Charles Dutoit – a supreme interpreter of French music – conducts a rare Sydney production of Debussy’s spellbinding opera Pelléas et Mélisande. You won’t be able to resist this heartbreaking tragedy or the gorgeously sensual atmosphere of Debussy’s music.
EPIC SYMPHONY
19–24 July
MAHLER 3
Heartwarming Voices
David Robertson leads your SSO through Mahler’s expansive, all-embracing Third Symphony.
Awakening nature is the inspiration, the dream of a summer morning, and angelic voices lead us beyond the world and its cares. With Susan Graham and Sydney Philharmonia Choirs.
All concerts at the Sydney Opera House Tickets also available at: sydneyoperahouse.com
9250 7777 Mon–Sat 9am–8.30pm Sun 10am–6pm
FOR THE FAMILY
24–25 March
KATE
MILLER-HEIDKE
Classically trained and astonishingly versatile Miller-Heidke presents her hits as well highlights from the Rabbits in her first collaboration with your SSO.
9–10 June
LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS
Back by popular demand it is Last Night of the Proms with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra! Dress up, sing along and wave your flag at one of our most popular events!
26 March OLYMPIC ORCHESTRA –MUSIC FOR SPORT
From Rocky to Olympic Fanfare and Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, Guy Noble and the musicians of the SSO will showcase the music that has accompanied our most exciting sporting moments!
Calibre essay Prize
For the eleventh year in a row, we seek entries in the Calibre Essay Prize – the country’s premier prize for an unpublished non-fiction essay. Calibre is now worth a total of $7,500. The winner will receive $5,000; the runner-up, $2,500. Both essays will appear in ABR. Once again, Calibre is open to anyone writing in English around the world. We recommend the quick, inexpensive online entry system. Guidelines and the entry form are available on our website. Entries will close on 15 March 2017.
All previous Calibre-winning essays are available online, including Michael Winkler’s ‘The Great Red Whale’, which has just been reproduced in The Best Australian Essays 2016, edited by Geordie Williamson. These essays have contributed to a major rejuvenation of the essay form. As always, we thank Colin Golvan QC (Chair of ABR) for his generous support for Calibre.
anthologies galore
It’s a heady time for anthology fetishists and a propitious one for Australian poets, with several anthologies appearing in recent weeks. Poets always crave a guernsey in Black Inc.’s The Best Australian Poems, and this year Sarah Holland-Batt (winner of the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for poetry) has chosen works by 108 poets, including (drum roll) a dozen that were first published by ABR. Many of these appeared in our online national project, States of Poetry.
Acts of anthologising are ambitious (risky, some might say). There is a particularly expansive new volume from Puncher & Wattmann: Contemporary Australian Poetry, edited by Martin Langford, Judith Beveridge, Judy Johnson, and David Musgrave. There are 239 poets and more than
500 poems. The publisher makes considerable claims for our national poetry: ‘While no one was looking, our poetry has become too large for the space set aside for it, too important to be quiet, and too insistent to be ignored. It has evolved into one of our country’s greatest cultural achievements.’
Launching the book in Sydney, David Malouf said: ‘Poetry really is, at the moment, the most flourishing of the literary arts in Australia: much more interesting and much more sure of itself, it seems to me, than the novel or any kind of prose.’
Other anthologies worth noting are Bonny Cassidy and Jessica L. Wilkinson’s Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter Publishers), John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan’s The Fremantle Press Anthology of Western Australian Poetry, and Jamie Grant’s 100 Australian Poems You Need to Know (Hardie Grant Books).
Vale leonard Cohen
Canadian poet, novelist, and singer–songwriter Leonard Cohen died on 7 November at the age of eighty-two. A revered musical figure, he was best known for exploring themes of religion,
politics, and personal relationships through his spoken-word styled song. Cohen lived for many years on the ‘amphitheatric’ island of Hydra. He crops up in Paul Genoni’s article on page 36, part of the circle of artists and expatriates that surrounded Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift on the Greek island. Cohen described the ‘glorious setting at Hydra’ as a youthful idyll: ‘Everybody was beautiful and young and full of talent and covered with a gold dust.’ It was there that he met one of his many paramours, Marianne Ihlen, who was once prophetically told that she was ‘going to meet a man who speaks with a tongue of gold’.
the age of sCorn
Clearly, after the egregious US presidential election, we can now dub this The Age of Scorn. How fitting it was to receive a publication titled Scorn: The wittiest and wickedest insults in human history (Profile Books, $24.99 hb, 9781781257296). Matthew Parris, the editor, once served as a British MP, so he should know a thing or two about vituperation.
All our favourites are there, including Gore Vidal on Ronald Reagan (‘A triumph of the embalmer’s art’), Tom Lehrer on Dr Kissinger (‘Satire died the day they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize. There are no jokes left after that’), and Nancy on Ronald Reagan (‘He doesn’t make snap decisions but he doesn’t overthink either’). The aperçus of Donald Trump are not represented, but, following his elevation to the (do not adjust your set) White House, we can doubtless look forward to an appendix in the next edition.
Australia, as in most British anthologies, is poorly represented, but at least Lady Diana visited the place [Advances continues on page 5]
December 2016 Contents
Brian Matthews
Peter Craven
Sheila Fitzpatrick et al.
James McNamara
Jane Sullivan
Paul Genoni
Ben Ball et al.
Kerryn Goldsworthy
Letters
Julienne van Loon, Minnie Biggs, David Palmer, Gil Appleton
Memoir
Shaun Carney: Press Escape Michael McGirr
Deng Thiak Adut and Ben McKelvey: Songs of a War Boy
Dilan Gunawardana
History
Fawaz A. Gerges: ISIS Colin Wight
Peter H. Wilson: The Holy Roman Empire Christopher Allen
Andrew Lambert: Crusoe’s Island Danielle Clode
Amanda Webster: A Tear in the Soul Rachel Robertson
Poems
Caitlin Maling
John Kinsella
Fiction
Michelle Cahill: Letter to Pessoa & Other Short Fictions
Fiona Hile
Michael Chabon: Moonglow Kevin
Anthony Macris: Inexperience and Other Stories Chris Flynn
Melina Marchetta: Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil Agnes Nieuwenhuizen
Cristina Sánchez-Andrade, translated by Samuel Rutter: The Winterlings Gabriel García Ochoa
Annabel Abbs: The Joyce Girl Ann-Marie Priest
Essays
Nicolas Rothwell: Quicksilver Andrew Fuhrmann
Arts Update
The Light Between Oceans Brian McFarlane
The Eighth Wonder Michael Halliwell
Film
Paul A. Schroeder RodrÍguez: Latin American Cinema
Sarah McDonald
Geoffrey Blainey’s prevailing optimism
Luminous essays from Tim Winton Books of the Year
Paul Beatty on the US whitelash
Margaret Drabble’s new novel Letter from Hydra
Publisher Picks
A new study of Thea Astley
Music
Oliver Hilmes, translated by Stewart Spencer: Franz Liszt
David Larkin
Scientology
Steve Cannane: Fair Game Fiona Gruber
Language
Peter Gilliver: The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Bruce Moore
Science
Daniel P. Todes: Ivan Pavlov Nick Haslam
Jo Chandler (ed.): The Best Australian Science Writing 2016
Ian Gibbins
Philosophy
Alison Gopnik: The Gardner and the Carpenter Tim Smartt
Television
Tony Garnett: The Day the Music Died Michael Shmith
Biography
Andrew Harrison: The Life of D.H. Lawrence Shannon Burns
Poetry
Ellen van Neerven: Comfort Food
Joel Deane: Year of the Wasp
Mike Ladd: Invisible Mending Nathanael Pree
Alexander Pope, edited by Tom Jones: An Essay on Man
Robert Phiddian
Sport
Gideon Haigh: Stroke of Genius Bernard Whimpress
Children’s Fiction
Zana Fraillon: The Bone Sparrow Margaret Robson Kett
Open Page
Peter Singer
THANKING 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 NSW Government through Arts NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.
We also acknowledge the generous support of our sponsor, Flinders University, and our new partner, Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of Copyright Agency; The Ian Potter Foundation; Eucalypt Australia; RAFT; Sydney Ideas, The University of Sydney; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.
Sydney Ideas
and dispensed loving cheer to a onearmed man: ‘My, you must have fun chasing the soap around the bath.’
As ever, Aristophanes should have the last word: ‘Under every stone lurks a politician.’
TransnaT ional liT eraTure
Flinders University has published a bumper November issue of its free online journal Transnational Literature. The current issue contains essays, reviews, stories, and poetry dealing with themes of cross-cultural interaction from sixty residents of fifteen countries. Gillian Dooley is the general editor, and its book reviews editor is Patrick Allington. Contributors to this issue include David Adès, Claire Gaskin, and Satendra Nandan.
new aBr survey
We love hearing from our readers, and surveys help us to improve the magazine and to augment its appeal to new readers and advertisers. This month we’re conducting a new online survey aimed at gaining a more accurate profile of our readers. This survey will be totally anonymous – unless you wish to be in the running for one of our juicy prizes (in which case we will need your name and email address). The survey is now available on our website.
free gift subsCriP tion
There’s still time to give a friend a sixmonth subscription to ABR (print or online). New and renewing subscribers can do so up until 31 December. You can qualify for this special offer by renewing your current subscription even before it is due to lapse. Why not introduce a young reader or writer to ABR?
All you have to do is fill in the back of the flysheet that accompanies this issue, or contact us on (03) 9699 8822 or business@australianbookreview.com.au (quoting your subscriber number please). We will contact the nominated recipient to establish whether he or she wants the print edition or ABR Online (thus we will need the recipient’s email address). Terms and conditions apply.
Letters
Parallel importation
Dear Editor,
I’d like to thank Colin Golvan QC for his intelligent, articulate, and well-argued response to the Productivity Commission report’s proposed changes to parallel importations and fair use, published as both a podcast and a brief commentary by ABR (November 2016).
These are big issues for Australian authors and illustrators, such as myself, and for the many Australians who value local literary culture and a thriving book industry. It’s so helpful to have an intellectual property and trade practices expert such as Colin Golvan contribute meaningfully to the public debate.
Julienne van Loon, RMIT University, Melbourne
Compasses and radar screens
Dear Editor,
You are not the only reviewer/commentator who has described the opening projection in the Met’s production of Tristan und Isolde (November 2016) as a compass or a ‘huge nautical compass’. However, it is not a compass. It is a radar screen; a huge, not necessarily nautical, radar screen. Of course, neither a radar screen nor a Zippo lighter was in existence in Wagner’s time, much less in the times of Tristan und Isolde, but, these days, that is neither here nor there.
Let’s hear it for ‘our’ Stuart Skelton! Minnie Biggs, Kurrajong, NSW
I stand encompassed. Ed.
Bingo!
Dear Editor,
In July 1963, as an eighteen-year-old student travelling from New York to France with my family on board the SS United States, I was paired with Helena Rubinstein for several games of bingo. Although she was travelling under a pseudonym, I recognised her immediately. She was a delight throughout our games. I knew she was ‘of a certain age’ (ninety then), but she
looked marvellous. Her coal-black hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and her face was unwrinkled; only her hands, with rings on every finger and looking like talons, gave her age away. Graham Sutherland’s portrait (whose acquisition by the National Portrait Gallery Fiona Gruber writes about in Arts Update), certainly captures the woman with whom I spent an afternoon.
David Palmer (online comment)
Belvoir renaissance?
Dear Editor,
When I saw the production of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer at Belvoir St Theatre (which Ian Dickson reviewed for Arts Update), Colin Friels’s performance was riveting: multi-layered, complex, mesmerising – and in perfect balance with those of Alison Whyte and Pip Miller. It’s another hit for Belvoir following the very different but equally brilliant The Drover’s Wife. One hopes that both these productions will have another life for the sake of those who failed to get a seat this time around.
Is this the long-awaited Belvoir renaissance?
Gil Appleton (online comment)
The MTC will present the Belvoir production, with the same cast, in March 2017. Ed.
Quote of the Month
‘Trump looms up before us, an outsized avatar of all that has gone wrong and might yet go wrong. We have to clean up our act. We have to stop tolerating lies and slander. We have to embrace again honesty and equity. We have to be careful to give responsibility every bit of respect it deserves. We cannot sustain our civilization on cynicism and resentment.’
Marilynne Robinson, The New York Review of Books, 10 November 2016
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Australian Book Review
December 2016, no. 387
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Doing the Police
Geoffrey Blainey’s prevailing strain of optimism
Brian Matthews
THE STORY OF AUSTRALIA’S PEOPLE: THE RISE AND RISE OF A NEW AUSTRALIA
by Geoffrey Blainey
Viking, $49.99 hb, 496 pp, 9780670078028
The seminar, as far as I can remember, took place in what was then the Melbourne Teachers’ College on Grattan Street. The late-afternoon sunlight slanting through ornate windows burnt bright on a huge World War I scene on the wall behind the speakers’ table where the names of those who had made ‘the ultimate sacrifice’ were listed with melancholy precision. I remember gazing at that painting while I waited for the seminar to start. It reminded me of the ornate, scrolled, oval frame I had inherited, from which my grandfather, No. 17051 Private Alexander Murray, looked out, slightly quizzical, puzzled, his boyish face overshadowed by the military cap. On either side of the portrait hung his medals, their ribbons faded, and between them a citation in which futility grapples with dignity. ‘He whom this scroll commemorates … passed out of the sight of men by the path of self-sacrifice … Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten.’
The topic of the seminar was peculiarly, if rather morbidly, appropriate – Black Armband History – of which one of the speakers, Don Watson, remarked, ‘The puerility of it has been cleverly attached to the national mood. We have to presume that is why [Prime Minister] John Howard took up the cry. None of us believes there is a single serious Australian historian whose work fits Mr Howard’s description. It is difficult to believe that the motives of the black armband school are not political, if only because their reading of history and their understanding of how it is written could not be
so wrong-headed without being wilful …’
Geoffrey Blainey was a vocal and strenuous participant in those so-called ‘history wars’, but, although I agreed at the seminar with Watson’s recognition of the essential ‘puerility’ of the argument and with Noel Pearson’s later plea that we needed ‘to appreciate the complexity of the past and not reduce history to a shallow field of point scoring’, it seems to me that a proper contemporary appreciation of Blainey’s new book, The Story of Australia’s People: The rise and rise of a new Australia, should not be diverted by either the glib and ultimately meaningless ‘black armband’ or the silly and equally vapid ‘three cheers’ nomenclature. Blainey, in this work at any rate, generally shrugs off the sloganising past. He does this especially through storytelling.
In a celebrated interview with actress Charlotte Rampling, filmmaker Jack Bond asks, ‘What is the essence of French film?’ Rampling laughs at this imponderable question, but answers after a characteristic, considering pause: ‘They [French directors] tell stories in a different way. They don’t try to make stories that have to entertain. They just tell them – stories of people’s lives …’
In Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens, a master storyteller, introduces the illiterate Betty Higden to whom ‘Sloppy’ regularly reads excerpts from the newspaper with great panache and drama. Betty explains that she is not ‘much of a hand at reading … [but] I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.’ REVIEW
Geoffrey Blainey is not half bad either. And he ‘does’ many voices – the voices of the goldfields, the outback, the explorers; the voices of farmers, squatters, ‘tall poppies’, poets, idealists, inventors; of prime ministers, heroes, rogues; the ‘voice’ of drought, Lawson’s ‘red marauder’; the voices of soldiers and leaders in Australia’s many wars; the voices of migrants and their detractors; of priests, politicians, paragons, and paupers. In The Story of Australia’s People, Blainey ‘just tells’ the story. He understands narrative, how it must be disciplined as it unfolds, temptingly revealing this or that side-track and fleetingly appearing faces; how sometimes unsuspected or uninvited voices arise from narrative’s potentially unruly array of possibilities; how, if you are sufficiently aware and skilful, references to hard-won, unpretentious or briefly relevant sources can be woven in to sentences that still maintain their integrity and relevance as storycarriers; how speculation can embroider and intrigue without distorting the essential, known story:
If the [Eureka Stockade] miners had marched on Melbourne, what could Hotham have done? Where would he have found reinforcements for his small force? … if [Peter] Lalor had been more experienced, and all his miners had remained in the stockade on that first weekend in December 1854 [instead of leaving to spend the night with friends or family], his forces probably would not have been routed. The result of the rebellion would have been undecided and postponed. Perhaps the two leaders would have found a compromise, or perhaps they would have fought another battle in Ballarat or elsewhere …
Historians, some of them anyway, might find the conditional nature of this passage – ‘if … probably … perhaps … perhaps’ – unacceptable, but this is how story, the ‘stories of people’s lives’, can become lively and enthralling narrative, because lives and events have these penumbral, shadowy, but finally unrealised possibilities. Blainey is fascinated by them and speculates about them: what might have been can be instructive, atmospheric, a moving part of the story, as long as it does not hijack the story itself. His intriguing glance at French colonial ambitions is an example of how much can be suggested or implied by imaginative speculation and reconstruction:
France was now eager to find a new and remote colony … In 1853 it began to occupy New Caledonia … thereby [shunning] one of its last opportunities to snatch a small remote portion of this dry continent. Indeed, if the Aborigines even in one region had been more united and less debilitated by diseases, and if they had begun to understand the politics and rivalries of the barely comprehensible world that was half-swallowing them, they could have informally invited the French, thereby conferring on them some legitimacy.
France’s decision to ignore Australia was understandable. Even Colonial Australians took little interest in most
parts of their own land … The effects of this decision, or default, were far-reaching. The huge continent became the sole possession of Britain. Few decisions have had more influence on Australia’s modern history.
Blainey’s method in general is straightforward, chronologically tracing a sometimes dramatic, sometimes complex, but always carefully mapped path through ‘momentous changes, many being unexpected, into the twenty-first century’. As the title suggests, his journey from the ‘stampede for gold in May 1851’ (Chapter 1) to a vision of ‘a continent of hope and opportunity’ (Chapter 25) is a more optimistic progression than is to be found in, say, David Day’s Claiming a Continent: A new history of Australia (1996) which places ‘race at the centre of the Australian story and [links] it to a broader narrative of possession, dispossession and proprietorship’, or in some other versions of the same story. This difference in tone and texture is partly the result of Blainey’s prevailing strain of reasonable optimism –unsurprising given his strenuous role in the black armband arguments – and partly the commitment to narrative. ‘Story’, allied to a fluid, confident prose style, gathers its own momentum and sweeps along, now with some pace, now attending to detail, but never taking time off for essayistic polemic or drum beating of one kind or another. In Homage to Catalonia (1938), one of the great narratives of twentieth-century literature in English, Orwell recognises, in his characteristically no-nonsense fashion, the nature of the narrative beast. Having initially ‘ignored the political side of the war’, he found it was beginning to ‘force itself’ on his attention, and – recognising the potential clash of narrative with polemic – he advises, ‘If you are not interested in the horrors of party politics, please skip.’
In the end, Geoffrey Blainey’s stirring peroration –‘Rarely if ever in the long history of the same land were two peoples so different in cultures, languages, religions, kinships, weapons, and economic and social life. And yet it is, for both peoples, a continent of hope and opportunity’ – is difficult to endorse in its entirety, and his encouraging narrative can only partially establish its reality. Aborigines, for example, remain critically disadvantaged. Their health and the health of their children is parlous, and their history suffers routine attacks of denial. And although, in the bigger picture, ‘there’s keen delight in what we have’, being told by Pauline Hanson on television that ‘Australia does not welcome refugees’, and seeing former liberal prime ministers and present coalition members scrambling to parade their Trumpism seems more like the dreary ‘rattle of pebbles on the shore’ than the ‘rise and rise’ of a new wave. g
Brian Matthews’s memoir A Fine and Private Place (2000) won the inaugural Queensland Premier’s Award for non-fiction and his Manning Clark: A life (2008) won the National Biography Award in 2010.
Topography of accidents
Luminous essays from Tim Winton
Peter Craven
THE BOY BEHIND THE CURTAIN by Tim Winton
Hamish Hamilton, $45 hb, 299 pp, 9781926428765
Everybody thinks they know about Tim Winton: the working-class hero from the West; the whale of a man who’s been writing since he was a boy; the master of one of those big Australian prose styles that is muscular and magnetic and sometimes just a bit too self-delighting; someone who straddles the literary and the popular like a colossus.
Whatever you think of The Riders (1994), Dirt Music (2001), or Breath (2008), did anyone ever put them down in a hurry? If I’m sounding ambivalent, I shouldn’t be, because this new selfportrait via a suite of essays is a dazzling book, full of wisdom and wonder, written in, yes, muscular prose but with a staggering, effortless sense of drama
wherever you pick it up. Tim Winton can fascinate you and bring you to the point of tears even when you thought you weren’t interested in what he’s talking about.
We begin with the dark biographical melodrama of teenage Tim, alienated and adrift, pointing a gun at passers-by in front of the curtain, not with a desire to kill, not with the gun even loaded, but knowing he could. ‘Lurking there behind my parents’ curtain, I put a gun between myself and the world. I reduced my neighbours to objects, made targets of them. Anything could have happened. None of it could.’
If that sounds self-dramatising, it justifies its every word, including the reflection that he found his way out through words. There is thus a sort of continuity when we jump back to the eight-year-old Winton being subjected to the empty spaces and psychedelic aporias of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, he says, ‘sent me through a Star Gate of my own into an expanded reality … it was a wormhole into the life of the imagination’.
No one is better than Tim Winton at giving dramatic substance to the interface between art and life. It is extraordinary how much he fictionalises the process of factual narration.
His father, a traffic cop, was in a dreadful accident from which he might never have recovered. Something happens that fills young Winton with the terror of that memory. He says he has dreaded such sudden moments but also made them into a kind of aesthetic raison d’être.
ABR Gender Fellowship
Australian Book Review seeks applications for this new Fellowship.
We welcome proposals for a substantial article on gender in contemporary Australian creative writing in all its forms. The Fellow will be chosen by Anne Edwards, Andrea Goldsmith, and Peter Rose.
The ABR Fellowships – which are funded by a range of philanthropic foundations and ABR Patrons – are intended to reward fine Australian writers and critics, and to advance the magazine’s contribution to ideas and critical debate. All published Australian writers are eligible to apply.
The Fellowship is worth $7,500
Applications close 1 February 2017
This particular Fellowship (the first of its type to be offered by ABR) is fully funded by Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO, a former Vice-Chancellor of Flinders University and a long-time ABR Patron and board member.
See our website for full conditions and guidelines: www.australianbookreview.com.au
Tim Winton (photograph by Hank Kordas)
CHICAGO
Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic
Alice KAplAn
“Kaplan’s history charts the success of Camus’s debut novel, which is an astonishing tale. It was published in the most unpropitious circumstances, during the Nazi Occupation. . . . She is particularly brilliant at showing the ways in which the novel was refracted in reading. L’Étranger has been called a ‘colonial allegory, an existential prayer book, an indictment of conventional morality, a study in alienation, or a Hemingway rewrite of Kafka’”
Spectator
The Phoenix
An Unnatural Biography of a Mythical Beast
Joseph nigg
“Nigg’s The Phoenix is as singular as its subject. With intelligence, grace, and sound scholarship, he has restored this extraordinary beast to its rightful place in the universal library.”
—Alberto Manguel, author of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places
The ArT of The BLues
A Visual Treasury of Black Music’s
Golden Age
Bill DAhl
“Art of the Blues provides a fascinating visual documentation of the music industry as well as insight into American culture. It’s difficult to quickly flip through this beautiful book because there are so many compelling images that deserve a closer look.”
—Bobby Reed, DownBeat
VorAcious science And
VuLnerABLe
AnimALs
A Primate Scientist’s Ethical Journey
John p. glucK
“A powerful appeal for human respect and compassion for those creatures who have unwillingly dedicated their lives to science. Gluck tells a vivid, heartrending, personal story of how he became a vocal activist for animal protection.”
—Publishers Weekly
ngemenT Climate Change and the Unthinkable AmitAv ghosh
“The Great Derangement bristles with trenchant and dense ideas, expressed with exemplary lucidity and finesse. At a time when the idea of the engagé intellectual is not just unfashionable, but in full-blown retreat, here is a book that triumphantly announces its return.”
—New Statesman
orchid
A Cultural History
Jim enDersBy
“Orchids are beautiful, strange, savage, sexy, mysterious, luxurious and expensive rarities. Endersby traces the history of our scientific understanding of orchids, and their culture, from the Greeks to present orchid enthusiasts. You won’t be able to put down this lavishly illustrated and fascinating book.”
—Stephen Buchmann, author of The Reason for Flowers
The Universi T y of Chi Cago Press
‘In my fiction I’ve been a chronicler of sudden moments like these … my life feels like a topography of accidents… I suppose you could say they form a large part of my sentimental education.’ This tallies with the darker side of Winton’s vision as a writer of fiction without being remotely arty or self-reflexive when he adds, ‘but now I knew that we were not, and never really could be, out of the woods’.
You could accuse Tim Winton of a kind of agnostic Calvinism where the individual is predestined to his own dark woods, but he is always so open and so sane, so modest in his bracing doubts and more bracing faith. He gives a humorous and humane depiction of the working-class Church of Christ community that shaped him and to which his parents were impelled like zealots after his father’s life was saved, perhaps by the intervention of some saint. A sauntering, naturalistic evocation of a narrowly evangelical community, it is full of laughter and farting and the face of human fun. It was that one-time Jesuit Greg Dening who said that at the heart of any absolutism there is an inch of licence that makes it tolerable. Winton is superb and convincing on the subject of how a world of straitlaced people in Pelaco shirts and staid skirts went a great distance towards teaching him what was what.
They taught him, through Scripture, the importance of story and that the example of Christ, so plain, so given to sacrifice and kindness, was a harder saying than all the blood and thunder of the Old Testament. The Word also taught him the power of all words. When St Paul said – and young Winton learned the words by heart – ‘For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord’, it gave him entrée to the kind of language he would encounter in Hamlet’s ‘what a piece of work is man …’ He grew up, he says, ‘riding incantatory rhythms toward the stifling reaches of afternoon’, but admits he never would have foreseen that the
Church itself would become the greatest threat to his faith. He says he has come to like the smells and bells and that he crosses himself like a papist even if ‘a roomful of rockchoppers certainly brings out the Calvinist in me’, though most of his ‘heroes “belong to Rome”, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Julian of Norwich, Leonardo Boff’.
As some of those names suggest, Winton is very much a man of the left, especially the environmental left. It is notable what dramatic power he conveys in his accounts of how he worked to save an environment where the boodie could come back, and how he pumped his fist silently ‘like a mad barracker’ when it did. He invests his environmental involvements with such a sense of drama and such an evocative sense of the beauties and places at risk that he will bring out the dormant greenie in anyone, because he makes his commitments so patently a blow for life (and analogous to the truth of art). The Boy Behind the Curtain might become a book of prayer and wisdom for the thousands of Australians like Ken Henry who share its passion.
A superb account of working to save the Ningaloo Reef involves a tribute to a cultivated Englishman. There is another evocative and semi-spectral story about the haunted house in Ireland in which he wrote Cloudstreet (1991) and where, later, he felt impelled to write The Riders. These essays are on a par with anything written anywhere in their play of mind and their command of tempo and rhetoric.
Winton, much a man of the beach, indicates that the sheer flow of surfing, its lack of point, makes it his meditation. He has a wonderful tribute to sharks, as well as a reverent homage to that celebrator of beautiful and terrible creatures Peter Matthiessen, who once felt the touch of the Great White. Winton also talks of the baleful irrationality of the Australian attitude to the killer shark. ‘Our demon,’ he says, ‘is silent and it swims.’
This is a rich and brilliant book with a great vibrancy and glow and wisdom. It has a sly account of the enigmas of Elizabeth Jolley and a vivid depiction of the annihilating horror when he discov-
ered that the 1,200-page draft of Dirt Music was not working. There is also a fine sermon on the refugees: all about giving a child a stone when it asks for bread, all about driving an angel from your door when you deny pity, all about what does it profit a nation when it suffers the loss of its soul.
