Author: Max Porter
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Reviewer: Stephen Keim
I have a friend who, for no good reason except that she knows that I like to read, drops off four excellent new books at my chambers. I have no obligation to repay my friend except by reading the books and enjoying them. With Lanny, I have done something to expiate my growing moral indebtedness.
Lanny is also a source of brownie points for me on the home front. Lanny is a novel and I, famously, never read novels and, oh so unfairly, suffer moral ignominy for my narrow (non-fiction) choices when it comes to discretionary reading.
The action in Lanny takes place in an ancient village, come commuter town, an hour out of London.
Lanny of the title is an unusual child. His mother writes murder mysteries. His father works in the city and exhibits many of the undesirable personality traits of men who work in the city.
Lanny’s Dad’s line manager refers to Lanny as mad as a March hare which annoys Lanny’s Dad who realises, nonetheless, that it is he who has transmitted such perceptions to his boss. Lanny’s unusual qualities are such that words can only hint at them. The school report says that Lanny has an innate gift for social cohesion and will calm a fraught classroom with a single well-timed joke or song.
Lanny is calm and unhurried and comes in with the sound of a song on his creaturely breath, stinking of pine trees and other nice things. Lanny is, no doubt, smart for one so young but his knowledge is as much attributable to connections and understanding of the deeper magic as it is to intelligence and learning.
Pete is a once, and still, famous avant garde artist from decades earlier who applies his trade, quietly, in the village. Pete and Lanny’s mother appreciate one another and Pete, at first reluctantly, agrees to give Lanny some art lessons. And a deep bond is formed between the old artist and the knowing child.
Peggy is the old mad witch of the village. She understands, better than anybody, Lanny’s unusual ability to connect.
The narrative of Lanny is told in the voices of the characters. We don’t hear about the characters. We hear from each of the characters. We hear what they think including about one another.
Befitting an ancient village, the town has its own haunting, its own local god or saint in the form of a shape shifting, mood changing Dead Papa Toothwort. As Toothwort moves around and through the village, he overhears the townspeople speaking and, like the pub closing scene in part II of The Waste Land, the ordinary voices of the town scatter across the page and catches of tawdry temporary dramas of daily life are glimpsed before fading and giving way to the next.
Porter, born in High Wycombe, was formerly a book seller and an editor having been editorial director at Granta and Portobello Books until 2019. His debut novel, Grief is a Thing with Feathers, was a huge success in 2015 and he published The Death of Francis Bacon in 2021. Lanny was released in 2019. Lanny is described as a book about a family who lives in a village peopled by the living and the dead. In this respect, it resembles Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Padramo. It may equally be said that every town and every locality is haunted by what has taken place there. We rely on novels like Lanny to remind us of this deeper truth.
The lyrical music of the competing voices telling their respective points of view becomes stretched and frantic as mystery descends upon Lanny’s village; relationships fray and are tested; and tragedy beckons. What does the deeper magic allow the living? What has Toothwort done? Do the ancient verities offer any mercy?
Lanny is a beautiful novel and comes highly recommended by this reviewer.
Stephen Keim
Clayfield
25 May 2022
Author: Marcus Zusak
Publisher: Picador/Pan Macmillan
Marcus Zusak is the author of The Book Thief. The Book Thief was published in 2005, has been translated into thirty languages and was made into a film in 2013. The bandwagon of The Book Thief passed by close to me. Everyone I knew seemed to be reading it at some stage. But, for some reason, I did not hop on. I have never read The Book Thief.
So, when, Brett from the Blokes’ Book Club, chose Bridge of Clay as the next read, I knew nothing of the work of Marcus Zusak. I got round to my reading duties, late. When I started reading, I had heard suggestions that the book was hard to follow in its opening chapters but that it got better. It was, a little, and it did, indeed.
Bridge of Clay was published in October 2018. While it spans events across generations, the time in which Matthew, the oldest son and narrator, is typing the story he narrates on the old Remington TW is very recent. Nonetheless, the book’s atmosphere seems much older. The Sydney of which it speaks could almost be the Sydney of Patrick White’s Tree of Man. Something about the subject matter: the small towns, talk of Remington typewriters, the people of the racing industry, families growing up with siblings struggling to find their respective pathways, combine to make the story seem to belong to an era, much older.
The events must be modern, however, because Kingston Town’s win in the 1982 Cox Plate is spoken of by the characters of the book as ancient history and that happened just a few years ago, in 1982.
