The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers

Delia Falconer’s new novel is a quiet novel: written in tight instances of thought, remembrance, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers traces a morning in the life of Brevet Brigadier General Frederick W. Benteen—once a captain in Custer’s Seventh Cavalry. This quietness and tightness is also evident in the final length of the work: this is no sprawling story of a larger than life hero of the West. At just over one hundred and forty pages, it is deceptive—over “quickly”, it continues to creep up on the reader. It is not a book to devour in one sitting so much as one to mull over, to read slowly and lingeringly. The story recounts Benteen’s thoughts about his wife, Frabbie, and the men in his unit—Handsome Jack, Stargazer and others—during Custer’s last stand.

Launching the novel at Readings Carlton last night, Adrian Martin spoke of the difficulty in our culture of praising things: of the tendency among book reviewers to fall into certain clichés that ultimately tell the avid review reader very little about the quality of a work. I find it difficult to find the words to praise this book: its surface stillness belies the way this novel moves the careful reader.

The acknowledgement pages reveal the research behind this book: and reading it one feels there is a huge body of history beneath the surface. But this is not a book so much about the large event (Custer’s last stand at Little Bighorn) so much as the personal story of the personal experiences of that conflict have touched Benteen. This book became surprisingly personal for me: having grown up in an army family, I was struck by how it captured the life and varying attitudes of military men—of how the observations which never ring false for the narrative at a century’s remove also hold true for my own father and brothers.

In spite of the quietness of this novel, it is at times very funny. It is a warm book: its precision never detracts from the reader’s emotional journey. It overstates nothing, but there is plenty of wry humour for the reader. A favourite moment comes when Benteen recalls meeting a nun in New York: she tells him how the monks used to piss in the molten stained glass to achieve a certain milky yellow colour. After this anecdote—“That one thought changed the whole of Europe for him.”

This novel is an occasion for celebration: it is not a sweeping epic, but a fully realised and very personal account of a life. It never sets a foot wrong, and has been, years after Falconer’s debut, worth the wait. I can’t help but worry that, not giving in to any cheap tricks, this book may not find an instant readership the way Falconer’s first novel The Service of Clouds did: I worry about all books that rely on concentration for the richest rewards in the age of the sensationalisticDa Vinci Code -style blockbuster. I hope, sincerely, that this worry is groundless and people take to this book in the way it deserves.

My Summer of Love

That rare thing—an semi-gothic English romance about the heat of the Yorkshire summer. A sexy English film that captures the languidity of teenage girls at the moment between adolescence and adulthood. Mona (Natalie Press)—real name Lisa, but so-called by her brother in her childhood because of her penchant for whinging—lives above The Swan, a pub that no longer sells alcohol, with her brother, fresh out of prison and born-again into the love of Jesus. Tamsin (Emily Blunt) is home for the summer after being expelled from school for being “a bad influence, apparently.” Tamsin comes upon Mona lying in the grass. Tamsin is on horseback, while Mona has been coasting on a motorbike with no engine. The class difference between the two is etched from the start. And this class difference contributes to the impression that from the beginning of their relationship, Tamsin is in control of the trajectory. Mona explains her nickname; Tamsin says she’s studied the original. Tamsin feeds Mona the gems from the education that comes with her wealthy background: Nietzche’s “God is dead”, a performance of Saint-Saens the swan. She mills around with a glass of wine, staring imperiously at Mona. As their relationship blossoms into the love of the title, it is Tamsin who maps out the desire, and provides Mona an escape from the increasingly bleak situation at the born again Swan.

The gothic aspects come from the contrasting, and yet equally claustrophobic, atmosphere of the houses these girls come from. Tamsin’s grand estate is heavy with the absence of Tamsin’s family: the house is old, elegant, huge. Tamsin tells Mona to stick with her—as though the house is too vast, as if once separated they may not find their way back to each other. The Swan is barren, tiny. Our first glimpse is of Mona drawing a portrait on her wall, and then furiously drawing a frame in red texta. The pub is full of the hushed prayers of the evangelical born again Christians. Paddy Considine gives a wonderful performance as Mona’s brother, trying to find an alternative to his violent past in religion.

The film is slippery: it is funny, it is romantic and steamy, it is dark and has elements of the thriller. It doesn’t fit any one genre, and some viewers will no doubt find this frustrating. It does leave the focus a little soft a times: none of the possible trajectories is fully explored. At the same time the emotional intensity and melodrama in many ways echoes the way the world appears to the teenage lover: all possibilities, comedic and tragic in equal measure, are heightened. The performances are the revelation, and this film offers the viewers an experience that bears revisiting.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer’s followup to Everything is Illuminated is set in New York, post-September 11, and the primary narrator is precocious nine year old Oscar Schell, who lost his father in the World Trade Centre. Oscar is a wonderful invention of Foer’s: a truly original and contemporary voice, with his tambourine, veganism and vast working knowledge of Beatles material. Other strands of narrative are narrated by Oscar’s paternal grandparents: his grandfather a survivor of the bomber of Dresden, and his grandmother the survivor of her husband’s abandonment. These narratives are stylistically differentiated by formatting, so the voices remain clear. From time to time the short sentences of Oscar’s grandmother is a little wearing, but as the narratives merge this very shortness adds an immediacy to the story.

This is a novel about survival, and about the gaps in what people say and cannot say to each other as survivors. Oscar cannot articulate his grief and feelings of guilt over his father’s death, and so when he finds a mysterious key he has never seen before in his father’s closet he decides to search for the lock it opens. There is a sense, as Oscar tells us the number of locks in New York City alone, that he expects he will not be able to find the lock: that it is the act of searching which is important to Oscar. There is an honesty to this writing: as in his first book, Foer approaches tragedy through comedy. The comedy here is gentler however, not laugh-out-loud in the same way as the intertwining narratives of Everything is Illuminated. Foer’s previous book is probably more dazzling, but there is a directness in this book which I personally found more appealing.

The book also contains pictorial material: this is more successful in some instances than others. Oscar collects this material for the book of things that have happened to him. Photographs of locks punctuate the text: this is innocuous enough. Some photographs are difficult to grasp, except in considering Oscar as a product of a media-saturated generation. Other photographs, and a marked up, corrected-with-red-pen version of the bombing of Dresden is powerful material. On the other hand, sheets of paper from an art supply store border on the twee.