Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say.

- I've read most of Elizabeth Strout's novels over the last few decades and this new one is easily one of her best. It focuses on the intense, complicated relationships that quite ordinary people experience throughout their ordinary lives. Lives that seem comfortable but on many levels are not. 

- The key word is 'ordinary'. We're immersed in ordinary communities, watching ordinary families deal with ordinary dramas. Couples split up, marriages begin and end, people argue, new friends are made, accidents happen, and people die. Some from suicide, like the school principal. 

- The main character, Artie, is a history teacher at a local high school. He talks to his students about about wars, fascism and the Nazis. Why are there always wars? Can there ever be global peace? He felt he had to convey some optimism to the young students but he knew there could never be peace. The current political environment after Trump's reelection in 2024 is ugly and its negativity ever present. 

- He and his wife Evie seem to enjoy a good relationship, despite some tragedies upending their lives, such as the death of their young daughter, and his son Rob's disclosure that Artie is not really his father. Artie doesn’t confront Evie and tell her he knows. He buries it within himself. But he does contemplate suicide. 

- He’s starting to keep more secrets, and even to indulge in shoplifting. ‘He had somehow slipped the ties of the world that had been his for almost thirty years...It was a private thing, to be alive. He understood this now’. 

- His relationship with his son, despite the biological secret, is deep. Rob relies on his father for advice and their love is strong. 

- There are other incidents dotted throughout the novel that enrich it immensely. The book is only 200 pages long and the writing is clear and unpretentious. It's a joy to read. 

  

Emma Cline, Switzy

 

- Emma Cline is a bestselling young American author of The Girls, Daddy, and The Guest. I haven't read any of them. On the front cover Mark Haddon calls her new book 'Sublime...completely gripping...a wonder'. Daisy Johnson calls it 'Her best book yet. Completely extraordinary'. 

- My opinion? It's easily one of the most tedious novels I’ve ever read. It's a deep penetration into a shallow man, and everything about it annoys the crap out of me. Her staccato prose reflects his consciousness and vacuity. She's a writer of talent but it's wasted on this annoying lightweight of a man. The silly title, the meaningless front cover, and the absence of an author photo, says it all. 

- David Hastings, now in his early seventies, is a former Chief Financial Officer on a flight to Zurich via London, and he reflects on his long corporate life: suits, coats, shoes, flights, hotels, dinners, a Rolodex, Christmas cards, secretaries. He works for his boss called Stearns. He's constantly playing Solitaire on his phone. He’s an empty soul with minimal intellectual energy, no interest in politics, world affairs, or today's wars. He has no deep love for his family or friends, apart from one school friend Tom. In other words he’s as boring as batshit. He’s off to Switzerland for euthanasia. 

- He doesn’t reflect on how much money he’ll leave his daughter, nor his house, furniture, belongings. Not even his Will. His wife Annabel and he divorced when their only child, Rebecca, was ten. 

- At least he recognises his current irrelevance: 'Now the young people had different brains…They had seen behind the curtain..’ He's also aware of 'The smell of old people. Their decaying skin. The addled brain'. He's been diagnosed with Amyloid plaque and has, as he tells it, 'odd fake medications, tests and treatments. For executives only'. His memory is virtually gone altogether. Only habitual things remain. He's ‘now learning that everything - oh, just everything - disintegrates’. 

 - By far the most interesting character in the novel is Cody, his assistant. Cody is in his mid-thirties and looks after him in every way. I guess he's well paid but we're never told. 

- An interesting dimension to the story is his reflections on his school days, and his friend Tom. They'd go to Tom’s house for school breaks. Tom was bright. And David was attracted to him, even physically. The school bullies attacked Tom on one occasion and David stood there and did nothing. They were distant from that point. 

- At the end of the novel he and Cody fly in a private noncommercial plane to Zurich.  

- In a comfortable room, with a nurse in attendance, he swallows the barbiturate. 

