The young Damon is born in South Africa but does not feel as if he belongs there, though that is where he aimlessly returns when his wanderings fail to resolve his loneliness.  He aches to connect with others, but does not know how.  Conversations begin, falter and drift away.  This is the pattern of his relationships.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

His first inconclusive journey is with a German hiker called Reiner.  They fall into travelling together by accident, and together they wander through Greece to see the ruins at Mycenae.  Reiner seems to be a controlling personality, who uses silences to exert power.  Back in South Africa Damon is unsettled and resolves to try to develop the relationship.  He invites Reiner to travel with him to Lesotho, but the same awkwardness is the result.

On his second trip Damon remains in Africa, travelling through Nigeria, Tanzania and Malawi.  In contrast to the claustrophobic non-relationship with Reiner, he interacts with more people, most significantly the siblings Jerome and Alice.  In an almost comic-opera sequence that isn’t funny at all, he  vacillates over continuing the journey with them, decides not to, changes his mind, gets lost and runs into visa problems while pursuing them, and finally joins the group again only to find that he had gone through all these dramas and they were not really bothered about whether he was there or not.  But they are kind to him in a desultory way and eventually he takes up their offer to visit them at home in Switzerland, only to feel uncomfortable and out-of-place once he gets there…

His third journey is the most harrowing because he undertakes to look after Anna, whose mental health is on the brink and he over-estimates his ability to help her and his capacity to be there for her as much as she needs.  She is actually beyond the help of any well-meaning friend; she is in urgent need of professional care, which is impossible to organise properly in Goa (India).  This story is called The Guardian, but it’s another example of dashed hopes because he isn’t able to protect Anna from herself.

Each of these failures to connect arise from his inability to understand himself or others.  Nothing turns out as he hopes because he fears intimacy and interdependence.  He is tormented by conscience, anxiety and guilt, and these moments of introspection are marked by a curious interweaving of first and third person narration.

He sees Reiner a little way off, on a boulder at the edge of the cliff, leaning against the abyss.  What passes across his mind then, fleetingly, wordless, is the urge to push, one tiny movement of my hands and he is gone.  Where does it come from, this thought of murder surfacing so casually amongst the everyday debris of my brain and then sinking away again.  (p46, underlining mine)

The title comes from William Faulkner:

Then he sits in the sun, listening to the water, reading.  In a strange room, you must empty yourself for sleep.  And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you.  And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not.  And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.  The words come to him from a long way off.  (p46)

These ambiguities make In a Strange Room challenging to read.  It inverts the travel/adventure genre completely: there is no revelling in the interest, excitement or beauty of the places they visited so that the reader wonders why they are there.  Nothing much happens: like Damon we are hoping that something will make these wanderings satisfying or conclusive, but it doesn’t.  It’s more of a quiet examination of emotion, and memory.  It’s quite haunting…the plot details, such as they are, fade, but Damon’s perceptions of futility and emptiness remain long after the book is closed.

In a Strange Room was shortlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize.   I also enjoyed The Impostor,  a gripping story of crime, obsession and secrecy in the new South Africa (see my review) and The Good Doctor which quietly explored the impact of deep-rooted post-apartheid social and political tensions on an idealistic young doctor.  It was shortlisted for the 2003 Booker and also the Commonwealth Writers Prize.  All three books are very different to one another, showing that Galgut is a writer not afraid to experiment with style and form.  I like his work very much.

PS I had bought this book last year, but was happy to read it to support the 2012 Africa Reading Challenge at Kinna Reads.

Author: Damon Galgut
Title: In a Strange Room
Publisher: Atlantic Books (Grove Atlantic) eBook edition 2010
ISBN: 9781848873254
Source: Personal library, purchased for the Kindle from Amazon

Availability:
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A casualty of the Red Book group financial disaster, the previous Reader’s Feast  book store on the corner of Bourke & Swanston closed in the middle of the year, but prior to that was always conveniently ‘on my way’ on any trip to the CBD.  It had the biggest and best range of books dear to my heart: classics, Australian literary fiction, and audio books.  The staff were knowledgeable and passionate about books.  They also offered great author talks and book launches, and it was there that I had my copy of The Sea autographed by John Banville, and it was there that I met Kate Grenville, one of my favourite Aussie authors.  The closure of this store was a loss to the intellectual heart of our city, and most embarrassing of all, it meant that there was no serious book store right in the heart of Melbourne, so recently proclaimed a UNESCO City of Literature.

