Six Degrees of Separation - Where will Shopgirl lead me?

Last month, a tweet from Whispering Gums introduced me to the 6 Degrees of Separation meme.

Annabel Smith and Emma Chapman began the 6 Degrees of Separation meme in 2014 and now it is managed (is that the right word?) by Kate at Books are my favourite and best. The idea is that Kate nominates a book and, on the first Saturday of the month, participants reveal chains of six books that all connect in some way. 

This month's book is Shopgirl by Steve Martin. Damn, haven't read it. Thank goodness for Google! Steve Martin's heroine is an artist making a living selling gloves at Neimann Marcus in Beverley Hills. Already I'm stumped. I'm working with a book by a comic, set in California, featuring a heroine who is both artist and shop assistant. 

My first stop is Shopaholic Abroad by Sophie Kinsella. This is the only book in the 'Shopaholic' series I've read. It's a frothy confection of romance and fashion and dazzling New York. At the risk of spoiling the end, the book's heroine Rebecca finds her calling working in Saks Fifth Avenue. So my first link is based on the occupations of the heroines.

Now I'm in New York I feel like I'm on slightly firmer ground and the city is my next link. It seems impossible to go past Anita Heiss' Manhattan Dreaming. Her heroine Lauren, a curator at the National Aboriginal Gallery in Canberra, receives a fellowship at the Smithsonian. It's been years since I read it and loved it. Heiss is a genre-hopper. She has done some outstanding work, not least being The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. Her most recent book is Our Race to Reconciliation, for younger readers. I always learn from her work so it's on my to-be-read list.  

Another Indigenous writer I admire is Kim Scott, which brings me to his third novel That Deadman Dance (2o10). This book won so many awards, including the Miles Franklin in 2011. Set on the south coast of Western Australia, it tells a story of the early encounters between black and white.

There are many strands to That Deadman Dance: epic coastal journeys, whaling sequences that will make you gasp in wonder, injustice, understanding and loss. But it is the characters - flawed, credible human beings, embodying their history but never mere ciphers - who stay with you: Menak, the tribal elder, both wise and cantankerous; Jak Tar, the escaped sailor, who takes (and is given) Binyan as his resourceful wife; Bobby Wabalanginy, the dancer, the go-between, who has to grow old to know fear; Chaine, the entrepreneur, who gives and then takes and whose cosseted daughter Christine reads The Last of the Mohicans and wonders at the shining manhood of her childhood companion, Bobby; and Cross, who "encourages ideas of entitlement" in his Noongar friends: his bones are exhumed and ceremonially reinterred on higher ground while Wunyeran's are dishonoured and scattered.

SMH review by Morag Fraser, 13/1/2011 

I almost didn't finish it. I remember putting it aside over Christmas and wondering if I'd return to it. When I did, early in 2011, I galloped to the end - and what an ending it was! Have you ever felt a book punch you in the guts? That's how I felt at the end of That Deadman Dance and six years later I'm still recalling that feeling. 

Now I'm in Western Australia, I'm going to link to Dorothy Hewett. Perhaps best known as a poet and playwright, Hewett wrote three novels: Bobbin' Up, The Toucher and Neap Tide. I read the last two when they were first published but that was some 20 years ago. Maybe I should have gone with Rudyard Kipling's Kim? Although I haven't read that.

Dorothy Hewett used to live in the Blue Mountains and that provides a link to Delia Falconer's The Service of Clouds, which was set in Katoomba in the period 1907-1926. (I'm a bit horrified to discover it was also published nearly 20 years ago!) I remember this as a very lyrical first novel about photography and clouds and love and the effects of World War 1. The experience of reading it remains imprinted in my memory. Perhaps its because I spent a year living in Katoomba when I was 6, a year that is also imprinted on my memory. The Service of Clouds, though, is also a novel about that moment in the early 20th century when life changed irrevocably for small communities such as those in the Blue Mountains and it talks about the war without ever taking you to the front.

