Category Archives: Books

LoSoRhyMo #6: Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall

Posted on 10 November 2011 | Leave a comment

Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010)

The Book Club (the one where we swap books and keep discussion of them to a minimum) has introduced me to many writers and kinds of writing that I wouldn’t have sought out otherwise. Thanks to it I’ve read excellent books I might have prejudged as boring (an engrossing biography of a World Bank CEO comes to mind). But there have also been books the lender thought were brilliant that stank in my nostrils. By page 34, I was thinking By Nightfall might be about to join Philip Roth’s The Humbling as one of my stinkers (though nowhere near as pungent as that). Two characters’ visit to the Metropolitan Museum on page 34 came close to tipping the balance:

… Peter and Bette walk together through the Great Hall at the Met, grand somnolent portal into the civilized world. Why deny its satisfactions – its elephantine poise, its capacity to excite the very molecules of its own air with a sense of reverent occasion and queenly glamour and the centuries-long looting of five continents. The Hall receives with a vast patience. It’s the mother who’ll never die, and right up front are her votaries, the women of the central kiosk, elderly for the most part, kind-looking, waiting to offer information from under the enormous floral arrangement (cherry blossoms, just now) that festoons the air over their heads with petal and leaf.

This is by no means uncharacteristic of the prose – the pages are littered with such unmurdered darlings. But Cunningham wrote the novel The Hours, the basis for the excellent film of the same name, so I read on. A couple of bedtime reads and a long walk with the dog took me to page 167. I still wasn’t engrossed, but I was planning to read the remaining 71 pages (yes, I was counting pages) to see what Michael Cunningham would make of the (to me) unpromising narrative. Then I was chatting to someone and outlined the story so far – see Sonnet 6 below – and realised I just didn’t care. I read somewhere recently that one of the rules of writing a novel is, ‘Cool stuff now, cooler stuff later,’ that is, ‘Don’t save all your cool stuff to the end – you know it’s coming, but the reader doesn’t.’ There’s probably lots of cool, subtly nuanced stuff towards the end of this book. And maybe what I’ve read is cool to a certain sensibility.

Sonnet 6: The story up to the point where I stopped reading
Our Peter’s life is fairly flat.
He loves his wife, they do sex well
enough, they’re faithful, and that’s that.
Their daughter doesn’t even yell.
His gallery in NYC
is testing his integrity.
The Hirst shark (symbolising death)
is at the Met. But soon a breath
of something new arrives: the younger
brother of his wife, who’s hot,
and often naked, stirs erot-
ic yens in Pete. This new-found hunger
leads to reams of introspection
and one psychoanalysed erection.

I peeked ahead after I wrote that.

[SPOILER ALERT]

Peter does kiss Mizzy, his brother in law, which seems to lead to a lot more introspection and a little conversation. My guess, based on a skim of the last pages, is that it all turns out satisfyingly inconclusive in the end.

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LoSoRhyMo #5: Leslie Cannold’s Book of Rachael

Posted on 9 November 2011 | 2 comments

Leslie Cannold, The Book of Rachael (Text 2011)

At the Sydney Writers’ Festival earlier this year I embarrassed myself and Leslie Cannold, author of this book about an imagined sister to Jesus, by singing her a snatch of Dory Previn:

Did he have a sister, a little baby sister,
 Did Jesus have a sister?
 Was she there at his death?

I was expecting to find in the novel the kind of revisionist pleasure provided by ‘Did Jesus Have a Baby Sister‘ (the link takes you to the song on YouTube). But it turns out to be quite a different beast: it doesn’t so much ring changes on the biblical story as set out to imagine what life would have been for a spirited young woman in the time of Jesus, using the biblical story as a kind of baseline. There is some revisionism, of course: the virgin birth is explained – almost incidentally – by the familiar Roman soldier story; as a young man, Joshua/Jesus comes home late at night smelling of alcohol and women; and there’s an excellent account of the raising of Lazarus. But the aim isn’t to debunk or mock.

