Australian Book Review, October 2020 issue, no. 425 by Australian Book Review

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The Twitter mob

Johanna Leggatt

Gail Jones

Sue Kossew

Black Americans and the GOP

Michael L. Ondaatje

Spies in Australia Sheila Fitzpatrick

The paradox of Donald Trump

Timothy J. Lynch

Bodies in motion

Paul Muldoon on the pandemic, the economy and the dictator

Advances Clive James to the end

All about Yves

Advances was surprised when Geoffrey Lehmann – in ABR prizes have over the years attracted much interest from introducing his contribution to one of our ‘Poetry for Troubled local publishers, with a number of prize-winning or shortlisted Times’ podcasts – said that he’d chosen Emily Dickinson’s essays and short stories leading to book contracts. poem ‘At Half Past Three, A Single Bird’ partly because it was ABR is delighted that Yves Rees, winner of the 2020 Calthe only poem he knew off by heart. And there we were – poor ibre Essay Prize, will publish a memoir with Allen & Unwin. prosaic Advances – naïvely imagining that poets had reams of The book, titled All About Yves: Notes from a transition, will exthe stuff by heart and that as they pounded the beaches or, in pand on Yves’s gender transition and ‘journey of re-becoming’ the Victorian context, trudged around their local ovals they as explored in ‘Reading the Mess Backwards’, which appeared chanted Shakespeare sonnets to the indifferent seagulls. Not in our June–July issue. Jane Palfreyman, a publisher at Allen & so, apparently. Unwin, commented, ‘Yves Rees already has a stunning repuMost welcome then is a posthutation as a writer, historian, commenmous collection by Clive James, who tator and public intellectual, and my proves prolific even in death. James, colleagues and I are hugely proud to who died in November 2019 after be bringing their personal story to a final decade of amazing fecundity Australian readers.’ despite immense health problems, Yves Rees also read the winning had compiled a volume of some of the essay for a recent episode of the ABR most memorable poems in the EngPodcast, available on our website. lish language, his aim being ‘to provide All About Yves will be published in ammunition that will satisfy the early 2022. reader’s urge to get on his or her feet and declaim’. The Fire of Joy (Picador, Podcast chat $34.99 pb) contains ‘roughly 80 poems How timely it was for us to revive the to get by heart and say aloud’. ABR Podcast at the beginning of 2020 Certain poems select themselves: – this year of contemplative isolation. ones like John Donne’s ‘The Sun In recent weeks, aficionados will have Rising’, George Herbert’s ‘Love III’, noticed a more interlocutory bent a famous oneiric gift by Coleridge, in the podcast. Felicity Plunkett and Emily Dickinson herself of course Jack Callil were in conversation about (‘There’s a certain Slant of light’), and Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet (Felicity ‘An Arundel Tomb’ by Philip Larkin reviews Summer, the final volume, on (whom James rates ‘the greatest Engpage 23), and Jack also interviewed lish poet since Marvell’). We also have James Bradley about his review of Thomas Wyatt’s ‘They Flee From Me’, David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue most beauteous of them all perhaps. (published in the September issue). Happily, a quarter of the poems Apropos of other content in this Yves Rees don’t seem automatic, and here Clive issue, stay tuned for Peter Rose’s inJames’s wide reading and sentimental terviews with Johanna Leggatt about leanings introduce some novelties, poems by Brian Howard, Twitter and ‘cancel culture’, and with Michael L. Ondaatje on Edmund Wilson, and Dorothy Parker among them. the subject of black Americans’ attitudes towards the RepubliIt’s good, in her centenary year, to meet Gwen Harwood, can Party. to whose inimitable gifts James was rightly alert: ‘She had the invaluable gift of musicality … [and] was theatrical to ‘Radical, inclusive, rebellious’ her roots’. Allen & Unwin has a new imprint, Joan, to be curated by James was always a champion of Stephen Edgar, and the writer, actor, and director Nakkiah Lui, a Gamillaroi and Torres Sydney poet closes the anthology. ‘When I look through the Strait Islander woman. Joan, named after Lui’s grandmother, splendor of Edgar’s work,’ he notes, ‘I often wish I were [Edbears the motto ‘Radical, inclusive, rebellious’ and will commisgar], but you can’t have everything.’ sion books across all genres. ‘I want Joan to help create space Quite! He was only and ever Clive James, abidingly so. At for the voices that get pushed to the fringes,’ said Lui, ‘because the end of his postscript (‘Growing up in poetical Australia’), when our most vulnerable follow their dreams, they create he writes, ‘I chose the right spot to be born, just as I chose the limitless dreams for the rest of us.’ [Advances continues on page 6] right profession – poetry – and followed it to the end.’ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Australian Book Review October 2020, no. 425

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published ten times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Editor and CEO Peter Rose editor@australianbookreview.com.au Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu abr@australianbookreview.com.au Digital Editor Jack Callil digital@australianbookreview.com.au Business Manager Grace Chang business@australianbookreview.com.au Development Consultant Christopher Menz development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Judith Bishop) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Ian Dickson, Rae Frances, Colin Golvan, Billy Griffiths, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (NSW, 2019) | Sarah Walker (Vic., 2019) Declan Fry (Vic., 2020) Monash University Interns Vivian Lai-Tran, Elizabeth Streeter

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Volunteers Clancy Balen, Alan Haig, John Scully Image credits and information Page 21: Kalgoorlie Super Pit, Gold Mine, Western Australia (photograph by Genevieve Vallee /Alamy) 2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

ABR October 2020 LETTERS

Kyle Wilson, Lindy Warrell, David Malone, Al MacDonald, Roger Rees

COMMENTARY

7 18 39 54

Paul Muldoon The pandemic, the economy, and the dictator Johanna Leggatt The problem of belonging Michael L. Ondaatje Black and Republican in the age of Trump Paul Hetherington Belated recognition of Australian prose poetry & Cassandra Atherton

UNITED STATES

Timothy J. Lynch

Three books on the paradox of Donald J. Trump

POLITICS

Luke Stegemann

Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum

HISTORY

13 14 42 49 53

Sheila Fitzpatrick Adam Wakeling Jim Davidson Peter McPhee Simon Caterson

Traitors and Spies by John Fahey Dunera Lives, Volume II by Ken Inglis et al. Under the Rainbow by Richard Broinowski A New World Begins by Jeremy D. Popkin Burning the Books by Richard Ovenden

DOCUMENTARY & TELEVISION

16 51

Josh Krook Moya Costello

The Social Dilemma Creating Australian Television Drama by Susan Lever

POEMS

20 38 52

Brian Henry Louis Klee Kate Lilley

‘Same Mind’ ‘Actually Existing Australia’ ‘For Noting’

FICTION

22 23 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 32

Sue Kossew Felicity Plunkett James Antoniou J.R. Burgmann Michael Shmith Jo Case Andrew McLeod Kirsten Tranter Elizabeth Bryer Thuy On

Our Shadows by Gail Jones Summer by Ali Smith The Tolstoy Estate by Steven Conte The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson Trio by William Boyd Bluebird by Malcolm Knox The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis Piranesi by Susanna Clarke Broken Rules and Other Stories by Barry Lee Thompson Three wildly different Young Adult novels

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

34 35 36 37 50 61

Sylvia Martin Tali Lavi Jane Sullivan Francesca Sasnaitis Aaron Nyerges Diana Simmonds

Vida by Jacqueline Kent The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku Max by Alex Miller The Time of Our Lives by Robert Dessaix Chasing the Light by Oliver Stone How I Clawed My Way to the Middle by John Wood

INTERVIEWS

45 62

Sandy Grant Richard Fidler

Publisher of the Month Open Page

CLASSICS

Greta Hawes

Antigone Rising by Helen Morales

ENVIRONMENT

Timothy Neale Body Count by Paddy Manning Fire by Stephen J. Pyne

POETRY

55 56

Judith Bishop Anders Villani

Change Machine by Jaya Savige Tilt by Kate Lilley

LITERARY STUDIES

Graham Tulloch

The Mystery of Charles Dickens by A.N. Wilson

CZECH REPUBLIC

Christopher Menz

The Golden Maze by Richard Fidler

SCIENCE

Diane Stubbings

The Genes That Make Us by Edwin Kirk

PHILOSOPHY

Janna Thompson

Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment by Karen Green

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Peter Goldsworthy

Australian Poetry 1986, edited by Vivian Smith AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Our partners

Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; ; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

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Ultimo Press

There’s another new imprint, this time from Hardie Grant, whose co-founder and CEO Sandy Grant is the subject of this month’s Publisher of the Month on page 45. Ultimo Press will be based in Sydney and led by former HarperCollins ANZ CEO James Kellow. ‘Our ambition is serious,’ Kellow said in a statement. ‘We want to become home to Australia’s most original and creative storytellers, but we also want to be distinctive, a little bit different, to disrupt and to have fun.’ Sandy Grant noted that Kellow’s aim at Ultimo Press is to ‘create a modern, exciting, and global trade publishing list’ and said that Hardie Grant sees Ultimo Press as ‘distinct, independent and free to pursue its ambitions backed by our broader business’.

Sober voices

Doomsday

Dear Editor, Thank you, thank you, thank you, James Ley (ABR, August 2020). I was beginning to think that nobody else could see the doom ahead with the changes that are escalating under the current federal government. I am in my late seventies, and my heart cries for this country as I watch it being decimated socially, culturally, and, it must be added, physically with fires and the absence of action on global warming. The ignorance of those poor souls who consider their insistence on baring their faces during a pandemic greater than the need to have compassion for others is surely an early sign of what things will look like in the long term with the disintegration of critique and creativity in our society. Lindy Warrell (online comment) Dear Editor, In Australia, the perception that classical music is the music of privilege has a genuine basis in the cost borne by parents for either private music lessons or private school fees. Instrumental music is the gateway for lifelong engagement with music as participants and audience members. The fact that it hardly features in our state school system, that there is nothing like the government support provided to sport for children, and that there is so little public pride in the achievements of our musical heroes leaves us behind many other developed countries, 6 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

As we went to press, entries were pouring in for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, now worth a total of $10,000. We seem to be on track for a record field (last year we received about 1,000 entries). The Prize closes on October 1. We look forward to publishing the five shortlisted poems in our January–February issue. Meanwhile, the Calibre Essay Prize, now in its fifteenth year, will open on October 15, with a closing date of January 15. Once again we are looking for original non-fiction essays ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words. Full details about the Calibre Essay Prize will be available on our website from October 15.

Letters

Dear Editor, Many thanks for Ben Bland’s judicious and trenchant review of Hidden Hand: Exposing how the Chinese Communist Party is reshaping the world by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg (ABR, September 2020). Sober but informed voices are acutely needed in this debate. Kyle Wilson (online comment)

Music as a gateway

Prizes galore

including both the United Kingdom and the United States. David Malone (online comment) Dear Editor, In the United States we find ourselves with music education budgets being cut regularly and an emphasis on the STEM curriculum (science, technology, engineering, math). Efforts to add arts (STEAM) have not made much progress. We are ‘educating’ a generation whose only goal is to learn ‘useful’ skills and get a decent job. Arts and humanities are too often considered frivolous. Al MacDonald, Denver, USA

A necessary fillip

Dear Editor, It was heartening to read in your commentary ‘Thinking in Headlines’ (ABR, September 2020) that during the pandemic you are beginning each day with a different poem by Wallace Stevens – ‘a necessary fillip’, as you put it. In my trauma practice, I have used lines or whole stanzas from poems to help repair people who have been traumatised. We learn how tender language generally improves information flow and enhances the chance of rational decision-making. I am not familiar with Stevens’s poetry, but some of his lines clearly offer a fork in the road and might lessen the focus on their trauma. Similarly, your reference to Frank Kermode’s notion of banalisation (‘How many times can we speculate about what Covid clings to without going mad?’) challenges us to disrupt our gloom and to develop a more constructive, if not alternative, way of thinking. This is what poets such as Rosemary Dobson, David Campbell, David Malouf, and Peter Rose do endlessly. As Seamus Heaney wrote in his poem ‘Fosterling’, ‘So long for air to brighten, / Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.’ Roger Rees, Goolwa, SA

Comment

Bodies in motion

The pandemic, the economy, and the dictator

by Paul Muldoon

‘H

ealthy People Gather for Your Freedom.’ So read the sign held proudly aloft by a young woman at a protest against coronavirus restrictions on ‘Freedom Day’ in Melbourne. Drawn to the Shrine in a symbolic gesture of solidarity with those other ‘diggers’ who defended Australia against the threat of authoritarianism, she was part of a small crowd with a big message: ‘Freedom is under threat’. A bit like coronavirus itself, perhaps, ‘Freedom Day’ was an accident waiting to happen – not least of all in Victoria. No democratic government can expect to curtail freedoms without stirring up the civil libertarians (both the sane and the crazy), and the restrictions devised and enforced by the Andrews government have been more severe than most. If one is to believe former prime minister Tony Abbott, the premier of Victoria now heads up a ‘health dictatorship’ that holds five million Melburnians under ‘house arrest’. Daniel Andrews, though in truth a champion of social justice, has of late acquired the disagreeable moniker of ‘Dictator Dan’ for putting a plague city into lockdown. Seen from a purely existential perspective, the accusations and the protests are not entirely unjustified. Who would deny that the coronavirus restrictions have been oppressive and suffocating? What Melburnian doesn’t want to be released from lockdown? There is, however, an enormous difference between how lockdown feels as a lived experience and what it represents as a political reality. While accusations of a police state make for powerful rhetoric, they ultimately do little more than testify to the poverty of our political concepts in the face of the unprecedented. The more we learn about this highly contagious and uncommonly lethal virus, the more old verities like ‘liberal is good’ and ‘authoritarian is bad’ lose their power to illuminate or guide. Though it is not really to the credit of Tony Abbott, the strange amalgam ‘health dictatorship’ says a great deal about the peculiar nature of the power we have fallen under and the difficulty we have in making sense of it. Health dictatorship? That would be

a strange dictatorship indeed. Fortunately, there is a much better word for it: ‘biopower’. Although the term biopower will no doubt sound foreign to many ears, Covid-19 has given Australians (and many others around the world) a firsthand experience of it. Coined by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, biopower refers to the political regulation of life itself. In lectures given at the Collège de France in the late 1970s, Foucault linked the advent of biopower with the emergence of statistics (literally the records of the state) during the eighteenth century. As the state acquired the technical capacity to measure births, deaths, morbidity, longevity, and many other essentially biological phenomena, it finally became possible for it to know, or paint a picture of, the health of the population as a whole. Assembled serially in time, statistical information allowed governments to detect irregularities in various ‘life processes’ – birth rates, death rates, morbidity rates – and intervene in them as necessary in order to re-establish their natural equilibrium. Corresponding to the moment when the biological came under state control, suggested Foucault, it was the advent of biopower that truly marked the threshold of modernity. If the ultimate expression of state power had once been found in the ancient sovereign right to take life away (‘to put to death’), it was now found in the capacity to administer, multiply, and optimise it (‘to make live’). Modernity, on his reckoning, was the age of biopower. For Foucault, one of the clearest markers of this entry of power into life was to be found in the domains and sciences that suddenly took on political significance. The only reason, on his account, that sexuality rose to prominence as a public issue in the nineteenth century was because it served as a critical locus of life processes. As a point of connection between the organic life of the individual and the biological life of the population, sexuality assumed a strategic importance that made it more or less impossible for the state to ignore. If one could control sexuality, noted AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Foucault, one could, as argue with science.’ it were, ‘take possession And nor can you, of life’. Similarly, it was more or less. Medprecisely because the icine is not like an biological was drawn ideology, a view from into the ‘apparatuses ‘the left’ or ‘the right’, of security’ in the nineto which one might teenth century that take an in-principle medicine (especially objection. But therein the branches associated lies the difficulty – for with public hygiene) both the public and emerged as the great the opposition. How handmaiden of powis one meant to reer. As a repository spond to restrictions of knowledge about on liberty imposed both the individual oron the authority of ganism and biological science? Where does processes, medicine beone turn for guidcame an indispensable ance? aid to a power whose principal goal was to homas Hoboptimise the health and, bes might with that, the producnot be a bad tive power of the popplace to start. As the ulation. first political theoDoubtless the genrist in the Western eral public, which has tradition to attempt now spent the better to put politics on part of a year wrestling a scientific basis, with the coronavirus, Hobbes began from will need little conthe premise that huvincing of the entwineman beings were but A protester at the Freedom Day protest at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne on September 5. (Photograph by Michael Currie/Alamy Live News) ment of medicine and ‘bodies in motion’ government that is whose restlessness constitutive of biopower. The daily newspapers tell the story: ceased only in death. On his thoroughly materialist account, when it comes to the pandemic, it is not just column space that motion was the only reliable sign of life and all human activity the politicians must share with the epidemiologists, it is author- could be attributed to two fundamental drivers: desire and fear. ity as well. If the former command the rules, it is the latter who To the first could be attributed our locomotion towards things command the statistics. By now the public is also well accus- (attraction), and to the second our locomotion away from them tomed to seeing their state and federal politicians joined by their (aversion). Freedom, on Hobbes’s famously negative conception, respective chief health officers on the nightly news as the latter was to be found in the absence of external impediments to this report on infection reproduction rates, modes of transmission, motion; that is, in the silence of the laws. tolerable case numbers, and geographical hotspots. The numbers At first blush, this negative conception of liberty seems to are dictated and, in their stubborn facticity, reveal themselves as cast doubt on the merit of rules. Yet the equivalence Hobbes drew the real dictator behind the dictator. ‘You can’t argue with this between absolute liberty and total lawlessness revealed politics sort of data,’ said Andrews in justification of his refusal to ease the as a delicate balancing act between freedom and security. Left to tight restrictions under which Melbourne is suffering. ‘You can’t their own devices, he noted, bodies in motion would inevitably

Meatsplaining

The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial ‘an excellent and timely compilation on an exceedingly vexing problem.’ – Carol J. Adams 8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

come into conflict, either because they desired the same thing and fought to satisfy themselves or were fearful of one another and killed to secure themselves. Unless one was prepared to tolerate endless war among these bodies (and Hobbes wasn’t), one had no choice but to regulate their movement. In his famous work Leviathan (1651), published in the midst of the English Civil War, Hobbes elicits our support for an all-powerful sovereign who plays the role of the traffic cop, directing bodies around each other by way of those hand signals called laws. For him, the whole art of government lay in facilitating movement while avoiding collision. Convinced by his experience of the Civil War that security was a more important value than liberty, Hobbes was happy to grant the sovereign considerable discretionary power to prevent collisions between those bodies in motion (including the censorship of opinions and doctrines that fomented dissent and brought citizens into conflict with one another). But if there is much in Hobbes to justify the label of authoritarian, he might be better seen as a highly risk averse actuary for whom the pre-eminence of life over liberty was a no-brainer. What good was the latter without the former? In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, governments around the world are rediscovering the wisdom of that order of priorities. Having, with the help of the epidemiologists, become apprised of the biological risks associated with bodies in motion, they have been willing to suspend basic rights in order to limit movement and save lives. Calling up emergency powers long forgotten, but always held in reserve, even in democracies, they have introduced hitherto unseen controls upon the body in motion to ensure their citizens do not become the unwitting vectors of a disease which needs only the merest of contacts (not a violent collision) in order to kill. Current attempts by governments to control the body in motion through evening curfews, social distancing, home schooling, intimacy bubbles, travel restrictions, hotel quarantines, and all the rest go well beyond anything Hobbes imagined and thus reveal something about the distinctive nature of our current predicament. For Hobbes, the regulation of motion had no higher purpose than to stop trespasses. By clarifying what political subjects could rightly claim as their own – or, as he put it, by defining ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ – the sovereign made it clear both where the body in motion needed to stop and where the regulation of it needed to stop. Motion that did not harm, which did not result in collisions over ‘mine’ and ‘thine’, did not need to be proscribed and was in fact the basis of the vitality of the state. Since it is exercised over life itself, biopower greatly extends the need for regulating the body in motion. Concerned with the political subject, not as a potential trespasser but as a site of biological processes – in this instance that of viral transmission – it is forced to proscribe motion that does not generate collisions over ‘mine’ and ‘thine’, but which still does significant ‘harm’. Though they commit no trespasses against other individuals, bodies in motion can easily compromise attempts to safeguard life at the level of the population – not least of all, of course, in a pandemic. Hence the harsh penalties currently being imposed on actions which, under normal circumstances, would be considered the sacred right of every democratic citizen: leaving home, going to work, staying out after dark. A dictatorship this would

surely be, were it not for two things: the lack of arbitrariness in the restrictions and the great reluctance with which they are imposed.

Accusations of a police state ultimately do little more than testify to the poverty of our political concepts in the face of the unprecedented The coronavirus pandemic has shown us just how far democracies can be taken from their fundamental principles by the logic of biopower. But there is nothing inherent in this peculiarly modern form of politics that opposes it to the free motion of the body. On the contrary, since it is only by way of circulation that life continues (and, in fact, continues to proliferate and expand), biopower is actually disposed towards a kind of laissez-faire. As Foucault noted, one of the surprising discoveries of statistics was that the biological processes operative at the level of the population have their own regularities and are inclined to achieve their own equilibrium. In the absence of an exceptional event like the current pandemic, the best thing a government could do to optimise the life (and, with that, the economic power), of the population was to leave things more or less alone. Its mission was not to contain bodies and lock them down, but to ensure that they were always in motion and their circulation maintained. The reason pandemics create a crisis for democratic governments is because they place them in the paradoxical position of having to protect life from itself. In the state of emergency, life must be refused what allows it to flourish – circulation – precisely so that it can survive. Provided, therefore, he continues to follow the logic of biopower, Premier Andrews will be true to his word and will repeal the lockdown measures as soon as the infection numbers allow. Andrews is no dictator. He is just, like Hobbes, very risk averse. And who could blame him? In relation to the coronavirus, ‘once bitten, twice shy’ is not such a bad motto – as the emergence of second and third waves of infections around the world is beginning to show. With circulation comes infection and with infection comes restriction. It’s a vicious circle. This is not to say, of course, that there is no room for reasonable disagreement. When Andrews claims that you can’t argue with the data, he is only half right. The next phase of the pandemic is likely to see more scrutiny of the statistical modelling, greater precision in the classification of cases, and increased differentiation in regimes of restriction. Victoria, by necessity, has already set itself apart from the rest of Australia. Further distinctions are being made between rural and urban areas, and others relating to council wards or safe and dangerous workplaces may yet come. All of which will put pressure on the idea, crucial to national unity, that ‘we’re all in this together’. For the moment, a combination of faith in science, a sense of civic responsibility, and, of course, fear of death has prevented most healthy people from gathering for their freedom. Unlike dictatorships, biopower has logic on its side and logic is a great instrument of compliance. g Paul Muldoon is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Monash University. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Politics

The world’s most dangerous man? The paradox of Donald Trump Timothy J. Lynch

n year four of their respective terms, George W. Bush and Barack Obama enjoyed a mixed press. Some accounts lauded them, others were sceptical. The assessments were uniformly partisan. The titles of contemporary books reflected how Republicans backed Bush (he was ‘The Right Man’), Democrats Obama (for successfully ‘Bending History’). Donald Trump, on the other hand, stands as one of the most vilified presidents in American history, from all points of the spectrum. Indeed, these books together make the case that the forty-fifth president is a man so psychologically flawed he poses a clear and present danger to American democracy. These three books represent a broad, frontal assault on the Trump presidency. They come from the progressive left (Mary L. Trump), the media-left (Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig), and the right ( John Bolton). Worse for Trump supporters is the proximity each author has to their subject. These books deal in firsthand accounts of his character and behaviour, before and during his White House tenure. Given this, their accounts are not easily dismissed as ‘fake news’, as Trump has predictably done. Mary Trump is his niece. Rucker and Leonnig, journalists, have spent hours in the White House Press Room. Bolton was the president’s longest-serving national security advisor (2018–19). These are people who know Trump well in the major settings of his career: family, media, and office. They do not paint a flattering picture.

ary Trump, in her book Too Much and Never Enough: How my family created the world’s most dangerous man (Simon & Schuster, $32.99 pb, 236 pp), depicts a bipolar family. At one pole is Fred Sr, the sociopathic patriarch. At the other, the saintly Fred Jr, his elder son, Donald’s brother and the author’s father – the victim. The book is an accounting of Jr’s demise at the hands of Sr and his ‘toxic’ patriarchy. This bipolarity makes the book intelligible, predictable even, but at the price of psychological nuance. Mary’s first concern is the grinding of a familial axe. The legal travails of father and then daughter linger across the narrative. She feels, probably rightly, gypped out of her share of her family inheritance – though one suspects this book will earn her much more. The defence of her father is genuine and sustained throughout. Indeed, the book makes clear that both Fred Jr and his brother Donald were differently victimised by Fred Sr. Donald 10 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

turned his father’s bullying, status-is-everything parenting into an emotionally cold but highly successful pursuit of wealth and then power. His brother (‘Freddy’) was crushed by it, dying of alcoholism at the age of forty-two. (Donald has been resolutely teetotal, in part, in reaction to this.) Despite Mary Trump’s credentials as a trained clinical psychologist, the psychological profiling is humdrum – can there be an easier discipline to sound vaguely competent in than psychology? Bad dad produces children variously affected by that badness. The stories are voyeuristically fascinating – all family dynamics, because of their essential privacy, are. None of us knows what is really going on next door. So to be told in gory detail what afflicts America’s First Family holds the reader’s attention.

Can there be an easier discipline to sound vaguely competent in than psychology? In 1953, when Donald was seven, Freddy, in a bid to stop his young brother’s taunts, tipped a bowl of mashed potato on his head. The humiliation of this, according to Mary, still stings the president. ‘From then on,’ Mary tells us, ‘he would wield the weapon [of humiliation], never be at the sharp end of it.’ The psychological profile and compilation of anecdotes would just about hold the work together. The book is very readable, and compact. What greatly reduces its cogency is the plodding partisanship the author thinks matters to her account. This becomes a study in tedium. A fan of Hillary Clinton, ‘the most qualified presidential candidate in the history of the country’, who, like her, was denied a rightful inheritance by Donald Trump, Mary Trump wants us to know her book is animated by the justice of Hillary’s cause. Their respective accounts of being swindled by Trump have netted them millions, but, according to Mary, have cost the United States much more: lives, dignity, reputation.

or regular readers of the Washington Post, Rucker and Leonnig’s book A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s testing of America (Bloomsbury, $29.99 pb, 465 pp) may seem like déjà vu. Because it uses their reporting as a basis for the narrative, even though buttressed by subsequent research, there is much here that will sound familiar. Although they clearly disdain their subject, their account suffers less from a liberal bias than from a mood of permanent crisis. Because the book is largely assembled from their published journalism, each episode builds toward a climax that is never realised. The fierce urgency of now, which makes newspapers so compelling, is less effective in retrospective. The Mueller investigation (2017–19) is central to the narrative. Despite the effort to re-enact scenes they did not witness, this makes for some tired fare. Trump, though wounded, survived both it and the impeachment it presaged. These extensive campaigns to remove him fizzled. Yet reading this book, we get the impression that Trump’s crimes were so self-evident, so discoverable, that impeachment was bound to succeed. Democratic attempts to land the fatal blow are forever imminent and inevitable. Just one more transgression and we’ll have him. But it is Trump who endures. Allies and enemies come and go; the text offers a sure guide to the highest White House staff turnover rate in US history. But Trump’s opponents are

similarly revolving. John Mueller (a Republican), Nancy Pelosi (a Democrat), James Comey (the FBI chief sacked by Trump), and the president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen (an intimate) – none becomes the decisive or even cumulative threat the authors expect them to be. The impeachment the book builds toward but does not cover (going to press before the hearings started in February 2020) now seems such old news. Set against the myriad dislocations of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter, the attempts by ‘the Washington élite’ (Trump’s favourite opponent) to erase the result of the 2016 election, documented by Rucker and Leonnig, look trivial. For Rucker and Leonnig, as their book title suggests, Trump is a case study of functioning narcissism. His ‘impulsivity’ is the most indexed trait in their account (nineteen references), next his ‘image focus’ (seventeen), ‘ignorance’ (sixteen), ‘paranoia’ (fifteen), ‘lying’ (ten), and ‘hunger for praise and recognition’ (nine). This listing is not exhaustive. Despite these emphases, there is no real analysis of his psychology, as foreshadowed by the title, just the welding together of ‘gee Trump is just terrible’ stories, with far too much time devoted to the failed Mueller report. What an exercise in futility that seems in retrospect. But for Democrats it was the key to unlocking Trump’s impeachment. The book does not get that far.

eft-wing bias is not something of which John Bolton has ever been accused. For that reason, his indictment of Trump in The Room Where It Happened: A White House memoir (Simon & Schuster, $35 pb, 577 pp) should represent the severest test for the president’s supporters. When ‘Never Trumpism’ was the preserve of the liberal left, the sentiment could be dismissed as just a product of an increasingly polarised political system. But when a lifelong conservative, over nearly 600 detailed pages, expresses his frustration with the president, Trump’s character becomes unavoidably the issue. Bolton does not describe a president thwarted by the forces of liberal internationalism – the theme of his earlier book on George W. Bush and the United Nations – but by his own conduct. Bolton’s Trump lacks strategic vision and is ‘stunningly uninformed’. The author’s claim that Trump was surprised to know that the United Kingdom was a nuclear power has entered diplomatic folklore. Throughout the book we are presented with a president who equates his personal warmth with foreign leaders with America’s national interests. If he and Putin/Kim/Erdoğan get on, that is, ergo, good for the United States. Bolton provides a devastating account of the failure of this maxim in regard to all three strongmen. The story of Trump’s short-lived ‘bromance’ (Bolton’s word) with Kim Jong-un is especially compelling. The DPRK leader outfoxes the US president at every turn, claims Bolton, despite the NSA’s best efforts to educate him. I note that this should but likely will not perturb Trump’s base very much. As an advocate of hawkish militarism and free trade, Bolton represents that part of the Washington establishment Trump has been chiding for decades. The wonder, then, is why he imagined Bolton would serve his purposes as national security advisor and, in comparative terms, for so long (almost eighteen months). Trump subsequently dismissed him as a ‘dumb

warmonger’, echoing North Korea’s ‘human scum’ appellation. Bolton wears both monikers with honour here. While all three books have a descriptive richness born of access and animation born of anger, neither singularly nor collectively do the authors explain the Trump phenomenon. We get much of the ‘what’, ‘when’, and ‘where’ of Trump. None applies themselves enough to the ‘why’. Each treats Trump as an aberration. This only gets us so far. This is a man, after all, love him or hate him, who has transformed American, possibly even global, politics. His ignorance, racism, sexism, duplicity, and narcissism, all asserted and documented here, have not prevented him from becoming the most consequential leader since the end of the Cold War. There is a paradox that these books illustrate but cannot resolve: why is a man so chaotic, so reviled, so malignant also so transformational?

