Tag Archives: Novel

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

Posted on 26 Aug 2026 | 1 comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once Peyman has gone, the composure breaks:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the meeting:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ann Patchett’s Whistler at the Book Club

Posted on 25 Aug 2026 | Leave a comment

Ann Patchett, Whistler (Bloomsbury 2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye and the book clubs

Posted on 20 Jul 2026 | 6 comments

Amitav Ghosh, Ghost-Eye (John Murray Publishers 2026)

Before the meetings: I loved Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy – Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire (links are to my blog posts) for their exuberant language, their array of brilliant characters and their remorseless portrayal of British colonialism.

Ghost-Eye is a very different animal. It’s set in the recent past and present. Its characters live mainly in urban India and Brooklyn, with excursions to a remote village in the Sundarbans in the Ganges Delta. The main action involves westernised characters coming to terms with a case of reincarnation that is gradually revealed to be something even more challenging to Western ways of thought. The academics who take the incursions from the ‘other reality’ seriously are described as being ‘woowoo’, but the book – in my reading at least – asks us to take them seriously as an alternative to the western culture’s extractive, reductive, and now catastrophic dealings with the natural world.

I found the book didactic, plodding, and often incoherent. I was unconvinced by the characters. Where in previous books Ghosh’s play with language has thrilled me, the one distinctive use of language in this book is an irritating attempt at a hip young person’s dialogue.

It turns out that page 79* is a good place from which to launch a description of the book as a whole:

Four of the book’s main characters appear here.

Varsha, the subject of conversation, is the book’s central phenomenon. The book begins in 1969, when she is a three-year-old living in an extravagantly wealthy, strictly vegetarian family in Calcutta. One day, to her parents’ consternation, she asks for fish and refuses to eat anything else. Fish has never been in their house, and none of the servants would ever dare to break the rigid prohibition. A doctor is called in, and after spending time with Varsha, decides that this is a job for his wife, a psychologist who has dealt with ‘several cases of this type’ – that is, he explains, children who remember past lives. End chapter one.

Back to page 79: Monty is that doctor. In spite of being the one who first broached the subject of past lives, he is the book’s main voice of ineffectual scepticism. Shoma is his wife. She has done a lot of research into ‘cases of the reincarnation type’ in collaboration with a professor from the University of Virginia, and she has conducted tests with Varsha that convince her she really does remember a past life.

The other character named on this page is Dev, a refugee from Burma who is a servant in the household.

After a long session with Varsha, Shoma has had a vivid dream in which the little girl came to her bedroom and stared at her through the mosquito net. When she wakes up there are three knots in the string binding the net to the bedpost:

‘Shoma!’ said Monty sharply. ‘Of course there are knots in the string. That’s what it’s there for – to hold up the net. It has to be tied, doesn’t it?’
Shoma began to chew her lip. ‘It’s just that when I went into Varsha’s room yesterday, she was playing with a piece of string, tying knots. Her ayah said that she’s been doing that a lot lately.’
‘What does that have to do with our mosquito net?’ said Monty in astonishment. ‘Shoma, get a grip on yourself –’

You can hear the Twilight Zone music playing. Not only can this little girl remember a past life as a fish-eater, but is she also capable of out-of-the-body travel? And wait, there’s more:

Monty was interrupted by a loud thumping on the stairwell door.
He went to see who it was and came back looking puzzled. ‘It was Dev,’ he said. ‘He wanted to know if you were all right.’
Shoma stared at him. ‘You mean he knew I had a nightmare? How is that possible?’
‘Who knows?’ Monty shrugged. ‘Let’s go and sit on the veranda; it’s nice and cool out there.’

Ooooh, here’s something psychic about Dev too!

Out on the veranda, Shoma and Monty labour the point:

‘I just can’t stop thinking about that dream,’ Shoma said, sinking into her easy chair. ‘To be honest, it didn’t even feel like a dream; it was as if Varsha was really there, watching me through the mosquito net.’
‘Now, now, Shoma,’ said Monty. ‘You’re just imagining all this.’

