Alice and Melbourne

I've been in Alice Springs for the past few days for work. Apart from the trips to and from the airport and a short guided tour of the Desert Park (where I took several blurry photos of rare native birds in flight because my colleagues did not appreciate the need to approach them slowly or silently) I was inside a hotel so my perceptions are necessarily impressionistic and may owe a lot to the postcards in the giftshops.

As everyone said, the landscape looked like a Fred Williams painting from the plane with orange plains rippling from horizon to horizon, occasionally blurred with purple smudges that turned out to be hills. The clouds and their shadows looked exceedingly picturesque against this background. From the ground, the landscape was flat and orange and then suddenly these ridges would rear up as if pushed from below. It was unexpectedly rainy and cold. I enjoyed it more when I was there on holdiays years ago on what was probably the most irritating family holiday of my life.

The work was meant to be a talkfest but it became surprisingly confrontational (which was why I had no time to leave the hotel and do anything, um, fun on my own). And then I had to come home straightaway and liberate the diabetic cat from the cattery because my Beloved is STILL away and work wouldn't pay for the cat's extortionate boarding fees. Needing two needles a day doubles the price.

On my return flight I took a quiet delight in being in the front of the plane while the most confrontational of the participants in the talkfest were in the back despite their greater seniority. About the only thing I can be happy about.

I've been reading a delightful biography of Lord Melbourne, Prime Minister to Queen Victoria and the guy Melbourne was named after (although this hasn't happened yet). It's by Lord David Cecil and it's the twentieth anniversary edition of a 1939 book. Lord David (or Cecil??) was a distinguished English professor at Oxford and Cambridge. He has this wonderfully rhetorical style that uses generalisations to describe his subject without burdening the reader with too many footnotes and details. His style does the reader the favour of apparently assuming that they know the facts that he is actually imparting. I feel flattered and entertained. And Melbourne was a really interesting man living in exciting times.

The book opens with a description of the grand mansions of the eighteenth century from which England was governed by the grand lords. He shows how these houses weren't in fact effete palaces like Versailles but the venues for domestic and national drama and, in the country, functioning rural estates providing the economic lifeblood of the nation until the industrial revolution brought prosperity to the middle classes. Lord Cecil is refreshingly frank about the intellectual laziness of the aristocracy raised in a delightful milieu that made thinking too hard seem vulgar. The young William Lamb (who became Lord Melbourne) was prevented by the Napoleonic Wars from having a Grand Tour and instead after some very pleasant years in Cambridge spent time styudying in Glasgow with some very tiresome hardworking northerners.

The domestic tragedy of his youth was his marriage to Caroline who nurtured a grand passion for Lord Byron. She christened him "bad, mad and dangerous to know" but in the end it was she who became quite mad. Their marriage starts off sounding like something written by Jane Austen and then quite Byronic, and then as if Emily Bronte was directing proceedings. Then Charlotte Bronte takes over as young William eventually turns into Mr Rochester and locks up his wife in the country house. Lord Cecil describes the various versions of who said what to whom. What comes through is the tremendous sadness for someone who had married for love dealing with a wife who became comepletely and unpredictably unbalanced in the days before psychiatry. And the only child they had was intellectually handicapped and could not be made fit for polite society even though William did his best to educate him.

Anyway apart from the salacious gossipy side, the book has a potted history of the political developments in Britain and it's very easy to read.

The Walker and Harry Potter

My Beloved is away on a work trip again. Of course I spent the first night of his absence reading and reading and reading until the words stopped making sense.

It was after two when I reached the last page of Jane R Goodall's The Walker, one of the Woemen's Weekly's 'Great Reads' and winner of the 2004 Ned Kelly award for best crime novel 2004. With recommendations like that, is it any wonder I couldn't put it down?

