Review of The Night Guest

I hadn’t intended to review The Night Guest. While I enjoyed reading it, I didn’t like the ending and the book left me with a clammy feeling that I didn’t want to revisit. However, as I’ve been musing about animals and carers for my book When the World Shivered, I thought might be worth thinking about further, as The Night Guest features both.

This is the story of Ruth, an elderly widow who lives on an isolated stretch of coast, and believes herself to be visited by a tiger. After its first foray into the house, in which she hears the noises it makes, ‘loud and wet, with a low, guttural breathing hum punctuated by little cautionary yelps’ (2), she is reminded ‘of something vital – not of youth, exactly, but of the urgency of youth’ (6). Her childhood was spent on Fiji, where her parents were missionaries, and where she fashioned an unrequited romance for a doctor.

Shortly after the tiger’s first manifestation, a woman named Frida arrives to take care of Ruth. Rather than being preyed up on by the tiger, Ruth is gradually, subtly, threatened by this carer, a muscular woman who is also from Fiji. She tends to Ruth so efficiently that Ruth cannot see how she would survive without her, and at the same time she infiltrates Ruth's few relationships and persuades her to sell her car.

McFarlane’s hand is surest when she bleeds reality and fiction into one another through Ruth’s wavering point of view. The reader is uncertain as to whether Frida is friend or foe, or whether Ruth is losing her mind and cannot read the situation clearly. The ending provides answers, but until this point, the reader is held in suspense.

Herein lies the horror of the story. Ruth is physically, intellectually and emotionally isolated, and vulnerable to the depredations of others. A woman who is mean to care for her becomes a predator, like the tiger. And yet the bond between them is close, as it would be when people’s daily rhythms are knotted together. An acquaintance, Ellen, muses ‘She remembered the way Ruth and Frida had run together like lovers, and how embarrassed she’d been by that intimacy, and, later, how unsettled’ (273). The tiger also has multivalent meanings, being at times threatening, and at other times a delight. At the end of the novel, Ruth ‘leaned her head into his soft chest, where his great heart ticked’ (268).

Frida is yoked with the tiger through this thematic similarity and their simultaneous appearance, and through a scene towards the end in which Frida fights the animal. ‘There had been no beginning to Frida and the tiger, and now there would be no end,’ McFarlane writes. ‘They both snarled and bared their teeth, Frida called out the strange syllables of a warlike alphabet’ (224). These similarities can be read as a metaphor for colonialism, for the imposition of power upon vulnerable subjects, and how they fight back. The tiger invokes Ruth’s childhood and her missionary parents, who colonised Fijians through Christianity, and at the same time it reminds us that we are really not so different from animals: we are both prey and predator as we try to survive.

The vivid evocation of Ruth’s childhood also suggests the circularity of our lives – when we are old, we become like children. Our minds, sometimes sharp and sometimes wandering, can be just as fantastical as theirs, but while this is tolerated in young people, it isn’t so much in the elderly.

There is much to plumb in this novel, which won the NSW Premier’s award and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin. I heard McFarlane speak at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference last year (ASAL always have at least one session to showcase Australian writers, which I think is great) and thought her intellectually astute. She has a book of short stories coming out soon, The High Places, which will be published by Penguin and, based on this book, well worth a read.

This is my 8th review for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Review of Stanley and Sophie

I picked up this small volume from the library after I’d written my review of Hopscotch, Jane Messer’s account of the impact of the Global Financial Crisis upon a middle-class Sydney family. I dimly remembered having read another review or article about Jennings’ 2003 novel about Wall Street, Moral Hazard, which commented about how few women write about the financial world, or feature in it as characters with agency.

As I searched in vain for that article, I disappeared down the rabbit hole of the internet, and came up with Jennings’ memoir Stanley and Sophie. Having been revising my own memoir, and researching writing about animals for my young adult novel, I thought I might kill two birds with one stone by reading this book.

The factual and fictional blur frequently in Jennings’ writing. Moral Hazard is a novel about a woman who writes speeches for financiers by day, and by night cares for a husband losing his mind to Alzheimer’s. This book, as a memoir, picks up where that left off, with Jennings living in New York and mourning to her husband who also had died from Alzheimer’s.

