Everyman's Rules
for Scientific Living
Carrie Tiffany
Scribner, 224 pages, $31.75
John Allemang has been
writing his Book A Day
column for The Globe since Nov. 28. Today is his 98th review. On Saturday, John offers his 100th review, along with
an essay on the pains and
pleasures of this column.
And on Monday, he's right back at the books.
Just when you think you've had your fill of solemn stories about Depression-era stoics -- even CBC has sworn off the grim-faced heartland -- along comes Australian writer Carrie Tiffany with a novel that dusts off the dust-bowl dourness and reclaims the genre for the forces of whimsy.
This takes some doing in a book that features mouse plagues, nutrient-deprived children dying from spina bifida, men going off to be killed in two world wars, a pet cat paralyzed by a snake, a cow that dies and has to be burned after eating stink grass, and even the blood of a stillborn baby coursing through a barren wheat field. You would think, if you didn't know better, that Carrie Tiffany lays it on thick.
Perhaps she does, but relief comes from her enchanting narrator, a progressive yet dreamy young woman named Jean Finnegan who teaches the latest in household skills to backwoods mothers from her post on the Better-Farming Train. Australia is caught up in one of those periodic fits of modernity where science is being marshalled to make ordinary lives better, and the train's purpose is to bring the fruits of progress to the people who need it most -- the marginal farmers scratching a living off the parched red soil between Melbourne and Adelaide.
This is a book about the power of optimism -- blinded by its rational delusions, we (book characters and readers alike) can bear almost anything for a while. Jean's new husband Robert Pettergree, a soil scientist and creator of the rules that give the novel its title, is the unseeing rationalist in the family, though even he has a trick of winning bets by guessing the source of soil samples on taste alone. A little of Robert goes a long way -- he seems too cold-hearted and obtuse to be human, but that is probably Tiffany's point.
While Jean is modern enough to enjoy quickie sex on the Better-Farming Train, she is more a wide-eyed onlooker than a true believer in the power of superphosphates and new wheat strains. It's her unscientific approach to the art of living -- her flirtatious fascination with Mr. Ohno, the renowned Japanese chicken-sexer, for example -- that gives Tiffany's keenly observed book a greater sense of pleasure than the Depression usually gets from its artistic admirers.
