My top books for 2016: five literary fiction; five non-fiction; four popular fiction.

FICTION

Howard Jacobson: Shylock is my Name

How could I go past another Jacobson. Here he exhibits his usual penetrating insight into the male of the species, especially the anxious, older, Jew. He's always ruminating on Jewishness but his insights are glorious and his writing has a wondrous fluency.

This novel is essentially a dialogue between religious and secular Jews that celebrates both but essentially confirms the religious. And I love his usual vexatious interrogation of Christianity.

Han Kang: The Vegetarian

This superb novel won the International Booker prize earlier this year. It's a subtle and nuanced meditation on men, women and relationships in a conservative society. And a devastating portrayal of severe mental illness and social isolation.

But most importantly it's a savage critique of the provincialism of South Korea and its backward social conventions and laws. Why are arty but otherwise sane people kept in police cells for months awaiting legal processes and enquiries to unfold before they can be rightfully released? What's so new and worrying about being a fucking vegetarian?

We see a constipated society that can't deal with resistance or individuality or art or the deep rhythms of human existence. And shamefully can't deal with depression.

Kang has written a very powerful and mesmerising novel in beautiful, spare, but poetic prose.

Jock Serong: The Rules of Backyard Cricket

I was absolutely bowled over (sorry) by this book. It's an excellent story, beautifully written. Two cricket stars are brothers and have a very tense relationship.

Australian cricket is full of brothers of course: the Chappells (Ian/Greg) and the Waughs (Steve/Mark) being the best known. In this story one is an insufferable, conscientious prig and health freak, the other a gregarious party animal, druggie and gambler. They never connect of course.

They are propelled and ultimately captured by anger, but in opposite ways: controlling it or giving in to it. 

It ends in tragedy and strikes exactly the right note. This is a wonderful and superb achievement.

Graeme Macrae Burnet: His Bloody Project

This was shortlisted for this year's Booker prize. It's a marvellous and gripping story about the awful, hard, and unforgiving lives of the 19th century peasant class in Scotland.

It's presented as a factual account of a brutal murder but it's fiction, superbly and sympathetically rendered.

Two supposed memoirs are presented to the jury. One from the prosecution is an obnoxious piece of ugly, ignorant, insulting, pompous, snobbish, haughty, arrogant, pretentious drivel, demeaning '..the lower tribes of our country'. The other, from the accused, a humble well written account of what happened and why. 

I, accurately of course, predicted this would not win the Booker, being nowhere near deep or meaningful enough, nevertheless it's a superb read. And it will make you angry, and I love books that make one angry.

Emma Donoghue: The Wonder

This is Donoghue's follow up to the highly applauded Room, and it is absolutely fucking brilliant.

It's deliciously anti-Catholic, anti-piety, anti provincial religious nonsense. It's about an eleven year old Irish girl in the 1860's who has seemingly - and that word is important - refused to eat food for four months, but, until the final two weeks, stays alive and well and healthy. The village is celebrating a 'miracle'.

Of course the stupid kid would be force-fed in today's medical world - taken to hospital, drip fed and provided with psychiatric help.

In our Trumpian, post-truth age this story resonates. It's a study of delusion. What people want to believe dictating what reality they 'see'.

It condemns the criminal irresponsibility of the family, carers and authorities (the 'committee men') and the cruel insipidity of their pious religious beliefs.

It's a celebration of truth, fact, rationality and sense. There's a nice love story in there too.

NON-FICTION

Helen Garner: Everywhere I Look

Who doesn't love Helen Garner? Her lovely, translucent prose with the regular stunning phrase or description ('the golf course...and its hoses sprinkling bridal veils of spray..').

This is writing at once plain and vivid, filled with acute insight into human feelings and emotions.

Garner is fascinated as usual by crimes, court processes and outcomes. 'What people find really hard to bear is the suggestion that they themselves might contain their share of human darkness, hidden inside their souls.' 

'Sometimes it seems to me that, in the end, the only thing people have got going for them is imagination. At times of great darkness, everything around us becomes symbolic, poetic, archetypal. Perhaps this is what dreaming, and art, are for'.

Buy it.

Maxine Beneba Clarke: The Hate Race

What a magnificent memoir this is. It immerses the reader in the pain of ugly racism.

A young girl's struggle is so powerfully articulated. We feel for her; we ARE her; we become angry at the vicious, cruel racism perpetrated openly and insidiously.

