Ian McEwan, The Cockroach.

- McEwan’s always been a master storyteller and his skill is again on show here. He’s also politically astute. 

- Unfortunately though, this 100 page novel is in the end a dismal failure. The Kafka-inspired cockroach side of the story is just silly. It's too simple, obvious and literal to be effective satire. 

- Jim Sams, the newly installed British PM (Boris obviously), and Brexit feature. Sams applies all his cunning and deceitfulness to get Brexit through parliament (although here it’s called ‘Reversalism’, as compared to our current 'Clockwise' economies). Reversalism turns everything upside down. Citizens pay money to work, and get cash payments from the government when they spend. Companies pay money when they export and receive money when they import.  

- It's a truly absurd and ridiculous thesis which has no satirical oomph because it completely misconstrues Brexit and the disruption it would involve.

- There are of course some lovely moments. This is McEwan after all. He captures perfectly the deviousness, treachery and cunning of ruthless politicians - the Cabinet meetings, the press leakages, the constructed fake news, the anti-PM plotters, and others.

-There is also coruscating wit at every turn as he caricatures the dismal, elitist, Conservative Cabinet members - the cockroaches. 

- This novel could have been heaps better had McEwan not strayed so far from Boris and Brexit realities. 

J.M.Coetzee, The Death of Jesus

-  This novel is the final in Coetzee's magnificent Jesus trilogy - The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus, and The Death of Jesus. In my opinion it's the best of the three.

- It shares the formal prose style of the previous two, reading like an Elizabethan drama, and investing the story with a level of fabulism akin to the gospel story of Jesus of Nazareth. The boy David is an otherworldly creature and his story full of parables.

- In this final novel David is only ten years old but he 'cannot or will not do sums. More worryingly, he will not read’. He only reads Cervante's classic novel Don Quixote, and is obsessed with the comic idealist's opposition to anything real. The central theme is idealism versus reality. Quixote’s idealism promises liberation. As his followers cry ‘liberate us from our wretched fate...make our chains fall away’. 

- Likewise, David has a mind of his own, undeveloped as it is. He's over-confident, even arrogant. He’s an ‘extravagante’ according to his teacher, and a gifted dancer.

- Simon and Ines are his foster parents who took him in five years previously and love him deeply. However a local orphanage and its soccer team holds an attraction for David that he can't resist. He wants to live there. So he makes an accusation against Simon, who's been  ‘...doing bad things to me’.

- The relationship between Simon and Ines is a more central focus of this book than David, and is very well presented. They are caring, loving people, flummoxed by David’s new sense of independence. They argue, of course, but in the end their frustrations with David's eccentricities invest this novel with real power. When he suddenly becomes quite ill and is confined to hospital, the leaden, bureaucratic protocols of the hospital put enormous strain on them. In the end David dies of the mysterious, undiagnosed illness, and Simon and Ines continue to be treated disrespectfully by the hospital staff because 'there are rules we have to follow'.

- In all three books in the series Coetzee makes no specific Christian references. Apart from the titles there is no Jesus, heaven, hell, miracles, or even Mary and Joseph. It’s a secular world. However Ines and Simon are clearly Mary and Joseph, ‘companeros’, not husband and wife or in any sexual union. The novel explores their relationship. They are just human beings. The Christian gospels, on the other hand, never present them as such. And Jesus was fully human too, no doubt as annoying as David. So Coetzee is essentially demystifying the biblical story, removing its supernatural embellishments. After David's death was there a resurrection of sorts? No, just memories. 

- But Simon does say at one point: ‘The world may be as it was before, but it is also different’. And his former dance teacher says: ‘You could learn only by following. When David danced he was somewhere else, and if you were able to follow him you would be transported to that place too’. 

- The peculiar Dimitri character, so central to the second book, is a key player in this one too. He's a passionate 'follower' of David. After David's death he writes long letters to Simon, who he considers 'ordinary'. What are we to make of these letters? They smack of devotion but also of madness. While Simon and Ines go their separate ways, into normal lives, is Dimitri, an unabashed enthusiast, soon to become a gospel writer? 

Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin

- ‘I mightn’t have done much good in my life, but at least I contributed to the destruction of the planet.’ 