It’s years since I read any theology, apart from Tissa Balasuriya’s Mary and Human Liberation. Leslie Cannold’s approach to the biblical narrative goes quite a bit beyond Balasuriya’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, and she certainly doesn’t take up his vision of Mary (here called Miriame) as a revolutionary figure. I doubt if many scholars would take seriously the book’s version of how Joshua came to go on his preaching mission (he was looking for a woman who was pregnant to him, who had been consequently sold into prostitution by her father). It’s clear from this and other examples that this is not an attempt at historical excavation. Such pernicketiness aside, I don’t think I’ve ever read an account of the Jesus story that brings home more clearly what it meant to be poor or outcast or female in those times. That was the main pleasure of the book for me, rather than an engagement with the characters, who never quite came completely to life, despite even the scattering of cheerful sex scenes. Still, the pleasure was considerable.

But it’s November, and a sonnet is compulsory, even though it may create even more embarrassment all round than an off-key rendition of Dory Previn:

Sonnet 5: Where were the women?
 These days I think of the Last Supper
 and wonder where the women were
 when Jesus foretold in that upper
 room his foes would soon bestir
 themselves and take his life. Who cooked
 and shared that meal, were overlooked
 by gospels and two thousand years
 of art and preaching? More than spears
 such silence pierces the hearts
 of half the world. Oh they were there,
 not just their sinful, perfumed hair
 or veils, or wombs and other parts.
 They've always held up half the sky.
 Their absence is a stupid lie.

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The book group, The Life and Malcolm Knox

Posted on 27 October 2011 | Leave a comment

Malcolm Knox, The Life (Allen & Unwin 2011)

Before the Book Group met: I knew The Life was about a surfer, based to some extent on a real person (as spelled out in an interesting article by Nick Carroll here). I knew that it also drew on Malcolm Knox’s own fairly recent experience as a surfer. Now, unless you count the pleasant and instructive experience of copy-editing a book of essays on surfing and surf culture a couple of years ago, the closest I’ve been to riding a surfboard is to have broken a wrist the first time I rode downhill on a skateboard. Oh, and Peter Drouyn was two years behind me at boarding school, and I once had a friend who said things were gnarly. So no matter how many people recommended The Life, I would have given it a miss, as I have Tim Winton’s Breath, if it wasn’t for the Book Group. And so but yeah I have yet another reason to be grateful to the group.

I’m writing this a day after finishing the book [and about a month before the twice postponed meeting], and the voice of Dennis Keith – DK, the narrator and main character, who occasionally starts a sentence with a string of conjunctions a bit like the last sentence in my first paragraph – is still echoing in my head. He’s a wonderful character, overweight, approaching 50, living with his mother, socially incompetent and suffering from some kind of mental chaos. But once he was the world champion surfer, a genius on the waves. A double tale unfolds – the story of events leading up to his mental implosion 30 years earlier, and what transpires after the arrival of a young woman he calls his BFO – short for Bi Fricken Ographer. There’s a central love story and a violent death, but the main power of the book for me is in the world created in its language, and though I gather there’s some controversy about the way DK is recognisable in the surfing community as a version of a still-living surfing legend, for outsiders like me there’s a feel of authenticity that probably has something to do with not having moved too far from actual history.

After the group: We met last night. Malcolm Knox is a friend of one of our members, and came to the meeting as a special guest.  As a result, we stayed pretty much on topic all night, even though two of us, who arrived late, had been to the annual opening to the public of the Egyptian Room of the Petersham Masonic Hall, which would usually have been a major distraction from the book of the night.

One of the guys has been a keen surfer all his life, and knows an awful lot about the parts of the real world that the novel relates to. Others have done some surfing. To most of us the surfing world was pretty much a closed book. We’d all enjoyed the book, and I think it’s true to say that we all loved the chance to talk about it with the author. He was completely useless when asked to clarify the ending – he’s written a version where the end was clear, but it didn’t work because DK could never have got things that clear in his head, so he had to rewrite it to its present opacity. Sadly, this means that he doesn’t know who dunnit any more than any careful reader. Apart from that, he seemed happy to be quizzed about the process of writing, and rewriting, about the thinking behind a number of key decisions, about anything at all really, and we were pretty happy to do the quizzing.

