Chapter 1: What books are discussed in this episode?
Music Music Music
Hello and welcome to The Bookshelf here on Radio National, online on the ABC Listen app. I'm Kate Evans and today I have a different partner in books. Cassie McCullough is away taking a well-earned break, so instead I'm delighted to say I'm here with Michaela Kolowski. Michaela, hello. Hello, Kate, and thank you very much to you and to Cassie for having me along for the ride.
Now, you've appeared on The Bookshelf before as a guest, but you spend a lot of time on stage or on Zoom interviewing writers. Who have you been speaking to lately?
I have been speaking to a couple of a really good mix of Australians and internationals. I was lucky enough to speak with Evie Wilde about her latest book, The Bass Rock. So Evie grew up in Australia, but she's based in London now and runs a little bookshop there. And The Bass Rock is extraordinary.
It's about these three generations of women who are living and experiencing a lot of violence on the same piece of land in Scotland. And it's really the first book she's written that wasn't based in Australia, but it's well worth a read. And I also had a great time speaking with Julia Baird about phosphorescence, which I know is on a lot of people's reading lists.
I don't think a book could have been better accidentally timed for a pandemic. It's a very beautiful book about finding meaning and searching for meaning and happiness and joy and contentment. And also with a very interesting American author called Sasha Sagan about her first book, which is called For Small Creatures Such As We.
She turns out to be the daughter of Carl Sagan, the great science communicator and physicist. And hers is a really interesting book about, I guess, creating ritual. How do you create ritual if you are somebody who doesn't have religion in your life? So quite a big range of authors I've been able to respect too.
Well, last week I watched you in conversation with the English writer David Mitchell, who wrote Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks, and his latest, Utopia Avenue, which is a novel about music in the 1960s. Now, I could tell you really liked it. Why? What did you like about it?
Well, I have to say, first and foremost, it is kind of one of my favourite periods of music. I love that kind of late 60s, early 70s rock and roll, psychedelic blues, post-jazz time. But also I think it's a really hard topic to write about and he does it in usual David Mitchell style with such humanity and with such warmth and without ever making you feel like it's not true.
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Chapter 2: How does Nicholas Shakespeare's The Sandpit reflect personal experiences?
He's probably got Asperger's. He's also a guitar god and he is giving a press conference and talks about where ideas come from and how do they land. And he's really talking about, I guess, what I think of as that feedback loop between social change, political change, things happening in the world.
And then there are songwriters who are somehow receptive to those things and they take all of that in and they deliver a song like The Times They Are A-Changin' or they deliver this amazing piece of music that somehow encapsulates what everyone's feeling. And then that song, in turn, inspires a whole group raft of people to action. It inspires people to write. It inspires people to change laws.
There's a beautiful feedback loop between creativity and action that David Mitchell describes really powerfully.
Now, we could easily get carried away here and just spend the time talking about the books that we've read and the authors that we want to talk to. But we should say instead that the books on today's show include a novel from Vietnam, Nguyen Phan Quay Mai's The Mountain Sing. But what else? The Australian writer Amanda Laurie and her latest novel, The Labyrinth.
And the English writer Nicholas Shakespeare's The Sandpit. So why don't we begin there?
Nicola Shakespeare is an English writer with a strong connection to Australia. He's written about Tasmania and has a biography of Bruce Chatman, which is wonderful.
So he's written both non-fiction and fiction. His earlier novels include The Dancer Upstairs, which was also a film. And I've read a lot of his essays in places like the London Review of Books. But Michaela, we've both read his latest novel. It's called The Sandpit. That's right.
The sandpit of the title is actually at the side of a school in Oxford where most of the story takes place. It's a school called the Phoenix School, a prep school, as the English call it, a private co-ed school where they learn Latin and play rugby and might go on to rule the world. You're getting the picture.
