On preferring films to books

Mark Gomes

In researching his new survey of the Australian novel, Panorama du roman australien, Frenchman Jean-Francois Vernay noted that in ‘a lot of Australian literary criticism … there was the complaint that Australians preferred film adaptations of Australian novels to the books themselves’ (The Age, 14 February 2009). Whether or not this statement is true, there can be no denying that film adaptations often rescue Australian novels from obscurity and generate untold profits in new, film-themed editions for local publishers.

The warm reception awarded a newly restored print of the 1971 film, Wake in Fright, and Text Publishing’s tie-in reprint of Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel of the same name, seems to support Vernay’s observation. Text’s reissue of Cook’s novel, the first edition since 1983, comes replete with new endorsements from J.M. Coetzee, M.J. Hyland and actor Brendan Cowell and is selling fast at Readings, Carlton, as fast as tickets sell for screenings of the movie at the adjacent Cinema Nova.

The irony is that while Canadian director Ted Kotcheff’s movie is good, Cook’s novel is extraordinary, and that while resurrection of his novel is welcome and overdue, it is souring that it should come apropos the movie and years after Cook’s death in 1987. Reviews of the film commonly make perfunctory reference to the book before lapsing into wild, adulatory language – Nick Cave comments that the film is ‘the best … about Australia in existence’ – but contemporary mention of Cook’s work of itself remains scarce.

Why the film excites interest enough to sell copies of the novel after fifty languorous years must be more than a question of marketing, or simple sell-on correspondence. Films are implicitly made for more than an audience of one, but this doesn’t fully explain the public’s preference for Kotcheff’s creation over Cook’s. Adaptations of foreign novels to film don’t necessarily pique publishers’ interests here either. So what is it about Australia’s preference for our stories when transferred to the big screen?

In the case of Wake in Fright, the cynical response is that the film is less cerebral and more character-driven than the novel. Echoing a passage of the book included in the film, in which the alcoholic Doc Tydon explains to protagonist Jon Grant that his ‘condition’ is overlooked in the tiny town of Bundanyabba because he ‘is a character’, Kotcheff tends to overlook the most disturbing and affecting qualities of Cook’s prose: falling short of the hideous truths therein; unable to penetrate the characters’ outward, outback eccentricities.

This is not to criticise the film on grounds of its fidelity to the novel – that common interpretative mistake outlined by Brian McFarlane in his expert commentary on literary adaptations in the June issue of ABR – but simply to think about the Wake in Fright phenomenon with Vernay’s observation in mind. Kotcheff’s Bundanyabba, its raffish cast of characters and the unravelling of schoolteacher Jon Grant in their midst is convincing, yet is played for entertainment more than Cook’s original version.

Vernay’s line arguably holds for countless other Australian books adapted for the cinema: James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout, Colin Thiele’s Storm Boy, Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette’s Puberty Blues, Boyd Oxlade’s Death in Brunswick, Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, Luke Davies’ Candy, Raymond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father, the list goes on. You also have to wonder whether the popularity of the film versions of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well has something to do with Penguin’s inclusion of the titles in their next fifty Popular Penguins selection.

The award-winning biographer Jacqueline Kent, who was married to Kenneth Cook, will write at length about the novelist and Wake in Fright in the October 2009 issue of ABR.

The vintage of the human mind

Mark Gomes

Selecting a new body font for Australian Book Review has required many of the same skills involved in good editing. Both jobs call for a general attitude of service, rather than expression, and both demand sensitive reading above all else. Like an effective edit, a good typeface should interpret text – working from within, not without – and hold itself back as far as possible from readers’ notice, so as to grease their reading and not to distract from letterforms’ signified meaning. A font, like an editor, must aim to fuse invisibly with its subject, assuming its voice, and to maintain the modesty and appropriateness of the submissive in a master–servant relationship.

