"Running in the Family" by Michael Ondaatje with commentary by Faye Lawrence

Michael Ondaatje is well known for his Booker winner, the novel "The English Patient". . As well as being a very successful novelist he is a noted poet, literary editor, academic and film maker. Ondaatje was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka , in 1943 , moved to England with his mother and attended senior school there before migrating to Canada. He became a Canadian citizen in the 1960s where his literary talents have been recognised with many awards. He lives in Toronto.

"Running in the Family" , published in 1982 , is a memoir about his family in Sri Lanka which reaches back and forwards over several generations to tell a highly personal , yet historically and culturally fasinating story . It has all the hallmarks of a poet and imaginatve novelist - wonderful imagery, incredible story-telling , atmosphere you can feel, emotion and humour. Ondaatje tells how he was drawn to travel to Sri Lanka to re-connect with his family and his roots by a "the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto". The memories , smells and sounds of Sri Lanka called him . He writes of "wanting to touch them (his relations) into words".

A special feature of this lyrical , explorative memoir is the story of Sri Lanka itself . The physical, cultural and historical background is beautifully , often humourously and graphically portrayed. One is constantly reminded of the physical surroundings - heat, rain, floods, cool shade, wonderful animal life , colonial architecture , spices, tea plantations , winding roads, jungle , plants, flowers etc.

In this sensual setting we hear equally wonderful stories about recent generation family members no longer alive .The recollections by friends and relatives of the authors father and maternal grandmother and both amazing and touching. The Grandmother is depicted by relatives as an Aunty Mame character with a penchant for picking flowers from friends or public gardens and presenting them as gifts. The stories are gleaned from family members and friends recollections as the author travelled around and visited many places in this small and vibrant island which he knew as a child - and in the hands and mind of the poet novelist they take on a fictional/family legend quality of sometimes alarming and always entertaining qualities .

Interwoven with the more fanciful, entertaining family stories is the authors visceral , dreamlike recollections , reconstructions and analyses of the family history going back some centuries but mostly looking back at two previous generations. At times the reader can be puzzled by the multiple story tellers Ondaaatje is employing in the narrative - however it tends to fall into place as you go along . I was confused at times but delighted overall and found the style and technique added to the character of the relatively small memoir - aptly so about a small but altogether fascinating country.

I was intrigued by the historical vignettes about Sri Lanka which come through the memoir via the family background. You get a tantalising view of the colonial past and the multicultural legacy of centuries and centuries of migration , conquest and assimilation - often via poets or writers of the past. I dont mean to give the impression that there is an attempt to chrionicle this long, fascinating history but the author in talking of his family connections going back centuries does offer some intriguing insights into its nature , its difference, its fascination for locals and foreigners.

There is one particular chapter "Don't talk to me about Matisse" which delighted me with the literary refrences and feel for the place. In this chapter the author writes of an ancestor Dr William Charles Ondaatje, a Tamil, who was a Director of the Botanical Gardens in the mid 19th Century "who knew at least fifty-five specimens of poisons easily available to his countrymen" and wrote them up in journals. D.H. Lawrence found Ceylon very difficult and in typical style strongly wrote of his feelings and distaste. Michael Ondaatje comments in this context "Heat disgraces foreigners" The lyrical , often sad Ceylonese poetry quoted contrasts with these observations. The line"Dont talk to me about Matisse" comes from such a poet.

"Running in the Family" then is not the usual run- of- the- mill family memoir .The reader goes on the explorative journey with the author and picks up a lot of information on the way about this multicultural , unique part of Asia with which Australia has many close connections - not only from this difficult current time but of the past 50 or so decades .For instance I was motivated to follow up on the Sri Lankan Cultural groups and found from my google search that Melbourne has a large community of citizens of Burgher origin from Sri Lanka - folk with some Dutch background . Yasmine Gooneratne , a Professor at Macquarie University ,and a fine novelist in her own right is mentioned in the book as supplying information and background. Sri Lanka is then more than just a sum of its parts - it is a significant and influential part of our world. Michael Ondaatje in his exploration of his heritage has opened this up to me. I hope it met his needs in finding his roots.

