Dead Cat Bounce

Peter Cotton. Dead Cat Bounce. Scribe, 2013. ISBN: 9781922072542

Back in May Laura Bartlett at the ACT Writers Centre asked me where I thought the literary imagination could be found in Canberra. In reflecting on the books I had read up until then, I came up with three categories: Inevitable Canberra, Symbolic Canberra, and Comfortable Canberra.

The first category, Inevitable Canberra, is for the books that are set in Canberra because they have to be, to make the story work. They tend to be politically based. I mentioned in May that this category was the one that had the least affection for Canberra, needing the place but not really knowing, loving, or understanding it.

Peter Cotton’s debut novel Dead Cat Bounce more or less fits into this category. Cotton is a former journalist and media adviser to federal cabinet ministers, with a ten year career based in Canberra. He knows his way around town. His novel, a police procedural about the murder of a senior minister in the middle of an election campaign, draws on Canberra for its momentum. There’s a little bit more going on here, though.

To begin with, Dead Cat Bounce doesn’t have to be in Canberra. The pollies are on the election trail, and not tied to the House and sitting schedules, so it really could have happened anywhere. Actually, now that I think of it, the fact that a minister would be in Canberra during an election campaign is a bit weird. So, Canberra is definitely the chosen setting, not merely the necessary one.

My second notional category was Symbolic Canberra. I used this to group together those books that use Canberra’s features as metaphors for their writing. Cotton’s work fits in here too. Our dead minister has been found on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin at Attunga Point, not far from the Yacht Club, and, as the police profiler helpfully points out for us:

Lakes feature in the mythology of a number of ancient cultures, where they’re generally linked to a transition to death. In Greek mythology, for instance, the god Dionysus descended into the underworld through a lake.

The killers may be using LBG as a metaphor for the journey to hell, and I think Cotton is also using the lake, and Canberra more generally, as the symbol of political power. Even though this story could happen anywhere, its location in Canberra concentrates our thinking on the consequences of this killing for the election and for our democracy. Later in the story when matters escalate further, the feasibility of continuing the election as a whole comes up for discussion, as Canberra virtually goes into lockdown. Our parliamentary processes, regardless of whether we currently have a parliament, are fragile, and that fragility, and the importance of preventing their fracture, is magnified by setting the story in Canberra.

Which takes me to category three, Comfortable Canberra. In my thinking, Comfortable Canberra is for those novels that ‘get’ Canberra. The city may be a necessary location or a symbolic motif, but it is also a place that they know and understand and can get around in plausibly without getting lost. Cotton knows his way around Canberra, getting around the usual sites of Civic, Kingston, Yarralumla, Red Hill, Forrest and Fyshwick. Cotton’s characters have drinks at the Kingo and the Hyatt, coffee in Garema Place. They lunch at a Manuka café (could it be Caphs?!?), they have working lives in Woden, and dark things happen on Mount Ainslie. Indeed, Cotton’s characters even wax lyrical, if stereotypical, about their lives in the city:

We both liked Canberra’s clean air, and its four seasons. That it had wide roads, and was relatively uncluttered.

Another symbolic, mysterious lake, Lake George, also has an important place in the story, as does the township named after it. North of Canberra, down Macks Reef Road, a little out of Bungendore, the village of Lake George is the home of a ‘person of interest’ to the investigation, as they say.

Weereewaa was the Aboriginal name for the lake… The word meant ‘bad water’, and the blacks, and the Europeans who took their land, had plenty of reasons for thinking there was something bad about the lake.

What I particularly like about Cotton’s story, is that, when the security types are getting all heavy-handed, he has one of his characters, remind us that there are people who live in Canberra and who don’t have or want anything much to do with what is going on on the Hill:

What I’d say to you Mr Redding is this. The people of Canberra are feeling very insecure in the wake of [these crimes]. They’re also very angry with the perpetrators. Combine anger and insecurity, and what do you get? Hysteria, of course, and the symptoms of it are everywhere in this town…. So, Mr Redding, as you consider your next move, please be mindful of the impact it’ll have out here in Australia-land.

So, in Dead Cat Bounce, Canberra is inevitable, symbolic, and relatively comfortable. A bringing together of all of its various elements. And dead politicians, which not everyone believes is a bad thing.

Awards:

Nil

Caphs Count:

10%

The Invisible Thread

Irma Gold (ed), Judy Horacek (ill). The Invisible Thread: One Hundred Years of Words. Halstead Press, 2012. ISBN: 9781920831967.

