This month I go back to Australia, for the first time since 2018. At the moment I am making lists of things I miss, things I want, hoarding the promise of near-future pleasures like a dragon gloating over his lair. A small sample: gum trees, the tram creaking down past my family home, easy access to Vegemite, early autumn still rich and warm with Australian summer, Preston Market, magpies in the morning, the Chinese restaurant we always go to on High Street, jugs of beer, the tubby tabby who still comes up for a crotchety cuddle or two, the misty line of the Dandenongs from our balcony, that wide open sky, my family thank god fucking finally, and water. The brown strip of the Yarra, Melbourne tap water tinny from the faucet, my dad out with the hose watering the veggie patch, those crashing seas that make European beaches feel tame and tepid. In case you would like to join my anticipation, here are some books which, like me this month, aim to tick up your hydration.
Julia Armfield’s debut novel OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA tracks two halves of a relationship: Leah, trapped deep underwater after a submarine disaster, and Miri, trying to understand the Leah who has come back to the surface. Leah spends too much time in the bath; she reacts slowly or not at all to conversation; her body has become newly porous. For fans of her short stories, it will not be a surprise that Armfield’s writing is beautiful and tragic and intelligent, with the kind of sting in its tail that leaves you off-balance on every other page, and it’s amazing and awful to watch that being put into the practice of Leah and Miri’s relationship as they ease away from each other, as they mourn all that they are leaving in that freshly deserted space. It’s a love story that is also a horror novel, tenderness seeping into fear, terror smiling through the romance, and like Leah, it sends you shuttling with each chapter deep down into the hungry, seething sea-dark. A book to be eaten up, then savoured slowly.
(preorder a signed edition from Waterstones - it’s out this week!)Imagine if Sally Rooney had an Australian sense of humour and a mild interest in horror and you’ve got SPRINGTIME, a novella by Michelle de Kretser published pre-Rooney and with more bite in less pages. SPRINGTIME is the story of Frances, who has moved to Sydney with her new boyfriend, Charlie, an older man who has left his wife and son for her, and her dog, Rod, who she loves in a less complicated way. On her daily walk by Cooks River, Frances starts to notice someone she suspects is not entirely alive. Like all good ghost storytellers, de Kretser has the knack of making something mundane feel frightening, whether it is Sydney’s lush and overpowering blossoms or Charlie’s son, an eerie child ready to take his place amongst the eerie children hall of fame. I love a slim pile of pages that can hold me in its grip for the exact length of one too hot bath, but this book ticks back into my head time and time again, tripping me up in the middle of the night, slipping across my gaze in the morning sun.
(buy @ readings)Perhaps one of the most delightful and frustrating reading experience of recent years, SHINE ON, BRIGHT AND DANGEROUS OBJECT had me wanting to somehow call up its author Laurie Colwin in 1975 and tell her how much I loved it and demand a fresh draft in the same breath. I would say sixty percent of this book is extremely, extremely good; forty percent is baffling and/or aggravating to the extreme. The fact that I am reccing it anyway is a testament to how much I mean the “extremely”. Colwin merrily kicks you off the deep end with her first sentence, which explains that our heroine, twenty-seven-year-old Elizabeth Bax, is a new widower; her husband Sam has drowned in a sailing accident and the rest of the book (with some exasperating detours) is the story of her grappling with her grief while she falls in love with her husband’s brother. Colwin has a knack for summing up characters in a single, winning sentence—“Our Sam is hoping to be elected the world’s most dangerous boy,” his brother says—but the pleasure of her writing is that she doesn’t often stop at one. Come join me in my fury over the strange ending and what this book could have been: I promise it’s worth it.
(buy @ ebay)I read Eden Robinson’s MONKEY BEACH in a dreamlike haze, wondering why it hadn’t been made into the world’s most beautiful miniseries yet, finished it and discovered it had actually just been made into a film, and promptly decided not to watch it as I am too possessive about the characters who came to life in my head. A coming-of-age story set in the Haisla community of Kitamaat on Canada’s northwest coast, MONKEY BEACH shows myth crossing over into life in easy, matter-of-fact language that demands to know who got to decide it was myth, anyway. Through the eyes of Lisa, our protagonist, we meet her family (her missing brother, her friendly albeit secretive parents, her adored uncle and grandmother) and her magic (the crows, the B'gwus, the dead). Lisa is the kind of heroine I want to follow everywhere: into brawls and boats, through kitchens and parties and school and snow, and this book is a journey that doesn’t end.
(buy @ indiebound)CONSIDER ALSO: Lucy Snowe catching the boat to Belgium with everyone throwing up over the side; “Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains”; one of Joanna Newsom’s most distressing love songs, or a selkie tale if you fancy something cheerier; the line in Goodbye, Columbus which made me laugh for about a month where Ron gives one “the feeling that after swimming the length of the pool a half dozen times he would have earned the right to drink its contents”; the Secret History gang on their rowboat; humpback whales sneaking up on Norwegian fishermen; Win and Leo in their stoned sexy rooftop pool or furious freezing sea swim (tag yourself); the bit in Anne of Green Gables where she acts out the Lady of Shalott.