Bookish-Dreaming

Sara Douglass: Lost Footsteps

by

Gillian Polack

11b

Once upon a time, Australia had a cultural cringe. We still have a cultural cringe, but it’s subtler and looks a bit less like a grudge against the world for being cleverer and wittier and more learned than we are. Mostly, the cringe has always been in our mind’s eye and hasn’t reflected reality. It has given many Australian artists and writers and singers a particular attitude, however, that marked them as Australian on the international stage.

This shift in our view of ourselves didn’t come easily or quickly. There are, however, certain points where seminal events occurred (the film Strictly Ballroom was one) and sometimes an individual artist has helped bring about a wider change in the arts because of who they were, what they did and how they did it.

Sara Douglass was one such individual. She changed the world of heroic fantasy for Australian writers and opened the doors for so many very good writers. She died, tragically and far too young, last year. I never met her, for she was very private. She was only four years older than I am (and I am happily middle-aged, not even nearing the age of maturity), and she died just before the release of The Hall of Lost Footsteps, a collection of her short stories.

She knew her time was limited and she sent out some very important messages to her fans and friends. Her blog was dedicated to her gardens and her writing and a whole new side of herself was presented to fans as she updated and shared herself in a new way. Occasional whimsy is not something I associate with her books, nor would I have predicted such a strong gardening streak, but the two were combined in a “Why be stoic when I can make every day count?” attitude. She wrote some extraordinary life-enriching entries right up to the time when she was too ill to write at all. For instance, Douglass said about one of her final books:

The book, The Devil’s Diadem, has been a life saver. It has given me something to do each day, something to look forward to, and I have loved every moment of writing it. I hated finishing it—so much so that I am now deep in planning for my next venture. It is almost as if the book has been a charmed talisman. Most of it I wrote while undergoing chemo—one week sick as a dog in bed, one week not so sick and sitting in front of the computer typing away as if my life depended on it, and trying to fit in all my medical appointments as well.

My favourite entry, the one which made me look at her fiction in an entirely new light, is dated November 23, 2008. Douglass talked about her cancer and her garden and she explained a visualisation tool for those who needed support in dealing with her illness. One of the problems faced by friends and fans of the dying is feeling helpless: Douglass gave her fans strength in her own difficult time.

The Hall of Lost Footsteps contains an entry that, if one follows the table of contents, looks like a short story. It's anything but. “The Silence of Dying.” She first wrote it for her blog. It created such a huge response from her readers that she revisited it on the blog and talked about it. “The Silence of Dying” created a door for fans and on those fans still appear and talk about which books they intend to read, and how they miss her.

It’s a personal reflection on how Douglass perceived death, written when she was looking it clearly in the face. There’s some not-so-wonderful reflections on historical death (which, if she were alive, I would have argued with—her history is not my history, obviously) and some particular and amazing insights into how death and chronic illness are treated in our society. Douglass believed that we should allow ourselves to see death and not to hide away from it and pretend it doesn’t exist.

This is a woman whose last days were not wasted. I’m not sure that any of her days were wasted. She is one of the small group of writers who broke through the barrier Australians created for ourselves with our cultural cringe. She walked the world stage. The books that created that big breakthrough moment for a culture and changed life for a whole branch of potential Australian writers (who are no longer potential and who all have very nice international profiles) were in the Axis Trilogy I am going to admit heresy and admit I didn’t like it. Douglass’ use of violence is very direct and I have small stomach for it. Even without enjoying her novels, however, I could see that they were good, and fresh and very strong. The directness of her approach to story-telling was extraordinary and captivating.

What else is in The Hall of Lost Footsteps? The introduction is by the friend (Karen Brooks) who cared for her right to the end. The rest are stories. Douglass’ writing tended towards the epic adventure, so this is the sum total of her short stories.

The writing is of its moment: it encapsulates the style that was fashionable and fresh at the time the world first encountered her, when big fantasy sequences were just hitting their stride as an element of world literature (especially English language) and just before Australian writers entered the genre in any number. This means that it’s delightfully easy to read.

My biggest surprise in her stories was the sense of humour. It’s not a sense of whimsy, more a merriment at the ways of humans. It underlies several of the stories, always there, never spelled out. There are no jokes, and the stories—whether about trapped love or lost family—always appear serious. It is, however, buoyantly there, beneath the grand display and the sober themes. It gives the tales a vibrancy and lifts them up from the heroic adventures told by other writers of fable and fantasy. Douglass laughs, and we, her readers, laugh with her, minstrel-complicit.

All her stories, even those that lack humour entirely, have this sense of minstrelsy. She wrote high fantasy, firmly grounded in her own vision of the Middle Ages. These other stories are dramatic and bloody. Always heroic fantasy—seldom dark, never gritty. They have a magic sheen, and are uncomfortable, with darkness replacing the merriment beneath the surface.

All her stories are a little larger than ordinary life. It’s the sense of the Medieval exotic they express and the directness that Douglass always uses in the expression. The stuff of heroes and heroic fantasy. The stuff of adventures that are the right size for people to undergo.

Douglass was one of the first to enter that world stage and her presence and her distinctive clarity and dramatic tales opened doors for many Antipodean authors. The Australian speculative fiction world has lost three young writers recently, each loss bearing their own tragedy: Sara Douglass, Paul Haines and James Goodrum. Douglass came closer than any of them in fulfilling her writing potential. She helped others to become writers, simply by writing what she loved.

Books mentioned in this column:
The Hall of Lost Footsteps by Sara Douglass (Ticonderoga Publications, 2011)


Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.

 


 

 
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