Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life: an extraordinary, utterly absorbing, yet painful read.

Normally I read all Booker shortlisted titles but this year that was a confronting challenge. A Little Life came highly recommended, with heaps of enthusiastic reviews, but it was 720 dense pages long.

For the last two weeks however I've been completely absorbed in it, night and day. It's easily on a level with Ferrante when it comes to obsession.

It's basically a novel of abuse, of trauma and incredible pain. It's viscerally powerful and confronting and at the same time exquisitely good.

A word of warning - it's not for the faint hearted. The author grabs you by the back of the neck and thrusts your head into a toilet bowl of depravity. You need a strong stomach. It's a Dickensian horror story for our time that I'm sure not even Dickens could bring himself to write.

It's beautifully written in smooth and lucid prose, although off-putting at times in its lugubrious and dawdling style. It's frequently wordy and gets bogged down in too much detail which irritates - slabs of prose for dozens of pages without a break. (There is an unwritten protocol governing this sort of thing in fiction. Short chapters or frequent breaks are psychologically necessary. Yanagihara ignores this).

Basically the novel is the story of Jude, a child abandoned at birth and brought up in an orphanage run by a religious order. We are all too familiar these days with what inevitably goes on in these dark and sinful places. The boy is good-looking and highly intelligent.

Slowly, as the novel progresses on its meandering way through the lives and careers of his close friends from college onwards, Jude's awful story is revealed. Yanagihara teases, entices, diverts to other stories, but she never forgets, even hundreds of pages later, to tie up the loose ends. That is so satisfying.

The book is an excellent portrayal of urban, professional, upper middle class US society, almost a sociological analysis of a privileged elite's social, economic and working lives - their country properties, their luscious apartments with expensive art adorning the walls, their constant holidays in foreign parts, their apartments in London and Rome, their theatre, opera and music, their so New York wealthy lifestyles.

It's a celebration of deep friendship and love. But such care for Jude is never enough to bury, much less eliminate, his pain. I doubt there's been any character in literature who's been shown such love and support, but to no avail. Were his years with Willem, his loving and long-term partner, totally non-salvific? The author's intricate dissection of the rich and varied emotions at play in the Jude/Willem relationship is breathtaking. Jude is a cutter. He knows it's bad, but he's desperate to ease his interior pain, and the fact it causes him such grief, including serious infections, is a perversity he can do nothing about. Neither can Willem. It's just so tragic and sad.

The novel has weaknesses, and some critics have have ripped into it for its 'sentimentality' and 'contrivance' (See Daniel Mendelsohn's controversial review in the New York Review of Books here).

There are some really annoying tics in the writing. For example the main characters are constantly saying 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry' to each other. Over a huge 720 page book which must have taken a long time to write one can forgive the author for not noticing this. But the editor? And the constant use of the expression 'off of' is annoying. However I did enjoy the narrative device of using a loose 'he' to deliberately destabilise the reader. It adds a surprising, intriguing and distancing edge to the narrative, seamlessly becoming a character's reflections rather than an authorial telling, and the reader is aware of being on uncertain ground. 

And it is often so fucking yuppie it is unbelievable. Here is a classic passage: 'They've seen very little of their friends for months now: JB has been on a fellowship in Italy for the past six months, and Malcolm and Sophie have been so busy with the construction of a new ceramics museum in Shanghai that the last time they saw them all was in April, in Paris - he was filming there, and Jude had come in from London, where he was working, and JB in from Rome, and Malcolm and Sophie had laid over for a couple of days on their way back to New York.' (609)

It verges on melodrama. They are all so clever, rich, handsome and successful. Even Jude, always in mental and physical pain, is one of New York's most brilliant and successful litigators.

Nevertheless, all these little negatives are entirely tolerable in a story of such substance and power. I can enthusiastically recommend this book.

The Marvellous A.A. Gill's Pour Me

If you're not familiar with A.A. Gill's restaurant and travel reviews then read this. Its sizzling style and panache defines the man, easily one of the world's finest journalists/critics in my humble opinion*.

His latest book, Pour Me, is the best autobiography I've read in many years, if not ever. It is a classic.

He was born into a loving family with libertarian, dissenting, argumentative parents. He was diagnosed as dyslexic when not much was known about the condition, so was sent to a 'special' boarding school (which was nothing of the sort). He survived the experience by indulgence - in books, music, protests, sex, drink and drugs, and 'good mates'.