You would go a fair distance to find a better book of essays, separate pieces so powerful they have the ambience of a self-portrait without the burden of the search. The Boy Behind the Curtain justifies its cover’s family resemblance to Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest (1995). g
Peter Craven is one of Australia’s bestknown critics. He writes regularly about literature, film, television, and theatre.
War Crimes
‘Putin’s bombing of Aleppo will be viewed as among the modern world’s most egregious war crimes. I appeal to the people of Russia, the US, Europe, and the rest of the world not to stand idly by, but to spread the word and voice their outrage. An outpouring of public opinion could induce President Putin to put an end to his heinous crimes against humanity.’
George Soros, The New York Review of Books, 10 November 2016
Real news
Michael McGirr
PRESS ESCAPE
by
Shaun Carney Melbourne University Press
$29.99 pb, 218 pp, 978052280022
You can judge this memoir by its poignant cover. It shows a picture of the author taken in 1966 when he was eight or nine years old. Behind him is one of the accessories of the baby boomer period, a Volkswagen. The Beetle is parked near long grass, redolent of Melbourne’s outer suburban fringe, an area that features prominently in Shaun Carney’s account of his origins. Frankston and Carrum Downs are the heartland of this book.
In the photo, young Shaun Carney looks stiff and uncomfortable. Jimmy, his father, embraces him with one arm. Despite the smile on his face, Jimmy seems awkward. His eyes have nowhere to focus. Jimmy was a chain smoker and heavy drinker; he tried to maintain simultaneous relationships with different women. By the time Shaun started school at the age of four, Jimmy ‘was always coming up with reasons not to be around’. In the photo, the cigarette in Jimmy’s right hand is beautifully balanced by a watch on his son’s wrist. That contrast encapsulates an essential difference between the two men. Shaun Carney will tell us that he worked at The Age for twenty-six years, six months, and twenty-eight days. There is a strong sense in this book of the passing of time. Carney has achieved eminence as a
journalist. But this book is gnawed by grief. Carney mourns the passing of a robust journalistic culture that has been replaced by a far less substantial sense of news. He was made redundant, a sad word with a bitter aftertaste. Deeper than that, Carney mourns his parents. Look at the cover: the father and son find it hard to be close.
There are lighter moments in Carney’s childhood, many of them revolving around popular culture. He writes that his leaning towards journalism was the result of watching Clark Kent at work at the Daily Planet. You can’t blame Carney for resorting to television. He was an only child, born ten years into a difficult marriage. His father had been deeply wounded by his own childhood. Even Jimmy’s true name was a mystery. His mother experienced ‘disappointment and isolation’. For all that, Carney emphasises all the reasons he has to be grateful.
This is an exquisite book with a string of tender moments, unlike the political gristle Carney has dealt with over the years. His personal and journalistic lives occasionally overlap. Carney wrote a biography of Peter Costello. At one stage in the book, Costello calls Carney to take him to task for some opinion or other. At the time, Carney’s six-yearold daughter, whom he calls ‘Jane’, is suffering from cancer and ‘had been reduced to skin and bone by her treatment’. Naturally, Carney didn’t think Costello’s concerns were as important as the latter thought. At first, Costello insists that he doesn’t have to hold back ‘because you’ve got a sick daughter’. But the tone of the conversation becomes more human, and Carney notes that the following budget made provision for a kind of medical test that Carney had drawn to Costello’s attention and that would help patients in Jane’s situation. This book is not without its frustrations. It has areas of unexpected privacy. We never discover how many children Carney has. In his twenties, Carney married ‘and started a family’. He describes the subsequent divorce as ‘a wound that will never fully heal’. He has another family with Caroline Milburn, a colleague, but only speaks of one child, ‘Jane’. Carney’s account
of her heroic journey with leukaemia is superb: sensitive, open to others, never mawkish. Carney says blandly that ‘my children might one day want to tell their own stories in their own way and in their own names’. The reader must respect this decision. Yet when he is dying, Jimmy regrets that ‘he should have done more for and with his granddaughters’. Jane, it appears, has at least one
Carney mourns the passing of a robust journalistic culture that has been replaced by a far less substantial sense of news
sister, maybe more, who are completely absent from the story. Surely the impact of Jane’s illness on the whole family was significant. There are pieces missing here. This is all the more perplexing given that Carney spent his childhood in a context of half-told stories. This is not to imply that stories have been withheld from any person who actually has a right to them. A memoir such as this is a gift to the reader. But there are people the reader is sorry not to meet.
The heart of this book is Carney’s humility. He admits that he lacks imagination, that he is a ‘fifty-fifty split between wanting to hang back and a compulsion to be noticed’, that often as a journalist he was a ‘fashion slave’ who went ‘with the dominant thinking’. There is a self-effacing quality here that allows him, finally, to embrace his father. Carney’s account of his father’s sickness and death is profoundly moving. He tells a story of going with his father to Officeworks in Collingwood. It turns out that the building was the very place where Jimmy started his apprenticeship as a fifteen year old soon after World War II. There are three generations of vulnerable children in this searching book, all inhabiting a fragile culture. Carney’s achievement is to hold them together. g
Michael McGirr is the author of Things You Get for Free (2012).
The greater of two evils
A significant
book on the phenomenon known as ISIS
Colin Wight
ISIS: A HISTORY
by Fawaz A. Gerges
Princeton University Press (Footprint), $59.95 hb, 381 pp, 9780691170008
After the prolonged débâcle following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, events in the Middle East in late 2010 and early 2011 seemed to be taking a turn for the better. The ‘Arab street’ had found its voice and democracy, we were led to believe, was on the march. Despite the setbacks that followed 9/11, perhaps Francis Fukuyama’s optimistic liberal triumphalism concerning the ‘end of history’ had been right all along?
By 2013 the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, or Da’esh) had put the final nail in the coffin of liberal triumphalism and stunned the world with its military successes. From relative obscurity, it had taken over leadership of the global jihadist movement from Al Qaeda, as well as controlling large tracts of territory in Iraq and Syria, an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom. All of this it had achieved with an army estimated to number no more than 30,000 combatants. What explains the emergence of ISIS, and how has it managed to position itself so effectively at the forefront of the global jihadist movement?
In ISIS: A history, Fawaz A. Gerges explains the emergence of ISIS as a direct consequence of the sectarian divisions unleashed by the invasion of Iraq, and for which the neo-conservative administration of George W. Bush bears ultimate responsibility. The misguided invasion was merely the first mistake among many, but any understanding of ISIS has to take into account the social, political, cultural, economic, and religious context of the Middle East considered as a whole.
One starting point for this discussion is understanding ISIS as an extension of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), itself the result of the US-led invasion of the
country in 2003. Gerges pieces together an intriguing narrative that presents ISIS as a movement that owes much to the US-led invasion of Iraq and the postwar dismantling of state structures, and little to the charisma of its leaders. This is not a ‘great man’ theory of history, but one that rightly, in my opinion, places structural forces at the heart of its explanation.
A detailed examination of the Shia-dominated post-Saddam political establishment and its inability to nurture national identity allows Gerges to demonstrate the accelerated development of intercommunal distrust and a deepening of the Sunni–Shia divide. Beyond the borders of Iraq, attention is also paid to the breakdown of state institutions in Syria, its descent into fullblown war, as well as the consequences of the Arab Spring in neighbouring countries, particularly Egypt, to shed light on the conditions that fuel ISIS and help explain its emergence, development, and success.
In Iraq, the ideological commitment to the de-Baathification process that was initially introduced as an unofficial program and then turned into a permanent article of the constitution led to the destruction of state institutions and established a sectarian-based political system. Also, the US-led invasion entrenched the division of the country along Sunni–Shia lines and set the stage for a fierce, prolonged struggle driven by identity politics. The humiliating disbandment of the Iraqi army and the dismembering of state institutions also fueled anger against the United States, and for brief periods, united both Shia and Sunnis against a common enemy.
In his meticulously researched, beautifully written, and well-argued
text, Gerges highlights how the deBaathification program, combined with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s exclusion of Sunnis, provided fertile conditions for the emergence of ISIS out of al-Qaeda. ISIS’s success, Gerges argues, owes much to the legacy of Paul Bremer’s simplistic analogy of de-Baathification with the postwar denazification of Germany. This deprived the country of an officer class and the administrative cadres that had ruled under Saddam Hussein, leaving sectarian-based militias to fill the void. According to Gerges, some thirty per cent of the senior figures in ISIS’s military command are former army and police officers from the disbanded Iraqi security forces. It was the military expertise of these men that transformed the Sunni-based insurgent movement of Al Qaeda in Iraq into ISIS, ‘an effective fighting machine, combining urban guerilla warfare and conventional combat to deadly effect’.
Under the ferocious leadership of the self-styled caliph Abu Bakr alBaghdadi, the former Baathist officers controlled ISIS, albeit from behind the scenes. In the context of a collapsing security environment in both Iraq and Syria, the once-dominant but now threatened Sunnis adopted Salafijihadism as the default identity in the face of Iranian-dominated Shia regimes in Baghdad and Damascus, as well as a Kurdish revival in the north. Yet Gerges is not a one-dimensional thinker and argues that these historical default identities should not be equated only with religious fervour or commitment. Rather, Iraq, like other post-colonial states in the Arab world, has remained
committed to traditional institutions at the expense of the development of a coherent nationalist project around which citizens could unite.
In addition, the power plays within jihadist groups are also a vital element of any explanation as evidenced by the vicious war of words and struggle for power that followed al-Baghdadi’s split from Ayman al-Zawahiri (Osama bin Laden’s successor as leader of Al Qaeda). Indeed, Gerges reminds us that ISIS in Syria initially gave priority to its conflicts with the Nusra Front and other
The Islamic State had put the final nail in the coffin of liberal triumphalism
opposition militias rather than against Assad’s forces. This is a significant and often overlooked, element of the dynamic that drives conflict in the Middle East as various groups emerge to claim the mantle of radical political Islam.
Importantly, both ISIS and Al Qaeda share the totalitarian impulse of the Islamicist movements that give priority to the ‘sovereignty of God’ over the will of the people. This destructive ideology, with its overt dictatorial qualities, holds that no individual, no family, nor community group has the right to govern: Allah is the one true ruler and the only holder of real sovereign power. As such, many in the West have failed to note how this is not only a conflict for control of the state and associated territory, but also represents a direct challenge to the Westphalian system of sovereign states.
The competition between Al Qaeda and ISIS continues to be played out by al-Baghdadi and Abu Mohammad al-Joulani, leader of the Nusra Front. Gerges deals with this issue in some detail and argues that it seems likely to strengthen Al Qaeda rather than ISIS. Unlike the Nusra Front, ISIS consider Islamists who take part in electoral politics to be apostates, thereby justifying their execution. Its extremism and violence, as with that of Abu Musab alZarqawi, eventually, alienates potential followers and will lead – with help from drones and air strikes – to the pseudo-
Caliphate’s eventual extinction.
By contrast, Joulani and his barely visible Al Qaeda leader Ayman alZawahiri can be seen to be playing the long game and present themselves as the more rational wing of the global jihadist movement. How times had changed when a movement that was once viewed as the most radical and extreme jihadist group in the world now seems tame when compared to the violent extremes of ISIS.
With prospects for meaningful change in the region slim and the circumstances that enabled ISIS still mostly in place, is the group here to stay? ISIS has pushed the binary worldview of jihadism to new extremes. Increasingly fragmented from within and devoid of theological backing, the organisation relies solely on violence,
with little to offer by way of a peaceful future. The divisions within the organisation are undeniable, and its supposed military invincibility has been exposed as a myth. Its long-term future is far from certain.
Written and argued with admirable clarity, ISIS: A history is a significant book with clear appeal beyond academic, diplomatic, and policy-making circles. This is a highly recommended volume and one that sets the standard for those interested in understanding the phenomenon we have come to know as ISIS. g
Colin Wight is Professor of International Relations and current Chair of the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. ❖
Deep Knowledge
Like paper burning up into folds, the hives cling to the stone. What could be feral about such order?
The hexagons of honeycomb visible through the camera. The riverbed sand different from the rock of the wall, the thin gums growing out the scree up the gulch. We are lucky it is winter, heat amps the hum into a drone, and we are lucky it is dry, the caves and gully filling if and when it rains. Someone says there are not many bees. But at the cave mouth we look up and hear the hum set back into rock, the bees flying and settling in the limestone tubes near their queen. At the other end of the caves – darkness, someone has burnt a hive down to the ground. The honeycomb black and thick like metal grating. We can only imagine the motion, the noise, a whole colony set loose against the sky.
Caitlin Maling
Caitlin Maling’s latest collection is Border Crossing (2017).
SUMMER READING GUIDE
from Text—independent publishing since 1994
Inspired by one of Elena Ferrante’s earlier novels, TheLostDaughter, this is a bewitching fable for Ferrante fans of all ages. Accompanied by gorgeous full-colour illustrations by Mara Cerri.
TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH
An audacious psychological thriller in which nothing is as it seems. After being diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ted finds himself holding a gun to his temple. But then the doorbell rings.
Francesca Stubbs holds our hand as we take a walk through old age and death. This is Margaret Drabble at her incisive best, exploring the end of life with her trademark humour, composure and wisdom.
2016 BOOK OF THE YEAR, AUSTRALIAN BOOK INDUSTRY AWARDS
Heartbreaking, joyous, traumatic, intimate and revelatory, Reckoning is the story of Australia’s most beloved performer.
The Keefe boys are destined for greatness. Darren has two big talents: cricket and trouble. Wally will probably captain Australia. It begins in a suburban backyard. Love, hate, fury—all poured into a made-up game.
‘A noir tour de force.’ SMH
SHORTLISTED, MAN BOOKER PRIZE, 2016
A mesmerising literary thriller set in the Scottish highlands in 1869. Roderick Macrae is arrested for a triple murder. But was he insane? Can an advocate save him from the gallows?
Spanning fifteen years of work, EverywhereILook is full of wisdom, insight and unexpected moments. It includes Garner’s controversial essay on ageing, her moving tribute to her mother and pithy diary extracts.
This dazzling biography, written with unprecedented access and handsomely illustrated with classic Whiteley artworks, candid photos and rare sketches, reveals for the first time the full portrait of this mercurial artist.
Two astonishing novellas by Mexico’s greatest novelist in one volume: a bawdy, feverish tale about two feuding crime families with blood on their hands (Transmigration) and a haunting, poetic meditation on immigration (Signs).
Don’t worry about who she is. A rich and rewarding collection of occasional writing from one of the greatest writers of our time: from letters to her publisher to interviews with editors and journalists, as well as responses to readers’ questions.
Books of the Year
Sheila Fitzpatrick
Originally published in German, Albrecht Dümling’s
The Vanished Musicians: Jewish refugees in Australia (Peter Lang), a fascinating compendium of Jewish musicians who found refuge in Australia in the 1930s and 1940s, is now available in Australian Diana K. Weekes’s excellent translation.
Kevin Windle, Elena Govor, and Alexander Massov’s From St Petersburg to Port Jackson: Russian travellers’ tales of Australia 1807–1912 (Australian Scholarly Publishing) is a treasure trove for anyone with a weakness for ship’s captains’ and spunky young Russian ladies’ impressions of our native land. It was a Russian ship that in 1814 brought the news of Napoleon’s defeat to Sydney.
Next is David Brophy’s Uyghur Nation: Reform and revolution on the Russia-China frontier (Harvard University Press). If you have ever wondered who the Uyghurs are, Brophy, who teaches at the University of Sydney, is the man to go to.
The Great Departure: Mass migration from Eastern Europe and the making of the Free World (W.W. Norton), by Tara Zahra, is a ‘must read’ for history buffs as well as migration scholars.
Miriam Cosic
Four books stood out for me this year. David Rieff’s In Praise of Forgetting: Historical memory and its ironies (Yale University Press, reviewed in ABR 6/16) makes a startling argument: that cultivating historical memory, especially in the political realm, may do more harm than good.
American writer Shadi Hamid’s controversial Islamic Exceptionalism: How the struggle over Islam is reshaping the world (St Martin’s Press) examines how the difficulty of reconciling secularism and Islam not only makes integration tricky for Muslims in
the West, but perpetuates sectarian war within the religion.
When Breath Becomes Air (Bodley Head), by Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who chronicled his own death from cancer, is simply extraordinary: humane, poetic, moving, and enlightening. And Sebastian Smee – the Australian’s former art critic, now with the Boston Globe – has written a riveting study, The Art of Rivalry: Four friendships, betrayals, and breakthroughs in modern art (Text Publishing, 11/16), the title of which says it all.
James Bradley
I’m not sure any book I’ve read this year has affected me as much as Annie Proulx’s monumental account of the human and environmental catastrophe of North America’s forests, Barkskins (Fourth Estate, 8/16). While it isn’t without its faults, in particular its desire to include everything, that same encyclopedic impulse and sense of incoherent grief lends it extraordinary power and breadth, and makes it necessary reading for anybody interested in the environment.
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Some Rain Must Fall (Vintage) is also encyclopedic, albeit in a personal sense, and manages the not inconsiderable trick of being both scarifyingly funny and deeply moving (how many other writers are likely to describe getting drunk and throwing up in Björk’s toilet?).
Finally, I loved my friend Georgia Blain’s Between a Wolf and a Dog (Scribe, 5/16). Like all her novels, it explores the often unarticulated complexities of the intersection of the personal and the political with exquisite grace and intelligence.
Brenda Walker
It’s been a magnificent year for books by Australian women, but I won’t discuss some of the books that I
would normally be celebrating, since I’m reading them for the Stella Prize. Among books by men, one stands out: Anthony Macris’s explosively funny Inexperience (UWA Publishing, 12/16). The first part is a sequence of stories describing the quickly deflating love affair of a pair of Australians seeing Europe, and each other, in the absence of love and wonder. Macris charts the hyper-aware thoughts of his decent, stricken narrator, flying home amid dreams of garbage and his mother. Other more comical stories chase obsessions into sad or ridiculous conclusions. Macris is a sincere and sensationally good writer.
James McNamara
I’ve been in the United States this year, so my reading has a distinctly American ‘flavor’. Assuming the country still exists by the time this goes to print (I write on election eve), here are my picks. The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 3, 1926–1929 (Cambridge University Press, 8/16) is a superb contribution to a first-rate series, showing Hemingway up close as he becomes a major writer.
It was a treat to have our greatest television critic, Clive James, return to his beat with the excellent and enjoyable Play All: A bingewatcher’s notebook (Yale University Press, 11/16).
Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right (Scribe, 10/16) is surely one of the most important political books of the decade, vital for understanding America’s hyper-partisan politics.
Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 12/16) – the first American Booker-winner – is currently whizbanging about my head: a stunning satire that leaves no third-rail untouched.
Fiona Wright
My favourite work of fiction in this year was Georgia Blain’s lush and loss-ridden Between a Wolf and a Dog. It’s a novel about the ways in which we hurt each other, or are hurt by the world, yet it is hopeful and redemptive in the small moments and minute joys that it charts.
In non-fiction, I loved Catriona Menzies-Pike’s
The Long Run (Simon & Schuster, 4/16) for its fascinating exploration of women’s bodies in sport and in public, and the delicious humour it directs at runners as a species.
As for poetry, Ellen van Neerven’s Comfort Food (UQP, 12/16) delighted me with its emotional heft, its sustaining interest in community and love, and the sparse balance of its lyricism and language.
Mark McKenna
Two of our finest writers on place – Nicolas Rothwell (Quicksilver, Text Publishing, 12/16) and Kim Mahood (Position Doubtful: Mapping landscapes and
memories, Scribe, 9/16) – demonstrate why it is impossible to understand Australia without venturing into the interior and far reaches of the continent. Divining the sacred, Rothwell moves effortlessly from Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia to the Pilbara, while Mahood returns to the Tanami, the country that has shaped so much of her artistic and literary practice.
In The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their craft (Black Inc., 8/16), Tom Griffiths, one of our most acclaimed historians of place, turns his eye to his ‘favourite’ historians and writers, distilling the essence of good history and subtly revealing why the discipline’s limitations are also its greatest source of strength.
Finally, two outstanding examples of biographical writing: Sebastian Smee’s The Art of Rivalry and Robert Forster’s Grant & I (Hamish Hamilton, 11/16).
Sarah Holland-Batt
This year I was taken by Michelle Cahill’s new collection of poems, The Herring Lass (ARC Publications), a characteristically restless migration across continents and vast bodies of water, fearlessly interrogating dynamics of power and subjugation in both human and animal worlds; Cahill’s collection strikes against the tyranny of the ‘desiccating colonies’ with a supple intellect and graceful musicality.
I was impressed by Dan Disney’s witty, erudite, quickfire either, Orpheus (UWA Publishing). Disney’s inventive takes on the villanelle, held in playful conversation with poets and philosophers, turn the well-worn form (in one instance, quite literally) on its head.
Further afield, I loved Ottessa Moshfegh’s début novel, Eileen (Vintage), mordant psychological thriller in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, it is one of the most gripping and disturbing novels I’ve read in years.
Andrea Goldsmith
Jordie Albiston’s, Jack & Mollie (& Her) (UQP, 5/16) ticks the three essential boxes for a verse novel: it tells a gripping story, it has well fleshed-out characters, and the poetry demands a second reading. It is a book for dog lovers (Jack and Mollie are canine characters), as well as readers interested in the boss dog – Albiston’s expressive rendering of the black dog.
In Mothering Sunday (Scribner), Graham Swift is at his best. This short, perfectly structured novel tells of an orphan housemaid, her lover, and a day of illuminating bliss. Told from a single point of view, the narrative moves with musical ease between the past, the present, and the unfolding future.
Iris Murdoch’s letters, Living on Paper, edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe (Chatto & Windus) reveal the philosopher, novelist, and lover in her own uncompromising words. What a woman. What a life.
Nicholas Jose
The great gift this year was Mick: A life of Randolph Stow (UWA Publishing, 3/16) by Suzanne Falkiner, which provides the material for a new look at this much-loved writer. Falkiner recovers Stow from the archive, including his own wonderful correspondence, and travels in his footsteps from Geraldton to Harwich and all the way to the Trobriand Islands. She is good on settings, knowing how someone can be out of place where they are most at home, and writes about his loyalties and antipathies with empathy and a dry wit that Stow would surely have appreciated.
Julia Leigh, by contrast, is both hunter and hunted in Avalanche (Hamish Hamilton, 8/16), as she, the woman in the text, pursues a child through IVF. Funny and unflinching, this self-fictionalising prose does just what its title suggests.
Simon Tormey
It has of course been an extraordinary year globally in politics, with Brexit, Trump, and the rise of insurgent movements of the right and left across the democratic world. Benjamin Moffitt’s The Global Rise of Populism (Stanford University Press) offers an extraordinarily prescient account of these developments with a sweeping narrative encompassing global developments.
Fellow expat Australian Saul Newman’s Post-
anarchism (Polity) also offers a notable take on contemporary politics, albeit one framed in terms of the shortcomings of democratic politics itself.
I enjoyed Rosa Prince’s Comrade Corbyn: A very unlikely coup (Biteback Publishing, 11/16), not least for the insights it offers into one of the stranger phenomena of the year: the takeover of the British Labour Party by a hard-left fringe that had for decades made little headway within or without the party. Strange days in contemporary democratic politics; but each of these books has way offered some illumination to those curious to understand the key trends and tendencies of our times.
Bronwyn Lea
A few years ago I commended The Gorgeous Nothings (2013), the first full-colour facsimile publication of Emily Dickinson’s poems scribbled on the backs of envelopes. So it’s possibly cheating to now put forward Envelope Poems (New Directions), a petit curation of these same poems, which, in Susan Howe’s words, seem to ‘arrive as if by telepathic electricity and connect without connectives’. It’s too ravishing to ignore. In the corner of one large envelope Dickinson wrote: ‘Excuse / Emily and / her Atoms / the North / Star is / of small / fabric but it / implies / much / presides / yet.’
Equally a work of art is Melissa Ashley’s début novel, The Birdman’s Wife (Affirm Press), about
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Elizabeth Gould, who created more than 650 handcoloured lithographs for The Birds of Australia and other publications.
Turning to living poets, I was especially taken with Liam Ferney’s Content (Hunter Publishing), which I regard as a genuine knockout.
Patrick Allington
Philippe Sands’s East West Street: On the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ABR, 10/16) is a gripping account of genocide and international justice, mixing the personal and political with rare balance. It also makes a startling companion to Despina Stratigakos’s Hitler at Home (Yale University Press), a fine and original study of Hitler’s carefully crafted domesticity.
With his novel about euthanasia, The Easy Way Out (Hachette, 9/16), Steven Amsterdam cements his place as one of Australia’s best contemporary novelists. The opening scene is excruciating.
Gillian Mears’s The Cat with the Coloured Tail (Walker Books Australia) enthralled my daughters and me. It’s an odd, pensive, beautiful parable for children, and a fine last work by a wonderful Australian writer.
Kerryn Goldsworthy
My picks this year illustrate the pleasure that writing can give to its readers. There are very few writers whose personal essays seem to deepen and widen on a second or even a third or fourth read, but Helen Garner is one of them. Her style is inimitable, for while its elegance is undeniable, its essence is pre-verbal, grounded in her intense and unique ways of looking and seeing. Everywhere I Look (Text Publishing, 5/16) seems the ideal title for her 2016 essay collection.
Sticking with women writers from post-colonial countries, I’d also nominate Margaret Atwood’s take on The Tempest, a very funny novel called Hag-Seed: The Tempest retold (Hogarth, 11/16), which is another joy to read. Exuberant, witty, and deeply humane, it reflects Atwood’s mercurial mind and intellectual depth. It is also a very clever exercise in the reading and re-reading of Shakespeare, something that may never get old.
Glyn Davis
In Music and Freedom (Vintage, 8/16), Zoë Morrison begins with wisps of piano, all those black notes guiding hands, the act of learning and playing. When it enters, the counter-melody is violent and sad, a choice that reverberates in this memorable début novel.
John Murphy’s biography of H.V. Evatt (NewSouth, 11/16) has tragedy, too, if self-inflicted. Murphy gives us a driven man without humour, sophisticated and naïve, a blunt force who achieves much but
ends up bewildered and frustrated.
The study of character flows through the fourteen portraits offered in Tom Griffiths’s The Art of Time Travel. Griffiths evokes a conversation across generations about the nature of scholarship and experience. Always generous, if sometimes gently disappointed, this is a meditation on Australian intellectual history to savour.
Ruth Starke
Shivaun Plozza is a fresh new voice in Young Adult fiction, and her angry heroine Frankie (Penguin, 6/16) is an engaging rebel with a definite cause. The racy, first-person narration shows a keen understanding of contemporary teenagers, and humour is found in the unlikeliest of situations.
Children love Leigh Hobbs’s Mr Chicken wherever he goes, but I especially treasure Mr Chicken Arriva a Roma (Allen & Unwin) because the Australian Children’s Laureate takes him to my favourite city in the world – and to Via Margutta, where I once lived.
A big hooray for the return of Stella Montgomery, Judith Rossell’s plucky little orphan from Witheringby-Sea (2014), now banished by her awful aunts to Wormwood Mire (ABC Books), a mouldering old family mansion full of dark secrets where she is to live with her two odd cousins and their governess. Thrills, chills, and magic – what’s not to enjoy?
Mark Rubbo
Helen Garner’s collection Everywhere I Look was a pure delight. It showcases Garner’s distinctive voice and her take on the world around her. Her view on things is unpredictable, distinctive, and original.
Justine van der Leun’s We Are Not Such Things (Fourth Estate) examines the killing of a young American woman in South Africa by a mob just before the fall of apartheid. Van der Leun finds the killers of Amy Biehl and over four years dissects the case and in doing so exposes the hopes and failings of modern South Africa.
Music and Freedom by Zoë Morrison, a novel about domestic violence, is this year’s best début.
