And the winner is...

After the first six months of this reading project, here are my awards —

Best novel:           The Eye of Purgatory by Jacques Spitz
Best memoir:        Second Wind by Carl Zuckmayer

Best lead character in a novel: Frances Nolan (above) in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Best supporting character in a novel: Roddy Cornett in Wide Open Town

Best lead character in a memoir: Edmund Blunden in Undertones of War
Best supporting character in a memoir: Major Sir Francis Fletcher-Vane in Inglorious Soldier

Picnic at Hanging Rock

This mysterious novel, published in 1967, was well-known in Australia before being made famous internationally by Peter Weir’s film of 1975. The plot centres on a school for young ladies in rural Victoria, based on the author’s own alma mater, Clyde Girls’ Grammar School. The mysterious events that happen when the schoolchildren are taken on an outing to Hanging Rock, a nearby geological attraction, occur in February 1900.

The author, Joan Lindsay (née Weigall, born 16 November 1896), spent much of the First World War as a student at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne. As part of her introduction to the novel, she attempts to add to the mystery of the story:
“Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year 1900, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.”
The disappearance of several of the girls and one of the members of staff is left unexplained at the end of the novel. The publisher decided that this would make the novel more effective as a mystery (the final chapter of the author’s original text, with partial explanation of what had happened on Hanging Rock, was excluded and suppressed until it was published in 1987).

Set during the Boer War, in which 600 Australians were killed, the author’s concern with disappearance and loss is reflective of the experience of her generation in losing so many (60,000) young men (brothers, cousins, husbands) in the First World War and a further 40,000 (sons, nephews) in the Second World War. The author makes occasional references to the conflict in South Africa:
“The Fitzhuberts and their friends were a smug little community, well served... pleasant comfortable people for whom the current Boer War was the most catastrophic event since the Flood”
“An uneasy silence accompanied the mousse of tongue despite the host’s monologues on rose growing and the outrageous ingratitude of the Boers towards Our Gracious Queen.”

The typical preservation of the room of a son killed in the war is represented in the perceived sanctity of lost Miranda’s belongings in the room she shared with her friend Sara:
“Nothing had been changed since the day of the picnic... Miranda’s soft pretty dresses still hung in orderly rows in the cedar cupboard from which the child invariably averted her eyes. Miranda’s tennis racquet still leaned against the wall exactly as it did when its owner, flushed and radiant, came running upstairs after a game with Marion on a summer evening. The treasured photograph of Miranda in an oval silver frame on the mantelpiece, the bureau still stuffed with Miranda’s Valentines, the dressing table where she had always put a flower in Miranda’s little crystal vase.”   

We Think the World of You

This tragicomic novel, published in 1960, is largely concerned with Evie, a German Shepherd dog, whose master, Johnny, has been sent to prison for theft. It deals with both the incarceration of Johnny and the captivity of his dog at his parents’ London home. This is reflective of the author’s experience as a prisoner of war in Switzerland during the First World War.

The author, Joe Ackerley (born 4 November 1896), received a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the 8th Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment. He went to France in June 1915. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916) he was wounded both by a gunshot to the arm and by shrapnel to one side of his body. He was rescued from a shell-hole having been lying there injured for six hours. He was invalided home but soon recovered and returned to duty on the Western Front. In May 1917 he was wounded in the leg while leading an attack near Arras and was captured by German forces. He spent the remainder of the conflict as a prisoner of war, being moved from camp to camp before ending up as an internee in a resort hotel in Switzerland. During his detention he began to write the play Prisoners of War.

Ackerley was open about his homosexuality for much of his life and this novel explores the homosexual central character Frank’s love for both Johnny and Evie. The frustration that Frank experiences in his love for both Johnny and Evie is representative of the author’s own difficulty in forming loving relationships (the author had been tormented by unrequited love when a prisoner of war). Frank frequently feels estranged from Johnny and from his wife and his parents. Johnny’s father is a villian of the piece and is the one character connected by the narrative to the war in which the author fought:
“Generally a silent, ruminative sort of man, he was liable, if addressed, to respond, and would launch, in his slow, monotonous, complacent way, into reminiscenes, usually concerned with the First World War, which seemed to have neither direction, end, nor point, excepting always to exhibit himself, in a climax one had learnt to foresee... as having come off best.”

Frank thinks of Evie in affectionate terms that are normally reserved for lovers:
“She stood before me now in the failing light of this early March evening, gazing at me intently. How pretty she was! How elegantly tailored her neat sable-gray, two-piece costume! Her sharp watchful face was framed in a delicate Elizabethan ruff, which frilled out from the lobes of her ears and covered all her throat and breast with a snowy shirt-front. She stood like a statue — no, she was too lightly poised for that; more like a dancer...”
Whereas Frank succeeds in rescuing Evie from confinement in the scullery at Johnny’s parents’ home, he ends up taking full responsibility for Evie’s care and through it is both restricted and lonely:
“Advancing age has only intensified her jealousy. I have lost all my old friends, they fear her and look at me with pity or contempt. We live entirely alone. Unless with her I can never go away.”

