Tag Archives: Novel

Omar Musa’s Fierceland and the Book Club

Posted on 12 Oct 2026 | 9 comments

Omar Musa, Fierceland (Penguin 2025)

Before the meeting: This is a fabulously ambitious novel.

Two children in a village in Sabah in northern Borneo are taken into the forest by their father on an excursion that turns out to be the beginning of his ruthless acquisition of ever-increasing areas of jungle to turn them into ecologically disastrous palm oil plantations. While there, the children witness brutally murderous treatment of an Indigenous man whom they have come to love. The rest of their lives is dominated by that experience, and by their troubled relationship with a father who represents the worst of rapacious, extractive capitalism.

Omar Musa is a brilliant spoken-word performer (see the YouTube below where he is accompanied on cello by his wife, Muriel Roberts Musa). The novel, his second, is not confined to a naturalistic mode of storytelling. In its opening pages the forest speaks, and the language cries out to be read aloud, even chanted. Here’s a taste:

mud-gravy & gizzard stones, steeple my long luminous bones & carnal green – the unseen seen – green is God naming itself, green is the sprawl, rot & fern-tickle of time – my steaming velvet a sprung floor for trickster tango – orang, hutan, orangutan, mousedeer, leopard, vampire ghost – black loam & clay blue-grey, sequinned by skulls, I wear my sapblooded heart on sleeve

The forest has further chapters, but as the palm-oil plantations spread, it has less to say and becomes less exuberant, until its final utterance is just a few plaintive words.

The main story unfolds in alternate chapters focusing on the two children, Rozana (known as Roz) and Harun – first in 1998 when they witness the terrible violence, then over the decades as they live with the privilege that comes from their father’s enormous wealth. They are sent to separate boarding schools in Sydney, where Roz, after a troubled adolescence, becomes an unsuccessful artist (and there is some finely honed satire of artists exploiting their diasporic status). Harun makes a mint from a virtual reality forest creation in Los Angeles. They return to their tiny village in 2018 when their father dies, and they inherit enormous wealth – unfairly distributed between them, but enormous all the same. They have both come to understand the devastation that their father has caused to the environment and Indigenous people, and the inheritance brings their ethical dilemma into focus.

The story is enriched by historical excursions – into 19th century Venetian glass-making, the beginnings of Malaysia’s palm-oil industry in a trade visit to Nigeria in the 1970s, tables as emblematic of colonisation. There are elements of what I’ll risk calling magical realism: mainly figures from Malaysian folklore like the vengeful female ghost, the pontianak. A character known affectionately as Crazy Auntie, a poet living in exile in Sydney, is the voice of reason – speaking against extractive capitalism. Roz’s redemption as an artist comes when she creates an installation based on Crazy Auntie’s poem, ‘The Song of the Wood’, translated into the more than 50 languages of Sabah: the book gives us 15 versions of the poem, printed in white on a mildly decorated black background. The English version ends:


Kill a language and a forest dies
Kill a forest and a language dies

Children of ash –

Be gentle with my heart.

While I was thinking about this book, I heard a radio program about some children of top Nazis (it’s at this link) who are facing the implications of their origins. And I thought of a close relative who is currently researching how our recent ancestors, sugar farmers in Queensland, benefited from the blackbirding of Pacific Islanders. Roz and Harun’s ethical quandary resonates.

I don’t think the book entirely succeeds. There are bits where you can feel things being hammered into shape. The conclusion (no spoilers) has a poetic logic but leaves too many questions unanswered. There’s a moment on page 132 when I nearly stopped reading. It’s in the chapter that tells the story of a glass bead, a murrina (but also a macguffin), from its creation in mid-nineteenth century Venice, through its passage from owner to owner until it ends up in the forest of Sabah. As a poetic history of colonisation, it’s laboured, but it works, until the moment early in the twentieth century when the Rajah of Pandasan, then owner of the bead, plays chess with a Polish visitor named Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. The Pole asks the Rajah what he will find if he keeps going upriver:

You get to the heart.
The Pole’s eyes light up. The heart? The heart of … darkness?
No, you fool, says the Rajah, laughing. The heart of spirit. The heart of light. Follow any River and you’ll get to a mountain peak. – no place on earth is more full of light.

