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.