"Reading Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction reminded me of how good it is sometimes to read, as the authors put it, something totally disconnected from current publishing trends. So I grabbed up Seance on a Wet Afternoon, a suspense novel from 1961 that blissfully has nothing to do with now.

Seance is about medium Myra Savage and her dogged, loyal husband Bill. Myra makes a small but sufficient living hosting seances; Bill is out-of-work due to chronic severe asthma. Both of them believe absolutely in Myra's power and Myra, indeed, believes more in it than in anything else. She won't entirely claim to receive messages from the dead when she knows she doesn't and she won't engage in too much pageantry and showmanship; her professional ethics, such as they are, are almost sound. Well, sound-ish. When someone at her seance table has enough psychic energy for their minds to meet, she performs a genuine reading; when they don't, she throws out vague platitudes and moves on.

But while Myra knows she isn't genuinely getting any messages from the beyond, she's convinced that she could, if only she could combine her gifts with those of more powerful, talented people. She's in need of networking, but her lack of flash--and solidly working-class background--isn't conducive to it. What she needs is five minutes of fame, that's all. Then the rest of the world will forget about her, but her peers in the paranormal will remember, and she'll have access to all the resources she needs.

So she decides, as you do, to kidnap a six year-old girl, the daughter of a wealthy family. Hey, then she can give the family inside clues as to the girl's whereabouts and the time of her return! And when the furor has died down a little, she can even tell them where to find the ransom money! She rationalizes this as being all fairly above-board morally--after all, they don't plan on hurting the girl, and they don't plan on keeping the money. Wrecking the parents' psychological well-being for a few days, possibly getting someone else falsely accused, and potentially terrifying a child... eh.

And before you can say, "Wait, isn't this a notably terrible plan?", McShane is there to confirm it. Myra has a kind of intelligence, but not nearly enough to plan this level of crime, and Bill's no help on that score. What you get in Seance on a Wet Afternoon is a crime planned and executed by people with no particular talent for criminality, and things go predictably but rivetingly wrong. This is a doom-laden novel in a lot of ways. Once it's clear that Myra's plan has massive holes in it, that Bill has a conscience about the child and a tenderness towards her and Myra does not, that the other people involved are failing to dance to Myra's tune... things just creep inexorably towards the end.

And the actual ending is a huge strength. I like the way McShane deals with Myra's powers--there's a lot of ambiguity around them for much of the novel, and then the revelation of truth comes twice, in two very different and almost low-key Shakespearean ways. I know this was made into a movie, and after reading the last scene, I'm eager to see it, because I think it would be terrific on film.

This is a quiet, clever novel that, in its pacing, character types, and plot, makes for a nice vacation from current genre norms. Recommended."

"4.5�

Western Australia, 1930. Not 1830. . . 1930. This is recent history. 2400km, barefoot, through rivers and harsh bush, always hiding. Three “half-caste� Aboriginal girls, 8, 11, and 15, ran away from the Moore River Native Settlement, where they’d been sent in the south of the state, and trekked all the way back north on their own, following the rabbit-proof fence.

It’s an important story, simply told.

SOME BACKGROUND
For those who are interested, I’m including web links I found. I hope they continue to work. If not, I hope someone will post new ones as comments.

There is a map in the front of the book to show how far this was. Here’s a link to a page with the map, a picture of the author, and a film trailer.

The film of this book is perhaps better known than the book itself, which was written by Molly’s daughter, Nugi Garimara (Doris Pilkington).

Nugi (the author) was herself taken and left at Moore River in 1940 when she was 4 (renamed Doris) and was reunited with her mother 21 years later at Jigalong, where she learned her mother’s story.

Nugi/Doris : the author
Molly : the author’s mother, the eldest of the 3 girls whose story this is
Maude : mother of Molly (Molly’s father was white, hence the government interest)

THE STORY
Rabbit-Proof Fence: The True Story of One of the Greatest Escapes of All Time is a fictionalised account of the girls� adventures and ordeals. It is a straight-forward story, told in the third person without a lot of embellishment, but with descriptions of the bush, catching rabbits, and the rain and mud.

Molly’s mother, Maude, grew up at Jigalong and seems to have had an independent dispositon. She didn’t care for the fellow she was intended for (the feeling was mutual), but fell for Thomas Craig, an Englishman who was a fence inspector. Maude’s family was happy, since Maude hadn’t broken any kinship laws. And Thomas was happy and named the baby.

Molly was a pretty little baby, (noted only with an entry in the station record, not registered), and later, she had two little cousins, also “m³Ü»å²¹-³¾³Ü»å²¹²õâ€�, half-Aboriginal and half-white. The three girls played together and were teased and bullied by the others because they weren’t black enough.

A.J. Keeling, the Superintendent of the government depot at Jigalong noticed the attitude of the Mardu children and reported that “the girls ‘were not getting a fair chance as the blacks consider the H/Cs [half-castes] inferior to them. . .� (Department of Native Affairs file no. 173/30.�

[POLITICAL RANT]
So the decision was made to move them, much as we consider moving children today whom we believe to be living in abusive situations. But in the cases of the Aboriginal children, moves were not into nearby family foster care but into European-style institutions where they were to be cut off from all family contact and told to speak only English. Drastic. And of course they were to live in dormitories and be trained in simple trades, not raised and educated as white children were. Shameful servitude.

BACK TO THE STORY
The families did their best to hide the girls, knowing they were at risk of being removed, but the kids were found and taken south in July 1931. Interestingly, in August 1930, a year earlier, Keeling “wrote in his report that ‘these children lean more towards the black than white and on second thoughts, think nothing would be gained in removing them.� (Department of Native Affairs file no. 173/30.) Someone read it. No one responded.�

And there you have it. The government official who knew the families could see that the girls were better with them in spite of the teasing or bullying, much the way community services try these days to keep families together and help the family. 20-20 hindsight.