There is a paradox that these books illustrate but cannot resolve: why is a man so chaotic, so reviled, so malignant also so transformational? Each author is bemused by his behaviour when the real target of their enquiries should be his support. Mary Trump invites us to think of him as Claudius, Hamlet’s wicked uncle. But one of the most important features of that greatest of plays is Elsinore’s embrace of this usurper. What is so rotten in the United States that Trump is viewed as the cure for it? The niece has not much to tell us about America’s receptivity to Uncle Donald. Her lumbering partisanship is why Democrats no longer have appeal in constituencies for whom her uncle now speaks. Rucker and Leonnig, similarly, do not account for his transformative power. Rather than offering an account of his appeal, they retell failed steps to remove him. Even Bolton, a man simpatico with any number of conservative leaders, fails to grasp Trump’s populism. I was fascinated in different ways by each book but left all of them still unsure why nearly sixty-three million Americans voted for the clown depicted in them – and very likely will do so again. That lacuna will be filled in the years and decades after he leaves office. Some nascent explanations include a political establishment discredited by botched wars in the Middle East, a trade policy that enabled China’s rise at the expense of too many American workers, and a financial crash in which welfare for bankers took priority over help for blue-collar mortgagees. Covid-19 hit too late for proper treatment by the authors. What is remarkable is how far Trump’s myriad disasters in its handling have not yet signed his political death warrant. His re-election is distinctly possible, even if current polling suggests that it is improbable. To understand why that is the case, books about Trump in future will have to wrestle with a rock-solid base that does not read books. None of these three books does that. g Timothy J. Lynch is Associate Professor in American Politics at the University of Melbourne. His latest book is In the Shadow of the Cold War: American foreign policy from George Bush Sr. to Donald Trump (Cambridge University Press, 2020). ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Politics

The age of hatred

contempt for democracy. Notwithstanding obvious examples of highly centralising, authoritarian, left-wing political systems that disregard democracy – the Venezuelan regime comes to mind, as The vulnerability of liberal democracy does the little cousin it has spawned in Spain’s Podemos – ApLuke Stegemann plebaum focuses on Trump’s America, Johnson’s Brexit-addled Britain, Orbán’s Hungary, the Poland of Duda and Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party, and the Spanish far-right formation Vox. Three decades ago, liberal democracy seemed to be on an inevitable trajectory towards both broader representation and Twilight of Democracy: The failure of greater prosperity for all in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet politics and the parting of friends bloc and its ideological companions. Yet history is nothing if not circular; perhaps ‘we’ in the comfortable West have enjoyed, by Anne Applebaum since 1945, three generations of well-being that in historical Allen Lane terms was exceedingly rare. Is the heyday of democracy, with its $35 hb, 205 pp will to consensus politics, receding into the past? When people increasingly refer to ‘late capitalism’, what exactly do they mean, ur age,’ begins the epigraph to Anne Applebaum’s and what exactly do they envisage might replace that economic book Twilight of Democracy, ‘is indeed the age of the system that has so often, if not always, accompanied democracy? intellectual organization of political hatreds.’ This disMuch of Applebaum’s work has served as a warning against a arming quote from French writer Julien Benda dates back to complacent forgetting of the darker past; her books on the Soviet 1927; how little has changed in a century. Just one generation gulag and the genocidal engineering of the Ukraine famine are after the triumphant ‘end of history’ – and notwithstanding both riveting and appalling. Twilight of Democracy is another the impact of Covid-19, fleetingly referenced here – Western vertiginous read. As the title suggests, the sense of an ending democratic societies are prey to institutional decline, increasing pervades the book, along with a deep anxiety about the future. A distrust, violence, and hatred. relatively clear, mapped future was the promise of the twentieth Applebaum’s exploration of these changes revolves around century’s postwar democracies; such promises sound hollow two parties she hosted for friends in Poland – one in 1999, the now as democracy and its key institutions, undermined and under other in 2019. Over two decades the friends change, as do the attack, begin to collapse. mood, the technology, the By whom, and how? topics of conversation, the Applebaum locates the future prospects. So too the ongoing collapse of faith presence, or absence, of solin democracy in the way idarity. This use of personal new technologies of comanecdote to illustrate and munication allow what measure broad geopolitical she terms ‘cascades of and ideological shifts is falsehood’. Lying without mostly effective. Her friends adverse electoral conseare drawn almost exclusively quences is thriving; it feeds from a cast(e) of diplomats, political extremism. In polpoliticians, intellectuals, ity after polity, falsehoods and editors: undoubtedly increasingly form the basis influential people, yet there for popular support. How is scarcely an opinion floated do simple untruths or wild that does not come from this conspiracy theories spread rarefied air. This is a minor among populations that are flaw in an otherwise cogent mostly safe, comfortable, Vladimir Putin with Viktor Orbán on a visit to Hungary in February 2015 analysis. (photograph www.kremlin.ru/ Presidential Press and Information Office and employed? Why do What visions of national via Wikimedia Commons) more and more citizens identity hold sway at any in Western democracies given moment, and why consider themselves oppressed or under threat, despite their and how do those visions shift? How is ‘we’ defined in an age of comparative prosperity? All of us are to some extent ‘radicalised increasingly granular division? Applebaum’s is the latest in a long by algorithms’, trapped in self-reinforcing loops of bias and line of books and articles that deplore the intransigent polarisafalsehood. The idea of a ‘common narrative’ has vanished, though tion of contemporary political and cultural debate. Despite her this is precisely what the authoritarian mindset, of both far right reputation as a conservative historian, most of her targets here are and far left, offers: moral surety and correction. ‘Anger,’ writes on the right, as she ponders how some of her closest conservative Applebaum, ‘becomes a habit. Divisiveness becomes normal.’ friends in Europe and the United States have drifted, over the past The resulting hyper-partisanship is at the root of new forms of two decades, from sober conservatism to conspiracy theories and

‘O

12 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

distrust: of institutions, of experts, of establishment politicians, of the judiciary. In this confused world, everyone is jumping at shadows. Is it any wonder that the erstwhile orderliness of democracy seems old-fashioned, a relic from a previous time no longer up to the task of serving the needs of angry, fearful citizens?

Is the heyday of democracy, with its will to consensus politics, receding into the past? ‘How vulnerable democracy is,’ wrote Mario Vargas Llosa, ‘and how easily it dies under dictatorships of the right and left.’ In their different ways, what Applebaum refers to as ‘the millenarianism of the far right and the revolutionary nihilism of the far left’ are both disenchanted with the failures of liberal democracy: for the right, a moral depravity and decline brought on by secularism, multiculturalism, and sexual diversity; for the left, the moral bankruptcy of capitalist-driven racism and structural inequality. Both angry visions contain elements of paranoia and fantasy; both manifest their rejection of democracy by a resort to authoritarianism. These extremes offer an intellectual and cultural narrowing in thought and deed; both make use of a performative and self-righteous anger; both are convinced of their mission of moral pedagogy. Both have expanding influence over public

debate, yet both lack two elements necessary for social consensus: generosity and compassion. Neither – and this goes to the nub of Applebaum’s analysis – has much faith in orderly democracy. This lack of a shared moral purpose, Applebaum argues, serves to undermine and delegitimise democratic institutions; a mutually held and cynical belief that these institutions are fundamentally corrupt leads to ‘cultural despair’. Applebaum emphasises this sleepwalk into authoritarianism does not happen without a cadre of what Julien Benda called ‘clercs’ – intellectuals, journalists, scriptwriters, and others happy to serve the interests of demagogues. Demagogues well know how to exploit the restless, paranoid fears of the right, or the urgent desire of the left to atone for the ‘errors’ of history. Both extremes meet in a common belief in the power of manipulation: of the media, and of objective realities. It takes little historical knowledge or imagination to fear, as Applebaum does, where this disenchantment may lead. New brooms tend to sweep violence into play. ‘Revolution is often rash in its generosity,’ warned Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. ‘It is in a hurry to disown so much.’ We might be careful what we wish for. g Luke Stegemann is a writer and cultural historian based in south-east Queensland. He is the author of The Beautiful Obscure (2017) and the forthcoming Amnesia Road (NewSouth, 2021).

History

Interpreting the archives John Fahey’s new book Sheila Fitzpatrick

Traitors and Spies: Espionage and corruption in high places in Australia, 1901–50 by John Fahey

Allen & Unwin $34.99 pb, 448 pp

am a great fan of archives, and so is John Fahey, a former officer of an Australian intelligence service (the Defence Signals Directorate) turned historian. His previous book, Australia’s First Spies (2018), covered the same time period (1901–50) but focused on the good guys (our spies) rather than the bad ones (their spies). His itemised list of Australian, British, and US archival files consulted runs to several pages. Most of these are the archives of intelligence agencies. And here’s the rub: intelligence files contain many names, but not necessarily the names of actual spies. They include people whom intelligence officers have their eyes on and would like to recruit but so far haven’t, and people they suspect the other side may have recruited, without so far having been able to confirm their suspicions. Can we call someone a spy just because his or her name shows up in

an intelligence file? I will return to this question. But first let’s look at what Fahey has to offer on espionage and corruption in high places in Australia in the bad old days before ASIO, under Colonel Spry’s direction, brought, in Fahey’s account, order and proper procedures to the Australian intelligence world after 1949. There are two main tracks to Fahey’s story. The first is the failures and deficiencies of Australia’s small and fragmented pre-war and wartime intelligence agencies. The second is the ever-present threat of Soviet espionage, linking up with home-grown Australian communists and fellow-travellers. The story of the incompetence, lack of focus, and bureaucratic infighting among a variety of state and military intelligence services before the war is told with vigour and a wealth of detail. It is here that Fahey finds the ‘corruption’ of his title, though it is not financial corruption he has in mind but rather the misuse of intelligence services by politicians to further their own political ends. Prime Minister Billy Hughes is the prime example, following his bitter battles over conscription of World War I, but ALP leader H.V. Evatt is portrayed as cut from the same cloth, although in this case no specific examples are adduced. One of the myths Fahey is keen to contradict is that Australian intelligence services always went after the left. He shows, on the contrary, that the initial impulse to set up intelligence services in the various states after Federation was connected with the White Australia policy and the need to keep an eye on resident Asians and other non-whites. Offbeat organisations like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, unpopular with the intelligence agencies as well as the Australian public, were also harassed AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

without due grounds. Pre-war security surveillance may not have focused exclusively on the left, but the implication of Fahey’s story is that it should have, because since the time of the 1917 Revolution, the Russian/communist threat had been a real and present danger to Australian security. He credits Alexander Zuzenko – a Russian radical in Queensland who welcomed the Russian Revolution of 1917, helped to found an Australian communist party, and was deported to the Soviet Union in the early 1920s – with laying the foundations of a sleeper network that, in Fahey’s view, was only waiting to be revived with the arrival of the Soviet Legation in Australia in the 1940s. Party member Walter Clayton, named in the Royal Commission on Espionage in 1954, would be a key figure in the revived network.

One of the myths Fahey is keen to contradict is that Australian intelligence services always went after the left There was solid evidence against Clayton and sometime DEA staffer Ian Milner, but Fahey goes further. Figures 16.5, ‘The CSIRO network, 1948’ and 17.1, ‘The Melbourne illegal cell, 1927–50’ deserve particular scrutiny. These network diagrams are Fahey’s own creation, based on ASIO surveillance files and the presumed real identities hidden behind code names in Venona intercepts (the Allies’ successful decoding of Soviet radio transmissions during the war). The alleged CSIRO network consisted of Professor Sergey Paramonov, a distinguished entomologist who was a keen member of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church; Wilbur Norman Christiansen, a pioneer in radio astronomy who had been a member of the left-wing Labour Club at the University of Melbourne as a student; and two other ‘Christiansens’ who must in fact be Clem Christesen, editor of Meanjin, and his Russian wife, Nina, head of the Russian Department at the University of Melbourne. All of them were named by someone at some time as likely Soviet agents, but as no evidence is given that any of them were aware of being recruited or passed on any information, it seems to be a network that existed in the eye of the beholder. The ‘Melbourne illegal cell’ is touted by Fahey’s publishers as his big discovery, but it could also be viewed as his speculation or even fantasy. The alleged Melbourne cell was a largely Jewish one consisting of Jack Skolnik, proprietor of a wine business in Richmond and a major patron of the Jewish sporting club Hakoah, and the furrier Solomon Kosky, with engineer David Morris and (surprisingly) academic Hirsch Munz, author of well-regarded monographs on the Australian wool industry and Jews in South Australia, thrown in for good measure. As Fahey notes, ‘what intelligence work Kosky actually did is unknown’), and there is ‘not one mention of the Melbourne cell or any of its activities’ in Venona transcripts, meaning either that its members shunned radio transmission or, as he concedes, that there was in fact no activity and presumably no cell. Fahey is nevertheless persuaded that they constituted a cell set up by the GRU, which ‘in the course of time was drawn into the growing control of the NKGB’. This last twist seems particularly odd, given that, 14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

as Petrov attested and Fahey knows, the two Soviet intelligence services, military (GRU) and civilian (NKGB), were at daggers drawn, with explicit instructions not to share information in Australia. ASIO was extremely interested in Kosky, in line with its general predisposition to be suspicious of Jews born overseas, and Fahey’s suspicions are heightened by Kosky’s connection with the fur trade, which the GRU sometimes used as a cover in its international operations. Kosky, born in Russia, was interested in doing business with the Soviet Union and knew the commercial attaché and others in the Embassy. He also probably gave discounts on furs to friends and potential business prospects, including Soviet diplomats and their wives (my interpretation of ASIO’s Kosky files, not Fahey’s). But it seems harsh to interpret this as treason. Sometimes, to paraphrase Freud, a fur is just a fur. g Sheila Fitzpatrick’s new book, White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War history of migration will be published by Black Inc. in early 2021. She is a professor at Australian Catholic University and an honorary professor at the University of Sydney. History

‘The flame of the small heart’ The conclusion of the Dunera project Adam Wakeling

Dunera Lives, Volume II by Ken Inglis et al.

Monash University Publishing $39.95 pb, 508 pp

any have come to Australia in strange circumstances, but the two thousand or so who arrived on the Dunera and Queen Mary in 1940 have one of the most unusual stories. With the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Germans and Austrians living in the United Kingdom became enemy aliens. In May 1940, with the British Army on the Continent facing destruction and with invasion a very real threat, Winston Churchill ordered every enemy alien in the country arrested and detained. It was, he later realised, a mistake, as most Germans living in the United Kingdom were Hitler’s enemies rather than his supporters, and many were actually refugees from Nazism. But some had already been sent out of the country on ships bound for Australia and Canada. Not since the last convicts had been dropped at Fremantle in 1868 had the British government banished people judged as undesirable to Australia. The mostly Jewish internees who arrived in Sydney on the Dunera in September 1940 were all men aged between sixteen and

sixty-six. The voyage had been miserable. It seems the British Army had staffed the ship with soldiers it wanted to get rid of – perhaps those who wouldn’t be missed if it was torpedoed. They freely stole from the detainees, scattered broken glass where the men exercised, and threw their luggage overboard. On arrival in Australia, the ‘Dunera Boys’ found a marked improvement in their situation, with better food and laid-back guards. One internee recalled holding a soldier’s rifle while he rolled a cigarette. But they were still interned, in camps at Hay, Orange, and Tatura. They were joined soon afterwards by German families arrested in Singapore and deported to Australia aboard the Queen Mary. This book deals with both groups. From 1941, the internees were gradually released to undertake war work. A sizeable number enlisted in the Australian Army, where they formed a non-combat unit, the 8th Employment Company. Some seven hundred, either for simple convenience or a genuine and unexpected liking for Australia, decided to stay. Some found Australia to be a geographic and cultural desert and returned to Europe at the first opportunity. Others went to the United States or to help build the new Jewish state of Israel. Many had lost family or friends in the Holocaust, and recognised they had done better than those who had ended up in Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags. Nonetheless, as the authors of Dunera Lives point out, they were still victims of ‘injustice, bureaucratic bungling, and human error’. Who were the Dunera Boys? This is the question that Ken Inglis, Bill Gammage, Seumas Spark, Jay Winter, and Carol Bunyan set out to answer in their two-volume work. The story of the Dunera internees is not unknown – it was the subject of the 1985 television film The Dunera Boys – but it is not widely known either. The first volume of Dunera Lives (reviewed by Astrid Edwards in the September 2018 issue of ABR) illustrated the story of the internees through photos, sketches, and scraps of writing. The second volume consists of twenty individual profiles. The first two profiles are not actually of internees. One is of Edward ‘Tip’ Broughton, the New Zealand-born Australian Army officer of Māori heritage who commanded the 8th Employment Company. An eccentric and popular officer, he educated himself in Jewish customs, made kosher food available, learned some German, and left a strong impression of tolerance on the men under his command. The other is Julian Layton, English refugee advocate, who championed the rights of the Dunera internees but was left haunted after a visit to newly liberated Bergen-Belsen by the spectres of those he could not save. The other eighteen profiles (of nineteen individuals), a cross-section of the internees, show that there was no single Dunera story. Around four-fifths of the internees were classified as Jews under the Nazi racial laws, but they varied from orthodox to Christian to secular. Many were well educated; Dunera Lives features profiles of scientists, artists, and businessmen. Ironically, Leonhard Adam, an anthropologist, had been tasked with interrogating Indigenous Australian prisoners for the German Army during World War I. Physicist Hans Buchdahl, who settled in Hobart, corresponded with Albert Einstein in the United States. But there were also labourers, tradesmen, and artisans, such as furniture designer Fred Lowen. There are advantages and disadvantages to telling history

through profiles, and Dunera Boys trades breadth for depth. But the style works well for the subject matter, and it leaves us with a real sense of how a single random event in history can alter the course of someone’s life. The postwar lives of the subjects are not simply an epilogue to a story about World War II. This is fitting: for the younger internees in particular, this was the bulk of their lives. The Dunera internees were not refugees, although it’s im-

Franz Philipp in 1946 (photograph courtesy of the Visual Cultures Resource Centre, University of Melbourne)

possible to read Dunera Boys without thinking of those who have been forced to flee their homes and seek asylum in the years since. The authors draw on the internees to speak for the others who also ‘suffered and suffer a cruel wrench from home and country’. Ken Inglis, who died in 2017, was inspired to begin the project by Franz Philipp, a Dunera internee, who taught him at Melbourne University. Reflecting on his journey from Dachau to England to Australia on the Dunera, Philipp wrote a poem which the book, appropriately, quotes: Man is not good, yet he carries A glimmer of goodness within him, With effort that spark turns to flame The flame of the small heart

Adam Wakeling is a lawyer and historian. His next book, A House of Commons for a Den of Thieves: Australia’s journey from penal colony to democracy, is published this month by Australian Scholarly Publishing. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Documentary

‘Because you’re mine’ All the dangers of big tech in one film Josh Krook

Detail from a still from The Social Dilemma (Netflix)

f you watch one film about technology this year, make it this one. The Social Dilemma (Netflix) features almost every tech insider turned outsider. There’s Tristan Harris, Google’s former chief design ethicist who famously dissented over the company’s attention/addiction business model. There’s Justin Rosenstein, the inventor of the Facebook ‘like’ button, who now regrets his invention. There’s Guillaume Chaslot, inventor of the YouTube recommendations system, who now regrets his invention. There’s Jaron Lanier, founder of virtual reality, who now wants people to delete their social media accounts. There’s Shoshana Zuboff, author of last year’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, who blew the lid on the whole game. And that’s just in the first few minutes. Each of these luminaries shares a similar story. In most cases, they started in big tech with wide-eyed enthusiasm. Gradually, they became concerned with the ways in which their work was changing the world. ‘There were meaningful changes being made around the world because of these platforms,’ says Tim Kendall, the former president of Pinterest, hesitating for a moment: ‘I think we were naïve about the flipside of that coin.’ The flipside seems almost too large to define. The big tech companies are causing smart-phone addiction, political polarisation, the disintegration of democracy, the rise of mental illness, the destruction of family relationships, the spread of voter manipulation, the virality of conspiracy theories, and hate riots in Myanmar. ‘When you look around you, it feels like the world is going crazy,’ says Tristan Harris, almost frantically. As a documentary, the film teeters somewhere between a polemic and a hard-hitting docu-drama. There’s the requisite creepy music, blending techno-beats with a few long droning synths, reminiscent of Blade Runner 2049. There are, of course, the dramatisations. Set in modern suburban houses and played by actors, the film shows the relatable ‘get off your phone’ situations of the middle-American family. In one of these scenes, a mother dares her adolescent son to avoid using his smart phone 16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

for a week. When he inevitably fails, three days later, the film cuts to Jalacy ‘Screamin’ Jay’ Hawkins’s classic song ‘I Put a Spell on You’ – ‘because you’re mine’. In reality, of course, the big tech companies have put a spell on all of us. Despite the media’s obsession with privacy, the risks posed by new technology have nothing to do with privacy, per se. George Orwell’s 1984 was not about privacy. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was not about privacy. When we talk about technology ushering in a techno-fascist police state, we are not talking about a risk to privacy: we are talking about control. The big tech companies are not seeking to steal our private photos, they are seeking to control our lives, our choices, our thoughts, our actions, and our very connection to reality. Privacy is not just a red herring: it’s almost quaint, like worrying about a matchstick in the middle of a bushfire. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls our modern world a digital panopticon. There is, however, one big difference between the prison experiments of the 1800s and our world: today we are imprisoning ourselves. Every tweet we post, every picture we like, every article we share hands more information to the big tech companies, who use this information to make us even more addicted to their platforms, so that we can never leave. ‘How much of your life can we get you to give to us?’ asks Tim Kendall, rhetorically, at one point. He seems to imply that they can get everything. I like to compare the big tech companies to a partner who knows everything about you. Your partner knows that if they leave chocolate on the kitchen counter, you won’t be able to resist it. They know that if they push your buttons in just the right order, they’ll make you angry or they’ll make you laugh. Now imagine that partner earning billions of dollars a year to gain your attention at all times, for the sake of increasing their advertising revenue, with the ads playing on their bodies, at all times. What’s more, imagine that your partner knows everything about you and that they have machine learning and artificial intelligence to help them manipulate you. But there is no need to imagine. As Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, says: ‘Google has a better sense of what we prefer than we do, and Google certainly has a better sense of what we prefer than our partner does.’ At what point do they know so much about us that we are no longer in control of our own lives? That is the question at the heart of The Social Dilemma. It is a question that should terrify you. It certainly terrifies me. Despite the darkness of these ruminations, the film ends on an upbeat note. The insiders turned critics offer a few tips. Turn off your notifications. Follow multiple media networks with contrasting views. Don’t let kids have too much screen time. Delay all social media use until high school. The real solution, however, is a legal one. If we want to control the big tech companies before they control us, we need stronger laws and regulation. On that last point, we might already be too late. g Josh Krook is a writer and law academic researching the future of legal education. He writes about technology, the future of work, and philosophy for his personal blog New Intrigue, and serves as law editor for the Oxford Political Review. ❖

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Comment

The problem of belonging

The Twitter mob is a threat to writers and journalists

by Johanna Leggatt

n early August, deep in the winter of Melbourne’s stage-four discontent, journalist Rachel Baxendale became the story. The Victorian political reporter for The Australian newspaper was attacked online for questioning Premier Daniel Andrews on his government’s hotel quarantine program, as an explosion of new coronavirus infections caused unprecedented economic shutdown and the curtailment of civil liberties. As thousands of people watched the premier’s live press briefings from their living rooms, Baxendale assiduously probed Andrews about the use of security guards instead of Australian Defence Force personnel to guard returned travellers. It was an uncontroversial line of questioning; reporters, after all, are not responsible for telegraphing the government line, for emollient Dorothy Dixers, or for solicitous enquiry. But many on social media thought otherwise and for five days straight they flooded Baxendale’s Twitter account with invective. Some accused Baxendale of being a Murdoch shill, hell-bent on dismantling Andrews’s Labor government, while others berated her for failing to ask the premier ‘one single supportive question’. (Some of the more disturbing comments contained explicit death threats, which Victorian government health minister Jenny Mikakos alerted her to). As Baxendale told ABR: ‘While I am not actively attempting to undermine the government’s health message, my job is not to ask supportive questions. In fact, I will often ask questions that are not reflective of my own personal stance, but are part of my job as a journalist to hold all politicians to account.’ There is a predictable and dulling rhythm to the routine trashing of reputations on Twitter: the high-profile journalist, writer, editor, or public figure transgresses the peculiar lore of a Twitter tribe – says the wrong thing, does the wrong thing, publishes the wrong thing – and is torn down and shamed. It feels deeply personal, and the insults often are, but it’s also part of a broader movement, what is commonly referred to as being ‘cancelled’. For many, the fallout is devastating – some lose their livelihoods, their careers, and their reputations. Many targeted journalists will announce their intention to ‘take some time off Twitter’, as if the site is a dreary but necessary second job they cannot quit and instead must merely seek to curb its influence. The host of 18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

television’s Q+A, Hamish Macdonald, has suspended his account temporarily. According to The Guardian’s ‘The Weekly Beast’ column, he intends to use the surplus time to ‘read a book a week’, which could be perceived as commentary on the paucity of deep reading that is possible with an active Twitter presence. Baxendale also took a short break from Twitter in the aftermath of the abuse, but has since reactivated her account to track breaking news. ‘The most destructive aspect of Twitter is that people will say things to you [on the site] that they would never say over a cup of tea in real life,’ she says. ‘It attracts people with very strong, often angry, opinions.’ So why do so many people bother with Twitter? If the platform is so destructive, so hellish, why are so many writers, activists, generalist journalists, and public figures still on it? The answer is, of course, buried in the question: it’s the virtual village square where news breaks, gossip is circulated, and the very public online executions – apologies, cancellations – occur. It is an explosive forum for opinions and grandstanding, and while some accounts focus on light-hearted GIFs and memes, the dominant content is highly partisan.

There is a predictable rhythm to the routine trashing of reputations on Twitter As a result, Twitter has devolved into a channel for our most juvenile emotions: boosting allies, performing for an audience, complaining at no one and everyone at the same time, tearing down opponents, crafting a ‘likeable’ online persona. This tendency has only intensified in recent months, with the global pandemic shrinking many people’s worlds into a smaller set of habits and routines, while Twitter has expanded to fill in the gaps that would otherwise be devoted to real-world engagement with others. In its April report to shareholders, Twitter admitted that, partly as a result of the pandemic, usage jumped to 166 million daily global users in the first quarter of 2020 – up from 152 million at the end of 2019 – highlighting the need among some users to find comfort in a cause or a tribe, to let out lockdown frustrations, to distract ourselves. As a difficult 2020 draws to a close, should

we really be surprised by how toxic the site has become? Our modern tendency to express our feelings publicly, to as many people as possible, is twinned rather disastrously with a concomitant desire to shut out ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ ideas. In the Twitter world, we no longer need to countenance opposing ideas or arguments – a novel thought – but can instead assert a socalled right to be protected from exposure to what is disagreeable, to cancel what is discomfiting. Our social-media age promotes psychic dependency, an impoverished version of adulthood in which the locus of control is externally rather than internally oriented. Among those with this passive psychological makeup, the world perpetually happens to them: they are acted upon, they are victims of pernicious and relentless external forces, they require cosseting from the difficult world. Some people are, of course, genuine victims of tragedy or circumstance, who face damaging and systemic challenges and injustice – and that is not to be dismissed. But there is a troubling narrative at work in the cancel culture playbook as the self-diagnosed masochist/ victim – wary of others, tremulous as a kitten – shifts to the polar and equally dysfunctional psychological position of sadist, the destroyer of reputations, the bully with the pitchfork and a ready mob on backup. In most religions, you are afforded redemption, but Twitter warriors are not interested in reconciliation, or the kind of nuance or context that would flesh out the issue and complicate their activism. Very often the victim of the cancellation will appeal for mercy, offering an apology and umpteen hours of community service in the form of personal reflection. It matters little. The attempted apology, the pleading for mercy, does not inspire grace but the rush to double down on the injury – sans courtroom, or anything resembling a fair hearing. Twitter is a blunt, crude, and highly effective tool to bring about the annihilation of another human being. Often that human being is a woman. Not exclusively, of course, but women statistically receive a disproportionate amount of hate and trolling online, and there is a certain odious underground of the Twitter universe that reserves its ugliest expression for women with both power and profile. In their 2018 ‘Troll Patrol’ study, Amnesty International found that female journalists and female politicians were subjected to some kind of harassment or abuse on Twitter roughly every thirty seconds, and women of colour experienced significantly higher levels of abuse overall. ABC journalist Leigh Sales makes a point of routinely retweeting screenshots of the vile, often sexual, ‘feedback’ she receives after interviewing male politicians on The 7.30 Report. Sales declined to be interviewed for this piece, saying that she prefers to just leave existing comments regarding Twitter to ‘speak for themselves’. And indeed they speak volumes. Likewise, it is hard to imagine a man receiving the same level of hostility that Baxendale was subjected to, although she notes the issue of gender is not clear-cut. As she points out: ‘The worst abuse was from men, but about seventy per cent of the abuse was from women, and it was quite personal,’ she says. ‘Sexism is not just expressed by men.’ Not everyone views cancel culture as a problem, with some writers defending the movement as an inelegant form of redress, an attempt at democratising our hallowed institutions. They view the complaints about cancel culture as confirmation of the old

guard’s desire to resist change, to keep marginalised people outside positions of power, or to cause injury to others with harmful expression. The question of course is: who gets to decide what is harmful, and, assuming it is harmful, who decides what the ‘punishment’ should be? Defenders of cancel culture are insisting on a punitive form of justice that is neither legislated nor agreed upon. While Twitter occasionally produces meaningful change and activism, such as the #MeToo movement against sexual abuse and harassment, the overwhelming tendency of the site is to engender insult and reactionary mob kickback. The ensuing destruction this causes to people’s lives far outweighs the site’s positive contribution to society.

