The Silence, by Murray Bail

 

By Núria Lecina

BIOGRAPHY

Murray Bail (born the 22^nd of September 1941) is an Australian writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction.

He was born in Adelaide, South Australia, a second son of Cyril Lindsay Bail (1914-1966) and Hazel Bail (née Ward). His father worked in the tramways and his mother was a housewife and a milliner. He has two brothers.

He has been married twice. His first wife was Margaret Bail (née Wordsworth). They got married in 1965 and divorced in 1988.

His second wife was ​Helen Garner; they got married in 1992, and they divorced in 2000. She also was a well-known Australian writer.

He has lived most of his life in Australia, except for sojourns in India (1968-70), England and other parts of Europe (1970-74). After working for advertising agencies in Adelaide and Melbourne, he moved with his first wife to India in 1968, where he worked for an agency in Bombay. During his travels, he became ill of amoebic dysentery and went to London for treatment. Once there, he decided that the novel he had written in India was worthless and threw it in the trash.

For recovering, he remained in London for five years (1970-1975), spending the first year on unemployment benefits. He then wrote for many newspapers, which encouraged him to publish his first novels once he returned to Australia. This travel’s experience influenced him. Many of his works reflect which he, an Australian, thinks when observing his country from outside, its culture, and the way people live.

Now he lives in Sydney.

Before dedicating himself to literature, Bail worked in galleries and as an art critic. He was trustee of the National Gallery of Australia from 1976 to 1981, and wrote a book on Australian artist Ian Fairweather.

 

Bail is considered one of the most innovative Australian writers in short fiction, classified as very interesting, unique and an intellectual of the 20th century.

He is known for his dry humour and for challenging the traditional narrative. Bail used to say that novels should not be stories with a beginning and an end, but that they should be instruments for thinking. That inspiration comes from mistakes. When nothing goes as you expected, imagination begins, he says.

He did not believe in sudden inspiration, he believes in thought and patience. He could spend years revising a work. He is an admirer of Kafka, Borges, Nabokov and Calvino —all writers who play with language and with the way people tell stories.

He had often said that Australians were too practical, and that the local culture did not value invention or fantasy.

He says it with irony, but it is a real criticism: he wanted Australian literature to stop being just stories of the outback and survival, and become a more philosophical and universal literature. He doesn’t have a very extensive body of work, but he does have a lot of work to do. He says that writing is like making furniture with words: few pieces, but well-made and useful. This is in line with his passion for cabinetmaking and object design.

 

HIS WORK

 

-Novel

Homesickness (1980)

Holden’s Performance (1987)

Eucalyptus (1998). He has been awarded several times for this work. This is the story of a botanical fairy tale. It is his most famous novel, where realism and fairy tale are mixed. A father promises that only he who knows the name of all the eucalyptus trees of his property will be able to marry his daughter. Curiously, Eucalyptus was to be made into a film starring Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe, but the production was cancelled at the last minute due to artistic disagreements between Bail and the director.

Camouflage (2000)

The Pages (2008)

The Voyage (2012)

 

-Non-fiction

Ian Fairweather (1981). This work was written when Murray was working on the National Gallery of Australia; it’s a biography of this artist, an Australian painter who was also eccentric and solitary, who lived in a cabin made of drums and scrap wood.

Longhand (1989)

 

-Notebooks 1970-2003 (2005)

He (2021). The last book, only 164 pages to explain his autobiography. He writes it in the third person; he doesn’t like to use the first. It’s curious that he describes why he started writing his memoirs: it was dissatisfaction of his way of working, sitting at a table writing every morning and at weekends. And he admits that the inspiration for his fiction is found in his childhood memories and travels. He says that he has lost interest in art, and that music occupies more of his free time than looking at paintings.

 

-Short fiction

Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories (1975), republished in 1986 as The Drover's Wife and Other Stories. Here is where we can find our short story, The Silence.

