Transcript of Radio New Zealand’s Saturday Morning with Kim Hill

8 May 2006

11.25am: Children's Books with Kate de Goldi

Kate: I thought this was the most amazing book. Remember we did her wonderful story about a couple of years ago about the dolls house? It was Abyssinia and it was the most extraordinary kind of metaphoric story. She’s an amazing writer. She’s written a quite beautiful book The First Book of Samuel which is about a Jewish family

It’s very very difficult to explain what sort of writer she is but one of the writers she reminded me of was Janet Frame and Janet Frame particularly in her memoirs, because what we have here is three sisters living in Sydney during the early 1950s, in fact it’s April 1954 when the infamous Petrov affair was occurring. You won’t remember that Kim because you’re too young.

Kim: I remember people remembering it.

Kate: That’s right. Petrov was a Russian defector and it was in the news for weeks and weeks whether he was going to be allowed to stay and whether his wife was going to be allowed to stay.

Kim: This was in the Cold War

Kate; That’s right, and Petrov was actually taken by the government and hidden at some point. That’s what’s going on in the headlines and  headlines from the Sydney Morning Herald are actually used throughout this book but the real story-

Kim: They’re great headlines...more polio cases

Kate: Yes, so we’ve got all the grim things that are happening at this time – polio

Kim: Hydrogen bombs

Kate: And then the strange little things that go on in any city,  circus coming to town, or the fair or whatever, a man-woman

Kim: Tragic life story of a man-woman

Kate: Transexual, yes. But Matilda is the third child in this story and the whole story or more or less the whole story is narrated from her perspective, third person but from her perspective. But interestingly at the beginning it starts with a version of the Red Shoes, the fairy tale, so it starts once upon a time, and I think Dubosarsky is announcing her kind of approach in this. Matilda is having the story read to her by her older sister, Frances, and it’s a perfect evocation of what happens when you’re reading to a certain kind of child that interrupts and asks questions all the time. She’s wanting to understand the story on its deep level – it’s a really sinister story, a child’s feet are chopped up then become wood. I think the idea with this is that somehow or other everything that Matilda observes that’s going on in her family and the wider world thereafter has the quality of mysterious fairy tale about it. There are things that she doesn’t understand and they exist side by side in her consciousness and she never properly puts them together but the reader puts them together.

And the story’s brilliantly structured because it starts – it really happens only over about four days. There’s the mother, and the father is off in the merchant navy, Uncle Paul comes to stay. Now there is never – I’ve read the book twice – there is never one negative word used about Uncle Paul, not one adjective that’s negative – but he immediately feels like a troublesome character

Kim: Because really really early on he’s described as looking at their mother-

Kate: That’s right, that’s all that’s said. And it’s that fantastic unaffected way a child looks at what an adult’s doing, feels disturbed but can’t put it into words, and that is the kind menace that hovers all the way through the story. It’s quite brilliant. Meanwhile the oldest sister Elizabeth’s having a breakdown and that’s described in such a brilliantly unaffected way as well - Elizabeth was home from school because she was having a nervous breakdown. Everyone just says that.

“Elizabeth was fifteen. She had long hair in plaits and she didn’t go to school. She used to go to school but one day she’d come home with her plaits tied up on top of her head with a white ribbon and said she wasn’t going back. Their mother had called the doctor and the doctor agreed with Elizabeth. “She needs a rest,” the doctor said, stroking Elizabeth’s…..  “She’s having a nervous breakdown.”

So Elizabeth’s just there, another disturbing presence, who has obviously seen or experienced something that’s unsettled her but all she does is go down to the beach and get sand and upend it in the garden.

Kim: Over the flowers.

Kate: that’s right. Now Matilda sees what’s happening, Uncle Paul watching her mother and he’s there when her father is not, Uncle Paul’s her father’s brother and he’s a louche character, he plays the piano in a night club and he lives in a seedy hotel

Kim: And his moustache is slightly too big

Kate: That’s right, John Clarke wouldn’t like it. And Frances is the sister who wants to sleep all the time, hardly ever speaks but when she does it’s kind of important. Meanwhile next door some black coated men arrive in limousines and someone that they don’t know about is staying next door. What you realize after a while is it’s possibly Petrov. But there’s also another weird mad old man next door with a gun, he flails it around one afternoon. Matilda is the person who unites all these strange happenings and sees them and at the same time the real story, and it circles in and in and in on the story, the real story is what happened when they went on a family picnic to the Basin several days before or a few weeks before and Matilda has been up a tree at that picnic and observed something and we don’t know what it is until near the very end.

And it’s quite heart-stopping. I was just absolutely riveted to it.

And the red shoe, the title of the story, refers not only to the Red Shoes, the fairy tale which hangs over and sort of structures this whole story, but also to the red shoe that she drops out of the tree when she is startled by what she sees at the picnic.

I think it is just magnificent.

Kim:  It’s very very beautiful and it’s a beautifully produced book.

Kate: It is. Interestingly when I was  reading it again last night – I was puzzled the first time through by the character inside Matilda’s head called Floreal, a sort of imaginary friend who is constantly telling her what she doesn’t want to know, he’s telling the truth, and he’s just someone who’s inserted himself in her head obviously when these troublesome events started. Anyway I looked up Floreal on the internet today. I knew it had something to do with flowers but it’s the second season in the French republican calendar, you know the calendar that was made after the Revolution, it comes after Germinal, Germinal being the time events are sprouted, Floreal being the time of flowering, so I think it’s quite obviously a literary symbol for the flowering of knowledge, Floreal representing the flowring of knowledge.

Kim: Aren’t you clever?

Kate: No not really because it did take me along time to work it out.

Kim: She’s worked as a Latin teacher so she’d be a linguist as well

Kate:  My point is she’s a highly literary writer but she has the genius of being able to write on an utterly plain and simple level. So that’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.