Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

- A tender and delightful story about the delicacy of loving relationships, for both old and young people. 

- The old husband suffering from Alzheimers who can’t recognise his wife; the young male IT professional who takes a job offer in America but can’t see the suffering of his girlfriend who is in love with him. The bar owner who is estranged from her parents returns to the family home for her younger sister’s funeral but they still want nothing to do with her. The pregnant woman who is likely to die if she gives birth. 

- Every time someone enters the cafe the author describes what they are wearing. Why?

Hannelore Cayre, The Godmother

- An interesting tale of a middle aged woman who learns through her job, as a translator for the police, about drug running gangs in France, and decides to profit from it. 

- Also very insightful about older parents in appalling aged care facilities, and the drama and tensions they bring to their families. 

Jodi Kantor/Megan Twohey, She Said

- This is a thrilling and vitally important read. Easily one of the great journalism stories of our time - up there with Woodward and Bernstein's All the President’s Men. Superbly written and structured it's about two New York Times journalists' struggle to persuade women to break their silence on famed Hollywood producer and serial abuser Harvey Weinstein.

- What strikes you is the courage of the many actresses and staff who came forward about Weinstein, putting their careers at real risk. Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow, Rose McGowan, Selma Hayek and many others. 

- It's also a gripping story about how aggressively Weinstein fought back, using highly experienced lawyers to protect him. Besides large sums of money the legal documents they drew up to ensure confidentiality were extraordinary. Some clauses often defied common sense and were surely unenforceable, however they seriously scared the victims into silence. 

- These lawyers were celebrities in their own right, eg, David Boies (Al Gore’s lawyer in the 2000 presidential recount) and Lisa Bloom (well-known 'feminist’ lawyer). 

- Some of the stories of Weinstein's abuse are appalling and heart wrenching. The journalists worked day and night for more than year to persuade the women to come forward. And what I found remarkable is the seriously high level of support and encouragement they received from senior editors and staff at the New York Times, particularly from Executive Editor Dean Baquet.

- The last third of the book details the case of Christine Blasey Ford and her Congressional testimony against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, whom she accused of attempted rape at a party when they were high school students. She was another victim courageously coming forward.

- I so enjoyed this book. It's a brilliant and inspiring read.

Alan Furst, Under Occupation

- This is one of Furst’s best. As usual it's set in occupied France in 1942 and the French Resistance and its heroism is front and centre. 

- The story has all the tension needed to bring the period alive, and the characters are endearing, apart, of course, from the Gestapo. 

- The sheer courage of so many French citizens at the time remains inspiring to this day. 

- A light but great and entertaining read (especially if you're crazy about Paris!)

Anonymous, A Warning.

- It took me a while to get hooked by this new book on Trump. There have been others - Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury and Siege, Bob Woodward's Fear and Michael Lewis' The Fifth Risk, being the key ones, all of which I've read. It seemed to be traversing old ground, offering nothing new.

- But it gradually became quite obvious that this insider job was very different. It was not written by a journalist but by a White House staffer, and, critically, by a committed Republican. It has a different flavour altogether.


- 'Anonymous' is quite obviously a foreign affairs/diplomacy advisor, most probably a West Point graduate, very pro-military, and totally shares the established American prejudice that their country is the world leader in everything and other countries should genuflect at all times. The ever present ‘enemies’ are still China, Russia and Iran. It's lazy, conventional thinking. (If there’s one good thing about Trump, he vaguely recognises that and has called out US warmongering for what it is). 

- What makes Anonymous's account fascinating is that he's a conservative Republican committed to traditional values, a purist and staunch believer. Although he sounds like a real prick at times, a high-minded private school prefect, he's not annoying. His critique of Trump is devastating, relentless and exceptionally well written. It can't be seen as a simple anti-Trump rant from a public servant who feels neglected because of the President's obvious preference for his 'politicals', his chosen advisors and Department Secretaries. He's standing for values, both personal and professional, and propriety.  

 - Because of his conservative bias there are real weaknesses in his critique. He has minimal understanding of economic issues (being from the ‘all debt is bad’ school), and a conventional 'America First' stance on foreign policy (cliches first, nuance second). Also, and disappointingly, he never mentions Trump's appalling stance on climate change (pulling out from the Paris Agreement), his abandoning the six-nation Iran nuclear arms control deal and re-imposing severe economic sanctions. Although he rightly condemns Trump's tariff war with China.

