Sofi Oksanen, When the Doves Disappeared at the Book Club

Posted on 21 Jul 2026 | Leave a comment

Sofi Oksanen, When the Doves Disappeared, translated by Lola M. Rogers (Atlantic Books 2015)

Before the meeting: The action of this book takes place in in two time frames: under German occupation 1941–1943, and as part of the USSR 1963–1966. In the first chapters, the Germans are seen as liberators from the yoke of Communism, but as the nature of the Nazi regime becomes evident, Estonian freedom fighters who have resisted the Soviets now take up arms against the Germans. And there are pragmatists who make themselves useful to the Germans and later, perhaps after a time in Siberian exile, manage to rise in the ranks of the Soviet bureaucracy. The book follows the careers of three Estonians: Roland, who remains a principled freedom fighter (though he tends to fade from the narrative until he makes a surprise reappearance late in the book); Edgar, who disowns his early Soviet identity to work for the Germans and twenty years later is manufacturing propaganda for the Soviets, with many betrayals in his wake; and Juudit, Edgar’s unhappy wife who becomes the mistress of a German officer, works for the resistance and in the 1960s is once again living a wretched, alcohol-soaked life with Edgar.

It’s a hard book to get into. The ground is always shifting under the characters’ feet, and the reader is often left partly in the dark. Here’s the opening:

We went to Rosalie’s grave one last time and placed some wild flowers on the grassy moonlit mound. We were silent for a moment with the blooms between us. I didn’t want to let Juudit go, which is why I said out loud what a person shouldn’t say in that situation:
‘We’ll never see each other again.’
I could hear the gravel in my voice, and it brought a gleam of water to her eyes.

There’s an awkwardness about the language that at first I thought might be a problem with the translation, as if award-winning Lola M. Rogers didn’t have a feel for natural English: ‘a gleam of water’ is an odd way to speak of tears, for instance, and there’s a weird, tight-lipped disjointedness. But the awkwardness is at one with other unsettling elements. We don’t know who the speaker is, or why he and Juudit are visiting the grave at night, and for me at least these questions aren’t definitively answered until very late in the book. This opening scene is the only one set in 1948, and only when I went back to it after reading the whole book did I understand that in characteristically elliptical way it fills in a lot of the blanks about what happened between 1943 and 1963.

The elusive quality is a feature not a bug. It reflects the reality of the characters’ lives under both Nazi and Soviet regimes: you never know who you can trust, or when you might inadvertently let slip some detail from your past that will incriminate you. The narrative is infected by this secretiveness. It doesn’t make for pleasant reading, but I came away from the book with a deeper understanding of the human cost of living under totalitarianism, and a slightly better informed picture of the history of Estonia in the middle of last century.

Two pernickety whinges. My copy of the book comes with paraphernalia designed for book groups – a glossary, a list of questions for discussion, suggested further treading, and an interview with the author. I found this vaguely insulting, like the time I went on a school excursion to see a performance of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, only to have my post-theatre rumination on the bus home rudely interrupted by the school principal quizzing me with comprehension questions. Please, let me just read it! (Less irritating but more pervasive is the use of US spelling – why, in a British edition?)

The Book Club meeting: As you can tell from the above, I wasn’t wild about the book, but I liked it a lot more than anyone else in the group. We discussed it along with Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing. This book got pretty short shrift. If you love it, the comments are wide open for your input.

The three books taken together might have amounted to travel-deterrant propaganda for four countries, featuring terrible, ingrained violence in Northern Ireland, endemic mutual distrust in Estonia, wild unpredictability in India. and overconfident promises made and disastrously not kept in the USA. Our next meeting we’re going to Iran (The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran) and the USA (Ann Patchett’s Whistler). What could possibly go wrong?

The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on the beautiful, unceded land of Gadigal of the Darug Nation, and I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal country. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

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Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye and the book clubs

Posted on 20 Jul 2026 | 4 comments

Amitav Ghosh, Ghost-Eye (John Murray Publishers 2026)

Before the meetings: I loved Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy – Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire (links are to my blog posts) for their exuberant language, their array of brilliant characters and their remorseless portrayal of British colonialism.

Ghost-Eye is a very different animal. It’s set in the recent past and present. Its characters live mainly in urban India and Brooklyn, with excursions to a remote village in the Sundarbans in the Ganges Delta. The main action involves westernised characters coming to terms with a case of reincarnation that is gradually revealed to be something even more challenging to Western ways of thought. The academics who take the incursions from the ‘other reality’ seriously are described as being ‘woowoo’, but the book – in my reading at least – asks us to take them seriously as an alternative to the western culture’s extractive, reductive, and now catastrophic dealings with the natural world.

I found the book didactic, plodding, and often incoherent. I was unconvinced by the characters. Where in previous books Ghosh’s play with language has thrilled me, the one distinctive use of language in this book is an irritating attempt at a hip young person’s dialogue.

It turns out that page 79* is a good place from which to launch a description of the book as a whole:

Four of the book’s main characters appear here.

Varsha, the subject of conversation, is the book’s central phenomenon. The book begins in 1969, when she is a three-year-old living in an extravagantly wealthy, strictly vegetarian family in Calcutta. One day, to her parents’ consternation, she asks for fish and refuses to eat anything else. Fish has never been in their house, and none of the servants would ever dare to break the rigid prohibition. A doctor is called in, and after spending time with Varsha, decides that this is a job for his wife, a psychologist who has dealt with ‘several cases of this type’ – that is, he explains, children who remember past lives. End chapter one.

Back to page 79: Monty is that doctor. In spite of being the one who first broached the subject of past lives, he is the book’s main voice of ineffectual scepticism. Shoma is his wife. She has done a lot of research into ‘cases of the reincarnation type’ in collaboration with a professor from the University of Virginia, and she has conducted tests with Varsha that convince her she really does remember a past life.

The other character named on this page is Dev, a refugee from Burma who is a servant in the household.

