Kate Forsyth is one of Australia’s most treasured storytellers. On today’s edition of What Katie Read, she gives us the rundown on all of the best books she’s been reading lately …
Hamnet
by Maggie O’Farrell
Maggie O’Farrell is a new discovery for me. I read her breathtaking memoir I Am, I Am, I Am last year and bought Hamnet the moment I had finished. It was already on my radar, having won the Women’s Prize last year and having been reviewed so positively by many of my friends.
It tells the story of the death of William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, and how his loss comes to inform the writing of the play Hamlet. As Maggie O’Farrell notes in her epigraph, in Shakespearean times the names ‘Hamnet’ and ‘Hamlet’ were the same. Although the book is named after the eleven-year-old boy who dies, the narrative focuses mostly on the story of his mother Agnes (the famous Anne Hathaway of the thatched cottage and second-best bed). She is a wild spirit, a witch, a woman of the woods and the fields, barely able to scratch her name. Her grief at the loss of her son is one of the most heartrendingly true depictions I’ve read:
What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any time, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.
Maggie O’Farrell writes beautifully, but what I love most about this book is the boldness of her artistic vision. She uses the device of the omniscient device brilliantly, sliding in and out of heads and points-of-view with utter confidence. One of my favourite vignettes is the way she follows the journey of the plague bacillus in the body of a flea from a monkey’s fur to the glass beads that Hamnet’s twin sister Judith fingers with such excitement. She also chooses not to name William Shakespeare once. He is the Latin tutor, the husband, the father, the player. He is just a man, a man who makes mistakes, who is unfaithful, who is full of doubts, a man who was not there when his son died. Somehow, the not naming of him is very humanising. It also foregrounds Agnes’s story – the shadowy wife, the silent woman – in this book, she steps forward to the centre of the stage, stands under the spotlight, and speaks out, telling her own story.
Hamnet also has one of the most perfect last lines ever written. Just thinking about it gives me chills. A perfectly composed and executed book, this book will be forever in my heart.
Buy it here
The Dollmaker of Kraków
by R.M. Romero
A beautifully produced and heartrendingly poignant novel for children that delicately weaves together history and fable to create something quite profound.
I was drawn to buy this book because of its beautiful cover, designed by Lisa Perrin, and exquisite internal illustrations by Tomislav Tomic, a fairy-tale-inspired artist whose work I’ve long admired. It’s dedication by the author reads: ‘for the children who were lost in the Holocaust’ and the back cover begins: ‘There is war. There is pain. But there is magic and there is hope.’ So I knew what to expect between the covers – a story of sorrow and strength, wonder and woe – and R.M. Romero did not disappoint me.
Set in Kraków in 1939, the story explores the friendship between a dollmaker whose fingertips carry magic and the beautiful little doll he brings to life. ‘Karolina awoke in her new world with a glass heart. It felt as if both roses and their thorns grew within that heart, for it held all the happiness and sorrow she had ever experienced in the Land of the Dolls.’
The dollmaker is by nature shy and retiring, but Karoline helps him make new friends and begin to open up to life. Then Kraków is invaded by the Nazis. The beautiful city is bombed, soldiers in jackboots march the cobbled streets, and their Jewish friends face unspeakable danger. Both the dollmaker and the doll will learn how dark the human heart can be, and also how courage, kindness and self-sacrifice can triumph even in the most terrible of times.
‘Please, be kind.
Please, be brave.
Please, don’t let it happen again.’
It reminded me of The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen and The Museum of Mary Child by Cassandra Golds, two of my favourite children’s’ authors – that is very high praise indeed.
Buy it here
Elizabeth And her German Garden
by Elizabeth von Arnim
Every month or so, I like to read an old favourite classic. This time I chose Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim – it’s a tiny sparkling jewel of a book, first published in 1898 and only a hundred or so pages long. It purports to be the diary of a young woman who finds solace and liberation in the garden of her husband’s old country house. It begins ‘May 7th: I love my garden’ and goes on with such glorious quotes as: ‘When I got to the library I came to a standstill – ah, the dear room, what happy times I have spent in it rummaging amongst the books, making plans for my garden, building castles in the air, writing, dreaming, doing nothing’.
