Readers often ask writers about where the ideas for novels and stories come from. The answer to this question is really never simple. I will be talking about my new novel – Child of the Twilight. And where it fits into my thinking. Once a novel is published, the writer has the luxury of being able to mentally going back over its origins, of seeing how each element somehow developed from events, thoughts, ideas etc.
This kind of thing is deeply personal and is perhaps not often discussed. Readers and reviewers and critics come to the novel from the outside, as it were, but it is the writer who holds the real keys. It is the writer’s business to give the readers enough guidance to take them through the narrative. And it is the reader’s responsibility to take notice along the way. To follow the clues. That makes it sound as if every story is a mystery – and in a way I think that is true.
One of my short stories called The Quince Tree is published in a collection in Norway. It is a tiny little old story and I never think about it much. But recently I had an email from a Norwegian reader who wanted to know about the use of colours in the story. Did they mean what the reader thought they meant? And how had I arrived at the scheme she found operating with the colours in the story. Now when I get a question like this I take it very seriously, and I have to stop and consider my response. Because when I write – and when many fiction writers write – the elements that make up the narrative and that texture the prose arrive freighted with the writer’s own understandings and memories and points of view and prejudices – and so forth. From the writer’s side of things, everything is going forward at once – the nature of the character, the events, the setting, the tone, the language – everything depends on everything else. But readers – such as the reader in Norway – come to things bit by bit, and may be attracted to the flash of the colour yellow, and start to wonder why yellow. Now in the case of the quince story, the colour is the colour of the fruit, and so is unavoidable – so the question that arises is really – why quince? There is truly no simple answer to that question. The subject matter of a story comes from deep within the experience and dare I say the heart of the writer. The writer is in a sense saying to the reader ‘I have a message for you,’ should you want to hear it.
I propose to tell you the story of the writing of my novel Child of the Twilight. Of telling you where I believe it comes from, telling you what possessed me to write this book. Before I do this, let me just outline the plot for you, and tell you a little about the characters.
A miracle working statue of Baby Jesus is stolen from a church in Rome. This fact is the central matter in the novel, and also holds the central image in the novel of the importance of babies and the making of babies, including modern methods such as IVF.
A young Australian priest is there in Rome at the time of the theft. His mother in Melbourne has a keen devotion to the lost statue. The statue is not recovered. The priest – his name is Roland – returns to Australia where he works in Melbourne, part of his duties being as chaplain to a girls’ boarding school. One of the girls at the school gets pregnant to a boy from the brother school, but she loses the baby very early in the pregnancy. She was not actually aware that she was pregnant.
As part of her recovery her aunt takes her overseas for a holiday. They visit the church where the statue went missing, as well as other Catholic shrines. One of the aunt’s great interests is in black statues of the Virgin Mary. These statues are – or used to be – key figures for women’s focus on conception and childbirth. They are associated with the earth itself, with darkness, mystery and miracles.
When in Rome Cora and her aunt meet an old priest at the church from which the statue of the baby disappeared. They discuss the lost statue with him, and talk about the Australian priest Roland who is known to all of them. One of the key ideas in the book is the ease with which international connections are discovered and established – the six degrees of separation idea. There is a sense in which a vast human family is united by the holy family – located here in the lost statue of the baby, and the figure of the black madonna. Cora’s boyfriend (the father of her lost child) follows her to Italy, and a few years later he and Cora marry. The lost statue is never found, however the mystery of its disappearance is revealed at the end of the book.
Reduced to that more or less factual outline, the book could sound rather solemn. However the tone is not at all solemn, owing to the fact that the story is narrated by a nineteen year old girl who is completely unsentimental. So she tells the story, and at some points she enters the story.
