Claire Keegan, Foster

 

- First published in 2010 this brilliant little novel, only 88 pages, has been unavailable in bookshops for nearly a decade. Now at last it's been re-issued in a new paperback edition, no doubt due to last year's realise of the film The Quiet Girl which is based on it. (The film is also superb by the way).

- Foster is a must-read. In fact it's widely regarded as a classic by literary critics all over the world, and that's hardly a surprise given Irish author Claire Keegan's genius. I was enthralled by her latest novel, Small Things Like These, published last year, so was keen to read Foster.

- In exquisitely subtle and gentle prose, an unnamed young girl tells her story. There's lots of dialogue between the handful of characters and their familiar, engaging Irish lilt drives the simple but very powerful story. 

- The girl's mother is again pregnant - she already has three kids, and her husband is worse than useless as a father - so she asks her sister to care for the girl over summer. Her sister and her husband, the Kinsellas, are childless. Financially they are far better off than the girl's family.

- The girl is quiet and reticent at first but soon settles into a pattern on the dairy farm they own. The husband is also quiet at first but gradually he and the girl form a real bond. She also enjoys the electric appliances which are new to her - the refrigerator, freezer, vacuum cleaner, iron and other mod cons. The woman (the girl refers to her as ‘the woman’) bathes her, cleans her ears and brushes her hair. They eat healthy food. She helps the woman with the housework and cooking. They watch the 9pm news on TV. Visitors often come for card games. It's a warm, loving and respectful environment. 

- At one point a nosey neighbour tells the girl that the Kinsellas had a boy who drowned. She now knows why her bedroom wallpaper is illustrated with cars, trucks and tractors. 

- As the summer months proceed the husband, John, becomes more talkative and likeable. He forms a real bond with the girl. He takes her to the seashore, times her 100 metre or so runs to the postbox, which she really enjoys. She's also introduced to books.

- When it’s time for her to go home they drive her. They share an acute sense of sadness and loss. The last few pages of the novel are very emotional. Her father and her siblings are cold. As the Kinsellas drive away from her house she runs fast up the long driveway to embrace them. She realises she has discovered love and a real home. She hugs John, her ‘daddy’. 

- Your tears will flood the final page. 

Maggie O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait.

 

- He has brought her here, to this stone fortress, to murder her, reflects Lucrezia.

- Maggie O'Farrell, prize-winning author of the wonderful Hamnet, has written a new historical novel that is just as good. It's a highly dramatic story, utterly absorbing and tense.

- We're immersed in the the Renaissance period, the De Medici families, and their privileged aristocratic lives. They have maids, wet-nurses, advisors, guards, cooks, gardeners, and servants who bathe and dress them. Their multiple palaces are full of art and jewellery and surrounded by lush grounds and fields. Domestic tensions are commonplace and of course the servants witness everything, and talk to each other.

- Lucrezia, for political reasons, is forced into marrying Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, a region east of Florence. She is only 15 years of age. Her older sister Maria was to marry him but she died suddenly from a fever. Alfonso is a nasty piece of work. He is ruthless in using brutality to cement his authority. He must always get his way and not be contradicted. He is desperate for an heir to secure his reign. He forces himself on Lucrezia every night but after nearly twelve months of marriage no child is conceived. 

- O'Farrell discloses in the very first chapter that Lucrezia believes he will murder her for not getting pregnant. The 'Historical Note' in the frontispiece informs the reader that ...in 1560, fifteen year old Lucrezia di Cosimo de' Medici left Florence to begin her married life with Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara. Less than a year later, she would be dead. The official cause of her death was given as 'putrid fever', but it was rumoured that she had been murdered by her husband. 

- He is arrogant and self-entitled. She is simply a chattel. But inside herself she is passionate and rebellious. 'A fire kindles, cracks and smoulders'. She knows he is ‘…a vengeful, irascible monster in human form, a devil in collar and cuffs.’ She is a talented painter, bright and full of life. ‘It is not…in my nature to acquiesce, to submit’. 

- We're immersed in the ugly pre-modern world of Men, Women and Marriage: strict, severe, absolute roles. The frequency of death of children and the young means procreation is central. It is about power and protection. Love doesn’t mean much, if anything at all. 

- All sorts of dramas occur in the novel as O'Farrell builds the suspense. Out of frustration Alfonso gets the physician to examine her. ‘Her blood is hot and this can overexert the female mind...a tendency to emotional excess...She must eat cool foods...no excitement, no dancing, no music, no creative endeavours, no reading, except for religious texts...Oh, and I recommend that her hair be cut..

- The novel's tragic ending is expected, of course. We've been told all along what will happen. 

- But did it? 

- O'Farrell has given us a superb and beautifully written portrait of the traditional masculine and feminine worlds. Thankfully the one we live in today is radically different. Or is it? 

Prince Harry, Spare

 

- I was totally sucked in by this book. Ghost-written by J. R. Moehringer, the prose is crisp, punchy and eminently readable. 

- Harry's main focus is the lowlife Murdoch tabloid press in the UK and their lies, and the 'paps' who suck their arses for money. His anger is palpable and his critique of their destructive behaviour relentless. The book's worth reading for that fiery demolition alone.

- Many journalists, columnists and other palace watchers have had their say lately on this book, and on Harry and Meg as a couple. Their lies continue, as does their barely disguised racism. Most of them haven't bothered to read it, or if they have, have skimmed it. So many issues have been taken out of context, such as his time in the army and his combat role in Afghanistan. 

- Harry is also highly critical of his father Charles, his brother William, and particularly the palace bureaucrats who virtually rule their lives. They were weak and still are. 