Twitter is a blunt, crude, and highly effective tool to bring about the annihilation of another human being In a speech by journalist George Packer published in The Atlantic earlier this year, entitled ‘The Enemies of Writing’, Packer lamented the rise of writers as members of an identifiable community. The unfortunate consequence was that writers ‘learn to avoid expressing thoughts or associating with undesirables that might be controversial with the group and hurt their numbers’. As he so beautifully puts it: A writer who carries the thought police around in his head, who always feels compelled to ask: Can I say this? Do I have a right? Is my terminology correct? Will my allies get angry? Will it help my enemies? Could it get me ratioed on Twitter? – that writer’s words will soon become lifeless. A writer who’s afraid to tell people what they don’t want to hear has chosen the wrong trade.

This year, more voices have spoken up alongside Packer’s, most notably a high-profile group of more than 150 writers in the now-infamous Harper’s magazine letter that called for open debate and tolerance for opposing views. Most recently, musician Nick Cave spoke out against cancel culture, which he deemed to be ‘bad religion run amuck’. The intellectual freedom they are advocating is not remotely possible on Twitter, which, with its tribalism and cancellations, has a deadening effect on original writing, shoehorning ideas into inviolable truths, and discouraging intellectual curiosity. The kind of free thinking that is required to write interestingly, with élan and a sense of daring, involves doubt and uncertainty, sometimes confusion. It may involve the ability to hold opposing concepts in one’s mind without needing to assert a clear moral position. Any artist or writer who has ever followed a hunch, been led by an idea rather than the other way around, understands the fatal mistake of introducing certainty, let alone ideology, into the creative life. Equally, journalists are at risk of falling prey to mob mentality, with many, no doubt, fearing being cancelled, trolled, or abused via the platform. Journalists should be contrarian in their work, but Twitter’s playground psychology of likes and retweets, its display of ‘followers’, are anathema to the very grown-up work of keeping the powerful in check, of maintaining a healthy AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

scepticism towards popular ideas. Journalists on Twitter are encouraged to be joiners, to define themselves by the opinions they hold and the thinkers they support. Some journalists handle this bind better than others – limiting their time on social media, blocking trolls, and refusing to engage in the vapid fights between the right- and left-wing Pied Pipers of public opinion – but it’s easy to imagine that at least some journalists self-edit, mentally scanning their next piece for how it will play out on Twitter, careful not to upset the mob or to advance an idea that runs counter to their tribe’s values. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is well aware of the problems with his site. Speaking on The New York Times podcast The Daily, he admitted that he is considering retrofitting checks and balances, including preventing users from retweeting articles if they haven’t clicked on the piece in a bid to curtail the spread of misinformation. While pointing out that online abuse and harassment have long been features of social media, Dorsey conceded: ‘ It’s not to say that we didn’t incentivise different ways of amplifying the

behaviours that already existed.’ Dorsey has been speaking about the need for change on Twitter for many years, announcing in 2016 – the year keen tweeter Donald Trump was elected – that the site had to become more palatable for the average person. We are yet to see meaningful change. Meanwhile, it will be up to writers and journalists to define the terms of their engagement, if any, with Twitter, to challenge the groupthink of social media users, and to remain open to opinions that are different from their own and to the possibility of changing one’s mind. We will need to kill the inner critic who warns against advancing certain ideas because someone, somewhere, may find it offensive, while at the same time resisting the urge to finger-point at others’ mistakes or transgressions, to inflate our own ego with public ‘gotcha’ moments. We may find that by doing this, by observing rather than joining in, and by privileging a controversial idea over a safe bet, something original emerges. g Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based journalist and critic.

Same Mind Just before I left sleep behind I borrowed a series of chords so I could swerve my way through the days I saw yawning in front of me like graves freshly dug and I declined to ask permission and I declined to apologise and refused to offer recompense because I was convinced the chords were mine or, if not mine, common, as in communal, as in common law, the commons and so on, a case of breathing the air we breathe without asking where it came from, of drinking the water falling from a cloud, and I walked through my days past the open coffinless graves with that music inside me, it was for the moment mine,

and while I intended to let go of it, to share it with those around me, I was alone when I arrived, afraid to give up what I had carried so far, across hours and hours of pain, regret, and self-hatred which would have led me dirtward without this series of chords, the simplest but most delicate progression of sounds, tones I abandoned when I forgot the cause of my misery, the origin of my disappointment, the source of my daily failure to exert my self in any meaningful way, and for that music I am thankful even as I hold onto it too firmly and for too long, as I overstay what little welcome I was offered.

Brian Henry

Brian Henry’s eleventh and most recent poetry collection is Permanent State (2020). 20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

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F I C T I O N AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Fiction

Things known and foreknown A virtuoso performance from Gail Jones Sue Kossew

Our Shadows by Gail Jones

Text Publishing $32.99 pb, 309 pp

the theme were, similarly, intricately intertwined. Entangled with these fictionalised family stories are those of historical figures whose lives are reimagined in the novel (a technique Jones explored earlier in her short story collection Fetish Lives [1997]). One of these is Paddy Hannan, an Irish gold prospector escaping the Great Hunger to make a new life in Australia, who, with two other Irish migrants, ‘discovered’ gold in the West Australian goldfields and started the gold rush around Kalgoorlie. As Jones notes at the end of the book, she has respected the ‘shape of Hannan’s life’ but has written a ‘fictive version’ of it. Details, such as the statue of Paddy Hannan that remains to this day in Kalgoorlie, are used to explore the idea of historical legacy and fame. It is clear from the notes at the end, too, that both mining and Kalgoorlie have personal reverberations for Jones: ‘I trust I have honoured, in some small way, the lives of my father and grandfather and the generations who endured the labour of underground mining.’

ail Jones’s new novel, Our Shadows, provides readers with another virtuoso performance, showing a writer fully in control of her medium. It is a poetic and beautifully crafted evocation of shadowy pasts whose traumatic effects (in the The retrieval of repressed memories world and in individual lives) stretch deep into the present and works on both an individual level and the future. at the level of the nation Set in Kalgoorlie and Sydney, the novel’s focus on mining provides both historical context for the present-day narration and a complex metaphor of dispossession and despoiling on the There are a number of striking images that recur throughout, one hand, and ‘discovery’ and ‘luck’ on the other. some of them relating to the idea of scale, one of the thematic threads The novel deploys multiple voices from both the present and of the novel. The Kalgoorlie mine’s ‘hellish’ Super Pit, for example, the past. Jones focalises the present-day story mainly through the shows the huge and enduring impact of extractive industries on third-person narration of Sydney-based sisters, newly widowed the landscape, leaving humans ‘rescaled’. Similarly, Hokusai’s Frances and her older sister, Nell. They have been brought up by painting The Great Wave, which hangs in the sisters’ childhood their grandparents in Kalgoorlie after the death of their mother, bedroom, represents the power of the natural world and the frailty Mary, and the disappearance of their father, Jack. The narratives of humanity, denoted by the artist’s aesthetic use of scale. Francof Fred and Else Kelly (the grandparents whose surname the girls es’s memory of Hokusai’s depiction of the tiny ‘bubble heads’ of adopt) are threaded throughout, often in contrapuntal telling of people in the fragile boats dwarfed by an enormous wave recalls the same event. Else’s versions of events are told in Joycean poetic her own childhood experience of an allergic reaction to a bee form, whereas Fred’s war memories – sting when her own head was massively which hark back to his experience as a swollen, out of scale with the rest of Japanese prisoner of war amid a culture her body. of masculinity and ‘strenuous forgetAs in many of Jones’s novels, the ting’ – finally emerge in a rush of recall. ‘books of childhood’ assume signifiElse’s self-awareness, despite her failing cance. The sisters’ obsession with the memory, is expressed in snippets of her ocean and with Jules Verne’s Twenty former feisty self: she wittily refers to Thousand Leagues under the Sea proherself as Someone Else and Elsewhere. vides them with a particular sentence The narrative’s slow excavation of to which they keep returning, even as the past is reinforced by Jones’s use of adults, and which, as Frances suggests, past-tense narration and repeated use ‘held premonitions of what would help of retrospective phrases such as ‘s/he in the future’. This magical thinking lays remembered’ or ‘what returned to her’. emphasis on a totemic belief in words The retrieval of repressed memories and in reading itself. works on both an individual level and, It is not until the second part of more allegorically, at the level of the the novel, when Frances returns to nation. In this way, family histories and Kalgoorlie, that an Indigenous perspecnational histories are closely linked to tive emerges. Part of the novel’s reckideas of hidden shame, loss, and pain. oning with the past is encapsulated in This unearthing of buried memories the relationship that develops between is reminiscent of Jones’s novel Sorry Frances and Val (whose real name is Paddy Hannan statue in Kalgoorlie (photograph by Raki_Man via Wikimedia Commons) (2007), where the narrative method and Ngulyi), a Mandildjara woman from the 22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

Martu community who was taken from her parents and sent to live with a white family in Kalgoorlie. A close childhood friend of Frances’s mother, she now acts as companion to Frances’s embittered Aunt Enid, who still lives in the family’s old house in Kalgoorlie. Val takes Frances on a road trip to Lake Ballard to help her come to terms with her ‘sorry time’ after Else’s death, gradually introducing her to the Aboriginal languages that Val is helping to recover, and educating Frances in a ‘new frame of [Indigenous] knowledge’. It is during this journey that Frances starts to come to terms with ‘the secret history of her own life, the untold inner story’. In addition to the novel’s narration of past and present, Jones uses the future conditional tense (‘there would be’, ‘she would’) to denote a prediction of a future that is yet to emerge – ‘things known and foreknown’. A sense of time that has patterns repeating across generations could be regarded as fatalistic, but in this novel, as in much of Jones’s work, the idea of hope emerges from the shadows of the past. This optimism is given specificity in the story of Modesto Varischetti, the so-called ‘entombed miner’

(another of Jones’s real-life characters given fictional treatment here), with whom Frances has always had a secret fascination. His rescue from the depths of a mine, after being trapped underground by floods in 1907, seems to represent a resurrection, or, as the narration suggests, ‘the dawning of a frail, provisional faith’ for Frances. Juxtaposed with this historical image of recovery is the more recent example in the novel of the Thai boys’ soccer team who were ultimately brought out from the shadowy depths of the Tham Luang cave. New life is shown to appear from underground in nature too: cicadas reborn from below and shrimps from under Lake Ballard’s salt crust. In an interview with Breandáin O’Shea on the Tall Poppies podcast, Jones described writing as a ‘mechanism to deal with loss’. This novel brilliantly and lyrically conveys the ways in which the past continues to haunt the present and to cast long shadows into the future, while still offering the possibility of hope for reconciliation, both individual and national. g Sue Kossew is Professor Emeritus at Monash University.

Fiction

‘What a lark! What a plunge!’ Ali Smith’s bravura quartet Felicity Plunkett

Summer

by Ali Smith

Hamish Hamilton $29.99, pb, 384 pp

could begin with a lark stitched into a letter. It’s 2020 and ‘all manner of virulent things’ are simmering. Sixteen-yearold Sacha writes to Hero, a detained refugee. She wants to send ‘an open horizon’. Unsure what to say to someone suffering injustice, she writes about swifts: how far they travel, how they feed – and even sleep – on the wing. The way their presence announces the beginning and ending of summer ‘makes swifts a bit like a flying message in a bottle’. Maybe they even make summer happen. Sacha writes about Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins ‘Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music’. It says, Sacha thinks, ‘what would happen if you split a lark open? I have a vision that if you were to open a swift, metaphorically of course, the rolled -up message they carry inside them is the unfurled word. SUMMER.’ Or I could begin with Hannah in Nazi Germany, where the simmering virulence is fascism, as Ali Smith loops a thread between ‘unprecedented’ times and what precedes them. Hannah is one of the dazzling-minded, blazing characters who recur in

Smith’s oeuvre. She is central to this work of emotional courage and encouragement. Her heart-breaking and -mending story is one thread of Summer’s connection through Smith’s bravura seasonal quartet, written swiftly – on the wing – profoundly responsive to the news that rolls in, folded or scrolled, with its continual toll and knell. Hannah is the sister of Daniel Gluck, a character central to Autumn (2016) and now to Summer. In Autumn, Gluck is the elderly German-born neighbour who, amid ‘a fraction of something volcanic’ – Brexit, xenophobic graffiti, news of war, and environmental destruction – meets the young Elisabeth. Exchanging solace and reading, they set out to become lifelong friends: ‘We sometimes wait a lifetime for them’, as Daniel says in Autumn. Now aged 104, Gluck is in lockdown while the pandemic flares – ‘one more time we’ll find out what’s worth more, people or money’. His thoughts drift to his internment with his father in a British camp for ‘enemy aliens’ during the 1940s. These Germans are ‘mostly Jews and people the fascists want dead’, Daniel tells a soldier who calls them Nazis: ‘We’re not Nazis … you couldn’t get more opposite from Nazis.’ There’s the flickering Zelig, traumatised Dachau survivor and ‘ghost brother’ to Cyril (‘partly doctor, but of course ejected from university’). And Maryan Rawicz, half of the celebrated piano duo (his musical partner is interred in another camp), searching for notes in the camp’s smashed and rattled pianos, their elephant-shorn keys torn out for dentists to transpose into human mouths. There are specialists on Rilke’s poetry, philosophers, and artists, including Kurt Schwitters, derided by Hitler as a ‘degenerate artist’, all severed and displaced. Schwitters invented Merz art when he fractured the bank name Commerzbank and placed it in a collage. Merz rises from the smithereens of consumerism, bringing the discarded and broken into conversation with one another, including, in Summer, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

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TICKETS

green-leaning porridge and the contents of his chamberpot. The internees debate art. There’s a wink from Smith, whose own collage-like work might be imagined as Merzroman, when Daniel writes to his sister in a letter he then burns: ‘Should The Artist Portray His Age? ... And you would be so proud of me because I spoke up and said but what about the artist portraying her own age, and when I did I was nearly laughed out of the room’. In Germany, Hannah is engaged in the exquisite midwifery of delivering names of the dead to save other lives. She takes her own, ceremonially, from the grave of Adrienne Albert, a girl born when Hannah was but who died as a child of Spanish influenza. In this delicate transmutation, life folds into life, ‘as metamorphic as caterpillar and butterfly’. Hannah invents a profession for Adrienne. She is a seamstress. Something sparks – kinetic, molecular, anagrammatical – when Hannah gently transplants the names of the too-soon dead. She mentally continues the siblings’ conversation. In her brilliance – a swift, skip-quipping linguistic deliciousness that is Smith’s joyous imaginative signature – Hannah zips ahead of her thoughtful brother, lighting things up, stitching them. ‘She forgot. He is not flippant like she is. He is not quicksilver. His energy is steady, something like a tree root.’ His deep steadiness and her blossoming ingenuity are of the same tree. Smith witnesses the risky trickery by which Hannah outpaces her hunters, crossing languages and borders. Translation for Hannah is both a wordsmith’s joy and essential to her survival. Amid all this appears Claude, also devoted to life and the resistance of violence, opening a new stanza for her (because, as Smith writes, drolly, ‘love happens’). In a park ‘overrun with flowers’ she waits, holding a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations. She meets his single word ‘yes?’ with her own: yes. He is a mimic who gives her the gift of her own laughter. He warns her that it’s easy to conceive when you are laughing, sparking the slant rhyme of laughter and daughter. Claude and Hannah know they can’t have one another’s names in their head. Eventually, ‘she can’t have her own child’s name in her head’. The seams between loss and gain, the heartleap of all this, is where Smith is at her most magnificent. Smith’s work spirals and vaults through ideas, texts, and fascinations: inclusive, allusive, empathetic. It works at the porous borders between singular and plural selves, and between syllables and languages. Its currency is quicksilver, its methodology crossing, as metaphor’s is (arriving, as it does, from the Greek metapherein, to transfer), and translation’s (from the Latin, translatio, to transfer). In Spring (2019), a mysterious, heroic young woman – Smith’s portrait of a kind of Greta Thunberg – imagines: ‘instead of saying, this border divides places. We said, this border holds together two really interesting different places. What if we declared border crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible.’ And Charlotte (returning from Winter [2017]) reminds Sacha: ‘A chance to make the world bigger for someone else. Or smaller. That’s always the choice we’ve got.’ Instead of the pernickety exactitude of borders, passports, ego, and linear narrative, Smith’s work is echoic, prismic, full of siblings and doppelgängers, and that intake of breath when someone enters a life carrying the echo of someone else’s beauty,

as when Daniel sees Hannah in Sacha. Each of the quartet’s novels has a Shakespearean play spun through it, in this case The Winter’s Tale. Sacha’s mother, a former actor, sees the play as ‘all about summer, really. It’s like it says, don’t worry, another world is possible.’ This renewal is central to Schwitters’s art, of which he said: ‘everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments’. Virginia Woolf – her work a kind of heartland for Smith – had a similar idea: ‘arrange whatever pieces come your way’.

Smith’s work spirals and vaults through ideas, texts, and fascinations: inclusive, allusive, empathetic After the war, Romanian-born poet and Shoah-survivor Paul Celan wrote: ‘Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.’ Amid loss and trauma, a poem goes out, a ‘message in a bottle, sent out in the – not always greatly hopeful – belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps’. As Hélène Cixous wrote of Celan’s poems, they take ‘the desert as subject ... It is a writing of disaster, a writing that speaks of and through disaster, such that disaster and desert become the author or spring.’ Like the other three novels, Summer begins with a soaring monologue, strung from that embodiment of apathy: So? As in so what? As in shoulder shrug, or what do you expect me to do about it? or I so don’t really give a fuck, or actually I approve of it, it’s fine by me.

But no, there is a swerve from this certainty. ‘Not everybody said it.’ Like Hannah the seamstress, like Schwitters, Woolf, and Celan, Summer says, instead, sew. So, to the seam where swifts flock with larks. Through the abundant generosity of her allusions – to film, photos, poetry – Smith’s novels carry ideas across borders. Sacha’s summer-opening, summer-carrying lark summons whatever larks we might have in the private treasury of our own heart’s sustaining images. I hear Dickens. Not his novel David Copperfield, which circles through Summer, but the orphaned Pip in Great Expectations embraced by his generous uncle-by-marriage Joe, who declares of their adventures ‘What larks, Pip!’ I think of Woolf ’s Clarissa Dalloway, newly recovered from the Spanish flu, tenderly opening the day: ‘What a lark! What a plunge!’ I remember larks that cross the river in Alice Oswald’s Dart: ‘listen / a / lark / spinning / around / one / note / splitting / and / mending / it’. Smith’s quartet is a work of splitting and mending, repair instead of despair. Hard-won creativity trumps the graspers and bruisers. Unafraid of being laughed out of the room, the larking, migratory powers of the heart – kindness, love – compose the notes of revival, as recuperation and gain surge up after violence and loss, tendrils, as summer does. g Felicity Plunkett is the ABR Patrons’ Fellow. Her most recent poetry collection is A Kinder Sea (UQP, 2019). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Fiction

Strange brew

An odd novel about World War II James Antoniou

The Tolstoy Estate by Steven Conte

Fourth Estate $32.99 pb, 410 pp

uring Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Germans occupied Yasnaya Polyana – the former estate of Leo Tolstoy – for just forty-five days and converted it into a field hospital. The episode features in the war reportage of Ève Curie (daughter of Marie), and sounds like tantalising, if challenging, source material for a novelist. There’s the brutal irony inherent in the home of a world-famous prophet of non-violence being occupied by, of all people, the Nazis. There’s the human loss and horror of the deadliest military operation in the deadliest war in history. And there’s audacity in invoking and responding to Tolstoy’s great epic of another – Napoleon’s – doomed invasion of Russia: War and Peace (1869). With his second novel, The Tolstoy Estate, Steven Conte has ignored those challenges altogether and tried to write a bestseller. It’s an odd choice, given the literary invocation of the premise, and one that is likely to appal Tolstoy enthusiasts. In fact, it is better not to approach the work with the great writer in mind at all. Although Conte describes it as the ‘love child’ of War and Peace and Curie’s accounts, the result is a middlebrow romp which includes a love affair between a Nazi doctor and a Bolshevik writer, their reflections on Tolstoy, and a lot of usually crass ribaldry on the side. (Nazi characters walk around saying things like: ‘Good God, man, what’s the point of being the master race if we can’t ogle a lady subhuman?’) It is a strange brew indeed. German medic Paul Bauer arrives at Tolstoy’s former estate and falls in love with its communist custodian, the writer Katerina Trubetzkaya, over a shared enthusiasm for War and Peace. The fearless and idealised Katerina, who happens to speak perfect German, taunts the Nazis with sardonic comments and stock insults like ‘German swine’, which, rather implausibly, they tolerate. Dialogue is not this novel’s strength, which is a shame as there is quite a bit of it. Putting aside a couple of witty one-liners – such as when Katerina tells Bauer that ‘in the whole of recorded history only two men, Hitler and Napoleon, have failed to realise that in winter Russia gets cold’ – the following passage is more or less representative: A rap on the window made him start. ‘Hey, Bauer!’ Molineux. Bauer drew an arm across his helmet. ‘I’m trying to sleep.’ ‘Bah! You insomniacs are your own worst enemies.’ ‘Go away.’ 26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

‘Exercise! You need exercise!’ ‘For Christ’s sake, it’s raining.’ ‘No longer. Listen.’ It was true, the rain had stopped.

For a novel marketed as ‘an exploration of the moral, emotional and intellectual limits that people reach in wartime’, this is risible stuff. But if you ignore the puff and read it as a blockbuster, skimming the dialogue, you can sit back and witness the slightly zany plot unfold. (And it does get zany. Later on, Tolstoy’s ‘ghost’ starts to transfix the other Germans, including a high-ranking Nazi officer who ends up causing problems for Bauer.) The tone isn’t always right, either. Conte sometimes appears to be trying to write comedy, historical romance, and thriller all at once. Whereas black comedy of the Heller or Vonnegut variety is rooted in anger and absurdity – and a belief that sincerity alone could never convey the full magnitude of grief, injustice, and monotony in war – the humour in The Tolstoy Estate can be glib and ghoulish. In one chapter, for example, Bauer has to amputate the leg of a patient: Bauer finished the cut and Pflieger picked up the severed limb, but instead of binning it straight away he held it up and, by slapping his spare hand against the amputated one, gave Hirsch a limp round of applause. ‘Thank you, Lieutenant, for your generous support. See, Sepp: I’m a genius.’ ‘Put it down,’ Bauer ordered him. ‘Jokes, yes, but no maltreatment of body parts. That could be you lying there.’

Mercifully, there are a few high points, such as the first of two epistolary flash forwards, about halfway through, which outclasses the rest of the novel. Composed of two letters between Bauer and Katerina, they offer a glimpse of the kind of limber, aphoristic storytelling and genuine pathos the author can achieve when he ditches dialogue altogether. Certainly, Conte is alive to the best in Tolstoy, and the speech becomes much less stilted when the main couple share their insights into War and Peace. Bauer talks of Tolstoy’s ‘capaciousness. The range of his curiosity, his empathy’; while Katerina notes that, ‘He’s not especially concerned with mellifluence. Flaubert would be in agony if he had to use the same word twice on one page, whereas if a word suits Tolstoy he’ll flog it to death.’ In his author’s note, Conte asserts that World War II is beginning to occupy a mythic, ‘Homeric’ space in the popular imagination, as Markus Zusak’s far more inventive Young Adult novel The Book Thief (2005), narrated by Death, would also suggest. And if we have enough distance to mythologise, we also would seem to have the distance to shatter old notions of bad taste; as seen in Taika Waititi’s irreverent film Jojo Rabbit (2019), a war comedy in which a German boy with Hitler as an imaginary friend discovers a young Jewish girl hiding in his mother’s attic. Even so, The Tolstoy Estate’s themes demand a more careful tread, and by trading on Tolstoy without accessing the depth of life in his fiction, this book conjures a ‘ghost’ of its own – the literary novel it could have been. g James Antoniou is a Melbourne-based critic.

Fiction

Radical futures

A world trembling on the brink J.R. Burgmann

The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson

Orbit $32.99 pb, 576 pp

ur stories are not working. Whether they be the kind we tell in fiction, or the larger canvas of culture twittering away across the global village, our present reality – the seismic planetary shifts, the pandemical turmoil – evades our collective narrative comprehension. We are clearly at a critical moment in history, the consequences of which will ripple through time in unimaginable ways. In preparation for what is to come, we urgently need to view the frightening present with clarity. Only then, by extrapolating the likely future of our planet, might we begin to imagine a better world. There may not be a more qualified living writer to do this than Kim Stanley Robinson. In his ground-breaking New Yorker essay ‘The Coronavirus and our Future’, Robinson, invoking Raymond Williams, reflects: The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling … we’ve been overdue for such a shift. In our feelings, we’ve been lagging behind the times in which we live … the age of climate change … wrecking our one and only home in ways that soon will be beyond our descendants’ ability to repair. (New Yorker, 1 May 2020)

Robinson’s latest novel, The Ministry for the Future, attempts to articulate the societal transformations, the collective shifts in thought, that will be necessary in order to confront and therefore change the shared future of the earth and all life therein. This is by no means a novel departure for the Californian, who from as early as his Nebula and Hugo Award-winning Mars trilogy (1992–96) has contended with and, as much as a novelist might, fought against our Anthropocene moment, the trajectory of which we continue along today ‘despite the 2020 dip’ in emissions referred to early in the novel. But while much of his earlier work this century – Science in the Capital Trilogy (2004–7), 2312 (2012), Aurora (2015), and New York 2140 (2017) – deals with similar climatic and existential fears, none is as ferocious or clear-sighted as The Ministry for the Future. Set just a few years from now and spanning multiple decades, The Ministry for the Future recounts the rise of the eponymous ministry, established in Zurich in 2025 to work with the IPCC, the United Nations, and all governments signatory to the Paris Agreement. Headed by Mary Murphy, a no-nonsense Irishwom-

an appointed to the unenviable task of guiding her team of experts from across a range of disciplines, the ministry’s singular purpose is ‘to advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens … all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves’. Of course, Mary’s team soon discovers the present impossibility of its mission, the mere symbolism of its formation against the intractability of international policy and of the very systems through which our current world order is organised. To be blunt, neoliberalism is the primary problem. Robinson is unwavering here, the sweeping sequence of events by which the ministry attempts to trigger immense societal transformations as clear a critique of present-day capitalism as you will find in fiction. Although the ministry – along with Frank May, the sole survivor of the novel’s opening climate horror – provides the novel with its recurring core of radical ideas, this only scratches the surface of Robinson’s remarkable achievement, a work sufficiently radical in form to convey both the immensity and the complexity of anthropogenic climate change, a world ‘trembling on the brink’. Told almost entirely through eyewitness accounts, dozens upon dozens of interlinked characters and events, the novel’s scale is exceptionally expansive, cycling kaleidoscopically through entire worlds: Mary’s ministry, Frank’s climate-induced PTSD, ecological destruction, climate catastrophes, eco-terrorism, clandestine government operations, geo-engineering and carbon drawdown projects, riddles told from the points of view of inanimate objects and matter, climate change refugees, the reconfiguration of the world’s banks and rewilding movements, to mention just a few. Constructing a novel, a towering future history, from more than one hundred short story-like vignettes might be disorienting, even distressing, given the subject; but in so doing Robinson appears to have arrived finally at an ideal hybrid of forms. Shortform fiction tends to occlude the long-term processes of climate change, focusing rather on what Robinson, in discussion with Gerry Canavan in 2014, referred to as ‘moments of dramatic breakdown’ precisely because these ‘are narratisable’. This might explain why post-catastrophic fatalism features so strongly in short climate fiction. But, as Robinson himself elaborated, ‘if we do that we’re no longer imagining the peculiar kinds of ordinary life that will precede and follow’ those moments. The novel form, he concluded, is generally better suited to the grander narrative demands of anthropogenic climate change because ‘the novel proper has the flexibility and capaciousness to depict any human situation … That’s what the modern novel was created to do, and that capacity never leaves it.’ By subsuming shorter, more dramatic forms of storytelling into a larger, meaningful narrative architecture, Robinson leaves little chance for soothing denialisms and the various narrative closures that pervade climate fiction more generally. It makes for painful reading. As much as The Ministry for the Future could be seen as a work of future realism, laced with traces of disaster dystopia, it is ultimately a utopian novel. What is particularly distressing is that the meticulous, encyclopedic steps by which Robinson’s ministry ushers in a greener and more equitable – though still far from perfect – post-capitalist age feel distinctly possible, and yet just out of reach. g J.R. Burgmann is a PhD candidate and a researcher at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Fiction

Brighton dark

William Boyd’s populous new novel Michael Shmith

Trio

by William Boyd

Viking $32.99 pb, 352 pp

he first three chapters of William Boyd’s beguiling new novel, Trio, are devoted to the waking habits of three people: a novelist called Elfrida Wing, stirred from slumber by the brightening morning sun; a film producer called Talbot Kydd, jolted into a new day by an erotic dream taking place on a beach; and an American actress called Anny Viklund, who, it seems, hasn’t had the time to consider sunrays or reverie. Anny, the only one of the trio not to wake up alone, has spent a vigorous night with a younger man called Troy Blaze. We soon discover that, despite their dawn chorus of assorted groans, creaks, and flatulence, the members of this trio are acutely dissimilar in almost every other respect. Their one connecting filament – more a strip of celluloid, really – is that they are all in Brighton, England, on the shoot of a film called (deep breath) Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon. That prolix title alone ought to give away the fact that Trio is not a novel of our times, but one of more than half a century ago. This was in 1968, when England basked in the lurid glare of psychedelia, made movies actually titled Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, and tried (like the ageing Talbot) to fathom the meaning of the line ‘Someone left the cake out in the rain’ from Jimmy Webb’s song ‘MacArthur Park’. Anny Viklund plays Emily B, and her paramour, Troy, is her leading man. It almost goes without saying that most of their scenes involve a banana-yellow Mini. Anny also has a dark side, in the form of two other men: Jacques Soldat, a philosopher boyfriend in Paris, and Cornell Weekes, her former husband, a terrorist on the run from Special Branch and the FBI, who appears on the scene, demanding money. Talbot Kydd, a war veteran with a wife in London and two grown children, is the movie’s long-suffering producer, who, in true sixties fashion, nurses an ulcer and, as we soon discover, is on the verge of easing open the door of the closet in this, the early, tentative period following the legalisation of homosexuality in England. But Talbot also has a crisis a day to manage, not merely with the film but with the corporate machinations of the company making it. More peripherally involved with the film is Elfrida Wing, who is married to its director, Reggie Tipton, a serial philanderer, who insists, for professional reasons, on being called Rodrigo. Elfrida, lodging in Brighton with nothing in particular to do 28 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

except drink to excess, is fed up with being called ‘the new Virginia Woolf ’, and personally blames the old one for an extended bout of writer’s block. How ironic, then, that VW (as if from the depths of the Ouse river) provides the very literary inspiration for Elfrida’s new novel? Trio yields its various secrets carefully, not entirely predictably, and occasionally with surprising, even dramatic, results. But this is essentially an intimate, chamber-like work, and the very opposite of the more symphonic scope of Love Is Blind, Boyd’s 2018 novel about a Scottish piano tuner in fin-de-siècle Scotland, France, and Russia.