 

 

SUMMARY

 

Let’s set the scene:

Australia is a continent of seven and half millions square kilometres. It’s the largest world island. In spite of this extension, there are only 28 million inhabitants and the population density is of 3,4 residents for square kilometre.

The first residents arrived there 42,000 years ago. They were nomads, hunters and collectors. Their spirituals values were revering the earth and believing in the dream time. Nowadays, Aboriginal people keep this culture even though the political changes. It’s the country less world populated, where the ninety per cent lives in the urban areas. The big portion inside is arid and desert.

It would be in one of these deserts, some years ago, that we could imagine at our character, Joe Tapp.

The Silence seems a simple history. Joe Tapp lives in the desert, in an enormous landscape, alone, in a campsite where he has a tent, a freeze, a petrol drum, firewood that obtain from some cut trees and a lot of rubbish. All of it scattered.

It’s not clear if Joe is an Aboriginal Australian, but his habits and his behaviour make us think that he is very close to this culture.

His life is very repetitive, the story explains his daily routines. For over a year he has been there, in the desert, hunting rabbits that live hidden in the dunes. He sets traps so that they are stuck in the rabbit’s neck. His activity is in the morning, he goes with sacks on his back to collect the corpses. Once in the camp, he skins and cleans them, removes the pelts and puts them in the freezer. He rests, and at sunset, he returns to the trap area to prepare them again. He sleeps and starts the new day again.

Joe is an introverted person, rooted in the environment where peace and silence reign; tranquillity is only broken by some animal noise. It’s the silence of nature.

All this activity, which aims at his survival, is altered every two weeks when Norm Treloar arrives with his noisy red truck, to buy and pick up the dead frozen rabbits. This is the only relation with another human. Joe doesn’t feel well at all when Norman arrives. Norman is a communicative man, and always, like a social routine, greets him, asks him how everything is going. Then, they load the meat on the truck, they have a tea, and finally Norman leaves, raising the desert’s dust. All return to natural state, the silence!

Joe feels worse and worse each time. He is overwhelmed, often thinks about the meeting with Norman, and suffers waiting for the next time. Every time he feels the meeting more intrusive. Breaking the silence bothers him, disturbs him. Norman’s words and noise offend him. He doesn’t want this relationship, he even throws to the fire the newspaper that Norman lefts. He wants silence, but also humanity disconnection. But he needs to go on with the business.

Joe thinks about his work, enjoys his peace, he loves to be there, surrounded by nature, he spends hours squatting. Like an Aboriginal.

And when suddenly he heard the truck’s far noise, Joe knows what he would do. He runs to the sand dune and hides behind the bushes. From there, he can see the campsite, and he lets Norman do the work. The truck driver looks around, searches for Joe, honks the horn, smokes a cigarette, and finally goes to the freezer, fills the truck with the meat, and leaves.

The silence returns, and Joe comes back to the campsite ready to carry on his work. Now he can go and setting rabbit’s traps, happy to have had a resolution.

 

My opinion

Silence is the absence of all sound or noise. In this story, it is the fact of stopping talking little by little. Joe is becoming more and more silent. For what reason?

Joe decided to be there more than a year ago, in the desert. We don’t know where he came from or what he did before, or why he came there. He chose to live in a place where it was easier to find himself, to be in contact with a silent world, to live at his own pace.

I think that the environment has been absorbing and integrating him in the nature, and he has finally found an inner peace and a meaning to his life. Possibly we, who live in a completely different place, don’t understand this. We live in a continuous communication, sometimes very crazy.

Silence can also be a kind of non-verbal communication, and maybe Joe’s story wants to transmit this other lifestyle to us. Maybe it’s not necessary to speak a lot and think more.

 

QUESTIONS

-Hunting with traps today here is forbidden: What can be the rules for an "ethical" hunt?

-Now and then there is a rabbit pest, or a locust pest, or any kind of pests. If they are natural phenomena, must we fight them?

-What are the benefits of being alone? And the damages? Do we need moments to be alone? Why are we nowadays more individualistic?

