Review of Australian Fiction
Vol 9: Issue 5
Debra Adelaide & Eleanor Limprecht
Review of Australian Fiction
Review of Australian Fiction Copyright © 2014 by Authors.
Contents
Imprint
The Ministry of Reading Debra Adelaide
Sao Eleanor Limprecht
Published by Review of Australian Fiction
“The Ministry of Reading” Copyright © 2014 by Debra Adelaide
“Sao” Copyright © 2014 by Eleanor Limprecht
www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com
The Ministry of Reading
Debra Adelaide
1 The Reading Room
The minister stared at the cover of the report before her, nothing else on her desk apart from a glass of water, not even a pen. She had already underlined the crucial passages. Her staff would be here shortly. Five copies of the report awaited them on the conference table in the centre of the reading room, specially booked and unavailable to the public for the occasion. At the first knock, she took her reading glasses from her pocket and polished them on a corner of her silk shirt. Her assistant Ainsley rose from her desk and went to the door.
The Capital had always featured a reading room, but Dr Wheeler’s administration had transformed it. The thick dark curtains had been replaced with gauzy ones that let in the light, which was not so cruel at all, though generations of librarians had once decided otherwise. The windows were thrown open, allowing strong breezes that made the curtains salsa wildly into the room. The original books that had sustained more than a century of administration were now gone. A serious culling had seen off every mustard-yellow bound volume to the government repository in an industrial estate south of the city. The shelves were filled with books on any topic but selected according to a strict criteria: that they not be boring. Hardcovers and paperbacks, new and secondhand, cheap and not so cheap. But they were all bargains, as far as the minister was concerned. She had already abolished the tax on books, restored the trade restrictions that protected local authors from encroachments by foreign multinationals, broken the apparatus that was leading to near-monopoly of the industry by chain stores, and set up a Book Club (she refused to employ terms like inquiry, commission, or committee) whose primary objective was to tell people to go stick their head in a book.
Like equal pay, the ministry of reading had been around for a long while but, like feminism, was still finding it needed to justify itself. In the early months of Dr Wheeler’s position, it became necessary to make some adjustments against the ever-present old guard who preferred books to be kept in libraries and readers to remain anonymous, passive. No one had ever questioned the fact that there always had been an entire portfolio devoted to numbers, and the minister was rather weary of words playing second fiddle to numerals. If the nation saw fit to have its finances controlled by someone called the Treasurer, then they could accept that the Reader would be in charge of its language as well.
The minister was devoted to words. An ex-librarian, the only one in the current government—dominated, as was the usual case, by well-groomed lawyers and slightly less kempt party officials and organisers—she persuaded the President to provide more support for her portfolio and more authority to her position as the nation’s Reader.
2 Fossil Ridge
Dr Wheeler’s credentials for her position were immaculate. She had spent a crucial formative period in the remote north of the country, a region dominated by primary industries and dangerous wild creatures, where working and drinking were the main occupations. She had run the Fossil Ridge library-come-hardware store for twenty years and had stood for office at the urging of numerous devoted citizens who had ensured her reputation had spread far across the vast region whose electorate she came to represent. After her election, the President had been intrigued.
‘A library and hardware store in one?’
‘Only way to get the locals to notice the books. The place was so remote they had to come to me for bolts and fence strainers. Even light bulbs and batteries.’
‘What happened to the municipal library?’
‘You’ve never been to Fossil Ridge?’
The President had not. Nor had he travelled anywhere near the great stretches of land north of the Capital, where every other place was named something Hills or Ridge or Downs, as if there were features—rolling meadows with gambolling lambs and hopping rabbits, picturesque stands of shady trees—instead of the bleak rocky landscape that stretched into an endless distance, and light that skewered the eyeballs.
‘There is no municipality, as such. And the closest thing to a public library was a travelling one, a Kombi van that arrived once a year.’
‘Once a year?’
‘Nearly every year. Sometimes the floods kept them out. But when the council headquarters shifted to the coast, the library service went too.’
The President had only a vague idea that from the coast Fossil Ridge would have been well over a thousand kilometres away by road. And not particularly good road. It was country where no one stayed by choice, except for eccentrics. But Dr Wheeler seemed normal. In this climate, she had persuaded the entire town to read her books, a collection that had commenced when she was a young council trainee working in places so remote that the post was only weekly. She had started a reading group, an exclusively men’s one, women being rare in that place. It was perhaps a national first. Back then she’d relied on Reader’s Digest catalogues (a company she blessed, for they would send their publications anywhere on earth) and a series of book clubs that sold their wares like reproduction miniature vases or commemorative spoons. Consequently her collection was big on condensed versions of popular male authors and facsimile editions of classical titles, leather-bound. But books like the novels of James A. Michener and Morris West, the complete set of Dennis Wheatley (a freebie thrown in when she ordered a twin set of The Iliad and The Odyssey) and The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám were popular among her male readership. It helped, too, that the books were sturdy hardcovers. Even after years of constant circulation, her copies of Exodus or The Dam Busters were still intact.