Even though I count a number of brilliant writers among my friends, I’m still a boy from North Queensland who didn’t meet a Published Writer until I was 20 years old (the poet R D Murphy, aka Brother Elgar FMS), and I was very impressed by Malcolm’s generosity in joining us like this. He said he feels a sense of responsibility – if people are prepared to read his books the least he can do is sit down and have a meal with them, and anyhow he’d rather talk to eight people who have actually read it than 300 who’ve come to his talk at a festival because they couldn’t get into the one they really wanted. I hope he enjoyed the evening as much as I did.

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Sarah Maddison’s Beyond White Guilt

Posted on 25 October 2011 | Leave a comment

Sarah Maddison, Beyond White Guilt: The real challenge for Black–White relations in Australia (Allen & Unwin 2011)

I’ve been having trouble blogging about this book – maybe I would have been better off writing one of those ‘X reads Y’ series of posts that take you through the book along with the blogger over the days or weeks it takes to read it. There was hardly a page when my mind wasn’t firing off in many directions, excited by one idea, quarrelling with another, irritated by an elliptical use of a reference, challenged and provoked and challenged again. But here you are, just one little blog post.

The book starts brilliantly. While strolling around her inner city suburb the author sees on the bank of the polluted and deformed Cooks River a tiny space that she imagines to be pretty much unchanged in the 200 and more years since white settlement. She pictures a group of people of the Eora nation going about their lives there, and is shocked by the mental image, not because it is new or surprising, but because she realises ‘that [she] had allowed [her] consciousness of that reality to fade.’ She goes on, ‘Unlike Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, I could choose to “forget” or to deny or repress the reality of my place here.’

Such moments must have been experienced by every thoughtful non-Indigenous Australian – moments when, in shocking contrast to our habitual complacency, it becomes blindingly clear that our current lives rest on a history of colonial invasion and dispossession. Recounting this example in the Introduction implies a promise that the next 200 or so pages will unpack such moments: How and why does that forgetting happen? What would happen if we stopped ‘forgetting’ and began to live in the real world? How do we go about making that change? Is this a thing that we need to address as so many million individuals, is there a challenge we need to meet collectively, and if both how are they connected?

Coming from the author of Black Politics, a powerful account of the main themes and tensions in Aboriginal politics based on extensive interviews with a range of Aboriginal leaders, this implied promise feels anything but hollow.

I’m not confident that I can summarise the book’s argument adequately, but here goes:

  • When the British arrived on the continent of Australia in the late 18th century, they wanted the land, and took it, with devastating consequences for the people who were already living here. Some people baulk at calling what happened genocide, but it’s hard to see how that word is far off the mark.
  • As the Australian nation formed, and people took on the  Australian national identity, they needed stories of the nation’s origin that would allow them to feel good about themselves and the identity. Stories were told of pioneers’ hardihood, of Anzac larrikin heroism, of sporting accomplishments. The history of European–Aboriginal relations was marginalised or silenced. This version of national identity became entrenched both in public institutions and in people’s minds.
  • The objective reality is that all non-Indigenous Australians continue to benefit from the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders continue to struggle with the consequences of the huge and ongoing assault on their ancestors, their cultures and their communities.
  • We know this. We mostly ignore it, but we know it. [This has to be very confusing for us as children: the stories are told and discounted in the same breath.] This is a kind of anaesthesia, a dissociative story we tell ourselves.
  • To break through that anaesthesia and face the reality of our history involves emotional discomfort. Unless we face this discomfort we’re likely to either a) see the problem (if we admit there is one) as inherent to Aboriginal and Torres Strait cultures and so none of our business, or b) intervene in ways that  don’t challenge the assumptions that allowed the past and ongoing injustices to happen in the first place. [Her discussion of the Intervention is compelling.] Either way, we continue to live in a strange, dissociated state.
  • What has to change is us.
  • Real, effective change isn’t impossible. Australian history is full of examples. [She discusses  the 1967 referendum, the Reconciliation process of the 1990s, and the Sorry Books and the apology for the Stolen Generations.]
  • So what is to be done? We need a difficult conversation about remembering and forgetting. We need dialogue – as opposed to debate or just conversation – in which [I’m quoting Boori Pryor, not anyone in this book] ‘we see your tears, you see our tears’. We need to acknowledge our [now I’m quoting Sarah Maddison] ‘bonds of solidarity with the perpetrators of historical and human injustice’, and find a way to break them, that is, ‘to rethink who we are as a nation’.
  • ‘Relationships will be central to whatever path lies ahead’. An immediate opportunity is the referendum coming up in 2112 to include an acknowledgement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Constitution.