Bridge of Clay is the story of five brothers: Matthew, Rory, Henry, Clay and Tommy. The five brothers live without parents in a house at 18 Archer Street in Sydney’s racing district. Archer Street is named for the racehorse who won the first and second Melbourne Cups in 1861 and 1862. The novel is also the life stories of each of their parents. Their father, Michael Dunbar, who grew up in a country town 12 hours from Sydney; loved and knew everything about Michelangelo; wanted to be an artist; and married his primary school sweetheart. Their mother, Penelope Lesciuszko, was raised in Poland by her father who taught her how to play the piano and to love Homer’s classic works. Penelope’s father arranged for her to escape to the west, some years before the fall of communism, by her not returning from a concert performance in Vienna. Penelope chose Australia and she met Michael who, five years before, had been left by his bride from childhood, over her newly purchased piano which had been delivered some distance up the street at Michael’s place as a result of a mistake by the delivery man as to the address.
Penelope’s enthusiasm for The Iliad and The Odyssey was handed down to her five sons. Her enthusiasm for music, not for want of trying on her part, failed to find fertile ground. Because of the former, it is not surprising that the pets at 18 Archer Street, which really belonged to the youngest brother, Tommy, the cat, the fish, the bird, the dog and the mule were all named for Homeric characters (as was, of course, Penelope, herself).
On the first page of Bridge of Clay, Matthew tells the reader that Clay was the one who took it all on his shoulder. The enormity of the truth of this is not revealed to the reader until the very end. But parts of that truth become evident at earlier points in the narrative. Sometimes, a toddler comes out with a statement that no one could have taught them and they make us feel that they must have been here before in some earlier life. Clay is that in spades. He feels the pain and joy of everyone about him and understands what everyone is thinking. He hears the stories. He remembers everything. As the narrator says and the title suggests, Bridge of Clay, more than anything, is the story of Clay.
Clay loves a girl. Her name is Carey Novak. She became an apprentice jockey and rode a famous horse to win a division 1 race. Carey provides the title. When Clay decides he must leave the others and go and help his father, Michael, build a bridge, Carey says that, when you devote yourself to building a bridge, that bridge is partly made of you. The bridge is to be built of stone and is to resemble the design of the Pont Gard, the famous Roman bridge in France. But it is also built of Clay. Bridge of Clay is the story of the bridge but it is also the story of Carey and the story of Carey and Clay.
Because Bridge of Clay is so many people’s stories spanning generations and parts of the world, it is not surprising that 13 years passed between the publication of The Book Thief and Bridge of Clay. Neither is it surprising that Zusak experimented with structure and even the identity of the narrator before he felt able to complete the task he set himself.
Matthew is the narrator but, as the reader finds out, his task is to write down Clay’s story. And Clay is able to tell Matthew so much of the story because he listened and remembered every story that others had to tell, before it was too late.
Zusak starts somewhere near the end with Matthew typing on the old KW that the reader soon finds out belonged to Michael’s mother and which Matthew travelled to unearth from a backyard of the country town 12 hours from Sydney. Chapter by chapter, the narrative moves forward and back in time. For a time, the filling in the past details Michael’s childhood, how he courted Abbey and how their marriage fizzled out. Meanwhile, each other chapter details life at Archer Street of the parentless five brothers. Then the narrative switches with the past focussed on Penelope’s life with her father in Poland. Then the reader hears about life at Archer Street before the children were parentless and before Michael were known by his children as the murderer. It is like a huge colour by numbers drawing being filling in, cell by cell.
Zusak sets himself the task of a complex narrative and the further task of a complex means of advancing that narrative. But he achieves each task with skill and great craft.
Bridge of Clay is a story of love and tragedy. It tells of love between teenagers who mean to spend the rest of their days, together, and of older, more wizened people with the same intention. It tells of love within a family, between parents and children and children and parents and between siblings, despite their many differences in temperament and interest. It is a story of success and failure but they are often difficult to tell one from another. The tragedy comes in different forms and at different times and it challenges the love, also, in many different ways. Zusak is said to have compared the writing of the book to The Odyssey in that the book was the war and the sequel would be the coming home. I think the book may have expanded since Zusak said those things. Bridge of Clay encompasses enough war but, ultimately, it is a story of difficult comings home. Thesimilarities to Homer’s classics are clear. The gods are no less cruel. And, ultimately, the characters are no less heroic.
Bridge of Clay is about the way in which people can be brought together. Relationships can be broken. But they can also be mended. Clay is well-named and Bridge of Clay has more than one meaning. He brings people together and overcomes forces as strong and overwhelming as the waters of a creek in flood.
I read the last 25 pages with tears streaming down my face. In my world, that is a mark of a pretty excellent book. Good choice, Brett
Author: Simon Cleary
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Reviewer: Stephen Keim SC
Simon Cleary conducts a busy practice at the Queensland Bar. He is also a busy family man doing his fair share, with his wife, Alisa, of raising his two active and enthusiastic sons, Dominic and Liam to all three of whom The War Artist is dedicated. Rather, incredibly, Simon has just published The War Artist, his third novel through University of Queensland Press. I stand back and think how is that even possible.
