Recently, I went to my local bookshop, Megalong Books, in Leura, to meet up with author Claire Corbett. I’d met Claire on Twitter and, discovering she was local, gladly accepted her kind offer to sign a copy of her debut novel When We Have Wings for a visitor from Sweden. While waiting, holding a copy of Claire’s novel in my hand, I struck up a conversation with another customer who turned out to be Peter from East Avenue Books, a second-hand bookshop in Adelaide, who was holidaying in the Blue Mountains with his wife Joan.
I asked Peter which books by Australian women were most popular. Without hesitation he said, “Anything by Geraldine Brooks.” Another Australian female author I’d never read.
A few days later I was holidaying at my mum’s and found the book I’d chosen to bring with me was one I’d already read, Tara Moss’s Fetish. As usual, I hadn’t read the back cover blurb, so wasn’t alerted to the mistake by the story summary: I’d picked up a copy from the library solely for the kangaroo on the spine and the “F” in the title. (It was to be my February read in the “Aussie Authors With A Twist” challenge promoted on GoodReads: the “twist” is to match the first letter of the month with a letter in either the author or title: “F: February, Fetish”.)
Not hopeful, I hunted around to see if Mum had any other books by Australian women I could read, and there on the coffee table was Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’s Crossing,* loaned to her by a friend. For anyone who hasn’t paid attention to the literary scene, Brooks is a one-time foreign correspondent who has settled in the USA on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts. She has won numerous literary prizes for her work, including a Pulitzer Prize for her book March. She’s in that category of authors that I’ve formerly been reluctant to read: an author who gained her reputation overseas and, seemingly as a result of that, earned credibility in the eyes of Australian reviewers and readers, even though her subject matter – in this case, the first Indigenous graduate of Harvard College – is often intensely American in setting, theme and tone.
Or is it? And why should this be important?
One of the complaints about the Miles Franklin Award has been its “Australian” emphasis. The terms of Miles Franklin’s bequest, that the Award be granted to a book of high literary merit that depicts “Australian life in any of its phases”, have often been narrowly construed as demanding an Australian “setting” and strong sense of “place”. The idea that a book might speak of the lives and concerns of Australians and be set entirely in another country – or universe, for that matter – seems anathema to those who interpret those criteria, criteria which, I guess, were originally selected as part of an effort to champion Australian writing, to free it from inherited notions that anything Australian must be second-rate, that quality writing could only come from England.
See the contradictions?
First, it seems we look to non-Australian literary prizes to tell us what to read and value. Second, we demand our own literary prize contenders make their work overtly “Australian”. Where does this leave Australian writers whose work doesn’t fit into an overtly “Australian” category?
If authors, like Brooks, win major international literary prizes, no problem. But what of other, hugely popular Australian writers, such as Anna Campbell, who writes historical romance, or Anna Jacobs, who sets her “clogs and shawl” books in 19th-century England, or prize-winning romantic-comedy author Kandy Shepherd, published in the US, who swapped her settings from Blue Mountains NSW for rural Northern California? Or successful Speculative Fiction authors such as Kate Forsyth? To name a few.
Are these authors’ books, because of their settings, less “Australian” than ones set in Broome, Alice Springs, Port Douglas, Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide? Judging by the criteria set for the Love2Read “Our Story” selection, an initiative of the National Year of Reading, it would seem so. And guess what? The “Our Story” selection is dominated by books by men. Is this emphasis on “Australianness” helping to marginalize work by talented women?
The Stella Prize panellist, Jo Case, has written on the implications of this “blokey” construction of Australian identity in relation to women’s writing and the Miles Franklin Award, so I’ll leave that for now. I’m meant to be reviewing Caleb’s Crossing, a book which consistently appeared in lists of “top 5” selling books of online Australian bookshops at the end of 2011. Reviewing it seems more important than ever now that I’ve seen some Twitter responses to the novel – one reader couldn’t get into it and set it aside; another, a librarian, persisted, but found it didn’t get any better. How do these responses tally with all the hype and mega sales?
So two questions hovered when I picked up Caleb’s Crossing, the book’s popularity – deserved or not – and whether Brooks’ story, just as much as all those shortlisted on the “Our Story” selection, might reflect what it means to be Australian in the 21st century.
