Battered Penguins - South Wind by Norman Douglas

I read some advice to writers given by Martin Amis the other day, to this effect: when reading, you should ask yourself constantly, 'How are they doing this, how are they creating this effect, how have they set up this scene, how have they created this character'. I thought I'd give it a go when reading South Wind. Very quickly though, I found myself drifting from 'How?', to 'Why?'

As page after page of tangled description and meandering plot line, (if this flimsy bit of gossamer could be given such a substantial description), confronted me, I became less and less able to understand what the hell Norman Douglas was thinking of as he wrote this heap of pages that he eventually called a novel.

A character is introduced, you follow him for a bit, and then another is introduced, and you are led off with him for a while. Another appears, and you wander off in the direction he takes for a few pages, before being introduced to someone else, who goes somewhere else and does something else, without any real connection or reference to those other characters you have already met. This goes on for hundreds of pages. As each new figure appears, you, the reader, like a starving man in the desert, clutch at them more desperately, hoping that at last you have found a central figure to cling to, a hero whose story will enlighten everything, a hero who will actually have a story, one that moves from somewhere to somewhere, one that will possibly even reach some kind of dramatic conclusion.

I used to think the phrase 'narrative arc' was an annoying publishing cliche, but now that I have read South Wind I am not so sure.

I should point out that there are amusing moments in South Wind and interesting apercus, but in the end the book is too much like Nepenthe itself, the book's setting, (a thinly disguised Capri, apparently), about which one character remarks,  'The canvas of Nepenthe is rather over-charged'.

Douglas may possibly have intended the book as some kind of fairy tale. Certainly, the fairy tale is a motif that recurs a couple of times - and the book actually ends with mention of one. There is one exciting moment, after hundreds of pages of rambling, when Douglas appears to have finally settled on murder-mystery as his form, but he rapidly lets the idea fall. Could the thing be a meditation on England - the island in the book is its antithesis and the text contains many observatons about being English? In the end, I have to admit that I have no idea.

To sum up, I am baffled by this book, with its crowd of well-observed characters having wordy and sometimes witty conversations. DH Lawrence portrayed Norman Douglas as Argyle in Aaron's Rod, (they fell out badly as a result); quite frankly, even a novel by DH Lawrence, for all his foibles and flaws, supplies more satisfaction for a reader, in my view, than does South Wind. And yet the book is not, paragraph by paragraph, badly written, and I know of readers who regard it as a brilliant work of early modernism. Therefore, I hesitate to condemn it. It is not undiverting; it is merely hard to get hold of or quite see the point of.

I'm haunted by the suspicion that it is simply a lack of sophistication that stands as a barrier between me and admiration of this novel. The same unsophistication means that I am appalled by another work of Douglas's, an absolutely filthy collection of limericks that he gathered and annotated. If you are at all easily shocked, I should leave them well alone, but perhaps somewhere within this latter work there may be some clue as to what the hell he was up to when he was writing South Wind.

Wish You Were Here

Sold on the line that the new Australian film Wish You Were Here was this year's Animal Kingdom, we went along to the cinema to see it on Saturday night. While neither film presents a flattering picture of contemporary Australians, Wish You Were Here, disappointingly, was never in Animal Kingdom's league.

Which is not to say it wasn't worth seeing. The film is never boring. Its portrayal of Australians treating Asia as their playground, a place to abandon normal standards of behaviour and spend as much time as possible completely ripped, is probably all too accurate. However, it didn't make the main characters particularly sympathetic. Additionally, I found the plot pretty unbelievable in a number of places. This may merely indicate that I lead a sheltered life, but it seemed unlikely to me that  a couple - one member of whom was pregnant - would abandon their two small children for a week in order to head off to Cambodia for a holiday with a young relative and her boyfriend, who they had barely met. Once there, I was pretty surprised that the pregnant wife seemed unperturbed when her husband decides to indulge in a few recreational drugs. On their return to Sydney, I was even more astonished by some of the decisions taken by the pregnant wife, decisions that I suspected a male scriptwriter might believe in but that most women who have been pregnant would view as fairly unlikely - my sense is that, no matter what your own emotional turmoil may be, when pregnant you never ignore the safety of your unborn child.

