You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Australian war novels’ tag.
Well, this is rather lovely news: BODIES OF MEN has been shortlisted for the 2020 ACT Book of the Year.
For three decades now, the ACT and surrounding region have provided me with such a creatively sustaining environment. I left Sydney at the age of 18 and never really returned, preferring to call Canberra home, which I did for twenty years. Even though to most people it’s only ever seen as the centre of Australia’s federal politics (to the frustration of those who live there), and perhaps as a relatively well-known ‘designed’ city, to me Canberra has been the place where I began exploring so many things – all that made me feel truly alive.
Literature swiftly became the core of that.
Ten years ago, I moved 80 kilometres up the road and across the border and Goulburn, in New south Wales, is where I live now. However, it’s becoming my habit to say that Goulburn is my hometown, Canberra is my home city, and the ACT region is where my creative community lives. So, it feels…special to have BODIES OF MEN being endorsed by my peers in the ‘hood.
Nice also knowing my funny little war novel still has a bit of puff.
As ever, gratitude to Gaby Naher of Left Bank Literary, my publisher Robert Watkins, and Hachette Australia. Thanks also to artsACT, which administers the award – it mustn’t have been easy when the process got, well, plagued.
All the love in the world to everyone who has engaged with the novel.
That’s where it lives now: in the minds of readers.
Onwards.
As a schoolboy I lied to my friends.
Not about what I had done on the weekend but about the ‘fact’ that I did not watch war movies, because I did not like war. To be accurate, I clearly remember saying, ‘I object to war.’ I grew up with parents who were constantly fighting – they hated each other with an unfathonable intensity – so it made sense that I did not seek out high-conflict stories in which violence was at the core.
But I did engage with war stories.
Very much.
I used to be glued to the television while watching The Dam Busters, which was made in 1955 but repeated regularly, and The Great Escape (1963). Along with most other children my age, I laughed along with Hogan’s Heroes (1965-1971 with endless reruns). I was obsessed with Jeff Wayne’s musical version of The War of the Worlds (1978) based on the novel by HG Wells (1898) – as the disco rhythms got my heart beating fast I would sit on the floor and be transfixed by the cover illustrations that depicted a war between humanity and alien invaders.
I allowed myself to be captivated by the serialisation of Roger McDonald’s classic war novel 1915; it was aired in 1982, when I was 14 years old. At the end of the final episode, when the main character, a soldier, comes home a physically and psychologically damaged young man, I turned to my mother and said, ‘What will happen to him?’ She said, ‘We don’t know, do we?’
I said, ‘But I need to know.’
Four decades later, that need has not gone away: I have not stopped trying to work out how we let things get so out of hand that the only ‘solution’ is to pick up weapons and try blasting the enemy to smithereens.
Just before I sat down to begin writing this piece it took less than ten minutes to retrieve 50 war books from my shelves. There is the Great War poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. There are the Great War novels: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1928), Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929), and Regeneration (1991), Pat Barker’s fictional account of the close friendship between Owen and Sassoon as they recovered from what we would now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There is Stephen Crane’s American Civil War story The Red Badge of Courage (1952), which I first read as a boy – perhaps that was the book that had sparked my bold schoolyard claim
I own the classic Australian war novels, including The Middle Parts of Fortune by Frederic Manning (1929), the previously mentioned 1915 by Roger McDonald (1979), and Richard Flanagan’s Man Booker Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013). There are the glittering international successes: Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (2013), All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (2014), and Robin Robertson’s astonishing verse novel about post-war life, The Long Take, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.
The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh (1991) and Aminatta Forna’s The Hired Man (2013) have both had a significant impact on me.
There is nonfiction too. Peter Stanley’s gutsy Bad Characters: sex, crime, mutiny, murder and the Australian Imperial Force (2010), which was the co-winner of the 2011 Prime Minister’s Prize for history, and Charles Glass’s very moving Deserter: a hidden history of the Second World War (2013).
I could go on.
What if I applied that old trick: my house is on fire – or there is an approaching army at the end of my street – and I only have time to rescue three war books?
*
Keep reading over at the Canberra Times, which published this piece on 7 November 2020.
Well, the writing life is full of surprises, isn’t it?
Today it was announced that BODIES OF MEN has been longlisted in the inaugural 2020 ARA Historical Novel Prize, which recognises the best historical long-form fiction in Australia and New Zealand.
Crikey, I did not expect that.
Indeed, expecting anything as an author is a recipe for a disaster. Mostly I just want to get better, and, perhaps, to connect with more and more folk who are interested in literature. So a nod like this is a shot in the arm (to mangle my body parts).
And what a list to be on. It’s all rather dazzling, which means I’ll head to the couch for the rest of the day. This afternoon the Southern Tablelands weather is miserable – cool and rainy – so perhaps I’ll light the fire.
