- Speers clarifies what actually happened in the week that ended Turnbull - and, thankfully, Dutton.
- He also blows out of the water the absurd myth that Morrison engineered it weeks beforehand, and was never a last minute ‘accidental’ leadership candidate. He was.
- And Julie Bishop was soundly defeated in the first voting round not because she was a woman or considered insubstantial (which she is), but because her supportive colleagues judged her highly unlikely to beat Dutton in the final runoff. She was too ‘moderate’.
- Poor Mathias Cormann. A real robot after all.
- As for Mitch Fifield, possibly the worst minister for communications and the arts we’ve ever had - and that’s saying something - he went from ‘backing Turnbull, to Dutton, to Morrison’ in two days!
- This is a clearly written record of an extraordinary week in Australian political history. Speers is fair and no political bias is evident.
- It was a week that made the Coalition even more beatable in the next election than it was. Extraordinary tin ears, all of them.
- It only takes a little more than hour to read, so buy it, read it, and save it for your kids or grandkids when they’re studying Australian history, politics or comedy in a decade’s time.
- Disappointing really. I was expecting a far more powerful novel given all the hype that surrounded it - fawning reviews from other major crime writers like Don Winslow and Adrian McKinty.
- It’s a standard chase story, a genre that has little power in the end - ‘this happened, then that happened; they went here, then there’, etc.
- The conclusion is lame in the extreme, and very emotionally unsatisfying. The hero gives up and allows himself to be ended, virtually committing suicide. And the deaths of all the key and interesting characters along the way comfortably removes the necessity for any dramatic and imaginative resolutions.
- A major structural problem is that Carlos Marcello, the Mafia crime boss considered by many historians to have organised Kennedy’s assassination, and who chased down and eliminated all his associates to protect himself, is a real figure who died thirty years later. That seriously restricts the novel’s fictional options. It becomes a hybrid of fact/fiction, constricted both ways.
- Also, that the core narrative of the love story peters out with little drama is a real and irritating weakness.
- This Man Booker winner is an exceptionally good and satisfying read.
- The setting is the Troubles in Belfast in the 1970’s - Catholics and Protestants are in a violent civil war. The IRA paramilitaries and the occupying British forces are murdering and bombing each other, and civilians (informants and ‘renouncers’ included) are always suspects and casualties. It’s an ugly place.
- Nothing is named however. Not the city, not the country. Even England is simply ‘that place over the water’. Likewise, the characters are not named. The narrator is ‘middle-sister’.
- This works so well in universalising the themes - the suffocating, gossiping, provincial political/social ghettos corrosive of good and loving relationships; the religious, conservative, family small-mindedness; the all-pervasive surveillance state; the emerging and soon to be powerful feminist movement (women who have ‘issues’) naming the imprisoning, oppressive and poisoning patriarchy - dominant themes in an 18 year old woman's painful experience of coping in a rotten society.
- She has been accused of the crime of ‘reading while walking’ because she devours literary classics as she walks the neighbourhood, and ‘in our type of environment it presents you as a stubborn, perverse character’.
- This a hard read and barely 10% of readers will get beyond the first 70 or so pages I’d hazard a guess. Great slabs of page after page prose, long paragraphs, no section breaks, 50 page chapters, densely typeset. It's formidable.
- However it sucked me in. It’s frequently tedious, strange, and frustrating, but it’s also mesmerising and an intellectually powerful critique of a savage, totalitarian, all controlling patriarchy.
- It’s also often humorous, which is engaging, and the dialogue is always rich, intelligent and verbose in that stereotypical Irish, Joycean way. And all the characters, educated or not, speak in the same style and tone. The girl’s ‘ma’ and ‘da’ are opinionated, loquacious and delightful. As is ‘maybe-boyfriend’, his friend ‘chef’, middle-sister’s ‘longest friend’, and the ‘real’ milkman (his trade not surname) who is later revealed as ma’s ‘ex-boyfriend’ and possibly new one.
- The narrative constantly introduces characters and events that initially seem to make little sense, like ‘tablets girl’, a poisoner, and her half-blind sister, but gradually what meaning is being suggested starts to become clear.
- The predatory ‘Milkman’ (his surname not trade) may be an insignificant individual but he symbolises a class of men and the social realities they have constructed - stalking, sleazy, powerful, dangerous, not to be associated with (echoes of Harvey Weinstein). The title of this book is Milkman (the surname not the trade). That is significant.
- Slowly but surely a detailed picture of meaningful human relationships in a society under immense pressure emerges. A tapestry is being woven that gets richer and richer as the book progresses. The victory goes to those few with integrity and the courage to fight for their rightful place. Middle-sister is one of them.
- Anna Burns has written a stunningly good, profound and utterly original novel. Highly recommended.
WARNING: DO NOT GOOGLE ‘BLACK SATURDAY’ BUSHFIRES UNTIL YOU’VE READ THIS BOOK. (You need to not know or remember how it ends).
- This was a must-read for me as I’m a great fan of Chloe Hooper’s work, particularly her fiction.
- This is her first non-fiction book after the superb The Tall Man. From the get-go it is powerful stuff. Its description of the ferocity of the bush fire is compelling.
- The alleged arsonist, Brendon Sokaluk, is identified by the police arson squad early and easily, without drama (someone dobs him in). He’s an intellectually disabled local identity. In terms of story power it seems limp, but that’s before Hooper’s talent for painting the full picture becomes evident.
- The townspeople are angry and cruel. There are many death threats. It’s ugly. Brendon has always been regarded as a ‘vegie', a 'retard’, a ‘spastic’. A lot of people feel intimidated, even threatened, by ‘strange’ people’. He is later diagnosed as autistic.
