Dan Wang, Breakneck

 - Dan Wang has written a brilliant book on all levels. In clear, very readable prose, he tells the story of the dynamic post-Mao China over the last fifty or so years, focussing particularly on the current Xi Jinping era. China has evolved into an 'engineering state', relentlessly building big at breakneck speed. All twenty-five members of the Politburo, China's cabinet, are engineers, and male. 

- In contrast, the US has floundered over the same period, losing its manufacturing capabilities and ambitions. In stark contrast to China it has become a 'lawyerly state', bogged down in administrative procedures, legal processes, and judicial restraints which stall every attempt to make change. 'Lawyers create so many complications that the rules governing everything from health care and housing to banking have become incomprehensible'. 

- A very enlightening feature of the book is the way Wang describes the huge cities of Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen and paints a picture of what living in them actually entails. Shanghai is by far the best place to actually live, rather than just work, 'where many streets have remained human-scaled rather than being built for cars'. It's full of cafes, has a Paris edge, is easy to get around by bike, and is highly walkable. The other large cities are dominated by tall tower blocks and highways. They are cold and lack charm. 

- As for the people, they are lightly taxed, in fact three-quarters of them pay no income tax at all. There are no broad property taxes either, so the rich do well. But there are severe consumption taxes which are regressive because they burden the poor rather than the rich. As Wang notes 'China is a country governed by conservatives who masquerade as leftists'. 'Low taxes make China stingy on welfare. Around 10 percent of its GDP goes towards social spending, compared to 20% in the United States and 30 percent among the more generous European states...Only ten percent of the unemployed are eligible for modest benefits'. 

- Wang goes into great detail about the two disasters that the Chinese leadership brutally forced on their citizens over the recent decades - the One Child policy introduced in 1980, and the Zero-Covid policy.  Both were cruel, inhumane and destructive. 

- I would have liked Wang to go deeper into the foreign policies of both China and the US, particularly over Taiwan, but he doesn't go anywhere near that, apart from hinting that if the US goes to war with China over Taiwan it will lose. As we know the US is a warmongering nation but China isn't, despite Xi's massive spending on defence and weapons over the last decade. 

- China calls itself a developing nation. The US should too.

- Read this magnificent, highly informed book. 

(Dan Wang is a research fellow at the Hoover History Lab at Stanford University)

Trent Dalton, Gravity Let Me Go

- The only Trent Dalton book I'd read before this one was his bestselling first novel Boy Swallows Universe, which was just so damn good. As was the TV series. 

- His new novel Gravity Let Me Go is a different beast altogether. It's lighter and far less realistic but it's also immensely enjoyable. What's on show is Dalton's huge talent for brilliant comic writing. His prose is slick and utterly absorbing. 

- Noah Cork is a freelance journalist who was fired by the Murdoch-owned The Courier Mail. He was famous for his writing on crime in the Brisbane area.  Unfortunately the police hated him for his frequent condemnation of their ineptitude and put pressure on his piss weak bosses. 

- He has two daughters - Erin, who is fifteen years old, and Clementine, who is twelve. Erin is a pessimist: ‘The world is sick and dying and cannot be saved, and anybody who doesn’t see this truth is either wilfully ignorant or profoundly stupid’. Clem on the other hand is utterly delightful. She's highly intelligent and into literature - ‘Is this a circumstance of great peril, Dad?’

- Noah has just published a book about an unsolved crime - ‘Anonymous Source: The Disappearance and Discovery of Tamsin Fellows’. It's become a bestseller.

- He and his family live in the upmarket Northern Brisbane suburb of Jubilee. Their modest house is in a cul-de-sac and they're friendly with all their neighbours. The trouble is there's been a kidnapping and murder of one of them, and, predictably, the police are getting nowhere.  

- At times the story gets quite weird as Dalton indulges in all sorts of comical extremities, but it stays absorbing. It's a thriller and the ending is surprising and very satisfying. 

- I relished his prose. He's an exceptionally talented writer.

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. 

 

Greg Sheridan, How Christians Can Succeed Today.

 

- This has to be the most theologically illiterate tome I’ve ever read. It fails on so many levels. 

- Sheridan has minimal understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition and its richness. His book is simplistic in its Christian beliefs about the resurrection of Jesus, his ascension to heaven, and other ‘facts’. He makes no attempt to engage with the gospels and their stories and parables and whether the facts as presented actually happened, rather than being a rich collection of fictional and mythological elements that constructed the Old and New Testaments over centuries. 

