Category Archives: Book Club

Sofi Oksanen, When the Doves Disappeared at the Book Club

Posted on 21 Jul 2026 | 2 comments

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 | 6 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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Maria Reva’s Endling and the book club

Posted on 7 Jun 2026 | Leave a comment

Maria Reva, Endling (Virago 2025)

An endling is the last surviving individual of a species. Famous ones were Benjamin the Tasmanian tiger, and Martha the passenger pigeon. The species facing extinction in Maria Reva’s novel are less impressive than thylacines or pigeons: they are snails. The central character, Yeva, is a Ukrainian woman who has made it her life mission to find individuals from endangered snail species, keep them alive in her laboratory–van, find mates for them, and with any luck release the results of their pairings back into the wild. As other sources of funding have dried up – because who cares about snails going extinct? – she funds her project by joining a ‘romance tour’. Men, mainly from the USA, come to Ukraine in search of wives and a bridal agency rounds up women who are desperate or foolish enough to let themselves be put on offer. Our heroine has no intention of marrying one of the men, but their compulsory gifts have become her source of funding.

The first chapter of Endling is all about the snails – how richly varied in their behaviours, mating habits and generally lifestyles. One snail in particular, whom she names Lefty, has a shell that spirals to the left, severely limiting its chances of finding a mate. Yeva’s snail obsession comes to make complete sense to us. We understand how death after death, extinction after extinction, takes its toll. Yeva sinks into a deep depression and decides to end her life. It’s a grim, compelling stand-alone short story.

But another of the ‘brides’ has also joined the agency with complex ulterior motives. She has a plan to kidnap a hundred of the ‘bachelors’ and expose the horrors of the bride trade, and she wants Yeva’s help. And chapter two sets a whole new direction.

Things proceed pretty much as you would expect: there are obstacles, unexpected changes of plan, oddly comic missteps, and the van full of kidnapped bachelors sets off on some half-arsed plan to expose the marriage trade. Then there’s an explosion. Russia invades Ukraine and the novel comes to a sudden halt. There’s an interim as the author scrambles to get back on her feet. I loved the scrambling, but don’t want to say too much more because the surprise of how the disruption plays out is a big part of the sometimes grim pleasure of the book. I was enjoying the more or less conventional story-telling in the first part of the book, so was relieved that the story does continue, transformed. Lefty survives to play a key role in a climactic scene involving terrible violence, unlikely romance, and what seems to be the author giving instructions to a character over the phone.

Page 79* is all about Pasha, the only one of the ‘bachelors’ to be treated sympathetically. Like Maria Reva, he is Ukrainian-Canadian. His parents were immigrants who did everything they could to assimilate, and part of his motive for coming to Ukraine has been to reclaim his Ukrainian identity. Here he is imagining the woman he wants to meet on the romance tour:

She’d be sitting on the sidelines, in what she thought was her best dress – something comely but plain, like a church smock – hardly distinguishable from the interpreters, and she’d be wondering why she’d come to this glitzy social. She’d feel like she didn’t compare to the svelte femmes fatales, though she was decidedly more beautiful in an unplaceable ethereal way. She’d regret not having put on more makeup, having stayed up the night before finishing a university assignment (some rigorous program) so that the delicate skin under her eyes bore the slightest hint of blue. No, the woman of Pasha’s dreams did not belong on this romance tour any more than Pasha himself did, but they’d both been spurred by the hope of love. They simply did not know what else to do.

We’re being played with there. The woman in Pasha’s hopelessly romantic fantasy is described in a way that could apply to Yeva, and more unlikely matches have occurred in fiction. But everything in my readerly soul rebelled at the thought of Pasha and Yeva pairing up to live happily ever after. At the same time, I so wanted him to find happiness: he’s naive, but his heart is in the right place, and his yearning to be part of Ukraine is genuine. I won’t tell you what happens, but I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that in this book that focuses on a handful of fabulously unconventional female characters, the last couple of pages belong to him.

The meeting: We had three books on our agenda. Along with Endling there was Maria Reva’s Endling and On Not Climbing Mountains by Claire Thomas (see here).

