My favourite books

“Rounding the corner and passing in turn the fire-bell, the Rechabite’s Hall and the flour mill, hearse and coach, resembling two black smudges on empty space, set to crawling up the slope that led out of the township. From the top of this rise the road could be seen for miles, running with curve or turn through the grassy plains. About midway, in a slight dip, was visible the little fenced-in square of the cemetery, its sprinkling of white headstones forming a landmark in the bare, undulating country.”

And so Henry Handel Richardson describes the setting of Richard Mahony’s resting place. It is towards the end of the last chapter of Ultima Thule, the third book of three that comprise The Fortunes of Richard Mahony which I consider the great Australian novel. To this day I can still get wet-eyed when I go back to The Fortunes … and browse through it, especially that compelling third book in the trilogy. I marvel at the creative skill and the fine touch and the flow and the richness of the settings and the characterisation. I am left stunned by the skill and sated by the emotional demands. I would add, in parenthesis as it were, that the setting described here by Henry Handel Richardson is something to which we Tasmanians should readily relate. For me it evokes recollections of driving, even now, through the Derwent Valley or parts of the midlands or the east coast, especially at a time when it looks sparse, dry and humourless.

I love books, all kinds of books — novels, biographies, autobiographies, short stories, memoirs, histories, essays, thrillers, humour and many others. I don’t complete all books — because I find that some are not for me for one reason or another — but mostly I do complete them because I settle on books that tickle my particular reading fancy. For many years now the books I have been reading have self-selected. I generally know if a book will interest me because I know and respect the author or the bookseller who knows my tastes or the friend who has read it and liked it. I think that, like most avid readers who are similarly eclectic in their tastes, one becomes part of a loose fraternity of readers who exchange views and recommend books to each other en passant in coffee shops or lifts or airport lounges.

However, before launching into a discussion of some of my favourites I would like to remind readers what the book world in Australia was once like. It was in the mid-sixties and I was passing through Sydney on the way home to Canberra after a few weeks in Geneva at a conference. The Customs official was ferreting among my dirty undies when he waved two books at me and declared with a triumphant leer “I’ll have to confiscate these, Sir.” The books waved were Fanny Hill by John Cleland and Another Country by James Baldwin, both about as titillating as the label on a Weeties packet but I had bought them and they were on the government’s list of banned books. Argument was a waste of time. Then, having savoured his victory, the customs officer waved the books again and declared with due solemnity “I don’t know why they banned them, you know. I reckon they’re pretty harmless.” I gazed vacantly at him and then wandered off marvelling at the cheek of Her Majesty’s customs service — I lose two books and he and his mates get them to read them. And I was silly enough to think that, along with other grubby tomes like em>What Rude Little Ronny Did In The Bath,/em> or whatever, they were stored in huge, hermetically sealed steel vaults deep in the bowels of ASIO headquarters lest they escape and corrupt our innocent citizens. Back in the sixties Big Brother really did exist in Australia. Thankfully, it is no longer so or at least not in the book world.

Flanagan’s immense generosity of spirit

Of the Tasmanian writers there are many whom I like and certainly Richard Flanagan whose immense talent is matched by an equally immense generosity of spirit. I also have a special affection for the writing of Geoffrey Dean who has an eye for the quirky in the routine of every day life and conveys it with a deft touch and great warmth. Across Bass Strait two of many whom I especially enjoy are Tim Winton and Murray Bail. Winton is a writer of the first order and Bail’s Eucalyptusand em>The Drover’s Wife and Other Stories are among the best of contemporary Australian writing.

To leap now across continents, I turn to two men with whom I should perhaps have started, two polymaths whose contributions to civilised thought over much of the last century will endure long after the contemporary notables — politicians, generals and captains of industry — have strutted their stuff. I refer to Isaiah Berlin and Edward Said. A Jew and a Palestinian, the former an academic at Oxford for much of his life, the latter an academic at Columbia University in the United States for much of his life but both of them active and influential in diverse areas far beyond academia. Said was a Professor of English and Comparative Literature; Berlin was a Professor of Social and Political Theory. Please read Said’s Out of Place – A Memoir and Reflections on Exile and please read any or all of the many books, papers, articles, and letters of Isaiah Berlin but especially The Hedgehog and the Fox, his famous essay on Tolstoy and history. I don’t know if they ever met but I would like to think that they would quickly have found considerable common ground had they done so.

While on academics I should return briefly to Australia and mention Raymond Gaita, the Melbourne philosopher whose Romulus, My Father is a delightfully human memoir of a father by a son whose humanity and sensitive touch makes for one of the most engaging memoirs I have read.

Germany was part of my growing up

The Gaita family came from Yugoslavia and that takes me back to Europe, especially to Germany. Perhaps I have a fixation about Germany but, then, Germany was part of my growing up. Hitler contorted my life as a boy and, along with millions of others, I hated him then and I hate him now. And yet as Alan Bullock reminds us in his fine biography of Hitler — Hitler — A Study in Tyranny — if the victorious allies in 1918 had not been quite so keen to penalise Germany as savagely as they did at Versailles then Hitler may not have found the grounds and the popular support that he needed. The Germany that gave us Hitler also gave us Christopher Isherwood and his portraits of a decadent, drifting society ripe for the plucking. I don’t think Isherwood was a great writer but he was an acute observer of the human condition and a fine and lucid reporter in his fictional treatment of Germany in the 1930’s in “Goodbye to Berlin” and “Mr. Norris Changes Trains”.

