Stephen OrrCritiques

Stephen Orr (b.1967) is a national treasure IMO. Over the course of his prolific career he has written novels, novellas, YA, short stories, non-fiction and plays which are quintessentially Australian and yet universal in their preoccupations. His latest title Shining Like the Sun is not just a novel about an old man in a declining Australian town, it's about depopulation of the countryside all over the world and a celebration of what matters about life in small towns: a sense of connection.

The title comes from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966) by Thomas Merton, quoted in an epigraph at the beginning of Orr's novel.

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness . . . This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . .

As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realise this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Stephen Orr shows that one way to tell them that is to write a novel that shows people 'shining like the sun.'

Wilf Healy is eighty, and he lives in the back room of a pub in a small town called Selwyn, where he has taken on all the jobs that aren't economically viable any more. He delivers prescriptions for the chemist and the mail for the post office; he does a shift at the failing pub and he drives the school bus with its half-dozen passengers, along with trying to sell the school's limp vegetable produce. None of these jobs are full time, and some of them aren't paid, not even petrol money for his ancient Morris. These jobs have nothing to offer young people in secondary school who are already planning their escape. Wilf would like to retire, but every time he raises the issue, it turns out to be all too hard for people who know that he will go on doing it indefinitely, because he cares.

What's left of Wilf's family after the death of his wife Nancy and his son Steven, consists of his niece Orla and her ne'er-do-well seventeen-year-old son Connor. There's a brother still alive, called Colin, but he took off for a brighter future decades ago and lives in the US. He did not come home for any of the funerals. So Wilf's responsibilities also consist of caring for Orla who has a 'blood disease' and trying to get Connor back on track after he prematurely left school to become a 'rock star' writing his own songs.

There must be hundreds of Wilfs all over Australia and rural areas elsewhere...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/04/02/shining-like-the-sun-2024-by-stephen-orr/

Orr’s imagination takes us to an unimaginable situation. My shocked reaction to a story from Stephen Orr's new collection...
https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/03/27/mrs-meiners-has-gone-to-get-chalk-from-the-b...

Drought ridden Australian family generational farm story. Bleak, and didn't appreciate the style

Roland Griffin, famous artists' inability to connect with autistic son Hal. Edgy, Aus in 1950s, post war, very well written, but hard to read!

Sincerely, Ethel Malley is Stephen Orr's tenth novel and I've read and reviewed all but one of the others, so I can confidently say that this is the best one he's ever written. It works on so many levels: it's a great story in its own right; and it has wonderful characters used to explore enduring themes like courage, fortitude and integrity as well as loyalty and trust within friendships and family. The transformation of the central character and narrator is both entirely credible and wondrous. But then there are questions which emerge from the book as a whole: what is truth and and who gets to tell it? who protects the individual against the power of the press? what is lost when it is so difficult to do anything worthwhile in a conservative milieu? why is tradition so mercilessly hostile to modernity? how and why does a culture drift into mediocrity? and anyway, what are the arts and why do they matter ?

This remarkable novel is a fictionalisation of the notorious Ern Malley literary hoax. Although it's not at all necessary for enjoying the novel, for those not familiar with the hoax, it's well worth reading up on this at Wikipedia because it's a significant element of Australia's literary history which influenced the trajectory of modernist poetry in Australia.

Briefly, what happened was this: in 1943, two conservative Sydney poets, James Macauley and Harold Stewart, rivals of the precocious Max Harris and not best pleased about the success of his modernist literary magazine in South Australia, cobbled together some random texts and submitted it for publication as modernist poetry. Harris fell for the hoax and in 1944 published the poems in a special edition of the magazine, with a Sidney Nolan cover and a brief bio of the poet: 'Ern Malley' who had died young, leaving the poetry to be discovered amongst his effects by his sister Ethel. The hoax was subsequently revealed and Max Harris was tried and convicted for publishing poems that were 'obscene'. Angry Penguins folded in 1946, but by the 1970s those same poems were regarded as good examples of surrealism, and in what I can't resist calling 'poetic justice' today they are read more often than anything written by Macauley or Stewart.

(The excerpts from the poems that are quoted in the novel show just how this could indeed be so.)

Set in 1943-44, Sincerely, Ethel Malley tells Ethel's story, and she is a brilliant creation. From her bemused discovery of the poems to her naïve uncertainty about what to do with them and her subsequent contact with Max Harris via a local 'expert', she becomes a warrior on behalf of her brother when the storm about authenticity of the poems erupts.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/04/15/sincerely-ethel-malley-by-stephen-orr/

Overall it is very good though there is a drabness about the suburban life. It's like as if for the author to go back to the suburb of his childhood is a dank place of mold he didn't want to go to again.

