Category Archives: Book Club

Bookblog #25: The Book Club (with addition)

Posted on 9 Sep 2026 | Leave a comment

[This post was originally published on 19 July 2008 on my earlier blog. I’m retrieving it here as Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip got a mention in the Book Group’s discussion of Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song]

As I may have mentioned previously, our six-member Book Club has a general ban on talking about books at any length. The routine business of the evening is to swap books, eat and play cards, in that order. The swapping is highly ritualised: each of us offers three books, and each – in an order determined by drawing cards from the pack – borrows three books from the pool of offerings; before that happens we do ‘returns’ and ‘retentions’ from the previous meeting. Each book is given a score out of 5 by the offerer and the returner, and up to 30 seconds of discussion is permitted.

spare

At our most recent meeting, by tacit agreement, we didn’t play cards, and lingered over dinner instead. In a striking departure from SOP, someone asked, ‘What did everyone think of The Spare Room then?’ It had transpired during the swapping that everyone had read that book, and now it turned out that everyone had an opinion about it.

One person, who has made a film about death and bereavement, was intensely critical of the way Character Helen avoids facing up to death and her avoidance is not challenged by the book. (I actually think this is wrong – I read the last pages of the book as undermining and even invalidating much of Character Helen’s version of events.) Another, who had serious cancer some time ago, was gobsmacked by Character Helen’s lack of compassion – she couldn’t see how anyone could write such a character and expect readers to be sympathetic to her. Yet another saw the whole issue of death as the occasion rather than the subject of the book, whose actual focus is on the way in relationships between women expectations and commitments have to be constantly adjusted and renegotiated.

I don’t know what I think, except that I loved the way the book took a narrative about emotional subtleties and made something like an action tale out of it, and (I didn’t say this) I regard the scene where Character Helen sets out to reassure her guest that she hasn’t been a complete failure as unintentionally ironic – I mean, reading other people’s novels in manuscript makes a life meaningful? Ice-cold comfort, I would have thought. So there you go, Helen Garner got us talking.

I came away from the meeting with four books, the first of which was a retention from the previous meeting (I’d only managed 10 pages or so in the six weeks between meetings, not an uncommon occurrence):

Pat Barker, Life Class (Hamish Hamilton 2007)
Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (Vintage 1996)
Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip (Text Publishing, 2006)
Michelle De Kretser, The Lost Dog (Allen & Unwin 2008)

lifeclass

At the meeting, someone mentioned World War One Chick Lit, a genre I hadn’t heard named before. I don’t think Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy would fit that description, since quite a lot of its action takes place in the trenches. Life Class, on the other hand, probably does. The War doesn’t start until after more than a hundred pages of unrequited love among London art students. It does include graphically described mutilation and suffering in a hospital and nearby village close to the front in Ypres. There’s an ongoing discussion of how an artist should respond to the war, the main options being to ignore it because it’s just something that happens to people rather than being chosen by them, to glorify it (there’s a spectacularly noxious quote from the Futurist manifesto), or to do one’s best to tell the truth about it even though one’s work might be unshowable.

Even though Pat Barker includes an end note listing a number of biographies of artists who lived through those times, the debate pretty much sticks with the headlines, and the book amounts ends up being a footnote to the trilogy, a tale of young love thwarted by the War, not through the death of one lover, but by the creation of an uncrossable gulf between the two of them. Perhaps I’m missing something, but at times it felt as if there were two or even three different affairs being described: was her love unrequited as she felt, or his as he felt, or was she playing a manipulative, bisexual game as a third character claimed and was never contradicted. I didn’t know, and I’m sorry to say I didn’t really care.

0099590018

I loved Jeanette Winterson’s opening address for the Sydney Writers’ Festival this year, and perhaps even more her chat with Romana Koval on the Book Show, which covered some of the same ground. So even though I’d been largely bored by The Stone Gods, which I’d scored at the previous Book Club meeting, I picked up Art Objects  with hope in my heart. The book and I got off to a bad start with the epigraph, ‘If truth is that which lasts, then …’: I muttered under my breath, ‘If truth has nothing to do with lasting or otherwise, then there’s no point reading the rest of that sentence.’ But after that initial skirmish I was, alternately, putty in Jeanette’s hands and driven nuts by her indulgences.