Josef … Konrad, ‘The heart of … darkness?’ Get it?

Happily, this awkward knowingness is not at all typical, and I’m glad I decided to read on.

Page 79* gives you a better idea of the writing.

It’s 1978, 20 years before the inciting incident in the jungle of Borneo. Yusuf is the main characters’ father. Here he is a young man, a recently graduated engineer, in Nigeria with a group of Malaysians to explore ‘the age old cultivation’ of oil palms. At the start of the page, Yusuf is telling their genial Nigerian host, Ekben, that ‘he had grown to hate poverty with a passion that most people reserved for other human beings… He spoke unashamedly about his long-term plans. How he would have many sons and start an empire. He’d come to realise he was less an engineer and more a businessman, he said, although the engineering would come in handy.’

In this quiet moment where one young man proclaims his ambitions to another lies the seed of ecological and genocidal disaster. The novel doesn’t follow Yusuf’s career – in fact, the first full sentence on this page is the only account it gives of the career’s overarching shape.

He would go first into logging, where endless riches awaited, and then put to use the skills he had learned here.
—Working for the government? asked Ekpen.
Yusuf looked around.
—Working for myself, but with the government’s help. When I have a family, I’Il do anything to make their lives better than the one I had.
—Anything? asked Ekpen.
Yusuf paused for a moment, and in that moment, Ekpen cut in.
— I come from a wealthy family, so maybe I see these things a tad differently. But I can see that, in both of our countries, there are many opportunities now that didn’t exist before. It’s a new world.
— It takes a hard man to make his way in a hard land, replied Yusuf.
— Be careful, my friend, said Ekpen.

You get a taste here of the breadth and generosity of Musa’s imagination. However great the harm Yusuf is to do, there are real forces compelling him: the hatred of poverty, the harsh realities of his society, a fierce commitment to his family. As this is a flashback, the reader knows that Yusuf’s decision to go after those ‘endless riches’ will lead to the destruction of his family’s happiness and much more.

Yusuf strode into the market as if it was the one in Sandakan where he had once sold trinkets to make ends meet. He was looking for a gift for his new wife Jenab, a name he was still getting used to calling her, and another for his best friend Nurhanizah, who had just finished her studies and moved into a raucous sharehouse in Sydney.

This moment reminds us that Nurhanizah, ‘Crazy Auntie’, who is to become Yusuf’s main moral antagonist, and whom he will destroy, was once his best friend. She too is westernised, but the values that go with a ‘raucous sharehouse’ pit her against him. We’re also reminded that Yusuf’s loyal wife, Jenab, was once named Ruth. In the underlying schematic of the novel, it’s an outsider who is willing to support Yusuf’s rapacity.

The final paragraph on the page is an example of the kind of writing that makes the book live. Whatever Musa’s characters might be up to, his prose celebrates the vibrant reality of communal life, in Nigeria as well as in Malaysia.

The kaleidoscopic mayhem of the marketplace was a universe unto itself, a pinballing, jangling, chattering, humming orchestra of commerce and capital, voices rising in gossip and aggravation and trade, meat and fish lying on newspaper, some fresh, some flyblown, some smoking and drying in the sun, piles of chillies, okra, cassava, fufu wrapped in plastic, machines cleverly devised from spare parts into utensils for grinding and blending, the roar of these machines, and more upon more, the chatter of people hustling for every square inch, foot or naira in this city, wearing football jerseys and batik, the whole market like one giant textile woven from many different threads, creating a oneness that then frayed into disparate parts again.

This vision of the market celebrates organic, messy, apparently chaotic life that moves from oneness to disparate parts and then back. It’s like the jungle, in contrast to the regimented rows of the palm-oil plantations.

Incidentally, one of the small pleasures of the book is the use of non-English words without explanation. This page’s action is taking place in Benin City, Nigeria, so the two words that are new (to me) are Nigeria-specific: naira is not a measure of space as the context may suggest, but the Nigerian currency; and fufu is just what you’d expect from the context, a food – ‘a pounded meal found in West African cuisine’ according to Wikipedia. Elsewhere, the scattering of Malaysian and (I think) Arabic words contribute to the rich sense of place that is one of the beauties of the novel.

