Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me.

- This is a typical Ian McEwan novel, and fans will love it, as I certainly did. 

- His style is to establish right from the get-go an everyday practical premise around which an intense contemporary drama will be built. Ordinary people are doing ordinary things, normally related to their work and usually professional careers. He’s a very social writer in this sense, who's always interrogating current social and political movements and trends. 

- In Machines Like Me we're in the early 1980's, but with an imaginative twist. PM Margaret Thatcher has sent the navy to the Falklands to oust the invading forces of Argentina (historically accurate), and the internet and social media are everywhere (not accurate).

 - History is being rewritten, and it seems to favour the progressive political left. Instead of winning the war Thatcher loses it. The computer scientist and WW2 hero Alan Turing, who actually died in 1954, is alive and well and very influential in the 1980s; the Beatles reunite and release a new album in 1982, although John Lennon of course was killed in 1980; Socialist Labour leader Tony Benn ousts Thatcher at the next election (Benn was never a Labour leader), but is killed in the Brighton hotel IRA bombing (which Thatcher herself survived). 

- Central to the plot is the emerging reality of artificial intelligence, a movement led by Turing. The main character, Charlie, comes into a bit of money and buys a 'synthetic human' called Adam. Together with Miranda, his girlfriend, they develop Adam's personality and form an affectionate relationship with him. McEwan spends a lot of time, perhaps a bit too much, exploring fascinating philosophical and moral issues that they all confront along the way. Their reflections and conversations are serious, intelligent and rather engrossing. 

- This intellectual exploration is such a trademark of McEwan's and why I like his novels so much.

- He also has a gift for excellent characterisation and plotting. That's certainly true here. Miranda's backstory is so absorbing, and eventually becomes the principal focus of the novel and its resolution.  

- How does it all end with the 'ambulant laptop' Adam, who rather unfortunately develops a mind and personality very much his own? Very satisfactorily indeed. 

- In summary, this is a superb new novel from a master of the craft.

Max Porter, Lanny

- This is such a beautifully written novel. It's refreshingly original and extremely powerful. I found it riveting. 

- As much as anything it captures the intense drama of living in a small village in the countryside - the strange noises and eerie silences. Everything is heightened and scary. It could be the wind, animals, insects, intruders, or even killers. 

- Young adolescent boy Lanny Greentree is a gifted, happy, very well liked, only child. His mother adores him; his distant father, who commutes to London for his work in finance, barely tolerates him.

- His mother introduces him to an older man, a well regarded artist, to teach Lanny the basics of drawing and painting. Lanny and the painter develop a strong personal relationship. 

- Part 2, beginning half way through the novel, radically pivots the narrative. It becomes a mystery and a tragedy and it's very intense. Ironically Lanny's mother is a thriller writer.

- Porter, via a cacophony of village voices that are simple declarations of ignorance, prejudice and cruelty, paints a frightening reality of a seemingly innocent country town and it denizens. As one character says ‘All of this has shown what a bunch of wankers most people are’. 

- Part 3 brings all the threads together in an extremely satisfying way.  ‘...she knows she is watching a replay, she is peering from a fold in time....’ 

- I highly recommend this book. It's exquisitely good.  

Vicki Laveau-Harvie, The Erratics.

- I'm baffled as to how this memoir won this year's Stella Prize. Out of a shortlist that included Melissa Lucashenko's powerful Too Much Lip and Maria Tumarkin's superb Axiomatic.

- It's about two old parents living near the Rockies in Alberta, Canada, and their two daughters whom they kicked out of home decades previously. Unfortunately for the reader this family is boring, and the fact that the senile parents are batshit crazy doesn’t help in the slightest. They are utterly charmless. That they’re nameless also doesn’t help. The author keeps them at an emotional distance. 

- The book simply didn’t engage me, and I would hazard a guess it won’t engage many other readers. 

- Sure, it’s written in sassy, sparkling and delightfully comic prose with an edge of cynicism and world weariness, but it’s ordinary, frankly, with little insight or depth.

- The oldest daughter (the author) is fiercely intelligent. Her dealings with carers, doctors, neighbours and others looking after her mother and father are competent and professional. Although, very frequently, she eviscerates all of them. 

- Her relationship with her younger sister is just as much in focus as her relationship with her parents. Her sister is a softy, more emotional, sentimental and anxious. Frankly, she’s annoying. The fact that she too is nameless doesn’t help. 

- The senile parents, now in their nineties, keep on living and surviving year after year, with no change in the dynamics of the family relationships - no development, no reconciliation. I'm sorry, but I found that frustrating and, again, annoying. 