The thread that runs through these essays is an argument for taking art seriously, for the need for the reader or viewer of art to work. This is wonderful, and there are bright flashes of insight on every page. She’s a brilliant and passionate advocate for things that are very dear to my heart, and yet … somehow her pentecostal rhapsodies leave me cold, and on occasion her self-proclaimed love for words can be hard to distinguish from love of the sound of her own voice. It’s probably telling that having read her lively, intelligent, lyrical essays on Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, I felt not the slightest stirrings of desire to read any of their works. Here’s a fine passage from the essay ‘The Semiotics of Sex’, that touches on the literature vs literacy debate (I still have my calico bag from the 2004 literacy convention, which sports the wistful slogan, real texts • real lives • real learning • real pleasure):

Learning to read is more than learning to group the letters on a page. Learning to read is a skill that marshals the entire resources of body and mind. I do not mean the endless dross-skimming that passes for literacy, I mean the ability to engage with a text as you would another human being. To recognise it in its own right, separate, particular, to let it speak in its own voice, not in a ventriloquism of yours. To find its relationship to you that is not its relationship to anyone else. To recognise, at the same time, that you are neither the means nor the method of its existence and that the love between you is not mutual suicide. The love between you offers an alternative paradigm; a complete and fully realised vision in a chaotic unrealised world. Art is not amnesia, and the popular idea of books as escapism or diversion misses altogether what art is. There is plenty of escapism and diversion to be had, but it cannot be had from real books, real music, real theatre.

See what I mean? These are things that cry out to be said, but it’s preaching to the choir – and I do mean preaching.

On the other hand, how about this evocation of the context of her advocacy of the imagination, from ‘Imagination and Reality’:

Children who are born into a tired world as batteries of new energy are plugged into the system as soon as possible and gradually drained away. At the time when they become adult and conscious they are already depleted and prepared to accept the world of shadows. Those who have kept their spirit find it hard to nourish it and between the ages of twenty and thirty, many are successfully emptied of all resistance. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that most of the energy of most of the people is being diverted into a system which destroys them. Money is no antidote. If the imaginative life is to be renewed it needs its own coin.

She’s still preaching, but here I feel the urge to bang a tambourine accompaniment. Teresa Nielsen Hayden memorably said in her classic blog post, Things I Believe: ‘I believe we’re bound to occasionally confuse God with His creation. The part of creation I most frequently confuse with God is the English language.’ Jeanette Winterson should be forgiven if she occasionally makes the same mistake, and preaches accordingly.

mrpip

‘Why is Dickens a great writer and Trollope hardly a writer at all?’ was one of the stand-out aggravating lines in Jeanette Winterson’s book. It provides a nice segue, though, to Mister Pip, in which Dickens is introduced as ‘the greatest English writer of the nineteenth century’, and whose plot revolves around Bougainvillean village schoolchildren being transported into another world through having Great Expectations read to them – so that they become in some measure Jeanette’s ideal readers.

Consensus at the Book Club was that Mister Pip was superb. I struggled, and failed, to like it. I was uneasy from the start about the first person narration by Matilda, a black village child during the Bougainvillean civil war and blockade of the early 90s who falls in love with Dickens’s Pip and witnesses terrible brutality. The voice never rang true for me – and though some of what I took to be false notes (there’s a Somerset-Maugham-ish explanation of the suddenness of nightfall in the tropics, for example, as if Matilda somehow thinks of non-tropical experience as the norm) are accounted for by Matilda’s later life as told in the final chapters, I never came to trust the voice, and the book never made sense: the last remaining white man on the island reads Great Expectations to the schoolchildren, and when the book is destroyed by soldiers, along with all the houses and possessions of the villagers, he and the children have a project of retrieving the whole narrative; then there are some scenes of hideous brutality; Matilda and a handful of other villagers escape to live in Australia; she becomes a Dickens scholar, and at the end of her narrative decides to go back to her village.

Maybe my problem with the book boils down to its being set in a real time and place, but presenting a kind of allegory about colonialism. Monstrous things did happen in Bougainville in the early 90s while the White world largely turned our collective back, and Lloyd Jones manifestly – and laudably – wants us to acknowledge that. But, almost certainly in spite of its author’s intentions, this book (in my reading) ends up exploiting the horror for literary and, as it turned out, prize-winning effect.

lostdog

The Lost Dog, on the other hand, has a voice to die for. The phrase ‘jewelled prose’ came to mind: there’s hardly a sentence, and probably not a paragraph without a glowing adjective, a finely cut phrase, a many-faceted image or a sharply glittering epigram, though I don’t think you’d find any extended metaphors as laboured as that one. I was so captivated by the prose that I’d reached about the halfway point before I started to wonder if there was a plot; fortunately, just about then Michelle De Kretser started to give clues about where the book was heading. I remember someone saying of the movie Stand By Me that almost everything in it was there to allow the movie to get away with the one moment of tenderness between two boys. It’s not quite that simple with The Lost Dog – in fact, there’s nothing simple about this book – but after all its playing with time, its ruminations about modernism and post-colonialism, its playing around with references to Henry James (the point-of-view character, Tom, has just finished writing a book on James when this book opens and he loses his dog), it gives us climactic moments affirming simple human/animal realities. (The beautiful cover was designed by excellent blogger Ampersand Duck, who had clearly read the book. The book I borrowed is hardcover and a pleasure to hold in the hand.)

