Paging through the years: Kate Morton’s ‘The Distant Hours’, and a new resolution

Goodbye to all that...

This was supposed to be a bookish blog, a forum for me to record my thoughts on what I’m reading and make wry insider observations about the goings-on in the book world  – never mind my lack of insider knowledge in this area. It was supposed to be, dare I say it, a literary blog – not some sort of cat-adulation forum.  Despite my best intentions, though, it seems to have become dominated by anecdotes about the cat: in much the same way that this pesky feline has come to intrude into my morning sleep-ins and civilised dinners with friends, she has decided to stick her paw into my foray into the blogging world too.  Well, enough is enough, I say – this has to end. 

I’ve therefore formed a new resolution: to write more book reviews. A plethora of book reviews. Nothing but book reviews for the next month at least.  And I’m not going to edit them either : each piece will get a cursory glance-over once I’m finished, but there’ll be no more of this meticulous drafting and redrafting, then leaving for a day just to see how it reads after the effects of that third glass of wine have worn off.  We’ll have more spelling errors and typos, more slipshod syntax, more vital words accidentally left out in my eagerness to get my ideas down  (Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap was a (key word omitted) book’. Factually accurate, yes – but what was it she meant to say, wonders the intrigued reader. Remarkable? Contemptible? Thick?) There’ll be more spontaneity, dammit – more of that raw, amateurish feel that supposedly distinguishes blogs from Victorian novels. The cat won’t like it, but she can just go and chase a bird or something .

So, The Distant Hours: this was the first Kate Morton novel I’ve read. I didn’t expect to like her – most of the reviews I’ve read have made her sound frivolous and sensationalist, but I have to admit that I’m hooked, enamoured. I can’t wait to read her other novels, but at the same time am reluctant to, because then they’ll no longer be there to anticipate, no longer a pleasure shored up for the future.

I read this book in the way I used to read books when I was a child: rapt, transported, carried away by the sheer force of the narrative. I gobbled down mouthfuls whenever I could: during my lunch-break, on the bus on the way to work, while I queued up for my coffee in the morning. And when I wasn’t reading, I was constantly thinking about what would happen next, incapable of carrying on any semblance of a normal conversation.  I must have been quite boring to be around. (The cat, who is sitting beside me on the desk as I type this, confirms that indeed I was.)

The novel is about Edie Burchell, an editor for a small publishing company in London who has recently split up from the man everyone expected her to marry. Edie is visiting her parents for a Sunday dinner when a letter arrives addressed to her mother, Meredith, sent some fifty years before and delayed by the war. Her usually self-contained and undemonstrative mother breaks down when she reads the contents. It’s from Milderhurst Castle, she reveals, a place she was billeted to during the war. She says little more about it and Edie doesn’t press – their family has never been big on sharing things – but Edie is intrigued, and knows there’s more to the story than her mother has let on.

Shortly after, when Edie is driving to meet a client in the country, she chances across a sign to Milderhurst Castle and decides to drive by it. Standing at the gates, she realises that she has visited there before – a fact which her mother adamantly denies when she raises this with her later.  She learns in the village that the castle is the ancestral home of the author, Raymond Blythe, and that his three aged daughters still live there and occasionally allow visitors.

Blythe’s gothic novel, The True History of the Mud Man, was a childhood favourite of Edie’s, telling of a sinister, almost chthonic, golem-like figure who creeps out of the mire of a castle moat: ‘the Stygian, slippery figure emerging from the lake to claim the girl in the attic window.’ (p54).  So, on a whim, Edie takes a room in a local bed and breakfast and arranges for a tour of the castle the following day.

There she meets the antiquated ‘sisters Blythe’ (‘the ‘sisters’ jumped in front of the ‘Blythe’, like the Brothers Grimm, and there was little I could do to stop it’ (p37), bound together at the castle by a cruel and unnatural bequest in their father’s will.  Edie chooses not to reveal her mother’s connection to the castle, but has a disturbing encounter with Juniper, the youngest of the sisters, dressed in a girlish pink gown from fifty years ago, who refers to her as ‘Meredith’ and confesses that she has done a terrible thing.

And so the mystery deepens. Over the following months, Edie becomes caught up – enchanted – by the enigmatic Blythe sisters, gradually learning more about Juniper’s descent into madness after being seemingly jilted by her fiancée; the charming Saffy’s fruitless attempts to break free of the castle’s clutches; and the stern, repressive Percy, whose fierce devotion to the castle seems to shield some dark and sinister secret. Edie also discovers surprising things about her mother, and initially has difficulty reconciling the passionate, bookish girl who takes shape beneath her research with the distant, pragmatic maternal figure she has grown up with. As Edie becomes more immersed in the world of Milderhurst and its inhabitants, a series of perplexing questions come to light: what are the mysterious origins of the mud man? What really happened to Juniper’s fiancée? And how is her mother involved with it all? 

The first thing that struck me about this novel was how tightly it was crafted. There was not a single extraneous event, a feat made even more impressive by the non-chronological structure of the text, with episodes from the past and present continually jigsawed together. The action continued right up to the final page, with a series of devastating revelations unveiled, each with impeccable timing. The story never became mired down, but instead constantly pressed on towards its conclusion, and at the end, everything was satisfactorily explained, and all the loose ends tied up, although not in a trite or predictable way. This made the novel extremely satisfying, in the way that only a perfectly planned novel can be.

It was passionate as well, though. So often, well-structured novels are dry, cerebral, robotic things, with the intricate plot coming at the expense of characters and emotion, but this was lush and sprawling and fervid. Morton writes beautifully, and is particularly good at creating atmosphere through rhythm and imagery: ‘Gristly knuckles balled as she fidgeted with a match, finally bringing it to life; in the flame’s light I glimpsed her face and I saw there proof that she was shaken by the morning’s events… the sweet, smoky smell of fresh tobacco mushroomed around us’  (p399). The castle in particular, is described so vividly that it almost operates as a character as well as a setting:  ‘I shivered, overcome by a sudden and pressing image of the house as a giant, crouching creature. A dark and nameless beast, holding its breath; the big old toad of a fairytale, waiting to trick a maiden into kissing him’ (p54).

 Morton treads a fine line with the names of her characters, the romantic settings, the strings of coincidences in the plot and her use of pathetic fallacy. There is the constant threat that the story could at any moment descend into melodrama, and yet it never does. In this sense, the novel is stylistically similar to Barbara Vine’s work or the novels of Sarah Waters set in the 20^th century – slightly gothic but with a sharp modern sensibility.  There’s more than a little Jane Eyre there too – a book referenced a number of times during the novel.

This is appropriate, because The Distant Hours is very much a book for book-lovers. It is absolutely steeped in literature; filled with characters who write stories, read stories, decipher stories, and turn their lives into stories and vice versa. This passion for books is exemplified in Edie’s description of her first encounter with The Mud Man: ‘All true readers have a book, a moment like the one I describe, and when Mum offered me that much-read library copy, mine was upon me. For although I didn’t know it then, after falling deep inside the world of The Mud Man, real life was never going to be able to compete with fiction again.’ (p19). I loved the plot strand involving Edie’s investigations into the genesis of The Mud Man novel, which perfectly demonstrates the way literature and biography can intersect, and the strange, almost mythic, resonance novels gain from this transformation of the real to the imaginary. The first few pages of Raymond Blythe’s  fictitious novel comprise the  prologue to The Distant Hours and the only thing I regretted after finishing this book was that The True History of the Mud Man doesn’t exist in the real world. It very easily could – Morton fleshes it out so convincingly, in the opening pages adopting a plangent, poetic voice infused with both quiet menace and beauty, a haunting presence that underpins the rest of the novel – almost like the eponymous ‘little friend’ in Sarah Water’s latest book.  Psychologically, The Mud Man rings true – the horrifying personal inspiration for the novel is satisfyingly explained by Morton, but, it could as easily be read, as it initially is, as a rich cultural metaphor for soldiers returning home from the muddy battlefields of the Great War.

