Category Archives: Page 7x/47/7

Claire G. Coleman’s Enclave

Posted on 16 May 2025 | 3 comments

Claire G. Coleman, Enclave (Hachette Australia 2023)

This is the first book I’ve read by Noongar writer Claire G. Coleman. Her first novel, Terra Nullius, won prestigious prizes and her poetry and essays appear regularly in journals I read. (If you want to plough through my earlier posts to see what I’ve managed to say about those earlier encounters, here’s a link.) So I was happy when I got hold of a copy of Enclave, her third novel. I enjoy science fiction, so the fact that it’s a dystopian genre novel was an extra cause for joyful anticipation.

The book delivered on both fronts – filling the spot in my heart reserved for intelligent speculative fiction, and expanding my acquaintance with Claire G. Coleman’s writing. If you want to read a proper review, I recommend Magdalena Ball at Compulsive Reader (here’s a link), Maggie Nolan on The Conversation (link), Bill Holloway at The Australian Legend (link)or all three.I’ll stick to my resolve of focusing on page 78*. As often happens, this arbitrarily chosen page reveals a lot about the book, and hints at a lot more.

We are at about the one-quarter point of the narrative. Christine is the protagonist, a young white woman from an affluent family living in the walled city of Safetytown. Her father has bought her a new apartment as a reward for her success at university, and on this page her parents are taking her to ‘the homemaker centre’ to buy furniture, along with her younger brother, Brandon.

The building was huge. A great big windowless box, the outside grey-painted steel, as tall as their house. Christine wanted to see if she could see the Wall from the top but could see no way to get up there.
Their car roared underground. The car park was the size of the building, painted a nauseating colour, something between souring cream and pus-green, lit by fluorescent tubes, blue-white, as bright as day. Something about the colour, the cold light, cut into Christine’s brain like a hangover.
She had always hated this place.

The citizens of Safetytown are constantly being told how fortunate they are, how safe. Yet the adjectives here tell a different story: ‘windowless’, ‘grey-painted’, ‘nauseating’, souring’, ‘pus-green’. Even more significant is the ever-present Wall. It’s a powerful image, inevitably reminding us of Trump, Berlin and Israel–Palestine. Christine has always been told that beyond it is nothing but predatory violence, misery and chaos. In the otherwise sharply visual elements of this page, it is present to Christine as an object of curiosity even though it’s out of sight. She is beginning to suspect that she has been lied to: she is clear that she has always hated the homemaker centre, but a deeper discontent is brewing.

The next paragraph goes further into the reasons for her discontent:

Security’s cars could not have been more obvious if they tried. Hatchbacks, sedans and vans, all black. Their windows were tinted; on their bodies, and on their bumpers, were patches of a different texture of black – tinted glass panels hiding cameras.
Around the car park on every pillar, on seemingly arbitrary sections of roof, were conventional video cameras. The cameras were obvious and Christine wondered why she had never noticed that before.
Or had she noticed but forgotten? The thought was slippery; she could not hold on to it.

This first part of the novel is about Christine’s awakening. Here she’s noticing things she has never noticed before, in particular the ominously ubiquitous surveillance and enforcement. Not on this page, but part of the same process, she has noticed that one of the anonymous brown ‘servants’ is extraordinarily beautiful. These uniformed servants, all people of colour, are bussed in each day from beyond the wall and then out again in the evening. They ensure that the citizens don’t have to lift a finger to tend to the necessities of life. No one asks how they live on the other side, and in the early chapters they might as well be invisible, but like the women in the movie Conclave they are very present to the reader. Christine’s attraction to the woman servant is so outside the realm of what is considered possible that, like her ‘slippery’ thought about the cameras, it only fitfully enters her consciousness.

They exited the car, one of the doors slamming with a dull echoing thump; deafening, startling. Father turned to the sound, the anger on his face uncharacteristic; he normally hid it better. When he saw Brandon, staring into his face defiantly, daring him to react, Father smiled indulgently. Christine fumed in silence.

So much of what is to unfold is hinted at here. The benevolent father bestowing a brand new flat and furnishings on his daughter is suddenly enraged: not that he’s usually calm, but that he normally hides his rage. When he sees that it’s his son who has made the noise, he is pacified. It will come as no surprise, a few pages later, when the rage is unleashed against his daughter, while the son remains firmly in favour.

So Safetytown is authoritarian, sexist and – we know from earlier and will soon learn – intensely racist and homophobic. Christine is noticing at least some of it, and fuming.

The overall shape of the narrative is strongly implied on this page. Christine will incur her father’s wrath. Somehow she will find herself on the other side of the wall. Will she finally discover she has been lied to all her life? (Anyone who’s read any dystopian fiction would be astonished if the answer to that was no.) Will she escape or be exiled to the other side of the Wall? (See previous parenthesis.) Will she find a better world out there? (Likewise, you’d be pretty astonished at a no answer.) Will she find happiness with the beautiful brown servant woman, and will that woman have a name? (See previous parenthesis.) Will she play a role in bring Safetytown down? (One would certainly hope so, but that would mean she’d have to make giant strides out of her complacent self-absorption.) Perhaps most importantly for the success of the novel: are there any surprises? (No spoiler alert, but yes.) Does it get preposterous? (Yes – in many ways, but mainly in a delightful sequence that could only have been imagined by someone who lives in Naarm/Melbourne and loves it with a passion.)

Bill Holloway at The Australian Legend enjoyed this book less than Claire G. Coleman’s two previous novels, Terra Nullius (Hachette Australia 2017) and The Old Lie (Hachette Australia 2019). I take that as encouragement to go looking for them.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this country, never ceded.

* It’s my current age.

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Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool at the Book Club

Posted on 28 Apr 2025 | 4 comments

Richard Russo, Everybody’s Fool (Allen & Unwin 2017)

Before the meeting: This is the second book in Richard Russo’s trilogy set in the dead-end town of North Bath in rural New York: it was preceded by Nobody’s Fool (1993) and followed by Somebody’s Fool (2023). I read it as a stand-alone. At about page 80 I went to Wikipedia for a synopsis of Nobody’s Fool, and really I needn’t have. (I also watched a trailer for Robert Benton’s 1994 movie, which was probably a mistake, as the image of Paul Newman as the character Sully was seriously different from the one I’d built up for myself, even allowing for the fact that Sully has aged 20 years since the first book.)