Well, a new business, Reader’s Feast (Vic) Pty Ltd, under the same dynamic leadership of Mary Dalmau, opened late last year  at 162 Collins Street, Melbourne 3000.  That’s the iconic Georges’ building, for those who know Melbourne well.

They’re kicking off their 2012 events calendar with the Crime and Justice Festival so if you are a fan of the genre, make sure you check it out.

An email from Mary today tells me that their  hours of opening are:

Monday to Wednesday, 9.30am to 6pm;
Thursday 9.30am to 7pm;
Friday 9.30am to 8 pm;
Saturday 10am to 5pm; and
Sunday 11am to 4pm.

Contact details and social media connections are as follows:

Reader’s Feast Bookstore
162 Collins Street
Melbourne Vic. 3000
Also accessible from 195 Little Collins St
PH: 03 9662 4699
Email: readers@readersfeast.com.au
Website: www.readersfeast.com.au
www.facebook.com/readersfeastbooksellers
www.twitter.com/readersfeastbks

But in a splendid return to the dazzling form which produced Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey’s new novel, The Chemistry of Tears, is a deliciously eccentric tale of obsession, centring on clockwork, and grief.

Hidden grief is probably more common than we know. In Carey’s tale, Catherine Gehrig is The Other Woman, trying to grieve in secret for Matthew Tinsdale who, until his untimely death, is her colleague and lover at London’s ‘Swinburne Museum’.  No one else knew about their affair, (or so she thought) so she tries to deal with her loss without any of the support that a grieving widow could take for granted.  She can’t attend the funeral.  She receives no consolatory sympathy cards.  None of the stilted, awkward words of well-meaning friends ease her way through the raw passage of grief through the human heart.

But it is Carey writing this novel, so Catherine’s journey is anything but dignified.  Naughty man, he makes his readers smile, chuckle, and laugh out loud at poor Catherine’s antics.  An obsessive and controlling personality, she is well-suited to her job as the first female horologist at the museum, but try as she might, her efforts to behave as an unfeeling mechanical creature are sabotaged by the madness of her overwhelming grief.

The director of the museum is an unlikely shining knight to rescue Catherine from herself; he has a sort of ‘God complex’ which manifests itself in interfering in other people’s personal relationships.  Eric Croft is privy to her secret, and he arranges for her to undertake an absorbing ‘special project’ in a private annexe to the museum, where she may sob obsessively (and delete incriminating emails) without invoking the perplexed curiosity of any colleagues.

In Carey’s tale, the duck, a marvel of 19th century invention, was (or might have been) created to amuse a sick child by a father with an obsession to rival Catherine’s own.  Through journals she discovers in the box of parts, Catherine retraces his journey: Henry Blandling travels to Furtwangen in Germany, the home of craftsmen in clockwork, to have the duck made from plans he has found. It is a bizarre journey, parts of which left me occasionally confused as to what was going on.  This is partly because of the form that Carey has played with…

The plot is revealed in alternating chapters.  There is Catherine’s first person narrative, which isn’t always coherent due to, er, her indiscretions.   At times she is mad with grief, and at other times she’s just nutty.  Then there is Blandling’s narrative, which consists consisted of his eleven journals until, er, they became fragmented and had to be read in bits and pieces shreds. He’s not only nutty too, but he’s surrounded by characters not just nutty but also weird-and-scary enough to rival anything from a Grimm’s fairy tale.

With the German characters Carey’s whimsy is in full flight.  Frau Helga, Herr Sumper, the boy Carl aka The Genius and the fairytale collector M. Arnaud confuse and exasperate Blandling with their obsessions, their lies, their magic and their mysteries, and all the while poor Blandling does not know if he is chasing a dream for a son who may already be dead.  (We ought to feel sorry for him, but he’s not a very likeable character.  Too bad-tempered, too judgemental).

