All That I Am By Anna Funder

[Azucena Mcquay]

Australianssoldiers are dying in the Afghanistan war, but no satire of disguised insurgents turning their guns on their military instructors will shock local critics into a new school of abuse. It seems that the renewed sense of decline is prompted by the transition from print to online. This appears to be expanding the massage circles of publishers, authors and reviewers, and shutting critical voices out.

Multiple first-person perspective has been popular in recent fiction writing, and fluid multi-temporal narration is a long-established technique. Funder is drawing on tried novelistic techniques. They are, nevertheless, conspicuous and brave for a first-time novelist who has a reputation for non-fiction. The organisation places constant pressure on Funder to distinguish between the overlapping consciousnesses and temporalities.

I wonder, now, about interrogation chambers: why do they think bright lights brings the truth out of people? They should try the seduction of shadows, where you cannot watch your words hit their target.

The more critical Australian reviews were by James Ley in the Age and David Marr in the Monthly. Ley spends a great part of his review commending the virtues of the novel, though without particular enthusiasm. Right at the end he comments:

On a technical level, the novel might have made more ambitious use of the overlapping perspectives of its two narrators and one occasionally feels the lack of a more idiomatic sense of language (the voices of Toller and Becker are a bit samey), but All That I Am is an unusually well written and intelligent first novel, a story that justifies its own telling.

What is to be done? The decline polemic is supposed to end with a witty but rousing call for unyieldingly rigorous, critical criticism. In Faint Praise, Gaile Poole suggests that the decline polemic might just be another part of the game:

The venom. The scorn. That asymptotic decline! The charges are so excessive, so extravagant, they rest so shakily on the myth of a Golden Age of reviewing that clearly never existed that its tempting to dismiss them as typical publishing fare.

Vidyan Ravinthiranon a poetics of video games Thomas H. Fordon tone talk Ben Etheringtonon Les Murray and Mudrooroo Ben Etherington Ben Etheringtonon Australian poetry reviewing Ben Etheringtonon Hannah Kent Ben Etheringtonon Anthony Macris Ben Etherington Vidyan Ravinthiranon a poetics of video games Thomas H. Fordon tone talk Ben Etheringtonon Les Murray and Mudrooroo Ben Etherington Ben Etheringtonon Australian poetry reviewing Ben Etheringtonon Hannah Kent Ben Etheringtonon Anthony Macris Ben Etherington

What if we approached video games as we do poems? In this essay, Vidyan Ravinthiran proposes a new way of writing about gaming: a poetics that gives as much credence to the rhythms and repetition of fingerwork as to the patterns of storytelling.

What do critics mean by tone? Is it a rhetorical attitude or an atmospheric quality? In his review of two recent studies, Thomas H. Ford shows how writing about tone sets the tone of a broader debate about the uses of literary criticism.

Drawing on the insights of two new books of literary criticism, Joshua Barnes argues that recent developments, such as the rise of autofiction, should serve to remind us that the novel, fiction, and realism are distinct categories despite their historical convergence.

We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands on which we work, the Burramattagal people of the Darug nation, and pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. Sovereignty was never ceded, and the struggles for justice are ongoing. We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands this digital platform reaches.

The book that started the modern genre of biographers writing themselves into their narratives was Footsteps by Richard Holmes, which I highly recommend to you all. Holmes used this approach to show how difficult it really is to bring your subject back to life. So many biographers now use this approach merely to interpose themselves into the story, rather than to illuminate the gaps in the record. The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, by Gregg Hecimovich, which I shall be writing about soon, gets this balance right. Unlike Funder, Hecimovich talks about himself in order to show us the challenges of getting reliable information about Crafts.

By contrast, Funder is just as interested in her own writing as she is in Eileen, rather like Orwell was. Eileen has been used in a sorry cause here. Instead of rescuing Eileen from obscurity, Funder is using her to tell her own story.

