ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and the NBC Banjo Award in 1992, To the Burning City was Alan Gould’s second novel, following his award-winning debut The Man Who Stayed Below (1984).  I have yet to source a copy of that, and there are some others I’d like to find, because (as you can see from my reviews), I like this author’s work very much.

An award-winning poet, essayist and novelist, Gould (b.1949) was born in postwar England but his father’s military career took the family to Northern Ireland, Germany and Singapore before migration to Australia in 1966.  He is based in Canberra.  His novels include:

• The Man Who Stayed Below (1984) winner of the 1984 Colin Roderick Award
• To the Burning City (1991)
• Close Ups (1994), read back in 1994.  I may yet publish my review from the reading journal archive, despite its flaws.
• The Tazyrik Year (1998)
• The Schoonermaster’s Dance (2001), see my review
• The Lakewoman  (2009), shortlisted for the 2010 Prime Minister’s Awards
• The Seaglass Spiral (2012), see my review
• The Poet’s Stairwell (2015), see my review and a Sensational Snippet

To the Burning City explores the relationship between two half-brothers, Jeb and Len, prompting me to muse that while blended families are common now through divorce, even when divorce was uncommon in the postwar period, they must have been common enough when women widowed by war remarried.  Yet even so, the relationship between step-siblings isn’t common in the fiction I’ve read.  To the Burning City shows how Len’s father Flight Officer Crispin a.k.a. Charlie Hengelow — one of those who aimed the bombs at their targets  — did not die in the war, but rather deserted his family to deal with his postwar inner demons.  The novel explores how Jeb, who as a child hero-worshipped his older half-brother, struggled with these complex relationships in adulthood.

Being one of the fatherless, was what little Len feared when sent off to boarding school aged four…

There were boys whose fathers got killed.  This didn’t happen often, but when it did someone you knew, someone you had been playing with only yesterday evening, in the schoolyard or down among the ferns, would emerge from Miss Leverton’s study with a face that had turned the same blotchy pink as the Empire countries in the atlas.  Miss Leverton or Matron would help them pack an overnight bag and drive them in the school car to the station where they were put onto a train which took them to their mothers.  They would be gone for a fortnight or so, and then they would reappear in the classroom one day.  They would act quite normal, a bit quieter at first.  But they were different somehow, it was difficult to say exactly why.  (p.13)

Len prays for his father every night, all through the long years of the war, when he sees his father only a couple of times, and each time he leaves without saying goodbye.  But Len’s prayers don’t deliver his father safely back to the family after the war, and without anybody explaining why, there is a divorce, and his mother remarries, to Group Captain Wilfred Corballis.  Another child is born — Jeb — and they move about a lot, as families in the forces do. Gould captures the way a peripatetic childhood leaves gaps in the memory:

They were in another place and living in another house.  Whenever Jeb came to recollect the change in later years he could not account for the actual changeover.  How had they got to be there; by car, by train, by sorcery? He could recall none of the preparations for leaving Candleware Road nor the impact that the new place, which was called RAF Gattisby, originally made on him when he saw it for the first time.  Suddenly, it seemed, he was just there. It was one of those islands of memory, seemingly discontinuous with previous and subsequent experience.  And the discontinuity was always vaguely troubling.  (p.43)

Jeb first becomes aware of a glitch in his relationship when Len makes a visit to the boarding school.  He seems too large for it somehow, and Jeb is embarrassed when Len’s obsession with model planes attracts the unwanted attention of his school fellows.

Drearily he realised that he would cop it after Len had gone.  He looked at his half-brother, who was absorbed in fitting the two halves of the fuselage together.  On the whole he would have preferred that Len had not come.  At least, not this version of Len.  He had longed for his half-brother’s company when he was small, and still did in holiday time.  But holidays were a different world.  Yes, better if Len had not come.  The thought made the younger boy feel ungrateful.  (p.97)

When Jeb’s father is dying, he realises that Len is not the hero he thought he was.  He is no comfort to anybody, and when he refuses to go up to the ward, Jeb for the first time speaks his mind:

‘Why don’t you go up and see him?’

‘You said he doesn’t hear anything.  What would be the use?’

‘He might.  They don’t know,’ Jeb said desperately.

‘Look, I’m better off being useful at the edge of things.  I’ll run you home later, then bring you back in the morning.  I’d only be in the way up there.  Really, old man.’

‘Arh, old man! old man! why don’t you quit all this ‘old man’ stuff, Len? You’re frightened to go up. That’s all it is.  I’m sick of all this ‘old man’, ‘old chap’ stuff. Why are you always trying to keep me in my place?’ (p.105-6)

This exchange finishes with Len admitting that he didn’t ‘care for him particularly’ and for Jeb, who loves his dad dearly, this is a devastating revelation.

After this death they finish up in Australia where the family fractures again because Len in adolescence prefers to live in England.  He has failed to live up to his promise at school and is working at dead end jobs, in touch with the family only through his father’s sister Aunt Eva.  There are many gaps in Jeb’s understanding of all this, and not just because of his age.  The topic of Len’s father is off-limits, and it is only through intemperate remarks by Aunt Peg that some of the past provokes Jeb’s curiosity.

With one of his university friends he tracks down Aunt Eva in the UK, and — realising that Len is seriously disturbed — tracks down Hengelow in Germany, where he is seeking redemption for the destruction of German cities in the bombing.

But what Hengelow doesn’t realise is that his son Len wants to exact retribution too, and he finds an extraordinarily cruel way to achieve it.

Highly recommended as an absorbing story that held my attention throughout.

To the Burning City is available as an eBook through the Untapped Literary Project.  See the link under Booksellers in the side bar.

Gould has Icelandic heritage through his mother and his first book of poems, Icelandic Solitaries, was published in 1978.

Author: Alan Gould
Title: To the Burning City
Publisher: William Heinemann, 1991
Cover design by Jarratt Skinner
Cover artwork: Waterloo Station, 1944, by Colin Colahan (1897-1987), see the original at the Australian War Memorial website
ISBN: 9780855614171, pbk., 328 pages
Source: personal library, purchased secondhand from Brotherhood Books.