Murdoch and Hitchens: Two Great Non-fiction Reads

Over the last two weeks I've read Sarah Ellison's War at the Wall Street Journal and Christopher Hitchens' Hitch-22. You won't find any better non-fiction around at present. Both books are superb.

Sarah Ellison was a senior reporter with the WSJ during the months of struggle by Rupert Murdoch to acquire the paper, a true American icon, in 2007. She covered the story for the Journal, so was in a prime position to bring all the threads together to produce what must be one of the best business books of the year (up there with Michael Lewis' The Big Short).

What is simply amazing about this book is the incredible access Ellison obviously had to all the players, major and minor, in the drama. This is about as 'inside' as a book can get. It's almost as if she had secret microphones under board tables, tray tables, crockery, car seats, beds, urinals...whatever. Everybody seems to have disclosed virtually every piece of detail to her. Even Murdoch himself seems to have allowed her unlimited access. 

But the real pleasure of the book is the riveting tale itself - how the Bancroft family, owners of the Journal for over a century, were slowly but surely worn down and outmanoeuvred by a master at the game. 

And the subsidiary story is just as powerful: it's about newspapers and their future, if any. How, in the first instance, would the WSJ change under Murdoch's control - would the culture, values and journalistic integrity it enshrined for decades be undermined? And how would, not just it, but all newspapers fare in a radically changing media world?

Ellison is fair, broad-minded, and professional to the end. Her own biases are never thrust down the reader's throat. But the facts she marshalls speak for themselves. The Journal is a very different paper two years after Murdoch took control. Many observers lament this. But Murdoch, of course, begs to differ: 'We produced a better paper. I'm sorry but it's as simple as that'.

I've long been a fan of Christopher Hitchens, one of the West's most vociferous and intelligent defenders against fascists, extremists, dictators, totalitarians and other fools. Since the Iraq war however, when he, alone in leftist circles, came out in support of Bush's 2003 invasion, he has been pretty universally vilified by friend and foe alike, and he's challenged the loyalty of his many fans. He's also recently, of course, joined the Atheist brigade along with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. (I found his 2008 treatise God is Not Great almost unreadable in its anthropological ignorance and all round pomposity).

Hitch-22, A Memoir can be seen as a monumental justification of his unpopular positions (it's a densely typed 435 pages), or as a fascinating exploration of his lifelong obsessions, beliefs, passions and friendships. It's clearly the latter but works also as the former.

This is a beautifully written story of a passionate believer in political liberalism, secularism and global democracy. One admirable feature of Hitchens' style of journalism is his constant determination to get out from under his desk, to get away from his books, friends and comfortable lifestyle, and personally visit the trouble spots of the world on a regular basis. He's been a political activist, a player, all his life, from his rabble-rousing Oxford and Cambridge days, through to his frequent excursions to Cuba, Poland, Argentina, Romania, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Zimbabwe, Cyprus, Morocco, Uganda, Venezuela, Nicaragua and many others.

He's almost Woody Allen's Zelig, his famous everywhere man...talking to heads of state and other key players at seemingly every momentous turning point in world history.

But one of the real pleasures of this book is the fine intellect and profound literary and cultural erudition that underpins it. There are so many wonderful allusions and apt quotes - they could be assembled as small books in themselves. And talk about interesting friends!

Hitchens is a fabulous character who has written a fabulous book. Well worth an investment of your time.

The Miles Franklin Shortlist: and the winner is..?

The Miles Franklin literary award is Australia's most famous, as well as being its most controversial. This year one shortlisted author, Alex Miller, received headlines when he offered the quite reasonable observation that Kevin Rudd's new 'Prime Ministers Award' was a mistake, and that the substantial prize money on offer could have been better spent bolstering the preeminent and far more prestigious Miles Franklin.

