Devil May Care, a James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks, writing as Ian Fleming, read by me.

As a general rule one wants a book title to be pithy and to the point, the front wrapper to be clean and clear. In this the above book fails. In fact, the cover is, well, covered in writing. However, it needs every word, except of course the bit about me being the reader. That’s just me being facetious, but I think you gathered that already.
It does need all of the title though. If you have seen below, you will have noticed that I recently reread Ian Fleming, just to rediscover and explore how much the intervening years have changed both Bond and I. With that fresh in the mind I read Sebastian Faulks’ Bond. This is of course not the first time someone other than Fleming has written a Bond book. Some may recall the John Gardner Bond books. (Clearly Bond is a character too large to be contained by his mere creator.) Nor is the idea of another author continuing a franchise all that novel (apologies for the gratuitous pun). Tom Clancy is now written by any old Dick or Harry, and Eric van Lustbader writes Robert Ludlum. And we are still not all that sure who wrote those plays attributed to Mr. Shakespeare. But we do know who Sebastian Faulks is. Prior to his Bond, he published eleven books, including Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. I have to admit to having ambivalent feelings about him as an author. Reading Birdsong I remember being engrossed by the narrative, but close to bored by some pages, feeling that much was gratuitous and not central to the plot. However, I forgave all for the pages that were brilliant. There is a description of the battle of the Somme that simply shredded my heart. It is breathtakingly perfect, writing that leaves one stunned, simply silenced and shocked by the intensity of the experience. Not many authors can do that, and for that all is forgiven. The house on Green Dolphin Street almost undid me again. I did not like it and found it anemic, lacking in substance and not worth the effort expended in having to turn the pages. Charlotte Gray saved the day, and made me continue to read what he writes.
There must be many ways of tackling the task of writing in another’s shoes, as it were, following keystrokes, copying ways of thinking, but Faulks has chosen well. He has taken up the story early where Fleming left off. Indeed, if you read Casino Royal and Devil May Care in short succession, you would not be discomfited by any jarring in the plot, characterization or history. Faulks’ Bond is Fleming’s Bond, down to the unruly lock of black hair plastered on his forehead. His world is that of the Cold War, where the Russians are dastardly, and the villains hell-bent on world domination. Women are gorgeous and alluring, hiding reserves of strength and guile under their tastefully brief frocks, and there is much smoking, heavy drinking, a spot of sex and more than a little lustful indulging of gastronomic desires. In this book the villain sports a hideous defect (a monkey hand – complete with simian unopposable thumb and hair) hidden by a white glove. Said defect has twisted his mind, in typically twisted plot, to a virulent hatred of all things British. He is brilliant, of course, and evil and wealthy, with his own legion of thugs to do his bidding. Chief among these a sociopathic Vietnamese enforcer who has had his conscience surgically removed (no, really). Exotic locations include Rome, Paris and Persia. There is a simply wizard piece of military kit called an Ekranoplan (a large boaty/planey/hovercrafty thingummy), the female lead is called Scarlett, Moneypenny is breathless with excitement at Bond’s double entendres, M is dour, gruff and hides his avuncular pleasure with Bond’s adventures less than perfectly, and Bond still laments the fact that he has been forced to ditch his small Beretta for a Walther PPK.

All vintage Bond, much like the wines quaffed.
All in all, most satisfying.

Louis de Bernières – Explaining to Humans What They Did

It’s probably true that readers come to expect a certain product from an author, though this may be more true of specific genres like crime fiction and historical romances, built, to a more or lesser extent, on working, known models. Good authors, however, surprise. They are to be identified, as often as not, by the breadth and range of their writing, the diversity of the situations they tackle and the spread of characters they invent. Louis de Bernières is one such.

He started his writing career with the so-called South American trilogy (The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts (1990), Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991) and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992).

