Before I ran any sort of blog, I used to put my thoughts about books down in my diary. This was better than not putting my thoughts about books down anywhere. But diaries are essentially private things. You're completely unaccountable for anything you write there, because you're the only one reading it. So my book reviews were very haphazard. They ranged from the very expansive, with loads of transcribed passages, to the incredibly brief; they were completely subjective, off-the-top-of-my-head reactions; and they were totally based on the text, because I very rarely did further research (I was working, doing lots of other kinds of research, so there just wasn't time).

For these reasons, my old diary entries don't lend themselves to being reproduced as blog posts.

Then I started a blog, Travel and Food. And if you think you're writing for other people (even if no other people ever read what you're writing), you do it differently. Well, I do anyway. I'm definitely more circumspect. I don't just sound off. Serving as a portmanteau for anything happening in my life in the period 2010-18, this first blog occasionally contained book reviews. But -- again because of pressure of time -- these were mostly brief (unless they happened to be work-related), and often as not they just set out some key reactions, and some pointers to other people's reviews.

The Velvet Cushion tries to be much more thorough, and to lay down something that I can build on and learn from. I'm still critical, of course, but I try extra-hard to be fair; I do the research; I take other views into consideration; I support what I'm saying with evidence.

Anyway, the reason I bring all this up is that I sometimes come across Book-notes-appropriate information on works I read before I kept a blog of any kind. I want to save these snippets (the whole purpose of Book notes), but there's nothing to link them to. I could reproduce bits of diary, but then I fall foul of that different-audiences thing I was talking about. I'd end up editing my diary text to make it public, and that kind of retrofitting also seems a bit weird.

So, this sub-series of Book notes will be a bit of a fudge... New sources, plus edited snippets of diary, all with the purpose of building that book-web-in-my-head that I aspire to. Here goes...

1.
Yukio Mishima would have been 100 this year.

He was controversial, that's for sure. One of Japan's most acclaimed writers, he was an ultra-nationalist and traditionalist, and he committed ritual suicide in 1970 after the coup attempt he led failed. And yet... "In 2025," Alexander Howard comments, "with nationalist rhetoric and debates about cultural identity in the news, Mishima’s concerns about the erosion of tradition, problematic as they are, feel strikingly relevant.


Kyoto, 2015

His debut novel (The Thieves, 1948) featured an introduction by Yasunari Kawabata, who was Mishima's sponsor and champion. But it was Confessions of a Mask that made him famous in Japan. Its protagonist seems obsessed by death, and when he survives the war he feels only half-alive. This might have reflected Mishima's stance, too: "Exposed to a heady concoction of wartime propaganda and emperor-worship, he struggled to make sense of what defeat meant for post-war Japan, and to come to terms with Emperor Hirohito’s abdication of divine authority." His final acts express his longing for "a glorious militaristic past".

His work has inspired all kinds of artists (including David Bowie), and as well as a literary icon, Mishima is "a cautionary reminder of the complex, sometimes dangerous relationship between creativity and fanaticism".

My one experience of Mishima was his third novel, Forbidden Colours (1951), which I read in 2007. Summary: "An aging, embittered novelist sets out to avenge himself on the women who have betrayed him. He finds the perfect instrument in Yuichi, a young man whose beauty makes him irresistible to women but who is just discovering his attraction to other men."

I can't say I enjoyed it... What I did appreciate, says the diary, was "its portrayal of 1950s Japan, which seems comfortable inside but fairly bleak outside, and its depiction of a fairly lively gay scene", but I hated the pervasive misogynism. Others, however, feel much more positively about it. See the reviews here, here, and here.

We're going to be doing a Mishima novel with Henry Eliot later this year, so I'll see how I get on with that...



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2.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer would have been 100 this year.

This renowned Indonesian author died in 2006. The Buru Quartet, his most famous work, was written during his 10 years of imprisonment on Buru island during the time of Suharto: "Initially denied access to writing materials, Pramoedya kept the stories ‘alive’ by recounting them to other prisoners, who, when he finally was allowed to write, assisted him to produce the novels. After his release from prison in 1979 the novels were published, quickly banned by President Suharto’s New Order government, but circulated clandestinely and attracted great interest."

The four parts are This Earth of Mankind and Child of All Nations (both published in 1980), followed by Footsteps (1985), and House of Glass (1988).



Together, they're a penetrating look at what was the Dutch East Indies, taking us from the end of the 19th century to the first decade of the 20th. We see the world through the eyes of Minke, who is loosely based on Indonesian journalist Tirto Adhi Soerjo (1880-1918). Nathan Hollier argues: "Minke is a captivating, magnetic and inspiring character for many reasons but perhaps most profoundly, most powerfully, because he is a ‘native’, to use the terms of the day, who is able to see the value and learn principles and teachings of the European Enlightenment and then use this knowledge against his teachers, the Dutch, who justify their ongoing mastery of the Indies peoples through the argument, more often assumed than stated, that they are more civilised than those they have colonised, that they and other Europeans are able to acquire and appreciate knowledge and beauty in ways that the Indies peoples cannot. The spuriousness of this justification of colonialism is revealed progressively throughout the novels, as the Dutch are forced into overtly perfidious and barbaric behaviour to maintain their dominant social position, a position underpinned not by any superior cultural or intellectual capacity but by their greater educational opportunity, wealth, and ultimately guns and money."

