The first was the The Summer Game, by Gideon Haigh. Haigh is the foremost cricket writer in the world today. His journalism is always interesting and incisive, and the series of cricket books he has written widely acclaimed. He is a local Melburnian, but travels the world following the cricket – when he’s not playing for his amateur side, the Vincibles.
This book was about Australian cricket in the period between 1950 and 1970 – which roughly equates to the immediate post-Bradman era to just before the Chappell era, with WSC looming darkly somewhere on the horizon. By and large it’s very much an amateur era, with the players paid a pittance and setting off on long overseas tours on ocean liners. It’s an era of great and resounding highs – the Windies tour of 1961/62 being the exemplar – amid unremarkable and dull lows of defensive cricket and slow scoring. And sprinkled throughout the era were some great players: Miller, Lindwall, Harvey, Hassett, Benaud, Davidson, O’Neill, Lawry, McKenzie, Chappelli and so on.
This book was the very compelling story of all that. I found it fascinating and raced through it. Given his cred in the industry Haigh had great access to past players and they were very candid with him. It was a very different time in our history, I knew that, and I knew the cricket, with some exceptions, was reflective of the quieter, more conservative, less commercial times. Still I managed to be surprised. I was surprised at the bureaucratic shenanigans and incompetence in the background which did very little to advance the game – and which led ultimately to World Series Cricket. I loved reading about the old players, most of which I knew, but some I knew by name only. It was interesting to hear their story and to see it in the context of the times. Just as it was fascinating to hear the background stories, the gripes, the tensions, the pranks, and most of all, the strategies.
There are a lot of heroics in this book, but reading it now it seems quaint. Looking back it was an era sandwiched between two momentous times – the war, and Bradman and his invincible; and the inevitable commercialisation of the game, one day cricket, WSC, coloured clothing, and the elevation of cricketers from struggling amateurs to professionals idolised the world over. No doubt this is why Haigh chose this era to focus on.
The other book was The Hidden, by Tobias Hill. I have to admit some disappointment in this. I was looking forward to reading it because it sounded fascinating: an archaeological dig in Sparta and the tensions/mysteries arising out of that. It was well written, but unsatisfying. A day after finishing it what strikes me is that the motivations where never adequately articulated. What led them to do what they did? How did the leaders enlist the others in the cause? It also seems somewhat prosaic in the end, a bit like listening to a great joke in the telling only for the punchline to fall flat.
The writing is top notch, but somewhat murky. It ‘s the sort of writing that lends itself to a story like this, but I think is also more characteristic of European writing: not murky so much as closed in. I think in general you can hypothesise and suggest that most European writing in general is inward looking, where as writing from the ‘new world’ countries (America, Canada, Australia), looks outward, is more expansive. You can hypothesise further and suggest that is symptomatic of the different cultural and geographic heritage. Europe is crowded with history, much as it is crowded with people. They have centuries of struggle and enquiry behind them, of wars, plagues, of kings, queens, popes, and the general rise and fall. There is much to reason out, at the same time the only real space one finds is inside. There is little sanctuary in the wider world all crammed in together.
This is in complete contrast to the writing of the new world. To start with our countries began. Despite the existence of indigenous peoples, in terms of western culture these were uninhabited lands. They were discovered and settled by a combination of adventurers and refugees and people seeking a new start - and in the case of Oz, built on the back of convict transportation. The concept of our nations is very different, even now. On top of that these settlers found a lot of untamed space, room to explore and to ramble within. It must have been revelatory for those early settlers, and though we have become accustomed by it in the generations since we view a world from the broader perspective an untrammelled sky presents to us. And so we look outwards looking to continually extend the boundaries of our own personal world. Over time that perspective has infused our writing. There’s a lot of blue sky in the writing of the new world.
I digress. Looking back at The Hidden the writing is darker and has a lingering shadow of menace which is perfectly in tune with where the story was presumed to be going. More problematic for me was the lead character. For the story to work he had to be of a particular character, gullible, yearning, confused, aimless. There’s no way a Hemingway character could have played this role, and in fact the protagonist is very much an English, almost archetypal, character.
Mercer is the sort of diffident character that Americans probably find charming, but which Australians just find plain annoying. He frustrated me no end, to the point I had no sympathy for him. He was just a gullible soft-cock walking into trouble – which, I guess, is what he was supposed to be. I just think it might have worked better had he not been such a cliché.
There other book I have started is Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table. Levi is one of the great characters. He was a Jewish-Italian chemist who survived Auschwitz and who came out of it writing lucid prose about it whilst returning to his career as a chemist. He wrote a number of books notable for their intelligence and objective humanity and was widely lauded; then one day he fell, or jumped, from the top of the stair well in his apartment building. This is generally accepted to be suicide.The Periodic Table is basically a series of essays, stories, memoirs that begin with a description of a chemical element before broadening into a piece thematically sympathetic to the qualities of chemical. I’ve only just begun, but have read other works by him, and find him a very intelligent, highly sympathetic writer. I don’t doubt that he is one of the most important writers of the last century for his work interpreting the experience of the holocaust in a humane but scientifically precise method. His life as a chemist is hardly incidental. It was important work for him, and the scientific approach he learned as a chemist was applied when he wrote of his experiences in Auschwitz.
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