Anna Fienberg is the well-loved Australian author of the whimsical Tashi series of children’s books, and Escape is her first adult novel. 

Although Fienberg has a light touch to start with, the novel becomes quite harrowing.  The chapter names signal the agony, the genesis, the rebirth and finally the resurrection of a woman caught in a trap of her own making; like a Houdini in a straitjacket, she must find her own way to escape.

It begins with a quotation from Leonardo da Vinci:

Between light and shade there is an intermediate state, something twofold, belonging to both, resembling a light shadow or a dark light.  That it is that you must seek, for it holds the secret of perfect beauty.

The quotation implies a need for balance, compromise, and recognition that it’s not wise to cling to unrealistic dreams.  But Rachel, the central character caught in a loveless marriage, doesn’t seem able to do that.  Not that she doesn’t try: she does her best. She supports her husband Guido, only to have him take advantage of her, time and time again.  She tolerates his infidelities and is rewarded only by neglect.   Venus and Mars pop psychology tells her not to ask an insecure male to help around the house because it’s a reminder of his mother nagging him and his response is to rebel – so she ends up doing it all herself rather than provoke a row, and her reward is to be treated like an incompetent servant. 

What’s more, having invested all her love in her daughter, she’s not coping very well when Carla takes off overseas to discover the joys of independence in Italy.  (‘The Last Supper’ is the last meal the family has together before Carla’s departure.)   As the marriage disintegrates, so does Rachel’s tenuous sense of self.

It would be easy for Rachel to come across as a martyr, but she’s too self-aware for that.  Her rather intriguing profession saves her from being dreary - she’s a magician, and she’s writing a book about Harry Houdini.  However her obsession with the world of illusion blinds her to reality – she’s not just seduced by the panoply of escapology equipment on sale at Baudelaire’s magic shop  – she’s also built a palace of dreams around a man who’s not what he seems.  On the plus side, however, she’s unwittingly created a safety net for her daughter by teaching her a repertoire of escape acts, as if to provide her with the means to avoid making the same mistakes.

‘Slack’, it seems, is the principle by which escape acts  succeed.  The audience must somehow be distracted while the escapologist makes a space between the body and the restraint, whatever it is:

Slack, substitution, subterfuge – this is the bible of escapology.  Whether you are escaping from a straitjacket or a Bohemian Torture Crib, obtaining slack is the only way out. (p22)

How does this play out with the restraints of a marriage gone wrong?  Does Rachel cut herself any slack in dealing with Guido, the sexy self-centred poet who demoralises her on a daily basis?  No, alas, she vacillates between blaming herself for his appalling behaviour because he’s a ‘creative soul’ needing nurturing and she should have done what a loving wife would do – and simply giving up, because she thinks she’s unworthy of anything better.   Her friends and family have no illusions about him, but she’s blind to that.

In the daily hell of this rancid marriage Rachel is nostalgic for the days when Guido the poet-magician seduced her, magnetic on stage and irresistible to a naive young woman.   But Clara’s right: her mother has confused her hero Houdini with her husband …and she’s given up on Guido because it’s easier to opt for a ghost than a demanding, critical living man. (p18) 

It’s just a curious coincidence, I suppose,  that two children’s authors, Fienberg and Sofie Laguna (One foot Wrong) should contemporaneously choose to make their debut into adult fiction with novels that show the damage that can be done to a child’s psyche.

Author: Anna Fienberg

Title: Escape

Publisher: Bantam (Random House) 2009

ISBN: 9781863256681

Source: Personal copy (purchased from Benn’s Books Bentleigh $32.95)

Chapter 12: Cyclops

Cyclops

Well now, I might be in two minds about this chapter, but sure enough, you don’t need to be a genius to see one-eyed narrators strange and wonderful all through.   Cyclops, it is, and were they not the creatures in Homer’s Odyssey with only the one eye?  They were giants, were they not, and given to throwin’ their weight about, and anythin’ else besides, if an’ it got in their way? And was it not Odysseus who blinded the biggest bigot of them all, Polyphemus, drunk an’ all as he was, so can we not expect a drunken barney in this chapter, followed by retribution against the victor as well?    

Stuart Gilbert’s chart in my Penguin says that the ‘technic’ for this chapter is ‘gigantism’ but for my money, it’s parody, and James Joyce is a lot better at it than I am, as you can see from the above attempt.  (Well, he would be, wouldn’t he?)  This chapter is a ‘conversation’ between an un-named debt-collector and a ‘Citizen’ in Barney Kiernan’s tavern, blathering on and inflating their stories (ok, that is gigantism, sort of) while being undercut all the time by one parody after another.  Who is/are (t)he(y), and who is/are the parodist/s?  Irish nationalists and his/their mate/s in the pub? One and the same person in ironic self-deprecatory self-awareness? Who knows?  Who cares? Let the scholars sort that out…    

It’s very good fun.  Like a lot of people suffering discrimination (as the Irish were in Ireland then), the debt-collector looks for someone else to discriminate against, so he’s anti-Semitic, and he likes to be able to look down on others worse off than himself.  He speaks in that Irish idiom that we all recognise so well,  and he’s a bit of a boozer (as we say here in Oz) because ‘he’s not having anything between drinks’ (p378).  He holds court in the pub,  going on and on about this and that and assuming that everyone is fascinated by his stories.  His rival for attention is The Citizen whose platform is the politics of Irish nationalism but the debt-collector pokes fun at him by weaving in anecdotes of one sort or another and jokes,usually at someone else’s expense.  We’ve all met people like that…    

Stuart Gilbert’s chart says that the organ of the body for this chapter is the muscle, but wouldn’t you think it should be the eye because of all the references to blindness and weeping?  The Homeric Cyclops is signalled in the first lines with an allusion to Odysseus driving the stake through Polyphemus’s eye when the debt-collector comes in complaining about a chimneysweep who ‘near drove his gear into my eye’ (p376) ; the sub-sheriff gives Breen ‘an eye as good as a process’ (p386) and Alf – referring to an impending hanging - says ‘You should have seen long John’s eye’ (p386).  Bob Doran, ‘blind to the world’ , a condition he is often in (p385 and p407) weeps about dead Paddy Dignam, ‘the tear bloody near your eye’ (p391).  ‘A torrent of tears’ bursts ‘from the lachrymal ducts’ of the witnesses to the execution (p401) while the provostmarshall ‘brushed away a furtive tear’. (p402).  The debt-collector says he’d train the dog Garryowen with its ‘eye all bloodshot’ by giving him ‘a rousing kick now and again where it wouldn’t blind him’ (p 403).  Bloom quotes the New Testament (Matthew 7:4) to intervene in JJ and The Citizen’s argument about law and history: ‘Some people…can see the mote in others’ eyes but they can’t see the beam in their own’ and the Citizen promptly retorts with Swift’s  ‘There’s no-one as blind as the fellow that won’t see.’ (p423).  

