Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A haunting novel for the subtle of mind, 12 May 2006
Carrie Tiffany's first novel is one which, if you're willing to take it on its own terms, will stay with you. If you come to it expecting a tightly paced, neatly wound-up story, you'll be disappointed. But if you instead just enjoy the sad, astute reflections of narrator Jean Finnegan, this novel will give you something back.
Jean is a seamstress on the Better Farming Train in the 1930s, which tours Australia teaching the latest scientific farming methods. We follow her from her time on the train, where she meets scientist-farmer Robert Pettergree, to several years later when they are married and living in the inhospitable Mallee area, trying to prove that it is possible to make the land profitable. Interspersed in this account are memories of Jean's and Robert's childhoods, as well as photographs, and annual harvest results charting the year's success - or failure.
In every sentence Tiffany offers absorbing, detailed observations about the world she has created, which bring it to life beautifully. But for the reader this world is also full of questions and holes and unexplained silences. Neither Tiffany nor her character Jean, offer any interpretation of the deeply troubling glimpses we read of husband Robert's childhood. Characters are introduced at the beginning and then silenced so that we never hear from them directly again. We get to know Jean Finnegan and her world, but only through a very narrow selection of her experiences; Tiffany does not allow us the illusion that we are seeing everything, and this creates an eerie uncertainty about the events described.
This book seems not to be about Australia between the wars, or about farming, or about the relationship between Jean and Robert, but about possibilities, about the course a life takes, and about evidence and knowing. It is wise, intelligent and understated, and would be a good read for anyone who likes books and has an appreciation for literary subtlety.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Science of Emotion, 13 Mar 2006
This novel was chosen as part of the UWA Perth International Arts Festival as the One Book for 2006. It's not difficult to see why, it teaches us so much about the difficulties the original Australian farmers faced in trying to grow crops on such complex land. It's great to read about the Better Farming Train - a self-contained education institution on wheels, educating communities on all aspects of land management, animal husbandry, sewing, health and nutrition. Carrie Tiffany manages to convey the main character Jean's struggle as a series of matter-of-fact events whilst still giving the reader a sense of Jean's emotions attached to the decline of her situation with her husband and farm. I loved the way there are photographs and charts interspersed with the story, showing us that we are reading a living diary of a woman living in a tumultuous part of Australian history. I loved that Jean is so devoted to her husband through it all, that as he moves further away from everything she gets closer. You see that she has such amazing strength. The book is a struggle between science and emotion, that by trying to create a positive outcome by mathematical and scientific means doesn't always work because agriculture, and life, just isn't like that. And the disappointment that even if we think we have the formula correct, something still doesn't work... I would recommend this book highly!
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A sad, evocative novel set in rural Australia, 24 April 2006
This luminous, sparsely written but wonderfully evocative novel is set in rural Australia during the 1930s.
Jean, the 23-year-old narrator, is a seamstress instructor on board the government-sponsored 'Better Farming Train' that trundles through agricultural districts espousing wisdom on everything from chicken-sexing to baking cakes.
Her colleagues comprise a wonderful mix of eccentric characters which include the matronly infant welfare teacher Sister Crock, the cooking lecturer Mary Maloney, the Japanese chicken-sexer Mr Ohno and the Yorkshire-born 'agrostologist - a specialist in soil and crop', Robert Pettergree.
When Jean enters an erotically charged romance with Robert it looks like she is going to live happily ever after. They leave the train, get married and set up home in the Mallee, a wheat-growing region of western Victoria. Together they set out to prove that Robert's Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living, an article he penned for an agricultural journal, really do convert low-yielding paddocks into rich, productive ones.
But when the local farmers don't appreciate this new scientific way of thinking, it looks like their efforts may be doomed. Throw in a never-ending drought, the Depression and a looming war, is it any wonder Jean's new-found happiness soon begins to wear thin? But ultimately it is her marriage that self-combusts because Robert is too emotionally distant to recognise his own - and science's - limitations...
I read Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living in two short sittings. It's an easy read, helped in part by the narrator's delightfully simple voice, which is naive, sometimes pained and at other times full of the wonder of life.
Tiffany's assured writing perfectly captures the Australian landscape and the era within which the story is set.
And despite the bareness of the prose, her eye for detail manages to convey so much in just a few short words. There's a lot going on here, so much so I'm tempted to read this book again to see what I missed first time round.
The book is full of quietly understated moments but it's the tear-inducing emotional punches that deliver the poignancy without sentimentality that makes the story so memorable.
My only quibble is that the narrative seems a little directionless and needs more structure to move the reader along, but that's a small price to pay for a gorgeous little book that captures the Australian melancholy so effectively. A worthy contender for this year's Orange Prize.
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