Catherine Peake

Catherine Peake's Books and Writing

books

Surrounded by It

by Leave a Comment

If hipster history is your thing then this could be the book for you. Covering the sizeable period of 60,000BCE to 1824 (the year Australia was formally named Australia), historian, children’s author and comedy writer Richard Hunt has written a funny and informative popular history with Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia, published in 2014.   

The title gives a nod to Australia’s national anthem ‘Advance Australia Fair’, composed by Peter Dodds McCormick and first performed in 1878, and epitomises the geographical situation of Australia that impinged on the conditions experienced (and which are still experienced) by the settlers and citizens of Australia.

Starting with stories of the original inhabitants, then moving on to the discovery of land by European explorers and its settlement by British convicts and their keepers (and incidentally contributing to that nation’s great maritime reputation), Girt is not your standard history book. This doesn’t mean that it is not filled with facts and anecdotes from the time (even if some of them cannot be said to be central to the development of the nation), because besides its comedic narrative it is also a work of scholarship. 

Hunt looks at his subjects in some detail, even if taking an unconventional approach, and Girt covers the reactions of the original inhabitants and the Europeans to each other, the colonisation of Australia by the British, the first convicts, and the early governors ending with Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Hunt retains his geographical focus on Port Jackson and Botany Bay, and the notorious First Fleet plays a prominent role in the story.

Led by Captain Arthur Phillip, the eleven ships comprised the first convict and supply vessels to arrive in Australia with their occupants intending to stay there. Sketching the careers and personalities of prominent characters such as botanist Sir Joseph Banks, wool entrepreneur John MacArthur, and explorer and governor William Bligh, Hunt gives a personal touch to his narrative.

The gruesome nature of some of the events and conditions of the early years of the settlement are not passed over, but are treated to a comedic interpretation that some readers might find a less than sympathetic depiction of the conditions the settlers and indigenous people endured. The light touch nonetheless renders the book entertaining and easy to read, and Girt has been the winner of several awards. Hunt published the second title of his ‘The Unauthorised History of Australia’ series, True Girt, in 2016.

…

Time for Lunch

by Leave a Comment

In the tradition of humorous fictional diaries, Christina Hindhaugh’s quintessentially Australian take on life on a sheep property, For Better, For Worse and For Lunch, is a light and funny read. Published 1992, in a time before the ubiquity of mobile phones, the novel gives a realistic portrait of life on an isolated farm in the latter part of the 20th century.

The humour of the novel begins with the trials and tribulations of the fictional diary writer, Jess, who is newly married and living on the farm with her husband Edward, whom she variously nominates as ‘Edward the Industrious’, ‘Edward the Immodest’ or ‘Edward the Emotional’, depending on the situation at hand.

City born and bred, and miles away from her family and friends, Jess confronts the many challenges that present themselves in the daily run of farm life. Sheep drenching, shearing and pest control, not to mention bushfires, too much rain, not enough rain, crop blight and faulty water pumps test her courage and inner resources. But she manages to triumph over the situations thrown at her, or at least humorously learns to deal with them, and the book is in a sense a coming of age novel for those in their mid-twenties.

Highlighting the differences between city and country life, and her past life with her present life, the character Jess yearns for Melbourne, her former home city. Anticipated trips there are highlights that don’t always eventuate due to pressing events on the farm, and by the end of the book Jess has come to recognise the advantages invested in her new life on the farm.

The various compromises required in a marriage provide further scope for humorous situations. But with growing support from the local community Jess accepts the situations she has not previously had to contend with, including the changes in her husband’s behaviour due to stresses induced by particular times in the farming year such as harvest and lambing.

Jess doesn’t entirely leave her former life behind, and her love of literature shines throughout the book, with literary quotes and book titles making regular appearances. Awarded an OBE for services to women in agriculture, Hindhaugh drew on her own life experiences for the novel. Much of her other written work, encompassing articles, fiction and biography, is also a source of education for people wanting to know about life in the bush, all with a dash of humour thrown in.  