- As a republican I'm definitely on Harry's side. Good luck to him, Meg and their children in California. They deserve to live in peace. 

- This is the book's blurb. It's a perfect summary:

Gail Jones, Salonika Burning

- When wars, even the drumbeats of war, define our times, when deadly viruses are running rampart, when medical services are under severe stress, this beautiful new novel by celebrated Australian author Gail Jones digs deep and offers hope.

- It is 1917 in the city of Salonika (now Thessaloniki) in Macedonia. Before the first world war Salonika was abuzz with life, colour and charm. Now it was a burnt city. That was the omen. That was the sign everything was coming apart. Demolition by fire. 

- Jones' sharp, sensitive writing, with its poetic edge, brings the drama vividly to life (…he could hear the scrawny bushes murmur with soft fingerings of breeze). We're introduced to four main characters, two of them Australian women (Olive and Stella), one an English woman (Grace), and one a young English man (Stanley). Something within them perhaps knew the idiocy of this war, of all wars, and the waste that claimed them.

- The four have very different backgrounds and family circumstances. Olive is from a wealthy banking family so she purchases a truck and converts it to an ambulance servicing the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Salonika. 

- Grace is the only girl in a family of ten children. She became a surgeon as a means to escape her suffocating Plymouth Brethren family. She was hieratic and remote... and considered all Australians essentially ignorant...She seemed to have no regard for the dense world of sentiment, for small, fragile and personal things. 

- Stella is the assistant cook at the hospital (with romantic ambitions to become a writer), and a rather fervid nationalist. A bookish daughter was a scandal in farming circles. (Jones in her Author's Note at the end of the novel discloses that Stella was based on Stella Miles Franklin, well known of course to all of us).

- Stanley, is a medical orderly and an artist attracted to ancient history, architecture and poetry. He was also religious and like his shy colleague George, not attracted to women. 

- As the war proceeds they are confronted by ugliness and death and the uncomfortable challenges to character and decency that they bring. Some measure up, some don't. 

- This is a real gem of a novel, and has just been shortlisted for the 2023 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. It would not surprise me if it won, though the other five shortlisted novels are superb too.  

Sophie Cunningham, This Devastating Fever.

 

- Australian publishing industry stalwart Sophie Cunningham has written an immensely satisfying and invigorating novel. It's intriguing on every level. I was absolutely blown away by it. 

- On one level it could be described as a novel about writing a novel, and the extraordinary amount of anxiety and stress involved. Alice is the author and Sarah her agent. It's taken Alice years to do her research and write her novel, and she's exhausted. Cunningham has given us a graphic dissection of the authorial experience. Every aspect of the process is interrogated. 

- Alice is fascinated by Leonard Woolf, his wife Virginia, their families and friends in England, and the times they lived in. They were an integral part of the highly influential and somewhat radical Bloomsbury group of artists and writers in the early 20th century. The social and moral strictures of the Victorian age were ending and profound changes about to be unleashed. It was the beginning of modernism. A time of freedom and hope.

- Unfortunately the extreme ugliness of the First World War was just around the corner. 

- By focussing on the long life of Leonard Woolf, a career diplomat, writer, essayist, gardener, and a passionate environmentalist, Alice restores him to the grand status in the history of the 20th century he deserves. 

- Her novel is a delightful mash-up of genres, offering us a seamless mixing of times, fiction and facts. Alice is writing today but being visited by and talking to characters alive 100 years ago. 'Imaginary Leonard' and 'Ghost Virginia' frequently appear and enlighten her. 

- Sexual trauma. War. Political upheaval. Environmental destruction. Radical gender politics. All happened then. All happening now. 

- Leonard becomes enamoured of Virginia, ‘a woman with whom he could share his soul’. They marry, despite her doubts. She adamantly refuses to engage in sexual intercourse with him, and frequently attempts suicide. She's descending into ‘madness’, but Leonard maintains his loyalty, love and commitment to her. Alice recalls a psychiatrist telling her that Virginia’s choice of suicide towards the end of her life supported her insistence that she had been sexually assaulted when young. Alice is also inflicted by memories of sexual abuse as a teenager, and the constant abuse since. Will it never stop? That was the question she kept asking herself. Will it ever stop’

- Leonard became a passionate gardener, growing fruits and vegetables of all types year round. He was also relentlessly anti Fascism and Nazism, was sympathetic to Palestine, and urged the government to embrace the need for rearmament. He hated Neville Chamberlain and his preference for treaties and the naive belief that Hitler would negotiate peace.

- Meanwhile Alice brings us back to contemporary Australia and its own horrors - the severe 2019 bushfires, Covid, mandated isolation, Zoom meetings, Melbourne’s strict lockdowns, floods, the mouse plague. With her wife Edith she moves to the country. Like Leonard she is a lover of nature. They build a garden, planting vegetables and an orchard.

- But she can't escape the horror: new strains, dying forests, dying oceans, catastrophic floods, heat bubbles, disappearing glaciers, collapsing ice sheets, talk of war, actual war. Would it ever stop? It would never stop. Not in her lifetime. Not in the lifetime of the children she hadn’t had, but knew and loved nonetheless.

- Themes of dying and killing are strong in this book - whether humans, animals, nature, the planet as a whole. Deaths and suicides. Millions and millions over the last 100 years. 

- So by the end of the novel I also was devastated by This Devastating Fever. It is, quite simply, an extraordinary achievement. A novel for our times, and an award winner in 2023 for sure. Hopefully The Stella Prize which Cunningham co-founded.