Interview: Chris Womersley

Chris Womersley's Bereft, a haunting post-First World War tale of a young soldier's return home to the Australian Outback to settle dark scores from his past, is out now (pub Quercus). My review is here, and you can read a sizeable excerpt in the Quercus flip-book here.

Why did you decide to set your story in the aftermath of the First World War; and were any of the characters hewn from real-life?

The decision to set 'Bereft' in the aftermath was more or less accidental. A historical novel was pretty much the last sort of book I ever imagined myself writing but around the time of its germination I became fascinated by millennium movements and fancied setting something in a period in which characters might imagine the end of the world was at hand. The year 1919, in the aftermath of war and the Spanish flu pandemic, seemed like such a time. It was only after I started writing 'Bereft' that I realized that the Walker family and their attempts to deal with the grief of losing their daughter/sister mirrored that of entire nations mourning their dead.
None of the characters were based on real people, although the knowledge that my grandfather George (who makes a fleeting appearance) fought in WWI and had been gassed in France was something of a spark for the book.

You don't spare the reader the horrors of the battlefield. How important was it to stay unflinchingly honest to the facts in that respect?

Initially I resisted the idea of writing anything in the way of a battle scene, but realized partway through writing the novel that such having a scene was inevitable. It was necessary to present something of the horror of battle without making it so explicit that it turned people away or, equally, was too timid. I guess the challenge for me was to try and present it in such a way that was new for readers, which prompted me to invent the image of the dead birds littering the ground in the aftermath of battle.

In your opinion, how well does Australia remember its War veterans, and do you feel the wider world sometimes forgets or relegates the role Australians played in the conflicts?

World War One occupies a curious place in the Australian imagination. Certain battles (Gallipoli, Flanders) are generally touted as being the crucible in which the Australian identity was forged, which is something I feel slightly queasy about. More than 60,000 Australian soldiers died during the war and Armistice Day and Anzac Day (the anniversary of the Gallipoli landing) are widely commemorated. Frankly, I am unsure how the wider world sees Australian participation. For Australia of the time, of course, it was always a geographically distant war, so it is weird how vivid in the imagination it remains.

How did the character of Sadie evolve through your drafting and editing process? Did you always intend for her to be so ambiguous?

I originally conceived of Sadie as a boy. It was only when I was flicking through an art magazine and saw a reproduction of a painting of a girl wearing a muslin dress lying down (Asleep? Dead?) facing away from the viewer that I realized, quite suddenly, that my little boy (who was, at that time, unnamed) was actually a girl. Once I had written her introductory chapter – where she meets Quinn for the first time – Sadie really came to life for me in quite a startling way. I always intended her character to be ethereal and ambiguous but her fondness for magical trinkets and so on developed in the process of writing, as the themes of the novel expanded and became more defined.

You paint quite a damning picture of small-town Australia in that time -murderous, incestuous, drunk: and that's just the Sheriffs. Did the remoteness of these places really give the local authority figure carte blanche to behave in such way?

I think it’s important to note that Flint is a fictional place and I wasn’t seeking to provide any sort of social comment in the writing of 'Bereft'. Any resemblance to people living or dead etc etc, you know. Having said that, I suspect that isolation can provide people with a sense of being able to operate outside not only the law but outside conventional moral codes. But you’re right – small-town Australia doesn’t come off too well in the novel; I tend not to go there very frequently.

Your work has been compared with the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, Beckett and Cormac McCarthy among others. Which would you choose?

Hmm, I still have quite a fondness for Charles Dickens. He can be very sentimental and a tendency to waffle on a bit but, overall, his character are just so vivid and funny and memorable. Plus, his books still sell many years after his death and what author wouldn’t want that? Not that I plan on dying for a while…

Be they druggy doctors or sociopathic Sheriffs, you seem attracted to society's underbelly. Can we expect more of the same in your future work?

