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.

Louise Penny: A Better Man

- This is the first book in the Amande Gamache detective series that I've read. And it will be the last.

- The novels are set in rural Quebec and Montreal, mainly centering around a delightful small village called Three Pines.

- However there's way too much trivial detail about the minor characters and their interactions. It gets very twee at times - folksy, homey, provincial and quite annoying.

- There's a flood emergency and it has almost nothing to do with the crime story, but it goes on and on and on. At 400 pages this book should have been 100 pages shorter. There’s so much padding. OK, we get it, author. You live there in real life and you want us readers to love it too. 

- There are three separate stories actually: the crime, of course; the flood; and three or four old batshit crazy women and their daily ins and outs. No interconnection at all between the stories, apart from the characters and their personal relationships. 

- In the murder story there's an undercurrent of family violence and abuse. It rises to the surface as the novel proceeds, and it's powerful and well written. This is the heart of the book. 

- Some fictional narratives are like thick tapestries being slowly unraveled, but if the author takes forever to do it readers frequently lose the thread and it all just becomes irritating. This book is a prime example.