Yet another refrain singing through my mind was the first of Brooks’ Boyer Lectures on the idea of “home” that I’d recently heard on Radio National. In that, she discussed growing up – literally – in “Bland Street” in Sydney. Listening to her half-Australian, half-American drawl, I sensed that, growing up, this author – like many of our generation – had held an insidious belief that “real life” happened somewhere other than where we found ourselves. And why wouldn’t we – being educated by reading dominated by stories set in other places and other times?
Youth of our generation left adolescence with wealth, leisure, fearlessness and great expectation – we happily flew off to Europe or Asia before the term “Gap Year” was invented. We engaged in a rite-of-passage during which self-deception ruled: we weren’t “tourists”, we were “travellers”, even if we banded together with other Aussies or Kiwis on Top Deck and Contiki buses, or on mattresses in a friend-of-a-friend’s flat in Earls Court. Many, like Brooks and the character Mandy – another foreign correspondent – in Charlotte Woods’ The Children, became true travellers, citizens of the world, never fully making it back “home”.
Is it surprising to me that Brooks married an American and settled in Martha’s Vineyard? No. Does this make her writing any less “Australian”? Perhaps. But how does one judge such things?
Another refrain teasing me as I read Caleb’s Crossing was the fate of Bennelong, the Aboriginal man whose name was endowed to the site of the Sydney Opera House. Bennelong lived in the earliest days of settlement in Sydney in the late 18th-century, learned to speak English, dressed in European garb and travelled to London where he was feted as a curiosity of the Empire.
The song of Bennelong’s life formed a sad counterpoint to the one I heard of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, Brooks’ eponymous character. The European worlds which these two indigenous men encountered were vastly different: the values of the Puritan evangelists who founded the New World had little in common with those who settled the East Coast of New Holland more than a century later, English military masters and their impoverished, often drunken, convict charges. But this difference in the nature of the colonial-indigenous encounter provoked for me a number of questions: what if the Puritans had travelled further west and set out across the Pacific? Or what if La Perouse had beaten Cook to Botany Bay? If the Chinese had settled here during their fifteenth-century explorations, or the Dutch later? What if we were now to be invaded, not by a horde of desperate refugees, but by a race convinced of their own moral or technological superiority, such as true alien invasion? Or, closer to reality, if our world were transformed in less than a few generations irreparably for the worse, because of the values of those who claimed the land and means of production, whose attitude to resources is one of exploitation, who unthinkingly introduce foreign species or technologies and non-sustainable land-use practices? What would we lose? What would we gain and at what cost? Would our accommodation of these alien values destroy our “essence”? What “essence”, if any, do we Australians have to destroy?
For me, it didn’t take much for Brooks’ story of 17th-century America to appear vitally relevant to what it means to live in Australia in the 21st century. Read this way, Caleb’s Crossing creates space to consider the most pressing issues that face us, both as Australians and as citizens of the world, as we enter an uncertain future. How can such considerations be anything, if not Australian?
Clearly, however, such a reading is far removed from the events and characters depicted in Brooks’ story. So to the question, why all the fuss over Caleb’s Crossing? And why the temptation for some readers to put it down and not pick it up again?
I enjoyed this novel, but it isn’t without its shortcomings. In my view, these stem from a paucity of characterization and a confusion of genre. Brooks falls into a classic trap: she romanticises Caleb – not his fate, certainly, based as it is on fact; but the construction of a sense of his “essence” as an Indian prince robbed of his rightful heritage, his songs and ceremonies, his physical fitness and the island land of his ancestors. Caleb never became real to me as a person, remained only the repressed object of desire for narrator Bethia May – daughter of an Evangelist minister, or “Storm Eyes” as the boy Caleb dubs her – and later as an exemplum of an early “Uncle Tom” figure, whose conversion to the ways of the Europeans leads to his downfall. This idealization of Caleb’s character wouldn’t matter if readers were invited to believe that Bethia herself remained distant from him, treating him as an object in her imagination, or if there were some grounds given for her construction of him as a “noble savage” more than a century before Rousseau. But Bethia is portrayed as having known Caleb intimately, perhaps more than a brother, from a very young age, including – improbably – learning his language.