Your mileage may vary, but that reads us pure clunk to me. It comes as no surprise that Varsha does indeed turn out to have amazing supernatural powers, and so does Dev. Towards the end of the book there is a twist in which even more people recover memories of past lives and discover that reality is much richer, more mysterious and full of possibility than their limited western mindset has allowed them to understand. And in this discovery lies the possibility of averting the climate crisis. To which I say, Bollocks!

There’s a lot of power in the proposition that Indigenous knowledge and ways of understanding the world will be crucial in dealing with climate change. But to conflate Indigenous knowledge with acceptance of the literal reality of reincarnation, mind-reading, astral travel and a string of other paranormal phenomena, as this book does, is a travesty. It may be that the book and I just got off on the wrong foot and I couldn’t recover. Maybe it’s meant to be just a bit of fun and I’ve misread its tone completely. It’s being read by both my groups – the BookGroup and the Book Club – so I hope to hear from people it worked for.

Back to page 79:

Outside, as happened every day at dawn, municipal workers were washing the street with hosepipes, and in the distance, across the lake, vultures were slowly taking wing, rising into the sky, one by one, on an upwelling early-morning thermal.
Monty, meanwhile, was leaning over the veranda’s balustrade, waiting for the newspaper boy to throw up the two dailies, English and Bangla, that were delivered to them every day, both rolled into stiff batons and secured with strings made of coconut husk. Monty liked to think that if he succeeded in catching even one of the papers in mid-air, the day would be off to a good start. As for the occasions when he caught both, he would radiate good cheer all day.

This paragraph reminds me that the book has its pleasures, including a vivid evocation of places, but especially the Indian ones. This is middle-class Calcutta in the 1960s, where vultures catch thermals and newspapers are delivered daily. You have to love the detail of that coconut-husk string. And neither Monty nor I feel any need to reconcile his moment of idiosyncratic superstition with a hard, logical view of the world.

The Book Club meeting: I was the only one who had trouble with the book’s preternatural elements. Everyone else enjoyed the yarn, some as pure fantasy, at least one as playfully challenging reductive materialism. I’m left with the odd sense that I’ve misread the book, but can’t undo that reading.

Ghost-Eye was one of three books discussed at the Book Club. It will also be discussed at the Book Group‘s next meeting, which I will not be able to attend. If I glean any further insights from reports of that meeting, I’ll add a note here.

The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on Gadigal land, and I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

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

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Michael Winkler’s Griefdogg at the Book Group

Posted on 17 Jun 2026 | 4 comments

Michael Winkler, Griefdogg (Text Publishing 2026)

Before the meeting: Many smart, thoughtful people with excellent taste love this book, so don’t take too much notice of me when I say I found it irritating, chaotic, self-indulgent, contrived, box-ticking and maybe just a little bit culturally appropriating. Also the back cover blurb gives away the two shoe drops that I didn’t know I was waiting for.

I kept reading after the first couple of pages out of devotion to the Book Group, and resolved to hold my tongue at the meeting so as to glean what other people love about the book.

My usual practice of looking at page 79 (my age) would just lead to a lot of grumpy exclamations, which would add nothing to the sum total of human knowledge, so I’ll refrain.

I did have an unexpected stab of pleasure on page 141. The narrator is indulging in one of many digressions on environmental issues, and moves on from fracking and mining to ‘the mindless introduction of pests and weeds’:

Who decided to introduce buffel grass in the 1950s? Names should be named. It is on the public record that government entomologist Reginald Mungomery was the first to bring in cane toads. Thomas Austin, the wealthy buffoon, is credited with setting loose thirteen rabbits imported from England at Winchelsea in 1859. I know a man who knows the names of the brothers who released the Boolarra strain of European carp in pondage near Merbein in 1964, after which they swam into the Murray River and wrecked the ecology forever. Induct them all into a hall of shame for ecological and waterway degradation. Let us piff rotten fruit at them.

Reg Mungomery was a relative of mine, a cousin several times removed. He visited us once when I was a child. He wasn’t proud of the cane toads. I’m thrilled enough when the town I come from is mentioned in Literature. But this is actually a Family Member! I almost decided to like the book. But only almost.