Well, Michaela, I spoke to Nicholas Shakespeare last week and it turns out that that fictional school is based on a real place called the Dragon School where he actually went. But so did people like Alain de Botton, the writers Neville Shute, John Mortimer, Antonia Fraser, so a place full of writers and actors.
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Chapter 3: What themes are explored in Nguyen Phan Quay Mai's The Mountains Sing?
And if he's right, it could be the solution to solving an international energy crisis, or it could be used in war. So Marvar is immediately excited about what he says he's done. And we never actually find out if Marvar was, if what he said was true, that he actually had worked out how to safely create nuclear fusion.
It puts Mavar in a terrible dilemma because he doesn't know who to give this information to or who to keep it from. And he also knows that if his government back home in Iran find out that he has been able to crack the code for nuclear fusion, that they will do anything, go to any lengths to get that information out of him.
And so without wanting to give away all the details of the plot, people believe that there is a formula that could solve either an energy crisis or be used in war or whatever. And this formula is so small and neat, it can be held on a post-it note, which I'm very pleased with as a post-it note devotee myself.
So that's when it becomes a sort of chase novel, a mystery novel, a spy novel and we're off. The plot is off and running. But this is where, Michaela, I have a theory about this book. What's your theory? Okay. Well, I reckon there's either two or possibly three ways of reading this book. So you can read it for this spy plot.
You can read it because it's very nicely written as a piece of literary fiction with lots of references to other books. Or you could read it as a book about the dilemmas of storytelling, because what John Dyer has to do is decide whether this is a story that needs to go out into the world or whether what's at stake is silence, whether he needs to keep this story and not tell anybody about it.
And I think that, for me, that became the central dilemma of the book. what your rights and obligations are to speak or to be silent. And of course, there's a lot of pressure on that decision because he's a journalist. What do you think? How does my theory hold up?
I think your theory does hold up. I think there's a very strong strand in this novel, which is about what it means to be a journalist, what it means to be a truth seeker or a truth teller.
And in the case of John Dyer, he's somebody whose career really stalled because he gathered a very important story in Brazil and then wouldn't publish it for a whole variety of reasons that are made clear in the book. So I think there's something to that. There is something about silence.
I mostly read this book, I have to say, as a pretty much a fantastically, mostly well-written page turner that was in the kind of literary spy thriller kind of genre. I really enjoyed it for that. And that's what I thought it was mainly about. And what I would say is that... There's even a character in the book whose name is very similar to Updike. But it's in that vein, definitely.
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Chapter 4: How does Amanda Lohrey's The Labyrinth challenge narrative conventions?
Angela, tell us what's been keeping you busy.
Well, I've been trying to read some... fantasy fiction which I've never read before. One of the books I've read is Gideon the Ninth, a debut novel by the New Zealand writer Tamsin Muir and wow what a debut. It was named as one of the best books of 2019 by a vast number of publications and it's wild and wacky and original.
It's set in a galactic empire which has nine planets and each ruled by a house and which has a necromancer and a cavalier, and Gideon is the cavalier for the ninth house. She's, well, it's hard to explain her. She wields a mighty sword, even though there's advanced technology.
She wields this big sword, much bigger than itself, amidst the infighting violence and lesbian escapades in this galactic empire. There's lots of different genres in it, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, horror, murder mystery, action. It's full of excesses.
And one of the reasons I liked it was it's not only crazy and wacky and audacious, it's also full of anguish and suffering by characters who have difficult and complex feelings. And I loved Gideon herself. I felt sad as I got towards the end of the book that I wouldn't be there with her character again.
So, Angela, you don't usually read fantasy, is that right?
That was the first fantasy fiction book I'd read. And I thought I will do something different.
Yes. Well, I'm really delighted that you both turned to a new genre and found something both wild and exciting about it. Because on the next Radio National Book Club, we're focusing on speculative fiction and fantasy. And the book we're going to read is is N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became. That's for the first week of September.
