Rhiannon Brown: It seems to me that for all the characters in your book things change, people evolve, and yet the past, the present and the future are all happening simultaneously to them. Michael thinks he is also the eleven-year-old boy playing cricket in the street. Rita, through her dress, connects with the past and has to reject that in order to move forward. Vic, feeling a breeze against his cheek, is transported back into a time when he was behind one of those great engines. Is that how we live time, all at once, as it were?
Steven Carroll: It’s the way it happens in the book. It’s a very fluid notion of time. Time almost collapses and characters are almost simultaneously living the future and the past, and the author intervening connects them to the present because I think quite often the sadness of a lot of these characters is that they do miss the present, but quite often they’re either dwelling in the past or yearning towards the future and are conscious of both, but I think that notion of time… I suspect that’s more authorial than the way the characters experience time, although there is the exception of Michael, he is one of these people who even as he is living a moment is nostalgic for it.
‘It’s a very fluid notion of time. Time almost collapses and characters are almost simultaneously living the future and the past’
Most of the characters, if I can sort of dwell on this point, do exist, and they have throughout all three books, in a kind of almost frantic or constant state of becoming, all yearning towards some perfect state of being. And of course it’s all an illusion. And society itself has its own yearning, except when society yearns we call it progress, and the both of them are moving in a kind of concert. We do need those sorts of things, we do need our dreams, we do need to look forward to some imagined state of perfection or being better, but at the same time the paradox is that we become so lost in our yearning, so lost in our straining towards some sort of otherness that we miss the moment. Whole societies can do this, people can too. The moment is a very slippery thing.
‘the paradox is that we become so lost in our yearning, so lost in our straining towards some sort of otherness that we miss the moment’
A lot of this is actually…it’s strange where the sources of books come from, but I went back to university about three or four years ago and studied Martin Heidegger, and he is very much concerned about that sort of thing, in fact his whole enterprise… I’m just an amateur at this sort of stuff when it comes to philosophy and theory but his whole notion or project, I suppose, philosophically, was to take philosophy where it began in wonder, and by implication that people ought to actually go back to a state where they can actually see the wonder of existence. Too easily we lose it.
You’ve got to be in the moment quite often to actually experience it, but quite often we look back and think, ‘Oh, wasn’t that wonderful. I wasn’t watching though.’ And that’s why the very end of the book bounces off the Hardy poem Self Unseen where something extraordinary happens to a character, he lives through it but doesn’t actually recognise its extraordinariness until years later and he realises that he was looking away.
Rhiannon Brown: Let’s just get back to one of the main stories in the book and the idea that this suburb is celebrating its 100 years, and the centenary wall.
Steven Carroll: Basically that is what you might call a kind of structural device. I needed a way of actually bringing all of these stories together, and the idea of centenary suburb is the glue that holds all the stories together. I stole it. I was reading at the time Robert Musil The Man Without Qualities, and the glue that holds his story together is a celebration as well, and so I thought actually I can use that, and so I took that, and it became the spine, if you like, that runs throughout the book. But again it links up with that whole notion of history and progress and the characters in the suburb thinking themselves to be emblematic of progress and the suburb of being emblematic of progress in the sense that it has come from being a frontier community to a settled civilised community in a very short space of time.
Again, it was a way of exploring the idea of progress in the context of the suburb because it’s a sort of article of faith for a lot of the characters in the book and in lots of ways it’s almost an enlightenment notion too because there is that sense…they feel as though they’re riding the train of History with a capital H, and there’s also a sort of residual sense of perfectibility in there as well. It gave me a way of bringing, I suppose, the grand narrative themes of literary fiction to the small picture of a suburb if a suburb is celebrating its 100th birthday.
Rhiannon Brown: So a group of members of the community who consider themselves fairly prominent and important, from the mayor down to the local shopkeepers, decide to bring in an artist, a younger guy who’s a painter, and they commission him to paint a mural. He ends up painting a different idea of history to the one that they had in mind.
‘it was a way of exploring the idea of progress in the context of the suburb because it’s a sort of article of faith for a lot of the characters in the book’
Steven Carroll: Yes, it’s almost as though they know they’ve let someone into their midst with a touch of the time bomb about him, that there’s something about him that’s unpredictable, and of course he is a bit like that. He sees the suburb and the history of the suburb in totally different terms to the committee that’s hired him, and the painting that he eventually gives them, the mirror that he eventually holds up to them at the very end is in contradiction to the way they would have thought about themselves. Again, it does link up to the whole notion of history and progress and the two being linked together because you actually lined up a whole line of dignitaries whose article of faith is progress but nonetheless are depicted looking backwards, just as…and this is 1970, and it’s as the Whitlam wave is about to hit.
‘This is one of the beauties of writing a novel, you can actually inhabit the minds of people that you might not necessarily agree with or even like’
Rhiannon Brown: Whitlam is quite a big presence throughout the book and he is referred to by the oldies as ‘their Whitlam’. They regard him with deep suspicion.
