Rachel Kushner, Creation

 

- This latest novel by acclaimed British author Rachel Kushner was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. I had not read any of her previous three novels so was attracted to it. And the back cover blurb was very enticing. Basically it's an ode to social protest and resistance, full of all sorts of whacky outsiders who hate what the government is doing to their rural communities in the provinces of France.

- Does it all add up to a powerful novel? No, not really. But it does have likeable elements, particularly the ending. 

- It's a mishmash of amateurish anthropology, astrology, sociology, philosophy and politics. One local and aging 'primitivist' in particular, who lives in a cave because that's what the Neanderthals did, is the main inspiration to the local communities. He writes long emails about how wrong and anti-human our modern civilisation is. ‘The world ruled by capital would not be dismantled. Instead, it had to be left behind...I deplore violence in all its forms'. 

- The other main person of influence in the commune is an 'activist', not a deep thinker. He has long been the head of a radical farming cooperative who are organising a huge and possibly violent protest against corporate and government plans to modernise the region by building massive dams, tunnels and agricultural operations that would effectively destroy the local communities. Capitalism must be destroyed and governments brought down, 

- The main character, thankfully, is a thirty-four year old American woman. She is a former FBI agent who is now privately contracted and has been instructed to insert herself into the commune to spy on their plans. 

- She gradually develops a real affection for the compound. The farming, the maintenance, the creche, are all impressive, and the people 'real'. ‘There are no politics inside of people.’ 

- There is plenty of drama as the story comes to a climax. It's by far the best part of the book, and the only really absorbing part in my view. 

(Here's an interesting bit: a politician has been invited to open the annual agricultural fair. He is accompanied by a Michel Thomas, a celebrated and mysterious author. Kushner must surely be satirising Michel Houellebecq! ‘Thomas was always at the scene of the crime, a bystander and observer to society’s convulsions….with a talent for washing up on the shores of chaos’). 

Melanie Cheng, The Burrow

 

- Melanie Cheng has written a sensitive drama of death, pain, sadness and profound regret. 

- In an unnamed city in Australia a baby named Ruby drowns in a bathtub. Her grandmother, who was bathing her at the time, had suffered a minor stroke. This beautiful novel digs deep into the emotional repercussions of this tragedy on the baby's family over the years to come.

- A feature of the novel is the pace of the unfolding of the full story. Cheng is in full control. The details emerge slowly and surely. Each short chapter is narrated in turn by the family members - the father Jin, the mother Amy and the older daughter Lucie. Lucie was six at the time of Ruby's death and is ten now. The other narrator is the grandmother Pauline. 

- The family live in a gentrified inner-city neighbourhood. They are renovating their house which is a bit of a shambolic construction site with the facade covered in blue tarp. The grandmother has broken her wrist and is staying with them for a few weeks. There is tension. She is not liked by Jin and barely tolerated by her daughter Amy. But she does get on well with Lucie and her new pet rabbit. 

- Covid restrictions still in place. Home schooling, social distancing, and mask wearing are all mandatory, and travelling beyond a limited area is severely restricted. This greatly adds to the pressures on this family. 

- Cheng introduces other elements into the story that add to the drama very effectively. The strenuous relationships between the adults are compounded by various events. 

- This is a short novel (184 pages), but it's very emotionally powerful, and enriched in the end by compassion and generosity. 

- I loved it. 

Michel Houellebecq, Annihilation

 

- I've long been a fan of celebrated French author Michel Houellebecq, having read all his novels over the years. He offers a delicious immersion in all things French - politics, history, class, culture, food and wine. And of course sex.

- His latest novel is his longest yet at 525 pages. But it's probably his best. It's about family relationships and the drama of politics. Families are rarely the source of happiness, but politics and work are. Annihilation focuses on parents, siblings, couples, friends, and work colleagues. Relationships are under the microscope. And we're taken inside the political world because a Presidential election is the background to all that's happening on the personal level.

