Australian Book Review, March 2019, issue no. 409

Fellowship Twenty

Felicity Plunkett is the 2019 ABR Patrons’ Fellow. This Fellowship is worth $10,000. Felicity will contribute a number of articles and review essays over the course of the next year.

A frequent contributor to the magazine since 2010 and a past Fellow (2015), Felicity Plunkett – poet, critic, teacher, editor – was chosen from a large field, and here we thank everyone who applied in this round.

We especially thank the ABR Patrons who make this program – and so much else – possible.

We look forward to advertising the twenty-first Fellowship – the ABR Indigenous Fellowship – shortly.

Behrouz Boochani

Though often convivial, not all awards ceremonies are stirring, but the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – held at the MPavilion on January 31 – was very different. Behrouz Boochani’s extraordinary book No Friend But the Mountains (published by Picador, translated by Omid Tofighian) was named the Victorian Prize for Literature, having already won the Prize for NonFiction. Boochani, who remains on Manus Island where he has been incarcerated since 2013, recorded a video message and then spoke live to the audience via an iPhone. He spoke with great dignity and feeling.

Congratulations to the organisers and the Victorian government for not excluding Behrouz Boochani from these prizes, which – on this occasion – transcended the merely festive and monetary. (Boochani had earlier been excluded from the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards because he is neither an Australian citizen nor a permanent resident.)

At the ceremony, Omid Tofighian read a new poem by Behrouz Boochani (again, translated by Tofighian). We are thrilled to be able to publish ‘Flight

from Manus’ on page 7.

Felicity Plunkett reviewed No Friend But the Mountains in the October 2018 issue.

Porter Prize

This year’s judges – Judith Bishop, John Hawke, Paul Kane – have shortlisted five poems in the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which is worth a total of $8,500. The poets are John Foulcher (ACT), Ross Gillett (Victoria), Andy Kissane (NSW), Belle Ling (Queensland/Hong Kong), and Mark Tredinnick (NSW). The poems commence on page 39.

This year’s Porter Prize ceremony will be held at fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, on Monday, March 18 (6 pm). Reservations are essential for this free event: rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au.

After readings from the work of Peter Porter, the shortlisted poets will introduce and read their poems. Then a special guest will name the overall winner, who will receive $5,000.

MWF on the move

The Melbourne Writers’ Festival (first presented in 1986) was based at the Malthouse Theatre from 1990 to 2008. Many people with fond memories of those congenial auditoria and the main foyer – always packed with authors and publishers and readers – have been hoping that MWF would find a more gemütlich home than Federation Square.

Happily, this year MWF will move to the State Library of Victoria (SLV), that dynamic cultural complex in the heart of town. The creation of new public spaces as part of SLV’s $88 million Vision 2020 redevelopment will make it possible for the Library and adjacent venues to accommodate a festival with this popular writers’ festival.

SLV CEO Kate Torney commented:

‘The Library is thrilled to be partnering with MWF to become the new home of Australia’s favourite literary festival. The partnership will bring new audiences to our magnificent Library, which is being transformed to meet the changing needs of our visitors.’

The Festival will run from August 30 to September 9.

Calibres galore

When the Calibre Essay Prize closed in mid-January, there were more than 450 entries – far more than in previous years. That’s almost two million words of essayism. Judging is underway but will take longer than expected. Hence, the winning essay will appear in the May issue – not April.

Hearty thanks to everyone who entered the Calibre Prize.

2019 Stella Prize Longlist

The 2019 Stella Prize longlist features books by twelve women, from a variety of publishers. Allen & Unwin figures prominently, with Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee, Little Gods by Jenny Ackland, and Bluebottle by Belinda Castles. Three-year-old publisher Brow Books is favoured too, with Pink Mountain on Locust Island by Jamie Marina Lau and Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin. Axiomatic has already won the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature Best Writing Award and was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premiers’ Literary Award.

The other longlisted titles are Stephanie Bishop’s Man Out of Time (Hachette), Enza Gandolfo’s The Bridge (Scribe), Chloe Hooper’s The Arsonist (Penguin Random House), Gail Jones’s The Death of Noah Glass (Text Publishing), Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip (University of Queensland Press), and The Erratics by Vicki LaveauHarvie (Finch Publishing).

The winner will be named at a ceremony in Melbourne on April 9.

A D VA N C E S

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Asbestos

Letters

Dear Editor, In an otherwise excellent review of David Goldblatt: Photographs 19482018, I was shocked by one sentence

by Alison Stieven-Taylor (ABR, January–February 2019). In commenting on David Goldblatt’s primary focus on South Africa, Stieven-Taylor wrote: ‘One notable exception was a trip to Australia in the late 1990s to photograph the ghost town of Wittenoom, infamous as the site of Australia’s asbestos mining industry.’ Wittenoom was indeed infamous, and its blue asbestos is a particularly infamous form. But Wittenoom was not Australia’s only asbestos mining site.

There is an abandoned (and largely unremediated) white asbestos mine near Barraba in northern New South Wales. Less than 400 km away, in the Clarence Valley on the New South

2 MARCH 2019

Wales coast, is a former asbestos mine at Baryulgil, then a largely Aboriginal town, where mine tailings were used for roadwork and in the school’s playground and sandpit.

It appears that asbestos was mined at many sites in Western Australia other than Wittenoom: also at three sites in New South Wales other than those noted above; two in Tasmania; and four in South Australia.

It is important that this part of Australia’s history not be airbrushed by implying that there was only one mine.

David Godden, Tamworth, NSW

Gallery directors

Dear Editor, We would like to thank Ron Radford for his generous review of our book Australian Art Exhibitions: Opening our eyes. We’re impressed that it ap-

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

peared so soon after publication.

We should note that Dr Radford’s curatorial career, which was marked by innovative exhibitions in a number of art museums, was one reason for the addition of the Career Paths appendix at the end of the book. As this is only concerned with those involved in key exhibitions of Australian art, it does not include either Edmund Capon or Betty Churcher, whose interests lay elsewhere.

The impact of Edmund Capon on the Art Gallery of New South Wales probably deserves a study on its own.

His skill at managing both staff and trustees brought coherence to policies on all fronts, and his scholarship in Chinese art led to the establishment of a large and flourishing curatorial department of Asian art.

Joanna Mendelssohn, Catherine De Lorenzo, Alison Inglis, and Catherine Speck

March 2019

Ian Tyrrell Prudence Flowers Ceridwen Spark Dominic Kelly Francesca Sasnaitis Kerryn Goldsworthy Susan Sheridan John Foulcher et al.

Australasia as a legislative laboratory The abiding US reliance on torture Free speech and conformity Trouble at MUP John Kinsella’s most extravagant achievement Steven Carroll’s Glenroy novels A memoir of Kenneth Cook Peter Porter Poetry Prize shortlist

9 12 14 19 24 27 29 39

Letters

David Godden, Joanna Mendelssohn, Catherine De Lorenzo, Alison Inglis, Catherine Speck

Photography 30

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Poem

32 34 36

History & Politics

38

Behrouz Boochani 7 Judith Rodriguez 45 Elizabeth Malcolm and Dianne Hall: A New History of the Irish in Australia Michael McGirr 11 Paddy Manning: Born to Rule? Paul Williams 16 Stephen Greenblatt: Tyrant David McInnis 47

44 46

Society

Fiction

Biography & Memoir

Reg MacDonald: The Boy From Brunswick Sheridan Palmer Alan Walker: Fryderyk Chopin Paul Kildea Joshua Jackson: A Certain Idea of France Rémy Davison Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer: The Years Gemma Betros

Poetry

Peter Mares: No Place Like Home Tom Bamforth 22 Lee Kofman: Imperfect Tali Lavi 52 Ginger Gorman: Troll Hunting Jacinta Mulders 53 Carrie Tiffany: Exploded View James Ley Kate Richards: Fusion Chris Murray Gillian Best: The Last Wave Rose Lucas Debra Adelaide: Zebra & Other Stories David Haworth Kristen Roupenian: You Know You Want This Amy Baillieu Garry Disher: Kill Shot Dervla McTiernan: The Scholar Candice Fox: Gone By Midnight David Whish-Wilson Trevor Shearston: Hare’s Fur Jack Callil

Jane Lydon (ed.): Visualising Human Rights Alison Stieven-Taylor

48 50

25 28 33

49

Judith Rodriguez: The Feather Boy & Other Poems Jennifer Strauss Gerald Murnane: Green Shadows and Other Poems Geoff Page

Essays

Julienne van Loon: The Thinking Woman Johanna Leggatt Rebecca Solnit: Call Them By Their True Names Daniel Juckes

Science

Gina Rippon: The Gendered Brain Nick Haslam

Literary Studies

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59

56

60 57 58

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John Whittier Treat: The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature Mark Gibeau

Interview

Open Page Debra Adelaide

From The Archive

Christos Tsiolkas: Dead Europe Michael Williams

ABR Arts

Patricia Maunder Ian Dickson Barney Zwartz Bronwyn Lea Patrick McCaughey

62 63 64 65 66

If Beale Street Could Talk Mary Stuart The Flying Dutchman Death of a Salesman Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again CONTENTS

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Australian Book Review | March 2019, no. 409 Since 1961 First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) ISSN 0155-2864 Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing

Cover design Judy Green Cover photograph Refugee Behrouz Boochani from Iran, on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, on Tuesday 11 April, 2017. (Photograph by Alex Ellinghausen. © Fairfax Media, MEAA) Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 One year (online only): $60 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available. www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Advertising Media Kit available from our website Contact Amy Baillieu abr@australianbookreview.com.au Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and website comments. All letters and online comments are edited before publication in the magazine. Time and space permitting, we will print any reply from the reviewer with the original letter or comment.

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Flight From Manus

Awake I am beholding clouds beholding dreams and … beholding the hands of a woman … she has taken a fragment of me with her Exactly like the force of a fork carving out a piece of cake I muse on those hands that seem to have bathed within jungles submerged into oceans touched herrings Hands covered with the dirt and sand of deserted plains Hands soaked with dreams Your hands Your arms If I were you, beholding me I would fly I would fly from one cloud to another cloud from one tree to another tree from one lake to another lake from one mountain range to another mountain range and from one city to another city Fly over the valleys fly over the expanse of the oceans fly over the immensity of the deserts If I were you, beholding me I would fly from one river to another river If I were you, beholding me I would even send my kisses into flight … from the lips of a woman … sweet savour … to the lips of a man … sense him like salt And this is who I am living in wonderful solitude and imagining the kiss from those lips … lips that are overflowing with emotion … overflowing without cause or reason If I were you, beholding me I would fly from one island to another island

Behrouz Boochani v Behrouz Boochani is an Iranian-Kurdish journalist, human rights defender, poet, and film producer. (Translation by Omid Tofighian, American University in Cairo/University of Sydney) POEM

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

We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partners Monash University and Flinders University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; Eucalypt Australia; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

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REVIEW OF THE MONTH

‘The liveliest interest’ Australasia as a legislative laboratory

Ian Tyrrell PROGRESSIVE NEW WORLD: HOW SETTLER COLONIALISM AND TRANSPACIFIC EXCHANGE SHAPED AMERICAN REFORM

by Marilyn Lake Harvard University Press (Footprint), $68 hb, 307 pp, 9780674975958

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n 1902, Australian feminist and social reformer Vida Goldstein met Theodore Roosevelt in the White House during her North American lecture tour. Marilyn Lake retells the story of their encounter in her important new book. Seizing Goldstein’s hand in a vice-like grip, the president exclaimed: ‘delighted to meet you’. Australasian social and economic reforms attracted Roosevelt and other Americans. Lake’s focus is primarily, though not exclusively, on Australia, yet New Zealand was in some cases more socially ‘progressive’. Other antipodean visitors, including Catherine Spence, who lectured in Chicago on proportional representation, and jurist H.B. Higgins at Harvard, also received warm welcomes. Visits to and fro often produced long friendships, and the chain of letters is important in Lake’s impressive reconstruction of a transPacific sensibility.

In Progressive New World, Lake argues that Australasia and the United States were engaged in a conversation of mutual, if sometimes qualified, admiration. Charles Pearson’s friendship with Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton, Alfred Deakin’s with philosopher Josiah Royce, and New Zealander Edward Tregear’s epistolary debates with the labour economist Victor Selden Clark, are explored, among other affective connections. In this light, US historians will need to reassess the assumption

that progressive reform was either an internal product or a result of transatlantic dialogues alone.

Australia and New Zealand became known from 1890 to 1920 as a legislative ‘laboratory’ through social ‘experiments’. Foundational to Australian reform, White Australia and tariff protection were ‘closely watched by reformers in the United States’. Arbitration, women’s voting rights, hours and conditions of work, and indeed every question on the intervention of the state in the economy and society saw Australasian innovations being highlighted. Progressivism for Lake equals primarily democratic reforms and social justice, but with a racial underpinning. American historians still dispute the term’s coherence, meanings, and efficacy, but most would concede that, in ‘Progressivism’, efficiency was a third pillar of the diverse and changing ‘movement’ after 1900.

It was not just Americans who found antipodean reform intriguing, but Lake does not assess this multinational curiosity. Instead, she treats Australasians and American reformers as having so much in common that their interactions can be considered apart from larger transnational circulations. What made the trans-Pacific exchange distinctive was a self-conscious fashioning of New World democracies seeking to throw off the trammels of old Europe; but simultaneously both REVIEW OF THE MONTH

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sides of the exchange were settler-colonial states that supressed and marginalised the original inhabitants to achieve Progressive ambitions.

The first theme, trans-Pacific links, has been covered before, but rarely if ever with Lake’s meticulous attention to gender and the sequences of personal communication.

Australian views solidified in the 1880s and 1890s as Federation beckoned. Reciprocal influences are documented, and the flow east across the Pacific is stressed, though Lake shows how the Australian constitution bore marks of the American, notably through transnational networks stimulating Andrew Inglis Clark’s interest in federalism.

Australasian reform was usually in advance of the United States. Lake acknowledges that antipodean impacts upon the latter were often subtle or circuitous.

The Sheppard-Towner Act (1921) on child and maternal health and welfare was ‘anticipated’ by Australian experiments. Path-breaking use of sociological data in wage determinations, as in Muller v Oregon (1908) to support a minimum wage, similarly revealed in a subterranean way Justice Higgins’s preoccupations in the Harvester judgment (1907).

Lake explains why the complicated US Constitution made Australasian social democracy hard to copy.

(Indeed, Sheppard-Towner was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1927.) By the time significant US social democratic measures were enacted federally it was the 1930s, and the context was more Atlantic-centred than Pacific. Moreover, many American democratic measures, like city management and citizen initiative laws on referenda and recall of state officials, are not discussed, while others that are, like proportional representation, had limited impact stateside.

The treatment of settler colonialism is Lake’s most arresting contribution, and yet it raises contextual questions. American historians have mostly shied away from the concept. Margaret Jacobs, perhaps the best-known American practitioner in the field with comparative interests, notes how many scholars see it as a ‘fad’. Yet Lake builds upon Jacobs and the phalanx of Australasians working on settler colonialism to demonstrate the idea’s relevance to state formation. The marginalisation and discrimination concerning the indigenous was, Lake argues, the dark underbelly of Progressivism. That movement as a whole sought to advance the interests of whites, including women, and this came at the expense of American Indians. At most, Progressives tended to favour indigenous (and other ethnic) cultural assimilation, a process that amounted to fulfilling Patrick Wolfe’s idea of a ‘logic of elimination’ in settler colonialism. But Lake notes that certain forthright Progressives, mostly women, spoke on behalf of indigenous people. In her final chapter, Lake gives voice to independent indigenous protest, and draws parallels between movements across the Pacific seeking to combat Progressivism’s assimilative nationalism.

Applying settler colonial analysis must confront 10 MARCH 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

the different world-historical position of each country.

The two reached divergent developmental stages, and Theodore Roosevelt sensed the trajectory. When Pearson visited the United States in the 1860s and when Deakin toured in 1884–85, it was possible to see a white settler correlation. By 1900, however, the United States was transitioning from a settler-colonial polity to a nationempire in which the frontier of settler colonialism was displaced into national and global struggles over the distribution of resources. Progressives pitted not whites against American Indians but Progressive reform against big economic interests that, Roosevelt stated, gained control of land, forests, and mines at the expense of ‘the actual settler’. The latter’s survival Progressives saw as securing the republic’s moral, demographic, and economic footing. Indians were collateral damage in this process. Progressives did not initiate American Indian assimilation, but the paternalistically inclined among them, like Roosevelt, could offer only a brake on corrupt and inefficient nineteenth-century allotment policy that began depriving American Indians of tribal land in the name of competitive individualism and republican citizenship well before the Civil War. The Fairfax newspaperman Samuel Cook of Marrickville was neither well-known nor a self-identified ‘Progressive’. Travelling home from Britain in 1907, he visited the White House and, like Goldstein, ‘had a most interesting interview with President Roosevelt’.

Whether Roosevelt welcomed every Australian approaching his office is surely doubtful, but he seemed as ‘delighted’ to see Cook as anybody, ‘showed a great interest in Australia, and expressed his gratification at its success and progress’, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. Arbitration was discussed, but the most telling moment was Roosevelt’s asking Cook why Australians still called themselves colonials. The unstated assumption was that Americans were not. Cook protested, but the question suggests that Roosevelt understood how trans-Pacific Anglo-Saxons already had a materially and conceptually unequal relationship – and future. American and Australian literary and political élites espoused a certain Anglo-Saxonism, but the American version after the Spanish–American War (1898) assumed a coming US takeover within the Anglosphere, and the need to strengthen the imperial state internally to compete with rivals Germany and Japan.

Thereafter, Progressivism’s egalitarian potential was increasingly deflected towards strengthening the state through efficiency, that other, neglected leg of Progressive reform. As for trans-Pacific links, Americans all evinced ‘the liveliest interest’, Cook remarked, but they ‘did not know much about Australia’. g Ian Tyrrell is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of New South Wales. His most recent book is River Dreams: The people and landscape of the Cooks River (UNSW Press). v

‘All their sins and sorrows’ A history of the Irish in Australia without the craic

Michael McGirr A NEW HISTORY OF THE IRISH IN AUSTRALIA

by Elizabeth Malcolm and Dianne Hall NewSouth, $34.99 pb, 444 pp, 9781742235530

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here is much to admire about this detailed and painstaking book. The authors have entered a field that is replete with stereotypes and even gags. They will have none of it. The result is an account of the Irish in Australia subtly modulated and insistent on evidence. It is suspicious of the lore and yarns that have sometimes been made to take their place.

Elizabeth Malcolm and Dianne Hall make countless references to this book’s spiritual godfather, Patrick O’Farrell, whose The Irish in Australia, published in 1986, is still a delicious reading experience. Indeed, a number of the chapters in this new book begin with references to O’Farrell as a starting point. The authors are a little in awe of him, which is easy to understand. They treat him like an elderly ancestor whose stories may need to be toned down a bit.

O’Farrell remarked in his preface that, ‘I have found the Irish a vastly entertaining, perplexing and inexhaustible subject, for which capacities to amuse – in the best sense – I am deeply grateful.’

Malcolm and Hall, on the other hand, do not participate at this level. They add balance by strenuously standing apart from the community they describe. They don’t like Irish jokes either, noting that their persistence into contemporary times is a sign of the ongoing marginalisation of the Irish. They have a point, but it is amusing to come across a history of the Irish with so little sense of craic. To be fair, the book makes brilliant use of cartoons from various periods of history, pointing out the bias that may come from cartoonists trained in England. This is a welcome change from O’Farrell, whose book includes no fewer than six pictures of Daniel Mannix, six times as many as any other figure.

Mannix does not really appear in this new book until near the end. For once he has to wait his turn.

Malcolm and Hall have an enormous amount of ground to cover and always tread warily. But there are omissions. They do not deal much with the contribution of the Irish to the development of a vernacular Australian spirituality, one of the most significant aspects of the history of the Irish in Australia.

Inextricably linked to this is the impact of the Irish in establishing the sexual mores of parts of the Australian community, with which this book does engage, especially in fine chapters on sexual relations between Chinese and Irish and also Indigenous Australians and the Irish. Religion in this book is mostly a political phenomenon. There is much commentary on the vexed issue of government aid for Catholic schools, regarded for generations as political poison. The authors note the irony whereby it was finally Robert Menzies, ‘a man not noted for his Irish or Catholic sympathies’, who finally came to the party in the early 1960s; he was from a side of politics that Irish political interests had usually regarded with suspicion, even hostility. Menzies needed votes at the time, and Catholic votes were as good as any.

Beneath the structure of schooling there was and remains a debate about the inner purpose of education. Of course, not all Irish were Catholic, but many of them were. There is no mention in this book of the Christian Brothers, who arrived from Ireland to stay in 1868 and built a network of schools that continues to educate about 40,000 young Australians. Sure, the brothers had a political project, to improve the lot of their constituents and get them

off the bottom rung of society. And sure, their history has been painfully dark, an issue this book does not address. But the brothers also wanted to convey a sense of God, morality, life’s ultimate purpose, and the best use to make of a boxing ring. The Irish Sisters of Mercy were likewise engaged in education, as were the Brigidines and Presentation sisters. Indeed, even Mary MacKillop, from Scottish stock, brought many sisters from Ireland to work in her schools. At their best, these figures, with limited resources, created a folksy and colourful spirituality, full of warmth and eccentricity. There were many nuns who prayed as though God were a bold boy who needed telling off. The famous green Catechism was green for a reason.

It gave one-line answers to such tricky questions as ‘who is God?’ and ‘why did God make the world?’ Religion as part of daily housekeeping established a unique style in which sermons were marginal and authority a veneer. Monsignor Hartigan’s comic poetry, which teases his Irish community mercilessly, would surely be as much worth a mention as the stodgy Rolf Boldrewood.

There are moments when the authors do get close to these issues. One of the best chapters in the book, ‘Madness and the Irish’, asks many questions about the high rates of incarceration of the Irish in secure mental facilities.

To their credit, here as everywhere, the authors are crystal clear when they pose questions to which they can find no objectively verifiable answers. They are scrupulous in acknowledging the work of fellow historians, often describing HISTORY

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the challenges they have dealt with in their attempts to create clear pictures.

So we don’t know why the mental health of so many Irish was deemed a threat to the community; some may well have been more of an inconvenience than a danger. Others were mystifying to nonIrish medical staff. There is a portrait of a woman locked up with her rosary beads and prayers, prone to trafficking with fairies. It is hard to believe she was really sick, just imaginative. Likewise, there are moments when the sense of alienation inherent in Irish Celtic spirituality finds kinship with Indigenous experience. The remarkable Daisy Bates, herself Irish, told the journalist Ernestine Hill in 1832 that her ethnic-

The famous green Catechism was green for a reason ity explained ‘her lifetime loyalty to the lost cause of a lost people with all their sins and sorrows in her always loving heart and mind’.

Malcolm and Hall argue strenuously against a belief that persisted in post-settlement Australia that the Irish were a kind of lesser brand of European.

It would have been interesting for the book to have considered the views of Thomas Keneally and others that Islam in Australia has inherited the stigma associated a century ago with Catholicism. Maybe that is beyond its remit.

Again and again, they point out that there were Irish on every side of every social divide. Writing about the horrendous Myall Creek massacre of 1838, for example, they note that ‘in addition to the Irish among the perpetrators, Irish men were also to the fore among the police, magistrates, lawyers and judges who captured and prosecuted them’. It is much harder to write history without stereotypes. But, as this book shows, it is far more stimulating. g Michael McGirr is the Dean of Faith at St Kevin’s College in Melbourne, a school that was started by the Christian Brothers. His most recent book is Books That Saved My Life (Text, 2018).

12 MARCH 2019

In plain sight

The long US reliance on torture and degradation

Prudence Flowers CIVILIZING TORTURE: AN AMERICAN TRADITION

by W. Fitzhugh Brundage

Harvard University Press (Footprint), $74.99 hb, 407 pp, 9780674737662

T

he Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1791, prohibits the use of ‘cruel and unusual punishments’. General Order No. 100 (the Lieber Code of 1863) declares that ‘military necessity does not admit of cruelty’ and explicitly bars American soldiers from torture.

The UN Convention Against Torture, which the United States signed in 1988, stipulates an absolute ban on torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishments. Yet, as W. Fitzhugh Brundage amply demonstrates in Civilizing Torture: An American tradition, the United States has used torture at home and abroad for centuries.

Physical and psychological torment helped subjugate indigenous and enslaved populations, underpinned the formation of the carceral state, and has long been an instrument in America’s military adventures, particularly in the developing world. Yet notions of national exceptionalism have led many Americans to insist that the United States is a ‘unique nation with uniquely humane laws and principles’. Thus, despite international revulsion at the horrors inflicted by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, President George W. Bush still maintained that ‘any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture.’

Although the material in Civilizing Torture is distressing, Brundage’s approach is restrained. Acts of extreme cruelty are a necessary element for his argument, but this is neither an exhaustive catalogue of bodily humiliations, nor a partisan polemic. The book ranges from the earliest moments of exploration and colonisation in the 1500s and 1600s, to the War on Terror

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

in the 2000s. Case studies are included because, at the time they occurred, they triggered public discussion about whether certain practices or behaviours were torturous. By focusing on these debates, Brundage demonstrates the long history of torture in the United States while exploring the ways that torture has been discursively justified.

The public nature of the evidence base also hammers home one of his core contentions: ‘torture in the United States has been in plain sight, at least for those who have looked for it.’

Some examples, such as the use of the ‘water cure’ in the Philippines in the early 1900s, or the rape, abuse, and murder of civilians in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, the torture and ritual humiliation of prisoners as part of the War on Terror in the early 2000s, are well known. Brundage’s contribution is to methodically ground these notorious events in the broader historical context, vividly undercutting official claims that heinous acts are the work of a ‘few bad apples’.

A particularly fascinating thread is the focus on physical and psychological coercion in the nation’s prisons and police stations. In the new-model penitentiaries of the early 1800s, ‘bodily suffering’ was often seen as an instrumental means of compelling obedience, crucial if inmates were to be rehabilitated.

From the late 1800s to the 1930s, a modernising police force relied on extreme forms of violence (the so-called ‘third degree’) to extract confessions. Although the Supreme Court eventually ruled these excesses to be in violation of the Constitution, police torture did not completely disappear. In the 1970s and 1980s, some Chicago officers openly

terrorised African-American suspects, deploying the techniques they had learnt as soldiers in Vietnam. This element of the book is urgent and timely, vital to understanding the dangers inherent in the dramatic growth of the prison–industrial complex, as well as the long history of police brutality that fuels contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter.

Throughout, Brundage offers important insights into how extreme acts of physical and psychological violence are reframed and redefined. In almost every instance, defenders of torturous practices present American actions as falling on the acceptable side of state violence. As one CIA agent mused about the methods used to interrogate Vietnamese communist prisoners, ‘Were they tortured? It depends on what you call torture.’ At various points in US history, hangings, suffocation, stress positions, beatings, burnings, electrocution, waterboarding, sustained solitary confinement, and profoundly disorienting ‘brain warfare’ were all treated as legitimate techniques for the use of a modern, civilised society.

This long-running renegotiation of what exactly constitutes torture has also helped Americans maintain that ‘torture is something done by other people elsewhere’ (whether that be Catholics during the Spanish Inquisition, Native Americans, Filipino and Vietnamese nationalists, communists, or terrorists).

When American colonists, prison officers, slave owners, soldiers, or police officers subject people to profound bodily and psychological horror, it is something else, something other than torture.

This book is thus as much about wilful ignorance and national self-delusion as it is about the physical mechanics of torture. Despite vigorous debates amongst contemporaries, and copious historical evidence to the contrary, Americans have repeatedly pleaded ignorance about the actions of the state.

Brundage’s book is a welcome corrective, posing a profound and systematic challenge to this ‘compulsion to restore national innocence’.

Brundage also demonstrates that US officials and the broader public

have frequently accepted torturous practices, as long as they occur in a state of exception and to those viewed as outsiders. Whether that be the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on Crime, or the Civil War, critics of state

by torture apologists, to be aware of the circumstances that are used to justify torture, and to be conscious of the types of people likely to experience the unchecked violence of the state. Given that the current occupant of the White

An American soldier, aided by South Vietnamese soldiers, interrogates a suspected Viet Cong insurgent (undated)

violence are told that the pain and suffering of a minority is necessary to preserve the security of the majority. Victims of torture (whether they be slaves, Native Americans, criminals, prisoners, or ‘illegal enemy combatants’) are rhetorically defined as barbarous and uncivilised adversaries, unworthy of the protections officially offered by the state. Although each case study includes voices that spoke in horror at what was done in the name of America, in most instances these critics had little success in halting abhorrent practices or in holding individual torturers (let alone those in power) to account.

Understanding the history of torture in the United States will not prevent future violence, but Brundage views this information as providing an important framework for an engaged citizenry. Civilizing Torture encourages the reader to look carefully at the ‘subtle work of denial and erasure’ used

House has insisted that torture ‘absolutely’ works and has boasted he ‘would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding’, the lessons of Civilizing Torture feel positively urgent. g

Prudence Flowers is a lecturer in the history program at Flinders University. She is the author of The Right-to-Life Movement, the Reagan Administration, and the Politics of Abortion (Palgrave, 2019). v HISTORY

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Taking a stand

An overview of complex issues

Ceridwen Spark THE TYRANNY OF OPINION: CONFORMITY AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM

by Russell Blackford Bloomsbury, $43.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781350056008

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ecently I was speaking with a friend about the impact of the #MeToo movement on gender politics and the implications for male academics. He suggested that there are only two speaking positions for men.

The first is as a cheerleader from the sidelines. The second is as a critic, offering challenges or raising questions.

But, he said, for those who would like to be viewed as politically left, the first is the only real option, because the second entails too many risks. Chief among these is the likelihood of being labelled a dinosaur with a vested interest in defending the patriarchy. Men on the conservative side of politics may be willing to wear such charges, but those who are more liberal understandably are cautious about risking the damage to their reputations that raising questions about feminist orthodoxies may imply.

The dilemma inherent in this example – namely the risk of exploring views that deviate from current, accepted norms – lies at the heart of Russell Blackford’s The Tyranny of Opinion: Conformity and the future of liberalism.

Though not focused specifically on contemporary discussions about gender equity, the book explores arguments of relevance for debates on this hot topic, as well as those relating to the politics of religion and identity, including racial identity. Accessibly written and well-structured, it offers an excellent overview of the complex issues at stake when we talk about freedom of speech and the ways in which civility, privacy, and personal stability are undermined by call-out culture and social media.

Blackford is a philosopher, legal scholar, and literary critic at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales.

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In The Tyranny of Opinion, his fifth book since 2012, he draws on his obvious familiarity with, and appreciation for, the work of John Stuart Mill, author of On Liberty (1859). Mill famously said: ‘he who knows only his own side knows little of that’. Blackford’s willingness to explore, respectfully and without apparent prejudice, a range of views, examples, books, and thus ‘sides’ suggests that he holds the philosopher in some esteem. Blackford writes in ways that seek to demonstrate his commitment to learning about and trying to understand the values and beliefs of others, including those with whom he disagrees.

In the first substantive chapter, Blackford explores, and for the most part accepts, Mill’s approach to restricting individual liberty where this is required to prevent certain harms.

He also discusses and appreciates Mill’s idea that government censorship and authority are not the only, nor even the main, threat to human liberty. Rather, as he argues: ‘Even more dangerous, perhaps, and certainly more difficult to understand or restrain, is a less overt, more insidious kind of tyranny; what Mill called “the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling”.’ The following two chapters explore freedom of speech and some possible necessary limits to this, touching on defamation, hate speech, and invasive speech.

Having laid the intellectual and philosophical framework for his argument in the first four chapters, Blackford then focuses on the book’s main topic – namely the tyranny of prevailing opinion and feeling. It is here that the author really hits his stride. Though the foundational early chapters are scholarly and clear, there is an occasional whiff

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

of recycled lectures. At times, reading them can feel like hard work. In contrast, the second half of the book comes alive with passion and rich examples, while also conveying Blackford’s evident grasp of other, often controversial literature pertaining to this discussion.

Readers will learn, for example, about Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies (2017), Alice Dreger’s Galileo’s Middle Finger (2015), and The Natural History of Rape (2000) by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer. Blackford discusses these texts respectfully and with a view to considering the merits of the arguments presented, rather than asserting his own ‘politics’.

Chapter five, for instance, the first in this livelier half of the book, was inspiring. Here, Blackford explores the ‘downsides of conformity’, observing the ways it can impoverish debate and make outcasts of those who dare to challenge prevailing opinion. Arguing that we should treasure and celebrate non-conforming individuals because of the role they play in defending our desire to freely discuss ideas, he makes the point that this celebration should still occur even when we don’t agree with the views expressed. Having just read Elizabeth Kleinhenz’s recent biography of Germaine Greer, I could not help but think appreciatively of the example of this often controversial yet wonderfully unbridled woman. When, in chapters seven and eight, Blackford explores some of the ways in which individuals, including those who are reasonable and respectful, have been punished for silly jokes and even thoughtful articles that challenge prevailing views and norms, the importance of public figures who are willing to push our discussions into

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less proscribed places only becomes more evident.

Ultimately, Blackford enjoins readers to ‘take a stand, as loudly as [they] dare, for liberal values and for freedom’.

Noting that most of us are happy to entertain and to venture a much greater range of views and opinions in private than we are in public, he suggests that we should, to the extent that we can, be courageous in doing so publicly,for the sake of ‘true’ liberal principles and values.

Embodying this on the page through his own civil and well-considered voice, Blackford’s book reminds me of a statement I heard recently on a podcast. The reporter, Steve Kolowich, in an episode entitled ‘My Effing First Amendment’ from the podcast This American Life says: ‘Free speech is supposed to be one of the few remaining ideas in American politics that everyone can agree on. But free speech doesn’t solve political conflicts. It creates them.

Solving them requires more advanced tools like trust, humility, dialogue, listening.’

Blackford’s book exemplifies how things might be if only we would all stop shouting at one another and learn to listen. g Ceridwen Spark is a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Global Research at RMIT University.

‘The philosophy of a billionaire’ A second look at the businessman turned politician

Paul Williams BORN TO RULE?

by Paddy Manning

Melbourne University Press, $34.99 pb, 503 pp, 9780522870787

F

uture generations of readers will invariably look back in awe at the second decade of twenty-first-century Australian politics for its ridiculous revolving door of prime ministers.

Personal and journalistic accounts of this rare instability – Australia had six prime ministers between 2010 and 2018 – have certainly proved a publishing bonanza. Defeated prime ministers publish memoirs as rapidly as journalists and commentators write their chronicles.

Journalist Paddy Manning’s first edition of Born to Rule – written during Tony Abbott’s failing prime ministership and released just weeks after Malcolm Turnbull’s accession in late 2015 – is clearly one of the better accounts.

Given that no one from outside the parliament (except perhaps Bob Hawke) had been (for years) more frequently labelled a prime minister-in-waiting than Malcolm Turnbull, the release of a balanced portrait of the brilliant but seemingly irascible Turnbull was perfectly timed with Abbott’s exit.

Varun Ghosh expertly reviewed Manning’s first edition in ABR in December, 2015. Ghosh noted Manning’s 16 MARCH 2019

view that a Turnbull narrative of childhood austerity didn’t really align with a more salubrious reality. He also noted Manning’s account of a young and ‘imperious’ Turnbull finding unending success – early journalistic prowess, a Rhodes Scholarship, winning high-profile legal cases for Kerry Packer and ‘spycatcher’ Peter Wright – before turning to business where he made his real fortune. Only with the defeat of the 1999 republic referendum did Turnbull, head of the Australian Republic Movement, taste failure. Entering the House of Representatives in 2004 and immediately elevated to the frontbench, Turnbull’s next major defeat arrived when the Godwin Grech affair and a carbon emissions trading policy saw his political judgement lampooned and his party leadership lost. A humiliation borne of impetuousness undoubtedly tempered Turnbull’s second,more measured leadership term, which ended in August 2018.

While Ghosh laments – perhaps unjustly – Manning’s ‘unsatisfyingly brief taste of what may come’ from a Turnbull prime ministership, he was right to highlight Turnbull’s central

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

and potentially debilitating dilemma as a moderate leader ahead of a conservative party. That dilemma became a key theme of Born to Rule: a detailed account – replete with chatter from secret partyroom meetings and other deep background detail – of a dazzlingly popular entrepreneur who, so obviously ‘born to rule’, offered Australians a way out of a leadership circus entertaining Australian politics since 2010.

The optimism that Turnbull generated in 2015 was entirely justified.

After Abbott’s loss of thirty successive Newspolls – a rationale Turnbull used to unseat his predecessor – the new Liberal leader immediately reversed the Coalition’s fortunes. It was also an optimism shared by much of progressive Australia. Sydney Morning Herald journalist Elizabeth Farrelly, for example, bravely predicted that Turnbull would be our longest-serving prime minister since Robert Menzies. Turnbull’s electoral honeymoon was indeed passionate: a November Fairfax-Ipsos poll pegged the Coalition at fifty-seven per cent to Labor’s forty-three; the temptation for Turnbull to call a December election

must have been strong. But the love affair was also painfully short: by April 2016, Newspoll found the Coalition again trailing Labor, despite Opposition leader Bill Shorten’s own unpopularity.

As the Coalition’s numbers slumped further, it was only a matter of time before Turnbull’s Newspoll yardstick would be used brutally on his own back.

Thus, the theme of Manning’s second edition of Born to Rule? – cleverly updated with a question mark – is how and why the Turnbull dream so decidedly turned to ashes. The conventional wisdom among moderate Liberals is that Turnbull’s vision was thwarted only by a recalcitrant and arch-conservative right wing led by Abbott, Peter Dutton, and others.

But, with the addition of two new chapters – ‘Mr Harbourside Mansion’ and ‘No, Prime Minister’ – Manning challenges this view with twin arguments: while the rational observer can’t deny that strong conservative resistance to same-sex marriage and climate change policy constrained Turnbull’s leadership, nor can it be denied that many misfortunes were of Turnbull’s own making.

Manning cites, for example, his major failure on tax policy – an area haunting Australian politics since the largely ignored recommendations of the Henry Tax Review a decade ago – where Turnbull floated, then abandoned, plans to revive state income taxes, raise the GST, and slash corporate tax rates. The political danger of a vacuum in tax policy is a given: Turnbull seemed unaware that there is little support among the business community or the Liberal base for a prime minister who cannot execute tax reform.

Manning also notes that Turnbull’s enthusiasm for technology – ‘there has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian’, he often stated, to loud derision – failed to resonate outside inner-metropolitan bubbles (particularly Queensland, which Turnbull ‘never understood’), and especially when such projects as the National Innovation and Science Agenda were left dramatically underfunded.

More broadly, Manning depicts a leader unable to manage internal dissent from the right – something Robert Menzies and Malcolm Fraser could do, just

as Bob Hawke and Paul Keating managed Labor’s left – and an inability, like Kevin Rudd, to translate big ideas into tangible outcomes.

Ultimately, future historians would be well placed to draw on Manning’s account of arguably Turnbull’s worst moment of judgement: the decision to call a double dissolution election in the vain hope of clearing a hostile Senate. The reduced quota under double dissolution rules produced an even more ideologically diverse and troublesome Senate (including four One Nation Senators). Moreover, the Coalition’s House of Representatives majority was reduced to a single seat – a majority later lost before the 2019 election, but not before the Australian people lost their own confidence in Turnbull, who appeared to stand for nothing and who appeared increasingly tetchy towards critics. Who can forget Turnbull’s 2016 election-night address, when a humble acknowledgment of victory morphed into an angry tirade of blame?

Manning’s last chapter is worth the price of the book alone. In ‘No, Prime Minister’, Manning offers both a clean account of Turnbull’s last days and something of a philosophical treatise on contemporary challenges to democracy in a Trump–Brexit world. In it, Manning quotes French President Emmanuel Macron – like Turnbull, an investment banker turned centrist politician – who laments political postmodernism: ‘the idea that you have to deconstruct and destroy every grand narrative is not a good one’.

Which brings us back to Manning’s added question mark. Was Turnbull born to rule? Manning’s conclusion is clear: ‘The wheeler-dealer, businessman-politician. Whatever it takes. It is the philosophy of a billionaire, not the leader of a nation.’ g Paul Williams is a Senior Lecturer in politics and journalism at Griffith University’s School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences. He is a weekly columnist with Brisbane’s Courier Mail newspaper and a frequent media commentator on Queensland politics.

He has published widely on voter behaviour and political leadership. v

ABR Patrons’ Fellowship Australian Book Review is pleased to announce the recipient of the ABR Patrons’ Fellowship.

Felicity Plunkett

Felicity Plunkett will contribute four essays throughout 2019.

Felicity Plunkett is a poet and critic with a PhD from the University of Sydney. Her first collection of poetry Vanishing Point won the Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Prize. Felicity’s chapbook Seastrands was published in Vagabond Press’s Rare Objects series in 2011, and she is the editor of Thirty Australian Poets (UQP, 2011).

A former ABR Fellow, she first wrote for the magazine in 2010.

The ABR Fellowships are intended to reward fine Australian writers and critics, and to advance the magazine’s contribution to critical debate.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of all the ABR Patrons.

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‘Well, there are other publishing companies’ On MUP and the resilience of non-fiction publishing

by Dominic Kelly

T

he University of Melbourne’s announcement on 30 January 2019 that Melbourne University Publishing would henceforth ‘refocus on being a high-quality scholarly press in support of the University’s mission of excellence in teaching and research’, which led to the resignations of its chief executive, Louise Adler, and five other board members, was just three days old when one of the more absurd responses was floated as a serious option.

On February 2, The Age reported that Senator (and MUP author) Kim Carr had flagged the possibility of a future Labor government providing seed funding to continue MUP’s model of popular publishing elsewhere.

Like many politicians and journalists, but few other Australians, Carr was deeply concerned about the prospect of MUP no longer publishing political memoirs and general-interest books, and instead focusing on scholarly works. ‘To ensure we protect political culture and debate’, he stated, government intervention was required. Carr’s long-time political foe, Liberal minister (and MUP author) Christopher Pyne, put aside partisanship and expressed support.

Thankfully, things have settled since then and a number of more thoughtful contributions have emerged.

But the inanity of the debate in those first few days was troubling and revealed a deep schism concerning MUP’s role in the Australian publishing industry. On one side were figures from politics and the media, who tend to see MUP’s trade publishing as some sort of unique, benevolent gift, both to the university in the form of healthy sales, and to the nation in the form of serious non-fiction books that tell our stories back to us. On the other side were academics, many of whom were dismayed

by MUP’s direction under Adler and see the shake-up as a positive development. Caught in the middle of this messy, emotive debate were MUP’s rival publishers, of both the scholarly and more commercially oriented kind.

First to decry the University of Melbourne’s decision was Bob Carr, one of the five departing board members.

Carr, an MUP author, has long fancied himself as a man of Australian letters. He sits on the board of Australia’s largest bookseller Dymocks, and in 2008 published My Reading Life: Adventures in the world of books. But Carr betrayed a deep strain of anti-intellectualism when he COMMENT

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predicted that the changes to MUP would result in its day, Dodd published his own thoughts, and appeared shrinking to a ‘pocket-sized and cloistered publisher of to be bamboozled by Maskell’s explanation. ‘The funacademic scripts’. This is almost certainly untrue, but his damental problem with the MUP decision is that it’s comments were instructive, revealing how little regard a hard to discern its philosophical or strategic base,’ he board member of Australia’s largest university press has wrote. ‘We are no closer to understanding why the MUP decision was made.’ It’s worrying to think that one of for scholarly publishing.

As with any debate involving the so-called ‘ivory the few journalists in Australia dedicated to reporting tower’ of academia, the spectre of élitism hovered. on higher education seems incapable of understanding Historian (and MUP author) James Curran broke how academics regard their own industry.

Let’s be clear here. The problem many academics ranks and accused many in his profession of ‘flicking have had with MUP over the switch to stratospheric the past decade or more is snobbery’ in their criticism The inanity of the debate in those that it has published books of some of MUP’s popular of little cultural value. (Untitles. In a piece ostensibly first few days revealed a deep schism fortunately, this issue was disapproving of condescenconcerning MUP’s role in the muddied by the use of the sion, journalist and author Australian publishing industry term ‘airport trash’, which Peter Hoysted, aka Jack implied that only low-brow the Insider, sneered in The Australian at an academic world that ‘holds a derisive books are sold in airport bookshops, which is demonview of the world outside its comfy confines’. Hoysted strably untrue.) To suggest that a university press should concluded by arguing that the week’s events revealed not show discernment in what it publishes is little ‘the disconnect between academia and the real world, a more than faux-populist philistinism. Blonde Ambition: world academics rarely enter into and understand even Roxy Jacenko unfiltered. Bettina Arndt’s sex advice. The less’. Here, I wasn’t sure whether we were still talking Gangland true-crime series. Kirstie Clements’s fashion about the University of Melbourne in 2019 or Oxbridge industry memoirs. The cookery books of fashionable restaurateur Shannon Bennett. The most infamous of in the nineteenth century.

Meanwhile, the news coverage continued to em- MUP’s books was I, Mick Gatto, which, as UNSW Press phasise the widespread dismay among journalists and publisher Phillipa McGuinness commented in Inside politicians, while neglecting the views of academics. The Story, ‘became shorthand for everything that was wrong Age quoted former publisher Hilary McPhee criticis- with MUP’. If readers want these books, publishers ing ‘irritated’ academics, who, she claimed, envied the should supply them. But in what strange world do they sales figures of more commercially successful authors. belong on the list of a university press?

The standard explanation for this populist strategy is No such academics were interviewed to test McPhee’s claims. Had more views from within the academy been that commercially successful titles help to subsidise the sought, journalists might have begun to understand why generally unprofitable business of scholarly publishing. the disappointment of their industry colleagues (mostly However, MUP has remained overwhelmingly reliant on a generous $1.25 million annual subsidy from the MUP authors) was not the entire story.

The worst offender in this regard was The Austra- University of Melbourne, and only began to post modest lian’s higher education editor, Tim Dodd. On February profits in 2017. As Hardie Grant Books chief executive 6, the newspaper published an article by the University Sandy Grant noted in an interview on RN’s Saturday of Melbourne’s new vice-chancellor, Duncan Maskell, Extra (February 9), popular titles generally involve large in which he reiterated that MUP was not being turned advances, meaning that the margins remain extremely on its head but simply being directed to ‘refocus’ on its tight. So the strategy was not succeeding on its own terms, while also contributing to the decline of MUP’s core mission: reputation. Additionally, there is the issue of the limited resources available to a small operation like MUP (media MUP will commission leading scholars and authors, reports inform us that it employs fourteen permanent cultivate young researchers of promise and will popstaff ). Each book requires a significant investment in ularise academic research for a broad readership. The new editing, design, promotion, and other support. Time MUP list will include books that have a serious research devoted to another instalment of Gangland distracts component that ensures lasting value. There will also be from the dissemination of scholarly work to the wider books in the political and current affairs space, some by community. people who are not academics; great political biographies MUP chairman Laurie Muller, who also resigned, can have a place at the new MUP. The publishing house claimed in July 2018 that the university’s push for more will focus on high-quality works and be available to the academic publishing was ‘unexpected’, but he was conwidest possible audience. tradicted last week by his predecessor Peter McPhee, Fairly clear, I would have thought. Yet on the same who was chairman from 2011 to 2017. McPhee told The 20 MARCH 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Guardian that the board ‘made a very deliberate decision in 2012 that we were only going to publish books that the university community would feel comfortable with’. Several of the books listed above were published following the 2012 review. One gets the feeling that the new guideline was quickly forgotten.

None of the aggrieved board members can convincingly claim that they were unaware of disquiet about the quality of MUP’s list.

To be fair, the alarm of politicians and journalists was not about the potential loss of these low-brow titles, but rather about the future of their own and their colleagues’ books, predominantly political memoirs and works of long-form journalism.

When MUP author Gillian Triggs, another of the board members to resign, appeared on RN Drive, she was asked by Patricia Karvelas about the outlook for books like Louise Milligan’s award-winning Cardinal: The rise and fall of George Pell. ‘Well, there are other publishing companies,’ she replied. Quite.

This exchange highlighted another remarkable aspect of the debate: the notion, seemingly prevalent among journalists, that MUP is the only publisher of serious non-fiction in Australia. Just how narrow are these people’s reading habits?

This brings us to the other key constituency that has largely been ignored in the past fortnight: other university presses. There are a number of such houses across Australia, but followers of the MUP debate would be forgiven for being unaware of their existence. In the words of UWA Publishing’s director Terri-ann White, ‘the vibrant intellectual work of university publishing houses in Australia momentarily appeared obliterated’. Like all university presses, UWA Publishing navigates a tricky path between providing serious scholarship and reaching the widest possible readership. ‘All of us take very seriously the injunction of the third pillar of the modern university: engagement with the community,’ says White. But the MUP debate made it seem ‘as if you could only be one thing or another: boring scholarly or racy populist’.

With its successful NewSouth imprint, UNSW Press have also pursued a hybrid model, bridging the perceived divide between the academy and the public.

Like White, UNSW Press chief executive Kathy Bail

views the idea of a binary between trade and scholarly books as false. Each university press strives to find the mix that works for them. Asked if NewSouth would ever go down a populist path similar to MUP’s, Bail says that they have never had the budget to pay the hefty advances that come with that approach, so the question is moot.

What, then, will the ‘refocused’ MUP look like? For the pessimists, something akin to Bob Carr’s alarmist vision quoted above, or, in Peter Hoysted’s words, a return to the 1980s, ‘with odd, dandruffspeckled sales men and women forlornly flogging a list that no one wants’. Even after Duncan Maskell stated on the record that crossover publishing would continue at MUP, Laurie Muller claimed that it is ‘reasonable to conclude that MUP’s wider publishing of books of topical, social and cultural interest will be no longer’.

To date, the only casualty has been the cancellation of disgraced Border Force boss Roman Quaedvlieg’s Tour de Force, which may not be a serious loss if his rhetorical incontinence on Twitter is any guide to the manuscript’s content. For the optimists (and I’m one of them), it’s possible that, in addition to providing more support for scholarly publishing, MUP will eschew facile memoirs and true crime in favour of substantial works of history and biography written for a general readership. Fine recent books that fit this description include Frank Bongiorno’s The Eighties (Black Inc., 2015), Judith Brett’s The Enigmatic Mr Deakin (Text, 2017), Clare Wright’s You Daughters of Freedom (Text, 2018), and Patrick Mullins’s Tiberius with a Telephone (Scribe, 2018).

Regardless of whether books of this calibre return to the MUP fold or continue to be the preserve of its rivals, readers can rest easy. The rumours about the death of serious Australian non-fiction have been greatly exaggerated. g Dominic Kelly is an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe University. He is the author of Political Troglodytes and Economic Lunatics: The hard right in Australia (La Trobe University Press, 2019). v COMMENT

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‘One little piece of earth’ Dissecting Australia’s housing crisis

Tom Bamforth NO PLACE LIKE HOME: REPAIRING AUSTRALIA’S HOUSING CRISIS

by Peter Mares Text Publishing, $32.99 pb, 318 pp, 9781925603873

I

n his analysis of Australia’s growing urban inequality, Peter Mares recounts a conversation with a homeless man outside a train station while Mares was walking his dog. The dog is well fed and has a warm place to sleep, but Mares can only give the man a few coins. These are implicit priorities we all share. Why, asks Mares, do Australians unhesitatingly spend $750 million annually on a ‘flutter on the neddies’ at the Melbourne Cup rather than on housing our fellow citizens? The policy discussions, political posturing, and expert advice on Australia’s housing crisis are hard to follow and often contradictory.

‘I am surely not alone,’ he writes, ‘in being perplexed by the radically divergent views in this debate.’ No Place Like Home is a compassionate, clear-eyed unpicking of one of contemporary Australia’s ‘wicked problems’.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 116,000 people were homeless on census night. Yet, of a larger group of people who move in and out of a cycle of homelessness, ‘rough sleepers’ are only the most visible.

Others might stay with friends or family, couch surf, or find temporary accommodation in hostels or refuges. Homelessness is compounded by wider social problems, and it is not just about a lack of housing. In 2016–17, forty per cent of people seeking assistance from specialist homelessness services were doing so to escape family violence. In total, two and a half million Australians have experienced homelessness at some time in their lives, according to ABS figures.

In his book The Forgotten People (1943), Robert Menzies articulated a vision of homeownership that has remained central to the Australian dream.

22 MARCH 2019

‘One of the best instincts in us,’ he wrote in 1944, ‘is that which induces us to have one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours.’ The wider experience of housing stress means that Menzies’ ‘forgotten people’ – the ‘salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers, and so on’ – can now no longer afford to rent, much less to own, their ‘little piece of land’. Rates of homeownership in Australia have continued to fall. When Menzies stepped down in 1966, home ownership was seventy-one percent but had fallen to an all time low of 65.4 per cent in the 2016 census, decreasing sharply from 68.1 per cent in the decade since 2006. Yet home ownership is core to Australia’s political DNA. Whether the crisis is caused by immigration, urban population growth, shortage of housing stock, planning regulations, zoning laws, low urban density, negative gearing, low wages growth, lack of rental protection, miserly social welfare provisions, wealthy overseas investors, a tax regime that exempts the ‘family home’, or over-investment by the young in smashed avocado (according to Bernard Salt in The Australian) depends on your ideological predisposition. John Howard famously observed: ‘I don’t get people stopping me in the street and saying, “John you’re outrageous, under your government the value of my house has increased”.’ For former Treasurer Joe Hockey, buying a house was a question of ‘getting a good job that pays good money’, advice he has taken for himself at considerable public expense.

For Malcolm Turnbull, as for Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, the real problem lies with a lack of new dwellings.

What is clear, however, is that policy

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

settings and political culture are a long way behind ensuring adequate housing for all. ‘Politics,’ as Liberal politician and housing advocate John Alexander observes, ‘stuffs things up.’

While Mares delves into these debates and casts light on their oftencomplex interactions, his starting point is the housing experience of the people he knows. Encounters with renters, owners, investors, policy-makers, real estate agents, social workers, and housing advocates recur throughout the book and make the intricacies of housing policy compellingly humane.

Underpinning Mares’s investigation is a comparative experience with his former flatmate Carolyn. They were renting together in the early 1980s when Carolyn prophesied, with broad accuracy, that Mares would become a ‘Volvodriving academic’. Mares duly became a homeowner and entered the ranks of middle-class solidity, and he will eventually pass on his assets to his children.

They will receive their share of around $407 billion in intergenerational wealth transfer from baby boomers by 2025.

In contrast, Carolyn, a single mother of two, continued renting. She lives in housing stress and faces an uncertain future, enduring the humiliating tactics of estate agents, for whom renters often are second-class citizens. ‘Housing stress’ is broadly defined as paying more than thirty per cent of household income on rent. Had Carolyn been on government benefits, this figure would have risen to between sixty and one hundred per cent of income spent on rent.

The Productivity Commission estimates that fifty-three per cent of low-income households live in rental stress. Why? In Australia’s ‘Game of Homes’,

housing is a financial product, not a can’ McMansions, local residents have home and advocates the capital gains place of one’s own. The primary resi- often opposed greater density, fearing tax, the abolition of negative gearing, dence is exempt from any form of capital that it will lower prices and alter local and the introduction of a broad-based gains, wealth, or inheritance tax, and character. property tax (as has been adopted in the has almost no impact on penACT) in place of stamp duty, as sion entitlements. Mares estiwell as protecting long-term rentmates that these tax concessions als as a viable form of tenure, as is could be worth $100 billion done in Europe. The development per year. Australia’s housing of mixed-occupancy community boom, based on equity from (as opposed to social) housing, the private home, ensures that increased funding in rental asproperty developers build invessistance programs for low-income tor assets, rather than affordable earners, and the promotion of houses. In the indiscriminate long-term, build-to-rent dedepositing of city apartment velopments would ensure more blocks (‘birdshit architecture’, affordable and accessible housing according to urban theorist Jan stock.

Gehl) and in developments No Place Like Home is a superb such as Fisherman’s Bend in dissection of Australia’s housing Street art in Melbourne, 2009 (Photograph by Fernando de Victoria, developers build for crisis. Sadly, Mares’s modest Sousa via Wikimedia Commons) the affluent, who seek a spot on reforms will be far too bold for If Australia is to build the estimated either of the main political parties in the ‘housing escalator’ to wealth. While city centres grow taller and suburbs 200,000 affordable dwellings required upcoming elections. g on the urban periphery expand, there to relieve current housing pressure, is a problem of the ‘missing middle’. a more sophisticated approach is Tom Bamforth is a writer and aid Despite the fact that the older leafy needed. Mares offers a palette of well- worker. He is a Visiting Professor in charm of areas such as Melbourne’s considered policy options. He questions the School of Architecture & Urban inner-east is being replaced by ‘Tus- the excessive protections on the private Design at RMIT. v

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SOCIETY

23

Smudged Francesca Sasnaitis LUCIDA INTERVALLA

John Kinsella

UWA Publishing $24.99 pb, 240 pp, 9781760800079

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ccording to the online resource Climate Action Tracker, Australia’s emissions from fossil fuels and industry continue to rise and are heading for an increase of nine per cent above 2005 levels by 2030, rather than the fifteen to seventeen per cent decrease in emissions required to meet Australia’s Paris Agreement target.

What this means for our environment and how the changes will manifest is a matter for speculation.

Lucida Intervalla is set in that notso-distant future: the atmosphere is ‘smudged’; Centralia is the barren heart; posting, tweeting, and messaging are out of control; surgical and genetic modification has brought humanity a step closer to immortality. The joke is that Perth hasn’t changed that much. But this is not a typical ‘pisstake’ (the title of one of its many short chapters) in the style of Ben Elton’s Stark (1989), though the themes are similar. Acclaimed eco-poet and self-confessed anarchist John Kinsella lampoons big business, ignorant government, and ineffectual activism almost as an aside, a habitual response to a culture and society he finds inexplicable at best and reprehensible as a whole.

Fundamentally, Lucida Intervalla – disjunctive and impressionistic in structure, admittedly ‘composed over many years’ – sees the author in thrall to language and ideas. Kinsella credits the life and writings of philosopher Søren Kierkegaard for inspiring the distortions, digressions, narrative manipulations, 24 MARCH 2019

and pyrotechnic excesses of literary and artistic allusion in which he revels.

As for the anti-heroine of this, his third novel, Lucida Intervalla appears to be the apotheosis of everything Kinsella detests. Self-serving and superficial, she is without moral compass. In her greed for fame, experience, power, and money at the expense of everything around her, she is the poster girl for post-feminist despotism, amusing at first but horrifying in retrospect. She is an exasperating figment of her creator’s imagination, his alter ego and his nemesis. And yet Kinsella endows this egomaniacal character with pathos, a backstory that explains, though does not excuse, the development of his digital-age Machiavelli.

Lucida is a slippery character. Her name means ‘lucid moment’ in Latin and refers to periods of temporary sanity between bouts of madness. It cannot be a coincidence that her name is also the title of a collection of doggerel verse written in 1679 by James Carkesse, the inmate of an insane asylum. Both heartless and hurt, Lucida has translated herself from a misunderstood and neglected child into an arch media manipulator and artist, an interpreter and appropriator of other artists’ work.

In Kinsella’s game, Lucida is both the star of the show and the audience of her own celebrity. Will the real Lucida Intervalla please stand up? Kinsella matches aspects of her personality to typefaces from a font group that includes Lucida Bright, Lucida Blackletter (a gothic script), and Lucida Sans. It’s a pity the publication doesn’t make use of the various font styles. Perhaps that would have been overkill in an already overabundant text.

The artist known as Duke is Lucida’s primary source before he disappears, and she is accused of his murder.

He is as evasive as Lucida, ‘searching for what he calls the “ineffable”’. Descriptions of his art recall, in turn, a feral John Wolseley wielding charcoal from his own campfire, exponents of the CoBrA style, a poor imitation of Robert Smithson, conventional landscape artists, and the best of Sidney Nolan. He appears as an iteration of Kierkegaard transplanted to an antipodean landscape.

There are references to a Victor Emerita

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

(Latin for ‘victorious hermit’), the pseudonymous editor of Either/Or, and to a Climacus, the pseudonymous author of De omnibus dubitandum est (everything must be doubted), a title Kinsella surely intended as a sign that everything is open to interpretation. And not forgetting the original Saint John Climacus, the sixth- or seventh-century monk whose Ladder of Divine Ascent is obliquely referenced in a joke Lucida makes about her laddered stocking not being the pathway to Paradise. Climacus is also credited with the ascetic practice of carrying a small notebook in which to record one’s thoughts, a habit I imagine Kinsella adopted long ago.

Duke does complain of being ‘tired of translation’. Before the Danes adopted him, he was a simple ‘sou’-west coast and forest boy from the tall timbers and hippy commune milieu’ of a place called Denmark. At some point in his sketchy past, someone must have mistaken the Western Australian town for the nation state and allowed the Danes to claim him in perpetuity. Perhaps his disappearance can be explained by a desire to return to the anonymity of his youth, pre-Lucida and her mistranslations of his life.

It is not a spoiler to reveal that the novel ends with the hilarious image of a deified Lucida reading Aristophanes’s satire The Clouds to her parrots. That Kinsella does not provide a translation from the ancient Greek hardly matters.

The clue to deciphering Lucida Intervalla lies in the conclusion of the play, a wanton act of destruction that sees reason symbolically reduced to ashes, and that can be read as a warning from Kinsella of the imminent apocalypse.

Lucida Intervalla is a cryptic vision of the future and undeniably dependent on the references each reader brings.

It could mean the difference between plunging into a purgatory of impenetrable allusion or delighting in the dizzying heights of infinite interconnectedness.

In either case, the reader will be left gobsmacked by what is Kinsella’s most extravagant, experimental achievement to date. g Francesca Sasnaitis is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at UWA.

Father man James Ley EXPLODED VIEW

by Carrie Tiffany Text Publishing

$29.99 pb, 192 pp, 9781925773415

T

he term ‘exploded view’ refers to an image in a technical manual that shows all the individual parts of a machine, separates them out, but arranges them on the page so that you can see how they fit together. As the title of Carrie Tiffany’s new novel, it can be interpreted as a definitive metaphor and perhaps, in a somewhat looser sense, an analogy for her evocative technique. Various things happen over the course of Exploded View, some of them dramatic, but the novel has little in the way of a conventional plot. Its characters exist in relation to one another, but they barely interact.

There is almost no dialogue. It is the kind of novel in which the psychological and emotional unease is displaced or buried beneath the matter-of-fact narration.

What makes it distinctive is that much of this unease is not conveyed via insinuating moments of dramatic tension; it is approached figuratively and analytically, disassembled using the the novel’s central metaphor as a mechanism. Exploded View draws out the multiple implications of the idea that a nuclear family can be understood as kind of machine, consisting of separate but interlocking parts.

It develops this simple analogy into the kind of extended conceit one associates with the metaphysical poets. It reflects on how the individual components fit together, how they function as a single entity, and, more to the point, what might cause such a finely attuned piece of machinery to break down.

Exploded View is narrated by an unnamed teenage girl, who lives with her mother, her brother, and her stepfather, whom she refers to as ‘father man’. She signals her resentment at father man’s controlling presence by retreating into herself and refusing to talk. ‘You have

to stop listening to yourself to be able to speak,’ she thinks. ‘You are only lost to others – not inside yourself.’

From this position of wilful detachment, she views the world as a succession of images and disjointed scenes, which she records in neutral, precisely observed, sometimes fragmented, but invariably elegant sentences. Everything in the novel is filtered through her singular consciousness. She possesses an intelligence that is disinterested and logical, yet always alert to metaphorical implication. Her peculiar mode of perception, at once systematic and analogous, collapses the distinction between the rational and the emotional, charging her observations with double meanings.

Tiffany’s mechanically minded narrator often slips into the dry idiom of an engine-repair manual, but her inflected thinking makes even these apparently affectless remarks seem like wise saws: ‘Every car is a collection of failures waiting for their time and place’; ‘When a part is damaged all of the surrounding parts are put at risk. The site of the fresh damage can be far removed, in time and place, from the cause.’

The novel’s defining conflict – between the narrator and father man – is enacted at arm’s length, indirectly for the most part, almost as a curious kind of allegory or fable. He is a mechanic by trade, and she is also attracted to the intricacy and elegant logic of machinery, schooling herself with an old Holden manual she keeps under her bed. ‘In a manual, everything is straight,’ she thinks. ‘Everything is clean. A pure view.’ But in telling her how to put an engine together, the manual also teaches her how to identify its weaknesses, how to coax it apart. It provides her with a means of subversion. She rebels against father man by sneaking out at night and tampering with the cars he repairs for a living (he expresses his hostility in a much more crude fashion by chopping off her ponytail).

Exploded View is an offbeat comingof-age story. Its middle section describes a hypnotic trans-continental road trip undertaken at the insistence of father man, which traps the family in their car – ‘the ideal container for a family’, because it fixes everyone in place, even

when they are travelling to a new destination – and places them squarely under his control: ‘When father man gets behind the wheel the car becomes included in his body, so that the outer edge of the car becomes his outer edge, even with us inside.’ The novel dramatises the narrator’s desire to break out of this enclosing family structure and seize control of the machinery of life for herself, something that is expressed most effectively through Tiffany’s perpetual awareness of the various ways in which her dominant metaphors are conventionally gendered – a phenomenon that usually devolves into the false assumption that men are logical and women are emotional. (‘There isn’t much that’s female in an engine,’ the narrator muses early in the novel.) Tiffany does nothing so banal as point out that these stereotypes are patently untrue. She co-opts and manipulates them, plays scientific and poetic understandings against each other, conflates their notionally opposed logics in order to make them speak of her narrator’s burgeoning sexuality and discontentment.

Tiffany’s interest in the expressive potential of mechanistic or taxonomical modes of discourse has been a feature of all three of her novels to date. In Exploded View, she has honed her technique to produce a work that has a late-modernist density. The figurative yet scrupulously unemotive language is remarkably efficient; there is hardly a detail that does not reverberate beyond itself, evoke some deeper implication. What the novel lacks in narrative momentum, it more than makes up for in the refinements of its style and imagery. g

James Ley is an essayist and literary critic who lives in Melbourne.

FICTION

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26 MARCH 2019

readings.com.au

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Loops and folds Kerryn Goldsworthy THE YEAR OF THE BEAST

by Steven Carroll

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Fourth Estate $29.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781460757697

n his 2017 essay ‘Notes for a Novel’, illuminatingly added as a kind of afterword at the end of this book, Steven Carroll recalls a dream that he had twenty years ago. It was this dream, he says, that grew into a series of novels centred on the Melbourne suburb of Glenroy, a series of which this novel is the sixth and last. It was a vivid dream about my old street in Glenroy where I grew up. In the dream my father (who is now dead), my mother and I were standing on the street … it was a Saturday night in 1957 …

We all had our best clothes on … The vividness and the urgency of the dream prompted a novel that, over three drafts, eventually became The Art of the Engine Driver [2001].

With four more novels in between, set at various times over the twentieth century but always featuring the same three main characters – Vic, Rita, and Michael, a father, a mother, and a son – Carroll has chosen with this final novel in the series to return to the beginning of the story, to the conception and birth of Vic the engine driver in the terrible year of 1917.

The opening scene takes place in October of that year, when a woman called Maryanne, a thirty-nine-year-old spinster, pregnant with the child of a country-town German draper who will not marry her, is standing on the edge of a crowd in the Melbourne CBD. The occasion is a street rally about the contentious second ‘referendum’ on wartime conscription (more accurately called a plebiscite since it involved no change to the Constitution) that bitterly divided an Australian society already in a state of collective anxiety and civil unrest.

This first section of the novel is titled ‘Festival of the Id’. In the open-

ing scene, Carroll concentrates more on the crowd than on his main character, musing on the forces behind its ugly, mindless mood and its hovering on the edge of violence. In ‘Notes for a Novel’, Carroll discusses the central importance of Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents to his thinking about this novel: Freud argues, compellingly, that although we may pride ourselves on being civilised … we must suppress the pleasure seeking, anarchic, primal part of ourselves or no cooperative social enterprise can be successful … But every now and then there is a mass outbreak of the primal and the Id erupts into pleasure seeking, death desiring life. For death … is the Id’s ultimate pleasure: that something final that it craves.

The crowd in the Melbourne CBD on an October day in 1917 is the Id made manifest, the Beast of the title, something Carroll proclaims overtly perhaps a little too often. If this novel has a weakness, it is Carroll’s overreliance on a style that has characterised the Glenroy novels: one that relies on repetition of particular words or motifs, which, when overused, come to seem artificial and forced.

Carroll’s style, while not ornate or pretentious, nonetheless has an incantatory or even sometimes biblical quality in its rhythms. This too can become intrusive, with its many declarative sentences beginning with ‘And’. Sometimes there are five or six of these to a page, creating an overly portentous tone that often isn’t justified by the subject matter.

Carroll has written about his reasons for using such a style, of wanting to avoid the simple social realism traditionally associated with fiction about workingclass people. But having a good reason for a particular stylistic approach doesn’t guarantee that it will always work.

This style is at its most intrusive in the reflective passages, but all of the novel’s scenes of action are focused and intense, and some of them are brilliantly and movingly written. The scene of baby Vic’s conception, which takes place between the illicit lovers in a small teacher’s room at the back of the schoolhouse in a country town, more

than fulfils Carroll’s stated ambition of showing the extraordinary beneath the ordinariness of most people’s lives: ‘You look different. Sitting there,’ he said slowly …

‘How? How do I look different?’

‘Schöne,’ he said, almost in a dream.

‘Schöne Frau.’

Such strange-sounding words. The language of the enemy. But wonderful.

Other precisely imagined and intensely conveyed scenes include: Maryanne’s delivery of a fateful letter to a rich woman’s house; her sister Katherine’s departure after the baby is born; and the horrifying scene in which Father Gheogan instructs Maryanne that she must put herself in the care of the Church and give up her baby to a foundling home: ‘the priest roaring at her like a three-headed dog’. All of these scenes combine a richly cinematic quality with complex interiority.

As with all of the earlier Glenroy novels, this final one concerns itself with the ominpresence of history in our lives: with time and its loops and folds in the connections between past and present. The whole six-part family saga unfolds from that moment in the back room of the schoolhouse where Maryanne is called beautiful in a foreign language by a man who never comes to know his son. Like many of his contemporaries in real life, Vic is, in a sense, sui generis: a child not of easily traceable lineage either humble or noble, but rather of the new country itself. g

Kerryn Goldsworthy won the 2013 Pascall Prize for cultural criticism, and the 2017 Horne Prize for her essay ‘The Limit of the World’.

FICTION

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Ancient falls Chris Murray FUSION

by Kate Richards

Hamish Hamilton $32.99 pb, 291 pp, 9781926428703

F

usion is the fiction début from the author of the acclaimed Madness: A memoir (2013). It draws on Australian gothic and older gothic traditions. With the meditative possibilities of walking alpine ranges, it also portrays claustrophobia and compulsion.

Its drama centres on a small and wounded cast, a reclusive household that suddenly encounters the outside world.

Conjoined twins Sea and Serene share a life that, although secluded, is vibrant with sensory information and memory. The past, a childhood of barbaric treatment at the hands of nuns and classmates at Hope Home, lingers in their minds. Cruelty has driven the twins to their quiet home on Blindeye Creek. One of the few intimate relationships they experience lies in the connection to their environment, which, in turn, links the twins to those who have walked these mountains before: This land is a sentient being with an enormous elemental power, fierce spirit – holy and unholy both – above and below, all round and beyond us. The Jaithmathang people, Bidawal people, the Dhudhuroa people knew this well.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of years before us. Their songlines still criss-cross the earth where the Lightning folk walked before they all became stars.

Otherwise, Sea and Serene’s companion is their cousin, the self-pitying 28 MARCH 2019

Wren. His own history of childhood abuse and professional disappointment brought him to the twins’ doorstep some years previously. They welcomed him as a saviour who taught them to fish and preserve vegetables. Since then, the three have lived almost self-sufficiently. They touch community only through Wren’s trips to the nearby town of Swiggin, where he sells home-produced cannabis and lemon liqueur, and where he drinks.

One evening Wren returns with company. There has been an accident on the road. The victim is a beautiful woman, seriously injured, who is at first feverish and subsequently suffers amnesia. The twins name her Christ.

With her arrival they feel a new sense of purpose. While they rejoice in their opportunity to tend to the newcomer, it is clear that Christ, too, is running from something. Moreover, the spell she casts threatens to destabilise the strange family of Sea, Serene, and Wren. The harmonious dynamic changes as Christ’s new perspectives cause the revision of longheld opinions and affection is contested.

As the patient recovers, she is torn between the soothing escapism offered in her new home and the wish to know herself. The others must decide between helping Christ and keeping her for themselves. The novel will uncover Christ’s past and simultaneously delve into Wren’s and the twins’ suffering. Aspects of these histories remain frustratingly fragmentary rather than tantalisingly so; the characters tend to relive old episodes as emotional experience. The characters’ main work is not to retell, but to struggle for self-acceptance and resolution. On this journey there are glimpses of ancient falls, humiliations, and punishments.

The focus remains on the twins.

Much of the novel is narrated in their first-person plural, which comes apart, significantly, amid the upheaval brought

by Christ. Their encyclopedia tells Sea and Serene that they are not ‘viable’. Yet they live, provoking reflections on what such enforced codependence must entail.

Fusion probes the psychological and practical implications of life as dicephalic parapagus twins, from whocontrols-which shared limbs to whether or not Sea and Serene are of the same

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

mind. To Wren, who wished to become an engineer, the twins’ relationship is a form of ‘quantum entanglement’: If you try to interact with one particle by itself, without the other, they both collapse into nothing ... Every single thing one of the particles does is relative to what the other is doing. Every infinitesimal flicker of breath and every muscle tensing and relaxing every nerve firing, every little thought.

Christ disagrees. In addition to the scientific evaluations they read, the twins contemplate a lifetime of judgments inflected with superstition and fear of the other. Sea and Serene have been called monsters and a monster. As in Frankenstein, we contemplate the inhumanity that underlies instinctive revulsion at the unfamiliar: ‘Who decides which human form is good and right and which human form is not? Are we a whole divided wrongly, never to be made whole again? … Are we indeed a freak?’

From their friendship with Christ, Sea and Serene recognise the eye of the beholder for the first time. Yet Richards could have made more of the characters’ personal demons in a book that is long for a fable. Given the straightforwardness of the plot, the novel would benefit from greater inner turmoil as opposed to dilemma. We are in a psychological genre. There’s a great deal of psychology in Fusion, but both the inner and outer journeys move in rather obvious directions.

Above all, Fusion is a reflection on love and how the manifestations of it range from self-sacrifice to selfishness.

As girls who share limbs, Sea and Serene devise a system to ensure that they reach the bathroom every morning. As adults, they wonder whether they are separate in ways that had never previously occurred to them. It may be that their long-standing habits of thought and movement must change. In the twins’ routine is a potent allegory for any meaningful human bond, which must be cooperative in order to survive. g Chris Murray is a lecturer at Monash University. His memoir, Crippled Immortals, was published in 2018. v

Kent and Cook Susan Sheridan BEYOND WORDS: A YEAR WITH KENNETH COOK

by Jacqueline Kent

University of Queensland Press $29.95 hb, 247 pp, 9780702260391

K

enneth Cook (1929-87) was a prolific author best known for his first novel, Wake in Fright (1961), which was based on his experience as a young journalist in Broken Hill in the 1950s. In January 1972, as I sat in a London cinema watching the film made from this novel by director Ted Kotcheff, its nightmare vision of outback life seared itself into my brain. I was about to return home to Australia after two and a half years away, and I wondered why on earth I had made the fateful decision to go back to a place as violent and cruel as this.

Wake in Fright exemplifies the tradition of Australian bush Gothic, with its themes of entrapment, madness, sexual violence, and massacre (in this case, of kangaroos). Its small-town setting links it with Thea Astley’s novels dealing with the rituals of male violence and the humiliation of schoolteachers and other purveyors of culture beyond city limits. The restoration and rerelease of the film in 2009 again drew shocked and fascinated responses; since then, both book and film are frequently taught in Australian literature courses.

Because of the success of the film, it has been Cook’s fate to be remembered as a one-book writer. Yet he claimed it was just a story that had to be told, one that he soon left behind in a career that spanned writing novels and stories, journalism, television and stage plays, founding a film production company, speculating in real estate, and running a butterfly farm.

Beyond Words is Jacqueline Kent’s memoir of her intense relationship with Cook, a man twenty years her senior.

They had been married only a few months when he died of a heart attack, at the age of fifty-seven, on a road trip in western New South Wales. A ‘lay

alcoholic’ (his self-description) and a chain smoker, he had already come perilously close to having a heart attack, and suffered an unacknowledged degree of stress over the end of his first marriage and his bankruptcy.

They met when Kent was employed to edit his comic bush stories, Killer Koala. There was an initial sparring match over the telephone about what this process would involve: ‘Ms Kent …

I am not used to being edited. My characters do not exclaim, they do not snort, wince in speech, respond, or chuckle and gibber’. He invited her to what turned out to be a long and boozy lunch.

Reading his stories the next day, she was intrigued to find that their humour emanated from the same sensibility that had produced the ‘grimly nihilistic’ Wake in Fright.

They were opposites in many ways.

He was a knockabout writer, a man of many enthusiasms, while she was a university-educated freelance editor with literary ambitions. He was a declared bankrupt, an estranged husband, and the father of four adult children, while she was ‘an independent household of one’. They shared political views formed by opposition to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. They shared jokes and stories. There was clearly a strong sexual attraction between them. Above all, they shared a life in the literary world in the 1980s when it was the ‘rather lunatic, passionate industry’ that preceded ‘the relatively pinched, cautious literary world of today’.

Kent writes of her younger self: ‘It’s very easy to get a name for independence of mind when you don’t really engage with the messiness of life. And this I think is exactly what I had done: I had shielded myself behind a wall of books and a regulated pattern of work.’

The memoir traces the stages by which her orderly life and Cook’s messy one merged, so briefly and dramatically.

At key moments he called the shots, moving their friendship into a sexual relationship, proposing that they leave her tiny, much-loved apartment to buy a new place nearer to his family; deciding to get married; even going on the road trip that turned out to be their last time together. Yet while he challenged

the independence she valued so highly, he also admitted to a few uncertainties of his own – about the age difference between them, and whether she would want to have a child. Still, he was not one to talk freely about his earlier life or to exchange the kind of confidences that she had expected; and some of his attitudes – to money, for example, and even to literature – left her puzzled.

In a relationship so concentrated into a short space of time, many questions, inevitably, remained.

Since her husband’s death, Kent has made her name as an award-winning biographer – of publisher Beatrice Davis, of musician Hephzibah Menuhin, and, most recently, of Julia Gillard – and has also published a number of Young Adult novels. Turning her hand to memoir, she deftly constructs a narrative that dramatises key moments in their story so that she herself is strongly present, but without making herself the centre of the story.

She creates a vivid sense of the man she loved – his humour, his prejudices, his physical and emotional presence; but also his otherness and the things he hid from her. Regret is inevitably part of mourning the loss of someone deeply loved, and she bravely lists the things she wished she had been able to do: to persuade him to look after his health; to find out more about his life and beliefs; to encourage him to write more novels.

All impossible tasks, probably, with the man she has portrayed here – a clever, charming, headstrong, unreconstructed Australian male of his generation. g

Susan Sheridan is Emeritus Professor in the School of Humanities at Flinders University in Adelaide. Her latest book is The Fiction of Thea Astley (2016).

MEMOIR

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Reading pictures

Finding dignity in visual recognition

Alison Stieven-Taylor VISUALISING HUMAN RIGHTS edited by Jane Lydon

UWA Publishing, $34.99 pb, 188 pp, 9781742589978

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ow do you visually portray a concept like human rights?

Much of the scholarship around this question focuses on the idea that to understand what human rights might look like, we have to visualise life without them. Historically, photography has played a significant role in exposing violations of human rights to a mass audience.

Images of King Leopold of Belgium’s vicious rule of the Congo in the mid-1800s, and pictures from the Holocaust, confirmed the import of the picture as a document of evidence. This is an idea that historian Jane Lydon, editor of Visualising Human Rights, affirms in the book’s introduction, where she states that photography is a universal language, one crucial to constructing ‘a shared humanity’.

While discussion on photography dominates Visualising Human Rights (as one would expect), the book also illuminates other approaches to thinking about the role of the visual in shaping collective thought.

Featuring seven essays by scholars and artists, Visualising Human Rights explores ideas of the self-image, memory, selfrepresentation, spectacle, protest, personal narrative, and media censorship.

In ‘The Right to an Image’, Sharon Sliwinski suggests that the pursuit of human rights involves the individual’s ability to shape his or her self-image. Framed by the idea of the ‘social imaginary’, Sliwinski argues that images promote common cultural perceptions, which 30 MARCH 2019

Protschky demonstrates how the soldiers’ pictures ignore the role of the Dutch as colonisers and instead focus on the inhumanity of the revolutionaries.

In this scenario, the Dutch soldiers depict themselves as humanitarians and ‘render invisible’ their complicity in the act of oppression. Here, the photograph stands for both individual and collective memory, constructing a view of history that ‘sanitised Dutch colonial violence’ by portraying the Indonesian republic as incapable of caring for its citizens.

In ‘Sharing a Personal Past: #iwasarefugee #iamarefugee on Instagram,’ Mary Tomsic argues that the public view of refugees is constructed by the media, and that it is rare for refugees to enact self-representation in images. Tomsic presents a case study on Instagram to discuss how former refugees are using social media to counter the homogenised visual portrayal of refugees in mainstream media. On Instagram, individuals who were child refugees and are now adults in their Frederick Douglass (c.1841–45), photographer unknown adopted country are postof passive civil rights protests to argue ing pictures of themselves as children. that, by challenging the visual norm, one By connecting past experiences to the can create a new dialogue. present through the use of hashtags Susie Protschky addresses the idea – #iwasarefugee #iamarefugee – a of human rights through an analysis of broader narrative unfolds where human Dutch soldiers’ personal photographs. rights are found in the dignity of being In ‘Soldiers as Humanitarians: Photo- ‘visually recognised’. graphing war in Indonesia (1945–1949)’ Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugcan be denigrating and one-dimensional. Sliwinski draws on several examples, including abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who used photography in the mid-1800s to dispute the prevailing idea of a ‘Negro type’. She also references American Eve Arnold’s photographs

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

liese address the Australian government’s treatment of asylum seekers in the essay ‘Between Spectacle and Secret: The Politics of Non-Visibility and the Performance of Incompletion’. In their analysis of the 2015 public event Call to Account, which is now also a film, the pair investigates the visual as a performative act of protest. In Call to Account, citizens, non-citizens, and ‘never-to-be citizens’ challenge the Australian government’s refugee policy, which obfuscates through both spectacle and censorship.

In ‘An Avatar of Peace: Commemorating human rights activism’, Vera Mackie explores the affective capacity of a bronze statue of a Korean girl in traditional dress.

Located in Seoul, this statue ‘commemorates the demonstrations that have taken place on that site for over twenty-five years on the issue of militarised sexual abuse perpetuated by the Japanese Army and Navy in the AsiaPacific War’. Mackie reveals how and why interaction with the ‘Peace Monument’ may encourage viewers to participate in ‘further activism on human rights issues’.

Artist Brenda L. Croft shares a very personal journey of discovery as she visually retraces ‘the footprints of her Gurindji/Malgnin/Mudburra relatives who famously walked off Wave Hill pastoral station in the Northern Territory in 1966 on strike’. In ‘home/lands’, Croft’s visual narrative is woven around the story of her father, Joseph Croft, one of the Stolen Generations. Through photography, Croft tells a complex tale of displacement and abuse, identity and kinship, drawing on historical roots that point to contemporary concerns.

The final chapter, ‘“Never Look Away”: Humanitarianism and Australian Newspaper Photographers’ by Fay Anderson, considers the ‘humanitarian impulse/ethos’ in Australian photojournalism. Anderson argues that while newspaper photographers may be personally committed to telling difficult yet important stories, traditionally they have been censored by the commercial and political imperatives of the media. Anderson illuminates the machinations behind the evolution of press photography in Australia, providing important insights gleaned from interviews with past and present photojournalists.

Visualising Human Rights reveals that while photography may be a universal language, it is not the only visual form through which human rights can be imagined. However, at a time when the photograph is omnipotent, this book points to the significance of understanding how to read a picture, comprehend its nuances, and identify its political narrative. By analysing the content, context, and response to images, and by demonstrating the myriad ways in which human rights can be visualised, this book makes an important contribution to advancing visual literacy. g Alison Stieven-Taylor is an international commentator and journalist specialising in photography. Presently a lecturer in journalism at Monash University, she is also writing her PhD on photography as social change.

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PHOTOGRAHY

31

‘The making of Len’

repetitions. Further, his pressuring for curatorial ‘critical reassessment’ of this late artist’s work also tends to pushiness.

The rollicking world of Leonard French The text, apart from some minor editorial slips, rollicks apace, rounded by evocative passages in which you can smell the turps, envisage the colours, and empathise with the artist’s grinding THE BOY FROM BRUNSWICK: exhaustion. Still, one wonders what LEONARD FRENCH, A BIOGRAPHY readership the author has in mind. The

by Reg MacDonald Boy from Brunswick swings from popuAustralian Scholarly Publishing, $69.95 hb, 540 pp, 9781925801392 list, anecdotal, and potted histories of eminent figures and places to insights ld friendships and close col- a persistent recourse to blokey banter, into French’s wilful determination and laborations between author and reflecting French’s ‘long[ing] for male sexist world. Throughout, we observe subject can be either a blessing company’ to record and ruminate over only too painfully how oppressed or a curse in biography – a tightrope his life. The artist’s quest for ‘endur- women were by men and society: we between discretionary tact and open fire. ing monumentality’ in his art is one look back in anger at that postwar era Both call for intimate but when women were balanced subjectivity, esseen as ‘charming’ pecially where virile egos wallpaper and male are concerned. The Boy chauvinism reigned, from Brunswick, a massive particularly in the pub, tome with sixty chapters the élite art world, and 540 pages, offers a bit and beyond. French’s of everything. hard-working mother, Jan Senbergs, who Myrtle, endlessly batknew and admired Leonard tles her argumentaFrench from the 1950s, tive, headstrong son. gives a frank account of Len, convinced that his fellow artist in the he needs to live in orforeword, which makes der to learn how to be for valuable commentary. a great artist, leaves his We are informed by the pregnant wife, Joy, and author, Reg MacDonald, embarks on a postwar that the biography is based grand tour of Britain substantially on extensive – courtesy of Joy’s interviews with the artist one-way ticket. This over a three-year period. pilgrimage is marked Hence, French’s raconby guilt but glitters teur-like voice resonates in the hope of finding throughout the text, in universal origins, anexcellent quotations from cient motifs, and artiscorrespondence between tic authenticity. Often the artist and his family destitute and unable that reveal a perceptive, to send money back articulate man and conto his wife and their firm the importance of newly born twins, he primary material. Macsurvives a vagabond Donald, who knew French itinerary while savourfor more than forty years, ing Europe’s modLeonard French and Roy Grounds standing under the NGV ceiling on the front wisely relies on this valuernism, all the while cover of LIFE Australia, August 19, 1988, Vol. 45, No. 4. LIFE logo and cover design © TIME inc. Cover photograph by David Moore, courtesy of David Moore able resource, but he is also justifying his artistic Photography © Lisa, Michael, Matthew and Joshua Moore remarkably attuned to destiny. On returning the artist’s punchy verto Melbourne, he soon nacular. Herein lies one of the more thing, but MacDonald’s homage is deserts Joy for a talented, ‘feisty’ woman disquieting aspects of this biography, tarred by macho slang and unnecessary who must play second or third fiddle to

Sheridan Palmer

O

32 MARCH 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

her self-absorbed husband.

French’s ambitious, bombastic nature, evident from an early age, drives MacDonald’s ‘heroic’ tone, a kind of reworking of Homeric myths, classics, and a Gulley Jimson morality. The Depression finds an allegory in the Iliad, and his mature professional life in the Odyssey.

There is a Dantesque ascent from the pit of suburban poverty as the tenacious young phoenix – or, as we are constantly reminded, the working-class ‘boy from Brunswick’ – rises from the filthy atmosphere of brick factories and the burning stench of landfill tips, scenes set for ‘the making of Len’. A restaging of Genesis befits French’s quest for artistic regeneration and survival with a staggering output to meet proliferating commissions and exhibitions.

While French believed his destiny lay not so much at home but elsewhere, it is Australia’s cliquey and affluent late 1950s and 1960s, abetted by a number of political and cultural mandarins, namely Rudy Koman, H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs, Eric Westbrook, and the art critic Alan McCulloch, that made him one of Australia’s most popular and wealthiest mid-century artists. As an emblematic symbolist, French’s passion for classical literary and mythical sources gave his work a universality that transcended local and national trends and, as such, made him an obvious choice for monumental public commissions – the great stained-glass ceiling of the National Gallery of Victoria and windows of the National Library of Australia being two of his more memorable.

MacDonald’s prose is replete with a chauvinistic banality that borders on the offensive. While French’s own crude, expletive colloquialisms and need for ‘male company’ is repeatedly suggested, MacDonald’s parodying of his subject’s insider view of art politics, art friendships, and the art world is often cast in puerile idioms like ‘Not a happy chappie’, or ‘a fair whack of …’, ‘chockful of testosterone’, and galling statements like ‘the incestuous arts community … getting its balls in a knot’, while outrageous alliterations such as ‘The Feisty French Female Line’ grate. Moreover, MacDonald, a former press secretary to

Prime Ministers John Gorton and the indiscreet Billy McMahon, informs us that he was privy to major arts-related issues, including how ‘dizzy’ Sonia McMahon was responsible for James Mollison’s appointment as deputy director of the Australian National Gallery in 1971. Pillow talk may have swayed her ineffective husband, but a powerful and assiduous committee of arts people most certainly determined Mollison’s future.

Moreover, from numerous published and online sources – McCulloch’s Encyclopaedia of Australian Art (1968) entry on the painter Geoffrey Jones being one example – he takes verbatim extracts without due acknowledgment. Nor should we rely, as MacDonald apparently does, on French for accuracy; the artist James Cant returned to London in 1950, having previously been part of its avant-garde art world in the 1930s, not to study, but because he believed he had a better chance of successfully exhibiting, particularly his commissioned paintings based on Aboriginal Oenpelli cave paintings.

If you can ignore the crass, sexist jargon, this highly informative epic of a unique Australian artist testifies above all else to Leonard French’s passionate commitment to his art and provides interesting insights into Australia’s postwar modernism and art world. g

Sheridan Palmer is an art historian, curator, and Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her most recent book is Antipodean Perspectives: Selected writings of Bernard Smith (Monash University Press, 2018), co-edited with Rex Butler.

THE LAST WAVE

by Gillian Best Text Publishing

$29.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781925773378

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ilian Best’s début novel, The Last Wave, is a thoughtful narrative that charts the intricacies of one family’s experiences and relationships across three generations, from the postwar period to the present. It makes use of the iconography of the coast and the unpredictability of the sea almost as a dramatis personae that motivates, consoles, and potentially threatens the characters in their proximate lives. Set on the coast of southern England, Best’s imagery is beautiful and evocative: windswept, shingle beaches, the White Cliffs of Dover, Vera Lynn’s haunting song.

Martha and John Roberts live by this grey and unruly sea; for Martha, a swimmer, it has always been an immersive experience of challenge, providing her with a sense of purpose beyond the roles of wife and mother.

Her desire to swim the Channel, to feel salt on her skin, is life-defining, offering both independence and emotional connections.

The story is told in multiple voices within the family. This shifting of perspective does allow us to see into the various cross-currents of family life – its rifts as well its opportunities.

However, it is also a rather wooden strategy, as it somewhat heavyhandedly stitches together its themes and symbolisms, providing no real rationale as to why we might be privy to each character’s point of view. In narrative terms, these varying currents are brought to a head in the novel’s present in which John descends into a fog of dementia, Martha is dying from cancer, and unspoken things surge and press.

Best nevertheless conveys a powerful sense of the emotional tides sweeping her characters. Her poignant portrayal of the enduring bonds between John and Martha, even in the face of such unravelment, gives insight into how we might all face that last wave when it inevitably comes.

Rose Lucas BIOGRAPHY

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‘A great fiery explosion’ Paul Kildea

FRYDERYK CHOPIN: A LIFE AND TIMES

by Alan Walker Faber & Faber, $59.99 hb, 756 pp, 9780571348558

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he author and critic Richard Ellmann died in May 1987, a handful of months before the publication of his biography of Oscar Wilde. Twenty years in the making, the book instantly established a benchmark in literary biography. Psychologically astute and critically nuanced, Oscar Wilde invites the reader into a world of bourgeois values – moral and artistic – that leads so tragically to the grim poverty and degradation of Wilde’s final years.

Ellmann had cut his teeth over three decades earlier with a biography of James Joyce (1959), written when many of those who had known him were still alive. Yet it took his study of Joyce’s fellow countryman to demonstrate the virtuosity and sheer nerve necessary to recreate a life in print so many years after the subject’s death. He takes the reader by the hand and never lets go, no matter how rough the terrain.

Musical biography often seems a step or two behind literary biography, largely beholden as it is to the positivist approach to music and history that the Germans invented in the nineteenth century, which not even New Musicology in the late twentieth managed to dent.

Alan Walker’s three-volume biography (1983–96) of Liszt is a case in point.

Even more years in the making than Ellmann’s Wilde, Walker’s biography is recognised as the definitive study of Liszt and his music, though one very much shaped by the polite conventions

34 MARCH 2019

of Old Musicological enquiry.

In Fryderyk Chopin, Walker tackles an altogether more complex subject.

Chopin is psychologically and musically far more elusive than Liszt, who dominated the Romantic landscape as no other. Chopin was the far greater revolutionary figure, yet he commanded no army, no disciples, and was largely uninterested in the huge cultural shifts happening around him. He was a mutineer, something close to Julian Barnes’s description of Chopin’s friend Delacroix: a ‘great fiery explosion happening at the same time as Romanticism’. What a potentially brilliant portal into the development of the Romantic imagination!

Yet there remains something determinedly old fashioned about Walker’s biography. Even the contents pages read like epigraphs in a Dickens novel: ‘Chopin travels to the village of Szafarnia for a summer holiday, to the home of his friend “Domus” Dziewanowski.’ Or: ‘Chopin becomes infatuated with the singer Konstancja Gładkowska but does not declare his feelings.’ This is Walker’s deliberate choice, an early signal that modern biographical trends will not shape the ensuing narrative.

This old-fashioned quality also governs Walker’s prose. He is forever explaining what he’s doing, resorting to first-person plural to this end: ‘Nicolas adopted the Polish form of his name, Mikołaj, which he never abandoned, and which we therefore propose to use

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

throughout our narrative.’ How irritating you find this technique depends to some extent on how good you find the associated musical insights. And in these Walker excels. Writing about the A-flat Mazurka, he singles out an eightbar passage that offers ‘a glimpse into the future of harmony’, before illustrating the slippery chromaticism in question – real tectonic shifts in the harmonic terrain – and telling us how these bars stumped both Mendelssohn and Liszt, so out of place did they seem next to what came before and what soon followed. On the whole, I prefer deft analyses like these to the historical critics and biographers Walker quotes a little too frequently, framed as they are in the sort of flowery visual imagery and analogy that Chopin particularly disliked. Walker clearly does not need such props, and the frequency with which they turn up in a book whose purpose is to replace this type of existing scholarship is disconcerting.

Sometimes, as he imposes motive on events, Walker’s ear sounds a little tinny. It is simply not feasible that Chopin’s prevarication when asked to perform his ‘Là ci darem’ Variations in Vienna in 1829 was because he hadn’t touched a piano in weeks; this was the same young man who had been playing in the finest Warsaw salons since boyhood, his wondrous technique and memory widely admired. Nor to be believed is the story about Chopin calming unruly fellow students by improvising a melodrama about easily frightened robbers, the students falling off to sleep in the middle of the lively musical narrative.

Given that in his spirited prologue Walker sets up his stall – writing clinically about the source material that other biographers have missed or inexpertly handled – such episodes ever so slightly undermine our confidence in his judgement.

Anyone writing about Chopin today

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has to decide pretty smartly what to do with George Sand, the wonderful and ferocious free spirit with whom Chopin spent a quarter of his life. Walker points out that musicians have not always been kind to Sand (‘It may be useful to pause at this point in order to consider the complex personality of the woman with whom Chopin was to spend nine years of his life’), yet does not avoid such traps himself. He acknowledges that it was during this relationship that Chopin wrote some of his greatest music, yet there remains something grudging about Walker’s admiration for the woman who made such creativity possible. This is never more evident than in the vexed issue of their sexual relations. To Walker, ‘Sand had imposed conditions of celibacy on Chopin after the pair had returned from Majorca’, conditions Chopin apparently found extremely difficult to understand or abide by. Yet the far more likely explanation is that the sexually inexperienced musician found either Sand or sex intimidating and gratefully took on instead the mantle of brilliant child instead of passionate lover. Sand’s sad, furious letter to Chopin’s friend Grzymała upon their breakup in 1847 – in which she despairs at having lived the previous years in Chopin’s company as though a virgin – is hardly the reflection of someone who had implemented such rules and roles.

There are carefully chosen and illustrative musical examples, which Walker speaks to with his customary skill, but these are at the expense of the many iconic images that capture the nineteenth century and Chopin’s place in it. I missed them – as I did the sort of physical and psychological layering Ellmann is so adept at. Paradoxically (or explicably) for such a meaty volume, it is a relatively quick read. And this is Walker’s achievement. He has set out to write a cradle-to-grave narrative of arguably the most original musician of the nineteenth century, distilling in unadorned prose every detail he has discovered in archives throughout Europe. If the resulting book is more Life than Times – an outcome of Walker’s musicological training – this does not necessarily take away from his achievement. g Paul Kildea is the author of Benjamin Britten (2013) and Chopin’s Piano (2018).

36 MARCH 2019

Life as combat

A searching biography of Charles de Gaulle

Rémy Davison A CERTAIN IDEA OF FRANCE: THE LIFE OF CHARLES DE GAULLE

by Joshua Jackson Allen Lane, $69.99 hb, 928 pp, 9781846143519

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here is a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail outside a castle, brimming with French menat-arms, who taunt King Arthur and his knights remorselessly, while the Britons are convinced that the Holy Grail lies behind the drawbridge. The Grail was, of course, membership of the Common Market, to which President Charles de Gaulle had denied Britain entry for a decade. It was the Gallic ‘Non’ of 1963 that merely continued the thousandyear war between France and England.

But it was not the first time de Gaulle had had ‘trouble with Anglo-Saxons’.

De Gaulle dominated French politics for almost thirty years, from the fall of France in 1940 to (barely) surviving the post-1945 political wilderness, multiple assassination attempts, and the 1968 student revolution. He is inseparable from France’s modern political history.

But was he a liberator, an imperialist, or a fascist? Perhaps all three. Historian Réne Rémond regarded Gaullism as forms of Bonapartism and Boulangisme. Franklin Roosevelt detested de Gaulle’s ‘fascism’. De Gaulle himself was influenced by Charles Maurras’s Catholic integralism, while Maurras, an ardent monarchist, praised de Gaulle early in the war. The best-known contemporary admirer of Maurras’s philosophy is Steve Bannon, the architect of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.

Most of twentieth-century French history was a far cry from the belle époque of the nineteenth. The humiliating loss of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, followed by the chaos of the Parisian Communards in 1871 led to emergence of the Third Republic (1871–1940). The Republic ended in military defeat, just as the Second Empire had. However, it

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

was also an age of extremes, with the Beaux Arts architecture and Art Deco drawn in sharp contrast with the ugly anti-Semitism and the Catholic fascism of the Dreyfus affair. Under existential threat of annihilation during the Great War, the Republic survived 1918 but could not persuade the Americans or the British at Versailles that the German threat was merely in temporary recess, not extinguished.

De Gaulle grew up in a family that was both monarchist and immersed in French literature and history. Throughout de Gaulle’s formative years, the ghost of Dreyfus haunted French politics. The Third Republic groaned under the weight of rampant anti-Semitism, while anti-Dreyfusards, Boulangistes, Congregationalists, Action Française, Croix de Feu, and communists fought pitched battles in the streets. In this turbulent milieu, inconvenient political nuisances like Serge Stavisky, the wellconnected embezzler, were disposed of by the Sûreté, while police chiefs auditioned for major films ( Jean Chiappe was up for the title role in Abel Gance’s 1927 silent epic). They all had one aim: to destroy the Republic. Aided and abetted by the Nazi invaders, their chance came at Vichy in 1940. Appointed to Paul Reynaud’s war cabinet shortly before the Franco-German armistice, de Gaulle was infuriated by the defeatists.

Marshall Philippe Pétain, now prime minister, signed the Republic’s death warrant and ceded two thirds of France to the Germans; de Gaulle departed for London and was welcomed by Winston Churchill. On the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo in 1940, de Gaulle broadcast his call for French resistance from

London. Few French citizens heard his call live and fewer still had heard of de Gaulle. But his name would become the clarion call for popular resistance throughout the war.

Meanwhile, Vichy proved to be the centripetal force around which the sum of French politics, past and present, converged: Marshall Pétain, the Catholic authoritarian; Pierre Laval, the failed Socialist turned German ultracollaborationist; François Mitterrand, de Gaulle’s political opponent of the 1960s and future president, but at Vichy a mere fonctionnaire; and Admiral Darlan, would-be leader of the Free French.

Darlan was assassinated in Algiers in

De Gaulle is inseparable from France’s modern political history 1942; did a Gaullist agent kill Darlan?

There are more suspects than Murder on the Orient Express. Joshua Jackson is dubious, arguing that de Gaulle had no agents in Algiers to do the job. He points the finger at Giraud, the general who had the most to gain from Darlan’s death.

Jackson dispels long-held myths about de Gaulle’s relationship with Pétain, the ‘victor of Verdun’ and France’s most prominent soldier. Pétain’s patronage rescued de Gaulle’s career, but de Gaulle did not name his son after him; nor was Pétain godfather to de Gaulle’s son.

Tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for treason in 1945, Pétain’s sentence was commuted to life by de Gaulle.

De Gaulle had achieved the impossible by the end of the war. He marched into Paris in August 1944 at the head of the French 2nd Armoured Division.

France was restored to the victor’s table, one of four powers occupying Germany, with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. But the ‘problems with AngloSaxons’ persisted; in 1945, de Gaulle found himself close to declaring war on Britain over France’s attempt to reestablish colonial rule over Syria. Rejected at the 1946 elections, de Gaulle spent the next decade attempting to regain power. In 1954, after the French defeat at Diên Biên Phù, and again in 1956,

following the Anglo-French withdrawal at Suez, de Gaulle’s opponents feared a coup d’état, but the General would only contemplate a return to the Élysée Palace by constitutional means.

He did not have to wait much longer for the Fourth Republic to collapse. By 1958, the French army was locked in a brutal struggle to maintain imperial power in the face of the rising tide of Algerian independence. The army’s determination to retain Algeria at all costs saw civil war threatened in France, as the conflict between pro-independence groups and imperialists spread to the mainland. In mid-1958, parliament voted de Gaulle extraordinary powers to write a new constitution and resolve the Algerian crisis. De Gaulle’s second leadership stint (1958–69) would prove no less tumultuous than his first. Reluctantly, he determined that Algerian independence was inevitable, forcing one million French settlers to return to the mainland. Algeria also provided, with a certain joie de vivre, a licence for French élites to indulge in assassination plots against one another; de Gaulle survived no less than twenty-one attempts on his life.

De Gaulle’s new constitution promulgated the Fifth Republic, ushering in a decade of plebiscite democracy. He drew his power from public approval, elevating his presidency above both parliament and politics. Everyone, he said famously, was, had been, or would be a Gaullist. Gaullism comprised a curious mixture of nationalism, centrism, and conservatism. It was never panEuropean; de Gaulle merely employed European unification as a cipher for his grands projets: France as a ‘third force’ in world politics; an independent nuclear strike force; a bridge between the superpowers; and the Franco-African union, a means of maintaining French economic dominance in post-colonial Africa, which he viewed as entirely different from the monopoly capitalism espoused by the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. In the Far East, De Gaulle’s ideology saw no contradiction between igniting the 1946 IndoChina conflict and denouncing the US war in Vietnam twenty years later.

In 1961, Britain applied for Common Market membership, a move de

Gaulle viewed as a Trojan horse for US infiltration of Europe. Without consulting his allies, de Gaulle fronted a press conference on January 14, unilaterally and dramatically vetoing Britain’s membership application. ‘Britain,’ de Gaulle declared, ‘was not ready for EC membership.’ A week later, de Gaulle and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signed the Elysée Treaty, binding Germany to coordinate its foreign policy with that of France. But the treaty did not remove Bonn from Washington’s orbit, disappointing de Gaulle.

Nearly sixty years later, the Franco–German ‘axis’ remains bound by the 1963 treaty, leading to cooperation on everything from the creation of the Eurozone in 1999 to resolute opposition to the 2003 Iraq war.

In 1969, de Gaulle surrendered, finally: to democracy. Battered by the 1968 student revolt, his constitutional reforms were defeated narrowly in a referendum and he resigned and departed the Élysée Palace for Colombey-lesDeux-Églises. He never set foot in Paris again, except once, incognito (he died in 1970, aged seventy-nine).

Liberated from politics, de Gaulle obtained a copy of Las Cases’s biography of Napoleon and settled down to write his final memoirs. De Gaulle had criticised Napoleon for doing everything himself, but the Fifth Republic adopted most of the machinery of Bonapartism: a strong presidency and a weak cabinet; plebiscite democracy; and decision making without consultation of either advisors or politicians. His ministers complained of his authoritarianism; they learned of cabinet decisions only when they read the morning papers. Jackson nevertheless argues that de Gaulle, enigmatic to the end, should be viewed as a man of ‘honour’. In contrast, his corruptible contemporaries – nothing more than nature’s go-betweens – sought only personal advancement for their betrayals. But Charles de Gaulle was unique in saying ‘Non’ to the enemy from day one. As he conceded in an unguarded moment, ‘Life was combat.’ g Rémy Davison is Jean Monnet Chair in Politics and Economics at Monash University.

BIOGRAPHY

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Unsayable Gemma Betros THE YEARS

by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer Seven Stories Press $19.95 pb, 237 pp, 9781609807870

T

he word indicible appears frequently in the work of French author Annie Ernaux. In English, it means ‘inexpressible’ or ‘unspeakable’. Yet saying the unsayable – or rather, exploring the crevice between what is discussed openly and the inexpressible within – is where Ernaux excels. As the opening anecdotes of The Years (Les années) display, this may not always be pleasant: shit, urination, and sex are described in matter-of-fact detail, while in other works the basic mechanics of abortion and adultery, domestic violence, and death are registered calmly and head-on. Ernaux’s quiet determination to document the unspeakable, however, forms a vital record of what it means to have been a child, a woman, a human being in the twentieth century.

Born in 1940, Ernaux published her first book in 1974. Some twenty books have followed, many centred around a particular incident or period in her life.

La place (winner of France’s 1984 Prix Renaudot), for example, begins with the death of her father, while the unflinching ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ (1997) charts her mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s. Ernaux’s books are mostly short but, with the repetition of certain stories, images, and dialogue, together resemble a serial novel. Ernaux was initially inspired, she tells us in The Years, to write something like Guy de Maupassant’s Une vie (1883), something that would ‘convey the passage of time inside and outside of herself, in History, a “total novel” that would end with her 38 MARCH 2019

dispossession of people and things’.

This is classic autofiction territory, but her decision to replace the ‘I’ of earlier works with ‘she’, ‘one’, and ‘we’ – what her translator refers to as a collective ‘I’ – indicates that here we are being taken on a different journey altogether.

The much-lauded Les années was published in France in 2008, appearing in English with Seven Stories Press only in 2017. While not the first of Ernaux’s books to be translated, it is perhaps the one with widest appeal, recounting the cultural and social shifts she has experienced against a backdrop of current affairs ranging from World War II and the revolutions of 1968 to 9/11. Her aim, she declares, was to tell the story of her existence but to dissolve this existence into that of her generation.

Ernaux eschews traditional narrative, which, she notes in her earlier work La honte (1997), ‘would produce a reality instead of the search for it’. Instead, she builds impressions of the past decade by decade. A single photograph or a few minutes of home video serve as her Proustian madeleine, as do memories of family meals and dinner parties with their changing food, method of setting of the table, and topics of conversation.

A 1950s family gathering might, for example, revive such recollections as: – living in a house with a dirt floor – wearing galoshes – playing with a rag doll – washing clothes in wood ash – sewing a little pouch of garlic inside children’s nightshirts near the navel to rid them of worms

Inventories of song titles and films, items of clothing, even the changing contents of a supermarket trolley help her quest. While Ernaux has toyed previously with the idea of being an ethnologist of herself, here she is more like a historian, anxious to record for future generations memories, objects, habits, and language that the internet might distort or neglect.

Like all good writers, Ernaux identifies the transformations we sense but cannot always immediately articulate.

She tracks, for example, the connected growth of advertising, consumerism, leisure time, and self-obsession. She

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depicts a society that, satiated, looks steadfastly inward rather than taking on the much harder task of being curious about the past (other than an ostentatious form of civic duty) or the outside world. She worries about the reversal of various twentieth-century achievements, seen in increased hostility towards immigrants or the worsening place of women, who are told they have it all but are still judged for their bodies, clothing, and sexuality. Ernaux has a way with aphorisms (‘Anomie was catching’), but the book forms, too, an extraordinary document of language and its changing use over the twentieth century, from the patois or dialect of her childhood Normandy to the days when a party was still a ‘surboum’.

Replete with cultural references, The Years cannot have been easy to translate.

Canadian translator Alison L. Strayer acknowledges having had to look up many details, but seems to have struggled with deciding what to translate and when: certain names and terms are translated or receive an explanatory footnote, but others do not. Strayer also confesses to the challenges posed by Ernaux’s minimalist but occasionally ‘breathless’ writing, with the result that the author’s laconic, yet lyrical style is sometimes lost. She does, though, preserve Ernaux’s unusual spacing.

History almost always has a capital ‘H’ for Ernaux, but it is a form of history that historians tend not to broach, not least due to lack of evidence. She fears that this failure to acknowledge the silences in our society condemns those ‘who feel but cannot name these things’.

When the silence breaks, she writes, ‘little by little, or suddenly one day, and words burst forth, recognized at last’, other silences begin to form. We have perhaps seen a recent example in the protests of the gilets jaunes for whom Ernaux controversially declared support, comparing Emmanuel Macron’s Élysée to the Versailles of France’s ancien régime in its scorn for workers. Ernaux’s commitment to disturbing these silences has made her one of contemporary France’s most important and intriguing observers. g Gemma Betros is Lecturer in European History at the ANU.

Peter Porter Poetry Prize THE SHORTLISTED POEMS

Dancing with Stephen Hawking For Melinda Smith

I was living in England. Punk days, they were.

On my way to the party, I fell and scraped skin from my knees, tore my stockings. No matter, they were punk days, and I looked the part – black-root blonde, make-up slurring my face.

And there she was: He wants to dance with you.

And there he was, seeping into his chair, mind in the machine. From a distance, I’d thought him all thought, the body’s ruin savaging desire, but something simmered there. He rolled across the wooden floor like a ship leaving harbour, adrift on a wide sea. I did my best punk moves, spasmodic thrusts and jumps, while he swayed left then right in his choreography of wheels.

I tried not to stare. We moved until the music slammed into silence, left everyone talking too loud for a moment, like the noise of insects in the dark. I don’t recall talking at all, only the time given … Walking to the station, I stopped, looked up to a moonless sky, wondering whether that cloud was a cloud or a galaxy. And I thought of the dance of asteroids, the merciless pull of black holes, red giants and white dwarves, breathless nebulae. I thought of the atoms in my eye, spinning and spinning, and the torrent of light surging through me, soaking me to the bone as I stood looking up, with my bloodied knees.

John Foulcher

The Mirror Hurlers for Joyce Lee

1. The Looking-Glass Apprentice Mistress, I’ve seen the sunlight swim on red brick walls. I’ve watched your mirror fly from a high window. I remember the crash. It hit backwater bedrooms, distant kitchens.

The frame had shattered but the uncracked mirror flashed, a pool amongst ruins.

I saw my face in it, then your voice flooded the laneway. ‘Try it. Mirror hurling goes back centuries.’ I grab my full-length mirror, stagger to the bedroom window.

The mirror leans against my shoulder, a cape made of myself. The brick wall opposite moves in the heat. I turn around and cart the mirror back to its dark corner. And you talk of leaving. Mistress, I know you want real height, sky streaming in at your front door, unbroken mirrors scattered across the earth, but show me survival again. Think of me here climbing the stairs in terror, lanes like canyons around me. All my mirrors unhurled.

2. The Mirror This is my sworn story of staying whole. My owner knows it backwards.

I dreaded slippery-fingered servants, but when the mirror mistress picked me up it was like a kept promise. When she threw me, I flew through my cousin the window, and the air whispered of weightlessness. Falling was a new way of being held. The crash was a savage cradling. I lay there taking in faces, safe in the sacrificial wreckage. Now my unbreakable shine waits for you all.

Come to me for the backhanded truth of who you are. See, your left hand knows only too well what your right hand is doing. Your crooked smile slants the other way. And notice the fake depth in your eyes, your thin visiting presence. Stranger, I give you your shallow reversed self.

3. The Mirror Detective I know them. Their two-faced ways, their almost invisible shimmers of thought. They are thieves, stealing mirrors and hurling them into the world. They won’t get away with it.

I am after them, with my dull routine and my non-reflective mind.

I’ll hunt them down. I’ll climb the stairs, knock on the last door and there it will all be: suspiciously open windows, mirrors in mattresses, tables littered with wrecked frames. Mirror hurlers at work.

They’ll soon find out their mirror hurling days are over.

I’ll let them know that prison mirrors are made of tin.

They will put on their long coats. I will frisk them for mirrors.

4. The Mirror Lovers There are those who will never release their mirrors.

They cannot surrender their perfect self-portraits.

They sleep with them. They wake up beside themselves in dim rooms, and wonder if they have married.

All day there’s a quicksilver gleam in their eyes.

They feel strangely flat. They have to resist an impulse to mime the movements of others.

Their minds are full of unwanted reflections.

At night, they return to the mimicry of marriage.

The fingertip touching, the two-dimensional tenderness.

5. The Mirror Mistress I loved the lanes, the early morning shudder of sun across old brick.

But here on this cliff top with its mountains of pure space, I know I have come home.

Looking-glass lakes are scattered across the earth, my run-up takes me right to the edge.

I let the mirror go and everything seems to slide.

I am wiped from the mirror’s mind.

I am replaced by sky.

Ross Gillett v

63 Temple Street, Mong Kok Remember 63 Temple Street, Mong Kok? Remember that cha chaan teng, Mrs Suen, the owner?

Sorry, that jars your ears.

Remember ‘leave ice’, ‘fly sugar leave milk’, ‘tea go’ – the waiters’ breaths, like shooting stars?

Sorry for the monosyllabic dictums.

The imperatives chase me back with their voracious tails to Mrs Suen’s cha chaan teng: go, leave, fly.

Remember the deep-fried peanut toast – a square button of butter, egg tassels, slurry glass eyes of a honey stripe, and the sweet full-cream condensed milk?

Mrs Suen uses Carnation’s condensed milk from the contented cows of Australia – as she says.

As for the peanut butter, her preference is USA’s Planters’ Crunchy, the nuts clutter but melt like mercy – as she says.

Remember me? Mrs Suen asks.

Remember the already remembered?

All of us remember – yet only some grasp the gyration of the remembered.

How can I not remember? Mrs Suen! I reply.

For fifteen years at daybreak the lukewarm TV gargles – ‘Welcome to Hong Kong’s Morning.’

Every day I eat deep-fried ghost, drink mandarin ducks, no milk, no sugar.

A diet to keep myself forgotten.

I didn’t forget you, Mrs Suen says.

But all of us forget – yet only some let go of the gyration of the forgotten.

How not to break the fluid egg yolk on my doll noodles?

Slightly tilt the egg’s fringe up with your chopsticks and pinch – but the translucent membrane still cracks.

It doesn’t forget the way to brokenness, and neither do I. Grandma sipped the braised pork belly, her last ritual in the hospital.

The rain breaks its back.

It reaches out its little hands and cut them off in front of me.

It says, Follow me. And just as I follow, it vanishes, and multiplies.

Here’s my mobile number, I forgot yours, Mrs Suen says.

Laozi says – ‘She forgets it. That’s why it lasts forever.’

Did she trade her memory for the eternity of my number?

The rain finds its path to remember, and falls on every person, wanting – I: One tea set, please.

Waiter Kuen: Tea set’s sold out.

I: A fast set, then.

Waiter Kuen: No fast set today.

I: I’d have a constant set, anyways.

Waiter Kuen: Constant set is fast set, fast set is tea set. a fate of return – the rain and Waiter Kuen’s back.

Now the rain’s a searchlight: a black dog sniffs, a black car follows.

There’s no way to see how the rain enters.

You still have much black hair, Mrs Suen, I say.

The rain, stumbling upon its hands, tries to grip a larger surround.

Thanks to the braised pork belly, Mrs Suen jokes.

O, O, what a slice! Grandma exclaimed.

The fat broke loose on her tongue.

She never woke up again.

A raindrop is very quiet on my lips.

It melts into a shore afar – to where?

A red bean sneaks out of my glass.

I lick it back – to where?

I forget to give Mrs Suen my mobile number.

The rain has no proper path to rise back as rain.

How does hunger enter me?

I forgot the first bite in my life. I forget why I forgot.

Coolness sprawls flat on my tongue.

I can’t even give it a name.

Belle Ling v

Searching the Dead

The bone-coloured branches of the rusty fig twist and rise into a canopy of leaves that shuts out the beating sun. It’s like standing in a limestone cave and gazing up at limbs that resemble toned calves and bulging biceps. As if the tree has been fashioned out of human body parts miraculously glued together.

From a distance it appears sublime, but standing beneath it, I can’t shift these images of haunches, thighs and elbows.

The human form, even when you’re not looking for it, is everywhere. Five days out from Nui Dat, after the firefight and the ambush, I went back into the rubber plantation to search the pockets of the dead. They weren’t our dead, our dead had been dusted off that morning, but here were men who resembled us, soldiers who had been trained to follow SOP, move carefully day and night, minimise risk.

Clothes now stretched tightly over bloated arms and legs, feet cold and green, flies and gnats crowding around their eyes, their mouths. Bodies washed clean by the rain, a few with legs completely missing, one or two without heads. We were searching for intelligence.

I found a gold American watch, sunglasses, a plastic comb, a bag of uncooked rice, a lock of hair. Occasionally, what appeared to be a diary, filled with Vietnamese script, a pressed flower fluttering down to the ground.

A cowrie shell bringing the news from the South China Sea. In one man’s pockets a pair of lacy black knickers.

And photos wrapped in plastic to preserve them – a girlfriend leaning against a motorbike, a couple posing near a lake, a family in front of a shimmering pagoda.

Everything smeared with the same red dust that coated my skin. There won’t be another photograph of this man sitting with his children as he tucks into a steaming soup.

The rubber trees had been hit by bullets and dribbled latex, as if they were crying. Johnno and Boffa were digging a mass grave. I took my shirt off so I could feel the sun on my back. I might have been fielding at square leg, dreaming of the tea break.

When I opened a tin of tiger balm or laid down a pack of playing cards, this shiver spread from my neck to my shoulders. I was so aware of my body, how it was greased and primed, how it wasn’t going to jam.

What I collected I put down by the base of the banyan tree, the wood darker than this fig, soldiering on through the hot afternoon, soaked with sweat. I was elated to be alive.

The work had to be done before we could move out.

I made a shrine to lives well lived, then went to find some cool water to drink, some fresh air to breathe.

Andy Kissane

Raven

Listen, my friend, this road is the heart opening Mirabai Out walking Sunday morning, the light wintering Again inside the start of spring, a raven Overflies me, and the yaw of its wings, As it banks a little in the blank verse Of the Sunday air – for no reason It knows – the groan of wingbeat is, I think, The sound my heart makes opening again each day, Reluctant at first to get about the work Of bearing my body through all it wants and misses, And through the weightless freight of waiting out The gloom that doesn’t want to still. But still One lets it open, whingeing on its hinges, A sly hope refusing to call time.

And making slowly through the silver gums, Their shade a drapery of all the clothes One’s lovers used to shed, a single feather Fallen from another bird – nib End planted in the turf – flares some blue, Shows some indigo, inside its mourning Garb. And this, I think, is the nature of things: The fierce persistence of the wild within The ordered world; this is a love you felt You must let fall, which will not let you slip.

This is the work you leave, unmade yourself By all you’re called to make, the love, the space For everything you barely understand.

At home, you stand it in a glass, and start Again. Word by word, beat after beat, Putting pain to use, feathering forth The silence out of which the future comes.

Mark Tredinnick

‘Conquering time’s atrocities’ An abundant final collection from Judith Rodriguez

Jennifer Strauss THE FEATHER BOY & OTHER POEMS

by Judith Rodriguez

Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 136 pp, 9781925780079

J

udith Rodriguez, who died in November 2018, was a champion of other people’s causes: the right to be heard, the right to freedom from persecution, the right to refuge when such freedom is denied. She was also a champion of poetry and gave generously of her time and energy to fighting its corner. Generations of fledgling poets profited from her mentoring; generations of students were introduced to the pleasures of Parnassus through her intelligent promotion of fellow poets, notably in her time as poetry editor for Penguin Australia (1988–97).

But there’s the rub: those who give much of themselves to other people’s interests may neglect their own – which in this case is a pity, for Judith was a notable poet and for too long we have not seen enough of her poetry. Many of the poems in this new and abundant collection are on show for the first time, even though some were written considerably earlier.

‘Abundance’ is relevant. A large and generous spirit shines through these poems and delights in (or is appalled by) the details of ‘The World We Live In’, the appropriate title of the first of three sections in the collection. For Rodriguez is, in the best sense of that term, a ‘worldly’ poet. However large or modest the theme of a poem may be, it is grounded in the local, in detail of the here and now, the sensory world of light and sound in which we live and move and have our being.

Yet if the local is sometimes simply to be enjoyed for its ‘thinginess’, its oddity or beauty, it is more often imbued with a sense of its place in time, in history, in the political world where power makes itself manifest, often unpleasant44 MARCH 2019

ly. So, in ‘Epics Enacted in Cloud’, the sight of a plane crossing the violence of a stormy sky is imbued with the violence of history, and it is not just metaphorically that ‘The sky of threat / rushes to a knot’, since clouds literally (but innocently) carry the detritus of willed human destruction.The poem concludes: ‘Hiroshima? Chernobyl? This is a view from the tower, out. / Not seasons’ chemistry set cloud to murder the planet.’

Rodriguez understands the paradox of energy, its Janus face of vitality and destructiveness. Energy is indeed one of her own qualities: of language, opinion, action, but she is engagingly aware that it can get out of hand domestically as well as on a wider scale. So she tells against herself the story of ‘Venetia’: ... who with perfect courage let me paint her London ceiling with violent unshiftable Dulux (a case of only my boredom with well-sized plaster)

The poems in the first section seem a long way from such a domestic scene. Here we are in the ‘great’ world of Hiroshima and Chernobyl, of the Holocaust, dispossession, guerilla warfare, terrorism, and cruel indifference; the world where the barb of injustice ‘turns and festers’, breeding ‘a monstrous updraught of hate’. And yet we do inhabit that world domestically. We live individually in a world that ‘goes horrified to bed and rises horrified’. Sleeping, we suffer the bad dreams brought by the world’s news:

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Then there’s the bed-size morass between the news and day.

No matter that there fluttered a tender gathering of small clouds high over the shredded plane-trees.

South Africa is burning awake screaming in the obscene necklace

Australians, too, inhabit and bear responsibility for that kind of world, as the group of Boat Voice poems reminds us. In an evocation of Yeats’s memorable phrase ‘a terrible beauty is born’, ‘Siev X’ weaves into its text the words of a survivor from that ‘certain maritime incident’: Like birds floating on the water the drowned children wash up on the mind’s beach. ...

Each night floods our shores with their sodden wings.

Here is a world in which the poet’s language must speak to give voice to silenced beings, especially those whose life itself has been a defiance of horror – the vanished diplomat, ‘Wallenberg’, the imprisoned Uyghur writer present at the 2014 PEN International Congress only as an image: He looks at me. The word after his last written word struggles to breathe between us.

He looks at me, silenced. The world’s voices die.

He is an image on cardboard placed on the chair where the man would have leaned crossing his legs, riffling his MS, smiling a little, live, a man of words ready to read.

If such figures provide a bastion against the world’s horrors, so too do friends. A capacity for friendship resonates throughout the final section, ‘Celebrations’. For Rodriguez is by no means given over to grimness. She is often wryly comical, and if many of the poems in this section are elegies, what the remembered dead bring her is ‘somehow laughter from beyond’, and the poems perform that restoration of the lost to the light of the present that her friend Gwen Harwood saw as a major purpose of poetry. ‘Out of time, in mind’ concludes ‘The Reading: In

Memory of Shanti Devadasan’, a poem that not only draws together many of the themes threaded through The Feather Boy, but also serves as a declaration of poetry’s role as it celebrates reading Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night with Devadasan in a shopping mall in Chennai: Guttering years cannot blur or stow in the dark that reading. Teachers after Chennai

classes turning pages in Illyria, lady, among bolts of silk, unroll the beloved fable of finding the lost, joining the sundered, conquering time’s atrocities, contraries meeting in sacred joy.

Jennifer Strauss is a poet, anthologist, and retired academic.

The 2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Ceremony

The Feather Boy A feather caught in grass tells of the wind.

It must fill or fall. I am eight, floating in the lane’s dark flue, the feathers in my fist.

War takes me for a man. Up ahead is where shots rattle like a knocked door and break off. The men met where they said are running, we run too, to a shout and its botching.

My knees catapult me out from the wall’s foot, and my dark charges lie like spent shells, faces by barely daylight light enough to find with hand stretched, then (crouching) cupped from the stir of air – light enough for the feathers I save to betray life.

I am the feather-boy. If I call, a knife makes sure. And I call, for us crushed in hiding, for all of us scattered, parents, cousins, our fates feathers in war’s updraft.

Next day in the yard, there’s a farm hand with a message or a stranger looking too long, strong as my brother, a man to rot in the wood.

The forest feathers prickle and stoop in my pocket.

Judith Rodriguez ‘The Feather Boy’ is based on the account of a Holocaust survivor who was the eight-year-old ‘feather boy’ with a partisan group resisting the Nazi occupation.

It is reproduced with kind permission from Puncher & Wattmann.

Please join us as we announce the winner of the 2019 ABR Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

After readings from the poetry of Peter Porter, the shortlisted poets will introduce and read their poems. A special guest will name the winner, who will be awarded $5,000 and an Arthur Boyd etching from the series ‘The Lady and the Unicorn’.

Date Monday, 18 March 2019, 6 for 6.15 pm to 7.30 pm Venue fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne Bookings This is a free public event and everyone is most welcome, but bookings are essential: rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au

POETRY

45

Turf Geoff Page GREEN SHADOWS AND OTHER POEMS

by Gerald Murnane Giramondo $24 pb, 104 pp, 9781925336986

T

If this is a poem – I mean, if Lesbia Harford might not disown it or Thomas Hardy

here has been a long and often troubled history of poets writing novels and novelists writing poetry. The skills needed are very different and equally hard to learn. Few writers have made equal careers in both.

If they do, it’s usually the novels that receive most attention. (Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje spring to mind.)

Many major novelists, however, had some poetry among their early work.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner started penning Keats imitations. Some novelists, like David Foster, have put out a book of poetry, had it negatively reviewed, and have then returned, with some chagrin, to prose. Similarly, some poets’ novels are dismissed for their ‘poetic prose’. There is a strong tendency among poets and novelists (even among their reviewers) to ‘protect their own turf ’, as it were.

The ‘turf ’ image may also be apposite for the novelist Gerald Murnane, given his lifelong obsession with horseracing.

Now, in his eightieth year, Murnane has declared that he has written all the fiction he intends to write and has issued Green Shadows and Other Poems as a kind of valediction.

In an author’s note supplied by the publisher, Murnane recalls that he wrote ‘only poetry’ till his mid-twenties, with little success. With the publication of his first novel, Tamarisk Row (1974), Murnane ‘felt more confident explaining [him]self in sentences than in poetic forms’ and essentially gave up on poetry 46 MARCH 2019

– until one day in October 2014 when he ‘sat at the kitchen bench and spent no more than ten minutes composing the first poem in Green Shadows’.

The poem, short enough to quote in full, is a kind of miniature indication of the approach taken elsewhere – i.e. loosely formal (with much use of half rhyme), relatively simple diction (with sardonic or humorous overtones), and a significant autobiographical or confessional dimension. It’s called ‘If this is a poem’:

might read it through, then I’ve somehow betrayed or never knew my true vocation.

Of course, it’s ironic. Murnane has already more than fulfilled his ‘true vocation’ by producing the novels that have been praised by admirers and ignored by quite a few others (The New York Times once called him ‘the greatest Englishlanguage writer most people have never heard of ’). In ‘Last Poem’, Murnane nicely encapsulates the situation by concluding that it ‘tells how // for sixty years, I wrote / about only what mattered most / to me, and whether or not / my stuff was read, and then stopped’.

It has to said that Green Shadows and Other Poems is nearly always entertaining and often moving – an important criterion for Murnane. As he says in ‘The Darkling Thrush’, ‘I esteem / above all poems or passages of prose / those that put a lump in the throat.’ This may come as a surprise to readers who have felt defeated by the complexity of Murnane’s prose, but it’s certainly true of the majority of the poems here.

At times, as in the first poem quoted, these emotions arise from tributes, either in passing or in whole poems, to poets he admires – Hardy (clearly), John Clare, Lesbia Harford, Philip Larkin, William Carlos Williams. It’s a diverse list, but it makes sense as one reads the poems.

Other important sources of emotion

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include memories from childhood and more recent experiences as a widower in the small town of Goroke in western Victoria. Some of these feelings derive from a recurrent sense of shyness and/or inadequacy. In ‘Pettit’s Tap’, for instance, he courageously admits to having been one of those who bullied a hapless family of primary school children by forcing them to drink from one tap only and not from any other. In the context of praising a friend, Brody Gray, for asking a bully ‘how it felt to bring to tears / his weakling victim’, the poet admits ‘It was no satisfaction / for me alone to react.

I called // in the Mob. They had their usual fun. / Len blubbered as usual, and I was proud / to be with the majority …’

This not-always-comfortable honesty is seen in other poems. Conversely, there are things of which Murnane is certain and for which he doesn’t apologise. His famous reluctance to travel outside his home state is one of them, best expressed in the poem ‘Nontravelling’. At the end of it, he points out that we ‘stickers-in-the-mud … see not sights but the very thing we’d all // like to see. I’d call it the Real / or the True or the Ultimate, even though I, a noted / non-traveller, have not yet had it reveal / itself while I’ve stood my ground and kept my eyes open.’

As these excerpts demonstrate, Murnane’s way with metre and rhyme is approximate rather than expert. His sustained use of half-rhyme is impressive though perhaps destabilised by the occasional full rhyme. Sometimes, as in this stanza from ‘The Ballad of R.T.M’, the metre, a mix of anapaestic and iambic, slips out of control: ‘But if he made little impression on girls, / he had much more success / with men who mattered.

At Caulfield one day, / the Victorian Chief Secretary … ’ Despite such ‘turf-defending’ reservations, Green Shadows and Other Poems, with its abundant humour, irony, and genuine feeling, is definitely worth reading. It may also cause some of Murnane’s worldwide fiction followers to tweak the more arcane of their theories. g Geoff Page is based in Canberra and has published twenty-three collections of poetry.

Warnings David McInnis TYRANT: SHAKESPEARE ON POWER

by Stephen Greenblatt

I

Bodley Head $37.99 hb, 224 pp, 9781847925046

n 2017, Oskar Eustis directed the Public Theater production of Julius Caesar – a play that pivots on the assassination of a political leader – in Central Park with a lead actor who bore an unmistakable likeness to the forty-fifth president of the United States. The conservative backlash was swift and powerful: key sponsors Delta Air Lines and the Bank of America withdrew funding for the production, and Donald Trump Jr took to Twitter to vent, querying ‘how much of this “art” is funded by taxpayers?’ and pondering ‘when does “art” become political speech & does that change things?’ Scholars, including Stephen Greenblatt (New York Times, 12 June 2017), were quick to point out the obvious: that Shakespeare’s play does not endorse the assassination of Caesar, and that the efforts to preserve the Roman Republic do more harm than good.

Nevertheless, the damage had been done, and Shakespeare companies across the United States received death threats in the following weeks, despite having no affiliation with the Public Theater.

Shakespeare’s political relevance was firmly in the public’s imagination.

Stephen Greenblatt’s new study of political tyranny is a product of such controversial events. From the early question, ‘how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?’, it is obvious that Donald Trump (never named in the book) is the not-so-subtle subtext. Billed repeatedly as ‘relevant’, ‘highly relevant’, and ‘contemporary’ on its cover blurb, Greenblatt’s account of Shakespeare’s tyrants barely attempts to disguise its topicality for modern America. Where Greenblatt’s early works invest faith in the power of anecdotal history and foreground the critical problem of subjectivity in methodology, offering a conceptual

account of how texts both affect and respond to the conditions of their production, Tyrant extends the New Historicist methodology, acknowledging the potential for presentist concerns: ‘The playwright remained very much part of his place and time, but he was not their mere creature.’ The political and religious tensions of early modern England are thus refracted through the lens of current anxieties, as when Greenblatt observes of the ‘radicalized’, ‘home-grown’ terrorists trained abroad and ‘smuggled’ back into England (the Jesuit conspirators seeking to remove Elizabeth I from power): ‘[l]ike the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, the beheading of Mary on February 8, 1587, did not end the threat of [Roman Catholic-sponsored] terrorism in England’. (Interestingly, the bin Laden reference has been added to the opening chapter – presumably to reinforce topicality – since it was first published in The New Yorker, 4 May 2018).

This is not just cheap political point-scoring, however; on one level, it is a study of Shakespeare’s techniques, and the positive value (rather than political expediency) of what Greenblatt dubs ‘oblique angles’. By this he means the temporal-spatial displacements of hot political issues – that is, the benefits as well as the necessity of dramatising classical antiquity, Catholic Verona, medieval Elsinore, and so forth, at a time when the portrayal of contemporary England on stage was strictly forbidden. Greenblatt’s ostensible purpose is not merely to critique current regimes through an oblique angle of his own (Shakespeare’s works). Rather, the invective is couched in terms of the search for salvation: the hope that Shakespeare’s depictions of such tyranny might prove enlightening in their exploration of ‘the desperate, painful, heroic measures required to return a damaged nation to some modicum of health’.

Through readings of party politics in the Henry VI plays, Greenblatt argues that ‘[p]arty warfare cynically makes use of class warfare’ to divide and disenfranchise the ‘ignorant lower classes’, and he critiques the ‘cynical exploitation’ of false populism embodied by the rebel Jack Cade’s use of secrecy,

absurd promises, and lies in his uprising.

A tyrant’s ability to insinuate himself into the minds of those around him, and the role enablers play (whether through fear or impotence) in consolidating the tyrant’s power, is explored in chapters on Richard III. Warnings for the present are implied throughout: ‘the new ruler possesses neither administrative ability nor diplomatic skill, and no one in his entourage can supply what he manifestly lacks’. Accounts of Macbeth, Lear, Leontes, and others are mined for Shakespeare’s insights into a tyrant’s rise to power, their behaviour once empowered, and their fundamental moral and psychological characteristics.

Written more for a general audience than an academic readership, Greenblatt’s Tyrant necessarily includes a great deal of contextualising description as he summarises the plot of The Winter’s Tale (for example) in order to explore the actions of ‘an autocratic, paranoid, narcissistic ruler’ who ‘does not need to traffic in facts’.

Greenblatt’s final chapters document strategies of resistance, including ‘fantasy solutions’ (the reformation of the tyrant), pre-emptive strikes (Julius Caesar), the harnessing of tyrannical qualities for good (Coriolanus), and slipping away in self-imposed exile to gather strength before an invasion (Lucius in Titus, Malcolm in Macbeth, Cordelia in Lear), in the manner of ‘resistance fighters in Nazi Germany, Vichy France’, and elsewhere. But perhaps the most reassuring observation pertains not to any active strategy that might be used to curb a tyrant’s impact, but to the inherently limited nature of tyrannical power: Shakespeare did not think that tyrants ever lasted very long. However cunning they were in their rise, once in power they were surprisingly incompetent.

Possessing no vision for the country they ruled, they were incapable of fashioning enduring support.

Let’s hope Shakespeare was right.

g

David McInnis is a Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Melbourne.

SHAKESPEARE

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Wonderment Johanna Leggatt THE THINKING WOMAN

by Julienne van Loon

NewSouth Publishing $34.99 pb, 251 pp, 9781742236308

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ovelist and academic Julienne van Loon does not doubt that the thinking woman is ‘alive and well’, but when she scans the (mostly) male names in bookstore philosophy sections and the (mostly) male staff lists of university philosophy departments, she wonders where they are hiding.

Some, van Loon contends, were cast out from ‘capital-p Philosophy’ or were never admitted in the first place. Many, she notes wryly, are simply having a better time elsewhere. The Thinking Woman is van Loon’s attempt to draw attention to the careers and contributions of leading female philosophers, while using their ideas to flesh out what constitutes a good life for women. What are the necessary material and emotional requirements for women to live fulfilling lives?

And how are these lives circumscribed by misogyny and gender inequality?

The Thinking Woman is also much more than a thematically organised collection of essays that bring the dense theories of living feminist and female philosophers to a general readership. In many ways the book is also a revelation, as it marks van Loon as an extraordinary memoirist, able to draw convincing parallels between her own life and the academic arguments of her philosopher subjects without descending into cant or mawkishness. Van Loon manages to move confidently and convincingly between discussing her early love of trees 48 MARCH 2019

and her first job working at a Dagwood Dog truck, to Julia Kristeva’s theory of subjective horror and Rosi Braidotti’s concept of bios/zoe.

Van Loon travels to the United States and visits the Brooklyn home of writer Siri Hustvedt, where they discuss the notion of ‘play’ and its importance in fuelling the imaginative life of adults and in providing relief from the strain of navigating our inner and outer reality. Hustvedt speaks of traumatised adults who are, tragically, unable to play; they cannot respond spontaneously or imaginatively to their environment. As neuroscientist Stuart Brown asserts, the opposite of play is not labour but depression, a concretisation of ideas, and a deep rejection of the possibility of metaphor.

In the chapter on love, van Loon opens up about the end of her longterm partnership. She recounts not the fights or betrayals but the slow drifting apart of two people who are steadily falling out of love, leaving van Loon to wonder whether she is ‘trapped in the wrong narrative’. Her relationship ends not long after she discusses a novel with a colleague and, while doing so, notices something stirring, the potential for ‘profound intimacy: strange, improbable, and completely unexpected’. The story of the end of her relationship is told against the backdrop of van Loon’s meeting with US writer Laura Kipnis, who, in her book Against Love: A polemic, posits adultery as a political act that can trigger some people to wake up from the oppressive work of maintaining the domestic marriage set-up. Kipnis wonders whether the work that is required to maintain domestic coupledom is analogous to Marx’s ‘surplus labour’, a kind of interminable exertion from which we never clock off. Kipnis astutely notes how couples discipline each other, both overtly and covertly, creating cordons and limitations in otherwise free lives.

Why do we stay, van Loon is prompted to wonder, when a relationship has become little more than a perfunctory nine-to-five job?

After a series of illuminating discussions with philosopher Nancy Holmstrom on the notion of employment and work, van Loon starts to question whether

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there is such a thing as meaningful, nonalienated labour in a post-industrial context. Van Loon doesn’t reach a definitive answer, but her explorations of our relationship to work are among the most perceptive sections of her book.

After van Loon resigns from her workplace of seventeen years, she experiences a dulling epiphany of sorts. There is no formal thanks or reply to her resignation letter, no acknowledgment of a mutually beneficial joint project coming to a close. Van Loon realises there was nothing special or unique about her relationship to her employer, and the considerable value she invested was decidedly one-way. It leaves Van Loon wondering about the illusory quality of those past seventeen years and her connection to what she produced in that time: the epitome of Marx’s concept of alienated labour.

Van Loon also discusses ‘wonder’ with fiction writer Marina Warner, friendship with feminist and philosopher Rosi Braidotti, and exchanges emails with psychoanalyst and feminist Julia Kristeva about the notion of ‘fear’, especially women’s fear, which casts a long shadow over van Loon’s early life.

Her recollections of her tough upbringing, of her long-suffering mother and abusive father, are moving, but this is not what stays with you in the end. It is van Loon’s capacity for wonder, the call of her imagination, which really moves the reader.

Wonder, in many respects, is the ultimate feminist ideal. A person in a state of wonderment has agency; she is the subject rather than the object of her life, sufficiently free from fear and duty to be enthralled by ideas. Wonder certainly saved van Loon from the indignities of her small double-brick house in Dubbo, with an often violent and drunk father.

The more her father terrorised the home, the more van Loon sought out her own company, the inner world of her imagination: ‘Wonder nurtured me. It saw me through my bewilderment and beyond it.’ It also led to a career as a writer and thinker, for which the world of ideas is all the richer. g Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based journalist and writer.

Neurotrash Nick Haslam THE GENDERED BRAIN: THE NEW NEUROSCIENCE THAT SHATTERS THE MYTH OF THE FEMALE BRAIN

by Gina Rippon

Bodley Head $49.99 hb, 448 pp, 9781847924759

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few intellectually superior women exist, conceded nineteenth-century anthropologist Gustav Le Bon, but ‘they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads’. Armed with cephalometers, scales, and birdseed for measuring skull volumes, Le Bon and his peers found that women’s heads tended to contain smaller brains than men’s. The five missing ounces must account for women’s cognitive inferiority, they surmised.

The Gendered Brain prosecutes the case that wrong-headed ideas about sexually dimorphic brains and female deficiency are not historical curiosities but endure in modern neuroscience.

Gina Rippon, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Aston University, aims to correct the distorting mirror it holds up to gender. The main target of her critique is gender essentialism, the tenacious idea that women and men are fundamentally different. On the essentialist view, gender differences have deep roots in sex-determining genes, brains, and hormones: anatomy (and physiology) is destiny. Rippon does not offer a radical critique of the notion of gender itself, deny that gender differences exist, or rule out biological contributions to them. Instead, she argues that many differences between men and women are powerfully shaped by culture and socialisation from a surprisingly early age. These differences are also smaller and more malleable than our stereotypes would have us believe.

Despite its title, much of the book explores gender from the perspectives of child development and psychology rather than neuroscience. The chapters that examine brain science take special aim at the over-hyping of neuroimag-

ing research, which Rippon skewers as ‘neurotrash’. She charges that experts often present brain scans as if they were X-rays of the soul, making reckless claims based on tiny samples and sometimes unreliable methods. A study in which an fMRI machine appeared to register brain-like activation patterns from a dead salmon is given an amusing airing. Rippon laments that uncritical media reporting of neuroscientific research often compounds its problems, forcing findings into a simple ‘male brain’ versus ‘female brain’ narrative. The commonly expressed idea that the brain is ‘hard-wired’ gets equally short shrift.

Redirecting her critique from brain science to psychology, Rippon challenges what she sees as unwarranted claims about hormonal effects on behaviour and Darwinian approaches to gender that propose distinctive evolved skills and dispositions for females and males. Her key message is that gender stereotypes are more powerful and pervasive than we might imagine. They do not merely describe how women and men are believed to differ, but also prescribe and create gender differences.

For example, expectations that people of one’s gender tend to perform poorly on a task tend to impair one’s performance on it. This ‘stereotype threat’ phenomenon shows that beliefs about gender can be powerfully self-fulfilling even when they are inaccurate.

The importance of stereotypes becomes especially apparent when Rippon explores child development. Babies, she writes, are ‘rule-hungry scavengers’ and children ‘gender detectives’, socially attuned from an early age to clues for how they and others should act. At age two or three, they have usually acquired a sense of their gender category and the traits and trappings associated with it, gleaned from the highly gender-coded societies in which we live. Gender-egalitarian parents who despair when their young daughters embrace all things pink and princessy might be tempted to blame biology – indeed, some researchers have speculated that a female preference for pink might spring from an evolved berrygathering adaptation – but Rippon shows that social influences are impressed on us well before we can speak. ‘A gendered

world’, she writes, ‘will produce a gendered brain.’

Like the brain’s surface, the book has a few wrinkles. Australian readers may be peeved to discover that a locally developed method for studying the psychological effects of ostracism is misattributed to American researchers.

American readers may be surprised that a famous Yale psychologist is given a Canadian affiliation. Readers from outside the United Kingdom may be puzzled by casual references to gurning, RADA, UCAS, and other Briticisms.

The heavy weight that Rippon places on stereotype threat as an explanation for gender differences may be more than it can bear, as it is itself under serious threat within psychology.

The Gendered Brain appears at a pivotal time. It adds to an influential body of work in critical gender neuroscience that includes Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brain Storm (2011), Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender (2010) and Testosterone Rex (2017). These books mount sharp challenges to popular ‘Mars and Venus’ gender theories and the shaky scientific foundations on which they rest.

Rippon’s is the most accessible of the four, breezy in tone and wide-roaming rather than systematic. The earlier books encountered an often hostile reception, their authors accused of ideological biases against a variety of inconvenient truths. A more even-handed assessment would say the books have advocated not so much against biologically informed gender science but for a more careful and reflective version of it, one that recognises the entanglement of nature with nurture and that understands that our beliefs and practices can create and reinforce gender differences. There are encouraging signs that the neuroscience research community is engaging constructively with this critique, and it may not be too much to hope that the field will develop a less polarised and more nuanced understanding of gender.

Until that happy convergence comes to pass, Rippon’s neurotrash-talking shows why it is necessary. g Nick Haslam is Professor of Psychology and Pro Vice-Chancellor (Graduate) at the University of Melbourne.

SCIENCE

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Dark future Daniel Juckes CALL THEM BY THEIR TRUE NAMES: AMERICAN CRISES (AND ESSAYS)

by Rebecca Solnit

Granta $24.99 hb, 188 pp, 9781783784974

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n the first page of her book Hope in the Dark (2004), Rebecca Solnit quotes from Virginia Woolf ’s diary: ‘The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.’ Such optimism is, Solnit acknowledges, surprising. But it’s a persistent theme in her work and it finds clear articulation in her most recent essay collection, Call Them by Their True Names.

Solnit is a complex writer and thinker, at once a cultural historian, an avant-garde activist, and a feminist whose work permeates the mainstream – from a Beyoncé hat-tip to the term ‘mansplaining’. Reducing that complexity is difficult and perhaps unhelpful given the rationale of the essays in question. In Men Explain Things to Me (2014), Solnit touches again on Woolf ’s diary-statement and suggests that, ‘It’s the job of writers and explorers to see more … to go into the dark with their eyes open.’

This requires a courage that, in Call Them by Their True Names, is embodied in Solnit’s commitment to precision, even as she delights in the indefinite – she sees words as ‘gestures in a ballet’ instead of ‘pieces in a game of checkers’.

In the essay titled ‘In Praise of Indirect Consequences’, Solnit describes what she calls ‘collateral benefit’.

A case in point is the indirect transfer of non-violent resistance tactics from anti-slavery campaigners to suffragettes, 50 MARCH 2019

Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr, and then to protesters at Occupy, Standing Rock, and for #MeToo. Each action of resistance, she argues – even if it does not succeed in its immediate goal – has repercussions. Through an awareness of the winding paths of historical cause and effect – akin to a metaphysical game of bowling ‘shrouded in mists and unfolding over decades’ – hope can be maintained. She makes a compelling case. And an inspiring one: ‘Hope is a belief that what we do might matter … that the future is not yet written. It’s an informed, astute open-mindedness about what can happen and what role we might play in it.’ This open-mindedness depends on the above-mentioned duality. Solnit excels in the kind of nuance required to write it.

The book’s title speaks to Solnit’s reverence for clarity and precision. If things are called by their true names, it might be possible to resist some of the ravages of this post-truth era.

Accurate language actively eschews ‘the disintegration of meaning’. It’s refreshing, in this context, to see Solnit reverse the charge of relativism onto the right: nuance doesn’t mean avoiding an answer, it means searching for the correct one – even if that search is occasionally unsuccessful. In the essays, Solnit’s insistence on context and depth proves this point; the case studies she describes – death row inmates, police shootings, voter disenfranchisement, and more – are deep explorations of cause and effect. Linking causes also draws attention to the forces behind them, one particular target being Donald Trump and the United States he symbolises.

Here, Solnit writes with a glint in her eye, entirely unafraid to call a spade a president, and the frequent takedowns of ‘45’ are glorious.

Her gaze is not a blinkered one. Repeated pleas for nuance cover the gamut, from libertarian right-leaners to the more cynical reaches of the left. These essays demand activism and urge agency on all sides of the political spectrum.

Solnit makes the point that complexity can be comprehended only by engaging with allies, and she suggests that, ‘Conversation … is a means of accomplishing many subtle and indirect things.’ This is

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not a plea for echo-chamber politicking, but a call to give the arguments for progressivism more depth; to thicken the bonds between friends, to solidify foundations, and to open up a way into a clearer kind of discourse. These essays are part of that process, one example being ‘Death by Gentrification’.

The city of San Francisco – Solnit’s home and a place of vast and intricate diversity under siege from the Silicon Valley on its doorstep – is a case study for her argument that gentrification, impelled by neoliberalism and capitalism, tears apart the fabric of cities already under strain. The link between police brutality and this kind of stress shows what happens when the less tangible aspects of a place are removed.

This has resonance in the Australian context, perhaps because of the way in which Solnit argues that actions and events work, replete with unintended consequences. This complex concatenation builds resonance for the Australian reader: the book presents parallels to the treatment of Julia Gillard and Julia Banks, to the dismissal of refugees on Manus Island and Nauru, to debates around what should stay in or out of the ground, and to continuing colonisation. ‘The Monument Wars’ demonstrates this last parallelism, arguing that erasure of ‘all signs of the ugliness of [a] country’s past ... would be a landscape lobotomy’. The essay calls for accuracy and honesty in addressing the past; it is a reminder that ‘our emerging perspective is hardly the final realisation of inclusion or equality’.

Call Them by Their True Names doesn’t have the overall consistency of a work designed to be one thing: ideas are repeated and specific thoughts reiterated. But Solnit writes with verve and candour, in lyrical prose that reinforces her claims around interconnectedness and vitality. The book is as difficult to pin down as the rest of her oeuvre. But that, perhaps, is part of her method of emphasising entangled connections – to the visible and invisible past, and to the lines of influence that stretch into a dark and possibility-rich future. g Daniel Juckes recently completed a PhD at Curtin University.

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$29.99 paperback 978-1-5434-0852-2 also available in hardcover & ebook www.xlibris.com.au

Aussie Pilot follows the life of a young Air Force pilot. After being drafted to a USA carrier and then Vietnam, he finishes military life. Author Kevin Johnson paints a portrait of an ambitious young man who studies medicine, assists the Flying Doctor Service, and then develops a large market-garden export company with a Japanese partner.

But life takes a turn for the worse when his wife is assassinated. He moves back to Australia, where he meets his second wife—which opens the door to magic, illusion, and witchcraft.

Space travel, evil tycoons, and business manipulation become the norm.

51

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The marks of suffering Tali Lavi IMPERFECT: HOW OUR BODIES SHAPE THE PEOPLE WE BECOME

by Lee Kofman

Affirm Press $32.99 pb, 318 pp, 9781925584813

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marble statue of a crouching Venus disfigured by age and circumstance appears on the cover of Lee Kofman’s Imperfect. The goddess of love and beauty is a ruin, although one capable of radiating an uncertain allure. Through a deft trick of typography, the emblazoned title can be read as either ‘Imperfect’ or ‘I’m Perfect’.

Kofman announces from the outset that she has attempted ‘to tell as truthful a story as I could about how our bodies can shape our lives, and what we can do about this’. She argues for a deep engagement with the word ‘imperfection’, for societal adoption of the principles of wabi sabi, the Japanese aesthetic philosophy, so that the two titular possibilities are not polar opposites. Her embrace of the word ‘imperfect’ feels bold in a cultural climate that would argue that the word should be discarded, laden as it might be with negative judgement. But being brave is a state familiar to Kofman.

In Imperfect, the writer’s past unconventional marital lifestyle as recounted in her previous memoir, The Dangerous Bride (2014), pales in relation to evidence of her gutsy spirit. As the book bears witness, Kofman’s own body is scarred.

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The first marks of suffering erupt at the age of eight following a heart operation in a Soviet hospital – where ‘aesthetic skin suturing’ is perceived by surgeons as a waste of time. Thankfully, she narrowly evades being operated on by ‘the Butcher’. At the age of ten, after being hit by a bus and sewn up by like-minded surgeons, she is left with considerable scars on one leg. They have accompanied her on migrations to Israel and later to Australia, along with her stories that she has written in three languages.

While Kofman concedes that her response to these scars, in covering them, is hardly courageous behaviour, her audacity resides in her sense of drama and self-parody. This is also one of the delights of the book. Before the operation, she tells the tough children of Odessa, in ‘shamelessly melodramatic fashion’, that she might die, thus endearing herself to them. Post-accident, her child self holds court on a park bench, employing her ‘mangled leg’ as a ‘social bait’ and ‘telling and retelling my Homerian epic to people I’d just met’. These are skills Kofman continues to excel at, spinning a tale with relish and endearing herself to people.

Imperfect takes the writer’s experience as a starting point and then departs from the interior journey to meet, with curiosity and empathy, others who have ‘imperfect’ bodies. Informed by the writer’s doctoral dissertation, it is a hybrid of cultural history and memoir.

Through Kofman’s interactions, we are introduced to people who don’t fit into society’s cultural aesthetic norms.

The scale of subjects is wide. There are burns victims and people with fat bodies, dwarfism, Marfan Syndrome, self-harm scars.

Kofman has a wonderfully frank voice and rejects saccharine messages that celebrate these forms without qualification, or narratives that are overarchingly triumphant. Loneliness, isolation and terrible ostracisation are darker themes. She speaks of the redeeming force of a loving partner and wonders at the price it costs to utter this in a female voice, as if it might erode her feminist positioning. Near impossible standards of female beauty, their unrelenting promotion and pursuit, are constant themes

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

in the book. Kofman almost coquettishly professes an attraction to forms that contain beauty, and admits an aversion to its utter repudiation.

Last year, it seemed impossible to avoid the anthem of inclusivity ‘This Is Me’, a song featured on the The Greatest Showman soundtrack and sung by Keala Settle, the large bearded lady of the film.

In true Hollywood manner, the lyrics move from the darker sentiment of the pariah, ‘I’ve learned to be ashamed of all my scars’ to the feel-good, ‘I’m not scared to be seen / I make no apologies, this is me.’ While not apologetic, Kofman is also not belting out a similarly uncomplicated tune of triumph and glory – one perhaps more palatable to those who wish for Hollywood trajectories.

As I was reading Imperfect, thoughts of the film recurred. Its flagrant rewriting of history makes me acutely uncomfortable. P.T. Barnum appears as a hero of, rather than a promoter of ‘freak shows’ and profiteer of a culture that equated voyeurism of human ‘oddities’ with entertainment: the same grim exploitative Victorian parading that rendered Sarah Baartman as a subhuman ‘Hottentot Venus’.

Kofman’s book is the inverse of this approach, for even as the writer discloses voyeuristic tendencies, they are not the propelling force of her study.

Imperfect refers to familiar individuals, such as Lucy Grealy and Turia Pitt, alongside thinkers and cultural critics.

Kofman encounters and interviews her ‘imperfect’-looking subjects – Karen Jacques, Andy Jackson, ‘Mia’, and others – not to render them strange but to explore how it is for them to be rendered strange by others. Looking and visibility are at the core of this work, as is fitting for a book dedicated to one of her sons, who has albinism and its associated condition of nystagmus (involuntary movement of the eyes), or, as the writer phrases it, ‘my boy with beautiful dancing eyes’. Kofman’s writerly gaze also dances, but in her case purposefully, from the internal to the external, defying simplistic resolutions with compassion and brio. g Tali Lavi is a writer, reviewer, and public interviewer.

Dark noise Jacinta Mulders TROLL HUNTING: INSIDE THE WORLD OF ONLINE HATE AND ITS HUMAN FALLOUT

by Ginger Gorman

Hardie Grant Books $29.99 pb, 304 pp, 9781743794357

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inger Gorman’s book-length piece of investigative journalism, Troll Hunting: Inside the world of online hate and its human fallout, arose from her experiences as a victim of cyberhate in 2013. Through her own example, and the examples of others, she shows the vulnerability of all internet users to cyberhate, and how quickly and unpredictably it can be triggered. In the remit of trolling – a world deliberately inhabited by Gorman during the writing of this book – all bets are off: intent, rationality, morality, and good judgement suspended in the contest with the provocations and offence meted out by the avatars she encounters. Like an anthropologist, Gorman tracks the evolution of a language that is designed to harm – one running relatively unchecked but with adverse consequences for human life.

The premise of Troll Hunting, in trying to find out who trolls are and seeking to understand their motives, has been canvassed elsewhere: in 2015 American writer Lindy West wrote for The Guardian about ‘What happened when I confronted my cruellest troll’, and Dublin-based Leo Traynor wrote a similar exposé in 2012. In both cases the identity of the troll is surprising, and both stories are articulated with humanity and humility. The conclusions reached

by Gorman about trolling and its ties to societal misogyny, and the fact that trolling is a symptom of the isolation and suffering felt by trolls themselves, are not new. However, Troll Hunting is informative because it adds case studies to our arsenal in terms of understanding this behaviour. It analyses the problem in terms of Australian regulation and enforcement against cyberbullying, and looks at the different actors involved and their different levels of responsibil-

ity. These are all valuable contributions.

The book is best understood when viewed as a product of Gorman’s experiences as a trolling victim and her practice as a journalist. It is through this personal lens that Gorman frames her discussions with academics and other experts, her recounting of interviews with trolls, and her own experiences and speculations. The narrative style is intimate: it is stippled with authorial observations and musings, details about family life, and some sections are determinedly memoir. In one section, Gorman acknowledges the unorthodoxy of this approach to the journalistic method. Her choice seems apt in light of her subject matter and its characteristics: the trolling world is deeply personal, and its currency is emotional digs.

Moreover, in a world where boundaries – between ‘real’ and online, logic and lies, politics and personality – are rendered void, her similarly borderless movement between analysis, expertise, and anecdote reflects the lawlessness of her subject matter and its emotional weight.

The book feels a fitting product of Gorman’s suite of experiences in this zone.

The work is particularly strong in its elucidation of two themes bound up in trolling, both of which were key issues in public discourse in 2018. The first is misogyny. In several chapters, Gorman sets out how women are disproportionately targeted, pilloried for ‘speaking up’, and how trolling is used to harass, bully, and abuse. The analysis is not confined to the harm against female journalists and television personalities (though this is frighteningly and intensively documented), but also sets out the prevalence of online abuse in cases of domestic violence (in a cited 2015 survey of domestic violence workers, ninety-eight per cent ‘had clients who had experienced technology-facilitated stalking and abuse’).

The second is her critique of social media organisations, particularly Twitter and Facebook. As companies that create space for this behaviour on their platforms, she articulates the problems with their poor control of hate speech.

One issue is to what extent corporations should be able to regulate our communications outside the remit of

government oversight. Moreover, she methodically sets out the public relations jargon, elisions, and denials of responsibility that have come to characterise the responses by Facebook and Twitter to suggestions that they are not doing enough, particularly in the context of the 2018 Australian Senate committee hearings into the adequacy of existing cyberbullying laws. ‘Despite their insistence on being platforms for and champions of free speech … they are hellbent on controlling the message. The companies remain largely unwilling to be held to account.’

Gorman’s work is keen to dismantle the assumption that trolling is an ‘online’ problem; the emotional damage inflicted is very real. However, trolling

It shows the vulnerability of all internet users to cyberhate and how quickly it can be triggered is facilitated by the internet. This leads to the question as to how much, or in what ways, the qualities of the internet are responsible for these pockets of intense and arbitrary bullying we see today. Trolling commentators, Gorman included, agree that the behavioural basis of trolling sits in society and in human relationships: in our emotional wounds, in the ways we feel we are not being listened to, in parenting, in the ways we are socialised. Crucially, our communications are also shaped by the systems we use. While discussing this issue, Gorman quotes philosopher Don Ihde, who said in 1979 that ‘particular tools unavoidably select, amplify and reduce aspects of experience in various ways’. This challenge – identifying how the internet allows for the amplification of sublimated ire – would, as Gorman suggests, be a good focus for future work, in computer engineering as well as academia and criticism more broadly.

Troll Hunting is evidence of the poor current integration between human emotional needs and the internet, and who bears the ultimate costs. g Jacinta Mulders is a Canberra-based writer, critic, and former lawyer.

SOCIETY

53

Bring a new story home with you today.

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A sequel to Aussie Pilot, Aussie Know-How continues the events affecting the hero, his friends, and their children. This book enters the world of believable science fiction and joins modern day and ancient magic practices to solve past catastrophes. Since his second marriage to a witch, David Granger and the discovered computer Orack, set about correcting some past disasters whilst also continuing to work as a consultant to the USA president. Their attempts to negotiate peace in Afghanistan and the Middle East are affected.

54 MARCH 2019

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Fences and core myths David Haworth ZEBRA & OTHER STORIES

by Debra Adelaide

Picador $29.99 pb, 324 pp, 9781760781699

A

s the United States tears itself to pieces over a proposed wall, which has in recent months transmogrified into a steel fence, here in Australia we have no right to be smug or to rubberneck. After all, Australia loves its fences. Since it was first occupied as a penal colony, this land has been bisected by a seemingly endless series of enclosures, barricades, frontiers, and fences, including some of the longest in the world: the rabbit-proof fence in Western Australia; and the dingo fence in the Eastern states. Fences, both physical and symbolic, have long been used by our leaders to banish undesirables or to constrain their movement within acceptable boundaries. Various Australian governments have forcibly removed Indigenous Australians to reserves and missions, interned so-called ‘enemy aliens’ within camps during wartime, and detained those fleeing danger or tyranny abroad within remote and offshore prisons.

Debra Adelaide’s masterful new story collection, Zebra, draws upon this history of fences to examine what it means, in Australia in 2019, to be a good neighbour. Zebra is full of fences, backyards, and divided spaces, and full of people making choices about the extent of their kindness and compassion for those on the other side. The first story, ‘Dismembering’, is narrated by a woman who dreams of a body that she and her ex-husband may or may not have buried next to her back fence.

In the story ‘Welcome to Country’, the fence is much bigger: armed conflict has made the Northern Territory an ‘autonomous state now just called Country’, surrounded by a massive wire fence. Adelaide is explicit about some of the history this fence is drawn

from: ‘There had been dingo fences and rabbit-proof fences before – now we had the ultimate fence.’ The story is narrated by a man who travels across the continent to perform an act of kindness in honour of someone that he has lost.

In ‘The Master Shavers’ Association of Paradise’, a young man detained at an island prison tries to survive by showing generosity to his fellow prisoners. In ‘I am at Home Now’,Woollarawarre Bennelong writes to the woman he once stayed with in England, thanking her for her hospitality. And in ‘Wipe Away Your Tears’, a woman visits Anzac Cove in Turkey and hears about small moments of generosity shared between the Anzacs and the Turkish forces. Over the course of the collection, a timely theme emerges.

Adelaide reminds her readers that, despite these fences, trenches, barricades, and border walls – despite all the forces intended to divide people – it is still possible to show compassion.

In the final story, the eponymous ‘Zebra’, Adelaide suggests that kindness thrown over a barricade won’t cut it: the principles of being a good neighbour must be enacted both personally and at a national level. This strange and beguiling novella, comprising a third of the volume, is similar to the opening story in that it depicts a woman hanging about near her back fence. The woman happens to be prime minister, and the property in question is the Lodge. We don’t see her conduct much prime ministerial business. Rather, she pursues domestic matters: adopting a zebra from an overseas zoo; dealing with a sexist neighbour; and overseeing the construction of a children’s farm and a hedge maze. Both the titular zebra (is it black with white stripes or white with black stripes?) and the maze it wanders through are seductive symbols of ambiguity, hybridity, and liminality; they work as counterpoints to the various fences and divisions in the book.

In the unashamedly idealised character of the prime minister, Adelaide depicts an elected leader who demolishes walls rather than erects them. But the novella fascinates primarily because the protagonist’s fictional world doesn’t hold together in a strictly realist way. We are given numerous details about how this

politician has transformed the nation, but we only ever see her working on her gardens and her house. The personal is transmuted into wide-ranging political action, but this occurs via a mysterious, seemingly magical process: All her housekeeping, her good order, her sensible decisions, the harmony and joy that had rippled through the rooms like the laughter of elves had extended past the house, outside the grounds, beyond the neighbourhood, through the city, and flowed past the borders, across the states, the whole country.

Readers familiar with Adelaide’s work will be aware how brilliantly she can capture the textures of everyday experience – home life, family life, the lived experience of women. This fascination with the quotidian is on full display in Zebra. But there is something new here as well. The stories in this accomplished and moving work are more fantastical than much of Adelaide’s previous work. Taken together, they exhibit a restless and ambitious desire to examine many of the core myths that Australia as a nation tells about itself – myths about our First Peoples, asylum seekers, the Anzacs, and our elected leaders. g

David Haworth is completing a doctorate in English Literature at the University of Melbourne, looking at depictions of non-human artfulness and creativity. His Master’s thesis won the 2013 Percival Serle Prize.v FICTION

55

Mean friends Amy Baillieu YOU KNOW YOU WANT THIS

by Kristen Roupenian

Jonathan Cape $29.99 hb, 227 pp, 9781787331105

‘I

f you think you know what this collection will be like, you’re wrong,’ Carmen Maria Machado (author of the brilliant Her Body and Other Parties, 2017) states on the back cover of Kristen Roupenian’s provocatively titled début, You Know You Want This. It is an unusual description of a short story collection from an emerging author, but Roupenian is not your average débutante. She is the author of ‘Cat Person’, the short story that launched a thousand hot takes after the New Yorker published it in December 2017.

Published during the rise of the #MeToo movement, ‘Cat Person’ – a finely written, conversation-starter of a story – relates the prelude to, and aftermath of, a bad date between twentyyear-old Margo and thirty-four-yearold Robert in confronting, nuanced detail. ‘Cat Person’ captured the public imagination to an extraordinary degree.

Roupenian, then an MFA student at the University of Michigan, became the author of the ‘first short story to go viral’.

A subsequent bidding war by publishers resulted in a seven-figure book deal.

The supernova-like impact of ‘Cat Person’ cleared the way not only for this subversive collection to appear in print but for it to do so in a beautiful matte hardback edition with shiny holographic foil lettering. Inevitably, this early success will also bring with 56 MARCH 2019

it a degree of scrutiny and pressure not usually faced by début collections.

You Know You Want This consists of twelve ‘horror’ stories, including ‘Cat Person’, which seems even creepier now when read alongside the others. This is a punchy, furious collection that bristles with violence and a sense of menace.

The stories mostly focus on the subtleties and dangers of human interactions and the blurred boundaries between fear and love, disgust and attraction, power and vulnerability, reality and horror. Characters variously inflict pain or have it inflicted upon them, generally with no real consequences for the perpetrators who are sometimes even rewarded for their actions. Roupenian is also keenly interested in the stories people tell themselves about their lives: for example, the ways in which they can build the ‘elaborate scaffolding’ of a potential relationship on foundations as shaky as text messages from someone they barely know; or the unsettlingly different perceptions two people can have of a single shared experience.

The stories range in subject and style from the quotidian horrors of bad sex and unrequited love to an Angela Carter-esque gothic fairy tale about a princess unsuccessfully trying to choose a husband, only to fall for the mysterious black-caped figure that appears at her door (‘The Mirror, The Bucket and the Old Thigh Bone’), and the brutal, disturbing story of what happens when a woman discovers a book of spells at her local library and decides to cast one (‘Scarred’).

In You Know You Want This,the commonplace and the grotesque collide in surprising and confronting ways, such as when a macabre revenge is enacted at an eleven-year-old’s birthday party with the help of a ‘good-luck candle’ (‘Sardines’). Sometimes the horrors are more mundane, as in the chilling ‘Look At Your Game, Girl’, when a man with ‘flat’ blue eyes and yellow toenails offers a cassette tape of Manson Family music to a twelve-year-old girl at a skatepark.

The imagery in Roupenian’s stories is often enthusiastically repellent and will not be to all tastes. In the longest story in the collection, ‘The Good Guy’, Ted, the eponymous ‘good guy’, is in

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

a car at the end of a first date with a girl who ‘plunged her tongue into his mouth and wriggled it around’. During the encounter Ted reflects to himself, ‘So this was kissing … Frankly, it was hard to ever imagine being turned on by this activity. Two boneless slabs of flesh, flopping around, like a pair of slugs mating in the cavern of your mouth.’

Still, bad kisses are the least of it.

‘The Good Guy’ opens with the startling assertion that by thirty-five the only way Ted can maintain an erection during sex is to ‘pretend that his dick was a knife, and the woman he was fucking was stabbing herself with it’. In ‘The Death Wish’, a woman arrives at the narrator’s dingy motel room for a hook-up and outlines what she is looking for from the encounter: ‘“I want you to punch me in the face as hard as you can. After you’ve punched me, when I’ve fallen down, I want you to kick me in the stomach.

And then we can have sex.”’

There are brief flashes of warmth and love in the collection (such as when a scared girl watches over her sleeping family in ‘Look At Your Game, Girl’), and there is some much-needed humour in the strong concluding story about a woman who finally works out how to indulge in her desire to bite people without having to worry about the consequences (‘The Biter’). Wolf-whistles being replaced by ‘meows’ in the story of an American Peace Corps volunteer attempting to teach unruly Kenyan schoolgirls are also a nice touch (‘The Night Runner’).

You Know You Want This is a tense, inventive, and flawed collection from a promising writer. The gruelling darkness of the stories is leavened by lighter moments scattered amid the horror.

Jessica’s observation in ‘Look At Your Game, Girl’ – that she can only spend ‘short, thrilling bursts’ of time with the ‘mean friends’ she finds ‘the most fascinating but also the nastiest’ before she starts to feel ‘exhausted and sore’ – feels apposite.

It comes as no surprise to learn that the stories are being adapted into an HBO series. g Amy Baillieu is Deputy Editor of Australian Book Review.

Terminal velocity Three new crime novels

David Whish-Wilson

L

ast year in New York, I visited the Mysterious Bookshop, Manhattan’s only bookstore specialising in crime fiction. The otherwise knowledgeable bookseller had heard of three Australian crime novelists: Peter Temple, Garry Disher, and Jane Harper.

If I were to visit this year, however, I’m pretty sure the bookseller would be able to add more Australian novelists to his list – the multi-award-winning author Emma Viskic for one, along with Dervla McTiernan and Candice Fox. Fox has become an internationally bestselling author, a success amplified by her four parallel collaborations with James Patterson, one of which hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

McTiernan’s 2018 début, The Ruin, was both a critical and commercial success in Australia and overseas, garnering praise from fellow writers, critics, and fans alike for the Ireland-set novel’s cleareyed style and deep characterisation.

In 2018, Garry Disher was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Australian Crime Writer’s Association Ned Kelly Awards in recognition of a career spanning several decades.

Twice awarded Germany’s most prestigious crime-writing award, the German Crime Prize, and twice winner of the Australian equivalent for best crime novel, the Ned Kelly Award, Disher is one of Australia’s great writers and the author of more than fifty books.

Kill Shot (Text Publishing, $29.99 pb, 242 pp, 9781925773224) is Disher’s ninth Wyatt thriller. Wyatt is a distinctive character in Australian crime fiction, and one that reflects Disher’s deep knowledge of the genre in its Australian context, harking back to a long tradition in nineteenth-century Australian crime fiction of zero-detection novels peopled by everyman/woman characters (rather than brilliant Sherlockian detectives

and evil genius antagonists). Wyatt might be a supremely effective master thief, but one of his most important traits is his ability to change, adapt, and camouflage himself as an ordinary man.

His experience, honed instincts, and quietude make of the world a living text that he reads with incredible insight.

Wyatt’s observations of the men and women he shadows, and the worlds they inhabit, provide one of the great pleasures of reading the Wyatt novels. There is the minimalist, descriptive adroitness familiar to quality crime noir, for example, when Wyatt describes an old pilot as a ‘squat, broad man with a square, overheated face, yellowing teeth and white hair springing from his skull …’

But there is also the deeper reading of characters in extremis as they learn something new about themselves in Wyatt’s presence, such as an early target for a theft who is a blusterer: ‘You didn’t engage with them. It only worsened until they felt ridiculous. Then they’d go to some other extreme to counter that impression, and it would go on until someone got hurt.’

With the plot of Kill Shot focused on Wyatt relieving a Newcastle-based Ponzi-schemer of his getaway stash, and because the narrative shifts from Wyatt’s perspective to those of the novel’s variously invested characters, there is also room for some social commentary on contemporary Australian life, especially in the context of the banking royal commission. Wyatt’s target, the corporate-schemer Tremayne, assuages his anxieties about the potential for a fraud conviction by convincing himself that he can ‘outwait the Probity Commission. They were notoriously timid and he’d probably get no more than a rap over the knuckles. He couldn’t blame them. The Federal Government strips thirty-eight million dollars out of their budget and expects them to shake

a big stick at corporate malfeasance?’

Wyatt’s extreme caution, his cool observation, and his understanding of human behaviour position him as both hunter and hunted. On Wyatt’s tail are two worthy antagonists: an old-school policeman different from his arrogant, young colleagues because of his focus on relationships-based policing and detection rather than modern surveillance, and an ex-military security company owner who intends to relieve Wyatt of any loot. Wyatt is made vulnerable because the source of his information is a prisoner, and the conduit for this information is the prisoner’s daughter who Wyatt is developing feelings for.

The novel’s terrific sense of mounting suspense is predicated upon Wyatt’s increasingly dangerous position as he moves closer to his target. Beautifully written, with pitch-perfect dialogue delivered by well-drawn characters, Kill Shot is Garry Disher’s best Wyatt novel yet, and that is saying something.

T

he Scholar (HarperCollins, $32.99 pb, 369 pp, 9781460754221), Perth-based Dervla McTiernan’s sequel to her widely acclaimed début, The Ruin, continues with her central character, Cormac Reilly, although the setting has changed from Dublin to Galway following his partner Emma Sweeney’s accepting of a research position with Darcy Therapeutics at Galway University. Cormac Reilly begins the novel as an outsider within the local detective branch, due to suspicions about his previous role.

When Emma discovers the body of a young woman in the street outside the university late at night, she is understandably distraught. Her first reflex is to call Cormac, who later, together with his colleague Carrie O’Halloran, is first on the scene. Rather than handing the clearly malicious hit-and-run case to another detective, Reilly takes it on himself. The investigation leads quickly to Carline Darcy, granddaughter of Darcy Therapeutics founder, John Darcy. Carline, a brilliant chemistry student, has a strained relationship with her grandfather. The Darcy name carries weight in Galway, particularly with Cormac’s boss, and he is ordered to FICTION

57

HARE’S FUR

by Trevor Shearston Scribe

$27.99 pb, 208 pp, 9781925713473

H

are’s Fur is about what follows grief. Russell Bass, a seventytwo-year-old potter, lives alone in Katoomba. Adele and Michael, his wife and child, have both died. Time still passes. He wakes early, drinks coffee, visits friends, throws clay.

One morning, seeking basalt for glazes at a nearby creek, Russell discovers three siblings living in a cave: two young children, Todd and Emma, and their teenage sister, Jade. Moved to act, he brings them food, offers them help. At first hesitant, they come to trust him, and a tentative relationship begins.

Hare’s Fur is a tale of convalescence, a restrained, moving story about how we discover new meaning in the wake of anguish. While Trevor Shearston’s prior fiction has largely explored the fictionalisation of historical figures – Jack Emanuel’s assassination in A Straight Young Back (2000), Italian explorer Luigi D’Albertis in Dead Birds (2007), the bushranger Ben Hall in Game (2013) – Hare’s Fur proves the writer’s talent beyond historical saga. Katoomba, nestled in the heart of the Blue Mountains, also provides a vivid backdrop. Privy to its ‘teatrees, acacias, and hakeas’, its ‘grevillea laurifolia, dillwynia, and hibbertia’, Shearston is clearly at home; it’s no surprise that he lives there.

This serenity is occasionally disrupted by superfluous touches – Russell’s internal, italicised musings, for one, tend to get in the way. We are also rationed only fragments of the lives of Adele and Michael – in one beautiful passage, Russell watches Todd approach a wallaby, recalling Michael once doing the same – and we are left wanting more.

Overall, Hare’s Fur is about the inevitable reconfiguring of a life. It shows us that, like Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with seams of gold, we too can mend ourselves, we too can reconnect our pieces.

Jack Callil v 58 MARCH 2019

steer clear of the family and the institution. Complicating Cormac’s refusal to do this is his partner Emma’s position within the company, and suspicions among his colleagues that he is unfairly protecting her from scrutiny.

In the hands of a lesser writer, The Scholar might have been merely another run-of-the-mill police procedural, and yet McTiernan’s depiction of the office politics in the local Garda station is brilliantly rendered. Her roving narrative point-of-view brings deep characterisation to each of the novel’s main players, releasing fragments of backstory that accrue and give a strong sense of each character, while using forensic, acute, deeply considered prose to raise doubts in the reader’s mind as the novel moves toward its satisfying conclusion. Cormac Reilly in particular is a brilliant character – understated, careful, humane, and clever – as is his overworked colleague Carrie O’Halloran. Galway is evocatively described, with its dim streets and turbid river, a fitting setting for a story that successfully plumbs the depths of the human heart vis-à-vis tropes of ambition, resentment, loss, and trauma.

The Scholar is a thoughtful, clever, wellcrafted novel that suggests great things to come for its author.

G

one by Midnight (Bantam, $32.99 pb, 376 pp, 9780143789154) is dual Ned Kelly Award-winning author Candice Fox’s sixth novel in as many years, alongside her prodigious output since 2015 with collaborator and international bestseller James Patterson, which includes three co-written novels and a novella. Gone by Midnight is the third novel in Fox’s Crimson Lake series. Set in the Cairns area of far-north Queensland, the series focuses on the investigations of ex-detective Ted Conkaffey and Amanda Pharrell.

The novel begins with Conkaffey – still doing it tough after having been unfairly accused of abducting a young woman – trying to keep a low profile in a town where many assume his guilt.

He and Pharrell are hired by the mother of a child who has gone missing from a local hotel. Her motivation for hiring Conkaffey relates to her distrust

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

of the police and her belief that Ted will protect her from their inevitable interest in her. The disappearance of her son presents itself as something of a locked-room mystery. How does one boy securely locked in a room with three other boys go missing when the door hasn’t been accessed? Various suspects present themselves, although Conkaffey and Pharrell’s attempts to obtain a clean run at the case are stymied by the resentful and obstructive local plods, due in large part to their hatred of suspected paedophile Conkaffey and previously convicted murderer Pharrell. The novel is peopled by colourful rogues, none more than Amanda Pharrell herself. Spiky and terse, flamboyant and irreverent, she provides many laugh-out-loud moments.

Crime fiction is a broad church, and Gone by Midnight isn’t a novel that invests time on social verisimilitude or deep psychological exploration of its protagonists and their world, nor upon generating an aesthetic that mines the novel’s tropical setting – none of which will trouble Fox’s fans. Gone by Midnight hits terminal velocity halfway through page one and never slackens. g David Whish-Wilson is the author of five crime novels and three nonfiction books. His latest crime novel is The Coves, out with Fremantle Press in 2018. His next novel is True West, to be published by Fremantle Press in November 2019. He lives in Fremantle, Western Australia, and coordinates the creative-writing program at Curtin University.

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Excavations Mark Gibeau THE RISE AND FALL OF MODERN JAPANESE LITERATURE

by John Whittier Treat

University of Chicago Press (Footprint) $69 pb, 406 pp, 9780226545134

I

n his 1998 book, Japanese Literature as ‘fluctuation’ (‘ Yuragi’ no nihon bungaku), Komori Yōichi deconstructs the concept of ‘modern Japanese literature’ by examining the Encyclopedia of Modern Japanese Literature (『日本近代 文学大辞典』), an impressive work that, despite its six volumes, fails to provide an entry for the very thing it proposes to discuss: modern Japanese literature.

This, Komori argues, is due to modern Japanese literature’s status as a ‘privileged sign’. Like the modern nationstate of Japan, it can only be defined indirectly, through a tautology of association and exclusion. That is, a work is modern only if it is not premodern.

To not be premodern, a text must not only be written after the start of the Meiji period (1868–1912), it must also have been properly baptised at the font of European and American literature.

We know that Akutagawa Ryūnosuke is a modern writer not simply because he was active in the early twentieth century but because scholars have discerned in him traces of Anatole France.

Had Akutagawa written gesaku, waka, monogatari, or in any other ‘premodern’ literary mode, he would be invisible to the editors of the encyclopedia, regardless of when he wrote. This logic of exclusion is applied to the other components of the phrase, ‘modern Japanese literature’. A work is Japanese if it is not non-Japanese, if it is written in Japanese by a Japanese person – though the concepts of Japanese l anguage and ‘Japaneseness’ are themselves hardly straightforward. A text is ‘literature’ only if it is not not literature, if it is not art, music, journalism, etc.

Komori calls for a literature that rejects the logic of exclusion and embraces multilingualism and multiculturalism; a literature that not only ‘recognises the

pluralistic coexistence of minority languages and cultures inside unitary communities’ but that ‘introduces heterogeneity and asymmetry as the basic principles of all relationships’. In many ways, John Whittier Treat’s formidable book is just such a literary history. ‘One aim of this book,’ he writes, ‘is to re-examine certain key conjunctions in the history of Japan’s modern literature where we can excavate just how literary texts came to embody emerging, dominant or resistant strategies of power in society.’

What Treat means by this becomes evident in the first chapter, where he looks to accounts of ‘poison women’ for the ‘origins’ of ‘modern, Japanese, literature’.

The chapter begins with an examination of tsuzukimono, or serialised accounts that appear in tabloid newspapers. Specifically, he looks at Kanagaki Robun’s (1829–1894) ‘Bird-Chasing Omatsu’. Omatsu, a prototypical dokufu or ‘poison woman’, is a stunningly beautiful member of the untouchable caste who uses her charms to seduce, and subsequently bilk, one man after another. Though he does, briefly, engage in textual analysis, Treat is less concerned with what the story says than what it is and what it does. That is, he is interested in its function in the larger context of Japan’s literary development. To this end,Treat takes the reader on a surprising journey that includes the emergence of libel and slander laws, competition between highbrow and lowbrow newspapers, and the occasional mention of Hillary Clinton’s alien baby. Through his discussion of ‘Bird-Catching Omatsu’, Treat examines how discourses of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ coalesce in early-Meiji Japan.

This pattern is applied in subsequent chapters, where various texts are juxtaposed with changing technologies, laws, economies, geopolitical situations, and so on. The second chapter reads Higuchi Ichiyō’s famous story ‘Child’s Play’ (‘Takekurabe’) against the rise of the textile industry. In Chapter Three, Natsume Sōseki’s I Am a Cat (1905) is juxtaposed with rakugo (comedic storytelling) and the development of stenography. He examines Taishō literature through the lens of Kishida Ryūsei’s (1891–1929) art. ‘Imperial

Japan’s worst writer’, a dodgy fellow named Kim Mun-Jip, is used to examine ‘Japanese’ literature written outside Japan by a non-Japanese. Creole in occupied Japan is explored through the constitution and the rise of boogiewoogie. The remaining chapters look at Fukuzawa Shichirō’s ‘The Story of a Dream of Courtly Elegance’, featuring fantasies of beheaded emperors, the rise of manga, Yoshimoto Banana’s imaginary, schizophrenic Kitchen (1988), Haruki Murakami’s multiple personality disorder, and the wonderfully bizarre world of Takahashi Gen’ichirō.

Treat’s is a unique and unusual narrative (if it can be called such) of modern Japanese literary history – one that interrogates each of those terms in its turn. It is formidable not only in its scope and ambition but also in its writing. Treat’s theoretical analyses makes zero allowances for the uninitiated and are clearly written for a specialised audience with a thorough understanding of literary theory. This is neither surprising nor a defect, but readers who are unfamiliar with Foucault, Jameson, Williams, and the like will find themselves gazing vacantly at no small number of paragraphs and pages.

There are, as always, a few quibbles.

The notes are uniformly unkind. Elaboration in some of the notes would have made the book more accessible to nonspecialists. The author presumes the reader’s facility with French and German but, oddly, not Japanese. Japanese words are invariably explained, but the Germanically impaired will be forced resort to Google Translate.

In sum, Treat’s book eschews any pretence of comprehensiveness.The combination of a broad, cross-disciplinary examination of ‘literature’ with a narrow focus on specific themes and works means that the text somehow manages to be both far broader and far narrower than conventional literary histories. It is a very welcome addition, and counterpoint, to the existing body of Englishlanguage Japanese literary histories. g Mark Gibeau teaches at the Australian National University. His translation of Dazai Osamu’s novel A Shameful Life (Ningen shikkaku) appeared in 2018. v LITERARY STUDIES

59

with

Debra Adelaide Where are you happiest?

Generally where I am right now, in my study writing, but also in the garden. It is very uncomplicated.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Some dreams are extremely vivid, but unless I consciously process them they vanish like water down a drain. Doesn’t everyone dream like this?

What is your favourite film?

Some Like It Hot. Everything about it is brilliant: the script, the performances, those jaw-dropping dresses created for Marilyn Monroe by Orry-Kelly. The scene where a dozen girls are partying in the sleeping compartment of a train is pure cinematic genius.

And your favourite book?

Wuthering Heights or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; I can never decide.

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

Nigella Lawson, obviously, along with Dorothy Parker and Stephen Fry. A combination of sumptuous food, glittering conversation, and copious drinking. I would do the washing-up.

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

I wish that ‘proactive’ would disappear: it is an ugly word of limited application. And I like ‘counterpane’, a far nicer word than ‘doona’.

Who is your favourite author?

Yesterday it was Evelyn Waugh, the day before it was Donna Tartt, the day before that it was Thea Astley.

Every author I admire is my favourite.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Sybylla Melvyn (from My Brilliant Career), who is so bold, clever, flawed, and ardent.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Whatever mysterious thing they do that totally immerses me in their stories. When I work out what it is, I will develop this quality too.

60 MARCH 2019

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, which I read when I was about sixteen. It opened my eyes to the ways in which women were treated. It is the first book I remember reading that required me to think critically.

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

He was never an idol, but Ian Fleming’s James Bond books enthralled me when I was a teenager. Several years ago I tried rereading Casino Royale; after the third chapter I was so repelled by the sexism I couldn’t continue.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

Nothing, and that is the simple truth. I could pretend it is crippling self-doubt or lack of time, but the only real impediment to writing is failure to write.

What do you think of the state of criticism?

In Australia it is constrained by the obvious lack of outlets. It is impossible to imagine publications like Slightly Foxed or The New Yorker thriving here.

And writers’ festivals?

Usually exhausting. But the best writers’ festivals are actually readers’ festivals: so long as I remember that, all is fine.

Do you read reviews of your own books?

Yes. Writers should engage with the broader literary culture, and thus be interested to see how critics evaluate their work.

I often disagree with what is said, but that is not the point.

Are artists valued in our society?

Of course not! Has any government ever had a Minister for Reading? A Department of Dance? Of Poets’ Affairs?

Is there any arts organisation funded as generously as the Australian Institute of Sport? When was the last time a novelist was Australian of the Year?

What are you working on now?

Revisions of my next book, a collection of essays, plus another mess which may or may not become a novel.

Debra Adelaide’s latest book is the short story collection Zebra & Other Stories (Picador).

(Photograph

by Gregory Ferris)

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Art | Dance | Film | Music | Opera | Theatre

ABR Arts

Peter Kowitz, who plays Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, backstage during rehearsal (photograph by Dylan Evans, courtesy of Queenland Theatre)

Bronwyn Lea on Death of a Salesman Art

Andy Warhol

Patrick McCaughey

Film

If Beale Street Could Talk Patricia Maunder

Theatre

Mary Stuart

Ian Dickson

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61

If Beale Street Could Talk 

T

Patricia Maunder

here is an inordinate weight of expectation surrounding Barry Jenkins’s third feature, If Beale Street Could Talk. His previous film, Moonlight, won three Oscars in 2018, including Best Picture (after La La Land ’s mistaken-award chaos), and was nominated in five other categories. Furthermore, this is the first English-language film adaptation of a work by celebrated African-American writer James Baldwin.

Like Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk observes the disadvantage inherent in the black American experience. It uses a time-hopping narrative shot through with poetic tenderness. While easy-to-follow flashbacks and flash-forwards heighten the inevitable tragedy between the two young lovers at the film’s heart, their romance is too rarefied to make this as satisfying as its predecessor.

Jenkins’s Oscar-nominated screenplay is largely faithful to the novel of the same name, Baldwin’s fifth, which was published in 1974. It maintains the setting in Harlem, the New York neighbourhood where Baldwin grew up.

In a languid opening long shot, we are introduced to Clementine ‘Tish’ Rivers and Alonzo ‘Fonny’ Hunt, just as their deep childhood friendship becomes something more. A moment later – actually weeks or months hence – Fonny is in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Victoria, a Puerto Rican immigrant, whose violent rape is but the latest blow in a troubled life we barely glimpse, has been pressured to finger him by a crooked white cop, who has taken a dislike to this virtuous young black man.

In an extended scene that is the film’s most powerful, the couple’s families learn that Tish is pregnant with Fonny’s child. The Rivers are poor but loving and supportive; the Hunts are better off but dysfunctional. This gathering is at first rich with subtext before exploding into anger, as the proud and pious Mrs Hunt, carefully dressed and coiffed, spits venom at her son’s fiancée. The Rivers will strive to clear the name of Fonny, who is like a surrogate member of the family. Mrs Rivers even makes a desperate journey to Puerto Rico in the hope of persuading Victoria, who has returned home, to correct her story.

For the audience, Fonny’s innocence is never in doubt.

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much as they adore each other. Their romantic, hopeful, pre-prison moments are often bathed in a golden light by cinematographer James Laxton, and caressed by the gentle jazz and strings of composer Nicholas Britell (both were among Moonlight’s Oscar nominees; Britell is again nominated for Beale Street).

Notwithstanding Baldwin’s physical descriptions, two attractive young actors have been cast in these leading roles.

Newcomer KiKi Layne and Stephan James, best known as Jesse Owens in the 2016 biopic Race, offer more than good looks. Both exude nuanced calm, with Layne giving Tish, the film’s narrator, a shy determination, while James hints at Fonny’s complex experiences beyond the frame.

The couple, meeting time and again either side of prison glass, remain steadfast. Briefly, Fonny loses his temper and hope, then quickly apologises to Tish, but the horror he endures is written on his face, the cuts and haunted eyes recalling an earlier conversation with a friend just released from prison. In there they can do whatever they want with you, says this African-American, also falsely convicted. At a few points during the film, brief montages of documentary photographs reveal the misery of the era’s black prisoners.

We are troubled by this reality, and the cruel jolts that threaten to push the film’s central relationship off the rails, from the false imprisonment to the white lawyer, driven to overturn this race-based injustice, being frozen out by the justice system and his peers. Tish and Fonny seem to float above it all most of the time, buoyed by a love so pure that Jenkins has almost deified them.

Which is why, ironically, several imperfect supporting characters are more interesting. Aunjanue Ellis, for example, in her only scene, delivers a powerhouse performance as Mrs Hunt, indirectly revealing her character’s life of disappointment. Regina King is Oscar-nominated for the role of Mrs Rivers, who subtly, lovingly guides her husband and daughters through the announcement of Tish’s pregnancy, and barely holds herself together during the critical Puerto Rican mission. Notable cameos include Pedro Pascal (Game of Thrones) as Victoria’s protective brother, and Diego Luna (Rogue One), playing a restaurateur whose friendship with Fonny speaks volumes.

If Beale Street Could Talk offers a refreshingly different perspective on the African-American experience to cinema’s usual takes of clichéd comedy or violence and despair. It navigates these two extremes with hope, love, and poetic language often lifted verbatim from Baldwin’s novel, but with such reverence for the two principal characters that they become adrift from reality – a reality that has changed little since the novel was published, as institutional racism sees black Americans incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites. g If Beale Street Could Talk (Entertainment One), 119 minutes, is written and directed by Barry Jenkins.

Patricia Maunder is a media professional covering travel, lifestyle, and the arts in print, online, and radio. v

Mary Stuart 

T

Ian Dickson

he contest between Elizabeth Tudor and her cousin Mary Stuart, providing two such meaty roles, has proved irresistible fodder over the years for actresses on both stage and screen. On film, Katherine Hepburn and Florence Eldridge, Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson, and Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie have taken turns to duke it out. Recently, on stage in London, there was a much-praised adaptation of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart in which a coin toss at the start of the evening determined which of the two roles Juliet Stevenson and Lia Williams should play. Now it is the turn of Caroline Brazier and Helen Thomson to tackle these iconic roles in what is billed as an ‘adaptation’ of the Schiller play by Kate Mulvany. Mutilation would be a more apposite word.

Schiller’s wordy drama comes down heavily on the side of Mary, but she is no simple victim. Ironically, it is her pride and amour propre that ultimately bring her down.

He plays fast and loose with historical fact, inventing a character, Mortimer, who is a fanatical devotee of Mary.

Schiller also famously concocted a meeting between the two queens, a meeting which actually never occurred.

In her program notes, Mulvany comments on the way the media have tried to beat up conflict between various royal women – Diana versus Fergie, Kate versus Megan – and contends that the patriarchy cannot abide the prospect of powerful women being anything but rivals. This is undeniably true as far as popular culture is concerned, two prime examples being Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women and the recent television series Feud.

The problem here is that Elizabeth and Mary actually were rivals. To downplay the fact muddies the waters and weakens the drama. Schiller’s two queens are complex women very conscious of their royal heritage and where that places them in society. Mulvany’s are, well, what?

Brazier’s Mary Stuart is a very matey type, joshing with her jailor, Paulet, who calls the former queen of France and Scotland ‘Mary’. Her lack of nobility means we get no sense of the lèse-majesté with which she feels she is being treated. If Brazier’s Mary is allowed little sense of majesty, Thomson’s Elizabeth is afforded even less. Her opening scene comes over as though it were

adapted not so much from Schiller as from the Carry On Laughing’s ‘Orgy and Bess’, although there Hattie Jacques shows more regality than Thomson is allowed here. Thomson is a splendid comic actor and she lands laugh after laugh, but her Elizabeth comes across merely as a foul-mouthed harridan, and by the time we are supposed to take her seriously, it is too late.

As is the fashion now, Mulvany’s script is deliberately demotic. This might not matter if the everyday language were used with any skill. Here it is leaden, dull, obscenity-laden, and the occasional direct quotes from Schiller sound almost absurdly out of place. Given the fact that the meeting between the two women is entirely an invention, there is no reason why it needs to take place at Schiller’s Fotheringay. Mulvany makes it a fantasy in which Elizabeth, under the influence of alcohol and ‘substances’ (what substances were there in Elizabethan England: eye of newt, tongue of frog?), conjures up and finally confronts her nemesis. Here, Schiller gives us a mighty encounter between two strong, flawed, but ultimately heroic women. Mulvany, on the other hand, has them enter into a dispute as to who is the greater victim. Women who define themselves by what men have done to them.

The real problem with the play is that the cast have only, indeed barely, two-dimensional characters to work with. This is a shame since the Sydney Theatre Company has assembled a group of actors that could successfully have played either the Schiller original or a worthy adaptation. Towards the end of the play, both Thomson and Brazier are allowed effective soliloquies which they handle superbly. Here, we see what they might have achieved if the rest of the script had reached that standard.

The supporting roles are strongly cast. Simon Burke makes a warm, decent, likeable Paulet. As Shrewsbury, Peter Carroll turns in one of his effective old fogey performances. As Mortimer, Fayssal Bazzi has to struggle with the fact that his part has been so cut that it is difficult for him to develop it. For some reason, his character has been turned into the sixteenth-century equivalent of Jack Dracula and become a tattooed, walking billboard.

However, Bazzi makes his mark, as it were.

Technically the play is up to STC’s usual high standard. Lee Lewis moves everyone on and off Elizabeth Gadsby’s signature rostra with aplomb. Mel Page’s costumes, Paul Jackson’s lighting, and Max Lyandvert’s music and sound design all work well.

The theatre is finally getting to hear more women’s voices, and it could use more potent female takes on stories until now told by men. Unfortunately this is not one of them. g Mary Stuart, presented by the Sydney Theatre Company, continues at the Roslyn Packer Theatre until 2 March 2019. Performance attended: February 9.

Ian Dickson is ABR’s Sydney theatre critic.

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The Flying Dutchman 

I

Barney Zwartz

t is easy to overlook – this side of The Ring and Tristan und Isolde – quite how radical Wagner’s first distinctly Wagnerian opera, The Flying Dutchman, really was.

Written in Paris, where grand opera was utterly dominant, the opera broke with the form, style, and subject matter of grand opera and introduced Wagner’s own concepts.

In 1839 Wagner had gone to Paris, the nineteenthcentury ‘capital of Europe’, to make his fortune. Rienzi, the opera before the Dutchman, explicitly set out to be the grandest of grand operas – Hans von Bülow cruelly called it Meyerbeer’s best opera – but with The Flying Dutchman, he set out on his own course. Later, he wrote that his true career as an artist dated from the time he stopped working from the head and put his trust in his intuitions, and that this happened for the first time with Dutchman.

It was the most penurious time in Wagner’s life. He had to leave Paris to write Dutchman; when he returned he could hardly leave his house because his shoes had barely any soles. Meyerbeer introduced him to the new director of the Paris Opera, who gave him five hundred francs for the synopsis of a one-act version of Dutchman, but then assigned the opera to another composer (Le Vaisseau Fantôme by Pierre-Louis Dietsch). Wagner resolved to make it a full-length opera, and, with a double intervention on his behalf by Meyerbeer, it was taken up by the Berlin Hofoper. Meanwhile, in October 1842, Rienzi had a successful première at the Dresden Opera, which then acquired Dutchman and gave it four performances, conducted by Wagner, in January 1843.

The character of the Dutchman, Wagner wrote, was a blend of the spirit of the folk, Ulysses, and the Wandering Jew. After blaspheming in an attempt to round the Cape of Good Hope, he is condemned by the Devil to do battle with the unresting waves for eternity. He yearns for death, which redemption he may gain only through a woman who sacrifices herself for him.

This woman, Senta (first called Minna, after Wagner’s first wife), is no longer the home-tending Penelope of Ulysses but the quintessence of womankind – the woman of the future, Wagner said. ‘This was the Flying Dutchman who arose so often from the swamps and billows of

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my life and drew me to him with such resistless might; this was the first folk-poem that forced its way into my heart, and called on me as man and artist to convey its meaning and mould it as a work of art. From here begins my career as poet and my farewell to the mere concocter of opera texts.’

Interestingly, unlike Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and Tristan und Isolde, neither protagonist shows any affection for the other – their only ambition is to die together.

Suzanne Chaundy, director of Melbourne Opera’s fine new production, understands this psychological drama. The pair embrace only once, after a build-up of tension. Chaundy lets the drama unfold sympathetically and without exaggeration throughout.

Melbourne Opera mounted a superb Tristan und Isolde in 2018, and this Dutchman falls only a little short.

Under noted Wagnerian conductor Anthony Negus, the augmented Melbourne Opera Orchestra produces precision and momentum without quite the freedom and dramatic impact of the Tristan.

Conductor Christian Thielemann has noted that the Dutchman orchestra is the smallest of the ten true Wagnerian operas, but by far the loudest. Not so here: it is the magnificent chorus that produces tremendous volume and conviction. The ghost chorus, usually pre-recorded and played off-stage, is sung live in the most anarchic scene of the opera.

The production also enjoys really fine singers in every role, from the rich tenor of Michael Lapina as the Steersman and the always engaging Mary of mezzo Roxane Hislop to the main roles – bass-baritone Darren Jeffery as the Dutchman, Lee Abrahmsen as Senta, bass Steven Gallop as Daland, and tenor Rosario La Spina as Eric.

Abrahmsen, who just seems to get better and better, is thrilling. She produces a huge sound with no loss of sweetness, delicacy, or control, and she never sounds forced. The equally reliable Gallop, a big bass who can also act, is an entertainingly avaricious Daland, and it is a luxury to cast Rosario La Spina as the desperate Eric.

As for the Dutchman, Darren Jeffery is marvellous in the great first-act monologue, Die Frist ist um, and is sinister yet melancholy throughout, but on opening night, at times, he seemed underpowered.

Andrew Bailey’s revolving set (sometimes ship, sometimes village), combined with a cloth backdrop, is fluid and effective, while Rob Sowinski’s lighting is dramatic and imaginative, making an essential contribution.

With so many people on stage so often, the chorus often moves with noticeably exaggerated care. The only flaw is the surtitles, which are so small and so dim that I usually couldn’t read them, despite being about only a quarter of the way back from the front row. g The Flying Dutchman was performed by Melbourne Opera at the Regent Theatre, Melbourne, in early February 2019. Performance attended: February 3.

Barney Zwartz is a Melbourne journalist.

Death of a Salesman

knows, requires constant impersonation, but Willy has lost himself in a lifetime of fantasy and lies.

Peter Kowitz’s Willy – among the best I’ve seen – swells and shrinks inside his suit as bravado augments his  physique before conceding to the humiliation of arriving, totally unprepared, at one’s obsolescence. He’s just paid off the car, but it’s on its last legs. ‘Once in my life I would eventy years ago, on 10 February 1949, Arthur like to own something outright before it’s broken!’ he says.

Miller’s Death of a Salesman premièred on Broadway ‘I’m always in a race with the junkyard!’ He has one more to rapturous acclaim. Miller’s intention in writing payment to make on his mortgage, but it doesn’t look like the play, he recalls in his autobiography, Timebends (1987), he can make it. ‘They time things,’ he observes, ‘so when was not to put ‘a timebomb under capitalism’ – as one you finally paid for them, they’re used up.’ Fortunately for outraged woman accused on opening night – but rather Willy – or at least it appears fortunate inside his rapidly to expose a ‘pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by deteriorating mind – he has a ‘proposition’ in the form of standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage an insurance policy that shines like a diamond in the dark at the moon’. It’s ironic that a country that did so much to jungle, if only he’d reach out his hand. Willy knows exactly articulate and sell the American Dream – perhaps best pré- how much a man’s life is worth: for him it’s a head price cised by Hap Loman as the fight to come out ‘number one of $20,000.

Although Miller’s men often struggle with their conman’ – should give birth to one of literature’s biggest losers.

But after hundreds of productions of Death of a Salesman sciences, his women rarely do. They’re either dangerous temptresses, like Abigail Wilaround the world, Miller’s antiliams in The Crucible (1953), hero – ‘a joker, a bleeding mass or maternal saints like Willy’s of contradictions, a clown’ – has wife, Linda. But Angie Milbeen found to be representative liken bestows Linda with an everywhere, in every system, of emotional complexity that ourselves. has us question the naïveté I wouldn’t be alone in and purity of her actions: thinking Miller’s writing lacks does Linda really think she is poetry. His plays give little protecting her husband when pleasure in the reading, and she returns to him the instruhis most famous lines – ‘he’s ments – gas pipe, car keys liked, but he’s not well liked’ or – of his suicide attempts? It’s ‘attention must be paid’ – sound not clear exactly what Linda bland or even naff removed Jackson McGovern, Peter Kowitz, and Thomas Larkin considers her shiny prospect to from context. And yet Death of in Death of a Salesman (photograph by Peter Wallis) be, but her knack for prodding a Salesman, properly staged, as Willy to his doom nevertheless it is in Jason Klarwein’s anniversary production, consistently delivers one of the most en- propels the narrative along its deadly tracks.

Willy’s thirty-something sons, Biff and Hap – played thralling and emotional experiences in live theatre. In honouring the play as the period piece it has become, Klarwein by Thomas Larkin and Jackson McGovern – are described resists a heavy interpretative overlay of his own and relies on by their mother in a moment of rage-fuelled lucidity as the dramatic vigour of Miller’s characterisation to draw us an ingrate and a philandering bum. Single and serially into 1940s America. Sound designer Justin Harrison sets the unemployed, they show us that the failure-to-launch synmood with the melancholic tune ‘We Three’ from The Ink drome existed long before Gen Y males preferred to live as Spots – ‘We three, we’re all alone / Living in a memory / shut-ins playing video games rather than venture out for My echo, my shadow, and me’ – suggestive of Willy Loman’s a driver’s licence and a job. When Hap vows at his father’s lonely life on the road with only the voices inside his head graveside to marry and to continue Willy’s dream to come out number one man, we suspect that Hap, too, is in a race for company.

The set, intelligently conceived by Richard Roberts, with the junkyard. At least Biff has seen what a ridiculous zeroes in on the rudiments of a family home: a kitchen lie his whole life has been, which might be just enough to and the marital bed. At sixty-three, Willy is kicking and save it. g flailing down a greasy slide to oblivion. He would say or Death of a Salesman is being performed by Queensland Theatre at do anything to make a sale, but nobody is listening; they the Playhouse from 9 February to 2 March 2019. Performance attended: haven’t been for years, and his commissions have hit the February 15. skids. Desperate and obsequious, Willy habitually plagiarises the kind of Depression-era optimism found in Dale Car- Bronwyn Lea’s most recent poetry collection is The Deep negie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Sales, he North: Selected poems (2013).

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Bronwyn Lea

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Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again

S

Patrick McCaughey

ome time ago I appeared on a morning radio program with a prominent guru of Australian culture who declared that Andy Warhol was ‘a one trick pony’. Neither remonstration nor persuasion could help the guru out of his imperturbable complacency. He had summed up Warhol in a sentence – what more need be said?

A pity the guru could not have waited to take in the Whitney Museum’s massive retrospective – with its Duchampian title, Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again – to save him from his tomfoolery. Even for those familiar with Warhol, the exhibition is full of surprises (and a few disappointments). It leaves no doubt regarding Warhol’s centrality to the American story, and not just its art history. Few artists have embraced the extremes of that experience, from the banal to the catastrophic, and have made such vivid art out of them. Paradox and contradiction abound in Warhol’s art, personality, and career. He is the perpetual outlier, the prankster in American art, yet he defines the turbulent decades from the 1960s to his death in 1987 aged fifty-eight.

The early pop paintings and objects mark a decisive change in American art. When he showed the Brillo boxes in 1964, hundreds of them stacked and strewn across the floor of the Stable Gallery, he outraged and dumbfounded the New York art world – arguably the last serious artist to have such an effect. No matter how familiar and frequently exhibited these Campbell’s Soup Cans and Coke bottles are, they retain the freshness of their assault on pictorial decorum. Collectively they parody the American Dream, where noses can be straightened, dance steps taught, and everybody, high and low, can swig a Coke.

‘Everybody has their own America,’ Warhol once claimed, ‘and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see … you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from

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art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one.’

In Warhol’s art there was less dreaming and more rude awakening. You don’t have to go far in the Whitney’s retrospective to encounter death and disaster. They start uneasily with the life-size pictures of Elvis Presley pointing a revolver at you. In gun-ridden America, that’s no joke. Then comes the shattering, black-and-white Saturday Night Disaster, where the corpses of two men have been vomited out of a crashed car. Warhol, the master of repetition, stacks the same image on top, death in duplex.

In 1963 Warhol told Art News, ‘My first show in Paris is going to be called Death in America. I’ll show the electric chair pictures and the dogs in Birmingham and car crashes and some suicide paintings.’ They form a deeper tranche of experience in his work, none more so than the ambiguously titled Race Riot – ambiguous because the pictures show no sign of riot. Instead, a snarling Alsatian attacks a neatly dressed, straw-hatted African-American man, ripping the legs off his trousers. Bull Connor, the infamous Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, Alabama, provides the text: ‘I want ‘em to see the dogs work. Look at those niggers run.’ Okwui Enwezor quotes it in his exceptionally fine catalogue essay ‘Andy Warhol and the Painting of Catastrophe’. They are modern history paintings, as American art historian Anne Wagner pointed out over twenty years ago. In a newly racially divided America, they speak with intensity and urgency.

The most moving of Warhol’s history paintings come in the Jackie Kennedy series, disappointingly only cursorily represented in the Whitney. The individual portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy in blue and red form the antechamber to the Dallas catastrophe. The source for these works is the official White House photograph.

The enlarged, hesitant, half-smiling faces of the young woman have an eerie effect. Warhol painted them in early 1964, months after the assassination. You know as you look at them that an irreparable tragedy has befallen this woman. She will never look the same again. ‘Changed, changed utterly …’

Warhol deploys his gift for repetition with force and effect in the larger Dallas istoria. He transforms the over-familiar newsreel images into the most painful moments of private grief. In ‘the transition from First Lady to widowhood … Warhol is taken over by a special unaccustomed purpose to return narrative and temporality to his work’, to quote Anne Wagner. The electric chair paintings are contiguous to the Jackies.

Brilliantly selected, they are by turn luridly offensive in colour and steel gray in monochrome. Few other contemporary paintings register so bleakly the sense of death, the annihilation of being, the descent into nothingness.

The Electric Chairs in particular and the exhibition as a whole resolve one of the vexed issues in the interpretation of Warhol. Hal Foster, a heavyweight of contemporary art history, peremptorily dismisses the darker reading

of Warhol: ‘An essay could be written on the desire of painted in 1986, the year before his death, represent a left critics to make Warhol a contemporary Brecht.’ distraught self. Fairbrother interestingly recounts their Tom Crow, no less renowned as critic and historian, has origin. Warhol made the series at the invitation of Lonargued the contrary, that Warhol’s ‘images were carefully don art dealer Anthony d’Offay. But Warhol disliked the and consciously developed to maximize their impact on choice of the polaroid images he and d’Offay had made, the viewer … to magnify the meaning of the subject.’ and instead produced a series on an entirely different shot.

The verdict favours Crow over Foster: you are riddled D’Offay was appalled with the result and insisted that with consequence and content throughout the show.

Warhol remake the series using their original choice. The During Warhol’s lifetime, much of the controfinest of these come where Warhol camouflages his face as versy surrounding him stemmed from the antics of his though hiding behind a Fool’s motley – and this from an studio-cum-showartist who craved room, the Factory, fame and publicity. the weirdness of These compelled his camp followers, and camouflaged and the cryptic/ Self-Portraits are comic awfulness indeed the image of his films. Robof the unsettled ert Hughes’s disself. dain rose to highWa r h o l h a s pitched contempt been dead for more for Warhol and fothan thirty years. cused as much on The raunchy fumes the ambiance as the of the Factory have work. He recorded disappeared into Warhol ‘entering a the ether, leaving drawing room, pale us with the residue eyes blinking in the of his art, a rich pock marked bun of and complicated a face, surrounded oeuvre. Only a by his Praetorian donkey would call Guard of chitterhim ‘a one trick ling ingénues …’ He pony’. g derided the inmates of the Factory as a Contributor’s note: ‘legendary shifting The NGV has an entourage of drag exceptionally fine queens, raucous juSelf-Portrait from venile models and that final series. human parrot fish’.

It was one of the Tre vor Fairlast works acquired brother’s essay in during my time the catalogue is a as Director and shrewd analysis of done at the perAndy Warhol (1928–1987), Nine Jackies, 1964. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, the Warhol milieu: spicacious urging nine panels: 60 3⁄8 × 48 1⁄4 in. (153.4 × 122.6 cm) overall. Whitney Museum of ‘sowing confusion of Robert Lindsay, American Art, New York; gift of The American Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc. proved to be the then Curator of Leonard A. Lauder, President 2002.273 © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the best tactic for surContemporary Art. Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York viving on all fronts’.

It was bought from Warhol revelled in Anthony d’Offay, the media embrace. The strange world of the Factory I think, and purchased for a very reasonable price: from spawned his films, his magazines, and his endless stream memory, $65,000. Warhol died the following Sunday: of moneymaking portraits of celebrities and stars and 22 February 1987. g nonentities. It was a randy court of jostling favourites, Andy Warhol – From A to B and Back Again is exhibiting at the Whitney a seamy world of drugs and hangers on. ‘There was not Museum of American Art from 12 November 2018 to 31 March 2019. much firm ground around Warhol.’

The unsettled ran deep within Warhol, forever keepPatrick McCaughey is a former Director of the National ing ahead of his audience. The final series of Self-Portraits Gallery of Victoria.

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From the ABR Archive Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Dead Europe was published by Vintage.

Michael Williams reviewed it in the June–July 2005 issue of ABR.

S

o often, the language used to discuss Australian literature is that of anxiety. A.A. Phillips’s ‘cultural cringe’, coined in 1950, is never far from the critical surface as readers and commentators grapple with questions of national and literary identity. The report of the 1995 Miles Franklin Award’s judges offers one such example: [N]ovels about the migrant experience seem to us to be seizing the high ground in contemporary Australian fiction, in contrast to fictions about the more vapid aspects of Australian life. In particular, they are incorporating into the cultural memory first-hand experience of the major historical events of the century, events from which Australia has been largely insulated, but which are a growing component of contemporary Australian life.

That the novel that inspired these observations is The Hand That Signed the Paper is beside the point, as is the underlying assumption that ‘migrant’ refers to Australia’s Demidenkos rather than its Darvilles. Of more interest is the evident anxiety about Australia’s ‘insulated’ distance from those political and social movements that constitute the worthwhile stories of the century. Meaning, the implication is, must come from abroad.

Nobody could ever accuse Christos Tsiolkas of an interest in ‘the vapid aspects of Australian life’. Dead Europe is a book whose big ideas are played out on a global scale. It is also a book that unflinchingly explores the nature of the Australian experience. It is bold, gripping, and deeply disturbing – almost enough to make one pray for some vapidity.

It is easy to imagine the protagonist of Dead Europe as Ari from Loaded (1995), twenty years down the track.

The anger is still there, largely beneath the surface, as is the disillusionment with identity politics. But Isaac is a tangibly older, somewhat wiser narrator than Ari: the consuming sense of nihilism and lack of purpose has been replaced with a fear of disconnection; Isaac, ruefully aware of his thickening waistline, lacks Ari’s vain confidence in his own youth; to a certain extent, he is reconciled with his Greek-Australian status, with his sexuality, even with his deeply unhappy and fractured family. The same dance of identity that so characterised Tsiolkas’s earlier work is still the key, but the steps are surer this time, and an exploration of anti-Semitism is the underlying tune.

Tsiolkas’s Europe is a world of uneasy alliances and even uneasier ideological and political shifts. Isaac tours a new-old continent, far removed from the tourist postcards.

Tsiolkas is particularly strong on the expatriate’s disappointment in the face of changes to the mother country.

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of contemporary Greece with disapproval. This is neither proud Greek culture nor the workers’ idyll that his father’s generation fought for. Interspersed with Isaac’s travel experiences (and thoughts of home) is a parallel narrative set in wartime Greece. These chapters adopt a more folkloric tone than the rest of the narrative. The first few are almost reminiscent of Louis de Bemières in their depiction of wartime village life. But Tsiolkas is not a writer who is prepared to content himself for long with bland niceties, and the tale of hatred and death carries with it the inexorable weight of ghosts.

There is something unmistakably grimy and compromised about all the interactions in this book, but that is the milieu in which Tsiolkas excels. The despair and the alienation felt by almost all of the characters in this dark, angry book are offset by a passion for ideas – both the author’s and their own. It is, at times, contrived: Colin’s swastika tattoo; the mute old man and his blind wife who strain too hard for effect and ring a little hollow. Other sections of the book, particularly those concerned with the wartime narrative, are excessively portentous. Tsiolkas is guilty of some overwriting, but, on the whole, most of the flourishes of language and indulgences of plotting are effective.

Then Isaac visits Prague and things become unpleasant. While present from the outset, certain elements – most notably corporeal, violent ones – begin to take hold and dominate the book. With the nastiness of Tsiolkas’s previous novel, The Jesus Man (1999), still lingering at the back of my mind, I had hoped that this was just a horrific interlude. It’s not. The tendency towards the transgressive and the disturbing content isn’t really a problem in itself.

For the first two-thirds of the book, the use of the abject – of darkness, of decay, of horrific violence and racism – is so perfectly balanced with the characterisation and narrative that it adds force to this remarkable book. In the last act, it’s all that’s left. Is Tsiolkas arguing that racism – no, anti-Semitism – is inescapable? Does he want us to reflect on our responsibility to our history? Are we all cursed by an inherent violence and inevitable bloodlust? In the end, the clear vision and enquiring intelligence that make this book so important are lost.

The energy, the furious – even poisoned – drive that propels this novel is thrilling. As a meditation on the corrosive, consuming power of hatred, it is convincing and compelling. It is also a deeply political novel; about those beliefs we accept and those we reject, and how little our positions regarding them really matter. It’s a very modern ghost story that is truly haunting and haunted. I just wish there hadn’t been so much shit and blood, semen and vomit. It seems like a lot of waste. g