Most Australians have a view about Alan Joyce, the current CEO of Qantas. He's either a fucking little Irish runt who's sapped the life out of a 90 year old iconic Australian-owned airline, or a smart energetic leader unafraid to take on the huge task of dragging a failing company into the 21st century.
During my reading of journalist Matt O'Sullivan's absorbing new book I veered from one extreme to the other, but by the end I was neither. I was sort of stuck in the middle, having developed a lot more respect for airline CEOs trying to operate successfully today in a crazy, endlessly battered industry.
At the young age of 42 Joyce succeeded a much older and more experienced Geoff Dixon who was CEO in the early 2000s. Dixon had it good. The 2001 collapse of Ansett early in his term handed Qantas a 90% share of the Australian domestic market on a platter and enabled it to book strong and steady profits for a decade. Joyce on the other hand had to immediately confront the global financial crisis in 2008 which blew away so much highly profitable corporate travel; had to contend with the freeing up of the Australian market for foreign airlines, particularly low cost Middle East and Asian giants; had to fight off an emerging Virgin Airlines which was majority owned by cashed up and hungry giants like Singapore Airlines, Etihad and Air New Zealand; had to deal with record high oil prices; and had to wrestle with the Qantas Act, a regulatory framework that limited foreign investment to 49%.
Qantas was being hammered on all fronts. How Qantas management dealt with all this is a business story with many dimensions - strategic, financial, operational and political. Not the least of these is the disastrous industrial relations drama that Joyce engineered in October 2011 when he suddenly grounded the entire Qantas fleet, stranding 100,000 passengers around the world, all because he couldn't negotiate a successful outcome with a range of union leaders representing ground staff, engineers and pilots. It was the 'thermo-nuclear option' and was a kick in the face to loyal customers, many of whom have never flown Qantas since.
O'Sullivan is a senior business journalist for Fairfax and has reported on Qantas and the airline industry for decades. His book is full of behind-the-scenes detail and drama as he's obviously had access to countess insiders over the years.
If you're into business books, as I am, you will enjoy this well-written and researched tale immensely.
This is Andrew Keen's third book about how awful the Internet is. I read his first, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture, when it was published in 2007, and enjoyed it immensely. It was a passionate and well written manifesto proclaiming the virtues of publishers, editors, broadcasters, film makers, journalists and other professional content producers, commonly known as gate-keepers. Their roles were necessary and critically important. As a publisher I was sold. The book had a lot of critics though, but I wasn't one of them. They said it reeked of elitism, but I was part of that elite.
Since then however the Internet has come a long way and inflicted massive social and economic change well beyond the cultural sphere. Keen would have changed the word 'change' in that sentence to 'damage'. Everything about the Internet, in his view, is just plain wrong. Here's where I part company. He's gone way over the top.
The Internet Is Not The Answer is so incredibly one-sided, so one-dimensional, it's virtually impossible to take it seriously.
From the title onwards it's a disaster. Keen is all snark, a prim, professional sneerer, seemingly antagonistic for personal reasons to the Internet as it demolished his music business fifteen or so years ago.
He seizes upon every possible negative, providing example after example of the detritus the huge tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Uber, Airbnb and others have left in their wake. He visits Rochester in upstate New York, the former home of the former huge corporation Kodak, now a hollowed-out industrial wasteland, and that image permeates the book: 'Rather than just a city it's the whole economy that is losing it's centre. For all of Silicon Valley's claims that the Internet has created more equal opportunity and distribution of wealth, the new economy actually resembles a donut - with a gaping hole in the middle where, in the old industrial system, millions of workers were once paid to manufacture valuable products.'
Keen really has fun with the entrepreneurial founders of the huge tech companies, now all billionaires with their oval-sized yachts and $50 million houses. They are hostile to trade unions, taxation and regulation, and Amazon in particular cops it for its harsh, inhuman treatment of its warehouse workers. None of this is original, nor particularly significant in the global scheme of things.
Keen swallows hook, line and sinker all the copyright owner anti-piracy narratives and numbers dished up on a regular basis to governments and agencies but universally panned as over-the-top and unreliable by independent economists. He becomes particularly exercised by music piracy, and streaming services like Spotify and Pandora who pay paltry royalties to their lifeblood, the artists. Not one single thing about today's music business is good. It's all a 'catastrophe'.
Every snippet of bad is cherry-picked to support the depressing picture.
There is an old Latin saying: Abusus non tollit usum - the abuse of something doesn't detract from the use of it. Every major and worthwhile policy, initiative, reform or innovation has a dark side, a downside, an ugly side. This insight never enters Keen's head and his book is fatally weakened by that.