The film is well-acted and beautifully shot and it provides a pretty damning indictment of a kind of thoughtless, ignorant hedonism that may be all too prevalent in Sydney - it will certainly confirm everything my Victorian relatives think about Sydneysiders. The trouble is I'm not sure the story of a bunch of extremely shallow people (and, if you don't think they're shallow, how do you explain their equanimity in the face of Gracie's unscheduled appearance, which, after delivering a momentary emotional jolt, appears to leave their lives quite unruffled) really amounts to anything, especially as the ending just dribbles out.

I Take it Back

We lived in London for four years and about halfway through our time there we came back to Australia for a few weeks. When we got to Sydney, we realised we'd both completely forgotten our bank account pin numbers. The next morning, with heavy heart, we set off down Crown Street, Surry Hills to try to persuade the bank to supply us with new ones. Imagine our surprise when we walked through the door and were greeted by a smiling young woman who provided us with new numbers without fuss or complication. We gave her a  few bits of information, she cheerily sorted things out for us and we went on our way.

So I shouldn't be mean about the Commonwealth Bank for a single millisecond. They are so much better than the British banks we dealt with, where our experiences mirrored pretty closely those recounted by a man called Parsons on the BBC's Now Show the other day:

More Good Design

It was such a pleasure to see in Euroa that the bank I keep - in as much as 'keep' is the right verb - my money with made the sensible decision to knock down this horrid fusty old building:

in order to put this one up instead:

Presumably they display the evidence in their window because of the pride they feel about what they've done. At the Commonwealth Bank, they have clearly  been visionaries since way back (well, the sixties anyway). That would be why they decided to go with that nice yellow and black combination for their corporate colours. It's so smart and attractive, isn't it? I haven't yet managed to get a job with the Commonwealth so I can't wear their uniform, but I do try to wear yellow and black as much as possible in my private life. The yellow complements the whites of my eyes so perfectly and the black complements the dirt under my fingernails. They call it colour coordination in fashion circles, I believe.

A Curious Obsession

While travelling recently, I realised something that I had up until then only been unconsciously aware of - designers have a peculiar fascination with taps, (especially those associated with showers.) In the places I stayed, I encountered taps that reminded me of something a ship's captain might use on the poopdeck (is that the right word and should it be used in a bathroom context?)

plus brass objects that appeared to be misplaced sundials, chrome gearsticks and odd steel swan-neck type arrangements that had to be manipulated out at an odd angle from the wall. I never got the hang of any of them and, as a result, most mornings ended up with either blasts of cold water straight in my face when I least expected it or utterly soaked bathroom floors and ceilings.

Why do they do it? Why fiddle with the functional? Why not invent a tomato sauce bottle that works without effort instead, (and, no, I don't think those horrible little sachet things you pinch open so that they can spray all over you are a good solution)? After all, if the considerable energy and ingenuity that have been put into redesigning the tap - an object that worked perfectly well to begin with - had been redirected to solving world poverty, (say), there would be more than one good consequence. As well as allowing all of us to set out on our travels without the lurking worry that we may not get a single decent shower until we get home again, it would remove Bono entirely from our lives, (oh yes, and it would relieve the suffering of countless millions, which would be quite good as well).

Beneath Western Skies

I was admiring the quiet Islington streets near where my sister-in-law lives when my daughter pointed out that there was a teeming sky-highway above our heads:

Words and Phrases that Annoy Me

I've been under a bit of stress lately, and when that happens I become pedantic, which is why, after months without this kind of post, suddenly there are two only a few days apart.

The phrase that is annoying me today is 'longer hours', as in, 'People are being asked to work longer hours', 'Longer hours are bad for your health', 'Recession means longer hours at work', et cetera. This is absurd. An hour is an hour, it can't be longer or shorter. People may be being asked to work more hours. Many hours at work may be bad for your health, but each hour remains the same, neither longer nor shorter.

There, that's off my chest - should I mention the issue of 'cheaper prices'. No, leave it alone - you don't want to look like an all-round obsessive. Or is it too late already?