Beatrice Warde famously applied the metaphor of a goblet holding wine to this peculiar situation in a lecture delivered to the British Typographers Guild in 1937:

Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine … [and] two goblets ... One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

Warde’s point is that expert readers, like expert wine lovers, do not want their appreciation of writing or wine obstructed by a mannerist font or ostentatious drinking vessel. In a magazine such as ABR, devoted to written ideas not their materiality on the page, fonts should work transparently in action, in strictly classical fashion. For the same reason, ABR’s new choice of font also needs to recognise and match our readers’ sensibility by being something more elegant than your average Times New Roman, in which the magazine has been presented for many years. The new choice of font must silently chime with our audience’s expectations, not as accompaniment, but as Warde’s ‘crystalline goblet … worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind’.

After much debate and experimentation, the font we have decided on for the task is Caslon. Designed by the thrice-married, beer-brewing lover of music and British typographic genius, William Caslon (1692–1766), there is nothing self-conscious about this beautiful face, in which the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were first set, and about which George Bernard Shaw famously swore, ‘I’ll stick with Caslon until I die.’ We believe the new typeface will lift the atmosphere of the magazine in a manner befitting both our readers’ and contributors’ taste, retaining a beautiful look and feel while never distracting from ABR’s considered content. The new design is débuted in our July–August issue.

Marcel Proust and the windy heck

Peter Rose

Soon after learning of the appalling Air France disaster over the Atlantic Ocean, I was seated on an Airbus, with even less leg-room than usual and no manuscript to edit, which was most unusual. Looking through the window, I saw one of ABR’s senior contributors strapped to the wing and quite supine. She had placed herself there voluntarily for the windy heck of it – rather like J.M.W. Turner and Chateaubriand, each of whom purportedly had himself lashed to the mast of a ship during a storm, for the full Romantic frisson. My contributor (who shall remain nameless, though I’m not sure why) waved to me and mouthed an invitation to join her on the wing. But I cried off, citing another book I had to write before we arrived in ... wherever it was.

Strange then – or not so strange at all – that this should follow a decision made just yesterday in our office to include an oneiric question in a new feature called ‘Open Page’, which will have its début in our July–August issue. Each month we will invite a prominent author to answer a few questions about his or her work, method, literary politics and predilections.

One of the questions is, ‘Are you a vivid dreamer?’

Our aim in presenting ‘Open Page’ is to find out more about the writers whom Australians most like to read. Here, we have drawn almost inevitably on the famous Proust Questionnaire, so called only because Marcel Proust was the most famous person to complete it – twice in fact, when he was aged thirteen and twenty. Nevertheless, all but one of the questions are our own. We won’t enquire about our monthly subject’s favourite bird (Proust: the capricious swallow) or favourite occupation (‘loving’) or most marked characteristic (‘a craving to be loved, or, to be more precise, to be caressed and spoiled rather than to be admired’). We will leave that to Vanity Fair, in which the Proust Questionnaire continues to appear more than a century after its creation.

And who will our first subject be? And why does she write? And would she do so if she had her time all over again? And if she dreams at all, is she an aviatrix?

Stay tuned for the July–August issue.

The Slap snapped up – Christos Tsiolkas’s novel on the small screen

Rebecca Starford

Local television drama is about to get a much-needed boost: Matchbox Pictures has purchased the rights to produce a television adaptation of The Slap, the recent winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Award-winning director Tony Ayres, one of five partners at Matchbox, hopes the series will unfold over eight episodes, just as Christos Tsiolkas’s novel is told over eight chapters from eight different points of view. Ayres said the series would be shot around the inner-Melbourne suburbs of Fitzroy and Northcote, where The Slap is set. Ayres believes that the novel lends itself to film as it is ‘about intimate human relations and television is such a fantastic medium to for that’.

MUP and the underworld: Mick Gatto’s autobiography

Rebecca Starford

Hot on the heels of Colin McLaren’s Infiltration: The True Story of the Man Who Cracked the Mafia, Melbourne University Publishing (MUP) is releasing underworld identity Mick Gatto’s autobiography, Mick Gatto: My Story. ‘After many years of resisting media attention,’ the press release reads, ‘Mick Gatto has decided it is important to tell his own story.’

