{misc.} bookish travels

I've just had a lovely week off work, visiting Sydney. I managed quite a few bookish things - a fruitful trawl of a couple of second-hand bookshops...

 

Look! Two Persephones -- Cicely Hamilton's William, An Englishman; Monica Dickens' Mariana. Such a great find - second-hand they are as rare as hens' teeth in Australia. The others are: a Virago edition of Charlotte Mew's collected poetry and prose; Beryl Bainbridge's The Dressmaker; Marguerite Duras' The Lover; and Lisa Lang's Utopian Man (the fictionalised story of the founder of Melbourne's Cole's Book Arcade – reviewed by reading matters and anzlitlovers).

Some new book window-shopping (and buying)...

 

Here we see Anne Summers' The Misogyny Factor (for a taste of this take-down of misogyny in Australian public life, see her extraordinary talk (NSFW!) here. Also Lily Brett's Lola Bensky (which I wanted to read after enjoying travellinpenguin's review), and Murder on the Home Front by Molly Lefebure, based on her work as secretary to a forensic pathologist in London in World War Two.

A kind friend, knowing my love of vintage Australiana, gave me this wonderful old book - Possum by Mary Grant Bruce - about a sickly city family who embrace the health-filled delights of the bush:

 

I went to a couple of events at Sydney Writers' Festival. How's that for the view from one venue?

 

I managed to get along to three 'conversations' (a friendly format, I think): on Bohemian Sydney: Dancing with Empty Pockets with Tony Moore (author of a new book on bohemianism in Australia) and Elizabeth Farrelly; What the Classics Teach Us with Robert Greene, David Brooks, Richard Gill and Alastair Blanshard; and Fantastical Tales, with Sulari Gentill, Kate Forsyth, K.B. Hoyle and Judith Ridge. An eclectic mix, but all quite fascinating. Two of the three were free, too – a nice way to allow everyone access to some really good discussions.

 

I visited a couple of exhibitions, including Dressing Sydney at the Sydney Jewish Museum (about the origins of many familiar Australian fashion and design labels) and - my absolute favourite - the Lego Colosseum at the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney.

 

I ate a lot of cake, visiting both Black Star Pastry and Bourke Street Bakery:

   

And found a bottle of orgeat syrup, which I'm sure all Regency fans will recognise as a suitable Georgette Heyer-ish drink for ladies. I suspect Regency ladies did not drink it like this, however - the 'Japanese Cocktail' (brandy, orgeat, bitters, fresh lime. Amazing…):

   

I also gave a seminar paper at the university (terrifying but happily well received by a very kindly audience).

 

Sydney University, looking very handsome.

Of course, despite all of these bookish pursuits, I only finished one book - on the plane home! – the amusing tale of how a clever conman latches on to an unscrupulous millionaire and teaches him some lessons in humility (and frustration): An African Millionaire: Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay by Grant Allen (who wrote one of my favourite reads this year, Miss Cayley's Adventures, also free at project gutenberg).

Finally, in the minus column, my laptop has died after a rapid and painful decline, so I have a backlog of about 30 million blog posts I want to comment on but can't until the replacement arrives. On the plus side, no one seems to have noticed that I'm writing this at work… Talk soon!

{review} the rowland sinclair series

Sulari Gentill A Decline in Prophets (2011) 

Sulari Gentill Miles Off Course (2012) 

Sulari Gentill Paving the New Road (2012)

Rowland Sinclair, Milton Isaacs and Clyde Watson Jones lined up at the foot of her bed, all leaning against the rail as they asked about her health. Annie Besant regarded them warmly. It was a particularly Australian habit, she observed - to lean. Australian men seem to lean whenever possible - against walls, posts, chairs… Australians had the ability to relax in any company or circumstance - they would face Armageddon itself leaning casually on a fence.

Sulari Gentill's 'Rowland Sinclair' series goes from strength to strength. She is such a refreshing new voice in Australian crime writing: no brutalized female corpses; barely a hint of sex; lots of solid historical background (and some wonderful bits from old newspapers), memorable characters, classic locations, and a sprinkling of little historical and literary riddling to tease the reader. I reviewed her first book (A Few Right Thinking Men) here, and have recently devoured the next three in the series. 

