Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy.

 

- In very lucid prose journalist and historian Anne Applebaum has written an extremely powerful book exploring the fate of liberal democracies over the last half century - how they've swung between left and right, liberalism and authoritarianism, and what gives rise to these ever-present forces.

- It's a personal journey in many ways, involving friendships often ripped apart by changing political dynamics and allegiances. An American by birth she's lived and worked for many years in Europe and the UK and has always been part of the political elite. Her husband was a senior politician in Poland and held international roles in the UN. 

- She explores dissenting movements and constant frictions in Poland, Hungary, Venezuela and Spain in particular, before moving on to Britain and the US. Her analysis is always astute and detailed. She castigates the awful, ruthless, far right and corrupt Orban government in Hungary, and its Tory sympathisers in the UK. It's one of the world's ugliest and vicious regimes yet they, thankfully a minority, support it.

- As a former conservative herself (as an editor for the centre-right Spectator) and a colleague of Boris Johnson at the time, her story of the rise of anti-EU sentiment and the Brexit debate is simply riveting. She condemns the whole Brexit campaign and its lies. Boris is not spared.

- In today's world she believes something else is going on that propels the fierce political divisions we're seeing. It's 'the contentious, cantankerous nature of modern discourse itself'. So many people can't handle it, can't understand it, and want a simpler, united, traditional society. Simple visions and explanations give birth to QAnon conspiracy theories and take a psychological and emotional hold.

- Her chapter on America and its constitution, its birth and fundamental optimism, is superb. The radical leftist forces of opposition to this exultation of capitalist ‘exceptionalism’ versus the Christian right’s antipathy to what it perceives as secular moral depravity. 

- Of course this leads to Trump and how the Republicans have split. Applebaum's former friend Laura Ingraham, now a Fox News host, and her whacky Trumpism, is thoroughly annihilated.

- The extreme woke left is not exonerated however. So-called 'cancel culture' on the Internet, the extremism that sometimes flares up on university campuses, the exaggerated claims of those who practice identity politics are a political and cultural problem that will require real bravery to fight. 

- The final chapter takes us back to the Dreyfus affair in 1894 and how the primitive antisemitism that drove it divided French society in a way that sounds familiar today. 

- Nothing much has or will change. 

Aravind Adiga, Amnesty

 

- Indian-Australian author Aravind Adiga has written a quite brilliant evocation of the constant tensions felt by illegal immigrants in Australia as they live, work and observe life around them. He also depicts the strangeness of Australian ways that are so apparent to them. 

- Danny, the main character, initially flew to Australia on a student visa. He had declined the option suggested by friends in Sri Lanka to pay people smugglers to come by boat. He saw himself as a legitimate refugee after having been tortured by the Sri Lankan military because he was deemed a 'terrorist' Tamil. 

- He overstayed his visa and is now officially an 'illegal'. He chose to apply for refugee status immediately after his legitimate arrival by plane to Sydney, and his application was rejected. Now his passport has expired, he has no Medicare, no driving licence and no social security benefits. He lives in a tiny, rundown attic above a grocery shop. And he is terrified someone will dob him in. 

- So....he has an extremely uninteresting, although stressful, life. Nothing significant happens. He trawls around inner Sydney, as in Ulysses, having random thoughts and memories, and does a few apartment cleaning jobs. The streets of Glebe, Broadway and Sydney's CBD, including George St and William St, the sandstone buildings, the Coca-Cola sign in Kings Cross, Central Station, Circular Quay, the buses and trains: all these celebrated Sydney landmarks have become his neighbourhood. But it's a seedy, untrustworthy, cruel, corrupt world that illegals inhabit. They're always anxious and on edge. The screeching birds of Australian cities don't help.

- This novel is as much about Indians in Australia generally as it is about ‘white people’. Adiga doesn’t really like them. He paints them as loud, crude, grasping and self-indulgent. His first novel, the 2008 Booker prize winner The White Tiger vividly excoriated them too. He’s not too enamoured of the Chinese either. Muslims are occasionally mentioned but never negatively. Prior to coming to Australia Danny spent a satisfying year working in a hotel in Dubai. It is apparent he prefers white Australia, despite our underlying racist character. White people have got the law, and we don’t.…where did it come from, this fair law? In Sri Lanka … it does exist - evil. A man puts on a uniform, and becomes the uniform.

 - Quietly Adiga builds a plot. Two of Danny's cleaning clients, Radha, and her lover Prakash, are addicted gamblers. Rhada's husband Mark sells real estate to Chinese investors. Rhada is murdered. 

- Adiga handles this deftly and he builds a measure of tension and dread. The police investigation presents Danny with a moral choice. Because if he talks to them about what he suspects he's effectively disclosing his illegality.