She suffers emotionally, psychologically and physically at school and as an adult. The racism is always there. 

Clarke's prose is crisp and clean, with a constant drumbeat: 'This is how it changes us. This is how we're altered'; 'This is how it happened. Or else what's a story for'; 'When I gather the threads in my fingers, this is how they weave'; 'This is how it haunts us. This is how it stalks'. (193).

The bullying in High School is particularly ugly: '...there was an unfathomable brokenness somewhere inside of me..' And the teachers called it 'teasing'! 'You'll have to get used to it'.

The blurb on the back cover calls this book 'funny'. Jesus.

Andrew J Bacevich: America's War for the Greater Middle East - A Military History

The US strategy in the Middle East has always been a combination of ignorance, naïveté and Wild West gunslinger swagger - in other words bullshit all the way. Best-selling author Andrew Bacevich, a retired professor of history and international relations at Boston University and former US army military officer, has written a thoroughly researched, fascinating and highly lauded account of the West's strategic and military failures in the Middle East, what he calls 'the pernicious legacy of Western imperialism'. 

It is just riveting. The history and religion of the region has countered for little. From the disaster of Lebanon in '82, the intervention in Libya, the Iraq-Iran war, the Iran/Kuwait failure, the Somalia disaster, the Afghanistan invasion ('an exercise in strategic irrelevance'), the Iraq invasion ('an attempt to change the way they live), Petraeus's absurd 'surge' ('a pseudo-event'), and more - Basevich offers us an unparalleled historical tour de force. 

Volker Ullrich: Hitler, a Biography

This remarkable book, a best-seller in Germany when it was first published in 2013, is a landmark, utterly compelling achievement. Once again, in this age of Trump and ignorant, racist populism, we need to be reminded that 'Hitler was only able to launch his second political career because his adversaries criminally underestimated him'.

The Great Depression hit Germany particularly hard. The people demanded 'a strong man'. 'Few traditional conservatives were...prescient. Most...believed the Nazi leader could be kept in check'.

There is such a strong narrative drive to this book that it's impossible to skip over even the dense historical bits that you'll never remember later.

The assemblage of quotes from observers of events is powerful and telling. And yes, it is so heartening to read the contemporary critics of Hitler and his Nazi initiatives who were so prescient, courageous, and ultimately of course proved right. 

Clementine Ford: Fight Like a Girl

Yes, I read this and absolutely loved it! This is feminism in the trenches. A wonderful, angry, ferocious, inspiring read. Highly recommended.

There are annoying bits: there's a touch of 70's radicalism in the theory: easy, simplistic, absolutist, hardly nuanced; the constant references to 'cisgendered' women is unnecessary and boring; it's poorly edited (the world population is now 7.4 billion, not 'six billion'!); there's no index or author photo (inexcusable); the standard condemnations of patriarchy reflect rather amateur social and sexual analyses and conceptual overreach ('..another tool developed by thousands of years of patriarchy to deflect our attention away from trying to destroy it').

But this all pales as the book proceeds and the vigor of the language takes hold ('the bourdoir holy-pokey'; 'anti-women banana brains'). And the chapter on online abuse ('Hate Male') is superb.

Make no mistake. This is a very worthy best-seller and a must read. 

POPULAR FICTION

Adrian McKinty: Rain Dogs

Inspector Duffy's dealings and conversations with his police colleagues are always a delight. They're witty, often crude, always robust. He detests these anal retentives, and his insults flavour the novels deliciously. This fourth novel in the series doesn't quite have as many juicy ones as the last one but they're all just so satisfying.

And there's Jimmy Saville and the British establishment to boot. Very pleasing.

I love the short sharp sentences and phrases like jotted notes. They give rawness to the style that keeps the pace flowing.

There's great drama at the end, providing a good and satisfying resolution. 

There's a fifth in the series coming early next year. If you haven't got into McKinty yet, get a life.

Mark Lamprell: The Lovers' Guide to Rome

This is a lovely, romantic novel about two couples and two senior ladies in the enchanting city of Rome.

It's beautifully written, with a light touch. Very engaging indeed. We're sucked into the dynamics of love and fidelity - new, stale and old.

And Rome comes alive in all its history, majesty and wonder. 

Nice holiday reading. And better still - IT MAKES YOU WANT TO GO TO ROME!!