After a long session with Varsha, Shoma has had a vivid dream in which the little girl came to her bedroom and stared at her through the mosquito net. When she wakes up there are three knots in the string binding the net to the bedpost:

‘Shoma!’ said Monty sharply. ‘Of course there are knots in the string. That’s what it’s there for – to hold up the net. It has to be tied, doesn’t it?’
Shoma began to chew her lip. ‘It’s just that when I went into Varsha’s room yesterday, she was playing with a piece of string, tying knots. Her ayah said that she’s been doing that a lot lately.’
‘What does that have to do with our mosquito net?’ said Monty in astonishment. ‘Shoma, get a grip on yourself –’

You can hear the Twilight Zone music playing. Not only can this little girl remember a past life as a fish-eater, but is she also capable of out-of-the-body travel? And wait, there’s more:

Monty was interrupted by a loud thumping on the stairwell door.
He went to see who it was and came back looking puzzled. ‘It was Dev,’ he said. ‘He wanted to know if you were all right.’
Shoma stared at him. ‘You mean he knew I had a nightmare? How is that possible?’
‘Who knows?’ Monty shrugged. ‘Let’s go and sit on the veranda; it’s nice and cool out there.’

Ooooh, here’s something psychic about Dev too!

Out on the veranda, Shoma and Monty labour the point:

‘I just can’t stop thinking about that dream,’ Shoma said, sinking into her easy chair. ‘To be honest, it didn’t even feel like a dream; it was as if Varsha was really there, watching me through the mosquito net.’
‘Now, now, Shoma,’ said Monty. ‘You’re just imagining all this.’

Your mileage may vary, but that reads us pure clunk to me. It comes as no surprise that Varsha does indeed turn out to have amazing supernatural powers, and so does Dev. Towards the end of the book there is a twist in which even more people recover memories of past lives and discover that reality is much richer, more mysterious and full of possibility than their limited western mindset has allowed them to understand. And in this discovery lies the possibility of averting the climate crisis. To which I say, Bollocks!

There’s a lot of power in the proposition that Indigenous knowledge and ways of understanding the world will be crucial in dealing with climate change. But to conflate Indigenous knowledge with acceptance of the literal reality of reincarnation, mind-reading, astral travel and a string of other paranormal phenomena, as this book does, is a travesty. It may be that the book and I just got off on the wrong foot and I couldn’t recover. Maybe it’s meant to be just a bit of fun and I’ve misread its tone completely. It’s being read by both my groups – the BookGroup and the Book Club – so I hope to hear from people it worked for.

Back to page 79:

Outside, as happened every day at dawn, municipal workers were washing the street with hosepipes, and in the distance, across the lake, vultures were slowly taking wing, rising into the sky, one by one, on an upwelling early-morning thermal.
Monty, meanwhile, was leaning over the veranda’s balustrade, waiting for the newspaper boy to throw up the two dailies, English and Bangla, that were delivered to them every day, both rolled into stiff batons and secured with strings made of coconut husk. Monty liked to think that if he succeeded in catching even one of the papers in mid-air, the day would be off to a good start. As for the occasions when he caught both, he would radiate good cheer all day.

This paragraph reminds me that the book has its pleasures, including a vivid evocation of places, but especially the Indian ones. This is middle-class Calcutta in the 1960s, where vultures catch thermals and newspapers are delivered daily. You have to love the detail of that coconut-husk string. And neither Monty nor I feel any need to reconcile his moment of idiosyncratic superstition with a hard, logical view of the world.

The Book Club meeting: I was the only one who had trouble with the book’s preternatural elements. Everyone else enjoyed the yarn, some as pure fantasy, at least one as playfully challenging reductive materialism. I’m left with the odd sense that I’ve misread the book, but can’t undo that reading.

Ghost-Eye was one of three books discussed at the Book Club. It will also be discussed at the Book Group‘s next meeting, which I will not be able to attend. If I glean any further insights from reports of that meeting, I’ll add a note here.

The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on Gadigal land, and I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land. 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 79.

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Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe and the Book Club

Posted on 19 Jul 2026 | 2 comments

Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (William Collins 2018)

Before the meeting:

This book starts dramatically. A woman in Belfast, widowed mother of ten, has just got out of a hot bath at 7 o’clock at night when there is a knock on the door. Minutes later, she has been taken off into the night, and her children never see her again. Her name was Jean McConville, and her abduction – its context, the motive of the abductors, her eventual fate, the identity of her murderer(s), the stories told about it – forms a central narrative thread of this gripping, immensely readable account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, focusing on the IRA and Irish nationalism. It’s a gripping true crime story that unfolds into a broader historical narrative – though in his note on sources, the author says the book is ‘not a history book but a work of narrative non-fiction’.

The book reads like a thriller, though about a fifth of the book’s 512 pages are dedicated to notes, mostly naming sources but also occasionally acknowledging different interpretations of events. As well as conducting his own extensive interviews, Radden Keefe drew on an archive of interviews with IRA members who had agreed to be taped on condition that the tapes would remain locked away in Boston College in the USA until after their death. The final chapters tell the devastating story of how that condition was broken, and raise important questions about the control of political narrative.

A television series based on the book that aired on Disney+ last year has provoked trenchant criticism that sometimes spills over into criticism of the book. Timothy O’Grady in The Irish Echo (at this link) decries the way the series turns one particularly horrific act into public entertainment, and then picks apart Patrick Radden Keefe’s evidence for his solution to the murder of Jean McConville. The person Radden Keefe accuses took no action when the book was published in 2018, but is apparently suing over the TV show.

I suppose it’s not surprising, given my Irish Catholic background (as a young child I imagined my North Queensland home was a kind of mystical version of Ireland) that I was deeply engaged with this story. It joins what I now see as a lot of reading and television watching I’ve done recently. The characters of Derry Girls, which debuted the year Say Nothing was published, are in the crowd at Bill Clinton’s 1995 visit to Derry when, as page 252 has it, ‘people were everywhere, clotting the narrow streets of Derry, teeming beneath the arches of the ancient city walls’. The excellent police procedural Blue Lights (2023–) creates a version of what happened when the political violence came to an end but the enmities and violent mindsets remained. Seamus Heaney, whose letters I read recently (blog posts beginning here), is quoted a number of times – the book’s title echoes that of his poem ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’, and a number of the book’s characters appear in Heaney’s letters. For example, Dolours Price, IRA terrorist and hunger striker, whose masked photo is on the cover of my edition of the book, married actor Stephen Rea and turns up in a letter written from London in 1986: ‘Will see S. Rea. And Dolours (I suppose).’ Given Heaney’s usual warmth, it’s easy to surmise that Dolours wasn’t one of his favourite people.

