A small and aching sense of hope: Josephine Rowe's A Loving, Faithful Animal

 

Some books revel in heaviness and brokenness, wallow in them like pigs in mud, as if the heaviness and the brokenness themselves are important on their own. For me as a reader, however, heaviness must have a purpose within a story. It must mean something. The brief and bruised sexual encounters, the hands raised in anger to inflict pain, the profanity hissed at the ones our characters are supposed to love and protect, the regrets and unpaid human debts – they all must mean something, even if the meaning is only to reveal their meaninglessness, the characters’ futile attempts to heal their own brokenness.

In A Loving, Faithful Animal, the brokenness has meaning. The book is a history of sorts, a history of cyclical, hereditary pain passed on from a Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD to his wife, who releases her own pent-up grief in moments of unpredictable violence towards her eldest daughter, Lani. Lani copes with the pain by hardening herself against family connections, self-medicating with prescription drugs, alcohol, and boys. Ru, the youngest, watches it all from her protective loneliness while the innate hope she carries inside herself grows slowly weaker until it is all but extinguished. And from afar, Les, the girls’ uncle, hovers at the periphery of their lives like a flawed guardian angel. This is a family estranged, even – perhaps especially – when they are in proximity to one another.

There is no single protagonist to this story, no hero. Instead, the book’s chapters alternate between points of view, offering insights into each character’s perspective. It draws a history of systematic hurt and cyclical abuse, tracing the injuries to their root cause and exploring how pain breeds pain. One especially powerful chapter takes the reader into the fractured chaos of the mind of someone suffering from PTSD. The past clashes with the present, and the cerebral pain is tangible.

Through it all, the book expresses a deep and true Australian sensibility, one of huntsman spiders, salmon-clouded sunsets, humid Christmas afternoons, and a mythological wildcat which is the stuff of local lore. The writing is beautiful, literary without being pretentious. And at the book’s end, there is a whisper of new beginnings, a small and aching sense of hope -- if not healing, then the promise of a promise of healing. 

Still, somehow, the spilled salt thrown over your shoulder, even in restaurants. Still counting the magpies in the cypress branches, as though a higher Something has taken the trouble to arrange them out there, for you to tally and make sense of. Still your heart slipping whenever a sparrow finds its way into the house, whenever a forlorn ornament stows into January.

A Loving, Faithful Animal

Josephine Rowe

UQP, 2016, 200 pages

A big, happy, fairytale joy-drug (aka: The Lunar Chronicles)

I’ve just burned through the first three books of Marissa Meyer’s The Lunar Chronicles, and I’m as happy as a schoolgirl on muckup day. I’m filled with a sort of giddy, evangelical joy that makes me want to buy multiple copies, one for each of my friends, and distribute them. To be honest, I’d only need to buy the first book of the series because these books are a drug – a big, happy, fairytale, joy-drug. My lovely book-fairy-friend Hayley got me hooked, and bam: just like that I'm a pusher, too.

The four books of the Lunar Chronicles – Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, and Winter – and their various offshoots are, essentially, sci-fi reimaginings of beloved fairytales.

Sci fi.
Plus fairytales.

Hear me squeal when I say: the coolest.

As far as sci-fi goes, these books are a delight. The world building is impeccable, immaculately conceived and executed, but also ridiculously accessible. I love sci-fi but I don’t like getting bogged down in laborious descriptions of how things work, of how this particular aspect of life in space is made possible through this intricate and specific process. I like enough information that I can believe in the world, and then move on. Meyer nails this, never setting a foot wrong.

She also manages to set her world – her universe, really – within a global context. One Goodreads reviewer commented that dystopian novels tend to be focussed so clearly on the US that one wonders what is going on in the rest of the world while North America claws itself to pieces. This is never an issue with The Lunar Chronicles, as the story takes its characters from Asia to Europe to Africa to the moon and beyond. There is a global sensibility to the characterisation, to the naming of people and places, and to the division of power, too. It’s so refreshing.

As an addition to the reinvented fairytale oeuvre, these books are perfect. Meyer takes the heroines, antagonists, and complications of fairytale classics and manages to hit on all their major touch points in a way that is both nostalgic and satisfying. However, she also finds fresh angles from which to examine their stories and personalities, and there are some very fun “aha!” moments along the way.

Each book focusses on the story of one particular fairytale heroine, but along the way, their tales become inextricably linked and the reader is pulled along on an epic journey to save earth from dark forces – because these are fairytales, and there’s always got to be a baddie. But what really works is the loveability factor of the characters. They are clearly drawn, sweet, funny, flawed, and brave. Marissa Meyer even managed to convince me (in just a few pages) to love an android. What more can I say?

