Angela Savage's blog

‘I felt guilty but I still put my art and my life in front of my family.’

So says artist John Wolseley of his decision to leave England and his two small sons to move to Australia to paint (GoodWeekend, May 5, 2012). Suddenly I don’t feel so bad about putting my daughter in child care one day a week when she was four months old so I could return to writing fiction.

I note Wolseley’s son Will says in the same interview, ‘I don’t know why [Dad] feels so guilty; I was fine [growing up].’

But I wonder why some artists feel they must choose between art and family, to put one in front of the other rather than allowing them to coexist, side by side.

Alexandra Styron in her memoir Reading My Father says her father author William Styron ‘consecrated himself to the Novel’ at the expense of everything else, including his children.

French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas suggested, ‘There is love and there is art, but we have only one heart’. Probably a good thing he remained a bachelor.

I became a published author at the same time I became a parent, editing the galley proofs of my first novel while my three-week-old daughter Natasha slept on my lap. The timing forced me to confront head-on the challenges of being both a writer and mother. And while I do find the balancing act a challenge, at no point have I ever felt there wasn’t enough room in my heart for both love and art, for my partner and our daughter as well as my writing.

My problem is not lack of heart, but lack of time.

Virginia Woolf observed in 1928, ‘A woman needs money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ If that woman is a mother, I suggest she also needs a supportive partner and excellent time management skills.

It’s only with discipline, planning, organisation and a supportive partner (also a writer) that I manage to combine art and family. I’ve even learned to embrace routine after resisting it for decades because I can’t earn a living, write and be a mother without it.

Discipline, planning, organisation, routine. Not traits normally associated with the free-spirited life of an artist. Perhaps that’s what puts men like Wolseley and Degas off.

That said, most days end with me wishing I’d spent more time with my daughter. And more time writing.  I often wonder if the degree of selfishness needed to be a good, at least productive writer is incompatible with the selflessness needed to be a good, at least attentive mother.

You know those quizzes where they ask what talent would you most like to have? My answer would be the ability to bi-locate, to be in more than one place at a time. This gift was allegedly possessed by twelfth century Flemish Saint Drogo, who was seen simultaneously attending mass and working the fields.

Needless to say, if I had the ability to bi-locate I’d do neither of those things. I’d spend time with the people I love, and time writing.

Being a writer and a mother, I feel stretched, tired, at times conflicted. What I don’t feel is guilty. While the great balancing act can be exhausting, it’s also exhilarating. And if not now, I believe one day my daughter will understand that being a writer makes me a better mother–and much less demanding of her.

Recently I asked now six-year-old Natasha what she thought about having a mummy and daddy who write books.

‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘Books are full of information and you get to use your imagination.’

(Such a perfect response, I forgave her for miming a rainbow over her head when she said ‘imagination’ in reference to Spongebob Squarepants).

Do you have any thoughts or tips on combining art and family?

‘Everyone is hooked on something,’ says the back cover blurb of Annie Hauxwell’s debut novel In Her Blood. I quickly became hooked on this novel.

That said, I don’t believe the back cover blurb does it justice. Hauxwell herself offers a more compelling synopsis in an author Q&A on the Penguin website:

‘Catherine Berlin, an investigator with a financial regulator, finds the almost-headless body of her informant in a shallow reach of the Thames. The death is linked to Berlin’s investigation of a local loan shark, and her unorthodox methods are blamed for the death. It looks as though she’ll pay only with her job, but then on a routine trip to her GP, who prescribes heroin to long-term addicts, she stumbles across a second body and is implicated in that murder, too.

‘Berlin has seven stolen days of clarity in which to solve the crime – and find a new supplier.’

Catherine Berlin is the star of this book. In Berlin, Hauxwell pulls off the almost unthinkable, creating a sympathetic though unsentimental character who is by her own admission a career junkie.

Her transition from recreational user to career junkie had been seamless and unremarkable. It wasn’t until her usual connection failed and she was seized with blind panic, that she realised a relationship she had regarded as casual was now serious.

Berlin is a high functioning addict, holding down a job and a flat, seeking justice for her dead informant. But Hauxwell never allows the reader to forget the predominance of heroin in Berlin’s life. The novel is divided into sections called ‘The First Day’, ‘The Second Day’, etc, based on the number of ampoules of pharmaceutical-grade heroin Berlin has in her possession before her supply runs out. And we get to see how her decisions are shaped by her addiction, and the sometimes shocking way she prioritises access to the drug above all else.