Jennings had been raised on a farm in Australia and for her, dogs were working animals kept outside, ‘housed in kennels made from corrugated iron that were well away from where we lived, with no concession to the weather, which in winter was cold enough for ice form on puddles and dams and in the summer hot enough to make the lead fall out of pencils’ (11). When the dogs grew old, they ‘were retired under a rainwater tank where it was blessedly shady, sweetly cool’ (11). In her personality, she was avowedly unsentimental. ‘Call me cold,’ she states. ‘Actually, call me vinegary’ (10).

Why, then, does she fall head over heels in love with a dog? She missed her husband and her marriage, but she was also suffering from ‘the prolonged exposure to Alzheimer’s … I hadn’t been released from it. Instead, I was trapped in a place where reluctance leached through the walls, nihilism pooled on the floor. I tried caulking the holes with work and antidepressants, but still the insistent seepage, still the sorrow. Ashes and dishwater’ (20). When she met Stanley, ‘an aristocratic alpha male border terrier’ (4), it’s love at first sight. ‘Stanley had a job’, she writes, ‘to bring me into the sunlight’ (21).

And so he did, by offering structure to her days, walks, companionship and entertainment. However, Stanley was lonely, and when another border terrier, Sophie, was offered up as a companion, Jennings adopted her too. Despite their daily walks, however, the dogs were confined to an apartment, and Jennings was confined ‘by memories of my marriage, by places and possessions that triggered the memories’ (91). She made the heartbreaking decision to give the dogs away.

The second part of the book is set in Bali, where Jennings stays with her brother. The dogs in this place are not reared for companionship, but as offerings. Once despatched, they keep watch on the house as spirits. Jennings comes to know as macaque known as Chico, who becomes tetchy for a mate. They find him a small female known as Cheeky at the bird market in Denpasar, where macaques ‘sat on top of cages, drooping and despondent, their will to live all but extinguished. Some would become pets, while others would be slaughtered for their brains, believed to impart energy. All of them had been poached, their mothers killed’ (125).

It was at this point that the book came alive for me; previously I’d had no connection to it, possibly because Jennings hadn’t been feeling much either. Cheeky, motherless, attaches herself to Jennings and wails when she leaves, ‘a never-ending susurrus of complaint and dispossession’ (128). The sounds and the experience, she writes, ‘tapped directly into the sadness that had accumulated in me. My stiff upper lip, kept as firmly in place as possible since my husband’s death, went slack. I started to cry and couldn’t stop’ (129).

It was also at this point that the book became more intellectually engaging. Is a dog, however cossetted, well-fed, well-walked and groomed, any different to a monkey tied to a chain, or to the endangered baboon and baby Sumatran tiger, kept under the floorboards by a vendor at the bird market for buyers of stature? We keep animals for our pleasure, but what about theirs? Do they want to be our pets, and are we right to make them so even after thousands of years of domestication? And why do we keep doing this: making them our own? Is it because their humanity sometimes exceeds ours?

For against Jennings’ grief and interactions with animals is set the destruction of the World Trade Towers and the Bali bombings. ‘I loved my dogs,’ she writes, ‘and my heart went out to the monkeys. When we cry for our animals, we cross for the whole sodding mess. The whole sodding, sorry mess’ (156).

Perhaps the answer lies in a story written by Sophie’s new owner, who fell for her too and knew she would be hers. He describes how dogs ‘take us out of our brains and down into the street, where we are more real, more vivid; their attention keeps us in place and allows us constant contact with the sensate world in which we live’ (179). Animals, in other words, remind us that we are animals too, and therein lies their joy. For people corralled in houses away from the brush of undergrowth, with tarmac instead of soil underfoot, the sensations of stroking a dog’s head, of feeling a cat’s claws as they knead before settling into your lap, of studying the glossy round of a bird’s eye, all remind us of who we are and where we have come from.