- He includes some great quotes from former presidents, philosophers and political observers. 

- He's firmly of the view that if the Democrats nominate a ‘socialist’ in 2020 (he doesn't name Sanders or Warren) Trump will benefit. It must be someone who ‘campaigns on unity’ (he doesn't even name Biden). That way many disaffected Republicans would vote for him or her and the nation would be saved from another horrendous four years of Trump. If Americans re-elect Trump in 2020 they will go down in history as the most anti-democratic nation on earth.

The verdict is in. Despite some accomplishments, it's evident Trump is behaving immorally, weakening the party he professes to lead, undermining democratic institutions, abandoning crucial US alliances, emboldening our adversaries, dividing Americans with hateful rhetoric and chronic dishonesty, and surrounding himself with people who will only reinforce his defects. It was easy to dismiss a pile of insider accounts about the severity of the situation. However, the pile is now a mountain, and the stories paint a portrait of a leader who handles the nation's affairs with persistent negligence. Donald Trump deserves to be fired.


  

Garry Disher, Peace

- Garry Disher's new police procedural once again features Constable Paul Hirschhausen, known as Hirsch, who we met in the superb Bitter Wash Road, published in 2013, which I reviewed at the time and said this: 

Bitter Wash Road is Australian crime writer Garry Disher's strongest work to date. It comes pretty close to Peter Temple's classic The Broken Shore in achievement. It's not your average crime thriller. It's a social critique of considerable substance. As well, it has a strong coherent plot, beautifully resolved.

Disher invokes a genuine country Australian atmosphere in all its dry unforgiving hardness. The menace is so thick you could cut it with a knife. We're talking territory not far from Snowtown here - a dark, backward place, where deviance thrives.

- Unfortunately, and much to my disappointment, Peace is nowhere near as good. It lacks power and oomph, and any depth of meaning.

- It has the same country small town setting, the same rural noir deadness and meanness, the same ugliness and provincialism. And the same ugly cops, flown in from Adelaide and Sydney, who hate Hirsch because he was a whistleblower on some significant corruption issues he saw when he was a city detective. He was subsequently demoted, shoved back in uniform and shunted to the country.   

- But he is a likeable, competent, caring and highly professional policeman, working hard to keep in touch with his community and its concerns. He navigates and resolves the typical arguments and resentments and is popular.

- A random series of minor crimes is everyday business. But Disher knows how to build tension. You know something big will happen. And it does.  

- But in the end the main story loses power and the various threads don’t really mesh in a satisfying way. It sort of fizzes out. Goodies become baddies, baddies become goodies and it's very, well, meh. 

- But please read Bitter Wash Road. In contrast to Peace, it's immensely powerful.

Ross Garnaut, Superpower.

- This is a very sober and rather dull read unfortunately because of its decidedly academic tone. But if you are at all interested in the politics and economics of Australia's challenge in dealing effectively with the climate emergency this detailed book is essential reading. 

- It’s refreshing and invigorating if you take it slowly and read it carefully. Garnaut's thesis is that Australia has massive potential in a carbon-free future. If we get it right our economy will benefit enormously. 

- His language is measured and constrained, which I found a little disappointing. He's Australia's authority on this stuff, yet he remains reserved and deliberately refuses to be overtly political. It’s politically anodyne, without anger or passion. He goes way too softly softly. For instance, all he says about Abbott’s destruction of Gillard's highly effective carbon pricing regime, the so-called ‘carbon tax’, is ‘...it left an incoherent climate and energy policy legacy’. Christ, Ross, it was fucking disastrous! 

- Nevertheless, as you proceed through the book, you cannot help but be increasingly angry at the Coalition's refusal to face scientific facts and its endless evasions and lies. Labor is not let off scot free either. Adani?

- Resurrecting a carbon tax, by far the best policy, is not possible in the immediate future because it would need to be bi-partisan. But long term?  Garnaut remains hopeful.

- I'm so glad I wrestled with this book. It wasn't easy, but I did it. Highly recommended.

