Australian Book Review - January–February 2022, issue no. 439

A capacity to startle

Advances

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize, now in its eighteenth year, attracted an equal-record field of 1,328 entries, from thirty-four countries. Our three judges – Sarah Holland-Batt (Chair of ABR), Jaya Savige (shortlisted in this year’s PMLAs, discussed below), and Anders Villani (ABR Rising Star) – have now chosen their shortlist: ‘Sixes and Sparrows’ by Chris Arnold ‘Gippslanding (triptych)’ by Dan Disney ‘Australianesque’ by Michael Farrell ‘In the Shadows of Our Heads’ by Anthony Lawrence ‘Hummingbird Country’ by Debbie Lim

The shortlisted poems appear from page 26. Our five poets will also introduce and read their poems on the ABR Podcast.

itself – impressed with their formal mastery, lyricism, and wit.

Broadly, the judges observed that the entries this year tended away from briefer lyric and elegiac modes in favour of expansive poems with a more immediate political and social justice focus.

The five accomplished shortlisted poems each share a narrative bent, a focus on form (four out of five are stanzaic), and a capacity to startle and surprise with vivid imagery, linguistic torque, humour, and juxtaposition.

Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

Australian prime ministers may have lost some of their lustre over the past few years, but the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards have not. Indeed, they seem to grow in prestige and a certain resistance to the modish. ABR warmly congratulates each of this year’s winners: Amanda Lohrey (Fiction); Grace Karskens (Australian History); Stephen Edgar (Poetry);

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize shortlisted poets (L-R): Chris Arnold, Dan Disney, Michael Farrell, Anthony Lawrence, and Debbie Lim

This year’s Porter Prize ceremony will take place via Zoom on Wednesday, 19 January (6pm). To register your interest, please visit the Events page on our website and RSVP to rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au.

On our website we list the twenty-four poems that comprise the official longlist. There you will also find the full judges’ report, including remarks on the five poems. Our judges had this to say about the overall field: This year’s entries were richly impressive and varied, among which the shortlisted poems – focused on Australia’s recreational hunting culture, mathematics and computation, family abuse, the outset of love, and, metapoetically, the state of Australian poetry

Quentin Sprague (Non-fiction); Cath Moore (Young Adult Literature), Remy Lai, Meg McKinlay, and Matt Ottley (Children’s Literature).

Amanda Lohrey’s The Labyrinth, described by Morag Fraser in her September 2020 ABR review as ‘stark, unflinching – gothic without contrivance’, has won the PMLA for fiction in addition to its triumphs in the Miles Franklin and the Voss Awards.

Stephen Edgar was the inaugural winner of ABR’s poetry prize in 2005 (six years before it became the Porter Prize). His claim to being Australia’s leading formalist poet could not be stronger with The Strangest Place: New and selected poems, which [Advances continues on page 7]

South Flows the Pearl Chinese Australian Voices Mavis Gock Yen sydneyuniversitypress.com.au

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Australian Book Review January–February 2022, no. 439

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Peter Rose |Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au Amy Baillieu | Deputy Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au Jack Callil | Digital Editor digital@australianbookreview.com.au James Jiang | ABR Editorial Cadet assistant@australianbookreview.com.au Grace Chang | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Billy Griffiths, Johanna Leggatt, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Beejay Silcox, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (2019) | Sarah Walker (2019) | Declan Fry (2020) Anders Villani (2021) | Mindy Gill (2021) Monash University Intern Isabella Venutti Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully, Elizabeth Streeter, Guy Webster Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine.

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Image credits and information Front cover: Close up abstract view of waves washing up on the beach at San Simeon State Park, San Simeon, California, USA (H. Mark Weidman Photography/Alamy) Page 31: British author John le Carré, photographed during an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) at a hotel in Hamburg, Germany, 16 October 2017. The author presented his new novel A Legacy of Spies (German title: Das Vermaechtnis der Spione).

(Credit:Christian Charisius/dpa/Alamy Live News) Page 63: Henri Matisse, White and pink head (Tête blanche et rose) 1914, oil on canvas, 75 x 47 cm, Centre Pompidou, Paris, MNAM-CCI, purchased 1976, AM 1976-8. © Succession H Matisse/Copyright Agency 2021. Photo: © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI / Philippe Migeat / Dist RMN-GP

ABR January–February 2022 DIARIES

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Lisa Gorton

How to End a Story by Helen Garner

LETTERS

12

Brenda Niall

Dear Prime Minister by Martyn Lyons

HISTORY

13 16 17

Mark McKenna Billy Griffiths David Kearns

History Wars by Doug Munro What is History, Now? edited by Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb Confronting Leviathan by David Runciman

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

22 58 59

Beejay Silcox Carol Middleton Barnaby Smith

Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller by Nadia Wassef This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes Campese by James Curran

CLASSICS

19

Alastair J.L. Blanshard

Twelve Caesars by Mary Beard

UNITED STATES

20 55

Timothy J. Lynch Jack Callil

Two books on Donald Trump’s last days in office Fulfillment by Alec MacGillis

GRAPHIC NOVELS

24

Bernard Caleo

Kent State by Derf Backderf & Underground by Mirranda Burton

PORTER PRIZE

26

The 2022 Shortlist

Debbie Lim, Michael Farrell, Anthony Lawrence, Dan Disney, Chris Arnold

COMMENTARY

32

Samuel Watts

Unnaming the Moreland City Council

INTERVIEW

34 50

Anna Clark Don Anderson

Open Page Critic of the Month

FICTION

36 37 39 40 41

Marc Mierowsky Polly Simons Morag Fraser Alice Nelson Rose Lucas

Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka Three new novels of friendship Silverview by John le Carré The Sentence by Louise Erdrich Devotion by Hannah Kent

LITERARY STUDIES

42 43

Jonathan Dunk David Mason

Patrick White’s Theatre by Denise Varney How to Read a Poem by Thomas H. Ford

POETRY

44

Abigail Fisher

46 47 48

Felicity Plunkett Geoff Page Gregory Day

Endings & Spacings by Pam Brown >>> & || by Dan Disney Such Color by Tracy K. Smith Selected Poems by David Musgrave Save As by A. Frances Johnson

DESIGN

49

Christopher Menz

Frances Burke by Nanette Carter and Robyn Oswald-Jacobs

ESSAY COLLECTION

51 60

Sophie Knezic Nicole Abadee

Buried Not Dead by Fiona McGregor These Precious Days by Ann Patchett

POLITICS

52

Ben Wellings

Democracy Rules by Jan-Werner Müller

LAW

54

Kieran Pender

Law in a Time of Crisis by Jonathan Sumption

MEXICO

57

Gabriel García Ochoa

Horizontal Vertigo by Juan Villoro

ARTS

62 63 65 66 67

Ian Britain Julie Ewington Ian Dickson Tim Byrne Gabriella Edelstein

Benediction Matisse: Life & Spirit Death of a Salesman As You Like It Julius Caesar

Peter Porter

Typewriter Music by David Malouf

FROM THE ARCHIVE 68

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The ABR Podcast Our weekly podcast includes interviews with ABR writers, major reviews, and creative writing. Here are some recent and coming episodes.

Peter Porter Poetry Prize The five shortlisted poets

Books of the Year

Peter Rose and guests

Dugongesque Krissy Kneen

Edward Said James Jiang

Helen Garner Lisa Gorton

William Cooper Penny Russell

Scott Morrison Judith Brett

The fight for native title Stephen Bennetts

Bequests and notified bequests Gillian Appleton Ian Dickson John Button Peter Corrigan AM Dr Kerryn Goldsworthy Peter Rose Dr Francesca Jurate Sasnaitis Denise Smith Anonymous (3)

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Our partners Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the NSW Government through Create NSW; the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia; and the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries.

We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

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Geoff Page reviewed in our March 2021 issue. Grace Karskens is another ABR prize alumna; her essay ‘Nah Doongh’s Song’ won the Calibre Essay Prize in 2019. Alan Atkinson judged her People of the River: Lost worlds of early Australia in the magazine’s November 2020 pages as ‘a marvellous pioneering effort’.

So if you fancy a flutter at the literary stakes, why not subscribe to ABR? With our track record, it may significantly shorten your PMLA odds!

Prizes galore

Nor do the prizes stop there: this year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize will open on January 24 and remain so until May 2. The cash prizes will be apportioned thus: $6,000 for the winner, $4,000 for the runner-up, and $2,500 for third place.

This year for the first time, ABR will introduce a youth category to the prize, aimed specifically at secondary school students, Years 7 and upwards. We’ll provide more details closer to the opening date.

The youth category will be a regular feature of ABR’s prize program across all the genres, so stay tuned!

Vale Stuart Macintyre

of such prodigious brilliance and unbending willpower to try to remake those he influenced into carbon copies of himself, or to assemble a devoted but dreary circle of disciples. Instead, Stuart lived what academic freedom might be.

Anna Clark, another speaker, began with Stuart’s trademark ‘Hiya!’, his first remark to her when they met in 2001. Stuart supervised her PhD, and Anna recalled the celerity and attentiveness of his readings of her successive drafts: ‘Ugh!’ was another Stuartism. U-G-H with an exclamation mark.

They were carefully scattered in the margins. But they were never snarky. And they were always balanced with generous encouragement. Her was directing us to be better writers – and showing us we had a model for that right there in our own work. He was such an authority, so knowledgeable, that we had various nicknames for him, like ‘Big Mac’ and ‘Macopedia’. I don’t know if he knew our buzzwords. If he did, he probably would have scribbled ‘Ugh’ with three exclamation marks.

Anna Clark, who co-authored The History Wars with her supervisor in 2003, has a new book out in February: Making Australian History (Vintage). We will review it in the next issue. Meanwhile, she is our subject on Open Page (page 34).

ABR mourns the death on 22 November of distinguished historian Stuart Macintyre, an esteemed contributor from 1981 to 2014.

Stuart – a graduate of Melbourne, Monash and Cambridge Matisse in the Domain Universities – joined the staff of Since Covid-19 alighted, Melbourne University in 1984 and Advances has been eerily bogged was Dean of the Faculty of Arts in Southbank, but last month – and the Ernest Scott Professor of masked, vigilant, brolly-wielding – History. His many books include we made our way to Sydney, partly The Oxford History Australian to enjoy the Matisse: Life and Spirit History, Volume 4 (1986), The Reds: Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne University Press) exhibition currently showing at the The Communist Party of Australia Art Gallery of New South Wales. Julie Ewington extols the from origins to illegality (1999), and The History Wars (2003). exhibition on page 63. And what a stirring experience Matisse Stuart’s erudition and collegiality were second to none. is, with its many loans from the Centre Pompidou. Another His prodigious energy and capacious knowledge made him a highlight is the famous Chapel of the Rosary at Vence in the dream for editors, Peter Rose among them. He commissioned south of France. It is, as Julie notes, a breathtaking evocation – Stuart to co-edit The Oxford Companion to Australian History such a tonic after this godawful year.

(1998) – with Graeme Davison and John Hirst – and often With the gradual revival of the performing arts and the published him at ABR. reopening of public galleries around the country, ABR has Frank Bongiorno (professor of history at ANU), speaking greatly increased its arts criticism online and in the print at Stuart’s funeral at Ormond College, spoke eloquently of edition. One priority has been an expansion of our coverage Stuart’s long contribution to the history profession in this of the visual arts. Francesca Sasnaitis, writing for ABR Arts country. He noted his trademark altruism: online, leads us through the big new The View from Here show at the refurbished Art Gallery of Western Australia.

We loved him for his selflessness, as for his loyalty. But his This year we look forward to bringing you more reviews of greatest act of generosity was to encourage us to find our own art exhibitions from around the country. g way of being historians. How easy it would have been for a man A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

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Diaries

The love problem

Helen Garner on the fissures between fact and fiction Lisa Gorton

V is an almost comical figure here, falling somewhere between Casaubon in Middlemarch and Robert in The Diary of a Provincial Lady.

V says that women’s writing ‘lacks an overarching philosophy’ …

‘Bloody fussy women,’ he says.

How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998

by Helen Garner

T

Text Publishing $29.99 hb, 248 pp

‘Stupid, cliché-ridden, impertinent, presumptuous, offensive women.’

‘I’m like an ocean liner,’ he says, ‘levelly forging along. And you’re a smaller boat that swerves and flitters here and there – a bright little thing.’

‘I know this mightn’t sound very good,’ he said, ‘but why do you he first two volumes of Helen Garner’s diaries – Yellow imagine that anyone would be interested in reading your diary?’

Notebook (2019) and One Day I’ll Remember This (2020) – cover eight years apiece. This one covers three. It is an This characterisation of V makes How to End a Story about intense, even claustrophobic story of the breakup of a marriage – something more than the question of one particular marriage. a story told in the incidental, fragmentary form of a diary.

In an earlier volume, Garner wrote: ‘I would like to write It becomes a different question: what compels a woman to about dominance, revulsion, separation, the horrible struggles stay with a man such as this? She herself comes to see the relationbetween people who love each other.’ And, ‘Later, a dream: some ship in terms of a ‘classic position’: ‘I think I am in the classic kind of dark, dumb attraction between V and me.’ Now here it is: position of a woman artist who in order to maintain a marriage a story of the struggles between people who love each other, and is obliged to trim herself so as not to make her husband feel their slow waking out of it. How to End a Story starts just after – what?’

Reading this diary you can sense, in its background, founthe publication of Garner’s book The First Stone (1995), a book dational works of feminist writing. that she started writing at about the time About jealousy, and trying to live with that she started on the relationship with V. it: Simone de Beauvoir’s novel She A lot of the entries in How to End a Story Came to Stay. About the search for her reflect, one way or another, on ‘the trouble own living space: Virginia Woolf ’s between women and men’. Even seemA Room of One’s Own. About accommoingly digressive parts of the diary reflect dating a sexist man: Simone de Beauvoir’s back on the question. She and a friend The Second Sex. Beauvoir wrote: ‘The visit the new Armani store: they compare oppressor would not be so strong if he its clothes for women with its clothes for did not have accomplices among the men. They prefer the latter. She is told oppressed’. H writes, ‘I wanted so much that her haircut is ‘too short’; she calls to be loved that I tried to turn myself it ‘blokeish’. Her daughter gets married; into the sort of woman I thought I would she remembers how her father thwarted have to be … I connived, I enabled, and her first wedding. She visits her parents: I allowed him to set hard into worse when her father leaves the room, he turns versions of the misogyny he already felt.’ out the light, leaving his wife and daughIt is as though H requires herself to test ter in the dark. She and V pass a couple the truths of this long tradition against fighting in the street. Passing that place her own nerve ends. the next day, V says, ‘I wonder what hapIn 2009, says Brennan, Garner ‘read pened to that bloke.’ She quotes Proust Helen Garner (Darren James,Text Publishing) an ABR review by Vivien Gaston of two on jealousy; Richard Ford from Women books by artists’ wives’. In her journal she with Men. In a conversation with Bernadette Brennan, Garner set out a wrote: ‘A slightly sickened sense of recognition slithers through rule for publishing her diaries: ‘all I’m going to give myself permis- me: the serving, the self-abasement or at least – abnegation, the sion to do is to cut, and fillet, and chop out bits’ (A Writing Life: attempts to rationalise the man’s egotistical demands & serene Helen Garner and her work, 2017). These entries are selected (cut, sense of entitlement & the wife’s subservience to these …’

But she had guessed it from the first. ‘Dread: he too will filleted, chopped out) with an eye for what it is to break with someone after years. In its obsessiveness, How to End a Story captures turn out to be manly in that way – looked after by a woman, how the single self has to be extricated painfully, piece by piece, no longer alive to her yet still drawing full benefits from her … from shared habits, friendships, places, stories, memories, things. Is there hope for women and men?’

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calibre essay prize

PRIZE MONEY

$7,500

CLOSING SOON

17 January 2022

The 2022 Calibre Essay Prize, one of the world’s leading prizes for non-fiction essays, is now open for submissions. The Prize is worth $7,500 and is open to all essayists writing in English. We seek essays of between 2,000 and 5,000 words on any subject and in any genre: personal or political, literary or speculative, traditional or experimental.

This is the sixteenth time that ABR has run the Calibre Essay Prize. This year, our judges are Declan Fry, Peter Rose and Beejay Silcox.

The winner will receive $5,000; the runner-up $2,500.

For information about terms and conditions, frequently asked questions, and past winners, please visit our website: www.australianbookreview.com.au

Recent winners ‘The Calibre Prize has changed my writing life. It has encouraged me to take risks, to confront difficult subjects head-on, and to trust that there is a willing readership that will follow you through the trial of making sense of reality. Treat this prize as an incentive to find where events end and stories begin.’

Theodore Ell, 2021 winner

‘In my essay, I sketched the kind of narrative I have always hungered to read: a story of trans becoming that digs into the messiness of bodies, gender and identity. The recognition afforded by the Calibre Prize is an important step in that struggle.’

Yves Rees, 2020 winner

The Calibre Essay Prize is generously funded by ABR Patrons Mary-RuthASindrey U S T R A L I and A N B Peter O O K R McLennan.

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he first two volumes of Garner’s diaries offer, as one of their chief pleasures, the feeling of time as it passes. They are full of small occasions, glancing insights, a slowly accumulating drift of actions and consequences. This one is different. This one is as compelling as a detective story. This one is edited with the sense of an ending.

One of the pleasures of detective stories is how they transform all their incidental detail into what might be evidence. In How to End a Story, H is asking herself questions that have the same sort of effect. Is he having an affair? Should she stay with this man?

Or move out, get a room of her own? The reader, questions in mind, starts looking for evidence. The reader is privy to intimate details. The reader is watching for clues. The reader can see what’s coming. The reader can judge.

How to End a Story is alive with the sort of daily events and details that are companionable in writing. Always, there is the straightforward pleasure of Garner’s prose. But this diary’s sense of an ending changes the way in which it’s read. For one thing, it gives symbolic force to certain ordinary things. Her shopping bags, for instance. H’s husband V, being a male genius, needs H out of the apartment all day. She goes to her rented office.

She returns, weighed down with bags, to cook the dinner. Alain Badiou, writing on Samuel Beckett, defines four figures ‘generic of everything that can happen to a member of human kind’. The first is, ‘to wander in the dark with a bag’ (Figures of Subjective Destiny: On Samuel Beckett, 2008). It is a diary: these were real shopping bags. Still, for a reader, these shopping bags come to signify what H has to lug about, bring back to the place, empty out to make into something nurturing. Badiou: ‘The two figures of solitude are: to wander in the dark with one’s bag and to be immobile because one has been abandoned.’ The memory of these shopping bags gives extra charge to the shopping bag that V stores, at the end, in his workroom for ‘X, the painter’.

There are symbols in writing because there are symbols in life.

These are two writers, breaking up. It makes sense, then, that the facts which have symbolic force in this record of their breakup find symbolic expression in literature. As in Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The Purloined Letter’, much depends upon a letter hiding in plain sight. Later, a blue straw Armani hat becomes the fetish object of H’s magnificent rage. In A Writing Life, Brennan notes how, after the breakup, in a room of her own, Garner wrote a twelve-page narrative poem in rhyming couplets called ‘The Hat in the Flat’.

In How to End a Story, H writes about her experience of therapy – and this, too, brings in questions about how symbols work in life. The therapist sits behind H’s shoulder, where she can’t be seen. ‘She said that I’m in competition with her, interpreting my own dreams.’ The therapist translates symbols. ‘“I think,” she said, “that the house is you. The dark part of yourself.”’ But, that dark is metaphorical. The body and the self and its symbols can hardly be separated. There are a lot of dreams in How to End a Story – as though, in recording these, Garner is again worrying at the question of how dreams and symbols and fiction work in with ongoing life. H quotes Don DeLillo: ‘We stand around, look out the window, walk down the hall, come back to the page, and in those intervals, something subterranean is forming, a literal dream.’ Except, it seems, that Garner doesn’t want the dream on 10 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

its own, self-enclosed and self-sufficient. She wants to include the ground on which that literal dream was formed: the standing around, the looking out the window, the walking down the hall, the coming back to the page.

H

ow to End a Story is working at what Garner calls ‘the crossover between fiction and an account of what happened’. Truman Capote, in an interview published in Conversations with Capote by Lawrence Grobel in 1985, foresaw the ‘conjunction’ of fiction and non-fiction: I think the two things are coming into conjunction like two great rivers …

Fiction and nonfiction?

Yes. They’re coming into a conjunction, divided by an island that is getting more and more narrow. The two rivers are going to suddenly flow together once and for all and forever. You see it more and more in writing …

Do you think that Joyce and Proust took writing as far as it could go?

Oh no, I don’t at all. There is a root for fiction, but I think it’s going to have to involve more and more what it is that I’m trying to do, which is to make truth into fiction, or fiction into truth – I don’t know what it is …

(Capote kept a journal, too. He said: ‘I do dialogue and description. In my journal I have my special list of truly despicable people. It’s run now to something over four thousand names.’)

Truth into fiction, or fiction into truth – H says, ‘maybe my right place to work is down a fissure between fiction and whatever the other thing is. Down a crack.’ Because How to End a Story is a diary, in telling its story it tries to discover how stories take shape in day-by-day life, through the weird interplay of accidents and habits and happenings and revelations and, sometimes, decisions.

‘About writing,’ she wrote: ‘meaning is in the smallest event.

It doesn’t have to be put there: only revealed.’ Along with this interplay between dreams and daily life, the diary format offers Garner a way to make the story work through fragments. She dispenses with all the machinery of getting characters up and dressed and breakfasted and out the door, and from one country to another, and from one year to the next. She keeps only those events that reveal their meaning.

How to End a Story is composed with something like a novel’s sense of an ending. But, that is not to say that it doesn’t matter whether it is fiction or ‘whatever the other thing is’. Because this is a diary, because it is true, it concentrates attention on the writer’s particular way of seeing people and places and things.

We can contest all of it.

At times, reading this diary, you feel like a spy. At times you feel like a friend. At times you feel like a judge. Take the occasion when H tells someone to get fucked in a restaurant. She gets ticked off for that. The reader can judge V, and the other people there, and her. Meanwhile, H is judging him, and them, and herself too. Reading some diaries (Elizabeth Bishop’s translation of Helena Morley’s diary, for instance) is like sitting where H’s therapist sits, looking over the writer’s shoulder. Reading Garner’s diaries is not like that. It is much more like talking face to face.

At one point, H twists around to see her therapist – to check that she is there.

In the first volume, H writes, ‘I see that what I am doing, in this diary, is conducting an argument with myself.’ That argument makes a place for the reader. In the second volume of these diaries, H is reading Peter Handke’s notebooks, The Weight of the World.

She writes: ‘He’s more brutal with himself than I have ever been.

He inspires me to try to be more truthful in this book. It’s hard, for I am always hiding something, either from myself or from the person who may or may not, today or on some future day, read this and be inclined to think less of me.’ That is, the reader was there all along: imagined counterpart; spy, friend, judge; someone with a place held for them in that ongoing argument which the writing is.

At the end of his love poem ‘They Flee From Me’, Thomas Wyatt suddenly turns the poem over to the court of public opinion: ‘But since that I so kindly am served / I would fain know what she hath deserved.’ The last line reveals that the judges have been gathered around the poem, listening, from the first. Perhaps for Garner that’s the point of mixing fiction with ‘whatever the other thing is’: it makes the reader part of it; it gives the reader licence to judge. Garner remarks that her story of The First Stone is ‘full of holes’, for instance. She seems surprised that readers expected anything else.

This is what connects Garner’s diary project with her sequence of books about legal trials: an interest in the meeting of opposing views; a structure which looks for justice out of conflict. I thought of Garner’s diary when I read Annie Ernaux’s brilliant memoir A Girl’s Story (2016): I needed them to be alive, as if I needed to be writing about what is alive, to be endangered in the way one is when writing about the living and not in the state of tranquility that prevails when people die and are consigned to the immateriality of fictional characters.

There is a need to make writing an untenable enterprise, to atone for its power (not its ease, no one feels less ease in writing than me) out of an imaginary terror of consequences …

Garner, too, seems to pay for the right to speak by endangering herself, to an extent that’s disconcerting.

‘Don’t talk to anyone about this, will you.’ Normally this would enrage me, but I say, ‘I won’t. I’m too ashamed. I’m ashamed of my own naivety. I’m ashamed for you. And I’m ashamed because people will say, “What? She’s still hanging around waiting for that jerk-off?” I’m not going to tell anybody about this.’

And I’m not …

But she does. Because she needs to be ‘writing about what is alive’, to be endangered – and because, answering those reiterations of shame, she takes an epigraph from Jung: ‘The love problem is part of mankind’s heavy toll of suffering, and nobody should be ashamed of having to pay his tribute.’ g Lisa Gorton, who lives in Melbourne, is a poet, novelist, and critic, and a former Poetry Editor of ABR. Her novel The Life of Houses (2015) shared the 2016 Prime Minister’s Award for fiction.

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11

Letters

‘In God’s vineyard’

for comment.

Lyons describes the letters to Menzies as ‘writing upwards’.

Many, but by no means all, are deferential. By directing applause Writing to a prime minister or anger at the top level, the writers are acknowledging the prime Brenda Niall minister’s authority. Lyons has sorted his immense swag of letters into five main categories. These are the congratulatory letters, the letters that express anger and protest, those that request favours, those that give advice, and the paranoid letters.

The fan mail and congratulation group is the most predictable and respectful, although in this division, the ‘take it easy, old Dear Prime Minister: Letters to boy, we need you’ letter from Sir Frank Packer claims a chummy Robert Menzies, 1949–1966 equality.

by Martyn Lyons How does one address a prime minister? ‘Dear Sir’ is the UNSW Press simplest way, but ‘Honourable Sir’ and ‘Highly Respected Sir’ $39.99 pb, 272 pp appear in Lyons’s list of what he calls the ‘remote greetings’. Some etter writing thrives on distance. Out of necessity, in the writers press the wrong button, as did the Indian collector of early years of European settlement, Australia became a stamps who asked for a gift from ‘Your Majesty’. After Menzies nation of letter writers. The remoteness of the island con- was knighted in 1963, ‘Dear Sir Robert’ became the most popular tinent gave the letter a special importance. Even those unused to form. In signing off, some correspondents reminded Menzies of their cause or plight. As well writing had so much to say, as the ‘obedient servant’ opand such a strong need to tion, there was the religious hear from home, that the lanote, as in ‘Yours devotedly borious business of pen and in God’s vineyard’. Some ink and the struggles with sign off in anger or disgust. A spelling were overcome. Earpatriotic flourish – ‘For God, ly letters reflected the homethe Queen and Sanity’ – assickness of settlers as well as sumes that Menzies shares their sense of achievement the writer’s crusading spirit. and their need to hold on Some letters were acto a former life. It’s possible companied by gifts. A pair to see the emergence of a of elephant tusks came as democratic tradition of leta token of esteem from a ter writing in those needful South African admirer. A times. Rich or poor, well edcentenarian sent a piece of ucated or semi-literate, they her birthday cake. A nun sent all felt the urge to connect. a ‘miraculous medal’. There A letter is a transaction were Christmas cards and between writer and recipient; birthday cards for Menzies it speaks of their relationship. and his family. The prime The undelivered messages minister was urged to drop that drove Herman Melville’s in for tea.

Bartleby to despair were Not all the correspondcalled ‘dead letters’. Letters ents were so pleased with sent to unknown officials in their prime minister. Lyons anger, praise, or supplication finds a group with more deoften bring bland replies: Robert Menzies greets Queen Elizabeth II as his wife, Pattie, looks on, 1963 mands than congratulations.

(Wikimedia Commons) formal thanks that close the Their shared belief is that door on any further corre‘if you want something done, go to the top’. Complaints about spondence. The lucky few open up a conversation.

It is mostly one-way traffic in Dear Prime Minister: Letters to bureaucratic red tape are expressed in peremptory tones. If a Robert Menzies 1949–1966. Historian Martyn Lyons has trawled government official has blundered, it is Menzies’ job to sort things through the archives to read 22,000 letters in which the needs out. It’s his job to see that the old age pension is increased to and passions, obsessions and grievances, of many Australians and meet the cost of living. For some, Menzies appears as indifferent some overseas correspondents are revealed. By today’s standards, and neglectful. Others rely on his ‘safe pair of hands’ and expect Menzies had a minuscule staff to deal with his mailbox; and those hands to get busy.

It is impossible to read Dear Prime Minister without lamentbecause more than half the letters were handwritten, it was hard work to read, reply, and in some cases refer to the prime minister ing the fading of the letter as a form. Fax, texts, and emails may

L

12 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

History reveal something of the relationship between sender and recipient, but they cannot match the individuality of ink and paper and the feel of the handmade item. In describing the letters to Menzies as physical objects, Lyons makes their ordinariness expressive.

The intent of the letter is usually plain from the start. ‘Please don’t think I’m a crackpot’ is one way to deflect a quick dismissal.

Many insist on being ordinary people, undeserving of the great man’s time. Housewives, self-styled, often stress their humble status.

The mood quickens in the later chapters, in which questions of religious and political beliefs appear. Menzies is identified with loyalty to the queen and a Commonwealth which many preferred to remain white. Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru is regularly accused of treachery because of his support for anti-colonial independence movements. And, of course, because he wasn’t white.

Menzies’ devotion to Queen Elizabeth II was so well known that monarchists felt free to criticise her gently, as if from inside the family. ‘Much as I admire and love our dear little Queen, I think she needs a spanking,’ one monarchist wrote. The issue here was the queen’s decision to cancel an allowance made to her uncle, the former Edward VIII. Once a king, always a king.

Ideas about war, communism, the Catholic Church, and the White Australia policy predominate in the late 1950s. Menzies is expected to keep the nation safe from alien powers and to preserve peace and calm at home. His habitual formality of manner was sometimes seen to lapse. He was rebuked for rudeness to Australian Labor Party leader Herbert Evatt in the fractious 1950s, but most often he is praised as an uncompromising enemy of the left. His correspondents show very little interest in Indigenous affairs. Some letters are critical of apartheid and urge a more open approach to immigration. On the whole, Lyons concludes, ‘the majority uphold the fading dreams of white supremacy and imperial solidarity’.

The ‘Paranoid letters’ group might not seem to deserve inclusion, except for the fact that we are still hearing voices like these. ‘Woe to the Bloody City. It is all full of Lies and Robbery,’ writes one of Menzies’ correspondents. Another believed that the Freemasons had ‘telepathic radio sets’ that were controlling the thoughts of influential people like the queen.

Lyons uses the Menzies mailbox to illuminate a period and its problems. Menzies himself plays a minor, mostly passive, role, noting, thanking, but rarely engaging with the issues raised. When a Melbourne journalist indicted the capitalist system for ‘making a hell of this earthly paradise’, he pencilled a note: ‘Do not answer.’

Lyons doesn’t include complete letters and, judging from the extracts quoted, that was a wise decision. His analyses are shrewd and witty. ‘The silent masses,’ he concludes, ‘turn out not to be so silent after all.’ The letters express pain and anxiety; they release feelings of anger and frustration. Although many of the letters are repetitive and clumsily expressed, they offer a rare insight into the concerns of those who thought it worthwhile to write ‘Dear Prime Minister’. g Brenda Niall’s memoir My Accidental Career will be published

by Text in March 2022. She co-edited (with John Thompson) The Oxford Book of Australian Letters (1998).

