The Broken Book by Susan Johnson

When I tracked Susan Johnson down at the Australian Society of Authors Congress in Sydney a few weeks ago with her book in my hot, acquisitive little hand, and forced her to sign it for me, with a wheedling smile and a dance of the cover of her book in her sight line, she was very gracious about the whole thing, wishing me well in my own work, in the inscription. She said she hoped I liked it and that it was a book that polarised - people seemed to either love it, or hate it.

I am firmly in the love camp, and I have been trying to put my finger on precisely why. I can't quite...

What I can do is note that this is a remarkable novel, and I can't understand why it didn't win some sort of literary prize (did it? Surely it has!?). I love the fragmented nature of a story that still makes perfect sense, and the style (to say it is confessional is to do it an injustice, only because that word has become associated in literature with a kind of cultural cringe about 'women's writing' - it is, at times, deeply intimate but never cloying). Johnson's expertise in carrying off an unorthodox structure is impressive, and through her own example, she infuses the work with an understanding that the best writing is not just something utilitarian, but art. Capital A Art, I think.

The latter is central to the story, inspired, rather than firmly based, on the life of Australian writer Charmian Clift aka (in Johnson's novel) Katherine Anne Elgin 1923 -1969. Clift collaborated on three novels with her husband, the writer George Johnston (who won the Miles Franklin for My Brother Jack) and had two novels entirely of her own making published in 1960 and 1964 - Walk to the Paradise Gardens and Honour's Mimic respectively. She was a well-known (and loved) columnist and a short story writer.

The Broken Book refers to the novel that Elgin (Clift?) is working on when she dies. In some ways the slippage between the real-life Clift (if such a person - any person - could be pinned down) and the fictional character Elgin, creates a space where (what I think ) the central questions of this novel are posed: What is art? How do the actual lived experience of the writer and the work inform one another? Where or what is the line where/when a written work crosses over into the territory of art? Is writing, or any artistic endeavour, a form of neuroticism? Is it worth it? Who gets hurt along the way? It seems that in this case, the answer is often the writer herself.

What I loved about this book was not just the subject matter, which I assume would be of interest to most writers, but the book itself. I mean, not only the insights Johnson displays in this sensitive and compassionately imagined story about the relationships between husband and wife of that era, parents and their children, and the desire for some sort of transcendence through knowledge or art, but the way in which the words Johnson has chosen catches fleeting human experiences and shows them for the beautiful, complex, often painful, but ultimately joyful gifts that they are.

I can't say any more about this book, except to recommend it to my fellow writers. The three last books I have discussed in this blog have encouraged me to keep going, not because I have a hope of equalling their outstanding artistic achievements, but because it is a beautiful thing to do. And sometimes, for one or two people, a good book implants a kernel of understanding that wasn't there before. And that is really something.