Ha! It’s true, I do love a nutcase – they are just so interesting and much more fun to work with than plain old healthy and happy folk. So, the answer is Yes, you can expect a few more of them to pop up in the future. I have recently started work on a new novel which, at this stage, features a couple of junkies involved in a global art forgery scam that, you never know, might just go horribly wrong…

Review: The Portable Son

Barrett Hathcock's beautiful short story about teenage betrayal, 'High Cotton', first appeared on the consistently great 'Fried Chicken and Coffee' website two years ago. Read it here. The story tells of two boys who love to dive in cotton bins in Mississippi, and the challenge their friendship faces as the opposite sex begin to consume an increasing part of their lives.
'High Cotton' both begins and underpins Hathcock's debut short story collection, The Portable Son, which is published in the US by Aqueous Books, and is also available internationally in e-formats, including Kindle.
Its nine stories, of which the gleaming 'High Cotton' remains the standout, concern not so much growing up as the uneasy embrace of lower middle-age: a time when college friends and conquests are dispersed, parents are ailing, jobs are boring, and sex is less about thrill and more about need.
Peter, the collection's continuous character, intersperses awkward flashbacks with trying to get to grips with the monotony of everyday life. He is hanging on in law school while his friends are getting married and making babies. While he is not an especially easy character to like, it is all too easy to identify with his predicament. Hathcock has fashioned a sad reminder of what it's like to be left alone in the world, even when friends and family are close. It's also a delightful glimpse of a seldom-seen genteel side of the American south: a world away from dungareed rednecks, where hearts are broken gently, and only memories ache.

'The Portable Son' also happens to include, in 'Nightswimming', a truly devastating father-and-son birds-and-bees talk. Part of it's here, courtesy the publisher. The rest of it's even better, but you'll have to buy the book for that. Readers of a sensitive disposition, etc etc…

'Son, you should know that what you're about to enter is an exciting time. I don't have to tell you this. You're about to piss yourself as it is, I can tell. You're already excited about everything. And I want you to be. I don't want you to let what's going on between your Mom and me get in the way of your enjoying yourself for these next few years. We're all going to work it out and whatever happens, you know that I love you and that's what's important. I'll still be there for you. And I'm going to try not to be jealous or live through you in some way like some fathers do. But I have to admit that the next few years will probably be the best years of your life. You probably have no idea what I'm talking about. That's okay. Youth's wasted on the young, anyway. But I want you to remember, want you to remember what I'm about to say: What you're about to go through will never be repeated. Remember that. It's precious and brief and it only happens once.
'We'll get that new car pretty soon and you probably won't listen to a word I say afterwards. It's okay. It's to be expected. I don't know where you are, so to speak, but sooner or later, you'll only smell gasoline and pussy, and anything me or your mother says won't really compare to those two smells. And I'm not going to tell you to hold it in, son. Your Mom might, but I won't lie to you: some of the best pussy I ever got was when I was in high school, so I'm not about to pretend that you won't be involved. But I would tell you to take it slow. Slow Down. Don't be in such a rush to grow up. Get laid. Get a job. Whatever. But remember to be a kid for a while.'

Interview: Jamil Ahmad

Jamil Ahmad's The Wandering Falcon (pub. Penguin) is an extraordinary collection of inter-linked stories which shines a light on the remote tribal regions bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. It has been deservedly shortlisted for this year's MAN Asian Literary Prize. Ahmad, now almost eighty, has come to literary fame late: his manuscript lay unpublished at his home for thirty years. You can read my full review here. Here, in a brief, exclusive interview, the author talks about the inspiration behind his book.

After taking so long to get published, are you surprised by the positive critical reception (and MAN Asian longlisting) for 'The Wandering Falcon'?

I was surprised, but then 'The Wandering Falcon' has offered me one pleasant surprise after another in the past year and a half.

Tor Baz is an unusual, elusive central character. Why did you decide to convey him in such a relatively unconventional way?

I have always believed that no person is a dominating character, 24 hours a day and seven days a week (other than comic book heroes). Life is by and large a feeble struggle with strong currents. This is the theme that Tor Baz represents.

In your previous work as as Commissioner and political officer in the tribal areas, how difficult was it to gain to trust and respect of these societies?

I never found it difficult to gain trust in any of the areas where I served. All one needed to show was that you protected their interests with as much vigor and commitment as you protected the interests of the state.

The tribal areas obviously come in for a bad press, especially in the West, dismissed as breeding grounds and hiding places for al-Qaeda. But one gets the impression that Western society could learn a lot from the way life is organised in these areas: their honour codes and morals?