Is this a failure of the novel? Possibly, but I understand why Brooks has constructed Caleb’s character in this way. It enables her to get away with a narrative transition that, to a romance reader, would be otherwise unthinkable: she swaps from one hero to another mid-novel. This brings me to the book’s second glaring shortcoming: its confusion of genre.
In Caleb’s Crossing, Brooks initially harnesses the power of romance. Avid romance readers would have no trouble reading the cues: Caleb is portrayed initially as a handsome, “exotic” warrior figure whose love is forbidden, given the mores of Bethia’s time. The narrative choice of creating a fictional memoir, penned at different intervals during Bethia’s life, allows Brooks to hint at the possibility of illicit union between the two, teasing the reader with a sense that Bethia may succumb to temptation and transgress the moral code of her time, that “Solace” is Bethia’s child. This sense is derived from carefully crafted hints about what Bethia desires but won’t admit to herself, her older brother Makepeace’s warnings of self-deception, the constant references to the possibility of damnation, the temptations Bethia herself chastises herself for – not limited to her literal drinking from the forbidden cup belonging to Caleb’s uncle, the indigenous “pawaaw” or medicine man. Brooks creates an underlying sexual tension between Caleb and Bethia which, for a romance reader, doesn’t entirely disappear when Bethia’s new love-interest, Samuel, appears.
The story achieves this shift from one “hero” to the other, but only because the characterization of Caleb is so slight, so emblematic. The reader never becomes fully invested in regarding Caleb as Bethia’s mate; in fact, we get the sense that we know little more about him mid-way through and at the end than we did at the beginning. This transition from Caleb as love-interest to the equally little-known male character of Samuel creates confusion: is this a love story, with the desired object so repressed that the reader is invited to feel the grief of the loss even when the character herself is unaware? For some readers, perhaps. But why should consistency in genre be important? For me, it has to do with the emotional pay-off (or lack of it) of the novel. Had Brooks consciously opted for a clever double-blinding of the first-person narrator to her own illicit desires, the book would have held far more emotional power for me. As it stands, the distance I felt from Caleb meant that I didn’t care as much as I should have about his fate: the novel’s emotional climax failed to touch me in the way it would had this been a romance-gone-wrong or love story, or indeed a romance with a happy ending. That’s the price Brooks pays for this confusion of genre: a lack of emotional power in the narrative.
Could Brooks have written the relationship of Caleb and Bethia in some other way? Certainly, but not without risking adding a further charge of falsifying history. Stories of sexual transgression are nothing new in American Literature – consider Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter – but a story of love between a Christian gentlewoman and “a salvage” at that time: how likely was it? The book ends as it ostensibly begins, not as a romance nor a love-story, but as a fragmented memoir. This device suggests it was written over a series of years and this arguably explains its disjointedness.
Perhaps, some might argue, the gaps in the narrative and characterisation represent shifts in time and the changing perspective of the narrator herself as time colours the way she views the past and stretches the limits of her self-honesty. Perhaps there is greater depth in such a construction than I’ve given credit for here… Or perhaps the book just isn’t that well written.
For the novel’s strengths, I look to Bethia herself, the portrayal of early settlement life in America, the previously unknown (to me) story of the first indigenous scholar of Harvard University, the tensions between Bethia’s book-loving character and her role as a woman growing up under a religious patriarchy, as well as Brooks’ depiction of the devastation brought European settlement to the Wopanaak tribe of Noepe (now Martha’s Vineyard). For me, in terms of my enjoyment of the story, these strengths fairly weigh against the book’s weaknesses.
