Kevin Rudd, The Avoidable War.

 

- This is an exceptionally well informed and enlightening book by Kevin Rudd. His fluency in Mandarin and his deep understanding of the American and Chinese political elites gives his analysis immense credibility. It's comprehensive, encyclopaedic in detail, and fascinating on many levels. 

- The challenge he would have undoubtedly faced was to get the right balance between the micro and the macro, and there can be no doubt he's succeeded. We don't get lost in the detail as the larger picture is constantly in sight. 

- Rudd is very measured and fair. He's not reflexively anti-Chinese, as so many politicians and commentators today are. He’s no Peter Dutton (he has a brain) and he's no SMH/Age opinion writer Peter Hartcher. He’s respectful of what China under Xi Jinping has achieved, including its larger global ambitions. But he's also critical, and in fact frustrated by Xi's autocratic, take no prisoners, Marxist-Leninist reactionary obsessions.  

- His facts and statistics are very up to date, including key data from late 2021. And he covers all possible subjects: economic growth, financial challenges, climate ambitions, technology futures, military expansion, foreign policy aims, the Belt and Road Initiative, Taiwan, Russia, North Korea, the UN, the global rules-based order, the democratic West, and many others. 

- The key focus of Rudd's analysis is on what he calls China's Ten Concentric Circles of Interest: Staying in Power; Securing National Unity (Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Inner Mongolia); Ensuring Economic Prosperity (the New Development Concept); Environmental Sustainability; Modernising the Military; Managing China’s Neighbourhood; Securing China’s Maritime Periphery; The Belt and Road Initiative; Increasing Leverage Across Europe, Africa, Latin America and the Arctic; Changing the Global Rules-Based Order.

- China's increasing power and presence in the developing world is covered in detail. African nations don’t care much about human rights so China finds them easy to deal with. But the BRI offers loans, not grants, so debt entrapment is a constant probability. In Latin America as well.

- China is aggressively challenging the global, American-led, Western liberal-democratic model, the norms and rules of the order created after WW2, including the UN, the IMF and WHO, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and NATO. 

- Trump’s trade war with China has been an unmitigated disaster for US-China relations: tariffs; investment prohibitions; visa and financial sanctions on Chinese leaders, journalists, diplomats and students; increasing naval exercises in the South China Sea; increased warships to the Taiwan Straight; a surge in arms sales to Taiwan; and Washington officials sent to Taiwan for talks (profoundly angering China). 

- Biden has adopted most of Trump’s anti-China policies. The mood of Americans has changed. So relations remain in the freezer, and are highly unlikely to revert to the more productive and cooperative relationship in place prior Trump. 

- Where Rudd's analysis gets fascinating is his projections for the future, particularly the next decade of Xi Jinping's likely rule. A lot will depend on the economy, which is not Xi’s strong point. Productivity is a major problem, and economic growth is likely to slow considerably, to a level of around 4% by 2025. Xi's increasing crackdowns on China's substantial private sector, in favour of state control, is becoming a significant negative. 

- Xi also has an increasing cadre of enemies. Besides his 'clean out' of contrary Party voices, his antagonism to religious practice, Non Government Organisations, universities, entrepreneurs, media organisations, lawyers and young people, could come back to bite him at any time. 

- Rudd offers some intriguing alternative futures for US-China relations, displaying strategic thinking of the highest quality. He offers 10 Scenarios: China succeeds in taking Taiwan with no American intervention; the US defeats China; China defeats US forces; a military stalemate occurs; China is deterred from military action by threat and diplomacy; a  limited war breaks out in the South China sea; conflict develops over Japan’s claims in the East China Sea; conflict increases between China and the US over North Korea; Xi succeeds in all his ambitions without military conflict; Xi is defeated and humiliated.

- The final chapter is titled Navigating an Uncertain Future: The Case for Managed Strategic Competition. Though the general point of the final chapter is clear: cooperation, collaboration, compromise and competition, it's unfortunately frustrating and almost unreadable. It's a typical Rudd bureaucratised word salad. Throughout the book the word 'strategic' is used far too often. In this chapter it's ludicrously over-used. 

(Three substantial events have occurred in 2022 after the completion of this book - Russia's invasion of Ukraine; the devastating flare-up of covid in Shanghai and Beijing and Xi's brutal enforcement of a covid-zero policy; and the China-Solomon Islands' agreement. Rudd's view on these events would definitely have been well-considered and welcome).

Adam Ouston, Waypoints

 

- Adam Ouston's first novel has a profundity that's easily missable.

- The narrator, Arthur Bernard Cripp, known as Bernard, is obsessed with repeating the world famous Harry Houdini’s first flight in an engine-powered plane in Australia in 1910. Because his wife and daughter were killed in a Boeing jet which crashed 100 years later (Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 on 8 March 2014, which killed 239 people) he is desperate to get some insight and closure from re-enacting Houdini's achievement. He contracts an aviation enthusiast to build an exact replica of Houdini's plane. 

