Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things and the Book Group

Posted on 25 Mar 2026 | 1 comment

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (Flamingo 1997)

Before the meeting: After Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me gave us so much pleasure last month, this month’s Chooser met with general approval when he picked the novel that made her famous.

I first read The God of Small Things before I started blogging. Apart from a general sense of having enjoyed it, I retained just one image, of a group of policemen marching in long grass. It turns out that the image comes towards the end of the book, on page 304:

A posse of Touchable Policemen crossed the Meenachal river, sluggish and swollen with recent rain, and picked their way through the wet undergrowth, the clink of handcuffs in someone’s heavy pocket.
Their wide khaki shorts were rigid with starch, and bobbed over the tall grass like a row of stiff skirts, quite independent of the limbs that moved inside them.

There’s so much of the book in those two sentences. The starched shorts, so vividly present and so rich with metaphorical meaning; the initial capitals ‘Touchable Policemen’ marking a childlike personification of key concepts; the river, the undergrowth and the tall grass as part of the physical environment that is such a force in the book. Above all, the complex tone is characteristic: the soldiers are almost comic, puppet-like, yet the reader knows that they are about to do terrible things.

The rest of the book was fresh and new to me. It’s the story of twins Estha and Rahel, their mother Ammu (whose divorced status was scandalous in the mid 1960s, in the Syrian Christian community of their small village in Kerala), and their extended family: Ammu’s brother Chacko, her blind mother Mammachi, and Baby Kochamma. (The text is scattered with Malayalam words, only sometimes translated. I understood ‘Kochamma’ to mean ‘Auntie’, and a quick websearch just now gave ‘a woman who is to be respected like a mother’.) In spite of her cuddly name, Baby Kochamma is a nasty piece of work, disappointed in love by a priest when she was young, and now bitter, moralistic and vindictive. Chacko’s divorced wife, an Englishwoman, comes to visit with her daughter Sophie Mol (‘Mol’ means something like ‘daughter’), who is about the same age as Estha and Rahel.

We know from the beginning that there is to be a disaster. The narrative takes place in at least three time frames: before the disaster, the disaster, and a couple of decades after the disaster. We see Sophie Mol’s funeral before we know who she is, and there are plenty of hints of the other terrible incident – which isn’t revealed until the final pages, just after the scene with the starched shorts.

There’s another moment that has idiosyncratic resonance for me. There are a three or four guava trees on streets near my home. I recently went scrounging and picked from the trees and from the footpaths enough ripe and slightly bruised fruit to make a delicious jar of jam. The unusable fruit on the ground, and there was a lot of it, was a disgusting mess. So it was a personal pleasure when a day or so later, on page 205, Rahel and Estha approach the hut of Velutha, a servant whom they love:

Velutha wasn’t home. <snip> But someone was. A man’s voice floated out from inside and echoed around the clearing, making him sound lonely.
The voice shouted the same thing, over and over again, and each time it climbed into a higher, more hysterical register. lt was an appeal to an over-ripe guava threatening to fall from its tree and make a mess on the ground.

Pa pera-pera-pera-perakka
(Mr gugga-gug-gug-guava),
Ende parambil thooralley
(Don’t shit here in my compound).
Chetende parambil thoorikko
(You can shit next door in my brother’s compound),
Pa pera-pera-pera-perakka
(Mr gugga-gug-gug-guava.)

Exactly what I want to sing to the guavas of Enmore.

This is a book that cries out for quotation. You can feel Arundhati Roy’s glee as she comes up with similes, malapropisms and mondegreens, little asides, big digressions, wonderful descriptions of people. Page 79* is a good example. As it happens, it starts with Velutha and moves on to Baby Kochamma.

The family are driving to the nearest sizeable town, Cochin, to see The Sound of Music. It’s a long drive, interspersed with flashbacks, flashforwards and songs from the show. At page 78, already running late, they are held up by a demonstration – the street is full of workers, possibly including some Naxalites (the ‘extremists’ who Arundhati Roy was to spend time with in the jungle some decades later), carrying the red flag of Communism. The adults in the car have complex responses. Baby Kochamma is unequivocally on the side of capitalism; Chacko, though he effectively owns a pickle factory, identifies as a Marxist and theoretically is on the side of the workers; the twins’ mother says nothing, but later we realise that she has fellow feeling with the demonstrators. Rahel thinks she sees Velutha – as a former Untouchable, he usually goes shirtless, but the man Rahel sees is wearing a white shirt and waves a red flag.

Though we have met Velutha previously in stories of Ammu’s childhood, it’s here that we learn who he is from the twins’ point of view:

They would sit with him for hours, on their haunches – hunched punctuation marks in a pool of wood shavings – and wonder how he always seemed to know what smooth shapes waited inside the wood for him. They loved the way wood, in Velutha’s hands, seemed to soften and become as pliable as Plasticine. He was teaching them to use a planer. His house (on a good day) smelled of fresh wood shavings and the sun. Of red fish curry cooked with black tamarind. The best fish curry, according to Estha, in the whole world.
It was Velutha who made Rahel her luckiest ever fishing rod and taught her and Estha to fish.
And on that skyblue December day, it was him that she saw through her red sunglasses, marching with a red flag at the level crossing outside Cochin.

Then there’s a characteristic switch in perspective. The omniscient narrator steps in with a premonition. Rahel’s red-tinted glasses fill the world with the colour of danger. Birds of prey wheel above the demonstration, and Velutha’s black back with its distinctive leaf-shaped birthmark becomes a potential target:

Rahel could see pieces of red sky. And in the red sky, hot red kites wheeled, looking for rats. In their hooded yellow eyes there was a road and red flags marching. And a white shirt over a black back with a birthmark.
Marching.

Then the point of view comes right down to a close-up, and some characteristically tactile description. Where Rahel sees a friendly figure in the crows, Baby sees a threat:

Terror, sweat and talcum powder blended into a mauve paste between Baby Kochamma’s rings of neckfat. Spit coagulated into little white gobs at the corners of her mouth. She imagined she saw a man in the procession who looked like the photograph in the newspapers of the Naxalite called Rajan, who was rumoured to have moved south from Palghat. She imagined he had looked straight at her.

I love the final paragraph on the page. Rahel the child is aware that the man with ‘a face like a knot’ means to be unkind, but her preoccupations seize on his unintended normalising of her family.

