Tag Archives: Novel

Andrew Miller’s Land in Winter at the Book Group

Posted on 21 Dec 2025 | 7 comments

Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter (Sceptre 2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Book Group met on Gayamagal land, and I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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

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The Melancholy of Resistance at the Book Group

Posted on 3 Dec 2025 | 1 comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

is five linked principal clauses:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Book Group met on Gadigal land, and I have written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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

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Mrs Dalloway, report 2

Posted on 1 Dec 2025 | 2 comments

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925, Penguin Classics 2020) from page 103 to end

As I expected, it took me just two months to read Mrs Dalloway three pages a day. If you haven’t read it, I recommend doing it slowly in just this way: three pages at a time seems to be just about perfect.

The book looks for the person behind the public-facing name Mrs Dalloway, to create a kind of literary cubist portrait: beneath the skin of the upper-crust English lady whose life centres on giving parties for the right people are the remains of a glorious, multi-faceted creature who once lived with grace and passion. We see her from many angles, through the eyes of her husband (who barely sees her), her daughter, a resentful working class history teacher, a maid, a man whose proposal of marriage she rejected in spite of their mutual passion, a woman who was also drawn to her when young, an older aristocratic woman of the type played so splendidly by Maggie Smith, and more

In one way the book is about the disappointment of youthful hopes and expectations. For example, Sally Seton, who once ran naked down the corridors of an country mansion, is now Lady something or other with six sons and insists that she is completely happy. Clarissa herself is married to Richard who is at best a mediocre politician. Peter Walsh, her former suitor, has spent most of his life in India, unhappily married and now caught up in an awkward affair. And quite unconnected to Clarissa until the final pages is Septimus Smith, a soldier returned from the trenches of the ‘Great War’ with what we would now call PTSD. He is haunted by the image of a friend who was killed in the War, and in the end (spoiler alert, but the book is a hundred years old after all) kills himself in desperation. When Clarissa learns of his death, she is playing hostess at her party, to which the whole book has been building. Suddenly she is alone and grapples with thoughts of her own mortality.

I came to the book expecting it to be difficult and a bit airy-fairy. Maybe it is both. The English class system is rock solid in its pages, and though Clarissa is criticised as a snob, the basic viewpoint of the novel can’t be entirely absolved of that charge. But I wasn’t prepared for how much pleasure there is in the way the narrative glides among different points of view, for the almost Whitmanesque celebration of city life, for its laugh-out-loud moments, or, in the end, for the pervading sense pathos in a society and individual souls who have survived the momentous events of a World War and a pandemic. I wasn’t prepared for just how much, sentence by sentence and page by page, I enjoyed it.

it’s hard to pluck a passage out of context, but here is a bit I love. Peter Walsh is watching Clarissa as she escorts the Prime Minister from the party:

And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room, prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her grey hair. She wore ear-rings, and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. Lolloping on the waves and braiding her tresses she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf in some other woman’s dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its element. But age had brushed her; even as a mermaid might behold in her glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over the waves. There was a breath of tenderness; her severity, her prudery, her woodenness were all warmed through now, and she had about her as she said goodbye to the thick gold-laced man who was doing his best, and good luck to him, to look important, an inexpressible dignity; an exquisite cordiality; as if she wished the whole world well, and must now, being on the very verge and rim of things, take her leave. So she made him think. (But he was not in love.)

Yeah, right! He wasn’t in love!

Maybe I should give To the Lighthouse a go.

I have written this blog post in Gadigal and Wangal country. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai, the book club and November verse 5

Posted on 13 Nov 2025 | 3 comments

Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Penguin 2025)

Before the meeting: This is a massive family saga that spans three continents, a romance, an Indian–US comedy of manners, and a magic-realist tale (though Sonia, a writer, is critical of that term).

All of the principal characters are caught, one way or another, in a tangle of Indian and US culture. The central difference, gestured towards in the book’s title, is the contrast between US individualism and Indian sense of belonging to a family and a community: loneliness and embeddedness, self-determination and obligation. When this plays out in comic mode, it works brilliantly. In the Indian scenes, again and again, someone is asked in shocked tones why they are alone.