As with many of Jennings’ other works (such as Snake, which I reviewed last year), this is a small book which, like gelato, melts on the tongue, her phrases like dissolving sugar. Stanley slept with her at night, ‘starting the evening curled into a tight comma, by morning monopolising all the pillow like a grand pasha’ (21). The chapters are succinct, their endings often a perfect cadence, as in ‘If I Could Stop the Wind Blowing’. After an altercation with a Republican over Stanley’s marking of his door, Sophie is encouraged to forever after ‘hoist her bottom high in the air and splash her message on the glossy black paint’ (79) and she is subsequently rewarded with the superlative, ‘Best girl in the world’ (79). I could read Jennings’ dogs on the page as well as if I might have in person, and this lent extra charm to the work.

As I’m deaf, I compensate for the things I can’t hear by reading body language, and on I love reading dogs as much as I do people. When my father leaves the house to work on his renovations, his whippet paces delicately, tail between her legs, her eyes like dark saucers. She and my mother’s dog, a tiny, feisty cavadoodle, will sit by the window all day, noses pressed to the glass, until he returns. My sister’s cocker spaniel is Bentley, a dumb blonde of a dog who dug a solid hole in my heart when I lived in her house for a year. A puppy, he sat at my feet as I wrote Entitlement and followed me from room to room. Now an adult, he’ll sit when he’s told to, but quivers with the anticipation of my body loosening and bending down to embrace him, after which point he will jump uncontrollably. As Jennings puts it, ‘What we love most about dogs is that they are transparent, their emotions pure, unmuddied by ambiguity even when torn by conflicting desires. They express themselves with graphic simplicity’ (42). Even I, not demonstrative by nature, am secretly delighted by the way he comes barrelling through the door when he sees me, a 20 kg mass of fur and enthusiasm. When do we ever bowl each over with such love?

This is my 5th review for the 2015 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

H is for Hawk, Perception and Disability

When I was young we had a ginger cat named Vincent to whom I was passionately attached. His mother had bred with one of the feral cats on the farm and he was a muscular and unlikeable creature. I spent hours trying to understand him and win him over. For the most part that was fruitless, but sometimes he’d deign to sleep in the curve of my back as I lay on my tummy on my bed.

I can’t remember if my interest in animals started with Vincent, or if it was because I grew up on a farm and, while my father and uncles worked, I watched the way sheep bustled in a herd; how hipbones jerked beneath the skin of our cows as, in the evening, they were jostled to the milking shed; or the large, liquid eyes of my aunts’ horses.

When I began researching the history of the deaf, I found, people with disabilities have long been regarded as closer to animals than humans. Deaf people, for example, were seen as subhuman because they could not hear the word of God and because they couldn’t speak clearly.

Which is why I loved reading Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk, her memoir about training a goshawk in the wake of her father’s death. Aside from the originality of the subject matter and the poetry of her writing, it brought up many interesting questions about the relationship between animals and humans, between wildness and domestication, and where the line between the animal and human really lies.

Hunting with her hawk, McDonald writes, ‘took me to the edge of being human. Then it took me past that place to somewhere I wasn’t human at all. The hawk in flight, me running after her, the land and air a pattern of deep and curving detail, sufficient to black out anything like the past or the future, so that the only things that mattered were the next thirty seconds … I crept and walked and ran. I crouched. I looked. I saw more than I’d ever seen. The world gathered around me. It made absolute sense. But the only things I knew were hawkish things, and the lines that drew me across the landscape were the lines that drew the hawk: hunger, desire, fascination, the need to find and fly and kill’ (195).

I paused after reading this passage, considering it with some suspicion, as humans are animals, and the division between us largely — I think — comes down to culture. In 1747, Carl Linneaus, who developed a system for classifying plants and animals (still in use today), defended his decision to separate apes from humans as thus: ‘if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I would have fallen under the ban of all ecclesiastics. It may be that as naturalist I ought to have done so.’

Nor does heightened perception make one more animal that human. People with disabilities have extraordinarily developed senses – a person who is blind, for example, will be remarkably attuned to sound and touch. To see like a hawk does not necessarily mean that one is becoming like a hawk; it means that a human is developing their sense, rather like becoming better at the piano through practice. I think we need to widen our understanding of what it is to be human, to include those who have what seem to be extraordinary abilities. One might think that I’m writing of savants, but really, it’s anyone who operates in a way that’s different from the norm. If ‘human’ becomes more inclusive, then we can do away with the category of ‘disability’ and its concomitant inspiration porn, as Stella Young described it.

