The Glade Within The Grove

by David Foster

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award.

Two of David Foster's previous books, Dog Rock and The Pale Blue Crochet Coathanger, feature the eccentric postman D'Arcy D'Olivieres, a great and memorable creation, and one who makes a welcome return to Foster's fiction in The Glade Within the Grove. Now the retired postman of Dog Rock, D'Arcy recalls a time when he was a fill-in postman at a small town called Obliqua Creek. There he discovers an unpublished manuscript in an old mailbag - The Ballad of Erinungarah, written by 'Orion'. As D'Arcy himself says, 'Weird piece of work. Back then, 1990, I'm not sure I understood the implications. But I have thought about little else since.'

D'Arcy becomes obsessed by the Ballad and the events it describes, and writes The Glade Within The Grove as a gloss on the Ballad, and investigation of events that happened nearly thirty years ago: namely the establishment of a commune in the late 60s, deep in the forest country of the Far South Coast, somewhere near the NSW/Victorian border. The valley is a paradise, populated sparsely by isolated logging and rural families. It is literally stumbled upon by a famous 60s rock guitarist, Michael Ginnsy, who loses his dog in the valley, goes in to find him, is taken under the wing of two old hippies, Phryx and Gwen, who show him the way out of the inaccessible and impenetrable valley. Returning to Sydney, he can't stop talking about this idyllic place, and is eventually persuaded by a motley group of people at a wake for Martin Luther King to let them join him and attempt to find the valley. So they set off in the Kombi: hippies, a former pin-up girl, a drug dealer, junkies, rich kids looking for excitement, a Marxist. In the days of the anti-Vietnam movement, this disparate group are all variously pursuing alternative lives, so a commune is the obvious answer when they literally stumble (again) upon the valley paradise.

The link between country and city is forged when Attis, a foundling looked after by the logging family, and Diane, the youngest, feistiest and most radical of the city group, meet at a rodeo and instantly fall in love. Then they find abandoned the hut where the old hippies Phryx and Gwen lived, and discover they were killed by a lone anti-logging terrorist, who has found a Sacred Grove of 1000 year old cedars deep in the valley, and is trying to protect them from the outside world. Newcomers and suspicious old-timers must work together to save paradise from the madman.

Genres: Fiction, Australia, Novels, 20th Century, Unfinished, Literature

428 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

David Manning Foster (born 15 May 1944) is an Australian novelist and scientist. He has written a range of satires on the theme of the decline of Western civilization, as well as producing short stories, poetry, essays, and a number of radio plays.

Foster writes in an Australian tradition of idiosyncratic satire and comedy that may be traced through the work of Joseph Furphy, Miles Franklin, Xavier Herbert and David Ireland. His novels are the most wide-ranging and fearless of the Australian novels that have contributed to the late twentieth-century re-examination of Western ideologies and the literary forms in which they are expressed. ('Foster: The Satirist of Australia' by Susan Lever)

Reviews

[Pat Settegast · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book may be the most understated, underhanded literary slight of hand tricks I've ever read, and somehow it managed to keep me interested in its little head games until the end... the final passage is one of the best pay offs I've ever worked toward.

Be it said: this book is a farce - but an epic farce - a modern retelling of the ancient Hellenized Phrygian myth of Cybele and Attis set circa 1969 in a virgin old growth forest in Australia, but David Foster continually thwarts his own story, attempting to lose the reader in the minutia of detail and stream of consciousness dialogue. Once, he's sure you're lost; he lets the story find you again, dropping leads that look like red herrings or connecting the most rediculous symbols.

So much about the hippies that in the hands of less capable authors would seem daffy or daft rolls through these pages just as naturalistic as the laisons of D.H. Lawrence or subtext of Charles Dickens. There are some passages that are an absolute bog of unattributed nuance, but taken on the whole; it still reads well between tokes. You better like Eucalyptis trees, Cold War politics, and the self-emasculation rituals practiced among worshipers of the Magna Mater Idea.

[Tessa]

Someone threw this book in my local pond, which was an unexpected way to get a book recommendation (an arbitrary act of violence or sweet revenge?), but I will take it.

I tried to upload a photo, but I am so dumb. It's on my bookinsta if you (darest doubt me) want to see a bunch of sad books submerged in water

[Stephen Hayes · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about the establishment of a hippie commune in 1968/69 in southern New South Wales.

The story is told by a retired postman, who discovers the manuscipt of an epic porm on the topic in the bottom of an old mail bag, The Ballad of Erinungarah . He asked a friend, Kimberley Moon, about the poem, and tried to follow up the events of 27 years previously, when the members are scattered or dead, and the children have grown up,

I found it an interesting and good read, and found it particularly interesting because the people involved in starting the commune were about my age, and in the same period I was involved in starting a commune, though of a rather different kind. Another reason for finding it interesting is that, though the location was fictional, the general area was at one time the home a relative of my wife Val. Her name was Agnes Green, and she lived a very interesting life, part of it in Southern New South Wales. Her first husband, William Wilson, was drowned in the Tuross River there, in 1852, when it was the scene of a gold rush.

In addition to starting the commune in a very isolated valley, the inmates also developed a neopagan cult, in which several of the males of the group emasculated themselves. The narrator, the eccentric retired postman D'Arcy D'Olivera, interprets this in the light of James Frazer's The Golden Bough, and sees parallels with the ancient cult of Cybele.

The style reminded me of some of the books of Peter Tinniswood, such as A touch of Daniel, which give a vivid picture of life in the vicinity of Manchester in England in the same period. Tinniswood's writing was contemporary, while Foster's book was written nearly 30 years afterwards, and occasionally makes remarks about not meing sure whether some things were true to the period. I'd be interested in knowing what people from Australia who were alive at that time think of its authenticity of description.

I enjoyed it, but perhaps younger people, who have no memories of that period, might not like it so much.