Richard Flanagan, Question 7

 

- This is a fascinating book. It's not just a memoir, it's a highly emotional mixture of passion, anger and reflection. I found it utterly absorbing. We're taken to Hiroshima and the atom bomb, the novels of H.G.Wells, the scientific geniuses Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein, Flanagan's mother and his former Prisoner of War father, and the colonial extermination of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. 

- There are echoes of Flanagan's previous novels throughout, mainly Death of a River Guide and brilliant The Narrow Road to the Deep North. 

- Over the course of his life certain events have become seared in his mind, and his telling of them incites immense anger which the reader can feel and share. 

- Like this one: At 8.15am on 6 August 1945, bombardier Major Thomas Ferebee released a lever 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, said 'Bomb away!, and forty-three seconds later 60,000 people died while eighty miles to the south my father, a near-naked slave labourer in his fourth year of captivity as a prisoner of war, continued with his gruelling work pushing carriages of rock up long dark tunnels that ran under the Inland Sea.

- And this one: a war of extermination, a war the Tasmanian Aboriginal people finally lost... Exiled to slums and an island reserve and silence, renamed and reviled as islanders and abos and boongs and half-castes and troublemakers, they could be called any vile humiliation imaginable but what they were: the original human inhabitants of the island. 

- We're taken back to the origin of nuclear physics and the splitting of the atom. The scientist Leo Szilard was terrified the world could be destroyed. He was inspired by the futuristic novels of H.G.Wells, and it seemed obvious that Nazi Germany would become the first country in the world to develop nuclear weapons. That was horrific. 

- Humanity was likely to be extinguished. 

- And as for bomber Thomas Ferebee, look at the precision aerial bombing of France during the war, and the carpet bombing of Vietnam twenty years later. Many more thousands of people died than in Hiroshima. Ferebee was involved in both. Our American hero. 

- Flanagan takes us to his awakening as a young student in Oxford. The world there was grey… dreary and dispirited… where mediocrity was a virtue called tradition...The English were Martians. ‘Dirty little East End Jew. Go home to the colonies, convict. Women smell of slime, don’t you think? Hey, Paki - oi! Fif-faf-fuddle!' That was the true language of Oxford, its necessary language of hate.

- The final chapter is an exquisite telling of his near drowning in a kayak in the Franklin River. He was only twenty one and came very close to death. But, miraculously, he survived through the help of a courageous friend. He wasn't extinguished. As the world itself has so far survived. 

- And, by the way, his father lived until he was ninety-four. 

- Flanagan has written a thoroughly inspiring work. Brilliant. 

Inga Simpson, The Thinning

 

- It took me a while to comprehend what on earth Inga Simpson was on about in this new novel. There are some very strange and seemingly meaningless elements, and I was tempted to bail. Thankfully, I didn't. I started over again and read it twice. And was captivated. 

- It's set in the future, and the earth has been wrecked by climate change, ecological destruction, authoritarian regimentation, and abusive control of citizens and their lives. 

- A new subspecies of humans has emerged, called the Incompletes. They are infertile, but have higher levels of sensory perception. And they are disliked by other people. 

- The main character is Fin, a young woman whose father was a celebrated astronomer, and whose mother an astrophotographer. They join a small band of colleagues and become outliers, living off the grid. 

- Simpson keeps us in the dark on so many details, which I found frustrating. What year is it? How’s the earth’s population faring? Where did these Incompletes come from? And why? 

- But as the novel progresses in the second half, it gets far more dramatic and interesting, and in fact spellbinding. A full eclipse of the sun looms, and crowds of people gather in parks and ranges, determined to get the best viewing positions. What they don't know is that the astronomer outliers have a plan that will impact planet earth radically. They are determined to liberate humanity, whatever it takes - destroy space junk, power stations, gas wells, destructive mining operations, and reclaim the land by returning it to an inland sea. 

- As Fin reflects prior to the eclipse: What if the thresholds I long to cross are not portals to another dimension, but the capacity to fully inhabit our own? A way of circling back, into ourselves. Our best selves. What if we could see a way to make a new world, where all beings, no matter how fragile, could thrive?

- So take it slowly at first and relish Simpson's beautiful prose and love of the natural world. You will become absorbed. 