The past is important in this book, and another area where Morton shines is in her continual parallelling of the past and present. In the novel there is a consciousness of the legacy a person leaves behind them, whether it be a house, a book, or another person whose life they have affected. There is also a consciousness of the way people change over time yet are still fundamentally the same person – an idea demonstrated most palpably in the character of Meredith, who at the end of the novel, again starts to resemble the passionate writer with the unique, clear-sighted vision of the world that she was in her younger days.

Edie develops a closer relationship with her mother through learning about her childhood, and one of the main themes in the novel is how healing can result from unravelling the mysteries of the past. Mystery and secrecy are one of Morton’s key motifs, and I particularly enjoyed the way this book was preoccupied with the hidden parts of people’s lives. Everybody in this book had secrets, and no-one was as they initially seemed to be. Multiple narrators are used throughout the novel, yet Morton – a master of the opaque statement, the omitted detail - never allowed her characters to give their secrets away while telling their own stories. The one exception to the secrets rule was Edie, who as a result, at first seemed a little transparent in comparison with the other characters. However, you quickly realised that her role in the book was to interpret, unravel the mysteries of the past and restore order – and interestingly, she is the one character whose situation is unresolved at the end of the book. She is about to move into a new role at work, we have hints that a fresh romance awaits her, yet we still know very little about the relationship which had finished just before the story begun. Her life is not contained within the pages of the novel, but continues to press out at either side. This, along with the haunting resonance of The Mud Man, stops the book being altogether too neat and gives a sense of the story continuing to unfurl afterwards.

What I really loved about this book, however – and a mini-spoiler alert here – was how everyone in it is actually better than we first thought. We initially believe the worst of then – not our fault, though – we are lead to think that way – but by the end of it they are all wonderfully redeemed. This alone makes the book worthwhile.

Anyway, enough raving about the book. Do read it though - I’m convinced you’ll love it (she says with the easy assurance of someone with no idea at all who they’re addressing.)

And if I still haven’t convinced you, here’s the UK webtrailer…

The Ruckus Birds

Jacqueline Jones - Birds in the Jungle

The ruckus-birds were back this morning at 4am, screeching and shrilling and jabbering and splitting the darkness apart. They’re like something out of Lewis Carroll’s strange garden: the car alarm bird, with its insistent sonic cheep; the typewriter bird, with its abrupt clatter of song, and gangs of their darting, shrieking cohorts. I’ve never seen these birds – they exist in that unreal pre-dawn state caught between dream and reality – but I imagine them as jungle birds hidden in the undergrowth, garish swabs of fuchsia and emerald set against a chalkboard night.  Yellow crests zip and unzip the shadows; great wings flap and slice the heavy air; beaks like dragons’ claws rend silence apart. The mad cacophony of cries carries through our bedroom window to where we lie swaddled in sleep and twisted sheets. We awake, astonished,  for a moment thinking ourselves lost in the wilds of New Guinea –somewhere steamy and green and primal, far away from the narrow streets of Rozelle where already the din of garbage trucks can be heard in the distance. And then we place it: ah yes, it is the ruckus birds again…

My First Book Club

I had always dreamed of being in a book club. I envisaged a small, articulate band of women meeting regularly in each other’s lounge rooms for impassioned discussions about the latest Booker Prize winner or literary wűnderkind, fuelled by copious bottles of red wine and homemade chocolate brownies. As the evening progressed, incisive literary criticism would give way to diatribes about unfaithful spouses, drunken readings of the novels we were all secretly working on and general female bonding. It would all be wonderfully sophisticated and stimulating.

In my mid-twenties, I decided it was time to make my book club dreams a reality. I was living in Revesby at the time. Revesby had a lot going for it: it had a supermarket, for instance, should you wish to purchase groceries. It had an RSL club which regularly attracted luminaries such as the U2 cover band and the Metallica tribute show. It had a Chinese restaurant and BBQ chicken shop. It also had a train station, should you want to leave.  Revesby wasn’t really a book club type of place, but I decided to start one there anyway.

The founding members of the club were myself and a good friend, Angela*, who also lived in Revesby. We came up with a catchy name for the club; ‘Choco-lit’ (inspired!), then put an ad in the local paper. To my surprise, we quickly accrued a respectable number of members from the local area, primarily young mothers and bored house-wives.

Our meetings gradually developed a pattern where we would take it in turns to choose the book, and whoever chose that month’s book, would host the meeting and provide the chocolate. In the first year we read some wonderful books: Bo Caldwell’s Distant Land of My Father, Vikas Swarup’s Q & A, and Joseph O’Neill’s Star of the Sea. There were some less successful choices, too, of course: no-one had much to say about A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and we were all disappointed by Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down. But in general, things were going well: the books we read were varied and engaging, the conversation was invigorating, and while we were not quite at the drunken-confessional stage of group cohesion, we were all getting on well.

 And then came Edna. Edna was a retired woman in her seventies with an uncanny ability to track down a Readers Digest condensed version of any book that had ever been written. Most of us thought this wasn’t really in the spirit of a book club – particularly when applied even to short story collections and Ladybird early readers – but we kept our reservations to ourselves. Edna was accompanied by her slightly younger friend/chauffeur, Avril, who was loyal, quiescent, and always vigorously affirmed everything Edna said and did.  

I knew from the start that Edna was going to be trouble. It wasn’t just the condensed books issue: she was grating and overbearing in personality, certainly not your sweet, pastel-cardigan-wearing, lavender-sachet-carrying type of old lady. She had very decided – and restrictive – views on what constituted an appropriate book club book: namely, no ambiguity, no tampering with chronology, nothing too ‘airy-fairy or intellectual’ and absolutely no homosexuality – or as she descriptively termed it, ‘men gaying around.’ She favoured large print mystery novels of the type commonly found on library discard tables. She tended to fixate on inconsequential details in books: the name of the grocery store the protagonist shopped at, whether they were 6’2 or 6’3, whether some entirely trivial event had taken place on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. She also had the remarkable ability to bring any discussion around to three recurring themes: feminism’s debt to her, her hysterectomy and death, torture, mutilation and the grotesque. She was forever launching into gruesome descriptions of ancient Egyptian embalming rituals or exactly how a particular serial killer had tortured each of his victims to death – never mind what the conversation was actually about.  One minute you’d be talking about the ball at Netherfield or Mrs Dalloway’s party, the next she’d be giving you a lurid account of how the Sioux Indians would slit open the stomachs of the Jesuit missionaries, tie their intestines to a stake in the earth then fasten them to their horse before making it bolt. It used to put us off our chocolate.

I think it was the meeting at Edna’s house which signalled the beginning of the end. Usually I could keep her in check – it was my book club and I wasn’t going to let some morbid old lady wreck it, dammit! – but I was distracted on this particular night. I had just got my licence and being a particularly nervous driver, spent most of the meeting recovering from the stress of driving there and preparing for the stress of driving home. I was also thrown by the fact that Edna’s house turned out to be located behind some type of meat packing yard – something she had not thought to mention when giving us the address. The path was open for Edna…

The last fateful meeting of ‘Choco-Lit’

‘So what did everyone think of the book?’ Edna asked, now that she had finished showing off her moccasins made of human skin. The book under discussion was a singularly-forgettable D-grade detective novel set on a farm – so forgettable in fact, I honestly can’t remember what it was called. A Cowbell for the Coroner, A Rifle in a Haystack - something of that calibre (ha!)

‘I thought it was the best book we’ve read yet’, Avril announced firmly. ‘A wonderful choice Edna – much better than that boring Mrs Dallowade  - where was the action? I thought someone said there were wolves in it? Or that Booker Prize winning one with all the gay men gaying around. A real page-turner.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Edna said dismissively, putting a tray of wheat digestive biscuits on the table. She had decided to forego the usual chocolate-based snacks as, since her hysterectomy, anything with dairy ‘played havoc with her innards.’ We all eyed them unenthusiastically.