A man with a red flag and a face like a knot opened Rahel’s door because it wasn’t locked. The doorway was full of men who’d stopped to stare.
‘Feeling hot, baby?’ the man like a knot asked Rahel kindly in Malayalam. Then unkindly, ‘Ask your daddy to buy you an Air Condition!’ and he hooted with delight at his own wit and timing. Rahel smiled back at him, pleased to have Chacko mistaken for her father. Like a normal family

I can’t say I know a lot about India. I’ve never been to Kerala. But at a railway station in Rajasthan, men did stop to stare unblinkingly at the young women in our group. It didn’t feel particularly aggressive or even deliberately impolite. We put it down to cultural difference. That experience helps me to visualise what Arundhati Roy is describing here, and to understand why Rahel isn’t particularly disturbed.

On the next page, the man with the flag turns his attention to Baby Kochamma and speaks to her in English, justifying her terror. But that’s another story, of the many told in this marvellous book.

The meeting: There were seven of us and as always we ate well and enjoyed each other’s company. We spoke as little as possible about Donald Trump, Iran, Israel, fuel and the tendency among younger generations to identify with self-diagnosed mental illness or neurodivergence. We gave passing glances to recent theatre and film pleasures, and to bodily pains, including severe side effects from statins that two of us have experienced, and the satisfaction of a third who convinced his specialist not to prescribe them for him.

One person had said on the WhatsApp group that he’d reach the halfway point of the book and was going to give up. I replied on the group that I loved the book and was looking forward to an interesting conversation – but it turned out that he had read the wrong Arundhati Roy book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. He said at the meeting that there are some wonderful passages in it, but he found it very hard going.

Another person had read the right book in the 1990s and hadn’t been inclined to reread it. I don’t think this was from active dislike. As the single parent of a teenager, and the only one at the meeting still in full-time employment, I imagine he doesn’t have a lot of time for reading, let alone rereading.

One person was about halfway through the book, but intending to read the rest and not touchy about spoilers. I’m starting to think it would be good to have a designated non-finisher for every meeting. The non-finisher could then ask questions that lead the rest of the group to think about how things fit together. In this case, there’s a scene where Estha, the boy twin, is sexually molested. Our non-finisher wanted to know if this had a lasting effect on him as it seemed at the time that life just carried on. I replied blithely that it was a bit of a red herring – we were tempted to read this incident as explaining why the Estha we see many years later has become an alienated mute, but the real cause is the much worse incident that happens at the book’s climax. I was gently corrected: Estha’s terror of the incident being repeated set off a chain of events that leads to the climactic incident.

Of the other four, one had read the book reluctantly – feeling that he might have had enough Indian novels for a while (cue a brief digression as we enthused that Amitav Ghosh is scheduled to come to the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May), and it took a while but after the halfway point, once all the characters had been introduced and the plot got moving, the book won him over completely. We generally agreed that it was a bit of a struggle in the first half to keep track of the complex set of relationships. The time shifts, especially in the first half, were often confusing. It’s a book, someone said, that needs to be read in reasonably long sessions – not ten minutes at a time before you go to sleep at night. Nods all round.

Someone else said that when he was struggling with the language he read a passage out to his partner to see if she could make head or tail of it. When he heard the words aloud he realised they were crystal clear. From then on, he slowed down, letting the language play on his inner ear, and enjoyed the experience. (Sadly, he couldn’t find the passage to read it to us.) Conversation hovered around this: not universally seen as a virtue, the book is peppered with writerly quirks, turns of phrase or eccentric punctuation that draw attention to themselves and pull the reader out of the story for a moment. A young writer flexing her muscles, I think someone said. And why not? someone may have said back.

We left our host with the washing up and dispersed into a clear, warm, early Autumn night.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time that has elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. The Book Group met on Gadigal land. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal, where yesterday’s sudden downpours show no sign of recurring today. I acknowledge Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 79.

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Journal Catch-up 33: Meanjin Winter 2025

Posted on 22 Mar 2026 | Leave a comment

Esther Anatolitis (editor), Meanjin Vol 84 Nº 2 (Winter 2025)
(links are to the Meanjin website: I believe that they are now all accessible to non-subscribers)

This is the antepenultimate issue of Meanjin as produced by Melbourne University Press and edited by Esther Anatolitis. Queensland University of Technology recently announced that they will bring about a resurrection, but who knows how much continuity there will be? So in spite of the good news, with this issue the journal is nearing an end.

However, though it encompasses plenty of gloom about the environment, democracy, world peace, the state of Australian literary culture and more, the journal itself shows no sign of imminent mortality.

As always it starts out with a piece by a First Nations person. This time it’s ‘I Am an Invisible Man’ by Djon Mundine OAM. Subtitled ‘This is how I became a curator’, this brief memoir acts as a brilliant summary of the rising awareness of Australian First Nations art over recent decades as seen through the lens of one person’s contribution.

I can’t be the only person who has a special place in his heart for Barry Jones, quiz champion in my childhood, then Labor Party eminence and parliamentarian, still going strong and writing with precision from a broad knowledge base. His article here about our dangerous times, ‘Courage, anyone?‘, ends with a call to arms that reads as a thinly-veiled reproach to our current Prime Minister:

In Australia, we have to be honest with ourselves about race, class, our history.
As citizens we have to engage, engage, engage.
The year 2025 is no time for deference and over-caution.
More than fifty years ago, Gough Whitlam used heroic advocacy to change Australian society. We must follow his example.
It’s time.

Alison Croggon is another commentator on Australian cultural life who is always worth reading. Her article, ‘Courage, imagination, understanding: Creative Australia in 2025‘, spells out the implications of Creative Australia’s ‘confounding decision’ to cancel the contract with Khaled Salsabi and Michael Dagostino to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. She sings from the same sheet as Barry Jones:

At a time of mass species extinction, climate chaos, growing authoritarianism, economic inequity and war, the health of a culture may seem trivial. I persist in believing that it is far from triivial, that the insights and freedoms that art offers can not only help us recognise and combat the problems we have, but also survice them.

There’s an interview with Chinese-Australian poet Ouyang Yu, at his gloomy contrarian best. ‘In the future,’ he says, ‘the hope of mankind to defeat AI is its ability to err.’ And he means humankind’s ability to err, not AI’s. And later: ‘Posthumous existence is the only one that is tolerable and meaningfully available to a writer.’ His story of writing in both Chinese and English and the different relationships with his readers in those two language communities is fascinating.

Carl Sciberras, tasked with writing about ‘The Year in Dance‘, begins with – what I had completely forgotten, and which he claims not to have seen – Rachel Gunn’s breakdance at the 2024 Olympics. He does move on to less headline-grabbing, more excellent performances.

