And while I am totally on a rolling ranting rollick here about books and writers and stories that matter, let's sail abroad for a moment and consider a literature in which I have been swimmin' for the last few years, which would be Australiana, in which I most admire not only the great heroes of that dusty lucky country's tale-tellers, like their
Twain figure the terrific
Henry Lawson, whose stories are a great place to start if you have never read anything by an Australian, and the excellent mystery writer
Arthur Upfield, and the wonderful
Nevil Shute who was a most fascinatin' man altogether whereas his name was actually Nevil Shute Norway and he was born in London and was an aeronautical engineer worried that being known as a writer would damage his professional cash-earning capacity, which you have to laugh about that, and he then moved to Australia and lived the rest of his life there and set many of his best books there so I would say he's an Australian writer despite being born inside the Empire that enslaved my people for six centuries, not that the Irish have long and bitter memories or anything. Anyway, Shute's terrific, and it's too bad that all anyone knows of his work usually is the novel
On the Beach, which partly people know of that not only because it's a great post-apocalyptic novel but also because the movie made from it starred
Ava Gardner, who was, I point out, of Irish descent, so there you go. This reminds me of the Ava Gardner story that the poor woman had the affections of
Howard Hughes inflicted upon her, and when she refused to accede to his intimations and delectations, which included the gift of a new car in hopes that automobilia would spur amorousness (how very American), he had the car completely taken apart and left in her driveway in careful pieces. Was that dude weird or what? I cast no aspersions on the fact that he was born in Texas. So anyway, back to Australia, where
Tim Winton has written the masterpiece
Cloudstreet about western Australia, and
David Malouf has written the masterpiece
Remembering Babylon, and
Inga Clendinnen wrote the masterpiece
Dancing With Strangers, and
Robert Hughes wrote the haunting
The Fatal Shore, and
Shirley Hazzard made
The Great Fire, and
Peter Carey made many cool books among them
True History of the Kelly Gang which is superb, and
Kenneth Cook wrote the menacing
Wake in Fright which was made into a chilling movie, but over and above all these may be
Helen Garner, who might be the most widely accomplished modern writer, famous for her fiction but an even better essayist (read her collections
The Feel of Steel and
True Stories, and her great nonfiction
Joe Cinque's Consolation), and
Mark Tredinnick is an interesting writer about nature, and
Terry Monagle is a lovely writer about spirituality (read his
Fragments), and
James Button is a superb journalist, and while the Tasmanian
Richard Flanagan's novels, notably
Death of a River Guide and
Gould's Book of Fish, win acclaim and awards and all, I might posit that his brother
Martin Flanagan is the Australian writer most interested in matters of race not as politics but as possibility, in the still riveting idea of an Australia that emerges from its orbit as English satellite not to become an American satellite, or a cousin of Asia, but a country brimming with a kind of light that has everything to do with where the human species might go in terms of peace and harmony and cohesion and creativity turned to vigor rather than violence. In a real sense it seems to me that a nation's best writers are really dreamers of what the country and its people are really about in their bones, and what they might be if everyone sings rather than slings; which is why, to loop around toward
yesterday's post, such American writers as Twain and
Bellow and
Willa Cather and
Flannery O'Connor and
Eudora Welty and
Isaac Asimov seem the best of us, and Martin Flanagan, especially in works like
The Game in Time of War, seem the best of that brilliant land today. A nation's very best writers are those who have something finally to say about their own place, its salt and spice, its sins and bones, its gifts and glories, its pain and prayers. Such writers do more than entertain; they point toward what is best and what might be better; which is finally a glorious and insane thing to try to do; which the attempt is lovely and so very human in its ambition and madness; rather like marriage, or democracy, or grilling asparagus.