Jane Harper: The Dry

This is one of the most intense and absorbing crime narratives I've read in a long time. 

It's set in an Australian country town and is heaps better then Emily Maguire's An isolated Incident, also set in an Australian county town. Why such a common setting? Because they're dark, those places, and scary. I should know - I was brought up in one of them, left at 16 and have never gone back.

L.S.Hilton: Maestra

This is a delightfully anti British upper classes romp. And it's also extremely sexy, verging on the pornographic. 

Hilton knows how to write about sex. Her heroine is sassy, clever, and very sexy. A thrilling tonic for an old white male like me!

It's got an intricate plot involving the art world, the mafia, the seedy night life of Paris and Rome with all the streets, locales, shops, bars and restaurants brought to life. And a driving crime narrative to boot. 

What's not to like?

An outrageous waste of trees: Gabriel Packard's The Painted Ocean

I've complained often on this blog about quotes from famous authors on covers of new books that praise the buggery out of the 'masterpiece' you've plucked off the shelf and tempt you to buy it.

More often than not they lie. 

The endorsements for Gabriel Packard's debut The Painted Ocean come, among others, from highly regarded authors Colum McCann and Darin Strauss. This is what Strauss says: 

Gabriel Packard has written the sort of book publishers, readers, the whole world is hungry for: a thrilling and literate debut, a smart page-turner that takes your emotions and wraps them around its brutal, quick fist. I sat to read the first page of this novel and blew the rest of my weekend finishing the whole blessed thing.

Colum McCann similarly enthuses: 

A major new literary talent .... a fearless tour de force.

Well, here's my quote that prospective readers should heed:

This book is garbage, an outrageous waste of trees. It's one of the most stupid books I've read in a long time - stupid on every level. It has absolutely no merit at all. It's utter trash. Don't waste your money. Buy something else, anything.

Eleven-year-old Shruti is from a broken home in suburban England, living with her Indian mother who can't speak English. Shruti is subject to awful racism and bullying at school and is then abandoned when the mother comes under pressure from her family to return to India to remarry.

But then another Indian girl, the sassy, beautiful, street-smart Meena, a real male fantasy creation if ever there was one, turns up at the school, befriends Shruti, serves it up to the bullies and completely transforms Shruti's life. 

Shruti becomes obsessed with her, following her to high school and university. Meena invites her to join her on an adventure holiday to India. 

And then.....the book plunges from male fantasy to utter absurdity. And it gets not just ugly, but revolting. As it turns out, Meena also has  succumbed to obsession. In a cultish way she's been sucked in by a fascist, authoritarian, rapist white thug called Steve. They imprison Shruti on an isolated island off the Indian coast, where Steve brutally rapes Shruti every night before making 'love' to Meena.

So we quickly descend from disaster porn to depravity porn. It is relentless. 

Shruti eventually escapes and navigates a small, stolen fishing boat all the way back to England - seven thousand miles away!!

Where, of course, she thrives.

So we are meant to take this ridiculous narrative seriously. I tried to figure out what this so-called literary author (who thanks Peter Carey and Colum McCann 'for their invaluable advice and support') was getting at. What was his point? Is the novel anti-cult? Anti-Indian? Anti-misogyny? Anti-colonial?

No, none of these things. The book is just a tedious and shameful exercise in degeneracy.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I rarely am.
  

Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life: an extraordinary, utterly absorbing, yet painful read.

Normally I read all Booker shortlisted titles but this year that was a confronting challenge. A Little Life came highly recommended, with heaps of enthusiastic reviews, but it was 720 dense pages long.

For the last two weeks however I've been completely absorbed in it, night and day. It's easily on a level with Ferrante when it comes to obsession.

It's basically a novel of abuse, of trauma and incredible pain. It's viscerally powerful and confronting and at the same time exquisitely good.

A word of warning - it's not for the faint hearted. The author grabs you by the back of the neck and thrusts your head into a toilet bowl of depravity. You need a strong stomach. It's a Dickensian horror story for our time that I'm sure not even Dickens could bring himself to write.

It's beautifully written in smooth and lucid prose, although off-putting at times in its lugubrious and dawdling style. It's frequently wordy and gets bogged down in too much detail which irritates - slabs of prose for dozens of pages without a break. (There is an unwritten protocol governing this sort of thing in fiction. Short chapters or frequent breaks are psychologically necessary. Yanagihara ignores this).

