Tag: novels

Sannah and The Pilgrim, and Pia and The Skyman, by Sue Parritt

Sue Parritt’s Sannah and The Pilgrim is the first title in her climate fiction trilogy. It is followed by Pia and the Skyman and The Skylines Alliance. I found Sue Parritt’s vision what a future world might turn out when wrecked by climate change to be scarily plausible.

The story: Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand) are ravaged by droughts. In Australia in particular. The coastal plains have been inundated by rising sea levels. The ‘Whites,  although impoverished by today’s standards, hang on to power through apartheid. They force the ‘Browns’, mostly refugee populations from the drowned Pacific Islands, to labour on the little arable land that remains.

We see this future from the point of view of a resistance movement, the ‘Women’s Line’, as they endure dangers to help the serfs held in the underground prisons to escape to what we hope will be a better life for them in Aotearoa. This is an Underground Railroad of the future.

Sannah, “The Storyteller”, belongs to the Women’s Line. When a light skinned stranger calling himself Kaire arrives at her dome she must consider whether he is a spy. The twin mysteries of Kaire’s origins and Sannah’s purpose in “storytelling” drive along the narrative in the first novel. Kaire’s background when revealed gives us another viewpoint of the conditions on the planet.

We have escapes by desert and by sea, rescues, betrayals, brutalities and passions. Yet Parritt’s low key writing makes this stark way of life seem almost normalised, which makes it all the more disturbing; and the wreckage of not just the planet but of humanity springs out at us.

In Pia and the Skyman the story picks up from the bases in Aotearoa.

Parritt writes on her website –

“I want readers to grasp what is happening not only in contemporary Australia, but throughout the world with regard to refugees and the ongoing environmental degradation that poses increasing problems for humanity… By writing fiction that I believe could easily become fact, I hope to inspire more ‘ordinary’ people to take a stand and work for a more equitable and sustainable world.”

Sannah and the Pilgrim was Commended in the FAW Christina Stead Award, 2015. Pia and the Skyman was commended for the Christina Stead Fiction Award 2016 in the National Literary Awards of The Fellowship of Australian Writers. You can learn more about Sue Parritt and these books at her blog.

Where to find the trilogy: All the books are published by Odyssey Books and available through Waterstones, Indigo and Amazon. The third book, The Skylines Alliance, is also now available.

Another Cli-Fit series I loved and is the Chronicles of the Pale by Clare Rhoden. You can see my review here.

You are at Baffled Bear Books, the blog of Mark, guardian and blundering typist for Mawson Bear, Ponderer of Baffling Things and one of this bright world’s few published bears. Mawson is writer bear of It’s A Bright World To Feel Lost In.

‘Eyes of a Hunting Cat’: Jane Austen’s short novel, Lady Susan

 Lady Susan, a short novel in letter form, remains unknown to many Austen fans even though a movie version, Love and Friendship, was made recently.

The Tedettes Jane Austen Bookclub with their discoveries about Jane Austen
The Tedettes Jane Austen Bookclub with their discoveries about Jane Austen

The novel is packed with exquisitely written barbs and eyebrow-raising cynicisms, the best delivered by Lady Susan herself as she confides her schemes to her ally, Mrs Johnson. Here is Lady Susan speaking of the wickedly expensive schooling of her 16 year old daughter, Frederica.

Not one lover to her list

“To be mistress of French, Italian, German, Music, Singing, Drawing etc. will gain a woman some applause but will not add one lover to her list.”

Austen is thought to have written Lady Susan before Northanger Abbey, but exactly when is not known.  The Austen-philes quoted below guess at 1803, 1805 and 1808, which puts Austen in her mid to late twenties. She wrote the first version of Pride and Prejudice, of course, when younger still.

A Lion In The Path

“Lady Susan … (is) a lion in the path of those persons who would call Jane Austen charming, soothing, refreshing etc.  G. H Lewes, when he recommended Charlotte Bronte to “follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen’s mild eyes” was unaware of Lady Susan, where Miss Austen’s eyes are those of a hunting cat. … In controlled grimness it looks forward to a masterpiece never written.”

Sylvia Townsend Warner, novelist, wrote the assessment above in a 1951 essay published by The British Council.  (The essay, sadly, is probably no longer available, even if you do have one shilling and sixpence net*).

Before Becky Sharp there was Lady Susan

But David Cecil, author of  A Portrait of Jane Austen , is among many Austen-philes determined to keep Miss Jane’s eyes as mild as possible.

“Lady Susan Vernon is a sort of blue-blooded Becky Sharp, an unscrupulous adventuress, far more sensational in her evil doing than any character in Jane Austen’s later books.”

The Tedettes Jane Austen Book Club knit and read
The Tedettes Jane Austen Bookclub (and Knitters). Their main bother is to find the bonnets.

Cecil thinks of the novel as a youthful experiment, even a mistake.

“It is lively and readable … All the same, Lady Susan is not a success. Jane Austen had no acquaintance with smart society and has to describe it from hearsay: with the result that her picture lacks the intimate reality with with she portrays the country gentry … We may suppose she realised this for she made no effort to have the book published in her lifetime … She was gradually learning her art.”

The Perils of Gout

Mawson’s Guardian thinks that if a reader’s frisson of guilty delight is a desirable part of entertainment then young Austen had thoroughly learnt her art.  Even the brutal lines in Lady Susan  that make Cecil wince are delivered superbly. Here is Lady Susan commiserating with Mrs Johnson about her husband’s gout.

“My dear Alicia, of what mistake were you guilty in marrying a man of his age!  just old enough to be formal, ungovernable, and to have the gout – too old to be agreeable, and too young to die”.

Mr Johnson (Stephen Fry in the movie) has forbidden Alicia from seeing Lady Susan on pain of her being despatched to his properties in America if she persists, for he believes Lady Susan to be a Bad Influence.  If you’ve never seen Fry play a ruthless role, watch on as he delivers the line, “I hear the Atlantic crossing is very cold this time of year”.

Subtle, Terrifying

The Teddettes Jane Austen Book Club with their editions of Jane Austen novels
The Tedettes with their prized Folio editions of Jane Austen’s work

 Richard Church, in the Foreword to the Folio edition of Austen’s shorter works, is perplexed that Austen even penned such a work as Lady Susan.

“This is a masterpiece, powerful, subtle and terrifying. It is as cruel as Les Liaisons Dangerous by de Lachol. This Lady Susan may well be compared to  ..  Madame de Merteuil for coldness of soul, amoral cruely and icy lust. What was this feature of Jane Austens’s personality? so primitive, unladylike and deadly? Here was no chronicler of the drawing room and the country house tea party.”

 Bright Eyes

“In her person she was very attractive. Her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appearance one of health and animation. In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour, she had full round cheeks  with a mouth and nose rather small but well-formed, bright hazel eyes and brown hair forming natural curls around her face.”

What kind of eyes did Jane Austen really have?   Here is a word-portrait penned by her nephew. (Jane and Cassandra loved the role of Aunts.)

Hmm, so hazel eyes, greenish eyes, and bright. The green of a hunting cat’s eyes, perhaps?

Take your own look at Lady Susan who herself certainly seems to deserve that description. And then enjoy Kate Beckinsale’s excellent portrayal in the inexplicably renamed, but otherwise guiltily-delightful film, Love and Friendship.

Where to find Lady Susan, in various editions: On Amazon and at Booktopia.

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