Cleary’s first novel, The Comfort of Figs, published in 2008, weaves a complex narrative joining stories of love and tragedy surrounding the construction of Brisbane’s famous Story Bridge in the late 1930’s and stories of love and activism involving a young man working as a botanist in “change of millennium Brisbane”.
In 1912, Cleary published his second novel, the equally complex Closer to Stone, a story of two brothers, the one who disappeared in north west Africa, and the one who went to search for him. As Comfort links stories across time, Closer links the rigours of north Africa to the fictionalised Helidon and the stone masonry business in which the two young men had grown up.
Seven years of early rising and thousands of unrelenting hours of work later, Cleary has completed The War Artist and it has hit the shelves.
The War Artist displays Cleary’s continuing interest in big narratives tackling big themes. The big themes, however, express themselves most clearly amid the ordinariness of daily life and the challenges of human relationships. So it is in life. So it is in Cleary’s novels. And Cleary’s novels stretch out and embrace the wide world. But his characters find an anchor in those parts of south-east Queensland with which they and Cleary are familiar: Brisbane, where Cleary lives and works and writes and Toowoomba and its environs, where Cleary, the son of one of Toowoomba’s leading solicitors, grew up and went to school.
The War Artist revolves about James Phelan, a brigadier in the Australian army, serving in Afghanistan. Phelan makes one of those decisions about which it is never clear whether the decision was made in one’s own interest or, as one thought at the time, for the benefit of others and the greater good. Phelan decides to go on patrol so that he can understand the impact on soldiers in his command of the decisions he makes and the demands he places upon those soldiers. Tragedy strikes and Phelan sees close up the blood and chaos of war on the ground.
Phelan does all the right things. He accompanies Sapper Beckett’s body home to Australia. He speaks to Beckett’s parents. He tells them how sorry and grateful he and the Australian Army are for their son’s sacrifice.
Phelan does something further, something uncharacteristic. Before leaving Sydney, he decides to get a tattoo, Sapper Beckett’s full name, an indelible reminder, tattooed on his shoulder. He intervenes when Kira, his female tattooist, is attacked by a drug affected friend of one of her friends. And the bond of saving a person from a violent attack leads to a deeper, albeit transitory, bond. Phelan returns to Brisbane to find that his wife, Penny, has undergone a tragedy of her own and faced it without troubling him when he feels that, perhaps, he had a right to be involved.
Phelan is more affected by Beckett’s death, and his ambiguous responsibility for it, than he imagined at first and he never returns to active duty. He is diagnosed and treated for post traumatic stress and his recovery is slow and arduous. Phelan and Penny retreat to, and rent and restore to habitability, the family farm property of Phelan’s childhood located on the lower ridges of the Toowoomba escarpment. Phelan finds some kind of return to health through the hard work of farm maintenance and in writing poetry, a by-product of his treatment for the stress disorder.
Domestic violence at home and the recollection that Phelan had kept her safe, once before, leads Kira, now with a seven year old son, Blake, to abandon her long term partner in Sydney and to seek out Phelan in Queensland. A beautiful young tattooist emerging from a clouded past promises difficulties of explanation, at the very least, and Phelan disappears back into an alcoholic stupor, a phenomenon that has become rare in his new life. This leaves the women to work it out, Blake and Kira are allowed by Penny to stay, for the moment at least, and a new status quo emerges. Phelan even asks Kira to tattoo him again, this time with poppies, and this is the genesis of Kira becoming the war artist of the title.
Cleary has chosen a description of a crying Odysseus for the epigraph of The War Artist. There are references, for example, to the many headed sea monster, Scylla, in the text. It is, perhaps, not coincidence that Penny shares her given name with the Penelope who waited patiently for Odysseus to return. Penny has no Telemachus to help her through her share of the pain of long separation.
It seems clear that The War Artist is also a tale of homecoming. The point seems to be that the things to be feared in a homecoming from war do not cease when one crosses one’s own threshold. The many headed monster comes in many forms and waits within our own soul. There are pathways, nonetheless, which can be followed and Minerva, herself, can turn up in many forms and when least expected.
The War Artist is only 310 pages but there is nothing little about Cleary’s novels. The War Artist fits the mould. The theme of experiencing war and finding peace is grand but the writing is empathetic and the relationships touch the reader’s heart.
The journey home is a theme that continues to merit treatment by novelists and filmmakers alike. For me, Phelan’s predominant experience was not homecoming as such but, rather, the search for atonement for barely detectable wrongs that, nonetheless, without atonement, would continue to haunt despite everything that might have since transpired. The War Artist is, perhaps, not a modern Odyssey. Rather, Conrad’s Lord Jim is its precursor and Phelan’s dilemma is closer to that of the eponymous character of Conrad’s famous novel.