VOCABULARY

singlet, drums, burrowed, gears, whine, melt, sport, juice, grub, saltbush, billy, rowdy, strain, stunted, revved

 

Collector, by Raymond Carver

Summary and analysis

Review

Deep analysis

BIOGRAPHY: click here

SUMMARY

Mr Slater is at home alone. Outside, it’s raining. He is out of work and has been waiting for the post man for some time. He’s expecting an important letter.

Then somebody knocks at the door, but it isn’t the postman, because he knows his tread. Mr Slater doesn’t move at the knocking, but the man outside insists. It turns out to be a salesman, Mr Audrey Bell. He was looking for Mrs Slater, because he says she had won a prize. But there is no Mrs Slater in the house. Later we learn that the “prize” is a free vacuuming of the house.

Mr Bell comes into the house a little bit as if he was invading it: Mr Slater doesn’t really invite him to come in, but, although he puts up some resistance at the beginning, he soon seems a bit indifferent to the intrusion. The salesman takes off his coat and his galoshes and starts to assemble a contraption that turns out to be a vacuum cleaner. He behaves as if he were at home, and even asks for an aspirin because he says he has a headache.

Once the machine is ready, he goes to the next room and starts to clean a mattress. It is an easy task because the blankets are on the floor, as if nobody wanted to sleep on it anymore.

After that, Mr Bell goes to the sitting room and asks for some dirt or a full ashtray. Mr Slater gives him a full ashtray and Mr Bell empties its contents onto the carpet there; he wants to demonstrate how well the machine works. All the while, the owner of the house has been watching the salesman’s operations without complaining, but also keeping telling him he isn’t going to buy anything.

While the salesman is doing his demonstration, the letter Mr Slater was waiting for arrives. The postman has slid it inside through the mail slot. But neither Mr Slater nor the Mr Bell go to pick it up.

When the salesman has finished his work, picks the letter up, reads the recipient (that was Mr Slater), folds the letter, puts it in his pocket, puts on his coat and galoshes, and goes away. Never Mr Slater tries to get the letter; he only makes sure he was indeed the addressee. He doesn’t buy the vacuum cleaner.

 

QUESTIONS

 

-I suppose you had paid attention that in the story the dialogues are not marked (with quotations marks, for example). Why do you think the author uses this stylistic device?

-In your view, why does the salesman mention some important writers? What do you know about Auden, Rilke, Voltaire and Madame Châtelet?

-Mr Bell pulled his lips? What can be the meaning of this gesture? Do you remember some other curious gestures or grimaces?

-In your opinion, what is the relation between the title and the story?

-The story is very simple, but it has to have a deeper meaning: for you, what is its true meaning?

 

VOCABULARY

 

notices, railhead, corns, matted, churchly, scoop, tugged

In the Hours of Darkness, by Edna O'Brien

EDNA O’BRIEN, by Glòria Torner

She is one of the most representative contemporary authors in Ireland as a novelist, playwright, children’s and youth literature, memoirist, scriptwriter, poet and short-story writer.

 

BIOGRAPHY

Josephine Edna O’Brien was born in 1930, in Tuamgraney, County Clare, a small rural village in the west of Ireland. The youngest of four children, she grew up in the atmosphere of Irish National Catholicism of the 1940s, marked by an alcoholic father, who was a farmer, and a strict mother in religious practice who considered writing “a path of perdition”.

After finishing primary school in her village, she was educated at the Convent of Sisters of Mercy, a boarding school in Galway.  In her 20s, she went to university in Dublin where she graduated in Pharmacy in 1950 and where she worked briefly as an apothecary. In 1952, against her parents’ wishes, she married the writer Ernest Gebler, with whom she had two children. They settled in London, where O’Brien turned to writing as a full-time occupation. Ten years later, in 1962, she escaped from a loveless marriage and moved to the desolate suburban London where, at least, she felt free to write.