Apart from the fakery wrought by the dreadful Helen Darville in 1994 when her The Hand That Signed the Paper, supposedly written by one Helen Demidenko, caused a critical and media sensation, most of the controversy and debate over the years has been caused by the stipulation in Franklin's will that the entries explore 'Australian life in any of its phases'. This has worked to exclude many brilliant novels written by Australians that were simply ineligible because their settings were not specifically Australian (eg. The Book Thief; Dog Boy).

This year's shortlist is presented above, and what an extraordinary dilemma it presents the judges.


Who's likely to win? Let's discuss:


Sonya Hartnett's Butterfly has no chance at all. It's barely an adult novel, Hartnett still tethered, seemingly, to her Young Adult origins.


Deborah Forster's disturbing The Book of Emmett is a powerful portrayal of a cruel and stunted husband and father, and the emotional wreckage he visits upon his working class family. It's hard to believe this first novel hasn't sprung from the author's personal experience. It reads like a gut-wrenching memoir, visceral and raw.


Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey is a truly remarkable, very mature book by a young novelist which has been called Australia's 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. I absolutely loved this novel and predict it will become a much read and discussed one for many years to come. It is so rich in character, story, drama and humour that it's very hard to put down. It could have been even better, an instant Australian classic, pushing Cloudstreet off its pedestal, if only a gifted structural editor had got hold of it and addressed its one big flaw: its main characters get off too lightly. Justice is not allowed its relentless course, and there needed to be a major tragedy - all the ingredients were there. Then it would have been superb.


Alex Miller has won the Miles Franklin twice in the past, in 1993 and 2003. Will Lovesong be his third? In a word, no. It's a great book but is pulled off the top rung by a fairly insipid ending. There's a real lack of resolution.


So it's down to Peter Temple's Truth or Brian Castro's Bath Fugues, both truly great works of art, but soooo far apart on the literary spectrum. One popular, the other utterly inaccessible. Truth is crime fiction at its best, brilliantly written and conceived. But will the judges award it our preeminent literary prize? Or will they opt for a highly literary work by an accomplished Australian master?


I was determined to read Bath Fugues because I needed to read all the shortlisted entries in order to pick a winner, or subsequently condemn or otherwise the judges' choice. (Last year's choice, Tim Winton's Breath, left me speechless. It was the same old, lightweight piece of surfer-boy flim flam that's Winton's traditional line of load).

Three-quarters of the way through Castro's longish book I still hadn't got into it and it was annoying me intensely. I scribbled these notes to myself: 'clogged with writerly indulgence - the meandering reflections of his self-obsessed main characters'; 'what narrative there is gets utterly buried in a sort of faux-philosophical Montaigne/Baudelaire mud'; 'hard work - but it doesn't pay off'; 'constant undisciplined digressions'.


But by the time I'd finished the third part of this three-part novel, I realised what was going on and it had finally got to me. There's no doubt this is a complex, very difficult piece of work, sort of like the poetry of Ezra Pound. It's a hard slog, highly intellectual and with little emotional power. But in the end....quite a magnificent achievement, rich with meditations on decay, art, beauty, youth and sex. Very few readers will have the patience to read it, and it will certainly not be a popular win if it gets up. But it could be Castro's time.


So Castro or Temple. Back both. The decision will be announced June 22.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

In a very handsome (hard cover), well-priced ($32.95) volume, Text Publishing (for a few years now Australia's best publisher in my view), has FINALLY published in Australia (within 40 not 30 days of its original British release) Philip Pullman's intriguing, provocative and highly controversial The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.

Fervent, believing Christians will dislike this fictional retelling of the Jesus story intensely. There is no doubt it is heretical in the accepted, ecclesial sense. It denies miracles and most importantly Jesus' bodily resurrection. Jesus is a man, nothing more, nothing less, in possession of no supernatural or otherworldly powers, and to whom nothing that conflicts with the normal laws of physics happens. He is a powerful preacher however, whose simple message offers hope to the poor, the sick and the oppressed.

