Product disclosure

Last week a colleague I don't know very well was going to Japan for a holiday. He said that he was spending a few days in a mountaintop monastery and was wondering how he'd cope with the silence.

This instantly made me think of David Mitchell's Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

I asked if he read fiction and would he like to take this book with him.

He did and he said he would

but

as I handed my copy over I had some serious qualms about whether I was acting in accordance with my workplace code of conduct.

I mean, the first chapter is a fairly graphic description of a very difficult childbirth and some other extraordinarilty nasty things happen especially in the mountaintop monastery in feudal Japan.

Was my loan going to ruin his holiday?

He said he'd take my warnings on board and we both admired the cover. All of David Mitchell's Australian editions are gorgeous to look at.

I'm still waiting for my postcard.

Excuse me, I have a question

Last Sunday I was pushing a pram around the Melbourne CBD with my first hangover in years waiting until it was time to go to the airport to fly home.

After many retail adventures where unnecessary and expensive things were bought to make a three-year-old stop yelling quite so loudly when Mummy's head was hurting, I sought refuge in a secondhand bookshop and my daughter fell asleep.

During this lull I foundJustin Evans's A Good and Happy Child for $1.

I must admit to buying it in jest to see if it would work as parenting aid. To be fair it was reasonably effective for the rest of the day to say "Look baby, it says here you've got to be good and happy."

But the other day I looked inside and realised it was really good and certainly did not deserve to be sold for so little. Evil book retailing industry that causes such disconnect between price and quality!

In the book, a man goes to see a therapist because he says he can't bear to touch his newborn child. He mentions it wasn't his first time in therapy but he doesn't like to say what happened before. The therapist tells him to write everything down and the book purports to be him recording both his present day consultations and his recollections of the imaginary friend he had in childhood who made him do bad things. The way it's told, many things could be either supernatural manifestations or psychiatric problems. It is extremely spooky. Two nights in a row I put it down because I preferred to read it in the nice safe daylight.

The trouble is that I have questions. Many questions. Things are left out or not clarified. The present day timeline is bery disjointed. The unreliable narrating means it's really hard to know what really happened. Why does the book stop there exactly? Is that a good thing or bad? What happened next? Is any of it real? What happened to his mother? What? What? What?

In the past I would have just wondered. It was always far too hard to write fan letters care of publishers and would have seem impertinent to accost someone at a book signing or something.

But now writers all have websites. It's just so easy to ask them anything.

Anything at all.

I guess my question now is do I really want to know?

Ambivalence about bonnets

I can't say I was actively looking forward to Cranford, the ABC's latest BBC bonnet drama.

But I was planning on watching it.

I love a good bit of historical drama especially when it has a decent budget and nice clothes and the sort of high production values the BBC sees fit to lavish on such things. (Thank you BBC!! If national telly licensing will save the Australian television drama industry I say "bring it on!") One of my favourite games is playing "spot the star of British stage and screen in fancy dress". And if it's based on a book I haven't read, well then there'll be a surprise at the end for once, won't there?

But it must be said, Cranford did not start well.

Dame Judi Dench, Imelda Staunton and other famous older actresses were running round in big skirts and bonnets arguing over whose gossip was more extraordinary? Not nearly as funny as I think I was expected to find it. And my Beloved agreed.

In fact, when the phone rang 15 minutes in, we both lunged for the handset. He was extremely disappointed to find it was for me.

But then I persisted, thinking "it's got to improve. Dame Judi, Michael Gambon and Julia Sawahla and the brother from Party Animals who isn't going to be the next Doctor aren't THAT hard up are they?"

It seemed a slim hope as Victorian novel cliche of dutiful daughter giving up love followed cliche of matchmaking stepmother followed new big city doctor trying to win over wary locals. Yawn.

But then something changed. I came to trust in the magic of the personable young people falling in love and by the time of the cough in the morning becoming the dangerous fever that night I was hooked. (this isn't really a spoiler because THIS IS A VICTORIAN NOVEL but all the same stop now if you don't want to know) By the time of the harrowing deathbed scene I was a teary blubbery mess.

Well done Mrs Gaskell! That did the trick.

Angry Penguins Update

I finishedthis book, really I did.

But I can't swear, 100 per cent, that I kept on liking it.

Because it made me feel

just a little

actually quite a bit

um

thick.

I mean there were lots of lovely absurd bits about the clash of popular and "serious" culture and well observed moments of domestic life and I realise it's NOT MEANT to be taken too LITERALLY especially when people zip babies into motorcylcle jackets and ride off with two pillion passengers. I mean as IF a proper bike jacket would have room for a child inside!

And I did understand a lot of the absurdity of the situation of trying to find the meaning to everything through structural analysis.

But I finished the actual plot part last Friday on my way home from work and didn't get a chance to open it again until waiting for the bus on Monday where I found a 30 page appendix explaining the search for meaning by classifying the 175 most common words in five texts of Helen Garner in different dimensions complete with diagrams and refernces to Halliday, Saussure and Jung.

And I'm afraid even though it was an EXTREMELY long journey with quite bad traffic, I didn't quite get the finer points of some of the arguments.

But it was quite nicely done.