Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper, Sarah Krasnostein, The Mushroom Tapes.

 

- I was extremely reluctant to read this or any other book on the mushroom murders. The media's constant, bland, repetitive reportage of it over the last two years has been insufferable. 

- Yet this book is written by three of my favourite Australian authors. I had to read it.

- I actually enjoyed it immensely. It's balanced, open minded, and not biased in any way. Though they’re exasperated. They’re not writing, they’re talking to each other, and their discussions about the two month trial are being recorded. And hence this book. 

- And the real joy is they’re highly literary. There are lots of meaningful quotes from ancient and modern authors dotted throughout. On all sorts of aspects of what it means to be human.  

- The trial was held in Morwell, east of Melbourne in Gippsland. They drive there regularly over the course of the trial, often staying for a few days in some dump of a hotel. They’re talking to one another all the time, trying to explore Erin’s background and upbringing and her psychological makeup. And her family, particularly her feminist mother whom she resented. 

- Simon, her husband, was authoritarian, and a fervent Baptist. He was coercive and  controlling. 

- Helen is reflective and confronts the real questions: why did she do it? ‘What is in your head and how did it get there?’ She was…'overwhelmed by her emotions...In order to live a life, women have to throttle back in themselves huge amounts of aggression. So I'm never surprised when I hear about a woman killing someone. It doesn't surprise me at all.' 

- Chloe, on the other hand, is ‘the hard arse’. ‘What if we expected a broken person and we’re seeing a monster?’ ‘Of all the huge stories happening in the world, why are we all here? Climate change, the Middle East, AI about to take our jobs, the threat to democracy. But that is exactly why everyone is here. So as not to think about these things.'

- They talk about country towns, and the Baptist church. Erin's husband's father was the pastor.  

- And, of course, the mushrooms. Erin thoroughly researched death cap mushrooms, and where to find them. Details of all types of mushrooms are presented by experts during the trial. Health and Childcare officials had tried to question Erin on where she bought the mushrooms. But she'd change the time and location. She constantly lied.  

- What absolutely gobsmacked me was Erin’s previous attempts to poison her husband, Simon. After eating food prepared by her he was hospitalised four times during 2021 and 2022!! That’s why he declined to attend the family lunch. 

- As Sarah observes: ‘…I think this accounts for why people are so gripped by this. It’s a very recognisable, unexplosive-until-the-end narrative of the domestic and the everyday.’ 

- Erin’s testimony is somehow convincing. Helen would not be at all surprised if she was declared ‘not guilty’. Helen is more sympathetic to Erin throughout the whole book. ‘I don’t really believe in the devil, but I do believe that people become possessed by evil. You can talk about it in psychological way - that she’s very twisted. But there’s this great wretched darkness that she seems to reveal. I have a horrible sense of her as a kind of black hole, a vortex.’ 

- These profound reflections are what makes this book so interesting, and in fact absorbing. The murders of entirely innocent people by a lying, brutal, self-righteous animal are a stain on our humanity. 

Andrew Pippos, The Transformations

 

- Australian author Andrew Pippos, famed for the much loved novel Lucky's, has just released his second, The Transformations.

- It focuses on the dynamics of love, sex and relationships, and the changes that are an inevitable part of life. The quote from Ovid's Metamorphoses in the prologue is so apt: What we were once, and we are today, we shall not be tomorrow.

- In plain prose, full of sentences that are simple statements or describe simple facts, he delves deep into the lives and workplaces of his main characters who are journalists at a quality newspaper called The National. It is owned by a wealthy family and was founded in 1963. It competes with Murdoch's The Australian, also, ironically, founded around that time. The National is progressive in its political and social outlook, unlike The Australian which is simple rightwing trash written by and for old men needing comfort. 

- George Desoulis, 35, is a subeditor. Hilary Benton is the editor-in-chief. The time frame is around 2015. Newspapers around the world are diminishing and closing. They are going online, and there are severe staff cuts. Revenues and profits are collapsing, and advertisers are exploring other options. 

- George was married to Madeleine and they had a kid called Elektra. They split up however, and Elektra was brought up in Melbourne by Madeleine's rich and conservative parents. She is now fifteen and hates them. She wants to live with her father George back in Sydney. He's into books, as is Electra. She gets her way. She's tough and highly intelligent, and one of the novel's most enlivening characters. She's also gay, and into weed. So things were changing, or 'transforming' if you like. 