The book was set in London in the late sixties and early seventies and told mostly from the points of view of young female characters. Two of them are dealing with the world of work at a time when job opportunities for women were changing. There's a lot of discussion about the difficulty men have with coping as women as colleagues rather than subordinates or sex objects. At various stages more make-up and eyelash fluttering are suggested as career enhancing stratiegies!! One character initially regrets choosing to wear a short skirt when she's called into her male supervisor's office for a dressing down. She follows her usual tactic of placing her notepad over her legs until she reconsiders and uses the vision of her slim knees as an aid to persuade her boss to adopt her point of view. It made me think about how such similar things still go on except with a lot more subtelty. I remember how a decade ago the attitude of my avuncular supervisors changed for the worse when I replaced my bob with an incredibly stylish but short haircut. One of the older women took me aside and said she thought I was very brave whereas I thought I looked FABULOUS.

Goodall describes the interior monologues of all the female characters really well as they plan what to wear and budget their clothing allowances. She uses a lot of period fashion details that ring true (even if I don't know for sure because I wasn't there). One character wears a purple minidress with white piping that sounds like one of the dresses I found in my grandmother's wardrobe when she went into a nursing home. And until I read this bookd I'd never heard that the opposite of a 'mini' was a 'maxi' or 'maxiskirt'. For a scary thriller about a serial killer this was a really enjoyable read.

On the second night my Beloved was away, I hired the latest Harry Potter on DVD. This was Goblet of Fire one which is probably my least favourite of the books because of the artificiality of mapping the annual rites of the boarding school novel onto the three tasks of the Triwizard tournament. (Why are the students from other schools there all year when they only need to be there for a month? Why is it the girl who stuffs up most in the tasks? Why does Herminone have to fall into that trap of looking really nice once they put her into a frock?) What struck me about this movie was that, unlike the previous three, the students aren't wearing robes but what look like private school uniforms with even the girls wearing ties. They look heaps more sensible but this isn't in the book!!!

Kalishnikovs and Zombie Cucumbers

That's the title of the book I couldn't remember yesterday. It's by Nick Middleton and about his travels in Mozambique both before and after the peace accord in 1992.

Sadly, I remember almost nothing about it except that it was amusing (as Little Britain's frustrated customer would say) and Mozambique was a very strange place where colonialism, post colonialism and witch doctors collide. It's my favourite title this week. Apologies for "I like this book" standard of critical discourse but it's been a long week. It has both a bibliography and an index (not normal in travel writing). Curiously Amazon appeared to list it as costing from $104. And Mr Middleton has written more travel books in the last ten years, all with interesting titles.

To return to March, yesterday's SMH had a Heckler which made me smile lamenting the popularity of the Civil War as an example of US cultural imperialism. She suggested that Australian political leaders should worry less about the American Civil War and more about conflicts we were actually involved in. Up to a point she has a point but taken to its logical conclusion we shouldn't study anything except Australian history and I should forget everything I learnt in that pesky Ancient History degree I did. and I certainly shouldn't be readling about zombie cucumbers.

Australian Wins Pulitzer

Pavlov's Cat recommends 'March' by Geralidine Brooks which recently won a huge international literary prize. It retells Little Women from the point of view of the absent father and is based on the life of Louisa May Alcott's real father.

Someone lent me it to me a couple of months ago but I was put off partly by thinking an extract I read in one of the week-end papers was overwritten. And then I told myself that because my reading was alternating between real Victorian novels and Patrick O'Brian yarns, I should avoid more of the same. But really I think I was afraid to start it because a lot of continuations of much loved books are disappointing (Pemberley anyone? That AWFUL sequel to Gone with the Wind??)

But I'm shallow enough to read it now Ms Brooks has won the Pulitzer! Go Aussie Go! I remember enjoying her book about Nine Parts of Desire about women and Islam and her sig other/husband/partner?? (Tony Horowitz??) wrote a hilarious book I only vaguely remember about being in the middle east as a foreign correspondent's hanger-on. Disappointingly, I've checked and it's called Bagdad without a Map . The other book I was thinking of had a title like Zombie Babes and Kalishnikovs. Annoying when the truth gets in the way of good ideas.