This so fits in with The Committed...


The Old Dutch Quarter, Semarang, 2013

Minke gradually learns that it's not only the colonizers who have scientific and aesthetic achievements to their credit, and discovers the Eastern thinkers and artists who have contributed to advancement in these fields. He also learns about other people's struggles for independence. But he doesn't end up idealizing the pre-colonial past. "In casting off Dutch colonial power, Minke recognises that it would be a step backward to then re-impose traditional Indies social forms and patterns, with their own tyrannies, inhumanity and ignorance."

I read the first two volumes of the Quartet in 2007, and found them very interesting. I noted at the time: "It's very clever the way the author depicts Minke's ongoing embroilment -- increasing and deepening -- with the colonial system. He tries to use his writing to protect a poor sugar farmer, and learns that what he thought were his newspaper allies are stooges of the sugar lobby. They will defend individuals against acts of injustice... but they'll do nothing to attack the system. Even his great protector, [Dutch liberal] Herbert de la Croix, has treated him patronizingly by employing 'Fatso' to spy on him."

It's quite a feminist-inclined series. For example, there's a wonderful female character called Nyai. She's the concubine of a Dutch man, Herman Mellema; and she's an astute businesswoman, an auto-didact, and an effective mentor for Minke (he marries Annalies, her daughter, but as the offspring of a concubine, her legal status is uncertain, and she is shipped off back to The Netherlands, where she dies).

It was 2009 before I embarked on Footsteps. It was not uninteresting, but I found it a less enjoyable novel, and overly didactic. My enthusiasm for the first two was not matched by House of Glass either, which I read in 2011. This one is narrated by Pangemanann, a police officer whose job it is to monitor and stamp out the naissant independence movement. As he gets drawn more and more into examining the lives of dissidents, he increasingly loses his own moorings in family and society. And the diary reacts to the final tragedy: "The spare, abrupt way in which the death of Minke is recounted has huge impact. What an influential life, you think, and what a sad, lonely, shocking end..."



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3.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o dies.

Born in 1938 in Limuru, Kenya, he is regarded as one of Africa’s greatest writers. Since he grew up at the height of British colonialism, it's not surprise that his writing, too, examines "the legacy of colonialism and the intricate relationships between locals seeking economic and cultural emancipation and the local elites serving as agents of neo-colonisers".

Ngugi stopped writing in English in 1977, and afterwards wrote mainly in Gikuyu. My only experience of his work came in 2007, when I read Wizard of the Crow (published in 2005, and translated into English by the author). In this case, my diary entry is probably worth citing:

"It's a little too long, but it's good. Definitely something you would want to include in your Politics Through Literature paper. All Africa is there: Squalor, corruption, hopelessly inflated leaders, sycophancy, economic hopelessness, witchcraft, fundamentalist religion, postcolonialism -- yet also hope, optimism, courage, fundamentally decent and resilient people, comradeship, and self-sacrifice.

"The satire is poured on with a heavy hand, and everything is larger than life, but in essence, most of it rings very true. It's a little too didactic, especially at the end, but it's very funny in parts, and very moving in others, and generally a good read.

"The 'good' characters -- Nyawire, Kamiti, Maritha, Mariko, etc -- are salt-of-the-earth, spiritual, patriotic in the best possible way, steeped in homespun wisdom -- very likeable, very pure. Believable? Not sure... But then I have to remember that this is a satire. Satires don't need well-rounded, believable characters. They need good guys and bad guys, clearly delimited."



4.
Another look at Picnic at Hanging Rock.

This is by Joan Lindsay (1896-1984); it was published in 1967, but the action is set in 1900. Lindsay used to visit Hanging Rock with her family, and her earliest memory goes back to when she was four (ie, in 1900).

Summary: "[While on a school trip] three schoolgirls and their teacher from nearby Appleyard College set out to explore the rock and [most] are never seen again. Their disappearance, shrouded in mystery, rattles the college’s otherwise careful community. Their manufactured sense of order is challenged by something unexplainable -- this unease anchors Lindsay’s suspenseful narrative... Lindsay’s prose has a sensual quality -- fit for reading on bleached, dry grass, on the hottest day of summer."

My Hanging Rock experience is as follows: Not long after I moved to Australia, in 2007, we did an excursion to the site. It was quite the little literary tour. We stopped in Bacchus Marsh (birthplace of Peter Carey), and after a pleasant hour at the Garden of St Erth, and another stop in Woodend to sample Bourkies Bakehouse's prize-winning vanilla slices, we headed for the Rock. The whole thing is like a gigantic rockery, and from the top you get superb views out to the surrounding countryside. The series of exposed rocks known as the pinnacles have weird, worn features. And the whole area was running in the ruby-like crimson rosellas.