Basically the novel is the story of Jude, a child abandoned at birth and brought up in an orphanage run by a religious order. We are all too familiar these days with what inevitably goes on in these dark and sinful places. The boy is good-looking and highly intelligent.

Slowly, as the novel progresses on its meandering way through the lives and careers of his close friends from college onwards, Jude's awful story is revealed. Yanagihara teases, entices, diverts to other stories, but she never forgets, even hundreds of pages later, to tie up the loose ends. That is so satisfying.

The book is an excellent portrayal of urban, professional, upper middle class US society, almost a sociological analysis of a privileged elite's social, economic and working lives - their country properties, their luscious apartments with expensive art adorning the walls, their constant holidays in foreign parts, their apartments in London and Rome, their theatre, opera and music, their so New York wealthy lifestyles.

It's a celebration of deep friendship and love. But such care for Jude is never enough to bury, much less eliminate, his pain. I doubt there's been any character in literature who's been shown such love and support, but to no avail. Were his years with Willem, his loving and long-term partner, totally non-salvific? The author's intricate dissection of the rich and varied emotions at play in the Jude/Willem relationship is breathtaking. Jude is a cutter. He knows it's bad, but he's desperate to ease his interior pain, and the fact it causes him such grief, including serious infections, is a perversity he can do nothing about. Neither can Willem. It's just so tragic and sad.

The novel has weaknesses, and some critics have have ripped into it for its 'sentimentality' and 'contrivance' (See Daniel Mendelsohn's controversial review in the New York Review of Books here).

There are some really annoying tics in the writing. For example the main characters are constantly saying 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry' to each other. Over a huge 720 page book which must have taken a long time to write one can forgive the author for not noticing this. But the editor? And the constant use of the expression 'off of' is annoying. However I did enjoy the narrative device of using a loose 'he' to deliberately destabilise the reader. It adds a surprising, intriguing and distancing edge to the narrative, seamlessly becoming a character's reflections rather than an authorial telling, and the reader is aware of being on uncertain ground. 

And it is often so fucking yuppie it is unbelievable. Here is a classic passage: 'They've seen very little of their friends for months now: JB has been on a fellowship in Italy for the past six months, and Malcolm and Sophie have been so busy with the construction of a new ceramics museum in Shanghai that the last time they saw them all was in April, in Paris - he was filming there, and Jude had come in from London, where he was working, and JB in from Rome, and Malcolm and Sophie had laid over for a couple of days on their way back to New York.' (609)

It verges on melodrama. They are all so clever, rich, handsome and successful. Even Jude, always in mental and physical pain, is one of New York's most brilliant and successful litigators.

Nevertheless, all these little negatives are entirely tolerable in a story of such substance and power. I can enthusiastically recommend this book.

The Marvellous A.A. Gill's Pour Me

If you're not familiar with A.A. Gill's restaurant and travel reviews then read this. Its sizzling style and panache defines the man, easily one of the world's finest journalists/critics in my humble opinion*.

His latest book, Pour Me, is the best autobiography I've read in many years, if not ever. It is a classic.

He was born into a loving family with libertarian, dissenting, argumentative parents. He was diagnosed as dyslexic when not much was known about the condition, so was sent to a 'special' boarding school (which was nothing of the sort). He survived the experience by indulgence - in books, music, protests, sex, drink and drugs, and 'good mates'.

He suffered severe alcoholism throughout his twenties. The book is unflinching in describing his descent into that hopeless, degrading, personal terror. It's an enlightening treatise on the psychology of addiction. 

Read this memoir for the exquisite writing, and the wit that sparkles on every page ('...my oldest friend Christopher...we have lunch every two or three years and consequently have remained close'. p101).

His story reminded me of the marvellous and revelatory Patrick Melrose novels by fellow English writer Edward St Aubyn. They share similar lacerating, thoroughly invigorating prose styles. 

Pour Me's narrative keeps spinning off into memories, reveries and meditations on art, music, histories, teachers, doctors, other people of influence, painters (including a lovely few pages on Turner and his virtual invention of the colour yellow), and editors and cooks ('One of the great misconceptions about dinner is that nice people make good food. That there is a soul in honest, loving dishes which are passed from the hand of the chef to the mouth of a grateful diner; that you could trust a good cook. But it's almost exactly the opposite. Great food is cooked by twisted, miserable, depressive, cruel, abused and abusive, needy, compromised and shamed people. p162).