- Bernard gives us a detailed, comprehensive summary of the MH370 tragedy. And the real pain he is suffering. It's very affecting. This is the central focus of this former circus owner and performer. He also searches for every detail he can find on the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shar, and his marriage, career and personal history including all his social media posts. 

- An intriguing feature of the book is Bernard's constant repetitions in the telling of the story. He rambles on in a circular motion like a babbling, dribbling, demented madman, but of course he’s nothing of the sort. It takes a while to get to know him as he wanders off on all sorts of tangents. The picture we get though is one of immense pain: ...and while we're on the subject of fate and the questions that have gnawed away at my insides these past years - sometimes I feel as though I have dealt with them, put them to bed; sometimes I feel completely numb to it all, but then the smallest, seemingly insignificant thing, a word on a billboard, a scarf in a window, a child's scream, will cause me such incredible pain that for a moment, sometimes longer, I am unable to breath and I stand there pulverised, choking on my own grief... 

- Ouston breaches all the conventions of long form fiction by dispensing with all the traditional breathing spaces: paragraphs, chapters and accepted punctuation. His sentences are always long, often lasting for pages, and the print is small, broken only occasionally by old photos. He is allergic to fullstops. Ubiquitous semicolons and commas are used instead, conveying the run-on urgency and relentlessness of Bernard's search for meaning and closure. Spaces and stops are not options. This form, often used in modern autofiction, totally suits the purpose here. 

- It doesn’t take too long to get used to this rhythm and pacing and be sucked in. The energy and clarity propels it forward. There’s a magic to it. We learn quite a lot about Bernard's career in the circus, and the places across Australia he performed in, some with interesting back stories about awful hardships suffered by early explorers, including the Calvert Expedition in WA and the lost Leichhardt Expedition in Northern Australia. Sickness and death due to starvation and drought were common. He reflects again on his own tragic loss and his struggle for survival.

- His father is suffering from Alzheimers and needs constant care at home. This must be provided by Bernard himself due to financial constraints. This feeds his passion for information. He frequently rants about how the mass storage of every spec of data under the sun, the complete sweep of history, has become banal in this age of information. Why can't it provide hope, answers and comfort? 

- He's led to reflect on Alzheimers, its history and subsequent developments such as Huxley’s ‘transhumanism’, and the enthusiasms of other radical futurists. The prospect of prosperity and fulfilment for everyone on the planet excites him. How about a brain-computer interface? We are not far off being able to bring people back from the dead. He's comforted by a vision of the future that is naive in the extreme. 

- What is missing from his reflections is a deep understanding of the nature of evil. The MH370 pilot’s career and depression are sympathetically portrayed. Bernard is not angry. He relates to him. He doesn't even mention the passenger victims apart from his wife and daughter, and whether the pilot would have considered them at all. They are just numbers. 

- Ouston subtlety rebukes his inhumane idealism, separated as it is from nature and the reality of human life in this ancient and painful world. The Boeing was not just an amazing iteration of high tech majesty, it was a weapon of death, deliberately employed by a human being.

- This is an extraordinary achievement by Ouston. It is supremely well written and deep in meaning. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Fernanda Melchor, Paradais.

 

- This extraordinary little novel, only 124 pages, made it onto the 2022 International Booker Prize longlist, and it so well deserved the honour. It is superbly translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes. 

- Written in stunningly vital prose, full of passion and anger, it's a grenade in your hand.

- Franco ('Fatboy') and Polo, are Mexican misfits in their mid-teens. Fatboy is sexually obsessed with the beautiful and sexy Senora Marian who lives with her husband and young son in an apartment in the new upmarket residential precinct, Paradais. Fatboy also lives there with his wealthy grandparents. We don't know what happened to his parents. He is obsessed with porn. Polo, lower class and a school dropout, is employed by the precinct as a gardener. He loathes the job and considers Fatboy an ugly, flatulent, pain in the arse. 

- However he sticks with him as Fatboy funds their nightly binge drinking and smoking. It's the only joy they have, apart from sex. 

- Polo's world is violent and controlled by Narcos. There is no escape. His older cousin Milton, who he likes, was savagely beaten by a vicious gang and had no option but to join them. His female cousin, Zorayda, a 'slut' who Polo had frequent sex with, got pregnant. Perhaps the baby is his.

- The story builds to a shattering and tragic climax. There is only death and hopelessness in this community. Certainly no future.

- Immerse yourself in the sheer orgasmic joy of Melchor's blistering prose, and have a nice day.

Yumna Kassab, Australiana

 

- This novel is an absolute gem. I became more and more sucked in the more I read and re-read its plain, unadorned, yet beguiling prose.

- There are five sections that make up this intriguing book, all of them linked in thematic, echoing ways.