The second in the series is A Decline in Prophets. I was wondering how Gentill would manage her large cast of regular characters, and a highlight of this book was how she took her time to flesh out the groups' dynamics. Their witty badinage is a delight. We discover our hero Rowly - semi-voluntarily exiled from Australia after his disastrous run-in with the New Guard - travelling in style on RMS Aquitania, along with a group of Theosophists (including Annie Besant), a hot-headed Catholic Bishop, various eligible young ladies, and - of course - his faithful coterie of Clyde the artist, Milt the Red poet, and Edna, sculptress and unattainable love of Rowly's life. The action shifts - with murders aplenty - from the luxuries of life onboard to New York (where Edna makes a hit with one Archie Leach) then back to Sydney. Mysterious pregnancies, mad prophets, ambiguous suicides, Masons, mortuary chapels, dodgy poetry, and lots of fun and games. Can the gang make it safely back to lovely Woollahra with a murderer hot in pursuit? And has Rowly pushed his conservative elder brother's tolerance of his Bohemian lifestyle too far this time? A Decline in Prophets won the 2012 Davitt Award for Best Adult Crime Novel by an Australian woman.

The third in the series, Miles Off Course, is, I think (and at the moment!), my favourite. It has such a wonderful Australian setting, moving from the sophisticated high life of the rich in the Blue Mountains to the harsh life of the stockmen who graze their animals in the 'High Country' of the Snowy Mountains. Rowly is sent by his brother Wilfred (a 'Mycroft', and one of my favourite characters - perhaps I relate to being the oldest sibling?) to track down a missing stockman. Harry Simpson is no ordinary stockman - an Aboriginal hand who grew up with the Sinclairs, he is far more than an employee to the Sinclair men. Rowly's stint roughing it in the High Country is more than welcome to him for other reasons: someone is gunning for him - could he be the next high-rolling victim of a spate of abductions? If the travelling snake circus doesn't get him first… This book also has the single best opening line I have read in the last decade. 

No 4., Paving the New Road, offers a change of scene for Rowly and his mates; it is also rather more brutal than its predecessors. It is quite an achievement on Gentill's part to create a veristic 'What If?' as she transports her gang of Bohemian Australian artists to Munich, 1933: "it was decided that they would pose as art dealers. Art was a language they could all speak." Rowly agrees to go to Germany to sabotage the plans of his old enemy Eric Campbell, the New Guard politician who would bring Fascism to Australia. Campbell is touring with members of the British Union of Fascists, whose members include the repellent Unity Mitford (with whom Rowly makes rather a hit). Along the way, Rowly also makes the acquaintance of a young blonde lady called Eva who works for a photographer and has a very secret boyfriend… Gentill does a lovely job manipulating people, events (and dates) to place her hero at the centre of an Australian-led fight against Fascism. There's a lot of humour in this book, despite the grim subject-matter and the knowledge of what is to come for the world. Where will Rowly and co. be in 1939? At the rate Gentill is producing these books, that won't be long! (Two incidental points: does "taught-haired" = tow-haired? And how freaky is it to discover someone you know has given his name to a character. My equilibrium is still awry.) 

If you liked this... for crime-loving history-nerds? It is hard to avoid comparison with Kerry Greenwood's 1920s' heroine Phryne Fisher, who is rich, strong-minded, and (er... unlike Rowly) not always a lady.

   

{misc.}

Dim image of dessert train (taken by over-sugared photographer 
with fear of taking photos of food in public and
accompanied by food photography disapproving friend.)

Well, I'm crazy insane busy in a why-did-I-do-this-when-I-could-be-reading-fun-books?-way. 'This' being a paper I am writing for a conference in early July. In Edinburgh. In Scotland (in case there is another Edinburgh somewhere). I haven't given a serious academic paper for so long. Years. Many, many years. Books for fun have certainly fallen by the wayside while I juggle too many things, including my day job which has nothing to do with my other lives.

And my reading plans? I do hope to read something for Beryl Bainbridge week. And I do hope that I will be able to wallow in frivolous reading during the horrific number of hours/days it will take me to get from Australia to Scotland (via - my reward! - Paris).

Anyway, I had a lovely bookish encounter the week before last when, on a quick jaunt from Adelaide to Sydney (primarily to use the university library, though I confess I also used a dessert train to sustain my endeavours), I was taken by a friend to hear Sulari Gentill speak at Sydney Writers' Festival. I had loved her debut historical crime novel, A Few Right Thinking Men {REVIEW}, and was pleased to find the author as quirky and amusing as her book. She was an excellent speaker 'in conversation' about how - and what - she writes. She also grows black truffles and studied both astrophysics and law at university. Afterwards I got to speak with her, while getting the next two books in the Rowland Sinclair series signed (always a thrill to have a signed copy, I think), and she was such a delight.

It is nice when a writer one admires turns out to be a lovely person as well. Incidentally, there was quite a bit of celebrity-spotting available at the festival. At the next signing booth was Dame Stella Rimington. The thrill! And, according to a passerby, Roddy Doyle was sitting next to us at lunch.