She rifled through her knitting bag for her Readers Digest condensed edition, then once it was firmly grasped in her withered claw, turned abruptly to Angela . ‘What did you think of the book?’ she demanded.

Angela was caught off guard. ‘Oh, I’m not really sure…’ she began lamely.

She was saved by the sound of someone calling out over the back fence – Tracy, arriving late. ‘I’m so sorry,’ Tracy apologized breathlessly. ‘I’ve been walking around for ages. I wasn’t sure this was the right place. And then I just thought I’d try round the back…’

‘You should have knocked at the front door,’ Edna squawked in annoyance, lumbering out to unlatch the back gate.

‘Yes, I would have’, Tracy explained, ‘but I was thrown by all the carcasses and the notice about meat packers only’.

 ‘Yes, I don’t think you actually mentioned you lived behind an abattoir’, Angela added in support.

‘Of course I did!’ Edna bellowed indignantly.  She fixed her gimlet eye on Angela once again. ‘You haven’t told us what you thought of the book yet,’ she said in a vaguely menacing tone, fingering her moccasins.

‘I thought there were some quite interesting ideas in it,’ said Angela, flustered.  ‘But did anyone else find it was quite difficult to keep track of the characters? I mean, seven detectives did seem rather excessive…’ She looked desperately to me for support, but I was too strung out from the drive across to notice, having had to change lane twice and go around two separate roundabouts. Also, the road had been slightly narrow in parts.

Tracy, always one for a good debate, came to her aid. ‘Yes, it was a bit much, wasn’t it? Just another example of the patriarchal excesses underpinning the text. ‘ Edna gave her a frosty gaze, interpreting ‘patriarchal excesses’ as a criticism of her choice of book. Tracy ploughed on valiantly, however. ‘ I thought it was interesting the way the author problematised sexual power. When the husband cuts out the maid’s tongue and imprisons her in the henhouse, he’s effectively denying her a voice and relegating her -’

Edna cut her off: ‘That’s just how men were back then.’

‘Cutting out women’s tongues?’ Tracy interjected incredulously.

Edna ignored her. ‘Back in my day, women didn’t have the choices you girls have today. You could be either a secretary or a typist – and you had to look after the house and raise the children too. I was a trailblazer, one of the first women to ever set foot outside of the front door…’

She spoke for several more hours. All of the other members nodded politely, seemingly in gratitude for the many life opportunities Edna had afforded them. No doubt, she imagined each of them was privately considering nominating her for the Order of Australia.

‘Now, I believe we were talking about the book. I think we need to discuss the part where they went to the grocery store to pick up some milk… How was it they got there again? A Four-wheel drive? Or a limousine? No, that wasn’t it – something beginning with an ‘m’. A bicycle maybe? No, that doesn’t begin with an ‘m’. Oh, what do they call those things?’

‘Oh yes, that bit with the grocery store!’  Avril piped up. ‘I remember that. Was it a tractor perhaps?’

‘No, no, not a tractor!’ Edna said repressively. ‘I told you, it began with an ‘m’’.

 ‘It was a taxi,’ said Tracy quietly.

 ‘Oh, what do they call those things!’ Avril cried out theatrically, smacking her forehead with her palm. ‘Some sort of sleigh I think’.

‘Yes, that was an interesting bit,’ Angela said, tactfully attempting to steer the conversation towards a more meaningful topic, ‘though I thought the bit where the husband visits the prostitute was perhaps more significant overall. Did anyone else think that he -’

‘I’ve got it, it was a kayak!’ Edna interrupted. ‘Wait, no, that wasn’t it.’

They discussed the question strenuously for several more minutes. Everyone else looked on politely as Avril continued to shout out different forms of transport and Edna tried to locate the section in the book.

At last she found it. ‘It was a taxi!’ she announced triumphantly. We all tried to look as if this fact had some relevance to the book as a whole. ‘Right, I think that’s about it then.’ Apparently the book has been adequately deconstructed. ‘What are we going to read next month? A member of my group recommended In the Cut.’ (Both Edna and Avril attended a group where women over sixty wrote poems about the various surgical procedures they’ve endured.) ‘Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make it as I’m having my left lung removed.’

Tracy couldn’t make it either (the unofficial reason was that her six year old daughter needed therapy after overhearing Edna’s detailed account of ancient Mesopotamian circumcision practices at the last meeting.) Angela suggested Charlotte Gray, though you could tell her heart wasn’t really in it. I was too distracted to make a proposal: I was trying to remember if the park brake still worked when the keys weren’t in the ignition. And things petered out a bit after that…

             ________________________________

It’s been nearly a decade since I moved out of Revesby. I’ve lost contact with most of the old members, but the last I heard, a few of them still met up occasionally, though it has become more of a mother’s group. No-one has heard from Edna, though I doubt anyone has enquired too closely.

I have a new book club now: just in its early stages, but I have high hopes of it. We meet at a wine bar, close enough to my house for me to walk or to get a taxi home, if it’s been a particularly impassioned, wine-fuelled night. We’re only small, yet hope to gradually get more members. If you’re interested, send me a message – but strictly under seventies only.

Yes, indeed...

*A fictive name, as are all of the others in this piece  – appropriate, given the subject matter.

The Hideous Carbuncle and the Great Literary Detective Puzzle

The other day, for the first time in my life, I unexpectedly found myself envying women who wear the burqua. I realise that this is a rather unconventional attitude and that it’s more traditional to pity them as voiceless victims of misogyny, or to take the French perspective and see them as potential terrorists concealing guns, bombs and Al Qaeda tracts within the thick folds of their garments.

 Very few people consider the advantages of the burqua from a vanity point of view, however. For those of us who, thanks to modern media, feel perennially discontented with our appearance (ie. women), what could be more liberating than a full-body covering? Safely ensconced within the all-concealing inky black draperies, you can say goodbye to fat days, bad hair days and bad skin days. No-one will be any the wiser if you neglect to shave your legs, dye your roots or spend an entire workday with teeth red-stained from wine: as long as your mascara is unsmudged and your eyebrows in good order, you’re all set.

 As I said earlier, I realise that my attitude puts me rather at odds with most people in the modern world. Most people, however, do not have the incentive I had to conceal themselves. You see, the other day I was afflicted by what makeup artists might term an ‘imperfection’, and those not in the industry must term a hideous great carbuncle. (For those turning to their dictionary, by carbuncle I mean a large pustular growth rather than a precious stone – if it were a precious stone, I’d be quite delighted to be in possession of it and would probably speak of being blessed rather than ‘afflicted’.) To be even plainer still, I had a pimple.

Pimple is such an ugly, adolescent-sounding word which my family have always avoided using. When I was growing up, my mother would instead make tactful reference to  ‘blemishes, while my Dad preferred the more clinical term, ‘lesion’, conveniently ignoring the word’s more usual associations with cancer. Through a simple enquiry like, ‘What’s that on your face – some type of lesion?’, my father was thus able to transform an everyday beauty dilemma into a full-blown medical emergency.

But to return to my own massive ‘imperfection’: I won’t describe it in too much detail, and certainly won’t include a photograph on the off-chance that you are eating. Suffice to say that it was conspicuously positioned smack-bang in the centre of my forehead. And that when I opened the bedroom door, the cat recoiled in terror and left her kibble untouched all that day: it was bad enough that I didn’t have a tail or glossy coat, but this was really pushing the limit.

Greatly distressed at this unprecedented feline rejection, I turned to Richard for comfort. He stolidly insisted that I was overreacting: ‘You can barely even see it,’ he maintained.  However, he rather ruined the effect by spending the entire morning staring fixedly at my forehead with that horrified-fascinated gaze people usually reserve for shark-attack victims or diseased organs preserved in jars of formaldehyde.

