The young man and the sea: One Would Think the Deep, by Claire Zorn

A big wave rolled toward them… Sam paddled for it, there was no fear. He didn’t think about what it would be like to be held down under it; he didn’t think about anything. He met the wave as it crested and popped up onto his feet with more fluidity than he’d ever managed before. He drove the weight of his left leg down like he had seen Minty do, which pushed the board forward, accelerating across the wave. He felt it more strongly than before, the sensation Minty tried so clumsily to describe: a delicate paradox where he was, for a short time, in control of his world while simultaneously being at the mercy of the ocean. 

Reeling from the sudden death of his mother, Sam is yanked from the world he knows and thrust upon an aunt and cousins he lost touch with long ago. No longer sure of who he is or what he wants from life, Sam focusses purely on survival, adapting to his new life by shadowing his cousin Minty, whose bleached dreads and easy grin are known all over the coastal town. Minty is going to make it big in the surfing world, everyone says, and because there is nothing else for him to do, Sam follows Minty straight into the surf, stuffing his messy grief down into the deepest parts of himself.

Sam’s sea is a sea of biblical might, terror, and awe. It is a living but untamed entity, a being with the power to take life and to give it, to wound and to heal. It is Sam’s friend and his enemy, the tangible representation of his grief and confusion. It is a torture chamber, wringing and refining Sam into something else, and Sam throws himself into its embrace time and again.

Yet the sea is not enough. Chameleon-like, Sam drifts into his extended family and attempts to blend in. But the brokenness Sam brings with him from his home life in Sydney meets an altogether new kind of brokenness in Minty’s family, where secrets are currency and Sam is dirt-poor. Sam’s grief simply happens to him, and his healing occurs in the same way. But it’s not without pain; as he shifts and evolves, his grief is buffeted and bruised, brought into the light and then shoved back into the dark.

Sam’s story is both a coming-of-age and a family saga. It’s a story of growing up, of first love, of race, of family, identity, and of mortality. It grapples with the seeming pointlessness of living a life that, at some point, is inevitably going to end. The writing is crisp, spare, adolescently blunt, and captivating. The characters provoke recognition; we see in Sam, in Minty, in Sam’s aunty Lorraine, in his jealous cousin Shane, and in his grandmother, something of ourselves. Our uncertainty, our fatally flawed attempts to love each other while protecting ourselves from our own fragility, are all echoed back to us. These characters are ones we love even when they are not lovable – and they are frequently not. There are teenage boys ruled by hormones and peer pressure, adults who aren’t dependable, pivotal family members who shoot through when the going gets tough. Yet somehow their stories begin to fill in the gaps of Sam’s broken past, hinting at redemption. We see these characters and their fumbling attempts at grace, and we love them for it.

And it's impossible for me to write about this book without also commenting on the fierce rush of nostalgia this book generated for me. I was transported back to small-town New South Wales -- into, in fact, my own teen years in the nineties. While I’ve never been a surfer, I spent big chunks of young adulthood in coastal towns, including a significant stint in a tiny Northern Territory town with a hearty indigenous population and a strong surf culture. My best friends at the time were a bunch of surfing sisters, and the cute, polite, intimidating older boys in the local church were half made of ocean themselves. The details of this book all ring true to my experience – the fish and chip shop, afternoons spent at the pool, the ongoing struggle to understand the opposite sex, the challenge of learning how to assert oneself, the distasteful inertia of peer pressure which recognises the distastefulness of the accepted norm but offers little clue as to how to break away from it.

This is no saccharine-sweet trip down memory lane, however. The details are grounded, vivid, and real: the music, the fashion, the pop culture references, the nineties modes of communicating and being. I know the towns Zorn writes of, I know these kinds of surfer kids. There is an authenticity which is tangible. The only moment it falters – and most likely only in my eyes – is in the romance, which somehow feels less authentic. I am a romantic at heart, but I’m a cynic too, constantly holding romance up to the light of my admittedly jaded scrutiny. Sam’s love interest and her family give Sam a glimpse of another kind of life, one that he’d never know otherwise, but these moments feel less dynamic than the clashing disharmony with Sam’s limping and angry family. The love story occasionally feels like a teenage fantasy, healing wounds that can’t otherwise be healed, but that’s okay. If anyone could do with a teenage fantasy, it’s Sam.

One Would Think the Deep is a gloriously-written, uncompromising addition to Australia’s beautiful YA fiction tradition. At its heart, it’s about grief. But it’s also a story of young adults growing up into who they are meant to be, and its ending offers a satisfying hint at a new beginning.

