- Robert Harris, a master of quality historical fiction, has built his latest novel on an intriguing premise: the inversion of time periods. History, after the catastrophic end of civilisation in 2025, began again.
- The church declared that ‘God had punished the ancients for their elevation of science above all else’. 'Scientism’ was now a heresy. It caused a cyber network collapse, a climate crisis, a nuclear war, and a global food shortage. It was a massive armageddon. No money, no communication, no food. Starvation, disease and massacre took most people, and the rest would have drowned in the rising waters.
- This 'Apocalypse' happened in 2025, known from the biblical Book of Revelation as the year of the the beast, 666. History had virtually ended and the remnant Church authorities, once small communities began to establish themselves again, declared a new calendar. This novel is set in the year '1468', which, although never spelt out, equates to 2827 under our current calendar.
- This post-science, post-rational-enquiry, post-enlightenment society is a replication of the what we know as the dark Middle Ages - here officially named as the ‘Age of the Risen Christ’. The monarchy, the church, the state, are absolute authorities and demand subservience. As we look upon the ruins of that era now, these citizens are looking on the ruins of the 21st century. (And much of it is plastic).
- The population of England has shrunk from 60 million to 6 million. And critically, of course, here is no such thing as as the foundational power of electricity.
- It has the bleakness, coldness and darkness of a Hannah Kent novel.
- But of course human beings, being the age-old package of sinfulness, pride and ambition, as well as compassion, love and loyalty, are not much different whatever the period or circumstances. They feel the same emotions. Harris' skill, on show in all his historical novels, is to infuse his narratives with the exquisite drama of human interaction. He brings history very much alive.
- Prophets are universally ignored. Truth is buried as a heresy. Knowledge and enlightenment are more often than not entombed.
- Australian Journalist David Leser has written a very detailed and comprehensive analysis of the key movement of our times - the slow but sure demolition of the patriarchy.
- It's full of facts, statistics, history and theology, and is clearly written and told.
- He trawls through both popular and academic literature, sometimes skimming the scholarly works and cherry picking the quotes, which makes it a bit too breezy at times. But it gets far better as it progresses.
- It traverses old ground, and we're all familiar with the #MeToo narrative and its cast of characters by now, but nevertheless he tells the story well and in detail.
- Leser surprises at times with his insight into male-female relationships and the challenges of interacting these days. He becomes very personal, recounting, for example, his conversation on a French train with ‘a beautiful woman’ who sat next to him. They talked for 90 minutes and he was tempted to invite her out when next in Paris. ‘It’s not the try-on that’s wrong, I’d argue; it’s the way the try-on happens’.
- The chapter Augustine Confessions is superb, particularly the section on the failure of his marriage. ‘My needs counted more. My projects counted more. My interests counted more’.
- He examines in detail the difficult terrain of the ‘grey zone’ where things aren’t so black and white and where career damaging accusations are frequently out of kilter with the gravity of the possible offence.
- Unlike Weinstein, with the Aziz Ansari story ‘we enter the nightlands of doubt and ambiguity’. Leser learns so much from his two daughters, now in their twenties, and as a result his commentary is so much more finely attuned than it could have been.
- He has lunch with an old friend Helen Garner and they talk though the issues, including the fierce reaction to her book The First Stone. Garner remains sceptical: 'I'm always attuned when a whiny note appears in these stories and a note of entitlement’.
- He also walks us through the enormously celebrated short story Cat Person, published in the New Yorker in December 2017, by Kristen Roupenian. ‘Boofheadedness’ met ‘gracelessness’. That's a great summary of the story.
- I was impressed by his assessment of new campus and corporate policies and protocols around sexual interactions that rarely get the balance right. ‘We need to live in a world of moral proportion and, right now, we don’t’.
- The chapter on India is enlightening. Its disastrous, primitive and cruel misogyny is very slowly being transformed.
- One quality shines through Leser's long narrative. After what must have been an arduous journey through the mire he can still talk with astuteness and sensitivity about ‘feminine qualities...which centuries of masculine culture have repressed or removed'.
- This is a superb book, well worth your time.