Consequently, I spent nearly an hour trying to conceal my carbuncle with a thick layer of foundation and powder, yet only succeeded in drawing more attention to it. I tried covering it with a bandaid but just looked like a member of a fight club. I considered wearing a beret but was afraid I’d come across as an idiot who couldn’t read a calendar well enough to know that Bastille Day was two months ago. While I haven’t had a fringe since I was ten, in my desperation I even contemplated breaking out the nail scissors and cutting myself one on the spot.

But this would have been excessive. Instead, I resolved to spend the entire day with my head dipped forward so that my hair fell in front of my face like a set of theatre curtains with just a narrow crack for a stagehand to slip through. This meant I would be at risk of walking into lamp-posts and walls of course, but it was better than looking stupid.

I would also avoid speaking to people as much as possible. I mentally checked off the people I absolutely had to communicate with that day: just one or two, I worked out, but I could email them instead – never mind that their desks adjoined mine. I would eat lunch on the roof by myself – it was pouring with rain and there was no shelter, so it was unlikely anyone else would venture up there.  And I would forego my morning coffee so I didn’t have to speak to my usual Italian barista who habitually addressed everyone as ‘beautiful’, but confronted with my horrible visage, would today be left tongue-tied I was sure.   

With my plan clearly established, I ventured out into the world of men. I won’t lie to you – it was agony. From the moment I set foot on the bus I felt ugly and ridiculous in the way that only a thirty-two-year old woman suffering the double ignominy of crows’ feet and bad skin can understand. And of course, to compound the situation, every other woman had chosen that particular day to break out the stilettos and designer suits and look their sleekly-polished, lip-glossed, blow-dried best.

I narrowly missed out on a seat on the bus so was forced to stand in the aisle, carnival-freak-style. And because of the constant jolting and rocking, I had to hold on with both hands and couldn’t take refuge in a novel as I usually would.

And so I played the game I often amuse myself with on public transport – what I imaginatively refer to as, ‘Guess the Book.’ Basically, I try to work out what the people around me are reading based on their age, clothes, and general demeanour. Over the course of the trip, I gradually gather more information about the book: its size, layout, glimpses of the cover and any snatches of prose I’m able to be make out. When the person snaps the book shut to leave, or I walk past them on my way out, I’m finally able to see the title and learn whether or not my guess is correct.

Ninety percent of the time it’s a Steig Larsson or Jodi Picoult (I can spot a Jodi Picoult from 50 feet in daylight.) Eat, Pray, Love has been cropping up more and more over the past few months, though, and Harry Potters are still surprisingly popular. It’s the obscure titles I enjoy most of all however, and those books which seem completely incompatible with the reader’s appearance.

On this particular morning, there was an older lady in front of me, one of those prim, neatly-starched women with rigidly waved hair the colour of a Blue Persian cat, a sensible padded blazer, and well-polished orthopaedic shoes. She was carrying a tartan  umbrella and a thick, trade-sized paperback: Rosamund Pilcher, I postulated, or possibly  The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Peering over her shoulder, I could just make out a subheading in the centre of the page: ‘How blowtorch was disembowelled’, I read.

The unexpected violence thrilled me. Blowtorch? Disembowelled? This was intriguing! I had expected country churches and fresh-faced girls from Cornwall but had instead got the type of heading Brett Easton Ellis might have penned were he writing a book involving defective industrial equipment. What could it mean? I dimly registered the double ‘l’ in ‘disembowelled’, which meant I was dealing with an Australian or English rather than an American publication, but that was the only clue I had. I tried vainly to read more but the bus pulled in at the next stop and I was pushed further down the aisle by the crush of new passengers. The woman got off the bus before I was able to learn anything further.

The moment I got to work I opened up Google and typed in ‘blowtorch’ and ‘disembowelled.’ Nothing illuminating came up – mainly references to a past episode of 24 involving a typically gruelling torture sequence. I tried adding ‘book’ and ‘novel’ and various other literary words, but still nothing. Unfortunately, my boss chose that particular moment to stop by, and  rather than seeing cover images of the adorable children’s book involving a mouse I was supposed to be working on, she was greeted with a page-full of articles about serial killers and mutilation. She choked out a brief, ‘good morning’ before rushing off, most likely to HR to see if there was any history of animal cruelty or similar serial killer-like tendencies in my employment file. But I was too distracted too care.

My distraction didn’t subside as the day continued. I couldn’t focus on work at all, with those two incongruous words circling tantalisingly in my head. What was the connection between them?  I was so caught up in this great literary puzzle that I forgot about my resolution of not talking to anyone. Instead, I spent the entire day barrelling up everyone in my immediate vicinity to ask them whether ‘blowtorch’ and ‘disembowelled’ meant anything to them (at the same time giving up all hope of ever seeing any of them outside work in a social context:  ‘Do come over to our place for dinner and see the delightful collection of bodies we keep below the floorboards!’) I forgot as well about not going out for coffee and barely even noticed when the barista called me by my Christian name, which I didn’t even realise he knew, mysteriously dredging it up from some dark recess of his mind.

‘Disembowelled’ and ‘blowtorch’ – what link do those words have?’ I mused as he frothed the foam on my latte.

‘Umm, none?’ he offered cautiously, surreptitiously taking my photo so he could add it to the list of customers to be treated with caution he kept pinned behind the counter for the weekend staff.

And it was then that the break-through occurred – a matter of pure luck, as it always is in the best detective stories. A man’s voice piped up from the queue behind me: ‘It’s a Rudd* thing, I think.’

‘Really?’ I asked, intrigued. ‘It’s about Rudd? As in a dark secret from his schoolboy days?’ This was wishful thinking, really: the most interesting thing Kevin Rudd had done previously was write a children’s book about a dog and cat trying to avert a series of disasters during the Australia Day celebrations. It wasn’t particularly exciting.

‘No, I think it’s more recent that that – some sort of political scandal maybe,’ my anonymous benefactor supplied helpfully, but could tell me no more.

My course was clear, however: I had to find a bookshop with a well-stocked Australian politics section and look through every single book which could potentially involve Kevin Rudd until I found one whose size, layout and typesetting roughly matched what I had seen on the bus.

So this is what I did, and Lady Luck was on my side once again: after opening just two or three books, I came across The Rise of the Ruddbott, a recent release by political journalist, Annabel Crabbe, a woman clearly determined to stretch the creative powers of language to their full potential in order to make Kevin Rudd’s leadership seem at least mildly exciting. It was the right thickness, the font looked similar, the margins were about the same width, and there were lots of subtitles. I anxiously flicked through the pages and there it was, a bold, black heading about two thirds of the way through: ‘How Blowtorch was Disembowelled.’ 

So there it was: the great literary puzzle had been solved. I didn’t stop to learn more – to discover what this blowtorch business actually was, for instance – and I certainly didn’t buy the book. It was enough that it had been found. The hunt was over. My quarry had been tracked down.

And in all the excitement of my Sherlock Holmes-style detective work, I quite forgot about my hideous carbuncle.

*Kevin Rudd is of course the extremely un-dynamic, former Prime Minister of Australia (and this is most likely the only occasion I will ever refer to politics in this blog.)

Of curious cats and krinkletoys, cabbages and kings..

The vicious beast responsible for the heinous acts detailed in my previous post (now, that's a ragdoll cat!)

My last post about Fina’s shameful behaviour during an otherwise civilised dinner with friends has generated quite a few enquiries: ‘What a shocking cat – why do you keep her?’, ‘Do you not fear for your own safety?’, ‘Have you considered keeping her locked in the attic?’ (we have, actually), ‘How could you expose her to small children?’ – that kind of thing. The most frequent question has been, however, ‘What exactly is this Krinkletoy thing* she showed such malevolence towards and where can I procure one for myself?’

I have therefore written this helpful narrative account of my quest to obtain a replacement krinkletoy for Fina.

How to Procure A Krinkletoy – An Instructive Tale

I strode into the pet products emporium in Darling Street. ‘Show me your finest krinkletoys!’ I demanded of the woman behind the counter.

‘Krinkletoys?’ she said in confusion. ‘I don’t think we have any of them, ma’am. Perhaps you mean bozzleboxes?’