Those are just the patently obvious allusions to eyes.  More Joycean is that the debt-collector is a classic one-eyed supporter of his own opinions, complaints and judgements.   He launches into a story about a bad and doubtful debt – a tirade which is promptly interrupted by a parody of a court judgement, legalese passing judgement about some tea and some sugar which ’shall not be pawned or pledged or sold or otherwise alienated by the said purchaser’.  Very droll.  (p377) .    His counterpart is The Citizen, with even more rabid opinions, which are parodied as well.

To enjoy parody, of course, you have to be familiar with the subject in order to recognise it.  My guess is that the following comes from Irish myth, for although Google soon told me that Michan is a parish in ireland, I scoured the index of my Penguin Early Irish Myths and Sagas (1981) for the allusions without success:    

In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy Michan.  There rises a watchtower beheld of men afar.  There sleep the mighty dead as in life they slept, warriors and princes of high reknown.  A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams (p379).    

Those fishful streams are full of a great list of fish, and then there is a list of trees, and another list of things that maidens play with, not to mention a list of places that heroes come from and yet more lists of the vegies, the herds and the sounds of the animals that they bring in homage:    

and there is ever heard a trampling, cackling, roaring, lowing, bleating, bellowing, rumbling, grunting, champing, chewing, of sheep and pigs and heavyhooved kine from pasturelands of Lush and Rush and Carrickmines and from the streamy vales of Thomond, from McGillicuddy’s reeks the inaccessible and lordly Shannon the unfathomable….(p380)    

This reminds me of those lists in Homer. (I am also currently reading my most excellent new Robert Fagles The Iliad (1990), and have not long finished chapter 2, The Gathering of the Armies, which is mostly a whopping long list of all the units led by the Achaeans.  Now that I’m reading this much better translation than the one I have from my undergraduate days, I couldn’t  resist ordering Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey as well.  Expect erudite references to Joyce’s structural source in future posts.  Well, I shall try.  How does one show a self-deprecating smile online? )   

The comedy gets better and better.  The debt-collector tells us how The Citizen roughs up his mongrel dog Garryowen and Joyce treats us to a hilarious parody of The Citizen as Homeric hero:   

broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely freckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero … the widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest.  (p382)   

This hero wears a belt ‘graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity’ – and the list of these ‘heroes’ goes on for an entire page and includes everyone from the English tea merchant Sir Thomas Lipton to the Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, and the Woman Who Didn’t.  There’s Beethoven, Dante, Lady Godiva, Goliath, the last of the Mohicans and even Gutenberg!   Even the mangy dog is heroic:   

 ’a savage animal of the canine tribe whose stertorous gasps announced that he was sunk in uneasy slumber, a supposition confirmed by hoarse growls and spasmodic movements which his master repressed from time to time by tranquilising blows of a mighty cudgel rudely fashioned out of paleolithic stone. (p384)   

The Citizen rants on about the dominance of British births, deaths and marriages in The Irish Independent (p384) and, in comes Alf Bergan, trying to alert drunken Bob Doran that Denis Breen and his wife are in the pub.  Breen, you may remember from Chapter 8 (Lestrygonians) was the pathetic butt of jokes because of his libel suit against the perpetrator of the postcard with the enigmatic UP on it.  The reason for his indignation is obscure, but probably has something to do with impotence, and it’s the subject of much hilarity.  Alf, in the telling of his story, mentions seeing dead Paddy Dignam, leading to much mockery and an absurdist parody of spiritualism (p389).  Bloom, who’s been ‘prowling around’ outside since page 387 comes in on p391, asking for Martin Cunningham, but he won’t have a drink, thank you, though he will have a cigar…   

Alf shares a letter from one H. Rumbold to the sheriff, offering to be hangman for a forthcoming execution, and then the conversation meanders on to a discussion about capital punishment in which Bloom explains the scientific reasons for a certain natural phenomenon which occurs to men after hanging (which I will coyly not name for fear of attracting even more of that yucky spam which Akismet so brilliantly deletes from my blog dashboard).  Then there’s a lot of blarney about Irish nationalism and drink being the curse of Ireland.  There’s also an allusion to the ‘shoneens’ who ‘can’t speak their own language’, which recalls Haines the Englishman mocking the milkwoman back in chapter 1 because she couldn’t understand him when he spoke Gaelic to her.  The dog gets a bowl of water, but Bloom refuses another drink, explaining (much to the debt-collector’s confusion) that he’s looking for Martin Cunningham so that he can tell him about the problem with Paddy Dignam’s insurance…   

I got a bit confused here, because Bloom is disappointed to learn that Nannan, running for the mayorality, has set off for London with William Field M.P. to represent the cattle traders over the measures to contain foot-and-mouth disease.  Is Nannan a nickname for Martin?  Anyway, Bloom recovers enough to join in the yakkety-yak about Irish sport, and the debt collector becomes quite peeved by Bloom’s loquacity (p410), which, we learn, was occasionally accompanied by the Irish Caruso-Garibaldi … in superlative form. (p411).  

 J.J. (who seems to be Jack O’Molloy, a young lawyer) comes in and joins the mockery about Breen, which Bloom tries to moderate (p416).  The Citizen rants on about Irish trade, the perfidies of the British navy, the potato famine, and French betrayals, and he questions the, um, proclivities of ‘Edward the Peacemaker’ (Edward VII).  He questions Bloom’s right to call himself Irish too (p430) but that’s nothing compared to what happens when the horse Throwaway – that horse that Bantam Lyons thought Bloom had tipped him to win in Chapter 5 (the Lotus Eaters) - wins the race at 20 to 1 (p422).  Bloom has stepped out on his quest for Martin Cunningham and in his absence Lenehan puts two-and-two together to conclude that Bloom has slyly gone to pick up his winnings (p435) and obviously isn’t going to shout the bar as any good Irishman would.  The commentary is vituperative: Martin, who hasn’t gone to London at all, comes in looking for Bloom, only to hear that ‘It’d be an act of God to take a hold of a fellow like that and throw him in the bloody sea.’ (p439) Bloom, still not aware of the extent of the crowd’s hostility comes back, and there’s bedlam.  The Citizen loses it entirely and chases Bloom out of the tavern to the cheers of the mob and ‘the bloody mongrel after it with his lugs for all he was bloody well worth’ (p448). Who rescued him with ‘furious driving’ in the ‘chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven‘ ? I don’t know, surely not Blazes – We’ll have to read on to find out! 

Cyclops is a rather long chapter, 73 pages in my edition, and this post is getting way too long too.  I’m not going to indulge myself by exploring all the parodies that amused me so much.  Rather, in case you haven’t got one of those annotations of Ulysses that have kept the publishing industry busy for so long, (and I wish I had one!) I’ll just alert you to the ones that I could identify.    

