Fridays with Miss Fisher

Finding time – and the inclination – to maintain this blog is hard to come by.  A short post then.

Detective fiction is not a genre I am particularly enamoured with.  While Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle were staples for an Indian childhood, it wasn’t something I re-read into adulthood.  Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is pretty much in the cosies genre and its TV adaptation like with most cosies isn't always strong on plot. Yet it’s addictive Friday night viewing and mixes all the cosy elements right.  It doesn't hurt that it is immensely beautiful to look at and nicely performed. 

I bought a couple of the books to read along with the TV episodes and while the two differ greatly, in tone the TV series remains faithful to the novels for the large part.  Phryne Fisher is sort of a female James Bond, a pistol packing, exquisitely dressed, fabulously rich lady of somewhat easy virtue.  Like with all perpetually upstaging clever private investigators, you tire of her a bit (hands up if you find Holmes insufferable!).  But the books are on pretty good form in recreating 1920s Melbourne and obscure details of Australian history with a slant towards female emancipation.  And Greenwood creates vivid characters which helps the transfer to TV. In spite of this the books themselves feel a bit undercooked here and there,  there is an element of a first-rate concept all dressed up with nowhere to go. The writing is equally hit and miss with the opening chapters of Cocaine Blues being rather clumsy.   Though completely different in tone, the books reminded me of Amitav Ghosh’s novels.  A wealth of detail, a few interesting characters and yet swathes that are curiously shallow and one dimensional.

Anyway all the viewing and reading of history-mysteries reminded me that it was time to revisit my favourite detective of all time, DCS Foyle.  Foyle’s War, here I come!

Murray's Myrtales*

Given that there are more than 700 species of eucalypts in Australia, it would appear that this is a country where they have roamed far and wide and endlessly invented themselves depending on where they found themselves. No other tree is as emblematic of the country, its omnipresence an indication that the tree is not an accommodating soul. All this has everything and nothing to do with Murray Bail's endlessly inventive novel, Eucalyptus. Part fairy tale, part botanist's manual (such evocative common names as Pumpkin Gum, Yellow Jacket, Barber’s Gum, Kakadu Woollybutt, Manna Gum, Gympie Messmate & Bastard Tallowwood pepper the book) and part post-modern collection of innumerable truncated inconclusive parables, what most permeates it is whimsicality and wisdom. It starts off with a princess in a tower (no, not really its just Ellen Holland up on a tower slapped onto a NSW property) a beauty speckled with birthmarks and beauty spots whose hand may only be won by the man who can correctly name all the eucalyptus species on her father's property. This fantastic yet simple premise results in a Mr. Cave who identifies all the trees but cannot tell a story. Not so the Stranger who haunts the eucapytus groves of Mr. Holland’s property and takes each tree as the starting point for a modern day fable ("In one of the harbourside haciendas in Vaucluse lived a small bright-eyed woman in gold sandals who had been married and divorced so many times she had trouble remembering her current name"). Each of these stories naturally has something to say about Ellen’s situation - or perhaps not. Who will win the speckled beauty's hand? Bail's story is singular, erudite, raises questions on how we live our lives. It is also hugely playful - its’ most marvellous random excursion is the National Geographic photographer who comes, records and names all the trees without him or anyone else being aware of it (Bail I am quite sure doesn't like photographers).

Immersed in the book, you begin to note the musicality and the nature in train stops - RedFern, Wolli Creek, ArnCliffe, Banksia, RockDale and so on.

I wanted to bookmark too many parts of the book, here are just a few bits from it.

"Her father had warned her about men. Did that include fathers?"
"…the formidable instinct in men to measure, which is often mistaken for pessimism, is counterbalanced by the unfolding optimism of women, which is nothing less than life itself; their endless trump card."
"A person meets thousands of different people across a lifetime, a woman thousands of different men, of all shades, and many more if she constantly passes through different parts of the world. Even so, of the many different people a person on average meets it is rare for one to fit almost immediately in harmony and general interest. For all the choices available, the odds are enormous. The miracle is there to be grasped".

* Myrtales is the order to which eucalypts belong.

Cloudstreet

Its a long time since I read Australian fiction and I am just through with a very well known work, Cloudstreet. Tim Winton's book is a chronicle of Australian working class life, most of it set in post war Perth. Its account of two families (the aptly and amusingly named Lambs and Pickleses) who share a house (the eponymous Cloudstreet), is somehow simultaneously a generation spanning linear novel and a poetic, fragmented account of a particular kind of Australian life. Poetic in spite of employing throughout the direct and salty form of speech favoured by most Australians. The book plunges you into all the features of post war Australian life - a rural upbringing, migration to suburbia, gambling, prudence, strong family bonds, fire, water - and its main characters all ring true. Winton also alludes to the themes of the day like the wars and its impact on Australian life, the Menzies years, the work life of the city, the Nedlands monster et al without losing his focus on the two families. The book is also very successful in evoking that other motif of Australian fiction, the landscape. He makes Perth and its environs come alive till you can smell and feel the West Australian world the families inhabit. And he is exceptionally successful in evoking watery landscapes, fitting given the role it plays throughout the novel, especially in the life of Fish Lamb, the slow boy who partially narrates the story. Winton also has deeper themes going on, Cloudstreet with its ghosts of a white lady and black girl past and its recurrence sense of evil, for example could stand in for a nation where black and white history has been divisive. Cloudstreet is eventually rid of the ghosts - Winton uses the consummation of Rose Pickles and Quick Lamb's relationship to signal this, presumably a new generation literally banishing ghosts past. While most of the characters are working class or of the land, there are two exceptions. With both, Winton falters. One is Toby Raven with whom Rose Pickles has a brief relationship. He is middle class (or upper middle class), clever and college educated with smart friends with a taste for the different (literally given the Italian establishment he and his friends frequent) and a journalist. His role in the book is clearly to act as a counterpoint to the Lambs and Pickleses. Rose is an outsider to this world and he serves as a catalyst for her flight back to Cloudstreet and into Quick Lamb's arms. However, Winton makes him so much of a poser that he becomes a caricature, almost as if the author had a few axes to grind with the Australian literary establishment. The choosing of a journalist figure and someone who denotes a life of the mind as an object of ridicule also rather sadly reinforces the anti-intellectual strain of Australian life. All the more surprising given that this novel is not cast in the populist mode. The aboriginal figures in the novel on the other hand are distant, almost other worldy, and here Winton falls into the trap of black fella spiritualism. Both Lambs and Pickleses "see" them but they are not real figures and even though Winton's language itself does not falter, the reader is left with the idea that they only serve as mystical clap trap. In fact the only reference to a real aboriginal person is the native girl, part of the stolen generation, whose ghost inhabits Cloudstreet. As a result the working class are given direction and are allowed to experience epiphanies by the people who once inhabited the land but there is no allusion to the racism that one can reasonably expect to have been present in at least some working class families in post war Australia. Nevertheless these are minor quibbles about a book I really liked and I hope to read more of Winton's work.