As you’d expect from the title, the central narrative strand is a romance. True to the form of the romcom (no spoiler really) the protagonists Sonia and Sunny have sex at almost exactly the midpoint and then are separated, seemingly irretrievably. Integral to the romcom are family intrigue, corruption, violent murder, and a dispersed conversation about arranged marriage. I loved all that.

There’s another story jostling for the centre. This begins with an unconvincing episode of coercive control and develops into a kind of ghost story that more or less centres on a mystic talisman that Sonia has inherited from her grandfather. A European painter who has held Sonia in his thrall steals the talisman and makes it central to his art (yes, appropriation!). I found this strand unconvincing at the level of character, but there’s an interesting reflexivity to it as the artist keeps telling Sonia, an aspiring novelist, what she should and should not write: we are clearly being invited to read this book as a repudiation of his advice.

Page 78* is early in the book, part of Sunny’s narrative. He is a young man living in New York City in the late 1990s with Ulla, a white US woman. He’s intent on making it in the USA as a journalist, and embarrassed by his mother’s insistent claims on him. He can barely read her long letters (‘Mummy, please stop this gossip!’), and on this page he explains the context of one of them to Ulla (and, incidentally, to the reader):

One tiny thing I’ll mention in passing. The bottom paragraph describes Sunny’s family home as a ‘gray modernist house … designed by a disciple of Le Corbusier’. So much information is conveyed in those few words. First, the family comes from wealth. Second, they are to some degree westernised – their house is modernist. Third, the fact that the architect was a disciple rather than Le Corbusier himself suggests something about the limitations on the aspirations of colonised elites. And fourth, ‘gray’ is an example of the the North American spelling conventions used throughout (‘neighborhood’ later in the paragraph is another): that these spellings persist in the UK edition is not a mistake, but an enactment at the micro level of the way US culture has come to dominate the book’s westernised Indian characters.

Before that, there’s a paragraph of raw exposition:

Sunny had explained that Vinita and Punita were his mother’s servant girls, daughters of his mother’s cleaning maid, Gunja, who had eight living children – three had died in infancy (Babita used the phrase “popped off”); and Gunja’s husband was a drunk who sold chicken and mutton bones for a living, collecting them from dhaba eating places, then transporting them to a bone meal fertilizer tactory. They occupied two rooms in Begumpur, but Gunja could not afford to have six daughters at home; she’d have to marry the elder one, although she was only fifteen. To give the child a little more time, she begged Babita to keep two of them in exchange for housework. <snip> Even though she had two servant girls for free, Babita was to her mind involved in a social experiment to uplift society.

The fate of Vinita and Punita, known collectively as Vini-Puti, is to be significant much later in the book. But because it’s November*, rather than discuss further, here’s a little verse:

November verse 5:
So much in his mother's letter
needs to be explained. Just who
is Vini-Puti? Who is Ratty?
What's this kebab how-de-do?
Gunja, mother of six daughters,
trains two up to follow orders,
flee the confines of the slum,
work for free for Sunny's mum,
cook liver pâté soaked in brandy.
This is tragic seen up close:
the mum's small gain, the girls' great loss.
But this ain't Hamlet, this is Sunny.
Vini-Puti serve their turn 
like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

After the meeting: We discussed The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny along with Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me. I was astonished when the discussion of this book kicked off with one person saying she hated it and gave up at the 40 percent mark (she’s a Kindle reader). Nothing happened, she said. And that included Sonia’s harrowing emotional enthralment to the bizarrely irrational western artist. Probably needless to say, others disagreed.

Of the three of us (out of five) who had read the whole book, I liked it the best. For all three of us the first 40 percent (I make that about 260 pages) was what we enjoyed most. We had different versions of why it became less enjoyable: perhaps there’s a forced assertion of Indian ways of story-telling, a cultural repudiation of the western mode of the earlier parts; perhaps the talismanic object is too sketchily realised to carry as much narrative weight as seems to be intended; perhaps the book is just too long.

