By David Astle
"When a writer you admire dies, rereading seems a normal courtesy and tribute." The words belong to Julian Barnes. Not just a writer I admire, but one who's thankfully still kicking, adding to his legacy as the years roll by.
Talisman: James Joyce's Ulysses is a reminder of a lost writer. Credit: Simon Letch
Backlist as checklist, there are only a few of his titles I've yet to devour. One relates to cookery, the other cycling – among other essays. Both topics remind me that life is too short. Even admiration has its limits.
But I am a fan. Just as Barnes admires John Updike, the writer implied in the opening quote. When Updike died in 2009, Barnes chose to reread the Rabbit quartet, a series he remembers reading in one joyous swoop during a 1991 book tour of America.
"I read them as I crisscrossed the country, my bookmarks the stubs of boarding passes." From Run to Redux, Barnes lived and breathed Updike. From Rich to Rest, Barnes savoured the American gifted in "giving the mundane its beautiful due". The novels punctuated the trip all the way until Florida, his last resort.
If we're lucky enough, we have such books in our lives. Where J. Alfred Prufrock (T. S. Eliot) measured his life in coffee spoons, readers have prose and poetry as touchstones. Honduras fills my senses the moment I recall Huckleberry Finn. A random quote from Philip Larkin has me re-sweltering in Albury, where I'd binged on the poet's anthology.
Ulysses is another talisman. Updike of all people described the novel as its own continent, complete with soaring peaks and hidden valleys. I read the book in Dublin. The year was 2001, my trip a prize courtesy of the James Joyce Foundation, where I studied Joyce as well as toyed with my own prosaic stuff.
I've kept the Penguin edition as a careworn souvenir. Only last month, when I pulled the beast from the shelf a bookmark fell to the floor. Not a boarding pass, as you might suspect, but a printed email that still saddens me with every reread.
Its writer is Liam Davison, a novelist aboard Malaysian Airlines MH17, the aircraft shot down over Ukraine six months ago today. His wife Frankie was also killed, along with 296 other passengers, including many Australians. Liam had won the Joyce prize the year before me, sharing his advice on how to survive Dublin:
"Don't ask for scotch on an Aer Lingus flight," his email went. "Don't get on a bus without the right change. Don't decide to walk from O'Connell Bridge to the Guinness Brewery, no matter how short it looks on the map. Don't joke about Joyce." The warmth of his words sent me marching to Liam's fiction, which I've been reading – and rereading – since Christmas.
In The White Woman, maybe his best-known work, a posse combs Gippsland seeking an Anglo captive of the local blacks, whether she exists or not. For as Liam writes, the party can't "bear to contemplate that endless expanse of scrub without her somewhere in it".
Elsewhere, in a story called Birdsong 33° 21' N 43° 47' E, a character finds himself "caught between the twin impulses of remembrance and erasure". You and I live in that midspace too, the power of words helping us retrieve the moments we stand to lose in the daily tumult, to rehear the voices that once reached us.
I never met Liam, or Julian Barnes for that matter. Not in person anyway, but I'm grateful for the thoughts they've committed to paper. Each clear and careful sentence, from either writer, is a privilege for readers to hoard. Rereading The Velodrome, Davison's Vogel winner, has helped to grease the cogs of memory. Refinding a bookmark has reminded me never to sing among Irish drinkers, unless I can claim perfect pitch.
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