We’re sure he has. The autobiography marks a departure from MUP’s more scholarly list – but Louise Adler, CEO and Publisher-in-Chief of MUP, has confidence in the publication: ‘It is the story of a kid with a passion for boxing, the illegal gambling rackets that brought huge wealth to so few and ruin to so many, and it is the story of Australia’s very own violent underworld.’

The book, co-authored with crime writer Tom Noble (of Neddy: The Life and Crimes of Arthur Stanley Smith fame) will be published in October.

ABR hits America!

Rebecca Starford

Thanks to conscientious ABR reader, Lisa Hill, the magazine’s annual reviewing competition, worth $1000, is now listed on the National Book Critics Circle blog, ‘Critical Mass’. NBCC member Janice Harayda, of the ‘One-Minute Book Reviews’ blog, hopes that ABR’s Reviewing Competition ‘might encourage a sponsor in the US to start giving out prizes like that, too. This prize differs from the Pulitzer and NBCC prizes for criticism in that it’s for an unpublished review’. The first prize for the ABR Reviewing Competition is, after all, a big one: Harayda notes that when she was the book editor of the largest newspaper in Ohio, ‘we generally paid $100, on rare occasions $150.’ Operating in a small and indeed recessionary Australian market, it is heartening to see ABR as a forerunner in the recognition and appreciation of robust literary criticism.

Entries for the 2009 ABR Reviewing Competition are now welcomed – click here for more information.

From here to eternity: the filming of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

Peter Rose

Publishing schedules are tight – ‘nasty, brutish and short’, some editors might even say. Books, often several years in the writing, are usually turned around in a matter of months – weeks even, if the topic is sensitive or controversial enough (David Marr’s The Henson Case, published by Text Publishing last year after a gestation of just two or three months, exemplifies the celerity with which author and publisher can move when the need arises).

Issues of ABR happen fairly quickly. Timeliness is important – we endeavour to furnish readers with cogent reviews as soon after publication of new books (simultaneously, if possible) – but we eschew those onerous deadlines that are the bane of literary hacks’ lives: ‘800 words by the day after tomorrow, thanks, Ed.’, to paraphrase George Orwell. Wherever possible we give our critics four or five weeks with a book. ABR contributors are busy people. Almost all of them have other careers, many of them senior ones. We want our writers to be comfortable with their articles: to reread the book if need be (always advisable), to allow it to ‘draw’, as it were, before sitting down and crafting the review (the hard part).

Once an article reaches ABR the Editor edits it, then several other people have a look at it, too. Once changes have been finalised we return it to the reviewer, so that she can see what we’ve done to it and make further changes, if she wishes. Then we page the article, which is subsequently proofed by about half a dozen people before that particular issue goes to proof. This in-house process takes anywhere between a week and a month – rarely longer. A week later, the new issue is ready to hit the news-stands – or subscriber letterboxes. And so it goes.

Film, notoriously, is very different, obeying its own mysterious and ostensibly dilatory principles. Few people in the publishing industry, I sometimes think, would be suited to this leisurely and enigmatic industry. It seems like years since we first heard about the filming of J.M. Coetzee’s Booker-winning novel Disgrace (1999). It was always an appealing prospect. Coetzee’s final twentieth-century novel is one of the great novels of the past two decades, as compelling and necessary now as it was ten years ago.

Now, at last, the Australian première of the film – an Australian–South African production – is imminent. Steve Jacobs is the director; Anna Maria Monticelli has adapted the novel for film. John Malkovich – always watchable and chameleonic – plays Coetzee’s embattled protagonist, David Lurie; newcomer Jessica Haines is his afflicted daughter. Judging by the stills, the cinematography is outstanding.

