Tuesday 22 October 2013

The Following (10) "There are examples of writing..."

There are examples of writing that only need to be broken up to draw attention to them, leaving the reader marvelling at having missed something in the square of a paragraph.

Here are the last few sentences of John Ruskin's article on Turner's engravings, The Harbours of England (1856), unaltered except for line breaks:


One great monotony, that of the successive sigh
and vanishing of the slow waves upon the sand,
no art can render to us.

Perhaps the silence of early light, even on
the "field dew consecrate" of the grass itself,
is not so tender as the lisp
of the sweet belled lips
of the clear waves in their following patience.

We will leave the shore
as their silver fringes fade upon it,
desiring thus, as far as may be,
to remember the sea.

We have regarded it perhaps too often
as an enemy to be subdued;
let us, at least this once, accept from it,
and from the soft light beyond the cliffs above,
the image of the state of a perfect Human Spirit -

"The memory, like a cloudless air,
The conscience, like a sea at rest."

Thursday 3 October 2013

The Following (9) "A good review..."

A good review does not have to be favourable from the author's point of view - some of my books' best reviews have expressed reservations while laying out the bones of the book fairly.

Having said that, the magnification an author can make of the tiniest admonition is tremendous.

Here are some guidelines for reviewers laid out years ago by John Updike: 

My rules, drawn up inwardly when l embarked on this craft, and shaped intaglio-fashion by youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion, were and are:


1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation–at least one extended passage–of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author ‘in his place,’ making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

                  - from John Updike's Introduction to Picked-Up Pieces, 1977

Saturday 28 September 2013

The Following (8) "Without any idea..."

Without any idea of where the compulsion came from to link a future prime minister of Australia to the wit and wisdom of a state hangman, I simply obeyed, in the early pages of The Following,  the fiction-writing imperative of sticking to an idea as long as it persisted. The connection lasted through to the final draft and the printed page and Marcus Friendly MP,  and Bert Shepherd, butcher of Harden, remained linked to the end.

As a writer I offer no explanation for this unlikely alliance of innocence and creepiness reducible to common sense,  relying instead on a gut feeling of inevitability, or conviction, conveying itself to the reader.

Only after The Following was published did something around this conjunction of opposites became clearer to me. At their first meeting (on page 5) Bert dubs Marcus his "friend-boy". This was a phrase used to me years ago by a European refugee in his forties, nicknamed the Professor, who was fond of me and my teenaged mates -  his "friend-boys" - when we worked, in uni vacation, as Station Assistants loading goods' vans for country trains on Central Station. The Professor was thin, pale, hesitant, respectful, shy and trembly. His domain was a two-carriage electric parcels' van plying the suburban rail network. Sydney in that era was home to a population of displaced persons. World War II had rolled over the Professor leaving him physically intact but only just, and mentally shaky as a parchment blind hanging in a dusty room dark with secrets.

The Professor was nothing like the robust Bert Shepherd, he was unmistakably a victim not a state operator, but what he exuded was unnatural understanding, as if he could see past  the brash shells of who we were into or towards a better self not yet revealed to us.

The next year, when we came back on the job, sporting our union badges and student smart-arsed attitudes, we asked after the Professor and learned he'd been found dead, suicided, in his one-roomed flat in the city.




Monday 16 September 2013

The Following (7) "The novel trap..."

During the writing of a novel beware the author who talks about the work in progress. It won't be a work in any proper sense of the word until it's finished...So how can it, as a work, be spoken about until done?

And after the finish of a novel, the work done, beware the author ready with an explanation of what the work is, or does. The work exists to explain itself, how can it be be summarised?

The novel published, beware the author who clams up, goes dog in the manger, says nothing or retreats to statements like the two paragraphs above.


Friday 6 September 2013

The Following (6) "Knots and their uses..."

A novel finally done (tied together) is a length of words where every part, despite apparent separation, belongs with every other.

Rope, cord, string play a part in The Following, reflecting the novel’s attempt to evoke the ineffable. A rope is real but knots appear and disappear along its length like phantoms. Life and death depend on knots well-tied, the surgeon's knot, railwayman’s and seafaring knots, varieties of occupational knot down to the hangman's knot that collapses (a knot term) after use, into a guileless length of cord. 