One Would Think the Deep
Claire Zorn
UQP 2016, 306 pages 

The week in books: The Island Will Sink and a contemporary Emma

Episode 1: the one where I finally get my reading mojo back

Winter has been a stingy beast. She promised books, blankets, and steaming mugs of cocoa, but so far all she has delivered is a six-week long flu. So my winter has felt mostly like a cycle of working, sniffling, coughing, sleeping, headaches, working. But in between, a few bookish snatches. And – joy of joys – I spent last night and this morning entirely at home, doing nothing but catching up with family, sleeping, eating, and reading.

Last night, I finished the final pages of Alexander McCall Smith’s Emma, a contemporary take on Austen’s classic of the same name. With its at times condescending and unsympathetic heroine, I feel like Emma is perhaps Jane Austen’s most contentious story, but it’s one I’ve always loved because of its humour and the fact that Emma develops and grows throughout the novel. As a love story, it feels healthy and right, because Emma is loved for who she is in spite of her flaws, and yet the man who loves her hopes for growth and carries an expectation of great things. Alexander McCall Smith’s Emma failed to capture that for me. Here’s what I shared on Goodreads (slight spoilers ahoy):

Because I had friends who had already read this one and were all unimpressed, I went into it with very low expectations. Then, as often happens, my expectations were so low that they were exceeded, and at first I had a lot of fun reading this retelling of a classic Austen tale. But about one third of the way through the book, things began to drag. What had seemed fresh and funny at the beginning simply didn't develop into anything more. The characters felt one-dimensional and boring. There was little to bring sparkle to the story. And worst of all, Emma -- already a challenging character, but with enough wit and warmth to get her by in the original Austen -- is frankly unlikeable in this story. She is selfish, entitled, narrow-minded, judgmental, and incredibly idle. Even her kindness is an act of condescension. The original Emma got herself into strife by being too interested in others' affairs. McCall Smith's Emma isn't really interested in... anything.

And this aspect of her character doesn't change throughout the story. In fact, by the end of the book, the vibe was still an introductory one, as if the pace hadn't quite picked up from the opening scene-setting. The conclusion felt hurried and unsatisfactory, a hasty declaration without any evidence of a genuine relationship behind it. What's more, there were some odd moments of sexual confusion for Emma that lent nothing to the story and, in fact, felt like a tacky attempt on the author's part to use the briefest of references to sexual diversity as a trite way to be relevant or contemporary (while still sounding quite the opposite).

 I like you, Alexander McCall Smith, but I did not like this book. At all. 

I only recently realised that this version of Emma is one book of the four-book Austen project, which includes other contemporary reimaginings of Austen stories by Val McDermid, Joanna Trollope, and Curtis Sittenfeld. I’ve been seeing Sittenfeld’s Eligible (a Pride and Prejudice story) around bookstagram a lot lately, and am keen to give it a try. But I have to say that this version of Emma left me a little less enthusiastic about exploring an Austen retelling.

The book I finished this morning, on the other hand, left me far more satisfied. The Island Will Sink is a debut novel from Australian author Briohny Doyle, and also represents literary mag The Lifted Brow’s first foray into book publishing. The Island Will Sink is out next month and I feel it will meet with a wonderful reception. Why, exactly? It’s hard to put into words.

The Island Will Sink is at once intelligent, challenging, and yet accessible. The story is beautifully-paced, unfolding with a process that feels both literary and cinematic, filmic and immersive in a way that compellingly mirrors the story – that of a filmmaker who creates immersive cinema. Max Galleon processes the world through the language of film, and it is through this language that we meet with Max’s world, a near-future landscape of a culture bent on obliterating its environmental footprint and concerned with optimising the physical and mental health and wellbeing of its inhabitants. Enhanced surrounds provide personally-tailored feeds for information and entertainment, virtual reality is the standard plaything of pre-teens, and individual monitoring systems report on, archive, and even edit personal experience and memory. Everything is within reach – and at the same time, nothing is.

Max is a man in crisis mode, obsessed with his own amnesia, neglectful of his family, and stuck in creative block as he plans his next blockbuster disaster film, the latest in a long line of films to plunge their audiences into a simulation of total annihilation. The timing of Max’s film project coincides with the accelerated sinking of Pitcairn Island into the Pacific Ocean, an environmental disaster which would signal the beginning of a new age.