Maxine Beneba Clarke’s memoir The Hate Race (Hachette, 10/16) should be read by every Australian. It lays bare our attitudes to race.
Geraldine Doogue
The book that will stay with me well beyond this year is Universal Man: The seven lives of John Maynard Keynes by the historian Richard Davenport-Hines (William Collins, 12/15). His stunning success is in assembling seven different narratives of the legendary economist who turns out to be so very much more than this mere title. It travels similar ground to the classic Skidelsky biography but summarises the
incomparable, diverse skills of this British polymath. Above all, he reminds us of the incomparable importance of persuasion, as a key skill that should exist in every reformer’s quiver. Oh, how needed right now.
Peter Mares
I would recommend Madeline Gleeson’s Offshore: Behind the wire on Manus and Nauru (NewSouth, 8/16), not because it makes pleasant reading, but because it comprehensively documents a reality we must face. Together with the Guardian’s Nauru Files and Four Corner’s ‘Forgotten Children’ exposé, Offshore leaves Australian citizens with nowhere to hide from the crimes committed in our name.
My favourite Australian novel of 2016 was Jacinta Halloran’s elegant and engaging The Science of Appearances (Scribe, 11/16). I suggest it as an antidote to the horrors catalogued in Offshore, because it celebrates those things that make for a flourishing human life: the love of family, a connection to place, and a feeling of belonging, intimacy, sex, art, science, human endeavour, a sense of purpose, hope in the future, and the capacity for moral judgement.
Jane Sullivan
Two dark novels about claustrophobic worlds and captured characters impressed me this year. Charlotte Wood’s dystopian vision of the logical consequence of a misogynistic society, The Natural Way of Things (Allen & Unwin, 11/15), took me into a penal colony for young women who had proved an inconvenience to powerful men, and then went further: into what happens when your dreams die. It’s a surreal exploration of the way mind, body, and soul can transcend fetters.
Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (Text Publishing) is a portrait of another closed society, a remote crofting village in nineteenth-century Scotland, and a shocking and seemingly inexplicable act of murder by a teenage villager. Accounts, witness reports, and a trial, all set down as in an authentic case, gradually reveal a truth that is chilling yet inevitable: the power of a feudal system that supports petty tyrants, stereotypes its criminals, and grinds down its victims.
Michael Shmith
The Romanovs, 1613–1918 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 9/16), Simon Sebag Montefiore’s exhaustive trawl through 300 years of Russian family tsardom, is gripping and often astonishing. The whole shebang is typified by Montefiore’s opening words: ‘It was hard to be a tsar. Russia is not an easy country to rule.’
The Long Weekend: Life in the English country house 1918–1939 (Cape), by Adrian Tinniswood, is a gloriously witty Wodehousian account – the stuff of magnificence and madness. For example, this brilliant
solution to rewiring an eighteenth-century ballroom without ruining the décor: drop a dead rabbit through the floorboards at one end; at the other, pop in a ferret with the cable round its neck. Voila! Light!
Barry Jones’s The Shock of Recognition is a masterly distillation of the music and literature that has enthralled Australia’s favourite polymath. It’s almost as good as talking with him in person.
David McCooey
I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a collection of poetry as much as Sharon Olds’s Odes (Picador), with all its wit and inventiveness. The contents page alone is a delight (‘Ode to the Clitoris’, ‘Ode to My Fat’, ‘Sexist Ode’, ‘Spoon Ode’). For all their elegiac weight, these poems are joyful and life-affirming, without sentimentality.
Faber cannily avoids calling Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (3/16) poetry, but it owes much to poetry – to Emily Dickinson for the title, and to Ted Hughes for Crow, the oversized bird who helps the book’s grieving family. Porter’s début is a funny, moving, highly original meditation on loss.
Although I have work in both anthologies, I must mention Writing to the Wire (UWA Publishing), poems on (and sometimes by) asylum seekers, and Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter). Each anthology shows Australian poetry to be the urgent, diverse, and engaged thing it is.
Jen Webb
A dystopic fable reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s darkest imaginings, Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things expands perspectives of the war between men and women, and of what might motivate people who participate – willingly or coerced – in that war. Beyond the horror is a carefully crafted, beautifully observed account of friendship and perseverance.
Any collection of old and new is likely to have rough edges which, if handled well, enchant the reader. This is the case with John Foulcher’s 101 Poems (Pitt Street Poetry, 6/16), thirty years’ worth of poems, which are marked by his characteristic gentle wit, close observation, and narrative edge.
I have been a sucker for poetry/photo combos since I read Fay Godwin and Ted Hughes’s Remains of Elmet, and PJ Harvey and Seamus Murphy’s The Hollow of the Hand (Bloomsbury) gives them a run for their money. Few songwriters write convincing poetry, but Harvey does, and powerfully.
Paul Giles
Jessica Riskin’s The Restless Clock: A history of the centuries-long argument over what makes living things tick (University of Chicago Press) is a major work of intellectual history tracing arguments about mind and matter from Descartes onwards.
Less consistent but intermittently brilliant is Donna J. Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press), which discusses connections between human and nonhuman creatures in the contemporary epoch.
American writer Mary Gaitskill’s first novel in ten years, The Mare (Serpent’s Tail), also addresses human–animal relations. Although occasionally awkward, it is a rich and stylistically ambitious work.
A collection of essays edited by William Coleman, Only in Australia: The history, politics, and economics of Australian exceptionalism (Oxford University Press), makes timely points about how Australian myths of ‘mateship’ have modulated into bureaucratic idealisations of ‘computing technology … and the recurrent catastrophic consequences of that misplaced faith’.
Peter Craven
J.M. Coetzee’s The Schooldays of Jesus (Text Publishing, 10/16) is the continuation of a masterpiece that is breathtaking and enthralling in its strangeness.
The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain (Chatto & Windus) is an astonishing and poignant account of the love of two men, written in a window-pane prose that recalls Tolstoy’s.
The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 6: 1932–1933 (Faber) covers the terrible years of Tom’s abandonment of Viv and what provoked him to leave her, but it also includes innumerable instances of his kindness, disregard for convention, and capacity to see the tears in things for others as much as for himself : an unexpected revelation of a book.
The second volume of Charles Moore’s life of Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (Allen Lane), provides us with an absolute steadiness of hand, the kind of wholly credible portrait of the Iron Lady who did as much to shape the world we live in as anyone.
Seamus Heaney’s slightly stilted translation of Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid (Faber) and Clive James’s nominal versification of his thoughts about Proust (Gate of Lilacs: A verse commentary on Proust [Picador])
are reminders of the world elsewhere in literature, in which all our reading must take its place.
Robert Harris’s Conclave (Hutchinson), full of the white and black smoke of papal election, was the thriller that topped the highbrow trash stakes.
Susan Sheridan
Two of the great contemporary writers, Helen Garner and Tim Winton, published volumes of essays and occasional pieces this year. These work partly as memoir, appealing to our desire to know about the life that feeds into the writing. Garner’s Everywhere I Look is a generous collection of pitch-perfect sketches and reviews, each one taking us with her as she looks, really looks, at the world around her and registers her response to it.
The pieces in Winton’s The Boy Behind the Curtain (Hamish Hamilton, 12/16) range from a chilling evocation of male adolescence in the title story, through accounts of his love for the sea and its creatures, to his hard-hitting attack on Australia’s appalling treatment of asylum seekers, ‘Stones for Bread’.
My third choice of new books, Edmund Gordon’s excellent The Invention of Angela Carter: A biography (Chatto & Windus), has sent me back to re-read that incomparable fabulist’s books.
Tom Griffiths
I have been eagerly awaiting Kim Mahood’s next book because I loved her Craft for a Dry Lake (2000). Position Doubtful is entrancing and different; it is poetic, gritty, confronting, and inspiring all at once, and offers a rare and valuable window onto Aboriginal Australia.
Another book not to be missed is Mark McKenna’s From the Edge: Australia’s lost histories (Miegunyah), which is a series of deep explorations into places of encounter between Aborigines and settlers. It is riveting scholarly storytelling.
In the same class is Peter McPhee’s Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (Yale University Press, 9/16). And for a distillation of wisdom about Australian cities and the people who imagined their pos-
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sibilities, you can’t go past Graeme Davison’s City Dreamers: The Urban Imagination in Australia (NewSouth, 11/16).
Paul Hetherington
Many engaging books of poetry were published in 2016. The following are characterised by conspicuously individual poetic voices at a time when so much free verse poetry can sound alike. New Zealand poet Tusiata Avia’s feisty Fale Aitu | Spirit House (Victoria University Press) reveals how the personal and the political may be combined in trenchant and uplifting poetry that is also sometimes lyrical.
Have Been and Are (GloriaSMH Press) continues Brook Emery’s exploration of a personal metaphysics of landscape and self in poems that are simultaneously beguiling, worldly, unworldly, and allusive.
John Kinsella’s Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador) encapsulates much of the best of thirty years of his obsessive and protean poetry, which has the environment and its degradations at its restless centre.
Susan Varga’s Rupture: Poems 2012–15 (UWA Publishing, 10/16) is not always technically sophisticated, yet it speaks with a persuasive truthfulness of difficult personal circumstances, allowing the reader wide spaces in which to travel, move, and think.
Lisa Gorton
Kim Mahood spent much of her childhood on a cattle station in the Tanami Desert. In Position Doubtful, she records her experience of returning after a gap of years to that place and working as an artist with its traditional owners. Though written with the immediacy of a journal, this is a sustained meditation on different ways of mapping place. Sometimes lyrical, sometimes grumpy, sometimes elegiac, but always frank, Position Doubtful ranges across the wide meaning of country,
extending past landscape into story, family, history, politics, geology, art, memory, and belonging. It is a vivid and memorable book.
Frank Bongiorno
Tom Griffiths’s The Art of Time Travel is a powerful meditation on the nature of historical enquiry by one of our leading historians. Its appearance was especially timely in a year that saw the passing of Inga Clendinnen and John Mulvaney, who both feature prominently in its pages.
The year saw many accounts of recent Australian politics, from Niki Savva’s blistering The Road to Ruin: How Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin destroyed their own government (Scribe, 6/16) to Sarah Ferguson’s elegant The Killing Season Uncut (Melbourne University Press, 8/16), a disturbing account of the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd era and the making of a television documentary on it. But my personal favourite was Brad Norington’s Planet Jackson: Power, greed and unions (Melbourne University Press). A veteran journalist, Norington shows that he understands precisely what is at stake in union corruption: the betrayal of workers and, via those unions’ influence on the Labor Party, the government of us all.
Brian Matthews
If there are rules for memoirists, two outstanding recent memoirs probably break most of them. Michael Wilding in his marvellous Growing Wild (Arcadia, 8/16) wittily undermines the idea that memory will serve by doubting the accuracy of many of his recollections then casting doubt on his doubts with veritable riffs of rhythmically incisive detail.
Tim Winton’s Island Home: A landscape memoir (Hamish Hamilton, 11/15) is a Wordsworthian and Blakean engagement with nature as a living, shaping force. Through observation and experience of the
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clamorous, mysterious world of natura naturans, Winton obliquely tracks some of the paths of his own life.
Two other writers who excitingly and confidently challenge the boundaries of their genre are Shirley Hazzard (We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected essays, Columbia University Press, 5/16) and Graeme Davison (City Dreamers). In both, as in Wilding and Winton, erudition and intelligence are sharpened and enlivened by wit, eloquence, and daring.
Susan Lever
It’s been a great year for books that offer a personal perspective on our shared experience as Australians. Drusilla Modjeska’s Second Half First (Knopf, 11/15) and Helen Garner’s Everywhere I Look present some of their most thoughtful work. Frank Bongiorno’s The Eighties: The decade that transformed Australia (Black Inc.) wittily reminds us of the ambiguities of a time usually depicted in a rosy glow. Kim Mahood’s Position Doubtful probes through layers of understanding of the people and land where she was born, across the Tanami Desert to the East Kimberley; it is rich with insights delivered with sensitivity and honesty. For sheer reading pleasure, though, I recommend Idle Talk: Gwen Harwood letters 1960–64 edited by Alison Hoddinott (Brandl & Schlesinger) where Harwood amuses her friend (and us) with the vicissitudes of 1960s suburban life in Hobart.
Ian Donaldson
I’ve particularly enjoyed this year The Art of Time Travel, Tom Griffiths’s beautifully pondered account of the work of fourteen Australian historians; and, from the other side of the world, a pair of absorbing biographies: Richard Davenport-Hines’s Universal Man: The seven lives of John Maynard Keynes and Hugh Purcell’s A Very Private Celebrity: The Nine Lives of John Freeman (The Robson Press). That’s sixteen lives for the two Englishmen, if you take the titles literally – almost as many as cats are traditionally granted – but both men, as these authors show, were indeed quite brilliantly diverse in their talents, aspirations, and achievements, and their life stories are hard to put down.
Felicity Plunkett
Ali Smith’s Autumn (Hamish Hamilton) is the first novel in a proposed series of four. It is about the edges of life and what can be said without words, the language of cow parsley and silence, love, transposition, borders, and translation. It extends strands of Smith’s short stories in Public Library and Other Stories (2015), about reading, anagrams, and etymology, and enacts a poetics of the digressive and layered, the fructive and petalled.
Judith Wright’s Collected Poems (Fourth Estate) is an updated collection of the poet’s work with a beautiful celebratory essay by John Kinsella.
Then Come Back: The lost Neruda poems (Copper Canyon Press) is a bilingual edition of poems discovered in 2014, translated by Forrest Gander with an exactitude that itself interrogates the art and limits of translation.
Nigerian-born Timothy Ogene’s Descent and Other Poems (Deerbrook Editions) examines love, doubt, solitude and migration in attentive, luminous poems.
Shannon Burns
I particularly admired Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians (Text Publishing), which is an urgent, semi-Dostoevskian story of brokenness, sexual awakening, perversion, and (partial) redemption, written in a lively, Joycean style. McBride’s uncompromising first novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (Text Publishing) set the bar formidably high, but The Lesser Bohemians doesn’t disappoint.
It’s been a great year for the shorter forms of Australian fiction. Ryan O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers: The fantastic lives of sixteen extraordinary Australian writers (Black Inc., 8/16) is an elegantly constructed, knowing, and funny collection of invented biographical profiles of Australian literary figures. O’Neill blends satire, formal playfulness, and pathos with rare skill.
Michelle Cahill’s Letter to Pessoa (Giramondo, 12/16) is a high-literary, reflexive, empathetic, and diverse assortment of outward-looking fictions that pack a punch, and Julie Koh’s Portable Curiosities (UQP, 8/16) is uniquely surreal, entertaining, and sometimes dazzling.
Catherine Noske
It has been a rich year for fiction, but the book which stands out most for me is a biography. Suzanne Falkiner’s Mick is a beautiful and detailed examination of Randolph Stow’s life, supported by a wealth of research. This is a work which not only feels overdue, but is touching in its intimacy.
More playfully, Ryan O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers collates (hilarious) fictional biographies to form a larger narrative, probing the idiosyncrasies of both Australian literary culture and the biographical genre. Read side-by-side, these two works seem to push at what biography might be – one in a positive sense, the other through the ridiculous, with a marvellous sense of fun.
Morag Fraser
These three books were balm in a year pocked by venality and a narcissistic degradation of language. Powerful words, flowing from writers whose depth
of experience is matched by their integrity and frankness.
The essays in Tom Griffith’s The Art of Time Travel, about his fellow Australian historians, many of them women, is a revelatory and reconciliatory sweep of a landscape too often obscured by academic infighting. A stylish joy to read.
Imagine an Australian politician game enough to utter these words: ‘Music … is an epiphany, a sudden exposure to the numinous.’ Barry Jones is game – always has been. The tour of his musical and literary milestones in The Shock of Recognition: The books and music that have inspired me (Allen & Unwin) is as beguiling for its self-revelation as for its extraordinary erudition.
Tim Winton’s The Boy Behind the Curtain roots you to the spot, forces you to ask questions – about yourself, about the way we live. Sinewy and lyrical by turns, Winton’s is an authentic Australian voice to trumpet to a world audience.
Kevin Rabalais
In my early twenties, enthralled by the work of Paul Bowles, I began to use the intrepid author’s philosophy of travel as a guide for my reading life. Bowles wanted each place he visited to be new and unexpected. I want books to usher me into unforeseen regions, writers who allow me to think and feel more deeply. The Mozambican novelist Paulina Chiziane surprised and left me in awe with The First Wife: A tale of polygamy (Archipelago Books).
With grace, humour, and a story that feels absolutely necessary, Brett Pierce’s memoir, Beyond the Vapour Trail (Transit Lounge), confronts us with the life and work of an international aid worker.
Siri Hustvedt’s A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on art, sex, and the mind (Sceptre, 12/16) offers a continuing education, while Annie Dillard – marvel and unclassifiable gem – reveals how the everyday can astonish in her selected essays, The Abundance (Canongate, 9/16).
Paddy O’Reilly
The High Places by Fiona McFarlane (Hamish Hamilton, 1/16) does indeed take us to high and strange places with perfectly tuned prose and a deeply intelligent sensibility. Julie Koh’s Portable Curiosities is a slippery and subversive collection that made me laugh aloud as it sank a knife into contemporary Australia. I laughed along with Ryan O’Neill too, in Their Brilliant Careers, a romp through a fictional literary history of Australia where the familiar is twisted into the ridiculous. The Rules of Backyard Cricket (Text Publishing, 10/16) by Jock Serong, while classified as ‘crime’, is a compelling literary novel dissecting toxic sporting culture and its fallout.
Felicity Castagna
Cath Crowley’s Words in Deep Blue (Pan Macmillan) is a deeply moving love letter to books and words and a landmark in contemporary Australian Young Adult literature for being both highly readable and literary, as well as for its ability to convince any reader that books really do matter.
In After the Carnage (UQP, 9/16), Tara June Winch reveals her trademark capacity to depict ordinary lives. Winch demonstrates that sparse, succinct language can be used to conjure memorable images that stay inside your head long afterwards.
Geoff Page
Four books where my pleasure was pretty much unalloyed were Gate of Lilacs by Clive James, The Fox Petition by Jennifer Maiden (Giramondo, 4/16), 101 Poems by John Foulcher, and Jack & Mollie (& Her) by Jordie Albiston. James’s blank verse Gate of Lilacs may well persuade those who abandoned À la recherche du temps perdu to persevere. Maiden’s latest collection addressing recent political history is remarkable for the intensity and complexity of its moral vision. Foulcher’s 101 Poems is a timely opportunity to sample the achievement of this sometimes under-estimated poet. Albiston’s Jack & Mollie (& Her) is not a strangely written account of a depressed female poet’s relationship with her two dogs: it is an important and affecting book by a leading Australian poet.
Available at ABR Online, SoundCloud, and iTunes
• Ashley Hay on ‘mongrel trees’
• Colin Golvan on parallel importation
• Michael Halliwell meets Brett Dean
• Ian Dickson on Edward Albee
• Catherine Noske on Westerly ... and more.
Monash Arts
Making a difference through research
WHAT IF WOMEN WERE LEADING PEACE-KEEPING NEGOTIATIONS?
At the Monash Centre for Gender, Peace and Security our researchers are investigating what roles women can take to build peace and protect women's rights, and what the impact is of giving women the opportunity to take on leadership in a peace-keeping role.
The Centre has developed a global critical mass of outstanding and passionate scholars in the Gender, Peace and Security field. Among them is Dr Lesley Pruitt, who together with Dr Katrina Lee Koo, is exploring young women's leadership and peace-keeping in the Asia Pacific region.
Their research plays an important role in communicating between the policy-makers and the practitioners on the ground. They provide useful information back to DFAT, for example about the project they are funding to let them know what is good, what needs to change and what they need to invest in to help drive effective leadership.
Listen to the full interview on Monash Arts SoundCloud and for further information on pathways to research visit arts.monash.edu
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Whitelash
James McNamara
THE
SELLOUT by Paul Beatty Bloomsbury
$26.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781786070173
The morning after the US election, Los Angeles was still. Usually a roar of noise, my city was stunned silent. As I spoke with distraught friends and colleagues, the fact that our West Hollywood polling place had been in a funeral home now seemed prescient: it felt like a wake. Donald Trump, who ran a vile campaign that – amongst innumerable barbarisms – suborned sexual assault, abused minorities, made racist claims, and was cheered by the KKK, had been elected president. As evening fell across America, protests began.
After Barack Obama’s election, I, like many progressives, hoped we had moved into a post-racial world, that Dr King’s dream had been realised and people were no longer judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. How wrong we were. How naïve. As the day went on, election demographics were released: Trump’s votes came not from the dispossessed poor but the angry white. As commentator Van Jones said: ‘This was a whitelash against a changing country … a whitelash against a black president.’ In the following days, reports came in like long-delayed telegrams from another age: a black woman shoved from a path; a gay man beaten until he bled; Muslim women’s hijabs ripped from their heads; swastikas sprayed on walls. Racism and intolerance are alive and well, and Donald Trump has restored their ugly public voice.
Paul Beatty’s Man Booker Prizewinning satire on race in America, The Sellout, was a vital work before Trump’s election. Its importance has only intensified. The word Swiftian is too often used, but here it is apt. Like Jonathan Swift, Beatty viciously exposes societal rot, shocking readers with sharp prose and uncomfortable humour as he con-
fronts our blindness to structural racism, and the comforting falsehood of ‘postracial’ America. As the narrator, Bonbon Me, drolly says: ‘Just because racism is dead don’t mean they still don’t shoot niggers on sight.’
The Sellout begins in the Supreme Court, where Bonbon, a young AfricanAmerican man, is charged with owning a slave and segregating an LA town. The ‘black Justice’ demands to know how ‘in this day and age a black man can violate [such] hallowed principles’. The book looks back to tell us.
Raised in Dickens (loosely based on LA’s Compton) by a social scientist father, F.K. Me, Bonbon is an experimental subject: home-schooled and used to test racial assumptions. But when his father is shot by police for talking back and Dickens is suddenly removed from the map by planners, Bonbon is lost. ‘Like the entire town,’ he writes, ironically, ‘I was my father’s child, a product of my environment, and nothing more.’ Bonbon sets out to discover himself by restoring Dickens, and that narrative provides the framework for Beatty’s satiric argument.
The disappearance of Dickens from the map reflects its societal equivalent: impoverished suburbs ‘exiled to the netherworld of invisible L.A. communities’. In response, Bonbon starts reclaiming Dickens by erecting a sign then painting a border. He is aided by Hominy, an elderly child star famed for playing a racist stereotype. When Bonbon rescues Hominy (depressed that fans can no longer find his house) from an attempted self-lynching, Hominy insists on becoming Bonbon’s slave, to find ‘relevance’: ‘sometimes we just have to accept who we are and act accordingly. I’m a slave.’ This dramatisation of racial disenfranchisement is heightened by cartoonishly violent whipping scenes. Later, Hominy becomes a reverse Rosa Parks, standing for a white woman on the bus and posting a sign giving priority seating to whites. The passengers ‘shook their heads, not so much from disbelief that the city had the nerve to reinstitute public segregation, but that it had taken so long’. Hominy’s act reminds readers that LA’s suburbs, like many cities’, are actually ‘mind-numb-
ingly racially segregated’. Hominy’s sign symbolically argues, too, that ‘the rights of African-Americans were neither God-given nor constitutional, but immaterial’ in America.
At the novel’s climax, Bonbon segregates Chaff Middle School, excluding white students to promote ‘community feeling’. This ironic reversal of Jim Crow segregation laws shows that the official policy of ‘“integration” can be a coverup’, a fiction, because disadvantaged schools like Chaff ‘had already been segregated and re-segregated many times over, maybe not by color, but certainly by reading level and behavior problem’.
Like Swift’s A Modest Proposal (which proposed the Irish poor sell their babies as food), Bonbon and Hominy’s outrageous behaviour is a satiric tool that savagely reveals social deficiencies. As Bonbon’s trial judge concludes: ‘In attempting to restore his community through reintroducing precepts, namely segregation and slavery, that, given his cultural history, have come to define his community despite the supposed unconstitutionality and non-existence of these concepts, he’s pointed out a fundamental flaw in how we as Americans claim we see equality.’
That false belief in equality is not limited to race: Beatty describes the African American ‘face that feigns acknowledgement that the better man got the promotion, even though deep down you and they both know that you really are the better man and that the best man is the woman on the second floor’. This mordant condemnation of institutional racism and sexism resonates after Trump’s election. Our first black president hands power to a white man whose racist rhetoric sought to delegitimise him. A vastly more qualified woman won the popular vote yet lost the presidency to a misogynist. And all around the country, citizens and immigrants who trusted deeply in the democratic promise of America, in tolerance and justice, are suddenly afraid. g
James McNamara was the third ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellow for his essay ‘The Golden Age of Television?’. He lives in Los Angeles.
That good night Jane
Sullivan
THE DARK FLOOD RISES
by Margaret Drabble
Text Publishing
$29.99 pb, 325 pp, 9781925355307
I’ve been reading Margaret Drabble’s novels with great pleasure for most of my life, and we’ve all been getting on a bit: Drabble, me, her readers, her characters. So I suppose it was inevitable that we would get to a novel about old age and death. When I discovered that these were indeed the subjects of her eighteenth novel, The Dark Flood Rises, and saw the sinister black-lace design on the cover (is that a devil face?), I steeled myself for a grim read. But it isn’t grim at all.
Grim things certainly happen: infirmity and illness, pain and loss of faculties, grief and loneliness. By the end, some of the people we have come to know intimately are no longer in this world. But on the whole, Drabble’s people are going gently into that good night. Some of them seem to be having quite a good time, considering.
Novels about old people just being old are surprisingly rare. The aged tend to turn up as parents or grandparents of the main characters. If they take centre stage, like Peter Carey’s impossibly ancient Illywhacker, they often do so in order to look back at times when they were young. This is strange when you consider how many well-regarded novelists are hitting their sixties and seventies (Drabble
is seventy-seven), and indeed how many of their baby boomer readers are in or approaching the same age bracket. Are we too squeamish to confront the twilight years? Do we believe they are static, dull, the domain of boring old farts? Drabble’s having none of that. As one of her characters says, old age is a theme for heroism. She introduces us to an ensemble of souls who have all passed the threescore-and-ten mark, and gives us intertwining stories in a magisterial third-person voice about what they are up to. In some cases, they are not up to much: but there is still courage, and still a rich inner life. It helps that these are privileged English people, intelligent and highly educated, still in possession of their marbles (only one woman, in her nineties, has dementia), and still able to live in some comfort and style. They have had careers, sometimes distinguished ones. They have family and friends, and sometimes we hear from children and other younger characters.
We meet Francesca Stubbs, still at work as a consultant on housing for the elderly, still bustling around the country to inspections and conferences, still delivering meals to her ex-husband Claude, a retired surgeon who is almost bed-bound but seems content to lounge around listening to Callas, and indulging in mild lechery with his beautiful home help.
It was a stroke of inspiration to make Fran the main character, for while her friends and family are arty-farty or scholarly types given to musing on paintings, history, music, or poetry, Fran is resolutely down to earth; although she is a worrier, she takes pleasure in simple things. She is not much taken with Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, in which Winnie speaks despite being buried up to her neck in sand. Fran chooses to live in a high-rise council flat that gives her a view of glorious cloudscapes, and nothing beats a boiled egg for breakfast at a Premier Inn.
Not that the arty-farty stuff goes to waste. Drabble is always a skilful weaver of metaphor, and her characters’ knowledge and taste allow her to play on a symphonic array of allusions and observations that various artists and thinkers have made, directly or indirectly, to age-
ing and death. Occasionally, these digressions become too elaborate or repetitive, but the reader is always drawn back to the central theme.