I expect I’ll look like an idiot when it’s shortlisted for every pretigious award.

The meeting; I didn’t manage to hold my tongue, partly because I’d said something blunt on the pre-meeting WhatsApp chat. Once we’d sat down to our usual excellent bring-something dinner and canvassed the state of architecture in Sydney (are developers running the show or are they weeping with frustration?), theatre (David Wenham is brilliant in An Iliad), they made me vent my spleen. Reluctantly at first but increasingly enjoying myself I complied. I happened to be sitting at one end of the table. Then, brilliantly, the man sitting at the other end spoke eloquently and at length about why he loved the book. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a conversation more.

I’m a firm believer that the perspective of someone who loves a book will be more interesting than that of a hater, so I’ll try to summarise what the lover said – and refrain from verbalising my different take.

In the previous week, he had started on a number of books that adhere to contemporary norms (a number of points of view presented turn by turn, etc.), and couldn’t finish any of them. He picked up Griefdogg and was delighted from the start that he didn’t know what was happening or where it was going. It felt like a brave book. It’s messy, throws a lot of stuff into the mix and sometimes it doesn’t work, but how much better to have something that tries and occasionally fails than something that plays safe the whole time.

Specifically, he loved the masculinity theme. There’s a sex scene near the start that makes comedy from a focus on performance, and the main plot line asks what happens if you radically reject the expectation that men will be over-responsible and over-worked.

The treatment of place is brilliant: Mildura as a small rural community where everyone knows everyone’s business, but everyone has secret griefs. At one point the main character’s adult child comes home from a time in Melbourne and names the way the city is ignorant and uncaring about rural realities – the book as a whole addresses that ignorance.

There’s a lot of hydrology, much of it highly technical, which provides a metaphorical underpinning.

Towards the end the main character creates a piece of public art, which my Book Group friend described in wonderful lyrical language.

The respectful treatment of Aboriginal issues in a book with only one peripheral Aboriginal character is impressive. In particular there’s a dig at urban pieties that turn out to be lethally uncaring when push comes to shove

As I was typing this, I received a text that began ‘A last ditch attempt to influence your blog.’ I’d love to quote the whole text, but I want to avoid spoilers (and if you want to avoid them, don’t read the back cover blurb). I’ll just quote this:

We have a new male hero created from a vey different story arc. A sometimes clumsy and overwritten one, but one that places the man’s newfound awareness squarely and beneficially in his community.

There were six of us, and we were pretty evenly divided. Of the two non-finishers, one had tried a number of times and failed to get enough traction to take him past the 7 percent mark. The other was still partway through the first of the three sections and quite enjoying it. Of the other two, one liked the book, and particularly found the ending wonderful (I can’t hold back completely – I loathed the ending, even more after he said why he loved it). The other was pretty much in my camp. He compared it to the work of theatre directors like Barry Kotsky – always drawing attention to themselves rather than to the work: it needed a couple more revisions, he said.

There were some points of agreement. We all enjoyed the high-quality dad jokes that are scattered through the text. A favourite was: ‘Why did the chicken cross the Möbius strip?’ You can find the answer on the interwebs.

A final thought: I’ve recently listened to Zac Seidler talking to Richard Fidler on ABC’s Conversations (you can hear it at this link). He talks about the limited opportunities in our society for men to talk about meaningful things. It made me realise all over again what a terrific thing this Book Group is.

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

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Reading with the Grandies 36: Tui T. Sutherland’s darkstalker, the graphic novel

Posted on 9 Jun 2026 | Leave a comment

Tui T. Sutherland, Darkstalker: The Graphic Novel (adapted by Barry Deutsch & Rachel Swirsky, art by Jake Parker, colorist Maarta Laiho, Graphix Press 2025)

Tui T. Sutherland’s Wings of Fire series continues to dominate my granddaughter’s reading. When I asked her about a character in The Lost Continent, the second book in the series I’ve read, she handed me the comics version of Darkstalker, a stand-alone novel, saying that it would explain the background. She was right.