Coonardoo by Katharine Susannah Prichard - commentary by Faye Lawrence

I have just returned from a trip to the Nothern Territory where I had nine days visiting dramatically beautiful and highly significant cultural sites in Kakadu and Litchfield National Parks. I re-read "Coonardoo" as my evening reading whilst I was travelling around this region which was both a poignant and poetically apposite experience to add to the magnificence of the terrain and the cultural intensity of the country. The novel is set in Northern Western Australia however the countryside is sufficiently similar to be evocative of the country I was in.

Coonardoo is the Aboriginal heroine of the story which was first published in 1929. It is a tragedy and a love story. The love story is particularly remarkable because it was between an Aboiginal woman and a white cattle station owner. As is often mentioned, the fact of sex between Aboriginal women and white men was not unusual in the remote parts of Australia at that time but a story of actual love was daring in the extreme and caused somewhat of a scandal.

Katharine Prichard was writing of her time as any writer would be but she was stretching the imaginitative limitations at the same time. The passages where the love between the two is explored are few in the book but they are strong and touching. Throughout the book we are constantly reminded of the womanly affection and love which Coonardoo has for Hugh - the station owner - whilst the love Hugh has for Coonardoo has to be explained in the context of his (and white Australias) limited understanding of the Aboriginal society. Hugh cannot entirely face the fact of his deep affection until towards the end of the novel. Hugh's morality, meaning that he will not live in partnership with an Aboriginal woman, is explored warts and all by Prichard. Hugh is a decent man by the standard of the day , kindly and respectful to his Aboriginal indentured workers which in turn adds to the poignancy of the situation. Coonardoo is a tragic victim as much of his decency as of the overall racism , ignorance and roughness of the remote country. An excellent essay on the novel "Coonardoo" by Drusilla Modjeska for the 1990 edition outlines this thesis very well and is recommended.

The novel is remarkable on several other levels - we are treated to poetic descriptions by Prichard continually . She paints clear exciting pictures of the scenery, the birdlife and the atmosphere. One description of heat in this country shows off her wonderful writing and observation and I quote from Chapter 19. "The air, at a little distance, palpitated, thrown off from the stones in minute atoms, visible one moment, flown to invisibility the next. Weaving with the sun for shuttle. the air spun heat which was suffocating." and then a little later in the paragraph "And stillness, a breathless heaviness, drowsed the senses, brain and body, as if that mythological snake the blacks believed in, a rock python, silvery grey, black and brown, sliding down from hills of the sky, were puttting the opiate of his breath into the air, folding you round and round, squeezing the life out of you"

This one example of her powerful descriptive writing also serves to bring out a couple of other strong points about the work. Namely that it is of its time - mention of "blacks" collectively and other terms are stated simply and leave a modern day Australian somewhat shocked. But along with this there is the honest attempt to give the Aboriginal way of life as she saw it and researched it a dignified and very significant part in the story. It is a view from "the homestead verandah" of inter-relationships of the two cultures but it is a very empathetic and intelligent one. Prichard lived at Turee station in the Kimberleys for several months with some family friends and was inspred by her time there .She had known very little of Aboriginal culture or Station life before this . She had gone there from Perth to have quiet time to finish "Haxbys Circus" but stumbled upon this incredibly rich aspect of life in Australia which provided her with the background for this inspired, imaginative work. The detail she absorbed of Station life, white Australian prejudices and ignorance , Aboriginal life, storyline and language, droving and horsebreaking etc are woven into the story with great skill.

The characterisations in this two culture novel are inevitably uneven. We know a lot about Coonardoo but we cant know her thoughts very well - because the author will not have her think like a white woman . There is therefore an uneveness in the portrayals of the main Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal characters . The Aboriginal characters other than Coonardoo are depicted by their actions set in cultural patterns . In this context they are honestly drawn and illuminate the Aboriginal tapestry of this story and are vital to the richness of it. However they are not characters perhaps in the usual novelistic sense.