• A medical journal explaining (a-hem) natural phenomena occurring after hangings (p394)

Robert Emmett’s execution (Source: Wikipedia)

  

• A fawning newspaper report of Robert Emmett’s execution, starring the aforementioned Rumbold and attended by a vice-regal houseparty which includes among others the Grandjoker Vladinmire Pokethankerscheff Mynheer Trik can Trumps and Nationalgymnasiummuseumsanatoriumandsuspensoriumordinary-privatedocentgeneralhistoryspecialprofessordoctor Kriegfried Ueberallhemein.  There is a right royal Cyclopean dustup with an assortment of weapons including an Aussie boomerang(!) in this parody.  (Robert Emmett was hung, drawn and quartered in a Dublin street by the British government, for his part in the  1803 uprising). (p397-8).
• A theatre critic’s review about a ‘marvellous exhibition of cynanthropy which ‘bears a striking resemblance …to the ranns of ancient Celtic bards’ (BTW Cynanthropy, thanks Wikipedia, is a mental condition in which one imagines oneself as a dog) (p403)
• A child’s ‘reader’ (or primer) and then a report from Hansard, parodying question time in parliament, on the topic of foot-and-mouth disease (p409).
• The Minutes of a Masonic Lodge, recording a ‘most interesting discussion … on the revival of ancient Gaelic sports and the importance of physical culture‘ (p410)
• Sports journalism about the boxing match that Blazes Boylan seems to have ‘fixed’ , to win a hundred pounds in the betting (p413)
• A law report, citing an appeal about the probate of ‘the late lamented Jacob Halliday’ (presumably a precedent for Paddy Dignam’s case) and the trial of a swindler offering ‘passage to Canada for twenty bob’ (p418).
• The social pages of a newspaper, parodying a report of a most silvicultural wedding - with one of those Homeric lists of bridal attendants bearing the names of multitudinous trees (such as Miss Holly Hazeleyes); ‘a playful crossfire’ of arboreal products in place of confetti, and a honeymoon in the Black Forest. (p424)  Later, on p433, there’s a parody of similar sort of report about a diplomatic visit of the ‘chief cotton magnates‘ and another one about a farewell to a royal visitor,  ’Nagyasagos uram Lipoti Virag…for the distant clime of …[the] Meadow of Murmuring Waters’ on p445.
• The Apostles Creed, parodied to show the folly of Irish recruits who believe in the promises of the British navy (p427)
• A gallery catalogue describing a ‘muchtreasured and intricately embroidered ancient Irish facecloth’, to describe a hankie used to wipe up spit (p430-1)
• Valentine’s Day cards?? Or is it a sort of blessing? (p433)
• Gadzooks, there’s a a medieval traveller’s tale! (p436-7)
• An account of a religious festival, a procession of all the saints and sinners bearing assorted symbols and sacrificial items including (yes!) ‘eyes on a dish’ (underlining is mine p441)
• A retelling of the Odyssey, with Moby Dick as a ‘milkwhite dolphin’ thrown in for good measure? (p443)
• Bloom’s eviction from the pub retold as a newspaper report of an earthquake (p447) .

There is also repeated use of the biblical ‘lo!’ to announce the arrival of  two characters in the pub: the ‘godlike messenger…radiant as the eye of heaven’ (Alf Bergen, p 385); and ‘a comely hero of white face’  (Jack o’Molloy, p414). It’s also used for Bloom’s miraculous escape from the wrath of The Citizen (p449) parodying the Ascension of Christ.

 The commentaries I looked at (Novel Guide and Carlin and Evans ) make much of Bloom as outsider in this chapter.  The Citizen obviously loathes Jews in general and Bloom in particular, sneering that the Irish should never have let ‘strangers’ in (p420), but while Bloom studiously ignores the talk that goes on not very subtly behind his back, the others mock his seriousness, his lack of hostility to the non-Irish, and his unwillingness to shout them a drink.  The Novel Guide has this to say, and it’s worth visiting the site to see the specific examples on which the summary relies:  

This is perhaps the strongest episode for revealing the startling anti-semitic and misogynist prejudices of the crowd and the fairness of the outsider, Bloom. In every instant [sic]] Bloom reveals a capacity to consider different points of view, and goes as far as to say love is what is important.  

 Bloom’s position on the margins is reinforced, however, by his ability to see two sides to an argument. Further to this, his masculinity is doubted by his fellow men as he has been seen buying baby food, for example. Bloom’s ability to appreciate traditional feminine and masculine forms of behavior is regarded by these men as questionable. In their eyes, he appears to be what the citizen accuses Breen of being: ‘neither fish nor flesh’. Because Bloom refuses to be tied to stereotypical masculine behavior, he is regarded by his fellow men as androgynous and worth killing. He refuses to fit the stereotype, and it is clear that Bloom is being used as a means to criticize the type of macho male which unquestioningly accepts nationalism, Catholicism, and the lower status of women. (Novel Guide).    

PS I hope I haven’t mucked up anybody’s bookmarks or hyperlinks, but I’ve renumbered my ‘disordered thoughts’ to match the chapter numbers they refer to.  I’m adding links to all the chapters I’ve done, at the bottom of each post, as I do them.

Links to my disordered thoughts for other chapters are under construction (because I haven’t finished (re) reading the book yet). NB Page references to anything before Chapter 11 are to my 1979 Penguin, and after that are to my Penguin 2000 reprint.

• Intro  
• Chapters 1,2,3  (Telemachus, Nestor, Proteus)
• Chapter 4   (Calypso)
• Chapter 5   (The Lotus Eaters)
• Chapter 6   (Hades)
• Chapter 7   (Aeolus)
• Chapter 8   (Lestrygonians)
• Chapter 9    (Scylla and Charybdis) 
• Chapter 10  (Wandering Rocks) 
• Chapter 11  (Sirens)
• Chapter 12  (Cyclops)
• Chapter 13   (Nausicaa)
• Chapter 14   (Oxen of the Sun)
• Chapter 15   (Circe)
• Chapter 16   (Eumaeus)
• Chapter 17   (Ithaca)
• Chapter 18   (Penelope)

I’m having a little flirtation with Canadian literature – reading two Canadian books within a week! 

Kevin from Canada has written a perceptive essay about similarities between Australia and Canada, and he’s right: we do have much in common and these similarities influence preoccupations in our literature.  However there is one difference which is all-encompassing to Australians: Canada is geographically connected to the rest of the world – and we are not.  We’re not even connected with New Zealand,  our nearest English-speaking neighbour with a sort-of-similar history as a British colony, but it’s over 2000km away across the Tasman Sea.  We don’t have the same accent and we can’t get their TV or radio stations.  We don’t know who their TV stars are, or their football leagues.  We don’t watch their films and we don’t take any notice of their literary awards (except here at ANZ LitLovers, of course!)   Most of us have never been there either. 