The South American titles are all well written and plotted, with quirky, fully-fleshed characters who stay as voices in your head long after you have finished the books. De Bernières is also one of those remarkable authors who is able to inject pathos and sympathy for his characters without becoming maudlin or overly sentimental. Simply put, as well as being funny and true, his writing can make you very sad too. In fact, it can be quite operatic. Imagine for a moment the aria I Pagliacci, a clown singing with tears in his eyes, quite beautifully. I remember being shocked by the brutality in these books, characters that you had lived with for hours and pages being killed in the most gruesome fashion, yet, de Bernières holds it all together and never slips into gratuitous horror. In his books violence is a fact of life, and serves to make a point. Perhaps it is something inherent in South American authors and those who spent time there, due to their situations and history, (not unlike South African writers), that violence and death are such an integral part of their writing. Much the same (surprisingly savage) violence can be found in Puig and Llosa, even Borges and Marquez.

It was his fourth novel, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1993), that bought him to the attention of a large, world-wide audience. It became so well-known and –liked that it suffered the ghastly fate of coming to the notice of the terminally dim-witted, addle-brained, money-hungry denizens of high office in Hollywoodland.
It was degraded into a Hollywood movie, but by all accounts the author was not happy with the outcome. He was correct in that respect and it is an entirely missable, if not entirely tiresome adaptation of a subtle, clever, funny book. (Incidentally, for a really good cinematic interpretation along the same lines, look for the Italian movie Mediterraneo – it will leave you with a smile on your face, and that is almost more than one can reasonably ask for.)

Many would have thought that Captain Corelli’s Mandolin was the best he could, or would, do. Many would have been completely wrong. Birds Without Wings (2004) followed. It’s a masterpiece, a big, beautiful, sprawling epic of the Middle East. Set in a small village in Turkey in the time leading up to, and during, the First World War, in the time of Kemal Atatürk, it recounts the story of two friends, one Christian, one Muslim, making their way in a world that is soon torn asunder by world-wide conflict, the disintegration of old ways and the eruption of nationalistic and religious conflicts. It is a very rare thing, a book that makes sense of the lunacy, the zealotry and the seeming mercilessness of the Middle East. It’s a thick, juicy, funny, sad, true, wise look at a part of the world with problems so intractable that the rest of the world really would like to forget that it was there at all.

His latest offering, A Partisan’s Daughter (2008) is, to just burden the hackneyed phrase absolutely to death, another masterpiece. This time he picks another part of the world that seems to suffer a spot of bother every now and again – the Balkans. Her father a partisan with Tito in the Second World War, Roza lives in a squat in England in the Seventies, and tells her tale to Christian in a series of encounters, chapters alternating turn by turn with the voices, thoughts and experiences of a twenty-something Roza and forty-something Chris.

De Bernières’ fluidity of writing, his ear for dialogue and the way he manages to observe details that make you go “ah” when you read it is nothing short of remarkable. He has the heart of a storyteller. He makes you listen to what he says. You find yourself turning pages just to find out what happens, and along the way become so entranced with the characters, their lives and thoughts, that the world he makes for you, the words he feeds you, the thoughts he plants and the conversations he offers you, lets you into a complete, and completely human, world of his making. Along the way he tells you how the world came to be the way it is. By sketching the lives of people not unlike you, he reveals history to you. Not the large history of dusty tomes filled with reams of dates of slaughters past, nor that of equally dusty dons, nit-picking cause and effects over port and stilton, but the real, local, immediate history of people trying to live lives forever at the mercy of events too large for them to ever influence in the slightest.

He has a turn of phrase, a sense of language and an understanding of human experience that never ceases to take your breath away with the startled realisation of just having had the truth revealed to you. “Old men don’t become virtuous just because age pins them up against a wall and snarls contempt into their ears. Time screws death into you through every orifice, but it never stops you yearning.” ( From A Partisan’s Daughter).

Perhaps he is so succesful as a writer because he submerses himself so completely into his characters and their circumstances, whether they be boys, men or women, and in whatever troubled region they live, that he never once fails to make them real and honest and true. How else can we understand the world than by looking at it through the eyes of those who live there, and then?

Will the real Bond, James Bond, please stand up?