Or this one: ‘What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment … what can life in town offer in the way of pleasure to equal the delight of any one of the calm evenings I have had this month sitting alone at the foot of the verandah steps, with the perfume of young larches all about, and the May moon hanging low over the beeches, and the beautiful silence made only more profound in its peace by the croaking of distant frogs and hooting of owls?‘.
Elizabeth and her German Garden was published anonymously, and the names of all the people within the book are concealed behind nicknames. The author calls her husband ‘the Man of Wrath’, an irreverent appellation that I have since adopted for my own husband, while her children are simply called ‘the April baby’ and ‘the May baby’ and so on. The author was in fact born in Kirribilli in Sydney, Australia, and christened Mary Annette Beauchamp, but called May by all her friends and family. The New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield was her cousin. She met the German aristocrat, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin, while travelling in Europe and married him soon after. They lived in Berlin initially, but then she moved to his country estate in what is now Poland. Elizabeth and her German Garden was her first book and it was a runaway bestseller, being reprinted eleven times in its first year of publication and earning her over £10,000. She became so famous that everyone called her Elizabeth and she ended up adopting her pseudonym as her name. Her marriage was unhappy and did not last, and the estate was eventually sold. It gave me an enduring desire to marry a count and build a garden in the ruins of a castle somewhere – a dream that seems increasingly unlikely to ever come true. Luckily I can dip in and out of this charming little book as often as I want!
Buy it here
Code Name Helene
by Ariel Lawhon
Inspired by the daring true-life adventures of Nancy Wake in France during the Second World War, Code Name Helene is a very readable account of an extraordinary life. Born in Australia, Nancy worked as a reporter for Hearst in Paris just before the outbreak of the war. She married a Frenchman, and was later dropped behind enemy lines to work as a spy for the British. The book begins as Nancy jumps by parachute from an RAF plane into Nazi-occupied France, then moves back and forth in time explaining how she came to be the head of a resistance network there. Nancy is an appealing character, full of spirit and life, and the story of how she struggles against misogyny and mistrust to help win the war is brought to vivid and compelling life on the page. It’s a big book – 437 pages – and has a cast of hundreds. At times, the jumps around in time can be a little confusing – for example, scenes where Nancy meets people who have already appeared dozens of times in previous pages. But Ariel Lawhon writes with such verve that the pages seem to fly past, and Nancy’s big, bold, brave personality is given every chance to shine.
Buy it here
A Single Thread
by Tracy Chevalier
Tracy Chevalier is one of my favourite writers. I find we have a lot of common interests –women’s stories, women’s art, women’s struggle. She’s one of the few authors whose books I will buy and read as a matter of course, regardless of where and when her books are set. And all of her books are very different – I never feel she is telling the same story over and over again, which some authors unfortunately seem to do.
A Single Thread is set in Winchester in 1932. Violet Speedwell lost both her brother and her fiancé in the Great War, and has struggled to overcome her grief and the loss of all her dreams for her future. She cannot bear to stay at home, caring for her embittered mother, and so she has moved away from home and is working as a secretary for a mere pittance. She is independent, but poor, sad and lonely. One day she finds out about a group of women who meet regularly to embroider kneelers for the cathedral. The idea of making something beautiful that will bring comfort to those in need appeals to her. Hesitantly Violet approaches the broderers, and begins to learn the craft. She makes new friends, and finds new purpose in her life. But life as a single woman between the wars can be difficult, fraught with complications and dangers. Violet must discover hidden reserves of strength and courage if she is to build a new future for herself.
I loved this book so much. I am actually trying to teach myself embroidery at the moment, partly because the craft is at the heart of the novel I am writing myself right now, and partly because I love to make beautiful things with my hands. I also loved the book because of its themes – an ordinary woman struggling to make her way in the world, the importance of female friendships, the need for compassion and self-reliance, the beauty of women’s traditional arts. A book full of luminous grace.