Christos Tsiolkas, Damascus

- This extraordinary novel is Tsiolkas’ best yet. It's immensely powerful, provocative and utterly compelling. A must read. It may not appeal to everyone however, as Tsiolkas literally grabs your head and bangs it hard against a concrete wall. 

- It's a story of the first century of Christianity, focused on the early apostles and believers particularly Saul, later known as Paul. The times are brutal, rough and primitive, and Tsiolkas doesn’t hold back. He paints a world riven with vicious cruelty, lust and misogyny. His prose is vigorous, earthy and masculine, ‘full of blood and life’. The characters are passionate and quick to anger. 

- Society is riddled with religious, political and ethnic wars. The Jews hate the Greeks and vice versa, and they both hate the Romans. It’s an ugly world, with its primitive gods, rituals and superstitions. Baby daughters are routinely killed. Regular beatings of women and slaves are the social norm. Tsiolkas thrusts us into the ugliness, vulgarity and depravity of the poor, the slaves and the lower classes; into their trenches of shit and piss and filth - 'the sounds and stink of poverty’. This book is not for the faint hearted. 

-  Saul, before conversion, despises these new 'Salvation' communities:  ‘...they are disciples of that despised teacher, that would-be prophet, that crucified Nazarene crank’. He works for the Jewish priests, hunting dissenters. He’s a spy, and very prone to anger. He detests 'this strange and disturbing cult'.

- Tsiolkas vividly portrays the radical and revolutionary character of the new movement and its adherents, and the searing fractures dividing them. There is no sentimentality here. The Second Coming was believed to be imminent, though as the decades progress, into the fourth generation, doubt is increasing. 

- The chapter on Vrasas, a guard and soldier overseeing Paul at the end of his life in a prison in Rome is simply sublime. What a masculine creation he is. Illiterate, bold and stupid, in subservience to his masters and the Roman gods. Like a modern alt-right anti-Semite extremist, brutalism and violence are his defining features. He detests the Christian sect: ‘This is the most depraved of sects, flesh-eaters and lovers of death’. However his summation of his own life-affirming beliefs is compelling: 

'I walk with the sun, I walk in the brightness and life of day, I leave the dead to the crows and to the flies. With every breath my blood is nourished by life. Those who pray to death hate this; that we are alive, that we experience joy, that we also suffer and that we know pain; but all of it, the pleasure and the endurance, all of it is worth it, for it is life: all we have is life'. 

- Tsiolkas is very theologically literate. This is essential in making the story compelling. For example, the dispute between Jesus’ twin brother, the illiterate and doubting Thomas, and the educated Paul with his deep knowledge of scripture, over what really matters - the physical resurrection of the Saviour or his teachings - is a key early Christian debate. Tsiolkas never shrinks from immersing the reader in these critical theological issues, though of course some readers will be frustrated.

- One real gem is the tussle between Timothy, Paul's long time friend and scribe, and the preacher Able as they face the challenge of motivating a congregation of believers to 'await the Saviour’s return'. Able is a populist evangelist, and Timothy more conservative and intellectual. The issue is: should we 'remake the world’ or ‘turn the other cheek and retreat from the world’. The believers are divided too - the citizens and the refugees. The refugees abhor the ‘turn the other cheek’ message. They are now proud ‘Christians’. The scene reeks of a Hillsong, modern day Pentecostal assembly. 

- There are so many more arguments, debates and issues explored in this extraordinary novel. It is formidable in its scope and ambition. Having being frustrated over recent months with new fiction - so many books started but then put aside - I absolutely devoured this. It was what I was craving. It restored my faith in the power of literary fiction.

- It will undoubtedly dominate the literary awards calendar next year, and be a Booker contender as well. 

Philip Pullman, The Book of Dust Volume Two: The Secret Commonwealth.

- Philip Pullman's second volume in The Book of Dust trilogy is a delightful read. It's just lovely to be re-introduced to Lyra and Malcolm again. It's nineteen or so years later. Lyra is 20 years old now and Malcolm 32. She's a student and he's a professor of history at Oxford.

- The series continues the story of Lyra from Pullman's earlier His Dark Materials trilogy. Both are set in a parallel world, modern, yet non-modern, pre-internet times. 

- The Secret Commonwealth, as explained by Lyra, refers 'to the world of half-seen things and half-heard whispers. To things that are regarded by clever people as superstition. To fairies. Spirits, hauntings, things of the night'.  

- Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon are estranged due to their separation by a witch in the calamitous Arctic wars a decade previously. The human/daemon relationship is explained in more detail in this book. It seems more like friendship and companionship. There are far more conversations, more sharing. Individual humans are frequently referred to as ‘they’ - the human and the inseparable daemon. 

- In this volume Pullman's focus - thankfully - is far more on the real, human, political world. There are no fairies, witches, aeronauts, armoured bears or battles, and less freakish, cosmic strangeness. The story of Lyra and Malcolm, and the way Pullman slowly develops their increasingly romantic connection, is powerfully engaging. 

- The central storyline is that the ultra conservative, ecclesiastical and authoritarian Magisterium is regrouping. After centuries without papal leadership ambitious men want back total control. This is forcing the Oakley Street organisation (reformists) to re-organise too. Things are also stirring in the distant Levant. The precious resource, rose oil, is becoming scarce and expensive.  

- Lyra’s personal struggles as a young woman are front and centre as well. She is grappling with the contrasting notions of reason and imagination. She’s reading books by faddish 'rationalists', and her daemon Pan objects. He demands she rediscover her imagination. One night he deserts her, setting off on his own journey. Lyra simply must follow and search for him. She longs for reconciliation. 

- I have one major difficulty with Pullman's trilogies. He can’t help himself at times. He continually introduces strange characters who have only a tangential relationship with the overall plot, like the 'Furnace-Man' and the 'Princess Cantacuzino'. Yet on the positive side, these novels being essentially stories of journeys and adventures, many characters Lyra meets are good natured and kind and offer her names of friends and associates to connect with. 

- I really look forward to the final novel in this trilogy. So much will be resolved I'm sure. And in a very satisfactory way. Pullman is a genius.

Ian McEwan, The Cockroach.

- McEwan’s always been a master storyteller and his skill is again on show here. He’s also politically astute. 

- Unfortunately though, this 100 page novel is in the end a dismal failure. The Kafka-inspired cockroach side of the story is just silly. It's too simple, obvious and literal to be effective satire. 

- Jim Sams, the newly installed British PM (Boris obviously), and Brexit feature. Sams applies all his cunning and deceitfulness to get Brexit through parliament (although here it’s called ‘Reversalism’, as compared to our current 'Clockwise' economies). Reversalism turns everything upside down. Citizens pay money to work, and get cash payments from the government when they spend. Companies pay money when they export and receive money when they import.  

- It's a truly absurd and ridiculous thesis which has no satirical oomph because it completely misconstrues Brexit and the disruption it would involve.

- There are of course some lovely moments. This is McEwan after all. He captures perfectly the deviousness, treachery and cunning of ruthless politicians - the Cabinet meetings, the press leakages, the constructed fake news, the anti-PM plotters, and others.

-There is also coruscating wit at every turn as he caricatures the dismal, elitist, Conservative Cabinet members - the cockroaches. 

- This novel could have been heaps better had McEwan not strayed so far from Boris and Brexit realities. 

J.M.Coetzee, The Death of Jesus

-  This novel is the final in Coetzee's magnificent Jesus trilogy - The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, and The Death of Jesus. In my opinion it's the best of the three.

- It shares the formal prose style of the previous two, reading like an Elizabethan drama, and investing the story with a level of fabulism akin to the gospel story of Jesus of Nazareth. The boy David is an otherworldly creature and his story full of parables.

- In this final novel David is only ten years old but he 'cannot or will not do sums. More worryingly, he will not read’. He only reads Cervante's classic novel Don Quixote, and is obsessed with the comic idealist's opposition to anything real. The central theme is idealism versus reality. Quixote’s idealism promises liberation. As his followers cry ‘liberate us from our wretched fate...make our chains fall away’. 

- Likewise, David has a mind of his own, undeveloped as it is. He's over-confident, even arrogant. He’s an ‘extravagante’ according to his teacher, and a gifted dancer.

- Simon and Ines are his foster parents who took him in five years previously and love him deeply. However a local orphanage and its soccer team holds an attraction for David that he can't resist. He wants to live there. So he makes an accusation against Simon, who's been  ‘...doing bad things to me’.

