Carmel BirdReviews

Carmel Bird's beautiful new book Telltale: reading writing remembering is the perfect book for a post-covid brain.

That is to say,, it's probably perfect any time, but when the ability to concentrate, read and remember is a bit compromised, a book like this is ideal. It doesn't have a plot to be followed, or characters to connect, or a narrative voice to interrogate for reliability. It can be read in short, unconnected bursts of energy for the sheer delight of Carmel Bird's reminiscences and the pleasure of the book's exquisite design.

It's ironic that I'm reading the book with a post-covid brain. Telltale has its origins in the great Covid enchantment — enforced isolation during the pandemic — when the books in the author's own personal library became the catalyst for this memoir. As Australian readers will know, we had strict and lengthy lockdowns in my state, widely supported because we evaded the worst of the virus when it was at its most virulent and the previous federal government had failed to secure adequate vaccination supplies. I'm reading the book now in the wake of being very unwell with the latest variant, but I was unlikely to die from Covid because I've had four vaccinations and the latest antivirals. But the steady rate of deaths each week means that the sense of dread is not entirely vanquished. (And we are not yet allowed out of the house, by law.)

Carmel Bird lives outside Melbourne in a small regional city and here she captures the sense of foreboding that was widely shared:

Dead of night. I am at my desk, 'safe' inside my house in Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia. This is dja dja warrung country. The outside world is muffled by darkness and by the rows and rows of books. A misty wave of danger and foreboding whispers at the windowpanes, creeps under the door, drifts down the chimney, tickles with invisible slippery poisonous fingers the chambers of my heart. What is the shape of this hovering harbinger of death? Do the vast lugubrious wings of some dark angel slowly beat above the tiny marbled sphere of the turning world? (p.14)

If you've read any of Carmel Bird's novels, you'll recognise the macabre imagery and the playful gothic style...

I have described Telltale as a memoir, but it's more than that.

Telltale is composed of two different kinds of narrative. One is warp and one is weft, and I am not sure which is really which. Will the threads hold? What patterns might I work across the surface? Will the metaphors crumble into useless dust? One threads speaks of books read and sometimes of books written. And also of things that happened in my life. The other speaks of a journey of the heart, a pilgrimage through a patchy history of the world, becoming a poetic thread that runs through the whole narrative. (p.5)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/06/04/telltale-reading-writing-remembering-by-carm...

Reading this book was such a "non-event" that I wouldn't even waste time reviewing it. I have given it one star for the cover !

Marsali Swift and her husband William have returned to Melbourne after what they hoped would be a permanent retirement tree change to the quaint property of Listowel, in the Victorian Goldfields township of Muckleton. They hoped for a quiet life full of rural splendour, delightful book clubs and country charm. Instead they become victims of a theft, a neighbour goes missing - presumed murdered, and they uncover disturbing facts about their little town’s violent past.

The style of writing is somewhat unusual, especially for the genre, and it may not appeal to all readers. The novel is set out in a journal/memoir style and is a combination of recollections of the events interspersed with random thoughts and observations relating to art, history, politics, the environment, literature and science. It’s kind of like being stuck next to Great Aunt Clara at a wedding after she’s had too many glasses of sherry. It is charming, confusing, informative and irritating all at the same time. Part of you want to leave the table, and part of you can’t drag yourself away.

The style of the novel allows for extensive descriptions of character and places. One can readily visualise Muckleton, its quaint streets and landmarks and eclectic mix of locals. It is worth pushing through to the end, even if the writing doesn’t set readily with you.

“Field of Dreams” by Carmel Bird will either earn a place in your top ten for the year or be left unfinished. Reader’s choice.

I received a free copy of this book through Sisters in Crime - Australia, in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I was really looking forward to reading Carmel Bird's latest novel, and I am pleased to say that it does not disappoint!

The voice in this latest novel from one of our best-loved writers is just like one of my dearest friends. Chatty, discursive, and intelligent; knowledgeable about the history of the world and sensitive to its contemporary woes; warm, witty and kind. But reading Field of Poppies is not just like a long, leisurely intimate conversation with someone whose wisdom I treasure, it's also a perfect expression of the zeitgeist. (And if you want any confirmation of that, check out Australia Talks at ABC Online, to see the issues that are bothering other Australians).

The narrator is Marsali Swift, an older woman who is an irrepressible optimist reluctantly coming to terms with unpleasant truths. The 20th century was a dreadful century, but the 21st may even be worse. And there is no hiding from it. Marsali, a retired interior designer, and her husband William, still working part-time as a doctor, made a tree-change to the (fictional) town of Muckleton in Victoria's goldfields region, but the world found them there anyway.

Two events, she tells us right at the beginning, have propelled them back to urban life in the Eureka Tower in Melbourne. Their Muckleton house was robbed while they were on a jaunt to hear La Traviata at the Arts Centre in Melbourne, and a woman called Alice Dooley has vanished. As it happens, most of their eccentric possessions were recovered from the robbery, but Marsali still feels that her rural idyll has been violated. Her sense of security is shattered, partly because she has to face up to the fact that her sense of community is a myth. Robbery isn't just something that happens in the city, and what makes it worse is that in the countryside, it's committed by people that you know.