In Canada you can walk, ride or drive to another country.  Not only that, but what’s just over the border is the most powerful and influential country in the world, the US.  During the Vietnam War, draft dodgers slipped over the border to Canada, and Canadian kids dreaming of excitement and adventure could plan similar cross-border excursions.  Yes, you can get into, and you can get out of Canada without too much fuss, and what’s more, you can fly to Europe and see the rest of the world without too much trouble and expense as well.

If you travel to Australia by ocean liner, as I did as a child, you have some understanding of just how far away it is from everything.  By comparison, 20 hours in a plane to Europe is just a crude glimpse of its isolation, though the air fare would give most Canadians pause for thought.  Yes, it’s tiresome and expensive to get into, and out of, Australia.  It’s well within living memory that a phone call to England was prohibitively expensive, that world news came by unreliable cable, that letters from grandparents in the UK took 6 weeks to get here.  Well, satellites and the internet may have changed communication, but the geographical isolation persists: it still takes hours and hours in a plane to get anywhere.   

Wars are fought overseas;  trends and fashions are overseas; status and power are overseas, and added to this sense of being marooned a long way away from everything – though watching it on TV – is the fact that we’re in the southern hemisphere.  Our seasons are upside down; Christmas doesn’t come with snow,  April doesn’t bring Spring showers. We feel left out and vaguely embarrassed when everyone else is talking about blizzards in December or heat waves in June.          

Published in 1988 Cat’s Eye, by Margaret Atwood, traces a Canadian childhood and adolescence in the forties and fifties, a time when Australia was still culturally isolated from the rest of the world yet resolutely British in character.  (Post war migration brought Europeans here in large numbers to boost our pathetically small population, but they had yet to influence our way of life.)   What’s fascinating for me, is how close Atwood’s observations are to my understanding of what Australia was apparently like then too.  (I was born post-war, and didn’t arrive here till the 60s, but I’ve eavesdropped on lots of (mostly scornful, rarely nostalgic) conversations about Australia in the 40s and 50s, and of course I’ve read stories set in the period such as Steven Carroll’s The Art of the Engine Driver  as well as non fiction such as  The Australian Ugliness in which Robin Boyd derided Australia’s 1950s conformity).  Yet, seen through the prism of Atwood’s feminism, it seems that little girls in Canada were pretty much like little girls in Australia too: preoccupied with fitting in, with being good, and with surviving the spite and cruelty of other little girls whose malice was enough to scar the psyche for life.

The novel tells the story of Elaine Risley, an artist revisiting Toronto for a retrospective of her works.  It’s not a place of happy memories: after a peripatetic childhood while her father researched insects in the Canadian wilderness, Elaine and her brother Stephen have to adapt to living in a half-finished house (the builder absconded); to attending school, and to fitting into the pre-assigned gender roles of the period.  While for Stephen this seems effortless, for Elaine it is a torture made up of betrayals, cruelties, rejections and occasional real harm.  She is powerless to deal with it, and her mother’s feeble efforts to protect her from it are sabotaged by Elaine herself.  She goes on sabotaging herself right through adolescence and into adulthood…

Her ‘best friend’ and most malicious tormentor is Cordelia.  Why did her parents name her thus, wonders Elaine, and rightly so, for she is nothing like Shakespeare’s Cordelia at all. 

…these are ways of delaying time, slowing it down, so I won’t have to go out through the kitchen door.  But no matter what I do, and despite myself, I am pulling on my snowpants, wadding my skirt in between my legs, tugging thick woollen socks on over my shoes, stuffing my feet into boots.  Coat, scarf, mittens, knitted hat, I am encased, I am kissed, the door opens, then closes behind me, frozen air shoots up my nose.  I waddle through the orchard of leafless apple trees, the legs of my snowpants whisking against each other, down to the bus stop.

Grace is waiting there and Carol, and especially Cordelia.  Once I’m outside the house there is no getting away from them.  They are on the school bus, where Cordelia stands close beside me and whispers in my ear: ‘Stand up straight! People are looking!’ Carol is in my classroom, and it’s her job to report to Cordelia what I do and say all day.  They’re there at recess, and in the cellar at lunchtime.  They comment on the kind of lunch I have, how I hold my sandwich, how I chew.  On the way home from school I have to walk in front of them, or behind.  In front is worse because they talk about how I’m walking, how I look from behind. ‘Don’t hunch over,’ says Cordelia. ‘Don’t move your arms like that.’

They don’t say any of the things they say to me in front of others, even other children: whatever is going on is going on in secret, among the four of us only.  Secrecy is important, I know that: to violate if would be the greatest, the irreparable sin.  If I tell I will be cast out forever. (P119-120)

There is much more to it than this, but I want to avoid spoilers…

Atwood’s feminism is alert to the incongruity of the power games these little girls play.  They do it, it seems, because they don’t have any other power.  Like the adult women, they are excluded from the real action in this period; they have no one to prey on but each other.  While the girls’ mothers may dabble in the arts, absorb themselves in religion, or play homemaker in a kind of desperation, they have no careers, no income, no power and no status.   School teachers are caricatures in drab clothing; they are irrelevant.  (Even in the 70s when Elaine goes to hear Stephen deliver his lecture on astrophysics, the audience is mostly men.)  Yet Elaine is conflicted about the ‘women’s meetings’ she goes to in adulthood; she sees herself as a collaborator in male/female stereotyping too. 

Atwood’s humour is both droll and biting.  Here’s Elaine in the new department store:

I revolve through the revolving doors into Simpsons, where I become lost immediately.  They’ve changed the whole thing over. It used to be sedate wood-trimmed glass counters, with gloves in standard models, appropriate wristwatches, accent scarves in floral prints.  Serious-minded good taste.  Now it’s a cosmetic fairground: silver trim, gold pillars, marquee lights, brand-name letters the size of a human head.  The air is saturated with the stink of perfumes at war.  There are video screens on which flawless complexions turn, preen, sigh through their parted lips, are caressed.  On other screens are closeups of skin pores, before and after, details of regimes for everything, your hands, your neck, your thighs.  Your elbows, especially your elbows: aging begins at the elbows and metastasizes.

This is religion.  Voodoo and spells.  I want to believe in it, the creams, the rejuvenating lotions, the transparent unguents in vials that slick on like roll-top glue.  ‘Don’t you know what that junk is made of?’ Ben said once.  ‘Ground-up cock’s combs.’ But this doesn’t deter me, I’d use anything if it worked – slug juice, toad spit, eye of newt, anything at all to mummify myself, stop the drip drip of time, stay more or less the way I am. (p113)

The most poignant scene was, for me, at the end, when Elaine – successful in art, happily partnered, and mother of two dear little girls, - finds herself envying two daggy old ladies on the bus. 