- George, in the meantime, has fallen very much in love with his work colleague Cassandra (Cass). But she's married to a bloke called Nico who is a recovering alcoholic. They have an 'open marriage', which works for both of them because they can have frequent sex with other partners. So George and Cass have frequent sex, normally once a week, as does Nico with his girlfriend. 

- So we're in a world of personal, sexual and social transformations. It's a revolution really. 

- As the book progresses of course, things start to get complicated and start to change. Pippos dives deep into all the things that effects the characters' lives and careers. No one is spared from the challenges. There is no stability. Nothing can really be relied on. 

- A full and meaningful life demands, above all, love, belief and courage. And hope. It will work out, it really will.   

Sofie Laguna, The Underworld

 

- Acclaimed Miles Franklin award-winning author, Sofie Laguna, has gifted us another sensitive, insightful and beautifully written novel. One of the best I’ve read this year. 

- A young girl, Martha, is in her mid teens. It's the 1970's. She’s absolutely delightful and fascinating, and the only child of an unhappy marriage. Her parents and their friends are all conservative Liberal voters. They of course hate Whitlam. 

- Martha attends a private girls boarding school south of Sydney, and she loves it. She's exceptionally bright. Classes on the ancient underworld of Greek and Roman times captivate her. ‘A dead language suited her best. It was her own. Latin - reading it, translating it, learning the stories and poems - was her private inner puzzle...It was study and reading and being in the library that made Martha feel better’. Her school friends are her life, and her best friend is Valerie, a girl from a large family (mainly boys) from a farm just east of Broken Hill. 

- Her mother doesn’t like Martha. ‘It had been that way for years’, and Martha doesn’t like her mother either. She particularly hates horse riding with her. But she likes her father, sort of. She enjoys being with him - eating pizzas, watching TV. But he’s also frequently distant and absorbed in his work. 

- She gets her first period, and Laguna describes the painful experience in detail. Martha writes the dreaded letter 'M’ in her calendar. 

- She reads that homosexuality was accepted by the Romans, but not between women. Valerie invites her and another friend to her family’s property. With the many brothers and dogs they have a wonderful time - riding horses, singing songs, eating good food, roasting marshmallows around the fire. She undergoes a sexual awakening. She feels sexually aroused by Valerie. 

- She reads about homosexuality at the library. Homosexuality was accepted by the Romans, but not between women. It was considered ‘…a social or moral aberration….No individual is born homosexual’, according to most scholars. 

- At their final end-of-year party she's partly drunk and thrusts herself onto Valerie. She’s shamed by the other girls. They isolate her, as does Valerie herself.   

- She finds her first year at Sydney University very difficult but really excels in the following years, getting High Distinctions in all of her subjects. But she misses Valerie, who went to Adelaide Uni, terribly. Laguna brings Sydney University alive - the old sandstone paths and buildings, the beautiful lawns and trees, the surrounding streets and pubs. And Martha's lectures on Roman poets are described in detail. We're immersed in the course details. And there are heaps of quotes in Latin, many not translated into English. The point is to absorb us, to thrust us headfirst into it. 

- The 1970's of course, to those of us who were students at the time, were alive with protests on political issues like Vietnam, Women's liberation, and University administration. Martha however ignores them. ‘Latin language, literature and the history of Ancient Rome formed the parameters of her world’. 

- Over the four years of her course she receives short letters from Valerie expressing love and friendship and apologies, but she doesn’t reply. 

- Martha's choice for her honour's thesis in her fourth year is the poetry of Sulpicia, a female poet who was considered a fake by male scholars. A visiting Professor from the UK was convinced the poems were written by the male poet Tibullus. His anti-women attitude pissed Martha off, so she decides to write her thesis on Sulpicia. '…what really gets me is that it’s still going on today - and so pervasively. The male dominance, and the attempt to monopolise scholarship.’ 

- Laguna plummets her reader into the ancient world and Martha's thesis, and doesn’t condescend. I personally found it absorbing. (Martha's thesis in the end is judged 'outstanding'). 

- The final chapters of the novel are very dramatic, involving rape, trauma and depression. But the resolution is very satisfying indeed. 

- Sofie Laguna has written an exceptionally powerful and original book which doesn't hold back. We're thoroughly immersed, challenged and enlightened. The whole point of novels after all.