Sue Orr, Loop Tracks

- Celebrated New Zealand author Sue Orr's latest novel is a very close, microscopic rendering of personal and generational interactions in a formerly conservative and now progressive society. Her rich and poetic prose brings these tensions vividly to life. 

- Charlie was only fifteen when she was sexually abused on the back seat of an old Vauxhall by a boy she didn't know. Whether it was rape or, more technically, an 'unlawful sexual connection' is a side issue. The year is 1978. What we are presented with is a drama of provincial ignorance and profound parental cowardice, typical of the times. The New Zealand government had recently forced the closure of the abortion clinic in Auckland.  

- Charlie is on the plane, on her own, headed to Sydney for her abortion, but it's sitting on the tarmac due to technical problems, and the hours tick by. Stressed, she makes a decision she will later in life profoundly regret. 

- She gives birth to a son who is immediately wrenched from her. He was named James (Jim) by his new parents, the Cartwrights. And unfortunately, though Orr never provides us with the details, Jim became a drug addict as a young man and spent time in gaol. He turned out to be a lowlife of 'swaggering narcissism'.

- Forty-two years later, in 2020, in the midst of New Zealand's severe Covid lockdown, Charlie is living in Wellington with her eighteen year old grandson, Tommy, who was abandoned as a toddler by his father, Jim. Tommy is a little on the spectrum. 

- Jacinda Ardern is now PM and the next election is approaching. She's favoured to win handsomely. How radically different modern times are in a now progressive society. 

- There will also be referendum on Euthanasia. For some strange reason Tommy is against it: …failing to acknowledge the great good, the need to protect the weakest among us. He’s also suddenly against abortion, having been sucked into the Pro-Life movement all the way. He even starts applauding the anti-vax, anti-masks, anti-5G conspiracy campaigners. Turns out he's quickly become pretty ignorant and confused. Charlie of course loses it, and screams at him: I got off that jet and had that baby, and that baby turned into that disaster of a human being called Jim Cartwright. Your fucking abomination of a father.

- So we're in the midst of a social critique, one anchored by the personal and domestic tensions of a very ordinary family. As a result the novel at times gets a bit bogged down in pedestrian detail. NZ’s Covid drama in 2020 for example, before Delta and Omicron, is a bit small town and suffocating. It teeters on the edge of becoming a tedious micro story. But Orr paints the micro as the macro really. We're embedded in the totally human in all its critical dimensions. The centrality of relationships is the focus and the legacy of serious decisions made on lives to come. Children denied the love of parents and family amounts to serious, longterm damage.

- Of course Jacinda romps home to victory. 

- So does this glorious novel. A real pleasure to read, and full of hope in these difficult times. 

Bea Setton, Berlin

 

- Intriguing novel with a captivating cast of characters, mainly postgrad students living and studying in Berlin. As the back cover blurb says Channelling the modern female experience with razor-sharp observation and witty flair, Berlin announces Bea Sutton as an electrifying literary voice for her generation.

- It's certainly a well written story. The narrator Daphne is a young French-English woman seeking some meaning in her rather vacuous life by spending a gap year in Berlin. She's also a profoundly troubled personality and a propulsive liar, desperately seeking some sense of authenticity. For instance she's pretending to her new friends she’s completing her PhD in philosophy, which is far from the truth. 

- She's enrolled in a German class and is quickly learning the language. She's also seemingly incapable of eating anything but chocolate, chips, and seeds, day and night. She's quite physically attractive but thin and getting thinner. Yes, a fascinating and rather sad character, whom you can't help but like and support. The seeds of greater things were latent in me somewhere, just waiting to bloom.

- The young men she meets are mostly boorish inadequates, apart from one. Her new female friends are supportive, yet they know little of her real self. They walk a lot around Berlin, visiting lots of cafes, parks and well-known historical monuments. There's also lots of German words, phrases and short sentences with translations and notes in English. That's so good.

- Some seemingly criminal events happen in her apartment - rocks thrown through her window and crockery and furnishings trashed. The police get involved. The resolution is very satisfying. 

- The novel centralises communication through social media apps which is good to see in contemporary fiction. Phones have become vital bodily organs. 