The book gives rounded portraits of many Irish nationalists, including Gerry Adams, who insists against all the evidence that he was never a member of the IRA; Brendan Hughes, a major figure in the IRA, who felt betrayed by the Good Friday agreement in which the IRA agreed to disarm; Dolours Price, a glamorous and notorious IRA member. As it happens, page 79* is part of one of the few stories from the other side. Frank Kitson, nicknamed the Little Brigadier, had served in the British Army in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising, and was an expert in counter-insurgency. He was sent to Northern Ireland in 1970 to join the young and inexperienced military there:

You can get a sense from this page of how the prose moves along. But if you want to check, there are eight notes at the back of the book relating to these four paragraphs. For instance, the narrative isn’t cluttered with the name of the ‘subordinate’ who described Kitson as the sun, but the notes and bibliography tell us it was Mike Jackson, in his book Soldier: An Autobiography (2007).

When Frank Kitson arrived, in 1970, he was not the overall commander of British forces. But he was in charge of the army’s 39 Airportable Brigade, which had responsibility for Belfast, and his influence far exceeded his station. As one of Kitson’s subordinates later put it, ‘Within his area of responsibility he was the sun around which the planets revolved, and he very much set the tone.’

A good story needs a villain, and while Maggie Thatcher comes to play a villainous role in the hunger strikes, Frank Kitson is the main villain on the ground in this story. But he’s just a man doing his job, and he’s pretty good at it:

The biggest challenge facing the army when Kitson arrived was a shortage of solid intelligence. The men and women who became paramilitaries, whether republican or loyalist, looked like everyone else in the civilian population. So how to identify them? In previous decades, the membership of the IRA had been relatively static – the same names came up year after year. But the old police files were in desperate need of an update, now that there were new recruits flocking to the cause every week. This difficulty was only exacerbated by the blunderbuss approach favoured by the army. ‘When I was first there, the tactics were rather to stand in a line, pump the place full of gas, and let people chuck bricks at you until they got tired of it,’ Kitson later recalled. ‘Not a very good idea because the gas did so much damage to the local people. It made them hostile.’

As the story unfolds, Kitson establishes an undercover group called ‘the Feds’, who also ‘looked like everyone else in the civilian population’. Largely under Kitson’s influence, the IRA came to be riddled with informers. One of the book’s main narrative strands deals with an informer at the highest level, and one of its unresolved questions is what is to be made of atrocities committed by British operatives in order to maintain their cover.

Then at the bottom of the page, the picture of Kitson takes us back to the main story, and we for a moment see one of the main characters, Brendan Hughes, from an antagonistic perspective. There’s also a tiny glimpse of the general language and lore of the army, that reminds us incidentally that US movies, in particular Westerns, were standard entertainment fare in Britain in the 1970s:

In particular, Kitson was interested in D Company of the Belfast Brigade, the IRA unit operated by Brendan Hughes and the one that was doing the most damage. British soldiers referred to Hughes’s operational area in West Belfast as ‘the reservation’ – Indian country, where soldiers should tread carefully, if at all.

The meeting: After a delicious meal and entertaining general catch-up, we discussed this book along with two others. – Ghost-Eye by Amitav Ghosh and When the Doves Disappeared by Sofu Oksanen. It was generally agreed that three books was too many, and I may have been the only person who actually finished all three.

Interestingly, some people found this book hard going. One person felt she now knows much more than she wanted to know about the IRA, though at the same time she wished she had read it before a number of encounters with a friend who was dealing with the difficulties of a childhood in the dangerous and secretive environment it so vividly evokes. For another the book only came alive in the last third, when the focus shifts from the violence to the way the narrative was shaped – and especially the extraordinary betrayal of trust involved in the tapes recorded and stored at Boston College in complete secrecy, until they weren’t secret any more. One, who has read a lot of Irish history, talked about the history of violence on that island that preceded the English invasion by centuries.

We reminded each other of moments towards the end of the book that are deeply moving – especially the discovery of Jean McConville’s body decades after her disappearance. We agreed that Gerry Adams, terrorist turned politician, emerged in a bad light. Though three of the five of us had Irish Catholic childhoods, the Catholic–Protestant sectarianism of pre-1960s Australia didn’t come up.

The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on Gadigal land, and I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. 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 79.

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How to End a Story, report 2

Posted on 8 Jul 2026 | Leave a comment

Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978–1998 (Text Publishing 2025)
– pages 194 to 353, mid 1986 to partway through 1988

Helen Garner’s diaries continue to give me joy, five pages first thing each day.

A lot has happened since my last post. The character known as V has appeared and Garner’s relationship with him has become a dominant narrative thread. Even if a kind blog-friend hadn’t sent me a key to some of the people in the diaries, I would have guessed that V is novelist Murray Bail, who was to become Garner’s third husband. At this stage they are besottedly in love and Helen is spending a lot of time travelling back and forth between her home on Melbourne and hotels and other temporary abodes in Sydney, where V lives.

Other things are happening. Books are published and reviewed (she mainly quotes the negative ones). She appears at literary festivals all over the world and converses with the famous. She writes a screenplay, probably for Last Days at Chez Nous. A benefactor gives her money to buy a small house in rural Victoria. She moves out of the home she has shared with her daughter. Other young people come and go in her life. She has a religious experience and someone she calls ‘my nun’ appears. It’s hard to believe that this is less than two years in a life.