These books are romantic, and I’m not a big fan of fictional romance because so often it aims to be powerful and instead lands somewhere around cheesy (at best) or cloying and embarrassing (at worst). I like my romance as a sidenote appended to the “real” story. So it’s funny that these completely fairytale romances tugged at my heart and held my attention so completely. But they revel in loyalty, in the characters accessing their inner courage, in using their weaknesses as toeholds to find their strengths. There’s a lot of fierceness to these stories, but there’s a lot of sweetness, too.

All of this and I’ve managed to not really tell you anything that happens in The Lunar Chronicles. Which I think is for the best. If you know your fairytales, you’ll guess at some of the plot developments. But others will come as a delicious, hand-clapping, toe-curling surprise. I’ve been reading lots of classics lately, old favourites as well as twentieth century big guns. I’m finding them to be mentally, creatively, and philosophically stimulating. But it’s made me so happy to lose myself in something so light and joyful, but with enough drama to keep me turning the pages. They do justice to the spirit of the original fairytales.

I guess I’ll just be over here chewing my fingernails to the quick until Winter and Stars Above arrive in the mail.

Advancing Australia where? A review of Australia to Z by Armin Greder

Although the peaks and valleys of history tempt us to assign ultimate values to events and the people who propelled them along, where nations are concerned, there are no “goodies” or “baddies.” Rather, there are good moments and bad moments. There is greed and there is generosity. There is shame and there is celebration.

Armin Greder’s picture book, Australia to Z, tackles this dichotomy head on in an abecedarium that points to one characteristically Australian idea or image for each letter of the alphabet. With minimal text and vivid illustrations, it resembles picture books more generally targeted to young children. However, this unsettling book provides more food for thought for older readers, right from its opening images: a double-page spread showing the silhouette of an Indigenous man (A for Aborigine) standing on a rocky outcrop overlooking the water while on the B side opposite a little convoy of boat people paddle their way to shore -- not the boat people that popular news media would have us consider when we hear those words, but an earlier group of boat people: members of the First Fleet, arriving from England.

This disarming and surprising examination of Australian culture continues throughout the book. All the icons we think of when we consider what it means to be Australian are present, evoking images of wide open spaces, sunshine, and the laid-back larrikin ideal we’re so fond of. All the things we love to laugh at about our country are present. But they are there alongside the things that shame us, making us grin on one page and pause on the next.

It’s a book that’s gently funny in spots and starkly sobering in others. It’s also darkly beautiful, with a thoughtful, limited colour palette and paintings in fluid, scratchy lines, reminiscent of sketches by Matisse.

In this text, Armin Greder challenges the idea of what comprises our national identity and confronts the mingled shame and pride of our history. Alongside that, he manages to embody all that is important and potent about picture books. The loveliest of them are works of art which engage the mind as well as the senses, and Australia to Z certainly falls into this category.

Australia to Z
Armin Greder 
Allen & Unwin, 32 pages

9/10

The (very) Mysterious Mr Quin (indeed):

Do you remember watching after-school cartoons and seeing the elements of earth, wind, fire, water, and (the always-forgotten) heart pool their powers and, with a mighty collision of forces, produce the marvel that is Captain Planet? That’s how I feel whenever old media and new technologies combine in a smart and fun way: something cool materialises.

This month, I’ve been playing with the Mr Quin app, an immersive mystery adventure from Agatha Christie Limited. Mr Quin is one of Agatha Christie’s most enigmatic characters, an elusive figure who is, in the queen of crime’s own words, ‘not quite human, yet concerned with the affairs of human beings and particularly of lovers. He is also the advocate for the dead.’ In the app he gets a makeover, reinvented for the 21^st century and finding his voice through social media. (Watch the trailer at MrQuin.com, or jump straight to the app store.)

The app interface is set up to allow the potential release of future stories. The first instalment, Love & Death, is based on Christie’s short story, ‘The Coming of Mr Quin,’ and has all the classic elements of a locked-room style mystery: a manor house, a bunch of bright young things gathered to celebrate an event, a 24-hour window in time, and the lingering shadow of grief over the suicide of a loved one.

The party is documented by Mr. Satterthwaite, a social media entrepreneur and society cool kid who has been invited to live-tweet the event (#TruthParty) and help cast aside the darkness of friend (and former owner of Royston Manor) Derek Capel’s death. Grieving men, masked women, a magician, a skeevy DJ, live camera feeds, alcohol, money, and lingering grief: what could possibly go wrong?