I had my biases about illegal drugs and drug users challenged years some ago when I worked in HIV/AIDS prevention. While some readers may struggle with Berlin’s character, to me she’s entirely credible: I found anti-drugs crusader Daryl Bonnington harder to believe.

Still, there’s a lot to like in this book. The London setting is bleak, corrupt and unfriendly – commensurate with my limited experience of the place – a city in decay due to the global economic downturn. In this context, loan sharks prosper and Hauxwell effectively provides readers with instructions on how to set up a successful loan shark business – assuming they have the stomach for it – through the character of Archie Doyle aka ‘Oily Doyley’, the subject of Berlin’s investigation.

The writing is sharp and suspenseful, the plot engaging, the characters enthralling. I’m hooked on Annie Hauxwell and hanging out for my next fix.

In Her Blood by Annie Hauxwell is published by Penguin.

‘Payday Loans’ Discussion Paper
The Australian Government is inviting feedback on the Strategies for reducing reliance on high-cost, short-term, small amount lending Discussion Paper. Submissions close Monday 4 June 2012. More information is at the Treasury website.

Despite Indonesia’s proximity and its intense, at times turbulent relationship with Australia, relatively few Australian novels are set there, with the notable exception of Christopher Koch’s 1978 award winning The Year of Living Dangerously [made into one of my all-time favourite movies by Peter Weir].

Is this because, as the Australian character in Ruby J Murray’s Running Dogs suggests, when it comes to Jakarta, let alone the whole country, ‘Looking to see the city for what it was, its actual scale, required too much from her’?

Murray, who has spent significant time in Indonesia, rises to the challenge, producing in Running Dogs a complex and engaging debut novel that brings Indonesia to life without trying to explain it.

The story moves between the end of President Suharto’s 31 year rule in 1997-98, and the present day. The 1990s story is told by the Jordan children, Petra and Isaak, whose Indonesian mother has died, leaving them with a wealthy, brutal American father, his damaged second wife, a younger half-brother Paul, and the nanny Mbak Nana.

The present day narrator is Diana, an Australian who accepts an aid posting to Jakarta in the hope of reconnecting with Petra, whom she’d befriended six years earlier in Melbourne. Reunited with Petra and introduced to her brothers, Diana becomes more than a spectator in the unravelling of a family whose obscene wealth and privilege may protect them from justice but not from revenge.

A violent denouement is prefigured in the opening—a body in a hotel room with a bullet in the head—but the narrative is neither linear nor predictable. We are plunged into streets teaming with anti-Suharto protestors, and shipped to luxurious private islands. We accompany Diana on a disastrous donor tour to an orphanage, and Petra to an equally cringe-worthy fancy dress party where her stepmother is complimented for the ‘nice gesture’ of dressing the children as Indonesians.

Moments of wry humour combine with finely observed detail to light up the text like ‘sun caught on the burnished sides of the keoprak tins in the early evening.’

‘Jakarta beat me,’ Diana laments towards the end of Running Dogs. ‘Jakarta is much older than you are,’ her Indonesian friend counters. ‘Jakarta knows things we don’t know.’

Murray’s novel is a welcome opportunity to get to know Jakarta a little better.

An edited version of this review appeared in Readings Monthly May 2012, together with a Q&A with Ruby J Murray.

(c) Mary Boukouvalas

It started with Steve Earle‘s one man show at The Corner Hotel in Melbourne. Steve introduced one instrument he was playing as the bouzouki. ‘It’s a Greek instrument,’ he said, ‘but I play it Irish-style. The Irish have a long tradition of picking up whatever instruments wash up on their shores and playing them better than where they came from.’

Steve went on to play a number of Irish-style songs in his set, including Dixieland, a song about a Kilrain Fenian from County Clare who fled Ireland for America and ended up fighting with the 20th Maine regiment at Gettysburg — one of an estimated 150,000 Irishmen who fought in the Union army.

I am Kilrain of the 20th Maine and did I tell you friend I’m a fightin’ man/
And I’ll not be back this way again, ‘cause we’re all goin’ down to Dixieland.

The sad postscript to ‘Dixieland’ is that many Irish heroes of the American Civil War returned home to the same prejudice, poverty and unemployment that saw them drafted into military service in the first place.

