The Time We Have Taken (24 page)

T
he time we have taken is no more or less than it takes for a dreamer to roll over in bed and wake from the dream. No more or less time than it takes for a suburb to be born and grow, for its streets and footpaths to be scooped out of the paddocks of old farms and wild thistle country. No more or less time than it takes for a factory to appear, flourish and fall into decline because time has moved on. No more or less time than it takes for a summer to come and go, or for a comet to pass across a suburban sky, looking as if it were standing still, frozen up there in the stars, when, in fact, it is moving at infinite speed. The time we have taken amounts to no more or less than that.

Michael is currently sleeping in his room; the street below is still and dark. He has gone to sleep with
Madeleine on his mind, but in the moment before he wakes, in the first light of the summer’s morning, he will once again be walking down the old street. Eleven or twelve, he will always be walking down the old street and wearing his best summer shirt with the button-down collars that he had forgotten all about until this dream retrieved it, his father just ahead with his ear turned to the sound of a distant engine, and his mother beside him in a floral dress that is just a bit too good for the old street. The sky will glow the colour of ripe peach and they will, all three, be pausing at a vacant paddock, staring at the gently swaying khaki grass. And they will stand like this forever, because the dream will always hold them just so. It will take them in. No one will move or speak. And there will be no fates to be met because nobody is going anywhere, everybody safe and forever as they are inside the dream. It will be so clear and true that he will enter it and live it, as he did then when he walked the same street as a child.

And while his son sleeps, travelling towards the luminescent moment of that dream, Vic sits, long into the night, on his doorstep overlooking the town, driving again, his freshly shaven, clean cheek turned to the sea breeze, at his most alert and alive, his most complete, wanting for nothing. Let us leave him exactly as he is now, seated on his doorstep, but in the cabin again of one of those dirty, filthy engines that he
complained about all his life, without which he was lost. Let us leave him as he was, as he now is and will always be, an engine driver. His head leaning out of the cabin window, cheek to the wind, the engine’s big wheels beneath him, turning, spinning through the night, its headlamp, like the light in his eyes, bright and strong enough to see clear into the next morning.

And Rita, unable to sleep, places the remnants of the old life into boxes. The remnants of that glorious shot at living — photographs, letters, and an old cigarette lighter that still flames — all packed away. Boxes that already have the look of boxes that will never be opened again. And while Rita sees this, there is also a Rita who registers the secret thrill of knowing that when the house is behind her and she steps out into the street for the last time, she will also be stepping into whatever it is that lies before her as well. And that very uncertainty will be a beginning, because the ‘us’ that lived there is now ‘them’.

When everything is settled, when everyone has gone their separate ways and finally stop long enough one day to glance back, one day when slowness is upon us and time allows the view, the question we will ask is the question that will nag us again and again: did we hear the music of the years? Did we see the fiddler’s hand, bowing it higher and higher through days emblazoned with wonder, or were we looking away?

The house, the yard on summer nights, the passionfruit vine where the spider indifferently spun its web, the street that started bare and filled overnight with weatherboard box houses and gardens that bloomed while you watched, the open farm land that hovered for a few years between town and country, the dances, the songs, the tennis, the cricket, the coming and going back from station, work, school and home, throughout the years that saw a suburb born — that, that exotic tribe, was us. And the time we have taken, our moment.

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Steven Carroll

‘
[STEVEN] CARROLL
…has the happy knack of being able to hint obliquely at situations and events of some magnitude, thereby endowing the mundane with a curious but convincing urgency’ Andrew Riemer,
The Age

Steven Carroll was born in the suburbs of Melbourne and grew up in suburban Glenroy, which had recently expanded in the post-war housing boom. ‘I lived for cricket when I was a kid… I used to play cricket in the mornings and the afternoons, and I think a lot of kids did, but I stopped playing some time when I was about seventeen or eighteen.’

He was educated at La Trobe University and taught English in high schools before playing in rock bands in the 1970s and being ‘saved by theatre’ in the 1980s. After leaving the Melbourne music scene, he wrote plays and later became the theatre critic for Melbourne’s
Sunday Age
. He found his true calling in prose, with his debut novel
Remember Me, Jimmy James
being published in 1992, after being picked up by publisher Hilary McPhee, who recognised in Steven Carroll something very special. The book was highly regarded by the critics:
The Age
gave it a special mention in their Book of the Year feature.

