Everywhere I Look (28 page)

But, my God, when she hits her straps she can lay down a muscular story.

At their height, her dry, sinewy sentences stride forward powered by simple verbs. She knows how to break off at a breathless moment. She is familiar with labour, fear and abandonment. Her rendering of dogs and their meaning is very fine. She knows the landscape, with its bleak terrors and its occasional beauties. She has observed with a merciless eye the dull stupidity and squalor that poverty brings. She is not going to gussy it up.

Between Two Worlds
, the enthralling biography of Baynton written by her great-granddaughter the late Penne Hackforth-Jones, makes it clear that the six stories in
Bush Studies
, the core of her small output, draw directly on the first half of her life.

She was born Barbara Lawrence in 1857, the seventh of eight children, at Scone in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, where her immigrant father was a timber worker and coffin-maker. She seems to have been a strange, short-sighted, grittily emotional girl, a passionate reader of the few books she could get hold of, and possessed by confused fantasies of escape and adventure.

As a teenager she answered an advertisement for an up-country housekeeper. After a gruelling train trip to the property on the northwestern plains of New South Wales, the naïve girl was coarsely challenged, humiliated and sent packing. A few years later, in her early twenties, with little more than her hard-won literacy and numeracy to recommend her, she was hired as a governess by the Fraters, a Scottish grazing family of impressive style but varying fortunes, whose glamorous son she soon married.

Set up by his disapproving father near Coonamble on the Castlereagh River, the handsome horseman Alex Frater soon showed his true colours. He drank, he gambled, he flirted with girls fresher and prettier than his clever, overworked, furious wife. The property slid into disarray while he went off droving and boozing for months at a time, leaving her and their babies without protection. The theme of a weakened and dependent person alone at night in a flimsy bush dwelling, which occurs again and again in Baynton's work, surely originates here.

By the time Frater had seduced and impregnated Barbara's young niece Sarah, who had come to help her with the children, the iron had entered Barbara's soul. In 1889 she blasted her way out of the marriage, keeping custody of their three children. Her divorce, according to Hackforth-Jones, was ‘the four-hundred-and-fifty-first of the colony'. Throughout her life Barbara liked to deliver a terse piece of advice to her daughter Penelope: ‘If you make yourself a doormat, don't be surprised if you're walked on.'

Poor Sarah's fate enacted this bitter wisdom. She toiled on in wretched poverty, bearing more and more children to the ever-unreliable Frater, until soon after the birth of the ninth she fell into despair, and died in a Sydney mental hospital.

Meanwhile, Barbara shook the dust of the bush from her feet and lit out for Sydney. She was engaged as a housekeeper in pleasant Woollahra by the respected Dr Thomas Baynton, a widower more than twice her age. Barbara had learnt from her former mother-in-law how to conduct herself among educated people. Within a year, and the day after her divorce from Frater was finalised, she and the doctor were married.

Though only in her early thirties, she had experienced enough affront, desolation and rage to fuel a lifetime's literary output. Now, sharing an orderly urban life with a man she loved and respected, she could begin to write.

It irked her that some of her contemporaries were starting to romanticise, or to present in comic form, what she knew as the grinding slog and suffering of people who worked the land. She would make it her business to show the truth.

No one in Australia would publish
Bush Studies
, so she took it to London, where she met the usual insults dealt out to colonials; she even contemplated burning the manuscript and going home. But at last, in 1902, the book appeared in both London and Sydney. A. G. Stephens, who had first run her work in the
Bulletin
, opined ludicrously that the stories offered ‘a perverse picture of our sunny, light-hearted, careless land'; but Baynton had many admiring reviews, and felt at last established.

Nothing else she published packs the raw punch of
Bush Studies.
Her natural form is the short story. Her novel
Human Toll
contains powerful and sensitive passages, but her obsession with phonetic dialogue is frustrating and fatiguing. One forgets her poetry with relief.

But what a woman! When her dear Dr Baynton died, she inherited and sensibly invested a comfortable fortune. In London during World War I she was a generous host to many a lost Australian serviceman on leave. She fought her way up the social ladder in the most audacious way. Her third husband was a baron who had converted to Islam. He was offered the vacant throne of Albania. To Barbara's great disappointment he refused it. The marriage lasted barely a year.

By now, though certain good friends never gave up on her, she seemed stuck in the role of the perverse dowager in jewels and long white gloves, known for her jealousy, bursts of wild rage and equally violent remorse. She returned to Melbourne and took up residence next door to her daughter, whose husband had the sense of humour and strength of character to keep the matriarch in line. Her grandchildren she thrilled by writing and reading aloud to them cautionary tales ‘of human unpleasantness and folly'. These stories were never published, and when at the age of seventy-two the champagne-drinking old termagant died, her faithful daughter, who loved her, threw them into the fire.

2012

The Rules of Engagement

United 93

On a lovely autumn morning in early September 2001, United Airlines Flight 93 took off from Newark, bound for San Francisco. Among its passengers were four young Islamic hijackers, armed with knives and explosives. While flight 93 was in the air, three other hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. By 10.03 that morning, flight 93 had missed its hijackers' target, the Capitol in Washington, and slammed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. No one survived.

Five years have passed. We have tried to absorb the facts and find the meanings of that day. We've had to make peace with them, in our private ways, because we've got to keep on living in what is known as the post-9/11 world. So how can we bear, now, to be dragged through it again, to sit in the dark for two hours and watch the story's relentless deathward plummet, in what feels hideously like real time?

Two things make it possible. First, the exemplary tonal and technical brilliance of
United 93
as a piece of filmmaking; and second, the fact that some of the passengers on flight 93, knowing that nothing could save them, found the nerve to plan and launch a wild, last-ditch attack on the hijackers. The laws of feature-film narrative are ironclad. Without this burst of hopeless defiance, we would have no curve, no plot, no movie.