I’m crediting Steve Earle with kicking off a week for me where everything seemed to have a touch of the Irish.

The night after the gig, we happened to watch ‘Nights in Ballygran’, Episode 5, Season 1 of  Boardwalk Empire, set on the eve of St Patrick’s Day in 1920. Boardwalk Empire, our current HBO series of choice, is set in Atlantic City during Prohibition and centres on gangster-politician Enoch ‘Nucky’ Thompson, played with equal parts charisma and repugnance by Steve Buscemi. ‘Nights in Ballygran’, my favourite episode to date, sees Nucky reluctantly organising a dinner to celebrate what he refers to as the annual festival of ‘crying, arguing, and public drunkenness’. At one point the little people he employs threaten to go on strike unless they’re paid more for the indignity of dressing up as leprechauns at the dinner. Nucky responds by cutting a deal with their chief negotiator.

For all his wealth and power, I doubt Nucky Thompson could have cut a deal with Bobby Sands and his fellow political prisoners, whose story is brought to the screen in Steve McQueen’s excellent 2008 film Hunger, which we watched the following night. Sands and nine other IRA inmates starved themselves to death in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison in 1981 in protest against the Thatcher government’s insistence in treating them as common criminals rather than political prisoners. I remember the hunger strikes vividly — I was 15 in 1981 — though I wasn’t aware that prisoners were ‘on the blanket’ for several years beforehand, wearing blankets instead of prison uniforms and smearing their cells with excrement when prison guards refused to allow them to use the toilet.

Hunger is simply one of the best films I have seen in a long time, and not just because it stars my latest crush Michael Fassbender as Sands. As my astute partner Andrew Nette writes in his review on Pulp Curry, it is a blistering film made with remarkable restraint: ‘Fassbender’s depiction of Sands is nothing short of astonishing, given that the meat of the character hangs on just one scene in the 96-minute film, a conversation between Sands and a sympathetic priest.’ I later read that the 17 minute scene in question was shot in one continuous take on the fourth attempt — apparently a world record for a single take on film. A significant portion of the rest of the film has no dialogue at all, serving as an object lesson for writers in the art of ‘show, don’t tell.’

McQueen’s is only the third English language film made about Bobby Sands and the Maze Prison hunger strikes, though I know of at least ten songs written on the subject. The one I remember growing up was ‘The Ballad of Joe McDonnell’, performed by the Wolfe Tones, about the fifth of the hunger strikers to die.

And you dare to call me a terrorist
While you look down your gun
When I think of all the deeds that you have done
You have plundered many nations, divided many lands
You have terrorized their peoples, you rule with an iron hand
And you brought this reign of terror to my land.

It was ultimately with music that my Irish week came to a climax with The Pogues in concert at Festival Hall on 4 April 2012.

It’s been two decades since they last (dis)graced our shores and rumours circulated for months about whether the original Pogues line-up would make it — specifically whether lead singer/songwriter/drunken Irish poet Shane MacGowan would be there and, if he was, whether he’d be upright/sober/coherent as distinct from his last visit.

I felt the crowd at Festival Hall holding its collective breath as the band filed out. Shane had made it, though he shuffled like an old man. When he opened his mouth to speak, he was unintelligible. But then he sang — ‘Streams of Whiskey’ for starters — and was transformed. As @jpevans12 on Twitter said, ‘Like his talking brain is fried but his singing brain’s still there. He even remembered the words.’

And Shane’s words are worth remembering.

So drunk to hell I left the place
Sometimes crawling sometimes walking
A hungry sound came across the breeze
So I gave the walls a talking
And I heard the sounds of long ago
From the old canal
And the birds were whistling in the trees
Where the wind was gently laughing
(A Pair of Brown Eyes, 1985)

Here’s what my learned friend Tim Shaw, who also saw The Pogues that night in Melbourne, has to say about Shane MacGowan’s song writing.

“With the exception of the works of Turlough O’Carolan, many of the great Irish ballads were never attributed to a writer. It’s as if these songs had always existed and came from the very core of the universe itself.

“To maintain its karmic balance, the universe found Shane and gave him a direct link to essence of the cosmos so that he could continue the work of those anonymous bards.

“This can be the only explanation for why Shane’s melodies are simultaneously traditional yet original and why his lyrics can beautify a gritty, post-industrial setting with timeless longing.

