‘Internal’ exile is in fashion, and that’s where I’m headed this summer

A few weeks ago, we took a small tribe of children to see Home Alone at the Sydney Opera House, with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performing the score live as the movie played on a large screen behind the musicians.

I was the only member of our party never to have seen the film before (a cause of much consternation to the others) and I was delighted.

Reading is such a simple pleasure. It’s my favourite route to inner exile.Credit: Matt Davidson

A story of rupture and reconciliation, a romp, a gentle tale about self-reliance and grit, all topped with a cameo from John Candy – a film doesn’t need anything more than that to be perfect. The experience of being in the sold-out Concert Hall with a full orchestra was transporting, and there was even a live choir singing the Christmassy parts at the end.

The audience was encouraged to be vocal in response to the film and the music, and we were. When the lights went up, I didn’t want to leave. The communal sensory experience had taken me outside time and place, and I wanted to stay there for a while longer.

In recent months, I have been reading about the concept of “internal exile” or “internal emigration”. The term comes from the Russian, “vnutrennaya emigratsia” and means a sort of travelling into oneself, to take comfort in small pleasures – often solitary pleasures of the mind, like reading, or listening to music, or gardening or making a pleasant home.

It was popularised during the Soviet era when life was so grim and resistance so futile that citizens needed to look inwards for comfort if they were to find any.

It began circulating again in the context of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where, it was reported recently, social despair is so widespread that mortality from alcoholism has surged, even for a country that has traditionally high rates of alcohol consumption.

“Internal emigration is a way of retreating into yourself and shutting out the world along with everything that annoys or upsets you,” Viv Groskop wrote in an article for the New York Review in 2019.

Of course, some American writers have proposed it in response to the election, again, of Donald Trump as US president. There is a general feeling of resigned exhaustion among even the most vehemently anti-MAGA Americans. It’s tiring to fight all the time, and it doesn’t make a difference anyway.

There has been some hand-wringing among liberals as to whether this sort of disconnection – in service of art, and the soul – is a cop-out.

Some of us have been practising internal emigration for years – we didn’t need a dictator or a wannabe dictator to force us into it. My favourite route to inner exile is reading – and this year I have read piles of fiction in service of my travels.

Reading is, for my money, the best way to leave a situation, at least temporarily, even if you have to stay put in it physically.

When I published a novel in 2021, the best compliments I had were from readers (mostly women) who told me they neglected their families and household labour to keep reading it.

I am always interested to read the end-of-year articles about what politicians have read and enjoyed during the year, and what they will read over the break. How truthful are they in this accounting, and how much of it is image-projection?

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told The Australian that Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs (a book of essays by the British author about the personal meaning of his chosen songs) was one of his favourites this year. Albanese also read Michael Easson’s biography of the first Labor prime minister, In Search of John Christian Watson.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton told The Australian he greatly enjoyed How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates. Over summer, he will read Think Twice, by US thriller writer Harlan Coben. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles favours biographies of historical American presidents, and deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley plans to read Hillbilly Elegy, the memoir of US Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.

One of the reasons I read mostly fiction is that I don’t want to be fed information – I get quite enough of that at work. But the sneaky thing about novels is that they end up teaching you anyway, by taking you into wildly different worlds and exposing you to the interiority of strange people.

The two most instructive novels I have read this year were Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize), and True Grit, by Charles Portis.

Stone Yard Devotional is a first-person novel about an agnostic woman who retreats to a convent in the Monaro Plains and contemplates death a lot. It is about stillness, deep thought and quiet connections with the people who form our small societies – all things which are hugely counter-cultural in the energy-dense and horribly busy world we inhabit.

True Grit is a 1968 Western about a girl who sets out to avenge the murder of her father in the post-Civil War badlands of Arkansas. Its protagonist and narrator, Mattie Ross, has the true grit of the title, and apart from being a gasp-inducing wild adventure (complete with a pit of rattlesnakes and a lot of shoot-outs), and containing one of the greatest characters ever written (the ageing, hard-drinking, one-eyed deputy US Marshal Rooster Cogburn, memorably portrayed by John Wayne in the 1969 movie), the book made me contemplate the nature of toughness.

Toughness in the sense of an unyielding, stubborn refusal to ever, ever give up. This sort of toughness is perhaps the opposite of internal exile, but I am determined to take an odyssey inwards this summer. Toughness can wait until January.

My exile starts with the book that is beckoning from my bedside table – The Light Years, the first of the Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard. The chronicles are a five-book family saga: just the thing to take me away for a good length of time.

Merry Christmas.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.