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. 

Peter R. Neumann, The New World Disorder.

- I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It's absolutely brilliant on every level, as well as being superbly written in crystal clear prose. It has been translated from the original German by journalist David Shaw, and it's rare that translations are this good. Neumann is currently Professor of Security Studies at King's College London and is an internationally sought-after expert on terrorism and geopolitics. 

- The triumph of the West had seemed unstoppable not that long ago...but now the West is under pressure, and it has only itself to blame. Over the last thirty years, through a mixture of naïveté and arrogance, it has lost its global advantage. Today's challenges are profound: the rise of China, climate change, and the polarisation of society. (back cover blurb)

- As a reader I'm an obsessive underliner. Sentences that encapsulate fundamental insights and meanings demand to be remembered. While reading this book I virtually underlined every paragraph. 

- Neumann's chapters on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are magnificent. He condemns the profound ignorance and naiveté of the US and its conservative commentators. The 9/11 attacks showed that the West was vulnerable; the wars in the Middle East exposed the limits of its military power, and the collapse of the financial markets revealed the contradictions inherent in its economic model. 

- He also obliterates Putin and puts his war on Ukraine into perspective. Putin's a posturing Eurasianist with the power fantasies of a populist imperialist.  

- He's also excellent on the creation of the EU and the disaster of Brexit. And quite pessimistic on the world's dismal failure to address the challenges of climate change. 

- In summary, this is a book that deserves to be widely read. I hope it becomes an international bestseller. 

Benjamin Stevenson, Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect

- There's no doubt Benjamin Stevenson is a brilliant comic writer. His gift shines through on virtually every page. 

- Ernest Cunningham, the fictional author of the best-selling Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, is writing his follow-up Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect. Ernest continually breaks the fourth wall, telling us all what he's doing and why, which makes it so charming. 

- The train is the Ghan, running from Darwin to Adelaide, and the luxury carriage is hosting 'The Australian Mystery Writers' Festival' featuring six internationally successful authors. (Note to ed: there should be no comma after Writers). A couple of murders take place. 

- The book has a serious problem however. It's hard-going. The story is clotted, the narrator fussy, and he drowns the reader in so much detail the experience is like drowning in mud.  

- It gets really tedious and alienating towards the end, as the incestuous, mind-boggling connections between all the characters are revealed. Our omniscient, first-person narrator somehow knows everything, indulging in his own cleverness. 

- But he does satirise the mystery thriller genre exceptionally well, particularly the ‘butler-dunnit’ model. 

- And I must say he portrays the regular modus operandi of the publishing industry and its many players very accurately. The Oxford Comma also plays a part!

- But, all in all....meh!

Yumna Kassab, Politica

- This new novel from Yumna Kassab is a challenging read. I was really enthralled by her two previous novels Australiana and The Lovers, but in Politica she adopts a more nebulous style, exploring the world of her many characters in a suggestive, less realistic, way. 

- She takes us to the Middle East and to an unidentified country, spanning decades of time from the late twentieth century. Some of her characters live throughout that entire period, but most don't. The book has numerous chapters of only two or so pages. 

- Yet Kassab combines poetry and prose in her portrayal of the lives of the citizens of the country through its periods of war and peace. There are families of children, parents and grandparents, and they are rarely safe. Death surrounds them. War takes its victims. They have hopes and dreams, and they find real comfort in each other in their homes and communities. Some believe in the need for revolution and others in the need for negotiation and peace. ‘They mean to erase us from the face of the earth. This is one continuous tale of dispossession and displacement’.

- Of course we think of today's wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and the ugliness of both, but Kassab is careful not to tread on that ground. She generalises and focuses on the individuals caught up in mundane, day to day routines, and their hopes and dreams. But her insights are often profound, and her prose engrossing. 