The Sulari Gentill books I bought (breaking the book-buying ban that has been in force to fund my 'holiday') were A Decline in Prophets and Miles Off Course (more info via the publisher). If only I had the time to read them...

 

{review} out of print

June Wright Murder in the Telephone Exchange ('First Novel Library No. 122'; London: Hutchinson & Co. n.d. [1948]).

This is probably the best 20 cents I've ever spent on a secondhand book (esp. as I just saw it here on amazon for US$62). Murder in the Telephone Exchange is  set during a long, hot Australian summer in the Melbourne Telephone Exchange in the late 1940s. The heroine is a telephonist on the 'boards' in the 'trunkroom' (long distance call switchboard) of the Exchange and the narrative is from her point of view and possesses the innocent unreliability of the narrator who cannot, yet, see everything.

I have seen girls, beaded with perspiration from hot apparatus, putting calls through every minute for hours on end during bad bush-fires and crises in Europe and the Pacific, until they collapsed from sheer nervous exhaustion. I know that strained concentration which is needed to complete connections, with half a dozen lines under your tense fingers, that must not make mistakes.

But is the narrator really so innocent? And what is going on in the telephone exchange? Who is listening in? Who is rifling the lockers? Who whacked the prying busybody supervisor over the head with a 'buttinsky'? Who is picking off the telephonists one by one? What's the connection with national security? Will the heroine find love with the freckled basketball-loving Sergeant? Why is everyone called John?

The author worked in an exchange (the book is dedicated to its employees) and the details lend an authentic air to this tale of the 'inside job'. The atmosphere of growing, claustrophobic fear is spot on, especially as the body count grows. It's a first novel (it won a competition with the prize being publication) and suffers from being a bit over-complicated. The dialogue is a tad hysterical:

"You fool, you hopeless little fool," he continued, gripping my arm. "Don't you realize that you may be holding in that silly brain of yours some half-forgotten fact that may make your life a danger to this inhuman creature?"

This isn't a great book, but it does grip the reader and, in its way, it's a lovely piece of Melbourne social history. There's more here on crime fiction in Melbourne and more on June Wright here.

Rating: 5/10

If you liked this... maybe some less innocent portraits of Australia: 

• 1920s Sydney/N.S.W.: D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (1923);
• 1930s Sydney: Sulari Gentill, A Few Right Thinking Men (2010) - review here;
• 1940s wartime Sydney: Dymphna Cusack and Florence James Come in Spinner (1951);
• 1950s Sydney: Madeleine St John's The Women in Black (1993);
• and Kerry Greenwood does a nice recreation of Melbourne in the 1920s in the Phryne Fisher mysteries.

{review} a few right thinking men

Sulari Genill A Few Right Thinking Men (2010)

I'm lucky enough to have been given a signed copy of Sulari Gentill's A Few Right Thinking Men by a friend. I thoroughly enjoyed this book - and why wouldn't I? It's set in my favourite era, it's a crime novel, it's Australian, it's well written and well-researched and it opens a fascinating window into Sydney society of the 1930s. I kept wishing that I'd thought of it!

The hero is Rowland Sinclair, wealthy man-about-town who really just wants to live for his art and forget his social responsibilities. He has thrown his Woollhara mansion open to his poor artist friends - including the talented sculptress for whom he holds a torch - and the group of friends sets out to solve the mystery behind the murder of Rowland's uncle. Was the crime related to Rowland senior's financial interest in a gambling hell? What do the Communists and their opponents the "right thinking men" of the Old and the New Guards have to do with the crime? The narrative travels from Sydney to country New South Wales (amid the "Bunyip aristocracy", a lovely phrase) before culminating in the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the so-called "iron lung" of Depression Sydney. Gentill has picked a very interesting period on which to base her narrative and the historical underpinnings are deftly handed and well explained. It is quite unbelievable how close the New South Wales' Labor government under Jack Lang came to revolution in this era. 

The strength of the setting and characterisation was a happy thing, since the solution to the mystery was not difficult to unmask. One other tiny quibble: this book is quite coy about sex. Maybe I should consider that just a refreshing change (!), but I never got the impression that Rowland, who is such a capable (and right-thinking) man, was particularly passionate. Nevertheless, I loved all the characters and am thoroughly looking forward to the sequel where Gentill can push forward with their development.

Rating: 7/10

If you liked this... I want to re-read D.H. Lawrence's Kangaroo (1923), another novel concerned with Sydney's nationalistic politicking.

I've already posted this image, but it's so lovely here it is again:

"The Bridge in-curve" (1930) 

Grace Cossington Smith (1892-1984) 

from the National Gallery of Victoria.