 ’What an absurd suggestion!’ I roared. ‘Krinkletoys are the thing I want – krinkletoys!’

‘Twizzletails?’ she offered helpfully. ‘Flufflebombs?’

‘Enough of your damned insolence, woman!’ I bellowed, and began to scour the shop myself, leaving the impudent harridan to cut up her wretched kangaroo meat.

I shortly discovered the object of my quest: krinkletoys, a veritable plethora of them, in every colour you could imagine! In unwitting imitation of the intended recipient, I pounced upon the display and eagerly pawed through it before finally selecting the very finest of them: a handsome krinkletoy with small upright ears, a neat pointed muzzle and turquoise and brown striations banding his feathered body. He looked tough and hardy as well: he would need to be to withstand the ordeal awaiting him.

I paid for the krinkletoy at the counter and requested that the woman wrap him in brown paper and string. She refused, objecting that she was not a Victorian shopgirl, so cursing her once more for her effrontery, I tucked him carefully in my reticule and proceeded home.

At home, I presented Seraphina with her new Krinkletoy and she immediately and delightedly savaged it.

*The good folk at Google would have you believe that this is a krinkletoy. Do not be misled: it is not. It is a stupid looking butterfly with twig antenna. No self-respecting cat would stoop to owning such an object. Please see my former post for a photo of a recently decapitated krinkletoy.

Friday night dinner with friends: leek and lemon risotto accompanied by general carnage

It’s an embarrassing thing when you invite friends over for dinner and the cat spends the entire evening mauling everything in sight.

This was the first time Darrell, Sandra and family had met Seraphina Nightingale and they were initially very impressed. ‘She’s gorgeous!’ they crooned, after we had coaxed her out from behind the couch, exclaiming over her shiny coat, her distinctive markings, her delicate pansy face and noble bearing. They had just spent an exorbitant sum on a ragdoll kitten from a breeder and could scarcely believe we had picked Fina up from a shelter.

I’ve never been a fan of breeders, particularly when there are so many deserving animals in need of homes already, so took the opportunity of highlighting Fina’s good points to them. Given that they had opted for a ragdoll breed themselves, they obviously valued limpness in cats, so I dwelt particularly on her meek, compliant nature:  ‘She’s very placid, very docile – she’ll sit on your lap all evening and just purr away.’  Fina chose this particular moment to sink her teeth into Darrell’s hand. ‘Umm, she doesn’t normally do that,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘She’s usually very affectionate. ’  She bit him twice more, drawing blood.

To his credit, Darrell took it quite well, offering diplomatic excuses for her savagery, while Richard went to get bandages and disinfectant from the medicine cupboard: ‘No, no, it’s my fault. I intruded into her personal space – I should have let her come to me when she felt comfortable.’

As if on cue, Fina sidled up to Sandra, winding herself around her legs, then leapt lightly on to her lap and began to purr. Sandra began to stroke her tentatively. For a few minutes, a cosy silence pervaded the room. Everyone started to smile and look charmed again and coo in that soft, slightly dim-witted voice usually reserved for babies and spouses.

‘She’s beginning to settle down now,’ I ventured, ‘this is more like her usual self.’ Then, without warning, Fina turned around and bit Sandra. When Sandra cried out, she indignantly swiped out at her, claws unleashed.

Richard again left the room for medical supplies. ‘She’s a bit unsettled. Probably better not to bother her,’ I said, conveniently forgetting the fact that it was Fina who had approached Sandra. ‘Umm, maybe we should just eat.’

We gave the kids their dinner then sent them into the spare room to watch a DVD. I cautioned them to bar the door behind me when I left: if I or another adult wanted to come in, we would knock three times and imitate the call of a mopoke, I explained. They should not open the door for any other reason – especially if they heard frantic scrabbling sounds or miaowing.  I handed them a baseball bat before I left. ‘Just in case things don’t go as planned,’ I said cryptically.

Somewhat on edge, the rest of us sat down to eat in the dining room. We tried to focus on the meal: a leek and lemon risotto* with garden salad, followed by gelato and fresh strawberries for dessert. It was hard though, what, with the cat carrying on in the background. 

Staunchly refusing to face up to reality, I gaily chattered away about the advantages of owning a cat: ‘They’re so much easier to look after than dogs – they’re so self-contained. They just do their own thing.’ Meanwhile, Richard plied everyone with wine in a desperate attempt to take their mind off their injuries and prevent them from noticing Fina ‘doing her own thing’ in the background.

In a shameless display of unmitigated savagery, she tore her all of toys apart with her teeth, including her favourite, Mousey. ‘She doesn’t normally do that,’ I repeatedly apologised, each time sounding less and less convincing. Every so often, she’d launch an offensive on someone’s shins: creeping up purposefully with her eyes narrowed and ears flattened back against her skull. The Madeleine Peyroux CD could not wholly drown out the sound of her flagrantly scritching her claws on the sofa, exposing the yellow foam inside as she prepared for some hideous finale to the evening.

Of course, she timed the climax perfectly:  as we finished the last spoonfuls of our dessert, in true gladiatorial style she decapitated Krinkletoy in the middle of the rug.  

‘She doesn’t normally….’ I began one final time as our guests looked on in mute horror.

‘Probably a good thing we went to a breeder,’ concluded Darrell.

 

 

 

 

The decapitated krinkletoy

 

*Leek & Lemon Risotto Recipe

Ingredients

• 60 gms butter
• 4 tbsp olive oil
• 4 cloves garlic, crushed
• 3 leeks, sliced
• 6 bay leaves
• Few sprigs of fresh thyme
• 3 cups arborio rice
• I cup white wine (whatever’s in the fridge will do)
• Vegetable stock – around 5 cups, but may differ depending on the brand of rice you use
• 1 lemon, grated rind and juice
• 2 cups mushrooms, sliced
• Handful of walnuts
• ¼ cup low fat cream
• Salt and pepper
• 100 gms parmesan (plus extra for serving)
• Chopped parsley (to garnish)

Instructions

1. Melt 50 gms of butter in a pan with 3 tbsp olive oil. Add garlic and leeks and saute until soft – about 10 mins.
2. Add the bay leaves, thyme and rice. Stir for a minute until the rice is glossy.
3. Add the wine and stir until absorbed.
4. Add the stock, about half a cup at a time, stirring constantly until absorbed.  Continue until the rice is creamy, and the grains are still firm yet not starchy (around 20 minutes.)
5. Add the lemon juice and rind and salt and pepper to taste. Stir for a few minutes. Meanwhile, heat the remaining butter and oil in a pan and saute mushrooms and walnuts until mushroom are soft.
6. Add mushrooms and walnuts to risotto. Stir through, along with cream and parmesan.
7. Serve garnished with parmesan and parsley.

Justin Cronin’s ‘The Passage’: a book to bring a nation to its knees (in every sense of the word)

Every intelligent person should have a copy of Justin Cronin’s The Passage by their bed. If an intruder comes into your room in the dead of night and you want to hurl a book at them to defend yourself, this is definitely the one you should reach for. As far as heavy, potentially lethal missiles go, The Passage is unparalleled and I recommend it without reservation.  At nearly 800 pages, it would also make a fabulous doorstop. Or a paperweight. Or, if there should come a point in the future where humankind is forced to use books for toilet paper or fuel, you would certainly want to have it on hand then. I would probably not advise its use in deportment classes though: walking around with it balanced on your head would most likely cause serious spinal damage.

As you might have worked out, The Passage is a great big brick of a book. To be more precise, it’s roughly the size of two and a half bricks. If I had a standard house brick on hand, I would photograph the book beside it as visual evidence. Lacking a brick, I’ve taken the liberty of photographing it beside the cat. 

And, to give you some idea of how large the cat is, this is a photo of her taken on our most recent holiday.

So you can see, it really is a book to bring a nation to its knees. I had to buy a new handbag in order to carry it with me on the bus to work (more a beach bag than a handbag, technically.)  I have also seen some women dragging it behind them in a small handcart or hiring unemployed Sherpas to walk alongside them with it.

