Girl With A Monkey

by Thea Astley

Written in Astley’s trademark spiky prose, laced with challenging vocabulary and scattered with French phrases and quotations from Horace, Catullus and the Catholic Mass, Girl with a Monkey tells the story of an assertive young woman called Elsie who is escaping from what we would call today a stalker. In her short period of time in what is obviously Townsville though it’s never named, Elsie has been out with a number of young men, all of them disappointing and not just because they are not her intellectual match. Her escape is facilitated by requesting a transfer to a different school, and the novel traces her last day in the town.

Genres: Australia, Novels, 20th Century, Fiction

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

Thea Astley was one of Australia's most respected and acclaimed novelists. Born in Brisbane in 1925, Astley studied arts at the University of Queensland. She held a position as Fellow in Australian Literature at Macquarie University until 1980, when she retired to write full time. In 1989 she was granted an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Queensland.

She won the Miles Franklin Award four times - in 1962 for The Well Dressed Explorer, in 1965 for The Slow Natives, in 1972 for The Acolyte and in 2000 for Drylands. In 1989 she was award the Patrick White Award. Other awards include 1975 The Age Book of the Year Award for A Kindness Cup, the 1980 James Cook Foundation of Australian Literature Studies Award for Hunting the Wild Pineapple, the 1986 ALS Gold Medal for Beachmasters, the 1988 Steele Rudd Award for It's Raining in Mango, the 1990 NSW Premier's Prize for Reaching Tin River, and the 1996 Age Book of the Year Award and the FAW Australian Unity Award for The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow.

Praise for Thea Astley:

'Beyond all the satire, the wit, the occasional cruelty, and the constant compassion, the unfailing attribute of Astley's work is panache' Australian Book Review

Reviews

[zed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thea Astley’s debut novel the story of a young girls last day in a town that is far too provincial for her wants and needs. Though a simple story it is pulled along by some mesmerising writing that has grabbed my imagination as to the people and place.

The Girl with a Monkey. The title is possibly condescending but then the author would have been aware of that. Is it a metaphor for Elsie, the leading characters troubles and fears be that with her relationships with her profession, provincialism, the snobbish middle class or with men?

Else admits that she is strangely entertained by her last day. She despises herself for this but makes excuses. She enjoys her own observations of the local middle class, the prints of Gauguin and Millet on their walls for example. Enjoys her own despising of the education system that took her to provincial Townsville where she has to deal with a school principle who has little time for her. But most of all she despises having to deal with her relationship with Harry, an older and less educated road worker who is the major key to Elsie and her monkey. Elsie may just be enjoying her intellectual superiority over Harry but as she says at times Harry shows native shrewdness and humour with Elsie even at times finding him a “dark horse”. But on the last day her relationship with Harry comes to a head. She fears violence but may not have really wanted to avoid Harry as she “craved the dramatic”. This craving for the dramatic comes to a fitting end when the reader decides as what the monkey is.

Thea Astley is an outstanding writer! Four eventual Miles Franklin awards prove that. Being my third novel by Thea I know that she is a writer who appeals to my own reading wants and needs. This is a really good novel.

[Vishy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thea Astley is one of Australia's greatest writers. She is a four-time winner of the Miles Franklin award. 'Girl with a Monkey' is her first book.

Elsie is a teacher in a small town. Her time in the school is getting over and Elsie is leaving town to move to work in a school in another small town. The story describes what happens on the last day before Elsie leaves, how easy or hard it is for her to part from friends and from her school, how hard it is for her to break up with her boyfriend who is possessive and is obsessed with her. As the story describes that last day, we are also taken into the past, and we see how things were when Elsie moved to that town, how she met Laura, her best friend, how two men vied for her love, how she favoured one over the other and how this man turned out to be obsessive, even dangerous.