They seem to me to be amazingly carefree.  They have saved up for this trip and they are damn well going to enjoy it, despite the arthritis of one, the swollen legs of the other.  They’re rambunctious, they’re full of beans; they’re tough as thirteen, they’re innocent and dirty, they don’t give a hoot. Responsibilities have fallen away from them, obligations, old hates and grievances; now for a short while they can play again like children, but this time without the pain.

This is what I miss, Cordelia; not something that’s gone, but something that will never happen.  Two old women giggling over their tea. (p420-1)

This was my sixth Atwood, and my last book for 2009 – a great one to end on.   Happy reading in 2010, everyone!

The only other review I could find is at Time Magazine.

Author: Margaret Atwood

Title: Cat’s Eye

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 1989

ISBN:9780747503040

Source: Personal copy ($8.00, secondhand, Diversity Books in Mentone)

 

I have just joined the Book Depository Affiliate Program. This means that I get a small commission if viewers click on the Book Depository logo in the RHS menu and subsequently buy a book from them.   As it happens, I was recommended to them by one of our ANZLitLovers members, and quite a few of our book group use them regularly because their prices are very competitive with other online booksellers.

I am supporting this venture because the Book Depository offers reprints of the classic books I am interested in, because they stock international titles that are hard to get in Australia, and they deliver worldwide for free.    I support them in the same way that I support the other booksellers listed in my Recommended links, because they give good, prompt and reliable service. In the case of Readings and Readers Feast (located here in Melbourne but with an online presence as well)  they also sponsor literary festivals that I attend regularly, so I buy from them in preference to any other local bookshops, though I’m also a regular at Benns Books in Centre Rd, Bentleigh.

The small Book Depository commission, if it ever amounts to anything, may help to pay for my bookbuying habit!

What a pleasure it is to read this witty, intelligent book! I’ve read a bit of dross lately, for one reason and another, and observant readers of this blog may have noticed a couple of titles in my ‘currently reading’ menu box have never made it to a blog post. Well, why bother bagging very popular books, eh? What would be the point?

The Acolyte,  however, is a treasure.  It won the Miles Franklin in 1972, Thea Astley’s third win and (according to the book blurb) her favourite of her own books.  The Well-Dressed Explorer won in  1962, The Slow Natives in 1965, and I have those to look forward to on the TBR as well, and quite a few others which I found mostly for a song at Brotherhood Books.

The only other Astley I have read is Drylands, a powerful, angry book, written in 1999 and her last.  It is fiercely critical of Australian anti-intellectualism; cynical about justice for victims of white-collar crime; scornful about attempts to import ‘culture’ in the form of writing groups and a branch library to the backblocks of Queensland; and contemptuous about small-town life and society.  There are no concessions: Astley expected her readers to be literate and she peppered the book with allusions to William Faulkner, Teilhard de Chardin, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Belloc’s Tarantella, and many others, including composers less well-known.  Her characters engage in one tirade after another, and although I have learned from Rosa Cappiello not to mistake the wild extravagant voice of the character for the opinion of the author, nevertheless, Astley can’t have made herself many friends in Queensland with this confronting book.

My favourite quotation from Drylands (as you would expect from a blogger who’s had a sporting bypass) is this one, from the character Joss:

I do wish the sporting blah blah would stop stop stop…this country is round the bend over jumping and kicking and running all in the name of winning.  It isn’t about sport any more.  It’s about power.  And money.  And politics.  And it’s boring. My God, it’s boring.’ (p249)[1]

The Acolyte is quite different in style and tone.  It is bitter and cynical, but the anger is directed inwards, not so much at the society in which her characters live, though her narrator, Paul Vesper, does sneer at Grogbusters, ‘ a border town of rangy street sprawl in the southern part of the State with apple and grape farms plotting its granite ridges and sheep on random story-book squares’. (p3)  Vesper is the ‘acolyte’, the devoted attendant of the blind pianist Jack Holberg, but he is not alone: all the characters in this novel sacrifice themselves to serve his genius.

Vesper, at least, seems aware of what he is doing, though he seems powerless to break free of Holberg’s powerful grip on his sense of self-determination. Vesper loses his ‘Rotary Dad and CWA Mum’ (p2) after they ‘debated the right of way unsuccessfully with a lilac cement-mixer’ (p68) so he is financially independent, but even before that, he abandoned a career as an engineer to be at Holberg’s beck-and-call, and his amanuensis.   As his compositions achieve international fame, Holberg holds court in his architect-designed mausoleum (p57) , defying his ordinary origins with an aristocratic mien and a harem of women.  Hilda, (his wife) and Ilsa , (his friend’s wife) however are pale, vacuous handmaidens in Holberg’s service, and Holberg’s live-in friends all have to endure rudeness, cuckoldry, mental cruelty and violence, ‘just one big happy incestuous family’ (p52). 

It is wickedly funny.   Holgate’s elderly aunt Sadie  ‘played Manilla poker and the stock exchange with the deadliness of a Chicago mobster’ (p57) .  She has a red wig to hide her thinning hair, and wears ‘Bermuda shorts and a Stetson and refreshed herself constantly with chipped ice and a stomach-ripping plum brandy. (p58) After a fall she is taken to a Glitterlights Convalescent Home for a month’s repair (p108) but comes back ‘refreshed and television-addicted from the cure-methods of the twilight zone’. (p115) She certainly has an acidic tongue, berating the hangers-on and critics with equal ferocity. 

There are also moments of poignant empathy for Holberg’s disability:  most of the time he and they ‘act as if there were nothing different about him at all’ (p95).  One day however, after Vesper has driven him on a ‘town trip to ruin Mr Shumway’s leading lady’ (p95), he asks Vesper how he whiles away the time, and Vesper says he goes window-shopping, to a film or the library. 

 ’I'd like to be able to do that too, matey.  window-shop, go to the odd movie.  What’s window-shopping really like, eh?  If it’s too much of a feast, you’d better not tell me.’  I couldn’t tell him after that, though he pressed me when we were next in the city’s main street.  ‘It’s a lot of gimcrack rubbish, ‘ I said, hesitant outside a picture gallery.  ‘Loud, brassy, tawdry’. ‘You’re a loyal old liar, ‘ he said, pressing my arm… (p96)

Later on, when Vespers finds some of Holberg’s plaintive writing about what it’s like to be blind, it’s what jolts him into really seeing how he is wasting his own opportunities. 

It’s not an easy book to read.  There are characteristics of modernism everywhere: unconventional metaphors, e.g. ‘restlessness spreading like nettle-rash’ (p56) allusions to music and books half-remembered and obscure, and antiphrasis e.g. ‘There was wind, and had been for days, from the coast, a scurrying dark concussion of branch and leaf-strop’ (p97).  It’s a book that demands concentration, and it seems best to read it with as few breaks as possible so as not to lose the plot.   But it is very, very good, and well worth the investment of effort.