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was, that one person hated this book and one didn’t finish it. They found the disruption of the form self-indulgent and tedious. When I mentioned the passage that Maria Reva had read out at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, which I found hilarious, they screwed up their noses and said that was exactly the kind of thing they hated. One of them liked the snails, but found the romance tours story repetitive and then improbable. Oh well, as my high-school Latin teacher used to say, de gustibus non est disputandum.

The three of us who did enjoy the book, really enjoyed it. One said it was bonkers, a good thing.

One of the unrelated joys of the evening was a reading-aloud of Evelyn Araluen’s poem ‘Acknowledgement of Cuntery’. I will make my acknowledgement anyhow. The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on the beautiful, unceded land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, which is also where I have written this blog post. 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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Hannah Kent’s Always Home, Always Homesick at the book club

Posted on 5 Jun 2026 | 1 comment

Hannah Kent, Always Home, Always Homesick (Picador Australia 2025)

Before the meeting: You don’t have to have read Hannah Kent’s first novel, Burial Rites (my blog post here), to enjoy Always Home, Always Homesick, but having read it had me loving this book. It’s a memoir about Kent’s love affair with Iceland, beginning with a period she spent there in her teens as an exchange student. It’s also about the making of that first novel – the landscape and history that inspired it, the persistence and serendipity of research, the critical reception, and especially the way it was received in Iceland.

Soon after I finished reading my library copy, I visited the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art to see the Olafur Eliasson exhibition, Presence. Although the most striking works there are installations that play with light in miraculous ways, there are also many photos of Icelandic landscapes – treeless, austere, other-worldly. These works formed a magnificent accompaniment to Hannah Kent’s loving descriptions.

Of course, it’s not all about the book and the landscape. Relationships are important. An Icelandic family weren’t originally meant to be her hosts but stepped in when they saw she was less than happy. They became like a second family for her, and over the years since that original visit they have stayed in her life. The language casts a spell on her; the weirdness of day–night cycles so close to the pole fascinates, and of course there’s food, which brings me to page 79*.

At this stage of the book, teenage Hannah is still finding her way in Iceland, staying with a taciturn family who make her feel strangely isolated. If I had picked the book up in a shop and read this page, I’m pretty sure I would have bought it:

The traditional midwinter feast:

There are hrútsprungar, lambs’ testicles, pressed into a loaf bound with something clear and gelatinous. There is also sviasulta, which is the boiled meat of a sheep head that has been pressed into a mould. It, too, is jellied, and as I cut a slice 1 am told that the eyes and tongue are included in the mix. I glance at my plate, half expecting to find the steady, clouded gaze of a boiled eye. Alongside these dishes are blood pudding, blóğmör, dark red and granular, and liver sausage, lifrarpylsa.

Yum!

After the meeting: We had three books on our agenda. Along with Always Home, Always Homesick there was Maria Reva’s Endling and On Not Climbing Mountains by Claire Thomas.

I found the first five pages of the Claire Thomas book deeply unpromising and gave up on it. Only two of the five of us had read it: they loved it and made us non-finishers regret our life choices.

But we all enjoyed Always Home, Always Homesick. We admired young Hannah Kent’s courage in going to the ends of the earth as a teenager. We commented on the evocation of place and though none of us were inspired to visit Iceland, we were reminded of other examples of its austere beauty.

Someone pointed out that there was very little if anything about Hannah Kent’s relationships with people of her own age group in Iceland. The difficulty involved in attending school where only Icelandic was spoken is mentioned, but the social difficulties are passed over in virtual silence.

People who hadn’t read Burial Rites apparently enjoyed the book as much as those who had.

The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on the beautiful, unceded land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, which is also where I have written this blog post. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this 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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Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know at the Book Club

Posted on 30 Mar 2026 | Leave a comment

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know (Jonathan Cape 2025)

Before the meeting: I heard Ian McEwan talking about this novel on David Runciman’s Past Present Future podcast a while back (at this link). Well, not so much about this novel as about what it’s like to be contemplating one’s own death at a time when the future of the world as we know it is in doubt. How will the people of the future regard us who were alive at this critical moment in human history? That question, he said, was the genesis of the novel.

