Poor Fellow, My Language: What Language Is This?

And so I pick up this book, runner-up for the 2011 Miles Franklin, and the apparatus of mediation and apperception – everything from The Australian Book Review to The Independent to The New York Times bestseller's blurb – says it's great – "fierce economy of style" and so forth: and I pick it up and find that it's written in dead-speak. Perhaps, I think, this is meant to be some sort of analogue to the early C20th newspaper accounts of disasters; perhaps it's meant to be like that. (This is the first chapter, where the murder takes place in the storm.)

I am slightly surprised to find, in the second chapter, Quinn, the falsely accused brother of the 12 year old girl, isn't 13 or 14, but 16. That seems old, for the father to have been so worried about them in the storm and flood. You'd expect a lad of 16 to have some physical strength and sense, enough to look out for a 12 year old; enough, at least, for that thought to have crossed the father's mind, even in a monstrous storm.

And then, in the midst of the stiltedness, the book begins to be populated by sentences like this: He steadied himself against a tree and was afraid. (p. 24).
??
"He was afraid and steadied himself against a tree"?

Quinn, waking from a nightmarish dream, frantically struggling with his gas mask, says to himself: Move it, move it, move it. (p. 32)

Not in 1919, in Australia, he doesn't. The Australian idiom was "Move!" or "Move your arse!" "Move it!" is American.

He closed his eyes to better enjoy the sun's warmth. – General tone & flavour. (p. 37)

Quinn visits Mary, his mother, who is dying of influenza. She speaks of going into the murdered girl's bedroom, hoping in her grief that handling the girl's things, reciting lines of poetry over and over again, can bring her back.
She says to Quinn: Your father hates that I go in there. (p. 57)

That's a particularly New York Jewish construction. You'll hear it in Woody Allen's early films. Neither Mary nor anyone else would have said that in outback NSW in 1919. There's no indication in the book that Mary's first language is Yiddish.

The woman in question was perched in a green armchair. Her thin and restless fingers wrung a pair of black gloves in her lap, as if to death. Her husband stood at her shoulder and each of them wore a startled, pensive expression like they had steeled themselves for bad news so many times that their faces were permanently set thus. (p. 62)

If the narrative voice of this novel is, in its stiltedness, attempting to evoke the starchiness of early C20th Australian newspaper speech, then "like" meaning "as though" is completely out of place. It is an Americanism that became familiar to Australians when American TV did; it entered Australian English (where it still clangs) no earlier than the mid-'50s. Combined with the fussy and self-important "thus," the passage becomes a whipsaw of USUK usages posing as a period Australian sentence.

The mise en scene is muddled... The hardscrabble of dry land and people driven crazy by poverty is well evoked (the Irish placenta on the river flats… Although by this time you are ready to suspect Kurosawa or the Chamberlain affair).

What's not clear is how the lush orange and nectarine orchards near the richer part of the town (named Flint), relates to the rest, where the water ends, how the grass high as his knees could survive away from the river. The farmer that must have brought his flock up here to graze – whereabouts would he have gone afterwards? What of the sheepdogs? (Never a bark, a nose, a threat of being sniffed out; never another allusion.)

It's all very well for The Independent to say the descriptions of the Australian bush have "a precise and transporting intensity." The Independent has no way of knowing these descriptions haven't got a feasible, realized geography. The Independent would never have let D.H. Lawrence get away with crap like this.

I have no objection to Australian writers or anyone else using American or English idioms whenever they like. What a good novel requires is that writers know what they're doing, where and what period the expressions they're using come from, and what their origins suggest; writers need to use them to build to deliberate and successful effect. Novelists need an ear for dialogue...

I don't even care that by my lights this is a bad book. Bad books sell well all the time; in certain moods I'm ready for a really bad book.

My real objection here is twofold: that the writer has no ear and no idea; and that that the "critical" apparatus of at least two countries has made a concerted effort to tell me this is a good book. More than a good book, a Miles Franklin runner-up. Does the critical apparatus of two countries have a tin ear? Doesn't it know what it's doing? (Doesn't it know that it doesn't know?) (Is it just that the cheques keep clearing?)

There are Henry Lawson stories that are pitch-perfect, still, a hundred and twenty years later. The Slap is pitch-perfect. They're written in a particular language.

