ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

As I made my morning coffee today in the quiet of my kitchen, a bird was singing outside.  Mindful of the motif of listening in Gregory Day’s new novel The Bell of the World, I paused, and listened, really listened, so that I could identify the bird.

The Bell of the World is a challenging book, not because it’s hard to read and make sense of, but because it challenges our ideas about what art is, what music is, and even what literature is.

Titled ‘Big Cutting Hill’ and set in the early years of the 20th century, Part One introduces Sarah Hutchinson, a troubled young woman under the care of an Indigenous woman called Maisie.  Sarah’s immediate family is absent from the novel, so we know only that her mother drank to excess and that after her parents’ acrimonious divorce Sarah was packed off to boarding school in Devon.  There, bells punctuate her day and she feels claustrophobic after the wide open spaces of Australia.  From there she is offloaded to Uncle Ferny’s bohemian circle in Rome.

In Rome, in artistic circles (that include ‘poetivores’!) Sarah is exposed to (and excited by) modernism.  But sent home to Uncle Ferny’s farm Ngangahook she is confused, lethargic and depressed, and it is Maisie’s wisdom that begins to heal her.  This healing coincides with the return of Uncle Ferny (who is hairy from reading i.e. unshaven!)

In Part Two, (in Sarah’s voice) Ngangahook illustrates the clash between European settler values and the Hutchinsons’ desire to belong in their landscape.  The local wannabe dignitary Selwyn Atchison wants a civic bell to dignify the town (and himself), expressing…

…his own Presbyterian need for a bell to civilise, indeed to drown out the pollinating salt airs of this small inlet into, and out of, the sea.  (p.69)

Sarah and Uncle Ferny reject the entire concept.  Such a bell would impose itself on the bush which has its own ancient soundscape of birds and the rustlings of native fauna and the whistling of the wind in the trees.

No schoolbell, no churchbell, no bell for service nor for storm.  Just the silence that is so filled with sound.  The reach of the pealing bell of the moonlured surf, beseeching no one at the rivermouth.  That, I came to believe, through the pressure of engagement, is the only bell of auditory range that ever an inlet wanted to be heard.

But still: a niceness in the offing, something coming our way other than weather, that’s what caused the bitter unsuccessful petition to so deepen and endure. (p.66)

(The point is that nations do irreversible things without any consideration for how it might impact globally… climate change, nuclear waste, starting endless wars, noise pollution from planes, blighting the night sky with satellites, invading privacy with drones. None of us can escape from it, and on and on and on it goes with global forums powerless to put a stop to it.)

Uncle Ferny’s refusal to contribute to the fund to pay for this intrusive bell arouses not only indignation but ostracism in the town.  The townsfolk were already bemused by Sarah’s concerts on her ‘altered piano’. In her narrative she includes a newspaper clipping:

In a novel procedure Miss Hutchinson had adjusted the workings and thus the sound of the homestead’s grand piano with the following items from the field: a bullock bone, a piece of ironbark, a banksia cob, a scrap of 8 gauge wire, a kangaroo rib, a train ticket, a fray of crinoline, a bandage, a letter, fern fronds, a bridle hasp and fox-fur. (p.61)

What is music?  Sarah’s composition is titled ‘My Autumn’ and it distinguishes the Australian autumn from the European one with its very sound.  We learn later in Part Three that Sarah — alone on an isolated property — is creating experimental music that could take its place amongst the most radical of experimentalists in the 20th century.

Meanwhile, Uncle Ferny’s favourite book, Such Is Life by Joseph Furphy, is in need of repair.  He has read it so constantly — throughout all his travels and giving readings of it to his pals in Rome so they can hear what Australia sounds like — that it is literally falling apart, so he and Sarah make a rare journey to Geelong to the Bookbinder of Moolap.

(BTW Bill at The Australian Legend has discussed the merits of Such is Life in 12 posts.  See here. Update, later the same day: Plus, Brona at This Reading Life has posts from her Readalong here, thanks to Bill (see Comments below) for the tip.)

