Microwunderkammer

 Parental artifact #1 (this may be a series, based on things I have inherited from my parents’ estate, and the thoughts they elicit).

My mom was a big fan of the author Nevil Shute. This might have been because we lived in Australia for a year, and many of his novels are set in Australia and use the peculiarities of that country in the mid-20th century to drive their plots; or it might have been because he is simply a rather good novelist who plots and writes well, can spin an interesting romance, and can develop at least one thought-provoking idea per book. At any rate, she had acquired over the years a pretty complete collection of his works from library sales, garage sales, and very rarely even getting one new. Because the books were there when we were growing up, my brothers and I also have read a bunch of Shute’s works, and because they were special to mom, these books became things that carried a little more significance than random 75-cent paperbacks in terrible condition that came from a library sale.

So, it was not too surprising that when the time came to go through and divvy up all my parents’ books, the Shute books were more difficult to allocate than the Daphne Du Maurier or the Captain Hornblower books. We ended up trying to figure out who already had what books (everybody had “A Town Like Alice” and “On The Beach”, natch) and then trying to balance completism with having nice hardback editions etc. I was a bit unsentimental; for me, the main value of the books is that they are a good read, and less that it was an object that my mother owned, read once or twice, and put on a shelf. So I wasn’t put out when another brother got the only copy of “Beyond the Black Stump” that we’d seen. I pretty quickly found out that it was available, for free, from Fadedpage.com, a website that provides e-books of stuff that’s no longer under copyright in Canada; I downloaded the electrons, while the book stayed in California, and settled in to read a Shute novel that I had never read before.

“Beyond the Black Stump” is definitely a Shute novel. It has engineers, romance, airplanes, Australia, some adventure, and a pretty efficient style that makes it a good read. I was particularly interested in it because, unlike any other Shute novel, it also features rural Oregon. About a third of it is set in a fictitious town that is like La Grande or Union, out on the northeast side of the state, in 1955 (I live in rural Oregon, in roughly the opposite corner of the state, with many neighbors who ardently wish it were still 1955).

This isn’t a book review, so I’ll summarize the plot as boy (petroleum engineer, from Oregon) goes to outback Australia (“beyond the black stump” is slang for out beyond nowhere), meets girl (daughter of the owner of a vast station), they fall in love, and interesting complications ensue. A lot of the friction that makes the novel (and the relationship) interesting have to do with the differences between rural Oregon, only two generations removed from being on the wild frontier but still regarding itself as being frontier, and back-of-beyond Australia, still very much a wild frontier. This still has some relevance, as some of the psychopathologies of Roseburg and rural Oregon in general have to do with an ineradicable belief that living here makes you a rugged pioneer who stands on his own, rather than just an ordinary citizen who has been getting a weird, Oregon-specific tax benefit from the Federal government for their entire life.

The book is dated, though—and not just in the way that Australian Aborigines are depicted. There are aspects of the relationships between the love interests and between other folks in the book that just seem weird. Why should it be a scandal that she’s with that guy? Who really cares about what those two did years ago? Wait—he did what and is still accepted in society? And really, you lovebirds, you seem to be making things needlessly complicated.

I was thinking about how these things struck me as weird, and then I did some math. 1955, the lovebirds were almost 20 and almost 30, and I realized that these folks who were having relationship complications, but behaving completely normally for the time, were the same age as my parents!

This goes some way to explaining why my mom was a big fan of Shute; she probably didn’t read this until the 1980’s, when it could have had additional sentimental charm of reminding her of her younger years. With regard to my mom, though, the more interesting thing for me to think about was how much had changed. In 1955, when the book was set, and when she and my dad were in the very early stages of their relationship, there were plenty of rules about how a relationship should go and what was proper and acceptable and what was not. They may have bumped up against some of those rules (their parents didn’t particularly get along), but mostly they played by them. How did it look to her, then, in the early 1990’s when I became romantically involved with the love of my life, under quite different rules? She (and my dad) made no fuss about it, and seemed to be fine with how things went. I didn’t ask whether she felt like things were improper or wrong, and she was mum. I also don’t know whether she wished her relationship with dad had been more modern. I’ll never know for sure.

Ultimately, the relationship in the novel bumps into the problem of the lovebirds (and the lovebirds’ families) having some quite different values, perhaps stemming from their different ideas of “frontier” life. Those differences make a neat, happy ending for the central lovebirds impossible. However, one gets the sense that the outcome is a better ending for all concerned, and the story wraps up in a very satisfactory manner with at least a prospect of happiness for all. I’ll also note that, having played by the rules of their day, my parents stayed together their entire lives, over 50 years. Also, playing by the modern rules, I’m still madly in love with my sweetie.