Buy it here
Ransom
by David Malouf
I am currently writing a novel set in Greece during World War II. As part of my research, I like to immerse myself deeply in the stories, myths and poems of my setting, and so have been reading a lot of Sappho and Homer, as well as books inspired by their works. Ransom is a slight, delicate, sensitive book inspired by just one scene in The Iliad.
In the original poem – thought to have been composed ten centuries ago – the great Greek warrior Achilles grieves the death of his friend and companion Patroclus at the hands of the Trojan hero, Hector. Every morning, he tied Hector’s dead body behind his chariot and dragged him at full speed around his dead friend’s tomb, but every morning the broken and ravaged corpse lies as if untouched. At last, after twelve days, Hector’s father King Priam goes to the Greek war camp, kneels at Achilles’s feet, and offers to ransom his son’s body. It is a scene of extraordinary humility, grace and forgiveness that delivers the true message of this famous poem of rage and masculine violence: the horror and futility of war.
David Malouf takes this scene and reimagines it from the point-of-view of the ageing Priam, whose son lies dead and desecrated in the dust. His grief for his son and Achilles’s grief touch for just a moment, and open up a space for understanding, compassion, sorrow and a kind of quiet redemption: Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world.
David Malouf’s writing is so spare and lyrical, Ransom almost reads like a poem in itself, like an extension of the original Homer. A really beautiful and unusual book.
Buy it here
The Bird In The Bamboo Cage
by Hazel Gaynor
I have always loved books set during World War II, and read a lot of novels set during that harrowing and tumultuous time. Most of the books I read are set in Europe, but I’ve long been interested in books set in the Asia-Pacific arena where my own great-uncles fought – one of them was a prisoner-of-war in a Japanese camp and I was brought up on stories of his courage and suffering. I’ve even been thinking of writing a book set during that time. So I wanted to read The Bird in the Bamboo Cage as soon as I heard about it.
It is inspired by the true story of the British teachers and children of the Chefoo Missionary School in China who were interned by the Japanese following the bombing of Pearl Harbour. The author Hazel Gaynor heard the story on a podcast and knew at once she wanted to bring it to life. Her narrative is told in alternating chapters between Elspeth Kent, a teacher at the school, and one of her pupils, ten-year-old Nancy. Elspeth and the other teachers do their best to guard their young charges against the horrors of war, but as the school is moved into an internment camp to wait out the long years of the way, their courage and faith almost quails. The story is told in restrained and elegant prose, slowly building to a heartrending finale that had me choking back tears. A truly unforgettable story of the bravery and resilience of ordinary people in an extraordinary situation, it would make an astounding film. I hope someone makes it one day!
Buy it here
Kate Forsyth
Kate Forsyth wrote her first novel aged seven and has now sold more than a million books worldwide. Her newest book, co-written with Belinda Murrell, is Searching for Charlotte, which tells the fascinating story of Australia’s first children’s author (and Forsyth’s own distant relation) Charlotte Waring Atkinson. Her novels for adults include The Blue Rose, inspired by the true story of the quest for a blood-red rose during the French Revolution, Beauty in Thorns, a Pre-Raphaelite reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, and Bitter Greens, which won the 2015 American Library Association award for Best Historical Fiction. Kate’s books for children include the fantasy series The Witches of Eileanan.
Named one of Australia’s Favourite 15 Novelists, Kate has a BA in literature, a MA in creative writing and a doctorate in fairy tale studies, and is also an accredited master storyteller with the Australian Guild of Storytellers. She is a direct descendant of Charlotte Waring Atkinson, the author of the first book for children ever published in Australia.
Find out more about Kate Forsyth here.
Searching for Charlotte
The Fascinating Story of Australia's First Children's Author
For almost 140 years, the author of Australia's first book for children was a mystery. Known only by the descriptor 'a Lady Long Resident in New South Wales', she was the subject of much speculation. It was not until 1980, after a decade of sleuthing, that legendary bibliographer Marcie Muir gave her a name: Charlotte Waring Atkinson.
And not only a name, but an extensive creative family history, connecting her to two of the nation's celebrated contemporary children's writers, Kate Forsyth and Belinda Murrell...
Comments
No comments