Author: Thea Astley

Title: The Acolyte

Publisher: University of Queensland Press, 1998

ISBN: 0702215406

Source: Personal copy (Dymocks)

[1] Alas, I can’t cite the reference to Drylands properly, I don’t have the book any more, only notes and quotations in my reading journal.

I’m really looking forward to seeing Jane Campion’s new film, Bright Star, which is based on the true story of the doomed romance between 19th century poet John Keats and his unconventional young neighbour, Fanny Brawne.  For three years they kept their romance secret, only to have Keats die at the age of 25 from consumption (otherwise known as TB).

This one of my favourite poems by Keats, the first verse of which I learned at school…

From Endymion

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old, and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
‘Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.

From A Book of Poetry, selected & edited by W.M. Smyth, Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd, London. 1968. SBN 713114215  p177

Everybody’s doing it, and it’s been a tradition at ANZ LitLovers ever since we started the group back in 2002, so here’s my Top Ten for 2009, arranged in order of first publication, and with the nationality of the author in brackets. As you can see, my love of classics remains undimmed, and my bias towards Australian fiction is as marked as ever.  (Just what you’d expect, from an ANZ LitLover!)

1. Cranford (1851) by Elizabeth Gaskell (UK)
2. War and Peace (1869) by Leo Tolstoy (Russia)
3. Voss (1957) by Patrick White (Australia)
4. The Twyborn Affair (1979) by Patrick White (Australia)
5. Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison (USA)
6. The Remains of the Day (1989) by Kasuo Ishiguro (UK/Japan)
7. Death of a River Guide (1994) by Richard Flanagan (Australia)
8. Rules for Old Men Waiting (2005) by Peter Pouncey (UK)
9. The Bath Fugues (2009) by Brian Castro (Australia)
10. The World Beneath (2009) by Cate Kennedy (Australia)

I haven’t finished Ulysses by James Joyce yet; I’m only half way through because I’m reading it properly and at leisure for the first time in my life.  (This is my fourth reading of it, twice when I studied it at university back in 1983, and again some time in the 9os when my son was reading it). I won’t be able to include it in a Top Tens for the year list because this reading crosses two years - from Bloomsday 2009 to Bloomsday 2010, but it is without any doubt the most exhilarating book I’ve ever read, and I’m really enjoying reading it in company with Team Ulysses, Wandering Rocks and Ulysses ‘Seen‘.

I’ll be putting up the Top Tens for the rest of our group on the Top Tens page over the summer holdiays.

Over at 21st Century Fiction (a Yahoo reading group) we’ve been taking a break from book talk and sharing Christmas recipes and traditions from around the world, and so it seems appropriate to pay homage here to the lady who has done more to transform the way Australians cook than any other.

In Australia, Margaret Fulton OAM was the first to publish the type  of cookbook that is now ubitiquous.  Lavishly illustrated and with easy-to-follow instructions, it assumed that users did not know much about cooking, but more importantly it encouraged Australia’s cooks to use the diversity of fresh foods that are available here, to experiment with cuisines from around the world, and to be creative.  Her book and her articles in women’s magazines were enormously popular, with result that everyday Australian cuisine became diverse and exciting, and our restaurants are the same. 

Fulton’s 1968 Paul Hamlyn Margaret Fulton Cookbook was not the one I learned to cook with; it was the one my mother had, and as you can see from the splashes on the cover, it was – and still is – well used.  It has the best recipe for home made lemon squash and a foolproof recipe for pavlova.  The Complete Margaret Fulton Cookbook came out in 1974 when I was a young wife, and from this book I learned to make dolmades, pâté, moules marinière, soufflé, crêpes Suzette, Chilli Con Carne & Mexican cornbread, Malaysian satays, wiener Schnitzel, Ossobucco Milanese, chicken with 40 cloves of garlic, and a wonderful variety of vegetable dishes.  (All these recipes clearly identified by the splashmarks on the pages, this is a cookbook that gets used!)

Margaret Fulton’s New Cookbook came out in 1993, and featured a lighter style of cooking.  It is even more multicultural than its predecessors, and also includes a wider variety of vegetarian options.  The salads are particularly good, and the gazpacho Andaluz soup is a favourite on very hot nights when nobody wants to cook.

But it’s at Christmastime when families gather together to celebrate in their traditional ways that Margaret Fulton’s cookbook comes into its own.  That recipe for Roast Turkey (p221) has been used in our household for over 30 years now.  Follow the instructions slavishly and you will have the most moist and tender turkey you have ever eaten.  We make the stock, the vegetables, the gravy and the custard the Fulton way and it always turns out brilliantly.

The only Christmas recipe I use that does not come from Margaret Fulton is the one I use to make the Christmas pudding.  For that I am indebted to Meredith’s mother, who passed it on to my sister back in the 1970s.  Here it is:
Meredith’s Mother’s Christmas Pudding
This quantity serves 8-10, or you can double it for a larger pudding.
Ingredients:
110g plain white flour
110g fine while breadcrumbs
225g currants
225g sultanas
110g raisins
65g mixed peel
250g raw sugar (not brown)
250g unsalted butter
4 eggs
½ large grated carrot
3 tbsp brandy
Almond essence
½ tsp nutmeg
1 tsp mixed spice (not allspice)
½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
Method:
Prepare fruit: chop raisins, dry out in over on tea towels.  (Don’t worry if they happen to burn a little.)  Chop peel finely.  Scrub and grate carrot. 
Prepare dry ingredients: sift flour, soda and spices together.
Rub butter into dry ingredients, add sugar and breadcrumbs & fruit. 
Beat eggs, gradually add spirits & essence. 
Stir into dry ingredients, mix thoroughly and let stand one hour.
Fill into greased basins, cover with foil and put on lid.  Boil in a very large saucepan till cooked 3 ½ – 4 hours.
On Christmas Day, steam for a further 1 -1 ½ hours or in a slow cooker/crock pot on low for about 10-12 hours.
If doing a double quantity boil for 7-8 hours, & reheat by boiling 2-3 hours or in the crock pot for at least 12 hours.
Keep in the fridge (if living somewhere hot like Australia) for at least 3 weeks before serving.  I make mine on Melbourne Cup Day (the 2^nd Tuesday in November)
Serve flamed with brandy and with old fashioned English custard or brandy butter.

Late Nights on Air won the Giller Prize (in prestige, the Canadian equivalent of the Miles Franklin Award) but it’s not a book that’s had much publicity in Australia.  That might be because it’s an introspective sort of book that takes quite a while to engage the reader. 

BEWARE: SPOILERS    

A small town radio station in Northern Canada is used to bring the cast of characters together.  There’s Harry, who mucked up a promising career down south by drinking too much, Dido who’s an exotic outsider with a sexy voice; Gwen – pale and wan and running away from everything; and Eddy, who seemed like a sleaze to me, but Dido ends up in his bed.  All these people have failed relationships, and it suits them to be somewhere remote and easygoing where they don’t have to worry too much about fitting in.  