The final chapters of the book range over his career in journalism in the heyday of newspapers and features. It's a celebration of the craft, and of editors and photographers. 

I can thoroughly recommend this wonderful book.


*This from the blurb: 'A.A. Gill is the author of A.A. Gill is Away, The Angry Island, Previous Convictions, Table Talk, Paper View, A.A. Gill is Further Away, and Golden Door, as well as two novels. He is the TV and restaurant critic and regular features writer for the Sunday Times, columnist for Esquire, and contributor to the Australian Gourmet Traveller.

Some light reads for the holidays

Irish writer Paul Murray's The Mark and the Void I just had to read because his earlier novel Skippy Dies was just so damn good. In fact it was brilliant. The guy writes with flourish and his characters are real and rounded and utterly engaging.

This one takes a bit of time to get into. By page 100 you may still be tempted to bail. It wasn't very funny and I  couldn't decide whether it was serious or satirical. Murray just wasn't striking the right note.

But then it got very interesting. The Irish, who were so full of themselves prior to the collapse, were the target and their severe economic troubles during the GFC the context. The characters work for a major Irish bank and the drama of their working lives, including the shameless bosses, the losers, the outright wankers, the government regulators, the shameful deals, scams and delusions - it's all there in colourful detail.

The main character Claude is a young, bright guy with integrity and aspirations and he yearns for a love life too. 

It all comes together delightfully in the end. And I was so glad I persevered. 

This was a bestseller in France in 2013 and was shortlisted for France's prestigious, Booker-equivalent, Prix Goncourt. The English translation has just been released.

God knows why this rather pedestrian, populist piece of nonsense would be so highly regarded. But that's France for you.

It's very French in its dynamics. It's the story of a Muslim and a Jew. Two young men share a struggle to be accepted and to succeed in their careers and reach the highest social circles. The Muslim is forced to reinvent himself and deny his Muslim origins. Moving to America he adopts the identity of his Jewish 'friend'.

It's ridiculously melodramatic and overripe at every turn. Of course the women in their lives, sexual objects, are supremely beautiful and very rich. And the men themselves very handsome and they ascend to the heights of power. 

This is cliche central. Don't bother.

The third novel in J.K.Rowling's 'Robert Galbraith' series is easily the best of the three, and you certainly don't need to have read the previous two. 

It has the same pattern: the cops pursue the wrong suspect, and our PI hero Cormoran Strike the right one.

What makes the series absorbing in my view is the premarital relationship drama between Robin, Strike's admin assistant, and her upper class, rather arrogant, toffy, banker and wanker fiance Matthew.

And the developing relationship between Robin and Strike. Rowling does this side of things supremely well. 

As for the crime stuff you do need a strong stomach. Rowling seems to love unspeakable brutality and viciousness in her evil men. She gets really low and relentless, shoving your face in their abysmal atrocities. 

As usual however the ending is a fizzer, with zero emotional impact. This it shares with its two predecessors.

The day after I'd finished it I couldn't remember how it ended or who was the culprit. The only thing that stuck with me and that will suck me in to reading the fourth in the series were the absorbing relationship dramas. 

Rebus is back thank god. Holidays coming up after all. 

Even Dogs in the Wild is good but far from Rankin's best. He seems to have decided to shove all his previous main characters, both goodies and baddies, into the one novel and it simply doesn't work. It's like having Superman and Batman in the one comic. Wha..?

John Rebus and Malcom Fox cosing up to each other? Oh please. We end up two distinct strands in the narrative, and it's all forced.

I think Rankin is getting sentimental. He loves his characters too much. The dialogue is often excruciatingly twee.


Though it's well enough plotted and the ending is, as usual for Rankin, highly satisfactory (unlike Rowling), this one's for the aficionados only. 

Australian crime novelist Garry Disher's last book Bitter Wash Road was simply superb. I raved about it here.

But this one, another in his Wyatt series, is a major disappointment. It's a very ordinary and unexciting piece of work.

It's all guns, murders and low lifes in Noosa, with no suspense or any attempt at larger meanings. And, with possibly one exception, none of the characters are really brought to life or are in any way engaging.

Disher also commits a classic mistake - kill off characters you cant be bothered to involve in a more satisfying resolution.

