The Wicker-Work Woman by Anatole France (1897)

France is very much like Richard Le Gallienne for me - very enjoyable in the moment, but difficult to remember long afterward. I'm not sure why this is, but there is a 'loftiness' in both of them, whereby their ideas can be typified as being high falutin', and ground-level things like plot can seem to fade into the background a little. But, whereas Gallienne is usually, ultimately, quite simple in outlook, with notable exceptions, France is always complex, which more suits the mode. This is he in his classic guise as antiquarian, philosopher, moral enquirer, with a wily line in comedy running at the backdrop. It is barely a novel, the only plotline of any calibre being the breakdown in the marriage of Monsieur Bergeret, the main character. I can't remember whether or not I've been introduced to him before, but I know he recurs in later books, because the name appears in their titles. My assumption at this point is that he is the latest in a long line of France characters who represent the author in their enquiringness and fascination with archives, papers, translations, and literary work, as well as the morals of their time. These older gentlemen, caught up in the small politics of their location, and exemplifying various philosophical angles in their life and thoughts, seem to be France's central stock-in-trade. They can be religious, or laypersons. Some of them seem to be exemplars of high ideals for France, and his depictions can become a little cloying, like Abbe Coignard. But this guy, Bergeret, is much more faulty. A bit windy, and given to opinionising, and cold and ruthless when he feels he's been hard done by; he's no slice of perfection, and much the better for it. His wife has an affair with one of his pupils, and her gradual freezing out of the home when he discovers it is something to behold. But the space allocated to this is relatively small; all of the rest takes the form of a series of historic-philosophic-moral conversations about all sorts of topics with various men, or groups of men, met up with around the provincial town where they live. Clerics and academics abound, so I think it must be some sort of university town, unless it is a fantasy-place that France has simply peopled with an abundance of his favourite things. I have a strong feeling that this one will suffer the same fate as the others of its kind in his oeuvre in my memory, and quickly fade as to detail. But I was struck, in the moment of reading, with how many levels there were on which to appreciate it, especially his rueful recording of human frailty, and his ability to both gouge it and laugh at it at the same time, and even yet display empathy toward it.

The Man in the Silo and other stories by EO Schlunke (1955)

What a fine surprise. I had a set of possible expectations of this where one of the major likelihoods was that it would be aged and uninspiring. It has proved me wrong, resoundingly. This large set of short stories is typified by a rueful quality, a sourly wise sense of humour. And what they also sport is a low-key poetics; almost noirish. Schlunke had been well known for a while in Australia by the time this was published, mainly for his stories published in the Bulletin magazine, and also a couple of serialized novels which never made it into book form. He was the chronicler of the countryside, not in its salt-of-the-earth guise, but instead with a full wily realisation of the scheisterism and conservative malfeasance of the zone. Knowing some parts of country Australia as I do, he captures beautifully these aspects; in fact, the only one he doesn't quite go for the jugular in is that of the difference between what holier-than-thou farmers professed in their churches on Sunday, and what they got up to every other day of the week! These sins are obviously not only the province of the country, but, given the wholesale absence of truthful record in current times of any darknesses in Australia's literature of country life (it's a neverending story of romance and "the best people in the world") this book is ever the more crucial and valuable. And it is 1950s, ultra-white, breadth-blind country Australia with which it deals - humorously! What a blessed thing! These stories of villainous salesmen, creepy real estate agents, uptight moralist farmers and lazy exceptions to the rule, the conned and misled, suspicious incomers of a doubtful marque, bemused Italian prisoners of war lost in this lack of perspective, as well as an occasional adventure into the otherworldly and chilling, have a four-to-the-floor bite which exhilarates. The noirishness is matched by an almost Chekhovian fated sourness. If ever a book's perspective was needed in a national literature, to redress a too-rosy picturing, this is it, in Australia's here and now.

Commonplace Book

'"...Now, on the contrary, our parliamentary sharks are betraying France to a foreign power, Finance, to wit. For it is true that Finance is to-day one of the Powers of Europe, and of her it may be said, as was formerly said of the Church, that among the nations she remains a splendid alien. Our representatives, whom she buys over, are not only robbers but traitors. And, in truth, they rob and betray in paltry, huckstering fashion. Each one in himself is merely an object of pity: it is their rapid swarming that alarms me."'

from The Wicker-Work Woman by Anatole France (Chapter XII)