I grew up with James Bond. I remember watching Goldfinger at the Drive-In, (at the Dakota I think it was, but may be wrong), and Moonraker at the Kine Flora. I was an instant convert. When Sean Connery introduced himself as Bond, (flick the lighter open, light the cigarette, flick the lighter closed), James Bond, I knew that he was going to become a fixture in my life. And that he did. Not Sean Connery so much, but Mr. Bond. I saw all the movies, remaining a steadfast and loyal audience even through the dreadful Moore years, until new light dawned with Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig. I even watched the Australian Bond and the come-back of Sean Connery, hairpiece and all. As a teenager I read the books. Even then I understood that the difference between the film version and the Fleming version of Mr. Super Spy was profound. I enjoyed both genres, for different reasons. The spectacle of the film always diverted, while the written words conjured exotic, dangerous, situations with beautiful, desirable, erotically available women. What more could I wish for?

With the latest release I thought it a good idea to revisit the books, both to find out if I would still enjoyed them and to establish how far we have drifted away from the original article. I decided to begin at the beginning and read Casino Royal, where Bond made his bow. For a start I was astonished at how much James smoked (I suppose this should come as no surprise when you consider the picture of Ian Fleming that graces the back cover of the paperback). In our era the sentence: “Then he lit his seventieth cigarette of the day… (p.13) makes one fair choke on one’s granola bar.

Briefly, Bond is sent to Royale-les-Eaux to take on a communist spy, Le Chiffre, at the gaming tables to bankrupt him and expose his pilfering of party funds. As is to be expected there is a lot of card play, fisticuffs, racing cars, a beautiful woman, descriptions of spy craft, some torture, SMERSH, several loud bangs and some dead bodies. All most diverting.

In this book, written in the mists of pre-political correctness, women were not equal. At all. “Women were for recreation. On a job, they got in the way and fogged things up with sex and hurt feelings and all the emotional baggage they carried around.” (p.33) No forceful, intelligent, tough, female M here. Though of course M is here, only he’s a crusty older man, a secretive, shadowy manipulator of others.

Also absent here is Bond’s Aston Martin. In fact, Bond is dated a tad. “Bond’s car was his only personal hobby. One of the last of the 4.5-litre Bentleys with the supercharger by Amherst Villiers, he had bought it almost new in 1933 and had kept it in careful storage through the war.” (p.36)

And what of the famous vodka Martini? Shaken not stirred? Ha! Our man gives very careful instructions for his own drink, one he has invented and is proud of: “’A dry Martini,’ he said. ‘One. In a deep champagne goblet… Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it is ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel.’”(p51)
Both Fleming and Bond know a lot about food, drink, guns and (rather surprisingly) clothes. It does seem unlikely that Daniel Craig would describe a woman’s attire thus: “Her medium-length dress was of grey soie suavage with a square-cut bodice, lasciviously tight across her fine breasts (OK!). The skirt was closely pleated and flowered down from a narrow, but not thin, waist. She wore a three-inch, handstitched black belt. A handstitiched black sabretache rested on the chair beside her, together with a wide cart-wheel hat of gold straw, its crown encircled by a thin black velvet ribbon which tied at the back in a short bow. Her shoes were square-toed of plain black leather.” (p.39) Good grief.

Of the Double O: Bond says: “It’s not difficult to get a Double O number if you are prepared to kill people… That’s the meaning it has. It’s nothing to be particularly proud of.” (p.64)
And: “A Double O number in our Service means you’ve had to kill a chap in cold blood in the course of some job.” (p.142)


In the end you realise that but for the ghastly gadgets and the abomination of Roger Moore in a bespoke Safari suit, the celluloid Bond has not been too untrue to himself. He is a misogynist, he smokes and drinks too much, he is violent but does not enjoy it too much, and he does suffer occasional spasms of conscience. He is more human, the way Fleming wrote him, and more believable. While no one has been able to, (despite much speculation) ascertain how closely the character of Bond comes to the life of his creator, he is most certainly a more human character than he appears to be on celluloid. He bleeds a lot more, for one thing, and spends a long time recuperating from his wounds. A superman he is not, a veteran of the shadow world of assassins and spies he most certainly is.

Nick Hornby’s Slam, Easily Excellent.