He suffered severe alcoholism throughout his twenties. The book is unflinching in describing his descent into that hopeless, degrading, personal terror. It's an enlightening treatise on the psychology of addiction. 

Read this memoir for the exquisite writing, and the wit that sparkles on every page ('...my oldest friend Christopher...we have lunch every two or three years and consequently have remained close'. p101).

His story reminded me of the marvellous and revelatory Patrick Melrose novels by fellow English writer Edward St Aubyn. They share similar lacerating, thoroughly invigorating prose styles. 

Pour Me's narrative keeps spinning off into memories, reveries and meditations on art, music, histories, teachers, doctors, other people of influence, painters (including a lovely few pages on Turner and his virtual invention of the colour yellow), and editors and cooks ('One of the great misconceptions about dinner is that nice people make good food. That there is a soul in honest, loving dishes which are passed from the hand of the chef to the mouth of a grateful diner; that you could trust a good cook. But it's almost exactly the opposite. Great food is cooked by twisted, miserable, depressive, cruel, abused and abusive, needy, compromised and shamed people. p162).

The final chapters of the book range over his career in journalism in the heyday of newspapers and features. It's a celebration of the craft, and of editors and photographers. 

I can thoroughly recommend this wonderful book.


*This from the blurb: 'A.A. Gill is the author of A.A. Gill is Away, The Angry Island, Previous Convictions, Table Talk, Paper View, A.A. Gill is Further Away, and Golden Door, as well as two novels. He is the TV and restaurant critic and regular features writer for the Sunday Times, columnist for Esquire, and contributor to the Australian Gourmet Traveller.

Some light reads for the holidays

Irish writer Paul Murray's The Mark and the Void I just had to read because his earlier novel Skippy Dies was just so damn good. In fact it was brilliant. The guy writes with flourish and his characters are real and rounded and utterly engaging.

This one takes a bit of time to get into. By page 100 you may still be tempted to bail. It wasn't very funny and I  couldn't decide whether it was serious or satirical. Murray just wasn't striking the right note.

But then it got very interesting. The Irish, who were so full of themselves prior to the collapse, were the target and their severe economic troubles during the GFC the context. The characters work for a major Irish bank and the drama of their working lives, including the shameless bosses, the losers, the outright wankers, the government regulators, the shameful deals, scams and delusions - it's all there in colourful detail.

The main character Claude is a young, bright guy with integrity and aspirations and he yearns for a love life too. 

It all comes together delightfully in the end. And I was so glad I persevered. 

This was a bestseller in France in 2013 and was shortlisted for France's prestigious, Booker-equivalent, Prix Goncourt. The English translation has just been released.

God knows why this rather pedestrian, populist piece of nonsense would be so highly regarded. But that's France for you.

It's very French in its dynamics. It's the story of a Muslim and a Jew. Two young men share a struggle to be accepted and to succeed in their careers and reach the highest social circles. The Muslim is forced to reinvent himself and deny his Muslim origins. Moving to America he adopts the identity of his Jewish 'friend'.

It's ridiculously melodramatic and overripe at every turn. Of course the women in their lives, sexual objects, are supremely beautiful and very rich. And the men themselves very handsome and they ascend to the heights of power. 

This is cliche central. Don't bother.

The third novel in J.K.Rowling's 'Robert Galbraith' series is easily the best of the three, and you certainly don't need to have read the previous two. 

It has the same pattern: the cops pursue the wrong suspect, and our PI hero Cormoran Strike the right one.

What makes the series absorbing in my view is the premarital relationship drama between Robin, Strike's admin assistant, and her upper class, rather arrogant, toffy, banker and wanker fiance Matthew.

And the developing relationship between Robin and Strike. Rowling does this side of things supremely well. 

As for the crime stuff you do need a strong stomach. Rowling seems to love unspeakable brutality and viciousness in her evil men. She gets really low and relentless, shoving your face in their abysmal atrocities. 

As usual however the ending is a fizzer, with zero emotional impact. This it shares with its two predecessors.

The day after I'd finished it I couldn't remember how it ended or who was the culprit. The only thing that stuck with me and that will suck me in to reading the fourth in the series were the absorbing relationship dramas. 

Rebus is back thank god. Holidays coming up after all. 

