Hannah Kent, Devotion

 

- It pains me to say so, but the power of this beautifully written novel is undermined by a fatal narrative flaw. 

- Kent’s focus in her three novels to date has been small communities under immense stress, where goodness and truth are challenged but are eventually victorious. They are all set in the early 1800’s: Burial Rites in Iceland, The Good People in Ireland, and Devotion in Prussia and South Australia.

- Kent is a writer of enormous talent. Her prose is simply beautiful with a light, sensitive and poetic touch. She is also a gifted storyteller who brings her characters and settings vibrantly to life. The central focus of Devotion is the intensity of the love between two young women, something foreign and forbidden in those times and particularly in conservative religious communities. 

- I'm reluctant to disclose the flaw in the novel as it may be perceived as a spoiler. But I can't critique the novel without doing it. The narrator, the young teenager Hanna, actually dies on the disease ridden boat transporting her persecuted Lutheran community from their small village in Prussia to the new colony of South Australia. However, ghostlike, she continues to narrate, telling the story of all subsequent events, including her own burial at sea. By employing this device Kent has abused every genre of historical fiction. To me it was alienating in the extreme. 

- The ghost is invisible to everyone. People pass through her body, but she has all her senses. The wind blows her hair and she feels the cold. She refers to her former life as ‘…my living years’. By indulging in this device Kent is having it both ways. It enables her to explore the intensity of same-sex love and intimacy while forgoing engaging with the real world challenges it brings. She is quite capable of conveying the drama of that, but she refuses to do so.

- As an isolated spirit, surprised she's not at the right hand of God, Hanna has insights and asks questions that may not have occurred to her while living. She begins to doubt religious belief: My parents’ belief that my death was the will of God broke my heart. 

- And she recognises and embraces her sexual orientation, her obsessive love for Thea. At one point she sees through a window two beautiful men who…shared such an intense look of affection and desire that I was jealous.

- She also celebrates Thea's mother, Anna Maria, accused of being a witch by some fervent Christian believers, as a woman of science and nature, not religious superstition. Anna Maria is the first to welcome the Indigenous peoples on the land (the Peramangk people) as friends. She learns about food sources from them - grubs, yabbies, ant larvae, bird eggs, nectar. The new white arrivals, at first starving, are fed and saved. 

- Thea, rendered so desperately unhappy by Hanna's death, is forced by tradition to marry the young Hans and they have a son. But she still yearns for her real love Hanna to be an intimate part of her life. 

- Of course, as Hanna has always known, the only way that can happen is if Thea dies and joins her in the spirit world. 

- So, guess what, after Thea is bitten by a snake, of all things, that happens. Felicitous resolution for sure. 

Christos Tsiolkas, 7 1/2

- Tsiolkas has written in 7 1/2 a confronting but ultimately unsatisfying mishmash of genres: memoir, realistic fiction, essayistic reflections, nature writing, childhood memories and movie critiques.

- I am writing a book about beauty. I want it to be simple, almost straightforward in its intent. If I were a poet it would be easier. Or if I were a musician. It’s harder to distill beauty into prose. The novel is treacherous.

- Fundamentally it's a celebration of the body in all its sensuality, pungent extrusions, youth and ageing. It’s also very gay. Tsiolkas is obsessed with the look and smell of sweaty armpits and beautiful male bodies. His uncle Nikos and his father’s friend Stavros inspired and attracted him while growing up. They were working class, with rough hands and sublime bodies. His wider focus is the beauty of nature in all its dazzling colours, and its birds, insects, animals, flowers, beaches, mountains and storms. 

- Though he briefly refers to the bushfires in early 2020 there is no reference to the harshness and loneliness of the interior; no reference to regional towns and their challenges and provincialism, and no reference to Indigenous lands. Disappointingly European visitors seem to want to see people, to drink coffee or wine or beer in a promenade cafe. They want motion and movement: they fear, and are made anxious by, this wondrous remoteness. It affirms that they are indeed outsiders, strangers. Whereas I return here again and again.

- This novel is far removed from the earthy, angry, realism we're come to love and expect from Tsiolkas. In fact he criticises that genre mercilessly here, effectively condemning his own oeuvre. 

 I am nauseated by their arrogance and their naivety...I have been agreeing to it for a generation now, and increment by increment and timid sentence by timid sentence I have been substituting moralism for imagination...How more tedious can the contemporary novel become?…I go into a bookshop these days and it is as if the shelves are filled with the agonised and narcissistic rantings of teenagers...I’m tired of being angry all the time...Our literature of the last half century has been the babblings from the university. There is so much I love in that chatter: incisiveness, interrogation, the engagement with reckoning. But not its arrogance, not its moral certitude, not its self-righteousness, not its smugness and not its masochism...I shed Justice, Society, Love, Equality, Liberty and Revolution...Shit on the censors of the Church and state, urinate on the puritans of the left and right. Pursue beauty.....I need to dive into the sensuous, bestial and amoral splendour of this world.