McDonald continues, ‘every time the hawk caught an animal, it pulled me back into being a human again … hunting makes you an animal, but the death of an animal makes you human’ (196), for she killed the animal to put it from its misery. This was interesting. Again, is it culture that makes McDonald act this way? Can it be said that it’s grace that makes us distinct from animals? Or do other animals behave this way as well?

While these passages made me question things, there were other parts of McDonald’s work that were gorgeous – her nature descriptions, her magical thinking, her tentative but developing relationship with Mabel, the hawk. And this passage:

‘I am beginning to see that for some people a hawk on the hand of stranger urges confession, urges confidence, lets you speak words about hope and home and heart. And I realise, too, that in all my days of walking with Mabel the only people who have come up and spoken with us have been outsiders: children, teenage goths, homeless people, overseas students, travellers, drunks, people on holidays … I feel ashamed of my nation’s reticence. It’s desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar, unusual, in anything that isn’t entirely normal.’

McDonald and Mabel are a paean to difference, to flight, to the permeable boundaries between ourselves and other creatures.

On Exhaustion

People never ask me what it's like to be deaf, or what I find hard about it. As I lost most of my hearing when I was four and had some speech therapy, my speech is fine, and people don't realise I have a disability until I tell them. Even then, they don't realise how bad it is, because I seem to listen so well. And because I am polite, and hate people making a fuss, I rarely remind them to speak clearly.

It's not the isolation that's difficult – I’ve found ways around that through writing, reading and a small circle of close friends, though it took me a good twenty years to learn the social skills I needed to make friends, and those twenty years were excruciating. Nor is it the inconsideration of people who assume that you’re rude or simple because you haven’t heard them; I accept that I don’t have a visible disability and that, for the most part, people aren’t deliberately unkind. Nor is it the cultural apartheid of cinemas and performance venues that don’t care enough about their deaf patrons to ensure working loop systems, or even to install such systems at all, such as the Cineplex cinemas in Brisbane. On asking the manager at Hawthorne why they didn’t have a hearing system, I was told that the movies they showed were blockbusters, which were so loud that deaf people can hear them. I would have laughed if I wasn’t so angry; it’s quality of sound, not loudness, that makes the difference. Meanwhile, the headphones at Palace Centro are patched up with duct tape, and those at Palace Barracks were broken for months. When I complained about the latter and pointed out that it was discriminatory, I was told that I was being ridiculous. I never went back. I have taken my money elsewhere and I watch films at home, or only go to screenings with subtitles, or watch dance performances that don’t require listening to words.

These are irritations and, like cuts and scratches, they always heal and fade. But the one thing I can never get over is the perpetual exhaustion. I have 25% of an average person’s hearing, and I rely on this bit of hearing and lipreading to get by. I can’t hear with loud background noise, nor in a group larger than three, and even then that’s hard. And as I’ve lost one sense, I’m constantly alert to compensate for it – to check someone’s face in case they’re speaking to me, to strain to hear the words in a sentence and match them with body language, to read lips and put the words into context, to work out how to get some information at a train or bus station when I can’t hear the overhead speakers. The energy necessary to maintain this level of vigilance is enormous.

These past few months I’ve been teaching creative writing one day a week at the University of Queensland. The classes were small enough for me to hear without passing round the transmitter of my FM system (which is like a small walkie talkie for deaf people), though I asked students to use it when they were reading because their heads dipped down to their papers and I couldn’t read their lips. I had to be completely alert so that I could hear their contributions and respond to them. It made the discussions a bit stilted as I could only hear one person talking at a time, but I figured they were adult enough to deal with that.

I loved my students. They tried hard, they listened to the lectures and my tutorials, and they improved in a very short time. Teaching creative writing also helped me to remember my own knowledge about writing, and to refocus on the nuts and bolts of my craft. However, I was so tired by the semester’s end, and so frustrated that I hadn’t had any energy to write, that I resolved to stick to my other, two-days-a-week admin job and write, even if that meant living on baked beans for six months.

