Posts Tagged ‘Australian’
Squid Ink and the jam tin
Squid Ink meets the Bottersnikes
Bottersnikes and Gumbles is the first of four books, a lovely set of Australian writing. S. A. Wakefield wrote these four books and Captain Deadlight’s Treasure and that’s all I’ve been able to find on him.
Bottersnikes are well known for squashing Gumbles into jam tins, I have great pity for Squid Ink, he’s following the Gumble tradition; it can’t be comfortable in that jam tin.
Found a treasure
Sometimes it’s possible to find treasures just by reading the publishing page in a book. I did this last night with a book I listed and found it had been published specifically to commemorate The 33rd World Science Fiction Convention held in Melbourne August 1975. Worldcons are held in different cities around the world every year and this was the first one in the southern hemisphere.
Worldcon is a very significant event with speculative fiction fans coming from around the world. I went to Worldcon (also called Aussiecon 2010) and it was wonderful with panels on so many different features of writing and fandom.
My eldest had managed to get herself into a play. Written in the 1950s it was a very controversial play of the era focussing very closely on womens total emancipation from men. I enjoyed it very much and was thrilled to be seated with the father of science fiction fandom in Australia, Merv Binns and his wife, Helena. They are both lovely people.
I’m sure you want to know what Merv Binns has to do with the book. Apparently it was his idea to put together an anthology and so Lee Harding did exactly that. The book is called Beyond Tomorrow and is available for sale here. It has some wonderful authors in it including Ursula Le Guin who was also a guest of honour for Worldcon in 1975 and our very own Tony Morphett who has written so much for Australian television including writing the screen play of D’arcy Niland’s The Shiralee.
The Peace Garden – Lucy Sussex
Just for a bit of a change of pace I thought I’d review a book I picked up this afternoon. It’s a children’s book so didn’t take too long to read. It was Lucy Sussex’s first fiction novel.
I first heard of Sussex last year when I attended AussieCon 4, fourth World Science Fiction convention to be held in Australia, in 2010. I attended a panel and I forget the correct title but I think it was about Australian female horror writers, Sussex was on the panel. When I saw the book I knew I had to read it and see what made her so good.
The Peace Garden is a fairly ordinary patch of land in a fairly ordinary town in Australia surrounded by ‘interesting’ people. Holly is shuffled between her separated parents, it’s currently the holidays and she’s with her mother and step-father. Despite being only 11 she’s left on her own a lot of the time and finds her way to The Peace Garden. It doesn’t remain peaceful for long as two people decide they want to lease it for their own purposes. Holly finds herself in the middle of all this, bringing together the misfit children in the town and helping find a resolution that suits almost everyone.
I like the writing, I found it very easy to read. Some of the misfit children seem to be misfits more because of their parents rather than due to their own behaviour and Holly seems to bring out the best in them. The language is uncomplicated and the concepts are easily understood by someone with a reading age of about 11, but if they’re reading above their age I’d still recommend it.
There are lessons in this book. Never judge a book by it’s cover being the biggest. One of the children, Gawaine (he prefers Gary) has a mohawk and ‘intriguing’ clothes but he turns out to be the nicest person, Bridie is in a wheelchair and can’t speak but when Holly starts talking to her we find she is lovely, bright and quite capable. Another lesson is that there’s always a better idea, one that can include many more people.
One thing I found quite interesting, I waited the whole book to see if it would be followed up, were a couple of possible horror motifs. They weren’t followed up. Sussex had the choice to make it into a horror story but chose, instead, to make it into a lovely story about children helping the whole town to win in the nicest possible way.
Because I loved this book so much I’m going to give it away. I reread that sentence and it doesn’t really make sense but that’s tough. It’s too young for my kids so I want someone else to have it for theirs. Tell me your favourite childhood book and why you liked it so much. You have until 5pm Tuesday 21st January. Your time starts…now!
Puddin’ today and puddin’ tomorrer
Squid Ink meets his match
The Magic Pudding was originally written in 1918 and has been enjoyed by countless generations since. Now Squid Ink has read it…sorry, devoured it.
Seriously though, The Magic Pudding by artist Norman Lindsay is one of those iconic children’s books, the ones everyone wants to read to their kids and if they don’t they then should. It’s a book that excites the imagination and makes every child want a pudding like that, a pudding that talks, walks and doesn’t get any smaller no matter how much you eat.
The Abs Award No 1
As promised on Twitter a couple of weeks ago I’m going to start a series of awards, this one will be called The Abs Award, it will be awarded to the book, or series, that causes me the most pain and will be dedicated to my dearly departed abs.
