A History of Silence
by Lloyd Jones 2013 (Text)

The Luminaries
by Eleanor Catton 2013 (Granta)

Coal Creek
by Alex Miller 2013 (Allen & Unwin)

 Reviews by Jim Morgan

 

Unenchanted

The first work I ever read by Lloyd Jones was his brilliant The Book of Fame, a novel about the 1905 triumphant tour of the British Isles by the New Zealand All Blacks in which they lost only one game —  to Wales, involving a dubious decision by  a referee against a NZ try.

I loved this book and its celebration of its team of rural heroes conquering the world of rugby union over a century ago. Jones supplies a mass of detail, showing wonder, idiosyncratic human behaviour in glory, loneliness and mateship.

Since this enchanting book about a game, Jones has published regularly, his best-known book being Mister Pip (a multi-prize winner but pipped at the post for the Booker) about a girl’s life-changing teaching by a mysterious schoolteacher in war-torn Bougainville who takes charge, reading Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations to a swelling crowd of awestruck islanders. (It has recently been filmed, unenthusiastically received by David and Margaret.)

I must say I failed to succumb to the celebrated charm of this book, one of a few in a long life of obsessive reading I didn’t actually finish.

His new non-fiction book is A History of Silence, which starts in Christchurch after the 2011 earthquake and becomes a personal excavation. Now I have to say that I am again unenchanted — this time by Jones’s grab bag of stories that allows him in this instance to pursue a sad family background rather than the devastation of Christchurch in which he soon loses interest.

Whereas I, having spent six hours in the last week in the skilled hands of my dentist — ex-Vic captain and manager of the Australian women’s cricket team which was actually stranded over there by that earthquake of 22 February 2011 — remain spellbound by the detail of the city’s destruction.

And I enjoyed Jones’ 2004 novel, Paint Your Wife (to be reissued next year).

 

Getting my goat

To go with my somewhat dismissive glance at A History of Silence, I cannot resist putting a first impression of a current blockbuster that can claim some place alongside the work of Karl Ove Nausgaard’s Min Kamp — the recent winner of the Booker Prize, The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton, in all its full glory of 832 pages, if nothing else.

As yet unfinished by me, and likely to remain so, once I had put my jaundiced finger on what was, if not getting my goat, reminding me of the much-thumbed volume of Kane and Abel in the back lavatory of the old Arts and Crafts weatherboard house at Lorne.

It didn’t matter where it was open — Jeffrey Archer had succeeded in making the book that sold I don’t know how many copies totally unputdownable, simply enough, by his identification of every move of the brothers by, say, a physical description of the colour of a piece of furniture. So does Eleanor Catton in the disposition of her gentlemen by the stoking of each man’s pipe (just as current TV epochs focus in on the now gone rituals of cigarette smoking) and their imposing nomenclature by which many of her gold-mining characters adrift in mid-C19 New Zealand, in the American fashion, bear sort of double surnames such as Crosbie Wells and Emery Staines etc etc.

So far the rare females who are about the diggings are no better than you would imagine, of easy virtue yet captivating. The men are a self-consciously canny but immature bunch, obsessed with the affairs of the diggings and the maritime complications of the passage of goods and chattels between NZ and London or Melbourne, in itself not so fascinating a subject.

But I will choose to be circumspect and reserve my judgment until I’ve finished The Luminaries, like the Booker judges, now choosing to talk about the new novel by the ever award-winning Alex Miller.

 

Highly romantic

Coal Creek is a beautifully compiled tale of a young uneducated Central Queensland stockman and his pure love for a young girl, scarcely in puberty as she is. Yet what is between them stands in sharp contrast to the other relationships described in this moving account that can only end in death and disaster.

Bobby Blue, the central character, stockman (and fleetingly policeman) knows the stone country and its canny steeds such as his mount, Mother, and the animal and bird-life, like they are his family. Through stupidity and prurience, especially of his boss’s wife, Bobby becomes the victim of a Shakespearean denouement of death and destruction, the reader led through and to this denouement without a false note.

This is a great tale of young love, set in the authentic detail of a much-loved countryside, to read and put alongside R.D. Blackmore’s 1869 Lorna Doone, a book that, in early adolescence, gave me a highly romantic slant on life, one that I have never regretted or abandoned.

 

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Guest reviewer, James Waite Morgan , ex-pastoralist and novelist : Parakeet, Loving Helen, The Artist’s Wife, Fat of the Land — is the biographer of his grandparents, S.A. men in The Premier and the Pastoralist.