Trio is not a novel of our times, but one of more than half a century ago Boyd, always a fine storyteller, conveys his sharp sense of social observation of an era that seems as alien to many of us now as the Roaring Twenties would have been to Screaming Lord Sutch or Jane Asher. Mind you, Boyd’s recollections were possibly aided by the likes of Joan Collins and Frederic R aphael, who are included in a list of gratitude and acknowledgments. My problem with Trio is more to do with other characters, some of whom seem to exist for momentary reasons rather than to advance the plot. Take the appearance of a distinguished local actor, Sir Dorian Villiers, whose rococo speech habits owe much to an actual knighted thespian who lived in Brighton, Laurence Olivier. At a swanky at-home party (Dirk Bogarde and Jill Bennett are in attendance), Villiers taps Talbot for a cameo role in the film. But, I suspect, this episode was really more of a dramatic device to place the three main characters in the same room. Not that Elfrida, Anny, and Talbot meet up all that often. It’s their separate lives – for which also read parallel universes – that matter here more than any personal or professional cohesion. When there is an encounter it is almost incidental – but shrewdly observational, too. For example, Anny, who can’t quite remember Talbot’s name, recalls him only as ‘tall and bald’ with ‘one of those classic, clipped, dry English accents’. Or, conversely, Talbot sees in Anny ‘an exceptionally tiny person … as if she were a prototype or a maquette for a young woman, almost a different species’. Or, when Talbot encounters Elfrida in a bar, he regards her as ‘the oddest woman … Tall, slim, she seemed to be trying to hide her face behind her thick dark hair ... She often wore heavy black-rimmed spectacles that made the barrier seem even more impenetrable, though, oddly again, her lips were always painted a lurid red.’ In its abrupt, episodic way, Trio propels one along, but mainly out of entertainment value rather than anything more profound or lasting. To me, it reads as if it is more of a treatment for its own film version or, possibly, a six-parter for BBC television. Can’t you see that banana-yellow Mini hurtling over the cliff at Beachy Head? g Michael Shmith is a Melbourne writer and editor. His most recent book is Cranlana: The first one hundred years (Hardie Grant, 2019).

Fiction

Local infections Malcolm Knox’s new novel Jo Case

Bluebird

by Malcolm Knox

Allen & Unwin $32.99 pb, 487 pp

alcolm Knox told Kill Your Darlings in 2012 that with The Life (2011), his celebrated surfing novel set on the Gold Coast, he wanted to write a historical novel about the Australian coastline and ‘that moment when one person could live right on the coast on our most treasured waterfront places, and then all of a sudden they couldn’t’. In Bluebird, set on a northern beach a ferry ride from ‘Ocean City’, this brutally undemocratic transformation is promoted from a minor theme to the engine that drives the highbrow soap-opera narrative. Gordon Grimes and his wife, Kelly, separate in the aftermath of their shared fiftieth birthday party, at which Kelly sleeps with Gordon’s best mate, Dog. Kelly takes their fifteen-year-old son Ben and moves from their rented ex-housing commission house to The Lodge, the childhood home she hates and Gordon loves, as the community hub of his own childhood. A crumbling beach shack bordered by mansions, The Lodge is two-thirds owned by Kelly’s hated stepmother, Leonie, who gifts Gordon a third on the occasion of the separation, propelling him into The Lodge with his goddaughter, Lou, in tow – and an obviously doomed, hopelessly under-resourced mission to save The Lodge from the ravages of time, and defend it against ‘the real enemy, the money that landed in Bluebird freshly laundered and itching to renovate’. Knox is a past master of contemporary social realism, using carefully mined details of character and place to reveal complex truths about how we live and who we are as a society. His first three novels – Summerland (2000), A Private Man (2004), and Jamaica (2007) – cleverly dissected the mores and subterranean lives of Sydney’s bourgeoisie, with a focus on the sinister undercurrents of relationships that maintain polite veneers. The Life (2011) was a departure in terms of style and subject, with his articulate, cultured, determinedly ‘ordinary’ narrators replaced by a kinetic ocker poetry that reflected the adrenalised waves and spikes of working-class surf champion DK’s interior life. The protagonist of his last novel, The Wonder Lovers (2015), was another oddball outsider; this time, hyperarticulate and deliberately stripped of the kinds of defining cultural characteristics so integral to Knox’s earlier social realism. A fable with a magical realist edge, it carried a clear moral warning against living life without fully committing to it; in a theme continued in Bluebird, it showed that failure to act has consequences. ‘Gordon could never have made the hero of a man’s story,’ says Lou. ‘Men’s heroes have motivations to act. Gordon makes

excuses not to … All Gordon wants is the status quo.’ In a tragicomic subplot, Gordon refuses to acknowledge Dog’s betrayal, and continues to endure his daily presence rather than confront him. ‘Indifference, a fair go, being laidback, whatever you wanted to call it, was a collective effort mighty in its tenacity,’ reflects Kelly, whom Gordon amiably forgives, and who slept with Dog not out of nostalgic lust but as a clumsy blow against inertia. Gordon’s general inaction, however, is less indifference than a reluctance to disturb a well of repressed emotion; a childhood tragedy at its deepest level. ‘If he let himself go in that direction, he could not say where he would stop.’ Knox’s old Bluebirders are property rich and cash poor. ‘Old Bluebird was a worker’s aristocracy, except for the work part.’ Gordon was retrenched three years ago as editor of the Bluebird News, ‘gone the way of lamplighting, wet nursing and elevator operating’. He’s characteristically unsuited to ‘customer-facing’, which is ‘all that’s left’. Old Bluebirders are marooned in a world that physically resembles their home, though its social conditions have changed, leaving them bewildered and defensive. Leonie, the wicked stepmother archetype, who narrates stylised introductory slivers to the sections of the novel (which read like a meditation over a crystal ball), diagnoses the ‘local infection: crippling nostalgia’. The irony is that Old Bluebird was a very specific paradise, where racism and homophobia were endemic, and the paedophilia of pillars of the community was silently tolerated. Transitional Bluebird is perhaps best encapsulated by ‘Asperger-ish, ADHDlike’ Ben, whose inability to fit in with the crowd means that he’s punished for falling further outside it with his sexuality. ‘Diversity was cool. Or it was until Ben’s coming-out, which fell flat: someone must have decided they could only take so much, and Ben took them past the unspoken limit.’ This is the first of Knox’s novels to consciously reflect a multicultural, diverse Australia. The racism of the white characters is brilliantly captured through their reactions to characters like Kelly, who is Anglo Indian – particularly Gordon’s mother, Norma. (‘Did it make Norma less racist to utter these comments while not caring about, or even seeing, Kelly’s own colour?’) Leonie is a conscious satire of the stereotype of the scheming, much-younger Asian second wife, which she embodies. But that stereotype is never quite subverted, and though she has a voice, the stylised nature of her interludes mean that she’s never made real or authentic. At just under 500 pages, Bluebird feels too long. Some ideas are repeated so often that it starts to feel as if we’re being bashed over the head with them – particularly the notion, repeated by several characters, using similar phrasing, that Gordon is dragging down, or ‘killing’, those who try to help him (which only sometimes feels true to the relationship). Despite these structural flaws, at a sentence level Bluebird is consistently excellent, rich with spot-on social observations details that are sharp, funny, and affecting. As a comment on Scott Morrison’s Australia, and an exploration of the casualties and boons of progress, it’s very good. g Jo Case is a bookseller in Adelaide and associate publisher at Wakefield Press. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Fiction

‘The cold flesh of my cadaver’ A landmark in Latin American literature Andrew McLeod

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis, translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux

Penguin Classics $27.99 pb, 368 pp

rom the moment one reads that this book is dedicated ‘To the worm that first gnawed at the cold flesh of my cadaver’, it is clear that The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, first published in Rio de Janeiro in 1881, is a novel like few others. The novel is a landmark in Latin American literature, prefiguring the works of canonised writers such as Borges, Lispector, Rulfo, and García Marquez by decades. The fact that it – and, indeed, the entire oeuvre of its author, Machado de Assis (1839–1908) – is largely unknown outside the Lusophone world has bewildered generations of writers and critics, from Harold Bloom to Susan Sontag to Salman Rushdie. In his foreword to this excellent new translation by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, Dave Eggers is the latest to add his name to that list. Contrary to what one might expect of a tale narrated by a dead man – ‘not exactly an author recently deceased, but a deceased man recently an author’ – the story itself is deceptively simple. Told in 160 short, titled chapters, The Posthumous Memoirs presents itself as the autobiography of an unremarkable member of the Brazilian aristocracy, focusing primarily on the narrator’s love affair with the beautiful Virgília. Echoing Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a work to which this novel is openly indebted, the eponymous Brás recounts his own birth and genealogy, his amorous adventures, and his various half-hearted efforts to make something of himself. Any attempt, however, to reduce this novel to a plot summary does it a tremendous disservice. In telling his life story, Brás takes the reader on a journey from the Garden of Eden to the fall of Napoleon, via meditations on the pleasure of removing tight shoes, the metaphysical purpose of the human nose, and the 1848 Dalmatian Revolution, at one point riding through ‘the living condensation of all time’ on the back of a taciturn hippopotamus. One chapter consists entirely of punctuation; another is simply Brás’ notes for a chapter he never writes. Chapter 130 is to be inserted into Chapter 129. As playful as this novel often appears, it is nevertheless a deeply affecting examination of the human condition. Lovers’ thoughts fly across the city and sit conversing on a windowsill; a house where the lovers once hid is later knocked down and replaced by one three times the size, ‘but I swear to you that it is far smaller than the original’; a slave fantasises that his master’s property belongs to him – an illusion that allows him a brief moment of pride and pleasure. 30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

The daily presence of slavery and servitude in this world, which feels more like a tropical Belle-Époque Paris than a colonial outpost, is one of the novel’s most thought-provoking engagements with its discourse, rendered all the more fascinating today by its resonance with contemporary Brazil and the renewed global vigour of civil rights movements. Machado de Assis – known generally as Machado – was the mixed-race grandchild of freed slaves. For most of his life, it was legal in Brazil for one human to own another. In his pioneering critical works on Machado, the Brazilian literary and cultural critic Roberto Schwarz examines how the fundamental tensions and contradictions of nineteenth-century Brazil are laid bare in The Posthumous Memoirs. Schwarz describes how Machado’s poetics – especially the volubility of narrators like Brás, who can switch opinions in a heartbeat – manifest the fundamental tensions of a nation that incorporated passages from the Declaration of the Rights of Man in its 1824 constitution, yet clung to legalised slavery until 1888, seven years after the publication of The Posthumous Memoirs. In his ground-breaking 1973 essay on Machado, ‘Misplaced Ideas’, Schwarz contends that the enshrining of these mutually exclusive notions in Brazil served to illuminate the ongoing inequality perpetuated by liberal political systems in Europe and North America in the same period. Despite being almost 140 years old, this novel feels like it could have been written yesterday. Thomson-DeVeaux’s translation is a significant achievement. It renders Machado’s distinctive prose in a manner that captures the tone and register of the original Portuguese, while her comprehensive introduction and explanatory notes allow the novel to pour beyond the pages into the world at large. The chapter entitled ‘The Whip’, in which the narrator encounters his childhood slave beating another man in the street – ‘he had bought himself a slave and was paying back, with steep interest, the sums he had received from me’ – is powerful enough on its own, but the note explaining the significance of the area in which the scene occurs brings the incident directly into the modern day. Some notes detail variations between the text as it is presented here – based on the definitive fourth edition of the novel – and its original serialised form; others provide background and context for Machado’s wide-ranging literary and historical references. How one engages with the endnotes, however, is entirely up to the reader: like all great works of universal literature, the novel itself needs no explanation. Early in the novel, Brás observes: ‘That Stendhal should have confessed to writing one of his novels for only a hundred readers is a source of some surprise and consternation.’ In turn, Brás suggests he would not be surprised if his own memoir fails to find ten readers: ‘Ten? Perhaps five ... But I still harbor hopes of winning the sympathies of [public] opinion.’ That Machado’s oeuvre should have had such difficulty winning the sympathies of English-language readers is almost inexplicable. With Thomson-DeVeaux’s masterful new translation and its widespread accessibility through Penguin Classics, the worm might finally turn. g Andrew McLeod is a Melbourne-based writer and literary critic. He holds a PhD from Monash University, focusing on the work of Machado de Assis. ❖

Fiction

Prisons of the imagination Susanna Clarke’s surreal second novel Kirsten Tranter

Piranesi

by Susanna Clarke

Bloomsbury $27.99 pb, 272 pp

t is day one hundred and seventeen of the official ‘Shelter in Place’ order in Berkeley, California, when I finish Susanna Clarke’s surreal, heartbreaking novel Piranesi, having rationed the final pages over several days. There is something about lockdown and its strange effects on the mind that makes every text seem like a code for the situation of quarantine, every story an allegory of constriction, captivity, or exile. But Piranesi speaks to these themes with unique sharpness: it is literally a story about a man trapped in a house of endless rooms, who no longer remembers that another world exists. The narrator has forgotten his real name and is called Piranesi. The name references the eighteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the House described in the novel seems to embody his monumental, uncanny architectural images, especially his collection of etchings titled Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons, 1750). In these haunting engravings, as in the novel’s House, massive stairs and walkways connect gothic archways and innumerable vast halls filled with statuary. The House encloses a dreamlike world. Rain falls from clouds in the upper levels, while the lower levels of the house – the ‘Drowned Halls’ – are filled with water that resembles an ocean with its own tides. Windows look onto enclosed courtyards and show the sky. The novel is told in the form of Piranesi’s obsessive journal entries describing the House, its many statues, rooms, windows, fish and bird life, and collection of anonymous human skeletons. The voice is innocent, archaic, with important nouns capitalised and liberal use of exclamation marks. I found myself wondering if Piranesi were one of the nineteenth-century magicians in Clarke’s début novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell (2004), venturing into a strange world beyond our own. But traces of the modern world begin to show and become more obvious, more insistent and malign. Initially, Piranesi’s only companion is a man he calls ‘the Other’, a cantankerous, arrogant person who holds a ‘shining device’ and somehow has access to things necessary for survival in the House such as a sleeping bag, fishing nets, and matches, which he gives to Piranesi. How are we to understand this place that resists conscious understanding? It is suggested that the House was discovered by someone searching for ‘a passage, a door between us and wherever magic has gone’. One character believes that ‘it was created by ideas flowing out of another world’, which seem to have taken concrete shape in the form of innumerable statues. We meet a

stone elephant carrying a castle, two kings playing chess, a woman holding a beehive, a hall of giant minotaurs, and countless more. These stone figures – human, animal, whimsical, monstrous, divine – convey every state of being from joy to struggle and despair in a vast repository of arcane symbolism. The novel revels in its intertextual conversation with literary and popular culture. Piranesi’s favourite statue is a faun, in a nod to Mr Tumnus in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia. ‘He smiles slightly and presses his forefinger to his lips’, as if in warning, Piranesi tells us; ‘I dreamt of him once; he was standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child.’ Doctor Who also gets a reference. The House not only offers a tribute to Narnia and the Doctor’s timetravelling TARDIS, but to every fantasy world ever reached through a fictional portal or tear in space, on a page or on a screen or in the imagination.

There is something about lockdown that makes every text seem like a code for the situation of quarantine The extraordinary Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was a massive brick of a book, a story that reached with epic ambition across time and space in a completely realised magical universe. With Piranesi, Clarke has condensed the power of that sprawling narrative into a little jewel box, an intricately crafted puzzle of a novel that, like the Italian Piranesi’s etchings, constantly asks the reader to shift perspectives, to guess and see anew more freshly impossible geometries. Despite the signature beauty of Clarke’s prose, Piranesi’s point of view seems at first so weird, so stubbornly naïve, and the whole thing somehow too clever and artificial. This changes as the story draws us further into the mystery of the narrator’s existence and the relationship of the House to our own world. The novel’s parable of creativity, the story of a mind lost in an imaginary world of beauty, danger, loss, and wonder, loses its sense of contrivance and as though by magic comes emotionally true. Piranesi’s story is not only a testament to the power of the imagination and a discourse on the mutability of the self, but also a story about the best and worst of human impulses, where cruelty and egotism contend with kindness, compassion, and courage. Clarke’s careful turns of the narrative screw have a stealthy power, and the moment Piranesi comes to contemplate the possibility of leaving the House feels both inevitable and unexpectedly tragic; it seemed as though I had somehow forgotten and was now being forcibly reminded of the awful loss that attends disenchantment, the wrenching pain of disconnect between art and life, matter and spirit, imagination and reality, self and other, that is the foundation of all creativity. Clarke writes brilliantly about magic and also understands the magic of language, its power to reveal the mysteries that shadow what we take for reality, to conjure empathy and provoke insight. Like Clarke’s magician Jonathan Strange, Piranesi laments the passing of magic from the modern world, and yet makes its own case that fiction is one place it might be rediscovered. g Kirsten Tranter’s novels include Hold (2016). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Fiction

Clandestine glances

What to do with a Ken doll?

Elizabeth Bryer

Thuy On

A captivating first collection

Three wildly different Young Adult novels

Broken Rules and Other Stories by Barry Lee Thompson

Transit Lounge $29.99 pb, 240 pp

n perhaps the most tender story in this textured, interconnected collection, an adolescent son spends the summer sunbathing in the backyard and sneaking glances at the paperboy while his working-class, stay-at-home father, who reads detective fiction and likes to ‘figure things out before the endings’, gently attempts to make it known to his son that he can tell him anything. This develops into one of the missed opportunities that are emblematic of the collection: the son is too caught up in his longing for other boys, and his relief on learning at school that same-sex attraction is a ‘phase’, to notice that he has a sympathetic ear in his father. The summer rolls on, his sexuality unresolved. The stories collected here often detail the moments between events in a life: the uncertainty before the revelation; the friendship after it nearly became something else; the intrigue that almost led somewhere. ‘I considered knocking again. Just one more time. I think about it sometimes, I wonder what might have been had I tried that third time.’ Residues, memories, suspicions unconfirmed. While each story features a relatively brief moment, together they cover the expanse of an entire life, from early childhood to old age, suggesting that the collection might be read as an examination of the passing of time. Taken together, the stories become meaningful in other ways. For the elderly protagonist of ‘Playful Arrangements’, for example, the monotony of life is punctured when a decrepit man, his gaze potentially malevolent, notices him, causing him, ‘no coward, but sensible’, to turn and run. A story such as this, on its own, raises more questions than it answers. Do the men know each other? Is the protagonist unhinged, seeing threats where none exist? In the context of the collection, more evocative possibilities are suggested: Is the protagonist hyper-aware because of a lifelong need to detect, and protect himself from, homophobia? If the writing, periodically, becomes slightly mannered, there are also phrases of considerable beauty, such as ‘you have to crane your mind a little to understand what he is saying’. With so much left unsaid between characters, a sense of mystery permeates the everyday that they inhabit, making this a captivating début. g Elizabeth Bryer is a writer and translator. Her first novel, From Here On, Monsters, is published by Picador. 32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

hese three Young Adult novels differ wildly in tone, execution – even their grasp on reality. Georgina Young’s début novel, Loner (Text Publishing, $24.99 pb, 256 pp), won the Text Prize for an unpublished Young Adult manuscript in 2019, and was a deserving winner. Text has decided to market it as adult fiction, but it works well as a crossover novel. Her protagonist, twenty-year-old Lona (does not sound like loner!) Wallace is bookish, socially gauche, a virgin, and a self-declared weirdo. In many ways a typical Bildungsroman, Loner maps the convoluted path of an emerging adult uncertain about her future. Set in contemporary Melbourne, the book examines different ways of self-creation: with Lona moving out of home (and back again), falling in (and out of ) love, and failing and succeeding in understanding what she wants to do with her life. She’s a work in progress. When her friend Tab takes a photo of her, it turns out blurry and unfocused, much like Lona herself. For a host of confused reasons, she has recently dropped out of university and now castigates herself for being ‘unqualified and spineless’. In the liminal world that is post-school but pre-career, Lona ekes out a precarious living in the gig economy, dwelling for a time in a share house where privacy is minimal. Trying to deduce the rules of adulthood, she wonders why working three part-time jobs is still not enough to secure a flat of her own. Lona is a relatable and engaging character, socially maladroit but funny and spirited in spite of her desultory ways. It’s not surprising that she’s a fan of Daria, the 1990s animated character whose deadpan delivery and cynical outlook made her the poster girl for outcasts everywhere. Lona is similarly world-weary and sardonic, though it’s hard to figure out if she is being sarcastic or not – ‘sincerity never leaves her mouth fully intact’. Proudly defiant about her radioactive blue hair, a confrontational hue that’s admired by the tweens in the skating rink where she works, she thinks, ‘To all the girls who aren’t brave enough. It’s coming. The not giving a fuck.’ Loner canvasses the various dramas of friendship, romance, and family with insight and wry humour, and the secondary characters are skilfully drawn. That its twenty-five-year-old author is not much older than her wannabe rebel artist makes the book even more verisimilitudinous. Special mention should be made about the matter-of-fact and non-tokenistic handling of Lona’s cross-cultural relationship with George, her Asian boyfriend.

avina Bell has written picture books and junior and middle-grade fiction, but her first Young Adult novel, The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love (Text Publishing, $19.99 pb, 288 pp), is a shape-shifting effort that’s hard to categorise. It’s a beguiling and confusing blend of magic realism, fairytale, and dystopian trauma. Set some time in an otherworldly future when Antarctica has lost the last of its ice, the Amazon forest has been razed, Paris bombed out of existence, and there’s a killing illness called ‘The Greying’, the book follows the musings of identical twin teenagers, Summer and Winter, who have been left to fend for themselves on a remote island after the disappearance of their father, a quasi-mad scientist/techno whiz. His top-secret work is said to affect ‘the seas, the Earth’s tilt, the shift of its axis, the turning of the world’. Holed up in a church with beds made out of communion cushions and subsisting on fancy canned food instead of having to eat the slurry that most of humanity is surviving on, the girls try to ride out the geopolitical disaster. The narrative is alternated by the sisters; both are unreliable witnesses as to what had happened, what is happening, and will happen. The trans-seasonal twins while away the hours with their absent mother’s classic and improving literature collection, books like The Diary of Anne Frank and Alice in Wonderland, and there are several moments where whimsy (a talking beached blue whale) interrupts a tale that’s often morose and ponderous. Bell has created a detailed and evocative universe; The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love is darkly framed. There’s a bear-like creature whose presence threatens to weaken the twin’s tightness, and violence and death are never far away. Depending on your tolerance for surreal and amorphous storytelling, Bell’s slipperiness can feel invigorating and inventive, or frustrating and evasive. That the title itself could easily be flipped around to read The End of Love Is Bigger Than The World is a measure of its open-ended nature.

and cheesy. Sixteen-year-old Katie Camilleri, dreaming of a perfect boyfriend out of sheer boredom, decides to sculpt one herself. The magical recipe involves a hunk of clay and some contributing gloop delivered by an eyedropper from her friend Libby. After a stormy night, Katie awakes to see her creation has become a talking, walking, anatomically correct dreamboat (though missing a belly button – an oversight). He smoulders like ‘a long-lost Hemsworth brother’ with ‘floppy hair that always sits just right. And eyes like the sky on a clear Summer’s day.’ He’s ready-made to lavish attention upon her, but now that he’s lying naked on her bed, what to do with this Ken doll? Aside from the weird science that’s never explained, Guillaume deploys every trope of the 1990s teenage rom-com: as well as competing love interests for our hopelessly insecure heroine, there’s a pack of bitchy alpha girls to contend with (‘the devil and her demon minions’), a formal school party, a falling out and subsequent rapprochement of besties, and the first and subsequent kisses for the lovelorn. Narrated in the first person by Katie, with frequent interjections from Libby, the book plays for mortified laughs. Guy, the Pygmalion-cum-Frankenstein creation, has no agency and is happy to be ordered about, with Katie and her friends having to introduce him to the niceties of modern Australian life (including being taught fourteen different connotations of ‘mate’ and how to do a Tim Tam slam.) In terms of themes, You Were Made For Me touches upon real life and cyberbullying as well as body image, racism, and parental loss. For the most part, it’s a light and predictable tale about adolescent romances wherein a chastened Katie duly learns about the deceptive allure of perfection. g

o, from post-apocalyptic despair to frothy silliness. Popculture journalist Jenna Guillaume’s second novel, You Were Made for Me (Pan Macmillan, $17.99 pb, 328 pp), is breezy

Thuy On is Books Editor of The Big Issue. Her first book, a poetry collection called Turbulence, was published by UWAP in March 2020.

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australianbookreview.com.au/features/book-of-the-week AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Biography

Genital advantages

spoke at rallies, and wrote for the Woman Voter, a situation that might be envied by recent female leaders like Julia Gillard, who not only had to contend with public opposition but also with the A new biography of the suffrage activist factional interests of the men in her own party. Sylvia Martin A woman of international standing who charmed President Theodore Roosevelt in America in 1902 and addressed an enthralled audience of ten thousand in London as a guest of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1911, Goldstein is not widely remembered today, although Clare Wright’s portrayal of her in You Daughters of Freedom (Text Publishing, 2018) has Vida: A woman for our time helped shed new light. Her obscurity is in part due to her reserved by Jacqueline Kent nature and equable temperament; the woman behind the immaculate presentation and apparent lack of intimate relationships has Viking remained a mystery. For Wright, she was ‘a public woman’ who $34.99 pb, 329 pp ‘lived and breathed politics’. iles Franklin used to delight in relating an anecdote Jacqueline Kent, well placed as a biographer of Julia Gillard, about a librarian friend who, when asked why a less has taken up the challenge to breathe life into this earlier politicompetent colleague was paid more, replied succinctly: cal woman. In an interview in 2019 when she was writing Vida, ‘He has the genital organs of the male; they’re not used in library Kent vowed to ‘go a bit deeper’ than the previous concentration on work, but men are paid more for having them.’ her public career, ‘to join dots, sometimes even to speculate’. Kent I was reminded of this when I found that the subject of draws extensively on the archival research undertaken by GoldVida, Franklin’s friend Vida Goldstein, stein’s first biographer, Janette M. Bomford, had preserved a piece of doggerel in a whose book That Dangerous and Persuasive newspaper from around the same time, Woman: Vida Goldstein (Melbourne Uniwhich begins: ‘She was pretty / She was versity Press, 1993) laid out Goldstein’s fair / Tailor-made and debonair.’ After career in almost forensic detail. On this listing her favourable attributes, it finishes basis, Kent builds a more comprehensive with what was missing: ‘No she hadn’t / picture of Goldstein’s family life, including Really hadn’t / Poor Vida hadn’t pants.’ her quietly progressive social reformist These gems come from more than a cenmother (only nineteen years her senior) tury ago, but how much has changed for and her more domineering, anti-suffragist women, at least in the world of politics? father, who remained under the same roof Who can forget Julia Gillard’s ‘misogyny even when the couple became estranged. A speech’ of 2012? chilling detail in the story of her maternal Starting her public life as a suffrage grandparents may have influenced Goldactivist, Goldstein (1869–1949) made her stein’s concern for women’s marital rights first bid for federal politics in 1903, standand her lifelong temperance. ing as an independent candidate for the One less successful speculation conSenate on a platform of women’s rights. cerns the ‘conjecture’ around Goldstein’s Unsuccessful, she was ranked fifteenth of friendship with her dynamic business eighteen candidates, but outpolled each of manager, Cecilia John, who burst onto the other two women candidates by more the WPA scene in 1913, alienating some than thirty thousand votes. Goldstein was of the more moderate feminists. The two to make four more attempts to win a seat worked closely over the next few years, in parliament, the last and least successforming and running the Women’s Peace ful being in 1917 when her increasingly Army together and eventually representing militant support of the suffragettes and the WPA at the International Congress of her pacifism during wartime dented her Women’s conference in Zurich in 1919, popularity. Disillusioned but not embitafter which they parted company. A more tered, she continued to work for social nuanced reading might have done more reform and devoted the rest of her life than repeat the rather stale argument about to the Christian Science faith that had women’s intense friendships, after which helped her bear the acrimony she received the discussion is closed off with the ahisfrom both public and press. Throughout, torical statement: ‘Vida never identified she was supported by her loyal cohort of as lesbian, although Cecilia John did.’ To Women’s Political Association (WPA) my knowledge, Cecilia never ‘identified Vida Goldstein, 1912 members who managed her campaigns, as lesbian’, nor did other WPA women in (Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria)

34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

Memoir same-sex relationships such as Mary Fullerton and Mabel Singleton, who distanced themselves from a term then considered synonymous with perversion. Goldstein remained silent on the subject of desires she may have harboured, either for Cecilia or for the unidentified men who made the many marriage proposals stressed by both Kent and Wright. (Curiously, Kent never couples the two women’s first names, referring to them as ‘Vida and Cecilia John’ or ‘Vida and John’, a distancing practice that gives rise to such oddities as ‘Vida, John and Adela’.)