I persist in my opinion, shared by one other Clubbie, that it was a good idea to pair this with Mother Mary Comes to Me. Both books have domineering, eccentric mothers. The protagonists in both are secular Indians appalled at the rise of Hindu nationalism and the BJP – the Demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque looms in the background. Both explore myriad ways in which cultural differences can be negotiated by people from a globally non-dominant culture. Both have main female characters steeped in classic English literature.

We had an excellent dinner, including a dessert that fell flat on the floor when it was taken from the oven, but was delicious anyhow.

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

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78, and in November I write fourteen 14-line stanzas in the month. which means incorporating one into most blog posts.

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Mrs Dalloway, report 1, and November verse 1

Posted on 2 Nov 2025 | 1 comment

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925, Penguin Classics 2020)

Since taking nearly two years to read Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu six years ago, I’ve had a classic slow-read on the go most of the time. When I’ve embarked on one of these slow-reads I regularly come across mentions of the book elsewhere. It’s like that with my current project, Mrs Dalloway.

This month, a friend sent me a link to Zora Simic’s article in The Conversation, Trauma memoirs can help us understand the unthinkable. They can also be art. Here’s an excerpt:

Of all Woolf’s novels, Mrs Dalloway is the one most often read as semi-autobiographical and as a reckoning with unresolved trauma: of England’s in the wake of the first world war, and in the novelist’s own life. <big snip> Woolf has long been a lodestar for writers grappling with trauma – in their lives, and on the page, especially women writers.

Reading the first couple of pages, when upper-class Clarissa Dalloway is out in the early morning shopping for flowers and enjoying the life of the London streets, I couldn’t see much trauma. But then the scene broadens and darkens. By page 103, I’m now reading the book as mainly about aftermaths: Clarissa is recovering from an illness and enduring an unhappy marriage; the War and pandemic are still alive in collective memory; Peter Walsh, freshly returned from a decade in India, is still wounded by having been rejected by Clarissa many years earlier; returned soldier Septimus Smith is wandering London’s streets, hallucinating, suicidal, ‘shell-shocked’ and putting his Italian wife Lucrezia through hell. There’s plenty of trauma to go round.

I’m glad I’m reading this book just a few pages a day. It cries out for sharply focused reading, which I can just about sustain for three pages at a time. Read this way, the book is exhilarating. I had thought it was going to be the stream of consciousness of one upper-class Englishwoman. In fact there’s a whole array of characters, and the narrative voice flits among them. I say ‘flits’ because feels as if the narrator is an elf-like creature (I almost see her as Tinkerbell) who slips in and out of people’s minds, sometimes staying for barely a second, sometimes for several pages. Most of the characters are aristocrats of one sort or another, but not all. Lady Bruton’s maid Milly Brush has definite likes and dislikes as she stands impassively while her mistress entertains three gentlemen for lunch. One of those gentlemen is a bluff middle-class man with pretensions – he knows how to craft a publishable letter to The Times but believes women shouldn’t read Shakespeare for moral reasons. And Richard – Mr Dalloway – makes an appearance, buying flowers for Clarissa and resolving to tell her he loves her (which the reader knows is far too little, far too late). And so on. It’s much more complex, and funnier, than I expected.

Here’s page 78*:

And because it’s November**, here’s a verse drawn from it and the next page:

November Verse 1: Septimus Smith
He might have made a great accountant
but for Shakespeare, Keats and love
that set him scribbling with his fountain
pen all night. 'You need to tough-
en up, play football,' said his mentor.
War changed everything. He went to
fight in France and made a friend,
a cheerful manly friend, whose end
in Italy was sudden, brutal.
Mrs Woolf says War had taught
him not to feel, to set at nought
such loss. Sublime the total
calm he felt. But, come next year,
the sudden thunderclaps of fear.

