Who doesn't know of the Thorpedo? If you don't but you do know of Michael Phelps. You should know that Phelps studied Thorpe and moulded his public peWho doesn't know of the Thorpedo? If you don't but you do know of Michael Phelps. You should know that Phelps studied Thorpe and moulded his public persona on Thorpe's. There were star swimmers before Thorpe just as there has been stars since him. But it's probably fair to say that Thorpe was the first Swimming Superstar. He was feted inside and outside swimming, and while he was probably the most famous person in Australia at the peak of his powers he was also modelling for Armani, hanging out with Chelsea Clinton at the White House, and kicking back with the Royals in England. He was known around the world. He was front page news everywhere.
This book was published just after Thorpe's success in Athens. An Olympics that made Thorpe the first and only athlete to ever win a medal in the individual 100m, 200m, and 400m freestyle at an Olympics. As the book points out the 100 metres is 15 percent ATP, 50 percent anaerobic, and 35 percent aerobic; the 200 metres is a ratio of 10 to 30 to 60; and the 400 metres is 5 to 25 to 75. To put it another way the difference in energy and aerobic demands is the equivalent of Usain Bolt winning 100m up to 1500m. Such different energy systems, it's absolutely incredible. Not even Phelps could achieve such range in his own peerless career.
If you've seen Thorpe swim you'll know that he's one of one. I was reading this book looking for tips for my own swimming but it only confirmed my opinion that Thorpe was entirely unique in the world of swimming and that no one will ever be able to swim like him. The author repeatedly remarks on Thorpe's combination of flexibility and strength, his 1.96m height, and his size 17 feet. While Thorpe has always hated the "freak" appellation, it's pretty close to the mark. As Thorpe's coach Doug Frost says in the book.
His kicking power allows him to
"Get into a position where he can plane a little - like a surfboard - riding the bow wave produced by his body."
It will come as no surprise to hear that Thorpe had a sports mad father. It may however be surprising to hear that his father was on the trajectory to make the Australian cricket team but burnt himself out and as such vowed never to push his own children. They somehow developed insane drives and pushed themselves to places their father could never dream of. Thorpe's sister, Christina was an Australian swimmer as well. And she taped this to the back of the toilet door in their childhood home.
"Only the pain of a hard workout can save the agony of defeat The difference between the ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra effort The greatest thing in life is doing what people say can't be done.
Christina never quite reached the success her training dictated and she puts that down to not having the mental game that her brother Ian developed. Ian often talks about seeing no merit in trying to play games with other swimmers and building tactics around getting into their head. Equally he never had anyone else in his head. He has always just swum his races to maximise his own ability. It seems here that the lion does not concern itself with the opinions of the sheep.
Most coaches in swimming will teach an extended S shape for the way you pull your hand back through the water. This is an effort to always be pulling against still water. I did discover that part of Ian's secret beyond his phenomenal kick and surfboard like tendencies are that he
"minimises his S-stroke by using his great flexibility to exaggerate his body rotation, so that when he pulls his arm almost straight down the centreline of his body, he's actually pulling against still water and effectively carving an S pattern without wasting time or energy."
It was interesting to read about his swimming suit as well. About a decade ago world records were falling every week as a new generation of supersuits were allowing athletes to swim astoundingly fast. FINA has since banned those suits and that has put the whole thing to bed. Suits were also controversial in Thorpe's time but I was super interested to read that Thorpe's suit was not about reducing drag like the more recent supersuits do. Instead his was based on Alpine Sking suits that focus on compression for increased performance. Thorpe's suit put his body under extreme compression which he believes worked perfectly with his type of muscles and allowed him to exert a lot more force. I guess the principle is not dissimilar to the weight belt weight lifters use.
There's all the dramas of Thorpe's career in this book, his change of coach, various doping allegations, questions of his sexuality. All are handled pretty matter of factly. Although it's interesting to read a book knowing that some of it is essentially a puff piece or misdirection. I understand the book needed to be published at the peak of his powers but the honesty and insight that might have come after Thorpe had retired and also come out as gay would have made for a better biography. It's good that so much was captured in interviews by the author close to the events because it's not coloured by reflection but equally there's a falsity to a lot of it.
There's lots that could be said about how special Thorpe's swimming is, and there's dozens of races you could watch that would just blow your mind. It's hard to describe how effortless and beautiful his stroke is. He always looks like he's just cruising in a warm up, even when he's setting world records. Probably his most memorable swim will be the anchor leg he swam in the 4x100m at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. A swim in which he let Gary Hall Jr the individual 100m gold medallist pass him and then reeled him back in and swim over the top of him, on a night when an hour earlier he'd won individual gold in the 400m and the whole world was watching. He was 17 years of age.