- One section of the book is titled 1973, where we explore the life of the delightful Salma. She's full of anxieties but she does stuff. She learns to fish, drives to the countryside for a day, travels overseas with Zahra and bores her friends telling them about it later, her nephew Dawood is a bragger, she dreams of the dead, she regrets not emigrating overseas - free education, free hospitals, etc, she can’t afford to buy groceries, the war has stopped but is there peace although there are elections, she resists engaging in politics now, is she a sellout, Ahmed proposed but she declined. ‘There was a war. It broke over them. They never found their way back and they did not find whatever it was they each privately wished for…Her life has momentum but no direction…’ 

- There are many short stories of seemingly unrelated events, but the prime focus is always the people and how they deal with them. Although the war may be relegated to history now, its effects are still felt. 

- Kassab has the gift of forcing you to confront these seemingly simple but profoundly meaningful lives with their rhythms and memories. 

There are many bodies buried in this ground.

   Some of the dead are only bones.

   Others are more recent. Their burial was hurried, done in 

the dark, ground covered so it did not appear disturbed.

   I have watched for many years.

   When the world is troubled, there are more secrets to put

to sleep in the earth, in the night-time when they believe no

eyes can see.

   I watch. There are others - humans - who believe this park

can shelter their terror and their dreams.

  There is always the watcher, one of lightness on the right,

the scribe of darkness on the left, and then the Great One who

not even the smallest detail escapes.

  The world may not see. There may be no witness in the

living but the record is always kept. The weight of history is

layers, and it does not disappear, no matter how oblivious 

is humanity.

- When reading this novel you may be tempted to bail at times, but stay with it. It's well worth it. 

John Gray, The New Leviathans

 

-This new book by celebrated British political philosopher John Gray is highly provocative and challenging. It's a critique of contemporary liberalism in the West, and also of Russia's and China's global ambitions. 

- He bases his analysis on philosopher Thomas Hobbes's treatise Leviathan which was published in 1651. It was condemned and attacked then as a defence of atheism and heresy. Copies were publicly burnt by Oxford University and calls for Hobbes's execution for blasphemy were made. Today Leviathan is universally regarded as a classic work that continues to inspire and explain much of today's decaying world.    

- One thing I liked about Gray's book is that, although he frequently references other scholars and thinkers in an academic style, he never shies away from confidently expressing his own opinions: Western elites are renouncing tolerance in much the same way pagan elites abandoned their old gods. If the process continues, liberal freedoms will soon be forgotten, along with the world in which they were practised.

- He explores in detail the contrasts between Russia and China and the West, their history and ambitions, and his opinions are often confronting: 

The European Union is not an emerging super-state but a crypto-state lacking any military capacity to defend itself. Once the American security guarantee is withdrawn, the EU will be seen for what it is: a geo-strategic vacuum.  

The resurgence of geopolitics has been accompanied by the return of the planet as a deciding force in human events. Climate change and pandemic diseases destroyed [former empires]...wiped out by overpopulation, drought and resource wars. The belief that humans can escape dependency on the natural world is a modern conceit. 

Conceivably, global warming may occur at a rate that makes adaptation impossible...the Anthropocene is coming to an end. Humankind is ceasing to be central in the life of the planet, so that life itself may go on.  

- His stance on wokeness is controversial. He diagnoses it as hyper-liberalism, which rejects the necessary compromises. It is not enough for avowed enemies to be defeated. Hidden heretics must be hunted out, tormented and destroyed. The opportunity for persecution is one of the attractions of hyper-liberalism....The inquisitions staged on Western campuses are a mark of advancing barbarism...If it does not blunder into a global war to restore its lost hegemony, the US may drift on, a florid hybrid of fundamentalist sects, woke cults and techno-futurist oligarchs.

- Gray's book is certainly worth reading. It offers a wider scope on current disruptions and wars that we're immersed in on a daily basis, and challenges us deeply.  

Angela O’Keeffe, The Sitter

- Angela O'Keeffe has written an intriguing short novel that is both subtle and rich in meaning. Her prose is fluid and immensely readable, and I therefore read it twice. It was so good. 

- The fundamental premise is at first strange and slightly off-putting, but it doesn't take long to figure it out and hence get absorbed by the unfolding story. Hortense Cezanne, the wife of the famous French painter Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), who painted his wife's portrait  twenty-nine times, is talking to us about the author of a novel centred on Hortense herself. She refers to her as 'the writer'. She's in the same room as this writer, sitting next to her, and voicing her thoughts. 