Phantom Islands

I've been reading the delightful Phantom Islands of the Atlantic by Donald S Johnson which describes how some people claimed to have found some islands that weren't, shall we say, actually there and they were included in maps for up to several hundred years and then they were quietly removed once mapmaking got better.

It's a lovely combination of the history of naval exploration and of cartography and Mr Johnson wears his learning very lightly. He explains when the islands first appeared and how mistakes or deceptions could have been made. I particularly liked the story of how the Hudson Bay Trading Company sought a royal patent for ownership an island they weren't ever able to find again (because it didn't exist) and two hundred years later their opponents accused them of hiding the location (at which point they renounced their claims. So far, it's made me think hard about how difficult it was for old time navigators sailing off into the beyond without being able to leave a trail of crumbs to find their way home again.

My Beloved said that he read this book immediately after reading Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World which gave him the impression that history was interesting and fun and he should read heaps of books like this. Then he discovered the sad truth that most popular history is badly written and overly technical. These two books, however, are fabulous.

More Jack - and Phillip

If you were puzzled by last Thursday's description of Letter of the Marque, that was because I wasn't reading it but Treason's Harbour. Immediately after I finished it, I did read 'Letter of the Marque' in which Jack and Stephen prepare for a very long trip to South America which doesn't happen although many many other things do.

These books are so very satisfying that I feel no apology for raving about them so positively. Jack Aubrey is a robust goodhumoured hero that faces adversity as well as good fortune. The reader even learns to love his many foibles. His dear friend Stephen Maturin is far less likeable on the surface but he's certainly very clever and, like Dr Worm, interested in things. And they travel all round the world having adventures.

In general, this Easter was a wonderful opportunity to kick back and read too much. I also read half of Donald Johnson's delightful Phantom Islands of the Atlantic about mistakes explorers and cartographers made before any of us knew any better.

I even caught up on my sleep which meant that the past two mornings I've been dreaming very vivid dreams. This morning I woke up completely convinced that Prince Phillip had died of a heart attack. I was very surprised when this wasn't on the news and I asked everyone around me whether it had happened in the past few days or weeks and I'd been too busy to notice. Maybe enough sleep isn't a good idea after all...

Jack is Back

Yet again, just as I was contemplating an expensive trip to a bookshop, a colleague lent me two more Patrick O'Brian books about Jack Aubrey. The first is
The Letter of Marque. It finds Jack and his mate Stephen in Malta dealing with secret agents and double agents and mastiffs and diving bells. All rollicking good fun so far. Looks like a great way to spend Easter.

Honk if you are Jesus

That's got to be one of the best titles around. Shame the book wasn't so hot. It's by Peter Goldsworthy and is about genetic engineering in a parallel universe where in 1993 the extinct dodo was cloned and now merrily populates zoos aroung the world. Reanimating extinct species has always been one of my secret wishes about how the world could made more fun so I liked this part of it conceptually a great deal.

The author is a doctor so there was lots of convincing medical jargon about in vitro fertilisations and what's needed to locate viable old DNA but the main character of a 48-year-old virgin doctor was just really badly drawn. It was one of those books where if you stopped and thought too hard you'd find too many plotholes. Consequently I raced through it and then sat around annoyed with nothing to read. It was written in 1993 so it's funny to revisit the Gold Coast when private universities were so shockingly new.

Spoiler warning - But the title is also misleading. The book's evil genius has a nefarious plot to bring back Jesus through reactivation of his DNA, but I think the technique they used (of creating sperm by splitting ordinary cells and inserting it into an egg) would have led to the production of Jesus' kid, not the guy himself. End of spoiler

In one scene, I was reminded why I have a problem with Redgum's (and now the Hilltop Hoods') song about Vietnam called 'I was only 19' which has the line 'and Frankie kicked a mine the day mankind kicked the moon. God help me, he was going home in June'

This makes you think he was going home soon after the first Moon landing in 1969. I wasn't born then and Redgum members probably weren't either and the Hilltop Hoods definitely weren't but it's pretty common knowledge Neil Armstong made his 'one small step for man' etc speech on 20 July 1969.