In today’s reading, there are 24 entries, ranging in length from a single short sentence to half a page. She watches Passage to India on the television and goes to the Australian Opera production of La Forza del Destino. She and a woman writer friend have an alarming conversation with an unnamed male poet about child abuse. She records a dream or two. She writes about the stars in Primrose Gully (‘How small they were, how far away’) and the ‘astonishing beauty of Sydney in early winter’. (I just went walking in sunlit rain yesterday in Sydney in early winter, and I was astonished too.) She quarrels with the friend she lives with, ‘perhaps for the first time’. She records snippets of conversation, some overheard, some of which she is a part.

Diaries are often places where people write their misgivings and doubts rather than their considered opinions. There’s a lot of that in the entries about V. If it was a movie the audience would be silently crying out, ‘Don’t do it, Helen! Get out while you can!’ In today’s reading alone, she receives a letter from him that makes her want to shake him and fantasise calling it all off. She visits an art gallery with him and finds it impossible to tell him why a particular painting means something to her, partly for fear that he’ll tease her and laugh at her. She imagines him reproaching her for her reading habits. And she agonises over what their affair means for his wife, though they don’t seem to be able to talk about that – as in this on page 253:

‘His father went to jail.’
‘What for?’
‘Theft, I think. Embezzling, maybe.’
‘Embezzling’s creepy, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Worse than straight-out theft. It’s the betrayal of someone’s trust over a long period.’
Horrified that he might think I was referring obliquely to his behaviour towards his wife. But he didn’t seem to notice, and went on talking.

But every now and then, almost by accident, we get a glimpse of why she’s in the relationship:

In Neilsen Park the astonishing beauty of Sydney in early winter: tremendous towers of cloud coloured delicately in greys and pinks, boats sliding or toiling, clear cool air. How can that hard-looking mouth be so soft?

I believe Garner when she says she didn’t alter the text of these diaries except to protect people’s identities (though not all the identities are well protected). I expect that she left entries things out. I’m in awe of her moral fortitude in deciding over and over again what to leave in.

I am a man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post on the astonishingly beautiful land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Damien Becker’s Thin Reed Throat

Posted on 3 Jul 2026 | Leave a comment

Damien Becker, Thin Reed Throat (Flying Island Poets 2026)

This book won the 2024 Flying Islands Manuscript Prize for Emerging Poets. It makes me happy that the prize exists as a means to getting such a beautiful work into print.

According to the ‘About the author’ note, Damien Becker’s poetry ‘draws on a lifetime of chronic illness, living with cystic fibrosis, and as a double lung transplant recipient’. The book isn’t anything like a novel in verse, but the poems are arranged to form a kind of narrative, so that the reader is invited into the world of children living with cystic fibrosis, where they attend the funerals of friends and are prepared for an early death themselves; into the social experience of living with cystic fibrosis as an adult; into hospital life; and in a wrenching series, into the story of a double lung transplant and its aftermath.

After my first read of the book, I looked up a cystic fibrosis website where I read a number of ‘transplant stories’. They tend to focus on the practicalities – how soon or late to apply for a transplant, how to prepare, what to expect physically and emotionally. They talk of the before–after difference and have a recurring theme of gratitude. What Damien Becker does is make rich, profoundly moving poetry about the experience. One of the book’s last poems ‘A Letter, Delivered on the Sydney Opera House Stage’, begins, ‘Dear daughter of my organ donor.’ He did indeed perform a version of it at the Australian Poetry Slam National Final at the Sydney Opera House in 2019:

If you’ve watched the video, you’ll agree that the last line – ‘The voice that will fill the air will be strong, and will be mine’ – works powerfully in a spoken-word poem, where the voice it names is the slightly laboured, vulnerable voice that we hear. It works just as powerfully on the page, where previous poems have made shown us the difficulty of breathing with lungs that desperately need replacing.

This is a book of poetry that opens doors in the mind and heart.

I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers and commenters.

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S. Shakthidharan Gathers Up His World in One Long Breath

Posted on 30 Jun 2026 | 1 comment

S. Shakthidharan, Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath (Powerhouse 2025)

Sydney’s new Powerhouse Museum at Parramatta, due to open later this year, may be an impending disaster as a museum – see John Macdonald at this link – but as a publishing house it’s off to an excellent start with this book, which it commissioned from S. Shakthidharan, co-creator with Eamon Flack of a number of superb and acclaimed theatrical events. (His second play, The Jungle and the Sea, is about to have a return season at the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney. I recommend it.)

The book has already received a number of awards. Receiving the Multicultural NSW Award earlier this year, Shakthidharan named its most interesting quality when he described it as ‘an act of vulnerability’.

It’s a memoir. Its prologue begins, ‘At first light, you wake,’ and each of the six chapters that follow is similarly addressed to someone, a different person or personified being each time. Because part of the pleasure is figuring out who is being spoken to in each new chapter, I won’t give you a complete list – enough to say that the addressees include his parents, his wife and his young son. The effect is a profound shift from the individualism that might have seemed an inevitable quality of memoirs. The book becomes a self-portrait, but of a self that is always in relationship. David Winnicott’s famous quote, ‘There is no such thing as a baby, there is a baby and someone,’ comes to mind.

It’s a story of family migration from Sri Lanka to Australia, with all the disruption, cultural challenge and unexpected opportunities that brings. There’s a wonderful account of the creation of Shakthidharan’s first play, Counting and Cracking, which is intimately connected to his family’s own story. I was delighted to read about the response of his family and the Sri Lankan community to it and its success in Australia and elsewhere. There’s a delicious episode where he can’t appear at a writers’ festival because of an emergency with his infant son, and his mother – who has been reserved in her comments about his work – agrees to stand in for him. When he later sees the video of her appearance he is deeply moved by what she has to say, things she had never said to him in person.

Place is important. There’s the first, major migration of the Tamil family from Sri Lanka to Sydney, but place is important in other small and big ways. Rather than telling the story of how he first met his wife, he tells the story of his first visit to her family in her childhood home in rural New South Wales, a visit that marked the beginning of their romantic relationship. The picture is rounded out when she visits Sri Lanka with him – only then do they feel they really know each other. Partly this is cultural but, as he tells it, the smells, sights and feels of a place are crucial.