At the meeting: We started out the night with non-alcoholic prosecco, which meant that I could join in the toasting for a change. The excellent meal prepared mainly by the Mid-career Artist culminated in her signature pavlova. Then we discussed Douglas Stuart’s John of John, and finally turned our attention to Fierceland, which we had picked because it won the 2026 Miles Franklin Award.

It tended to divide us. One person didn’t read much of it and didn’t care to say why. Another felt an overwhelming sense of dread and stopped reading before the halfway point. Another said that too much of the book was taken up with ‘devices’: the history of the bead/murrina was just one of them. She didn’t much care for the chapters where the forest speaks.

One person gave an eloquent account of the book as a work of great ambition that fails to fulfil that ambition but is still an admirable and enjoyable work. I felt as if she was reading my mind. We could have done without the little chapter about tables and colonisation; the genre-busting inclusion of fifteen pages on which the same poem appeared in fifteen different languages is a darling that could have been murdered; and so on. But without them it would have been a less interesting book.

One person felt that a didactic element made some parts tedious. Others (including me) didn’t register it as didactic, though we did feel that we were learning things we thought we already knew, which must be one of the things that successful fiction does.

In these conversations we sometimes flick back and forth between the two books, but that didn’t happen this time. Maybe there’s the germ of an exam question there: ‘What don’t John of John and Fierceland have in common? Do not compare and contrast.’

The Book Club’s five members, all of settler heritage, met on Wangal and Gadigal land, which is where I wrote this blog post. 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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Douglas Stuart’s John of John and the Book Club

Posted on 11 Oct 2026 | Leave a comment

Douglas Stuart, John of John (Pan Macmillan 2026)

Before the meeting: I love this book.

It’s set on a remote Scottish island where Gaelic is still spoken in a fiercely pious religious community. Cal is a young, gay fine arts graduate who has come home from Edinburgh because, according to his father in one of their painful weekly phone calls, his grandmother is ill – the book’s opening sentence is, ‘Her feet were as purple as calf liver.’ The young man’s full name is Calum John, and on the genealogy-conscious island he is identifiable as John of John. John McLeod, his father, is a church elder and weaver – stern, ascetic, hardworking, painfully honest and a harsh parent. John’s wife, Cal’s mother, has long since left him and been ostracised by the religious community as a result. It’s not a spoiler to tell you that John, the father, has a long-term, secret, sexual relationship with another man, his neighbour Innes.

Chapters mostly alternate between Cal’s and John’s points of view. A rich portrait of the remote community emerges. A good part of this is in the language – not just the occasional Gaelic dialogue and the bilingual chapter numbering (a h-aon / one to fichead ‘s a sia / twenty-six), but in the English words that feel as if they belong in that place. On page 20 in chapter 2 for example, there are five words that were new to me:

  • croft (which I previously thought signified a small farm, but here refers to the house on the farm)
  • harling (here ‘painted an almost painful white’, this is roughcast – plaster mixed with small stones or shells, which I recognised in a scene in 35 Up one night this week)
  • rickle (a loose heap), skive (to pare or scrape, as in leather)
  • semmit (a vest or undershirt).

The meaning of all five is clear enough from context, but they enrich that context.

The plot revolves around the relationships of the three men and Ella, John’s mother-in-law who has been young Cal’s protector and a thorn in the side to John. Cal resumes the exhausting work of weaving at his father’s loom, and deals with unfinished business with other people of his generation, including a woman he was expected to marry and a man his own age who no longer wants to have sex with him. John must deal with Innes’s increasing impatience with their secrecy. More than once, John lashes out violently at Cal, and it’s a measure of the strength of the writing that we understand why Cal not only stays on the island but dutifully tells anyone he meets that the terrible bruising on his face was caused by a fall. It’s partly that Cal feels he has failed to make it on the mainland, but deeper than that is ancient family loyalty. Nobody believes him about the fall, but no one intervenes, and we understand that too.

A potential sexual triangle develops between Cal, John and Innes, which would make great comedy-of-manners if the stakes weren’t so high for all of them. For Cal, to be out as Gay would mean exile back to his mainland life. For the others it would mean the end of their lives as they know it, and for John especially it would mean facing his deep sense of shame. All the same, I must ask at the book group if other people laughed at the scene where Cal tries it on with Innes – I didn’t, but I cringed.