Nick Hornby is a remarkable writer, not because he writes well (he does), but because he is easy to read. It is one of the most difficult illusions for an author to master: making the reader believe that writing is easy. In this Nick Hornby is simply inspired. The eye flies over the page, the pages turn quickly and the voices of the characters chatter away in your head like an overheard conversation in a quiet room.
His latest offering, Slam, is ostensibly written for young adult readers in the same way that Fever Pitch was written for football supporters, (more particularly the misguided few Arsenal supporters still wandering around, dazed and confused), and will therefore find a large audience of readers who are not. As we have come to expect of him the book is warm, witty, wise and (of course) easy to read.

Since publishing Fever Pitch in 1992 he has authored five novels, High Fidelity, About a Boy, How to be Good, A Long Way Down and Slam. In addition he has also written three other books of non-fiction, has edited four anthologies of short stories and written two screenplay adaptations.
Most well-known as a humorous writer, he never fails to surprise with the depth, complexity and humanity of his stories and characters. The obsessive way the record collector goes about compiling the perfect mix tape, the moral quandary of the adulterous woman trying to be good, the adult learning how not to be a boy, and the boy learning to cope with slamming into reality – all are nuanced characters whose experiences make us examine our own, help us understand how things are, how the world works.

Somewhat ironically Slam, though for and about teenagers, shows a new maturity in his writing. Perhaps it comes with the passing years, perhaps just with life knocking the stuffing out of him. It would seem obvious to conclude that he gathers experience as he goes and that his works change as his world view does. And his world view changes because of the experiences he gains. Slam serves as a good example of this.

In short it is about a young boy, Sam, who continues the family tradition, started by his mother, of accidentally becoming a parent at sixteen. His guide through this experience is the autobiography of Tony Hawks (Occupation Skateboarder), who has advice for almost all situations except his mother also becoming pregnant and giving birth to his son’s aunt, mere months after said son is born.

In this world families are dysfunctional, but in a way that makes them understandable, attractive even. It is as if he has written a book he wants his own children to read, so that they would be warned that life could turn and bite you as soon as look at you.

Not only does the book read well, but life, seen through the eyes of a teenager, one who has had to learn to cope with adult issues long before he is ready for them, is a fresh experience. Sam tries his best to understand, and to cope. He is not a bad kid, indeed, he is a good one.

“I think I can remember Ms. Miller telling us in religious studies once that some people believe you have to live your life over and over again, like a level on a computer game, until you get it right. Well, whatever religion that is, I think I might believe in it. I might actually be a Hindu or a Buddhist or something, without really knowing it.” (p.277)

In learning, he becomes wise beyond his years.

“Age isn’t like a fixed thing… You can be seventeen and fifteen and nine and a hundred all on the same day. Having sex with the mother of my son after a long time without any made me feel about twenty-five, I’d say. And then I went from twenty-five to nine in two seconds, a new world record. I didn’t have a clue why I felt nine years old when I’d been caught in bed with a girl. Sex is supposed to make you feel older, not younger. Unless you’re old, I suppose. Then it might work the other way around.” (p.283)

As Sam learns, we learn, together we come to understand that life is challenging, strange, surprising, mutable and not at all what we expect.

Amelie Nothomb: The Perpetual Introspective Outsider

Under the most excellent title Le Clézio, le backlash, Adrian Tahourdin writes an article in the Times Literary Supplement on the most recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literatute. In it he refers to the dissenting voices being heard in France regarding this year’s winner. He refers to an article Frédéric-Yves Jeannet wrote in Le Monde, where the latter states that Le Clezio writes about fine sentiments and noble causes, but that these sentiments do not necessarily make for good literature. He goes on to suggest that Amélie Nothomb would have been a more worthy recipient of the prize.
While not wishing to deride the work of the worthy monsieur Le Clezio (especially as I have not read any of his books, it shames me to admit), I have to agree.
Discovering the writing of Amelie Nothomb is a rare pleasure and an unexpected joy. She is provocative, playful, funny, profound and strange – in short, all that one can hope for in a serious author.