Page 79* falls in ‘A New Performance’, the chapter addressed to his mother.

The page gives you a good idea of the quality of his writing. It’s straightforward with a strong current of emotion that carries it forward, and a generosity towards the person it addresses.

Living in Sydney gives Shakthidharan’s mother ‘the freedom and the courage’ to divorce his father, and as a matter of survival she starts a small dance school, making ‘something out of nothing’. This new beginning reaches back to the deep cultural knowledge she received from her mother, and leads a splendid future (and present):

You create a dance company that earns enough for you to keep our house and gives hundreds of women like you an opportunity to hold on to their culture and share it through the flow of their bodies across a space. It feeds you, your art form: no, it feeds our entire community, this magical thing. It connects them to their language, to their stories, to their old home – all of which might otherwise be lost in this new one.

And once you begin, you cannot stop. Your mother is in you after all. What began as classes in my uncle’s basement for a handful of girls grows into a company of brown women dancers that tours Australia and the world.

You do this in the nineties and the early years of the new millennium, when diversity is not yet a buzzword. You name the company Lingalayam, in honour of your mother.

Though he doesn’t give us his mother’s name – the chapter is addressed to her, so it wouldn’t make sense – there’s enough information for the interested reader to find it. The Lingalayam Dance Company has a webpage (here), and names its founder as Anandavali. Anandavali has performed at the Belvoir Street Theatre a number of times, in her son’s work and others, without making any kind of point about their relationship. I for one have come away from her performances feeling that my world has been transformed. Here the son honours of his mother’s art, and her life. Maybe he’s making a point about multiculturalism, but it’s beautifully folded into the address to his mother.

The shows you choreograph are faithful to the classical form and also speak to what it means to be a woman, here, today. You do what hardly anyone else can do: you hold on to the integrity of who you are and your culture, but you figure out a way to share it that invites everyone else in.

What a way to become Australian! To belong! Not by limiting yourself, but by expanding the collective sense of what we might all become, what our country might one day be. God, I am proud of you for doing that. You are not just a dancer, a teacher, a choreographer: you are now a guru, sustaining our heritage in the dance hall your mother built for you.

To bring cultures together, holding on to the integrity of them all, but figuring out ways to share them that invite everyone in: that’s a lot more attractive than the defensive calls for something called monoculture that are getting airplay just now.

It’s a beautiful, rich book – about family, art, migration, creativity, love, parenthood, masculinity, Western Sydney, domestic negotiations, intimacy. About life in place and in relationship.

I am a man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post as the days are beginning to lengthen and get colder on the land of Gadigal and Wangal. I acknowledge their 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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Kit Kelen’s Food of Love

Posted on 24 Jun 2026 | Leave a comment

Kit Kelen, Food of Love: concert pieces / 101 poems (Flying Island Poets 2026)

‘If music be the food of love, play on.’ Anyone who did the Queensland Junior Scholarship exam in 1972 will recognise that as the opening line of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which we read with commentary at least four times over the year. (Oddly, though I was in a class of 15 year old boys, I don’t remember any sniggering about the play’s gender-based comedy, but that’s another story.)

Each of the 101 poems in this pocket-sized book includes the name of a piece of music as a subtitle, and often the combination of title and subtitle could stand as a poem by itself. For example, ‘placating a serial killer / Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade”’ or ‘we sing what the ghost sings / “Waltzing Matilda”’. Just the titles give joy. My favourite title-as-mini-poem is ‘trout as earworm / Schubert’s “The Trout”’.

Most of the music is classical, but the book casts a wide net – ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ and the theme tune from The White Lotus both get a guernsey.

What the poems do with their musical ‘sources’ varies widely. They might describe the music, as in the first line of ‘at the castle keep / Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bare Mountain”’ (page 38):

great insect or whirr of the orc hoard

They might enlarge on the music’s theme or narrative – as in ‘the cloud sorter’s dream / Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now”’, or ‘numanah numananah and where are we now / Ron Grainer’s Dr Who theme’ (page 103):

someone must yet invent this planet

they have already in time to come
in time for supper sometimes

Some play with the associations the music has gathered over its lifetime – so Rossini’s Barber of Saville has inspired ‘on the occasion of Bugs Bunny’s 80th birthday’.

There’s nothing obvious or facile in the way the poetry does these things. At the book’s Sydney launch at the Addison Road Writers’ Festival last month, Peter Boyle described Kit Kelen’s poetry as ‘cubist’. Whether or not you know the relevant music, you have a sense that the poem is looking at it from a number of points of view – bouncing off it, coming back at another angle, sometimes going off and doing its own thing. This can make for difficulty, even incomprehensibility, but there’s pleasure in it.

I usually single out one poem when I write about a poetry book. Here, rather than my arbitrary choice of page 79 (my age), I’m looking at page 101 (may I live so long): ‘Cordelia’s song / John Cage’s 4’33”’:

I love the pairing in the title. In case you need reminding, Cordelia is King Lear’s favourite daughter who, when asked what she can say about her love for him, replies, ‘Nothing, my lord.’ In case you also need reminding, the score John Cage’s ‘4’33″’ instructs the musicians not to play their instruments for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. They are two great Nothing moments, where the ‘nothing’ is rich – Cordelia will not speak because to do so would belittle her love; Cage, as I understand it, invites the audience to attend to the unscripted music of life itself.

The poem proceeds in the manner Kit Kelen has made his own. There are sentences whose subject is understood, and sentences that stop as soon as enough has been said for the reader to know (or guess, or invent) their endings. Syntax is just slightly out of kilter. Punctuation is scarce, which leads to teasing ambiguities. Language is made strange, but it stays friendly.

What I like most about the poem after a number of readings is the way its apparently fragmentary nature comes together into a deeply satisfying whole.