Vida Goldstein charmed President Theodore Roosevelt in America in 1902 and addressed an enthralled audience of ten thousand in London The main strengths of Vida lie in its contextualising of the time, from ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ of the 1880s to the economic depression of the 1890s to the rigours of the World War I years and later, and also in Kent’s elucidation of the wider political scene, particularly when she compares Goldstein’s position with today’s Australian female politicians. Differences as well as similarities between the periods are noted: the WPA’s racism and support of the White Australia policy, for instance, and the essentialist view of the suffragists that women in power would provide a purifying influence on men. Kent’s engaging style, never ponderous or dry, will introduce a new generation of readers to the life and times of an important Australian pioneer for women’s rights. If, despite the promise of the book’s intimate title, the ‘real Vida’ remains somewhat elusive, it is interesting to speculate on possible counterparts in politics today. To my mind, the woman who most resembles Vida Goldstein’s calm and charm, her quick wit and steely-eyed determination, is Penny Wong, even though, unfortunately, she does not aspire to become prime minister. Non-Anglo, a lesbian, and a mother, Wong truly is ‘a woman for our time’. g Sylvia Martin’s latest book is Sky Swimming: Reflections on auto/biography, people and place (UWA Publishing, 2020).

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Bearing witness A radical form of humanity Tali Lavi

The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku

Macmillan $32.99 hb, 208 pp

ddie Jaku looks out benevolently from his memoir’s cover, signs of living etched across his face. The dapper centenarian displays another mark, one distinctly at odds with his beatific expression and the title’s claim: the tattoo on his forearm from Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Less discernible is the badge affixed to his lapel bearing the Hebrew word zachor; ‘remember’. The Happiest Man on Earth blazes with the pursuit of memory, of bearing witness, but it is also determinedly oriented towards the future, its dedication inscribed to ‘future generations’. As I read Jaku’s book, the same sensation struck me as when I read Hans Keilson’s memoir There Stands My House (2011): it is perhaps best described as the privilege of experiencing someone’s remarkable company and being entrusted with his story. Keilson was also a German Jew who survived the Holocaust, but one who did so by hiding. Jaku’s experience was one of hiding, betrayals, internment, the crushing brutality of Auschwitz and the Buchenwald concentration camp (twice), the death march, and myriad other horrors. Following the Shoah, the lives of both men are formed out of the memory of their parents, shadowed by their murder and also influenced by their embodiment of compassion. Jaku and Keilson cleave to a belief in humanity as a resounding reply to hate. Writer Liam Pieper has deftly allowed Jaku’s singular speaking voice to emerge unfiltered. Jaku ushers the reader to go with him as he extends his fellowship, each word resolutely countering the darkness of oblivion and intolerance. The book is an extension of his almost four decades-long volunteering at the Sydney Jewish Museum and of his 2019 TED talk. The miraculous seems a concept at odds with the telling of a narrative so mired in suffering, but the word ‘miracle’ often nudges its way into Holocaust survivors’ accounts, as it does here. Jaku addresses survivor guilt and the fraught existence of a survivor, asserting that those who held on to their belief in an inherently evil world did not wholly survive their experience. His experience as a refugee and migrant reverberates in our contemporary world. In The Happiest Man on Earth, Jaku continues to ask questions for which there are no answers. He acknowledges suffering but resists being defined by it, adhering instead to his philosophy of choosing a radical form of humanity, a resistance both potent and infectious. g Tali Lavi is a writer, reviewer, and public interviewer. She worked on the original Melbourne Jewish Writers Festival and is now co-programmer of Melbourne Jewish Book Week. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Biography

The brother as torturer Alex Miller’s tribute to a mentor Jane Sullivan

Max

by Alex Miller

Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 280 pp

hen Alex Miller first thought of writing about Max Blatt, he imagined a celebration of his life. But would Max have wanted that? He was a melancholy, chainsmoking European migrant, quiet and self-effacing, who claimed nothing for himself except defeat and futility. Max died in 1981, but for many years he was Miller’s mentor, inspiration, and best friend. As a fledgling writer, Miller looked up to the older man for advice, criticism, and confidence. His first published short story was based on a wartime incident in Max’s life. Later, as an acclaimed novelist, Miller often spoke of Max, in interviews with myself and others, imitating his friend’s slow raspy voice and eyes narrowed against cigarette smoke. Max turns up in his writing in various guises, notably the character Martin in his autobiographical novel The Passage of Love (2017). For all their closeness and rapport, some part of Max remained forever a mystery. He was a man given to silences who revealed little about his past. Miller knew he had been a communist resistance figure in Nazi Germany and that in 1933 the Gestapo had imprisoned and tortured him. He guessed that this was the reason why something seemed broken in Max: realising that his torturer was his brother, so to speak, he lost his faith in humanity and his whole life began to seem futile to him. After Max’s death, something slowly stirred in Miller: a desire to rediscover his mentor’s life and to write about it. He is candid about the reasons. One is a sense of guilt: Miller didn’t contact his best friend in the two years before he died, and he doesn’t know why. Another is a conviction that, although he never asked, Max would have wanted his friend to tell his story. Still another is that Miller would like to bolster his sense of Max as a hero and prove that Max was wrong: his life did matter. Along with the desire comes tension and fear. Who knows what he will discover? Max, a non-fiction book, is not in fact the story of Miller’s friend. Such a story could never be complete – it exists only in fragments. What it is instead is a long, deeply absorbing and moving detective story, with Miller as the detective trying to track down the elusive traces of his friend. The trail meanders through old documents, letters, photographs, and background histories of the times, and takes Miller and his wife, Stephanie, to Germany, Poland, and Israel. Nothing goes smoothly: Miller encounters constant setbacks, surprises, dead ends, and maddeningly incomplete information. For a start, Max Blatt does not seem to be his hero’s real name. 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

And yet it’s striking how both dogged persistence and sheer chance produce results – above all, through the people Miller meets. This is no dry and dusty quest through the archives: at every turn, someone spontaneously materialises to help him through sheer curiosity, empathy, and generosity of spirit. The book is full of his vivid tributes to these people. The trail flows backward to more than one source, branching out into many tributaries that are all important to Max’s story. Perhaps naïvely, Miller began his quest with the conviction that he would not have to delve into Holocaust history. The reader suspects this cannot be true when examining the life of a Jewish resistance figure living in Europe in the 1930s. Olek, one of Miller’s contacts, who is today keeping the traditions of Judaism alive in Poland, never knew Max but made a shrewd guess about him. Something decisive must have happened in his life, ‘something of which he was not proud’. Miller discovers that ‘something’, which has everything to do with family and survivor guilt. In 1940, when Max was living in Poland, he made the necessary but wrenching decision to escape into Lithuania, then made his way to Shanghai and finally to Australia. What he left behind must have haunted him all his life. His conflicted feelings come over powerfully in Miller’s account of Max meeting his brother Martin at the airport in Tel Aviv after thirty years of separation. They stood on the tarmac and gazed at each other for half an hour before they embraced. ‘There were, and there are, no words for it,’ Miller writes. Somehow, though, he finds the right words. Highlights of this book are the enchanting vignettes Miller gives us of places he finds in the course of his travels, places that offer a fleeting tranquillity and beauty we can set with some relief against the darkness of his discoveries. He observes the innocent faces of fox cubs, or an old hand pump freshly painted green, or he romps with an old friend in the grey Sea of Galilee. All these seemingly disconnected interludes become magical parts of the search for Max. Another surprising pleasure is Miller’s discovery that often the facts in the story matter a good deal less than the myths that friends, families, and descendants create, memories that may not be reliably or objectively true but still carry their own poetic and spiritual authenticity and significance. Which is no doubt why Miller also makes a point of telling us about his dreams. There are many things we will never know about Max, but he lives on in the hearts of those who loved him. In Miller’s account, these include some women, particularly Liat, Martin’s daughter and Max’s niece. Miller first met her when she was fifteen at Max’s house in Melbourne, but he has no recollection of her. It is the elaborate trail of research that leads him to Liat in her sixties, running a farm in Israel, her warmth and generosity perfectly expressed in their picnic by the Sea of Galilee, where she serves tea and pieces of cake on a plate rimmed with pink roses. In its solemn fashion, Max is indeed a celebration of Max Blatt’s life: or, more accurately, a celebration of the way that he is remembered, with all the inevitable gaps and imperfections, in the lives of those who follow him, and those who have been drawn together through Miller’s quest. g Jane Sullivan’s latest book is a bibliomemoir, Storytime (Ventura Press, 2019).

Memoir

Broken hips and painful feet Reaching une belle vieillesse Francesca Sasnaitis

The Time of Our Lives: Growing older well by Robert Dessaix

Brio Books $32.99 hb, 256 pp

pinks and feathery greys, looking rather Bloomsbury’, offers a glimmer of hope. ‘The best thing about growing old is being released from the stranglehold of sex,’ she says, but having more time for friendship doesn’t seem recompense enough for those of us who are not quite there yet. Even Dessaix is perturbed by Andrea’s equanimity. Dessaix’s eminently quotable ruminations might apply equally to living well at any age: cultivate the ‘life of the mind’, the art of conversation, and, especially, friendship; non-sexual, intimate friendships, of a kind largely out of fashion in Western societies. Caring deeply for and about others is essential, too. ‘Loneliness is the punishment for not caring enough about others,’ says Ingmar Bergman’s gloomy Professor Isak Borg (Wild Strawberries, 1957). Loneliness, not death, is what the elderly fear most in nursing homes isolated from the normality of a heterogeneous community. If you have not already developed an inner wellspring of resources by then, it will be too late. Start practising early, take joy in your own company, and stay open to fresh sensation, Dessaix exhorts the reader.

n the garden of a hotel twenty minutes from Yogyakarta, a group of hopeful, middle-aged Westerners gyrate anxiously to the strains of LaBelle’s greatest hit. Unlike their young Balinese instructor, they are fighting a losing battle. Why bother? Robert Dessaix wonders. Next morning, his travelling companion answers in her husky smoker’s growl, ‘It’s death they’re afraid of – Take joy in your own company, and stay open or at least dying.’ Do we most fear negation or the ‘broken hips, the strokes … to fresh sensation, Dessaix exhorts the reader the dementia and painful feet’ – the debilitating pain of ageing? In the nursing home where his partner’s mother lies dying, Dessaix’s search for answers takes the reader on an eclectic journey through Western and Eastern literature, art, and thought, from ‘catastrophically old, remembering almost nothing’, Dessaix posEpicurus to the Japanese concept of yutori – ‘having the time tulates that ‘an intricately configured life of the mind’ might hold and space – and even the resource – to do, with a sense of ease, us together when bodily systems fail. But what happens when whatever it is you’d like to do’; from Borobudur to Tasmania; from the mind goes? Faced with illness, decrepitude, and dementia, Dessaix is shaken. ‘It claws at your heart,’ Dante’s concept of hell to absurd he says. ‘How to live amidst such endless contemporary visions of paradise; suffering? How to find a pathway through from Leo Tolstoy and André Gide it?’ Dessaix aspires to live to a beautiful to Diana Athill and Eva Hoffmann. old age, ‘une belle vieillesse, as the French In between, Bette Davis quips ‘old call it’. That still begs the question: how? age is certainly no place for sissies’, If most of us are in denial, in fear of the and Dessaix’s delightful cast of Virprocesses of dying, how much worse, gilian guides impart skerricks of their how unimaginable is losing one’s mind? hard-won wisdom. Hungarian Sarah, No matter how old we are, we persist in ‘looking more and more like Maggie thinking we’re immune. Smith’; Katharina, ‘gaunt but full of At funerals, in lieu of shared beliefs, life’; Gide’s granddaughter Sophie non-believers opt for celebrating the life Lambert: all these glorious, elderly of the deceased, a few amusing anecdotes, women, whose gusto for living remains a toast, nothing ‘too genuinely heartfelt’. undiminished by shrivelling prospects, Dessaix’s impression is that mourners seem to have achieved contentment, sometimes feel ‘they’re owed a final per‘blander than happiness but more reformance’, as if this might grant absolution liable’. from intimations of their own mortality. I Growing older well is not about disagree with Dessaix that ‘we Westerners staying taut and trim or preserving shrink from looking’ at a corpse. He fails, a wrinkle-free exterior, says Dessaix, in this instance, to take cultural, racial, although the question of sex does socio-economic, and geographic differpresent a few issues. In a society Robert Dessaix ences into consideration. Nevertheless, he obsessed with youth and perfect (photograph by Shane Reid) is right: under any circumstances ‘saying physique, even if you happen to be up for amorous adventures, who would desire cellulite and saggy good-bye is harrowing. It cuts you to the quick.’ It is ritual and the certainty of an afterlife that some non-beskin? Being ‘loveable – yes, desirable – not really’ seems a terribly sad way for life to fizzle out. Andrea, another muse, ‘in gauzy lievers miss. Yet ‘instead of “philosophising”, most of us keep the AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

profounder questions about life and death at bay by giving our minds over to trivia’. An afternoon of gossip now and then, a round of golf, a hand of bridge, or watching Nigella Lawson toss a salad are welcome respite from Weltschmerz, but ‘a lifetime of trivia is surely a tragedy’. Sadly, I suspect most of us prefer our philosophising in palatable doses via Robert Dessaix or anyone who has done the hard thinking for us. Remaining mischievous, playful yet disciplined, is essential to staying young in mind, if not in body. Dessaix wonders if it’s a ‘gay thing’ or being childless, and proceeds to enumerate the reasons why straight, white men, weighed down with responsibilities, can’t or aren’t interested in remaining childlike. To their detriment, perhaps they don’t have time. One can’t imagine Clive Palmer, for example, being interested in play or having friends or reading, for that matter. ‘Our sense of consequence must first be prised away from our sense of achievement,’ says Dessaix. The Time of Our Lives will appeal to readers like the author: erudite, leisured, financially comfortable. It is for those for whom

intellectual and cultural pursuits have significance over and above economic imperatives; who are as cynical of organised religion and bunkum spirituality as Dessaix and who are as deeply engaged with creativity – ageing fellow-travellers for whom exploration and discovery are an insulation against decline. It doesn’t matter whether you’re interested in opera or jazz, contemporary art, or the Impressionists: it’s ‘curiosity about the world that “binds you to life” when you’re old and need binding, as Gide wrote’. Money helps, of course, but it doesn’t guarantee a graceful fading. There is no magic formula for growing older well, Dessaix concedes, unless it’s ‘to never quite grow up in the first place’. His seemingly meandering text is a meticulously crafted passeggiata. This dextrous stylist leads the reader by the nose to a foregone conclusion: whatever epiphany we seek must come through our own inexpert peregrinations. g Francesca Sasnaitis is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia.

Actually Existing Australia Pale ankles in the mountains, divergences on a quarry. We are witness to it land and witness to it some fact of further summer or things a truck driver might say ‘Ossa ashiver and no one knows why speaking, coughing: it is a throat, after all, writing poems is nothing like gladness. Take posture, gesture from the rib how the body is – it is hard here shrubs heave like lungs, the young men fly in, flown in quarry throat-deep folly so it happens. Black glass of the vitrified brain, in the earth-shaft critique in pure resin, boiled stone; no time is ever resolved and still we find it in ore, grate it as glass, itemise it as sand, grind it until it’s suave as paste. A poem hardly written.

Louis Klee

Louis Klee was co-winner of the 2017 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. The phrase ‘no time is ever resolved’ comes from a speech by Jeanine Leane delivered early this year in Cambridge. 38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

Comment

‘What the hell do you have to lose?’ Black and Republican in the age of Trump

by Michael L. Ondaatje

hile on the campaign trail against Hillary Clinton in 2016, Donald Trump appeared to deviate from a scripted speech he was delivering in Dimondale, Michigan. What followed was remarkable: ‘At the end of four years, I guarantee you that I will get over ninety-five per cent of the African-American vote. I promise you.’ Undaunted by six decades of black voting behaviour and his own poor standing with African-Americans, not to mention the fact that he had yet to defeat Clinton, Trump promised a ‘new deal for black America’ that would spark a decisive black shift to the Republican Party. African-Americans had long been the nation’s most partisan racial group: since 1964, no Republican presidential candidate had won more than fifteen per cent of the black vote, and no Democrat less than eighty-two per cent. Yet Trump, a man with a long and divisive racial history, vowed that he would soon rival Barack Obama for electoral appeal among African-Americans. In making his pitch to black Americans, Trump focused on some of the stark realities of black urban life – ‘You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs … What the hell do you have to lose?’ – before pledging, ‘I will produce for African-Americans.’ Better jobs, great schools, safe neighbourhoods: these, Trump proclaimed, would be his top priorities for black America. But African-Americans were sceptical. In the 2016 election, Trump won only eight per cent of the black vote, failing to dent the long-standing ‘black wall’ of support behind the Democratic Party. Few, doubtless, had forgotten that Trump had launched his political career during the Obama administration by peddling the ‘birther’ conspiracy that the nation’s first black president was a Kenyan-born Muslim ineligible for the White House. Nor did the Republican Party itself inspire confidence in African-Americans. A striking feature of the GOP convention in 2016 was the near absence of black faces: fewer than twenty of the nearly 2,500 delegates, and only three of the sixty-three speakers, were black. There was a history behind this lack of black representation.

Republican outreach efforts to black America had failed miserably in the preceding decades. Notwithstanding the rise of a number of prominent black Republicans, most African-Americans continued to view the GOP as wholly unsympathetic to their interests. Having been loyal to the Republican Party as the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Fifteenth Amendment – the 150th anniversary of which is marked this year – African-American electoral support for Democrats was once as unthinkable as many today imagine it to be for Republicans. Alliances began to change in the 1930s with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s largely symbolic politics drawing many African-Americans towards the Democrats, and further consolidated in the 1960s when Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson passed Civil Rights legislation aimed at undoing segregation and ensuring the exercise of voting rights in the South. From here the new constellation of loyalties crystallised, with Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate in 1964, running almost exclusively on an anti-Civil Rights Act platform, and Republican leaders since then prioritising southern white conservative support over the political issues that mattered to most African-Americans. Such a ‘Southern Strategy’, initiated by Goldwater and extended by Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, succeeded in bringing disaffected whites into the party, but alienated black voters. Over the past four years, despite his pledge, Trump has failed to make clear inroads into the black community. In 2020, his approval ratings with African-Americans remain unimpressive, with racial turmoil one of the main storylines of his presidency. Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests have exploded across the nation and received worldwide attention. Never one to shy away from a fight, Trump has sprayed rhetorical fuel on these racial fires. He has presented himself as the law-and-order president (an allusion to Nixon) who will quash the BLM ‘anarchists’, ‘terrorists’, and ‘looters’ and restore calm to the nation’s streets. He has condemned BLM as a ‘symbol of hate’, despite the fact AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

that eighty-six per cent of African-Americans ‘strongly support’ or ‘somewhat support’ the movement as a legitimate response to racial injustice. Trump has also provoked the ire of African-Americans in other ways: for example, defending the heritage of the slave-holding South; retweeting a video of a supporter yelling ‘white power’; implying widespread voter fraud in cities with sizeable black populations; and denigrating Caribbean and African nations as ‘shithole countries’, when more than fifteen per cent of black Americans are the children of immigrants.

Trump’s approval ratings with African-Americans remain unimpressive, with racial turmoil one of the main storylines of his presidency In 2019, the sole black Republican in the House of Representatives, Will Hurd, announced that he would not seek re-election in 2020. Solidly conservative and widely viewed as a future star in the GOP before Trump’s election, Hurd’s explanation for stepping down was clear: ‘The party is not growing in some of the largest parts of our country … Why is that? I’ll tell you. It’s real simple. Don’t be an asshole … Don’t be a racist … These are real basic things that we all should learn when we are in kindergarten.’ According to polls, at least eighty per cent of African-Americans share Hurd’s view that the president is racist (at the time of writing, there has been no formal poll on whether the president is an asshole). Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham went further, declaring Trump one of the two most racist presidents in American history alongside Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson. For his part, Trump insists he is ‘the least racist person in the world’ and has done more for black Americans than any president since Lincoln. He points to the strong backing he has received from a vocal band of black supporters who have chided his critics and lauded his achievements throughout his presidency. Yet close attention to black voices within the Republican Party and to those around him reveals that, rather than uniting black supporters, he may have brought further division within his own ranks between traditional black conservative GOP supporters and a new cadre of black Trump loyalists. For decades, conservative African-Americans aligned with the Republican Party have laboured in the wilderness as ‘a political minority within [their] racial group, and a racial minority within [their] political group’, as historian Leah Wright Rigeur reflected in a recent article by Afi Scruggs for USA Today. As such, they have often found themselves the focus of suspicion and unfair derision. Being ‘black and Republican was about as compatible as being black and aspiring to leadership in the Ku Klux Klan’, quipped the editors of the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, in 1976. In reality, moderate black Republicans are under no illusions about America’s racist past and the problems that African-Americans continue to face. Rather, they have worked for decades within the GOP to expand the boundaries of conservatism to accommodate and support black aspirations. In contrast to the soundbite politics of the brash black Trump supporters, moderate black Republicans draw inspiration from ideas and values 40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

deeply embedded in black history and articulated by black leaders across the generations from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington and even Malcolm X. Many have clung to a vision of the GOP as the ‘Party of Lincoln’ and support an approach to black advancement that prioritises, as Booker T. Washington did, self-reliance, educational development, economic empowerment, and moral respectability – over the ‘big government’ liberalism favoured by the Democratic Party. Others, even if not subscribing to a ‘Booker T.’ ethos, emphasise a political calculus, as Jesse Jackson did in the late 1970s, that stresses the importance of two-party competition. African-Americans, said Jackson, need to ‘pursue a strategy that prohibits one party from taking us for granted [the Democrats] and another party from writing us off [Republicans]. The only protection we have against political genocide is to remain necessary.’ Echoes of this argument were heard at the 2020 Republican National Convention (RNC) when black Republicans called out Joe Biden for his remark in May: ‘If you’ve got a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or for Trump, then you ain’t black.’ At the same convention, African-American speakers provided forceful endorsements of what they saw as Trump’s achievements for black Americans. They recounted how he had delivered the lowest black unemployment rate in history prior to the pandemic. They praised him for the record funding he had provided to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). And they celebrated Trump’s First Step Act, which has paved the way for the early release of non-violent black offenders disproportionately impacted by the harsh Clinton-era Crime Bill. For a president routinely accused of racism, the RNC was an image-softening exercise to present Trump as a true friend of black America, at least to white Republicans. And yet the show of support at the RNC obscured the dilemmas and divisions posed by the differences between the small but significant strand of traditional black conservative support for the GOP and a new group of black Trumpist ideologues and culture warriors who have come to the fore in recent years. One of the most visible in this latter category of Trump’s black supporters has been thirty-one-year-old Candace Owens, a highly combative political ideologue who, in 2018, founded the ‘Blexit’ movement to encourage an African-American exodus from the Democratic Party. Described by Trump as ‘a very smart thinker’ who is ‘so good for our country’, Owens boasts more than six million followers on Facebook and Twitter and is a Fox News regular. She describes BLM as a movement of ‘whiny toddlers pretending to be oppressed’ and ‘a trash organisation that has nothing to do with black lives’. She accuses liberals of cultivating a ‘victim mentality’ in African-Americans to entrench black dependency and trap black voters – like modern-day slaves – on the Democratic Party’s ‘plantation’. For Owens, the key to black America’s ‘second escape’ is the seemingly all-powerful Trump. As she tweeted in 2018, ‘I truly believe Donald Trump isn’t just the leader of the free world, but the savior of it as well.’ These are unconventional views for an African-American to hold; in the case of Owens, they are especially puzzling. This is the same Candace Owens who, in 2015, railed against the ‘batshit crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party’, before stating: ‘The good news is, they will eventually die off (peacefully in their

President Trump supporter wearing a Black Voices for Trump shirt at the rally in the Bojangle’s Coliseum, 2 March 2020 (Photograph by Jeffery Edwards / Alamy)

sleep, we hope) and then we can get right on with the OBVIOUS social change that needs to happen.’ In her rapid about-face, and in her use of messianic language, Owens sounds increasingly like other ‘true believers’ in a party built increasingly around personal loyalty, if not around a personality cult. African-American sisters ‘Diamond and Silk’ – two of Trump’s ‘most loyal supporters’, in their own words – have undergone a similarly dramatic political conversion from registered Democrats in 2012. The high-volume noise from such Trump ideologues contrasts with the painful dilemmas experienced and quiet exits chosen by many long-time black GOP members. Take Gregory Cheadle, whom Trump referred to as ‘my African-American’ at a campaign rally in 2016. Cheadle did not attend the 2020 RNC. After nearly twenty years as a registered Republican, Cheadle made the decision to leave the party in 2018, dismayed by the president’s rhetoric on race and his use of black people as ‘political pawns’. Higher-profile black Republicans, including former Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, and former GOP Chairman Michael Steele, also stayed away, harbouring similar reservations about Trump’s politics, character, and fitness for office. In a decision that neither Powell nor Steele could have taken lightly, each has endorsed Biden for president. Powell explained his reasoning directly, focusing on governance and fitness for office: Trump ‘lies all the time’, disrespects the Constitution, and represents a serious threat to American democracy. Steele

identified Trump’s exploitation of racism as his main concern. A member of the Republican Party since 1976, and a man with solid conservative credentials, he recently joined the Lincoln Project: a national movement of prominent Republicans dedicated to defeating Trump in 2020. While the presence of Owens and co may convince a small portion of concerned white Republican voters that Trump is not racist, African-Americans who support the president will likely do so for other reasons. They will look past Trump’s alleged racism (if they indeed accept that charge) not because they endorse prejudice against their own people, but because they believe the president’s policies on issues such as unemployment, criminal justice reform, and judicial nominations will serve black interests more effectively. Beneath the clamour of this chaotic presidential campaign, one unintended achievement of Trump’s first term seems clear: rather than uniting and forming a more potent electoral bloc, black Republicans find themselves increasingly divided. g Michael L. Ondaatje is Deputy Director of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, and Professor of History, at the Australian Catholic University. He is the author of Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), and has embarked on a biography of Neville Bonner, the first Indigenous Australian to sit in the federal parliament. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

History

Read, learn, buy!