I have stopped talking about the plot and am now talking about how the story is told. This girl is called Sydney. Why? People have often been named after places in the world – but in recent years this has become particularly fashionable. Dakota, Paris, India, Cheyenne, Montana, Odessa. I noticed that Australian place names are not popular – so I decided to use one. Sydney. Her surname is also a place name – Kent – and her mother is named after a Spanish town, her father after an English village. The girl Sydney was an IVF baby, and she is very hung up on the fact that all her genetic material came from unknown sources – both of her parents being infertile. Another key fact is that the origins of her egg and sperm are unknown, and there are no records. So – in the context of a world of six degrees of separation, Sydney imagines she could be related to anybody and everybody. She has a very detached and matter of fact way of talking about things. So the chances of becoming sentimental about the religious aspects of the story are avoided.
So that is how the book is. But I said I would talk about where it came from. Telling you what possessed me.
A long time ago when I was studying French in year twelve at high school, we read a story by Prosper Merimee about a black statue of the goddess Venus. These pagan statues were christianised in the middle ages, and so have become the black madonnas in shrines throughout Europe. In fact the statue of Venus in the story fascinated me, and led me to realize the presence of the black madonnas, and also their significance. They are so unlike the pretty statues of Our Lady of Lourdes and Our Lady of Fatima – these two being nineteenth century images, whereas the black ones are much more ancient. The black ones are part of the world of medieval knights and troubadours, and interest in all this led me to the secret language of the troubadours – called the Green Language or the Language of the Birds. This is a rhyming, punning way of speaking, and by using it the troubadours could communicate secrets and messages without seeming to do so.
There is a character in my book – Cosimo, the older priest in the Roman church where the statue was – who sometimes speaks like that.
For many years I studied the phenomenon of the black madonna, and I visited a number of shrines, mainly in Spain and France. But the novel that references these images and ideas did not really get going until I saw a news item – a very tiny news item – in the paper in 1994. It was a report on the theft of a miraculous statue – the Bambinello – from the Franciscan church in Rome. For some reason – and these things do remain unclear – this sparked the book. But I still wrote a number of other books before this one was completed.
One thing that kept puzzling me was how I was going to get the tone I wanted – the unsentimental plain narrative that was almost cold. Then I the idea of the character of Sydney Kent came to me, and the rest fell into place. Sydney is an international child, wandering the world with her wealthy professional parents. She tells the story.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Home Truth Review
Publication Date: July 2010
From Bookseller and Publisher
Review by Candice Cappe
FOUR STARS
In the introduction to Home Truth, Carmel Bird talks
of Steven Spielberg’s character E.T., and his plight to
reconnect with that place he called home, a place where
he would find safety and solace from the alien world in
which he found himself. This sets an appropriate scene
for the ten essays that follow in this fascinating collection
of reflections on home and belonging. The sense of home
can be interpreted in so many ways: it is the place of
our childhood, as explored by Gabrielle Lord and Peter
Goldsworthy; a place of history and origin, as discussed
in Matthew Condon’s essay; the womb from which we
evolve and grow before becoming independent and
reaching out into the world, as in Ian Britain’s piece; and
a place of memory and lost meaning when the person we
share it with is no longer there, as expressed in Andrea
Goldsmith’s moving recollection. With contributions
from some of Australia’s best known contemporary
writers, readers are treated to an eclectic and diverse range
of pieces demonstrating that home is as much about the
people who share it with us as it is about time and place.
This is a thought-provoking collection, taking us on a
journey into personal spaces we all know and recognise as
dimensions of those places we call home.
Candice Cappe is the bookshop manager at the
National Library of Australia in Canberra”
From Bookseller and Publisher
Review by Candice Cappe
FOUR STARS
In the introduction to Home Truth, Carmel Bird talks
of Steven Spielberg’s character E.T., and his plight to
reconnect with that place he called home, a place where
he would find safety and solace from the alien world in
which he found himself. This sets an appropriate scene
for the ten essays that follow in this fascinating collection
of reflections on home and belonging. The sense of home
can be interpreted in so many ways: it is the place of
our childhood, as explored by Gabrielle Lord and Peter
Goldsworthy; a place of history and origin, as discussed
in Matthew Condon’s essay; the womb from which we
evolve and grow before becoming independent and
reaching out into the world, as in Ian Britain’s piece; and
a place of memory and lost meaning when the person we
share it with is no longer there, as expressed in Andrea
Goldsmith’s moving recollection. With contributions
from some of Australia’s best known contemporary
writers, readers are treated to an eclectic and diverse range
of pieces demonstrating that home is as much about the
people who share it with us as it is about time and place.
