Book Review - Love Your Sister by Connie and Samuel Johnson

Review by Rhonda Pooley

This book was recommended to me by a friend who read it after watching Samuel Johnson’s portrayal of Molly Meldrum in a recent tele-movie. I expected a light-weight, celebrity’s family sob-story. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

When Connie Johnson was diagnosed with a third cancer – this time, incurable -she challenges her brother Samuel to raise money for breast cancer research by riding his unicycle around Australia.
Sam lives with a bi-polar condition that has driven him to alcohol and drug dependency and threatens to destroy family relationships. Connie’s challenge to her brother has a second, and equally pressing motivation - his restored mental stability. It breaks Connie’s heart that she won’t be around to help him get his life in order.

The journal of their partnership in addressing both issues is told from their alternate perspectives, and with their respective personalities coming through clearly and endearingly. There are no false notes from either of them.

With the ‘Love Your Sister’ ride about to start, Connie is nervous about her first-ever radio interview. She says,

“I wondered how I was going to be light, engaging and funny when talking about cancer and death and he (Sam) read my mind. He said, ‘This is about life, it’s about finding meaning in the madness, it’s about making something positive out of something negative, it’s a happy story.’ He was right!”

Sam is refreshingly honest:

“I’ve never been the brother to lock arms and say, ‘Well, we’re in this together and off we trot to the hospital.’ …I’ve pretty much embargoed the old cancer chats. I don’t want to chart test results or follow her platelet counts. Never have, never will. It’s too upsetting, because I can’t make her better.”

Sam frequently refers to Henry, who alternatively nags or torments him. The reader eventually learns this is Sam’s alter-ego. Their ironic dialogues are often hilarious.

Although this book is about Connie and Sam’s relationship, the most compelling character for me is Sam and Connie’s father, Joe. Widowed early, he raised his young children with humour, wisdom and considerable self-sacrifice. He comes across as a totally human, totally believable, totally lovely man.

When it all comes together, the unicycle journey is a story in itself – a near-broken man on half a bicycle, pushing himself to the limit for a cause that can’t have a happy ending. Like the circus clown it is associated with, it inspires much love and laughter, yet doesn’t deny the hidden pain.

This was a compelling read.

About Rhonda Pooley

Rhonda Pooley, married to James for 50 years, has four children and grandchildren. She has been a small business owner, a receptionist for a funeral company and a regional tourist centre. University education, in her late forties, saw her teaching English in secondary schools and re-igniting her interest in creative writing. After successes in several short story competitions, her book, “Cambodian Harvest” was published in 2014. Since 2003 she has made regular short-term mission journeys to Cambodia and Finland in response to dreams and visions about these nations and believes, like Caleb and Joshua (and Methusaleh, et al) that it’s never too late, and you are never too old, to do what God has written on your heart.

Book Review: The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brookes

Review by Rhonda Pooley

‘The Secret Chord’ has all the elements I have come to expect from Geraldine Brookes: meticulous research, vivid characterisation and a gripping plot. The Old Testament stories of King David are convincingly retold through the narrative voice of his mentor and conscience, the prophet Nathan - or Natan, as Brookes writes it. Except for David most of the characters’ names have traditional Jewish pronunciation rather than the more familiar English renditions: for example, Yonatan for Jonathon, Batsheva for Bathsheba.

All the well-loved Sunday school stories are here – the fight with Goliath, David’s skill as a harpist and singer, his years as an outcast in the wilderness, his adulterous affair with Batsheva, and the triumphant reign over a now united kingdom. I was impressed by the exploration of the scorn directed at the young David by his father and brothers – an issue that had always puzzled me. Brookes extrapolates a plausible explanation for this from between the lines of the Biblical account.

Other passages I found to be emotionally authentic are the powerfully written descriptions of David’s musical prowess. An example is this description of his singing voice:

It is hard to describe a sound without likening it to another sound, and yet the timbre of David’s voice was a thing apart. It had the urgency of the shofar, and yet was not shrill. It could engender awe, as a high wind howling dangerously through mighty branches, or bring delight, as an unexpected trill of birdsong….or it could bring unease, like a wild beast howling in the distant hills. 