Take the first couplet:

imagine just inside your scone 
(rarely gets airplay)

A prose paraphrase might be: ‘Imagine what’s going on inside your head, and only that. It’s something that you rarely pay attention to.’ But ‘scone’ is more interesting than ‘head’ – apart from the effect of its slangy informality, it implies the thinking mind as well as the physical head. And ‘airplay’ is more than attention: with Cage’s composition in mind, the word suggests that the piece allows what’s in your ‘scone’ to be heard as if in a concert: the random thoughts as well as the tinnitus (or whatever people who don’t have tinnitus hear in their ears).

The second triplet places us in the concert hall:

face all emotion, one would expect 
conductor's hands open 
as if she/he would receive

Well, not exactly in the concert hall. The book is dedicated ‘for everyone at ABC Classic FM, for all you have taught me over many years’. The dominant voice of the book isn’t that of a concert-gooer, but of a music-listener. This line implies that the poem’s speaker has not seen the piece performed. ‘One would expect…” The beautifully evoked image of the conductor about to begin has a mildly ironic flavour here.

We shift again in the next line, to an abstract reflection on the piece, placing it, perhaps, in the context of Eastern meditation practices:

the effort at nothing in mind

The next couplet takes another leap altogether, into pure, tantalising, paradoxical nonsense, about which I have nothing to say:

imagine a funnel the planet falls through 
and that's the proof – imagining!

As I read it, the next few stanzas are versions of what goes through this listener’s mind during the piece. First, he realises that the absence of played music is not the same as silence, that there is never silence (the contorted syntax – ‘there is no ever’ – creating the effect of a thought being reshaped as it forms), that instead of silence there’s hush in which the sound of a distant bird can be herd, and the sound of what feels like your own brain at work:

there is no ever silence 

there's hush and through the wall 
some far bird breaks the day

you will think it is the mind's mechanics

As with any experimental art, derisory voices are heard, and responded to. 

could do this in your sleep 
and I do

This couplet reminds me of Alice Miller’s discussion of Picasso’s late paintings in her wonderful collection of essays on the role of trauma in creativity and destructiveness, The Untouched Key. People might look at those paintings and say, ‘A four year old could do this.’ Miller argues that it took genius create something with the simplicity that comes naturally to a four year old. Here, ‘You could do this in your sleep,’ is meant as a similar slur, but the response ‘and I do’ turns it into praise – the piece does something that most of us can only do when sleeping.

Then another resistant comment. Who hasn’t thought when faced with a piece of conceptual art, ‘I see the idea, I don’t need to see it played out’? 

this theory's already proven 
no need to show it off

In response, the poem takes off, with one couplet and four one-line stanzas, groping to put words to the experience of listening to Cage’s piece. It’s worth paying attention to pronouns. So far, there has been ‘one’, ‘you’ and ‘I’. Now it is ‘we’. 

a melody commences
here where we’ve never met before

it’s only the world turning we hear

it’s just this old hat for a head

here’s the answer to a prayer

Each of those stanzas takes a different tack: perhaps it’s a pause at the start of something new; perhaps it’s a chance to think about our place in the cosmos; maybe it’s just something comfortable and undemanding (though ‘this old hat for a head’ refuses to be tied down to a specific neat meaning); perhaps it’s a quiet sense of spiritual presence. Maybe it’s all of those. Whatever:

an orchestra’s required

An orchestra and being part of an audience. It’s a lovely paradox: to be silent and imagine ‘just inside your scone’, an orchestra is required.

I’m reminded of a passage from David Malouf’s essay ‘Being There’, which could well have had Cage’s piece in mind:

All those elements of noise out of which organised sound arose – the street noises we have just stepped away from, voices in the foyer, the whispers and shuffling before the conductor is quite ready, the slight disturbance of the air that is created by 2000 men and women breathing, even the occasional cough, that substratum of undifferentiated sound against which made music has to assert itself, and against which we bring ourselves to attention. Somehow, to experience the fulness of what music offers we have all to be there. Presence is everything.

I think David Malouf would have enjoyed this poem.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time since Arthur Phillip raised his flag on the shores of Warrane. I wrote this blog post on the currently blue-skied land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Michael Winkler’s Griefdogg at the Book Group

Posted on 17 Jun 2026 | 4 comments

Michael Winkler, Griefdogg (Text Publishing 2026)

Before the meeting: Many smart, thoughtful people with excellent taste love this book, so don’t take too much notice of me when I say I found it irritating, chaotic, self-indulgent, contrived, box-ticking and maybe just a little bit culturally appropriating. Also the back cover blurb gives away the two shoe drops that I didn’t know I was waiting for.

I kept reading after the first couple of pages out of devotion to the Book Group, and resolved to hold my tongue at the meeting so as to glean what other people love about the book.

My usual practice of looking at page 79 (my age) would just lead to a lot of grumpy exclamations, which would add nothing to the sum total of human knowledge, so I’ll refrain.

I did have an unexpected stab of pleasure on page 141. The narrator is indulging in one of many digressions on environmental issues, and moves on from fracking and mining to ‘the mindless introduction of pests and weeds’:

Who decided to introduce buffel grass in the 1950s? Names should be named. It is on the public record that government entomologist Reginald Mungomery was the first to bring in cane toads. Thomas Austin, the wealthy buffoon, is credited with setting loose thirteen rabbits imported from England at Winchelsea in 1859. I know a man who knows the names of the brothers who released the Boolarra strain of European carp in pondage near Merbein in 1964, after which they swam into the Murray River and wrecked the ecology forever. Induct them all into a hall of shame for ecological and waterway degradation. Let us piff rotten fruit at them.

Reg Mungomery was a relative of mine, a cousin several times removed. He visited us once when I was a child. He wasn’t proud of the cane toads. I’m thrilled enough when the town I come from is mentioned in Literature. But this is actually a Family Member! I almost decided to like the book. But only almost.

I expect I’ll look like an idiot when it’s shortlisted for every pretigious award.

