Where ideas grow ~ Abbey's at 131 York Street Sydney is an Aladdin's cave for readers - and so much more than just the latest new releases. Digging into the back catalogues of writers and discovering the links between topics is exactly what our 'knowledge-seeker' customers love about Abbey's - it's a place where connections are explored and reading trails are followed. abbeys.com.au
Would you like to try a piece of really original writing? Something unusual? If so, read The Town by Shaun Prescott. This is a first novel from a short story writer and it is very successful. His work is being compared to Gerald Murnane, especially to The Plains. There is a carefully controlled voice of the narrator, a writer who has moved to a Central West country town in order to write a book about the disappearing towns of the outback. The voice is dry and flat like the surrounding countryside. Is it banal? Surely something will happen? Someone will rebel? Fatalistic for sure. The Lifted Brow is the small publisher responsible for this. Take a good look.
I’ve just finished reading Tim Winton’s deeply personal book The Boy Behind the Curtains. This is a wonderful book, brilliantly written, wise and mature. In some pieces he recalls accidents that happened to his family, in others he speaks about the landscape of Western Australia and in others he recalls the important part played by church-going in his adolescence, or a visit to the National Gallery of Victoria or the euphoria of surfing or swimming with whales or the strangeness of a winter living in the gatehouse of a derelict Irish castle. A fine book to give to a young person just awakening to the world. These autobiographical pieces are to be savoured one at a time. The Boy Behind the Curtain has recently won the Non-Fiction Prize at the Adelaide Festival. Tim has donated the $15,000 prize to the fund for the Ningaloo Reef, one of his environmental concerns.
Since then I have read Tim Winton’s latest book, a novel called The Shepherd’s Hut. This is a very different approach. Written in the voice of an angry, poorly educated young man who has been horribly abused by his father, it is a style I would usually not enjoy reading but there are intermittent gorgeous descriptions of the Western Australian landscape as the young man escapes from society. He stumbles across an old man, a priest who has been, for some reason, seemingly imprisoned on the edge of the huge, beautiful salt lake. Gradually, you come to understand that this is an allegory about the painful search for peace. Winton’s writing is never dull and always has some deeper meaning. The story will stay with you.
Fans of Julian Barnes will enjoy his latest novel The Only Story, which is the curiously unemotional tale of a long love affair between a very young man and an older married woman in the suburban wilds of Surrey, England. All very circumspect and polite. I found it odd and dispiriting but nonetheless thought-provoking.
I’ve been watching a three disc set of Evelyn Waugh’s fabulous novel Brideshead Revisited.So sad. So melancholy. But thirty or more years ago no-one rang a friend on Sunday night because everyone was watching Brideshead Revisited. The novel was a surprise departure from the famous satirical novels he had written in the thirties and described Charles Ryder’s infatuation with an aristocratic Anglo-Catholic family. It was first published in 1945 but the Popular Penguin edition which you can buy for $12.99 (who can complain about the price of books!) has some revisions made by Waugh and his Preface to the revised edition.
After Brideshead Revisited he went on to write some of best novels of the twentieth century, using his own experience as a not very successful soldier. Officers and Gentlemen, Men at Arms and Unconditional Surrender were put into one volume in 1965 under the title Sword of Honour. There is a special edition in Penguin Modern Classics as well as a Popular Penguin edition. At Abbey’s you can usually find the backlist titles from special authors so look out for Vile Bodies, Handful of Dust, Scoop and Put Out More Flags, all of which were first published in the thirties. Enjoy yourself. You can also find Waugh’s Complete Short Stories 1910-1962 as well as Work Suspended and Other Stories. To complete your pleasure look for Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited by Philip Eade. And what a life! Not an especially nice man but a wonderful writer with a wicked tongue.
Hogarth Press, the publishing company founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, has a new project: to have some of the plays by Shakespeare retold by current bestselling authors.
Shakespeare himself was not averse to borrowing stories and hopefully this idea will prompt readers to look again at the well-known plays. I’ve just finished my first one which is Anne Tyler’s retelling of The Taming of the Shrew called Vinegar Girl. My oh my! This is a perfect little book - well produced (just look at the front and back covers) and very amusing. I laughed out loud. It is about a strong-willed nursery school teacher who is pushed into the arms of the Russian assisting her demanding father in his long-term research. Father wants him to stay even though his residency permit is about to expire and Father can’t see why daughter Kate shouldn’t marry him in order to keep him in America. There is of course a precocious younger sister eyeing off her possible boyfriends. Anne Tyler’s books are always good and this one is very funny. Laugh out loud funny. We need more of this!