It’s an important subject, and an important book. When you read it you may find my summary inadequate, and if so you’ll get no quarrel from me. The fact is, I found the argument hard to follow. My best guess as to why is that there are actually two books here struggling to co-exist. One is the one I’ve tried to summarise above. The other is a companion volume to Black Politics, which acknowledges and synthesises a vast body of thinking in a range of disciplines that addresses the issues of racism, colonisation and collective guilt. Notes and the bibliography account for nearly a quarter of the book’s pages. The text is studded with rich, provocative quotes, but at times it feels that no phrase, no concept can be used without deference to its originator. This may be sound academic practice, but the effect – at least for my kind of reader – is that hardly any time at all goes by without someone identified as political scientist A, legal scholar B, anti-racism educator C, political psychologist D, historian E … the list goes on … popping up, throwing a couple of words into the ring and then disappearing. I’d be going, ‘Who was that talking head? What  context did they use that phrase in?’ I would rather have read an overview of the scholarship,  White Politics, perhaps, and then moved on to Sarah Maddison’s argument. Or perhaps this is just a longwinded way of saying I found the scholarly apparatus distracting here.

Another reason for my difficulty is confusion about the word guilt. You’ll notice I haven’t used it in my summary. Is guilt a feeling or a legal verdict? Does it refer to a subjective state or a collective condition, or a vertigo-inducing combination? It seems to me that there are a number of quite distinct things rolled together in the one term here.

You can see Sarah Maddison speaking loud and clear in her own voice in a talk given at the Wheeler Centre here. I recommend it.

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Colm Tóibín’s Empty Family

Posted on 14 October 2011 | Leave a comment

Colm Tóibín, The Empty Family (Picador 2010)

I’ve read very little by Colm Tóibín – his book on Barcelona, an extraordinarily spoilerish review of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, and that’s pretty much the lot. This collection of nine short stories, which has been beside my bed for a while and which I decided to read just now as possibly better suited to post-nasal-surgery times than a single longer work, is my introduction to his fiction.

While there are no characters who recur, and nothing like a discontinuous narrative, the book feels coherent – a number of the stories are about people returning to their country of origin after a period of exile, self-imposed or otherwise; many of them deal with Gay male experience; they are mostly set in Ireland or Barcelona, and in all of them connection with place and the people of the place are significant. An elderly Irishwoman returns to her native Dublin after a long absence to design a film set; after the fall of Franco, a Barcelona Communist returns from exile and encounters the old and new Spains; an Irishman returns from New York when his mother is dying. ‘The Pearl Fishers’ traces a delicate, questioning path through the Irish Catholic Church’s sex scandals. ‘The street’, the longest story, traces the developing relationship between two Pakistani indentured labourers in Barcelona.