To describe the sound I find myself turning to other senses – sight and touch. The fall of fine silk through the hand; the rich warmth of enveloping fur. Or a goldsmith beating out a foil…the sudden gleam, as if sunlight itself had been captured. David’s voice was that bright flare of shimmering gold. It could transmit light and warmth…. 

Sometimes, the voice could summon such a power that it recalled not sunlight but lightning – something so fierce and magnificent that when it passed through you, it left you stricken and hollowed. (p. 165-166)

As might be expected from a popular secular novelist, David’s more notorious human frailties are made much of, and it is here that Brookes tends to depart from the Biblical record. Her ‘take’ on the relationship between David and Yonatan is particularly disturbing. Her narrative voice descends into gratuitous crudeness not seen in her earlier novels.

Given the castigation of same-sex relationships throughout Hebrew history, the friendship described so graphically by Brookes would have been soundly condemned if it had in fact been homosexual in nature.  That there was no challenge by Natan in the Bible record—as he did so readily in the matter of Batsheva—suggests that there was no such transgression of the law in David and Yonatan’s situation. In describing a predominantly sexual origin and outworking of that relationship, Brookes’ has written a narrow view of the covenant of affection and loyalty that may exist between men.

Allowing for my reservations regarding the portrayal of David’s relationship with Yonatan, I am happy to recommend The Secret Chord. While I consider Brookes departs from the integrity of research in that section of the novel, it proved to be a disappointing, but nevertheless temporary, distraction in the overall portrayal of the life and times of the despised shepherd boy who became the king the Bible describes as a man after God’s own heart.

About Rhoda Pooley

Rhonda Pooley, married to James for 50 years, has four children and grandchildren. She has been a small business owner, a receptionist for a funeral company and a regional tourist centre. University education, in her late forties, saw her teaching English in secondary schools and re-igniting her interest in creative writing. After successes in several short story competitions, her book, “Cambodian Harvest” was published in 2014. Since 2003 she has made regular short-term mission journeys to Cambodia and Finland in response to dreams and visions about these nations and believes, like Caleb and Joshua (and Methusaleh, et al) that it’s never too late, and you are never too old, to do what God has written on your heart.

Book Review: The Profilist by Adrian Mitchell

By Rhonda Pooley

With only sketchy biographical material available regarding the colonial artist, Samuel Thomas Gill, but using his paintings as a guide, Adrian Mitchell, has written an imagined - but convincing – portrait of Gill under the fictitious name of Ethan Dibble.

Having trained as a silhouette artist, known then as a profilist, Dibble/Gill escapes England and the disapproval of his family, and sails to the new colony of South Australia where he intends to use his artistic skills more freely. He is not prepared for the fledgling colony’s ‘unsatisfactory desolation’ that greets him on his arrival and, with wry humour, his paintings and sketches record both the hardships and pretensions of the settlers. These street scenes come to the attention of the Governor and Dibble/Gill finds himself socialising with the ‘snobs and nobs’. He seems assured of a flourishing career.

But the threatened bankruptcy of the new colony puts paid to his hopes and he is forced to fresh pastures - first to the Victorian goldfields and then to the more-established centres of Sydney and Melbourne. His paintings continue to record the sometimes bizarre activities of diggers, bushrangers and explorers, and he finds himself keeping company with colonial celebrities such as writers Adam Lindsay Gordon & Henry Kendall, and also the notorious dancer, Lola Montez.

Throughout the novel, Mitchell uses the terminology of the art world to paint word pictures of characters and landscape, for example:

“There appears to be little call for portraits, nor paintings of favoured dogs or horses. In the absence of such custom, I have been turning my attention to painting a number of street scenes….I am not altogether pleased with them, myself. There is difficulty in giving any sense of all this turbulence going on at the centre of the settlement’s arrangements. So much jostling and competition amongst the citizens, and yet you would never know it from the look of dazzling quietness in the streets – bullocks nodding off in the sun, residents doffing their hats to the ladies, standing to one side and ceremoniously bowing, horses at a walking pace, having done their dash coming through the outskirts of the town. All is sunny and sedentary, if not soporific. It looks like every day is Sunday. It misrepresents the actuality.