- A very enjoyable read. 

Ottessa Moshfegh, Lapvona

- This new novel from US author Ottessa Moshfegh is quite simply outstanding. With fierce intellect she constructs a potent witches brew out of a medieval small village story. It's absolutely relentless in painting depravity and sheer evil, while giving it the standard Christian gloss the period demands. 

- She doesn't spare the reader from the ugliness of life and death in that time of ignorance and cruelty. The village priest's black garments signify the opposite of enlightenment. 

- Broken relationships, lies, violence and corruption are the norm in the village, and evil reigns supreme. Villiam is the overlord and resides in an enormous manor situated on a mountain overlooking the village. He's a liar, a thief and a complete lowlife. ‘He couldn’t clean the shit from his own arsehole’, as Father Barnabas at one point says of him. He just feasts and drinks and requires entertainment from his servants, who are consigned to eating just cabbage. 

- Sheep herder Jude and his deformed son Marek (aged 13) are central to the story, as is Agata, Marek's mother. Ina the old, blind, wise, yet scheming wet nurse is also a key character.   

- Summer brings a long drought, with crop failure, insect pestilence, starvation, and even cannibalism. But the gardens around the manor stayed green and flourishing with vegetables and fruit and cows, because Villiam had hoarded the water in a private reservoir upstream. 

- All Moshfegh's characters, no matter how minor, are well drawn and brought vividly to life. While it's hardly original to set novels in medieval/pre-enlightenment times that explore social, political, religious and economic realities, Lapvona is surely unique in being such a relentless portrayal of pure evil and ugliness. There are some wrong notes, including a touch of comic melodrama and a meaningless subplot of fantasy, both of which run counter to the novel's dark realism, but nevertheless the overall experience is immensely gratifying. 

- If you enjoyed Moshfegh's last novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, as I certainly did, you will feast on this. It's darker, more demanding, but equally as satisfying. What an extraordinary talent she is. 

Frank O’Loughlin, New Wineskins

 

- Way too much God talk. 

- Good on communion and bread sharing. 

- Good on the history of bread for the Israelites. From the bread of slaves to the bread of freedom. 

- To give communion from the Tabernacle - when it is not truly necessary - is to neglect the very nature of the Mass as the action if the gathered People of God. 

- Drops the dated word Transubstantiation at the end, just to say we’ve moved beyond that anti-Protestant period.

Chris Womersley, The Diplomat

 

- It's December 1991 and our Melbourne born narrator, Edward, returns from London where he had been living for a few years with his wife Gertrude, who has just died from an overdose. They were painters and drug addicts. Besides bringing her ashes with him back to her family for her burial, he hides in the urn some heroin and pills. They and their friends were lowlifes, the lot of them. 

- Despite having read Cairo, Womersley's previous novel featuring Edward and Gertrude, and enjoying it immensely, it took me quite a while to warm to them again. Junkies, who writes about them these days?

- As the novel develops, however, Edward becomes, despite his many faults, extremely likeable again. Of course he now has your standard cliched anti-Australian views of a returnee from London: 

The place was like a country town; its people were ugly, unsophisticated, dull, fat, fearful...How much better it would have been if the country had been invaded by the French or the Spanish instead of those dull English Protestants with their awful food and lousy clothes, their pious censoriousness. Then we might have been a better dressed and more imaginative people. We might have nursed someone brilliant who could invent something to be proud of, more than the Hills hoist and a brand of football that no one else in the world played or took the slightest notice of....Horseracing, gambling, digging valuable rocks from the ground, barbecues, slaughtering the Indigenous people and sitting on the beach reading trash like The Thorn Birds. What a legacy.  

- The escape to London didn’t work. It brought new challenges they couldn’t meet. Their aspirations as artists went unrealised. The easy paths they were sucked into - scams, theft, partying, drugs - led to so much personal pain. And they had no family support. Art, politics, literature - what had they done for me…was a collection of experiences the same as an actual life?...We had pretty much made ourselves unemployable; it was intrinsic to the artistic mission.