What We Can Know is set in Britain long after our time, which is known in that future as the Derangement. In 2042 there has been an Inundation caused by the melting ice caps, and a nuclear winter created by international war has put an end to global warming. Britain is now an archipelago. North America is the domain of lawless warlords. Nigeria has become the preserver of electronic connectivity. Life is simpler and more difficult, but there are still academics, and there is a vast trove of records preserved from our time.

The central characters of the novel specialise in the literature of a period that overlaps our present moment. Their students revolt, seeing such studies as irrelevant to the needs of the times, and regarding literature produced by the generations who allowed such catastrophic events as beneath contempt.

That all works well. The physical environment is always interesting, even for a reader like me who has little knowledge of British geography, and so can’t appreciate the specifics of boat trips from island to island. However, I was far from engrossed by the central narrative thread, which concerns the main character’s search for a long lost poem, written in 2014 but never published. He hunts through the vast reservoir of data, and pieces together a picture of the dinner party when a distinguished poet read the poem aloud and presented it to his wife on a vellum scroll tied up with a bow. The story is told and retold from many points of view, becoming in my experience increasingly tedious, until there is a final telling that may amount to a revelation, but by that time I was well beyond caring.

Page 79*, taken in isolation, isn’t much to write home about, though it’s a nice example of the novel’s intertextuality. It’s a summary of part of an actual book published in 1985, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes, which has a minimalist Wikipedia page at this link.

Among its many treasures is an account of a journey on foot the eighteen-year-old Holmes took in the Cévennes, southern France, tracking the same route taken by his hero, his ‘friend’, Robert Louis Stevenson a hundred years before. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes was Holmes’s bible. He stopped in the same villages as Stevenson, tried to keep to his exact route on the old country tracks and slept like him in the open, ‘à la belle étoile‘. As he walked, he constantly referred to his copy of Stevenson’s book. In the early 1960s, the last remnants of the ancient French peasantry hung on in the rural fastness of La France Profonde.

And so on. I was interested enough in the description of Holmes’s book because I’d enjoyed the 2020 film Antoinette dans les Cévennes, which also traces the route taken by the young Robert Louis Stevenson in the 1870s.

You won’t be surprised to learn that the passage’s context makes it something more than a schoolboy summary. The narrator had come across Holmes’s book when he was a 22 year old student who hadn’t yet settled on a subject for his doctorate. He had ‘eased the hundred-year-old hardback from its shelf’ as a delicate remnant from a past era, and tells us about it now because it contains one of the ‘most exquisitely evoked descriptions’ of a longing for ‘what was never known and is lost’ – the emotion that is the central driver of his academic research and of his quest as narrated in the first half of this book. The world before one was born in what was never known, and its loss is intensified for those who live after the Inundation

Most of page 79 leads up to that ‘exquisitely evoked description’. Then, at the bottom of the page, Holmes is standing at a bridge in the village of Langogne in a semi-hallucinatory state hoping that Stevenson, long dead, would soon be arriving:

Then he saw, fifty yards downstream, picked out against the fading gleam of the western sky, the old ruined bridge into town, the one his dear Stevenson would have crossed. Holmes was bereft, close to tears. ‘There was no way of following him, no way of meeting him. His bridge was down. It was beyond my reach over time, and this ruin was the true, sad sign.’

The narrator draws out the meaning of this:

The collapsed bridge downstream and the man crossing it a hundred years before represent the past from which I too am excluded, the past that from here seems whole and precious, when many of humanity’s problems could have been solved.

But, though Stevenson’s bridge was down, the country he had walked was substantially unchanged in Holmes’s time. In the narrator’s present time, all that land is lost, under water.

And that is the chord that vibrates through the novel. I the reader am living in the time that the character sees as ‘whole and precious’. Logically I can see that the book should have me on an edge – a prolonged moment of appreciating the world I live in, preemptively mourning its loss, and resolving to do what I can to protect and defend it. Whether the failure is mine or the novel’s, it didn’t have that effect on me.

When – spoiler alert – the second half of the novel has a different narrator, in a different time period, that driving emotion fades into a distant background, and the book, in my opinion, becomes a much more commonplace affair.