Places too have multiple meanings. The historian Bennett Carpenter is slowly drying out like a mummy with his longtime partner, Ivor Walters, in a beautiful house in the Canary Islands, the legendary Isles of the Blessed and also the sought-after retirement dream for British expats. But the earth quakes offshore, and back home the waters are spreading in the fens where Fran’s
Are we too squeamish to confront the twilight years? Do we believe they are static, dull, the domain of boring old farts?
solitary daughter Poppy lives. You can’t get away from the dark flood.
It could be argued, though I wouldn’t do it, that Drabble is sanitising old age. Like Claude’s cat Cyrus, her claws are sheathed and heavily padded. Teresa is dying of cancer; we realise her pain is acute, but we don’t share the agony. We watch her enjoy her sandwiches and trips down memory lane with Fran. Teresa has taught herself to aspire to a humble and contrite heart, and she counts her comforts: a blanket, a mug of soup, a radio quiz, a book on her lap. There is great poignancy and truth in this seeming trivia.
Nothing much happens in this supremely wise novel, and yet everything happens. It’s a quiet epic. There is no clear answer to the question of how to summon the courage old age demands, let alone how to have a good death, or the pros and cons of euthanasia, or the unlikely prospect of an afterlife. But Drabble’s intricate mosaic of observation, meditation, and affectionate humour suggests that if there are answers, they lie in small things. Call no man happy until he dies, goes the old saying: but perhaps the odd moment of happiness can be enough. g
Jane
Sullivan is a literary journalist and novelist based in Melbourne.
Tightrope
Fiona Hile
LETTER TO PESSOA & OTHER SHORT FICTIONS
by Michelle Cahill Giramondo
$24.95 pb, 247 pp, 978817925336146
You can tell a lot about a piece of writing from how it begins. For American poet Billy Collins, ‘the first line is the DNA of the poem’. With novels, as J.M. Coetzee writes, in Elizabeth Costello, ‘the problem of the opening … is a simple bridging problem … People solve such problems every day … and having solved them push on.’ Coetzee’s high-wire opening barely hints at the philosophico-literary grapplings that will ensue, but in an after-the-fact reading it is all there – the structural reliance on Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ (1915), the inference that a passage through the recurring impasses of language is somehow guaranteed by death, the acknowledgment that building/writing is also always a matter of destruction.
What to make, then, of a book that begins with a letter? And not just any letter, but one written to the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, whose literary alter egos numbered more than fifty and whom the French psychoanalyst Colette Soler likened to ‘a Russellian paradox’. Women write more letters than they post, writes Darian Leader, because of a specific relation to language. For Jacques Lacan, the love letter is of more interest than love itself – for the ways in which writing presents the subject in a relation to language rather than as its subject, and for the propensity of the letter to take on ‘strange shapes’.
Pessoa is just one of the addressees of this first collection of short stories from Michelle Cahill, an Australian poet who is the editor of Mascara Literary Review and a frequent commentator on identity and marginalisation in Australian literary culture. Issues to do with illness, medical intervention, and bodily reactions arise throughout this
demanding and complex work. A character (or animal) might ‘resist traces of nausea’, have its vocal cords paralysed by a tumour, undergo a caesarean section, submit to hormone injections and laparoscopies, maintain a reliance on viralsuppressing drugs. There is frequently a pleasingly forensic quality to the prose – ‘Julio watches the lump of cartilage in Miguel’s neck slide up and down as he speaks’ – and always an awareness of the socio-sexual hierarchies that attend the dispensation of medicine and sex.
Although Letter to Pessoa has been marketed as a collection of short stories, it is strictly speaking a collection of letters, fragments, character studies, and ficto-autobiographical interludes, or, as the narrator of ‘A Miko Coda’ has it, ‘my tightrope, Shinto page, my transmission, infinite possibility of hypertext, open diary, not excluding hybridized epistle’. Nevertheless, ‘Duende’, reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and the poetry of Federico García Lorca, won the 2014 Hilary Mantel International Short Story Award. As Cahill has written on her website, it is partly influenced by Lorca’s lecture ‘Theory and Play of the Duende’ (1933), which deals with ‘the cost extracted by art, the dying of the self as we try to inhabit two worlds, impossibly’.
Cahill has said of her writing that it ‘reflects a sense of fragmentation caused by the movement between countries and cultures’. The theme of being caught between worlds is evident throughout the book. Updating a Romantic epistolary tradition that takes in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Rousseau’s Julie (1761) and Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), as well as numerous philosophical, political, and poetic works, was never going to be easy. Epistles to iconic poets, novelists, a songwriter, and a philosopher shatter the idea of a unified letter-writing subject and make it brain-bendingly challenging to conceptualise this collection: ‘I’ll never be anything,’ boasts the narrator of ‘Letter to Pessoa’, and there is a sense in which an aleatory and elusive subjectivity structures these works.
‘Letter to John Coetzee’ takes our most famous literary import to task
over the double colonisation of Melanie Isaacs, the object of academic David Lurie’s lust in Disgrace (1999). Though Cahill doesn’t hesitate to, as the Lacanians say, ‘shake the master and to bore holes in knowledge’, she skilfully implicates her own writing among the list of charges, offering a timely and useful interpellation to the debate sparked recently by novelist Lionel Shriver’s remark that, ‘Taken to their logical conclusion, ideologies recently come into vogue challenge our right to write fiction at all.’ Cahill shows that as far as fiction is concerned, there is no ‘logical conclusion’ but rather, a series of what we might think of as archipelogical paradoxes.
One way of navigating this emotive and brainy book might be to follow the lead of the stunning ‘Borges and I’, to trust in the ‘imaginary, tattered map which occupies the entirety of this city and its outer precincts’. In a moment that is strikingly similar to a scene from Coetzee’s recent The Schooldays of Jesus (in which a grape-picker responds to a duckling that has been injured by a child), a Nepalese activist’s niece encounters a bird dying in the forest. Where, in Coetzee’s ethical universe, ‘The young man grips the bird between his knees. A swift motion, and it is done’, Cahill’s character, Hemani, watches the bird struggle for a few moments. Then, ‘laying her hand on the bird’s warm breast, without speaking, she told the bird to die’. This moment provides a succinct response to the question of why Letter to Pessoa might begin with what is arguably a love letter and models an ethics of literature worthy of serious and ongoing contemplation. g
Fiona Hile is the author of Novelties (2014).
Slanted
Kevin Rabalais
MOONGLOW
by Michael Chabon Fourth Estate
$39.99 pb, 436 pp, 9781460753224
‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant,’ wrote Emily Dickinson. In Moonglow, his latest novel, Michael Chabon follows Dickinson’s directive. This shape-shifting novel masquerades at times as a memoir and at others as a biography of the author’s grandmother and, more frequently, of his grandfather. At the centre of this family saga that takes us through much of the American Century, we discover the complexities of that man, an engineer, World War II veteran, and occasional romantic figure who often lives inside the grey areas of the law.
When the novel begins, the narrator, like Chabon himself, has launched a promising literary career. Chabon’s coming-of-age novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), earned its twentyfive-year-old author praise as the next J.D. Salinger. Following that début, Chabon hopscotched between successes. His novels include Wonder Boys (1995), the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007). In Moonglow, he returns to the early days of a life that has become one of the most successful in contemporary American literature.
Moonglow begins with the young Chabon journeying across the country to visit his dying grandfather in California. There, over the final ten days of his life – or eight, if we are to believe another figure that Chabon provides
late in this novel which ventures in many directions and whose narrative becomes, ultimately, cumbersome – the man plunges into the secrets of his life. Under the influence of painkillers, the character we know only as ‘my grandfather’ reveals his picaresque adventures. ‘Out flowed a record of his misadventures, his ambiguous luck, his feats and failures of timing and nerve,’ Chabon writes. We follow him through the Jewish slums of pre-war Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany and back to America, where he commences one life after another. One of them places him at work in the heat of America’s space program. Other escapades include hunting the Nazi V-2 architect Wernher von Braun, the attempted murder of his business partner, and blowing up a Washington, D.C. bridge.
If there were a canon of stellar Author’s Notes, Chabon would earn a place with his entry for Moonglow: ‘In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.’
Some of the novel’s finest writing resides in that note. Despite the tender relationship between the characters we know only as ‘my grandfather’ and ‘my grandmother’, Moonglow strains as it attempts to reveal the secrets of these characters’ lives. In a novel that the author encourages us to read as autobiographical, Chabon remains, throughout, uncharacteristically clinical. Moonglow proves most successful when it focuses on family life, the relationship between ‘my grandfather’ and ‘my grandmother’, and examines the myths that one generation offers another. We follow the grandfather home from the war. Soon he meets a young European immigrant with a complicated past. Chabon writes of their meeting: ‘Then he saw that in gun-colored ink on the inside of her left arm, she bore the recent history, in five digits, of her life, her family,
and the world. He read its brief account and felt ashamed.’
Chabon is at his best when he displays his deep fiction writer’s curiosity about the introduction of lies into the cold facts of a life, the kind of selfmythologising that helps us all face the mirror, and also the ways in which stories enter our lives to float through the layers of memory and assume their own existence. About the tales of ‘my grandmother’, Chabon writes, ‘Her storytelling was a performance undertaken with ardour and panache … A few survived because some incident or sense impression of mine got tangled with or trapped inside the telling.’ His descriptions of her make the reader wish that Chabon had taken a different narrative direction. ‘She strode into rooms with actress shoulders and the humble swagger of a girl who had come of age among hardworking nuns,’ he writes.
Chabon’s decision to refrain from giving these characters names holds us at a distance, as does his ambition to present as many aspects of the grandfather’s life as this four-hundred-page novel will allow. This results in a thishappened-next narrative, complete with footnotes, that brings to mind the conviction of certain writers that the existence of a detail makes it an essential component of the story’s engine. The novel’s many reflections continually undercut its momentum.
In the eight novels that Chabon has published, we find one common thread, namely an author who refuses to repeat himself. Since his début, Chabon has always made great leaps between books. This latest about family and secrets, lies and truth, reminds the reader of what Dickinson wrote in the final lines of her poem: ‘The truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.’ Here Chabon attempts to provide the truth of a life, a kind of truth deeper than any memoir could reveal. Self-consciousness, along with an eagerness to work in too many directions at once, prevents Moonglow from achieving the kind of story-truth that the art of the novel provides. g
Kevin Rabalais’s books include Novel Voices, The Landscape of Desire, and Conversations with James Salter
Following the stories
Examining the heart of the European experience
Christopher Allen
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE:
A THOUSAND YEARS OF EUROPE’S HISTORY
by Peter H. Wilson
Allen Lane, $75 hb, 1006 pp, 9781846143182
Empires of a thousand years’ duration are not common in the history of the world. Adolf Hitler’s dream of a thousand-year Reich evaporated after little more than a decade, and Napoleon’s conquests were not much more lasting. Even the Roman Empire, depending on the dates we set for its beginning and ending, succumbed to internal decline and barbarian invasion after some six or seven hundred years. Or did it? The reality is more complicated, for we tend to forget that its eastern half held out for almost exactly a millennium longer, against repeated and fierce military assaults, until it was finally overwhelmed by the Ottomans in 1453.
Perhaps more shadowy still to most readers, in spite of being closer to home in Europe itself, also lasting a thousand years and only ending two hundred years ago – with a coda running up to Word War I – is the successor entity known as the Holy Roman Empire. We recall Charlemagne from history lessons at school; from art history we may know Titian’s portrait of Charles V; we travel to Palermo and hear about Frederick II; we are in Frankfurt or Nuremberg and are told about Electors and the Imperial Diet; we even probably recall that the House of Windsor were once the Electors of Hanover, without quite knowing what that means.
One reason for the patchiness of our understanding of the Holy Roman Empire is that it had hardly any direct impact on Britain and relatively little on France – though Proust’s narrator goes to sleep dreaming of la rivalité de François Ie et de Charles Quint – and first really forces itself on our attention when we study the history of Italy in the medieval and early modern periods. Most
of all it was a central European phenomenon, concerning the German-speaking peoples as well as the Czechs, Hungarians, and some other subject nations.
A further reason why even educated people have a vague grasp of the subject is that there was something inherently vague about the Empire itself. It was not a nation, but something more like a federation; it had a system of elective monarchy – hence the Electors – and the emperors, with limited financial resources, were only occasionally in a position to project their military power beyond their own territories. And yet, in medieval political theory, papacy and Empire were the two divinely ordained pillars of the Christian world: ultimately, the Empire guaranteed the security of the Church in the temporal realm, while the Church endorsed the emperor as a figure of quasisacred authority in the secular domain.
As Peter H. Wilson argues in this admirable new history of the subject, even academic study of the Empire suffered, over the last century and a half, from the nationalist bias of mainstream, originally nineteenth-century history, with its belief in the self-determination of peoples and its idealisation of the unifications of Italy (1860) and Germany (1870) as triumphs of the modern and progressive state. In such a teleological perspective, the Empire tended to be seen as an early but misconceived and ultimately abortive attempt to unite the German peoples into a nation-state. Today, more than half a century after the crash-and-burn end of militant German nationalism, and surrounded by recent examples of the savagery of newly-freed and would-be self-determining ethnic and religious groups – from the breakup of Yugoslavia
to the meltdown of the Arab dictatorships – we are less inclined to equate nationalism with progress. The story of a massive and multi-ethnic political association that survived so many turbulent centuries no longer looks like one of stagnation and missed opportunities, and may even offer lessons for the evolving European Union; unfortunately, this volume was probably not on the bedside tables of those who voted for Brexit a few months ago.
The Empire tended to be seen as an early but misconceived and ultimately abortive attempt to unite the German peoples into a nation-state
Particularly interesting in this regard is the way that the Empire, in spite of its special relationship with the papacy, took the Reformation in its stride. By this time the imperial crown had effectively become hereditary within a single family, the Austrian Hapsburgs, whose own vast landholdings, both within and outside the boundaries of the Empire, provided them with economic and political power in their own right. The Hapsburgs always remained Catholic, but they were not in a position to suppress the German princes who adopted the cause of the Reformation, and in the end the system allowed for co-existence between Catholic and Protestant states within a Christian Empire. That is why, when the Huguenots were expelled by Louis XIV after 1685, many could find refuge within the imperial territories.
The case of the Jews is also instructive: they were placed under the direct protection of the emperor, which meant, as Wilson points out, that enforcing their security became a matter of law and order, and of maintaining the prestige of the state. In the anti-Jewish hysteria that flared up periodically, there were indeed from time to time massacres and expulsions, but these were regularly punished and reversed, respectively, and in an increasingly effective manner after new laws were enacted in the sixteenth century.
Wilson’s book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically: it has four main parts, under the headings ‘Ideal’, ‘Belonging’, ‘Governance’, and ‘Society’. Each of these is in turn divided into three chapters – thus ‘Society’ comprises ‘Authority’, ‘Association’, and ‘Justice’ – creating an overall duodecimal structure that is implicitly in harmony with the medieval origins of the institution itself. If one needs to check the year-by-year sequence of events, these are outlined in a separate fifty-page chronology. There is also an extensive glossary, as well as lists of the reigns of the kings and emperors who ruled over the Empire through the centuries, as well as exhaustive notes citing all bibliographical sources, and an index.
The scholarly achievement is massive, the sheer quantity of material mastered in producing this history daunting; and yet for all its size and weight, Wilson’s book is highly readable. One reason for this is no doubt his thematic structure, which allows us to follow the story of particular topics, such as the Reformation and religious tolerance, or the Empire’s characteristically corporate and consensual political institutions, so different from the ‘modern’ model of absolute monarchy. But it is also a credit to Wilson’s writing that his style is clear and penetrating, infectiously conveying the author’s own evident fascination with a subject that turns out, as he rightly asserts, to lie at the heart of the European experience. g
Christopher Allen is the Senior Master in Academic Extension at Sydney Grammar School, and national art critic for The Australian
The Sizzler at the York Agricultural Show, 2016
A horizontal twister, but none of the dramatic life and drop of hellraiser rides. Sedate, but vertiginous enough to rearrange conceptions, open perceptions to a very different York – those eucalypt canopies a blur of recognition shifting the boundaries of cognition, and the strobe of people’s smiles and grimaces a resetting of old associations. This is the show where my family features large in displays, winning firsts and seconds across numerous categories, judging others. But in the seat of the Sizzler, my son
beside me fighting centrifugal centripetal contradictions of presence, waving to a cousin whom he can see but I can’t, I fixate on eucalypts I know too well, the upper third of the painting of my world passing before my eyes, a landscape shot of spin in which our
portraits unwind and rewind, and the best sheaf of oats, the best sheaf of barley (I worship its votive neatness when seed’s fully set), and best sheaf of wheat though a warning from the judges on the runner-up that insect damage might affect the final outcome.
O glorious inflorescence – sets of perfect pedicels, O glorious fertilizer company with its cards on the table, sponsors and protectors of the temple, offering to help bring troubled farmers up to speed, and outside in spring sunshine the latest Case tractors and info about headers
too large to squeeze into the showgrounds, maybe? But spinning on the florets of the Sizzler, I make patterns from the canopies and upper branches of the eucalypts whose species names I can turn into anagrams, but now let go of within the empyrean of colony
refusing to accept its decline. The speakers positioned equidistant about the diameter of my cascading epiphany pump out dance music I could never dance to, but the beats time with impact each time round, inside out, and I know the summer coming will be the burning heartbeat
of volatile eucalypt oil, this town always conscious of summers tipping over into the cauldron, and each season being a brink into harrowing, an agriculture of a way so new no amount of learnt behaviours will keep furrows and windrows in alignment.
As the Sizzler slows down the eucalypts revert.
John Kinsella
John Kinsella’s books include the three-volume Graphology Poems 1995–2015 (2016).
Robinsonade
Danielle Clode
CRUSOE’S ISLAND: A RICH AND CURIOUS HISTORY OF PIRATES, CASTAWAYS AND MADNESS
by Andrew Lambert Faber
$39.99 hb, 319 pp, 9780571330232
The story of Robinson Crusoe, penned by Daniel Defoe in 1719, is one those remarkable books that created a new genre. The ‘Robinsonade’ or castaway story became one of the most popular forms of adventure novel, inspiring a host of famous ‘imitators’: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide (1894), R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858), and Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island (1874). Defoe’s tale also inspired true adventure. Matthew Flinders was ‘induced to go to sea against the wishes of my friends from reading Robinson Crusoe’. In the sizeable shipboard library of French explorer Lapérouse, there was only one novel: Robinson Crusoe
The study of Defoe and the Robinsonades is similarly vast. First-year courses devote entire semesters to analysis of the novel. The list of books published about Defoe, his famous novel, and his inspiration Alexander Selkirk, is astounding, and the study of the book’s impact on exploration history is in itself quite significant. Just recently, Australian academic Karen Dowling published the excellent Restless Men: Masculinity and Robinson Crusoe, 1788–1840 (2014), which explores the resonance the famous novel generated for generations of explorers and immigrants. Crusoe’s Island: A rich and curious history of pirates, castaways and madness, by naval historian Andrew Lambert, appears to follow similar territory, exploring the impact that ‘the island of Robinson Crusoe’ had on ‘our imagination and culture’.
I recall one conversation with a publisher about a proposed book title that did not accurately reflect the contents of a book. This did not matter, she said dismissively, so long as the title made readers buy the book. Crusoe’s Island perfectly illustrates that conundrum. This
book is not about the fictional Crusoe’s island (nominally located in the Caribbean off Trinidad and Tobago), but the island on which Alexander Selkirk was actually marooned – one of the Juan Fernández group, off the Pacific coast of Chile 11,000 kilometres due east of Sydney. Nor is it particularly a history of pirates, castaways, and madness, although all three make telling appearances. In fact, this book is a history of British (and predominantly naval) engagement with the Juan Fernández islands, both fictive and real from its discovery to the present day.
Chronology is a compelling structure for a historian, but it does not always make a compelling story for a reader. That said, the component chapters of this book often present fascinating stories in themselves, which might have been more effectively constructed as distinct essays with their own thematic narrative structure. This might also have allowed the chapters on literary analysis of various fictional representations of the Juan Fernández islands, and the fascinating accounts of madness apparently caused by scurvy and ‘calenture’, more scope for detailed analysis and investigation. Despite that, as one would expect from the author, who is Professor of Naval History at King’s College, London, there remains much to interest the British naval history enthusiast in this book.
Given the broadly European, even global, nature of exploration, this sharply British focus is somewhat incongruous. Other nations, particularly the Spanish, do rate a mention, but only in a rather cursory manner. As an example, Lambert dismisses Louis de Bougainville’s highly successful and influential Pacific expedition as simply an ‘attempt to pre-empt them [the British] at the Falkland Islands – gateway to the South Pacific’. Bougainville lost only seven of his 330 men over the three-year journey, inspired European imagination with idealised images of Pacific culture, and almost certainly accelerated Britain’s own Pacific exploration ambitions, all of which could have substantially contributed to the central themes in Lambert’s book. The book concludes with a rather puzzling Brexit-like rant against the ‘falsifying’ of history. ‘Modern Britons
are profoundly ignorant of their imperial past,’ Lambert claims, ‘having been systematically been fed a very different identity, one of Continental origin. The search for a European origin has distorted the past.’ For Australians, who may feel that they were systematically fed a British imperial version of history to the exclusion of other cultures, this does feel a little like the pot calling the kettle black.
Chronology is a compelling structure for a historian, but it does not always make a compelling story for a reader
Lambert has a curious tendency to take hearsay at face value. The accounts of the ‘old man’ Joshua Slocum (who, at fifty-one, was younger than the author himself) are marked by a flippant reference to raping a minor, an incident which is neither relevant nor particularly accurate. The achievements of Dampier, the ‘old buccaneer’, are dismissed on the basis of his colleagues’ condemnation. Lambert exhibits little tolerance for privateers. Many a capable captain’s achievement has been trashed by scuttlebutt and gossip (Baudin being a wellknown example). Notwithstanding his fellow officers’ views, Dampier was the first man to circumnavigate the globe three times. Just surviving that feat was a rare achievement at the time.
The story of a small, strategically placed island, regularly visited by foreigners, with an inflated sense of importance derived from a quasi-fictitious history, might be seen as metaphor for British history. But this is a book about the power of stories, their power to shape imagination, to drive ambition, and even to sustain empires. Our accepted view of history is very much dependent on the ability of the victor to tell a compelling story. Lambert’s book is both an analysis, and a striking example, of just that process in action. g
Danielle Clode was the inaugural Australian Book Review Dahl Trust Fellow in 2014. Her latest book is Prehistoric Marine Life in Australia’s Inland Sea (2015).
In late 1963, Rodney Hall – an aspiring but unpublished poet and novelist – travelled through Greece’s Saronic islands with his wife and their infant daughter. Shortly after Christmas they found themselves on the island of Hydra, where they fell into the company of expatriate Australian writers George Johnston and his wife Charmian Clift, whose time on the island was drawing to a close after nearly a decade. The Johnstons, their marriage precariously holding together amid a ruinous trail of alcohol, infidelity, and public brawling, did as they had done so often before –cast aside their personal troubles and embraced their fellow Australians with immense personal warmth, hospitality, and charisma. As Hall remembers, ‘they were lovely, they were so warm, and welcoming, and funny and clever, and it was just instant friendship, we just loved them.’
By this time, a string of marginally successful novels had rendered Johnston’s finances as fragile as his marriage, but he was also armed with his justification for having taken his family from the locus of postwar literary expatriation, London, to a poorly developed corner of the Aegean. In his hands, Johnston held nothing less than his tilt at the Great Australian Novel, the book he believed would redeem his reputation and set right the personal and professional toll of his expatriation. As Hall recalls:
Among the many apparently insignificant but nonetheless telling moments of Australian literary history, that one COMMENTARY
Hydra as intimate theatre by Paul Genoni
stands out in terms of its sheer unlikeliness and oddity – the prematurely aged, consumptive, alcoholic novelist with his last roll-of-the-dice manuscript, soliciting the approval of an unpublished acolyte; both adrift on a rocky outcrop in the Aegean, one desperately trying to eke a free flight from Qantas so that he could return to Australia and enjoy his long-awaited redemption; the other still hopeful of finding his own place in the literary firmament. One dream neither may have dared entertain was the critical successes that lay ahead: with hindsight we know that there were four Miles Franklin Awards, two apiece, around that distant table.
Hydra, it seems, is the sort of place that breeds such unlikely alliances and intimacies. Indeed, intimacy is something that Hydra does profoundly well. The only point of entry is by boat into the embrace of the small, perfectly formed harbour, with the island’s one substantial town (also called Hydra, or ‘the port’) rising precipitously away from the dockside, cosseted by the monastery-clad uplands. It is not surprising that this basic topography of houses lifting sharply in semi-circular tiers above the flatness of the dockside agora has frequently provoked comparison to the classical amphitheatres that dot the Aegean.
After we had known them five or six days, George said ‘I’ve finished this book, would you like to read it? You will have to come over to our place because I have only got two carbon copies and I can’t let either of them out of the house.’ So every morning I left Bet with the baby and I went over and sat at Charmian’s table, a big long wooden table running along one wall with a bench on one side and ladder back chairs. A lovely, beautiful kitchen. And I would read My Brother Jack, and sometimes George would come down to watch. It was a bit intimidating and he would sit at the end of the table and smoke. The table would seat sixteen or so people, and he would sit at the far end of the table pretending to read a book on his own account, but really checking on my response. And it was very exciting because certainly the first third of that book is truly wonderful, and I was able to be highly demonstrative. That went down well.
Hydra has other features that add to the intimacy experienced in the best (amphi)theatres – great sound and views. The complete absence of vehicles on Hydra – donkeys and mules still provide the only transport – is not only aesthetically pleasing and appealing to romantic temperaments, but without vehicle noise the natural shape of the landform becomes akin to a giant orchestra shell. Sound is held in the air and sent ricocheting from the hard surfaces of walls and rooftops and along the narrow laneways with startling clarity, bringing neighbours close and the dockside commerce and social activity into every home. The ringing of bells, the clamour of children, the barking of dogs, the braying of donkeys, the crash of harbour-front equipment, the rise and fall of distant voices all drift across the town. Couple this with the clear light of the Aegean and the excellent sight-lines whereby Hydriots have a view into neighbouring houses, streets, and down to the harbour, and the residents all become intimate spectators.
Hydra is also an amphitheatre adorned with a natural stage in the form of the wide, flat expanse of the dockside, fringed with restaurants, tavernas, and shops. This gathering of dockside commerce is common to many Greek islands, but on Hydra it reaches a picturesque intensity due to the
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distinctive shape and beauty of the harbour; the broad and gently arcing sweep of the port; the rugged and starkly precipitous backdrop; and the solidly handsome harbourfront buildings. This famously beautiful agora is a kind of stage built for display. It is where generations of locals and visitors alike have gravitated, certain of finding something to watch, and certain of being seen.
It was on this dockside stage that Johnston and Clift, and other Hydra expatriates of their generation, spent much of their time. Soon after the couple arrived in 1955 they were joined by Sidney and Cynthia Nolan, and artist Cedric Flower and his writer wife, Pat. These three couples thus started a community of expatriate artists and writers that persists until this day, one that became as renowned for its rollicking sociability and interpersonal intrigues as for its creative output. According to numerous accounts, the daily libations began before the arrival of the lunchtime ferry from Athens – bringing as it did the hope of incom-
the first days of the Hydra colony, but the island and the town have continued to attract new generations, including many Australians, who still find Hydra an alluring place to write, to paint, and sometimes to settle.
ing royalties – and frequently continued until late into the evening. One member of this foreign ‘colony’, Canadian poet, novelist, and later singer–songwriter Leonard Cohen, has remembered the intensity and otherworldliness of those early years:
Everybody was beautiful and young and full of talent and covered with a kind of gold dust. Everyone there had very special unique qualities. These are naturally the feelings of youth, but in this setting, in this glorious setting at Hydra, all these qualities that youth naturally can claim, they were magnified, and they sparkled, and every-one to me looked glorious, and all our mistakes were important mistakes and all our betrayals were important betrayals and everything we did was informed by this glittering significance. That’s youth.
