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Back Burning
Sylvia Petter Winner, IP Picks 2007, Best Fiction
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ISBN 9781876819422 |
RRP: AUS$28 |
short fiction |
PB 144pp |
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Reviews |
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Sample
I’m on a flight from Sydney to London and beneath me a haze veils the Opera House. I’ve just buried Ralph, my mother’s husband.
I move to the vacant seat by the window and think of my husband and daughters in England. I think of another man in my life, of the two men my mother loved.
I’d gone to Sydney for my stepfather’s funeral, my head filled with visions of brush fires and burning. The outside of the white bungalow, the house I’d grown up in, had still been the same, just the paint on the guttering had started to peel.
Links
eNews 33: Commentary by Lauren Daniels
eNews 35: Interview by Assistant Editor Casey Hutton
feature on Sylvia's work in Arab World Books
Interview at Inkwell Newswatch
Interview in the short review
Sylvia Petter is a cartographer of dislocated lives. With compassionate precision, she charts the detours, the disruptive incursions of passion, loneliness and loss, the ever-shifting conceptions of home and of the self. Her characters are always on the move through complicated terrain, and the journey is richly rewarding for the reader.
– Janette Turner Hospital
In simple, direct and compelling language, the stories reward the reader with a variety of distinct and memorable experiences: from the complexities of love (and unfaithfulness) to those of history and the way it treats, mistreats and selects its victims, building its ironies on the accidents of race, nationality, personality, place and parentage. With its broad geographical span and array of venues, this book would make a fine companion for a journey. Not only does it entertain; it makes you think, it makes you feel, it makes you appreciate the humanity of its many characters.
– Thomas E. Kennedy, Advisory Editor, The Literary Review
Sylvia Petter’s second collection is storytelling at its best. Each story presents a mini-world complete in itself—with real-to-life characters, heart-aching situations, and “visions of wings”. Petter takes the reader for a fast moving, eclectic tour around Europe, and back and forth to Australia. Crossing cultures with every page, and shifting between generations, Petter slowly builds a world of human goodness and trust in the midst of shadows. The reader is won over by Petter’s sharp wit, polished craft and honesty. Bravo for this tour de force.
– Susan M. Tiberghien, author of One Year to a Writing Life
Sylvia Petter is certainly one of the raciest and moving writers I have read. These stories are strong and compelling. They vividly portray characters which, when fleshed out are real and devoid of superfluous descriptions. There is a lovely rumbling inevitability of some of these stories, like a raging river running to the sea. Petter had the benefit of working with Alex Keegan in the UK on his 'boot camp'- writers' course of criticism and self-criticism. What better man to work with and this work of Petter's shows it. It is all very entertaining, as well. 'The Colour of Haze' about the Nazis is especially pungent. Every kid knew there was a row back then but didn't know what it was about. The past can be disturbing for children, too. These are themes that needed to be re-expressed and Petter knows just how to do this to reach a wide audience. The writing is stark and clear. This is a very passionate book. But so aimed and direct. So Hitler spoilt a whole generation, but they still have the memory and never forget. You will have to get this book, if you can - the internet will get it for you.
– Trevor Reeves, Southern Ocean Review
In Back Burning Sylvia Petter brings a powerful sense of place to every story. This is combined with a precise examination of fragmented lives and the fragmented people living them.
The title story is set in the still space of an airplane arcing between two worlds – the narrator’s native Australia, where she has just buried her mother’s husband, and England, where await her own family and a potentially adulterous relationship. The structure allows the narrator to trace patterns between herself and her mother until she finds release in a decision not to pursue her deliciously tempting friendship, but to see it as a back burning, a “fire… lit to quell bigger flames.”
While several of the 28 very short stories stand alone, many are grouped by theme. Sometimes this works well – a set of stories about infidelity worked like a series of sketches of the same view, each one bringing more understanding and richness to the subject. However, a run dealing with European heritage and the taint of involvement with the Nazi regime worked less successfully: the subject matter seemed overstretched. All the stories were well-crafted, but taken together it felt as if the author was using each one to examine an idea from a different angle without finding anything new to say.
There was an offputting didacticism to a couple of stories. In "The Tschusch" a thoroughly unpleasant main character illustrated the worst of racial intolerance in 1990s Vienna. Yet despite strong plotting, the denouement – where the injured MC is helped by a Croatian doctor, just the kind of (former) immigrant he despises – felt like an O Henry twist: it was there to affect the reader but had no impact on the character.