Nevertheless, the final chapters of the book are excellent. They focus on the uncontroversially ugly side of these powerful Internet companies - their partnership with government spying agencies in illegal surveillance and their massive and continuing breaches of privacy. Keen also serves it up to Uber, a truly disgraceful company on every level. I really enjoyed that.
After all the demolition work the reader is anxious to know what Keen thinks should be done. Technology can't be un-invented. So?
He calls for far more and tighter regulation. 'The answer is to use the law and regulation to force the Internet out of its prolonged adolescence'. As well, monoliths like Google should be broken up and Amazon should be vigorously pursued by the Department of Justice to curb its overwhelming market power. Bold politicians need to rise to the occasion.
Frankly, it all seems a rather lame fix to all the negatives we've been served up thoughout this intensely depressing book.
If you haven't heard or read people raving about these brilliant Italian novels then you're either living on the moon or a complete moron - shame on you!
First published in their Italian versions in 2012 and 2013, and well-translated and published in English a year later, these three are part of a four book series to be completed in 2015.
Belonging to the genre of confessional fiction - part autobiography, part fiction - Ferrante tells the story of the intense friendship between Lila and Elena as they grow up in a poverty stricken neighbourhood in Naples mid last century and develop into strong, fiercely independent women confronting the challenges of love, sex, bad marriages, children, work, frustration, exploitation and desperation.
It's a relationship exquisitely dissected with surgical precision. But there's so much more to the story than this. The setting is Naples but it could be any provincial Italian town or neighbourhood. The men, the parents, the powerful families and their businesses, the limited job opportunities and abusive workplace conditions, the schools and teachers, the ambitions and aspirations, the ignorance, the stunted lives, the vulgarity, the emergence of the middle class, the destructive power of love and passion. It's all there and more, and the story is beautifully told. And as it unfolds it becomes more and more encompassing, fascinating and thoroughly absorbing.
It's the drama of our post-war development. It's a story of political and social development, ugly domestic violence, poverty, power, unions, class division, privilege, influence, sexism, abuse. Friendships are riven by the passionate tapestry of Italian politics: the Christian Democrats, the Communists, the Fascists, the youthful rebellion of the 1960's and terrorism. Running through all this are the personal narratives: the confronting relationships, the lovers, the marriages, and importantly the underlying drama of Nino - his beauty, intelligence and sexual attraction: 'the swift, brilliant, even cruel aggressions of Nino Sarratore, my schoolmate, my friend, born in the neighbourhood, like me.'
This is a rich, hard nosed, critical, unsentimental, unforgiving, relentless, dynamic and frequently savage story of ordinary but proud people in a proud and passionate country desperately searching for a way forward or a way out.
I can't wait for the final book in the series.
(Dear publisher: These books have been copy-edited by a comma-illiterate editor: the run-on commas in virtually every second sentence of the first book are annoying. The second and third volumes are not so bad).
The covers are uninspiring too. The same female model is used for all three books and the reader has no way of knowing whether it's meant to be Lina or Elena. And it matters because their physical appearance is frequently described throughout the series. It all could have been done much better.)
I read about 50 books this past year, 20 or so less than I usually get through. (I went to France for three months in the middle of the year and spent most of that time walking around Paris and driving around Provence).
So here are my favourites, in no particular order:
FICTION
I'm a great fan of Martin Amis so any new book by this superb writer I read immediately. This year he released of The Zone of Interest set in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. It received a few ordinary reviews but they were misreads - oversensitive and dull minded. It's at the top of my list.
Another one of my favourites, Ian McEwan, released The Children Act. McEwan frequently writes short novels, almost novellas, and they are always gems. He brings a searing focus to seemingly unremarkable everyday events and brings them intensely alive. This was one of those. And he takes very seriously people's working lives, investing them with high drama. Magnificent.
Michel Faber's The Book of Strange New Things was extraordinarily good. Set on a far away planet this was a savage and brilliantly written critique of Earth and its tiresome inhabitants. He pulled it off.
Any new book by Jacobson is a must read for me. (This has been a year for English novelists it seems). J was new territory for this writer who usually immerses himself in domestic Jewish dramas and polemics, often comical, but it was absolutely sensational. Large in scope, imagination and meaning. I loved it.
Irish author Colm Toibin's Nora Webster was superb. It's the story of an intelligent strong-minded woman struggling to raise four kids after her husband dies, and attempting to fashion a new, satisfying, independent and meaningful life for herself. Toibin writes so well about women bound by the provincial and stultifying strictures of a Catholic post-war Ireland. Episodic but dramatic, and in the background the Troubles are emerging. I am so in love with the feisty Nora Webster.
