Jock Serong, The Burning Island.

 

- Jock Serong can tell a story, infusing it with constant drama and tension, and bringing historical characters and narratives vividly to life. This novel is a sequel to his magnificent Preservation, published in 2018. (I reviewed that novel here)

- His prose is beautiful, often poetic, as are his descriptions of the natural world and its rhythms and colours. And he speaks deeply and movingly about the essence of love and the value of rich personal, family and social relationships. 

- In 1830 Mr Srinivas, now a wealthy timber merchant, organises a boat voyage on the Moonbird down to The Furneaux Group of islands to the north of Van Diemen’s Land to look for clues as to how a previous voyage on the Howrah disappeared. The supposition is that Mr Figge, an evil, murderous man featured in Preservation, was responsible. 

- The collection of characters brought together by Srinivas come across at first as a strange and rather tedious lot. Eliza Grayling, a stern teacher; her father Joshua, a hopeless drunk and now rendered blind; the schooner’s master who wears dresses and hair combs; two young twins and deck hands, uneducated and constantly fighting; and a Doctor Gideon, an amateur scientist and a fervent Christian, or so it seems. 

- There are incidents on the way, all seemingly unconnected. This happened, then that happened, then that happened...I began to yearn for some meaning, some overarching vision to bring it all together and enrich it. Preservation was deeply meaningful in contrast, a harsh critique of the early days of the Sydney colony and its savage treatment of the Indigenous inhabitants. 

- However, deep into the story the various elements do come together and start to form a rich brew indeed. New characters emerge, inhabitants of the various small islands in Bass's Straight. For instance the gun-carrying and proud native woman from Penguin Island: As another woman told it ‘She talked to the people, men, women, an she said we gonna take the settlers down. An she meant it. All that bad treatment, all them beatings, she wanted to take it out on the squatters, an the troopers an...she didn’t care who, as long as it was white men.’

- The tension builds. The Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, for example, commands the capture and re-education of all the Aboriginal people on the islands. They are to be rounded up and Christianised, ‘saved’ from their squalor. 

- Serong constructs a very satisfying conclusion indeed, apart from one key thing that's left hanging. There has to be a third in this series, and that will be well worth waiting for.

Suzanne Smith, The Altar Boys.

 

- If you’re not a Catholic you are going to get very angry reading this book. If you are a Catholic you’re going to get even angrier.     

- Six-time Walkley Award-winning journalist Suzanne Smith digs deep into the clerical club and the administration of the Maitland-Newcastle diocese. The hero of the story is Father Glen Walsh, who refused to remain silent, and who suffered for his 'betrayal' his whole life. 

- A nest of ugly, debauched pedophiles were flourishing in the diocese, including the notorious Vince Ryan, and other frequent abusers like John Denham and James Fletcher. It was an absolute disgrace that they were protected from the law for decades by bishops and other priests. This is a story of the wider church’s awakening to the sleazebags in their midst. Particularly the families of the victims. The hierarchy remained ‘belligerent, ignorant and condescending’.      

- The author portrays the pious Catholicism of the parishioners exceptionally well. They were loyal, working class families, virtually all of Irish descent who revered and loved their priests. And the Marist Brothers who taught their boys. Or so they thought.

- Glen Walsh wrote a letter to the head of the Marist Brothers for the Sydney Province, Brother Michael Hill, outlining his own abuse by Brother Coman Sykes. After an ‘independent review’ his allegations were deemed ‘not sustained’. He felt he had been double-crossed. Many years later that decision was reversed after another official and independent examination.

- Walsh reported another case, 'Brendan's', direct to the police in defiance of his bishop, Michael Malone, and is told in no uncertain terms, as in 'fuck off', to leave the diocese. Malone never allowed him to return despite representations from other priests and friends. 

- Smith tells the story of journalist Joanne McCarthy’s investigations for the Newcastle Herald and her passionate advocacy for a Royal Commission. She focussed on concealment. ‘Maitland-Newcastle would become notorious across Australia and the world for being one of the worst epicentres for child sexual abuse’. 

