My imagination holds a place for somewhere evocative of the Scriptorium. My Uncle Bob, an orchardist on the Hawkesbury River, maintained a garden shed full of books with a covering of fairy dust, or so it seemed in my boyhood. I approached it as a magic place. Pip Williams’ book evinced this same infusion: words and their subjective meanings, experienced, felt and dwelt.
Readers are reminded that there are words for men and words for women. Some are particulate matter that have left both, rendered anachronistic by changing mores. Some are Cinderella words that are just right; others totally inadequate to express a sentiment. There are risks for men who engage in feminist discourse. Why no male equivalent of nag? We could try badger, bully, harangue and harass. My own creation is harassle, a merger of the meanings of harass and hassle, and gender neutral.
The whimsical air current that bore the “bondmaid” name-slip aloft to settle out of sight is reminiscent of Forest Gump’s feather escaping from his book in the final scene. We have been sub-optimal custodians and nurturers of language when we allow words with color and precision to escape into oblivion. The harsh education of Cauldshiels reminds one of the fact-driven pedagogy of Dickens’ Hard Times where one was forbidden to wonder.
We witness again in this novel the restraints on women’s choices persisting in the early twentieth century. Dankworth is the archetypal entitled male who commands a right to spatial hegemony and assumes and asserts superiority over a female scholar. The modern term “waste of space” seems appropriately derogatory. Reference to PM Asquith demonstrates the power of no in relation to suffragettes (see Clare Wright “You Daughters of Freedom”)
Notions of obscenity are explored including the range of uses for the word cunt (explored by a distant relative of mine, Inga Muscio, in a book bearing that title). Note the very different non-sexual meaning Dickens ascribed to ejaculate. The vocabulary of war is instructive also. Where is today’s best equivalent of the Oxford market for a bank of idiosyncratic language from which to make withdrawals? The word quickening has a vast array of alternative interpretations (see Hannah Kent’s “The Good People”) with its connections to fairies and the occult.
One can’t help thinking that, despite the Scriptorium’s preservation purpose, we have lost so much of the richness of our language, swallowed by the cult of youth and American cultural imperialism. The same words can be profane in some mouths and sacred in others. The relationships in this novel are authentic and honest. We gain insight into what it is to be a mother, a soldier, a significant other. The book provides the best ever definition of loss. But let’s not get the morbs and upgrade morning tea from madeira cake to anzac biscuits.
Awesomely Astute 