Iain Ryan, The Strip.

- I very much enjoyed Iain Ryan's previous novels, The Student, and The Spiral, but this one is a cut above. It's brilliant. How on earth does a crime writer who is not, and never has been, a cop, write a novel as intricate and informed as this? It's so real, and the characters so believable. There are none of your tired and empty cliches. 

- The setting is the Gold Coast in the early 80’s - the criminal underclass, the corrupt police, and the deadening conservative culture and society more generally. We're a decade or two prior to the reforms introduced by the Wayne Goss and Peter Beattie governments. As the key criminal player says at one point: One day, everything I do here on the coast will be legal. The fucking, the gambling, abortions, drugs. The lot.

- A serial killer is on the loose. Detective Constable Lana Cohen from Sydney has been sent up north to work with a bunch of detectives investigating the deaths of eight victims of a serial killer. But the police on the Gold Coast are incompetent, lazy and stupidly blokey. Beer and prostitutes is all they care about. The place is known as a ‘punishment posting’. It is where the Force sends its weakest officers. ‘They’re dogs, each and all’.

- Ryan thickens the story with a lot of characters and twists, so the reader is challenged to stay with it. But that pays off in spades. He builds an extremely satisfying resolution with some stunning reveals.

- This is a masterful piece of work. It is easily one of the best crime novels I've ever read, and I've read a lot of them. 

- Here are some reviews from authors who know what they're talking about: 

Steeped in the bitter lore of old-school policing and backlit by the gaudy neon of the Gold Coast streets, The Strip is hands done one the the finest Australian crime novels you'll ever read. (David Whish-Wilson)

Tense and compelling. (Garry Disher)

Iain Ryan's The Strip is an eye popping, nightmarish miasma that sets a new bar for Australian crime. Drenched in sweat, despair and corruption, think David Fincher's Seven, set on the Gold Coast in the 1980's. Except weirder and with more tension. A total triumph in every respect. (Chris Flynn)

The Strip is bingeworthy reading - a gritty crime thriller reeking of corruption, murder and sex. If you like your heroines flawed and kick-ass and your cops dirty as hell, you'll love Iain Ryan's gripping foray into the underworld of the Gold Coast. Hardly took a breath from first page to last. (Kate Mildenhall)

If David Peace wrote a novel set in Queensland's Gold Coast in the 1980's, the result would be The Strip. Fast paced, gritty, sharply observed noir that goes hard into the sleaze and corruption of the moonlight state. (Andrew Nette)

Paul Dalgarno, A Country of Eternal Light.

 

- A brilliant and exhilarating novel that creates magic out of the mundane. One of the best novels I’ve read this year, and easily the best Australian one. 

- Dalgarno submerges us deep into the ordinary lives of a working class family in Scotland. There's nothing that distinguishes them other than their deep love for one another despite occasional tensions. Margaret and Henry live in a council flat and have two twin daughters Rachel and Eva. 

- We span the decades from after World War II to 2021, and although the 'Living Margaret' dies in 2014, the 'Dead Margaret' revisits key events over that period and reflects on them. It doesn't take long as a reader to get used to that authorial device, in fact to love it, as her voice has a gentle touch, and she's a charming and sensitive woman. Like Dante, she reflects, ‘I’m on a divine mission’. (She ain't that divine however - in 2021, during Covid, she doesn’t know why people are wearing masks or social distancing!).

- We're told the daughters grow up and have relationships and children of their own. Rachel moves to Australia and Eva to Spain. I use the words 'we're told' deliberately. Dalgarno provides a shocking reveal at the end that throws a whole new light on everything that comes before. I reread chapter after chapter and was, once again, utterly transfixed by his genius. 

- Read this and revel in the delicious prose and storytelling. 

Tony Birch, Women and Children

- I was not a great fan of Tony Birch's previous novel The White Girl but this one is simply superb. It's an absorbing and fascinating story with multiple layers of richness.  

- Joe Cluny is an eleven year old boy who attends a local Catholic school in a working class suburb of Melbourne in the mid-sixties. He's not too bright and is always getting into trouble. His thirteen year old sister Ruby on the other hand is dux of her class and well liked. Sister Mary Josephine and Father Edmond run the school and force all the kids to swallow the very traditional and silly Catholic beliefs and practices. It's profound ignorance dressed up as piety. It's also dangerous and abusive. The cane is always at hand. 