‘Youth’ may have passed from those who remain from
Where writers and artists go, popular and scholarly interest inevitably follows. In September 2016, a conference, ‘Half the Perfect World: Post-war Literary Expatriation and Sociability’, drew a party of academics, writers, and interested players to Hydra to remember and discuss aspects of the island’s expatriate history and other examples of postwar literary expatriation. The conference took its title from a Cohen song of the same name that references Hydra (‘The polished hill, the milky town / transparent, weightless, luminous / where love’s unleashed, unwilled, unbound / and half the perfect world is found’), a reminder of the expatriate’s dilemma, whereby the world they inhabit may only ever be half of the world they desire. Conference attendees included a number of creative writers, such as novelist Susan Johnson (who based her 2005 novel The Broken Book on the lives of Johnston and Clift); expatriate Australian fiction writer and part-time Greek island resident Meaghan Delahunt; Vogel prize-winner Nick Angel; diplomat-turned-novelist Margaret Barbalet; and poet Andrew Taylor. Together with others they not only experienced firsthand the beauty of the island and the town, but also glimpsed something of the lives of the expatriates of the Johnstons’ era – by eating and drinking at the same tavernas; swimming at the same rocky beaches; walking the same cobbled laneways; and, memorably, by standing in the kitchen where Rodney Hall read My Brother Jack under George Johnston’s watchful eye. Although George Johnston and Charmian Clift’s joint legend was ignited by their Hydra years, the couple’s flame burnt most brightly when they settled back in Australia, even as their personal troubles deepened. My Brother Jack, published in 1964, was a runaway success, an acknowledged classic of its period, and the first instalment in an acclaimed trilogy that told the story of Johnston’s alter ego, David Meredith, and his expatriation along with his wife Cressida Morley to ‘the island’. Clift herself went on to become one of Australia’s most widely read essayists, with her syndicated contributions to the Sydney Morning Herald frequently bringing the sights and sounds of her former island home, and the lives of her fellow expatriates and Hydriots alike, into the homes of her many readers. Together, the couple ensured that this remote island would come to hold a very particular place in Australia’s literary imagination. g
Paul Genoni is an Associate Professor with the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University. With Tanya Dalziell (University of Western Australia), he is currently writing a social history of the expatriate community on Hydra during the time George Johnston and Charmian Clift lived on the island (1955–64).
From left to right: Marianne Ihlen with her son Axel, Leonard Cohen, David Goschen, George Johnston, and Charmian Clift enjoying dockside life in Hydra (photograph by James Burke, Getty Images)
Into the red
Andrew Fuhrmann
QUICKSILVER
by Nicolas Rothwell
Text Publishing
$29.99 hb, 200 pp, 9781925355574
Quicksilver begins in magniloquence, like the prophet Isaiah. It was the cold midwinter season, we are told, when Nicolas Rothwell began his days of journeying, driving west from Papunya in the Northern Territory towards Marble Bar in Western Australia. ‘The roads were empty: for the best part of a week I saw no trace of man and his works.’ As he drove, he thought about the last expedition of Colonel Warburton, the first European explorer to cross the continent west from the centre. He remembered how Warburton, after eight months labouring through the Great Sandy Desert, camped by the dry bed of the Oakover River and there witnessed a marvel beyond all expectation. ‘To our great surprise,’ Warburton wrote in his diary, ‘we were awakened at 3am by the roaring of running water.’ In the morning, they discovered that the landscape had been transformed by a fast-moving flood some 300 metres wide. For in the wilderness shall waters break out, said the prophet, and streams in the desert.
Quicksilver is a book about the sacred and its relationship to the world of the profane. It is a collection of six essays exploring the many dim passages and hidden transits between the human world, the world of nature, and the mysteries of whatever lies beyond. Some of these essays have appeared before, but here they are allowed to expand and grow, sprawl and cascade.
Rothwell’s method is to pursue correspondences and connections, to approach his subject by indirection, circling around its shadowy neighbourhood. In the book’s first essay, for instance, he begins with the idea of going ‘into the red’, juxtaposing his own journey into the red centre of Australia with Maxim Gorky’s journey into the red heart of the Soviet Union after he returned from his
second exile in 1928. Another journey takes Rothwell from the High Tatra Mountains in Slovakia to the Kimberley, where he reflects on parallels and affinities between the Frankist and Sabbatean cabalists and the Aboriginal cult of the Kurangara. They both, he argues, represent a similar kind of religious epiphany and upheaval. The old order changeth, yielding place to new, and the line separating the sacred and the profane is redrawn.
Such revolutions, Rothwell says, are common in Australia’s frontier history. And he goes so far as to suggest that the Western Desert art movement can be understood as a late instance of this, a moment of rebellion and surrender, born of defiance and of despair.
Do the associations that Rothwell arranges for us offer a fleeting insight on the meaning of life? Perhaps, but sometimes it is as though his fascination with mysticism is on the brink of inadvertent self-parody, where it would take just one push. The more direct he is in describing his beliefs, and the more oracular his tone and the more enigmatic his speculations, the less convincing it all seems; but when he allows his theme to progress by pure, unforced narrative logic, allowing his allegorisations only to develop implicitly, without coercion, through the juxtaposition of ideas and images, the inward seriousness of his work, and its depth of sincerity, is powerfully felt.
This is certainly true of his essay about Stalker (1979), Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece of science-fiction cinema about an expedition into a quarantined wasteland known as the ‘Zone’. Rothwell leads us from the badlands of Estonia to the British nuclear test sites at Maralinga. The explorers in Tarkovsky’s film know that the only way to approach the great secret at the heart of the Zone is to go circuitously, to follow the spiral of an inward curve, and this is how Rothwell, when he is at his most engrossing, proceeds himself.
He is fascinated by the idea that certain ways of seeing and writing about the landscape might allow us to intuit something about what lies beyond it. ‘[T]he natural world,’ he says, ‘the unending bush is the veil around us
through which we must see’. He suggests that, here in Australia, it is often the European visitor – the D.H. Lawrence or Bruce Chatwin – who has this double vision. These cultured exiles, Rothwell suggests, accustomed to living in landscapes thick with literary associations, all but covered over by the cultivation of the past, are particularly sensitive to the beauties of the Australian landscape, its special silences, its strangeness and singularity.
He links these writers with explorers such as Thomas Mitchell and George Grey, Eyre and Leichardt. Even when these first visitants saw no beauty, their letters and journals nonetheless captured that sense of a revelation lurking or looming just beyond the horizon of desolation. And he sees his own work very much in this same tradition: alive to the shadow and shimmer of something holy but inexpressible.
Why be surprised that Rothwell is writing under the sign of Mercury, messenger of the gods? He has ever been the dutiful envoy of fallen idols, rushing hither and yon in every sense between Europe and Australia, between the metropolis and the outback, between a past crowded with culture and a present full of the portent of eternity, bearing messages that still have a faint aura of sanctity clinging to them.
Not that he is assuming the role of desert prophet. He doesn’t soar too far above the human world, nor evaporate entirely into the wilderness. Here, as in his other essay collections, he always insists on the feel of the landscape. He dwells on things that are ruined and disappearing, on mysteries great and small, but also on natural forms, colours, sounds, and movements – and gives each a moral life. g
Andrew Fuhrmann is a Melbourne theatre critic.
SURVEY
Publisher Picks
To complement ‘Books of the Year’, we invited a number of senior publishers to nominate their favourite recent titles published by other companies.
Ben Ball
I’m fresh from Hannah Kent’s compelling, humane, and utterly convincing The Good People (Picador, 10/16). Kent completely inhabits her material. In this single nineteenth–century Irish valley, she has created a whole world – indeed, a whole cosmology – that we struggle to break free from at the end of the book. The folded landscape, the terrifyingly precarious lives (especially of women), the honest engagement with folk wisdom, the cold – is it too early to think of a Kentland?
I also recently read Tara June Winch’s After the Carnage (UQP, 9/16), a remarkable collection of stories roughly a decade after her knockout début, Swallow The Air (2006). Startling without being showy, various but not tricksy, moving, fresh, and beautiful – an extremely potent voice ready to roar.
Ben Ball is Publishing Director, Penguin Books Australia.
Meredith Curnow
Two books examining Australian identities arrested me this year. Stan Grant’s Talking to My Country (HarperCollins) is direct, unadorned, and poetic. You hear his honest and mellifluous voice as you read, and think, and digest. Grant is a storyteller through training and tradition; by combining the language of healing with optimism, he has given us an important call-to-action.
Sporting folk, and their avid followers, are often great storytellers. From the Outer: Footy like you’ve never heard it, edited by Alicia Sometimes and Nicole Hayes (Black Inc., 6/16), delighted me and did not shy away from darkness.
Meredith Curnow is Publisher, Knopf, Vintage, Random House Books
Madonna Duffy
As a publisher and a reader, I am always looking for fresh new voices. I was impressed by Rajith Savanadasa’s début novel, Ruins (Hachette, 10/16), and the way it broadens our knowledge about Sri Lanka’s post-civil war period. It also captured a family and a country wedged between its ancient culture and the modern world.
I enjoyed Dominic Smith’s The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (Allen & Unwin, 6/16) for its treatment of art forgery, and I loved the behind-the-scenes view of the art gallery world.
Madonna Duffy is Publisher at the University of Queensland Press.
Sally Heath
How good is it to disappear from a world of constant interruptions into a book of 493-plus gloriously written pages? Pretty damn good if it a sumptuous study of a woman and power prompted by the Sarah Palin phenomenon and ending as a seven-year investigation into Queen Victoria From the opening pages of Victoria: The queen (HarperCollins), historian and journalist Julia Baird wears her extensive and original research lightly with assured and deft writing that is never overawed by her subject.
Another highlight was the insights and force of Tim Winton’s memoir The Boy Behind the Curtain (Hamish Hamilton, 12/16).
Sally Heath is Executive Publisher, Melbourne University Publishing.
Michael Heyward
Fiona McFarlane’s collection of stories The High Places (Hamish Hamilton, 1/16) reminds its readers that she is a writer of scary talent. In these stories, just as she did in her novel The Night Guest (Hamish Hamilton, 12/13) McFarlane listens, really listens, to her characters while they puzzle things out, trying to keep life at bay until it becomes comprehensible. But life never waits. The tension in this dynamic shapes her sentences into their marvellous forms, and is a measure of her resistance to false sentiment. You can open this book and begin reading anywhere.
Michael Heyward is Publisher at Text Publishing.
Nathan Hollier
The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their craft (Black Inc., 8/16), by Tom Griffiths, was as entertaining as it was thought-provoking. It sent me off to read Australian historians I should have read but hadn’t (such as Donna Merwick), deepening my understanding of
others (especially Geoffrey Blainey, Greg Dening, and Mike Smith), and prompting me to pick up books (by Eleanor Dark and Eric Rolls) that had sat on my shelves for years without me working up the enthusiasm to open them.
Other works I admired included Madeline Gleeson’s Offshore: Behind the wire on Manus and Nauru (NewSouth, 8/16) and Ian Lowe’s The Lucky Country? Reinventing Australia (UQP, 8/16).
Nathan Hollier is Director of Monash University Publishing.
Ivor Indyk
I was impressed by Π.O.’s monumental collection of poems, Fitzroy: The biography (Collective Effort Press) Π.O. has always pursued his own path, developing an original and uncompromising poetic, and most of all, celebrating the suburb of Fitzroy – it is his country, and he is its epic poet. This collection dramatises its history in 400 verse portraits; but what is extraordinary is the diversity of fact that goes into their composition, giving the poetry an encyclopedic range that rises naturally from the smallest and most populous suburb in the country.
Ivor Indyk is Publisher of Giramondo Publishing.
Phillipa McGuinness
This year I have read little fiction; all my reading outside work has been in the service of the book I’m writing about 2001. Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s Yassmin’s Story: Who do you think I am? (Vintage) is up there among many striking memoirs published this year – not just because of its mix of faith, fast cars, and working on rigs, but mainly because we hear the optimistic voice of a young Sudanese-Australian Muslim woman entirely herself.
Mark McKenna’s eye-opening From the Edge: Australia’s lost histories (Miegunyah) is also about belonging. Read it, if only for the story of an extraordinary walk in 1797.
Phillipa McGuinness is Executive Publisher of NewSouth Publishing.
Jane Palfreyman
Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident (Picador, 4/16) is a brilliant and engrossing novel which subverts our responses to reading, viewing, and reporting on violent crimes against women, both actual and fictional. We realise after reading this transformative novel that all violence against all women is connected (hence the ironic title) and accreted by our conditioned responses to it as both news and ‘entertainment’. This is a stunning novel about what really happens when someone is killed.
Georgia Blain’s Between a Wolf and a Dog (Scribe, 5/16) is an assured and luminous novel. The book unfolds over a storm-swept Sydney day as family therapist Ester and her family all teeter on the brink
of what might be disaster or salvation. This is a profound and beautiful meditation about being alone and human, about our never-ending search for self-knowledge and connection, and, ultimately, forgiveness and love. Blain’s intelligence, compassion, acuity, and sheer talent are a gift for any reader.
Jane Palfreyman is Publisher at Allen & Unwin.
Aviva Tuffield
The two Australian books I’ve most admired this year are Josephine Rowe’s novel A Loving, Faithful Animal (UQP, 5/16) and Maxine Beneba Clarke’s memoir
The Hate Race (Hachette, 10/16). At first blush they may seem very different, but both address the ineffable effects of intergenerational trauma, especially as experienced in childhood. Rowe’s kaleidoscopic, polyphonic gem gradually reveals a picture of one damaged family living in the shadow of their Vietnam vet father’s PTSD. Beneba Clarke’s powerful, honest, and haunting account of growing up black in middleclass Australia is a testament to what racism does to a young person’s psyche. Somehow it also contains much humour and tenderness; a timely, essential book.
Aviva Tuffield is Publisher at Black Inc.
Terri-ann White
I have chosen Position Doubtful by Kim Mahood (Scribe, 9/16). My declaration of interest here is that I stayed for five days at Mulan, the community setting for this deep book; Mahood and I ran writing workshops for a book project while she was completing it. Mahood is usually fairly dispassionate about how black and white Australians trade with each other; in this intriguing work about our continent and how people inhabit it, she turns on affinity and long connection. Mahood offers testimonies and stored losses. It’s also a book about maps, how we navigate vast country with maps or different systems of knowing. It’s poetic and wonderful.
Terri-ann White is Director of UWA Publishing.
Geordie Williamson
Ryan O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers: The fantastic lives of sixteen extraordinary Australian writers (Black Inc., 8/16) is a thesis wrapped up in a pisstake. Consisting of sixteen capsule biographies of Australian authors who never existed – or rather, who do exist but in altered guises – the book is starts off as a work of cod lit. crit. and ends as a Calvino-esque fable about our national resistance to literature.
Meanwhile, in North America, Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton (Viking) introduces us to one imagined writer who, like all great novelistic creations, becomes more eloquently acute, intimately knowable, and supersensibly attuned than her creator could ever hope to be.
Geordie Williamson is Publisher at Picador Australia.
The Light Between Oceans by Brian McFarlane
If you read a novel prior to seeing the film derived from it, you know what to expect by way of major plot manoeuvres. Attention is then apt to focus on how the filmmaker has responded to the original, and the ‘what’ can then often be seriously challenged. As one who believes fidelity to be ideal for relationships, I favour playing around with adaptations.
Where does The Light Between Oceans stand in this regard? Director–screenwriter Derek Cianfrance, in adapting M.L. Stedman’s engrossing 2012 bestseller, has opted to retain to a remarkable extent the novel’s narrative trajectory – with one major exception.
Stedman opens her novel on Janus Rock island, with a boat containing a dead man and a baby washed up and pulled into shore by lighthouse-keeper Tom Sherbourne, whose young wife, Isabel, urges him to delay reporting this to the authorities, and embraces the child.
Cianfrance’s film opens eight years earlier with Tom (Michael Fassbender), a veteran of the Great War, ‘looking to get away from things for a while’. Accepting what is meant to be a temporary job as keeper of the Janus lighthouse, in the film’s first few minutes on another beach he sees a happy girl feeding gulls. She is Isabel (Alicia Vikander); he takes up the Janus appointment; they subsequently marry and are happy together; but there are two poignantly recorded miscarriages on the island before the crucial arrival of the drifting boat.
Sometimes that ‘how’ of the film can leave you wondering ‘why’. Cianfrance is perhaps more concerned to establish the basis for Tom’s moral conflict from the outset. His war experiences have left him withdrawn, and Fassbender captures his troubled containment with a persuasive minimalism. His growing happiness with Vikander’s outgoing expression of life-loving is touchingly done. His love for her when she wants to keep the baby, to let it be thought on the mainland as her own, born prematurely, creates a powerful conflict for Tom, acting for her well-being. The film, with its two ‘hot’ stars of the moment, renders this with gut-wrenching emotional vividness. These two complement each other
as the film needs them to, and the third protagonist to emerge, Hannah, the baby’s birth mother, is played by Rachel Weisz with an painful apprehension of loss that actuates a moral dilemma for the film that is only resolved in its last moments.
This is a film of great visual beauty, but it is a beauty that never descends into mindless pictorialism. From its opening moments depicting, in a vast overhead shot, a train making its way through a mountain and seaboard landscape, to the accompaniment of Tom’s voice-over about the need ‘to get away from things’, there is pervasive connection between image and narrative intention. Tom, that is, is a man lost in his world and needing to finding a new way. There are several exquisite Turneresque sea- and skyscapes, but again they represent more than natural beauty: there is also a telling quality of emptiness about them; and there are many shots that encapsulate the solitariness of the Janus lighthouse which may offer a beacon of reassurance to seafarers but is no guarantee of security for the little family living alone there. Even the comparative safety of the nearest mainland West Australian town seems compromised in the nocturnal long shots, which silhouette the towering rocky outcrop that seems to threaten its cosily lit domesticity.
These images are examples of the sort of ‘how’ I had in mind earlier. Just as altering the sequence of the earlier events means that the film will make different demands on our involvement with the issues raised by the dead man and the baby, so the visual rendering of states of mind through images, which juxtapose the natural world and the human behaviour that takes place in it, becomes a vital element in our emotional response. And a third element of ‘how’ may be seen in the casting of some of Australia’s best-known actors, such as Jack Thompson, Garry McDonald, and Bryan Brown. They – and other excellent players such as Jane Menelaus and Anthony Hayes – ground the film’s events in a recognisable rural-town setting of faces and places.
This is a film in which right and wrong, truth and lies, are in ongoing tension, a dialectic that gives toughness to what in lesser hands might have become a melodramatic tear-jerker. A lie in the interests of someone else’s happiness or the truth when it is bound to cause grief: such issues give the film a spine as well as a heart. Eschewing feel-goodism, it ends instead with both the past and the implied future’s endowing the present with a sense of earned forgiveness. g
The Light Between Oceans (CTC). 133 minutes. Written and directed by Derek Cianfrance and based on the novel by M.L. Stedman. Distributed by Entertainment One.
Arts Update is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation
Brian McFarlane is an Adjunct Professor at Swinburne University of Technology.
Modernity flux
Sarah McDonald
LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA: A COMPARATIVE HISTORY
by Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez
University of California Press (Footprint) $71 pb, 376 pp, 9780520288638
Latin America – the term – is an invention of a would-be emperor of Mexico, French in origin, trying in vain to strengthen the imperial project through a link to a Latinate origin, including and privileging the language and culture of the romance languages and excluding the Anglophone in the quest for colonial pre-eminence. However, long before the empire of Napoleon III attempted to make this claim the New World was being invented through the tales of mythical beasts, Amazons, and the unfathomable riches of El Dorado These inventions have been, and continue to be, reworked. First, through the lens of colonialism, then the foundational fictions of the post-independence era. This was closely followed by the reinvention of these new nations from within, shaped by the weight of their European heritage, while sometimes drawing on the supposedly superior traits of the creole élites, and occasionally elements of indigenous culture. In the early part of the twentieth century, this reinvention was attempted via the poetic and aesthetic movements seeking to create and express an authentic national culture grounded in what many have termed a fantastical reality and shaped through a cannibalistic approach to the European vanguards. For many intellectuals and theorists, the attempts by the countries of Latin America to define themselves as modern nations exemplified a search for modernity in the absence of modernisation. In Latin American Cinema: A comparative history, Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez examines the cinematic invention of Latin America and its interplay with the multiplicity of modernities encompassed in the region.
Cinema in Latin America, from the
technological developments of the silent film era to the stylised international box-office hits of the last two decades, has been caught up in a cyclical struggle of determining its own parameters and negotiating the structural and aesthetic demands created by foreign film industries. Long before we started to conceive of the global as we do today, cinema in Latin America was constantly engaged with and affected by globalisation. Ways of telling stories, at once intensely personal and local, have been increasingly reshaped and retold, responding to and informing global understandings of Latin America.
In his Nobel lecture (8 December 1990), Octavio Paz stated that ‘modernity is a word in search of its meaning’. In reference to the experience of Latin America, Paz details his journey to understanding that modernity is found within, that it is at once traditional and modern, a ‘simultaneous plurality of time and presence’. Schroeder Rodríguez invokes Paz’s call for other forms of ‘cultural periodization’ that respond to the multiple experiences of modernity in Latin America. His approach to contextualising cinema opens up a space in which the multiple participants in the creation of global modernities, from those cultural locations loosely understood as centre and periphery, high and low, European, indigenous, African, are recognised and privileged in their roles as producers in the multiple experiences of modernity in Latin America.
Schroeder Rodríguez takes up the challenge of categorising the cultural periods in Latin American cinema not through a new lens as such but through an old lens focused in a new way, achieving what he himself points to as Paulo Antônio Paranaguá’s call for a new history of Latin American cinema. The comparative approach here serves not to erase the specificities of national experience in favour of some sort of homogenous Pan-American depiction of cinema’s role in Latin America. Rather, it allows a nuanced understanding of the wider ideological developments that underscored the shifts in cinema across the region. It also allows the author eloquently to bring together local, national, and transnational productions in what
he refers to as a ‘triangulated’ view of cinema’s trajectory in the region.
Throughout the book Schroeder Rodríguez works his way through five eras of cinema in Latin America, beginning with the first forays into silent cinema, dividing his attention between the earliest film productions, which he brands as conventional cinema, to the avant-garde productions that were a feature of the latter half of these early years. He then tracks his way through studio cinema (part two), neo-realism and art cinema (part three), the new Latin American cinema (part four) to contemporary cinema (part five). This pathway through the cinema of the region allows the author to engage with the boom and bust cycles of production, the challenges of Hollywood’s role in the marketplace, and the various polit-ical and economic catastrophes that, at one moment or another, depending on the nation in question, saw the strengthening of the film industry, or, in the case of Brazil under former President Fernando Collor de Mello, its almost complete destruction. The development of cinema takes place against a backdrop of changing forms or models of modernity shifting from a desire to emulate to one of creative independence. One of the strengths of this book is the author’s ability to draw out the increasing prominence of Latin America as an interlocutor in the creation of global cinematic dialogues, one whose innovation and style influences others, an active producer of global cinematic culture.
At the core of these analyses remains the question of the cinematic invention of Latin America and its representation of various modernities in flux. These representations are about a modernity understood at the local level rather than a response to sweeping onedimensional understanding of a single modernity for a nation or region. The understanding of cinema in this book responds to the realities of the global era but grounds this understanding in the local, the personal, a modernity defined from within. g
Sarah McDonald is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University. ❖
The Eighth Wonder
by Michael Halliwell
Opera and politics are closely intertwined. The commissioning, composition, and performance of opera have been used as political instruments in many different contexts, while the actual presentation of opera has often had an overtly political dimension, with operatic performance and opera theatres themselves constituting a significant reflection of political aspirations, national prestige, and identity.
New operas in Australia, or anywhere else for that matter, that receive a second, let alone a third, production are exceedingly rare. It is greatly to be welcomed that Opera Australia is presenting Alan John and Dennis Watkins’s opera, The Eighth Wonder – premièred in 1995 – although now badged as Sydney Opera House –The Opera (The Eighth Wonder). It had its first performance on the steps of the said Opera House on 28 October 2016. (The original work enjoyed a revival in 2000 as part of the Olympic Festival; both series of performances were generally well received by public and critics alike.)
Of recent operas premièred in Australia, The Eighth Wonder is probably the work most overtly concerned with the politics surrounding the idea of national identity, not only the building of the Opera House. The preface to the published libretto makes this explicit: ‘As personal dramas interweave with political realities a portrait is drawn of a nation coming of age. The tragic fall of the architect is balanced by the triumphant emergence of the voice of a new generation.’ All of this is couched in symbolic terms through the framing of the work in Mayan mythology; intertwining themes of individual aspiration, creativity, and sacrifice in direct conflict with political pragmatism.
Commissioned by Opera Australia, it is a large-scale, panoramic work, employing more than thirty soloists, a large chorus, and dancers, and consisting of a prologue and fifteen scenes, divided into two parts. It spans the period from 1955, when the decision to build an opera
house was made, to 1973, when the Opera House was opened by the queen. It is an unashamedly ‘political’ opera in the tradition of recent so-called ‘CNN’ operas by John Adams such as Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), but it also has something of a pageant quality that one finds in some of the work of Philip Glass.
It interweaves dream-like sequences set in Mexico at the time of the Aztecs, New South Wales parliamentary wrangling over the decision to build an opera house, the aspirations of a young singer, and several satiric scenes depicting the fickle public attitude towards the building. The opera has significant self-reflexive qualities – the narrative of the building of the opera house culminates in an operatic performance within the actual opera theatre itself – and there are important meditations on the nature of opera and performance, all explicitly linked to the polemic surrounding the actual viability of opera as an art form within a post-colonial society such as Australia.
The opera’s eclectic score combines popular musical styles ranging from a quasi-pop idiom, unashamedly music theatre elements, to operatic music of great expressivity and intensity, characterised by a strikingly flexible and imaginative use of the orchestra. The libretto is an amalgam of poetic language and slangy Australian vernacular. Some of the most effective scenes occur in the confrontations between the Architect and the Politician, where the politics of the work are most direct and explicit, as well as in the lyrical moments between the Architect and Alexandra, the young singer, whose dilemma is emblematic of the challenging career paths followed by many Australian artists.
The current performance takes place on the steps in front of the Opera House, with the famous shells in the background. It has been nicknamed the ‘Silent Opera’ by some: the audience is equipped with headphones through which they listen to the performance, with the orchestra and chorus housed within the building. The action takes place on the steps with the audience arrayed below. It is particularly effective in this context, for the Opera House provides a unique backdrop to an opera about its construction. The use of ‘live’ sound in this space would be virtually impossible.
So did it work this time round? There are always pros and cons. One cannot cavil about the impressive setting and the innovative staging, but some might miss the frisson of live performance – the unique sensation of strong, unamplified voices on one’s skin and penetrating one’s bones. There is a feeling that one might be listening through quality headphones to an opera performance on a digital platform such as Spotify. The voices sound as natural as is possible given current technology, but amplification evens out disparities in vocal size, quality, and projection, a large part of the attraction of live opera. However, the words are much clearer than is often the case in the theatre, making the surtitles virtually redundant.
The performances were uniformly strong, dominated by Adam Frandsen as The Architect, and Stacey Alleaume as Alexandra, the aspiring young diva. Frandsen coped well with the high tessitura and length of the role, his attractive lyric tenor only occasionally showing some signs of vocal strain. While his English diction was impeccable, the occasional Danish inflection was appealingly appropriate. Alleaume is a real find, a lyric soprano of warmth and substance with a radiant stage personality. One highlight – despite a heavy shower –was her singing of a sonnet celebrating Sydney, ‘When English ships first sailed between the Heads’.
