Mark Brandi, The Others

 

- An eleven year old unnamed boy lives with his father on a small farm in the bush. He’s home schooled and has no friends. He keeps a diary and we’re reading it. He’s a very sensitive, warm-hearted young boy, but he's wary of his often angry father.  

- Brandi's tone is one of foreboding and it's totally sustained. The boy tries hard to read his father and his moods. He keeps his distance and refers to him as ‘him’, never ‘dad’. His father constantly refers to 'the others', plague-ridden people from the 'town' and the 'commune' who they must avoid.

- The boy's fascinated by the natural world around him, the foxes, the birds, and the sheep they tend on the property. The foxes eat the young lambs, their favourites, and the crows pluck out their eyes. There are plenty of mice around. And only the boy seems to notice that there's 'a fire up the hill'. And a sound of some sort. He's afraid ‘…the others might come. Like he says they would’. 

- There’s a sinister tone to many diary entries. ‘That’s the thing about things that are good. It always seems that they never last. But bad things, they can go on forever’. ‘You can never know what’s underneath things. Like the rusty sheets and the mice. Like him and his eyes’.  

- The tension builds, very slowly. The boy ventures out of the farmhouse against his father’s orders, just to explore and try to get some answers. His father refuses to answer his questions on their circumstances and his mother’s death. His curiosity is denied. 

- After secretly following his father up the hill he finds a young woman chained to a tree and bound. He concludes his father is training her to be his servant. 

- Evil is closer than you think. Perhaps it’s not the ‘others’. Once a sound like thunder is heard. ‘He doesn’t want to talk about the sound. Or the smoke. Or the woman'.

- Like Brandi’s two earlier novels, Wimmera and The Rip, the resolution is nice and uplifting. Good people and the authorities come to the rescue. Brandi can’t seem to stay in the darkness. He believes in a Christian salvation.

- He should stay in the darkness however, because that's where his remarkable talent lies. 

T.J.Newman, Falling.

 

- It's been ages since I've read a thriller. I've been holding off, just desperately waiting for the next Don Winslow due in September and the new Adrian McKinty due soon after (hopefully). 

- But this debut by former American flight attendant T.J.Newman has been receiving huge plaudits by some big names, including Winslow and McKinty, and Dervla McTiernan, Janet Evanovich, Lee Child and James Patterson. So looking for something light and breezy during lockdown I tried it. 

- Wow! It's a riveting story with loads of pace and tension. There are three interlocked dramas that propel it: one on the LA to New York flight, one in the pilot's home in LA, and one involving FBI agents and their intervention. This is not your classic who-dun-it, the perps being disclosed early on. It's a drama of terrorists seeking revenge and retribution. 

- Because of the author's decade of experience in the skies there’s a credibility and realism to the story. It's full of fascinating details brought vividly to life. She also has the ability to suck the reader in emotionally. Virtually every chapter, for example, ends on a mini cliffhanger.  

- The terrorists are immigrants to America from war-torn Kurdistan, and are at least allowed to articulate their case. Newman is sympathetic to their unforgivable betrayal by the US and its allies during the Syria-ISIS conflict over the past decade. They were abandoned and subsequently invaded by neighbouring Turkey. 

- To a non-American there are evident weaknesses in the book. It celebrates and honours every category of person and entity involved in the drama - whether they be police, air traffic controllers, flight attendants, airport authorities, politicians, passengers. They're great Americans heroes, the lot of them. They're all lauded and honoured. In other words it’s thoroughly sentimental.

- Nevertheless, it's an absorbing read, and will undoubtedly become a blockbuster movie in a few years. Thankfully Tom Hanks will be too old by then for the lead role! 

Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy.

 

- In very lucid prose journalist and historian Anne Applebaum has written an extremely powerful book exploring the fate of liberal democracies over the last half century - how they've swung between left and right, liberalism and authoritarianism, and what gives rise to these ever-present forces.

- It's a personal journey in many ways, involving friendships often ripped apart by changing political dynamics and allegiances. An American by birth she's lived and worked for many years in Europe and the UK and has always been part of the political elite. Her husband was a senior politician in Poland and held international roles in the UN. 

- She explores dissenting movements and constant frictions in Poland, Hungary, Venezuela and Spain in particular, before moving on to Britain and the US. Her analysis is always astute and detailed. She castigates the awful, ruthless, far right and corrupt Orban government in Hungary, and its Tory sympathisers in the UK. It's one of the world's ugliest and vicious regimes yet they, thankfully a minority, support it.

- As a former conservative herself (as an editor for the centre-right Spectator) and a colleague of Boris Johnson at the time, her story of the rise of anti-EU sentiment and the Brexit debate is simply riveting. She condemns the whole Brexit campaign and its lies. Boris is not spared.

- In today's world she believes something else is going on that propels the fierce political divisions we're seeing. It's 'the contentious, cantankerous nature of modern discourse itself'. So many people can't handle it, can't understand it, and want a simpler, united, traditional society. Simple visions and explanations give birth to QAnon conspiracy theories and take a psychological and emotional hold.

- Her chapter on America and its constitution, its birth and fundamental optimism, is superb. The radical leftist forces of opposition to this exultation of capitalist ‘exceptionalism’ versus the Christian right’s antipathy to what it perceives as secular moral depravity. 

- Of course this leads to Trump and how the Republicans have split. Applebaum's former friend Laura Ingraham, now a Fox News host, and her whacky Trumpism, is thoroughly annihilated.

- The extreme woke left is not exonerated however. So-called 'cancel culture' on the Internet, the extremism that sometimes flares up on university campuses, the exaggerated claims of those who practice identity politics are a political and cultural problem that will require real bravery to fight. 