Australia’s most extraordinary bookseller Jim Davidson

Under the Rainbow: The life and times of E.W. Cole by Richard Broinowski

Miegunyah Press $44.99 hb, 319 pp

elburnians above a certain age will remember Coles in Bourke Street. Unknown to most of them, it stood on the site of another Coles, Cole’s Book Arcade, for half a century probably the most famous shop in Australia. Its founder, Edward William Cole, is now the subject of an engaging biography by Richard Broinowski. E.W. Cole was born in Kent in rural poverty in 1832. His

E.W. Cole in his study at the Bourke Street Arcade

real father was unknown, and his stand-in father was transported to Van Diemen’s Land for stealing a legendary handkerchief. (As fate would have it, both father and son would later be in Melbourne at the same time, unknown to each other.) Independent and enterprising, young Edward went to London and became a streetseller. He then emigrated to South Africa in 1850. Little is known about the two years he spent there: he went to the Eastern Cape 42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

but found it discomforting, as it was embroiled in yet another frontier war. Then Victoria beckoned, as the site of recent gold discoveries. Cole crossed the ocean, made his way to Castlemaine, and soon realised that, compared with the hit-and-miss of prospecting, real money was to be made by supplying miners’ needs. He began by making lemonade, but, being both curious and progressive, he pioneered photography in the district; later he went on a four-month trip down the Murray with his business partner, producing stereoscopic photographs. Back in Castlemaine, other business ventures foundered. Bankrupt, Cole retreated to Melbourne, living on his wits. He opened a pie stall in the Eastern Market; a woman offered him some books she no longer wanted. He thought he might as well take them, and placed them alongside the pies. They sold (you might say) like hot cakes. Cole had found his vocation. He established a bookshop, then in 1883 opened the Arcade that made him famous. Entered under the large painted rainbow Cole adopted as his trademark, the establishment rose a full three storeys; instead of dowdiness, light streamed in from the plate-glass ceiling. Galleries full of books lined the walls. Counters were generally absent; people were encouraged to help themselves. ‘Read the books. No-one asked to buy.’ One of the many to avail himself of Cole’s invitation was R.G. Menzies, then a poor law student. Cole provided seats – public seating was unavailable, then – greenery, and even a fernery. Children were entranced by gadgets, parrots, and particularly the monkeys (ultimately removed after outraging public decency). Adults were soothed by the strains of a small orchestra, playing light classics (stiffened by a popular hymn). There was something for everyone. More and more features were added until the place became a protodepartment store: fancy goods, porcelain, photography, and framing were all on show – along with such delights as a mechanical hen, laying metal eggs. Outliers of the Arcade eventually extended to Collins Street and Howey Place. Edward Cole was an avid publicist and knew how to grab attention. A series of newspaper advertisements told of an extraordinary tribe recently ‘discovered’ in mysterious New Guinea. The people had tails. It became a running gag, even after people saw that their name, the Elocweans, was really E.W. Cole spelt backwards. Cole also produced tokens and medals. Then there was Cole’s Funny Picture Book, immediately recognisable by the trademark rainbow on a black background: ‘a richly grotesque collection of Victoriana’, Broinowski writes. It was a kind of scrapbook, containing stories, rhymes, riddles, moral and uplifting tales, poems, and cartoons, including one of a Patent Whipping Machine for Naughty Boys, which was half-serious. First published in 1879, Cole’s Funny Picture Book became a familiar object in many a household: it sold 870,000 copies and was last printed in the 1960s.

Cole’s most extraordinary act of publicity was when, in all seriousness, he advertised for a suitable wife. He listed the (conventional) virtues and attributes he required, and – even more remarkably – found her. His marriage to Eliza was happy, fruitful, and long-lasting. Cole was doubly Victorian, both a man of his place and of his era. For a man with only a smattering of education, he was also, as Broinowski points out, ‘slightly ahead of his time’. He might have fantasised about a flying machine propelled by umbrellas, but he had a genuine interest in aviation. He believed in world federation and the universal use of a modified English. Having been struck, on that journey down the Murray, by some deep similarities between Aboriginal beliefs and Christianity, Cole was also strongly opposed to all sectarianism. Instead he asserted, ‘Advance knowledge. Let prejudice perish, let justice and charity encircle the Earth and extend to the men of every creed.’ More simply he would say, ‘Do good and you will be happy – and make others happy.’ He wrote pamphlets, annoying the clergy and respectables. For them he had an additional word, as – without racial prejudice himself – he came to campaign against the White Australia policy.

How can you support this policy and call yourselves Christians? he asked. Don’t you realise Christ was a coloured man? Under the Rainbow has been generously conceived. Apart from the well-written narrative, there are discursive boxes giving fuller treatment of particular subjects. The book has been carefully researched, overseas as well as in Australia, particularly with regard to Cole’s Japanese connection. It also pays attention to his origins, deconstructing family stories, and to his sad decline – when employees at the Arcade would refer to him and his colonnaded mansion derisively as ‘the Parthenon’. And Broinowksi has been served well by his publisher, Melbourne University Publishing, which has drawn on the Miegunyah Fund for a sumptuous production. Illustrations are lavish and pertinent, from street scenes to a collection of Cole’s tokens, and the mechanical hen. The sense of display echoes the famous arcade itself. g Jim Davidson’s new book, Emperors in Lilliput: Clem Christesen of Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith of Overland, will appear with MUP in 2021.

‘I am afraid we cannot make it on our own’ PEN Melbourne supports Belarusian PEN and Svetlana Alexievich ‘And now there is another unknown person ringing at my door.’

Svetlana Alexievich, Belarus, 9 September 2020

The members of PEN Melbourne know full well what this knock at the door signifies for a writer who has spoken out courageously against a tyrannical government. PEN Melbourne condemns the arbitrary arrests of members and staff of the Belarus PEN centre for carrying out peaceful protests against the recent presidential election result, following claims that the vote was falsified. Those detained include secretary, poet, and translator Hanna Komar, project manager, poet, and translator Uladzimir Liankievic, and translator Siarzh Miadzvedzeu. We abhor the arbitrary detainment, ill-treatment, and torture of hundreds of peacefully protesting citizens of Belarus; and the serious attempts to crush the people’s freedom of expression and their right to criticise the appalling record of the Lukashenko government on human rights and widespread corruption. We are deeply concerned that charges have been brought against members of the opposition Coordination Council, including Svetlana Alexievich, Chair of Belarus PEN, world-renowned writer, and Nobel laureate. Ms Alexievich is now the only member of the Council’s executive presidium who is not in prison or in exile.

Members have been charged with undermining national security. However, the Council was created to facilitate a political transition and to ensure a peaceful resolution of the post-election crisis in Belarus. After unidentified men attempted to enter Alexievich’s apartment recently, diplomats from several European Union nations gathered there to prevent her detention. On September 18, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution from the European Union to launch closer monitoring of alleged rights violations in Belarus. PEN Melbourne urges the authorities to drop all charges against Ms Alexievich and the other Coordination Council members. Svetlana Alexievich has called on the international community to intervene and to speak out for the Belarusian dissidents: ‘We are a small country. I am afraid we cannot make it on our own.’ Hear these words and join the international calls to the Belarusian government to immediately release those citizens unjustly detained against their fundamental human rights and to cease the unjustified harassment of peaceful protesters.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Category

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Publisher of the Month with Sandy Grant

Co-founder of Hardie Grant, Sandy Grant has had a distinguished career in book publishing and media. He was formerly MD of Heinemann, Octopus, and Reed Australia, and CEO of Reed Books UK. Sandy is also a former director of Meanjin, the Australian Republican Movement, Chair of the Melbourne Writers Festival, member of the UNESCO City of Literature Bid Committee, President of the Australian Publishers Association, and Chair of the Copyright Agency.

What was your pathway to publishing?

My older brother Jamie, who is now a poet, was working for Cambridge University Press. When I finished my degree in economics and philosophy, he introduced me to a publisher he knew, who was looking for staff. I took a job opportunistically in 1977, but then enjoyed it from day one.

How many titles do you publish each year?

Hardie Grant publishes around 400 new titles a year – my individual contribution is pretty modest.

Which book are you proudest of publishing?

Every victory has a thousand generals in publishing – meaning that I am claiming books where I was an actor, not solely responsible – but I have been involved with two Booker Prize winners, two prime ministers’ memoirs, Spycatcher, other great novels, important non-fiction, multi-million-copy-selling children’s series, ground-breaking food and wine books, and recently a wide range of excellent First Nations authors. As with any proud parent, it is too hard to nominate one child ahead of the others.

Do you edit the books you commission?

I’ve never edited, but I read and talk and stay as close as is helpful to key books.

What qualities do you look for in an author?

Sincerity, authenticity, passion for the project, knowledge, and then awareness of how much they have to commit in order to complete a successful book.

Who are the editors/publishers you most admire?

Reading the letters of William Heinemann to authors like D.H. Lawrence left an impression. I worked very closely with the extraordinary Paul Hamlyn; I always admired the passion of Lloyd O’Neil; I worked with and sincerely admire Helen Fraser, who subsequently ran Penguin UK; and I should add the tenacious Louise Adler, whom I worked with for some years. Then there are my current colleagues who are so good at what they do – Julie Pinkham, Marisa Pintado, Sarah Lavelle

(Photograph by Fiona Hile)

Interview

among a small galaxy of talent at Hardie Grant.

Do you write yourself ? If so, has it informed your work as a publisher? Occasionally, but informally. It reminds me to be polite to people who write like me when I reject a book.

What kinds of books do you enjoy reading?

My primary pleasure over the years has come from Australian fiction. I started with Patrick White, Martin Boyd, Shirley Hazzard, and Jessica Anderson and have never really stopped. Although I do possibly read as much American fiction, I feel more connected to the Australian writers.

In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?

Publishers are very privileged to be able to sit with some of the great minds and the most impressive people of our era and have them talk to us about their work and their ideas. The challenge is ensuring you publish a book that represents them properly.

In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties? If it is a casualty, it is the publisher who will lose out. Individuality matters.

On publication, what is more gratifying: a brilliant launch, a satisfied author, encomiastic reviews, or rapid sales? An author is satisfied by rapid sales. You must have a satisfied author, so rapid sales are the surest path to gratification.

What’s the outlook for new writing of quality?

There is a whole new generation of writers talking to us and getting published, and that generation has its own definition of quality. It is an aeon apart from Patrick White or what I thought was quality in the 1970s. Books, eBooks, audio books, and podcasts are in demand and need talented writers and thinkers. I think the outlook is good. g AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Classics

Beyoncé at the Louvre The dark power of antiquity Greta Hawes

Antigone Rising: The subversive power of the ancient myths by Helen Morales

Wildfire $32.99 pb, 222 pp

reek myths are entirely predictable: Actaeon offends Artemis and is hunted down by his own hounds; Pentheus refuses to worship Dionysus and is ripped apart by his mother; Antigone disobeys the king, and dies for her crime. Beginning, middle, and end: so familiar, so inevitable. The trick was never really in the plot, but in what you did with it. And what Helen Morales does with Greek myth deserves our fullest attention. With the dazzling, restorative energy of Beyoncé taking over the Louvre, Morales gives us storytelling for our moment. This book is thoughtful, passionate, human, and humane. It is no kneejerk tribute to the glory that was Greece or fawning shrine to ancient wisdom. In Antigone Rising stories are – rightly – bound up in social structures. The Greek myths hurt, enslave, subdue. They have been, and still are, used to shape bodies, tame minds, train ethical imaginations. They are a still-living tradition, and in living with them, some of us are harmed more than others. Yet there is an ultimate hopefulness here as well, and for this reason too this is a necessary book for our moment. Myths belong to us; change is always possible; narratives morph; the power of stories lies exactly in their capacity to do unexpected things. Morales wears her subjectivity on her sleeve: these are the observations of someone whose life as a mother and educator does not end when she enters the ancient storyworld. Her skill is in bridging those myriad points where the personal and the political, the ancient and the modern, the scholar and the citizen, intersect without resorting lazily to far-fetched analogies or creaky tropes. The first two-thirds of the book offers a confronting vision of the dark power of antiquity. It asks why stories of heroes killing Amazons were so attractive, why we turn to ancient maxims for diet advice, why Pentheus obsessed over what Bacchants (don’t) wear, why sex-striking Lysistrata stills stands as a paradigm of female activism, and vengeful Diana represents female empowerment. For Morales, the danger lies not merely in their cleaving to the normativity of the basic templates, but in their suppression of potential alternatives. A sex strike to end Liberia’s civil war garnered headlines and mouse clicks, but such reporting reduced the women involved to mere domestic objects. Overlooked entirely in the crass details is the real work of sustaining activism and a whole landscape of political principles and progress. Leymah Gbowee describes three years of community organising: 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

‘the greatest weapons of the Liberian women’s movement were moral clarity, persistence, and patience’. Sex, in other words, was the least of their arsenal. Likewise, ‘Diana, Hunter of Bus Drivers’, responsible for a pair of murders claimed to be in retaliation for the sexual violence suffered by women in Juárez, takes on the folkloric glamour of the huntress-goddess. Yet, as Morales points out, this is not real power: glorification of individual acts of violent revenge occludes a bigger story: the crushing catastrophe of a system of justice closed to marginalised and abused women. Indeed, in a chapter cannily titled #Metu, Morales shines a light onto Ovid’s repetitive, recognisable, inevitable emplotment of gods raping vulnerable heroines. With this as our familiar template, no wonder we struggle when real women come forward to detail the actual, messy traumas of sexual assault.

The book offers a confronting vision of the dark power of antiquity Rare indeed are those Greek heroines who are able to band together: collective action falters when the plots are repeatedly stacked against you. Morales’s dea ex machina is neither Diana, nor even the Antigone of the title, but Beyoncé. Her turn in the Louvre is the turn the book needs, proof positive that ‘it takes a cultural phenomenon to rewrite a cultural script’. Morales juxtaposes here the bland, superficial certitude of white supremacist appropriations of antiquity with the layered, shifting juxtapositions of the ‘APES**T’ music video. As the Carters sing ‘I can’t believe we made it’, Morales takes us in new directions: to museum collections dominated by European ideals of beauty but blind to the actual sources of their imperial wealth, to the mirage of a ‘Greek miracle’ in a Mediterranean already indebted to the millennia-old innovations on its southern and eastern shores, to marble statues that were not originally white, and to the very idea of taking up space to protest and to find newness in revivifying the past. It is a statement about the exclusion of Black bodies that is simultaneously ‘restorative mythmaking’. The ‘subversive power’ of Morales’s title lies ultimately in our hands. Nuance and complexity are products of thoughtful, committed engagement: ‘the viewer makes connections’. Woven through the book is an argument so old that it is again revolutionary: an argument for the best that philology can offer. This is a book founded on deep reading, close analysis, and decades of teaching and studying. Ancient literature is not a prestigious straitjacket or a canon to be learned and recited, but a jumping-off point, a place of inspiration as weird and as varied as the present. So, when Beyoncé plays Venus pregnant, Morales muses that for all her defying of recent convention, she is recalling the Roman mater who gave birth to Aeneas. The Liberian activists take us back to Lysistrata, where the sex strike is both more cringingly crass – and more serious about economic inequity – than we typically (mis)read it to be. And in seeking a trans experience in a Greek storyworld seemingly so unwelcoming to transgressions of conventional binaries, she finds a fragment from a sixth-century mythographer. Describing how Caenis was raped by Poseidon and became Caeneus, invulnerable warrior, Acusilaus uses male

pronouns before the sex change: his male identity was there before the transition. There is nothing intrinsically exceptional about Greek myths except this: we have been living with them for millennia, and they have the deep patina of objects passed through myriad hands. There is no secret knowledge to be unlocked in them, just, for the patient and the observant, the story of our lives as storytelling

animals. In Morales’s telling, the central point of enquiry should not be the tale told, but the teller. g Greta Hawes is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History and DECRA fellow at the Australian National University. She is the author of Rationalizing Myth in Antiquity (2014) and Pausanias in the World of Greek Myth (forthcoming, 2021).

Environment

Stolen safety

Two explorations of our changing climate Timothy Neale

Body Count: How climate change is killing us (Second Edition) by Paddy Manning Simon & Schuster $32.99 pb, 349 pp

Fire: A brief history

by Stephen J. Pyne NewSouth $29.99 pb, 238 pp

ast spring, as the harbingers of a dangerous season converged into a chorus of forewarning, I decided it might be a good idea to keep a diary of the period now known as ‘Black Summer’. The diary starts in September with landscapes burning in southern Queensland and Brazil. Three hundred thousand people rally across Australia, calling for action on climate change. I attend a forum of emergency managers where, during a discussion about warning systems, a senior fire manager declares: ‘We need to tell the public we cannot help them in the ways they expect, but we’re never going to tell them.’ Next week, Greg Mullins, the former NSW fire and rescue commissioner, comments on ABC radio, ‘We’re going to have fires that I can’t comprehend.’ Federal politicians assure the nation that we are resilient. Victoria and South Australia then experience the hottest October days in eighty years. At the beginning of November, several people having lost their lives in fires, Prime Minister Scott Morrison offers his ‘thoughts and prayers’. Like some of those affected, journalists link the fires to climate change and the deputy prime minister is quick to remind everyone that ‘we’ve had fires in Australia since time began’. Friends in Melbourne and Sydney text me about ‘PM2.5’ and ‘N95’ masks. Hospital presentations for asthma rise throughout south-east Australia. After a brief trip to Hawaii, the prime minister announces the need to focus on ‘how we manage native vegetation’ to avoid future infernos. Much of eastern Victoria is soon alight. My diary entries become sporadic. Black Summer was unprecedented in its length and scale. Just as many predicted its extremity from the biophysical signals, those familiar with past Australian fire crises could have foreseen the archetypical cultural symptoms. There were pitched debates about the timing and wording of warnings and how to manage

our flammable bush companions (or ‘fuel loads’). The financially interested offered technological solutions both old (large air tankers) and new (cube satellites), without any mention of their proven efficacy. Politicians, somehow perplexed, commissioned new inquiries to look into the recommendations of the fifty or so inquiries held in past two decades. As in previous fire disasters, these contests were epiphenomena of our differing expectations: that is, expectations about our natural surrounds and our personal safety.

Politicians, somehow perplexed, commissioned new inquiries to look into the recommendations of the fifty or so inquiries held in past two decades In Body Count, journalist Paddy Manning begins with the 2019–20 fires but extends his horizons beyond, investigating how anthropogenic climate change ‘loaded the dice’ in fatalities due to fire and other hazards such as heatwaves, thunderstorm asthma, and floods. The book is a fair primer on recent disasters but possibly most useful to posterity as a collection of expectations rather than as an analysis. Manning states that we need to properly understand why these people died, but his interviews with their relations uncover few who agree with him about the urgency of climate change or even its very existence. While one refrain throughout these conversations is people’s lack of trust in government institutions, the most prevalent theme is: ‘Where was the government?’ W hy did governments not warn people, or warn them more urgently? Why did the state fail to protect them? The paradoxical coexistence of low opinion and high expectation of government seems linked to a wider sense of stolen safety. Although few of Manning’s interlocutors seem to share his view that climate change entails ‘the loss of a safe planet to live on’, one in which fossil-fuel consumption has turned the climate against us, they all seem to understand that they once lived in secure and certain surrounds.

hese surrounds seem very different in Stephen J. Pyne’s revised edition of Fire: A brief history, originally published in 2001, which begins its account of the sticky relationship between humanity and its habitat with the Carboniferous period some 350 million years ago. Only then did Earth’s atmosphere and environs allow a spark to become a flame. Pyne, often presented as the pre-eminent historian of fire, tracks the multitude of ways in which humans have used fire to shape their surrounds, whether through the creation of the hearth, burning landscapes, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

or the capturing of its power for warfare and energy. His style, which has won him many readers, is overwhelmingly cast in mixed metaphors, binaries, and the archetypes of Greek, Roman, and Christian literature. Unlike Manning, though, Pyne tells a story that is less Paradise Lost than Prometheus Unbound. This Promethean narrative begins with humans, somewhere around 1.2 million years ago, beginning to harness fires started by lightning strikes and, later, fire-making tools. The raw became cooked. Fires were set to clear ground or set game to flight. With time, it became a means to contour the landscape and its ecologies. A hazardous fire planet, either hostile or indifferent to our presence, became slightly more habitable through hominids’ lasting ‘alliance’ with fire, as repeated burning of certain landscapes made them at once more productive and more combustive. On the Australian continent, as Aboriginal peoples worked with the shifting rhythms of Country, many species that tolerated or even promoted fire flourished. Readers looking for a detailed account of Australian bushfires might want to start elsewhere, as Pyne’s temporal and spatial scope here is global. Like Heraclitus, the author casts all of existence in fire’s light. Such a claim to primacy is daring and unsatisfying. Just as bushfire management today figures all biomass as fuel, everything is fuel for Pyne’s stadial narrative of humans, who first make a primeval connection with fire and are then alienated from it through forges, kilns, steam engines, batteries, and other ‘pyrotechnologies’. The cost of modernity, in this telling, is that landscapes civilised by millennia of deliberate burning have grown ‘feral’ and have promoted ‘bad fires’.

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In the new preface and closing chapter, Pyne suggests that what is needed on a planet experiencing a ‘Pyrocene’ of increasingly frequent and extreme ‘bad fires’ is more ‘good fires’ or preventative and strategic intentional burning. At the same time, he argues, the fixation with fire problems as biophysical matters with biophysical solutions needs to be jettisoned in favour of regarding them as ‘fundamentally a social and political issue’. I fiercely agree, but it’s confusing coming from Pyne, whose books are oblivious to the workings of political power, race, class, or gender. Such obliviousness is possibly a function of the grand scale of Fire, as the particularities of nations and inequities are always hard to pick out when you’re working with geological epochs. Nonetheless, humanity in general isn’t responsible for a heating planet: it was the work of specific profiteers and colonisers. Repeatedly framing Australia’s post-invasion history in terms of the firestick being ‘passed from group to group’ – rather than in terms of settlers’ aggression and Indigenous dispossession – does not read as naïve simplification. Instead, it seems antipathetic to the arguments made by many Indigenous peoples in Australia that their relationships with fire are matters not simply of technique but rather of restoring ancestral control and authority. Manning does not seek answers in ancient elemental connections or even redistributions of power, but rather closes with a hodgepodge of social science and nationalism. If Australians are resilient and pull together in an emergency, as we heard from Morrison and others last summer, why not utilise this instinct to combat the climate emergency? And if it is widely accepted that warnings and advice about natural hazards change behaviour and action, as Manning contends, why don’t we mobilise this power to nudge people into taking climate action? Only, these premises do not withstand scrutiny. First, tales of mateship in a crisis need to be tempered with reminders, offered in abundance by the current pandemic, that the bonds of community are not on offer to all in need, nor do they hold up well under a crisis that lasts more than a few weeks. Decades of action are needed to mitigate climate change. Second, we may know how to promote risk awareness, but we know little about how to translate awareness into action. Instead, it seems to me that the stronger case for better warnings – whether regarding climate change or natural hazards – is the one based on democratic value. The primary rationale for releasing clear information should not be that it will make people do what we want. There is an aphorism common among geographers and others that ‘there is no such thing as a natural disaster’. Rather, there are normal accidents and slow emergencies in a world accustomed to privatising profit, where individuals are routinely subject to consequences for which they rarely bear anything close to individual responsibility. In such a context, we do not need a new technical fix. We do not need to militarise emergency management. We do not need reminders that we are resilient. What we do need is to think hard about what we may reasonably expect from life on this combustible planet and why, time after time, some hazards and exposures are deemed natural and others simply ‘bad luck’. g Timothy Neale is DECRA Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology and Geography at Deakin University.

History

The force of things

A lively history of the French Revolution Peter McPhee

Was ‘terror’ an inevitable outcome of revolution? Does revolution inevitably result in dictatorship? A New World Begins: The history of the French Revolution by Jeremy D. Popkin

atives of political stability and social order. Instead, Napoleon’s path to authoritarian emperor by 1804 was the result of his own megalomania and the exigencies of warfare with Europe.

Basic Books $49.99 hb, 627 pp

eremy D. Popkin, a historian at the University of Kentucky, fittingly begins his account of the French Revolution with a printer in Lexington enthusing in late 1793 about the ideals of the Revolution of 1789 in his Kentucky Almanac. The printer’s geographic distance from the events in Paris meant that his gilded vision of the Revolution coincided with its most violent and repressive period in 1793–94, later dubbed ‘the Reign of Terror’. This juxtaposition of 1789 and 1793 is useful for Popkin to make his key point that, ‘despite its shortcomings, however, the French Revolution remains a vital part of the heritage of democracy’. The explanatory power of Popkin’s richly detailed account comes from ‘deep narrative’: the interplay of ideology and circumstance, choice and necessity. While Louis XVI’s regime was mired in financial crisis and corroded by ‘Enlightenment’ challenges to traditional sources of authority, the Revolution of 1789 was not inevitable. Rather, Louis’s government mismanaged crisis, offering the prospect of sweeping reform without a clear strategy for achieving it. The most important puzzle of the French Revolution has always been how a revolution that had begun in 1789 with a humanitarian, reforming zeal developed into a tough Jacobin regime of constraints on individual liberties and the safety of the person by 1793–94. Was ‘terror’ an inevitable outcome of revolution? In more recent decades, the resurgence of authoritarian nationalism has posed a different question for historians. Why did a democratic and rights-based revolution ultimately result in the seizure of power in 1799 by a militaristic clique under Napoleon and his one-man rule by 1804? Does revolution inevitably result in dictatorship? What drove the Revolution onwards through war and terror? The armed menace of counter-revolutionaries inside and outside France or the messianic zeal of revolutionaries themselves? While Popkin does not make his own judgement explicit, he implicitly endorses the ‘force of circumstances’ thesis, quoting the young revolutionary Saint-Just: ‘the force of things has perhaps led us to do things that we did not foresee’. Reflecting on the extraordinary year of ‘terror’ in 1793–94, Popkin concludes that it is unlikely that ‘the basic achievements of the Revolution could have been preserved … without something resembling a revolutionary dictatorship’. Similarly, Popkin insists that the coup of December 1799 did not inevitably portend one-man rule: Bonaparte and his supporters had no clear or agreed agenda other than the imper-

This is an immensely assured, coherent narrative of the Revolution from someone who has devoted his career to understanding this tumultuous period of triumph and tragedy, from his earliest study of the liberation of the newspaper press after 1789 to later work on the slave uprising on Saint-Domingue in 1790, the abolition of slavery there in 1794, and the triumph of the new nation of Haiti in 1804. Not surprisingly, Popkin writes particularly well of these themes throughout the book, as he does of the attempts of women activists to push the Revolution towards greater recognition of their civic rights. In contrast, there is hardly a word about peasant women and the many women across all sectors of society who regretted or contested revolutionary reforms to the Church. This is a shortcoming of Popkin’s otherwise thorough overview. The deep confrontation between the secular and civic values of revolutionaries and the claims to authority of the eighteenth-century Catholic Church, so deeply embedded in particular rural regions, was to have deadly and durable consequences in France and elsewhere. Popkin has produced a more detailed political narrative than my own general history of the Revolution, Liberty or Death, published in 2016. Mine is rather shorter and concentrates far more on provincial France, where ninety-eight per cent of French people lived. He has much more to say than me about slavery and the Caribbean, and about national politics: I have more to say about rural and small-town responses and the social consequences of the Revolution. That’s all a matter of choice, of course. He gives us lively and detailed accounts of the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 and of Napoleon’s clumsy ‘Brumaire’ coup d’état of 9 November 1799, but skips over in one page the peasant revolt or ‘Great Fear’ of July–August 1789, the largest popular uprising in French history. Whereas I see the abolition of privilege and the seigneurial system as the most significant social change of the period, he emphasises the abolition of slavery and the experience of ‘the laboratory of modern politics’. The book’s length perhaps explains the absence of helpful aids to readers such as a chronology or bibliography. The absence in the text of any reference to historians’ debates about the Revolution may be due to his target audience of the educated general public, but it will be a loss to the students who will nonetheless value this book for the precision and reliability of its detail. Popkin enlivens his account with vivid pen-portraits of individuals who experienced the Revolution firsthand, such as the feisty Parisian glazier Jacques-Louis Ménétra; brilliant and outrageous celebrities such as Mirabeau and Danton; deeply contentious figures such as Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and Robespierre (all sketched with sympathy); and in particular the young friends Jean-Marie Goujon and Pierre-François Tissot. Goujon, born in 1766, was a clerk in a law office when the AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Revolution began, but found his calling as a brilliant administrator and Jacobin politician. After the overthrow of Robespierre, he despaired of a future ‘where equality is disregarded, rights violated, and [where] the masses will be completely subservient to the rich, sole masters of the government and of the state’. Arrested after involvement in the last great insurrection of the revolutionary period, in ‘Prairial Year III’ or May 1795, Goujon stabbed himself to death before he could be guillotined. He was

perhaps given the knife by his close friend Tissot (born 1768), who had married Goujon’s sister. Tissot survived the Revolution with his core political values intact, became a successful historian and businessman – and was still alive when France next became a republic in 1848. g Peter McPhee is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne and Chair of the History Council of Victoria.

