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what is the favorite book you remember as a child?
My favourite book was an ancient copy of Captain WE Johns’s Biggles in the South Seas.
I liked it for the awesome fight when a giant squid attacks the seaplane that Biggles and co arrived on. But the real attraction was the underwater cave system that leads to a grotto with a sort of subterranean beach. Ginger and a Polynesian girl have to hide there from the bad guy.
I later realized that it’s strongly hinted that they have sex, which is apparently a bit unusual in the WE Johns oeuvre.
Later still I realized that Johns lifted the grotto from RM Ballantyne’s The Coral Island.
I was at school with a lot of people from Samoa, Tonga and the Cooks, who are, you know, Polynesian, and I never even connected them with Johns’s Polynesians. Johns thought Polynesians were nice, noble and a bit simple: one out of three (“nice”) really isn’t good enough, and the “simple” was more insulting and racist than I realised, aged eight.
One thing though: about four years ago I swam through an underwater tunnel in Samoa, from one cave into another cave where you could breathe. I swam deeper into the cave, awed. But then I realized I wasn’t alone. Hiding off to the side, amongst the cave rocks, keeping very still while I was there, was a young Samoan couple who’d been having sex. They were in a beautiful place, but it must have been very uncomfortable. I guess their parents didn’t approve and they didn’t have a place of their own. Love and lust will find a way.
Anyway, I pretended I hadn’t seen them, turned around and swam out again. I was sorry I’d disturbed them, but I also remembered Biggles in the South Seas and thought: the world’s a lot more complicated than you ever knew, Captain.
What is your favorite book today?
Right now it’s a cage-fight between the Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio and The Thousand and One Nights, by a lot of people.
They provide a framework, and an unattainable quality goal, while I’m writing the second (and last) volume of The Lockdown Tales.
Boccaccio’s closer to realism than The Thousand and One Nights, which reads like the best dreams you’ve ever had. But the level of invention in both books is awe-inspiring. Every so often, if you write, you have to read some of the pinnacles of human invention. It helps to remind you that you have to try harder and do better.
Tell us about your current book in 10 words.
Covid: Ten people isolate together on a farm, tell stories.
What are you reading right now?
Rediscovering Homer: Inside the Origins of the Epic, by Andrew Dalby.
I picked it partly because I’ve got a bad cold right now, and I’d have to go outside to get to my library. It’s cold out. But the poetry books are just outside my bedroom door. So right now I’m mostly in bed, reading poetry or about poetry.
But Rediscovering Homer is fascinating on the transition of the Iliad and Odyssey from their oral sources to the written form in which we know them. He picks up (without acknowledgement) Robert Graves’s idea that maybe the person who put the Odyssey into written form was a woman, and gives that idea some support in relation to what we know about authorship and social conditions at the time.
It’s still only a “maybe”, of course. We don’t have know nearly enough.
What books do you have on hold at the library?
I’m not good at returning books, even when I’ve read them, so I don’t belong to a library. I can’t afford the fines, or that ironical look in the librarian’s eye.
Instead I made my own library. I started buying books when I was twelve and forgot to stop. This is what happens in the end, if you do that:
Do you have any bad book habits?
Books are my friends. (They’re not my only friends.) But I treat them with care and respect. No, really.
E-Reader or print? and why?
I like print. It’s more functional, easier to flip through. And a book can acquire emotional memories and resonances that an e-reader can’t do.
Still, I take an e-reader rather than books when I travel. So I expect to charge mine again late next year, with luck.
One book at a time or multiples?
As well as the Decameron and volume three of The Thousand and One Nights, I’m also reading Voss, by Saul Bellow, but I’m losing interest. And I’m sort of reading a legal thriller, but I haven’t picked it up in three weeks. I stopped Homer to read PG Wodehouse’s The Luck of the Bodkins, and then went back to Homer. And I’m reading the second Penguin translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh.
This all sounds very highbrow. I read Star Trek comics, bad science fiction, crime, comic novels, all sorts of stuff. I’m just going through an up-market patch at the moment.
Dog-ear or bookmark? (don't worry—Librarian Judith won't hold it against you—much)
Memory. I shut the book, and find my way back to the place next time.
Least favorite book you've read this year?
I just rescued that legal thriller I mentioned. I’m unlikely to go back to it. So it must be Pleading Guilty by Scott Turow.
Favorite book you've read this year?
Apart from the Decameron and volumes one and two of The Thousand and One Nights, it’d be Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, by Daisy Hay. There’s not a lot of new information there, but it’s well told.
When do you do most of your reading?
After midnight. In bed.
Favorite place to read?
