Category Archives: Book Group

Niall Williams, The Fall of Light and the Book Group

Posted on 6 May 2026 | 4 comments

Niall Williams, The Fall of Light (Picador 2001, Picador ebook 2010)

Before the meeting: The group has previously enjoyed three Niall Williams novels (my blog posts here, here, and here). This month’s chooser decided that we couldn’t have enough of this good thing.

The other novels have been set in the fictional Irish town of Faha. In so far as this one centres on a particular place, it is the real-life Scattery Island in the estuary of the Shannon River, though the action also wanders over three continents. According to a foreword, the novel is a family story that has passed down through generations, embellished on the way.

The story unfolds in 19th century Ireland. In the context of longstanding, brutal English occupation and the devastating potato famine, we follow the travails and adventures of the Foleys. First Emer the mother leaves. Then her husband Francis and their four sons set out across the width of Ireland, on what they see as an epic quest, seeking a new life in the West, in Galway. First Francis is swept away by a river in flood. Then the brothers are separated. Tomas the eldest falls catastrophically in love and flees for his life with his beloved. Of the next two brothers, twins, Finan finds his way to Africa, and Finbar becomes the leader of a community of Gypsies. The youngest brother, with the deeply Irish name Teige, has an uncanny facility with horses that opens possibilities for him. It’s all told in wonderfully musical prose with a touch of what you could call Celtic magic realism.

The family is dispersed – to Africa, to continental Europe, and to North America. The book is most vibrantly alive in the Irish sections. Finan’s life in Africa is told briefly at third hand. Finbar’s adventures with the Gypsies (probably not what they’d be called if the book were written now) left me unconvinced, though there are some wonderful moments, of which my favourite occurs when Finbar, who has waited outside the caravan where his partner was in labour, calls out, ‘How is my son?’ The midwife replies:

‘Your son has no penis.’ She watched as all the fathers’ heads came up and their eyes opened and their mouths dropped and there was a kind of moan that passed among them like a wind.
‘No penis! But two heads!’ she shouted, and bought her hands up to the sunken sides of her leathery face and leaned back and hooted a kind of hoo-hoo of owl-like laughter to the astonishment of all.

When I told a version of that to my grandchildren they were quick to guess that there were twin girls.

Two sons end up in North America. The westward trek in the USA, paralleling the one in Ireland, is a different kind of desolation – a solitary Meek’s Cutoff. But, like the Gypsy story, these sections lack the Irish sections’ vivid sense of place and I was always glad when the narrative returned to Ireland.

Though I infinitely prefer to read books in hard copy, I had to content myself this time with an ebook from the library. Where page 79* falls depends on your settings, but in my reading it occurs at about the one-third point. Francis and Teige, father and son, have been reunited against all odds. (You might have guessed that the shape of the story is separation and then arduously achieved, partial reunion.) After some time together Teige tells Francis that he has done what they all set out to do in the first place – he has seen the sea, and gone into it, even though he was afraid of its wildness. The father says he was ‘right to try it and keep well out of it’:

Another pause, then Teige added: ‘I didn’t though.’
‘You didn’t?’
The pony flicked her head. Her tail swished. The boy looked at her a moment and felt his father’s eyes upon him.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I still went in, three times.’
The father said nothing then. He sat there and the emotions he held made his lips quiver. He blinked. Dark clouds moved across the sky. The night fell and the stars came and went and wheeled above them and each lay down to the slender hope of their dreams.

This kind of interplay between understated dialogue, big emotions and romantic descriptions, all framed in a mild mockery, is one of the joys of the book. ‘The father said nothing then.’ We have followed Francis’s narrow escape from drowning, so know what lies behind his quivering lips and blink. Maybe the dark clouds and the stars are there to mark the passage of time, but they are also a way of showing the thing that can’t be said by these inarticulate characters: for Francis, the realisation that his son has dared to go into the ocean marks a great shift in his own emotional state. It lends strength to ‘the slender hope’ of his dreams.

You might wonder what that pony is doing there, flicking her head and swishing her tail. Teige has calmed her down and ridden her in a race for the Gypsies, after which she has become his steadfast companion. He is forever moving close to nervous horses, stroking them and speaking to them in language that isn’t quite words, calming them and coaxing them to do what their owners require. It’s an almost magical power that places him at the emotional heart of the book.

This stage of the narrative is a journey. Francis is looking for what will come to be known as Scattery Island – monks who saved him from drowning have given him directions. Both he and Teige are seeking the other sons and their mother.

Still on page 79:

The following day when they were passing a cottage a cry stopped them. The cottage was not unlike others, a small building of dark stone with crooked windows and a door open to the road even in that February. The cry was that of a woman, it came from the garden beyond. The Foleys stopped, the pony flicked her ears. Then Francis called out. There was no response and Francis looked to Teige who slid down the pony. Together they walked in around the cottage and found in a small garden a woman of fifty years trying to pull up from the earthen ridges the fallen body of her husband.

The landscape they travel through is full of suffering and death. Mostly there’s a generosity of spirit among the sufferers. Here Francis and Teige don’t hesitate before they stop to help, and in the nature of fairy tales – or family stories that have been polished and decorated by generations of telling – when they help this couple and their children they gain information that leads them forward dramatically in their quest.

I’ve mentioned Scattery Island a couple of times. The real-life island at the mouth of the Shannon River is better known as Inis Cathaigh (the link is to its Wikipedia page). It became a place of safety for a community of pilots during the Great Famine. How Francis and the other Foleys relate to that actual history is a beautiful invention.

The meeting: We met, unusually, in a pub. It was a beautiful space, though noisy, which made it hard to maintain a single conversation, even with the music turned down. we displaced a women’s baseball team (‘We don’t usually come to the pub on a Tuesday night in our uniforms’) and were displaced in turn by a group of young women toting laptops.

We had a terrific discussion of the book.

A number of us confessed that they had come to the book reluctantly. We’ve read three of his books already. Do we have to read one more? For some, it came alive when the famine appeared. For others, it was the language from the very beginning. I don’t think anyone wasn’t won over completely.

To generalise, we were all willing to forgive its faults because the story rattles along brilliantly, and the writing is wonderful. We differed on what the faults were. One man couldn’t bear the unrealistic elements of the romance between Teige and a wealthy Englishwoman – others (me included) were charmed by its improbabilities. Some loved the sequence where all the Gypsy women give birth on the same day, whereas other (me included) were irritated by the artifice. We were all, I think, unenthusiastic about the North American sections, and even more so by the almost perfunctory treatment of the brother who goes to Africa.

