Laura's Review - Remembering Babylon

Set in mid-19th century colonial Australia, Remembering Babylon explores issues of race and class through a young man named Gemmy Fairley. Gemmy turns up in a Queensland village, seemingly out of nowhere. He is white, but "appears" black and speaks the language of native people. He is most comfortable communicating with the three children who first discovered him, members of the McIvor family. Through various means of communication, Gemmy shares his background as a ragamuffin boy tossed from a ship, who lived with aboriginal people for 16 years. The McIvor family take him in, providing for his basic needs and giving him work to do around their property. Gemmy baffles the community:

He had started out white. No question. When he fell in with the blacks -- at thirteen, was it? -- he had been like any other child, one of their own for instance. (That was hard to swallow.) But had he remained white?

They looked at their children, even the smallest of them chattering away, entirely at home in their tongue, then heard the mere half-dozen words of English this fellow could cough up, and even those so mismanaged and distorted you could barely guess what he was on about, and you had to put to yourself the harder question. Could you lose it? Not just language, but it. It.

For the fact was, when you looked at him sometimes he was not white. His skin might be but not his features. The whole cast of his face gave him the look of one of Them. How was that, then? (p.40)

But Remembering Babylon isn't so much Gemmy's story as everyone else's. Janet, Meg, and Lachlan are forever changed after finding Gemmy. Several settlers actively work to oust Gemmy, showing their true selves and straining Jock and Ellen McIvor's relations with them. And just beyond the hubbub lives Mrs. Hutchence, an eccentric woman who offers love and kindness to everyone she meets. Malouf introduced every type of character imaginable: angry, bigoted settlers, a young schoolmaster, a preacher nearing the end of his career, etc. Most were not as well-developed as the McIvor family, and after a while I found the frequent new faces a distraction. The ending was also strange, jumping ahead in time while leaving a number of loose ends back in the 19th century. Still, this was a worthwhile read, an interesting study of human nature, set in a historic period I enjoy reading about.




Cross-posted from my blog

Crossing the River - Wendy's Review

For two hundred and fifty years I have waited patiently for the wind to rise on the far bank of the river. For the drum to pound across the water. For the chorus to swell. Only then, if I listen closely, can I rediscover my lost children. A brief, painful communion. A desperate foolishness. The crops failed. I sold my children. -From Crossing the River, The Prologue-

Crossing the River begins in the 1700’s as an African man is forced to sell his three children - Nash, Martha and Travis - into slavery. The novel then assumes a three part structure - a snapshot in time during the 1820s, the latter part of the 19th century, and finally the late 1930s-early 1940s. The three children from the beginning are symbolically represented throughout the novel with each of their voices distinct and individual as the reader follows the history of blacks from Africa, to the American West, and to Europe.

A slave named Nash Williams is freed from bondage and sent to Liberia to convert native Africans to Christianity in the late-1820s. Narrated partly through Nash’s letters back to his white master, the reader gains an appreciation of not only the brutality and desolation of slavery, but the power of freedom even when it means living in poverty.

Martha, an elderly black woman, is abandoned in Colorado while trying to travel with a group of black Pioneers to California. She grieves her lost child, and remembers the love of a man.

Finally, Travis - a black American GI - falls in love with a white English woman named Joyce during WWII. This section is narrated in a non-linear fashion from Joyce’s point of view and exposes the bigotry and obstacles to mixed marriage and relationships during that time in history.

Phillips’ prose is constructed beautifully - haunting and filled with alluring imagery.

The river wore a rutted frown where their slow progress had disturbed her sleep. To either side the somber banks, cluttered with trees, shrubs and vines, were pressed by a thick, brooding undergrowth that was heavy with years. As dusk approached, the heat still hung low like a ceiling above their heads. -From Crossing the River, page 66-

The novel’s plot is elusive because the story is not about these three characters really. Instead Nash, Martha and Travis are representative of a people as a whole. Phillips reveals the tortured search for home by a people whose lives were torn from their homeland. He doesn’t spare the reader the horror of slavery or the grief of those whose families were destroyed by it.

Then the auctioneer slaps hs gavel against a block of wood. I fall to my knees and take Eliza Mae in my arms. I did not suckle this child at the breast, nor did I cradle her in my arms and cover her with what love I have, to see her taken away from me. As the auctioneer begins to bellow, I look into Eliza Mae’s face. He is calling out the date, the place, the time. Master would never have sold any of us. I tell this to my terrified child. Slaves. Farm animals. Household furniture. Farm tools. We are to be sold in this order. -From Crossing the River, page 76-

Caryl Phillips is a gifted writer and in Crossing the River his talents are clearly on display. The novel is vivid and unique. It is largely symbolic, and so is not always an easy story to understand. This is a book which needs to be read two or three times, I think, to gain full appreciation of its message.

Crossing the River was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993. Phillips has authored numerous other works - his latest in 2007 is a novel titled Foreigners.

Recommended.

The Stone Diaries - 3M's Review

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

1993, 361 pp.

1995 Pulitzer/1994 NBCC Award

Rating: 4.5

I loved this book. I loved the writing. It isn't a heartwarming book, but it is a thoughtful one. These "diaries" chronicle Daisy Goodwill's life from her birth in 1905 to her death in 199? (we aren't told the exact year). Each chapter of her life is told from her point of view, although in the book (and sometimes even in a single sentence) she switches back and forth between 1st and 3rd person. We learn of her childhood, her marriages and children, loves and losses, work and leisure, and finally her old age and death. The "chapters" made me think of my own life stages so far and the ones that are to come. All of us have a similar beginning and ending, but it's the middle that makes life interesting.

There were many, many beautiful passages in this book. I'll leave you with one as an example of the excellence of Shields' writing:

Something has occurred to her--something transparently simple, something she's always known, it seems, but never articulated. Which is that the moment of death occurs while we're still alive. Life marches right up to the wall of that final darkness, one extreme state of being butting against the other. Not even a breath separates them. Not even a blink of the eye. A person can go on and on tuned in to the daily music of food and work and weather and speech right up to the last minute, so that not a single thing gets lost.

Carol Shields died of cancer in 2003. She was a gifted writer, and I definitely plan on reading more of her works.