Then there is all the biographical and autobiographical work that I have enjoyed over the years from Gwen Harwood’s Selected Letters to A.B.Facey’s em>A Fortunate Life, from Harold Acton’s memoirs to Patrick White’s Flaws in the Glass, from Paul Hasluck’s The Chance of Politics to Tom Hiney on Raymond Chandler to Caro on Lyndon Johnson, Gentry on J. Edgar Hoover and Williams on Huey Long. There are echoes in contemporary America of Johnson, Hoover and Long — three of the most venal, corrupt leaders in any democracy at any time.

As for novelists, I cut my teeth on Dickens and writers like Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemmingway, Somerset Maugham and Scott Fitzgerald and can still read them all and enjoy them all. I suspect that Greene would have won a Nobel had he not told such a good story. Prize givers mostly don’t seem to favour good story-tellers, however well the tellers tell their stories!

Evelyn Waugh was indeed a great writer and a formidable stylist but I wonder sometimes if the style did not on occasion become an end in itself. I think I learned rather more by reading Anthony Powell’s quite brilliant profile of a generation in his A Dance to the Music of Time. Yet another fine British writer (and poet) is Laurie Lee whose Cider with Rosie, A Rose for Winter and others are a delightful mix of autobiography and observation of the world, writ both large and small. And very personal, very human. For me, however, the best of contemporary stylists is Alan Bennett because he carries the reader forward so effortlessly, so unobtrusively. He can also be very funny but, again, with no great fuss and always with great humanity.

Heights of special literary excellence

In a similar vogue is Alistair MacLeod, a Nova Scotian whose Island, No Great Mischief and other books have won international acclaim. He reminds me somewhat of Andre Makine, the prize-winning Siberian émigré now long resident in Paris. They both seem to have this special sense of “place” — a place from whence you came or put down roots or which is important for some private reason or where you find inspiration or perhaps where you lived and loved and left after watching the sun come up over dry paddocks and broken fences. MacLeod’s compatriot Margaret Attwood is also well represented on my walls.

There are presently many fine writers of fiction in the United Kingdom and Ireland — people like Ian McEwen, John Banville, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Sebastian Foulks and others. I was only recently reading a book by Banville entitled Prague Pictures (Bloomsbury; Portraits of a City series) and there are parts of that little book — especially when he is writing about his friendship with “the professor” — that Banville reaches heights of special literary excellence.

There are many American writers dotted around my walls — Richard Ford, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Jeffrey Lent, Tobias Wolff, Patrick McGrath, Cormac McCarthy and many others. McCarthy is a quite brilliant novelist and, for my part, like no other novelist anywhere, any time. For the setting of most of his work — the border country where the United States meets Mexico — think of Nolan and Drysdale paintings of the Australian outback. Parched, harsh, unforgiving land where nothing much lives and not much that does lasts for long. Think too of the people who are as distant as the horizon and just as animated. I have never read any writing remotely similar to that of Cormac McCarthy. It is unique and uniquely compelling. Very special stuff. Jeffrey Lent is new to me but excellent value. However, the reader would be well advised to tighten the seat belt before tackling Lent’s Lost Nation, a great novel in my view.

Patrick McGrath and Tobias Wolff are relatively new to my shelves but acquisitions of which I am very proud. Wolff’s The Night in Question is a collection of very special, beautifully crafted short stories and McGrath is also at ease with both short and long fiction and none of it is less than brilliant.

The Henry Root Letters

Crime, spies and the like? Yes but no so much in recent years. Of the Australians, I think Peter Corris and Shane Maloney are very good indeed, as is Kerry Greenwood. Beyond our shores, I enjoy the work of the Spaniard Arturo Perez-Reverte and the American James Lee Burke. My favourites, however, are those of yesteryear — people like John Le Carre, Eric Ambler, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

In what I shall call “entertainment corner” I have two offerings by way of conclusion — The Henry Root Letters and The First Cuckoo (and Second — and Third) — Letters to The Times since 1900.

Henry Root has been revealed only very recently, shortly before his death, to have been one William Donaldson, an English journalist. The “letters” are very funny indeed — good belly-laugh stuff. Enjoy them — if they are not in print then they may well be available on the second hand market.

The Cuckoo series is also rich in humour but, even more importantly, the books are a marvellous profile of British life across a century that covered two world wars, the Great Depression, the dismantling of sundry empires, the nuclear era, the exploration of space and much more.

And I haven’t covered all the writers I wanted to cover and I never found time or space for writing in Asia, Africa and Central/South America. Perhaps next time.

And so to complete Henry Handel Richardson’s farewell to Richard Mahoney …

“All that remained of Richard Mahony has long since crumbled to dust. For a time, fond hands tended his grave, on which in due course a small cross rose, bearing his name, and marking the days and years of his earthly pilgrimage. But, those who had known and loved him passing, scattering, forgetting, rude weeds choked the flowers, the cross toppled over, fell to pieces and was removed, the ivy that entwined it uprooted. And, thereafter, his resting-place was indistinguishable from the common ground. The rich and kindly earth of his adopted country absorbed his perishable body, as the country itself had never contrived to make its own, his wayward, vagrant spirit.”