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Mangowak Trilogy #1
The Patron Saint of Eels
A contemporary fable, this book shows that when life seems dull and cruel it is the power of the natural world, and our ability to imagine it, that can bring the wonder back into living.In the southern Italian village of Stellanuova, in the 1700s, a Franciscan monk, Fra Ionio, becomes known as the Patron Saint of Eels when he brings a distraught fisherman's yearly catch of eels back from the dead in the village market. When Stellanuova's inhabitants emigrate to Australia in the post World War II migrations of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, the immortal saint is left looking down on an abandoned town. To fulfil his calling, he decides in heaven to migrate with his countrymen and now looks down on the state of Victoria, where he intercedes in matters relating to eels.
In the southern Victorian town of Mangowak, Noel Lea lives with the melancholy inheritance of a place undergoing the gentrifications of contemporary Australia. Along with his oldest friend, Nanette Burns, he longs for a time when life was less complex and unexpected magic seemed to permeate the ocean town and its people. When spring rains flood a nearby swamp and hundreds of eels get trapped in the grassy ditches around Noel's family home, he and Nanette encounter the vibrant Fra Ionio and get more magic than they bargained for.A beautifully written, charming and evocative book by Gregory Day, who also authored Trace , in collaboration with photographer, Robert Ashton.
In the southern Victorian town of Mangowak, Noel Lea lives with the melancholy inheritance of a place undergoing the gentrifications of contemporary Australia. Along with his oldest friend, Nanette Burns, he longs for a time when life was less complex and unexpected magic seemed to permeate the ocean town and its people. When spring rains flood a nearby swamp and hundreds of eels get trapped in the grassy ditches around Noel's family home, he and Nanette encounter the vibrant Fra Ionio and get more magic than they bargained for.A beautifully written, charming and evocative book by Gregory Day, who also authored Trace , in collaboration with photographer, Robert Ashton.
181 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2005
About the author
Gregory Day
17 books14 followersGregory Day is an Australian novelist, poet and musician who is best known for his Mangowak novels,
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
May 15, 2011
The patron saint of eels is gentle, evocative and deeply Australian. Set in a coastal Victorian town, it's the story of Noel and Nanette, two life-long friends saddened by the changes occurring in their town, and the loss of their community's connection to the landscape around it. They long for a time when life was less complex, when the miraculous was commonplace.
When spring rains flood a nearby swamp, hundreds of eels are washed downstream and become trapped in a ditch near Noel's home. Coming to their rescue is Fra Ionio, a Franciscan monk who has travelled a long way to save the eels - and remind Noel and Nanette about the important things in their lives.
I love the concepts in this book (in no particular order):
- the knowledge of our finite existence creates the intensity of our senses, driving desire, taste, lust etc;
- life is full of "gaps", between those experiencing great joy and great suffering (who are often oblivious each can be of each other, even when the physical distances between them are not great);
- that we have a connection to nature, and any truly theistic view of the world understands that God exists in all things;
- that there are miracles in nature everyday, we just don't stand still long enough to see them; and
- a truly religious journey means being real in the midst of life, not hiding away.
The novel offers a profoundly contemplative look at life and spirituality. Interestingly, although the concepts may at first seem very eastern, they reflect an important (and so far relatively isolated) shift in Judeo-Christian theology: that life and death, joy and grief, success and failure all have equal value in a life of meaning.
Reading The patron saint of eels, I was reminded, time and again, of the writings of Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest in the US who writes about contemplative prayer, the power of simply "being" rather than "doing", and the equal validity of pain and suffering in the spiritual journey.
His book Everything Belongs (non-fiction) is one of the most profound pieces of writing I've ever read. I've re-read it many times over the years (and still struggled to hang on to its lessons for more than a few days at a time). I'm now reading another of his books, Simplicity: The freedom of letting go, which continues the contemplative theme.
I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on books that have changed the way they look at the world (fiction or non-fiction), or if anyone else has read The patron saint of eels ... or anything else you might like to talk about as it relates to great stories.
When spring rains flood a nearby swamp, hundreds of eels are washed downstream and become trapped in a ditch near Noel's home. Coming to their rescue is Fra Ionio, a Franciscan monk who has travelled a long way to save the eels - and remind Noel and Nanette about the important things in their lives.