United 93
's director, Paul Greengrass (
Bloody Sunday
,
The Bourne Supremacy
), is British. Perhaps this is why he has been able to steer clear of the heroic posturing and sentimental appeals to patriotism we might have feared in a native version of the story.

At the same time, the physical world in which
United 93
unfolds is effortlessly American. Greengrass has cast a mixture of obscure actors and actual airline workers and flight-control personnel. Part of his remarkable achievement is to establish, in layer after relaxed layer, the texture of an ordinary working morning—to make the casual, the mundane glow under the shadow of its annihilation.

First, though, in the opening shots we see the hijackers at prayer in their cheap motel. Fresh sunlight streams past its windows. Their faces are sombre, and very young. The camera averts its gaze, accords them privacy as they wash and shave their faces, limbs and genitals. They slide knives into their belts. Then, as they step out of their cab at Newark and join the check-in queue, their approach to the plane is intercut with cheerful footage of what they have come to destroy.

The flight crew ambles with its wheelie suitcases down the pristine aisles of the aircraft. Outside, mechanics in overalls stand under the plane's belly, gazing up at the curved metal. The camera roams along the rows of passengers as they gather at the gate lounge, engaged in the benign trivia of the departing. One of the hijackers, his face rigid, calls a number on his mobile: ‘
Ich liebe dich
,' he murmurs, unanswered, as if to a machine, ‘
Ich liebe dich
.' Among the readers and talkers and eaters, a grandmother sits quietly working at her crochet, a pastime that, along with knitting, has vanished from planes since that day. The plainer the people—coarse skin, double chins, unglamorous clothes—the more their tiny preparatory actions strain our nerves.

Before flight 93 has even got the signal to taxi, we cut to the command centre of the Federal Aviation Administration, where workers at their screens call out in bewilderment as one plane in flight, then another, drops off the radar or suddenly changes course. ‘They think they got a hijack!' ‘This is sim?' ‘No! Real world! I heard it in my ear! Check it out!' At Newark, ignorant flight 93 turns on to the sunny runway and thunders towards take-off.

The deluge of information that Greengrass has to handle defies précis. We get swamped by it, just as the air traffic people do. In dim command centres and control towers, people in headphones stand gaping before TV screens. Smoke gushes from the World Trade Center. The second plane plunges voluptuously into the glistening wall of steel and glass. The camera itself becomes panicky, incredulous, mimicking our shock.

But Greengrass drives the narrative on with a furious authority, leaping back and forth between the dawning horror on the ground and the pale, peaceful innocence of flight 93, where the pilots are being served their little breakfasts on plastic trays, and a lady politely asks the attendant for a glass of water to take her pills.

And then the first hijacker, shouting in praise of Allah, throws himself on a passenger and stabs him to death in a welter of blood. The others murder the pilots and haul their bodies out of the cockpit. The austere, devout young man in glasses (‘
Ich liebe dich
') is now in command of the plane. While his panting comrade sluices blood off his hands with a bottle of spring water, the new pilot wedges a colour photo of the Capitol among the controls and turns the aircraft towards Washington.

This is not a film about heroes. It's not even, thank God, about characters: we don't ‘get to know' anyone. It's a vast ensemble piece on speed, a densely textured, brilliantly edited, unerringly paced creation of chaos and horror.

On the ground, the civilians shout for the military, and the military begs in vain for orders. The chain of command is non-existent. The fighters they get into the air are not armed. ‘Can we engage? Do we have any communication with the President at all? How about the Vice-President? Holy shit! What the fuck? What are the rules of engagement?' The only person with the nous to take charge is the guy who's been promoted the day before to national operations manager at the Federal Aviation Administration. He cuts through the uproar. ‘Everyone lands,' he says, ‘regardless of destination.'

‘You're gonna shut down the entire country?' cries his deputy. ‘Take a minute!'

‘Shut down the airspace! We're at war! With someone!'

Flight 93, awash with blood, goes screaming across the bright morning sky. In the cockpit the hijackers hear radio reports of the twin towers and Pentagon strikes: ‘The brothers have hit both targets!' Some passengers pray and weep, hunch over borrowed mobiles to whisper farewells, sob out promises to their children, make declarations of love.

But others, hiding from the hijackers among the high seat-backs, start to rage and mutter. It takes one cool head to galvanise them. ‘No one's going to help us,' he says. ‘We've got to do it ourselves.' An ex-pilot thinks he can fly the plane, if they can break down the door. A bunch of them seize whatever weapons they can find—forks, a fire extinguisher—and rush the hijackers, battering the cockpit door with a heavy steel trolley.

Their violence sends a charge of crazed energy through the film's last minutes. The air is thick with howls of terror and anguish, with cries to God in Arabic. The camera, too, is in there fighting: things blur and lurch, something splits apart, wires are trailing. The cockpit's windscreen fills with city streets, then with the fresh dark-green grass-blades of a meadow.

I have a rule of thumb for judging the value of a piece of art. Does it give me energy, or take energy away? When I staggered out of
United 93
this rule had lost traction. I realised I had spent most of the screening crouching forward with my hand clamped around my jaw. Something in me had been violently shifted off-centre. Outside in the street there seemed to be a dark grey cloud over everything. An excruciating pity for all material things overwhelmed me. This flayed sensation lasted about two days, then gradually dissipated. Then I was left with a confused mixture of respect for the craft of the movie, amazed admiration for the people who charged the hijackers, and the same old haunting question: why do stories matter so terribly to us, that we will offer ourselves up to, and later be grateful for, an experience that we know is going to fill us with grief and despair?