- Marion is Joe and Ruby's mother, and Charlie is their grandfather. Charlie's shed is full of stuff that fascinates Joe, and his friend Ranji is a scrap metal dealer. They are mature and kindly men that epitomise what real men should be. They also tell stories and read books, which Joe and Ruby find inspiring. 

- Oona is Marion’s younger sister. Oona is in a relationship with Ray, a local electric goods shopowner. He is a vicious abuser, as are so many of the shysters that are dotted throughout the community. But she keeps returning to him, believing her abuse won't happen again, and perhaps she was to blame anyway. 

- The local priest has an opinion: ‘If she was a married woman, this would not have happened’.

- Of course the beatings continue, and get more vicious. 

- The way Birch brings all the threads together at the end is immensely satisfying. There were a number of ways things could have gone, but he keeps the story grounded. 

- Well worth a read. 

Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience

- This novel was shortlisted for this year's Booker, and was predicted to win by a number of critics. 

- It didn't win but it certainly deserved its place on the shortlist. It's absolutely brilliant. (Paul Lynch's Prophet Song actually won).

- Early in the novel our unnamed narrator lands at an airport in an unnamed country, walks towards the automatic exit doors, but 'the sensors did not at first register my movement, however exaggerated, so I had to wait until another recently deplaned passenger passed though the doors...' This says everything about the novel's essential meaning. She is a young woman (negative number one) and, as is slowly and subtly revealed, Jewish (negative number two).  

-She goes to her older brother’s mansion in the north of this unnamed country to be his 'retainer' (really a domestic slave). There's a ‘surface placidity...a kind of idiot impenetrability’ to him. He’s a very successful businessman, recently divorced, insufferable and self-entitled, and politically on the right. She's not bothered. She loves him, as she does all her siblings. 

- Previously she had been a journalist and an audio typist for a legal firm. She doesn't speak the language of this 'northern country' and the inhabitants of the town she now lives in don't speak English (or don't bother too).

- The fact that the country is not named is frustrating at first. But as the novel progresses that lack of specificity amplifies the universality of the treatment she receives - the abject prejudice.

- Interestingly, and because of the antisemitism she experienced at school, she doesn't like identifying as Jewish. She ‘gave the impression of being clean and without history, like gentiles, like people unstained by ancestral shame...I steadfastly refused to say the bracha over our classroom Sabbath ceremonies’. 

- Bernstein broadens her focus to the subtle savagery of majorities in regard to minorities, whether Jews, Indigenous, or ‘foreigners’. They’re forced to shrink and hide. She depicts victimhood so well. In the local cafe for example the racist vibe is ugly. 

- Strange things happen in the town to various animals, all pretty normal, but the residents feel her presence among them is the cause. 

- Bernstein provides an interesting twist at the end which is very satisfying and apt. There is no horror or victory or evil but there is peace.  'I know they will not come because they do not need too'. 

- I read this novel twice, luxuriating in the delicious prose and subtlety. It's so good. 

Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

 

- Today this novel was announced as the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize for fiction, and deservedly so. It's brilliantly written and powerful. In idiosyncratic and multilayered prose, often clotted but always poetic, Lynch is merciless in plunging us deep into the ugliness of war and social conflict. It demands to be ready slowly. 

- An autocratic, fascist regime, dangerous right-wing nationalists, has gained power in Ireland, and it hasn't taken them long to unleash terror on who and what they perceive as enemies of the state. 

- Eilish and Larry, and their kids Mark, Bailey, Molly, and their baby Ben are the central focus. Larry is the deputy general secretary of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland, so he's a target. 

- They are a happy family, but the pressure is building on them. The union is planning a protest march of 15,000 people. Larry is concerned and decides it would be safer not to go, but Eilish says the march must proceed. It does but the police violently arrest many, including Larry. 

- 'What she sees before her is an idea of order coming undone, the world slewing into a dark and foreign sea'. This is how societies splinter, and trust eroded. Her father, friends and work colleagues are being ‘visited’ too, and bureaucrats are pressuring her. 