She is suitably exotic, born in Kobe, Japan, to Belgian diplomat parents and has lived in China, New York, Bangladesh, Burma, England and Laos. She speaks Japanese and has worked there as a translator for a large corporation. Because of this, one surmises, she feels at home everywhere and nowhere. She is the outsider who never ceases to try to understand how she fits, or does not fit, into the world around her. She is a precocious talent and writes what can only be described as autobiographical fiction. It would be easy to see this as arrogance or hubris, but she explores the world through her experience, and in so doing, makes the world more understandable, more explicable and bearable for us.
Though her books are intensely personal, the themes are universal. She is, (dare one say) after all Belgian, which is French enough to be an extentialist who has only the self with which to interpret life. There is something Ionesco-esque (to coin a phrase) about her work, and she is absurdist enough to sometimes write herself into her own books. That takes some self confidence, and some balls, and some skill to pull off without becoming either precious or gimmicky. She is none of those things.

“Contrary to what one might believe, my attitude towards others had nothing to do with vanity. It was purely logical. All roads led to me: it wasn’t my fault, or my decision. It was a given, a fact of life. What did I need friends for? They had no role to play in my existence. I was the centre of the world: there was nothing they could do to make me more central.”
(Loving Sabotage, p.38 - 39)


There is some difficulty in reading books in translation. Invariably you are left with the lingering feeling that you are missing something important, that some nuance, some shade, some gesture, elludes you. Reading for long enough brings a cure. You make peace with it and also learn to understand that great writing translates well. It is a universal, of sorts, perhaps like genius. You have to learn this through Dostoevsky and Kundera and Grass and Boll and Hrabal and Puig and Zola and on and on.

“Language is less practical than it is aesthetic. If, seeking to speak of a rose, one had no word at one’s disposal, if each time one had to say: ‘the thing that opens in the spring and smells nice’, the thing in question would be much less beautiful. And when the word is a luxury word, namely a name, its task is the revelation of beauty.”
(Sulphuric Acid, p.38)

Nothomb very often writes young characters, young girls, and sees the world through their eyes. In an interview she once admitted that after she turned 25 nothing interesting happened that she wants to write about.
With such introspective writing there is a danger that it would pale, that it would become dull and uninteresting, like a bare acquaintance recounting their whole day to you in every detail, but, as with the universal, she holds your attention. Her imagination, her life, the world through her eyes, even though they be young, is fresh and interesting, funny and filled with the discovery of the absurdity of the world, our bodies, our existence.
It is almost as if her words are better than she is.

Being that personal, having survived a bout with anorexia at seventeen, she writes about food:

‘You see! There’s nothing in the world more disgusting than dried figs.’
They swooned with a shared disgust that took them to seventh heaven. For a long time they detailed the repugnant aspects of this desiccated fruit, uttering cries of pleasure.
‘I swear I’m never going to eat them ever again,’ Roselyne said solemnly.
‘Even under torture?’
‘Even under torture!’
‘And if someone stuffs them into your mouth by force?’
‘I swear I’ll throw up!’ the child declared, in the voice of a young bride.
That night elevated their friendship to the level of a mystery cult.’
(The Book of Proper Names, p.48 - 49)

To date she has published 16 books, and written a play and song lyrics. She has been translated into 30 languages and routinely makes the best-seller lists in France.

We can only hope that one day she will indeed be a Nobel Lauriate. Her talent is undeniable, her genius hard to deny.

Life as Remarkable Failure: Tim Winton – An Open Swimmer.

An Open Swimmer, published in 1982, is Tim Winton’s first short novel, and won the Australian /Vogel Award for Best First Novel. To anyone who has read any of his books, this honour will come as no surprise. He is an exceptionally talented writer, with deep insight into the human soul. Since then he has received more accolades; the Miles Franklin Award, twice (Shallows, in 1984 and Cloudstreet, in 1992), the Commonwealth Writers Prize, South East Asia and South Pacific section, in 1995, and has twice been short listed for the Booker Prize. While these have all been well deserved, it is merely a matter of time before he harvests one of the major literary prizes. I’ll wager good money on that.
He has been a prolific author since then, but his work receives less attention here than it deserves. I would wish to change that. Kindly indulge me – allow me to open your mind to his talent.

As an introduction to his work, An Open Swimmer serves admirably.