Similarly, "Viennese Blood" presented a snapshot of the anti-Semitism of 1930s Austria but took this reader nowhere. The coy unwillingness to give dates made it feel as if this was another reveal – are we in pre-war Vienna or the present day? Oh look, it’s a Nazi salute. To my mind, sacrificing story and character for intensity of purpose – even for a worthy cause – makes for a less satisfying read. In these two stories, there was no ambiguity, nothing to decide, nowhere for the reader to go.
However, these two, perhaps undone by a seriousness of intent, were the exception. Mind Wisps luxuriated in the unstudied strangeness of Jason “spun from the strands of my true love’s mind”; Matthew charted a moving journey about a mother's love for her prematurely born son; my personal favourite, Mimosa, was a harrowing account of a bush fire and a mother’s death, as the main character writes to a man who may or may not be her father.
I found Back Burning an imperfect collection with some outstanding stories. But what stayed me with me was the journey – from the tangled loyalties of old world Europe to the bush fires of new world Australia, it's an impressive range for a slim book.
– Elizabeth Rutherford-Jones, the short review
Petter’s background of European parents and adult life framing her growing up in Australia and feeling a deep affinity there forms the matrix of dislocation from which many of her characters suffer. They are often travelers, or expatriates from one place or another, single parents, single adults, lonely children trying to make connections with others. Often but not always these connections are overtly sexual—but at the core they are quests for an emotional “home” with another person.
One story, “Closer than Comfort,” about an Asperger-syndrome child, could almost stand as an emblem for all: she is bright, her father disappeared when she was very young, and her mother’s good intentions are of no use to her. Almost magically, her fascination with computers, which enable her to work and to communicate from a safe distance, leads her to something the reader hopes will be love: an internet friend decides to come from Scotland to Australia to meet her, and, on the brink of flight, she chooses instead to stay and meet him. (Here I felt an inversion of Joyce’s “Eveline,” who can’t cross the barrier to emigrate with her lover, Frank.)
Other lonely children in these stories, both boys and girls, have a tough time. Their fathers may be absent or mis-identified. The man they have known as father may not be in fact. One girl’s misplaced, not-even-conscious flirting with her mother’s boyfriend comes to a tragic end in “Bogeyman” when the mother tells him to leave. A shy and lonely man who has resisted the girl’s advances, he kills himself, the girl and the reader discover when the girl asks her mother many years later and from another country to which she has emigrated, why he disappeared.
Besides the difficulties in romantic relationships and families, some of the stories have political themes: the aftermath of Naziism or its revival, prejudice in Austria or Germany against eastern European immigrants. One of these stories, “The Tschusch,” ends with a terrorist bombing that cuts short an Austrian bigot’s self-congratulatory vacation in Dubrovnik, where he has expected to exploit the very people he denigrates at home.
Because they are so short, the stories trade on symbols and turns of phrase. The title story, “Back Burning,” refers to the strategy of setting a fire to stop a fire—a frequent occurrence in the tinder-box part of Australia in which Sylvia Petter grew up. In that story, the “back burning” is not literal, but springs from an encounter a woman has while returning from her stepfather’s funeral in Australia. He was the man her mother had left her father for; she herself may be on the verge of leaving her family for another man. But on the plane she is forced to converse with an Indian woman returning to part of her family in England: the woman’s insistence on talking about her family is irritating to the main character, but as she listens, something changes for her. She will not let the conflagration break out, as her mother did. She will go home to her husband.
Literal as well as figurative “back burning” occurs in one of the later stories, and one of the longest in the volume, “Mimosa,” a horrific tale in which a female Australian wildfire fighter finds her mother terribly burned on the floor of their devastated home when she returns from a shift of backburning. The mother survives in hospital long enough to convey to her daughter that there is a Frenchman who should be notified of her death. After trying various emotional ways of telling the story in a letter, the daughter settles for a brief, noncommittal announcement, but puts even that into her pocket in the end.
The acknowledgments for the volume reveal that some of the stories have appeared not only in print but in online and broadcast media. I do not think the medium is irrelevant to the form and brevity of the stories. In the same way as short early modernist stories appeared in weekly journals or other ephemeral media (think of Joyce, Kipling, Saki), these stories play to readers in the midst of other activities, or listeners who must “get it” in one brief “sitting.” These lucid glimpses into lives on the brink point both to the future of the short story and its history.
– Suzanne Ferguson is Samuel B. and Virginia C. Knight Professor of Humanities, Emerita, at Case Western Reserve University.