Even Dogs in the Wild is good but far from Rankin's best. He seems to have decided to shove all his previous main characters, both goodies and baddies, into the one novel and it simply doesn't work. It's like having Superman and Batman in the one comic. Wha..?

John Rebus and Malcom Fox cosing up to each other? Oh please. We end up two distinct strands in the narrative, and it's all forced.

I think Rankin is getting sentimental. He loves his characters too much. The dialogue is often excruciatingly twee.


Though it's well enough plotted and the ending is, as usual for Rankin, highly satisfactory (unlike Rowling), this one's for the aficionados only. 

Australian crime novelist Garry Disher's last book Bitter Wash Road was simply superb. I raved about it here.

But this one, another in his Wyatt series, is a major disappointment. It's a very ordinary and unexciting piece of work.

It's all guns, murders and low lifes in Noosa, with no suspense or any attempt at larger meanings. And, with possibly one exception, none of the characters are really brought to life or are in any way engaging.

Disher also commits a classic mistake - kill off characters you cant be bothered to involve in a more satisfying resolution.

So forget this totally forgettable effort.

Three wonderful books by Charlotte Wood, Tom McCarthy and Robert Harris

This new novel from the highly regarded Australian author Charlotte Wood is both fascinating and frustrating in equal parts, but nevertheless a compelling read.

A group of ten young women who in one way or another have recently featured in the media through unfortunate sexual experiences have been drugged, kidnapped and sent to an isolated, abandoned rural property in outback Australia where they are imprisoned and cruelly treated by two men.

The book is well written, some passages exquisitely so, and the narrative superbly structured. But I found it pretty weak imaginatively. It lacks the gut-wrenching emotional power of far better prisoner narratives - Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North being the touchstone.

The women never talk of escaping. In fact they barely talk to each other at all. No ideas or theories are tossed around as to why they are being held or by whom, and no plots hatched.

As the months and seasons pass each woman in her own way is sent to the edge of insanity. But there's no evidence of any visceral anger at their captivity.

In a way they are complicit in their own victimhood. They internalise their plight, indulging in fantasies, obsessions and playthings. They retreat into themselves. They could organise to kill their captors, whose only weapons are sticks after all, and escape to freedom, but they don't. Some of them do form close relationships with each other which are sustaining and supportive, and two of the women are strong and independent. The other eight are weak, 'girly' and rather pathetic. Which may well be Wood's main point. 

Presumably the prison is an allegory of their life in the real male dominated world. They often reflect on their unfortunate relationships with men prior to their kidnapping - 'in his every moment with her, his every act, it was his own self he saw and coldly worshipped' - but we're only given glimpses and hints. The prison camp is meant to convey the substance. 

Here's where the reader is, however, left entirely frustrated. If this is an essay on misogyny its premise lacks credibility. But maybe Wood is far more sophisticated than the puff piece boosters on the cover and prelims, great male and female writers all of them*. 

It's a question as to whether this book chooses to represent misogyny at all, or whether it's just a meditation on what it is to be female.

*Malcolm Knox, Ashley Hay, Joan London, Tegan Bennett Daylight, Clementine Ford, Christos Tsiolkas.

I'd not read Tom McCarthy before so when his new novel Satin Island was shortlisted for this year's Booker I took the opportunity and am so glad I did.

(The actual Booker winner, Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, I'm 60 pages into and finding the Jamaican patois tough going. It's like reading a set text - you're not really reading it for pleasure).  

Satin Island has a fascinating corporate premise at its core: a brilliant anthropologist is hired by an elite London-based consultancy company to read the contemporary zeitgeist and uncover patterns and theories to construct a unified theory of the whole that will revolutionise its offerings and bring it glorious success.

'U', as he's known, searches for meaning in the rich kaleidoscope of reality to construct this magic concoction. But he's constantly encountering and being fascinated by little dissonances in our social fabric, be they accidents, glitches and illogicalities - like oil spills, parachute failures, cancer cells, video buffering, torture, etc.    

But he keeps at it, encouraged by his boss, the mysterious Peyman, who is nothing if not insane. U's presentations at future-oriented conferences are unmitigated tripe, but he's ceaselessly celebrated by his corporate audiences.

As the dissonances attest a satisfying and meaningful whole is a baseless proposition. 

Ironically an air of meaninglessness, rather than meaning, begins to surface. An overwhelming sense of the unfathomable and the disjointed bombards our senses and unravels our comfortable webs of comprehension. 