Iain Ryan, The Dream

 

- This new novel from Iain Ryan, the second in his promised four part series on Gold Coast corruption in the 1980's, is, unfortunately, a total disaster - unlike the first in the series, The Strip, which was brilliant in every way. 

- It's full of very unlikable characters, known at the time as the 'white shoe brigade'. They were ugly abusive thugs and criminals who dominated business development and the underworld. The police higher-ups were also involved. The Minister overseeing every aspect of it was Russ Hinze, a mover and shaker in the Bjelke-Petersen government. 

- In Ryan's novel they are financing and constructing Fantasyland, a huge theme park (presumably Dreamworld). There is cocaine, weed, and speed everywhere. And porn, whores and constant drinking. 

- Ryan immerses us in this ugliness. The story slowly gets richer and richer but there are so many characters who constantly pop up that you can't help but lose the thread. (A 'Cast of Characters' would have helped). As Bruno, the detective constable investigating the case reflects at one point: ‘Too many grim details circle this case. There’s a lot of blood and bad energy. The chain of events are fucking disastrous: a dead family, dead bank tellers, dirty cops, illicit porn, a motel room beheading. What is this?’.

- The storyline is way too complex. Baddies in every nook and cranny, all linked in mysterious ways. Some are gay, but homosexuality was a crime in the eighties. A few old men have authority over it all but they're obnoxious in the extreme. 

- I was hoping for a resolution that was emotionally satisfying, but it didn't emerge. It just got sillier. Dead bodies everywhere. 

- At least Ryan has documented how vulgar and corrupt the Gold Coast entrepreneurs, the police and the Queensland government were at the time. 

Emma Darragh, Thanks For Having Me

- This novel won this year's Readings Prize for fiction. Frankly, I don't know why. 

- It's about everyday family life in the working class burbs (we're in Wollongong) and has a distinct Young Adult feel, although technically it's not a YA book (there's too much sex). It's a chaotic jumbled up mix of kids, teens, sisters, mothers, fathers, rabbits, parties, sex, pregnancies, cassettes, Walkmans, 70’s pop stars, and dopey commercial TV shows.

- It spans four generations, from the mid-1900s to today. The main focus is on mothers and their daughters, and the mothers have a habit of deserting their husbands and kids when they simply can't take it anymore. 

- Vivian's life as a child, teen and mother is central. She hasn’t spoken to her own mother in years. Her experience of raising her baby, Evie, who won’t sleep, is the best part of the novel in my view. It's a dramatic and credible rendering and so well written. As a young adult Viv was a 'party girl'. A decade later, in an unhappy marriage, she leaves home, just like her own mother, and often considers suicide. 

- We spend a few chapters with the teenage Evie and her sister and school friends as they experience their sexual awakening. It's graphic. They are desperate to see an erect dick. 

- We also spend a lot of time reading about alcohol. On virtually every page. 

- Oddly, the boyfriends and husbands are not central to the tale, but they seem nice and normal and there's not a hint of abuse, sexual or otherwise. 

- All the painful drama belongs to motherhood. 

Samantha Harvey, Orbital

 

- This novel won this year's Booker Prize. It's certainly a worthy winner. It's a breathtaking, visionary, deep view of planet earth and the humans who live on it. 

- Six astronauts from different countries - Roman, Shaun, Chie, Pietro, Nell and Anton - are circling planet earth in a spacecraft. Their job is to tend to all sorts of scientific stuff, which they assiduously do. They also reflect on their families, personal relationships, achievements and ambitions. They are not so special. They are normal human beings. They circle the earth sixteen times a day. They are in awe of its stunning beauty. 

- Samantha Harvey's prose is beautifully poetic, and its written with passion and anger. The astronauts are in awe of their planet and continually reflect on its beauty, geography, colours, and weather systems - 'just a giddy mass of waltzing things'. And its headlong journey to destruction. 

- It's a 137 page short novel, but the small print and dense prose mean it can’t be read quickly. I had to read sentences and paragraphs a few times to let them sink in. It's certainly worth the effort. 

- They see a huge typhoon developing near the Philippines ‘..a charging force closing in on land’. They can see how destructive it will be.

