I’m researching James Sykes Battye (1871-1954) for my novel. He was the first state librarian in Western Australia, establishing what was then called the Victoria Public Libary, now the State Library of Western Australia.

He was only 23 when he was appointed state librarian in 1894, and incredibly he was appointed for life. He stayed on in this role – also in control of the museum and art gallery – for more than half a century, dying on the job in 1954 at age 82.

At the time of his death, the state cabinet was trying to negotiate his retirement; he apparently wanted to stay on. In her thesis on him, Celia Chesney mentions intriguingly that the cabinet was prepared to let him live on in the house attached to the library after his retirement. I am fascinated by this image of an octogenarian librarian clinging to his position, living in the library itself, having ruled the library and the cultural life of the state for the first half of the century, through two world wars and a depression.

Born into a working class Victorian family, he worked his way up the ladder of society. He was heavily involved in the freemasons, an intriguing and disturbing – though commonplace – link for men in high places in Australian society in the early twentieth century. He is best remembered today because the collection of Westraliana in the state library is named after him and because of the cyclopedia of Western Australia he compiled. (I am fascinated by the polymathic nature of prominent people in the early twentieth century; this man having his finger in so many pies is something that’s going to inform one of my characters.)

The picture I’ve got of him from my reading is an ambitious man who started the library well, building an impressive collection and engaging the interest of the public. But a long decay set in as funding dropped during the Depression and the library atrophied. He came to obstinately cling to his position, unable to relinquish the role, unable to admit to himself that his time had passed.

There are two significant sources of information on him. Firstly, the entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, written by historian Fred Alexander. Alexander and Battye were not, apparently, always on good terms and one can see evidence of conflict in Alexander’s assessment of Battye’s contribution to UWA:

he rarely revealed constructive imagination and, despite a certain skill and finesse in negotiation, was no match for the subtler academic minds. Partly because of his relatively low public service standing, his achievements as ambassador for the university were limited.

Secondly, an unpublished thesis of 15000 words written for a diploma of history at UWA by Celia Chesney. Called “A man of progress : Dr James Sykes Battye”, it includes a helpful annotated bibliography and is available, of course, in the Battye Library.

Ten years ago today one of my favourite singers, Mark Sandman, had a heart attack on stage and died. He was the frontman of Morphine and I hadn’t heard of them then. I heard about his death, though, because it was on Triple J’s music news and my mum thought the Australian comedian The Sandman had died.

Months later in February 2000, I started hearing this song I loved on Triple J. I thought it was by Nick Cave, because the voice sounded similar, but it was more haunting and smooth than anything Cave has done. I was working in a noisy bus station and I kept missing the DJ’s announcement of what the song was.

Eventually I discovered it was Morphine’s the Night. On my 19th birthday, 5 March 2000, I went into the Wesley CD store in the city and asked if they had it. And they did – the posthumous album had arrived that very day.

Since then, I’ve got all Morphine’s albums and they’ve never had a song quite like ‘The Night’, but I’ve come to love a lot of their music and feel sad that they were over before I even loved them. Their music has a kind of blues-jazz sound to it, but mixed with a voice somewhere between Nick Cave and Lou Reed and different to them both. ‘Low rock’ I think they described themselves as. Saxophone, a two string bass and drums, no guitar. Their best songs have a haunting quality; no-one does sadness and bitter-sweet memories like Morphine.

Dream like, or smoky jazz club at midnight, or a car trip across America, in the middle of nowhere at night.

My favourite album is the posthumous The Night, followed by Cure For Pain. They never released a bad album, to my mind, all of them have some stand out songs I play over and over.

This is an extract from a paper I gave this week; you can find the whole paper on my other blog.

It might be much more appropriate to go off and write a novel (and not a ‘Christian’ novel where half the characters are Christians and all the other half become Christians on the last page) but a novel which grips people with the structure of Christian thought, and with Christian motivation set deep into the heart and structure of the narrative, so that people would read that and resonate with it and realize that that story can be my story.
- N.T. Wright, “How can the Bible be authoritative?”