- We are in rural NSW in the Tamworth/Gunnedah region, and in the middle of a drought. Cliches abound, and that's the point. Ordinary people of the town are the focus and they are exquisitely ordinary and, on the surface at least, exquisitely boring. The emptiness and banality of their lives comes from a desperation and meaninglessness. Marriage and child rearing are tough. It's all bleak in tone. All the kids in the town and bored and rebellious. 

- But while there may be a level of civility on the surface, there is evil underneath that sometimes erupts. That's a familiar theme in Australian literature and our rural noir crime genre. This book is appropriately titled Australiana.    

- All the chapters are very short apart from one. They build a world of kindness, tragedy, fantasy, thuggery, darkness and death. 

- In the long chapter (40 pages) a young farmer tells his personal story of rural life and his lifelong friendship with Barry. They 'escaped' to Sydney as young men. Barry stayed but our narrator returned to the farm after ten years. He turns out to be a self-important prick and a know-all. Kassab gets the tone exactly right. He’s anti-city, dopey, a provincial cliche. In the city, he proclaims, you go for weeks without seeing a horizon or a sunset. Banalities and truisms abound. Barry's story, unfortunately, turns out to be tragic. Darkness underneath, again. It's a hugely enjoyable chapter. 

- There are other stories, all resonant and hinting at larger meanings. There’s death all round in this harsh, anti-human place. Away from people, away from rules, the world takes on a deranged quality.

- The concluding chapter is about a bushranger, Frederick Ward, who became a legend in the region. Better a story than the plain old truth. Give me a story any day. Kassab asks, and it's her final question: Why do we idolise bushrangers in this country? What does that tell you about the psyche of the nation?

All the elements that make up this novel add up to a magnificent read. Highly recommended.

(I was born and brought up in Broken Hill. I escaped to Sydney at the age of 16, the most liberating thing I've ever done in my life, so no wonder I related to this novel).

Ian Dunt, How To Be A Liberal.

- British political journalist, editor and philosopher Ian Dunt has written a fascinating story about the development of intellectual and personal freedom in the West since the mid-18th century, as we liberated ourselves from ancient regal, feudal, ecclesial and authoritarian rule. It's a stunning achievement, superbly researched and detailed.

- It is also written in clear and lucid prose, making it a pleasure to read.

- He takes us on a journey from Rene Descartes to the present day, with explorations of the thinkers, activists and economists who have shaped our times: John Stuart Mill and his extraordinary wife Harriet Taylor, French intellectuals Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Stael, Isaiah Berlin, John Maynard Keynes and his rival Frederich Hayek, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, George Orwell and others.

- Democracy was born in England and revolutions instigated in France and the United States. None of it was smooth sailing. The reality of individual and social freedoms took a battering along the way, and conservative, reactionary movements set much progress back. The horrors of war in the 20th century and the atrocities committed by cruel and vicious autocrats like Stalin and Hitler laid so much to waste. 

- The thirty year post-war period from 1945 to 1975 was a golden era of solid economic growth and progressive social policy. Then followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the birth of the EU, and the emergence of the internet and Big Tech. The financial crisis of 2007/8 brought an end to so much hope and prosperity however. Austerity became government policy in many Western countries, ushering in an age of nationalism.  

- Today we're witnessing the ugliness of right wing nationalist governments take hold in many countries around the world, including Hungary under Orban, Brexit under Theresa May and Boris Johnson, and the US under Trump. Anti-immigration policies have sidelined the 'elite' and a powerful and ignorant populism taken hold.  

- There are so many sentences and paragraphs I could quote to illustrate the power of this magnificent book. Here are just a few:

The slavery of women had lasted from the dawn of civilisation until the Victorian period almost completely intact. The liberal revolution had taken place without even noticing that it was ignoring half the population. 

[Orban's] approach provided the broad storyline that would be told around the West: the people versus the elite, the fixation on immigration as a threat to the country, the denigration of the global rules-based order and the subversion of domestic institutions in a bid to undermine the separation of power.

America...was the primary author of the rules-based international system. It was the country, out of all the liberal states, which defined itself by immigration. If it fell to nationalism, it would signal that we were entering a new era. And then a man emerged who could achieve precisely that. His name was Donald Trump.

Decades of American commitment to multilateral trade had been put into reverse. Liberalism's commitment to trade as a safeguard against war was  being destroyed. 

 

Matthew Levering, The Indissolubility of Marriage.

- A highly detailed and very clearly written book supporting the Catholic Church’s doctrine on the indissolubility on marriage. It was published in 2019.

- Amoris Laetitia is Pope Francis's encyclical published in 2016 which defends the Church's traditional position but encourages increased pastoral care to affected spouses.

- Levering seeks to justify the Church’s position but gives a considerable amount of space to contrary theological views.

- He is not persuaded by these views. I disagree with him, and find his position trapped in a theological linguistic universe unrelated to the real one.