 | Reviews of The Broken Book by Susan Johnson. |
This book has been nominated for the 2006 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Allen and Unwin, the novel's publisher, describes the book as follows: "Inspired by the fascinating life of one of Australia's most talented and intriguing literary figures, Charmian Clift, The Broken Book is wonderfully rich, complex and compelling. Susan Johnson has created an audacious and original novel with an awe-inspiring ability to explore emotional truths."
The "Good Reading Magazine" was enthusiatic in its praise for the book: "Mirroring truths of art and life, creativity and reality, The Broken Book is, at its heart, the story of a woman's struggle to become the artist she has passionately planned to be. Katherine Elgin grew up in a small coastal town in Australia, desperate to transcend her beginnings and make her mark. From her rebellious and contemplative childhood Katherine emerges as a stunningly beautiful young woman, with a voracious appetite for life's most interesting experiences and an overwhelming desire to write the best book she possibly can. But beauty is a double-edged sword and throughout her life - from Sydney, to London, to the islands of Greece - Katherine carries the burden of being both siren and artist.Inspired by the fascinating life of one of Australia's most talented and intriguing literary figures, Charmian Clift, The Broken Book is wonderfully rich, complex and compelling. Susan Johnson has created an audacious and original novel with an awe-inspiring ability to explore emotional truths."
Kerryn Goldsworthy, in "Australian Book Review", found another side of the novel: "...in writing this kind of extremely allusive and self-reflexive book, Johnson is implicitly addressing some of the big questions in literature, philosophy and psychology: questions of subjectivity and representation, of appropriation and ontology and the nature of fiction itself. And the novel just isn't intellectually interesting enough to sustain the weight of what it has taken on. Complicated, yes; complex, no." But her criticism isn't all bad as she goes on to say that "there is one chapter in which this book takes flight like a beautiful, dangerous firework. Katherine, desperate to get on with her writing, is having her whole attention insistently claimed by her two little girls and ends up in a deadly battle of wills with one of them. For a moment, it turns into a different book altogether, dazzling and disturbing." Was it Cyril Connelly who detailed this struggle in Enemies of Promise?
In "The Age", Delia Falconer finds the book to be "immensely readable", but still seems to be more in agreement with Goldsworthy's opinion: "Johnson presents us with a woman experiencing her own beauty from the inside, rather than through the distorting lens of the rather awful [George] Johnston, [husband of Clift, and author of My Brother Jack, etc]. Unfortunately, she does not quite get to grips with the older Elgin's intellectual complexity, or find the magic door that will liberate this novel from biographical facts. This is in part because Clift did not live long enough to find the insights into her life a first-person novel demands. One wonders what the feminist '70s - or even Johnston's dying first - might have brought to Clift's understanding of herself."
You can read an interview with the author from "The Age', and another from "The Sydney Morning Herald", and an excerpt from the novel.