I do believe so.

Al-Jazeera reported recently on the terrible mental strain placed on inhabitants of these areas by the constant threat of drone attacks. In what way has the latest Afghan war and specifically these missile attacks changed these communities, and their perception of the outside world?

I am not current with the situation but I do feel that in many parts of the tribal areas drone attacks are not resented to the degree they are portrayed in the print and electronic media. The most traumatic event for these societies and these areas was the Afghan war in the late seventies. Traditional power centres of these societies were bypassed when Mujahideen groups were created. This tragedy was further compounded by other policy decisions in the years that followed. The west and its surrogates sowed the wind in 1978 and are now reaping the whirlwind.

Something that shines through in your book is the glimpses of strong female characters in a world many are quick to judge as terribly repressive. How do you perceive the role of women in such societies today?

As I stated earlier, I am out of touch with the current situation. However, the status of women in areas such as the Mekran coast or among the nomad tribes may not have changed too much even with the passage of half a century.

Review: Drifting House

On the face of it, South Korean fiction has the raw materials to make it big: partition, war, dictatorships and economic boom-and-bust, all played out against the backdrop of a deeply traditional, rigidly honour-bound society.
But while the likes of Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto have succeeded in ushering modern Japanese writing into global favour, their South Korean equivalents have struggled to make such an impressive breakthrough beyond their homeland.
Until now: this has been a stellar season for South Korean fiction, starting with Kyung-sook Shin's Please Look After Mother, which as well as selling over one million copies at home, was released in 19 other countries, and is the first South Korean novel to be shortlisted for the prestigious MAN Asian Literary Prize.
Now comes Krys Lee's Drifting House (pub. Faber), a debut collection of nine tight short stories which jab at the heart of her modern nation's struggle to survive the myriad travails of its recent past.
Where Shin's work was predominantly concerned with exploring the rural, matriachal perspective of modern Korean life, Lee's book is very much urban and masculine: most central characters are husbands struggling to hold their families together under such an enormous, accepted weight of responsibility.
Lee's world is one that stretches far beyond the confines of her own nation's borders, to the countless Koreatowns dotting America's west coast, yet her message remains the same. Delicately, devastatingly, she strips away the veneer of post-Olympics, post-dictatorship economic respectability, bringing into focus the almost pathological obsession with work and education that came with it: an obsession ill-suited to such rigidly structured family models.
Lee's characters are people whose biggest fear, beyond family break-ups, beyond even death, is becoming a burden. They will gladly send spouses and siblings across the Pacific to escape it, consigning them all to a life of soullessness in the process, yet anything is better than the alternative.
The desperate period after the 1997 IMF crash which exploded the South Korean economic miracle is most starkly described in 'The Salaryman', in which an unexpected redundancy leads its comfortable, salaried central character into an alarmingly quick spiral of despair, culminating in his abandoning his wife and family and adopting a grotesque existence on the streets, simply unable to face the humiliation of going home no longer with a means to provide for them.

You, the docile fool, had believed that if you worked hard enough, you could protect those you loved.

While the first handful of stories in Lee's collection provide the layers of insight
required to begin to understand South Korea's unique society, the second half of the book is stronger. The stand-out, for sure, is the book's title story, a gut-wrenchingly memorable story of abandoned siblings seeking to escape the hell of Kim Jong-il's famine-ravaged north: a tale all too familiar to anyone who read the survivors' testimonies in Barbara Demick's seminal Nothing To Envy.

The day the siblings left to find their mother, snow devoured the northern mining town. Houses loomed like ghosts. The government's face was everywhere: on the sides of a marooned cart, above the lintel of the gray post office, on placards throughout the surrounding mountains praising the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il.And in the grain sack strapped to the oldest brother Woncheol's back, their crippled sister, the weight of a few books.

'Drifting House' provides a superb, overdue insight in a fascinatingly complex culture which, in the context of global literary fiction, has been neglected for too long. Lee, whose forthcoming first novel has also been acquired by Faber, is talented enough to remain at the forefront of this shift-change. If 'Drifting House' is anything to go by, we have not heard the last of Krys Lee's South Korea; not by a long shot.

