Seven women and three men leave the city to avoid a pandemic. They isolate together in a local farm, where they pass the time working, flirting, eating, drinking, making music and above all telling stories. It happened in Florence in 1351, during the Plague, and gave us Boccaccio’s Decameron.
Welcome to the August 30th stop on the blog tour for The Lockdown Tales by Alan Whelan with Goddess Fish Promotions. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for spotlights, reviews, author guest posts, and a giveaway! More on that at the end of this post.
Please note that this post contains affiliate links, which means there is no additional cost to you if you shop using my links, but I will earn a small percentage in commission. A program-specific disclaimer is at the bottom of this post.
Author Guest Post
In February 2020, just as Covid-19 was starting to make headlines, my housemate bought a place of her own and moved out. That left me rattling round alone in a three-bedroom house.
When the lockdown came, it was like the wind changing when you’re pulling some bizarre facial expression: suddenly that face is fixed and you can’t go back to normal till the wind changes again. So my parents used to tell me, anyway. So lockdown meant my home and for that matter my relationship status wasn’t going to change till the wind changes again.
I’ve spent the lockdown so far living on my own. That’s been weird for me. I like having people about me and usually there are. Flirting and getting more serious, talking and trying to make people laugh is my life. Until March 2020.
The Lockdown Tales is my first fruit from that solitary time. Life stops, so a writer writes. Though I minded not being interrupted, it’s ideal for writing.
The Lockdown Tales borrows the framework of a 700-year old book about another pandemic: the bubonic plague and its impact on Florence in 1347 and 1348. That book is Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, that came out in 1353. In the Decameron ten people, seven women and three men, leave the city while the plague rages and go to the country, where they flirt, drink, eat, dance, make music and tell each other stories. After ten days, with ten people, there are a hundred stories.
The interesting thing about the Decameron, apart from its excellence, is that few people remember that its background is the Black Death. That’s because it’s a collection of stories that people would want to tell each other in a hard time: often funny, sometimes sad, often bawdy, sometimes satirical. They show people trying to be noble and generous in hard times to the best of their ability, and they are as far from depressing or miserable as Boccaccio knew how to be.
I took none of Boccaccio’s stories, nor any of his characters, but I borrowed his framework and something of his attitude. So in 2020 seven women and three men go to stay on a farm owned by the richest of them, Gail, a real estate agent. Some are unemployed, or doing precarious shiftwork. Some are professionals. Not all are white, or heterosexual. My cast is more diverse than Boccaccio’s.
But their goals are the same. They want to stay safe, and they want to do well by each other in hard times. In The Lockdown Tales some end relationships and others start them, they learn to trust and rely on each other, and above all, they tell stories to keep each other sane.
It’s not a preachy book, but there is an underlying value that runs through the story of the ten women and men, and the stories that they tell: it’s that kindness, cleverness, courage and hope are better than their alternatives.
The book isn’t a fictional misery memoir. It recognizes that the virus kills people and damages those it doesn’t kill. But it’s mostly about people living and looking out for each other. That is not at all a naïve observation. It’s realistic, and that’s my genre, probably: comic realism.
Realism is not despair, and despair is not a way of facing up to reality. It’s a way of refusing to engage with it.
Early in the lockdown there were, at least in Australia, selfish idiots who scoured the supermarkets for meat and pasta and bought up all the toilet paper they could find. Some of them apparently intended to sell their stock on the roadside for twice the price. So for a while I was feeling bad about the decency and intelligence of my fellow citizens.
But I went shopping in the local supermarket, and saw a guy standing by his car, outside. He’d managed to get some stock of toilet paper, and he was giving the rolls away, especially to old people who’d never win a trolley fight with an idiot. He had a lot of grateful customers, and no one paid more than a smile.
I don’t know who that guy is. But when I was writing, I thought of him often. The Lockdown Tales is a book about a hard time that has hurt many of us, including me, but it’s a book of hope.
About the Book
The Lockdown Tales
Disobedience, Love, Patience and Other Stories
by Alan Whelan
Published 6 January 2021
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Page Count: 302
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!
Seven women and three men leave the city to avoid a pandemic. They isolate together in a local farm, where they pass the time working, flirting, eating, drinking, making music and above all telling stories. It happened in Florence in 1351, during the Plague, and gave us Boccaccio’s Decameron.
Seven hundred years later, in Australia, it happens again. The stories are very different, but they’re still bawdy, satirical, funny and sometimes sad, and they celebrate human cleverness, love, courage and imagination.