>One of the aspects of getting older that's a bit eerie, is finding that part of your life has become 'the olden days'. Initially, my idea of 'the olden days' was that era when my parents were children and young adults, a time that they would evoke with nostalgia (or otherwise). Then, emerging with self-mockery but solidifying into nostalgia (or not), 'the olden days' become the years of my own child- and young adulthood. But what's really spooky is when the years of The Offspring's child-and young adulthood have become 'the olden days'.

Though they'll enjoy it just as much, I suspect that the generation after mine will read Stephen Orr's new autobiographical novel somewhat differently to me. This Excellent Machine was a revelation, because The Offspring was (just like his parents) immune to popular culture. So whereas most parents were dragged into 1980s culture by their children, I wasn't. Orr's book is a 'foreign country' to me. It's like reading about a tourist attraction you missed seeing while you were on a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

Orr is one of my favourite authors: I've read all but one of his seven novels, and he is a genius with characterisation and setting. In This Excellent Machine Clem Whelan is the central character, trapped in the Sunnyboy summer of 1984 and wondering what to do with his life. When he quizzes his mother once again about his long-absent, best-forgotten father, he knows the script even before they start, and eventually he recognises the pattern:

I'd had enough. She was like a mower starting on a very big paddock. (p.85)

*Ouch!*

There is a conspiracy of silence about this absent father. Clem lives in a close-knit street in a working-class suburb of Adelaide. (Only, most people are not working, except in backyard ventures or casual, pointless jobs. The 1980s was when people started to find out what globalisation really meant). Everyone knows everyone else, and people rarely move away so the neighbours remember Clem's birth and early childhood. And they remember his father, but they keep schtum about it too. Clem has reached the age where he needs to know, mainly because he is in search of a mentor to guide him through his difficult last year at school. He's not sure it's going to be worth it, and his teachers, ground down because of the hopelessness of their students' future, aren't much help. Pop's advice is to knuckle down but Clem thinks it might be too late...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/04/30/this-excellent-machine-by-stephen-orr/

A good read, sadly spoilt by some factual errors.

Stephen Orr is one of my favourite authors, and I have read (and reviewed) all of his fiction except for his debut novel Attempts to Draw Jesus (2002) which I have yet to find. Although each book he writes takes us into a different Australian landscape, there are common themes: a nostalgia for the intimacy and eccentricities of suburban life as his generation lived it in the 1960s and 70s; a preoccupation with the relationship between father-figures and sons; and the impositions of parental ambition on the next generation.
Where The Hands, an Australian Pastoral (2015) focussed on the intergenerational inheritance issues of a hard-scrabble farming family, Incredible Floridas revisits the theme of Dissonance (2012) which explored the conflicts between creative ambition and normal family life. And whereas Dissonance is loosely based on the life of the composer Percy Grainger, for Incredible Floridas Orr has chosen a well-known Australian painter as the inspiration for his central character Roland Griffin. By the descriptions of the artworks and the workings of Roland’s imagination, the reader can see that Roland is loosely modelled on Russell Drysdale (1912-1981). Similarly caught in the cross-currents of post-war art, Roland finds that his landscapes with iconic figures of Indigenous people and outback battlers are being displaced by abstractionism, and at the same time in the State Gallery of SA he is disappointed by the classical paintings on display because they’re not about Australian life. Galleries have bought Roland’s paintings but no longer hang them, and the Archibald Prize rejects his latest work. Nevertheless, in the middle of the catastrophic drought during the war years Roland takes his family into the devastated ghost towns of the interior and sketches the people doing it tough in what’s left of the towns. He admires the optimism of the people who are hanging on and he believes passionately that he has something to contribute to urban people who know nothing of the hardships of people on the land.
But the novel is not primarily about the travails of an artist’s life. It is more about a man whose son has committed suicide, and the inevitable guilt and what-ifs that ensue.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/01/08/incredible-floridas-by-stephen-orr/

The lead story in Datsunland, a new collection of short stories from Stephen Orr is a great conversation starter…

Titled ‘Dr Singh’s Despair’, it’s about a clash of cultures on an epic scale. Dr Singh is an Indian doctor who has agreed to work in a remote location in the hope of bringing his family here to Australia for a better life. He is an educated, cultured, rather formal man who is used to being treated with respect. To say that the casual mores of Coober Pedy come as a shock is a bit of an understatement.

