Brendan Colley, The Signal Line

 

- This novel, set in Tasmania like much of contemporary Australian fiction, is quite frankly weird. If it weren't for the fact that the characters are so interesting and likeable (apart from one), and the pace rather compelling, I would have bailed pretty early. 

- It's a strange cocktail indeed. Colley’s given us a mix of the fantastical and the real, with no distinction between them. His point presumably being that the spiritual is real and embedded in the everyday. And without it the book would be a tiny domestic story of minimal significance, although heartwarming. 

- At the centre of the story is a ghost train which arrives at Hobart station one morning, as it has arrived at various stations around the world over the last sixty years. It's carrying passengers from Italy who thought they were on their regular hour-long commute to Rome. The police turn up, and there are witnesses. It's a real event. 

- Also central to the story are two brothers, our narrator Geo, a viola player, and the older Wes, a policeman. Their recently deceased father was an abusive drunk who favoured Wes. Their mum, also now dead, was a violist with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Music and its beauty plays a big role in the novel. 

- As does heaps of paranormal stuff. The father’s old lamp flickers when not plugged in. He’s presumably communicating. Their mother communicates via an ouija board. Twisting pendants, crystals and divining rods feature predominantly. Labuschagne is a bookseller and a paranormal enthusiast. Sten is the Swedish ghost train hunter. Paco and Camille are young hippy backpackers who turn up one day and hang around.  

- Their interactions are full of whiskey and joints and cigarettes. Day and night they're into it. Why Colley has made this so central is beyond me. And why he has made Wes so ugly and abusive is also beyond me. Perhaps love, friendship and hate are all part of the reality mix, redeemed by the spiritual.  

- The Signal Line is a metaphor for when you advance another step closer to your dream. These characters are searching, and desperation isolates and pains them. As the narrator's girlfriend tells him at one point: Many people live without knowing their passion. But you found yours at the beginning, and you can spend your whole life expressing it. You are blessed....I believe chasing the dream is more important than the dream...chasing something is what makes a person grow. 

- The ending is very sentimental and pretty soppy. Even Wes is redeemed. 

Hugh White, Quarterly Essay: Sleepwalk to War.

 

- This new Quarterly Essay from respected foreign policy analyst Hugh White is so sensible on every level. He pulls no punches and it's written in crystal clear English, very much unlike the tiresome word-salad bureaucratise indulged in by Kevin Rudd in his recent book The Avoidable War. In fact he calls Rudd out. There can be no 'managed strategic competition' when it comes to China and its ambitious agenda. China has no interest in a deal.

- There are so many quotable sentences in this essay that I underlined virtually every second one! The Quad does not actually do anything except meet, for example.

- Refreshingly White tackles the Taiwan issue head on. He provides the frankest assessment of the situation I've ever read, and I've read a lot on this issue over the last few years. 

The best way out of this predicament for America is to abandon ambiguity and acknowledge frankly that it cannot and will not defend Taiwan with armed force. And the best path for Australia is to urge America to do that and to tell Americans plainly that we will not support them in a war over Taiwan.

Because of the serious risk of nuclear war, America better withdraw quickly and gracefully. Abandoning Taiwan to Beijing for example. 

- White also makes sense on Ukraine. Russia needs to be offered ‘a respectable place in the international system’. Great powers like Russia and an emerging India are needed to keep China at bay.

- The coming new multi-polar order will balance interests, and the US and Australia need to adjust. Our absurd pro-war posture against China will do us great damage. Her calls out AUKUS for the disaster it is: …it is hard to recall anything more absurd than this whole sad mess.

- To White, Japan presents us with a model on establishing workable relations with China. As do the countries of Southeast Asia who are united in believing that it would be both futile and disastrous for America to try to contain China in a new Cold War. As for the Southwest Pacific, home of Solomon Islands: They will not be frightened into turning their backs on China by our dire warnings.

- He's very critical of our new Albanese government's inability to outline a realistic alternative to the dated, chest-thumping and dangerous Howard/Morrison/Dutton views. Labor has deserted the policy debate and called it bipartisanship.

- This essay is wide-ranging and up to date. It is a thoroughly refreshing and enlightening read. Highly recommended.  

Mieko Kawakami, All The Lovers In The Night

- Our lonely and isolated narrator, Fuyuko Irie, is a proofreader at a small publishing house in Tokyo. She gets persuaded to go freelance by Hijiri, a former colleague, a challenge she accepts. 