A general footnote: one of Jeanette Winterson’s tendentious remarks was ‘”Write from your own experience” is fine for the writing class, useless for the writer.’ Well, not entirely useless I think. Part of my difficulty with the Lloyd Jones book was that I believed the book when it was talking about Dickens, but not about Bougainvillean culture: I’m sure he did a lot of research, but it doesn’t feel experienced in the book. On the other hand, the only moments that rang false for me in The Lost Dog were those when Tom does something sexual when alone: as if that had to be included to make him a proper man. I’d bet good money, on the other hand, that Tom’s bi-cultural experience has a lot in common with Michelle’s, and that Matilda’s is a long way from Lloyd’s.

Addition: Tipped off by a review of the latest Meanjin in today’s Spectrum (supplement of Sydney Morning Herald), I found Ampersand Duck’s post about designing The Lost Dog‘s cover. It’s a terrific post, but I just want to quote this, in a self-congratulatory way: ‘For me, the most alluring part of the job was that part of my brief was to read the book properly. Hooray!’ I thought as much!

 

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Shida Bazyar’s Nights are Quiet in Tehran at the Book Club

Posted on 26 Aug 2026 | 1 comment

Shida Bazyar, The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran (2016, translation from German by Ruth Martin, Scribe 2025)

Before the meeting: This novel invites readers into the world of leftist Iranians who allied with Islamists against the Shah in the 1970s, only to face exile or worse under the rule of the Ayatollahs. Though it was written before Trump’s first presidential term, and Ruth Martin’s wonderfully readable translation was published before his current war on Iran, it takes on extra power when read in the context of those events.

It is the story of one Iranian family told in four slices of time: 1979, the year the Shah was deposed and the Islamic Republic was established; 1989, when the family is living in exile in Germany; 1999, when the regime relaxes a little and some family members visit Tehran; 2009, when once again the streets of Tehran are full of protests in the Green Movement, and the exiles watch the brutal repression unfold on social media. An undated epilogue tentatively suggests a brighter future.

Each section has a different narrator. In the first, youthful Behraz tells how he and his two close male friends see their hopes for a socialist revolution dashed, and though in his political fervour he believes there is no time for romance, he is drawn to the beautiful Nahid. In the second, ten years later, Nahid is married to Behraz. She describes their life in Germany and remembers the events that led to their flight from Iran. In the third, their eldest daughter, Laleh, takes up the story, describing a visit to Tehran, her first experience of noisy, exuberant family life, and the quiet revelation of the fates of Behraz’s friends. In the fourth, Mohad/Mo, who was a rowdy little boy in the previous section, now deals with the dual identity of dissipated German university student and Iranian exile.

Shida Bazyar is a German writer whose parents, like Behzad and Nahid, were communist activists in Iran in the lead-up to the 1979 revolution. They left the country in 1988 and – unlike Laleh and Mo – Shida was born in Germany. The book clearly draws on the author’s family’s experience, both in the youthful activism against the Shah and then against the Ayatollah, and in the experience of exile. Especially in the third section, when teenage Laleh returns to Tehran, the writing feels so alive it must be drawing on actual experience. (I’ll stand by that statement even though Shida Bazyar was born in 1988, so was one year old at the time of the fictional visit.)

A look at page 79* gies you an idea of the quality of the writing – including the fluency of the translation.

It’s part of Nahid’s narrative. She is remembering the moment when they decided to leave Iran, early in the 1980s. Behraz’s friend Peyman is visiting their safe house to tell them he has received a letter requiring him to turn himself in to the Islamic regime, which they all know means he is to be arrested for his communist activism. It’s a quiet, decisive moment in their lives:

Look after yourself, Behzad told Peyman – it sounded like a throwaway remark – and then Peyman said, Look after yourself. At least I know I have three whole days of freedom left, and you have no such security, comrade. His expression remained serious as Behzad laughed. We shook hands for a long time, Peyman and I, then Peyman gave me back the tea glass before putting on his shoes, his small, clean leather shoes, and once more he smiled before hurrying away into the darkness, as we closed the door quietly behind him.