Carroll was lauded as having a fresh, vibrant voice and for his ability to show us in his prose what it meant to be Australian. After two more novels, Carroll returned to writing
about the Australian urban landscape in 2001 with
The Art of the Engine Driver
, the first of a trilogy of loosely connected stories set in the 50s, 60s and early 70s, continuing with
The Gift of Speed
and
The Time We Have Taken
. Shortlisted for the 2002 Miles Franklin Award,
The Art of the Engine Driver
was read on ABC radio; was a set text both for Melbourne University and the CAE summer program; and a film version, produced by Mark Joffe with a screenplay by Matt Cameron, is in pre-production.
The Art of the Engine Driver
has also been published in France and Germany and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina 2005.

The Gift Of Speed
— a quintessentially Australian story of a boy, a suburb and a summer of cricket and dreams — was published in 2004 and was highly commended in the 2005 Fellowship of Australian Writers National Literary Awards, the FAW Christina Stead Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2005 Miles Franklin Award.

The final novel in the trilogy,
The Time We Have Taken
, was published in 2007. This is a story of intersecting lives in the year 1970, during the centenary celebration of a suburb. It 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. Again, in 2008, Carroll was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, and this time he proved triumphant. The judging panel described Carroll’s novel as a ‘poised,
philosophically profound exploration…a stand-alone work that is moving and indelible in its evocation of the extraordinary in ordinary lives.’ On winning the award, Steven commented, ‘It’s a tremendous thrill but it’s also daunting to be joining a long list of authors whom you’ve either studied or admired for years. The Miles Franklin comes with the gravitas of a whole literary tradition, and you feel the weight almost instantly.’ And as for the prize money, Carroll plans to buy his old guitar back: ‘I had one of those pivotal moments in my late twenties when I sold my Rickenbacker for an electric typewriter… So I just might be making a trip down to Chapel Street, to a certain music store to pick out the old guitar, get the axe back.’

The Time We Have Taken
earned Carroll further international recognition as winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, South East Asia and South Pacific Region. The book was also shortlisted for the 2007
Age
Book of the Year Award (Fiction) and the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction.

He gave up a lecturing post at RMIT in the late 90s in order to write full time and lives in Brunswick in Melbourne with his partner, also a writer, and their child.

The Art of the Engine Driver

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 Gift of Speed

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.

BORN

1949, Melbourne

EDUCATED

English and history at La Trobe University

MARRIED

Lives with his partner and son

CAREER

High school English teacher; musician; playwright; theatre reviewer; journalist; lecturer; novelist; taxi driver.

NOVELS

Remember Me, Jimmy James

(1992)

Momoko

(1994)

The Love Song of Lucy McBride

(1998)

The Art of the Engine Driver

(2001)

The Gift of Speed

(2004)

The Time We Have Taken

(2007)

AWARDS AND HONOURS

The Art of the Engine Driver
:

• Shortlisted for the 2002 Miles Franklin Literary Award

• Shortlisted for the Prix Femina 2005

• Shortlisted for the Prix des Lectrices d’Elle 2006

The Gift of Speed
:

• Shortlisted for the 2005 Miles Franklin Literary Award

• Highly Commended in the 2005 Fellowship of Australian Writers National Literary Awards

• Highly Commended in the 2005 FAW Christina Stead Award for Fiction

The Time We Have Taken
:

• Winner of the 2008 Miles Franklin Literary Award

• Winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award, South East Asia and South Pacific Region

• Shortlisted for the 2007
Age
Book of the Year Award (Fiction)

• Shortlisted for the 2007 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction

Steven Carroll:
When I started
The Art of the Engine Driver
I thought it would just be one book, but by the time I’d finished I realised there was a lot more in there. And there’s tremendous pleasure in going intensely into a small area because the area that the book deals with or dwells in is a rectangle about a mile and a half long and about a half-mile wide, but not only was there enough for one book but enough for three.

Rhiannon Brown:
All the characters in your book, Steven — Rita, Madeleine, Michael, Vic, Mrs Webster — they all seem as if they’re very familiar to you. Are these based on people in your own life?

Steven Carroll:
You can’t walk away from a lot of biographical elements in the books. My father was an engine driver and we did grow up in a suburb like the one described in the book. For him it was through engine driving, through action, that he achieved significance, and also a sense of aesthetics entering his daily life through the art of engine driving.