Fortunately, just as I was about to reread a complete chapter to try to unravel the tangled plot threads, Carey provided some advice in the form of Catherine’s reflections on her experience of reading Blandling’s journals:

It had been tantalizing to stare through a glass darkly, to see or intuit what had taken place in Furtwangen and Low Hall so long ago.  Reading in this way did not require that you interrogate the unclear word.  In fact you soon learned that what was initially confusing would never be clarified no matter how you stared and swore at it.  One learned to live with fuzziness and ambiguity as one never would in life. (p199)

So I am reprieved from trying to make sense of the fuzzy bits, it seems…

It’s interesting that Carey chose to set this novel in London, not New York where he’s been resident now for ages.  One mustn’t stereotype, but perhaps there is something quintessentially British about genuine eccentricity?  Or is London’s WW2 legacy of keeping a stiff upper lip, and adhering to the maxim to ‘keep calm and carry on’, better suited than a city lampooned for its excess of psychiatrists and grief counsellors?

I liked this novel much better than Parrot and Olivier in America!

Author: Peter Carey
Title: The Chemistry of Tears
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton (Penguin), 2012
ISBN: 9781926428154
Source: Review copy courtesy of Penguin Australia

Availability:
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Did you love the quirky Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany?  I did.  It was her first novel, shortlisted for The Orange Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Guardian First Book Award and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize.  It has been a long wait for her second novel, Mateship with Birds but from what I have read so far, (I’m up to page 28 and am hooked) the wait is worth it.

Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

On the outskirts of a country town in the early 1950s, a lonely farmer trains his binoculars on a raucous family of kookaburras roosting next to his dairy. But as Harry observes the birds through a year of feast, famine, birth, death, war, romance and song, his neighbour, Betty, has her own set of binoculars trained on him. Of Betty’s two fatherless children, it is Michael who gravitates towards the gentle man next door, and Harry, sensing Michael is ready to stretch his wings, decides to teach him the oldest lessons in the world. Harry knows all about girls. But how much does he know Betty? Mateship with Birds is a tender, witty novel of young lust and mature love. A glorious tale of innocence lost, it celebrates life on one small farm in a vast, ancient landscape, and a collection of misfits who question what a family might be.

 Have you ever wondered what a dairy farmer might be thinking as he undertakes the twice-daily toil of milking the herd?  This is a Sensational Snippet to whet your appetite for this enticing novel:

He moves slowly between each cow, going backwards and forwards into the engine room, checking the separator.  When the rhythm of the milking is well underway he lets his mind wander.  Harry entertains himself with the idea that the girls are a troupe – perhaps dancers or singers – and that he is their manager, responsible for their myriad complex travel arrangements and costumes and meals.  They are on some sort of vague world tour where they are much acclaimed for their talent and beauty.  Harry is a dedicated but exasperated manager, worn down by attending to all of their feminine needs and foibles.  He’s responsible too for their reputations.  When Babs leaves her stall at unexpected speed, her empty udder slapping slackly between her legs, he watches after her and feels ashamed on her behalf, hoping nobody has seen his good girl with her bloomers showing.  Harry shakes his head and finishes rinsing the udder in his hands – the tight bag of a milker in her first lactation.  Four cows to go now.  The pump is chugging along warmly.  Harry wonders what grand city they are in today.  He sees bold headlines in foreign newspapers, imagines them being met in the foyers of expensive hotels.  The sound of their breathing falls into line with the pulse of the cups inflating.  Harry is their conductor – he’s at the centre of an orchestra of pistons, lungs and udders.  The cows provide the wheezy melody, the milking machine bashes along underneath with its regular motorised beat.  It’s Harry’s music-de-milk and the dawn is only just breaking.

From Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany, Picador, 2011 p 27 (purchased from Benn’s Books Bentleigh, $19.99)

Availability:

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‘We put our books and writers on the high shelf of the past, where we forget  about them. Imagine if our art galleries  decided to banish the works of Brett  Whiteley or Fred Williams to their darkened basements. Not for a year or two,  but a decade or two. That’s what we routinely do to so many significant writers  whose books are out of print’.

It’s wonderful news to read that many of our brilliant books of the past are going to be reissued by Text in their Text Classics series.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/classics-going-to-waste-20120121-1qb9z.html#ixzz1kCIQPYqY

Sometimes compared to  Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Lost Time), Anthony Powell’s masterpiece might also be called a comedy of manners.  It is much easier to read than Proust, and not just because the sentences are shorter: it’s more amusing, less angst-ridden, and the ‘Britishness’ of its subtle ironies is part of its charm.