I have written this blog post near what was once luxuriant wetland, in Gadigal and Wangal country, where I recently saw two rosellas (mulbirrang in Wiradjuri, I don’t know the Gadigal or Wangal name). I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

* My blogging practice is to focus on the page that coincides with my age, currently 78.
** Each November I aim to post 14 fourteen line stanzas on this blog (see here for an explanation, though that explanation incorrectly calls my verses sonnets)

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Robbie Arnott’s Dusk and (not) the book group

Posted on 23 Oct 2025 | 6 comments

Robbie Arnott, Dusk (Picador 2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have written this blog post near what was once luxuriant wetland, in Gadigal and Wangal country. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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

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Beginning Mrs Dalloway

Posted on 3 Oct 2025 | 6 comments

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925, Penguin Classics 2020)

I was listening to Christopher Lydon’s Open Source podcast when he interviewed Merve Emre, editor of The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (Ms Emre is from the US, so her book adds a period to the novel’s name). Their enthusiasm for Woolf’s book made me realise it would be ideal one of my slow reads of the classics.

My introduction to the book was Stephen Daldry’s movie The Hours, which is based on Michael Cunningham’s novel of the same name and stars Nicole Kidman with a prosthetic nose. I’ve vaguely wanted to read Mrs Dalloway ever since, but been just as vaguely reluctant because of a general impression that the writing was beautiful but difficult.

So here goes. At three pages a day, it will probably take about two months. I don’t intend to delve into annotations and footnotes. Mercifully the copy I have from the library doesn’t have a learned introduction. Bearing in mind someone’s description of a classic as a work you cannot encounter for the first time, I’ll inevitably bring preconceptions to it, but I’ll try to read it as if it’s just a novel.

At this stage, six pages in, I’m loving it. I’m also glad I’m reading a few pages at a time, because – so far at least – I’d hate to be rushing it.

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Albert Camus’ L’étranger

Posted on 2 Oct 2025 | 2 comments

Albert Camus, L’étranger (1942, Methuen Educational 1970)

A month ago I announced that I was resuming my practice of reading a couple of pages from a classic text first thing each morning, starting with Camus’ L’étranger. The first book I did this with was Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, which took nearly two years. L’étranger has taken a single month.

In some ways, Camus is the anti-Proust. Look at their first sentences. Proust’s vast novel opens with his narrator yearning for his mother to come and say goodnight and then, famously, goes on marathons of introspection; Camus’ Meursault doesn’t make a big deal of his relationship with his mother, he resolutely refuses to perform emotions, and in the end pays a significant price for it. Here are their opening sentences:

Proust: Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure. (A long time ago I went to bed early.)

Camus: Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. (Today Mum died.)

It’s not hard to imagine that Camus had Proust’s work in mind, and deliberately did the opposite.

L’étranger is a classic, so I came to it already knowing a version of the plot. Meursault, a white man living in Algeria, shoots an Arab and when put on trial is unable to give a reason for doing it. In the trial much is made of the fact that he didn’t weep or give any sign of emotional upset at his mother’s death just a day earlier, and he is sentenced to death.

What surprised me on actually reading the text is that the murder isn’t completely arbitrary. Somehow I’d got the idea that he just pushes the man off a moving train, but it’s much more complex than that: in fact the shooting is the culmination of a series of encounters.

For me, more shocking than the murder, and more shocking than the fact that Meursault doesn’t weep at his mother’s vigil and funeral, is the way he takes it in his stride when his neighbour brutally beats a woman, and goes on an outing with the neighbour the next day as if nothing has happened.

Meursault’s lack of emotion is mystifying. We don’t like him, or empathise with him, but when his defence lawyer asks the court if he is being condemned to death for killing a man or for not weeping at his mother’s funeral we know that he’s naming something real.

I might have thought this was unrealistic, an existentialist fable, but the memory of Lindy Chamberlain told me otherwise. If not in the courtroom (and that’s debatable), then certainly in the press, she was widely condemned for not having what was deemed an appropriate display of emotion when her baby daughter went missing. Camus would have understood.

