The Time We Have Taken (25 page)

‘
IN THE SPARE, EPISODIC STYLE
of the two earlier novels (
The Art of the Engine Driver
and
The Gift of Speed
) in this trilogy, Steven Carroll undertakes a parallel task of representation as his cast of characters reconsider their lives in and beyond the suburb that has been their crucible… What do they make of their lives? Do they hear the “music of the years”? Or are they deaf, missing the wonder of it? Carroll’s novel is a poised, philosophically profound exploration…a stand-alone work that is moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives’, stated the Miles Franklin 2008 Literary Award Judging Panel on Steven Carroll’s winning novel,
The Time We Have Taken
.

The Age
Book of the Year 2007 Judges offered this praise: ‘The characters are drawn with a poignant intimacy and the narrative moves with a kind of poetic majesty… The reader is both immersed in and embraced by the place, the people and the time, and while the story is so obviously set in Australia, it has a breadth of vision that lends it something universal.’

Debra Adelaide, in her review for
The Australian
, commented, ‘It is the creation of a larger concept of suburban life in all its astonishing transcendent possibilities that makes this novel so special. Carroll’s revelations of these beautiful insights into our utterly ordinary world make him a writer worth cherishing. His prose is unfailingly assured, lyrical, poised.’

The
Sydney Morning Herald
review noted that Carroll ‘expertly illustrates both the
potential and the vulnerability created by the possibility of dramatic change. If it is the job of the fiction writer to remind us that we are not alone, then Carroll earns his keep here.’

Michael McGirr stated in
The Age
, ‘Carroll writes the kind of still prose that invites the reader into a contemplative space… The result is a deeply satisfying encounter with the empty spaces that the suburb failed to fill both between people and inside them.’ And in conclusion, McGirr added, ‘Carroll takes time to tell an untidy story with a gentle sense of wonder. His prose whispers loud.’

Katharine England in the
Advertiser
spoke of the series as a whole: ‘Each novel stands on its own, but they are more interesting considered together, making up as they do not only a history of the twentieth century phenomenon the suburb, but also a slow-moving, Proustian meditation on being and time.’ She described Carroll’s prose as, ‘the repetitive accretion of detail, like the brushstrokes of a pointillist, the echoes within the novel and from book to book, the use of tenses which base time in the present but refer constantly to past and future, contribute to the hypnotic effect of the whole.’

By Debra Adelaide

IN POISED
, contemplative prose, unexpected glories of everyday suburbia resonate.

Rather than taking it for granted, I have lately come to revere the sentence, to appreciate properly its shape and capacity. Sentences are, of course, lines, and so a novel, like any piece of prose, is just a series of lines one after another, yet Steven Carroll’s new novel achieves admirable things with all those lines, although the result is more than merely architectural. Structurally and thematically, his novels offer lines in parallel, where past, present and future combine without effort. Sometimes single sentences unite the three stages in shimmering harmony.

In
The Time We Have Taken
, there are few dramatic events and almost no plot. Instead there is meticulous interrogation of the small moments that shape life. The broader theme of travel that dominates creates a range of specific metaphors — railways tracks (strongly evident in the first of this series,
The Art of the Engine Driver
), trains, cars, roads — that replicate the characters’ inner and actual movements, while even sport fuels this theme: in
The Gift of Speed
, larger histories toss balls back and forth above the characters as the West Indians and Australians battle it out in the 1961 Tests.

The narrative lines in
The Time We Have Taken
are modest. Four main characters, at different stages of life and in separate places,
become aware of the passing of time, realise they have ‘known the days, and the days are almost over’. For those familiar with the previous two novels, some context to update you: Rita is now alone, Vic has retired to a fishing town up north, and their son Michael is a student teacher pursuing a relationship with Madeleine.

The year is 1970. The novelist George Johnston, author of a representative Australian novel, is dying. Political change is in the air. It is the centenary celebrations of the flat outer suburb of Melbourne where Rita and Vic have spent their life. A mural is in preparation that culminates in a vast linear story of progress. It is appropriate that journey and movement inform the design of
The Time We Have Taken
, which captures a period when Australia was poised exquisitely on the edge of change, yet when people were still idling in neutral or nervously looking back to the past.

But everything is already shifting irreversibly for these characters: Vic will probably die alone in his self-imposed exile, Mrs Webster is without the husband and his engineering business that have dominated her life, Rita has lost the roles of wife and mother that have so far defined and contained her, and Michael will farewell his girlfriend and join the protest against the Vietnam War.