…But never mind how heavy it is, I hear you cry out in exasperation. What actually is this book you’re talking about? What is it about? Why all this fuss about it? Well, clearly, you don’t work in either bookselling or publishing because The Passage is the must-read book of the moment. The first in a trilogy, it has been touted as the ‘literary thriller’ of the decade, a novel  that will appeal to fans of both Stephen King  and Cormac McCarthy .

The author, Justin Cronin, a Professor of English and previous winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, reportedly wrote the series to impress his 13-year-old daughter, Iris (who hopefully has a longer attention span than most teenagers of that age.)  This seems to have been a solid career move for him: the trilogy sold to Ballantine Books in America for an alleged $3.75 million in a massive bidding war and had an initial print run of 250,000. Already, the film rights have been optioned by Ridley Scott for $1.75 million. It’s published in Australia by Hachette and in the two months it’s been released, has sold around 19,000 copies.

I’m not going to reveal too much about the plot other than to say it’s a post-apocalyptic  vampire novel  in the same vein (ha!) as Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Very much in the same vein. In fact, I suspect its the same series compressed into three volumes and published under a different heading.

If you want to learn more about it, you can have a look at the series website here. Alternately, there’s a good review on James Bradley’s blog which some of you may have read a few week’s back in the weekend Herald.

I’m not really a fan of paranormal fiction generally, but I was keen to read this to see if it lived up to all the hype.  The first thing that struck me about it was that it was frightfully good value from a net weight perspective.  I paid $35 for it, which works out at roughly 80c a kilo. Compare this to most titles today where you’ll be paying an average of $92 for one kilo of literature. (I’m not just estimating this amount, please note. I actually used my kitchen scales to weigh a random selection of current novels, calculated the weight against the RRP and then made a spreadsheet of the results: I’m nothing if not scientific in my methods.)

Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn: particularly poor value, weighing in at only 2oogms with an RRP of $22.99

Factoring in that the average person allegedly reads 3.7 books per year, and that the average book is around 220 pages long, at 766 pages long, The Passage represents nearly a year’s worth of reading for under $40.  In today’s financially-straitened times then, it makes quite an economical purchase and certainly gets the ‘thrifty thumbs up’ from me (an indicator of merit devised several seconds ago for the purposes of this post.)

I’m not going to probe too deeply into the question of whether The Passage actually is more ‘literary’ than standard vampire fare. Here’s a few quotes that should make the answer quite clear:

‘Don’t you understand ,’ Richards said quietly, ‘that I’d shoot you right here to put a smile on this man’s face?’

Paulson’s body had gone rigid. ‘What the f..k?’ he sputtered against the clenching muscles of his throat. He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing  up against the muzzle of the gun.

‘I’m cool, I’m cool.’

‘Anthony,’ Richard said, his eyes still fixed on Paulson’s, ‘it’s your call my friend. You tell me, is he cool?’ .

…Yes, reminiscent of Virginia Woolf at her most lyrical. (And highly appropriate reading for a 13-year-old.)

Here’s another example:

‘The grenade went off, taking out the front of the chalet, but Richards heard this only vaguely … as he experienced the sensation, utterly new to him, of being torn in half.’ 

Pure Dickens.  

Or finally:

‘Wolgast turned in time to see the creature that had once been Anthony Carter fall upon his partner like a giant mouth.’

See? – He uses a simile so it has to be literary. 

I have to admit that I didn’t actually finish the book. It wasn’t the writing that deterred me, however, but the weight factor. I’d been starting to notice my neck and shoulders aching in the evenings, then I was off work a few days back with a terrible migraine – something I don’t usually suffer from. It was lugging that stupid book around that caused it, I decided. So on page 502 I decided I’d had enough. It’s probably better that way: I’d have had to wait until 2012 for the next part anyway.

And just in case this post has made you eager to sample The Passage for yourself, you can read the first 15 pages here. 

 

Defending the Black Dog*

I really feel sorry for black dogs. They get such a hard time of it. People are always going on about how difficult it is to be a Muslim or a working mother or a shareholder in a lucrative WA mining company in Australia today – but nobody spares a thought for the black dogs.  To the contrary, it is perfectly acceptable to publicly state that they should be beaten and kicked and generally mistreated – and you will never hear a dissenting voice on the subject.  One writer harbours so much resentment towards them that he wrote an article entitled ‘Beating the F’n Black Dog.’ It was for a men’s group, however, and presumably a real man needs an expletive to be able to fully grasp how truly despicable and reviled these creatures are.  

Is this the face of evil?

And even when black dogs are not being openly libelled they must feel such a drag to be around – so depressing – constantly bringing everyone down through their mere existence.

Winston Churchill** is to blame, of course (or, that c….* Churchill, in case any men are reading.) Yes, he may have done a lot for the English people during the war, but he did nothing at all for black dogs.  I’m sure there are a whole heap of Labradors and Boxers and even little Scotties out there who growl and bare their teeth each time his name is mentioned and have to be forcibly restrained  when someone launches into yet another impassioned rendition of his famous: ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’ speech. Now, I’m not saying Churchill was a bad man as such, but he really should have thought more carefully about the implications of his choice of metaphor.

Because now it’s everywhere. Musician from Bob Dylan to Manic Street Preachers are constantly writing songs vilifying black dogs. And poets – my god, the poets can’t get enough of it! The final straw for me was when I saw a copy of Les Murray’s Killing the Black Dog in a shop window the other day – this, from the esteemed bard of Bunyah, one of our nation’s leading poets! Was it really necessary for him to take this persecution of black dogs to this violent new level?

 Imagine what a dog would think were he to see this book in the window – or worse, in his owner’s hands (supposing of course, he were also able to read.)  I can see it now: a faithful hound with grey specks in his black coat plods in to bring his owner (a Professor of Literature) his slippers as he reads in front of the fire. His toenails click companionably on the wooden floor (the dog’s, that is.)  He flops down and lays his head on his owner’s feet, looking up at him trustingly, a picture of perfect contentment. But then, what’s this he espies in his beloved owner’s hands – the latest offering from Australia’s favourite poet? The poor dog would be quite justifiably alarmed and concerned for his safety, not to mention confused as to what he had done to deserve this treatment – why his beloved owner should have turned on him so – after all his years of faithful service and companionship.

Poor bewildered black dog...

And then of course, here in Australia we have also have the Black Dog Institute, an organisation dedicated to the study and treatment of depression.  What do the dogs make of this I wonder? Do they view it in the same way that the Jews and gypsies viewed the infamous Nazi ‘Racial Purity’ institutes?

But it’s not just the English speaking world who are guilty of making black dogs feel bad. The French too, are at fault: grappling with a bete noir  - or black beast – anyone? And I’m sure the problem extends into Asia and the Middle East and the rest of the world as well (I have no actual evidence of this, mind you.)

This disparagement of black dogs is a problem of global proportions and we need to address it. Ask yourself what you might do to help black dogs feel more valued in our society. You could adopt a black dog from a shelter. You could write to your local member. You could do as I do and make a special point of patting every black dog you see in the street and telling it it’s a good dog. ‘It makes me so happy to see you,’ I say, ‘not depressed at all.’ And in the main part, they wag their tails and fix me with a look of intense gratitude. (Except for those which respond by biting me, of course, which actually is quite depressing. But then sometimes the owners bite me too, which is also depressing.)

Forget ‘Reclaim the Night’: it’s time to reclaim the black dog.

*Please note that this isn’t a post about depression but rather a light-hearted look at one of the phrases we use to describe it. It is not intended to make light of this serious issue or to give offense.