- Her oldest son Mark is called up for national service, as are many young men barely out of school. There are protests on the streets but the police are watching them. Mark joined the protest but is now missing. 

- Schools are closed, as are offices. A curfew is in place. Eilish's house and car are attacked by thugs. The splintering of the community is increasing. Retailers, neighbours, and old friends are taking sides. It's ugly. The government blocks the internet and all foreign media, and electricity is frequently down. The sound of war is there all day and night. Citizens are imprisoned in their home. Food and water are hard to find. The regime insists it is bombing terrorists. 

- The rebel forces are gaining ground, but it's still chaos. Supermarkets are closed, and roadblocks are everywhere. The tension between Eilish and her kids is increasing, which is inevitable. Tragedy confronts them when their house is bombed.

-The way this novel is brought to an end by Lynch is just perfect. It's enormously sad and dispiriting and makes the reader profoundly angry. But is the author offering a glimmer of hope? Given today's awful world, that is debatable.

- A profound and original piece of 'fiction' for our times. 

Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day

- Another beautiful little book from the marvellous Irish author Claire Keegan. I so loved Foster and Small Things Like These. This one is smaller, at only 47 pages, yet it too packs a powerful punch.

- Cathal is a young office bound man in a boring admin job. He meets Sabine, a young attractive woman working in an art gallery. After a while he proposes, she accepts, and brings her clothes and furniture to his house.

- But he senses she's an intrusion on his daily routines. He’s upset. ‘Maybe it’s just too much reality’. And as for that engagement ring that cost him 128 euros plus VAT to get it resized for her finger! 'Do you think I'm made of money?' he'd said - and immediately felt the long shadow of his father's language crossing over his life...

- One night she talks to him about misogyny: ‘It’s simply about not giving...to some of you we are just cunts'. She will not tolerate being treated as subservient. She walks, prior to the wedding day.

- It's a simple story. He’s a pathetic inadequate. A little boy who, like his father and brother, calls women ‘cunts’. Once again he just sits in his arm chair, staring at the TV, and that's his life. 

- The End. 

Banana Yoshimoto, The Premonition

 

- Short Japanese novels have become a thing now in the English speaking world. Over the last few years Emi Yagi's Diary of a Void, Mieko Kawakami's two novels All the Lovers in the Night and Heaven, and of course Toshikazu Kawaguchi's bestselling Before the Coffee Gets Cold series have really made their mark.

- Perhaps this is why Banana Yoshimoto's The Premonition, first published in Japan in 1988 has just been re-released in English by Faber. And I thank god for that. This is a Japanese classic, a fascinating, strange, and absorbing story, and exceptionally well translated by Asa Yoneda. And it's only 133 pages long so can be read in one sitting.  

- A young girl, Yayoi, visits her aunt Yukino aged 30, who lives alone in a neglected, untidy house a short train trip from Tokyo. Yukino taught music at a private high school and has become quite an eccentric. 

- Yayoi’s parents are upper middle class. Her dad’s a doctor, her mother a nurse. She loves her younger brother Tetsuo. They’ve just moved back into their renovated house and bought a dog. Tokyo's vibrancy with its trains, stations, bars, restaurants and parks is on show.  

- So that's the setting - sort of normal people leading normal lives. Except, as it turns out, that's far from the case.

- The young girl dreams, and has visions of people that appear in a strange way to be familiar. She is very sensitive to the darkness, the stars, the wind, and the trees, as if nature has messages. 

- One night her brother gets a phone call and leaves the house. Worried, she found him and walked home with him. The next night she herself runs away from home and goes to her aunt's house, where she stays for a long time.

- That's when she learns the truth about all sort of things, which of course I can't disclose. 

- The aunt becomes the central character from that point. …the dark feminine magic that was her nature…she harboured something vast, lost, and familiar, and it was like a siren call to those of us who were missing parts of our childhoods...She had the habit of looking away from things she feared, or found distasteful, or thought might hurt her.

- Also central to the story is Yayoi's and her brother Tetsuo's relationship. 

- A wonderful reflection about how life's vicissitudes whack us however good as humans we are.