Page 79 is in Chapter a sia / six, one of the few that has a focus on someone other than John or Cal. This is Ella’s chapter. It gives her backstory – how as a young Glaswegian woman during the Second World War she had enjoyed the high life and resisted the attention of a taciturn man from the islands – Old Calum as he came to be known – until she got pregnant by a serviceman and Calum asked her to marry him. In this chapter we meet Grace, Cal’s mother, for the first time, and see Ella’s behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings to make Cal’s time on the island tolerable.

But page 79 itself is taken up entirely with Ella’s visit to a derelict blackhouse. A blackhouse, according to my web research, is a type of house that used to be common in the Scottish highlands and islands, built of stone with a thatch roof (‘laid up of stone and sod’, as Stuart puts it). (Wikipedia has photos.)

The page doesn’t move the plot forward, but the elegiac tone that suffuses the book comes into focus here. The state of the blackhouse works as a metaphor: the old ways of the island are on the way out, partly because of the different morality of the younger generations (Cal isn’t the only one touched by 21st century sexual mores), and partly because the traditional work of small farms and hand weaving is coming to an end.

Ella parked the car and clambered up the overgrown path. It was a long, low building laid up of stone and sod, and if she would have seen it on the mainland, she would have sworn it was a cow shed. There was a knack to opening the door. It had warped in the frame and she had to lift it and force it with her shoulder, much like a bailiff might. She was getting too old to do it. That anyone should see a woman grunt like this would be the talk of the church.

There’s so much happening in that short paragraph. We’re reminded that things are different from ‘on the mainland’, and that moralistic surveillance is everywhere. The clambering, shouldering and grunting keep the narrative firmly in the physical reality.

The Morrison blackhouse had fallen into such disrepair that she felt as though she had let all of Calum’s ancestors down. Several windowpanes had smashed one winter and in the thaw all the textiles sprouted black with mould. With no fire in the grate, finches built their nests in the gable corners, mice tore at the mattress and shat in the drawers. Then a section of the roof blew away. There had been two separate rooms but the dividing wall had liquified to mush. Now there was a puddle in the middle of the dirt floor and the surface was skittering with midges.

This is still intensely physical, but there’s also a reminder of the importance of tradition in this place, even for an outsider like Ella – ‘she felt as though she had let all of Calum’s ancestors down’. In the first chapter, on the ferry to the island, a woman asks Cal, ‘And who do you belong to?’ and he replies, ‘I’m John of John of Iain of Iain the Breabadair.’ Even for Cal with his long, dyed-blonde hair and his arty ways, ancestry is important. Breabadair means ‘weaver’ – Cal’s family have been weaving for five generations.

She liked to come to the house now and again and look through all the things from her past. The items that were truly meaningful she had rescued long before, but the house still held some odd ends of furniture and little outdated things, all the trinkets that Grace had whined about not having enough space for, her dishes and towels that all seemed to have a pattern or a fleck of colour that Grace didn’t like.

This may be the first appearance of Cal’s mother, Grace. As you might expect, there are interesting revelations to come about why Ella is living with her hostile son-in-law rather than her daughter, and about why Grace left John all those years ago, leaving Cal with him. But here there are just hints of mother-daughter tensions, of Grace as someone who knows her own mind and, though Ella might call it whining, can hold out for what she wants.

At the meeting: We had a terrific discussion of this book. I asked if other people had laughed at the scene where Calum tries to seduce Innes.Nobody had. They agreed it was weird but, as one of the women said, men do weird things. Weird or absurd, believable or not, I think we all agreed that it was poignant, saw it as a measure of Cal’s desperation for closeness and perhaps for a sexualised version of fatherly affection.

But the conversation really kicked off when one person said she found the whole thing unbelievable. Why did Cal stay on the island where he wasn’t welcome, and life was full of drudgery and violence? Why did John’s wife not blab about his homosexuality when she left him all those years ago? Why didn’t she take her sone with her? Why did Innes keep hoping after all this time? How did John manage to have a long-term homosexual relationship while genuinely adhering to stern puritan religious beliefs, preaching and practice?

They were good questions, and the rest of us fumbled around for answers. The importance of attachment to the place was mooted. The way small, isolated communities command loyalty. Cal is young – in his early 20s – and, like a number of unnamed friends of one person, unable to take the initiatives necessary to improve his life.