The kingdom novel is an elusive, mythical creature. We’re not even sure if we have any living specimens. We do have some prescriptions for what it should look like, and numerous rumours of sightings.

One of the problems is that most evangelicals who write novels write inferior popular fiction, romance, science fiction or thriller, usually promulgating popular piety. It’s rare to find any fiction on the shelves of Koorong with profound spirituality or reflecting a thoughtful theology. I’m not a fan of secular popular fiction; evangelical fiction is much the same only with even worse writing and bad theology.

Some theologians have used the novel form to get their message across, and we do at least get better theology from them. Brian McLaren wrote A New Kind of Christian and its two sequels; the theology is good, or at least I generally like it, but as a novel it’s appalling. It is dominated by slabs of dialogue which put ideas in characters’ mouths; the descriptive interruptions feel like filler. The plot, characterisation and prose are all uncompelling. It seems to work for a lot of people, at least for getting across some ideas in an accessible way, but it’s not the novel Wright is describing. Paul Wallis, who lives in Canberra, has done a better job in his recent publication, The New Monastic, which I’m reading at the moment.

There are some good literary novelists who have Christian faith, but they are usually much better writers than Christians. We might think of Graham Greene (1904-1991), whose work often reflected Christian concerns, but who struggled to even believe in God’s existence. He wrote what I regard as one of the great Christian novels, The Power and the Glory, following the fugitive whisky priest travelling illegally around a South American republic, administering the sacraments and comforting the people while trying to escape the police and struggling with his own sins. But Greene’s religious concerns faded from prominence the further he went into his career. A polemical biography (Michael Shelden’s The Man Within) I read paints his faith as a cynical veneer. Adultery seems to have been one of his lifelong hobbies and it’s also a preoccupation of his writing.

Adultery was also a preoccupation of the other great 20th century Christian novelist, John Updike (1932-2009). He wrote beautifully and his short story “The Christian Room-mates” is one of the best pieces of Christian literature I’ve read. He might best be described as a liberal Episcopalian who acknowledged the limits of theological liberalism and admired Barth and Kierkegaard. But his Christian themes, whether liberal or not, feel, in the end feel like the subset of a warm humanism. He is one of the greatest postwar American novelists, but he never wrote the sort of novel Wright was imagining.

Closer to home, we have Tim Winton (1960-), one of Australia’s most important novelists. He was brought up a fundamentalist in the Church of Christ, but as a teenager read John Yoder and Jim Wallis, who influenced him to a social justice faith. On the face of it, this is extremely promising. But if Yoder has shaped Winton’s writing, I struggle to find it in anything he’s published since 1992 when Cloudstreet came out. (I haven’t read his early work yet, which might be where I’m more likely to find it.)

Instead, faith in Winton’s writing is more of a subterranean mood. His writings are often described as ‘spiritual’ – the transformative experience of the boys surfing in Breath or the significance of the Swan River to the characters in Cloudstreet. In the Winter issue of Zadok Papers, Lisa Jacobson writes:

Winton’s writing is infused with his Christian faith, although he is not so much a Christian writer, as a Christian who writes. Dirt Music nevertheless reflects his spiritual worldview, and the novel is imbued with biblical language.

This ‘infusion’ is at the level of spirituality and symbolism, the suggestion of spiritual experience and perhaps even divine encounter in the consciousness of the individual. Jacobson goes on to say:

Winton’s work is steadfastly concerned with a faith swept clean of iconic paraphernalia. This aligns him closely with what Bonhoeffer has called a ‘religious imaginative life’ instead of any clear devotional theme. Rather it displays, as Vincent Buckley says of what constitutes religious writing, a ‘tremor undertow of feeling, indicating one pole toward which the temperament is driven by the facts of living.’