Bronwyn Lay’s article, ‘The climate crisis urges us to repair our broken constitution‘, whose argument is summarised in its title, gave me a new word, in purple (mine not hers) and helpfully defined in this quote:

Australia has a particular agnotology, a culturally induced ignorance, that denies our nation is founded upon violence against First Nations peoples and their Country. (p. 71)

Harry Saddler, in ‘Australia in three books‘, uses his platform to preach to the choir about current political culture (not the subject of any of his chosen books). But I am grateful to him for adding another excellent word to my vocabulary, a word whose dictionary meaning isn’t as scatological as the word sounds:

It’s impossible not to think of the ways the worst trends of American politics and public life have been and continue to be taken up eagerly by the kakistocracy that makes up so much of federal parliament. (p. 123)

Of the four short stories, I resonated most with is ‘Open’ by Jo Langdon, in which a woman narrator, her mother and her young daughter deal with bereavement, estrangement and each other. The little girl in particular is wonderful.

In ‘A refugee daughter’s pilgrimage‘, Lisa Pham visits locations that figure in her Vietnamese refugee parents’ story:

Discovering a piece of my family’s history and going back to the places they once inhabited has been transformational, healing, life-affirming. I no longer flinch when someone asks if my family were boat people: it is a part of who I am. Their story is also my story.

Of this issue’s poems, I enjoyed ‘Listening in‘ an ekphrastic poem by Lachlan Brown that sent me googling for Vic McEwan’s work The Unravelling (there are two photos some way down on this lnk), which in turn sent me back to the poem for a greatly enriched second reading. I also enjoyed ‘The Anthropocene is a geological epoch‘ by Sophie Finlay and ‘Waves Poem‘ by Toby Fitch: these poems are on consecutive pages, the first belying its title’s academic abstraction, and both of them evoking planetary subjects through minutely observed detail – of a blue-ringed octopus and waves in a bathtub respectively.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time that has elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal, where the nights are lasting longer and small lizards seem to be everywhere. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

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Jennifer Maiden’s Mandatory Sentence

Posted on 19 Mar 2026 | Leave a comment

Jennifer Maien, Mandatory Sentence (Quemar Press 2026)

Mandatory Sentence is the latest in Jennifer Maiden’s continuing tightrope act of producing a book of poetry at the start of each year. As in previous years, most of its contents are in effect occasional poems, that is, poems written in response to breaking news – developments in the Gaza genocide, the demolition of the East Wing of the White House, Anthony Albanese’s visit to China, news about AI, and so on. Many of the poems feature fictional or historical characters responding to these events, sometimes in dialogue with current politicians.

If you’re new to Maiden’s poetry, you might need help with the characters who populate the book. George Jeffreys and Clare Collins, familiar from Maiden’s four novels and many poems, appear with their ever-increasing family that includes a son named Corbyn and a number of animals. There’s a weird, cuddly little creature named Brookings – named after the Brookings Institute and originally perhaps emblematic of what Maiden sees as that organisation’s deliberate naivety, but now taking on a life of its own. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eleanor Roosevelt and other make brief repeat appearances. Maiden’s daughter Katharine, has appeared in her mother’s poetry since The Winter Baby (1990) – as well as being the book’s publisher in real life.

I read Mandatory Sentence just after my first reading of Evelyn Araluen’s The Rot. They’re very different books, but they both respond with some immediacy to world events from a left / progressive perspective, so it’s not surprising that there are moments when they chime. One such moment is the opening of ‘Brooking Becomes a Bomb Bay Door’, which echoes that of Araluen’s ‘Uplock Actuator System’. For this blog post, I’ll stay there.

Both poems were evidently inspired by the same interview Richard Marles gave on the ABC in August last year – at this link – in which he asserted repeatedly that Australia does not supply weapons to Israel, but is ‘part of the F-35 process’. Neither poem is limited to satirising that assertion – the Shovel does that brilliantly, here. How they each make distinctive poetry from the material is interesting.

‘Uplock Actuator System’ begins:

We aren't sending weapons, they said, 
just the only lock for the only door that 
opens when they are fired from the air.

The poem progresses in nine three-line stanzas of almost intolerable intensity, evoking the suffering of Gaza and linking it to the ‘parallel occupation’ of Australia and the unwilling complicity of all of us. It ends with a call to engagement .

‘Brooking Becomes a Bomb Bay Door’ is by comparison laid-back and playful, adjectives I wouldn’t easily associate with Maiden’s political poems. You can hear her performing it, pretty much deadpan, at this link. Here’s how it appears in Mandatory Sentence:

It begins with the titular Brookings – a ‘small fur baby wombat-possum cross’ who could have come from a children’s cartoon – watching the television, cutely ‘like a kindergarten’. And there’s some almost silly play on words – the word ‘cross’ appears three times, each with a different meaning.

The small fur baby wombat-possum cross 
sits watching Marles on the ABC say we send no arms 
to Israel. Brookings is at present tired and cross 
sitting with his four legs crossed in attention 
like a kindergarten,

The adult shorthand – ‘Marles on the ABC’ – alerts us that this is not a cute and cuddly poem. Contemporary Australian readers will know that this is Richard Marles, Minister for Defence, and the context is Israel’s genocidal bombing of Gaza (the context has moved on since the book was published – but the poem’s concerns are still sharply relevant). The language of political denial-not-denial is skewered in just three lines.

like a kindergarten, so I probably should not 
have stirred him up by explaining that 
Australia does not send whole weapons but
the doors for bomb bays in their planes
which it replaces as often as they ask.

The poem’s central tension is set up: on one hand, there’s the innocent, naive, playful fantasy creature and on the other the poem’s speaker who is aware that the Australian government is complicit in terrible things.

For the next 14 lines, the rest of the first page, innocent Brookings plays. In the Brookings poems – this book also includes ‘Brookings Becomes a False Flag’ – it’s clear Maiden’s invented character is not simply a mouthpiece for the poet but has an independent imaginary existence. (This may not be obvious with other Maiden characters, but I think it’s always true – Maiden sets her imagined people/creatures up and is interested to see what they have to say – what, for instance, would Dietrich Bonhoeffer say to Kevin Rudd this time? Do I need to say that Bonhoeffer isn’t as cute as Brookings?)

Brookings’s metaphorical origins may be at work in the background, suggesting that liberal organisations like the Brookings Institution aren’t serious about addressing things like genocide. Nerdily, I went to the Institution’s website to see what it was up to at about the time this poem was published – and while it wasn’t playing at being a bomb bay door (or a Bombay door with beads and velvet curtain), it was hosting a discussion about the future of drone warfare (link here). Make of that what you will.

But the poem doesn’t mount an argument about the Brookings Institution. It just gives a picture of innocent, or at least oblivious, playfulness.

There’s a turn, and in the second part of the poem the narrative moves to bedtime, which is a pretext for introducing Tolstoy’s War and Peace. This might seem a bit forced, but if you can accept a ‘fur baby wombat-possum cross’ then why not also accept War and Peace as its ‘best book’?

