The Women’s Prize, formerly the Orange Prize, announced its longlist recently.
I am not one of those faithful award junkies who read every book on every prize longlist and then reread those that make the shortlist. I have tried that in the past and found it wearying, because readers have wildly different tastes, and mine do not always coincide with the judges.
I try to read one or two of the longlisted books every year, and have discovered some brilliant books that way. And so I found myself drawn to Kate Grenville’s longlisted novel, Restless Dolly Maunder, because I have long meant to read Grenville, who won the Orange Prize for The Idea of Perfection.
This spare novel, and by spare I mean stripped-to-the-bone, is a short, fast read. Your reaction will doubtless depend on your attitude to the spare style. Sometimes it worked for me, sometimes I wanted more detail, but I like the concept. I recommend that you begin with the last chapter, “Grandma, ” which is really an Afterword, but could be read as an introduction. Grenville explains that this novel is the story of her grandmother, based on conversations with Grenville’s mother, parts of her mother’s memoir, old photos, and Australian history.
“Grandma” gave a new context to the whole of the novel. I was particularly shaken by a paragraph about Grenville’s mum trying to understand why her mother, Dolly, never loved her.
In her own last days, Mum asked again the question she’d so often come back to in talking about her childhood: Why did my mother never love me? I sat by her bed in the hospital and had no answer. I can see that Mum’s question came out of her experience, but the answer to it had to be found in Dolly’s. In a way this book is an attempt, after all this time, to come up with an answer to Mum’s painful question. Perhaps it’s also a different answer to the one Grandma asked me.
And so Grenville imagines the life of her grandmother Dolly, beginning with her struggles on a hardscrabble farm in Australia. Bright Dolly wants to be a teacher, and though her teacher recommends that she go to a teacher’s college, her father will not allow it. And there is no way off the farm for Dolly, except through marriage, so she marries Bert, a charming young man who is chronically unfaithful. She longed to marry Jim Murphy, but he is a Catholic, and will not intermarry with a Protestant. Dolly is thwarted by convention on all sides. So Bert and Dolly move to another hardscrabble farm, but one cannot fight the droughts, storms, and locusts, and they never get ahead. In addition to the stress of farming, Dolly is an unhappy mother with three children, only one of whom she likes, the youngest, Max.
Dolly is cold and mean-spirited, but she finally takes charge and yanks them off the farm to start a shop in a town. She becomes a brilliant businesswoman and the shop is a great success. The problem is that she gets bored and then wants to start a new business. She drags the family from town to town, where she buys a pub, a hotel, a boarding house, and other businesses. (Grenville’s mother said that they moved so often she ended up attending 14 different schools.)
The education of her children was important to Dolly. The schoolteacher in her yearned for them to succeed academically. She sends her son, Frank, and daughter, Nance, to boarding schools, but while Frank is allowed to come home for weekends, Nance boards at the strict Catholic school year-round except for holidays. She is a brilliant student and fits in until she questions some aspects of the Catholic religion, and then is referred to as the devil.
Although Dolly is unkind to her children – really horrid, if I may say so – she is not going to put her children deliberately through hell and immediately calls Nance home and finds her a new school. And yet she is never as kind as she should be to Nance and Frank. When both sons enlist during World War I, she worries about Max, the youngest, but doesn’t give a damn what happens to Frank. Frank becomes a prisoner of war: she barely gives him a thought. And as for the future of Nan, she badgers her to become a pharmacist instead of a teacher, because a woman pharmacist has the same financial opportunities as a man. Nance finally cannot resist her mother’s determination.
So what kind of woman was Dolly? Complicated or brutally single-minded? Ambitious or just vicious? A cold mother who neglected her children – or doomed to motherhood because she had no access to contraceptives?
This short, well-written book is fascinating in parts, but often wearying, because Dolly is so cold and unlikable.
I admired the realism of this slim volume, but it was not for me.
Is Your Ideal Job Reader-in-Residence?
In Fort Collins, Colorado, the Perelandra Bookshop has a unique staff position. They hire a reader-in-residence, who, for three months, is given a book and coffee stipend and can follow his bliss and read whatever he wants. He is required to show up and read at the bookshop twice a week, but has no other responsibilities.
In an article in the Colorado Sun, owner, Joe Braun, explains the concept. “I think the residence paralleled my own personal concerns about the extent to which we focus ourselves on production. In focusing on production, foregrounding content creation, what we do is necessarily create a consumer in the process. The idea is: produce, consume, produce, consume.”
I say, Bravo!