It would be naïve to think that the fact of living for a time in Canberra would automatically leave some indelible, detectable mark on a writer and her writing. The influence of having lived in one part of the world or other is often not singular enough to allow any of us to point to a piece of work and say “There. That bit is because of Canberra”. It’s part of who we are, not some specific aspect of our being, divisible from the rest of us.

If there is no single, discernible influence of place on any one of us, is it not also true that every individual influence leaves some trace on us somewhere? We are all the sum of our parts. Or more than.

And so to The Invisible Thread: One Hundred Years of Words, a centenary anthology of writings emanating from Canberra. This is not a selection of writings about Canberra, but of works by authors who are connected with the city.

The thread is, indeed, invisible at times. Many of the works reproduced in full or extracted here are not discernibly related to this part of this world, although some are. But, if the ties linking one work coming out of Canberra to another are at times invisible, other links are often shining and clear. I did enjoy very much the way that editor Irma Gold and her advisory committee have put this anthology together.

I felt in the beginning that I was playing one of those word puzzles where you change one letter in a word at each turn to make a new word. Somehow you get from ‘cold’ to ‘warm’, changing one letter at a time. Word ladders, I think they’re called. The progression through Part One: “Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards”, was so gentle that it was no surprise at all to find myself having moved effortlessly from CEW Bean’s “Anzac to Amiens” to Michael Thorley’s “Things”—“After their owners die, things die too”.

Bean’s poetic observations of the western front. His research at Tuggeranong Homestead, with the experience of war lingering for his correspondents in Peter Stanley’s “Quinn’s Post”. War pursuing, or never having left, Lesley Lebkowicz’s elderly “Good Shoppers”. Judith Wright asking us in “Counting in Sevens” to contemplate the markers of our lives, and which of them will we remember in our old age. AD Hope looking back in rage and love through “Meditation on a Bone”, refusing to give up on past hurt. John Clanchy’s “The Gunmen”, allowing ancient hurts to perpetuate themselves onward and forevermore. Penelope Leyland tracing perhaps one of the greatest of hurts and most primal of fears, the “Lost Child”, swallowed up by the unfamiliar Australian landscape. Roger McDonald’s solitary men, together, not devoured by the landscape but part of it, where the spaces are as important as the solid things, in “When Colts Ran”.

I dipped in and out of The Invisible Thread over a few weeks, which is what you should be able to do in an anthology. It did mean, though, that I lost the thread in places, or just forgot to look for it. It is a collection that pays reading in sequence, for the joy of finding those links in the chain, but the selections also introduced me individually to new friends, and allowed me to also revisit old acquaintances.

As I said, this is not an anthology about Canberra, but rather of, from, or maybe through Canberra. There is, though, the visible as well as the invisible trace. Bob Crozier, the Queanbeyan postie’s journey to deliver the mail to Bean. Buckler and Fred’s visit to “the national capital with its monuments – Parliament House, War Memorial, Civic Centre – held off in dry grass paddocks” on “one long, hot endless day”. Bill Gammage’s referencing of the 2003 bushfires, and how the loss of ancient management practices may have precipitated them. The Unknown Soldier, lying in state in King’s Hall at Old Parliament House before processing through the city and our consciousness to the War Memorial. Phar Lap’s heart in its glass case in the Museum: “’I don’t like cold dead places with old dead horses without hearts,’” Marian Eldrige’s Alvie mutters. Dorothy Johnston’s “Boatman of Lake Burley Griffin” giving a mysterious other life to the Lake, dividing us from the here and now and from each other, offering solace, leading some of us away.

The final piece is called “Luminous Moments”, extracted from Marion Halligan’s The Taste of Memory. It is a lovely work to finish on, I think, reflecting the thread that runs, visibly or not, through the rest of the writings. Halligan’s prose here is a stream of consciousness – one thought seamlessly seguing into the next without losing the train or the coherence of the story, until somehow we find ourselves back where we began, but having been enriched by the journey. This, like the rest of The Invisible Thread, is a series of luminous moments indeed.

Awards:

Nil

Caphs Count:

13%

Riding on Air

Maggie Gilbert. Riding on Air. Escape Publishing, 2013. ISBN: 9780857990457

One of those aphorisms that is often wheeled out to writers is to “find your own voice”. Maggie Gilbert has her own voice. It is funny, light, wry, self-deprecating, engaging and real. Reading Riding on Air is just like chatting to Maggie herself. I know this because I have known Maggie since we were about ten years old. I’m not going to tell you how long that is. As long as I have known her, Maggie has been writing and working towards being a published author, so I had a reasonable idea of her excitement when she told me that her first full-length novel was being published at Easter.

