Steven Carroll, O.

 

- I’m a great fan of Melbourne author Steven Carroll. He writes of love and courage in difficult historical times, and explores the constraints on young women and their passions and challenges.

- This new novel is captivating from the start. We're in occupied France in 1943. 

- As in all his novels Carroll's characters navigate fraught social and political times. Integrity and strength are essential. While loyalty to all sorts of established norms is demanded, conventions are frequently confronted. And in occupied France challenges abound. We think we’re awake...’ she says, voice dreamy, wistful, removed...but are we just sleepwalking?

- Dominique Aury, the adopted name of Anne Desclos, was a real and inspiring historical figure. She was the first female board member of the major French literary publisher Gallimard who carried on a secret lifelong relationship with the well respected publishing director Jean Paulhan. It was a deep, forbidden love. Paulhan was married. She wrote the Story of O, meant just for him. The protagonist 'O' was degraded and humiliated, possessed and brutally defiled..but always with this proud, defiant air of being somehow beyond him and beyond them all.

- Albert Camus was for decades also on the Gallimard board. The directors were fiercely divided on whether the feted company should publish this novel by an unknown novelist 'Pauline Reage'. Camus votes to publish, as does Jean who of course knows the author's real identity, but chairman Gaston Gallimard doesn’t. He considers it ‘smut’? 

- After the book is published in 1954 by a small underground printer Carroll explores the ramifications, some very dangerous. The book becomes a sensation, opinions strong and divided. However there are no dramatic developments. Even the police, who suspect Dominique is the real author, decide not to pursue any charges. Calm comes after the storm. 

- We're taken forward to the 1968 student revolution in Paris, and disappointingly this profound social and political revolution passes Dominique by. A former resistance fighter herself, she's dismissive of it. She just doesn’t get it. That's ironic. 

- Carroll's fictional creation Pauline Reage, a courageous resistance member during the occupation, who was helped by Dominique to escape to London during the occupation, dramatically re-appears years later and meets with Dominique to discuss the book. It's a pivotal moment in the story. Pauline speaks of the book's deeper meaning, the central focus being France’s submission. O for occupation...France the whore who rolls over and surrenders, submits herself willingly to her masters.

- The unpolitical Dominique is shaken as she is persuaded of this truth. Her 'little novel' becomes far more powerful and significant. 

- An impressive and well written novel indeed, and an immensely enjoyable read.

(One question kept bugging me, as a former publisher: did Dominique sign a contract and get royalties? Carroll never mentions it.)

Iain Ryan, The Spiral.

 

- Erma is a young academic angry that her research assistant Jenny, now dead from suicide, had made a formal complaint against her. Erma is a fighter and she wants answers.

- The suburbs and streets of inner city Brisbane are brought vividly to life in this extraordinary new noir thriller from former Brisbane, now Melbourne based, writer Iain Ryan. I became a fan after reading his previous novel, The Student, which was just so damn good. This one, published this month, is even better. 

- Erma haunts the streets, strip clubs, music venues and seedy pubs of the hip but dark and tawdry precincts of Fortitude Valley and New Farm. There are too many missing young students. Too many questions. The atmosphere is electric and Ryan's prose is exquisite. He writes with such a deftness of touch. The action sequences, and there are many, are gripping. 

- Erma's heightened anxiety causes her to be 'thrashed around by nightmares and memory' - ghosts and demons on the one hand, and family trauma on the other. 

- There’s a charming earthiness to her: I...flop down on the couch and stare at the ceiling. I call the cat but the little prick doesn’t come.... Life is wasted on the stupid. 

- The novel ends with a very satisfying resolution. The threads are all brought together. 

- I hope Ryan pens a sequel to this absorbing read. Readers will yearn for more of Erma, and more of inner city Brisbane.

Laura Jean McKay, The Animals In That Country

 

- Talking animals for fuck's sake! I don’t like animals, never have. I couldn't finish this book and bailed at page 106. The fundamental premise is absurd. If it hadn’t won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award I would never have bought it. 

- It really is a silly proposition - a ‘zooflu’ pandemic that enables affected humans to talk to animals and vice versa. I’d rather read a First Nation voice on the land and its vitality. 

- The main character Jean would be at home in Nimbin. She's a lowlife and a drunk. Such a cliche.

- The writing is full of vivid similes: ...her whole voice changes - harder and sweeter at the same time, a boiled lolly; ...like a tourist who doesn't know his face from his bum; The stench of the forest, private as an armpit. Although the narrative circles and circles and circles...

- I was constantly asking where’s the depth? 

Chris Wallace, How to Win an Election

 

- This is a brief but brilliant little gem of a book. Wallace is knowledgeable and persuasive, and her decades of experience writing about Australian politics shines through. She lists the 10 basic things a political party must focus on to win an Australian federal election.  

 - Unfortunately it was written and completed in the first half of 2020 and published in September last year, pre Trump's defeat and Biden's victory, and before the politics of the pandemic really started to dominate national life. So it has a dated feel to it. And, surprisingly, current Labor leader Anthony Albanese does not get a single mention. Ironically, contrary to her own advice, she focuses on the last election in 2019 rather than the next one expected this year, 2021. The publisher would have been wise to delay this book’s release by a few months at least. 

