Chapter 1: What is the significance of memory in fiction?
This is an ABC podcast. I remember first reading that line and thinking, I'm in. And this book was suddenly speaking my language.
So I cried and laughed.
And the suggestion is that these whispers are treacherous but also lethal.
You have to be qualified by misery to read that book. I had never read a book like that. And these are the stories that I am so honored to learn and to read. So here you have the book as a mirror.
And it's kind of beautifully grubby in a way that great Russian novels are. And as a reader, I want that, I want it all.
Hello and welcome to Radio National's on-air and podcast monthly book club. I'm Kate Evans, our theme is memory, and Cathy McCullough, I promise hand on heart that I am not going to impersonate Barbara Streisand and sing that memory song from the musical Cats.
Oh, Kate, just saying it. That's going to be an earworm for me for days now. Thank you for that. Look, I'm so excited to be here talking about these two great books. I'm still kind of in recovery, I think, from the big weekend of books.
What a smash hit that was. Some fantastic discussions there, which, of course, people can catch up on and listen on the ABC Listen app or on the Radio National website. But what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about memory in fiction, as frequent a theme as secrets, love and betrayal, I reckon, Cassie.
Yeah, it comes and goes, doesn't it, from fiction? It has its moments. But yeah, perhaps we're going to see two very different versions of memory in the two books we're going to discuss.
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Chapter 2: How does Jessica Anderson's 'Tirra Lirra by the River' explore memory?
But I wouldn't listen. I said I simply adored trains. You won't adore this one, said Peter. But I said, of course I should. I adored all trains. The truth is, I was terrified to fly again.
Oh, as you say, there is so much in that first page, both her voice and what's happening, although it's not entirely clear why she's there and what's going on. So, Robert, maybe you can help set us up. What else we need to know as we read that first page?
Yeah, sure. And it's such a warm and somewhat dense beginning, isn't it? And we have already this sense of time flashing forwards and backwards. She's forgotten her hat, but she doesn't know that yet. So as you said, we have Nora Porteus, a woman in her 70s, returning to her childhood home in Brisbane. And
and we learn that her parents are dead, her brother and sister are dead, and this is what in some ways brought her back to this somewhat slightly dusting vacant house.
Initially, the only contact she really has is with her neighbours who have to care for her as in the early stage of this novel she falls ill, and really it's in this almost feverish state that she becomes kind of possessed by these memories that intrude into her day, and you get the sense that it's very much this illness which is
confines her to her bed and to this house that sort of forces her to confront some of these memories. And these are memories that get evoked by small sights and sounds in this house. And right from the start, you get this sense of this sort of internal tension in Nora, and it comes across in the writing, especially in the initial pages.
There's sort of almost a nervousness in Nora coming back to this place because it's a place that we learn she fought so hard to escape.
Yes, there's a real fragility and brittleness about her. You know, she actually, as you say, she becomes sick quite quickly and falls into the care of strangers. And that makes her even more vulnerable. She's caught some flu on the way. But the contrast, Alison, between her having this, the 14 planks of the front stair propped up against the veranda, such a clear memory of the house.
But she also doesn't remember the name of the man who drove her there, just from the railway station. And in fact, he was a person from her childhood. So we already have this jarring sense of her in the present with real memory, I guess, dysphoria almost.
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Chapter 3: What themes are presented in Hugh Brakey's 'The Beautiful Fall'?
But I also felt that Colin's recollection of that time was, was probably very different.
Chapter 4: How does the protagonist's amnesia shape the narrative?
There is even a hint in the parting message and then one communication down the track that maybe Nora's view of it wasn't entirely accurate and maybe she was able to have made a difference and she simply didn't. I don't know, that's probably controversial, but...
Yeah. Well, that's the great thing about memory, isn't it? How contested and difficult it is and how everybody's memory of the same event will be completely different. Because, I mean, there was some solace and escape and creativity for her, Robert, isn't there? In that she is an artistic person. I mean, does that help?
Yeah, well, and that's such an interesting part about that Sydney part of the story. And obviously there's the portrayal of her horrendous marriage to Colin, but it's such a captivating section of the book because we can feel the excitement of Nora getting
as she gets these glimpses into a life that she senses she could be living with these artists, these bohemians, and it gives life to these artistic impulses that are already present in her. But it's very nonspecific. She just senses the excitement of art and creativity and then it stirred something in her. And this is really, you can feel that the speed of the novel really picks up here.
And I was reading contemporaneous books
reviews of the book when it came out and this is the part that people absolutely love this portrayal of Sydney in this time even though it was through this time of the depression it was this time of a flowering of bohemia and artists and modernism in Sydney and you get a sense of that you can smell it in the air and you can feel that excitement building up in Nora but she doesn't quite know what to do with it but she does get a sense that she wants she wants a piece of this
Yes, and she makes some great friends and friendships that last long after she's in that space. And that's always a real sign that there's a connection being made in a time and a place. And yeah, a wonderful period in this book as well.
And then there's such interesting stuff going on with the writing, the way in which she's moving between moments of exhilaration and moments of sadness and anger. And in 2010, ABC Sydney did an on-air book club about this novel, and the critic Geordie Williamson was the main commentator on it. Now, this is what he said about the style.