Someone pointed out that it’s a book about men, that the women aren’t fully developed characters. (This observation case an interesting light on the midwife’s joke I quoted above – the character’s assumption that a baby will be male reflects an awareness of the male-centred nature of the narrative in general.)

At the end of the book, the narrator reveals that Tiege is his ancestor. Some of us took this to be an authorial statement – and an explanation for why the narrative is less ‘tight’ than other Williams novels: this is a version of his own family story, so was obliged to go where the actual history had gone, even if fancifully. I’m inclined to think the narrator is separate from the author.

Someone observed that the book is suffused with love, especially love among the Foley men. we agreed that this is true of the book, an it led to a number of us telling stories about their siblings, mainly brothers. There was a theme of connections being lost or broken and re-established after a period. I didn’t realise it at the time, but this was an astonishing echo of the book’s shape.

One question remained unresolved. How =do you pronounce ‘Teige’. Everyone except me rhyme it with ‘intrigue’. I hear it as ‘tyke’ but with a soft end. Opinions welcome in the comments.

The Book Group members are all men of settler heritage. We met on Gadigal land. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 79.

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

Posted on 25 Mar 2026 | 4 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on 11 Feb 2026 | 5 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Melancholy of Resistance at the Book Group

Posted on 3 Dec 2025 | 1 comment

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance (1989, translated by George Szirtes, published by Tuskar Rocks Press 2000)

Before the meeting: László Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Melancholy of Resistance (Hungarian title Az ellenállás melankóliája) was his second novel. Written as the Communist regime was collapsing in Hungary in 1989, it centres around an outbreak of senseless mass violence in a small Hungarian town. In real life, happily, the transition from Communism to a version of democracy was peaceful, but the book’s nightmarish vision and weird allegorical tale resonate far beyond its immediate political context.

One thing was clear to me as I read: this book, with its absence of paragraph breaks, long internal monologues about, for example, esoteric musicology, a key character who remains unseen and unheard except for weird chirping sounds, and many story lines that peter out or are resolved with a throwaway comment in the middle of something else, could never be made into a film. I was wrong. In 2000 (the year this translation was published), Béla Tarr adapted it in Werckmeister Harmonies, which has been called ‘one of the major achievements of twenty-first-century cinema’ (an impressive accolade, even if it was written in the YouTube comments section).

I haven’t seen the film, but I can’t think of a better way to convey the feel of the book than to show you its trailer:

There you have it: the young, naive idealist who may well be the idiot people think he is; the old, disillusioned musicologist; the corpse of a huge whale wheeled into town; the ominously silent crowds of men; the awful mob violence; the invading military (though I don’t remember a helicopter in the book). Some elements are missing, though I expect they’re in the movie itself: a mysterious character known as the Prince, two children caught in the crossfire, and the key roles of two women. Nor do the streets of the movie seem quite as covered in frozen garbage as those of the novel.

The book’s most striking feature is absence of paragraph breaks and the predominance of long sentences. The sight of page after page of uninterrupted text is intimidating at first, and it’s annoying having to hunt around if you lose your place, but the effect on the page, as I imagine it is on the screen, is a dreamlike flow. And George Szirtes’ has translated the Hungarian into extraordinarily smooth English that enhances that effect. This isn’t Proust, where the sentences turn in on themselves, clauses nesting within clauses, with a hypnotic, introspective effect. Here the effect is more propulsive – the long sentences sweep you on. And they work brilliantly in a book where characters are always in motion (even if sometimes the motion is mental). They walk, stumble, run errands, occasionally waddle, stalk, pursue, flee, but always move.

It’s as if the characters can’t stop for breath, so the text has to hold out for as long as it can without a full stop, and even longer for a bit of white space.

Page 78* occurs partway through the third paragraph/section, which unfolds from the point of view of Valuska, a kind of holy idiot and easily the book’s most sympathetic character. Valuska has been introduced doing his nightly routine at closing time in the Peafeffer tavern, in which he demonstrates the mechanics of a solar eclipse, deploying three paralytic drunks to represent the sun, the moon and the earth. His attempt to communicate the awe-inspiring order of the cosmos is tolerated by the drinkers as a way to delay closing time. At the top of this page, the evening is over and they walk out into the cold night:

The first thing to note about this page is that, counting the sentence that started on the previous page, there are just three sentences. The middle one is quite short: at 20 words it may be the shortest in the book, but is otherwise unremarkable. The others are typical of the book.

It would please my inner 11-year old Queenslander to analyse one of them – identify the main clause and the subsidiary clauses, and the nature of the subsidiary clauses. It probably wouldn’t be very entertaining for my readers, so I’ll limit myself to noting that the basic structure of this:

So they filed out in silence, and while the majority showed no particular desire for further entertainment, there was a couple here and there who, when Valuska bade them a warm good night at the door (it wasn’t possible to bid farewell to everyone, for some, particularly those who had been woken too suddenly and shoved out into the icy cold, were too busy throwing up against the outside wall), gazed after him as they had done the previous night and who knows how many nights before watching as he, still under the spell of his vision, proceeded on his way with that characteristically cramped gait of his, leaning forward, head bowed, puttering on tiny feet, almost breaking into a run (‘as if he had something important to do’) down the deserted street, and they sniggered behind their hands, and then, as he turned of by the water-tower, burst into loud and healthy laughter, for there wasn’t much else to laugh about – particularly these days, when driver, warehouseman, house-painter and baker all felt as if ‘time had somehow stopped’ – except Valuska, who, as they used to say, provided ‘free ’ntertainment’, not only with his act, but with his whole appearance, with those mild fawn-like eyes ever shining, that nose, so like a carrot in both colour and length, that postbag which never left his side, and that impossibly baggy coat thrown over that skinny body of his – all this was, in some strange fashion, invariably amusing and proved an eternal fount of rare good spirits

is five linked principal clauses:

So they filed out, and a couple gazed after him, and they sniggered, and then burst into laughter, for there wasn’t much else to laugh about.

That skeleton is adorned with images of the bitter cold, vaguely comic drinkers throwing up, descriptions of Valuska, an explanation of what they found amusing about him, and a reminder of the drinkers’ wider context – ‘driver, warehouseman, house painter and baker’.

