Despite having won a record four Miles Franklins, it is easy to forget how fantastic a writer Thea Astley was. Perhaps this is because it is her later (and, frankly, weaker) work that is more available in second-hand bookstores. Perhaps it's the usual tired cultural-cringe narrative still running through my generation's veins. It certainly can't be because her themes or attitude are dated. Her tales of vaguely unlikable, repressed, judgmental Australians still resonate. Her characters glancing at one another, never looking in the same place at the same time, rarely able to express how they feel, usually unaware of the missed connections. Worrying their teeth along the frayed edges of their cultural norms, unsettled by the new, but unsatisfied with the old.

Astley strikes me as Australia's answer to Muriel Spark, or Margaret Drabble. They too are authors who can seem a bit "dried up" to my generation but - once the book has begun - surprise us with their savagery and insight. And unlike most of Australia's great writers born before 1940 (Patrick White and Christina Stead come to mind), she was truly Australian from birth to death.

The Slow Natives haunts me, and I'm not even sure it's one of her best books. It is, nevertheless, a riveting portrait of the grayness of life and the chances some take to grab at flecks of colour therein - or, more often, the way ordinary people remain blind to those polychromatic moments. Is Astley cruel? Many readers think so. I instead see her as honest, reflecting a guarded, territorial, tall-poppy-obsessed 1960s Australia. I hope our culture has changed in 60 years. I think it has. But, then again, no-one in Astley's fiction seems too far removed from our reality. ( )

This is now one of my favourite Australian novels. ( )

Astley’s The Slow Natives. Her characterisation can be simply devastating:

"Bernard had met Miss Trumper before. Six times? Seven? He was not sure, but she could have given him a total of minutes devastatingly accurate, a summation of trade, an analysis (false) of looks exchanged or emphases (misread). Her frantic hands automatically began to twitch curls into provocative positions and one forefinger, desperate digit, rubbed the corner of her mouth to erase the trapped carmine grease she knew from experience would be there. Then one hand stroked pleats, and then pushed at puffs of hair at her nape. Her hair-style had not changed since she wowed them during the war. And she went, naked as birth, across the concrete veranda to the man who had never yet really seen her.

‘Hullo’, said hearty Bernard, all pipe and chuckles. ‘What splendid weather for lotus-eating! And how are you?’" (p.95)

In The Slow Natives, her fourth novel and the second of four to win the Miles Franklin Award, Astley is writing about an era of social change where not everyone has caught the bus. It is the middle sixties, and in the fictional town of Condamine the role of women is still circumscribed even though the sexual revolution is stirring. Astley’s post-menopausal married women are just that, and only that, and her unmarried women like Miss Trumper are oddities. It is men who have agency…

And it is men who dominate the narrative voice. The story begins with Bernard Leverson and his travails at a wearisome slide night. (Remember slide nights, anyone? Such torture!) Bernard has a wife, Iris, who is having a tepid affair with Gerald Seabrook, which is a matter of indifference to Bernard but not to his son Keith. Keith is adrift in the stormy waters of adolescence, and spends his judgemental time baiting his parents. Through his eyes we see the damage done to the young by adult betrayals and indifference; through his father’s eyes we see the banality of a long marriage and an insipid career.

The characterisation of women in this novel is quite striking when one remembers Astley’s feminism. Iris is an empty shell with nothing much to do in her son’s teenage years, and apart from some shrill accusations late in the novel she is voiceless. Miss Trumper, an unmarried teacher of piano, is wracked with guilt about a long-ago abortion and as we see from Astley’s cruel pen in the excerpt above and from later plot developments, desperate in her sexual frustration. Her friend Miss Paradise is a jealous spinster, unintentionally mocked by Bernard when in a slip of the tongue he addresses her as Miss Paramour. The characterisation of these women remind me of Patrick White at his savage best.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2015/09/13/the-slow-natives-by-thea-astley/ ( )

I do love a book that’s as rich and complex as Thea Astley’s The Slow Natives. Her characterisation can be simply devastating:

Bernard had met Miss Trumper before. Six times? Seven? He was not sure, but she could have given him a total of minutes devastatingly accurate, a summation of trade, an analysis (false) of looks exchanged or emphases (misread). Her frantic hands automatically began to twitch curls into provocative positions and one forefinger, desperate digit, rubbed the corner of her mouth to erase the trapped carmine grease she knew from experience would be there. Then one hand stroked pleats, and then pushed at puffs of hair at her nape. Her hair-style had not changed since she wowed them during the war. And she went, naked as birth, across the concrete veranda to the man who had never yet really seen her.

‘Hullo’, said hearty Bernard, all pipe and chuckles. ‘What splendid weather for lotus-eating! And how are you?’ (p.95)

In The Slow Natives, her fourth novel and the second of four to win the Miles Franklin Award, Astley is writing about an era of social change where not everyone has caught the bus. It is the middle sixties, and in the fictional town of Condamine the role of women is still circumscribed even though the sexual revolution is stirring. Astley’s post-menopausal married women are just that, and only that, and her unmarried women like Miss Trumper are oddities. It is men who have agency…

And it is men who dominate the narrative voice. The story begins with Bernard Leverson and his travails at a wearisome slide night. (Remember slide nights, anyone? Such torture!) Bernard has a wife, Iris, who is having a tepid affair with Gerald Seabrook, which is a matter of indifference to Bernard but not to his son Keith. Keith is adrift in the stormy waters of adolescence, and spends his judgemental time baiting his parents. Through his eyes we see the damage done to the young by adult betrayals and indifference; through his father’s eyes we see the banality of a long marriage and an insipid career.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2015/09/13/the-slow-natives-by-thea-astley/ ( )