That level of grace, poise, and maturity is quite clear throughout the book. One thing the book does is never let you forget that Ian Thorpe was not just impressive for his feats in the pool but was somehow an actual angel out of it too. Despite being thrust onto the world stage at such a young age he somehow turned out to be one of the most exceptional human beings Australia has ever produced. He gave away all his prize money to charities, he gave so much of his time to kids with the most horrific illnesses, this was largely inspired by his boyhood friend Michael, who he stuck with throughout his battle with cancer. Thorpe's character is probably best summed up by an American swimmer, Josh Davis, a competitor.
"I admire Ian, not just for what he's done in the water but for what he's done out of it. He's got what we want, but here he is with priorities in his life. He really is ahead of the rest of the human race, and not just physically."
If that's what your enemies are saying about you, you must be pretty special. ...more
As a Robbie Arnott Completionist, I've decided reading this book will be a very different experience based on whether you're an Arnott virgin, or a seAs a Robbie Arnott Completionist, I've decided reading this book will be a very different experience based on whether you're an Arnott virgin, or a seasoned campaigner and particularly someone who has read The Rain Heron.
As we've come to expect from Arnott, Tasmania is the main character, though like in The Rain Heron it remains unnamed. Partially because Arnott has run this version of Tasmania through a gauntlet of his own fantastical visions. Arnott's eye for nature and his ability to depict it is world class, those who have experienced the Overland Track or the inland parts of Tasmania will be taken back there immediately, it just happens that there'll be a few unfamiliar features added.
The first element of fantasy in Dusk is the idea of Pumas being introduced to Tassie. This one is not particularly far fetched and quite believable. I never forget that Roosevelt wanted Hippos in America, and Escobar brought that to reality in Colombia (they're now a pest there). Human history has a litany of examples of animals being moved around the globe to sometimes catastrophic consequences. For some reason we seem to loathe animals that adapt to the environment as well as we do. Aussies alone will know the destruction and change wrought by rabbits, cane toads, camels, foxes, fire ants etc. But Arnott has chosen an Apex predator, and the colonial mistake of thinking one can control nature becomes far more personal.
The second component of Arnott's magic-realism is to reimagine Tasmania through a sort of post-apocalyptic/wild wild west lens. The bones of ancient sea creatures litter the plains. Men ride around trying to collect bounties on animals. Fat cat graziers rule the towns (not that far from true Australian history, just not in Tassie). There's a villain in here too, who is your typical wild west weasel. There's also the Patagonian (the man from out of town). While the specific features are different to the Rain Heron, the process is so similar.
Arnott's also woven in his now regular reckoning with the first people of Australia. Here the first nations characters don't play a huge part but make a few asides and comments that come across as both wise and ruthless in their true judgement of the settlers.
With each of Arnott's books I've felt a similar atmosphere and feel. His previous work Limberlost was the most realistic of his novels; being tied to his grandfather's early childhood. I felt that the lean towards realism actually favoured his style which is naturally prosaic. Dusk is a tilting back to the magic side of the magic-realism equation. Its major similarity with the Rain Heron is this almost amnesiac blanket that lays over the top of the whole text. While names are important, and we find the Renshaw twins constantly fighting the reputation their name carries. The places aren't named, nor are many of the underlying societal issues. We've got a quest to capture a big cat and that's the driving force of the narrative, even if the real story is the Renshaw twins escaping their parent's legacy. Arnott's prose is also more spartan than his previous novels, the imagery is still exceptionally strong but it's almost like he's put a sepia lens over everything.
The cat Dusk is named but she has far less personality than the Rain Heron, as such she's less of a load bearing structure in the story. The Rain Heron was mythic and carried with it some kind of divine judgement, Dusk is just a puma that's lonely and hungry.
The flashbacks woven into the narrative are a feature of Arnott's last few novels and he's always been quite good at them. Unfortunately, they're almost too familiar as a feature of his writing now. Just as the great sea creature was embedded as a flashback in Limberlost and it surfaced at the climax, so does Iris' experience in the river work in the same way.
So yes this is a good story, it's an easy and enjoyable read, and Arnott's prose is great. But if you've read the Rain Heron it will feel like you're walking along a familiar well-worn path. It's true that the path is surrounded by fantastical scenes but the lack of novelty in the narrative may find you growing slightly bored. If you haven't read the Rain Heron you'll probably give this a star or two more than I do....more
In my review of Outline, the first book in this trilogy, I mentioned Maria Tumarkin. Particularly when Tumarkin went to an Ira Glass talk where he saiIn my review of Outline, the first book in this trilogy, I mentioned Maria Tumarkin. Particularly when Tumarkin went to an Ira Glass talk where he said
"A story is like a train going to a station."
and she felt rather that a story:
"sometimes, and increasingly, it can feel like a tank crushing all sorts of things under its tracks. Something in the way the form pushes itself onto the experience; something about how the obligatory reflection framing the story often feels subtly untrue."