Winton’s style is sparse, and his prose stripped, pared, bordering on brutal. Language and words serve inadequately his task of bringing to paper the feelings and emotions of people, the sweeping grandeur and irresistible, immutable forces of nature. The land he lives in, the world his characters inhabit, is ancient, an overpoweringly forceful existence that pre-dates man. Perhaps, in a primordial land, about an ancient earth, one can only speak in stunted words, half-sentences, broken thoughts. Perhaps, with those long-buried memories of humans at the mercy of the elements, the half-remembered/half-forgotten terrors of existence haunting like the distant sounds of the sea, one can only write like Tim Winton. His humour is sardonic, and often oblique.
In his world, in our world, emotions are simple. People are stripped of artifice and subtlety, like his words. In the contrast between the settled earth, and the space it occupies failing to transplant what was there before, humans grapple with each other and with nature, searching for meaning.

This novel is set in his native Western Australia, a vast land where nature and the sea rule the lives of those who settle there. In a very real sense, the sea, the landscape, and nature itself are characters as much as the people Winton creates, and feature as meaningfully in his writing.

An Open Swimmer is, on the surface, a deceptively simple tale told in three parts. In Part One, Jerra Nilsam, a young man who dropped out of university after completing two years of study, then spent some time working on the boats of fishing fleets, currently unemployed, goes on a camping trip with his childhood friend, Sean. They plunge away along the coast in an ancient VW bus. The land is powerful, ever awake, ever dangerous, but also beautiful and bountiful. The harshness is unrelenting: “Brilliance held their lids against their eyes. Sun beat them into the sand.” (p.11)
Though they break away from the city, it is ever-present, and the conflicts there and within themselves, unresolved. They dive, fish, surf – repeating all the experiences of their youth, re-living the way they ran free as boys, as blood-brothers. But their relationship is complicated. Under the surface, shifting like sunlight on heaving sea, responding to the deep tug of tides, the memories of yesterday twist and turn in the shadows. They remember, reflect, think, talk, grind against each other like pebbles long in a stream.
Their friendship is not what it once was. They have drifted apart, and have been forced apart by life. Unlike Jerra, Sean finished his degree, and works for his father, a successful businessman. He lives in a company-subsidised town house in South Perth. Jerra lives with his parents, in the bedroom he occupied as a boy. Their once close bond is slipping away. The resentments of the past, and the realities of the present, have separated them. Sean has become undeserving of his trust, like an unpredictable animal. “Thought what you’re going to do?” Sean blinked, his eyes lit red. To Jerra, sometimes, they were like the eyes of a fox, drilled in a spotlight. (p.12) (A sentiment later repeated, that time about both Sean and his father, Uncle Jim.)

Winton’s characters live caught between two worlds, between city and nature, and their natures mirror the conflict. Though they leave the city behind and strike into the bush, the conflict stays present and clear. There is no running away from it.

While looking for firewood they meet an old man. He has lived in a shack in the bush, away from civilization and other people, for twenty years. They discover that he keeps a dreadful secret, and that his exile is only partly self-imposed. He used to have a boat and a wife, and now has nothing. He fears the law of man, is at the same time incapable of escaping his own, inner law – he is twice condemned. While he avoids people and towns, he grapples with the memory of what he has done. His words come with difficulty, and he is sometimes confused, mingling past and present. Their conversations are stunted, monosyllabic:
“See many people out here?”
“All that come.”
“Many come?”
“Enough.”
“When was the last?”
“Couldn’t be sure.”
“Anyone been here before?”
“Not here. Not this beach. You are the first.”
“Always a first time.”
“Everything’s been done. At least once.” (p.40.)

The only other words the old man uses are pages torn from a bible, used for rolling smokes. It’s tough going, he says, but he’s already up to Deuteronomy 18 or 19.

We also learn that Sean’s mum was Auntie Jewel, a woman who encouraged Jerra to write poetry when he was a child, but something went awfully wrong, and she died.
Words enter the picture again through the poetry, as does the civilization that accompanies it. There is no escape. Sean is reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Even nature speaks. They find a tree that says no – it has the letters NO carved deeply into the trunk. Even though it says no to Jerra, he does not know what it means, what it is telling him.