All the same, even for those who haven’t read about the characters’ earlier lives, it’s clear that they are living in various aftermaths. It begins with a burial and returns to the cemetery again and again. One man has been given a year to live, another is stuck in grief for his wife who died in the act of leaving him, a third has been released from jail and proclaims unconvincingly that he has turned over a new leaf. One couple remain affectionate though their affair is long since over, another deal with a long history of mental illness. Friendships endure in spite of mutual irritation, enmities are maintained in spite of deep-seated fellow-feeling. It’s complex, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes wretchedly painful, abounding in situational ironies. There are two violent deaths that we don’t witness, and one shockingly violent scene that we do. There are two villains, three if you count the out-of-town dealer in snakes and drugs. There’s a disgustingly incontinent dog. A couple of characters from the first book make cameo appearances, for no obvious reason apart from letting longterm readers know what they’re up to.

Class is ever-present. Most of the book’s characters know they have been excluded from the good things of life. They’re rough with each other, but there’s also kindness and integrity and a strong sense of belonging. At one point Sully, who has the strongest claim to be the main character, reflects that he has made sure ‘that his destination at the end of the day was a barstool among men who had chosen to be faithful to what they took to be their own natures, when instead they might have been faithful to their families or to convention or even to their own early promise’ (page 448). It’s an attitude that elsewhere might be called quiet despair, but here it includes an assertion of connection.

I enjoyed it a lot. It deals with serious themes, but it’s a lot of fun in all sorts of ways.

On page 78*, nobody is being nice to anyone, but nobody’s going anywhere. The scene is Harriet’s diner, one of the three eating and drinking establishments in the town. The characters are Ruth, owner of Harriet’s; her daughter Janey who has just come in complaining about a scene in her bathroom; Carl, a failing developer whose post-prostate-surgery incontinence (which everyone knows about) is responsibe for the bathroom scene; Roy, Janey’s violent ex-husband, fresh out of jail and claiming to have turned over a new leaf, who has just left; and Sully, one-time lover of Ruth, who now hangs around every day to be generally helpful and has just picked a fight with Roy. Ruth is speaking to Janey:

‘Sorry about the bathroom,’ she said, ‘but Carl had an accident.’ She emphasised the name ever so slightly. Remember? she seemed to be saying. What I told you about Carl?
‘Oh, right.’ Janey shrugged. ‘I guess that makes it okay.’
‘That was my thought,’ Ruth said. ‘I’m glad you agree.’
Janey rolled her eyes to show that she most certainly did not agree but wasn’t going to go to the mat over it, either. ‘Was that my idiot ex-husband’s voice I heard earlier?’ Ruth apparently took this to be a rhetorical question, because she didn’t bother answering. ‘He’s taking that restraining order real serious.’
… ‘He hasn’t caused any trouble so far, or even tried to,’ Ruth said, glancing at Sully. ‘Unlike some people.’
‘That’s the thing about Roy,’ Janey said, putting her now-empty mug into a plastic busing tub. ‘He won’t, until he does. But when he does, it’ll be my jaw that gets broke, like always.’
‘He breaks your jaw because you’re always mouthing off.’
‘No, he breaks it because he enjoys breaking it.’
‘Like you enjoy mouthing off,’ Ruth said as Janey brushed past her.
‘Well, jeez,’ Janey mused, pausing in the doorway to her apartment. ‘Let’s think a minute. Where the fuck do I get that from?’

I could probably have picked any page in the book and found similarly alive dialogue, and a similar complexity of relationships. Notice that Sully doesn’t say a word. Ruth’s glance in his direction comes from a woman you don’t want to cross. Likewise, we know that Janey is right about her ‘idiot ex-husband’, but Ruth isn’t gong to back down meekly. It’s no spoiler to say that Ruth’s attributing Roy’s violence to Janey’s mouthiness is rich with narrative irony: what she says in the heat of mother-daughter irritation is a standard blame-shifting rationale used by perpetrators of family violence. That irony goes deep in the light of events yet to come, but my lips are sealed.

After the meeting: We read this along with Christine Dwyer Hicks’s The Narrow Land (yesterday’s blog post here).

They’re very different books, and though I tried in my post on The Narrow Land to note things they had in common, no one else was much interested in such attempts. I’d say that a couple of us enjoyed this book much more than the other, but others not so much. One got to about 20 percent (this is how Kindle readers talk) and then went no further, another read about four percent. The first, probably being polite to those of us who enjoyed it, said that while she could see that the writing was very good, she had no desire to spend any more time in the depressing world of the novel.

Two of us talked about the human warmth and humour. I fond myself laughing helplessly as I recounted one of the more macabre episodes. Others remained stony-faced. The other person who found the book funny said it was like Carl Hiaasen’s work (‘Without alligators,’ I agreed). She also made a cogent argument for the book’s acknowledgement of class in a way that isn’t common in novels from the USA. Similarly civil but unconvinced response.

When I said I could imagine a movie adaptation directed by the Cohen brothers that seemed to bridge the chasm a little.

As I’m about to hit ‘Publish’, I realise that nowhere in my ‘Before the meeting’ section did I mention the wonderful comedic energy of the writing: the book opens with a bravura description of the North Bar cemetery; the town doesn’t have alligators, but it is terrorised by a king cobra; there are terrible smells; a building collapses like something out of a Buster Keaton movie. All of this seems to have passed most of the other club members by. Maybe you have to have to temporarily suspend solemn empathy as well as disbelief.

The Book Club on the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation, overlooking the ocean. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land as rain poured down. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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The Book Club at Christine Dwyer Hickey’s Narrow Land

Posted on 27 Apr 2025 | 10 comments

Christine Dwyer Hickey, The Narrow Land (Atlantic 2019)

The cover of The Narrow Land features Edward Hopper’s painting Sea Watchers (1952). The back cover tells us the book is about a ten-year-old boy who forms an unlikely friendship with ‘the artists Jo and Edward Hopper’. But nowhere in the narrative itself are we told the names of the two artists, even though many of the man’s paintings are lovingly described and even a reader as ignorant about US art as I am could recognise some of them (admittedly with help from Duck Duck Go) as Hoppers. Nor is there an afterword or acknowledgement to clarify the story’s relationship to historical fact.