- Harvey confronts us with all sorts of challenges. ..only white American men have gone to the moon - this is what the world is, a playground for men, a laboratory for men; OK, we’re alone, so be it; trying to go where the universe doesn’t want you when there’s a perfectly good earth just there that does; the atom bomb - be afraid my child of what a human can do - you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory; This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness…Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? Can we not stop tyrannising and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend? Every swirling neon or red algae bloom…every retreating glacier…every mound laid newly bare…every scorched and blazing forest…every shrinking ice sheet. 

- They come to see the politics of want. The politics of growing and getting, a billion extrapolations of the urge for more, that's what they begin to see when they look down. They don't even need to look down since they, too, are part of those extrapolations, they more than anyone - on their rocket whose boosters at lift-off burn the fuel of a millions cars.

The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

Percival Everett, James

 

- Most reviewers and literary critics highly anticipated this superb novel would win this year's Booker Prize but it didn't. Perhaps because it's not really original but a reworking of Mark Twain's classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

- Unlike Twain Everett digs deep into the cruelty of slavery. And his narrator is not Huck but Jim, Huck's black companion and an escaping slave. Huck is the supporting character. James is the lead. It's a highly dramatic story, with action aplenty. 

- James and his slave friends speak to each other in perfect English, but in ‘the correct incorrect grammar’ to their white masters, because the whites need to ‘feel superior’. James gives the children language lessons: Let’s try some situational translations...'And the better they feel, the safer we are’ becomes Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be. He is highly intelligent and literate, having taught himself from reading books in his former owner Judge Thatcher’s extensive library. He dreams of Voltaire and his liberal views on racism and ‘hierarchy’.

- James and Huck are real friends. Huck is running away from his abusive father, and James has to leave his wife and daughter and hide away because Miss Watson, his owner, wants to sell him to a man in New Orleans.

- On their journey down the Mississippi river in various stolen canoes and hastily thrown together rafts they meet plenty of strange and dangerous characters. Crooks and liars posing as the 'King of France' and the 'Duke of Bridgewater'; the 'Virginia Minstrels', a group of singers in blackface; Henderson the repeat rapist of young black girls; a steamer full of white thrill-seekers powered by a starving young black man shovelling coal into the furnace 24/7. 

- The word 'nigger' is common parlance. When Twain's original novel was published in 1884, after the civil war, many critics condemned it for frequently using this horrific word. In fact even today many school libraries refuse to hold it, accusing it, ironically, of racism. What Everett has done in his new version is to openly confront the real ugliness of racism at its core. It's a confronting read, and very powerful indeed.

 

Jock Serong, Cherrywood

 

-A brilliantly written but ultimately tedious novel. While the characters are real and attractive, the dominant story is juvenile and silly. As a minor character observes at some point: it's an Enid Blyton, Jack and the Beanstalk tale. 

- There are two time frames. The first is a century ago, in the early 1900’s. The second is in 1993. An Englishman, Thomas Wrenfether, has inherited a fortune from his wealthy parents, and is persuaded by a business colleague to invest in a newly discovered European timber called cherrywood. He could ship it to Melbourne and build a new type of ship, a paddlesteamer. Once in Melbourne he hires the right builders, carpenters and other crewmen, and fulfils his dream. Until the ship's launch. 

- 1993 in Melbourne we meet Martha, a formidable young lawyer. She's frustrated at work, and yearns for something far more meaningful. One night in Fitzroy she happens upon a small pub called the Cherrywood, and becomes immediately attracted to the young barman. She wants to return but, surprisingly, can't find it. Here's where the Disney-like fantasy element begins. 

- I started to get Serong's point. Successful people in their daily work worlds can be deeply confused, unstable and unsettled, and it frequently doesn't end well. 'The grounded life...doesn't satisfy'. He has also written a love paean to Fitzroy. There are connections to ancient histories and English-named streets, and people to old families. When reality is harsh we create our own haven. Our imaginations and creative sensibilities save us. Like the concept of ‘salvation’.

- ‘How is the irrational alternative world I’m inhabiting any more batshit crazy than Christianity, or Thatcherism, or betting on greyhounds?’ Martha proclaims at one point. 

- As the novel proceeds the history and real identity of the pub becomes clear. Unfortunately it's a magical tale that becomes increasingly silly and meaningless, and goes on and on and on...

- So half good, half bad.