Martin Buckingham as the Premier, and Samuel Dundas as the Politician, effectively represented conflicting political imperatives, both displaying strong vocal resources and creating distinctive characters. David Greco sang the Engineer – a character truly between a rock and a hard place – with great commitment, sympathy, a full, rounded tone, and a lithe stage presence. Adrian Tamburini’s smooth, rolling bass conveyed the duplicity and opportunism of the conniving Maestro, a figure who survives all the vicissitudes that plagued the project but finally receives his comeuppance when Alexandra returns in triumph to star in the opening performance.
Small playing platforms were moved back and forth as the action progressed, drawing the focus to small details of character and action, all overshadowed by the looming presence of the House itself. The sound designer, Tony David Cray, deserves many kudos for the uniformly excellent sound quality.
Purely coincidentally, a few days before the première, the National Opera Review was released by the federal government. This new production answers some of the questions that the Review poses. All in all, it is a remarkable opera that caught the attention of the public when first performed, and this production should attract a new audience. It is good to see a large-scale work which
The smaller roles were comparable in quality, with singers often playing multiple characters. Gerry Connolly was a suitably regal, if somewhat caricatured, Queen Elizabeth in a series of humorous exchanges at a party on her yacht.
A large part of the success of the performance must go to Anthony Legge, who conducted the orchestra and chorus ‘off-stage’ in the actual Opera House. Coordination with singers in front of the building was via a large monitor behind the seating, but there were few moments when one felt that communication between orchestra and stage was shaky. The steps of the Opera House is an expansive, wide-screen space to fill, but David Freeman directed the performers with an acute eye for detail, effectively using body language to convey character to the audience who are at some distance from the ‘stage’.
Freeman is aided by the innovative and flexible sets and Dan Potra’s striking costumes, which are complemented by Trent Suidgeest’s stark but subtle lighting.
shows great skill in blending various stylistic influences, as well as revealing a sure sense of dramaturgy from both librettist and composer. On one level, Sydney Opera House – The Opera is a nationalistic piece with occasional lapses into caricature and stereotype, but it has a very Australian sense of playfulness and irony that thumbs its nose at taking this all too seriously. It is a work that imaginatively, entertainingly, yet critically engages with recent and controversial history, and its role in the burgeoning mosaic of national identity. g
Sydney Opera House – The Opera (The Eighth Wonder), composed by Alan John and Dennis Watkins, and directed by David Freeman, was performed at the Sydney Opera House. Performance attended: 30 October 2016.
Michael Halliwell has published widely in the field of music and literature. A longer version of this review appears in Arts Update.
The Eighth Wonder (photograph by Hamilton Lund/Opera Australia)
Lisztomania
David Larkin
FRANZ LISZT: MUSICIAN, CELEBRITY, SUPERSTAR by Oliver Hilmes, translated by Stewart Spencer c
Acentury before Beatlemania there was Lisztomania. The symptoms were similar: fans driven to near delirium by their proximity to their musical idols, this mass hysteria finding involuntary physical release during performances. The Beatles may have been mobbed during their 1964 American tour, but Liszt left Berlin in March 1842 ‘not like a king, but as a king’, as one contemporary put it: in a carriage drawn by six white horses, surrounded by adoring crowds. Ken Russell tapped into the similarities between Liszt and contemporary rock idols in his marvellously extravagant film Lisztomania (1975), featuring The Who’s Roger Daltrey in glam rock outfits as Liszt (and with a brief cameo from Ringo Starr as the pope). Even with all its wilful anachronisms, this film conveys something of the mesmerising effect Liszt had on audiences throughout Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Oliver Hilmes is the latest biographer to try to capture in more sober prose the extravagance and variety of Liszt’s life. The subtitle of the English translation – Musician, Celebrity, Superstar – suggests a focus on the glamorous external aspects of his subject’s life, and Hilmes certainly has an eye for the sensational. Liszt’s more scandalous amours are covered in detail: among them Agnes Street-Klindworth, whom Hilmes describes as ‘the spy in lace petticoats’; and the ‘Cossack countess’ Olga Janina,
who was neither of those things, but who did brandish a revolver at Liszt and pretend to take poison in his presence.
Still more ink is expended on the two women who were his long-term companions: Comtesse Marie d’Agoult, who eloped with Liszt, bore him three children and after the break-up wrote an excoriating roman-à-clef about him; and Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, who left a failed marriage in native Poland with her young daughter to live with Liszt in provincial Weimar. Hilmes makes us aware of the social opprobrium that both women faced as a result of their choices, and in general draws attention to the less beatific aspects of both connections. For instance, as Liszt and a recently pregnant Marie arrived in Switzerland in 1835, the former wrote: ‘We are both in fairly good spirits and are not thinking of becoming unhappy.’ The sorry story of Carolyne’s attempts to obtain an annulment, and the vested interests which thwarted her ambition to marry Liszt at the eleventh hour are also recounted in detail.
On the whole, Hilmes is evenhanded in his treatment of the glitzy and the grimy aspects of his subject, and steers clear of the hagiographic tone infusing Alan Walker’s definitive threevolume study of the composer (1983–96). He disapprovingly describes the elderly Liszt as setting a bad example for his young pupils by his excessive drinking (two of his greatest pupils, Alfred Riesenauer and Arthur Friedheim, succumbed to alcoholism) and forcing them to smoke. Still less palatable to modern sensibilities is Liszt’s harsh treatment of his three children, who lived with their grandmother in Paris, and were forbidden from seeing their mother. His daughter Cosima’s emotional remoteness from her father late in his life can perhaps be thought of as a form of karmic justice. However, Liszt’s disinterested help for other artists is also featured, not least his artistic and financial support of Wagner.
Liszt’s legendary status within his own lifetime rested firmly on his pianistic accomplishments, yet these only occupied the first half of his career. At the age of thirty-five, he abruptly quit as a touring virtuoso and settled in Weimar
to devote himself to composition and to supporting other aspiring artists, whether through his piano teaching or through conducting new music. Hilmes consequently only devotes the first third of his book to Liszt’s years as a performer. There is little new in this retelling, although he does provide some welcome specifics as to Liszt’s earnings (and occasional losses) during this period. Hilmes doesn’t credit the cynical Heinrich Heine’s suspicions that the ecstatic audiences were seeded with paid applauders, but he does acknowledge ‘Liszt’s gift for self-promotion’.
While this book provides a highly readable account of Liszt the untouchable pianist and Liszt the attractive but flawed human, it skimps in its treatment of Liszt the composer. A single page is given to the major creative accomplishments of his thirteen years in Weimar: his development of a poetically infused orchestral music, which led to the invention of the single-movement symphonic poem, and the epic multimovement Faust and Dante symphonies. Perhaps more was not to be expected: the dust-jacket describes Hilmes as holding a PhD in twentieth-century history, and he is best known in the English-speaking world for his biography of Cosima Wagner (2010), a musically significant figure but not a creative one.
Nonetheless, the primary reason why we care about Liszt today is because of the compositions he left behind, particularly those for piano. We can learn of Liszt’s significance for his era through accounts of Lisztomania, but his significance for ours is because we can be thrilled anew by performances of his virtuoso Mephisto Waltz, or transported by his glorious Sonata in B minor Hilmes may have shied away from indepth discussion of his works because of the inherent difficulty of capturing the experience of music in words, but these works are what has enabled Liszt to fulfil his ambition ‘to hurl [his] lance into the boundless realms of the future’. g
David Larkin is a senior lecturer in musicology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Hubbard’s church
Fiona Gruber
FAIR GAME: THE INCREDIBLE UNTOLD STORY OF SCIENTOLOGY IN AUSTRALIA
by Steve Cannane
ABC Books
$32.99 pb, 378 pp, 9780733331329
When you join the Church of Scientology, you sign a contract for a billion years. You are then audited with the help of a machine called an ‘E Meter’, which helps uncover areas of conflict and blockages in your current life and previous ones. The goal, after undergoing an intensive and expensive course of study into the theories and practice of the Church’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, is to go ‘clear’. This state, one of utmost analytical clarity, gives one the ability to achieve goals impossible in a ‘pre-clear’ state. Each step costs thousands of dollars, but the rewards, say adherents, are worth it. Alongside the anonymous rank and file, Scientology can count many celebrities among its present or former members. These include John Travolta, Tom Cruise and (formerly) Nicole Kidman, James Packer, and Australian rugby league stars Joe Reaiche and Pat Jarvis.
So how did Hubbard, a small-time science fiction writer, end up as a man of such influence? His Californian roommate from the 1940s, newspaperman Nieson Himmel, is quoted as saying, ‘whenever [Hubbard] was talking about being hard up, he often used to say that he thought the easiest way to make money would be to start a religion’. At that point, Hubbard – depressed and dabbling in occultism – was on a veteran’s pension from the US Navy.
By 1954 the pulp sci-fi author had written Dianetics, with its highly attractive science of self-improvement, and founded the Church of Scientology. Its philosophy of self-betterment chimed with the times; the book and the movement soon became worldwide,
phenomena with hundreds of thousands of devotees. They made him millions of dollars and gave him enormous power and influence. Despite Scientology’s claims that it could rid the body of illness, both physical and mental, Hubbard suffered from chronic pancreatitis and died from a stroke in 1986. By this time he was a wanted man, hiding out on a ranch in California and sleeping in his Blue Bird motorhome, ready for a quick getaway if the FBI or his many litigants should track him down. His church, however, under his youthful successor, David Miscavige, was flourishing.
Steve Cannane, author of Fair Game , explains in the Introduction that he is not intent on mocking the belief system of Scientiologists, which includes an evil God Xenu and a race of extra-terrestrials called Thetans. Cannane is much more interested in the abuses of power exercised over the past sixty-odd years, the lives ruined, laws broken. Cannane has spent several years on Scientology’s tail, starting as an investigator for the ABC program Lateline in 2010, which aired accusations of child ill treatment and sexual abuse within the church, charges that were vehemently denied.
The book’s title refers to Hubbard’s instructions on how to deal with critics; opponents who were fair game, he wrote in 1967 could be ‘deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.’ Targets have included organisations and individuals: journalists, judges, politicians, psychiatrists, and ex-members.
Hubbard’s third wife, Mary Sue Whipp, went to prison for her role in running Operation Snow White, a plan of mass infiltration of government and private offices, including the US Justice, Treasury and Labor departments, and the Internal Revenue Service. The plan, hatched in 1973, was to root out any documents that cast a negative slant on Scientology.
The paranoia and vengefulness extends to members, including those who have held high office. In a climate of fear and constant informing worthy
of the Stasi, anyone caught breaking rules, having ‘thought crimes’ or standing up to Hubbard or Miscavige could and can be imprisoned, sometimes for years, in what amount to prison camps, with punishing hard labour. Even those who get out aren’t safe. Former Scientologist spokesman Mike Rinder, who joined the church in Adelaide in the 1960s and rose to become head of its oppressive Office of Special Affairs, left in 2007. Since then he has been under constant surveillance. This, according to Cannane, includes being stalked and being filmed by cameras hidden in neighbours’ nesting boxes.
Cannane is especially interesting on the role of Scientology in Australia, a country Hubbard knew from his wartime posting in Brisbane. Some of the earliest recruits came from Melbourne, and many rose to positions of power. Victoria banned Scientology after the damning Anderson Inquiry of 1963–65. Hubbard, formerly glowing in his assessment of the country, concluded in Scientology’s response, entitled ‘Kangaroo Court’, that ‘only a society founded by criminals, organized by criminals and devoted to making people criminals could come to such a conclusion’.
Cannane also explores the role Julian Assange and fellow internet warriors have played in undermining Scientology’s secrecy and practice of hounding critics. At a time of declining membership – in the United States it has fallen from 55,000 in in 2001 to 25,000 in 2008 – the web may be the greatest enemy to the church’s public profile and business model; members pay up to a US$300,000 to reach the highest rung of enlightenment, Operating Thetan VIII, but much of this secret teaching is now freely available on the web, as is a welter of hostile publicity.
Former church spokesman Robert Vaughn Young has described the church’s predicament as Scientology’s ‘Vietnam’. ‘Their only choice is to withdraw’, he is quoted as saying – ‘they cannot win’. For the church, Steve Cannane’s study is another unwelcome sally. g
Fiona Gruber is an arts journalist and producer.
Australian Book Review presents
Arts Update
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Contributors include
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Ian Dickson
Morag Fraser
Andrew Fuhrmann
Fiona Gruber
Grazia Gunn
Michael Halliwell
Philippa Hawker
Sophie Knezic
David Larkin
James McNamara
Michael Shmith
Jake Wilson
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Forever twilight
Bruce Moore
THE MAKING OF THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY
by Peter Gilliver
Oxford University Press
$81.95 hb, 642 pp, 9780199283620
There have been popular accounts of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, especially Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998) and The Meaning of Everything (2003), and there have been more scholarly accounts, such as Charlotte Brewer’s Treasure-House of the Language: The Living OED (2007). Peter Gilliver’s 642page The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary is firmly anchored in the scholarly tradition, as it documents the history of the OED project from brief mentions of the desirability of a new dictionary in the records of meetings of the Philological Society in the 1840s, through to the OED’s present online,and constantly changing third edition.
The first half of the book deals with the first edition and its supplement (1861–1933), focusing on James Murray as chief editor, and the three other editors appointed later to assist him: Henry Bradley, William Craigie, and Charles Onions. The second half of the book (1935 to the present) focuses on the four supplements edited by Robert Burchfield, the 1989 second edition (amalgamating, in electronic form, the text of the first edition with the supplements) by Edmund Weiner and John Simpson, and the start of the third edition under the editorship of John Simpson.
In the account of the first edition, there is abundant evidence for a history of Hogwartsian dimensions: the setting is the medieval university town of Oxford, where the supremely wise magicianlexicographer Dumbledore-Murray trains a band of magicians to produce a work of overwhelming national significance, all lined up against the shadowy figures of the ‘Delegates’, that Oxonian term for the group of academics who control the publication of the University
Press’s books, and who work under the unreasonable belief that books should be published according to an agreed timetable and budget, with the text limited to an agreed number of pages. When Murray came on board in 1879, the plan was for a four-volume work of 6,400 pages to be completed in ten years; it took fifty years, ten volumes, and 15,490 pages.
One of the strengths of Gilliver’s history, however, is that it offers nuanced assessments of all participants: Delegates and lexicographers, significant players such as Frederick Furnivall (of the Philological Society, the original sponsor of the project), and even volunteer contributors. In so doing, he brings to life the drama of this enterprise in ways that show how difficult it was for all sides. Indeed, there were also many professional and personal tensions among the lexicographers themselves. While it may not be obvious to the casual user of the dictionary, the different editors produced entries of differing kinds and qualities.
Murray certainly had cause for complaint about the way he was treated at Oxford. He was an outsider, a Scot who was not university educated. During his period as editor, he was twice denied a fellowship at Oxford colleges. He was deeply offended by the fact that the Delegates continually interfered in editorial matters – for example, suggesting deletions of particular words or classes of words (compounds and derivatives, technical words, regional words), or protesting at the use of illustrative quotations from newspapers – in ways that demonstrated their ignorance of the lexicographical task in which he was engaged. Murray died in 1915 and did not live to see the project completed; the last word he worked on was twilight. We are left with an overriding sense of Murray’s clarity of vision right from the beginning of his editorship – he knew what the dictionary should be, and he triumphantly put that knowledge into effect.
Many anecdotes bring to life the social environment in which the dictionary was produced. Murray discovered missing material for the section ‘Pa’ in a stable in Ireland, where it was being used ‘to light fires or rub down horses’. The ironically titled Scriptorium (in fact
a corrugated-iron shed), constructed at the back of Murray’s Oxford house, in which much of the editing and sorting of quotations was done, had to be sunk two feet into the ground so that it did not ‘injure the outlook’ of the next-door neighbour, a Professor of English Law; the consequent dampness of the building led to illness of varying degrees of seriousness for all who worked there. In the preparation of the first supplement, someone deleted Bradley’s entries for lesbian and lesbianism, which prompted him to protest: ‘Lesbianism is no doubt a very disagreeable thing, but the word is in regular use, & no serious Supplement to our work should omit it.’ They omitted it anyway.
Work on the third edition began in the early 1990s, and although a ‘wizard’ 2005 publication date was planned, later extended to 2010, a completion date is no longer mentioned. For users, the online electronic form is the most obvious change, with new and revised entries being added regularly across the whole dictionary. An even more signific-ant change is the policy to move from a British English dictionary (with voices from some of the former colonies) to a truly World English dictionary –‘English in all its varieties’.
Whether or not the dictionary will ever appear again in hard copy is uncertain. Gilliver suggests it might, but it is impossible to know at this stage. The history of the Dictionary should warn us that any firm predictions about such matters are mere dorbellism, foziness, jobbernowlism, lourderie, sottage, and sumphishness. g
Bruce Moore, editor of the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary (2016), was director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre from 1994 to 2011.
Psychic juice
Nick Haslam
IVAN PAVLOV: A RUSSIAN LIFE IN SCIENCE
by Daniel P. Todes Oxford University Press
$52.95 hb, 855 pp, 9780199925193
Conventional wisdom has it that Ivan Pavlov made dogs salivate to the sound of a bell, discovered the conditioned reflex, and laid the foundations for behaviourism, an austere creed that ruled the mind to be off limits for science. Almost all of this is false. Pavlov’s bell was in fact a sophisticated adjustable buzzer. The ‘conditioned reflex’ is a mistranslation: reflexes are instead ‘conditional’, occurring only under certain conditions. Pavlov, no behaviourist, saw his scientific work as a pathway to understanding ‘our consciousness and its torments’. His goal was not to reduce mind to mechanism but to use the tools of digestive physiology to comprehend the complexity of psychological functions and individuality. As the distinguished medical historian Daniel Todes writes in this superb biography, the salivary glands were to Pavlov a window into the psyche.
The only correct feature of the popular image of Pavlov is the iconic dogs. He dabbled in other creatures during his long career, including a disastrous involvement with mice and a more positive experience with a pair of chimpanzees. At one point he resisted a recommendation from Alfred Nobel to study giraffes. But Pavlov always returned to his faithful dogs, which he regarded with unrestrained anthropomorphism. As Todes astutely notes, Pavlov had ‘a long-standing practice of
interpreting dogs as people and people as dogs’. A keen student of canine temperament, he observed that dogs came in many distinct ‘nervous types’, but they were all members of a species that was uniquely suited to his mode of experimentation.
For the dogs involved, this special status was a cross to bear. Pavlov’s preferred experimental method was to perform surgeries that allowed the animal’s salivary, gastric, or pancreatic secretions to be collected via fistulas. The vivisected animals were then exposed to an assortment of conditions and their secretions precisely measured. The cruelty of these studies reveals the extent to which Pavlov sometimes failed to see dogs as people. In ‘sham feeding’ experiments, food was ingested but fell through an incised hole in the oesophagus back into the feeding bowl, to be devoured all over again in Sisyphean fashion. In ‘teasing experiments’, food was presented to the animal but withheld. Pavlov’s observation that salivation sometimes increases when food is merely signalled rather than consumed – what he called ‘psychic secretion’ – revealed a way for mental phenomena to be examined in liquid form. His studies of the determinants of this ‘psychic juice’ were carried out on an industrial scale, as was his collection of bottled canine gastric juice for the treatment of human dyspepsia, the sales of which supported his laboratory’s work.
Todes leaves no aspect of Pavlov’s life and times unexplored. His biography is comprehensive on the subject of Pavlov’s scientific development, starting from his turn away from religion as a young seminarian to his role as an elder statesman of the Soviet academy in the 1930s. Scientific success came slowly to Pavlov, and his story offers hope for despairing young scholars the world over. At the age of thirty-two his longgestating dissertation was rejected by its examiners. A year later, in 1883, after becoming side-tracked by a new theory of urination, he submitted another thesis that received a grudging pass. By the age of forty Pavlov had been passed over for two junior academic positions, had experienced a period of homelessness, and was employed as a part-time lecturer in pharmacology, outside his true
field of expertise. A mere fifteen years later, in 1904, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, the first Russian to be so honoured. A similar false dusk can be seen in the early career of Sigmund Freud, whose scientific work was derailed by the need to make a living as a neurologist in private practice, and veered off alarmingly into theories of the nasal origins of neurosis and the therapeutic value of cocaine. We can imagine the two towering figures in the late 1880s, dreaming parallel dreams, in St Petersburg and Vienna, of the future success that seemed to be slipping away from them.
Todes does not present Pavlov’s life simply as the trials and triumphs of a singular scientific hero. The book embeds him in his moment in history and his life outside the laboratory: his troubled relationship with his father, his illnesses, his enduring affair with a colleague, the summers in his beloved Baltic dacha, and his many battles with the Soviet authorities. Pavlov’s attitude towards the latter was for many years antagonistic, his dissidence only tolerated because of his global scientific standing. Announcing that the Russian Revolution had created a mass neurotic breakdown and that Lenin’s dictatorship of the proletariat was only ‘the administration of slaves’ did not endear him to the revolutionaries, who confiscated his Nobel Prize funds. Nevertheless, Pavlov was equally averse to the tsars and the Orthodox Church, and as a fervent Russian patriot he eventually accommodated himself to the Soviet regime. Its ideologues in turn did their best to co-opt Pavlov’s science, representing it as a source of ‘water for the materialist mill’.
Ivan Pavlov: A Russian life in science is an exceptional scientific biography, but it is also a vivid portrait of its time and place. Todes wears his exhaustive research lightly, never burdening the reader with unnecessary or undigested detail. Unlike Pavlov’s dogs, teased and drained into a state of perpetual appetite, the reader is left fully sated. g
Nick Haslam is Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne.
Mess is good
Tim Smartt
THE GARDENER AND THE CARPENTER: WHAT THE NEW SCIENCE OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT TELLS US ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PARENTS AND CHILDREN
by Alison Gopnik Bodley Head
$42.99 hb, 303 pp, 9781847921611
Philosophers do not have the best track record as parents. Plato seemed to entertain the idea that children should be raised by the state. Rousseau abandoned all five of his children to an orphanage. There is a rumour that Descartes used to travel with a lifesized mechanical doll that he named after his daughter. Wittgenstein was encouraged to move on from his brief career as a primary school teacher in rural Austria after it was discovered that he would sometimes pull the children’s hair out if they were particularly bad at mathematics.
Alison Gopnik, a philosopher and psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working hard to correct this situation. Her latest book, The Gardener and the Carpenter, is a deeply researched enquiry into the world of childhood, particularly the connection between child and adult that we have come to call ‘parenting.’
One way to summarise Gopnik’s overall point is to notice something funny about the word ‘parent’. It has become a verb. This is odd, since words that denote similar relationships don’t shift so happily into verbs. We don’t really friend our friends, or spouse our spouses, or daughter our parents. But in recent years, Gopnik suggests, we have learned to parent our kids. In the process, we have become increasingly anxious about whether we are doing it right. The shift here is a transition from a kind of relationship to a kind of work. The upshot is that it is now all too easy to worry about our parenting techniques, when this should be as
odd as worrying about our spousing or friending techniques. While there are certainly ways to wonder whether we are being good friends or good spouses, no other relationship has created a behemoth quite like the parenting industry. This literature is heavily prescriptive, filled with rules, activities, and plans that promise to transform parents into experts at what now seems to be a necessary and vital skill: parenting.
Like the best analytically minded philosophers, Gopnik shows that noticing what we do with words goes a long way towards understanding why certain options and desires come to life for us. She sets out to show that there is an enormous difference between ‘parenting’ and ‘being a parent’, and that we have every reason to resist the former and cultivate the latter. The most significant reason is that parenting creates the very obstacles for children’s development that it intends to overcome. In a nutshell, Gopnik hopes to convince us that ‘parenting is a terrible invention’. Gopnik explains the distinction between parenting and being a parent through a charming pair of images: a carpenter and a gardener. A carpenter is someone beholden to the idea of parenting as a project that is directed toward crafting a child into a particular kind of adult. Perhaps a successful or happy adult. They study the parenting literature for the right blueprints, tools, and instructions, and then they get to work.
If the villain of Gopnik’s book is an activity-hungry kind of parenting, who is the hero? In a word, the hero is mess. Mess is good. Deeply good. A gardener is a parent who respects the mess of childhood. Gopnik argues that gardeners learn to accommodate randomness, spontaneity, and variety in their garden, not to eradicate it. The good gardener creates a protected, stable, and safe environment for the mess of nature to take form and flourish. A gardener doesn’t make the plants, she creates an environment that lets the plants themselves flourish.
To my lights, at least, this idea sounds like it is on the right track. The brilliance of Gopnik’s book is to be found in the arguments she gives to support her point. To convince us of the errors of parenting, Gopnik draws on
research in developmental psychology. The overwhelming lesson is that our current best biological and evolutionary story about children’s development is that they thrive in the extended mess of childhood. Much of the empirical detail of this story comes from Gopnik’s own lab at Berkeley, and she recounts the fascinating results of this research in rigorous, sparkling prose.
One example of this type of argument is her work on the question of how children learn. The cliché is true: children are sponges. But they’re intelligent sponges who sensitively calibrate their credences in response to a suite of epistemic factors about, for example, a speaker’s confidence, counterfactual possibility, predictive power, and inductive grounds, without being taught these concepts. This research supports the idea that children are incredibly skilled at acquiring information from the world. They learn best by simply being allowed to learn, rather than being the beneficiaries of parenting techniques.
The final chapter addresses the philosophical question, ‘Why have children?’ Although Gopnik draws on the work of L.A. Paul, I was left wishing this chapter had been longer. For instance, I would have loved to watch Gopnik tease out the implications of some recent work on the normative value of childhood by philosophers such as Tamar Schapiro and J. David Velleman.
Caring for a child is demanding. The central point of The Gardner and the Carpenter should come as a balm: we have good scientific reasons for believing that perhaps we’re making it a lot harder work than it should be. g
Tim Smartt is a Research Associate at the University of Notre Dame Australia in the Institute for Ethics and Society. ❖
Broad appeal
Ian Gibbins
THE BEST AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE WRITING 2016
edited by Jo Chandler NewSouth
$29.99 pb, 308 pp, 9781742235035
Most scientists are writers. Notwithstanding the distortions induced by the ‘publish or perish’ imperative of funding agencies and academic appointment committees, the publication of original research is fundamental to the scientific process. Depending on the field, a successful scientist may write a hundred or more publications over his or her career. In terms of sheer numbers of words, this is equivalent to two or three full-length novels.
The best Australian science is published in a daunting array of international journals, mostly discipline-specific, but some, such as Nature and Science, cover the whole scientific enterprise. So far in 2016, more than 100 articles with Australian co-authors have appeared in Nature, and around sixty in Science Modern science is highly collaborative, and not all co-authors necessarily end up with text in the final articles. Nevertheless, this output represents a significant contribution to the leading edge of scientific literature.
Given this wealth of internationally recognised, peer-reviewed literature, how much appears in The Best Australian Science Writing 2016? Well, none. Such is the paradox of scientific writing: it is aimed primarily at other scientists, using the unavoidable combination of technical terminology and dry writing style necessary for concise professional communication. However, these same constraints often make the scientific literature opaque to non-specialists in the field, let alone to readers without a formal scientific background. This is nothing new. Coincident with the development of modern science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an emerging breed of authors used lay language to popularise the latest, most ex-
citing scientific discoveries. Faced with our current absence of well-informed national science policy, we need good practitioners of popular science writing more than ever. Consequently, we should be grateful for the fine selection of contemporary popular science writing collected by Jo Chandler in the 2016 edition of Best Australian Science Writing. Who are the best writers to bring science to the people? Scientists, who surely have the requisite insight and deep knowledge of their chosen subject? Or professional journalists who can tell a good story within the constraints of commercial publishing? Perhaps unsurprisingly, this collection contains articles from both camps. Indeed, two-thirds of the authors of the thirty-four articles assembled here are not by practising scientists. While most are experienced science journalists, poets and novelists add to the mix. Each of the scientists has made or is making significant contributions to his or her field of research. They range from PhD students through hospital physicians to a Nobel Prize winner, all equally intent on bringing their stories to a wider audience.