I don’t know what to make of that, since it looks as if a significant dimension of the book is a fictional depiction of Hopper’s practice and the Hopper marriage. In particular, to judge from Josephine Hopper’s Wikipedia entry, it’s likely that the narrative draws on her copious journals recording her bitterness and their stormy quarrels. The character’s journals are mentioned, but Josephine Hopper’s are not.

The Hoppers-not-Hoppers, she in her sixties and he quite a bit older, have a terrible relationship. They are at their Cape Cod house for the summer in the early 1950s. He is stuck, searching for inspiration. She lives in his shadow, resents his failure to support her work, nags at him to get on with his own, is hyper-alert to possibilities that he will be attracted to other women, and relentlessly picks fights with him. He is relentless right back at her. They’re not people you want to be around.

Ten-year-old Michael comes into their lives. He is a German war orphan, possibly Jewish, brought to the US and adopted by a working-class couple in New York, spending the summer with a benefactor who is the artists’ neighbour.

Relationships develop among these characters, including Michael’s complex host family. The narrow land of the title refers literally to Cape Cod, as in this map. It also refers, I think, to the narrowness of a non-combatant USer’s world-view: Michael’s hosts are unable to imagine the magnitude of what he has endured (which he experiences now as nightmarish flashes of memory). The narrowness is also there in the constrictions that society places on the artist, and the claustrophobia that ‘Mrs Aitch’ rails against in her marriage. Perhaps it refers also to the limits imposed on people’s lives in the wake of the Second World War – partners, parents and siblings are still being mourned, and returned soldiers wander through the narrative like wraiths.

For the most part, this isn’t a pleasant read. I found Mrs Aitch especially painful – like Pansy in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, her bitterness is unremitting, but she lacks Pansy’s biting wit. Unlike Pansy though, she finds temporary relief in connection with children – Michael and his obnoxious host Richie – where we get to see her in a more positive light. Also unlike Pansy, she has a moment when her intolerant discontent saves the day.

Having just described Richie as obnoxious, I feel obliged to say that even though almost all of the characters are unlikeable, most of them have moments when we see an underlying pain. We come to see Richie in particular as tragic.

Page 78* turns out to be a good example of my pervasive frustration. It’s near the start of the novel’s second section, titled ‘Venus’, in which we realise that ‘he’ – Hopper-not-Hopper – is searching for a woman he glimpsed the previous summer, as he feels that she will inspire him now. (Spoilerish note: he does find her, but it doesn’t work.) On this page he remembers the day that he found her:

She was standing in the doorway of a house, a man standing on the threshold, maybe leaving or maybe hoping to get inside.
He’d driven by and pulled in further along the street. Then he walked back past the house. There had been a bush by the gate, tangled and dried up from the heat, a lawn, yellowed by neglect and the ravages of a long summer.

There’s a description of her clothes and a snippet of overheard conversation, then:

He had walked on for a couple of minutes. then crossed the road to return on the opposite side, his head tilted as if he were searching for the number of a door. As he came closer to the house, he saw her lift her hands and put them under her hair, which was a whiter shade of blonde. Then she flipped it all up, holding it for a few seconds to the back of her head. He could see the damp patches of sweat stamped into her armpits and the outline of her long neck, the soft curve where it joined her shoulders. She dropped her hair and her face lifted upwards. The blue blouse. The light on her face. He couldn’t figure out if it was pouring into her or pouring out of her. He thought she looked sanctified. Then he thought she looked the opposite.

He rushes home and drags out his easel:

He laid it down: the street, the house, the figure of the girl in the doorway, the figure of the man alongside it with one foot on the step, the lawn, the gate, the tangled bush.

This is emphatically an account of a particular artist’s creative process. It’s as if the novelist sets out to imagine for us how Edward Hopper created one of his paintings, but then – for legal reasons, perhaps, or from simple respect for the unknowability of the real man – pulls back from acknowledging that that’s what she’s doing. The understated eroticism here plays nicely into the portrait of the artist’s marriage: his wife (never named) realises that she is not the model for the woman in the painting, and is furious.

On the way to the meeting: We read The Narrow Land along with Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool. Just before the meeting I’m noting some things the books have in common:

  • they both have dogs that make a mess of cars – the disgustingly incontinent Rub in Everybody’s Fool, and Buster in this book who leaves a car ‘looking like a feathered nest’
  • characters read books: Sully in Everybody’s Fool remembers as a boy reading the beginning of a book we recognise as David Copperfield (Dickens), and discarding it; Michael in this book reads The Red Pony (Steinbeck) and Tom Sawyer (Twain) and takes them in his stride
  • Class looms large: when Michael’s working-class foster parents turn up we suddenly feel grounded in honest relationships; when Sully’s son turns up in the other book, we’re away with the abstractions of middle-class life.

After the meeting: The books had to compete with the pope’s funeral on the TV, but we still had an interesting conversation.

I think we were all a bit perplexed by A Narrow Land – not quite sure where its focus is. The person who had first proposed it, an artist herself, kicked the conversation off by saying that she was disappointed the book had so little to say about Hopper’s process, and in a way we circled around that central absence for the rest of our conversation.

One other person shared my unease about the relationship between the fictional characters and the historical persons. Others had no problem with it, and I still find it hard to say precisely what my problem is. Our host produced a hefty volume of Hopper’s work and we tried to pin down the paintings he works on in the book. No one claimed to have enjoyed the book unreservedly, though I think we all found some joy, or at least pleasure, in it. No one was much interested in trying to compare the two books.

We met on the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation, overlooking the ocean. I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia.

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George Megalogenis’ Minority Report

Posted on 22 Apr 2025 | Leave a comment

George Megalogenis, Minority Report: The new shape of Australian politics (Quarterly Essay 96, December 2024)

George Megalogenis takes Australia’s federal polling statistics and renders them into readable, even enjoyable prose. In this Quarterly Essay, he reads the data from elections since John Howard’s time up to the present moment, and attempts to make sense of the current political landscape.

The global financial crisis, the coming of the teals, Covid, the defeat of the Voice referendum, the genocide in Gaza, housing, the climate emergency, the hollowing out of the ABC: all are grist to the mill of this nuanced inside-baseball analysis.