Robert Harris, Precipice

 

- I've read all of Robert Harris's novels over the years and can say, without a doubt, that Precipice is easily one of his best. A master of historical fiction, he has delivered here a beautifully and sensitively written drama about about love, companionship and intimacy, and the need for deep, trusting personal relationships in difficult times. The First World War is about to begin, and Britain is sucked into supporting its allies France and Russia against their enemies Germany and Austria. 

- It's a fascinating story by a master of the craft. We're taken deep into the heart of the British government in war time, and the passions, arguments and personal feuds at the Cabinet level. Harris fully captures the dynamics of the predicaments and debates. 

- The Prime Minister, H.H.Asquith, heads Britain's first and only Liberal Government. He's an intelligent, sensitive human being as is revealed to us, and a real leader, unlike some of his loud and boisterous colleagues. Many names are familiar: Winston Churchill, Lord Kitchener, Lloyd George, Edward Grey, Arthur Balfour. Their personal hatreds and resentments are often on show. Cabinet meetings are reliably contentious. We're also exposed to the key role of Ambassadors and their frequent telegrams. 

- The communications of the time were telegrams and letters. The postal service delivered mail up to twelve times a day - an analogue email if you will!

- Hidden from his colleagues and the public is the very personal and intimate relationship Asquith is having with a young woman from the aristocratic class, Venetia Stanley. They see each other regularly and write loving letters every day. Unfortunately the security service catches on and secretly photographs their letters before they're delivered. The married and much older PM is likely to be engulfed in a huge scandal propagated by the conservative press. 

- Meanwhile we're taken to the heart of the war. The British naval landing in the Dardanelles is a total failure, despite being enthusiastically supported by Churchill. Many British ships are sunk and thousands of sailors drowned, so the army is sent to Gallipoli, along with Australian and New Zealand troops. Thousands are slaughtered. The novel digs deep into the machinations of war planning and resourcing - the soldiers, munitions, ships, weapons, and maneuvers - and the mistakes that can be made on every level. 

- The ending brings the political and personal dimensions of this highly emotional drama to a satisfying resolution. And Harris's Historical Note is very enlightening. 

- I can't recommend this book highly enough. It is magnificent. 

Noam Chomsky, The Myth of American Idealism

- The great Noam Chomsky, now 95 years old, is widely credited with having revolutionised the field of modern linguistics, and is equally renowned for his incisive writings on global affairs and US foreign policy. This new book, written in collaboration with Nathan J. Robinson, co-founder and editor in chief of Current Affairs magazine, re-works some of Chomsky's pieces over the last few decades or so to bring them up to date. 

- It is an utterly inspiring book. He brings a razor sharp clarity and perspective to today's substantial issues, and he's as unforgiving of ‘liberals’ as he is of conservatives. It's a critique of American delusion and imperial ambition. The US is a warmongering nation. Every president has committed crime after crime.

- Each chapter addresses a major war or issue over the last seventy years, and America's disastrous response. The US had no legal or moral right to interfere in Vietnam. The wrecking of Afghanistan was just appalling US revenge for 9/11 - the Taliban offered to give bin Laden up, but Bush declined. The war was a major US crime, with no justification whatsoever.

- Similarly the invasion of Iraq was  ‘…a criminal act of aggression by a state seeking to exert regional control through the use of violence’. 

- If you just want to dip into this book then read first the thoroughly enlightening chapter on Israel/Palestine history. The war is placed into a deep historical perspective, and Chomsky, a Jew himself, does not shy away from condemning Israel's atrocities. 

- Then read the chapter on China’s emergence as a ‘threat’. It's full of sense, and is highly critical of Obama, Trump, Biden and other US leaders and politicians. Their demonisation of China is ignorant, America-first hogwash. And they use the so-called defence of Taiwan as cover. He actually praises Paul Keating as one of the only Western leaders to call it right. 

- Then there's Ukraine and NATO. He questions the relevance and continued existence of NATO after the end of the Cold War, condemning it for engaging repeatedly in illegal and aggressive warfare. The US should have dropped the goal of NATO membership for Ukraine and persuaded it to become a neutral country. 

- Nuclear: the frightening prospect of a nuclear war initiated by the US is real. The US consistently refuses to do anything to help avoid it. It refuses to support any related UN resolutions.  

