… and navigated
Those reading blues can’t keep a good bookworm down. I was rescued from my sadpatch by two lovely recent Australian releases, both of which I picked up at the Sydney Writers Festival this year. (I had a wonderful festival, too. Spent whole days laughing with the cheeky and charming David Walker, long evenings drinking with the visiting publishers, and a sunny morning falling in love with Michael Cunningham.) I love festivals. And festival bookshops. And discovering writers I may not otherwise have read.
Favel Parrett was one of these. I saw her speaking at a panel about literary influences, and she listed a whole pile of books that I love. She talked about writing landscape, and the poetics of water, and writing as tracing little pieces of your self. She was prepared. And she is dead cute. And I figured these were all reasons I might like her book.
Past the Shallows is a heartbreaker. It’s so gently told, through the eyes of three young brothers, growing up in a grim coastal town. Their father is a gruff and angry man, and an exacting one, the family struggling to survive on the money they can make fishing in an outdated boat.There’s not much hope for any of the boys, but their gestures of tenderness – a warm cup of milo, a borrowed jumper – shine through all the more for it.
But it’s the minor characters that really shake up the book, from a burnt-skinned hermit, feared and scorned by the town, who offers strange respite and companionship to the youngest son, to a brittle and irascible aunt powerless to intervene in the shipwreck of the brothers’ childhoods and a wealthy fisherman whose kindness is simple. They build up a picture of a town that is all too aware of what goes on behind closed doors, that really does care for the fate of the boys, but yet is unable to step in or really speak out. Against this, there’s a lyricism and a power in the landscape and the water that is arresting.
In many ways, what Past the Shallows offers are the staple ingredients of Australian writing – landscape, the coastal town, the father trapped by his own rough masculinity, the outsider, the uncanny child. But its emotional tenor is so finely felt that this hardly matters, and the plot moves along delicately. A great deal is left unspoken in the book, and allowed to palpitate just below the surface. It really was a swoon to read.
And at the same time, for equally dubious reasons, I picked up Chris Currie’s The Ottoman Motel. Chris is one of the sweetest people on the literary scene, affability incarnate in my opinion. And I’d already heard about the book’s beautiful acknowledgements, which make any engagement-ring-inside-the-champagne-glass gesture look, well, most lame.
But what hooked me into this book was also its delicate and slightly damaged protagonist, another sensitive young boy. The opening sequence, where Simon is travelling in a car with his parents is enchanting – the imagination and machinations of the mind of a child I’ve never seen as convincingly and beautifully portrayed as they are here. And states of waiting, of unknowing and of irresolvability are at the heart of the book, and lend it a heightened, luminous sense of suspendedness, of the weight of time, and of the uncanniness of longing. I loved Simon. And I loved his oddball friends – a girl who wears her missing mother’s dresses, a boy who dreams of building a restaurant in an abandoned swimming pool – even more.
I’d been warned that the book might be disappointing, because it becomes something of a thriller, or another small-town mystery, but it’s so wonderfully handed, so littered with oddities and moments of raw and vulnerable emotion and so resistant of easy solutions that I never found this to be the case. And the idea of disappearance, of missingness, is something of an obsession of mine at the moment.
Or it could just be the ranga factor. Adding ginger to any recipe can’t help but make it better.