The word knot conjures up a thinker, knuckles to forehead, sorting out a tangle. This is Marcus Friendly, entering politics, in Book One.

The word hitch announces Book Two,  signalling a delay, a complication. In the language of knots a hitch joins a rope to something, which happens in The Following when two people come together (in a love match).

A bend in Book Three, “The Yeomans Bend”, is a curve of the horizon that beckons towards Windy Point Light, where world and spirit are joined (a bend is a knot joining two lengths of rope).

My favourite knots are the bowline, which holds reliably tight, but is easily undone, the buntline hitch, which I tied from the age of twelve without giving it a name when I started wearing a necktie (it pulls harder the more strain put on), the sheet bend, for joining lengths of rope thereby extending the washing line on Mondays, the truckie's, carrier's, or waggoner's hitch for tying down everything that might blow away when carrying it to the tip. 

‘You are a shoddy little shit,’ said Herring when he cornered
Tiger alone, taking him by the necktie and informing him inter
alia that in naval terms a necktie knot was a buntline hitch,
tighter the harder it was pulled, and a choker.

(from Book Three)

The world was run by knots and methods of knots, demanding the agreement of a nudge or a tweak, and if you didn’t slant them, or snug them, or roll them they would not be right. Everyone from railwaymen to priests, storemen and underground miners had their knots of trade: end-stoppers and eye-splices, tassels, sinnets, round turns and half-hitches, occupational hitches and working bends.

(from Book One)



Sunday 1 September 2013

The Following (5) "Today is publication day..."


Today is publication day of The Following,  about an Australian politician and his line of descent, a few days out from an Australian election where parliamentary democracy will return a party majority of one sort or another, and as a writer under the sway of either, I will be free to insist on my own metaphorical take on anything I like (and have).

It was very different for Boris Pasternak in 1936, addressing the Minsk congress of the USSR Writers' Union, a petrified and obedient assembly of writers whose lives literally depended on denying their interior intuitions and giving themselves over to political instructions on what they should or should not write. And who can blame them? I fear I would have been one of them.

Pasternak spoke about the poeticising of experience, hardly a threat, you might think, to the might of a tyranny, yet it takes no effort of the imagination to sense the hall hushed to the danger of the writer's words: 

"The unforeseen is the most beautiful gift life can give us. That is what we must think of multiplying in our domain. That is what should have been talked about in this assembly, and no one has said a word about it…Art is inconceivable without risk, without inner sacrifice; freedom and boldness of imagination can be won only in the process of work, and it is there that the unforeseen I spoke of a moment ago must intervene, and there no directives can help."

Pasternak survived this moment of dare inexplicably. He lived through European politics played out in what he called "the bestiality of facts" by "the left and right wings of a single materialistic night."

Gearing up as he was even then to write Doctor Zhivago or something along its lines, Pasternak conveys the strangeness a writer feels facing "the novelty of the themes and situations" he wishes to address. This he must accomplish "in a space rarefied by abstractions and the language of journalists."

He added, "I will deal with subjects that are common to us in a language different from from yours. I will not imitate you, I will dispute with you..."

Sunday 25 August 2013

The Following (4) "...a yacht sailed into the story..."