Valuska stands out: time has ‘somehow stopped’ for the town in general, but he is fascinated by the continuous movement of the heavenly bodies and is himself always on the move. That stopped-ness comes into focus in chilling scenes in which the town square is full of motionless men, all as if waiting for something. And when they move, the effect is shocking, violent.

I don’t know that I’d recommend the book, but I enjoyed it, and it has stayed hauntingly in my mind. It makes many other books feel like plodding reportage.

After the meeting: This was one of the best meetings of the book group ever. We exchanged gifts – everyone was supposed to bring a book from their shelves, though the book I received (a Gary Disher title) is in suspiciously mint condition. Some of us read poems – by Adrian Mitchell, Mary Oliver, Simon Armitage and Robert Gray. We reminisced about the group’s history and argued about how firmly fixed our list of dates for the year should be. We shared stories of courage and shame. We ate well. We enjoyed the early summer evening. And we had a wonderfully animated discussion of the book.

Three out of eight of us had read the whole thing. A number of others were well under way and intend to finish it. Everyone had something to say. Here are some of my highlights.

I was reading Mrs Dalloway a couple of pages a day alongside of The Melancholy of Resistance, and felt strongly that the books spoke to each other but couldn’t say how. When someone mentioned the way the narrative focus transfers from one character to the next at the end of each section, I realised this is one of the similarities: where Virginia Woolf’s narrator slips from one character’s mind to another sometimes several times on a single page, Krasznahorkai’s narrator does a similar thing, but on a much wider arc.

One man read the book not realising it was more than 30 years old, and the political dimensions of it seemed right up to date. I don’t know if he mentioned the MAGA riots in January 2020, but they certainly seemed relevant.

Someone said it was hard to resist a book where a character spends four pages trying to work out the physics of hammering a nail while repeatedly hitting himself on the thumb. And then, having solved the problem by acting without thinking about it, he is told by his cleaning lady that he’s done it all wrong. Our group member who has been studying philosophy told us that this is even funnier when you know that one of Heidegger’s most famous passages involves a hammer. (That person’s favourite moment is Mr Eszter’s seemingly interminable rumination about the pointlessness of the diatonic scale (at least that’s what I think it’s about) – which was my second least favourite moment.)

Contrary to my own response, one man felt the book was intensely cinematic. And as we talked it was clear that it’s full of memorable scenes. We reminded each other of the scene where Valuska demonstrates the mechanics of an eclipse, the interrogation scene, the force with which Mrs Eszter’s hand comes down on Valuska’s shoulder to stop him from speaking, the horriific scene where the mob runs riot in the hospital, the brilliantly evoked streets full of frozen garbage, and more.

At heart, one man said, it’s a love story between Mr Eszter, an intellectual who has given up any hope that thinking could be of value, and naive, well-meaning Valuska.

And that’s a wrap for the Book Group for 2025.

The Book Group met on Gadigal 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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Robbie Arnott’s Dusk and (not) the book group

Posted on 23 Oct 2025 | 6 comments

Robbie Arnott, Dusk (Picador 2024)

Before the meeting: we had enjoyed Robbie Arnott’s previous novel, Limberlost, so Dusk was a promising choice.

It’s set in a place very like nineteenth century Tasmania. Iris and Floyd Renshaw, the twin children of notorious outlaws, travel to the highlands and aim to kill a puma named Dusk that has been ravaging the region, killing livestock and people. A bounty has been offered by the graziers, and the twins see it as a chance to move away from their life at the margins. The story of their encounters with graziers and other hunters, and with a community of people who lived there before the settlers arrived, is full of elegant twists and moral dilemmas. There are moments of sheer horror, and moments of great tenderness. The writing is consistently vivid – you can tell that Robbie Arnott has visited the landscape even while he adds surreal elements like giant bones protruding from the ground; and the twins’ physical ordeals are viscerally real.

Even as I recognised all these qualities, I had trouble engaging. From about page 100, when the twins and their companions come close to Dusk, I started to care, and where a couple of pages are blacked out after a dramatic moment, what might have seemed a bit of cleverdickery had me on the edge of my seat. But then I got lost again and the final pages left me, as the song says, wondering why.

At page 78*, the twins have just arrived in a small town full of men who are hunting the killer beast. She – Dusk, the puma – has killed the son of a wealthy grazier, whom the twins have encountered grieving extravagantly in the street. For the first time since they came to the highlands, Iris finds herself confronting what they may be up against, ‘the probability of being ripped into death, faster than blinking’. Now, ‘starkly aware of the softness of her flesh, the smallness of her body, the stumbling clumsiness of her humanity’, she encounters for the second time Patrick Lees, a man who stands out from the crowd of hunters. On page 77 he has proposed that the twins join him to help track down the beast. Floyd, characteristically, stays more or less silent.

‘So you are chasing the bounty,’ said Iris, annoyance bending her voice.
Lees contemplated his pipe before slipping it back between his lips and speaking around it. ‘Maybe I’m just endlessly curious.’
 Iris clenched her teeth, holding her irritation in. Floyd kept rubbing his chin, seeming to take in Lees’ words without making any effort to respond. All of it was maddening to Iris – Floyd’s stupid performance, the sudden appearance of Patrick Lees, the unmoored feeling she had while being near him, his casual offer, his playful duplicity – and she wanted to get away from both of them and from herself, so she tugged at the collar of her coat and touched her hat. ‘We’ll think about it.’
  Lees nodded. ‘Of course.’ He indicated a lemon-gold building that rose above the stable. ‘I’m staying at the inn. I’ll be leaving at first light.’ Another little smile. ‘I hope to see you then.’

They left Patrick Lees breathing smoke at the plains and walked back through the stable to the street.

The main thing on display in this passage is Robbie Arnott’s deft use of tropes from romance novels. Iris is irritated by a suave, superior man, while having an ‘unmoored feeling’ while she’s near him. It’s no spoiler that Iris can’t resist the offer to go on the hunt with him, or that they do spend a night together. But as in the romance genre, there is every indication here that Lees is a cad: his little smile is surely a red flag, and while Iris may be uneasy, the reader can be reasonably certain that someone who breathes smoke is dangerous. You leave this page with a subliminal sense that Lees may not be just a romance-genre cad, but a horror-genre monster.

