In one of his most expansive novels since Confederates, Australian author Thomas Keneally recreates the cataclysm of World War I, providing an epic vision of warfare with all its horrors, while focusing on the specific contributions of Australia, and its nurses in particular, to Britain’s war effort. Creating two sisters, young nurses from the rural Macleay Valley in New South Wales, who volunteer to serve in Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, Keneally creates the points of view through which he then describes the war, its atrocities, and the heroic actions of its Australian participants. The result is a grand saga in which these two nurses, their colleagues, their patients, and their soldier friends share their lives and their feelings as they deal with the accidents of fate which will change them all. Engaging and often moving, the novel explores life at the front a hundred years ago, with main characters whose psychological acuity gives them some depth. Though the novel does get a bit preachy in places and makes occasional moral pronouncements, Keneally has written an ambitious novel which pulls no punches: “There are only two choices, you know. Either die or live well. We live on behalf of thousands who don’t. Millions. So let’s not mope about it, eh?”
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When Eirene Sklavos, a school-age child, sees Mrs. Bulpit for the first time, she has not even started to come to terms with the fact that her mother will be leaving her with Mrs. Bulpit indefinitely. Having traveled with her mother from Greece to Australia to escape the horrors of World War II, Eirene has already dealt with the death of her father, a communist fighting for what he and his wife believe to be a better world for Greece. Almost immediately after Eirene meets Mrs. Bulpit for the first time, her mother departs for Alexandria, where she plans to continue her political efforts. Alone in a foreign country, Eirene will have to learn the hard way who she is and where she belongs. She soon meets Gilbert Horsfall, a boy her own age, who is also living with Mrs. Bulpit, though his trip to Australia from England has taken much longer. His father is working in New Delhi; his mother is dead. He, too, has growing pains, and he, too, is a foreigner to Australia. The degree to which the two children may be able to help each other is a question for much of the novel, as are the effects of uncontrollable outside forces on their lives as they grow and develop. Written in experimental style.
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The earlier books that I have read by Australian author Elizabeth Jolley, while a bit more boisterous in some ways than the works of her contemporaries in England during the period (Beryl Bainbridge, Penelope Lively, Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, Alice Thomas Ellis), seem to fit comfortably into the niche occupied by these other, better known authors, despite Jolley’s unconventional (and some might say outrageous) private life. With Foxybaby (1985), which follows Mr. Scobie (1983)… and Miss Peabody (1984)…, however, Jolley permanently separates herself from her peers back in England, writing a book in which nothing is sacred, with characters who are sometimes crazy, usually self-absorbed, unashamedly venal, and often bawdy. She is realistic, if not enthusiastic, in her depiction of sex in all its variations as salve for the souls of the lonely and the sometimes bored. Nothing about this book is dainty or subtle. Elizabeth Jolley is obviously having great fun taking advantage of the freer, more forgiving attitudes of Australia as she creates this over-the-top novel, filled with wild characters who “let it all hang out.”
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Through flashbacks, an aging surfer, Brucie Pike (“Pikelet”), relives his coming-of-age on the west coast of Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. A lonely boy leading a solitary life, he finds a companion, if not friend, in Ivan Loon (“Loonie”), with whom he shares his love of extreme surfing. “How strange it was,” Pikelet remarks, “to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw and cared.” But the beauty of surfing quickly yields in importance to its excitement and its increasingly dangerous thrills. “There was never any doubt about the primary thrill of surfing, the huge body-rush we got flying down the line with the wind in our ears. We didn’t know what endorphins were, but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became; from day one I was stoned from just watching,” Pikelet declares. Eventually, however, Pikelet begins to question the relationship between excitement, thrills, risk, and death and what maturity really means. In spare prose which uses some of the most vivid action verbs ever included in a novel, Winton tells an exciting story which makes the seductive thrills of surfing comprehensible to the non-surfer, while showing how his characters discover what makes men humans and ultimately what makes life worth living.
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If a reader were to base his/her whole opinion of this latest book on the “bliss” Paul Theroux experiences when he sees the Ku/’hoansi bush people, one might conclude that this book is a genuflection to simpler cultures living the hunter-gatherer lives of their forbears, a rare reaction by Theroux who is notoriously hard to please. That felicitous conclusion would be completely wrong, however, even in relation to his experience among the lovely Ju/’hoansi bush people who so impress him in Namibia. When he makes this statement, Theroux has already traveled through South Africa, spending significant time in Capetown and discovering that while the special townships created for the poor have improved in the last ten years, that new, even more desperate, poor are arriving from rural areas and making new, and even more primitive settlements in slums on the outskirts. His travel plans up the west coast, from Capetown to Timbuktu in Mali, along the south and west coasts of Africa, allow him to seize opportunities as he travels, make notes as he goes, and post his observations in ways similar to his observations of the Horn of Africa and the East Coast ten years ago. His visit with the Ju/’hoansi on Namibia has been the first sign of hope that he has had in his trip. Angola, his next stop, proves to be the turning point. One of the richest countries in the world in terms of its oil production and revenues, all of which end up in the pockets of politicians and businessmen, Angola becomes the centerpiece of the book in terms of the corruption at the heart of African life. Ultimately, Theroux must decide whether it makes sense to continue into increasingly devastated West African cities.
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