US writer Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See was a totally unexpected literary and commercial success this year. It took everyone in the industry by surprise, particularly his publisher. Sales have gone through the roof (as described here). When I read it I saw immediately why. Its two central characters are young adults during the war years of the early 1940's, a French girl and a German boy. It's got exactly the same appeal as The Book Thief and Jasper Jones, huge successes internationally. I absolutely loved this book. It's an instant classic.
I finally read Italian author Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, the first in her four-book Neapolitan saga about the intertwining lives and loves of two female friends growing up and living adult lives in backwards Naples in the 20th century. I was hooked. It was astonishing and I've now started on book 2 and will immediately get onto book 3, recently published. (Neapolitan males - ugh. I giovanni sono cosi stupidi!)
Australian author Wayne Macauley's Demons rightly establishes him as perhaps Australia's greatest contemporary author. That's a big statement I know, but I've become so irritated with the predictably effusive praise lavished on our 'greats' like Tim Winton and Peter Carey - who in no way deserve it now if they certainly did once - that it's such a joy to find an author like Macauley producing such fine work. Demons is rich and meaningful in so many ways. A book to debate endlessly. A treat for book clubs.
Finally, a book that was released in April 2013 to no real fanfare. Then it surprisingly won the Prime Minister's Award for 2014 a few weeks ago, shared with Richard Flanagan's very worthy A Narrow Road to the Deep North. I'm talking of Steven Carroll's A World of Other People. Another World War Two setting - this time in London during the blitz. A young Australian bomber pilot falls in love with an English girl possibly modelled on Iris Murdoch, but their relationship is sadly brought undone by the tragedy of war. This is the second of Carroll's novels that features the poet T. S. Eliot and that contrasts his 'thin-lipped' conservative vision with the destructive passion of young love and energy, as a new post-war era emerges. As Iris reflects:
This is them, the army of the miserable. Look at them, no wild emotions to carry them away. No runaway horses in their hearts. No forbidden words to quietly mouth in the privacy of their rooms as if having personally discovered them. Look at them, and she smiles faintly to herself as she crosses with the lights and pronounces farewell judgement: look at them - cuntless, cockless, and fuckless, the whole miserable bunch.
This is a very fine work indeed. Subtle, nuanced, immeasurably sad and well worth the PM's prize.
NON-FICTION
Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Capital is my pick for the outstanding non-fiction book of the year (my review of it is here). As with any economic critique that attacks some pretty basic dynamics underpinning our experience of capitalism in the West today, it has not ceased to rile the conservative establishment who are still squealing like stuck pigs (see this).
Any book by Michael Lewis is a must-read if you want to fathom the rules and behaviour governing the new and powerful financial class. Lewis writes lucidly about abstruse topics and brings them alive by making them personal and dramatic. This is an immensely enjoyable and informative book.
These two books about the whole Edward Snowden saga were just superb, particularly Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide. Greenwald absolutely skewers much of the mainstream press for its ignorant, prejudiced and cowardly attacks on Snowden. It's a delicious read.
Of the three books published about Fairfax over the last two years this is probably the best (although the other two, Colleen Ryan's Fairfax: The Rise and Fall, which focuses on the board and ownership machinations, and Pamela Williams' Killing Fairfax about how James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch stole the classifieds from under their noses, are wonderfully enlightening reads too). Hills focuses on the management, whose strategy seemed to be - and in fact still is - the one the US military used to great effect (irony alert!) during the Vietnam war: 'destroy the village in order to save it'.
New Yorker magazine correspondent Evan Osnos' Age of Ambition won the 2014 US National Book Award for nonfiction. It's an extremely fascinating and very enlightening portrait of modern China, focusing on the social and economic lives of ordinary Chinese citizens. It's a bit lacking on the economic analysis front, which I found frustrating, but is otherwise rich in insight. Osnos is fluent in Chinese and lived and travelled widely throughout the country for ten years. An extremely enlightening read.
Wayne Macauley's previous novel, The Cook, published in 2012, was extraordinary in every way. I absolutely loved it. It was resonant with meaning on multiple levels and the evil it depicted was as exquisite as the food its affluent, urban characters consumed.
In his new novel Demons Macauley deepens and broadens his focus beyond skewering the morally bankrupt inner city creative and professional elites. Their vacuous lifestyle, prejudices and beliefs are a bit too easy a target, so he moves well beyond that to engage in a more philosophical rumination about the shared social fabric that sustains us and the destructive forces that can bring it undone.
A group of well off, middle aged friends go away to a large isolated house for a weekend, without phones and computers. They of course take plenty of gourmet food and wine, and they take it in turn to tell stories about real people and their fates. These stories, all fascinating and dramatic, are the heart of the book and its meaning. All but one of the half a dozen or so stories are true and have death at their centre. (The one that is not true doesn't).