Cattleman

The narrative of this engaging novel, set in rural Queensland, fluctuates between the present situation of the central character, Ben, as a dying old man in his hospital bed in the 1950s and the past situations of his adult life dating back to the early 1890s. As he lies there, his conversations and his dreams bring him back to the many incidents that have shaped his life, including both World Wars.

The author, Sydney Porteous (born 18 August 1896), interweaves much of his own life experience into this novel. Like the hero of this novel, he too was a cattleman; just as Ben was known as Boss, he was known as Skip. Skip was working as a cattle station trainee in New South Wales in 1914 when the war broke out. By then Ben, from the previous generation, was married with children and had established himself on a cattle farm in Queensland. Ben and his son, Dan, go to Victoria (the author's home state) to enlist before embarking for the Middle East. The author enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in November 1914 and served in the 8th Battalion of the Light Horse Regiment. At Gallipoli that battalion began the disastrous attack on the Nek on 7 August. Much reduced in numbers, the unit had a defensive role until it withdrew on 20 December 1915. Likewise, Ben and Dan were in the 8th Australian Light Horse. The main action that Ben recollects is in Egypt and Palestine; “Gallipoli was only a memory; a senseless interlude that had cost them so many mates.”

On 1 December 1917, the author was wounded in action at El Burj in Palestine. It was at the same place that he depicted Ben and Dan and their unit relieving a Scottish unit on a prominent defensive ridge but they were among a number of soldiers sent by night to an exposed outpost. When the Turks launched an attack that night, there was no safe route of escape and the Australian soldiers had to flee with enemy soldiers on either side. Ben was wounded and many, including, Dan, were killed. Ben recalled the disaster:
“What a turn-up! What a howling mess! And what had they achieved for it all? Nothing. Not one damned thing. In fact they had only caused confusion to the men in the line by racing up the hill all mixed up with a  mob of Jackos. Probably half the outpost had been killed by their own machine-guns. What a lovely bloody thought! Well, at least Danny hadn't been killed that way. But he was dead, wasn't he? Murdered by some brainless Headquarters mug who kept them stuck out there until it was too late. If they expected Sergeant Ben Mc Ready to go back into the line and fight after that, they had another think coming. Let them come back here and put him on a crime sheet for refusing to obey an order. Let them take his bloody stripes away. He didn't want the rotten things. When he got his wind back he;d find Headquarters and tell 'em so. Tell 'em what he thought of the whole show.”

While away at war, Ben's wife had given birth to a second son, Ken. When, as an experienced pilot, he joined the Air Force at the beginning of the Second World War, Ben gave him firm advice:
“Don't knock back any promotion that comes your way. It's not a matter of higher pay. It's a matter of getting to where you're giving the orders instead of taking them. The higher up you get the fewer numskulls you've got pushing you around and the more chances you have of getting home alive. Dan was killed through the mistake of a dud officer. I wouldn't want the same thing to happen to you.”

Ben lost his second son when Ken’s plane was shot down over the English Channel. Whereas it was rare for a father to lose a son in each war, it was common for a man to lose a brother in one war and a son in the next. The author’s description of loss in this novel is reflective of his own life, not only the loss of so many fellow soldiers in the First World War but also the death of his first wife in childbirth in 1930. Ben also experienced the sudden death of his wife. Though Ben recounts great loss and hardship in his life, there is also gratitude for what has been and hope for what is to come. It has much in common with Albert Facey’s classic Australian memoir, A Fortunate Life, which I read immediately prior to this project.

The Leopard

Published posthumously in 1958, this novel, set in Sicily in the second half of the 19th century with a concluding chapter in 1910, was nominated by The Observer as one of the ten greatest historical novels. It has much in common with the fiction of the interwar period as it deals with political upheaval and social change. The central character is a prince, heraldically referred to as the Leopard.

The author, Giuseppe Tomasi (born 23 December 1896), son of the Prince of Lampedusa, based this novel on his family's experience of the erosion of its traditional influence on Sicilian society as Garibaldi's movement brought about a restructuring of politics that led to the unification of Italy. The description of loss and decay is reflective of the huge impact that the First World War (and indeed the Second World War) had on Italian society. Tomasi had served in the Italian army in the First World War, having been conscripted in 1915. In late 1917 he was captured during the Battle of Caparetto and was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp at Szombathely in Hungary. Nearing his death in 1957, he wrote in a letter of instruction to his family that his fellow prisoner, Guido Lajolo, who had emigrated to Brazil, should be notified of his death.

The destruction of human life is a motif throughout the novel. In an early scene the body of a young solider had been found in the garden:
“They had found him lying face downwards in the thick clover, his face covered in blood and vomit, crawling with ants, his nails dug into the soil; a pile of purplish intestines had formed a puddle under his bandoleer.”
A month later, the Prince recalled the soldier when viewing “six baby lambs, the last of the year’s litter, with their heads lolling pathetically above the big gash through which their life-blood had flowed a few yards before. Their bellies had been slashed open too and iridescent intestines hung out.”

Another interesting feature of the novel is the author’s flourishing use of military language. It is scattered throughout the text, almost echoing the actual military engagements going on outside the Prince’s estate:
“But the defence forces of his inner calm always on the alert in the Prince were already hurrying to his aid, with the musketry of law, the artillery of history.”