There’s a lot to admire in this book. There’s a lot to discuss. The surreal elements of the landscape read as both hamfisted metaphor and strategy for including First Nations characters who won’t be mistaken for actual palawa. But I was unconvinced. Even the basic set-up didn’t work for me, even if someone were to tell me that pumas were once introduced to Tasmania / lutruwita. I enjoyed some parts but never got on its wavelength

After the meeting: I couldn’t go to this meeting, and though I missed the people, I wasn’t sorry not to discuss the book. The WhatsApp report painted a picture of a very convivial evening, where everyone liked the book, some more than others. Evidently one person liked it more as the evening wore on – maybe I would have joined him in that movement. Maybe not.

I have written this blog post near what was once luxuriant wetland, in Gadigal and Wangal country. 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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We Solve Murders with Richard Osman and the Book Group

Posted on 10 Sep 2025 | 2 comments

Richard Osman, We Solve Murders (Viking 2024)

Before the meeting: As a boy I read a lot of British crime fiction. When I was 13, I put a brown paper cover on the conveniently-sized novel I had to read for school (Booran by M. J. Unwin – trigger warning for 1950s colonialist attitudes), then transferred the cover to book after book by Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh over the course of the year. My parents were impressed that I appeared to read Booran so many times. For my father’s birthday in April, I gave him a pile of ten pre-read paperbacks, and for Christmas another twenty. It didn’t occur to me that my pretence might be transparent.

This means that on the cusp of teenagehood I read enough ‘cosy mysteries’ to last a lifetime. I can still enjoy the odd Agatha Christie on TV or at the movies, but I have no desire to reread the books. Not even The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

Reading We Solve Murders felt like an enforced return to that territory. It’s a cosy mystery mixed with a comedy action thriller, written with amiable wit in elegant prose, with a plot that features many exotic locales, influencers being murdered and a villain who uses generative AI to disguise their identity. (Incidentally, it’s a bold move in a genre novel written in the style of a friendly English gentleman to have the villain’s chapters preceded by a Chat GPT prompt to render text ‘in the style of a friendly English gentleman’. I can’t be the only one to think Richard Osman is having a little joke at his own expense.)

This is explicitly intended to be the first book in a series, like Osman’s first series The Thursday Murder Club, and we can probably expect a TV movie, hopefully less mediocre than the recent TMC movie. There are moments where I would laugh if I saw them on screen. Just one example, from page 244. Amy, the hard-boiled heroine is talking to Nelson, who may be about to kill her:

‘It’s just you don’t seem like an assassin?’ says Amy. ‘And I know a lot of assassins.’
‘I am not an assassin,’ says Nelson, his tone very reasonable. ‘I’m just, you know, a regular criminal and politician.’

Boom tish!

The story rattles along at a good pace. The characters are an amusingly diverse bunch of types. There are twists and turns and plenty of travel. It is what it is and it’s terrific at it. I was entertained, but it took many more hours than a movie would.

After the meeting: It was a small group, not for lack of interest in the book but because of family birthdays, travel commitments, viruses – and our current policy of sticking to our designated dates no matter what. Not for us the practice of that group who don’t decide on a date until everyone has read the book. Still, the four of us enjoyed each other’s company until well after my watch announced it was my bedtime. Among many things, including the colourful career of one us, we did talk about the book.

One chap put it nicely: Richard Osman works in popular entertainment, having devised and presented a number of successful game shows. He knows what works with audiences and has brought that knowledge to the new (to him) field of novel writing. I’m pretty sure someone said that there’s a big overlap between his target readership and people who go on cruises. (We had an interesting digression into the sociology of cruise ships.)

When it was observed that when Australian comics try to replicate those British game shows they don’t always come up with a winner, we realised that their Englishness is at the heart of their charm. And that is also true of this book. Our one English-born and bred group member spoke eloquently on this point. There’s a character who can be relied on to give details of which roads he takes to get from one village to another: this, our group member assured us, has the ring of authenticity. The book is firmly rooted in a particular place – a village in the New Forest. Another chap who lived for some time in an English village testified that, just as in the book, in a two-pub village most pub-goers were loyal to one establishment and wouldn’t dream of visiting the other. What I read as cosiness is also a celebration of something distinctively English. And they did say ‘English’, not ‘British’.

Someone asked, ‘Did you laugh?’ No one said yes. On the page, the book is often funny but not laugh-out-loud. We shared stories of books that did make us laugh out loud – a Georgette Heyer regency romance and the The Traveller’s Tool by Sir Les Patterson were mentioned. (There was another interesting digression about Barrie Humphries.) But we had a sense that a movie, or preferably a TV series, might be on the way.

One of the non-attendees summed it up well in a WhatsApp post: ‘No thinking, just chorkling. The goodies win / the baddies get their come-uppence. Very English.’

The Book Group met, and I wrote this blog post, on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation as the days are growing suddenly warmer. I acknowledge Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Jean-Michel Guenassia, the Incorrigible Optimists’ Club and (not) the book group

Posted on 30 Jul 2025 | 2 comments

Jean-Michel Guenassia, The Incorrigible Optimists’ Club (2011, translation Euan Cameron 2014)

Before the meeting: The Book Group’s designated chooser defied recent practice and chose a long book – 624 pages in my edition. I doggedly put in the time, and had read the book well before the meeting, only to realise that I was away from home on the night and couldn’t be there.

The club of the title is a group of exiles in 1950s Paris who meet in the back room of a bistro, mostly to play chess but also to share news of their homelands, and to argue fiercely about love, politics and life in general. One of the two main strands of the book is made up of their stories. Mostly they are without ID, even stateless refugees or defectors from the Soviet Union. One has actually been a friend of Stalin’s, who defected for love but remains faithful to the Soviet cause. The rest are dissidents or men (they are all men) who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jean-Paul Sartre is a member and kind of patron, though after a riveting scene in which he registers news of Camus’ death, he pretty much fades from the narrative.

We see the club and its members through the eyes of Michel Marini, a schoolboy who first visits the cafe to play desktop football (whose French name, ‘baby-foot’, trand). His coming of age story, against the backdrop of the Algerian War of Independence, is the other main narrative strand. Michel befriends Cécile, the girlfriend of his older brother, Frank. Frank bunks off to fight in Algeria, then disappears, only to reappear as a fugitive. Cécile calls Michel ‘little bro’, and neither she nor he realise that he is completely in love with her. Meanwhile, Michel’s parents’ marriage goes through tumultuous times.

