Glenda Larke

A Tale of a Frog and a Snake
(Expedisi Kulamba, Universiti Malaysia Sabah)

There I was, a four-striped tree-frog, minding my own business in a tree overlooking the research tent of the Kulamba camp – until along came a striped-tailed racer. He was hungry and I was dozing…

I squealed and squealed, hoping someone would come to my aid. But all they did was grab their cameras…

Many thanks to Liew who stood on a precarious log, valiantly held by Wong, to take these shots over the protracted course of a reptilian lunch – well over an hour.

(Expedisi Kulamba, Universiti Malaysia Sabah)

Yep, I have a thing about fungi now.

Here’s a cicada corpse. My perverse husband rejoices in these things. This insect was infected with a fungus growth that sent it mad. Something in that fungus made the poor cicada go to the underside of a leaf and cling there, nicely placed for the dispsersal of fungi spores. And there it slowly died as the fungus took over its body.

Jeff VanderMeer must have found his inspsiration in Cordyceps.

(Expedisi Kulamba, Universiti Malaysia Sabah)

The camp has twenty-one people, researchers, lecturers and assistants and university students. We are aided by boatmen from the village, glad enough to earn more than they can get from fishing.

[Me, and some students, birding]

This is not the Kinabatangan of the well-heeled tourist, or even the young eco- backpacker. This is the end of civilisation where even the fishermen rarely trespass. There is an old logging road, and a logging camp, for – alas – even paradise has its snake. We use the road to explore the forest. The mud is gluey and I still haven’t managed to get my feet clean. (I am thinking it’s time I get a pedicure for the first time in my life, except it seems so horribly decadent. I’ve just spent a week with fishermen who earn less than $US 70 a month.)

There is a generator at night for a few hours – long enough to recharge batteries. We sleep in canvas cots under a roof – but the tropical rain often proves too much for the “roof”. One night I had to climb into my bed from an ankle-deep muddy pool – complete with resident frogs. Another time there was an ominous crack and one of the support beams broke under the weight of the water collecting on the canvas.

That’s the village headman standing next to my husband, fro the water village down at the mouth of the Kulamba. The villagers built the camp for us – and my husband reckons that must be why the canvas cots are all so short…

The mosquitoes are ferocious and persistent. The earth churns into mud. We wash in water pumped up from the river and cook with water filtered from the Kinabatangan.

But, oh, the scenery along the rivers of this wetland.
Magic.

I had an email from a reader of this blog who asked about themes. (Thank you Ink Paws!) Do I consciously write a book around a theme? Or is the use of themes by writers – as some of her teachers posit – more unconscious?

For me, the answer is sort of yes and no. One thing I don’t ever want to do is write a book that sets out to lecture – so I try not to belabour a point. However, I do consciously write to a theme, taking care that it enhances rather than dominates the story, even as the story that enhances the theme.

Here are some of my themes, and yes, there is often more than one:

The danger of having just one super-power in the world;
how power can corrupt even people who have the best intentions;
how difficult it is to have a truly sustainable society without making incredible sacrifices;
how difficult it is to live with guilt and how much courage it takes;
how easy it is to be patronising about people who are different;
how love doesn’t always conquer all, even though it is important to have it.

All themes from the Isles of Glory trilogy. [The marketing folk in the US who designed the cover seemed to think it was all about swords and sorcery and sex!]

Heart of the Mirage has a theme revolving around the tragedy of stolen children (read the acknowledgements at the back of the book) and what we really are – the person we were born and intended to be, or the person we were made into by our upbringing – or neither. It’s also about how strong women (and strong men, too) can still do foolish things because of love. It’s about how terrible betrayal can be.

The Shadow of Tyr is about deception. It also returns once more to questions of guilt and betrayal. It’s about the hollowness of revenge. It’s about what happens to a child when a mother simply does not have time for him. It’s about whether war can be justified.

Havenstar had themes about religion, about living with uncertainty, about prejudice.

All those themes (and quite a few more!) were deliberate choices, made sometimes before I started the book, or developed from my personal beliefs as I wrote.

So I found it interesting when it was pointed out to me by a fellow writer (and watch out for his new book; it’s brilliant), Russell Kirkpatrick, that there was one all important theme that runs through all my published books that I hadn’t even noticed, and yet is central to them all. When I thought about it, it was so obvious I felt a fool for not recognising that it was there. Duh. I mean, how stupid can you get?