The emotional intensity of the moment is conveyed entirely through gesture: Peyman has accepted the oblgatory glass of tea, but he has not sat down, and at parting he shakes Nahid’s hand ‘for a long time’. The door closes quietly behind him as he disappears into the darkness, and we know it’s the last time Nahid and Behzad will see him. (It’s not a spoiler to say that in Laleh’s narrative, when they meet up with Peyman’s widow ten years later, the emotion is much more on the surface.) The paragraph is also a beautiful example of how the novel portrays character. Nahid wants us to know that Peyman is anything but a performative martyr. He plays with children, and takes their words seriously, and when he is about to surrender himself to the regime, he manages a deadpan joke about the danger hanging over his friend.

Once Peyman has gone, the composure breaks:

Behzad and I were like abandoned children in our living room, which, although it was a hiding place arranged by the movement, was slowly becoming homely, with framed poems by Hafez and Rumi on the walls, and Laleh’s paintings in among them. I clutched Peyman’s tea glass, and as we sat down mechanically and the tears began to well up in my eyes, Behzad said, Nahid, this time we’re going to do it right, this time we need to leave. Then finally we looked at one another, and in my mind’s eye I could see all the situations in which Behzad and Peyman had sat in the midst of our friends, discussing things with serious faces. Peyman, the clever, quiet one, and Behzad, the one who called the shots, and the state probably didn’t care which of them it threw into its dungeons first, but it would only be a matter of time before Behzad got a letter, too.

That paragraph is mostly important in the flow of the novel as giving a flashback to the moment Behzad and Nahid decide to leave Iran and come to Germany. On paying closer attention to it for this blog post, I noticed something that slipped by me on first reding.

Nahid mentions Hafez and Rumi, two towering figures in Persian/Iranian culture. Her attachment to them was something that drew Behzad to her in the first place, and here they have an honoured place on the wall with little Laleh’s paintings – emblematic reminders that there is more to the life of these characters and this nation than endless struggle. Yet nowhere in the novel is either of them quoted.

A few pages later, the couple discuss a poem by Bertolt Brecht. The poem is ‘Thoughts on the Duration of Exile‘, but even though it is eminently relevant to their situation, it is only indirectly named and quoted. It’s clear from this and other moments that poetry is important to Nahid, and probably to Behzad as well. Readers aren’t given a direct look at any of it.

Then I realised that something similar happens in earlier parts of the novel. The main action, from one point of view, is the characters’ activism. Yet there are very few specifics about that activism: Behraz drives a car full of leaflets, but we don’t know what is in them or what is to be done with them. He spends time with other revolutionaries in a captured barracks, but what they do there is passed over in silence. We know that he is risking his freedom, even his life, but we don’t know what he is doing.

Some readers may find this effect frustrating or evasive. I didn’t. This isn’t an educational documentary about Iranian culture and history, it’s a story of how that history affects the lives of one small family – and by implication, many more.

The book was written before the Women, Life Freedom demonstrations of 2022 (link here) and its brutal repression. Things were so bad that in mid 2026 members of the Iranian diaspora in Sydney were demonstrating in favour of Trump’s invasion. As I was reading the last pages of the book, Donald Trump was reported as saying he would ‘beat the f***ing s**t out of Iran. The grief that permeates the book’s last pages seems more insistent and the hopeful epilogue more unrealistic with every passing news flash.

At the meeting:

It turned out that for a couple of us the stories in this book gave them insights into things they had been told or noticed about Iranians in their lives. And conversely, stories they had heard from those friends helped in their appreciation of the book. A small example: in Laleh’s section, Iranians presen their visiting family members with gifts in plastic bags – when this happened our group member’s acquaintance she had though it was just her Iranian family being offhand, but the book makes it seem a matter of cultural difference.

We were all engaged by the book. A couple of people – maybe everyone except me – found the first section, Behraz’s narrative, hard to follow and a bit boring. Weirdly, I liked his narrative because of its clarity. I think I read it with the utterly confusing opening of Sofi Oksanen,’s When the Doves Disappeared (link is to my blog post) fresh in my mind: I knew where the characters’ allegiances lay and wasn’t bothered by the lack of specifics about their activities.