- The unfortunately christened Florent-Claude Labrouste is 46 years old and a typical Houellebecq sad fuck. Cynical, disillusioned and alone. The sort of bloke that hates Paris and hates pensioners. He's wonderful company - intelligent and exceptionally well-informed, and he’s confiding in YOU.

- In the typical Houellebecq way, literary references are sprinkled throughout, mostly cheekily. And very satisfyingly there's so much wisdom: 

'...there can't be an area of human activity as utterly boring as the law'. 
'...our student years are the only happy ones, when the future seems open, when everything seems possible, and after that adulthood and a career are only a slow and progressive process of ending up in a rut'. 
‘...alcohol is very important for the elderly, it’s almost all they’ve got left’. 
‘God is a mediocre scriptwriter...the whole of his creation bears the stamp of approximation and failure, when it isn’t meanness pure and simple’. 

- He studied agriculture and started working initially at the giant corporate Monsanto, and hated it. ‘My superiors in the company were quite simply pathological liars’. Now he’s working for the Department of Agriculture and negotiating with Brussels. 

- As part of his job he travels a lot, all over France it seems, and drops names of streets, provinces, villages and locales, and this is rather challenging. I had to continually call on Google maps to follow his journeys. 

- Of course there's lots of sex. In fact, there's an obsessional focus on it as he reflects on his former girlfriends and lovers. But it’s very funny too, as if sex is a type of comedy routine carried out by two people, or one woman and a dog or two. This time he's far more comic than in any of his previous novels, which adds to its delight. The thing is though, he rarely makes love, just seems to get blowjobs. It’s all about his cock. Ironically, however, his new anti-depression medication makes it well nigh impossible for him to get an erection. 

- Houellebecq is a very political novelist and this novel is no exception. Florent-Claude's good friend and fellow agriculture student began working for Danone on graduation, and later bought a farm, raising dairy cows in the very local, traditional way. But Brussels’ decisions would bankrupt him and millions of French stockbreeders. The EU and its free trade policies were devastating. The Chinese were also buying traditional farm lands. The local farmers started organising and protesting, some with guns. It all ended tragically, with countless suicides.

- In the end he's fading away, sadness overwhelming him. But he offers us deep and rewarding reflections on Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Conan Doyle.  

- And in a passage of exquisitely beautiful prose, he describes his simple joy on listening to a bootleg recording of the rock band Deep Purple in concert in Duisburg in 1970. 

- Reading Houellebecq is always a pleasure, and Serotonin is absolutely no exception. 

Chuck Wendig, Wanderers.

                                                                                                                                                

- This way-too-long popular novel of 780 pages is built on what seems at first a fascinating premise. Some parisitical bug has infiltrated humans in rural America and turned hundreds of them into 'walkers', virtual zombies, shuffling day and night across the land, unable to be stopped. If grasped they immediately swell and explode. Their skin is impenetrable to sharp objects so blood samples can’t be extracted as they walk. And their numbers are increasing.

- A predictable cross-section of society, from redneck Republicans to evangelical preachers, have a range of views as to what’s caused this - the devil, terrorists, the liberal President in the White House - and their ignorance and fear is contrasted with the informed research of the scientific community. 

- The Alt-Right is having a field day, flashing their Swastika tattoos and Confederate flags. They're white supremacist gun lovers, members of fascist militias, supporting a Trump-like candidate in the upcoming Presidential election. The current President, standing for a second term, is a Hillary-like woman who is loathed by these types, and one reason is she 'always wears pantsuits’. She is soon assassinated.

- The scientists can’t identify the pathogen so the huge and ugly Department of Homeland Security takes over. Of course it rides roughshod over sense and science, threatening 'to nuke all of them' if they don't disperse.

- This book grabs you until about halfway through, when things start to get very silly. A sort of hyper-Google called 'Black Swan’, recently invented, can see into the near future. This is too much. Too overripe. Too literal. And way too heavy handed. The problem is, what does all this end-of-days detail actually signify? The story gets crazier the longer it goes on. Why is civilisation coming to an end? Why? The deadly fungus pathogen exterminating everyone just doesn’t cut it. What is it symbolic of? Presumably it's climate change, often hinted at. Perhaps there are too many humans, reeking havoc on the environment. Getting rid of 99% of them would probably help. A chosen elite, revealed to be the walkers, can rebuild after the armageddon! Even create their own gods, as humans always do. 