But he has a twin brother called Christ, who has an eye to history and politics, and the need to 'interpret' his brother's message of radical love and poverty so as to make it more palatable, worldly and enduring. He is, clearly, the emerging institutional Church. He is not a saint, this Christ, although well meaning. He is a sinner who sleeps with prostitutes and eventually betrays Jesus with a Judas kiss.

'Christ wrote down every word, but he resolved to improve the story later....For the Kingdom to flourish, it needs a body of men, and women too, both Jews and Gentiles, faithful followers under the guidance of men of authority and wisdom. And this Church - we can call it a church - will need men of formidable organisational powers and deep intellectual penetration, both to conceive and develop the structure of the body and to formulate the doctrines that will hold it together. There are such men, and they are ready and waiting. The church will not lack organisation and doctrine.' 

Pullman's seemingly simple story of a good man and his clever, conniving brother is anything but. This novel is situated in a rich, theological tradition in its quest for the truth of the historical Jesus, the beginnings of the 'official' gospel story, the canon, and the critical first 100 years of the Christian offshoot of Judaism.

It is beautifully written, in graceful, simple and elegant prose, and it brings to vivid life the people and pivotal events of 2000 years ago.

An astonishing achievement really. I urge you to read it.

A Few New Books..(for those of you with time!!..)

Just a few words on some of the books I've read over the last month or so - a wide range of genres, from highbrow to lowbrow, you must admit!


Let's start with the low first:

I guess I've read about four or five Harlan Coben novels in my time, mainly on long and boring plane flights. This one, his latest, is only mildly entertaining, although I must admit that Coben is interesting in that he has a real gift for portraying the emptiness and ordinariness of modern American suburban life. His characters are real people in real family situations. He rarely goes underground, with criminals, murderers, serial killers, and other ugly types. This is middle class fiction, and sort of wholesome, and the focus is usually on teenagers and parents in stressful, but still ordinary situations. I guess Coben writes about what he knows.

Lee Child's new Jack Reacher thriller 61 Hours is much, much better than his last one, Gone Tomorrow. Child actually takes time to explore Reacher as a character, his past, what makes him tick, etc. He comes out of this a fully developed and believable human being and therefore a hell of a lot more interesting. The plot is excellent too. Unputdownable, as all good thrillers need to be!

All the literati across the globe are suddenly into English crime writer Philip Kerr, so I had to read his latest And The Dead Rise Not, just to find out what all the fuss was about. Kerr's central character is ex-policeman Bernie Gunther, who plied his craft in Nazi Germany, specifically Berlin, in the 30's and 40's. This is Gunther's sixth outing. While an enjoyable read on many levels, particularly political, I was disappointed overall. Kerr just tries way too hard to get the slick, private-eye, Philip Marlow patter in there, and it's forced and irritating. It's look-at-me-aren't-I-stylish annoying. And the book is full of structural flaws in plotting and character.


OK, now to the hard stuff:

Nobel Prize winner, Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk released his latest novel The Museum of Innocence late last year, and I've sort of been meaning to get around to reading it, you know, but it's sooo long and looks so, like....serious. So when the ABC's First Tuesday Book Club selected it for discussion in May I thought OK..it's time.


Now when you read a novel by a Nobel laureate you don't say 'Oh, I didn't like it...it didn't grab me..etc'. Literature at this level judges YOU, you don't judge it! (take note Marieke!). So I feel rather good about exclaiming to all and sundry that The Museum of Innocence is simply superb. It's boring in parts, the central character is a tad annoying, and there's an argument for saying it's 100 pages too long, but when you finish it and you feel that deep level of satisfaction that a good literary experience can bring, these things become trifles.


The novel is set in the fabulously interesting and ancient city of Istanbul in the mid-70's, and it explores the intense and passionate love between a rich young man and an astonishingly beautiful, but poor, young girl. As it turns out her beauty becomes toxic and destructive, and ultimately tragic for both of them. This novel could not have been written in the West. It takes far too seriously some very traditional themes of virginity, fidelity, marriage and family. But that's precisely what makes it so fascinating and powerful. Highly recommended.

