How could I make such a sweeping prediction? But remember, I’m in Bali, I’m on holiday, sixteen days of this pool are ahead and I’ve only read the opening pages.
I think about the Miles Franklin short list Mateship with Birds is the only other book I’ve read off the list and while I admired that book a lot, there was no question for me – even then, even with a few pages down – that Questions deserved the award because it was bigger and by that I mean more ambitious and more wide-ranging, and clearly equally as well written. Then I think: wow, if she doesn’t do that, maybe one day I’ll do something like that. Would de Kretser be so cruel? I reminded myself of my admiration of how George RR Martin kills off his main characters often when they have barely ‘gotten going’ and thought: wow, if she does that, how amazing. I floated off in my swing, smiling, paddling to the edge. My daughter, I have to say, is brilliant.
‘What about if they didn’t meet.’ And she made her hands move above the water, two boats passing each other, close but no slowing, no touching. She’s so lonely.’ ‘Wouldn’t it be great,’ my daughter said, astride her own noodle in the Horse position. ‘She, one of the main characters Laura, I feel sorry for her. Maybe they’ll be love interests,’ I said, bobbing in the shallow end, noodle submerged in what we called the Swing Position. I told my daughter how I thought these two initial characters, in different countries and with very different lives, would connect somehow. I had no feeling that de Kretser was being fair and equitable to two children like a parent who knows they favour one, and I liked this. In the pool, with its horses and phalluses looming to the side (long story), I filled my daughter in on the apparent structure, that there were sections set in decades, alternating between what seemed to be two main characters emerging, but not regular or balanced necessarily.
I had chosen Questions from my pile of unread for the above reasons, as well as its heft and its fame (it had just won the Miles Franklin). Often the best holidays morph into nostalgia that has a literary accompaniment, eg I read Franzen’s Freedom over three weeks the south of Turkey in 2010, and his The Corrections in Bali in 2011 (told you I liked him). I was to be away for two weeks, I needed something big and meaty something literary and ‘good’ that would entertain me and make me think. In those first few pages I saw what de Kretser was aiming for and it was ambitious: a large-canvas, social novel in the vein of Jonathan Franzen (don’t sneer, I like him) a novel of importance with big themes and beautiful writing. ‘I knew that in four or five pages that this is a work of genius,’ I said to my daughter, as I floated on some child’s pilfered foam noodle, filled with the expansion and generosity that a holiday can bring. I was in a pool in Bali earlier this month and had just read the opening pages of Questions of Travel.
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