And a different problem I see is all those straight lines – you don’t have to inspect the town plan to realise that. They are like some sort of grid imposed on what I see as the real landscape of this place – they are perspective lines of awkward prominence - so that I cannot think that what I have depicted is altogether satisfactory. I have been searching for a way of softening those hard lines.” (p 42)

Mitchell also plays with word meanings, weaving them seamlessly into the fabric of local history and politics; for example, this description of the goldfields - note his use of the word ‘rights’.

“The diggers do not mend matters. They leave an endless waste, streams turned out of their proper channels…the very earth itself heaved upside down and inside out. Utterly undone. After the diggers nothing is ever the same again. There can be no putting to rights here. But demanding rights, ah, that is quite another matter. The diggers have their grievances about the licence. They have to pay for it as soon as they are on a declared field and even the storekeepers and delivery men have to possess one, almost like a leave pass. Which is not very far from the old convict ways.”

There is much to like about this book, from its ironic descriptions of early Adelaide to the sly humour used to debunk some of Australia’s heroes of exploration. But this book is not only a wordsmith’s delight; the stunning full page colour plates of S.T. Gill’s paintings throughout also make it a feast for art lovers. If S.T. Gill’s work is not familiar to you, I encourage you to seek out his original paintings at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

I recommend this novel not only for its perceptive and often humorous insights into our colonial past, but also as a gift book to delight the eye.

The Profilist is available from good bookshops or from Wakefield Press.

About Rhonda Pooley

Rhonda Pooley, married to James for 50 years, has four children and grandchildren. She has been a small business owner, a receptionist for a funeral company and a regional tourist centre. University education, in her late forties, saw her teaching English in secondary schools and re-igniting her interest in creative writing. After successes in several short story competitions, her book, “Cambodian Harvest” was published in 2014. Since 2003 she has made regular short-term mission journeys to Cambodia and Finland in response to dreams and visions about these nations and believes, like Caleb and Joshua (and Methusaleh, et al) that it’s never too late, and you are never too old, to do what God has written on your heart.

Review: Hunger Town by Wendy Scarfe

Rewviewed by Rhoda Pooley

Hunger Town, by Adelaide-born author, Wendy Scarfe, is set in Port Adelaide during the Great Depression between the two World Wars and chronicles the years of unemployment, protest and reprisal, and the rise of communism in the union movement.

These historical events are seen through the eyes of Judith Larsen, daughter of a Norwegian immigrant, who grows up on a coaling hulk on the Port River. She marries charismatic Harry Grenville, a dreamer who embraces communism believing that under such a system the State would pay him to dance. Their relationship is played out against his idealism and her grasp of practical realities. As Harry struggles to find work and becomes increasingly embroiled with the Comrades, Judith finds fame as a political cartoonist, which only adds to the tension between them. When Harry disappears, having left Australia to fight in the Spanish Civil War, Judith leaves all that is familiar and safe and sets out to find him.

I learnt so much about Port Adelaide’s social history from this book, in particular that Adelaide was affected first, and hardest, when the Great Depression hit Australia, The many domestic cameos, such as Judith’s mother keeping important documents in a drawer under her recipe books, are such a telling pieces of ordinary life at the time. One such document is a letter confirming their tenancy of the coaling hulk so long as they don’t use it as a meeting place for communists. This proviso infuriates her husband who would have destroyed the letter except for her insistence that it is their insurance against eviction – the fate of so many in depression times.

The story held my attention from start to finish, but the point at which it truly sang for me was in the passages dealing with the women’s activities in feeding their families and supporting their men; they ran soup kitchens, organised marches to Federation Hall, and scrounged for food and fuel.

Hunger Town fits the bill as well-researched, and well-written, historical fiction, and in beautiful prose explains why Port Adelaide is such a close knit, and fiercely loyal, community to this day.

About Rhoda Pooley

Rhonda Pooley, married to James for 50 years, has four children and grandchildren. She has been a small business owner, a receptionist for a funeral company and a regional tourist centre. University education, in her late forties, saw her teaching English in secondary schools and re-igniting her interest in creative writing. After successes in several short story competitions, her book, “Cambodian Harvest” was published in 2014. Since 2003 she has made regular short-term mission journeys to Cambodia and Finland in response to dreams and visions about these nations and believes, like Caleb and Joshua (and Methusaleh, et al) that it’s never too late, and you are never too old, to do what God has written on your heart.