Rhiannon Brown:
What do you mean, the aesthetics?

Steven Carroll:
Just the sense of pleasure that doing something in an artistic way gives somebody. And it can come accidentally into people’s lives, in isolated moments, something being executed as perfectly as it can be, and that comes along from time to time. Vic had that in his job. I remember when my dad used to talk about engine driving with his friends, his fellow drivers,
and they would talk about it in aesthetic terms, they would talk about the artistic touches and the characteristic touches of fellow drivers, how they could do such-and-such, and how they did such-and-such and ‘I wonder how they do it?’ But none of them would ever tell, they all kept their secrets, and Dad had his secrets when he drove too. It was his job, it actually gave him a sense of meaning. And for Vic, it’s a very similar thing.

I suppose in
The Art of the Engine Driver
there is more of a biographical element in it, but as the books progressed it became less and less so. So with
The Gift of Speed
I didn’t feel like I was actually dealing with the original models. I developed them to the extent that they started losing their faces, and by the time I actually got to part three they just felt like characters and it was actually quite liberating.

There is something quite good and urgent in being able to take something, a subject like I did in
The Art of the Engine Driver
and feel it was at your fingertips but there was also something far more satisfying in actually moving on through
The Gift of Speed
and
The Time We Have Taken
to the point where you actually feel you’re dealing with inventions and I didn’t feel like I was restricted by what I might have known, and that’s very important because the whole task of fiction to me is not to replicate reality but to reinvent it.

Rhiannon Brown:
Where Vic, the character based on your father, the engine
driver, was very prominent in the beginning of the novels, it’s in the third novel where we have Michael who is playing a bigger role. Let’s talk a little bit about the idea of ordinariness because Michael falls in love with a woman called Madeleine and says, ‘The gift of Madeleine was a kind of blessed ordinariness, a sense of being connected like everybody else was.’ In some sense I get the feeling that in your books you’re chasing the idea of the ordinary and wishing to transform it. Would that be right?

Steven Carroll:
See, nothing is ordinary really. In some ways, what’s happening in these books is the exhilaration of actually taking very ordinary things like a suburb, like the people in the suburb, and the people who would regard their day-to-day lives as being humdrum stuff, the exhilaration of taking that very ordinariness and attempting to transform it into something that actually transcends the way they see themselves. In lots of ways the characters miss those transcendent moments, and that’s the kind of sadness of them in lots of ways. They’re in a constant state of yearning and longing, but that’s why the books are written in the present tense, that the characters miss those transcendent moments but the book is actually in the moment, and the reader, through reading the book in the present tense does not miss the moments, hopefully.

Rhiannon Brown:
It seems to me that for all the characters in your book things change, people evolve, and yet the past, the present and the future are all happening
simultaneously to them. Michael thinks he is also the eleven-year-old boy playing cricket in the street. Rita, through her dress, connects with the past and has to reject that in order to move forward. Vic, feeling a breeze against his cheek, is transported back into a time when he was behind one of those great engines. Is that how we live time, all at once, as it were?

Steven Carroll:
It’s the way it happens in the book. It’s a very fluid notion of time. Time almost collapses and characters are almost simultaneously living the future and the past, and the author intervening connects them to the present because I think quite often the sadness of a lot of these characters is that they do miss the present, but quite often they’re either dwelling in the past or yearning towards the future and are conscious of both, but I think that notion of time… I suspect that’s more authorial than the way the characters experience time, although there is the exception of Michael, he is one of these people who even as he is living a moment is nostalgic for it.

Most of the characters, if I can sort of dwell on this point, do exist, and they have throughout all three books, in a kind of almost frantic or constant state of becoming, all yearning towards some perfect state of being. And of course it’s all an illusion. And society itself has its own yearning, except when society yearns we call it progress, and the both of them are moving in a kind of concert. We do need those sorts of things, we do need our dreams, we do need to look forward to some imagined state of perfection or being better, but at the same time the paradox is that we become so lost in our
yearning, so lost in our straining towards some sort of otherness that we miss the moment. Whole societies can do this, people can too. The moment is a very slippery thing.

A lot of this is actually…it’s strange where the sources of books come from, but I went back to university about three or four years ago and studied Martin Heidegger, and he is very much concerned about that sort of thing, in fact his whole enterprise… I’m just an amateur at this sort of stuff when it comes to philosophy and theory but his whole notion or project, I suppose, philosophically, was to take philosophy where it began in wonder, and by implication that people ought to actually go back to a state where they can actually see the wonder of existence. Too easily we lose it.