In Caleb’s Crossing, Brooks makes narrative choices which serve both to detract and to enhance the reading experience: she chooses romance over character, and plausibility over romance. For me personally, the book was interesting and enjoyable: I loved Brooks’ use of language, I’m interested in the subject matter, and I had enough going on in my own mind about whether the story might conceivably be regarded as “Australian” to keep me reading late into the night. But, in consideration of the book’s popularity, I have to say: I’ve read other books by Australian women in the lead up to the Australian Women Writers 2012 Challenge which I’ve found more gripping (Kirsten Tranter’s The Legacy, Jaye Ford’s Beyond Fear), more politically provocative (Kalinda Ashton’s The Danger Game, Caroline Overington’s Matilda is Missing), more emotionally engaging (Charlotte Wood’s The Children, Heather Rose’s The Butterfly Man), equally as evocative of a past time and place (Christine Stinson’s It Takes A Village and PM Newton’s The Old School), and as beautifully written (Gail Jones’ Dreams of Speaking).
Based on Caleb’s Crossing, does Geraldine Brooks deserve her place as the top-selling Australian woman writer for 2011? Not judging by what I’ve seen. And I’ve only just begun to read.
*This review forms a part of my contribution to a number of challenges, including the Australian Women Writers 2012 Reading and Reviewing Challenge, the Booklover Book Reviews blog’s Aussie Authors 2012 Challenge, the GoodReads Aussie Readers’ group’s Aussie Authors with a Twist, and Bookdout blog’s Eclectic Reading Challenge.
What’s all the fuss about? Geraldine Brooks’ Caleb’s Crossing by Elizabeth Lhuede is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at elizabethlhuede.wordpress.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.elizabethlhuede.com.
Devoted Eclectic 
Jo @ Booklover Book Reviews
/ January 15, 2012Excellent article Liz. You’ve raised a point that often ruffles my feathers.
Although a proud Aussie, when I seek out novels by Australian authors, I am not necessarily seeking out a story set in Australia. In fact I often find myself drawn to fiction set internationally, in places or situations I have not had the opportunity to experience myself. This does not mean, I have a ‘grass is greener’ mindset in respect to countries other than Australia. I have travelled internationally and I can say with sincerity, there is no other place I would choose to live.
I support the work of talented Australian authors, irrespective of whether their subject matter is ‘Australian’.
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Elizabeth Lhuede
/ January 15, 2012Thanks, Jo. Glad I’m not the only one whose feathers get ruffled!
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bernadetteinoz
/ January 15, 2012I don’t know where to start you’ve raised so many points…might need to do a full response at my blog but in the interim,,,,
First, I loved Caleb’s Crossing but will admit I was already a huge fan of Brooks from her days as a foreign correspondent right through to her fiction. her book YEAR OF WONDERS is one of my top dozen favourite books ever (even though I hate its last chapter). The things I look for in Brooks’ writing are the female characters and their experiences of life and I also am fascinated by her exploration of religion and spirituality (which is a theme common to most of her fiction including Caleb’s Crossing). I also love her way with language.
The question of whether anyone ‘deserves’ their status as top-selling is one I won’t go into as that way madness lies. What sells and what is good is rarely the same thing (just look at the tv ratings)
As for any Australian quality to Brooks’ stories I’m not sure I’ve given it much thought, though I do think her world-wandering is a very relevant aspect to being Australian. Whatever the motivation for it (and on this I suspect you are at least partly right – we wonder if we’re not good enough) we are a nation of travellers. Personally I think this is a terrific thing as the alternative strikes me as frightening. I’ve travelled the world pretty extensively myself and the scariest people I’ve come across are those who never travel far from their front doors. Forgive me for being political for a moment but I think it’s no coincidence that the world got into such an all fired mess when America elected a President (Bush junior) who had barely travelled beyond his country’s own borders. But Aussies ARE travellers and we do set up homes all over and I think we’re all the better for it and it IS a part of what makes us different culturally from some other national groups.
I’m quite OK with the Miles Franklin only looking at books that are set here as I think it is important that we foster that writing and those books. Not every book written by an Australian has to be eligible for that award – there are plenty of other awards and they can all foster different aspects of writing and I’m fine with that.
I’ll leave your genre critique of the book alone as I don’t read much in the romance genre so can’t comment intelligently and I really wish all this genre nonsense would go away anyway. When I first started reading adult books (and it’s not that long ago – I’m only 44!) there didn’t seem to be much beyond fiction and non-fiction at the local book store – now there are a gazillion categories and it drives me bonkers. I just want to read a good yarn
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Elizabeth Lhuede
/ January 15, 2012Thanks for taking the time to read the review and for your response, Bernadette. It’s good to discuss and think these things through more. If you end up writing more on your blog please ping me on Twitter.