Perhaps in reaction to evangelical fiction, Jacobson and others seem glad that the Christianity in Winton’s fiction remains implicit and mystical. Winton’s achievements are significant, and we should be grateful that one of Australia’s greatest novelists writes out of a Christian orientation. Yet his writing only goes a little of the way toward what Wright is hoping for. What his work doesn’t have – or Updike’s or Greene’s – is a Christian community. I think the best kind of kingdom novel would depict a Christian community.

Appendix: Wright’s Great Christian novel: the best attempts I’ve read

1. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)
In 1954, told he is not long for this world, 74 year old Congregationalist pastor John Ames sets out to write a testament of his life for his seven year old son. Robinson’s prose is careful, precise, close to perfect even as she writes in the cadence and idiom of an old man fifty years ago. It is wise and grace-filled. It is Christian in many senses, but perhaps most importantly because its heart is grace: grace is embedded in the narrator and the novel. (I don’t think Christianity is or should be simply grace at its heart, but I think the novel and the novelist might contend so.) A novel Barrack Obama lists as one of his favourites.

2. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940); also The Heart of the Matter (1948)

3. Victor Hugo Les Miserables (1862)
No novel is quoted more often in sermons and with good reason; it’s one of the most beautiful stories of redemption written.

4. John Updike, “The Christian Room-mates” [short story] (1964)
The cultural Protestantism and mild faith of a college student is unsettled by the impassioned Christian pacifist he is forced to share a room with.

5. Tim Winton, Cloudstreet (1991)

6. Fydor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
The novel most quoted by theologians, at least its famous ‘Grand Inquisitor’ parable.

7. C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (1949-1954) and The Cosmic Trilogy (1938-1945)

8. Mike Riddell, The Insatiable Moon (1997)
The author is a New Zealand Baptist turned Catholic and his novel features a man who may be Jesus returned or may be crazy. Watch out for the new feature film based on it.

9. Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

10. Morris West, The Last Confession

Books I haven’t read but should have

1. Madelaine L’Engle A Wrinkle In Time

2. The works of Charles Williams – A theologian and novelist much admired by C.S. Lewis; I have tried unsuccessfully to read several of his works.

3. The works of Rudy Wiebe – the most famous Mennonite novelist; I haven’t been able to get into his rather dense prose.

4. The works of Annie Dillard

On Saturday, I finished DeLillo’s Libra and the Kennedy assassination was going through my mind so much, I was desperate to finally watch JFK. But Nicole had already seen it, so I also got out Death of a President as well, a mock documentary made in 2006 about the assassination of George W. Bush. Death of a President was so weak, Nicole went to bed after half an hour and I turned it off to start watching JFK. I stayed up late, but still only got halfway through. I woke up early and put it on at 7am to watch the second half, the earliest I’ve ever seen a film. I think I was dreaming about it all.

Libra and JFK make for interesting comparison. DeLillo uses the contradictions and paradoxes of the assassination and of what we know of Lee Oswald to create a complex situation and a paradoxical character, represented by the scales of Libra – a man weighing contradictory things at the same time, ready to tip one way or the other. The paradoxes make for a postmodern novel, a postmodern character, a postmodern world like DeLillo always evokes.

In JFK, Stone takes the same contradictions and paradoxes and irons them out with a much more elaborate conspiracy theory. A surface reading makes it much more convincing than DeLillo’s vision, but that is exactly because it is so neat, so unwilling to accept that the truth of JFK’s assassination might be impossible to get to.

So, for example, what are we to make of Oswald setting up a pro-Castro organisation in the same building as Guy Bannister, a far-right private detective working against Castro? For DeLillo, it is about Oswald’s own contradictions, wanting attention and taking it wherever he can get it, giving some information to FBI agents, applying for work with a  man like Guy Bannister – anything to get noticed. For DeLillo, pro- and anti- Castro forces in this context are not opposing forces, but two sides of the scales, the same type of men, disenchanted, extreme men. In Libra, Oswald doesn’t know what he actually wants, beyond being listened to, glory, vindication of his genius, of his confused view of the world. And this, in its own way, is utterly convincing.