By the requisite 50 pages, I had decided that I wasn’t much interested in any of them, but I did like the portrait of a Canada I know very little about.  It intrigued me perhaps because there was a time in my family’s life when my father’s career meant that a choice had to be made between moving to Australia or to Canada.   So it’s just a fluke that I grew up as a hybrid Aussie instead of a hybrid Canadian. We are city people, so it’s unlikely that my parents would have settled as far north as remote Yellowknife,  but landscapes of its type would have been part of my (hybrid) national consciousness  in the same way that Australia’s Red Centre is.  My interest in the land of the midnight sun is what kept me going when the plot itself seemed as lost as the lost souls in the story…  

Some great books, of course, use a plot based just on everyday events to achieve greatness.  Patrick White’s Tree of Man and James Joyce’s Ulysses are obvious examples.  Nothing much happens; the plot is a structure around which to play with language and to experiment with literary ideas or styles.  But Late Nights on Air doesn’t seem to be doing that.  I checked out the characteristics of Modernism in case Hay was cunningly doing something with that but no, none that I could pick up on, though of course it’s always possible that it’s a reworking of an ancient Inuit myth or something…  

By page 75, I was starting to wonder if they were ever going to start on the portentous canoeing trip promised by the back cover blurb.  A quarter of the way through the book I was weary of the political agendas (development v wilderness; tradition v modernism for indigenous peoples) and I knew more about the technology of broadcasting in the seventies than I wanted to.  I was also starting to notice some very long sentences, always a fatal sign for me when I’m reading.  (There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with a long sentence; it’s noticing only that it’s long that’s the problem, and it usually portends that the book is going to take longer than it deserves for me to read it.)  

Although based in Yellowknife, where lawyers for the pipeline companies and the native organisations set out their formal positions, the enquiry would travel over the course of the next two years to settlements up and down the Mackenzie Valley, to communities on the Beaufort Sea and in the Yukon, and even to major cities in southern Canada, since at issue was the future of the northern wilderness, alternately considered a last frontier by developers and an indispensable homeland by the native people, but undeniably one of the last wonders of the earth. (p75)   

This excerpt sounds more like an undergraduate politics essay than a prize-winning novel to me…  

WARNING: CRITICAL SPOILER 

By p122, I was beginning to wonder whether this one should join the short list of books I have jettisoned without finishing.  Gwen the novice radio presenter and Ralph the photographer meet up at the beach.  He’s taking endless photos of watery weeds.   Each one is subtly different, he says.  (Hmm, I’m thinking, you must have to like seaweed a lot to spend your time doing this.)   

And then we get the foreshadowing, as if to say, ‘Don’t worry, something will happen, eventually.’  ‘The events of the following summer would make these pictures of Ralph’s almost intolerably moving.  But Gwen could not know that now.’  This was so clumsy it made me stop reading altogether. (That’s the last thing I want when it’s a book that I just want to finish so that I can read something better.) Ok, something bad is going to happen and it’s not going to happen to the seaweed.  Or to Gwen, since clearly she’s going to be around as well.  Clunk, clunk, and the plot pieces fit together: G+R+S-(G+S) = R, right?  

Hornby's cabin (Source: Wikipedia)

And how will this happen?  Well, let’s see.  We know there’s a fateful canoe trip coming – the blurb tells us so.  There have been plenty of heavy-handed allusions to the death of the Arctic explorer John Hornby and his trusting companions, and there’s been a retelling of events on pp 106-9 that suggests that it was Hornby’s failure to make preparations which caused the tragedy.   

Fortunately the book improves (a lot) once the trip begins.  There are some lucky escapes from peril, and yes, it does seem as if the group has over-planned the gourmet treats and the book-readings at the expense of a rifle to deal with wolves and bears.  Still, you know they aren’t going to starve like Hornby & Co, and this makes it more interesting.  The luck seems a little contrived here and there but it turns out that the omens and portents and tea-leaf/seaweed readings are all just a little bit wrong.   

Back at Yellowknife, the ends need to be tidied up, some predictable, and others not quite so.  (Dido, for example, doesn’t meet the end you might expect if you know your Virgil, depending on your view of self-sacrifice). 

So why did the judges award this book, which is IMO ok but uneven, the prestigious Giller Prize?  I get the impression from other reviews that a couple are a little bit doubtful too, but they’re right about the evocation of the tundra being superb.  See the New York Times, Quill and Quire, The Walrus and the effusive The Washington Post.  (I was disappointed to find that Kevin from Canada hadn’t reviewed it: I would have liked to know what he thought of it because he writes perceptive reviews that I have learned to trust.)

Author: Elizabeth Hay

Title: Late Nights on Air

Publisher: Maclehose Press, Quercus, London, 2007

ISBN: 9781847245502

Source: Personal copy, $29.95 from Benn’s Books, Bentleigh.

Chapter 11: Sirens

Well, as you can see from the book cover, I’m reading my new copy of Ulysses now because the old one finally fell apart.  I miss the other one with its yellowing pages and fading pencil marks from my university days, but this one has a splendid introduction (which I haven’t yet read) and a copy of Stuart Gilbert’s chart showing the schema for the novel. 

The chart confirms some of my guesses about chapter 11, and confused me with some of the others.  It tells me, for example, that the scene is the concert room.  This puzzled me because I thought it was in a pub, and I assumed that Gilbert was referring to some sort of music hall where Molly performs – except that she’s not actually present in this chapter.  Fortunately Carlin and Evans came to the rescue with more helpful detail – because Sirens is set in the Concert Room saloon at The Ormond Hotel, Ormond Quay.  Ah. 

I also thought that the colours of this chapter might have been gold and bronze, from the barmaids’ hair, but Mr Gilbert doesn’t say so – and neither do Carlin and Evans.

The Sirens, in Homer’s Ulysses, are a bewitching lot of damsels whose wondrous song lures the unwitting sailor to his death on the rocks. (I can’t remember why they wanted to do this as it seems a bit pointless to me).  Anyway, Ulysses stops up the ears of his crew with wax so that they can’t hear the Sirens’ song, and he gets them to lash him to the mast so that he gets to hear it but can’t fling himself into the water.  So, the themes of this chapter are going to be irresistible music and seductive wenches, and that indeed is what it turns out to be.  But that’s not all…

Yes, the organ is the ear; and yes, the art is music, but hey, it turns out that the narrative style is fuga per canonem.  Missed that one, and Penguin, unlike the ever helpful Carlin and Evans don’t include a handy translation for the musically challenged. C&E spell it fuga per canone (and my Latin is way too rusty for me to know which who is right) and it means a fugue according to rule.  So were I to deconstruct the chapter I might find that it conforms to a strict pattern somewhat like this:

A fugue opens with one main theme, the subject, which then sounds successively in each voice in imitation; when each voice has entered, the exposition is complete; this is occasionally followed by a connecting passage, or episode, developed from previously heard material; further “entries” of the subject then are heard in related keys. Episodes (if applicable) and entries are usually alternated until the “final entry” of the subject, by which point the music has returned to the opening key, or tonic, which is often followed by closing material, the coda. (Wikipedia)

(BTW I can’t resist adding a link here to my post about Brian Castro’s The Bath Fugues which plays with the same musical structure for his entire novel.  If you like James Joyce you will love this witty and erudite Aussie author.)