This is a thought-provoking collection, taking us on a
journey into personal spaces we all know and recognise as
dimensions of those places we call home.
Candice Cappe is the bookshop manager at the
National Library of Australia in Canberra”
Thursday, April 15, 2010
INTRODUCTION TO READING AT BOOKTIQUE 18 APRIL 2010
'Child of the Twilight'
Back in the nineties I published a non-fiction book about the indigenous children of the stolen generations. This new novel also has ‘child’ in the title, and these books both reflect my lifelong interest in the subject of the child. Children are the focus of a lot of my fiction. I think that children signify hope, all that is good and beautiful. It is easy to become sentimental about children and childhood, and I probably often do.
'Child of the Twilight' begins by considering the centrality of the child in the Christian religion – a miraculous wooden statue of Baby Jesus is stolen from a church in Rome. It goes on to explore how children are conceived – in the ordinary old fashioned way, and by modern methods of IVF. Early in the book there is a little scene between one of the main characters and his twin sister when they were small. What the little girl says to her brother sums up the simplicity and truthfulness of a child’s view of the world.
‘They had been taken to visit an ancient uncle. In his garden there was a cherry tree and a grape vine. Roland and Eleena were sitting together on a low stone wall in the sun, each with a glass of red fizzy drink. Eleena turned to Roland and she said: This is nice, Rolly, this is nice. And he felt she meant everything – not just the drink, everything – the sun, the stone wall, the cherry tree, the grapevine, the sky – everything. Life, she said to him, was nice. This is nice, Rolly. Life is nice.’
I will read two short pieces from the novel. The first bit is set in Rome in 1994 and is about the theft of the statue. The second is in Melbourne in 2001 and is about a pregnant schoolgirl. The two pieces are linked by the presence in both of the young Franciscan priest who is the Roland I just read about. Actually in the second piece I don’t think the priest gets a mention, but he is there – believe me.
'Child of the Twilight'
Back in the nineties I published a non-fiction book about the indigenous children of the stolen generations. This new novel also has ‘child’ in the title, and these books both reflect my lifelong interest in the subject of the child. Children are the focus of a lot of my fiction. I think that children signify hope, all that is good and beautiful. It is easy to become sentimental about children and childhood, and I probably often do.
'Child of the Twilight' begins by considering the centrality of the child in the Christian religion – a miraculous wooden statue of Baby Jesus is stolen from a church in Rome. It goes on to explore how children are conceived – in the ordinary old fashioned way, and by modern methods of IVF. Early in the book there is a little scene between one of the main characters and his twin sister when they were small. What the little girl says to her brother sums up the simplicity and truthfulness of a child’s view of the world.
‘They had been taken to visit an ancient uncle. In his garden there was a cherry tree and a grape vine. Roland and Eleena were sitting together on a low stone wall in the sun, each with a glass of red fizzy drink. Eleena turned to Roland and she said: This is nice, Rolly, this is nice. And he felt she meant everything – not just the drink, everything – the sun, the stone wall, the cherry tree, the grapevine, the sky – everything. Life, she said to him, was nice. This is nice, Rolly. Life is nice.’
I will read two short pieces from the novel. The first bit is set in Rome in 1994 and is about the theft of the statue. The second is in Melbourne in 2001 and is about a pregnant schoolgirl. The two pieces are linked by the presence in both of the young Franciscan priest who is the Roland I just read about. Actually in the second piece I don’t think the priest gets a mention, but he is there – believe me.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Reading By Moonlight
My Short Review Of
Reading by Moonlight: how books saved a life
A memoir by Brenda Walker, published by Hamish Hamilton
When a woman goes into hospital for cancer surgery, she packs necessities, and usually something that is dear to her. Brenda Walker has spent a lifetime reading, and her treasured object was a book. Throughout the five stages of the treatment – surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, reconstruction and survival – she is never without reading matter. In her case the books are mostly classics such as the works of Dickens, Dante, Tolstoy, Patrick White. They speak to her, sustain and console her, bring light in the terrible darkness, and give shape and meaning to the experiences she must undergo.