- Wendig’s prose is full of swagger and energy. He can certainly write, in that typical American jazzed up, swashbuckling, rock and roll style. All colour and movement, with the vulgarity to match. 

- Don't waste your time on this. There's too much quality literature to read.

Catholics for Renewal, Getting Back on Mission.

- This is a passionate declaration of the essential and long overdue reforms that the Catholic Church must implement immediately.

- The statistical data is very comprehensive, and the the call for a radical overhaul of the treatment of women in the Church well argued. 

- Unfortunately the recommendations are far too heavy on governance structures like Pastoral Councils, etc. These sorts of reforms are downstream structural impacts that will largely take care of themselves when the core revolutionary reforms have been enthusiastically embraced. 

- There are major moral issues that aren’t addressed because of the book’s focus on making recommendations to the upcoming Plenary Council. These issues include: birth control; marriage/divorce/re-marriage; abortion; sex before marriage; sexual identity; gay marriage; euthanasia.

- The two core realities that have to be radically reformed as a matter of urgency are women priests and celibacy. The Church is infected with serious and ingrained misogyny. Women are seen as ontologically inferior to men, which means they can ‘never be priests’. They are just domestic servants and bearers/nurturers of children. This medievalism has to be brought to a savage end immediately.

- Regarding celibacy, the calls in this book for it to be made voluntary are wrong. To allow priests and religious to ‘chose celibacy’ would simply allow clerical sexual abuse to be seeded. Men and women of the church should be not just allowed but encouraged to form intimate relationships with other people, even if it never leads to marriage. There have always been and always will be bachelors. That’s fine. But a pledge at a relatively young age to remain celibate is something else entirely. Celibate priests in a married-priests world would not be welcome in parishes or schools. That is today’s reality.

- It infuriates me that recent popes, including, disgracefully, Francis, have totally ruled out women priests and continue to show no inclination to abolish celibacy. At a time when there is a dire shortage of priests it is simply mind-bogglingly moronic. At a time when the dwindling faithful and many ex-Catholics are crying out for inspiration, this sort of third rate leadership must continue to be loudly condemned. Until it ends. Which it will.

- Books like this are a key weapon in that destruction. 

Lucie Morris-Marr, Fallen.

                                                                                                                      



- This book is a very detailed and comprehensive history of the Pell case from an obviously intelligent and responsible journalist. I found it utterly absorbing. 

- In the first 50 or so pages Morris-Marr relates her personal story as to how she got sucked into the telling of this drama in the first place, and in fact became obsessed by it. Her Herald Sun editor gave her a front page exclusive in February 2016 to reveal that Victoria Police had launched an investigation into claims of sexual abuse by Cardinal Pell. 

- The reaction was swift and intense. Predictably, the rusted-on Pell supporters came out in droves. She copped serious flack and animosity from Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt and the reactionary, conservative cohort at The Australian. She knew her time working for Murdoch was over. She became a freelancer, working mostly with The New Daily and CNN. 

- When the court processes get under way in the Melbourne Magistrates Court as part of the committal hearings, the lengthy detailed narrative begins. She infuses the story with a high level of drama. It's detailed and vivid, and told with empathy and sensitivity. Her journalistic skills shine through. Her focus is on the facts and legal processes and any biases she might have are kept well and truly in check.

- For many readers I'm sure, and many admirers of Louise Milligan's superb Cardinal, most of the story is well known. But Morris-Marr includes all sorts of detail and personal observations about how the central characters are interacting that make it all once again utterly engrossing. 

- The press were not allowed to see or report on the accuser's testimony in court and Pell's defence barrister Richter's relentless questioning. She simply summarisers what the Prosecutor said about it during his closing submission. The power and persuasiveness of J’s testimony is the central issue. In an otherwise comprehensive and dramatic narrative it’s unfortunately a gaping hole. Judge Kidd ruled in the second trial that not even the transcript would be made available. 

- The key question, as she puts it, was ‘Somebody in this case was lying. Was it the surviving accuser? Or was it Pell?’ 