A tidy little earner Peter Ryan meets his match Mark McKenna

History Wars: The Peter Ryan– Manning Clark controversy

by Doug Munro

I

ANU Press $55 pb, 229 pp

t was one of the most notorious episodes in the annals of Australian publishing. In September 1993, writing in Quadrant, Peter Ryan, the former director of Melbourne University Press (1962–87), publicly disowned Manning Clark’s sixvolume A History of Australia. Clark had been dead for barely sixteen months. For scandalous copy and gossip-laden controversy, there was nothing to equal it, particularly when Ryan’s bombshell was dropped into a culture that was already polarised after more than a decade of the History Wars.

One month before Ryan’s blistering attack, Quadrant, edited by Robert Manne, ran Geoffrey Blainey’s essay ‘Drawing up a Balance Sheet of our History’, in which the wily historian identified his former teacher Manning Clark as one of the chief architects of what Blainey labelled the ‘Black Armband’ view of Australian history. Now, in his essay and others that followed, Ryan chimed in with more vindictive intent, describing Clark’s work as ‘gooey, subjective pap ... a vast cauldron of very thin verbal soup’. He mocked Clark’s literary style as ‘bad to the point of embarrassment’, and cast his entire multi-volume history as little more than ‘a construct spun from fairy floss ... a fraud’.

And this from a publisher who, when Clark was alive, had lavished him with nothing but fawning, unadulterated praise. Ryan had inherited Clark’s project, then shepherded and cajoled him to complete each successive volume, from Volume Two in 1968 through to the publication of Volume Six in 1987.

Almost twenty years since Ryan’s article appeared, Doug Munro, one of New Zealand’s finest historians, has given us the first comprehensive account of the entire saga, providing insightful biographical and political context, excavating every morsel of intrigue and drama, and skilfully revealing the controversy’s lasting significance. In a tenacious scholar such as Munro – a historian of the Pacific who has recently published widely on the lives of historians – Ryan has met his match.

Munro became interested in the controversy gradually, but as he read more and more, he was convinced that ‘Ryan’s version of events didn’t stack up’. Nor was it ‘trustworthy’. ‘I am no more enamoured of Clark now than I have been in the past’, he explains, ‘but I believe that Ryan behaved badly’ and that he ‘emerges from the episode with little credibility’. One of the key questions that Munro is driven to answer concerns Ryan’s motivation.

Why did he attack Clark with such ferocity? Why so soon after Clark’s death? And what drove him to abandon his professional A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

13

and professionally – with his view of Clark. He was envious of Clark’s extraordinary success and, in 1993, increasingly opposed to Paul Keating’s republicanism and the progressive left politics that Clark had championed vigorously since the early 1970s.

Munro shows that Ryan, who had stopped voting Labor in 1975, was eager to establish his own credentials as a writer in the wake of his retirement from MUP. In early 1993, he had lost his fortnightly column in The Age and was soon offered a column in Quadrant, where he would continue to write until shortly before his death in 2015. He quickly saw the advantage in trying to destroy Clark’s posthumous reputation. Taking the axe to a tall poppy became a way of elevating his own status as a public figure and endearing himself to his fellow conservatives.

Robert Manne has always defended the publication of Ryan’s article. Clark, he argued, was ‘cavalier with facts, unreliable in his mastery of documentary sources, [and] uninterested in the work of other historians’, a reasonably accurate assessment of Clark’s scholarship with which Munro largely concurs. But through a combination of meticulous research and savvy political instinct, Munro scuttles nearly all of Ryan’s justifications for publicly denouncing Clark.

He shows that Ryan was not locked into a contract with Clark, nor was it clear from the outset how many volumes of the history would be published. When Clark became depressed and disillusioned by reviews and threatened to stop, Ryan urged him on, mixing flattery with perfectly timed cheques against Clark’s advance to keep MUP’s ‘tidy little earner’ on track. Nor was there a conspiracy of silence in the academy regarding the quality of Clark’s scholarship. Much of Ryan’s critique had already Manning Clark at the University of Newcastle, 1980. been aired by others. Ryan’s essay was hardly original. It (Courtesy of the University of Newcastle Photographic Collection, Special Collections, was not what was said about Clark that was controversial, The University of Newcastle, Australia) so much as who was saying it. The dubious decision of a ... he was always trying to be in the public eye’. Ryan was also major publisher to publicly dump on his firm’s most successful deeply conflicted about their relationship. ‘We never had a row’; author was, if nothing else, sensational.

As for Ryan’s motives, Munro is unsparing. Although Ryan ‘he was a fucking nuisance’; ‘we shared a frame of allusion’; ‘I could set my watch by Manning’s calls at 9.30 on a Monday morning had privately expressed reservations about Clark’s work to others, ... he would often call in one of his gloomy moods ... I’d inten- he ‘lacked the intestinal fortitude to confront Clark about the tionally save a few bawdy tales or pub stories each week to cheer shortcomings of the History’ while his author was alive. Then, him up’; ‘[My negative view of his work] was an emerging thing’; when Clark was dead and could no longer respond, Ryan, driven ‘What I was doing was my duty to the firm, looking after the best by ‘sheer vindictiveness’, ‘professional jealousy’, ‘political differencinterests of MUP with one of our best-selling authors ... I wished es’, and ‘a desire to restore his public profile’, skewered the author who had helped to establish his reputation (along with figures I hadn’t had to be his publisher’.

The two men had known one another since their university like Richard Walsh and Hilary McPhee) as one of Australia’s days in Melbourne in the 1940s. Ryan had fought in World War leading publishers in the late twentieth century.

Munro rightly asks, ‘what does a controversy that basically II, and in 1959 published a classic account of his time on patrol in New Guinea, Fear Drive My Feet. Clark did not enlist because of lasted a fortnight as a media and talkback radio event mean to his petit mal and, as Peter Coleman noted, was ‘indifferent to the us thirty years later?’ In his rigorous examination of the whole ex-serviceman ethos’. The differences in personality between them affair, he has allowed us to see the damage wrought by one epiwere stark. Ryan was fastidious, officious, and cunning. Clark sode in the history and culture wars that have plagued Australian was melodramatic, needful, and self-centred. And as Ryan often literary, intellectual, and political life for almost five decades.

I doubt that a more definitive account will be published for many moaned to others, he was far from being a ‘compliant author’.

In his later years, Ryan sounded embittered. Something in years, if ever. g him was unfulfilled. To my mind, there was little doubt that his view of himself was deeply entangled – emotionally, intellectually, Mark McKenna’s latest book is Return to Uluru (Black Inc., 2021). obligations as Clark’s publisher for more than twenty-five years?

In May 2007, when I interviewed Ryan for my biography of Manning Clark (An Eye for Eternity, 2011), it was clear that merely talking about Clark seemed to animate every fibre of his being. Ryan lurched from affection for Clark to outright hostility in the same breath. ‘Even when I disapproved of him I didn’t regret knowing him’; ‘he was a complete fucking hypocrite’; ‘he needed to be buoyed’; ‘he was a bad man’; ‘he was an exhibitionist

14 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

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History

Gone fishin’ History in cupfuls Billy Griffiths

What Is History, Now? How the past and present speak to each other

edited by Helen Carr and Suzannah Lipscomb

I

Weidenfeld & Nicolson $32.99 pb, 339 pp

n early 1961, historian Edward Hallett Carr (1892–1982) delivered a series of lectures on his craft. The resulting book, What Is History?, was a provocation to his peers and a caution against positivist views of the past. He urged the reader to ‘study the historian before you begin to study the facts’. He illuminated the subjectivities of the historical process, from the moment a ‘fact’ occurs to when it is called as such, through the endurances and erasures of archival selection to the silences created by the historian’s narrative choices. The most famous passages are Carr’s maritime metaphors, in which he likens ‘facts’ to ‘fish swimming in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean’. What the historian will catch depends on the kind of facts she wants, and once they reach the fishmonger’s slab, she will cook and serve them ‘in whatever style appeals’. ‘History,’ Carr concluded, ‘means interpretation.’

Sixty years later, Carr’s great-granddaughter Helen Carr, together with Suzannah Lipscomb, has revisited the classic text in a new edited collection, What Is History, Now? Helen Carr was born six years after her great-grandfather died, but she grew up with stories of ‘the Prof ’, and throughout her life has engaged in an imagined dialogue with him, ‘one of our greatest and most influential historians and thinkers’. She hopes this collection will serve ‘as a tribute to Carr’s timeless work’ as well as ‘an olive branch to those who have felt pushed out or marginalised from history’. (I wonder what E.H. Carr, the great advocate for context, would make of his work being called timeless?)

Lipscomb shares Helen Carr’s inclusive vision for history. As she reflects in her individual contribution, ‘if we keep on telling the same stories of the people in power … we will be complicit in keeping the marginalised marginal’. Together they have commissioned and curated an engaging, if inconsistent, series of essays about reading into silences, writing histories ‘against the grain’, and recentring peripheral voices.

But the question in the title – ‘What is history?’ – is no longer active in this new volume. This book is neither a historiographical argument nor a review of the past sixty years of scholarship; rather, it is a showcase of the variety of history-writing currently underway in Britain and America. History, in Carr and Lipscomb’s framing, is a stable, clearly defined discipline based on documents.

It is distinct from other disciplines, such as literature, archaeology, and ‘prehistory’, and can be ‘flexible, malleable, colourful and without bias’. It is something to be accessed or enjoyed or 16 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

extended to others. And while they suggest that ‘history belongs to us all’, they regard history-writing to be the domain of professional, mostly academic, historians.

If this seems a narrow framing of ‘history’, fortunately it has not stopped the contributors from bursting disciplinary boundaries and celebrating, in Bettany Hughes’s words, ‘that there are as many ways to understand history and to enact historiography as there are ways to be human’. Indeed, Leila K. Blackbird and Caroline Dodds Pennock explore how Indigenous perspectives are subverting and enriching ‘European ways of understanding and telling history’. And in the final essay in the volume, Simon Schama bristles at the perceived need to seek ‘permission from the academy’ to engage with archives other than documents.

‘Is natural history history?’ he asks. ‘How could it not be, when the epic of the earth circumscribes everything else historians write about?’

This is far from the first book to revisit Carr’s text, and it is similar in structure to earlier efforts, such as David Cannadine’s 2002 collection, What Is History Now? It not only shares a title (overlooking the comma) but also a contributor. While the chapters in the Cannadine collection offer historiographical reviews of some of the branches of history (i.e. ‘What is social history now?’), the chapters in this collection act as pitches for the value and necessity of various subdisciplines: ‘Why global history matters’, ‘Why diversity in Tudor England matters’, ‘Why family history matters’. Far from conjuring the ‘vast ocean’ of historical experience, this bite-sized approach brings to mind a different maritime metaphor: Gustave Flaubert’s jibe that ‘writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful’. But I level this criticism at the framing of the book and not at the contributor chapters, which, more often than not, runneth over.

There is an activist, revisionist spirit throughout the collection. Representation is a recurring theme. Jaipreet Virdi asks why disability – such an enduring part of human experience – is so conspicuously absent from historical discussions: ‘the people whose histories have long been glossed over, trapped in medical files or valued only for inspiration need their stories told’. Justin Bengry builds on this theme in his chapter on queer history, where he finds ‘ancestors and aliens in the very same people’. ‘Having a history matters,’ he writes. ‘That the past is ultimately so full of possibility must challenge us to reconsider our own times.’

Unfortunately, Carr and Lipscomb’s interest in representation does not extend to geographical representation. Several contributors call for broader, non-Western perspectives, especially given the geopolitical dynamics of the twenty-first century. Indeed, Maya Jasanoff, in her critique of imperial histories, even calls out the ‘disproportionate concentration of resources and “authority” in the well-endowed universities of former colonial metropoles’. Yet this legacy of empire remains on full display in What Is History, Now?, with its dominant northern-hemisphere focus.

The most interesting strand is the exploration of history as a way of thinking: as a process of questioning and querying, of making informed judgements about reliable or unreliable sources, of contextualising, synthesising, empathising, and understanding.

As Alex von Tunzelmann argues, the craft of history is a vital tool in the age of misinformation. ‘History gives us all the time in the world to think,’ writes Hughes. ‘History reminds us to

remember, to think better.’

What is sometimes lost in this collection – and particularly in the way it has been framed – is the idea of history as a creative act: a performance of critical imagination. The editors’ assertion that history can be written ‘without bias’ undercuts more interesting conversations that could be had about the limits of the historical imagination, the interplay between history and fiction, and the idea that a work of history can also be a work of great literature.

Similarly, flippant remarks such as ‘As we write, history is hot stuff ’ undermine the gravity of their subject. History is always political.

It is not just a discipline that moves in and out of the public eye.

It is an endless, dynamic dialogue between past and present.

There is little that is ground-breaking in this collection, but that doesn’t stop it from being lively and rewarding. It is well suited to graduate historians in search of a specialty. If you are looking for robust historiography, turn to one of the other hundreds of books that have used E.H. Carr’s writing as a spur to historical thinking. If you crave an elucidation of the subtleties, complexities, and magic of history, search out a single-authored book, perhaps even by one of these talented contributors, where they have the space to develop a voice, cultivate an argument, and show, as well as tell, what good history can be. g Billy Griffiths is an Australian writer and historian.

History

Reading Hobbes in the pandemic Intellectual history in an age of crisis David Kearns

Confronting Leviathan: A history of ideas

by David Runciman

I

Profile Books $39.99 hb, 287 pp

n ‘that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE’, wrote Thomas Hobbes, ‘Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul … giving life and motion to the whole body’.

This ‘Artificiall man’ was to ensure ‘the peoples safety’, and the means at its disposal were limitless. The sovereign was ‘not subject to the Civill Lawes’ and could abrogate any ‘Lawes that trouble him’. Leviathan was published in 1651, written by Hobbes while exiled in France after fleeing the English Civil Wars.

The Wars had already produced almost 200,000 deaths, including that of Charles I, beheaded in 1649 following a conviction of treason by Parliament.

The circumstances of Leviathan’s publication and its arcane language may seem remote, but Hobbes’s argument, that the sovereign holds unlimited rights in seeking the populace’s safety, feels remarkably timely. On 23 September this year, Melbourne began a world-record 235th day in lockdown. At the time, more than half of Australia’s population was under restrictive stay-athome orders. In May, the Australian Federal Court upheld the federal government’s ban on returnees from India, citing the Biosecurity Act 2015’s intent ‘to impinge on common law rights’ to protect public health.

Hobbes’s seeming timeliness provides the starting point for David Runciman’s Confronting Leviathan: A history of ideas.

Runciman, a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge, has been writing on politics and political thought in academic and public contexts since the mid-1990s. His first essay in the London

Review of Books, on the National Lottery, appeared in 1996, a year before Cambridge’s Ideas in Context series published his first monograph, Pluralism and the Personality of the State. These early publications remain indicative of Runciman’s characteristic blend of accessible style and deep scholarship.

Confronting Leviathan is based on the first series of Runciman’s podcast ‘History of Ideas’, a spinoff of the LRB’s ‘Talking Politics’, which he hosts with Helen Thompson. It constitutes an intellectual history from the seventeenth century to the present, relating ‘the history of ideas to the big political themes thrown up by the pandemic’. Its unifying narrative is the modern state, defined in terms of representation and limitless coercive power to secure public safety. Although ‘almost everything about politics over the last four hundred years has changed’, the modern state and its ‘core paradox’ remain: the state’s potential as saviour or destroyer.

Runciman traces the modern state’s history through twelve texts, beginning with Leviathan, as it initiates ‘our story’ as ‘moderns – modern citizens or modern subjects of modern states’.

Whereas pre-moderns separated rulers and ruled into rivals, Hobbes conjoined them in a ‘mechanical embrace’. Hobbes claimed that humans – driven by natural law to escape their ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ lives in the state of nature – contract together to create the state and its sovereign representative.

The machinery of state and sovereignty is thus constituted of the people, who relinquish their rights to the sovereign, providing it unrestrained ‘power and authority’ over them.

Taking a serial contextualist approach, Runciman situates his remaining texts within their historical moment while exploring how each engaged with Hobbes’s state. So-called ‘great book’ histories of political thought typically venerate Western male writers. Confronting Leviathan diversifies this canon. Gender and nationality are not the only metrics to judge genealogies, but this biographical diversity underpins argumentative variety. Critiques of the Hobbesian state include Mary Wollstonecraft’s insistence that states must provide ‘genuine political equality’, Benjamin Constant regarding freedom’s contingency on ‘political participation’, and Gandhi and Frantz Fanon on colonialism revealing the modern state’s ‘coercive heart’. Alexis de Tocqueville’s and Francis Fukuyama’s concern that democratic representation leads to stagnation, and Max Weber on the necessity that representatives balance ‘conviction and responsibility’, inflect Hobbes’s argument.

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Throughout, Runciman emerges as a cautious defender of the state. Against Friedrich Hayek’s critique that over-active states risk ‘tyranny’, he argues that ‘the state could prove decisive’ against climate catastrophe. Catharine A. MacKinnon’s demand that states address gender-based violence is reconfigured as fundamentally Hobbesian: a demand that the state ‘use its violence against other forms of violence’. Responding to Hannah Arendt’s accusation that the state reduces humans to machines of ‘calculation and computation’, Runciman suggests it could be on ‘our side’ against increasingly invasive technologies. He similarly claims that the state may hold the power to break the capitalism-crisis nexus identified by Marx and Engels. Runciman’s conclusion blends optimism and warning. The modern state is ‘contingent’, not ‘inevitable’. But for now, states ‘have life-and-death power over us’ and, as states are constituted by our will, ‘we have power over them’. The representative state possesses terrifying coercive force, but faced with predatory capitalism, climate disaster, health crisis, and technological overreach, we may need ‘the power of the state to save us’.

At a time of declining numbers of history graduates across the Anglosphere, Confronting Leviathan insists on history’s importance. From the English Civil Wars to the Cold War through natural law, democracy, feminist and post-colonial theory, machine learning, and climate change, it demonstrates Quentin Skinner’s assertion that ‘to understand the state, you have no option but to be a historian’. But Runciman’s argumentative ambitiousness brings dangers. Confronting Leviathan hinges on Runciman’s claim that his authors all wrote within a ‘Hobbesian

world’. This argument presumes Hobbes initiated an epochal shift in political structures towards a modern statehood that centralised authority in the sovereign representative, conflating political thought and political life.

Rival intellectual traditions have sought to disperse authority, and this is often closer to reality. Dispersed authority is frequently associated with James Madison’s separation of ‘legislative, executive, and judiciary powers’, mentioned in passing by Runciman. Matthew Hale, the most senior common lawyer in England between 1671 and 1675, claimed that Hobbes spoke of ‘absolute Dominion or Sovereignty’, a ‘rare’ condition compared to sovereignty subject to ‘Qualifications’. In England, this meant sovereignty subject to common law. Hale was likely thinking of the 1610 Case of Proclamations, where Edward Coke cited the fifteenth-century judge John Fortescue to rule that sovereign prerogative could not violate ‘the law of the land’: statute, common law, and custom.

In 2019, the UK Supreme Court deemed unlawful Boris Johnson’s attempt to prorogue Parliament, citing Coke’s judgment. Although prorogation was a prerogative power of the Crown as ‘sovereign in person’, it violated ‘Parliamentary sovereignty’. The case entailed a clash between Crown and Parliament’s rival sovereign authorities, subject to common law arbitration.

Rather than Hobbes initiating an epochal shift, the modern English state remains reliant on a judicial tradition dispersing authority and stretching back at least two centuries before Leviathan’s publication. Australia’s separation of powers comprises a more divided configuration. Our head of state is the monarch PETER THI EL / MARGAR ET ATW FRANK WIL CZEK / CHR OOD / ARLIE HOCHSC ISTOPHER HILD / HITCHENS

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of another state: the queen of England. This structure resulted in our most famous constitutional crisis, the 1975 dismissal of the elected prime minister, Gough Whitlam, by the governor-general, the queen’s representative in Australia.

Our states remain, as Michael Oakeshott put it, ‘various and ramshackle’, constituted by rival authorities holding varied powers. Hobbes did not invent the modern state, but he engaged in a

battle over it that we inherit. Histories like Runciman’s are critical to our participation in this battle. A second series of ‘History of Ideas’ is out, and Runciman has acknowledged that the story he has told is one among many. Telling these stories is necessary to comprehend our world’s complexities and to confront its challenges. g David Kearns is an intellectual historian working in Canberra.

Classics

Rendering Caesar

Roman emperor and the various ways in which artists in different historical periods have chosen to depict them. As this book shows, there is nothing particularly unusual about the cargo of Roman emperors in Western art the Batavia.

Alastair J.L. Blanshard For centuries, Roman emperors have appeared in paintings, sculptures, wallpaper, tapestries, and ceramics. Images of Roman emperors have decorated every conceivable object, from imperial thrones and the bronze doors of the Vatican to boxer shorts and chocolates. Indeed, the trade in images of Roman emperors was so widespread and ubiquitous that it feels odd that Twelve Caesars: Images of power from the ancient world to the modern there was only one image of an emperor on board the Batavia.

This book owes its origins to the series of A.W. Mellon Lecby Mary Beard tures in the Fine Arts that Beard gave in Washington in 2011.

Princeton University Press Through a string of carefully chosen case studies, Beard examines $49.99 hb, 376 pp the diverse motivations of both patrons and artists in depicting e know exactly when the first image of a Roman the lives of Roman emperors and those surrounding them. She emperor arrived in Australia. It came as part of the is forensic in exposing how shameless we are in wanting to assogoods on board the ill-fated Batavia, which ran ciate ancient objects with imperial rulers, often on the flimsiest aground off the west coast of Australia on 4 June 1629. This of pretexts. She explores not only how the assorted depictions shipwreck went down in infamy following the mutiny of a group reflect preconceptions about ancient Rome, but also how the of the survivors and the subsequent murder of, at least, 110 men, images address the contemporary concerns of their audience. women, and children. Eventually, the survivors were rescued and In this way, the Roman emperors became a mirror not only for princes but for anyone who gazed into their eyes or at their often the horror of the actions of the mutineers was revealed.

One of the motives for the rescue expedition was the retriev- surprisingly jowly necks.

Not all emperors are created equal. The third century ce is al of the ship’s rich cargo. This included a magnificent Roman carved cameo depicting the Emperor Constantine and his wife full of entirely forgettable emperors. Many of them are famous in a chariot drawn by centaurs trampling the emperor’s enemies. primarily for the brevity of their reigns. Does anyone have strong feelings about the reigns of TreThis gem had supposedly arrived in bonianus Gallus and Volusian Europe in the thirteenth century (251–53 ce)? Augustus and following the sack of Constantinople Nero, on the other hand, remain and had passed through the hands names to conjure with. of numerous owners, including the As the title of this book imartist Peter Paul Rubens, before being plies, twelve emperors stand out purchased by a group of speculators from the pack. Part of the secret who thought there might be profit to to their success lies in having be made in selling the cameo to the the right biographer. Beard Mughal Emperor, Jahangir, whose brings out well the strengths of court was known for its wealth and their main biographer, Suetoniextravagance. The cameo was on its us, whose biographical sketches way to the Mughal court when it was of the first twelve Roman emshipwrecked. perors, the eponymous Twelve This bit of Australian historical The Gemma Constantiniana, c.312 ce, forming part of the Batavia Caesars, would provide the trivia doesn’t appear in Mary Beard’s treasure, recovered in 1629. Now in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden inspiration for the numerous book, but it wouldn’t be out of place in Leiden (once in the Royal Penningkabinet). Photographed while authors and artists discussed in on loan to the Western Australia Maritime Museum, Fremantle, in this work, which discusses our 2017. (Guy de la Bedoyere, Wikimedia Commons) this book. Latinists have tended fascination with the figure of the

W

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Politics to be a bit sniffy about Suetonius’s prose style, often comparing him unfavourably with historians like Tacitus. Yet, as this book demonstrates, his mix of wide-ranging anecdotes, gossip, telling details, and, most importantly, physical descriptions of his subjects would prove a potent one. A scholar like Varro may know all the finer points of Latin grammar it takes to compose a sentence, but Suetonius knows what it takes to retell a story.

Part of the appeal of Suetonius’s biographies was his ability to take his readers into the private lives of the imperial family. There was much prestige to be gained by showing intimate familiarity with the lives and loves of the emperor. In a monarchical form of government, power is reflected by proximity. In the Roman Republic, you could tell the importance of an individual by the magistracy that he held. Under the Roman Empire, in which the emperor held absolute power, it was more important if you knew what would make Augustus laugh or the foodstuff that would win him over to your cause (hint: al dente asparagus or green figs). At least, that was the fiction in which both emperor and his biographers colluded.

A by-product of the heightened attention paid to proximity to the Emperor was the increased importance (either real or imagined) that this accorded the women of the imperial household.

As Beard points out, there was never an official title of ‘empress’, but that did not stop Romans or the generations after them from imagining the influence wielded – sometimes for good, but more often for ill – by the wives, daughters, and lovers of the emperor.

Artists embraced these ‘mothers, matriarchs, victims, and whores’.

In the shocking tales of the scandalous life of Claudius’s wife Messalina, Aubrey Beardsley could find a vehicle for all his anxieties about the ardent sexuality of women of the fin-de-siècle.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres devoted at least one hundred drawings and three paintings to exploring the cool, calculating nature of Augustus’s wife, Livia. Few artists seem to have been able to resist the dramatic tensions of the Freudian car crash that was Nero’s relationship with his mother.

Beard is a consummate reader of images. One of her great strengths is the way she is constantly alive to the potential for images to misbehave. Trying to make a Roman emperor stay ‘on message’ is a tricky business. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. You may offer up an image of Julius Caesar as a ‘worthy’ suitable for imitation. Others will see only a despot ripe for the assassin’s knife. Beard shows how artists such as Mantegna or the designers behind the magnificent Flemish tapestries that decorated the court of Henry VIII were able to exploit this ambiguity, thereby creating works that could speak equally to both Charles I and to the man who signed his death warrant: Oliver Cromwell.

This book not only tells us a lot about what we know (or rather think we know) about Roman emperors, but also, more importantly, why they mattered in the past and why they matter today. It is a clever, witty, thought-provoking book. As Augustus would say, you should rush out and buy it ‘with more speed than you can cook asparagus’ (celerius quam asparagi cocuntur – from Suetonius’s Life of Augustus). g Alastair J.L. Blanshard is the Paul Eliadis Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland.

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Chaos chronicles

Donald Trump’s last days in office Timothy J. Lynch

Landslide: The final days of the Trump presidency

by Michael Wolff The Bridge Street Press $49.99 hb, 326 pp

Peril

T

by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa Simon & Schuster $49.99 hb, 510 pp

he Trump presidency (2017–21) has generated more books across its four years than most presidencies have across eight. It is ironic that an avowedly anti-intellectual president, who advertises his dislike of reading, has had such a profound impact on political literature. These two books – Landslide and Peril – will likely remain the most read of that growing collection. As their titles suggest, each is a chronicle of the chaos that consumed the United States during and after the 2020 election campaign.

Both recount the bizarre close to one of the most unexpected presidencies in American history. Both exploit high-level access to the people who surrounded Trump as he was dragged from office in the three months following his November election defeat. Both reconstruct the violent assault on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, two weeks before Joe Biden was sworn in. Both offer compelling narratives of this northern winter of peril.

Bob Woodward’s methods are well known and consistently effective. He wines and dines his sources at his DC home. They begin to open up. Trust obtains. In short order, across his many books, senior officials give him the rough draft of history. His books are unavoidable, and have been since the 1970s. His pull is immense, his bank balance healthy. His critics, often jealous, decry his ubiquity but also his over-reliance on the people most receptive to his attentions.

Despite his early fame as a co-author (with Carl Bernstein), Woodward now usually writes alone, though he has a large team of researchers on hand. For Peril, his third book on the Trump presidency, he has partnered with the Washington Post ’s somewhat pedestrian Robert Costa. Neither author can make their prose sing. The drama inherent in the story they relate is belied by the prosaic style. I have never enjoyed reading a Woodward book.

I own them all, have read each one out of a sense of scholarly obligation, but rarely revisit them. They are important but strangely unsatisfying as reading experiences.

The issue is not simply stylistic. Woodward and Costa become ciphers for sources animated by their professional need to distance themselves from Donald Trump – except, of course, for Trump himself, who did, rather too casually, grant Woodward an audience. This exchange reveals little more about the president’s motivation and character than we were able to glean from his public utterances.

Peril uses General Mark Milley, the nation’s senior military officer and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, for much of its narrative reconstruction as well as its moral tone.

Milley is the sort of man who is inclined to be sceptical of Donald Trump. The Bostonian soldier disdains the New York television personality. He secretly tells the Chinese government to ignore him. He sides with Trump’s nemesis, Nancy Pelosi, in this intrigue. He refuses to allow his boss to exploit the US military for his own political purposes. Across the book, Milley works to negate Trump’s excesses. He becomes one of several officials who revealed to the authors how they struggled to maintain decency as Trump descended into delusion.

Michael Wolff is unlikely to match Woodward’s reputation.

His public persona reeks of self-promotion. But Landslide, his third book on Trump, deserves to be regarded alongside that of the Watergate journalist. Wolff has written a consistently interesting and appropriately judgemental account of Trump’s efforts to elide reality. He manages to be both damning and sympathetic towards the forty-fifth president. Few authors pull this off.

Take, for example, his depiction of the team that surrounds Trump. ‘Yes’ men and women for the duration of the administration, in its final weeks, they avoided conveying bad news to the boss. This opens him up to the designs of a ‘hapless band of co-conspirators … too crazy or drunk or cynical’ to be any use to a flailing president. From Rudy Giuliani, and his melting toupee, to the reality-detached lawyer Sidney Powell, these misfits give Trump the advice that made certain he would leave office facing the shame of impeachment.

The analogy to Adolf Hitler was always overdone in the rhetoric of his detractors. But there is something of the Berlin bunker in Wolff ’s account of Trump’s final presidential days. Giuliani moves around subpoenas – futilely challenging state election results – like so many non-existent troops, each offering the leader false hope that salvation is within reach. The shrewder staff and family, like his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, ease themselves out as the Giuliani conspiracists move in. The chapter ‘Rudy’ is Wolff ’s best: It was a measure of Giuliani’s need, character, and stamina in the face of mockery, rejection, and a wide range of bureaucratic remedies to block his access to the avenues of power ... that he nevertheless became such a central figure in Trump’s presidency.

It was a measure, too, of Trump’s own constant search for alternatives to standard advice and counsel. As much as even he mocked Giuliani – and Trump was often withering in his contempt – he invariably turned to Rudy when he was the only man saying what the president wanted to hear.

And yet, as Wolff makes clear, this was a presidency that came remarkably close to re-election. Its descent into fantasy as the postal ballots came in should not obscure the likelihood that, without Covid-19, the Trump administration could now be entering its sixth year. He got more votes than any Republican candidate in American history (seventy-four million) and a larger share (twenty-six per cent) of the votes from people of colour than any GOP candidate since 1960. There was nothing inevitable about his 2020 defeat. This was why he so manically

challenged that result.

Trump was not joined in this doomed attempt by his vice president. The real hero of both accounts is Mike Pence, who had earned the opprobrium of the Democrats for his facilitation of Trump. When the real crisis erupted on 6 January, it was Pence who, coolly and despite enormous psychological and physical pressure, decided to tally the electoral college votes and to uphold the US Constitution. Pence deserves his rehabilitation as surely as anyone documented in these pages.

There was nothing inevitable about Trump’s 2020 defeat. This was why he so manically challenged that result Woodward and Costa, unlike Wolff, balance their account of the Trump fall with that of Biden’s rise – ironically from an actual bunker. But for sheer enervation, this parallel narrative of the hoped-for return of normalcy to America is hard to beat.

