As I made my morning coffee today in the quiet of my kitchen, a bird was singing outside. Mindful of the motif of listening in Gregory Day's new novel The Bell of the World, I paused, and listened, really listened, so that I could identify the bird.

The Bell of the World is a challenging book, not because it's hard to read and make sense of, but because it challenges our ideas about what art is, what music is, and even what literature is.

Titled 'Big Cutting Hill' and set in the early years of the 20th century, Part One introduces Sarah Hutchinson, a troubled young woman under the care of an Indigenous woman called Maisie. Sarah's immediate family is absent from the novel, so we know only that her mother drank to excess and that after her parents' acrimonious divorce Sarah was packed off to boarding school in Devon. There, bells punctuate her day and she feels claustrophobic after the wide open spaces of Australia. From there she is offloaded to Uncle Ferny's bohemian circle in Rome.

In Rome, in artistic circles (that include 'poetivores'!) Sarah is exposed to (and excited by) modernism. But sent home to Uncle Ferny's farm Ngangahook she is confused, lethargic and depressed, and it is Maisie's wisdom that begins to heal her. This healing coincides with the return of Uncle Ferny (who is hairy from reading i.e. unshaven!)

In Part Two, (in Sarah's voice) Ngangahook illustrates the clash between European settler values and the Hutchinsons' desire to belong in their landscape. The local wannabe dignitary Selwyn Atchison wants a civic bell to dignify the town (and himself), expressing...

...his own Presbyterian need for a bell to civilise, indeed to drown out the pollinating salt airs of this small inlet into, and out of, the sea. (p.69)

Sarah and Uncle Ferny reject the entire concept. Such a bell would impose itself on the bush which has its own ancient soundscape of birds and the rustlings of native fauna and the whistling of the wind in the trees.

No schoolbell, no churchbell, no bell for service nor for storm. Just the silence that is so filled with sound. The reach of the pealing bell of the moonlured surf, beseeching no one at the rivermouth. That, I came to believe, through the pressure of engagement, is the only bell of auditory range that ever an inlet wanted to be heard.

But still: a niceness in the offing, something coming our way other than weather, that's what caused the bitter unsuccessful petition to so deepen and endure. (p.66)

(The point is that nations do irreversible things without any consideration for how it might impact globally... climate change, nuclear waste, starting endless wars, noise pollution from planes, blighting the night sky with satellites, invading privacy with drones. None of us can escape from it, and on and on and on it goes with global forums powerless to put a stop to it.)

Uncle Ferny's refusal to contribute to the fund to pay for this intrusive bell arouses not only indignation but ostracism in the town. The townsfolk were already bemused by Sarah's concerts on her 'altered piano'. In her narrative she includes a newspaper clipping:

In a novel procedure Miss Hutchinson had adjusted the workings and thus the sound of the homestead's grand piano with the following items from the field: a bullock bone, a piece of ironbark, a banksia cob, a scrap of 8 gauge wire, a kangaroo rib, a train ticket, a fray of crinoline, a bandage, a letter, fern fronds, a bridle hasp and fox-fur. (p.61)

What is music? Sarah's composition is titled 'My Autumn' and it distinguishes the Australian autumn from the European one with its very sound. We learn later in Part Three that Sarah — alone on an isolated property — is creating experimental music that could take its place amongst the most radical of experimentalists in the 20th century.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/03/06/the-bell-of-the-world-2023-by-gregory-day/ ( )