- As a bored reader I thought 'thank god!' You may wonder why I lasted until the end. It wasn't because I wondered whether he'd chose life over death. It was solely because of Emma Cline's entrancing prose. 

Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.

- Cory Doctorow is a snappy writer whose insight into all dimensions of AI companies and their scamming techniques is comprehensive. He’s always worth reading. 

- His new book is a fascinating social and economic take on how AI is influencing virtually all dimensions of business, employment and income, and not in a good way. He's probing deeply into the business side of AI corporations and who they’re screwing. He's not fooled at all by their pretentious rhetoric about how productive our future can be. 

 - He delves deeply into the appalling way tech companies like Google and Amazon treat their workers. 'Amazon's coders are now being worked like Amazon's warehouse workers and delivery drivers, among the most abused workforce in the wealthy world'. They're not even allowed to take toilet breaks. 

- He also addresses the contentious copyright issue. Most authors and artists are loudly proclaiming they are not being paid for the scraping of their content and that this is a breach of copyright law. Legally this isn't true. And 'every search engine makes a copy of every web page it can find, without taking a license or seeking permission to do so'. The substantive issue is that the huge dominant corporations all agree on paying their workers, including creative ones, as little as possible. Their wages are there for the taking. That is the principal issue we should be focused on. 'Scraping in order to make a transient copy of a work for the purposes of analysis, indexing, and so on, is legal'. 

- Doctorow is convinced that AI is a bubble, which will burst. ‘Every AI company is losing money, and the bigger the AI company is, the more money it’s losing. The biggest AI companies are losing billions per quarter…. even if one AI company survives most or all of the rest of them will fail. When that happens the AI bubble will burst. Investors will panic-sell their holdings. Companies will collapse. In other words the bubble will burst as all bubbles do, always....Remember: seven giant AI companies account for 35% of the US stock market...We're talking about a crash that will put 2008 in the shade and meet or exceed the pandemic sell-off'. The economic costs will be felt around the world for generations to come. It will be 'a prolonged, brutal, global crash'. 

- What's more 'The serious environmental costs of AI will be borne by everyone on the planet, and all the animals and plants we share it with, for hundreds of years to come’. 

- Cory Doctorow has written by far the most informed and enlightening book on AI and its consequences I've ever read. I highly recommend it. 

 

Hossein Asgari, Desolation

 

- A writer enjoying a tea in a cafe is approached by a Middle Eastern stranger who asks in Farsi to listen to his story. And so begins a fascinating tale of Amin’s large family and his life and one event in particular. 

- The oldest boy in his family was Hamid who was a brilliant maths fanatic and an atheist. He has been asked to come to Harvard for an interview, so boards a commercial flight from Tehran to Dubai in July 1988 to obtain a US visa. The plane, Iran Air Flight 655, is misidentified by the Americans and shot down over the Strait of Hormuz, killing all 290 passengers and crew on board. 

- From there we're immersed in Amin's story. He's a teenager in a small town when we meet him and is keen to meet up with his attractive female neighbour Parvaneh. They go to high school together. An affection grows and she invites him to come to their house. (DANGER! Asgari's novel explores the traditional Islamic restrictions on male/female behaviour and relationships). The classmates watch classic American movies. Amin asks her about her writing and reading. She’s read The Great Gatsby five times and loves Of Mice and Men. And movies. She also loves Marilyn Monroe and Madonna and Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan and Billy Joel and John Lennon. She's secular and modern. (MORE DANGER!) 

- The Iran/Iraq war has finally ended and Parvaneh’s family return from the countryside to Tehran. She called occasionally but he was distant. He became more religious and angry and never shaved. He verbally abused young men in the park for smoking and their hairstyles. He quit his university course in his second year and enrolled in military service. 

