The story of his childhood was one of relentless movement, cold, deprivation and suffering. These topics came up over again as we talked about the book: what the impact of the Russian revolution had been on the characters, the abuse of the children by regular beatings and how that contrasted to the moments of closeness that followed (as Richard said, this is the hallmark of child abusers), the diseases that the characters seemed to suffer from, the strictly patriarchal society – it was really engaging and rounded. There was even some discussion about land rights and somehow Rolf De Heer even came up.
It felt quite different than the past Zoom with four of the participants sitting together in Rohan’s kitchen (Rohan, Grant, Richard and Quinn) although the noise that they all generated was a bit intrusive. Mark’s daughter, Ebba, also tuned in briefly at his end. He remarked afterwards that he was surprised that we’d managed to get through the time she was listening without swearing(!).
After quite a bit of haggling and chopping and changing – ie, as per usual – we managed to settle on our next book The White Girl by Tony Birch, an indigenous author perhaps motivated by the Black Lives Matter movement which is very dominant at the moment.
I'm not sure whether the next meeting will be by Zoom or whether we’ll be able to get back to The All Nations. Rohan said that he’d contacted them and we would have been allowed to go there tonight but we would have had to have a meal. We have school holidays coming up so over that extra month things to do with lockdown are likely to change. I’ll advise in the WhatsApp group closer to the date!