The essay and the correspondence in Quarterly Essay 97 probably make a significant contribution to our general understanding of Australian electoral politics. But as I was reading it, I couldn’t help but be aware that it was written at the end of 2024, and if a week is a long time in politics, then the four months that have passed between then and now amount to an epoch. Even the correspondence was written before Donald J. Trump’s ‘Independence Day’. Who knows if, as Megalogenis projects, there will be a hung parliament in May? And if there is, who knows if he is right that it ‘offers perhaps our last best chance to restore purpose to our politics – and policymaking’?

Still, I admire and enjoy Magalogenis’ ability to communicate complex matter in a readable way. Page 47, which begins a section on the level of trust in government, includes an example:

In the wake of the 2010 federal election, I pinpointed the 2001 campaign as the turning point to a more trivial politics.
John Howard responded to warnings of electoral doom with a panic of handouts in the first half of that year. …
None of the bribes offered to voters in this period came with offsetting savings for the budget. They left a maze of entitlements and distorted market signals which stored up problems for the future, most notably in the housing sector, where prices boomed beyond the reach of the middle class, and in public infrastructure, which could not keep up with population growth.
Labor’s unforced policy errors on climate change and the mining tax in 2010 felt like the culmination of a decade-long trend which reduced the relationship between government and citizen to the question: how can I buy your support?

That general trend to trivialisation was interrupted first by the global financial crisis which, Megalogenis argues, created ‘a bubble of trust in our leaders and institutions, which burst once the existential threat passed’, triggering what he calls a ‘new super-cycle in our politics – pro-incumbent in the crisis and anti-incumbent in the recovery’.

There’s pleasure in discerning patterns of this sort. There may also be some usefulness.

In the correspondence, the stand-out for me is Judith Brett. She observes that the major political parties have been hollowed out, as their membership has declined and they have become ‘professional electoral machines’. When memberships were much larger, debate, negotiation and compromise took place within the parties. These debates connected with the lived experience, interests and prejudice of a range of electors. And when the legislation reached the parliament it was assured safe passage by the government’s majority:

What is happening, I think, is that the debate, negotiation and consensus-building is shifting from inside the parties back to the parliament, where they were for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries … The conflicts of interest will be more publicly visible than they are when the resolution takes place inside the parties. This will be a magnet for media speculation and give the impression of dysfunction, but in my opinion it is no cause for alarm. The public will have a clearer view of the interests and arguments at play, and the government will have to negotiate. But it does not mean the end of effective legislation.

We’ll see.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where the day started out with rich blue sky, turned to heavy rain, fined up, and as I press ‘Publish’ is beginning to rain once more.. I acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this land for millennia.

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Jennifer Maiden’s WWIII: New Poems

Posted on 8 Apr 2025 | Leave a comment

Jennifer Maiden, WW III: New Poems (Quemar Press 2025)

You don’t go to Jennifer Maiden’s poetry for a comfort read. For almost a decade now she has announced the title and theme of a forthcoming book early each year, and uploaded sample poems as they were written over the following months, generally relating to violence, political hypocrisy, and villainy from the headlines. The book has appeared, as promised, early the next January. It’s as if a fragmentary epic poem of our times is unfolding in real time.

WW III: New Poems is the latest instalment. As the title suggests, violent conflict, especially in the Ukraine and Gaza, features prominently, behind it the looming threat of global war. For a proper review, I recommend Geoff Page in the ABR at this link. This blog post isn’t so much a review as a disjointed reflection on just page 47*.

Before going there, a personal note. My blog post about Maiden’s previous book – The China Shelf: New Poems (Quemar Press 2024) – focused on the poem, ‘It’s an odd thing, pity’, and included this:

Not everyone will grasp how US imperialism can be seen as ‘falling’. If anything, some would say it’s on the verge of exploding and bringing the rest of us down with it, terrifying rather than poignant. 

The title poem of WW III includes this:

Reviewing The China Shelf, a kind critic worried
that my reference to the falling Empire could 
lessen the idea that it wasn't just falling
but exploding, and possibly dragging 
its allies hellward with it, but he was only
considering one poem and of course the book 
and others before it always took
often a stance of sharper warning

I may have got it wrong, but at least I’m kind, and as a humble blogger I’m flattered to be called a critic.

Page 47 of WW III is the first 19 lines of ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer woke up in the Australian Ambassador’s residence in Washington’.

This page sets the scene for a much longer poem. The ‘serious conversation’, foreshadowed in the second-last line, could be summarised as, ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer tells Kevin Rudd that it’s not wise to set Australia up to be the US’s proxy in a future war with China.’ The poem could be summarised abstractly: ‘With Dietrich Bonhoeffer as mouthpiece, Jennifer Maiden repeats her warning that the USA is not to be trusted as an ally to Australia.’ Luckily, as with any poem worth its salt, that summary tells you almost nothing and is pretty misleading. You can buy the book to read the whole poem, or you can hear Jennifer Maiden performing it at this link.

The poem belongs to Maiden’s personal tradition of poems where a famous person, historical or fictional, ‘wakes up’ to interact with a living person. In 2009 her fictional character George Jeffreys woke up in a number of global hotspots to see George W Bush on television. Kevin Rudd is one of a number of Australian politicians who have figured since then in delicious conversations: Tony Abbott with Queen Victoria, Julia Gillard with Aneurin Bevan, Malcolm Turnbull with Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote, Tanya Plibersek with Jane Austen. (Beyond these shores, pairings have included Mother Teresa and Diana Spencer, Gore Vidal and Julian Assange, Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton.) Usually the pairings are based on something the politician has said or written. In Kevin Rudd’s 2006 essay, ‘Faith in Politics’, published in The Monthly (link here, if you want to refresh your memory), he named Bonhoeffer as an inspiration. The pair made their maiden Maiden appearance in Drones and Phantoms (2014).

It’s interesting to notice just how much information is either given or assumed in these lines. It wouldn’t be a crime to read without googling. As Magdalena Ball said in her review of The China Shelf (link here), ‘You don’t have to have the kind of encyclopaedic knowledge of Australian history and command of current affairs that Jennifer Maiden does to read her books.’ But it helps, and there’s always the invitation to learn more.

First, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I’ve vaguely heard of him as a pastor who spoke out against the Nazis and was murdered by them. So I know he brings a kind of moral integrity to the conversation. The poem give me a little more: 

Dietrich had been in New York in the 1930s at a seminary, where
he had already witnessed the intolerance of one Empire, before
he returned home to the murders of another.

I might not have gone googling if I wasn’t blogging about the poem, but I did, and found that while studying theology in New York in 1930, Bonhoeffer engaged with African-American churches, and became strongly anti-racist. I don’t know that he used the term ‘empire’ about either the USA or Nazi Germany, but it wouldn’t be a poem without that kind of editorialising.

Second, Kevin Rudd. You’d probably know that he was the Australian Ambassador to the USA, but for those who know him there’s a deft evocation of his persona: ‘profound, bouncy, possibly tragic’. (Further on in the conversation, Kevin asks a question ‘and answered himself, as was his custom’.)

Third, the setting. Here’s a pic from the building’s facebook page – ‘the prettiest of places’. Who knew it was associated with the notoriously belligerent US general George Patton? (For readers of my generation no explanation needed: George C Scott in the movie Patton leaps to mind.) According to my googling, Patton rented the house rather than built it, but the association is still there.

DJ Kity Glitter with Rudd. Photo from Sydney Morning Herald 5 June 2023

Fourth, the headlines. Kevin Rudd did host a party featuring drag queens at the ambassador’s residence in June 2023. As far as I can tell, the tennis party was a different occasion, but who’s to say there wasn’t tennis at the Pride party as well? The fabulous image of drag queens playing tennis is an example of a news items seized on for poetic purposes, in this case with what looks like glee.

Given recent events in the USA, the mention of drag queens suggests that the poem will be about culture wars. But it’s actually a piece of misdirection. Over the page, the poem’s real subject is revealed, when Kevin asks:

____________________________________ But I suppose
really you are here about the police force?

And the poem’s key news item is identified: a hot-mic moment in August 2024 in which a US official, talking to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese,

_________________________ named Rudd as the schemer 
who dissuaded America from proposing their own police 
force in the Pacific in favour of one organised and paid for 
by Australia.

All this information, of course, doesn’t lie inert on the page, but is woven into engaging poetry. For instance, one of Maiden’s themes is the way the US, behind its benign façade, is a ruthless military power. The residence, with its link to Patton, could have been built to her specifications. The prettiness and cosiness of the residence is haunted by bold military maneuvers (note the US spelling), yet the sensuous reality is also there:

still for a moment and for a moment doubtful. They were in 
soft chairs plump enough for a cottage or a sitcom, in a room 
too large not to let time enter, but intimate enough for their 
serious conversation.

We are given enough of Kevin and Dietrich’s histories and personal quirks for them to be more than simply avatars for positions or points of view (like, say, the characters in Plato’s dialogues). On the other hand, neither on the page nor when performing the poem, does Maiden make any attempt to give them different voices. (Maiden-Trump has none of real-life-Trump’s incoherence.) They are not fully-rounded dramatic characters (it’s not a sitcom) but they have enough independent reality that you feel the poet herself is curious to hear what they have to say in their ‘serious conversation’. I think that’s why this long run of imaginary conversations doesn’t feel tired or repetitive – they are still part of a process of discovery. (There’s an underlying question that this poem goes on to address: What are we to make of Kevin Rudd’s current incarnation as Ambassador? What’s happened to his irritability, his love of China, his social awkwardness, any bitterness about being ousted by Julia Gillard? It doesn’t address Trump’s hostility to him … that would be a different poem.)

It’s easy to be caught up in Maiden’s subject matter. Her poems can be contentious – over the page, Kevin says, as if it’s plain fact, ‘the Americans replaced me with Gillard’, and even on this page there may be an implied equivalence between Nazi Germany and 1930s USA. (If ever there was a poet who didn’t expect her readers to agree with her sentiments a hundred percent, it is Jennifer Maiden.) But this is poetry, and what is said isn’t necessarily more important than the way it is said.

Weaving isn’t a bad metaphor for how these lines progress. The reader’s attention moves back and forth like the shuttle on a loom: the residence with and without snow, General Patton then and now, corners and mirrors, military manoeuvres and drag queens, Kevin’s contrasting qualities, a room large but intimate, the shift from drag queens to the Pacific police force. Maybe it’s not so much a shuttle as a tennis ball. ‘Click. Clock.’

The way the poem sounds is interesting. Some of Maiden’s poems have sustained rhymes that you barely notice on first reading. That’s not so in this one, but especially in the opening lines there’s a lot of alliteration, especially of sibilants (‘prettiest of places’, ‘still manifested, / like ghosts in corners’, ‘every possible strategy and some that should not’). The long lines often break in mid sentence, even mid phrase (‘his friend / Kevin’, ‘should not / really have been’, ‘where / he had already witnessed’, ‘before / he returned’, ‘they were in / soft chairs’, ‘their / serious conversation’). To my ear, these result in a kind of clutter, a feature rather than a bug, that adds an odd urgency to the voice, an urgency that’s all too fitting in poems that predict war.

Since WW III: New Poems was published, Dietrich and Kevin have had a further conversation in the Residence. Click on this link to the Quemar Press website and search for “Rare Earths”.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this country, never ceded.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 78. As WW III: New Poems only has 76 pages, I’m reverting to the year of my birth, ’47.

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Journal Catch-up 29: Overland Nº255

Posted on 30 Mar 2025 | Leave a comment

Evelyn Araluen and Jonathan Dunk (editors), Overland Nº 255 (Winter 2024)
(Links are to the online versions unless otherwise indicated.)

I sometime approach literary journals as if shouldering a grim obligation – doing my bit in the cultural ecology. (Added later: The morning after I uploaded this post, I read in a letter from Esther Anatolitis, editor of Meanjin, that my subscription ‘supports the ecosystem of Australian writing: that fragile yet incredibly powerful space where the finest new work is written’. Great minds draw on the same tropes.) The austere retro design of this Overland, one of four to mark a 70th anniversary, didn’t do much to dispel the grimness. Nor did the editorial, which underlines the darkness of our times. But then …

The first thirty pages or so are taken up with ‘Writing from the South: an interview with Kim Scott’. It’s leisurely, full of unfinished sentences and swirling crosscurrents of thought and information – there’s no apparent attempt to tidy up the spoken conversation, and as a result you (or at least I) get to feel you’re in the room with the the living, breathing, thinking author of, among other things, That Deadman Dance, Taboo (links to my blog posts) and (what I haven’t read but now really want to) Benang. He’s in conversation with Samuel J. Cox.

