A Descant for Gossips

So good this book it hurts. This is my second Thea Astley novel and if I thought the Miles Franklin award winner The Slow Natives was very good this, her second novel verges on great.

Written in 1960 this stunning books stands the test of time. The author's writing shows profound cynicism from the beginning and very deep sadness at a very bitter end. The descriptive prose and the use of brilliant analogy and metaphor make Thea Astley a great writer and I for one look forward to immersing myself in her work well into the future.

The themes of the book are what many should not have to relate to but just maybe could. Cruel gossip that cuts at the core of the understanding reader as they are taken on a journey of the pretentiously small town middle class. A middle class forcing their pathetic demands for conformity onto their children and their children's peers as they swill sherry at their beach houses but seem to, with consummate ease, wallow in their own barbaric self-serving pity. It was true back in the time that this book was written and can still be to this very day. Ask any one that has left a small town in Qld to escape the rigid thinking of their so called betters. In fact ask anyone anywhere about their needs to leave small minded thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1AJPpiVW60

All around the room in a whirl
You saw dancers catch fire when you were still a girl
In a town that's built on the whispers of tattlers
But yet to inspire a single a single dot in the Commonwealth atlas

God only knows how these things ever start
An empty plate in the place of a heart
That finds it's way on a trail of crumbs
And stains windowpanes on the prints of thumbs

So go take rest
Pull the blankets up tightly with your knees to your chest
A far off sound
But to such delicate ears it must seem like there's a zoo burning down

A nagging ache there must be some place better
Searched through every library book down to the last letter
Even Thornfield Manor sounds enticing
With echoes down the hall and on the walls the heads of bison

So go take rest
Pull the blankets up tightly with your knees to your chest
A schoolyard song
And no one can blame you for getting it so horribly wrong

The old saddlers breath that always smells of leather
The café sign letters been faded forever
Irrelevant facts from the history tester
Snowed under the chalk dust of last semester

Can't you see
What it's done to your mother, what it's done to me?
All their words
Will shatter into pieces when I lock you in my arms again