1.
Was 1984 influenced by George Orwell's fear of drowning?

I didn't really notice this in the audio-adaptation, but Nathan Waddell cites loads of textual examples of "sinking ships, drowning people and the dread of oceanic engulfment". Orwell narrowly escaped drowning off Scotland in 1947. Another source for this imagery, however, might have been the loss of the Titanic, which Orwell admits moved him deeply.


The Mull of Kintyre. The sea off the west coast of Scotland in quieter times

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2.
There has been LOTS more on that 250th birthday of Jane Austen's...

-- Why are Austen's heroines always tramping?

"[Austen's] characters have been walking for centuries -- through mud, across class boundaries and against expectation. They walk in pursuit of clarity, connection, escape and self-hood. Their steps -- measured or impulsive, solitary or social -- mark turning points in their lives. And in a world designed to keep them stationary, their walking remains a radical act." Yay! We always hated Miss Bingley, and how nasty she was about Elizabeth's walking: "To walk three miles, or four miles, or five miles, or whatever it is, above her ankles in dirt, and alone, quite alone! what could she mean by it? It seems to me to show an abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country-town indifference to decorum."


Around Matlock, Derbyshire. A county where Jane Austen may or may not have walked

-- "Was Jane Austen the first writer to show how it really feels to be a middle-aged woman?"

"The realist novel had come into being precisely to solve the problem of compassion... By understanding their own and other people’s thoughts and feelings, 18th-century Britons believed, humans could be happier and make better social judgments. But the realist novel hadn’t been created to pay attention to middle-aged nobodies like Miss Bates. Novels weren’t built to spotlight women on the blurry borders of social hierarchies, who weren’t rich or young or beautiful... We see [that by including middle-aged women] Austen was challenging and questioning the constraints of the novel itself. Even as she perfected the marriage plot, she pushed back against its core assumptions."

-- Is reading Austen good training in mind-reading?

Recursion is the term given to "to our ability to represent the mental states of others in our heads, and to do so on multiple levels". Austen frequently presents situations such as this: "Elizabeth thinks that Darcy believes that she is interested in Wickham." This is a three-level recursion, because it involves the thoughts of three distinct characters. And of course, the reader is involved as well: "For example, when Elizabeth reads a letter that Darcy gives her after she has rejected him, the reader has to reorder, along with Elizabeth, all the previous levels of interpretation: what she thought he felt, what he thought she felt, the intention she attributed to him, and the intention she attributes to him now. Cognitive psychology suggests that the human mind can comfortably handle up to three levels of recursion. Literary fiction, especially the type that explores complex interpersonal relationships, is a natural way to train this skill. In this sense, reading Austen is like lifting mental weights: her characters invite us to think with them, about them, and sometimes against them." The occasional lack of certainty as to whether it's the voice of the narrator we're hearing or the voice of the character obliges readers to do the mental work, "since we must infer who is speaking, what they are really thinking, whether or not they are telling the truth, whether there is a contradiction between what they say and what they feel..." So yes, as such, it's a subtle exercise in mind-reading: "Reading Austen's work is not only a source of entertainment; it also subtly refines our ability to put ourselves in other people's heads."



-- Colds, rheumatism, fever, fatigue? Why so much illness in Austen?

A number of reasons. Firstly, lack of medical knowledge meant there actually was a lot of illness in her time. We know now that a good soaking doesn't in itself make you catch cold, but back then, people thought it did, and the fear -- in an era without effective treatment for respiratory infections -- was very real. Secondly, illness can be a strategem: "In literature, illness becomes a tool for female characters to attract attention, express vulnerability, or even appear more attractive in their fragility. Illnesses and accidents can burst into their lives and change everything, sometimes forever." Thirdly, vague complaints -- headaches, fatigue, malaise -- are "typical of certain well-to-do classes where boredom and self-centeredness were disguised as physical discomfort". Here, Austen is arguably not always that sympathetic (she had personal experience of caring for her mother, whose health was fragile and unstable). In sum, "Through fevers, fainting spells, and colds, her novels give shape to repressed emotions, class tensions, and gender inequalities. Illness functions as a metaphor for what changes, hurts, or simply cannot be spoken out loud."



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3.
Justin Kurzel's TV serialization brings The Narrow Road to the Deep North back into the spotlight.

Summary: "'The more people I am with ... the more alone I feel,' thinks army doctor Dorrigo Evans in the presence of his wife-to-be Ella during a precious six-day furlough, all the while consumed by thoughts of Amy Mulvaney, his uncle’s young wife. Dorrigo’s brief affair with Amy trails him for the rest of his life, the memory of her flaring up at unexpected moments. As Dorrigo marches through university, through training, through war, through a prisoner-of-war camp, he gathers his memories around him like armor. Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North has been praised as a 'kick to the stomach' for its unforgiving depiction of conditions on the Japanese-run Death Railway, known to prisoners as 'the Line,' during World War II. But it is equally remarkable for its depiction of how surviving Australian soldiers and Japanese officers live out their lives after the war. There is banality in evil, but there is also banality in heroism: The Narrow Road gives us a protagonist who bears witness to both."

I was not a huge fan of this 2014 Booker Prize winner when I read it two years later, and was slightly surprised when it came in at No. 6 last year on the Readings list of best Australian books of the 21st century. It's memorable, though. Those descriptions of life in the POW camps are with me still.


Chungkai War Cemetery, just outside Kanchanaburi

Luke Johnson reminds us that Flanagan drew on the three-year-long POW experience of his own father (who died the night he completed the final draft). More than 90,000 Asian civilians and 16,000 prisoners (2,800 of them Australian) met their deaths on the infamous railway project. Given those numbers, Flanagan has been criticized for foregrounding Australian losses. But surely that's permissible, in light of the very personal connection... Johnson also recalls that the book divided opinion quite markedly when it came out, with reviews ranging from the effusive to the scathing. Which I can understand, given that I myself was in two minds about it. If I ever had access to the television adaptation, though, I'd definitely give it a watch...


The River Kwai