A clumsy summary might make this work seem like a soap-opera, so I shan’t try except to say that the novels follow the fortunes of a group of young men through their adolescence and adulthood, from the immediate post WW1 period to the early 1970s.  It begins when Jenkins, Templer, Stringham and Widmerpool are in the same house at Eton, and it moves on as they muddle their desultory way through and out of university and then into careers of one sort or another.  They muddle into and out of relationships too: love, business, artistic and so on.  Along the way there is a veritable cavalcade of eccentric and sometimes dubious characters from all walks of life.

The novel takes its name from a painting now in the Wallace Collection, in London, and the book-covers in the edition I have are details from the painting.

The Dance to the Music of Time, c 1640 by Poussin (Source: Wikipedia Commons)

In the very beginning of the book, the narrator, Nick Jenkins, reminiscing about the past, muses on the patterns of life:

These classical projections, and something from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin’s scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays. The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

Jenkins is an engaging narrator. Mild and self-effacing, in this volume he is misled by his own inexperience into assumptions about his school friends; well into his twenties he is mystified by ‘girls’;  and he is naïve about ‘getting ahead’ until it belatedly dawns on him that some of his pals – including the unprepossessing Widmerpool – are unexpectedly becoming men of influence.  When he eventually begins work in a publishing house that specialises in art books, he is frustrated by the novelist St. John Clarke who’s supposed to write the introduction but delays so long that (a) a retrospective of the artist’s work comes and goes and (b) the art movement to be covered by the introduction is passé.   Jenkins does get a novel written by the end of the book, but no one seems very impressed.

The humour is subtle, but the occasional chuckle is impossible to suppress.  To give you a small taste of the author’s droll style, here’s an excerpt (from The Acceptance World, the third novel in the First Movement):

In fact to get rid of a secretary who performed his often difficult functions so effectively was a rash step on the part of a man who liked to be steered painlessly through the shoals and shallows of social life.  Indeed, looking back afterwards, the dismissal of Members might almost be regarded as a landmark in the general disintegration of society in its traditional form.  It was an act of individual folly on the part of St. John Clarke; a piece of recklessness that well illustrated the mixture of self-assurance and ennui which together contributed so much to form the state of mind of people like St. John Clarke at that time.  Of course I did not recognise its broader aspects then.  The duel between Members and Quiggin seemed merely an entertaining conflict to watch, rather than the significant crumbling of social foundations.  ( p122)

The book concludes with that most excruciating of all social occasions, a school reunion.  Widmerpool is on the rise; Templer’s wife has left him, and Stringham seems to be drinking too much.  On now to the Second Movement – what fun!

PS A Dance to the Music of Time is included in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (the 2006 edition).  Here is part of the citation:

…as with Proust, the joy of these addictive novels does not lie in their plots or in the portrait they give, such as it is, of half a century of largely upper-class English life.  Powell’s success comes from his comedy, his characterisations, and his style – the first two of these being indivisible from the third.  Beautifully written, his assessments of the private experiences of his hero comfort us and steady our view of the world.  Everything, in his quiet but elegant prose, becomes matter for comedy and puzzlement. (p655)

Author: Anthony Powell
Title: A Dance to the Music of Time (1st Movement)
Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1995
ISBN: 9780226677149
Source: Personal Library, purchased from the Book Depository

Availability:

Fishpond:

A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement
A Dance to the Music of Time: Second Movement
A Dance to the Music of Time: Third Movement
A Dance to the Music of Time: Fourth Movement

Book Depository:

A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement;
Second Movement;
Third Movement;and
Fourth Movement

Tasmania still has one of the great wilderness areas left on earth, and at the time that (For the Term of) His Natural Life was set in the early C19th, was a densely forested and hostile landscape except for the pasture lands where settlers were.   It was, as far as the authorities were concerned, the perfect place for a penal colony because with its rugged coastline, impenetrable bush and paucity of edible flora and fauna[1], escape was virtually impossible.  Macquarie Island where the action of Book 2 takes place in the southwest is often very cold, very wet, and very gloomy. When The Spouse and I once visited the area hoping for a joy-flight over the Gordon River (one of many places in Tasmania that were/are the subject of conservation battles) the weather was so bad we couldn’t even take a boat trip up the river. We couldn’t see much past our noses in the fog, and this was high summer!

