Final verdict (for now) on parallel importation of books

The final verdict is in: the copyright restrictions on parallel importation of books into Australia are staying (which is good news for Australian writers).

Kate Eltham from the Queensland Writers' Centre sums up the outcome (and links to more information) here.

For background on the issue, you can check out my post on the subject back in July.

(And yes, I will write about an actual book again very soon! - Nearly caught up on everything again...)

The household guide to dying

I’m back from my big adventure and a tad behind on a large number of projects. So … I thought I’d post a review I wrote for a competition recently (which did not bear fruit), until I can offer up posts on my holiday reading material.

Dying is an ambitious topic to tackle in fiction. While death is used as a plot device or metaphor in countless novels, it’s not usually the driving force of the narrative.

Debra Adelaide makes death and dying the central theme in her 2008 novel The Household Guide to Dying. But while the impending demise of the narrative character propels the story, it’s also a mechanism for a broader story arc that prevents the novel from being a one-trick pony.

The novel revolves around Delia, a “domestic advice” columnist, whose often acerbic advice masks a woman whose life has not always been as well ordered as her pantry. Exhausted and ravaged from chemotherapy, Delia is preparing herself for the natural conclusion to a long battle against breast cancer.

In between making plans for her young daughters’ future weddings, and stocking the fridge with frozen home-cooked meals, she decides her final book of household advice should be about dying – a subject she’s now qualified to write about with absolute authority.

Delia’s impending death – which she faces with an often jarring sense of practicality –provides the motivation to not only prepare her family for a future without her, but to also finally tend to old wounds inflicted in a small country town many years earlier.

The Household Guide to Dying at first feels like another of those stories intent on celebrating the simple pleasures in life, usually best perceived in moments of human frailty. Certainly Adelaide has a wonderful eye for detail and an evocative turn of phrase, but she’s also intent on telling a story. So, as Delia starts to unpick the seams that have held her life together, it’s apparent there’s much more to this fastidious woman than immaculately laundered clothing and perfect cups of tea. Adelaide paints her stroke by stroke and, ironically, the closer she comes to death, the more human she becomes on the page.

The household, and the role of a woman in it, is a powerful motif throughout the story. So much so, the novel could easily be mistaken as a treatise on the pre-feminist importance of women in society. But a closer examination suggests Delia’s commitment to a perfectly ordered household is a response to the unpredictability of life in the world outside – a world that has left her with deep, well hidden, scars.

Over the years, she’s taken control of her household with almost militant precision, and she approaches death in much the same fashion. Almost every decision she makes is about controlling as much as she can in the lives of those she loves from beyond the grave.

The Household Guide to Dying is meticulously constructed, with the mood continually shifting from humorous to macabre, witty to poignant. Delia’s catalogue of household knowledge and responses to hapless advice seekers are woven between accounts of her final days, and flashbacks to the moments that have shaped her life. Events are told outside of chronological order, ensuring the gentle pace of the story never stalls and saving it from being too flippant, morbid or melodramatic.

There can be no accusations of sentimentality here. Delia doesn’t pass through the seven stages of grief – at least not on the page – and perhaps the story would have been even richer if she had. But what grief she doesn’t express for herself, she does for the past, and when her moment of redemption finally comes, it’s surprisingly effective.

Threaded through all of this is Delia’s research into her own “household guide to dying” – learning about caskets, funeral services and autopsies. The latter is meant to emphasise the banality of death in the face of unbearable grief, but – aside from feeding morbid curiosity – is distracting by its detail.

Helen Garner also tackled the subject of dying in 2008, with her much lauded novel The Spare Room. It’s told from the perspective of a woman forced to watch a dying friend struggle against the inevitable. Narrator Helen agrees to support a friend battling the final stages of a terminal cancer while she undergoes bizarre experimental treatment. Over the course of three emotionally-charged weeks, Helen becomes nurse, guardian angel and unflinching judge of the choices made by her dying friend.

Ironically, Delia is more emotionally muted in her response to death than Garner’s Helen, but then Delia’s story is influenced by a different tension. In The Household Guide to Dying, the tension is not just about Delia facing her own mortality; it’s about what she needs to do before she can face it with a sense of completeness. To her, the task is everything.

Although The Household Guide to Dying is not focused solely on Delia’s inexorable steps towards death, it still manages to be confronting, simply because it deals with issues of mortality and how that theme translates off the page.

A brief break in transmission

Hello ... just a quick post to say I'm eating and drinking my way across Italy at the moment, so the next post is still a few weeks' away.

(I've just finished reading Craig Silvey's excellent Jasper Jones, so that's next on the list...)

Jeff Lindsay and Darkly Dreaming Dexter

One of the highlights of this year’s Brisbane Writers’ Festival on the weekend was a packed session featuring Jeff Lindsay, author of the books that have spawned the Dexter TV series.

The crowd was a mix of fans of his four books and fans of the TV series, and – obviously – those of us who appreciate both.

The man who has created one of the most morally ambiguous characters of recent times spoke about Dexter’s genesis and how important it is for readers (and viewers) to still question the nature of good and bad.