The books occupy a vital space in her life alongside the spaces necessarily occupied by professionals, family members and dear kind friends. The writer says that if she had to nominate ‘the single person” she was staying alive for it would be her son. And she also expresses her profound love for and gratitude towards her mother who at least five times made the journey from New South Wales to Western Australia to look after her.
This memoir is very moving and also instructive, frankly guiding readers through the terrors of disease and treatment, and fear of dying, while exploring with them the joys of immersion in the gift of great literature.
This book, while facing dark truths and examining deep loneliness, is luminous with a quiet joy. It tells how stories hold the promise of more stories to come, and of another dawn. It stands beside Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her husband, “The Year of Magical Thinking” and also Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor” as one of those books you will take to your heart, and will not easily forget.
Reading by Moonlight: how books saved a life
A memoir by Brenda Walker, published by Hamish Hamilton
When a woman goes into hospital for cancer surgery, she packs necessities, and usually something that is dear to her. Brenda Walker has spent a lifetime reading, and her treasured object was a book. Throughout the five stages of the treatment – surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, reconstruction and survival – she is never without reading matter. In her case the books are mostly classics such as the works of Dickens, Dante, Tolstoy, Patrick White. They speak to her, sustain and console her, bring light in the terrible darkness, and give shape and meaning to the experiences she must undergo.
The books occupy a vital space in her life alongside the spaces necessarily occupied by professionals, family members and dear kind friends. The writer says that if she had to nominate ‘the single person” she was staying alive for it would be her son. And she also expresses her profound love for and gratitude towards her mother who at least five times made the journey from New South Wales to Western Australia to look after her.
This memoir is very moving and also instructive, frankly guiding readers through the terrors of disease and treatment, and fear of dying, while exploring with them the joys of immersion in the gift of great literature.
This book, while facing dark truths and examining deep loneliness, is luminous with a quiet joy. It tells how stories hold the promise of more stories to come, and of another dawn. It stands beside Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her husband, “The Year of Magical Thinking” and also Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor” as one of those books you will take to your heart, and will not easily forget.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Footpath Library
Published in The Age - 13 March 2010
On a hot February evening we drove into a narrow street behind the Town Hall in Fitzroy. High above us along the ridge on the slate roof of a ancient bluestone church were strung, at regular intervals, like pearls on a necklace, seventeen seagulls, facing east, their backs to the setting sun. They were waiting for pickings. Down below, a crowd was gathering around two white Vinnies vans, one van giving away sandwiches the other dispensing free soup, coffee and cordial. I was with the people in the red car behind the vans, the car with a boot full of books. We would stop here for half an hour, offering free books to homeless and disadvantaged people.
While people surged forward to the vans, we put down a rug on the pavement and placed on it rows of books and magazines. A Chinese grandfather brought over his folding chair and gathered up some of the Chinese books for himself, smiling broadly, sipping coffee from a polystyrene cup. One man, disappointed that there was no dictionary on the rug, ordered one for next week. The books are free to take away, like the food. This is the Footpath Library, an initiative of the Lauriston Girls’ School Community Service Program.
Every Sunday night two members of the school staff follow the Vinnies vans which make six stops at key locations around inner Melbourne. Books are collected from members of the school community, and are stored in the school library – nine shelves where the books, in excellent condition, are stacked three deep. My journey began at the school library. As a book-lover I was dazed by the sight of the tightly packed spines on the shelves – Minette Walters, Gabrielle Lord, Ruth Rendell, Dean Koontz, Sydney Sheldon. There’s also a huge collection of biography and non-fiction, which is the most popular category with clients of the Footpath Library. And several shelves of books in Chinese. A regular contributor to the supply is Bayside Library Services; one large donation of books came from the State Library of Victoria. We put eight shopping bags of already selected books into the boot of the car in preparation for the night’s work.