“Alan Whelan brings us a clever, sensual and sometimes poignant collection of stories that would make Boccaccio proud”
– Tangea Tansley, author of A Question of Belonging
“An old frame for a sharp new snapshot of contemporary Australia”
– Leigh Swinbourne, author of Shadow in the Forest
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Excerpt
My instinct makes me want to stay away from people who are too sad, and I keep Bob away from them too. I know that’s not the kind thing to do, but people who are very messed up frighten me. I have the idea – I know it’s irrational – that some of their sickness or disfigurement or bad luck will rub off on me, or onto Bob. So I often keep away, even when I know I should probably help.
But Tracy pulled me into her life, a little. I wasn’t a friend; I don’t think she had any friends. I knew her because she went to a mothers’ group in Petersham, and I went to their meetings too. It wasn’t a very practical group. Nobody swapped or passed on highchairs and walkers and other baby equipment, and no one really shared tips on looking after kids. It was just a bunch of women drinking coffee after school, talking about nothing much and watching the kids play together. Bob was two, and Tracy’s son Bylan was seven, so, like Tracy and me, they didn’t have much to do with each other.
She and I only had one conversation before her life started heading downhill. She spoke to me, I think, because I was the second poorest woman there, after her. I mean, the other women were income-poor but they’d mostly had better jobs, or an employed partner, or both, before they found themselves on their own with a kid. They had more stuff, like clothes and a car and so on. I didn’t, so although Tracy was older than me she saw me as closest to her.
About the Author
Alan Whelan lives in the Blue Mountains of NSW, Australia. He’s been a political activist, mainly on homelessness, landlord-tenant issues and unemployment, and a public servant writing social policy for governments. He’s now a free-lance writer, editor and researcher.
His story, There Is, was short-listed for the Newcastle Short Story Award in June 2020, and appeared in their 2020 anthology. His story, Wilful Damage, won a Merit Prize in the TulipTree Publications (Colorado) September 2020 Short Story Competition, and appears in their anthology, Stories that Need to be Told. It was nominated by the publisher for the 2021 Pushcart Prize.
His book The Lockdown Tales, using Boccaccio’s Decameron framework to show people living with the Covid-19 lockdown, is now on sale in paperback and ebook.
His novels, Harris in Underland and Blood and Bone are soon to be sent to publishers. He is currently working on the sequel to The Lockdown Tales and will then complete the sequel to Harris in Underland.
Alan Whelan co-wrote the book, New Zealand Republic, and has had journalism and comment pieces published in The New Zealand Listener and every major New Zealand newspaper, plus The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald.
He wrote two books for the NZ Government: Renting and You and How to Buy Your Own Home. His stories also appear in Stories of Hope, a 2020 anthology to raise funds for Australian bushfire victims, and other anthologies.
His website is alanwhelan.org. He tweets as @alannwhelan.
His phone number is +61 433 159 663. Enthusiastic acceptances and emphatic rejections, also thoughtful questions, are generally sent by email to alan@alanwhelan.org.
Giveaway Alert!
Alan Whelan will be awarding a $15 Amazon or Barnes & Noble gift card to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.
a Rafflecopter giveaway| June 7 | Christine Young | June 7 | Long and Short Reviews |
| June 14 | Literary Gold | June 21 | Seven Troublesome Sisters |
| June 28 | Fabulous and Brunette | July 12 | Straight From the Library |
| July 19 | Candrel’s Crafts, Cooks, and Characters | July 19 | All the Ups and Downs |
| July 26 | Viviana MacKade | August 2 | The Avid Reader |
| August 2 | Novels Alive | August 9 | Hope. Dreams. Life… Love |
| August 16 | Independent Authors | August 23 | Archaeolibrarian – I Dig Good Books! |
| August 30 | Westveil Publishing |
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Thanks for hosting!
Alan Whelan is new to me, but I love meeting new authors. Thanks to this blog for the introduction.
This author is a new one to me, thank the book tour for making me aware. This book looks very interesting.
Sounds like a great read.
Sounds like a very good book.
Thank you for those kind comments!
This is my first book of full-length fiction, though I’ve had short stories in anthologies, and even won literary awards, which is nice.
But this is my first full-length fiction book, all on my own.
If you have any questions about me or the book, I’d be happy to answer as best I can! I like meeting readers!
Best regards to you all.