📚 🚶Introducing Our May book
Discover The Children's Bach by Helen Garner
Dear walking book clubbers,
Thanks so much for all your positive feedback and support about last week’s letter introducing my new charity Bookbanks.
Now May is here, and with it comes The Children’s Bach - small and lethal, shattering the domestic with luminous, pared-back prose. Read on to find our dates for our May meet ups, some thoughts about the book to mull over, and links to read (and listen) on. Enjoy!
Before we get going, thanks to Michael who’s highlighted the Barbican’s James Baldwin through film season this month - so if you’re looking ahead to our June book, Giovanni’s Room, it might be of interest.
Our May The Children’s Bach events
Please note that for the benefit of your fellow walkers, you need to have read the book before coming along to a walking book club. If you’ve not read the book, you are very welcome to join the Zoom instead.
Emily’s Regent’s Park Walking Book Club: Friday 17th May, 12-1.45pm, setting off from Daunt Books, 84 Marylebone High Street, W1U 4QW, £8-15
Emily’s Hampstead Heath Walking Book Club: Sunday 19th May, 11.30-1pm, setting off from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road, NW3 2QB, £8-15
Emily’s Zoom Book Club: Monday 20th May, 8-9pm, £1-15
On Our Reading Radar: Friday 24th May, 1.30-2pm: Australia Join this month’s discussion thread to share your cultural highlights from the month, as well as your recommendations on the theme of AUSTRALIA - What other great Australian (and New Zealand) novels and films should we know about?
Buy The Children’s Bach from Daunt Books HERE and receive 10% off using the code WBC at checkout, or just tell them you’re in the group if you’re buying it in the shop.
Other May author events - ticket GIVEAWAY
Wednesday 8th May, 6.30pm
With Catherine Chidgey - an incredibly talented New Zealand author - on her wonderfully imaginative new novel, The Axeman’s Carnival at the Lutyens & Rubinstein Bookshop in Notting Hill. Tickets HERE.
Thursday 16th May, 6.30pm
With Emma Tarlo about her astonishing non-fiction book Under the Hornbeams, about the author’s friendship with two rough sleepers in Regent’s Park. In the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town. Tickets HERE.
I’m delighted to have TWO FREE TICKETS to each event to give away - if you’d like any of them, please drop me a line.
Introducing The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner
As it says in the David Nicholls cover puff, this is ‘a jewel of a novel about a perfect family falling apart’. Australian writer Helen Garner was born in 1942 and this book was first published in 1984, recently republished as part of a trio of her great early work, along with Monkey Grip (about addiction) and This House of Grief (a true crime court case). Although she’s long been lauded in the Australian world of letters, republishing this trio is bringing her long-overdue recognition in America and the UK. I am so glad that this widespread acclaim has happened while she’s still alive, rather than coming posthumously, as is often the case (e.g. with Persephone Books’ Dorothy Whipple). It is important to remember that she’s not for everyone - see below for a hatchet job of a review, amidst the many positives!
You can read an extract from the start of the novel HERE.
Here are a few points to consider, to keep you going till our mid-month discussions:
Characters
In The Children’s Bach, Garner moves between six main characters. Here is a very simplified cast list:
Dexter - the rather vocal patriarch of the Fox family, married to Athena, with two children, the younger of whom is severely disabled
Athena - married to Dexter and seemingly a domestic goddess (at one point Elizabeth describes her as the goddess ‘of war and needlecraft’)
Elizabeth - an old university friend of Dexter’s, brought back into his orbit through a chance encounter at the start of the book
Vicki - Elizabeth’s sister, twenty-years’ younger than her - come to stay because their mother has just died.
Phillip - Elizabeth’s musician boyfriend-of-sorts
Poppy - Philip’s daughter.
Garner gives us very little about her characters’ backstories, or details of their lives other than in the time we spend with them. They are slippery - I found it hard to keep them straight in my head. With so little knowledge of them, it’s hard to know how to expect them to behave, which makes for quite an unsettling reading experience. Do you think Garner’s equivocal about each of her characters? Are there any who are purely ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or do they all show more complicated behaviour? What did you make of the narrative being shared between them all? Do you think there is one particular character at the heart of the book, or not?
A perfect family…
… or is it? The Fox family falls apart when Elizabeth, Philip and Vicki penetrate it, but are the fault lines already in place? Would some kind of family disintegration happen at some point even without the catalyst of Elizabeth and her entourage? Perhaps on the surface all is calm, but underneath there’s a violent, simmering rage. I was particularly shocked when Athena calmly says ‘of course’ she’s fantasised about pushing her disabled child under a truck, ‘hundreds of times’ (p.55).
Domestic bliss
This is a domestic novel, taking place largely within the Fox’s home, and with many details from this sphere: the iron, the washing up … A key moment of symbolic exchange between Athena and Elizabeth takes place while gathering in the washing from the line. What did you make of Garner’s emphasis on these domestic details? I found it very unnerving when this world is punctured by outsiders like Philip, who ‘fell into strange beds in houses where a boiling saucepan might as easily contain a syringe as an egg’ (p.40). It’s wholesome soup, not syringes in the saucepans of the Fox house. There’s also the horrible symbolic bit about putting the rabbit out into the wild - do you think the Foxes can cope with the inhospitable wild, or have they been domesticated for too long?
Music
This weaves through the book: the piano, Dexter’s love of loud singing, Poppy’s cello lesson, Billy’s singing the Skye boat song, and Philip’s gig to name just a few instances… What is Garner doing here? Why is she making us think so much about music? Is she comparing the craft of her pared-back writing to music, when Philip explains that to make a song, ‘You put everything you can think of in at the beginning … and then you start taking bits out’ (p. 110)? Or how about when he gives a girl a tip (p.147) to ‘take out the cliches … Don’t explain everything. Leave holes. The music will do the rest’? If Garner is inviting comparison between music and her work, what do you make of her work on these terms? Is the book free of cliches? Do the holes work?
So much to discuss! I hope these fire off some interesting ideas.
More about Helen Garner
THIS New York Times review by Daphne Merkin, of The Children’s Bach along with This House of Grief, is a great place to begin.
Rumaan Alan has written insightfully about her experience of reading the book for Lit Hub, HERE. THIS by Bernadette Brennan for The Australian Review is a great detailed piece of literary criticism. And THIS by Isabella Trimboli for the Nation is great on Garner’s portrait of the threat within the domestic.
I think it’s important also to read THIS real hatchet job of a review by Peter Hayes for The Sydney Institute. He makes some good points, but for me these aren’t integral to the book. You might feel differently!
THIS 20 questions with Helen Garner from the TLS is fun. I enjoyed listening to her interviewed by Alex Clark on Open Book HERE (along with Andrew O’Hagan).
And HERE she is interviewed by Rachel Cooke for the Guardian. Don’t forget that you can see Rachel Cooke interview Helen Garner live at Daunt Books on 28th May, tickets HERE. I’m sure there’ll be a few walking book clubbers in the audience - I wish I could join but unfortunately I’ll be away that half-term week.
Happy reading,
Emily
I loved this novel so much!