Then I was insanely lucky enough to get funding from the Australia Council to work on my young adult novel, When the World Shivered, and the future isn’t looking quite so grim - a huge and unutterable relief. I've only had a handful of days off since February, and this means that I can have evenings and weekends off.

This novel will be based on my short story of the same name, which was published in the Review of Australian Fiction. The novel about the relationships between children with disabilities and their animals. I started thinking about it when I went to the Artists with Disabilities conference in Sydney last year, and watched people with their carers. The carers were people who wanted to be there and who were paid for it, but what would happen, I wondered, if a person with a disability was matched with someone who wasn’t temperamentally suited to caring? I was lucky as I grew up because my brother has a generous disposition and likes an audience, so he was happy to relay information to me that I missed (albeit often elaborated upon; the Whites are nothing if not performers). But what if I hadn’t had that kind of sibling, if my sibling was someone who just wanted to be left alone and not have to look after someone else?

I started thinking about companion animals, and dogs, and how we have domesticated them, which can also be seen as a way of keeping them close to us without their will. Do dogs really want to be dependent on us? Do horses want to carry people around? These are the kinds of ideas I’ll be exploring in the novel. I’ll also be reading books about animals and humans (if you have any recommendations, leave them in the box below!), and I’m about to write a post on Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk. With luck, given my tortured schedule, I should have it up later this week.

I’ve also finally got back on the bandwagon with my author newsletters. If you’d like to be on the mailing list for these, you can sign up here.

On Being Alive Again

Well, I made it through, although the angel fish didn't.  While I endured three months of unremitting hell, Andromeda made revolutions of her tank that became slower and slower.  Eventually she sank to the rocks at the bottom, her eyes disturbingly dark, and H buried her in the garden.  He then bought me four more fish to cheer me up, but three of them died too.  I am relinquishing my dreams of having a wall-length aquarium; I think a beagle called Basil will be a safer bet.

So, the thesis has been submitted and I am enjoying the unsurpassed delight of waking up and realising I don't have to go to the British Library.  I have the leisure to read for pleasure not for study, to have a social life that involves going out more than once a month and also permits alcoholic beverages, and to contemplate, heaven forbid, finding a bloke who isn't intimidated by my possession of four degrees, including an (almost) doctorate.

I rewarded myself with a trip to San Francisco, and shopped my little heart out in Anthropologie, and stocked up on skin products and Benefit makeup.  At a friend's recommendation I took the boat to Alcatrez, which I hadn't visited though I spent a year on exchange in Berkeley in 1999.  I confess to enjoying the aloe garden more than the prison, which had an interminable audio recording (which I couldn't hear well) of men attempting escape by digging themselves out with spoons.  I also stopped by Coit Tower and enjoyed the smell of eucalyptus in the morning heat.  Then I went across the bay and stayed with a friend in Berkeley, though the poor boy had his orals the following week and I was anxious about disturbing him.  

It was odd to be back in Berkeley.  I visited the cafes I used to sit in and read, walked over the beautiful campus which was at its loveliest in the dying afternoon light, and contemplated visiting my old boss at Bancroft Library but decided against it as I couldn't think what to say to him.  I also met up with my friend K and it was lovely to see him again, and he kindly drove me to the airport.  On the flight home, which was half empty, I read Nam Le's The Boat which was one of the best things I've read all year.  All of his stories, bar one, were flawless, and I fought with my usual feelings of jealousy.   

I flew into Brisbane and was surprised, as I always am, by the friendliness of the people at immigration and customs.  The latter even cracked a joke about rescuing my Pimms as it went through the X-ray machine.  My sister and the kids met me, and over the next few days I attempted to sort out my jetlag.  I met SP and the gorgeous boy bought me a bottle of champers and took me to dinner, though we were both exhausted and frayed.  On Friday I flew to Sydney for L's 30th birthday.  I stayed with Cousin A, and had emailed him previously to check that he was in possession of an iron.  I was impressed to find, on arrival, that he had cleaned his flat, and he whipped out the iron, but unfortunately it leaked all its water over my Sacha Drake silk maxi dress.  I was going to use it again the next day but found it, to my amusement, in pieces beside the kitchen sink.  