- Tsiolkas always incites a visceral reaction, and this book is no exception. He never shies away from celebrating bodily functions including sweating, reeking, pissing and shitting. And the Gothic character of much of his prose, honouring his Greek and Christian origins, elevates to mythic status the often quotidian realities he’s describing. I write in English, but I speak it with a Greek tongue.

- In fact the thickness of his prose often becomes tiresome. He himself calls it ‘baroque’. Everyday events and weather patterns are subjected to an arch, heavy handed style.

- His friend Andrea’s critique of him is spot on. You have a particular skill….that emotional and unrepentant honesty…..that rawness doesn’t feel diluted. As she implies, this book is a surrender, a capitulation to self-indulgence, a shameless retreat. 

- Ironically, given his rants noted above, there is a realist subplot in the novel - the story of the former gay porn star Paul. Apparently this has been long simmering in his creative brain. Whether it ended up a novel, a play or a film, it was going to be called Sweet Thing, named after Van Morrison's classic song. We're introduced to Paul, an American, and his wife Jenna (also a former porn star) via an extraordinary sex scene between them. It's lusciously described in erotic detail. Tsiolkas is so obsessed with sex in this novel that it strikes me as immature and it typifies his self-indulgence. 

- Paul also has a brother, Andy, who is still living in their old family house in LA. He's a thin, scrawny, dying junkie, married to another junkie. The stoned Paul is disgusted with himself after he touches and kisses the stoned wife. He has been sucked back into the 'netherworld' and is desperate to escape by returning to Australia and its physical beauty. This is melodrama writ large. It's cliched and overwrought nonsense. 

- I guess one could argue that Tsiolkas is in fact satirising the contemporary and fashionable critique of realism in fiction, but there's little evidence that this is the case. 

- This novel just doesn't gel. It won't be popular, it won't sell, and it will quickly be forgotten.

Damon Galgut, The Promise

 

- This magnificent novel won the 2021 Booker Prize, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's a fascinating read, set in South Africa in the three decades after the end of the Apartheid regime in the early 1990s to the present day.

- Although it's a seemingly simple story of a white family living on a farm near Pretoria, it develops into much more than that as conflict, struggle and tragedy define the individual lives of the two parents and their three children.  

- Galgut brings shifting perspectives and voices to his story. He darts from one consciousness to another, switching from the third person to the first person in the space of a sentence. And he’s not just a narrator but a commentator on what he's created too. It’s generous, sometimes folksy, prose, and is often delightful and funny. 

- Rather surprisingly, as if there wasn't enough intergenerational conflict in the family, there is also a Jewish versus Christian rift. Loyalty to these Western traditions, and reverence for their respective religious ministers, defines them. It takes a while to be introduced to all the extended family members and friends and clerics, but there is one thing in common - an ingrained racism. 

- The novel has a distinctly South African flavour. Differences dominate as the racist past still defines everything. The whites are masters, the blacks servants, the ugly arrogant overlords versus the lower classes. But the reckoning has begun, despite Nelson Mandela's breakthrough Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The fundamental social structure is in increasing decay. No lights, no water, lean times in the land of plenty. The whites' time is up. 

- Anton, Astrid and Amor are the offspring, the younger generation. Their perspectives on their privilege are more critical of it, but despite the promise they show only the youngest girl Amor comes close to fulfilling it. The oldest, the son Anton, Galgut's principal focus, is an aspiring novelist, aware of the social change underway and its attendant obligations, but in the end amounts to a dismal failure.

- As the years progress Ma, the Jewish mother, dies and ten years later, Pa the Christian. Both of these characters are cranky and unlikable. The extended family members all unite and reunite for the funerals. Galgut brings a charming comic tone to these rather ridiculous get-togethers. 

- There is a wonderful side story about the Rugby World Cup final between the Springboks (South Africa) and the All Blacks (NZ). It's on the same day as Ma's funeral. The whole country is watching, and amazingly South Africa wins. Mandela, released from jail a few weeks earlier, presents the cup. The nation is ‘beautiful’ and ‘amazing’ the media cries out. Everyone is gathering around their TVs. However the young daughter, Amor, who 'still holds herself aloof and apart' slips out. She knows. She just knows. There’s another side to South Africa - raw and vengeful violence.

- Troubles are always simmering. The clashes in the townships, the constant threats to Anton and the farm, it's all full of menace and there are always incidents. Astrid, the middle child is killed by a black thug in a carjacking.

- On a rare visit home for Pa's funeral, Amor wants to discuss with Anton the promise their parents made to Salome, their black maid for many years. They had promised to give her ownership of the small house on their farmlands that she and her son lived in. But they never delivered and now Anton also refuses to do it. The house has been neglected over the years: Amor looks around, at the cracking plaster. The broken cement floors. The missing planes of glass. Income from the farm is dwindling and land values falling. Anton's novel is not going anywhere. At 50 he realises he’s a failure. The decay of the old elite white structure in South Africa is self evident. 

- The novel ends in tragedy but also hope. A tribute to love, care, compassion and service. 

- All Booker prize winners are worth reading and this one is certainly no exception. And in the day of the long novel it's only 293 pages! 

Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

 

- The world Franzen builds in this just released long novel (580 pages) is rich in detail and meaning. But typically, the reader must get beyond the estrangement and boredom of the first 100 or so pages, just like his previous novels, before the magic, like a drug, kicks in. The constant God bothering in this one will frustrate many readers too.

- He does tend to ramble on and on. The backstories are often tiresome in the extreme. He's introducing us to the Hildebrandt family - Russ, the pastor, Marion, his wife, and their four kids Clem, Becky, Perry and Judson. At first Marion comes over as batshit crazy. When Russ first met her...she was a pants-wearing, half-Jewish Catholic who lived with homosexuals. Later he resents her for having snared him into marriage. 

- The kids, at least before they leave school, are bright and full of promise. But it’s a dysfunctional family in the end. Perry, although intellectually brilliant, becomes a hopeless drug addict and a major financial burden on the family. Their relationships sour.

- Franzen drowns us in a religion versus secularism debate. The emerging new consciousness of the late 60's and early 70's, including drugs, sex, and the tensions over the Vietnam war and racism loom large, and traditional religious belief is challenged.

- But Franzen holds fast and gives us very fundamentalist Christian book, while also acknowledging native Indian beliefs and criticising white colonial arrogance. 'The world’s persistent talk of God' is everywhere. 

- Disappointingly the novel has serious weaknesses and they annoyed me intensely. The word 'hatred' is massively overused. Russ’s 'hatred' for his younger assistant pastor becomes absurd. It's way overdone and immature. His sexual attraction to a younger female parishioner becomes an obsession, but then he suddenly ‘hates’ her. Not long after, when he sees her again, he was flooded with voluptuous presentiment. After Becky and Clem fight...she struggled to regain her Christian bearings, but her hatred was too intense.

- Although lives are described in microscopic detail, minor incidents become highly dramatic. Commonplace emotions are over-intense - it's not just ‘hatred’ that's overused. So is the constant follow up 'sorry’. It's almost comic. The instant shifting in reactions is quite silly. Characters go from love to loathing and back again in seconds. It's over the top and overripe writing, which is very American. 

- You could conclude that all these characters are as mad as cut snakes. That would be rational.

- Of course Franzen's gift for prose that's bursting with electricity is always on show: their mouths like twins or proxies of other wet parts; lambert rationality; supremely unpleasant lavatorial digression. 

- I considered his 2010 novel Freedom a classic. It was a brilliant interrogation of contemporary America. (See my review here). Crossroads, unfortunately, is nowhere near as good.

Diana Reid, Love and Virtue

 

 - This is thoroughly absorbing debut novel by Diana Reid, a graduate in philosophy from Sydney university. She brings a subtle and incisive voice to her characters' experiences of residential college life.          

- The colleges are Fairfax and St Thomas’, women only and men only (presumably Women's College and St Paul's in real life, bastions of privilege, most residents having graduated from Sydney's elite private schools). Eve is 20 years old and Michaela 18. Their circle of friends include Emily, Claudia, the delightful Portia ('wait, what?'), and Luke, Nick and Balthazar. There is not a working or even middle class person in sight, the closest being the narrator Michaela, who went to a Catholic school in Canberra, and whose mother is a teacher. (This ambience resonated with me, having attended a Sydney University residential college myself, International House).

- The students' interactions are conveyed in intricate detail. It's constant parties, facile drinking games, sexual encounters and humiliations, and betrayals. Eve becomes aware that Michaela and Nick had sex while very drunk and she raises the issue of consent with her. They argue about it and the nature of casual sex, whether it’s ‘meaningless’. The memory of a raped and murdered student on campus, years previously, lingers. And a tragedy awaits them now. 

- This argument becomes the core of the novel. Eve is a highly confident and articulate feminist and social critic. She has the intelligence, bravery and linguistic armoury to be a mover and a shaker. Although she 'dislikes Germaine Greer', that's precisely who she reminds the reader of. She becomes an outspoken and media savvy journalist and author after graduating in Cultural Studies. Although she has a tendency to steal other women's personal stories and present them as her own. 

- Michaela, on the other hand, is more restrained and reflective, and describes herself as 'a cocktail of personalities'. She unfortunately becomes involved with her professor, Paul Rosen, who has 'a reputation'. He's twice her age and they have frequent sex in his house, at great risk to his career. Eve becomes aware of it, and once again the political versus personal contest emerges. It's a common dialectic in any community or society. 

- Reid has an incredible ability to dissect intimate relationships with surgical precision and nuance. The contrast between Eve’s perspective and Michaela’s is clearly presented but there is never any over-dramatisation. Eve may be ‘objectively’ right, and Michaela too self-absorbed and personal, lacking the conceptual framework to articulate what is so evident to Eve, that elite colleges are noxious places. Although Michaela does at the end register that the privileged college boys are ‘morally impoverished’. Which of course does not deter them from achieving their career goals in our corporate, professional and political realms.