It’s never dull, richly political and just as rich in its focus on the storms of adolescence. Yet the blurb describes it as a debut novel. Could this possibly be the work of a young person? I went looking and found that it’s not. According to Wikipedia, Jean-Michel Guenassia is almost as old as me, and was 59 when the book was published. He had in fact previously published one novel, and three TV screenplays and some plays had been produced. The Incorrigible Optimists Club is another example of an overnight sensation that was years in the making.

Euan Cameron’s English version is smooth, lively and engrossing.

Page 78* highlights elements of the book that didn’t feature in that quick overview. But they’re qualities that are important to the way the book draws the reader into the warm embrace of its imagined time and place.

We’re still getting to know Michel before he becomes involved with the Incorrigible Optimists, before the realities of the Algerian War intrude into his life, before his parents’ relationship becomes fully hostile. His father, a small businessman, has just bought a flash car – a DS 19 – and takes it for a spin with Michel in the passenger seat:

After a rough start, the car behaves like a midlife-crisis dream come true. We’ve been told that Michel’s father loves to impersonate the cool screen actors of the day, and that he is more or less despised by his wife’s upper-class parents, including Grandfather Philippe mentioned here. This paragraph reminds us of that tension, shows him having fun with his son, and at the same time fleshes out the soundtrack of the era. This kind of detail is what brings the narrative alive, even for readers (like me) who have vague to nonexistent knowledge of he singers and actors mentioned:

My father was the happiest man in the world. He began making fun of Grandfather Philippe, adopting the cheeky, mocking accent of Jean Gabin, whom he imitated wonderfully. I burst out laughing, and the more I laughed, the more he carried on. I was given the full repertory of Pierre Fresnay, Michel Simon and Tino Rossi. I had tears in my eyes. He switched on the radio. We were treated to a Brassens song. We took up the chorus:
_ Les amoureux qui s’bécotent sur les bancs publics, bancs publics,
_ bancs publics ont des p’tites gueules bien sympathiques.

Jean Gabin played Maigret in 1958. Pierre Fresnay was the suave Frenchman in La Grande Illusion. Michel Simon was described by Charlie Chaplin as the greatest actor in the world. Tino Rossi, like the others that Michel’s father impersonates, was feted as a film actor who supported the Resistance. Even without all the googling, you can tell that this is a moment when father and son are enjoying each other and loving life, singing together, and celebrating an anti-Fascist strand of French culture.

Here’s a YouTube of George Brassens singing ‘Les amoureux des bancs publiques’. The words don’t really matter, but they translate as ‘The lovers who kiss on public benches, public benches, public benches, have very friendly little mouths.’

Then there’s this:

On Christmas evening, my father had arranged a surprise for me. He took me to the Opéra de Paris. Since he had only had the idea at the las moment, he had paid a fortune for tickets at an agency. He dressed up for the occasion, and when I arrived in my creased suit, he looked at me in bewilderment.
‘Haven’t you got anything else to put on? We’re going to the Opéra.’
“It’s all I’ve got.’
‘I’m going to tell your mother to buy you some things. Come on, we’re going to be late.’
We found ourselves in the upper circle, at the side. Despite his protests, I let him sit in the proper seat. I took the folding one. You had to dislocate your neck to get a view of the stage. The Opéra was packed, the women in evening gowns and the men in dinner jackets. He was excited. Even the programme was exorbitant.
‘Your grandfather would have given anything to see Rigoletto.’

This time Michel doesn’t share his father’s enthusiasm. The tiny incident, especially coming on the heels of the singing together with Georges Brassens, shows us the mutual affecrtion between father and son, as well as the distance that is growing between the generations, both of which become hugely important when the father disapproves of things done by Michel’s brother Frank but makes enormous sacrifices for him.

After the meeting: Sadly, I wasn’t there.

I wrote this blog post on Wulgurukaba land, the luxuriant island of Yunbenun, where cockatoos screech during the day and curlews serenade the night. I acknowledge the Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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

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Annie Ernaux’s Man’s Place at the Book Group

Posted on 8 May 2025 | 3 comments

Annie Ernaux, A Man’s Place (La Place ©1983, translation © Tanya Leslie 1992)

Alphonse Duchesne, who ran a small cafe/grocery in Normandy with his wife, died in 1967, two months after his daughter Annie Ernaux qualified as a school teacher, marking a transition in the family’s class status. On the train journey home from the funeral, Ernaux writes:

I tried to keep my son entertained so that he would behave himself. People travelling first-class have no time for noise and restless children. I suddenly realised with astonishment, ‘Now I really am bourgeois,’ and ‘It’s too late.’ (Page 18)

Later that summer, she thought to herself, ‘One day I shall have to explain all this,’ meaning she needed to write about her father and the distance that had come between them during her adolescence: ‘Although it had something to do with class, it was different, indefinable. Like fractured love.’

This short book – just 64 pages – is a rigorous, spare and unsparing, attempt to rise to that need. In 1982, having already written three novels, Ernaux set out to write a fourth one, about her father. But, she writes:

I realise now that a novel is out of the question. In order to tell the story of a life governed by necessity, I have no right to adopt an artistic approach, or attempt to produce something ‘moving’ or ‘gripping’. I shall collate my father’s words, tastes and mannerisms, the main events of his life, all the external evidence of his existence, an existence which I too shared.

The book tells two stories: the life story of Ernaux’s father and – always in the present tense as if allowing us to look over her shoulder as she types – the self-reflexive story of the writing of the book.

The father was from a peasant background. His own father was illiterate, and he worked first as a farm hand, then as a factory worker and finally, along with his wife, ran the small grocery shop and café. He bickered with his wife, spoke a rustic version of French, never set foot in a museum, voted for reactionary politicians ‘for a lark, but without conviction’, was intensely proud of his daughter’s success in moving into the middle class but didn’t make any part of the transition with her.

Every now and then, Ernaux steps directly into the frame to say how long she has now been writing, explain that it is a slow process because she is avoiding her own emotional memories in order to focus on her father’s story. It’s not that she doesn’t draw on memory – as for example when she describes a photo of her father taken at her wedding reception, and recalls her sense of him at the moment it was taken, ‘certain that he wasn’t enjoying himself’. And through it all, told in flat unemotive language, the terrible undertow of the daughter moving away into a different world:

One day he said, ‘Books and music are all right for you. I don’t need them to live.’