We get only intimations of the dysfunction that now afflicts the Biden administration (the hapless Kamala Harris vice presidency is not prophesied). The story of both books, unsurprisingly and unavoidably, is Donald Trump. And yet we leave each account not knowing much more about him than we did before the authors’ sources were tapped. This is less because Trump is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma (as Winston Churchill described Soviet Russia). Rather, it is because Trump the man is banal. ‘[W]ho knew what was in Trump’s mind?’ Wolff asks repeatedly. Trump has nothing intriguing to relay. His seemingly exclusive lens is television. He disdains reading. He avoids the boost to imagination that alcohol can bring. He is not much more than a set of instinctive and predictable responses to political and cultural stimuli. What becomes compelling, but under-analysed, in both books, is how far such a nonentity in intellectual and emotional terms could command such allegiance from his immediate advisers and his more distant voter base. Neither book really offers an explanation for that. Why did he command such loyalty? Why might he again?

One answer, which these books implicitly offer, is Trump’s imperviousness to reason and logic. Woodward, Costa, and Wolff present numerous examples. How will the postal votes be thrown out? Via a fantastical set of lawsuits against myriad states. When this fails? The ‘Supremes’, his three appointees to the US Supreme Court, will overrule the result. If they don’t? Mike Pence will refuse to affirm it on the Senate floor. If he refuses? He must be pressured to do so. At no point did the infeasibility of each answer occur to the man asking the questions. And yet this complicity in unreality, this willingness to defy every convention of normal political behaviour, served to reinforce his image as a great disruptor. It remains the basis, despite some damning evidence presented in these books, of his likely next run for the presidency in 2024. g Timothy J. Lynch is Professor in American Politics at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is In the Shadow of the Cold War: American foreign policy from George Bush Sr. to Donald Trump (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

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Memoir

‘Those shelves have power’ Three women with a vision for Egypt Beejay Silcox

Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller

by Nadia Wassef

T

Corsair $32.99 pb, 224 pp

he Nile runs straight through the middle of Cairo, from south to north like a grand zip. In the middle of this citied stretch of river there is an island known colloquially by the name of the suburb that crowds it: Zamalek. Once the grounds of a summer palace, the island became a colonial stronghold in the 1880s, when an extravagant leisure club was built for British Army officers, replete with croquet lawns, a polo field, and pony stables. Now, Zamalek is a restless mix of affluence and decay: home to old money, new expatriates, and crumbling artdeco apartment blocks – the last gasp of Nasser-era rent control.

Embassy gardens thrive behind concrete walls and razor wire, while national service recruits doze in the heat, chins propped on the barrels of their AK-47s. American fast-food chains rub greasy shoulders with antique stores full of French rococo and fauxNapoleonic gilt. The ponies outlasted the British Empire, and can still be booked for riding lessons, but the summer palace has been swallowed by a Marriott Hotel. And on the busiest street of this well-storied isle – where the everyday traffic is as loud as a rock concert – there is a bookshop.

I stumbled across Diwan on my first night in Cairo, and for the two years I called Zamalek home, I lived a short walk away from its grand glass doors. The store was the centre of my mental map, a pocket of alphabetised calm in the city’s ever-roiling chaos – so ferociously air conditioned my glasses would fog. It was the place I’d arrange to meet new friends so we could browse our way to conversation, and where I would go to people-watch on lonely nights (lurking in the divide between the Arabic and English language books was the rarest of Cairo commodities, a non-smoking café).

The store was the landmark overseas visitors would use to trace their way back to me, or – more often than not – the place they’d get lost along the way, returning with far too much literary luggage.

The booksellers of Diwan filled my hands with stories of Cairo – raw-hearted, past-bound el-Qahira – and those stories helped me to understand my transitory place within it. I left Australia with two boxes of books; I sent home more than a dozen.

But I never said goodbye. I left Egypt as the pandemic hit – a rush of packed bags amid rumours of airport closures. I intended to return. Now, with those intentions scuttled, it is a quiet delight to be able to revisit my favourite Zamalek haunt in Nadia Wassef ’s bittersweet memoir, Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller. ‘Diwan isn’t a business,’ Wassef writes. ‘She’s a person, and this is her story.’

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and their friend Nihal Schawky: three women with a wildly hopeful vision for Egypt’s literary future. ‘We launched Diwan in a culture that had stopped reading,’ Wassef explains. ‘Education had emphasised rote memorisation and discouraged freedom of thought. Readers were alienated at every turn ... literature died many successive slow and bureaucratic deaths.’ The country was entering its third decade under Hosni Mubarak’s listless, censorious leadership, and national illiteracy levels were at a record high. Egypt’s publishing infrastructure had largely crumbled, and state-printed books were flimsy creatures, stapled together like pamphlets (and largely propagandist). Bookshops, Wassef recalls, were either government-run, glorified newsagents, or ‘tomb-like’ places where the books desiccated on the shelves. ‘Starting a bookshop at this moment of cultural atrophy seemed impossible and utterly necessary.’

Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller is the story of what happens when dauntless optimism collides with bureaucratic torpor – a tale of shake-ups and shakedowns. ‘We had no business plan, no warehouse, and no fear,’ Wassef writes of herself and her co-founders. Dismissed as ‘bourgeois housewives wasting our time and money’, the trio would go on to open sixteen Diwan outlets (and close six) – not bad for novice businesswomen in a notoriously corrupt and ferociously patriarchal autocracy.

There’s a long and mighty history of female entrepreneurship in Egypt, Wassef argues – it’s just unsung, a history of erasure. Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller is a potent rejoinder, but it’s not a jaunty girlboss manifesto, some kind of Cairene Lean In. Wassef is writing from London, where she relocated after the military intervention that brought to power General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi: Donald Trump’s ‘favourite dictator’. Her memoir elegises pre-revolution Cairo, those new-millennium years of reformist idealism in the lead-up to January 2011. It was a time that shimmered with possibility; if not a cultural renaissance, then the promise of one.

By the time I arrived in Cairo in early 2018, that shimmer had long proved to be a mirage. The city was a hard knot of grief.

Diwan’s flagship was the Zamalek store, which opened on the former site of a men’s gym (‘I savoured the irony of our female-owned-and-operated bookstore replacing that temple of masculinity’). Wassef was the store’s English-language book buyer.

Rather than a dutiful chronology, she gives us a reading experience akin to browsing. We wander from one section of the store to another – classics, parenting, art and design – each a prompt for reflection, personal and political. ‘Diwan, and Egypt, changed around me,’ the former bookseller writes. ‘As always, my shelves offered me an unexpected education on these changes.’

There are the Jamie Oliver ‘Naked Chef ’ cookbooks that land Wassef in strife with the Egyptian censors (‘Little did I know then how much angst this particular chef ’s metaphoric nudity would cause me’); and the coffee-table books that are increasingly popular in Cairo’s gated communities; a new kind of home decor for a new kind of insular wealth. In the months before the Egyptian revolution, Wassef watches as sales of self-help books skyrocket: ‘Egyptians, tired of waiting for the government to help them, looked for arenas where they could help themselves,’ she writes. (Egyptians, Wassef claims, invented the self-help genre – the morally instructive Maxims of Ptahhotep was written sometime between 2400 and 2500 bce. In my time in the city,

the runaway bestseller was Why Men Marry Bitches: A guide for women who are too nice by Sherry Argov).

‘Those shelves have power,’ a crotchety customer warns Wassef: ‘use it wisely.’ She feels the weight of that power, particularly when it comes to stocking Diwan’s ‘Egypt Essentials’ section.

For how do you tell the story of a place that stands in the literal and existential shadow of the Pyramids? Romanticised, mythologised, colonised, nationalised, pathologised, and plundered: Egypt defies the easy slipstream of narrative. Nostalgia is a national pastime, but every mind conjures a different country, so memory is a conversational battlefield. ‘Searching for something, I gathered images of my home in one place,’ Wassef explains. ‘Our eclectic collection would introduce the coloniser to the colonised, the historians to the novelists, the locals to the outsiders.’ It was a collection as much for Egyptians as tourists; a chance to reclaim a history too long defined and gatekept by others. ‘Westerners created Egyptology then taught it to the Egyptians,’ Wassef laments.

‘There’s a double irony in the way that colonialism first severs us from our past and then forces us to turn to the colonisers for knowledge of that very past.’ (It is perhaps no accident that Edward Said, author of Orientalism, 1978, and founder of postcolonialism, spent his formative years in Zamalek.)

I spent hours browsing in Egypt Essentials, revelling in its kaleidoscopic portraiture. Wassef ’s ‘modern mythology’ made space for sumptuous catalogues of King Tut’s tomb jewellery, Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1937), and fictional forays into Cairo’s Queer underground (see In The Spider’s Room, 2017, Muhammad Abdelnabi, or Guapa, 2016, Saleem Haddad).

Naguib Mahfouz’s entire back catalogue was there – in all its capacious, Nobel Prize-winning glory – next to photo-essays on revolutionary graffiti, joyful histories of Egyptian cinema, and illustrated maps of the Valley of the Kings. There were memoirs from Jewish families exiled by Nasser in the 1950s (The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, 2007, Lucette Lagnado), and the diaries of feckless nineteenth-century British toffs who shipped parlour pianos and iron beds across Europe to provision their Nile cruises.

It was on the shelves of Egypt Essentials that I discovered Sex in the Citadel: Intimate life in a changing Arab world (2013), by Egyptian-British journalist Shereen El Feki; the raw-toothed feminist fiction of Nawal El Sadaawi; and my favourite Egyptian fiction: Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964).

Ghali’s heavily autobiographical novel was the first book I bought at Diwan, and I read it in one jetlag-jittery jag on that first night in Cairo, listening to the party boats echoing up and down the river. It’s the story of a young man from a bankrupted branch of a wealthy Cairene family, who carouses his way across the city while his relatives pick up the tab to keep the old-money honour intact. The man can’t take a job – it would give the game away – so he’s stuck in a kind of indolent rage, a septic inertia.

Around him, Cairo is also stuck, nursing a vicious post-colonial hangover Beer in the Snooker Club was Ghali’s only novel (he died by suicide in 1969), but his send-up of Cairene classism still echoes. ‘While my staff and I inhabited the same city,’ Wassef writes more than five decades later, ‘our cities were not the same.’

There’s no escaping the fact that Wassef comes from wealth; that she had the means to open a luxury-goods store in the heart of

well-monied Zamalek, and the choice to leave it – and Egypt – when it suited her. There’s also no question that, for fifteen years, she worked herself into the dust to make Diwan viable.

Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller is frank about both: the work, and the privilege underpinning it.

Arabic books, for example, consistently outsell English language books in the store, but it’s the imported books that

Romanticised, mythologised, colonised, nationalised, pathologised, and plundered: Egypt defies the easy slipstream of narrative keep Diwan’s doors open; an uneasy cultural bargain with a tenacious whiff of empire. ‘Our local customer-service staff sold foreign books that, in some cases, cost more than their modest salaries,’ Wassef admits. We watch the women of Diwan sew the trouser pockets of store uniforms shut – lest their employees nick any loose notes – and then travel home in their slick SUVs, chauffeured by personal drivers. The Cairo I recognise is here.

I bought those glossy international books, and had change to spare for carrot cake. It would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Diwan’s newer outlets are in the city’s mega-malls, out on the edge of the desert, where artificial ice rinks keep captive penguins, and middle-class consumers go home to compound life. Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller is more than the tale of a bookstore: it’s a portrait of the city’s fast-fading micro-economies, like Zamalek, where wealthier families have visible, tangible relationships with neighbourhood traders: the family butcher, the baladi bread maker, the street-side shirt ironer. It’s a life that’s easy to sentimentalise – and Wassef does – an amiably patrician model of inter-generational patronage. But as the New Administrative Capital (NAC) takes shape an hour east of Cairo – a city built entirely of highwalled enclaves – there’s an accelerating sense of civic fracture.

It’s hard to care about something (or someone) you don’t see.

I used to run a weekly creative writing workshop in Cairo around the corner from Diwan, and I’d often begin by asking my fellow writers to pen love poems to their shape-shifting city.

‘Mish mumkin,’ they’d say. ‘Not possible.’ And then they’d go on to write extraordinary pages, full of fury and forgiveness, and scabrously funny (Oh, Cairo, how you piss me off!). ‘Diwan was my love letter to Egypt,’ Wassef writes. ‘And this book is my love letter to Diwan.’ Like those mish mumkin poems, Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller is honest about its city – the class-riven cruelties, the misogyny, the revolution’s squandered opportunity – but it’s also full of broken-hearted love: ardent and irreverent (and elaborately sweary as befits any self-respecting Cairene; my running list of Arabic curses tops a dozen pages). ‘Those of us who write love letters know that their aims are impossible,’ Wassef writes. ‘We try, and fail, to make the ethereal material.’ Impossible perhaps, but if you find yourself in Zamalek, you can still visit Diwan.

For now, at least, she is still there. g Beejay Silcox is a writer and critic. In 2018, she relocated to Cairo to accompany her husband on his diplomatic posting.

She left the city in March of 2020; her husband stayed to keep the Australian embassy open. They were reunited a year later.

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Graphic Novels

On the home front

Picto-critical eyes on the Vietnam War Bernard Caleo

Kent State

by Derf Backderf Abrams ComicArts US$24.99 hb, 288 pp

Underground

E

by Mirranda Burton Allen & Unwin $29.99 pb, 272 pp

ditorial cartoonists gamble their all on a same-day art, their work created, read, and discarded on the day of publication. The makers of graphic novel journalism use the language of cartooning, too, but in their case it’s a marathon, not a sprint: they spend years arranging thousands of images and tens of thousands of words across hundreds of pages in order to create their books. Two new graphic novels cast a picto-critical eye on the war in Vietnam and show how it came home to roost, bringing death and imprisonment to suburban streets in Australia and the United States.

In Kent State: Four dead in Ohio, American cartoonist Derf Backderf documents the four days in May 1970 that led to Ohio National Guard troops shooting students protesting against American involvement in the Vietnam War. As in his previous graphic novel, My Friend Dahmer (2012), about the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, Backderf ’s own life intersects with a national narrative: in the first scene, his mother drives the ten-year-old Backderf past a platoon of National Guardsmen who have been deployed to bust a truck drivers’ strike. Four days later, these same soldiers will fire on the protesting twenty-year-olds on the Kent State University campus, killing four and wounding nine. The confrontation that the Backderfs drive past sets the scene for the physically violent clashes between the law and protesters, presented throughout the book in disturbing visceral cartooning, culminating in the day of the killings: 4 May 1970.

A major challenge for historical comics is scene-setting: Backderf has a lot of information to convey in order to establish the political power blocs and social ruptures that led to the Kent State shootings. There’s the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which by 1968 has 100,000 members. There’s the Weathermen, the militant radical wing of the SDS, which declares war on the Nixon administration and bombs multiple US targets in 1970. Their violence and ‘cartoonish militancy’ (Backderf ) mandates the extreme measures taken by the FBI against them, but also drives widespread desertion of the SDS as more pacifist students distance themselves from the Weathermen’s violent tactics.

In the town of Kent, Backderf describes a sharp social and political divide between the older, more conservative 24 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

townsfolk and the university population. He is particularly good at delivering the tenor of student life: sharehouses, music practice, smoking joints, listening to the new Paul McCartney solo album, and meeting friends at the bars on Water Street. He does choose to deploy text-heavy pages in order to bring us up to speed with various aspects of 1970s America, Kent, and campus life. Almost two pages of illustrated text are needed to explain the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), an on-campus building housing a program for training officers (5,000 of the 6,600 commissioned officers who died in Vietnam were ROTC graduates), but these infrequent wordy pages are buttressed by sequences of dialogue and action, so they don’t break your reading rhythm.

For example, when the Kent State University ROTC building is destroyed on 2 May, and more National Guardsmen are called in, the tension builds until the students stage a sit-in protest on a street in town, which Backderf depicts using a full-page image on which the only words are the chant, ‘Guard off campus!’

Backderf ’s cartooning style follows solidly in the tradition of

A page from Underground by Mirranda Burton

the US underground cartoonists of the 1960s and 1970s (artists like Robert Crumb and Spain Rodriguez) as well as MAD magazine – it’s a ‘dirty realism’ cartooning, unafraid of exaggeration and the grotesque. Given these 1970s comics history roots, his cartooning style matches the temporal setting of the tale and in fact lends it an added layer of verisimilitude.

C

loser to home, Mirranda Burton’s Underground: Marsupial outlaws and other rebels of Australia’s war in Vietnam tackles the impact of the war on the streets and people of Melbourne and Saigon. The central human character is Jean McLean, who became the convenor of the Victorian branch of the Save Our Sons movement in 1965. We also follow Bill Cantwell, an Australian soldier who serves in Vietnam, and Mai Ho, who escapes to Australia by boat with her daughters after the war. All three now live in Melbourne, and one of the satisfactions of this book is seeing how Burton braids these lives together. Burton’s background as a printmaker is evident in Underground: in addition to her ‘straight’ cartooning storytelling, there are pages where she utilises a scratchboard approach, which lends a more ‘open’, less time-bound quality than that of her comics frames sequences. This helps her narrative to breathe, which is important because she is covering so much more ground than Backderf (decades, not days); compression of character and event becomes inevitable.

Underground ’s marsupial is a wombat adopted by Marlene

Pugh and her artist husband, Clifton, in 1969 on their bush block home north of Melbourne. During an artist’s residency there forty years later, Burton stumbled upon the story of Hooper Algernon Pugh, ‘the wombat who wouldn’t do combat’. A 1970s antiwar technique, the ‘fill in a falsie’ campaign had protesters registering pets and ancient philosophers for conscription as a way of wasting the time and resources of the National Service Office.

When the police arrive at Dunmoochin in 1972 seeking Hooper, who’s been called up, Clifton Pugh describes him: ‘Short fellow.

Very large nose. Small ears.’

These two graphic novels examine fifty-year-old wounds in the national lives of three countries. Because comics traffic in icons (conveying more meaning with less information), they can shuttle between iconic figures (Richard Nixon, Gough Whitlam) and ‘ordinary’ people (such as Jean McLean) and imply, via comics’ sequential logic, causalities between these strata in human affairs.

Both books solve, in different ways, the problematic requirements of expository dialogue and text-heavy pages so that the reader has enough information to understand the historical period.

Burton’s characters are restrained, modest, polite – in a word, Australian. Burton’s is a quiet book, Backderf ’s more strident, but both deploy the tactility and immediacy of graphic novels to persuade their readers to feel the human cost of the Vietnam War on the home front. g Bernard Caleo is a PhD student at the University of Melbourne.

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A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

25

Peter Porter Poetry Prize

The Shortlisted Poems Hummingbird Country My aunt says, never trust a hummingbird. Never trust a creature which flies backwards with ease, whose feet were made useless for walking. My aunt is not a real aunt but a cat shaped like a woman. She runs her claws across the ceiling and drags my heart from room to room in a grey ribbed mouth. She stalks in gardens. Steals all the hummingbird feeders. Later I hear their glass bones jittering apart in the sack when she kisses them with a hammer. My aunt says never trust an animal that is armless like god – in each eye sits a minute camera.

She gouges out each flowering bush by the house, installs heavy velvet blackout curtains.

Bad days she binds me to the chair. I practise violet palpitations and miniature thoughts, teach my fingers to flutter so fast you can’t see them. I wear skin brooches: tender blues, green. She hasn’t noticed I am mastering the art of iridescence. Evenings, I collect slugs and grind them to a paste. Gather lichens, compare the tensile strength of different kinds of spiders’ silk. In my head I hone a delegation of moons. My tongue lengthens and grooves. Under darkness I rehearse the languages they will speak in the new country: Snowcap, Emerald, Hermit, Bee … When she comes in at night to check my breath, I sink deep into torpor. I am learning to sleep like the dead in a thimble of moss. Each morning on waking I perform fresh wingbeats in bed. Marvel at how small I’ve become. Tomorrow break of day, I will be glint of raindrop. Genuflection of light. Rotation of air – afterwards she will lift back the sheet and find nothing but a tiny pair of dropped arms.

Debbie Lim Note: This poem draws on a line from Norman Dubie’s poem ‘Hummingbirds’: They will be without arms like god. Snowcap, Emerald, Hermit and Bee are varieties of hummingbirds.

26 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

‘Australianesque’

Peter Porter wrote a sonnet sequence about Christopher Brennan which has never been published. The poem, which he showed me, during my brief masquerade as Brian Castro, was in a red notebook.

I didn’t feel comfortable being Castro long, although Brian himself was ok with it: given my work with Melbourne’s HK community (offering advice on being LGBTQ+ in Australia, providing practice dating sessions, etc.). The title of the poem was ‘Australianesque’, which Peter verbally qualified as a working one. He was venturing (his verb) on the acrostic form, not, à la Gwen Harwood, with any mischievous intent, yet partly in subtle homage to her famous stunt. Rather than use, as would be conventional – he felt, he said, too conventional – Brennan’s or Harwood’s names, he used the fourteen letters of the coinage, ‘Australianesque’, to start each line.

(Hence his reservation regarding the title, which would give it away.)

The poem – and the notebook itself – seem to have disappeared.

I went through Porter’s archive – and talked to his charming daughter – when I was being Helen Garner, and had an idea about writing a book about death as emotional blackmail, tentatively titled ‘The Ultimate’, that would bring together Ted Hughes, Brennan, and other widowed writers. My (i.e. Helen’s) publisher was sceptical and the project died a natural death. By then I was myself again. It’s a funny position to be in, when my own interests overlap with those of the identities I assume. I write poems about the quarrels I have with myself (usually to do with approach or emphasis) like a proper Yeatsian, and wish I could talk to – or as? – Judith Wright about them. Peter Steele writes about this notion somewhere; but Peter P never mentioned Yeats to me.

(He seems livelier than W.B.) Perhaps we could compare Yeatsians and Steinian poets, along the lines of a quarrel with nouns? But not Here. I remember the poem itself better than others I’ve been shown by illustrious antecedents, because of the form: e.g. ‘N’ for Ned Kelly.

In the poem, Kelly appears as Brennan’s spiritual ancestor.

Or perhaps rhetorical ancestor is more accurate. Compare Ned’s The Jerilderie Letter to Brennan’s Musicopoematographoscope and I think you will see what I mean. It’s a productive convergence of the desperation to be heard, coupled with an enraged desire to damn their respective audiences. It’s tempting to wonder what Porter’s brilliant mind might’ve done with ‘I’ for Indigenous and ‘Q’ for Queer, but that is to wonder like a person of 2021 or -22. And you can spell ‘Australianesque’ without other key initials – M for Migrant, for instance, C for Convict, or G for Gold. Porter was, I think, more interested in the slipperiness of the suffix ‘-esque’ (using ‘Dantesque’ and ‘carnivalesque’ in his poem): its shortfall and excess.

Michael Farrell

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27

In the Shadows of Our Heads I’d called the Humane Society to report the neglect of a neighbour’s dogs. A woman assured me there would be an investigation, took my details, then asked if I needed more assistance. I mentioned the flightless

of light and shade like a view through the arrow-slit of a zoetrope. We opened the past and found things worth sharing. As a child she’d been orphaned when, escaping a forest fire, the family car had come adrift

swans of Malta, and she said Imagine, ten thousand years, then added They were the size of the pygmy elephants that also roamed the island. To test her liability to respond in a capering manner, I described the pattern

in smoke and driven off a bridge. She had lost an eye and her spine had been broken. The monocular vision and limp had ended her ribbon-floor exercise routine.

When we met, she had approached like someone

of my sleep and how, after drinking Akvavit, my cells become part of the dust of the Horse Head Nebula.

Your astral projection is world class, she said. I could see a swivel chair, the noise-cancelling headset, a light

leaning into wind. I told her I’d stolen meteor samples from an observatory on a school excursion. This had led to frequent stealing, and when I said kleptomania, I lowered my voice and concluded the confession

blue blouse embroidered with a hook or claw symbol, the windows of light on her shoes. Are your projections always so peregrinatory? I’m curious, as I sense I’m far too fond of the regional. Satisfied, I felt compelled to ask

with the words illness, serial, and the eight-point-turn of psychopharmacological. When we stopped for lunch, I sat across from her by a river whose patchwork surface she described as snake skins sewn haphazardly together.

if Spring, in the mountains, had ever crossed her radar as a good season and reason for marriage, but chose instead to invite her for a drink. I don’t date, but we could drive, as long as you’re partial to Elgar’s

I saw the glass eye, and she said Ocular. Three perfect syllables, then they ruined everything with Prosthesis.

Her hand hovered briefly over mine before moving on.

I said nothing and she took a long time to answer it.

‘Nimrod’, anything by Wagner, and my minder, Karl, who, depending on his mood, likes to follow at a clip or respectful distance in his Beamer. I laughed. Alright, she said, His name is Bob, he’s either a serial tail-gater,

We discussed rescue dogs and how certain bats would make good pets if only their bites weren’t potentially lethal, causing fever and delirium. At fifteen, she had run away to live in a trilogy of Mervyn Peake novels.

or he moves like a tortoise in his Triumph Mayflower.

On Sunday morning, her music darkening the speakers, we passed the wreckage of housing estates, then onto a road lined with trees that cast flickering lines

I suggested we return via a pub where the Guinness is collared velvet, the music live. As we stood, the flame of a kingfisher fluttered on like a pilot light and went out in the shadows of our heads.

Anthony Lawrence

28 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

Gippslanding (triptych) >> lumpen-proling an outer suburb gun shop’s counter, he’s off to Kuta MATE ANY CHANCE WE GET, drags cadre of city shooters each Easter to mountains at Mittagundi, this dozy dozer cousin hoohahing the moo of his bull in highest legal calibre, the dog teams bacchanal-savage at 4WD thighs of the hero-parodies waddling back channels, swamped camo gear over strained paddocks into nightfall, Fitzgerald’s hut hypertensively exploding spotlight whitely into flumed valley enfoldments as if seeking a mounded crevice to slide into, or hole in which to set the key of self, unlocking unreal plenitudes of being … but, no, this bullet-spurting panic of flankers whoops in thou-shalts across cornerless flatworld terrains of mind, warbling empty as prey-birds circling animalities (their own), berserk, unlost, unmad >> Spring nights, our Landcruiser crawling Hinnomunjie hills, our spotlights scanning the fence lines like a bad god’s crazed intention unblinking, our rifles nursed out windows, murmuring in dogged ½ talk, ‘oi roo,’ & our scrub-crossing beams hell-bright, nuzzling the blast … we are stabbing holes,

terminally, into marsupial lives, our violence a bland high country brotherhood’s recreation, & our term for the joeys in pouches is ‘dispatch,’ as if horror will always find euphemism in the peripheral leaden folds of a readymade scene, our brutalities structural, a quiddity snarled in mutters of WHO THE FUCK WAS TO KNOW, those nights depthless with stars shuddering the aeons, & our disavowals in blunt grammar keeping each soulless, static in a surface tension of inherited wrongs repeating, freely & by rote >> in thick slabs, Autumn moonlight ghosts Bogong, the night impounding the Mitta & our tinnie bobs the Dartmouth Dam, stars on black waters as if shoal eyes deeply whirling, adrift, stricken by the monochrome formidable depths we barely intuit, ‘how do you say whereof we cannot speak, thereof etc. in Dhudhuroa or Yaithmathang,’ night has been asking, & ‘what are we taught to think of beauty without content,’ all night ¼ lit & casting the ether for Macquarie perch (native, endangered) & rainbow trout (introduced) staying mute, steadfastly silent, struck dumb as inheritance

Dan Disney

A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

29

Sixes and Sparrows Mathematics is perfect; reality is subjective. Mathematics is defined; computers are ornery.

Mathematics is logical; people are erratic, capricious, and barely comprehensible.

– Bruce Schneier, Secrets and Lies

it begins with three libraries, three swamps. one that cut bright segments from the air. with backs to black powdercoat: a shiver of hand, turtleneck. with hand in hand under the osprey nest: a guide through dark. stop and watch the time – this will repeat: a black cat on the em. and head up dear, you’re shallow and blind. it begins with mathematics: questions of whether white is one or zero. crow equals zero: too easy. make an adder from nand gates, broken alternator belts, sparrows’ feet. all sums go to zero: distance between black cat and reasons to wake. a wake: the hours ductile, made of unquiet desolation. wait, we’re getting ahead of ourselves – it begins with advice. violence. it begins with a radius: pain, six weeks with a cast left arm. in the aftermath, hagiography: chorus of meanings / layers of black. a history of threat: face framed in crow. add another: no saint. case made from metal: for earthing; for capacity to withstand. thin bleed of warmth: eddy currents under insulation. always a magic word: helo for email, jfif for picture, stalker for impact. bits missing in truth tables. braided paper carries weight: force and point for passing skull. it all boils down to threat: black cat on the keyboard, glass shards, actor-network theory. inside a skull’s osmotic action, always revenant: a shade in the substrate. and, of course, the software says black isn’t black, only zero traced in the shadow / an indecipherable cause. relax, relax. a six-day panic attack gets you plenty of work. that, and eye-burning: light the way to fresh-washed skin, cotton; a black cat on the femurs. is sleep a black cat on consciousness? how much of that happened? where’s the evidence? is this enough? again. it begins with email – always does. helo. how do you cope? it begins with admission: negative zero. a hand at the back of the neck is either quiet or threat, one or zero. and hand on the wrist, an empty mantissa. it begins with a library, third swamp, adios florida. it begins in a hall: old library dusted. you could hang a blue whale in there; someone has. how much steel suspends a jawbone? who braids metal cable? and could they braid baleen? it’s a black leather jacket and the smell you’d know anywhere: the one that creeps out, spreads everywhere. it begins with accusation: magenta sensation spread through the flesh: birds of paradise, bison. what kind of life in a glass case? is there reddening (back to accusation) or a blanch? bison, birds – taxidermy – the black iron branch: passer, deliciae. passer: evacuee. it begins with flight from the city, set aside the sparrow at six. all the stories say never look back: the gods get salty. spend time in a skinner box: never get sick of beginnings, go back for the kick. whether the birds are black or white, this one flies from sight.

30 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

no. start again. it begins with ativan for dinner, with sleep disruption: the kicking all it knows for affection. is the black dog a black cat in disguise? pyjamas? what colour’s its moustache? it begins with friday this time. with the thickest coffee you can make, black cats’ breakfast, and head up dear, the rabbit may die. it begins with sorry fourfold, third swamp’s banks, difficult pills. jfif: dusty pink, black feathers in her hair. his empty pockets, face drained away. he’s in some hell or another and no ladder. empty pockets. the thing about time is its engineering: no space for suicide plans in the jawbone of panic– good show. who braids the cable? what load can it carry? it begins with conversation, with revision, with critique. a threading. operations can be parallelised without common critical sections; with panic and memory function: the high whine of platters spun to seventy-two hundred, oxide dropped off – as if dlp6 roped off questions of pad, sparrow, chrysler spire, night skyline. it begins closer to home: one or zero footprints on country, black cat dodges the djiti-djiti. it begins where it always has: splined under railtracks: old dog and what he wouldn’t give for a kick; a black cat marked the edge / of one of many circles. it begins with fascination: that which can’t be clawed back. someone’s been hunting: low to the ground, toes angled for purchase. helo. how do you do time? its ends? and in between it begins with spilt red wine: magenta sensation in his face. shame – it begins with secrets: jarrah wood smoke; something unsaid, low walls. it begins with black cats, never the wine – quarry and moon. it begins with sunlight in irises, white pullover, thrown rhizomes. it begins with orphée. the slow descent has begun. adios, yes.