It’s made me wonder what is it that any writer hopes to achieve when they sit down at the desk and start working on the first sentence, and then, hopefully, the last sentence. I’m not sure recognition is the answer; perhaps it’s just about wanting to create some kind of ripples in the literary pond, and, with a bit of luck, the bigger pool beyond.
In any case, there’ll be a few moments of reflection to mark the occasion, and then back to the desk in the morning.
Over and out.
*
UPDATE: a brief interview and reading for the longlisting can be found here.
In a couple of weeks I’ll be LIVE ONLINE talking all things Writing War with the very wonderful Melanie Myers, Simon Cleary, and Cass Moriarty, who must be one of the hardest-working people in Australian letters.
The panel, which was organised last year by Avid Reader Bookshop in Brisbane, was originally scheduled to be held in person in the store. However, things have changed a lot since then, haven’t they. It’s been a tough year for so many, a heart-breaking year, a tragic year. The writing community has had to rethink how it does things, with events either cancelled or moved online. Thankfully the Writing War discussion will still be happening, thanks to the wonders of the internet and the tenacity of folk.
Who knows what we’ll end up talking about, but we’ve already decided that we won’t be shy about heading into the contentious (and increasingly frightening) world of Australian military history. Why is it so hard to talk about war history? Why are so many scared about having a point of view?
Have we really reached the point where it is impossible to have an alternative or creative view about Australia’s military past? Is it now impossible to critique it, even in a respectful and informed way? Why is it that people have lost their jobs – indeed some have even been kicked out of the country – if they have tweeted criticism about Anzac Day?
It will all be happening at 6.30pm on Monday 20 April. The tickets are just $5. It’ll be via Zoom so it’s open to folk anywhere in the world.
It’d be great to have your company.
Booking information here. Big thanks to to Krissy Kneen and the amazing team at Avid Reader Bookshop.
The leaves on the trees are beginning to yellow, I’m sitting at my desk and wearing a dreadful pair of black tracksuit pants, a blue-striped hooded top, and a pair of red woolen socks – the mornings are cool but the days are still warm, if not very warm – and there is an ever-so-perplexing feeling in my chest and legs, as if tomorrow I will head overseas on an adventure. But I’m not heading overseas tomorrow. On 23 April – so, in six weeks’ time – my novel BODIES OF MEN will be officially published.
Bodies of Men: now with added endorsement from Karen Viggers
Yikes.
As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I began writing the novel in 2013 when I was a writer-in-residence at UNSW Canberra, which provides the campus for the Australian Defence Force Academy. Since then I have had the great fortune to work on some other projects, including THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT, but progressing (reworking, re-imagining, refining) the story that would become BODIES OF MEN has been a mostly private obsession.
Put simply, I could not let the story go. Or perhaps the story would not let me go? Either way, here we are, with the novel soon be published by Hachette Australia.
How do I feel? Grateful.
A little about the story:
Egypt, 1941. Only hours after disembarking in Alexandria, William Marsh, an Australian corporal at twenty-one, is face down in the sand, caught in a stoush with the Italian enemy. He is saved by James Kelly, a childhood friend from Sydney and the last person he expected to see. But where William escapes unharmed, not all are so fortunate. William is sent to supervise an army depot in the Western Desert, with a private directive to find an AWOL soldier: James Kelly. When the two are reunited, James is recovering from an accident, hidden away in the home of an unusual family – a family with secrets. Together they will risk it all to find answers. Soon William and James are thrust headlong into territory more dangerous than either could have imagined.
Novelists chatting with booksellers in Sydney. Photo credit: Hachette Australia
Four reasons for that feeling of gratefulness:
- as of yesterday, the final edits are done and next week Hachette sends the novel to the printer (to push the travel metaphor, it feels as though the boat’s being slid into the water and either it will take us to the other shore or we’ll sink somewhere along the way);
- international best-selling author Karen Viggers has provided an endorsement: ‘A beautifully written, tender and sensitive love story told within the tense and uncertain context of war’ (how wonderful it was to receive Karen’s response and then see it placed on the top of the front cover);
- in the past fortnight Hachette sent me and four other novelists to Melbourne to meet booksellers over lunch and dinner, and then we did it again in Sydney this week; it was so terrific to spend time with those who work tirelessly to get novels in the hands – and hearts – of readers; these sessions also provided me with the first experience of talking about my novel in public, which I was a bit rubbish at initially but soon managed to find a way of doing it succinctly (I hope); and
- BODIES OF MEN will be launched in Canberra at 6pm on Thursday 16 May at The Street Theatre – the forever thoughtful novelist Robyn Cadwallader and engaging performance poet CJ Bowerbird will provide personal responses, and there will be book sales, and, of course, booze.
So, it’s autumn. Within weeks there will be the need to go looking for firewood, and the second doona will have to be put on the bed, for dinner there will be soups rather than salads and red wine instead of white, and, this year, there will be a novel called BODIES OF MEN in the world. Yes, I’m grateful, very grateful, and I’m also excited – I might just have to buy a new pair of tracksuit pants to mark the occasion.
Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecote 