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Biographical note:
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844718115
ISBN: 9781844718115
Author: Patrick Holland
Title: The Source of the Sound
Series: Salt Modern Fiction
Product class: BC
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: FNB
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 01-Nov-10
Extent: 128pp
Height: 198 mm
Width: 129 mm
Thickness: 9 mm
Weight: 192 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: NP
Price: GBP 8.99
Price: USD 14.95
Rights: World
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Short
description/annotation: The Source of the Sound traces the journeys of exiles in search of home. The collection is littered with the mise-en-scène of being lost: motel rooms, alcohol abuse, prostitution … Yet, in each story there is some elemental contact with light and sound, the product of the characters’ longing for simple, uncorrupted, reorienting signs.
Main description: The Source of the Sound traces the journeys of exiles in search of home, through the terrestrial infernos and purgatories of supermodernity. In almost every story there is some elemental contact with light and sound; the characters’ longing for simple, uncorrupted signs that would render life in the 21st century meaningful and justified. ‘The City Lost to Heaven’ revives the medieval miracle play in the unlikely setting of Beijing, pitting the quiet of winter snow and whispering traditions against the noise of progress. ‘Integrity’ imagines an obscure, unloved place on a western Queensland plain, that by Providence or otherwise, is protected by the play of light and shadow on the landscape, and which, unlike history-snubbing non-places, possesses a memory.
Naturally, the collection is littered with the mise-en-scène of being lost: motel rooms, alcohol abuse, prostitution … ‘Music for Airports’ is the tale of three journeys: of a disoriented diplomat, a man he might have saved from the firing squad and a flock of eastern curlew. ‘A Haunted Solitude’ tells of two Croatian soldiers who encounter a gypsy prostitute in wartime Bosnia. ‘The Passenger’ imagines a highway that never ends.
The collection’s final story, ‘The Source of the Sound’, is a response to the murder of a close friend of the author’s sister, many years ago in the town where they grew up. As a story of tragic death, it is concerned with the deepest exile: exile and the kingdom.
Table of contents:
Flame Bugs on the Sixth Island
Integrity
A Haunted Solitude
The Passenger
The Sons of Cain
The City Lost to Heaven
In the City of Exiles
The Lost Country
By the Aral Sea
Music for Airports
The Composer
The Source of the Sound
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Excerpt from book:
Flame Bugs on the Sixth Island
Go down to the rock pools when the evening tide is out and there is a chance you will see them. Sometimes one will swim in among the mangroves in the tidal flats, but the rock pools are best. Flame bugs are what we call them. I do not know if they have other names. I do not know where else they are found but our island. I have never heard them spoken of by anyone who does not live here.
The northeast wind comes in spring and blows the flame bugs to our shores. One October in boyhood I took to going down to the rocks alone to look for them.
I never asked the boys to come with me. I was worried they would try to net and torment the creatures. I thought about how the boys dragged mud crabs out from under rocks with hooks and tried to crack their shells.
The most precious time I went looking for the flame bugs was with the girl we called Shell. We called her Shell as before anyone knew her she was seen collecting shells on the south beach, and because she wore a necklace with a by-the-wind-sailor pendant. She belonged to that tribe of children whose European blood naturalises here; whose blonde hair the sun and salt water turns white and the white skin olive.
One afternoon I saw Shell sitting bored in her front yard and, though I had planned to go alone, I asked her if she wanted to come look for flame bugs and she said that she did.
We left Ooncooncoo Street at twelve-years old and six o’clock.
Shell had only recently moved to Moreton Bay: so close yet so far apart from the big city. She was lonely and a little intimidated at school. Most of us had grown up together and there were more boys than girls and we boys were very rough unless isolated. First I pitied her. Then I wondered at her: at her way of sitting with her knees beside her; at her speech and her interests that were cultivated and strange to me. I made a habit of noticing her. But I did not know how to introduce myself. This night looking for flame bugs was the first time we had truly spoken. Walking off her street I got the feeling she was excited at the prospect of making a friend, even of me, and that she would have followed me anywhere; far further than the rock pools.
She told me how at her old school she had played the violin but here there was no teacher. Her mother was doing her best in a proper teacher’s stead. She told me she liked the island but for that. I told her I knew a girl who played piano, which was true. I told her my mother, being a school teacher, could let us into the community dance hall any time we liked, where there was an assortment of old instruments and the opportunity to nurture a band, which was not true at all. Between fact and fantasy we decided her musical ambitions did not have to end. We arranged public concerts that would never take place.
We walked off the bitumen streets, through a paddock of cattle on saltwater couch, to the Esplanade lined with wooden buildings and drooping streetlights not yet lit. We came to the sand where more than a dozen tidal pools reflected the twilight arch. The sun sets quickly here and amidst the pools we stood in true twilight. I wonder if I hoped we would be left alone, or if that jealousy is mine – the man’s rather than the boy’s.
No one came onto the beach to disturb our isolation. The ocean was uninhabited but for a lonely fishing boat with lit mast-light in the offing.
I gave her my torch. I told her to shine it into the pools and look for the reflective eyes that would indicate the animals. You almost never found flame bugs in the tidal pools on the sand and mud and I did not hold any serious hope, only I was hoping to stretch time by putting more movements into it. A thing I knew was possible. She checked every pool on our way toward the headland where my true hope was.
We left our shoes on the sand. Our children’s feet found all the footholds in the rock, and a girl of twelve gives up nothing in agility to a boy. Soon we were kneeling by a captured pool, a deep one the sea had only recently left. We did not need the torch now. Its light would not penetrate that depth of water. And anyway, all that was needed was to swirl your hand in it and if the pool held a flame bug it would light like an underwater candle.
She told me she had never seen one. If there was a flame bug here tonight I wanted it to be her find.
Previous review quote: To paraphrase the famous movie line: I’d like to have what Holland’s having. His imagination is unrivalled. Jennifer Somerville
Good Reading Magazine Previous review quote: On ‘Music for Airports’:
The story, musically told in a counter-point of bird and man, takes a number of unexpected turns before reaching its rueful diminuendo, all the while emphasizing the great cultural distances that persist in this era of alleged globalization.
Jeffrey Poacher
Australian Book Review Previous review quote: On ‘Flame Bugs’:
A beautiful and bittersweet story about childhood innocence lost, and written in tough lean prose, its denouement leaves a lingering impression. Justine Ettler
Sydney Morning Herald |
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