The action of Darkstalker takes place two thousand years before the main series. It answers my questions about the nature of Clearsight, the dragon venerated almost as a god in The Lost Continent. I’m guessing from its final image that the character Darkstalker emerges as a major villain in the series. This is his origin story: a tale of love and ambition, of good intentions leading to terrible deeds, of epic battles and bloody assassinations. It includes a scene that resembles the Blood Wedding from Game of Thrones. There’s a magical device that could be a satirical take on Donald Trump’s golden dome. At the heart of the narrative are challenging ethical issues.

For what it’s worth, I would recommend the prose novels rather than the comics. I found the art in this book generally unattractive compared to that in The Lost Prophecy (different artist, same colorist). To my eye, the many characters aren’t different enough from each other – I suppose there’s only so much you can do with dragon faces and bodies. But the story is gripping, and ends in a satisfying cliffhanger.

Page 79* illustrates both my dissatisfaction with the art and my enjoyment of the complexity:

These two characters are Darkstalker (on the left, with crooked horns) and Clearsight. They are both animuses (or is it animi? a question raised by the characters, not me), that is to say, they both have magical powers. [Ny granddaughter has read this and informs me that Clearsight is actually NOT an animus.] Clearsight is a seer, who can see many versions of the future with remarkable clarity, and is acutely aware that a decision made in the present determines which of many futures will come to pass. Darkstalker has the most powerful magic of any living dragon. They have just met for the first time, though because of their remarkable powers it’s as if they know each other intimately from their intense future relationship. On page 77 Darkstalker takes one of Clearsight’s claws/hands in his, and page 78 shows us the kaleidoscopic visions this produces in her mind – a smattering of blood, images of grief, tenderness, pride, a scroll and a bracelet whose meaning will be made clear later …

On this page, we realise that Darkstalker has not seen the visions, and he promises in gentlemanly manner that he will never read Clearsight’s mind. Only then do they introduce themselves. Clearsight can say her name is Tailbite because she knows that he knows that she knows he was expecting her. It’s love at first sight, but that sight has been preceded by detailed visions of each other. Clearsight’s thought bubbles in the final frame might be read as expressing pure romantic love, but there’s terror there as well: ‘I want to fly away and I want to keep having this conversation for eternity’. This moment of first meeting is filled with joy. But Clearsight knows how many ways and how terribly things could go dark. Well, reader, they do go very dark, and she was right to want to hold onto this moment. People coming to this after reading books in the series published before it will know that already, so the moment is charged with tragic irony.

From the little joke about the plural of animus to the complex play with what the ability to read minds and see the future can do to relationships, this is a book that treats its young readers with respect. The popularity of the series is comforting evidence that young people’s attention spans may not be as monstrously shortened as we some people fear.

Also, I enjoyed this story a lot.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

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

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Maria Reva’s Endling and the book club

Posted on 7 Jun 2026 | Leave a comment

Maria Reva, Endling (Virago 2025)

An endling is the last surviving individual of a species. Famous ones were Benjamin the Tasmanian tiger, and Martha the passenger pigeon. The species facing extinction in Maria Reva’s novel are less impressive than thylacines or pigeons: they are snails. The central character, Yeva, is a Ukrainian woman who has made it her life mission to find individuals from endangered snail species, keep them alive in her laboratory–van, find mates for them, and with any luck release the results of their pairings back into the wild. As other sources of funding have dried up – because who cares about snails going extinct? – she funds her project by joining a ‘romance tour’. Men, mainly from the USA, come to Ukraine in search of wives and a bridal agency rounds up women who are desperate or foolish enough to let themselves be put on offer. Our heroine has no intention of marrying one of the men, but their compulsory gifts have become her source of funding.

The first chapter of Endling is all about the snails – how richly varied in their behaviours, mating habits and generally lifestyles. One snail in particular, whom she names Lefty, has a shell that spirals to the left, severely limiting its chances of finding a mate. Yeva’s snail obsession comes to make complete sense to us. We understand how death after death, extinction after extinction, takes its toll. Yeva sinks into a deep depression and decides to end her life. It’s a grim, compelling stand-alone short story.