So Angela, perhaps you can read that one too, as well as anybody listening. And Angela, I know that you read very widely and the book you've read for us today is from the Australian writer Amanda Laurie. That's called The Labyrinth. And we'll get to that one a bit later in the show.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the character John Dyer in The Sandpit?
The poem is about a girl's sorrow. when she thinks of the past with her lover during the autumn. Nếu biết rằng tôi đã lấy chồng Nếu biết rằng tôi đã lấy chồng Trời ơi!
Người ấy có buồn không? Trời ơi! Người ấy có buồn không? Có thâm mị tới lời của vợ Có thâm mị tới lời của vợ
Oh, my
This is The Bookshelf on ABC Radio National. I'm Michaela Kolofsky, here with Kate Evans and guests Toby Martin and Angela Bowne. The music you've been listening to is by Sydney performer Dang Lan, a poem about saying goodbye.
And Toby, the novel we've read for the show today is full of goodbyes and loss, although some were silent goodbyes, having to leave without looking back. And that book, as I said, is called The Mountain Sing by Nguyen Phan Quy Mai.
Quy Mai is a Vietnamese poet and translator who now lives in Jakarta. Although she had a career in finance and she did postgraduate study in Australia, she worked on a study in Australia on the long-lasting socio-psychological consequences of the Vietnam War. She's written eight books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, in Vietnamese. But I believe the one you've both read, she wrote in English.
Is that right? Yeah, she wrote this one in English. But one thing you notice as a reader is that all the place names and proper nouns are in Vietnamese using the full Vietnamese alphabet and all of the speech and accent marks that remind us this is a tonal language. So it's a particular way of using English on the page.
And I wonder, Toby, whether as a musician, tonal languages, like what does it mean to you when you hear Vietnamese or even see it on the page like that?
Well, I mean, yeah, hearing Vietnamese spoken, I mean, there is a when I hear it, it's always struck by the incredible variety of, of vowel sounds.
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Chapter 6: How does the relationship between John Dyer and Marva develop?
It's anchored in some ways in what we call the Vietnam War, as this little girl is hearing the stories of her grandmother's life. But her grandmother was born in 1920 in a family that is described as, or she's described as like a... a jade leaf on a branch of gold. So a middle-class family that was quite well off.
But then of course, everything changed in World War II and the grandmother's father was killed by the Japanese. And so they get through the terrible trauma of World War II. And then in 1945, there was this devastating famine. They survived the famine. And then in the 1950s,
There's this land reform movement in which the Communist Party was inciting people to do away with their bourgeois overlords, of which her suffering family was a part. And then it goes up into the 1970s and the Vietnam War, and it does flip forward as well. So it covers about 60 years, but very much through personal stories and and a family's experience.
And even though we meet so many characters, Toby, you know, men who lost their legs in the war, people who were working in the fields, people who are walking the streets of these cities, overwhelmingly it's a story of women's lives, isn't it?
Definitely. I mean, I think the structure is very ingenious, that this very complicated and complex history is told through women the things that Huang hears, you know, stories told to her or letters she reads or a diary she reads. So it all comes sort of through her.
And, yeah, I think by doing so you get this very strong sense of the chaos and randomness of war, you know, seeing it through the eyes of someone who's between the ages of sort of 12 and 15, you know, 16. These events kind of happen. And they're chaotic and they don't make sense, which I think is possibly the way, you know, it seems to be a really authentic way of things are experienced.
The women characters are so incredibly strong and resilient characters, particularly the grandmother character. Her story is really amazing and the kind of sacrifices she has to make and the decisions she has to make really without giving too much away.
These decisions about leaving members of her family to protect them and those kinds of things, which are so difficult to make, but she does them and she's a very strong person.
And those stories that you're referring to are the parts of the book that I have not been able to stop thinking about. So it's the mid-1950s. This family is essentially driven out of town, or this woman with four or five children with her, and she's north of Hanoi, and she's just trying to walk there, and she's got literally nothing with her at all.