Unsettling echoes of tragedies and disasters seep into the narrative. 

The final chapter is superb. U waits at the Staten Island ferry terminal in downtown Manhattan and simply observes ordinary commuters going about their daily business - queuing, buying coffee and donuts, waiting to board, etc. A sense of heightened normalcy pervades. Anything could happen. This is 9/11 territory. 

I was reminded very much of Colum McCann's lauded celebration of New York and the World Trade Centre towers Let the Great World Spin.

McCarthy is a writer for our times. Satin Island is a brilliant book.

I've long enjoyed the novels of Robert Harris and considered his last An Officer and a Spy to be a masterpiece. I blogged about it here. 

Dictator, the third and final instalment in his marvellous and celebrated Cicero series, is likewise magnificent. 

This is the politics of ancient Rome. It's corrupt and brutal though ostensibly democratic. Its intrigues are awash with blood. Harris has written an essay on war as much as an historical and dramatic novel - an essay that is supremely relevant to our modern times.

Rome is the epitome of a warmongering nation. Flimsy excuses justify aggression, and the self-aggrandisement of Patrician warrior leaders, dealing in treachery and deceit at every turn, expose them as brutal criminals at heart. 

Cicero is an honourable, generous figure of integrity and Harris is committed to faithfully rendering the exact words of his powerful Senate speeches. He spoke truth to power, but was always aware of the ever shifting alliances that could trap even the most powerful and clever.  

We're immersed in the world of Caesar, Pompey, Cato, Cassius, Antony and others, and the many marriages and familial connections that bind them all. Their manoeuvrings drive the plot and provide the suspense.

Harris also gives us a rich flavour of Roman society: its gods, beliefs, superstitions and social structures.

But the central focus is the remarkable Cicero and his faithful biographer, the humble and intensely likable Tiro.

I can't recommend the novels of Robert Harris enough. He's a superb writer.

David Marr's Faction Man; Michel Houellebecq's Submission

David Marr's Quarterly Essays - this is his fifth - are always a must read. He writes beautifully, with precision and insight. 

This one on Bill Shorten is, unfortunately, his weakest. Firstly he's been wrong-footed by Abbott's recent demise and the turnaround in the polls given the nation's huge sigh of relief. 

Secondly, the subject is nothing if not lame. Marr is forced to trawl a lot of old ground: the ugly union fights for control and influence in Victoria; the turmoil of the Rudd/Gillard years, etc. He desperately tries to make this stuff interesting, but it simply isn't. It's tedious. Shorten always was and still is a Union Man. The 'Faction Man' title refers to his grubby union deals and self-serving alignments, not the traditional Labor factions we all know and love. 

Surprisingly, Marr spends very little time on any analysis of the polls over the last two years and why Shorten's disapproval rating is so consistently bad. Now, compared to Turnbull, it's disastrous. The electorate knows why, but Marr doesn't seem to. There is nothing about the Greens here either, and their growing appeal to disenchanted Labor supporters.

(I enjoyed lines like this though: 'Shorten's body is not made for suits').

I've always liked celebrated French author Michel Houellebecq's novels, Atomised (1998) and Platform (2001) in particular.

He brings a jaded, disillusioned, cynical flavour to his usually anti-Western critiques. His main characters are single men, unlucky in love, but constantly on the lookout for casual sex with hot young women. He mixes his literary efforts with soft porn, and it's hard to know how seriously to take what seems to be his main focus - the decadence of our modern, capitalist, materialistic society.

Submission is simply excellent though, and in my view his best. The same ambivalence is there - what is he really trying to do? what is his main point? Is he really anti-Western and pro-Islamic, or is this a mild satire and in fact a comic rubbishing of Islamic society?

The first-round French Presidential election of 2022 has necessitated a run-off between Marine Le Pen, leader of the extremist right wing, anti-immigrant United Front, and the charismatic leader of the newly emerged Muslim Brotherhood party Mohammad Ben Abbes. Abbes wins.

Of course, this is a political fantasy. There is at present no Islamist party in France and there is never likely to be, apart from on the extremist fringes. But Houellebecq uses the scenario to explore and possibly even advocate ideas that could only be described as pure male fantasy.