I felt that Cusk was saying something very similar and sure enough in this book I get almost an exact quote to that effect.
"History goes over the top like a steamroller, she said, crushing everything in its path...
There is this feeling throughout this trilogy that the stories being told are crushing all other perspectives, even the perspective of our protagonist Faye. So it comes with little surprise that after two books of cruelty and meanness Faye or rather Cusk is quite interested in Justice. What should all these horrible people that seem to surrond her at every turn be dealt? What are their fates? Justice is certainly something that seems to keep Faye going; in the absence of a god, the idea that there is some greater force and that we're also responsible for the action of that force is important.
I said that I found his remarks somewhat cynical, as well as strikingly indifferent to the concept of justice, whose mysteries, while remaining opaque to us, it had always seemed sensible to me to fear. In fact the very opacity of those mysteries, I said, was in itself grounds for terror, for if the world seemed full of people living evilly without reprisal and living virtuously without reward, the temptation to abandon personal morality might arise in exactly the moment when personal morality is most significant. Justice, in other words, was something you had to honour for its own sake, and whether or not he believed that Dante could look after himself, it seemed to me he ought to defend him at every opportunity.
Later one of the woman who is meant to be interviewing Faye has a similar opinion. In fact in many ways she seems to repeat back to Faye her own opinion from earlier.
'You asked me earlier,' she said to me, 'whether I believed that justice was merely a personal illusion. I don't have the answer to that,' she said, 'but I know that it is to be feared, feared in every part of you, even as it fells your enemies and crowns you the winner.'
And then at another event another person comments on fairness which also appears to be a little bit of a critique of Cusk's own writing.
We invent these systems with the aim of ensuring fairness, she said, and yet the human situation is so complex that it always evades our attempts to encompass it. While we are fighting the war on one front, she said, on another chaos has arisen, and there are many regimes that have come to the conclision it is human individuality that causes all the problems. If people were all the same, she said, and shared a single point of view, it would of course make us much easier to organise. And that, she said, is where the real problems start.
Like the previous books, this final instalment in Cusk's ground breaking literary experiment in form; abandons plot, pushes the protagonist to the side, and just lets the prose sing. Cusk has definitely saved the best till last. The final book even goes meta and self-referential with a few interactions with the previous books and their methodology, and a character that reappears from the first book. As has often been the case throughout, characters say things that are unnervingly relevant to Cusk's own life.
'Unusually for a man of this nation,' she said, 'and perhaps for any man, he has been honest about his own life. He has written about his family and his parents and his childhood home in a way that makes them completely recogniseable, and because this is a small country he worries he has used them or compromised them, though of course for readers in other parts of the world it is just the honesty itself that comes through. Though of course if he were a woman,' she said leaning more confidentially towards my ear, 'he would be scorned for his honesty, or at the very least no one would care.'
Remind you of anyone?
The meta analysis even stretches to what is almost a commentary on Goodreads. This quote is what prompted Faye's justice comments above.
It was entertaining, in a way, to see Dante awarded a single star out of a possible five and his Divine Comedy described as 'complete shit', but a sensitive person might equally find it distressing, until you remembered that Dante - along with most great writers - carved his vision out of the deepest understanding of human nature and could look after himself. It was a position of weakness, he believed, to see literature as something fragile that needed defending, as so many of his colleagues and contemporaries did.
Just like the other two books, the mid section of Kudos is the strongest part. Though, this last instalment also seems to have a little more of everything. It's certainly got more contributions from Faye herself. Where in the previous two the sessions of what were essentially client centred therapy, had little to no contributions from Faye, now we get her pushing back more, and even though most of her comments are ignored, we feel as the reader, that she's no longer content on the sidelines. Cusk has mentioned that part of inventing this style of fiction was to reduce herself as a target for criticism. For the most part Faye has presented the smallest target possible, though in this final book she starts to rankle at her wallflower status and peep her head over the parapet a little more.
The lack of self-awareness from the other characters in the book also naturally rings alarm bells. Faye comes across as more of a ghost than a living human, given how nothing she says to other people, regardless of how insightful it might be, ever disrupts their speech, let alone their image of themselves. This was something Cusk set in Outline and has stuck to throughout. It should be an indicator that we have an unreliable narrator but because this same narrator has essentially ceded the floor to all the other characters we don't really notice the way her own perception warps the story.
There's been humour throughout the trilogy but this book definitely goes to 11. Faye is at a literature festival in what seems to be a German town, and she goes through a string of interviews where the interviewers talk exclusively about themselves and their own theories on life and writing. One highlight comes when one interviewer talks about her own struggles, doesn't ask a single question, and after recounting her entire life story says she needs to go but don't worry because as she says to Faye.
‘I think I have everything I need,’ she said. ‘In fact I looked up all the details before I came. It’s what we journalists do nowadays,’ she said. ‘One day they’ll probably replace us with a computer programme. I read that you got married again.’