The Footpath Library began when a Sydney woman, Sarah Garnett, was working as a volunteer, serving meals to homeless and disadvantaged people, and started bringing along books for distribution. This small gesture has developed in other cities to become part of the services on which homeless and disadvantaged people rely for sustenance and comfort. Joan Hammonds, the librarian at Lauriston, is the force behind the Melbourne Footpath Library, which has been operating for two years.
My journey continued in North Melbourne where the two Vinnies vans were stocking up. The six regular volunteers, led by long-timers, Norm and Manfred, wore fluorescent orange vests with the blue logo on the back. The 1,500 sandwiches are made from donated bread, with fillings such as tuna, ham, cheese, vegemite. Our first stop was on the edge of a North Melbourne park, and as we drew up a dozen or so clients drifted into view, some with their dogs, making first for the food and coffee, then over to the striped rug where we had placed the books from one of the shopping bags in the boot. This is not a grand operation – the rug is small and displays maybe fifteen books. Joan is quite familiar with the clientele at each stop, and so each bag is filled with things designed to interest them. Magazines such as New Scientist and National Geographic were popular here. There was some discussion over the merits of a book on war by Winston Churchill.
The books lie on the rug, face up, shiny coloured invitations to other worlds. The light is beginning to fade, the empty polystyrene cups are beginning to blow and bowl along the road. A few books have gone. Pack up the vans, the car, drive off. The clients linger by the wire fence to the park, but when I look back, they have dissolved into the pink dusk.
The drive to the Fitzroy Town Hall takes us past the Zoo, the dry parklands where birds are twittering loudly, round College Crescent. The towers of the university halls of residence speak not only of learning and books but also of warmth and community and home. We concentrate on being simply practical, not sentimental, with our car full of books, but there is a temptation to philosophize as we sail along past the have-a-lots on our way to the have-no-muches.
After the Fitzroy Town Hall we head for Hanover House in Southbank. The lights in St Patrick’s glow amber in the twilight as we zip past on our way to a street behind Crown Casino. Again it is easy to wonder about the distinctions, this time between the pulse and glitter of Crown and the quiet dignified gathering of people, two of them in wheelchairs, standing in the pool of light outside the crisis accommodation of Hanover House. We spread out our wares on the red and grey rug. A woman pounces with delight on Boris Starling’s thriller Vodka, provoking mirth among the company. She takes a couple of other things, and I talk her into taking Kay Cottee’s First Lady. Again the New Scientist and National Geographic are winners.
Next stop is a narrow lane where we park behind buildings, and a few people appear out of the shadows to get their meal and talk among themselves. This lot is not interested in books. But then we get to Flinders Street Station, and like children waiting for the circus, the people are sitting in a long line on the ledge of the stone foundations. One of the regulars is a woman “Annette” who says she has so many books in her room that her landlady has warned her not to bring back any more. Nothing daunted, she picks up a Ruth Rendell, but puts it back saying she already has it. She is thrilled with the autobiography of Barrie Humphries. I think she took about six books to add to her overflowing collection. Two novels by Iain Banks – severe black and white covers – attract the attention of two young men, but then they put them back. This is a busy gathering with a considerable feeling of camaraderie. It feels less isolated, more part of its surroundings, than the other stops. Annette spies a history of the Boy Scouts and gleefully carries it off.
Last stop a street by the Victoria Market where there are just a few people in need of soup and sandwiches, a magazine, a thriller and some conversation. All over until next Sunday.
On a hot February evening we drove into a narrow street behind the Town Hall in Fitzroy. High above us along the ridge on the slate roof of a ancient bluestone church were strung, at regular intervals, like pearls on a necklace, seventeen seagulls, facing east, their backs to the setting sun. They were waiting for pickings. Down below, a crowd was gathering around two white Vinnies vans, one van giving away sandwiches the other dispensing free soup, coffee and cordial. I was with the people in the red car behind the vans, the car with a boot full of books. We would stop here for half an hour, offering free books to homeless and disadvantaged people.