Embarrassingly, I haven’t read War and Peace (though I saw the King Vidor movie on Super 8 in 1964 and fell in love with Audrey Hepburn). Other readers will know what specific bearing the scene from the novel has on the rest of the poem:

He’ll ask I read him the bit in War and Peace
he likes best at the moment when
Natasha clears belongings from the cart
to make room for some wounded men
as the Rostovs' Moscow house is left
so Kutuzov can defeat Napoleon.

But those of us who haven’t read the novel can still see/feel how it works in the poem.

The War and Peace moment is juxtaposed with the image of Tolstoy at the time when he wrote it:

Tolstoy never fails to soothe
with his independent post-view of
history in its merciful details as
in reality he sits in his wooded plantation
under a tree to school some gathered children.

As often happens with poems, it seems as if this one has gone wandering, from Marles to Brookings, to War and Peace, to Tolstoy sitting with children under a tree. Then the next couple of lines bring it home:

The ABC of Marles does not interplay vision
of children firebombed in tents or shot
in line for food

The poem has interplayed vision of Tolstoy schooling children in a safe ‘independent post-view of / history’ with a scene from his great novel. If tha ABC was to interplay vision of children with the Marles interview, those children would not be safely ‘post-history’ but concurrent with the interview, victims of atrocity. The tension in the opening lines between child-like naivety and a violent reality comes to a head here.

Incidentally, ‘the ABC of Marles’ seems at first to be a slightly odd way of saying ‘Marles on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’, but it can also read, less oddly, as ‘the alphabet of Marles’ – that is, the evasive language Marles uses.

The poem doesn’t go to graphic description of the atrocities – it gives enough to let us know the heaviness that sits in the speaker.

But – and it’s an important question – what is a parent or quasi parent to do? The speaker allows Brookings to continue in ignorance, and the poem ends with the peaceful image of mother and not-quite-child at bedtime;

And now he rests his furry heavy head
in its impossible softness up against my arm
and I read to him again from his best book,
which he opens and shuts a few times first,
transfers to it his bomb bay doorway function

Just two things complicate the image and provoke further thought and feeling.

First, the word ‘impossible’ suggests that, just as any soothing Tolstoy has to offer is dubious because he was writing from a safe historical distance, so any comfort afforded by Brookings is illusory because he is after all an invention, an impossibility.

And second, the last line: what does it mean that the ‘bomb bay doorway function’ can be transferred to a book? What is released when a book ‘opens and shuts’? If you’ve read this far, you probably have as good an answer to that question as I have and together we could probably come up with better ones. I’m reminded of a long history of assertions of the power of the word. There’s the proverbial: ‘The Pen is Mightier than the Sword’, ‘You can kill a person but you can’t kill an idea,’ and so on. The idea seems to be everywhere just now that the narratives we tell are crucial: we can believe the story coming from the White House, or commit ouselves to a different story. That final image gestures towards this kind of thinking. Perhaps what is released in those last lines is the possibility of resistence.

It’s not a call to arms like Evelyn Araluen’s poem, but it is a call to think, to reject double-talk, maybe even to hope.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time that has elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal, where the nights are lating longer and small lizards seem to be everywhere. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

* When blogging about a book, I currently focus on page 79, which is my age. Mandatory Sentence has just 70 pages, so I gave myself permission to go with a whim.

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The Letters of Seamus Heaney, progress report 2

Posted on 12 Mar 2026 | 2 comments

Christopher Reid (editor), The Letters of Seamus Heaney (Faber & Faber 2023)
– pages 390-598

Over the month since my first progress report on reading Seamus Heaney’s collected letters, he has aged from 53 in 1992 to 64 in 2003. Among other things, he has translated Beowulf, written a couple of translations/versions of ancient Greek plays, won the Nobel Prize, had a number of friends die, become much in demand as a public person, travelled a lot including to Tasmania in 1994, and still managed to produce a number of books of poetry. Increasingly his personal letters (as opposed to ‘correspondence’) have been written in planes and airports. He uses a laptop and a fax machine but has stayed away from email for fear that he’d ‘be inundated entirely with queries from grad students and indeed grade schoolers doing their essays’. And always there’s a yearning for moments of solitude and recollection.

I’m enjoying hugely my morning read of seven or eight pages. Apart from anything else it’s a joy to pay attention to someone other than the Attention-Seeker-in-Chief at Mar-a-Lago. I can’t add much in general to what I said in my first progress report (at this link). Here are some snippets.

Heaney writes to his translators, clarifying meanings for them – and giving us fascinating insights into the poetry and the art of translation. Most recently in my reading is an explanation handwritten at the bottom of a fax from Jerzy Illg. Illg’s fax asks for an explanation of the phrase ‘the Bushmills killed’ in the poem ‘The Bookcase’. Heaney writes (page 593, probably 23 May 2003):

‘To kill the bottle’ means to finish off all the drink. So it’s late in the evening and the Bushmills bottle is empty … You know how it is –
Best – Seamus

I’m sure I didn’t know what the phrase meant when I read the poem. So thank you, Jerzy Illg.

There’s a lot of verbal playfulness in many of Heaney’s letters. He’ll slip in a phrase from Wordsworth or Hopkins or a contemporary poet, and Christopher Reid the editor will usually add a helpful explanation of the reference. One that that I loved, that Reid didn’t explain: Heaney and his wife Marie are heading off for a brief holiday, and he describes it as a period of ‘silence, exile and sunning’ – a reference to a much quoted phrase from James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘silence, exile, and cunning’. I laughed out loud at Reid’s note at the end of a letter to fellow poet Derek Mahon in October 1997. Congratulating Mahon on a recently published book. The letter reads, in part:

I couldn’t place one [of your poems] above the other in my mind just now, just have this Baudelairean dusk-mood of gratitude. I see Milosz calls poetry a dividece from ourselves: high-yields, mon vieux.

After explaining the references, Reid writes: ‘Below the signature, in Mahon’s hand, on the actual letter in the Emory archive: “Pompous ass.”‘ Oh, I think, not everyone enjoys Heaney’s playfulness.

My pleasure in the third moment I’ll mention is less mean-spirited.

In January 2000 (page 519), in a letter to musician Liam O’Flynn, Heaney writes:

I’ve been fiddling with this Japanese form called the tanka – two lines longer than the haiku, and a development of it – consisting of five lines of five-seven-five-seven-seven syllables. It’s like a wee pastry cutter I nick into the ould dough inside the head, just to give it shape.

That is such a wonderful descritption of why I love the tight form of the Onegin stanza: it too is a ‘wee pastry cutter’ that can ‘nick into the ould dough inside the head, just to give it shape’.