Thank you for this. Wifedom is sitting on my 'to-read' pile so I find your comments really interesting. I was persuaded by a very positive review by Caroline Criado Perez, but now I'm intrigued to see how I feel about it. This business of inserting yourself in to books about other people is becoming more popular I think, and more frustrating. I'm a keen gardener and was persuaded by reviews to buy a book called 'Why Women Grow' by Alice Vincent. I was expecting it to be about women gardeners/growers, a combination of history, biography, achievement, a celebration of women who grow. It wasn't. it was mostly about the author's relationship, her shall I, shan't I have a baby self-talk, and a few discussions with a small number of self-selected women who did a bit of gardening. I felt similarly to you in describing Wifedom. A waste of time and money, reading about someone's thirty-something angst.

I cannot quite fathom why this book was published. Or why the reviews are so tame. It is supposed to tell the story of Eileen O\u2019Shaughnessy, George Orwell\u2019s first wife, and thereby illuminate the modern state of wifedom. But that\u2019s not what Funder achieves. Instead, it\u2019s a medley of suburban memoir, clich\u00E9d fictional scenes, and some familiar material about Eileen. Someone else has already written Eileen\u2019s biography, you see, and only three years ago.

The reason for a second life would either be new material or a fresh interpretation. Funder has neither. Instead, she writes about herself reading George Orwell by the swimming pool after ferrying her daughter around, the conscience-pricking note her son wrote which she keeps pinned on the fridge, the fact that her female lawyer friends complain that their husbands don\u2019t do the laundry, and so on.

Harmless, you might think, useful even, to compare this to Eileen\u2019s life. But Funder has written several books and worked for the government. The women she refers to as being in the position of modern wifedom\u2014comparable to Eileen\u2014are professionals with husbands who don\u2019t pull their weight. Comparing this to someone who gave up her career, and ended-up clearing out the overflowing latrine in a remote cottage with few amenities or conveniences (like electricity) while her manipulative husband wrote second-rate novels and ignored her sexually, isn\u2019t very convincing. Especially when you add in the fact that Orwell was a terrible sex pest who tried it on with all of Eileen\u2019s friends.

Funder uses Eileen as an excuse to write a book she otherwise wouldn\u2019t get published. No-one will read a memoir of a middle-class writer going about their day. Nor would you be able to sell the fictional vignettes Funder inserts. But wrap it all up as Mrs Orwell\u2019s invisible life and hey-ho. (Incidentally, the idea that there is something modern about the use of biography to examine wifedom begs the question as to whether Funder has read Froude.)

Thus many problems of scholarship are allowed to slip past. Not only are the invented scenes trite, they make large claims about Orwell that aren\u2019t substantiated. Was the sex perfunctory? Did Eileen react like that when he announced he was going to Spain? Why must I go looking elsewhere to find this out? It often reads more like a BBC period drama than a serious book. So many pages have zero footnotes.

Funder writes that \u201Cclearly\u201D Eileen had told the vicar to remove the word \u201Cobey\u201D from the wedding vows. Orwell said that other parts of the service were missed out too. I was intrigued\u2014did Eileen ask for these other things to be removed? What were they? I looked for the source. No footnote. Eileen\u2019s previous biographer, Sylvia Topp, makes this same claim, referencing Orwell biographer Gordon Bowker. But Bowker has assumed this is what Eileen did. \u201CEileen, it seems, had arranged with John Woods to omit at least one of the vows...\u201D He also has no source.

So perhaps Eileen arranged it, perhaps the vicar fumbled, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But this trail of speculation has been written up as near-fact. Apparently many suffragettes removed \u201Cobey\u201D\u2014if that\u2019s the cause of this speculation, then tell me! Add it as useful context! But don\u2019t just interpose your assumptions like this.

Speculation can be a good thing. Biographers should do more of it. But in a careful, well-referenced way, as in My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, which persuasively argues, against other biographers, that McCullers was a lesbian. Otherwise you\u2019re just doing what Lytton Strachey did: bending the truth to prioritise your prose. This is an unfortunate trend in modern biography, such as in the work of Alexander Masters, who is always more interested in himself than his subject.

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