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.