Abbes brings back the patriarchy. Men can have multiple wives. Women are encouraged to leave school early and marry. Female employment and careers are Western and wrong. The family unit is the new social welfare net, so government provided welfare is virtually eliminated. As the participation rate of women in the work force is radically reduced, the unemployment rate drops dramatically and male salaries soar. The economy booms. Universities become Islamic in curriculum and management, and are well-funded by Saudi money. Only academics who have converted to Islam can be employed.

Houellebecq takes the opportunity to celebrate old Christian values of family, charity, modesty, etc, by reminding us that Islam was very respectful of the Christendom of the middle ages in its early founding years. Patriarchy is proposed as the natural order of things, the best organisation for any society.

Once again our main character is a lonely, single, disillusioned man in his 40's, frequently indulging in meaningless sex, depicted of course in detail. (It's hard for a male to read Houellebecq without getting a constant hard-on!). The meaningless sex is emblematic of the debased social relations of our current Western way of life.

Submission was published in France on the very day of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack. It caused enormous controversy, with many people outraged.

Now you know why.

Bernard Keane's new novel Surveillance - I wanted something more serious.

Bernard Keane, political editor for Crikey, is without doubt one of the best journalists in the country. A former senior public servant, he does his homework, reads government, industry and commissioned reports and submissions by the bucket load, and he can write.

I consider him essential daily reading. His take on things political, social and economic is passionate and insightful. He has pet hates which I share. One of them is governments' surveillance of their own citizens, and particularly Australia's recently introduced data retention regime.  

I therefore had to read his just released novel, Surveillance. I expected a real world fleshing out of his ferocious antipathy to government and corporate overreach in this contested terrain.

Unfortunately, I didn't get it. The novel is really a piece of soft porn with a pretty ordinary corporate malfeasance narrative as cover. In Keane's fictional world all beautiful women are just hanging out for cock - the bigger the better.  

It's hardly a robust critique of political power and lack of transparency, much less an examination of how people's real lives are negatively affected. It's an old fashioned thriller that presumes to take us behind the veil of secrecy of the cybersecurity and defence establishment and the corporations that rely on it for business. The higher the level of public anxiety and panic, the better for business. We're led into a forest of acronyms: ASD, ASIO, ACSC, AFP and more - agencies and their feverish, faux serious manoeuvrings, all done quietly and efficiently by a self-important, crusty, but powerful elite. This is an age old story of establishment power, trussed up for our times.

If business is bad then security threats need to be manufactured. Public debate can always be massaged by a compliant media provided the lie is big and mythic enough. It's in everybody's business and political interest. 

This is an easy read set in the familiar streets of downtown Sydney, but a lost opportunity by Keane. 

I wanted something more serious.

Harper Lee's invigorating Go Set A Watchman

I was critical of New York Times review of this new release for breaking the publisher's July 14 embargo - it would have been party to a clear breach of contract - but nevertheless Michiko Katukani's take on the book is well worth reading. For her this 'sequel' was unexciting and unlovely in its focus on the now bigoted racist, Atticus.

A more positive review by Stephen Romei, literary editor of The Australian, does the book far more justice.

There have been lots of reviews - the majority rather negative.

But I agree with Romei. Go Set A Watchman is wonderful, stimulating, and a real pleasure to read. 

As much as anything it's a novel of dialogues, debates and ideas. And wit abounds. Scout, known by her real name Jean Louise and now in her mid-twenties, is a delightful, highly intelligent and feisty young woman who has spent the last few years in New York. This is a very playful telling by Lee who obviously identifies with her richly drawn and extremely likable character. 

Jean Louise's adult awakening to Atticus is so much more meaningful knowing as we do the child Scout's naive view of her saintly father in To Kill A Mockingbird. The two books enrich each other immeasurably. In fact they both need each other. It was pure editorial genius that Lee was persuaded to first retell the story from the child's point of view rather than proceed to publish Go Set A Watchman. But why did Lee and her publisher decide not to release the first book at all, rather than a few years later? Perhaps so as not to destroy the magic of Atticus that had taken hold in the public imagination? I guess we'll never know.

Unlike in TKAM, a strain of high amusement runs through the GSAW narrative. It has a vastly different tone, at times reading like a satirical village comedy. But Lee manages to expertly combine this playfulness with a serious and savage critique of racism in the South. It is a fiercely passionate denunciation of white supremacism and Lee is very angry indeed. The writing in the heated arguments, particularly those between Jean Louise and her father, is rich, powerful and disturbing. The contrasting ideas and beliefs are fully articulated and the reader served a sumptuous, invigorating feast. 