- The current climate disaster? Oh please, ‘US politicians have consistently placed the interests of the fossil fuel industry over the future of humanity’. The Green New Deal (AOC led) was cynically disparaged by senior Democrats, even though it was the right way forward. ‘The green dream, or whatever they call it’ scoffed Nancy Pelosi. Influential media like The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times continue to be abysmal in their coverage.

- ‘In the United States now, there is essentially one political party, with two factions’. The Republicans’ ‘core agenda is to privatise, to deregulate, and to limit government’, and the Democrats ‘have essentially abandoned whatever commitment they had to working people and the poor, becoming a party of affluent professionals and Wall Street donors.’ 

- The US believes it has an inherent right to dominate the rest of the world. ‘As Harold Pinter argued in his Nobel Literature Prize address: "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless...The US has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good". 

- Chomsky ends with this paragraph: An extraterristrial observer looking at our species would say that our primary trajectory is toward suicide, that we are collectively running toward a cliff. Human civilisation, having started almost ten thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent, may now be approaching its inglorious end. It may turn out that higher intelligence was a kind of 'evolutionary  mistake'. One of the theories put forward for why no intelligent life has so far been discovered elsewhere in the universe - the 'Fermi paradox' - is that intelligent life may be a kind of lethal mutation that annihilates itself whenever it arises. 

- A brilliant book from one of the best minds of the last hundred years. 

Josh Bornstein, Working For The Brand

 

- This is so damn good. It's comprehensive, enlightening and global in reach. Bornstein, an award-winning Australian lawyer who specialises in employment and labour-relations law, digs deep into the underside of corporate operations and how they treat their staff. He sees through their bullshit. If you’re not a leftie you’re gonna hate this book. If you are, you’ll love it!

- If you've been awake and alive over the last few decades you will recognise the multitude of awful instances of corporate and institutional stupidity that Bornstein covers in detail. Here are some of them: Scott McIntyre and SBS cowardice; Yassmin Abdel-Magied and the ABC (‘Like SBS, the ABC sacked Abdel-Magied in order to placate a right-wing mob’); Israel Folau and his immature treatment by Rugby Australia; the appalling treatment of Antoinette Lattouf and Laura Tingle by an ABC management terrified of the Murdoch press. 

- He provides us with an excellent background to these current employer-employee woes - the neo-liberalism agenda of the 80's onwards, the disaster of Howard's WorkChoices, the huge drop since then of union membership, and the development of corporate cancel culture. I relished his destruction of Alan Joyce and Qantas and their sackings of thousands of staff represented by unions. 

- Academic freedom also comes under the microscope. The Roz Ward case was an example of ‘serious misconduct’. She posted, satirically, a photo of a red 'communist' flag on social media on Anzac Day and was persecuted by her university. Universities have become corporate institutions over the last three decades, and we've witnessed a rapidly shrinking minority of tenured academics. The ugliness of the system in its underpayment of casual academics on short term contracts is horrendous. Bornstein provides lots of examples of unbelievably stupid and immature behaviour by university administrations.

- He also digs deep into the current status of news outlets. 'The ideals of fairness, objectivity, and impartiality are invoked in support of the rules that severely restrict the human rights of their journalists...and like other businesses, the rules are often selectively enforced, in response to dubious online shaming campaigns'. 

- And what about consensual sexual relationships? That freaks corporates out. So 'morals clauses' are now common in employment contracts. Corporations have amassed far-reaching powers over the private lives and opinions of their employees. 

-Bornstein’s dream corporate statement closes the book and it says it all. If only!

We sell goods and services for profit. We employ many people who harbour a range of values and views. We support our employees' fundamental right as citizens to participate in debate and other forms of civic life, including by expressing unpopular views. Their views are their own. They don't speak for the company. We will not censor, sack, or discipline them for exercising their rights.

- (This book has no index, which is intensely annoying. It also has no author photo. This cheapness is common in the Australian publishing community unfortunately.)

Tim Winton, Juice.

 

- A man and a girl traverse a deserted, isolated terrain in a post-apocalyptic world. He tells his story to a ‘comrade’ they meet along the way, a story about his father, mother, wife and child, and their very rustic lifestyle. 

- Over generations what is left of humanity has suffered extreme and highly dangerous weather. Their summers were spent in underground bunkers to escape the mid-fifty degree days. Even winter days averaged mid-thirties. Huge storms, floods and bushfires were common, and hailstones were fist-sized, frequently destroying houses, sheds and crops. 