A few years ago, Gerry Clark put a flyer on the Akaroa Yacht Club notice board seeking a crew member to sail with him to the Bounty Islands for his annual bird count. Don answered and went along. 
After a week’s sail they stood off Bounty Island (in the direction of New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic islands) and Don and another crew member went ashore. A gale was building and Clark said he would move the yacht farther out, clear of the low islet bereft of anchorages, but return before dark to collect them. He did not return, it was blowing too hard, they lost sight of him, and Don and his mate slept ashore between boulders with a flapping tarp over them in cold conditions. In the morning Clark was sighted, not far off shore, and all was well.
A later trip, Don told me, followed the same pattern as the one Don went on, but did not end well. Clark put two men ashore from Tortorore for the bird count and once again the yacht moved off into open water farther from land, out of sight. Clark had someone with him on the yacht this time, a third crew member who, like Don, had answered the thumb-tacked appeal. 
Once again a gale blew. Towards evening, when it came time for the men ashore to be picked up, there was no sign of the boat. The two on shore spent the night more or less as Don had, then crossed the island looking for Tortorore on the other side. Eventually, among the rocks, they found wreckage of the yacht. Clark was never found along with his scratch crew member.
“It could have been you,” I said, when Don told me about it. There was a feeling that Clark had something like the possibility of this coming at him for years, hardly welcome at any age but he was in his seventies, doing what he loved in a place he loved, a low set, wind swept, bird-breeding haven in the wild south. No better memorial could stand for him than those rocky islets barely above the tide. But while “doing what he loved” may equally have applied to his much younger crew member, Roger Sale, it seemed bitterly sad that the two fates, older and younger, fulfilled and promising, were yoked together.
On the subject of solo sailing versus taking crew along, Clark once wrote: “I am more frightened in storms when I am by myself – I cannot quite understand the psychology of that, unless it is just because there is nobody to give me a hand in an emergency.”
In another age, I thought, Clark might serve as a Jack London-admired model, self-interested if not quite as self-impressed as the skipper of the Sea-Wolf, a dangerous man on the sea.
The sorts of storm Clark meant would rank as emergencies in anyone’s language. In 1986, having seen his crew home by other means after Tortorore was dismasted, he was soloing back from the Antarctic on a ten week stint that has entered small boat history. Near Heard and McDonald Islands the jury-rigged Tortorore rolled five times in seas only a degree above freezing, leading Clark to decide that his chances of survival were negligible: as he was already numb with cold he would have the benefit of dying quickly. But he came through, eventually, arriving off Fremantle on a balmy, breezy afternoon, where the New Zealand America’s Cup contenders were training (he took a photo of them streaming past). The half-wrecked Tortorore limping along without fanfare under a home-made spritsail was like some lurking ghost-ship from the wrong side of the universe and was appropriately ignored by, if she was not outright invisible to, her countrymen racers.
Allowing Clark a better fate, and a more considered personality, the yacht Worker's Comp sailed into Book Three of The Following.

Thursday 22 August 2013

The Following (3) "...a prominent Australian journalist threw out the challenge..."

A prominent Australian journalist (David Marr)  threw out the challenge, complaining, a few years ago, that Australian writers didn't write political novels. Taking this up in "The Following" I found I could only write a political novel by leaving out, so to speak, the politics, the sort anyway that gets thrashed out in party rooms or endlessly recycled in the press. I was unsure anyway if "political" (or any diminishing adjective, for that matter) belonged with the word "novel".  

I was left with politics as found in the inner attachments of the individual, something like the inner magnetic field that tends an individual one way or another from the starting point of family or social group. Attachment + connection = spirituality seems to work more validly and strongly in fiction than attachment + connection = politics. Or else, is political life something other than it seems? In novels, for anything to happen, a lot is other than it seems. The political party that many of the characters in "The Following" are attached to, unchangeably,  obviously has a name in real life,  but in the novel it goes without one in order to enhance a deeper reality than realism.

In Book One of "The Following" Marcus Friendly, future Australian prime minister, attains, as a boy, a vision of consolation from a violent, murky man. It feeds his gift for leadership and deal-making. A childhood friend, Luana Milburn, struck by revolutionary fervour, finds her beliefs so dangerous to her inner stability that she hides them like burying lightning in the ground. Marcus's lifetime friend, Tim Atkinson, marries her,  and through his own socialistic but somewhat materialistic tendency, invents political PR that is passed on to Max Petersen, the product of Marcus Friendly's own late-life love affair surviving, as a local MP, into the present day. Luana, meantime, white-haired stick of an old lady,  survives Tim into a new era, where a shamed secret looks more like a badge of heroic survival.

In Book Two I hived off from adherents of democratic socialism and anger-fueled extremism. Up rode a horseman, Kyle Morrison, son of Australia's most famous poet (to keep his identity fictionalised -The Bounder). Kyle is an un-self-examined rural conservative politically, a dismal failure in his father's eyes but personally touching. He, just like Marcus Friendly, leads his whole life subject to a revelatory vision. Meantime, at his elbow, his employee Ross Devlin, mainstay of the pathetically isolated  local party branch, is a Friendly follower. As a way out of an impasse, Book Two offers a portrait of two people, a man and a woman,  with entirely opposing political  beliefs, who fall in love. 