So forget this totally forgettable effort.

Three wonderful books by Charlotte Wood, Tom McCarthy and Robert Harris

This new novel from the highly regarded Australian author Charlotte Wood is both fascinating and frustrating in equal parts, but nevertheless a compelling read.

A group of ten young women who in one way or another have recently featured in the media through unfortunate sexual experiences have been drugged, kidnapped and sent to an isolated, abandoned rural property in outback Australia where they are imprisoned and cruelly treated by two men.

The book is well written, some passages exquisitely so, and the narrative superbly structured. But I found it pretty weak imaginatively. It lacks the gut-wrenching emotional power of far better prisoner narratives - Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North being the touchstone.

The women never talk of escaping. In fact they barely talk to each other at all. No ideas or theories are tossed around as to why they are being held or by whom, and no plots hatched.

As the months and seasons pass each woman in her own way is sent to the edge of insanity. But there's no evidence of any visceral anger at their captivity.

In a way they are complicit in their own victimhood. They internalise their plight, indulging in fantasies, obsessions and playthings. They retreat into themselves. They could organise to kill their captors, whose only weapons are sticks after all, and escape to freedom, but they don't. Some of them do form close relationships with each other which are sustaining and supportive, and two of the women are strong and independent. The other eight are weak, 'girly' and rather pathetic. Which may well be Wood's main point. 

Presumably the prison is an allegory of their life in the real male dominated world. They often reflect on their unfortunate relationships with men prior to their kidnapping - 'in his every moment with her, his every act, it was his own self he saw and coldly worshipped' - but we're only given glimpses and hints. The prison camp is meant to convey the substance. 

Here's where the reader is, however, left entirely frustrated. If this is an essay on misogyny its premise lacks credibility. But maybe Wood is far more sophisticated than the puff piece boosters on the cover and prelims, great male and female writers all of them*. 

It's a question as to whether this book chooses to represent misogyny at all, or whether it's just a meditation on what it is to be female.

*Malcolm Knox, Ashley Hay, Joan London, Tegan Bennett Daylight, Clementine Ford, Christos Tsiolkas.

I'd not read Tom McCarthy before so when his new novel Satin Island was shortlisted for this year's Booker I took the opportunity and am so glad I did.

(The actual Booker winner, Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, I'm 60 pages into and finding the Jamaican patois tough going. It's like reading a set text - you're not really reading it for pleasure).  

Satin Island has a fascinating corporate premise at its core: a brilliant anthropologist is hired by an elite London-based consultancy company to read the contemporary zeitgeist and uncover patterns and theories to construct a unified theory of the whole that will revolutionise its offerings and bring it glorious success.

'U', as he's known, searches for meaning in the rich kaleidoscope of reality to construct this magic concoction. But he's constantly encountering and being fascinated by little dissonances in our social fabric, be they accidents, glitches and illogicalities - like oil spills, parachute failures, cancer cells, video buffering, torture, etc.    

But he keeps at it, encouraged by his boss, the mysterious Peyman, who is nothing if not insane. U's presentations at future-oriented conferences are unmitigated tripe, but he's ceaselessly celebrated by his corporate audiences.

As the dissonances attest a satisfying and meaningful whole is a baseless proposition. 

Ironically an air of meaninglessness, rather than meaning, begins to surface. An overwhelming sense of the unfathomable and the disjointed bombards our senses and unravels our comfortable webs of comprehension. 

Unsettling echoes of tragedies and disasters seep into the narrative. 

The final chapter is superb. U waits at the Staten Island ferry terminal in downtown Manhattan and simply observes ordinary commuters going about their daily business - queuing, buying coffee and donuts, waiting to board, etc. A sense of heightened normalcy pervades. Anything could happen. This is 9/11 territory. 

I was reminded very much of Colum McCann's lauded celebration of New York and the World Trade Centre towers Let the Great World Spin.

McCarthy is a writer for our times. Satin Island is a brilliant book.

I've long enjoyed the novels of Robert Harris and considered his last An Officer and a Spy to be a masterpiece. I blogged about it here. 

Dictator, the third and final instalment in his marvellous and celebrated Cicero series, is likewise magnificent. 

This is the politics of ancient Rome. It's corrupt and brutal though ostensibly democratic. Its intrigues are awash with blood. Harris has written an essay on war as much as an historical and dramatic novel - an essay that is supremely relevant to our modern times.