- The relationship between Simon and Ines is a more central focus of this book than David, and is very well presented. They are caring, loving people, flummoxed by David’s new sense of independence. They argue, of course, but in the end their frustrations with David's eccentricities invest this novel with real power. When he suddenly becomes quite ill and is confined to hospital, the leaden, bureaucratic protocols of the hospital put enormous strain on them. In the end David dies of the mysterious, undiagnosed illness, and Simon and Ines continue to be treated disrespectfully by the hospital staff because 'there are rules we have to follow'.

- In all three books in the series Coetzee makes no specific Christian references. Apart from the titles there is no Jesus, heaven, hell, miracles, or even Mary and Joseph. It’s a secular world. However Ines and Simon are clearly Mary and Joseph, ‘companeros’, not husband and wife or in any sexual union. The novel explores their relationship. They are just human beings. The Christian gospels, on the other hand, never present them as such. And Jesus was fully human too, no doubt as annoying as David. So Coetzee is essentially demystifying the biblical story, removing its supernatural embellishments. After David's death was there a resurrection of sorts? No, just memories. 

- But Simon does say at one point: ‘The world may be as it was before, but it is also different’. And his former dance teacher says: ‘You could learn only by following. When David danced he was somewhere else, and if you were able to follow him you would be transported to that place too’. 

- The peculiar Dimitri character, so central to the second book, is a key player in this one too. He's a passionate 'follower' of David. After David's death he writes long letters to Simon, who he considers 'ordinary'. What are we to make of these letters? They smack of devotion but also of madness. While Simon and Ines go their separate ways, into normal lives, is Dimitri, an unabashed enthusiast, soon to become a gospel writer? 

Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin

- ‘I mightn’t have done much good in my life, but at least I contributed to the destruction of the planet.’ 

- The unfortunately christened Florent-Claude Labrouste is 46 years old and a typical Houellebecq sad fuck. Cynical, disillusioned and alone. The sort of bloke that hates Paris and hates pensioners. He's wonderful company - intelligent and exceptionally well-informed, and he’s confiding in YOU.

- In the typical Houellebecq way, literary references are sprinkled throughout, mostly cheekily. And very satisfyingly there's so much wisdom: 

'...there can't be an area of human activity as utterly boring as the law'. 
'...our student years are the only happy ones, when the future seems open, when everything seems possible, and after that adulthood and a career are only a slow and progressive process of ending up in a rut'. 
‘...alcohol is very important for the elderly, it’s almost all they’ve got left’. 
‘God is a mediocre scriptwriter...the whole of his creation bears the stamp of approximation and failure, when it isn’t meanness pure and simple’. 

- He studied agriculture and started working initially at the giant corporate Monsanto, and hated it. ‘My superiors in the company were quite simply pathological liars’. Now he’s working for the Department of Agriculture and negotiating with Brussels. 

- As part of his job he travels a lot, all over France it seems, and drops names of streets, provinces, villages and locales, and this is rather challenging. I had to continually call on Google maps to follow his journeys. 

- Of course there's lots of sex. In fact, there's an obsessional focus on it as he reflects on his former girlfriends and lovers. But it’s very funny too, as if sex is a type of comedy routine carried out by two people, or one woman and a dog or two. This time he's far more comic than in any of his previous novels, which adds to its delight. The thing is though, he rarely makes love, just seems to get blowjobs. It’s all about his cock. Ironically, however, his new anti-depression medication makes it well nigh impossible for him to get an erection. 

- Houellebecq is a very political novelist and this novel is no exception. Florent-Claude's good friend and fellow agriculture student began working for Danone on graduation, and later bought a farm, raising dairy cows in the very local, traditional way. But Brussels’ decisions would bankrupt him and millions of French stockbreeders. The EU and its free trade policies were devastating. The Chinese were also buying traditional farm lands. The local farmers started organising and protesting, some with guns. It all ended tragically, with countless suicides.

- In the end he's fading away, sadness overwhelming him. But he offers us deep and rewarding reflections on Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Conan Doyle.  

- And in a passage of exquisitely beautiful prose, he describes his simple joy on listening to a bootleg recording of the rock band Deep Purple in concert in Duisburg in 1970. 

- Reading Houellebecq is always a pleasure, and Serotonin is absolutely no exception. 

Chuck Wendig, Wanderers.