Of course, I was also worried about reading it. Or, more to the point, reviewing it. What if it sucked? It’s a young adult novel about teenage girls and horses, published by Escape Publishing, a new ebook imprint from Harlequin. I am not exactly this book’s target demographic. And my last experience of a Harlequin Mills & Boon romance was less than great.

I needn’t have worried. As I said, sitting down with Riding on Air was like settling in with Maggie for a natter. The book is funny, engaging and believable. Light without being vapid. In my opinion, being able to write good, realistic, conversations is perhaps the key sign of a good writer or, perhaps more accurately the real let-down of less good writing. It has never seemed that difficult to me, but some writers do seem to need to turn their characters’ conversations into speeches, making them mouth the things that are required to drive the story forward rather than letting them say what they want to say. I felt that the voices of Riding on Air’s characters were natural and flowing and authentic.

Melissa is 16, and devoted to giving her horse, Jinx, the best chance she can give him to shine at dressage. They’ve come a long way together, but Melissa’s juvenile rheumatoid arthritis is getting worse, and she’s stashing pills for the times her hands become too painful to prepare Jinx for the qualifying event coming up in Goulburn. And she’s worried that this flare-up may not go away. Of course, there’s also a boy.

I should have known he’d be the one to come to my un-rescue on his mechanical charger. I have that kind of luck. God, why didn’t you kill me in that fall?…

A lanky body moved in to block the sun and I blinked my watering eyes at the sudden change in light… I blinked some more, still sun-dazzled. Dazzled, anyway. William’s face came into focus, dark eyebrows frowning above narrowed lake-blue eyes.

The storyline follows Melissa as she pursues her dream of making Jinx the best dressage horse he can be, while she keeps her increasing pain a secret from her family, from William, and from her two best friends Tash and Eleni. A few online reviewers have commented that those not into horses might find all of the technical dressage detail a bit much. I found it interesting to understand a little bit more about what is going on between horse and rider, although there were a couple of moments where it got a bit beyond me and I felt I might have accidentally picked up a horse riding handbook.

We also watch as Melissa overcomes her lack of self confidence to realise that William does care for her, and that his interest is not some kind of cruel trick. Melissa feels all of her emotions in her guts. Fairly literally. The word “stomach” appears 70 times in the book, although it’s rarely clichéd. In fact, it’s amazing the sorts of original gymnastics Melissa’s stomach can do:

 My stomach plummeted and then curled in on itself, as tight and prickly as a startled echidna.

Most of the stomach quivering is, of course, related to William, who I found just a shade too restrained and wise for an eighteen year old boy. Although, my experience with eighteen year old boys is a bit dated.

There is a chapter towards the end of the book where Melissa, too nervous to sleep before her big day in Goulburn, chats in the kitchen with her stepmother Jennie. It’s an important scene where Melissa begins to realise that she may have misunderstood the motives of the people who have hurt her. It’s a lovely moment, and its revelations are pointed without being forced. And there is Maggie’s ever-present wry humour to even out any potentially bumpy bits.

“I stuffed it up,” I choked out.

“Maybe. But I’m sure you could fix it.”

“I’m not. He was really mad at me.”

“I don’t know what you two argued about but I do know this: that boy is totally besotted, Melly, and it wouldn’t take much effort from you, I’m sure.”

“He wants me to do something I can’t,” I said, and almost fell over myself as Jennie’s eyes widened. “No! Not that. He wouldn’t – I wouldn’t, not yet anyway – oh!”

Jennie laughed and shook her head, miming putting her fingers in her ears.

Canberra connections? The Caphs Count is becoming an increasingly vivid example of the importance of sample size when drawing conclusions from statistical data. Melissa and her friends live in Sutton, which literally butts up against the ACT border. Is very much a country town. At about half-an-hour’s drive from Civic, it’s not too far for William and Melissa to go out for a movie and get some Thai for dinner, but the action here is very much in the horse paddocks at home.

Riding on Air is, as the publisher’s blurbs tell us, a story about following your dreams, but it is also about deciding what you are and aren’t prepared to give to achieve them. These are life lessons we all need to learn at some time or other. It is something I think Maggie is pretty clear about too.

Awards:

Nil

Caphs Count:

14%