- Frankly, I was a little disappointed with this novel. It didn't quite live up to the hype that preceded its publication last week.
- It’s a good story, exceptionally well written, but there is little else to it. A mystery, a thriller, with a near-future setting. A lot's happening on the surface, but there's little depth or meaning underneath.
- British migrants are desperate to leave the UK because some sort of pandemic has decimated the cities still under a regime of economic austerity. Australia, on the other hand needs skilled workers so has a program in place to ship them here, once they've cleared rather arduous health and security checks.
They are shipped, not by plane, but by a large sail boat, to save on fuel costs! People smugglers and asylum seekers and their flimsy boats. These pre-authorised UK migrants are of course a cut above the 'browns' but a nasty virus on the ship wreaks havoc, with many deaths during the long nine week voyage. That changes everything. ‘We were a threat, the enemy. They wanted to send us home’.
- There are now echoes everywhere - Christmas Island, Nauru, Manus, the Tampa, The government is ‘weeks from an election’. The migrants have no hope in hell of settling in Australia. We know this story.
- Predictably sprinkled throughout are references to every detention event - stranded kids; hunger strikes; sewn lips; suicides; cruel guards, appalling conditions; an unsympathetic public.
- We feel for them, but they are white English speakers after all. That, frankly, makes it easier for us readers to digest, and renders real world comparisons far less powerful. I was expecting something far more politically biting and savage.
- As a thriller, the final twist at the end is superb.
- From the get-go this is a thoroughly delightful read. In fact it’s the definition of delightful. I don’t usually read YA novels, but this is a book for adults as well as newly arrived ones. Perhaps branding and marketing it as a YA novel will unfortunately confine it to a niche when it deserves a much wider audience.
- Natalie, the narrator, is shy, complex, intelligent, pimpled, massively self-conscious and full of your standard teenage anxiety. She’s also very funny: ‘I honestly shouldn’t be allowed to talk to people’; ‘I scream into a pillow, which feels good the first time I do it but very over the top the second time’.
- The constant phone texting between these 18 year olds is so good and true. It’s such an essential part of personal and group interaction these days, yet most contemporary authors don’t feature it.
- I kept thinking of Sally Rooney's Ordinary People but this is Rooney with a mischievous wit. Kenwood has a light touch but a sure hand in rendering the subtlety of personal relationships and family dynamics.
- I absolutely gobbled this book up. It's a real treasure.
- This debut novel is a stylish, intoxicating and mysterious work that combines various narrative threads exceptionally well. They are at first seemingly unrelated but fuse into a satisfying and meaningful whole in the novel's final chapters.
- The characters' names are multicultural and exotic: while there's Cameron, Maddison, Charles and Felix, there's Dhiya, Ajak, Tane, Jhon and Bishal.
- Bryer explores the creative process in its many dimensions, and her experience as a translator shines through, translation being defined as not just a language process but a real re-creation of the original.
- Eventually the focus is on modern Australia. ‘From here on, monsters’ is an unknown cartographer’s description in 1504 of the imagined inhabitants of the Antipodes. The Aboriginal occupation, society and culture of the Great South Land is erased by the European colonisers. Who, exactly, are the monsters?
- Our 'official' description of today's migrants/asylum seekers is ‘Illegal Maritime Arrivals’. Truth in reporting is being censored. Things disappear - characters, words, events, scenes, views, facts. Meaning fades.
- One character asks at one point ‘When do you think we’ll be able to see again?’
- The ending is at first confusing, but highly suggestive. Art needs to rise to the occasion, cut through, tell the ugly truth, and change things. Not be a meaningless exercise in narcissistic wankery.
(Shaun Prescott, author of the wonderful novel The Town, is quoted on the back cover and he gets it so right: 'Traverses the chasm between truth and history, and challenges our faith in the liberatory potential of art. It's a modern Australian novel about modern Australia that, refreshingly, doesn't read at all like a modern Australian novel'.
And Bryer quotes the Japanese poet Issa translated by Czeslaw Milosz:
To know and not to speak.
In that way one forgets.
What is pronounced strengthens itself.
What is unpronounced tends to non-existence.)