Book Three of "The Following" is set in the present day and no summary, I feel, of its feelings and content, characters and setting, could do justice to what I put into it and where it comes from in my own life, so I will let it do its work for readers of "The Following" if it can - and only add, that like the other two Books, it finishes with a movement towards somewhere else,  an other place altogether, in this case the sea.

Tuesday 20 August 2013

The Following (2) "...love and fear of the sea..."


Tiger Yeomans thought about the books he’d read about the sea and how they represented his love and fear of the sea and something almost touching on actual experience. He stood at the corner of the headland on the ginger-coloured rocks, looking down at the rusty cracks. They resembled the surface of a seaway streaked and flattened by the wind.

Sea stories so exactly fitted the requirements of going out in boats that on the rare occasions when Tiger had reading time on the water he disliked reading them owing to a redundancy of experience, whereas on land he hardly read anything else.

His choice of reading was anything from Moby Dick to an article on dinghy sailing in Yachting Monthly, but of course that magazine had writers going back to Jack London, with whom, in a rather crestfallen way, Tiger had fallen out, as he had with friends whose bombast wore thin.

When Tiger pulled out a chart, or a book of knots, he experienced a gathering of intention as whimsical as the wind, before it was turned into a surge of accumulated problem-solving under the heading of a voyage.

Tiger puzzled over Melville, who said:

Ah, ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in our being, these still drive us on.

It was the pull of the sea story. The broad shape pre-existed.

A wealthy young man, leading a soft and comfortable life, was thrown into the water while on a fogbound San Francisco ferry after a collision with a steamer, plucked from the waves and forced to work as a crew member by a psycopathic skipper. Another man,  a novelist and magistrate, his limbs so swollen by oedema that he had to be trussed on and off the ship by a hoist, made a voyage to Lisbon at the very end of his life but with a spirit so hale and lively that he feels immortal on the page as he gives an account of that sail. A third man, calling himself Ishmael, makes Tiger grin and wince, just to think of him.

Tiger’s friends, Jake and Judith Try, sailed to the sub-Antarctic every summer on bird counts. The only expertise Tiger had ever displayed around that heroic bolt, Workers Comp,  was to suggest an apostrophe in the name, they could choose where.

Wednesday 14 August 2013

The Following (1) "...far from malign, the influence of the State Hangman opens Friendly to his potential..."

Most novels come about by a process of growth from seed but The Following evolved more through a grafting process. A few years ago I wrote a story about a hangman with mystical powers of consoling his victims, and made him the executioner in an actual hanging, in Bathurst Gaol, in 1916 - a sensational hanging of a political nature, when two "Wobblies" went to their deaths for shooting a policeman in Tottenham, NSW.

In The Following I have the hangman influence a boy - Marcus Friendly - who rises to become the sixteenth prime minister of Australia. Far from malign, the influence of the State Hangman opens Friendly to his potential, as does his close relationship with two independently-spirited girls, Luana Milburn and Pearl Dease, who remain, throughout Marcus's life, contrastingly, counter influences.


In the novel I don't give a name to the party Friendly follows, in order to elevate a feeling of political attachment to the level of what might be called spiritual attachment, akin to a gift or source of personal revelation, and shorn of journalistic and sociological methodology. There are, however, clear parallels to Ben Chifley and Australian Labor. When Friendly dies, in 1951, though he is, apparently, childless, and all but abandoned by the electorate and his party, he passes something on that perhaps only fiction can - or at least I hope can - make seem very real: those "forces of a higher order [in the words of Pasternak, denying being polarised-political in Dr Zhivago] coming from a greater depth in time, which reassert their continuing presence in the most ordinary everyday life."


The second of The Following's three Books takes up the story of Kyle Morrison, son of Australia's most famous poet, The Bounder. The action moves to a pastoral property in North-Western NSW in the 1970s, apparently far-removed from the working-class Friendly political world. But in fact nested inside Kyle Morrison's seeming backwater are all ingredients of conflict and reconciliation building from Book One.


Book Three moves into the present day, where, on the South Coast of NSW, at the height of a recent summer, a group of old friends including an affable PR hack, Tiger Yeomans,  and Max Petersen, MP, a backbencher, get together as they have annually for many years though in heightened emotional circumstances. The grafting here is about as close to autobiographical as anything I've written. But its roots (or I should say scions) are hidden. These are only a few hints of "The Following".