In more recent years Dr Wheeler had opened an Amazon account and obtained books more efficiently than if she’d ordered from booksellers in the main cities. The postage, she discovered, was the same from Seattle to anywhere, and it seemed the Amazon accounts department was yet to work out that shipping to Fossil Ridge was considerably more time and trouble than to Birmingham, Samarkand or even the Canary Islands.
She had selected titles on an arbitrary but workable system. For instance, each year she ordered all the shortlisted titles, multiple copies, from the major literary awards. She opened a book at the Fossil Ridge Hotel, setting out a blackboard where the odds were noted and adjusted as the announcement drew close. Every year, the locals voted in favour of an alternative title, while guessing the actual winners almost every time. When Peter Carey won the Booker for Oscar and Lucinda, Fossil Ridge had favoured the imminent controversy with The Satanic Verses. In 1992 they’d spurned the joint winners for a clear outsider, The Butcher Boy, which remained a favourite among the local meatworkers. Later they’d resisted The Sea for the same reason they would also reject Breath. Coastal themes and watery metaphors held little appeal for landlocked, drought-choked readers.
When Penguin issued its first Popular reprints she displayed all fifty of the bright orange books in the hardware store window alongside a display of colour-coordinated paint tins. Fifty titles at ten dollars each, free delivery for bulk orders. Some of the customers could spend that on alcohol over a few weeks. And
the rewards were massive. Each reader paid ten dollars deposit in exchange for reading any number of these titles, and interest soon developed into obsession, readers lining up for books with reputations, authors whose names were near-legendary. She bound the paper covers in clear plastic contact, and the readers were respectful: they had handled folio editions and gilt-edged volumes for years and knew not to read in the bath or over their breakfast sausages.
High in demand at first were Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Lolita, The History of Sexuality and Delta of Venus. Nevertheless, after the idea of books about sex was replaced by the reality (they discovered that Lolita actually contained no sex, while Foucault’s account was more history than sex), readers gradually promoted their own favourites. For Dr Wheeler it was fascinating, like watching yeast rise then clarify in a barrel of home-brew beer. After the heady ferment of Lawrence or Nin, or the intoxication of love (in a cold climate, or in the time of cholera, either was preferable), readers settled for the comparative sobriety of ethics and philosophy. High in favour was Paul Davies’s The Mind of God, closely followed by The Consolation of Philosophy and Six Thinking Hats. She was surprised to find that one favourite amongst the fiction was not as she’d expected, given the town’s regular diet of authors like Chandler and Capote. So popular was Pride and Prejudice that she had added extra copies from her collection of quality reprints to the Popular Penguins set to satisfy demand. She could not attribute this to recent Austen mania, for the movies, the television miniseries, the reading clubs, the raft of contemporary books from Bridget Jones’s Diary to The Jane Austen Book Club, had failed to have an impact on the readers of Fossil Ridge. She could only attribute it to the novel’s intrinsic witty wisdom and its satisfying moral, social and cultural patterning.
Or maybe it was style. For the number one book of all fifty of the Popular Penguins surprised even her, who thought she gauged the pulse of her readership fairly accurately. It was Eric Partridge’s Usage & Abusage: A Guide to Good English. There, she thought, was something for the theorists to ponder, for the marketing geniuses to work out. Why a town like Fossil Ridge with its ore and semi-precious metal miners, who spent their waking hours underground and their sleeping hours drinking; or its itinerant station hands, who sank wells and mustered cattle, built fences and dredged dams; with its collection of council workers who filled potholes or stamped and filed rates notices; its core population of bartenders (eight), schoolteachers (one), nurses (one-half), priest (one-quarter) and meatworkers, agricultural advisors and engineers (anything from ten to hundreds depending on the time of year and the amount of rain), plus its scattered leaseholders, tradespeople and one taxi driver — why they elevated a book of grammar to the number one title was worth perhaps several research projects in linguistics or anthropology or cultural studies.
The minister held great affection and admiration for the readers of Fossil Ridge. Indeed it was their devotion to the act that was the reason she was here today in the reading room in the Capital, awaiting her staff, about to discuss a report. When as a minister of the government, as the nation’s first Reader, she had reflected on the singular success of the Fossil Ridge lending library, she decided she must examine the implications. What had her readers there revealed about the nature and effects of reading? The place represented a rare, perhaps unique, experiment in the reading process, and she was keen to absorb its lessons. It was a Petri dish of reading culture. She had long held the idea that reading was a good thing to do, but could never justify it or back it up by hard data. In a culture of commodity, where reading was an essential skill as opposed to a desirable pastime, it would be good to assess the real results of sustained reading on an entire population.
At the time, certain questions had intrigued her: was the crime rate in Fossil Ridge lesser or greater? Were the people more generous and charitable, gentle and pacific? Or did they become introverted, selfish and irascible? One meditative book about reading that Dr Wheeler consulted shortly before she left for the Capital had espoused the virtues of reading as if it were a health regime that went hand in hand with bowel regularity and dental hygiene. This author had gone so far as to claim that devoted readers were likely to be more fastidious in their personal habits than non-readers. Did the citizens of Fossil Ridge floss more frequently than the rest of the nation?
