Spirit of Progress (25 page)

On a hot summer’s night in the 1950s, the old and the new,
diesel and steam, town and country all collide — and nobody
will be left unaffected

As a passenger train leaves Spencer Street Station on its haul to Sydney, a family of three — Vic, Rita and their son, Michael — are off to a party. George Bedser has invited the whole neighbourhood to celebrate the engagement of his daughter.

Vic is an engine driver, with dreams of being like his hero, Paddy Ryan, and becoming the master of the smooth ride.

As the neighbours walk to the party, we are drawn into the lives of a bully, a drunk, a restless girl and a young boy forced to grow up before he is ready.

The Art of the Engine Driver
is a luminous and evocative tale of ordinary suburban lives, told with an extraordinary power.

‘subtle, true and profoundly touching’
Le Monde

‘exquisitely crafted … fresh and irresistible’
Miles Franklin Literary Award Judges

‘a little masterpiece’
Hessische Allgemeine

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN
LITERARY AWARD, 2002

SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIX FEMINA ETRANGER, 2005

The history of his summer is written in the grass…

In 1960 the West Indies arrive in Australia, bringing with them a carnival of music, colour and possibility. Michael, who is sixteen, is enthralled. If, like his heroes, he has the gift of speed, he will move beyond his suburb into the great world…

And yet, as his summer unfolds, Michael realises that there are other ways to live. When the calypso chorus accompanying Frank Worrell and his team fades, Michael has learnt many things … about his parents, his suburb, a girl called Kathleen Marsden, and about himself.

The Gift of Speed
is a masterful blend of storytelling, memorable characters and a uniquely Australian sensibility by a novelist at the height of his powers.

‘A must-read’
Bookseller + Publisher

‘If, as they say, the past is another country, then Carroll is
the ideal guide’
Sydney Morning Herald

‘Rarely has such an arid place as suburban Melbourne in the heat
of 1961 evoked such graceful and tender prose’
The Age

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN
LITERARY AWARD, 2005

That exotic tribe was us. And the time
we have taken, our moment.

One summer morning in 1970, Peter van Rijn, proprietor of the television and wireless shop, pronounces his Melbourne suburb one hundred years old.

That same morning, Rita is awakened by a dream of her husband’s snores, yet it is years since Vic moved north. Their son, Michael, has left for the city, and is entering the awkward terrain of first love.

As the suburb prepares to celebrate progress, Michael’s friend Mulligan is commissioned to paint a mural of the area’s history. But what vision of the past will his painting reveal?

Meanwhile, Rita’s sometime friend Mrs Webster confronts the mystery of her husband’s death. And Michael discovers that innocence can only be sustained for so long.

The Time We Have Taken
is both a meditation on the rhythms of suburban life and a luminous exploration of public and private reckoning during a time of radical change.

WINNER OF THE THE MILES FRANKLIN
LITERARY AWARD, 2008
AND
THE COMMONWEALTH WRITERS’ PRIZE
FOR THE SOUTH-EAST ASIA AND
SOUTH PACIFIC REGION, 2008

They may never have a life together, but they will have their
moment. They will have this much.

England, September 1934

Two young lovers, Catherine and Daniel, have trespassed into the rose garden of Burnt Norton, an abandoned house in the English countryside. Hearing the sound of footsteps, they hide, and then witness the poet T.S. (‘Tom’) Eliot and his close friend Emily enter the garden and bury a mysterious tin in the earth.

Tom and Emily knew each other in America in their youth; now in their forties, they have come together again. But Tom is married, and his wife has no intention of letting him go. What is it that binds Tom and Emily together? What happens when the muse steps out of the shadows?

In the enclosed world of an English village one autumn, their story becomes entwined with that of Catherine and Daniel, who are certain in their newfound love and full of possibility.

From one of Australia’s finest writers, this is a moving, lyrical novel about poetry and inspiration, the incandescence of first love and the yearning for a life that may never be lived.