The meeting: We read What We Can Know in tandem with Carys Davies’s Clear. Like that book, it evoked widely divergent responses. In this case I was the Most Negative, and she who had been Most Negative for Clear enjoyed this one as a satisfying holiday read.

For some the world-building amounted to thinly disguised lecturing about climate change. Others felt there wasn’t enough of it – and I guess I’m in that camp: I would happily have stayed in that future, wandering beyond the confines of university scholarly life. Where my engagement as a reader was fading by the end of the first part and died irretrievably when the narrator and time frame changed, that was where others felt the book finally came alive. I think there were two people (out of five) who were there for both parts. (My interest had died to such an extent that I had to be reminded of the key revelation in the second part.)

I think the key thing that worked for others and not for me is announced in the book’s title. Appropriately enough, the title is hard to remember: I keep misremembering it as ‘All We Can Know’ or ‘All That You Know’ and I keep thinking of Keats – ‘That is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.’ So What We Can Know: the book is about knowledge, specifically historical knowledge. The academics of the future can sift through the mountains of detailed electronic and other documentation of our times but what goes unrecorded will remain unknown, and if the records of significant truth aren’t found then that truth remains unknown.

I’m sailing very close to spoilerish now, but the book’s central search for a lost poem, reputedly a masterpiece, turns out to be wrong-headed. A different document, found thanks to ingenious deciphering of clues in the archive, transforms the meaning of events as they were known up to that point. For some readers, perhaps for most, this is deeply satisfying. It might, I concede ruefully, be a matter of attention span.

The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. Our combined ages add up to many more years than have passed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British Crown. 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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Carys Davies’s Clear at the Book Club

Posted on 29 Mar 2026 | 2 comments

Carys Davies, Clear (Granta 2024)

Before the meeting: On a remote island to the north of Scotland, the population has shrunk to just one man, plus a cow and a number of domestic animals. The man, Ivar, is the sole surviving speaker of the island’s language. The island is owned by a wealthy mainlander, and this is 1843, during the time of the Clearances, when tenants all over Scotland were evicted to make way for more profitable sheep. An idealistic clergyman, John Ferguson, an impoverished member of the newly formed Free Scottish Church, agrees to take on the errand of travelling to Ivar’s island to prepare him for his removal. The errand turns out not to be all that simple: John Ferguson (he is always referred to by both names) has a near-fatal fall, Ivar tends him, and as he recovers they learn to speak each other’s language.

I love this book. It’s a story well told, with genuine suspense (what will become of the gun that John Ferguson brings with him to the island?) and an implausible final twist that I found delightful. What I especially love is its resonance with Australian history. As the relationship between the two men develops and Ivar shares his knowledge of knowledge of language and place with John Ferguson, I am reminded insistently of the relationship in the early settlement of Sydney between Lieutenant Dawes and the young Cammeraygal women Patyegarang – as fictionalised by Kate Grenville in The Lieutenant and explored by Ross Gibson in 26 Views of the Starburst World (links are to my blog posts – if you’ve got time to spare I recommend the comments on the second one for some splendidly irrelevant Canadian humour). There is a similar sense of a small piece of light against the gathering gloom of genocide and language extinction.

It’s a short novel, and page 78* comes just after the halfway mark. Perhaps it marks a turning point:

It’s two weeks since John Ferguson has been dropped off on the island and fallen from some rocks. He is recovering well in Ivar’s hut and the language lessons are well under way:

John Ferguson mimed what it was he wanted to know, and Ivar acted out what he was trying to describe, and between them they inched towards the right words for, say, knitting and spinning and carding the wool; for eating quietly and for eating noisily; for walking quickly and for walking slowly; for shouting and for whispering; for jumping and for shivering; for coughing and sneezing; for crouching by the fire and for shooing away the hens.

