ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Reviews From the Archive

An occasional series, retrieving unpublished reviews from my journals 1997-2007

Ride on Stranger, by Kylie Tennant (first published 1943)

According to the PEN Macquarie Anthology of Australian Literature edited by Nicholas José) (2009), which includes an excerpt from Ride on Stranger, Kylie Tennant was sued for libel over one of the scenes in it.  In satirising the social life of the Communist Party of Australia, she apparently made one of her characters identifiable, so Angus & Robertson withdrew the edition and paid up £250.  But unless that was included in Kerryn Goldsworthy’s Introduction to the 1990 A&R edition, I didn’t know that when I scrawled my thoughts in my journal.  In 2006, I had not read anything else by Tennant, and as you can see, I was a bit dismissive.

6th October, 2006

Beware: spoilers

Written in 1943 and made into a tele-series in the 1980s, this is probably the most well-known of Tennant’s novels.  In her day, I think she was as popular as George Johnson.

It’s the story of Shannon Hicks, whose father works in the butter factory and whose mother wanted something better for her daughter.  It’s ironic then that Shannon ends up back in small town Kerluit (?sp) milking cows.  Then again, maybe not, because she left school prematurely, and never stuck at anything.

She is destined to be alone and independent, and yet she is the one on whom others depend—because she has an innate ability to learn new skills and to organise.  She goes to live at her Aunt Edith’s Sydney boarding house as an unpaid skivvy, but leaves when Edith marries a snake-oil salesman called Vincent Sladder (who eventually ends up in gaol.)  Shannon goes on to work in a variety of jobs unworthy of her and nearly marries Quilter, for whom she organises a political campaign.  She mixes with anarchists and lefties and has a harshly cynical view of the world.  I didn’t like her much.

I also became tired of the parade of characters.  They’re vaguely Dickensian in their stereotyping: good-hearted blowsy Beryl; Merv Leggatt the earnest Leftie; Mr Sladder the snake-oil salesman; assorted ‘types’ from the Proletarian Club.  Even John Terry whom she eventually marries because he seems ‘sane’ is a caricature of a ‘solid dependable type’.

Kerryn Goldsworthy says in the Introduction that the novel deals with serious issues and it’s true, but IMO they’re swamped by the slightly hysterical style.  Shannon’s mother nearly dies giving birth, and Olly dies from a botched illegal abortion—being a woman is a risky business before contraception.  There’s poverty, ignorance, exploitation by bosses, limited choices for women and so on.  But ultimately there’s too much of everything and it’s all a bit of a muddle.

Tennant at least thought so too.

Well, that last sentence is interesting, eh?  I have no recollection of what made me write it.  Perhaps there is something in the Introduction to suggest that Tennant was dissatisfied with her novel; perhaps Tennant had something to say about it in her autobiography The Missing Heir (1986).  Since I’d borrowed the book from the library, I can’t check it to see.

In my review of The Honey Flow, I referred to this review of Ride on Stranger in my journal as churlish. and I confess, re-reading it now, I am a bit taken aback.  I am, after all, resurrecting this review for Bill’s AWW Gen 3 week at The Australian Legend, and he thinks highly of Tennant. (See here).  But fossicking around online to find something to temper my criticism, I found that I’m not the only one to have some reservations about Tennant’s writing.  Some Curator’s Notes about the novel’s successful 1979 transition to screen by Anne Lucas suggest that she found the ABC TV series humorous and well-paced, less iconoclastic and more romantic than Tennant’s novel.  Well, I had long grown out of wanting romantic novels by 2006, but I did like political novels, especially written by feminists. Why didn’t I like this one much?

I consulted my own review of Kylie Tennant, a life, by Jane Grant in which Grant discusses Tennant’s rejection of modernism and her suggestion that this eventually made her writing unfashionable.  I thought there was more to it than that:

In… Jill Roe’s biography of Miles Franklin (see my review), [..] she comments that Franklin never repeated the success of her early work because she lacked the education and mentoring that could have guided writing that instead became fossilised.  (That’s my word for it, not Roe’s). While both Franklin and Tennant had gifts of characterisation based on real life and their reportage was adept and incisive, and Tennant went on being published though Franklin had much more limited success, their publication difficulties were not because they were women, it seems to have been because they were writing picaresque novels that did not explore personal feelings, as did the novels of Ruth Park, Eleanor Dark, and Eve Langley.

Perhaps that’s what made the novel seem iconoclastic…

Update Feb 2022: This title is now available through the Untapped Australian Literary Heritage Project.  It can be borrowed electronically through libraries and can be purchased in digital form from eBook sellers.  For details visit the Untapped website. 

Author: Kylie Tennant
Title: Ride on Stranger
Introduction by Kerryn Goldsworthy
Publisher: Imprint Classics (Angus & Robertson), 1990, first published 1943
ISBN: ISBN 10: 0207166390, pbk., 301 pages
Source: Kingston Library