The meeting; I didn’t manage to hold my tongue, partly because I’d said something blunt on the pre-meeting WhatsApp chat. Once we’d sat down to our usual excellent bring-something dinner and canvassed the state of architecture in Sydney (are developers running the show or are they weeping with frustration?), theatre (David Wenham is brilliant in An Iliad), they made me vent my spleen. Reluctantly at first but increasingly enjoying myself I complied. I happened to be sitting at one end of the table. Then, brilliantly, the man sitting at the other end spoke eloquently and at length about why he loved the book. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a conversation more.

I’m a firm believer that the perspective of someone who loves a book will be more interesting than that of a hater, so I’ll try to summarise what the lover said – and refrain from verbalising my different take.

In the previous week, he had started on a number of books that adhere to contemporary norms (a number of points of view presented turn by turn, etc.), and couldn’t finish any of them. He picked up Griefdogg and was delighted from the start that he didn’t know what was happening or where it was going. It felt like a brave book. It’s messy, throws a lot of stuff into the mix and sometimes it doesn’t work, but how much better to have something that tries and occasionally fails than something that plays safe the whole time.

Specifically, he loved the masculinity theme. There’s a sex scene near the start that makes comedy from a focus on performance, and the main plot line asks what happens if you radically reject the expectation that men will be over-responsible and over-worked.

The treatment of place is brilliant: Mildura as a small rural community where everyone knows everyone’s business, but everyone has secret griefs. At one point the main character’s adult child comes home from a time in Melbourne and names the way the city is ignorant and uncaring about rural realities – the book as a whole addresses that ignorance.

There’s a lot of hydrology, much of it highly technical, which provides a metaphorical underpinning.

Towards the end the main character creates a piece of public art, which my Book Group friend described in wonderful lyrical language.

The respectful treatment of Aboriginal issues in a book with only one peripheral Aboriginal character is impressive. In particular there’s a dig at urban pieties that turn out to be lethally uncaring when push comes to shove

As I was typing this, I received a text that began ‘A last ditch attempt to influence your blog.’ I’d love to quote the whole text, but I want to avoid spoilers (and if you want to avoid them, don’t read the back cover blurb). I’ll just quote this:

We have a new male hero created from a vey different story arc. A sometimes clumsy and overwritten one, but one that places the man’s newfound awareness squarely and beneficially in his community.

There were six of us, and we were pretty evenly divided. Of the two non-finishers, one had tried a number of times and failed to get enough traction to take him past the 7 percent mark. The other was still partway through the first of the three sections and quite enjoying it. Of the other two, one liked the book, and particularly found the ending wonderful (I can’t hold back completely – I loathed the ending, even more after he said why he loved it). The other was pretty much in my camp. He compared it to the work of theatre directors like Barry Kotsky – always drawing attention to themselves rather than to the work: it needed a couple more revisions, he said.

There were some points of agreement. We all enjoyed the high-quality dad jokes that are scattered through the text. A favourite was: ‘Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?’ You can find the answer on the interwebs.

A final thought: I’ve recently listened to Zac Seidler talking to Richard Fidler on ABC’s Conversations (you can hear it at this link). He talks about the limited opportunities in our society for men to talk about meaningful things. It made me realise all over again what a terrific thing this Book Group is.

The Book Group members are all men of settler heritage. We met on Gadigal land. 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 of the blog.

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Raewyn Connell’s Trans Lives

Posted on 14 Jun 2026 | 5 comments

Raewyn Connell, Trans Lives: Social Realities Across the Globe (Polity 2026)

Raewyn Connell is an Australian social scientist who has written widely on education and gender issues. She is also a trans women. She brings a scholarly insider’s perspective to this short book on trans issues. The back cover does a nice job of summarising:

Raewyn Connell gathers the evidence about the lives of trans women and men, hijr, travesti, and other groups around the world. She looks at the forces shaping trans lives, including medicine and its limitations, precarity and poverty, unequal gender relations, the role of sex work, the state and the corporate economy. She discusses what is behind anti-trans campaigns, criticising the simplistic idea that ‘transphobia’ explains these, suggesting more potent causes. Finally, by exploring the creative ways trans groups have organised, she argues for the contribution they can and should make to solving our shared contemporary crises.
Written in clear and vivid language, this book offers illuminating new perspectives on gender transitions, and on gender itself.

In a field that often features mudslinging polemic from one direction and rigid insistence on correct language from the other, the book’s first sentences set a steady, good-humoured, magisterial tone:

Call it sex change, gender reassignment, gender affirmation, or gender transition. It is a very intimate and a very public process. It often means changes in the body, and always means changes in the way the body is seen by others.

‘Call it what you will, here are some realities.’ The book is interested in groups more than individuals. While acknowledging that voices from the individualistic USA tend to frame the way trans issues are discussed all over the world, it casts its net wide, citing scholars from Africa, Latin America and Asia, and reporting on personal visits to some of those places.

The most influential ideas in this discussion come from the global North, especially the USA. But most trans groups actually live in the post-colonial, majority world. Any attempt to understand transition and issues around it must take careful account of their experience. (Page 2)

Careful is a good word. The book does feel careful, not as in treading on eggshells, but handling with loving, scholarly care. Even its flashes of radical lefty-ism feel careful. On page 87, for example, Connell writes, ‘Perhaps the most researched of all social divisions, class is also the most denied.’ Or this on page 102: ‘Populist and fundamentalist influence has surged; the liberal oligarchies called “democracies” are in retreat.’

The most interesting bit of information about trans politics worldwide is that although homosexuality is vehemently condemned in Iran, in 1986 the Ayatollah formally declared that change of sex was not forbidden under Islamic law – and a bureaucracy now exists to deal with gender transitions in that country.

There’s an excellent discussion of gender, as it concerns people who are not trans as well as those who are. First, Connell questions the term ‘cisgender’ for a number of reasons, of which I really like the third:

It gives far too rosy a picture of sexed bodies and gender identities being ‘aligned’ … Cisgender people, it seems, have no gender trouble. They are the normals, the sun shines as they sit around their swimming pools in their married couples … The image of trouble-free conformity conveyed by the concept is unreal.