- I enjoyed this wonderful novel immensely. The characters are bursting with life. Five stars.


 

John Lyons: Dateline Jerusalem : Journalism's Toughest Assignment

 

- This is a magnificent little book by experienced journalist John Lyons. I read his 2017 memoir on his six years as a foreign correspondent for The Australian based in Jerusalem and I clearly remember it as enlightening and powerful. In this new one Lyons revisits the issue of the Australian media's coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict, though his focus is narrower. He gives example after example of how our editors and journalists are cowered by right wing Israel lobbyists who are absolutely relentless in their opposition to any semblance of fairness or balance in media reporting on the Palestinian predicament. A prime example was the lack of any significant coverage in Australia of the highly regarded report on Israel by the international organisation Human Rights Watch released in April this year. It did not shy away from calling Israel's treatment of the Palestinians a policy of apartheid and persecution.   

- Israel is determined to continue its occupation of the West Bank, the expansion of settlements, and its opposition to any possibility of a Palestinian state. Lyons resists mentioning the contentious word ‘apartheid’ but he does describe the reality of it in detail. We are now at a point where the 'two state solution' is totally unrealistic. 

- Even mention of ‘Palestine’ in a media story or, for god's sake, a crossword is condemned by the mainly Melbourne-based lobby, the Australian/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (led by Mark Leibler and Colin Rubenstein). This despite the fact that three million Palestinians live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

- What is extraordinary is that the media reports that are constantly objected to are quite frequently published in Israel itself without any complaint whatsoever. In Australia however our journalists are dubbed anti-Semitic at every turn. It's nasty and it's absurd.  

- Lyons praises former and current editors of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, Paul Whittaker and Clive Mathieson, for standing up to this bullying. (Nick Cater was another story). 

- Thankfully Lyons fully addresses the issue that readers of The Saturday Paper have long found disturbing. Why the minimal coverage of the Palestine issue? Morry Schwartz, owner and founder, and editor-in-chief Eric Jensen respond and are quoted at length. They comment on former editor Maddison Connaughton’s surprise resignation, and former morning editor Alex McKinnon’s letter of complaint where he addressed what he called A policy of silence…they’re deceiving their readership by pretending that they don’t have a stance, but they do. Schwartz and Jensen reject these assertions. TSP was always intended to be Australia-focused, according to Jensen. And according to Schwartz I want the same level of reporting as Poland or Russia or Saudi Arabia or Chechnya. Lyons just leaves that there!

- As another leader of the Australian Jewish community Dr Ron Weiser says: The Australian Jewish community is one of the most pro-Zionist and Israel-connected in the world. 

- Finally Lyons reflects that the controlling faction of the Australian Jewish leadership is way out of kilter with [even the] security and military experts in Israel.

- This is an absolute must-read. It won't take you long. It's only 80 or so pages and is written in very lucid prose. 

(This piece by Louise Adler, the editor of In The National Interest series, of which Lyons' book is a part, is also excellent)

Peter Papathanasiou, The Stoning

 

- What propels this powerful novel is Papathanasiou's rage. It's white hot and it explodes in brilliant, graphic and fiery prose with a relentless and mesmerising beat to it. And it's dotted with breathtaking similes: The trees, once lush, became empty hatstands; A scatter of white cockatoos spread themselves across the sky like a throw of salt crystals; His frame sunk with gravity, expanded, like a blob of jelly released from its mould.

- This is a raw political novel at its core, not just a crime story, although its two dimensions are integrated seamlessly. Papathanasiou is critiquing the ugly racism of Australia. Reading the novel is like drowning in an ugly cesspit. It depicts humanity at its worst. An immigration detention centre is located on the edge of the outback town of Cobb. It is full of camel jockeys, sand niggers, terrorists, rapists and peadoes, according to the locals. But Papathanasiou takes us inside the facility at various points in the novel and we see it for what it fundamentally is - a cruel and miserable institution set up by government and outsourced to private enterprise, ex-military, drug running thugs. The asylum seekers are rendered sympathetically and the stories of two of them in particular are heartbreaking. 

- The narrative is littered with cliched Australiana: heat, roos, birds, possums, insects, pubs, weary cynical police, lingo like ‘mate’, ‘bugger’. The town is a caricature. There are two pubs in the town, one for white drunks, the other an aboriginal ‘shithole’. The ugliness of the beer swilling, racist men is over egged. It’s almost comic. But I think it's deliberate. Papathanasiou is portraying an Australian version of Dante's Inferno. This is not so much outback noir as outback horror in the Kenneth Cook Wake in Fright tradition. 

- The terrain is so familiar: isolated county town, murder, city cop with baggage, dopey racist and misogynistic locals, cheap accommodation, economic devastation, eucalypts dying of the drought, rabbits dying with myxomatosis. Everything is in decay. Even the roos are angry. We've been here plenty of times before but Papathanasiou has lifted the genre to a whole new level. This is the best it's ever going to get. 