The final few chapters are intense, and some critics doubt their realism and credibility. Atticus is condemned, in fact demolished by an out of control Jean Louise, but gets a chance to explain his position. It's rational. He's a liberal, as we've always known, but now in his senior years, an Establishment one. He's a lawyer.

I thoroughly recommend you read this book, but if you haven't read TKAM you must read that first.

Richard Price's Exhilarating The Whites

I had planned an enthusiastic review of this superb crime novel and then made the mistake of reading this piece in The New Yorker by Joyce Carol Oates which said everything I wanted to say, only of course far, far better.

Stephanie Bishop's unnerving The Other Side of the World

This book has come with enthusiastic recommendations from many critics and booksellers I deeply respect. Martin Shaw from Readings, a very discriminating reader, proclaimed: '...without  question one the finest Australian novels of 2015'.

I had to read it, despite the cover, once again, turning me off. (Down Under, get it?) 

The book is powerful, no doubt about that. The power kicks in about two thirds of the way through and then is relentless. It's confronting and asks far more questions than it answers. It's a domestic drama about marriage, children and especially motherhood. And a profound and uncomfortable depression. 

The problem I had with the book was the author's obsession with describing in micro detail the natural environment in which the characters move - in rural England, in suburban Australia, and in provincial India. The narrative is frequently buried in long and poetic descriptions of the ordinary goings on in the physical world - birds, trees, winds, breezes, flowers, seasons, rivers, insects, rocks, moths, spiders, weevils, beetles, mosquitoes, etc, ad nauseum.  

There isn't a paragraph, no matter how short, that doesn't digress into description. The writing is sublime, the phrasing poetic, there's not a word out of place or a cliche anywhere. But how much more of this Boys Own Guide to the Natural World am I meant to bare? Frankly, it verges on the tedious.

But in the end, because of the overwhelming power of the story, the book is a triumph. 

So persevere with this, enjoy the writing, and be deeply moved and emotionally shaken by the drama.

The Miles Franklin winner for 2015: Sofie Laguna's The Eye of the Sheep

First up - this book is a very worthy winner indeed. It caught me and most other readers and critics by surprise. The smart money was on Joan London's The Golden Age and Sonya Hartnett's Golden Boys. I had read both these novels and enjoyed them thoroughly.

Frankly, I had avoided reading Laguna because, superficial as I am, the cover turned me right off. A small boy and a big dog, and there must be sheep in it as well? Nup, not for adults who don't generally go for YA. But the cover sends entirely the wrong message. The novel is a powerful and visceral adult drama even though Jimmy the young boy is the central character.

Jimmy's mildly autistic, perhaps suffering from Aspergers - we're not told - but he's a fully drawn, loveable, rich and thrilling character. His enthusiasm for life's basics is infectious. He suffers from 'speeding' and speaks in threes: 'your book, your book. Your book, mum'. He also refers to his school as 'enemy territory'. In a word, he's delightful. 

The central drama is not his condition, however. It's the domestic violence in his home. It's ugly indeed. Laguna skilfully conveys the horror but without emptying the father of all sympathy. Jimmy and his older brother Robby have a warm and loving relationship with both their parents. The deep connections between them are explored. Jimmy and his father Gavin have a bond that survives Gavin's extreme volatility. Gavin is a frustrated man who resorts to the Cutty Sark in the top cupboard for relief. He is eventually made redundant from his printing job, thus taking the narrative to a much darker place. 

And the ending is very satisfying, both emotionally and intellectually.

Laguna has written an excellent, highly dramatic novel, a deserving winner of this much coveted award. What gives the book so much power is the innocence, joy and vulnerability of Jimmy. It's a magnificent portrait and it won't let you go. That boy gets under your skin.

Also shortlisted for the 2015 Miles Franklin, Sonya Hartnett's Golden Boys is a major achievement. Coincidentally it shares similar themes with Sofie Laguna's The Eye of the Sheep.

Comparing the two novels on all sorts of levels would make a good Aus Lit 101 essay question.

Hartnett's always been hooked on fancy names for the young adults who people her narratives: here we meet Colt, Bastian, Freya, Marigold, Avery, Declan, Garrick...there's no Robert, Ben, Anna or Amy in sight.