I mentioned a library. I like being in it with a book and a cup of chai, when I don’t have a cold.
Favorite genre?
Realism with comedy. I don’t mean comic novels, though I read a lot of those. I mean realist novels that acknowledge that humour is part of life.
Do you loan your books?
I used to. I lost too many treasures and had others horribly damaged. Now I’d have to know you, trust you, and see you often.
Favorite book to recommend?
Right-Ho Jeeves by PG Wodehouse. The prize-giving scene is still the most brilliant, funniest thing in English.
How do you keep your books organized?
Non-fiction is in a simplified Dewey system. History, Philosophy, The Brain, Psychology, then a section I call “Bullshit” which contains my books on astrology, miracle cures, lost continents, hollow earths, conspiracy theories, pseudohistory and so on, then Science.
Then there’s fiction, which is simply alphabetic.
Poetry is upstairs.
Re-reader or not?
Absolutely a re-reader.
If I still had it, I’d re-read Biggles in the South Seas and horrify myself. I’m sure it’s even more offensive than I remember.
What would make you not finish a book?
In fiction, I tend to stop if I can’t tell the characters apart and I don’t care about them. Also, it’s so badly written that I keep wanting to fix up the sentences. I’m a writer: don’t make me do that. It’s work.
In non-fiction it’s if my bullshit-detector goes off too often. Unless it’s so splendidly silly it gets pride of place in my bullshit section.
Keep books or give them away?
I’m a keeper, he said modestly.
Seven hundred years later, in Australia, it happens again. The stories are very different, but they're still bawdy, satirical, funny and sometimes sad, and they celebrate human cleverness, love, courage and imagination.
"Alan Whelan brings us a clever, sensual and sometimes poignant collection of stories that would make Boccaccio proud" - Tangea Tansley, author of A Question of Belonging
"An old frame for a sharp new snapshot of contemporary Australia" - Leigh Swinbourne, author of Shadow in the Forest
My instinct makes me want to stay away from people who are too sad, and I keep Bob away from them too. I know that’s not the kind thing to do, but people who are very messed up frighten me. I have the idea – I know it’s irrational – that some of their sickness or disfigurement or bad luck will rub off on me, or onto Bob. So I often keep away, even when I know I should probably help.
But Tracy pulled me into her life, a little. I wasn’t a friend; I don’t think she had any friends. I knew her because she went to a mothers’ group in Petersham, and I went to their meetings too. It wasn’t a very practical group. Nobody swapped or passed on highchairs and walkers and other baby equipment, and no one really shared tips on looking after kids. It was just a bunch of women drinking coffee after school, talking about nothing much and watching the kids play together. Bob was two, and Tracy’s son Bylan was seven, so, like Tracy and me, they didn’t have much to do with each other.
She and I only had one conversation before her life started heading downhill. She spoke to me, I think, because I was the second poorest woman there, after her. I mean, the other women were income-poor but they’d mostly had better jobs, or an employed partner, or both, before they found themselves on their own with a kid. They had more stuff, like clothes and a car and so on. I didn’t, so although Tracy was older than me she saw me as closest to her.
His story, There Is, was short-listed for the Newcastle Short Story Award in June 2020, and appeared in their 2020 anthology. His story, Wilful Damage, won a Merit Prize in the TulipTree Publications (Colorado) September 2020 Short Story Competition, and appears in their anthology, Stories that Need to be Told. It was nominated by the publisher for the 2021 Pushcart Prize.
His book The Lockdown Tales, using Boccaccio’s Decameron framework to show people living with the Covid-19 lockdown, is now on sale in paperback and ebook.
His novels, Harris in Underland and Blood and Bone are soon to be sent to publishers. He is currently working on the sequel to The Lockdown Tales and will then complete the sequel to Harris in Underland.
Alan Whelan co-wrote the book, New Zealand Republic, and has had journalism and comment pieces published in The New Zealand Listener and every major New Zealand newspaper, plus The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald.
He wrote two books for the NZ Government: Renting and You and How to Buy Your Own Home. His stories also appear in Stories of Hope, a 2020 anthology to raise funds for Australian bushfire victims, and other anthologies.
His website is alanwhelan.org. He tweets as @alannwhelan.
His phone number is +61 433 159 663. Enthusiastic acceptances and emphatic rejections, also thoughtful questions, are generally sent by email to alan@alanwhelan.org.
CONNECT WITH ALAN WHELAN
WEBSITE: https://alanwhelan.org/
TWITTER: https://twitter.com/alanNwhelan
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ReplyDeleteI liked the excerpt.
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ReplyDeleteThis sounds like a very good book.
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