Garry Disher, Sanctuary

 Disher tells a story of male abusers getting their comeuppance. They are a seedy underbelly of scammers and thieves. Total lowlifes. 

-There are, thankfully, some sensitive and caring gentleman in the book, and they happen to be cops.

-The women who were abused are fighters and clever. Grace was a foster child who descended into petty crime and hid behind many identities to escape the law. Erin’s former husband is looking for her. He’s a nasty piece of work, a far right woman hater into scams of all sorts and is addicted to porn. 

-Disher’s prose is fast-paced and his plot and subplots full of detail. It’s very country Australian, set in the Adelaide Hills in the main. I had no idea CCTV was everywhere, even in rural areas. The police totally rely on it in this novel. 

-Unfortunately a number of stories fizzle out and are not satisfactorily resolved. This is emotionally unsatisfying as the characters Disher has painted in detail in these subplots are immensely likeable. 

-So while this is an absorbing read on the whole, it is also a little frustrating. 

Dignitas Infinata

 

- The Vatican has today released this document on human dignity, addressing the personal freedom and equality of all human beings. 

- It’s excellent on the broad philosophical and moral beliefs and traditions that underpin these critical realities in today’s world, a world that too often ignores them. 

- However its positions on the equality and rights of women, while well stated in theory, are undermined in practice by the Catholic church itself. Even the sexist language of using ‘he’ to refer to all humans, plainly gives it away. Arguing that women should have the same rights as men in every sphere of life, work and society, yet continuing to deny them the priesthood, is hypocrisy writ large.

- Denying any right to abortion from the moment of ‘conception’ (a constantly used and sacred word), and entirely ignoring modern biological science in determining personhood, is profoundly ignorant. Abortion and euthanasia in this document are in the same category as genocide. Artificial insemination is also outlawed. Referring to ‘a human being in the initial phase of its existence’ is a constant mantra. 

- The discussion on gender diversity is also profoundly ignorant. Cliches about bipolarity at birth to be revered throughout human life are indulged in, and no attention given to contemporary academic thinking at all. ‘…any sex change operation, as a general rule, runs the risk of undermining the unique dignity that the person has received from the moment of conception’. 

- Interestingly, homosexuality is not mentioned in the document at all. Neither is gay marriage. In fact it says ‘…every person, regardless of his or her sexual orientation, must be respected in his or her dignity and welcomed with respect, taking care to avoid every sign of unjust discrimination’. 

- Thankfully the document abandons the age-old belief in a possible ‘just war’. The logic of a ‘legitimate war must be left behind’. 

- The rights of migrants and refugees are also deeply respected. ‘…every migrant is a human person who, as such, possesses inalienable fundamental rights that must be respected by everyone and in every situation’. 

- So there is both good and bad in this document - profoundly typical of a church mired in the believed rectitude of its centuries of history. 

Steven Carroll, Death of a Foreign Gentleman

- Steven Carroll has long been one of my favourite Australian novelists. He's a gentle, intelligent, sensitive writer, and an explorer of love and relationships in all their dimensions.  

- In this new novel he delves into the genre of crime fiction, introducing us to Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter, an Austrian-born cockney Jew. The year is 1947, and the locale Cambridge University. His parents were interred by the British government during the war and did not survive. 

- A cyclist has been hit by a speeding car at an intersection and dies. He was the highly celebrated philosopher Martin Friedrich who was on his way to the university to give a lecture. He was German and prior to the war a supporter of Hitler and his Nazi vision of German ‘liberation’. He was short, fat and self-entitled, but he brought a European sensibility to the harsh, desiccated rationality of the Wittgenstein-obsessed culture of Cambridge. ‘…an old man, short and stocky, face like a storybook animal, a badger stuffed into tweeds’. He was 'a mixture of Heidegger and Sartre, with a dash of Camus’. To him, and his many student fans, his Existentialism was like being released from Plato’s cave, into reality, not shadows and illusions. 

- Carroll introduces us to three young women, two of whom had affairs with Friedrich although he was thirty or so years older than them. One of them, Daisy, was only nineteen. Tragically, she got pregnant and had an abortion which killed her.  