Chris Arnold

Works Referenced William Basinski, ‘dlp6’, The Disintegration Loops IV (line 54) Angela Carter, ‘The Bloody Chamber’ (lines 2–3) Catullus, ‘2’ (line 36) Jorie Graham, ‘The Dream of the Unified Field’ (line 12) Eric Hamilton, JPEG File Interchange Format (lines 15, 46) Johann Johannsson, Orphée (lines 37,65) J Klensin (editor), RFC2821: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (lines 15, 25, 60) Bruce Schneier, Secrets and Lies Wallace Stevens, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ (lines 20, 58) The Twilight Sad, ‘And She Would Darken the Memory’ (lines 5, 45) A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

31

Commentary

More history, not less The unnaming of Moreland City Council

by Samuel Watts

O

n 19 November 2021, a delegation of Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung community leaders and prominent local non-Indigenous representatives presented a letter to Moreland City Council, in the inner-northern suburbs of Melbourne, asking that the Council be renamed. As the petitioners pointed out, Moreland – a name given to parts of the area in 1839 by Scottish settler Farquhar McCrae and then adopted by the local Council in 1994 – was the name of a Jamaican slave plantation to which McCrae’s family had a connection.

Renaming the Council, the letter’s authors asserted, would be an ‘opportunity to complement the current spirit of truth-telling and reconciliation’, bringing about greater awareness of both the global legacies of enslavement and the dispossession of Wurundjeri people in Melbourne and, fundamentally, healing for the descendants of those people and for those who call Moreland home today.

The petitioners did not suggest a new name but asked the Council to consult with relevant stakeholders, specifically the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation, in order to establish an alternative name.

Elizabeth Jackson, who was Mayor of Brunswick when it merged with Coburg to create the City of Moreland, recently noted in an interview on 3AW that there was ‘considerable disquiet in the community’ over the name in 1994 and active lobbying against it, yet Moreland was chosen as an effective compromise between Brunswick and Coburg. In late 2021, the political and cultural climate has shifted; within a week, Mayor Mark Riley had agreed to ditch the name and to commit to ongoing community consultation and to consultation with the Indigenous community. On 13 December, Moreland Council passed a motion to replace the name in 2022, with a letter of support from the local government minister.

The Moreland Council not only represents a highly diverse section of Melbourne’s inner-north, but also includes Australia’s second most progressive electorate, according to ABC Vote Compass Data. Resistance to this petition would not have been politically savvy, at least in the suburbs of Brunswick, Coburg, and Pascoe Vale. Anecdotally, almost none of my neighbours in Pascoe Vale (apart from other historians) was aware of the origins of the Council’s name. Nor were they particularly attached to the name. The connection between the McCrae family and the slave 32 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

trade is documented (if sparsely) in the historical literature and has been previously noted on the Moreland Council website and on a Council-supplied historical marker beneath the Moreland Road sign. Farquhar McCrae’s heritage-listed house being one of Melbourne’s oldest houses, it is surprising that Moreland’s slavery connection was news to the mayor and to the Council.

M

cCrae’s name has been long overshadowed in the history books and in public memory by his more successful ( John Pascoe Fawkner) and more monstrous ( John Batman) peers. Born in 1807 in Scotland, McCrae studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and demonstrated both skill and ambition in his early professional life as a surgeon. Aged twenty-five, McCrae injured himself while dissecting a body.

This led to an intractable illness from which he never recovered, despite moving his wife and young family to Melbourne in an attempt to benefit from a warmer climate. McCrae purchased a rectangular block of land to the north of the city, between the Moonee Ponds creek and Sydney Road, in what is now Pascoe Vale South, and called it Moreland. ‘La Rose’ still stands, a beautifully preserved family home built in 1842.

Neither the exact nature of the McCrae family’s connections to this plantation nor McCrae’s precise motivations for using the name Moreland can be established without further historical research. Whether the McCrae family actually owned the Moreland plantation, merely managed it, or had some other financial interest in it remains an important question, but it is not crucial to the issue of renaming that the Council faces today. It seems clear that McCrae was purposefully commemorating the Jamaican plantation (and perhaps his grandfather) by drawing a connection between the two spaces and linking the process of European colonisation in Australia to the institution of slavery.

McCrae and his family lived at La Rose for only two years before moving to Sydney, where McCrae, whose investments had turned sour and whose medical practice had failed to flourish in Melbourne, hoped in vain for a fresh start. Debts, disagreements, and poor health followed McCrae to Sydney, where he died six years later, at the age of forty-three.

Some advocates for the name change have cited McCrae’s financial and personal difficulties and the fact that he left Mel-

bourne for Sydney in 1844 as evidence that he was an unscrupulous financier whose various bad deals caught up with him, but this is not supported by the historical record. As historian Douglas Wilkie has highlighted in his recent study of McCrae, almost all colonial investors were affected by a severe but shortlived economic depression in the early 1840s and Farquhar’s experience was far from unique.

The major historical distortions have occurred during the conservative backlash to the Council’s decision, most prominently on Sky News and in the pages of the Herald Sun and The Australian. News Corp columnist Caleb Bond described Farquhar McCrae as a ‘swashbuckling surgeon and magistrate’ – a journalistic flourish that is more romance than reality, given McCrae’s lifelong tribulations. With rather circular logic, Bella d’Abrera, Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program at the Institute for Public Affairs, suggested in The Age that rather than condemning McCrae’s pro-slavery sympathies, Moreland Council should be thanking him, for without him it wouldn’t exist. Additionally, as a doctor, Farquhar ‘devoted his life to tending to the sick’. According to d’Abrera, the Council should honour him for ‘the service he rendered to fellow human beings’, as if a profession in medicine provided a moral carte blanche.

What is clear is that McCrae was an active participant in the dispossession of Wurundjeri land and that he – or, more accurately, his family, after his death – profited from it. McCrae marked this act of dispossession by naming the land after a Jamaican sugar plantation. Caribbean sugar plantations were brutal places; the back-breaking labour of cutting sugar cane was matched only by the hellish work of transforming that cane into crystallised sugar.

The process of grinding the cane and boiling it to make sugar was often deadly. Children would work alongside adults in sugar mills and exhaustion could mean losing both arms in the mill grinder or suffering horrific burns in the boiling house. For enslaved people, it meant a horrible combination of the worst aspects of both farm and factory labour. The mortality rates for labourers on sugar plantations in Jamaica, Barbados, Louisiana, and elsewhere were extremely high, even by eighteenth-century plantation standards.

Renaming Moreland Council provides an opportunity to educate Australians about this history and about the links between slavery in the British Empire and European colonisation of Australia. Historians have already begun this work in earnest; the Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery project, funded by the Australian Research Council, and featuring a team of researchers from across the country, has already made a significant impact in academic circles (see Georgina Arnott’s essay ‘Links in the Chain: Legacies of British Slavery in Australia’ in ABR, August 2020).

A public discussion about the legacies of slavery in Australia could significantly improve popular knowledge and understanding of Australian history – how the country was colonised and by whom, and how Australia sits within broader transnational historical narratives. Renaming Moreland could provoke such a discussion.

A common tactic among those who oppose such changes is to position themselves as the defenders of history against a rising tide of political correctness. Only by shuttering one’s own interpretation of history and its role in society is this perspective tenable. The issue of renaming goes to the heart of history’s

purpose and function. Is history simply the preservation of the past or is it something more relational, more abstract, and more to do with the present than we might like to admit? Advocates for change are often accused of ‘presentism’ in such debates – of applying contemporary moral standards to the past and decrying any individual who falls short of these standards, but these accusations fundamentally misrepresent the task and motivations of the historian. Historians should neither venerate nor denigrate historical figures, but rather seek to investigate how people in the past understood themselves and their place in the world – what historians of the French Annales school termed histoire des mentalités. Moral judgements are necessarily a part of historical scholarship; to pretend otherwise would highlight either a blindness to one’s own individual biases or a complete moral relativism. It would also negate much of the function of history: to continually reinterpret and examine the past in order to better understand and deal with contemporary issues (moral, political, social, and cultural). Those who oppose renaming on principle rightly point out that societal values inevitably change over time and that what is considered acceptable in one era is often unacceptable to us today. It simply does not follow to argue that because we can’t change the past we are somehow restricted in the present or that we therefore should not apply a critical lens to the past.

Place names, statues, and memorials do not represent historical scholarship, which is constantly challenged, debated, and amended – they are often, by their nature, set in stone, and present a simple, celebratory and easily comprehensible narrative to the public. As Zoë Laidlaw, Professor of History at the University of Melbourne, told me recently, while we can’t change the past, ‘we do choose how we engage with the past – what events we solemnly commemorate, whom we celebrate, whom or what we condemn. As we make those choices we demonstrate our empathy, not just for historical actors, but for those in our own times too.’

History serves the present, as much as the past, and the removal of a name can provoke a discussion about our history that does more to impact public memory and consciousness than leaving them there ever could.

Another common objection to renaming historical places is that it is the thin end of the wedge. If we rename Moreland, what about Melbourne, and what about Victoria. What about, what about, what about? Well, what about it? We live on Indigenous land, and if white Australian identity is too fragile to consider recognising that in our place names, we are far from reaching any form of racial justice (which must ultimately involve both sovereignty and some form of economic reparations). Ultimately, the issue of renaming in Australia is less about condemning a historical figure to the dustbin, but more about thinking practically about what kind of future we want and what kind of country we want to live in. It’s about empathy and honesty. It’s about recognising more of our history, not less. g Samuel Watts is a PhD Candidate in History. His research focuses on the experiences of African Americans in the Deep South during Reconstruction. Sam is the co-founder of ANZASA Online, an American studies blog. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

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Open Page with Anna Clark

Anna Clark is the author of Making Australian History (Vintage), a history of Australian history, and has written extensively on history education, historiography, and historical consciousness. She is currently Director of the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney.

(Lena Barridge)

Interview

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

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

The underwater world is my happy, calming place, so I’d have to say a protected marine zone where I can get a glimpse of what Australia’s natural bounty must once have been like everywhere.

My mum gave me Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes when I was about ten. I remember being floored by its tragedy. She’s still inside me somewhere, and when I visited Hiroshima a few years ago I left a little paper crane for her at the shrine.

What’s your idea of hell?

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Blower vacs, loud revving cars, and noisy groups of people (with the possible exception of a crowded footy game at the MCG).

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

The insistence on KPIs. Sometimes you just need kindness, time to think slowly, or even a nap.

What’s your favourite film?

Muriel’s Wedding. I love the mix of camp, poignant, vernacular Australianness.

And your favourite book?

Clarity – writers who want you to understand.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Roald Dahl’s Boy. I must have read it at least twenty times. Dahl’s childhood was at once familiar and totally incomprehensible.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

I can’t read things that are bleak or violent anymore. I loved Jude the Obscure and 1984 when I was younger, but there’s no way I could read them now.

Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, such a rambling story, one that doesn’t avoid life’s sadnesses or fall into the trap of oversentimentalisation. I liked each of its characters and enjoyed the texture of their lives.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Do you have a favourite podcast?

What qualities do you look for in critics?

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

How do you find working with editors?

I really enjoy Conversations on the ABC.

There are so many, but my dad tops the list. He died when I was twenty-three, and I’d love nothing more than to catch up with him over a beer.

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

I feel like such a graceless grump writing this, but when I get an email about another ‘exciting opportunity’, I want to run to the bush, pop a kettle on the campfire, and be as far away as possible. ‘Drongo’, however, is a word I love.

Who is your favourite author?

I am greatly enjoying Hannah Kent, Sigrid Nunez, and Sally Rooney. For my work, I also have a pile of non-fiction I have devoured and keep returning to for content, as well as form: Barbara Taylor, Tom Griffiths, Inga Clendinnen, Helen Garner, Anna Funder, Grace Karskens, Mark McKenna, Svetlana Alexievich, Tara Westover, Janet Malcolm, Maria Tumarkin, and many others …

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Although my kids make me happy, parenting is often incompatible with writing. I crave the uninterrupted space to read deeply and write purposefully, even if it’s for an hour.

I prefer long-form critical essays, where the works are placed in a broader context and in conversation with one another.

I’ve only had good experiences. Editors have helped me find my voice and guide it towards clarity and coherence.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I really enjoy watching authors talk about their craft and method.

Are artists valued in our society?

No, sadly: the humanities and creative arts are so undervalued.

But also, yes: there’s always a demand for storytellers to help explain who we are as a society at a point in time, where we have come from, and where we might be going.

What are you working on now?

I’ve just finished a book on the history of Australian history, which took about seven years, so I’m only just starting to dip my toe into some new ideas and research projects. In the meantime, I’m also developing a podcast about Australian history for primary students with Clare Wright. It’s a lot of fun, and I hope it sees the light of day sometime! g

Category

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Fiction

‘Strewn with words’

accounting for the searing reach of his plays, poems, and novels, nor for how deeply enmeshed his moral standpoint as a writer is with his work as an activist – and vice versa.

Wole Soyinka’s late style Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth does Marc Mierowsky not offer a resolution. Instead, it raises the partial to high art.

With the same sense of late style Theodor Adorno detected in Beethoven’s final works, the novel’s fragmentariness refuses a higher synthesis. Its attention to its parts is constitutive, not ornamental. Edward Said’s insight that works of this kind are about ‘“lost totality”, and it is in this sense that they are catastrophic’ Chronicles from the Land of the certainly applies.

Happiest People on Earth In Soyinka’s hands, the lost totality is the nation that might

by Wole Soyinka have been. In its place is a novel exposed at the joints. The places Bloomsbury where its multiple stories, tales, and diversions meet are social as $29.99 pb, 444 pp well as textual. The novel centres on a group of friends not unlike n You Must Set Forth at Dawn (2006), Wole Soyinka’s final the fraternity of the pen Soyinka formed as a student, who all volume of memoirs, the writer cites a piece of Yoruba wis- studied in Europe and have now returned home. The leitmotif dom: ‘T’ágbà bá ńdé, à á yé ogun jà – as one approaches an will be familiar to readers of Soyinka’s first novel, The Interpretelder’s status, one ceases to indulge in battles’. This was once the ers (1965), which also traced the lives of expatriates reasserting hope of a man who describes himself as a ‘closet glutton for tran- themselves on re-entry as a way to explore a changing homeland.

In Chronicles, the group is made up of Duyole Pitan-Payne, quillity’. At one point, Soyinka even dared to think that he would assume the position of a serene elder at forty-nine: seven times scion of an influential family and engineer preparing to leave for seven, the sacred number of Ogun, his companion deity. But a UN appointment; Kighare Menka, a rural boy come good, now nationally renowned for his surgical Ogun is wilful as protector and muse. work on the victims of Boko Haram; The life the god carved for Soyinka Prince Badetona, a mathematician took the image of his own restlessness. whose skill with numbers is not alA poet, playwright, novelist, and Nobel ways used for good; and Farodian, the Laureate, Soyinka remains an activist mysterious financier, who it seems has for democracy, his bona fides hard won lost contact with the ‘Gong of Four’. as a political prisoner during the NiThe group’s name comes from a Benin gerian Civil War (1967–70) and in exgong. As students, they put the image ile during the dictatorship of General on T-shirts, replacing the carved figures Sani Abacha (1993–98). with their four conjoined heads.

One reason why the proverb may The gong is a symbol of their early not have the force it once did is that ‘embattled idealism’. This idealism is when it was first voiced ‘a certain entity tested and deformed to varying decalled Nigeria was not yet thought of ’. grees as the novel follows the group’s The battles of Soyinka’s long life (he was interactions with a cynical political born in 1934) have, by implication, not set, desperate to show its humility and been an indulgence but a necessity. In affinity with the country’s people. The 1960, he witnessed the emergence of current prime minister, Sir Goddie, is the modern state as it formed within leader of the People on the Move Party the confected borders of a colony, and Wole Soyinka at Stockholm Public Library, 2018 (Frankie Fouganthin/Wikimedia Commons) or POMP. The acronym, characteristic he has spent his life trying, in word of Soyinka’s delight in wordplay, reveals and deed, to draw it out towards a truer version of itself. At eighty-seven, there is little hint that this task a shallow idea of progress, where meaningless ceremonies paper is over, merely the acknowledgment that he might have reached over the brutal extraction of wealth.

The shallow corporate speak in politics is only matched in ‘a moment when age dictates the avoidance of certain forms of religion. Sir Goddie, who is known as ‘the Presence’, finds a engagement’.

With this acknowledgment, Soyinka returns to an ideal he counterpart in Papa Davina, ‘the Prescience’, whose connection expressed as a student in England in the 1950s: of writing as its to the four is only revealed at the novel’s end. As in politics, the own form of engagement, in which he and his comrades would goal is extraction. To get the most from his countrymen, the ‘make a trenchant use of the pen, the stage, propagate progres- charlatan preacher attempts to contain the syncretic heteroglossia sive ideas, mobilise the people and expose their betrayers. The of indigenous religions, Christianity, and Islam under the banner contested arena would be strewn with words, with polemics, not of ‘Ekumenika’, his answer to the American megachurch.

And all this in the land of the ‘happiest people’! The novsoaked in gore.’ For most of Soyinka’s career, this transfiguration of rebellion into word has been partial at best, never fully el’s title comes from a 2011 Gallup poll that rated Nigeria the

I

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highest in happiness index. Chronicles lays waste to this ludicrous measure of humanity – its supposed representative wholeness – as Menkha is set in pursuit of ‘Human Resources’: a shadowy cabal that procures and sells body parts for use in ritual. What he finds is a sleek corporate conglomerate that literally dismembers its people and sells their parts back to the moneyed classes. As he progresses, the novel of friendship becomes a murder mystery, and its ever-present satire dances its way to the point of excess: where the target and the exaggerations the mode usually requires to sharpen its attack meet in reality.

Chronicles is difficult to read. The prose is dense, allusive; the plot filled with divagations. This is the point. To be anything less would implicate the novel in its own critique of the falsely holistic.

That it can be at once difficult and enthralling is perhaps evidence

that Soyinka has taken what Said thought a prerogative of late style: ‘the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them’. In Soyinka’s case, the forces do not so much pull against each other as touch at various points on the road, always under the eye of Ogun, god of drivers.

As they do, the novelist finds a form to reflect his apparent fate: ‘To watch the nation turn both carrion and scavenger as it killed and consumed its kind, the road remaining an obliging stream in which a nation’s fall from grace was duly reflected.’ g Marc Mierowsky is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. His first book, on Daniel Defoe and the campaign to end Scottish independence, is forthcoming with Yale University Press.

Fiction

Secrets and broken hearts Three new novels of friendship Polly Simons

W

hen Anne Shirley dreamed of finding a ‘bosom friend’ in Avonlea, she did more than conjure Diana Barry into existence. The heroine of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) imprinted on us an almost impossible standard for what to expect from our earliest female friendships: a lifelong source of joy sustained by a mutual devotion to each other’s best interests. More often than not, however – as the popularity of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels attests – childhood friendships are as complicated as any other. And when they rupture, whether through accident, argument, or design, the aftershocks can last well into adulthood.

In Kate Ryan’s accomplished début, The Golden Book (Scribe, $29.99 pb, 256 pp), the relationship between the protagonist, Ali, and her childhood friend, Jessie, is a complicated one. In this case, the ‘golden book’ of the title isn’t some rosy-eyed reference to carefree days of innocence now gone, but an actual document, a record of the risks and initiations undertaken by the girls as they grow up in a small town on the New South Wales coast.

Years later, Ali – now a mother herself and having long since left both the town and her friendship with Jessie behind – receives a phone call to say that Jessie has died. Returning ‘home’ for the funeral, Ali is forced to reckon with her fraught memories of their friendship and what responsibility she bears for the devastating way in which it ended.

Jumping between the life of the adult Ali, with all its complications, and vivid flashbacks of her time with Jessie, The Golden Book moves seamlessly across time. Ryan’s language is direct and unshowy; she paces the story with admirable restraint, letting Ali’s memories unfurl slowly until the full picture of what happened between her and Jessie is revealed.

The chief joy of the novel is in Ryan’s nuanced portrayal of childhood friendship. Wild Jessie, with her boundless freedoms, artistic but disengaged mother, and host of older brothers, is an object of envy to the more cautious Ali, with her schoolteacher parents and strict routine. Yet Jessie, for all her recklessness, can also be suffocatingly needy, and Ali wields one significant advantage over her friend, which she is not afraid to use to her benefit. Ryan has a keen eye and an empathetic understanding of these shifting power dynamics; the relationship between the two girls feels realistic and fully realised. Also drawn sensitively is the relationship between Ali and her pre-teenage daughter, Tam, whose intense friendship with another girl once more brings Ali’s childhood fears to the surface. The result is a thoughtful and unassuming novel that raises questions about guilt, blame, and the fickleness of memory.

D

ealing with similar themes but with a very different feel is journalist Vanessa McCausland’s third novel, The Beautiful Words (HarperCollins, $32.99 pb, 368 pp).

Here, the two best friends in question are Sylvie and Kase, who share an idyllic childhood growing up on Sydney’s northern beaches – until one night, when a party on the beach leads to a tragedy, causing Sylvie to lose her short-term memory and the friends to never speak again.

Twenty years later, Sylvie, now working as a cleaner of deceased estates and still suffering from memory problems, receives an invitation to attend Kase’s fortieth birthday party on a windswept island off the Tasmanian coast. Desperate to find out what happened, she accepts. But just as the friendship between the two women starts to repair, they discover that their mothers have a shared and equally fractured history of their own.

Told across four timelines – the current day, the friendship between Sylvie and Kase, that of their mothers, Franny and A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

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THE MUSIC

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

LIMELIGHT

TIME OUT

S YDNE Y OPERA HOUSE 4 MARCH - 2 APRIL C ANBERRA THEATRE CENTRE 7-16 APRIL AR T S CENTRE MELBOURNE 28 APRIL - 14 MAY

Eve, and the night of the beach party – what could be an overly complicated structure is made relatively straightforward thanks to clear signposting. McCausland uses this framework effectively, allowing the separate storylines to illuminate each other and the tension to build until the secrets at the heart of each friendship are exposed. She creates a strong sense of place at each turn and captures well the shifting tides of adult friendship and how allegiances shift as circumstances change. In particular, she articulates the discombobulation of coming back to a friendship after many years away; of knowing so much about a person’s early life and so little about the person they have become.

After such a sustained build-up, however, the conclusion feels rather rushed. In the final section of the novel, the plot takes a detour into #MeToo territory. It’s an unexpected turn but a welcome one, giving the plot a much-needed shot in the arm and saving it from predictability. Frustratingly, it occurs too late in the narrative to feel like anything other than a plot device to facilitate a happy ending. It seems like a missed opportunity, not only for the novel to explore the questions it raises about wealth, power, and influence, but also the ways in which those who possess them can dictate our memory of events.

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BY WILL IAM SHAKESPEARE DIREC TOR PE TER E VANS BELL SHAKESPEARE.COM.AU

or Vega, the protagonist of The Wingmaker (Text Publishing, $24.99 pb, 224 pp), the third novel by Danish-Australian author Mette Jakobsen, it’s the desire to avoid human contact altogether that prompts the events of the novel. As the narrative begins, the art conservator has arrived at the icy, dilapidated Seafarers’ Hotel looking to be alone. Suffering from a broken heart both literally and metaphorically, having recently suffered a heart attack and been dumped by her partner, Vega is hoping the ramshackle hotel will offer her not only a chance to recover but an opportunity to work on her latest commission: reconstructing the wings of a beautiful but sad-looking marble angel. But her enforced solitude is not to be. Already inhabiting the hotel is an eccentric handyman, Gunnar, who is battling a few demons of his own. Soon he’s joined by others: a group of tango-dancing local farmers and, most importantly, Vega’s estranged adopted sister, the freewheeling, party-loving Suze.

In the hands of other writers, such a quirky set-up might seem painfully contrived and embarrassingly clunky. It’s a credit to Jakobsen’s writing and her lightness of touch that it comes across as charming instead. Jakobsen is an expert at creating jewel-like moments that often feel filmic. At times, the novel feels more like a collection of interconnected scenes than a coherent whole: an accruement of impressions that never quite become more than the sum of their parts. The characters seem to exist in a vacuum, free of any context beyond the odd memory or two recounted by Vega. Without those foundations, it’s difficult to engage with them on a deeper level or to care much about what happens to them when the book ends.

That said, however, there’s a lot to like about The Wingmaker.

It’s quietly beguiling, and there’s a clear lesson to be gleaned about the importance of being vulnerable and accepting help as a path to healing. With a happy ending virtually guaranteed, the reader is free to enjoy the journey, every whimsical step of the way. g Polly Simons is a Sydney-based arts writer, critic, and bookseller.

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Fiction

Life in the swamp

John le Carré’s posthumous novel Morag Fraser

Silverview

by John le Carré

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Viking $32.99 pb, 208 pp

riting in The New York Times on 15 December 2020, three days after John le Carré’s death, Philippe Sands, genocide scholar and professor of law at University College London, recounted a 1962 encounter in Vienna between his friend (Sands knew Le Carré by his birth name, David Cornwell) and the famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Cornwell had asked Wiesenthal how he could continue to live in the city, given Vienna’s history of anti-Semitism. Wiesenthal replied: ‘If you are studying the disease you have to live in the swamp.’

Le Carré had worked in British intelligences services for more than a decade when his first novel, Call for the Dead (which introduced Circus spymaster George Smiley), was published in 1961. Sands, whose friendship later extended to reading drafts of Le Carré’s post-Iraq War novels, remarked poignantly: Looking back, I wonder if this was David’s way of actually speaking for himself. He too knew of the swamps, and they informed his view of the world and his writings. The swamps appear even deeper in 2020 than they were in the extraordinary postwar years that formed him. This may be what makes him so current, and our loss so acute.

Silverview, Le Carré’s posthumously published novel, conjures a very deep swamp, recognisably of our time. (Le Carré’s timing has always been a strength: when his 1995 novel Our Game came out, with its background of strife in the Caucasus, few readers could have located Chechnya on a map, let alone fathomed the complex ethnic and religious history of the region. Le Carré did both.)

Silverview is an angry, witty novel, suffused with rueful disillusionment. But the loyalties and moral derelictions are, as ever with Le Carré, embodied in his characters. In newspaper articles he was vehement – about the second Iraq War and its compounding human and political cost, about the folly of Brexit (he took Irish citizenship late in his life). But his novels are not tracts. This one (which, in its plot complexity and occasional opaqueness, rewards rereading) is a fictional exploration of affectless ruthlessness, occasional decency, passionate commitment, and the queasiness of moral ambivalence. No dying fall about it.

Silverview is the name of a ‘big Edwardian pile in East Anglia’ inherited from her military father and inhabited by Deborah Avon, a Boudicca of British intelligence, now dying. Living (in separate rooms) is her husband, Edward (or Edvard) Avon, son of a Polish fascist, one-time communist, recruited as a British spy, scarred by

Warsaw and Bosnia, now a self-described ‘British mongrel, retired, a former academic of no merit and one of life’s odd-job men’.

At Edward’s insistence, the house of Deborah’s soldier father was renamed Silverview after Friedrich Nietzsche’s Weimar home, Silberblick. Deborah, in a fine display of English social savagery, sketches the symbolism and marital battle lines implicit in the name-change in one of the novel’s icier scenes: ‘Even if Nietzsche was our most fearless advocate of individual freedom, then what? Individual freedom to me always came with built-in obligations. Whereas for Nietzsche and Edward there are none … A most dangerous dictum, would you not say, Julian?’

Julian is a press-ganged dinner guest, bystander to the conflict between Deborah’s adamantine adherence to duty and Edward’s romantic attachment to a cause. We first meet Julian in his newly acquired bookshop in a small seaside town in East Anglia, after an ‘impulsive escape’ from his financially successful ‘City life’. He is fast becoming aware that ‘his lack of the basic literary education required of your upmarket bookseller was not to be repaired in a couple of months’.

Into Julian’s bookshop walks Edward Avon, importunate, eccentric, persuasive. He proffers a boyhood friendship with Julian’s disgraced father as bond, and proceeds to tell Julian how he should stock his shelves and create, in the basement, a ‘Republic of Literature’. Emblematic of what Julian must acquire is W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. Le Carré does not labour the point, but Sebald’s unusual walking-talking fiction hybrid, with its allusions to entropy, shadows the whole of Silverview. Out of his depth, but decently wary, Julian is annexed – to literary ambition, and a demanding friendship.

The novel is dense and episodic. Its locales, including not Oxford but the ominous Orford military installation, are vivid, uncongenial. We meet Stewart Proctor, intelligence service stalwart, in a West End safe house, questioning Lily, the Avons’ spiky daughter. Next, Proctor is in the midst of family, juggling imperatives – sitting at the Bechstein to render the Flanders and Swann Hippopotamus song for his twins’ twenty-first birthday celebration, then ducking to the old scullery to answer the dedicated (and deniable) green service phone.

In the novel’s best scene – a protracted dissection of Edward Avon’s history as a ‘Joe’– Proctor interrogates two old service hands, husband and wife, once the ‘golden couple’ of Eastern European and Levantine operations, now stroke-smitten (Philip) and horsy ( Joan). In parting, Philip confides to Proctor, ‘The thing is, old boy – between ourselves, don’t tell the trainees or you’ll lose your pension – we didn’t do much to alter the course of history, did we? As one old spy to another, I reckon I’d have been more use running a boys’ club. Don’t know what you feel.’

But the course of history has been altered, not benignly, and Proctor knows much of the how and why. He can say what he feels – about ‘poor toothless, leaderless Britain tagging along behind because it still dreams of greatness’ but he can’t prevail in the face of his lethally bland once-colleague, soon-to-be head of service, Quentin Battenby (‘Parliamentary oversight people eat out of his hands’).

Swamp it is, banal and poisonous. The novel has its flaws, but Le Carré’s oversight of historical and twenty-first-century iniquities stands as a salutary and provoking challenge. g A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

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Fiction

Spectres

Louise Erdrich’s ghost-filled novel Alice Nelson

The Sentence

by Louise Erdrich

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Hachette $32.99 pb, 386 pp

dith Wharton, famed purveyor of ghost stories, said that she needed her reader to meet her halfway among the primeval shadows; that to believe in the fetches, haunts, and other ‘spectral strap-hangers’ that filled her pages one must still be able to hear the distant echo of the hoarse music of the northern Urwald or the churning darks seas of the outermost shores. The spectral presence in Louise Edrich’s new novel, The Sentence, appears in the midst of a decidedly unghostly suburban Minneapolis, but so compelling a presence is the phantasm of Flora that the reader embraces her wholeheartedly, diving without question into those primeval shadows where wraiths lurk.

It is the singular Tookie, an Ojibwe woman who has found redemption from a lifetime of strife and sorrow working at a bookshop specialising in Native American literature, that Flora has chosen to haunt. Having spent ten years in prison, Tookie marvels at her miraculous new life, which contains ‘a regular little house’, a job, and a kind husband. ‘Knowing what I know of my tribe’s history, remembering what I can bear to remember of my own,’ Tookie says, ‘I can only call the life I live now a life of heaven.’

The novel is both the unfolding tale of Flora’s haunting of the mordant, whip-smart Tookie, and a limning of other kinds of spectres from Native American history that rise up and threaten to overwhelm the precariously balanced present.