- I cannot recommend this novel highly enough. It's superb, and you will never forget it.

Jennifer Down, Bodies of Light

 

- Quite simply, this new novel from Australian author Jennifer Down is just blew me away. It's a highly emotional and heart wrenching story of Maggie, born in Melbourne in 1973, whose junkie mother dies when she is two and whose father is jailed for drug dealing when she is five, and who, for the remainder of her miserable childhood, is shuffled between cruel institutions and foster families. 

- From a very young age she suffers constant sexual abuse. 

- Down takes us on a brutally honest journey. Everything in Maggie's life is transitory, as she's switched from family to family and from institution to institution. She has no anchor. As a teenager her life is just boys, sex, drugs, and alcohol. Despite the loving care of some of the foster mothers she's wandering and lost. As an adult she suffers unbelievable pain. We are not spared any detail no matter how ugly.

- She marries Damien who ‘eclipsed everything else’. They were deeply in love, but of course she had secrets. Down has a gift for writing about intimacy. The birth of Maggie and Damien's first baby is beautifully and sensitively told and the drama of it brought intensely alive. There is enormous tragedy in their lives which unfortunately brings the marriage to an end.

- Maggie is forced to adopt a new identity as 'Josephine' and eventually finds herself in the US, where she lives for many years after marrying Jeff. While Down embellishes this period of her life with a little too much irrelevant detail, causing the novel to lose some of its power, we nevertheless feel so deeply for Josephine and Jeff as they struggle with her bruising legacy. 

- The ending is very emotionally satisfying.

- There is no doubt that this novel has set a high bar for Australian literary fiction. It's an extraordinary achievement.

(There is one editorial error in this book that is intensely annoying to a fussy reader like me. The word 'teevee' is constantly used instead of TV and it’s so wrong. Who writes that? It appears in no other book, article, magazine piece ever. Arnott’s chocolate teeVee snacks are the closest. Please, Text, do your readers a favour and fix it at the next reprint.)

Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life.

 

- A novella in fragments. 63 pages. The front cover is a photo of the unnamed narrator sleeping next to a potato. That sums it up. The personal story of a complete loser, full of ex boyfriends and so-called former friends, and a boring mother. She was bullied at high school. She has aches and pains, bad Tinder dates, unsatisfying sex, bad skin, no money, no ambition and irregular casual work which she's hopeless at anyway. It's not surprising she's unsatisfied with her rather miserable life and the grooves she's stuck in. She refers to her condition as 'Depersonalisation Disorder'. 

- In a way the book is also about dumb boyfriends. They are worse than useless, all of them, but never short of offering advice as to how she should get her act together.

- What lifts off the page is an exquisite existential meaninglessness. New Zealand author Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle quite brilliantly captures the emptiness of so many lives and the vacuity of so much of our contemporary social fabric. 

- Her writing is sublime. There are constant swirls and shifts in the telling. The focus often changes mid sentence, which is mesmerising. This is attention deficit disorder on full display, and deadpan humour brings it vividly to life. 

- It could be said that it's hardly a challenging venture to write a little novel like this. It could be dismissed as a slight, playful, comic take on a twenties-something lifestyle. But that would be overlooking the honesty and truth of it, the minute dissection of the everyday stuff we are all contending with. And the way it creeps up on you and stays with you, and demands you read it again, and again.

- Hugely enjoyable this. Hugely. 

Sebastian Faulks, Snow Country

- Once again Sebastian Faulks has written a hugely enjoyable novel with characters struggling on the margins of a society under immense political pressure and contending with the realities of revolution and war. 

- The central focus is Austria leading up to and after the first world war, and the subsequent emergence of fascism in Europe. Austria was a premonition of Hitler's Germany. The young journalist Anton and the poor and uneducated Lena, who turns to prostitution to support herself, are contending with the fragility of societies being pulled apart by political and economic pressures from all sides. Good people are suffering and dying, and lives and relationships struggling. Other characters in the novel bring these tensions vividly to life. 

- Vienna was also the centre of psychoanalysis in the Freudian tradition and the contentious debates around treatments and therapy. The human mind and its subtle dynamics became a central focus.

 ...'I came to have a low view of the human creature, the male in particular. He seems to be a deformed animal.'

'What do you mean?'

'We are obsessive,' Anton said. 'We appear to have bigger brains than other creatures, but we behave in a way that's contrary to our own interests. These harmful passions that drive us mad with love or with the need to slaughter one another. We don't seem very well...evolved.'

- Snow Country is the second in Faulks' Austrian trilogy, the first being Human Traces published in 2005 which I haven't read. But I did enjoy immensely his last novel Paris Echo set during the Nazi occupation of Paris in the early 1940s. (See my review here). Faulks' gift is to write love stories set in fractious times, and to bring the personal and social brilliantly alive. 

