Book Review: Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany

CAUTION –SPOILER ALERT

Carrie Tiffany’s second novel, Mateship with Birds is widely described as a book about family. My reading, however, casts the principle theme as loneliness, with the family, or lack of it as the setting. 

Central to the novel is the family group of single mother Betty and her children Michael and ‘Little Hazel’ and their neighbour Harry, a divorced dairy farmer. Living in the outskirts of an Australian country town in the 1950s, the family operates with Harry as unofficial surrogate father, and their joint existence tetters on the potential of greater intimacy. This unspoken connection is a lonely one:

Harry looks out of the window at the jasmine curling around the verandah posts. It is his cutting. He brought it over in a kerosene tin when they first arrived. Over the years he’s trained it up the posts, steering it away from the gutters and towards the front door. Sometimes Sip will come back from visiting Little Hazel with a garland of jasmine around her neck and sneezing at the sweet juice of it. Sometimes he’ll notice Betty with a few squashed flowers in her hair. It is worse to be here with them, in the house but separate, than to be alone. (p.89)

Betty works at the local aged care home where the male clients read like a litany of disappointment. On her lunchbreak she leaves by the back door, dresses up and returns as the lunchtime wife of the men. Whether these lunchtime encounters include sex is unstated. However, the tone of the book certainly deems this possible, particularly when one old man leaves his wife’s wedding dress ‘For Betty’ upon his death.

Laced through the novel are Harry’s diarised observations of a family of kookaburras that inhabit his property.  Reputedly the relaying of their rituals and altercations was an attempt to engage the reader in their fascinating lives, and possibly to drawn comparisons between them and the human characters. Not for me. As the book neared its close, I found myself skimming through these seemingly endless entries. Perhaps I’m not keen enough on birds.

In truth, I was more interested in Harry’s cows than the birds, despite the credence given to the later by the novel’s title.

On these wet mornings the word seems close around them – Harry and the herd. It is the same greasy rain that hits them both, that sticks to hide and skin, that gushes down their legs and gathers in their eyelashes. Harry opens the gate and pushes in among them. Their blood is hot. Each cow gives off her own great heat and takes in the heat of her sisters. They are urgent with milk and hunger, stamping and bellowing and thrusting out their necks…. They don’t fear Harry. They don’t fear any man or dog, even a proper farm dog. What they fear is being alone. Being left behind. (p.4-5) 

The manner in which Harry regards Betty seems akin to the way he views his herd of cows:

When she stands he notices the roundness of her belly, her dinner not yet digested. (p 89)

Obsessive and frequent sexual references are such that one never knows what assault will be wrought on the reader as page follows page. And here comes the spoiler. Towards the close the novel’s most unattractive character Mues, abuser of birds and guilty of indecent exposure, is found to have had a long-term sexual relationship with one of his sheep. It is a moment that is shocking and yet unsurprising given the novel’s trajectory.

As transfixed as this novel is on sex, on primal need, and on its centrality to our humanity and sense of worth, the sexual act is not ultimately posited as the solution to loneliness. Even in the final scene where, (thank heaven for that), Harry and Betty consummate their desire, the scene is strangely empty and almost sterile.

There is beautiful writing here certainly, and one imagines that is what won Carrie Tiffany the (inaugural) Stella Prize and the Christina Stead Prize, and had it short-listed for the Encore Award, Western Australian Premier's Book Awards, Prime Ministers Literary Award for fiction, Miles Franklin Award, Victorian Premier's Literary Award for fiction and the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2013.

But my book club were all agreed. This book had such a masculine tone, had we not know otherwise we'd have assumed it had been written by a man. The back-cover blurb promised something quite different to the nature of its contents.

I am sorry to say I did not love it. 

I was happy to put it down. 

I was disappointed.

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Kate Grenville: The Secret River

Kate Grenville is one of Australia's best known authors with eight novels and four books about writing to her name. Having greatly enjoyed The Idea of Perfection (2000) a winner of the Orange Prize, I decided to read The Secret River (2005) as my second review in the Australian Women Writers Challenge. 