In his provocative 2006 book Native American Fiction: A user’s manual, the Ojibwe novelist and academic David Treuer bemoans what he terms ‘the legendary mist of Indian misery’ that, to his mind, suffuses the work of many of his contemporaries. ‘How does one escape this all-pervading thing, exoticized foreknowledge?’ he asks, claiming that much of Native American writing is read for its cultural authenticity rather than as literature. Erdrich, too, has been preoccupied with these kind of questions of white appropriation, condescending sympathy, and sentimental racism – in life and in literature. The Sentence takes up this fraught issue in a far more overt manner than Erdrich’s previous work. In the bookstore, Tookie encounters earnest white customers she terms ‘wannabes’, who confide to her that they always wanted to be Indians as children, telling her tales of sleeping in tipis made of blankets, playing at fighting cowboys, and tying their sisters to trees. ‘The person is proud of having identified with an underdog and wants some affirmation from an actual Indigenous person,’ says Tookie. She is also assailed with questions ranging from ‘Can you appraise my turquoise necklace?’ to ‘What’s a cultural

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Indian thing that would fit into our funeral service?’ Tookie tries to sell these sorts of customers Paul Chaat Smith’s Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong, but notes wryly that they hardly ever buy it.

Before her death, Flora’s obsession with all things Native American has turned into an ‘unaccountable, persistent, selfobliterating delusion’. At first, she tells people that she had been an Indian in a former life, then later invents a Native American ancestor, producing a photograph of a ‘grim woman in a shawl’

So compelling a presence is the phantasm of Flora that the reader embraces her wholeheartedly, diving without question into those primeval shadows where wraiths lurk that Tookie suspects she has plucked from a junk store bin.

She attends every powwow and has made herself a traditional dance outfit of buckskin and purple beadwork. But Flora’s ‘Nativephilia’ has a positive side to it, too; she fosters Native American teen runaways, attends protests, raises money for a Native American women’s refuge, and is generally devoted to good works in the community. ‘So what if she needed, however fake, a connection?’ asks Tookie. Slightly unnerving and acquisitive in life, Flora’s obsession becomes openly sinister in her spectral form; she wants to take possession of Tookie.

For a ghost story, The Sentence is also intensely preoccupied with worldly concerns and veers frequently into social realism, vividly chronicling a fractured and uneasy nation. The novel is set mostly in 2020, during the pandemic, and also encompasses the killing of George Floyd and the ensuing outrage. Erdrich brilliantly expresses feelings about the recent calamity that often remain inchoate for the rest of us in prose that is never solipsistic or sentimental. Tookie reflects on the way that ‘we straggled through a year that sometimes seemed like the beginning of the end.

A slow tornado. I want to forget this year, but I’m also afraid I won’t remember this year.’In the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, Tookie describes the way that the smell of popcorn is a blessed reprieve from the smell of spent tear gas – ‘sour, musky, chalk’.

Erdrich’s rendering of the catastrophic events of recent times is perfectly counterposed with her unfolding of the central ghost story, and the tapestry of intersecting individual lives that she so skilfully weaves. The characters are never entirely subsumed by the sweep of history, either distant or recent, though, like the ghost of Flora, it threatens to overwhelm them at all times.

In a 2017 New Yorker essay on the Standing Rock pipeline protests, Erdrich writes about the way that history is a living force in the Lakota way of life. ‘Each of the great events in their common destiny includes the direct experience of ancestors, whose names live on in their descendants.’ By the end of The Sentence, the reader comes to realise that perhaps a novel full of ghosts, in all their different guises, is exactly the right thing for our own haunted, and haunting, times. g Alice Nelson is a West Australian writer. Her new novel, Faithless, is forthcoming with Penguin Random House in 2022.

Fiction

Some things remain The weighty impress of the past Rose Lucas

Devotion

by Hannah Kent

‘S

Picador $32.99 pb, 418 pp

ee, my hands, they reach for you. My heart is a hand reaching.’ So begins Hannah Kent’s wide-ranging and poetic new novel, signalling its key themes of love, longing, and the pain that arises from division. While hands reach out, desperately seeking each other, Devotion explores the possibilities and the limits of such clasping. This is a powerful narrative that grapples with what connects passionate bodies and hearts and what might keep them apart, be it physical distance, religious constraint, or the limits of the imagination. Through the motif of devotion – religious, emotional, sexual – Kent’s skilful novel considers the fundamental human experiences of attachment and desire as experienced by characters who carry the weighty impress of the past, with its complex tracery of love, geography, and suffering, into the unfolding possibilities of new worlds.

Devotion primarily tells the entwined stories of Hanne Nussbaum and Thea Eichenwald, who live in the Prussian village of Kay in 1836. Through the reflective dreaminess of Hanne’s first-person voice, the reader becomes aware of her position on the margins of her closed religious community, where Hanne balances her love for family and tradition with the call of another kind of life, as yet hard to define, another way of understanding herself and the world. While the novel suggests the ecstatic possibilities of religious devotion, epitomised in the hymns that soar throughout Hanne’s life, she finds herself more attuned to the nuanced language of the trees and the wind and the intriguing beauty of her new friend Thea. As they move into their young womanhood, the braidings between Hanne and Thea deepen, even without the social structures in which to fully express it.

Kent is tilling familiar ground; as in her earlier novels, Burial Rites (2013) and The Good People (2016), she is focused on the experience of women who are on a social periphery, and whose deep feeling and independence bring them into conflict with prevailing norms. In addition, all three novels, set in the first half of the nineteenth century, are redolent with the textures and scents of a certain kind of elemental life, suffused with mud, wood smoke, the muck of animals, salt water, and the sweat of unwashed human bodies. Kent conjures a raw edge of human experience, close to both beauty and the fracturings of violence.

Hanne and Thea’s community are Old Lutherans, now marginalised by the edicts of a reformist Union church. As a persecuted religious minority, the elders decide to take the community on the perilous journey to the new world of South Australia,

leading to an excruciating six-month journey aboard the crowded, disease-ridden Kristi. The gruesome conditions on the immigrant ship echo those in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996): families struggle in darkened holds, the girls reach for each other in the wildness of storms, and the community experiences the trauma of loved ones being buried at sea, including the shock of the ‘sailor’s stitch’ threaded posthumously through the membrane of a nose.

In recounting this journey, Kent draws on the history of Prussian immigration to the town of Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills; like Atwood, and as in her previous novels, Kent builds explicitly on stories and histories of the past, using them as fabric from which to devise her own ruminations on the richness of human experience.

Kent conjures a raw edge of human experience, close to both beauty and the fracturings of violence The second half of the novel unfolds in the unfamiliarity of the new world, where heat, rain, and existing inhabitants momentarily challenge the pilgrims’ drive to recreate the old world, to build ‘Heiligendorf ’ in the hills and valleys of this new ‘paradise’.

Nevertheless, beliefs still clash, tensions erupt, there are still different ways of interpreting meaning in the world – even as the settlers establish themselves and new children arrive. For example, as a midwife with knowledge that lies outside a strict Lutheran orthodoxy, Thea’s mother is always under suspicion, her ability to heal the sick, to suture the gash between the living and the dead, seen as morally and spiritually dangerous.

The themes of immigration and colonisation provide an important context for the novel, both in terms of understanding the complicity of the position of the settler Australian and the immigrant’s tensions between the call of a previous life and the possibility of somewhere new. However, through its poetic focus on Hanne and Thea’s deepening love and its tenacity in the face of misrecognition and separation, Devotion is also an intensely embodied reflection on the nature of love itself: what is it that draws one person to another? When is devotion about steadfastness, a focus on the loved one, and when might it hold on too tight or for too long?

In its concerns about the impact of the past, Devotion is also a rewriting of the ghost story and of what it might mean to be haunted. Rather than being something that is fearful, Hanne’s narrative suggests that the persistence of the ghost is itself an enactment of love, a devoted return to bardo-like haunts of familiarity where meanings continue to be made. Drawn to the body and presence of the loved person and the viscerality of places once inhabited, the ghost signifies what remains, an acknowledgment of the inevitable carrying forward of the intensity of connection. Perhaps what Devotion tells us most is that love is never finished but will, somehow, always find a way to speak – in the embroideries of words and stories, the quiet rustling of the wind through strange and familiar trees, even the eerie song of the whale that Hanne hears while she is on the ship, resounding through the hidden chambers of the deepest ocean. g Rose Lucas is a Melbourne poet and academic.

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Literary Studies

Untimely theatrics

tations, both in its methodology – as a work in theatre studies rather than of literary criticism per se – and in its key argument that White was a committed playwright rather than a novelist A new study of Patrick White’s drama dabbling in theatre. In Varney’s analysis, White becomes one Jonathan Dunk contributor among others to a series of syncretic theatrical events.

As such, she is as attentive to the aural and scenographic aspects of successive productions of White’s plays as she is to their linguistic and thematic textures. White was infamously pedantic; he rejected Donald Sutherland as a potential Voss because of his ‘flabby wet mouth’, and was closely involved in most of the Patrick White’s Theatre: Australian productions of his work during his lifetime. The close attention modernism on stage, 1960–2018 Varney pays to each of these productions contributes to the

by Denise Varney scholarly literature on White and vividly illustrates a strand of Sydney University Press Australian theatrical history. $45 pb, 212 pp White has always occupied an idiosyncratic place in our literatrick White’s plays are conventionally assigned a margin- ary history. As a novelist, he inherited both the anxieties of a beal place in the landscape of his writing. Historically, they lated modernism and, ambivalently, the nationalist energies of the have either been regarded as poetic but unconvincing ex- turn-of-the-century Australian novels he derided in ‘The Prodigal tensions of the performative dimensions of his prose, or as fun- Son’ as the ‘dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism’. damentally misconceived exercises in contempt. Tim Winton In Patrick White (1996), Simon During advanced the argument spoke for the latter camp when, writing in the London Review of that the steep decline of White’s reputation during the 1990s Books (22 June 1995), he dismissed White’s dramatic work as a resulted from a confluence of conventional literary mortality and a ‘long and wasteful engagement with the theatre and its poison- wider transformation of Australian society from a narrow-minded Anglophone outpost to a confident multicultural power. In retrospect, the book’s timing on the cusp of John Howard’s election undermines that judgement, but it is clear that White’s work has played different roles in developing structures of cultural and literary value. More recently other critics, such as Andrew McCann, have suggested that the aspects of White’s work conducive to cultural nationalism – its dramatisation of colonial archetypes among other things – constitute the least interesting things about it, and that the historic attempt to read White through this lens precluded more dynamic possibilities. This rings true of the ambivalence with which critics like G.A. Wilkes and Leonie Kramer approached the distinctive ironies of White’s prose, and it’s possible to read A.D. Hope’s famously splenetic 1956 review of The Tree of Man in this light.

Amanda Muggleton as Alma Lusty in Patrick White’s The Ham Funeral, directed by Adam The early Australian reception of Cook. Adelaide Festival of Arts, State Theatre Company of South Australia, 2012. (Photograph by Shane Reid) White’s dramatic work was similarly ous hangers-on’. Winton’s judgement is informed by a solitary contentious. In 1962, the governors of the Adelaide Festival remodel of authorship that can be applied to the rural metaphysics jected White’s most aesthetically successful early play, The Ham of White’s Castle Hill novels but that is increasingly inapplica- Funeral (1961), on the advice of Neil Hutchison, then director ble to the urbane satires his work became following his move to of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, that it was a stylistic failure and an affront to common decency. Varney contextualises this inner Sydney in 1964.

Playwriting is a materially social form, and Denise Varney’s judgement, illustrating White’s theatre at this point as the sudden new book, Patrick White’s Theatre, departs from earlier interpre- advent of an alienating modernism in a dramatic landscape then

P

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dominated by the school of earthy backyard realism epitomised

by Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955). The Ham Funeral also had its advocates, including on the festival’s board of governors, but its surreal symbolist style, and at times shocking content – one scene features a foetus in a dustbin – were radically unlike anything then being staged. As White’s fame grew, the play’s reception became less rancorous, but an element of ambivalence towards the uneasy combination of metaphysical symbolism and comically pitched realism would remain.

Varney identifies two key moments in White’s dramatic writing: a strand of anti-realist modernist theatre in the 1960s, and a second period in the 1980s characterised by political engagement and a more playful presentation of marginally gendered subjects. The latter shift deserves comparison with White’s last great novel, The Twyborn Affair (1979), which revises many of the themes of his earlier work in a kinder light. In terms of the plays’ performance history, Varney argues, White’s earlier drama only found its best expression when it was embraced and revived by Jim Sharman during the 1970s, and the later work when it was restaged in the twenty-first century by Benedict Andrews and Michael Kantor in conversation with international developments in the art form caused by transformations in Brechtian theatre led by writer–directors like Heiner Müller. Hans-Theis Lehmann theorised this paradigm as a post-dramatic theatre emphasising multiple and heterogeneous perspectives, which disrupts the supposed coherence of the fictional world. This view resonates with the wider trope of White as an essentially untimely writer who staged nineteenth-century ideas in the language of a belated northern modernism decades before the birth of his best antipodean interpreters.

Varney combines a theoretically astute sense of the hybridity of the dramatic event, with a dense but lucidly rendered sociological history of White’s plays as they progress through different productions, revivals, and receptions. In that respect, Patrick White’s Theatre forms a valuable cross-section of White’s dramatic poetics from an academic perspective. However, it also uses those poetics as a vantage point from which to study many of the leading figures in twentieth-century Australian theatre, and thus attempts a diachronic study of a transforming national self-awareness expressed in performance. In treating the dramatic event as a syncretic enactment of meaning, rather than a mere rendition of a pre-existing literary meaning, Varney’s dynamic method leads her to the striking conclusion that the lacunae and discomforting tensions in White’s dramatic work are at least as indicative of the contradictions of Australian society as they are of formal infelicity. This is an essential insight, and one which could be usefully extended to White’s novels, and perhaps to Australian modernism broadly, as a dissonant and uneven dialectic between radically irreconcilable values and priorities.

Tim Winton made his judgement back in the context of the publication of White’s letters, which reveal the man in all his stunted privilege and mercurial cruelty, shorn of the sublime textures of his novels. White was certainly a morally flawed man and a technically flawed writer. Nonetheless, one still wonders how much of the criticism both elicit arises from self-recognition. g Jonathan Dunk is the co-editor of Overland Literary Journal.

Totalise the reading Where poet and reader meet David Mason

How to Read a Poem: Seven steps

by Thomas H. Ford

I

Routledge $52.99 pb, 145 pp

n my thirty years as an academic, the greatest joy and puzzlement I had was in teaching poetry. I agree with T.S. Eliot that ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’. Our best teaching often involves what we do not fully understand. The scholar D.S. Carne-Ross once argued that, upon hearing poetry spoken in an unfamiliar language, you can tell it is poetry, the language of poetry, which is other than what I do in writing this review. Anyone faced with the problem of teaching poetry in an academic setting will realise that part of the problem is the academic setting itself. Poetry has thrived for millennia everywhere on earth without the benefit of professors, classrooms, and theories of reading. How, then, might we teach it?

One answer, given in books such as Thomas H. Ford’s How to Read a Poem, is that we don’t teach poetry at all. We teach reading – criticism. Author of a highly regarded book on Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air (2018), Ford – an academic at La Trobe University – brings to his subject wide reading, including the poetry of hitherto marginalised writers, deep understanding of the history of criticism and literary theory, a sense of humour and proportion, and a prose style free of unnecessary jargon. The result is a fine book touching on ‘creative reading’ in multiple ways. Yet even Ford would acknowledge, as all good critics must, the degree to which Poetry with a capital P escapes his purview. Why shouldn’t it? It eludes most poets as well.

How to Read a Poem is really about the kind of thinking poetry makes available to us. Ford uses the word ‘reading’ as a noun, a thing we make, adding, ‘This book is intended to help you become a reader in the sense of someone who reads poetry in order to write about it.’ I can imagine a book such as this one escaping the academic setting and reaching bloggers in garrets, book groups willing to try something different, people interested in reading creatively. But what is this enrichment? When Ford avers that ‘you should read poetry because it’s good for you’, my heart sinks. I can tell any three-year-old that spinach is good for her, but that won’t make her eat it. The principal lack in How to Read a Poem is the same thing too much poetry lacks – the allure that makes us remember it, rivets our attention with dramatic power or voice or attitude, the material pleasure that brings us to poetry, or, in Robert Frost’s terms, the delight that ends in wisdom.

This book would be useful in a course on poetry, but also one on poetics, the history of criticism or theory. Ford offers seven steps toward the creation of ‘a reading’, each of which receives A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

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Poetry its own chapter: ‘Fragment the poem’, ‘Read it aloud’, ‘Describe a form’, ‘Find the weirdness’, ‘Find poetic self-reference’, ‘Find other ambiguities’, and ‘Totalize the reading’. ‘Criticism,’ he writes usefully, ‘is an exercise of making judgments. But it proceeds, perhaps paradoxically, by suspending judgment.’ In a time when judgement, often personal and political, too often precedes reading (both verb and noun), such sentences come as a relief. Ford’s book is humane and intellectually serious, steeped in multiple traditions yet open to the subversion, the freedom that poetry allows.

Stasis anxiety

Two poets address the impasses of the present Abigail Fisher

Endings & Spacings

by Pam Brown Never Never Books 69 pp

How to Read a Poem is really about the kind of thinking poetry makes available to us While his prose is gently discursive and allusive, full of brief examples from a variety of writers, including philosophers, critics, and theorists, the focus of his reading is a single poem, ‘Lines Written Under a Picture of a Girl Burning a Love-Letter’

by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, ‘and first published in a London weekly magazine, the Literary Gazette, on 16 November 1822, when Landon was just twenty years old’. Ford saves the juicy bits of his reading – the feminist point of view and the kind of historical anecdote that proves useful in a classroom – for his final chapter on the big picture, or on ‘totalizing’ the reading.

The first six chapters deal with methods of comprehension and awareness that help critics give substance to their essays. As a Wordsworth scholar, he would know ‘we murder to dissect’, and it might be argued that his method does not allow the poem to breathe sufficiently before it is dismembered.

Landon’s poem is formally accomplished, a sonnet with rhymes commenting on each other: ‘thing’ with ‘communing’, ‘brook’ (as in ‘abide’) with ‘look’, etc. The off-rhyme of ‘die’ and ‘history’ provides an occasion to discourse about how sounds – everything they do and do not contain – create shadings of meaning, implications of the sort students often have trouble developing in their essays. Ford would no doubt agree that in the best poetry meaning is never one thing but a field of possibilities.

Late in the book, he celebrates ambiguity with the help of Roman Jakobson and William Empson, but his chapter on reading aloud also goes a fair way into the rich implications of sound.

He may be right to put step one, ‘Fragment the poem’, before step two, ‘Read it aloud’, but in my classrooms I always did the reverse, devoting part of every class to performance, asking students to memorise and perform poems of their own choosing. I wanted them to experience how it feels to carry someone else’s language around in your body, move to it, speak it aloud in different circumstances. We don’t really understand the greatest poems – or we understand partially, as we understand life – but we can speak them to one another and reside with them over decades and change in relation to them. In his chapters on weirdness and ambiguity, Ford finally touches on poetry’s attempt to say the unsayable, its deepest measure of life, its way of companionship, and its importance. This is the imaginative realm where poet and reader meet. g David Mason is an American writer and permanent resident living in Tasmania. His most recent books are The Sound: New and selected poems and Voices, Places: Essays.

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>>> & || (accelerations and inertias)

‘E

by Dan Disney Vagabond $25 pb, 79 pp

ndings & Spacings’ opens with a confession: after several decades of ‘making connections / through strings of words’, Pam Brown is no closer to answering the question, ‘what does a poet / do’? In interviews, Brown tends to describe writing poetry as a kind of ‘benign compulsion’, an engagement with the world that must be critical to be interesting but that ‘can’t answer questions any better than anything else’, as she asserted in Meanjin in 2001 and has resolutely maintained ever since. In her latest collection, Endings & Spacings, even this benign compulsion – ‘dwindling now’ – comes under threat, its benignity troubled by the resemblance between arranging lines on the page and the curation of fragments in a virtual ‘museum / of imperial plunder’.

Brown’s preoccupation with the historical detritus of human existence – in memories, photographs, Christmas decorations, and rotting bouquets – comes to a head here, as does her ambivalence towards the task of cataloguing and arranging (‘not composing’) such material for an audience caught in the same ‘networks / of self confirmation’ as herself. If we understand detritus in Brown’s work through Mckenzie Wark’s Capital Is Dead (2019) – the framework of which looms large in both Brown’s and Disney’s collections – we could say that Brown’s world is thickly layered with what Wark refers to as the ‘practico-inert’, material evidence of the past which testifies to the difficulty of putting human ideals into practice. Its population is thus rendered passive and indifferent by the seemingly insurmountable challenges posed by the overheated junkyard of the present. Brown is not so much sanguine about this state of paralysing inertia as she is sceptical about the alternative – or at least suspicious about giving settler Australian poetry a more affirmative role in the making of history.

This might explain the tension between connectivity and isolation that runs through this collection, particularly in the alignment of text on the page. The question is not so much how to connect during the apocalypse – these poems are full of connections, between ‘strings of words’, images, memories, even between poets themselves, primarily over Zoom – but rather, whether there’s any point in meeting up with one other person for an hour of socially distanced exercise when you ‘don’t want / to w a l k / any where any more’. This sentiment predominates in ‘(crossing my mind)’, the first of the three loosely divided poems comprising the collection, and is developed further in

the second poem, ‘(lingering)’, as in the description of a ‘pocket park’, a ‘favourite / outdoor wedding / location’. The spacing of text on the page is initially playful, responsive to the topography of the scene, before flattening abruptly into a subdued list – ‘silver bits / white tat / ashy peach / organza / chintz flakes’ – and finally abandoning the task of cataloguing altogether – ‘rubbish / left behind’.

The compulsion that underwrites ‘Endings & Spacings’ may be dwindling, but it is still the compulsion of one of Australia’s best contemporary poets. It is no surprise, then, that the result is clear-headed, specific, and never predictable on the level of the word, the line, the caesura, the page. These poems are peppered with quick, luminous moments even as they meditate on passivity, blurring the line between acceleration and inertia – walking to a ‘field of weeds’ is ‘like / nimbling / an interior bozozo’, purple king beans scream ‘all the way / from pot to pan’, ‘clumsy bats / echo-lob across an ordinary horizon’ and the supermoon might be ‘waning / but it’s bright’. Brown doesn’t reconcile this tension in the final lines of the collection: in the pandemic

we didn’t take any photos

of our infrequent

endings spacings & get togethers we’ll have to

make up for it maybe

In avoiding a clear conclusion, this ‘denouemental’ closing statement invites and rewards re-reading, maybe even lingering.

D

isney addresses similar anxieties about documentation and history with his image of an army of Benjaminian angels, ‘backs / turned on the present’, ‘shooting || / selfies for future museums’. Like Brown, and Wark, Disney is concerned with the accumulation of the practico-inert, looming ominously in the background as the angels shoot their selfies: ‘our histories / storming in / -dustrial, propulsive, a piling / reserve of debris’.

However, the very notion of ‘inertia’ for Disney must also be understood as fundamentally destabilised by the growth imperative of contemporary capitalism, so that it no longer describes the tendency of matter to maintain its state of (im)mobility but rather the maintenance of an ever-increasing rate of acceleration.

This state of frenetic standstill is evoked in ‘Conversations in taxis’, the spinning ‘cab an unstill point’ as the driver reminds his passengers that ‘accelerations & inertia’ are ‘one & the same’. While this certainly resonates with Brown’s ‘unending bad news’ (can ‘worse / get any worse’?) the difference is that Disney approaches this so-called ‘age of screen-blinded, willfully ignorant, atomized Homo digitalis’ with an optimistic belief in poetry’s capacity to ‘unroll our fists into outstretched hands that can beckon, wave, reach out’ (Kenyon Review, 2019).

Is Disney’s solution, then, for the angels to put down their phones, look around themselves, and maybe write a poem about bees? Perhaps. But for a poem about bees to be useful at this point in history – in which Australian farmers are importing Israeli robot bees to cut costs on pollinating their tomatoes – it can’t be written in the same language that poets have been using to write about bees for hundreds of years. accelerations & inertias marks the next chapter in Disney’s ongoing search for an updated poetic language, something with the capacity to ‘deprogram our biorhythms of indifference’. This is most obvious in his use of homophonic and machine translation in his engagement with Korean poetic traditions, and the use of the coding symbols ‘>>>’ and ‘||’ in the title and body of his collection. The myriad ways that Disney engages with digital languages suggest a concurrence with the speaker in ‘Coronation’, who characterises the late capitalist apocalypse as simply ‘one more / operating system’. Yet rather than wondering ‘how to contact Admin. / Troubleshooting, those || who wrote the code’, Disney proposes something closer to a collective Warkian hacking. The parallel lines of the ||, or caesura – a scission that is also a pause, a space, between units of rhythm and speech – gesture towards a mode of coming together that is neither an act of fusion nor an acceptance of the limits of one’s material conditions. Rather, it symbolises the inertia of materiality itself in developing a new kind of resistance.

The extent to which Disney’s work is informed by this possible resistance – his commitment to poetry as a means of ‘strid[ing] together into a dialectic of intelligent, courageous, unflappable hope’ (2019) – is at once thoughtful, compelling, and a little annoying. The structural constraints adopted throughout are helpful to the extent that they highlight the improvisational fluidity of balancing broken syntax, which is Disney’s strong point. If he occasionally veers towards the intentionally mawkish, even a little smug, this is mercifully offset by moments of self-awareness and playful humour (‘thinking, thinking || fuckoffificatorily’).

The most effective moments in accelerations & inertias are understated, and involve people showing each other things. In my favourite poem, ‘Bukhansan Dreaming’, two people are together in a forest, one explaining repeatedly: ‘this one / my favourite tree’, ‘these are / the best stones’. This act of sharing, in its intimate simplicity, recalls Disney’s epigraph: ‘things explain each other, / Not themselves’. It also resonates with one of the more poignant passages in ‘Endings & Spacings’, in which the speaker observes the night sky with her partner, J. The beauty in this scene is not in the stars or the waning moon; the description of the sky itself is underwhelming, slipping almost immediately into a meditation on Eureka nationalism and suburban driveways. Rather, it’s in the showing, the presentation, and in the presentation of the presentation that there’s something stubbornly moving: J says there are planets lining up

she means it

i mean they really are

Abigail Fisher is a first year PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and an occasional bookseller. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

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Poetry

Gorgeous traffic

Tracy K. Smith’s marine vitality Felicity Plunkett

Such Color: New and selected poems

by Tracy K. Smith

‘T

Graywolf Press $46.90 hb, 221 pp

he wave always returns’, writes Marina Tsvetaeva. And it ‘always returns as a different wave’. Such Color reveals such a relentless renewal of lyricism as a signature of Tracy K. Smith’s poetry. A selected edition promises to highlight images and ideas across the American poet’s work. For Smith, one constant is the movement of water. In ‘Minister of Saudade’, from her second collection, Duende (2007), the speaker asks: ‘What kind of game is the sea?’ After a pause at the stanza break, an incantatory reply comes: ‘Lap and drag. Crag and gleam. / The continual work of wave / And tide.’ Ceaseless making, flux, and patterning are also a poem’s work. Smith’s image of creative marine energy recalls Sylvia Plath’s image of words’ ‘indefatigable hooftaps’, echoing as they carry meaning outwards. In Plath’s case, as in Smith’s, one direction is seawards.

The sea’s ‘continual work’ is also time’s work of making and unmaking, cresting and dragging. Time’s leaps and stasis form part of Smith’s poetic practice, especially in her treatment of history’s layers, brought to the light in many poems. Her metaphors are restive, moving like spectres between objects and ideas. In The Art of Daring: Risk, restlessness, imagination (2014), poet Carl Phillips suggests that we are ‘each of us, uniquely haunted’.

Such Color traces the shapes of Smith’s ghosts and hopes, the duende that gives her second collection its title. Federico García Lorca felt the duende, a spirit of passion and inspiration, demanded the renewal of forms, bringing ‘to old planes unknown feelings of freshness’. This collection assembles selected poems from Smith’s four previous collections with the eighteen dazzling new poems collected under the section title ‘Riot’.

The Body’s Question (2003) establishes the metaphorical grammar of Smith’s poems. Bodies in water recur. The lake in ‘Drought’ lures a boy to its ‘cold, cold center’ where the syllables of his called name strive and ripple towards him like thrown stones.

Or water is itself a body. The river is ‘a wide, black, furious serpent’ in ‘Gospel: Luis’.

There are waves ‘the color / Of atmosphere’ (‘Thirst’), as air and water shadow one another (‘Gospel: Jesús’). Lovers’ bodies swim together in afternoon light (‘Credulity’). Timelessness is imagined as sea when recognition sparks: ‘We were souls together once / Wave after wave of ether / Alive outside of time.’

As Kevin Young writes in the introduction to the full collection The Body’s Question, using Smith’s own phrases to mirror her work, ‘her lines themselves [are] a “gorgeous traffic” that 46 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

“mimics water”’. A repeated word slips back into the poem in a phrase broken over the line, ghostly and uncanny. ‘You are pure appetite. I am pure / Appetite’, says the speaker in ‘Self-Portrait as the Letter Y’. Insistent images undo and remake themselves.

Appetite is another current through Smith’s work, and one of the body’s questions is desire. ‘Getting to what I want’, says the speaker of ‘Joy’, ‘will be slow going and mostly smoke’, like thwarted efforts to coax kindling into flame.

Time’s leaps and stasis form part of Smith’s poetic practice, especially in her treatment of history’s layers The question of what a poem can do pulses through Duende.

If ‘[e]very poem is the story of itself. / Pure conflict. Its own undoing’, history may be a lie a poem can undo. Knowing this, there are some ‘who don’t want the poem to continue’, but can’t be sure it’s ‘important enough to silence’. This includes personal histories of loss. There is a ‘sea in my marriage’, where the speaker of ‘El Mar’ sits in a ‘tiny house afloat / On night-colored waves’.

But Smith, in a recent interview with Paul Holdengräber on The Quarantine Tapes, describes a commitment to bringing to her various contexts ‘the vocabulary of justice and anti-racism’.

So the poem is also a boat carrying ‘a hundred bodies at prayer’, witnessing the theft of freedom.

Smith’s ‘I’ expands from the sensual ‘I want, I want’ of a poem like ‘One Man at a Time’ to move between speakers and over time, yet she identifies the pernicious nature of the ‘huckster, trickster’ ‘we’: ‘We has swallowed Us and Them. / You will be next to go.’

This ‘we’ assumes its own dominion, as in ‘we the people’. Instead, Smith creates choral poems from eclipsed or lost voices, such as the kidnapped teenagers given as ‘wives’ to the rebel commanders of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda.

Poems of witness return in Wade in the Water (2018), a book about racism and hate that refuses to relinquish love. It begins with ‘The Angels’ and two grizzled angels watching over a sleepless speaker who is ‘worn down by an awful panic’ in a scruffy hotel room, and who comes to marvel that ‘they come, telling us / Through the ages not to fear’. The angels, joy, and love that return to Smith’s poems are more vital for the violence they survive.

Before Wade in the Water was Smith’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars (2011), a book-length elegy for her father, a scientist who worked on the Hubble Telescope. The title is borrowed from David Bowie, and its sonnet coda addresses the ‘small form’ who ‘tumbled into’ her at the moment of conception.

‘The wave after wave is one wave never tiring’, writes Smith in a poem of the same name in ‘Riot’. On the ‘far shores / of the nationless sea’, trees remember lynchings, while a speaker wonders ‘What if / the world has never had – will never have – our backs?’

With found text and poems responding to violent language Smith shows indefatigable commitment to the continual work of justice and witness. Around this injustice, rapture and light persist, and the collection closes with the repeated phrase: ‘We live –’. g Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic. Her latest work is A Kinder Sea (University of Queensland Press, 2020).