This was the first of Annie Ernaux’s ‘autobiosociological’ books. It’s the fourth I’ve read, and with each one I become more grateful to the Nobel committee for drawing her to my attention. The others (with links to my blog posts) are:

After the meeting: I was a little apprehensive about this meeting, as I had picked the book. The job was sprung on me at the last meeting, it had to be a short book, and this was on my TBR list, so I named it on the spot without due consideration.

It turned out that, quite apart from the big plus of brevity, the book was generally much liked, and we had a discussion that made me glad all over again to be in the book group. At times the discussion was personal: one man honed in on the early part of the narrative when the family’s life was disrupted terribly by the bombing of Normandy in World War Two (a part of the narrative that had passed me by); a number of us drew parallels with the trajectories of our own lives – as the first generation in our families to go to university; and the conversation wandered, seemingly off-topic, to our relationships to our parents, and various ways in which the stories of different parents had been discovered and even published.

We had a wonderful difference of opinion. One man, call him K–, himself a recently retired small businessman, said that Annie Ernaux had completely failed to get that her father, as a small businessman, had made a life for himself that he was completely happy with: when Ernaux portrays him as ashamed of his lack of ‘culture’, that is complete projection. I must be just a little bit in love with Annie Ernaux because my defensive hackles went up, and I disagreed that the father was portrayed as anything other than happy with his life!

The back cover blurb of the Ftzcarraldo edition says that ‘Ernaux reveals the shame that haunted him throughout his life’. So K– isn’t alone in reading the book that way. I still disagree. But I’ve been reflecting for days, and while I still think K– was wrong, I believe he put his finger on something at the heart of the book.

There’s no doubt that Annie the character believed that she had a better life than her parents, that they were proud she had made the transition, that a gulf of mutual incomprehension developed between the generations. The father certainly feels shame in some social situations – not understanding what a school teacher means by ‘town clothes’, not being able to spell when filling out a form. It’s explicit that the people of the daughter’s world look on people like her father with scorn. But I don’t read Ernaux or her father as sharing their judgement. She lays out the detail of his world, and is pretty clear about her own ‘bourgeois’ perspective. When she mentions in passing that he votes for a reactionary politician ‘for a lark’, it’s clear that she disapproves, but her disapproval isn’t the point.

K– went hunting for passages to support his reading. His case doesn’t stand or fall by one tiny sample, but what he came up with was this, from when the 20-something Annie is visiting her parents:

As soon as I plugged in the bedside lamp, the wire blackened, sparks flew and the bulb went out. The lamp was in the shape of a ball resting on a marble base, with a brass rabbit standing upright, its front paws sicking out at its sides. I had once thought it very beautiful. It must have been broken for ages. Indifferent to things, they never got anything mended at home.

K– read the tone of that last sentence as something close to contempt: ‘These people are barely human, they care so little for their environment.’ I read it as more two-edged: ‘As the kind of person who travels first-class, I expect my things to function well and to meet certain aesthetic standards. My parents have different priorities, a much greater tolerance for imperfection.’

I’m going to reread the book.

The Book Group met on the land of Gadigal of the Eora nation. I wrote this blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the many generations of Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country.

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The Book Group and Wolfram Eilenberger’s Visionaries

Posted on 9 Apr 2025 | Leave a comment

Wolfram Eilenberger, The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Salvation of Philosophy (©2020, translation by Shaun Whiteside 2023)

Before the meeting: It’s unlikely that the group would have read The Visionaries if we chose books by consensus. But The Chooser has spoken and we’re out of our comfort zones.

It’s a hard book to describe. Without anything by way of preamble or general argument, it plunges straight into its story. The first chapter, ‘Sparks: 1943’, introduces the book’s four subjects: four quite different women writers, each heroic in her own way, poised to take a major leap forward In the midst of the horrors of the Second World War. As with each of the book’s eight chapters and Coda, the chapter is subtitled:

Beauvoir is in the mood, Weil in a trance, Rand in a fury, and Arendt in a nightmare.

And the four philosophers are introduced:

  • Simone de Beauvoir, aged 35, is in occupied France in her famously unconventional ‘family’ with Jean-Paul Sartre, with ‘better things to do than worry about the judgment of that petit-bourgeois fascist’ (that is, Adolf Hitler): she is on the brink of ‘a new definition of man (sic!) as an acting creature. And one that was neither empty of content, as in Sartre’s latest work, nor bound to remain absurd, as in Camus’s writing.’
  • Simone Weil, 34, is in London, desperately ill and in pain, but lobbying for the creation of ‘a special unit of French nurses at the front who would be deployed only in the most dangerous places, to provide first aid in the middle of battle’. She would head this unit personally, in what looks awfully like a plan to commit suicide by altruism. De Gaulle dismisses the proposal out of hand: ‘She is mad!’ Instead she writes urgently and copiously, including ‘a 300-page redesign of the cultural existence of humanity in the modern age’ before collapsing in exhaustion.
  • After ten years as a freelance writer in New York City, Ayn Rand, 37, sees the publication of her 700-page novel, The Fountainhead, and launches her passionate espousal of independence, her worldview that saw altruism as the great destructive force.
  • Hannah Arendt, 36, also in New York, has been driven out of Hitler’s Germany, and is now finding in herself the courage to face the reality of the industrialised murder of millions of Jews. What mattered was ‘to be entirely present’, or, as paraphrased by Eilenberger, ‘to philosophise’.

In the following chapters, Eilenberger tells us the story of the life and work of each of these four women over the preceding decade. It’s left to the reader to discern any unifying theme or concern. In my reading, the closest he comes to articulating a central theme is on page 69:

The philosophising person seems to be essentially a pariah of deviant insights, the prophet of a life lived rightly, whose traces can be found and deciphered even in the deepest falsity. At least this is one way to understand the role that Ayn Rand as well as her contemporaries Weil, Arendt and Beauvoir assumed with ever greater confidence. Not that they had expressly made a choice. They simply experienced themselves as having been placed fundamentally differently in the world from how other people had been. And deep inside they remained certain of who or what the problem needing treatment was: not themselves, but the Others. Possibly, in fact – all the Others.

If one were to pursue that view, the actual impulse of astonishment at the beginning of all philosophising is not the surprise that there is ‘something and not nothing’, but rather, honest bafflement that other people live as they do.

If I understand this correctly, part of what he is saying is that whereas their male colleagues were interested in the individual human being in relation to the world, these four women were interested in human beings in relationship to each other.