Well, Sirens certainly begins with a theme (aptly, flirtation/seduction) and voices there certainly are: it really is just like a pub where snatches of conversation ebb and flow and an eavesdropper can hear contrapuntal leitmotifs all over the place, especially as the drinkers start repeating themselves when they’ve had a Guinness too many. The chapter begins with pert barmaids watching the ‘viceregal hoofs go by’ (p331) as they pick the chipped varnish off their nails and titter at their patrons; they are a bit ‘up themselves’ as we say in Australia, Miss Douce the ‘haughty bronze’  threatening to ‘complain to Mrs de Massey if I hear any more … impertinent insolence’ (p352) as if her own vulgarity had not prompted ‘loud boots’ unmannerly’ interest.  They’re quite nasty about Bloom, Miss Douce claiming that he took a lecherous interest in her when she was in Boyds getting something for her sunburn and he was buying soap for Molly’s bath.  (I can’t find anything in The Lotus Eaters that places her there at the same time as Bloom, but maybe I missed it?)

Anyway Miss Kennedy (the golden blonde) calls him a ‘hideous old wretch’  and the pair of them repeatedly shriek over his ‘goggle eye’ (p333) ‘his bit of beard’ and his ‘greasy nose’ (p334):

In a giggling peal young goldbronze voices blended, Douce with Kennedy your other eye.  They threw young heads back, bronze gigglegold, to let freefly their laughter, screaming, your other, signals to each otherm, high piercing notes. (p334)

In comes Simon Dedalus, and he’s picking chips off his rocky thumbnails too (p335). Miss Douce flashes her sunburnt bare arm at him, and Lenehan enters as Bloom crosses Essex Bridge on his way to buy paper (two sheets cream vellum paper one reserve two envelopes, p339) .  Yes, he’s flirting too, in a sterile middle-aged kind of way, getting organised to write his reply to Martha, and eyeing off a ’swaying mermaid’ on a poster (p339).  Alas his fantasies are interrupted by a glimpse of Boylan’s ‘gay hat riding on a jauntingcar’ (p339).  This makes three times he’s seen the man in the one day, and this time he decides to follow him.  (Well, three is always such a decisive number in literature, eh?)

(BTW, lest like me you are imagining Boylan in a sexy cream and black open tourer do visit Joyce Images to discover that a jaunting car is not a motor vehicle at all. Scroll down about half way to see one.)

Before long there’s to be a singalong at the piano, which has just been tuned by the blind stripling from Lestrygonians.  (It used to be common for the blind to be steered into piano tuning as a career; these days education systems are much better at offering more diverse opportunities).  Anyway, if you’ve ever had your piano tuned, you’ll appreciate the brilliance of this description:

From the saloon a call came, long in dying. That was a tuningfork the tuner had that he forgot that he now struck.  A call again.  That he now poised that it now throbbed.  You hear? It throbbed, pure, purer, softly and softlier, its buzzing prongs.  Longer in dying call. (p340)

I’m intrigued to read that ‘Blazes Boylan’s smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor where he strode’. (p340) Now where have I heard that shoes not paid for will squeak as you walk in them?  Is it Irish folklore? Is Blazes not quite as flash as he appears to be?? He meets up with Lenehan, and Bloom comes in too, along with Richie Goulding and his legal bag.  (Who’s Richie Goulding, where did he spring from??)   Those sexy young minxes outsmile each other at Blazes, Miss Douce ‘preening for him her richer hair, a bosom and a rose’ (p341) and ‘reached high to take a flagon, stretching her satin arm, her bust, that all but burst, so high’ (p341).  When Miss Kennedy isn’t looking, she:

‘nipped a peak of skirt above her knee. Delayed. Taunted them still, bending, suspending, with wilful eyes.

- Sonnez! [-Ring!]

Smack. She let free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter smackwarm against her smackable woman’s warmhosed thigh. (p343)

Well, ok, it’s a bit tame by today’s raunch culture standards, but it was pretty salacious back in 1904!

Boylan leaves suddenly, leaving Lenehan to gulp his drink down in order to follow him.  Ben Dollard and Father Cowley come in, and the singalong ensues.  The men flirt and tell crude stories while Bloom and Richie Goulding eat their meal, ‘married in silence’. (p347)  Things begin to repeat themselves so we must be beyond the exposition now and into ‘further “entries” of the subject  in related keys’:  Bloom eating liver; the piano playing; more songs; the jingling of Boylan’s car ‘jiggle jingle jaunty jaunty’ (p349); his ’smart tan shoes creaking’ (p356)  and Bloom thinking of Molly.  Improvisation on the piano (p359) mirrors what’s happening in the text: Bloom says he’s answering an ad when in fact he’s writing to Martha (p361).

More singing, lots of references to different kinds of music, and Bloom thinks about Rudy too, and how he failed Molly (p367).  Then he takes leave of Goulding and away ‘up the quay went Lionelleopold, naughty Henry with letter for Mady’ (p372). The stripling taps his way along the street, having left his tuning fork behind, and Bloom meets a prostitute that he knows but he’s not interested: ‘too dear too near to home sweet home’ and ’she looks a fright by day’. (p375)

Page references are to my new copy of the Penguin Classics Ulysses (2000), ISBN 9780141182803, $15.95 from Book Street Books in Hampton.  (And what a search it was to find it: 5 bookshops without a copy, and only one of them had the grace to be apologetic!)

Links to my disordered thoughts for other chapters are under construction (because I haven’t finished (re) reading the book yet). NB Page references to anything before Chapter 11 are to my 1979 Penguin, and after that are to my Penguin 2000 reprint.

• Intro  
• Chapters 1,2,3  (Telemachus, Nestor, Proteus)
• Chapter 4   (Calypso)
• Chapter 5   (The Lotus Eaters)
• Chapter 6   (Hades)
• Chapter 7   (Aeolus)
• Chapter 8   (Lestrygonians)
• Chapter 9    (Scylla and Charybdis) 
• Chapter 10  (Wandering Rocks) 
• Chapter 11  (Sirens)
• Chapter 12  (Cyclops)
• Chapter 13   (Nausicaa)
• Chapter 14   (Oxen of the Sun)
• Chapter 15   (Circe)
• Chapter 16   (Eumaeus)
• Chapter 17   (Ithaca)
• Chapter 18   (Penelope)