- Pell was still fully robed after mass. The old ‘heavy robes’ defence was trotted out. Personally I've never swallowed this. Soutanes can be lightweight (if he was wearing one at all) as are the cotton albs and silky chasubles. There's no wool around, so there’s nothing heavy about them in the sense we normally understand that word. The offence occurred in December, in summer. In fact the appeals court judged Pell’s official robes ‘not so heavy or immovable as the evidence of Monsignor Portelli and Mr Potter had suggested’.

- Some new stuff I didn't know: in the second trial ‘Richter’s closing address had been extensively reworked in both content and structure. It had to be’.

- Friends of Pell at the beginning remained defenders of Pell at the end. Disappointingly, Father Frank Brennan also weighed in to support Pell, citing the pathetic ‘heavy robes’ defence.

- Judge Peter Kidd, in his sentencing address, was hardly wishy-washy: ‘Your conduct was permeated with staggering arrogance’. 

- The book is very up-to-date (The Appeal Court's decision on 21 August, three weeks before publication, is covered in detail). The prosecution barrister had pressed one argument loud and clear: '...the surviving choirboy should and must be believed'.

- At the end of this fine book Morris-Marr indulges in some emotional, sensitive and very powerful reflections: 

  The elderly cardinal had found himself trapped in his own living hell, incarcerated in the very city where he once wielded so much power, the city where he proudly wore his elaborate mitre and carried his crosier in the procession with the choir out of the main doors of his cathedral. This was the choir from which one small, powerless, adolescent soprano walking in his red-and-white robes would eventually find the strength to speak up.

His allegations may eventually be discredited and ultimately rejected. But he has been heard. His voice has set a course of profound change, contrition and much needed inner reflection within the Holy See and the Roman Catholic Church around the world.

He may have given hope and a call to action to many voiceless survivors still struggling in the darkness, too frightened to tell, too damaged to share their experiences. He may also have brought courage to a woman in Gippsland who should have been saved, not ignored a tiny girl trapped in Ridsdale's ruthless grip.

For those many legacies, his voice will never be forgotten.

He'd proved to the world the meek really can inherit the earth.

Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

- It's Gilead up close and it's absorbing from the start. Atwood has pulled this off. It's an astonishingly good and fascinating story. 

- There are three main characters: Aunt Lydia, who is invested with a lot more power, and is redeemed; teenager Agnes, child of Gilead privilege, who finally learns to read and write and understand; and 'Baby Nicole' (now 13 year old Jade) who the Handmaid June succeeded in safely sending to Canada, and has now been sent back to Gilead on a mission.

- The backstories, particularly those of Aunt Lydia and her colleagues and their former pre-Gilead lives and professions, are full of fascinating detail. This sort of fleshing out, something missing in The Handmaid's Tale, is extremely satisfying. Lydia, despite being cunning, calculating, clever and a serious plotter, is portrayed as a sympathetic character. The book is basically about her and her privileged Aunty status. 

- As Lydia has recognised, ‘the aims of Gilead at the outset were pure and noble, we all agree. But they have been subverted and sullied by the selfish and the power-mad, as so often happens in the course of history’. ‘Bearing false witness was not the exception, it was common. Beneath its outer show of virtue and purity, Gilead was rotten’. 

- There are biblical and literary 'sayings' liberally sprinkled throughout the conversations recorded by the Gilead women. They are easy substitutes for critical thought and analysis, and typify the exquisite banality of Gilead belief. Even the words 'God' and 'Love' can’t be associated.  

- However Agnes is being awakened by being exposed to secret files and recordings secretly provided to her by Aunt Lydia, who is clearly working to undermine and destroy Gilead. One revelation is that Gilead's current leader, Commander Judd, who has had multiple wives, eventually murdered all of them by poisoning. He prefers his wives young. There is no divorce in Gilead so what else is a man to do?. 

- Agnes learns that she is the first daughter, and Baby Nicole the second daughter of the Handmaid Offred who escaped to Canada. They are half-sisters. Lydia also discloses to her, via a file note, that Baby Nicole has returned to Gilead, and for nefarious reasons.

- The ending pulls all the threads together in a very satisfying way. 

- The Handmaid's Tale made the Booker Prize shortlist in 1986 but did not win the prize (which went to Kingsley Amis' The Old Devils). This year The Testaments is on the shortlist. The smart money has it winning, making up for the 1986 'mistake'.