We spent a lot of time trying to work out what happens at the end of the book. It’s hard to say much here without spoiling, but I think we ended up deciding that while John’s future course is clear, Cal’s is up in the air: he has a momentary fantasy of how it will go, but on closer reading it seems unlikely that that’s how things will come to pass. The very final moments are inconclusive, though when we focused on the word bellwether, at least aspects of it became clearer.

Someone had looked up Harris tweed, and informed us that it is hand woven cloth whose production on rugged Scottish islands is rigorously policed. This is the kind of cloth that Calum and his ancestors have been producing.

We discussed this book in tandem with Omar Musa’s Fierceland. We had a great conversation about each book, but there was no crossover at all.

The Book Club’s five members, all of settler heritage, met on Wangal and Gadigal land, which is where I wrote this blog post. I gratefully acknowledge the Elders past and present of 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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Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song at the Book group

Posted on 9 Sep 2026 | 3 comments

Paul Lynch, Prophet Song (Faber & Faber 2023)

Before the meeting: The Book Group is going through an Irish phase. Several Irish novels ago, one of our number said, ‘This is a beautifully written Irish novel, but does the world really need another beautifully written Irish novel?’ Yet that same man was this month’s Chooser, and here we are.

I remember reading a little about Prophet Song when it won the Booker Prize in 2023. The Booker then as now has a bit of a reputation for choosing grim novels, and this choice sounded true to form. I wasn’t planning to read it.

But, as has happened before, what the Book Group wants …

It is a beautifully written Irish novel, and an unremitting dystopian tale. It begins with two policemen knocking on the door of Larry Stack, a reacher and union leader in Dublin. In a reasonably pleasant chat, they warn him to call off a strike he is organising. And it goes from there.

The strike happens. Larry and others are arrested and disappear. More people begin to silently disappear as the government claims emergency powers, and key positions at all levels of society – schools, hospitals, local councils – are filled with cold-eyed people wearing party insignia. The Republic of Ireland becomes a full-blown police state, all as experienced by Larry’s wife, Eilish: first her husband is disappeared, then her oldest son goes into hiding to avoid the draft and we assume joins the rebel forces; she is pushed out of her job. Things get worse from there. The quiet suburban street becomes a war zone, and when the rebels take it over things don’t get any better. Eilish lives through all of this, while searching for her husband, doing her best to care for her three remaining children, and looking after her father who, symbolically enough, has dementia.

And it’s Ireland! Coming to it so soon after reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing (link is to my blog post), where – in the real world – rebels would cross the border from Northern Ireland to find refuge in the Republic, I kept thinking it was an impossible fantasy: ‘It couldn’t happen there!’ But then I’d think of ICE in Minneapolis, and even the NSW police at a pro-Gazan demonstration earlier this year, and my blood would run cold.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say there is no happy ending. With one exception, for which I am hugely grateful, any time I feared the worst, the worst is what happened.

As in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, it feels as if each step in the destruction of a free society is something that has happened, recently, somewhere in the real world. It’s a deeply chilling book.

Page 79* is a nice example of the writing style. It’s one of those moments when life goes on despite everything – Eilish is helping her father get ready for a family wedding, and he has just said something appallingly curmudgeonly, in the manner of ancient Irishmen familiar from TV shows like Father Ted and Derry Girls.

Typically, most of the page is one long paragraph:

She looks into his face aghast and then she grows afraid, seeking past the face to what is changing inside him, seeing the self as though it were a flame respiring in the dark, the flame never still, the swollen flame tapering to its narrowest self. He is but he is not, this is what she thinks, and yet he seems to be himself again as he moves towards the mirror and she stands behind him as he studies his face, the skin pinkly shaven, a bleb of shaving foam behind his ear, she smooths it away with her thumb. She turns him around by the shoulders and buttons his shirt and loops the tie around his neck. It’s a lovely day for a wedding, don’t you think, they got lucky with the weather. He gives her a dismissive look and she knows he is himself again. That cousin of yours, he says, I cannot see her taking to the wedding bed. Dad, you cannot say things like that, Saoirse is your niece. Saoirse is a middle-aged woman approaching forty and her father is an ass, my sister never had any taste. Yes, well, it’s better late than never, don’t you think? She stands knotting the tie then pats his shoulder and lifts her eyes and something in the way he looks at her makes her think he is staring at his wife. She looks away, seeing out to the garden to where her mother stood, the climbing roses now ragged and slashed to the wall.