ABR stalwart Brian McFarlane (who frequently turns around books in a few days, and, endearingly, needs little editing) reviews the new film in our June issue, and is impressed by the adaptation. ‘Jacobs has taken a masterly novel and made an uncompromisingly brilliant film from this source.’ McFarlane admires Jacobs’s fidelity to Coetzee’s ‘curious tone of objectivity’: ‘There is perhaps a Brechtian denial of easy emotional involvement in favour of a tougher engagement with tough matters.’

Interestingly, McFarlane compares it with another new film, Isabel Coixet’s Elegy, which is based on The Dying Animal (2001), one of Philip Roth’s David Kepesh novels. Elegy stars Penélope Cruz in one of her most tense and intelligent roles. Opposite her is Ben Kingsley, playing another David, another ageing academic, another ‘disgracefully’ libidinous man of words.

Icon Film Distribution is distributing Disgrace in Australia, and the season starts on June 18. Icon has generously made lots of free double passes available for those who subscribe to ABR, so be quick.

Meanwhile, you can read Brian McFarlane’s article in its entirety when the June issue of ABR (about to go to print, as I write this) hits the news-stands on June 1.

And there’s more. In September, Random House will publish J.M. Coetzee’s new memoir, Summertime, the sequel to Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002). Boyhood, for this reader, is one of the great books about childhood – of any era – so Summertime (even in winter) is a superb prospect. We’ll review it in the September issue, of course.

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Joining ABR: Our new Editorial Intern reports on his first week

Mark Gomes

Beginnings like the one I have experienced as nascent editorial intern at the Australian Book Review are the stuff of dream fiction and inspirational memoir. Only a week has transpired of my six-month, Australian Publishers Association-funded placement at the magazine, and already I am irrevocably changed in terms of self-recognition and editing knowledge. I am by no means a fatalist, but the feeling I have is of uncanny arrival at a place I am meant to be: of shapeless aspiration made flesh, or rather, made stacks of review pages to be copy-edited. Out of hours have passed in an unreal fug as the realisation of my appointment and what it means in real terms of opportunity sets in. To be plain, this has been one of the best weeks of my life, and I envisage with great joy how I am to be ultimately transformed by the internship.

Allow me some biographical and publishing industry context to explain what may sound like hyperbole. I have spent the better part of ten years looking for a break in the world of Australian letters; first as a freelance writer and then, like so many editing and publishing graduates, lingering in trade publishing divisions other than editorial. Work has been constant and diversionary – detours in science publishing, the visual arts matrix and music criticism included – but with each new hustle the carrot of literary involvement telescoped away, or so it seemed. Try as I might, publishers’ and magazines’ editorial and proofing services, I learnt, are inevitably sewn up in-house or provided by long-serving freelancers, retired staff or those on maternity or paternity leave. Thus, I could only steel myself in wait for serendipity’s embrace.

ABR is a lean and exacting operation and the ideal place to learn editing and publishing procedure. Peter Rose, Rebecca Starford and Lorraine Harding have welcomed me as one of their own, and immediately set me to work across all aspects of the magazine’s production. I have everything to learn about commissioning, editing to house style, proofing, layout, administration and the magazine’s esteemed family of contributors. So far I have been most impressed by the sheer efficiency of planning required to publish to monthly deadlines, and, as a corollary, the general pace at which the publishing cycle unfurls. With luck and some serious mental grist, six months will be time enough for me not only to master the refined ways of ABR’s production, but also to creatively contribute to its future.

Extra and interesting certification of having arrived at the perfect place to conduct my internship was further provided last Thursday, when I attended an ‘Introduction to Australian Publishing’ seminar run by the Australian Publishers Association. This marvellously informative day featured presentations from an array of established industry professionals, each one an expert in their chosen discipline and running the gamut from commissioning editorial through marketing, publicity and retail book selling. Some of the major publishers were represented, and although I loved every minute of their racy anecdotes about big money deals, celebrity authors and company machinations, in the end they fortified my uncanny feeling that there is no better fit for me than ABR in terms of sensibility, publishing content, mission ethos and personnel.