I’m now reading letters Heaney wrote while working on books that I read soon after they were published, and evidently before I blogged about every book I read: Beowulf, Electric Light, District and Circle and Human Chain. I’m already sad that there are just 100 pages of the book, 10 years of letter-writing, and one month or reading to go.

I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation, as the sun rises later and tiny lizards bask while they can. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Evelyn Araluen’s Rot

Posted on 10 Mar 2026 | 2 comments

Evelyn Araluen, The Rot (University of Queensland Press 2025)

This is a brilliant follow-up to Evelyn Araluen’s first book, Dropbear. It’s passionately raw, intellectually challenging, and full of rabbit-holes. Araluen says in her acknowledgements, ‘In most ways this is a book for girls.’ She goes on to say, ‘A girl is so many things. Everything, really.’ It’s pretty safe to say that I’m not a girl. But as an oldish man of settler heritage I was swept away.

Alison Croggon in the Guardian (at this link) called it ‘a hurricane of a book’ and says (among other things):

The Rot is an experiential plunge into the nightmare of the present moment, as seen through two centuries of colonisation on this continent. Dark though it is – as dark as our times – it is not hopeless. The book is dedicated to ‘my girls, and the world you will make’: Araluen looks to the ‘Long Future’, a term coined by the Unangax̂ scholar Professor Eve Tuck, for what can be imagined for those who survive colonisation – contingent and elusive as that future might be. At the core of this collection’s bitter truths beats a sublime tenderness.

[In case you need a footnote: Unangax̂ are the Indigenous people of the Aleutian islands. Some of the most powerful moments in Rot come when Araluen wrestles with the implications of Eve Tuck’s thinking. You don’t have to go down this tempting rabbit-hole to feel the full force of the poems.]

Araluen was recently interviewed by Sian Cain for the Guardian (at this link) when she won the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Here’s a snippet:

She worked on The Rot ‘after work, after dinner, in the bath’ for months, though she now admits that such prolonged focus on such a traumatic subject was ‘irresponsible of me’.
‘I do not recommend drinking wine in the bath and listening to Mitski and crying and calling that a writing practice,’ she added.
The Rot reflects ‘a really panicked, distressed window of a time that I hope we all look back on with horror and despair and a real sense of regret,’ Araluen said.

[Mitski, another of the book’s many potential rabbit-holes, is a Japanese-American singer whose music has been described as a ‘wry running commentary on twentysomething angst, raw desire, and often unrequited love’ (link to Wikipedia article here).]

These quotes give an idea of the book’s tone and its scope, though there’s a lot that they don’t mention. For instance, the genocide in Gaza is a pervasive presence. I recommend that you read both the review and the article in full – and then I hope you’ll decide to read the book.

There’s so much to take in, so much to say, such complexity and intensity to untangle, so many rabbit-holes to be profitably explored. I’ll just offer a small note, keeping to my resolve to focus on one page.

Page 78* is the beginning of ‘What You Can Do with Your Hands’:

Before looking at the poem itself, it’s worth considering it in context. It’s title suggests that it is a direct response to an earlier poem. ‘You’ (page 25) ends:

no less human than yourself. Around us the
world sways, sometimes crumbles. It's not that
you think you can change this, but you need
something to do with your hands.

The hands motif turns up again in ‘Analysis Act Three’ (page 76), which launches itself with a quote from J H Prynne (from his 2022 lecture ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work‘, another potential rabbit-hole).

Prynne: no poet has or can have clean hands, because 
clean hands are themselves a fundamental contradiction.
Clean hands do no worthwhile work.

Sections viii and ix have this: (Apologies, but my WordPress theme doesn’t allow me to include section numbers as they ought to appear.)

Every day I ask myself what the machine doesn't want 
me to know. Every tomorrow will be the day I find a 
way to learn it. Every night I read poetry just to give 
my hands something to do.

Refusal, resistance, disavowal and survivance are
tenors of a liveable life. In action they are compromised,
bloody-handed, in the world and of it.

The book is full of theory, grief and rage. But the motif of hands beings it down to earth: thinking and feeling are not enough. We need to work, to engage. Reading poetry can be work. So are ‘refusal, resistance, disavowal and survivance’.

‘What You Can Do with Your Hands’ responds in the form of an instructional poem in 15 sections’. Page 78 has just the first two instructions:

First, verify. Count the fingers, the sharpness of the 
lines, check for smudges or extra limbs. Is there a blur?
A hollow aura where the wrong light strikes? What 
shadows loom from an open door? Wear eucalyptus 
on your wrist, invoke that old verse. Don't swallow
the fruit. Don't make deals with their kind.

Temple, brows, slide index fingers down the nasal canal, 
swipe thumbs under the eye. Push harder than you think you 
should. Swallow. It will hurt until it won't.

A quick and dirty summary of these sections would be something like: first, pay attention to your actual hands, and second, use them to become aware of yourself as physically present.

But this is poetry. The words matter. And they introduce an element of the uncanny, something that disturbs the prose meaning. ‘Check for smudges,’ Ok. I can do that, and it is an injunction to self-reflection: smudges – of ink, dirt, foodstuff – will show what I’ve been doing. But ‘check for extra limbs’? The mind goes wandering, and who knows where? Then the questions about light and shade ask the reader to notice their actual context, recognise that they are in a place, in relationship to whatever creates a looming shadow. (In my case right now, the shadows on my hands are cast by light from an open window.)

‘Wear eucalyptus’: fair enough. But what is the old verse we are to invoke? I lay that aside as another of the book’s potential rabbit-holes. If you have an idea, please say in the comments.

‘Don’t swallow the fruit’: I read this as referring to the tale where a person taken to a fairy land must not eat anything if they want to avoid being trapped there forever. That and the final sentence, ‘Don’t make deals with their kind,’ are warnings to keep one’s own integrity against the tide of disinformation and distraction that we live in – ‘Don’t drink the kool aid.’ Already the poem has moved quite a way from literal hands.

The second section comes back to the literal. It insists that the reader notice they are a body: that they push hard to make contact with their own physical existence.

I won’t discuss the rest in detail – the remaining sections cover how to acknowledge place; how to repair; how to cook; how to throw soil into a grave. They cover self-defence, self-care, first-aid, violence, tenderness, and finally connection. Section by section, the instruction form opens up possibilities, creates small and large riddles, resonates. Even Section 12, the shortest, ‘Pick up your fucking litter,’ repays a moment’s attention: the tone shifts and the speaker of the poem becomes for a moment an irritable Auntie. But the comic irritation doesn’t detract from the importance of the advice. Section 14, the second shortest section, is, among other things, a gloss on Section 2: ‘Remove your grip from your own throat.’ It’s one thing to push hard with your thumbs under your eyes until it hurts; it’s a different thing altogether to do violence against yourself, to stifle your own voice. I love Section 15, but it’s against my religion to quote the final line of a poem.