**Winston Churchill is generally credited with popularising the phrase ‘black dog’ as a metaphor for depression. The cat informs me that this footnote is patronising and unnecessary as everyone already knows this, but just in case she is wrong…

No cats for old men…

Apart from the fact that the ovens occasionally explode, my grandfather’s retirement village is a pretty good one. We were all a little worried when he and his wife announced that they were selling their house and moving there, envisaging Death March-like singalongs of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ led by brisk, lavender-haired women from the local church – a constant smell of urine and boiled cabbage – residents struggling for breath under a hundred-weight of rainbow-coloured crocheted blankets in bizarre re-enactments of medieval torture rituals – women in cardigans clapping their hands delightedly at yet another supper where everything including the water is pureed. And of course, bingo every night. 

This was what I was envisaging at least, and possibly getting retirement villages and nursing homes a little confused – because this place was nice. Very nice in fact – the sort of place you would expect to find in Florida filled with tanned old couples in tennis whites who drink highballs in the evenings and used to sell real estate. For a start, everyone has their own apartment and can mix with the other residents as often or as little as they please.  It’s set right on Botany Bay, and from your balcony, you can look out and see planes taking off in the distance. There’s a mangrove estuary just beyond the fence, giving the air a thin, damp, salty smell with just  the faintest undertone of sewage when the wind changes. The communal areas feature beautiful landscaped gardens and sun-drenched patios where families can gather for barbecues.  It also offers all the usual retirement village activities I cannot imagine my grandad ever actually partaking in. However, it’s reassuring to know that if he ever does develop a sudden desire to play boules or take a special line dancing class for seniors, there will be nothing to stop him from doing so.

There are drawbacks to the place, however. It’s quite expensive, for one thing. And, as I mentioned before, the ovens occasionally explode, sending lethal shards of glass everywhere. (This has only ever happened three times to be fair, and the manufacturers assure us that this was a manufacturing defect and the other ovens in the village  should be perfectly safe, unless of course they get overly hot. Interestingly, despite these reassurances, my grandparents still prefer to do all their cooking in the microwave and simply use their oven for storing large tupperware containers and ring-binders.)

The main drawback, however, is the management’s strict ‘no pets’ policy. I was appalled when I first heard of this. ‘No pets at all? Not even a canary or goldfish?’ I asked, aghast.

‘No pets at all’, Grandad repeated. ‘They don’t want them disturbing the other residents or attacking people.’ (He had heard the stories about my cat, clearly.)

‘But not even a goldfish?’ I persisted.  ‘Surely a fish couldn’t bother anyone.’

‘Perhaps they’re worried about allergies’, he suggested gamely. ’Or the bowls being knocked over and the residents cutting ourselves on the broken glass.’

This seemed to me unusually cautious for people that had no issue with installing explosive ovens. I couldn’t work it out - the place was either run by a syndicate of weapons manufacturers or a group of overprotective mothers who wouldn’t let their children play on the swingset in case they spoke to another child who at some point in their life had eaten gluten. (Actually, it was run by the Anglican Church, so kind of a combination of the two.)

But this no pets rule really bothered me – not only because it was mean and petty, but because it was bad for the residents from a mental health perspective. I recently became a volunteer telephone counsellor for Lifeline, and if there’s one thing it’s taught me, it’s that having an animal around is good for people. It makes them feel needed, provides companionship and affection, and establishes routine and order in their lives. Indeed, in my limited experience, when suicidal callers are asked what reasons they have for not killing themselves, the number one reason they come up with is a pet cat or dog. And I’m not talking just a handful of people either: according to the Australian Companion Animal Council Report Contribution of the Pet Care Industry to the Australain Economy 6th Edition 2006, an estimated 53% of households have a cat or a dog or both.

To draw again on my own experience: before she died, my grandmother spent some time in a nursing home which boasted a nursing home dog, a beautiful obese Labrador with dark liquid eyes. The residents loved him – so much so that the nurses had to paint ‘NO FOOD’ on his back in white paint to stop them feeding him titbits when he padded by on his daily rounds. (Many of the residents suffered from dementia or Alzheimers so simply asking them to please not feed him wouldn’t have been sufficient.) Now, the whole arrangement may not have been good for the dog from a dietary perspective – particularly given that chocolate was the usual treat of choice – but it certainly improved the quality of life of those residents.

So why take this small comfort  away from people, then  - particularly the elderly, who are more likely to be widowed, physically unwell, socially isolated and lonely? Chances are they’ve already lost their homes, their jobs and a great portion of their independence – and now they want them to give up their beloved animal companions too?

(This reminds me of another story I read recently about Oscar, a cat in Rhode Island who would visit residents in a nursing home shortly before they died and is credited with accurately predicting around 50 patients’ deaths.  His instincts were apparently infallible: he would sniff and observe patients, then curl up to sleep with especial ‘chosen’ ones who would invariably pass away within several hours of his arrival. Indeed, his accuracy led staff at the nursing home to institute a new and unusual protocol: once Oscar was discovered sleeping with a patient, the staff would call family members to notify them of the patient’s impending death. Nobody seemed to consider the obvious – namely, that the cat himself was killing them, rather than mysteriously predicting their demise through some uncanny feline sixth sense. 

Now that was a case where the animal probably shouldn’t have been allowed in the nursing home, not least of all because of how unnerving it would be for a resident who felt perfectly healthy to find themselves suddenly visited by this feline angel of death. But Oscar was an exception and I digress…)

In the main part, it is widely acknowledged that animals reduce depression and social isolation. I did some research on the internet, looking in particular at the Black Dog Institute (which, as it turns out, deals primarily with the study of depression rather than just black dogs in general, so was even more useful than I had hitherto anticipated.) Here’s what I learnt:

-  Web MD states that ‘just petting your animal can be soothing’. It  also adds: ‘The overall health of dog owners is better than those who don’t have dogs, according to a study that evaluated women ages 25 to 40 in China.  Half of the 3,031 women owned dogs and half did not. Those who had dogs exercised more often, slept better, reported better fitness levels and fewer sick days, and saw their doctors less often… In one study… pet owners had lower blood pressure and blood fat levels than non-owners.’ 

- Pets are a terrific conduit for social interaction: ‘You want to meet people? Once having left the house with the dog, it is impossible to avoid attention. There are always some people who will stop to pet a dog, ask questions and engage in conversation… There are some people who manage to walk their cats and I have known some of them. Horses are natural outdoor animals that are also connected with socialization as they have to be boarded and that usually involves having to interact with other people.’ Well, the sky’s the limit then…

- According to the Psychiatric Bulletin, parrots are particularly efficacious in the treatment of depression. To quote: ‘I have kept pet parrots for 20 years and can recommend them for the house bound, the lonely and patients with depression, especially middle-aged women suffering from the ‘empty nest syndrome.’ No, no pun is intended – this woman simply loves parrots. But lest you get too enthusiastic, I draw your attention to this note of caution: ‘parrots are probably not suitable for health centres, not because of confidentiality problems but because they can be noisy and it is unfair to keep them constantly caged. When parrots breach confidentiality it is with phrases they have heard repeatedly and with emotion. ‘ Stupid parrots, just never know when to keep their beaks shut….

-  Cats are recommended with some reservation: ‘Having an animal that looks forward to you coming home, as a dog will, can be very rewarding. Cats, unless they are particularly moody, will also be happy to see you when you come home (unless they are asleep).’

- Anecdotal evidence has its place too, hence this largely anecdotal piece about how a dog saved one couple’s marriage: ‘When our children were small we went out, as a family, to purchase a puppy. It was decided that we wanted a French Poodle. Once we saw “Buttons,” we all fell in love. Well, Buttons became a full fledged member of the family who set her own rules and regulations for proper behavior around the house. For example, if my wife and I had an argument, Buttons lets us know, in no uncertain terms, that conflict was unacceptable. Small as she was, she would directly intercede and bark until everyone realized that it was time for a truce.’ (To suggest that this couple might be slightly unbalanced would detract from the force of their powerful testimony.)

- And then there is this helpful caution, should you be inclined to place too much import on your relationship with your cat or dog: ‘ It is, however, important that you remember that while you can talk to your pets, they cannot replace human companionship. They don’t talk back. You can tell your dog or cat about your day or tell it how you are feeling but it won’t be able to offer any words of advice. It won’t be able to tell you that everything will be better, but it might lick your face. Sometimes, that is all that you need.’

