While on holidays I read this - and am really looking forward to talking about it at my bookclub. I thought it was very beautiful, though at times deeply disturbing. I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on it.One passage that stood out to me compared the religious character and landscape of North America with that of Australia:
'On TV Americans were so soft and sentimental, all happy-go-lucky and forever safely at home. But the way Eva told it, her countrymen were restless, nomadic, clogging freeways and airports in their fevered search for action. she said they were driven by ambition in a way that no Australian could possibly understand. They wanted fresh angles, better service, perfect mobility. I tried to picture what she meant. She made her own people sound vicious. Yet God was in everything - all the talk, all the music, even ont heir money. Ambition, she said. Aspiration and mortal anxiety.
'It was hard to negotiate the tangled cross-currents of pride and disgust in Eva's rambling account, but it gave me plenty to think about. Here in Sawyer people seemed settled - rusted on, in fact. They liked to be ordinary. They were uncomfortable with ambition and avoided any kind of unpredictability or risk. There was a certain muted grandeur in our landscape but it seemed that power and destiny did not adhere to bare plains and dank forest. There were no mighty canyons and mile-wide rivers here. Without soaring peaks and snow, angels seemed unlikely and God barely possible' (p168).
- I wonder ... do you think Winton is right? Is God barely possible in a land like Australia? Or perhaps just the Americans' God?
- And for those who've read the book ... do you think the main character, Pikelet, is unAustralian to the extent that he rejects ordinariness for extreme experiences? Hmmm...
6 comments:
Just started this book last night. I'm really looking forward to it.
As for the question, I wonder whether Winton's perspective is disinctively Western Australian. That is, there are indeed rivers flowing through deserts, breathtaking rock formations, the richest marine life on earth, unique animal species and all kinds of natural wonder in Oz, though perhaps being in and around Perth means being somewhat isolated from this. Maybe this is just displaying my ignorance of Western Australia, but perhaps there the sense of being cut off from the world is even stronger than in the rest of Oz.
That said, I have no complaints about geography being one factor affecting theological disposition. But maybe it can be over-read, or read too directly. It may not be the inspirational views that supercharge American spirituality into the restless search for perfection so much as the believability of the myth of endless progress in a land so abundant and rich in natural resources. Australians learned more quickly the limitations of a land with poor soil and low rainfall and that has left its mark on us (perhaps not enough, by the way, since we are still massively wasteful - though perhaps we're into an urban/rural cultural divide).
I think there's something to Winton's comments. I think one of the quests of Winton's work is to find a more authentically Australian Christianity, though I'm not convinced he looks in the right places.
I reckon this is actually quite a different book for Winton. I think it's actually quite a lot less hopeful than many of his other works.
"beautiful and disturbing" is a good description.
One of the things I appreciate about Winton's writing regarding his connections between faith and place is the determination to articulate it right here in the place he is describing (not some utopian elsewhere place)... the irony being that what is "right here" for him ends up functioning as "utopia" for most of his readers - the kind of "fantasy Australia" that drives execeptional filmakers like Luhrmann to make exceptionally ordinary films like "Australia"
So Winton does for me what Luhrmann failed to achieve - makes the landscape and people ordinary enough to believe that maybe God is lurking here somewhere in the beauty and the disturbingness of it all.
Been a Winton fan, its over a year since I read Breath, but as I recall, that is how I read the quote you've posted - the impossibility of God being not "in Australia" per se but in the ordinary-ness of a rusted on town, people and landscape.
Finally - I've always really liked Winton's nuance in this excerpt from an interview a number of years ago (around the release of Dirt Music I think):
Interviewer:
You've said you feel powerfully connected to that landscape in
a way you don't quite understand yourself and you keep trying
to explain and you're obviously not quite sure that you have.
Winton:
The places that I've lived in, the places that is I've been to
and experienced deeply, are the places that I feel most
strongly about and that I think I carry in me somehow,
whether I like it or not.
I do feel spiritually connected.
I do feel a sacred bond, and I don't mean that in a sense of
some kind of weird fascist mysticism that's going to require
me taking Poland by Tuesday or the other way around.
I feel it in a way that my life depends on it.
don't most Australians reject ordinariness,(even while being deeply ordinary)?
Wow, gbroughto, great comments.
Just started reading this book yesterday, actually. I concur with byron smith; it does feel Western Australian to me (ie it doesn't feel Victorian. And yet I don't know what that is.)
Thanks all for your insights and reflections. Its taken me a while to reply as there's been so much to ponder!
Byron, the idea of a WA perspective is interesting. In my view there is more sense in talking about regional landscapes than national ones - especially in a place as diverse as Australia, with states colonised directly from britain (rather than as satellites of just one 'parent' colony).
I'd like to think more about the idea of a distinctive (land-influenced) theological temperament. Manning Clark is interestin gon this, though I think he's an example of someone who over-reads, and reads thelinks too directly.
Geoff B - thanks so much for those interview excerpts. Winton seems to be suggesting a way of attaching to the land that is real and deep, and yet not possessive. There is room in the view he expresses for real, personal emplacement - that might yet be appropriate for migrant (as opposed to indigenous) people. Its not very often that white australians articulate an idea of place like that.
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