You’ve got to be in the moment quite often to actually experience it, but quite often we look back and think, ‘Oh, wasn’t that wonderful. I wasn’t watching though.’ And that’s why the very end of the book bounces off the Hardy poem
Self Unseen
where something extraordinary happens to a character, he lives through it but doesn’t actually recognise its extraordinariness until years later and he realises that he was looking away.

Rhiannon Brown:
Let’s just get back to one of the main stories in the book and the idea that this suburb is celebrating its 100 years, and the centenary wall.

Steven Carroll:
Basically that is what you might call a kind of structural device. I needed a way of actually bringing all of
these stories together, and the idea of centenary suburb is the glue that holds all the stories together. I stole it. I was reading at the time Robert Musil
The Man Without Qualities
, and the glue that holds his story together is a celebration as well, and so I thought actually I can use that, and so I took that, and it became the spine, if you like, that runs throughout the book. But again it links up with that whole notion of history and progress and the characters in the suburb thinking themselves to be emblematic of progress and the suburb of being emblematic of progress in the sense that it has come from being a frontier community to a settled civilised community in a very short space of time.

Again, it was a way of exploring the idea of progress in the context of the suburb because it’s a sort of article of faith for a lot of the characters in the book and in lots of ways it’s almost an enlightenment notion too because there is that sense…they feel as though they’re riding the train of History with a capital H, and there’s also a sort of residual sense of perfectibility in there as well. It gave me a way of bringing, I suppose, the grand narrative themes of literary fiction to the small picture of a suburb if a suburb is celebrating its 100th birthday.

Rhiannon Brown:
So a group of members of the community who consider themselves fairly prominent and important, from the mayor down to the local shopkeepers, decide to bring in an artist, a younger guy who’s a painter, and they commission him to paint a mural. He ends up painting a different idea of history to the one that they had in mind.

Steven Carroll:
Yes, it’s almost as though they know they’ve let someone into their midst with a touch of the time bomb about him, that there’s something about him that’s unpredictable, and of course he is a bit like that. He sees the suburb and the history of the suburb in totally different terms to the committee that’s hired him, and the painting that he eventually gives them, the mirror that he eventually holds up to them at the very end is in contradiction to the way they would have thought about themselves. Again, it does link up to the whole notion of history and progress and the two being linked together because you actually lined up a whole line of dignitaries whose article of faith is progress but nonetheless are depicted looking backwards, just as…and this is 1970, and it’s as the Whitlam wave is about to hit.

Rhiannon Brown:
Whitlam is quite a big presence throughout the book and he is referred to by the oldies as ‘their Whitlam’. They regard him with deep suspicion.

Steven Carroll:
This is one of the beauties of writing a novel, you can actually inhabit the minds of people that you might not necessarily agree with or even like. Mrs Webster is deeply suspicious of Whitlam, and I found as I got into the character of Mrs Webster that I could understand her reservations. It was fun dealing with them, viewing the kind of arrogance of not just Whitlam but the whole Whitlam generation. At one stage she refers to them as those emperors who crown themselves without waiting for somebody
else to do it for them. Michael, though, he adores Whitlam, he sees in Whitlam a whole new beginning and a very necessary one. He sees history at its best heading towards them. But when you look back, there must have been a sense of trepidation for our parents and those who actually didn’t share the enthusiasm of Michael’s generation.

Of course the whole enlightenment notion of progress has taken quite a battering over the last twenty years, and the mayor says at the unveiling of the mural, ‘You may think our ideas are quaint, our ideas of history and progress, but was it such a bad world we gave you after all?’ He suddenly finds himself very impassioned about the whole notion of his little suburb, his community, and it had taken him by surprise. Mrs Webster is watching and thinking, there’s the mayor, I never took him for the emotional type but he’s been caught up in a bit of emotion there. So he gives this quite passionate speech about the ‘the world we gave you, was it that bad?’ and of course it wasn’t bad.

Extract from ‘Steven Carroll’s
The Time We Have Taken
’ interview by Rhiannon Brown, first broadcast by ‘The Book Show’ on Radio National, 14 March 2007, is reproduced with permission of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and ABC Online. © 2007 ABC. All rights reserved.