Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is an ABC podcast.
Hello, it's the Bookshelf and today one of the most anticipated new Australian novels of the year. We're going to Darwin in 1942 to meet a young girl called Molly Hook in Trent Dalton's All Our Shimmering Skies. Hello, I'm Cassie McCullough.
And I'm Michaela Kolofsky, sitting in for Kate Evans while she's on a very well-earned break. And today we're also going to be talking about Marilynne Robinson's latest book, Jack. It's kind of part of the series of her Gilead novels, and it centres on two beautiful characters in St.
Louis, Missouri, after World War II, who fall in love, except one of them is white and one of them is African-American, and it's against the law. And that book, Jack, will be reviewed by Morag Fraser, who's a writer and one of Australia's most experienced literary and social commentators.
Looking forward to that. But let's get straight to the book that everyone's been waiting for. Well, it's not an overstatement to say that Trent Dalton's second novel, All Our Shimmering Skies, has been much anticipated. The first one sold 500,000 copies in Australia alone. An incredible debut, Boy Swallows Universe.
And it was read, I guess, Michaela, by people who don't often read Australian fiction, which is what made it so remarkable.
I think so. I mean, I think it's a coming of age story. It's about two brothers, Eli Bell and his mute brother, August, who were growing up together in Brisbane in the 1980s. They've got a heroin dealing stepdad and a serious criminal for a babysitter. So the backdrop of their everyday life is domestic violence and drugs and crime. But I think it's something that Trent Dalton said himself.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Trent Dalton's All Our Shimmering Skies?
Ultimately, the book is a love story. And I think that's what people responded to. And not just in Australia. It's a book that's really travelled around the world. It's been raved about in the New York Times and the Washington Post. And I think there are also screen and theatre adaptations of the book coming as well.
So absolutely no pressure on Trent Dalton following this up with this new book. Let's get to the story. It's a completely different location, but there are many similarities between the two. At the beginning of this book, we meet young Molly Hook. She's about seven years old. She's a gravedigger's daughter and also a gravedigger herself. It's Darwin in the late 1930s.
Chapter 3: How does Marilynne Robinson's Jack explore themes of love and race?
She's in the graveyard with her mother and they have a quite profound conversation and we soon realise it's the last conversation they will ever have, Michaela.
That's right. Violet Hook is someone we learn as well who really instils in Molly a great love of poetry and of plays and language in general. And one of the first things she does that I found so endearing, she takes young Molly around all the gravestones and makes her read out all the little epitaphs.
And it's kind of like Molly starts to learn about how you tell the story of your life through death. You know, she's learning wisdom about how she might live through looking at how people died and what they said about themselves. But it also gives this sense, both in the story and in Molly's life of...
the importance of finding your own story and of finding the words to tell your own story as well.
And she implores Molly to live her life with grace and so she can leave her own epitaph, not have one written for her. So she says to Molly, I'm going to leave you now. I'm going to go to the sky. And we realise as the adult reader, not as the child, that she's clearly very ill and she's dying and she's going to leave us Molly and not make her witness the death that she's going to experience.
So she tells Molly to turn around and look at the sky and that she'll always be in the sky ready to answer her questions. And then she walks away. She disappears. And so Molly's left alone. But when she does finally turn around, she finds that there's a gift at her feet that's been left behind.
It's a very important gift. It's a pan that belonged to Molly's grandfather. And this pan has a sort of a poem or a riddle written on the back. And really that becomes the structure of the book for us as the reader, where Molly's trying to work out what these strange riddles are on the back of the pan and what they might lead her to.
And it becomes the sort of the tip of her arrow that guides her as when everything else around her in her life gets worse and worse, as it really does in this book. You know, poor little Molly. literally lives with two very alcoholic parent figures, one her father, one her uncle, and there's a lot of violence in her life.
You mentioned before that her mother says, always look up, Molly, talk to the sky.
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Chapter 4: What are the main character dynamics in All Our Shimmering Skies?
And Molly very beautifully talks to the daytime sky, which she says can tell her lies, and the nighttime sky, which will never lie to her. But the truth is that Molly really only has sort of two friends. She has the sky and she has Bert, who's a shovel she uses to dig graves. But she's a very, very endearing little girl. There's also something else that I love.
There's a great description of her character. Once her mother leaves her and says to her, you know, cry for me now but never cry again. And Molly does that. She howls and howls and howls until there are no tears left. And then after that she's very sturdy. She's a very emotional girl but she's a very contained girl.
It says in the book she can move on quickly from anything, beltings, burns, bereavement, burials, blood.
