Book Review of Bereft by Chris Womersly

Carmel Bird's review of Bereft a novel by Chris Womersly published by Scribe

Review published in Australian Book Review, September 2010

The 1914-18 war is lodged in the minds of Australians with the power of myth. Chris Womersley, in startling, powerful, plain yet tender and lyrical prose, has constructed a heart-breaking narrative that opens up the wounds of war, laying bare like sinews the events that track back before the conflict and reach forward into the collective memory. I was reminded of A.S. Byatt’s recent novel The Children’s Book which also foregrounds in poetic language the so-called Great War, and similarly etches forever the stark horror of broken bodies and minds on the consciousness of its readers.

In Bereft, Mary Walker, in her quarantined bedroom in the small NSW country town of Flint, in 1919, is dying, a victim of the influenza epidemic (often referred to here as ‘the plague’) that followed the Great War. Her only daughter, Sarah, was raped and murdered at the age of twelve, in 1909. After the child’s death, Sarah’s older brother Quinn ran off and was not seen again. He was presumed to have committed the crime. A telegram from the Army told his mother he fought in the war and was killed. In her fevered isolation Mary is ‘comforted by visions of her lost children’. It is she who gave those children their passionate love of stories, saying that a good story is ‘like medicine’, but also she who speculates that maybe stories are a way of ‘hiding from the world’. It is Mary who realises there is no word to define a mother who has lost a child, Mary who grasps the word ‘bereft’ to describe herself, Mary therefore who gives the novel its title.

The ‘story’ you will read in this novel tells how Quinn perhaps survived the war and returned home after all, like a fugitive living ghost when his mother was dying, and how he took revenge for his sister’s murder, and for the ruin of his own existence. His elusive presence in Flint in 1919 takes on, for the people remaining in the little town, the ‘shimmer of truth’. Such a shimmer plays and tantalises across the novel, drawing the reader into the broken heart of the world as it emerges from the meaningless carnage and infection of war into the chimeric rubble of peace. The war, with its mythic qualities, takes on the face of a hideous dreamscape, and the fact that hallucination is never far from the novel’s landscape adds to the breathless nightmare nature of the story. Sometimes I felt a kind of faint echo of Under Milk Wood flickering through the fabric of the scenes, although in Bereft there is nothing whimsical. This is an account of terrible, terrible cruelty, of profound and wrenching sorrow. War is the big drama of human horror, but in what passes for peacetime are enacted also the basest moments of exquisite cruelty. That Womersley can marry these two extremes, and construct a narrative in which the reader is left with a burning sense of regret, tenderness and love, is a mark of his skill and of his fictional reach.

On his secret return home in 1919 Quinn inhabits the wild places in the hills behind Flint, leading a fugitive existence, with stealthy visits to his dying mother. One time he takes her a bunch of lavender, a herb known for its power to induce drowsiness, and later she is unsure whether she spoke to her son, or imagined she did. The reader is frequently placed in a similar position of doubt, but this effect is used in the narrative to increase a desire to believe, to in fact strengthen the credibility of the supernatural element of the text. Quinn has visited a London medium, and come away with a written message from the spirit of his beloved sister Sarah: ‘Don’t forget me. Come back and save me. Please.’ This note is his treasure and his talisman. Truth is a sombre and fragile matter.

Into Quinn’s life in the wild comes a strange elphin companion, a twelve year-old orphan sprite-girl named Sadie Fox who is looking for her brother, ‘a pilot in the war’. Quinn and Sadie have, in Quinn’s own words, ‘conjured each other’. They are each of the earth, having the ability to listen to the deep sounds of the natural world. Quinn constantly compares the busy lives of insects with the lives of human beings, and he can detect the ‘grinding of the earth’ as it revolves in space. It is a world forsaken by God, where in a moment of Blakean symbolism Sadie kills a sacrificial lamb.

Quinn’s quest for revenge moves relentlessly on with the tension of a thriller, pacing Sadie’s dream-desire to go with him to Kensington Gardens where there is a ‘fairy queen and she grants wishes’. Quinn himself concedes that this would be a fresh green place filled with mist. And so a link to Byatt’s The Children’s Book is firmly clarified. In both novels the ghastly stench and blood and mud and bone of war are played against the sad narrative of Peter Pan and the fairies, both articulating the inability of human beings to imagine anything more useful than fairyland. Quinn and Sadie and a grey horse walk away on an ‘ordinary Sunday morning’, closing the story to the accompaniment of hymns floating from the church. The reader can only weep for them, and for the suffering of the foolish world.

