Alchemy of the Word
Flannery O'Connor

'Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.'

So, with characteristic flair for character and setting Flannery O'Connor begins a tale in her particular style of American Southern Gothic. Present in this half paragraph are her trademarks: Mordant humour, pathos, irony and a compassion that holds the proceedings from tilting excessively into the grotesque.

O'Connor's short stories and two novels are primarily pieces of rural American observation about ignorance, race and religiosity. In all of the stories characters meet at the juncture of these three volatile roads and confront their own inner demons, whatever they may be. Her setting may have been limited but, like Emily Dickinson looking out her window in Amherst, O'Connor spied a variegated universe from her veranda. Perhaps because of her own battle with Lupus, there is a cool detachment and a pitiless, yet pitying, hawk's eye at work as she soars over the isolated communities she depicts, exposing with a singular lack of sentiment the secret workings of the human heart and mind.

Evil, for O'Connor was not an aesthetic abstraction, such as you would find in Lovecraft, say. The evil in O'Connor's stories, the bad things that people are capable of doing on a casual and everyday basis, resides within the human frame. It rises to the surface through chinks in the barely civilised armour when the inner core is somehow perverted or twisted toward a singular aim. When this happens, the perpetrator takes on biblical proportions; the retribution doled out is harsh, sudden and unforgiving. Everyday folk are inevitably caught unawares and their carefully nurtured world is unhinged, turned upside down and brought to the brink. In some of her stories – I am thinking primarily of ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find' and one or two others – there is the impression that the universe has turned sour and it is indiscriminately pouring its motiveless malignity down on humanity's head. But this is rare and unusual for O'Connor. It is usually people, wolves in sheep's clothing, that prey on people in a manner that can leave even the hardiest reader feeling exposed and insecure, especially if you read, as I did, her entire oeuvre back to back over one summer.

I began with her astonishing 1955 novel The Violent Bear It Away. Hooked, I rapidly moved on to her first novel Wise Blood (1949) and capped the whole endeavour with The Complete Stories (1971). At the end, I emerged shaken and oddly invigorated. In her too-brief life, Flannery O'Connor wrote two novels, two short story collections and two books of essays. Comparatively speaking it is a modest output. You soon realise, however, that, as with all good things, with O'Connor it is a matter of quality over quantity.

From the beginning to the end of that summer, I saw a unique world-view emerge and I began to realise how O'Connor's short stories feed the novels like a lifeline yet still manage to hold their own. What I mean to say is that I believe Flannery O'Connor is a short story writer first and a novelist second. That is not to say that the novels are not accomplished, they certainly are, but it is to say that Flannery O'Connor thought primarily in terms of the condensed tale. Within this framework one sees a stylist mature through strict application and discipline of form – for example, read O'Connor's first short story ‘The Geranium' and then follow that up with the reworking of the same themes and characters in ‘Judgement Day', written just prior to the author's dead, and you will see what a very long way she travelled in such a short amount of time.

O'Connor's short stories are not subservient to the novels. They are not an adjunct. She did not write them because she was filling in time while waiting for the next great idea for a novel. They exist because O'Connor had to get them out of her system in terms of a miniature reflection of the world she observed. The economy of having to get down to business taught her to observe Graham Green's wise maxim that ‘If it's worth saying, it's worth saying briefly.' When she transferred this dictum to The Violent Bear It Away, she caught lightening in a bottle.

The short stories are O'Connor's novels in a tighter form and the novels are the familiar themes given room to breathe and stretch their limbs. The novels grew out of ideas she first set down as short stories. (In fact, early drafts of both the novels are in The Complete Stories.) When O'Connor wrote in the short story form, she was literally and metaphorically holding up a mirror to the small religious communities in Georgia that nurtured her talent and proved to be her life-long inspiration. Like those isolated hamlets, the short story form is, after all, about brevity and compactness – a hermetically sealed order that exists within the blink of an eye, yet still manages to capture the essentials.

O'Connor wrote tales that impose a subjective landscape of dread and menace upon the mundane geography of the American South. In her pragmatic universe, bad things happen to good people. And evil is what men do. Circumstance or an innate calling has brought these undisciplined people to an impasse and they cannot turn back. Their innards are coiled and the only outlet is to paint the world in their own image. For them it is a prerogative, a calling, and a mission from a deity that knows neither forgiveness nor compassion. They do not need an external supernatural agency to inspire them. They are barbarism, blind Faith and Retribution itself, at once pitiable and terrifying. Whether they are children marching out of the dark forest to make a joke of a lifetime's work, an embittered man emerging out of a serene sunset bearing a flaming, tar-filled heart, or a woman committing a gross offence through pig-headedness and ignorance, they do so in the knowledge that childhood is the garden in which good and evil begins, and it can be a terrible place.

Perhaps in all of recent Western literature there is only Australian novelist Sonya Hartnett to equal Flannery O'Connor's harsh, uncompromising vision. The two writers have much in common. Not least is their undeniable talent for knowing how to offer redemption via the medium of writing itself rather than through obvious, predictable channels. That is to say that they both possess the ability to dissect the human condition through a series of economical and flawlessly constructed linguistic pivots and pirouettes that startle the eye, even as they restore a reader's faith in a tale artfully told. When you finally close one of their books and set it aside, it's not the horrors you recall but the alchemy of the word, the sheer beauty of expression, that elevates the subject matter to the level of human sufferance in the eyes of the storm we call life.

Passarola Rising
Azhar Abidi

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2006

A Borgesian conceit set in eighteenth-century Europe. It tells the story of two brothers who built a flying machine that allows them to traverse the known and unknown worlds in a series of fable-like vignettes. Bartolomeu Lourenco is a kind of Antoine de Saint-Exupery of his age – a single-minded explorer, more at home in the clouds than on terra firma, while his younger brother Alexandre is the down-to-earth one that finds himself roped into the adventure of a life-time. These two contradictory characters compliment each other as they flee from the Inquisition, have love affairs with women, join the French court and become embroiled in philosophic discussions, earthly politics and struggles for power. The story culminates in a series of disturbing, surreal visions over the North Pole that lead to disillusionment for one brother and an ecstatic reaffirmation for the other.

Ultimately, Passarola Rising is about the divergent paths humans must take in the quest for a true life. Although they are thematically very different, this novel often reminded me of The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk. By that I mean that both books are more interested in extrapolating ideas rather than bringing people to life. Like Pamuk in that novel, Abidi falls short of engaging the emotions and making the reader believe in the substance of his characters – there is a kind of detachment, as if everything were being viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. They do, however, succeed in their respective rhetorical aims, and that's no small feat. In case I seem overly critical, Abidi has, nevertheless, composed a tersely written fable that displays his teasing imagination with flair and aplomb. He draws you in and keeps you reading till the end partly because there is something innately appealing about flight, the lifting off from the ground, the suddenly widened perspective, the possibility of discovery as you drift closer to a state of mind that is more in line with a flying island, than anything to do with terrestrial limitation.

Azhar Abidi was born in Pakistan and lives in Australia. This is his first novel. It is to be hoped he has many more in him because, together with a handful of others, he seems to be lifting the Australian novel out of intense parochialism.