I thought that was a very Trent Dalton line. Yes, and Violet tells her daughter Molly to turn her heart to stone, not because that's what she wants for her daughter, but we learn afterwards that she's going to need a heart of stone to survive the world that she's about to be left alone in. Her father is violent himself and nasty and his brother... Aubrey is actually sadistic.
So she's there on her own. We fast forward about five years to when Molly is 12 and she's been without her mum but has learned to get by. And this is when the Japanese air raids of Darwin are about to begin. And I think, really, this is where the quest part of the novel begins, actually.
There's a journey that Molly is about to go on that she doesn't even know that she's going to go on it or with whom this is where that begins. A very vivid description of the air raids on Darwin in 1942, Michaela. It really shocked me, I have to say.
I didn't know that history very well. But you lived in Darwin, didn't you, Cassie? I mean, what were your experiences of being in that place and sort of still seeing the impact of that devastation?
Oh, it's still evident on the streets. You can still see a collapsed church from that time. There are still bullet holes in one of the walls of the banks. And you can just walk along the foreshore of Nightcliff and find shell casings that were from strafing attacks. So, you know, it's still very much present, literally in the ground of Darwin, but it's also there psychologically as well.
One of the biggest things that struck me about this novel is how beautifully Dalton writes about landscape. I mean, he's got a brilliant eye for character, nuance and dialogue. There are passages that read like poetry or like song. But he really struck me, these extraordinarily vivid depictions of the Northern Territory and the deep bush in that place.
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Chapter 5: What challenges does Molly Hook face in her story?
I think Trent Dalton doesn't shy from it. Some pages are really packed with these very visceral descriptions of violence. But the characters also talk about sadness and loss all the way through.
Let's talk about the language for a moment. Trent Dalton's style, his writing style, is very idiosyncratic. In fact, I think it was notable in Boy Swallows Universe as well. It's heavily ornamented prose with adjectives. It's almost Baroque. He uses these strings of adjectives. They just sort of pile up on each other and they kind of create this sense of...
almost like they're vaulting out of Trent Dalton's brain. Like he's got this machine just for making words and descriptive passages. He also uses a lot of similes. He's always, this is like that. Loads of metaphor. You know, this gives the writing a sort of magical realist quality. I think people have said that about Boy Swallows Universe. It's definitely here.
It's front-loading a lot of the ideas about how we should be seeing the landscape, how we should be seeing characters. how we should interpret events. It's very, well, look, sometimes it strays into being quite florid, I found.
He does have a, he's got a style now. We've come to know that that is Trent Dalton's style and he makes it work. I know what you mean, but it all comes together in a way that makes you really feel like you're standing where those characters are. And you're feeling what they're feeling and you're feeling the heat of that bush and the fear of what their worry is around the next corner.
All the way through the book, I think Dalton is also celebrating language. You know, he does that himself in the beautiful way that he constructs language. But also the book is kind of also bursting with poems and writers that Molly loves and that Greta loves. There's Walt Whitman and there's Alan Poe and there's Shakespeare and there's Emily Dickinson.
And I love that there was a real fusion between the things you imagine that maybe the author loves and the characters love as well.
Well, yeah, I mean, you couldn't get more far away from Hemingway or from John Steinbeck. I mean, it's really like packing it in there. And that too, also, I feel is how he creates his characters. So Molly Hook is not just a little girl who's growing up in
darwin and is impoverished she's a grave digger being beaten her mother's been taken away from her she's experienced dreadful cruelty she doesn't have any shoes she's only got a friend who's a shovel so you know there's almost this sort of magnification that comes with the way that the characters are created and that's true of long coat bob they're larger than life definitely they're
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Chapter 6: How do the historical events shape the narrative in All Our Shimmering Skies?
You mentioned before that the world of this novel is, and often the worlds that Marilynne Robinson writes about, are about race. But I felt like this story is at first, it's quite quietly about race. You know, we get these descriptions of how far apart Della and Jack are
conscious that they have to stand away from each other in order not to be seen to be together so that neither of them get into trouble in particular her and him as well but then halfway through the book or sort of really once their love is declared race becomes very much front and center of this story and i i felt like robinson was giving us a real master class in how race operates in america did you feel that
I felt that absolutely, because it comes so gently, doesn't it, as you say. It's not a themes novel. It's not a novel where she started with a whole lot of ideas and thought, okay, I'll flesh them out with characters. There's a certain amount of theological underpinning. She's talking about what goodness is and what grace might be, but even that's too theoretical.