The story unfolds rather like a twitter timeline, but one in which we are privy to everything that gets said, from public tweets to direct messages between friends. If that’s not enough guilt-free voyeurism, there are also multimedia easter eggs that appear along the way -- links to click, blog posts to read, videos to watch -- all with the chance for readers to engage and add comments as the mood takes them. And there’s a sense of tension underneath it all, fuelling the premonition that sometime, at some point in the night, something is gonna go down.

To read, I headed to the bottom of the feed and worked my way up. As the story progresses, new tweets and messages appear as notifications at the top of the screen – just like in real time on twitter. But it’s all the gleeful internet drama without fear of missing out; you can press pause to put the fun on hold and go refill the teapot. I really appreciated the fact that I could pick up and put the story down just as in a traditional reading experience. But I admit that the ‘putting down’ part gets harder as the tension of the story ramps up. 

I love new media, but I really love physical books -- which makes me a tough customer when it comes to app-based storytelling. With this one, though, I was addicted. Mr Quin takes the best elements of reading, film, and social media interfaces and pulls them together into something that's very engaging and a lot of fun -- with just the right amount of goosebumps. I hope there will be more to come, because I’m super keen to see what creepy mysteriousness Mr Quin will get up to next.
 

The Art of Illuminae

Illuminae has been one of 2015's most hotly-anticipated YA releases. Co-written by two YA fic big guns and launching a brand new sci-fi trilogy, Illuminae had lots of us jigging up and down impatiently waiting for October's release date.

I expected a good story, but I did not expect such an interactive, art-filled story format. With the story told in secret journal entries, chat logs, official documentation, court transcripts, and more, the text is only part of the adventure. Illustrations turn the pages of this book into artifacts preserving the tale of the book's main characters. It's a level of immersion which, in the case of this story, only enriches the reading experience. And it makes the book itself much more than just the words on the page. The physicality of it, the black and white pages, the evocative images of space, and the digital-style fonts all have me gushing.

As a result, I kind of paparazzi'd this book to death and had to share it with you. Illuminae is certainly a thing of unique beauty and is absolutely cool.

YAY for YA: Between the Covers in Brisbane

The Between the Covers YA Brisbane event just so happened to fall on one of the only Thursday nights in months that I was free. My mum – also an avid reader of YA as well as the person who listens to my breathless book raves – and I made a night of it and headed into the city to the State Library. It was hot and humid and rainy and felt a bit like Christmas – a selective kind of Christmas aimed at bookish, enthusiastic (and maybe a little bit nerdy) people who may or may not fit the expected demographic for young adult fiction.

The evening was a cosy, joyful celebration of books past, present, and future (captured in these pictures by my excellent mum). Harper Collins YA cool kids Amanda and Tim (oh, and Terry the literate dinosaur) shared their favourite YA reads of 2015 as well as offering us a sneak peek at books to look out for in 2016. There’s lots to look forward to, and right away, I found myself adding a bunch of upcoming releases to my future reading list: Eric Lindstom’s Not If I See You First, Amy Zhang’s This Is Where the World Ends, Alexandra Bracken’s Passenger, Sarah Ayoub’s The Yearbook Committee, and Colleen Oakes’ Queen of Hearts. Time travelling pirate ships, an origin story for Wonderland’s queen of hearts, contemporary Aussie fic… gah, it all sounds fabulous.

A highlight of the evening was getting to hear Aussie YA author Gabrielle Tozer (The Intern and Faking It) share her experiences and talk about her work. She was adorable and endearing, but even more than that, was warm, open, and generous in sharing of her wisdom and experience. It was refreshing and inspiring to hear about Gabrielle’s writing routine (getting up ridiculously early and writing first before anything else) as well as her advice to “write what you know and then exaggerate the hell out of it.” 

During question time, Gabrielle offered advice on how she presses forward when the demons of fear and self-doubt come in touting their crippling propaganda: “Remember why you love to write, and just start.” She shared about the novel she’s currently writing (which sounds gorgeous and I’d read it tomorrow if I could) and how, one day when the words weren’t cooperating, she wrote herself a manifesto of why she wanted to write this book, why this book was important to her. She came up with something like fifteen reasons to keep going, to finish the book, and now has a tangible document to guide her on towards the finish line. It was heartening and soul-building to hear that everyone wrestles with the same terrifying moments of creative emptiness, but it was even better to hear about practical, real ways to pull your socks up and get on with the job.

And if book quizzes, reviews, sneak peeks, and author chats weren’t enough, there were also tote bags, chocolates, and free books, which we all know is the fastest way to any reader’s heart. It was a wonderful evening, and if a BTCYA event pops up in your city: get thee hence. You’ll have a blast.