Waiting in the airport terminal for the car that was supposed to meet him…

He sat on a loose seat, took a freshly ironed handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. He remembered the brochures the Health Commission had sent him: Barossa Valley vineyards, fishing off white beaches on the Eyre Peninsula and marvelling at the Naracoote Caves.

Yes, some of this please, he’d written back. He was tired of living in the most densely populated place on the planet. A swarm of humans that just kept coming, filling his waiting room, his days, his nights, his dreams with broken bodies, malaria, typhoid and TB, floating through the small, hot room he worked in for sixteen hours a day.

Yes, some of this please.

But then came the next letter. We have shortages in remote locations. Very considerable financial incentives are involved.

Yes, some of that too.

So, sign here, Dr Singh, and we’ll pay your airfare, accommodation – the whole lot.

Almost. (p.5)

Well, we Aussies can just imagine it, can’t we? It’s Wake in Fright with indifferent racism instead of drunken violence. It’s Singh’s ‘failure’ to ‘see the funny side of things’ that will generate discussion. I think this would be a great story for secondary school students to unpack…

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/06/16/datsunland-by-stephen-orr/

It's the middle of winter, so naturally my mind turns to... the garden! Of course, here in SoCal we can pretty much garden year-round and I've got pots sprouting with peas, carrots, lettuce, beets, and turnips. At this time of year I find myself irresistibly drawn to seed catalogs and gardening books, where I pore over the pictures and descriptions and dream of what I'd like my garden to be.

One beautiful gardening book I've been enjoying lately is The New American Herbal by Stephen Orr. This is a hefty book at nearly 400 pages that is comparable to Sunset's Western Garden Book for content but loaded with beautiful pictures and focused just on herbs. I've never grown many herbs myself, but I've got a monster rosemary and a struggling thyme, and I plan to add catmint and valerian to the garden this year. (The catmint is just because I like mint and the valerian is because it's one of those plants I remember from my dad's garden that we called 'garden heliotrope' and always smelled so wonderful – he says it's died out now.) But the thing that strikes you in going through the encyclopedia-like entries is the huge variety in herbal plants and the many uses. Sure, plenty of them smell great – like lavender or that rosemary – but there are so many ways they can be used in cooking. Orr gives ideas on what goes best with what kinds of dishes and even includes a few recipes here and there. I've been putting off reviewing this book because I wanted to try the caraway-orange biscuits – unfortunately I just haven't had the time lately and didn't want to put it off any longer. Many herbs also have medicinal properties from simple relaxing teas (I'm thinking of that catmint) to the folkloric insomnia cures (maybe that valerian will come in handy sometime...?), although he offers reasoned cautions (such as warnings about other uses for aloe than just sunburns). But mostly I find so many of them beautiful to grow in the garden – and another I'd like to add this year is bee balm: both pretty and useful.

I compared it to another book on my shelf, Herb Gardening for Dummies. Overall, the information is comparable. Both talk about the history of the various herbs along with the uses and tips on growing. Orr even sometimes shows a sense of humor that is often prevalent in the Dummies books. But Orr's book is ten times more pleasing to look at, and let's face it: with gardening books, sometimes you want as much inspiration as you do information, and you can get both with this one. (I received this book from BloggingForBooks.)

Like most farm novels I’ve read – such as Alice Robinson’s Anchor point (my review), Jessica White’s Entitlement (my review) and Gillian Mears’ Foal’s bread (my review) – The hands, depicts the hard life of the farmer, the struggle to survive, and the uncompromising emotions that often attend such lives. You have to be tough to survive is the implication. But, do you? Sometimes, perhaps, you can be too tough. Orr’s characters have to contend with much – not just ongoing drought and debt, but grief that is layered upon layer through the generations, from the World War 1 related suicide of Murray’s grandfather, through the farm accident which damages Chris, to another accident which rocks the family and sparks the tension that finally brings it all to a head. Secrets will out and truths, emotional and practical, must be faced. For my full review, please see: https://whisperinggums.com/2016/01/09/stephen-orr-the-hands-an-australian-pastor...½

One Boy Missing by Stephen Orr is a highly recommended police procedural set in Australia.

Detective Inspector Bart Moy is tired and close to being washed out as a detective. He has returned to the small agricultural town of Guilderton, New South Wales, to help care for his aging father and also to try and recover from the loss of his son, Charlie. When a butcher reports that he saw a man stash a young boy into the trunk (boot) of his car, Bart is looking at the case as a possible abduction, but the case becomes difficult since no one seems to be missing a child.