‘a fine work … Carroll’s prose has a sublime rhythmic quality — it is lyrical and precise, almost as if he has sung words onto the page’

Australian Book Review

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BARBARA JEFFERIS AWARD

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ALS GOLD MEDAL

Many thanks to the following for their help during the writing of this novel:

The Australia Council for a three-month residency in Paris in 2010 where much of this novel was written. To John McLaren of Victoria University, Kendrah Morgan and Lesley Harding of Heide Museum of Modern Art, Deborah Clark curator of Visual Arts at the Canberra Museum and Gallery and Betty Churcher.

To Shona Martyn, Linda Funnell, Sue Brockhoff, Jo Butler and Amanda O’Connell at HarperCollins, and my agent Sonia Land (and all the gang at Sheil Land) for their support and enthusiasm.

Finally, my special thanks to my partner, Fiona Capp, for her constant support, suggestions and advice, not just in the writing of this novel, but all of them. And to Leo – the lion-hearted boy.

Steven Carroll was born in Melbourne. His first novel,
Remember Me, Jimmy James
, was published in 1992. This was followed by
Momoko
(1994),
The Love Song of Lucy McBride
(1998) and then
The Art of the Engine Driver
(2001), which was shortlisted for both the Miles Franklin Award in 2002 and France’s Prix Femina literary award for the Best Foreign Novel in 2005,
The Gift of Speed
(2004), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2005,
The Time We Have Taken
(2007), which won both the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the South-East Asia and South Pacific Region and the Miles Franklin Award 2008, and
The Lost Life
(2009), which was shortlisted for both the 2010 Barbara Jefferis Award and the ALS Gold Medal 2010.

Steven Carroll lives in Melbourne with his partner and son.

‘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’

Miles Franklin Literary Award Judges, 2008

‘The result is a deeply satisfying encounter with the empty spaces that the suburb failed to fill both between people and inside them. The surface of Carroll’s writing is deceptively calm … Carroll takes time to tell an untidy story with a gentle sense of wonder. His prose whispers loud’

Michael McGirr,
The Age

‘It is the creation of a larger concept of suburban life in all its 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’ Debra Adelaide,
The Australian

Praise for
The Gift of Speed

‘Carroll’s gift for evocative storytelling … had me captivated’

Australian Bookseller & Publisher

‘A novel of tender and harrowing melancholy’

Le Nouvel Observateur

‘Carroll’s a rare beast in that he writes with great affection and understanding about life in the suburbs … A lovely rites of passage novel that is oh so carefully crafted and captures the evanescence of time to perfection’

Jason Steger,
The Age

‘Carroll’s writing is astonishingly assured’

James Bradley,
Australian Book Review

Praise for
The Art of the Engine Driver

‘Subtle, true and profoundly touching’

Le Monde

‘A veritable gem … a beautiful discovery’

Elle France

‘An exquisitely crafted journey of Australian suburban life … fresh and irresistible’

Miles Franklin Literary Award Judges, 2002

‘a little masterpiece’

Hessische Allgemeine

Praise for
The Lost Life

‘Carroll’s prose is limpid and assured … [a] poised and beautifully burnished work. Carroll’s control is masterly’

Andrew Riemer,
The Sydney Morning Herald

‘Carroll’s ability to turn an ordinary moment into something sacred makes this novel a profound exploration of human desire, endurance, maturity and regret’

Bookseller
+
Publisher

‘This novel will consolidate Steven Carroll’s reputation among Australia’s literati … Carroll is as much the literary ringmaster as novelist in
The Lost Life
, but remains as “rewardingly eclectic, intelligent and involving as ever”’

The Week

‘[a] brilliantly envisaged novel … few novels begin with such measured elegance’

Sunday Tasmanian

‘its capacity to evoke a kind of sharp, sad nostalgia for an unlived past takes you by surprise. To enter the narrative is like entering into a slightly faded but exquisitely tinted photograph encased in gilded frame’

Canberra Times

‘this is not so much a departure as an arrival … Carroll’s fiction is distinctive for the way his clean prose decelerates experience, puts aside the urgings of linear temporality, to reveal a richness that habitually evades us … his beautiful and poetically attentive novel retrieves a warm, beating heart from Eliot’s haunted, stark, magnificent work of art’

Australian Literary Review

‘Carroll’s prose has a sublime rhythmic quality … almost as if he has sung the words on the page’

Australian Book Review