Do read the book if you get a chance.

I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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*** New Book: Thank Seven*** and other news

Posted on 10 Mar 2026 | Leave a comment

I’ve just published my seventh collection of verses from this blog: Thank Seven.

I’ve given copies to family and friends, and I can now announce the book’s existence without anyone spending good money on something they were going to get for free.

The book is available from Amazon, or at any number of bookshops. Readings has a warning that the book ‘may be self-published’ so buyer beware, a warning I endorse.

You can buy a copy from lulu.com or direct from me by clicking on this button::

Buy Now button

There’s information about all six books, plus my chapbook published by Gininderra Press, None of us Alone, on my Publications page.

In other news, I was interviewed by Emily Stewart for a piece she wrote for the Sydney Review of Books about Damien White, whose short stories she came across in a collection of Frank Moorhouse’s papers. Emily’s article, Cardboard Constructions, is a lovely dialogue between generations – Damien, a fine writer who died too early and Emily, also a fine writer some four decades younger. Damien has cropped up on this blog a number of times. Here’s a little verse he inspired a while back, first on my blog here, and included in my collection Take Five), 

On waking from a dream of a friend
who has been dead for many years

You left a note and neatly folded
clothes beside the famous cliff;
left the life and loves you'd shouldered;
vanished. But you left a whiff
of disbelief, and time's a traitor:
someone found you decades later,
now not Damien but Bob,
in Tassie with a uni job.
No note this time, a rope your chosen
tool: your mother mourned you twice.
This time there was no artifice.
Yet last night to my dream, unfrozen,
fugitive from death you came,
with warnings not to say your name.

I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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The Letters of Seamus Heaney, progress report 1

Posted on 12 Feb 2026 | 1 comment

Christopher Reid (editor), The Letters of Seamus Heaney (Faber & Faber 2023)
– pages 1– 389

In early December when I announced that I was embarking on a slow read of this book, I promised a progress report ‘in a month or so’. Given that so many of Heaney’s letters begin with some version of ‘Forgive me for not writing before now,’ maybe it’s appropriate that I’m more than a month late with this blog post.

In these two months, seven or eight pages a day, Heaney has aged from 25 in 1964 to 53 in 1992. He has married (to Marie, constantly referred to in the letters) and his two children have grown to adulthood. He has progressed from earning a living as a school teacher to being Poetry Professor at Oxford, and being in demand for lectures, readings and appearances in Ireland, the UK, the USA and occasionally in Europe. He has a number of books of poetry published, distinguished critics have engaged with his work, and he has won prizes. He has collaborated with Ted Hughes in editing two anthologies for children. He is part of Field Day, a Dublin organisation that presents plays and publishes pamphlets and books. He has become Famous Seamus – I phrase I got from the late Les Murray. He has been deeply embarrassed by being included in an anthology of contemporary British poets. He has fought off well-meaning attempts to, as he sees it, ‘commodify’ his early life. He has been been criticised by feminists and Irish nationalists.

Editor Christopher Reid has a brief head note at the beginning of each year, and follows most letters with brief explanatory notes (for example, on page 236, ‘”Frank” was the Faber editor Frank Pike (b. 1936)’). These minimal interventions allow the letters to tell their own story. What results is an intimate self-portrait and a partial, impressionistic autobiography. I’m enjoying it immensely, and I imagine that readers who are familiar with Heaney’s poetry – and that of his contemporaries and near-contemporaries – would enjoy it even more.

Today I have reached the half-way point, where eight pages of photographs bisect a 1992 letter to Ted Hughes – one of the photos being Heaney with Carol Hughes at Ted’s funeral in 1999.

The letter is one of the longer ones in the collection, and is a good illustration of why the letters make such good reading.

First he invites Hughes to visit him and Marie in their cottage in County Wicklow, which he describes as a refuge::

All you commended to me a year ago about gathering towards the focal point of self and surety and fate comes through as a breathing truth when I’m down here on my own. I’m by now like one of those hens that ‘laid away’ – the nest is out under the nettles, not in the orange-box compartments in the henhouse.

After that charming image of himself as a wayward chook, he writes, ‘But I digress,’ and writes a couple of paragraphs about poetic matters: mainly about how Hugh MacDiarmid is a good example of something Hughes had written recently (Christopher Reid makes an educated guess at what piece of writing he refers to.) I haven’r read any of MacDiarmid’s poetry or Hughes’s criticism so this mostly sails past me, except for the fabulously unguarded description of some of MacDiarmid’s verse as ‘the looney embrace of the Tolstoyan do-goodery combined with the McGonagallish tendency in the natural run of his speech’. (Reid lets the McGonagall reference go unexplained – if you need to know here’s a link to the Wikipedia page about his most famous poem.)

But it’s a personal letter, and after engaging with Hughes’s recent work, he sympathises with him over recent criticisms of him to do with ‘Sylvia’. It’s not clear what he’s referring to, but at this time (1992), Hughes was publishing poems about his relationship with Sylvia Plath, and reinforcing the view of him in some circles as responsible for her tragic suicide. Heaney is unambiguously supportive and characterises the criticisms as:

obtuseness and hostility and galvanised vindictiveness combined helplessly at first and then proceeded wilfully against you.

That’s all very well, and can be read as old white men banding together. But then, most interestingly, he refers to his own, lesser feminism-related tribulations. An anthology of Irish poetry recently published by Field Day, the organisation on whose board Heaney sits, has been roundly criticised. Heaney is remarkably undefensive:

the book sins indefensibly in many areas: no women editors, no ‘feminist discourse’ section …; too much ‘non-revisionist’ historical perspective.

Acknowledging this, he can tell Hughes that the criticism has nevertheless rocked him:

Vah! But I am more alive than before to the immense rage which man-speak, or even men speaking, now produces, The historical tide is running against almost every anchor I can throw towards what I took to be the holding places.

These letters aren’t written for publication. This isn’t a statement of position, but something said to a friend.

And he encloses a poem. Christopher Reid can tell us which poem it was, and I can look it up and enjoy it.

Page after page this book gives such privileged glimpses of the life, work and times of a very fine poet. In the next couple of years, he gets the Nobel Prize. I imagine his time out under the nettles gets even more precious.

I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Mother Mary Comes to me, Arundhati Roy and the Book Group

Posted on 11 Feb 2026 | 5 comments

Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me (Scribner 2025)

Before the meeting: As my regular readers probably know, I belong to two book groups – the Book Group and the Book Club. The Book Club read this book in November, and I blogged about it, here. For this Book Group meeting, I reread as much as I had time for, which wasn’t much. I enjoyed the writing even more this time, but will let that earlier blog post stand as my ‘before the meeting’ notes.