And this book had a scene where student doctors in 1969 were in anatomy class with televisions on watching the moon landing in July. I reckon the songwriter either didn't think plain old 'he was going home soon' sounded quite right or he was referring to the first unmanned landing on the moon by the russians in April 1966. But really I think he just didn't think anyone would notice. But I did, and I get bothered every time I hear the song now.

New Orleans again

My Beloved tells me that the Camellia Grill is in fact not part of the touristy part of New Orleans at all. It was at the intersection of two street car lines on the edge of the Garden District where the rich folk live in antebellum or reproduction mansions. I owe Amanda Eyre an apology I guess.

On the week-end I tried to read a book about the development of standard time called Time Lord. I love popular science but this was so badly overwritten that what could have been an interesting story to fill up several days made go to an encyclpedia instead. Life's too short to waste it reading dull books.

The Trouble with Sisters

I read Amanda Eyre Ward's How to be Lost over the past two days. I found it in the unofficial work library of books people don't really want any more and had put off reading it until I was desperate for lexical sustenance.

But it's really really good. Baldly, it's about a damaged family who lost a child and the search for her many years later. But there is depth and character and emotion and humnour behind the deceptively simple prose. One of the characters lives in New Orleans for a while but not in a touristy way. More a poor cocktail waitress way living in a African American neighbourhood and driving home drunk from bars every night. This was really well described but I smiled when she went to the Camellia Grill for breakfast one day because I had an omelette there one day as a tourist. (The next day I ordered hominy grits somewhere else and would have had collard greens if I'd remembered) So maybe locals wouldn't think she was that local.

She has a really good ear for dialogue and her pop music references were spot on. What I loved though was her description of the distance that grew between the adult sisters. They were very close as children but recriminations build up and it gets to be easier not to talk at all rather than have the same argument each week. This seemed very true to life.

Then again my favourite moment of all was the loud resolution not to go home for Christmas being undermined immediately by a parent. Been there. Hardest thing I've ever done was not to fly home for Christmas.

Peter Carey and my mother

I read the long
Spectrum article about Peter Carey and his new book this week-end. Apparently it has a central character going through a divorce with distinct similarities to the recent real life divorce of a certain Australian expatriate author living in New York. The female SMH journo spoke to the former wife of Mr Carey who made certain very measured comments about the break up. On the other hand, according to Crikey, a male journo in The Age , stated he deliberately decided to avoid the topic of Peter's divorce because it wasn't really that relevant. Um, sure.

Writers are just so cannibalistic. Why do they think they can get away with humiliating their exes by pretending it's all fiction? (I'm talking about you, Salman Rushdie.) I mean, you're a Booker winning author; your exes are usually not that well known. There's a bit of a power imbalance.

Writers should come with written warning "if you go out with me our most intimate moments will be rewritten to make me look better and presented to the world as fiction which everyone will assume to be fact."

I can take or leave Peter Carey. He knows how to write a page turner but I'm not sure there's much below the surface that I want to know about. Many years ago, my mother declared (as is her wont) that in a previous life she must have been married to Peter Carey. She was a real fan of his prose style based on reading the ever so charming Illywhacker. When the much much darker Tax Inspector appeared, I annoyed her a lot by borrowing it from the uni library and then reading it first. I wish I hadn't because then I felt responsible for giving her a book where a heavily pregnant woman is brutalised amongst other grotesqueries. She found it "sickmaking" and I thought their past life relationship would be all off but she keeps going back to the well. I guess I should be relieved I didn't give her a copy of anything by the Marquis de Sade.