- Hooper describes the towns and the La Trobe Valley coal region very sympathetically. The privatisations, the huge job losses - ‘The Valley became a human sink, a place people ended up...They lived beyond the sight of those with influence, amidst the symbols of the unloved past’.
- Is Brendon now a scapegoat? His defence lawyers and teams are thorough in questioning the police case.
- Part three of the narrative is the court proceedings. It reminded me of Helen Garner, but without Helen as a character. Hooper brings the drama alive with detail, subtlety and fairness. It builds to a conclusion without any hint as to how the jury will decide. Both the police prosecutors and the defence team are portrayed as highly professional.
- Very intense indeed.
- It doesn’t take long to get really sucked in by this story. The characters are delightful and the Paris setting enchanting. But there is a terrible darkness underneath it all.
- The history of France and particularly Paris features strongly in the story - the Nazi occupation in WW2 and the brutal Algerian independence conflict afterwards. France as both occupied and occupier. Although occupied, a majority of French people (at least initially) cooperated with the Germans in their rule, and in their rounding up of the Jews for transportation to Poland for extermination. ‘That the people who herded them in and locked them up, then put them on buses were not Germans with guns and dogs but the gendarmes they saw every day on the street’.
- The Resistance gained strength only in the last two years.
- It helps to read this book with a detailed map of Paris at your fingertips. So many streets and metro stations are named and they are integral to the story. Absolutely brings the city alive. The stark contrast between the low socioeconomic and the middle/upper class suburbs, and the French born and immigrant communities, are at the heart of the narrative. If you love Paris as much as I do then do yourself a favour and read this book.
- Hannah is an American academic who is researching how French women coped with the Nazi occupation from 1940-44, and what they thought of the Germans. The personal stories she uncovers are fascinating, as they’re focussed on domestic and family relationships as well as the tense political situation, not to mention their sometimes painful personal/sexual issues. In the years after the war ‘...so much was never said’.
- Tariq’s struggle as a young, uneducated, poor African migrant is very well told. His ancestry as Berber, Bedouin, Muslim, African, made him feel he ‘was part of something larger, more invigorating’. His discussions with the old man ‘Victor Hugo’ whom he meets on the Metro are stimulating. ‘According to [Victor] it was the historic duty of his country to be a light and an example, the guardian of freedom for the world. In his version of events it was the French not the Jews who were God’s chosen people.’
- Fundamentally this beautiful, empathetic novel is a love story, and an exceptionally good one.
- Details a shameful episode in Australian political history, when Senator David Leyonhjem slut-shamed Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young by yelling to her across the chamber: 'you should stop shagging men Sarah'.
- Although Hanson-Young never details her private life in this small book, the essential question is: what on earth does anyone's private life have to do with anything?
- It’s plainly written, without flourish or style, yet paints a brutal picture of the constant and ugly attacks on women by men in all walks of life.
- Hanson-Young rightly attacks the right wing Murdoch media and Fairfax shock jocks. This is how these tiny dicks get off.
- She recounts an ugly episode when a drunken Cory Bernadi hounded her and sidled up to her while she was speaking in the Senate and whispered foul things to her. What an utter sleazebag that supposed Christian is.
- Her defence of Labor politician Emma Husar is passionate and angry. Good to see. A woman whose political career was destroyed by slut-shaming.
- And an excellent appreciation of Julia Gillard and the awful misogynistic treatment she constantly received as PM.
- Not a terribly insightful book but worth reading.
- Ford’s prose sparkles as usual. She’s a superb writer. And her frequent anger is electrifying. She’s often very funny as well.
- She’s remarkably honest about her own circumstances in relation to the birth and parenting of her baby boy, including the stresses and strains on her relationship with her partner.
- Things most of us take for granted - as ‘normal’ - are forensically critiqued, eg pink for girls, blue for boys.
- Fabulous names for men: ‘overgrown oafs’; ‘unweaned sulks’; ‘smarmy gits’; ‘paranoid man-babies’; ‘an army of bloated, charmless cockjangles’; ‘poxy, arrogant, entitled fuckbags’;
- Very rich in data to support key arguments.
- Love the frequent ‘oh, I dunno...’ and ‘fucking’ (as in ‘creators are just really fucking antsy’; ‘well, fuck me sideways’) that enliven the passionate arguments.
- There’s a whole chapter on Milo Yiannopoulos. Why? The man is a waste of space and supremely unimportant, and has now faded into history anyway (unless you're one of the handful of ball scratchers who watch the Bolt Report). There’s also a whole chapter on Men’s Rights Activists (MRA) and other anti-feminist hate groups and their violence and rants. Devoting so many pages to these fringe lunatics is disappointing (even if Ford’s critiques are solid and forensic) when her much more enlightening interrogations of ‘normal’ and commonly accepted male behaviour patterns are where Ford is at her best. (Pity this book wasn’t written after the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing. Ford would have eviscerated him, and it would have been electric! She’s done it however in a recent Fairfax column).
- Excellent on custody and child support issues; misogyny in our politics and the media; so-called comedy about rape; men’s oversensitivity to criticism;
- Excellent on rape culture, particularly by the rugby players in Ireland and the outrageous and cruel punishment of the victim. Many other stories are revealing and depressing. Ford quotes a commentator: ‘I see a pattern emerging in rape culture that suggests women have a past, while men have potential’.
- One thing that sets Ford apart: she explores issues in depth and never lets up. It’s why she’s so persuasive.
- Beautiful Epilogue - a letter to her son. A lovely way to end a powerful book.
(PS: I would love to see Australian publishers adopt two rules and stick to them:
1. Always show a pic of the author.
2. Always include an index in a non-fiction book.
It’s a complete disservice to the reader not to do these things as a matter of course).
