Alison Croggon trained
as a
journalist and her work includes poetry, plays, libretti, translations,
editing and criticism. Croggon’s book, Navigatio, is a
story of her
family’s double migration and an account of a nineteenth
century sea
voyage and arrival. The book is divided into ten different stories, all
weaving past and present history.
The prologue informs the reader of her father:
Navigatio,
a first novel by the talented young Melbourne poet, Alison Croggon, has
also been released by the same innovative new publisher [as for Vivien
Hopkirk’s
Meditations
of a Flawed Groom],
Black Pepper. Like Hopkirk’s
Flawed
Groom, Croggon’s
Navigatio
is also highly
experimental and unorthodox in form. Two stories alternate here; one a
fairly straightforward autobiography, the other a stylistically
adventurous account of what seems to be an analogue for the
author’s
own family voyaging to (or at least towards) Australia in 1869. The two
strands of the novel, if that’s what it is,are decidedly
different from
each other, despite the centrality of the mother/three daughters unit
in both.
The autobiography is a relatively unadorned and presumably accurate
account of the unhappy marriage of Croggon’s parents - and of
some of
the more important highs and lows of her childhood in South Africa,
Cornwall and Australia. Unlike the autobiographies of, say, Sally
Morgan or Albert Facey, there is not a great deal here which transcends
the personal. Clearly this strand offers plentiful material for poems
(as seen already in Croggon’s outstanding first collection,
This is the Stone)
- or possibly
for an autobiographical novel along the lines of Kate
Jennings’ recent
book,
Snake
(also about the
unhappy marriage of an writer’s parents). As it stands,
however,
despite Croggon’s more than competent writing, this half of
the book is
finally disappointing.
This is particularly so in contrast to the other strand dealing with
the 1869 voyage. Here Croggon displays both lyricism and insight. In
the sections ‘Anaesthesia’ and
‘Adelaida’ she reports convincingly on
the psyche of her young mother of three in a marriage already turning
unhappy. In between a complaining letter to her brother and a cheerful
letter to her husband describing the same unbearable shipboard
situation we get a moving and poetic embodiment of what must surely
have been the feelings of such a woman at that time and how severely
she would have had to repress them. The quality of Croggon’s
prose
itself is additionally affecting since it reminds us of how much of the
woman’s own essence she has had to give up to fit the demands
of others
- and the fantasies about marital happiness which she has absorbed from
them. One paragraph is enough to get the flavour:
When
I was a virgin and whole the sea was different, it was a horse and I
was fearless. I was blown across its expanse without harm, I knew too
little to care who I was. Now I am small and timorous, a nose poking
out from the wainscot, a scurry of frills, a noise of yes. I put my
hand to the ladle and the crib and arrange the silver. How is it I
despise myself so much?
In another section of this 1869 narrative, the one called
‘Ananke’, we
are given a strong and stylishly colloquial monologue by a female
convict who has been savagely abused by her employers in England - and,
seemingly, by her father as well (whose influence she finds impossible
to escape and to whom the monologue is addressed). In the closing
sections of this strand, both equally well written, Croggon becomes
steadily more metaphysical and the story becomes a kind of reenactment,
almost in magic realism mode, of Coleridge’s ‘Rime
of the Ancient
Mariner’. As a piece of prose the final section is,as the
publishers
claim, a
tour de force
but
whether it makes a convincing conclusion to the plot is another
question. As a postmodern appropriation, however, it is certainly
carried off with great élan.
It is hard, ultimately, to know what to make of
Navigatio.What do
you say when a
book is two books - one decidedly more than the other? Probably both
could have done with a little more work - the autobiography given a
little more of the poetic writing found in the other half - and the sea
voyage filled out perhaps into the full-blown lyrical and freestanding
novel that it wants to be. In the meantime Black Pepper has Alison
Croggon’s second volume of poetry well on the way, a book
which will
surely be less problematic and more consistently enjoyable than the
rather strange adjacencies of
Navigatio.