But another of the ‘brides’ has also joined the agency with complex ulterior motives. She has a plan to kidnap a hundred of the ‘bachelors’ and expose the horrors of the bride trade, and she wants Yeva’s help. And chapter two sets a whole new direction.

Things proceed pretty much as you would expect: there are obstacles, unexpected changes of plan, oddly comic missteps, and the van full of kidnapped bachelors sets off on some half-arsed plan to expose the marriage trade. Then there’s an explosion. Russia invades Ukraine and the novel comes to a sudden halt. There’s an interim as the author scrambles to get back on her feet. I loved the scrambling, but don’t want to say too much more because the surprise of how the disruption plays out is a big part of the sometimes grim pleasure of the book. I was enjoying the more or less conventional story-telling in the first part of the book, so was relieved that the story does continue, transformed. Lefty survives to play a key role in a climactic scene involving terrible violence, unlikely romance, and what seems to be the author giving instructions to a character over the phone.

Page 79* is all about Pasha, the only one of the ‘bachelors’ to be treated sympathetically. Like Maria Reva, he is Ukrainian-Canadian. His parents were immigrants who did everything they could to assimilate, and part of his motive for coming to Ukraine has been to reclaim his Ukrainian identity. Here he is imagining the woman he wants to meet on the romance tour:

She’d be sitting on the sidelines, in what she thought was her best dress – something comely but plain, like a church smock – hardly distinguishable from the interpreters, and she’d be wondering why she’d come to this glitzy social. She’d feel like she didn’t compare to the svelte femmes fatales, though she was decidedly more beautiful in an unplaceable ethereal way. She’d regret not having put on more makeup, having stayed up the night before finishing a university assignment (some rigorous program) so that the delicate skin under her eyes bore the slightest hint of blue. No, the woman of Pasha’s dreams did not belong on this romance tour any more than Pasha himself did, but they’d both been spurred by the hope of love. They simply did not know what else to do.

We’re being played with there. The woman in Pasha’s hopelessly romantic fantasy is described in a way that could apply to Yeva, and more unlikely matches have occurred in fiction. But everything in my readerly soul rebelled at the thought of Pasha and Yeva pairing up to live happily ever after. At the same time, I so wanted him to find happiness: he’s naive, but his heart is in the right place, and his yearning to be part of Ukraine is genuine. I won’t tell you what happens, but I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that in this book that focuses on a handful of fabulously unconventional female characters, the last couple of pages belong to him.

The meeting: We had three books on our agenda. Along with Endling there was Maria Reva’s Endling and On Not Climbing Mountains by Claire Thomas (see here).

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was, that one person hated this book and one didn’t finish it. They found the disruption of the form self-indulgent and tedious. When I mentioned the passage that Maria Reva had read out at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, which I found hilarious, they screwed up their noses and said that was exactly the kind of thing they hated. One of them liked the snails, but found the romance tours story repetitive and then improbable. Oh well, as my high-school Latin teacher used to say, de gustibus non est disputandum.

The three of us who did enjoy the book, really enjoyed it. One said it was bonkers, a good thing.

One of the unrelated joys of the evening was a reading-aloud of Evelyn Araluen’s poem ‘Acknowledgement of Cuntery’. I will make my acknowledgement anyhow. The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. We met on the beautiful, unceded land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, which is also where I have written this blog post. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

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

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Reading with the Grandies 35: Tui T. Sutherland’s Lost Continent

Posted on 12 May 2026 | 4 comments

Tui T. Sutherland, The Lost Continent (Book Eleven of the Wings of Fire series, Scholastic Press 2019)

My granddaughter is an obsessive reader, possibly even more so that I was at her age. She reads a lot of comics, often called ‘graphic novels’ to claim a vague respectability, but mostly of a kind that I find hard to take or even fake an interest in: baby sitters, schoolgirl politics, etc. But one series that takes a lot of her time, reading and rereading, and then rereading in apparently random order, is Tui T. Sutherland’s Wings of Fire series. First the comic versions and then the original proper-novel versions of the ones that haven’t been made into comics yet.