While people surged forward to the vans, we put down a rug on the pavement and placed on it rows of books and magazines. A Chinese grandfather brought over his folding chair and gathered up some of the Chinese books for himself, smiling broadly, sipping coffee from a polystyrene cup. One man, disappointed that there was no dictionary on the rug, ordered one for next week. The books are free to take away, like the food. This is the Footpath Library, an initiative of the Lauriston Girls’ School Community Service Program.
Every Sunday night two members of the school staff follow the Vinnies vans which make six stops at key locations around inner Melbourne. Books are collected from members of the school community, and are stored in the school library – nine shelves where the books, in excellent condition, are stacked three deep. My journey began at the school library. As a book-lover I was dazed by the sight of the tightly packed spines on the shelves – Minette Walters, Gabrielle Lord, Ruth Rendell, Dean Koontz, Sydney Sheldon. There’s also a huge collection of biography and non-fiction, which is the most popular category with clients of the Footpath Library. And several shelves of books in Chinese. A regular contributor to the supply is Bayside Library Services; one large donation of books came from the State Library of Victoria. We put eight shopping bags of already selected books into the boot of the car in preparation for the night’s work.
The Footpath Library began when a Sydney woman, Sarah Garnett, was working as a volunteer, serving meals to homeless and disadvantaged people, and started bringing along books for distribution. This small gesture has developed in other cities to become part of the services on which homeless and disadvantaged people rely for sustenance and comfort. Joan Hammonds, the librarian at Lauriston, is the force behind the Melbourne Footpath Library, which has been operating for two years.
My journey continued in North Melbourne where the two Vinnies vans were stocking up. The six regular volunteers, led by long-timers, Norm and Manfred, wore fluorescent orange vests with the blue logo on the back. The 1,500 sandwiches are made from donated bread, with fillings such as tuna, ham, cheese, vegemite. Our first stop was on the edge of a North Melbourne park, and as we drew up a dozen or so clients drifted into view, some with their dogs, making first for the food and coffee, then over to the striped rug where we had placed the books from one of the shopping bags in the boot. This is not a grand operation – the rug is small and displays maybe fifteen books. Joan is quite familiar with the clientele at each stop, and so each bag is filled with things designed to interest them. Magazines such as New Scientist and National Geographic were popular here. There was some discussion over the merits of a book on war by Winston Churchill.
The books lie on the rug, face up, shiny coloured invitations to other worlds. The light is beginning to fade, the empty polystyrene cups are beginning to blow and bowl along the road. A few books have gone. Pack up the vans, the car, drive off. The clients linger by the wire fence to the park, but when I look back, they have dissolved into the pink dusk.
The drive to the Fitzroy Town Hall takes us past the Zoo, the dry parklands where birds are twittering loudly, round College Crescent. The towers of the university halls of residence speak not only of learning and books but also of warmth and community and home. We concentrate on being simply practical, not sentimental, with our car full of books, but there is a temptation to philosophize as we sail along past the have-a-lots on our way to the have-no-muches.
After the Fitzroy Town Hall we head for Hanover House in Southbank. The lights in St Patrick’s glow amber in the twilight as we zip past on our way to a street behind Crown Casino. Again it is easy to wonder about the distinctions, this time between the pulse and glitter of Crown and the quiet dignified gathering of people, two of them in wheelchairs, standing in the pool of light outside the crisis accommodation of Hanover House. We spread out our wares on the red and grey rug. A woman pounces with delight on Boris Starling’s thriller Vodka, provoking mirth among the company. She takes a couple of other things, and I talk her into taking Kay Cottee’s First Lady. Again the New Scientist and National Geographic are winners.