I love the concepts in this book (in no particular order):
- the knowledge of our finite existence creates the intensity of our senses, driving desire, taste, lust etc;
- life is full of "gaps", between those experiencing great joy and great suffering (who are often oblivious each can be of each other, even when the physical distances between them are not great);
- that we have a connection to nature, and any truly theistic view of the world understands that God exists in all things;
- that there are miracles in nature everyday, we just don't stand still long enough to see them; and
- a truly religious journey means being real in the midst of life, not hiding away.
The novel offers a profoundly contemplative look at life and spirituality. Interestingly, although the concepts may at first seem very eastern, they reflect an important (and so far relatively isolated) shift in Judeo-Christian theology: that life and death, joy and grief, success and failure all have equal value in a life of meaning.
Reading The patron saint of eels, I was reminded, time and again, of the writings of Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest in the US who writes about contemplative prayer, the power of simply "being" rather than "doing", and the equal validity of pain and suffering in the spiritual journey.
His book Everything Belongs (non-fiction) is one of the most profound pieces of writing I've ever read. I've re-read it many times over the years (and still struggled to hang on to its lessons for more than a few days at a time). I'm now reading another of his books, Simplicity: The freedom of letting go, which continues the contemplative theme.
I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on books that have changed the way they look at the world (fiction or non-fiction), or if anyone else has read The patron saint of eels ... or anything else you might like to talk about as it relates to great stories.
October 31, 2011
The recent announcement that Gregory Day was joint winner with Carrie Tiffany of the inaugural ABR Elizabeth Jolley short story prize reminded me that I have not one but three books by Day and that it was high time I read one of them! I decided to start with his debut novel The Patron Saint of Eels, which is a slim book of only 181 pages but it is highly regarded. The novel won the ALS Gold Medal in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize South East Asia and South Pacific Region, Best First Book, in the same year. There are also enthusiastic reviews at Great Stories; two at The Age, one by Lisa Gorton and the other by Michelle Griffin; and an interview by Ramona Koval at the Radio National Books and Writing website, so it seemed like a good choice to begin with. I shall get round to Ron McCoy’s Sea of Diamonds (which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in 2008) and The Grand Hotel in due course.
To read the reset of my review please visit
http://anzlitlovers.com/2011/11/01/th...
To read the reset of my review please visit
http://anzlitlovers.com/2011/11/01/th...
May 1, 2024
I was hoping this book would be more about eels and less about colonial erasure and settler “ancestral land connection” on stolen land yawwwwwwn
October 21, 2024
In my review of Gregory Day's most recent novel A Sand Archive, I expressed my dissatisfaction with a kind of Catholic mysticism that I detected beneath that book's concerns with French notions of revolution and environmental harmony. Going back now to read his first novel, The Patron Saint of Eels, my suspicions are confirmed: there is, indeed, a layer of mysticism in Day's writing that hangs heavily over his stories.
In The Patron Saint of Eels, this Catholic mysticism takes the form of Fra Ionio, a three-hundred-year-old Italian saint who travels back and forth between his heavenly mirror-world of Stellanuova and wherever eels, for some reason, are in trouble. This strange mission brings him to the fictional town of Mangowak, located on the Great Ocean Road, where flooding has trapped a great mass of eels in ditches, where they cry out in pain and anxiety.
The story itself is told from the perspective of a local man, Noel Lea, who is close Platonic friends with Nanette Burns. After rescuing the eels by leading them back to the river, Fra Ionio spends the rest of his time on earth, before his ladder back to Stellanuova opens up again, talking to Noel and Nan about his past: his miraculous resurrection of a crop of eels three hundred years earlier in Italy, the immigration of his entire town to Australia after WWII, and his previous visit to Mangowak to persuade another local man, Ron McCoy, to stop building a destructive weir that would block the migration of the eels. (McCoy is the protagonist of Day's follow-up novel, Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds, the second in the Mangowak trilogy.)
Much of the story thus unfolds didactically, with Day committing the rookie mistake of telling rather than showing his readers the bulk of his story. I was unimpressed by the novel's politics, not just its obvious Catholic mysticism and grotesquely naïve romanticism, but also its colonial notions of belonging and history. Take this deeply problematic passage, for instance:
"I said to Ron once that if a ghost of an old Wathaurong tribe member turned up back here one day, Ron’d be the only one he could have a proper yarn with. About the place. I said it to tease him but he took me seriously and said it was probably true. ‘I’ve got nothing against the blackfellas,’ he said to me on another occasion, ‘but just because they’re dead round here doesn’t mean they were perfect.'"