I don’t know if I would have been quite so struck by this book’s Not Safe For Work bits if I hadn’t read it immediately after Philip Roth’s The Humbling, but I was struck by them. In three of the stories, there are graphic accounts of sex, probably more specific than the ones in The Humbling, but where at one stage Roth’s narrator protests, ‘This was not soft porn,’ Tóibín’s narrator and his characters are too engaged to need any such disclaimer. Both writers describe activities that I personally have no urge to participate in – Roth’s account makes me wish I’d somehow missed those pages; Tóibín’s prose manages to shed light on the nature of desire. ‘Barcelona, 1975’ reads as memoir, or at least conte à clef, and has an almost anthropological feel to it: this is how we did things in the dying days of the Franco regime, this is some of what we learned, and in particular this is how it felt.  Everywhere in his writing, you can feel the connections between people, again in stark contrast to the despairing isolation in the Roth book. That’s got to do with their different subjects, of course: Roth is writing about the loss of creativity. But I suspect I’m talking about something that goes much deeper in each writer – perhaps a cultural difference between Irish Catholic, lapsed or otherwise, and New York Jewish intellectual who is only as successful as his latest creation.

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The Humbling of Philip Roth

Posted on 4 October 2011 | Leave a comment

Philip Roth, The Humbling (Jonathan Cape 2009)

I love Philip Roth’s prose, the way it seems to just flow directly from somewhere inside him, like lava or blood, yet always with extraordinary control of nuance. I haven’t read enough of his novels to know if The Humbling is representative of what he’s writing these days, but I do hope it’s not. I also hope the book isn’t a fictionalised representation of his current state of mind. Simon Axler, the hero, is a great stage actor who has suddenly lost his ability to act, and the agony of his loss is conveyed with such poignancy that it’s hard not to think Roth has been there, or has at least fantasised such a loss for himself.

What does a great artist do in such a situation? Well, first he doesn’t kill himself, then he commits himself into a psych hospital, then he’s discharged and after a while either kills himself or doesn’t (he does make a clear choice, I’m trying not to be too spoilerish). And that’s the whole story. Except for the second act where he falls in love with a much younger woman and has lots of increasingly exotic sex with her.

I believed in the despair. I accepted the falling in love. The specifics of the sex felt like an older man working hard to imagine how the young folk these days do stuff, what with all that queer theory and non-binary approach to gender they’re always going on about. Or maybe I was just embarrassed.

The Nobel Prize for Literature is to be announced in a couple of days and Philip Roth’s name is being mentioned again. If he gets up it won’t be on account of this book, but maybe it will cheer him up.

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Overland 204

Posted on 3 October 2011 | 11 comments

Jeff Sparrow, editor, Overland 204, Spring 2011

At a time where the terms of Australian political debate are set by the self-styled ‘centre-right’ Australian to the extent that vehemently anti-Communist Robert Manne is seen as left wing, everyone who’s more socialist than Ghengis Khan should subscribe to Overland. It has been appearing regularly for more than 50 years as a journal of ‘progressive culture’, unashamedly of the left from its beginnings, creating a space where dissenting voices can be heard (arguing with each other as often as not), and staying for the most part readable by people (like me) who wouldn’t know Althusser from a hole in the ground. Unlike the Australian, it has no Rupert Murdoch to prop it up. You can read most of every issue online. The point of subscribing is to help sustain it.

In this issue, in no particular order:

  • ‘The birthday boy’, a short story from an early Overland updated and retold in sequential art (ie, as a comic) by Bruce Mutard. While the story here stands on its own merits, I’d love to read the original, by Gwen Kelly, so as to follow the process involved in the updating (who were the 1955 equivalents of 2011’s Sudanese students, for instance?). I couldn’t find it on the Web. Maybe I’ll make a trip to the State Library …
  • John Martinkus, in ‘Kidnapped in Iraq, attacked in Australia’, tells the story of his capture and release by Iraqi insurgents in 2004 and the attacks on him by the then Foreign Minister and rightwing ‘journalists’. There’s nothing new here – I wrote to Alexander Downer’s office at the time and received a boilerplate reply – but it’s very good to be reminded of this shameful moment just now when Downer has been on the TV denouncing David Hicks again and one of the ‘journalists’ has been wailing about free speech after being held to account by a court
  • an interview with Afghani heroine Malalai Joya. I was glad to read this after attending a crowded meeting in Marrickville Town Hall where the acoustics and sight lines made her incomprehensible and invisible to me. The interview gives a sharp alternative to the mainstream media’s version of what’s happening in Afghanistan and it’s a great companion piece to Sally Neighbours’ lucid ‘How We Lost the War: Afghanistan a Decade on from September 11‘ in the September Monthly
  • some splendid, almost Swiftian sarcasm from Jennifer Mills in ‘How to write about Aboriginal Australia‘: ‘First, be white. If you are Aboriginal, you can certainly speak on behalf of every Aboriginal person in Australia, but it is best to get a white person to write down what they think you should be saying.’
  • Andy Worthington’s When America changed forever and Richard Seymour’s What was that all about? reflecting on the damage done to democracy in the USA and its allies by the ‘war on terror’
  • ‘Reading coffee‘, a short story by Anthony Panegyres that reminds us of anti-Greek violence in Western Australia during the First World War (and is also a good oogie boogie yarn)
  • Ellena Savage’s ‘My flesh turned to stone‘, which I may have misunderstood (it quotes Lacan, and refers at one point to gender-based torture, which may or may not be how the academies nowadays refer to torture of women), but seems to be putting the eminently sensible proposition that terrible experiences have lasting after-effects on individuals and communities, and expecting people to just get over them isn’t realistic
  • A number of poems, coralled off together in a section up the back, printed in white on pale green, which is either a cunning way of making us read the poems slowly or a case of a designer for whom readability isn’t a priority. The ones that spoke most to me are Jill Jones’s ‘Misinterpretations /or The Dark Grey Outline‘ and John Leonard’s ‘After Rain‘. Jill Jones discusses the former on her blog here. You may have to be fascinated by swallows to enjoy the latter – which is very short – as much as I did, but who isn’t fascinated by swallows?
  • Peter Kirkpatrick’s ‘A one-man writer’s festival’, a hatchet job on Clive James’s poetic aspirations. I found myself asking why. The poor bloke’s got cancer. Leave him alone.

I didn’t read everything, which is pretty much a hallmark of the journal-reading experience. You can skip things because of an annoying turn of phrase on the first page (as in a reference to Sydney’s western suburbs as perceived as ‘some bloody hell, beginning somewhere around Annandale’ – Annandale! I doubt if that would have got past the editors in a Sydney-based journal). You might be put off because something looks too abstract, or promises a detailed discussion of a book you plan to read. Or you might be pre-emptively bored by anything about publishing in the digital age, even while admitting the subject is important.

I read this Overland in a grumpy post-operative state. And enjoyed it.

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In praise of bricks and mortar bookshops

Posted on 1 October 2011 | 2 comments

Last night, slightly stir crazy from four days of post-seroplasty languor, I went with the Art Student to a book launch at Gleebooks. The happy hour we spent there makes me realise all over that buying books online (not that I do it that much) strips away a whole wonderfully human dimension of the book-buying experience.

The book was Compassionate Bastard by Peter Mitchell. Upstairs at Gleebooks was crowded with a marvellous combination of family, friends and colleagues of the author, and almost as many again with no personal connection. The launch managed to have an intimate feel and at the same time be the kind of thing that should have been filmed and put up on Slow TV or whatever. [Later addition: Peter Mitchell turned up in the comments to say that all three speeches were videoed, and can be watched on his website.]

Ian McPhee, Minister for Immigration in the Fraser government in the early 1980s, launched the book, and John Menadue, head of the Department of Immigration then and later, spoke. Peter Mitchell, who is a poet in another incarnation, went to work for the Department of Immigration in 1990, getting ‘a real job’. He became Director of the Villawood Detention Centre until he resigned in 2003 – so he was there as the bipartisan agreement on immigration and refugees was torn apart by John w Howard, and the new harsh and inhumane treatment that persists until now was ushered in.