We generally agreed that the two women’s narratives – that is, Nahid’s and Laleh’s – were the most engrossing. Nahid’s account of the experience of exile and Laleh’s wrestle with dual identity were especially strong. No one was particularly convinced by young Mo’s activism – he goes to demos about student fees and watches videos about Iran only because his German girlfriend wants him to. At least that’s how one person read him. My sense of him is kinder than that, and I found his section very moving as a picture of a young man more or less adrift from his cultural moorings, along with the horror of the repression of the Green Revolution.

We read the book along with Ann Patchett’s Whistler. When I blogged about Whistler, I mentioned that we did a little karaoke at the end of the evening. It says something about the difference between the books if I mention here that we also heard about the youthful political struggles on one member and current tribulations of a family member of another.

I read The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran and wrote the first part of this blog post on Wulgurukaba country, on the beautiful island of Yunbenun. The Book Club’s five members, all of settler heritage, met on Gadigal land, and I wrote the rest of the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present of all those Nations 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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Ann Patchett’s Whistler at the Book Club

Posted on 25 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

Ann Patchett, Whistler (Bloomsbury 2026)

Before the meeting: This is a story about a web of relationships among middle class people in north-eastern USA. It starts when the narrator, 54 year old school-teacher Daphne Fuller, is wandering through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her hospital administrator husband, Jonathan (excellent name, correctly spelled) notices that an older man has been surreptitiously following them. They charge through gallery after gallery to shake him off, but he catches up and reveals that he is Eddie, Daphne’s stepfather. But her stepfather’s name is Lucas. Then in a flash she remembers that her mother married twice after her first marriage ended, and she has completely forgotten Eddie, her first stepfather.

She has forgotten him, but in his brief time in the father role, she loved him with a passion. As the novel unfolds we come to know Eddie as a universally loved book editor, we learn the story of his marriage to Daphne’s mother and, crucially, Daphne remembers and tells for the first time the story of a road accident in which she and Eddie were involved when she was nine years old and he was 32.

It’s an enjoyable read, with a smooth New York wit and a gallery of pleasantly interesting characters. I wasn’t bored but I found myself wondering if there was any point to it. Then, towards the end, Daphne happens on a moment of tenderness between two other characters:

I wondered what anyone ever knows about another person’s relationship.

Looking at these two men leaning against one another in the middle of the room like a couple of support beams, one of them too tired to even go and sit down, I realized the answer was nothing. I knew nothing at all.

I think that comes close to naming the book’s central theme. There are any number of relationships that are easy to sum up in a word or two. But look just a little bit closer and they are full of surprises. And, unlike in the familiar Long Day’s Journey kinto Night structure, it usually turns out that people are kinder, braver, more generous that they seem. Which may be exactly what many of us need in a book just now.

One little note: I wonder if anyone else found echoes of the children’s writing of William Steig in Eddie’s witty dialogue, and in particular of Brave Irene (link is to my blog post) in young Daphne’s blizzard adventure. Please say in the comments.

At the meeting: No one else was much interested in my Brave Irene reference, though in reflecting about our discussion I think it is to the point.

Generally people felt that the book stayed on the surface of characters. But as we talked, it emerged, at least in my mind, that there’s a lot going on that you could easily skim over – much in the way a child can read something like Brave Irene without worrying about any deep themes. For instance, when one person said she was unconvinced by Daphne’s mother’s break-up with Eddy we did a group effort of teasing out her motivations. Someone else raised the question of whether there was something sexual going on between the adult Eddie and child Daphne trapped overnight in a crashed car in the book’s main event: I don’t think so, though it was certainly intimate and bonding, but the question was there. Or again, Daphne loved Eddie when he was her stepfather, which surely has something to sdo with her marrying a man 15 years older than her – if so, the book doesn’t make a point of it, and no one cares. Then there’s the delicious irony, which again is there without signposting, that the only character who is thoroughly negative is a man who once made a fortune from a series of books promoting positivity. (The irony of his negativity as opposed his fame resting on positivity is explicit, but not the meta-irony that he is the book’s beacon of negativity.)

That is to say, I was onto something. I await the opinion of my children’s literature–savvy readers.

The Book Club always discusses two books. Our companion to Whistler was The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar, about which I plan to blog tomorrow. A very different book.

We ate an excellent dinner of fish and kipfler potatoes, followed by a lemon delicious pudding cooked from a TinEats recipe. After our book discussion we did a little karaoke using our hostess’s new toy.

I read Whistler and wrote the first pat of this post on Wulgurukaba country, the beautiful island of Yunbenun. The Book Club’s five members, all of settler heritage, met on Gadigal land, and I wrote the rest of the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present of all those Nations who have cared for this country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

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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 | 6 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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