- But it's excellent on why Shorten lost: an unpopular leader with a blizzard of policies in a campaign lacking strategic focus and basic political craft.

- Each of the ten chapters outlining the ten principles is rich in wisdom and insight. I particularly liked number six on Labor and the Greens and why they should at least cooperate in key seats to further the progressive cause. Their decades-long unwillingness to negotiate in any meaningful way remains infuriating and destructive.

- The fable-like introductions to each chapter where the shattered leader (Shorten) licks his wounds in a cave and reflects on his awful, humiliating loss, are exquisite. 

(Ridiculously expensive at $29.99 for a short, small format, 145 page paperback. And typical of so much non-fiction publishing in Australia, no index or author photo).

 

Ashley Audrain, The Push

 

- This debut novel from Canadian author Ashley Audrain is a horror story that's absorbing and extremely intense. From the opening pages it's compelling and hard to put down.

- Brings to mind Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin and Leila Slimani's Lullaby. 

- What is it like when one parent favours one of their two children and the other parent favours the other? What effect, if any, does that have on the children?

- Motherhood is intricately dissected in all its dimensions - emotionally and psychologically. As is the profound suffering and effect of grief which is so well described.

- Blythe suffered from a neglected childhood. Her mother and grandmother were cold and uncaring, woefully inadequate parents. Did they pass this condition down? As a mother herself now Blythe becomes an obnoxious perfectionist at times, demanding and suspicious. Her husband tolerates her until he realises something might be wrong and dangerous. But is he right?

- Warning: don't read the last page of this book before you've read the whole thing. Just don't.

Robert Jones Jr, The Prophets

 

- This book will shake you to your bootstraps, it is so powerful and majestic. In fact it is extraordinary.

- While measured and restrained, with deliberate opacity rather than clarity, Jones powers his prose with the drumbeat of poetry. The style is oblique and mythic, conveying a sense of ritual in the events and movements, no matter how simple and ordinary. 

- But his focus is sure. Set in Mississippi in the mid 19th century before the Civil War he paints the world of slavery, a world of cruelty and oppression. 

- There are constant depictions of the raw ugliness of racism. This is a prime example:

They pushed people into the mud and then called them filthy.They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple.They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love.They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage.They stepped on people's throats with all their might and asked why the people couldn't breathe.

- Young slaves Samuel and Isaiah (given new Judeo-Christian names of course) are at one point chained and forced to pull a wagon while being whipped, after being suspected of having indulged in perverse homosexual acts. Relentless cruelty is an everyday occurrence.

- Jones reaches deep. In the middle of the book he portrays in detail some ancient African tribal rituals that are rich in meaning, community, love, friendship and generosity. King Akusa, a woman, confronts the ignorant Portuguese Brother Gabriel and his refusal to acknowledge the sacred union of two males. It's a critical chapter comparing rich ancient religious/cultural practices and desiccated protestant Christian traditions. He could see bodies, but it was clear he could not see spirits. 

- And these 'niggas' were invaded, plundered, abused, raped, starved and shipped by the white skinless ‘ghost cannibals’ who were weak, inadequate, pompous, self-entitled men. The nigga babies were snatched away, to be forever motherless and fatherless. 

- There is a conflagration at the end, a reckoning. 

- I have no doubt that this novel will be deemed a classic. And Robert Jones Jr will be our generation's James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. 

- A must read.

William Boyd, Trio

 

- Boyd has a wonderful way of bringing English society to life. He's a sharp and insightful observer. 

- Trio is a delicious story of movie making in London in the late sixties. The world is experiencing radical change - assassinations, student-led riots, sexual liberation, gay legalisation. Elfrida Wing is a successful author, Talbot Kydd, a film producer, and Anny Viklund a celebrated young and beautiful actress. They are all connected via the movie.

- There’s a comic dimension to the story. Rather strange names are a feature. Boyd’s surely having fun: Rodrigo Tipton and his children Butterfly and Evergreen; Troy Blaze; Cornell Weekes; Gianluca Mavrocordato; Sylvia Slaye; Ferdie Meares; Janet Headstone; Nigel Farthingly; Yorgos Samsa; Calder McPhail; Maitland Bole. 

- And the film is called Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon. The production is spinning out of control however, as spivs and grifters muscle in to try to exploit the movie for marketing and financial advantage. Preying 'friends' are constantly asking for favours.

- Our trio are feeling the pressure of all this and the changing times in general. They are hardly coping. Meaningless marriages are hiding desperation, despair and hopelessness. Drugs and alcohol are centre stage. In the end they are forced to take radical actions to free themselves.

- There are some lovely, cheeky observations about Englishness dotted throughout, that are classic Boyd: 

Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse....Elfrida actually disliked the novel, with its footling detail and its breathy neurasthenic apprehension of the world, all tingly awareness and high-cheekboned sensitivity. 

They both drank to fill the silence. Both lost in the awkward formality of their personas...chronic social ill-at-easeness being the English middle-class status quo...the banal politesse of their conversation tiresome and awkward.

Charm, she thought: a very illusive English concept, very loaded. To her it meant closed, polite, coldly affable, able to make conversation about nothing.