The site also adds this helpful footnote:  ‘Of course, you need not be depressed or anxious in order to have a pet.’ Well, thank god for that, I hear you exclaiming. And here I was, thinking I’d have to donate the cat to the local asylum…

So there you have it: with your beloved dog or kitty or parrot at your side, you too can progress happily into your twilight years. Unless of course you’re unlucky enough to move into an Anglican retirement home. In which case, you might want to give up baking too.

A long, long, long day’s journey into night indeed

A few days ago I saw Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Sydney Theatre Company, directed by Andrew Upton, AKA Mr Cate Blanchett, and starring William Hurt and Robyn Nevin.  The title did not lie: it was a long, long, long day’s journey indeed.

The play, which is regarded as an American classic, is about a retired actor, James Tyrone, his wife Mary, and their two adult sons, James and Edmund, who have retreated to their Connecticut holiday house for the summer. Over the course of one harrowing day, Tyrone’s egocentricity and tight-fistedness is palpably demonstrated, along with its poisonous impact on Edmund, who is dying of consumption, and James, who has become an alcoholic womanizer and failed second-rate actor. Meanwhile, in the throes of a morphine addiction which the rest of the family is helplessly trying to deny, Mary slowly unravels into madness. Basically, it’s the 36 year decline of a family compressed into 24 hours – and Andrew Upton decided to stage it in real time.

Most of the actors played their roles well. Robyn Nevin was masterful, but it’s the sort of role she’s made for: a neurasthenic southern belle vacillating perpetually between graciousness and hysteria, a sort of wired-up Mrs Dalloway. The actor who played James also seemed well-suited for his role – a boorish, slack-jawed walrus-looking type, the sort of person Mike Moore would interview if he were doing a documentary on what really goes on in chicken farms. As for Edmund, I couldn’t help thinking Upton was throwing the audience a bit of a red herring with him. He was nervy, he was sensitive and intellectual, he was wearing purple trousers – who wouldn’t assume he was gay and thus feel issues had been left unexplored when the play finished without any reference to this?

 

But onto Tyrone. It turns out there is a reason William Hurt is so named: it physically hurts to watch him on stage. Contrary to what you might expect from his slew of Oscar nominations, he cannot act. He’s awful. He continually wrinkles his eyes in a manner I can only assume is meant to look avuncular but which actually makes him look smug and short-sighted. He struggles to maintain an American accent, which is odd, given that he is, in fact, American. He delivers his lines rapidly and without any variation in tone, except for occasionally thrumming the final few words of each sentence, for reasons understood only by himself. And he bellows all of his lines, even when the stage directions call for a hushed, confidential tone, so that, unfortunately, they are all quite audible and falling asleep is an impossibility.

And then there are his gestures. All of them are jarring. He likes to lean insouciantly against the wall to show that he is a self-absorbed egomaniac who cares not a whit for anyone else’s pain. At particularly dramatic moments, he likes to fling both arms out like P.T. Barnum at the opening of a new circus. He’s also fond of wrenching his head to one side like a parakeet who has just been given a challenging new phrase to learn. (Apparently, this indicates that he has something sincere to impart – not that he’s just been stricken by an attack of tetanus or cerebral palsy. I warn you of this just in case, like me, your immediate reaction is to leap up and summon a medic.)

The problems with the production are not all William Hurt’s fault, however: the playwright, Eugene O’Neill, is also partly to blame. And perhaps it’s not even him – perhaps it’s merely that the play has dated over the years so that it no longer seems edgy and subversive and instantly recognisable. There are many things about it that are  familiar: in particular, the whole dysfunctional family dynamic brings to mind Jonathon Franzen, Dave Eggers and every indie film featuring Laura Linney released over the past decade. But you know you’re not watching a modern play when it opens with the husband commenting on how lovely and fat his wife is. And when, rather than slapping him and immediately embarking on the CSIRO diet, she smiles girlishly and twirls hers skirts.

There are contextual problems with the script, though – in particular, the whole notion of having a ‘dope fiend’ and a character dying of consumption in the same play. Surely the word anachronistic was made for occasions such as this. ‘Dope’ and consumption just don’t co-exist – it’s like a novel where the protagonist spends the afternoon snorting coke and surfing the net – and then summons the horse and carriage for an evening playing whist with the curate.

I completely understand why Mary is addicted to morphine – or is a ‘dope fiend’ – too. If I had to live with Tyrone and his endless head-twitching, I would be as well.To demonstrate: at interval, Richard asked me if there was anything I wanted at the candy bar. My first instinct was to reply, ‘I want the last 90 minutes of my life back’, but this would have been churlish and ungrateful given that he’d paid for the tickets – so instead I asked for some morphine – anything to shut out what was happening around me. I know people like to complain about legalised injecting centres and how they’re eroding the fabric of respectable society, but believe me, judging by the rate at which well-heeled theatre goers were quaffing champagne during that interval, if there had been an injection centre next to the theatre with stronger stuff than alcohol available, it would have been doing a roaring trade that evening. So you can’t wholly blame Mary.

But back to my issues with the script (and I’ll limit myself just to two more points, because, you know, I haven’t won a Nobel Prize for Literature so who am I to criticise?) Second last point then, the repetition: over and over (and over) the characters would implore each other to please ‘be quiet’ – to not say the awful, unbearable things we all knew were coming anyway. Yes, for god’s sake, please be quiet, the audience members would all echo silently in their heads each time. But no, the confessions and reminiscences would spill out just the same: ‘Let me tell you some of my memories,’ the character would begin (was ever a more ominous phrase uttered on stage?) and we would be regaled with yet another endless account of how whoever it was wished he could have been a windmill or wheel barrow or seadog chasing the spume, instead of the pathetic hollowed-out shell  of a man he was. Then three minutes later, a different character would do the same speech again. And then there was the repetition.

And lastly, the drunkenness – which was really just another excuse for more repetitive reminiscences. As every designated driver knows, it is tedious watching other people when they’re drunk if you’re not also drunk yourself (and due to the shortness of the interval and the exorbitant price of champagne, most of the audience were unfortunately not.) This rule hold fast whether the other person is sitting beside you in a bar or on stage performing. To those who are sober, drunks appear infantile and immature and cringe-worthy and predictable. And contrary to what Eugene O’Neill might believe about how intoxicated people typically behave, they don’t generally recite perfectly memorised sections of Shakespeare or Baudelaire: ‘I always envied you as a child, you bastard – you were so damn sophisticated, so cultured!’ James spits at his brother in a drunken rage – and then proceeds to rattle off yet another Rilke sonnet to prove his point.

And then finally it’s over. And at the end of the play – after all the drugs and booze and head twitching and despair – we’re left with nothing but a single light bulb burning against the darkness as all the characters are finally engulfed by night. By implication, all of their suffering is ultimately explained by the fact that the main character is too cheap – both in an emotional and monetary sense – to splash out on an extra light bulb. Yes, if Tyrone had been less tight-fisted, his wife wouldn’t have felt the need to take refuge in narcotics, nor would his sons have become the pitiful, broken creatures they are.  It’s a powerful motif – but this notion that people who limit their energy consumption are mean and stingy and responsible for their spouses’ inevitable decline into drug addiction, rather than, say, environmentally conscious, must be quite galling for supporters of Earth Hour.

… And now, as I bring this piece to an end, I find myself thinking of William Hurt again, of how his delivery was largely wooden yet occasionally hammy and theatrical – but how he was playing a second rate stage actor who was in fact emotionally dead where family and real life were concerned. I start to suspect that maybe I actually witnessed a brilliantly layered performance and was just too dense to realise it. But if it was great acting, would it have been so painful to watch? And would I not have got some inkling of how good it was during the performance itself?

Goddammit, my head hurts. I knew we should have seen Westside Story.