- A few hundred years ago the world suffered 'The Terror' brought about by fossil fuel caused climate change. What remains of humanity lives in diminished cities and small communities, referred to as 'hams'. There is no money or commerce, only trading in goods and services. Homes and vehicles are rare and powered by home-made batteries. 

- He was captured by an eco movement of disruptors (the Service) at the age of 17, and trained in the way of the real world to operate against the 'Dirty World'. He becomes an ‘operator’, sworn to secrecy. Their job is to destroy the wealthy inheritors of fossil fuel corporations, kill all of them and their children and servants. It's a murderous agenda, fuelled by anger and revenge. 

- The operations were always dangerous, and many of his colleagues died. Winton describes them in graphic detail. The Utah, Exxon, and Gulf of Oman eliminations were highly dangerous, highly risky, and many of his colleagues were killed.  

- He eventually suffered severe depression, taking a major toll on his young family. 

- I've read most of Tim Winton's books over the decades and was frankly getting tired of his focus on seashores and surfers. But this novel is absolutely a radical and passionate departure from that homey terrain. It is brilliantly written in prose full of inventive and imaginative descriptions. And it is unsparing in its condemnation of our current global heating denial.

(This would make a great TV series)

Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

 

- An Intermezzo is an interlude: a short period when a situation or activity is different from normal. So it's a very apt description of the story Sally Rooney brings to life in her new and hugely enjoyable novel. 

- It's about two brothers and their love lives. And the interlude is the period after their father's death, during which their never really close relationship descends into anger, resentment and deeper separation.

- Peter is older than Ivan by ten years. In alternate chapters Rooney tells their stories. Peter's in short, sharp, sentences, mostly without verbs. He's nearly thirty-three years old and is a successful barrister. His love life is complicated. His ex, Sylvia, is a literature professor of the same age, and their relationship was upended by an accident she had that destroyed her ability to have sex. They are still very much in love though. Peter frequently walks the streets of Dublin as in Joyce's Ulysses.

- The younger brother Ivan's chapters are in standard sentences. He's a twenty-two year old chess champion, who meets a divorcee, Margaret, the program director of an arts venue. They become attached despite her being fourteen years older than him. When Peter finds out about this relationship he condemns Ivan for his immaturity, and they argue aggressively. 

- However Peter has also met another woman, the young and beautiful Naomi, who, ironically, is ten years younger than him and a former sex worker.  

- Rooney’s focus on likeable young people and their love lives in microscopic detail is her familiar terrain. In Intermezzo however she digs a lot deeper and brings sex to the forefront. What part does it  play in deep loving relationships? There are many detailed descriptions of the sexual acts, and she explores the conflicting human emotions involved in all their complexity. Few novelists do that with Rooney’s level of intensity. This is by far the most erotic of her novels. 

- But interspersed throughout are rich conversations about art, culture, history, and religion. So on all levels the novel is deeply immersive and satisfying. 

Don Watson, Quarterly Essay: High Noon: Trump, Harris and America On The Brink

• This Quarterly Essay by well known author and respected political insider Don Watson is not just about the upcoming US election. It’s essentially a sociological read of today’s America. Watson imbeds the campaign in the nation’s history, its full political and cultural character, and how so much has changed for the worst for so many people over recent decades. Detroit being so representative of all that has happened to the struggling working class. ‘If you want to know America, know Detroit. If you want to fix America, fix Detroit’.  

• The central focus is on Trump and why he appeals to so many of the disaffected class.  

• Kamala Harris barely gets a mention until the last few pages. The essay ends with Biden’s resignation and Harris’s official nomination at the Democratic National Convention. Then, obviously, Watson had to submit his manuscript. Unfortunately the turning point, the debate, came afterwards. 

• However Watson absolutely nails what Harris’s weakness is, and how she needs to do a lot more than offering ‘joy’ to win the election. ‘…keep the love but temper the joy. The people whose votes [Democrats] need see nothing to be joyful about. Stop talking about the middle class, as if working people have only themselves to blame for low wages, and rents and mortgages they can’t afford’.

• ‘Once the Democrats allow themselves to be defined by their opposition to Trump, the fight is as good as lost.’ 

