By Claire Scobie
MEMOIR
All Is Given: A Memoir in Songs
Linda Neil
UQP, $24.95
As a child Linda Neil loved the word "wonderment". It is this quality, combined with a rarefied sensibility, that imbues her writing and her response to the world. A songwriter, classical musician, documentary producer and author, Neil frames her second memoir, All Is Given, ambiguously. "Think of this collection of stories as a book of songs that contains improvisations and variations on themes of truth," she writes. "You might even be able to hear the fabric of facts and fiction as they are stitched together."
All Is Given by Linda Neil.
The discrete pieces are linked by music, the alienation Neil felt growing up in Brisbane, and travel. Travelling is how she sheds "the skins of her old dead selves" to become new and vulnerable. In many ways, she is a sophisticated traveller – not in what she takes, but in how she interacts with other travellers. "It was the decorum of travel to understand the impermanence of connection – to not cling or expect anything long-term from these encounters … but to celebrate and honour them, without hope or regret, as they arrived and departed."
She doesn't carry a camera with her, only a laptop and a violin. To remember a moment, she composes a song. She travels to London, India, Kathmandu, Ulaanbaatar, Paris and Shanghai. Her first encounter is with Spike Milligan in Notting Hill. They had become pen pals and he suggested they meet for a curry. She relays a hilarious list of the topics they covered: from the Goons and "Goonishness" to Woy Woy, Woop Woop, "Doolittle" and "Do as little as possible".
In "Singing Love Songs in Kathmandu", she describes meeting an Israeli whom she calls Gabriel. They stumble upon a recording studio, where she will return to record some songs. As with other tales, she leaves much to the imagination, only hinting that from this chance meeting, one day she will call him "my Gabriel". In Shanghai, she meets a flower seller whose bicycle is adorned with flowers and who is a beacon amid the chaos of the city.
Neil suffers from the cold and during one freezing Paris spring she hibernates, barely venturing outside her apartment. Her time there becomes a meditation on what it is to be Australian with its "tyranny of smiling [and] upbeat brightness". Memories of watching classic movies with her mother Joan and her teenage obsession with Greta Garbo become "rendered into poetic, beautiful fragments: pristine, static, inflexible to reinterpretation".
I couldn't share her extended fascination with the Swedish actress. What I liked more were the scenes from Neil's teenage years: how her father encouraged her to swim across Tallebudgera Creek and the triumph when Neil made it to the other side; the films with her mother while eating Iced Vo-Vos.
The push and pull of home is a constant motif. Neil's first book, Learning How to Breathe, chronicled how she returned home to Brisbane to care for Joan, later diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. It was her mother who brought Neil up to be positive, to show the world her bravest face. As the disease took hold, and Joan's face became frozen, Neil understood why her mother "went to battle for [her daughter's] smile" when she still could.
As much as it captures the places she visited, All Is Given is also a love letter to the power of song. Its lilting cadence, and the way the stories loop back on themselves, become like riffs in prose. She is comfortable with silence and at the end simply invites the reader "to fill in all the blank spaces". There is an added poignancy in this because Neil can no longer travel due to a chronic illness. These days the world comes to her through domestic assistants, all "refugees who have made a home in the city where [she lives]".
By the end, it seems Neil has so successfully collapsed the distance between herself and her audience – exactly her hope – that she has become a tuning fork to the swirl of life around her.