Memoir

The Ulysses of adversity Oliver Stone’s stubborn boomer machismo Aaron Nyerges

Chasing the Light: How I fought my way into Hollywood: From the 1960s to Platoon by Oliver Stone

Monoray $35 pb, 342 pp

eviewing Oliver Stone’s film Salvador for The New Yorker in 1986, Pauline Kael detected a ‘right-wing macho fantasy joined to a left-wing polemic’. That same compound, a politically unstable one, bubbles under the surface of Stone’s autobiography, Chasing the Light. Generally speaking, it is hard to separate judgement about an autobiography from that about its subject, since reading an autobiography is like a long stay at someone’s home, listening to them detail their life story around the dinner table, night after night. The problem is twofold when its author is so politically conflicted. As distinct from a film review, to review Oliver Stone’s autobiography is undeniably to review ‘Oliver Stone’. Stone’s self-narrative is many-layered. Its early chapters offer a candid remembrance of his childhood, his bonds with his parents, the impact of their divorce, his years in an academically intense boarding school. Then comes his dropping out of Yale and his departure for Vietnam, first as a teacher, then as a soldier. Since the subtitle promises a ticket-of-entry to a filmmaker’s ‘fight’, the main event shows Stone struggling into Hollywood, dodging and weaving through the twists and turns of independent film financing, peppering the bout with punchy celebrity anecdotes. At times the book smacks of an award speech run long: a careful list, too exhaustive. At others it reads like a Borgesian riddle of mentorship, a career manual for an industry that doesn’t quite exist anymore. But the book’s interest lies less in these formal qualities than in the social implications of reading it, of spending three hundred pages with the man, of having to navigate the political fantasies that Kael saw in Salvador, that left-right combo of a masochist’s violence and pacifist’s plea. Stone evidently admires the rebel-hero figure, the thorn in the 50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

side of the status quo, the teller of untold truths and revealer of inconvenient secrets. By creating films he has made himself into a unique brand of counter-diplomat, challenging US propaganda by spinning it otherwise, howling against American exceptionalism at twenty-four frames per second. But just as frequently, this self-styled leftism, with all its sympathies for the plight of global communism, all its solidarity with those countries run over by US foreign policy, reveals itself ambiguously in regard to the power of collectivism. Perhaps it is the role of director that puts him at odds with it, but so does his fetish for the heroic rebel-transgressor. While Chasing the Light leaves no question as to Stone’s distaste for Reaganism, for neoliberal, market-driven economics, it fails to consider how the political economy of his own films is of a piece with them. In the first pages of the introduction, he recounts how he and his crew abandoned Mexico, the shooting location of Salvador, with local creditors and unpaid craftsmen in their wake. The details of how and when these debts were paid are of less import than Stone’s nascent self-mythologising, as he becomes the bootstrapping, tireless Ulysses for whom cutting corners, improvising plans, and pushing around cheap labour in ‘shithole’ countries (scare quotes his) are the secrets of his success. Stone resents his preppy, Manhattan-society adolescence being used against him, but he does himself few favours by setting these narrative facts amid the ‘poverty-is-great-for-creativity’ premise that Chasing the Light peddles. The idealisation of hunger from a man who was born into wealth and will die with it is suspect, no matter how ‘broke’ he was at thirty. Small details in his narrative actually work to cast doubt on the reality of his struggle. In a tellingly passing mention, he reveals that during the down-and-out chapters of his life he was already represented by William Morris, the foremost literary agency in the United States. It is easier to fetishise adversity once all the social capital required to overcome it has been accrued. Stone dropped out of Yale before enlisting in the infantry and going to Vietnam, so the question of what kind of student he would have been remains the sort of counterfactual fantasy in which he likes to indulge. Would he have been the anarchist who prides himself on slumming it, two dollars to his name, while conveniently omitting the fact that the opening of a trust or chair on a director’s board awaits him in a few short years? At any rate, such ‘the struggle is real’ shtick from someone unvictimised by a low-wage economy should be served with salt. As of this year, Stone has all but bowed out of Hollywood filmmaking, with no interest in making another feature. He admits to being unimpressed by the politically correct circus

the industry has become, and decries the need for on-location sensitivity counsellors and diverse casting. In a sense, Stone’s stubborn boomer machismo is the most endearing thing about him, letting the outlines of his character show more clearly. At least there he doesn’t trip over his own economic footing the way his left-wing polemics do. Incidentally, Kael’s review of Salvador was about as close as she came to praising Stone, who, as should now be evident, is a fantastically polarising figure. Responding to her review, even he – as the appeased egoist is like to do – granted her an insight. Kael ‘uncannily sensed the dichotomy in my political mindset’, Stone writes. Perhaps the sensitivities of that critic whom he dubs the ‘Wicked Witch’ were less ‘uncanny’ than he supposes. His selfdefeating political mindset is drawn most conspicuously in the casual gestures of this autobiography, voiced as boldly as one of his protagonists might deliver one of their on-the-nose diatribes against US imperialism. The fascination for Stone, no doubt, is in the classical figure he sets out to cut, heroically imperfect.

Only so polarising a man could become a representative figure of such a polarised society. The question is: do we need more Stone? Sure, Chasing the Light makes a worthwhile contribution to the ‘director’s struggle’ subgenre of autobiography, in which Frank Capra’s The Name Above the Title (1971) presides. It adds some vainglorious details to the insider’s tour of New Hollywood, where Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) remains unsurpassed. But Stone’s transgressive hero worship, the Jim Morrison complex he expounds in the middle chapters, is arguably something the twenty-first century could do without. The sexist ‘break-on-through’ moment of the 1960s is increasingly being reassessed as an origin point for the ‘break-things’ libertarianism of late-stage capitalism, not its heroic adversary. Chasing the Light presents an Oliver Stone the world has seen before, not the hero it needs today. g Aaron Nyerges is a lecturer in American Studies at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

Television

Back to Bellbird

A revelatory study of Australian television Moya Costello

Creating Australian Television Drama: A screenwriting history by Susan Lever

‘I

Australian Scholarly Publishing $39.95 pb, 290 pp

t is necessary in each situation,’ Jacques Derrida stated in 2007, in one of many instances of writing on writing, ‘to create an appropriate mode of exposition … to take into account the presumed or desired addressee.’ This was the phenomenon I sought while reading Susan Lever’s book on screenwriting for Australian television drama. The various bookends among which to stack the text’s potential readers – writer, academic, student, and sentimental Australian of a certain age – are the disciplines of creative writing, media, culture, and history, and the purposes of knowledge and entertainment. It is a book for wannabe scriptwriters, television buffs, and Australian-nostalgia tragics. As a tragic myself, among the shows I immediately looked up were Pastures of the Blue Crane (1969), Bellbird (1967–77) and Sea Change (1998–2000). This book is revelatory, even for a nostalgia buff. I rediscovered Something in the Air (2000–2) and reconsidered, with pathos, Women of the Sun (1981), ‘the first real achievement of Aboriginal television drama’, the medium which had ‘a more important role than film in changing the popular representation of Aboriginal people’. But Women of the Sun, despite its success (‘hailed as a “water-

shed” … and taught in schools’), did not lead to a continuing stream of Indigenous television drama, because of yet another downturn in ABC funding. As a result of Aboriginal activism, that renaissance came decades later with series like The Gods of Wheat Street (2014). The book thus brings to attention facets of culture, history, and the production process. For instance, Hector Crawford, during the production of Homicide (1964–77), allowed his writers to work from home when he was a mid-twentieth-century producer, long before early twenty-first-century Covid–19 workfrom-home practices. Further, Lever notes that Grundy’s Prisoner (1979–86) achieved, in 1979, ‘the unimaginable’ feat: the first Australian television show to be sold to an American network. Lever is a major figure in Australian literary scholarship. She is a life member of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, general editor of the Cambria Australian Literature Series, editor of The Oxford Book of Australian Women’s Verse (1995), and more. The reader can be confident of being in a pair of assured scholarly hands. From the outset, I was interested in television drama’s present manifestation as ‘streaming’ series. Lever cites a couple of writers who consider dramas such as The Wire ‘the pinnacle of contemporary fictional narrative’, comparable to a great national novel. Lever notes that ‘several Australian productions’, such as the comedy Please Like Me (2013–16), ‘have had international exposure on the streaming platforms’. But Australian television dramatists’ full participation in future streaming long-form drama is uncertain because of high budgets for which Australian writers and producers will ‘need support’. The book’s primary concern is ‘the writers’ role in creating Australian television drama’, with the script central to the creation of that drama as ‘a serious literary phenomenon’. Lever’s robust opening statement in the Introduction is that ‘television drama became the pre-eminent form of fiction-making within a few years of the commencement of broadcasting … [shaping] the imagination and dreams of millions of people’. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

The writer’s script has been neglected. Media as a new academic discipline wanted to distinguish itself from literary studies’ emphasis on the writer as creator, television production being collaborative. Many might name Aaron Sorkin as the onlie begetter of The West Wing, whereas in reality he is known as the showrunner, ‘more like a producer’, with a long list of writers to hand (though he did co-write eighty-nine episodes). How many of us could put together a list of Australian television writers as long as those we might have for Australian film directors or novelists? Lever describes this as ‘a wholesale critical neglect of an area of textual creation’. There is no Australian ‘television drama canon’ like that of novels, theatre, and film. Part of Lever’s remit in the book is a comparative study between the media of radio, theatre, film and television, and between British, American, and Australian cultural aesthetics. Of the latter, Lever writes that ‘after years of watching recycled material from Britain and America, Australian audiences learnt to love the simplicities and straightforwardness’ of Homicide. The chapters follow chronologically Australian television writers’ origins in radio, theatre, and film, through various television genres such as crime and comedy, to the rise of Indigenous television-making, while also covering the business models of television production – writers forming a guild and production companies such as Simpson Le Mesurier creating Halifax f.p. (1994 –2002).

The book’s uninspiring cover does the inappropriate work of pre-programming the reader as an academic in a narrowly defined disciplinary space. Such a cover ill serves the lively and insightful mode of the book’s exposition. Fortunately, the endorsements point to the richness of the text between its dissimulating covers: its meticulous research and engaging writing style. Paratextual material is perhaps an odd thing to highlight in the digital age and in a discussion of a book about the screen. EBooks, for example, often lack contextualising paratexts. But if it goes into another print run, the book deserves a more inviting cover. It is a valuable book for Australian identity, for the history of Australian creatives in the television industry, for the affordances new technologies give to culture, for its concern with local content, and for its recognition of scholars who work at knowledge creation. Australian television drama is genre diverse. Among the scriptwriters, names recur, but they represent Australia’s ethnic, gender, and sexual diversity, including Jon Bell, Nick Giannopoulos, Celia Pacquola, Debra Oswald, Josh Thomas, and Hannah Gadsby. There is a jouissance to be experienced in this book via its celebration of the making of oneself through the creative and cultural resources of place. g Moya Costello taught creative writing at Southern Cross University, and is now an adjunct.

For Noting

A creeping association might doldrum your bullet points and action items resembling life grid passing then gone change my number leave me alone give no ear to charms slip the bridle ungirth the saddle the x of the x blows sit at my desk and think there is more to come a spreadsheet fringe exposure seemly as introduction exactly so talking invents its outstretched necessities breezy pictures and other objective objects those who are marked with the tokens whose houses are plague houses passing-bells salute

Kate Lilley

Kate Lilley’s most recent collection, Tilt, is reviewed on page 56. 52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

History

Death by a thousand cuts The struggle to preserve knowledge Simon Caterson

Burning the Books: A history of knowledge under attack by Richard Ovenden

John Murray $32.99 pb, 308 pp

he store of knowledge available to humanity has never been so immense and accessible as it is today. Nor has it been so vulnerable to neglect or erasure. That, in essence, is the message of this book, written with urgency by the most senior executive at the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford, one of the largest and oldest library systems in the world. In Burning the Books: A history of knowledge under attack, Richard Ovenden explains that while competing impulses to preserve and destroy knowledge are nothing new in human history, the invention of the internet has brought with it the potential for loss of knowledge on a scale never before seen. In the historical equivalent of the blink of an eye, we have come to depend on the internet despite the basic instability of information technology. This is a fine thing – except when it suddenly fails. Although cyberspace, at least in theory, has the capacity to preserve indefinitely everything we put there, the reality is that data is being corrupted through lack of care or through outright malevolence on the part of those who wish to control the future by distorting or destroying the past. What is published online can easily be removed and manipulated by those governments and huge corporations with the power to do so. The one truly dependable safeguard against the misuse, corruption, and loss of knowledge is the dedication of independent libraries and archives to preserve all physical and digital information without fear or favour. Ovenden is alarmed by the steady decline over recent years in funding for many of these institutions in different countries, including the Australian National Archives. ‘This book is motivated by my own sense of anger at recent failures across the globe – both deliberate and accidental – to ensure that society can rely on libraries and archives to preserve knowledge.’ A recent scandal in his own country that outraged Ovenden involves the destruction in 2010 by the UK Home Office of documents proving the claim to British citizenship of thousands of immigrants from the West Indies who arrived in the years immediately following World War II. Many people who for decades had lived, worked, and paid taxes in Britain under the assumption that they were citizens were deported as illegal immigrants unable to confirm their status. Ovenden reports that it took the UK government nearly a decade to acknowledge that crucial documents proving citizenship had been destroyed, by which time some of those wrongly deported had died overseas still awaiting justice. In a case such as this, Ovenden sees the

failure to protect knowledge vital to the lives of citizens as a clear sign of a nation in decline. Ovenden notes that in Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the great eighteenth-century historian describes the destruction of the legendary Library of Alexandria in exactly those terms. Gibbon believed that this colossal disaster – the Library of Alexandria was reputed to hold most of the accumulated knowledge of the world – was primarily caused not by the external threats of invaders wanting to burn it down. Rather, it was ‘due to a long and gradual process of neglect and growing ignorance’ that was symbolic of ‘the barbarity that overwhelmed the Roman Empire’. Sadly, we still haven’t learned from the loss of the Library of Alexandria and the many other important libraries destroyed since then. One of the most harrowing sections in Burning the Books describes the destruction over a period of several days of the National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Siege of Sarajevo in August 1992. The library housed more than one and a half million books and other materials that ‘provided the recorded memory not just of a nation but the culture of an entire region, one that had a significant Muslim population’. During the siege, Ovenden writes, the library ‘was deliberately targeted by Serbian forces that sought not only military domination but annihilation of the Muslim population. No other buildings nearby were hit – the library was the sole target.’ The besiegers deployed snipers to shoot any library staff trying to save items from the library’s collection. Similar attacks were carried out on other non-Serbian institutions in the region, including the archives being maintained by local Catholic organisations. The destruction of the National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina was reminiscent of the burning of books carried out by the Nazis at night that symbolised the regime’s genocidal aims. Although the tone at times is bleak, there are many heroes in this book among the librarians and archivists who have actively sought to protect and preserve knowledge, regardless of the personal cost. I myself have worked in a university library and know several librarians who in their quiet way are striving to uphold the institution’s true mission in the face of budgetary pressures and other negative factors. While I was reading this book, I thought of a parallel between the existential threat to knowledge described by the author and the environmental crisis the world is facing due to overpopulation and human-induced climate change. Just when many people are recognising the wonder and potential of the natural world – the barely understood benefits of biodiversity are just one example of this growing consciousness – we are rapidly destroying what is left of the Earth’s biomass. In Burning the Books, Richard Ovenden posits a somewhat similar threat to knowledge, a threat that will only grow as long as the vital global role of libraries and archives is undermined, whether through a single death blow as occurred tragically in Sarajevo or by means of a thousand cuts in places like Australia. g Simon Caterson is a Melbourne-based writer whose first contribution to ABR appeared in 2001. He trained as a lawyer before completing a postgraduate degree in Irish studies at Trinity College, Dublin. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Comment

Working in the shadows

Belated recognition of Australian prose poetry Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton

Charles Baudelaire by Étienne Carjat, 1863 (British Library via Wikimedia Commons)

ntil recently, Australian prose poetry hasn’t attracted much attention – we’re not sure why. Having written prose poetry for years, we’re both fascinated by the form, which can be loosely defined as poems written in paragraphs and sentences rather than in stanzas and lines. Getting a handle on the larger tradition of Australian prose poetry is not easy. Many prose poems are buried in out-of-print books or lurk in slim volumes mainly comprising more traditional poetry. The many anthologies of Australian poetry published in recent decades have mostly included few prose poems. It was as if prose poetry had not been fully accepted as a legitimate part of the Australian poetry landscape. This mattered to us: as prose poets, we felt we were working in the shadows, if not in the dark. Like many other exponents of the genre, we had a limited sense of the Australian prose poetry tradition. The situation was markedly different in the United States and the United Kingdom where a variety of anthologies of prose poetry have been published, including Peter Johnson’s A CastIron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly (2019), Anne Caldwell and Oz Hardwick’s The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (2019), Brian Clements and Jamey Dunham’s An Introduction to the Prose Poem (2009), David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems from Poe to Present (2003), Peter Johnson’s Best of the Prose Poem (2000), and Stuart Friebert’s and David Young’s Models of the Universe (1995). Furthermore, when a significant international prose poetry anthology was released in 2018 – Jeremy Noel-Tod’s The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson – only three Australian prose poems were included in the selection of 200 works. Australian prose poetry was simply not very visible. It was important to take action to rectify this situation, and so we proposed to Melbourne University Press that we publish an anthology of about 160 Australian prose poems, written and published over the past fifty years or so. We suggested this be54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

cause the contemporary prose poetry form is important. It was inaugurated in Paris in 1869 with the posthumous publication of Charles Baudelaire’s ground-breaking prose poetry collection, Paris Spleen, and was rapidly developed by other major nineteenth-century French prose poets, including Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. Since then, prose poetry has become a vehicle for writers all over the world to address urban life in telling ways and to make works that combine truncated narratives with a genuinely poetic mode of expression. Prose poetry, even more than contemporary free verse, enables the intense expression of many things at once: the multivalent, the intimate, the fragmentary, the ordinary. Prose poetry is able to encompass diverse expressions of the crammed and sometimes clashing nature of contemporary experience. It is well suited to breaking down barriers between high art and more familiar forms of writing because, in its use of sentences and paragraphs, it looks like approachable prose fiction or non-fiction, rather than poetry. Prose poetry signals that, since the rise of modernism, the ‘prosaic’ and the ‘poetic’ are frequently bound together. Unlike the French tradition, Australian prose poetry only gathered momentum in the 1970s, partly as a result of the rise of the counterculture and the spread of American culture and values. The influence of prose poems written in Latin America and Europe since the 1950s also grew. Gradually, Australian literature became more diverse and adventurous. Chris Wallace-Crabbe included a prose poetry suite, ‘Going to Cythera’, in his 1971 collection Where the Wind Came. In 1975, Rudi Krausmann’s From Another Shore was the first full collection by an Australian writer to consistently employ prose-poetical techniques. Andrew Taylor’s volume of prose poetry, Parabolas (1976), is considered the first book of prose poetry published in Australia. As the twentieth century progressed, a significant number of Australian writers produced accomplished prose poems, including Pam Brown, Gary Catalano, joanne burns, and Ania Walwicz. Indigenous writers such as Ali Cobby Eckermann and Samuel Wagan Watson have increasingly taken up the form, partly because it is suitable for registering experiences of cultural disruption and disjuncture. The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry includes selections from all of these writers, along with many other authors and works. A rich and diverse miscellany of antipodean prose poetry is finally assembled in one place, with the potential to become a ready reference for Australian prose poets everywhere. The anthology also provides general readers with access to otherwise hard-to-obtain works and a way into new understandings of prose poetry more generally. We hope this publication will begin a process where prose poetry takes its rightful place in Australian literary culture, and that it will lead readers to further explorations of a significant Australian literary tradition that is only now starting to be properly recognised. g Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton’s The Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (Melbourne University Press) will be reviewed in the next issue.

Poetry

‘Lost in the funhouse’ An exceptional third collection Judith Bishop

Change Machine by Jaya Savige

University of Queensland Press $24.99 pb, 102 pp

hange Machine is an exceptionally strong third collection. To the extent that a schematic of thesis–antithesis– synthesis applies to poets’ books, this one both exceeds and incorporates the work that came before. Intriguingly, the title poem seems a late addition, citing the pandemic in three clipped lines, borne on the shoulders of two innocuous words, should and but: I’m broke. And everything should be contactless. We breathlessly await the new vaccine, but no-one disinfects the change machine.

Title poems are often the punchline of a book. Characteristically, this one begs to differ, puncturing any grandeur the metaphor suggests. ‘Change machine’ seems to be a trope for life and death – as the epigraph tells us, ‘Machine, or Engine, in Mechanicks, is whatsoever hath Force sufficient either to raise or stop the Motion of a Body’. It is certainly the engine of language, which raises and halts the spectres of perception. But it is also just the coin machine that gives the poet access to a public restroom. The poem’s irritable ‘I’ takes on a world in which little can be changed – every should is countered by the tough luck of a but – yet it matters to put words to an irrational world. The poet’s mots d’esprit are offered in the spirit of an antidote to rage, if not its sublimation: The word we used was mellowed and maybe he really had towards the end – but Victor took the jug cord to the boys for years. For half a life he whirred like a rowing machine. (‘Hard Water’)

Armed with wit and erudition, Savige launches visions of damage, dystopia, and occasional joy. These are common enough; what sets Change Machine apart is the exquisite marriage of

feeling to linguistic ambition and an exuberant gift for verbal generation. This combination is rarely distilled to such proof: the reader senses the pressure behind the mechanisms. The wit, range, and verbal polish occasionally calls to mind that other London-based Antipodean, Peter Porter; at other times, a fellow Joycean, and likewise expatriate, Paul Muldoon. As with Porter, the lexical wizardry (‘A carousel of oral cues, / these spinning sonic coins. // A slide show of old wishes’) papers over pain. But more than either, these poems recall American poets’ early twenty-first-century tussle between Language and lyric verse, as anthologised in a Norton anthology, American Hybrid (2009), and promulgated by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki in Verse magazine through the same period. Maintaining the tension between language as material means, and meanings that matter, Savige focuses his powers in the service of a hybridising, tragicomic vision. By the end of ‘Spork’, the poet has become that vision, conceived in a fuck-you gesture to a bigoted grandfather. The poem opens: Chimera native to our plastic age, crossbred ambassador from the planet of blur, both and not either or –

There is a masculine jocularity to some of the poems. ‘Starstruck’ comes to mind (‘plough into a murder / of gowned undergraduates on the crest / of the bend; or swerve, and be poleaxed / by a singular hackney car. I veered like a wakeboarder // from the kerb’). But then there are poems such as ‘Tips for Managing Subsidence’ and ‘The Cobra of Djemma el Fna’, dedicated to his partner, Emma, which apply the poultice of wit to the loss of unborn children with a harrowing finesse reminiscent of Muldoon’s The Annals of Chile (1994). Neither bears quoting; these must be read in full. ‘Flight Path’, which takes as its subject the death of a stowaway who fell from a plane over London, keeps at arm’s length that image of ‘a real day’ through its verbal decoration of a horrifying fall. The James Dickey poem ‘Falling’ addressed a similar event; both focus our attention on the surreal spectacle of these awful deaths: Above the High Street’s summer dioramas did he twist like a samaroid seed, or whistle like a samurai sword, swiftly and without words? (‘Flight Path’)

‘A real day’ is differently present in the poet’s gift for perception, trained on the natural world. Evident from his first book onwards – the upshot, perhaps, of being raised on Bribie Island – it bubbles up in lines such as these, where the scene is imagined but vividly present: Home is the hoof-crushed water mint, the hard rushes, and an adamant stonechat declaring mid-morning’s parliament again in session. (‘The Convict Lying Low by Hampton Court, Speaks’) AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

A typical strong book might have two or three standout poems. Change Machine has a more impressive number. Among them I would count ‘Hard Water’, one of the most powerful poems about domestic violence I have read; ‘Ladybugs’, a poem on self-harm (‘you’d say it was her prep for an exam / on how to use her skin to hoard the rain’); ‘The Offing’, a holiday poem, told with a verbal relish to rival Les Murray’s; ‘Tips for Managing Subsidence’, mentioned above; and two original and lovely poems for the poet’s son, ‘Infant Speech Bubble’ and ‘Bach to the Fuchsia’ (yes, Back to the Future). A similar number of poems, all in the opening section, could have been omitted without damage to the whole – they are too slight or over the top and indigestible (‘the wild albino leech of my eyeball / gorges on glare’). These only highlight the accomplishment of the stronger poems, which use similar means but apply much greater pressure. The choice to end the book on a faux-phonetic poem (‘in-

spired by the recurrent “Mutt and Jute” episodes in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake’) seems puzzling at first (‘Less faith it, y’aint // cart hut for these kinds of sillygigs’). But it’s almost certainly a variant on the deflationary move the poet makes in ‘Change Machine’. The book’s see-sawing ride between loss, pain, and humour – a balance so perfectly poised in many of the poems – gives the final hurrah to ‘sillygigs’. Could we be lost in the funhouse of language? Savige’s mirroring and anagrammatical poems suggest such a vision. ‘Sure it was funny, but not ha-ha // funny, more funny-sad, like the elegy for Ford Ford / in William Williams’s The Wedge (’44)’. This poet’s ability to dazzle through the damage is ‘ROTFLMAOWTRDMF’ in verse: ‘rolling on the floor laughing my ass off / with tears running down my face.’ g Judith Bishop most recent collection is Interval (University of Queensland Press, 2018).

Poetry

Curtain raiser

Poems of childhood sexual violence Anders Villani

Tilt

by Kate Lilley

‘E

Vagabond $24.95 pb, 90 pp

ven if truth be drawn from the work,’ writes Maurice Blanchot, ‘the work overruns it, takes it back into itself to bury and hide it.’ This strange, poetic movement to conceal what is manifest brings to mind another statement, by the psychiatrist and author Judith Herman: ‘The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.’ Early in Kate Lilley’s début collection, Versary (2002), two short poems appear verso-recto that feel misplaced, the ‘I’ nearer the poet, the scenes more nakedly historical. In ‘1972’, schoolchildren leave a dance and ‘cross the oval in pairs / to the steep bank behind the softball field’. ‘It’s cold on the ground,’ the speaker concludes, ‘my buttons loose to the sky.’ The impact of these final adjectives carries to the poem opposite, ‘Panic Stations’, whose first line has the speaker ‘rattled, shaken up’ after an unnamed incident. There is a lurch to the present tense, the speaker ‘holding my breath on the bottom of the pool’– the impossible peace of this state – while ‘horror’s breaking through’. From the standpoint of Lilley’s oeuvre, that breakthrough occurs in Tilt, winner of the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for poetry. Tilt is a layered work, irreducible to any monistic reading. But it must be acknowledged that the book confronts 56 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

with rare craft the subject of childhood sexual violence. Given the cultural appetite for trauma, Lilley has made a timely argument for the possibilities and value of poetic enquiry into such material. The first man who put his hands on me was a psychiatric registrar, how about that? He honed in on me at a party, someone’s backyard. I’m 12 in a sexy cocktail dress … Mum bought it for me, she said I looked like Jean Harlow.

This excerpt from the Etudes sequence bears unpacking. Again the fluid tense – could this be the backyard with the pool? – the tendency of extreme experience to blur then and now. Striking too is the speaker’s age: reading autobiographically from Lilley’s birth year, 1960, we date this original moment in what Tilt reveals to be a pattern of abuse and assault to either 1973 or 1972, the dance year. Importantly, the persistence of Lilley’s creative attention to these events reveals what, over time, she has added: accounts of men who harmed her; juxtapositions of child and screen siren, real and unreal, authentic and act, which serve as Tilt’s principal motif; and the disclosure of a cardinal wrong, the complicity of the poet’s mother in her mistreatment. ‘This is what I’ve been raised for,’ the speaker quips in ‘Party Favour’, locked in a bathroom by an older man, the noises of the party ‘far away / on the other side of the door’ – the remove, the underwater, of dissociation. Another line in ‘Party Favour’ has stayed with me: ‘It’s a curtain raiser that’s all.’ Lilley repeats the phrase in ‘Civil Wrong’ – ‘As a curtain raiser to future losses’ – and the idea of life as performance animates the book. Consider the titular poem. Reflecting on a job at a seedy leisure centre in Kings Cross, Lilley uses a welter of proper nouns and specific dates to cast an equivalency between female celebrities – Donna Summer, Brooke Shields, Judy Davis – and victims of violence in the Kings Cross area during that period: Juanita Nielson, Anita Cobby. The same technique, almost report-

age, ricochets the speaker between the workplace (where employees ‘gave out quarter tabs of acid gratis’), video games, drag shows, murder scenes, and her ‘second home’, the Academy Twin cinema. What we witness is fantasy and reality converging and acquiring attributes of each other – exposing their kinship.