Macauley exposes the deep and dark abyss - the 'dirty great gaping hole' - under the necessary courtesies, protocols and basic moralities of our social construct. By breaching these necessary constraints we descend not just into an immoral decadence but into chaos and madness. This is a very Australian theme. (It also underpins, incidentally, every Stanley Kubrick film, which is why they are so visceral and powerful).
Macauley also reflects on the nature of stories as bonding narratives, providing meaning, order and community, and whether 'truth' can be as destructive as physical assault if it's simply a reckless indulgence.
Australian literary critic James Ley has a long and very positive review of this novel in the latest issue of the Sydney Review of Books (here), but unfortunately he offers a fairly limited psychological/sociological reading and doesn't go to the deeper moral and metaphysical dimension. He also sees it as generational, claiming the young daughter of the politician is some sign of a more hopeful and responsible generation to come. Nothing could be further from the truth. She's as destructive and morally cold as her parents, using cruel trolling as her modern weapon.
So what we have here is one of the best Australian novels of 2014. It is superb.
I've long been a fan of Howard Jacobson's work. He is a superb, probing writer whose prose sparkles with wit and comic exaggeration.
J, his latest novel, is far from being comic however. It was shortlisted for the Booker in 2014, and had it have won it would have been a very worthy winner indeed. It is a remarkable, serious and challenging fictional exploration of a society in deep decay.
It's a melancholy meditation on history, community, family, and impoverished, stunted lives, all framed by Jacobson's continuing critique of Jewishness in all its vitality and social contribution down the ages.
We're introduced to a society of our time but denuded of all the splattered mud of history and development. A 'colossal social experiment undertaken to restore stability' has been put in place by a bureaucratic organisation called Ofnow, a 'monitor of the Public Mood'. Their job is to suppress memories of the holocaust referred to only as WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED. They try to manage and purify in the interests of harmony and well-being, and their tools are constant vigilance and surveillance. It is Orwellian in the extreme.
The novel is an intellectual and psychological exploration of Jewishness and hatred: '..those who had been the object of WHAT HAPPENED weren't just any old, interchangeable excuse for civil riot, they occupied a particular, even privileged, place in the nation's taxonomy of fear and loathing'.
Gradually Ofnow realises they've gone too far. Endless expressions of 'Sorrow' are backfiring. Raw human passion, prejudice and manifest evil can't be eliminated. The process must be better and more subtly managed. A society needs a deep and palpable enemy so a new and more insidious program is initiated - the rebirth of the Jew. 'What happened thereafter was a common tale of history repeating itself, one generation after another passing down its inheritance of shame.'
But there were positives: an 'excitement at the prospect of a cultural rebirth - musicals with wit, reject-rock, hellishly sardonic comedies, an end to ballads...'
The intellectual richness of this novel cannot be overstated. On virtually every page Jacobson gives us long passages dense with meaning. You will want to read them over and over again to suck out all they suggest.
Truly, a superb piece of work.
Here is the big book you should read over the Xmas/New Year holiday season. It is simply magnificent.
It is such a rich, multi-dimensional novel: full of meaning and suggestion, which deepens its focus as it proceeds. Faber serves up a wealth of challenging ideas embedded in an absorbing narrative. And he seduces with beautiful, clear, silken prose.
The plot is simple enough. Peter is a Christian missionary selected to join a team of specialists housed in an enclosed facility on a distant planet. They are employed by a mysterious corporate outfit called USIC. Indigenous 'aliens' also inhabit the planet.
Peter is an embarrassingly unsophisticated God-botherer. Naive, simple-minded, and constantly sprouting theologically insipid, sentimental claptrap. Some readers will be put off by this, which is unfortunate as there is a substantial point to it which becomes clear as the novel proceeds. His job as part of the team is to venture beyond the complex to befriend and 'civilise' the natives so they cooperate and continue to grow food for the colonisers.
Peter's wife, Bea (Beatrice), was disallowed by USIC from joining him on his mission. They communicate via email. As the narrative progresses these brilliantly written emails become the heart and soul of the book, and paint the passionate and increasingly feral Bea as a riveting fictional creation. There is enormous drama in their relationship. They love each other with an extreme, perhaps questionable, intensity.
USIC's residents, including Peter, were all damaged people in their previous lives - drug addicts, alcoholics, petty criminals, beggars, abusers. They couldn't handle the rough and tumble of the world and USIC provided an escape. The notion of escape develops as a major theme, suggesting too that god belief is little more than a vacuous coping mechanism, a psychological crutch.
Some readers will question the way the novel ends, perhaps with a whimper rather a bang. But in my view it is perfect. Perfectly real.
I can't recommend this fascinating novel highly enough.