Next stop is a narrow lane where we park behind buildings, and a few people appear out of the shadows to get their meal and talk among themselves. This lot is not interested in books. But then we get to Flinders Street Station, and like children waiting for the circus, the people are sitting in a long line on the ledge of the stone foundations. One of the regulars is a woman “Annette” who says she has so many books in her room that her landlady has warned her not to bring back any more. Nothing daunted, she picks up a Ruth Rendell, but puts it back saying she already has it. She is thrilled with the autobiography of Barrie Humphries. I think she took about six books to add to her overflowing collection. Two novels by Iain Banks – severe black and white covers – attract the attention of two young men, but then they put them back. This is a busy gathering with a considerable feeling of camaraderie. It feels less isolated, more part of its surroundings, than the other stops. Annette spies a history of the Boy Scouts and gleefully carries it off.
Last stop a street by the Victoria Market where there are just a few people in need of soup and sandwiches, a magazine, a thriller and some conversation. All over until next Sunday.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
REVIEW from Boomerang Books
For those who enjoy reading to indulge in the pleasure of beautiful writing then Carmel Bird’s latest novel might be just what you are after. Child of the Twilight is a deceptively complex work with great depth of both characterisation and theme. On one level the story is of love and loss, yet woven through this are the weighty themes of belief, fate and deception. Central to the story’s narrative is the theft of the religious icon named the Bambinello, stolen from a Rome monastery.
Throughout the novel the concepts of birth and origin play an important part in the lives of the characters as they contend with their individual loss, search for identity or quest to unravel the mystery of the missing statue. As the story unfolds, readers are challenged by the notion of faith and led to question the ideas we live by as the story delves into the labyrinth of real and imagined beliefs. The writing is contemporary and engaging, yet manages to sustain medieval overtones drawing close connections to myth and folklore, while exploring the deeper issues of loss and the unknown. This is a carefully constructed work with a compelling storyline that keeps you guessing right until the final pages.
Throughout the novel the concepts of birth and origin play an important part in the lives of the characters as they contend with their individual loss, search for identity or quest to unravel the mystery of the missing statue. As the story unfolds, readers are challenged by the notion of faith and led to question the ideas we live by as the story delves into the labyrinth of real and imagined beliefs. The writing is contemporary and engaging, yet manages to sustain medieval overtones drawing close connections to myth and folklore, while exploring the deeper issues of loss and the unknown. This is a carefully constructed work with a compelling storyline that keeps you guessing right until the final pages.
Creativity and the Bambinello
A key idea that informs my fiction is that of creativity, creativity in the forms of writing, painting, and biology. This idea has led me to contemplate images of the Madonna and child, focusing sometimes on the black virgin. The black virgin has a strong presence in my 2010 novel Child of the Twilight, as has the image of the baby Jesus.
In the 1987 story “The Woodpecker Toy Fact” there is a toymaker named Jack Frost. The narrator of the story recalls her childhood perception of him and his work. “At Christmas he used to make wooden peepshows of the crib. You closed one eye and looked through the hole in the box. Inside, in an unearthly light, were first the shepherds, then the animals, and further back the baby like a sugar mouse in his mother’s arms. The angels were in the far distance, wings sharp like the wings of swallows.” The narrator makes up a lie, telling people Jack Frost told her he made the original of the statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague, but nobody takes any notice of her.
At the end of Child of the Twilight a wedding takes place in the church at Woodpecker Point where there is a statue of the Infant of Prague, and there is also a fresco of a black virgin that is a portrait of an indigenous Tasmanian woman. This novel examines the issue of human fertility, presenting to the reader some babies who are the result of accidental couplings, some who are the result of IVF or ART, where science meets biology, and some who are the result of miracles outside science and beyond biology (notably the birth of Jesus).
The images of the black virgin that are venerated in churches, principally in Mediterranean countries, are signifiers of the fertility of Mary, and are frequently found where ancient fertility cults flourished in pagan times. The statues themselves are often the self-same statues that once were venerated as the black goddess. This dark aspect of Mary is deeply attractive to women in particular, and is acknowledged at a visceral as well as a spiritual level.