…

Author

Christina Hindhaugh

Title

For Better, For Worse and For Lunch by Christina Hindhaugh

Prime of Life

by Leave a Comment

Can a book whose main point is personal betrayal be funny? Muriel Spark’s novella The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, published in 1961 after appearing in The New Yorker, could be such a book. With the main character a spinster who works as a teacher and regards herself as ‘in her prime’, added to a group of schoolgirls who move from age ten to adulthood in the book, the story develops the various themes of education, growing up, work and private life, illustrating the human interactions with all of their accompanying emotions.

In imparting her particular brand of education, aimed at producing adults who will take their place in the world as members of the ‘crème de la crème’, Miss Brodie stimulates her girls to think outside the insular confines of suburban Edinburgh in the 1930s. In refusing to follow the standard curriculum, her teaching contains subjects such as art appreciation, the politics of the time and the development of personal awareness, not to mention elements of Miss Brodie’s own romantic history. Miss Brodie thereby produces a group of girls at odds with the rest of the school, leading to difficulties with the headmistress and other staff members.

One of the highlights of the book is Spark’s understanding of the female adolescent mind and how it interprets the partially understood facts of life as gleaned from overheard conversations. Liaisons between Miss Brodie and the two male staff members stimulate the girls’ imagination, enlivened by Miss Brodie herself who fills in much of the detail as she talks to her girls.

Much of the action of the story is seen through the eyes of one of the girls, Sandy, with some of the story told via ‘flash forwards’, or through the hindsight of the individuals in the group who reminisce as adults. Through Sandy, the character Jean Brodie begins to serve as a focus of pity and contempt, as well as love and affection. A story not always funny in itself, the humour is contained in the way Spark has written it.

Spark keeps her characters at arm’s length, but in the end the reader is left with an understanding of what motivates them. The book does not finish with a completely light touch, but it is perhaps a fitting closure to an illustration of humour in the daily lives of not always attractive characters, who are not in the end undeserving of the reader’s sympathy.

…

Author

Muriel Spark

Title

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark; The New Yorker

What the Devil?

by Leave a Comment

If you don’t want to bother with reading a book about a dozen or so characters (mostly older married couples) occupying themselves in their retirement, then you may as well not read Kingsley Amis’s 1986 Booker Prize winner The Old Devils. On the other hand, if that is not such a chore, you might find the book enjoyable and even funny, give or take one or two scenes.

It is debatable whether or not Amis is making the point that people don’t change over time, and that a person’s behaviour in their twenties is bound to be repeated up to and including the time of their retirement. The Old Devils illustrates the possibility of it anyway. The return to a Welsh town of the central character Alun Weaver and his wife Rhiannon, also sees a return to behaviour that mirrors the indiscriminate and casual liaisons of his youth, all with the same people who unlike him have not moved away from the area.

Alun has forged a career on the coattails of a Welsh local writer, Brydan, a fictional portrayal of the real-life writer Dylan Thomas. Alun writes a bit of poetry and emphasises his Welshness, but his main thrust has been regular appearances on television in England and a consequent expectation of media attention wherever he goes, including Wales. With Alun (born Alan), the novel encompasses the idea that once a fake always a fake. And, as with his wife, once a nice person always a nice person, even if arguably Rhiannon’s youth was spent in a way similar to Alun’s own.

Amis has his other characters, mostly couples of a similar vintage, weave in and out of the story around Alun, and they begin to reminisce during their regular drinking sessions (the men in the pub, the women in someone’s house), not in a particularly revelatory way, but as a reflection of the kinds of people they have always been. Whether or not this is of interest to the reader may depend upon their own vintage, but Amis illustrates a human perspective of events and character traits that can be seen as humorous in the long run.

The novel is incidentally also about love, from youth to older age, which dignifies some aspects of the characters’ reminiscences. Kingsley Amis’s son novelist Martin Amis regarded the novel highly, saying, ‘it stands comparison with any English novel of the century.’