The inevitability of change is signalled quietly, gathering more speed towards the
final part of the novel, when in a masterstroke Carroll introduces the mighty symbol, focus and indeed agent of this change. Small suburban politics, diminished but never trivialised, are thrown into stronger relief with the arrival of a mountain called Whitlam who appears for the centenary celebration. He is hardly a character, more a prop, briefly entering (stage left, of course) to remind us of the imminence of an inexorable force that will rock the ground forever. It is a brilliant portrayal: the mountain of Whitlam on wheels is propelled from Commonwealth car to civic function, back to car and airport; he is as inaccessible to the citizens as the moon, yet is familiar and welcome. In the novel, Gough Whitlam never speaks (an amazing thing in itself) but simply is: a monolithic presence, a focus of desires and apprehensions.

This slow, contemplative novel suggests several other great writers: Carol Shields with her ability to turn inside out the everyday in domestic life and reveal its unexpected glories. It also reminds me of Gerald Murnane’s genius for mapping the endless detours of the creative mind. And it is, one has to say, Proustian, fondly lingering on memory, following through a single idea to its end, however long that might take. Many episodes form small and beautiful epiphanies, and in this the novel is endlessly quotable, but one will do. Speeding through the streets one evening in Mrs Webster’s sleek black car, Rita’s experience of the gift of speed (these phrases resonate through the
novels) enables a brief moment of clarity: she sees her suburb and her own life telescoped, offered as if on a large canvas. And what she sees is ‘at once exotic, strange and utterly familiar. Gone. Wiped away by time and speed.’

At the conclusion of this strangely touching episode, where two women who have never been friends share a moment of intimacy, Rita stands in her front yard quietly marvelling at the vision of her street, yet at the same time experiencing ‘a sense of loss — both troubling and tantalising. A sense of having lost the thing she struggled against for so long.’ It is such a poignant depiction of the ambivalence surrounding our relinquishment of the past that it almost hurts.

Though many writers and artists are reclaiming the suburbs so derided, satirised (think Patrick, Barry,
Kath & Kim
) or simply ignored, it is the creation of a larger concept of suburban life in all its astonishing transcendent possibilities that makes this novel so special. Carroll’s revelations of these beautiful insights into our utterly ordinary world make him a writer worth cherishing. His prose is unfailingly assured, lyrical, poised. He can turn snoring or guitar tuning or leaving a cinema into an intimate, poetic experience. His sentences are impeccable. The small faults are not worth mentioning. The author of six novels and twice short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award, Carroll is on some kind of journey, and he deserves to reach his destination.

Courtesy of
The Australian
.
First published in February 2007

1. How would you describe the suburb in which
The Time We Have Taken
is set? What types of changes in society have formed this suburb?

2. The plans for the celebration of the centenary of the suburb act as a device to bring together the disparate stories of the characters. How do these plans for commemoration reveal the various feelings the characters have about history and progress?

3. Michael longs for a sense of connection to the world. Does his relationship with Madeleine provide this? What do you think their relationship represents?

4.
The Time We Have Taken
is told in the present tense, even as it describes the past, present and future. How does this make you view the notion of time in the story?

5. ‘That exotic tribe was us. And the time we have taken, our moment.’ Even as Michael is experiencing the present, he projects to the future, and becomes nostalgic for the moment he should be experiencing now. What are the other characters’ preoccupations with time? Can you think of times when they grasp the moment, or are there more situations where they let the moment slip away?

6. What does Mrs Webster discover as she experiments with the sensation of speed and acceleration?

7. Against the ordinary backdrop of the suburb, how and where in the story does the author convey the characters’ sense of wonder?

8. How would you describe the connection between Vic and Rita? How has time affected the way they feel about each other?

9. Mulligan, the painter commissioned to create a mural to celebrate the centenary of the suburb, produces a different perspective of the suburb and its inhabitants from the one the committee members envisaged. What do you feel the author is representing here?

10. In what ways do the characters transcend or escape the everyday?

11. What role do Bunny Rabbit and Pussy Cat play in the novel?

12.
The Time We Have Taken
is set in 1970, on the cusp of great change in the cultural and political life of Australia. What sorts of personal changes take place in the lives of Vic, Rita, Michael and Mrs Webster?