Summer Bookshelf celebrating Australian writing
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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?
I suppose the instinctive response I had was, what's one of the greatest books I've ever read and taught in Australian fiction? And The Transit of Venus always jumps out straight away. Interestingly, I say this is interesting because it's an absolute world book, I think, this book. It's an Australian book, but it's a book written by Shirley Hazard who left Australia aged 16 in 1947 and who writes a book that is... deeply ethical and deeply about history and about literature and about the world. And yet it is one of my favourite Australian fiction books. So why did I pick it? It's elegant. It's beautifully, beautifully written. It's complex. It expects a lot from its reader. It makes no concessions to sentimentality and
It's deeply ethical. You could read it in about five different ways and still pick it up the next time and find different things that you've never seen before. It's that complex. And it's also a great story.
Well, Bernadette, let's sketch out some of that great story for people who haven't read the book. There are two Australian sisters, Caro and Grace Bell. They travel to England with their terrible half-sister, Dora. Their parents have died in a ferry accident in Sydney, and we meet some of the people who become important to them.
But Bernadette, one of those people who we meet very early on is a man called Ted Tice, who becomes a very important character through the whole book. But in the second chapter, in one line, Shirley Hazard says, Ted Tice will later take his own life. And that's just left there. And then the story goes on and it's not explained and it's never even entirely revealed, even in the final pages. of the book. What does the way that she drops these little details tell us about how she writes, how she tells stories?
So in this book, Hazard is the ultimate omniscient narrator and she makes no bones about making sure that you as a reader understand that. It's a book also involved with calculations, this whole idea of the science and the transit of Venus. And she's going to suggest to us that there are many things in plain sight. There are many things we don't even see. There are many things we will see in hindsight, or we will see if only we were observant enough to see. So she quite ruthlessly tells us right up front, Ted Tice will take his own life in a northern city. We hear that, in a northern city. And yes... This will happen, but it will only happen after you've closed the pages of the book and you will have to work out how and why that happened.
The beauty of what she does there, and she does it again and again in this book, is that she gives it to you and she says, there you are, reader, you've got it. Do with it what you will. And then, in a sense, drops it on you 300 pages later when you suddenly realize, oh, no, I see what's going to happen here.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
9 identifiedMore from The Bookshelf
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