One might defend Day by saying that his portrayal of the Indigenous cultures in this instance is sympathetic, but I lean toward the view that this kind of romantic melancholy is really just a disavowed form of the racist colonial trope of the "dying race".
Nan's casual racism toward Italians does not help this impression, either. Initially, she keeps referring to Fra Ionio as "Iomio", and when Noel points out her mistake she says blithely:
"‘Ah well, whatever. Those wog names,’ she whispered with an ocker jest, ‘they all sound the same to me. No matter who he is.’"
Again, this remark might be dismissed as merely a bit of humor, an "ocker jest" as Day puts it, but its true function, intended or otherwise, is to repeat longstanding ethnic prejudices against immigrants.
For me, then, The Patron Saint of Eels fails as both a novella and as a political statement. Its romanticism supposedly leads the reader toward a greater respect for nature and the environment, but in so doing Day also recycles colonial and anti-immigrant prejudices. There is a dangerous conservatism, in short, that lurks beneath the benevolent surface of this literary vision, one that seeks to trick us into believe that it is not what it really is: a wolf in sheep's clothing.
In The Patron Saint of Eels, this Catholic mysticism takes the form of Fra Ionio, a three-hundred-year-old Italian saint who travels back and forth between his heavenly mirror-world of Stellanuova and wherever eels, for some reason, are in trouble. This strange mission brings him to the fictional town of Mangowak, located on the Great Ocean Road, where flooding has trapped a great mass of eels in ditches, where they cry out in pain and anxiety.
The story itself is told from the perspective of a local man, Noel Lea, who is close Platonic friends with Nanette Burns. After rescuing the eels by leading them back to the river, Fra Ionio spends the rest of his time on earth, before his ladder back to Stellanuova opens up again, talking to Noel and Nan about his past: his miraculous resurrection of a crop of eels three hundred years earlier in Italy, the immigration of his entire town to Australia after WWII, and his previous visit to Mangowak to persuade another local man, Ron McCoy, to stop building a destructive weir that would block the migration of the eels. (McCoy is the protagonist of Day's follow-up novel, Ron McCoy's Sea of Diamonds, the second in the Mangowak trilogy.)
Much of the story thus unfolds didactically, with Day committing the rookie mistake of telling rather than showing his readers the bulk of his story. I was unimpressed by the novel's politics, not just its obvious Catholic mysticism and grotesquely naïve romanticism, but also its colonial notions of belonging and history. Take this deeply problematic passage, for instance:
"I said to Ron once that if a ghost of an old Wathaurong tribe member turned up back here one day, Ron’d be the only one he could have a proper yarn with. About the place. I said it to tease him but he took me seriously and said it was probably true. ‘I’ve got nothing against the blackfellas,’ he said to me on another occasion, ‘but just because they’re dead round here doesn’t mean they were perfect.'"
One might defend Day by saying that his portrayal of the Indigenous cultures in this instance is sympathetic, but I lean toward the view that this kind of romantic melancholy is really just a disavowed form of the racist colonial trope of the "dying race".
Nan's casual racism toward Italians does not help this impression, either. Initially, she keeps referring to Fra Ionio as "Iomio", and when Noel points out her mistake she says blithely:
"‘Ah well, whatever. Those wog names,’ she whispered with an ocker jest, ‘they all sound the same to me. No matter who he is.’"
Again, this remark might be dismissed as merely a bit of humor, an "ocker jest" as Day puts it, but its true function, intended or otherwise, is to repeat longstanding ethnic prejudices against immigrants.
For me, then, The Patron Saint of Eels fails as both a novella and as a political statement. Its romanticism supposedly leads the reader toward a greater respect for nature and the environment, but in so doing Day also recycles colonial and anti-immigrant prejudices. There is a dangerous conservatism, in short, that lurks beneath the benevolent surface of this literary vision, one that seeks to trick us into believe that it is not what it really is: a wolf in sheep's clothing.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 17, 2017
Gorgeous little book that literally fell off the shelf. Lovely way of writing that reminds me of home brewed coffee from pottery cups
May 2, 2020
This was 181 pages of what exactly?
This. Book. Was. Strange
This. Book. Was. Strange
December 25, 2020
A charming Aussie novella that successfully takes the reader out of one’s daily problems in a way that works nicely. Not like anything else, well written, sometimes beautiful, especially the nature writing.