- What I most loved about this novel were the blistering critiques of contemporary art, gentrification, and blokey Australia generally. Like this:

Once upon a time, artists were society's outsiders, its renegades; we were not invited to the respectable parties. But all of that had changed. Now artists longed to be absorbed as quickly as possible into the art-industrial complex. Art had become a vehicle for some sort of celebrity. Perhaps it had been that way for ages. Andy Warhol had a lot to answer for. What a load of shit.

Brunswick Street seemed a lot busier than when I'd last been here, five years ago. It was the weekend. The footpaths thronged with tourists from the suburbs looking for brunch venues. I navigated past lovers wandering along hand in hand, groups of laughing friends, mothers and daughters. The suburb was changing. Its quirk was becoming commodified and very soon the worst sorts of people - real estate agents, corporate types who worked in marketing, Dire Straits fans - would want to live here. And then it would all be over.

- The novel is beautifully written, with insight and empathy. It looks into human beings, beyond the surface. Edward is a portrait of a loving, sensitive, insightful loser. For reasons which were unclear to me - something to do with artistic integrity or fear or plain old snobbery - I had always distanced myself from the ordinary world, but had in the process make of myself an alien. 

- After a pivotal meeting with his drug dealer in the The Diplomat hotel, he returns to his small and ugly room in the hostel, pessimistic and despairing, reflecting on Gertrude and her wonderful beauty and talent. 

- Finally, for readers who've spent some time in London, this delicious para will ring true:

We ducked into a greasy-spoon cafe for a sit-down and a cup of tea. The place was warm, packed with locals eating breakfast and gossiping. We managed to snag a recently vacated table in the window. The diner smelled pleasantly of crispy bacon and cigarette smoke. I had always enjoyed these places; they were like a neighbour's friendly and chaotic kitchen, invariably noisy with clatter and sizzle. The women working there always called you 'love', like they were your mum or aunt, and the food was generally awful, but in a glorious, delicious way. Bacon and eggs with chips and white bread and baked beans from a tin. Kippers, mugs of milky tea, sausages. Anything edible - the toast, even the bloody Mars Bars - could be deep-fried on request. You just had to avoid the coffee at all costs. It was always better to stick to the national beverage - tea - in the UK. 

Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch

 

- This latest by Julian Barnes is a novel of ideas, ancient and modern. It's definitely challenging, but if you're at all interested in how the West developed as a culture and society over over the last few millennia then you will find it absorbing. I certainly did. 

- There are three sections to the book, one and three telling the story of inspiring academic Elizabeth Finch and her students' reaction to her, and section two morphing into a history of a fourth century Roman Emperor, Julian the Apostate, who profoundly influenced her thinking. It's rich in ideas and insights, is charming, and in fact delicious. 

- Elizabeth is a heavy smoker, she suffers migraines, and is unmarried. She's stylish, conservatively dressed, charming, often cheeky, and her manner droll and wry. She also has poise and exudes immense authority. Her course is ‘Culture and Civilisation’. She obliged us - simply by example - to seek and find within ourselves a centre of seriousness. (A few reviewers have suggested Barnes has modelled her on English author Anita Brookner, a good friend of his. This may or not be the case but it is irrelevant). 

- The narrator of the novel, Neil, is one of her students. He's in his mid-thirties, is a former actor, mushroom grower, and hospitality worker, and now after two failed marriages is at a bit of a loss. After graduating, he meets Elizabeth ('EF') for lunch a few times a year over a twenty year period. Until her death. She leaves Neil her papers and library. He remains fascinated by her, but as a narrator he is supremely unreliable. 

- Who actually was Julian the Apostate? He was the last pagan emperor of Rome. He detested the way Christianity became the dominant religious tradition across the empire, displacing the more liberating and joyous pagan traditions. The old gods of Greece and Rome were gods of light and joy…whereas these new Christians obeyed a God of darkness, of pain and servitude…the pagan gods were conquered by the pale Galilean. Julian died in battle at the young age of 31. 

- Neil reads EF's notebooks, full of memories, arguments, quotes, scribbles and jottings. Julian also was a frequent scribbler who left a large written legacy. 