- And the forensic work of Detective Sergeant Kristi Faber, who ‘from 2008 to 2017...went on to convict a large number of priests and brothers with hundreds of charges relating to close to 180 victims.’ 

- Archbishop Philip Wilson... ‘had been in senior leadership roles for two decades while the abuse had occurred’. He was charged with concealment. Glen Walsh was a Crown prosecutor witness against the archbishop. He knew he would again be ostracised and further isolated in the diocese. 

- Walsh’s bishop at the time, and fellow priests, totally deserted him during his serious illness in 2016. His final email to them held nothing back though. He condemned them. Bishop Wright eventually welcomed Glen back to the diocese in February 2017 but in October reversed that decision in light of Glen’s testimony against Archbishop Wilson. ‘He advised me that the presbyterate will never forgive me for exposing them for what they are...’ Glen, already quite sick and frail, took his own life two weeks later. He was 56.

- Smith tells many other stories of abusers and their victims, which are sickening and heartbreaking. She has written a powerful book which I highly recommend.

(Unfortunately this is yet another Australian non-fiction book without an index. Or an author photo. This habit seems to have developed over the last ten years or so, and it's a bad one. Completely unprofessional. What's wrong with Australian publishers that they do this?)  

Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults

 

- As a lover of Elena Ferrante's superb Neapolitan Quartet, My Brilliant Friend, I couldn't wait to get into this. And it didn't disappoint. It's vintage Ferrante - family, school, friendships, sexual stresses and strains, a micro drama of a young Italian teenager's transition to adulthood. Ferrante captures the intensity of this process perfectly, and deals with the conflicting emotions with precision. She sucks you in.

- Naples is effectively two cities: the upper classes live in the hills, the lower classes down in the grubby parts. The teenage Giovanna, from an affluent family, is coming of age and is over-sensitive and hyper dramatic. Her educated father Andrea detests his illiterate sister Vittoria who inhabits the lower realm. Giovanna is navigating that relationship and wising up. 

- Andrea is a rather prissy, opinionated intellectual; Vittoria an earthy, vigorous, loud and vulgar character. She's also presented as quite melodramatic and a little comical. Giovanna has to come to terms with '...an incongruous juxtaposition of vulgarity and refinement’. And the smart young woman, who reads books and listens to music, is having to deal with the rough boys of the hood, the 'debased humanity' of lower Naples. 

- Milan features again. As in the quartet, it is presented as an important city for aspiration and culture. Escaping Naples becomes a necessity. Very few authors dissect with such precision the emotional complexity of these constant tensions.

- Unfortunately the novel suffers from very poor copy editing, and it's annoying. Constant run-on sentences, separated by commas instead of full stops, can't be attributed to Ferrante or to the English translator Ann Goldstein. The buck stops with the editor. 

- And although universally lauded for her translation of the quartet, Goldstein falls short in this novel. There's a frequent awkwardness to it. Here are a few examples: 'outside the family accords, secretly’ (‘i accordi’ means 'arrangements', a better word); ‘...the dailiness of my body’ ('quotidian ordinariness' would have been better); ‘...it was my first experience of privation’ (I don't know what that means); ‘street atlas’ (rather than 'maps' or 'directory'). 

- Nevertheless, a hugely enjoyable read.

             

David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue

 

- There are many fans of UK author David Mitchell's novels, and I am one of them. 

- His latest is a magnificent paean to sixties rock. It's absorbing from the start. It captures the character of Soho in the late sixties and its bars, clubs, cafes, music and art venues perfectly, and brings them stunningly alive. Though more than that is going on. There’s a revolution in play - throughout the whole of society and across the world. A new world is emerging. Not just in music and the arts, but in politics and society across the board. Mitchell shoves us into all of it. 

- His trademark vivid prose is rich, colourful, swashbuckling, earthy and real. We are introduced to the new band Utopia Avenue. Four brilliant musicians and songwriters have been carefully selected by an ambitious but talented manager. Elf is on the piano, Griff on the drums, Dean on the bass, and Jasper on the lead guitar. And Elf is a woman, highly unusual in those times.