Her life has been divided between England, where she has lived for more than 50 years and where she writes, and Ireland, where her writing comes from and where it endlessly returns, exploring her home country from a more detached perspective.

Edna O’Brien has publicly acknowledged that James Joyce’s works, especially A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, were her main inspiration and led her to devote to literature for the rest of her life.

Her first novel, The Country Girls, written when she was 30, was published in 1961.  It is the history of two girls who live in a backward and repressive country, especially in rural areas of Ireland. They grow up in their strict homes, attend a convent school from which they are expelled and travel to Dublin and London in search of imaginary opportunities, love and sex. This book was considered a scandal in her country and she was labelled an enemy of Ireland. Her family felt humiliated by this book. It was the first instalment of a trilogy, written in autobiographical style, completed with The Lonely Girl, later published as Girl with Green Eyes, and Girls in the Married Bliss. Now, these two books are set in London, and there the protagonists become disillusioned with marriage and men in general.

She has written more than twenty works of fiction where the main themes are Ireland and women. Some of them are: The High Road, Down by the River, In the Forest, The Light of Evening, The Little Red Chairs, and the last one, written in 2019, Girl, which was inspired by the Nigerian schoolgirls who were kidnapped by members of Boko Haram.

Other notable works include a dramatic work about Virginia Woolf, two important biographies, of James Joyce and Lord Byron, and an autobiographical essay called Mother Ireland.

She also has published nine short story collections where their setting varies, although Ireland appears in several of them. One of them is From Mrs Reinhard and Other Stories, where In the Hours of Darkness is included.

 

 

SUMMARY

The story opens when the protagonist, Lena, a middle-aged divorced woman, is going on her way from London to Cambridge. She is accompanying her son, Iain, who is about to start his university studies. Along the way, she draws a parallelism between her memories of her loneliness feeling of a day in the rural land surrounding Sydney in Australia, where she had been before, and this present situation. She describes the English landscape with these words: “devoid of houses and tillage”, “depopulated land”.

When they are already approaching Cambridge, Iain observes the university complex with optimism, but Lena, who is imagining the general atmosphere of study, is intrigued and frightened. She would like to be in her hotel bedroom reading the novels of Jane Austen, her favourite writer. She reflects on the future that awaits her: she will remain alone because Iain is the youngest child, the last one who lived with her. The pessimism and the loneliness for her future begins now, with these words, “bereft of her children”.

Arriving at the hotel in Cambridge, Lena observes things she didn’t expect: the hotel is near to a car park, ruined, with a lot of bars and a general confusion and noise, a “big ramshackle place”. When the porter, who takes Lena to her room, loses his way, she gets dismayed.  She also dislikes her single room because it isn’t a familiar looking room and the furnishing represents everything she hates. At that moment, she would like to be at home, and she pronounces the sentence “Bad place to die”.

Then, wanting a cup of tea, Lena goes to the lobby where there are other guests. Her new impression is more negative than the previous ones. There is a lot of confusion in the lobby, full of shopping bags that prevent a fluid passage. 

Later, in the College, she thinks she is watching a scene not of academic life, but of a commercial life, and the people there don’t look like scholars or academics, they look like salesmen or tradesmen. After a while, Lena, her son, a young professor, two first course students and their host meet to have dinner. Lena says the meat is “lovely”, even though it is not true, and all the dinner is not very successful. The conversation turns to a professor with peculiar and strange habits, or about the reasons why the students are expelled before the end of the course; but Lena, however, is not listening because she is concentrated on the beauty of the evening outside. Although the dinner has started early, their host is the first to leave. Then Lena goes to the host’s bedroom, where she has left her coat before. There he starts talking about the reasons why he has never married. She gets frightened when she looks at a violent image: a painting of a wolf with a man’s eyes hanging on the wall.  At that moment, she impulsively kisses the host.

After dinner, Lena and her son stay for a while outside, walking on the street. They part at her hotel, where Lena says good night to Iain. They decide to visit the town the following morning because they know the time to separate is approaching.