“Van Morrison has been allowed, on occassion, to briefly enter the little room that holds the secret to our humanity. Shane never has to knock.”

All these touches of the Irish, they lead to this same little room with its fleeting whispers of the secret to our humanity. I cannot catch it all. But with each touch, I become more determined to keep listening.

For Catherine Norah Josephine & Dimity Jane of the Pogues Posse, with special thanks to Tim Shaw.

Wendy James’ fifth book The Mistake was released to critical acclaim in March this year. Her first novel, Out of the Silence, won the 2006 Ned Kelly Award for Best First Book, making her one of only five women to win in that category since 1996. Though set over 100 years apart, the two books share common themes of how women’s choices and aspirations, particularly with respect to motherhood, are shaped by class and gender politics.

I had the pleasure of meeting Wendy at She Kilda in 2011. I admitted to not having heard of her nor read her books and was surprised when she told me about the Ned Kelly Award. In my defence I gave birth to my daughter the year Out of the Silence was published, entering a black hole with respect to reading that took the better part of two years to emerge from. But I also wondered whether Wendy’s debut novel had been given the attention it deserved.

When the chance came up to review a couple of crime novels for Radio National last month, I put a call out to see whether any Sisters in Crime had new releases due out around then. Wendy alerted me to The Mistake, which I read and subsequently raved about on the radio and internet. I was inspired to bump Out of the Silence up to the top of my reading pile, though baffled when I could only buy it second-hand, on-line from overseas. How is an award winning novel barely seven years old allowed to go out of print — or at the very least not available as an ebook? For that matter, as a history of the suffragette movement cleverly packaged as a crime novel, why isn’t Out of the Silence on the school curriculum?

Apparently if The Mistake does well, Out of the Silence may be re-released. Given the great reviews for The Mistake, here’s hoping that’s the case.

Meanwhile, Wendy kindly agreed to be interviewed for this blog, indulging my interest in and admiration for her and her books.

Out of the Silence mixes characters from real life — like feminist suffragette Vida Goldstein and working-class country girl Maggie Heffernan — with fiction, producing a novel that is compelling and informative. How did you come across these characters?

I’d read about Maggie Heffernan in books and articles about 19th century Australian women’s history. Her story has been written about fairly frequently; it’s almost a case study. I’d read about Goldstein in other contexts as well, because of her work for the suffrage and also as a pacifist, but the unexpected connection between these two veery different women was immediately exciting. So many things that interest me about the nineteenth century (and ours, too) — in particular issues surrounding class and gender — could be explored using a compelling real life story.

You refer to the Lindy Chamberlain case in The Mistake in exposing the media’s role in shaping public opinion. Were there any other real life cases or characters that inspired the novel?

The novel’s initial inspiration came from the story of Keli Lane, the water-polo champion who was recently convicted of murdering her infant daughter, Tegan. Tegan hasn’t been seen since she was discharged from hospital with her mother in 1996, and despite extensive police searches, authorities have been unable to locate her. Lane  herself  maintained throughout the period of investigation (though her story changed) that the child had been adopted out unofficially. The case is certainly sensational, but it was the attitude of some media — including various internet sites — that really struck me.  The focus was all on Lane’s perceived “character” — promiscuous, secretive, ambitious, a liar — rather than the available, and completely circumstantial, evidence. Like Chamberlain before her, Keli Lane was found guilty in the court of public opinion even before she went to trial.

I was also very interested in the way the media and the internet treated the parents of Madeleine McCann, the child who was abducted from a Portuguese hotel room a few years back now. The McCanns came under a certain amount of suspicion, as well as a great deal of criticism, not only for leaving their children unattended, but for their subsequent behaviour. Kate McCann, her mother, in particular, was treated very badly for not behaving as a griving mother is supposed to behave — she was too cool, too composed for people’s liking. The Booker Prize winning author Anne Enright even wrote a piece for the London Review of Books called ‘Disliking the McCanns’ which was pretty shocking. It’s hard to summarise, but it was clear that her dislike for them, for pretty spurious reasons — looks, speech, religious beliefs, perceived attitudes — drove her suspicions. It was very cold-blooded, and very unsympathetic. It left a rather nasty taste in my mouth. Lindy Chamberlain was appalled by this very obvious media bloodlust — seeing parallels with her own situation — and came out publicly in Kate McCann’s defence.