It was pissing with rain as I stepped out, and the traffic in Sydney appears to be much worse.  At Hyde Park I gave up and got out of the bus, but couldn't walk the rest of the way to Circular Quay because of my stupid (but pretty) stiletto sandals, so I had to catch the train for just one stop.  Although I was furious by this point, I enjoyed the drama of gathering up my masses of black-and-white silk skirt and tottering across the road.  Finally I made it to the Opera House bar and said Happy Birthday to L and caught up with H, whom I hadn't seen for two whole weeks.  He was sick with the flu and had no sympathy for my rage at the traffic, but I ranted regardless.  We caught taxis back to Kingsford for dinner at an Indonesian restaurant, and were overjoyed to see R.  We made so much noise that L's father came and told R to quieten down, so H and I started telling 'My sister's deaf!' stories at the top of our voices.  At the end of the evening we found we had overpaid the bill so L began distributing the change and R attempted to stuff $10 down my cleavage.  I burst out laughing, and H later said to R that he was impressed he'd got that far.  'I'm mellowing, R,' I told him.  'Yeah, right,' he replied.

I caught the train home to mum and dad's to save on carbon emissions, which entailed an 8.5 hour journey, as opposed to one hour by plane, which cost just the same.  I didn't mind it that much, despite being stuck next to a young mother with two wriggling kids, as I always like watching the landscape pass by.

Currently, I am writing fiction, enjoying the summer and drinking too many of the aforementioned alcoholic beverages, which is necessary to endure the cabin fever brought on by the descension of relatives at Christmas, the unbearably high energy levels of my sister and the kids and my family's complete inability to register any comprehension of the concept of privacy, which means that four people invariably walk in on me when I try to shower in the mornings.  Yesterday everyone except mum and I went to a nearby amusement park, where they looked at a museum of taxidermed two-headed cows and lamb corpses found in ewes struck by lightening (yes, only in Australia) and played on water slides built with scant regard for health and safety regulations.  I had a most pleasant day in the peace, fixing a short story and taking the dog for a walk to the video store, although said dog shat outside said video store and I forgot to bring a plastic bag, so I walked on unheeding.

In a few days we go to the coast for my birthday, whereupon I shall attempt to do something about my fluorescent skin, and continue to catch up on my three-month deficit of sleep.  It is strange to believe that, after four years of dislocation and stress, I can finally have a life again. Bring on 2009, I say.

The Incursions of Wildlife

Having lived in London for three years, where the only living creatures I come across are slugs and rats-with-wings, I am always pleasantly surprised by the fauna I encounter when I come home. In Brisbane there are Indonesian geckos which look like albinos, being all white, but are still adorable with their compactness and little hands. They come out in the evening and make a ‘clack-clack-clack’ noise which is startlingly loud for such small individuals. In Armidale, I staggered from my bed one morning to put the kettle on, and through the window I saw a white-faced blue heron hanging about the fishpond. Mum later said that it had been eating the goldfish and left me with instructions that, if I saw it again, I was to throw a shoe at it. Then, as I was vacuuming, I sucked up a piece of bark, only to realise that it was moving, and that I was inadvertently murdering a cricket. Well, I thought, if it was going to look like some bark in the 21st Century, then that was its problem for not evolving quickly enough to keep up with technology. Then there was the neighbour’s black Burmese cat which seemed to spend all its time at our place (but which killed three mice in one evening), and which woke me up at 7am by jumping on my bed twice. I was tired, and thus chucked the cat out the door in a fury. Only my father, in his wisdom, let it back in again, and so it woke me up a third time, after which much swearing ensued. I am not a happy bunny when I don’t get enough sleep, particularly when I’m on holidays, and when I couldn’t go back to sleep after this I decided I would have to walk off my violent mood. This was partially successful, until I got to the park and was attacked by a broody magpie, which scraped my scalp. I’d forgotten about the magpies; they always divebomb around the time of the high school kids’ exams, in Spring. I remember once when H and I were on the farm and I was learning to ride the motorbike, I decided we should visit our cousins. Not being very confident, I drove awfully slowly, with H sitting behind. As we neared a copse of trees, he said something to me but I didn’t hear it. ‘What?’ I replied, still putting along, and he shouted, ‘I’m being bombed by a magpie!’ I revved the accelerator and off we shot.