In the next paragraph, the reader is drawn into the process, as words from Ivar’s language are incorporated into the text:

Still heavily padded with English, the whole thing was an excited mixture of speech and gestures in which John Ferguson told him how he’d been down to the o to wash his socks, or that he’d stayed inside because it was gruggy out, or that he’d filled the lamp from the bunki and cleaned out the greut; that he’d a quick flinter around, swept up the flogs of snyag and brought in the skerpin, or that he’d picked some snori he’d found growing in the for, scalded the flodreks and drained them and saved the flingaso to make soup, and for a little while now had been sitting in the tur, going through everything he’d written down so far on the pages of his glossary.

I so appreciate Carys Davies’ good judgement in not giving us footnotes. They are absolutely not necessary – we are allowed to have a faint taste of learning the language by immersion. An interested reader, as I definitely am, can turn to the Author’s Note to find that, unsurprisingly, Ivar’s language is not Carys Davies’ invention. It is a version of Norn, now extinct but once spoken on the islands of Orkney and Shetland – and on Ivar’s fictional island which lies further north than either of those. The Author’s Note includes a glossary, including all the words in italics/purple on page 78 – flodreks, for example, are ‘limpets’ and flingaso is ‘water in which limpets have been scalded’.

Beneath this excited learning to communicate, and in the process learning about Ivar’s solitary way of life, there is a dark undercurrent. Over this idyllic scene there lies the shadow of John Ferguson’s mission. John Ferguson has allowed himself to forget about it for now, and Ivar is blissfully unaware of it. John Ferguson has been warned that Ivar, generally ‘placid and obedient’, was also large and strong and might not take kindly to being uprooted.

Perhaps anyone on the receiving end of so much lively enthusiasm would have begun to feel that they were in some way the object of it all, and surely Ivar could not be blamed for starting to think, at around this time, that John Ferguson might be beginning to return his feelings.

Just as, with genocide looming in Sydney, Lieutenant Dawes and Patyegarang developed an intimate relationship, so here Ivar has a growing emotional attachment to the messenger of his eviction. And at this point in the novel who can say if he’s right about John Ferguson returning his feelings? Certainly not the oblivious clergyman.

After the meeting: Astonishingly, while everyone agreed that the writing was excellent there were sharply divergent views about this book. The most negative version was that the book is completely silly. Nothing made sense: why did the owners need Ivar off the island, why had he stayed there in the first place, how unlikely is it that a clergyman would have taken on such an errand, how boring is all that stuff about language, how ho-hum is the inexorable movement towards the two men having sex, how implausible is the sex when it finally happens, and above all who would ever buy the final resolution? All of these questions could be answered satisfactorily by those of us who enjoyed the book, but our answers cut very little mustard. Mind you, I don’t think anyone saw the final resolution as completely realistic (see how careful I’m being about spoilers!): the difference is that some of us didn’t mind, and even enjoyed the improbability.

The Most Negative didn’t feel, as others of us did, an underlying dread: as the two men are building mutual trust and affection, we know that the moment will come when John Ferguson will have to reveal his true mission. And we know there is a concealed gun. Ivar has a secret ass well, so the elements were in place for an explosive climax. The book delivers that climax, but clearly not in ways that satisfied all readers.

I was pretty much alone in having loved the language lessons. But I think the world of the island felt real and substantial to us all, was in fact the book’s saving grace, even for the MN.

We read this book along with Ian MacEwan’s What We Can Know, which also prompted very different responses. Both books have islands and difficult sea voyages in small vessels.

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 club met on Gadigal land, and I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where the nights are lasting longer and small lizards seem to be everywhere. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of all those clans and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, which was 78 when I wrote that part of this blog post.

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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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Andrew Miller’s Land in Winter at the Book Group

Posted on 21 Dec 2025 | 7 comments

Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter (Sceptre 2024)

Before the meeting: The Land in Winter was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize. The judges described it like this:

In the depths of Britain’s coldest winter, two neighbouring women forge a friendship in the countryside. It’s 1962 and they have both just become pregnant. Around them, the men are struggling <snip>. As a winter storm wreaks havoc on their lives, these characters become pivotal figures in a community precariously balanced between history and future <snip>. In beautifully atmospheric prose, Andrew Miller brings suspense and mystery to this seemingly inconsequential chapter in British history.