Both Out of the Silence and The Mistake have plots involving missing, possibly dead babies. Disturbing themes, especially for anyone who’s a parent. As a mother of four, are these themes about giving voice to your deepest fears or exorcising murderous fantasies?

Maybe both? No, I expect it was partly giving voice to very deep fears, but really my own experience of motherhood has been one of relative ease (and pleasure, too, I have to add!). I had a roof over my head, a partner, enough money to survive, I could still work and study, I wasn’t some sort of social pariah. I was interested in was looking at how much harder it would be to love and nurture and protect a child if all that physical, emotional and social scaffolding wasn’t in place… What happens to the maternal instinct if there’s nobody looking after the mother?

While Out of the Silence is set at the turn of the twentieth century and The Mistake over one hundred years later, both books have central female characters — Maggie Heffernan and Jodie Garrow respectively — with simple aspirations to be a wives and mothers. Both are sympathetic characters, though you inflict terrible anguish on them. Are you subconsciously punishing them for their pedestrian aspirations?

Not at all! I hope by the end of The Mistake, Jodie’s aspirations are explicable — that her background explains her desires. I’d like to think I’ve challenged these sorts of assumptions — what’s wrong with a family and community oriented life, anyway? Maggie’s different, of course, she didn’t ever have the sort of opportunities that someone like Jodie had — her choices were limited because of her class and sex : marriage and family, with a fair bit of domestic drudgery thrown in; or low paid domestic drudgery for someone else.

The Mistake has lawyers, criminals, a trial by media, an inquest and assorted criminal activity, but it’s not a police procedural or a detective story. Do you think of it as a crime novel?

I’ve been wondering about this a bit myself… I think that The Mistake, like both Out of the Silence and Where Have you Been, is essentially a crime novel, if you regard a crime novel as being simply a novel where the narrative focus is on a crime. Perhaps the narrative emphasis is slightly different to what’s expected in the genre – in that it’s not so much the revelation or solution to the crime that’s the central thing (though this is still crucial), but the consequences of the crime itself on the family and the suspected perpetrator.

Buy The Mistake here and Out of the Silence here.

The Children’s Book Festival is aptly named, being a celebration of children’s books and in the tradition of all good festivals, having so much on offer as to make it impossible to do justice to it all.

When I read out the festival program to my six-year-old and asked her whom she most wanted to see, without hesitation she nominated Sally Rippin, author of the Billie B Brown books.

I was happy about that, being a Sally Rippin fan myself. Given some of the inane, poorly written fiction targeted at young girls, Billie B Brown is a breath of fresh air: well written stories with a feisty heroine at the centre who might well be my daughter’s peer.

Perhaps it was no surprise then to hear Sally Rippin describe how Billie B was inspired by her own childhood as a ‘bossy older sister’. Billie B Brown – The Beautiful Haircut, for example, was based on Sally’s own experience of cutting off her younger sister’s pigtails. The moral of the story, she told her audience was, ‘when you play hairdressers, don’t use real scissors.’

We saw Sally as part of a Meet the Author session in Queen’s Hall at the State Library of Victoria (where I last visited for a very fun photo shoot). Sally talked about how the character of Billie B developed as a combination of her experience and the imagination of illustrator Aki Fukuoka, who has been known to look and dress like Billie. I like that Billie is named in part for Billie Holiday.

Sally read Billie B Brown and the Copycat Kid to her rapt audience, before adjourning to the Readings Signing Tent, at which point I realised what a rock star welcome awaited the children’s authors. I lined up (willingly) for 35 minutes in front of the State Library to get some Billie B books signed, while my daughter and her best friend, accompanied by the latter’s father, had their faces painted and visited the petting zoo around the corner in Little Lonsdale Street. As luck would have it, I reached the top of the queue at the right time for the girls to be free to meet Sally — a highlight of the day.

Meanwhile, the signing queue for Andy Griffiths had grown like Jack’s beanstalk before the author had even left the building. As writer Fran Cusworth tweeted, ‘Anyone who thinks kids aren’t reading hasn’t seen the 5,889,556m queue to get Andy Griffiths’ autograph at kids’ book fest.’

I gave our girls a choice between another author talk and an illustrator’s workshop and they chose the latter, which found us in Anna Pignataro‘s wonderful world of fairies, rabbits and glitter. Again I was impressed with how much respect and patience children’s authors and illustrators show their fans as we crafted up a storm of bunnies, wands and tiaras.