After the meeting: It was a long time since we’d met. One man had had major heart surgery; another had spent months in India; there were stories of surgery on larynx and eyes; terrible things had happened in Sydney and around the world; Christmas had been and gone … Our host had prepared a delicious meal from recipes in the Kerala section of Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cookery, supplemented by riata, palak paneer, naan and choctop icecreams brought by others.

We had all enjoyed the book. One man said it was pretty much the best book he’s every read. Another (or perhaps the same one?) read it in a single sitting on a Sydney to Melbourne train trip. Our host said that he usually loves books that create a strong sense of place but loved this one in spite of its not doing that, and referred us by way of contrast to Madhur Jaffrey’s description of Kerala in her cookbook.

We tended to focus on the political dimensions of the book. Someone said that he had found first third of the book self-indulgent (not a view widely shared), but then it got interesting as Arundhati became more politically engaged. The picture that emerges of Narendra Modi was particularly striking – the man who had spent time in India said that his negative sense of Modi had been modified by conversations with educated, affluent Indians who saw his impact as largely benign; this book left him bemused. He was also able to tell us interesting bits about the antiquity Syrian Christians. (Founded by St Thomas in the first century CE. ‘I doubt that,’ said someone, then realised he’d made a Biblical joke.)

And inevitably we got to the paradox that a mother could be so horrible to her children, so beloved of people just outside her immediate family, and also a foundation for her daughter’s enormous success.

It looks as if our next book will be Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.

We met on the land of Gadigal of the Eora Nation, and I have written this blog post closer to the river, on the land of Gadigal and Wangal. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Susan Wyndham’s Elizabeth Harrower and the Book Club

Posted on 2 Feb 2026 | 3 comments

Susan Wyndham, Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower (NewSouth Publishers 2025)

I mistimed my reading of this book. I finished it just before we had to head off to the Book Club meeting, so I can’t do my usual thing of writing a bit about my own take on the book before reporting on the evening’s conversation. It turned out only two of the five of us had read the whole book, and the other completer had also just finished it that afternoon. Of the other three, two hadn’t looked at the book at all and one had read less than a hundred pages.

Nevertheless we had an animated conversation, partly because more of us had read Elizabeth Harrower’s novel The Watch Tower, and there are obvious points of connection between the two books.

Elizabeth Harrower (1928–2020) had four novels and a number of short stories published in the 1950s and 1960s. A fifth novel was accepted for publication in 1970, but she withdrew it in what she later describes as the moment she decided to destroy her life (page 156). From the early 1970s she was a self-identified writer who published nothing. She did go on writing, including copious letters and what she referred to as ‘something big’, which there is no record of anyone clapping eyes on. If the big thing actually existed, she must have destroyed it. Early this century she was rediscovered. Her novels and short stories were republished, or in some cases published for the first time, and in her last years, she enjoyed a degree of celebrity.

Two biographies were published in 2025. Before Susan Wyndham’s appeared, Latrobe University Press published Helen Trinca’s Looking for Elizabeth: The Life of Elizabeth Harrower. To add to the riches, 2024 had seen the publication of Hazzard and Harrower: The Letters, edited by by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham, consisting of four decades of correspondence between Harrower and Shirley Hazzard.

I’m sorry to say it, but at the end of our evening, none of us admitted to wanting to read further.

This was partly because Harrower tended to guard her privacy, and though she referred to herself as ‘a divorced child’ and much can be inferred about her early life from her novels, Wyndham’s account of her childhood is necessarily vague. Her piling on of whatever information she was able to discover – such as the fancy dress costumes young Betty wore – may be interesting to some readers, but to me they just feel like clutter. The clutter doesn’t end with childhood: there are lists of movies and plays that Harrower attends, descriptions of what she cooks for dinner, lists of dinner guests, and so on – the effect of which, for me at least, is that any broader narrative shape gets lost. Yet such details appear to be the only way available to flesh out the picture.

The portrait that emerges, in my reading, is of a woman who was bullied as a child and continued to see herself as bullied, misunderstood and under-appreciated for the rest of her life: bullied especially by her writer friends, including Patrick White, Kylie Tennant, Shirley Hazzard, Judah Waten and Christina Sread, all of whom loom large in this book. But I don’t entirely trust that picture as it seems to be drawn from her letters – and it may be a mistake to take someone’s bitching about one friend to another as a reliable indication of how that relationship really works.

I wasn’t the only one at our meeting to get a sense of Harrower as unpleasantly self-pitying. Someone asked a number of times, ‘Why did all those people keep being friends with her?’ On reflection, my guess is that it’s because – contrary to the image Susan Wyndham has extracted from the documents – she was actually good company, kind and interested in people, endlessly supportive of friends in need. (I learned a lot about the terrible sufferings of Kylie Tennant’s family, and about Shirley Hazzard’s mother whom Harrower befriended and cared for in trying circumstances). But if, as a biographer probably must, you focus on the toll such other-focused activity takes, you allow a sense of the person as a whingey self-sacrificer to emerge. Likewise with moments when friends complain about her: such moments may have been exceptional in life but come across as typical in the telling.

And then I remembered enjoying Susan Wyndham’s ‘Introduction’ in which she describes her own relationship with Harrower as a journalist and friend. Rereading it, I was struck by this paragraph:

Questions bubbled up in my mind from the depths of her past. How did this good-humoured woman write such disturbing novels? And why did she stop? They were questions she didn’t want to answer, or couldn’t after all this time. Later I realised they were the wrong questions. While I wanted to know about her childhood, her parents, her writing, her love affairs, she veered into talking about friends past and present. I should have taken the clue that her stories about Patrick, Christina and Judah were not just sentimental memories but the scaffolding of her adult life. She was a kind and porous friend, sometimes more concerned about the lives of others than was good for her. Her wide circles of friends were her family.

Perhaps that’s the version of Harrower’s life that is struggling to emerge from the welter of detail. It was a good life. There’s an implied criticism in the question, ‘Why did she stop?’ After all, she wrote five more novels than most people. Shouldn’t that be enough?

The Book Club met on the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal clans of the Eora Nation, overlooking the ocean. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land as the wind outside my windows gradually died down to a gentle breeze. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

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The Book Club at Elizabeth Harrower’s Watch Tower

Posted on 1 Feb 2026 | 5 comments

Elizabeth Harrower, The Watch Tower (1966. Text Classics 1996)

Before the meeting: I’m sticking to my resolve to write only about page 78*.

If you want a brief, thoughtful discussion of this book and its place in Elizabeth Harrower’s life work, there are plenty around. I recommend Kerryn Goldsworthy’s review, published in the Australian Book Review in 2012 (at this link). I particularly like this:

It is an accomplished and sophisticated novel of great power and intensity, but, as with most good psychological realism, the reader approaches the final pages with a sensation of exhausted, bruised relief.