Miles Allinson, In Moonland

 

- In lucid and engaging prose Allinson takes us on one family's inter-generational journey that is a sheer delight to read. The characters are struggling, financially and personally, and live on the margins. But they have mostly resisted social conventions, opting for authenticity and community. It’s a gently told and measured story, especially at the beginning, but its power builds and becomes absorbing. 

- At first we meet Joe, his hippy parents and their friends. It's the 1970’s and his marriage is on the rocks. 

- His father Vince was prone to violent rages and he committed suicide. He was a heavy drinker and likely abused by his father. His friends and lovers were all New Age marginals, living on the edge. As the story progresses we recognise the scars left on sons and daughters by parents and grandparents. They are carried down the generations and impossible to escape from.

- Joe sets out on a journey of discovery. His father had secrets and he wants to uncover them. He knows Vince spent a year in an ashram in India as a member of a cult run by a swami called Bhagwan. It was mostly Western innocents seeking transcendence and meaning - and sex. But Vince wasn't so innocent. His propensity for violent outbursts got the better of him. There was an incident.

- In the ashram Vince became close friends with a charismatic American Kurt. Twenty or so years later Kurt is now old and sick, but still living in India. He's agreed to meet with Joe. Kurt is fascinating and he raises the novel to a new level. He also had an angry and abusive father, and his views on the ashram experience are now clear: ‘All that fascist, corporate mysticism really gives me the shits…(Bhagwan) was just an empty vessel…a complete and utter fucking loony-tune’. 

- Joe is desperate to hear from him what happened to Vince, his father. What caused his unwillingness to share his experiences? Why was he so troubled? Kurt refuses to be honest, choosing to honour an unwritten agreement with his old friend. 

- The final part of the novel is also fascinating. Joe's daughter Sylvie is now 31 and Joe himself is a beaten, mostly drunk, old man running a caravan park for the aged in rural NSW. We're introduced to a dystopian future. Civil society has been wrecked, mostly by climate change. ‘…the riots, the blackouts, the housing crisis’. There's little meaningful communication between the two of them, but there’s a real connection. And hope.

- I enjoyed this novel immensely. 

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You.

 

- As a fan of Sally Rooney's two previous novels, Normal People and Conversations With Friends, I wanted this one to be good. Well, as it turns out, it's not just good but absolutely brilliant. By far her best yet. 

- Right from the get-go the characters are attractive and immensely likeable. Eileen spends her working day as a literary magazine editor, ‘moving commas around’ as she says. And of course she's woefully underpaid. Alice is a very successful young author whose royalty advances have made her quite financially well off. (Hello Sally?). She's in high demand for interviews and conferences, and all the other publicity gumph of the publishing world. Both young women are highly intelligent and physically attractive. Like Marianne from Normal People, and Frances and Bobbi from Conversations with Friends they will stick in your mind and stay with you. But they have issues.

- Rooney’s familiar terrain is young friends and young students navigating relationships and sex. Their love lives and often transient relationships are central. Beautiful World is no different, but in this one serious and unresolved tensions emerge that are very destabilising. And it’s far more erotic too, the sex scenes described in more detail and with more intensity. The characters are more adult and mature, now in their thirties. 

- What gives this novel enormous power is that Rooney moves well beyond personal relationships. She’s venturing into philosophical and political realms. As much as anything it’s a novel of ideas - religion, marriage, beauty, morality, creativity, inequality, communism, climate, and others. The book is extraordinarily rich in insight and observation. As Eileen writes at one point, perhaps vocalising Rooney’s own artistic ambitions: Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting.

- Alice and Eileen write long emails to each other addressing all these issues in depth. It's almost as if Rooney is interrogating herself. They are akin to essayistic explorations of life in contemporary times, passionate and personal and brilliant. Alice's reflections on the publishing industry and pretentious other authors who are constantly ‘complaining about bad reviews’ are delicious. They even dissect the Late Bronze Age and the reasons for its demise. So not all fans of Rooney will like this aspect. They’ll be way too challenged intellectually. But Rooney has risen to a whole new level of accomplishment. 

Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells, Sold Down the River.

 

- If you're a fan of US author Michael Lewis, as I am, you will devour this magnificent book. Hamilton and Kells have the same ability to critique a complex issue by grounding the story in the voices of ordinary participants or victims. In this case the voices of small farmers and Indigenous leaders who bring real world experience and age old traditional knowledge to today's dreadful water management crisis. 

- The Murray-Darling Basin is Australia's greatest environmental asset. Its 77,000 kilometres of ancient rivers, creeks and wetlands, along with its dams and locks constructed over the last century, are an immeasurably important contribution to the nation's food production and regional economy. It covers a million square kilometres - an area larger than France. But because '...the political and economic structures of modern Australia cut across catchment boundaries...The die was cast for more and more fighting over less and less water’.

- The real damage was done in the 1980s, when neo-liberalist free-market economics became fashionable. ‘…the water market was a natural place to experiment with free-market principles…the free marketeers embraced the idea that the decentralised decisions of market participants would achieve a more efficient water allocation than central planners ever could’.