Home Truth

Go to http://somehometruths.blogspot.com/ for interview on Home Truth anthology

Melbourne Writers' Festival

At the Melbourne Writers' Festival 2010 I will be speaking about my novel

Child of the Twilight

at a session called Writing Women.

Some of the key content of my novel is concerned with the existence of miraculous black statues of the Virgin Mary in Europe.

On my own dressing table I have a tiny statue of the black madonna from Guadalupe in Spain. She is dressed in a robe of atmosphere-sensitive chips that change colour with the weather. When it is hot she is bright turquoise, when it is cold she moves through pale yucky pink to icy-blue white. Her little black face remains forever pitch black.

I was in Guadalupe doing research for my Child of the Twilight, some of which is set in Spain, and much of which is concerned with the theft of a religious statue. In my Festival session on Women Writing I will discuss the question of the black images of the Virgin Mary - as well as other things.

In my other session on storytelling at Toff of the Town I will be telling a story.

It won't be a story about black madonnas, so just so you know, the story of the lady of Guadalupe goes like this:

In 1326 a cowherd, in response to seeing a vision of the Virgin, dug up a casket which contained a black statue of Mary. The statue had been buried six centuries earlier by knights fleeing from the Saracens. It became an object of veneration, and is believed to have been responsible for many miracles. When Columbus set out to discover the New World, he began his journey from the steps of the cathedral at Guadalupe, and placed his ships under the patronage of the Black Virgin of Guadalupe.

A great story I think.

Enid Blyton

The Enid Blyton Question

When I was at university in the 1950s I wrote, as part of a thesis on writing for children, a piece on the work of Enid Blyton. The idea was hardly revolutionary, simply being that although the writing was not so great, the appeal to children was phenomenal. At that time the works were often the subject of discussions among librarians mainly because of the inbuilt racism, but they were a fairly new topic for academic treatment. Since then I have not paid very much attention to them.

But among my collection of old videos is a copy of The Magic Faraway Tree, and of all the old videos the one my grandson fixed on was this one. He asked for the book of the film. So his father started reading it to him at bedtime, and now the child has become enchanted by, and a bit obsessed with, Enid Blyton. He has a favourite CD of Kate Winslet reading The Magic Faraway Tree. And I know a grandmother whose grand-daughter of a similar age has also fallen for all this. Admittedly I am dealing with an anecdotal sample of two.

The copies the children are hearing are from the old texts, although the Winslet recording makes changes such as in the names – I am not sure what else. The child notices and discusses the differences, but these do not seem to bother him. The vocabulary and ideas of the originals he treats as he treats any story – it is good narrative and it engages him and he learns new words and ways of being.

I bought him a new version of one of the books, and he accepted that this was the same but different, and so what.

The old Enid still writes terrible sentences, but she still has the power to enchant and enslave readers with her narrative drug. Changing her stuff seems to be a waste of time – unless it is just a ploy to boost sales, which I suppose is all it is.

HOME TRUTH - published July 2010 Fourth Estate - Essays by ten Australian writers on the idea of 'home'

INTRODUCTION by Carmel Bird

‘He was alone, three million light-years from home.’ So concludes

the first chapter of the novel of the film E.T. Packed between

‘alone’ and ‘home’, those three million light-years express the vast

and tender emotions carried by the concept of home, the place of

origin, the place of belonging, of comfort, of relationship, the

haven. Home is the place each human being (and each extraterrestrial)

seeks with the heart. In 1982 Steven Spielberg gave the

world the imperative ‘E.T. phone home.’ This unlikely little clump

of words went straight to the core of the matter. Connection with

home is the genesis of hope.

In this collection of essays ten writers have taken ten personal

approaches to the meaning of ‘home’. They sometimes locate their

home in the country of origin, in the town, in the house, but almost

all move into some examination of relationships with others, and

also into the nature of the self. ‘Home’ it seems is bound up with

identity. Exploration of identity frequently takes the writers into

recollections of their early selves, and ‘home’ sometimes lies very

close to the places and relationships of childhood. Contemplation

of home leads back to the mother and forward to the grave, such a

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trajectory bringing writers inevitably again to an examination of

the self.