- We're in Covid lockdown times in Sydney, Brisbane and Paris. Hortense is intrigued as she remembers the Spanish Flu in Europe a hundred or so years ago. 

- The writer has a daughter, Rebecca, and they are often in contact, personally and by email and phone. They have a lovely relationship. Although there are secrets. The writer adopts the pseudonym of 'Georgia O'Keeffe' to record the truths about her life and marriage, and Hortense's as well. Both women were effected by patriarchal values, amounting to abject sexism and abuse.  

- As Hortense admits at one point: Through it all my husband painted, and I kept house. Because of financial restraints we didn't always have paid help; I did the cooking, the cleaning and the washing of his workspace, his clothes, his paintbrushes; I wrote letters to his dealer to organise the sale of paintings; I was his assistant, his housekeeper, his secretary, his lover, his model and...his muse. We were not equals. He had the power to throw me out on my ear, the power to never give me another franc; at a certain point he changed his will and disinherited me, though by the end of his life he'd made sure that I would receive something. And yet. 

- Georgia had a baby as a young high school girl. She had sex with a boyfriend in the back seat of a car, and was sent by her Irish-Catholic parents to an institution run by nuns. The newborn was forcibly removed from her. Later in life she refused to have children with her husband. She chose divorce instead. ‘I want the baby I had.’ 

- Death is also a focus, including of children. And marriages. Our lives are filled with emblems of loss, and they continue to reverberate in us, and sometimes, after years, they can bring us undone. 

- O'Keeffe has written a beautiful and meaningful novel which I know I will read again.

 

Anne Michaels, Held

- In brilliant and poetic prose, this new and relatively short novel from celebrated Canadian author Anne Michaels offers us a quite challenging meditation on what it means to be human. There's a deep, underlying mysteriousness to all of our journeys and the connections we have to nature and to each other, the ‘…ideas of the visible and invisible, and the rules of space and time’. 

- The novel is a paean to love in many ways, particularly family love, and the homes, careers, belongings and memories that bind us together. Interestingly, all the couples featured over four generations are deeply in love. There are no divorces or separations, and friendships are lasting. 

- Quite surprisingly, however, a major theme in the novel is war. I've not read a more powerful description of the ugliness of war than this: 

To the historian, every battlefield is different; to the philosopher, every battlefield is the same. War has ever redefined the battlefield; we no longer pretend to fight on designated ground, instead recognise the essential substratum where war has always been fought: exactly where we live, exactly where we have always believed we were sheltered, even sacredly so, the places we sleep and wake, feed ourselves, love each other - the apartment block, the school, the nursing home - citizens ingesting the blast and instantly cast in micronised concrete, rigid as ancient Pompeiians in volcanic ash. Snipers, barrel bombs. The strategic bombing of hospitals, to prove how senseless it is to save lives in a war zone, senseless as stopping up a hole in the hull of a ship at the bottom of the sea. What history is war writing in our bodies now? War fought by citizens whose muscles have never before held a gun or passed a child overhead, hand to hand, to a mother in a train car crammed immobile with refugees. The war being written in these bodies, in this child's body....A man's brain spraying across your face. A baby in the womb, a bullet hole in its forehead. Exsanguination. Decapitation. The physics of ballistics in human bone and tissue. Soldiers praying for a successful massacre. 

- Michaels' characters often reflect deeply on other contentious issues that characterised the 20th century and still do today - refugees, oppressive authoritarian regimes, and the struggle for women's equality.  

- This superb review of the novel by Leah Kaminsky in The Age is worth reading.

 

Jhumpa Lahiri, Roman Stories

 

- This new book by Jhumpa Lahiri is a collection of short stories set mostly in Rome. Her last book in 2021 was a novel, Whereabouts, also set in Rome. I reviewed it very positively here. The two have a distinct flavour. Lahiri is a chronicler of the everyday. 

- In Roman Stories she focuses on marriages, children, daily incidents, families, food, immigrants, and inevitably, racism. Gently and suggestively she infuses meaning into the mundane. There are lots of reflections on life and its vicissitudes. The perspective is often from middle aged women. They know stuff.