This first descriptive part of the story, the adventure of moving house, has become a desolate experience with a dark atmosphere. She has imagined a better introduction for her son, but now everything seems to work against her, and this second part will be like a nightmare.

Lena goes to her room, but instead of the quiet room she has booked, she begins to hear loud noises and discovers there is a party going on. She leaves her hotel to find a place to sleep in her son’s, but when she gets to the College, she sees a young man wearing a small motorcyclist’s leather jacket coming towards her; at first, she doesn’t recognize him, but then she realizes that he is Iain; he’s going “in search of adventure”. They talk and joke for a time, and they say good night again.

She goes back to her noisy hotel, and the manager asks her if she would like another hotel; she decides to move to another one, but this second new hotel is worse than the first one. She finds the porter with an aggressive Dalmatian dog; he leads her to a room where another woman is sleeping, and both are annoyed by the mistake. At last, she arrives to an empty room very similar to the one she has just left.  It’s impossible for Lena to relax and sleep, although she decides to take sleeping pills. Waiting till morning in this room, she spots a notice above the mirror with an amusing comment, and, after that, she sits in a chair and waits for a moment. Finally, she decides to spend the night in the armchair.

Curious and surrealist ending of the story!

 

Two remarks

The importance of the title: “Darkness” means in a literal level “at night”, but in a symbolic level it means “difficult period”. There are also some symbolic images like “the wolf with a man’s eyes”, “a drunken woman holding up a broken silver shoe”, or “the Dalmatian dog”.  

As the story is written in autobiographical style and the narrator uses the Lena’s point of view along all the story, the events and feelings of past, the feelings and facts of present and the thoughts of future of Lena are present all around the story.

 

QUESTIONS

-Why does the narrator think of Jane Austen?

-The narrator feels sad because she’s leaving her son at the University. Do you think

her son feels the same?

-When you travel, what do you prefer, renting an apartment or staying in a hotel? Tell us your reasons why.

-Did you ever have a full English breakfast? How did you like it?

-How would you like to be greeted in a new place, as for instance, job, school, club…?

-In your view, why did the narrator kiss the College host?

-Did you have a bad experience with pranks at school / work? In your opinion, do they have to be forbidden?

-What are the advantages of studying in a boarding school?

-What do you need to sleep comfortably? What do you do if you can’t sleep? Do you take any pills?

-What is the relation between the title and the story?

 

VOCABULARY

tillage, tawny, bleached, predicament, bereft, props, toddler, lobby, ramshackle, buxom, spatters, spurned, china, freshmen, sorted ... out, johns, touch and go, cockerel, seed, sherbet, grouse, tackle, game, demurred, sprouts, raspberry chantilly, frayed paisley, cruise, forborne, knit up the ravelled, laced, rusticated 

Writers talk about Edna O'Brien 

The Little Governess, by Katherine Mansfield

SUMMARY 

This story deals with the naivety of a young woman and the lechery of a dirty old man who makes profit of her inexperience.

The protagonist, who has no name and so thus her innocence is highlighted, is a just graduated governess who travels from a British town to Munich to work as a tutor for a German family. She has never been abroad and, because of her ingenuousness, we can suppose she has neither been out nor away very often, and, as in the story there isn’t any mention of her family, we can think she has to be an orphan or an illegitimate daughter who has been raised in an institution and then sent to a boarding school, a case that wasn’t unusual in Great Britain in the 19^th century and at the beginning of the 20^th century.

The lady from the Governess Bureau who has found her a position in Augsburg, near Munich, gives her a lot of cautions to survive from all the dangers she is going to encounter during her trip. Perhaps this is the reason why the girl is afraid of everything and everybody. She is so afraid that she tends to behave clumsily to people she suspects they want to swindle or take advantage of her; but then, these people who have to serve her are even ruder.