It turns out that focusing on page 78 means paying attention to something I saw as of secondary interest on first reading.

This page features the book’s villain, Felix Shaw. (Sadly Elizabeth Harrower seems to have it in for Shaw men: a number of her villains have our family name.) For most of the book its main characters, Laura and Clare Vaizey, abandoned by their mother, live under Felix’s thrall, Laura as his much younger wife and Clare initially as a teenage girl in his care. There’s no romance, no love, and Felix is a misogynist in the full sense of the word – he actually hates women, and constantly torments, abuses and emotionally manipulates the two under his control.

Most of the book focuses on the sisters’ wretched servitude and isolation, but the moments when we see Felix apart from them, like this one, are interesting to revisit. Here he is giving a lift in his battered old car to a former business partner, Peter Trotter, one of a string of younger men whom Felix befriends, entering into financial dealings that invariably end up with him losing money and them leaving him in their dust as their enterprises flourish.

Felix has just explained that he is moving his office from his factory to his home. At least part of his reason, we know, is to intensify what we would now call his coercive control over his young wife. After a bit of bluster, typical rationalisation of a self-destructive action motivated by weird spite, he asks Peter Trotter’s opinion. There is a minutely observed moment of the kind Elizabeth Harrower is celebrated for.

Expressionless, Peter Trotter gave him a shilling to pay the bridge toll.

‘Expressionless’ does so much work there. Even while Felix is pretending that all is well, there is this wordless abject moment when he accepts the other man’s contemptuous financial help. Then Peter offers what the reader knows is a sensible perspective, but which falls on resolutely deaf ears, while illustrating Elizabeth Harrower’s gift for vernacular dialogue:

‘I say it’s a lousy idea. You save a few quid subletting the office at the factory (incidentally, I’ll be your tenant) and drop a packet.’
‘How do you make that out? Drop a packet!’
‘If you can’t see it – In your shoes, I’d be branching out, not closing down.’
‘Oh, would you? Who’s closing down?’
Peter Trotter shrugged. His indifference was bottomless. Pennies and dimes. Pennies and dimes. Why was he persecuted by the natterings of small-time no-hopers like Felix Shaw with his paltry manoeuvres, when he had real plans cooking?
Tiredly, he made Felix a further donation of his opinions. ‘That’s how it gets round. “Shaw’s doing the paperwork at home. Can’t afford a two-by-four office.” I’m not saying it’s a fact. Only how it looks to the trade.’
Thickly, defiant, Felix said, ‘So what? Who cares what the trade thinks? Mr Shaw’s not too worried about them.’
‘Yeah. Well. This is where I get off. See you.’

And that is the end of a relationship.

This page repays a close look. Felix’s reference to himself in the third person makes me realise that Harrower’s depiction of a self-involved, wildly irrational man with bombastic self-belief and demand for absolute loyalty from those he sees as his subjects is alarmingly relevant to the mid 2020s. But it also, surprisingly to me, evokes the reader’s pity for Felix: this man we experience mainly as a controlling monster is, from another perspective, a small time no-hoper with paltry manoeuvres. This pity is dangerous: though she doesn’t use such terms, Laura, terribly abused and exploited, also sees that Felix is a small-time no-hoper, a man whose sometimes alcohol-fuelled violence is born out of deep self-hatred and lack of self-confidence, and her pity for him (she does use that word) is part of what binds her to stay with him.

None of Felix’s attempts to manipulate young men into dependency succeed because on the whole men aren’t vulnerable economically and socially the way young women are in that era. Towards the end of the book, a young male employee named Bernard collapses at work and Felix ‘kindly’ takes him into his home. At last, a vulnerable man to join his toxic household! He deploys the same emotional blackmail and bewildering switches of mood to exert control over Bernard as he has used successfully on Laura, and through Laura on Clare. There’s genuine, chilling suspense: will Bernard succumb or will he escape, taking one or both of the women with him to freedom?

Evidently publicity for the first edition used the word ‘homosexual’. I didn’t pick up any hint that Felix’s yearning for young men was knowingly sexual. But there is something forlorn in the way Felix yearns for friendship with them and in his violent rages at home when they go their indifferent way.

After the meeting: There were five of us. Three had read the whole book, one had reached the 57 percent mark on her kindle, and the fifth – who was the only one to read Joan London’s introduction to the Text Classics edition – hadn’t got that far. None of us found it a pleasant read, but the conversation was interesting.

S– saw Felix as a cipher for coercive control, and admired the way the novel was an early describer of that phenomenon, about which we know so much more now. She hadn’t read Susan Wyndham’s biography of Elizabeth Harrower, which was also prescribed reading for this meeting, and was curious to know how much the book reflected Harrower’s lived experience – it was hard to believe that she didn’t have first-hand knowledge. (A couple of us were able to satisfy her curiosity.) I would have agreed about Felix as cipher if I hadn’t lingered on page 78. I think there was more to him than that, but it’s true that the narration never takes us inside Felix’s consciousness – we see mainly the chaotic vindictiveness of his behaviour.

K– thought the book was not only painful to read but was badly written. (Gasps all round!) In her view, Elizabeth Harrower’s reputation as a great Australian novelist came mainly from her friendships with members of the Australian literary pantheon – Kylie Tennant, Judah Waten, Shirley Hazzard, Christina Stead, Patrick White. (But that’s getting ahead to the discussion of the biography.)

I talked about two moments that produced a frisson in me. The first was the chilling moment when Laura, the older sister and wife of Felix, transitions from being Clare’s ally in victimhood to being his agent in cajoling/coercing her to bend to his will. I thought this was a richly complex turn in the narrative. Others just didn’t buy it. The second was when (possible spoiler alert), starting the book’s final movement, Clare decides to give up the week escape she had been planning in order to care for the ailing Bernard. The profound ambiguity of this moment made the book come alive for me: Clare sees herself as being able for the first time to make a difference to someone else’s life, and is decides to do it with a sense of elation; but the reader sees that for years she has been coerced into putting her own needs aside to attend to Felix’s whims, and it’s simply impossible to tell whether what she sees as her new dignity isn’t a variation on the servitude she has been enduring. In my reading the remaining pages are animated by that ambiguity, and the resolution (no spoilers this time) is perfect. S– thought there was no ambiguity at all: she was just falling into the same trap with a new man.

The conversation moved on to Susan Wyndham’s Elizabeth Harrower: The Woman in the Watch Tower, about which I will blog next.

The Book Club met on the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation, overlooking the ocean. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land sheltering from unusual summer heat. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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