In the final moments of the book, when Meursault faces the prospect of the guillotine, he has a conversation with the prison chaplain. After Meursault has monosyllabically rejected the chaplain’s attempts to discuss the after-life, the priest says Meursault has a blind heart, and promises to pray for him. Meursault snaps. His deadpan manner is shattered, and leaping about with rage and joy he declares that nothing matters, that there is no meaning to life. In my reading the key moment comes after the outburst, when calm has been restored:

Comme si cette grande colère m’avait purgé du mal, vidé d’espoir, devant cette nuit chargée de signes et d’étoiles, je m’ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde.
[As if that great burst of anger had purged me of evil, emptied me of hope, faced with this night laden with signs and stars, I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world.]

‘The tender indifference of the world’. The absence of hope does not necessarily produce despair, but an openness to reality. And then, in case we feel that we can welcome Meursault back into the fold of people who behave ‘properly’, his final wish is that there will be a good crowd at his execution who will greet him with cries of hate – that way he will feel less alone.

I have no idea what it would have been like to read this as part of high school French. Would it have vanished from memory as surely as the book we did study, of which I remember only the title, Le drôle. The internet reveals that that is a 1933 children’s book, written by François Mauriac. I suspect that all the two books have in common is that they were written in French by Nobel laureates. Times change, probably for the better.

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Susan Choi’s Flashlight at the Book Club

Posted on 30 Sep 2025 | 5 comments

Susan Choi, Flashlight (Jonathan Cape 2025)

Be warned: the back cover blurb of this novel reveals something that the novel itself only begins to hint at at about the midpoint. Luckily I didn’t read the blurb until after I’d reached that hint – but thanks a lot, Jonathan Cape!

Before the meeting: I’ll avoid spoilers here, and just say the novel becomes something quite different from what you might expect from the first hundred pages or so. But when you go back and reread the start, you find that the writer has played fair. Sharper and better-informed minds than mine may well have understood the broad shape of the story from the beginning.

As in many novels these days, each chapter takes up the story from the point of view of a different character.

There’s Louisa, whom we first meet as an intelligent, uncooperative child in a therapy session: she has lost her father, presumed drowned, a loss that hangs over the whole book.

Seok, Louisa’s father, was born in Japan just before World War 2 to Korean parents. When the war ends he is shocked to discover that he isn’t in fact Japanese. His parents emigrate to North Korea, but he refuses to join them and goes instead to the USA where, now known as Serk, he gets a job at a provincial college, marries, has a daughter (Louisa) and lives as much of the American dream as is allowed to a Korean green card holder in the 1960s and 1970s.

Serk’s white wife, Anne, escapes from the thrall of a charismatic religious leader, garners an education by doing secretarial work for a literary scholar, and marries Serk. She’s dramatically unhappy in the marriage, especially when she accompanies him on a temporary posting in Japan. By the time of his disappearance at the beach, she is almost completely disabled by alienation from Japanese society and what turns out to be multiple sclerosis.

As well as those three main characters, there’s Tobias, Anne’s child by the charismatic religious leader, whom she gave up to be adopted at birth. He comes back into her life as a troubled teenager and continues to play a role over the decades. And one other character, a South Korean named Ji-hoon, has a chapter to himself late in the book.

So it’s a family story, and the family is fractious. Mother and daughter don’t have a single conversation over the decades that remains affectionate or even cordial for more than a minute. Before he disappears, Seok/Serk is abrasive both to his family and to pretty much anyone who tries to get close to him, especially other Koreans. Tobias is charming and kind, but loopy. And, the miracle of it, we like and care about them all as one small family being crushed under the weight of geopolitics.

Page 78* is in one of Serk’s chapters.

A lot is happening on this page. Serk meditates on his connection with his daughter, on her brilliance and creativity. He briefly acknowledges to himself that his bursts of rage are beyond his control.

Only five and six years old when she’d created these things; her mind was always at work, it amazed him. He was trying to make her a present as well, and nights he didn’t feel compelled to leave the house, blown on a gust that he couldn’t control, he worked on the gift in their basement, and entered a rare sort of peace from using only his hands, not his mind.