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Chapter 7: What historical context is important in The Mountains Sing?
Oh, I have a long time ago. What this book did bring back to me very strongly was Jung. I haven't read any Jung for quite some time, but it seemed to me to be an absolutely Jungian book in so many ways from the numerous and important dreams in it. One dream being the making of a labyrinth, which Erica follows through and makes the dream come true.
What I remember from my reading of Jung's, the only true journey in life is the journey to oneself, which is what Erica is doing. And the other is the importance of the retelling of dreams, that the I think Freud thought the content of the dream as you dream it is the most important. Jung thought the retelling of the dream and how we change it as we retell it was important.
And of course, Erika retells at least 10 dreams.
in the book and the other jungian thing angela and i will confess to knowing a spoonful of things about jung if that is that apparently he argued that the cure for many ills is to build something and erica's father the psychiatrist believed in this in his work that a way to connect the mind and the body was to make something to use craft
He said, when you make something, you become a rivet in the fabric of the real. And so Erica takes this idea as an adult to make something. But what is it? What's the cataclysmic event that has led to her needing to build something, to make something?
Could I first say that the building is for Jungian. He did that himself. Jung built a tower and he engaged a stonemason in the same way that Erika does. The cataclysmic event is a shockingly sad one. Her son Daniel, who is an artist, becomes obsessed with a young woman. He paints her in various ways, paints various parts of her body. And eventually she rejects him.
And he's so sad that he decides to burn all the paintings in his studio. Unfortunately, it causes a fire in the building where there are home units and a young couple die. I think they've just got married. They're just on their honeymoon and they die. He's convicted of what... Amanda, Laurie calls homicidal negligence. It's not really a term used in Australia. I think it's manslaughter here.
He's convicted of manslaughter and sent to a jail some way away from where Erica lives. And she decides to buy a house nearby. She has a dream in which it becomes important to her to build her own laboratory. where she's living and go to live near the jail. She can only see her son every two weeks. It's an incredibly sad story in that way. It's sort of unimaginable to have your child put in jail.
He's obviously very disturbed and he won't speak to her and his behaviour is, I think, borders on bipolar or some sort of psychotic behaviour in the jail.
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Chapter 8: How does The Labyrinth address themes of loss and creativity?
And as I've said, I think it's sets out the Jungian ideas. It's also about parents and their relationships with children, loss of parents. I'm also struck by the amount of violence in it. We're told about the death of her mother by drowning, the father being hacked to death, her father's sister sends a postcard of a cathedral with a wrecked
chapel where all the the same statues have had their faces smashed off erica had a brutal love affair that left her with a broken nose and broken ribs daniel being bashed in prison yes it's got a lot it's a lot of violence in one in one story isn't it yes and there's the labyrinth itself a place where you don't actually get lost as in a maze you can't get lost
You have to, I suppose, let yourself go in it. You have to trust the labyrinth that you'll be able to get out again.
Do you think that's the appeal, Angela, of labyrinths in fiction? I'm thinking about, you know, there's beautiful works by Ursula K. Le Guin. Kate Moss has a book called The Labyrinth. It's even The Labyrinth of a Library in the Name of the Rose by Umbrato Eco.
The labyrinth is about a kind of form of, you've talked about it as kind of healing, but it's a pathway to self-knowledge rather than the maze, which is just sort of trickery.
Yes, I think that's definitely true and that's certainly what Jung said. And Erica says in the book when the maze has been built but not entirely, she looks at it from her window from a distance and she's seeing the hole for the first time and she feels a shock of recognition. It's as if her body has been laid on the ground in another form.
I said you have to be inside the labyrinth. It's a wonderful analogy.
Yes, yes. And you obviously have to be inside of it to get the benefit of it, to get to that centre core and then that's your centre core and you leave again. And that's what happens in the book. She does come out of it in various ways, doesn't she, Kate?
Yes.
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