                                                                                                                                                

- This way-too-long popular novel of 780 pages is built on what seems at first a fascinating premise. Some parisitical bug has infiltrated humans in rural America and turned hundreds of them into 'walkers', virtual zombies, shuffling day and night across the land, unable to be stopped. If grasped they immediately swell and explode. Their skin is impenetrable to sharp objects so blood samples can’t be extracted as they walk. And their numbers are increasing.

- A predictable cross-section of society, from redneck Republicans to evangelical preachers, have a range of views as to what’s caused this - the devil, terrorists, the liberal President in the White House - and their ignorance and fear is contrasted with the informed research of the scientific community. 

- The Alt-Right is having a field day, flashing their Swastika tattoos and Confederate flags. They're white supremacist gun lovers, members of fascist militias, supporting a Trump-like candidate in the upcoming Presidential election. The current President, standing for a second term, is a Hillary-like woman who is loathed by these types, and one reason is she 'always wears pantsuits’. She is soon assassinated.

- The scientists can’t identify the pathogen so the huge and ugly Department of Homeland Security takes over. Of course it rides roughshod over sense and science, threatening 'to nuke all of them' if they don't disperse.

- This book grabs you until about halfway through, when things start to get very silly. A sort of hyper-Google called 'Black Swan’, recently invented, can see into the near future. This is too much. Too overripe. Too literal. And way too heavy handed. The problem is, what does all this end-of-days detail actually signify? The story gets crazier the longer it goes on. Why is civilisation coming to an end? Why? The deadly fungus pathogen exterminating everyone just doesn’t cut it. What is it symbolic of? Presumably it's climate change, often hinted at. Perhaps there are too many humans, reeking havoc on the environment. Getting rid of 99% of them would probably help. A chosen elite, revealed to be the walkers, can rebuild after the armageddon! Even create their own gods, as humans always do. 

- Wendig’s prose is full of swagger and energy. He can certainly write, in that typical American jazzed up, swashbuckling, rock and roll style. All colour and movement, with the vulgarity to match. 

- Don't waste your time on this. There's too much quality literature to read.

Catholics for Renewal, Getting Back on Mission.

- This is a passionate declaration of the essential and long overdue reforms that the Catholic Church must implement immediately.

- The statistical data is very comprehensive, and the the call for a radical overhaul of the treatment of women in the Church well argued. 

- Unfortunately the recommendations are far too heavy on governance structures like Pastoral Councils, etc. These sorts of reforms are downstream structural impacts that will largely take care of themselves when the core revolutionary reforms have been enthusiastically embraced. 

- There are major moral issues that aren’t addressed because of the book’s focus on making recommendations to the upcoming Plenary Council. These issues include: birth control; marriage/divorce/re-marriage; abortion; sex before marriage; sexual identity; gay marriage; euthanasia.

- The two core realities that have to be radically reformed as a matter of urgency are women priests and celibacy. The Church is infected with serious and ingrained misogyny. Women are seen as ontologically inferior to men, which means they can ‘never be priests’. They are just domestic servants and bearers/nurturers of children. This medievalism has to be brought to a savage end immediately.

- Regarding celibacy, the calls in this book for it to be made voluntary are wrong. To allow priests and religious to ‘chose celibacy’ would simply allow clerical sexual abuse to be seeded. Men and women of the church should be not just allowed but encouraged to form intimate relationships with other people, even if it never leads to marriage. There have always been and always will be bachelors. That’s fine. But a pledge at a relatively young age to remain celibate is something else entirely. Celibate priests in a married-priests world would not be welcome in parishes or schools. That is today’s reality.

- It infuriates me that recent popes, including, disgracefully, Francis, have totally ruled out women priests and continue to show no inclination to abolish celibacy. At a time when there is a dire shortage of priests it is simply mind-bogglingly moronic. At a time when the dwindling faithful and many ex-Catholics are crying out for inspiration, this sort of third rate leadership must continue to be loudly condemned. Until it ends. Which it will.

- Books like this are a key weapon in that destruction. 

Lucie Morris-Marr, Fallen.

                                                                                                                      



- This book is a very detailed and comprehensive history of the Pell case from an obviously intelligent and responsible journalist. I found it utterly absorbing. 