Poetry

Infinite coastlines A substantial and enjoyable poet Geoff Page

Selected Poems

by David Musgrave

I

Eyewear Publishing $25 pb, 206 pp

t is disconcerting how the author of seven poetry collections can ambush the normally attentive reader of Australian poetry with such a forceful body of work as David Musgrave’s Selected Poems, which runs to more than two hundred pages.

Musgrave’s individual collections have appeared with various publishers over the years since To Thalia back in 2004, but insufficient attention has been paid to them.

One possible explanation is his being the head of the successful poetry publisher Puncher & Wattmann from its foundation in 2005. The number of such companies in Australia can be counted on one hand; Musgrave’s is remarkable for remaining coterie-free and dependably high in quality, despite the range of its output.

Another factor in Musgrave’s relative invisibility is that he is such a various poet, highly accomplished and easily able to manage both traditional forms and more ‘experimental’ ones. While some poets, like the late Les Murray or Stephen Edgar, are notable for their consistency in either viewpoint or technique, Musgrave ranges almost alarmingly widely, quietly evading any generalisation that an admiring reader might be tempted to make. As this indispensable Selected Poems makes clear, Musgrave’s variety has been present from the beginning and has not progressed in any particular direction over time. The book’s first poem, ‘Budapest’, dating from 1986, could just as well be its last, to judge from both its tone and technical assurance.

Sensibly, but not pre-emptively, the poems are arranged in three chronological sections: 1986–99, 2000–11 and 2012–20.

The first, in retrospect, has something preliminary about it, but is in no way inferior to the others. The second contains several of the important poems for which Musgrave deserves to be well known. They include ‘Australian Beach Pattern’, ‘Young Montaigne Goes Riding’, ‘The Baby Boomers’, and ‘The Poet’s House’. Three of these are distinctly ambitious long poems in differing styles, while the shorter one, ‘Australian Beach Pattern’, is no less persuasive. The third section has a similar number of highly memorable poems, notably ‘Coastline’, ‘Nine Crab Barn’, ‘Waratah’, ‘The Transportation of George Bruce’, ‘Homecoming’, and ‘The Man Who Loves Policemen’.

A closer look at some poems from the second and third sections may suggest reasons for, or at least examples of, Musgrave’s success in his numerous modes. In the last section, for instance, ‘Coastline’ is an ‘end-of-relationship’ poem which cleverly balances what is arguably the same continuing metaphor for just

over three pages, culminating in the remarkable line: ‘For love, like every coastline, properly considered, is infinite.’

‘Homecoming’, in turn, is radically different from ‘Coastline’ – and from Bruce Dawe’s classic poem of the same name about the Vietnam War. Who hasn’t felt Musgave’s seriously mixed emotions on touching down from overseas at what we used to call Mascot? ‘Business or first class, economy, it doesn’t matter; / pig-tailed professionals or t-shirted, unkempt and / scolding their children, they all speak the same / vulgar-demotic.’

‘The Transportation of George Bruce’ is a different world again. Five pages of long-lined octets, it’s presented in a nineteenth-century religious rhetoric all its own and is almost certainly intended as a tribute to the experiences of the author’s convict ancestors, of whom he seems understandably proud. It contains a strong whiff of colonial brutality – and, not unintentionally, passes over the Aboriginal inhabitants moving through the same landscapes. A typically vivid stanza recalls how the narrator and his fellow escapees ‘watched, from the thick part of the woods, / the police take the others away. It was raining, / the depth of winter, the sky black as loss, / the trees of our camp aglow with the fire / which had warmed us. There had been five of us / untimely mortals plus our Judas, who was spared, / leaving Meredith, Farr and me. The other two hanged.’

Totally different again is ‘Young Montaigne Goes Riding’, probably the book’s best-known poem. It’s an effortlessly formal accomplishment that takes us back to sixteenth-century France in a most convincing manner. Its twenty-three six-line stanzas, all rhyming abcbca, graphically embody the ebullient optimism of the young essayist and philosopher. Out for his morning ride, Montaigne is more interested in meditation and observation than in conversation. He would rather get back to his speculations and avoid the power of the king and instead enjoy himself on his own estate. ‘there is a shelf / in my circular library filled with books which say / the earth and planets revolve around the sun. / Perhaps that is the case. For every day / our fortunes change and turn around our sovereign / king. But I revolve within myself.’

Montaigne’s detached interest in society is also seen in a number of Musgrave’s other poems, particularly in ‘The Baby Boomers’, a five-page meditation on, and dramatic presentation of, the Australian generation just prior to his own. Again, like Dawe’s satire, Musgrave’s is cutting – but not without affection: ‘She can’t understand how they have suddenly grown old. / The Julie thing was at its peak when kumera was king, / pesto its prince, sun-dried tomatoes were almost de rigueur, / the currency of chic. Pediments were pastel, / “postmodern” was a seasoning she used to spice her works …’

At one level, this may seem like the fashionable chatter of its subject; at another, it’s a compassionate portrait developing from the opening line. It is also a reminder that humour has long been an essential weapon in Musgrave’s armoury, ensuring that his often complex thought processes do not outrun the average reader – who may well come to agree that David Musgrave’s Selected Poems is conclusive proof that its author is one of the most substantial and downright enjoyable poets at work in the country at the moment. g Geoff Page’s latest book is Codicil (Flying Islands Press, 2020).

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Poetry

Colonial haunts A poet’s dark self-effacement Gregory Day

Save As

by A. Frances Johnson

‘T

Puncher & Wattmann $25 pb, 78 pp

he flag’s taking off for that filthy place, and our jargon’s drowning out the drums.’ A. Frances Johnson’s new collection begins with this quote from Rimbaud, which immediately betrays her appreciation for both the European avant-garde and the viral nature of the context from which it emerged. Johnson is a poet, painter, novelist, and academic acutely sensitive to such colonial haunts, perhaps largely due to the delight she takes in the other tones offered up by historical subject matter. She has displayed this previously in Eugene’s Falls (2007), an expansive novel about Eugene von Guérard, and in exhibitions dealing with the ambiguous textures of botanical empire building. Interestingly, though, her layers of historical literacy have led to a skilful inspection of her own aesthetic fetishes, writing as she does in a time when ever more bilge-water seems to be issuing from the half-drowned ship of Western culture.

Because Johnson is both a loquacious imaginer and a handson maker of images, her range demands that her art must be self-reflexive, must see itself in others, and in what we are all part of. Poetry, with its licence for the slow burn of oblique remonstration, often does this best. That ‘Nature is a scene by Caspar David Friedrich’ is not lost on Johnson, nor that we have become lethal precisely because of our fantasias, our Victorian kit-edifices, our flying machines and omnivorous sequestration of landscape.

Thus the need, in this era of cool-bent redemption, the era not of the coal scuttle but of the scuttle from coal, to fess up. Indeed, this is becoming our signature in part, the ratifying of artistic worth via its appetite for correction, and Johnson, as a Professor in Creative Writing specialising in ecofictions, is inevitably well positioned to know the score.

So it is that in Save As her creative and critical impulses are well and truly mashed up, the moral audit here being thoroughly threaded through the artefact. The book is divided into two halves, ‘Save Us’ and ‘Save As’. The former includes the perfect pitch of ‘My Father’s Thesaurus’, a genuinely heartrending blend of portraiture, wit, and crisp lineation that won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2020. The tone of family elegies defines this first section, including ‘Ring-in’, where the poet’s grief aligns with her eye for motif on a road trip to collect her mother’s wedding rings. The tenderness of daggy memorial quests is inescapable here as the poet paints the moments – ‘My friend drives, lamblike behind the wheel, gentle with speed limits, / a processional

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reprise’ – then scarifies the images she makes – ‘We find the place, a plain Besser-brick parlour / framed in doric grief, the short drive massed with orphaned / icebergs that can never know life as a true rose’. The skill of these elegies lies in their unpretentious avoidance of the pitfalls best defined by Wilde’s dictum: ‘all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling’.

In ‘Bypass Town’, Johnson observes how ‘Like us, hills are stumped / by buzz-saws we can’t see’. This is perhaps another key to her viewfinder style. One even senses that, as with Picasso, her challenge is not to muster-up ideas but to come to grips with her own inborn facility. Objects, concepts, tableaux, and ironic idioms arrive with a copiousness that must make the poet particularly aware of our human temptation to plunder. So poise becomes a quest for equidistance, le bon mot, and the balance between collection and dispersal. As in: Love, I have come back for a blue wren teapot, six crocheted antimacassars, a daphne planter and the ventricular rictus of a death certificate, a paper chest.

This is how Johnson walks the line in this first section of the book, the line of her own need to celebrate and memorialise in forms that also guard and protect the souls departed, all of whom inhabit the living poet. That she is successful is the magic of her book, marshalling an abundant repertoire and a dark self-effacement to connect the reader to what is often highly personal material.

In the second section, ‘Save As’, poems of the lurid Anthropocene investigate the cusp of pointlessness and self-indulgence.

Once again, the prismatic faculties of the poet monitor the space by assessing our inability to escape or transcend a highly mediated predicament even as we describe it. ‘Retire “I”’, she writes, ‘let it hang its head / and not conspire with / mea culpa’s last egotism’.

It’s a bind we’re in, and so the poems are too. These poems of the second half are reaching for ways to depict the glare of climate and screen when sometimes perhaps only kitsch will do. They wrangle, revise, and deplore – ‘River gods self-harm as the privatised aquifer hoards’ – and at times the outrage at the neoliberal bomb on ecology is itself acerbic to the point of a too-obvious heat. We get the anger and frustration at ScoMo et al., but in diluting some of her artistry here Johnson risks simulating the issue. The fact that it took blokes a 240,000-mile trip to the Moon to look back and realise our blue planet was perfect is nevertheless a point well made.

Stay home, boil the bathwater, was Patrick White’s advice.

That’s if you’ve got a home. Whatever the case, Save As reminds us that surrealism now seems not so much an art movement as a geophysical portent. Bioluminescent, garish, and at times unable to escape the automatic brief of posthuman cadence, we fail, and admit to it. That’s the point of course. g Gregory Day is a novelist, poet, and composer from the Eastern Otways region of southwest Victoria. His new book Words Are Eagles: Selected writings on the nature & language of place will be published by Upswell in 2022.

Design

Clear Head Clear Vision A thematic look at Frances Burke Christopher Menz

Frances Burke: Designer of modern textiles

by Nanette Carter and Robyn Oswald-Jacobs

F

The Miegunyah Press $69.99 hb, 231 pp

rances Burke (1904–94) was the leading textile designer in Melbourne from the 1940s to the 1960s. Her modernist furnishing fabrics, preferred by architects, interior designers, department stores, and homemakers, were popular in domestic and commercial interiors, and her reputation was national. Her design skills were complemented by a good head for business and her command of all aspects of production, distribution, and marketing. The distinctive style of her textile designs is neatly summarised by the authors of this splendid volume: ‘A single, bright colour and clean, simple linework printed on quality cotton or linen made Frances Burke’s designs modern in style, instantly identifiable and very appealing.’ Burke’s wideranging design sources included flora and fauna, indigenous and exotic themes, as illustrated in a selection of her titles: Canna Leaf, Tiger Lily, Seapiece, Totem, Rangga, Pacifica and Moresque.

Burke was born in Melbourne into the rag trade: her father was a tailor’s presser, her mother a former tailoress. This gave Burke an early appreciation of textiles. After first training as a nurse, she retrained as an artist in the 1930s, enrolling at the Gallery School, Melbourne Technical College, and the George Bell School. Her first textile designs were produced in 1937, the year she registered her business. She was soon supplying designs to Georges and the Myer Emporium. By 1941, her work was sold through David Jones in Sydney, followed by shops in Perth and Adelaide and many regional centres. To ensure quality and viability, Burke managed and oversaw the design and production and wholesale and retail aspects of the business.

Burke’s career as a designer was not all plain sailing; her early attempts at textile production were not immediately successful. With her steely determination she soon solved any technical problems and was on the path to success. Indicative of her ambition is her private note ‘Two Year Plan for Living’, probably written in early 1937: ‘Clear Head Clear Vision / Clear discrimination that I shall not waste my time on inessentials.’

As one of her friends noted, Burke did not ‘suffer fools gladly but she mellowed’.

Nanette Carter and Robyn Oswald-Jacobs’s narrative of Burke’s life and achievements is part biographical – charting the designer’s life with her partner, Fabie Chamberlin, and her career and influence – and part thematic, led by her professional work.

The designs are analysed, major and minor projects discussed, and technical information is imparted with a light touch. The authors

provide context for both Burke’s development as a designer and for the artistic milieu in which she operated. We also get a strong sense of the rich design culture in Melbourne from the 1930s onwards, in which Burke was a central player.

From the late 1940s, Burke began visiting America. This kept her abreast of international design trends, which she promoted avidly back home. Her retail shop, New Design, in Melbourne’s Hardware Lane, displayed furniture by Melbourne designers Grant Featherston and Clement Meadmore, as well as American imports. She collaborated with leading Australian architects, including Roy Grounds and Guilford Bell, to supply designs for their architectural projects. One of the larger ones was for the Ansett Hayman Island Resort (1949). In addition to domestic and resort interiors, her fabrics appeared in hospitals, offices, universities, and libraries. One of her final designs was Black Opal for the proscenium curtain in the Canberra Civic Centre Theatre, which opened in 1965.

Burke’s career was not all plain sailing; her early attempts at textile production were not immediately successful Although Burke was primarily a designer of furnishing fabrics, wartime shortages and the sheer appeal of her designs meant that they were commandeered for clothing. In the 1950s Zara Holt sold garments made up in Burke’s patterns at her boutique, Magg in Toorak. In London, in 1957, Mary Quant had a hot pink blouse produced in Burke’s Goanna design.

Burke’s business and its promotion were aided by her friendships with influential patrons. Foremost was Maie Casey, a devotee of Burke’s. From 1940 to the 1960s, she used Burke’s designs in the Caseys’ private plane, at the Washington residence when her husband became ambassador, in a suit made of Bengal Tiger when she was vicereine of Bengal, and in Yarralumla, when Lord Casey became governor-general. Correspondence from Maie Casey to Burke is reproduced in the book, giving an immediate sense of the commissioning process and the close friendship between the two women.

Frances Burke, as an important figure in Australian design, is well represented in the major public collections in Australia, notably the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the Powerhouse Museum, and the RMIT Design Archives. Her work has been featured in many exhibitions and is regularly displayed. Still, she deserves to be better known. In this first monograph, she has been well served by the authors and publisher. Carter and Oswald-Jacobs bring decades of detailed research. The superb book design is by Daniel New, and in addition to the many illustrations of Burke’s own work there is a great selection of historical photographs. Frances Burke: Designer of modern textiles forms a substantial addition to the literature on twentieth-century Australian design. g Christopher Menz is a former Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia. He has published on the design work of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, and is a regular contributor to ABR. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

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Interview

Critic of the Month with Don Anderson

Don Anderson taught American, Australian, Irish, and English Literature at the University of Sydney from 1965 to 2000. Since 1982 he has written for ABR more than sixty times. His reviews and essays have also appeared in The Age Monthly Review, The Bulletin, Weekend Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Southerly, Meanjin, Quadrant, The National Times, Westerly, Island, and The Independent Monthly. His critical writings are collected in Hot Copy (1986), Real Opinions (1992), and Text & Sex (1995).

What makes a fine critic?

If we believe T.S. Eliot, ‘There is no method but to be very intelligent.’ Of which one might observe, to invoke an old philosophical distinction, that it is surely necessary but hardly sufficient. Gore Vidal, writing of Italo Calvino, insisted on admiration and description, encouraging his reader to read Calvino (‘the critic’s single aim’).

Which critics most impress you?

Alphabetically: Roland Barthes, Geoff Dyer, William H. Gass, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Hughes, Clive James, Samuel Johnson, Hugh Kenner, Frank Kermode, Meaghan Morris, Camille Paglia, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Geordie Williamson, Edmund Wilson, James Wood.

Do you accept most books on offer or are you selective?

These days, highly selective. If an editor thinks an author may interest me, I will respect their judgement, especially if the editor be Stephen Romei or Peter Rose, though I confess that I once, to my never-ending embarrassment, said ‘No’ to Jennifer Byrne, though I plead now, as I did then, being too busy.

What do you look for from an editor?

Critical leadership. Critical judgement. The editor’s principal responsibility, however, is to ensure that a critic’s copy is not sub-edited as mine once was (not in this publication) to change the title of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to Celsius 233. I jest not.

Do you ever receive feedback from readers or authors?

Not often, for which, to judge from an Outraged Reader’s response to my review of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), I should be eternally grateful. Actually, it wasn’t so much a review of the novel as a column about the critical reception of the cultural phenomenon known as American Psycho. I began: ‘Look, someone has to say it. American Psycho, Brett Easton Ellis’s shrink-wrapped, warning-emblazoned, succès de scandale is 50 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

… a deeply moral and thoroughly responsible novel.’ I proceeded through 1,000 words to this: ‘How can [people] deny Ellis’s right to the satire of excess when his Wall Street werewolf patronises a Manhattan restaurant called “Chernobyl”. That’s no joke!’ One reader not only missed the joke, but refused to permit it. She phoned early on a Sunday morning (no echoes of Wallace Stevens!), abusing me for encouraging rape and rapists, murder and murderers. I babbled of green fields.

What do you think of negative reviews?

To be discouraged, though I have suffered them and, very occasionally, prosecuted them. As our aunties used to tell us, ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.’ Gore Vidal would doubtless disagree, as would John Updike. I am nothing if not critical, which is Iago via Robert Hughes. But it depends upon what is meant by ‘critical’.

How do you feel about reviewing people you know?

Also to be discouraged, though I must again plead guilty, yet, in my own defence, would point out that when I set out reviewing, more than a half a century ago, the pool of literary talent was much smaller than it is now, and everyone knew everyone else, even if they hadn’t slept with them. But times have changed, for the better. In the launch copy of my second collection of critical writings, Real Opinions, I find a card, the face of which features a Jill Krementz snap of Kurt Vonnegut reading galley proofs, the verso of which bears a message from the late Helen Daniel thanking me for an advance copy of my book. She writes: ‘I won’t review it because I make the odd appearance in it.’ That’s a scrupulosity much to be admired, much to be aspired to.

What’s a critic’s primary responsibility?

To write well, to think well, and in the immortal words of G.A. Wilkes, to be an ‘eclectic sceptic’. Samuel Beckett had a different take on things. In Waiting for Godot: ‘ESTRAGON That’s the idea, let’s abuse each other. / VLADIMIR Moron! / E. Vermin! / V. Abortion! / E. Morpion! / V. Sewer-rat! / E. Curate! / V. Cretin! / E. (with finality) Crritic!’ g

Essays

The politics of partying Chronicles of queer theatricality Sophie Knezic

Buried Not Dead

by Fiona McGregor

‘W

Giramondo $26.95 pb, 304 pp

asn’t sexual expression a principal motivation of gay and queer dancefloors … Isn’t that the freedom we were fighting for? To be kinky dirty fuckers, without shame; to not sanitise ourselves in the bid for equality?’

So exhorts DJ Lanny K in 2013, reflecting on his time spinning discs at down-and-out pubs in ungentrified Surry Hills in the mid-1990s as part of Sydney’s fomenting queer subculture.

Lanny K, Sydney-based Canadian immigrant, is one of a handful of artists – performance artists, dancers, even a tattooist – interviewed by Fiona McGregor in her collection of essays Buried Not Dead. Mostly written between 2013 and 2020, each essay is based on a rolling interview with an artist and draws out their recollections of early practices and careers, several united by reference to a specific time and place – Sydney’s emergent gay scene in the mid-1990s.

The essays conjure the energy of an ascendent, vibrant subculture: a collective of individuals determined to carve out their own public sphere and flaunt their artistry – but more so to champion queer politics and community support in an era when violence against gays and dykes was ever-present: the tauntings, street bashings, and murder. Being ‘out’ is an explicit ethos running through the essays, and the second in the volume, ‘Dear Malcolm’, is penned as an open letter to former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, lambasting the conservative pragmatism of his political persona disavowing such public gay identification.

While they are styled as essays on art, the chapters reveal McGregor as a social historian, savouring the opportunity to chew the fat with her interviewees. A love of anecdotes narrated by flamboyant queers and committed artists, and of the cathartic

expression of underground queer performance culture, ripples across her pages.

Most, like Lanny K, are little known beyond their subcultures or artistic circles. We meet, for example, Jiva Parthipan, a Sri Lankan dancer and choreographer emigrating from London to Sydney and coordinating community arts projects for the NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors while waiting for his Australian residency to be secured. Eventually permitted residency through the Last Remaining Relative immigration scheme, Parthipan devises a performative lecture taking its title from the policy’s name, but the work is rejected from Parramatta’s festival of South Asian arts as it is considered ‘not Indian enough’. (It is subsequently shown at Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival in 2011.)

Two of the artists are famous: Mike Parr and Marina Abramović. McGregor follows Abramović across several exhibitions in Australia and overseas, attending Marina Abramović Presents at the Whitworth Art Gallery at the Manchester International Arts Festival in 2009, where the iconic performance artist had curated thirteen international artists to do durational performances each day for thirteen days. Before freely wandering through the Whitworth, visitors were compelled to undergo ‘the Drill’ – ‘a series of exercises and lifestyle homilies … delivered with the zeal one might expect from the daughter of a major and a general from Tito’s Yugoslavia’, McGregor drily observes.

Australian artist Mike Parr, by contrast, comes off as a more authentic performance artist, a maverick whose work is driven by a commitment to physical trauma and risk as a form of political activism. When seventy adult asylum seekers and three children held at the Woomera immigration detention centre stitched their lips together in 2002 in a statement of political despair at their indefinite detention, Parr showed his solidarity by following suit, stitching his lips together and branding his thigh with the word ‘Alien’ in a performance titled Close the Concentration Camps (2002). As a statement against the art establishment and the commodification of art, Parr undertook a performance at the 2016 Sydney Biennale, where he torched 120 self-portrait prints worth an estimated $600,000. Yet McGregor doesn’t miss the contradictions in Parr’s work: his anti-establishment politics sitting unresolvedly with the fact that his art has been patronised by the most prestigious echelon of the very art gallery system that he denounces. Many lesser-known women performance artists gave up much earlier in their careers, McGregor notes, through lack of public and private support. ‘Gender is a huge factor.’

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Politics McGregor’s acute awareness of issues of inequity – across race, gender, and class – that operate within the art world punctuates the essays with acuity and prevents them from sliding into mere descriptive synopses. At base, though, McGregor is as much, if not more, concerned with the artist as the art. What emerges is a cast of impassioned performance artists, each vividly situated in social contexts of opportunity and obstruction. More than once I found myself scurrying to the internet to look up the unfamiliar artists McGregor chronicled. What dance projects had Parthipan been up to since McGregor interviewed him in 2013? What had become of the postwar working-class girl from Williamstown – given the moniker Cindy Ray in the 1960s as a tattoo model and tattooist – now inducted into the tattoo Hall of Fame?

The essays conjure the energy of an ascendent, vibrant subculture: a collective of individuals determined to carve out their own public sphere and flaunt their artistry While McGregor captures the energy of queer subculture – the sweaty, all-night gigs and sartorial flamboyance – her writing remains curiously unerotic. There is more frisson of desire in the first paragraph of the New York punk dyke poet Eileen Myles’s autobiographic novel Inferno (2010) than in the entirety of Buried Not Dead. Likewise, the casual references to shooting up that appear over several pages aren’t a patch on Helen Garner’s unflinching spotlight on heroin addiction in Monkey Grip (1977).

More significantly, other artist–authors have shone a brighter light on queer culture and the plight of homosexual artists in the 1980s and 1990s, a case in point being the raw incendiary rage against homophobia in the Polish–American photographer, filmmaker, and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz’s memoirs Close to the Knives (1991) and the Waterfront Journals (1997). Similarly, a style of art writing pioneered in the last decade by American critics Chris Kraus and Maggie Nelson – whip-smart, rigorous evocations of the social and political milieu of contemporary art – knocks spots off McGregor.

But where McGregor excels is in the palpable affinity for her subjects. She is at heart a chronicler, bringing her selected artists alive in all the idiosyncrasy of their artistic passions, set against briefly sketched socio-political backdrops. Reading McGregor’s essays made me more than a little envious for an era and a subculture that so passionately flaunted its anti-establishment queerness and counter-cultural empowerment alongside a zeal for partying – a marked contrast to the killjoy context of social isolation and lockdown besetting the world over (and Melbourne in particular) in the years of Covid. Yet beneath the paean to queer performativity, the grit of McGregor’s progressive politics resounds. As she knowingly suggests, social conservatism goes hand in hand with the intolerance of difference, with homophobia and xenophobia – the true abomination against which queer theatricality protests. g Sophie Knezic is a writer, scholar, and visual artist who works between practice and theory.

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Mental borders

Reimagining representative democracy Ben Wellings

Democracy Rules

by Jan-Werner Müller

I

Allen Lane $45 hb, 256 pp

n this accessible contribution to the burgeoning literature on democracy’s travails and what to do about them, Jan-Werner Müller makes a case for hard borders and fundamental principles. These are not the hard borders desired by authoritarian leaders. Instead, Müller asks us to go back to basics (he uses the concept riduzione verso il principo) to establish some hard borders in our understanding – and hence practice – of democracy. Those borders should be drawn around the fundamental democratic principles of uncertainty and equality. At its most basic, this is a call to reimagine and reinvest in the intermediary institutions of representative democracy – particularly parties and autonomous media – to restore the infrastructure of democratic politics in the developed world.

Change gets a bad press these days. The long-term disruptive shifts of neoliberal economics have come home to roost for politics in the advanced liberal democracies of the world. The loosening political allegiances that accompanied those changes appear to have strengthened authoritarian populists, those who captured the popular anger directed at the change associated with globalisation and immigration and who promised resistance to ‘global élites’ while feathering the beds of oligarchs.

Medium-term changes to how the public (if there is such a single entity anymore) receives its information have also assisted those for whom pluralism is not a virtue. In the short term, the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the fears and anxieties that rapid change can produce, the lasting political consequences of which will not be known for some years.

Given all of this, from the perspective of progressive politics, change seems like a pretty bad thing – hence an evident desire to contain it: regulate social media, break-up Facebook/Meta, de-globalise the economy, and source locally, for example. Such actions are laudable, but there is also a technocratic and managerial logic to them that seeks to control uncertainty. Yet Müller asks us to embrace uncertainty as one of the core principles of democracy.

The idea of change is fundamental to a democracy, especially in a two-party system. It’s why we have ‘losers’ consent’ that allows the losers in electoral contests to ‘have their say’ while the winners ‘get their way’. However, the horizons of possibility narrowed in the 1990s when catch-all parties of the post-war era (mass parties appealing to all of the people some of the time) gave way to the cartel parties of the 1990s (professional parties mobilising some of the people some of the time). These parties

made a virtue of the end of ideological contestation in politics, which they claimed was now primarily about the competent management of the economy along neoliberal lines.

This technocratic logic clashed with one of the fundamental characteristics of democracy: what Müller refers to as ‘institutionalised uncertainty’. This managerial way of treating politics steadily decreased popular participation and laid the ground for the ‘double secession’ of contemporary politics: the withdrawal of the super-rich and the disenfranchised from political participation at the nation-state level. Both had deleterious effects on the second of Müller’s core democratic principles: equality.

This chronically anti-democratic logic of the double secession has shaped politics since the 1990s. It materially benefited the oligarchs and, more recently, put the wind in the sails of the authoritarians who exploited fears on the conservative side of politics. Historically, this part is not new: given the things that super-rich conservatives don’t like (communism, taxes, regulation), they have often been ready to open the door to radical-right parties and leaders in order to defend the things they think they can live with (fascism, tax havens, deregulation).

What is a newer departure from twentieth-century understandings of democracy is the disenfranchisement of the poor and marginalised sections of electorates in liberal democracies, a sort of return to the status quo ante of the nineteenth century.

Oligarchs were able to exploit anger at this state of affairs by using transnational media organisations and multinational corporate structures to influence the direction of politics beyond the reach of the mainstay of democratic politics, the nation-state. This was done by shifting blame onto key characters in the populist demonology: global élites, liberals, and immigrants.

This double secession impacted the two main pillars of democracy: parties and the media. Müller’s suggestions build on those of the progressive side of politics, calling for media operating in a mode of ‘transparent partiality’: autonomous from the oligarchs behind Fox News and Facebook/Meta, and ‘assessable’ by ordinary citizens. This would move us towards ‘real’ democracy and away from the ‘fake’ democracy that we currently have.

Following on from the diagnoses of democracy’s current ills, Müller runs through some of the current ideas and practices that might restore and, in his word, ‘re-open’, democracy. This is the least original part of this book, but nonetheless it provokes thought and, hopefully, action.

One example is restoring the idea of an Athenian-style lottery to randomly select citizens to deliberate and decide on isolated issues. This would have the advantage, if the deliberation happens quickly after the selection, of negating the unequal influence of well-resourced lobby groups on decision makers, particularly institutionalised ones like political parties.

There are some potential contradictions in Müller’s attempt to ‘solve’ democracy through what amounts to technocratic process-oriented means: providing solutions closes down the uncertainty of the process that Müller values. This might have to be a necessary or unavoidable contradiction, however. Müller

is right to stress that democratic practice must be open to new forms of representation.

Democracy Rules builds on Müller’s well-known work What is Populism? (2016) and that book’s conclusion that populism is bad for democracy because it is fundamentally anti-pluralist.

This is where Müller also rightly makes the case for ‘militant democracy’: the idea that, because democracy is uniquely at risk of self-abolition, it is legitimate to ban parties and individuals (no names mentioned) that don’t recognise equality as fundamental.

This intolerance of intolerance would make life hard for far-right parties and those radical-right populist parties that often present far-right ideas in emollient language.

We are currently living through an era that is defined by a politics of pessimism in which the existential stakes are high and both progressives and conservatives feel that they are losing

Jan-Werner Müller, 2018 (Oliver Berg/dpa/Alamy)

the battle of ideas. There is room for optimism (though Müller prefers hope to optimism). It’s always a difficult argument to make to cheer people up, but things have been worse. The 1930s and even the 1970s stand out as periods of democratic illness or torpor and concomitant radicalisation.

Müller’s book is a salvo for the optimists. He asks us to reclaim the uncertainty inherent in representative democracy in order to forestall the frustrations that lead to disenchantment that authoritarian anti-pluralists exploit so well. If we do so and combine this with a commitment to the hard border of equality, we can reopen democracy as an assessable and autonomous realm of equitable deliberation and decision making. g Ben Wellings is the head of Politics and International Relations at Monash University. He researches the relationship between nationalism and European integration, and the politics of the Anglosphere. He is author of English Nationalism, Brexit and the Anglosphere: Wider still and wider (Manchester University Press).

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Law

‘The laws are not silent’ Examining how law and history intertwine Kieran Pender

Law in a Time of Crisis

by Jonathan Sumption

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Profile Books $39.99 hb, 250 pp

hen World War II began, a defence regulation was issued in Great Britain that enabled the home secretary to imprison anyone who they reasonably believed had hostile associations. One such interned individual, Robert Liversidge, objected to his detention and challenged the validity of the home secretary’s decision. In the subsequent case, Liversidge v Anderson, the House of Lords adopted a deferential approach, holding that in a time of war it was inappropriate for the courts to subject the home secretary’s decision making to much scrutiny. But in a thundering dissent, Brisbane-born Lord James ‘Dick’ Atkin disagreed. ‘In England, amid the clash of arms, the laws are not silent,’ he wrote. ‘They may be changed, but they speak the same language in war as in peace.’

