M. Barnard Eldershaw (1897–1956)

I would love to give this 5 stars, but I'm trying to resist that urge these days. The book is flawed, dated, and occasionally a battering ram of ideas, so I'll stick to 4. But other reviewers here have said everything, and I'm mighty sleepy. So all I will say is the concerns of Barnard and Eldershaw (two classic leftie intellectual writers in an era of heavy right-left combat) remain with us. Questions about capitalism and materialism, about the unwanted influence of the USA on Australia, and also about whether Australia wants too much of an influence from Britain.

Australia doesn't often do dystopias - indeed, the only other literary example I can think of is Alexis Wright's compelling The Swan Book. Like all such attempts, dystopic novels reflect the age in which they're written rather than the future, and we may question Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow after 80 years on these grounds. But I think the combined literary prowess of the two authors with the cyclical nature of history has brought the wheel around again.

I will leave you with a quote from the first chapter (excerpted in the great introduction in the Virago edition) about Australians of the time:
They had been a very strange people, full of contradictions, adaptable and obstinate. With courage and endurance they had pioneered the land, only to ruin it with greed and lack of forethought. They had drawn a hardy independence from the soil and had maintained it with pride and yet they had allowed themselves to be dispossessed by the most fantastic tyranny the world had ever known: money in the hands of the few, an unreal, an imaginary system driving out reality... They loved their country and exalted patriotism as if it were a virtue, and yet they gave a greater love to a little island in the north sea that many of them had never seen... The small people was prodigal of its armies: generation after generation, they swarmed out to fight and die in strange places and for strange causes. Tough, sardonic and humorous, they were romantics the likes of which the world had never seen.… (plus d'informations)

Gosh, I really like this. The other reviews can speak to the novel's provenance, but it's fantastic to read a novel written by Australian women in the 1920s, reflecting on the 19th century. It's a fantastic soap opera, densely packed with taut character studies and some delicious synonym. What's more, as an analysis of the mindsets held by the early Australian settlers, it can't be beat. The odious William, with his desire to make Australia a "little England", is impressive in his vile nature, and I only hope Barnard and Eldershaw fully understood this.… (plus d'informations)

"Have you read any of his stuff? ...
I don't like it terribly", Ailsa confessed, "but, of course, it's very good."

It's an odd feeling to be the first person to review an older work on Goodreads. In one corner, that combo of excitement to share a novel with the world, a soupcon of smugness, and a hefty dash of nervousness that one does the book justice. In the other corner, a sorrow and wonder at why the book has been so neglected. In the case of Plaque with Laurel (1937), the latter is not hard to explain. Thankfully, the former makes up for it.

Australian authors [a:Marjorie Barnard|1056281|Marjorie Barnard|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/f_50x66-6a03a5c12233c941481992b82eea8d23.png] and [a:Flora Eldershaw|5309226|Flora Eldershaw|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png], both Sydneysiders born in 1897, met at university and - in the late 1920s - began writing as a pair under the pseudonym M. Barnard Eldershaw. Their first novel, [b:A House Is Built|4703054|A House Is Built|M. Barnard Eldershaw|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1515447440l/4703054._SY75_.jpg|4767379], was a great success, coming at a time when family sagas were en vogue and Australian history was a subject of renewed interest. Their subsequent works - novels, essays, non-fiction history, short stories - were more self-consciously literary, a challenge at the best of times but certainly not high on the to-do list of most residents of Depression-era Australia. The women continued to write alongside more mundane jobs, and played key roles in the literary circles of the time, alongside most of the influential Aussie left-wing writers of their generation.

Plaque with Laurel was the fourth of their five novels, and their least successful - although not because of a lack of literary merit. By 1937, they were "highbrow" rather than popular, and - as with their previous works - Plaque was published first in London (common for Australian writers of the time), but this time never got a showing in Australia. Its small print run did not sell out before war came, obliterating the book's memory. Contrary to the desires of publishers, the novel also was not a roman a clef - that is, a novel thinly disguising real-life personages behind its cast. That perhaps could have made a few sales. It was not formally printed in Australia (to my knowledge) until 1995, by the University of Queensland Press. Barnard and Eldershaw would carry on writing through the war, but they finished their collaboration after their next novel - [b:Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow|4688442|Tomorrow And Tomorrow And Tomorrow|M. Barnard Eldershaw|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1550665662l/4688442._SY75_.jpg|4739028] - a post-apocalyptic savaging of modern conservatism and capitalism, also sold poorly and then attracted the wrong kind of attention in the post-war anti-commie world.