- In the first 50 or so pages Morris-Marr relates her personal story as to how she got sucked into the telling of this drama in the first place, and in fact became obsessed by it. Her Herald Sun editor gave her a front page exclusive in February 2016 to reveal that Victoria Police had launched an investigation into claims of sexual abuse by Cardinal Pell. 

- The reaction was swift and intense. Predictably, the rusted-on Pell supporters came out in droves. She copped serious flack and animosity from Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt and the reactionary, conservative cohort at The Australian. She knew her time working for Murdoch was over. She became a freelancer, working mostly with The New Daily and CNN. 

- When the court processes get under way in the Melbourne Magistrates Court as part of the committal hearings, the lengthy detailed narrative begins. She infuses the story with a high level of drama. It's detailed and vivid, and told with empathy and sensitivity. Her journalistic skills shine through. Her focus is on the facts and legal processes and any biases she might have are kept well and truly in check.

- For many readers I'm sure, and many admirers of Louise Milligan's superb Cardinal, most of the story is well known. But Morris-Marr includes all sorts of detail and personal observations about how the central characters are interacting that make it all once again utterly engrossing. 

- The press were not allowed to see or report on the accuser's testimony in court and Pell's defence barrister Richter's relentless questioning. She simply summarisers what the Prosecutor said about it during his closing submission. The power and persuasiveness of J’s testimony is the central issue. In an otherwise comprehensive and dramatic narrative it’s unfortunately a gaping hole. Judge Kidd ruled in the second trial that not even the transcript would be made available. 

- The key question, as she puts it, was ‘Somebody in this case was lying. Was it the surviving accuser? Or was it Pell?’ 

- Pell was still fully robed after mass. The old ‘heavy robes’ defence was trotted out. Personally I've never swallowed this. Soutanes can be lightweight (if he was wearing one at all) as are the cotton albs and silky chasubles. There's no wool around, so there’s nothing heavy about them in the sense we normally understand that word. The offence occurred in December, in summer. In fact the appeals court judged Pell’s official robes ‘not so heavy or immovable as the evidence of Monsignor Portelli and Mr Potter had suggested’.

- Some new stuff I didn't know: in the second trial ‘Richter’s closing address had been extensively reworked in both content and structure. It had to be’.

- Friends of Pell at the beginning remained defenders of Pell at the end. Disappointingly, Father Frank Brennan also weighed in to support Pell, citing the pathetic ‘heavy robes’ defence.

- Judge Peter Kidd, in his sentencing address, was hardly wishy-washy: ‘Your conduct was permeated with staggering arrogance’. 

- The book is very up-to-date (The Appeal Court's decision on 21 August, three weeks before publication, is covered in detail). The prosecution barrister had pressed one argument loud and clear: '...the surviving choirboy should and must be believed'.

- At the end of this fine book Morris-Marr indulges in some emotional, sensitive and very powerful reflections: 

  The elderly cardinal had found himself trapped in his own living hell, incarcerated in the very city where he once wielded so much power, the city where he proudly wore his elaborate mitre and carried his crosier in the procession with the choir out of the main doors of his cathedral. This was the choir from which one small, powerless, adolescent soprano walking in his red-and-white robes would eventually find the strength to speak up.

His allegations may eventually be discredited and ultimately rejected. But he has been heard. His voice has set a course of profound change, contrition and much needed inner reflection within the Holy See and the Roman Catholic Church around the world.

He may have given hope and a call to action to many voiceless survivors still struggling in the darkness, too frightened to tell, too damaged to share their experiences. He may also have brought courage to a woman in Gippsland who should have been saved, not ignored a tiny girl trapped in Ridsdale's ruthless grip.

For those many legacies, his voice will never be forgotten.

He'd proved to the world the meek really can inherit the earth.

Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

- It's Gilead up close and it's absorbing from the start. Atwood has pulled this off. It's an astonishingly good and fascinating story. 

- There are three main characters: Aunt Lydia, who is invested with a lot more power, and is redeemed; teenager Agnes, child of Gilead privilege, who finally learns to read and write and understand; and 'Baby Nicole' (now 13 year old Jade) who the Handmaid June succeeded in safely sending to Canada, and has now been sent back to Gilead on a mission.