Part Two finds Jerra back in the city, in his old bedroom in his parent’s house. He is unemployed and wanders the streets. He experiences the dispossession and alienation of being an economic outcast in a community and life he knows well. “Jerra met eyes he knew, letting them blink by, clacking up the footpaths amidst the stink of rotting flowers, fluorescent windows of scaled, headless fish, the chatter of money in tills, on bars, in pockets, gutters.” (p.71)

His mother asks him why he has stopped reading. Books and words have failed him. Uncle Jim used to beat Auntie Jewel – it’s a dirty little family secret. She finally broke down and Sean came to live with them for a while.
Auntie Jewel encouraged him to write, and his grandfather taught him poems.
He visits his granddad in the old age home, who asks him if he has found a job. It’s very important that he does something. “’I never did much’, said the old man. ‘You get old ‘fore you get around to doing anything.’” (p.81).

Shortly after the visit, the grandfather dies. Uncle Jim, Auntie Jewel’s husband and Sean’s father, shows up at the funeral and brings a large wreath. Jerra is not impressed: “He’s a snake. Like his wriggling son, Sean. No, he thought. He’s a fox – with rabies. They both are.” (p.83)

Jerra and his father go on a fishing trip, where he reads his grandfather’s diaries.
When they arrive home again he reflects on the writing and the words, used by his grandfather and Auntie Jewel: “What a bunch of cripples, he thought. To resort to writing diaries and letters… and bloody books; … (p .96)

He meets a girl, Judy Thyme, and finds work in a deli. The business is owned by Al, and he is assisted by fat Rosa. Winton’s humour is wry: “Rosa was fat, a distended hotdog about to burst its red skin.” (p. 105)

With the flame of hope thus awakened, Winton moves quickly to dim it. Jerra gets into an argument with a rude factory worker. They fight in the shop and Jerra knocks him down. As a result he is fired.
His relationship with Judy seems to be progressing. She is attracted to him, but he keeps his distance.
He tells her about pearls found in the head of fish. It is a tale passed down from his grandfather and father. The pearls, he thinks, represent: “The aggregated life, the distilled knowledge of lifetimes, of ancestors, of travel, of instinct, of things unseen and unknown.” (p.135)
While Judy tries to make love to him, Jerra flees – physically bolts from the house and runs away.
Nothing works. People try to do the right thing, to survive, love, prosper, but for Jerra it all seems to end in failure.

Part Three sees him packing up and heading back into the bush. He is fleeing again, as he has done before. “Listening to the note of the engine, and tapping out its rhythms on the steering-wheel, Jerra tried to remember the things he had forgotten to bring, but it was hopeless; he hardly knew what he had, and, as always, he confused this with other trips, other forgotten things, other items to be remembered.” (p. 142)

He is searching for the shack, for the old man, for the tree that says NO.
The old man says: “Some people got bad in ‘em. Some things are too bad to let any good come any more. Some people never do anything at all. Maybe it’s better doing something bad than never doing anything all your life. At least it’s trying. You make blues. You gotta try.” (p. 158)

Jerra finds NO carved in the sand of the beach. He asks the old man what will become of him when he is too old to hunt or fish.
“Reckon I’ll know what to do.”
“And you could die trying to think of something.”
“Not too many choices.”
“And just die?”
“Others are dead an’ still walking around.” (p. 167)

While diving, and after a long struggle, Jerra spears and kills a big fish, a groper. Exhausted, having nearly been drowned by the fish in a Hemingway-esque contest, he cuts open the head to find the pearls. Instead of those repositories of wisdom and knowledge, he finds only the brain, “…the grey little brain and the black lining behind the eyes.” (p. 173)
The story of the pearls is only a fisherman’s tale. It’s a “…fisherman’s bloody superstition.” (p.169) The search is meaningless. He leaves the fish on the beach, but the old man finds him and berates him: “What are you? Gotta mutilate fish to find what you want? Why don’t you hack yourself open?” (p.174.)