There was another challenge. Australia was still defining itself culturally. It had, after all, been an island of several smaller British colonies until, in 1901, they came together as a federation. It was a country whose capital city, Canberra, had only commenced construction in 1913. The first Parliament to be based there was in 1927. Australia was still seen as a British outpost, as culturally inferior, as imitative or at best naive. Most artists of talent left the country for long periods, leaving the popular fiction to balladeers and superficial writers of character. And those who chose to stay faced an uphill battle to publish anything at all - abroad they were seen as colonials, at home they were seen as upstarts. "Artistic" was a dangerous thing to be. In the eyes of mainstream Australian culture, artistic women were opinionated, and artistic men were all poofs.

So a novel set in the new city of Canberra centered around a bunch of writers... well, that was hardly going to become a bestseller, was it?

And yet Plaque is lovely. It's not as ambitious as Tomorrow nor as captivating as House, but it is a gem.

"Literature's a pure accident", she told herself, "and largely a myth...

Set over the course of three-and-a-half days in the nation's capital, we follow a writers' conference. It brings together rising stars and falling ones, those at the centre of the literary world and those hovering on the fringes, upstarts, poseurs, wanderers, and philosophers. At the centre of it all is a plaque to be installed on the wall of the National Library, opened by a politician with no artistic taste, in honour of a recently deceased luminary, Richard Crale. Crale's former wife, his mistress, his war buddies, and his acolytes are among the conferees, and their memories of this deceased writer - this lacuna in the text of the conference - form much of the meat of the novel. He was a great artist, no one doubts. His status as a man remains open for debate.

The novel takes us - tightly and in depth - day by day through the conference, from boisterous meals to awkward ones, through nature tours and quiet nights, large gatherings and individual wanderings, predicted ceremonies and those much more unpredictable. Although I know it is impossible, it wouldn't surprise me if the great American film director [a:Robert Altman|21573|Robert Altman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1221790073p2/21573.jpg] had read this book as a youth. The book reminded me of nothing so much as an Altman film. Like a rippling ocean, or a tapestry, different characters emerge at points to share their tales. Tragedies, comedies, romances, dialogues, each appears before our eyes and disappears again. Some characters are central, others peripheral, appearing when need be before returning to the great mass. Each of the figures views each other figure differently, as of course we do, and in the manufactured confines of a conference (inside a manufactured city, at that), their relationships are strained and rewritten in a host of different atmospheres. The novel is consistently engaging. It is also, incidentally, beautifully written.

"They stood in silence looking out over the famous scene, and equally oblivious of it. Their conversation had run out to the last drop. It was the first time that they had had anything really important to say to one another; they knew that it would be the last. All that they were capable of giving one another as human beings they had now given. Their relationship had shrunk again to its habitual insignificance. The pause became a vacuum."

It's fair to say that there are perhaps too many characters to keep track of in a novel such as this (although this is true of many Altman films). Yet the "interwoven vignette" approach to narrative means we focus on the individual moments, treating each page like a short story, without as much necessity to locate the minor characters within a broader arc. What is perhaps grandest about this novel is Barnard Eldershaw's "spirit of place". The moments - the initial drive from Sydney to Canberra, forming a kind of prologue, in which the various figures pass each other on the road; the weary anticipation of the staff at the hotel; a bushwalk; an unexpected manhunt; a melancholy late night peeping into people's rooms - are rife with perfect details. Plaque feels lived-in, truly atmospheric, and the moments of amusement and pathos emerge truthfully from the passing of the days.

"Haven't you noticed that when people praise Canberra it's always for something that isn't there?"

Finally, there is Canberra itself. The city was my home for six years in the 2000s, and it's absorbing to see it in its infancy, as when a disturbed member of the conference finds himself alone at night on the site earmarked for a future cathedral, now St. Christopher's. The first novel ever set in the capital city, Plaque resonates with the strange stillness of the new and its determined attempts to develop urbanity and history. Its the perfect metaphor for Australian literature in the 1930s.… (plus d'informations)