- A principal legacy of Victorian politician Alfred Deakin (and later Prime Minister) in the late 1880s was legislation that ensured water ownership could not legally be separated from land ownership, thus guaranteeing water availability to family farms and communities. A century later that radically changed. 'Unbundling' became the driving reformist agenda. All states welcomed it. And banks too.

- Hamilton and Kells then take us on a deep dive into the practices of the financial traders. They provide plenty of stories and examples. They take us into the Michael Lewis Flash Boys territory of rapacious Wall Street traders who are all about micro-profiteering, not giving a fig about the real world destruction of lives and livelihoods that result. It was all about cornering the market, squeezing everything they could out of it. 

- The book's final chapter, The Betrayal, is compulsory reading. Here's a quote:

Top level regulators and agencies such as the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, the Productivity Commission and the ACCC assembled and published report after report. Between 1989 and 2020 more than 300 major water reports were produced in Australia...Brimming with fuzzy logic, linguistic ambiguity, categorical confusion, statistical insignificance, motherhood statements, statements of the obvious and statements of the obviously false, they are now useful only for recycling...

A once-in-a-generation scandal. A government authorised mega-theft.

This review by Jeff Sparrow in The Saturday Paper is spot on:

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/culture/books/2021/09/30/sold-down-the-river/163067760012378 

Moving Beyond Lockdowns

Covid 2021 

A few days ago I penned a few thoughts on Australia's current Covid challenge:

I think Australia must get to the point where we accept a tolerable level of deaths per year, say 1000 or so. This is in the influenza and road deaths region. At the current death rate of 0.3% of Delta cases, that means we should aim to limit daily cases to approximately 1000 across the country (365,000 per year). We’re around 1300 today.

We may even be forced to accept a sadder scenario - around 2000 deaths per year and 2000 cases per day. Given that 50,000 Australians die every year from various cancers, we may well have to embrace these numbers in order to fully open the economy and our state and international borders.

The problem is stopping rapid outbreaks. People will accept stable numbers but not rapidly increasing ones. That scares them. Our expectation is that aggressive vaccination rates will be the pathway to this stability. The evidence from around the world is that 70-80% of the adult population will be nowhere near enough. We will need to get to 90% of the total population and that will mean child doses for kids aged from three to 12. Over time the daily cases will inevitably decline.

Unfortunately we lack political leadership. We need our Federal and State governments to clearly articulate these realities, and persuade people that these ambitions are not harsh or cruel, but realistic and manageable. We have no other choice. The Delta variant is extremely infectious, and current elimination strategies involving constant lockdowns are incredibly harmful and unrealistic. Getting back to ‘normal’ means accepting the new Delta normal. Last year’s Wuhan variant is long gone. Like in the Cold War our strategy must be one of containment, not suppression. 

The real issue governments need to address involves ensuring the national health infrastructure is able to cope with these Delta realities. Hospitals will need an increased number of well staffed ICU and ventilation facilities, ambulance services will need to be expanded, and fit-for-purpose quarantine facilities built as a matter of urgency. This substantial level of increased investment in the health system needs to be federally funded. It is a national emergency.

The ‘zero case’ ambitions of the smaller states can’t be allowed to continue. They are a Wuhan leftover. All states and territories must embrace today’s challenge. Border closures are unAustralian, unfair and unrealistic given leakages will always happen. Our international border closures must also end.

Vaccine passports must be made mandatory for access to all events, retail, educational, care, travel and hospitality services. Enforcement will likely be a problem however, particularly for small businesses. It will be expensive and could become ugly. Once again the federal government must step in and fund these necessary security measures. 

 

Robert Gott, The Orchard Murders

 

- This is the first novel from Australian crime writer Robert Gott I've read. It's the fourth novel in his acclaimed Murders series, set in Melbourne during the second world war. 

- I enjoyed it immensely. It's obvious Gott has a talent for creating very interesting characters and absorbing storylines. Perhaps because this one was the fourth in the series the principal characters' backstories, while summarily fleshed out, invest the plot with a lot of detail that takes a while to stick in your memory. Nevertheless it does and the characters become fully alive and immensely attractive. Their personal relationships as friends and family are a key feature. And it was a delight to read a novel set in Melbourne's suburbs and streets in 1943, at the height of the Japanese invasion threat.

- Usually crime novels or TV series featuring Private Detectives are about as cliched as you can get - alcoholic, divorced, untidy habits, dingy offices, lowlife associates, etc. But Gott takes an entirely opposite approach and it's refreshing.  

- If the novel has a problem it's that it gets a bit cloying and cheesy at times. It’s got a touch of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five about it. Though the murders and violence are pretty ugly, the young friends and family members are all so nice to each other, and always inviting each other for dinner. (There's no sex though!). The senior police detective, who informally works with them, is their father figure, and he's also so nice. 

- Another problem is that some ancillary but interesting storylines sort of fizzle out at the end. The characters we've become interested in are abandoned.