- His constant quoting of familiar conservative writers of the last century like G.K.Chesterton, C.S.Lewis, and Malcolm Muggeridge, add absolutely nothing to his treatise other than supporting his simplicity. 

- His fundamental proposition is ‘with God out of the picture, humanity is immensely reduced’. Sheridan hates our modern world of secularism and modernism, initiated by science. ‘…our civilisation faces a choice between a re-enchanted culture informed by Christianity, or a future of chaos and cruelty’. The smartphone and social media are satanic. Popular culture is always anti-Christian. 

- There’s no analysis of the Catholic and Protestant traditions. ‘Christianity’ seems all one and the same. It becomes clear as the book proceeds he favours a fundamentalist evangelical extremism as his expression of true Christianity. 

- All that said, there are some positive features to the book. His chapter on St Paul, while being disappointing theologically, is excellent biographically and sociologically. 

- There’s also an excellent chapter on early Corinth and its deplorable practices regarding marriage, infanticide, forced abortions, and forced prostitution, and Christianity’s condemnation of these behaviours which inspired a revolutionary change for women. Paul preached the centrality of love. As a result the majority of early Christians were women. Sheridan makes clear how revolutionary Christian belief was at the time. 

- ’Christians exploded the sexual hierarchy of the ancient world as well as the social hierarchy.’ He’s also good on slavery, money, children, and death. ’Christians hold the most elevated view of the human body that has ever been imagined in human history’. 

- His chapter on the early church fathers is informed and enlightening. Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp were all executed for their belief in Christ. Irenaeus was the first great theologian. Also influential were Gregory of Nyssa in Turkey, Tertullian of Carthage, Origen of Alexandria, and St Anthony the Great. The early centuries were prone to heresies from influential sources, which had to be met effectively.

- The most important figure was Augustine of Hippo in Algeria. His two important books were City of God and Confessions. 

- Part 2 of the book is biographical. Sheridan introduces us to ‘Contemporary Early Christians’, as he calls them. They’re presented as models of Christian behaviour for our time. Most of them are unknown. Some of them are celebrated for their conservative social and political positions - Jordan Peterson, Mike Pence, Niall Ferguson for example. He interviews them in a very journalistic, Sunday Magazine, style. He certainly doesn’t indulge in any critique of their views. 

- An exception would be Marilynne Robinson, a Christian novelist. She’s excellent on Genesis and other parts of the Old Testament. 

- It becomes quite clear at the end that Sheridan is positing a Christian rebellion against the modern world, a world of digital ‘gadgets’ like desktop computers, iPads, and mobile phones. These internet obsessions are destroying our society, making it ‘woke’ and meaningless, particularly for the young. He's a great fan of the recent 

movement in the US, and increasingly in Australia, called Classical Liberal Education. The curriculum of these private schools is centred around the great books of history, and ancient Greek civilisation. Many teach Latin as well. God is always central. 'In a distressed and bleeding culture, these classical schools are field hospitals; perhaps more than that  - base camps; perhaps more than that - signs of a new creation.' 

- Two stars out of five. Max. 

Sulari Gentill, Five Found Dead

 

- I hadn't read any of Sulari Gentill's previous novels, despite the fact she's a multi-award winning Australian author, well known internationally. But I absolutely loved Five Found Dead, her latest.

- Just a few pages in, I was hooked! We're on the famous train, the Orient Express, travelling from Paris to Venice. There are murders on board and the suspect unknown. Hints of Agatha Christie's famous novel. 

- Fortunately there are a few retired police detectives on the train who meet and take charge of the investigation. They are led by the delightful Bonaparte Duplantier, a charming Frenchman. Our narrator, Merdith Penvale, and her twin brother Joe are also invited to help, as Joe is a successful thriller writer. 

- Other odd-bods are on board, all with opinions of course. As the first murder is followed by others the drama intensifies. There is also a Covid outbreak in one of the carriages, so that has to be locked down. The passengers are not happy at all. 

- There are so many characters, many forgettable, and the drama gets a bit congested towards the end. But that's a minor issue. As the story develops, and there are more murders, the resolution is surprising and very satisfying. 

- Gentill's prose is lively and highly readable. What a talent.