Charlotte Wood, The Weekend

- Adele, Jude and Wendy are friends of Sylvie who has recently passed away. They’ve come to her beach house north of Sydney over the Xmas weekend to clean it up. Adele, the fading actress, is arty and creative and still physically attractive. Jude, an ex-restaurant worker, is fastidious, bossy, organised and intelligent ('No wonder Jude had never been a mother. It would offend her sense of order'). Wendy, an old hippy and respected academic, has let herself go and is now overweight and poorly dressed. She also drives an old, broken down car, and has a dog, Finn, who is deaf, nearly blind, old, arthritic and half dead.  

- There's a distinct smell of decay in this whole group, and vivid memories of former glories. 

- As someone who absolutely loved Wood's previous, award-winning novel The Natural Way of Things, principally because of its depth and resonance, I was at first quite disappointed with this one. These characters seemed entirely batshit crazy and uninteresting. A pretty ordinary tale of fading seniors and their typical group dynamics. And the dog profoundly irritated me. 

- But after the first day’s cleaning, they go to the beach, then take showers, then head to a flash restaurant. Adele meets an old actress ‘friend’. Suddenly the book becomes hugely more interesting. Wood's sharpness of insight comes to the fore. She's brutal in her critiques and observations about their lives, old bodies and old friends. It's supremely intelligent. 

- They hold a Christmas Eve party and the wine flows and tensions emerge. We've all been to these, and Wood captures the drama superbly. 

- One guest, youngish theatre director, Joe Gillespie says: ‘You old girls are fucking hilarious’. But they are not. They are real in ways he would never know.

- The ending is powerful. I was struck by the beautiful image of the exhausted and storm-drenched Wendy and her dog being welcomed by a small congregation for midnight mass - ‘...trusting in this ancient, nonsensical, holy thing, accepting bread from a stranger’. 

- And the story of Daniel, Jude’s 40-year lover, who has a separate life as a husband and father, and who she only sees on weekends, is very affecting.

- So, in the end, I enjoyed this novel immensely. Being of the same age, perhaps too much of it struck me personally. 

Evie Wyld, The Bass Rock.

- All the reviewers of this novel refer to its 'gothic' flavour, which is misleading. There are some 'ghosts' or spirits but they're not important. It's quite a contemporary novel of male/female relationships and, principally, the ugliness of masculine power.

- Some reviewers have also commented on, and praised, the deliberate withholding of details as the novel progresses, and the slow, dribbling, revelation of family relationships. The reader is thrust into the murkiness of it all. I found this aspect annoying. The constant introduction of new characters is confusing, and it's multiplied by three because there are three narratives over three different time frames, connected by thin threads.

- Why the deliberate obscurity, this mystery? It adds virtually nothing. A dramatis personae would have been helpful (which I've provided below).

- It's a very English novel in many ways. Upper middle class, stiff upper lip, snooty, and a disdain for simple clarity. 

- Reviewers have also praised the writing. To me it was ordinary and charmless, like many of the characters. (‘But the money lasted only a grain of salt’). Some paragraphs are virtually incoherent. Apart from Ruth, the principal character, the women are annoying. Maggie is as mad as a cut snake and Viviane loves getting ‘drunk’. Just one glass of wine seems to make her ‘drunk’. Too much contemporary fiction indulges in this trope, as if there is no distinction whatsoever between 'slightly inebriated', 'tipsy', and 'drunk'. Virtually all the characters of this novel, set mainly in Scotland, drink Scotch whiskey, morning and night, like it was water. And sherry, and gin, and wine.

- The focus is on tangled, unsatisfying, man/woman relationships. Female sex with men is aggressive and rough. Rape is common. The men are abusive, deceiving and manipulative, most of the time. The women are victims of masculine power. The men behave as if they own women’s bodies. It’s very ugly. Violence seems to be their primary mode of expressing emotion, like apes. Murder is also part of the fabric, where raw animal emotion overcomes reason and decency. 

- Did I enjoy this novel? Not really. Will it stay with me? Yes.

- Here's what I wrote about Wyld's Miles Franklin Award winning novel All the Birds, Singing six years ago: 

Wyld's book is a spare and beautifully written story of a young woman's flight from horror, pain and abuse. In a real sense it's a testimony to the ugliness of men. We are spared no lacerating detail of the harsh, brutal treatment handed out to the woman by the cruel and violent men she encounters in country Australia as she flees from the consequences of a tragedy she caused as a reckless 15 year old  in Darwin. Eventually she finds her way to a peaceful Isle off the coast of England where she lives alone and tends sheep.


