BOOKS & WORDS
Summer book reviews by Mark Laurie of South Seas Books, Port Elliot domestic life. He demonstrates that amidst all of the craft and curated deception of the world he describes, it is the actual community of personal relations and their networks of loyalties and betrayals which define identity and place. Ultimately, this must prevail over the imagined community of the nation state and all of its petty jostlings.
of such luminaries as Edward Lear, Spike Milligan, Lewis Carroll, Peter Cook, Monty Python, Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers and Shaun Micallef, he examines what makes us laugh and why. This may well vary with personality, societal mores and time, but our desire for silliness, to connect ‘with childhood, madness and the primitive’ in that space between anarchy and normalcy, is timeless and continuing. There must always be a place for those who wish to join the Order of the Occult Hand, promenade with their pet lobster in the garden, or celebrate having a face resembling a badger. To quote G.K. Chesterton, this book is an ‘exuberant capering round a discovered truth’ much like a giant inflatable Trump baby buffeted by a strong breeze.
Agent Running in the Field by John le Carré
Published by Viking (Penguin Books) ISBN 9780241401217 $32.99 The master storyteller brings his finely developed clandestine world into the age of Brexit, climate change, Putin and Trump, its protagonists weaving their duplicitous craft within the divisions, contradictions and uncertainties of the current age. Reprieved from expected redundancy, veteran spy Nat is tasked with transforming a small, sidelined spy centre in London to run an unprepossessing assortment of Russian agents. At the same time, his longestablished badminton supremacy at the local club is challenged by Ed, an ill-at-ease and introspective man half his age given to railing at modern-day ills. Convergence between his private and professional lives forces Nat to confront the past, ringing in his ‘memory’s ear’ and the effects it has wrought on him, recognising that he may be ‘at a loss to know the difference between what he feels and is pretending to feel.’ le Carré is as watchful as his charges, his great gift the power to mix the oil of espionage with the water of ordinary 104
Silliness: A Serious History by Peter Timms Published by Wakefield Press ISBN 97817433056455 $24.95 An engaging exploration of the philosophy, history and categories of human absurdity, demonstrating our need for freedom from the tyranny of rationalism and an antidote to respectability and conformity. Peter Timms draws forth a host of jesters, pranksters, comedians and eccentrics who have plumbed the ridiculous through the ages, exploring manifestations through word play, physical comedy, bizarre and eccentric behaviour within performance, writing, music and film, cataloguing creativity’s offbeat edges. From Aristophanes through to Arrested Development, linked by the efforts
Paris Savages by Katherine Johnson Published by Ventura Press ISBN 9781925384703 $32.99 A fictional reimagining of the journey of three Indigenous Australians from Fraser Island to be exhibited and studied in Europe in the late 1800s. Drawing from extensive research conducted in Australia, Germany