Rome is the epitome of a warmongering nation. Flimsy excuses justify aggression, and the self-aggrandisement of Patrician warrior leaders, dealing in treachery and deceit at every turn, expose them as brutal criminals at heart. 

Cicero is an honourable, generous figure of integrity and Harris is committed to faithfully rendering the exact words of his powerful Senate speeches. He spoke truth to power, but was always aware of the ever shifting alliances that could trap even the most powerful and clever.  

We're immersed in the world of Caesar, Pompey, Cato, Cassius, Antony and others, and the many marriages and familial connections that bind them all. Their manoeuvrings drive the plot and provide the suspense.

Harris also gives us a rich flavour of Roman society: its gods, beliefs, superstitions and social structures.

But the central focus is the remarkable Cicero and his faithful biographer, the humble and intensely likable Tiro.

I can't recommend the novels of Robert Harris enough. He's a superb writer.

David Marr's Faction Man; Michel Houellebecq's Submission

David Marr's Quarterly Essays - this is his fifth - are always a must read. He writes beautifully, with precision and insight. 

This one on Bill Shorten is, unfortunately, his weakest. Firstly he's been wrong-footed by Abbott's recent demise and the turnaround in the polls given the nation's huge sigh of relief. 

Secondly, the subject is nothing if not lame. Marr is forced to trawl a lot of old ground: the ugly union fights for control and influence in Victoria; the turmoil of the Rudd/Gillard years, etc. He desperately tries to make this stuff interesting, but it simply isn't. It's tedious. Shorten always was and still is a Union Man. The 'Faction Man' title refers to his grubby union deals and self-serving alignments, not the traditional Labor factions we all know and love. 

Surprisingly, Marr spends very little time on any analysis of the polls over the last two years and why Shorten's disapproval rating is so consistently bad. Now, compared to Turnbull, it's disastrous. The electorate knows why, but Marr doesn't seem to. There is nothing about the Greens here either, and their growing appeal to disenchanted Labor supporters.

(I enjoyed lines like this though: 'Shorten's body is not made for suits').

I've always liked celebrated French author Michel Houellebecq's novels, Atomised (1998) and Platform (2001) in particular.

He brings a jaded, disillusioned, cynical flavour to his usually anti-Western critiques. His main characters are single men, unlucky in love, but constantly on the lookout for casual sex with hot young women. He mixes his literary efforts with soft porn, and it's hard to know how seriously to take what seems to be his main focus - the decadence of our modern, capitalist, materialistic society.

Submission is simply excellent though, and in my view his best. The same ambivalence is there - what is he really trying to do? what is his main point? Is he really anti-Western and pro-Islamic, or is this a mild satire and in fact a comic rubbishing of Islamic society?

The first-round French Presidential election of 2022 has necessitated a run-off between Marine Le Pen, leader of the extremist right wing, anti-immigrant United Front, and the charismatic leader of the newly emerged Muslim Brotherhood party Mohammad Ben Abbes. Abbes wins.

Of course, this is a political fantasy. There is at present no Islamist party in France and there is never likely to be, apart from on the extremist fringes. But Houellebecq uses the scenario to explore and possibly even advocate ideas that could only be described as pure male fantasy.

Abbes brings back the patriarchy. Men can have multiple wives. Women are encouraged to leave school early and marry. Female employment and careers are Western and wrong. The family unit is the new social welfare net, so government provided welfare is virtually eliminated. As the participation rate of women in the work force is radically reduced, the unemployment rate drops dramatically and male salaries soar. The economy booms. Universities become Islamic in curriculum and management, and are well-funded by Saudi money. Only academics who have converted to Islam can be employed.

Houellebecq takes the opportunity to celebrate old Christian values of family, charity, modesty, etc, by reminding us that Islam was very respectful of the Christendom of the middle ages in its early founding years. Patriarchy is proposed as the natural order of things, the best organisation for any society.

Once again our main character is a lonely, single, disillusioned man in his 40's, frequently indulging in meaningless sex, depicted of course in detail. (It's hard for a male to read Houellebecq without getting a constant hard-on!). The meaningless sex is emblematic of the debased social relations of our current Western way of life.

Submission was published in France on the very day of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack. It caused enormous controversy, with many people outraged.

Now you know why.