- This novel has been shortlisted for this year's Miles Frankin Award. It deserves to win.

 

Bri Lee, Who Gets to be Smart

 

- There have been some negative reviews of Bri Lee's new book, for example this one by Beejay Silcox in the Guardian. But they are wrong. Straight up and down wrong.  

- What Silcox fails to recognise is Lee's ability to felicitously combine informality - walking around Oxford with her friend Damien for instance - with informed critique.  

- She has the ability to cut through ‘how we envisage power and intelligence’ by personalising the story with anecdotes and reflections, bringing more power and meaning, and investing it with a lot more oomph. This is her talent. It is what made her first book Eggshell Skull such a huge hit. Combined with the clarity and lucidity of her prose and her often deliciously funny knifings of her enemies ('This may be the dumbest paragraph I've ever encountered'), her overall argument is brought vividly to life. 

- She didn't set out to write an academic treatise or indulge in the tedious journalistic cliche of interviewing and editing random individuals or 'experts'. She's primarily writing about her own thoughts and experiences.

- What we're offered is a skewering of a huge variety of subjects, policies and debates, all to do with the racist and colonial legacies embedded in our elite educational institutions and related social and political structures. Her inspiration comes from multiple sources: Omid Tofighian, translator of Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains, and the concept of Kyriarchy as defined by theologian Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, being just two of them. She brings a highly informed, coherent and logical perspective to it all. Her critique is unapologetically left wing/progressive all the way. 

- I thoroughly enjoyed her exquisite demolition of the the Ramsay Centre and its ambitions and key supporters: Howard, Abbott, Jim Wallace, Lyle Shelton, Greg Craven, George Pell, and other reactionary Christian conservatives. She sees through their bullshit. And she seethes with anger at the very mention of the name 'Tony Abbott'. 

- The chapter on schools is superb. The privileging of the private schools and the declining funding of public schools is clearly outlined. Gonski's bold recommendations on 'sector-blind funding' were just too bold for our politicians. A re-worked Gonski 2.0 still upset the Catholic schools. One Catholic academic wrote: 'Only by focusing on issues of quality are we going to address inequality'. Lee erupted ‘This may be the second-most stupid thing I’ve ever read’. Today ‘taxpayers fund about 80% of the cost of educating a child in the Catholic school system'.

- There's a lot more delicious stuff in this hugely enjoyable book, including topics like intelligence, learning a foreign language, slavery, women and power, women and medicine, COVID support discriminations, Chinese students, and Australia's anti-colonial movement. 

- Lee has written a stunning, highly enjoyable book. Surely there's a follow-up in the works: Who Gets to be Dumb. At one point she reflects: It is necessary to ask oneself what one considers the opposite to 'intelligence'. Options of varying severity include: stupid, dumb, naive, foolish, idiotic, slow, thick, moronic, vacuous, and dim-witted. 

- She names and shames plenty of these types in Who Gets to be Smart.

Alice Pung, One Hundred Days

 

- It took me a while to get hooked by this new novel from Alice Pung. A young teen coming of age. A harsh, miserable mother. A broken family. A private school/state school melodrama. It's hardly an original story. 

- But as it proceeds Pung turns this narrative into a gritty and utterly absorbing exploration. 

- This element - electric, pulsating prose - is original: 

Just when Nurse Chin least expected it, along came this demanding peasant yakking away about her daughter being duped, like this was a chickenshit village instead of a big world where smart Asian women could get opportunity and independence.

- Her mother steals the meagre wages her daughter makes at the hairdressing salon, and the generous amounts of money her father gives her. Her justification is that she's the one paying the rent and buying all the food.

- But only rarely does the daughter vocalise her thoughts and feelings to her controlling mother. She only thinks them, which is very frustrating for the reader. She should be railing at her, loudly expressing her anger. Thankfully in the end she does, and it pays off in spades.

- Only an Asian writer could bring Asian family dynamics so vividly to life. Pung has a full grasp of the traditional habits, prejudices, beliefs and superstitions of the older generation, their anti-Western bias setting them against modern science and medicine. This makes for some measure of comedy but it's well and truly overridden by the resulting ugliness and horror experienced by their children and grandchildren. Modernity is a harshly contested zone.

- But Pung also castigates this so-called modernity when needed. The incidental contacts with males dotted throughout, on buses and streets, depict ugly, low rent, feral racists. The mother's urge to protect her daughter and her new baby is not entirely unjustifiable. 

- A thoroughly satisfying read, magnificently written. 

David Brophy, China Panic.