- The backstories, particularly those of Aunt Lydia and her colleagues and their former pre-Gilead lives and professions, are full of fascinating detail. This sort of fleshing out, something missing in The Handmaid's Tale, is extremely satisfying. Lydia, despite being cunning, calculating, clever and a serious plotter, is portrayed as a sympathetic character. The book is basically about her and her privileged Aunty status. 

- As Lydia has recognised, ‘the aims of Gilead at the outset were pure and noble, we all agree. But they have been subverted and sullied by the selfish and the power-mad, as so often happens in the course of history’. ‘Bearing false witness was not the exception, it was common. Beneath its outer show of virtue and purity, Gilead was rotten’. 

- There are biblical and literary 'sayings' liberally sprinkled throughout the conversations recorded by the Gilead women. They are easy substitutes for critical thought and analysis, and typify the exquisite banality of Gilead belief. Even the words 'God' and 'Love' can’t be associated.  

- However Agnes is being awakened by being exposed to secret files and recordings secretly provided to her by Aunt Lydia, who is clearly working to undermine and destroy Gilead. One revelation is that Gilead's current leader, Commander Judd, who has had multiple wives, eventually murdered all of them by poisoning. He prefers his wives young. There is no divorce in Gilead so what else is a man to do?. 

- Agnes learns that she is the first daughter, and Baby Nicole the second daughter of the Handmaid Offred who escaped to Canada. They are half-sisters. Lydia also discloses to her, via a file note, that Baby Nicole has returned to Gilead, and for nefarious reasons.

- The ending pulls all the threads together in a very satisfying way. 

- The Handmaid's Tale made the Booker Prize shortlist in 1986 but did not win the prize (which went to Kingsley Amis' The Old Devils). This year The Testaments is on the shortlist. The smart money has it winning, making up for the 1986 'mistake'. 

Andrew McGahan, The Rich Man’s House.

  


- This final novel of the recently deceased Australian author Andrew McGahan has a rather absurd premise. A mountain off the coast of Tasmania is twice the height of Everest. It's a 'Magic Mountain' with a fist-like shape at the summit named the 'hand of God'. Geologically it's a single cliff twenty-five kilometres high. It’s not your regular mountain at all really - it's an upturned tectonic plate, named the 'Wheel'.

- One of the world’s most powerful men, now a billionaire, was the first to climb and conquer this enigmatic feat of nature in 1974. And he has in recent years constructed a mansion blasted out of the rock at the top of Observatory Mount, the ‘Child of the Wheel’ ten kilometres from it. The billionaire’s name is Walter Richman. (RICHMAN? Seriously?)

- It’s a long story, 600 pages, but eventually it absolutely absorbs you and demands your time until the end.

- Frankly, at first I was tempted to bail. 150 pages in and I was bored. Where is this going, apart from some ‘mystery’ of the Agatha Christie variety - a group of people assembled together and then horrible things are inevitably going to happen? 

- Where’s the social, political critique? Where are the underclass, the forgotten? Where’s the penetrating engagement with our contemporary world? Why write a book like this? 

- But 200 pages in the focus on meaning starts to appear and the tension builds. The narrator is Rita, the daughter of the architect of the mansion. ‘...some moral sense within her was in revolt, as if she had witnessed something indecent...it was degenerate’. ‘Loathing filled her, not for his wealth, but for his ego, for the sheer vastness of his conceit’. ‘It was the intrusion of something man-made where mankind did not belong’. ‘Rage at that enormity flowed in storm waves from the mountain...retribution was coming’.

- Rita had authored a new-age book in 1995 about 'invisible non-human presences, non-human forms of consciousness, all around us in the landscape’. It was, and still is, a contentious proposition.

- ‘What crime had Richman committed upon the summit that the Wheel could not forgive? Or was it just the crime of standing there at all?’ 

- This is an airport action thriller, though undoubtedly a well written one, with a slow-building plot. As reviewer Andrew Fuhrmann wrote in The Saturday Paper, it’s a Stephen King novel. But it has a majesty that’s very impressive. 

- McGahan must have spent an enormous amount of time researching the history and practice of mountain climbing. He includes so much detail on the equipment, preparation, organisational complexity, and dangerous nature of the sport. It’s presented in a very authoritative voice and brings the whole enterprise vividly to life.

- Definitely worth reading, perhaps during your summer holidays.