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New
Writing
Navigatio
Helen Horton
Imago, Vol.
9, No. 1, Autumn
1997
This is classed as a novel, but most of it is drawn from an
autobiographical source, even that half that is written as a fictional
account of a nineteenth century migration from England to Australia.
Except for two, the chapters alternate between this fictional family
and the writer’s own family, with its migration from South
Africa. The
exceptions are Chapter VIII, named ‘Angel’, a
series of fragments with
a dream-like quality, and the last chapter. In this ‘The Tale
of the
Ancient Mariner’ is retold via the medium of the log-book of
the
captain of a ship, the name of which,
Fidelis,
is symbolic, as is the ending of the book.
The focus throughout is on the far-reaching and complicated emotions
that are involved when a husband and wife relationship breaks down and
the inevitable spilling over into the minds and emotions of the
children, in this case, three girls.
This is not a story told sequentially. The chapters are individual
fragments, with the present and memories of the past constantly
intermixed, and firmly linked by the parallel family device. The result
is at times slightly confusing, but the book never wavers from its main
recurring theme of the emotional impact of family members upon each
other and their lasting effects. In the process of this emotional
probing, there is a certain amount of philosophising, that could
perhaps become just a little wearing. It takes the form, however, of a
questioning, rather than being didactic, and the reader is never
allowed to lose sight of the concept contained in the third paragraph
of the Prologue: ‘I want to migrate forever from these
shadowlands
where speaking is not possible because the darkness swallows every
syllable before it can be uttered, this realm that ate up my parents.
Each step takes me further into shadow, into the impossibility of
speaking. But I must persist.’ That tone is maintained
throughout.
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Books
Extra
Paperbacks
Navigatio
Fiona Capp
The Age, 30
November 1996
Established last year, Black Pepper is a small press which is rapidly
making a name for itself and has already published 16 titles. Alison
Croggon is best known as a poet, librettist and playwright. In her
first novel, she combines personal memoir with the story of a
19th-century sea voyage as she navigates the stormy waters of her
family’s past. ‘It took until my adulthood to
acknowledge how my father
lied to me... I don’t know how to navigate past what he has
taught me
about truth - that truth does not exist, that trust is
impossible.’
Now, as she contemplates the world her children inhabit, Croggon offers
up a meditation on memory and the meaning of
‘truth’.
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shorts
Navigatio
Airlie Lawson
Australian Book Review,
No. 186, November 1996
Find a comfy chair and a quiet room before you embark on
Navigatio. Though
slim, Alison
Croggon’s first novel is not light. Prose narrative overlaps
poetry to
produce a work densely packed with images and voices. The past, the
present and the imagination are all invoked, making the reader
constantly reassess and reconsider what has gone before.
Croggon, widely known as a poet, mixes her own story of migrating with
others. One of these others is a young mother who is travelling to
Australia over a hundred years ago, and her feelings of melancholy,
loss and looking are strikingly similar to the author’s own.
What is to be trusted? Doubting God, Croggon and the characters ponder
on the life of language, the nature of beauty and the cruelty of man.
Who is to be known they ask, and how? Is a person’s fate
wholly tied up
in what has gone before? The awesome helplessness of just being borne
along by life is wonderfully evoked in the final chapter, the logbook
of a sea captain, dated 1869.
A thoughtful journey.
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Navigatio: a response
By
Daniel Keene, September 1996
I am very grateful for the opportunity to launch this book. It gives me a chance to respond to it, and after reading
Navigatio
I wanted to respond. I needed, somehow, to express the joy it evoked in
me, joy in its subtle craft and in its potent contents. A response can
only be a secondary thing, a dignified shadow at best, the dignity of
which is something borrowed from the primary source, the book itself.
Like all fine work, I think
Navigatio
invites response, as much as it invites emotion and thought. For me it
also invites humility, not only in the face of the skill it displays in
its construction and execution, but in the face of the emotional and
intellectual terrain it covers.