I won’t try to summarise what was said. Enough to tell you that it was incredibly heartening to be in a room with three men who have had close-up experience and responsibility for thinking about policy on refugees and asylum seekers, who are scathing about by the focus group driven debate that dominates the subject these days (they named no names later than Howard, but they didn’t need to), who have been thinking deeply about the subject. They didn’t make huge claims for the book – but they did a great job of selling it to us as a well-written, often funny and sometimes heartbreaking collection of stories that show us the human dimension of Australia’s mandatory detention policy.

Ian McPhee said this book was an excellent companion read to Carina Hoang’s The Boat People and David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s book about the Tampa episode Dark Victory. He said that the Greens are the only ones in Federal Parliament who have a credible, humane, practical position on refugees.

Some snippets from John Menadue:
‘Mandatory detention does not deter. It only punishes.’
‘I think we can get back to decency, but we’re a long way from it now.’
‘The decency of Australian people is not shown by opinion polls, but with leadership it will re-emerge.’

John Menadue mentioned (with appropriate apologies, the Centre for Policy Development, which has developed a paper with the self-explanatory title, A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate on Refugees & Asylum Seekers. There’s a meeting in the Sydney Town Hall on 13 October to discuss this paper.

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Edwina Shaw’s Thrill Seekers

Posted on 28 September 2011 | 1 comment

Edwina Shaw, Thrill Seekers (Ransom 2011)

This is a Cutting Edge title – part of a ‘gritty’ Young Adult series from Ransom Publishing UK. A gang of Brisbane children progress from mucking around in Oxley Creek to more risky adolescent thrills. In what might seem a standard children’s or YA literature trope, the father of the main characters dies in the first chapter, and their mother is pretty much lost in grief and alcohol. In what follows the young people go more and more out of control. There’s an awful lot of flagon wine (‘goon’) and marijuana, a range of other drugs, quite a bit of violence, some awful sex and a lot of wretchedness. The most vulnerable character goes horrifyingly, dangerously mad*. At the end there is a glimmer of hope.

That might make it sound like one of those ‘problem’ books for young readers that periodically stirs up the moral panic merchants. And maybe it is, but it’s a book with a lot of integrity. It treats its difficult subject matter without romanticising it, and without moralising. It resonated strongly with elements of three excellent books I’ve read recently: the dangerous play of Watch Out for Me, the heartbreak of After Romulus, the drugs and risk taking of The Life (blog entry to come when the Book Group meets), and the madness/psychosis/mental illness of all three.

Really, though, I can’t even pretend to write a sensible review, because the author is my eldest niece. It’s not that I worry I’ll seem nepotistic, and it’s absolutely not a matter of being tactful – as in, ‘I’m sure the target audience will love it.’ I can say up front that it’s a terrific book. But you know, even though Edwina is a mature woman, mother of two, teacher of yoga, blogger, disciplined writer, wise and warm lender of support to other writers including myself, she is still inseparable in my mind from the person whose exultant joy at being able to crawl I had the privilege of sharing more than forty years ago, and even though I know this book is fiction my avuncular heart recoils from following that cheerful little girl into these dark places.

Versions of some of the chapters have been published as short stories. You can read some of them online here and here. That last one didn’t make it into the book, and confirms my sense that, if anything, the world of the book has grown less harsh on its transition from book for general readership to a YA title.
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* I’m deliberately saying ‘mad’ rather than ‘mentally ill’ or whatever . Raimond Gaita writes with characteristic acuteness about this kind of language in After Romulus (pages 71 to 74). Referring to the lines from King Lear, ‘Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!’ his discussion ends:

Lear’s cry is not heartrending because he suffers ‘social stigma’. And it would not move us as it does had he said, ‘Oh, let me not fall into bipolar disorder.’

Edwina’s story of Douggie includes the social stigma, but it also takes us into, using Gaita’s words again, ‘the unique terror that the word madness conveys’.

