A Short Novel about Watching Birds

My Women Writers Month may be over, but that doesn't mean that I've abandoned the fairer sex completely.  I still have a few books by female writers to get through, mostly by Australian authors - which is handy for two of the challenges I am involved in, the Australian Women Writers Challenge and the Aussie Author Challenge.  Last month, I read and reviewed Carrie Tiffany's first novel, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, and as I was lucky enough to receive an ARC of her second novel at the same time, that's what you're getting today :)

Mateship with Birds is also set in the Victorian countryside (in the town of Cohuna, near the New South Wales border), but a generation later, in the 1950s.  Betty and her two children, Michael and little Hazel, live by themselves on the edge of town, and their nearest neighbour, Harry, has become a friend who helps out around the house.  Both Harry and Betty are long single, and it is clear from the start that there is a spark between the two.

Apart from staring wistfully at each other's windows, Harry and Betty spend their time looking after their respective 'herds' - Harry's milk cows and the old men Betty helps to care for at the local nursing home - while Michael begins to realise that there is more to life than school and farming.  When Harry catches his young neighbour in a compromising position one day, he decides that it is time to give the boy some important advice for life...

Mateship with Birds is very different to the usual city-centric Australian fiction, but don't imagine that life in the country is peaceful and pleasantly bucolic.  The days are full of sex (mainly the people), violence (mainly the birds) and excrement (both), and Tiffany delights in describing it all for us in great detail.  We're treated to frequent mentions of shit, sweat, piss and slobber, both animal and human.  It's not always comfortable reading, but it does come across as the natural way of life out in the country...

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living was first published in 2005, seven years before Mateship with Birds.  If you were wondering what took Tiffany so long to produce a follow-up book, an interview I spotted recently in The Age might give you the answer.  You see, she actually wrote another book (Freud in the Bush) around a fictional visit the great psycho-analyst (never) made to Australia in 1911.  Originally planning to mock Freud, Tiffany abandoned the book when she realised that she actually agreed with many of his claims...

...and this is painfully evident throughout Mateship with Birds.  The book is littered with Freudian allusions, and the focus on sex is almost obsessive, with (it seems) barely a page passing without some sort of mention.  Oedipal complexes abound, and the fathers you would expect to see in the story are more conspicuous by their absence.  Most of the characters have dreams that any Freudian psycho-analyst would have a field day with, and at one point Harry writes about a childhood memory of his mother doing something very intimate in his presence.  Even the baby kookaburra, feeding its mother for the first time, seems to be in on the act...

It is possible though to think about the story in non-Freudian terms (just about!).  There is a strong focus on family and what that entity actually is.  Whether it's Betty and her children, Harry's skittish herd or the laughing kookaburras in the old gum tree, the reader is constantly confronted by family groups, none of which seem perfect or complete in the usual sense.  However, even these groups can be surprisingly strong:

"In the way of a family, the herd is greater than the sum of its members.  Even in a small family, three for instance, Harry has noticed this to be the case." p.47 (Picador, 2012)

There is also a link back to Everyman's Rules... in the way that science is shown to be a tool to be used cautiously and sparingly.  The more you attempt to impose science on nature, the more you lose sight of what life is about.  Harry's sex education lessons (which are certainly more biological than emotional) are a good example of the consequences of forgetting the human element in life.

Objectively speaking, Mateship with Birds is a better book than its predecessor.  It is more cohesive, and the writing feels stronger than in the author's previous novel.  I loved the little sections where Harry writes about the kookaburra family, the space used in the margins of his notebook forcing his observations into a wonderfully-shaped poetry:

"It seems plausible to consider

that birds were the architects for trees.

A hollow,

or a fork,
for every nesting cradle;

a branch for every grip.

And they designed a structure

to which insects are naturally attracted,

like women to the shops." (p.135)

Subjectively speaking though, I probably preferred Everyman's Rules..., purely because of the continual sex references in Mateship for Birds.  While there isn't a lot of sex in the novel, there's a hell of a lot written about it, often in fairly blunt terms.  This probably says more about me than the novel (and I certainly wouldn't want to discuss the matter in therapy...), but it did affect my enjoyment of the book.  The writer defends her position in the interview mentioned above (quite rightly), and I would definitely recommend Mateship with Birds - it's a very interesting book.  Just don't say that I didn't warn you about the adult content ;)