Molly was 15, Gracie was 11, and Daisy was 9. They arrived, by boat sailing down the coast (no tracks to follow home) on 27 July 1931. By 11 August 1931, the West Australian announced: “MISSING NATIVE GIRLS. . .� and went on to describe their disappearance.

Molly had good bush sense, but the bush itself and the bush tucker was different from that at home. She was counting on finding the fence to the east of them and then following it north.

“From when she was young, Molly had learned that the fence was an important landmark for the Mardudjara people of the Western Desert who migrated south from the remote regions. They knew that once they reached Bil-lanooka Station, it was simply a matter of following the rabbit-proof fence to their final destination, the Jigalong government depot; the desert outpost of the white man.

The fence cut through the country from south to north. It was a typical response to a problem of their own making. Building a fence to keep the rabbits out proved to be a futile attempt by the government of the day.

For the three runaways, the fence was a symbol of love, home and security.�

They had help along the way--people gave them food and clothing, sent them on their way, and sometimes contacted the authorities. Molly cleverly made sure they arrived at stations from one direction and left by another, so the owners would never really know where they came from or where they were going.

They were by turns cold and hot, wet, bone-weary, and had festering sores on their legs from the bush scratches. This was no picnic.

CONCLUSION
This is as close to a first-hand account of this phenomenal tale that we’ll ever get, I think. It is worth reading for that alone. Nugi/Doris has done a remarkable job putting this together and all Australian schools should teach it.

[END POLITICAL RANT]"

"I am enjoying the book a lot for it's intellectual honesty as well as it's writing, rather than manipulation of emotions. It's looking like it's going to be a 5 star book, but was only a 2 star movie.

I watched the film the other night. I felt totally manipulated the whole time. It made me wonder if the director's other job wasn't making Middle East propaganda documentaries. 10% facts, and 90% lots of tear-jerk ahhh those poor people, oooh those evil bastards moments. Plus atmospheric lighting and wonderful camera-work.

Although the cast were Aborigines, the director was a white Australian. Full of historical guilt no doubt. Still I'm sure the popularity of it helped assuage that and the money he made, well he didn't give any of it to any Aboriginal support projects. Why should he? It was only a commercial enterprise to him. The emotion was for us.

Here are two examples of the manipulation. The first is that the girls in the film are dragged away from their mother very violently and thrust into a car. The father, a white man, is said to be long gone. The book says that actually the parents were still together and when the authorities came to take the children to the school, it was with force of law not violence. The mother who was still with the father of the children, then left him because he was frightened to stand up to the authorities as he might go to prison.

But now I'm reading the book. The author is the daughter of the main character of the film. Her book is a great deal more nuanced than the film made of it. The film is all black and white, good and bad, the book is shades and colours, the good as well as the bad, but without ever forgetting the whole enterprise of the white man in Australia has been to deprive Aborigines of everything they wanted for themselves. (It seems very little different now. A bit like American Indians. One wonders why they make a fuss about some people in the world wanting to return to their ancestral lands but ignore what goes on at home?)"

"I'm ashamed of myself. I've seen "This Sporting Life", "Saturday Night And Sunday Morning", "Picnic At Hanging Rock", and even the Peter Ustinov version of "Murder On The Orient Express". And yet somehow I don't remember Rachel Roberts, the Welsh actress who appeared in all of those films and many more.

"No Bells On Sunday" was assembled from the journal she kept in the last 18 months of her life, as depression and alcoholism and suicidal impulses all laid their stones atop her one by one and finally crushed the life out of her. The first three-fourths or so are her (auto)biography -- her own words interspersed with editorialization by Alexander Walker (some of which is annoyingly twee; hence the docked star) and interviews with acquaintances and colleagues. The last fourth is her journal, day by day, over the last couple of months of her life as she realized first that everything she'd wanted was hopelessly out of reach, and then that the only thing she wanted to do now was die.

What emerges most from her words, and the words of all those around her, is not a diagnosis, but a dilemma. It's clear she was manic-depressive: The way she compulsively became the life of the party, or became the party itself when there wasn't a party to begin with. The way her acting was that of a consummate professional, but how the minute she left the stage or the camera was shut off, she needed drink and camaraderie (and more drink) to stave off the feelings of inadequacy and unease and disappointment.

But worse was how she seemed to know very clearly what was wrong -- that even as an award-winning actress on both sides of the Atlantic, she still remained emotionally starved in a way that simply could not be satisfied through the flashy trappings of her career. She tried to stave off the pain with pills and booze and friends, but it always came back. The strength to be her own person -- to be as coolly resilient as, say, her ex-husband Rex Harrison (whom she became increasingly obsessed with after their divorce) -- seemed unavailable to her.

Stories like this are wretchedly commonplace in Hollywood. I think we have become inured to them because we assume anyone with that much money or opportunity should be able to deal with their boredom and pain. I confess, that's the line of thought I had when I went into this book: Why feel sorry for her, when there are countless other people suffocated by their pain who never have one-one-hundredth of the opportunity she did, let alone access to the resources she had for dealing with it all?

But then I think about it this way. Here is someone who, by the standards of the pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps crowd, did all the right things. She ascended from unassuming origins, entered a difficult and often chauvinist industry, made a respectable place for herself in it, and earned her success the way we imagine it is best earned, by way of hard work and dedication. And none of it was enough to save her."