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Loading... Water Under the Bridgeby Sumner Locke Elliott
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A tapestry of surprise, bright dreams and foiled ambitions, which begins at the opening in 1932 of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Archie Ewers, son of a laundress, finds ways of disrupting the comfortable lives of those who have rejected him over the years. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.3Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Elizabethan 1558-1625LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Sumner Locke Elliott is known to most of us as the winner of the 1963 Miles Franklin Award with his first and very poignant autobiographical novel Careful, He Might Hear You which I read years ago when it was made into a film in 1983. Much more recently I reviewed Fairyland (1990), which was the last of his novels and an autobiographical novel which reveals a rather grim Sydney in the days before homosexuality was decriminalised. Apart from Edens Lost (1969) and Water Under the Bridge (1977) which were both set in Australia, all the others were set in the US, where he lived from 1948. These included: Some Doves and Pythons (1966); The Man Who Got Away (1972); Going (1975); Signs of Life (1981); About Tilly Beamis (1985); and Waiting for Childhood (1987). In 1977 he won the Patrick White Award.
But apart from these novels which were internationally successful (including in translation), Elliott was also a successful playwright and scriptwriter, most notably for Rusty Bugles (1948) which was, according to one of the speakers on the podcast, the first play to feature the Australian vernacular, an homage more commonly applied to Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) by Ray Lawlor. This may well have been because Rusty Bugles was promptly banned because of its bad language, which is apparently quite tame by contemporary standards. I'll leave that to others to judge.
What I learned from the podcast, and subsequently by poking around in my Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (1985 edition), was that one way or another, all Elliott's novels were autobiographical, featuring orphaned boys brought up by lone surrogate mothers. Elliott's own mother died young, leaving him to the tender mercies of the aunts who waged a custody battle for him as fictionalised in Careful, He Might Hear You. In Water Under the Bridge, the mother is careless of him, dumping him on a theatrical friend while she goes to nurse the husband by whom she so besotted that she barely notices the child's existence. Both of them promptly die of the flu epidemic, leaving him in the dismayed hands of the friend.
The portrayal of Shasta, the ageing chorus-girl, is both brutal and sympathetic. She gives up her big break on the stage to take care of him all through the bleak years of the depression, but her resentment about this entrapment and the lost opportunities for fame and for love bleed through into hysterical rants which are legendary in the boarding house. When Neil comes home after the celebrations for the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, he is warned to be wary:
Mrs Chauncey's warning does him no good at all. Shasta is awake, and she lures him into what starts as a genial conversation that then morphs into a tirade about his selfishness, about how she doesn't care about anything he does, but she's sick of being treated like a doormat, and so on. And on and on. Shasta has become an awful old harridan, tormenting Neil at every opportunity, and not evoking much of the reader's sympathy — not until a last opportunity for happiness arises. Elliott has set his novel in an era of real suffering — the Depression, and then the war, but he gives proper weight to Shasta's tragedy: the collapse of her long-held hopes and her fear of a lonely old age...
But it's not easy for Neil to escape.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/09/05/water-under-the-bridge-by-sumner-locke-ellio... ( )