Grand Days - By Frank Moorhouse
The BBC was wonderfully hosted by Andrew at his new abode. An intimate gathering of six (sorry about the long book everyone ... hope that wasn't too offputting!), and scored an average of 7. Members were intersted in the history Grand Days contained and generally found it a satsifying read. However its length, and as some would have it, padding, seemed to be its downfall. Here are the scores:
Dennis 8
Mark 8.5
Kevin 6.5
Leanne 8
Ewan 8
Helen 7.5
Andrew 7
Average: 7
These for and against comments from the My Favorite Book site on the ABC website reflected some of the comments put forward by BBC members:
For
Grand Days is simultaneously a delightful and delightfully strange exploration of the erotic possibilities of the self, or at least of Moorhouse's fictional alter-ego, Edith Campbell Berry. Edith is thrillingly alive and her journey is hilarious. It's something of a truism that Australian novels seldom deal with politics, even less often with international affairs, but Grand Days does both, evoking not just the times but allowing the reader new ways to think about the ambiguities of our place in the world, and the freedoms that they might allow us."
James Bradley"
Against
Frank Moorhouse is a master when it comes to short fiction or the kind of discontinuous narrative on which he built his reputation as one of Australia's finer authors. In Grand Days, however, he self-consciously attempts to write a "great novel" on an even greater canvas and it soon becomes clear that this is precisely the opposite of where his talent really lies. The book is a bottomless souffle. It starts with a certain frisson. But frissons, by definition, do not last for 700 pages. Most of Grand Days is effete and extraordinarily repetitious. Moorhouse's froth machine never runs dry, but only at the cost of recapitulating the same banal phrases, sometimes thrice on one page. Of course, there's nothing wrong with repetition per se, as long as the device is trained on some aesthetic purpose. But Moorhouse is so infatuated with his subject he can't even begin to tell when he's writing badly and there's too much bad writing in Grand Days to avoid the suspicion that all the padding is a sop to the author's vanity. Moorhouse wanted to write a fat novel. He did. Reading it, you can't help but crave the thin novel inside it."
Cameron Woodhead
See: http://www.abc.net.au/myfavouritebook/for_against/default.htm
Dennis 8
Mark 8.5
Kevin 6.5
Leanne 8
Ewan 8
Helen 7.5
Andrew 7
Average: 7
These for and against comments from the My Favorite Book site on the ABC website reflected some of the comments put forward by BBC members:
For
Grand Days is simultaneously a delightful and delightfully strange exploration of the erotic possibilities of the self, or at least of Moorhouse's fictional alter-ego, Edith Campbell Berry. Edith is thrillingly alive and her journey is hilarious. It's something of a truism that Australian novels seldom deal with politics, even less often with international affairs, but Grand Days does both, evoking not just the times but allowing the reader new ways to think about the ambiguities of our place in the world, and the freedoms that they might allow us."
James Bradley"
Against
Frank Moorhouse is a master when it comes to short fiction or the kind of discontinuous narrative on which he built his reputation as one of Australia's finer authors. In Grand Days, however, he self-consciously attempts to write a "great novel" on an even greater canvas and it soon becomes clear that this is precisely the opposite of where his talent really lies. The book is a bottomless souffle. It starts with a certain frisson. But frissons, by definition, do not last for 700 pages. Most of Grand Days is effete and extraordinarily repetitious. Moorhouse's froth machine never runs dry, but only at the cost of recapitulating the same banal phrases, sometimes thrice on one page. Of course, there's nothing wrong with repetition per se, as long as the device is trained on some aesthetic purpose. But Moorhouse is so infatuated with his subject he can't even begin to tell when he's writing badly and there's too much bad writing in Grand Days to avoid the suspicion that all the padding is a sop to the author's vanity. Moorhouse wanted to write a fat novel. He did. Reading it, you can't help but crave the thin novel inside it."
Cameron Woodhead
See: http://www.abc.net.au/myfavouritebook/for_against/default.htm
posted by Corporate Photography Sydney at Saturday, September 29, 2007
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