When a 9 year old boy is found and identified as the child thrown into the trunk, Bart tries to make a connection with him and get him to speak, but winning the trust of this boy is hard to do and it takes a long time to just get him to admit his first name. While trying to solve this case, and another, Bart is experiencing flashbacks and dreams about his own son. Bart's father, George, is a real curmudgeon and seems to be becoming much more difficult to handle.

While this is a well-paced literary police procedural, it is also a character study of the men and their personal relationships while dealing with life's changes - especially between fathers and sons. The dialogue between characters is very well done. Bart along with almost every character in this book is suffering or keeping a secret and struggling with trying to find a way to heal or a direction to take. While solving the case is an impetus for action, the bigger resolution the characters need is an emotional healing.

Orr does an exceptional job keeping the interest high in his characters while the case is slowly being investigated. The pacing is good, but it is slow until a point toward the end of the book where an event happens that set my heart pounding. It also marks an important change in the relationship between the characters.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Text Publishing Company for review purposes.

Having grown up in Adelaide during the 1980s, I have an odd pride in telling people I survived the mean streets of the cruel city. What with the Truro murders, the Family Murders and the echoes of the Beaumont children disappearance, we Adelaideans had every reason to be concerned about our health and wellbeing.

Whether Adelaide is a cruel city is best left to the philosophers but I couldn't help but notice that Orr tries to sell us on this claim yet proffers as evidence crimes committed hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. But that still leaves many crimes to startle even the most jaded Adelaidean; I hadn't realised just how savage the Snowtown murderers were and I can only imagine that David Partridge must be the biggest idiot in the world for murdering the young son of the leader of the Finks motor cycle gang.

I also noticed that Orr even used some research of mine, which gets him bonus marks. However, even with all this, "The Cruel City" never seems to reach great heights and it seems like a book he threw together to fill a gap in the market.½

If I ever wanted to transform myself into some kind of apothecary/herbalist guru, this would be the book to have. The New American Herbal by Stephen Orr is a hefty encyclopedia of the plants and botanical wonders that have been staples in cooking, homeopathy, aromatherapy, and the full spectrum of medicinal and culinary crafts.

Entries (there are 145 of them, a sizeable sample) are listed alphabetically and feature informative, at-a-glance type sidebars, lovely histories of each herb, and recipes for dishes and tonics where appropriate. I also appreciated the various instructional sections that comprise the beginning of the book like: "Herb Basics," which describes the various classes of herbs (e.g., adaptogens, analgesics, bitters, digestives) and the families of herbs (e.g., the mints, asters, laurels, nightshades, among others). Then there are sections on working with herbs--how to tend them, dry them, extract the oils, and work with the oils. I recently started making my own skincare lotions and serums using essential oils and found that section useful, if a little breezy. Gardeners will appreciate the suggested backyard projects. There is even a section on "Controversial Herbs" that I found fun to read (ahem, coca leaves and ephedra get a little attention).

Using herbs for scent, flavor, and as curatives is as old as time and this book offers a lovely modern update. This isn't a comprehensive book by any means—such a book would probably weigh 20 lbs and be completely unwieldly—but Orr's book is a splendid quick reference.

[Disclaimer: I received this book from Blogging for Books for an honest and candid review.]

Set in the heat, dust and community of the South Australian Mallee there is much that is visceral in ONE BOY MISSING. From the opening in which a young, vulnerable boy desperately tries to avoid a pursuer, to the character of DS Bart Moy who is back in Guilderton, possibly because his elderly father needs help, but mostly because he's running away from his past. He's lost and damaged, and there really doesn't seem to be much reason for him to be in the town that hasn't had a Detective presence for years.

Until the inexplicable report of a kidnapping or abduction of a young boy, even though no child from the area is missing. It looks like it might be quickly resolved when a boy of about the right age is discovered camping out, and stealing from local shopkeepers to eat. Aged around eight or nine, he initially refuses to speak, and when he does, enough details are drip fed to provide more questions than answers.

ONE BOY MISSING is a slow reveal book. Everybody has something to hide, and lots to fear. The story of Moy's own past, and the breakdown of his marriage after the death of his young son builds, as does young Patrick's own story. The triggers that convince Patrick to trust, share and talk are built cautiously and carefully, in no small part due to mutual pain. The connection between the young Patrick and the irascible old man, Moy's father, is part of the strength here - Patrick's desire to reach out and George's need to let go, accept his age and infirmity which he can't do so easily with Moy. There are also secrets everywhere - in Moy's own family, in Patrick's past, in the crimes that have been committed.