I guess I’m interested in genre for reasons: one, because publishers appear to want authors to know in advance their “target market”; and two, more importantly, because each genre (or mix of genres) appears to be shorthand for the type of emotional experience promised to the reader. But I take your point, as a reader and reviewer the subject probably seems crazy! 🙂
Similarly, with the question of literary prizes, I’m taking my cues from authors who know from their sales figures how important prizes such as the Miles Franklin are; and it’s not just the MF that has an emphasis which serves to marginalise women writers: it’s the Love2Read campaign, too. In the National Year of Reading the gender bias of that campaign will have a very real impact on the sales figures of authors included and excluded – and a consequent impact on those writers’ self-esteem and perhaps even the ongoing viability of their careers.
As for whether Brooks deserves her place as a top selling author that was, I admit, cheeky, and it’s not for me to judge. My comments are prompted in part by the fact that Brooks’ success is secure, whereas the fate of many equally brilliant contemporary Australian women writers, especially in these times of publishing uncertainty, is far less assured.
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Denise Imwold
/ January 16, 2012Superb review, Elizabeth! Our book group read this novel last year and whilst I enjoyed it, I really had to suspend disbelief at the beginning because I couldn’t quite fathom how it was possible for Bethia and Caleb to communicate with each other so fluently given their different languages!
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Elizabeth Lhuede
/ January 16, 2012Thanks, Denise. That really did require a suspension of disbelief, didn’t it? Bethia was portrayed as exceptionally bright, but even so… Similarly with the Buttery’s proximity to the lecture hall at Harvard. I guess that must be based on fact, but the idea that a girl fluent in the native tongue might end up working there and hearing and understanding smatterings of Latin and Greek did seem contrived. But Brooks managed to sustain my interest despite those things – the sign of a great writer!
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Kat
/ January 16, 2012My personal feeling is that there’s a place for the Miles Franklin, just as there’s a place for other genre-specific awards for Australian writers (e.g. the R*BY, the Aurealis). However, I think the Miles Franklin could do with broadening the scope of work considered for the award.
That said, I read romance almost exclusively, and I would struggle to name even one title I’d personally nominate for a Miles Franklin (if I could! Heh). It actually frustrates me that we don’t have more locally set genre novels or stories featuring well-developed Australian protagonists. I’ve loved books by Campbell and Shepherd, but I don’t think they embody anything uniquely Australian — and to be fair, they haven’t tried. Their work is deliberately set in places or times apart from Australia (except perhaps Shepherd’s latest release, which I haven’t read yet). The writing style for genre fiction also disadvantages these authors, because the focus for the authors and editors and publishers and readers are different than for literary works.
The only example I can really think of where I felt the Australian-ness of writing/setting even though the story didn’t have any specific mention of Australia or Australians is Glenda Larke’s Watergivers series, a fantasy set in a land where water is precious and sacred. As soon as I started reading the book, I thought, It’s so very Australian and yet there’s nothing specifically Australian about it. Her writing is also quite lovely.
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Elizabeth Lhuede
/ January 16, 2012Thanks for your response, Kat.
You’re spot on with your comments about the writing style required for genre fiction, or the perception of it – maybe if there were more Australian publishers interested in genre fiction, it would be treated differently? It seems a shame when there’s such an incredible pool of talent here to draw on, but I suppose their reluctance also has to do with the size of the Australian book-buying market. (Except, of course, if you consider ebooks and international rights – look at Shepherd’s success with her latest!)
As for whether Campbell or Shepherd embody anything uniquely Australian, I’d have to agree: they don’t. I guess what I was driving at is that perceptions of what constitues “Australianness” could be broadened – or at least discussed! 🙂
I hadn’t heard of Glenda Larke’s Watergiver series – more great books to go on my “to be read” pile.