Steven Carroll: This is one of the beauties of writing a novel, you can actually inhabit the minds of people that you might not necessarily agree with or even like. Mrs Webster is deeply suspicious of Whitlam, and I found as I got into the character of Mrs Webster that I could understand her reservations. It was fun dealing with them, viewing the kind of arrogance of not just Whitlam but the whole Whitlam generation. At one stage she refers to them as those emperors who crown themselves without waiting for somebody else to do it for them. Michael, though, he adores Whitlam, he sees in Whitlam a whole new beginning and a very necessary one. He sees history at its best heading towards them. But when you look back, there must have been a sense of trepidation for our parents and those who actually didn’t share the enthusiasm of Michael’s generation.
Of course the whole enlightenment notion of progress has taken quite a battering over the last twenty years, and the mayor says at the unveiling of the mural, ‘You may think our ideas are quaint, our ideas of history and progress, but was it such a bad world we gave you after all?’ He suddenly finds himself very impassioned about the whole notion of his little suburb, his community, and it had taken him by surprise. Mrs Webster is watching and thinking, there’s the mayor, I never took him for the emotional type but he’s been caught up in a bit of emotion there. So he gives this quite passionate speech about the ‘the world we gave you, was it that bad?’ and of course it wasn’t bad.
Extract from ‘Steven Carroll’s The Time We Have Taken’ interview by Rhiannon Brown, first broadcast by ‘The Book Show’ on Radio National, 14 March 2007, is reproduced with permission of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and ABC Online. © 2007 ABC. All rights reserved.
About the Book
The Critical Eye
‘IN THE SPARE, EPISODIC STYLE of the two earlier novels (The Art of the Engine Driver and The Gift of Speed) in this trilogy, Steven
Carroll undertakes a parallel task of representation as his cast of characters reconsider their lives in and beyond the suburb that has been their crucible… What do they make of their lives? Do they hear the “music of the years”? Or are they deaf, missing the wonder of it? Carroll’s novel is a poised, philosophically profound exploration…a stand-alone work that is moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives’, stated the Miles Franklin 2008 Literary Award Judging Panel on Steven Carroll’s winning novel, The Time We Have Taken.
The Age Book of the Year 2007 Judges offered this praise: ‘The characters are drawn with a poignant intimacy and the narrative moves with a kind of poetic majesty… The reader is both immersed in and embraced by the place, the people and the time, and while the story is so obviously set in Australia, it has a breadth of vision that lends it something universal.’
Debra Adelaide, in her review for The Australian, commented, ‘It is the creation of a larger concept of suburban life in all its astonishing transcendent possibilities that makes this novel so special. Carroll’s revelations of these beautiful insights into our utterly ordinary world make him a writer worth cherishing. His prose is unfailingly assured, lyrical, poised.’
‘Carroll’s revelations of these beautiful insights into our utterly ordinary world make him a writer worth cherishing. His prose is unfailingly assured, lyrical, poised’
The Sydney Morning Herald review noted that Carroll ‘expertly illustrates both the potential and the vulnerability created by the possibility of dramatic change. If it is the job of the fiction writer to remind us that we are not alone, then Carroll earns his keep here.’
Michael McGirr stated in The Age, ‘Carroll writes the kind of still prose that invites the reader into a contemplative space… The result is a deeply satisfying encounter with the empty spaces that the suburb failed to fill both between people and inside them.’ And in conclusion, McGirr added, ‘Carroll takes time to tell an untidy story with a gentle sense of wonder. His prose whispers loud.’
‘Carroll takes time to tell an untidy story with a gentle sense of wonder. His prose whispers loud’
Katharine England in the Advertiser spoke of the series as a whole: ‘Each novel stands on its own, but they are more interesting considered together, making up as they do not only a history of the twentieth century phenomenon the suburb, but also a slow-moving, Proustian meditation on being and time.’ She described Carroll’s prose as, ‘the repetitive accretion of detail, like the brushstrokes of a pointillist, the echoes within the novel and from book to book, the use of tenses which base time in the present but refer constantly to past and future, contribute to the hypnotic effect of the whole.’
The Review
Progress of Small Moments
By Debra Adelaide
IN POISED, contemplative prose, unexpected glories of everyday suburbia resonate.
Rather than taking it for granted, I have lately come to revere the sentence, to appreciate properly its shape and capacity. Sentences are, of course, lines, and so a novel, like any piece of prose, is just a series of lines one after another, yet Steven Carroll’s new novel achieves admirable things with all those lines, although the result is more than merely architectural. Structurally and thematically, his novels offer lines in parallel, where past, present and future combine without effort. Sometimes single sentences unite the three stages in shimmering harmony.