- His family went to Tehran for a wedding. On the first day he bumped into Parvaneh with her new boyfriend. He turned and walked away. Later he regretted that. But ‘he had seen her happy with another man and that was something he could never forgive her for’. The wedding party with its drinking and without sex segregation, and its unbearable dancing, also offended him. Walking, he accosted a young couple holding hands (‘Are you guys related’), but was beaten by them, and told ‘You fucking village people come here and dare to tell us how to live our lives, huh?’ 

- He enjoyed his harsh 3 months military training. At the beginning of his service he met Ghazi, who was three years older and had a Bachelor in History from the University of Tehran. He had interesting insights into classic books like Crime and Punishment and Don Quixote, and the importance of bookshops. They became good friends. They often met at a restaurant because Amin was fond of the waitress there. He was enthralled by the way she carried herself ‘with such effortless grace’. Her name was Ayesha and he knew he was going to marry her. He’s Shia but would be willing to convert to the more secular Sunni if necessary. But there's a mystery about her, a secret. 

- It was not from Ayesha but Ghazi that he finally learnt the truth. Ghazi, Haroun the restaurant owner, and Ayesha were planning to join al-Qaeda. The Palestinian religious scholar Abdullah Azzam was their inspiration, and Osama bin Laden had formed al-Qaeda. The mute prodigy Salman was his right hand man. They traveled to Pakistan to meet them. 

- Back in Tehran Amin tells Ayesha he wants to start his own business and do nothing else. She says ‘You’re not the man I thought you were’. And she's pregnant but that is illegal in Iran as their marriage is still not registered. He deserts her and flies to Kuala Lumpur then, after five years, to Australia. 

- At the end of the novel the writer questions Amin's story. Was he lying about his involvement and his support for al-Qaeda? Imagine if his brother had actually arrived in the US and lived peacefully with his family, but became victims of 9/11? Would that change his perspective. 'No!' shouts Amin.   

- The novel ends with Amin's memories of Salman's final two years of life after Osama's death. The 'silent evil genius' survived three attempts on his life before they finally got him. 'This very hand has shaken the hand of Salman the Mute. If I told that to the people in this garden, so carefree, so ignorant, so absorbed in their little lives, they would shit themselves'.

- 'He looks at me in silence'. 

- Hossein Asgari has written a powerful and informative novel about race, culture, religion, tradition, and passion. It's questioning and absorbing. 

James Curran, Grand Ambition: Paul Keating's Global Vision for Australia

 

 

- James Curran, a Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney, has written a detailed and utterly absorbing story of Paul Keating's time as Treasurer and Prime Minister of Australia in the 1980's and 90's. 

- I can do no better than quote in full the summary on the inside flap:

'Written with never-before-seen documents from Paul Keating's archive and drawing on many years of conversations, this book explores the ambitions for Australia that guided Keating: arguably the last prime minister with a compelling long-term vision for the country.

As Australia stands on the edge of the greatest reappraisal of its strategic circumstances, what is the relevance of Paul Keating's vision for Australia in the world today?

At the moment of his political defeat in 1996, Paul Keating stood defiant, still arguing for a vision of Australia that reached far beyond the limits of electoral politics. Three decades on, this book revisits that vision: bold, contested and somewhat unravelled by subsequent Coalition governments. It traces how Keating sought to reshape Australia's foreign policy at the end of the Cold War: anchoring the country in Asia, embedding China within a regional order, deepening ties with Indonesia and challenging long-held assumptions about dependence on great powers. For Keating, economic reform, national identity and international strategy were inseparable: part of a single, sweeping project to remake Australia.

Ambitious and provocative, this is both a portrait of a singular political mind and a reappraisal of a pivotal era. It argues that the questions Keating grappled with - about independence, security and identity - remain unresolved, and more urgent than ever in a world defined by rising tensions between the United States, China and the rest of the world.'  

