Category Archives: Kate Pardey

A Sparkling Constellation: Kate Pardey reviews The Hum of Concrete by Anna Solding

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The Hum of Concrete by Anna Solding. MidnightSun Publishing. 2012

There should be a rule against acknowledgements at the end of a novel. How can readers be expected not to keep on reading? As I blithely turned the pages at the end of Anna Solding’s excellent novel The Hum of Concrete I was confronted with some details about its inner workings that I would rather not have known. It was similar to watching a woman being sawn in half and then being taken back stage to be shown how the woman contorts herself into small boxes while the saw cuts through only a hair’s breadth away from her toes.

Spoiler alert, spoiler alert …. We’re told in the acknowledgements how some of the stories which make up this novel existed independently and then how good friends, and there seems an army of them, helped Solding in those last intense months when she ‘frantically tied all the strings together’. To her credit Solding does tie those strings together beautifully; the ending of The Hum of Concrete is as satisfying as the ending of any good novel and her friends deserve their acknowledgements.

There are many novels which are a combination of short stories, deftly woven together, think Julian Barnes, David Mitchell or Gail Jones but perhaps there could be a new name for this kind of novel? A decameron novel perhaps?

The Hum of Concrete is called ‘a novel constellation’ which is as good a name as any. Is this a confession that the author does not see this as a novel at all but rather a collection of short stories, which like a group of stars, will eventually, form a recognizable pattern. This is not a criticism of the Solding’s work just a perspective of a reader who likes to know what kind of book she’s buying or borrowing before she commits.

Interspersed amongst Solding’s intriguing stories of five main characters are wonderful evocations of what life is like in the  Swedish city of Malmo. We’re given vivid descriptions of Malmo in the quiet of winter, lively markets in summer, picnics in parks and feeding the ducks all of which work to give greater depth to her stories. Sometimes these places seem incongruous with her characters’ lives although perhaps that is what Solding is trying to tell us; that lives can get too caught up with people and rather we should spend more time enjoying the beauty of what is around us, the seasons, ripening fruit and even hissing geese.

This wariness of people is a theme also played out in Solding’s clear and deep appreciation of children. All five women are mothers and whilst their children have the capacity to bring worry and fear into mothers’ lives they also have a capacity to bring love and to help adults make sense of the world around them. The trajectory of these women’s lives seems solely propelled by their relationship with their children. Perhaps on a second reading partners will appear more centre stage or better still this will happen in Solding’s next novel; her ability to deal with the complexities of relationships would work well on a bigger canvas.

A secondary theme, which reinforces her main message, is the idea of gender. Solding looks at people’s ability to cope with what is different, the failures and successes of acceptance. This aspect of the novel is thought-provoking and is too large an issue to be left on the periphery. These are small criticisms of what fundamentally is a very good  ….. decameron novel/novel constellation.

MidnightSun is committed to an honourable cause; in these troubled times they are prepared to take risks but, I would suggest,  their publication of Anna Solding’s The Hum of Concrete was never a risk but rather a guaranteed success.

-Kate Pardey

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Kate Pardey is a Sydney based fiction critic.

The Hum of Concrete is available from MidnightSun Publishing: http://midnightsunpublishing.com/books/the-hum-of-concrete/

A writer of rare talent: Kate Pardey reviews ‘Foal’s Bread’ by Gillian Mears

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Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears. Allen and Unwin, 2011

Providing you are not an HSC marker one of the best things about the Royal Easter show is a visit to the animal pavilions. Here it’s possible to feel, taste and smell something of the country, and never more so, if you actually catch a glimpse of a place where someone, maybe Roley Nancarrow himself, bunks down for the night. There would be a few personal items, lined up along a narrow wooden shelf, toothbrush, razor, a shaving mug and below it a bunk bed with some tartan blankets spread across it, blankets that look as if they’d spent more time on a horse’s back than on someone’s bed. To sleep here would seem the greatest fun, Famous Five sort of fun that young gels from the city rarely had.

Gillian Mears Foal’s Bread sadly reveals that this kind of life is not all a city slicker might crack it up to be. The Nancarrows are tough, especially the women, and they need to be, dogged as they are by what seems relentless bad luck. The Nancarrows scrape a living off a small farm, ‘One Tree’, the kind of land the first squatters across the Blue Mountains wouldn’t have taken a second look at. They have more than their fair share of misfortune, early deaths, handicapped children, child abuse and one poor sod’s so bloody unlucky he’s struck by lightening – three times. One gets the impression that Mears may be aware the amount of misfortune she doles out is perhaps a little too much and there’s a Laugh Out Loud moment, in what could have been the worst moment of a book that has many, when Noah Nancarrow rides in and saves the day, crying out ‘For once we landed on the side of luck.

Praise the Lord you feel like shouting but that would be inappropriate because God, if He exists at all at One Tree is, as Noah Nancarrow believes, a mean ol’ God and as soon as times get tough he’s jettisoned in favour of the dubious virtues of self-belief, alcohol or 24/7 baking.

The hero of the book is Roley Nancarrow. Providing they’re not pedophiles Mears is kinder to male characters than female characters, and Roley and to a lesser extent his father, Septimus, are by far the nicest characters in the story. It is Roley whose efforts to overcome hardship evoke the most admiration and finally the most pity, and it is Roley who is the moral centre of the family.

Roley judiciously cautions his family they ‘gotta take the good times with the bad’ and surprisingly there are some good times at One Tree. Roley and Noah Nancarrow are at their happiest when they feel their dream of becoming a record-breaking jumping team is achievable. Although few at One Tree recognise the good times until after they’ve been had and a sense that nothing good will last for long permeates the book. There’s no denying this downbeat take on life can be a little depressing but Mears also deftly weaves into her story glimmers of hope, small moments of reprieve, of pure joy and feelings of warmth and tenderness, usually, tellingly, internalized rather than voiced, that keep life on One Tree from tipping into total misery.

Gillian Mears mentions in her acknowledgements she researched this book for years and given how familiar she is with the vernacular of the time one can well believe it. How deeply she is able to take her readers into the world of the Nancarrows; on some pages, especially when hardly daring to breathe for fear of what was coming next, I skimmed over whole sentences whose meanings I simply didn’t have the time to compute. Praise indeed, but a little frustrating as well. Mears is able to create the scrappy feel of the dried out bush, the dilapidated houses, and a people worn out through years of hard work and harsh climate; it’s as if she’s written the book using the sticks and stones and hard dirt of the bush.

The real extent of Mears achievement is, as with all good books, only fully understood after the last page is read. She draws her story to a close by writing a fitting finale for her heroine Noah Nancarrow. “An only life can take so long to climb/Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never,” says Philip Larkin and we finally understand that Noah Nancarrow has never managed to ‘climb clear of her wrong beginnings’. Mears is a writer of rare talent, the kind of writer who can sail over the writing equivalent of a seven foot three jump and come down to earth with arms outstretched.

-Kate Pardey

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Kate Pardey is a Sydney based fiction critic