- An element I found frustrating at first was her refusal to locate. Nations, races, individuals, cities, suburbs, and towns are all unnamed. People are  ‘…from another continent’, a character liked ‘…music from my country’. The closest she gets to naming individuals are giving them initials like P, F, or S. This of course helps to universalise her essential focus, but I'm not sure it works. Irritating a reader is hardly wise. 

- There's quite a bit of death and racial abuse in the stories, and many of the characters have very low level, service industry jobs, again branding them as immigrants. There are also authors and academics, but interestingly, these people are usually Westerners, from Italy or 'across the Atlantic', presumably the US. 

-Some of the stories, or parts of longer stories, are powerful and beautiful. Others immerse us in ugly realism. Rebellious teenagers, for example, roam around at night and leave smashed bottles on steps, shoot pellets, assault strangers on streets and rob them. The 'steps' I think are the Spanish Steps, a place of majesty, ancient history and beauty. 

Pip Adam, The New Animals

 

- Pip Adam's The New Animals was originally published in New Zealand in 2017, and has just been released in a handsome new US edition by small publisher Dorothy, A Publishing Project. Having loved Audition, Adam's 2023 novel (which I reviewed here), I felt propelled to get into this, her earlier one. 

- Frankly, I loved it more, if that were possible. It is truly an extraordinary work. There is so much going on in it. It's an immersion in the rawness of ordinary life and its demands and tensions, but at the same time it takes a much wider, more challenging view of human society and its contemporary crises. Adam seems to be suggesting that it's over. Yes, it's that brutal. 

- Her novel explores themes of isolation and connection and despair. We are introduced to a small group of workers in the fashion industry and the contractors they hire to help them design and release a new line of clothing. There's a lot of detail about their personal interactions, frustrations and sex lives. 

- Tommy runs the company. He's ambitious but across detail and smart. A natural leader. Carla, the hairdresser, preparing models for the launch, is a generation older, as are her colleagues. There is real tension between the two generations. Tommy sees it clearly: His generation was expected to fix everything…These forty-five-year old hairdressers and pattern cutters. None of them had ever grown up. They were too busy whining and revolting. It was up to him and his friends...Carla  thought she was living the self-determined life, but she wasn’t. None of them had the money to do that. It was money.

- Adam sprinkles some fabulous observations throughout: That seemed to be the most important factual commodity these days - Anecdote, Opinion. Feeling. The American people were sick of experts.

- The final third of the novel takes us to a whole new place. It focuses on Elodie, the young makeup artist. She and Carla's vicious dog walk towards the sea late at night. The dog runs off and is never seen again (thankfully). Elodie, suicidal, sinks into calm water and seemingly transforms into a sea creature. She's surrounded by plastics and all sorts of discarded rubbish, witnessing rising sea levels, and eventually landing on an ‘island of rubbish'.

- So the ending is a real punch in the gut. We go from hope to planet doom. Adam is merciless, but she's offered us a thought-provoking novel of real depth and meaning. 

Hwang Bo-Reum, Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop

- This novel was a recent best-seller in Korea and has now been translated into English by Singaporean translator Shanna Tan. It's an absolutely delightful read, and full of deep insights into Korean society, work and marriage. It could be summarised as a reflection on what makes for a happy life. 

- It's also a critique of today's common workplace practices, like casuals versus permanents. 

- Yeongju resigns in frustration from her meaningless corporate career and starts a bookshop in a suburb of Seoul. She's had no experience in the book trade, but has always been an enthusiastic reader. It takes a while for her to realise what's needed to make a bookshop successful. She starts on that journey, and it's detailed and very credible. 

- First up she hires a barista and pays him well. He befriends the coffee beans supplier and they have detailed discussions about the art of making topnotch coffee (I learnt so much from that!). 

- A few other support staff are hired and regular events like book clubs and author presentations scheduled. The customer base increases. Discussions on work, happiness, career demands, personal relationships, marriage, and divorce are vigorous and enlightening. Those discussions give the book enormous power. 

- There is so much more to this book than what I've briefly described here. It's full of richness and depth that makes for a highly satisfying read.