‘his novels offer lines in parallel, where past, present and future combine without effort. Sometimes single sentences unite the three stages in shimmering harmony’
In The Time We Have Taken, there are few dramatic events and almost no plot. Instead there is meticulous interrogation of the small moments that shape life. The broader theme of travel that dominates creates a range of specific metaphors — railways tracks (strongly evident in the first of this series, The Art of the Engine Driver), trains, cars, roads — that replicate the characters’ inner and actual movements, while even sport fuels this theme: in The Gift of Speed, larger histories toss balls back and forth above the characters as the West Indians and Australians battle it out in the 1961 Tests.
The narrative lines in The Time We Have Taken are modest. Four main characters, at different stages of life and in separate places, become aware of the passing of time, realise they have ‘known the days, and the days are almost over’. For those familiar with the previous two novels, some context to update you: Rita is now alone, Vic has retired to a fishing town up north, and their son Michael is a student teacher pursuing a relationship with Madeleine.
The year is 1970. The novelist George Johnston, author of a representative Australian novel, is dying. Political change is in the air. It is the centenary celebrations of the flat outer suburb of Melbourne where Rita and Vic have spent their life. A mural is in preparation that culminates in a vast linear story of progress. It is appropriate that journey and movement inform the design of The Time We Have Taken, which captures a period when Australia was poised exquisitely on the edge of change, yet when people were still idling in neutral or nervously looking back to the past.
‘journey and movement inform the design of The Time We Have Taken, which captures a period when Australia was poised exquisitely on the edge of change’
But everything is already shifting irreversibly for these characters: Vic will probably die alone in his self-imposed exile, Mrs Webster is without the husband and his engineering business that have dominated her life, Rita has lost the roles of wife and mother that have so far defined and contained her, and Michael will farewell his girlfriend and join the protest against the Vietnam War.
The inevitability of change is signalled quietly, gathering more speed towards the final part of the novel, when in a masterstroke Carroll introduces the mighty symbol, focus and indeed agent of this change. Small suburban politics, diminished but never trivialised, are thrown into stronger relief with the arrival of a mountain called Whitlam who appears for the centenary celebration. He is hardly a character, more a prop, briefly entering (stage left, of course) to remind us of the imminence of an inexorable force that will rock the ground forever. It is a brilliant portrayal: the mountain of Whitlam on wheels is propelled from Commonwealth car to civic function, back to car and airport; he is as inaccessible to the citizens as the moon, yet is familiar and welcome. In the novel, Gough Whitlam never speaks (an amazing thing in itself) but simply is: a monolithic presence, a focus of desires and apprehensions.
‘Many episodes form small and beautiful epiphanies, and in this the novel is endlessly quotable’
This slow, contemplative novel suggests several other great writers: Carol Shields with her ability to turn inside out the everyday in domestic life and reveal its unexpected glories. It also reminds me of Gerald Murnane’s genius for mapping the endless detours of the creative mind. And it is, one has to say, Proustian, fondly lingering on memory, following through a single idea to its end, however long that might take. Many episodes form small and beautiful epiphanies, and in this the novel is endlessly quotable, but one will do. Speeding through the streets one evening in Mrs Webster’s sleek black car, Rita’s experience of the gift of speed (these phrases resonate through the novels) enables a brief moment of clarity: she sees her suburb and her own life telescoped, offered as if on a large canvas. And what she sees is ‘at once exotic, strange and utterly familiar. Gone. Wiped away by time and speed.’
At the conclusion of this strangely touching episode, where two women who have never been friends share a moment of intimacy, Rita stands in her front yard quietly marvelling at the vision of her street, yet at the same time experiencing ‘a sense of loss — both troubling and tantalising. A sense of having lost the thing she struggled against for so long.’ It is such a poignant depiction of the ambivalence surrounding our relinquishment of the past that it almost hurts.
‘It is such a poignant depiction of the ambivalence surrounding our relinquishment of the past that it almost hurts’
T
hough many writers and artists are reclaiming the suburbs so derided, satirised (think Patrick, Barry, Kath & Kim) or simply ignored, it is the creation of a larger concept of suburban life in all its astonishing transcendent possibilities that makes this novel so special. Carroll’s revelations of these beautiful insights into our utterly ordinary world make him a writer worth cherishing. His prose is unfailingly assured, lyrical, poised. He can turn snoring or guitar tuning or leaving a cinema into an intimate, poetic experience. His sentences are impeccable. The small faults are not worth mentioning. The author of six novels and twice short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, Carroll is on some kind of journey, and he deserves to reach his destination.
Courtesy of The Australian.
First published in February 2007
Discussion Questions
1. How would you describe the suburb in which The Time We Have Taken is set? What types of changes in society have formed this suburb?
2. The plans for the celebration of the centenary of the suburb act as a device to bring together the disparate stories of the characters. How do these plans for commemoration reveal the various feelings the characters have about history and progress?
3. Michael longs for a sense of connection to the world. Does his relationship with Madeleine provide this? What do you think their relationship represents?
The Time We Have Taken Page 25