Later the old man finds him again and apologises. Tells him he did well in landing the big fish.
“Beat him, didn’t I?” said Jerra, suddenly arrogant.
“No.”
“Some things you can’t get around. Your words.”
“Yer can have anythink and it’ll likely be no good. It’s how yer get it and what yer do with it, that’s what counts. Havin’ it’s nothin’. Everybody’s got things. It’s nothing.” (p.189)
He was after the pearl, Jerra tells him. The old man, reminding us of Plato’s allegory, instructs him: “Keep tryin’, boy. You ‘ad the wrong fish. Spear an open swimmer, they’re the ones. Cave fish see nothin’.” (p. 190)

As storm blows up while he is sleeping in the old VW bus and Jerra is rescued by the old man when a tree falls over and crashes through the roof of the car.

Shortly thereafter the old man dies. Jerra finds his body on the beach. It’s not clear how he died, but he wraps and weighs the body down, sinks him at sea, in a deep hole in the reef. Jerra puts on the old man’s boots. They smell, but are soft inside. He returns to his shattered bus and sets fire to it.

*

It’s a simple tale, told in a deeply complex universe. There are no starts, no finishes. Human lives are not perfectly parcelled stories. They flow like water over and around obstacles, trying to find the best way. People struggle to exist with each other and with nature. Their actions are imperfect, and they often fail. Searching for the truth - for knowledge, for wisdom, love or peace - is a difficult and painful enterprise, and, more often than not, doomed to failure.

Winton’s characters search, they have to keep trying, calling to mind Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.” (Worstward Ho, 1984).



(All quotes are from the Picador edition, 2003)

Twilight of the feet of the Idols

Twilight of the feet of the Idols

No hero is ever safe from being felled by his/her past. I discovered this when the story broke that Gunther Grass had served in the Waffen-SS. I, and others, had believed him when he claimed that he did not fight in the war, and subsequently found his anti-nazi stance strenghtened by the courage of his convictions. In his old age he admitted that he had lied about it. What a quandry for his supporters. He was, and I suppose still is, despite the evidence of his feet of clay, a hero of mine. I have always loved his books. Loved the effort it took to read them, loved the reward they heaped on the reader if s/he persisted. The Flounder, I thought, was a masterpiece. It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that as an author he could stand apart from that which he had created and that his mis/deeds did not necessarily detract from the value of his work. It made me wander into the minefield that is post-modernism. Can an author be divorced from his work? Can a text stand alone? Can a work of art be intereted without refering to its creator? I did not wander far into that field before I lost some intellectual limbs and decided to retreat. Easier to understand it in terms of humans and what it means to be human. As the Romans said, I thought pompously: Errare humanum est.
Indeed. Thus can one admire the books though the author be flawed. Some may even argue that all authors are flawed and, further, needs to be so in order to create something worthwhile. If one is not familiar with moral ambiguities, after all, how on earth could one explore those? In order to write, to tell stories of humans about human experience, one must be human, no? One must be subject to the same glories and failings, surely? Simplistic, I grant you, but it made me sleep at night.
Then the latest shock nearly felled me. It involved another hero, a collossus of letters, a genius of literature, Milan Kundera, as vocal an opponent of communism as Grass has always been of nazism.

Kundera, it was alleged, denounced a Western spy to the Czechoslovak police when he was a student. It seems that he reported Miroslav Dvoracek after he visited a female friend of Kundera’s at her student quarters in 1950. The spy was arrested and spent 14 years incarcerated.

Alas and alack, my wailing was pitiful to behold. Not only was Kundera a traitor to his conscience, but lay revealed now as suffering from that most human of failing, jealousy. Something, ironically, he explored at length in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Shopping somebody for an ideal or belief one can forgive, but for a woman? No, that was just beyond the pale.

That being said, I am still a lover of his books.

Even after discovering that my heroes are human, that they suffer the foibles the rest of us do, their books are still good. It was Breytren Breytenbach, after all, who pointed out that it was foolish to expect consistent political thought from a writer. They, and we, change, and we change our minds. We are fallible.
The value of their books is undiminshed, maybe slightly tarnished, spotted with their failings. Perhaps they are still the stars they were before, (to stretch a metaphor to breaking point) but somewhat farther away. Space and time dimming their light somewhat.

But it was difficult to make the transistion, to come to that realisation.

Perhaps nothing really is so difficult as predicting the past.