Navigatio is a book of a little over a hundred pages, but it is a vast and complex work.
In order to speak of this book I need to speak of Alchemy. Of common
Alchemies and profound ones. Of the marriage of opposites and of
affinities. Of the deceptions and the truths of magic. I need to
conjure the idea of transformation, of transmutation; of the changing
of one thing into another, of base elements into richer, more resonant
states. Of an exchange of energies between a life lived and life
imagined, and of the equality that can be made to exist between these
two things. I need to speak of the imaginative riches that reside in
memory and of the memories that can be inspired by imagination. I need
to speak of drama and the dramatic, of poetry and what it entails, of
what it so fiercely requires. And perhaps finally, or firstly, I need
to repeat an old riddle. Question: when is a door not a door? Answer:
when it is ajar. This simple riddle is founded on the tricks of
language, on the difference between the spoken and the written, on the
idea that language is not a set of fixed meanings but a living energy
that has meaning only in usage; it is a riddle created by the invention
that the transparencies of language allows.
The riddle, the conjuring trick, the Alchemical, the metaphor, language
itself: they are all are pure drama. The dramatic concerns itself with
change, with transformation; with the living presence of that
transformation, experienced as it occurs. We can so rarely experience
tranformation, moment by moment; it either happens too quickly or too
slowly for us to perceive completely; usually we can only reflect and
remember.
Navigatio invites us to
witness the Alchemy, the riddle, the drama of transformation. It
spreads before us the process and the outcome. The magician, the joker,
the alchemist, the dramatist, the poet, reveal themselves. It is,
finally, an act of revelation. A revelation that leaves mystery intact.
In other words, an act of magic.
The architecture of
Navigatio
is deceptively simple: alternating chapters of biography and fiction,
one framing and revealing the other as the book proceeds, this
alternation giving the book its strange and irresistable momentum. It
goes like this: a woman is writing about her life; her life as it is at
the moment of her writing of it and of her life as it was, her
childhood. She remembers. Her remembering is a journey she takes,
through herself, through regions both familiar and unknown. She asks
questions of her self and of those people she remembers, old questions
and new ones. But she is always drawn back to the present moment, to
the moment of writing, to the act of writing itself. And then she
begins to imagine. Other lives. Another time. These other lives she
imagines, this other time, are connected to her; through common
affinities, through synchronous events, through similar longings,
through familiar sufferings. She invents a parallel world, a
coexistence as real as her memories, as present as her present moment.
This is the method by which
Navigatio seeks and discovers its form as a novel.
It is a stringent and confident design. But there is also a prodigious freedom of composition in
Navigatio;
in each chapter ideas are mixed with anecdote, biography with pure
fiction, historical detail with fantasy; there are passages of joyfully
intoxicated improvisation, that in ignoring unity of action achieve
more complex and richer structures. The writer is inventing her own
rules. But the rules she invents are not random: they are calculated
and calibrated, drawing on her deep understanding of poetics, and they
are finally, as all rules should be, liberating. The book takes
exuberant flight. But its wings are not made of wax. They are made of
steel.
Navigatio is at once an act of
intelligence and invention and an overwhelmingly generous act of
biography. That it resolves these differing if connected energies is
remarkable, and is the book's achievement. In its pattern and execution
it enters areas unheard of in Australian literature. It is a fearless
book of remorse and absolution. It is a joyous book, joyous in the face
of truths that are difficult, at the end of a labour that has stretched
the boundaries of both fiction and biography, that in the end resolves
them into a form that both exposes and increases the mysteries and the
reality of imagination and memory.
There is an ancient saying: Memory is the mother of imagination. In
Navigatio
memory and imagination stand together and sing to us, and the harmony
they make is richly alive, as beautiful a music as you could wish to
hear, a poem like no other I have read. It is pure joy.
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