- What I particularly enjoyed were Keating's thoughts on our current times. He tears AUKUS into shreds for example: '...the decision represented an appalling ignominy' that 'speaks volumes about our incapacity to absorb the region, enjoy the region, be part of the region and to celebrate the fact that we're here'. AUKUS 'was in effect a resuscitation of the Cold War policy of 'forward defence', the stance adopted by successive Coalition governments in the 1950s and 1960s and designed to keep Asian communism as far as possible from Australia's shores. AUKUS fused and made permanent the idea that China should be regarded primarily as a threat, and that Australia should rely on its traditional 'great and powerful friends'; a triumph of the Anglosphere...'  

- He also bluntly repudiates the idea that Australia should aid the defence of Taiwan. Taiwan is 'not a vital Australian interest'. 

- So Curran has written a superb book. It's a must read.

William Boyd, Cold Sunset

 

- This new novel by the excellent William Boyd is the third in his Gabriel Dax series. I very positively reviewed the second last year: here 

- Cold Sunset is just as good. In fact in a number of ways it's better. Gabriel is a very popular travel writer who gets approached every now and then by Faith Green, an MI6 secret service agent working to uncover Russian spies. It's the mid 1960's at the peak of the Cold War. The traitors Philby, Maclean and Burgess have been uncovered. And there must be more. 

- Gabriel is a handsome unmarried man in his mid-thirties. He and Faith, also single and attractive, indulge in frequent sex. And he has other attractive partners too. In fact there is far more sex in this novel than in the previous two combined. It adds a spark!

- The plot thickens considerably as the novel proceeds. Spies are uncovered and they need to be eliminated. Gabriel is sucked in and he becomes hunted. Yet he does the job. He spends time in Russia, Norway, and the Greek Islands, and his gun is always at the ready. 

- The plot gets complicated as it proceeds but it remains logical and credible. Boyd knows how to enrich the drama and colour it with glorious details on art, architecture, and literature. 

- Hopefully he is working on a fourth in the series. 

Rachel Cusk, Life of M

- This new novel by Rachel Cusk is both brilliant and sort of annoying. As a reader who loved many of her previous books I was constantly befuddled by the lack of clarity in this one. Who is the narrator - a woman or a man? Who is 'we' - one person or a couple? We are thrust into confusing and unreal worlds.   

- Cusk wrestles with the concept of 'reality' and its distortions. Of course movie scenes are fake, and acting is fake. The narrator and the actress are both constructing fictional worlds. 

- Cusk has no doubt based the character 'M' on the celebrated actress Natalie Portman. The unnamed films she refers to are Portman classics: Leon: The Professional (1994) and Black Swan (2010) for which she won an Oscar. Portman has apparently complained about how M was portrayed by Cusk, which is a little unfair as M in the novel is highly likeable, generous, grounded and approachable. 'She is unable to see selfishness as anything other than the product of stupidity'. 

- Cusk may be examining unreality but she also details the real world in numerous chapters. 'We’ describe the city and countryside they walk in (unnamed but Paris and its surrounds no doubt) and visit a museum and a bakery. They reflect on garbage collectors, bodies, tourists, the river and its bridges, the homeless and their strewn rubbish, dogs, pigeons, their parents’ house, and their domestic staff. 

- M's real world is luxurious: her mansion and its furniture, the spa, sauna and pool on top of a tall building, the principal actors room in a theatre, the fashion cocktail event which will be filmed. (Portman represents Dior in real life). M feels like an alien in this terrestrial scene. She avoids the city's famous and elaborate restaurants. 

- As the book proceeds M is seen as mature and wise. She understands stuff and can manage her career's ups and downs. 

- An excellent chapter towards the end describes M’s interview with a respected journalist. She finds him very attractive. At one point they discuss sex scenes in movies old and new. She feels lost. 

- And the final chapter is a sort of reckoning. The author visits M who tells her she doesn’t like the way the author's portrayed her. ‘Actually, it’s hurtful’, she says, and then she asks 'Are you a guy or a girl?' They are the last words in the novel. And they are quite meaningful given all her experiences of male behaviour, both good and bad, in her career. 

- So is this novel worth reading? Absolutely.