• Watson continually demonstrates his insightfulness. He talks to a number of people he meets on the streets, and visits various towns and cities to assess their economic circumstances. 100 miles west of downtrodden Detroit is Kalamazoo, a city of 75 thousand people, which is absolutely thriving. 

• ‘Sometimes the hoopla makes you wonder if Americans will ever grow up, and if we don’t have more in common with the village people of Albania, or Mars. What is it about their longstanding love of marching and mass rallies? Their hand-on-heart, flag-waving patriotism?’ 

Andre Dao, Anam

 

• This novel was recently announced as the winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for 2024. 

• It is certainly not a work of fiction in the usual sense. The people and events described are historically real. It’s more a bio infused with imaginative elements to bring the story alive, a blend of memory and history, and an intellectual journey. The narrator makes no concessions. As an undergraduate he read Derrida, a founding father of postmodernism and poststructuralism, and Husserl and his phenomenology.

• The Vietnamese war is the central focus. His family forbears were South Vietnamese and his grandfather an active supporter of the resistance to the Communist revolutionary forces under Ho Chi Minh. After the war ended in 1975 his grandfather was imprisoned for ten years for being a ‘non-communist intellectual’. The narrator spends a lot of time reflecting on his grandfather’s thoughts, friends, and experiences. He also takes us to Manus island camp, under Australia’s control. It has closed and the ‘boat people’ are being forced out. He became a migration lawyer, defending them. 

• But the narrator eventually realises he’s not retelling the story of his grandfather, he’s questioning it and interrogating it. And what about the contradiction presented by the Vietnamese refugees to Australia - after the war what were they fleeing from? Were they angry about the end of French colonialism and the retreat of the Americans? He now sees he’s writing a story about a story.

• There is a lot more to the novel than what I’ve described here. Dao delves deep into the family’s history - the grandmother, the aunts and uncles, and the narrator’s own relationship with his partner, Lauren, and their baby daughter Edith. All these elements add immense depth to the story, and increase the pleasure of reading it. 

Nina Kenwood, The Wedding Forecast

 

• This wonderful new novel by former bookseller Nina Kenwood is a delightful and emotionally deep romcom. I loved her first two YA (Young Adult category) novels but this one is fully adult and is undoubtedly her best.
• It’s about family, friends, partners, mothers, babies, parents, and relationship failures - multidimensional in a real way. But it’s mostly about love, how hard it is to find, the wrenching life-changing depth of it, and the sacrifices it demands. 
• There’s high drama on every level, and absolutely invigorating dialogue. What I particularly liked was Kenwood’s brilliant comic touch. You can’t help but be absorbed and captivated. The more you read the more you’re sucked in. 
• And as Nina admits in the Acknowledgements: ‘As well as being a romcom, this book is something of a love letter to bookshops and bookselling…’
• Buy this book and you’ll love it so much you’ll buy more copies for your family and friends. It’s that good. 

Malcolm Knox, The First Friend

 

• This is not an enjoyable book to read at all. You’re immersed in the ugly history of the Soviet Union since the October Revolution in 1917 until 1938, just prior to the beginning of the Second World War. 

• Post Lenin the Union was led by two murderous, abusive bullies, Josef Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria. They were merciless in their enforcement of Communist Party rule, and murdered hundreds of thousands of citizens in the process. Their egos were huge and their self-entitlement knew no bounds.  

• The central focus of Knox’s novel is on Beria and his years as the Governor of Georgia. He’s a vicious liar, manipulator and rapist, and has no respect for his staff or colleagues apart from his childhood friend and ‘brother’ Vasil Murtov, who is his driver and assistant. 

• I found it difficult to fathom Knox’s fundamental intent in this novel. Is it just a fictionalised history of a rotten autocracy, or does it have a deeper meaning? It can’t be claimed that it offers any insight into today’s Russia under Putin because the two states are vastly different. There is a contrasting narrative though. Murtov is married to Babilina and has two young daughters Ana and Melo. Their love for each other is real, and in the oppressive and brutal society they must survive in, inspiring. They are courageous and define what it actually means to be human. 

• Another aspect of the tale that enlivens it dramatically is Knox’s comic touch. The dialogue is frequently crude and funny, often blokey in an Aussie way.