- Two other characters are men who the detective believes are suspects in the hit and run. One, an older man, politically powerful and upper class, and the other a young spiv. All of his characters have backgrounds and secrets which are richly explored. 

- Carroll brings the story to a very satisfying end. He leaves us with the question: is the universe really empty of justice and godly intervention? He has written a magnificent novel, the first in a possible series. 

Louise Milligan, Pheasants Nest

The back cover blurb sums this book up perfectly: 

'She wonders if they have discovered her missing yet. Has it broken in the news? Who has been assigned to cover her story? Have they started spooling through her social media and pulling out photographs? Constructing a narrative about who she is and what possible reason any person has to kidnap or (let's be frank) kill her? She tries not to let out the whimper that's building in her sternum, at the thought that he might. Kill her, that is. He might kill her.

Kate Delaney has made the biggest mistake of her life. She picked the wrong guy to humiliate on a girls' night out and now she is living every woman's worst nightmare. Kate finds herself brutalised, bound and gagged in the back of a car being driven god knows where by a man whose name she doesn't know, and she is petrified about what's in store for her.

As a journalist who is haunted by the crimes she's had to report over her career, Kate is terrifyingly familiar with the statistics about women who go missing—and the fear and trauma behind the headlines. She knows only too well how those stories usually end.

Kate can only hope the police will find her before it's too late, but she's aware a random crime is hardest to solve. As the clock ticks down, she tries to keep herself sane by thinking about her beloved boyfriend and friends, escaping into memories of love and happy times together. She knows she cannot give way to despair.

As the suspense escalates, Kate's boyfriend Liam is left behind, struggling with his shock, fear and desperation as the police establish a major investigation. The detectives face their own feelings of anguish and futility as they reflect on the cases they didn't solve in time and the victims they couldn't save. They know Kate's chances of survival diminish with every passing hour'.

- This debut novel by well known 4 Corners journalist Louise Milligan is an absorbing read. Light, perhaps, but very enjoyable. Milligan tells the story with a delightful comic touch: 'Let's go and meet this D'Ambrosio fellow,' he says to Sylvia. 'Deal', says Sylvia, trying to pump his fist, but missing and clocking him on the jaw. 

- She spends a lot of time outlining her characters in depth. They’re all connected, if only slightly at times, but Milligan's deep dive helps flesh out what motivates them. She's very empathetic, frequently breaking the pace of her narrative to register their genuine human issues, anxieties, strengths and weaknesses. 

- Unfortunately, however, all her characters are a bit too good to be true. Kate is ultra beautiful, Liam is ultra smart and nice; their sex ultra in every way; her friends ultra loyal; the cops ultra weird; and the rapist/kidnapper ultra ugly. 

- Nevertheless, as I said, a delightful and absorbing read. 

Liam Pieper, Appreciation

 

- A self-entitled waste of space rants on about his miserable life. That's the bad 10% of this novel. The rest is magnificent. Every page buzzes with dazzling, scathing, scintillating prose. There are pinprick demolitions at every turn, and brilliant similes ('...a grin welded onto his face like a roo bar'). 

- Oli Darling is a 40 year old queer man who has built a very successful career as a painter totally due to the commercial genius of his agent and drug dealer Anton. On a TV talk show one night (the ABC's Q+A obviously) he lets loose on Australia's toxic masculinity and colonial myth building like Gallipoli. He’s articulate and right, but to many in the audience offensive. He’s condemned on social media.

- To help restore Oli's reputation Anton suggests he write a memoir which would be ghosted by a young and talented woman. This allows Oli to not only open up about his life as a young man struggling with his sexuality, but to express his colourful views on all sorts of things. And you have to say, his views are hugely entertaining on every level. This is Pieper at his best. 

- He's so good on the contrast between the Sydney and Melbourne monied classes, the country/city divide, and the privilege of private schools. At a fancy dinner in Sydney he is approached by 'the Miner', after 'moving breadsticks and brie from the buffet to her mouth with the methodical, hypnotic menace of a bucket excavator...Her knack for finding precious metals in untouched wilderness...is legendary. It has made her wildly prosperous and caused the extinction of countless species'. 