Port Arthur not far from Hobart in the southeast where Book 3 is set has its own melancholy moods too, apart from its awful history, and it can also have foul weather at any time of the year.   While there may be very hot days in Summer and there is always the threat of bushfire,  Mt Wellington – which glowers forbiddingly above Hobart – always gets snow in Winter but sometimes also as late as November when a cold front blows in from the Antarctic.  It’s not uncommon for bushwalkers in wilderness areas to die of exposure if they get lost, and their bodies aren’t found until snow melt.  So although Tassie today is one of my favourite places for a holiday, its weather may demand some stoicism.  My advice to anyone reading this book is, don’t assume bright skies and sunshine: think cold fingers and toes, wet feet and clothing, dripping leaves down the back of your neck, and fog!

Tasmania was first settled as a penal colony by the British, off-loading their villains as far away as they could and establishing a claim to this part of the world for their empire at the same time.  As you will know if you have read Dr Lurline Stuart’s introduction to this significant Australian classic here on the ANZ LitLovers blog, Marcus Clarke’s story features a man wrongly convicted and the duplicity of the men who wrong him, set in the penal colonies of Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur in Tasmania, and also at Norfolk Island off the mainland coast, half way between New Caledonia and New Zealand. It’s a riveting story.

Richard Devine is the profligate son of Sir Richard Devine, and heir to his considerable estate.  But Sir Richard, a war profiteer and a ‘gentleman’ only by marriage is just looking for an opportunity to prefer his nephew Maurice Frere as his heir, and the book begins with his wife providing him with a reason to do just that.  To protect her name, Richard assumes a new identity as Rufus Dawes and takes the blame for a crime he didn’t commit.  Unrecognisable in his new identity, he is convicted and transported to Tasmania, then known as Van Dieman’s Land.   Events conspire, and Rufus Dawes travels aboard the same ship as his rival Lieutenant Frere, frustrated in his ambition to join the leisured classes because of those same events and already on the path to brutal despotism.

Things go from bad to worse for Rufus: Clarke juggles the plot so that there are possibilities for relief from his misery but everything seems to conspire against him.  Part of the interest in the novel is whether or not his spirit or his integrity will be broken by the ghastly life he is forced to endure, and whether there will or – as events progress – can ever be any redemption.  But while using the novel as a vehicle for exposing the brutality of transportation, Clark also manages to create a real page-turner, with mutiny, conspiracy, escapes both successful and not, a love interest, harrowingly gruesome events and a compelling mystery.  The characterisation is excellent, especially of the stoic Dawes and his nemesis Frere; of the complex chaplain North and his counterpart the comic Meekin; and of a grand cast of villainous convicts and brutal guards.  Even the stock C19th representation of woman as whore and woman as Madonna works too.  Sarah Purfoy is a wonderful creation.

It would spoil the book to reveal much more than this and I entreat you not to read the Wikipedia summary beforehand – but it is safe to whet your appetite with this delightful clip of the 1927 film directed by Norman Dawn which pioneers some special effects to the ruins at Port Arthur!

[1] There was, of course, edible flora and fauna in Tasmania, which had sustained a plentiful diet for the indigenous people for 35,000 years or more.  Estimates of the population of the Parlevar people prior to the arrival of the British in 1803, range from 3,000–15,000.  But introduced diseases and warfare had decimated the indigenous population so that by the time of Clarke’s writing his novel in the 1870s, he could have known very little about them or how they lived.  In 1833 the last 200 or so survivors had been persuaded with false promises to surrender to ‘protection’ and had been removed to Flinders Island; and in 1847 the remnant 47 survivors were brought back to the Oyster Cove near Hobart on the mainland.  Truganner (often thought to be the last ‘full-blooded’ Palevar) died in 1876 and Fanny Cochrane Smith (recognised by Parliament in 1889 as the last survivor) died in 1905. See Wikipedia.

Availability:

The Angus and Robertson edition of For the Term of His Natural Life is available at Fishpond, but it’s also available as a ‘Popular Penguin’ almost everywhere, and you can find the Gutenberg edition for free, downloaded either from

• http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3424
• http://freeread.com.au/ebooks/e00016.txt
• or easily downloadable for a kindle as an .azw file from http://www.manybooks.net/titles/clarkemaetext02fthnl11.html

Fishpond also has Lurline’s His Natural Life (Academy Editions of Australian Literature) in stock.  It is well worth getting hold of this if you can because not only does it include a useful introduction and some essays about the historical background of the novel, there are also maps and extensive endnotes.