I’ll mention two other non-fiction pieces: ‘The Australian media’s problem with Palestine’ by Juliet Fox, which tells about decades of government suppression of Palestinian voices on a Melbourne community radio station; and ‘“Arts funding is fucked”: Overland 1973–1975’, a plus-ça-change piece by Overland‘s digital archivist Sam Ryan about the politics of funding to the arts in Australia 50-odd years ago.

As always, there’s poetry, ranging in this issue from probably-very-good-if-you’re-motivated-to-spend-a-lot-of-time-with-it-but-today-I’m-not to a beautifully executed punch to the guts. The latter is ‘The Killer in Me’ by Ann-Marie Blanchard, in which the speaker personifies her uterus after a miscarriage. Somewhere between the two extremes is the dauntingly titled ‘Poem in asymmetric transparency’ by Shari Kocher, a meditation on a Margaret Preston painting:

Three lotus lookalikes floating in solar darkness.

As it happens, page 78* occurs in the piece of fiction that speaks most to me, Jordan Smith’s ‘Something Is Rotten’, in which a technological solution to the climate emergency goes terribly wrong, seen from the point of view of young lawyers who thought their normal work was high-pressure. At page 78, the catastrophe is beginning to unfold, though the characters stay with their usual preoccupations. Paul, one of the barristers, looks out of his high-rise window at the ‘sat-drones’ doing hi-tech stuff to the upper atmosphere:

‘Fuck knows what they’re doing but it does look good.’ The sat-drones twinkled as, one by one, they flew up then plunged down, like waves running up and down a skipping rope. The colour of each oscillated between a crystal blue and a sharp, metallic crimson. Rob felt a bit dizzy. He and Sarine looked at each other.

As required by a tight deadline, Rob puts the dizziness aside, takes ‘a few painkillers’ and gets back to work.

His phone buzzed incessantly.

Sydney 6G
Friday, 6 June 11:43
Notification centre
News alert:
PM urges calm after atmospheric pressure dr… (10+)

Rob cleared notifications and switched on do not disturb.

The reader feel the disaster happening while the character sticks to the his mundane urgencies. It’s deft storytelling. Like the poems I’ve mentioned it’s marked as ‘Online soon’ on the Overland website, and may be available by the time you read this.

I don’t usually google authors, but I did look up Jordan Smith. He’s a barrister who has an Honours degree in nuclear physics, so I guess he knows what he’s taking about on both sides of the equation.

I haven’t exactly dispelled the notion of grimness I invoked in my first sentence – colonisation, genocide, miscarriage, climate catastrophe aren’t cheery subjects. But taken along with the evocative decorations from past issues (Richard Tipping in the 1970s, Rod Shaw and John Copeland in the 1990s) there’s something exhilarating about the way Overland has survived so much change in the world and in itself, still giving a platform to new voices, still saying things that aren’t easy to hear elsewhere.

I wrote this blog post on the land of the Wangal and Gadigal clans of the Eora nation. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and lived through extraordinary changes in the land and climate over that time.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age. This is first time I’ve looked at page 78.

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Journal Catch-up 28: Meanjin Spring 2024

Posted on 28 Feb 2025 | 1 comment

Esther Anatolitis (ediitor), Meanjin Vol 83 Nº 3 (Spring 2024)
(links are to the Meanjin website: some but not all of them are available to non-subscribers)

This Meanjin was published before King Charles visited Australia last year. This means Jenny Hocking’s blistering essay, ‘Remnants of Empire: Racism, Power and Royal Privilege‘, appeared well before Lidia Thorpe’s headline-grabbing outburst. The article, which amply fulfils the promise of its title, made me feel much more sympathy for the outburst.

There’s a lot else in this issue to delight and enlighten. Some pieces that I think of as necessary. Apart from Jenny Hocking’s, three that stand out are:

  • ‘Well, It’s Beautiful Country, Really –‘ by Mike Ross. Each issue of Meanjin these days begins with a ‘Meanjin Paper’ – an essay by a First Nations person. In this one Mike Ross, an Olkola man who has been at the vanguard of land rights for the people of Cape York for three decades, talks about finding meaning in Country, about constantly learning
  • ‘Lucky for Some‘ by Frank Bongiorno on the 60th anniversary of publication of Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country, which I read in tandem with Nick Bryant’s recent piece on the same subject in the Guardian
  • ‘Jews, Antisemitism and Power in Australia‘ by Max Kaiser, which parses the way accusations of antisemitism have been used to silence important points of view. This article may have been published six months ago, but it feels hyper-relevant today as actual vicious antisemitism and and dubious accusations of antisemitism are ramping up.

There are pirces that may not be necessary, but they’re fun and educative all the same:

  • an interview with poet Ellen van Neerven (which I enjoyed even though it focuses on a book of theirs I haven’t read)
  • a scathing annotation of the Australian Constitution from First Nations writer Claire G. Coleman

There is some excellent fiction, including these two:

  • ‘The Feeling Bones‘ by Lucy Nelson, which tells a family’s story in terms of their bone ailments; and incidentally informs me that ‘sits bones’, a term for the backside I had only heard used by my Pilates instructor, actually comes from the world of dance.
  • ‘The Other Doctor‘, in which James Salvius Cheng finds a way to talk about the exhausting business of being a medical practitioner without coming across as a whinger.