If this was punctuated conventionally, it would be broken up into at least four paragraphs. The dialogue would be in quote marks. Such breaks and marks would allow breathing space, but the overwhelming sense in this book is that there is no such thing: the forces of oppression and chaos are constantly closing in. Here, in their absence, the father’s dementia has a similar effect. Even the glimmer of relief, the thing signalling that he is his old self, is a bit of mean-spirited sexism. Unlike Father Ted he’s not funny, but this the nearest thing to comic relief the book offers. Then even that glimmer of relief is quelled by Eilish’s horror as she realises he is confused about her identity.

The final sentence, where Eilish looks out to the garden, is an example of a recurring motif. The book begins with Eilish looking out longingly to the dark of her garden. Her daughter Molly ties a white ribbon to one of their trees for every day Larry is missing. Here the climbing roses, ragged and slashed, are metaphors for Simon’s mental state – and the state of the land.

At the meeting: As usual we had a not-overthought and nonetheless excellent meal that included dolmades, pastizzi, some excellent salads, chicken wings and Aldi ice creams. Also as usual, we had a terrific conversation about the book. Everyone agreed that it’s excellent, beautifully written. Some couldn’t finish it because the way it chimed with what’s happening in the world made it unbearable. Some were alienated in some way by the focus on maternal issues. This is an all-male group: this alienation wasn’t about lack of empathy; in fact, as one man said, it was too much empathy that made it overwhelming.

We had an interesting discussion around the question, Why didn’t Eilish leave much earlier? There was an apparent disagreement about whether she was acting rationally or not, but my sense is that we were using the word rationally in different ways. Sure, it was 99 per cent sure that Larry has been killed and it makes sense for Eilish to save herself and her remaining children. But there is also the one per cent, and it makes sense to stay in the hope of reunion. Whether it was rational or not, we all agreed that it was profoundly human. One man’s Jewish grandparents had sent their son, his father, out of Nazi Germany but had stayed behind themselves, and been murdered. Like Eilish they knew the danger, but like her they couldn’t bear to leave their lives. (I should add that some people read Eilish as naively unaware of how bad things were getting.)

I floated my sense of Eilish’s father’s dementia as largely symbolic, less compellingly realistic than the rest of her family. That didn’t get much traction. In fact, someone pointed out that even though he was demented, he understood the dangers clearly enough and complied with his other daughter’s plans to extract him. Even with dementia, as a member of a generation that had lived when Nazism was taking over in Germany, he understood what was happening better than the younger ones.

Someone said he had enjoyed the book (if that’s the word), but wondered if its unremitting descent into chaos and misery really works. He likened it to Omar Musa’s Fierceland (which is on my To Be Read Very Soon list, and which he gave a general thumbs-down to), and compared them both unfavourably to Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip. His argument was waylaid by a dispute about whether the Book Group had actually read Mister Pip at some time. (I’ve just checked, and if so it was before either he or I joined. But I did read it – and I’ve just retrieved my ancient blog post that indicates I didn’t much like it – so I probably would have disagreed with him.)

The discussion of the book morphed into conversation about guns, pig-shooting, school cadets, the challenges of AI, grandchildren, truffle hunting, and (can this be?) not Donald Trump at all.

All the members of the Book Group are men of settler heritage. We met and I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation. I acknowledge their 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 79.

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Florence Knapp’s Names

Posted on 7 Sep 2026 | 2 comments

Florence Knapp, The Names (2025)

Florence Knapp was a guest at this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival. I didn’t attend any of her events, but I loved the podcast of her conversation with Claire Nichols (at this link). Whether it was her personal charm or the way her book’s premise touched something in me, I reserved the book at my local library immediately, and behold, instead of a six-month wait, it was ready for me to pick up almost immediately.