As Anna’s workshop was coming to an end, Bernard Caleo (full disclosure: close personal friend) arrived for a story telling session using his amazing kamishibai story box; and although my six-year-old and her friend were shattered by then, both were intrigued enough to stay for the opening and might’ve stayed for the duration if not for their flagging energy levels.

A word to the organisers for next year: load the morning sessions with stuff for 3-6 year olds, because that’s when they peak. Advertise cool stuff — like Bernard Caleo’s comic strip workshops — expressly for older kids in the afternoon.

I would’ve loved to have seen/met Graeme Base and Alison Lester, two of my favourite Australian author/illustrators. But clearly the 1:1 ratio of adults to children we had this year for the Children’s Book Festival was not enough. Next year I’ll aim for a 2:1 ratio in the adults’ favour and see if I can get to more author events.

Kudos and thanks to The Wheeler Centre and the State Library of Victoria for another excellent event.

The Wreckage is an explosive thriller, stylish and pacy, with the sort of literary flourishes I don’t often encounter in this genre – such as this one, which has stayed with me since I read it: “Kunther draws on his cigarette and exhales a stream of smoke that looks like his very spirit is escaping from his chest.”

I read after the fact that events in The Wreckage are based on a true story and I tip my hat to Michael Robotham for pulling off a complex plot and a compelling read.

I came to The Wreckage and Michael Robotham on a circuitous route viaMurder in Mesopotamia and Agatha Christie. I was interested in reading crime novels set in ancient Mesopotamia/modern day Iraq. Though on the surface these books appear to have little in common, in fact both draw on historically contingent, popular perceptions of this part of the world.

When Christie published her novel in 1936, Iraq was all about the treasures being unearthed in archeological digs. Murder in Mesopotamia is set on a dig, although most of the action takes place in the claustrophobic setting of the expedition house at Tell Yarimjah and other than the house boy, Abdullah, the locals hardly rate a mention.

The Wreckage was published in 2011, when Iraq is all about terrorism, corruption and money laundering – although its ancient history is acknowledged in the words of General al-Uzri: “This country is old. My ancestors created writing and philosophy and religion when yours were painting drawings on rock walls. This was the cradle of civilisation, but still you treat us like savages and barbarians.”

More Iraqis feature in Robotham’s work than in Christie’s, including some nuanced and sympathetic characters. And although both books play to popular stereotypes of the country and its people, I appreciate Robotham’s attempts to provide insight into how people live and think in a part of the world so poorly understood.

I’ve barely made reference to the plot, which takes readers from Baghdad to London and involves missing millions in US aid, a missing British banker, a couple of grifters, disaffected Pakistani immigrants, a hit man, an Arabic-speaking freelance journalist, forensic auditor, and a very pregnant woman. I was impressed to learn that ex-cop Vincent Ruiz, a key player in this maelstrom, is a regular fixture in Robotham’s novels as I didn’t feel at all left out reading about him here for the first time. More kudos to Robotham for pulling that off.

I read crime fiction for the politics, pace, sense of place and characters, and The Wreckage delivers on all my key criteria.

In celebration of International Women’s Day 2012 I’d like to honour Murasaki Shikibu, the woman believed to be the world’s first novelist.

Murasaki Shikibu wrote her novel The Tale of Genji in the eleventh century between about 1000-1012. To put this in perspective, the earliest of contenders for the first novel written in English, Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, was written around 1470 and published in 1485.

The Tale of Genji is a romance written over a decade in 54 chapters; the English translation runs to 1,100 pages. Prior to The Tale of Genji, most prose was limited to folk tales and poems.  Murasaki Shikibu’s work was something new, with a complex plot and character development.

Murasaki Shikibu — ‘Lady Murasaki’ — is believed to be a nickname. The author’s real name might have been Fujiwara Takako but we’ll never know for sure as it was not the custom at the time to record women’s names. Women were also traditionally excluded from learning to write Chinese, then the language of government in Japan. But Lady Murasaki’s scholar father allowed her to learn alongside her brother, whom she outperformed, prompting her father to lament, ”If only you were a boy, how happy I should be!” (see The Women in World History).

Married in her early twenties to a much older relative, Lady Murasaki gave birth to her only child, a daughter, and was widowed within three years. It is believed she was subsequently brought to the imperial Japanese court as a lady-in-waiting on the basis of her intellect and talent for writing.