- During Melbourne's stage 7, 8 and 9 lockdowns I'll read the previous three novels in the series though, for sure. 

(The three previous novels are The Holiday Murders, The Port Fairy Murders, and The Autumn Murders)

Emma Shortis, Our Exceptional Friend

 

- This new book by Australian historian Emma Shortis is just so good I literally squealed with delight at virtually every para. Try this:

The relationship remains based on those shared assumptions about the world - that it is full of threats to be countered, that those threats can only be mitigated by shows of strength, that American power is infinitely preferable to any other kind, that the violence that comes with it is inevitable, that Australia is just a bit player in the global scheme of things and can only carry on as it has.

This is bullshit.

- Shortis critiques our relationship with the US on every level. Her chapters list them all - shared values, shared enemies, shared wars, shared bombs, shared money, shared climate, shared fears, shared supremacy, and shared cosmos (space exploration). Her conclusion asks us to radically reassess a possible shared future.

- Her particular focus is the ANZUS Treaty, its origins and dismal legacy. The chapter on shared wars is powerful. Korea, Vietnam, Afganistan, Iraq - Shortis condemns the racism ('yellow peril') and total lack of morality. Australia's constant genuflecting to American dominance has always shown our embarrassing feebleness and lack of character.   

The degree to which the American military industrial complex has captured Australia is almost unparalleled elsewhere in the world. Since the Korean War in the 1950s, Australia has been one of the few countries to blindly trail America into each conflict. Our government's collective refusal to reckon with this legacy - to really confront the morality of American wars and our enthusiastic participation in them - has helped perpetuate American imperialism and led to the unnecessary, violent deaths of millions of people.

- What frightens me, and unfortunately Shortis doesn't address this specifically, is a possible US-China military confrontation over Taiwan. How will Australia respond? In the usual way? 

- This book is a must read.  

Katherine Brabon, The Shut Ins.

 

- This magnificent novel from Katherine Brabon is best read slowly, absorbing the detail and atmospherics in every sublime sentence. Brabon knows how to represent the ‘deep down inside’ of people. Her recent trip to Japan made her aware of the well known condition of Achiragawa, the 'other side'.

- She tells the stories of four Japanese people, connected to each other in family and other ways - Mai, Sadako, Hiromi and Hikaru. Mai and Hikaru were friends at school, Sadako is a bar hostess who 'entertains' Mai's husband 'J', and Hiromi is Hikaru's mother. The setting is Japan in the spring and summer of 2014. 

- J, never fully named, is comfortable with being part of the systems that make the world run smoothly. He’s a salaryman, a corporate loyalist, a man who decries ‘individual deficiencies’. He's barely human in other words. Mai and J are unhappy in marriage. Hikaru, on the other hand, began to truly leave this world and inhabit somewhere else. It was a form of 'social suicide', a peculiar Japanese condition labelled Hikikomori.

- Brabon's expository reflections on Japan and feelings of solitude and loneliness struck me very personally. I lived and worked in Tokyo for two years in the early 80's, managing a company with 35 employees, all Japanese. Not only does she perfectly capture the experiences of many gaijin (foreigners), but she brings alive so much of the anguish, pressure and stress of navigating this rigid society, the deadening social and cultural expectations, the imprisoning traditions, and most importantly, the deep misogyny of Japanese society. (Westerners constantly remark on the ‘politeness’ of the Japanese. It’s not politeness as we know it, but simply a social ritual, a distancing from any sort of personal engagement, and quite meaningless. We're in a world of transactional relationships). 

- Mai's story perfectly conveys the boring, standardised social lives of ordinary Japanese people - little individuality and total conformity. There is a comfort in everything unfolding as it should.

- The bar hostess Sadako's body was struggling to cope, as if rotting inside...I’m no good, she told herself. The roles she plays, and the pretence. Inside her there was a cold stone, perhaps impossible to remove.

- The young man Hikaru suffers from the condition severely: …I could avoid mistakes and consequences if I just stayed on this side of the door. He had a fear towards anybody who worked, anybody who was part of the systems everybody lived by. The people in charge said we had been raised in a society that made us focus on sacrificing individual preferences for a collective goal, and this made us struggle to express individual desires. Shutting ourselves away was the only way we knew how to do this. 

- Brabon reflects at the end: If anything, the story may help us to live with the loneliness and restlessness that visit like shifting cloud shadows - that is, the natural condition of this side.

- I can't recommend this superb novel highly enough. It's a major achievement.

J.P. Pomare, The Last Guests

 

- If there's one message from this book it's 'don’t cheat on your husband'.

- I was disappointed in it. It's a rather ordinary psychological thriller about a couple, their backstories, and the tense relationship that develops because of their secrets. 

- At the heart of the story is an act by the wife that totally lacks credibility. 

- The resolution at the end is stagey, melodramatic and all tricks and mirrors. Emotionally it's far from satisfactory.

- Pomare's previous novels are far better, particularly In the Clearing.