I recalled this now-famous statement when I first picked up Law in a Time of Crisis, a new book by Lord Jonathan Sumption QC. With a such a title, I thought, surely Sumption would engage with that notable dissent and the dilemma in moments of crisis between judicial deference to the government and the courts’ role as a bulwark of liberty. It is no easy question – and, in these Covid times, it is particularly salient. The thoughtful reflections of a former Supreme Court judge (Sumption retired from Britain’s highest court in 2018), I envisaged, would make for a timely and insightful read.

I was disappointed, then, that Liversidge was not mentioned once and that the question of law in a time of Covid was addressed only in the underdeveloped final chapter. That is not a criticism per se – Law in a Time of Crisis is a lively, thought-provoking collection of essays that covers vast ground, from British medieval history to the economics of personal injury law. It is an engaging book, frequently challenging orthodox positions and inviting readers to think critically. The book’s breadth underscores Sumption’s formidable intellect (Tony Blair’s long-time spokesperson, Alastair Campbell, once said that Sumption had a ‘brain the size of a planet’). But it is misleadingly titled. This is not primarily a book about law in a time of crisis, but rather a wide-ranging exploration of law and society. Its final section, four essays under the heading ‘The Constitution: Towards an Uncertain Future’, addresses Brexit and Covid – no doubt the inspiration for the title.

But it is not until the final, twenty-page chapter that Sumption engages with the law’s role amid our current crisis.

If one can overlook this disjuncture, there is much to enjoy within Law in a Time of Crisis. Each chapter is drawn from 54 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

speeches Sumption has given over the past decade, updated to take into account recent developments. In the foreword, he suggests they are linked by a concern with different aspects of ‘law and public affairs’. That is certainly one overarching theme.

But the other, which adds a great deal to the analysis, is the history of law – informed by the author’s training.

Sumption began life as a historian at Oxford, before jumping ship for life as a barrister (he concedes the motive was not ‘a thirst for justice’ but instead ‘rather vulgar … I wanted to be able to pay my grocery bills, with perhaps a bit more left over than an academic salary could offer’). But throughout Sumption’s distinguished career at the London Bar and then at the Supreme Court, he still found time to toil in the archives and produce outstanding academic works of history, including a four-volume, 3,000-page history of the Hundred Years War, one volume of which won the Wolfson History Prize.

He brings this dual perspective to the diverse topics considered in this book, Sumption’s second non-history publication, after Trials of the State (2019), though perhaps they are not dual perspectives at all. The first chapter, ‘The Historian As Judge’, explores the nexus between the disciplines, suggesting that ‘the study of the common law is an intensely historical process’. This is no doubt true, and Sumption, given his background, offers some astute observations about the ways law and history intertwine.

Historical enquiry continues through the essays. A chapter on the influence of the Magna Carta, often considered a foundational statement of civil liberties in Britain (and, by extension, Australia) is particularly noteworthy. Sumption arrays a range of sources from before and after King John signed the charter in 1215 to argue that it was actually not all that significant. ‘Claims such as those I have just cited,’ he writes, having canvassed the many adjectives used to describe the Magna Carta, ‘are high-minded tosh.’ Instead, Sumption suggests the document did no more than restate obligations on the monarchy that had already existed for over a century. ‘There are no high-flown declarations of principle,’ he writes. ‘No truths are held to be self-evident.’

Sumption’s thesis is well argued and supported by forensic historical analysis. He recognises that the Magna Carta might still have symbolic salience, even if it stems from a myth rather than any foundation in reality. But, he retorts: ‘Do we really need the force of myth to sustain our belief in democracy?’ It is a thoughtful essay, indicative of the wider tone of the collection – a sideways, often contrarian take on different facets of the law.

Sumption’s contrarian nature is evident in the postscript to the chapter, where he notes that it was originally a speech given in 2015 at the British Library to mark the opening of an exhibition on the Magna Carta’s 800th anniversary; ‘an occasion,’ he writes, ‘for a great outpouring of platitudinous humbug and national self-congratulation’. (The audience, according to a Guardian journalist present, was so stunned that no one had any questions.)

Other essays in the collection cover ground from state secrecy to contract law. Sumption makes the astute point that efforts towards transparency – such as archival requirements and freedom of information regimes – may be counter-intuitively detrimental to historical record keeping, as public servants and government officials use post-it notes and WhatsApp messages to circumvent the risk of later embarrassment. Sumption concedes that it is

‘a great deal easier to identify these problems than to suggest ways of dealing with them’, but offers a critique of British reforms that have brought forward the date of disclosure for archival material.

An essay on ‘home truths about judicial diversity’ is similarly engaging, as Sumption explores the challenges of improving diversity among the upper echelons of the legal profession to ensure it better reflects the make-up of society. It is an informed perspective, as Sumption was a member of Britain’s Judicial Appointments Commission, which in 2006 assumed the previously political function of appointing judges (Australia lacks an equivalent). The ex-judge’s exploration of the ongoing barriers to progress are perceptive, although his injunction that ‘we have to make choices and to accept impure compromises. We may even have to learn patience’ does sound a little tone-deaf coming from an Eton-educated white man, however well intentioned.

The final essay, from which the book takes its title, concerns the British response to Covid-19. Sumption has been an outspoken critic of public health measures in Britain throughout

the pandemic, and, true to form, ‘Government by Decree’ is the most provocative essay in the collection. Some of his criticisms – such as the lack of parliamentary oversight of pandemic measures – are compelling and have equal salience in Australia. But the essay is heavy on criticism and light on alternatives. Britain’s Covid response may well have been the worst of both worlds – heavy-handed and not all that effective (with ten million cases and 150,000 deaths since March 2020). But other democracies, including Australia, have demonstrated that short-term deference to emergency powers can ultimately be for the greater good.

As the ongoing debate about Victoria’s new pandemic laws has underscored, striking the right balance between legal limitations and executive authority in an emergency is not easy. Greater reflection on the appropriate balance, and the mechanisms to achieve it, is no doubt required. Law in a Time of Crisis is a great read. But it adds little to that wider task. g Kieran Pender is an Australian writer and lawyer.

United States

The Everything Store Amazon’s grip on America Jack Callil

Fulfillment: Winning and losing in one-click America

by Alec MacGillis

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Scribe $35 pb, 400 pp

n 1995, a new online marketplace called Amazon sent out its first press release, with its thirty-one-year-old founder, Jeff Bezos, proclaiming: ‘We are able to offer more items for sale than any retailer in history, thanks entirely to the Internet.’

Nearly three decades later – Amazon having steroidally expanded from a book retailer to a multinational hydra of e-commerce, cloud storage, and digital streaming – this is no longer hyperbole.

The company absorbs at least half of America’s online spending, and nearly 150 million US citizens subscribe to Amazon Prime, roughly the same number that voted in the recent presidential election. In 2020, while the pandemic crippled most industries, Amazon’s net profit swelled by eighty-four per cent. Today, Jeff Bezos is valued at US$200 billion – approximately the value of New Zealand’s GDP. Amazon’s effect on the planet – economically, societally, even demographically – is amorphous and wide-ranging, but nowhere is it more pronounced than in the United States. Chronicling this influence is Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment: Winning and losing in one-click America, a panoptic look at Amazon and the nation engulfed by what the author calls its ‘lengthening shadow’.

Beyond a mere examination of Amazon’s internal politics (territory already well covered elsewhere), MacGillis’s book traces the lineaments of an America weathered by vast regional and economic disparities, increasing political polarisation, and a fracturing of national cohesion – in the exacerbation of which, the author believes, Amazon has played an ‘outsized role’.

MacGillis is a senior reporter for ProPublica, and has written widely on America’s political and socioeconomic undercurrents.

This peripatetic journalism shapes Fulfillment, with each chapter navigating a different location and focus. It is full of humanising portraits, too, such as of low-income families struggling to get by, warehouse workers earning a fraction of their former industrialheyday salaries, and small businesses trying to keep Amazon out of their cities.

Indeed, Amazon’s decimation of small businesses is one of the book’s major themes, with MacGillis showing how the company’s retail dominance has been fuelled by ruthless anti-competitive tactics. Increasingly unable to compete with Amazon’s market share, small businesses are pressured into selling their wares via the company’s online marketplace, where their earnings are then curtailed by a fifteen per cent sales fee. This fee – in tandem with Amazon’s other profitable ventures, such as data storage and video streaming – enables a ‘predatory’ discounting of its own products, which its algorithms then disproportionately promote to customers. A feedback loop is preserved: Amazon’s industry command is strengthened, while the competition faces worsening financial precarity.

Tax avoidance has been another accelerant to Amazon’s rapacious hyper-prosperity. Throughout Fulfillment, MacGillis’s extensive research unveils the glut of subsidies, tax credits, and utility discounts that Amazon secures from local governments before establishing any new location. It even has a department dedicated to the task, an Orwellian office of ‘economic development’. These tax spoils are on full display when Amazon invites applications for site locations for its second corporate headA U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

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Amazon Fulfillment Center, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States, 2021 (Madeleine Jettre /Alamy)

quarters, an unprecedented move igniting a ‘grand nationwide reality show, a Bachelor for cities to compete for the affection of a corporation’, the cause for such sycophancy being that many parts of regional America – particularly those withering in a post-industrial era of globalised trade – see Amazon as a golden goose of employment and land value.

MacGillis argues that this goose is part of the nation’s broader fiscal problems. The company’s ballooning prosperity – as well as that of its other ‘Big Five’ siblings: Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Apple – has stimulated rapid economic concentration in a handful of coastal cities, leaching people from regional areas and destabilising wealth distribution across the country. Further, Amazon’s sheer ubiquity is gradually altering America’s landscape, compartmentalising it on the basis of the company’s logistical needs, having ‘segmented its workforce into classes and spread them across the map’, dividing the nation into ‘engineering and software-developer towns’, ‘datacenter towns’, and ‘warehouse towns’. This gradual ‘sorting out’ is slowly restricting financial mobility for swaths of regions and their citizens. As MacGillis writes, ‘It had not only altered the national landscape itself, but also the landscape of opportunity in America – the options that lay before people, what they could aspire to do with their lives.’

Moreover, these bustling tech havens are rife with their own problems. MacGillis takes the reader through cities such as Seattle, home of Amazon’s corporate headquarters, where the rising tide of newfound opulence ‘did not lift all boats’. Homelessness abounds, as inflated housing markets leave many unable to afford their bloated rent. The friction of affluence against poverty engenders a startling dissonance: people without housing forced to ‘defecate on sidewalks in a place with $24 lunch salads’; crowds waiting to eat at high-end restaurants overlapping with lines for nearby shelters. MacGillis astutely notes how in many cases this 56 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

economic upheaval falls along racial lines, with Seattle’s historically Black Central District having been forced out by rising property prices. Gentrification, he observes, with its implication of the old against the new, is too light a word for this kind of change: this constitutes ‘wholesale erasure’.

This regional disparity, one between America’s wealthy coastal cities and its more isolated, struggling Midwest towns, is ‘making parts of the country incomprehensible to one another’, MacGillis writes. (And an increasingly metropolitan national media – with regional coverage having deteriorated over past decades – only widens this gulf.) Fulfillment offers salient observations regarding America’s shifting political terrain: that this geographical disparity has given rise to an alienated and politically unmoored generation of those living beyond economic centres who feel unrepresented and unheard. The Democratic Party, once the ‘party of the underdog’, today finds itself dominated by ‘highly educated professionals in the wealthiest cities in the country’. For liberal readers, Fulfillment provides a compelling explanation for the political fandom surrounding Donald Trump, who tapped into these veins of disillusionment and abandonment.

The ‘fulfillment’ of MacGillis’s title is manifold. It’s the word emblazoned across Amazon’s nationwide ecosystem of ‘fulfillment centers’ that maintain the expediency of its shipping services, a nod to the satisfaction they’re providing their customers: that one-click endorphin hit. But it also refers to a sense of purpose, not so much the American dream as Americans dreaming of a financially stable life of dignity and self-worth. As Fulfillment compellingly shows, this a viable option for a dwindling few – and corporations such as Amazon, with all their promises of being ‘customer-first’, don’t seem concerned. g Jack Callil is the Digital Editor of ABR.

Mexico

To go big is to go home Mexico City as palimpsest Gabriel García Ochoa

Horizontal Vertigo: A city called Mexico

by Juan Villoro, translated by Alfred MacAdam

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Pantheon Books $62.99 hb, 357 pp

n Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, the planet Trentor is the capital of the Galactic Empire. Seen from space, Trentor is nothing but city: there are no rivers, trees, or any other natural features, only an endless urban landscape, a metropolis that has taken over the planet. Landing in Mexico City feels like landing in Trentor: the size is overwhelming, and its apparent infinity challenges most people’s understanding of a city. Juan Villoro calls this sensation ‘horizontal vertigo’. The term is borrowed from a description of the grazing lands of the Argentine pampa, and Villoro chose it as the apt title of his chronicle of Mexico City.

Villoro was born in that very city. He is one of Mexico’s most important public intellectuals: a journalist and author of essays, novels, anthologies of short stories, and children’s books.

According to him, during the almost seventy years he has lived there, the population has grown sevenfold. But how big does that make Mexico City, exactly? No one knows. Current estimates put it between twenty-three and twenty-five million people.

What does it mean to live in a city whose magnitude prompts that uncertainty, a margin of error of two million people? What characteristics and social behaviours correspond to a metropolis of that size? Google Maps is operable, but is that any use when there are four hundred and twelve streets of the same name?

What happens if one falls in love with someone on the other side of the city, a two- or three-hour drive away? Horizontal Vertigo explores these and many other topics with humour and insight.

As a local, Villoro is the fish that questions water and wonders about its chemical composition. He takes a step back from the rat race to observe and understand the city’s oddities.

A book attempting to encapsulate the complexity of Mexico City could easily have become an encyclopedia of tedium. For all its cultural candour, Arabian Nights without Scheherazade, jinns, or erotic burlesque is just an assemblage of one thousand and one very long tales. Mercifully, Villoro knows where to draw the line.

Horizontal Vertigo is a dynamic book, a collection of vignettes that includes memoir, essays, and poetry – sporadic snapshots of Villoro’s various experiences of living in the city. They don’t capture its true magnitude, but they conjure the city’s spectre, however hazily, and a sense of its enormousness. A flâneur in the style of Dickens or Baudelaire may, to a degree, be possible in present-day Manhattan or Melbourne’s CBD, but not in Mexico City. No one has taken leisurely strolls across the entire capital

– it is not physically possible – but if someone did there would be no time to write about it. Villoro steers away from the trap of exactitude, and acknowledges the difficulty of tackling the city as a topic: ‘How accurate is what I’m telling? As accurate or false as the image we can have of a city where people live in millions of different ways.’

Villoro has spent considerable time abroad as a diplomat and academic. This brings an interesting international perspective to his writing. The vignettes in his book reference the likes of Salman Rushdie, Günter Grass, Michael Ondaatje, and André Breton. For example, in his essay ‘The City is the Sky of the Metro’, he discusses the work of the Russo-German philosopher Boris Groys, comparing the subway in Mexico City to its fabled Moscow counterpart. Villoro argues that in both cities subway stations have been ‘curated’ in certain ways in an attempt to manipulate historical narratives, a practice he attributes to ‘failed’ revolutionary movements. In a short chronicle of how the swine flu epidemic unfolded in Mexico City, Villoro plays with Harold Bloom’s idea of the anxiety of influence in authorship; the piece is titled ‘The Anxiety of Influenza’, and it discusses precisely that: the angst generated in the collectivist culture by self-isolation due to the epidemic. But one could argue that this international element of Villoro’s writing is as much a product of his time abroad as it is a reflection of Mexico City’s cosmopolitanism. Mexico City is an economic powerhouse and Latin America’s gateway to the United States; its ‘local’ identity is the cultural crucible of any megalopolis, where every faith, nationality, and background is represented.

Memory as a cultural practice features prominently in Villoro’s discussion of the cityscape. In the Anglosphere, time is a commodity, punctuality its currency. But in Mexico City, where heavy traffic makes everyone perpetually late, the currency of time is backward-looking, focusing on history as a legacy of layered memories that co-exist with the present and enrich it. This is why, for locals, the tyre shop is not incongruous in front of a colonial church, and the colonial church is not anachronic to the archaeological site that sits next to it. Villoro turns the city into a palimpsest of his personal memories and the memories of others: family, friends, and the country’s own memory of unreconciled conflict, abuse, and survival.

Alfred MacAdam is a renowned translator and scholar of Latin American literature at Columbia University (previous translations of his have been reviewed for this publication). He has produced superb translations of seminal works of Latin American literature, such as Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz. Unfortunately, his Horizontal Vertigo misses the mark.

Presumably, MacAdam was trying to be faithful to the original text, to honour its Mexican identity. This approach is known as ‘foreignising’ a text (as opposed to domesticating it), and it can be very effective. In this case, the result is a frequently convoluted syntax that makes little sense, full of colloquialisms translated without much consideration for the cultural context of the target readership. g Gabriel García Ochoa was born in Mexico City and teaches at Monash University. His first novel, The Hypermarket, was published in 2019.

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Memoir

In their voicesteps

The unmistakable Miriam Margolyes Carol Middleton

This Much Is True

by Miriam Margolyes

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John Murray Press $49.99 hb, 447 pp

he title of Miriam Margolyes’s memoir, This Much Is True, strikes a declamatory note, well suited to the octogenarian actor whose greatest asset is her voice, with its diverse accents, timbres, and moods. It also proclaims that we are not going to have the wool pulled over our eyes, or to be frustrated by authorial modesty, tact, or political correctness.

It is nearly sixty years since Margolyes’s first radio job with the BBC Drama Repertory Company, and her career shows no sign of slowing down. Eight months of lockdown in Tuscany in 2020 finally gave Margolyes a hiatus from performance work and the chance to write this memoir. Told in chronological order with the exactitude of a keen genealogist and the panache of a veteran entertainer, it is a candid account of the unlikely theatrical success of a ‘short, fat, Jewish girl with no neck’. It includes a repertoire of anecdotes, complete with punchlines, familiar to anyone who has seen her guest appearances on The Graham Norton Show.

The memoir starts soberly, as Margolyes records her early years as the only child of Jewish parents, one conceived during the London Blitz. Her father, a doctor, was born in the Gorbals, the Glasgow slum. Her English mother, an outspoken social climber who shocked the au pair girls by vacuuming in the nude, was the dominant parent and a prototype for Miriam. She dedicated herself to obtaining the best education for her daughter, as a way for the family to join the intellectual and social élite of Oxford and for Miriam to be able to talk to anybody about anything.

Mission accomplished. Margolyes recounts her formative years at Oxford High School as the class clown; she spares us none of the trivia, embarrassment, and ‘pulverising experience’ of adolescence. But school also provided this budding entertainer with the perfect audience. Her days were spent making people laugh, and on the daily journey home she would invent plays and voice all the characters.

Mrs Margolyes used her husband’s connections through his patients to secure a sponsor for Miriam’s application to study at Oxbridge. Isaiah Berlin, the eminent intellectual, was duly invited to dinner, given the facts, and handed the sponsorship form to sign. Both Oxford and Cambridge offered Miriam a place.

She opted for an Exhibition scholarship at Newnham College, Cambridge. There she made lifelong friends and, in pursuit of her childhood dream, put acting at the centre of her world.

In 1962, she performed with the famous Footlights club, but she did not conform to their usual ‘dolly bird’ requirements.

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Margolyes was enlisted for her comedy skills, but most of the men cut her dead as soon as they were off-stage. It was a hurtful experience, but she was not alone in being given a cool reception.

Clive James was also suspect, coming from Australia, but his brilliance and refusal to be cowed won them over. Stephen Fry became her close friend.

Margolyes loves and hates with equal passion. She is not afraid to name and shame those who behave badly, including Arnold Schwarzenegger (‘What a pig of a man!’). It is unusual to read such frank exposure, although she turns the candid camera on her own exploits just as readily. Honesty and a sense of justice prevail.

Margolyes graduated with a Lower Second Class BA, which she wryly refers to as ‘the actor’s degree’. From here on, Margolyes took her destiny into her own hands. With no drama school training, the route was somewhat circuitous, via selling encyclopedias and modelling nude for Augustus John. Finally, she auditioned for the BBC Drama Repertory Company, creating a spontaneous cast of characters and startling the producers with her range of voices and accents. She had the ability to replicate the myriad British accents that indicate geography, time, and class. Before long, she was taking part in four or five radio drama productions each week.

‘Radio is a particular world and I belong there. The great, glory days have gone … These voices are part of my youth and it is a source of high delight to me to think I follow in their footsteps, in their “voicesteps”.’ She considers her early work in radio her best work. The first version of her one-woman show, Dickens’ Women, making use of her study of Charles Dickens at Cambridge, was recorded for Radio 4. This show went on to tour the world, including Australia, in 2012. Heather, her partner of fifty-three years, was born here, and Margolyes is now an Australian citizen.

Voice-over work promised a lucrative sideline. Sexy voices were her speciality, and she helpfully gives us the YouTube link to the Manikin Cigars advertisements where her crisp RP (received pronunciation) tones have undergone an astonishing transformation. As her career in theatre and film progressed, she was called on to perform most of the supporting female characters in the dubbed TV series Monkey in 1978. Her favourite voice of all was for the film Babe (1995), in which she played the mother dog, Fly. Margolyes loves an audience and has worked widely in theatre, but film does not have the same appeal. Jeremy Irons took her aside on the set of Being Julia (2004) and gave her advice about holding back and reserving her energy for the close-ups.

‘I would love to be enigmatic,’ says Margolyes wistfully. But she is resigned to being an ‘over-actress’.

This Much Is True, which includes photographs and an index and introduces us to luminaries of radio, theatre, and film, has historical value but is also a candid and comprehensive account of an extraordinary life. Although she credits her two editors with guiding her through the process of writing, Margolyes’s decades as a storyteller shine through in the clarion prose. Her voice is unmistakable. g Carol Middleton is a journalist, arts critic and author, based in Melbourne. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in the anthologies Melbourne Subjective, Ink3, and Vine Leaves Literary Journal.

Memoir

Campese’s goosestep The Paul Keating of Australian rugby Barnaby Smith

Campese: The last of the dream sellers

by James Curran

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Scribe $32.99 pb, 256 pp

he Australian team that won the 1991 Rugby World Cup must rank as one of our most charismatic national sport teams in modern times. The side that defeated England in the final at London’s Twickenham Stadium included several players now regarded as undisputed greats of global rugby: John Eales, Tim Horan, Jason Little, Michael Lynagh, and captain Nick Farr-Jones. There were also stirring ‘underdog’ stories: players who seemed to rise from nowhere that year to play starring roles, such as fullback Marty Roebuck and wing Rob Egerton. In Tonga-born flanker Viliami Ofahengaue, there was an early hint of the changing demographic of élite rugby players in Australia.

Then there was the right wing for the Wallabies. David Ian Campese, twenty-nine years old, was named Player of the Tournament and was joint top try-scorer. His exquisite performance in a semi-final against New Zealand defined that World Cup and in many ways came to define Campese’s career. His involvement in two tries – scoring one himself and laying one on for Horan – encapsulated his audacity, skill, speed, balance, and vision. It was a balletic display of athleticism and virtuosity that, for observers like James Curran, became an aesthetic experience. As Curran writes in this entertaining and enlightening book: ‘However difficult it is to describe perfectly his effect on the emotions of those who watched him, and the sheer chutzpah of his devil-take-the-hindmost attitude to playing the game, Campese’s expressiveness on the field demands critical appreciation.’

Campese: The last of the dream sellers is an intelligent and deeply felt meditation on the player’s rugby genius, as well as an erudite analysis of Campese’s complex position in the wider context of Australian sport. Curran dissects and marvels at his on-field feats, such as his famed ‘goosestep’, and addresses questions of multiculturalism (Campese’s father was an Italian migrant), class, and politics to provide a portrait of an often polarising figure who had as much ‘ability to provoke sensation off the field with his unguarded, blunt commentary ... [as] his exploits [did]on it’.

Though the book briefly covers Campese’s formative years in his hometown of Queanbeyan, this is categorically not a biography. Campese is more akin to a critical analysis, or study, of an artist’s oeuvre. The book is split into six themed chapters that are roughly chronological and that discuss different aspects of Campese’s career, which spanned 1979–1998.

Curran, a professor of modern history at Sydney University, takes a firmly literary approach to Campese as both performer

and personality. The words and ideas of writers and philosophers abound: Virgil, T.S. Eliot, Hemingway, Thoreau, Shelley, Seamus Heaney, and E.M. Forster, to name a few. J.S. Bach even makes an appearance. However, many of the most beautiful quotations that Curran includes come from the great English cricket writer Neville Cardus. All these elements give Campese something in common with Gideon Haigh’s much-admired On Warne (2012). Curran alludes to Haigh on occasion. He also quotes David Foster Wallace’s famous 2006 article about tennis great Roger Federer, a work that feels like a particular inspiration for Curran. Campese might also fit into the tradition of expansive sport critique pioneered by Norman Mailer in The Fight (1975), about the 1974 heavyweight bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, even if Curran’s tone is, thankfully, far gentler and more modest.

Two chapters particularly stand out for their critical acuity.

The first, ‘Movement’, sets the scene in the early 1980s for Campese’s arrival on the public stage. At this time, Australian rugby was undergoing a revolution, instigated by the likes of gifted fiveeighth Mark Ella, that saw the birth of the uniquely innovative, specifically Australian ‘running rugby’. Curran draws links between this daring new age in rugby and the nation’s changing political climate. The Hawke government that came to power in 1983, with its ambitious economic agenda, channelled an audacious spirit that paralleled both Campese’s play and running rugby generally. Curran writes of ‘that era’s prevailing mood – a headlong, near-carefree embrace of adventure, but adventure not without risks’. Paul Keating, especially, is seen as cut from the same cloth as Campese. Curran states that both men were ‘in their own respective ways, the carriers of this cavalier spirit’ and that ‘both were taking on establishments’.

Another key chapter is ‘Outcast’, which focuses on a calamitous error made by Campese against the touring British Lions in 1989. His errant pass late in the third test, many believe, cost Australia the game and the series. The ensuing media condemnation of Campese was brutal and, for Curran, revealing of wider prejudices. Some pundits saw an opportunity to castigate Campese for his consistently daring, risky style of play. Others blamed the error on the fact he played the Australian off-season in Italy. State rivalry reared its head as Queenslanders relished the chance to put in the boot. Even class antagonism (Campese being of working-class stock) was a factor in the vitriol. Curran astutely pulls all these things together to explore how Campese’s relationship with both the rugby establishment and the media was (and remains) fraught.

In contrast, a linguistic analysis of the British media’s adulatory reaction to Campese’s stellar performances is another of the book’s highpoints (words such as ‘beacon’ and ‘light’ dominated writing about him, Curran finds). Indeed, throughout the book there are a giddying number of quotes from press reports from across Campese’s career. If there is one criticism of Campese, it is that Curran occasionally relies on these too much. Rarely is a point made without a barrage of media quotes in support, sometimes overshadowing Curran’s own incisive analysis and considerable descriptive powers.

Ultimately, though, the book is an immense success. Unlike Campese’s on-field opponents, Curran, a historian, sociologist, and passionate rugby fan, is able to understand this quixotic sportsman. g A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

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Essays

Finding shelter

Ann Patchett’s companionable essays Nicole Abadee

These Precious Days

by Ann Patchett

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Bloomsbury $29.99 pb, 336 pp

n These Precious Days, her second essay collection (after This is the Story of a Happy Marriage in 2013), celebrated American writer Ann Patchett sets out to explore ‘what matter[s] most in this precarious and precious life’. Patchett is the author of seven novels, including Bel Canto (2001), which won the 2002 Orange Prize for Fiction, and her most recent, the internationally acclaimed The Dutch House (2019). When the pandemic struck in early 2020, Patchett did not have a novel in progress and decided that 2020 was not the time to start one. Instead, she wrote essays, something she has always done when she doesn’t have a novel on the go. Eventually she wrote the title essay about providing shelter and solace to a friend undergoing cancer treatment. It meant so much to her that it needed ‘a solid shelter’, so she crafted this book around it. It is a collection of twenty-two essays (plus an introduction and epilogue) – some of them new, some reworked versions of previously published work – in which she ‘grapples with’ themes that preoccupy her in work and life: ‘what I needed, whom I loved, what I could let go, and how much energy the letting go would take’.

As her readers will know, Patchett is wonderful company – warm, witty, and wise. In these essays she reveals who she is: a loving daughter, a happy wife, a kind, thoughtful friend, and someone with a clear sense of what she wants (see ‘Cover Stories’, on selecting covers for her books) and what she doesn’t (‘There Are No Children Here’, on why she has never wanted children). Two major themes are her passion for books and her love for her family and her female friends. There are also two essays on letting go of material things: ‘My Year of No Shopping’ and ‘How to Practice’.

Many of the essays are about reading and writing, or touch on them. In ‘My Three Fathers’, a loving tribute to her father and her two stepfathers, Patchett writes that although her father was a reader (they read Yeats aloud together), he did not approve of her ambition to be a writer and so she felt ‘unseen’ by him.

Nonetheless, he was a major influence – in ‘Two More Things I Want to Say About my Father’, she explains that she wrote with ‘a desire not to offend him’ and felt liberated when he died. ‘The First Thanksgiving’, ostensibly an account of her first Thanksgiving away from home, when she turns on a slap-up dinner for college friends, is really a homage to Irma S. Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, which taught her to ‘pay close attention to the text’ and that all she needed in life were ‘self-reliance and a book’.

Patchett was not a strong reader as a child, but she explains in ‘To the Doghouse’ how much she loved reading her grandmother’s

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Snoopy cartoons. She learnt a lot from Snoopy about being a writer, including how to accept failure and to love your own work.

Patchett is a passionate advocate for the arts and the humanities – books especially. Since 2011, she has been the co-owner of a bookstore, Parnassus, in Nashville where she lives. In ‘A Talk to the Association of Graduate School Deans in the Humanities’, she describes the joys of being a postgraduate student at the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop and finding like-minded people ‘who care[d] about words … and ideas more than they care[d] about food and shelter’. Owning the bookstore reminds her of the pleasure to be had from gathering friends and strangers to talk about books. She relishes her life – ‘I’m pretty much the poster child for how to incorporate the humanities into your life. It is my greatest love, my deepest joy’ – and is proud that she has created a community where all are welcome. ‘I’ve done more good on behalf of culture by opening Parnassus than I have writing novels,’ she says.

The other strong thread running through this collection is love. She reveals her deep love for her father and her two stepfathers in ‘Three Fathers’ (mentioned above), and pays tribute to her mother, an exceptional beauty and a funny, kind, smart person in ‘Sisters’. ‘Flight Plan’ and ‘A Paper Ticket is Good for One Year’ are about her husband, Karl. They have been together for twentysix years and went to Vienna on their fourth date (she asked him), then waited eleven years to marry – ‘we were both impetuous and prudent’. There are many references through the essays to close female friends, none more moving than the long title essay, ‘These Precious Days’, an account of how Patchett and her husband took a new friend, Sooki, into their home while she was being treated for cancer. This essay says everything about Patchett’s compassion and practical generosity – she acknowledges that her plan wasn’t perfect, ‘but it was better than doing nothing’.