- These characters are brought stunningly to life in every detail, including their cockney accents. We gradually get their class-based and mostly harsh, ugly backstories. They’re intensely interesting and very likeable. We relate to them - their long hair, Carnaby Street fashion, transient relationships, sexual identities, drugs, constant money problems, and cruel, reactionary, conservative, and angry post-war parents upset by the emerging and disruptive counter-culture and its new consciousness. And unlike in Bone Clocks, Mitchell’s least successful novel in my opinion, their stories are fully integrated into a seamless whole. There are little side trips (Dean’s three days in a filthy cell in Rome; Elf’s nephew’s cot death) but they enrich rather than detract from the larger narrative. And, as is usual for Mitchell, characters in his previous books make brief appearances in this one. 

- The conversations and arguments are electric and brimming with vitality. He writes about the musical structure of the songs like a seasoned critic and brings to life the concerts and performances. He's on stage with the band, utterly blown away by their brilliance. (If only we could be thrust forward 50 years to link to the music and hear the songs. We ache for it).

- As a writer, Mitchell has another dimension. I’ve never been an enthusiastic fan of his off-ramp excursions into otherworldly realms that too frequently complicate and bog down his core narrative. But at least he’s more restrained here. Jasper’s ‘Knock Knock’, an incorporeal spirit hounding him from his centuries old Dutch ancestry and ultimately hijacking his body, thrusts us back to Mitchell's previous, and quite superb novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Here it works.

- Real stars get brief appearances - David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Syd Barrett, Allen Ginsberg, Keith Moon, Brian Jones, John Lennon, Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, Jackson Browne, Jimi Hendrix, Mama Cass, Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia. There's endless parties and drugs. But is Mitchell indulging himself here: is this loose, sex and drugs, celebrity lifestyle the ideal and the one he would have preferred for himself? No matter.

- Towards the end of the novel we're forced to reflect on all this sixties stuff and find some deeper meaning. A journalist at a press conference asks the question 'Can songs change the world'? Forgive me for quoting the whole answer:

'Songs do not change the world', declares Jasper. 'People do. People pass laws, riot, hear God and act accordingly. People invent, kill, make babies, start wars'. Jasper lights a Marlboro. 'Which begs a question. "Who or what influences the minds of the people who change the world?" My answer is "Ideas and feelings". Which begs a question. "Where do ideas and feelings originate?" My answer is, "Others. One's heart and mind. The press. The arts. Stories. Last, but not least, songs." Songs. Songs, like dandelion seeds, billowing across space and time. Who knows where they'll land? Or what they'll bring?" Jasper leans into the mic and, without a wisp of self-consciousness, sings a miscellany of single lines form nine or ten songs. Dean recognises, 'It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)', 'Strange Fruit' and 'The Trail of the Lonesome Pine'. Others, Dean can't identify, but the hard-boiled press pack look on. Nobody laughs, nobody scoffs. Cameras click. 'Where will these song-seeds land? It's the parable of the sower. Often, usually, they land on barren soil and don't take root. But sometimes, they land in a mind that is ready. Is fertile. What happens then? Feelings and ideas happen. Joy, solace, sympathy. Assurance. Cathartic sorrow. The idea that life could be, should be, better than this. An invitation to slip into somebody else's skin for a little while. If a song plants an idea or a feeling in a mind, it has already changed the world.'

And later on, Jerry Garcia muses: 

'Every third or fourth generation is a generation of radicals, of revolutionaries. We, my friends, are the bottle-smashers. We release the genies. We run riot, get shot, get infiltrated, get bought off. We die, go bust, sell out to the man. Sure as eggs is eggs. But the genies we let loose stay loose. In the ears of the young the genies whisper what was unsayable. "Hey kids - there's nothing wrong with being gay." Or "What if war isn't a patriotism test, but really fucking dumb?" Or "Why do so few own so goddamn much?" In the short run not a lot seems to change. Those kids are nowhere near the levers of power. Not yet. But in the long run? Those whispers are the blueprints of the future'.

- The final chapter, Elf’s tribute, is simply beautiful. 

- What a magnificent book this is. Extraordinary.