But the dark beast of horror still pursues her.


(This is the Dramatis Personae for the three time periods, which readers will find helpful:

1. Present day: Viviane, Katherine (sisters), Michael’s daughters; Bernadette is their mother; Maggie (acquaintance). Deborah, real estate agent. 

2. Aftermath of WW2: Ruth ('Puss'); Betty (housemaid), her sister Mary and Mary’s 11 year old daughter Bernadette; Alice (Ruth's sister) and her husband Mark; Mother+Father; Ludwig (dog, now dead); Antony (brother, killed in the war); Peter Hamilton (husband); his two children (boys Michael and Christopher); his former wife and the boys’ mother Elspeth; 


3. Late 18th century: The Widow Clements (Charlotte); Joseph the son, and narrator; Agnes his sister; Cook; Father (Callum); the girl Sarah.) 

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

- I finally got around to reading some Sebald, the highly regarded and influential German novelist who died in 2001. 

- The edition, pictured above, is the 10th anniversary edition of his classic Austerlitz with an excellent introduction by the noted literary critic James Wood. 

- I was profoundly moved by this book. The experience of the Jews in Prague during the Nazi invasion is beautifully portrayed. Sebald's prose is easily read, and the narrative deceptively simple and unembellished. But while the story builds slowly and powerfully, the details accumulate and are ugly and sad. It is very affecting.

- The structure of the novel takes a while to get used to, as Sebald continually holds back and only gradually reveals the details and full richness of the tale. As Jacques Austerlitz tells his life story to his unnamed friend during their periodic meetings over many years, it becomes clear that his story only became clear to himself over that same time span.    

- The novel becomes a reflection on European history in the 20th century. As so many critics have written, it is haunting, mesmerising, and heartbreakingly tragic. 

- A must read.

Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt.

- This is pure populist American garbage. I read the first 100 pages and then threw it at the wall. It was absurd and intensely annoying, full of cliches and stereotypes that would make Trump proud - 'Mexico bad, the US good'.

- What is surprising is the accolades it has received from much revered writers like Ann Patchett ('I couldn't put it down. I'll never stop thinking about it'), Don Winslow ('A Grapes of Wrath for our times'), Tracy Chevalier ('Essential reading'), and many others.

- It's TexMex fodder, not real Mexican food. It's Starbucks, not Melbourne cafe quality. And it's a typical John Grisham-style chase novel, thrillers of the dullest, plotless, sort.

- The opening pages give the game away immediately. The extended family of the main characters, the mother and her son, are massacred by one of the vicious drug running cartels who've taken over Apapulco. 

- This really is populist nonsense, and it's littered with silliness. Just one example: Luca, the son, (the feminine version of Lucas, by the way), is a seven year old ‘genius’ whose first words as a toddler were 'Let's read that once again Mami, except this time let's make it a more agreeable ending'!

- There's currently a raging debate about this book being a perfect example of cultural appropriation. And it is, but in a base unsophisticated way. The author barely tries to give her characters realistic Mexican identities, however much 'research' she claims to have done. If that was her intention she's failed dismally. She's just written a populist action novel. There's no depth or sophistication here. 

- (Read these excellent reviews: David Bowles in Medium, David Schmidt’s piece in The Blue Nib, and Myriam Gurba's brilliant piece in Tropics of Meta).

J.P. Pomare, In the Clearing

- In country Victoria in the 1980s Australian cult leader Anne Hamilton-Byrne stole blond, blue-eyed children and 'raised' them to prepare them for the new world she intended to deliver.

- This novel uses that historical reality as its fictional setting. The insidious evil of this cult was the cruelty its delusions visited upon the innocent, and its aftermath.

- Pomare captures the emotional and psychological damage the children suffered and that followed them through adult life, years after their release. He has written a very well constructed, pacy thriller, with plenty of jolts, surprises and twists along the way.

- It's hard to put down, holding your interest right to the delicious end.

Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing.

- This is a wonderful holiday read, with delightful characters and plenty of 'rural noir'. There's provincial ignorance and prejudice in spades, but also love, loyalty and friendship.

- Set in coastal North Carolina in the 1950's and 60's there's no shortage of racism, sexism and middle class white privilege. 

- It's a coming-of-age novel, but a mature one. People are either good or bad, but the bad ones are ugly in the extreme. The domestic violence and rape episodes are raw and upsetting. 

- The book is exceptionally well written and paced, the final chapters covering the murder trial in particular. 

- And the twist at the end is very satisfying indeed. No wonder this novel has been a global best seller.

Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport

- A brilliant novel, truly a masterpiece. But few people, excluding most Booker Award judges I suspect, would have persevered and read all of it. It’s a challenge. But goddamn it, it just sucks you in and I got thoroughly immersed in it.  

- The principal, unnamed, character tells the story of her own life and times (‘this monologue in my head’). She’s now in her mid-40s and has had a sad, frustrated, ordinary, happy, satisfying, insecure, guilt-ridden, productive life as a child, a sister, a wife, a small business owner, and a parent. She misses her own mother terribly, and had a difficult relationship with her father. She’s not crude or vulgar in any way. She’s intelligent, aware, caring, angry, over-sensitive, anxiety-riddled, hardworking. Her husband Leo, who calls her a ‘domestic engineer’, absolutely adores her. She’s also a cancer survivor. And, importantly, she’s an absolute delight to spend so much time with. (It took me three weeks to read this 1040 page brick). She has to be one of the greatest female characters in American literature. She restored my faith in America. 

- Fundamentally the major narrative thread weaving this incredibly rich tapestry together is the story of a family - parents, grandparents, marriage breakdowns, kids, step kids - and the deep emotions permeating it all. Particularly in being a mother.

- Her four kids (Stacy, Ben, Gillian, Jake); her loving husband Leo; her garden; her pets; her chickens; her favourite movies and TV shows; the countless words she hates (especially those starting with ‘ex’ if they also have a ‘u’ sound, like extrude, exude, excommunicate); people she hates, eg Trump; Pence; old household objects; lines from songs; constant riffs on all sorts of things; home cooking traditions; random bits and pieces of ordinary domestic lives. She’s ‘wallowing in domesticity’. She’s incredibly knowledgeable about plants, food additives, birds, all sorts of natural world minutia. She’s a Jane Austin fan - the books and movies, and reads Anne Tyler and Joyce Carol Oates. She has a brilliant and formidable mind, always on show, and is very politically, socially and environmentally aware. In fact she’s a linguistic genius, utterly obsessive and verging on outright crazy. (And, not surprisingly, she rarely ventures onto social media). 

- The expression 'the fact that’ appears every three or four lines and acts like a full stop. It breaks up the statements and rants. You get used to it and it doesn’t annoy after 30 or so pages in. 

- Ellmann, through her character, celebrates American folklore, history, geography, literature, music, film, and popular culture generally. There are constant references, all informed and often cheeky. Abbreviations litter the text, and are spelt out in the Glossary. Eg POTUS doesn’t stand for President of the United States but for Purveyor of Totally Unprecedented Sleaze!

- She has a fascination with words that rhyme, suggest, resonate, and sound quirky, that just enter her head as she thinks. And she loves comprehensive lists - American desserts, meals, pies, drinks, food chemicals, fish dishes, sandwiches, creeks, islands and more. She’s got a thing about male gynaecologists. Why are they even allowed? 

- This is America in all its dimensions. And an honest, frequently savage critique - of racism, provincialism, Indian massacres, environmental destruction, contaminated water, corporate malfeasance, Fox News, Open Carry guys, school shootings, gun laws, paranoid police. She is a voice from the deep psyche of America. A voice of reason.

- Every once in a while there are two pages about a lioness and her cubs. Standard punctuation applies. They are sentenced and paragraphed (91-93) in the third person voice. The mother is protecting and rearing her cubs, so very natural. A major focus of this novel is motherhood. But when the lion is spotted by townsfolk fear breaks out among the population as if it’s a migrant or terrorist invasion. 

- Why have so many reviewers of this book called it funny, as if that’s it main feature? ‘Hilarious, eye-wateringly funny’ (Scotsman); ‘Hilarious’ (Bookmunch). (God, I hate that word hilarious, and I bet Ellmann does too.) These reviews are shallow. Even the blurb on the back cover says ‘...unforgivably funny’. Sure, it is often funny, and a constant comic tic is the clarified subject reference, eg ‘... and I’d try to draw them on top of the cake, the toys, not the moms’. (Ellmann indulges in this device far too much, at least once on every page, and it becomes tedious in the extreme). But comedy is not the book’s dominant feature, and it does a profound disservice to it to be described in this way. 

-(The original publisher of this huge tome, Galley Beggar Press Limited in the UK, deserves profound respect, and not just for publishing it. There is not one proofreading error in the whole 1000 page book. But editorially, the half dozen references to ‘koala bears’ are unfortunate (KOALAS ARE NOT BEARS. THEY ARE MARSUPIALS).