During the Heian period (794-1185) when The Tale of Genji was written and set, an upper class woman was seldom seen by men beyond her family and husband, and husbands and wives maintained separate households. According to the Tale of Genji website, women ‘spent much of their adult life in dark rooms, hidden behind an array of screens blinds and fans…[To] avoid the tedium of life at home, the only real option was to enter court service as a lady-in-waiting for the empress or another royal concubine. Ladies-in-waiting were free to pursue amorous liaisons with the gentlemen at court, which provides the setting for much of the first part of the Tale.’

Floor-length hair, whitened skin and blackened teeth were the height of fashion, but a woman’s dress sense, calligraphy skills and talent for poetry were what made her most attractive as a lover.

Merry-go-round and swings I guess.

The Tale of Genji was inspired by Lady Murasaki’s experience of court life. The central character Genji, the ‘shining prince’, is perhaps the author’s idea of a perfect man, one who always sends a ‘morning after’ poem and who continues to care for his former lovers even after the passion has died. In addition to romance, there is travel, tragedy and encounters with the supernatural. The novel was designed to be read aloud and was hugely popular in its day, shot through with observations about the pursuits and attitudes of the aristocratic classes.

It seems that from the first, women wrote to improve their world and read to escape from it.

I chanced upon Murasaki Shikibu credited as ‘The First Novelist’ in of all things the children’s encyclopaedia my six-year-old daughter was leafing through over breakfast this morning. With all the depressing talk of VIDA statistics and gender bias in literary reviews and awards, I’m thrilled to think the world owes the modern novel form to a Japanese woman.

The Tale of Genji is available on Amazon.

Comeback is the 35^th novel Peter Corris has written featuring Sydney-based PI Cliff Hardy since the first, The Dying Trade, was published in 1980. There are also two collections of short stories, ‘Cliff Hardy Cases’.

Comeback opens with a quote from British boxer Alan ‘Boom’ Minter: ‘A boxer makes a comeback for two reasons: either he’s broke or he needs the money.’

The same cannot be said of Corris, a full-time and prolific writer since 1982, known as ‘the godfather of Australian crime fiction’.

In Comeback, Cliff Hardy gets his PI licence reinstated and sets himself up in a new warehouse conversion office in Pyrmont. He is employed by young actor Bobby Forrest who is being stalked by a woman he met on the internet, the woman threatening to harm his girlfriend, Jane. Hardy muses, ‘It was a reversal of the usual stalker scenario, but what could I expect? It was the twenty-first century and we had climate change, an unwinnable war supported by both sides of politics, a minority government and a female prime minister. Change was everywhere.’

When Bobby is killed, shot by someone driving a white Commodore, Hardy is employed by the actor’s father, a former client, to find out who is responsible. The more Hardy investigates, the more possible candidates he exposes—from a Fijian-Indian sex worker, to the kick-boxing standover man of a local high-profile businessman, to a former actor with a grudge—all of whom seem to drive white Commodores.

Reading Cliff Hardy novels is like sitting down with a favourite uncle in a pub and getting him to tell his best stories over a few beers. Corris, like the character he has been writing for over 30 years, has still got it. He knows how to spin a good yarn, seldom stretching it out, keep it fast-paced and tight—though there’s a different energy in Comeback compared with the earlier Cliff Hardy novels. Less violence. Fewer rhetorical flourishes—not that there were many to begin with. There’s the usual political commentary, digs about Melbourne, short-lived bursts of introspection. But Corris keeps it real with Hardy, who must be pushing sixty, and adjusts the pace accordingly.

Corris makes it look easy, and I once heard him say it took him only six weeks for him to write a Cliff Hardy novel. But there’s significant skill in developing a character over 35 outings while allowing readers to pick up any book in the series as a starting point. You don’t need to have read an earlier Cliff Hardy novel before picking up Comeback though, like me, it might make you want to go back and read some of the earlier ones. I’ve just finished reading A Marvellous Boy (1982) and watching the 1985 film version of the 1983 novel The Empty Beach with Bryan Brown as Hardy (see here for a great review of the film). And it’s left me wanting to read more. No problems there.

Corris is a master of the conventions of the genre. By contrast, The Mistake by Wendy James pushes the boundaries of the crime genre. Hear the podcast of my reviews of both books for Radio National Books and Arts Daily here.