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Keziah Hill
/ January 17, 2012Wonderful review Elizabeth. I’ve read Brooks Year of Wonders (which was excellent) and March which was less excellent. I also heard her briefly on 702 the other day and she was very entertaining. I think the Miles Franklin is very limited in its definition for the reasons you mention. Australians have always been great travelers and ex-patriots. It’s perplexing to think someone like Christina Stead or Shirley Hazzard would not always have qualified for the MF.
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Elizabeth Lhuede
/ January 19, 2012Thanks, Keziah. Most people mention March and People of the Book as Brooks’ best – good to get a recommendation for Year of Wonders, too.
Now that you’ve mentioned Stead and Hazzard, I realise they are good comparisons with Brooks, in being that they both have set books in the US, for Stead with The Man Who Loved Children and for Hazzard with Transit of Venus (and probably more – wasn’t there one about the United Nations?). In Hazzard’s case The Great Fire – which I think was considered? – had a largely Japanese setting, like Gail Jones’ Dreams of Speaking. And of course Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney would have qualified for MF, no trouble.
My main curiosity has been to learn whether books by women get left off lists for old-fashion views of what constitutes “an aspect of Australian life”, rather an assessment of literary merit.
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Tony
/ January 20, 2012Yay – much better 🙂
What I wanted to say was about the Miles Franklin issue. I suspect that one of the best books I read last year (Elliot Perlman’s ‘The Street Sweeper’) won’t be eligible as it was mainly without Australian-ness(!), even though one of the main characters was Australian.
As for Brooks, she doesn’t appeal, precisely for the Australia-centred reasons given…
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Elizabeth Lhuede
/ February 16, 2012Apologies, Tony, I overlooked this comment at the time you posted, perhaps because we were exchanging tweets on Twitter. Thanks for dropping by.
I haven’t read the Perlman novel (though with the rave reviews, I would’ve by now if my attention wasn’t so focused in the AWW challenge). Maybe the judges will be flexible and start to consider that “some aspect of Australian experience” includes Australians abroad? It will be interesting to see what is chosen: If you’re right and Street Sweeper is excluded, What are the odds of an all-female shortlist this year?
As for your take on Brooks, sounds like I should hunt down your reviews of her work?
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whisperinggums
/ January 21, 2012Fascinating review Elizabeth … Too much there to comment on succinctly. I have reviewed this book on my blog too … And my main concerns, though I don’t see it in terms of “genre”, were similar to yours ie Caleb’s shadowiness and the non-resolution of the relationship hints between Caleb and Bethia. I have read, I think, all of Brooks’ books but think her last two are a little less successful. Her two non-fiction works are will worth reading.
As for the Australian issue and the MF … Too late now to tackle that, says she copping out!
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Elizabeth Lhuede
/ January 22, 2012Sue, I’m so glad you enjoyed the review. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve put the link to your review below – given your comments it might be interesting for some other commentators to compare responses, especially as your review compares Caleb’s Crossing with other Australian novels that fictionalise history: Kim Scott’s That Dead Man Dance and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (and, briefly, Leslie Cannold’s The Book of Rachael, which I haven’t read).
http://whisperinggums.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/geraldine-brooks-calebs-crossing/
Thanks for dropping by.
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whisperinggums
/ January 22, 2012Of course I don’t mind … the review is out there anyhow! Look forward to continued book discussions, eh?
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Anonymous
/ February 2, 2012Thanks, you’ve put your finger on aspects of Caleb’s Crossing I couldn’t quite articulate for myself. I put it down and then made myself keep reading not because of the romance/not-romance issue, because the friendship worked for me, but because the voice did not. Unlike the superb ‘March’, here Brooks’ research lies too heavily on the voice and Bethia’s character, rendering it uneven and distracting. Bethia’s life choices, while perhaps frustrating to the modern female reader, are consistent with historical lives. But her voice wavers between modern and ‘authentic’ and makes you fall over the words and ideas at odd moments. A pity, because I really wanted to like it, and it is an extraordinary and overall quite moving story.
I do see, though, why it sold a bundle.