Later we have another interviewer who decides Faye's life is too sad and that she'd be happier if she moved to what seems to be Lisbon. Faye responds:
I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting; when it happened to people against their will, the loss of the known world – whatever its features – was catastrophic.
But the interviewer plows on with trying to convince Faye to move. This interaction sums up the trilogy quite well. Only Faye seems aware of what makes her tick, no one else will listen to her or is even interested, they're all far too self-obsessed or hooked on their own impressions of her. This humour reaches its darkest point right at the end when after 3 novels of listening to others spill their guts, Faye's son says to her.
'Faye,' he said fractiously, 'will you just listen?'
One can do nout but laugh. We've just had three books of her doing nothing but listen and now this young potential source of hope commands her in the same horrible partiarchal way so many characters have been excoriated for throughout the trilogy.
I'm sure like me you've come across the thought experiment of what you would be like in Nazi Germany or whether you would work the Underground Railroad in Antebellum US. Like me you've probably reached the conclusion that while you think you'd do the right thing you just could never be sure. Cusk has a passage that is so chilling for its subversion of that exact thought experiment and it's followed by an example of gas lighting that makes the husband's position even more sinister.
My sister told me, she said, that she and her husband were once having a discussion about the former GDR and the awful ways in which people betrayed one another under the regime of the Stasi, and she had made the point that none of us truly knows the extent of our own courage or cowardice, because in these times those qualities are rarely tested. He had disagreed, very strangely: he said that under those same circumstances he knew he would be among the first to sell out his neighbour. That, my sister said, was the first clear glimpse she had had of the stranger inside the man she lived with, though there were many other incidents, obviously, during the course of their marriage that might have told her who he really was, had he not succeeded in persuading her that she had either dreamt them or made them up.
The patches of trancelike prose from the previous book have seemingly bloomed to nearly the whole novel. There's still a few sections where the prose throws you out of the trance and back to reality, oh there goes gravity.... But if you've read the previous two books you'll be quite familiar with this oscillation.
Who hasn't noticed this trend? It's nice to hear it so succintly put.
The personal value of books had - for her at least - increased; yet she had the sense that the attempt to make a public concern out of a private pastime - reading and writing - was spawning a literature of its own, in that many of the writers invited here excelled at public appearances while producing work she found frankly mediocre. In the case of such people, she said, there are only the grounds: the building isn't there of if it is, it's a temporary structure that will be swept away by the next storm.
There's a bit on Louise Bourgeois, and it hit hard because Sydney had an exhibition of her entire oeuvre this year. That goes to show that we're 6 years off the cultural pace of Europe. The section on Jacarandas also got a smile from this Sydneysider.
He had many friends - smart, aspirational people of good taste - who had planted a jacaranda tree in their new garden as thought this law of nature somehow didn't apply to them and they could make it grow by the force of their will. After a year or two they would become frustrated and complain that it had barely increased even an inch. But it would take twenty, thirty, forty years for one of these trees to grow and yield its beautiful display, he said smiling: when you tell them this fact they are horrified, perhaps because they can't imagine remaining in the same house or indeed the same marriage for so long, and they almost come to hate their jacaranda tree, he said, sometimes even digging it up and replacing it with something else, because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty - rahter than ambition and desire - that bring the ultimate rewards. It is almost a tragedy, he said that the same people who are capable of wanting the jacaranda tree and understanding its beauty are incapable of nurturing one themselves.
If you've read Cusk's other work, purple prose (pun intended) will be familiar. What you won't be familiar with however is the truly bizarre final scene. I've been racking my brain to figure out what the hell Cusk was trying to say. We've had 3 books of cruelty and selfishness, this most recent book also has numerous feminist diatribes (though none from the protagonist) albeit all delivered in very masculine domineering ways. Then to close the whole trilogy out we have the following.
"One of them got to his feet, a huge burly man with a great curling black beard and a rounded stomach and thighs like hams. Slowly he walked down towards the water's edge, his white teeth faintly glimmering through his beard in a smile, his eyes fixed on mine. I looked back at him from my suspended distance, rising and falling. He came to a halt just where the waves broke and he stood there in his nakedness like a deity, resplendent and grinning. Then he grapsed his thick penis and began to urinate into the water. The flow came out so abundantly that it made a fat, glittering jet, like a rope of gold he was casting into the sea. He looked at me with black eyes full of malevolent delight while the golden jet poured unceasingly forth from him until it seemed impossible that he could contain any more. The water bore me up, heaving, as if I lay on the breast of some sighing creature while the man emptied himself into its depths. I looked into his cruel, merry eyes and I waited for him to stop."
If you thought justice would be served, you were horribly wrong. But then that's probably the main message Cusk was trying to transmit. Kudos for achieving it....more
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