I enjoyed reading 'Girl with a Monkey'. The story was interesting but what I loved most was Thea Astley's prose. It was not the kind of prose you can push forward with or blitz through, you have to pay attention, you have to let the words come to you and work their magic. As Thea Astley herself says in the book in a different context – "Jostling and rushing were unknown in these northern latitudes because they were almost an impossibility under the vertical sun. Here one became a lounger, a lover of shade-patches and the cool gulfs of doorways." In cricket language, we can't read the book like we are batting during a T20 match. We need to read it like we are batting on the first day morning of a Melbourne or Brisbane test, waiting for the ball to come to us, navigating the swing and the seam and not rushing around but taking our time and enjoying the experience. I did that and it was very beautiful. Astley's beautiful sentences were a pleasure to read and I loved that aspect of the book very much. I want to read another Astley book just for her prose.

I'll leave you with two of my favourite passages from the book.

"There was some hardness in her that made her feel no emotion at all towards things she left, only to those she came back to. So many people and undertakings had abandoned her, or alternatively she had been forced to abandon so many, that a parting was no difficult thing. The very emptiness of the future gave a sorrowful pleasure. It was akin to travelling continually in space, tacking briefly towards some unattainable astral beach only to be swept away before anchoring safely."

"There is a certain permanence of beauty and truth to be extracted from natural scenery. We all have those moments of crystalline perception when the flesh, divinely prompted, seems to melt into nothingness, leaving the mind nervously aware, apprehending, cut off from was or will be, swung from there to here: those times when pausing at night beside the weatherboard house, starved for real music, a piano cuts the stillness with melodic scimitars, boomerangs of tune; or being a new-comer to the stunning plainsong of mountain and valley sweeping down into green sunlight, the breath is held unaware."

Have you read read Thea Astley's 'Girl with a Monkey' or any other book by her? What do you think about it?

[Pam · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an early work by Thea Astley but it contains all the hallmarks that made this author great for me. The simplicity of the story but the depth of the writing. The story is set over 1 day and involves a girl avoiding a man she has broken up with. Set in a Queensland town (Townsville) the story is beautifully constructed, language challenging and a sense of place easy to understand.

[Emma Balkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book gives a vivid of the stifling atmosphere of Queensland during the 1950s. Thea Astley uses such a broad descriptive vocabulary, but the plot didn't really grab me. A book that's under 150 pages, a book you can finish in a day, a book by a protagonist who has your occupation.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first book by Thea Astley. (1960)
It reflects her own
experiences as a school teacher in the Australian bush.
Read: 2016

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's always interesting to discover the early work of a well-loved author.  I began reading Thea Astley with her last work Drylands (1999) and then worked my way back through the other novels which also won the Miles Franklin Award: The Well-dressed Explorer (1962); The Slow Natives (1995) and The Acolyte (1972).  I've also read Coda (1994) and A Descant for Gossips (1960).  (All of these are reviewed here on the blog except, alas, for Drylands, click the links to see my reviews).  To read an author's debut novel after her mature work is sometimes disappointing, but not so with Girl with a Monkey, Thea Astley's first novel, published in 1958.

I try to imagine the impact this novel must have had.  This story of a young school teacher marooned in an intellectual wasteland pre-dates Kenneth Cook's Wake in Fright (1961) and is all the more iconoclastic because the school teacher is a young woman.  Two decades later when I was at Teachers' College myself, I was struck by how biddable my fellow students were.  I hung out with the other students who were already wives and mothers, and we could not believe how the younger ones meekly submitted to unreasonable changes to requirements (that affected our child-care arrangements and presumably their lives as well) and an absurd demand that female graduates would wear (virginal) white gowns to graduation, signalling that they were paragons of respectability.  This was the 70s, when we'd all read Germaine Greer, and yet these girls submitted to authority as if in a time warp.  How much more so must this have been in 1958 when Thea Astley was a teacher!

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/08/17/g...

[SWC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was surprised at the shortness of this publication, 144 pages as compared with an expectation perhaps of 250 pages. It was helpful to have month designations since the story was not told in chronological order. I am always impressed when an author uses words which do not necessarily advance the plot but embellish the setting in which the plot occurs. I even spent time translating the French and Latin quotes which were included.

[Ian Tymms · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my very favourite authors. Astley's astute insights into the banalities of Australian life crackle with an electric intelligence.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short novel set in Townsville after the War and first published in 1958. Beautifully written, capturing the languid lethargy of the tropics. One to savour

[Sean Harding · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short tale from Astley had some good moments but pretty forgettable over all.