Of the white characters , Hugh is somewhat problematic but his mother , Mumae, who valiantly worked the beloved catlle and horse station, "Wytaliba" whilst Hugh was away at school hovers over the story even after her death. Mumae is portrayed as an astute "verandah" observer - a decent hard working woman of the outback who treated her Aboriginal workers (indentured who work for food only ) with kindness but firmness as if they were children . She is pivotal to our understanding of where the story is going. In death she hovers ,it is believed ,over all in the guise of white cockatoos. Other white characters are intriguing - Sam Geary - awful but honest, Cock-eyed Bob, Saul, Hugh's wife Mollie who is well drawn, Phyllis, Hugh's Kimberley loving daughter - all add to the many dimensions of this fine and highly readable. novel.

I recommend this fine novel by a writer of rare sensitivity for her time who is , I think , being rediscovered. She is one of those very special women writers who have contributed so much to the Australian cannon by their sensitivity to the country and people and by their rich talent.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

First published in 1955, The Quiet American is probably one of the best-known and most admired of Greene's many novels. It is based in part on the writer's experiences as a reporter living in Saigon in the early 1950s. The setting is Vietnam during the war between the then colonial power, France, and the Viet Minh, the largely Communist rebel movement seeking to end French rule, in the period shortly before the definitive French defeat iat Dien Bien Phu n 1954. But in another sense the setting could be said to be what has often called 'Greeneland', the exotic, corrupt, decadent world of several of Greene's novels. (The Mexico of The Power and the Glory may spring to mind.) However, to say this is not to imply that there is something formulaic or unconvincing about the novel's portral of Vietnam, which in fact comes vividly to life for readers of the novel. It may be a bit of a cliche, but one does feel almost able to see the colours and smell the smells of the times and places Greene evokes.

There are a few memorable minor characters, such as the Pascal-reading, devoutly Catholic senior police officer Vigot, but this is essentially the story of three people. The narrator, Thomas Fowler, is a middle-aged English reporter, cynical and a bit world weary but happy enough living an unambitious life in Saigon with Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman. Into his world comes Alden Pyle, the 'quiet American' of the title, an idealistic Harvard graduate convinced that he has a mission to help Vietname by fostering a 'Third Force', a democratic nationalism which will provide an alterantive to both colonialims and Communism. Pyle also develops an interest in Phuong, and determines, with temporary success, to win her away from Fowler, with a view to marrying her and taking her to America. Central to the novel is the relationship between the two men, not really a friendship (despite Pyle's earnest efforts) but never really open hostility either. At one stage Pyle saves Fowler's life during a Viet Minh attack, and at the end Fowler appears to be complicit in Pyle's murder, having discovered that Pyle's activities include supplying the wherewithal for a rebel general to mount murderous attacks on Saigon civilians. Fowler decides that however noble Pyle's motives may be, his actions make him a menace that must be removed.

It has been suggested that the three main characters, Fowler, Pyle, and Phuong, to some extent 'represent' Europe, the United States, and Vietnam (or the colonised Third World more generally). There is probably a measure of truth in this, but the two men at least are individualised sufficiently to make them more than stereotypes. Phuong is a more problmatic case, and there have been accustations of both sexism and Orientalism in her portrayal. We do find statements like this comment by Fowler to Pyle on Phuong: 'She'll suffer from childbirth, and hunger and cold and rheumatism, but she will never suffer as we do from thoughts, obsessions - she won't scratch, she'll only decay.' However, it must be kept in mind that though Fowler is the narrator, he is also a character with biases, and that he cannot just be assumed to be presenting the author's views for us to endorse.

When first published the novel was denounced by some as being anti-American. Certainly it suggests that in some respects American idealism of the kind Pyle represents is likely to create greater suffering and mayhem than cynicism and pragmatism. But today it is difficult not to see the novel as more prophetic than ideologically biased. We inevitably read it in the light of the Americans' own war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and its pictures of the French, fighting what is clearly a losing war while pretending officially that all is well and victory is folllowing victory, is uncannily reminiscent of what we know was to come later, in the years leading up to the ultimate American defeat. (Some might see disturbing parallels to the Afghanistan war of today.)

The Quiet American may not display the most profound characterisation. Its picture of the Caodaist religion (which still claims seven to eight million adherents in Vietnam) may be a comic opera travesty. But is a beautifully written book, vivid, entertaining, thoughtful, and very enjoyable despite the disturbing elements of its subject matter.