She just gives you these characters. Even in that cemetery scene, as she goes out, and Jack is waiting to go out, so he went... He won't be caught with her. And the guard at the gate says, what are you doing bringing a black gal in here? There's dead people in here. It's breathtaking.
And you begin to realize that one of the reasons that Jack is such an agonized character is that he can never satisfy his father. And one of the things he can't tell his father, who's a good, God-fearing, Presbyterian preaching man, is that he's married, in common law sense, to a black woman. And this is Iowa, where there never were laws against miscegenation, but of course in practice, horrible.
There's another scene where she starts dreaming about Wyoming, and she meets an old man who says, why do you not want to go to Wyoming? It's just full of half-crazed white people. And she says, but it's part of America. And this old black man says to her, it is. You ain't. Scenes like that, and you think, oh, gosh.
Yeah.
In four words, she encapsulates the experience of, you know, such a huge section of the population in the United States of America. And it's interesting that those exact, those issues that were, they've been bubbling away since the Civil War. They're still bubbling away.
Absolutely.
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Chapter 7: What role does the landscape play in the characters' journeys?
You have both a death of affection and gratitude for the person you know and a sense of the obligation to tell the truth and not, well, he wouldn't want anything else. But that's hard. That's really hard.
Very special. I can't wait to read it. You're also a big non-fiction reader, like many of us actually, Morag. What else are you, what's on your reading pile in that department?
Well, I'm reading two books at the moment, a series of essays about the world after COVID and what we should do. One's edited by Emma Dawson and Janet McAlvin. The other one's edited by Tanya Plibersek. They're both very interesting, very thought-provoking.
Morag Fraser, thank you for your wonderful thoughts on Jack by Marilynne Robinson, and thank you for being a guest on The Bookshelf.
Yeah, great to have you along. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Morag Fraser is a writer, a former editor of Eureka Street magazine, and she's also a former chair of the board of the Australian Book Review and the Melbourne Writers' Festival. And she's currently writing, as we just heard, a biography of the Australian poet Peter Porter.
This is The Bookshelf on Radio National, online and wherever you get your podcasts. New fiction every week.
Now, Michaela Kolofsky, I recently had a chance to catch up with Craig Silvey, who is the author of Jasper Jones, one of the most loved books in recent decades in Australia, but also now Honey Bee, the long-awaited next novel from him. And I asked him about the books that have meant something to him over his life. So here it is, A Me, My Shelf and I with Craig Silvey.
Craig Sylvie, welcome to Me, My Shelf and I. Thank you very much for having me.
I'm very excited.
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Chapter 8: How do the characters' relationships evolve throughout the story?
It's so beautiful. It's a book called Lean on Pete by a guy called Willie Flaughton who's also a musician. Yes. He plays in a band called Richmond Fontaine and also the D-Lines. It's a very, very special book. It's so beautiful. The moment I read it, I read it in a single sitting and I just devoured it. It's so gorgeous.
And the scheme of it is essentially a 15-year-old boy called Charlie goes on a road trip with a racehorse that's going to be put out to pasture, put it that way, and he wants to save the horse. And so he absconds with this horse called Lean on Pete. And it's just the most beautiful, heartfelt, simply told, but intimate and rich and deep story. It has a great deal of sophistication.
It's such an incredibly... accurate portrayal of Americana. I just love it to pieces. I'd always wanted to write a novel with quite a naive voice. Charlie, the narrator of Lean on Pete, just has such a disarmingly simple narrative voice, but the book lacks no sophistication for it. It was something that gave me a great deal of inspiration when I
uh when i approached sam watson's voice in in honeybee uh it remains a really influential book for for me and i love it to pieces i think willie is just an incredible writer and probably underestimated to be honest with you i think he's one of the best american writers working today he came out for the sydney writers festival a few years back and i think everyone just fell in love with him
He's just a wonderful man.
Yeah, muso, and then he writes these books, these amazing books. Yeah, Willie Vlautin, what a man. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That is a really interesting choice, and I'm glad you've put it on the pile. Have you any others leading us into Honeybee? Give us one more, Craig, Sylvie. This is a great list.
I'll give you one more, and there's some honourable mentions. My one more is, again, probably a bit of an obscure choice, but I love this book. It is devastating. It is raw. It's heartbreaking.
and it's beautifully told it's a book called happy baby by an author called stephen elliott uh who wrote a little bit for mcsweeney's in the states um but this is published through mccadam cage i think so it was a small it was quite a small run but it's the story of of a boy in the us who whose parents sort of deserted him and he's been locked into group homes and and so forth but it's told in reverse the
It was actually edited by Dave Eggers, this book, and I think it was his determination that the book would be better told in reverse.
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