August 3, 2017
3 1/2 stars really. Not sure why its deemed as a fable.. I enjoyed it. The sense of place , believable people, make me sure I will look out the next two in the series.
October 23, 2022
Quite an enjoyable read with an inventive conceit.
May 6, 2011
I'm a bit at a loss as to how to go about describing this book. It is clearly a fable, though one with a distinctly Australian tilt to it. The pacing is slow almost to the point of being glacial, but the writing is superb, painting beautiful pictures of the landscape. It is probably a good thing that it is a rather slim volume, though, because I don't know if I would've held on to finish it if it had been very much longer.
The story begins when the narrator hears a strange noise following a heavy rainstorm one night. In the morning, he discovers that the ditches along the road outside his home are filled with eels, apparently washed out of a nearby swamp by the heavy rain. The sudden abundance of eels becomes the focus of the community for the rest of the day, but that night a stranger appears, who calms the eels that thrash about in the ditches and leads them to their home in the river.
The rest of the story explores the fantastic identity of this stranger, and his interactions with the narrator and his friend. Their conversation is an exploration of philosophy and a discussion of the nature of reality. While this discussion is interesting, I'm not really sure exactly what lessons we're meant to take from them.
The story begins when the narrator hears a strange noise following a heavy rainstorm one night. In the morning, he discovers that the ditches along the road outside his home are filled with eels, apparently washed out of a nearby swamp by the heavy rain. The sudden abundance of eels becomes the focus of the community for the rest of the day, but that night a stranger appears, who calms the eels that thrash about in the ditches and leads them to their home in the river.
The rest of the story explores the fantastic identity of this stranger, and his interactions with the narrator and his friend. Their conversation is an exploration of philosophy and a discussion of the nature of reality. While this discussion is interesting, I'm not really sure exactly what lessons we're meant to take from them.
December 9, 2011
Noel is woken one night to the sound of hundreds of eels sloshing about in the roadside ditches, having been washed out of the river by a recent string of heavy rains. It’s the most exciting thing to have happened in this tiny Australian town for ages, but even more remarkable is the stranger who appears the following night, chanting and ringing his bell for the eels. Noel and his friend Nanette spend the next day talking with the stranger. While it’s clear this is supposed to be a fable, the lessons are vague. My best guess is "stop complaining and do something about your problems" but then at other times it seems to be "relax and go with the flow". So I dunno. Not a whole lot happens in this book - in fact, basically nothing happens - but I enjoyed the descriptions of the Australian bush. I wouldn’t mind living in a fire tower overlooking such lands. All the same, it’s a quick read, so if you’re looking for something different from your normal fare, this might just fit the bill.
October 26, 2016
I enjoyed this short moral tale/fable. As a non-Australian, it gave me a real sense of the locality and the people of this small town in Victoria. It was the snippets we were given about their lives that particularly held me. The story involved the miraculous appearance of a saint from the distant past to save eels trapped in a ditch - but the fantasy element of the saint was balanced by the very ordinariness of the problem and the solution. Similarly, the morals of the story (like magic is everywhere if we look and understand the world about us) were very clear, but never laboured.
January 7, 2016
I don’t usually enjoy novels that employ the supernatural, but this is a small gem. Set in western Victoria, it describes how eels need to escape from a swamp (that is going to be drained for development) and reach the river. An Italian saint (Fra Ionio) appears in the town to help. The writer affectionately creates the small town characters (and the all-too-human saint himself) and demonstrates a love of the Australian landscape.
January 12, 2011
Such a nice short book and a lovely story. Happy and sad and surreal. Sorry for my limited description. Worth reading - even if Ian from book group was sceptical. :)
May 9, 2012
Despised it in high school however I found it sweet on the second read.
February 7, 2015
G'Day,
I really like this book, from this award winning Aussie author. Well Done Gregory Day.
G'Day mate
CYA later,
Namaste,
Happy Jack :):
I really like this book, from this award winning Aussie author. Well Done Gregory Day.
G'Day mate
CYA later,
Namaste,
Happy Jack :):
December 12, 2016
My favourite line in the book: "Faith is the gravity of Heaven." Such a beautiful story. Loved it.
July 12, 2016
Poetic, gentle and refreshing.
December 21, 2016
3.5 stars
March 23, 2010
This is a beautiful book. I loved every minute of reading it.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews