Australian Book Review, May 2019, issue no. 411 by Australian Book Review

ABR in Europe

Thinking of heading to Europe in 2020? After the success of our soldout tour in 2018, ABR, in association with our commercial partner Academy Travel, will head back to Germany in September 2020 – first Frankfurt, then Cologne, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Lübeck, and culminating in Amsterdam and The Hague. Christopher Menz, former art gallery director and curator and a seasoned leader of European tours, will guide this fourteen-day tour (16–29 September 2020). Those seeking further information should contact him at development@australianbookreview.com.au or visit Academy Travel’s website.

when the powerful seem determined to make words mean what they want them to mean.’ The five other shortlisted authors each receive $3,000 and a three-week writing retreat supported by the Trawalla Foundation.

$20,000 Vogel Award

Applications are open for The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award, one of Australia’s most lucrative prizes for an unpublished manuscript. Entrants must be aged under thirty-five. The winning author will receive $20,000 plus publication by Allen & Unwin. Past winners include Kate Grenville, Tim Winton, and the late Andrew McGahan. Visit the Allen & Unwin website for more information.

ABR Profile

Stella Prize

A large, enthusiastic audience gathered at Arts Centre Melbourne on April 9 for the announcement of the 2019 Stella Prize. After about an hour of speeches, we learned that Vicki Laveau-Harvie’s memoir, The Erratics (first released by Finch Publishing and now by Fourth Estate), had won the $50,000 prize. Laveau-Harvie – a former academic and translator – writes about her return to her parents’ ranch in Alberta, Canada, and the shocks that awaited her there. Of this ‘gripping memoir’ the judges said, ‘[it] mines the psychological damage wrought on a nuclear family by a monstrous personality.’ Fittingly, the winning author gave the best speech of the evening – personal, generous, heartfelt. She remarked that it should be the year of the Stella (a ‘remarkable beacon’). ‘This is a time when speaking truth seems more important than ever …

to see how audiences in the UK will react to this powerful Australian story,’ said STC Artistic Director, Kip Williams.

Vicki Laveau-Harvie at the Stella Prize event (LDT Photography, courtesy of the Stella Prize)

The Secret River in the UK

Sydney Theatre Company has announced that The Secret River, an adaptation of Kate Grenville’s novel by Adam Bovell and directed by Neil Armfield, will tour the United Kingdom in August and September this year. As part of its tour, the production will feature at The King’s Theatre during the Edinburgh International Festival and also at the National Theatre in London. ‘We’re very interested

Check out the new Publishing Profile on our website. This is intended to give readers and potential subscribers and contributors a sense of the magazine’s diverse programs and long history. Did you know, for instance, that each year we publish about 300 writers of whom about 90 to 100 are new to the magazine? Or that of our twenty-one ABR Fellows to date thirteen are women? Or that between 2016 and 2018 ABR published nearly four hundred poems by eighty poets as part of States of Poetry? We’ll go on expanding and updating this digest of the magazine’s publishing.

Prizes galore

The two winning Calibre Prize essays will be named in the June–July issue. We thank all the entrants for their forbearance. Meanwhile, the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize – with total prize money of $12,500 – closes on May 1. A D VA N C E S

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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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

May 2019

Johanna Leggatt Frank Bongiorno Peter Rose Daniel Halliday Beejay Silcox Paul Giles Brenda Walker Deb Anderson

Letters

Arnold Zable et al.,Roger Levi

The tribulations of trees Reflections on Australian democracy Nam Le on David Malouf Why is tax justice so hard? The disquieting lure of dystopian novels Ian McEwan’s new novel The short fiction of Chris Womersley The normalisation of climate change

9 11 12 17 26 30 32 51

Biography

Economics

Oliver Bullough: Moneyland Kieran Pender 14

Poems

Memoir

Kristen Lang 16 Charles Bernstein 29 Bella Li 52

History & Philosophy

Mark Dapin: Australia’s Vietnam Michael Sexton 20 Timothy Verhoeven: Secularists, Religion and Government in Nineteenth-Century America Ian Tyrrell 41 Philip Pettit: The Birth of Ethics David Neil 47

48 50 57

Theatre & Cultural studies

Wayne Macauley: Simpson Returns Alex Cothren Siri Hustvedt: Memories of the Future James Ley James Delargy: 55; Dave Warner: A River of Salt; Lindsay Tanner: Comeback; Anna Romer: Under the Midnight Sky Chris Flynn Melanie Cheng: Room for a Stranger Alice Nelson Sonia Orchard: Into the Fire Keyvan Allahyari Jaclyn Moriarty: Gravity Is the Thing Naama Grey-Smith Marcella Polain: Driving into the Sun Stephen Dedman Melissa Ferguson: The Shining Wall Jacinta Mulders

Michael Peppiatt: The Existential Englishman Gemma Betros

Sport

Mike Brearley: On Cricket Gideon Haigh

Politics & Society

Alison Croggon: Remembered Presences Ben Brooker 21 Robyn Dalton and Laura Ginters (eds.): The Ripples Before the New Wave Gillian Appleton 23 Charlie Fox: This Young Monster Keegan O’Connor 24

Fiction

Mary Hoban: An Unconventional Wife Jim Davidson Andrew S. Curran: Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely Peter McPhee

53 55 56

31 33

34 36 37 38 39 39

60 68

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt: The Coddling of the American Mind David Rolph Peter Seamer: Breaking Point Tom Bamforth Guy Rundle: Practice Ryan Cropp

Poet of the Month Emma Lew

Poetry

Emma Lew: Crow College Judith Bishop Hamid Dabashi: The Shahnameh Darius Sepehri

Natural History

Penny Olsen: Night Parrot Neil Murray

Open Page Judith Brett

From the Archive

Nam Le: The Boat Louise Swinn

ABR Arts

Ian Dickson David Hansen Elizabeth Kertesz Peter Tregear Richard Leathem

62 63 65 66 67

Mosquitoes Māori Markings: Tā Moko MSO Gala West Side Story Burning CONTENTS

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Australian Book Review | May 2019, no. 411 Since 1961 First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) ISSN 0155-2864 Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ABR is published ten times a year by Australian Book Review Inc. Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 Phone: (03) 9699 8822 | Fax: (03) 9699 8803 Twitter: @AustBookReview | Facebook: @AustralianBookReview www.australianbookreview.com.au

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Editor and CEO Peter Rose – editor@australianbookreview.com.au Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Assistant Editor Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Business Manager Grace Chang – business@australianbookreview.com.au Development Consultant Christopher Menz – development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Judith Bishop) Chair Colin Golvan Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Ian Dickson, Rae Frances, Sarah Holland-Batt, Vanessa Lemm, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder, Elissa Newall (Observership Program) ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) Editorial Advisers Bernadette Brennan, Danielle Clode, Clare Corbould, Des Cowley, Ian Donaldson, Mark Edele, Kári Gíslason, Tom Griffiths, Margaret Harris, Sue Kossew, James McNamara, Julian Meyrick, Bruce Moore, Rachel Robertson, Lynette Russell, Craig Taylor, Alistair Thomson, Simon Tormey, Ben Wellings, Terri-ann White, Rita Wilson Media Progressive PR and Publicity: Darren Saffin – darren@progressivepr.com.au or (03) 9696 6417 Volunteers Caroline Bailey, John Scully, Karolina Stamer-Squair, Annie Toller Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

This work was developed in a studio managed by the City of Melbourne’s Creative Spaces program. 6 M AY 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Letters Open Letter in support of Behrouz Boochani

Dear Editor, We, the undersigned, write this letter as Australian journalists, writers, editors, publishers, and lovers of literature, to call for our colleague and fellow award-winning journalist and author Behrouz Boochani to be allowed to enter Australia. Boochani, aged thirty-six, is a Kurdish writer, journalist, and filmmaker. He fled Iran in early 2013 following a campaign of persecution and harassment, and attempted to seek asylum in Australia. He has been imprisoned on Manus Island since August 2013. In the six years that the Australian authorities have detained him, Boochani has courageously continued to work, writing for publications in Australia and overseas, tirelessly reporting on the conditions on Manus Island, while also helping Australianbased journalists cover the situation there. In December 2017, the International Federation of Journalists recognised Boochani’s work as a legitimate journalist and granted him an IFJ press card. Australian journalists are acutely aware that his continued detention undermines Australia’s credibility as a leader for press freedom across the region. Boochani is undeniably talented. In 2017, he co-directed a film that he shot on mobile phone, titled Chauka, Please Tell Us The Time, which was selected for screening at numerous film festivals. His book published in July 2018, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Picador), is an extraordinary account of his experience of the Manus Island offshore detention system. It has been highly acclaimed by critics; in January 2019 it won two of Australia’s most prestigious prizes at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

We are deeply concerned for Behrouz Boochani’s welfare and safety. The success of his book and his status as a journalist have made him a target of the Manus authorities, a danger that has only increased with his rising profile. As Australian journalists, writers, academics, and readers, we extend a welcome to Behrouz Boochani. We regard him as a valuable member of the contemporary Australian literary community. He had the courage to stand up for the rights of his people in Iran, and in the past six years, he has borne witness to the trials of his fellow-detainees, and advocated for their freedom on Manus Island. We join with him in advocating for justice for all those detained on Manus. We call on the Australian government to allow Behrouz Boochani into our country, where he can continue to work safely as a journalist and writer. We also urge that he be offered a pathway to permanent residency. We will all be enriched by this. Dennis Altman, James Bradley, J.M. Coetzee, Patricia Cornelius, Michelle de Kretser, Delia Falconer, Mem Fox, Anna Funder, Helen Garner, Kate Grenville, Peter Greste, Michael Heyward, Matilda Imlah, Caroline Jones, Mireille Juchau, Tom Kenneally, Kathy Lette, Kim Mahood, David Marr, Phillipa McGuinness, Alex Miller, Kerry O’Brien, Felicity Plunkett, Peter Rose, Kim Scott, Beejay Silcox, Peter Singer, Christos Tsiolkas, Geordie Williamson,Tim Winton, Charlotte Wood, Alexis Wright, Clare Wright, Arnold Zable As we went to press more than 8,600 Australians had signed this letter. A full list of the signatories may be found at the MEAA website: https:// www.meaa.org/campaigns/freebehrouz/

MAFS

Dear Editor, I loved Alecia Simmond’s article on Married at First Sight (‘Forced Marriage: MAFS and Reality Television’s Chamber of Horrors’, ABR, April 2019). Words fail me about the recklessness shown by the producers and ‘experts’ delivering the content of this television show. As a gay man, I finally gained the legal right to marry my partner of nineteen years in 2018. When I see how some members of the heterosexual community treat their right to marry and to celebrate marriage, it makes me angry and upset. The marriage equality campaign was timely – a fitting demonstration of what love should be about and the right of celebration. This program just kicks that hard work and commitment in the guts. Roger Levi (online comment)

Correction

Last month, in Simon Tormey’s review of Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift, Charles Murray was listed as the author of The Strange Death of Europe. The author is in fact Douglas Murray.

Quote of the Month ‘Not much of the international writing worth reading in the last twenty years has been done outside [Thomas] Bernhard’s shadow … So where, I want to know, is England’s Bernhard? The bard for its unmanaged or mismanaged decline. The child at its nude parade. The excoriator of its moralaesthetic sloppiness … England is crying out for its Bernhard.’ Michael Hofmann, Times Literary Supplement, 18 January 2019 LET TERS

16 March – 14 July 2019 British Royal Portraits. Exhibition organised by the National Portrait Gallery, London. Tickets bendigoartgallery.com.au

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

#TudorsToWindsors

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

‘The sound of nothing at all’ Feeling essays about the tribulations of trees

Johanna Leggatt CITY OF TREES: ESSAYS ON LIFE, DEATH AND THE NEED FOR A FOREST by Sophie Cunningham Text Publishing, $24.99 hb, 312 pp, 9781925773439

hen Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird wrote The Secret Life of Plants (1975), many critics labelled their attempt to prove a spiritual link between people and plants as mystical gibberish, with a New York Times review chiding the authors for pandering to charlatans and amateur psychics. The review noted that although Tompkins and Bird made a fascinating case for plant sentience ‘suspended in the aspic of their blarney, it all looks equally improbable’. In the ensuing decades, more books have been published on the life of trees and their relationship to humans, some of which have sold well and been enthusiastically received by critics. Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What they feel, how they communicate – discoveries from a secret world (2016) topped bestseller lists and earned him a flattering interview in the profile pages of The New York Times. While an interest in trees has

certainly emerged among an educated readership, Sophie Cunningham’s collection of essays could be viewed as a heartfelt and timely postscript to much of this tree talk. It’s all very well to read books on trees, but what are we doing to save them and the animals and ecosystems that rely on them for survival? What will become of the groves that cannot replace their felled compatriots fast enough? What irreparable damage will climate change do? Naturally, it’s a political book, but it’s also touchingly personal, tracing Cunningham’s encounters with trees as she moves across continents and her hometown of Melbourne. Cunningham’s wide roaming acts as an entry point into stories on the trees, gardens, and plants she discovers during her lengthy constitutionals and sojourns. In ‘Escape to Alcatraz’, Cunningham volunteers as a gardening worker over two bird-breeding seasons on the San Francisco Bay island of Alcatraz. REVIEW OF THE MONTH

okay to cut down an 800-year-old tree and reduce it She photographs the snowy egret colony and takes a to a few hundred dollars’ worth of woodchips? Ours, particular interest in ‘survivor plants’, those two hundred apparently.’ Trees do grow again, Cunningham notes, or so species that grew defiantly through the forty-year but climate change is acperiod between the closure celerating climate variation, of the prison and the start What will become of the groves making it more difficult for of the garden’s maintenance organisms to adapt. that cannot replace their felled program. In ‘Tourists Go While researching the Home’, she touches on the compatriots fast enough? essays, Cunningham exdeleterious consequences of periences a succession of travel for the trees and the personal traumas, which become a way of framing the broader environment. Cunningham used to preference persistent grief she feels for the loss of global species and travel over everything else – superannuation, sensible habitat. Cunningham and her wife, Virginia, return from purchases, meaningful savings – but now she isn’t so sure. living in San Francisco at the height of the internecine Almost nine million people visit Barcelona each year, debate over gay marriage in Australia, ‘which seemed to and it’s getting harder to find places where the locals devolve into the right of LGBTQI teachers to teach and don’t want you to leave. Tourists, of course, also come in the right of bakers to refuse the supply of wedding cakes’. the form of animals and plants, which can sometimes While she is writing many of these essays, her father, have a severe impact on the biodiversity of the region. John, who was originally her stepfather before adopting In ‘I Don’t Blame the Trees’, Cunningham displays a Cunningham and her brother, is in a high-care ward in talent for great observational detail, noting that the Melbourne with frontal lobe dementia. She flies home debate as to whether eucalypts should be removed from to be by his side at the end, and he dies surrounded by California’s Angel Island is loaded with inflammatory family. Not long after John dies, her biological father, phrases such as ‘immigrant’, ‘invader’, and ‘refugee’. She Peter, dies from Parkinson’s disease. resists championing the cutting down of non-native Following these two losses, Cunningham experispecies simply because they don’t support local flora and ences months of insomnia; she takes comfort in animals fauna, wondering instead, quite astutely, what will and the living world. She opens windows around dawn replace the old trees after they are removed and pointto hear the birds, or rain, or building works, ‘anything ing out that these days all of us are from somewhere other than the sound of nothing at all’. Biologist E.O. else anyway. Wilson has described the post-extinction landscape as Cunningham leavens her firsthand stories with the Eremocene age, or ‘The Age of Loneliness’, and this summaries of scientific research and interviews. The is what Cunningham really fears: the emptiness that result is an intriguing mélange of personal journey and follows when a vital connection – be it with a father or journalism. The giant sequoia, we learn, are among the the natural world – is severed. world’s oldest trees and their final numbers can be found In this sense, these fine essays convey what factual along a belt of the western Sierra Nevada. When Cunreporting on the threat of climate change and the loss ningham walks through a grove of them, tears streaming of habitat cannot: something beautiful is dying, somedown her face, she thinks, ‘I would lay down my life thing precious and monumental may be lost forever. The for you’. Indeed, language often fails Cunningham, an temptation these days is to look away from the sadness, accomplished prose writer, when she would like it the to rant on Twitter about the threat to old growth rather most. Standing before old-growth trees, reaching for than to visit extant forests, but Cunningham is doing description, her mind stalls before their majesty. She nothing of the sort. The final essay, ‘Mountain Ash’, ends sketches the trees instead, but even this proves challengwith a visit to ‘Ada’, who has no surviving old-growth ing, with Cunningham left to wonder, ‘Is it possible to companions around her. Cunningham is aware of sciendraw, or write, a forest?’ tists’ aversion to overstating the consciousness of trees, There are a range of statistics deployed throughout of how this leads people to jump to conclusions about the essays to emphasise the threat that trees face, but their supposed personalities. She is, however, unapola handful stand out: almost all of the baobabs from ogetic, telling Ada, ‘I will drive, I will wade, through fields Africa – many of them more than two thousand years laid waste by clear-felling, through ancient and perfect old – have died; and it’s estimated that koalas will be rainforest, to stand before you, my queen.’ The effect of gone from the wild by 2050. Australia fares especially this highly confessional approach is oddly mesmerising, poorly in looking after its habitats, with thirty-five per and while Cunningham’s essays are accounts of her cent of all global mammal extinctions since 1500 occurintimate encounters with trees, her gift is in making ring in Australia, yet we have not listed a critical habitat them feel like they are our stories as well. g for protection for more than a decade. Furthermore, less than two per cent of the mountain ash estate in Australia Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based journalist and is now old growth, prompting Cunningham to ask, ‘In critic. what universe would a reasonable person think it was 1 0 M AY 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

A paean to the franchise Reflections on Australian democracy and society

Frank Bongiorno FROM SECRET BALLOT TO DEMOCRACY SAUSAGE: HOW AUSTRALIA GOT COMPULSORY VOTING by Judith Brett Text Publishing, $29.99 pb, 199 pp, 9781925603842

n July 1924, a Tasmanian senator from the conservative Nationalist Party, Herbert Payne, introduced a bill to bring about compulsory voting in Australian national elections. His proposal aroused little discussion. Debate in both the Senate and the House of Representatives – where another forgotten politician, Edward Mann, saw the measure through – was brief. Few spoke in opposition. The House debated the matter for less than an hour and passed Payne’s bill without amendment. Its implementation at the 1925 election caused barely a ripple. It has never been controversial since, although a few Liberal politicians have made its abolition another of their hopeless causes. Apart from marvelling that the nation’s politicians could have agreed so readily to a measure now widely regarded as the Australian political system’s most distinctive feature, you might be wondering how Judith Brett has managed to spin such an undramatic event into a book of almost two hundred pages. The answer is that she hasn’t. This book is a great deal more than an account of how Australia got compulsory voting. It is a meditation on Australian democracy and society. Brett’s argument is that compulsory voting was so uncontroversial because its way had been paved by decades of colonial history. Australia had developed a political culture in which rights were seen to have been bestowed by government rather than residing naturally in individuals or emerging out of a contract between state and citizen. Here, Brett relies on the understanding of Australia as a Benthamite society, the subject of an influential 1985 essay by Hugh Collins. If the role of the state

was to produce the greatest good for the greatest number, electoral systems needed to be devised to ensure the voice of the majority was faithfully reflected in results. This sensibility gave rise to two distinctive and unusual electoral practices. One, the ostensible subject of this book, is compulsory voting. The other is the ‘Alternative Vote’ – called preferential voting in Australia – used in House of Representatives elections since 1918. Brett suggests that both need to be seen as products of Australia’s majoritarian political culture. Compulsory voting means that the views of a majority of eligible voters, not merely those who show up, are registered at the polls. Preferential voting ensures that where there are more than two candidates, no one wins with a minority of votes – as occurs under a first-past-the-post system – unless they are also able to gather sufficient preferences from those who have their primary vote to other candidates. There had been advocates of compulsory voting since the nineteenth century. Some believed it would favour conservative over progressive parties because it would bring out of the woodwork the apathetic and satisfied who would otherwise fail to vote at all. Labor initiated compulsory federal registration in 1911, which Brett believes made compulsory voting inevitable. And when Queensland introduced compulsory voting in 1915, followed by a large swing to the Labor Party that saw it win office, Labor politicians had no obvious reason to stand in the way. Poor voter turnout in the early 1920s helped secure the case for compulsion. The story of preferential voting is equally fascinating. The rise of Labor

was a barrier to its implementation because that party did so well under the first-past-the-post system that operated until 1918. Labor candidates had frequently won seats because the non-Labor parties split the vote. Billy Hughes introduced preferential voting in 1918 precisely to prevent the continuation of this problem, in the context

A few Liberal politicians have made its abolition another of their hopeless causes of the rise of the Country Party. A fat lot of good it did him personally: an empowered Country Party under Earle Page got rid of him as prime minister after the 1922 election. Brett shows that these electoral innovations were not isolated experiments. From the earliest years of selfgovernment, the colonies had been prepared to make major departures from old-world practice. But contrary to the impression that they were the first in the world to use the secret ballot, the key colonial innovation was to ensure that the ballot to be filled out was provided by the government. More generally, Australians have been most comfortable with giving independent public servants the job of running elections, a stark difference from America’s continuing record of partisan manipulation. And from Federation onward, there were strong impulses toward national uniformity, another contrast with the United States and its kaleidoscopic voting arrangements giving ample scope for manipulation and disenfranchisement. In Australia, we like to provide fulPOLITICS

some opportunities to vote, and a vast and relatively efficient bureaucracy has grown up around ensuring fair and inclusive ballots. Practices now taken for granted – such as Saturday voting, a national roll, and postal, absentee, overseas, and pre-poll voting – are the products of decisions made about how to conduct elections. Probably only New Zealand rivals Australia in the ease with which one can exercise the franchise. Interestingly, these two countries were also among the earliest to allow women to vote, while Australia also allowed them to stand for parliament from 1902 (South Australia permitted both women’s voting and candidature from 1894). The story is not one of unqualified achievement. Australia made it harder for Indigenous people to vote after 1901; that is, when it did not prohibit them from doing so entirely, as occurred in some states. Brett nonetheless shows that there were liberals in the early federal parliament who were prepared to follow the logic of their own convictions by advocating votes for Aboriginal people. The racists, however, won the day, and liberals such as Richard O’Connor did not feel strongly enough about protecting the democratic rights of ‘a dying race’ to risk rejection of their electoral bill. Brett’s enthusiasm for Australia’s electoral achievements requires her to avert her eyes from some aspects of state politics. The gross malapportionment of lower house elections in Victoria, Queensland, and South Australia assisted the longevity of premiers such as Henry Bolte, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and Tom Playford, but these were hardly models of good electoral practice. It is hard to spot any majoritarianism here. Rather, these voting arrangements gave rural voters greatly more clout than their city cousins, thereby undermining democracy and promoting authoritarianism. In the case of Queensland, it contributed to an increasingly venal corruption. Nor does Brett give sufficient weight to the contribution of compulsory voting to the decay of party rank-and-file membership. While the transition from a mass membership to an electoral professional model is not 1 2 M AY 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

peculiar to Australia, political parties here have few incentives to develop their rank-and-file support because they do not need to get out the vote. They can ignore their base – the ‘rusted-on’ – while catering to the middle ground. This has the advantage of avoiding US-style polarisation, but it is questionable whether policy designed to appeal to a mass of disconnected, apathetic, and distrustful voters in the ‘sensible centre’ is necessarily the best recipe for good government either. The ‘democracy sausage’ available to voters who turn up on election day

reflects the largely peaceable and goodhumoured nature of Australian elections. There is surely some irony that the compulsory character of mass participation provides voluntary organisations with an opportunity to raise funds by running barbeques and cake stalls. Brett has produced a paean to the Australian election, but her fascinating story of how we vote also discloses larger truths about what we are like as a people. g Frank Bongiorno’s most recent book is The Eighties: The decade that transformed Australia (Black Inc., 2015).

‘Tinted by my face, cruciated by my hyphen’ Peter Rose

ON DAVID MALOUF by Nam Le

Black Inc., $17.99 hb, 108 pp, 9781760640392

or more than a decade the world has waited, patiently or disbelievingly, for a second book from Nam Le, author of The Boat (2008), a collection of seven tales that won the young Australian author acclaim throughout the world. Finally, it has arrived. A book-length essay running to about 15,000 words, it may not be what the ravenous world had in mind, but it is seriously interesting – interestingly interesting one might almost say. The volume appears in Black Inc.’s neat little Writers on Writers series, with its owlish photographs of authors and subjects: author on top, subject below. Until now there were four in the series, including Christos Tsiolkas on Patrick White, and Ceridwen Dovey on J.M. Coetzee. (Michelle de Kretser on Shirley Hazzard, due later this year, promises to be a notable pairing.) The authors, it’s apparent, are encouraged (perhaps even contractually required) to be intensely ‘personal’. Here, Nam Le – in his meditation on

the subtleties and self-presentation of David Malouf – does not disappoint. His response, deeply autobiographical, feels swiftly written and passionately conceived; the responsive reader will consume it in a trice and then go back to savour its anxious nuances and discriminations. Truly essayistic, it is ‘a thinking out loud, a setting down of thinking’. Like his short stories – which generate considerable tension, marking them out in an often bloodless genre – Nam Le’s essay bristles with paradoxes and contradictions. The book is curtly and alliteratively sectioned: Prime, Pigeon, Patria, Peril. The first opens with an evocative reminiscence of schooldays: not Malouf ’s, but the author’s – Melbourne Grammar School (1991–96): ‘bluestone shadow, navy blue and paler bluer, faces floating against rain and a sort of drowned light’. The author, brought here as an infant on a boat from Vietnam, intones some of the names from the MGS rollcall: Hooper, Frye, Downing – ‘fathers

names, patriarchs’ names’. (Will they recognise themselves? Do they read Nam Le? There must be a short story in this.) For this was high school: ‘Mood dream, time tolled through the body.’ Bookish, Palgrave and Norton his ‘boon companions’, Nam was drawn to the Johnno-like Ché, a brawny, charismatic country boy with a triple scholarship. The two outsiders’ friendship galvanised them and alienated the other boys. In Year Twelve, they encountered Remembering Babylon (1993). Malouf ’s luminous novel ‘shook their snobberies’: here was ‘a verymuch-alive half-Lebanese writer … producing English-language writing of the very first order’. The two young aesthetes admired the poetic prose ‘that seemed to flex its way serenely through any niggles of cringe’. Twenty years later, Nam Le (in one of his few limp phrases) has read ‘pretty much all of Malouf ’s other output’. Aware that Malouf and his books have been ‘praised and puffed and premiated’ (the language is self-consciously ornate), he is ‘not really interested … in writing encomia’. He notes that Malouf is ‘adept at slyly steering his eponymous studies’. Curiously, almost resistantly, he has never met the man or seen him in person. Brilliantly, he admits that he is trying to the write the book as though Malouf were dead. (One thinks of Frank O’Hara’s poem ‘The Critics’: ‘the assassin of my orchards’). Nam Le, sympathetic to ‘the unapologetic nature of Malouf ’s learning’, is conscious of his immersion in Western classicism. ‘[Malouf ] owns his occidentalism, in all its contradictions and culpabilities’. Frustrated by the public ‘snideries’ occasionally aimed at Malouf, Nam Le inveighs against the purists and the censors who (often from positions of great privilege and entrenchment) ‘have ripped from the world countless works, actual and potential, that dared associate with the wrong sex, race, creed, caste, class, colony – you name it’. This laudable passage warrants lengthy quotation: We are not so rich in art to deplore what we have merely because it is not what we might have had … On the worst part of the right, ‘culture warriors’

worship ‘Western culture’ only as far as they can weaponise it.The worst of the left, in response – pursuing its pet strategy of self-righteous self-loathing – relinquishes ‘Western culture’ to the right … When done from tribe, it can also feel oxytocin good. Even easier is to abhor writers and their works … when you haven’t read them … It is the craven logic of bullying. The agora, where speech is meant to be most free, has always attracted mobs.

Mostly, despite its literary dressing, this is a book of cultural affinities and oppositions. Nam Le, recalling a residency at the University of Wyoming, still regrets being enlisted as a spokesman for refugee settlement simply because of his ethnicity. ‘I allowed myself to be used. I became a mouthpiece.’ Most impressive to him is Malouf ’s composure, his ‘personal, artistic sovereignty’, his ‘disregard for fashion or recency’. He admires Malouf for eschewing the notion of being ‘representative’ in any way. ‘If literature has a nemesis,’ Nam Le writes, ‘it is instrumentalism.’ Again, he balks at the idea of surrendering to an orthodoxy or an expectation. (‘Identity is not nothing, but it’s not everything.’) Occasionally sententious, he writes: ‘Writers shouldn’t be joiners, shouldn’t be boosters or censors or mouthpieces – representatives – of anything but their own truths.’ Nam Le is, of course, familiar with labels. They stick to him because of his background. After all these years he remains a ‘Vietnamese-Australian’ writer. Yet Malouf would never be dubbed ‘Lebanese-Australian’, and J.M. Coetzee – born elsewhere, long settled in Adelaide, proudly naturalised, writing about Rundle Mall even – would never be described as ‘South AfricanAustralian’. The hyphen niggles at Nam Le; it won’t go away, ‘a hum of modelminority conditionality’. ‘Why should I be the one stuck with the hyphen?’ It is in ‘Patria’ that Nam Le and David Malouf ‘most meaningfully part ways’. Nam Le writes about his detestation of the ‘black hole of nationality’. Australianness, for him, is just one of the many lines of affinity and identity that shape a writer. He marvels at the ease

with which Malouf – ‘ethnically halfLebanese’ – has ‘elided these aspects of identity to little note and no fuss’. Nam Le’s Malouf is ‘a writer in the business of identity. Only not, it seems, one half of his own.’ Nam Le contests the Lawrentian notion of Australia as tabula rasa – ‘a new leaf. And on the new leaf, nothing.’ Mindful of Malouf ’s ‘tendency towards wholeness’, how he ‘tincts his work with neo-colonial motive’ and pursues his own ‘sedulous, stupendous project of nation-writing’, he resists the notion of reconciliation or ‘full possession’ of the continent through a ‘collective spiritual consciousness’, to borrow Malouf ’s phrase. Finally, he rejects an idea of reconciliation that ‘exhorts further “possession” of an already expropriated place. That isn’t palimpsest – it’s overwriting.’ Towards the end of this rather fierce little book, Nam Le wonders why he can’t ‘get interested in Malouf ’s campaign of cultural nationalism’. The answer is clear: ‘“Australianness” is alien to me because I’m still alien to Australia.’ He can’t share the apprehension of the fabled bush as ‘the dark unmanageable’. ‘A lifetime here, and I’m still outside this primal sense of being outside.’ And that’s when, as he says, it hits him. ‘For non-Anglos, non-Europeans, non-whites – whiteness is our “bush”. Whiteness is our surrounding, seething reality … the perpetual engine of our anxiety.’ Tinted by his face, cruciated by his hyphen (as he puts it), he knows he will never ‘pass’. ‘And I realise too that this is the land’s real gift to me. It’s okay. I no longer have to try.’ g

Peter Rose is Editor of ABR. LITERARY STUDIES

Dollars, pounds, and euros A terrifying glimpse into the land of lucre

Kieran Pender MONEYLAND: WHY THIEVES AND CROOKS NOW RULE THE WORLD AND HOW TO TAKE IT BACK by Oliver Bullough Profile Books, $39.99 hb, 304 pp, 9781781257920

he world, according to writer Oliver Bullough, has a problem. One unexpected consequence of globalisation and the liberalisation of financial policy has been an increasing flow of money across borders. This has given rise to a new global élite. Aided by seemingly respectable lawyers, bankers, and real estate agents, it operates largely beyond the reach of domestic regulation. That would be concerning enough if the élite’s wealth was hard earned; it becomes particularly alarming when much of that wealth is derived from corruption. In the world this élite inhabits – what Bullough labels ‘Moneyland’ – dollars, pounds, and euros trump all. Bullough is an Oxford-educated Brit whose cynical worldview was shaped by seven years in Russia, largely as a Reuters correspondent. He witnessed the rise of President Vladimir Putin and specialised in the post-conflict areas of the Caucasus. These experiences were articulated in his first two books, Let Our Fame Be Great (2010, on Chechnya) and The Last Man in Russia (2013, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize). He publishes widely and brings this journalistic pedigree to bear in this deeply reported, fast-paced work of non-fiction. Moneyland is a clarion call for action, but it begins with a history lesson. Following the financial chaos of the 1930s and the turmoil of World War II, the major powers convened in New Hampshire in July 1944 to develop a new international economic architecture. The consensus that emerged from the Bretton Woods Conference was intended to stop uncontrolled asset flows and stabilise domestic markets ‘in perpetuity’, and thereby ‘create a new 1 4 M AY 2 0 1 9

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system of peace and prosperity.’ One strength of Moneyland, deployed at this juncture and elsewhere, is Bullough’s effective use of similes and metaphors to explain complex legal and financial concepts – not dissimilar to the explanatory cutaways in the movie The Big Short. ‘Imagine an oil tanker,’ Bullough says of the international economy. ‘If a tanker has just one huge tank, then the oil that fills it can slosh backwards and forwards in greater waves, until it destabilises the vessel, which overturns and sinks.’ If that was the 1930s economic model, then Bretton Woods saw the design of a new vessel ‘where the oil was divided up between many smaller tanks, one for each country’. The capacity was the same, but the sloshing was localised and could no longer overturn the entire ship. Through currency controls and a gold standard, the global movement of money was kept in check – to transfer assets, ‘you needed permission from the captain’. The Bretton Woods model did not endure. It began to leak in the 1960s when enterprising bankers developed ‘eurobonds’: listed in London, issued in the Netherlands, paid in Luxembourg, with an Italian borrower, and designed to attract Swiss funds. Bullough explains: ‘The cumulative effect of this game of jurisdictional Twister was that [the bankers] created a highly convenient bond paying a good rate of interest, on which no one had to pay tax of any kind, and which could be turned back into cash anywhere.’ These eurobonds unleashed the phenomenon of the offshore, ‘the idea of an asset being legally outside the jurisdiction that it is physically present in’. This, in turn, gave birth to Moneyland.

History lesson over, the remaining bulk of Bullough’s book is spent on a tour of financial and legal concepts designed to facilitate Moneyland and the jurisdictions that now specialise in them. From the luxury spending habits of the rich to the rise of investment-forpassport schemes, from Russian assassinations to libel tourism, the ground covered by Bullough is formidable without ever feeling overwhelming. He muses at length on shell companies and the specialists who spend their days creating them to help clients evade legal and taxation scrutiny. ‘The more plastic bags you wrap around a dog turd, the harder it is for outsiders to realise what’s inside,’ he writes. ‘And if the last bag says Tiffany & Co. on it, perhaps no one will ever realise it’s full of shit.’ Bullough deftly weaves together conceptual explanations with stories both alarming and ridiculous in equal measure. Take Saudi billionaire Walid al-Juffali, who, in 2012, was on the brink of divorce from his retired supermodel wife, Christina Estrada. Concerned about Estrada’s likely divorce claim in Britain, al-Juffali persuaded Saint Kitts and Nevis to appoint him its ambassador to the London-headquartered International Maritime Organization – despite the fact that he possessed no maritime expertise. When Estrada’s lawyers demanded her share of the family assets, the Saudi businessman invoked his newfound diplomatic immunity. ‘He had found a tunnel into the most secure part of Moneyland yet,’ writes Bullough. Although a British appeal court ultimately found a way to bypass the immunity, al-Juffali’s actions were indicative of the wealthy’s ability to twist laws and

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governments to their advantage. While Bullough is critical of the usual offshore suspects – Guernsey, Jersey, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, the British Virgin Islands, Switzerland, Cyprus – he takes particular aim at the United States. In the penultimate chapter, ‘Tax Haven USA’, Bullough explains how America’s efforts to address offshore secrecy have not extended to within its borders. In several parts of the United States, trust structures have become attractive and opaque legal vehicles to store wealth of dubious provenance. In South Dakota, for example, trustees held US$226 billion in assets in 2016, a sevenfold increase from the prior decade. This might require a change in terminology; ‘offshore’ conjures images of idyllic Caribbean islands, not Sioux Falls. ‘If the best tax haven is now the United States,’ says Bullough, ‘we may need a whole new term for the places that adapt their laws to accommodate the needs and whims of the nomadic Moneylanders.’ Moneyland is alarmist without being hyperbolic, depressing without becoming unbearable. Bullough achieves this balance with laugh-aloud humour and insightful personal anecdotes based on the far-ranging travels that underpin this work. Bullough, digs through uncategorised government archives in the Caribbean, stalks millionaires at plush London hotels, and admires luxurious Miami apartments. The breadth of Bullough’s primary and secondary research is impressive, and a helpful note on key sources is provided for those wishing to read further. If there is one fault with this brilliant book, it is that the final element of its subtitle, ‘And How To Take It Back’, is given only the briefest consideration. Bullough has drawn important attention to a critical threat facing global society, both democracies where institutions are being eroded, and autocracies where populations face deprivation due to quickly offshored corruption. Perhaps, understandably, the author is short on solutions. Even as Bullough advocates for global cooperation, he remains pessimistic: ‘With money flowing freely, it seems impossible that some jurisdiction somewhere won’t undermine any international agreement. 1 6 M AY 2 0 1 9

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It is tempting to react to this dearth of possible remedies with negativity; tempting to concede that this is ‘just too difficult’ or ‘simply the inevitable result of globalisation’. But Bullough ends with a sobering thought: ‘It will never

be easier to confront than it is today.’ Fixing Moneyland in 2019 will be hard. But it is only going to get harder. g Kieran Pender is a researcher and writer based in London.

Painting the horizon for Graham

Even the waves of the sea, in the distance, have turned to stone. The blue/green rising into outcrops, ridgelines, a lone bull falling into half-solid ground. How the bull and the fall hover inside him. How the waves never quite dissolve – the sway of them, their shudder, leaching into the soil. At the shore, where he stands, the day spills through its unmarked paths. The surf tumbles beyond his hearing. The sand, he is sure, is the dust of bone, drifting, crumbling, the dust of the bull’s home from somewhere time has swallowed. He wonders, will the fall be his own. His feet feel like claws. Wind streams through his mountains. Seeps into his skin. The erosion etching again into his vision. He lifts into its rise. Feathers drip from the bull’s hide. Wings. Beating at his temples. One, small bird. And the stone ridge on the world’s other side. So it flies. Its beak bears his warmth. The man is caught. He cannot see the season’s storms crouching at the sea’s edge, but invites them under each blue ridge, the howl of them in his limbs. The stone barely tremors. Hangs. Tearing him from his flesh. The waves pound round his legs and his gaze sharpens. If he speaks, he must hammer, before he begins, the rock sounds from his chest, hauling into his eyes, into the blue crags of their distance, the touch of bull hide, tail feather. He says: it’s what we lose in dying – the tilt, the chance, the memory. The collisions crossing time. He wants to arrive. Unbodied. From his voice, vowels jolt out like cries, like tiny selves loping from his mouth; faint, ecstatic barking. His eyes follow the sound – beyond birds and bulls into the blue clefts of his dreaming. Each echo swerving through the jagged folds. Curling into stone and vanishing.

Kristen Lang v Kristen Lang’s most recent poetry collection is The Weight of Light (Five Islands Press, 2017).

COMMENT

Why do politicians find tax justice so hard? by Daniel Halliday

s part of his budget speech to the House of Representatives in April, Josh Frydenberg, the federal treasurer, announced that his suite of policy changes would ‘deliver better outcomes for all Australians’. Such talk is par for the course in parliamentary democracies. Everyone knows that a large portion of the electorate voted against the policy positions of any incumbent government. Yet no politician can expect to get away with publicly conceding that their policies might be aimed at keeping their base happy while also pursuing some swing voters. This may sound unduly cynical: Whatever the realities of gaining and holding elected office, why shouldn’t politicians hope to serve everyone? Shouldn’t this be their moral duty? Held in abstraction, this is an attractive and plausible view. But a more practical position needs to recognise the ways in which governing for everyone faces special difficulties in specific policy areas. The problem for tax policy is that benefiting everyone is, much of the time, basically impossible. The short explanation for this is that tax policy can never really start from scratch. The new tax policies in any budget are not like new football seasons, where what happened last time is irrelevant to the benefits and burdens that participants might incur as the next year unfolds. This is because the prevailing regime of tax rules is one around which taxpayers have formed expectations and have planned their affairs in ways that unavoidably look far beyond the next twelve months. Here, citizens really have no choice given what sort of plans they have to make. Almost no mortgage, or pension scheme, or course of higher education, or training

can run its course quickly enough to be completed before the next budget. Whether the prevailing rules are fair or unfair, what they already are imposes substantial limits on what they can be turned into by way of the reforms in a single budget. Because so many of our economic activities have a long-term aspect, there needs to be a corresponding long-term stability in the tax system. Otherwise, the uncertainty will be too much for many of these activities to be even feasible. This means that while there is flexibility in spending following a surplus, budgets are forced to be incremental and conservative with the tax rules. The larger the tax reforms any treasurer ventures to announce, the more the established plans and expectations of taxpayers stand to be upended. In an ideal world, past budgets would have been designed in ways that appreciated this. Treasurers over the years would, ideally, have done more to avoid entrenching tax rules that would narrow the options available to their successors in decades ahead. But once the horse has bolted, new policymakers have to start from where they have been left. This explains, whenever a big reform does get proposed, the changes are usually subject to a ‘grandfathering’ clause where the old rules stay largely intact for those already invested in them. It bears emphasising that this makes taxation different from other policy domains. The question of whether or not to include grandfathering simply wouldn’t come up in any new legislation about, for example, immigration or marriage equality. Policies on these matters do not need to stay the same simply for the sake of what stability brings. Radical reform can more easily have its day, and the road to greater fairness COMMENT

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is more open, even if our politicians don’t always take pick up the fairness tab for the tax rules. Budgets are not, after all, just about taxes. Insofar as young people us down it. Going back to the specifics of tax, the prospect of stand to lose out when stability is preserved, Australia grandfathered privileges is especially familiar and espe- could move closer to a fair fiscal system overall if young cially stark in the case of housing. Longstanding Labor people got their perks elsewhere. What form might this take? Policy action on such proposals to end the right to negatively gear a loss-making property only apply to future purchases of homes: things as student debt and childcare offers opportunities citizens who already have negatively geared proper- for the Treasury to spend in ways that will likely make ties can simply keep them that way. This can look like things easier for young people. A better solution would a form of fairness. Those who have a sunk investment (so be to address more directly the common feeling that the young, when trying to buy to speak) into the old way a house, have been dealt a of doing things don’t have The problem for tax policy is bad hand. But homeownto absorb the cost of having that benefiting everyone is ership is desirable in part it pulled out from under because renting a home has them. Stability is preserved basically impossible so many downsides. More for everyone – what’s fair favourable legislation for is that nobody gets their established financial situation disrupted, even though tenants, perhaps in ways that mimic countries where the consequence is that those planning after the change homeownership is considered overrated (like Germany), might promote intergenerational fairness in spite of need to do so under different conditions. But fairness here is not clear-cut. Grandfathering is grandfathering. This is not to say that there are literally no options for essentially a way of pulling up the ladder so that those who were around early enough to gain a privilege get making the tax system fairer. Some tax reforms, though to keep it, while those late to the tax party don’t get to controversial, may not affect stability with respect to join them. And the need for tax stability means that citizens’ ongoing financial affairs. The inheritance tax politicians aren’t in a position to simply do away with (still common in other Western countries) became exgrandfathering. Apart from the aforementioned moral tinct in Australia in the 1970s. But one of its advantages concern that it goes back on a promise (however short- is that the dead don’t have any more planning to do. sighted) made to those who invested accordingly, there The idea of taxing estates is considered toxic enough remains a more economic concern about triggering a that treasurers never mention it (let alone in a budget). recession or downturn that wouldn’t help young people But a tax might become more popular when government promises to dedicate its revenue to some cause that citizens either. What I want to suggest is that these difficulties can get behind.It would be interesting,for example,to gauge about tax could be better appreciated. Another line from public opinion on an inheritance tax that redistributes Frydenberg’s speech was that ‘our commitment to fair- all of its revenues as equal cash grants to people between ness means the next generation not having to pick up the the ages of twenty and thirty-five, or funds a scheme for tab for the last’. Granted, the treasurer’s party is not the people seeking to buy their own home and who aren’t lucky one seeking to change negative gearing. But regardless of enough to have older family members buy it for them. Until the conversation can be advanced in ways that policy differences across party divides, all legislators are in the same boat when it comes to the impossibility of recognise the poor prospects for tax justice in isolation, starting fresh where tax policy is concerned. It is the very our politicians will remain hamstrung. If they were general tendency for tax decisions to separate different granted leave to depart from the myth about magically generations into winners and losers that makes it so hard benefiting all citizens all of the time, they could make to construct tax rules that really do advance the interests progress towards policies mitigating the impossibility of of all Australians. And things will tend to get resolved designing tax rules that are fair over the short or medium by the fact that the Treasury still has to get its revenue term. Just as importantly, those outside politics would be from somewhere. The need to preserve old privileges in a better position to pressure them to do so. And if tax for those who already have them means it is the young rules continue to benefit the old, as may be unavoidable who remain exposed to whatever tax burdens the Treas- for some time, then it is the young who should have first ury must impose to offset the generosity of perks offered dibs on a surplus. g to older generations. This really is a case of the young picking up the tab. Daniel Halliday, who teaches at the University of MelNone of this has to mean that Frydenberg’s en- bourne, works mainly on topics at the intersection of dorsement of fairness between the generations is an political philosophy and economics, with a special focus impossible or utopian goal. But for a goal of intergenera- on markets, taxation, and inequality. He is the author of tional fairness to be realised, there will need to be some The Inheritance of Wealth: Justice, equality, and the right recognition that other elements of fiscal policy need to to bequeath (Oxford University Press, 2018). v COMMENT

Myths of war

Preconceptions about a misguided conflict

Michael Sexton AUSTRALIA’S VIETNAM: MYTH VS HISTORY by Mark Dapin

NewSouth, $32.99 pb, 261 pp, 9781742236360

lmost all historical events are attended by myths, some of them remarkably persistent, but Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War has perhaps more than its fair share. Mark Dapin has set out to dispel what he sees as six of these myths, which he first encountered working on his book The Nashos’ War, published in 2014. The first myth is that all the national servicemen who went to Vietnam volunteered for this assignment. This proposition is repeated in various Australian texts about the war, but Dapin demonstrates that it is not true. It was true that in the Great War and almost entirely in World War II all the Australians who served overseas were volunteers, and the same applied to those who were part of the National Service scheme of the 1950s and posted outside Australia. But the whole point of the conscription ballot, introduced in late 1964 by the Menzies government, was to boost the army with men who could be sent to fight overseas. This was the government’s explicit policy, and it would have been completely undermined if national servicemen had been allowed to refuse to go to Vietnam when their unit was posted there. Dapin’s second myth is that the ballot under which some birth dates were drawn was in some way fixed to obtain, for example, persons with particular occupations. I doubt that this was ever generally believed, but the book is interesting about the kinds of groups who became national servicemen. One reason that they do not seem to have reflected a cross-section of the community is that the scheme only lasted for eight years, and deferments for fulltime study meant that, at least in the 2 0 M AY 2 0 1 9

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early years, there would have been few university graduates, though it must be remembered that, in comparison with today, only a small number of persons attended university in Australia. The third myth is that there were no parades for returning soldiers as there had been in earlier wars. The book notes that, for logistic reasons, there were few homecoming parades in 1918 and 1945. In contrast, there were welcoming crowds of several hundred thousand in Sydney every year for troops returning from Vietnam between 1966 and 1969. This myth seems to have arisen from a feeling on the part of some of the troops that their role in Vietnam was not properly recognised on their return. This may be closer to the truth, given the fact that after the fall of Saigon in 1975 it was obvious that the allied forces had lost the war. Arguably, however, because this was the first conflict Australia had been involved in that did not have the support of the great bulk of the community, it was clear from the outset that this would be different from earlier wars and that those returning would never be viewed as heroes like their predecessors. Somewhat allied to the notion of no homecoming parades are the fourth and fifth myths: that returning troops were met by protests when they arrived at airports in Australia; and that they were the subject of abuse and, in some cases, physical attack once back in Australia. Dapin examines all the accounts of these allegations and concludes, correctly in my view, that, except for one isolated incident, there was no evidence for any of them. In relation to airport protests, for example, he notes the absence in ASIO records of any reference to them, despite this being a time when

ASIO operatives attended and recorded almost all protests against the war. On the question of public abuse of returned soldiers, it is certainly my recollection from the time that this did not occur. One reason why it didn’t was that those groups who were opposed to the war did not see Australia’s role in Vietnam as the responsibility of army personnel but of the national government that had sent them there. The final myth is that of war crimes committed by Australians in Vietnam. Despite some anecdotal accounts, Dapin was unable to find any hard evidence for this, although doubtless there were many untargeted civilians who suffered or perished because of their proximity to military engagements by all parties. It is not put forward as one of Dapin’s myths, but there does seem to be an assumption in some later accounts of the Vietnam period that the war was always unpopular in the Australian community. It is true that the conflict did not have the whole-hearted support of earlier wars, but the Liberals, under the leadership of Harold Holt following Robert Menzies’ retirement in January 1966, won what was then the largest election victory in Australian political history ten months later. The war was one of the foremost issues in the poll because of Labor’s opposition to the troop commitment that had been made in 1965. As the book points out, a Gallup poll in December 1968 still showed forty-nine per cent of respondents believed that Australia should stay in Vietnam and thirty-seven per cent that its troops should be withdrawn. This was at a time when it might be thought that it had become obvious that the war could not be won, and when the debate

in the United States on its continuation had become widespread. This was not the Australian electorate’s finest hour. The majority of the community was prepared to allow a small group, chosen by lot, to risk their lives in a conflict that had no impact on anyone else in that community. It was selfish and irresponsible behaviour that still leaves a bad taste fifty years later. It might be assumed from some other accounts of this period that universities at least were oases of radicalism and so did not reflect the rest of the community. In fact only a very small minority of university students had any real interest in politics, and only some of those were actively opposed

to the war. In something of a contrast to many of their counterparts in the United States, Australian universities at the time did largely reflect the views of society as a whole. One early myth that may have been, partially at least, dispelled by later histories is that the Australian government was pressured by Washington to make its first significant commitment of ground troops in April 1965. The exchanges between Canberra and Washington indicate, however, that the Australians, particularly Foreign Minister Paul Hasluck, effectively solicited the invitation from the Americans to become involved in the conflict at a serious level. Moreover, in early 1965 they

urged Washington to step up the war at a time when there was still some debate in the US administration as to what was the best course to take in Vietnam. This book is a valuable contribution to the history of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It will, however, bring little comfort to the Australian soldiers who fought in this misguided and misjudged conflict. g Michael Sexton is a graduate of the law schools of the universities of Melbourne and Virginia, and spent some years as an academic lawyer before taking up practice at the NSW Bar. Since 1998 he has been Solicitor General for New South Wales.

‘A dance with failure’

The intellectualism and viscerality of Alison Croggon

Ben Brooker REMEMBERED PRESENCES: RESPONSES TO THEATRE by Alison Croggon

Currency Press, $39.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781760622121

hen Alison Croggon’s theatre review blog Theatre Notes closed in late 2012 after eight years in existence, its demise was met with a response akin to grief. The first blog of its kind in Australia, and one of the most enduring anywhere, TN became essential reading for anyone interested in Australian performance. Croggon’s often expansive and always erudite critical commentary earned her an international following (and, in 2009, the Geraldine Pascall Prize for Critic of the Year, the first time it went to an online critic). Moreover, the reviews and essays on Theatre Notes were able to catalyse debate – much of it, in stark contrast to what usually passes for online conversation, respectful, informed, and cogently argued – in a way few comparable blogs have managed. If the typically unnuanced

print versus digital debates of the mid-to-late-2000s were won and lost anywhere it was on Theatre Notes, a blog that, arguably more than any other, succeeded in combining the best traditions of newspaper criticism – curiosity, wit, and rigorous argumentation – with the internet’s most promising advantages, especially its potential for wideranging dialogue and communitybuilding, and, above all, its unconstrained space. In an effort, perhaps, to ease the sense of loss occasioned by TN’s demise, Croggon wrote in her penultimate post: ‘Several people have suggested that I should put together a book of reviews and essays, and when I have caught my breath, I will think about doing so. (Publishers are welcome to flood me with offers.)’ At least one of those offers was forthcoming and that book has now

arrived, not a moment too soon, in the shape of Currency Press’s Remembered Presences: Responses to theatre, which collects almost a hundred of Croggon’s reviews and essays. Arranged in chronological order, most of the pieces here are drawn from TN but also ABC Arts Online (now, like TN, defunct) and print media such as The Monthly and The Australian. Regrettably, though probably inevitably, those singularly animated discussion threads are not reproduced (they remain accessible on the archived version of the blog, though, and are well worth having on hand as you make your way through this collection). Croggon herself provides an intriguing clue to the book’s raison d’être in a speech – sadly not included here – given to students at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1997: MEDIA

This uninteresting book [Leonard Radic’s The State of Play (1991)] wouldn’t matter if other useful critical commentaries were easily available: but they’re not. There is a scrappily researched history produced by Currency Press, but that is as useless. Nowhere do we have, for instance, books like Michael Billington’s One Night Stands or Kenneth Tynan’s collected reviews of British theatre, that can tell you what it was like to be there, why it mattered, why it was exciting.

Indeed, it appeared as though the distinction between the independent and mainstream sectors – often expressed in binary terms pitting naturalistic and theatricalist modes against each other – was breaking down altogether, or at least reconstituting itself as a vitalising interdependence. Among it all emerged new critiques of gender and colonialism, the reverberations of which are still be-

‘The point is not to drive home a lesson,’ she writes of the kind of work she admires the most, ‘but to open a scab.’ Despite the thought and felt brilliance of Croggon’s writing, again and again in Remembered Presences she acknowledges the limits of language when it comes to writing about theatre: ‘Performance always exceeds language: it is at once word embodied as action, and presence that can’t be contained by words. Writing about performance is by definition a dance with failure, an attempt to translate the untranslatable.’ But what a dance! What’s perhaps most surprising, for a critic whose ‘vitriolic’ reviews for The Bulletin in the 1990s saw her blackballed by what was then Playbox Theatre, is how generous these pieces are. Clive James once said the stupid critic who likes everything and the smart one who likes nothing are equally contemptible. Croggon is smart, and she likes a lot. While it’s possible to quibble with the individual selections – where, I wondered, is Croggon’s terrific long-form essay ‘The Critical Gap’, her definitive account of the arts funding crisis published in The Monthly in 2016, or her usefully contrarian takes on Alan Bennett’s The History Boys or the plays of Stephen Sewell? – the book’s real shortcomings lie elsewhere. Unlike Currency’s Kippax and Brisbane books, Remembered Presences has no index – an essential tool, I would have thought, for students, researchers, artists, and the general reader alike. An equally serious omission is the lack of a contextualising introduction or foreword, in lieu of which we are offered Croggon’s fine but inapposite short essay ‘How to Think Like a Theatre Critic’ (which, in any case, has appeared in print at least twice before). It’s a shame the book itself, in glaring contrast to its contents, seems to have been put together with such little thought. g

R e m e m be r e d P r e s e n c e s , scrappily produced though it may also be (more on this later), is such a book. It joins those by Billington and Tynan – and, it must be said, others by Australia’s Katherine Brisbane and H.G. Kippax, published in the years after Croggon’s speech – as a vital firsthand account of an innately ephemeral art form. And just as Kippax’s A Leader of His Craft (2004) and Brisbane’s Not Wrong – Just Different (2005) trace the contours of significant cultural struggles for public subsidy and recognisably Australian voices in our theatre, positioning their authors as vocal advocates for both, so too does Remembered Presences amount to something Alison Croggon at Perth Writers Week 2019 (photograph by Sam Wiki, via Wikimedia Commons) more than a blow-by-blow account of a significant chapter in this country’s theatre history. ing felt today in the ongoing revival of ‘In the end,’ Croggon writes, ‘a critic feminist and Indigenous performance. is only as good as the work she writes Which is all very well, but every revabout.’ The period covered here, 2004 olution requires a witness equal to the to 2012, was an unusually rich one for task of describing it. There is no quesAustralian performance, particularly tion that Croggon is among the best when viewed through Croggon’s Mel- critics this country has produced, and bourne-centric lens (most of the semi- there is not a review here that doesn’t nal productions assayed here, from Mel- attest to her precision of thought and bourne Theatre Company’s Blackbird expression, her ability to put theatre into to The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes, are by multiple contexts – historical, intellecVictorian companies). While independ- tual, political – and to exercise formal ent companies like Sisters Grimm and control (it’s hard to think of another Back to Back Theatre foregrounded critic whose reviews can so convincingly queer and disabled stories with re- enter a poetic register). But for all its fierce newed formal and conceptual rigour, intellectualism, Croggon’s criticism the majors seemed to find new energies locates the effects of performance in the in the naturalism with which they had body as much as the mind, emphasis- Ben Brooker is an Adelaide-based long been, often sneeringly, associated. ing theatre’s embodied, visceral nature. writer and critic. 2 2 M AY 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Upsurge Gillian Appleton THE RIPPLES BEFORE THE NEW WAVE: DRAMA AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY 1957–1963

by Robyn Dalton and Laura Ginters

Currency Press $40 pb, 246 pp, 9781760622589

eople who were university students at a particular time often like to regard those years as exceptional, a perspective which, embellished by nostalgia, memoirs, and media hype, can take on mythic proportions. A case in point is the concurrence of people and talent that led to a high point in student theatre at the University of Sydney during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In a theatre context, ‘New Wave’ describes the perceived beginning, at the end of the 1960s, of modern Australian drama. Theatre historians like Michelle Arrow and Geoffrey Milne have pointed out that the notion that this was where it all started ignores the work of playwrights from the 1920s onwards, and considers the success of Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1955 a virtual anomaly before 1970. Robyn Dalton and Laura Ginters suggest that historians have also underestimated the flourish at Sydney University and its ramifications, in later collaborations, of those who were involved. For them it is the ‘ripples’ that preceded the Wave: small perhaps, but influential in what followed. They avoid claims of a golden age. As Clive James wryly remembered forty years later, ‘it looks like the biggest concentration of talent in the universe but it was just an historical accident’. That some of those involved later became known nationally (the Johns Bell, Gaden, and Tasker, Richard Wherrett, Leo Schofield, Bob Ellis) and internationally (Germaine Greer, Clive James himself, Robert Hughes, Les Murray, Bruce Beresford, and Madeleine St John) no doubt added retrospective lustre. But the Sydney Uni upsurge was not an isolated development. Student drama had a long and honourable tradition at

the university. The work of playwrights like Lawler, Richard Beynon, and Peter Kenna foreshadowed what was to come. Exciting independent theatre was to follow with the APG in Melbourne and Jane Street in Sydney. Nevertheless, at a distance of sixty years, an assessment of the era and its importance is timely. Three people emerge as highly influential. Pamela Threthowan, a versatile English actress and director, energised student theatre with more than twenty productions in five years, including some of the first Beckett plays to be presented in Australia. Leo Schofield, later festival director and arts entrepreneur, initially contributed design skills and proceeded to direct revue, Restoration drama, Brecht, Purcell, and the ever-popular Victoriana. Ken Horler was a genius at spotting talent and an adventurous director of work by Brecht, Goldoni, and e.e. cummings. Horler later established Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre (1970) and, with Bell and Wherrett, introduced new Australian work and offered fresh, appealing treatments of the classics. Robust competition between rival dramatic societies – SUDS (the venerable SU Drama Society, established in 1889) and the newer Players – along with work by the colleges, language faculties, music, and other specialist societies, generated diverse and vibrant student performances. Into a theatre environment dominated by the tired imports of commercial producers, the societies brought the work of contemporary playwrights like Pinter, Brecht, and Beckett, attracting audiences from outside the university and even reviewers from the mainstream press. Paradoxically, there was ‘an almost total absence of Australian plays’ among the ripples. With no formal training available (NIDA took in its first students only in 1959), university drama offered an opening. Among the outstanding acting talents of the period were nineteenyear-old John Bell, who performed a Malvolio of astonishing depth and maturity, directed by Horler; and Arthur Dignam, who gave intense and moving performances in works like Pinter’s The Birthday Party, but ‘lacked the drive and self-confidence that propelled [Bell] into his subsequent highly successful

career’. Another success, Philip Hedley, decamped early for a distinguished career at London’s Stratford East. In those pre-feminist times, it was men who filled the key creative roles. Clive James, ‘Chester’ (Philip Graham) and John (later Kate) Cummings dominated sketch writing for the popular satirical revues. Casting of women often depended more on physical attributes than perceived talent. Albie Thoms (later director of absurdist theatre and avantgarde film) found the orientation week SUDS team ‘too intimidating’ to join, a reaction many young women would have shared. Nevertheless, gutsy women like Greer, Colleen Chesterman, and Rosaleen Smyth gamely auditioned. The freshers who launched into the new era of student theatre were very young, some barely sixteen. As beneficiaries of Commonwealth scholarships and children of the Menzies area, most of us were shamefully apolitical and extremely naïve. Ignorance about homosexuality was widespread, and almost no one was openly gay. Study was secondary to fun until performances were suspended, giving way to serious cramming for the looming exams. By the mid-1960s the great flush of student drama was over. Many participants joined the then-customary exodus to London, or dispersed into related areas or dropped out of theatre altogether. Dalton and Ginters painstakingly researched The Ripples over a number of years. They record all productions, directors, and originating organisations between 1957 and 1963, with detailed accounts of more notable productions, providing more than enough evidence for their evaluation of the era’s importance. Their in-depth interviews with participants yield lively anecdotal material, enhanced by rare archival photographs. There is a comprehensive index. It’s a nostalgia fest for anyone who was there, but there is much for anyone interested in Australian theatre history. Golden age or not, what is unarguable is that for most of us, to be young (and there) was very heaven. g Gillian Appleton was one of the crowd in Sartre’s Lucifer and the Lord (1960) and an occasional backstage dogsbody. T H E AT R E

Masquerade Keegan O’Connor THIS YOUNG MONSTER

by Charlie Fox

Brow Books $29.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781925704143

n his début collection of essays, This Young Monster, Charlie Fox pays homage to a range of artistic icons (or ‘monsters’) who revel in freakish and reckless play. His creatures of choice include filmmakers Buster Keaton and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, photographers Diane Arbus and Larry Clark, performance artist Leigh Bowery, poet Arthur Rimbaud, and many others. These characters move Fox to confront the question: ‘What’s it like to be a monster and what kind of art does such an identification demand you make?’ Fox’s writings come from a personal critical perspective, but he is clearly more interested in transformation and obfuscation than divulgence. He inhabits his subjects’ identities with playful abandon, his sensibility akin to the slightly twisted incarnations and reverential camp parodies of cultural figures by authors Wayne Koestenbaum, Kevin Killian, and Derek McCormack. Their spirit of ‘visitation’ and frivolous roleplaying permeates all the collected works here. Like Walter Pater (and like many of Fox’s monsters), the author reveals himself to be a ‘mask’ – many masks – ‘without the face’. In ‘Spook House’, a chapter written as a play script, Fox summons Klaus Kinski (himself in character as Nosferatu), Harry Potter’s Hermione Granger (in a Wicked Witch costume), and Michael Jackson (as a scarecrow) as mouth-pieces for his peregrinations. Here we see most vividly the kinds of masquerades and distorted mirrors that he is keen to evoke in his style of cultural criticism. Ditto the book’s centrepiece, ‘Trans2 4 M AY 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

former’, where Fox becomes Lewis Carroll’s Alice. With what only amounts to a slight shift in expression and tone from the personally attributed essays, the precocious and adventurous Alice plays the grande dame, theatrically selfcanonising and springing willy-nilly across her own heritage in twentiethcentury art. She lands upon works in which her observable legacies of metamorphosis and skilful self-evasion have received little critical attention – for example, the portrait-photographs of Francesca Woodman, Claude Cahun, and Cindy Sherman. Hitting ‘reality’ with a thump, she brilliantly recognises herself in the misbegotten and rebellious girl (played by Linda Manz) in Dennis Hopper’s 1980 treasure Out of the Blue. Here, ‘Wonderland’ has turned to wasteland: the girl is left to navigate only a dreary world, one coming down from the starry-eyed visions of the psychedelic 1960s with which Alice has been more commonly associated. The likening of Alice in Wonderland to the austere Out of the Blue epitomises Fox’s agility as a cultural critic. In pieces dedicated to individual subjects, he frequently deflects to a wide range of seemingly disparate works. Making correlations, he allows his essays to detour and ‘go roaming’ and meanwhile agitates the critical reputations of the works under discussion. (Such deviations offer us a sketch of his own charming idiosyncrasies as a compiler and consumer.) In his Alice’s surprising invocation of Out of the Blue, the ghosts of other possible lives, hovering above both Carroll’s and Hopper’s works, become more perceptible than before. Discussions of Harmony Korine’s film Gummo (1997) and the photographs of Arbus and Clark give further evidence of that energising critical faculty. Since it opened to an incensed and dismissive public, Gummo has long been defended as a work invested in raw realism, bucking against American cinema’s established traditions of escapism and idealism. Its brutality (and dark hilarity) still intact, Fox instead accesses the film and all the magical features that saturate it by way of the proto-Hollywood Alice in Wonderland and the prototypical Hollywood The Wizard of Oz (1939).

(He shares with experimental filmmaker and Tinseltown gossip Kenneth Anger an underground sensibility with a ‘Hollywoodian reflex’ – it feeds and enriches itself on Hollywood pulp; its dishonoured grunginess still wants a share in all the sparkly glamour.) Similarly, for Fox the stark representation of hidden realities in the photographs of Arbus and Clark do not preclude their phantasmagorical and performative elements. These artists use reality as yet another ‘luscious material supplied by the earth’, something to be appropriated and remoulded if not fiercely combated. Perhaps the best example of this need to modify and recreate – to treat body and earth as canvas and clay – is the Melbourne-born fashion icon Leigh Bowery, the subject of one of the book’s best essays. ‘His whole persona was a mask,’ said his wife, Nicola. Their marriage was also a mask, and veils abide even in Lucian Freud’s series of portraits of the corpulent Bowery in the nude, performing a private life. Here again, Fox leaves his subject even larger than we found him: the artist becomes an explosive gateway drug, goading him to sift through ideas about ‘queer monstrosity’ via Oscar Wilde, Anne Carson, the rapturous designs of Alexander McQueen, and even film director Todd Haynes’ homage to Jean Genet, Poison (1991). (The accursed angel Genet otherwise lingers as a mostly unspoken presence throughout the book.) In that chapter, Fox’s prose is incisive and analytical but glimmers still with the eccentricity and absurdity that he so cherishes in his subjects. It is in only occasional moments of self-reflection and self-justification – for example, when he reckons with the contemporary social and political significance of monstrosity in the final chapter (otherwise dedicated to the book’s ‘mascot’, Rimbaud) – that his writing loses some of its electric charge. Fox is most potent when he is play-acting, thinking leapingly, and keeping his subjects’ ‘grand imaginative follies’ afloat, as he is for so much of this exiciting book. g Keegan O’Connor is a writer and teacher of English Literature and English as a Second Language.

Fiction

A Donald Trump baby blimp flies above Westminster Square on 13 July 2018 (photograph by Paul Marriott/Alamy Live News)

Beejay Silcox on the lure of dystopian worlds Ian McEwan

Chris Womersley

Siri Hustvedt

Machines Like Me

A Lovely and Terrible Thing

Memories of the Future

Paul Giles

Brenda Walker

James Ley

FICTION

REVIEW OF THE MONTH

This is the way the world ends The disquieting lure of dystopian novels

Beejay Silcox

hen truth is stranger than fiction, fiction is a potent source of truth. In the first week of the Trump administration, sales of 1984 increased by 9,500 per cent, catapulting George Orwell’s sexagenarian novel to the top of global bestseller charts. As Kellyanne Conway recast White House lies as ‘alternative facts’, Orwell’s tale of doublespeak read like a manual. Welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave new world. The lure of dystopian novels has always been dissonant; they soothe as much as they disquiet – that feverish relief of surfacing from a nightmare to find your world intact, values affirmed. The rise of white nationalism, the preposterous uncertainty of Brexit, climate change – in the face of these waking terrors, there is a perverse comfort in darker dreams. We are more than a decade into the so-called ‘golden age’ of dystopic fiction, and readers show little sign of apocalypse-fatigue. This year’s most anticipated book release – after the Mueller report – is The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), due in September. On the small screen, a third season from the same brutal universe will terrorise us in June; two high-profile examples cherry-picked from dozens. On and off the page, we are ravenous for ruin. And we have never been furnished with so many ways to imagine a squandered future. Pick your poison: divine rapture or human folly? Plummeting fertility or rising sea levels? A virus, perhaps, but what sort – flesh-eating or hard-drive melting? And for women, what a grisly buffet – a dystopian novel for every 2 6 M AY 2 0 1 9

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feckless, cruel, and oppressive possibility. There is an ‘adolescent quality’ to contemporary dystopias, argues Jill Lepore in The New Yorker; even the books marketed to adults are ‘pouty and hostile’, a fictive mirror of our ‘untrusting, lonely and sullen’ post-truth century. The story we have always told ourselves about dystopian novels is that they galvanise change, providing narratives and lexicons of resistance. We invoke the redcloaked women protesting Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, dressed in homage to Atwood’s enslaved heroine. But what Lepore reports from the literary coalface is the obverse, a ‘fiction of submission’: It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments ... Its only admonition is: Despair more. It appeals to both the left and the right, because, in the end, it requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination, asking only that you enjoy the company of people whose fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own.

A similar critique is increasingly made about dystopia’s fraternal twin, satire: that it only speaks to the audience it makes comfortable. As Ben Greenman writes in the New York Times: ‘Most Trump satire doesn’t implicate the rest of us. It implicates the rest of them, expressing shocked disbelief at the base that continues to back him despite his increasingly indefensible behaviour. It labels them “other” and calls it a day. This leaves everyone at loggerheads. It makes of satire a frozen obelus, as

dependent upon divisiveness as the president himself.’ They’re criticisms that beg, hefty definitional questions about the role of writers (and of genres), and whether that role has changed – or should change – to match our absurdist times. ‘Right now, as far as I’m concerned, the dystopia has arrived,’ argues Sam Byers, author of Perfidious Albion (2018), a caustic and uproarious satire of post-Brexit Britain. ‘Is our job still simply to imagine?’ he asked in a recent interview. ‘Or is it in fact to interrogate the ways that we as political and economic subjects have already been imagined, and to reassert our right to make a world around which imaginative constraints have not yet been imposed by others?’ Has it ever been otherwise? Is this an astute call to arms, or an historically amnesiac chrono-centrism? In his 1961 essay ‘Writing American Fiction’, Philip Roth complained: The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.

Roth could have been writing yesterday. Or – undoubtedly – a decade from now. Reality consistently outstrips invention.That’s why we need novelists: to anchor us in unreality. Into the ever-growing glut of gloom arrives Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha (Graywolf Press, US$16 pb, 304 pp, 9781555978280), and John Lanchester’s The Wall (Faber & Faber, $29.99 pb, 288 pp, 9780571298709), two near-future, post-populism dystopias released within days of each other. The former, a pyrotechnic, feral satire with echoes of Pynchon and Vonnegut; the latter, a restrained and lonely novel in the mould of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). With a bang and a whimper, these books offer twin visions of what a ‘fiction of resistance’ might look like. Neither is comfortable. Trump Sky Alpha opens with bombast and bomb blasts as the president kickstarts nuclear armageddon from the jewel-encrusted helm of a wayward zeppelin (an unmoored, volatile windbag – the metaphor subtle as a gold brick). Below him, the genocidally insecure Trump imagines the people of America – ‘the best Americans, the most beautiful’ – looking skyward in adoration, ‘thanking him right there for his extraordinary, truly unprecedented achievements in the White House, more done in these months than in all the decades of all the other guys before, so it was ten out of ten, A+’. It is a writhing, twenty-page orgy of caricature: ‘Trump putting his rubberised face – by turns froglipped and haemorrhoidal, pig-and-pop-eyed – through its paces.’ His hair aloft in the dirigible’s updraft: ‘like some undersea organism ... rotating and swaying like primitive life seen at great magnification. Scalp fully

visible, pale and fat and peeled as a hard-boiled egg.’ Trump is often described as ‘satire proof ’. As Greenman writes, ‘subjecting him to ridicule is like pushing tacks into one of those giant gummy bears. All your sharp points just end up lost in there.’ This is not to say that Trump is unfazed by ridicule – never has a leader seemed more raw and alert to it – rather, that satire has utterly failed to dent his credibility or popularity, if not paradoxically entrenched it. Doten takes Trump’s absurdity and ups the ante by filling a gilded airship with loose and vengeful lobsters (TRUMP stamped on every tail and claw). The pristine Ivanka is vomiting on national television, bomb after bomb is falling, and Trump is caught in a deranged loop of freewheeling grandiosity: ‘I have talked to the generals and the generals who are with us have given me some really, really wonderful codes to work with, and the codes are beautiful, just beautiful ...’ Doten’s ventriloquism is uncanny and unsparing. It feels gluttonous, this farce: at first delicious, then decadent, then dyspeptic. For the world is burning, and as our end – and the story’s beginning – looms, Doten’s real target comes sharply into focus: ‘There might have been a chance, once, to resist, there must have been, but that moment was lost somewhere, it had slipped away – where had all the little moments been? There must have been so many chances to not be where we were – but this is where we were.’ Satire isn’t broken. As Doten scabrously demonstrates, in an undeferential era of populism and filter bubbles we have been aiming at the wrong targets. Trump isn’t in Doten’s sights; we are. All of us. Trump Sky Alpha begins a year after the president’s nuclear tantrum has destroyed ninety per cent of the global population. A handful of American survivors are going stir-crazy in a military dormitory, where the administrative tasks of reconstruction have been numbingly gamified. They spend hour after hour at computer terminals, identifying the dead by matching drivers licence pictures to corpse heardshots and scouring drone footage for survivors. Rachel, a former technology journalist, is being pressured by her ex-editor and his military minders to write a think-piece on internet humour at the end of the world. She is sceptical: ‘I see the world around me and it’s all guns and survival and control. There is no magic #resistance position right now for journalists, there is no democracy dies in darkness and the fucking news fit to print. Just accomplices to whatever this is.’ Rachel negotiates a grief-fuelled deal: when she finishes reporting the story, she will be permitted to visit the mass grave where her wife and child are buried. She is taken to a room ‘where the internet sits on ice, the archive of what’s left’ and wades into the digital wreckage. ‘What did the internet feel like?’ she tries to remember. ‘How to describe its loss?’ What emerges is a hyper-real ‘systems novel’ – FICTION

a manic, post-modern interrogation of the culture of ‘blind, endless consumption’ and its hyper-networked global colonisation. ‘The internet had amplified the stupid and the evil, and at the same time flattened them, made them impossible to distinguish. Or made distinguishing them somehow beside the point.’ Trump Sky Alpha is a difficult read: polemical, digressive, and cartoonishly violent – unashamedly so. It is also techno-fluent and form elastic; there are interview transcripts; multiple narration and point-of-view switches; a novel within a novel; a frenetic catalogue of memes, GIFs, and nostalgic internet in-jokes; and a mimetic Trump monologue or two. Readers unfamiliar with Pepe the Frog and TCP/IP protocols will – ironically – need the internet to help them navigate this analogue indictment of the digital world. ‘The universe has strapped us all into the most elaborate Rube Goldberg death machine,’ Doten writes with characteristic hyperbole. His novel feels like one. Whether that is a compliment or a criticism will vary from reader to reader. But what is most difficult about Doten’s dystopia is how sickeningly recognisable it is. The internet’s record of its own destruction – ‘giddy and etherised ... a jaded and pitiless amazement’ – looks, grotesquely, like everyday life online. ‘The need to be heard, the need to respond, the constant chaotic hum of it. Negative partisanship, zero-sum games, the non-stop trolling, the hate and the love, the postures that were knowing and cool and monstrously self-deprecating and panicked and thirsty and violent and performatively woke, none of it stopped at the end of the world.’ There is no sullenness or submission here. Brash and agitated, Trump Sky Alpha is a novel of mass complicity – a novel about laughing at the end of the world that begins by showing us just how eager and willing we are to laugh at the end of the world.

n subdued contrast, John Lanchester’s The Wall begins with a lone man staring out into an empty sea. That’s how the novel began in Lanchester’s mind: ‘I had started another novel and kept seeing a recurring image as I faded off to sleep,’ the author explained in an interview with the Irish Times. ‘It was a man standing on a wall, on his own, at night, facing the coast. I was thinking about who that was, what world he was living in. I realised I was thinking about the world after catastrophic climate change.’ A whirlwind tour of The Wall’s proper nouns – the Wall, the Change, Defenders, Others, and the Help – sets out the shape that world has taken. In the aftermath of a global climate disaster (the Change), Britain has wrapped itself in a 10,000-kilometre barricade, ‘a long low concrete monster’ (the Wall). As a form of national service, every young person must spend two years as a guard on the Wall (a Defender), protecting the country from migrants (Others). As our narrator – new Defender, Joseph ‘Chewy’

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Kavanagh – explains: ‘They come in rowing boats and rubber dinghies, on inflatable tubes, in groups and in swarms and in couples, in threes, and singles; the smaller the number, often, the harder to detect. They are clever, they are desperate, they are ruthless, they are fighting for their lives, so all of those things had to be true for us as well.’ For every Other that makes it over the Wall, a Defender will be set adrift: one in, one out. Others who are captured are offered three choices: to be euthanised, put back out to sea, or become a state-indentured slave (Help). There’s a taut fairy-tale logic here – the air is heady with allegorical and symbolic possibility. ‘One of the things about the wall in the book is that it is not a metaphor for anything else,’ the author insists. ‘We had this period when walls were coming down around the world and now, just as an empirical fact, they are springing up all over the place.’ It’s an intention his novel explicitly affirms. The life of a Defender is monotonous: twelve-hour shifts in the bitter, pelagic cold. ‘You look for metaphors,’ Chewy explains, as he searches for a way to convey the cold. ‘But you soon realise that the thing about the cold is that it isn’t a metaphor ... It’s nothing but a physical fact.’ It is this concrete heart that makes The Wall so quietly confronting, the sense that Lanchester hasn’t penned a parable, he’s penned a history of the future; not a what-if, but a when. Plain-spoken and intimate, The Wall is the future remembering its past – our present. Remembering a time when the world was ‘unfucked’ – when there were beaches and travel, and when food meant more than ‘turnips, turnips, fucking turnips’. ‘It must have been too easy, you know? You could just cook anything. Whenever. It just makes you think, how did people know what to want?’ Lanchester’s young people can only imagine a polyglot world of choices, where bearing children didn’t feel ethically indefensible, and families were not riven by intergenerational guilt: ‘The olds feel like they irretrievably fucked up the world, and allowed us to be born into it. You know what? It’s true. That’s exactly what they did. They know it, we know it. Everyone knows it.’ When we are forced to inhabit the world of a dystopia as we would a realist novel, the consolatory insulation of the fantastical is stripped away. What’s left is a profound sense of pre-emptive sorrow and empathy: ‘It takes much more effort to think that life is about you when the whole of human life is turned upside down,’ Chewy reflects, ‘when everything has been irrevocably changed for everyone.’ It is hard to conjure a better description of the soul of contemporary youth activism than this. ‘My main ambition, my main hope for the book, is that I’m wrong,’ Lanchester told the Guardian. The horror of The Wall is how tenuous that hope feels – not for the specifics of the scenario it outlines, but for its sense of bone-deep human loneliness, and corrosive regret.

The Wall and Trump Sky Alpha are timely – in ways both purposeful and accidental. ‘My goal was to write swiftly, with heat, capture something about our moment, and get the book out in Trump’s first term,’ Doten explained in a recent interview. Both books have attracted complaints that they are ‘Zeitgeisty’. Take Daisy Buchanan’s review of The Wall for the Independent: ‘It’s timely. In fact, it’s too timely. I feel for Lanchester. What probably seemed alarmingly prescient at the time of writing has become almost unbearable to read. It doesn’t seem fair that his work should suffer from being too relevant, but if I struggled with the prose it’s because those endless stretches of grey, cold concrete were looming a little too close for comfort.’ There is a persistent literary myth that speaking to the present is unambitious, unliterary – that fiction adorned with too many cultural baubles is destined to topple into obscurity (but try telling that to American Psycho, Bonfire of the Vanities, or the collected works of Dickens). What a catch-22: refuse to respond to ‘the moment’ and be dismissed for being out of date; respond too closely and be on the nose. Indeed, much of early Trump-lit has responded to this expectation by writing around him (take, for example, Barbara Kingsolver’s recent novel, Unsheltered [2018], which refused to utter his name). In contrast, Doten’s brazen opening pages offer nothing but targeted mockery. Similarly, Lanchester takes the most potent, weighted symbol of our politics and places it defiantly in the centre. Neither book lets us off the hook – and it is ‘us’ not ‘them’. These are not accounts that indulge our sense of moral superiority; on the contrary, they use that superiority as a bludgeon to wake us up. ‘Datedness is an interesting concept,’ Doten muses, ‘but as a writer I don’t really believe in it, or I don’t believe that it’s something the writer can control ... I’d like to think that there’s still a sense of the cultural texture in those passages that will be legible in five years or even fifty years, even if much of the context is lost. On the other hand, if that’s not the case, that’s fine. I won’t be here in fifty years to worry about it.’ The looming question is whether any of us will be. g

Beejay Silcox was the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellow. This is her final Fellowship essay but by no means the last you will hear from her in the magazine.

Karen Carpenter Her voice weeps singing to God ona frequency that tunes out her cries. We’ve only just begun to freak— the dread longing to be close to You who tears each soul to shreds. Hurting each other, but coming back for more. As if hurt is what matters.

Charles Bernstein v FICTION

Hunger Paul Giles MACHINES LIKE ME

by Ian McEwan

Jonathan Cape $32.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781787331679

an McEwan’s new novel imagines an alternative history of England in the 1980s, one in which Argentina won the Falklands War and Margaret Thatcher was subsequently trounced at the polls. It also projects an alternative narrative of scientific progress, one in which the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing did not die in 1954, victimised because of his homosexuality, but instead lived on into a ‘glorious patrician present’ to become the ‘presiding genius of the digital age’. Digital communication is presented here as having become ‘a daily chore’ by the early 1970s, with these characters in 1982 communicating regularly by email. The novel’s plot turns on Turing’s invention of robotic prototypes, known as Adam and Eve, one of which ends up as the property of the novel’s first-person narrator, Charlie. Adam’s speed and dexterity in cognitive processing makes a fortune for Charlie on the Asian currency markets, but Adam eventually asserts his independence, becomes Charlie’s love rival and has to be eliminated. This is a very fine novel, in some respects the best McEwan has published over the course of a long career, which is, of course, saying a great deal. One striking thing about the book is the way it pulls together many of the themes addressed by McEwan in his earlier work: the relation between the human imagination and science (as seen in Solar); the concern with national history and mythology, particularly military events such as Dunkirk (Atonement) or the Falklands War (The Plough3 0 M AY 2 0 1 9

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man’s Lunch); the uncomfortable frisson associated with interactions between individual consciousness and a ‘manufactured human’, something explored as far back as his early story ‘Dead as They Come’, where the well-heeled narrator falls in love with a dummy in a shop window. We get a summative sense in Machines Like Me of McEwan integrating all of these long-standing concerns into a multifaceted narrative that treats private, public, and political life as a continuum, raising questions not just esoteric or obsessive, as was sometimes suggested of McEwan’s earlier writing, but instead resonating with central social importance. The scientific expertise worked into McEwan’s text might not be handled quite as flamboyantly as in Richard Powers’s novels, but McEwan’s assimilation of complex material is woven more fully into a recognisable human environment, and this does make his work easier to read. There are many moments of fine comedy here, notably when Charlie’s prospective father-inlaw mistakes him for the lifelike robot and suggests he should go downstairs to ‘plug yourself in’. The overall burden of this book involves analysing similarities and differences between humans and machines: hence the book’s full title, Machines Like Me and People Like You. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is duly cited here, and the conclusion of McEwan’s narrator, that robots lack a sense of imaginative play and the capacity to empathise with an abandoned child – another familiar McEwan theme, of course – is perhaps not so surprising. Alternative history might be seen as an inverted form of science fiction, a knife through butter where the very malleability of the narrative environment renders it immune from the harsher limits of realism that history itself imposes, and there were a few occasions here when I got the sense of McEwan enjoying himself rather too self-indulgently with these speculative scenarios, as with the line about the Beatles regrouping after twelve years and finding their comeback album, Love and Lemons, being widely derided for its ‘grandiosity’. Many of us who experienced the services of Brit-

ish Rail during this period might also consider the prospect of an omniscient, omnicompetent robot less improbable than the idea of a train journey from London Euston to Glasgow Central taking only ‘seventy-five minutes’. Overall, though, McEwan’s novel has the same kind of thought-provoking charge that impels The Difference Engine (1990), a collaborative novel by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson imagining how nineteenth-century history would have been different if Charles Babbage’s pioneering computer had been systematically developed during Victorian times. The eerie plausibility of McEwan’s alternative history implies the contingent and reversible nature of all narratives, with one subplot involving Miranda, Charlie’s girlfriend, spending time in jail for perverting the course of justice in a good cause. The provisional nature of all received understandings of the past is implied as the story unfolds. More generally, the novel’s prognosis of how regular jobs based on principles of pattern recognition, such as those of doctors and lawyers, are fast disappearing as the efficiencies of an ‘ambulant laptop’ become increasingly humanised will strike many readers as only too plausible in our era of Google Home. This is a conceptually ambitious novel, but also one that is stylistically amusing and well-controlled. The larger dimensions of science are incorporated here more seamlessly than in Solar, where the correlation between global warming and a philandering climate scientist did seem on occasions strained. McEwan represents Alan Turing here as having a ‘lean fitness in early old age that seemed derived less from healthy living than from a hunger to keep on creating’, and McEwan, who is the same age now as his reanimated hero, might be said to have a similar kind of hunger for creation in the literary field. Edward Said suggested that ‘late style’ for artists often involves negotiating unresolved and contradictory rather than serene or transcendent elements. Machines Like Me explores darker aspects of the posthumanist age with poise and skill. g Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney.

Mirage Alex Cothren SIMPSON RETURNS: A NOVELLA

by Wayne Macauley

Text Publishing $19.99 pb, 144 pp, 9781925773507

are and compassion, a fair go, freedom, honesty, trustworthiness, respect, and tolerance. These were the nine ‘Australian values’ that former Liberal Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson demanded be taught in schools, especially Islamic schools, across the nation in 2005. How? Partly through the tale of John Simpson and his donkey, Murphy. They clambered selflessly up and down Gallipoli’s Shrapnel Valley with the bodies of Anzacs on their backs like Sisyphus’s boulder, their forty days of toil ended by a sniper’s bullet. Never mind that Simpson’s real surname was Kirkpatrick; that he did the equivalent work of many nameless others; or that Simpson was an illegal Geordie immigrant who had enlisted just for the free ticket back to England. ‘The man with the donkey’ has consistently proven too useful a tool to question for war recruiters and other patriotic tub-thumpers. Wayne Macauley, long one of Australia’s deadliest satirists, has also found it difficult to leave Simpson and Murphy alone. His short story ‘ Simpson and his Donkey Go Looking for the Inland Sea’ first appeared in Westerly back in 2001, before being republished in Macauley’s surreal collection, Other Stories (2010). This new novella expands but does not dramatically alter that story. In both, Simpson has survived Gallipoli thanks to a mysterious vial of water given to him by a wounded soldier named Lasseter. Simpson, back on Australian shores but still committed to his role as ‘helpmate to the dying’, believes that finding more of this magical substance will allow him to save the country’s ailing: ‘I will stand kneedeep in the healing water baptising all our downtrodden.’ Confusingly, this quest leads him not towards Lasseter’s famously misplaced gold reef but to

the Inland Sea, the enormous (and non-existent) body of water that once tricked Charles Sturt into dragging a boat from Adelaide to the Simpson Desert and back again. This conglomeration of Aussie myths and legends is slightly disorientating at first – one almost expects Simpson to encounter a drop bunyip-yowie – but it is effective as a broad allegory for the way solutions to this country’s deepest injustices always shimmer just out of reach. We never actually get anywhere near the Inland Sea; despite ‘eightyeight years resurrected’, Simpson has managed to venture ‘no further than the dry creek beds and back roads of country Victoria’. Impeded by his selfdescribed ‘Inveterate Samaritanism’, he is unable to pass anyone in need: ‘A moan, a wail, a whimper, and I was there like a dog to a bone.’ Each character Simpson heals – ‘a widow, a disabled, a refugee, an addict, an orphan’ – offers their own unique tale of woe, but each also prompts essentially the same question from Simpson and reader alike: ‘in a land of fatted calves why do you look so horribly thin?’ These stories within a story – a format also used in Demons (2014) – might read like the sort of hard-luck realism our literary culture breeds like rabbits, were it not for Macauley’s wellhoned, deadpan wit, which skips across even the darkest joke: ‘For Denis the main disadvantage of being raised by Christian men, aside from the obvious risks, was that they never told him he was ugly.’ A section in which a divorced mother fails to gas her children, due to a mismatch between hose and hatchback exhaust pipe, somehow manages to be harrowing and farcical at the same time, in the manner of Macauley’s breakout (and gross-out) novel, The Cook. Simpson’s philosophical musings on kindness stitch these tales together, although it is difficult to pin down exactly which ‘man with the donkey’ we are given here. He doesn’t appear to be the historical Kirkpatrick – he neither pines for north-east England nor speaks its patois – but he also isn’t the whistling-to-his-death larrikin of lore. This Simpson rages against those who turned suffering into Anzac jingo-

ism – ‘thrown to our deaths by indifferent men, our courage and laughter in the face of adversity now sells their snake oil for them’ – and he questions how Australians manage to conceive of ourselves as solicitous without ever really rolling up our sleeves: ‘is it that we see selflessness as a selfish thing? That the greatest danger in stopping to help is that someone might think you’re putting on airs?’ When Simpson promises to heal Laura – an abused woman who is also the sole ‘patient’ to appear in both the short story and novella – her brother reacts with understandable cynicism: ‘people are always saying that’. Tellingly, as Simpson’s powers begin to fade, it is Laura who comes to his aid with ‘mallee root water’ and a ‘grass basket’ of ‘broom ballart cherries, geebung drupes, quandong with sugarwood sap’ – the ministrations of a people who use stories and legends to edify their communities, not dupe them. If Macauley sometimes overplays his message regarding the discrepancy between our hovering myths and our real actions – a dream sequence involving Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country is particularly on the nose – his sharp voice is still like a sip of the Inland Sea in this Sky Newsaganda, post-evenhalf-truth era. Books like this may amount to no more than a thumbtack on our master’s chairs, but Simpson’s worthwhile return leaves the concerned reader fresh-eyed to the importance of actually living up to, rather than just blowharding about, core values like care and compassion, a fair go, freedom, honesty, trustworthiness, respect, and tolerance. They should teach this book at school. g

Alex Cothren is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Flinders University. FICTION

Taut and dark-edged Brenda Walker A LOVELY AND TERRIBLE THING

by Chris Womersley

Picador Australia $29.99 pb, 270 pp, 9781760554811

n Chris Womersley’s collection of short fiction, A Lovely and Terrible Thing, a man is caught in a fugue moment. Just after unexpectedly discharging a gun into the body of a stranger, he gazes at his reflection in a darkened window pane: ‘I saw someone outside looking in, before realising it was, in fact, my own reflection hovering like a small, sallow moon in the darkness.’ He stands for so many characters in this collection, visible beyond the boundaries of human habitation, forlorn, misinterpreted, and somehow failing, initially at least, to notice the mighty forces of chaos and destruction that lie before him. The mismatch between the shooting and the fey rumination is very funny, and black humour is another characteristic of the stories in A Lovely and Terrible Thing, where sensational events and wry, poised writing establish Womersley as an impressive writer of short fiction. His novels, City of Crows (2017), Cairo (2013), Bereft (2010), and The Low Road (2007), work with crime and the Gothic, with displacement in a geographical and psychic sense. The lives of the characters in A Lovely and Terrible Thing follow a relentless personal logic, one often 3 2 M AY 2 0 1 9

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surprising to the rational reader. This logic deposits them in fantastic, sombre, or sinister situations. Many of them are children, with parents who are completely alien: ‘[they] spoke often in their own unintelligible tongue’. Adults look the other way while children involve themselves in illicit and dangerous but oddly understandable enterprises. There is little to trust in the adult world – a grandfather simply disappears, lured away by invisible forces that a child’s father is powerless to resist. Adults are negligent or absent; some are actively homicidal and ruthless. Children, who aren’t yet primed for a world that is so visibly unhappy or peculiar, are perfect subjects for a writer so effectively focused on dislocation. Womersley also writes of bereaved parents, or parents who cannot remedy the damage that their own children suffer. ‘How was a family supposed to be?’ asks one child character. ‘Were they all like ours, bound by such darkness?’ Families in these stories are horribly obscure, especially to the children who inhabit them. Some of the best stories are about Melbourne junkies, who circle one another in callous love affairs or quasifriendships, rife with exploitation and blunt self-assessment: ‘No one becomes a junkie by accident; it takes a certain amount of determination. Sadly, that determination was never quite enough to stop being a junkie, and for years I had been in over my head.’ This is a world of household squalor, empty swimming pools, and dead connections, where characters note, in passing, the decent actions they fail to undertake. While people are strangely dislocated in these stories, objects, too, are unmoored, drifting from their intended destinations. A scarf is taken on a journey to Sydney in an attempt to revive a comatose addict by reminding her of better times. The journey is abandoned and the scarf is tossed into the open grave of a stranger in another state – a literal rendition of the hopelessness of the original plan, and a foreshadowing of the death of the woman in Sydney. A stolen bracelet finds its way into a drained swimming pool as part of an unspoken pact between a schoolteacher clearing the way for a passionate en-

gagement with an underage boy whom she is grooming. He traps rats, but he’s happy to move to bigger prey. Capture and predation are starkly revealed in ‘The House of Special Purpose’. The apparently innocuous title refers to the house where the Romanovs were confined and executed. The narrator’s pregnant wife has been hospitalised; when he spends time with her Russian parents, he is brutally disabused of his belief in goodwill, connection, and the way a child might unite a family. This Little Father – the popular name of Nicholas II – is overthrown, before his child is born, in a conspiracy that may include his own wife. In the title story, a child is able to levitate. Given the familial and social structures that Womersley imagines, this drift into the upper atmosphere seems welcome, and far less dangerous, than remaining below. The situations the stories describe are often grim and fascinating, and the writing is terrific. A rat frets in a trap: ‘nose twitching, eyes darting from side to side. Its little pink fingers pluck at the floor of the box, like an old lady worrying at her knitting.’ The grandmotherly rat is right to be nervous. A poolside kiss is ‘like a delicious, sodden punch in the mouth’. A drunk at a highway motel is ‘giving off a swampy odour, like leaves in a drain’. These unexpected, apposite similes surface in stories with equally unexpected plotlines, and plot and simile turn, always, toward the sombre or alarming. There is a tribute to earlier noir writing: Womersley parodies Raymond Chandler in the junkie stories: ‘The kettle had recently boiled and steam was bleeding down the window pane. It was winter. It had been winter for years.’ But no Philip Marlowe appears with a view to solving a crime. The crimes described here are too pervasive for any detective – they are crimes of callousness and inaction. A Lovely and Terrible Thing is a collection of taut, dark-edged, and very successful stories. Chris Womersley’s novels have a well-deserved following, and this transition to short fiction will add to his readership and acclaim. g Brenda Walker is a Perth-based writer.

Lucid fury James Ley MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE

by Siri Hustvedt

Sceptre $32.99 pb, 318 pp, 9781473694422

iri Hustvedt’s latest novel, Memories of the Future, weaves together three distinct threads. The overarching narrative, set in the recent past, unfolds contemporaneously with the book’s composition. It consists of the reflections of a writer with the mysterious initials SH, who is in her early sixties and lives in Brooklyn. She spends her days tending to her elderly mother and marvelling at the clownish mendacity of the newly elected president. SH is prompted to reminisce about her younger self when she comes across an old journal of hers, written in the late 1970s when she had just arrived in New York from Minnesota, a naïve provincial filled with dreams of becoming a writer. Interleaved with the elder SH’s musings and the younger SH’s journal entries are extracts from the unfinished detective novel she was struggling to write. This three-tiered structure reflects the novel’s preoccupation with the perennial themes of time, memory, and imagination. Hustvedt is fascinated with the fluidity of those related concepts, the way they seem to blur into one another. Again and again in Memories of the Future, the elder SH remarks upon time’s destabilising and estranging effects, its ability to magnify certain remembered details and obscure others, its transfiguration of life into a kind of fiction. ‘I have always believed,’ she declares, ‘that memory and imagination are a single faculty.’ Memories of the Future is also a timely work. It is a novel that addresses contemporary gender politics, and which might be read as Hustvedt’s refracted contribution to the #MeToo movement. The young SH, a lanky blonde with striking Nordic features, tends to attract a certain amount of attention from members of the opposite sex. She allows herself

a few erotic adventures, but her negative experiences accumulate and eventually come to predominate. She is ogled, patronised, and abused by a complete stranger as she is walking down the street. The air of menace comes to a head about halfway through the novel when she narrowly avoids being raped at the conclusion of a date with an arrogant creep, who barges into her apartment and throws her against a bookshelf. These individual experiences are presented as elements of an encompassing social critique. Memories of the Future is a novel that describes a young woman’s political awakening, her dawning awareness of the underlying pattern. It is saturated with examples of entitled and reprehensible male behaviour, which it presents as evidence of a smothering patriarchal culture. The novel’s central intrigue concerns the young SH’s neighbour Lucy Brite (Hustvedt has a fondness for a kind of low-wattage Dickensianism when it comes to naming her characters). When SH hears Lucy through the thin walls of her apartment repeating the phrase ‘I’m sad’ and conducting disturbing conversations with herself in different voices, she starts to piece together the story of the unhappy past that has left Lucy estranged from her son, grieving for a daughter who died when she either fell or jumped or was pushed from a window, and filled with bitterness toward her abusive and controlling ex-husband, who liked to discipline his family by locking away their possessions. The latter detail prompts SH to ask one of the novel’s defining questions: why should he be the one with the key? For the young SH, this kind of patriarchal oppression comes to be associated with her desire to be admitted into the hallowed realms of art and intellect. Memories of the Future supplies an emblematic example of gendered cultural effacement via SH’s interest in Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a largely forgotten poet and avant-garde artist, who is more than likely to have been the real creator of Duchamp’s famous ‘Fountain’. The sense of exclusion also inspires the novel’s best set-piece: a boozy dinner party that culminates in a male philosophy professor delivering

a condescending lecture to the female guests about the problem of other minds. Riled by the professor’s overbearing behaviour towards his wife and his assumption of their ignorance, SH launches into a blistering rebuttal of his outdated Cartesian assumptions, working herself into a state of lucid fury that culminates in her quoting Wittgenstein in German and then passing out. Though it is a pointed work in this sense, Memories of the Future is a novel and not a tract. It is a writerly book in the best sense, not simply by virtue of its ritual acknowledgment of modernist masters (Baudelaire, Hamsun, Kafka) and its studiously layered narrative, but because of its essential element of formal self-awareness. Hustvedt repeatedly breaches the fourth wall, drawing attention to the acts of writing and reading, noting their separation in time and space, and their ability to collapse that distance. She sees meaning and understanding as complex issues that must take account of cultural authority, the wilfully distorting nature of our powers of recollection, and the logic of competing genres. In Memories of the Future, she plays different genres against one another to create a distinctive hybrid that manages to be many things at once: a philosophical meditation, a fictionalised memoir (a tautology according to Hustvedt, who quite rightly insists that all memoirs are untrustworthy), a nostalgic evocation of pre-gentrification New York, a repudiation of the mechanical logic of detective fiction, a declaration of artistic integrity, and a withering cultural critique. But perhaps its most charming feature is its element of homage to the Romantic idealism of Hustvedt’s ‘female Quixote’, the young SH, who at the end of the novel literally rises above it all. g

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

At the gorge

Twists and tropes in four new crime novels

Chris Flynn

he plethora of crime stories is such that, in order to succeed, they must either follow a welltrodden narrative path and do so extremely well, or run with a high concept and hope for the best. Having the word ‘girl’ in the title doesn’t hurt. Readers are familiar with genre tropes, to the point of being high-functioning literary detectives, ready to sniff out lapses in logic and to scream at the page (or at a screen) when a plot goes haywire. Treat aficionados of crime fiction with contempt, and you’re dead in the water. Building a novel around a single concept is risky and difficult to pull off. In choosing this route, Northern Irish débutant James Delargy quickly writes himself into a corner in 55 (Simon & Schuster, $29.99 pb, 426 pp, 9781471184635). The idea must have seemed genius at the time. A battered man called Gabriel wanders into a police station in the remote Pilbara town of Wilbrook. Appearing terrified, he claims to have just escaped from the clutches of an outback serial killer named Heath, who was about to make Gabriel victim number fifty-five. Shortly thereafter, another injured man is led into the station by a local who caught him trying to steal his car. His name is Heath, and he claims to have just escaped from a serial killer called Gabriel, who – well, you get the idea. Very clever, except that the narrative has nowhere to go from there. The first two hundred pages has Police Sergeant Chandler Jenkins musing over which man is telling the truth while unwisely sharing information about his family with the suspects. Will his general ineptitude and that old missing-persons case presented in italicised flashbacks return to haunt him? Only readers of every crime novel ever written will know. Otherwise, professional officers of the law behave irrationally in order to manu3 4 M AY 2 0 1 9

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facture drama and thus propel a pedestrian plot, proving that not all ideas should be stretched out over four hundred pages. 55 has sold in nineteen countries and optioned for film, so look out for it on the seventh level of Netflix Hell.

iver of Salt (Fremantle Press, $29.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781925591569) is musician Dave Warner’s fourth crime novel, and the first not to feature duo Snowy Lane and Daniel Clement. It is set mostly in 1962. Warner launches into what feels like the start of a new series, cleverly combining the surf culture of northern New South Wales, organised crime in Philadelphia, and the dawn of skiffle music. Protagonist Blake Saunders is a young, handsome, disarming American expat who has opened a popular bar in the surf town of Coral Shoals. He delivers grog to eighteenth birthday parties in the hills, plays guitar in a band, and hits the waves when he needs to clear his mind. He does this often, for Blake is a former hitman on the run from the Mob, with two pistols and a raft of bad memories. No one in town knows about his past, although ambitious local lawman Sergeant Nalder has an inkling that Saunders is more dangerous than he lets on. The two form an uneasy alliance when a local prostitute is found murdered in a seedy motel. The man arrested for the crime is a spoken-word artist who performs at the American’s bar. Surmising that most poets struggle to get dressed in the morning, let alone muster the energy to slice someone into pieces, Saunders sets out to prove his friend’s innocence and to uncover the real killer. Warner creates a convincing milieu of surf dropouts and early 1960s Australiana, where coastal towns ripe for development and exploitation fall under the beady eye of underworld figures and entrepreneurs prepared to

take whatever steps are necessary to forge reputations and generate income. The irony is not lost on Saunders as he proves himself a capable detective, leading Nalder and the reader on a merry dance as he exhausts every possible avenue and suspect. This is Australian crime writing at its apex – a seemingly simple case that becomes ever more convoluted as the narrative progresses, widening to encompass protection rackets, early pornographic films, racism, and country-club politics. That it takes place against the backdrop of a burgeoning 1960s counterculture is refreshing as a sea breeze. Let’s hope River of Salt signals the beginning of a new Warner series.

ormer Labor Party Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner is also creating an interesting crime series, albeit one that mostly eschews the presence of law and order. In Comeback (Scribe, $29.99 pb, 240 pp, 9781925713909), the sequel to Comfort Zone (2016), Tanner tackles the Australian property development gorgon, confronting issues of corruption in the Melbourne construction industry, gentrification, and homelessness. Comeback heralds the return of unlikely protagonist Jack van Duyn (pronounced like ‘spoon’, as the character states repeatedly). Most crime novels feature some form of detective, either professional or amateur, but van Duyn breaks the mould. He is a fifty-something taxi driver in poor health, living in Brunswick squalor. His diet is awful, ants have overrun his kitchen, his sister hates him, his only friend is the ageing hippy downstairs who listens to The Alan Parsons Project, and bad luck follows him around like a mangy dog. He’s not even that sharp: when he witnesses an accident on the building site next door, it takes him forever and a day to work out that he’s caught in the firing line between unscrupulous developers, union heavies, and the local tenant’s association. Van Duyn is a charming oaf who stumbles from one tricky situation to another, one step behind until he takes the time to do a little digging on his detractors. Refreshingly, the cabby researches on his smartphone, a narrative

device that is conspicuously absent from too much modern literature. He also trawls microfiche at the State Library and rifles through a cabinet of foolscap folders, thus striking a nice balance of classic and contemporary tropes. Tanner has given us that rarest of protagonists – one who has a job. Van Duyn’s amateur sleuthing is repeatedly interrupted by the fact he has to work long hours driving a cab. His housing situation is perilous. A simple parking fine is enough to ruin him financially. And yet he tries to help others, particularly an old colleague who is sleeping rough and a woman afflicted by chronic fatigue syndrome. Their woes are generally caused by business-led, innercity gentrification. Tanner’s nuanced exploration of this housing crisis is a welcome narrative, lending hard-edged, working-class realism to a genre that sometimes forgets to include relatable people.

ase in point: Anna Romer’s fourth novel, Under the Midnight Sky (Simon & Schuster, $29.99 pb, 408 pp, 9781925184457). To be fair, Romer’s latest cannot be strictly classified as ‘crime’. It is more a blend of romance and mystery, with a few child murders thrown in for good measure. As protagonist Abby Bardot says early on when assigned to interview true-crime author Tom Gabriel: ‘His novels were mega-sellers across the globe, and most had been made into films or miniseries, but I’d always avoided them. Crime wasn’t my cup of tea; too much death and violence, too much darkness. Give me light and fluffy any day.’ Self-deprecating humour, or self-loathing? It is certainly a strange passage to include, but Romer’s entire venture starts out wobbly and continues in an all-toofamiliar vein. Protagonist returning from the big city to her sleepy hometown? Check. Haunted by a cold case that she was obliquely involved in years ago? Check. Everyone thinks she’s crazy except the handsome outsider who just moved to the area? Checkmate. ‘He was fleshy rather than a muscle-man, but there was definition there too in the ripple of his arms, and under the soft gingery fuzz of his chest hair.’ Clearly this is aimed at a specific market, and will likely sell gangbusters, but, as with Delargy’s 55, one has to wonder how far the patience of readers can be stretched with commercial ‘fantasy’ crime stories. There is a fine line between entertaining fans and insulting them with the repetitive churn of the template novel. Under the Midnight Sky holds zero surprises for anyone versed in the genre and commits several cardinal sins, most notably frontloading the narrative by information dumping. Bardot’s brother, Duncan, pops up for no reason other than to establish a troubled backstory via the sort of casual conversation about their parents no siblings on Earth ever have. ‘You still blame her, don’t you? For what happened to you at the gorge?’ g Chris Flynn is the author of two novels, A Tiger in Eden (2012) and The Glass Kingdom (2014). FICTION

Traces Alice Nelson ROOM FOR A STRANGER

by Melanie Cheng

Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 288 pp, 9781925773545

hat does it mean to live in a place but never to fully belong to it? How does our capacity for intimacy alter when we are in exile? How do we forge an identity among haphazard collisions of cultures and histories? These are the questions that Melanie Cheng has limned with potent and eloquent effect in her acclaimed short story collection Australia Day (2017), which won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2016 as well as the Prize for Fiction in 2018. The stories in Australia Day chart the baffling cultural and psychic dislocations of a diverse ensemble of characters: people out of place and searching for connection. There is damage and disaffection in these stories, but also unexpected consolations and new configurations of identity. The accretion of experiences in Australia Day gives the collection a powerful cumulative intelligence; read together the stories present a richly tessellated pattern of alienation and connection, of containment and release. Room for a Stranger explores similar terrain. A young Chinese man is forced to participate in an unusual homeshare program that places students in the homes of the elderly in exchange for companionship and household help. 3 6 M AY 2 0 1 9

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Andy Chan has moved to Melbourne from Hong Kong to study biomedicine; the failure of his family’s cleaning business necessitates his move to the spare bedroom of Meg Hughes’s suburban home. ‘Andy would save money on rent and Meg would sleep more soundly,’ Cheng tells us. ‘It was a win-win situation.’ Andy and Meg are both lonely and adrift, both trapped in restrictive identities and subject to prejudice and exclusion of different kinds. Each has a fragile sense of self and an innate timidity. As the weeks pass, they form a tentative friendship as their disparate lives brush up against each other in their shared domestic space. Cheng’s style is clear and competent, her sentences elegant and evocative, but ultimately the story that she unfurls is less satisfying than the crystalline contained narratives of her short fiction. In the wider field that the novel allows her, she seems less sure of how to manage her preoccupations, and the taut characterisations that served her so well in her short stories are not as effective here. The narrative is engaging and the engine of the plot drives the reader forward, but there is a sense that the complex joy of the novel, what D.H. Lawrence called ‘the one bright book of life’, is somehow missing. One of the novel’s difficulties is related to the rendering of Andy. He is at the story’s heart and yet we never gain any clear sense of who he is, of what drives or enlivens him. His fears and desires are never fully articulated. Race is only one element in Andy’s sense of himself as a person apart. Disconnected from his family and ambivalent about his studies, he slides into a distressing malaise. In Australia, he is presumably an attenuated version of his former self, but the glimpses of his life in Hong Kong are so minimal that we don’t absorb any illuminating sense of context. It may be that this is intentional; that Cheng is attempting to render the quiescence and passivity of a psyche doubly damaged by familial trauma and exile. But the characterisation of Andy drives him away from the reader. He is sketched almost entirely with a sense of pathos rather than with the tenderness and humour of which Cheng is so

capable, and his character feels at times frustratingly thin, disfigured as it is by a disconcerting kind of vacancy. ‘You should know I’m not normal,’ Andy says casually to a friend halfway through the novel. For a moment, the story hovers on the precipice of revelation, but then retreats. Elsewhere, Andy wishes that ‘someone would smother the endless chatter of his brain with a big black sheet’. These are tantalising glimpses, but Andy’s state of mind and the suppressed sense of damage that lingers around him needs to be dramatised, not merely stated. The character of Meg is far more successfully crafted. Cheng has spoken eloquently in interviews about the ignominies of ageing and her desire to create an expanded empathetic imagination with which to view the plight of the elderly, and she has certainly proven herself admirably adept at rendering older characters. In an earlier novella titled Muse (2016), she delivers the character of Evan; a complex fictional creation who is painfully alive to his own shortcomings and shamed by his failures and transgressions. The ghost of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’ hovers behind the pages of Muse, and there is a sense of a fully occupied personhood, one that she also successfully summons in her characterisation of Meg, a gentle introvert who was ‘born shy’ and struggles throughout her life to form meaningful bonds. Billed as a novel about unlikely connections and improbable friendships, Room for a Stanger seems more deeply preoccupied with disconnection, with the infinite ways that people of all ages and races fail to understand or respond to each other. At one stage in the novel, Meg wonders whether Andy will leave any trace of himself behind when he moves out; ‘Or would his presence be as ghostly as a breeze wafting through the dusty hallway?’ It’s a sentiment that seems to apply to Room for a Stranger as well, which is haunted by the ghost of the absorbing and affecting novel it could have been. g Alice Nelson’s novel The Children’s House was published by Penguin Random House in 2018.

On Oxytocin Keyvan Allahyari INTO THE FIRE

by Sonia Orchard

Affirm Press $29.99 pb, 288 pp, 9781925712827

he American writer bell hooks had characterised the 1990s as a period of ‘collusion’ between well-educated white women and the capitalist patriarchy (Where We Stand: Class matters, 2000). The new workplace gave these women greater economic power but curbed their agency in altering the structures of the ruling system. All the while, division of labour at home remained more or less unchanged, with women as the primary contributors. This made them feel, hooks recalls, ‘betrayed both by the conventional sexism … and by the feminism, which insisted work was liberating’ without addressing the dearth of job opportunities for women of less privileged classes. Sonia Orchard’s second novel, Into the Fire, catapults the reader into a world rife with this ideological conflict. The novel begins with the thirty-something Lara arriving at a house in southern Victoria that was burnt down a year ago in a fire that ended her best friend’s life. The sight brings back memories of when everything started. The year is 1990. Two decades have elapsed since Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch; Cultural Studies is booming; the gentrification of Fitzroy is in full swing. Suburban domesticity is a thing of the past, at least as far as Women Studies’ majors Lara and her best friend, Alice, are concerned. The vote, the pill, and no-fault divorce are faits accomplis. Now, possibilities radiate a vague, exhilarating sense of reality. Lara and Alice bond in the reassurance that they are ‘the women who would have it all’, if they want. Most of all, it is the coming-together in the promise of being ‘different’ – from their mothers’ lives – that cements their sisterhood. The narrative roams precipitously into the life of the ominous sounding Crow, the enfant terrible of Melbourne

University, a rising rockstar, who quickly strikes up a romance with Alice. The trio gets into a string of pardonable (even entertaining) indiscretions in and out of nocturnal music gigs. In this, the novel joins a growing coterie of Melbournica – Monkey Grip (1977), The Slap (2008), Amnesia (2014), and Black Rock White City (2015), among others – stories with a manifest affection for inner-city Melbourne and its volatile underbelly. There is a menacing side to all this. Alice is afflicted with something of a Sylvia Plath syndrome. Brilliant but overshadowed, exhausted by Crow’s macho glamour, she experiences something similar to a psychotic episode. Her mental health deteriorates upon moving to the Otways where the young couple settles in anticipation of parenthood. This also plants a seed of division between the friends. For Lara, motherhood at this stage of their lives is a betrayal of the convictions that glued them together. Alice is equally adamant: ‘I once asked Alice what she was going to do with herself down here now, expecting to hear of ambitious work, study or activist plans, but she just shot me a stunned glance and said “Mother”.’ Lara’s misgivings are not entirely unfounded. Crow’s exuberance about the birth of their child soon turns into frustration as his once promising career suffers from family responsibilities and distance from Melbourne. He proves an unreliable father and, increasingly, a controlling, beer-bingeing husband. Lara travels around the world for five years. She seems driven by the shadow of a lingering sense of confinement – perhaps instilled by her father – that keeps permeating outwards, restlessly and vigorously. At some point, she toys with becoming an escort in California. After all, it would look good on her ‘resume of being an interesting, provocative, progressive woman’. The tricky thing is treading the fine line between resistance to, and complicity with, an economy that relegates women to ‘caring’ roles. On her arrival back in Melbourne, Lara finds herself in an ‘enviable’ relationship with an old admirer of hers – Christian, an academic in environmental studies – and a well-

paid job at a documentary production company. Michael, the boss, is decidedly inappropriate, but Lara resolves that her time as an ideologue is over; she now asserts herself by ‘getting amongst the men and getting things done’. Despite Lara’s clear interest in questions of classism and sexism, what she – and to a degree the novel – misses is the relationship between adopting social equality as the new object of struggle and rendering the feminist ethos of liberation dispensable. Into the Fire has traces of a novel of ideas, but it stops short of wholeheartedly appraising the sense of entitlement and complacency among private-school products. This can-do-it-all undertone leaves behind a libertarian aftertaste conceivably disagreeable to some readers. Things unravel when Christian starts dodging conversations about having babies. Apropos of Alice’s married life, she now has three children, finances are tight, and Crow is ever so erratic. But even a greater appreciation of maternal love cannot fully bridge the rift between the old friends. To what extent, then, is Lara’s guilt about the tragedy that ensues justified? On a level, the novel is a meditation on the existential limitations of progressive thought: why do we do what we do? Are we only drawn to the allure of being accepted into a ‘tribe’? Or, perhaps, there is nothing beyond chemistry, and we are all oxytocin addicts. Orchard is a superb storyteller. Her writing is intimate and animated, with a lullaby quality. Part homage to motherhood, part critique of third-wave feminism, Into the Fire is a powerful discernment of the complexity and fragility of human behaviour. g

Keyvan Allahyari has recently completed his PhD in the department of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. v FICTION

Lightness Naama Grey-Smith GRAVITY IS THE THING

by Jaclyn Moriarty

Pan Macmillan $32.99 pb, 472 pp, 9781760559502

he first thing one notices about Jaclyn Moriarty’s Gravity Is the Thing is its narrative voice: distinctive, almost stylised. Exclamation marks, emphasised words in italics, a staccato rhythm, and clever comments in parentheses add up to a writing style sometimes deemed quirky. This style is not restricted to the voice of the first-person narrator but rather is a lens through which the work and its characters are cast. It reflects, more broadly, the author’s playful approach to language (as seen, too, in her website and blogs). Moriarty is known for her witty, imaginative fiction for children and young adults, which has garnered such

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prizes as the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, the Queensland Literary Award, and the Aurealis Award. While Moriarty’s 2007 adult début, I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes, was titled and packaged to highlight its whimsy, the cover of her second adult novel, Gravity Is the Thing, suggests contemporary realist fiction with a contemplative tone. (Interestingly, the book’s North American publisher, HarperCollins, has opted for a quirky illustrated cover design reminiscent of Brooke Davis’s Lost and Found.) The book is aimed at the popular market and carries glowing endorsements from bestselling Irish author Marian Keyes, as well as another successful Moriarty – Jaclyn’s sister Liane. Marketing aside, the distinction between ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ also presents as a theme within the novel. Gravity is The Thing contends that lightness does not necessarily mean frivolousness or superficiality, and that too much seriousness – or gravity – is its own kind of burden; the narrator reflects: ‘Heaviness is only lightness in disguise, overdressed.’ Themes of loss, grief, hope, the search for happiness, and the selfhelp industry are explored through narrator Abigail Sorensen, the thirtyfive-year-old owner of the Happiness Café in Sydney’s Lower North Shore and single mother to four-year-old Oscar. Her life is shadowed by the absence of the men she has loved and lost, most notably her brother, Robert, who disappeared the night Abigail turned sixteen. That year she began to receive chapters from a self-help book called The Guidebook in the post. Twenty years on, she is now invited on an allexpenses-paid re-

treat to discover the truth behind The Guidebook. The events propel Abigail on an often comical search for meaning in the world of self-help, which she describes as: a vast and thriving industry. It spans books, movements, religions, communes, therapies, diet, psychics, philosophies, life-changing novels and exercise regimes. From the earliest civilisations, people have been trying to sort out how to live, the point of it all, the key to happiness, and how to interact in a way that makes everybody like us.

Abigail turns to books like The Celestine Prophecy and The Secret (‘I did not believe a word of that book, but I wanted to so badly that I played as if I did’), ancient philosophy (‘Socrates strikes me as insufferable’), and feng shui (‘It occurred to me that chi might share some characteristics with the universe: all-knowing, all-wise, all-magical, yet also a bit daft’). Moriarty pokes fun at the absurdity and contradiction of purported rules to life and juxtaposes them with the confusing realities of living. Her parenting experiences are especially well rendered: although Abigail constantly questions how to live, she is living just the same, contending with daily parenting dilemmas, picking up toys, and slicing up carrot sticks while she contemplates the complexities of happiness (‘You think you’ve got life figured out, you lean back on the couch – and then it hits. You don’t have superpowers. You haven’t even got basic grammar’). Ambivalence permeates Abigail’s narration. Even when she is emphatic, it is often unclear if her statements are meant earnestly, flippantly, self-accusingly, exasperatedly. This can frustrate the reader, who wonders: ‘What are you trying to say here?’ Abigail is aware of the ambiguity; indeed it is part of the point. Her sympathy for another character is insightfully expressed as ‘a profound yet paper-thin (mismatched adjectives, I realise, and yet ...) sadness’. But this inability to choose where to settle – profound or paper-thin? – at times fills the reader with a nihilistic sense that, to Abigail, everything mat-

ters and nothing matters. The novel is divided into seventeen parts, each subdivided into chapters. Moriarty manages the leaps in time seamlessly, and though the first half of this long book could be pacier, the plot remains engaging. Propelling the narrative forward are the question of Robert’s disappearance, the mystery of The Guidebook and Abigail’s fellow participants, as well as curiosity about the fate of Abigail’s romantic relationships. While the premise of The Guidebook fails to convince (a fifteen-year-old receives mailed advice from two adult strangers and replies with reflections on her sex life), as the novel progresses the story becomes increasingly absorbing, and by its conclusion the reader is invested. Moriarty shines in the novel’s excellent final third, where the writing becomes intuitive, fluid, resonant. Dream sequences and allegorical references to flight are incorporated into thoughtful chapters that vary in length and subject. When the groundwork is thus laid, even a four-word chapter becomes deeply moving. The story gives way to vulnerability and revelation in a satisfying, beautifully written ending. Despite some tonal inconsistency, this immensely readable novel will appeal to a broad readership for its humour, candour, and moments of heartfelt recognition. While readers allergic to exclamation marks are advised to stay away, in the right hands this book will become a treasured favourite. g

Naama Grey-Smith is an editor, publisher, and critic based in Fremantle.

DRIVING INTO THE SUN

THE SHINING WALL

Fremantle Press $29.99 pb, 312 pp, 9781925591996

Transit Lounge $29.99 pb, 298 pp, 9781925760187

by Marcella Polain

n Driving Into the Sun, Marcella Polain – winner of the Anne Elder Award, the Patricia Hackett Prize, and more – has done an excellent job of capturing the inner emotional landscape of a young girl growing up fatherless in Perth’s outer suburbia in the 1960s. She recreates an era of television westerns and Bakelite phones, a time when Perth residents had just learned to worry about unlocked doors and windows, and when you could buy a house and land for $14,000 – if you were a man. If you were a woman with $13,000, as the novel points out, you needed a man to stand guarantor for the rest. Young Orla Blest’s main concern is trying to persuade her parents to buy her a horse, until her father dies suddenly. Unable to believe him dead, she awaits his return. Still in primary school, she is given much of the responsibility for looking after her tomboyish pre-schooler sister, Deebee, when her mother has to go out to work full-time. Orla must also deal with the conventional childhood issues of school, Christmas, betrayal by a ‘best friend’, a mutual blackmail pact with her sister, the possibility of miracles, not stepping on cracks for fear of breaking her mother’s back, and the differences between boys and girls. While largely ignoring anything that happens further away than Perth, she is a consistently faithful reporter of the adult behaviour she sees, even when she doesn’t completely understand their fixation on finances, fidelity, and fashion, or their worries about a possible prowler, or a sibling rivalry honed over decades. Driving Into the Sun deserves to share shelf space with The MerryGo-Round in the Sea and The Shark Net for its evocative description of Australian childhood in a muchmythologised decade. Stephen Dedman v

by Melissa Ferguson

n Melissa Ferguson’s impressive sci-fi début, wealthy, tech-enhanced Homo sapiens cordon themselves off behind a shining wall. In the desert outside their City (‘City 1’), ‘Demi-Citizens’ live in slum conditions, riddled with disease, hunger, and mistrust. Among them is orphaned Alida, who hustles to support her sister, Graycie, by scavenging and occasionally being trafficked inside City 1’s wall, where she is prostituted by the dodgy Freel. The City is serviced by a population of cloned Neanderthals. Considered ‘lesser’, they work as nannies, factory workers, and security officers. Ferguson’s imagined territory is exuberantly populous and satisfyingly specific. The author has dealt carefully with her world’s scientific and ethical mechanics: the details are co-dependent and considered. But the real fizz, the compulsive energy of the novel, comes from how closely her new environment analogises the features of our age. Sex, surveillance, class, corporate control, propaganda, unionism, inequality, trafficking, surrogacy, hate speech, entitlement, wealth as a marker of worth – all are represented here. Wars are streamed on live-feed, mental illness can lead to the revocation of citizenship, mind implants teach, heal, and control. These issues are not given mere lip service; they are occupied by characters and situations. This lends oomph to a critique of late capitalism’s tyranny. Of Alida: ‘She’d worked her butt off to get ahead, but without privilege or clout it was worth shit-all.’ The novel is deftly narrated. There are bold and complementary plotlines and likeable, imperfect characters. The tone is cleverly light and riddled with slang, which sits well against the bleak setting. The recourse to Australian jargon echoes Mad Max: here too there is dusty, half-baked nonchalance among AI-enhanced vehicles, rampant biological meddling, and brave, self-possessed heroines. Ferguson’s work is entertaining and empathetic. It champions courage and care, even in the midst of inequality and a clearly stacked system. Jacinta Mulders FICTION

‘A revolutionary wife’

Colonial belle meets principled weathercock

Jim Davidson AN UNCONVENTIONAL WIFE: THE LIFE OF JULIA SORELL ARNOLD by Mary Hoban Scribe, $39.99 hb, 320 pp, 9781925713442

he name of Julia Sorell – the granddaughter of an early governor – never quite died in Tasmania. A faint memory survived of a high-spirited young woman who was the belle of Hobart, a woman who broke hearts and engagements, including one with the current governor’s son. (It was also rumoured – with political intent – that she seduced his father, Sir John Eardley-Wilmot.) An element of scandal arose all the more readily because her own mother had deserted her father for a military man, and had run off with him when he returned to his regiment in India. Indeed, Mrs Sorell had taken Julia and her younger siblings specially to Brussels, where she foisted them on their gubernatorial grandfather. Thrown on her own resources, the girl became self-reliant and extroverted, the life of every party – she knew how to work the room long before the concept existed. Julia returned to Tasmania, and there lived a charmed life, at the peak of colonial society, occupying her mother’s place in her father’s household. She had, as Hoban points out, all the independence and privileges of a married woman; at the same time, young and beautiful and of marriageable age, she also had the attention of every man who entered her circle. She was not disposed to marry, at least not hastily. But in 1850 that is exactly what she did. When Thomas Arnold (son of the famous headmaster of Rugby School) arrived in Van Diemen’s Land as superintendent of education, it was love at first sight – for both of them. Tom was Julia’s polar opposite: introspective, gentle, a scholar by temperament, and was said to have been the most handsome under4 0 M AY 2 0 1 9

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graduate in Oxford. They were engaged within a month, marrying soon after. It did not take long for the shine to wear off. Tom emerged as a man who could not manage his finances, always tended to take principles to the extreme (and change them), and complemented this by being extremely authoritarian in the home. Hoban is very good in showing what a prison that could be for a mid-Victorian woman. She had no property rights – and all financial decisions were the prerogative of the husband. Legally, a wife had no separate identity: marriage was, in effect, a trusting surrender. In this case, as in most, sexual passion soldered the couple together. Julia and Tom were to have eight children; another two were lost shortly before or after birth.

She knew how to work the room before the concept existed When Julia first met Tom, he had drifted out of Anglicanism to become an agnostic. But like a number of highly strung intellectuals of the day, he was enticed by Catholicism: he even wrote to his father’s old antagonist, Cardinal Newman, for guidance. Julia was aghast. Apart from financial risk at a time when religion was a prime social determinant, she had her own reasons for being antiCatholic. Brussels for her had meant dark convent corridors, sacred morbidities, and the sniggers of schoolgirls who saw her as an outsider. But Tom was adamant, and in a special ceremony he entered the Church. The fiery Julia followed him with a bucket of stones and smashed a church window.

It did not end there. Although the governor confirmed Arnold in his appointment (even increasing the salary), Tom insisted on advancing the Catholic cause, which led to his dismissal. It became plain that he would have to return to Britain, where Newman offered him employment in Dublin. Tom was insisting that Julia, as his wife, should also convert to Catholicism as a matter of course. This she fiercely resisted, spiriting her daughters away to their Protestant relatives. More than that she could not do: in law, the children were property of the father, and in the event of separating from him, she would lose them. Despite the velvet glove, Tom was an extremist by nature. It was almost as though he would follow a principle through to the point of exhaustion. Later, he would fall out with Newman when teaching under him at Birmingham and – since he had doubts about the drift to the doctrine of papal infallibility – would abandon Catholicism. Julia was overjoyed, and for a time things proceeded smoothly. They settled in Oxford; among their cultivated friends was Charles Dodgson (‘Lewis Carroll’), the author of Alice in Wonderland. Indeed the first performance of a dramatised version of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party took place in the extravagant house Tom built there. He had hopes – not unjustified – of being appointed to the chair of Anglo-Saxon. But at that very moment he decided to re-convert to Catholicism, and returned to Dublin to take up a post at the Catholic University. Broken-hearted, Julia chose to remain in Oxford to be closer to her children. As they were launched upon the world, she could increasingly resist her husband and – since Tom put

the choice in these words – become ‘a revolutionary wife’. Given Tom’s financial incompetence, and meanness, Julia took in genteel young ladies as boarders; the house was sold from under her. She succumbed to cancer – the seriousness of which Tom was slow to recognise. Although each had vainly tried to change the other, leading to an unusual story of distress, the physical passion they had shared led to a touching deathbed scene. Each forgave the other, Tom cherishing Julia’s memory. An Unconventional Wife is superbly written, and skilfully draws on a number of diverse sources, compensating for a lamented lack – an intimate diary kept by Julia herself. Mary Hoban has got to the kernel of this story, since she has correctly conceived it as an exercise in the recuperation of women’s history. The flamboyant Tasmanian beginnings and the rather amazing afterglow – the two things usually associated with Julia – are reduced to being the bookends of an essentially tragic tale. Nonetheless, the after-story is worth a pause. Julia turned out to engender a constellation of creativity among her children. Polly became the writer Mrs Humphry Ward, one of whose novels sold a million copies. Polly advocated women’s rights through education, rather than the vote, while the other daughter, Judy, was a suffragette. Judy would marry into the distinguished Huxley family, so that Julia would become the grandmother of both the novelist Aldous Huxley and the renowned biologist and first director-general of UNESCO, Julian (Sorell) Huxley. A granddaughter would marry the preeminent historian G.M. Trevelyan. Even so, it invites a thought or two about Tasmania, then at the ends of the earth. For it gave birth to a leading Victorian lady novelist, educated FieldMarshal Montgomery of Alamein, and projected the swashbuckling Errol Flynn. g Jim Davidson has always been drawn to Tasmania. His fantasy on the French colony of Tasmanie appeared in What If ? Australian history as it might have been (2006), edited by Stuart Macintyre and Sean Scalmer.

Under God Ian Tyrrell SECULARISTS, RELIGION AND GOVERNMENT IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

by Timothy Verhoeven

Palgrave Macmillan $139 hb, 295 pp, 9783030028770

n an address to the National Prayer Breakfast (8 February 2018), President Donald Trump called the United States a ‘nation of believers’. As evidence, he reminded his audience that the American currency includes the phrase ‘In God We Trust’ and that the Pledge of Allegiance is ‘under God’. Trump omitted that, in their present state, these godly references date only from the Cold War era of the 1950s. Secularists had in the nineteenth century repulsed several efforts to have mottos of this ilk permanently imposed upon the nation or the constitution. Trump should – but will not – read Timothy Verhoeven, who addresses Church-State separation after the Revolutionary era, and who provides sober reflection on the complexities of the dividing line between politics and religion in American history. Readers will probably be unsurprised by the historical US penchant for embracing moral reforms of a quasireligious character, from alcohol and drug prohibition to anti-prostitution and antislavery activism to anti-abortion laws. Perhaps less obvious or understood for the foreign observer than the swirl of evangelical religious influence is the strict separation of church and state, a distinction which does not allow a wide latitude for state support of religious schools, as in contemporary Australia. Rarely has the history of American secularism received the attention it deserves, and Verhoeven’s book attempts to re-balance our knowledge. He argues that neither the advocates of Protestant religious influence nor the secularists attained cultural or political hegemony in the nineteenth-century United States, but he is especially concerned to contest the widespread intellectual preoccupa-

tion with the former impulse. American Sabbatarians had a strong sense of exceptionalism. Devotees saw the preservation of the work- and pleasure-free Sunday as the bedrock of the nation’s virtue and even a sign of its commitment to a Christian republic. But efforts to stop Sunday postage led to anti-Sabbatarian petitions of sizeable proportions in the 1820s and 1830s. The campaigns to defeat Sabbatarians intent on maintaining a Protestant religious orthodoxy were successful. Not until 1912 were the post offices completely

Rarely has American secularism received the attention it deserves closed on a Sunday, and then it was done to improve labour conditions, not spiritual relations. The earlier pressures for closure came in large part from religious sources, but anti-Sabbatarian opposition came partly from religious sources too, particularly Universalists and Baptists hostile to the old established churches such as Congregationalists and Presbyterians, who had only lost their special legal status in the individual states. Other objectors also claimed support for piety and free access to religion, but not the oppression they viewed as emanating from church taxes and legal privileges for particular Protestant denominations. Their arguments relied on the freedom of religion under the First Amendment to the US Constitution, and fear of a possible clerical conspiracy to unite church and state. Early-nineteenth-century antiSabbatarians had powerful supporters in the Democratic Party of President BIOGRAPHY

Andrew Jackson (1829–37). They won. Verhoeven goes on to show the repeated tussles over the proper place of the Almighty in the American firmament, especially the important but failed post-Civil War attempts of certain Protestant churches to have God formally recognised in the constitution. Verhoeven ends with a discussion of the inconclusive contest between opponents and supporters of Sunday opening at the Chicago’s World’s Fair in 1893. Along the way we learn about attempted religious taxes, moral reform, and the vexed question of the Bible’s place in public schools, among many interesting matters. Verhoeven does not assume the secularists were necessarily ‘progressive’ in our contemporary terms. After all, racist and pro-slavery southerners campaigned vociferously against ‘political preaching’ in the 1850s, by which they meant anti-slavery advocates among Christian ministers. It was Bible-inspired reverends and their acolytes in the North who constituted the ‘left’ in that struggle, a point that explains why the largely Progressive-oriented historians of the twentieth century concentrated on them in historiography, not the secularists. As this point suggests, questions can be raised over the meaning of these tussles and how much they reflected a strict church-state separation. Verhoeven recognises the point, but distinctions could be made with a different emphasis. On the issue of liquor laws, it is far from clear that church-state collusion or separation was the central issue, and throughout it is important to stress that most of those who pushed for moral reforms were not asking for a church-state link. By 1826, even Lyman Beecher, a leading intellectual progenitor of antebellum moral reform of the 1820s to 1840s and a former cheerleader for the established churches, specifically championed the separation of church and state as the bedrock of morality and American Exceptionalism; the aim of his followers was to Christianise the republic as a moral entity, not to convert it into a formally Christian nation-state. The post-Civil War Orthodox Calvinist attempts to create such a formal state, 4 2 M AY 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

with its Hegelian overtones of an organic and holistic nation, were unsuccessful, whereas the efforts to change the moral tenor of individuals collectively through laws controlling various ‘vices’ had considerably more purchase, partial success and potential alignment with secular objectives, such as an attentive, productive workforce and more harmonious and prosperous families.

Verhoeven’s energetically written book is a welcome addition and correction; it is particularly useful for illustrating the use of petitions, and for its close reading of those petitions to reconstruct the cultural mentalities of the time and fervent moral causes. g Ian Tyrrell is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of NSW.

On Diderot

An erudite biography of the great French polymath

Peter McPhee DIDEROT AND THE ART OF THINKING FREELY by Andrew S. Curran Other Press, $49.99 hb, 520 pp, 9781590516706

ndrew S. Curran recounts the only meeting between the two great philosophes Denis Diderot and Voltaire early in 1778 when Diderot, aged sixty-five, insulted Voltaire, then eighty-five, by averring that contemporary playwrights (including, by implication, the two of them) would not brush Shakespeare’s testicles if they walked between his legs. Two months later, Voltaire was dead; a few weeks later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau also died, aged sixty-six. Diderot – regarded by many as the greatest of the three – lived a little longer, until 1784. The last words his daughter Marie-Angélique heard him say were ‘the first step towards philosophy is incredulity’. Diderot was born in 1713 into a family of master cutlers in the fortified hilltop town of Langres, north of Dijon in eastern France. Originally destined for a clerical career, he dismayed his respectable parents by turning his back on the church and then, after studies in Paris, on religion altogether. He lived a life of prodigiously creative brilliance, captured here with verve and deep erudition by Curran. On producing his startlingly irreligious Letter on the Blind when he was

thirty-six years old in 1749, Diderot was imprisoned for atheism. On his release after one hundred days, he flung himself into producing, with Jean le Rond d’Alembert, the thirty-five volume Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, on its completion in 1772 regarded as the greatest intellectual achievement of the century. This compendium of secular knowledge, about everything from agriculture to zoology, was suffused with the scepticism of ‘reason’: ‘religion’ was grouped within the ‘Science of God’ on Diderot’s diagram of the tree of knowledge together with ‘superstition’ and ‘black magic’. The most radical article, by Diderot himself, was on ‘political authority’: ‘no man has received from nature the right to command other men … each individual of the same species has the right to enjoy [freedom] as soon as he is able to reason’. Despite that monumental task – for which Diderot himself produced seven thousand entries (almost one-tenth of the total) – contemporaries sometimes felt that Diderot’s brilliance had never quite been realised in print. It was only later that they understood why. A threat to his future liberty, made

in a warning by the police after his ot’s intellect not only inspired novelists necticut and the author of two other imprisonment in 1749, forced him to such as Balzac and Zola, but also in- remarkable and prize-winning books, withhold his most radical treatises from fluenced Marx’s understanding of class. one on the mental constructs of physthe public. His greatest individual works Diderot was a frequent adulterer and ical monstrosity in Diderot’s writings, only started to surface after his death, writer on sexuality, and Freud credited the other on ‘scientific’ constructions notably his novels The Nun, Jacques the him with the earliest understandings of of blackness and race at the time of the Enlightenment. This latest book is Fatalist, and above all Rameau’s equally fine, a wonderfully readable Nephew. In these he excoriated as well as expert introduction to religious intolerance, questioned Diderot’s life and work. custom and tradition as the basis At times it is rather breathof social order, and probed the lessly enthusiastic, assuring us subconscious and the meaning that Diderot ‘intentionally’ kept of love and sexual longing. his writings secret so he could The most controversial communicate with us rather than novel, which he was at pains his contemporaries. Perhaps his to hide, was Rameau’s Nephew. decision to keep his most radical Written in 1761, it first apwritings secret stemmed instead peared in German in a translafrom a judicious desire for selftion by Goethe in 1805, but the preservation from the police or his original French manuscript only wish to remain close to an autocrat turned up in a Paris bouquiniste like Catherine, with whom he on the Seine in 1890. This was stayed in St Petersburg in 1773–74, Diderot’s most cynical, mateto whom he acted as an art broker rialist analysis of morality and as well as an advisor on reform polivice, laced with vitriol aimed tics, and to whom he left his library at prominent contemporaries. and many unpublished works. One Coincidentally, by the time the need not accept Curran’s implicamanuscript was found, Diderot’s tion that he was somehow speakreputation had recovered from ing beyond the grave to liberals in the protracted rage of conserTrump’s America. It is difficult, vatives that he was a godless however, to disagree with the aupedlar of smut and radicalism Statue of Denis Diderot by Jean Gautherin. Bronze, 1886. thor that this extraordinary polywho had brought on the Revo145 Boulevard Saint-Germain, 6ème arrondissement of Paris math was ‘the most creative and lution of 1789. By its cente(photograph by Al Silonov, via Wikimedia Commons) noteworthy thinker of his era’ and a nary in 1889, he had been lionised by the secular Third Republic, childhood sexual desires. The Nun told ‘genius’: ‘his joyful and dogged quest for and huge statues of him had been a harrowing tale of the sexual and truth makes him the most compelling mental abuse a nun suffered when she eighteenth-century advocate of the art erected in his home town and Paris. He wrote at least one-fifth of the tried to leave her order. But he also left of thinking freely’. g most radical anti-slavery and anti- volumes of intimate and precious letters colonial treatise of the century, the Abbé to his greatest love, Louise-Henriette Raynal’s Philosophical and Political His- Volland (he called her ‘Sophie’ to retory of the Two Indies (three editions, fer to her wisdom). Over thirty years 1770–80). His Supplement to Bougain- (1755–84), he wrote her 553 letters, ville’s Voyage, the result of his fascination of which 179 survive. None of hers do. His intellectual range was breathwith the explorer’s stay in Tahiti in 1768, was similarly prescient on the impact of taking, coruscating the elaborate deceits colonialism and sexual predation. But of autocracy and ‘superstition’ (his word Diderot also left a mass of other ma- for religious belief ) but also warning, afterial ranging from revolutionary art ter 1776, of the dangers in the new and criticism to a reformist political treatise republican United States of America of for his generous patron Catherine the ‘the affluence of gold that brings with it Great, which she shunned. His creative the corruption of morals and the scorn Peter McPhee has published widely energy was astonishing. Not until 1948 of laws’. He warned of the dangers of on the history of modern France, most recently Robespierre: A revolutionary life was the final vast cache of his writings autocracy in large nations. Andrew S. Curran is a professor of (2012) and Liberty or Death: the French located in a château in Normandy. The brilliance and breadth of Dider- history at Wesleyan University in Con- Revolution (2016). BIOGRAPHY

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Peppiatt’s Paris Gemma Betros THE EXISTENTIAL ENGLISHMAN: PARIS AMONG THE ARTISTS

by Michael Peppiatt

Bloomsbury $47.99 hb, 361 pp, 9781408891711

wanted to like this memoir very much, not least because the inside of the book jacket promises, with some originality, a ‘not-uncritical love letter to Paris’. People (myself included) have a tendency to wax rhapsodic about France’s capital, but anyone who has ever lived there for any length of time knows just how dispiriting the reality of daily life can be. British writer and art critic Michael Peppiatt’s tales of neighbourhood stabbings, communal toilets, and the woman at the local boulangerie who always responds to his orders with a ‘Comment?’ or, more rudely, ‘Quoi?’ – just to remind him of his lowly status as a foreigner – are all too familiar. But Paris and its contradictions, we learn, are only partly responsible for this Englishman’s anguish over his identity. Encouraged by a Francophile father – who sees in their surname a diminutive of ‘Pépin’ and a link to Carolingian royalty – Peppiatt takes a job in Paris as an arts editor after his graduation. The Existential Englishman is the story of his life there between 1966 and 1994, told in the present tense and structured around the various apartments he inhabits. We follow his path across the city, from a Spartan room in the 14ème arrondissement’s Alésia to a series of flats in the then-unfashionable Marais where, among the narrow streets and derelict hôtels particuliers, he finds his spiritual home. Not for Peppiatt the cultural beacon of the Left Bank, but rather these ‘high and mighty houses’ abandoned with the French Revolution, which, despite having been ‘subject to every known depredation’ and ‘chopped into sordid little dwellings’, he finds ‘infinitely more poignant, more fully historical and more human than ever’. An interest-free loan from employer Le Monde permits him to buy his own

small piece of the Marais, which he sets about furnishing with carefully chosen antiques and the work of artist friends. Already a close friend of painter Francis Bacon – the subject of several of the author’s previous books – Peppiatt’s work in Paris brings him into contact with artists from all over the world. He accompanies them to buy pastels, witnesses their feuds, and joins them in bar-hopping, yet seems to remain at the periphery of the art world, noting ‘this is probably the role I fulfil best: getting into secret spaces and unusual situations, without any real credentials or involvement, just being there, observing, noting things down’. This changes only partially when he takes over the magazine Art International, an all-consuming and ultimately unsuccessful endeavour. Consequently, this is less a memoir about art than a memoir about the various existential crises Peppiatt experiences throughout his Parisian decades. The worst, triggered in true 1960s style by a particularly potent joint, plays havoc with his sanity. Others occur around work, love affairs, even food, where the contrast between his meals in local neighbourhood cafes and Bacon-funded extravaganzas at the Tour d’Argent and Ritz seem to have caused him some unease. He struggles most of all with writing. In each of his Parisian abodes, Peppiatt finds himself ready, with nails clipped, beard trimmed, and typewriter cleaned, to produce a great literary work. It never eventuates. He is, he later realises, a victim of perfectionism, both in language – ‘I wanted to be seen as incapable of a graceless line’ (a concern evident in the book’s more overwritten passages) – and in choosing a subject. Writing about Bacon eventually leads him to conclude that his real interest lies in fact rather than fiction. Like any good raconteur, Peppiatt has an arsenal of interesting facts, stories, and anecdotes ready for replay. He remembers the construction of the Centre Pompidou and the opening of the Musée d’Orsay, knows the buildings of the Marais inside out, and shares his enthusiasm for the game of jeu de paume (real tennis). Like any good raconteur, he is also perhaps slightly too fond of the sound of his own voice: we hear,

for example, about every famous person he has ever dined with (Catherine Deneuve), eavesdropped upon (a surprisingly tedious Marlene Dietrich), or almost but did not quite meet (Alberto Giacometti). Sharper editing could have made for a more enjoyable read. Yet this is in itself constrained by the way Peppiatt writes about women. The preface begins with him admiring ‘some raven-haired beauty’ in the library, and later ‘a room full of exquisite adolescent ballerinas’. Chapter by chapter, it gets worse. For Peppiatt, women are ‘passing opportunities’, recalled as ‘fireside skirmishes’ or by the nicknames he bestows upon them. He may lament his ‘brute sexual drive’, but he offers little soul-searching over his incessant cheating, only disdain for those women who dare to be angry at his mistreatment of them. Several passages, wallowing in egregious detail, would make the book a shortlist certainty for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award were it not restricted to fiction. Add in some cringeworthy comments on homosexuality, and one wonders what the author’s editor at Bloomsbury was thinking. As it is, Peppiatt’s recorded escapades and the attitudes that enabled them stand as an unfortunate monument to mindsets past. His book will no doubt provide much material for historians of the future but probably not always in the ways intended. Peppiatt ends the memoir in 2014 when, after a spell in London, he and his wife (yes, he finally marries) decide to return to Paris. There he finds that the city has suffered its own existential crisis: ‘how brutally downgraded, how lacking in identity and purpose this Paris appears compared with the Paris I encountered half a century ago’. He wonders if the ‘show of innate superiority’ before which he used to cower was ‘an instinctive cover-up for the void that was to come’, seeing a city that, even then, was living off its former glory. Things were ever, it seems for some, better in the past. g Gemma Betros is Lecturer in European History at The Australian National University. MEMOIR

‘Fair, with flashes of brilliance’ A nuanced collection from Mike Brearley

Gideon Haigh ON CRICKET by Mike Brearley

Constable, $49.95 hb, 418 pp, 9781472129475

he first words I ever read by Mike Brearley were in my first Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, the 1976 edition: they were a tribute to his long-time teammate at Middlesex, wicketkeeper John Murray. The tone was warm, generous, and largely conventional, with a single shaft of cool intelligence that stayed with me. Murray once confided in Brearley that his seemingly effortless style did not always come naturally; sometimes he had to force himself into the requisite shapes and attitudes. ‘I do not mean that he went through the motions,’ Brearley hastened to observe. ‘There is a respectable, anti-Stanislavski theory of acting which says that the actor should let feeling follow bodily movement and gesture, rather than the other way round.’ Wisden was a staid read in those days, and ten-year-old me rejoiced in an observation so unusual, so oblique. I did not know who Brearley was; he had not at that point even played for England, let alone become one of its most revered captains. I was certainly unaware he’d read classics and moral sciences at Cambridge. But it is interesting that I should have first noted his remarks of cricket as performance, as personal expression, and as aesthetic experience, because these have remained preoccupations of his journalism, some of which is collected in Brearley on Cricket. Brearley is the author of three of the great contemporaneous accounts of Test series: The Return of the Ashes (1978), The Ashes Retained (1979), and Phoenix from the Ashes (1982). Since then, while holding down a day job as a psychoanalyst, he has continued to write cricket columns and essays, mainly for English Sunday newspapers, in addition to two further books: The Art of 4 6 M AY 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Captaincy (1985), a celebrated thesis, and On Form (2017), a meditation on the theme. To my taste, the last was at best a qualified success, too full of inchoate thoughts, too prone to thisis-true-except-obviously-for-all-thetimes-it-isn’t dodgings about. Brearley

but rather precarious now.’ Looking, ever looking: it’s like Brearley is always going back to check his thinking and his feeling. His view on the spirit of cricket, for example, is of a piece, typically nuanced: ‘There is a risk of its being used to justify Establishment views, or one’s own views, wherever one is, when what is being advocated, often passionately, is the outcome of merely local conditioning. But it is not inevitable that it will be used in such a way.’ Nor is Brearley afraid to put himself to the test. In discussing last year’s ball-tampering fiasco in Cape Town, he harks back to a similar controversy during his own career in India in 1976–77, when the England team, of which he was vice-captain, was accused of applying Vaseline to the cricket ball from gauze bandages that bowlers were using to keep perspiration from their eyes. Were they? he wonders: I have never known the answer to this question. Was I, am I, naïve? I was not involved in the discussions. But nor did I enquire too closely. Did I refrain from enquiry in case the truth might have been unpalatable? I am inclined to think the action was innocent; but certainly I should have made it my business to know …

The Nawab of Pataudi (Photograph by Dennis Oulds, Central Press/ Getty Images from the book under review)

on Cricket has a different unevenness, characteristic of collections. But when it is good it is outstanding, and worth lulls into the everyday. In the first chapter, a memoir of his boyhood, he offers two thoroughly Brearley-esque sentences. Of his legspin-bowling father, he writes: ‘He had a high action, perhaps too high for a real leg-spinner.’ First the precision of the observation, then the hindsight analysis. Then: ‘He had a motorbike and sidecar, which seemed glamorous to me then,

Married to an Indian, Brearley writes well on the country and its cricket. Of that warmly remembered Indian team of the 1970s, with its four virtuoso spinners – Bedi, Chandrasekhar, Venkataraghavan, and Prasanna – he writes: ‘Especially on Indian pitches, this quartet was a formidable combination, and offered the captain something for every challenge. They were all, however, indifferent batsmen, so India often had a long tail. This was a feature of the old school of Indian cricket – with its reliance on sheer skill and subtly, and something of a scorn for utilitarian things like squeezing extra runs from the tail, or saving a few runs by athleticism in the field.’ The funniest piece in the book is dedicated to the Nawab of Pataudi Jr, the blue-blooded Indian captain with the look of a Fellini film star, who, when he took his only Test wicket, was grant-

ed the decision by an awestruck umpire: ‘That’s out, your highness.’ Brearley relates that Ian Chappell once tackled Pataudi about what he did with himself between cricket engagements, and grew frustrated when the Indian was so noncommittal. ‘Ian,’ Pataudi said at last, ‘I’m a bloody prince.’ When he was the age I was when I first read him, Brearley received a report from his art teacher: ‘Fair, with flashes of brilliance.’ It pleased him – reports otherwise could be so mundane. His writing is better than that, but it is certainly true that his thoughts condense with a pleasing crack, straight from the middle of the bat: Tom Cartwright had integrity ‘like Caleb Garth’; Ian Botham ‘lacked prudence, meanness, calculation’; John Arlott ‘knew cricket more in the way of a lover than of a critic’; for Ian Chappell ‘squeezing out runs is a matter of almost moral significance, not to mention pragmatism’. Brearley is adept at conveying physical presence. Dennis Lillee, he perceives, is ‘so well proportioned that you didn’t realise until you came close that he was six feet tall’. There is a vivid vignette of Viv Richards in the commentary box, still magnetic even in repose: ‘He smiles, tells me how pleased he is to see me again, wishes me well. He has to do some work. He leaves the box. The box is the poorer for it.’ The same will be true when Mike Brearley clocks off from cricket grounds for the last time. g

Gideon Haigh has been a journalist for thirty-five years, and now works mainly for The Australian and The Times.

Erewhon David Neil THE BIRTH OF ETHICS: RECONSTRUCTING THE ROLE AND NATURE OF MORALITY

by Philip Pettit, edited by Kinch Hoekstra with Michael Tomasello Oxford University Press $53.95 hb, 393 pp, 9780190904913

he Birth of Ethics is a remarkably ambitious and innovative work by one of Australia’s most eminent philosophers. It is the full-length statement of an argument originally set out in Philip Pettit’s 2015 Berkeley Tanner Lectures on Human Values. The aim of the book is to ‘offer an account of ethics … that makes sense of how we come to be an ethical species’. The extraordinary intellectual creativity of this book has to be understood in the context of the historical currents it opposes and the way it attempts to shift the ground of the debate. Pettit’s heterodoxy consists in his being both a moral realist and a metaphysical naturalist. Moral realism is the view that at least some moral claims are true, in the same sense that descriptive claims about the world can be true. Naturalism in philosophy is an ontological commitment that the materials from which theories are constructed should consist only of entities, phenomena, and causal relationships that are recognised in the natural sciences. With few exceptions, moral philosophy since the early twentieth century has tended to see naturalism as incompatible with a full-blooded moral realism. The heart of the problem is that true moral claims are ordinarily conceived as bearing universal authority. The claim, for example, that killing an innocent person is wrong expresses a reason for not killing that ought to be compelling for any person, regardless of who or when or where she is or whatever individual desires she may happen to have. A number of influential theories have held that a properly scientific view of the world leaves no room for the mysterious authority of the moral. Historically, the sovereignty of moral

obligation over other kinds of reasons has typically been anchored in something radically outside our empirical experience of the world – the will of God, Platonic Forms, Kant’s noumenon. Naturalism prohibits any recourse to the unknowable and, for the most part, naturalists have concluded that universal moral truths cannot be constructed from purely terrestrial materials. Naturalist moral philosophy has espoused views ranging from wholesale moral scepticism to various strategies for reinterpreting ordinary moral language so as to drain it of its apparent metaphysical pretensions. For example, claims that some action is right or obligatory or unconscionable are recast, not as assertions of fact, but as semantically disguised expressions of subjective emotional responses. The strategic gambit of The Birth of Ethics is to break with the traditional philosophical method of conceptual analysis and to approach the explanation of morality as a task of speculative reconstruction. The standard analytical approach takes hold of a moral concept and dismantles it, inevitably discovering, among the disassembled parts, some metaphysical contraband. Pettit’s reconstructive method, by contrast, is essentially an exercise in storytelling, which he calls ‘counterfactual genealogy’. We are offered a kind of ‘just-so’ story; that shows how moral concepts, practices and, ultimately, a moral reality could have emerged from the primitive communicative practices of a pre-moral society. An example of this kind of counterfactual genealogy is the familiar story about the emergence of money in barter societies. To overcome the impracticalities and inefficiencies of barter, one commodity (precious metal) becomes a universal measure of exchange value, and so becomes a means of storing fungible abstract value, and thus money is born. In fact there probably were no barter societies of the form imagined in economic textbooks, but this historically inaccurate story is, nevertheless, a useful device for understanding the nature of money. In this sense, Pettit’s explanation of the origin and development of ethics takes the form of an instructive fiction. The story begins in Erewhon, a hyCRICKET

pothetical, pre-moral community. The name of this community is borrowed from Samuel Butler’s anonymously published 1872 novel Erewhon (an anagram of nowhere), which satirised Victorian society. The inhabitants of Pettit’s Erewhon possess a language adequate to describe their world, but they have no normative concepts of any kind. They exchange useful information with one another about their world. False information, when relied on, leads to wasted effort and can even be dangerous. Everyone, then, has a natural interest in developing a reputation as a person whose information is reliable. So the people of Erewhon hit on a method of promoting a general tendency towards truth-telling by leveraging the reputational consequences of truth and lies. They develop an incipient form of promising that enables speakers to voluntarily raise the social cost of misleading others, and thus to generate trust in what they say. This is the first episode in a story that leads, by a series of plausible steps, to the emergence of concepts of responsibility. The actual origin story of ethics is, doubtless, far messier and less linear than this tale of how the Erewhonians built a scaffold from the ground of simple declarative language, floor by floor, to a suite of moral concepts and practices resembling ours. Pettit’s aim is to show that we can learn a good deal about what ethics is from this idealised account of how it might have developed. The ultimate success of a book that seeks to change the methods of moral philosophy can only be judged many years after publication. The Birth of Ethics aims to clear a tenable path that leads away from moral scepticism, and for that reason, I believe, it deserves attention. g

David Neil is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Wollongong. v 4 8 M AY 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Trigger-happy times Criticising the cult of ‘safetyism’

David Rolph THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt Allen Lane, $49.99 hb, 352 pp, 9780735224896

n 1987, Allan Bloom published his best-selling book, The Closing of the American Mind. The American mind must have remained sufficiently open to allow it, three decades hence, to be coddled. The mind that is being closed or coddled is, in the first instance, the young adult mind in its formative stage – at university. Cultural anxiety about what is going on at universities is nothing new. The latest manifestation is The Coddling of the American Mind. Developing their thesis first articulated in an article in The Atlantic, the authors, Greg Lukianoff, a lawyer focusing on the First Amendment and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (‘FIRE’), and Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, set out to analyse the particular cultural moment in which American universities find themselves. Lukianoff and Haidt identify the three ‘Great Untruths’: ‘The Untruth of Fragility: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker’; ‘The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always Trust Your Feelings’; and ‘The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a Battle Between Good People and Bad People’. These ‘untruths’, they argue, have been used in parenting and education over the last two to three decades, with the consequences that iGen (or Generation Z) – people born from 1995 onwards, the first generation of people who have grown up in a world in which the internet has been pervasive from the time they were conscious – have internalised them. For Lukianoff and Haidt, this generational shift explains why the problems identified on college campuses have become so prominent and acute (from 2013 onwards, members of Generation Z started entering universities). The authors then proceed to document

what they consider to be the evidence for the problem of coddling young minds at university: trigger warnings, safe spaces, micro-aggressions, call-out culture, no platforming, and identity politics. Having explored these manifestations of the problem on university campuses, they then seek to identify the underlying reasons for them. The causes of this phenomenon are not limited to universities, nor could they be. Universities are part of society, so understandably what occurs in society at large is reflected in universities. Lukianoff and Haidt point out that political polarisation on college campuses unsurprisingly reflects political polarisation in the United States more generally. They note that this polarisation informs and reinforces increasing self-segregation: people living in communities of the like-minded, with fewer interactions with those of different views. This is facilitated by the collapse of mass experience, most notably in relation to the profound changes to media and technology. Within a generation, three national commercial television networks have been eclipsed by social media platforms, allowing for individualised content consumption and creation. The problem and its causes are complex, and Lukianoff and Haidt’s analysis is reasonably nuanced. They provide an accessible explanation of intersectionality and argue it is a useful analytical tool, but contend that there have been poor applications or crude interpretations of it. They do not think identity politics is a wholly bad thing. They think a concern for safety is important, but they are critical of the cult of ‘safetyism’ for failing to discriminate between risks with no social benefit and risks that might provide young people

with formative experiences. They observe that there is a difference between banning smoking around children and mandating the wearing of seatbelts, and climbing a tree or walking to school by yourself. Treating all risks as requiring the same level of regulatory concern ensures that young people are ill-equipped to deal with risks they will encounter on their own as adults. There are, however, aspects of the argument that might have been amplified. The reasons Lukianoff and Haidt identify for the coddling allegedly occurring on college campuses are largely cultural. Economic factors are given less weight in their argument. Lukianoff and Haidt discuss class only in the context of divergences in parenting styles. One idea that they raise in passing, which could have been further explored, is the impact of the student as consumer. They note that, if students are paying a premium price for a college education, such that it has essentially become a luxury good, it is entirely understandable that they would want to control the experience. It is difficult to be overly critical of weak leadership in universities if the society in which these institutions exist has recast the role of people in those positions as service providers, rather than as educators as traditionally understood. The phenomenon Lukianoff and Haidt analyse in the American context has some resonance in Australia. In November 2018, Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan established a review into freedom of speech in universities, headed by Robert French, a former Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia. This was in response to real or perceived concerns that campus life in Australia was following the American experience. Whether the problem analysed by Lukianoff and Haidt in fact occurs in Australian universities is open to doubt. Political polarisation is not as pronounced as it appears to be in the United States. The tradition of students living on campus during their degrees is less common in Australia. Campus life altered with the introduction of voluntary student unionism and the expansion of student numbers. The impact of technology, allowing students

to study full-time at university, sometimes without setting foot on campus, is transforming higher education. Virtual students likely outnumber activist students in Australian universities. The strength of the book is the analysis of the problem in the American context rather than the solutions. The

Treating all risks as requiring the same level of regulatory concern ensures that young people are ill-equipped to deal with them solutions that Lukianoff and Haidt suggest are somewhat pat. The flavour of their proposed solutions is indicated by the content of the two schedules to the book: cognitive behavioural therapy, and the ‘Chicago principles’ on freedom of speech in universities, developed by the University of Chicago in conjunction with FIRE. A combination of social psychology and constitutional law is one way to analyse the phenomenon this book sets out to examine, although there are other equally good or better methods of doing so. There is one particularly grating feature of The Coddling of the American Mind. Each chapter ends with a summary, in bullet-point form, of the argument contained in the preceding pages. No chapter is especially long. The authors write clearly. The summary is just needless repetition. Perhaps readers should be trusted to retain the thrust of the argument and not have their minds coddled. g

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SOCIETY

Millions more Tom Bamforth BREAKING POINT: THE FUTURE OF AUSTRALIAN CITIES by Peter Seamer Nero

$32.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781760641290

n Breaking Point: The future of Australian cities, Peter Seamer quotes satirist H.L. Mencken: ‘There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.’ Seamer, a former CEO of the Victorian Planning Authority, Federation Square, and the City of Sydney, has written a clear, pragmatic, and readable account of the complexity of Australia’s urban development. Thinking critically about cities is an urgent task in order to accommodate an estimated additional 11.8 million people by 2046, seventyfive per cent of whom are expected to live in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth. While Australia’s cities are famously among the world’s most liveable, they face real and immediate challenges. Soaring house prices, ageing infrastructure, congested public and private transport systems, suburban sprawl, tall buildings of dubious quality, limited response to environmental and climate change pressures, and growing inequality that is manifested in spatial divides all place stress on the country’s urban development, living standards, and economic growth. Based on his years in the planning and management of Australian cities, Seamer proposes an array of ideas that will be more or less controversial in planning circles. His broad approach is evolutionary. ‘Behavioural change,’ he writes, ‘can be nudged rather than forced.’ Well-considered policies and a rational, evidence-based approach to planning can ‘encourage’ types of future work, transport, and consumption behaviours that could preserve the liveability of Australian cities. An impediment to more effective planning, according to Seamer, is the excessive focus on city centres, especially 5 0 M AY 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

in Melbourne. The conventional view is that the Central Business District and its immediate environs are the engine of economic growth and the locus of urban life. Infrastructure investment is often skewed toward providing radial transport links by road and rail to and from the CBD. Owing to the success of the Postcode 3000 project in the 1990s to regenerate Melbourne’s city centre, the CBD has also become a major residential zone. Once known for its drab emptiness after five o’clock, central Melbourne is now the focus of government, sporting, and cultural institutions, media, business, finance, tertiary education, retail and food culture, and has around 29,000 apartments (up from 685 in 1985). While transport and other infrastructure to support this urban efflorescence aim to get people to and from the centre of town, the reality is that most people do not work in the CBD. Eighty per cent of all jobs in Melbourne are located in the suburbs, and around half of those in employment live in the same area in which they work. Urban development needs are therefore local, and do not radiate out from the CBD as much planning and infrastructure investment supposes. Although popular, the introduction of the free-travel zone in the Melbourne CBD is emblematic of the failings of centralisation. With the loss of around one hundred million dollars annually in uncollected revenue, this is a service for those who are already most able to pay. The free-travel zone also discourages active transport by bike or on foot, and is a lost opportunity to invest in outer suburbs that are poorly served by public transport. Instead, Breaking Point advocates for the concepts of amenity, localisation, and polycentric cities by reducing the need to venture far. Polycentric cities aim to promote proximity between work and home, the use of public transport, and the reduction of travel times and congestion. Shops, hospitals, schools, workplaces, sporting facilities, and cultural institutions (clustered as the concept of ‘amenity’) need to be accessible from areas where most city inhabitants live: the suburbs. This would ensure equitable provision of infrastructure,

or access and opportunity, across the entire city, not just the centre and nearby suburbs. New transport technologies reinforce the need to plan for a polycentric city. Autonomous vehicles have the potential to revolutionise public transport, promoting suburban movement in a number of different directions rather than the radial limitations of existing infrastructure. More sophisticated pricing mechanisms (like those already used by Uber) will encourage local, shared, and non-peak travel. Polycentric cities can, in Seamer’s view, be achieved through encouragement. Differential fares could encourage passengers to use travel infrastructure at non-peak times; changes in communication technology might encourage more people to work from home; more open-minded planning that mixes business and residential zones might help develop local hubs. Hubs around Monash and La Trobe universities, for example, are undermined by a lack of wider amenities and poor transport connections. Similarly, investment in regional growth, at a fraction of the cost of metropolitan rail projects, would support the principle of polycentric planning at a national level. Breaking Point concisely captures the complexity of planning for Australia’s cities, about which many have strongly held views and which spark debates. Will beneficent ‘nudges’ really be sufficient to accommodate population growth? Expensive as it is initially, rail advocates will point to London, Tokyo, Moscow, Paris, etc. as the best examples of providing mass transit. Despite advances in autonomous vehicles, these are still cars and they will still clog roads and produce emissions. Conservationists will question Seamer’s support for developers and for cutting ‘red tape’, some of which also protects the liveability and heritage of Australia’s cities. There is very little discussion of sustainability or climate change and urban futures, and this is perhaps the book’s most significant omission. The aim, however, is to ‘start a discussion’, and Breaking Point does this very effectively. g Tom Bamforth is a writer and aid worker.

‘Ethics at the end of the world’ A jeremiad about the normalisation of climate change

Deb Anderson THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH: A STORY OF THE FUTURE by David Wallace-Wells

Allen Lane, $29.99 pb, 310 pp, 9780241400517 To a weary and frightened people, fatalism does offer the consolation of lethargic peace ... anger and alarm still signal life. Yi-Fu Tuan (Landscapes of Fear, 1979)

e afraid. ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’, the viral article published in New York magazine (2017) that was both fêted and scorned for its visceral bluntness, has grown out and up. A scary, 7,000-word portrait of a nearfuture Earth razed by climate change has matured into a deeper, darker treatise on environmental injustice, or what author David Wallace-Wells calls ‘ethics at the end of the world’. ‘And how widespread alarm will shape our ethical impulses toward one another,’ he writes, ‘and the politics that emerge from those impulses, is among the more profound questions being posed by the climate to the planet of people it envelops.’ The way this book sounds the climate alarm is no mere lyrical feat. WallaceWells, a deputy editor at New York, heard

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mistic of those considering it’ (that’s Wallace-Wells, saluting the ‘brave’ reader who has made it halfway through his book). With catastrophic depictions of climate change ubiquitous in the media, many writers telling these stories are only too aware they risk understating its gravity, enhancing the mass tendency to turn away, or deepening political depression. Wallace-Wells has a sharper take on all this. The worst possibilities of climate change have ‘become somehow unseemly to consider’ – out of decency, or fear, or fear of fearmongering. He includes other potential reasons, from confused panic and semi-conspiratorial confidence to an overabundance of faith in the teleological shape of history (‘or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay’). ‘It is worse,’ the book opens, ‘much worse, than you think.’ The longest section, Elements of Chaos, presents twelve ‘dimensions’ of how bad things

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his detractors yet did not repent. Be very afraid. For fear is now at the crux of the story. Can the spectre of impending Armageddon rid people of their complacency? It’s a sore point for those scientists, journalists, activists, and scholars who are trying to explain what global warming means for the way we live, without losing the audience. The odds are stacked against us. In 1999, media scholar Susan Moeller coined the term ‘compassion fatigue’ to describe the new status quo of dulled public sensitivity. She argued that it was the result of news media careening from one trauma to another, their formulaic coverage of poverty, disease, and death blurring multiple crises into one. Then along came the story of this century, of humanity speeding blithely along a course to more than four degrees Celsius of warming by the year 2100. It’s a story with ‘enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most opti-

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will become. Wallace-Wells presents a survey of the research that is broad yet detailed, cramming the insights of the science but also the politics and economics of climate change into wave upon wave of worst-case scenarios. T he public-facing optimism of advocacy is granted little space here. There are clear limitations. The author cautions that he is depicting each dimension as a discrete threat – from sea levels rising (a 2018 study shows the melt rate of the Antarctic ice sheet tripled in the past decade) to unnatural disasters, starvation, and economic stagnation. In contrast, the surviving populations must contend with a ‘latticework’ of impacts. There are other provisos, for better or worse: exactly how will the climate system recalibrate in response to human perturbation? How quickly will we shift away from a dependency on fossil fuels? Where this work falls short is its failure to integrate the worst possibilities for non-human nature. Its humancentred or ‘weak-green’ approach is unsurprising; Wallace-Wells says he came to the topic just a few years ago when amassing his own file of climate stories. ‘I am not an environmentalist,’ he states on page six. Perhaps this is a ploy to align the writer with the mythic American ‘everyman’ he hopes might read the book. Yet I hear the echo of another image-conscious catchphrase of the moment, ‘I am not a feminist, but’. For all the fear of fearmongering The Uninhabitable Earth might seek to address, the way it positions the author belies another culture of fear. That said, Wallace-Wells wants to scare us witless. His focus on humans and our nature is calculated: ‘Until now, it seems to have been easier for us to emphasise with the climate plight of other species than our own, perhaps because we have such a hard time acknowledging or understanding our own responsibility and complicity in the changes now unfolding, and such an easier time evaluating the morally simpler calculus of pure victimhood.’ Thus, about halfway in, the book strays from the environmental genre of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) into a short history of ideas on how culture is shaping climate. The optimism 5 2 M AY 2 0 1 9

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

of environmental advocacy groups does get a run here – mostly in terms of why we can’t, don’t, or won’t hear the riot of alarm bells. In fact, it is a visual metaphor that Wallace-Wells takes up to greatest effect in the next section, The Climate Kaleidoscope, described as how ‘we can be mesmerised by the threat directly in front of us without ever perceiving it clearly’. Again, the author is careful to speak not at but with his media-saturated primary audience, while imploring us to question our emotional prophylaxis. In six chapters, he weaves us through the cognitive biases fed by ‘crisis capitalism’, ‘the church of technology’, and ‘the politics of consumption’ (not to mention the ‘storytelling’ of The Day After Tomorrow et al.), citing a sweep of literature from the classic works of E.O. Wilson, Bill McKibben, and Naomi Klein to fringe texts on climate nihilism, climate fatalism, and ecocide. Intriguingly, it is the latter tour of pessimism that delivers greater insights into how climate is reshaping culture. We hear from writers Sam Kriss and Ellie Mae O’Hagan, who coined the term

‘human futilitarianism’ to remind us that political depression, no matter how crushing, is still a cry of protest.‘If humanity is the capacity to act meaningfully within our surroundings,’they write,‘then we are not really, or not yet, human.’ This book appears at a time when some scholars, educators, and journalists are advocating ‘solutions journalism’ and the embrace of humanity’s innate attraction to optimism as the means to create change. Journalism itself must adapt, argues scholar James Painter in the latest issue of global research journal Environmental Communication. In that respect, this version of The Uninhabitable Earth encourages readers to reflect on the present menaces. It warns us that we face a world where the scope of transformation may provoke not alarm but the perverse normalisation of climate suffering, and eliminate any efforts to narrativise warming. The more self-reflexively we can stare down that horrific possibility, the better. g Deb Anderson, a journalist and Monash University academic, is the author of Endurance: Australian stories of drought (2014).

As Time Goes By Tuesdays Paul comes by. He jogs up the driveway in his striped green shorts and I’m there at the door with Ella on my hip. She’s crying, she’s teething and drooling and crying from the pain, and some days I can’t stand it, I have to call my mother and go for a walk or a drive to the beach and watch the seagulls be ugly to each other. On Tuesdays I wait for Paul, and he always shows up at different times; there’s nothing I can do about it but stay in the house and listen to Ella until I hear the thud of his worn-out sneakers outside. He’s trying to make the football team again, but everybody knows that dream is long gone. Sweetheart, he says, running on the spot. I say, Don’t call me sweetheart. I love you, he says, and Ella cries some more. I wait for him to check his watch and stop running and then I give him the baby and we go inside. I make pastrami sandwiches and we sit and eat with the clock loud in the kitchen. Sometimes Paul looks at me and I look at him. Then I look at Ella and he looks at his watch. It goes by.

Bella Li Bella Li’s collection Argosy (Vagabond Press, 2017) won the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the 2018 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for poetry.

(Photograph by Tim Grey, Giramondo Publishing)

Poet of the Month OPEN PAGE with

Emma Lew

Which poets have most influenced you?

Reading Auden and Eliot in high school helped lighten my depression, or at least accompanied me through it. When I started writing poetry in my early thirties, my first teacher, Alan Wearne, read us ‘The Day Lady Died’ by Frank O’Hara. Later, John Forbes got me into Ted Berrigan’s So Going Around Cities and the Sonnets. O’Hara, Berrigan, then Ashbery, Padgett, Hejinian, and Coolidge all shook me up and loosened me up, exploding and extending what I’d understood as ‘poetry’. Other poets who had a strong impact were Yannis Ritsos, Fernando Pessoa, Yves Bonnefoy, John Anderson, Richard Hugo, John Scott, and Gig Ryan.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry? A bit of space and peace are good for writing poetry. I like to feel warm, so a small electric heater should be blowing on my ankles.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Writing a poem, for me, is an experience that blurs consciousness and the unconscious – the one relentlessly and obsessively advancing and checking the other. It begins usually with a line or a rhythm or both that I set down and run with, develop, push out from. I keep lists and lists of lines jotted down in a series of exercise books; lines gleaned from overhearing, from mishearing, from reading and misreading. Improbable lines, nonsensical, hypnotic lines; lines that have struck me purely for their nuttiness, or for their arresting syncopations or tones. I’ve stored up line upon line over the years, and I turn to them for something to start with, sometimes changing words or syntax, then seeking other lines that seem to connect with the first, then others and others – until I can start to see a kind of sense and tone emerging, and I try to nurture this thing and shape it and see what it seems to be trying to say, to adumbrate, to offer. It’s been frustrating, but over the years I’ve seldom been able to write anything with a ‘deliberate’ subject. It’s always been a matter of the poem coming into being and me, its humble, toiling servant, eventually stepping back and beholding something of my self – my pining orphan self,

my besotted pupil self, my steely, dour agent provocateur self, my serial killer self.

Roughly how many drafts do you produce before ‘finishing’ a poem? Usually a great many.

Which poet would you most like to talk to – and why?

Oscar Wilde, for his dazzling loquacity, his dear soul.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

Two: John Anderson’s the forest set out like the night, and Pure and Applied by Gig Ryan.

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie? The company of other poets tended to bring out the creep in me. It felt a little dog-eat-dog. On the other hand, I felt like a somebody, like I had a place, a right to be there among it all.

If Plato allowed you to keep one poem in his Republic, what would it be?

‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ by W.B. Yeats. It’s the most beautiful thing, so plain, so chantable, so haunting.

What are your favourite lines of poetry? The wind is felt and the stars and the sand so that no one will be taken by pain. (from ‘Grow’ by Joseph Ceravolo)

Is poetry appreciated by the reading public?

Perhaps not. I don’t know many who read it. Possibly we need grief; need to be in straits to have recourse to poetry. I know that’s what sent me to it initially.

Emma Lew lives in Melbourne. Crow College:

New and selected poems, just published by Giramondo, is reviewed on page 55. I NT ERVI EW

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Forms in bone Judith Bishop CROW COLLEGE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

by Emma Lew

Giramondo $26.95 pb, 144 pp, 9781925818055

riginal voices are always slippery to describe. The familiar weighing mechanisms don’t work very well when the body of work floats a little above the weighing pan, or darts around in it. As in dreams, a disturbing familiarity may envelop the work with an elusive scent. It is no different for poetry than for any other art: the mercurial alloy, or unforeseen offspring, astonish and perturb. They divide opinion. The reception to date of Emma Lew’s poetry, gathered for the first time in her New and Selected Poems, demonstrates this effect. Crow College takes an uneven number of poems from Lew’s two full-sized collections, The Wild Reply (1997) and Anything the Landlord Touches (2002). A number of the new poems previously appeared in a Vagabond Press Rare Objects chapbook, Luminous Alias (2013). While these new poems are as strong as the earlier ones, they contain a larger proportion of pantoums. Unlike other critics, I regard most of these as less successful than the more organically organised poems. The constraint is often too apparent, and the content made to fit. Given the long hiatus since the last full-length collection, I was struck by the vulnerability of art, facing its audience; its existence is never assured. Reviewing Anything the Landlord Touches, Justin Lowe addressed the poet directly: ‘Why did you put pen to paper?’ The question is harsh. Lew’s poem ‘Trench Music’ gave one possible answer, ahead of the question: ‘I cannot evade these forms in the bone, / the slow tunes from oblivion. // I fill up with shooting stars: / let my human half sing out.’ Poets’ ‘forms in the bone’ take their shape from many sources. The dark hybridity of a poem may extend beyond its genre – in the directions of visual

art, theatre, dance, sculpture, music. Art in any of these genres may be labelled poetic; but the converse feels less common: poetries that translate from the language of other arts into their own. The originality of Lew’s poetry comes from a hybrid lineage unlike any other Australian poet’s. Within it must be counted the visual arts and theatre, perhaps particularly of the German Expressionist period, and the irrational associations of absurdism and its descendants (highlighted by a recent Met exhibition, Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, 1950–1980). Reading a poem such as ‘Poem’, cited here in full, is like viewing a piece of conceptual art: ‘Decaying thunder, / all the ordinary rain. / A raft of tiny fools, / a poem of nails.’ August Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1902) may not be a direct source, but some of Lew’s monologues could readily have belonged in it. Many of Lew’s poems have the visual quality of tableaux, as if a voice were speaking within a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The children herding cows were so beautiful. One questioned me about the darkness. Ships with all their sails, I said. All the melodies of pain at every shift, and then the endless moon, growing and growing. (‘Light Tasks’)

Michael Brennan has acutely observed in Lew’s poetry ‘the ‘ferment and fury of history and consciousness … the recesses of times past’. Its exceptional visual and verbal qualities aside, one of the most striking aspects of the poems is, indeed, the sense of a historical consciousness. Lew’s histories are like fragments of fresco paintings on the walls of Russian churches: here, the broken detail of a robe, or a porch; there, a single eye gazing. The whole is unknowable (as any history is), but the detail is convincing. To see it makes one dream of other times. Lew’s imagination is attracted to the underbelly of history. ‘Chernobyl: Small Talk’ speaks to the irrationality underlying certain political systems and personal anxieties: ‘I feel that I can trust you with a secret: / I’ve been ordered to

fall in love with you / and I’m insanely worried about my eyes.’ ‘I’ve been ordered to fall in love’ makes oneiric sense against a backdrop of authoritarian politics; the comment about eyes is the sort of odd anxiety any lover might feel about a part of their body. Taken together, they conjure an Orwellian irrationality. While the name ‘Chernobyl’ suggests a relatively recent past, other lines in the poem give it a nineteenthcentury feel: ‘Come over, the apples are ripe / in my guardian’s orchards.’ Orchards, guardian: it is hard to imagine both words being deployed in a modern sentence. By such subtle means – an astonishing sleight of hand – the poet transports us to an undefined yet queerly familiar time. Crow College is graced with an excellent introduction by poet Bella Li. Though the guidance it gives the reader is deeply insightful, I missed the presence of endnotes. There are, no doubt, external touchstones, and it would help Lew’s readers to know what some of these have been. A brilliant early poem, ‘Of Quite Another Order’, draws on the real history of a ‘feral’ child, Victor of Aveyron, and the attempts to educate him – a story that a later poem, ‘Pali’, seems to touch upon again – but the source is not indicated. Many other poems draw apparent inspiration from scenes in Russian literature, which resonates with the heightened sensibility of the poems. Poetry – whether of this nation or any other – is richer for the presence of Lew’s passionate voices and disquieting, historical sensibility – these tableaux situated, as the poem ‘Luminous Alias’ observes, ‘somewhere between serenity and vertigo’. Let’s hope to see more of this original art. g

Judith Bishop’s most recent collection is Interval (UQP, 2018). POETRY

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Darius Sepehri THE SHAHNAMEH: THE PERSIAN EPIC AS WORLD LITERATURE by Hamid Dabashi

Columbia University Press (Footprint), $68 hb, 272p, 9780231183444

ot many peoples are able to read poems in their language written one thousand years ago, as Persian speakers in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan do today with Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, meaning the ‘Book of Kings’. The Shahnameh is Iran’s national epic, a vast compilation of pre-Islamic Iranian myths, legends, and imperial history. The summa of the life of Hakim Abol-Qasem Tusi, known by his honorific name Ferdowsi, at 50,000 couplets it is the world’s longest epic poem written by a single poet; it took the devoted poet just over thirty years to write. From its arrival in 1010 ce, the Shahnameh has powerfully shaped poetic writing in Persian and has been credited by scholars with preserving the modern Persian language. Outside Persian, even Turkic, Azerbaijani, Ottoman, Georgian, and Kurdish literary traditions have felt its influence, while Matthew Arnold’s highly popular and beautiful Victorian retelling of the story of ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ is but one instance of its impact, in translation, in European languages. Its scope is titanic: through sixtytwo stories, told in 990 chapters, the Shahnameh tells the story of a people and a land, the Iranians and Iranshahr (‘Greater Iran’), from a cosmogonic, to a mythic, to a historical age. Expectedly, the cast of characters is enormous, ranging from gods, monsters, and mythical animals to warrior kings, troublesome courtesans, and unruly, disobedient offspring. Uniquely, the central character of the poem is Iran itself, not, say, a war (the Iliad), or an individual (Beowulf). Another unique aspect is identified by Shahnameh expert Mahmoud Omidsalar: ‘Unlike other classical Indo-European epics,’ he writes, ‘the 5 6 M AY 2 0 1 9

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Shahnameh is not in a dead language. It is intelligible to every speaker of Persian in Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.’ For his colleague Hamid Dabashi, professor of Comparative Literature and Iranian studies at Columbia University, the Shahnameh is remarkable because, though canonical, it is not antiquated but alive and accessible. As Dabashi writes, it is ‘generation after generation, memorized, performed, painted, praised, critically edited, and even revered’. This reverence abides, despite Persian speakers already having the revered, spiritual works of Hafez, Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Attar, and Sa’di. Unlike those works, we find little explicit Sufism or Islamic mysticism in the Shahnameh.

Dabashi’s ardent style and voice can be charming and excessive

Hamid Dabashi has a twofold aim in The Shahnameh: The Persian epic as world literature. The first, carried out in the book’s early chapters, is to present the epic poem to Western and non-Persian-speaking readers, who are unlikely to know Ferdowsi well. Dabashi wants to arouse passion for the Shahnameh, to show how it can be read, to interpret the text for presentday circumstances, and to ‘wonder at its magic’. His decades of classroom experience teaching the epic sustain him here, allowing him to explore its subtleties. In these chapters, there is much worthwhile material covered regarding the Shahnameh’s creation, Ferdowsi and questions of authorial intent, stories, characters, the poems’ predecessors, and its cultural significance in Iran and globally. Dabashi’s ardent style and

voice can be charming, and excessive. A central concern is to staunchly defend the Shahnameh’s self-sustained aesthetic and moral power as a world unto itself, one established and justified by imaginative creative power and not an external political theology. Accordingly, Dabashi criticises many political usages of the epic in projects of ideological construction, where the poem is ‘symbolically iconicized and massively instrumentalized’, thereby destroying its polysemic richness. Though sometimes repetitive in these criticisms (with some unfortunate instances of academese), such critiques of the narrowness of nationalist myth-making are Dabashi’s strong suit. Overall he mounts a strong analysis of the Shahnameh as a ‘master signifier’ of narratives of state-sponsored Iranian modernity. The story of the Shahnameh thus becomes, in Dabashi’s mind, the story of how emerging modern nation-states use native literature, especially epics, to imagine themselves from ancient empires to post-colonial polities. For Dabashi, this is problematic for a non-European country like Iran because ‘the origin of linguistic and literary nationalism, as the political and ideological source of state-building projects, is deeply rooted in European colonialism’. Here, Dabashi attacks what he claims are Eurocentric literary, temporal, and spatial categories (for instance, the division between ancient, medieval, and modern periods), which have been inappropriately applied by academics to the Shahnameh. He argues that such inapt categorisation distorts and ‘deworlds’ the qualities of many works ‘and forces them into an obedient servitude to European historiography’. Dabashi’s second aim is

therefore to stage a re-conception of the category of ‘world literature’, insisting that the current framework is unable to deal meaningfully with texts such as the Shahnameh. This fits in with his earlier exposition of the epic’s majestic distinctiveness as a literary work, ‘neither an epic of conquest nor an epic of defeat but an epic of perpetual, historical defiance’, achieved in part by examining the Shahnameh against epics like Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Odyssey. Dabashi’s project is thus one of demolition (or, in Heideggerian terms, a destruktion), dismantling the inadequate prevailing conceptions of ‘world literature’ to rebuild a new understanding able to incorporate maverick, non-European works like the Shahnameh, establishing them in their proper place and ‘on an equal footing for a renewed global reading’. The two disparate streams in Dabashi’s book – the poem’s analysis and celebration on the one hand, and the academic dispute on the other – while related, take the book in different directions, and the academic material on ‘world literature’ may not be to the taste or patience of some general readers, who will still gain much from Dabashi’s introductory expositions. Regrettably, Dabashi at times uses stylistic language that is excessively rhetorical, instead of letting his arguments do the work. Stricter editing should have cleared up these elements, while preserving something of Dabashi’s garrulous, vigorous style. These issues notwithstanding, for those who wish to deepen their understanding of Persian poetry and literary history, The Shahnameh: The Persian epic as world literature makes a worthy companion to the English translation by Dick Davis. Marrying passion and scholarship, Dabashi reasserts the place of this beloved and foundational epic, ‘composed’, he writes, ‘in Persian with poise, patience, perseverance, as if performing an act of poetic piety, of moral obligation, of the ritual ablution of a people’. g Darius Sepehri was born in Iran. He is completing a PhD in the International Comparative Literature and Translation Studies Program at the University of Sydney.

End times Ryan Cropp PRACTICE: JOURNALISM, ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

by Guy Rundle

Black Inc. $32.99 pb, 373 pp, 9781760641313

ot long into the Obama era, the American comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert hosted a high-profile ‘Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’ in Washington, DC. In front of an enormous crowd of well-intentioned liberals, Stewart made a case for a return to the sensible centre. ‘We live in hard times, not end times,’ he declared. ‘The press is our immune system. If we overreact to everything we actually get sicker.’ The Australian writer–activist Guy Rundle, who was in the crowd that day, did not see things so simply. Modern politics was indeed a shouting match, he reported on the news website Crikey, but political dilemmas this complex would never be solved by ‘asking everyone to play nice’. Not all responses to problems were even equally valid, and some, like those floated regularly on Fox News, were ‘pernicious in their error’. Was it possible that this model of liberal progressivism – one that made rational appeals to a mass of sensible citizens in a universal political language – had reached a dead end? This short essay does not appear in the new collection of Rundle’s writing, Practice: Journalism, essays and criticism, but its theme – the tension between the breakdown of political communication and the urgent need for progressive action – appears throughout. In pieces for Crikey, the socialist magazine Arena, and elsewhere, Rundle pulls the rug out from under our politics, insisting that we’re plunging headlong into economic, social, and ecological disaster, and that there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it. It is a sobering thought, and one that Rundle comes at from a variety of angles. His Crikey journalism, which

makes up about half of this collection, takes us right to the coalface; it is seehow-the-sausage-is-made political writing for the age of the PR consultant. Too often, he reflects, political events are described without appropriate context, ‘like reporting a fistfight without mentioning that it had taken place at a clown sex party in a Berlin S&M bar’. With Rundle, by contrast, we witness the hysterical shambles of modern politics firsthand through the eyes of a determined sceptic. In his longer Arena and Meanjin essays, he goes up a gear or two, delivering polished, big-picture dissections of intellectual history and political philosophy (‘Into the Breach’, ‘The Bolshevik Century’). On such topics he is impressively well-read, with a rare ability to make references to Jean Baudrillard sound commonplace. In other pieces, he strikes a more personal note, writing himself into the history of London bohemia (‘Death in Soho’), or searching for the non-existent Kurt Cobain Trail in rural Oregon (‘Kurt Cobain in the Thriftway Carpark’). Rundle is at his best, however, when he finds a balance between the wisecracking, on-the-ground immediacy of his journalism and the big-brained erudition of his longer efforts. He calls this a ‘journalism of nothingness’, an attempt ‘to go somewhere that is the furthest from a Starbucks, to a carpark between nowhere and nowhere’. In these exhilarating essays (‘Melbourne Interstitial’, ‘Deadmalling’), he slips into flâneur-mode, wandering the crumbling shopping centres and freeway underpasses of suburbia-in-decline, watching forlornly as these places go ‘from something to nothing’. It is this stylistic and philosophiPOETRY

cal adroitness that makes Rundle such an intelligent guide to our modern malaise. He has, for example, a good claim to have seen Donald Trump coming – not literally, of course, but via his decade-long exploration of the sheer insanity of post-industrial, post-9/11, post-everything America. In 2010, for an essay on Sarah Palin (‘Palin in Celebration’), he travelled to Orlando to visit a gated community built – by the Disney Corporation, no less – to mimic a small 1950s American town, a place where ‘real people taking their kids out for a day looked like actors’. Rundle’s portrait of this strange pseudo-suburb – an entirely artificial version of an America that never was – says as much about Trumpism as any investigative journey to the Rust Belt. Rundle’s America is a semiotically

scrambled meta-world; a hollow, absurd, thoroughly mediated landscape crowded with images of a lost past. His writing is alive to the depressing fact that the circus carnival of late capitalism has almost fully destroyed the possibility of mass political organisation. In such an environment, a political mass like the one appealed to by Stewart simply cannot exist; it can only be fragmented into increasingly isolated communities and subcultures, a babel of incomprehensible political languages and toy towns. Make American Great Again? Yes We Can. There is a melancholy that thrums beneath the surface of much of this writing. ‘Everything burns in the end,’ he writes in the book’s introduction. His – our – world is infused with a sense of belatedness, a dusk-in-autumn feeling that we’ve reached the end of something.

Practice is certainly not an unenjoyable read – you are just as likely to laugh as to cry – but in between the gags there is always a hint of impending catastrophe. This can sometimes make for grim reading, and Rundle attempts to offset his innate miserabilism with firm political commitment. Changes, he writes optimistically, are ‘impossible until they happen’. He insists that our new problems – Uber-style ‘disruption’, politics as spectacle, million-dollar homes built two hours from the nearest job – require new solutions. But if so, modern progressive parties will need to offer a more convincing account of ‘how society works’. These are hard times, and the sensible centre cannot hold. g Ryan Cropp is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney.

Catalyst

The case of the disappearing Night Parrot

Neil Murray NIGHT PARROT: AUSTRALIA’S MOST ELUSIVE BIRD by Penny Olsen

CSIRO Publishing, $49.99 pb, 368 pp, 9781486302987

ight Parrot by Penny Olsen is more than a biography of a bird that spent most of the twentieth century successfully hiding from people. It is a historical biography of human determination and obsession, and of the ways in which this bird has acted as a catalyst for transitions between those two psychological states. Indeed, the book itself is a product of extreme determination: the preface that acknowledges the number and diversity of sources and people consulted is extensive and impressive. The rediscovery of a live population of the Night Parrot in 2013 triggered the decision to produce the book. Much of it is apparently based on material put together for a historically focused work that was set 5 8 M AY 2 0 1 9

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aside. This background now serves as a slow-burning fuse to a clear challenge to the integrity of some recent observations and claims. This is a thorough, brave, and important book. Its impact has been extensive and swift. Readers may be familiar with Dr Olsen’s similar book on the (some would add ‘supposedly’) extinct Paradise Parrot. The current book, copiously illustrated, follows much the same integration of history based on European explorers’ diaries, Indigenous information (historical and contemporary), museum specimens, letters and publications from ornithologists, and occasional police records. She also includes contemporary art works and some recent poetry by John Kinsella.

Even without the renaissance of the species, this would have made an entertaining and enlightening read. Night Parrots (Geopsittacus occidentalis) are hard to find. A predominantly desert species, they tend to spend the day in burrows under spinifex or samphire clumps, emerging at night to feed on grass seeds. The first recorded collection of a Night Parrot took place on Charles Sturt’s expedition to northern South Australia in 1842. Sturt had been commissioned by the governor of the colony to explore the north for sources of reliable water for agriculture. Sturt’s determination (obsession?) to track northward-flying waterbirds to an agricultural paradise was a failure, and when he returned to Adelaide, his health was

broken. But he had brought back a specimen of a new species, the Night Parrot, shot by the young John McDouall Stuart in samphire flats, northeast of Lake Eyre. Unfortunately, the specimen wasn’t recognised as anything new. Sturt’s birds were sent for identification to John Gould, the British expert on Australian birds. In his published journal, Sturt recorded it as a similar-looking species, the Ground Parrot, that inhabits east-coast salt marshes, suggesting that Gould didn’t see or didn’t look carefully at the specimen. Rightfully miffed, the bird vanished down a hole, finally showing itself to Australian parrot expert Joseph Forshaw in 1971 at the Liverpool Museum in the United Kingdom. Gould, who was sent another Night Parrot from Western Australia in 1855, realised in 1861 that it was something new, named it, but didn’t twig that Sturt’s bird had been the same thing. Meanwhile, most of the action returned to South Australia, courtesy of the discovery by Frederick Andrews, the South Australian Museum’s collector, of a reliable source of Night Parrots in the Gawler Ranges, north-west of Port Augusta. Olsen’s count is that, globally, twenty-two of the twenty-eight known museum specimens were collected by Andrews. Most of these were from the Gawler Ranges in the 1870s. Andrews comes across in his letters and a short written article, reproduced in the book, as the least obsessive of all the Night Parrot principals. A large part of the book deals with other and later searches, grouped by state. Their interest lies largely in why most failed to find the bird. Much effort went into Western Australia and what became the Northern Territory. Despite the effort – large-scale expeditions, extensive and intensive consultations with Indigenous communities, public advertisements – there were few positive results among many misleading ones. Some people, including Indigenous groups, certainly knew the bird, its names, and habits. Some supposed bird remains were real. These sections of the book are an engaging exposition of the human menagerie of

the times and places – some people to admire, some obviously obsessed by the search. Nonetheless, despite elaborate and costly investments, frustratingly no live specimen has ever been taken from the Northern Territory, and only three from Western Australia. None, too, from New South Wales or Victoria, although historical accounts from north-western Victoria have been accepted as reliable. In spite of probable sightings near

and by presenting unconvincing images of a ‘new species’ of Fig Parrot. Nonetheless, there could be no doubt that the film was of a live Night Parrot. Despite Young’s determination to keep the location secret and to exclude governments from management, key information eventually leaked out. South-west Queensland called. Extremely valuable outcomes from the newly discovered population have

Steve Murphy holding the male Night Parrot freshly removed from the mist net on 6 May 2016 (photograph by Rachel Barr)

the original Lake Eyre site in 1979, it took Queensland to drag the story into the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. Road kill found near Boulia in 1990 testified to the Night Parrot’s existence, but not to a location of original impact. Then, in 2006, a corpse on a roadside with feathers on an adjacent barbed-wire fence focused attention on Diamantina National Park and surrounds. It took until 2013 before incontrovertible evidence of a live Night Parrot was presented publicly. This came in the form of film presented by a nonscientist, but with an endorsement from the well-credentialled scientist Steve Murphy. This was tricky, as the presenter was John Young, an amateur who had polarised the Queensland birding community with regular claims of seeing unlikely things (like Paradise Parrots)

emerged: recorded calls can now be used in surveys, so it is possible not only to recognise a call remotely recorded in possible habitat but also to play calls and listen for answers. This has led to more populations being discovered and potentially protected in arid Australia. The most unwelcome outcome has been fake news of unreliable ‘findings’ and bad news that birds may have been unethically handled, reflecting something other than determination to do the best for the bird. Thanks to the revelations first presented in this book, which triggered a major enquiry, the way that the species is managed, and by whom, is being rapidly reshaped. g Neil Murray is an honorary research associate in the Department of Ecology, Environment and Evolution at La Trobe University. v N AT U R A L H I S T O R Y

OPEN Open PAGE Page with

Judith Brett Where are you happiest?

Camping at Thurra River in the Croajingalong National Park, swimming in its tannin estuary, cooking fresh fish, gossiping while walking its long white beaches, watching the sea eagles soar.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Loyalty. It seems an essentially masculine virtue, designed for armies and other hierarchies. Where is the virtue in being loyal to a venal and incompetent manager?

Which quality do you most admire in a writer? Clarity and uncluttered prose.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

When very young, the Bible. Later in the theory-heavy intellectual world of the 1970s and 1980s, Marx, Freud, and Lévi-Strauss.

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

Calvary, for Brendan Gleeson’s acting, for the exploration of the impact of child abuse on rural Ireland, and for the bleak Sligo scenery.

Ludwig Wittgenstein. As an undergraduate I was very taken by the formal beauty of the Tractatus. Its opening sentences – ‘The world is all that is the case. The world is the totality of facts not of things’ – seemed bold and incisive. Now it seems silly.

And your favourite book?

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

What is your favourite film?

Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, the great Australian novel of migration.

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

Alfred Deakin, because he was charming and I have spent so much time imagining him. Kim Scott, so that he could challenge Deakin to think hard about how Indigenous people experienced the European invasion of their land and tell him about the richness of their culture. Sally Warhaft, to help keep the conversation going and to talk with about it afterwards.

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

Appropriate – as in ‘not appropriate’, which is applied to anything from wearing the wrong shoes on a hike to egregious sexual harassment. And bring back ‘disinterested’ to mean having no personal investment rather than as a synonym for ‘uninterested’. It might encourage more disinterested behaviour.

Who is your favourite author?

Elizabeth Gaskell. In Wives and Daughters, she is kind to the flirt Cynthia and gives her a second chance at happiness, rather than punishing her youthful foolishness with death or a miserable marriage.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Lotte in Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar, who forgives Goethe for the wrongs he did her youthful self in the name of the prerogatives of genius. 6 0 M AY 2 0 1 9

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Not having anything to say.

What do you think of the state of criticism? I don’t really think about it much at all.

And writers’ festivals?

A very good thing. As a writer, of course I want people to read my books, but I also want the ideas and the stories in them to circulate among people who will never read the book but who might come to a festival session.

Do you read reviews of your own books? I certainly do, though I don’t dwell on them.

Are artists valued in our society?

Yes. But not all of them, which is fine as we probably have more than we need, given that anyone can decide to try their hand.

What are you working on now?

I only finished From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage just before Christmas, so I’m having a bit of a rest and writing a few short pieces. I would like to write another big biography but need the right person to emerge.

Judith Brett is Emeritus Professor of Politics at La Trobe University. Her books include Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, and From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia got compulsory voting (Text Publishing, 2019), which is reviewed on page 11.

Arts

George Wesley Bishop, Māori rangatira (possible Te Iriaha), 1860s, Carte de visite (photograph via Michael Graham-Stewart collection, Auckland) The Māori Markings: Tā Moko exhibition was supported by the New Zealand High Commission and Toi Maori Aotearoa.

David Hansen on Māori Markings: Tā Moko Theatre

Mosquitoes

Ian Dickson

Music

MSO Gala

Elizabeth Kertesz

Film

Burning

Richard Leathem

ABR Arts is generously supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund and the ABR Patrons. Visit our website to read the full range of ABR Arts reviews. ARTS

to switch on the Large Hadron Collider in 2008, she has taken on the universe. The heart of Mosquitoes (which had its première at London’s National Theatre in 2017) is the relationship between two sisters: Alice, a cerebral analytical particle physicist who has spent the past eleven years working at the LHC; and Jenny, her chaotic, irrational sibling. As Jenny puts it, ‘I’m Forrest Gump and you’re the Wizard of fucking Oz.’ Kirkwood, writing as the Brexit disaster unfolded, has said one of the themes of the play is that ‘we can’t seem to separate fact from feeling’. Jenny’s susceptibility to fearmongering internet propositions ith impeccable timing, the week the National infuriates her sister and causes a family tragedy that Science Foundation published the first picreverberates through the play. ture of a black hole, Sydney Theatre CompaAs the moment of the switching on of the LHC apny opened its production of Mosquitoes, Lucy Kirkwood’s proaches, Alice has to deal with an increasingly fractious exploration of the gulf between supposedly rational family that includes her mother, Karen, an extremely scientific knowledge and the vagaries of the human distinguished scientist who feels that she was cheated heart. Kirkwood has never been afraid of confronting out of the Nobel Prize won by her husband, and whose big themes. In Chimerica (2013), she examined the relamind and body are rapidly decaying, and Alice’s troubled tionship between China and the United States, while in teenage son, Luke, who is making agonisingly tentative advances to his classmate Natalie. On the periphery is Alice’s partner, the kind but ineffectual Henri, whose inept attempts to calm the troubled waters only cause more strife. As this unruly mob circle, collide, and bounce off one other, a mysterious creature wanders unseen among them. This is Kirkwood’s most audacious creation, the Boson, a personification of the Higgs Boson particle that may also be someone who vanished several years ago. In two major soliloquies, he is at first the voice of doom and finally that of hope and renewal. In her usual way, Kirkwood is juggling an enormous number of themes and concepts: the power of fear and the power that can be gained from Jacqueline McKenzie and Mandy McElhinney in Mosquitoes (photograph by Daniel Boud) inducing fear in others: the scientific – how the The Children (2016) she explored the culpability of the universe began and how it might end, the results of boomer generation for the present fragile state of the colliding particles, dark holes, the nature of mass, and planet. So when she accepted a Sloane Foundation comthe position of women in the scientific hierarchy; the mission from the Manhattan Theatre Club to write a play power of love, which for the unsentimental Karen is with a scientific theme, she was not going to think small. far from the most potent force in the cosmos ‘down the By setting her play around the disastrous first attempt list after gravity and superglue’, but which Jenny proves

Mosquitoes

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Ian Dickson

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

can heal and redeem; and the difficulty for the young of navigating relationships as the internet generation. Occasionally, Kirkwood overplays her hand. The sudden introduction of Shiva and the Nataraja toward the play’s conclusion seems unnecessarily confounding for those who are unaware of the Indian government’s gift of a statue of the Lord of the Dance to the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, but mostly Kirkwood gets the balance between the personal and conceptual right. The STC has a good history with Kirkwood’s plays, and Jessica Arthur’s spare, restrained, elegant production continues that. She and designer Elizabeth Gadsby handle the width of the Drama Theatre’s problematic letter-box stage with aplomb. Together with Nick Schlieper’s lighting, she gives it a sense of depth much greater than it has. The cast is uniformly strong. Jenny is a gift of a role. Kirkwood can be a very funny writer. Jenny gets an almost unfair share of the best lines and Mandy McElhinney makes the most of them. McElhinney shows us the resentment that Jenny feels for the patronising attitude bordering on contempt with which the rest of the family treats her, but also Jenny’s aching need for their affection and approval. It is the chaotic Jenny who understands and empathises with her bewildered nephew Luke, and the scene in which she proves her love for him and his mother is true and moving. The buttoned-up Alice is a much less brash creature, but Jaqueline McKenzie knows how to hold the stage and hold her own. As the play progresses, we become aware of the contradictory dimensions of this highly strung woman. The supposedly fact-obsessed scientist is also a Quaker but one who, in a devastating scene, advocates the survival of the fittest. McKenzie melds these facets into a believable whole. Annie Byron is a formidable Karen, a bitter, selfobsessed monster who is unravelling before our eyes, but she cannot make credible the scene in which this woman, who needs a walker to move around, suddenly finds the strength to haul her solid daughter onto her lap and give her a maternal belting. Charles Wu’s Luke and Nikita Waldron’s Natalie make even those of us whose adolescence was back in the Pleistocene Era remember the horrors of that time of life, while Jason Chong’s Boson has the authority and mystery of a successful magician. Mosquitoes combines the epic sweep of Chimerica with the depth of characterisation of The Children and makes one fascinated to see what Kirkwood will come up with next. g

Māori Markings: Tā Moko

David Hansen

he traditional Western art museum is struggling a bit. Its former role as a repository of national values, as reified and aestheticised in paintings, sculpture, and the decorative arts, is today challenged, if not assaulted, on multiple fronts, ranging from economic, political, and social globalisation, to digital technology and commercial popular culture. Increasingly, art museums’ collection displays – and especially their exhibitions and other public programs – are concerned not so much with the presentation of canonical works in diachronic array, but with disruptive transnational and transhistorical discourses. In this they are simply reflecting and responding to the rightful demands of First Nations people, of the multiple cultures of immigrant communities and of the social-media generation to have their particular histories, concerns, and beliefs reflected in the public sphere. Hence the contemporary curatorial mashups: identity, experience, and the body rule, okay? At the National Gallery of Australia, in the dying weeks of an anachronistic Pre-Raphaelite blockbuster, comes a modest but exemplary exhibition that demonstrates that previous and present professional preoccupations and methodologies can coexist harmoniously and productively. Tā Moko is an exploration of Māori tattooing, an appropriate subject for the NGA given the geographical proximity and historical connections between Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand, and given that twenty per cent of the world’s Māori are residents of this country. It is also appropriate in celebrating the strengths of the consolidated national collection – both the NGA’s masterpiece historic carvings Te Rauparaha and Raharuhi Rukupo and the superb New Zealand holdings of the National Library’s Rex Nan Kivell collection. Exhibition curator Crispin Howarth effectively traces this unique cultural tradition through paintings, Mosquitoes is being performed by Sydney Theatre Company drawings, prints, photographs, and artefacts from Euroat the Drama House, Sydney Opera House, from 8 April to pean first contact to the present day, along the way 18 May 2019. Performance attended: April 12. situating the practice in relation to Aotearoa’s complex Ian Dickson has degrees in drama from Yale and the frontier and bicultural histories. University of New South Wales, and is the co-author At the time of contact, Māori were a sophisticatedly of the musical Better Known As Bee. verbal but non-literate people, and their image-making ARTS

was constrained by strict religious, socio-political, and material conventions. Traditional moko are far from aesthetic-cosmetic; each part of the face, each particular curve and whorl denotes some aspect of the wearer’s lineage and authority, life history, and achievements. Such is their specificity that tribal rangatira (chieftains) would sign documents (including the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi) with a flat, graphic rendering of their personal facial tattoo. However, beyond the skin, the marae, and the canoe, there was no indigenous tradition of face-making. Accordingly, much of what we know of the traditional practices of tā moko comes through the accounts and illustrations of Pākehā (British Europeans), beginning with Sydney Parkinson and William Hodges, the artists of James Cook’s first and second voyages. Capital and Christianity followed the tracks of the early explorers, and European and American commercial interests (mostly whalers) and missionaries (mostly Wesleyans) sailed into contact and conflict with the people of the Pacific in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In this period, not only did Pākehā-Māori like John Rutherford and Barnet Burns have themselves tattooed, but British artists like Augustus Earle and John Sylvester recorded the blue-curlicued faces of their native sitters with strict precision. The European fascination with Polynesian tattooing even led to a brisk trade in toi moko, the preserved heads of tribal chiefs, these artefacts most commonly being exchanged for weapons. Indeed, such were the imperial anxieties generated by the inter-tribal Musket Wars of the 1820s that Governor Ralph Darling of New South Wales was forced to act against the trans-Tasman arms trade by prohibiting the importation of toi moko into Sydney. By mid-century, the Māori community, keen to adapt and modernise, had begun to adopt European dress and manners and to eschew traditional body marking. There was a brief revival of traditional culture in the 1860s and 1870s under the aegis of the Māori King movement and the influence of the prophet Te Kooti, but the association of moko with these rebellions eventually led to its banning under the terms of the Tohunga Suppression Act of 1907. By last century, the image of facial moko had come to signify the Māori past, and the elder portraits of Charles Goldie and Gottfried Lindauer from the early 1900s are suffused by a nostalgic, even sentimental tone. Nevertheless, while abandoned for much of the twentieth century (other than by members of Māori criminal gangs), the practice has undergone a significant popular revival since the 1970s, coinciding not only with a more assertive Māori cultural nationalism, but with the developing global-millennial fashion for inking. Which brings us back to the present exhibition. At one level, Tā Moko simply seems to parse the new conventions of twenty-first-century museum display: in its vari-coloured walls – one side a deep green-blue, the end wall a Regency-Victorian red, and the other side 6 4 M AY 2 0 1 9

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a jasperware cobalt; in the way in which the traditional ‘150 cm. centre’ single-line hang has been replaced by pictures climbing in decorative patterns up the walls and out of range of close examination; and in the liberal proliferation of text. However, closer attention reveals these devices not as the reflex tics of curatorial fashion, but as conditioned by and appropriate to the objects and ideas at hand. The wall colours can be read as denoting respectively the sea of Polynesian history and myth, the ochre-red of the land, and the blue of the sky (or indeed of moko pigmentation). The staggered up-and-down array of nineteenth-century photographs recalls the layout of nineteenth-century carte-de-visite albums, while any potential problems of distance and focus are overcome by the fact that these large images are tight blow-ups from astonishingly crisp historic originals – all of which are, in any event, on display in nearby vitrines. The metrewide band of text that runs ceiling to floor down one wall is more than a decorative, semiotic supergraphic; it is in fact a glossary of relevant Māori words, immensely useful when reading the exhibition labels. Not incidentally, those labels (printed in both English and Māori) emphasise the sitter – whose lineage, authority, and achievements are written in their moko – rather than the artist. Even the extensive public program activity, including (as the NGA’s Katie Russell put it at the opening) ‘artists coming to do moko live on human beings in the gallery’ is not gratuitous, but deeply serious, as authoritative as it is informative. That Māori culture is alive and kicking (or rather haka-stomping) was patently apparent at the exhibition opening, with its flax-cape-and-moko-wearing dignitaries, but also in the participation of the Queanbeyanbased children’s culture club Tumanako. What was also made clear at the launch, held almost exactly one week after the Christchurch massacre, is that the formerly strict cultural demarcations of the imperial past are softening. A Ngunnawal-Ngambri Welcome to Country and a smoking ceremony accompanied by a yidaki drone segued smoothly into a Māori conch trumpet call and urgent monotonal chanting, as guests at the opening processed upstairs to the Orde Poynton Gallery. And beyond the conventions of mutual respect nowadays commonly offered between First Nations peoples, there was a broader humanity in evidence. After New Zealand High Commissioner Annette King led a minute’s silence in honour of Aotearoa’s Muslim dead, there followed a recitation by the entire audience of ‘The Christchurch Response’, with its rich, repeated refrain: ‘They are us.’ Which is probably as good a vision statement for the contemporary, global art museum as any. g Māori Markings: Tā Moko is on display at the National Gallery of Australia until 25 August 2019.

David Hansen is Associate Professor of Art History and Art Theory at the ANU.

MSO Gala

Elizabeth Kertesz

he Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s 2019 Season Opening Gala in March was billed as part of its curated ‘East Meets West’ experience, and featured violinist Lü Siqing, with whom the orchestra toured China in 2018. The program reveals that what constitutes East or West depends very much on the perspective of the observer, in its juxtaposition of the music of central Europe with two distinct manifestations of Russianness. Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 formed the concert’s heart, framed by Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances from the opera Prince Igor, complete with the MSO Chorus and Tchaikovsky’s beloved Symphony No. 6, nicknamed the ‘Pathétique’. Borodin and Tchaikovsky often find themselves (somewhat too schematically) placed on opposite sides of a divide between the nationalist composers of the ‘Five’, which included Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov, and ‘Europeanised’ composers like Tchaikovsky. This internal East–West duality is encapsulated in the contrast between the ‘Asiatic’ orientalism of the Polovtsian Dances, by turns voluptuous (feminine) and barbarous (masculine), and Tchaikovsky’s interpretation of the central genre of the Western art tradition. The Polovtsian Dances are an effective curtain-raiser, and their vibrant celebration of Russian exoticism clearly enthused the audience in Hamer Hall. The MSO may have first performed them in 1940, but this was surely in the wake of their inclusion in each of the three Australian tours of the Ballets Russes company in the late 1930s. The chorus sang confidently throughout, and although the orchestra experienced some initial problems with ensemble, Andrew Davis’s brisk approach ensured seamless transitions and drew splendid playing from the lead woodwinds in the virtuosic solos. Despite the undeniable energy and goodwill of the performance as a whole, my overall impression was of a fluid and at times even jolly reading, rather than an evocation of the sensual mystery and pulsating savagery of the Polovtsian inhabitants of Borodin’s ‘East’. The ensemble shrank back to the proportions of a classical orchestra for our return to the West in Bruch’s attractive Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, offering a beautiful and consistent reading in support of Lü Siqing’s somewhat quixotic performance of the violin solo. Bruch, a German Romantic classicist, composed this deeply expressive concerto in the 1860s. Playing the 1699 Stradivari instrument ‘Miss Crespi’, Lü Siqing achieved considerable beauty of sound in the lyrical and pianissimo passages of the second movement (which was taken at a very slow Adagio). His approach to the virtuoso bravura writing, however, followed the trend of later twentiethcentury violinists, approaching the double stops with an aggressive attack that seems unsuited to the work’s overall aesthetic, and that contrasted with the stylistic integrity of

Davis’s interpretation. Bruch himself favoured the Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate, whose controlled rubato and effortless virtuosity was influenced by the Franco-Belgian school of violin performance. The audience responded warmly to Lü Siqing’s performance, and were rewarded with a showman-like rendition of Vittorio Monti’s Csárdás, eschewing the clichéd inflections associated with the Csárdás style. Excoriated by his nationalist peers for sentimental emotionalism, Tchaikovsky’s final symphony has been pigeonholed as tragic by the reading of his biography into its interpretation, and fuelled by his sudden death soon afterwards. The subtitle ‘Pathétique’ (applied only after the première) comes from a Russian term better rendered in English as ‘passionate’, or ‘suffering’. The work’s influence is such that the music – deservedly popular – was both literally reproduced and generally evoked in golden-age cinema, its sweeping lyricism modelling the soundscape of 1940s Hollywood melodramas, like Max Steiner’s score to Now, Voyager (1942), while the joyous textures of the third movement are intimated in Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s exuberant underscoring of Robin Hood’s adventures in the 1938 Errol Flynn swashbuckler The Adventures of Robin Hood. Both the orchestra and Davis, opening his final season as the MSO’s chief conductor, clearly enjoyed playing the symphony, their rapport evident in a performance of complete conviction. The clarity and quiet intensity of the opening Adagio were marred by a chorus of coughs and sneezes from the audience, but this could not hide magnificent playing from the lower strings, the burnished tone from the brass, and the nicely judged Romantic swells. Davis’s subtle use of rubato and astute control of the stormy development section provided a satisfying reading of the first movement. Although the steady pace of the Allegro con grazia rendered the second movement a little earthbound, the 5/4 waltz flowed without awkwardness, achieving a pleasing lilt in the reprise. The third movement opened with Mendelssohnian sprightliness, and after fluid dialogue between the instrumental groups, heightening suspense and drama led into a rollicking final section that brought the audience to the brink of applause, only averted by Davis’s injunction before the symphony. A suspended breath separated this delight from the richly expressive string textures of the Adagio lamentoso, in a performance marked by potent use of silence. Davis combined passion with dynamic forward motion to avoid the lugubrious longueurs that sometimes weigh down interpretations of this celebrated movement. The audience was held rapt as the last notes died away into an extraordinarily long silence, finally broken by sustained and heartfelt applause. g The Season Opening Gala was performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in Hamer Hall, Arts Centre Melbourne: 16 March 2019. (Longer version online)

Elizabeth Kertesz is a Research Fellow at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne. ARTS

West Side Story

Peter Tregear

ome sixty-two years after its Broadway première, Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins’s musical and geographical updating of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet continues to pack a powerful dramatic punch. While not without its weaknesses, such as the reliance on now-dated street slang and ethnic stereotypes, West Side Story remains a masterful fusion of musical and dramatic elements set to a score of operatic intensity. The work indeed has the distinction (albeit an increasingly less rare one at Opera Australia under the artistic direction of Lyndon Terracini) of finding a place in the repertoire of both opera house and music theatre. Another standout feature is the unprecedentedly high level of dance elements integrated into its plot. West Side Story gives its dancing ensemble named, individualised, roles, and the dance sequences that unfold are central, not incidental, to the storytelling and overall character of the work. The success of these elements is also grounded ultimately in Bernstein’s score, and in particular his command of popular and jazz musical idioms (mixed in with what he had learned from his close familiarity with the music of Beethoven, Stravinsky, Ravel, and Mahler). The suite of music that Bernstein eventually drew from West Side Story has now become a staple orchestral work in its own right. This particular production is the result of a partnership between Opera Australia and GWB Entertainment and forms part of a multi-year international tour by German-based musical events company BB Promotions to mark the show’s sixtieth anniversary. The sets by Paul Gallis, costumes by Renate Schmitzer, and lighting by Peter Halbsgut are, appropriately, all world-class. They, along with the polished work of choreographer and director Joey McKneely, pay homage not only to the original Broadway production and its (now historical) New York setting but also to the 1961 film in all its Technicolor glory. The thirty-one-piece orchestra is drawn from members of Orchestra Victoria. Under director Donald Chan it delivers Bernstein’s score with accuracy and a good deal of precision, though the overall effect was constrained by some unusually fast tempi and by the limited dynamic range that general amplification inevitably conveys. Another casualty, perhaps, of both, was that ‘swing’ of the Latin groove in numbers like ‘A Boy Like That’ was not as entrancing as it should have been. While that did seem a missed opportunity, it was, ironically, the belief that the stage representations of Puerto Rican life in West Side Story must also be as ‘authentic’ as possible that led to a controversy around Opera Australia’s casting of a non-Latinx singer (Sophie Salvesani) as Maria. But as the Puerto Rican scholar

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Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz has elsewhere noted, the show ultimately constructs its stylised Puerto Rican identity within the confines of a theatrical genre in which ‘references to reality are ... mediated at best’. Or to put it another way, music theatre has never really been interested in achieving cinematic realism. Thus, to seek to condemn the work, or the casting, on such a basis is to miss the point of the medium entirely (as I have argued elsewhere in ABR). Music theatre does, however, demand exceptional vocal, dramatic, and physical skill, and here the production was a bit of a curate’s egg. Standout principles were Chloé Zuel as a show-stealing Anita, Lyndon Watts as Bernardo, and Salvesani’s vocally assured Maria. Todd Jacobsson as Tony, however, lacked the requisite vocal dexterity and security of pitch to deliver the dramatic range required in and across numbers like ‘Something’s Coming’ and ‘One Hand, One Heart’. Noah Mullins’s Riff was more impressive and assured vocally, but in the end both lead male characters ultimately couldn’t quite deliver the kind of the compelling charismatic stage presence demanded by their characters. On the other hand, despite a rather tentative opening number (those iconic ‘clicks’, for instance, were hard to hear), and notwithstanding some lack of clarity and vocal precision from the men in particular, the hard-working ensemble impressed; ‘America’ was a particular highlight (as indeed it should be). This was just as well, because a good deal of West Side Story’s ultimate dramatic power resides in the effectiveness of these ensemble scenes. The very medium of dance, the fact that individuals from the same social group are made to move in step with each other, but also with apparent spontaneity, enables the work to project more mythic (rather than ‘merely’ ethnographic) representations of its rival, inner-urban communities. It also helps to draw our attention to the homosocial and homoerotic undertones of this kind of adolescent gang life. And the communal force of dance is surely one reason why the simulated rape of Anita by the Jets remains so shocking – the culpability for it must be shared (here, even the gaze of the audience feels complicit). Against this, the passionate love that Tony and Maria have for one another also enacts its own kind of violence; it is consummated at a terrible cost both to themselves and to those they profess to care for. As Maria sings to Anita close to the show’s second terrible denouement, ‘When love comes so strong / There is no right or wrong.’ The ultimate message of the work, should we need to look for one, is perhaps therefore not a simplistic ‘love conquers all’ but rather the fact that we all long to find ‘a new way of living … Somehow, Someday, Somewhere.’ g West Side Story was performed by Opera Australia at Arts Centre Melbourne, State Theatre, in April 2019.

Peter Tregear is a Principal Fellow of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music.

Burning

that could easily be read as homoerotic. Jong-su even questions Hae-mi as to why someone as worldly as Ben would be interested in her. She shows no concern, believing that being a simple shop girl is what he finds so charming. Conversationally, she is out of her depth with the two men, apanese author Haruki Murakami may be one of the at one point asking the meaning of the word ‘metaphor’. Later Ben gives Jong-su a killer of a metaphor when he’s most revered authors alive, but his work is seldom adapted for the screen, perhaps because the internal- describing the hobby that gives the film its title. We, along ised nature of his narratives doesn’t leap out as being with Jong-su, don’t initially take in the real meaning of what easily translated to film. Until now, only Norwegian Wood he says, but his words linger for the rest of the film and long (2010), an atypical Murakami novel, has seen wide exposure. after it has ended. We contemplate the chill of his dispasFinally, the essence of Murakami has come to life on the sionate delivery and the implications of his words. The exchange comes at the end of a remarkable exbig screen with Burning, an adaptation of the short story ‘Barn Burning’. It captures the distinctive spirit of his best tended scene that takes place in front of Jong-su’s family work and features many of his recurring themes: a reclusive farm. The three protagonists have shared a joint listening to central character; a chance encounter; unrequited love; Miles Davis on Ben’s car stereo. Then, for the fourth time in the film, Hae-mi dances. With possibly even an imaginary cat. each dance she reveals more of The story has been transherself, and on this occasion her planted to South Korea. Jong-su enraptured, topless reverie in the (Yoo Ah-in), a budding writer fading light is breathtaking. in his early twenties, is gathIt is a moment that enering names for a petition to capsulates the aural and vifree his father, who has been sual beauty of Burning. Hong imprisoned for assaulting a Kyung-pyo’s widescreen lensing police officer. Early in the film, is a joy to behold. You can almost Jong-su meets Hae-mi ( Jun feel the cold from the blueJong-seo), an old school friend. hued exteriors. Elsewhere, the Jong-su’s awkwardness is made camera glides elegantly through more acute because he fails to Ben’s pristinely chic apartrecognise Hae-mi. She puts this Yoo Ah-in as Jong-su, Jun Jong-seo as Hae-mi, and Steven ment, accentuating the condown to the fact that she’s had Yeun as Ben in Burning (photograph via Palace Films) trast with the cluttered chaos cosmetic surgery. It’s enough to of Hae-mi’s poky flat and the dank have us doubting that the two really know each other, a doubt reinforced later when Hae- confines of Jong-su’s farm. Mowg’s original score is an equally mi recalls another incident that Jong-su doesn’t remember. valuable asset, evoking a palpable sense of mounting dread. All three actors are quite perfect. We learn so Hae-mi is about to go to Kenya on holiday. They make love before she leaves and Jong-su spends the ensuing weeks much about their characters from the difference in forming an attachment to her. His visits to her cramped the way each one moves and the physical chemistry apartment become an opportunity to revel in the memory between them. Yeun walks a fine line between silky charm of that one afternoon of passion between them. Any chance and cold-bloodedness that would be the envy of any Bond of building on their physical encounter comes to an abrupt villain, Jong-seo is utterly beguiling in a very physical role, end when Hae-mi returns to Seoul with Ben (Steven Yeun). while Ah-in carries the emotional weight of the film, emIt’s obvious that the slightly older Ben is more charismatic, bodying a young man so unsure of every situation he finds himself in. It is a mesmerising study of human implosion. successful, and confident than Jong-su. Director Lee Chang-dong co-wrote the screenplay with Despite the anticipated romance coming to a halt, a deeper friendship develops between Jong-su and Hae-mi. Oh Jung-mi. They have wisely eschewed a voiceover, often Jong-su becomes a regular third wheel in the relationship a blight in film adaptations that doggedly try to capture between Hae-mi and Ben. This leads to another Murakami as much of a book’s content as possible. The beauty of trademark. While there is often a sexual frankness between Chang-dong’s Burning is that he lets the visuals speak for men and women in his works, the interplay between two themselves, keeping a sense of mystery about Murakami’s men is often the most complex dynamic. And so it is here. internalised characters. The result is more eloquent than Jong-su desires Hae-mi, but he is fascinated by and envi- words could ever be. g ous of Ben’s urbanity. He describes Ben as a Jay Gatsby, Burning (Palace Films) 148 minutes, directed by Lee Chang-dong. a young man who has acquired wealth in a mysterious In cinemas 18 April 2019. (Longer version online) way and who doesn’t work, while Jong-su toils away on a farm. He ruefully remarks that Korea is full of Gatsbys. Richard Leathem is the producer and presenter of Film There is an increasing intensity between the two men Scores on 3MBS FM.

Richard Leathem

ARTS

From the ABR Archive

Nam Le’s short story collection The Boat was published by Hamish Hamilton. Louise Swinn reviewed it in the July–August 2008 issue of ABR.

t a time when some fiction writers are busy defending their right to incorporate autobiographical elements, and some non-fiction writers are being charged with fabrication, it seems timely of Nam Le to begin his collection of stories with one that plays with notions of authenticity in literature. The narrator of ‘Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice’, ‘Nam Le’, is a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, as was the author. Like Nam Le, he has worked as a lawyer. This story has already been widely anthologised and it is easy to see why; it is clever and comical, evocative and moving – not to mention deeply intriguing. But this is not a collection whose chief concern is the creation of stories. The seven inventive narratives that comprise The Boat take us from Colombian slums to the South China Sea, from Hiroshima to New York, from Iowa to the Australian coast. Different cultures are explored in surprising ways. First books can sometimes read like stylistic impersonations of other authors, but in The Boat, Nam Le has already carved out his own style. He is technically inventive throughout, creating and inhabiting very different worlds. It is immediately evident that Nam Le is in total command of these worlds. Through different points of view we encounter a teenage boy, a young girl, an older man, a young woman, and a young man. The voices are as believable as they are intriguing and various. In the opening story, ‘Nam Le’ is being encouraged by his peers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to write about Vietnam. ‘Ethnic literature’s hot,’ they tell him. When a friend cynically suggests, ‘as long as there’s an interesting image or metaphor once in every this much text’, Le is setting the bar for himself, ensuring that the reader knows he is aware of exactly what kinds of criticisms can follow. Le is not going to take the easy way out. There are no lazy metaphors or stray images; while he is adept at finding the perfect phrase, he never simply resorts to phrase-making for its own sake. At the same time, the story manages to be a father–son tale, while exploring family ties and the tragedies that can lie within personal histories. It is a suitably strong opener. ‘Cartagena’, set in Colombia, shows us precisely what is at stake for a fourteen-year-old contract killer. Where the endings of short stories can so often be their downfall – too tidily rounded off, or merely truncated – ‘Cartagena’ exemplifies the perfect ending. If stories are music, the beat carries just as long as it needs to, and fades to a close. 6 8 M AY 2 0 1 9

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‘Meeting Elise’ is very different. In New York, a middle-aged painter, mourning his dead lover, is preparing to meet his eighteen-year-old daughter, a cello prodigy about to make her début at Carnegie Hall. Le’s confidence with language continues to be on display: ‘I don’t realise until I’m a little ways down Fifth. It’s the height of fall. I turn around. Central Park is in bloom, spastic with colour – red, orange, green, yellow, purple, brown, gold.’ Then comes ‘Halflead Bay’, which, at almost eighty pages, is a novella in itself. This length suits Le’s style. With his mother’s health fading through the grips of multiple sclerosis, a teenager is trying to prepare for a big football game, to negotiate his love life and to deal with his kid brother. The closing scene is a fight so tightly wrought, so evenly paced, that one feels each punch. A lesser writer would have shied away, but Le confronts the scene head-on, and the result is mesmerising. Reading becomes catharsis. Here is a story not easily forgotten. Next, in ‘Hiroshima’, without an authorial missing of a beat, a little girl hungrily awaits peace in a camp just before the fall of the atomic bomb. The language, suitably pared back and straightforward, only adds to the eerie knowing that evil looms: ‘Mrs Tamura does not sing that night. I lie on my back. Tomiko is on my left and Yukiyo is on my right. Everywhere there is the sound of sniffing.’ ‘Tehran Calling’ is an unwaveringly original suspense story about war and a friendship between two women. It is followed by the final story, ‘The Boat’, about a Vietnamese refugee in a boat carrying twice its capacity, surrounded by other refugees, and sickness, and storms. It is the harrowing highlight in a book full of them. Nam Le was born in Vietnam, moved to Australia, and currently lives in the United States, where longer short stories enjoy a greater vogue than they do here. Even the shortest of these stories far exceeds the length restrictions on most Australian short story competitions. Individually, the stories are vibrant, striking, alive; but collecting them has magnified their individual power. Linear reading of this compilation reinforces the sense that the author has compassion for his subjects, and this, in turn, draws out the compassion of the reader. It takes courage to expose the empathy that lies at the heart of these stories. Reading The Boat, life itself is wholly experienced in the text. It serves as a powerful reminder that this is how we can live – that fiction, in the end, offers an authentic way to know other people. g

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