‘I don’t know about that,’ the visiting dentist had informed her when she put it to him. ‘They always seem a pretty regular bunch to me. I tell you one thing, though, about what I know of these men, compared with a lot of other places I visit. Not one of them has the slightest interest in writing themselves.’
It was true: no one had ever expressed such a desire in all her years there. They were happy to remain consumers. To receive the word, not impart it.
‘And I can tell you,’ he added. ‘It’s not for want of stories. Not out there.’
By the time Dr Wheeler had left Fossil Ridge for the Capital she had read just about everything there was to read on the topic, yet could see that further study was clearly required. But many reams of paper and much congested jargon could be expended in research and result in no one learning anything about the success or failure of anything, and the example of her lending library, in a place where books were rare and reading valued, would be no exception if she were not careful. She was conscious that while the theorists, the cultural critics, the pragmatists and the educationalists had for decades wrestled with the nature, function and value of reading, there was one clear gap. That was when she contacted the International Brain Institute and commissioned a research study.
3 Reading is sport
Kendall, Jonesy, Helen, and Morrissey filed in one after the other. A few minutes later there was Tim, flicking his ponytail and stroking his beard. All her staff were efficient readers. Morrissey could have scanned the report faster had it been on her iPad, but the minister was not prepared to issue electronic copies. The pages would be taken to her private office after the meeting and destroyed. She had hand-picked her senior advisers and they rarely let her down. Even Tim, the poet. Between the five of them they covered all possible bases. Small literary novel (Helen) to mass market fiction and the self-help department (Morrissey). Poetry, which Tim covered from folk ballad to urban rap, Snorri to Vendler. Tim was her most democratic adviser. He read poetry as diverse and as divisive as Laws and Lawson, Hallmark and Hughes, even the inspirational verses of Helen Steiner Rice.
But she had a special soft spot for Jonesy. He had confessed to her, his first day on the job, that he hadn’t always been a reader, that in his younger days he’d really been interested in sport. Specifically water sports. And fishing, if that counted. The minister fixed him with a look and said, ‘But reading is sport, surely?’
Back in her junior high school days Dr Wheeler happened not to be what is known as a team player. She had tried to enjoy netball but despite craving to be like any normal girl who looked forward to Wednesday afternoon sport, who, in fact, regarded this as the highlight of the school week, she quite simply and thoroughly loathed it. Wednesday sport dragged around with a cruel inevitability as far as she was concerned, and she became obsessed with avoiding as far as possible this part of the school curriculum. Banished to the position of goalkeeper, and bored with the action always at the other end of the court, she was usually found holding a book when the ball came in her direction; there was always a chance she could get to read it, given the infrequency of that.
In her fourth year a timetabling hiccough meant that avoidance became a reality. She and a clumsy overweight friend eluded the lists of netballers, golfers, hockey players and swimmers, finding out, several weeks into the term, that no one seemed to miss them. They spent sports day in the music room reading romance novels and writing their journals, which they sometimes also compared, as was then the custom among fifteen-year-olds, until they were sprung by none other than the sports mistress herself who was roaming the corners of the school, whistle in one hand, clipboard in the other, on
a quest to flush out the unfit and the unfaithful. She screeched at them so loudly they dropped their books, stood to attention, and shivered in their non-sport shoes. When demanded to provide an explanation as to why they were not participating in sport, the young future minister seized on the only possible answer. ‘Reading is sport,’ she said. The sports mistress’s rather bug eyes became very prominent. ‘A sort of sport,’ she had added. ‘You exercise your mind…’ The whites seemed almost blue, glowing. ‘And your eyeballs…’
Why bother trying to explain, she thought. The woman never read a book in her life, the whole school knew that for a fact. Only magazines like Netball Weekly or Refereeing for Life, and even then she tended to look at the pictures. This school was deeply riven. On the one side were the sport and PE faculty and all the maths and science teachers (mostly men), who boasted of never reading a book. On the other was the handful of staff teaching humanities, who were alleged to have read a book or two. This was the school, after all, made famous because the deputy principal went on to become a major league coach. The school captains were annually chosen for their ball skills rather than their academic achievements, least of all for their proficiency with words. Speech nights were always torture.
They were marched down to the principal’s office, after which the sports mistress left, eyes still bulging, her long beaky nose quivering in anticipation of hunting down more recalcitrants. Fortunately for Dr Wheeler and her friend, the principal himself was in that afternoon, a rare situation: his relationship to the rest of the school was refreshingly casual and he tended to make full use of his deputy. The principal arrived late at school, when he was there at all, ambling through the back gates around recess time, having enjoyed a leisurely walk from the train station. He had long since had his licence cancelled due to driving under the influence, and could reliably be encountered in a jovial mood at staff parties, and functions at the local club. It was fortunate, because this principal maintained a sort of old fogey-ish disdain of matters of the flesh—apart from nourishment of the stomach and liver—and evidently was as unenthusiastic about organised sport as the two students. His chief activity consisted of emerging from his office once a week to aim a flaccid hose at the one tree that grew in the quadrangle. The exertion of this over, fifteen minutes later he’d be back in his office reviewing his domain through a thick haze of cigar smoke.
Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 9, Issue 5 Page 1