The broad appeal of science is indicated by the breadth of publications in which the articles have appeared. As well as established outlets like Cosmos magazine and ABC Radio National’s The Science Show, this year’s collection includes articles originally published in The Age (drilling ice core samples in the Antarctic), Newsweek (the perils of astronomy in Afghanistan), and The Monthly (infections; eel migrations; lizard census).
Many articles are short, offering alluring glimpses into modern research practice and its practitioners. However, this collection also contains longer articles originally published in the Griffith Review, The Weekend Australian Magazine, Aeon Magazine, and Australian Book Review itself (Ashley Hay’s Dahl Fellowship essay ‘The Forest at the Edge of Time’ has since won the Bragg UNSW Press Prize for Science Writing 2016). These essays benefit greatly from extended discussions of complex scientific concepts and their relevance for broader society. Amongst them, Margaret Wertheim, artist and science histo-
rian, expertly traverses current debates into the nature of conscious experience; Leah Kaminsky, physician, novelist, and poetry editor at the Medical Journal of Australia, explicates the emerging potentials and perils of individualised medicine resulting from the astounding progress in molecular biology; while Kathy Marks, the Independent’s AsiaPacific correspondent, critically appraises links between private and public players in the power and energy industries that have led to Australia’s demonstrably weak policy responses to global climate change.
Women feature prominently in this collection, both as authors (just over half) and as subjects of articles. Some female scientists, such as Tanya Monro, internationally recognised for her research on the properties of optical fibres (‘Her Brilliant Career’ by Wilson Da Silva), wield substantial influence in their fields and beyond. Others, such as Claire Wade, dog geneticist (‘Lessons From The Working Dog’ by Hazel Flynn and Elizabeth Finkel), quietly pursue their work, with its impact largely unknown outside specialist circles. With the struggle for equal opportunity for women in science nowhere near won, these stories vividly illustrate how women can make a significant mark in science, technology, and their broader applications.
As in previous editions, The Best Australian Science Writing 2016 takes a cue from website design, and offers links to related topics at the end of each article. Given that article titles can be somewhat cryptic in isolation, these links are an excellent way to navigate the collection. In an era when so much information is presented visually, it is refreshing to find no illustrations in this anthology. It really is all about the writing, ‘the story telling’ as emphasised by Chandler in her Introduction. Quoting ‘Radiology’ by poets Magdalena Ball and Rob Walker, let’s ‘put those speech bubbles under their own scan’. In doing so, we gain remarkable insights into the ever-evolving world of Australian science and its scientists. g
Ian Gibbins was a neuroscientist for more than thirty years.
In his own time
Michael Shmith
THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED: A LIFE LIVED BEHIND THE LENS
by Tony Garnett
Constable
$49.99 hb, 306 pp, 9781472122735
Tony Garnett, one of the most respected figures in British television drama, is also one of its most reclusive. Most people these days have almost certainly never heard of him, or, if they have, probably think he is a distant relation of Alf Garnett, of Till Death Us Do Part fame.
Even though the cantankerous Alf was a fictional character (played by the great, late Warren Mitchell), there is a slight connection between place and time. Both Alf and Tony Garnett were creatures of BBC Television in the monochromatic 1960s. While Alf made Britain shudder with his crude preTrumpist views that embraced racism and sexism, Tony, a producer who joined the BBC fresh from university, made Britain think hard about social realism. He was one of that generation of socalled radical creators who tackled the economic and social issues of the day, highlighting endemic problems such as housing, child care, police corruption, and psychiatric cruelty.
Through the use of such formidable directors such as Ken Loach, Garnett was responsible for a string of social-realistic documentary-dramas, all shot on grainy film stock and always on location, the most famous of which were Cathy Come Home (1966) and Up the Junction (1968). Garnett had a thirteen-year association with Loach (‘We were joined at the hip,’ Garnett recalls), which also resulted in the feature film Kes (1969) about a young Yorkshire lad who befriends a kestrel. It nearly didn’t get made, when a financier, turning it down, said, ‘Sorry, not for us. Wrong kind of bird.’
In the history of television, Tony Garnett, who is now eighty, stands out as a man of perseverance, great talent, and, above all, with a streak of reticence
that has successfully kept him out of the public gaze. ‘The infant refusing to tap-dance’ is how he describes his reclusiveness. ‘[F]or decades I scrupulously hid myself away, putting others up to be interviewed as the publicity machines became hungrier.’ Indeed, Garnett politely declined requests to be on Desert Island Discs and in Who’s Who. ‘I knew who I was and didn’t need to be in a book to find out,’ he said. (Yet he agreed to be interviewed, extensively and illuminatingly, for Louise Ormond’s recent documentary, Versus: The life and films of Ken Loach.)
Now he has his own book, in which he tells his story in his own time – and this is a story of heartbreak as well as achievement. In 1941, in Birmingham during the Blitz, when Garnett was five, his mother died of septicaemia contracted after a backstreet abortion; nineteen days later, his father committed suicide. These terrible events and their aftermath formed the pivotal point of Garnett’s life. Even today, as he writes, the direct memories remain vivid: ‘They play in my head, sharply focused, the voices clear, like a film.’
The Day the Music Died is indeed film-like in its narrative structure, economy of words, and setting of scenes and sequences. It is studded with affectionate reminiscence, remorseful recollections and poignant reminders. In the latter category is his discovery, in his aunt’s underwear drawer, of his father’s suicide note, which begins, ‘It is now 3 long weeks since my sweetheart was taken from me and I feel I cannot carry on without her …’
The book moves swiftly, tellingly, from tragic childhood and life with a big and devoted family, through a sad marriage and early acting career, to the BBC and independent-film years, and voluntary exile in Los Angeles during the Thatcher years. Garnett returned to Britain in the early 1990s to run his own independent company, and the book winds up at the end of that decade. I’m sure, though, he has more to say.
The book is not without its eccentricities and comic moments. Garnett’s gimlet eye is enviable, and there are many acute observations, mostly on the kind side. Possibly not is his account of
a drinking bout between two veterans of the bottle, writer David Mercer and psychiatrist R.D. Laing:
As David demolished a bottle of spirits his speech became blurred and soon degenerated into pompous nonsense. But Ronnie’s eloquent, insightful sentences kept rolling out, seemingly unaffected, indeed lubricated, by the booze; each had a subject, verb and predicate, carrying many complicated subsidiary clauses, and I would wait for it to crash. But every time he would land it smoothly and perfectly on a full stop, the meaning intact and the style elegant to the end. The alcohol’s only effect was a slower delivery.
The temptation with The Day the Music Died is to believe it should have been written, say, half a century earlier, when the influence of many of Tony Garnett’s television productions were profound and lasting. But it is precisely the long after-effects of Garnett’s pioneering work that makes the book so relevant, so important. He managed, quietly and successfully, to combat misguided right-wing opinion (chief offender, the odious self-appointed moral censor Mary Whitehouse) and consistent opposition from high within the BBC. In doing so, Garnett set the BBC on a new course that still influences creativity and public thought. It is the story that just had to be told. g
Michael Shmith is a Melbourne writer and critic.
This year’s “good read”
http://www.lady-ruth-bromfield.com
Reparation
Rachel Robertson
A TEAR IN THE SOUL
by Amanda Webster
NewSouth
$29.99 pb, 288 pp, 9781742235134
ATear in the Soul is a fine example of creative non-fiction that unfolds a personal story but also advances our knowledge of Australian society, past and present. It is a nuanced contribution to the growing body of literature in which contemporary nonIndigenous Australians attempt to make sense of the history of white settlement and take responsibility for our own complicity in the past and current treatment of Indigenous peoples. In combining a personal quest to reconnect to her past with an exploration of 1960s Kalgoorlie and a moral self-examination, Webster has written a book in which story and idea interweave to engage and move us, even while we are forced to confront disturbing material.
Webster was born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, her father and grandfather both local doctors. When she started school in the 1960s, she met Aboriginal children from the nearby Kurrawang Mission, who, she assumed, were orphans happily living in a caring community. She became particularly friendly with Bronwyn, who spent a summer holiday with Webster’s family in Esperance, and took a shine to a boy called Tony. Forty years later, a discussion with colleagues triggers a return to Western Australia to track down her friends. She is able to find them only
after meeting Gregory Ugle, Tony’s brother, who has self-published a story about his years at Kurrawang.
Gregory is initially wary about talking to Webster; the book delicately unfolds the complexities of their relationship and the developing trust between them which eventually leads to a warm friendship. He becomes Webster’s guide into the lives of the Kurrawang children, and takes her to meet his family and Bronwyn. In the course of her interviews with children and staff who lived at Kurrawang and her research into the archives, Webster pieces together the first, albeit partial, history of the Kurrawang Mission. Many of her childhood assumptions are challenged; the children were not orphans but part of the Stolen Generations. The conditions at Kurrawang were harsh and overcrowded, families were separated, and the children were treated cruelly at times, while also experiencing some care and support.
Bronwyn is homeless and living in the bush when Webster visits her. The scenes where the two friends unite are written with a light touch; they are pleased to see each other, but the differences between them are obvious and make their interactions complex and sometimes fraught. Webster is particularly caught up in questioning whether she should give money to Bronwyn or direct it to a community group that supports Aboriginal people. Resources are partly what she considers to be her reparation for the past: for her own relative affluence and ease compared with her Aboriginal peers’ struggles and poverty; for her grandfather’s role as local Aboriginal Protector; for white Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal peoples. More than money, though, this book is a form of reparation, an attempt to represent the reality of children’s lives in Kurrawang, the pain and damage they have experienced since, and to honour their resilience. Webster says, ‘I don’t believe it is possible to hurt another person without hurting oneself, an invisible hurt, a tear in the soul that allows the essence of one’s humanity to leak out, like bleeding from a cut … A collective group can’t hurt another collective group without hurting itself.’ She
believes that saying sorry ‘without some form of reparation’ is close to meaningless. This is not the act of someone trying to absolve herself from guilt or heal her ‘tear’, but rather a deeply moral exploration of our joint responsibilities for others’ sufferings, whether caused by our ‘collective group’ or not.
The most moving parts of the book are individuals’ stories, like Gregory’s tale of survival and his son’s response to his father’s experiences, and like the stories of Beverly Joy and Catherine, who lived at different times at Kurrawang, who both experienced rape there, and who, as Webster only discovers much later, were teenage mother and daughter. There is a heart-rending moment in the book when Webster finds out Beverly Joy’s real name (rather than the one given to her by the missionaries) and is able to tell it to her daughter Catherine for the first time. ‘Again I thought how odd and wrong it was that it fell to me to deliver information about a mother to an Aboriginal person.’
An interesting aspect of this book is the way the narrator changes as she learns more about Kurrawang and the goldfields Aboriginal community. She starts to learn to read the land and its people. She says of Kurrawang, ‘It was one of the few places I’d been where the veil between past and present seemed as fine as dust. Or as thin as a layer of skin. I was beginning to understand that landscape is never neutral. It has memory.’ She recounts her blunders in trying to understand the Indigenous people and to behave in culturally appropriate ways. She has thought deeply about the ethical implications of her work, and her Epilogue addresses the issue of when it is acceptable for a white person to tell such a story. Webster’s sensitivity and thoughtfulness, her careful processes, her willingness to own the dark aspects of her own family’s past, and her collaboration with Gregory Ugle all contribute to making this a strong and ethical book that adds to our understanding of West Australian history. g
Rachel Robertson is a lecturer in professional writing at Curtin University. She was joint winner of the 2008 Calibre Essay Prize.
Shifting genres
Kerryn Goldsworthy
THE FICTION OF THEA ASTLEY
by Susan Sheridan Cambria Press
$109.99 hb, 182 pp, 9781604979329
The record for the largest number of Miles Franklin Literary Awards ever won is jointly held by Tim Winton and Thea Astley, with four wins each. It may seem odd that with three of those already behind her, Astley should also have won the Patrick White Award in 1989 for ‘a writer who has been highly creative over a long period but has not necessarily received adequate recognition’. But, as David Carter wrote in an essay for ABR (December 2012–January 2013), the terms of the award are more complex than that: ‘The terms do state that the Award is for “an author who has already made a contribution to Australian literature by the writing … of published novels, short stories, poetry and/or plays”, with the purpose of encouraging the author “to continue to write such works for publication”.’
Susan Sheridan argues in her new book that Astley’s fiction steadily increased in both depth and complexity over her long career, and that her last six novels – those published from 1986 onwards – were her best. If this is the case, then that Patrick White Award did exactly what it was designed to do – despite the fact that on winning it, Astley herself, with a characteristic mix of selfdeprecation, sharpness of tongue, and an Eeyore-like world view, dismissed it as the prize ‘for people who fail’.
For a variety of reasons, it has become increasingly difficult over the last twenty years or so for scholars of Australian literature to publish full-length works, especially critical studies of individual authors. Cambria Press is an academic publishing house based in the United States, and its Cambria Australian Literature Series was established in 2008 under the general editorship, then as now, of Susan Lever. The Fiction of Thea Astley is the latest in its series
of monographs on Australian authors, which includes studies of the works of Christopher Koch, Shirley Hazzard, and David Foster, among others. The people most likely to buy this book are academics and university librarians, who are used to the prohibitive prices of most academic texts, but it can also be accessed electronically; e-versions start at $8.99 for a short rental, with library rentals and longer periods for various other prices.
Since Astley’s death in 2004, interest in her work has been sustained by various means, not least the collection of essays edited by Sheridan and Paul Genoni, Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds (2006). This new study, coming in the wake of Karen Lamb’s biography of Astley, Inventing Her Own Weather (2015), is the first full-length critical monograph on Astley’s fiction; in her Introduction, Sheridan says, ‘One of my hopes for this book is that it will contribute to confirming her reputation as a major novelist.’
Sheridan herself is one of the most respected and reliable scholars in Australian literary studies, and this book should certainly fulfil her hopes for it; she is one of those critics who can manage to be engaging and readable without any glossing over or dumbing down of complex ideas. There are little flourishes of throwaway wit, as when she describes the titles of Hunting the Wild Pineapple (1979) and It’s Raining in Mango (1987) as ‘fruity’, and of disarming directness in her engagement with other critics: ‘This is a misreading of the text, I believe.’
The description of Astley’s fiction in the Introduction covers every one of her sixteen works of fiction, one way or another, and serves as a basis for Sheridan’s own critical approach:
[Astley’s] work is driven by a moral revulsion against greed and corruption, against class prejudice and the cruelties practiced on social outsiders, against the racism of colonial dispossession and exploitation of Indigenous people, and against the presumption of male superiority and the physical and psychic violence practiced against women.
Accordingly, Sheridan’s critical meth-
odology comes mainly from the toolboxes of feminist and post-colonial critique. But she neither confines herself to these approaches nor swamps the practice with the theory, and she uses the idea of location, with its implied corollary of community, as a structural basis for the book: ‘The distinctive appeal of her work comes from her unique sense of place, in tropical Queensland and the South Pacific,’ she writes, and later adds, ‘The main organizing principle in this study of Astley’s fiction is her representation of place and power relations, and the innovative work of historicizing place.’
Sheridan also pays close attention to the business of storytelling, patiently sorting through the many narrative voices and focal characters of Astley’s complex techniques, especially in such works as A Kindness Cup (1974), where the time frame is both jumbled and compressed, its events filtered through one character’s consciousness and memory. There is also steady attention, throughout the book, to Astley’s shifting genres and modes – realism, comedy, irony, satire, tragedy – as well as to her ornate style. The Acolyte (1972) is described as ‘a sustained exercise in showing off, Astley’s virtuoso style at its most punning, allusive, and anarchic’.
Sheridan traces Astley’s steadily increasing intellectual and political sophistication while showing how certain themes, preoccupations, and stylistic features, apparent even in her earliest novels, keep reappearing throughout the rest. Unlike any critical discussion of Astley’s work that has preceded it, this book not only offers multiple comparative analyses of different novels, but also represents a kind of stepping back: a broadening of critical perspective to look at Astley’s entire oeuvre as a single entity, and to discern its patterns and developments over time. g
Kerryn Goldsworthy’s books include a monograph on Helen Garner (1996).
Readers who expect to be treated with gentlemanly courtesy have always found D. H. Lawrence rough going. His explicit fictional representations of sex and his anti-war diatribes were widely condemned in his lifetime, and his novels were duly censored or withdrawn from sale in Britain and beyond. Lawrence’s prose style –lyrical and sensuous one moment, brusque and coarse the next – can be as unsettling as his ideas, extreme as they are strange and seemingly liberated from any wariness about self-contradiction. Lawrence gave full expression to deeply misanthropic moods in person and in writing, which can make him seem misogynist, homophobic, racist, classist, treacherous, or fascistic to those who are on the lookout for such things. A tender interest in all kinds of people and places is equally evident, but that is, naturally, less notable when considering a writer whose fiction carries the mark of being included in F.R. Leavis’s ‘great tradition’. Canonisation has made a literary outsider who enjoyed sparse approval in his lifetime seem symptomatic of the shortcomings of a culture that he himself found wanting.
It is easy to read the attitudes of Lawrence’s flawed and limited male characters as his own, his representations of flawed and limited women as demeaning, and his portraits of flawed and limited indigenous characters as racist. But perhaps it is fairer to view them as the product of a flawed and limited writer who strove to depict and invigorate a culture that seemed, to him, to be flawed and limited.
Andrew Harrison does just that, portraying Lawrence as an imperfect but truthful man who possessed probing artistic integrity. He opens The Life of D. H.
Lawrence by considering Lawrence’s views about the practice of literary biography. We learn that Lawrence once hoped to write a biography of Robert Burns but felt that he wasn’t ‘Scotchy enough’. Of John Lockhart’s gallingly inaccurate Life of Robert Burns (1828), Lawrence says: ‘Made me spit! Those damn middle-class Lockharts grew lilies of the valley up their arses, to hear them talk.’
Lawrence, Harrison says, felt that a biographer should share the core aspects of their subject’s experiences – relating to nationality, class, and temperament –in order ‘to understand the writing and not pay mere lip-service to its meaning’. By these standards, Harrison, who has produced a carefully researched but often-bland book, seems temperamentally unsuited to the role of Lawrence’s biographer. He is, however, well attuned to the nuances of nationality and class.
Lawrence, Harrison tells us, was born in 1885 in the grim coal mining district of Eastwood, at a time when ‘[d]ust in the air created a host of respiratory and pulmonary problems for residents; tuberculosis and bronchitis caused the largest percentage of fatalities in the district, but there were also regular epidemics of measles, diphtheria, diarrhoea, scarlet fever and whooping cough’. Harrison implies that Lawrence’s delicate sickliness as an infant was a product of the environment in which he was born, and notes that ‘problems with his lungs would haunt him throughout his life’. Lawrence died from tuberculosis in his forty-fifth year.
Lawrence’s parents were a bad match. His father, Arthur, was a miner who disliked books and felt at home in working-class society, while his mother, Lydia, revered literature and ‘was invested
in a determined resistance to the outlook and values of her working-class neighbours’. Lydia was a teetotaller who ‘insisted on looking above and beyond Eastwood for her fulfillment’ and ‘fully intended to lift her children out of their present circumstances’, while Arthur knew how to enjoy himself in unglamorous company. Because Lawrence was one of Lydia’s favoured children, he felt pressured ‘to hate his father “for Mother’s sake”’.
Lawrence once hoped to
write a biography of Robert Burns
but felt that he wasn’t ‘Scotchy enough’
Lawrence went from being a sickly infant to a sickly child who excelled academically but was ‘tormented by his peers’ because he liked to play with girls He trained and worked as a teacher in early adulthood before concentrating on writing and meeting his great love, Frieda. Harrison relies on Lawrence’s correspondence to unearth a great deal of information – negotiations with publishers, arrangements with agents, travel plans –untangling a convoluted knot of marginal material to little obvious purpose. We learn that, following a period of illness, Lawrence ‘received eggs from May Holbrook, two chickens from William Ewin (or ‘Eddie’) Clarke (Ada’s fiancé), and a letter from Agnes Holt, inviting him to visit her and her new husband in their home at Ramsey on the Isle of Man’. None of this goes
anywhere. Soon after, Harrison informs us that ‘Lawrence arranged to spend a few days in London: he saw Austin Harrison, and on the afternoon of 25 April he went to the Heinemann offices to receive feedback on his poems, afterwards meeting Ben Iden Payne to discuss plans for staging one of his plays. None of the exchanges would assist his work in any significant way …’ That last line is the kicker. Populating paragraphs with names, dates, and places in order to reveal little of obvious value is one of Harrison’s specialties.
At times, the facts of Lawrence’s life are stated in chronological order. He did this. He did that. He wrote a letter. He sent a story off. He got angry. He got sick. Frieda took a lover. He expressed approval. This flattened style can produce a curious affect, especially when a striking detail is followed by incidental information. For instance, after informing us that Lawrence and his sister helped their mother die with an overdose of medication, Harrison writes in the following sentence (same paragraph too): ‘Through the Waterfields, Lawrence and Frieda were introduced to a small coterie of other wealthy ex-pats in the area, including the Huntingdons, Pearses and Cochranes.’ From the way he presents them, it is not obvious that Harrison sees a difference in value between these two kinds of information, and his unwillingness to dwell on striking details and draw out their importance to Lawrence’s life and fiction is intriguing. While many biographers insist on extracting too much meaning from every minor event they describe, Harrison skips along largely untroubled. It is partly for this reason that the presentation of the book as a ‘critical biography’ is dubious; we learn a great deal about the dates and circumstances surrounding each major and minor work, and of Lawrence’s dealings with editors and publishers, but there are only occasional grabs of sustained literary analysis. Instead, Harrison describes the shifts (in tone and scope) of the major novels as they are drafted, but in a scattered way, and waits to address contemporary critical approaches to Lawrence’s work in an afterword, where he suddenly comes alive.
Those who are keen to discover as much about Lawrence as they can will be excited by the minutiae of Harrison’s treatment, while others must rely on Lawrence’s enlivening eruptions. After all, a biography whose subject reacts against his publisher’s criticisms with: ‘Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters,
the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today’, and who writes to his formerly close friend (the consumptive Katherine Mansfield) to inform her: ‘I loathe you, you revolt me stewing in your consumption’, will never be entirely dreary. g
Shannon Burns is a past ABR Fellow.
Healing country
Three new poetry collections by Nathanael Pree
Ellen van Neerven, Joel Deane, and Mike Ladd present poems about journeys, recovery, and healing, from comfort food to the experience of a stroke, within overlapping landscapes as palimpsests for their respective pathways.
Reciprocity through feeding runs through Ellen van Neerven’s first collection (Comfort Food, University of Queensland Press, $24.95 pb, 104 pp, 9780702254055) – reciprocity within and without family. Staples like bread and noodles bring joy and contact through breaking and sharing. The fibrous texture of mango cheeks paired with a found object – half a tennis ball – correlates to childhood; the softness of pumpkin scones and familial Dutch comfort food represent togetherness and belonging, expressing van Neerven’s mixed Mununjali and European heritage.
Edgier correspondences are found in the elders drying out kangaroo tails on a wire fence crossed by settler lines imposed on country. These create their own twisted hieroglyphics, and ‘out here there’s reading to be done’ in order ‘to be a piece in time / not a timeline / or a picket in a fence’. An old neighbour attracts animals, including ‘a tree snake hung with his belts’ – juxtaposed skins of the living and dead. A woman with cancer remembers ‘that day she found a snakeskin by the river / they say grief
infiltrates strange locations / usually ties itself around your lungs like rubber bands’. Such lines within the body and spanning country are spun out deftly through the text.
All three collections present correspondences between conventionally animate and less obvious creaturely objects: van Neerven imagines riparian habitats, ‘where / the ducks look like shoes / in the water’ and where she sees ‘rocks tiptoeing across the river / like unsure words’. She decries the lack of care taken for such environments to which so many species are suited, and notes that ‘the pelicans are leaving us / like a line of words’. Species that remain are subject to fatal additives: ‘bassian thrush – chocolate milk / brown cuckoo dove – bronze custard / sooty oystercatcher – tastes better with oil’.
This reminder of mutual edibility and our combustible nature is paralleled in Mike Ladd’s stark and confronting images of human self-immolation: His ‘Gasoline Flowers’ presents four activist suicides as ‘an orange-yellow orchid’, ‘a wavering lotus of flame’, ‘a smoky iris’, and ‘a gaping petro hibiscus’. That these are paired with the delicacy of flowers only serves to underline the atrocities and their impact.
Joel Deane’s haunting collection (Year of the Wasp, Hunter, $19.95 pb, 112 pp, 9780994352859) is a reminder of
SONGS OF A WAR BOY: MY STORY
by Deng Thiak Adut and Ben McKelvey Hachette
$32.99 pb, 315 pp, 9780733636523
Songs are of great importance to the Dinka people of South Sudan. ‘They’re our avatars, and our biographies. They precede us, introduce us, and live on after we die,’ writes the refugee advocate, Archibald muse, and NSW Australian of the Year for 2017, Deng Thiak Adut. His memoir, Songs of a War Boy, serves as a profound if disturbing ballad to his tragedies and triumphs.
At the age of six, Deng viewed the world – his village – with awe: his father was a hippo-hunting warrior; eagles battled in the sky above; and the god Nhialic watched all below. This tableau was shattered when he was forcibly conscripted into the Sudanese People’s Liberation Front (SPLA) and deathmarched towards a training camp near the Ethiopian border. Wonderment dissolved into fear and hopelessness as he underwent a brutal training regimen and bore witness to the horrors of a hopeless war. He watched prisoners being tortured and burned. He became violently ill, emaciated, on the cusp of insanity. Flesh-eating insects burrowed inside his wounds. He watched comrades being struck by landmines, their torn bodies jolting upwards ‘like popcorn’ and showering him with viscera – all this, before the age of fifteen. After being shot in the back, he was rescued by his heroic older brother John Mac, who tirelessly sought avenues of escape for them both. Eventually, they found their way to the ‘paradise’ of Australia, as refugees.
Where others may have been consumed by trauma, Deng thrived. He learned English and eventually became an advocate for the disenfranchised, by sheer force of will. But like the shrapnel still embedded in his back, the plight of his people, and of those fleeing disastrous global conflicts, is a constant, aching reminder that his work is far from over.
The deeply moving song of Deng Thiak Adut is worth listening to, and is yet to be wholly sung.
Dilan Gunawardana
Susan Sontag’s ‘night side of life’, with the body beset by illness as alien and captive: ‘At the Base Hospital / the old man was sleeping, / hooked up like a cow / in the shed for milking.’ Once again, a human is presented for consumption, aged but with a childlike skull, within which there is that buzzing which never allows it to feel still. Deane’s leitmotif, the wasp, gets inside the ward, ‘scrawling graffiti in negative / space’, and inside the patient’s head. As a correlative to his stroke and concomitant aphasia, ‘a wasp performs a pig Latin liturgy / on the tabernacle / that is his tongue’. The insects also appear to have the power to ‘turn people into verbs’, uncertain and harsh vectors of memory, jerky, unsettled kinesis. The outside environment forms part of this febrile process: the sky ‘dreams / in dead languages: scratches the corneas’. Memory struggles with erasure when writing the limen of being not entirely one or another.
The creaturely word seems to confirm this, with visitations from an owl and ‘a seagull with ants for eyes’, correlatives for madness, clawing at the confinement and panic. This is followed by a nod to Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’, which holds its own and then some: ‘My mind’s not right, Cal,’ mutters the poet to the dog, Caligula, while searching for words or communication with a willow tree as next door ‘a barbecue is burning flesh’. This scene of unsettled domesticity evolves into a further vector of unease: ‘A whirlpool of sparrows / perform a perfect om, / but the circle / is too perfect. / They are not birds, / but a scree of drones / triangulating.’
The waspish presence delivers ‘auguries’ that pertain to this as well: ‘every killing demands a reply’, and, as the seasons change, ‘nameless millions begin to hum and swarm’. It is as if the buzzing, sonorous multitudes of being create a music on the edge of annihilation that finds no easy lines of release.
