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.)