I knew about the book, of course, but it wasn't until five years later that I read it. I finished it in Bangkok, having just arrived from Hua Hin, so I was very much in a different world by then. The diary verdict: "A good depiction of the land and its seasons, of the idiocies of early 20th-century conventions, and of how an event -- in this case a shocking and mysterious one -- sends out ripples that unstoppably unsettle, improve, or wreck others' lives. Once that pebble has been dropped in the pond, nothing can stop those ripples radiating outwards."

Moving forward further, to 2021, and I was prompted to look at it in a different light after watching a couple of movies featuring Australian First Nations people. It was then that I learnt that the novel (and the associated film, by Peter Weir) were massively better known than the real and tragic stories experienced by the First Nations groups who had inhabited the area. It was to try to rectify this imbalance that the Miranda Must Go campaign was launched by Amy Spiers in 2017.


The site as we saw it

Anyway, two articles this year brought all this back.

One was Cathy Perkins's review of a biography of Lindsay by 94-year-old (yes...) Australian writer Brenda Niall, who was curious as to how her subject had produced her one outstanding novel in just four weeks when she was in her late sixties. (That she did, of course, gives hope to us all...)

We'll never have a definitive answer, I suppose, but Niall does point to some key threads that Lindsay could draw on. Her parents were bitterly disappointed that this, their third child, was another girl, and not a boy. They tended to ignore her. In her memoirs, then, Niall finds traces of a personal shame and humiliation that fed into her fictional characters. The inbuilt sexism of the era, meanwhile, accounted for why Lindsay produced her work so late. Lacking other opportunities, she went to art school, where she "built the visual sense that would enable her to create the environment of her novel". One of her teachers was Frederick McCubbin, who is noted for depicting "the ill-ease of settler colonists in a beautiful but hostile landscape". It's possible, though, Niall suggests, that Lindsay gave up her art, and turned to writing, because her husband -- also an artist, and one of a family of artists -- was struggling to prove himself, and didn't want to compete with his wife as well. Her life went into supporting him, rather that fulfilling her writing ambitions.

Niall stresses that although Lindsay wouldn't have been aware of the Indigenous history that swirls around Hanging Rock, "she shows that the novelist was at least asking the question, 'to whom did the earth belong?' Clearly not to the girls in long white muslin dresses who emerged into the landscape of Lindsay’s tale from their Anglophile institution and were swallowed whole."


Lost, 1886. By Frederick McCubbin

Then, just last month (because it's now, unfathomably, July), a second Picnic article caught my attention, this time from the lovely site called Return of a Native.

The origin story given here is this: "On a winter’s day in 1966, when Joan was sixty-eight, she awoke from a strange dream about school girls in ethereal muslim dresses, climbing Hanging Rock. The dream felt so real that she told her housekeeper she could still feel the hot summer breeze through the gum trees, sense the girls’ lightness of being and hear their peals of laughter as they made their way up a steep track. She knew at once that she had the beginnings of a book, and the more she wrote down what she could remember of the dream, the more details came back to her. Over the course of the following week, Lindsay dreamed the chapters sequentially. Each morning she would go straight to her writing room and sit on the floor, her papers all around her, and 'write like a demon'. She knew exactly what would happen next; she said it was almost as though she had been watching a film the night before."

The title was borrowed from a painting: "It was the perfect paradox: a simple, pretty title that belied the novel’s gothic creepiness. Sometimes a disappearance can haunt and shock far more than an apparition."


Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1875. By William Ford

Lindsay was often asked whether the story was "true". In fact, when the book was at the peak of its popularity, the State Library of Victoria used to receive letters from people wanting more information about these "disappearances". Library staff could find no reference to an incident where girls went missing at that time and place...

It may not have been "true true", but an encounter between Lindsay and a still-costumed Anne-Louise Lambert, who played one of the characters in Peter Weir's film version, certainly indicates that for the author there was "great emotional truth in the story".

What is revealed in the McCubbin painting is also reflected in the story: "A core colonial anxiety related to the horror of erasure." According to cultural theorist Elspeth Tilley, The Europeans brought their own ideas of time when they colonized Australia, and "in their imposition of such foreign concepts, 'there's always an underlying anxiety or recognition' about the arbitrary nature of what they have imposed, and a 'repressed knowledge about the massacres and atrocities that were perpetrated on Aboriginal people'."

But the furore around a reiterated "white vanishing myth" can distract from the real Indigenous tragedy: "[Spiers and Tilley] argue that by the glorification of a fictional mystery, one culture has been upheld at the expense of another, ignoring a crime with its origins in a colonial history that white Australians can still barely face, let alone begin to recompense." This writer agrees that Lindsay would have been dismayed to hear that her book risks eclipsing First Nations experience at this site, and argues that this would not have been her goal: "She poses a number of questions in the novel about what it means to be Australian, to inhabit this ancient place and know its nature or not... She makes it clear that this land does not belong to the class-bound white Colonial world... Although she makes no explicit reference to Indigenous people in her novel, she exposes a limited white vision that sees the land as empty when it is teeming with plant and animal life, and a white entitlement that says of a six million-year-old sacred site that it’s been 'waiting, just for us'."