On the ferry which crosses the English Channel, she accommodates in the cabin for women only and there she feels safe and happy. But when she arrives in France and has to take the train, the porter, or the station master, treats the poor girl very coarsely, and, when she doesn’t want to give him the tip, or pay the price he asks for, he takes his revenge leading a man to her carriage for Ladies Only and even stripping off the restrictive sign that would have protected her from male company.

However, the man in her carriage is old, extremely old, she believes; but he seems a very polite and respectable gentleman from Germany; we even know he has been a civil servant, and eventually our governess imagines that a man like him could have been her grandfather.

The little governess destination is a hotel in Munich where her employer, a wife’s doctor, is going to pick her up at six in the evening, and, as the train is arriving in the morning, the kind old man suggests her that would be interesting for her to pay a visit to the beautiful city, and he offers her to be her cicerone. The young woman has some doubts, but eventually accepts.

At the hotel, the girl again behaves clumsily, this time with the waiter, when she doesn’t want to tip him. Moreover, this waiter suspects there is an illicit relationship between her and the old man.

So the girl and the old man go round Munich to see the sights. The man is perhaps a little bit too attentive because he buys her some sausages, pays for her lunch, offers his umbrella and his arm when it’s raining…

When it’s time (and even late) to go back to the hotel to meet her employer, the old man insists her to show his little flat, telling her that she doesn’t have to worry because there is a housekeeper. But when she goes in, there’s nobody in his bachelor’s house; there he offers her some wine and asks her to give him a kiss; and, as she denies it, he assaults her and tries to steal a kiss in the mouth, and really he gets it. The girl defends herself, gets free and runs away from the flat. Now she has discovered the old man’s true nature.

In the street, she asks a policeman for a tram to the station, where her hotel is, but she doesn’t say anything about the assault. On the tram, although everybody can see she is in trouble, nobody offers to help her. In the end, she gets to the hotel and asks for the lady that had to come to pick her up. But the girl has arrived too late, and the lady, being tired of waiting, has gone away.

And now the waiter has had his revenge, because he has told the lady that the girl had gone with a suspicious man. Moreover, he doesn’t tell the girl if the woman is going to come back to pick her up the next day, so the governess is in a big trouble: she doesn’t know if the lady is going to keep the position for her. What is she going to do now?

 

As you can see, this story is very different from the others we have read by Katherine Mansfield: there is a continuum and a crescendo in the narrative, and we foresee that a disgrace is going to fall down upon the girl. We can see the famous cliché about appearances being deceptive. We can also find a kind of morality in the story: don’t trust anybody because they can be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. In fact, this story is a Mansfield version of the Red Riding Hood, the famous tale for children. However, the primitive tale ended badly, like Mansfield’s, very differently from the modern versions whose intention is entertaining children without frightening them. So, the question will be: what kind of truths must we tell our children: the real cruel ones or the sweet and perhaps false ones?

 

QUESTIONS

-Do you agree with people who don’t want to take their children to a public school? Do you think it’s better a public education than a private one?

-“It’s better to mistrust people at first sight than to trust them.” Is it your opinion too? Why?

-Do you have a point of view about these “ladies’ compartments”? Do you think they are necessary to protect women?

-The way she treated the porter (and the waiter at the hotel), was it a bit haughty?

-Are her fears for real, or only fancies of an inexpert woman?

-“Most old men were so horrid.” According to you, is this most young people’s opinion?

-When and why does she start to trust the old man?

-“She felt she had known him for years.” When do you say this about a new acquittance?

-“His hand shook, and the wine spilled over the tray.” What happened exactly to the old man in his flat?

-Why the tram was “full of old men with twitching knees”, according to what the little governess saw?

-Is this a moral story? What is its morality?

 

VOCABULARY

porter, rub up, tucked up, pink-sprigged, pounced, cinders, flicking, spick and span, doddery, tangerines, pouted, dimpled, attar, cupped, swooped 

AUDIOBOOK

REVIEW

ANALYSIS

Little Red Riding Hood, by Roald Dahl

Freeway (a cinema version of the tale)

Susanna and the Elders