And what was the theme? — Being the outsider in a society.

My main character(s) is always the odd man out, plonked down in a world to which they do not belong, and where they have to learn to cope and survive, and even be happy.

Havenstar: Keris is wrenched from her comfortable, safe niche as a mapmaker’s daughter by circumstances beyond her control and plunged into a world where nothing is comfortable, let alone safe, or even the same from hour to hour.

The Aware: Blaze is the epitome of the outsider – she is even physically marked as an outsider and a non-citizen who is not allowed to fit in by law. (Geez, that sounds familiar when I think about it.)
In Gilfeather, Kelwyn is forced out of his pacifist, sustainable community into a much more violent world, where he is destined to become part of the violence he abhors.
In The Tainted, Ruarth is suddenly human after spending all his life as a bird.
In Heart of the Mirage, Ligea is returned to her real home, only to realise she is a stranger among her own people.

And of course, one doesn’t have to look far to see where all that is coming from…!

Looking back over my life, I see that the first time I became an outsider I was just eleven years old. Our family moved when my father retired. We went from a farm and a rural community to live in the suburbs of a big city. (OK, by today’s standards it wasn’t all that big, but it was back then…) I found myself thrust into a new school and a much more sophisticated society than I was used to, and I still remember how difficult it was.

When I was twenty-five I swapped my country and culture for another; I did the same thing all over again when I was forty-one, and yet again to a totally different society when I was forty-seven. And in the process, I have switched languages four times too. And you know what? It wasn’t always easy.

Yep, no wonder I have issues with being the outsider…

I am off into the wilds for a week tomorrow, camping along the lower reaches of the Sg. Kalumba, a tributary of the Segama River in eastern Sabah, where the proboscis monkey is king, Storm’s Stork nests…and the crocodiles are big. So no posts till Monday 20th.
Until then, let me ask you writers and readers out there:

What are your themes?
Have any of you had themes creep up and clobber you from behind, as I did?

I expect to find lots of replies when I came back. Play nicely, children!

I have recently read Jeff Vandermeer’s book Shriek, which is – among other things, about the horrible effects of fungus moving in on a city and its people. Definitely not nice stuff to think about (although the book itself is a good read).

So I finished Shriek, put it down – and get attacked by fungus. Yuk. Apparently as a result of getting water in my ear back on that nice beach holiday I had with my daughter, and supplying the spores with a nutritious environment to grow in… It’s just as well I couldn’t actually see inside my ear or I would probably have really freaked out.

Anyway, when I start losing my hearing and having pain in my ear, I trot along to a doctor, who completely misdiagnoses the culprit and gives me antibiotic drops. I guess the fungus loves antibiotics, because it throve on the diet and cheerfully produced spores, and more little fungi to grow into big fungi. By this time, I was climbing the walls. My tinnitus had revved up to the noise level of a jet plane about to take off, the fungi felt as though they have taken over my brain – either that or stuffed it full of cotton wool – and the antibiotic altered my system to such a degree that I ended up with thrush in places I don’t really want to mention.

I began to think Jeff’s book was jinxed. Or booby-trapped, or something. (He posted it to me, so….hmmm…)

And through all this, I am trying to finish off an-over-the-deadline manuscript and get a start on an environmental project and stop, um, shrieking at my husband because I feel so rotten.

Anyway, I eventually get the thing properly diagnosed and start putting in drops. Kills off fungus, but by this time there is so much stuff in my ear – half a bottle of antibiotics, half a bottle of fungicide and a dead fungal orchard – that I can’t hear a thing, expect of course the tinnitus, which is now around the noise level of a continually exploding volcanic eruption. Moreover, the cotton wool feeling has invaded every part of my skull until I was sure I’d been in the hands of a taxidermist.

So yesterday I trot off to see a specialist. Who – bless him – syringes my ear and pronounces me cured. The cotton wool disappeared, I can hear, 75% of the tinnitus vanishes, all in the space of two seconds, and I am so grateful I almost dance on the doctor’s desk.

And I trot along to the hospital pharmacy to pick up a tube of medicine.
Which the pharmicist tells me to put in my eye.
I am not sure whether it was because she misread the label as “Optic” drops when it actually read “Otic”, or whether her English was so poor she said eye when she meant ear.
Just as well I didn’t follow that advice, because I see that the instructions warn: ‘Keep away from the eyes”. Hmmm……..

Now all I have to deal with is the thrush, which is refusing to vanish.