- However she has a major personality problem. She is a quiet thirty-five year old woman with no friends, who never goes out, and barely watches TV or reads the news. She’s profoundly ignorant about everything and has no interests. In other words, she's a total, stunted bore. Why on earth Hajiri likes her is a mystery, only to become clearer as the novel progresses. 

- As Fuyuko knows, proofreading is a lonely business, full of lonely people. Ironically, it requires a distance from reading. I never really liked reading. In the rare occasions she enters a bookshop she glances at the shelves and feels surrounded by possibility…All I knew for certain was that this place had nothing to do with me. One day she sees in the mirror the dictionary definition of a miserable person. Her depression intensifies. She starts mild drinking, but it becomes constant, from breakfast onwards, turning her into a drunk. 

- During one of her rare ventures outside her apartment she meets an older man who immediately knows she’s a drunk. Mitsutsuka is his name and he introduces himself as a high school physics teacher. They start regularly meeting for coffee. But she never gets to really know him although she becomes increasingly attached to him. She imagines them as lovers - lovers in the night. 

-Hijiri is her polar opposite. She's supremely articulate and confident about her philosophy of life: spirituality, natural living….God, divine providence, nature, some super-energy, the universe…completely self-serving. She has no need for all that mystical paraphernalia. She is beautiful and has many sexual episodes with different men. She's full of life.

- Sex is not a thing for Fuyuko. During her final year of school her ‘boyfriend’ Mizuno forced himself on her, effectively raping her. He shouted at her you can’t think or speak for yourself…it’s like there’s nothing in there. A positive statement of consent or otherwise seems impossible for her.

- She reflects eventually: What had I been doing up until now?…The job that I was doing, the place where I was living, the fact that I was all alone and had no one to talk to. Could these have been the result of some decision that I’d made?...I was so scared of failing, of being hurt, that I chose nothing. I did nothing…paralysed by loneliness at home.

- It's a mystery why Hijiri still keeps in touch with her, like a project. She sends her some lovely clothes to replace the cheap and shapeless stuff she wears, and she calls her frequently. She senses there's something deeper in Fuyuko that needs to be liberated. Her argument with her at the end is telling. She is right: The truth is too much for you to handle.

- The final chapter is set two years later. Hijiri is seven months pregnant, filled with joy and expectation, and Mitsutsuka, the older 'teacher', just a distant memory. However he writes to Fuyuko confessing he was never a teacher, just a retrenched factory worker. Their relationship was just a meaningless dance macabre. 

- There is so much going on in this propulsive novel, and its setting in Tokyo is just magical. If you're familiar with Tokyo at all you will relish the constant references to the upmarket precincts of Shinjuku, Shibuya and Harajuku. Tokyo becomes a character in the novel, a bustling, vital, human community. In stark contrast to our pathologically withdrawn heroine.

Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and its Discontents.

 

- The eminent American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, author of the highly influential and controversial 1992 book The End of History And The Last Man, has written a substantial, insightful, yet concise overview of the stresses and strains on liberal democracies in today's messy and pretty ugly world.

- Occasionally it doesn’t hurt to step back and reflect on the bigger picture. And Fukuyama has done that superbly. His new book is conceptually very clear and well argued. It's measured, sane and fair in its assessment of the contrary forces at play. He critiques both the left and the right, calling out the extremes in both.

- Liberalism is not a perfect political system by any means. Centred on the autonomy and freedom of the individual, it has failed to recognise essential human needs such as community and group identity, and the basic need to belong. It has failed to recognise the significance of groups. That is so obvious today.   

The dust cover description sums the book up perfectly:

Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

 

- This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001 and has received wide acclaim. And no wonder - it is so damn good. It's sharply satirical and stereotypically Jewish in content and style.

- A young Jewish boy, Ruben Blum, grows up in America and becomes a scholar of history. We're subject to rich and detailed debates, and Judaism's struggle to survive under antagonistic Christian empires. 

- The small college where Blum lectures invites a controversial historian, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, to give a lecture to the students and an after dinner speech to a wider audience as part of his application for a permanent professorial position. 

- His lecture on the age old contest between history and myth, or between Judaism and Christianity, is stunningly good and warmly embraced, but his less formal speech at the college, after a few drinks, illustrates his fanatical nationalist Zionism, and most attendees find it offensive. Cohen presents us with both lecture and speech in full detail. He treats the reader as highly intelligent.  