I did read the first of the Wings of Fire graphic novels, The Dragonet Prophecy, eighteen months ago. Recently when my granddaughter spontaneously offered to lend me The Lost Continent, how could I say no? It’s the eleventh novel in the series but, she said, it is the first in a whole new story arc (not her exact words – she is after all only eight). When I’d finished it she told me that her reason for letting me read it was that she wanted someone to talk to about the world of the novels. My motive for accepting was to be a decent grandfather and provide her with some company in her reading life.

Virtuous motivation aside, I have to report that I loved this book and am tempted to sign up for the rest of the series. In a prologue, a dragon called Clearsight arrives on a continent that’s far from her home. Chapter One takes up the story two thousand years later when Clearsight is revered as a prophet who is responsible for all that is good in the society. There are three main tribes of dragons on this continent: SilkWings, HiveWings and LeafWings. There has been a huge war. According to the official account, the vicious LeafWings were wiped out by heroic HiveWings (with a red flag to readers of all ages: trees were also wiped out). The SilkWings, forever indebted to their saviours, are pretty much a slave species. Ruling the whole society is Queen Wasp.

Blue, the main character, is a young SilkWing whose wings haven’t come in yet. He believes that all is well. He accepts as simple facts of life that he and his kind have to pass through checkpoints constantly and must never meet the eyes of a HiveWing. But when his older sister Luna’s butterfly-like metamorphosis is brutally interrupted by HiveWing soldiers he has a rude awakening, the seeds of a revolutionary spirit are sown, and adventures ensue.

(Yes, there are words like metamorphosis. Also inexorable. This series doesn’t insult its readers’ intelligence.)

On page 79* Blue has hidden from a host of HiveWings and has met someone we know from the first moment will be the love of his life, a HiveWing named Cricket. Where all the others of her kind can be mind-controlled by Queen Wasp (who Blue now realises is not a benevolent ruler), Cricket somehow remains untouched, and she has helped him to hide in the hive’s library. At the start of this page she wakes him from an exhausted sleep.

What can I say about this? The story rattles along. We never forget that the characters are dragons (‘the sound of tramping talons’, ‘his tail seemed to be entirely in the way’, she ‘put one claw to her mouth in warning’). The queen’s mind-control is vividly, and creepily, conveyed in the image of eyes as ‘blank white pearls’.

As far as I can tell from a quick web search, the books have been extremely popular and, in spite of fostering discussion of subjects including vegetarianism, pacifism, slavery, authoritarian modes of government, internalised oppression, they don’t seem to have fallen foul of book-banners. Maybe it’s because it’s only dragons.

I don’t plan to go back to the previous 10 books, but my granddaughter has lent me the comic version of Darkstalker, a stand-alone that gives some of the back story. Both duty and desire urge me to read it.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers of the blog.

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

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Niall Williams, The Fall of Light and the Book Group

Posted on 6 May 2026 | 4 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still on page 79:

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

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

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

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

We had a terrific discussion of the book.

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

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

Someone pointed out that it’s a book about men, that the women aren’t fully developed characters. (This observation casts an interesting light on the midwife’s joke I quoted above – the character’s assumption that a baby is a sly indication that the narration knows its male-centredness leaves out a lot.)

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

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

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

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

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

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On the road in dark Yorkshire with J. M. Dalgliesh

Posted on 27 Apr 2026 | Leave a comment

J. M. Dalgliesh, Divided House and Blacklight (both independently published 2018), 2019 audiobook narrated by Greg Patmore

On long car trips, I used to read while the not-yet–Emerging Artist drove. Now, my vocal cords have lost stamina, we have fallen back on audiobooks. For our recent trip to Brisbane, we picked the first instalment of the Dark Yorkshire series – three novels in all. We managed to listen to two of them. We were under the vague impression that we were about to listen to some P. D. James novels featuring her detective Adam Dalgleish. We were wrong.