Lindsay claims the idea for Dexter came during a business group gathering of estate agents, lawyers and brokers many years ago. Sitting around listening to them network and promote themselves, he decided “serial murder is not always a bad thing” (and was possibly only half joking).

It gave him the idea of a serial killer who was sympathetic, not because of what he does, but because of who he is and the fact he acts from a position of amorality. Of course, it helps that Dexter only kills those who kill others (thanks to the foresight of his foster father Harry, a cop who saw the darkness in Dexter as a child and devised a way to channel it).

But Lindsay is very quick to point out Dexter is not a vigilante.

“A vigilante is someone who kills because someone has fallen through the cracks of the justice system and they are outraged personally and justice must be served. Dexter just likes to kill. He just happens to kill bad people because that’s the way his foster father set it up, and it works.”

Ironically, while the need for guilt is only a technicality for Dexter, it is imperative for Lindsay. “That line is important to me,” he told the weekend audience.

Lindsay has a very strong sense of justice. When talking about a young girl in his street who was raped and murdered, he momentarily dropped the wisecracks and was visibly emotional. He admitted he supported the death penalty, but only if there was no doubt of guilt - something he knew was next to impossible ... except for the fictitious Dexter.

As a reader or viewer, you can’t help but be a little unsettled at finding a serial killer likable, and Lindsay delights in shocking us with the reality of what Dexter does when he has his prey alone. While the series hints that Dexter may be more human than he believes, the books emphasise that Dexter’s humanity is a well constructed facade.

Lindsay thinks one of the reasons Dexter is so appealing is the fact he doesn’t see himself as human – only a monster good at pretending to be one. He is the voice of an outsider, allowing readers to see themselves in a different way, logically, without emotion.

The author says Dexter takes to the extreme something what we all do: fake in a relationship.

During his session on Saturday, Lindsay asked members of the audience to raise their hands if they were 100 per cent authentic with 100 per cent of the people they interacted with, 100 per cent of the time. Of course, no-one raised their hand.

“Dexter fakes all the time – but he knows he’s faking. He is very well aware of the fact he’s not a human.”

Interestingly, Lindsay hated title of the first Dexter novel, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, devised by his publisher’s marketing team. His original title was The Left of God, which was ruled out for fear it would create confusion for fans of the Humphrey Bogart film of the same name.

Lindsay’s young daughter – who hadn’t read the book but had heard enough conversations to get the gist – suggested “Pinocchio bleeds”. But while remarkably apt, it didn’t lend itself to serialisation...

While the TV series still takes its inspiration and some plot lines from the books, the two offer quite different stories and can stand alone without the other.

I’ve been a fan of the series since it started, and – now I’m reading the books – I’m enjoying the deeper (and often darker) perspective of the novels, along with Lindsay’s trademark wit and unique narrative voice.

If you enjoy the series but haven’t read the novels, give them a try.

Q&A with Sang Pak - Wait Until Twilight

This week's post marks the first author Q&A for Great Stories. Our guest is Sang Pak, whose excellent debut novel Wait Until Twilight was the focus of last week's post.

Here, he sheds some light on the inspiration for the story and its dark themes.

Was the idea for the book something that grew over time, or did you have a clear story outline from the start?
The idea was born from a set of dreams I had over a 2 week period a few summers back. I took the dreams, fleshed them out and added parts until I formed a story arc I could work with. Then revisions galore.

How much have your studies in psychology influenced this story?
You know, I think most of my psychological insights come from personal experience. Observing not only how I react to situations but other people as well. I've learned more from watching my thoughts and classmates during class than from the textbooks or lectures themselves. The only thing I gained from my studies were scientific terms to go along with those observations.

How did you decide on the idea of deformed babies to be the “freaks” that drive the change in Samuel? (And why three of them?)
Actually I dreamt of the three deformed babies. After I put it down on paper and was working on the revisions I started understanding what they meant. I'm not sure about the signifigance of three but I see it as a magical number not unlike the holy trinity: The Father, The Son, and The Holy Ghost, which does play a role in the book. The deformed babies are a metaphor for a wounded twisted aspect of Samuel that seeks nurturance and protection from an absent mother.

Did you have resistance from publishers on the theme?
My publishers loved the theme. They supported me from the get to. Very few revisions were asked for and they consisted mainly of a little more description in certain parts of the book.

What would like readers to take away from this story?
On a deeper level, it would be great if they recognized on some level, the struggle between chaos/nihilism/darkness versus order/belief/light. And how one can choose between the two...and how that choice can effect the rest of one's life.

Who/what do you like to read?
Hermnn Hesse, Raymond Carver, Flannery O'connor, Tolstoy, Yukio Mishima, Kurt Vonnegut

What’s next for you as a writer?
I'm working on another project but I don't talk about works in progress. It's bad luck!

(Thanks Sang for your time. Much appreciated.)

Sang Pak explores the darkness within

It’s easy to ignore evil when your life hasn’t been touched by it, but what do you do when it has? Do you just walk away or will it haunt you until you face it? And what if the darkness is in you?