And he tackles correspondence with his sister Soonja, the only family member who has stayed in Japan. In a typically tangential way the narrative acknowledges the racism in the background of the action that happens in the USA (there is racism in Japan too, similarly backgrounded for the most part).

He had a letter in progress that he extracted, as well as the series of received letters. It bothered him that their glaringly foreign airmail sheets, outweighed by their numerous conspicuous stamps, arrived so often at his office, despite such exoticism being, as he knew, almost expected of him, as the only foreigner on the permanent teaching staff. That he was using his college letterhead and not an airmail sheet himself was pure vanity for which he’d pay with the stamps.

Then we are shown a little of the content of the correspondence. Here, late at night and alone, he is able to engage with his Korean life, of which his US family and colleagues are completely unaware.

Running his eyes over his characters, he read, where he’d left off, ‘I cannot even begin to consider this without having confirmation in hand,’ and then he had to go back to the most recent letter to refamiliarise himself with Soonja’s latest equivocation. Or perhaps it was confusion, or ill-founded conviction, or just a function of her wretched written Japanese, arrested at the level of a child; she’d never had a scientific mind in the first place, her emotionalism often caused her to misrepresent supposition as fact, and being obliged to write him in her poor Japanese because his written Korean was undeniably worse likely added resentment to the other counterfactual tendencies in her personality; they might have last seen each other almost twenty years before, but he was still her elder brother. He still remembered all her shortcomings.

‘The permits are certain, the time is not certain, it cannot be made certain until you because for just a short length so you are the problem as I said in my letter before. Should I tell our parents you say NO?’

If that doesn’t make sense to you out of context, be reassured. It’s close to incomprehensible when you do have the full context. Later, Serk meets up with Soonja in person, but we never get a clear idea of what she is asking of him. What we know is that Seok, now Serk, feels a tremendous gravitational pull of eldest-son responsibility for his family, and that he resists this pull. We can’t tell what it is that they want from him. Around about this page, I started to wonder if he didn’t drown a year or so after this scene, but somehow deserted his beloved Louisa to go to North Korea. (That’s not a spoiler, I’m not saying if I was right, just that there’s a growing sense of unease about what happened.)

After the meeting: We all enjoyed this novel. Its acknowledgements list fifteen books about Koreans in Japan and the historical events that impinge on Serk and his families. Some of us had never heard of these events (I’m in that group). Others knew of them, and so weren’t completely surprised by the revelation that arrives soon after the halfway mark. One person thought they were urban myths but she was reassured when we looked up Wikipedia.

The discussion brought to light a feature of the book that I hadn’t focused on: many narrative strands are simply not resolved. For instance, there is one other Asian staff member at Serk’s college, known as Tom. He is also Korean, though Serk does his best to keep him at arm’s length and at one stage has a blazing row with him when he believes, wrongly, that he is a North Korean sympathiser. Tom disappears and soon after so does his distraught wife. We never learn what happened to them. For another instance, Louisa as a young adult marries a young man she meets on a bus – he is unwashed and smelly, and we understand that she finds this comforting because in that way he is similar to her older half-brother Tobias who was kind to her after Serk’s disappearance. She marries him, and then he pretty much disappears from the story except as an offstage character – wealthy, entitled and abusive (though we don’t learn any details). Another: when she’s old and living as a grumpy isolate in a community of old people, Anne develops a relationship with a man named Walter. The beginnings of this connection are beautifully realised as Walter is cheerfully unfazed by Anne’s prickliness. But then, as years pass with the turn of a page, he’s not there any more. As someone pointed out, given that the book’s central event is a disappearance, it’s only right that there are many subsidiary vanishings.

Perhaps related to that, one person felt that the shift of narrative focus with each new chapter was frustrating. Balls were left in the air and by the time we came back to that person the balls had landed and the person’s life had moved on. I certainly felt a kind of whiplash, especially in the final third, when time passes quickly, but I wasn’t frustrated so much as energised.

We discussed this book along with Michelle Johnston’s The Revisionists. Both books deal with significant historical events of the past half century. Reading The Revisionists I felt like a FIFO western observer. Flashlight is more like a deeply intimate conversation.