J. M. (not Adam) Dalgliesh is evidently one of the top ten best-selling authors on Amazon, and Dark Yorkshire was his first, extremely popular series.

In the first book, Divided House, Detective Inspector Nathaniel Caslin has to deal with dead bodies, a cyber-pornography set-up, corrupt colleagues, distrust from his superiors based on past honourable rule-bending, a curmudgeonly inability to deal with digital media (which makes it a surprise to learn he is only in his thirties), a marriage that is falling apart, and all the tropes of a good crime thriller.

This is the kind of storytelling that is consumed rather than engaged with in any reciprocal way. These days I consume it almost exclusively on screen, and mostly the small screen.

The plot is a bit too convoluted for my travel-weary attention span. Award-winning narrator Greg Patmore does a fine job for the most part, though I would have preferred that he didn’t try so hard to give each of the many characters a different voice, especially the women. It seemed that he was focusing on the women characters’ femininity at the expense of other qualities, by speaking in almost-falsetto. I occasionally had to remind myself that the woman character Caslin finds himself attracted to isn’t written as trans – she just sounds that way.

Caslin is also the hero of the second book, Blacklight. This time he’s dealing with a serial killer, and/or MI5. Not my favourite story type. But he does have a female partner, and once I accepted Greg Patmore’s version of a woman policeman’s voice, her bristly relationship with Caslin added some humour to proceedings.

J. M. Dalgliesh’s website has this to say about his books:

Penned in the style of crime thrillers with a touch of Scandinavian noir, readers who enjoy dark atmospheric mysteries will find his books a must-read.

If you can ignore the image of penned readers conjured up by the syntax of that quote, then these books may be for you.

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Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know at the Book Club

Posted on 30 Mar 2026 | Leave a comment

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know (Jonathan Cape 2025)

Before the meeting: I heard Ian McEwan talking about this novel on David Runciman’s Past Present Future podcast a while back (at this link). Well, not so much about this novel as about what it’s like to be contemplating one’s own death at a time when the future of the world as we know it is in doubt. How will the people of the future regard us who were alive at this critical moment in human history? That question, he said, was the genesis of the novel.

What We Can Know is set in Britain long after our time, which is known in that future as the Derangement. In 2042 there has been an Inundation caused by the melting ice caps, and a nuclear winter created by international war has put an end to global warming. Britain is now an archipelago. North America is the domain of lawless warlords. Nigeria has become the preserver of electronic connectivity. Life is simpler and more difficult, but there are still academics, and there is a vast trove of records preserved from our time.

The central characters of the novel specialise in the literature of a period that overlaps our present moment. Their students revolt, seeing such studies as irrelevant to the needs of the times, and regarding literature produced by the generations who allowed such catastrophic events as beneath contempt.

That all works well. The physical environment is always interesting, even for a reader like me who has little knowledge of British geography, and so can’t appreciate the specifics of boat trips from island to island. However, I was far from engrossed by the central narrative thread, which concerns the main character’s search for a long lost poem, written in 2014 but never published. He hunts through the vast reservoir of data, and pieces together a picture of the dinner party when a distinguished poet read the poem aloud and presented it to his wife on a vellum scroll tied up with a bow. The story is told and retold from many points of view, becoming in my experience increasingly tedious, until there is a final telling that may amount to a revelation, but by that time I was well beyond caring.

Page 79*, taken in isolation, isn’t much to write home about, though it’s a nice example of the novel’s intertextuality. It’s a summary of part of an actual book published in 1985, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes, which has a minimalist Wikipedia page at this link.

Among its many treasures is an account of a journey on foot the eighteen-year-old Holmes took in the Cévennes, southern France, tracking the same route taken by his hero, his ‘friend’, Robert Louis Stevenson a hundred years before. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes was Holmes’s bible. He stopped in the same villages as Stevenson, tried to keep to his exact route on the old country tracks and slept like him in the open, ‘à la belle étoile‘. As he walked, he constantly referred to his copy of Stevenson’s book. In the early 1960s, the last remnants of the ancient French peasantry hung on in the rural fastness of La France Profonde.