- The final thirty or so pages of the book builds the reader's anxiety to a high level. How will Oli's story end? 

- Pieper has written a superb novel, and I found myself reading sections and chapters over and over again. I was captured by his rich prose - luxuriating in it. 

(In The Guardian the humourless BeeJay strikes again!)

Gail Jones, One Another

- An excellent read once again from Gail Jones. I loved her previous novels and this is right up there with her best. 

- At first it's a bit hard to like but perseverance pays off in spades. Helen, an Australian post-graduate student at Cambridge, is researching her thesis on the Polish/British author Joseph Conrad. He was a man of the sea and also a celebrated man of letters who died in 1924 at the age of sixty-six. The novel switches back and forth from Helen's travails in Cambridge to Conrad's many sea journeys and writings, and manages to absorb the reader in both their personal and professional conundrums. 

- Joseph was not a well man. He suffered from many serious health conditions, and was unhappily married. But Helen knows him as 'a man of the plot. Unlike many contemporary writers, less committed to the logic of adventure, he loves a rollicking story. Intrigue, murder, suicide and spies’. She's captivated by them and finds solace in them. Her own personal life is falling apart. Her boyfriend, another Australian student in Cambridge, is violent and abusive. She must be honest with herself and her friends. 

- She happens to lose her draft thesis on a train. We learn that many well known authors also lost manuscripts. There is 'a long notorious history' of this - T. E. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Lowry, Dylan Thomas, and Sylvia Plath were among them. 

- Her manuscript is found, thankfully, but subsequent events, associated with her boyfriend, turn ugly. Tragedy is an outcome.

- Jones is focussed on the inner person, the anxieties, fears, failures and hopes. It's a very sensitive exploration. She also explores their forbears - parents, grandparents and siblings, and the places they lived their lives. At Cambridge Helen has empathetic and generous friends, and there are lovely and supportive older people in her life. Her natural tendency 'is to protect her Joseph, hapless and uncertain, acquiring over his thirty years in England a lustre of gentlemanly shine, even as he felt rather tarnished within...all his life he is a man who thinks  he is dying, not living....He feels miserable, boring, invalid and old'. 

- Most of us have read Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. 'Conrad's plots make him a favourite for film adaptations. There are thirty or forty out there, possibly more, beginning in the silent era'. Marlon Brando played Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, based on Heart of Darkness ('the horror, the horror'). That novel is unforgettable, a masterpiece. 

- Gail Jones has written, in her own way, a masterpiece. A magnificent achievement.  

Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World

 

- This is a stunningly good book and highly enlightening on the serious environmental and sustainability problems the world faces today. Dr Hannah Ritchie is senior researcher in the Programme for Global Development at Oxford University. She clearly outlines all the problems we face yet she remains positive and hopeful. We can, if we work together and with determination, solve them. This is the challenge of our times. 

- What I very much enjoyed about the book is Ritchie's clarity of thinking and writing. She clearly navigates so many difficult terrains in plain, non-academic English, providing not just loads of valuable information and data, but insight and sense. And the book has a very personal flavour. She's describing her own journey. 

- I can do no better than the back cover blurb to describe the book in detail:

Feeling anxious, powerless or confused about the future of our planet? This book will transform how you see our biggest environmental problems - and how we can solve them.

We are bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won't be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, that we should reconsider having children.

But in this bold, radically hopeful book, data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. The data shows we've made so much progress on these problems, and so fast, that we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in history. 

Packed with the latest research, practical guidance and enlightening graphics, this book will make you rethink almost everything you've been told about the environment, from the virtues of eating locally and living in the countryside, to the evils of over-population, plastic straws and palm oil. It will give you the tools to understand what works, what doesn't and what we urgently need to focus on so we can leave a sustainable planet for future generations. 

These problems are big. But they are solvable. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone. Let's turn that opportunity into reality.