The group met on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where I have also written this blog post. I was born on MaMu land, and spent formative years on the Gundungurra and D’harawal land. I acknowledge Elders past and present of all those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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

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Michelle Johnston’s Revisionists and the Book Club

Posted on 28 Sep 2025 | 3 comments

Michelle Johnston, The Revisionists (Fourth Estate 2025)

Before the meeting: Michelle Johnston’s day job is in emergency medicine. According to a 2023 interview on ABC Perth, she had written a draft of this novel when she decided that she had to go to Dagestan, a small republic in south of Russia where most of the novel’s action takes place, because ‘if you’re going to write somebody else’s story, you’ve got to respect it by going there and trying to understand it from the ground level up’. It was risky – DFAT advised against going and the Smart Traveller website warned of possible terrorist attacks – but she went out of dedication to the integrity of her writing, and in fact ‘had the most beautiful trip’.

The novel’s main character, Christine Campbell, doesn’t have such a beautiful trip, though the book captures the physical beauty of the place and the wonderful hospitality of its people. Christine is a journalist. Disenchanted with what Western Australia has to offer including an implausible level of sexism in Perth’s newsroom, she decides to travel to Dagestan to join Frankie, her best friend from schooldays who is a doctor working in a clinic in a tiny village there. Christine is there to help – she organises supplies and teaches first aid to local women – but she harbours an ambition to publish a groundbreaking piece of journalism about the possible outbreak of war.

It’s an odd set-up. We know from the beginning that Christine’s ambitions outstrip her abilities, and that her journalistic ethics are shaky. She intuits that the women of the village know that war is coming, but she can’t get them to say it outright. In fact everyone knows there’s a serious risk of war. It’s 1999: the war in neighbouring Chechnya ended in 1996, armed Islamist groups are forming everywhere, Russia is determined to fight them off, and the place, as Christine keeps saying, is a ‘tinderbox’. But she’s determined to write a feminist-leaning piece in which she gives voice to the women of the village saying what she just knows they would say if only they would say it. Her article will be titled ‘The Cassandras of the Caucasus’, because she believes the classical allusion will lend it class. (And the samples we see of her over-egged writing are consonant with that kind of thinking.) Frankie hints that she might expose the women to the danger of reprisals. She meets a famous journalist who gives her some Journalism 101 advice that seems to be news to her: if you’re out to get information from people, tell them up front that you’re a journalist.

The book opens in Manhattan 25 years later, in 2023, with Christine watching a TV documentary about herself and the one article that made her famous. A little later, Frankie turns up at her door, and challenges her about the untruths she told in the documentary and in the famous article. As the book proceeds, alternating between the two time periods, we learn the full story of how the article came to be written, and the fate of the Dagestan village. Revelation follows revelation. Christine’s ethics are a lot worse than shaky.

The book tackles important subjects: journalist ethics, the nature of memory, the role of ‘helpful’ but insensitive Westerners, the question of who owns a story. There’s a strong sense of place, not only in the austere beauty of Dagestan, but also in London where Christine and her friends have a brief respite, and Manhattan where she spends more than two decades in guilt, luxury and inertia.There’s a tumultuous affair with a man that we know is up to something, and a painfully real portrait of an unhappy marriage

On the strength of all that, you’d think I would have been engrossed. But I struggled with it, and it’s not easy to say why. It turns out that a close-ish look at page 78* suggests a possible reason.

Sarija is a teacher of English from a nearby village who has attended Christine’s first-aid classes, and even acted as her assistant. Here, the two women are chatting, leaning against the dusty haunches of Sarija’s horse. Sarija suggests that Christine might visit her village to talk to her students about writing:

‘You can ride on the back of my horse.’
‘I’d love that,’ Christine tells Sarija. She imagines cantering over mountain passes and through villages, swooping up stories and interviews as though she were playing investigative polo.