The Norseman's Song is a new novel from Melbourne poet and former speechwriter Joel Deane. It is dark and unremitting in its very sure-footed exploration of human cruelty, violence and death. It has echoes of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness - 'the horror, the horror' underpinning our fragile social cohesion, and how easily the bonds preventing our descent into hell can be destroyed. Deane's is a mature, rich and powerful vision, and his novel deserves to be widely read. Not for the faint hearted, but I loved it.

Which nicely brings me to On Evil, a new literary-philosophical work from one of my favorite writers and thinkers, Terry Eagleton (I raved about his Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, in May last year in this blog). Unfortunately On Evil is nowhere near as good, and I found myself frequently nodding off while reading it. Eagleton never clearly states his case, but chooses to let it emerge through his subtle engagement with a number of literary classics, philosophical treatises and historical events such as the holocaust. The blurb calls this 'a witty and accessible study'. I'd call it anything but!

If you love Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief (and who doesn't?) you will also love the new English translation of German novelist Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin. First published in 1947, this gut-wrenching novel is a masterpiece in its graphic portrayal of German society under the Nazi regime. Truly invigorating.

Contemporary American writer David Shield's Reality Hunger proclaims itself as a manifesto for writers of non-fiction. It's a call to arms, an attempt to destroy the concept of fiction as a still relevant art form. The book comprises 618 relatively brief but strong and succinct statements, many of which are intriguing, suggestive, resonant and powerful. For example: number 405: 'Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings'; number 529: 'We are adrift, alone in the cosmos, wreaking monstrous violence on one another out of frustration and pain'. Well into the book you start to realise, if you hadn't twigged at the start, that this entire work is a strung-together series of quotations from other writers. This is only acknowledged, reluctantly, and at the insistence of his publisher, at the end. Which proves Shields' major thesis that all art is a re-use and re-cycling of prior works, an exquisitely post-modern statement for our times. Interesting, but pretty uninteresting at the same time. I was not real sold at the end.

The Failure of Free Market Economics: Martin Feil

I came to know of Martin Feil when I moved to Melbourne and started to read The Age. Feil was a regular contributor to the business pages and I found him a very strange beast indeed. He seemed like a total throwback to me. I've always been a passionate supporter of free trade, open markets, deregulation - the whole 'economic rationalist' kit and caboodle. Paul Keating, the godfather of this school of economic thinking and policy in Australia, has been my hero for 30 years. Feil, on the other hand, hates Keating with a passion (but to give him his due, hates Howard and Costello too!)

So what sort of strange concoction is this man? I had to read this book to find out.

Feil's essential thesis is a quite familiar one:

'We are simply spending too much on imports, and exporting virtually no value-added products'  (p. 157)

'Decades of unremitting tariff-lowering - without the erection or retention of compensating non-tariff barriers - have led to entirely predictable adverse results. Imports have increased their share of virtually every market within Australia for merchandise goods. This has resulted in negative current-account balances for every year since 1973.  In turn, these negative balances have created a known foreign debt of  $700 billion.' (p. 219)

Feil laments the fact that we've destroyed our manufacturing base in the process of dismantling the protectionist regime Australia had built up over the previous century. Thus our industries can't compete with imports, and we have few products to export to help balance our accounts. Minerals, agriculture, education and other services are nowhere near enough.

His enemies are legion: Australian politicians; the whole economics profession; the Productivity Commission; the retail, hospitality and services sectors of the economy ('that produce nothing tangible'); and banks of course.