 

- This new book by David Brophy, a senior lecturer in modern Chinese history at the University of Sydney, is such a refreshing read. It is highly intelligent and informed, and full of facts and insights that so urgently need to be circulated and debated in these hyper-charged times. 

- It would be a mistake to characterise it as 'balanced', a rather meaningless cliche. It aims high, not low, thoroughly destroying anti-China posturing from the usual suspects on the left as well as the right. It names names and doesn't hold back. Clive Hamilton, Peter Hartcher and Hugh White are frequent targets. As is the defence and national security establishment.   

- Brophy's principal contention is straightforward: I see as dangerous any efforts to uphold a flagging American hegemony in Asia, which is now of an almost exclusively military nature. I worry at the visible rise in anti-Chinese racism we see here. And I worry at the worsening levels of state repression in China.

- Heather Rose’s highly lauded fantasy novel Bruny (2019) about a Chinese takeover of Tasmania is judged ‘a deeply problematic narrative’, indulging as it does in tired racial stereotypes. I read this book when it first came out and considered it dreadful. Thankfully Brophy destroys it. 

- The Conclusion addresses an important question of today: what should Australia do if China attacks Taiwan? We should oppose it in the same way we oppose America's wars: with demonstrations, strikes and coordinated international action, but not by calling for war on China ourselves. 

- These reviews on the preliminary page of the book are spot on:

Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

 

- This little novel is so unbelievably powerful. It’s a must read.

- It’s the 1990’s. He is 14 and bullied by Ninomiya and his friends at a Middle School in Japan. A girl classmate, Kojima, who is also bullied, asks to be his friend. Kawakami describes the  bullying in graphic detail and it's horrific.  

- The unnamed boy, the narrator, has a lazy eye, hence his nickname ‘Eyes’. Kojima struggles to be ‘normal’. They write letters to each other and talk freely. Both are from broken homes and unhappy marriages. 

- They are thoughtful, inquisitive and caring, despite suffering immense pain and sadness. 'Why do you think they do it? Why do you think they treat us like they do?’ 

- Kawakami allows her characters to indulge in Nietzschean philosophical musings on these fundamental moral issues. What is 'the right way to act’ here? Kojima is of the firm belief that fighting back with courage is a negative. I know there's so much pain in this, but we have to keep going...A time will come when everything will be clear. The reader can't but be unimpressed. It's a heavy handed moral imperative which is so unrealistic it's virtually other worldly. Nietzsche explored this in his tract Thus Spake Zarathustra, where he castigated the commitment to poverty, humility, chastity and asceticism as 'moralistic mendaciousness'. 

- Kojima also celebrates poverty and isolation. She conspicuously avoids being social, even to the point of rarely washing her hair or bathing. Unsurprisingly she's vehemently opposed to Eye’s consideration of undergoing surgery to fix his eye. She loves his eyes as they are. She refuses in the end to see him again or answer his letters, and begins to starve herself. She's become a victim of a moralistic cult.

- A counter perspective comes from one of the bullies. When challenged by Eyes he justifies his behaviour as having no meaning. It's an amoral universe. Everyone just does what they want...They’re acting on urges...Nothing’s good or bad…Nobody does anything because it’s right. That’s not why people do things.

- Kawakami gives us a superb and beautifully written ending. She could well have opted for sadness and tragedy, but she choses hope. 

(This review in the New Yorker is well worth reading)

(Pan Macmillan have priced this small 167 page paperback at $32.99, which is a complete and unforgivable rip off. In the UK it retails for £9.99. At the current exchange rate it should be no more than $24.99).

Martin McKenzie-Murray, The Speech Writer.

- This is so good and delightful, and a brilliantly funny book in all sorts of ways. It's clever, outrageous and way over the top. McKenzie-Murray's prose is punchy and often vulgar, and his Aussie dialogue hits the mark. 

- Toby Beaverbrook, son of English Baron George Beaverbrook II, tries to bring a measure of Churchillian eloquence to his political masters when he finally lands his dream job as a Canberra speechwriter. 

- The book has not received too many generous plaudits from Canberra-based political and media hacks who seemed to want something far more satirically serious, but these leaden sensibilities are tiresome. The author obviously set out to write a witty, comical, lighthearted read, and he's totally succeeded in my view. 

- There is perhaps an underlying critique of our political and public service elite, where rank self interest and stupidity rules, but it's a light touch. That's all that's needed. 

- The narrator, our junior speechwriter, ends up being thrown in jail for infusing a few drops of LSD into the prime minister's coffee, so he gets to read his memoir to Garry, his cell mate. Garry's comments, dotted throughout, are hilarious.

 - If you're stuck in lockdown, here's something to well and truly lighten the load.