Blinded by Science

With my focus on female writers this month, and the plethora of Australian challenges I'm taking part in (see the icons on the right of my blog for details), when I heard of Carrie Tiffany's latest book, I thought it sounded like one for me.  I was cheeky enough to ask for a review copy of Mateship with Birds and her previous novel, Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, and the lovely people at PanMcMillan (Picador) Australia were kind enough to send me a copy of both.  Sometimes life's like that :)

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living is set in the Mallee region in country Victoria, a part of the Australian wheat belt, in the 1930s, where our main character, Jean Finnegan, is travelling around on the Better Farming Train, a government-funded initiative to bring progress and development to the people outside the major capitals.  Jean, a superb seamstress (two in one month!) falls in love with Robert Pettergree, an expert on soils, and the two of them very quickly decide to get married and establish their own farm in the Mallee, one based on scientific principles.

With Robert's farming expertise and Jean's wealth of household knowledge, the couple are sure they can make a go of things out in the country.  Sadly though, events conspire against them: the harsh Australian climate takes its toll on all the farmers eking out a living, and the Great Depression rolls in from the city to the country.  Sometimes scientific living just isn't enough...

There's a lot to like about this book.  It stands out from the usual urban tales of Australiana, ignoring the state capital of Melbourne and instead concentrating on life out in the country, where when people talk about the city, they mean the small regional centre of Swan Hill, not the bustling metropolis which the best tennis players in the world are currently visiting ;)  It's also a reminder that the Great Depression was a worldwide affair, not a Steinbeckian phenomenon limited to the heartlands of America, and we can see the effects of the drought and economic disaster right here on our doorstep.

One by one, farmers fall victim to the drought, unable to cope in times of reduced rainfall and economic hardship.  As Robert, on the orders of the state government, tries to move the farmers on to a more scientific method of growing wheat, the signs of the Depression are already in the air.  The very train bringing the super phosphate, the chemical which is to increase the wheat yield, also harbours economic refugees from the city - the first signs of what is to come.

It's also an interesting book in a feminist light as we get to see Jean's motives for marrying and the world she has born into, not one which encourages young women to hang around waiting for a man or to try to make a go of it on their own.  In an early flash back, we see Jean at school, in a scene where we are told in no uncertain terms what her role in society is to be:

"I didn't like it when the teacher split us into boys and girls and we had special talks.  Our talks were about being modest and having babies.  The teacher showed us a map of Australia and drew a big rectangle inside the middle of it with a ruler.

'See this - all empty.  And whose job is it to fill up the empty continent with lovely healthy babies?  It's your job, girls.  What an honour.  What a privilege...'" p.16 (Picador, 2005)

When we move forward twenty years, we see that little has changed.  On moving to her new home of Wycheproof, Jean visits the small library at the local Mechanics' Institute.  Unfortunately though, she is unable to get her library card on that day - the application form has to be filled out in the name of her husband...

It is against this background that Jean's decision to get married, even if it is to someone she loves (and sexually desires) is made.  With no real family life to return to, she finds it easy to throw in her lot with the taciturn Robert, deciding to stick it out in the country, whatever may happen.  However, for Robert, life is not so simple.  His belief in the progressive nature of science and the inevitability of correct preparation bringing superior results, means that he is unable to cope with the cruel surprises nature - and economics - spring on him.  Perversely, the more Jean rises to the challenge, the more he loses his faith in what he is doing, and his nature prevents him from truly confiding in the woman he has chosen to share this life of hardship.

It's not a perfect book by any means.  It's a little short, and the part about the train, a mobile practical classroom roaming around country Victoria, is over in a flash, half making you wonder whether it was worth including it at all.  There are several sex scenes which, while probably serving some purpose, seemed a little exaggerated and superfluous at times, and one supporting character, the Japanese scientist Mr. Ohno, bordered on a caricature, one which I really didn't think worked very well at all.  The writing is also fairly sparing and simple - while effective, there are no elegant, lexical pyrotechnics to be found here (although many readers may consider this a good thing!).

Overall though, these are minor, personal quibbles, and the positives of Tiffany's novel far outweigh the negatives.  It's an easy read, but a compelling one, and anyone interested in Australian history will particularly enjoy Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living.  Having enjoyed the first novel then, I'll be very happy to check out Mateship with Birds, again set in country Victoria, but this time in the 1950s.  I see my Women Writers Month might last a little longer than I'd originally planned for...