Review: Looking For Transwonderland

Reading Noo Saro-Wiwa's account of her travels in Nigeria, Looking For Transwonderland (pub. Granta), it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the current wave of Islamist terror gripping the country's north was inevitable, if not overdue.
That a hopelessly corrupt and wholly uncontrollable nation of upwards of one hundred and sixty million people, swinging from strict Sharia law in cities like Kano to evangelical christianity in Lagos, has survived so long as a single entity seems remarkable enough.
On visiting Kano, Saro-Wiwa writes:

Our sporadic flashes of violence don't reflect complete failure.. but instead the occasional spewings of an active volcano that Nigerian society has done remarkably well to contain.

Saro-Wiwa is in a better position than most to pass judgement on the state of Nigeria today. She is the daughter of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the author and environmental activist who was hanged by the military government of Sani Abacha in 1995 - to international fury - following his campaign against the oil industry.
In 'Lost In Transwonderland', Saro-Wiwa returns to the country of her birth for her first sustained visit since her father's death. Despite having just cause to rail against almost everything modern Nigeria appears to represent, not least the endemic corruption which has wriggled its way into every aspect of its society, she is by turns patriotic and proud, becoming frustrated when her accent or attire marks her out for preferential treatment as a foreigner.
Saro-Wiwa hurls herself back into her country's culture and lifestyle with an admirable lack of caution. She braves the madness of Lagos head-on by using the death-defying okadas, or motorcyle taxis. Later she heads, via the clinical official capital of Abuja, to the fascinating, simmering muslim north.
The nation's many paradoxes are plain to see, not least in a religious fervour which seems so cruelly at odds with the everyday predicament of those who seem keenest to preach it.

If there's a country more religious than Nigeria then I haven't been there. According to the Bible, God made the earth in six days and took a rest on the seventh. But by creating Nigerians, he ensured that that was the last day off he's enjoyed ever since. Twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week we call on his services, connecting with him, singing his praise, establishing dialogue with him (and extremely loud dialogue at that). In my time in Lagos I had heard hairdressers singing their hallelujahs at salons; evangelical radio stations resounding in internet cafes; bus passengers collectively breaking out into ovine choruses of 'Jeezos is my father… he never, never fail me.'

In the gleaming show-city of Abuja, Saro-Wiwa finally comes to despair of the corruption which leads to so little being done. Government contracts are dished out for the sake of back-handers rather than any sense of civic improvement. Seemingly little has changed since the days when her father's nemesis Abacha stashed six billion US dollars in overseas bank accounts: government limousines crash down pot-holed roads; sumptuous palaces are powered by noisy generators. Saro-Wiwa writes:

I couldn't understand why these kleptomaniacs preferred to be kings of a slum rather than live amongst equals in paradise.

Indeed, the assumption of corruption has become so ingrained that no-one is spared.
'Everyone is corrupt,' she is told by a local in Kano. 'Even that Ken Saro-Wiwa. I've heard he wasn't honest either.'
'Ken Saro-Wiwa was my father.'
Ravi's face fell. 'I'm sorry - '.

In Saro-Wiwa's vividly portrayed Nigeria, the hotel rooms seldom have running water, and the hazy TV sets flick out WWE wrestling in between powercuts. But perhaps nothing sums up its parlous state better than the eponymous Transwonderland, a half-abandoned theme park outside Abuja. There, a rusting rollercoaster lurches and creaks yet defies seemingly insurmountable odds to stay on track. Finally, it deposits its shaken traveller back where they started, having failed to get anywhere fast.
That said, by the end of her brave, tireless voyage, Saro-Wiwa's patriotism remains largely intact. She has painted a revealing portrait of a nation which, for all its faults, can point to its continued existence as perhaps its greatest success story. Never mind its squandered oil billions. It is the energy and evident lust for life of its inhabitants that it will need to harness in order to see off its latest threat, and secure its future.

This book has been reviewed as part of the Africa Reading Challenge. More details here.