The inaugural Abs Award has to go to the Tomorrow Series and the Ellie Chronicles both by John Marsden. They don’t cause me physical pain, like my abs do when I’ve done too many exercises, but they cause me sheer emotional pain. They are all excellently written, the characters are so alive, the fight scenes are so clear and the countryside so well detailed I can almost see them in my mind’s eye. The reason they cause me so much emotional pain is the subject matter and how well written they are. I’m trying to read them all but I’m not being at all sensible or logical about it and reading them in order, I think the only series I’ve done that with was The Lord of the Rings as we had all the books before I started reading. I’m struggling to remember which ones I’ve read and it has everything to do with the fabulous writing.
The Tomorrow Series start off fairly innocuously with a teenage camp just before going back to school, they’re fairly resourceful teenagers and go away by themselves to a place they call Hell. While there, Australia is invaded and everyone in the area is herded into Prisoner of War Camps. They come out, realise what’s happened and end up taking the offence, taking on guerrila roles and really making a difference. In The Ellie Chronicles the war is over and the invading country has taken up residence, there is a sort of peace and we see the teenagers try to go back to normal life. Marsden shows us how hard it is for them to leave guerrilla warfare behind.
I’ve just finished reading Burning for Revenge, this is where they end up destroying a big landmark and helping the war effort in a very big way. It is so big and there are so many emotional problems involved with the demolition that I’ve managed to block out the vast majority of the book and I only remembered when they got to relative safety in Stratton and was reviewing some of the events that hadn’t happened yet. It’s one of those psychological things that happen when a problem is too big and too emotional that you tend to block it out rather than remembering it.
That’d Be Right – William McInnes
William McInnes, star of stage and screen was born in Queensland but I won’t hold that against him. He has a beautiful speaking voice and has used that to great effect as the ‘voice’ of so many characters. I’m wondering when he’ll follow in the late Leonard Teale’s footsteps and set Australia’s poems into audio form.
That'd Be Right - William McInnes
McInnes has an interesting writing style, I quite like it. This book illustrates Australia and our interest in both sports and politics, it makes me wonder if I’m really Australian despite being born here as I don’t like either sport or politics.
McInnes takes a simple walk down to the shops or a visit to the beach to take us back to a particular time in our history and examine the sport of the day and the politics. His father was a big Labour supporter, giving our How To Vote cards during elections and even running on one occasion so he had some inside knowledge but he didn’t leave it at that, he’d often ask people about politicians of the day and share the other person’s thoughts.
I loved this book. I thoroughly recommend it to Australians new and old, and to other nationalities if you’re wanting to try and understand the Australian psyche and why the majority of us are so excited by sport. There is the odd swear word in it.
Puberty Blues – Gabrielle Carey & Kathy Lette
‘By day we were at school learning logarithms, but by night – in the back of cars, down behind the Ace-of-Spades Hotel and on Cronulla beach – we paid off our friendship rings.’
Puberty Blues is about top chicks and surfing spunks – and the kids who don’t make it – in a world where only the gang and the surf count.
Puberty Blues gives us the facts no one wants to face. It is a horrifying yet hilarious account of the way many young people live, and some of them die.
I didn’t read this book when it came out in 1979, I was reading mysteries, fantasy and science fiction back then and this doesn’t fit into any of those genres. It’s an interesting little book, the authors were fairly young at the time of writing, and the book is semi-autobiographical. It is a seminal work as it was the first novel written by teenagers about teenager behaviour.
This is not the teenage behaviour I got up to, not that I’m trying to distance myself from it in anyway. The behaviour is raw and it shows them trying to have sex at a very early age and sometimes succeeding, sometimes you can be too young and not physically ready for sex, that’s depicted in this book.
I have a love/hate relationship with this book. I didn’t like the content as it is so far removed from anything I ever did and from anything I could ever conceive of doing, but on the other hand it tells it like it was and probably still is in some circles. I love it and hate it for exactly the same reason, the behaviour depicted. It is a great book for documenting what actually happened and probably still does happen.
It’s available for sale here
Warnings. There is lots of sex, swearing and drugs as well as other inappropriate behaviour.
It’s Café Scheherazade!
Saturday night, almost five hours after the play finished and my eyes were still sore from crying. I started within moments of the actors coming onstage and stopped while they were handing out cake. It was an awesome play, totally hit the tenor of the book, with seriously good music by some fabulous players and so many phrases came directly from the book.