A trio of memoirs call out to each other about disability, religion and sexuality:

  • Love Is Worship by Adrian Mouhajer, about finding peace in a Muslim family as a queer person
  • Dirty Things, Precious Things by Anna Hickey-Moody, about Catholicism, disability, family violence
  • Crocodile by Ella Ferris, brilliant, complex piece of writing which includes experiences of Aboriginality and disability

There are some excellent poems. The ones I warm to most (not necessarily the ‘best’) are:

  • ‘Mothertongues’ by Grace Chan, which begins ‘My son is starting to speak / in English’ and later, as she tries to teach him some Chinese, ‘our tongues stumble / in synchrony’
  • ‘The Women’s Shelter’, a rhyming sonnet by Claire Watson, in which a woman creates a knotted rag rug from strips of old bedsheets

There are things that aren’t my cup of tea: a smart-alecky essay on satire, an incomprehensible poem, some ‘experiments’, a review or two that convinced me not to read the books under consideration. But I can imagine each of those finding readers who will delight in them

I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging, and gratefully acknowledge their care for this land for millennia, as once agin the sun is rising later in the mornings, and spiders are making their presence known in the bushes.

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Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

Posted on 27 Feb 2025 | Leave a comment

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (©2006, Vintage 2022)

A Lesbian friend of mine was surprised, even shocked, when I told her I hadn’t read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. I got the impression that she revised her opinion of my literacy on the spot.

Well, now I’ve read it and can hold my head high again.

Alison Bechdel is probably best known for the Bechdel test, which serves as a rough guide to a movie’s level of misogyny or otherwise: does it have more than one named female character? do they have a conversation about something other than a man? According to Wikipedia, Bechdel modestly attributes the invention of the test to a friend and ultimately to Virginia Woolf. But it still bears her name.

She is also celebrated as a creator of comics, in particular her long-running series Dykes to Watch Out for. The strip ran for 25 years, from 1983 to 2008, with a brief revival on Trump’s first election. Fun Home, published in 2006, brought her a wider readership. The book was a New York Times bestseller. It has been adapted into an audio-book and an award-winning stage musical, with a movie reportedly on the way. It has been included on college reading lists and Wikipedia currently lists eight attempts at having it banned in the USA. When I bought my copy the shop assistant enthused that she had studied it at university, but then read it again later for pleasure.

It’s a memoir. At first, it seems like a familiar tale of living with a tyrannical father who is emotionally distant and given to violent rages. But it develops into something much more complex and interesting. Towards the end of the first chapter, Alison and her brother are at Sunday Mass with their parents, and a caption reads: ‘He appeared to be an ideal husband and father.’ This is an ordinary observation about middle class families putting on a front for public display, but then there’s a second caption: ‘But would an ideal husband and father have sex with teenage boys?’ And that question hangs there unexplained for many pages, as the narrative takes us back to the family’s early life, the father’s part-time work as a mortician (which is where the book’s title comes from – it was the Bechdel children’s nickname for the undertaker’s business), and Alison’s own portrait of the artist as a young woman.

So the narrative moves back and forth, entwining the narrator’s own story as a nerdy young person with OCD who comes out as a Lesbian, with the unfolding story of her father’s sexuality, and the way it all plays out in the family. Key moments are hinted at, passed over as offstage events, and then revisited in detail much later, so that there’s a constant sense of something not yet revealed.

It’s a bookish family, and a bookish book, shot though with literary references. The story of Daedalus and Icarus forms a major thread, beginning with a father-and-daughter game of ‘airplane’ as seen on the cover – ‘In the circus acrobatics where one person lies on the floor balancing another are called ‘Icarian games’.– and leading in the final pages to a revisionist interpretation of the myth, applied to this story. Camus gets a look-in, and so do Proust, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, J. D. Salinger, A Chorus Line, Henry James, Shakespeare of course, and more – none of them incidental to the plot.

Page 77* may give you an idea of the art and the narrative style. Alison is nineteen, at college, and has just realised she is a Lesbian. The realisation has come about ‘in a manner consistent with [her] bookish upbringing. A revelation not of the flesh, but of the mind.’ There are a couple of pages that could be used as a reading list for a young person making a similar realisation; she attends a meeting of a Gay Union ‘in petrified silence’, and in the resulting exhilaration decides to come out to her parents:

If you enlarge this image you see how beautifully words and images are integrated. The captions offer a commentary on the action: ‘We were that sort of family,’ ‘He seemed strangely pleased,’ ‘I was devastated’. The page is a good example of Bechdel’s skill with dialogue: the father’s words on the phone convey his awkwardness quite independently of the caption’s commentary. The images are more than illustration – the technical term for this kind of story telling is ‘sequential art’, a different beast from ‘illustrated story’. We see how 19-year-old Alison lives: her clothes, the music she listens to, that she has to go to a post office box to receive mail, that her coming-out letter is typed, and composed with the assistance of a thesaurus. As often in this book, the images themselves include text: not just the names of books and records, but a glimpse of the mother’s letter, implying a documentary dimension to the narrative.

On the next page, there’s a fine example of the way the story is given to us bit by bit, layer by layer. We see Alison’s diary entry about her mother’s letter, which quotes part of the letter we are not shown here, hinting at the revelations yet to come about the father’s sexuality.

Like Art Spigelman’s Maus, Joe Sacco’s Palestine or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, this is a comic that people who don’t read comics would do well to spend a little time with. It might not make comic-readers out of them, but it may give them the same kind of pleasure as a good movie or novel.

I wrote this blog post on land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation, where a flock of corellas, which I think are visiting from inland country, have been making a lot of noise. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and to any First Nations readers of this blog.

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

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The Book Club, Alan Hollinghurst and Our Evenings

Posted on 23 Feb 2025 | 9 comments

Alan Hollinghurst, Our Evenings (Picador 2024)

Before the meeting: About five decades ago I had to write an Eng Lit essay on Gerard Manly Hopkins’s sonnet ‘Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves’. It’s a poem that cries out to be read aloud, and on a weekend away at a beach house with friends, I found an out-of-the-way spot where I could perform the poem over and over for my own ears. It turned out that my secluded corner was actually an amplifying booth, and my sonorous renditions were heard by everyone in the house. Someone finally came and pleaded with me to stop. Embarrassment aside, I still love the poem.

So I took it as a personal gift to me when the poem is being recited, unannounced and unexplained, at the start of Chapter 15 of Our Evenings:

‘Earnest,’ I said, ‘earthless … equal … attuneable …’ Stella peered at me, tongue on lip, daring me.
‘… vaulty …’ she said.
… vaulty, voluminous … stupendous Evening strains to be time’s vast –’ (now we chanted it together) ‘womb-of-all – home-of-all – hearse-of-all NIGHT!’
‘I bet you can’t go on.’