The book confronts with rare craft the subject of childhood sexual violence Ladylike (2012), Lilley’s sophomore collection, begins with an essay in which the speaker asks: ‘In the criss-cross of mother and daughter … what is mine and what is hers?’ The first stanza of Tilt’s ‘Memorandum’ features a dying mother’s commands: ‘Help! Help! Come here! Rub my feet! Don’t stop!’ Later, Lilley returns to the imperative as though the commands now issue from within the speaker herself: ‘Name a prize after her call it the sad and lonely prize / Get it out on the airwaves the evening news … ’ Here, Lilley showcases the poem’s facility for exploring quicksilver interpersonal dynamics with economy. Under whose control could we catch ourselves? That Lilley is the daughter of poet and playwright Dorothy Hewett is well known; considered in light of Hewett’s literary standing, Tilt raises a further curtain. Yet the book is no bald confessional. It is most remarkable for how it withdraws at the moment when we expect it to embody what Anne Rothe calls ‘popular trauma culture’, troping redemption and recovery. Two-thirds of the collection displace the autobiographical voice, in favour of poems rich with the materiality of language – ‘seven panelled spine / large tulips onlaid / sovereign metonymy’ – and of objects. Lilley’s catalogues of Greta Garbo’s personal effects in ‘Realia’, Tilt’s final section, pierce ‘the ruse of … sublimity’ at play in public attitudes towards female celebrity; hidden among Garbo’s minutiae are a love of poetry and a queer identity, both traits key to the survivor’s development throughout the book. It is as if the early violence atomises into the later text, as it might a life: part of a miniature school set owned by Garbo are a ‘Boy and Girl each holding a flower / Condition: the Boy is missing his flower’; in ‘Lovestore’, ‘frigidity, the proper passion of water’, is ‘sometime accidentally hot’; the ‘bookplate frottage’ of ‘Association Copy’ connotes both the artistic taking of a rubbing from an uneven surface and the rubbing of another body in a crowd for sexual gratification. Readers may find the stylistic pivot from Tilt’s early poems to its later ones jarring, perhaps forbidding. But trauma here, rather than assuming command, becomes one element among many that found and sustain identity. If not a benign element, or an element to be eradicated, then one to be managed, contextualised, spoken of, not spoken of. g Anders Villani holds an MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. His first full-length collection, Aril Wire, was released in 2018 by Five Islands Press. A PhD candidate at Monash University, he lives in Melbourne. ❖ Anders Villani was one of four doctoral students whom we commissioned after the most recent series of publishing masterclasses at Monash University, our partner. Kate Lilley’s collection Tilt was published in 2018.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Biography

Dickensian mysteries

us in order to understand how Dickens does it. He does it in his own unique way. To get to the heart of how Dickens works his magic on us, Wilson turns both to his writing and The appeal of Charles Dickens to his life. Like others, he finds a source for Dickens’s work in the Graham Tulloch people, places, and events of his life, but he goes below the surface to the springs of emotion that they aroused in Dickens and which fed his creativity: he insists that there is no simple relocation into the novels, so that, to take one example, Mrs Clennam is not Dickens’s mother but a new creation, even though Dickens could only create her because of his experience of his hated mothThe Mystery of Charles Dickens er. In this way, as Wilson points out, Dickens’s novels are actually by A.N. Wilson full of the mysteries of his life but, because they are transmogrified into something else, they remain safely hidden in plain sight. Atlantic Books There is, of course, an abundance of literature on Dickens $39.99 hb, 358 pp and his writing, and Wilson uses it extensively, with generous his is a remarkable book – not so much for its subject acknowledgment. Drawing on this and on his own experience of a matter as for the intensity of the passionate involvement lifetime of reading Dickens, Wilson explores the central question of one writer with another. From the beginning, it is clear of Dickens’s power as a writer through his seven mysteries, beginthat this is not a conventional biography or book of criticism. ning with the relationship with the much younger actress Ellen A.N. Wilson approaches Charles Dickens through seven differ- Ternan, something Dickens desperately wanted to keep a secret. ent mysteries about his life. The principal one, which underlies Next comes his childhood with its up-and-down movement: on the whole book, is the mystery of what makes Dickens such an the one hand, an idyllic early life in Chatham and Rochester; utterly compelling writer. on the other, the blacking (shoe polish) factory, long recognised This is obviously a question of deep importance to Wilson. as a scarifying experience crucial to Dickens’s formation as a At its root, he is asking, what is the secret of how Dickens af- man and as a writer. The following two chapters deal with his fects him? To put it in my own personal terms, which this book marriage (how could he be so unutterably cruel to a woman he forcefully elicits, what is it that makes me weep every time I initially loved, expelling her from his home and forbidding his read the account of the death of Jo in Bleak House, despite some children to see her?) and his charity work (how could he combine misgivings (though only in one part of my brain) about his the enormous energy he put into practical acts of kindness with being taught the Lord’s Prayer as he dies? Or, to take a broader harsh and unforgiving attitudes towards ‘ruffians’?). canvas, what makes me take the improbable story of Pip – exThe next mystery is that of his immensely successful public ploited by a woman who has stopped time readings: what drove him to enact again at the point she was jilted, and sustained and again the horrific murder of Nancy by a fearsome transported convict who in Oliver Twist? Oddly, the next chapter, has made good in Australia (along with on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, is the least all the other unlikely characters and events satisfactory, even though it is the only of the novel) – as somehow totally real and one explicitly related to mystery through as a profound reflection on childhood, class, Dickens’s own words. The final chapter, as shame, guilt, and, above all, love? already noted, deals directly with Wilson’s That Wilson is passionately involved in own reaction to Dickens. It also attempts the search for an answer to his underlying to place his writing within three broad question is increasingly clear as the book categories of writers, but this attempt only continues, but it becomes overt and explicit reveals a ‘tangle [that] needs a little bit of in the last chapter, ‘The Mystery of Charles teasing out [which] this book has tried to Dickens’. Here, Wilson provides a truly do’. In the end, any attempt to fully cateA.N. Wilson (Atlantic Books) horrifying account of his own experiences gorise Dickens will always fail. Why, after as a young boy at Rugby, only relieved by his English teacher’s all, would we expect a writer sui generis to be classifiable? The inspired acting out of passages from Dickens’s novels. Of course, attempt to understand his power is more illuminating than any even this intensely personal explanation of Dickens’s importance overall solution of the mystery. to Wilson does not provide an answer to the mystery of why Like Dickens’s own work, this is a masterly performance Dickens is so compelling as a writer. Nor does Wilson’s answer, at which draws deep on the author’s own feelings and experiences. It one point in the book, that Dickens is a mesmerist, or any of the is a book which will make us lovers of Dickens think again about other partial explanations offered along the way, although the one the mysterious power his writing has for us. One hopes it will that gets closest is that it is to Dickens’s voice that we respond. also bring others to experience that same power. g Even at the end of the book the central mystery remains a mystery. As Wilson claims, Dickens is a writer sui generis and there Graham Tulloch taught English at Flinders University for forty is thus no point in thinking about how other writers affect years and has written extensively on Scottish literature.

58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

Czech Republic

Smetana’s brain The resilience of Pragueans Christopher Menz

The Golden Maze: A biography of Prague by Richard Fidler

ABC Books $39.99 hb, 580 pp

n May Day 1955, two years after his death, a colossal memorial to Joseph Stalin was unveiled on a prominent site north of central Prague. Towering above the city and containing 14,000 tons of granite, it was the largest statue of the dictator ever created. Stalin was depicted at the head of a representative group of citizens, dubbed by some as a bread queue. Otakar Švec, a prominent Czech sculptor, had won the commission in 1949. After the work’s stressful gestation, he killed himself shortly before the work was unveiled; there had been constant interference and police surveillance, and his wife committed suicide in 1954. Švec had intended bequeathing his possessions to the Prague Institute for the Blind, possibly knowing that the recipients would never see his socialist-realist monster, but the secret police destroyed the contents of his apartment and the Institute received nothing. Following Stalin’s fall from favour, the memorial was detonated in 1962. The podium survives (it’s now used as a bar), and the platform above houses a modern sculpture of a gigantic metronome, installed in 1991. This is just one of many stories about Prague that make it so fascinating to read about and complex to understand. For much of its history, Prague has been under foreign domination in one form or another (for centuries it was the Habsburgs). Its monuments are prone to be invested with powerful symbolism whose meaning is subject to regime change. Prague – no stranger to extremes – was at the vanguard of proto-Protestant reform spearheaded by Jan Hus at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The famous defenestration of 1618 ignited the bloodbath that was the Thirty Years’ War. Once Habsburg control was re-established in 1620, Catholicism reasserted itself with a vengeance and numerous splendid baroque churches. There were many times throughout its history when Prague, however picturesque, cannot have been a congenial place to live. Authoritarian regimes and state control took their toll. Given the destruction repeatedly wrought there over centuries, it is surprising how much of its historical fabric remains intact. Unlike many central-European cities during the twentieth century, Prague survived wars and invasion without too much damage to its buildings. Not so its citizens, who had to endure more than half a century of totalitarian control, much of it in terror – first from the Nazis (who occupied it from 1939 to 1945), then the Russians. Richard Fidler, who first visited Prague as the Iron Curtain

was corroding, is one of many visitors who have been captivated by this city straddling the Vltava. In The Golden Maze: A biography of Prague he interweaves his own visits, experiences, and impressions of the city with the bigger picture of its history. When Fidler first visited in January 1990, he was fortunate enough to be able to stay at the shabby but splendid art nouveau Grand Hotel Evropa on Wenceslas Square. Prague’s late nineteenthand twentieth-century architecture is every bit as impressive as its medieval, Renaissance, and baroque architecture. Fidler is a popular writer and broadcaster – not a historian. The Golden Maze is a straightforward account of Prague from the earliest times to the present day. The narrative is informative and approachable. If you are planning to visit Prague and are looking for an engaging, well-written guide, this is a good place to start; it will whet your appetite to delve further. There is a vast literature on Prague, ranging from informative travel guides to substantial tomes. Fidler does include some interesting trivia, such as Smetana’s preserved brain accidentally being flushed down a lavatory in the late 1940s, and that the young Spencer Tracy made his Broadway début as a robot when Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) premièred in New York in 1922. A large part of Prague’s history illustrates the resilience of its citizens under foreign domination. Fidler’s interest is in the more recent history of the city; his descriptions of the Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion of 1968 are riveting. The police state, surveillance, and betrayals during the Soviet era make truly depressing reading. The future does not appear all that promising either. It is for the period from the 1960s to the 1980s that Fidler’s journalistic and descriptive skills really come to the fore and we gain insights into modern Prague. He cites the compromises that were being introduced during the creation of the Czech constitution in late 1989: ‘The central clauses of one-party rules were pulled from the constitution like rotten teeth.’ In addition to his interview with Jaroslav Kovaricek, who immigrated to Australia after the Russian invasion and later became a well-known ABC broadcaster, Fidler interviews others who were in Prague during these decades. Fidler reports on a poignant encounter during the 1968 invasion when Kovaricek met a Russian tank commander on the street. The young Russian didn’t want to be in Prague; he had no quarrel with the Czechs. Sent there as part of his national service, he longed to be back home with his wife and new child. It is well worth seeking out images from that tumultuous invasion. In 2018, at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, there was a splendid retrospective exhibition for the photographer Josef Koudelka. The section dedicated to his famous images of the 1968 invasion was numbing and sobering for Czechs and tourists alike. g Christopher Menz is a former Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Science

Delicate balance Exploring the human genome Diane Stubbings

The Genes That Make Us: Human stories from a revolution in medicine by Edwin Kirk

Scribe $32.99 pb, 288 pp

he announcement in June 2000 that a first draft of the human genome had been completed was rightly recognised as a landmark in scientific endeavour. Predictions were that the sequencing of the genome would allow for the pinpointing of genes responsible for conditions such as Alzheimer’s and heart disease, and lead to finely targeted, even personalised, treatments for a range of disorders. That these ambitions are still some way from being met doesn’t make the discovery any less remarkable. The Human Genome Project (HGP) gave us the capacity to read the basic building blocks of life. Research into the human genome is teaching us that the relationship between our approximately 30,000 genes and who we are is enormously complex, the result not merely of the action of individual genes but also of the ways in which those genes interact with each other and with their environment. In The Genes That Make Us, Edwin Kirk reminds us that virtually everything ‘that afflicts human beings, and everything about us that is not an affliction, too, has genetics at its core’. Interpreting genetic sequencing data is at the heart of Kirk’s practice. A Sydneybased medical geneticist and genetic pathologist, he works with patients to determine the underlying genetic source of their conditions and to advise them of their treatment options. Both an account of the human stories at the heart of Kirk’s practice and a beginner’s guide to genetic medicine, The Genes That Make Us tells of the significant progress that has been made in genetics over the past two decades, while also signalling how far there is left to travel. Each chapter focuses on a different facet of genetic medicine, detailing the relevant genetics, its historical context, and current approaches to treatment and screening. Some of the thornier ethical questions each facet engenders are also flagged. A chapter centred on a patient with a family history of Huntington’s disease, a condition marked by ‘slow neurological demolition’, appraises the value of predictive genetic testing, particularly for conditions with no cure. (Ninety per cent of individuals at risk of inheriting Huntington’s choose not to get tested.) A patient with a genetic condition whose source is the mitochondrial genome (the mitochondria has its own complement of thirty-seven genes) prompts an examination of pre-implantation genetic testing, touching on concerns regarding the advent of designer babies and the application of gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR (a technique that allows for the alteration of gene sequences in order to modify the way genes function). The impact of the environment on our genomes is analysed via the history of thalidomide 60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

and its disruption of normal embryogenesis. Chapters on prenatal and neonatal screening consider the introduction of the heel-prick test for newborn infants (which screens for three different conditions, including cystic fibrosis), as well as the history of amniocentesis as a tool for diagnosing chromosomal disorders in a developing foetus. Kirk foreshadows current Australian government initiatives to expand prenatal and carrier screening to more than 1,300 potentially faulty genes responsible for more than 700 conditions. Also surveyed are the rapid advances in genetic screening and sequencing technology which now allow women (and less frequently men) who carry faulty copies of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, and who are thereby at risk of developing breast cancer, to make informed decisions, cognisant of the distinction between certainty and risk, about whether or not to have their breast tissue removed before potentially cancerous cells appear. One particularly interesting chapter explores the role of dysmorphology (a precursor of genetic screening and now an adjunct to genetic pathology) and its use of distinctive physical features in the diagnosis of syndromes that, more often than not, are the result of genetic errors, for example the identification in 1866 of Down syndrome. Kirk’s explanation of the relevant science is readily digestible (although an index would have been useful) and covers topics such as the processes which drive cancer; the genetics of sex differences; genetic mosaicism (replication errors that, in extreme cases, lead to an individual having two distinct genotypes); the properties of stem cells and their potential to be adapted for treatments; and the nature of heritability. Crucially, Kirk acknowledges that much of the difficulty around diagnosing and treating genetic disorders is the fundamental complexity of the processes which generate them. Much depends on the cumulative effect of slight genetic errors, as well as precisely when in an individual’s development such errors occur. There are still many unknowns about the way that genes control our development, a point Kirk concedes without volunteering specific insights into current barriers to understanding, or the realistic prospects of further breakthroughs. He gestures towards the likely existence of rogue research without accounting for its implications. Equity issues around the commodification of genetic science and the high cost of gene therapy (he offers the example of a treatment which costs US$2.1 million for a single dose) are also largely neglected. While Kirk is an amiable storyteller, he has a tendency to ramble. Some diversions are more welcome than others, for example his review of the work of Frances Oldham Kelsey, a research scientist who six times rejected applications for US approval of thalidomide as a treatment for morning sickness, unconvinced by the evidence. A long digression about the naming of various syndromes, however, is likely to test even the most attentive reader. Kirk is optimistic about the future. He envisages sequencing ‘getting better, cheaper, and faster’ and effective treatments for genetic-based disorders becoming more common. Even so, there will always be the need to negotiate the delicate ‘balance between what we can do in medicine, what it is useful to do, and what we should do’. g Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne.

Memoir

Gravitas and a twinkly grin A thespian stays true to his roots Diana Simmonds

How I Clawed My Way to the Middle by John Wood

Viking $34.99 pb, 308 pp

o his obvious surprise, John Wood became a household name playing ordinary, reliable Aussie blokes – most memorably Sergeant Tom Croydon on Blue Heelers and magistrate Michael Rafferty on Rafferty’s Rules – two of television’s best-loved everyday heroes. (I confess to writing about the latter in The Bulletin and describing him as ‘the thinking woman’s crumpet’.) Less well known is that Wood was also a busy playwright and screenwriter for much of his more public life. It’s this talent that shines here in vivid observation and shrewd evocations. Telling of the family’s move to the semi-rural outskirts of Melbourne, he conjures the unself-conscious innocence of a child: ‘I don’t think my sister Glenys was yet born. I do have a memory of going to the hospital with Dad to bring Mum and the new baby home, but it could have been Kaye’s birth two years later.’ Wood’s twinkly grin and gravitas on television and stage have made him a fixture in the contemporary public eye, so it’s startling to realise that his childhood was the dunny cart, the ice man, milk delivered from a ‘float’ and bread from the baker’s cart. Perceptively he observes of childhood: ‘Some memories slither away when you look them in the eye, leaving you uncertain as to whether you actually own them.’ Wood’s landscape and memories of growing up – working-class, outer-suburban, forgettable school days and all – are more satisfying than the inevitable rollcall of ‘names’ and showbiz tales that come later. He neatly knits together a reminiscence of an otherwise forgettable high-school French farce with more recent memories, including an appearance in Yasmina Reza’s Art. He recalls William McInnes ‘fart-arsing around’ in the wings while Wood was about to utter his opening line. It was a moment of realisation that he was at home and where he should be – on stage at the Victorian Arts Centre. Starring roles at Melbourne Theatre Company – and all Australia’s major companies – were years in the future when the unlikely thespian sang the only song he knew – a fey ditty from Trial by Jury – at his audition for NIDA. To his surprise, he was awarded a scholarship worth $6 a week. It was a pittance even then, but that wasn’t the point: he was in. Again, his very Australian life and family are what immediately capture attention. Not wanting to burden his hard-working parents, he knows he must work to save for the move to Sydney. His dad helps him get a job at the Footscray abattoir where he has toiled since returning from the war. It is a dreadful irony that

this ex-soldier – who suffered physically from his war experience for the rest of his life – took on and stuck at, for the sake of his young family, a job that must have been excruciating. Wood’s graphic documentary-stark account of that hellish place is the book’s best and most arresting writing, and especially memorable given the high pandemic profile of abattoirs. The recall is at once personal, dispassionate, and analytical. Wood maintains that rich mix – personal, analytical, dispassionate – throughout the book as he and Leslie, his girlfriend and later wife, settle into a succession of Randwick rentals while he progresses through NIDA and she through UNSW. At the same time, his mordant humour and memory for slights and perceived bad behaviour provide an acidic edge amid much sharp observation. Various people are described as ‘a bit of a prick’, someone else is ‘an arsehole, really’, while in the chapter titled ‘On Acting’, he immediately says: ‘I honestly don’t know what possessed me to create this heading. I don’t have the faintest idea about the subject.’ Much later, he ranges knowledgeably across the craft and also takes a cudgel to method acting while writing about an irritating guest actor on Rafferty’s Rules. Wood is adept at painting word pictures with depth and perspective. His accounts of the early days of the Nimrod in Sydney, and of working for the patrician John Sumner in Melbourne, are delightful and informative. At the same time, he seems comically preoccupied with height: Joanna McCallum for instance, is very tall, as are a number of others. Someone else is very short. Height or its absence is a droll preoccupation for a substantial man who has been a stalwart of Australian theatre for fifty-plus years. Although Wood is now more widely known for his television work, this came later. In 1981 he appeared in Jim Sharman’s Lulu in Adelaide, then at the Sydney Opera House. Judy Davis played Lulu; other luminaries included set designer Brian Thomson, lighting designer Nigel Levings, and costumier Luciana Arrighi, in an adaptation by Louis Nowra. Sharman invited Wood to join his new ensemble, Lighthouse. So the Woods moved from Melbourne to the Adelaide Hills. He is candid about the cost of an actor’s life for a family. He missed a lot of his two girls’ childhoods to Blue Heelers and Rafferty’s Rules. His grandchildren are now getting the attention: he delights in discovering what he missed. His second tranche of massive household fame came as Sergeant Tom Croydon in Blue Heelers. Wood writes astutely: ‘the place where most people come into conflict is a police station, a hospital, doctor’s surgery, church or courtroom. That’s why so much television is set in such places. They’re where we meet the gods and demons of our modern age.’ John Wood has made himself a unique place in the performing arts. With humour, bile, insight, and seeming candour, How I Clawed My Way to the Middle describes how, why, and where he did it. It’s the antithesis of the ‘star’ biography, and Wood is true to his roots. It tells as much about Australia as it does about the author. g Diana Simmonds is an author, journalist, and playwright. She was arts-features editor of The Bulletin, worked on the Sydney Morning Herald, Sunday Telegraph, and Time Out (London), and also for CSU Bathurst, UTS, and University of Sydney. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Open Page with Richard Fidler Richard Fidler is a writer and broadcaster. His interview program ‘Conversations’ is broadcast on ABC Radio and podcast around the world. He was a member of the comedy trio The Doug Anthony All Stars. His previous books are Ghost Empire (2016) and (with Kari Gislason) Saga Land (2017). His new book, The Golden Maze: A biography of Prague (ABC Books) is reviewed on page 59.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?

What’s your idea of hell?

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

The moon, of course (spacesuits are provided under this deal, right?). Feeling moon dust crunching under my boots while looking down on the big blue marble would be an incomparable thrill.

A world without goodwill. Most of my favourite hellish novels – Lanark, The Trial, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – take place in worlds where love and trust are feeble things, and the worst possible motives are always imputed to the protagonists.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Narrow consistency of opinion. The hobgoblin of small minds, as they say.

What’s your favourite film?

The Lives of Others, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, a 2006 German film about writers living in the shadow of the East German secret police.

And your favourite book?

I’ve reread Wuthering Heights many times. It seems miraculous that such a powerful, cosmic novel could emerge from an author who was so reclusive and travelled so little.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.

Jean Cocteau: generous, endlessly creative, and said to be the most brilliant conversationalist of his time. Gudrid the Far-Traveller, a medieval Icelandic woman who joined a Viking expedition to America where she fought against Algonquin warriors, came back and then embarked on a pilgrimage to Rome, where she met the pope. Isaac Newton, first of the modern scientists and the last of the magicians. 62 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

(Photograph by Sally Flegg)

Interview

The use of the word ‘learnings’ should be an offence punishable by death. On the other hand, fine old Australian words like ‘lair’, ‘cove’, and ‘skite’ are long overdue for a comeback. ‘Crapulous’, a wonderful synonym for hungover, is pretty good too. Hospitality.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll. I read it when I was seven and it forever changed the way I apprehend the world.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

The modern blight of interruption. The need to stop, step out of the world of the manuscript, and attend to an ‘urgent’ email.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I enjoy them mostly for the late-night drinking.

Do you read reviews of your own books? Yes.

Are artists valued in our society?

Not really. In Australia, artists and the work they produce fall under the rubric of the ‘arts sector’ of the economy, a zone that can be neatly cordoned off from the rest of society. In most countries, theatres, galleries, and music venues are woven into the fabric of a place. Here, we quarantine them into ‘arts precincts’ in case they infect the rest of the city.

What are you working on now?

Reconnecting with my friends and family after spending every waking hour outside my broadcasting work on my book. g

Philosophy

Synthesiser

A pioneering English historian Janna Thompson

Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment by Karen Green

Routledge $252 hb, 266 pp

atharine Macaulay (1731–91), a celebrated historian in England, was acquainted with leading political figures and intellectuals in Britain, America, and France. American revolutionaries were influenced by her republican principles, and the feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft was inspired by her views. Today she is a largely forgotten figure, at most a footnote in histories of the period and not regarded as significant enough to be included in the Enlightenment pantheon among the luminaries she supported or criticised. Melbourne philosopher Karen Green claims that the neglect of Macaulay is not only an injustice to a historian and philosopher whose works deserve attention. She regards her as an important advocate of a form of Enlightenment thought that cannot be reduced to an apology for the possessive individualism of capitalist society. Like other Enlightenment thinkers, Macaulay believed in reason and progress. Her views were premised on a belief in a benevolent Christian God who created humans as social as well as rational beings. Like John Locke, Macaulay believed that God endows all humans with natural rights. Reason, she argued, tells us that a good life for humans is a virtuous life. Her republicanism is a corollary of her moral philosophy. A political society ought to protect natural rights and encourage its citizens to be virtuous, and this is only likely if it is a republic governed by a parliament that truly represents the people. A republic, in her view, is not necessarily a political society without a monarch. It is one in which no one is able to claim special privileges or to use political power to oppress others. From her republican perspective, Macaulay assessed the events of English history in her eight-volume History of England (1763– 83). She approved of the deposition of Charles I and defended the Levellers of the English Revolution, but castigated Oliver Cromwell for undermining its progressive potential. She thought that the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 was mainly an attempt by leading nobles to retain power. Her criticism of taxation without representation was enthusiastically taken up by American rebels. Though she was celebrated for her history, she also wrote a treatise on moral philosophy, tackling difficult philosophical topics like free will. Her work on education supported her belief in progress by arguing that the failure of people to be rational could be overcome by a good education. One of the most remarkable facts about Macaulay was that she managed to forge a reputation as an intellectual at a time

when it was not common for women to become participants in public life. She left no letters or diary to cast a light on how she acquired the ambition to become a historian and philosopher. Green points out that she had access to the large library built up by her family, and supposes that she must have been aware of the writings of other women who had become authors and intellectuals. Macaulay lived at a time when it had become more acceptable for a woman to write for the public using her own name. She was also fortunate to marry two men who supported her. She suffered a price for her fame, especially after her first husband died and left her vulnerable to innuendo. Her later marriage to a much younger man damaged her reputation and her book sales. After her death in 1791, it did not take long for her reputation to wane.

Macaulay forged a reputation when it was not common for women to become participants in public life Radical reformers, Green points out, were no longer popular in the more conservative climate that followed the French Revolution. How much her gender had to do with her eclipse is difficult to know, but as Julia Gillard said in another context, gender doesn’t explain everything, nor nothing. How should we assess Macaulay’s value as a moral and political thinker? Green admits that there is nothing especially original about her ideas. Macaulay was a synthesiser – she put together views that others expressed into a coherent philosophy. She can also be praised for consistency, a virtue that is less common and more laudable than many people think. She was not centrally concerned with the rights of women, and she had little to say about slavery. But she made it clear that any practice that denigrated people because of their gender or race, and denied them the rights God gave them, was not in accordance with reason. She insisted that virtue was inconsistent with cruelty to animals, and she did not subscribe to the nationalism of Thomas Paine or Edmund Burke because her idea of rights and virtue applied to everyone equally. The sticking point for modern readers is the dependence of her philosophy on Christian theism. Green argues that most of what she says about reason, virtue, and rights can be translated into a secular idiom. We are, after all, social beings who depend on reason, even though we now have less confidence in its ability to tell us how to live and relate to one another. Green crams a lot of details into her account of Macaulay’s life and thought, and she assumes readers are familiar with the events and people of her time. But those who find themselves overwhelmed by Green’s exhaustive account of Macaulay’s social connections, politics, and travels, as well as of her writings and the responses of critics and supporters, should persist to the last chapter where she presents a sympathetic but critical assessment of Macaulay and her place in Western thought, and makes a good case for rescuing her from neglect. g Janna Thompson’s most recent book is Should Current Generations Make Reparation for Slavery? (2018). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW O CTOBER 2020

Poetry

From the Archive

Rare it is for a critic to come right out and say that the oldest trick in the book, when reviewing an anthology, is to concentrate on a ‘tendentious introduction’ or any ‘blinkered ideology’ behind the selections, rather than attending to the work itself. But that is what poet–novelist Peter Goldsworthy did in his witty review of Vivian Smith’s anthology Australian Poetry 1986. Goldsworthy’s review, published in the April 1987 issue of ABR, is one of many thousands of reviews in our digital archive, going back to 1978. All these reviews, essays, interviews, commentaries, and letters are accessible by ABR subscribers – an unrivalled critical resource.

hile I have never met Vivian Smith, I respect him awfully. The remarkable thing about his editing of Australian Poetry 1986 is that his own work is not in it. This is unprecedented among recent anthologies, and may of course be a printing error. Even that excellent poet of Buddhist leanings, Robert Gray, was unable to achieve such perfect nirvana some years back in his Younger Australian Poets. I feel that Vivian Smith could at least have included here his very fine poem ‘The Names: 1938–1945’, which appeared in the most recent Mattara Award anthology. As well as being modest, I suspect that Smith is also a Libran. This anthology is so catholic in taste, and so even-handed, that it is near impossible to review. It makes things so much easier when reviewing if an anthology contains a tendentious introduction, or the selection is determined by some sort of blinkered ideology. The actual poetry can then be ignored altogether, and the criteria of choice alone grappled with – a much easier reviewing task. Unfortunately, in this case I was unable to find any theme, or coherent ideology, running through the book, apart from a slight bias towards traditional metrical schemes. I did find two good poems about stingrays: one by Chris Wallace-Crabbe (‘a sort of leather paddle drying out’), and one by Geoff Dutton. These sent me searching through the book for other poems on the theme of stingrays, or for any hidden allusions to stingrays, but the scent proved false. There was an ingenious poem about a crab by Gwen Harwood, which came close. And there were several poems which might have been improved by slipping in a stingray, or by reading them as if they were about stingrays. The number of these duds, however, was not high. Many of the best poems in the book I have read before – years before, in some cases, so I’m not certain about the validity of the book’s title. I will, however, list a few of my favourites, and touch on them briefly. I can see no other way to review such an even-handed anthology except by compiling lists. I first saw Gary Catalano’s superb ‘Australia’ in Les Murray’s New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986). In his introduction to that book, Murray canvasses the concept of ‘Strange’ poems: poems that are untypical, and which Murray believes often tap a vision beyond that of current conditioning and received wisdom. ‘Australia’ is certainly one of Catalano’s Strange poems: a piece in which his usual intellectual dryness teeters exquisitely on the edge of nostalgia but does not succumb. 64 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW O C TO B ER 2020

Kevin Hart’s hilarious ‘This Stone Is Thinking of Vienna’ is another Strange poem, a departure from the finely wrought meditations he is better known for. John Forbes’s equally hilarious ‘Europe’ is also strange, but no more strange, perhaps, than the rest of his work. These two were the funniest poems in the book. The Best Line Award goes to Bruce Beaver for ‘pock snackle and crap / go the critics’, Best Image to Philip Hodgins for ‘The Dam’: ‘two ibises stand on the rim like taps’, and Best Intellectual Reverie to Philip Mead for ‘Invitation au Voyage’, although the last line of this seems to overbalance the poem a little too much, even if intentionally, in the direction of Samuel Beckett. The Best Poem In The Style Of Robert Gray is by Jeff Guess: ‘A Chinese Tea Cup’. It’s a beauty. The Best W.C. Williams is by J.S. Harry, Best Audenesque Elegy by Peter Kocan. Les Murray still does Les Murray better than anyone. The Best New Direction Award goes to John Tranter, who has travelled a hell of a long way and seems about to find himself back where he started, albeit with an immense amount of aplomb gained en route. But there are so many good poems in this book that it’s unfair to single any more out for special attention. The other refuge of sloths when reviewing anthologies, of course, is to play the game of Who Is Left Out. This is much easier than having to examine the work of Who Is In. Dear Kate and Susan, out of sixty-five poets, fourteen on my reckoning are female. This might creep as high as seventeen or eighteen if some ambiguous initials – e.g. A.D. Hope – stand for female names. I hope these statistics are useful for the dossier. I would like to have seen something by Kate Llewellyn herself: perhaps the erotic piece ‘Asparagus’, which I saw in the SMH some time back. I would also have included some of the translation-cum-imitation-cum-parodies that have been around lately: perhaps some Byron by Michael Sharkey (translated from the English?), and some of Laurie Duggan’s versions of Martial. I would like to have seen some Kevin Pearson and Jan Owen. Despite these predictable quibbles, the book is full of pleasure. There has been a lot of fuss made in recent years over short story writers in this country, but it will always be here, among the poets, practitioners of what Les Murray likes to call ‘the senior discipline’, that we will find the fullest awareness of the infinite possibilities of words, the most careful craftsmanship, and the most precise nuances of feeling and meaning. g

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