American writer Sang Pak’s debut novel Wait until twilight explores the influence of dark impulses on sixteen-year-old Samuel, an intelligent and intuitive teenager whose world is shaken when he encounters a set of deformed triplets hidden behind closed doors in his sleepy southern town.

Samuel is repulsed by the “freaks” and his reaction – and the dark thoughts he has towards the babies – haunt him for days afterward.

But when he attempts to atone for these thoughts – to prove to himself he’s a not monster – he’s confronted by true evil in the form of the twins’ adult brother Daryl. Daryl is menacing, brutal and obsessed with using Samuel’s inner turmoil for his own ends.

Samuel’s usual defence is to find a single focus and wipe everything else out of his head. He feels most normal when he feels nothing. But while that seems to have helped him suppress his grief for his mother, he can’t suppress the reality of the deformed triplets.

He tries to turn his back on the disturbed household, but he’s haunted by the triplets and the threat Daryl poses to them, and ultimately decides the only way to confront his own darkness is to save the defenceless babies.

His response to them is all the more amplified by the fact his friend David seems unperturbed by them: the triplets and their unbalanced mother are just another of life’s oddities – nothing to disturb his thoughts beyond the moment.

Wait until twilight has elements of J.D Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, as Samuel starts to react to the world around him in increasingly confusing ways – his own world of ordered focus starts to crumble, and we wonder if he might actually be descending into madness.

But, just as the violent encounters with Daryl disturb and conflict him, relationships in his “normal” world provide balance and help Samuel transform into the man he wants – and needs – to be.

Pak creates a dark undercurrent throughout the story that ensures a sense of menace pervades every page, even when Samuel is relaxed. The idea that seediness and darkness lurk just out of sight is not new - particularly in American fiction - but Pak's approach is powerful in its understatement.

In Samuel’s home town, the seedier side of human nature is indulged in back woods cabins only a stone’s throw from suburbia. That reality leads Samuel to assume the only way the rest of his community can be “normal” is to pretend there’s nothing terrible in the world - a luxury he no longer has.

Wait until twilight features a strong and confident narrative voice. Samuel is a likable and sympathetic character; he's masculine without being overtly fuelled by testosterone, and his inner struggles are compelling and believable.

Pak has created a novel that's at times deeply disturbing, but ultimately redemptive, and I suspect its characters will continue to stay with me for many weeks to come.

Next post: a Q&A with Sang Pak.

White Tiger - a complicated India

“Things are complicated in India.”

That about sums up the picture created by Aravind Adiga in his Man Booker Prize winning novel White Tiger, which I finally read recently.

This cleverly written novel is not the India of Bollywood films, nor does it offer the ultimate optimism of Slumdog Millionaire.

Instead, it puts the reader in the hands of Balram, a “social entrepreneur”, who tells us from the start he’s killed his master and set himself free from the “Rooster Coop” of the caste system.

Balram is amoral and selfish, but his circumstance in life – and his ability to respond to it with ingenuity, wit and self belief – ultimately makes us able to sympathise with him on some level.

Balram is the son of a poor rickshaw puller. Deprived of a formal education, he begs his way to becoming a chauffeur, and it’s while driving the corrupt rich men of the city that he begins to see where his opportunities for a better life may lie.

White Tiger depicts an India where the caste system continues to exploit and abuse its rural poor, and the rich – in the mad dash for capitalism and power – have become increasingly corrupt.

Balram talks about the India of Light (the shining new “economic miracle” of the call centres) and the India of Darkness (the poverty-stricken rural heart, where life is dominated by oppressive servitude).

The gap between the have and have-nots is never more obvious than in their attitude towards animals: in the city, the rich have servants wash their pampered pets; in the villages, the family buffalo has far greater value than a child.

Balram tells his story through a series of chatty letters to Wen Jiabao, the premier of China, who is soon to visit India. Balram very helpfully attempts to explain that India will succeed over China as a capitalist society in the long term because of the emergence of entrepreneurs – and goes on to use his own life as an example.

Ultimately, Adiga uses the corruption of Balram’s master to mirror the corruption of India itself and Balram does the only thing he thinks an entrepreneur should do in such a situation: take advantage of it.

Balram has no issue with corruption and exploitative behaviour in the India of Darkness:
“You can’t expect a man living in a dung heap to smell sweet”. He’s less forgiving of the rich in the India of Light: watching his good natured master allow himself to become corrupted leaves Balram with no remorse when the time comes to kill him.

And there is no companionship or honour among the suffering poor: just as their masters are cruel to them, they are cruel to each other.

As well as the plaudits, Adiga has attracted criticism for being a wealthy Indian man writing about the servant-class. But does that really matter? His story is engaging, eye-opening and – at times – uncomfortable for a reader sitting in First World comfort.

No single novel can completely capture a nation in all its essence. Adiga says his aim in writing White Tiger was to prick the conscience of his country and prompt some element of self examination - which is hardly an exploitative motivation.

I'm keen to hear how other readers responded to this novel.