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.
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 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.
Bernard Keane, political editor for Crikey, is without doubt one of the best journalists in the country. A former senior public servant, he does his homework, reads government, industry and commissioned reports and submissions by the bucket load, and he can write.
I consider him essential daily reading. His take on things political, social and economic is passionate and insightful. He has pet hates which I share. One of them is governments' surveillance of their own citizens, and particularly Australia's recently introduced data retention regime.
I therefore had to read his just released novel, Surveillance. I expected a real world fleshing out of his ferocious antipathy to government and corporate overreach in this contested terrain.
Unfortunately, I didn't get it. The novel is really a piece of soft porn with a pretty ordinary corporate malfeasance narrative as cover. In Keane's fictional world all beautiful women are just hanging out for cock - the bigger the better.
It's hardly a robust critique of political power and lack of transparency, much less an examination of how people's real lives are negatively affected. It's an old fashioned thriller that presumes to take us behind the veil of secrecy of the cybersecurity and defence establishment and the corporations that rely on it for business. The higher the level of public anxiety and panic, the better for business. We're led into a forest of acronyms: ASD, ASIO, ACSC, AFP and more - agencies and their feverish, faux serious manoeuvrings, all done quietly and efficiently by a self-important, crusty, but powerful elite. This is an age old story of establishment power, trussed up for our times.
If business is bad then security threats need to be manufactured. Public debate can always be massaged by a compliant media provided the lie is big and mythic enough. It's in everybody's business and political interest.
This is an easy read set in the familiar streets of downtown Sydney, but a lost opportunity by Keane.
I wanted something more serious.
I was critical of New York Times review of this new release for breaking the publisher's July 14 embargo - it would have been party to a clear breach of contract - but nevertheless Michiko Katukani's take on the book is well worth reading. For her this 'sequel' was unexciting and unlovely in its focus on the now bigoted racist, Atticus.
A more positive review by Stephen Romei, literary editor of The Australian, does the book far more justice.
There have been lots of reviews - the majority rather negative.
But I agree with Romei. Go Set A Watchman is wonderful, stimulating, and a real pleasure to read.
As much as anything it's a novel of dialogues, debates and ideas. And wit abounds. Scout, known by her real name Jean Louise and now in her mid-twenties, is a delightful, highly intelligent and feisty young woman who has spent the last few years in New York. This is a very playful telling by Lee who obviously identifies with her richly drawn and extremely likable character.
Jean Louise's adult awakening to Atticus is so much more meaningful knowing as we do the child Scout's naive view of her saintly father in To Kill A Mockingbird. The two books enrich each other immeasurably. In fact they both need each other. It was pure editorial genius that Lee was persuaded to first retell the story from the child's point of view rather than proceed to publish Go Set A Watchman. But why did Lee and her publisher decide not to release the first book at all, rather than a few years later? Perhaps so as not to destroy the magic of Atticus that had taken hold in the public imagination? I guess we'll never know.
Unlike in TKAM, a strain of high amusement runs through the GSAW narrative. It has a vastly different tone, at times reading like a satirical village comedy. But Lee manages to expertly combine this playfulness with a serious and savage critique of racism in the South. It is a fiercely passionate denunciation of white supremacism and Lee is very angry indeed. The writing in the heated arguments, particularly those between Jean Louise and her father, is rich, powerful and disturbing. The contrasting ideas and beliefs are fully articulated and the reader served a sumptuous, invigorating feast.
The final few chapters are intense, and some critics doubt their realism and credibility. Atticus is condemned, in fact demolished by an out of control Jean Louise, but gets a chance to explain his position. It's rational. He's a liberal, as we've always known, but now in his senior years, an Establishment one. He's a lawyer.
I thoroughly recommend you read this book, but if you haven't read TKAM you must read that first.
I had planned an enthusiastic review of this superb crime novel and then made the mistake of reading this piece in The New Yorker by Joyce Carol Oates which said everything I wanted to say, only of course far, far better.
This book has come with enthusiastic recommendations from many critics and booksellers I deeply respect. Martin Shaw from Readings, a very discriminating reader, proclaimed: '...without question one the finest Australian novels of 2015'.
I had to read it, despite the cover, once again, turning me off. (Down Under, get it?)
The book is powerful, no doubt about that. The power kicks in about two thirds of the way through and then is relentless. It's confronting and asks far more questions than it answers. It's a domestic drama about marriage, children and especially motherhood. And a profound and uncomfortable depression.
The problem I had with the book was the author's obsession with describing in micro detail the natural environment in which the characters move - in rural England, in suburban Australia, and in provincial India. The narrative is frequently buried in long and poetic descriptions of the ordinary goings on in the physical world - birds, trees, winds, breezes, flowers, seasons, rivers, insects, rocks, moths, spiders, weevils, beetles, mosquitoes, etc, ad nauseum.
There isn't a paragraph, no matter how short, that doesn't digress into description. The writing is sublime, the phrasing poetic, there's not a word out of place or a cliche anywhere. But how much more of this Boys Own Guide to the Natural World am I meant to bare? Frankly, it verges on the tedious.
But in the end, because of the overwhelming power of the story, the book is a triumph.
So persevere with this, enjoy the writing, and be deeply moved and emotionally shaken by the drama.
