A Cruel Bouquet: 'The Commandant' by Jessica Anderson

The surreal (previous post) reminds me of the image which ended up on Jessica Anderson's The Commandant. Part of Text Classics, a series I have been working on over the last 18 months, it was by an author I was barely aware of, though I knew the famous title of another novel of hers, Tirra Lirra by the River.

I found it a tremendously impressive work (introduced by Carmen Callil) – Anderson's prose has great verve and style, a flexible and, in this book at least, a kind of contained power, as if she was keeping a tight rein in case any sloppy move might cause the explosive subject matter to blow up.

From the blurb: "The penal colony of Moreton Bay is under the command of Patrick Logan, a man not afraid of brutal discipline. But his rule is being questioned and the arrival of his sister-in-law Frances will change everything. The Commandant is an unforgettable tale of power, duty and humanity."

My first attempt: I combined a banana symbolising Queensland (the red marks represented the cruelty, the floggings) and a Trigridia pavonia, the Tiger flower that makes an appearance at a crucial moment. There is something satisfying about the intersection of the vertical and the crescent – it echos the hammer and sickle, but more tenuously it also suggests to me some of Raphael's Virgins, like the Colonna Madonna. The pillar of Mary cradling the Child in the scoop of her arm. Of course, this has nothing to do with The Commandant, but it does explain why the composition exerts a charm on me.

 

But, oh, but. The author's estate put its foot down and firmly pointed out that Yes, we had no bananas in Queensland in 1835, when the story was set. It was no use arguing that one of the central design ideas for the series was to contemporarise the appeal of the books. Visual anachronism was sought after, even. As these things happen, the problem moment was compounded by the non-approval arriving late, so late that I was left with a day and a half to fix it, get final approval and send it off to the printers.

So long Andy. The symbolic banana was replaced by a literal cat o' nine talis, a period graphic which I repurposed. Used in green and grafted with Tigridia pavonia blossoms it became a kinetic bouquet, the beauty threaded into the violence. The red and palest pink of the blooms helplessly calls up white flesh and blood.

I did an interview with Shearer's Bookshop in Sydney about designing the Classics, and the lovely interviewer misheard me and gave me this immortal quote:

"Jessica Anderson’s The Commandant is like reading Jane Austen with wit."

What I said was: "Jessica Anderson’s The Commandant is like reading Jane Austen with WHIPS."