Stone’s interpretation of the same event? Jim Garrison, the DA heading the New Orleans investigation, sees it as clear proof that Oswald is not a communist at all, but an undercover agent for a nefarious coalition of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI, the CIA, all three with offices within a block of the building. Which, in the context of a conspiracy thriller is, in its own way, utterly convincing.

While Libra is a brilliant novel and JFK is an excellent film, Death of a President is a competent waste of time. It has the exact feel of what a decent, uninspired documentary might be like if George W. Bush had been assassinated in 2007. As I watched, I imagined how fooled a class of sixteen year olds would be in a few years if I was an English teacher showing it to them. It has all the tedious overnarration and overexplanation of certain documentaries, intercutting each action scene with interviews with key players. Utterly convincing; but because we know none of it happened, rather boring.

It needed an edge to it. Think Woody Allen’s Zelig, the fake documentary of a man with chameleon abilities who manages to make it into every significant event of the early twentieth century. It was worthwhile because it was funny, the fake documentary had a purpose.

But they didn’t have to make this one funny. They could have made it hallucinatory and surreal, using the plausibility of the documentary style to lead the viewer not just over a tedious fake assassination but one with outrageous elements. Or it could have been political, with some interesting point about either Bush or the anti-Bush protestors, about what it meant for a country to live under his rule for eight years. But it studiously avoided doing this. It did exactly what it was trying to do and gets marks for that, but what it was trying to do was so unremarkable.

I picture a different audience for this, my literary blog, than my theology blog. (Theology students, at least the ones at the library I work at, don’t read novels, except maybe Tolkien, to their great loss.) You, my imagined reader, are probably not a christian. In fact, you probably have a distaste for evangelicalism and for anyone who talks about the bible too much. There are good reasons for this. I am in sympathy with you. I have these two sides of me, that aren’t separate in my mind or soul, but are often separate socially – the literary world and the christian world.

But the two have to come together at the moment, because I’m writing a paper for the Newbigin Group (a theological discussion group) called ‘Beautiful Stories : writing novels for the kingdom’. In this paper, I have to use the framework for building for the kingdom laid out by Tom Wright in Surprised By Hope to talk about how my particular activity – writing – might be thought of as building for the kingdom.

Here’s a blurb on Wright’s book from the publisher:

Wright convincingly argues that what we believe about life after death directly affects what we believe about life before death. For if God intends to renew the whole creation—and if this has already begun in Jesus’s resurrection—the church cannot stop at “saving souls” but must anticipate the eventual renewal by working for God’s kingdom in the wider world, bringing healing and hope in the present life.

While you, my intelligent reader, might be most suspicious of Christians who believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus, Wright uses the resurrection as the basis of Christian hope and action for justice, beauty and evangelism in the world. (You probably like the first two and not the third.) For Wright (and for me) God’s action in the world is not confined to the saving of some individual souls, whisked off to ‘heaven’ after death. Instead, God is at work redeeming, renewing the whole creation, which one day will culminate in an intervention when everything is finally set right.

You might remember weeks ago me quoting Julian Barnes piece on the fate of all writers:

For writers, the process of being forgotten isn’t clear-cut. ‘Is it better for a writer to die before he is forgotten, or to be forgotten before he dies?’ But ‘forgotten’ here is only a comparative term, meaning: fall out of fashion, be used up, seen through, superseded, judged too superficial – or, for that matter, too ponderous, too serious – for a later age. But truly forgotten, now that’s much more interesting. First, you fall out of print, consigned to the recesses of the secondhand bookshop and dealer’s website. Then a brief revival, if you’re lucky, with a title or two reprinted; then another fall, and a period when a few graduate students, pushed for a thesis topic, will wearily turn your pages and wonder why you wrote so much. Eventually, the publishing houses forget, academic interest recedes, society changes, and humanity evolves a little further, as evolution carries out its purposeless purpose of rendering us all the equivalent of bacteria and amoebae. This is inevitable. And at some point – it must logically happen – a writer will have a last reader. I am not asking for sympathy; this aspect of a writer’s living and dying is a given. At some point between now and the six-billion-years-away death of the planet, every writer will have his or her last reader. (Nothing to be frightened of : 225)

Yet the incredible claim that Wright makes is that not all art will pass away. For him, God has given us tasks to do here and now that are part of his/her ultimate plans. Part of the task artists have is to depict the beauty of creation – while taking seriously its woundedness and looking forward to its redemption. The picture he offers is of Christ’s resurrected body, still with the nail wounds in his hands – and not as something incidental to Christ, but as the means by which he is identified.

Wright doesn’t know how God will use art (or anything else) in his/her renewed heavens and earth. We have to do our bit, without yet seeing the masterplan. When the time comes, it will fit into place somehow.

A wonderful, comforting idea. But I can’t help thinking of the practicalities. It’s okay for me, writing literary fiction with claims to seriousness and meaningfulness. What about the genre writer writing another crime novel? Does their novel get forgotten or remembered?

Are novels transformed and redeemed themselves? Do they become what they should have been? Does God take their potential and fulfill it? (What would a novel look like edited by God? If the Bible is the book we have from him/her, God seems less interested in perfection and tidiness than we might expect.)

And who reads them? What form do they take? I hope it’s not anything like Borges’ Library of Babel, where very possible book, every combination of letters has been written; that is a kind of hell.

If you want to hear my paper, you’re welcome to come listen at Vose Seminary, 20 Hayman Rd Bentley on Monday 29 June at 7:30pm. Alternatively, stick around and I will be posting it here and on An Anabaptist in Perth.

Having turned 90 in January, J.D. Salinger is in the news, suing an author who calls himself J.D. California to prevent him publishing a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye called ‘60 Years Later: Coming Through The Rye’.

The novel already appears for pre-sale on Amazon. The publisher is of dubious reputation, and the buzz around the book itself is not positive. If anyone was going to try to pull this off, it would have to be brilliant. As the title suggests, this sequel starts with Holden at 76, apparently losing his marbles and revisiting New York City.

In 2004 on my old blog (which was lost forever when the modblog servers went down permanently back in 2006) I wrote a creative post about a sequel to the The Catcher in the Rye called Holden Rides Again. In my post, I had obtained the manuscript from a girl who was romantically linked with J.D. Salinger’s son, Matty (star of an infamously bad telemovie version of Captain America – I’m not joking, this much is true). I gave a plot outline for the manuscript and was pleased when one person left a comment saying they couldn’t wait for it to be published for real.

J.D. Salinger has said that Holden exists only in the covers of the book; that there’s no more to tell. But for so many fans, myself included, that’s not true. I would love for him to have come alive for longer, to have read more of his adventures, to have found out how such a distraught youth might live the rest of his life.

In The Library of Babel, my new novel, the new draft actually starts with Tom finding a manuscript copy of J.D. Salinger’s sequel to Catcher in the Rye in the rare book room of the library. It’s a move that I’m in two minds about; I don’t want to dwell forever in the shadow of Catcher (characters reference it in my first novel; and originally in my second, one of the characters was named after Jane Gallagher, but this is gone now). But the point was something else – the sequel is about what happens when the angsty sixteen year old has to grow up. What comes next? What comes after deciding everyone’s a phony?

I wanted to situate my novel as an exploration of these themes. I have consciously left behind themes of adolescence and want to write about the mid to late twenties, and the challenges of living at peace with the world, while still trying to be authentic.

I may have to rethink using the sequel to Catcher in the Rye at all. In case it gets edited out, and in light of J.D. California’s hype, here’s my sequel to Catcher in the Rye, in the form of chapter four of the Library of Babel:

Holden rides again

Have a read and then vote in the poll, just like reality TV:

Holden Caulfield that is, star of The Catcher in the Rye. I’m not old enough or mature enough yet to renounce my love of this book. It’s my favourite book. But reading this review of The Catcher in the Rye today disturbed me. He’s not deep, she argues; his version of deep is to dismiss the whole world as phony and have a nervous breakdown. If you think that’s profound you’re still adolescent.

Actually, I’m not going to leap to the defence of Holden. I haven’t the energy. But I think I will be horrified if, like the reviewer Kathy, I ever get to the point of renouncing Holden and everything that book has meant to me over the years.

The last time I re-read it in 2005 I had finally come out of an adolescent posture of defying the whole world, and I still loved it. It’s not just profound, Catcher in the Rye, it’s also beautiful and funny, and that counts even if you think you’ve outgrown Holden’s ‘phony’ insights.

Maybe it’s time to read again. See if I’ve grown up yet.

In my writing, I want to find beauty in everyday life. I don’t manage this very often. Don DeLillo does it very well. I was smiling to myself reading the first few pages of Libra, smiling with private delight in the wonder of his pages, the intricacies, defamilarisations, astute observations.

Mary Frances watched him butter the toast. He held the edges of the slice in his left hand, moved the knife in systematic strokes, over and over. Was he trying to distribute the butter evenly? Or were there other, deeper requirements? It was sad to see him lost in small business, eternally buttering, turning routine into empty compulsion. (16)

I haven’t put flesh like this on the scenes I’m writing at the moment. They’re bare bones skeletons, they don’t live and breathe, they haven’t been called into being with deep acts of imagination.

Has anyone else ever thought that the dust-jacket author photos of Americans have a certain look? That they tend to stare into the camera with a certain insistence and boldness which others lack?

I have this feeling that writing is one of the most difficult things for amateurs. The problem is this: few amateur writers are interesting to read. Despite years of writing, most amateur writers remain boring, cliched, inept. (If you are an amateur writer, I’m not talking about you.) Yet you take music, painting or even more obviously pottery, crafts, woodwork, and an amateur can usually produce things that others can enjoy. (Or if I knew anything about music would the jam sessions of amateurs be horrid to my ears? Possibly.)

One of the problems might be the type of people who are attracted to writing. Is there a disproportionate number of amateur writers who are self centred and have emotional problems? (I’m possibly guilty on two counts.) Not that emotional problems necessarily make for bad writing, but I think good writing nearly always comes out of strong empathy. And self-centred wallowing – which makes up too much amateur writing – is boring.

At the university level, I think the output of undergraduate creative writing classes would tend to be abysmal if it could be compared to that of fine art and music undergraduate classes. My friend commented that this is because you need to audition for fine art and music whereas the university can make a lot of money out of the slackers or talentless who want to take creative writing.

It comes down to the sad thought that whereas someone who devotes themselves to learning the piano can probably entertain family and friends as well as enjoy the act of playing, someone who devotes themselves to writing will probably not entertain many people at all with the story they print out and hand around. Especially if it’s the start of another fantasy saga.

*

I was in a writing workshop recently and I noticed something concerning. If you’ve ever been in a writing workshop, you’ll notice such restrained politeness in discussing other people’s work. The knives are rarely out; there is rarely too much honesty. I always thought I wanted people to be more honest, but maybe that’s not too good either. Because in this workshop we were actually critiquing the work of an amateur writer who wasn’t in the room and who no-one knew. And I was shocked at how vicious everyone was with it. I thought it had some good points, but no-one picked up on these at all; perhaps because they knew the co-ordinator had held it up as a piece with problems.

I would hate to think the restrained politeness is a mask for viciousness. I think I prefer generous honesty whether the person’s there or not. It makes me fear that underneath everyone is jealously tearing down each other’s work while being polite about it; I hope that’s not the case. (But then you’ve probably witnessed me rip into a few published works on this blog; should the rules change or am I a hypocrite?)