Africa Reading Challenge

Fellow book blogger Kinna Reads has devised the Africa Reading Challenge: a loose commitment to read, review and discuss at least five books from the continent over the course of this year. It's a worthy idea, and should help shine a light on the sheer scope of Africa's fact and fiction output. This blog will start in the next few days with a review of Noo Saro-Wiwa's Nigerian travelogue, 'Looking For Transwonderland'. Another certainty on the list is Ahmadou Kourouma's fictional, first-person account of a child soldier, 'Allah Is Not Obliged'. How to resist a book whose opening paragraph reads:

The full, final and complete title of my bullshit story is: Allah is not obliged to be fair about all the things he does here on earth. Okay. Right. I better start explaining some stuff.

Other candidates include the equally unforgiving 'African Psycho' by Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou, 'Anatomy of a Disappearance' by Libya's Hisham Matar, and - feeding this writer's entirely irrational obsession with the country in question -'Told By Starlight in Chad' by Joseph Brahim Seid. Any other suggestions will be warmly welcomed.

Review: Chinaman

In my life I have seen beauty only twice. I'm not talking Tharuniya magazine front-cover beauty. I'm talking staggering beauty. Something so beautiful it can make you cry. Sixty-four years, two things of beauty. One I have failed to cherish, the other I might yet be able to.
Sheila at the Galle Face Hotel, 31st Nite Dinner Dance, 1963.
PS Mathew vs New Zealand, at Asgiriya, 1987.


Sports writer W.G. Karunasena is drinking himself to death. The way he sees it, he has no choice. He needs the arack to sustain him through his final assignment: to resolve the mystery of Pradeep Mathew, the greatest bowler he has ever seen, and a man whose fleeting fame and subsequent deletion from cricket history begs unfathomable questions.
In Chinaman, Karunasena, fondly known as Wijie by his friends and neighbours, and the most unreliable of narrators, given he is blind drunk most of the time, scours the Sri Lankan cricket hinterland in his quest for answers.
He encounters bent officials, busty media executives, gangsters, paedophiles and midgets, all of whom seem to have their own vested interests in either hiding or entirely misrepresenting Mathew's story.
What Shehan Karunatilaka has fashioned is, like Mathew's legendary delivery itself, a great, double-bouncing googly of a debut novel. It is by turns inebriated, bewildering and uproarious; a unique and dischordant symphony of tall stories, Sri Lanka-style.
Karunatilaka has taken a brave step into that in-between world in which fiction and fictional characters are melded into an existing, factual framework. Most of the cricket matches are real, as are their protagonists, but the line is blurred to the extent that Mathew often interacts with them. The book's inherent unpredictability soon makes it impossible to separate fact from fiction, and this serves to perpetuate the Mathew myth: he may well be the greatest spin bowler the world has ever seen. Or he might just never have existed at all.
If it is first and foremost a novel about cricket, and a timely exploration of the roots of the match-fixing scandal which still grips the game, it is also so much more. As Karunasena opines early in the book:

If you've never seena cricket match; if you have and it has made you snore; if you can't understand why anyone would watch, let alone obsess over this dull game, then this is the book for you.

'Chinaman' presents a rare insight into a modern Sri Lanka still (then) in the grip of the Tamil Tiger insurgency. On an individual level, it describes the determination of an ailing, ageing sports writer to take his last chance to make a mark in both his professional and personal lives. Sports writing can be the most vicarious of professions, in which even its finest exponents are forced to measure their achievements not through their own pen, but the greatness of others. It is almost as if, by restoring the memory of Mathew, Karunasena believes he will go some way towards making up for his own missed opportunities.

It is unnerving to think that the dead walk among us and are invisible, particularly if you are a curvaceous young girl about to take a bath. But it is as likely an explanation as any, if you believe in a soul, which even godless W.G. Karunasena does. When we feel despair, it is a thousand-year-old spirit cursing in our ear; when we feel craving it is a drunk apparition coaxing our tongue.

'Chinaman' is an incredibly difficult book to describe in a way that does it full justice. The topics it raises go way beyond the boundary. It breaks just about every literary convention going: there are false starts, blind alleys and contradictions, and by the time you reach the reality-stretching coincidence which heralds this truly brilliant book's final pages, it will seem entirely fitting.
The richly deserved winner of this year's prestigious DSC Prize for South Asian literature, 'Chinaman' indicates that Karunatilaka's talent will sustain much longer than that of Mathew ever did, or might have done.

Chinaman is out now in hardback (pub. Jonathan Cape). It is released in paperback in April by Vintage.