Newby is apparently highly-regarded as a travel writer, according to the book’s blurb: the ‘most successful travel writer of his generation’. First published in 1958,  A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is said to be characterised by his ‘self-deprecating humour, sharp wit and keen observation’ but I was not only underwhelmed by the tale of these amateur explorers and their ill-prepared post-war venture into the mountains of Afghanistan, I failed to see anything funny about the prejudices he took with him – and reinforced – on the trip.

I consider myself rather lucky to have learned a little bit about Afghanistan before 9/11.  I was teaching English as a Second Language when the first refugees from the Taliban began arriving in the mid 1990s, and I could not do my usual lessons using what I knew about my students’ country because I didn’t even know where Afghanistan was, much less anything about it.  There was nothing much in the Encyclopaedia about it, I couldn’t find a single book about it in any of my libraries, and Wikipedia and Google didn’t exist back then.  (Or if they did, I didn’t know about it).

But with the help of a very smart eleven year old girl in my class, and an enterprising photographer from Vermont who was selling online his 1980s picture postcards showcasing Afghan art and architecture, its ancient treasures, and its beautiful landscapes, I began a crash course in Afghan history, geography and culture.  So while the Afghan kids learned grammar and sentence structure and the intricacies of English vocabulary, I learned about a beautiful country with an impressive ancient history (and, thanks to the friendly generosity of my students’ parents) a most delicious cuisine.  

Newby, escaping from a job he didn’t like in his parents’ fashion business, went to Nuristan on a whim, with his pal Hugh Carless who worked in the Foreign Office.  One does not need to read far into this book to understand why British Foreign Policy caused so much strife, if Carless as represented in this book is anything to go by.  He was an arrogant prat with complete disregard for the protocols and customs of the places he visited on this trip.  (He wrote an epilogue for the book in 2008, so presumably he’s not bothered by this.)

There’s a not-very-funny scene early in the book where in Turkey en route to Persia (sic)  they almost crashed into an injured man on the road.  Carless went into a panic because their presence there might have provoked an international incident: they (having been as careless about maps as about every other aspect of their preparation) were on the wrong road, very near the Russian border during the Cold War with a carload of cameras and other stuff that looked a lot like spy equipment. And Carless didn’t have a diplomatic visa for Turkey which had hostile relations with Britain at that time.   So did Persia/Iran which had not so long ago ceased diplomatic relations with Britain and booted them out of the country after Mussadiq’s coup.

The authorities thought that the duo were responsible for this accident (which turned into a fatality because the unfortunate man died in the military hospital) but all was resolved because they behaved ‘in a gentlemanly way’ and anyway, the dead man was ‘only a nomad’.   Is there something wrong with my sense of humour that I don’t find this funny at all?  Is it supposed to be funny when later Newby drove onto a Moslem cemetery which he claims to have mistaken for a rubbish dump? Would this be funny if someone did it in the UK, or America or Australia?

Every prejudice you can think of is reinforced by this ‘witty’ book.  The man in the car repair shop in Meshed in the Persian province of Khurasan is a ‘broken-toothed demon of a man’ who takes a fancy to Carless and offers him a ‘small blind boy, good-looking but with an air of corruption’ (p55).  After fondling the boy and suggesting that Carless do the same, this man then disappears into a cupboard with him, from which emitted a ‘succession of nasty stifled noises that drove [Carless and Newby] out of the shop’.  This is not the only time that Newby goes out of his way to suggest that people in this part of the world are casual about sexual mores.  In Farman, he reports that he is propositioned while he is vomiting in the street (how ‘gentlemanly’ is that??), and later he reports on polygamy almost as if it were prostitution. 