- Neil gives us Julian’s history in fullsome detail, much of it boring and pretty irrelevant. There's too much about his reign, battles, campaigns and enemies. But Neil’s reflections, Barnes’s probably, are thrilling. What if he had ruled for another thirty years, marginalising Christianity year by year…And at least he ranges widely, quoting scholars and commentators down the ages: Lorenzo de’ Medici, Montaigne, Milton, Montesquieu, Voltaire (Julian was ‘a dazzling precursor to the Enlightenment’), Edward Gibbon, Ibsen, Swinburne, and….Hitler.

- After her retirement she was invited to give a lecture by the London Review of Books. Neil was present, as were many former students and prominent intellectuals. Of course she focussed on Julian and his anti-Christian writings. Unfortunately the tabloid press had a field day. They ridiculed her for celebrating an ancient philosophical lightweight, now largely forgotten. A load of bollocks according to one reviewer. One former student called her ‘an amateur…irrelevant’. Has Neil been living in a fool’s paradise regarding her? Did he get it all wrong, as he got most of his life choices wrong? 

- Barnes has alway been a novelist of ideas and socio-political issues, something he shares with Ian McEwan. Which is why I've long been an avid fan of both. Give his novel a go, if you're tempted. You won't regret it. 

(By the way this is a beautiful production of a hard cover book by publisher Jonathan Cape UK. It's thankfully printed in Australia by Griffin Press, as UK printers are generally third rate. They rarely get the binding right)

Peter Mendelsund, The Delivery

 

- An exquisite tale told initially in short, sharp, isolated sentences, often just a few per chapter. A young man on a bicycle is doing his daily delivery drop offs. In Part Two long paragraphs become the norm, and Part Three is 32 pages of one sentence. As we soon learn the form mirrors the deepening content. It’s the larger picture that’s important. This is the underworld of illegal immigrants, refugees, and their struggle to work and thrive. They are exploited, abused and neglected. They are victims of scams, thievery and corruption. 

- And occasionally (in brackets) an older and wiser narrator intrudes. It seems to be the boy's older self, reflecting on his family’s escape from their country which was ruled by a 'Stongman' and his ruthless regime. 

- In that country he was a cymbal player in a youth orchestra and a student of languages. He liked the French horn player, a young girl. 

- In his new country a young lady called 'N' is his dispatch clerk at the distribution centre. She favours him at times, but she’s also unkind to him at other times. But he really likes her. A man called ‘Uncle’ checks the delivery boy’s pickups and the Supervisor is a ‘fucker'. He's also abusive.

- In this new country so many former restaurant workers and managers have had to become delivery boys. 

- If they have an accident and damage the bike, they have to pay for the repairs. And on busy streets accidents are frequent.

- In part two a delivery takes him to a new neighbourhood, once upmarket but now derelict, and where delivery boys are prone to assaults from thieves and gangs. 

- He enters a truly poor place…storefronts grated or boarded up…everything written on…the city had fallen to pieces here. Then his navigation app directs him onto a highway. He crosses a bridge, into the upmarket mansions of Manor Grove.

- But there is nothing at his destination. No house, no people, nothing. Night is coming, his bike has been damaged in a fall, and his phone battery is barely 10%. He’s stranded.

- He reflects on his parents and their former country. The secret meetings, and the raid on their house by government thugs. 

- In part three he awakes and manages to briefly call his employer. Despatch girl number 6 answers and tells him to open the packages, just before the phone goes dead. He finds clothes, a large bag of money, food, a new power-assist for the bike, a picture of N as a kid, and a map. He's been gifted hope and the chance of a new life by the kindness of some fellow workers. 

- He's reminded of his time in the orchestra, and the conductor’s sophistication and culture, which stood in stark contrast to that general collective barbarity that would come later down the road.

- A sense of liberation propels him…forward motion is precisely the point…what it means to endure, what endurance requires - the ability to go on, to pedal, to set one’s eyes upriver…a happy life was a headlong life...

- This is a beautifully written, frequently poetic meditation on hardship, yearning, human generosity and hope. It's an extraordinary novel by Peter Mendelsund, a graphic designer and the creative director of The Atlantic.  

- (And look at that simple cover. Like NO. COVER. YOU. EVER. SEE. TODAY)