This is a book tinged with sadness, but the language is also full of ecstasy about the world, about the beauties of her town, of what it was to grow up in rural, semi-rural Brisbane suburbs in the early decades of the 20th century.
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Chapter 5: What role do the characters' pasts play in their present lives?
And so she so seamlessly transitioned between past and present and how much memory influenced her. her journey, and that was a great influence of mine.
When Things Are Alive They Hum is the name of Hannah Bent's novel, and we'll be talking about that in a couple of weeks' time on the bookshelf. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that.
The ABC Book Club Facebook group has been talking about this book, Tirralira by the River, as well. Let me just read you some of the comments. Sue Phillips says, I love Tirralira, beautifully evocative of time and place. So simple, never boring, with surprises waiting for you, reflecting on life and coming to peace with it.
And another woman, whose name was Monica, said, I recently read Tirralira after it had been on my bookshelf for many years. What a great pleasure it was to see the wonderful portrayal of the growth of a creative woman as seen through her 70-year-old memory. I don't know why I waited so long.
i'm going to buy a copy of this for my mum and i think also my aunt who who lives in london i just think it's a book that stands the test of time and also has some message in there and and i actually was wanting to ask all of you what do you think the message of this book is i was really pondering it when i finished it I mean, we're taken to some devastating places.
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Chapter 6: How do memories influence the characters' relationships?
We learn the fates of these beautiful young children that she grows, of the beautiful kids and other children that she grows up with. We learn what happens to them later in life. What do you think, Robert?
I mean, what a question. And I think one of the joys of this book to me is that at every opportunity, Jessica Anderson shies away from coming to simple conclusions. There's a much easier, neater version of this novel where Nora goes to London and
and finally breaks free of the shackles of her oppressive upbringing and her bad marriage and becomes a famous fashion designer and becomes the fully realised artist she could have been. But she doesn't. Nora sort of stands at the brink of things. She gets close to the edge of different worlds and she kind of vacillates between the two because she's a very real person living in a real time.
And even at the end of the novel, when she's sort of analysing all of these memories and what she's searching for, what they mean, and can she be comfortable with them? And she isn't really able to come to any conclusions about it because we don't come to conclusions about these things, do we?
And in the end, maybe it just comes down to sitting by the window, looking out at the mango tree and just wondering. And part of the joy of this book to me is that resonance of that questioning. The questioning doesn't stop and she doesn't give us easy answers to these things. So the answer really is what's the conclusion to a life? Does it really have an answer?
Yeah, I see that too. What did you take away from it, Alison?
I took away from it, I guess, my understanding of Nora as an old woman. imagining she's at the end of her life, although she may not be, and working through these memories she's sort of forced to by her illness and the fact that she's in her childhood home. And she achieves, I think, a resolution of sorts about her life and about her early memories, which I think is rather lovely.
And the final page, and I'm not going to give away the content of the final page, but that was a very moving description of how she came to terms with a really pivotal event in her childhood. And so I think ultimately what I took away from this book is that it's an old woman's coming to terms with the life that she's led and achieving a sort of happiness as a result.
I mean, she's come to terms with her sister. with that unexplained event that she finally understands on the last page. And now she's lived her life and she can contemplate as she wishes. So I thought that was a particularly lovely story. That's one of the reasons that I really enjoyed this book.
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Chapter 7: What literary devices does the author use to depict memory?
I'm talking about real history, so to speak, at the moment, and it's written by the victors. But what this has given novelists is a wonderful opportunity to rewrite history from another point of view. A novel that I read recently that I really love is Kate Grenville's A Room Made of Leaves. That was stimulated by the history of John MacArthur's
But the way Kate revisited that was from the perspective of his wife. And that completely changes our perspective, our viewpoint of John MacArthur and of early white Australian history. So I really like the idea of the unreliable historian. I think we're going to see quite a lot about the possibly unreliable narrator when we shift on to The Beautiful Fall.
Nice segue, Alison. Very good. Thank you. I lay myself upon the floor We're not all dying here Well, maybe I don't need it after all It was a place for me to rest my And all the books upon your shelf tell stories of who we are.
There's more to picture you.
I will play it on your broken guitar. Well, let's do it, shall we, Kate? Let's talk about our second book in today's bookshelf, Hugh Brakey's The Beautiful Fall.
So this is a debut novel from the Brisbane-based philosopher and academic Hugh Brakey. To make sense of the novel, you really have to understand the premise and what has happened to the central character whose name is Robbie. So Alison, can you set this one up for us? What do we need to know?
Thank you. We need to know that Robert suffers from recurring amnesia. And what this means is that he loses his memory every six months with remarkable regularity. When the novel begins, we start off with a letter from the previous version of him. I mean, when you lose your memory and you keep on being alive, the body has a number of different versions of you with
different memories and so Robbie has received this letter from his last version of himself which is telling him how to live his life. So that's where the novel begins with this letter from the previous version and I'd just like to read out one little paragraph from this letter. Memories are like armor. Without them, you have no control, nothing to hold your shape.
You become whatever anyone tells you to be. That's why you have to be on your guard from the very first moments. So with that terrible reminder of how careful he has to be, the new Robbie begins his countdown to the anticipated date when he'll lose his memory. And so the novel then begins at day 12, and then we count down to the anticipated event.
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