Liam Pieper, Appreciation

 

- A self-entitled waste of space rants on about his miserable life. That's the bad 10% of this novel. The rest is magnificent. Every page buzzes with dazzling, scathing, scintillating prose. There are pinprick demolitions at every turn, and brilliant similes ('...a grin welded onto his face like a roo bar'). 

- Oli Darling is a 40 year old queer man who has built a very successful career as a painter totally due to the commercial genius of his agent and drug dealer Anton. On a TV talk show one night (the ABC's Q+A obviously) he lets loose on Australia's toxic masculinity and colonial myth building like Gallipoli. He’s articulate and right, but to many in the audience offensive. He’s condemned on social media.

- To help restore Oli's reputation Anton suggests he write a memoir which would be ghosted by a young and talented woman. This allows Oli to not only open up about his life as a young man struggling with his sexuality, but to express his colourful views on all sorts of things. And you have to say, his views are hugely entertaining on every level. This is Pieper at his best. 

- He's so good on the contrast between the Sydney and Melbourne monied classes, the country/city divide, and the privilege of private schools. At a fancy dinner in Sydney he is approached by 'the Miner', after 'moving breadsticks and brie from the buffet to her mouth with the methodical, hypnotic menace of a bucket excavator...Her knack for finding precious metals in untouched wilderness...is legendary. It has made her wildly prosperous and caused the extinction of countless species'. 

- The final thirty or so pages of the book builds the reader's anxiety to a high level. How will Oli's story end? 

- Pieper has written a superb novel, and I found myself reading sections and chapters over and over again. I was captured by his rich prose - luxuriating in it. 

(In The Guardian the humourless BeeJay strikes again!)

Gail Jones, One Another

- An excellent read once again from Gail Jones. I loved her previous novels and this is right up there with her best. 

- At first it's a bit hard to like but perseverance pays off in spades. Helen, an Australian post-graduate student at Cambridge, is researching her thesis on the Polish/British author Joseph Conrad. He was a man of the sea and also a celebrated man of letters who died in 1924 at the age of sixty-six. The novel switches back and forth from Helen's travails in Cambridge to Conrad's many sea journeys and writings, and manages to absorb the reader in both their personal and professional conundrums. 

- Joseph was not a well man. He suffered from many serious health conditions, and was unhappily married. But Helen knows him as 'a man of the plot. Unlike many contemporary writers, less committed to the logic of adventure, he loves a rollicking story. Intrigue, murder, suicide and spies’. She's captivated by them and finds solace in them. Her own personal life is falling apart. Her boyfriend, another Australian student in Cambridge, is violent and abusive. She must be honest with herself and her friends. 

- She happens to lose her draft thesis on a train. We learn that many well known authors also lost manuscripts. There is 'a long notorious history' of this - T. E. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Lowry, Dylan Thomas, and Sylvia Plath were among them. 

- Her manuscript is found, thankfully, but subsequent events, associated with her boyfriend, turn ugly. Tragedy is an outcome.

- Jones is focussed on the inner person, the anxieties, fears, failures and hopes. It's a very sensitive exploration. She also explores their forbears - parents, grandparents and siblings, and the places they lived their lives. At Cambridge Helen has empathetic and generous friends, and there are lovely and supportive older people in her life. Her natural tendency 'is to protect her Joseph, hapless and uncertain, acquiring over his thirty years in England a lustre of gentlemanly shine, even as he felt rather tarnished within...all his life he is a man who thinks  he is dying, not living....He feels miserable, boring, invalid and old'. 

- Most of us have read Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. 'Conrad's plots make him a favourite for film adaptations. There are thirty or forty out there, possibly more, beginning in the silent era'. Marlon Brando played Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, based on Heart of Darkness ('the horror, the horror'). That novel is unforgettable, a masterpiece. 

- Gail Jones has written, in her own way, a masterpiece. A magnificent achievement.  

Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World

 

- This is a stunningly good book and highly enlightening on the serious environmental and sustainability problems the world faces today. Dr Hannah Ritchie is senior researcher in the Programme for Global Development at Oxford University. She clearly outlines all the problems we face yet she remains positive and hopeful. We can, if we work together and with determination, solve them. This is the challenge of our times. 

- What I very much enjoyed about the book is Ritchie's clarity of thinking and writing. She clearly navigates so many difficult terrains in plain, non-academic English, providing not just loads of valuable information and data, but insight and sense. And the book has a very personal flavour. She's describing her own journey. 

- I can do no better than the back cover blurb to describe the book in detail:

Feeling anxious, powerless or confused about the future of our planet? This book will transform how you see our biggest environmental problems - and how we can solve them.

We are bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won't be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, that we should reconsider having children.

But in this bold, radically hopeful book, data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. The data shows we've made so much progress on these problems, and so fast, that we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in history. 

Packed with the latest research, practical guidance and enlightening graphics, this book will make you rethink almost everything you've been told about the environment, from the virtues of eating locally and living in the countryside, to the evils of over-population, plastic straws and palm oil. It will give you the tools to understand what works, what doesn't and what we urgently need to focus on so we can leave a sustainable planet for future generations. 

These problems are big. But they are solvable. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone. Let's turn that opportunity into reality.