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Elizabeth Lhuede
/ February 2, 2012Thanks for those insights, Anon. I agree, and, in fairness to Brooks it must be a delicate balancing act, writing for a modern audience – a mass market fiction audience – that would balk if she made Bethia’s voice, as well as the values, more authentically archaic. It’s amazing, once discussion is opened up, how many other readers, like yourself, have reservations about this book, while still enjoying it (as I did). Shows her great skill as a storyteller, even when she doesn’t get everything right. I wasn’t moved by it, though, as I’d hoped to be. Now that I’ve finished yet another incredible book by an Australian author – Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy – I’m more convinced than ever that the attention given to Brooks is overshadowing some truly great Australian women writers.
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whisperinggums
/ February 3, 2012Look forward to your review of Dog Boy, Elizabeth. I read and reviewed that in 2010 (I think). She’s an excellent writer. (Have you read any under her previous – married – name of Eva Sallis? She’s not recognised nearly enough I think).
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Elizabeth Lhuede
/ February 16, 2012Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, Sue. I haven’t yet written a review of Dog Boy. It’s one of those that I think, “Where do I begin?” And since then I’ve read Favel Parrett’s Past the Shallows and one or two lighter books. Maybe I’ll review on a reread?
As for whether I’ve read any others under her Eva Sallis name – I’d heard she wrote under another name, but didn’t know what it was, so thanks for that. They are definitely ones I’ll look up: maybe when I’m up for another emotionally challenging read – assuming they have the same impact as Dog Boy. For now, though, I’m going for new authors: presently, Angela Savage’s The Half-Child. A completely different read again.
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whisperinggums
/ February 16, 2012Cop out, LOL Elizabeth!! But I’ll wait patiently for your reread! I do know what you mean though once I’ve read a book I feel I MUST blog it. Some are really hard and some just roll off the pen.
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Elizabeth Lhuede
/ February 16, 2012You’re right, it *is* a cop-out! 🙂 Just so you know, I did renew the loan from the library, so I’m not ruling it out…
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whisperinggums
/ February 16, 2012LOL … you go girl (as they say!)
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Melissa Watts
/ February 16, 2012The comparison between Caleb and Bennelong is really interesting. I hadn’t considered that but I think you are right. What I enjoy about Brooks’ novels is her strong female protagonists in a historical setting. Such fantastic characters. I wish Brooks recieved more attention in Australia.
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Elizabeth Lhuede
/ February 16, 2012Thanks for your comment, Melissa. Glad the Caleb/Bennelong comparison strikes a chord. Doesn’t Brooks get much attention? Knowing she was 2011’s top selling author for so many bookshops, I just assumed she did.
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deborahb
/ March 14, 2012I had decided just today that my aversion to Brooks came from her status as an institution (I haven’t read any Brooks’ novels yet) & worse, an Australian Institution! Aaiiieeee! So I determined that I should actually *read* something of hers before writing her off as ‘too popular’ or ‘too literary’ (though, the very fact she’s achieved this remarkable feat should MAKE ME want to read her work, surely? I am so contrary sometimes).
That said, I don’t think I’ll start with Caleb’s Crossing.
YEAR OF WONDERS sounds intriguing, perhaps that will make for a good beginning. 🙂
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Elizabeth Lhuede
/ March 15, 2012Hi Deborah, Thanks for dropping by. I felt exactly the same way about Brooks until I heard her Boyer lectures. Year of Wonders does sound like a worthwhile read.
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deborahb
/ March 14, 2012Oh, & I meant to say: what a thoughtful, insightful review & a critique of a wide range of topics. Thank-you.
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Elizabeth Lhuede
/ March 15, 2012Thank you!
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Maree Kimberley
/ May 10, 2012Thanks for this thoughtful review Liz. I finished reading Caleb’s Crossing almost a couple of months ago and have attempted (& failed) to review it on goodreads. Reading your review helped me to clarify why I found it so difficult to write one. I did like Caleb’s Crossing, but as soon as I finished reading it, it left my mind. I couldn’t remember much about it, and I think that’s because of the genre shift. I never really bought Bethia’s relationship with Samuel, it seemed fake somehow, and like you I didn’t have an emotional response to the novel’s ending, although I felt I should have. The book was somehow empty, and I think the failure of Brooks to follow through on the relationship she set up between Bethia and Caleb was the cause of that emptiness.
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