- The final chapter takes us back to the Dreyfus affair in 1894 and how the primitive antisemitism that drove it divided French society in a way that sounds familiar today. 

- Nothing much has or will change. 

Aravind Adiga, Amnesty

 

- Indian-Australian author Aravind Adiga has written a quite brilliant evocation of the constant tensions felt by illegal immigrants in Australia as they live, work and observe life around them. He also depicts the strangeness of Australian ways that are so apparent to them. 

- Danny, the main character, initially flew to Australia on a student visa. He had declined the option suggested by friends in Sri Lanka to pay people smugglers to come by boat. He saw himself as a legitimate refugee after having been tortured by the Sri Lankan military because he was deemed a 'terrorist' Tamil. 

- He overstayed his visa and is now officially an 'illegal'. He chose to apply for refugee status immediately after his legitimate arrival by plane to Sydney, and his application was rejected. Now his passport has expired, he has no Medicare, no driving licence and no social security benefits. He lives in a tiny, rundown attic above a grocery shop. And he is terrified someone will dob him in. 

- So....he has an extremely uninteresting, although stressful, life. Nothing significant happens. He trawls around inner Sydney, as in Ulysses, having random thoughts and memories, and does a few apartment cleaning jobs. The streets of Glebe, Broadway and Sydney's CBD, including George St and William St, the sandstone buildings, the Coca-Cola sign in Kings Cross, Central Station, Circular Quay, the buses and trains: all these celebrated Sydney landmarks have become his neighbourhood. But it's a seedy, untrustworthy, cruel, corrupt world that illegals inhabit. They're always anxious and on edge. The screeching birds of Australian cities don't help.

- This novel is as much about Indians in Australia generally as it is about ‘white people’. Adiga doesn’t really like them. He paints them as loud, crude, grasping and self-indulgent. His first novel, the 2008 Booker prize winner The White Tiger vividly excoriated them too. He’s not too enamoured of the Chinese either. Muslims are occasionally mentioned but never negatively. Prior to coming to Australia Danny spent a satisfying year working in a hotel in Dubai. It is apparent he prefers white Australia, despite our underlying racist character. White people have got the law, and we don’t.…where did it come from, this fair law? In Sri Lanka … it does exist - evil. A man puts on a uniform, and becomes the uniform.

 - Quietly Adiga builds a plot. Two of Danny's cleaning clients, Radha, and her lover Prakash, are addicted gamblers. Rhada's husband Mark sells real estate to Chinese investors. Rhada is murdered. 

- Adiga handles this deftly and he builds a measure of tension and dread. The police investigation presents Danny with a moral choice. Because if he talks to them about what he suspects he's effectively disclosing his illegality.

- This novel has been shortlisted for this year's Miles Frankin Award. It deserves to win.

 

Bri Lee, Who Gets to be Smart

 

- There have been some negative reviews of Bri Lee's new book, for example this one by Beejay Silcox in the Guardian. But they are wrong. Straight up and down wrong.  

- What Silcox fails to recognise is Lee's ability to felicitously combine informality - walking around Oxford with her friend Damien for instance - with informed critique.  

- She has the ability to cut through ‘how we envisage power and intelligence’ by personalising the story with anecdotes and reflections, bringing more power and meaning, and investing it with a lot more oomph. This is her talent. It is what made her first book Eggshell Skull such a huge hit. Combined with the clarity and lucidity of her prose and her often deliciously funny knifings of her enemies ('This may be the dumbest paragraph I've ever encountered'), her overall argument is brought vividly to life. 

- She didn't set out to write an academic treatise or indulge in the tedious journalistic cliche of interviewing and editing random individuals or 'experts'. She's primarily writing about her own thoughts and experiences.

- What we're offered is a skewering of a huge variety of subjects, policies and debates, all to do with the racist and colonial legacies embedded in our elite educational institutions and related social and political structures. Her inspiration comes from multiple sources: Omid Tofighian, translator of Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains, and the concept of Kyriarchy as defined by theologian Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, being just two of them. She brings a highly informed, coherent and logical perspective to it all. Her critique is unapologetically left wing/progressive all the way. 

- I thoroughly enjoyed her exquisite demolition of the the Ramsay Centre and its ambitions and key supporters: Howard, Abbott, Jim Wallace, Lyle Shelton, Greg Craven, George Pell, and other reactionary Christian conservatives. She sees through their bullshit. And she seethes with anger at the very mention of the name 'Tony Abbott'. 

- The chapter on schools is superb. The privileging of the private schools and the declining funding of public schools is clearly outlined. Gonski's bold recommendations on 'sector-blind funding' were just too bold for our politicians. A re-worked Gonski 2.0 still upset the Catholic schools. One Catholic academic wrote: 'Only by focusing on issues of quality are we going to address inequality'. Lee erupted ‘This may be the second-most stupid thing I’ve ever read’. Today ‘taxpayers fund about 80% of the cost of educating a child in the Catholic school system'.

- There's a lot more delicious stuff in this hugely enjoyable book, including topics like intelligence, learning a foreign language, slavery, women and power, women and medicine, COVID support discriminations, Chinese students, and Australia's anti-colonial movement. 

- Lee has written a stunning, highly enjoyable book. Surely there's a follow-up in the works: Who Gets to be Dumb. At one point she reflects: It is necessary to ask oneself what one considers the opposite to 'intelligence'. Options of varying severity include: stupid, dumb, naive, foolish, idiotic, slow, thick, moronic, vacuous, and dim-witted. 

- She names and shames plenty of these types in Who Gets to be Smart.