If I hadn’t been loving the book before then, I would have been hooked.

As it happens, I was enjoying the book. The hero-narrator David Win, son of an English mother and a Burmese father he has never known, was given a scholarship to attend a prestigious boarding school, and at the start of Chapter 15 he’s studying at Oxford. The novel traces his development into a successful actor, his crushes, affairs and finally marriage with men, and his arrival at a reasonably contented late middle age (as we in our late 70s refer to the 60s).

The phrase that gives the novel its title occurs when David is in his last year at the boarding school. He is taken under the wing of Mr Hudson, his English teacher. They listen to classical music together late in the evening. These quiet times have an intimate, erotic charge, but though other boys leap to crude conclusions, ‘nothing ever “happened”, as they say’. Among the pieces they listen to is the first movement of Janáček’s ‘On an Overgrown Path’, which has its own title, ‘Our Evenings’. (You can hear it played by Rudolf Firkusny in 1986 at this link.)

The piece seemed simple and songlike, but the modulations in it made you wonder, and an agitated figure broke in higher up and then, like the scratch on the record, disappeared and left you with the song in a further change of mood, which didn’t quite replace the first one but seemed to cast the shadow of experience over it – what, I couldn’t say, but I felt it. I had no idea what we were listening to or how long it was going on – there was a very quiet passage when the agitated figure came back, but subdued and dreamlike, a trance of sadness and beauty, and soon after that the piece ended without any fuss. I glanced at Mr Hudson, but he was staring at the fire too, and then he jumped up and said, ‘Shall we hear it again?’

Apart from being an instance of the way other works – plays, poems, pieces of music – move the narrative along, this passage is a nice example of the way David as narrator shows rather than tells. ‘I couldn’t say, but I felt it.’ He never says in so many words that he has a crush on Mr Hudson, or that he believes it to be reciprocated, but in little moments like this – in Mr Hudson jumping up and suggesting a replay – readers can draw their own conclusions.

The description of Janáček’s music could be applied to the novel itself: ‘subdued and dreamlike, a trance of sadness and beauty’ occasionally interrupted by an ‘agitated figure’. The prose is elegant and unruffled, and most of the terrible things that happen – AIDS, Brexit, Covid – are offstage. David as boy, adolescent and man is unfailingly polite and helpful – we are usually left to imagine what feelings he is covering up, even perhaps from himself. He regularly encounters ‘agitated figures’ in the form of racism, but mostly it’s of the raised eyebrow or muttered phrase, micro-aggressive variety. An African-heritage lover says, ‘You’re not even Black!’ Likewise the homophobia he encounters is subtle – when he comes out to his mother and her female friend, their response is more or less, ‘Well, that’s been obvious for a long time!’ Class plays a role –  David’s patrons, whom he loves to the end – are like Proust’s aristocrats in their unfailing graciousness and generosity, and the sense that nothing really touches them. The mystery of his father remains a mystery, though late in life he receives some vague information. As in real life, many mysteries remain mysterious.

I suppose sex itself might count as an ‘agitated figure’. There’s quite a lot of it but, though it’s not coy, very little is explicit. I remember only two moments when sexual body parts are named, one involving a kind rejection, the other the beginning of a solid relationship. Neither is the slightest bit prurient.

The last 10 pages depart from the mainly ‘subdued and dreamlike’ narrative in a way that came as a surprise to me, and casts a brilliant light back over the preceding pages.

After the meeting: At the Book Club, we usually have two books under discussion at each meeting. This time, there was just the one, but everyone had to report on the book they’d scored in our Kris Kringle at last meeting. So our discussion, which followed and preceded convivial conversation about other things, began with enticing rundowns of books by Bernhard Schlink, Jock Serong, Robbie Arnott and Niamh Mulvey, and an unenticing rundown of one other.

Of Our Evenings, we had a very interesting discussion. I probably liked the book most, but no one hated it. The only strong difference was about the last ten pages, which I felt gave shape and significance to the whole thing and most others experienced as a lame and unnecessary framing device. It would be too spoilerish to present the arguments here. I’ll just state the obvious: they’re entitled to their opinions, but they’re wrong.

One person had an interesting take on the title. It captured the way the book, for her, is like a series of conversations you might have in a quiet evening at home: meandering, pleasant, amiable recollections and reflections, without drama or much significance. (If that’s so, I hope I said at the time, there’s always an awareness of terrible things happening in the outside world, of which many of the tiny things that come up in those conversations are micro-effects.)

David Win as narrator and hero provoked interesting conversation, which I’ll try to summarise. He is an outsider because of racism, class and sexuality, not necessarily in that order. As an outsider, his main way of being in the world is to aim to fill other people’s expectations – to act out the scripts he is given. It’s not insignificant that he’s an actor. He rarely takes the initiative, and there’s a way he doesn’t seem to know who he is. Not just as narrator, but also as character, he doesn’t have access to his own inner life. The narrative restraint about sex, which is not so in Hollinghurst’s other books that people had read, may be part of this. I read out the only passage in the book that mentions hard-ons, and people laughed (but not at all derisively). It’s as if in this book explicit sex is a relief from always having to decode what is being communicated in tight-lipped upper-class British dialogue (see Mr Hudson’s ‘Shall we hear it again?’ above).

We discussed other characters that I didn’t mention in the first part of this blog, especially a Boris Johnsonesque blustering bully, .

Less centrally, some took an almost anthropological interest in the portrayal of Gay male relationships – and it’s true that Hollinghurst gives meticulous detail on how people make their desires known. One person felt that (minor spoiler alert) having the David’s mother become a Lesbian was just laying on the Gayness too thick. Another, on the contrary, was impressed and delighted by the nuanced portrayal of middle-class, middle-aged, post-heterosexual-marriage Lesbianism.

We didn’t discuss the Hopkins poem, the Janáček music, or the plays – notably by Racine and Ben Jonson – that turn up in the narration.

Mint-flavoured Turkish delight was on offer. Only two of us tried it. I was the only one to finish my piece. I don’t recommend it. I do recommend the book.

Our Book Club met on unceded land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge the Elders past and present. I hope that our conversation was in some way in continuity with yarns that have been happening on this land for tens of thousands of years.

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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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