The global financial crisis, which Feil delights in calling the global financial disaster, is shoehorned into assuming the almost theological role of an Armageddon, an inevitable and justified outcome of the disastrous free market policies the developed world has pursued over the past 30 years. To make this case Feil almost comically exaggerates the magnitude and severity of this event, even its reach into the deepest, unknown and wilfully unmeasured recesses of our economy. He needs such an outcome to bolster his anti free-market thesis. The fact that Australia seems to have escaped comparatively lightly from the GFC is in his view illusory. Just you wait! 'How can anyone argue with a straight face that free-market economics is still some eternal economic truth?' (p.142)

One of Feil's major arguments in this book is that, while Australia was perhaps justified in removing its high tariffs regime, it should have left in place, or created, a legion of 'non-tariff barriers' to replace it in order to continue a good measure of protection for our manufacturing industries, just like every other country on the planet has done. He lists the sorts of barriers he favors, and they include this:

'Simply slowing down the supply chain through technical Customs queries, making demands for additional information, and routinely engaging in the dilatory clearance of goods by the authorities....In the case of perishable products, this may result in the loss of the entire shipment'. (p.212)

In other words Australians should resort to the base level of corruption, inefficiency, malpractice and common trickery of much of the rest of the world. I'm sorry sir, that's not my country.

On the positive side, Feil's book has some marvellous statistics and information in it, and there is much to agree with. It's well-researched, well written and a good read. (Did you know, for instance, that since 9/11 Australia's defense budget has increased from $12.6 billion to $26.7 billion in 2008-9; that Customs has forgotten about trade facilitation and now focuses on our infantile obsession with border security; that its staffing has grown from 3900 to 5450 people, and its budget has almost doubled; that the Australian Federal Police has increased its staff from 4200 to 6000? What a growth industry security is!) 

It's just a pity the basic thesis of this otherwise fascinating book is so seriously flawed and unpersuasive.   

Michael Lewis' new book on the GFC: The Big Short

'The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him'. (Leo Tolstoy, 1897)


In the late 1980's Michael Lewis wrote Liar's Poker, an expose of Wall St that became an instant classic. It is one of the great business books of all time. Now he's followed that with The Big Short, an utterly absorbing story of the origins of the Global Financial Crisis, the incompetent and deluded (but very rich) Wall St morons who caused it, and the handful of savvy, smart outsiders who saw it coming but were universally panned, condemned and ignored.


The book is full of some 'compulsively fascinating characters' as the blurb says. But the real joy of the book for me is that it so clearly explains all the complex financial instruments that were at the heart of the sub-prime mortgage problem. By the time you get to page 140 you can immediately comprehend the following sentence and appreciate the real drama behind it:


'Only now did he fully appreciate the central importance of the so-called mezzanine CDO - the CDO composed mainly of triple B rated subprime mortgage bonds - and its synthetic counterpart: the CDO composed entirely of credit default swaps on triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds'. 

The Big Short is a must read - in so many ways a fable of our times.

Ian McEwan's Solar

I devour any new novel by Ian McEwan, so I couldn't wait to read the much anticipated Solar. Much anticipated because apparently it was 'a sort of comic treatment of climate change', and how could McEwan do this and pull it off? Comedy? After the ultra earnest On Chesil Beach? You have to be kidding!


Well, pull it off he does. Solar is superb. It's not a comedy - there are simply some very funny elements. And it's not about climate change - that is simply the intellectual setting, if you like.


This book is really an absorbing exploration of a very contemporary, post-modern obsession: fact v fiction; truth v narrative; the construction of an appealing, acceptable face to the world.


On the surface it's a simple story. Professor Michael Beard, Noble prize-winning physicist, spirals into total dissolution - physical, moral, social, intellectual. It's a long, slow suicide. But McEwan makes him entirely sympathetic. The man's passions, appetites and lusts can't hide a deep insecurity within, a longing for genuineness and integrity that constantly elude him.


There are some laugh out loud moments in the book that are more Ben Elton than Ian McEwan, but I predict Solar will be another very well-received novel for this eminently readable author. In some ways it out-McEwans McEwan. This master of the quotidian round, at home or at work - shattered as it always is by an event that fractures - outdoes himself here, propelling the story to its inevitable conclusion. Whether it has the sort of 'literary' merit always associated with this Booker prize-winning author, that will be endlessly debated.


In my view, Michael Beard is a wonderful creation, and he deserves to live forever!