It may be that what you find in any book depends on what you bring to it. A reader well-versed in 20th century philosophy would read this one differently from me: it seems that each of these women was pushed to the margins of political and philosophical thinking, and this book is part of a movement to rectify that. But I’m not that well-versed reader. I haven’t read a whole work by any of them, but I’ve known about all four in a general way.

In my mental landscape, Simone Weil is a weirdly saintly figure who embraced suffering (and loved one of my own favourite poems, as I blogged recently), a Jew who was lived her own intense version of non-Church Christianity; Ayn Rand is a demonic figure who celebrated and justified libertarian capitalism; Simone de Beauvoir is Jean-Paul Sartre’s devoted lover who wrote The Second Sex, a key text of second-wave feminism; and Hannah Arendt is a woman of extraordinary integrity who coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ and wrote about totalitarianism.

This book leaves those thumbnail sketches pretty much in place, but I now have a much richer understanding of the people and their works. I didn’t know, for instance, that Simone Weil had worked as a trade union organiser and had brilliant political insights, that Simone de Beauvoir had such a complex set of intimate relationships, that Ayn Rand was married and counted on her husband Frank O’Connor while she wrote fiercely about independence (and that ‘Ayn’ rhymes with ‘fine’), or that Hannah Arendt was quite so marvellous a human being as she appears in these pages.

Their stories are told independently, but Eilenberger makes occasional telling comparisons, and sometimes the women’s paths cross. I love the meeting between the two Simones on page 55, quoted from Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter:

I managed to get near her one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,’ she snapped. Our relations ended right there.

And on page 190, the moment that has stayed with me as a piece of wisdom to live by – far from the self-abnegation of Simone Weil or the grand existentialist abstraction of de Beauvoir. Hannah Arendt, Eilenberger writes, is ‘laying the foundation of her own ethics of true self-determination in the face of the Other’:

Gratitude, for the existence of other people in the world, and active concern, for their always given vulnerability, are for Arendt the two true sources of our moral life. And it is no coincidence … that these two predispositions are the very ones that are essentially alien to Ayn Rand’s superhuman ideal figure, Howard Roark.

Amid all the egotism, altruism, self-sacrifice, angst, ambition, bitterness, sweetness, ruthlessness, pain, of those brilliant young adult lives, the notion that gratitude and concern are central went straight to my heart.

After the meeting: Usually, we spend quite a bit of time chatting before turning to the book of the night, but this time we were into it before we even sat down. The food was, as always, excellent. Our host had done a huge tray of roast vegetables and the contributions of the other five of us, with minimal advance coordination, worked well. He Who Usually Brings Dessert was on the other side of the continent, but it was someone’s birthday, and we had cake.

Though the book took us well outside our collective comfort zone, I think we were all glad to have read it. Most enjoyed it for the history, and tended to skip the philosophy. One of us is doing a philosophy course with the University of the Third Age, and had read Wolfram Eilenberger’s previous book, Time of the Magicians, about four male 20th century philosophers. He gave a couple of mini-lectures that cast light, gratefully received, on some of our dark places.

We had three different readings of ‘the Salvation of philosophy’ in the subtitle: these four women were saved by philosophy in times of extreme hardship; they saved philosophy from the dried-up mainstream by focusing on the connections among people; in the terrible time of the Second World War and Nazi atrocities, they kept the flame of philosophical thinking alive. Maybe all three are correct. (I’ve just seen the subtitle of the original is Die Rettung der Philosophie in finsteren Zeiten (1933-1943), literally The Salvation of Philosophy in Dark Times (1933–1943). And the title itself is Feuer der Freiheit – Fire of Freedom. It’s kind of intriguing that the four woman aren’t named, and there’s not even a hint that the book focuses on particular women. I wonder how much that change of packaging influences out reading.)

A couple of guys took against Simone de Beauvoir. I tried to defend her, and was supported by someone drawing a comparison between her and one of the participants in Australian Survivor that was as obscure to me as the extracts from Simone Weil’s journals. Incidentally, I now know how to pronounce Weil (it’s VAY).

We were in awe at how young the four women were in the years covered by the book. Some were pretty sure that Simone de Beauvoir’s entanglement with a student would get her fired and publicly shamed these days. It was a revelation that for de Beauvoir the war at times barely disturbed her way of life (someone had been to see the Anne Dangar exhibition in Canberra and had a similar revelation – ‘Oh yes, Hitler’s doing all that stuff,’ the artists in France said to each other, ‘but cubism is so interesting.’) It was pointed out that two of the four women were novelists rather than philosophers as such. Someone thought Hannah Arendt was a bit dull (I was shocked). Some were surprised to find themselves feeling sympathy for Ayn Rand (I was ashamed).

We barely talked about Donald Trump. I hope he noticed the lack of attention.

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Niall Williams’s Time of the Child and the book group

Posted on 19 Feb 2025 | 14 comments

Niall Williams, Time of the Child (Bloomsbury 2024)

Before the meeting: As I was reading the first couple of chapters of this book, I had ringing in my ears something that a Book Group member had said about a different book, perhaps one of Niall Williams’s earlier novels, A History of the Rain or This Is Happiness: ‘It’s a beautifully written Irish novel, but I’m not sure the world needs yet another beautifully written Irish novel.’

The first chapters, in fact almost the first half of the book, are brilliant descriptions of life in 1962 in the fictional West Ireland village of Faha, the village we know from those previous books. The rain is still incessant and the village still slowly sinking into the river. The heart broken in This Is Happiness is still broken. Life is still dominated by the Catholic Church. Gossip is still the lifeblood of the community. Most houses now have electricity.

The first chapter begins with a wonderful setpiece, a parish Mass where the beloved parish priest stalls mid-sermon in the first major sign of dementia. Things are seen from the point of view of Jack Troy, the village’s general practitioner whose face and manner give away nothing of his inner feelings as his role in the community means he must always be available, including to people who will never ask for a doctor’s attention on their own behalf. After Sunday Mass he is regularly approached by people who indicate with a nod and a wink that his services are needed at such and such a house.

The second chapter revolves around another magnificent setpiece: the Christmas fair in which farmers bring their cattle to town to sell, and hawkers and traders come from elsewhere. Here, twelve-year-old Jude Quinlan, son of a drunkard farmer, carries the narrative burden.