The difference between Newby and the iconic travel-writer H.V. Morton is respect for The Other.  In every circumstance Newby sets out to depict The Other as quaint, strange, dirty, stupid and corrupt.  In a ‘horrible little hamlet’ the locals - including ‘several women in a state of happy hysteria’ – stand around and do nothing when a child is thought to be drowning in a sewer, so heroic Newby dives in only to find that the child is safe and well having merely strayed next-door and no one is very grateful (p58). Likewise, in the Customs House at Taiabad, the military commander bemoans the opium trade in remote areas, oblivious to his own staff puffing away within eyesight.  Every stream in this remote, sparsely-populated area is, according to Newby, polluted by human effluent and the food in any cafe is overwhelmed by ‘a terrible smell of grease’ , the mast as ‘stiff as old putty, the same colour and pungent’.  They would rather eat ancient ex-army ration packs of Irish Stew. 

But it was the descriptions of the people that I found the most offensive.  At the Afghan border the Pathans have ‘Semitic, feminine faces but were an uncouth lot, full of swagger’, and Newby mocks the pantaloons that they wear as pyjamas  (p62). When the people who help them over a collapsed bridge afterwards bargain for payment (as is the custom, and more fools Newby & Carless for not concluding an agreed price beforehand) these helpful people are ‘ruffians’, while the ones accompanying American vehicles on the road are ‘piratical’.  Hazaras (who in my experience are attractive people) are ‘slit-eyed, round-headed Mongols’ (p94) while the Tajiks are the ‘original Persian owners of Afghan soil: pleasant, regular-featured people’ (p34).  Both Newby and Carless think it is okay to delude their guides as to their real destination, because they know full well that the locals would refuse to take them to where long-standing tribal hostilities would put the entire party at risk. Their arrogant sense of entitlement is breath-taking.

If I had picked up a 1958 edition of this book for 20c in an Op Shop, I would put the grotesque misrepresentation of Afghanistan and its people down to the era.  In the 1950s, post-war Britons had not adapted to Britain being the vibrant multicultural society that it is today, and Newby was probably representative of many nobodies who grew up believing that Britain’s Empire and its people were infinitely superior to everywhere else on earth.  But times have changed and this book belongs in the dust-bin of history.

Author: Eric Newby
Title: A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
Publisher: Harper 2011
ISBN: 9780007367757
Source: Personal library, bought from the Pokolbin Village Bookshop in the Hunter Valley, and destined for my dust-bin when I get back home.

It’s the author’s restraint that makes it so harrowing. Anyone who remembers the news reports about the war in Sierra Leone already knows the back story gradually revealed by the characters.  Anyone who’s read Gil Courtemanche’s An Afternoon at the Pool in Kigali knows what to expect.  Any reader who comes to care about  the characters at all yearns – without much hope – that there will be a resolution offering some kind of peace for them.  And such a reader knows full well that the real people symbolised by these characters are living with the same sort of reality and the same likelihood of ever achieving any kind of normality (however that might be defined).

The story is narrated in the self-indulgent first person by Elias Cole, dying in the comfort of a private room in Freetown after a lifetime of greasing his career path at the university, and in the third person as we learn the story of Kai, a workaholic surgeon trying to blot out a traumatic memory not revealed until the very end.  Adrian Lockheart, a young English psychologist escaping from a banal marriage and career is the confidante of neither because the voluble Elias is silent about his acts of betrayal and Kai, like every other victim of the war, is too damaged to reveal his pain.  In an under-resourced hospital too-used to foreigners blundering into circumstances they don’t understand and none-too-privately despise, Adrian is politely tolerated but not expected to achieve much.  While Kai performs miracles with primitive equipment and a shortage of trained staff, Adrian deals with the mad and the sad with only vague hopes of restoring them to normality in a place where almost the entire population is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

In  this scenario, Elias is perhaps too unsympathetically drawn.  The fact that he is dying is ironic: he is the ultimate survivor.  I suspect that he will make most female readers’ skin crawl, and many a male reader might long to dish out a little rough justice.  His voice dominates the novel: unwillingly we learn about his obsession with another man’s wife, his sleazy stalking, and his relentless petty note-taking about the rival whose friendship he persuades us to believe that he valued.  As the revelations mount we long for Adrian to challenge this banal self-delusion but he is a psychologist and ought not make judgements.

But Adrian – like all the characters – is flawed, and when he falls in love his dispassionate clinical manner vanishes along with his sense of judgement about other things too.  Everything gets very messy indeed as love triangles intersect.

Perhaps I’ve read too many harrowing books lately…

Author: Aminatta Forna
Title: The Memory of Love
Publisher: Bloomsbury 2011
ISBN: 9781408809655
Source: Kingston Library.

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