Mike Ladd’s forms of disquiet are attended by presences such as a mosquito, under the net and in the mind, with its ‘needling, invisible whine’ and a deep distrust of contemporary urban business (Invisible Mending, Wakefield Press, $22.95 pb, 136 pp, 9781743054079). Even his home town, Adelaide – ‘old
quincunx’ with ‘that little brownsnake of a river’ – is put forward as something strange and slightly obscene in its regularity, a place where heatwaves arrive and ‘birds drop out of the sky and die on the softened bitumen’. The surrounding land conveys a sense of menace: ‘My beautiful eucalyptus, / what treacherous bastards you are / now the fire-farmers’ ways are lost.’ The European occupation has resulted in places such as a ‘sheep station [with] a concentration-camp haircut’. Forests are claimed by the state: ‘The track’s obscured by fallen trees. / There’s no easy way out of here.’ Finding firewood becomes a fraught activity. There seems nothing simple or fair in these configurations of control and country.
Forms of beauty and flashes of brilliance survive, such as in his Malaysian pantuns, conjuring a ‘shift back and forth between nature and culture; little worlds built in the face of transience’. One of these is evident in ‘Dirt,’ a route through sacred country, where ‘the termite statues / begin with circles / grow / into roadside gods’ of all creeds, welcoming travellers to ‘this battered, / holy ground’.The road’s significance is the very dirt: to invert Stephen Muecke, there is no sealed surface on the original ways.
Deane concludes that, in this chaotic, violent world, ‘though we have no time to live / we have just enough time to love’. Van Neerven, reflecting from the streets of Panaji, remarks that ‘everything here seems unfinished’: an observation as correlative to loneliness and transitory affairs, yet at the end of her assured and eloquent collection, ‘Buffalo Milk’ flows with vitality in lines of self-awareness and a uncommon sense of craft. In a similar vein, Ladd’s final poem, ‘A Country Wedding’, recounts a ceremony with a ‘rice-paper cage’: no metaphor, but immanence in ‘the fine-grained constellations’ that mark a shared way, encapsulating the direct and unmediated nature of three voices traversing the fault lines of self and country. g
Nathanael Pree is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. He has a chapter in A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott (2016).
‘Passion is the gale’
Robert Phiddian
AN
ESSAY
ON MAN
by Alexander Pope, edited by Tom Jones
Princeton University Press (Footprint)
$49.95 hb, 248 pp, 9780691159812
For the novice, Alexander Pope’s couplets can seem a numbing wilderness of equipoise – rhyme balanced against rhyme, half lines balanced around the caesura, regular iambs marching on to the end of pentametrical time (alternatively ‘to the edge of doom’). With a bit of experience as a reader, however, it is the wrought tension of Pope’s couplets that fascinates. The balance is only ever perilously achieved in a world constantly tending to chaos.
The most quotable phrases in his philosophical poem from 1734, An Essay on Man (here republished in an elegant and scholarly edition by Tom Jones), seem to bespeak bewigged Enlightenment complacency: ‘vindicate the ways of God to Man’; ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’; ‘my guide, philosopher, and friend’; and, no less than thrice, ‘Whatever is, is right’. It sounds pompous, doesn’t it? However, this is exactly like the Shakespeare game. The most quotable quotes get taken out of a vexed context that gives them quite a different charge. ‘To thine own self be true’, says Polonius to his son Laertes in Hamlet, but it must follow, as the night the day, that Polonius is a posturing hypocrite whose next deed is to send a spy after his son to France, and who subsequently dies of stab wounds partly consequent on his enthusiasm for pimping his daughter to the prince. Google Images tells me that ‘to thine own self be true’ is a popular tattoo. I hope they wear it ironically.
Coming back to An Essay on Man for the first time in a while, I am struck by how Pope’s rage for precision constantly isolates the paradoxes of life that energised the Age of Reason and remain urgent now. Are we driven by passion or reason? How should we balance their competing claims, at a personal, social,
or even ecological level? Easy in this strange year of Trump, Brexit, and angry electorates to give in to Yeats’s apocalyptic gloom: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’
It is more constructive, I think, to read the Essay and pause over lines like ‘On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail, / Reason the card, but Passion is the gale’. Jones’s note explains that a card was a navigational aid for mariners, so the general proposition that passion is a dangerous but necessary force in tension with reason is clear. Things are always this lucid in Pope, but they are seldom merely lucid. Consider ‘diversely’, suspend your sense of how we pronounce it these days (noting that it makes the line lumpy on the tongue), and realise that it would have been (and must, metrically, be) pronounced ‘divers–ly’. You either have a pointlessly irregular pentameter or, far more probably, a punning suggestion of divers penetrating an ocean of complexity that reason seeks only to guide us over. Emotion and order are joined, but forever pull in different directions. It is not a matter of one ruling the other, and balance is a tepid word for the fraught relationship, though having the balance ‘out’ is a dangerous thing, today as in 1734.
Where do humans fit in the ecological order? There are few more urgent social and political questions today, and Pope provides not a complacent answer, but a brilliant setting of the problem:
Ask you for what end the heav’nly bodies shine, Earth for whose use? Pride answers
‘’Tis for mine:
‘For me kind Nature wakes her genial pow’r, ‘Suckles each herd, and spreads out ev’ry flow’r;
‘Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise; ‘My foot-stool earth, my canopy the skies.’
Do we call our dominating and destructive attitude to the environment pride these days? Why should we not? Our aspirations lead us equally to creativity and destruction, and we only have the one planet on which to play out our fate.
Unlike other animals, we are capable of reasoning and detachment, but we are driven by passions that have much wider scope. In the age of the anthropocene, Pope’s great peroration at the start of Epistle II on the middle state of humans is both true and challenging:
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d; Still by himself abus’d or disabus’d; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
It is not as if we can choose to rise and have done with it. It is a constitutive paradox of being human, both as individuals and as groups. We imagine supercilious men in wigs, but that is far
Pope’s rage for precision isolates the paradoxes of life that energised the Age of Reason and remain urgent now
from the truth. Pope’s was an age of restless searching after truth and reason, not of placid truisms.
Jones’s edition makes the energetically paradoxical Essay on Man accessible, in a size that sits nicely in the hands and doesn’t burden your conscience with all the unread texts in an anthology or collected works. The introduction is extensive and excellent, though the notes sometimes seem waylaid by narrow scholarly concerns. I can think of only two greater poems in English about life, the universe, and everything – Paradise Lost and The Waste Land And the Essay is perhaps more persistently useful to think with than even those two. If we can get over our clichéd misapprehension that it is an orthodox hymn to rational order, Pope’s philosophical poem is as volatile and challenging as ever. g
Robert Phiddian teaches literature at Flinders University and is specially interested in political satire, parody, and humour.
Leaving paradise
Chris Flynn
INEXPERIENCE AND OTHER STORIES
by Anthony Macris
UWA Publishing
$24.99 pb, 230 pp, 9781742588704
Given the Australian propensity for travel, it is odd that the global wanderings of our citizens are not much explored in literary fiction, which is still in the anguished throes of self-examination, arguably stuck in a loop. How refreshing, then, to read Anthony Macris’s fourth book, Inexperience and Other Stories, a short volume which drops the reader into the discomfiting world of an Australian couple overseas.
Our unnamed narrator and his wife, Carol, are determined not to fall into the classic European tourist traps. Fed up with Australia’s ‘shabby modernity’, they arrive in Madrid, which turns out to be not nearly as glamorous as they imagined. After an embarrassing incident the couple decamp to Toledo, where they intend to view several masterpieces by El Greco. It does not take long for cracks to appear in their relationship. This leads to separation and a complete breakdown of their European adventure.
Although only 136 pages in length, ‘Inexperience’ is a moving portrait of Australian expectation and disappointment. The couple’s itinerary is somewhat aimless and exploratory, with a kind of restless ennui hanging about their necks, reminiscent of that felt by Kit and Port Moresby
in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky (1949). Macris has some choice observations about modern Antipodean life: ‘It’s a double-edged privilege, being Australian. If that’s the only passport you hold, there’s no real escape from paradise.’
The couple are philosophically devastated by their exposure to the Old World; their fantasy of finding meaning in European sophistication is rudely dashed. By the end, the narrator is weighing up the advantages of an early return home. ‘And you didn’t have to work so hard to be middle class in Australia. Being middle class in Europe looked like a real chore, with bad weather to boot.’ Mirroring the reality of many open-ended European excursions, the trip comes to a sudden, downbeat halt, for character and reader alike. The first hundred pages of ‘Inexperience’ are excellent, and while it is fruitless and unfair to wish the author had continued in this vein for another two or three hundred, some might find it frustrating to witness such a prodigious talent as Macris curtailing a story after so much detailed set-up and character work.
The remaining sixty pages of Inexperience and Other Stories reprints three of Macris’s discrete short fictions. In ‘The Quiet Achiever’, a man visits a patient in a psychotherapeutic clinic. ‘Triumph of the Will’ sees a small shop owner fretting as he watches the construction of a shopping mall nearby. ‘He felt as powerless as a tribal warrior shaking a spear at a division of the US army.’ Both were originally published in 1988.
‘The Nest-Egg’ (1990) is the pick of the bunch – a funny polemic railing against the cost of modern living, still relevant today. The grumpy narrator delineates all the sacrifices one must make in order to survive financially. He decides to read two books a month for the next fifty years. Allowing for inflation, he estimates the cost of these 1,200 books will be $42,849.42, or about fourteen cents per page. This is assuming that he will read from eight to eleven pm each weeknight. ‘I’ll sit in my uncomfortable armchair, a vinyl monstrosity from Saint Vinnies, not waiting for anyone to call or drop by due to the fact that I won’t have a phone or any friends to visit me, because my nest-egg, jealous
and demanding creature that it is, won’t allow me any.’
The forced austerities of ‘The NestEgg’ hark back to the main story, whose abrupt ending lingers. Throughout the book, Macris is urging us to embrace disappointment. Expectation of an ‘experience’ destroys the couple’s relationship, ruins repeated art viewings, and undermines the very idea of Europe. It is cleverly subversive of the author to likewise hoodwink the reader. Too often contemporary writing is forced into easy to digest chunks of narrative. Spoonfed 120-minute ‘event’ movies and single episode television arcs, we expect stories to play out in a fashion that is constructed and bogus. Novels become games, simulators of a neatly packaged reality that does not exist. Macris acknowledges all of this and nimbly sidesteps the pitfalls to deliver a book that can be read on a multitude of levels.
This is complex and thoughtful writing that eschews the idea of a book as an experience to be conveniently enjoyed (or in many cases inconveniently endured) and instead presents a narrative that is wilfully non-conformist. The delicious argument the couple has while waiting in a long queue outside the church of Santa Tomé in Toledo is telling and applicable to all books, films and art.
‘Do you realize these are perhaps the worst possible viewing conditions for a painting imaginable?’ Carol said.
‘The worst. A complete waste of time.’
‘Not necessarily. The thing is to enjoy the experience for what it is.’
‘And what is the experience?’
‘Well, at the moment I’m exhausted. This heat is really getting to me. Bestcase scenario will be if I’m capable of focusing on the painting at all. So if I get through this without collapsing, I’ll be happy.’
‘I’m not sure I know what you mean.’
‘What’s important is the fact that I get through it. There’s no reward. Other than the fact you get through it. That’s the experience.’
‘A real inexperience.’
‘Something you’re an expert at.’ g
Chris Flynn’s latest novel is The Glass Kingdom (2014).
Heads or tails
Agnes Nieuwenhuizen
TELL THE TRUTH, SHAME THE DEVIL
by Melina Marchetta Viking
$32.99 pb, 405 pp, 9780670079100
Much has been made of the fact that Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil is Melina Marchetta’s first adult novel. Marchetta is best known for her Young Adult titles, which include Looking for Alibrandi, Saving Francesca, and On the Jellicoe Road lively, popular works about the intense lives and tribulations of teenagers and their families, often in a cross-cultural (Italian–Australian) context. Having also ventured successfully into fantasy, here she moves into crime drama. This genre provides a fast-paced, incident-packed, and undemanding reading experience. Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief, who provides an endorsement for this book, is, along with Maureen McCarthy, Marchetta, and other ostensibly YA writers, widely read by adults. Marchetta is not straying far from her devoted audience.
Of Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil, one reviewer noted that ‘reading the whole thing in a searing rush of pages in one sitting is irresistible’. The complex, fast-moving plot, Marchetta’s vivid evocation of her characters, and her perfect ear for dialogue are seductive. Alongside pace and effective character-building, another hallmark of compelling crime fiction is the location of the action in a cultural or political setting and tapping into contemporary anxieties. Here we have jittery British and French societies ambivalent about immigration and security, a context of terrorist bombings past and present, racial profiling by police, and characters of Middle Eastern origins whose complex family connections and loyalties cross borders and generations. With action racing between France and Britain, you have a heady brew and an immersive reading experience.
In a Calais car park, a bomb explodes on a tour bus of British students. Nearby
are buses with French and German students. A few children are killed and three seriously maimed on the British coach. Mayhem ensues as police, parents, and the media descend. Chief Inspector Bish (Bashir) Ortley, sad and currently suspended, is made aware of information that will propel the story. Ortley leaps into his car and heads for Calais. His daughter Bee (Sabine) was on the tour bus, as was seventeen-year-old Violette LeBrac Zidane. How Violette managed to get from country Australia, where she has been living with grandparents, and onto the bus is unclear. Thirteen years ago, Bish had to deal with a horrific bombing in a London supermarket that killed twenty-three people. The bombers became known as the Brackenham Four. One of these was Noor Sarraf, daughter of the chief suspect and Violette’s mother. She was accused of making the bomb and imprisoned for life.
Another strand in the story is the mysterious death of Violette’s father, Etienne LeBrac, believed to have committed suicide, leaving four-year-old Violette alone in the wild. Members of the neighbouring Sarraf and Bayat families are key players, particularly soul mates Layla Bayat and Jimmy (Jamal) Sarraf, the latter now exiled in Calais. Eventually barrister Rachel (Bish’s ex) and solicitor Layla will team up to mount a case against Noor’s conviction. The Home Office man on the case went to school with Bish, and the daughter of the investigating French Inspector was on the French bus (there is a connection!). Shortly after the investigation into the Calais bombing begins, Violette disappears with one of the younger passengers, Eddie Conlon. The only clue is an unsigned postcard Violette sent to her mother in jail saying, ‘I’m going to shame the devil’, paraphrasing from the line in Henry the Fourth Part One, which Noor knew Violette had read at school. Violette appears to be on a truth-seeking mission and the hunt is on for her, for the bomber, and for possible links to the original bombing. The action hurtles on; when a second bomb threat is made, everything goes into overdrive. However, if you take your time with this book, problems become apparent. Far too many characters with way
too many links between them stretch credibility. Young Eddie, a significant character, says awkwardly: ‘I’m so confused … I can’t get heads or tails of who’s related.’ Marchetta packs in too many issues, important and topical though they may be: Anti-Muslim sentiments; racism; mistrust of government and police; the effects of divorce and parenting styles; variations in class and ethnic values and lifestyles; the role of the media, including the pros and cons of social media. There is even an imminent birth to factor in. The Algerian War of Independence is linked to current tensions between the French and Arabs in France.The London bombings of 2005 are referenced. In the febrile atmosphere following the bombing, the teenagers and some parents establish connections via social media, sharing information or hiding it, muddling the investigation.
The teenage characters – their conflicts, uncertainties, fickle relationships, and spirited behaviour – drive the story as much as the frenetic action and the need to know how it will all turn out. The acute insights and observations of the young people, and their ability to notice details and behaviour the adults miss –signature Marchetta traits – enliven the narrative. Compassionate, clever Bish holds it all together. Zusak says in his endorsement: ‘[The novel has] above all, the Marchetta trademark of a fierce and loving heart.’ Perhaps too much ‘heart’, too much busyness, and not enough toughness and clarity. g
Agnes Nieuwenhuizen is a Melbournebased reviewer. She established the Youth Literature Program and later the Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria.
‘Go, Scheery’
Bernard Whimpress
STROKE OF GENIUS: VICTOR TRUMPER AND THE SHOT THAT CHANGED CRICKET by Gideon Haigh
Hamish Hamilton
$39.99 hb, 332 pp, 9781926428734
Fifty years ago, Brian Scheer, a tall, sinewy Imperials fast bowler, thrilled a handful of boys by driving bowlers of all descriptions straight over their heads, depositing their deliveries in clumps of thick weeds on a low hill at the northern end of the Murray Bridge High School No. 2 Oval. Imps practised on Thursday evenings, and Scheer was the regular opening bowler in B grade, with just the occasional appearance in the first eleven. He was a useful batsman and made the odd twenty or thirty in matches, but the glory of his strokes, which resembled majestic seven irons by their steepling trajectory, was reserved for practice. I remember he would point his left toe high down the wicket, raise his arms shoulder high, his bat would point vertically skyward and his swing would carry through freely like a golf stroke to its completion. If the Murray Valley Standard had ever sent a photographer to Imps practice sessions or a keen amateur snapper had been on hand, one or the other might have captured something special, a small-town version of Victor Trumper’s ‘Jumping Out to Drive’.
At the end of his new book, Stroke of Genius, Gideon Haigh writes ‘that no great batsman has ever had a more faithful partner than Victor Trumper his photographer [George Beldam]’, because the man is epitomised by the image Beldam took at London’s Kennington Oval in 1905. Words failed to convey an adequate impression of his play. The photo is important in defining distinctions in cricket and particularly batting: art versus science; function versus form; how versus how many; a Golden Age of romance and aesthetics versus industry, productivity, and measurement. Interestingly, Haigh
also suggests that in the present visual century Beldam’s picture ‘has secured for Trumper a sizeable corner, while of Bradman there exists no single, quintessential image’. Has art triumphed?
George Beldam was a gentleman amateur, a Cambridge graduate before joining his family’s engineering firm, an amateur cricketer, footballer, golfer, painter, and photographer. As an amateur, he played several seasons of first-class cricket, achieved a scratch handicap at golf, and made a deep study of photography, which became his profession. Above all, he was a theorist both playing sport and recording it. His theorising drew him into close association with England’s most famous all-round sportsman, C.B. Fry, over cricket and discussions of aesthetics. It would serve him when photographing the triumvirate of Harry Vardon, James Braid, and J.H. Taylor in Great Golfers: Their Methods at a Glance (1904) His experience as a golf photographer influenced his angle in taking ‘Jumping Out to Drive’ a year later.
Before opening this book, I had great expectations. We all know the adage about a picture being worth a thousand words, and I knew Gideon Haigh was writing a book about the iconic photograph of Trumper. But a whole book? It is a remarkable photo, and Haigh has won a deserved reputation over thirty years, not only for his cricket writing, but also recently for such phenomenal books as The Office (2012) and his real-life crime story, Certain Admissions (2015). If anyone could pen 80,000 words about a single picture, Gideon Haigh could.
Then I read the first chapter. It was too clever by two thirds. The author was trying too hard. Historians care about context, but Haigh was laying on so many layers: history of cricket, history of cricket in art, history of cricket in photography, history of cricket in journalism, history of images of Australian Indigenous cricketers, discussion of amateurs versus professionals. I began to think a better title for the book would be ‘Everything you wanted to know about Victor Trumper jumping out to drive but were afraid to ask.’ Why afraid? Because Haigh might tell you.
I took a break for a week. I came
back and I am glad I did. The book embraces myriad aspects of Trumper –the aesthete, the incarnation of Australian possibility, the subject suitable for artistic representation, the myths and legend – and these are well developed. Haigh calls many witnesses – Fry, J.C. Davis, Leslie Poidevin, Neville Cardus, Arthur Mailey, Eric Barbour, Jack Fingleton, ‘Doc’ Evatt, C.L.R. James, Dal Stivens, even Kevin Rudd; some who saw Trumper in their mature years, some in boyhood who rhapsodised about him ever after, some who never saw him but wished they had. In the end, Haigh makes his own judgments, and these are typically forceful and elegantly, even euphoniously, expressed, as in the following example responding to a Mailey newspaper article comparing Trumper and Bradman:
Bradman brought out, in fact, a certain unevolved Victorianism of cricket’s aesthetic. His scores, huge, repetitive, homogenous seemed distastefully out of proportion, almost inhuman: had Ruskin not warned that ‘to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality’? Confronted by the objective reality of Bradman’s runs, an elite of critics found grounds for subjective dispute, reasserting other criteria of evaluation: beauty, audacity, capacity in adversity, skill on poor wickets. Bradman quickly overshadowed Trumper’s runs and steadily occluded his reputation. Yet in another respect, Bradman also ensured Trumper a continued relevance, as a counterpoint, as an alternative.
If I have one quibble, it is with the book’s subtitle. Did Trumper’s shot change cricket, or was it Beldam’s image that changed the way the game was seen? For readers, Stroke of Genius offers such numerous fresh perspectives about cricket that it is a stroke of genius itself. g
Bernard Whimpress is a historian specialising in Australian sport, and former curator of the Adelaide Oval Museum. He has written numerous books, and published and edited the Australian cricket journal Baggy Green from 1998 to 2010.
by
THE WINTERLINGS
Cristina Sánchez-Andrade, translated by Samuel Rutter
Scribe
$29.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781925321586
The village of Tierra de Chá in Cristina Sánchez-Andrade’s novel The Winterlings feels a bit like Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo, without the magic realism. It is a small community riddled with family secrets, desiccated aspirations, incest, and regrets. Located in Galicia, in north-western Spain, Tierra de Chá is full of succulent characters. There is Little Ramón, the sailor who was breastfed until the age of twelve. Mr Tenderlove makes a living as a ‘dental mechanic’, fashioning dentures from the teeth of cadavers, and dresses in drag in the privacy of his boudoir. There once was a lunatic who used to believe he was a chicken, and did so with such fervour that he started laying eggs, but no one knows where he is anymore.
After thirty years away, the Winterlings rejoin this variegated troupe. Sisters Dolores and Saladina has fled their village for the United Kingdom at the start of the Spanish Civil War. They have returned to what used to be their grandfather’s house in Tierra de Chá. They are fleeing once again, it seems, but they can’t escape the secret that binds them, in love and hate, like a feral embrace.
Sánchez-Andrade has a dark, witty sense of humour. In Tierra de Chá, people have a habit of making up truths and memories, which makes the line between fact and fancy a tenuous one. Her prose is moving; it has an oral quality that reminds me of another famous Galician author, Ramón Valle-Inclán. Samuel Rutter’s translation is a pleasure to read. It piques our curiosity with localisms and interesting turns of phrase that are not difficult to understand. In its style and use of language, the novel feels Galician, but never to the point that it alienates English readers.
Gabriel
García Ochoa
THE JOYCE GIRL
by Annabel Abbs Hachette
$32.99 pb, 358 pp, 9780733636974
In 1934, Lucia Joyce, then in her late twenties, entered analysis with Carl Jung, at the behest of her father, James Joyce. She had been in and out of psychiatric care for several years, but it was still not clear exactly what was wrong with her – if anything. A few years earlier, as a dancer in the Isadora Duncan style, she had been thought to have a genius akin to her father’s. Her biographer, Carol Loeb Shloss, considers that the arts of father and daughter were connected: that Lucia embodied the fluid self Joyce so painstakingly constructed in his fiction. Yet here was Joyce handing his beloved daughter over to a man who was openly hostile to Joyce’s literary experiments, which he saw as an attack on sanity. What happened in Jung’s office is not known; Jung deemed the analysis a failure and destroyed his records; Lucia’s own letters do not survive. But this almost mythic encounter is ripe for fictional exploration, and it is here that Annabel Abbs’s novel of Lucia’s life in Paris and Zurich begins. Unfortunately, her treatment of the brief but bitter engagement of analyst and dancer fails to bring either character to life.
The account of Lucia’s Paris years is similarly disappointing. The woman Shloss describes as a ‘scamp and sexual adventurer’ is depicted by Abbs as timid, sexually inexperienced, and childishly narcissistic. The love affairs she recounts play out like teen romances: her head spins, her heart throbs, and she obsessively rehearses her future married name. Lucia is plausibly sad but irredeemably dull. As for Jung, in Abbs’s hands he is peremptory, abrasive, and seemingly unqualified to hold a conversation, let alone conduct an analysis. Lucia dances and Lucia cries, but where is the quicksilver sprite who entered Finnegans Wake? And what was the nature of the burden she carried? These questions Abbs does not begin to answer.
Ann-Marie Priest
THE BONE SPARROW by Zana Fraillon Hachette
$19.99 pb, 234 pp, 9780734417138
Subhi lives with Maa and his older sister Queeny in ‘Family Three’, hoping that the ‘Night Sea’ will bring his Ba back to them. Born in detention to his Rohingya mother after she arrived illegally in Australia, his friend Eli and a kindly ‘Jacket’ make his life one of fitful pleasures amid the uncertainties of camp life. On the other side of the fence, in the nearby community, Jimmie feels besieged by grief following her mother’s death. She needs the comfort of reliving her mother’s stories, which are kept in a treasured book. A mostly absent father and an uncaring brother won’t share them with her; so, since she can’t read her, the stories are lost to her as well. These unlikely individuals meet at a ‘squeezeway’ in the wire, and their mutual needs help them to escape their separate worlds, for a time.
The enormous challenge for author Zana Fraillon is to immerse the young reader in the only world that Subhi has ever known. Subhi’s love of reading and thirst for knowledge make him a lively and lyrical storyteller. The terrible things he witnesses – material deprivation, inexplicable rules, and the horrific outcomes of passive protest – are largely related in his voice. (His sister Queeny’s efforts to make meaningful contact with the outside world echo those of young people in detention who have made the Free the Children NAURU Facebook page.) There is the occasional authorial relating of facts and feelings which Subhi wouldn’t or couldn’t know. In contrast to these, Jimmie’s difficulties seem discordant and trivial at times, but he friendship and affinities between the children are conveyed as both fleeting and deep.
Margaret Robson Kett
why do you write?
Because I have something to say – and not just to one person, but to as many people as I can reach. And when the writing goes well, I enjoy doing it.
are you a vivid dreamer? Yes.
where are you haPPiest?
Where? I’m happy when I’ve done something well, whether it’s writing, giving a talk, or organising an event. There is no particular place where that occurs. If you want particular places, it would have to be a different kind of happiness, such as I might feel on a mountaintop, looking out at the view, or at the beach, catching a wave.
what is your favourite film?
The Blues Brothers.
and your favourite book? Pride and Prejudice
name the three PeoPle with whom you would most like to dine
Renata (my wife), Bill and Melinda Gates
whiCh word do you most dislike, and name one you would like to see baCk in PubliC usage?
I dislike the way people use ‘inappropriate’ in order to pretend that they are not making a moral judgements. I’d like to see ‘uninterested’ back in public usage, because that would mean that people were no longer misusing ‘disinterested’.
who is your favourite author?
Derek Parfit.
and your favourite literary hero and heroine?
Huck Finn, Elizabeth Bennet.
whiCh quality do you most admire in a writer? Clarity.
name an early literary idol or influenCe whom you no longer admire – or viCe versa. Captain W.E. Johns.
what, if anything, imPedes your writing? Too many emails.
how do you regard Publishers? Affectionately.
what do you think of the state of CritiCism? I regret that there are fewer book reviews in daily newspapers.
and writers’ festivals?
I’m delighted that writers’ festivals are thriving in Australia. It’s a great way of connecting with your audience and meeting other writers.
are artists valued in our soCiety?
Some are, some aren’t – and some don’t deserve to be anyway.
what are you working on now?
I’m in the midst of a busy teaching semester at Princeton. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for writing anything long. I’m still writing my monthly columns for Project Syndicate, many of which have now been published in Ethics in the Real World.
Peter singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University, and Laureate Professor, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne. He is the author of more than twenty books, including The Life You Can Save (2009) and The Most Good You Can Do (2015) and Ethics in the Real World (2016).