- And there's the Alberta nature descriptions - endless and...annoying. There’s constant snow and ice and blizzards, and freezing temperatures. The extreme weather becomes a major character in the tale. It's off-putting. Why would anybody want to live there?

- This memoir is only 217 pages long but I couldn’t wait for it to end. It was like spending a long weekend putting up with people you just want to escape from. 

- This blurb on the back cover is a lie:

'A ferocious, sharp, darkly funny and wholly compelling memoir of families, the pain they can inflict and the legacy they leave, The Erratics has the tightly coiled, compressed energy of an explosive device - it will take your breath away'.

Wayne Macauley, Simpson Returns

- This is an intriguing premise which at first puzzled me. The connection between the fabled national hero of Gallipoli, Jack Simpson, and today’s downtrodden Australians seemed contrived. And his ‘invisibility’ to the vast majority of relatively affluent Australians unconvincing. 

- But as this short book progresses Macauley's intention becomes clear. Simpson is just a device connecting a number of stories of hard done by characters who live at the margins and under the radar. Our nation’s indulgence in the myth of the selfless, courageous Simpson, the typical celebrated 'mate' on the battlefield, is self-serving and stands in stark contrast to our ugly reality. 

- Simpson refers to his ‘Inveterate Samaritanism’. On his slow walk to the fabled 'inland sea' he meets the forgotten and impoverished: the young drug addict; the abandoned suicidal mother; the handicapped goat owner (‘as ugly as a hatful of arseholes’); the unwelcome Afghani refugee; the sexually abused indigenous teenager: the angry and deranged ex-teacher. That he doesn’t really help any of them in any meaningful way is telling. He sees his role as ‘...to administer my poultices and potions, my incantatory fictions, my sideshow bombast and quackery as best I could’.

- Macauley's novels are consistently savage critiques of Australian middle class delusions, and Simpson Returns is no exception. He brings considerable depth to his portrayal of our social fragility and the destructive all-pervasive darkness underneath. Simpson reflects at one point: ‘There is always a certain amount of self-deceit necessary for the healthy maintenance of a society hell-bent on proving the sun shines out of its arse.’ 

- A must read.

Carrie Tiffany, Exploded View.

          


- An unnamed girl’s reflections are the essence of this book: some are wise, some cruel, some naive, some nasty, some funny. ‘Nobody beautiful has ever caught a bus’. 

- Her mother's new partner, ‘father man’, is brutish and unlovable, a miserable turd. He runs an unlicensed car repair business in their garage. After dinner one night, in a flash of anger, he suddenly and without reason cuts off her pony tale. But most importantly he sexually abuses her at night. 

- Her revenge is sabotage. Under cover of darkness she enters the garage and loosens screws, bites into hoses, pours sand into engine parts, etc. 

- She knows exactly what she's doing. She obsessively devours a car mechanic manual containing diagrams of engine parts - the 'exploded views' of the title. 

- Tiffany brilliantly captures the deadness of the vast Australian outback and the experience of driving through it for days on end. The family of four cramped in their Holden for eight days, then a lousy three days in a friend's house on the coast, then eight days back again. They sleep in the car. It's absurd. It’s true horror. I was reminded of Shaun Prescott's creepy 'The Town'. Each town is every other ugly town. ‘It’s a fucking nightmare’ father man says. The spare, empty landscape; the empty roads; the life-denying ‘holiday’ of a family stuck day and night in a car without even the semblance of civilised living. There’s a morbid, suffocating vacuity eviscerating any real life, even insect life. ‘The nothing in the outback is thick and rich’. 

- But this novel is fully alive. The prose - the young teen's voice - is spare yet frequently poetic. It's beautifully done.

Felicity McLean, The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone.

                                                


- I was not that impressed by this novel. It has a YA feel to it - the narrator being an eleven year old girl for most of the novel, then twenty years older for the rest of it. That sort of straddling between teen and adult fiction leaves me cold. 

- There’s a hint that the new male teacher Mr Avery could be a child abuser. As could Mr Van Apfel, the bible bashing and violent father.

- The nature descriptions are constant and over the top. And there's too much deliberate quirkiness in phraseology (‘in his lay-preacher’s soothe’); 

- The author keeps hinting and suggesting as to what actually occurred at the heart of the mystery but never explicitly depicts or clarifies. The police must have been pretty incompetent not to work it all out. 

- Lost children in the harsh Australian landscape is a pretty common theme in Australian literature. There is nothing new here.