For me the one word that stands out from that is ‘inconsequential’. I never got on the book’s wavelength. I couldn’t find any reason to be interested in the characters, and couldn’t tell why the author was interested in them. Adultery, mental illness, patriarchy, the lingering effects of World War Two, the shady world of strip clubs and escort agencies, organised crime lurking in the background, a nuanced play of class, a solid evocation of a snowbound English countryside: there’s plenty there, but I mostly failed to care or be amused. Nobody is happy, everybody has a complicated past, terrible things happen to each of the main characters, some expected, some self-inflicted, some as arbitrary as a car accident. The prose is fine, but I would describe it as functional rather than atmospheric. The book doesn’t sing.

Page 78* occurs in chapter 7. The ‘two neighbouring women’, Rita and Irene, have met for the first time when Rita has brought eggs from her farm as a gift to Irene, the doctor’s wife.

As the women converse, they fill each other in on their husbands’ backgrounds. That is to say, this is mainly a page of exposition. But then, a lot of the book feels to me like exposition.

‘Bill was at Oxford,’ said Rita, as if that explained the naming of cows after queens of the Nile. ‘He was studying law but dropped out. It was his father who wanted him to do it. Wanted a lawyer for the family business, one he could trust.’
Irene nodded. She had heard things about the father. What had Eric called him? Anyway, he had rubbed finger and thumb together to make the money sign.
<snip>
‘Bill can’t mention his [father] without making a face like he’s sucking a lemon.’
‘They don’t get along?’
‘Nothing would make Bill happier than to find out he’s adopted.’

In the midst of that background briefing, one detail stands out. Irene’s doctor husband ‘had rubbed finger and thumb together to make a money sign’. So Bill’s father, we understand, is a Jew. There’s more about that later when we meet Bill’s family, but the antisemitism of Eric’s remembered gesture never leads to anything. This did make me wonder if the narrative was seeded with many such signals that I missed. A character will see an unexplained light in the distance, and there are moments of surreal weirdness, but the narrative closes over them and it’s as if they were never there.

After their expository chat, the two women – both newly pregnant – move on.

‘Would you like some Guinness?’ asked Irene. ‘I usually have a glass about now. Eric bought a whole crate of it. It’s full of iron.’
From the larder she fetched two slim dark bottles. She took two glasses from the dresser. She bent the tops off the bottles with an opener that had a handle of some kind of horn. Each woman carefully poured the black beer into her glass.
‘Here’s how!’ said Rita, holding out her glass across the table.
They tapped glasses and sipped the beer, then each carefully wiped away the foam moustache from her upper lip.

Ah, thinks the reader, Andrew Miller has done his research. Way back then in 1962, not only did women drink alcohol when they were pregnant, but doctors as likely as not recommended that they drink stout as an iron supplement. It may be that the horn handle of the bottle opener and the slim bottles are period details. That would explain the slightly laboured feel of the writing, detail apparently for detail’s sake.

You might think that page 78 is unrepresentative of the book as a whole. Or it might whet your appetite for more. But to my mind it’s dull, expository, laboured, and as such typical of the whole book.

For Andrew Miller’s sake, I’m glad that my view seems to be in the minority.

After the meeting: My view was broadly shared by the entire Book Group. After exchanging end-of-year book gifts (I scored Clear by Carys Davies), and enjoying the first parts of an excellent meal in a Manly restaurant, we had a generally unenthusiastic conversation about the book. The most memorable contribution came from someone who said she hadn’t reached the good bits. “What?’ someone said, ‘you didn’t read the whole thing?’ ‘Yes, I did,’ she said, ‘but when I said how boring it was S– told me it got better, and I was still waiting for tht to happen when I reached the end.’

We all agreed that the bitter winter was brillintly evoked. Someone thought the quality of the prose was a kind of correlative of that confining weather. We hunted around for why it has been so well received by critics. Maybe you had to be English, someone said. Maybe there’s a lot of subtlety, especially about class, that went right over our collective head.

There was so much else to talk about. So we did, and enjoyed the rest of our meal.

The Book Group met on Gayamagal land, and 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.

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

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Posted in Book Club, Books, Page 7x/47/7

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