…

Authors

Kingsley Amis; Martin Amis; Dylan Thomas

Title

The Old Devils

Sticking to the Formula

by Leave a Comment

Anyone can write them. All you have to do is follow the rules.

Limericks have a simple verse formula and instantly recognizable style: five lines, a strict rhyme scheme of AABBA (that cannot be tampered with), and a readily understood topic with humour an expected accompaniment. There is also an immediately recognisable metre to the scanning of a limerick, with some parody limericks making a humorous point of changing the metre of the last line or altering the rhyme scheme.

The composing of limericks has become so common, that if you get stuck with your poetic endeavours there are online limerick generators to assist, where all you have to do is feed in a few words and the computer will do the rest. But most budding versifiers prefer to write their own.

The limerick was made popular in the nineteenth century with the nonsense poems of Edward Lear, some of which he published in his A Book of Nonsense (1846). He didn’t use the term to describe them though, and took liberties with the five-line format by reducing it to four, but with his third line combining the third and fourth of a traditional limerick he retained the metre and rhyme scheme. The following famous verse is a particularly well-known Lear limerick.

There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, “It is just as I feared! –
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard.”

The origins of the limerick go back to the eighteenth century and earlier, where they are found in a form of folklore verse, and while it is assumed that the limerick is named after the Irish city of the same name it is not clear why.

There are several topics that form distinct groups of the limerick, such as the romantic limerick, the nonsense limerick, and those written for children, which have the added bonus of forming a good introduction to poetry. One of the most popular groups is of course the rude limerick, and the famous first line, ‘There was a young man from Nantucket,’ stands at the head of a multitude of different verses written by (mostly anonymous) authors.

The following anonymous limerick puts the rude limerick into perspective.

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

Why do some forms of verse remain popular? Surely humour has something to do with it.

…

Authors

Edward Lear; Anonymous

Titles

A Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear

The Stuff of Nightmares

by Leave a Comment

Possibly not to everybody’s taste, due perhaps to the frequent incursions of eighteenth-century learning into its narrative flow (not to mention various unbridled prejudices), Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock is undeniably funny. Written and published in 1818 (the same year as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), Nightmare Abbey is a novella-length satire aimed at the gothic and romantic clichés of the current-day novels.

With a country house setting in the form of the ancient Nightmare Abbey, and a cast (parts of the novel are set out as a play script) representing various stock characters from popular fiction, Peacock sets his story around a love triangle with the son of the house, Scythrop Glowry, at the centre.

A manufactured gloom is the prevailing atmosphere of the Abbey, with Scythrop’s father regularly entertaining guests whose eagerness to engage in morbid and inconclusive philosophical discussions perfectly matches their host’s negative view of the world. Happily for the occupants of the household there is a distraction available in the form of madeira, a popular tipple of the day.

Providing a counterpoint to the endless metaphysical debate, although still managing to retain his place in the misanthropic atmosphere, Scythrop sets about recovering from an earlier failed love affair. He develops a plan for saving the world, writes a treatise, then rapidly falls in love with two women at the same time, each of whom believes she is his intended bride. Various dramas ensue which end up involving most of the household and result in Scythrop falling into a deep depression. Luckily he has his father on hand to add to the development of the plot line.

Taking some of the models for his characters from poets he knew, with Scythrop a parody of his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley and two minor characters based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron, Peacock moves his story along with an added interest for his readers. He somehow also managed not to offend his friends in real life.

Peacock was one of the first wave of writers, such as Jane Austen who counted the Prince Regent as an admirer, that was beginning to change the status and relevance of artists in broader society. A new market for novels was developing in the increasingly affluent middle class, and books that provided acceptable entertainment for their leisure hours had the opportunity of becoming popular and their authors well-known. For some of the authors, including Thomas Love Peacock, their books have survived the time of writing and are still read today.

…

Authors

Thomas Love Peacock, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Jane Austen

Titles

Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

error: Content is protected !!