The relationship between these three males is both the focus and strength of this book. It's touching, moving, worrying and informative. There's a real sense of truth and honesty about the difficulties between father and son, son and lost boy, men in general, men who make mistakes, lives that go off the rails and the way that they try to heal themselves. There's also a realness to the character of George in particular, which was frequently moving - an old man, the farm lost years ago, a wife dead years ago, a son that's moved on, age, infirmity and isolation looming.

There is crime at the centre of this story, as the impetus for Patrick to be running wild, as the reason for Moy to be searching for an answer. But that crime is less important than the evolving relationships. Most definitely a character study, ONE BOY MISSING weaves the past and present into mistakes and good deeds. It also has a few points to make about the good and bad of rural communities.

There's a sense of place as well, and a very realistic portrayal of a town, on the edge of a farming community struggling against the weather and the downturn in farming conditions. There is a cast of supporting characters - the casserole provider and curtain twitcher, new and old cops, hermits and eccentrics. For those that know those sorts of small Mallee towns it feels right, and the idea that a young boy, and his family might be in the area, and yet not known about, is stark and discomforting.

The pace also seems to reflect the place, and the characters. Laconic and unpressured Moy is prepared to give Patrick the time and space to settle, to relax. And the dialogue is pitch perfect. It's such a joy to read something where every word, every exchange is right. It works to read, and it works if you say it out loud. Cannot emphasis enough what a joy that was.

Not your traditional crime novel, ONE BOY MISSING is engaging, moving and sometimes discomforting. Love it when something like this comes along and breaks a few rules.

http://www.austcrimefiction.org/review/review-one-boy-missing-stephen-orr

I love this book! Having been a young girl at the time of the Beaumont's disappearance in beachside Adelaide, I remember, it being school holidays (summer) leaning over the gate looking up and down the street, my suburb next to Glenelg Beach, looking for them! This book evoked the memories of those long hot summer days, living near the beach for me, but the suburbs in the book are where my mum grew up. I could breathe in every line and be transported back to that time. The early 1960s....I could read this book again and again. I have talked to people who read it who didn't feel overly excited about it. Maybe it is a nostalgia thing but I couldn't put it down. Stephen Orr is an amazing evocative writer. The story is disturbing but only too familiar in Adelaide at that time.

This is a horrible little book - in the sense that is filled with gut churning descriptions of some of the infamous crime that has occurred in the beautiful city of Adelaide. It's not the sort of book that one can say is "enjoyable". But fascinating it is - and truly horrific. I've only given this book three stars because the author, who is a fiction writer, seems to try too hard, at times, to use sensational rhetoric and conjecture to make his stories intriguing. But when he does this, it makes his story telling sound naive and superficial. The facts of these cases don't need any embellishment. They stand on there own as unbelievably sensational and horrific and I won't be rereading this book again! I have read far better books on one of the cases - the so-called Snowtown murders - that provide a much better, more nuanced analysis of the possible sociological and psychological precursors to that particular series of crimes. But for someone who wants a quick survey of some of the sensational crimes occurring in Adelaide, I suppose this is a good introduction. But you need a pretty strong stomach to endure the book to the end.

Another aspect of the book I didn't like is the way the author characterises Adelaide as somehow a unique "cruel city" throughout his story telling - but then, in a brief chapter at the end of the book, shows how these sorts of crimes occur everywhere - no city is immune.

So, while the book was fascinating and compelling, overall, I think it suffers from a lack of true depth in grappling with some of the questions that need to be asked - and inevitably do get asked - when these sorts of things happening. The biggest question - Why? - seems to have no real answer in the end. How these people could carry out such "evil" crimes with complete disregard for the humanity of their victims is a complete mystery.

I put off reading this book. Despite its inclusion in the longlist for the 2011 Miles Franklin Award and regional shortlist for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, I feared it would be like the execrable Room and I don’t much like the idea of novelists mining the pain of celebrity victims for their books. For Time’s Long Ruin is loosely based on the disappearance of the Beaumont children in Adelaide in 1966, and their parents, if still living, would be in their eighties. They have, by all accounts, had enough of the publicity and speculation that has surrounded the tragedy of their loss, and I think there is no merit in pandering to ghoulish public curiosity about crime of any kind, much less this one.

Stephen Orr, however, has written a sensitive book, which has for me transformed the static grainy images of the lost children that have haunted the nation’s consciousness for forty years or more. In his novel they are real people, with individual personalities and the irrepressible charm of real children. For all of Part 1 Janice, Anna and Gavin Riley are neighbours and playmates to Henry, aged nine. In a carefree world that ended on Australia Day 1960 [1] they rejoice in the anarchy of street life, late hours and minimal parental supervision, free to roam in a now mythic Australian childhood.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/times-long-ruin-by-stephen-orr/