At the center of Gregory Day's A Sand Archive is the figure of F(rancis) B. Herschell, a figure who is reconstructed by Day's narrator from the archive of papers he left behind upon his death. The narrator knows Herschell slightly, as the latter occasionally comes into the bookshop in Geelong where he works.

The narrator's interest in Herschell is piqued after borrowing a book from the library titled The Great Ocean Road: Dune Stabilisation and Other Engineering Difficulties, a self-published text that, despite its dry-sounding title, has glimpses of poetry in it. Against all expectations, Herschell is an incredibly well-read man who reads beyond his field of engineering, and seems particularly interested in French literature and culture. The opening chapter, for instance, recalls Herschell coming into the bookstore and looking up books about Proust.

Herschell's story mainly takes in the 1960s, when he is charged with helping to stabilize a section of the Great Ocean Road. At odds with his boss, Gibbon, Herschell has the idea of using grass to keep the sand in place. As such, he applies for a scholarship to study how this feat had been managed in the sand dunes of France.

Upon his arrival in Paris in 1968, he goes to a museum to view some paintings by Mondrian, who early in his career had painted the sand dunes in his native Holland. At the museum, he meets a young woman, Mathilde, who invites him to join in the street activities that lead to the famous events of May '68.

Herschell and Mathilde, together with Prof. Lacombe, go down to south-east France to study the sand dunes. Mathilde is originally from this area, and she stays with her parents, while Herschell sleeps in the old mill. There, the two of them become lovers, but she decides to leave him: her proper place, she decides, is to follow the revolutionary impulses that are alive in the world at that time.

Herschell returns to Australia and applies the lessons he learned about using grass to stabilize the Great Ocean Road. Despite the success of this venture, he increasingly comes to regret his decision, as the kind of grass he used is intrusive and does not suit the Australian environment. The narrator also projects onto Herschell a deep sadness about his failed relationship with Mathilde.

The narrator learns about Herschell's recent death from Anna Neilson, a local woman who was Herschell's friend and lover in his later years back in Australia. He reflects on Herschell's legacy, contrasting the violent outburst that accompanied the events of May '68 with the quiet revolution that Herschell was able to effect back home in Australia.

Although I liked the novel overall, I had some mixed feelings about The Sand Archive. Its strengths lie in its the intelligence and cultural sweep of Day's vision for, although he is in some ways a regional writer, his willingness to look beyond his own culture to figures like Proust, Mondrian, Camus, and many other sources of inspiration gives the novel a level of sophistication that is worthy of the very best Australian fiction.

The weaknesses of the novel lie in two main areas. First, it can sometimes be rather didactic in the way it presents its ideas. The story repeatedly pushes a kind of Catholic mysticism that bleeds over into its appreciation of nature and the environment, a perspective that sits rather awkwardly next to its French, atheistic, existentialist reference points.

There is also a kind of romanticism about the landscape, too, so that while I generally agree with Day's politics, I didn't find his presentation of them always to be convincing. The part I disliked most, though, was the way in which the narrator colonized Herschell's feelings. He regularly imposes his own emotions and expectations onto his subject in a way that felt stifling, even disrespectful.

These blemishes are minor, however, compared to the larger strengths of the book. Herschell is indeed a compelling character, especially in the context of the conservative Australia of the 1960s, and Day's connection of this context to the events of May '68 in France make for an interesting and thoughtful reflection on change and revolution. ( )

"They walked and walked, eventually towards the peripherique, through Chatillon towards Clamart. She told him later she thought they were seeking nature, as if it could still be found on the edge of the city, as both a consonance and a consort. Could the meter man with the bad cough across the street putting a ticket on a green Morris feel the same way? Perhaps. Could the girls with the short braids wolfing down a baba? Maybe one day, in the circadian calendar of her heart. ....And now a single file of scouts passed them on the other side of the road. As if to confirm all arcane regimentation."

This is typical of Gregory Day's writing in this book. If you like this extract, you'll love "A Sand Archive". I found much of this book to be impenetrable or, more often, unengaging or seemingly irrelevant to the story. I should have known better than to pick a book by a poet. They tend to take a different perspective on words and sentences than I do. I want to be able to read them and understand them. The fact that the book received a positive review on the ABC's "The Book Shelf" and that LT's erudite reviewer, anzlitlovers, found it 'exquisite' should also have been a red flag for me. I did give it 130 pages of chance to improve, but there was no sign that the remaining 200 pages would be any more digestible. ( )

Gregory Day’s new novel A Sand Archive, is such an exquisite book, I was really sorry to turn the last page. It reminded me a little of Stoner by John Williams and Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life in the way that it portrays an ordinary, unobtrusive man who isn’t really ordinary at all.
As I said in the Sensational Snippet that I posted yesterday, the central character FB Herschell is a young civil engineer who, tasked with stabilising the dunes along Victoria’s iconic Great Ocean Road, visits Paris in 1968, on a scholarship to study strategies used in Europe. He subsequently self-publishes a book with the unexciting title The Great Ocean Road: Dune Stabilisation and Other Engineering Difficulties and it is the unexpected poetry of this book that is a catalyst for the writing of this ‘sand archive’ (which purports to be) by a young writer who briefly knew Herschell. If you recall your surprise when reading Kate Grenville’s Orange Prize-winning The Idea of Perfection which portrayed a man who held our interest despite knowing more about concrete than most of us wish to know, then you will perhaps experience a similar frisson in discovering FB Herschell and his sand dunes.
The narrator meets Herschell in a bookshop in Geelong, a city now shedding its industrial past but decidedly prosaic back in the 1980s. He had discovered Dune Stabilisation and Other Engineering Difficulties when researching his own history of the Great Ocean Road, and now at work in the bookshop finds the author himself before him…

Like so much that went on in that bookshop, FB Herschell’s presence came as a stimulating intersection between what is written on paper and what is actually breathing and alive. Suddenly those fusty initials on that slim grey-brown volume had become a living man in front of me, chatting with my fellow staff members. And rather than that leaky desiccated type on a dun background, his eyes gleamed with the freshness of ongoing life, his mouth constantly finding shapes of dry appreciation, his pleasure evident at finding other people who dwelt deep in the nourishing but often overlooked vanishing points of beauty and knowledge.
To be honest, though, the most important thing for me was this: he had liked one of the books I had written and in his understated way wanted to make that clear to me. (p.5)

The narrator tells the story of Herschell’s epiphany in France. Inadvertently drawn into the civil unrest in 1968 he meets a lovely young woman called Mathilde, and discovers an intellectual, political and sensual world utterly unlike his puritan life at home with his mother in Geelong.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/04/14/a-sand-archive-by-gregory-day-bookreview/ ( )