Through both of these chapters, we are teased by hints that something big is going to happen. It’s as if the narrator is saying to his readers, ‘Yes yes, I know you’re here for a story, but first let me tell you about the place it happened in and the people who live there.’ At the end of the second chapter, more than a third of the way into the narrative, there’s this:

But it was here, at the back wall of the church in the village of Faha, on the night of the Christmas Fair 1962, that Jude Quinlan found the child.

Ah! The titular child has arrived! Then the third chapter continues to tease us. It takes us back a couple of days in the life of Ronnie Troy, Jack’s long-suffering dutiful daughter. After 16 pages in which we come to know and (speaking at least for myself) love her, she responds to a late-night knock on the door and at last the story begins.

Given that it happens so late in the book, I’m reluctant to say much more about it, except that though my Group member may be right that the world doesn’t need another book like this, I certainly do. Maybe it’s because I spent my 1950s childhood as part of the Irish diaspora in north Queensland, and I respond with little gasps of recognition to little throwaway lines about the Sacred Heart, the ‘Hail Holy Queen’, the smiling pope, or to the way the priest says Mass with his back to the church while the congregation’s more or less devout members goes about their own business. That is to say, maybe there’s a hefty dose of nostalgia in my response to the book. But if so, that nostalgia serves a serious purpose.

This is a time and place when the Church dominated Irish society. It was the time of the Magdalen laundries, covered-up clerical sexual abuse of children, pitiless laws against abortion and condemnation of most forms of birth control. None of this is foregrounded in the book, but oppressive Church–State authority looms large, mostly unspoken, over the second half of the book. On the one hand, a handful of people sinking to their knees to say the Rosary can be an exhilarating manifestation of something fine beyond words (though Niall Williams finds the words); on the other a priest with a form letter mouths deadly phrases like ‘For his own good’ and ‘Preserving his dignity’.

Just as much as, say, Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time or Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, this book is about decent humanity – individuals and communities – resisting the monolithic, repressive authority of Church and State. Like them, it revels in musical language. More than them it’s funny. I did cry, twice, but I laughed a lot.

Page 77* includes a micro example of the resistance. In the absence of a fairground, Faha’s monthly fair is a chaotic mess, and the church gates, ‘with their splayed look of welcome in the centre of the village’, are a main centre of trade. The curate, Father Coffey, representing the Church’s authority, asks the farmers not to stand their cattle there:

As it happened, the curate’s appeal fell on deaf ears, but he took some satisfaction when he was able to negotiate a treaty whereby Mick Lynch promised a rope corridor to let the daily Mass-goers through. As a goodwill gesture, Lynch said, the farmers would take their dung with them when they left, which Father Coffey reported back to the Canon, unaware it was a joke until the older priest put the hand across his laugh to stop his teeth flying.

With such jokes, in which the older priest colludes, the people of Faha keep the authority of the Church in its place.

Most of page 77 is taken up wth one of Niall Williams’s bravura character sketches:

Mick Lynch had the walk of a man who owned his own bull. Short and broad, he carried a blackthorn, wore a frieze coat and low hat with red feather in the band. That hat never came off his head outside of church. He wore it at the counter in Ryan’s, in the spartan confines of his iron bed, and when he went to wring the necks of geese. From victories in cards or trade, Lynch took a deal of pleasure. With a contrary nature, his cheeks were where the most of his hair grew, furred sideburns made key-shaped by the shaving of his chin which gave him a jailor’s look. Lynch had the reputation of being what Faha called a right cool man, a designation that pre-dated refrigeration, meant he could not be hurried or ruffled, and once, when asked by a dealer, ‘What are you looking for in a horse, boss?’ had delivered the incontestable answer, ‘Leg in each corner.’ He had not married. For women he hadn’t the handbook, he said, and children nothing but hosts to headlice and worms.

Remember, nothing has really happened in this book so far. That is, we’re a quarter of the way into it but we haven’t yet had what the movies call the inciting incident. But the narrator refuses to be hurried. There is too much to enjoy at any moment in the life of Faha, so though this is Mick Lynch’s only appearance, we’re going to take a moment, just for the fun of it, to savour him. I especially like that ‘outside of church’: whatever else he may be or do, it wouldn’t occur to Mick Lynch to defy the custom of men going bare-headed in church.

After the meeting: Unusually, this book was the subject of quite a lot of WhatsApp discussion before the meeting, mainly from people who couldn’t make it on the night. A number of us had wept, prompting one to ask whether we were ‘silly old men getting emotional about a baby and family relationships’. He who had made the remark about beautifully written Irish novels confounded my expectations by loving tis one, and wrote a thoughtful email on the theme of ‘the soul’. Another sounded a mildly dissenting note, having read only 80 percent and found it slow going; he reacted against the religion’s hold on people, and used the word ‘silly’ about a main character’s attempt to take charge of the situation (all of which are completely reasonable responses). Yet another quoted a number of favourite passages, and said he loved the way Catholicism co-existed with pishogues, which he noted was an excellent new word to him (as it is to me – definition at this link if you’re interested).

On the night there were just five of us. Among other things, we ate baked potatoes. Almost as soon as we arrived, those of us with Catholic backgrounds – a slim majority – were reminiscing about, of all things, our Confirmations. Not directly on topic, but certainly book-adjacent. We had an animated discussion. More than one said that the book took its own sweet time to get to the point – one said he almost stopped reading, but others (me included) thought it was a feature rather than a bug. Someone quoted a passage to the effect that Irish story-telling never goes in a straight line.

Someone said, on WhatsApp and then again on the night, that the book was an Irish Catholic equivalent to Marilynne Robinson’s Home. I don’t quite see that, though it’s an interesting thought. I had a go at articulating some of what I see the book as saying about Catholicism in Ireland then and now – which I won’t go into here because it would be spoilerish.

Interestingly, no one thought to say out loud that this is a Christmas story, even a kind of second-coming story. And, though someone had looked up Niall Williams on the internet, no one wondered aloud if he became a grandfather somewhere on the way to writing this book.

As for the rest of the conversation, I can’t do better than quote (with permission) from one chap’s report on WhatsApp. Conversation ranged, he wrote:

from John Cage and the Necks to motor bike accidents, playing golf, Parkinson’s disease and then the realities of being Bilbo Baggins.

I wrote this blog post on land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation. I was born in MaMu country, though as a small child I was confused about whether I lived there or in ‘Erin’s green valleys’. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of both countries, never ceded.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 77.

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