The Bookbinder of Moolap is a bit of an eccentric, and a frustrated author.  When Uncle Ferny returns to collect his book he finds that it has been radically altered. It’s twice the size because interleaved with its pages are the pages of Moby Dick, a book largely unknown at that time.  Expertly re-filleted and spliced, it’s not the book he loved any more.  Is it a book, as we recognise books to be?  It ruins both of them, after all, but it creates something new and interesting. It’s now a minotaur of a book. But are these two separate great works of literature still a great work of literature when ocean prose converges with the astringent Australian music of Uncle Ferny’s landbook of bullockies and brown rivers? As we saw with Sarah’s altered piano, Uncle Ferny is already accustomed to, indeed disposed towards, the alteration of sacred cultural objects for the purpose of, and in the spirit of, aesthetic creation. Does he accept the altered book?  Hmmm, would I?

You can see why it has taken days and days to read The Bell of the World.  It’s because it triggered all kinds of meandering thoughts.  It is a novel rich in meaning and full of surprises.

Part III, ‘The Natural History of Eternity’ introduces Sarah’s fruitful correspondence, through the pages of the American Natural History magazine with ‘The Correspondent from Stony Point’.  It’s the 1950s by now, and while life goes on at Ngangahook, and Don Atchison views Sarah in a way entirely different to his haughty father, and Joe Busch is intrigued by her… she writes to this American about … mushrooms (of which there are plenty on her property.) He turns out to be an American composer of experimental music, and the stunning climax of this novel is his performance at the Melbourne Town Hall.

‘John’ is a fictionalised John Cage, the pioneer of indeterminacy in music, who supported his commercially unsuccessful music by selling mushrooms to restaurants. He also wrote a book about them. His concert features avant-garde ‘sound artists’ such as Henry Cowell.  The text blurs (as perhaps the Minotaur of the book blurs?) with Joe playing Jelly Roll Morton jazz pieces on Sarh’s grand piano and wondering if he can ever reach the dizzy heights playing footy, and Sarah enthralled by the performance amid an audience that doesn’t know what to make of it.  Melbourne was being taught to listen.

You can hear Gregory Day discuss the book here but be quick; 3CR does not make its broadcasts available for very long.

BTW In a world of banal bookcovers, take a close look at the cover of The Bell of the World.  It represents the theme of connectedness, centred by a pensive Sarah gazing confidently at her world.  There’s a ghostly bell that never was yet it caused so much angst; and also from Part II there are Christmas bells (the seasonal bells) at Ngangahook.  Above and below, there is the network of mushroom spores that feature in Part III. There’s a Willy Wagtail too: I don’t remember its place in the novel, but I bet it’s there in the text somewhere!

Update, later the same day, re the Willy Wagtails, thanks to Carmel Bird’s helpful reply in Comments, and an email from Barry Scott, the publisher, I now know the significance of the willy wagtails.  Firstly, at the beginning of Part II when Sarah arrives at her uncle’s property:

…as I stepped down off the cart upon our arrival through the gate at Ngangahook, that this home in the glen was not a merely productive milieu, that it also thrived as a glen for a glen’s own sake, without superfluous moral ledgers or hectoring audits. I hoped very much that we would live in companionship with that, as the wagtail lives within its three-rung song. (p.56)

*

So she asked that separate part of herself, the part that saw the future and heard god’s timbre in the eternity of natural sound – she asked for the free restoration of her senses, to hear the wagtail’s three-rung song, the liquid song of the magpie in the background, and the thick bed of ocean sound beyond that. For this was a journey of emotion and loss,

And then, later in the book on p 272, there are Willy Wagtails that have made themselves at home in Sarah’s kitchen.  She is living in companionship with them:

And over in the kitchen, where Sarah had now gone to put the kettle on the stove, two willie wagtails flew about happily, perching here and there on the bench and cupboard-tops, wagging their tails, and occasionally sounding their three-part song. Joe had seen swallows caught up in the inside of houses before, and he’d seen cockatoos in cages of course, but never willie wagtails with the run of a kitchen…

Here’s a little video where you can hear its song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9E6D98gNiY

Update 10/3/23: Jack Callil has written a perceptive review of this novel at The Guardian. 

Author: Gregory Day
Title: The Bell of the World
Cover art by Sian Marlow and Peter Lo
Publisher: Transit Lounge, 2023
ISBN: 9780648414087, hbk., 408 pages
Review copy courtesy of Transit Lounge