All the essayists are established Australian writers, writers

who have had a great deal of time and experience on which to

reflect. The details are different for each one, but then each in

some way or other ultimately comes up against the sense of the

self. Australia is a continent to which Europeans came in the

eighteenth century partly for the purpose of establishing European

culture, in an attempt to convert a land they experienced as foreign

and hostile into a land they could ultimately consider to be home.

The terrible violence and tragedy of this exercise whereby

powerful invaders overtook the homeland of the indigenous

peoples will forever mark this country. And the invaders carried

with them their own tragic underclass, people who were forced

into exile from their homelands. The idea of home is horribly

scored and burned into the story of this country.

In 1997 a government report on the lives of thousands of

indigenous Australians who had been taken from their families was

published. It was called Bringing Them Home. This is a most

striking example of the powerful use of the word ‘home’, a word

which is used so frequently in speech and writing without

necessarily very much reflection. All the emotion of the stories

contained in the report is packed into the word. Home. The report

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contained personal accounts by indigenous people of their

childhood experience of being removed from their families and

homes and relocated. I edited and published a collection of these

stories in 1998 in The Stolen Children – Their Stories.

That is all a long time ago now, and it may seem odd to say so,

but as a result of seeing the word ‘home’ in the title of the report, I

have been contemplating the word ever since, wondering what it

means to people, how writers might explore it and describe it. This

present collection is the result of my contemplation. The writers

here are all people of principally European heritage, all originating

from migrations at various times up to the middle of last century.

A collection of ten essays implies a small selection, and I have

confined this selection particularly to writers who work with

images. I believe it is images that can give the writers the power to

carry their understanding of the word ‘home’ into the hearts and

minds of readers. For the word itself is an abstraction, and requires

the solidity of the image in order to come to life.

In February 2009 bushfires in rural Victoria killed 173 people.

Pictures of burnt-out houses are the graphic symbols of those lost

lives. These houses were homes, they were repositories of

possessions, hopes and dreams. They were the fragile havens, the

places of supposed safety and nurture, the locations where the

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people placed their identities. The word ‘homeless’ has a terrible,

terrible ring. When you are homeless, where is your identity?

Since 1788 Australia has been a place of migrations, from the

people who came here in search of a new home in the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries, to those who still today make their way

here in the hope of a better life, a hope that is sometimes frustrated

and dashed. Home, they are all looking for their home. The place

they once called home has in many cases become a place of danger

and fear, rendering it no longer truly ‘home’.

The essays in this collection address in various ways the

question of what ‘home’ might mean. It is my hope and

expectation that readers will take the essays as inspiration for

further contemplation on the meaning of the term.

I am sometimes visited by the memory of a dusty pink rose

that bloomed in my garden some years ago. In the hollow centre of

the rose lived a bright green praying mantis that seemed very much

at home. In the end, the rose lost its petals and died. I always

wonder where the insect went. And a most moving and potent uses

of the word ‘home’ can be seen on the First World War memorial

in the Sydney Botanical Gardens. The reference is to the horses

that were, at the conclusion of the war, shot by the soldiers who

loved them. Rather than see these faithful animals fall into the

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unloving hands of local traders, the men destroyed them. On the

memorial is the statement: ‘They did not come home.’

I LOVE THIS BOOK

TITLE: The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe AUTHOR: Andrew O’Hagan PUBLISHER: Faber and Faber

REVIEWER: Carmel Bird

This novel declares itself in its title. It is written by Marilyn’s Maltese. The world is probably divided into two kinds of people, those who like books by dogs and those who don’t. I do. I loved the idea of this book when I first heard of it, and I was utterly captivated by the reading, thrilled by the wit, energy and rhythm of the writing. The reflections of Maf are superb insights into America in the early sixties, as well as into big subjects such as literature, art, psychology, history and politics. This is philosophy at its most engaging. There is an ancient tradition in literature where animals speak to and for humans. Maf identifies a book by Cervantes ‘The Conversation of the Dogs’ as marking the birth of the genre in the development of the modern novel, and goes on to cite examples by Woolf, Chekov, Orwell and many more. Kafka he quotes: ‘All knowledge – the totality of all questions and answers – is contained in the dog.’ The view Maf gives of Marilyn is unlike any other, and is ultimately a most lucid and moving one. He can read her mind, and there is a point at which she can read his. He is so wise and wistful, she so fragile and doomed. On the one hand this book is a revelation about all the dogs in literature and art, and on the other it is a novel of profound and highly entertaining insight into the human heart.

New Book Due 1st July 2010