The statues themselves frequently come with stories of miraculous appearances in streams or caves, and are associated with water, the giver of life. The black virgin presides over birth and motherhood, and church hierarchy and patriarchy have over the centuries attempted to suppress devotion to her, fearful and suspicious of her pagan origins, and probably her dark female arts. You will find her steadily going about her business in such places as Montserrat and Saragossa as well as hundreds of less famous centres. She is good for tourism too.
In Child of the Twilight two are characters who collect facsimiles of the many statues of the black virgin, and one of these characters becomes involved in the search for a miraculous statue of the baby Jesus that has gone missing from a church in Rome. He was fashioned in the fifteenth century by a Franciscan, in the manner of Pinocchio, from a piece of olive wood grown in the garden of Gethsemane and was called the Bambinello. He was painted by angels, lost at sea, and ended up in a glass case in the church of Santa Maria in Araceoli, until he was stolen in 1994.
The role this image plays in the fertility of the characters in the novel brings together the miraculous, the scientific, and the biological, as well as locating the interest in the world of art, not to mention crime as well.
I have written at length on the subject of creativity in connection with the written word (Writing the Story of Your Life; Dear Writer; Not Now Jack) In my fiction I can also trace this preoccupation, specifically via the imagery of the mother and child, in Christian iconography, as well as in the frequent emphasis on the mother, and the child, in my the stories.
In the 1987 story “The Woodpecker Toy Fact” there is a toymaker named Jack Frost. The narrator of the story recalls her childhood perception of him and his work. “At Christmas he used to make wooden peepshows of the crib. You closed one eye and looked through the hole in the box. Inside, in an unearthly light, were first the shepherds, then the animals, and further back the baby like a sugar mouse in his mother’s arms. The angels were in the far distance, wings sharp like the wings of swallows.” The narrator makes up a lie, telling people Jack Frost told her he made the original of the statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague, but nobody takes any notice of her.
At the end of Child of the Twilight a wedding takes place in the church at Woodpecker Point where there is a statue of the Infant of Prague, and there is also a fresco of a black virgin that is a portrait of an indigenous Tasmanian woman. This novel examines the issue of human fertility, presenting to the reader some babies who are the result of accidental couplings, some who are the result of IVF or ART, where science meets biology, and some who are the result of miracles outside science and beyond biology (notably the birth of Jesus).
The images of the black virgin that are venerated in churches, principally in Mediterranean countries, are signifiers of the fertility of Mary, and are frequently found where ancient fertility cults flourished in pagan times. The statues themselves are often the self-same statues that once were venerated as the black goddess. This dark aspect of Mary is deeply attractive to women in particular, and is acknowledged at a visceral as well as a spiritual level.
The statues themselves frequently come with stories of miraculous appearances in streams or caves, and are associated with water, the giver of life. The black virgin presides over birth and motherhood, and church hierarchy and patriarchy have over the centuries attempted to suppress devotion to her, fearful and suspicious of her pagan origins, and probably her dark female arts. You will find her steadily going about her business in such places as Montserrat and Saragossa as well as hundreds of less famous centres. She is good for tourism too.
In Child of the Twilight two are characters who collect facsimiles of the many statues of the black virgin, and one of these characters becomes involved in the search for a miraculous statue of the baby Jesus that has gone missing from a church in Rome. He was fashioned in the fifteenth century by a Franciscan, in the manner of Pinocchio, from a piece of olive wood grown in the garden of Gethsemane and was called the Bambinello. He was painted by angels, lost at sea, and ended up in a glass case in the church of Santa Maria in Araceoli, until he was stolen in 1994.
The role this image plays in the fertility of the characters in the novel brings together the miraculous, the scientific, and the biological, as well as locating the interest in the world of art, not to mention crime as well.
I have written at length on the subject of creativity in connection with the written word (Writing the Story of Your Life; Dear Writer; Not Now Jack) In my fiction I can also trace this preoccupation, specifically via the imagery of the mother and child, in Christian iconography, as well as in the frequent emphasis on the mother, and the child, in my the stories.
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