Patchett writes in the introduction to These Precious Days that she is often haunted by death when she is part-way through a novel, and she circles back to death in the epilogue. But this is not a gloomy book. It is a joyful celebration of the things that matter – love, friendship, books, community – and an account of one person’s attempt to live a thoughtful, compassionate life.

It is, in Patchett’s words, a heartfelt plea to ‘find the joy in the interim and make good use of the days we have’. g Nicole Abadee writes about books for Good Weekend.

Category

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Film

Scandal and scansion A biopic of Siegfried Sassoon Ian Britain

Jeremy Irvine as Ivor Novello and Jack Lowden as Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction (photograph via the British Film Festival)

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inema and poetry make for a less obvious coupling than cinema and theatre or cinema and painting, but once you start counting, the number of movies about poets and their world is surprisingly high. Granted, there’s more about scandal than scansion in most of them, but the list, just from those I remember seeing, is impressive: The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), The Bad Lord Byron (1949), Stevie (1978), Gothic (1986), Barfly (1987), D’Annunzio (1987), Tom & Viv (1994), Total Eclipse (1995), Sylvia (2003), and Bright Star (2009). Within only the past five years we’ve been treated to Neruda, Mary Shelley, and two bardic biopics from director Terence Davies: A Quiet Passion (2016) and the newly released Benediction (Palace Films). Might Davies, you wonder, be planning a third such venture, to match his acclaimed semi-autobiographical trilogy about working-class life in Liverpool from the 1940s to the 1960s?

A Quiet Passion focuses on Emily Dickinson and the cloistered world of her family home in a nineteenth-century New England college town. If only snippets of her poetry are quoted on the soundtrack, there are some vivid shots of Dickinson at work on her famously introspective, astringent verse. That was the abiding ‘quiet passion’ of her quiet life, and her pursuit of it is evoked as effectively as the medium of cinema will allow. Benediction centres on Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), also famous for his impassioned verse, though it was in a different register and prompted by very different circumstances: what he witnessed as a soldier on the far from quiet or cloistered battlefields of World War I. The focus is less intense than in A Quiet Passion, as the narrative and settings broaden into a jumble of vignettes of Sassoon’s hedonistic social milieu in the interwar years, his torrid, torrential sexual passions, his retreat into a marriage that ends in disquiet, and his conversion to Catholicism – which may (or may not) provide him with the state of blessedness alluded to in the film’s title. There are more obvious opportunities here than in its predecessor for an ‘inherently cinematic’ approach to the main subject, to borrow a phrase from one reviewer of A Quiet Passion.

Yet the ways in which Davies takes up these opportunities lapse all too often into indulgent distractions and easy stereotyping.

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Sassoon the writer, whether of war poetry or his equally celebrated fictionalised memoirs published in the 1920s and 1930s, is all but forgotten after the opening sequences. Davies, the writer as well as director of the film, becomes preoccupied with, completely dazzled by, the ambience: the lush, louche glamour of the patrician and bohemian circles in which his subject moved.

He’s attuned to its superficialities and cruelties, but there’s a part of him that can’t help fixating on them, playing them up with a kind of delighted horror, at the cost of any complexity of characterisation and dialogue. A social outsider to this world, he is at risk of being seduced by it and, if unwittingly, of seducing us – outsiders in time – with his lavish visual recreations. Nostalgia rules and lures, as it never did in A Quiet Passion.

Smart parties and bedroom liaisons get far more attention than everyday professional or domestic life, not just in Sassoon’s case but also in that of his A-list lovers. The Hon. Stephen Tennant made something of a career out of his dandy-dilettante posturings, but his rival in sybaritic caddishness, Ivor Novello, happened to be a dedicated composer, lyricist, and actor as well.

He was A-list primarily because of his music, but this side of Novello is reduced in the film to his entertaining a few famous guests with a rendition of one of his most famous songs, ‘And Her Mother Came Too’. Subsequently, for variety, Davies resorts to such tired old standards as ‘The Charleston’ and ‘Tea for Two’.

Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, no slouches in the nostalgia department, evoke the same period much more subtly and inventively with their choice of song numbers in Savages (1972) and Quartet (1981).

Images of the famous lovers, guests, and friends that populate Benediction are also straight from stock: Edith Sitwell in her turquoise turban, Lady Ottoline Morrell in her avian finery. Even so, among other clunky info-dumps in the script, Davies insists on dropping their names, just in case we don’t pick up on who they are. And the repartee between them is remorselessly arch and clipped, as if they talked in nothing but aphoristic putdowns. (My favourite exchange, more Noël Coward than Novello: ‘How was Bavaria?’ ‘Bavarian.’) There are so many toxic barbs flying around you might wonder why the film was not called ‘Malediction’.

Some relief is provided by the gentler, poignant scenes featuring Sassoon’s relatively unfamous mother or his youthful and enchanted, then ageing and disenchanted, wife – radiant performances, respectively, from Geraldine James, Kate Phillips, and Gemma Jones. Genuinely moving, too, are the tenderly erotic exchanges at the beginning of the film between the young Sassoon ( Jack Lowden) and his fellow soldier and poet, Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), and the rueful flash-forwarded reflections of the older Sassoon (a wizened Peter Capaldi). The rest of the cast are every bit as accomplished, but they can’t save the long middle sequences from a pervasive air of the highly confected: pastiche at its most brittle.

No critic would wish a film director to stay forever on his home turf, but Benediction nonetheless made me pine for those lovingly incandescent Davies films about his childhood and youth in the distinctly unglamorous backblocks of an industrial suburb: unashamedly nostalgic in themselves, but for times and places that the director has personally known, and suffused in their lyrical, elegiac intensity with a true sort of visual poetry. g

Art

Sensuous serenity

Matisse masterpieces at AGNSW Julie Ewington

Matisse in the garden of Jazz publisher Tériade, St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, 1951–52, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, MNAM-CCI, Centre Pompidou, Hélène Adant Collection

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his exhibition, alive with colour, is a gift to our grey summer. The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) was already crowded at 10.30am on the first Sunday; our umbrellas were bagged, our raincoats cloaked. Matisse: Life and spirit, drawn mainly from the exceptional holdings of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, is the first dedicated Matisse exhibition in Australia for twenty-six years. The Gallery carefully says this is the ‘largest collection of work by Matisse to be seen in Sydney’, but that understates the appeal of this lovely exhibition. It offers an incisive, intelligent, and thorough introduction to Matisse that is essential viewing; its generosity and subtlety will repay multiple visits. (I wish I were a child again, could see Matisse for the first time.)

Matisse: Life and spirit is staged in nine chronological chapters, from ‘Towards fauvism (1895–1909)’ to ‘The cut-outs (1930–54)’, each offering a particular argument about Matisse’s work at that time. In ‘Towards fauvism (1895–1909)’ and ‘The radical years (1914–18)’, for example, we see Matisse becoming the great modern master of colour: the earlier section reveals his struggles to paint form through colour, the latter includes the remarkable French window at Collioure (Porte-fenêtre à Collioure) from 1914 – intense colour, radically simple composition – an open door between two ravishing paintings of the Nice harbour foreshore from the hotel window. One is the famous Interior, goldfish bowl (Intérieur, bocal de poissons rouges) (1914), its delicious play between blues and greens held in suspension by those orange fish at the centre of the painting. This is glorious: we float in the painting’s blue pool.

Other sections are equally persuasive. ‘A parallel search (1909–30)’ investigates how Matisse’s sculpture informed his painting, and vice versa, a practice that continued throughout his life; remarkably, it includes the massive bronze panels Backs I-IV (originally dating from 1909–30), which are usually on display in Paris. The Backs are directly opposite the brilliant concatenating patterns of Decorative figure on an ornamental background (Figure

décorative sur fond ornamental) of 1925–26, the nude’s ramrod back answering those in the sculptural works. In fact, a strength of the show is that each section features wonderful works. Almost the first painting one sees is the splendid La luxe I (1907), with its improbably monumental nude women on a Mediterranean beach, and together the Centre Pompidou’s Aurélie Verdier and the AGNSW’s Justin Paton and Jackie Dunn have mined Matisse’s prodigious oeuvre to anchor each section with superlative works.

The thesis of each of these exhibition chapters, or moments, is backed up by pithy summaries in the handsome publication and with illustrations of every work, like an old-fashioned exhibition catalogue. And in the accompanying suite of focused essays, Paton’s ‘Lateness. Lightness. Matisse’ is particularly fine. This consideration of Matisse’s work is always informed by the sense of the artist’s living practice, and how it was secured by constant experimentation. What now looks effortless, sensuous, serene was always the result of unceasing labour in the studio. This is demonstrated by generous selections from the artist’s drawings, and by the judicious use of archival films showing Matisse’s creative energy: look for the film showing Matisse working on the celebrated Barnes murals in the early 1930s, accompanied by his dog Raudi.

This is a scholarly show, beautifully structured, thoughtfully designed, and dense with information, but it wears its learning lightly: one captivating wall text mentions ‘flustered brushwork’ in Lorette with coffee cup (Lorette à la tasse de café) of 1917.

The curators (and distinguished catalogue essayists, including Roger Benjamin) draw attention to the importance of travel for Matisse; he deliberately sought fresh inspiration, renewed drive, from outside the conventions of European art. Matisse’s 1930 voyage to Tahiti, for instance – his delight in the blue of the Pacific, and his interest in tivaevae, the local cut-applique quilts – is given special emphasis; the exhibition features a particularly rich selection of the late cut-outs that eventually developed from this inspiration, including the phenomenal 1952 La tristesse du roi (Sadness of the king), with its risky colour combinations; this sits alongside the Gallery’s own example of the celebrated prints from the book Jazz (1947). This final room is a cracker, and with it the exhibition ends on a high note, a tribute to that lifetime of undimmed effort. Before that, in the Gallery’s great double-height space, there is a breathtaking evocation of the famous Chapel of the Rosary (1948–51) at Vence, in the south of France, using film as well as works of art. It is lively: architect Richard Johnson, the exhibition’s designer, bounces light off white ceramic tiles at the entrance in a nod to the Vence building. This is surely the next best thing to actually being there.

I am struck by how this show is grounded in local and current interests, which is emerging as the AGNSW’s hallmark when presenting exhibitions of historical art. The living connection with Pacific Islander culture is seen in the accompanying project Matisse Alive, and the loan to the Gallery of precious tivaevae by members of Sydney’s Islander communities. Importantly, Matisse: Life and spirit essays a more subtle handling than usual of the role of women in Matisse’s life: as models, as inspiration, as studio assistants who became increasingly important collaborators when the elderly artist was physically incapacitated and, since he could no longer paint, took to making cut-out with scissors.

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Installation view of Matisse: Life & Spirit Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou, Paris exhibition, on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 20 November 2021 – 13 March 2022. Photo © AGNSW, Mim Stirling

wall texts and in documentary photographs; in the fluid expansive ink drawing Nude seated on a bench (Nu assis sur une banquette devant une glace) of 1937, we see the truncated reflection of the artist himself in the studio, intent on his model. (Hilary Spurling dedicated her authoritative two-volume biography of Matisse to his wife Amélie, describing her as ‘its heroine’.)

Given the centrality of women in Matisse’s life and work, it’s fitting that the four major commissions from contemporary artists in Matisse Alive are by women: Nina Chanel Abney (United States), Robin White (Aotearoa New Zealand), Sally Smart (Australia), and Angela Tiatia (Australia). White’s four huge paintings on bark cloth, made principally with Ebonie Fifita, are outstanding: her long residence in in Kiribati in the 1980s and 1990s, and her constant travels in the region since, show in her supremely confident melding of contemporary and historical references in arresting paintings of island interiors: here, past and

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present co-exist, the Pacific is alive with all the artists who have loved it. Matisse is there, still.

Matisse: Life and spirit is the last major loan exhibition at the current Art Gallery building before Sydney Modern opens in late 2022. It is not to be missed. g Matisse: Life and spirit is showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until 13 March 2022. The hardback publication is $50.

Julie Ewington is an independent writer, curator, and broadcaster living in Sydney.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Theatre

Ritual to rancour Arthur Miller’s great outcry Ian Dickson

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Death of a Salesman (Prudence Upton, Sydney Theatre Company)

n his program notes, Kip Williams, artistic director of Sydney Theatre Company, talks about the need to ‘wrestle’ Arthur Miller’s great play ‘into the present’. But if ever there was a play that speaks, as the Quakers would say, directly to us in our condition, it is this one. When Miller wrote it, he assumed that the postwar boom would not last and that America would head back into another depression. In fact, the boom continued, and for the next thirty years the United States, albeit hesitantly, moved past the horrors of McCarthyism, Vietnam, and the brutal resistance of the south to the Civil Rights Act towards a more just and equitable society. But the election of Ronald Reagan and the past forty years of triumphant, unrestrained capitalism have led us to the Trumpian world where people are either winners or losers and are, in the gig economy, to paraphrase Willy Loman, eaten like an orange and thrown away like the peel. Miller’s play is a reminder that being human, in his words, ‘is something most of us fail at most of the time and a little mercy is eminently in order given the societies we live in’.

Director Paige Rattray, in her contribution to the program, sets up a series of straw men which she methodically knocks down. Death of a Salesman, first produced in 1949, has been described as many things, but I find it hard to believe that this volcanic work has been often regarded as either ‘reserved’ or ‘tasteful’. Nor has it been much approached as naturalistic, except by the producers of the unfortunate 1951 film version, directed

by László Benedek. Rattray rightly emphasises the play’s timelessness and universal relevance. In the 1980s, Miller directed a production in Beijing that, in spite of the reservations of many, clearly resonated with its audience.

Rattray’s approach is to present the play as a ‘memento mori – a ritual that we should perform to remind us of the dangers of losing our humanity to the idea of success’. David Fleischer’s set is a vast, empty space dominated by what appears to be a disintegrating proscenium arch resembling a decaying school hall. The action of the play takes place in front of this structure, while in the area behind, the stage as it were, figures congregate like a Greek

chorus, observing, chanting, and, on one occasion, ‘performing’.

Carefully chosen furniture, combined with Teresa Negroponte’s evocative costumes, situate us firmly in the era in which the play was written.

In her attempt to create a ritualistic atmosphere, Rattray uses an actor to perform the duties of a priest or shaman, who leads us in to the story by declaiming the stage directions. This turns out to be a major miscalculation. The result is faintly ludicrous – such as when we are told that Willy moves towards the fridge or that Biff smokes, and then we watch them do just that – but it also undercuts the actors’ ability to gradually reveal their characters. At his initial entrance, Miller describes Willy’s son Happy thus: ‘Sexuality is like a visible colour on him, a scent that many women have discovered.’ Callan Colley is an attractive actor and an excellent Happy, but no one can live up to that hype, and it caused laughter in the audience. Bafflingly, Rattray plays the most shattering scene in the play, Willy’s sons’ abandonment of their father in the restaurant, for comedy.

When Miller wrote Death of a Salesman, he assumed that the postwar boom would not last and that America would head back into another depression Rattray is fortunate that she has a cast of extraordinary ability who still manage to get to the heart of Death of a Salesman.

Willy Loman has been played in all sizes, from Lee J. Cobb’s enormous Lear-like interpretation to Warren Mitchell’s small man desperately trying to keep his head above the water. Jacek Koman is more in the Mitchell mode. His early scenes are low key, but he builds through the play, and by the time he reaches his confrontations with Howard, his boss, and the great final one with his son Biff, he has the full measure of the role.

Linda (Helen Thomson) also begins quietly, and in her famous speech in the first act, ‘attention must be paid’ is delivered more as an appeal than as a command. But Thomson gradually shows the woman’s steel, and she is ferocious as she rounds on her sons on their return from the restaurant. In the final moments of the play, as all great Lindas do, she breaks your heart.

As Biff, the golden boy gone to seed, Josh McConville balances his cynicism and his naïveté. Together, he and Koman elevate that final showdown into a theatrical moment that will stay with this viewer for a long time.

There is no weak link in the cast, but attention must be paid to Bruce Spence’s humorous, humane Charlie and to Philip Quast’s grandiose Ben. Death of a Salesman is Arthur Miller’s great outcry against an inhumane society. Unfortunately, that makes it a play that is universally relevant. g This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Ian Dickson is the co-author of the musical Better Known As Bee. A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

65

Theatre

Four weddings and no funeral Radiant Shakespeare from the MTC Tim Byrne

As You Like It ( Jeff Busby/MTC)

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s is often the case with Shakespeare, theories and counter-theories about the provenance of As You Like It (probably 1599 or early 1600) have floated around for centuries. One such theory posits that the play is Love’s Labour’s Won, the ‘lost’ sequel – or more accurately second part of a literary diptych – to Love’s Labour’s Lost (1595–96) and that As You Like It is actually the play’s subtitle. This would align with Shakespeare’s finest comedy, Twelfth Night, which has the subtitle What You Will. Take that as you like it and make of it what you will.

Certainly, the two plays make fascinating companion pieces: one is about a coterie of smug young men who hide out in a royal park in order to avoid love, the other about a ragtag bunch of outcasts who head to the forest in order to sanctify love. One has four failed attempts at wooing and no happy ending; the other has, as Jonathan Bate puts it, ‘four weddings and no funeral’.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is rather a hard sell these days, stuffed as it is with arcane literary allusions and abstruse wordplay. As You Like It has had a far happier and more profitable performance history, and it is easy to see why Melbourne Theatre Company programmed it at the end of a very dark year. There is something at the heart of the play that glows, not with pyrotechnical dramatic flair – although it has enough sparking wit to set a house on fire – but with a deep and abiding sense of communion. It is a ritualistic play, and a good performance of it feels like a spiritual offering.

Director Simon Phillips, who triumphed in 2018 with MTC’s Twelfth Night, resurrects many of the elements that made that production such a success. There is the baroque setting, with its intricately detailed costumes (this time designed by Alicia Clements, replacing Gabriela Tylesova); there is the cast, led by the gloriously winning Christie Whelan Browne, and again featuring a rambunctious Richard Piper; there is an eye-opening and highly considered set; and there is the sublime music by Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall: endearing, soulful, and wise.

By rights, this appliqué of past glories should result in a monstrous patchwork, and yet Phillips pulls off the whole thing 66 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

sublimely. As You Like It has a very delicate dramatic structure, with a forceful and grim opening act that quickly dissolves into something languorous and discursive, before gathering itself up in a burst of ceremonial joy at the end. This production strikes a confident note from the outset, and if that confidence wobbles slightly in the second half – there is a sense that later scenes have been under-rehearsed – it manages to coast through on the charm of its central performances. James Mackay brings a breezy sense of goodwill to Orlando, and Daniel Frederiksen is a raucous Touchstone; Georgia Flood is a terrific Celia, compact and generous; Laurence Boxhall and Natalie Abbott are a suitably ditzy pair of lovers as Silvius and Phebe. Tim Walter relishes the part of the melancholy Jaques, his ‘All the world’s a stage’ soliloquy stopping the play in its tracks. Jaques is Rosalind’s necessary foil – his considered detachment strikes the key note of ambivalence that offsets all the merriment – and Walter invests the role with a grand nobility. Harold Bloom called Jaques ‘merely rancid’, but Walter shows that this avowed outsider is more than ‘a fool or a cipher’, as Orlando would have it. He is the play’s true touchstone, the flint that sparks the joy.

Whelan Browne’s Rosalind represents the bulk of that joy.

One of Shakespeare’s finest, most supple creations, Rosalind seems to soar above the play she inhabits, wise beyond measure and yet happily drowning in the very love she manifests around her. Phillips has deliberately muted the gender politics in the play, so Whelan Browne underplays the comedy that can come from the character’s extended foray into transvestism and role play.

This doesn’t dull the sexual frisson between her and the various lovers, but it does simplify it somewhat; the overall effect is to emphasise Rosalind’s abiding generosity of spirit, less a subversive transgressor than a glorious cup-bearer of love.

Phillips’s production can be seen as a deliberate turning away from those elements that might truly upend the status quo – contemporary audiences are surely ready to see a non-binary actor, for example, play Rosalind (and Orlando, for that matter) – and it cuts some of the truly rancid musings of Touchstone, the mythical Hymen’s consecration of the nuptials, as well as Rosalind’s divine epilogue that separates the men and women of the audience. This is where the set, designed by Alicia Clements and beguilingly lit by Nick Schlieper, with its verdure growing abundantly within the confines of a large manor, becomes rather telling. This Arden is more a hothouse or giant terrarium, safely contained by convention and power, than a wild and untameable forest. It’s a wood within walls.

In its caution and gentleness, Phillips’s vision brings the play closer to the concerns of Love’s Labour’s Lost ; you can see the outline of the earlier play as if in a mirror. The final moments – when Orlando’s third brother bursts in under an illuminating white light and announces a return to order – are the resolution of the chord that is struck with the announcement of the death of the Princess’s father at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost. It is a great moment of restitution, a dispelling of darkness. After a long season of theatre closures, this gorgeous and rousing production, not provocative perhaps but winning and warm, feels like a perfect bringer of light. g Tim Byrne is a Melbourne theatre critic.

Theatre

To sleep or wake

Kip Williams’s hand-held Shakespeare Gabriella Edelstein

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Julius Caesar (Daniel Boud/Sydney Theatre Company)

hakespeare’s Julius Caesar, first performed in 1599, is deeply interested in the difference between sleeping and wakefulness, if sleeping is equivalent to wilful ignorance and being awake means political consciousness. Characters throughout the play can’t sleep, won’t sleep, sleep on stage, are roused from sleep; they dream, and their eyes open and close, put to an eternal sleep.

Before officially joining the conspiracy to murder Caesar in the Capitol, the play’s hero Brutus receives three letters from the conspirators Cassius and Casca entreating him to open his eyes to Caesar’s tyrannical aims: ‘Brutus, thou sleep’st; awake’. Once awake, it is his duty to ‘Speak, strike, redress’. The play’s language of sleep is strikingly similar to twenty-first-century discourses of wakefulness – whether a woke sensitivity to issues of social justice, or the rioters at the United States Capitol shouting, ‘Wake up to the steal!’

Kip Williams, director of the Sydney Theatre Company’s new production of Julius Caesar, is acutely aware that the play is caught between a distant past and our political present. In his Director’s Note, Williams writes that he ‘was shocked again and again by the echoes and reflections in this work of an ongoing cycle of power struggle across history’. This production situates the twenty-first-century political problems of cynical political machinations, vicious rhetoric, and mob violence along a historical continuum, starting with Julius Caesar’s statues of self-promotion strewn across Rome and ending with retail politicians directing the camera angles that best capture their pontifications.

In the production’s coup de théâtre, Geraldine Hakewill performs Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech over Caesar’s corpse, seamlessly transitioning her costume from toga and sandals to white suit and high heels. The speech itself suddenly mutates into modern political rhetoric, which Hakewill delivers with the same rhythm and cadences of Shakespearean verse: ‘we will fight them on the beaches’, ‘the lady’s not for turning’, ‘ask not what your country can do for you’, ‘yes we can’, ‘drain the swamp’, ‘I don’t hold a hose, mate’.

At this point the production descends into total political satire. Williams thus nicely solves the problem of the play’s anti-climactic second part. Once the play builds to the crescendo of Caesar’s assassination, it is easy for the audience to lose concen-

tration while waiting for Mark Antony and Octavius to avenge themselves upon Brutus and Cassius. The usual anti-climax of Brutus’s death is rectified by a production conceit similar to Williams’s use of multiple video screens in the STC’s recent The Picture of Dorian Gray: an enormous ascending and descending cube hovering above the stage, where the actors ceaselessly project their z live recordings of themselves and each other from their iPhones.

In the first half of the production, the omnipresent cube feels like a distracting gimmick with the actors’ arms always outstretched with their smart phones, faces constantly projected in enormous close-ups. The cube keeps the audience focused on the broadcasts above the stage. As a result, it’s difficult to admire the three actors’ bravura performances of all the play’s characters.

But perhaps that’s the point; we can’t close our eyes to the 24/7 news cycle. In the second half, the cube’s manic effect pays off, alerting the audience to the disturbing ubiquity of violence in devices that live in our pockets. After the insurrection, the cube projects a montage of riot scenes, glib texts sent between Mark Anthony and Octavius, footage from the Middle Eastern wars, pro-Mark Anthony TikTok conspiracy theorists, awkward Zoom meetings between the generals, and Cinna the Poet’s murder live-streamed on YouTube.

The production deftly alerts the audience to our own complicity with a culture of rhetorical violence. Brutus cannot see the irony in his statement that the conspirators should ‘carve’ Caesar ‘as a dish fit for the gods. / Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds’. Dish or carcass, they are still committing murder. Caesar’s murder is not enacted in front of the audience, but pre-recorded and projected onto the cube, with the three actors taking the parts of all thirteen senators. There is something maniacally playful and video game-like about the performance, each actor running up to Caesar and landing staccato-like stabs upon his body. (Some audience members were even giggling.) Afterwards, once the cube ascends and the actors are again revealed, Brutus, played by Zahra Newman, and Cassius, played by Ewen Leslie, roll around in Caesar’s blood laughing. A scene or so later, when the lights come up during Mark Anthony’s oration to the people of Rome, the audience realises that they are the bloodthirsty plebians rooting for murder. But while the production implies that our rhetorical violence gives way to physical violence, it also ignores the fact that the power and beauty of Julius Caesar is reliant on the very rhetoric being critiqued.

Although this technically and satirically adroit rendering of Julius Caesar is a lively reflection on our times, its entertainment value comes at the cost of the play’s central ethical problem: is the ‘noble, wise, valiant and honest’ Brutus right to kill the ‘colossus’ Caesar, whom he loves? The play’s power comes from its ambivalence: it’s unclear whether Caesar really is a tyrant or if Brutus is just a hypocrite. In this production, Caesar is performed

by Leslie not as the man who loves the Roman people and his friends, but as a sweaty, crazed narcissist who deserves to die. The drama at the centre of the play – the social and personal costs of murdering a friend and leader – is nullified by a production that aims only to make the play topical. Ultimately, while Kip Williams cries havoc and lets slip the dogs of war, what is lost is a moving human story of love, friendship, and betrayal. g Gabriella Edelstein is a Sydney-based academic and writer. ❖ A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

67

Poetry

From the Archive

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First published by ABR in October 1985, Peter Porter (1929–2010), the great expatriate poet and critic, began appearing regularly in the magazine from 2001 until his death. Over those ten years, Peter made an inestimable contribution through his poems, reviews, and essays (including some remarkable personal recollections of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath), all graced by his incomparable erudition and exquisite sensibility. The Peter Porter Poetry Prize is now a decade old, and the most recent shortlist appears in this issue. Peter’s presence – truly, in words of Hadrian, an anima vagula blandula – thus continues to be felt in Australian poetry. To honour his memory, we reprint Peter’s magisterial review of David Malouf ’s collection of poems Typewriter Music, from the June 2007 issue. This review is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

review is more like a conversation than an overview from an Academy, and conversations often start with a salient point leading on to judgement. I suggest readers of David Malouf ’s new collection should turn straight to page twenty-five and encounter a spray of short poems, titled ‘Seven Last Words of the Emperor Hadrian’. This is prefaced by the Silver Age Emperor’s own verse, the legendary address to his soul, which begins with the playfully sonorous words ‘animula vagula blandula’ and, in a most un-Latinate way, adds a halfrefrain, ‘pallidula rigida nudula’. If all of us, including Byron, who have attempted to put Hadrian’s words into our own languages were to be brought together, we’d stretch out to Macbeth’s crack of doom. No one has done it, to my knowledge, as brilliantly as Malouf does in his not-over-extended fantasy.

Each of the seven poems is a version of a direct translation of Hadrian’s one Latin verse, but each, like one of Brahms’s variations in his set based on Paganini’s twenty-fourth caprice, finds a new tone without resorting to egregious anachronisms or perverse salients.

Consider the third: ‘Little lightfoot / spirit, house / mate, bedfellow, where are you off / to now? Cat got / your tongue? Lost your shirt, caught / your death? Well, the last laugh / is on you. Is on us.’

This captures Hadrian’s patrician light-heartedness while preserving that lyrical darkness peculiar to the classical writers, so much more intense than any Christian dark night of the soul.

Malouf hints at this with the ‘Seven Last Words’ of his title. What can any mortal do in the face of death but joke about it. But the joke must be of featherweight seriousness. None of Malouf ’s interventions on the sparse Latin is vulgar or merely modern.

‘Cat got your tongue’ belongs to the Roman elegists as well as it does to ours. And what sort of laugh is the Emperor’s – the most powerful man on earth, but getting ready to die? Each of the elaborations is a witty development, but each stays well within the Emperor’s orbit. Malouf knows the Italian peninsula better than most, but his versions of Hadrian are not in any way proprietary – this is the human condition, and you won’t get any closer by visiting Castel Sant’Angelo. There could be no better key signature to the whole book than these Hadrianic sound bites.

Malouf has always been a wary celebrator of human love.

He has the poet’s fondness for finding the shows and remains of passion better worth writing about than its raptures. Such a note is struck right at the start of this collection. ‘Revolving Days’ is so regretful, so charmed to be looking back, not just at a love affair but at the clothes and pleasures of the past. Knotting his tie in the mirror, the poet can assure the lover that he won’t 68 A U S T R A L I A N B O O K R E V I E W J A N UA R Y– F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 2

do anything so uncomfortable as to contact him directly. He is, he emphasises, ‘writing this for you’, but not to you.

There are a number of gently reflective pieces of a similar sort, but there is also one, entitled ‘Like Yesterday’, which brings to mind a previous savage Malouf, erotic and unaccommodating of euphemism – the Malouf of that unflinching celebration of carnality and its semi-comical symbolism, ‘The Crab Feast’. This time the poet’s companion, ‘stickying his mouth with mute hosannas’, watches with him as a fish is ‘wrangled ashore’. The consequences of this are not spelled out, but for the writer it is a case of ‘my heart midair, still / thumping, a fish unsheathing / its lightning flash, suspended / on a breath. Alive. Speechless. Hooked. Ecstatic.’

The prevailing mood here and elsewhere is Latinate again, the sharpness of love returning on scents and breaths, but always on something or somebody palpable: ‘at ease after the roads / you’ve travelled and with just / a trace on your skin, / in the scent you give off, of what / you bring me, the light / you’ll pour into my mouth.’

Malouf ’s technical facility is assured, yet difficult to account for. He seldom rhymes, follows no stanza-shape out of the pattern books, and, at its least attractive, his verse is short-strawed and jagged. There is much reaching for lyrical afflatus too soon after having established a scene. However, the variety of subject matter is wide: retold myths, histories of styles and temperaments, and acute evocations of those unexpected glimpses of strangeness you receive along Australia’s straggling urban cantonments.

Another interesting section is a prose rumination, with intense short chorales for relief, purporting to be a letter from Mozart to his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. As a perpetrator myself of this sort of presumptuous Audenesque monologue, I feel entitled to pronounce the effort not worthwhile. The prose parts lack anything sufficiently singular to escape the sensation of listening to an exemplary Schools Broadcasting feature (no audacity such as Caliban’s soliloquy in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’), and the lyrical interpolations seem no more than marking time. There is one good notion, when Mozart apologises to the librettist of ‘Don Giovanni’ for having darkened the Italian meridional warmth and lightness of his verses with his own implacable Germanic seriousness.

The translations from Rimbaud and Horace are skilful and never overdone. In total, Typewriter Music is as fastidious as any of Malouf ’s admired prose works, but can afford to be more sprightly and irresponsible. There is no worrying about the destiny of the nation and no peroration on its historical emblems. The muses of poetry insist on their right to be scatological and irreverent, and Malouf has been happy to compose under their aegis. g