Patrick deWitt, The Librarianist.

 

- Patrick deWitt has the ability to dissect the personal and social lives of ordinary people and bring them vividly to life. There are no big heroes or villains or any characters outside the ordinary. This is what enriches his novels and makes them utterly enthralling. 

- In the just released The Librarianist we're taken to two time periods: 2005-2006 and 1942-1960.  

- Bob Comet has been an avid reader since his childhood days. We spend time with him as a young boy who's run away from home, and as an old retiree looking for involvement and meaning. His marriage didn't last and he has no children. But he is a kind, intelligent man whom neighbours notice and love. His career was as a librarian. 

- We meet the people he gets to know through the different stages of his life and they are of course delightful. DeWitt adopts a style of prose which is deliberately old-fashioned. It's a stiff and formal, proper English idiom which heightens the delightfulness of the characters' exchanges and humour. Many of them are sensitive to all sorts of things, even moody and peevish, and prejudiced, but essentially they're kind and supportive. 

- We are celebrating the simplicity of joy. I loved this novel and highly recommend it, especially to those of you starting to experience the fragility of old age!

Joel Deane, Judas Boys

- Deane has written a thoroughly mesmerising story about alienation and meaninglessness. It's full of sad characters desperate for friendship and belonging. They are needy or failures or bullies or predators, and whatever they experience they are barely able to tolerate. 

- Patrick Pinnock's school friend OB, who commits suicide at the age of nineteen, was a sad, neglected son of unhappy parents. We meet Patrick, known as Pin, when he starts as a boarder at St Jude's Catholic school in Melbourne. He and OB bond. We then follow him as a journalist to Canberra to take a job as a ministerial press secretary, and finally as an unemployed, broke loser who was sacked from that job for 'bad behaviour'. 

- There's a range of fascinating characters in the book that Pin bumps into on his life's journey. OB's mother 'Mrs O’Brien', unlike his own mother who was a religious nutcase, is sexy and attracted to him.  

- This novel is domestic noir at its best. Kitchens, bedrooms, meals, coffees, pools, homes, families  - all feature. 

- The final chapter of this rather short book (225 pages) is an imagined OB’s story. It is simply lovely and deeply reflective about the middle-aged Pin and OB’s mother, now an old woman, and the deep relationship they had forged. 

- This beautiful novel is worth re-reading and re-reading. It's that good. 

Graeme Turner, The Shrinking Nation

 

- This new book by Emeritus Professor and leading Australian cultural historian Graeme Turner is an enormously insightful and satisfying read. Turner's thesis is that the last two to three decades in Australian politics, society and culture have seen governments retreating from the deep challenges that the country has faced. The dominance of neoliberal ideology has privileged the market and the corporate sphere and eviscerated public government funded services and entities. 

- Turner places everything in a deeper context than we are usually exposed to. Thoroughly researched, it pulls together a comprehensive range of highly credible sources. The tone of the book is calm and measured but it builds to a powerful, damning critique of what Australia has become - a shrinking nation. Many academics can’t write clear English but Turner definitely can. And it clearly expresses his frustration at how low we’ve sunk.

- His academic background infuses his commentary with a sage-like, authoritative tone. He digs deep, and frequently quotes our wiser, more knowledgeable and intelligent commentators like Bernard Keane, Sean Kelly, Ross Gittens, George Megalogenis, Nick Bryant, Rod Tiffen, Judith Brett, Richard Denniss, Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen. 

- Let me list some of the principal issues Turner focuses on: government reliance in recent years on political advisors rather than the diminished public service; casualisation and low growth of wages worsening inequality in a war on young people especially; the new digital media technology and its generation of fear and anger to attract audiences; the decline of the media generally, just going for audiences through shock jocks and partisan commentary on 'the woke', the elites, the politically correct; the gay marriage debate; climate change apathy, anti immigration; the unemployed; the poor and disabled.

- There's an excellent analysis of the depletion of the ABC under Coalition governments, and the severe cuts to the arts and creative industries and workers. It's full of depressing numbers. Turner, having sat on a number of oversight committees over the years, is ruthless on condemning how the university sector has fared.  ‘..the largest scale and most deleterious commercialising strategy targeting public institutions has been in relation to the university sector’. Just look at the appalling treatment of universities during Covid - totally excluded from government support. In fact government funding from 2017 to 2022 declined by over 39%. 

- He also reminds us of the Black Summer bushfires in 2019-20 and the pathetic government response, and the Northern River floods in 2022. Lismore is still very much a disaster zone. 

- There are so many other topics covered in this book. The challenge for Albanese and Labor is huge, but unfortunately on so many levels they are not stepping up. Tepidity is simply nowhere near enough. Political boldness and courage is needed when our problems are so deep.  


(Disclosure: I and my family were close friends with the Turners during my years working in Brisbane)