I was slightly on the back foot as I only started reading the book the previous weekend and had about 30 odd pages to go when we went into fortyfivedownstairs. Took it with me and read some of it on the train which made things rather disconcerting when the exact same words came back to me on the stage only a short time later.
Café Scheherazade by Arnold Zable is one of the best books. It is a retelling of the stories of some of the people who used to sit around talking and eating in Café Scheherazade in Acland Street, St Kilda until it closed in 2008. The characters are talking to a journalist who originally went into get some details for Café Scheherazade’s 35th anniversary and ended up hooked by the stories. They are challenging stories as they encompass existence in Siberia, Kobe, Vilna, Paris and Shanghai in the years surrounding and during World War II.
There are so many good things about this book I really don’t know where to start or finish so I’ll just include a paragraph and tell you why I think it’s so good.
This is a tale of many cities: each one consumed by the momentum of history. Each one recalled at a table in a cafe called Scheherazade, in a seaside suburb that sprawls upon the very ends of the earth, within a city that contains the traces of many cities.
This paragraph is a bridge between two stories. It finishes off the previous story without diminishing it, reminds us where we are, not just in the cafe, but on the seaside in a suburb in a fairly remote location. It doesn’t seem remote to the people who live there but it is remote from the places these people have come from, not just in distance but also in the food, the culture, so many other things including the weather. It then reminds us that this city has so many other cultures from so many other cities in the world and seems to lead us directly into another story. The writing is just perfect it’s succinct without leaving anything out. This paragraph is just an illustration of the whole book.
The play is exactly what I expected, it is just a reduction of the book and although it leaves out so much doesn’t lack anything. To get the mood of the play all the actors and the two musicians walk out slowly backwards in time with the Klezmer music. It was very evocative of the book and as soon as I saw them I instantly thought of how hard it would be to keep their arms up like that, but that reminded me of Yossel, one of the characters in the book, who was nearing ninety:
…age does not matter. Willpower can defeat it. I can still lift fifty kilos. I have already walked fifteen kilometres today…
That is when the tears started. Already they had evoked the book from within me and all they’d done was walk backwards on stage to the sound of the music.
Fortyfivedownstairs is a fairly small area. There were around 100 seats with only a couple empty and to get to the seats you had to walk on the stage, there was no delineation between the stage and the first row of seats. They had kept one seat aside in the front row, next to a table with a sign not to sit there and not to use the table, I managed to sit behind this seat. Martin, the journalist, sat there a couple of times and the light was focussed on him, it highlighted my lap with my copy of the book and my tissue.
Some scenes were rather fragmented with the actors giving a couple of words each in turn. I felt this highlighted the fragments of stories that have managed to be told and the fragments of families that have survived that era. They were very powerful.
I cannot tell you the best part of the book or the play as they were both so excellent all the way through. I could highlight the writing style, the characterisation, the stories themselves or so many other points but that would take up a whole book. I could highlight the acting, the music, the stage direction but again, that would take a whole book. Much better to just tell you to read the book and see the play. If you can’t do both then as they are both as good as the other you have a choice if you’re in Melbourne until the 11th of September when the play has it’s final performance, but elsewhere there is no choice but to read the book. I have one copy to sell, if I can think of a good competition before it sells I might offer it as a prize. If you miss out you can buy this book and others by Zable at his publishers, it seems to be unavailable everywhere else I’ve tried.
I hope to finish the book in the next day or so, I’d like to move onto something a little easier on the emotions.
Circle of Flight – John Marsden
First came the Tomorrow series, followed by The Ellie Chronicles. This book is the third volume in The Ellie Chronicles. I managed to pick up Incurable and Circle of Flight at the same time and thought I’d picked up the earlier book of the two, unfortunately I managed to get it wrong and so I’ve been reading them out of order.
The Tomorrow Series is a very well written series of books set in Australia about an invasion. It’s not WWIII, but it’s bad enough as an unspecified country invades us and tries to take over the country. A group of teenagers fight back. The Ellie Chronicles take over when peace is negotiated. It’s an interesting peace and not everyone agrees with it. Ellie has adopted a boy and appears to be a target for the invaders.
This book has all the same qualities as Tomorrow When the War Began. Great writing, believable characters and lots of tension. In this book, Gavin, Ellie’s adopted brother, is kidnapped and she has to get him back. She has to go over the border and mix with the invaders in order to rescue him. This is not as easy as James Bond makes it out to be and when they are eventually rescued the bruises are obvious.
This is another recommended read. Actually, I’d recommend any of John Marsden’s books. At this point I’m making assumptions that all of his books are as good as these two series, that may be a poor assumption and I’ll read some of his other books in due course and let you know.