This book's not alone in its lack of an actual language.

Another recent award-winning Australian novel featured, in its first chapter, an American soldier in WW2 Sydney describing Australian mouths as being (as thin as) "letter-boxes," when the word the character would use is mailslots – the American word, where the emphasis lies on the horizontal line the character is actually registering. A page or so later this same man sees a girl sitting on her "bottom" and not on her butt or ass…

So I end at my beginning. What language is this, where Australian characters normally speak Yiddish or standard American, and American characters speak in English euphemism?

==

Womersley, Chris, Bereft: a novel, New York, Silver Oak, 2012
McConnochie, Mardie, The Voyagers, a love story, Melbourne, Penguin, 2012.

==

I didn't finish Bereft; I read slightly past the 100-page mark, where I found it turning into a detailed treatment for the film it always wanted to be. (I won't mention Quinn training himself to be still for hours on end, to avoid snipers in the War, and then standing still in the bush, and noticing his stiffness after, as though it were not routine.)

I've only read the online chapter of The Voyagers.

I haven't read the rest of these novels. If I'd been in a bookshop looking for something to buy, the clear lack of command of the material in these books would have killed the sale.

Poor Fellow, My Language: 'Im Bugger-Up.

It was when I was editing library catalogue headings for the University of Sydney, around 1996-1997, that I first began to realize just how non-standard Australian English had become. I had been gone from the country about 15 years at that stage, and so had lost any sense of the texture of Australian life.

Since then what seems to me to have been some kind of linguistic – movement, more than revolution – in the quality press. Fairfax, to be particular: I have not been able to overcome my dislike of the Murdoch media long enough to actually read The Australian since 1975.

I used to read The Age andThe Sydney Morning Herald online before going to work. I did that from late 1996 till, I suppose 2008, when they had both become tabloid: everything was sport, conflict, sex, crime – lurid and inescapable. I found that frustrating because I wanted to know what was going on, and footy and gangland murder, drug arrests and police corruption were what I was being given instead of political and social coverage. I used to find Michelle Grattan interesting and informative, but her column appeared to have denatured itself. The books pages – originally updated weekly, and particular to the papers they appeared in, first became more toothless, then began to be updated less and less frequently until they finally became one page pointed to by two different URLs, and almost changeless.

However, the period between 2001 and 2007 was interesting because language which had never before been in the register of newspapers of record regularly appeared on the front page, and this language was what would once have been called "coarse."

The first example that comes to mind is the word "stoush." It means "fight" – verbal or physical conflict long after the initial point of contention or conflict has been identified, and argued about. Originally the word belonged to the street. It would have been used in good and earnest by the Irish gangs of Sydney before the turn of the last century, and to comic effect by C.J. Dennis in the 1920s.

These words are Australian in the sense that they have been in Australian English for a long time (carried over from Cockney or London working-class or criminal or semi-criminal speech). They have not been part of the standard Australian English. Thirty years ago they were archaic. But like "bonza" and others, they have been resurrected and injected into the mainstream of Australian English as Australian identifiers.

To complain about "the coarsening of language" is not only to sound Victorian, but to miss the point.

Language like this is intensely political. It does not signify the sudden inclusion of formerly excluded groups, a new and pervasive flavour of Scottish shop-stewards, as it were.

This kind of language was being introduced and intensified as the "children overboard" incident was passed on as truth so John Howard could win a Federal election, as boats of Afghani or Iraqui refugees were being intercepted by the Australian Navy and turned back to Indonesia or offloaded at the prison on Christmas Island, as refugees were imprisoned in horrifying camps near Woomera or other places on the mainland or off-shored to camps / prisons on Nauru (paid for by Australian taxpayers), as the infamous Cronulla riots occurred.

Language like this is:

a) historically Australian, and so guarantees the "Australianness" of what is being said - that the matter is particularly or primarily Australian, unconnected to other happenings elsewhere, or virtuously Australian - that this should be thought or done to or for, by, with, or from Australia(ns)...
b) inflammatory

And, being inflammatory, it limits the scope of what may be readily perceived about what is being said.

It's the language of and imprimatur for right-wing street-thuggery, a la National Front, but without the embarrassment of an explicit political link.