Style and Themes
According to the AustLit Gateway News Astley was "revered for her meticulous and controlled use of language and her portrayals of the Queensland landscape and character, was renowned for her quick wit, raspy voice, and ever-present cigarettes". Many of her books explore the "geography and politics of the small community".
Astley built a reputation as a 'metaphoric' writer, resulting in a style that alienated some readers and critics. In an interview with Candida Baker, Astley quotes Helen Garner as saying "I simply hate her style" and goes on to say "I can't resist using imagistic language. I like it. I really don't do it to annoy reviewers". In her review of An Item from the Late News, Garner wrote "Great story, great characters ... Stylistically, however, this book is like a very handsome, strong and fit woman with too much makeup on ... This kind of writing drives me berserk".
Despite tepid reception among some, there were also many who admired Astley's writing for both its style and for the subject matter, such as writer Kerryn Goldsworthy, who was quoted as saying, "I love its densely woven grammar, its ingrained humour, its uncompromising politics, and its undimmed outrage at human folly, stupidity and greed". Goldsworthy continues to say that "her body of work adds up to a protracted study in the way that full-scale violence and tragedy can flower extravagantly from the withered seeds of malice and resentment ... The perps in Drylands are all her usual suspects: racists, developers, hypocritical gung-ho civic go-gooders, and assorted unreconstructed male-supremacist swine".
Academic and literary editor, Delys Bird, summarises the author's themes as follows: "Astley's novels and stories typically present a sceptical view of social relationships among ordinary people, one often coloured by her former Catholicism, and directed through the struggles of her self-conscious protagonists to find an expressive space within their uncongenial surroundings". In several novels, such as A Kindness Cup and The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow, she explores the relationships between white and Indigenous Australian societies. Leigh Dale writes that A Kindness Cup "focuses on the massacre of a group of Aborigines and the efforts made to forget and to remember this violence at a town reunion twenty years later, is marked largely by the rage and frustration felt by its central character who seems to mirror Astley's horror at the genial amorality that pervades some rural communities."
Astley found her material in newspaper stories and through her travels, but mostly in the various communities she and her husband lived in. In north Queensland, for example, she "found a wealth of stories and 'screwball' characters by listening to people in the small towns and wilderness of the tropics". In 1997, she wrote "Sadly, the north has changed. As we say up there: beautiful one day, developed the next. I keep writing about it. I can't help myself".
Read more about this topic: Thea Astley
Famous quotes containing the words style and, style and/or themes:
“The difference between style and taste is never easy to define, but style tends to be centered on the social, and taste upon the individual. Style then works along axes of similarity to identify group membership, to relate to the social order; taste works within style to differentiate and construct the individual. Style speaks about social factors such as class, age, and other more flexible, less definable social formations; taste talks of the individual inflection of the social.”
—John Fiske (b. 1939)
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)