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.
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.