So my last link is to another novel which reveals the impact of World War 1 without ever taking you to the frontline. It is, of course, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Another book about a woman wanting to be an artist, about the effects of war, about a coastal journey. I've read it many times since being 'forced' to read it a uni. It improves with each reading - as Margaret Atwood discovered. 

Well, that was harder than it looked. I'm looking forward to seeing where Picnic at Hanging Rock leads me in July. I might begin thinking about my chain tomorrow.

The Shoes of the Fisherman - Morris West

2017 Reading Calendar - March

When Morris West died at his desk, mid-sentence, on 9 October 1999, he had sold an estimated 60-70 million copies of his novels. His death was reported in London and New York, as well as across Australia. The 7.30 Report paid tribute, sharing excerpts of an interview with Geraldine Doogue in which he talked about life, love, death and the Catholic Church.

The Church seems to have been something of an obsession. He almost, almost took vows as a Christian Brother. Instead, he went on to create what Kerry O'Brien described as 'the so-called Vatican novel', publishing novels that explored morality, belief, religious power.

The Shoes of the Fisherman is one of these. Published in 1963, on the day Pope John X111 died, it is the story of the election of the first Russian Pope.

'The Pope was dead. The Camerlengo had announced it. The Master of Ceremonies, the notaries, the doctors had consigned him under signature into eternity.'

I read this book years ago. Intrigued by the pomp and mystery (for a non-Catholic) of the Catholic Church. Curious about this Australian writer who was read all over the world and doted on by my mother. As we packed up Mum's house to move her into full-time care, her copy of The Shoes of the Fisherman ended up in a box in my living room.

Returning to it was a struggle. My mind couldn't make sense of all cardinals. I lost track of the plot lines - there's the new Pope, at least two retiring cardinals, a priest returning from the spiritual wilderness, a journalist wrestling with an all-consuming love, a woman adrift in Rome. Sometimes I lost my way in the complexity of the sentences. I began to worry I was spending too much time on Twitter, that I was losing my ability to read anything more complex than 140 characters.

Struggle, though, is what I have come to think the novel is about. The struggle to find our way in the world, to live the life that we have chosen or which has been chosen for us. Kiril, the newly appointed Pope, wrestles with his role as the leader of the Church. George Faber, the journalist who has made his career reporting on the Church in Rome, has reached his own crossroads: how much of his soul is he willing to sell to secure marriage to the young Chiara, the deserted wife of a Catholic politician?

The Shoes of the Fisherman is also extraordinarily contemporary, even if sometimes its language feels outdated. Like so many of the book's characters, the world is at a crossroads too. A disaster is pending, unless Russia and America can find a way to work together. Environmental disasters loom. The Catholic Church is losing its eminence in many parts of the world. Kiril wrestles with how to change the Church while honouring its origins.

Morris West left Australia in the late 1950s, not returning until 1980. It is hard to find a sense of Australia in this novel. It is an international book, embracing the wider world without more than a backward glance to the country West had left. The references are brief. There is 'Hanna the Irishman from Australia', joining the other cardinals in the Conclave that will anoint Kiril. And 'A plague in the Philippines can infect Australia within a day'. But that's about it. Yet it's not as though West was completely disinterested in his home country. He returned to live in Sydney, chairing the Council of the National Library of Australia and the National Book Council. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours of 1985 and upgraded to Officer of the Order in the Queen's Birthday Honours of 1997.

Today, Morris West's 101st birthday, he is little read and you will probably only find copies of his 30 books tucked on the dusty shelves of secondhand bookshops. Perhaps it's time for those books to be dusted off and read again.

Want more?

• Listen to Morris West via the National Library of Australia. There are two interviews available online - one recorded by Hazel de Berg in 1960; the other recorded by Diana Ritch in 1992.
• Read the New York Times obituary.
• You might also track down the biography, Morris West: Literary Maverick by Maryanne Confoy, published by John Wiley in 2005.