There are also your stock figures: a big dumb bully, a sensitive awakening girl, a nerdy young kid, etc.

But it soon becomes clear that this novel is fundamentally not about adolescents at all. It's a rather savage critique of the adult world via two sets of parents: One father, a dentist, maintains a rather disgusting 'playroom', a place full of expensive toys for his and the neighbours kids, and the other is a violent and abusive drunk. 

Their fathers' propensities do not escape the kids' notice.

Hartnett gives us a slow build. It's very subtly done. The dentist's eldest boy, Colt, senses his father's sins and knows why they've had to move to new areas every few years. Freya, the eldest daughter of Joe, becomes increasingly angry about his violent bashing of her mother.  

Hartnett handles the increasing tension as the drama develops exceptionally well, but the resolution not so much. 

One thing that impressed me about Laguna's novel was how grounded her characters were. These people were from Altona, a working class suburb of Melbourne, and they reflected it in every way - what they ate, how they dressed, what music they listened to, what TV shows they watched, what buses they caught, how they spoke, etc.

Hartnett, on the other hand, refuses to locate her narrative entirely. It's not her concern. It's not important, but the negative is it doesn't constrain her from exaggeration and unreality. The maturity, moral strength and powers of reasoning and articulation of too many of the young characters are overdone. There is a fantasy element there, which I think is misplaced.

This shows up in the ending. There is a bashing and it should be condemned not deemed useful, and the victim shouldn't be a victim at all.

Talking about adolescents thrust into an ugly, violent, adult world, this book by American author Jim Shepard is truly astonishing.

It's an extraordinarily moving and sad story of the Warsaw ghetto created by the Nazis when they invaded Poland. It focuses on the children in an orphanage over the two years prior to their fatal train trip to the Treblinka camp and its ovens.

The sheer courage, spirit and deep humanity of these children and the adults they interact with are inspiring. They are being pushed out of their houses, starved, shot, and finally shipped off and gassed. But right to the end they struggle, manoeuvre and fight for life and survival, including constantly pushing against each other for advantage.

This slow build of a novel is a powerful and emotional kick in the guts. I've read many novels about the evil of the holocaust and this is one of the best. It personalises it through the experience of young, defenceless but feisty kids and brings it intensely alive.

Highly recommended.

Two New Australian Novels: One Excellent, One a Failure.

This is a very powerful novel that frequently brought me to tears but mostly made me intensely angry.

It interweaves the lives of four Australian women living in Melbourne from the years of the first world war until the 1990's. While very young they became pregnant to young men who deserted them or treated them cruelly. Their parents were no better, imprisoned by the moral, social and legal strictures of the day. They were also battling poverty and unemployment.

Single motherhood was an absolute no-no. Marriage was compulsory, or the baby forcibly removed for adoption. The story of Anna, a feisty teenager brought undone by the Salvation Army's excruciatingly awful 'home for girls in your situation' is one of the most moving and dramatic pieces of social history you're ever likely to read. It will make your blood boil.

Jones brings his characters vividly to life. His writing is measured and assured, the stories tense and deeply emotional.

No doubt this wonderful book will be shortlisted for a number of awards, and deservedly so. It is magnificent. It will also become a celebrated ABC TV mini-series, no doubt.

Steven Carroll's last book, The World of Other People, was the co-winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award in 2014, and deservedly so. I heaped praise on it here calling it 'a very fine work indeed. Subtle, nuanced, immeasurably sad and well worth the PM's prize.'

So I approached his just published Forever Young with high expectations, despite knowing that it was not another in his T.S.Eliot series. Unfortunately I was badly let down. 

The novel is the fifth in Carroll's 'Glenroy' series about the lives of ordinary Australians in ordinary suburban Melbourne. You don't have to have read the previous four to fully appreciate this one, as it includes so many reflections and memories of those earlier times and events that flesh out the characters and place them in context.

The setting is 1977, the year that Whitlam, for the second time, lost the election to Fraser, and then retired from politics altogether. This is presented as a 'moving on' for the country, a loss of its youth, a loss of the 'Mountain' for young people, a government that belonged to them.

The problem with the novel, quite frankly, is that it's boring. Carroll never succeeds in breaking through the banality and ordinariness of his theme of lost youth and idealism, and the moving on and settling and never being able to return.