And so on. I was interested enough in the description of Holmes’s book because I’d enjoyed the 2020 film Antoinette dans les Cévennes, which also traces the route taken by the young Robert Louis Stevenson in the 1870s.

You won’t be surprised to learn that the passage’s context makes it something more than a schoolboy summary. The narrator had come across Holmes’s book when he was a 22 year old student who hadn’t yet settled on a subject for his doctorate. He had ‘eased the hundred-year-old hardback from its shelf’ as a delicate remnant from a past era, and tells us about it now because it contains one of the ‘most exquisitely evoked descriptions’ of a longing for ‘what was never known and is lost’ – the emotion that is the central driver of his academic research and of his quest as narrated in the first half of this book. The world before one was born in what was never known, and its loss is intensified for those who live after the Inundation

Most of page 79 leads up to that ‘exquisitely evoked description’. Then, at the bottom of the page, Holmes is standing at a bridge in the village of Langogne in a semi-hallucinatory state hoping that Stevenson, long dead, would soon be arriving:

Then he saw, fifty yards downstream, picked out against the fading gleam of the western sky, the old ruined bridge into town, the one his dear Stevenson would have crossed. Holmes was bereft, close to tears. ‘There was no way of following him, no way of meeting him. His bridge was down. It was beyond my reach over time, and this ruin was the true, sad sign.’

The narrator draws out the meaning of this:

The collapsed bridge downstream and the man crossing it a hundred years before represent the past from which I too am excluded, the past that from here seems whole and precious, when many of humanity’s problems could have been solved.

But, though Stevenson’s bridge was down, the country he had walked was substantially unchanged in Holmes’s time. In the narrator’s present time, all that land is lost, under water.

And that is the chord that vibrates through the novel. I the reader am living in the time that the character sees as ‘whole and precious’. Logically I can see that the book should have me on an edge – a prolonged moment of appreciating the world I live in, preemptively mourning its loss, and resolving to do what I can to protect and defend it. Whether the failure is mine or the novel’s, it didn’t have that effect on me.

When – spoiler alert – the second half of the novel has a different narrator, in a different time period, that driving emotion fades into a distant background, and the book, in my opinion, becomes a much more commonplace affair.

The meeting: We read What We Can Know in tandem with Carys Davies’s Clear. Like that book, it evoked widely divergent responses. In this case I was the Most Negative, and she who had been Most Negative for Clear enjoyed this one as a satisfying holiday read.

For some the world-building amounted to thinly disguised lecturing about climate change. Others felt there wasn’t enough of it – and I guess I’m in that camp: I would happily have stayed in that future, wandering beyond the confines of university scholarly life. Where my engagement as a reader was fading by the end of the first part and died irretrievably when the narrator and time frame changed, that was where others felt the book finally came alive. I think there were two people (out of five) who were there for both parts. (My interest had died to such an extent that I had to be reminded of the key revelation in the second part.)

I think the key thing that worked for others and not for me is announced in the book’s title. Appropriately enough, the title is hard to remember: I keep misremembering it as ‘All We Can Know’ or ‘All That You Know’ and I keep thinking of Keats – ‘That is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.’ So What We Can Know: the book is about knowledge, specifically historical knowledge. The academics of the future can sift through the mountains of detailed electronic and other documentation of our times but what goes unrecorded will remain unknown, and if the records of significant truth aren’t found then that truth remains unknown.

I’m sailing very close to spoilerish now, but the book’s central search for a lost poem, reputedly a masterpiece, turns out to be wrong-headed. A different document, found thanks to ingenious deciphering of clues in the archive, transforms the meaning of events as they were known up to that point. For some readers, perhaps for most, this is deeply satisfying. It might, I concede ruefully, be a matter of attention span.

The Book Club’s five members are all of settler heritage. Our combined ages add up to many more years than have passed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British Crown. We met on Gadigal land, and I wrote the blog post on Wangal and Gadigal land. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present who have cared for this beautiful country for millennia, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

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

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