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Robert Manne and the Australian

Posted on 26 September 2011 | 1 comment

Robert Manne, Bad News: Murdoch’s Australian and the shaping of the nation (Quarterly Essay N0 43, 2011)

These days I keep up with the Murdoch commentariat mainly at second hand, most regularly by way of the delightfully caustic Loon Pond, where someone identifying as lapsed Catholic ‘Dorothy Parker’ from Tamworth holds a satiric mirror up to their venomous name-calling, impassioned defence of the rich and powerful, and self-serving illogic.

I guess everyone knows what kind of beast the Australian is, though it’s striking how reluctant people are to say so in public. On the Book Show just last week, for example, someone said that it was perceived ‘rightly or wrongly’ to be right wing, and Chris Mitchell, editor-in-chief, describes it as centre right. Robert Manne’s essay grasps that nettle and at the same time demonstrates that people have good reason to be cautious in calling a spade a spade in this matter. He has done a careful analysis of a number of case histories: its impassioned promotion of Keith Windschuttle, an amateurish historian with an agenda, to a major player in Australian culture wars; its unremitting support for the invasion of Iraq, and complete failure to acknowledge having got so much wrong; the bullying of Media Watch and the ABC until Australia’s only major non-commercial source of news and opinion was running scared; the bizarre attack on science and reason in its coverage of climate change; its elevation of itself to key political player in first supporting and then campaigning against Kevin Rudd; and, most appallingly of all, its sustained attacks on individual tweeters, one for correctly reporting a negative public comment from a former Australian employee, the other for what was manifestly a joke that would have been cleared up by a simple apology if the Australian hadn’t made it the subject of no fewer than five front page stories.

I had to stop reading every now and then to go out and get some fresh air.

This wouldn’t matter so much in, say, the Green Left Weekly, though I doubt of the GLW would ever be so vicious in attacking someone who wasn’t a high-profile millionaire. But Rupert Murdoch controls a huge percentage of the Australian print media, and the Australian is his heftiest newspaper. I learned in this essay that at some press conferences in Canberra more than half the journalists are from the Australian, that the members of what Robert Manne calls the political class read it without fail, that it is influential out of all proportion to its actual circulation.

People who depend on the Australian for their national and international news in print (and it is after all the only major national newspaper we have) need to read this essay. As always, Manne’s writing is lucid, his tone judicious even at his most combative – and he does get combative. I believe there have been no fewer than eight vigorous replies in the newspaper. I read only one, and if the others distort Manne’s arguments as blatantly as that, it’s all the more important that readers of the Australian read the actual essay.

Strikingly, one line of attack has been to say that Manne is arguing for censorship, for closing down debate. Yet Paul Kelly, the Australian’s editor-at-large, pulled out of a scheduled debate at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre last week, and no one from the Australian could be found to stand in for him. So actor Max Gillies read the bulk of Kelly’s published response. You can see the Slow TV of the ‘debate’ here. You can read Manne’s ‘deconstruction’ Kelly’s published response on Manne’s blog, here. I have no idea why Kelly and the rest declined a debate, but if my arguments had been taken apart so very deftly I would probably remember a previous engagement too. All the same, it’s a bit rich to accuse someone of wanting to shut down debate and then refuse to engage in a debate with them outside the protective confines of Rupert Murdoch’s flagship. Even more striking is the Australian‘s report on the Australian‘s no-show – at this point I weaken and give you a link: the journalist seems to be suggesting either that this was an excellent prank on the part of Kelly and Co, or that it would have been completely unreasonable to expect Kelly and/or others to actually face the big bully, who threatened to use reason at them.

This must be the most vigorously discussed Quarterly Essay yet. I wonder what editor Chris Feik will do for the correspondence section in the next issue. I imagine he will need to allow some space for the Australian‘s apologists (though they may well decide to ignore that opportunity as well). I hope he will also find space for comment along the lines of Tad Tietze post on the Overland blog, which while appreciating Manne’s careful accumulation of evidence, goes on to offer interesting observations from a left perspective.

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