The story builds with a sense of quiet foreboding, a subtle suspense heightened by the fact that Max, in his state of confusion, is an unreliable narrator. In fact, his whole world is unreliable, because when memories can be erased and rewritten, reality is a constantly shifting thing. The gaps in Max’s knowledge become gaps in the reader’s knowledge as the threads of narrative come apart and then together again.

The story plays out with a cool sterility reminiscent of films like Equilibrium, a grand sense of opera as in Tree of Life, and deliciously-balanced surrealism (think Inception). Beautifully written and even darkly humorous in places, it puts speculative fiction, often considered the domain of a specific readership, within the reach of anyone. I want to read it again and pull together the threads I might’ve missed, and I can’t wait to read others’ reviews of this one as it meets with audiences. A very impressive debut.

Finally, last night I began CS Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew, which I’m buddy-reading with my sister Andrea. It’s her first time reading and my first-time-in-a-long-time after devouring it many times in childhood. Already the story is rushing back to mind, along with those childhood feelings of wonder and fear. It’ll be so much fun to read and chat about this with my sister as we go.

How was your week in books?

Of time, timepieces, and reading Dickens

Or: a simultaneous review of Bleak House and the Fieldcrest Watch by Jord. 

This morning, I finished the final thirty pages of Bleak House, a project I began four months ago but picked up for real about two months back. At a pace of ten to twenty minutes a day, I slowly made my way through this chunky 940-page volume. I picked it up and put it down often, until it began to feel a little like a companion following me through a portion of my year. It saw the change of seasons from Autumn (Queensland’s lazy reverse-spring) to full Winter, and the ebb and flow of the plot points somehow seemed to bear a relationship, however slight, to the rhythm of my own days.

 I suppose it’s inevitable that a book we spend so much time with becomes a part of us, in some small way – especially when the book itself is a reflection on time and the passage of time. From its opening, which introduces us to the futile, convoluted, and endlessly-debated lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, there is a sense of time as a temptress, calling young dreamers to pin their hopes on it as the realisation of all their vain imaginings. In time, the suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce will be resolved. In time, its young suitors will be granted the wealth they’ve been promised. In time, the world will be theirs and they the world’s. In this way, time is a liar and a cheat.

But in Bleak House, time is also a revealer of secrets. It digs up long-buried shame, calling into question illusions of prestige, birthright, and identity. Time brings light to dark places, revealing the true heart of Bleak House’s characters, shining starkly on the fickle-minded and beaming on the steadfast. Time is also a healer, covering over old wounds, stitching together broken relationships, and soothing bitter grief. Most of all, it proves the mettle of the characters in Bleak House that I came to love – Esther Summerson, John Jarndyce, Allan Woodcourt, Caddy Jellyby, George the trooper, and so many more.

It’s apropos then that today, the day I concluded a large investment of time into a book so concerned with time, is also the day I review this gorgeous timepiece sent to me by JORD Wooden Watches. When JORD approached me about collaborating, I was delighted. I’d been seeing their lovely range of wooden watches around and really appreciated the functionality combined with an understated sense of style.

It’s been some years since I’ve had a new wrist watch and the one I was sent – the Fieldcrest design in green sandalwood – impressed me immediately with its beautiful detailing. All the key components of the watch, including the face casing and the band, are carved from softly-polished sandalwood. The deployment buckle with push buttons, used in place of a clasp, is made from stainless steel while the glass face is scratch-resistant and splash-proof.

The variegated grain of the timber, with tones from a soft caramel to a deep, almost oceanic green-brown, makes for a piece of jewellery that will mesh well with any outfit, from smart-casual to something a little fancier. I love the large and open face and the timeless, gender-neutral styling. This is a piece that would look good on anyone, and make a unique gift, especially for a graduation or 21st – or maybe the completion of a first draft manuscript that promises to rival Bleak House?

If you’ve been eyeing off the JORD range of wooden watches for yourself, brilliant news: JORD is giving you the chance to win a $75 voucher to spend on any watch in their range. Better yet, everyone who enters will receive a $20 e-gift card for their own wooden watch discount. (I want to sing “Wooden it be nice”, but I’m too mature for that, right? Right.)

To enter, be sure you’re following both me and JORD on Instagram. Leave a comment on this post tagging two friends who’d be interested, and jump over to this link to leave your email address. Couldn’t be simpler! The comp is open internationally, and I wish you all the best of luck.

One final thought: if Dickens could weave a compelling saga with an endless and inane lawsuit at its centre, what kind of story could he have written with a beautiful wooden watch at its heart? I can only imagine.

Bleak House
Charles Dickens
Atlantic Crime Classics, 941 pages 
10/10 

JORD Wood Watches

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.