I am now going to read Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time, which is retelling The Winter’s Tale. A friend tells me this is very good. Margaret Atwood’s version of The Tempest called Hag Seed and Howard Jacobson’s retelling of The Merchant of Venice which is Shylock is My Name are next. There are four more titles in the pipeline: Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear. I’ll alert you when they arrive.
Ian McEwan’s new novel has just arrived into the shop. It is called Nutshell and features a world-weary foetus commenting on the actions of his mother and her lover, who is also his uncle. They are named Trudy and Claude and they are plotting to kill his father. I immediately thought it must be the next title in the Hogarth series which will be Hamlet. But no! Gillian Flynn is down to produce the Hamlet re-write. Meanwhile Ian McEwan is enjoying himself having a long rant on the problems in modern society. Very enjoyable. He got into a bit of trouble about this.
I always enjoy memoirs and can recommend The May Beetles: My First Twenty Years by Baba Schwartz. Baba spent a happy childhood in a small town in Hungary, part of a substantial Jewish community. By the late thirties this happy life was shattered as the whole family, father and mother and three daughters, is shipped off in crowded trains to Auschwitz.The remainder of the book describes their sufferings and lucky escapes. These day-to-day accounts show how people just got by in the mass of Displaced Persons at the end of Second World War. Father is lost forever but Mother and girls do survive and return to their town where all their possessions have been taken by supposedly friendly neighbours. Soon they sail off to Israel before finally migrating to Australia. Although I have read many holocaust memoirs I found this one especially interesting and well written.
Father Edmund Campion has been writing small biographies of Catholic personages for many years and you can read some in Australian Catholic Lives, which is a sort of history of the church in Australia. A history of the people, not the Bishops. He has now written Swifty: A Life of Yvonne Swift whose work as Principal of Rose Bay School of the Sacred Heart and later as head of Sancta Sophia College in the University of Sydney is well-known to generations of students. She was much concerned about social justice and in mid-life decided to train as a lawyer. She set up her own office with another lawyer, finally in Chippendale, where she defended many notorious Sydney criminals. The small book contains many admiring messages from students and friends. I think there will be many who will enjoy this.
I set off eagerly to read a new biography of Evelyn Waugh by Philip Eade called Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited. I did feel the need later to read a more full biography such as the one by Selina Hastings but it seems this is now out of print. A Life Revisited is packed full of gossip, ranging from schoolboy adventures, undergraduate indiscretions and too much detail on flirtations and drinking. Nonetheless it is very amusing, chiefly in the direct quotes from Evelyn’s own diaries and letters. It was good to get clear the fate of Shevelyn, his first unsuccessful wife (also called Evelyn) and the future success of wife number two, Laura, mother of his six children. Coincidentally Nancy Mitford was the flatmate of Shevelyn, and it is through this connection that Waugh began his legendary friendship with Mitford and also Lady Diana Cooper. His first book, Vile Bodies, was such a tremendous success Waugh was taken up by “society” and able to indulge his fondness for witty insults, while collecting great material for his next black comedy.
His father, Arthur Waugh, was a director of Chapman and Hall, who published all Evelyn’s books except the first one. They were more than happy to do so seeing the copyright for their most important author, Charles Dickens, was about to expire. Evelyn turned out to be not only a terrific novelist but also a very savvy author who was able to turn his talents to journalism, essays and travel pieces. His many overseas adventures were funded by his publishers and the success of his satiric novels, while the success of Brideshead Revisited made him quite a rich man. At one time in his middle age it all became too much for him and while on a cruise to the Mediterranean, as he himself noted, he became “absolutely mad. Clean off my onion”.
This story is told in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, his last comic novel. His wartime adventures, with like-minded soldiers such as Randolph Churchill, formed the basis for the three novels which are now published together as the Sword of Honour Trilogy. One special favourite of mine is The Loved One, which he wrote after a visit to California to investigate the possibility of a film to be made of Brideshead Revisited. That never happened, only the marvellous TV version starring Claire Bloom and Jeremy Irons.
The Loved One was Evelyn’s satire on the American Way of Death as practiced at the Whispering Glades Memorial Park (not to be confused with Jessica Mitford’s American Way of Death. This best seller was reissued in 2000 as American Way of Death Revisited). I think it is time for another dose of Evelyn Waugh. You will find most of his novels in stock at Abbey’s. Check the website. Enjoy re-reading the backlist.