And while Alice was only an acquaintance, an eccentric divorcée who lived alone in the former matrimonial home and played a very valuable violin in a community musical group, Marsali feels her disappearance keenly. It is a sign that evil has come to Muckleton which in their retirement was meant to be a refuge from the meanness of city life. Marsali (though she's not religious) suggests a prayer vigil, and the community organises it, but Alice's disappearance remains an open wound.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/10/06/field-of-poppies-by-carmel-bird/

Carmel Bird is a prolific Australian author of novels, short stories, essays and books about the craft of writing. I have previously read her 1998 novel Red Shoes and a collection of short stories called Automatic Teller (1996). Child of the Twilight (2010) is her ninth and most recent novel.

It’s a delightful book. Very playful, and subversively witty. A companionable narrator with a confiding tone whisks the story along, charming the reader with the tale of its eccentric cast of characters, almost all of whom have suffered a loss that clouds their days but not their faith. (Faith in God, faith in miracles, faith in people, faith in the future). Only the narrator claims not to believe in the spiritual, being herself a child conceived through a medical miracle, not a religious one.

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2015/12/14/child-of-the-twilight-by-carmel-bird/

Family Skeleton is the ninth novel of Carmel Bird, this year’s winner of the Patrick White Award. It is, as you have probably guessed from the title, a novel of family secrets and scandals, told with Carmel Bird’s trademark wit and pizazz. What you probably haven’t guessed is that the narrator is the skeleton in the cupboard…

Actually, there are two narrators. Margaret O’Day is the matriarch of the family, living in comfortable widowed splendour in Toorak, and occasionally the subject of media interviews because of her philanthropic interests. One day she decides to write her memoirs, which alternate with the skeleton’s narrative, under the title ‘The Book of Revelation’ and an epigram from her dead husband’s memos to staff. These epigrams have a certain piquancy because Edmund ran the family funeral business (which looks suspiciously like a theme park for the dead). It’s known as O’Day Funerals and the epigrams include examples such as ‘My life is not as happy as it was, now I am dead.’

Edmund was a philanderer, dying in the arms of his mistress, but Margaret is long past any tension about that. Indeed, she includes Fiona and her two children in family gatherings, and in addition to paying for the boys’ education, she’s also made provision for them in the Will. Margaret, although a woman of scrupulous reputation herself, is not stuffy about anything much except good manners and the niceties of life in her mansion. She gets a little testy over naming rights of her grandchildren, however, but this is largely due to a mild case of superstition.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/11/17/family-skeleton-by-carmel-bird/

I thought, given its subtitle, that Fair game was going to be a memoir of Bird’s growing up in Tasmania. But I had jumped too quickly to conclusions. The subtitle “a Tasmanian memoir” means exactly what it says, that is, it’s a memoir of Tasmania. Her interest is Tasmania’s dark history – “the lives of convict slaves, and the genocide of the indigenous peoples”. The title Fair game, you are probably beginning to realise, has a deeply ironic meaning. A delightful book, but if you want to know more please check out my full review: https://whisperinggums.com/2015/12/06/carmel-bird-fair-game-a-tasmanian-memoir-r...

"Seven people die in deep sleep therapy. A woman dies from a bee-sting in the grounds of a psychiatric clinic where inmates are encouraged to live out their delusions.

The doctor rapes his patients in the Sleeping Beauty ward.

The Dr thinks he's an elephant, and that raping a woman will fix all her psychological problems because most of the problems women have are because of a fear of sex...and him raping them will solve this fear.

Weird book.

Intriguing exploration of language and stream of conciousness through the women being treated at a psychiatric hospital in Australia in the 1960s. The story opens with a woman who is not a patient at the hospital but who dies from bee stings in the hospital's White Garden, designed as an imitation of Vita Sackville-West's garden in England. The story shifts between the current mental landscape of several of the patients and figures from the past on whom the patients have become fixated. Themes in novel also include an exploration of the skewed male view of mental illness and sexuality in women and also parent-child, husband-wife, and sibling relationships.

A collection of simply yet powerfully told stories by an Australian writer who should be more appreciated than she is.½

I was convinced to buy this book after reading one of the blurbs on the back that said that anyone interested in books and reading would like this book. So, though I have no aspirations to write fiction, as an editor and reader of fiction I thought I would give it a go.
While this is probably a useful 'prod' for fiction writers, it is not all that interesting for this reader. While Bird does a good job of covering both the mechanics of good fiction and the more spiritual aspects of the writerly life, nothing is particularly revealing, humourous, insightful etc. Though it is good to see a book aimed at writers reminding them that if they want to be a writer, they will have to write (something many wannabe writers seem to forget).
What did annoy me about this book is the huge amount of quoting of other writers Bird uses. "As such-and-such said" is fine a few times, but used over and over again it starts to feel as though the author is showing off how well read they are. Or that they know how to use a quotations dictionary.
Overall, I am sure that this book would be inspiring for those considering choosing the path of writing fiction. Otherwise, save your money and either borrow this book from the library or spend you hard earned dollars on something else.

I don't own this, but I sincerely wish I did. Please don't let the rather insipid title fool you. This is lush, gothic, imaginative and beautiful. You could probably find it at a library, like I did, but please, please put any small press preconceptions aside and go read it!

Richmond, Coriander Press