Humans share the ‘clever device’ of sexual reproduction with many animal and plant species. As humans (or, as she says, humanid apes) developed, ‘the process of biological evolution was gradually mingled with, and then outpaced by, the social dynamic of history’. She uses the term social embodiment: our bodies are given us by evolution, but ‘how they work in practice is given to us by our history’:

Our lives are both social and biological, and these realities are necessarily interwoven. There is not an either/or.

That is true of food, shelter, sexuality, and also of gender. I’m truncating her line of reasoning terribly, but what follows is that gender can be thought of as a project – that is, individuals respond to situations and expectations, and make their own paths. We all do this. For trans people the gender project is not ‘aligned’ with biology. The concept of gender dysphoria focuses on the emotional pain of this difference. As I understand Connell’s account, a trans person is someone who just knows that, for example, he is a girl even though his body is male. Any emotional pain, such as a sense of being betrayed by one’s body at puberty, is a consequence, not a cause. Some people who have this knowledge manage to conform to social expectations, others struggle to act on what they know of themselves. Some are lucky enough to find a community, a group, that they can join.

There’s a lot more. The history of trans medicine is fascinating. Likewise the placing of trans struggles in the context of other social realities including women’s issues and class struggles.

I’ll just draw attention to two more things, both aiming to break down the sense that trans people are inevitably set apart from the rest of humanity.

The cover blurb mentions that Connell criticises the USA-originated term transphobia. Her most interesting objection to the term is this:

I am concerned that the concept of ‘transphobia’ loads the responsibility for bigotry onto the general population, and lifts it off the right-wing politicians, bishops, journalists, sectarian feminists and other ideologues who have so visibly been stirring up fear and hatred recently. Even if we assume a vague popular prejudice in the background, that explains neither the wild exaggerations of supposed threat nor the spectacular cruelty of recent anti-trans campaigns.

The first thing I saw when I opened the book was the final entry in the ‘Notes and References’ section, which refers to the parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke:

Luke’s text was compiled at least half a century later, yet this seems likely to be a valid oral tradition about Jesus. It is consistent with both the style and content of his social teaching generally attested.

I love that careful framing of the Biblical quote as a historical resource of a particular kind. When I reached the section ‘Solidarity’ in which the Good Samaritan is mentioned, I was pleased all over again:

The point of the story is the despised outsider giving help, when the privileged do not.
Trans groups … have some resources: energy and agency, a history and distinctive experience, creativity, capacity to organise. Loving our neighbours, using those resources in cooperation with them, is the best thing we can do.

I know very few trans people, but those I know are well placed to rise to this challenge.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time since Arthur Phillip raised his flag on the shores of Warrane. I wrote this blog post on the currently rain-soaked land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Reading with the Grandies 36: Tui T. Sutherland’s darkstalker, the graphic novel

Posted on 9 Jun 2026 | Leave a comment

Tui T. Sutherland, Darkstalker: The Graphic Novel (adapted by Barry Deutsch & Rachel Swirsky, art by Jake Parker, colorist Maarta Laiho, Graphix Press 2025)

Tui T. Sutherland’s Wings of Fire series continues to dominate my granddaughter’s reading. When I asked her about a character in The Lost Continent, the second book in the series I’ve read, she handed me the comics version of Darkstalker, a stand-alone novel, saying that it would explain the background. She was right.

The action of Darkstalker takes place two thousand years before the main series. It answers my questions about the nature of Clearsight, the dragon venerated almost as a god in The Lost Continent. I’m guessing from its final image that the character Darkstalker emerges as a major villain in the series. This is his origin story: a tale of love and ambition, of good intentions leading to terrible deeds, of epic battles and bloody assassinations. It includes a scene that resembles the Blood Wedding from Game of Thrones. There’s a magical device that could be a satirical take on Donald Trump’s golden dome. At the heart of the narrative are challenging ethical issues.

For what it’s worth, I would recommend the prose novels rather than the comics. I found the art in this book generally unattractive compared to that in The Lost Prophecy (different artist, same colorist). To my eye, the many characters aren’t different enough from each other – I suppose there’s only so much you can do with dragon faces and bodies. But the story is gripping, and ends in a satisfying cliffhanger.

Page 79* illustrates both my dissatisfaction with the art and my enjoyment of the complexity:

These two characters are Darkstalker (on the left, with crooked horns) and Clearsight. They are both animuses (or is it animi? a question raised by the characters, not me), that is to say, they both have magical powers. [Ny granddaughter has read this and informs me that Clearsight is actually NOT an animus.] Clearsight is a seer, who can see many versions of the future with remarkable clarity, and is acutely aware that a decision made in the present determines which of many futures will come to pass. Darkstalker has the most powerful magic of any living dragon. They have just met for the first time, though because of their remarkable powers it’s as if they know each other intimately from their intense future relationship. On page 77 Darkstalker takes one of Clearsight’s claws/hands in his, and page 78 shows us the kaleidoscopic visions this produces in her mind – a smattering of blood, images of grief, tenderness, pride, a scroll and a bracelet whose meaning will be made clear later …

On this page, we realise that Darkstalker has not seen the visions, and he promises in gentlemanly manner that he will never read Clearsight’s mind. Only then do they introduce themselves. Clearsight can say her name is Tailbite because she knows that he knows that she knows he was expecting her. It’s love at first sight, but that sight has been preceded by detailed visions of each other. Clearsight’s thought bubbles in the final frame might be read as expressing pure romantic love, but there’s terror there as well: ‘I want to fly away and I want to keep having this conversation for eternity’. This moment of first meeting is filled with joy. But Clearsight knows how many ways and how terribly things could go dark. Well, reader, they do go very dark, and she was right to want to hold onto this moment. People coming to this after reading books in the series published before it will know that already, so the moment is charged with tragic irony.

From the little joke about the plural of animus to the complex play with what the ability to read minds and see the future can do to relationships, this is a book that treats its young readers with respect. The popularity of the series is comforting evidence that young people’s attention spans may not be as monstrously shortened as we some people fear.

Also, I enjoyed this story a lot.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their 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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