Summer book reviews

by Mark Laurie of South Seas Books, Port Elliot.

Willowman

by Inga Simpson

Published by Hachette Australia

ISBN 9780733634550

$32.99

Inga Simpson has outed herself as a cricket tragic. With this new novel, she will endear herself to the many others of her kind who walk among us, particularly those drawn to the game’s more traditional and ‘pure’ manifestations or who look wistfully back to the days when education ranked cricket training and its attendant moral discipline more highly than (other) intellectual pursuits. Naturally, and as the title suggests, this acclaimed doctor of nature writing has also given considerable attention to the white willow trees so vital to cricket’s nuances and style.

Set at the turn of this newest century, lightly interwoven twin narratives follow Allan Reader, maintaining his family’s traditional bat-making business in a new home in Australia, and Todd Harrow, a talented young player seeking cricket’s highest playing honours. With professional success and satisfaction, they each find themselves dealing with stresses placed on their family lives by their dedication. There’s plenty of cricket action and Simpson portrays the highs and lows, rewards and sacrifices of the pared-back life of the professional sportsman. The novel moves to a higher gear when exploring the game’s social contexts, its meanings on the cusp of true professionalism for women and the introduction of its most attenuated, T20 format. What we value does indeed reveal who we are. However, it’s in the distillation of the patience and craftsmanship lying at cricket’s heart, its positioning as a kind of ‘Zen and the art of cricket’ if you like, when Willowman shines most brightly.

Marlo

by Jay Carmichael

Published by Scribe Publications

ISBN 9781925713695

$24.99

This short novel explores what it meant to be a homosexual man in mid-century Australia, in a small way seeking to redress a largely undocumented history and profoundly misunderstood group. Echoing the revelations associated with investigations into Dr George Duncan’s murder in Adelaide, and a long way away from Priscilla’s desert, it portrays lives forced into the shadows by surveillance, fear, victimisation and silencing. At the time, homosexuality was considered a pathological condition and its victims portrayed as either tragic or corrupting figures.

Christopher moves from Marlo to Melbourne seeking the anonymity of the city and to escape the gaze of his father, a man ‘from a generation who’d absorbed war and the Depression into their souls and were left speechless’, unable to communicate with their families. Reflecting the societal fears and prejudices of the day, the city proves to be no safe haven. Struggling with his identity under the relentless consciousness of disapproving eyes, their revulsion mirrored by his own shame, Christopher nevertheless finds love in these censorious times. Looking back from 2022, it may be startling to note the temporal proximity of the attitudes and constraints exhibited by the novel. However, for those readers old enough to remember anything of the last century, the need for some to ‘go, quiet, to [their] days, before the world was clear-eyed’ is all too familiar, recognisable and real.