Tony Messenger - 1972 Shortlist - The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith - Thomas Keneally

I’m going to add a bit of context here. In 1972, Thomas Keneally became the first Australian novelist to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize (Patrick White’s nomination for ”The Vivisector”  was for the 1970 missing Booker and that award was not made until 2010), at that time generally “Australian Literature” was not taught in schools, we’d only been a Federated Nation for 71 years. Only five years prior to the release of this book a Referendum was held to agree with the electorate to allow the count of Aboriginal people in the census. I distinctly recall studying in 1980 and being directed to NOT study the Australian texts (we had a choice of texts) as they were sub-standard and that given our short history, there was no such thing as “Australian Literature”. Add to that that in my teens I recall watching the film version of this novel so I knew the story prior to reading this story.

Based on the story of Jimmie Governor, this is a tale of displacement in one’s own land, of persecution, of unclear identity, shame and more. Written from an aboriginal point of view (which in itself is controversial – an Anglo-Saxon writing as an aboriginal?) it covers a lot of territory in its small frame (my edition is 178 pages).

Set around the time of the Federation of Australia (1901), Jimmie Blacksmith is of mixed race, with an aboriginal mother and an unknown white father, he is “taught” and influenced by the local missionary Rev. Neville and our tale begins with his maternal uncle setting out, with Jimmie’s initiation tooth in his pocket, to walk 100 miles to find Jimmie, who has married a white girl. We then flash back to the events which led to Jimmie’s marriage, the arrival of his maternal uncle, and further on to Jimmie’s involvement in unlawful events (I don’t want to add spoilers) and then onto the subsequent events.

Healy, Lewis, now Newby had each staked his soul on Jimmie’s failure. If they were so supreme on their land that they didn’t need to be political, why should they yearn so for Jimmie’s mistakes; and, when mistakes were not made, dream them up?

At times this could be a hard novel to decipher, with Aboriginal references and language;

To his mind people should continue to wed according to the tribal patter. Which was: that Tullam should marry Mungara, Mungara should wed Garri, Garri should wed Wibbera, Wibbera take Tullam’s women. But here was Jimmie, a Tullam, married in church to a white girl.

However this is convincing and, to me, a lot more realistic than Peter Carey’s gimmick of language and his attempt at ventriloquism in “True History of the Kelly Gang” (always a book I’ve disliked).

In 2012 “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith” has stood the test of time and should be celebrated as a master stroke in Australian Literature and voice, and although now people are asking Keneally if he would have been better placed to have written this from the settler’s point of view, I found the tackling of such a controversial subject honest and ringing true. Let’s not forget that it took until February 2008 before a Prime Minister of this country would formally apologise to the indigenous people of this land.

This novel wouldn’t have been my choice for the winner of the 1972 award but it is an important one and for people new to Booker Prize lists and the Australian novel one I would recommend.

Cross posted at my blog.

Tony Messenger - 1972 Shortlist - The Bird of Night - Susan Hill

Although I’ve been reading Booker Prize shortlisted novels for quite a few years, I am glad that in August last year I decided to start a blog and like any true manic began my Booker Prize journey by reading each shortlist from the inaugural year, 1969, onwards, in order of course!!!!  This would mean re-reading some, attempting for the umpteenth time others, but it would also mean discovering gems amongst the rubble. Why am I grateful I began this journey? Well, the 1971 shortlist threw up the wonderful “Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont” by Elizabeth Taylor and now the 1972 list has given me “The Bird of Night” by Susan Hill. Novels hard to track down, forgotten even, and without this exercise, ones I surely would not have sought out, but novels that this journey has given me the pleasure of discovering.

“The Bird of Night” is a dark, bleak tale of Francis Croft, World War One veteran and “the greatest poet of his age” who is mad. This short novel is written as a reflective journal by Francis’ partner Harvey Lawton, old, invalid, reclusive and hounded by researchers and biographers all wanting to resurrect the life of Francis. The journal style quickly called to mind Sebastian Barry’s 2011 long listed “On Canaan’s Side”;

Bill is gone.

What is the sound of and eighty-nine-year-old heart breaking? It might not be much more than silence, and certainly a small slight sound.

 or the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson

I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it.

Both journals written by the old, reflecting upon their lives. I also drew parallels to Alan Hollinghurst’s 2011 long listed “The Stranger’s Child” which explored the life of homosexual war poet Cecil Valance and his literary and personal impact across generations and (of course the) biographers coming to call.  Throw in the subject of madness, which was explored by Bernice Rubens with her Booker winning “The Elected Member” from 1970. Or mix in the country setting of J.L. Carr’s shortlisted “A Month in the Country” from 1980 (a tale of World War 1 veteran employed to restore a mural in a country church)  and I suddenly had a plethora of similar material which I have read (and reviewed some of them here) over the last nine months.

However this is so much more than a tale of poetry and madness:

But understanding was not control. If Francis knew what he was, he could not alter it, he had no power at all over the vagaries and eruptions of his own mind. He was helpless in the face of an attack of insanity, no matter which way it went with him, whether he was depressed or violent, whether he was hysterical, agitated or deluded by visions and voices.

It is also a story of relationships, the giving of oneself to another, but at what cost? And for what reasons? This is also a tale of England nostalgically coming to terms with life post World War One, of subtle melancholic references to their obviously homosexual relationship together and of reflections of better times. We know the outcome of Francis’ journey into madness before our journey begins and the genuine remorse that our narrator must feel becomes even more pertinent as he observes and fights the deepening madness and depression of his lover.

A section I particularly liked was Francis reading the reviews of his “greatest work”:

Even those who praised him the most extravagantly had sometimes ‘no idea’, they thought they understood him but they did not; they either read into the poem much that was not there, or else missed much that was.

Is this Susan Hill having a dig at critics of her previous work? Or her reference to the great mind of Francis being reduced to reading two or three Detective novels in a sitting (in recent years Susan Hill has written a series of crime novels featuring detective Simon Serrailler).  She may also be playing with our minds with her 2006 comment; “A novel of mine was shortlisted for Booker and won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction. It was a book I have never rated. I don't think it works, though there are a few good things in it. I don't believe in the characters or the story.”Interestingly this quote is referenced in a number of reviews of “The Bird of Night” on the internet; however the archive of Susan Hill’s blog where it was supposedly taken no longer exists.

A bleak, depressing but enjoyable and easy read which I thoroughly enjoyed after the slog of the winner from the same year “G”.

Cross posted at my blog.