The premise is straightforward enough. Cora, who is trapped in a dangerously abusive marriage, has to register the birth of her newborn son. Her husband instructs her to name the baby after himself – Gordon. Her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, wants him to be named Bear. Cora toys with calling him Julian, and escaping punishment by pointing out that the name means sky father, and so is a tribute to her husband.

That much is laid out in a prologue, set in October 1987. The rest of the novel tells what follows on from each of the choices. First in 1987, then every seven years until 2022, there are three chapters, headed ‘Bear’, ‘Julian’ and ‘Gordon’, and three radically different versions of the life of the family emerge.

Early on I wondered if there was much point to actually reading the book, once the premise was laid out. Maybe it was enough that the premise turns a spotlight on the ambivalence that I imagine most people have about their names, making me wonder, for example, how my life might have gone if, say, I had been named Arthur after my mother’s father (my father’s name was already taken), or something outlandish like Bandicoot, rather than Jonathan because, as my mother said, it sounds nicer than John.

But I’m glad I persisted with Florence Knapp’s story rather than my own. The lives of all three boys and their families are gripping, full of unexpected turns, each in its own way moving. The differences made by the different namings are wonderfully convincing, in big ways as well as small – from the drama of father Gordon’s immediate responses to tiny developments down the track. For example, when the baby is named on Maia’s suggestion, she forms a powerful protective bond with him. When he is called Julian, she becomes protective of her mother. When he is Gordon, they eventually form an alliance, but it is hard won. Taken as a whole, its a nuanced set of variations the theme of domestic violence and its long shadows.

Page 79* falls in Gordon’s section of 1994, when he is seven years old. Unlike the Bear and Julian, Gordon is taken under his father’s wing. On this page, father and son return from a special time at Pizza Express where the father asks, ‘What has Mummy been up to while I’ve been at work?’ Seeing that he gets an interested response when he says, ‘And one time, she said a bad word,’ the son makes up other maternal misdemeanours, including one that involves a stray cat. We fear for young Gordon’s soul.

Though I pick on page 79 arbitrarily, it’s interesting how often the page includes key moments in a book. Here, we have the moment when young Gordon gets an inkling of how his father is using him.

At dinner that night, his dad had brought up some of the things Gordon had told him. Not about the cat, which he must have known wasn’t true, but other things. He sounded pleased by the details, almost like he was teasing his mum, and Gordon had felt vindicated. Especially when his mum didn’t say those things were made up, but only looked at her plate, blinking, leaving Gordon wondering if she really did sneak bags of Monster Munch while he and Maia were at school; if she actually had used up his birthday bubble bath.

This puzzlement is given a nudge by Maia. On another timeline she is Bear’s besotted protestor. On this one she becomes Gordon’s moral guide:

Later, Maia had appeared at his bedroom door. ‘Do you have to be such a little–’ Gordon wasn’t sure what word she’d been about to say, only that it was a bad one. And that the reason she hadn’t said it was because they’d heard their dad coming upstairs. In bed, he had an odd gnawing feeling deep in his stomach. A bit like hunger but mixed with something ugly and sad. He turned over and buried his face in the pillow, trying to block out the memory of his mum blinking in that weird way. And Maia, glaring.

It would have been tempting to make young Gordon the replica of his father that old Gordon wants, but he is torn. At this point we feel the seven-year-old’s moral unease. In the last part of the page, Gordon makes a bid to break free of the destiny brought by his name.

The teacher is putting down a rectangle of card in front of each child, telling them these will go on the front of the trays where they’ll keep their workbooks and spelling diaries for the rest of the year. She tells them they should write their name and design a decorative border around it. Gordon sits for a moment, looking at what his classmates are doing, and then settles down to his own piece of card. Using his most careful handwriting, sounding out the letters in his head to make sure he gets it absolutely right, he writes L-U-K-E in orange felt-tip.

It’s no spoiler to say that the teacher doesn’t let him get away with it, but tears his card up, and writes his name in shockingly undecorated black on a new card. He is saddled with the name and all it brings with it. It would be a spoiler to say whether Florence Knapp allows him to escape or if she ruthlessly follows through on the logic of nominal determinism.

I loved that boy, and would happily have spent a lot more time with him, all three of him.

I am a man of settler heritage living on Gadigal Wangal country, where the days are suddenly warmer and magpies seem to be everywhere. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging for their continuing custodianship of this land, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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

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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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