Last week I read Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers in basically two sittings; like eating a huge pavlova alone in a room, it made me feel quite sick but oddly proud. It was what I wanted to do! I think that is a truth about reading. Most of the time we’re looking for the thing we want, not waiting to be told what’s good.
One of my very favourite things to happen in a novel is for a young person to turn up in a hot country to stay with a group of people who are generally behaving glamorously and badly. Seems like quite a specific kink, I know, but you’d be surprised, actually. The absolute best/worst, of course, is A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing (don’t worry, it’s coming), but there are loads! It’s the only fun bit of Conversations with Friends, for example, because the rest is just, how do they go from naught to shagging so often without feeling worried all the time. But the all time number 1 of its kind is Bay of Noon. We’re nearly at holiday time. Pack this book.
Bay of Noon is a SHORT novel by Shirley Hazzard. Do you know Shirley Hazzard? If I am doing one thing with this substack it is growing an audience so that I can tell you about Shirley Hazzard. She is one of the great sentence writers of all time. A brilliant, sparkly writer with a huge brain who knew when to use her talents lightly and when to really rip it up. A writer with, to use her own word, affinity - for places, for people, for other writers. She wrote the novels The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire and various other shorter things but before that, in 1970, she wrote The Bay of Noon. It’s about young woman moving to Naples and falling in deliciously with a glamorous couple and having a love triangle. It’s hot and sexy and probably completely radical for its time, and it does the thing that Bonjour Tristesse does which is make it look jolly easy to write a fucking brilliant short novel about sexual awakening in the Mediterranean. It is not at ALL easy, I can tell you from sad, sad experience, so we ought to be grateful for the ones we have.
And it is more than all that, of course. I can’t do Shirley real justice here, I’m just here to recommend books. But I have never read a writer who seems to enjoy so much using the exact words to say the thing she means, who thinks so carefully about ideas but never, never at the expense of the novel. She is precise, and joyful. Bay of Noon is really really fun, a writer starting to flex her muscles, the start of a journey into her books that is only more and more rewarding. You can buy the Virago Modern Classic here and if you get into it you can listen to Shirley being interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel here. And if you get REALLY into it I recommend Michelle de Kretser’s beautiful essay on Shirley here. Here is de Kretser, as always putting it perfectly, to close:
Hazzard was the first Australian writer I read who looked outwards, away from Australia. Her work spoke of places from which I had come and places to which I longed to go … It was reading as an affair of revelations and gifts. It fell like rain, greening my vision of Australian literature as a stony country where I would never feel at home. Splendour had entered the scene.
Lots of love! D xxx