- Houellebecq is a delightful literary show-off and never ceases to drop quotes from noted authors and poets, so we're constantly confronted with challenging, enriching ideas, and wit. ‘…she had probably nodded off over her Anita Brookner’.

- The principal characters are Paul from Finance and his wife Prudence from Treasury, ('They were in complete agreement about value added tax’). They split up eventually, and had not 'fucked' for ten years. (In all Houellebecq's novels couples don’t ‘make love’ or become ‘intimate’ - they ‘fuck’). Paul's boss Bruno, who has been the Minister of Finance, is now a key member of the Presidential candidate's team.

- Houellebecq lobs in plenty of challenging ideas. He loves babyboomers for one. The years 1945-1975 were the best. After the triumph over Nazism, hope, joy and economic opportunity became central. ‘Popular culture production had proved to be aesthetically superior to the cultural production of the elite’. Nevertheless ‘..we can no longer stand older people….it's why we park them in specialised places..’

- A new President is elected and we're reminded of Trump. He wants to remove the position of Prime Minister, reduce the House members, and enshrine more power to the President. It will be a ‘post-democracy…democracy is dead as a system, it’s too slow, too ponderous’.

- Three terrorist attacks occur over the course of the election, one killing 500 people. The terrorists are described as anarcho-primitivists, like the Unabomber in the US. Such radical political movements are not unfamiliar to Houellebecq readers. As social guardrails and fences collapse, so does political order. The comfort and security of earlier conservative times is missed. And ‘…a lot of people today had become very stupid; it was a striking and indisputable contemporary phenomenon....Family and marriage: these were the two residual poles around which the lives of the last Westerners were organised in the first half of the twenty-first century...It seemed obvious to Paul that the whole system was going to come crashing down’. 'The concept of decadence...Europe as a whole had become a distant, ageing, depressive and slightly ludicrous province of the United States of America’.

- The last hundred or so pages focus on Paul's severe illness. He is diagnosed with cancer of the jaw. The medical specialists recommend a major operation including removal of his tongue, and intense radio and chemo therapy. Houellebecq dives deep into the medical details and treatment options, and the decisions Paul is confronted with. The survival rate over the next five years is very low.

- At least he and his wife Prudence re-discover their intimacy and begin to once again have frequent sex. It becomes the real joy in their lives.

- There are various dramas of life and death, of parents, partners, family, friends, and society as a whole in this amazing and very enjoyable novel.

- I highly recommend it. 

(Unfortunately it is very poorly edited. It's full of so many simple errors - wrong words, missing words, commas instead of full stops, etc. For example: ‘It couldn’t have been later than five o’clock on the morning’; ‘in the end how found a space five hundred metres from the house’. Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, is a highly professional publisher, but its standards have fallen to a real low if this book is any guide.)

Michelle de Kretser, Theory and Practice.

 

- Michelle de Kretser's latest book is an intriguing mix of fact and fiction. It explores major issues on the 'theory' side such as modernism, feminism, racism, and colonialism, and others on the 'practice' side such as mothers, writers, lovers, friends, and enemies.

- It's hard to describe it as a memoir, as it indulges in the cliche of the unknown narrator. (However a name is dropped right at the end, for some reason).

- We're in the mid-80's when literary scholarship was heavily influenced by French poststructuralism which was conquering the humanities generally. Philosophers such as Derrida and Foucault popularised 'formlessness and mess'. Liquid and non-linear styles became an authentically female way of writing too.

- The narrator tells her life story in this faux-memoir. She was a pianist as a child and excelled at theory and practice. But at the age of eleven she was sexually abused by a music teacher and ditched the piano altogether.