The Secret River was awarded the Commonwealth Prize for Literature and the Christina Stead Prize, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and Miles Franklin Award, and has now been translated into many languages. 

There are obvious difficulties in approaching an award winning novel. The press of preconceived notions hang in one's head. What can be said that hasn't already been spouted elsewhere? So I approached with a head as clear as was practical. 

The journey of William and Sal Thornhill from London to a convict's life in Sydneytown, and then as settlers along the Hawkesbury River, is a compelling one. Anyone familiar with  Australian history knows there is unlikely to be a happy ending, and the tragedy at the climax dispels all hope of one, least of all the capacity of the characters for self-reflection. 

About a year ago I was responsible for teaching a Grade 3 unit 'European Settlement' in a local primary school. The children were asked to find out about how their family came to Australia. One young lad piped up saying, My family didn't come from anywhere else, just Australia. I explained that unless his family were of aboriginal descent his family had in fact come from another land. He looked at me dubiously. Nah, not mine. My family came from Mildura. The next morning he burst throughout the door saying, Guess what Ms Graham, my family came to Australia by boat!

Well, that's a story about a child's discovery, you say. True enough. But I heard recently of a well educated woman in her 60s who could scarcely believe aboriginal people had ever lived on the Bellarine Peninsula (Victoria, Australia), despite what she had learnt about William Buckley, an escaped convict who lived for decades with aboriginal people. History lessons do not always translate into living-breathing knowledge.

The story of Australian settlement is one, I believe, the adult community is yet to come to terms with. It is confronting to recognise that if your ancestors were landholders, farmers or squatters, chances are they had direct conflict with aborigines. Far easier to lump those attitudes in history books than imagine your own flesh-and-blood slaughtering, poisoning, driving away, or stealing children. The Secret River dives headlong into this reality, and it is disturbing.

The writing is deliciously pictorial. This from the opening pages describes William's first night in Sydney Cove:

The air moved around him, full of rich dank smells. Trees stood tall over him. A breeze shivered through the leaves, then died, and left only the vast fact of the forest. 

He was nothing more than a flea on the side of some enormous quiet creature. 

Down the hill the settlement was hidden by the darkness. A dog barked in a tired way and stopped. From the bay where the Alexander was anchored there was a sense of restless water shifting in its bed of land and swelling up against the shore.

.... 

Now, standing in the great sighing lung of this other place and feeling the dirt chill under his feet, he knew that life was gone. He might as well have swung at the end of the rope they had measured for him. This was a place, like death, from which men did not return. It was a sharp stab like a splinter under a nail: the pain of loss. He would die here under these alien stars, his bones rot in this cold earth.

The narrative immediately drew me into its story as Will's thoughts, through whom we view events, are related via colloquial grammar:

He had frightened her talking about the land too sudden, not working out how it might all be done. He had to go slower, that was all.

Kate Grenville

Some months have passed since I completed the reading. I avoided public reflection until I'd had time to analyse my reactions to The Secret River. This is because I found its ending unsatisfactory. Even now, I find it difficult to articulate why. Perhaps I expected remorse, rather than resignation from the characters I'd grown to know. I certainly wanted justice, but that would have flown in the face of history. The Secret River felt unsatisfying, not because of the writing, but because I wished history had been altogether different.

For this reason I am keen to read Grenville's new novel Sarah Thornhill (2011), a sequel to The Secret River. According to Grenville's website 'it's a story about what happens when you uncover dark secrets from the past, and is told through the voice of the youngest daughter of William Thornhill of The Secret River'.  

Further, now that The Idea of Perfection and The Secret River are in pre-production ahead of film release, it is clear the journey of these two stories are far from complete. I only hope my mind's images born from reading both novels will be at least equalled on the big screen. 

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Kate Grenville's website