- Professor Netanyahu has three young sons. In the Credits and Extra Credits final chapter we learn that the middle boy, Benjamin, later in life becomes the politician and Prime Minister of Israel. Here's what Cohen has to say about him: 

His reign, marked by the building of walls, the construction of settlements, and the normalisation of occupation and state violence against the Palestinians, represents the ultimate triumph of the formerly disgraced Revisionist vision promulgated by his father. 

- We also learn that the giant American literary critic Harold Bloom was actually the Blum character in the novel who coordinated the campus visit of Ben-Zion Netanyahu and his family. 

- Here are some of the many favourable reviews of this book:

'The Netanyahus is constructed with a brilliant comic grace that moves from the sly to the exuberant. Some scenes are funny beyond belief. But even when moments in the book are sharp or melancholy, they keep an undertone of witty and ironic observation. The vision in this book is deeply original, making clear what a superb writer Joshua Cohen is.' - Colm Toibin 

'Joshua Cohen is such an accomplished writer it's surprising he isn't a better known one.... Cohen's new book - his sixth - continues the turn to allegorical realism [and] is among his best: a fastidious and very funny book that is one of the most purely pleasurable works of fiction I've read in ages.' - Jon Day, Financial Times

'The Netanyahus is Cohen's sixth novel, his most conventional and his best to date. It is a tour de force: compact, laugh-out-loud funny, the best new novel I've read this year [and] probably the funniest novel ever written about contending historiographies.... Cohen's lesson, in this determinedly comic novel, is that history happens as farce and tragedy simultaneously.' - John Phipps, The Times

'[Cohen] clearly is a genius ... The Netanyahus [is] a comic historical fantasia - a dizzying range of bookish learning and worldly knowhow is given rich, resourceful expression.... With its tight time frame, loopy narrator, portrait of Jewish-American life against a semi-rural backdrop, and moments of cruel academic satire, The Netanyahus reads like an attempt, as delightful as it sounds, to cross-breed Roth's The Ghost Writer and Nabokov's Pale Fire.... This is a brisk, impudent, utterly immersive novel.' - Leo Robson, Guardian

'The Netanyahus, like Cohen's previous novels, is driven by the momentum of its prose. It has a freewheeling, all-consuming style which frequently turns up unexpected delights.... This is a surprising novel, full of quirks and explosive moments' - Christopher Shrimpton, Spectator

'No one writing in English today is more gifted than Joshua Cohen. Every page of The Netanyahus - an historical account of a man left out of history, a wickedly funny fable of the return of the repressed - crackles with Cohen's high style and joyride intelligence.' - Nicole Krauss, author of Forest Dark

Adrian McKinty, The Island

 

- Adrian McKinty's prior stand-alone novel, The Chain, released in 2019, was a huge international success. The Island, just released, will undoubtedly be as well. And it deserves to be. It's far better than the deeply flawed The Chain in my view. 

- It's aimed primarily at the American market: dollars are US denominated, distances are in miles, and temperatures are Fahrenheit. It's a story about a young American family holidaying in Victoria. So of course it's stuffed with your standard Aussie cliches: mates, blokes, spiders, snakes, sharks, dunnies, footy, and insufferable heat. 

- They visit Dutch Island, a short ferry trip from Melbourne, for just a few hours, but it quickly turns very ugly. The locals are one large family, the O'Neills, and they're neanderthals, or ‘Mad Max psycho-killers’ as McKinty calls them. They feel wronged and are utterly incapable of anything but violence. 

- McKinty is a master at keeping up the pace. Short sharp sentences, often with just one word, sprinkled with full stops. His prose is relentless and propulsive.

- The story gets more complex and intriguing as it develops, particularly towards the end. Family dynamics and circumstances play a central role, which adds immeasurably to the texture and makes it very satisfying. There’s a lot more going on in this book than the surface story would indicate.

- The O’Neill’s hunt for the young family is akin to the whites’ hunt for the indigenous people in the colony’s early years. The real prehistoric throwbacks are clear here.

- McKinty also has a gift for nature writing. He's poetic about Australian and American sublime natural beauty. 

- The ending is nice but a bit abrupt. One or two more pages of resolution would have made it more emotionally satisfying. But that's a minor issue. 

- This thriller is about as good as it gets. Give yourself a break. You'll thoroughly enjoy it.