- Her family emigrated to Australia from Ceylon when she was a teenager. She studied English literature at Sydney university and moved to Melbourne at the age of twenty-four. It was 1986 and Marxism and feminism were the thing, especially in Melbourne. She enrolled to complete a Masters on the novels of Virginia Woolf. Critics had become 'torturers', positing, demystifying, interrogating. (As a student in English literature in the 1970's at Sydney University I was immersed in the Leavis tradition of literary criticism, and D.H. Lawrence was my hero. But in Melbourne this liberal humanism was the enemy, and considered reactionary, and Lawrence 'destroyed').

- She shared a cheap flat in St Kilda, and was thrust into the social life all around her - the noise on the streets, the pubs, the sexual encounters in lanes, the prostitution and drugs. She was bright, she was popular, and she made good friends, male and female. And she continually experienced abject racism. She was also enduring a problematic relationship with her mother, and with her friend Olivia who was the fiancee of Kit with whom she was having an affair. So real life, the 'practice' was as torrid as the 'theory'.

- The central focus of her life however was theory. As the book proceeds we're immersed into the disruptive novels of Virginia Woolf. And Woolf's abject racism. ‘…the modernising trajectory of Woolf’s Englishwomen and the ongoing immiseration of the tea-pluckers’. She damns her last novel The Years as trapped in ‘the powerful fiction that the self-fulfilment of British women transcended the imperialism that enabled it’. Woolf was a terrible snob and ‘unforgivably rude about colonials’.

- As the book nears its end the friends move on, some overseas, they split from their partners, and some die tragically. She also tells the story of the celebrated Australian artist Donald Friend and his paedophilic abuse over many years in Ceylon and Bali.

- We're reminded at the end that reality is not like a novel with its well-worn narrative tropes, but is 'random and cruel'.

- Michelle de Kretser has written a 'novel/memoir' that is thoughtful and challenging and quite brilliant on many levels. It's confronting and loaded with intellectual heft. Just what we need in these tempestuous times.

Robbie Arnott, Dusk

 

- I've long been a fan of Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott. His last two novels, Limberlost (2023) and The Rain Heron (2020), were superb. His stories are original and tense, and the writing beautiful. His settings are Tasmania and its wild beauty. 

- Dusk is an action adventure that develops slowly into a fascinating tale of character, strength and the need for belonging. It's a contest between domesticity and danger. Human love, friendship, and community versus evil and its violence and destruction. It's likely set in the mid-1800s. 

- Twins Iris and Floyd Renshaw, are 37 years old. They are labourers, hunters, and travellers, often needing to thieve in order to survive. Their parents were ‘killer-thieves’, who were shipped as convicts from England when they were fifteen. They quickly became rum-addicted. 

- The twins are prisoners of nature - its wild terrains, mountains, rivers, bushes, ferns and trees. And the constant cold, ice and snow. Thank god for salvific camp fire, fish and tea. 

- A bounty has been offered to kill a wild puma (cougar) who has been killing shepherds in the wild northwest.  An expert hunter from Patagonia was hired but disappeared, presumably killed. Iris and Floyd head north to hunt down the puma. 

- Arnott builds the story slowly, frequently going back in time to flesh out Iris's and Floyd's real relationship, its dynamic and frequent tensions. He does this masterfully. Iris reflects on her brother at one point: What Floyd was doing now was presumptuous. And by heading back towards the waterfall’s roar he was, to Iris’s mind, being crass and obvious and judgmental, rather than tactful. 

- Many things happen along the way and the drama builds with an intensity and richness that is absorbing. The ending is unexpected but utterly satisfying. 

- On so many levels this is a brilliant novel. I highly recommend it. 

Ilan Pappe, A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

 

- This recently published short book is absolutely brilliant. It’s comprehensive, informative and easily the best book on the current genocide in Palestine I’ve read. It's also very clearly written, which is a blessing.

- Pappe is Professor of History at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. He is lauded throughout the world as the 'most original, radical and hard-hitting of Israel's new historians'.

