Chapter 1: What Australian fiction books are highlighted in this episode?
This is an ABC podcast.
All right, this is going to be good, isn't it?
I loved this book.
Put that effing book down.
You know, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
She's a furious woman. I'm reading it and reading it and I'm going, oh no. So I thought I really have to hook the reader. It's taken up half my heart, you know.
The book actually put a hex on me. Shirley Hazard's The Transit of Venus, Joan London's The Golden Age and Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career. This is The Bookshelf on Radio National or on your podcast catcher of choice. I'm Kate Evans and those are the books in today's show. They're all Australian, although Shirley Hazard spent most of her life away from the place.
And Miles Franklin was writing at the turn of the 20th century. And Joan London takes us to Perth. All of these discussions come out of our 2020 book club. Let's begin, though, with Shirley Hazard's The Transit of Venus, published in 1980. There are four of us in this discussion. There's me, Cassie McCullough, novelist Robert Lukens, and literary academic Bernadette Brennan.
And when we were deciding which books to discuss in the Book Club series, Bernadette said that this book was right at the top of her list of essential Australian fiction. Why, though?
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Chapter 2: Why is Shirley Hazzard's 'The Transit of Venus' considered essential Australian fiction?
I think that's the message that Hazard wants to get across.
But more and more though, as I made my way through this book, she's demanding of us that we are not easy readers. You have to pay attention, even on a sentence level, to find out not just what's going on, but to understand the images and the writing. There are many, many sentences that stop me in my tracks. Perhaps we could bring Robert in on there. What did it mean to read this novel?
fascinating. I read this for the first time, I don't know, maybe 20 years ago, and I've probably read it once every sort of seven or eight years since then. And I know it's one of these things people say about novels that it repays rereading. You hear this a lot, but this is a novel where for the first time I think that is just so completely true and almost necessary. It's interesting.
I've read a bit of In preparation for this, I was reading quite a bit of literary criticism about Shirley Hazard and particularly this novel. And this is a novel that's always spoken about in terms of rereading. I'm not suggesting that Shirley, for some reason I always just want to call her Shirley.
I'm not suggesting that she built this in a kind of Quentin Tarantino design Pulp Fiction to be watched seven times to find the little details. But she's constructed it rather than a two-dimensional painting.
It's almost like she's built a three-dimensional structure, a kind of cavern that you have to walk in and you can look around and see the different paintings on the walls and hear different echoes. And you do experience it slightly different each time. And it is because of that. It's not a complexity, even though it is complex. It's a sophistication. It's a layering.
It's almost like a painting where you know, even though there's this surface story and it might be about particular romances, it might be about Paul Ivory, the rakish playwright, or Adam Vale, the wealthy US activist.
that's just the surface level but you can see that there are behind that are 25 different layers of paint and you can sort of see shades of them so this is a novel that each time you come back to it it's almost like you're brought closer into the story you can make those small connections and it's that confidence that shirley has to to lay a seed on page 17 that doesn't pay off until page 313 and even if you don't make that direct connection
you have that sense of an echo, this kind of circularity. The fact that we learn early about the fate of Ted Tice, but then it's only at the end of the story that that kind of wraps around again. It is that orbit, that grand theme of that cosmic theme of Venus going in great orbit around the sun. And it's going to take a long time, but it'll come back and join back up where it started.
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Chapter 3: How does the narrative style of Shirley Hazzard impact the reader's experience?
Joan London speaking to me in 2015, just after the book was published. Robert, we meet this boy, Frank Gold, and he starts out in another institution where he meets what he thinks might be his future, his calling. So what is it and what happens?
Well, he realises quite suddenly in that way you can do when you're a young person, he realises that his vocation in life is to be a poet. And he's enraptured by that kind of certainty, that certainty that you can only have at that kind of age. It's that certainty that I had that I was definitely going to be an astronaut.
It's that certainty that people have that they're going to be a flyer, whatever it is. And it was interesting, too, because to him it was very much it's a job. it's something that you are going to, it's like he's seen his uncle repairing a car and he decides to become a mechanic. But for Frank, it's poetry.
And he commits to it again with that kind of commitment you have as a child where you aren't clouded by realities. And so he picks up the wrench of poetry and he decides that's going to be his way into the world.
Yes. And he meets this man, boy really, called Sullivan Backhouse. And Sullivan is in this facility for people who have polio, but adults and just briefly Frank's in it. Sullivan is in an iron lung. He's so badly affected by polio that he's actually needs help breathing. But I love Sullivan Backhouse. I think he's one of the most beautifully moving characters I've read in a long, long time.
I do too. But then I'd say that all these characters in this book are, I would think, some of the most beautiful characters I've met in a long, long time. And I think that's one of the great powers of this book. London's compassionate, feeling for her characters and the complexity of these characters in all their pain and loneliness and exile in different ways. But yes, Sullivan.
So Sullivan, in a sense, we get he's the sort of private schoolboy. He's the son of the more wealthy father who works for the governor, I think, because he comes in his fancy car.
Yeah, he's the aide-de-camp, yeah.
So you get the sense of Sullivan as the tall prefect and he was the rower and of course he got struck down with polio when he was rowing. But Sullivan is the character who is lying there in that lung composing poetry, thinking deeply and writing these lines about his last day on earth. And he's 17 now. So there's such a beauty about him as well.
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