And his writing style, previously and constantly praised by critics as being 'unfailingly assured, lyrical, poised' (Debra Adelaide) and 'astonishingly assured' (James Bradley), fundamentally lets him down this time. His habit of constantly repeating phrases becomes tiresome in the extreme. It feels as if he's got his boot on your throat and is pressing down harder. The same phrases are on an endless loop, para after para. What is meant to be a ruminative reiteration simply amplifies the banality of the theme. 

For the fact is this book is about nothing much at all. Young people growing old and, er, changing - moving on, escaping, discovering, making mistakes. Carroll brings to this familiar dynamic a leaden sensibility. 

Thankfully there are moments of genuine narrative tension and genuinely good writing. In the main, though, they are overwhelmingly buried.

Which makes this novel very hard to recommend, and will deny it the success Steven Carroll otherwise deserves.

Some Excellent New Reads

Dennis Lehane's new book World Gone By is just brilliant. 

It's as good, if not better, than Live By Night which introduced Joe Coughlin as an up-and-coming gangster during the depression and prohibition years of 30's America. When I read the first in the series, The Given Day, published in 2008, I was completely overwhelmed by Lehane's power as a chronicler of early 20th century America and its developing and frequently ugly power structures. 

Joe Coughlin was the youngest son in a powerful Boston family which virtually controlled the police force and the emerging union movement. In the second volume Live By Night he leaves for Florida, finally emerging as a smart, charming but brutal head of a major crime syndicate controlling alcohol and drug distribution on the Eastern seaboard as well as running gambling dens and casinos. As you would expect there's a lot of violence. 

The final novel brings the story to its fascinating but grizzly end. 

The series is well worth your time. All the novels are exquisitely plotted, gripping and absorbing on every level, and with all the tension and atmospherics you hope for in a quality read. 

I'd heard of Renee Knight's Disclaimer from early reviews in the trade press - obviously comparing it favorably to Gone Girl, the contemporary benchmark for relationship thrillers - so was looking forward to reading it.

The press were right. Structurally the two novels are similar. There are various narrative voices and time shifts, and they share a husband and wife focus.

I enjoyed it immensely. It's well written, far more credible than Gone Girl, and the drama has an incredible drive and tension that unfolds at just the right pace. It's a cliche, but I did find this book hard to put down.

And, thankfully and all too rarely, the ending is perfect. Deeply satisfying, intellectually and emotionally. 

No wonder the bids for the publishing rights went through the roof for this. It will be a mega seller and a blockbuster movie.

This is just superb. Kilcullen, a Middle East and counterterrorism expert, was a senior advisor to General David Petraeus and US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice from 2005 to 2008, and was an advisor to the UK and Australian governments and NATO prior to this. 

In the first half of the essay he delves deep into the disaster that was Iraq, and how absurd the original decision to invade was. He then describes how the forces unleashed via that hellhole, the  warring tribes, traditions, factions and personalities, gave rise to ISIS. The final section of the essay presents the challenge the West now faces, and how it should deal with it.

I found it very persuasive. And Kilcullen can write clear English, which helps.

Well worth reading. 

This new Australian tome on copyright and the digital age was published a few weeks ago. It defines what it means to be a 'curate's egg': good in parts.

It's a collection of opinions edited by Phillipa McGuinness, publisher at NewSouth Publishing/UNSW Press. Phillipa wrote the Introduction. Unfortunately it's one of the bad parts. She name-drops copyright gurus such as the highly respected US author William Patry but never intellectually engages with them. Like many of the content industry representatives in this collection the sneer and the scoff are meant to do the job.

The many good pieces in the book however more than make up for the bad. Film critic Marc Fennell is excellent, as is Professor Sherman Young, authors Carolin Window and Linda Jaivin, broadcaster Dan Ilic, historian/librarian Tim Sherratt and academics Dan Hunter and Nic Suzor. Their views are progressive and insightful. While respecting copyright they know the law needs serious reform.

By far the worst and in fact most disgraceful piece in this collection is by Jose Borghino who is currently Policy Director at the International Publishers Association (IPA) and was formerly with the Australian Publishers Association. It's elitist, nasty and cynical. Users and reformers are moochers. They are 'freetards'. It's truly awful, braindead stuff, but unfortunately so typical of industry representatives constantly mouthing the old and by now discredited corporate line. I'm always reminded of Upton Sinclair's famous dictum: 'It's hard for a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it'.