- The back-cover blurb sums it up: 

The devastation of 7 October 2023 and the horrors that followed it astounded the world. But the Israel-Palestine conflict didn't start on 7 October. It didn't start in 1967 either, when Israel occupied the West Bank, or in 1948 when the state of Israel was declared. It started in 1882, when the first Zionist settlers arrived in what was then Ottoman Palestine. Ilan Pappe untangles the history of two peoples, now sharing one land. Going back to the founding fathers of Zionism, Pappe expertly takes us through the twists and turns of international policy towards Israel-Palestine, Palestine resistance to occupation, and the changes taking place in Israel itself.  

- The Contents summarise the full story:

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. 

David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu, Who Owns This Sentence?

 

- Anybody in the publishing industry who is interested in copyright will find this new book absorbing and extremely enlightening. It not only covers in detail the history of how the notion of protection of creative works developed across the world over the last three hundred years, it doesn't shy away from robustly criticising the misplaced decisions governments have too frequently taken along the way.

- It's lucidly written, comprehensive, and very accessible. It doesn't get bogged down in legal niceties but it's apparent at every turn that the authors are fully across all of them. What is refreshing is that they don’t hesitate to call out bullshit when they see it. And they see it often. ‘…Intellectual Property continues to follow its long trajectory from the sublime to the ridiculous’. 

- The book's main focus is the corporate overreach that has developed over the last 50 years, particularly in the US. And the absurd protection given to all works up to seventy years after the author's death. This post mortem period was also adopted by Australia during the Howard years under pressure from the US. 

- The laws that create the opportunity to sequester and exploit creations of every kind for three or four generations do not have very deep roots and only the last few decades have they acquired such scope, length and power as to allow the accumulation of huge piles of money. That is why copyright now means more than it every did before, and why we need to understand how it suddenly got to play such a large role in modern life.

This book explains where the idea was first sown, how it sprouted, developed and ramified over centuries, and then, in a short space of time, was transformed into the biggest money machine the world has ever seen.

On December 16, 2021, SONY Music Group announced that it had acquired the rights to the work of 72-year-old singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen: the New York Times reported that the sale price was around $550,000,000. 

...the tax it aims to extract from the global audience of Springsteen-lovers over the next century must run into billions.  

Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road

 

- This novel, published in August last year, is a deliciously cheeky and satirical excoriation of English society. O'Hagan has a gift for wonderful comic writing. It's a scintillating, invigorating, skewering demolition. In fact it's extraordinary. O’Hagan is a genius. 

- It's full of interesting characters across the wide social spectrum. And thankfully, it starts with a Cast of Characters, all 59 of them. It reminds the reader who they are and how old they are. I kept flicking back to that every few pages. 

- The principal characters are Campbell Flynn, a professor, art historian and writer; his wife Elizabeth; Milo, a brilliant student and activist (‘A young Irish-Ethiopian with a taste for destruction’); Campbell's tenant Mrs Voyles, who is insane and lives in their basement; and some political and corporate high-flyers who are powerful, abusive and corrupt. 

- And there's the criminal underworld, mostly Polish and Russian, who run the drugs and illegal immigrant operations. At least they don't pretend to be righteous, unlike the entitled ruling class. There's barely a shred of dignity to any of them. 

- The novel is 640 pages long, with many threads and subplots, and heaps of detail. But everything comes together in a very satisfying way towards the end. If society is going to be radically changed, if the anger of ordinary citizens is going to bring about a revolution, if there's going to be justice in the end - then only a small minority will engineer and foresee it.  

- One thing I absolutely loved about this novel is the many quotable lines: 

Maybe that’s what postmodernism was in the end: the naming of emotion, as opposed to having it.

Like most pacifists, he's unbelievably aggressive. He wants to blame his mother for the state of the planet.

When he raised his head, AJ was staring at him. 'You are a middle aged white man' they said. 'And that's that'. 'Strange isn't it', he replied, 'that so many of you, who are so multiple, insist that the rest of us be only one thing'. 


https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/conversations/andrew-ohagan-novel-caledonia-road/103752056