This is an example of many similar moments. I would have said it hits a false note: why would Christine, formerly Crystal from the WA wheat belt, think of polo? Surely the forced simile is an awkward writerly intrusion? On rereading, I see it differently. What’s happening is that the narrative voice, while technically telling the story from Christine’s point of view, looking over her shoulder as it were, actually undermines her, mocks her as callow, exploitative, self-serving, in effect accusing Christine of thinking of her journalistic quest as a jolly sporting venture.

There are more examples even in this one page of dialogue.

‘They say you ask a lot of questions,’ Sarija says.
‘It’s what journalists do,’ Christine replies. ‘And, since we’re talking, I’d be interested to know how the conflicts around here have affected you and your family.’

This is a woman who has been uncomplainingly lugging boxes around the clinic, winning the trust of the local women as she teaches them first aid. As soon as she thinks of herself as a journalist she becomes patronising (‘It’s what journalists do’) and would-be exploitative (‘Since we’re talking…’).

Sarija opens up to her anyway. Again, Christine makes a small gesture of sympathy, but her mind goes to the juicy turn of phrase:

It is hard to imagine the violence in that one image. A brother as a human bullet.

‘I want to tell your story. Don’t you want somebody to account for the atrocities? For the rest of the world to know?’
Sarija continues to shake her head while she responds. ‘The rest of the world is not interested. They are too busy with their own savagery. Our story is buried now. But, Christine, you need to know this: you don’t find answers here by asking questions.’ She pauses. ‘You find the answers by being quiet.’

To which this reader, led by the narrative voice, wants to shout, ‘Yair, Christine. Be quiet.’

Later, when Christine is frustrated at the lack of usable quotes from the women, she thinks back to this conversation and sees Sarija as her likeliest source of good copy. There may be some truth to this portrait of journalism in the field, but when she’s being a journalist Christine is almost completely unlikeable. Later, when she manages an interview with a self-styled warlord, she castigates herself for doing something terrible with what she has been told. The narrative voice holds back from condemning her, so even when she’s hard on herself, she is seen to be missing the point. She does commit one major journalistic sin, and in that case goes from self-deception about the gravity of her offence to wallowing in shame and remorse.

Though Christine goes on to make amends in some respects, I get the impression that Michelle Johnston doesn’t like her main character – and that makes a book hard to read.

Other people like this book a lot more than I do. Lisa Hill’s review is definitely worth reading.

Just before the meeting: We read two books at each meeting of the Book Club. The Revisionists was paired with Susan Choi’s Flashlight, and the comparison wasn’t kind to The Revisionists. For just one thing, both books deal with terrible historical events. In her acknowledgements, Susan Choi lists fifteen books of fiction and non-fiction about her subject so the reader can check how closely her fiction sticks to known facts. Michelle Johnston tells us nothing about her sources. This might not have mattered, but when there is an unreliable central character, it would be good to know if two atrocities in particular were invented for the horror of it or were documented events.

After the meeting: We were pretty unanimous in not caring for this book. Not everyone agreed that the author didn’t like her central character – what I saw as criticism of her as callow and exploitative, others saw as ironic highlighting of her naivety. But none of us much liked her anyway. One person went so far as to say the book shouldn’t have been published. Someone who has visited New York City quite a lot was exasperated that when Christine decides to sell a Rothko that has come into her possession, she takes it to a local gallery. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘if you have a Rothko to sell you go uptown to Christie’s or Sotheby’s.’ Rookie error, I guess.

We pondered the meaning of the book’s title. Perhaps it refers to the way Christine altered some key facts in her famous article. Perhaps it highlights an otherwise inconsequential moment in the last pages when Frankie and Christine realise they have completely different memories of how Christine came to be in Dagestan. We also pondered the meaning of the cover image: two women in profile, both with the abstracted air of models. None of us could see how it related to the actual novel.

On the other hand we had culturally eclectic creations from Tokyo Lamington for dessert, and Flashlight (blog post to come) is an excellent book that provoked interesting conversation.

The group met on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where I have also written this blog post. The days are getting longer, and warmer, and I’ve been encountering a beautiful, satiny crow near my home. I acknowledge Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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

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