'China Men' by Maxine Hong Kingston, 'Mutuwhenua: The moon sleeps' by Patricia Grace, 'Fortress' by Gabrielle Lord, and 'Female Friends' by Fay Weldon

I’m well overdue with this article, and I suspect John McLaren is never going to speak to me again. Trouble is, I’m on a frenetic reading jag and its mainly McLaren’s fault. On the Thursday of Writers’ Week, he beguiled me into the bookshop near the Writers’ Tent and in no time at all I emerged buckling at the knees under the weight of a carton of books written by many of the writers I’d listened to and been impressed by during the week. I couldn’t get all the books I wanted because the book shop had sold out of some by then. By Thursday afternoon there wasn’t a copy of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior to be found in the whole of Adelaide, though I captured almost the last copy of her only other book to date, China Men, as McLaren and I scrambled after the bookshop’s goodies. Maxine Kong Kingston was one of the surprise successes of Writers’ Week. Until now she has been comparatively unknown in Australia, although she won instant recognition in the United States with The Woman Warrior, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in that country in 1976. She grew up in California, the child of immigrant Chinese parents, and writes most powerfully of the ancient myths informing the cultural and social behaviour of her race, and the ways in which race memory and an inherited conception of reality both enrich and terrorize the souls of Westernised Chinese. There is much to be learnt from her books, but, more than this, they offer, for me at least, an entirely new supply of food for the imagination. I managed to buy a copy of The Woman Warrior when I returned to Sydney, but I couldn’t buy a book by the Aboriginal storyteller Maureen Watson, because so far none exists. During the Wednesday session of narrative and storytelling, she argued very persuasively for the preservation of oral traditions in storytelling and proved her point when she joined with some other members of the Aboriginal community in a lunchtime storytelling m the Festival Centre Amphitheatre. Maureen Watson is working with some reluctance on writing for publication many of the Aboriginal myths she tells, but it is impossible not to agree with her view that much of the vitality and magic of these ancient myths will fade when they are fixed in print. Yet much of great value remains, as we learnt from the stories of New Zealand’s Patricia Grace, who writes stories based on Maori mythology. She describes a universe as elemental and as inexorable in its workings as Kington’s or Watson’s yet as different from theirs as each of them is to the other. In fact, this gathering of storytellers from widely differing cultural backgrounds demonstrated the fundamental importance of myth and story in shaping the individual’s response to a mysterious universe irrespective of his background or experience. This is not less true of the writers who find their material in contemporary, urban, Western culture as those I have already mentioned. This was the implicit theme of the Narrative Storytelling Session when Maureen Watson and Patricia Grace were joined by Australians Peter Corris, who writes detective stories and Gabrielle Lord, who wrote the novel of suspense, Fortress, and the American writer and former opera singer, Cynthia Macdonald, who, in telling something of her background, startled and delighted her audience by bursting into song. The feminist writers Fay Weldon (England) and Alison Lurie (United States) were nightly billed as major attractions. Puffball is the novel of Weldon’s most highly regarded by the more ardent feminists and there’s no question that it is a great book, but I enjoy her best when she is caustically witty as well as compassionate, in novels like Remember Me and Female Friends. I bought all of Fay Weldon’s books I could lay hands on. And Alison Lurie’s too. Those of you who haven’t yet sampled these writers have a treat in store. Lurie is sometimes compared with Jane Austen for the acuteness of her perceptions and the acid wit that laces her. narration. Yet, I think, the comparison is a little misleading. She draws infinitely more persuasive male characters than Austen for one thing and she is much more shockingly aware of the power of social pressures on the individual destiny. Try Love and Friendship, The Nowhere City, or The War Between the Tates if you don’t believe me. Neither Weldon nor Lurie is a feminist writer in the dogmatic or doctrinaire sense; they are equally compassionate and shrewdly satirical in their treatment of human foibles in whatever sex they find them. Though their moral judgements are stern, if implicit, the men and women who people their novels are seen more as victims of their own folly and society’s expectations that. as actively malicious agents in a hostile world. For the most part anyway. An unexpected pleasure was ‘An Hour with Jane Gardam’, the late afternoon session on Monday. I had not heard of this English writer before (shame on me – her novel God on the Rocks was runner-up for the Booker Prize in 1978). She is an elegant stylist and extremely comical writer with a gift for capturing the nuances of everyday speech in a deceptively simple way. She read a deliciously funny story of two little girl who takes revenge on an adult by desecrating a very expensive cake. From such a trivial plot she wove a tale that was a masterpiece of the storyteller’s art and my one regret is, because I would dearly love a chance to enjoy that story again, that it isn’t included in the only collection of short stories she seems to have published to date, The Sidmouth Letters. For the time being I’ll have to content myself with those of her novels as are available in Australia. God on the Rocks is presently available in Abacus paperback and her Black Faces, White Faces, and A Long Way from Verona are due for early release in the same series. I don’t know whether the organisers thought of it in this way, but it seemed to me that the reading of Act One of the Australian playwright Alma de Groen’s Vocations introduced the third strand of the storyteller’s art, historically the link between the oral and written traditions of narrative. This occurred on Tuesday morning in a session titled ‘Writing for a Dying Form’, which must surely have been meant ironically. The audience found this reading by professional actors vastly entertaining. It is a serious comedy, both funny and moving, about the changing relationships between the sexes in contemporary Australia by the author of the highly acclaimed Going Home, The Joss Adams Show, and Perfectly All Right (available in one volume from Currency). Vocations is not yet available in print. It will receive its first stage production from the Melbourne Theatre Company in August and shooting of the film version is expected to begin in September. We had to be content with Vocations, Act One but in the way it displayed character and situation, had a clear beginning, middle, and end and a definable theme it provided a splendid example of the storyteller at work through drama using action and dialogue instead of narrative and dialogue or, as in the simplest of the stories we heard during the week, unadorned narrative. I have been trying to decide why I allowed myself to be persuaded by The Great But Wicked McLaren into writing about these particular sessions of Writers’ Week. And I’ve decided that it is simply because a good story satisfies and comforts something atavistic in me as, perhaps, it does for all of us. But enough of this love talk, I want to get back to my books.

Mary Lord

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The Floating University: Experience, empire, and the politics of knowledge by Tamson Pietsch

Vincent Namatjira edited by Vincent Namatjira

Expanding Mindscapes: A global history of psychedelics by Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock

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