Tag Archives: Novel

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

Posted on 23 Oct 2025 | 6 comments

Robbie Arnott, Dusk (Picador 2024)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Beginning Mrs Dalloway

Posted on 3 Oct 2025 | 6 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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Albert Camus’ L’étranger

Posted on 2 Oct 2025 | 2 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Susan Choi’s Flashlight at the Book Club

Posted on 30 Sep 2025 | 9 comments

Susan Choi, Flashlight (Jonathan Cape 2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Michelle Johnston’s Revisionists and the Book Club

Posted on 28 Sep 2025 | 3 comments

Michelle Johnston, The Revisionists (Fourth Estate 2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We Solve Murders with Richard Osman and the Book Group

Posted on 10 Sep 2025 | 2 comments

Richard Osman, We Solve Murders (Viking 2024)

Before the meeting: As a boy I read a lot of British crime fiction. When I was 13, I put a brown paper cover on the conveniently-sized novel I had to read for school (Booran by M. J. Unwin – trigger warning for 1950s colonialist attitudes), then transferred the cover to book after book by Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh over the course of the year. My parents were impressed that I appeared to read Booran so many times. For my father’s birthday in April, I gave him a pile of ten pre-read paperbacks, and for Christmas another twenty. It didn’t occur to me that my pretence might be transparent.

This means that on the cusp of teenagehood I read enough ‘cosy mysteries’ to last a lifetime. I can still enjoy the odd Agatha Christie on TV or at the movies, but I have no desire to reread the books. Not even The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

Reading We Solve Murders felt like an enforced return to that territory. It’s a cosy mystery mixed with a comedy action thriller, written with amiable wit in elegant prose, with a plot that features many exotic locales, influencers being murdered and a villain who uses generative AI to disguise their identity. (Incidentally, it’s a bold move in a genre novel written in the style of a friendly English gentleman to have the villain’s chapters preceded by a Chat GPT prompt to render text ‘in the style of a friendly English gentleman’. I can’t be the only one to think Richard Osman is having a little joke at his own expense.)

This is explicitly intended to be the first book in a series, like Osman’s first series The Thursday Murder Club, and we can probably expect a TV movie, hopefully less mediocre than the recent TMC movie. There are moments where I would laugh if I saw them on screen. Just one example, from page 244. Amy, the hard-boiled heroine is talking to Nelson, who may be about to kill her:

‘It’s just you don’t seem like an assassin?’ says Amy. ‘And I know a lot of assassins.’
‘I am not an assassin,’ says Nelson, his tone very reasonable. ‘I’m just, you know, a regular criminal and politician.’

Boom tish!

The story rattles along at a good pace. The characters are an amusingly diverse bunch of types. There are twists and turns and plenty of travel. It is what it is and it’s terrific at it. I was entertained, but it took many more hours than a movie would.

After the meeting: It was a small group, not for lack of interest in the book but because of family birthdays, travel commitments, viruses – and our current policy of sticking to our designated dates no matter what. Not for us the practice of that group who don’t decide on a date until everyone has read the book. Still, the four of us enjoyed each other’s company until well after my watch announced it was my bedtime. Among many things, including the colourful career of one us, we did talk about the book.

One chap put it nicely: Richard Osman works in popular entertainment, having devised and presented a number of successful game shows. He knows what works with audiences and has brought that knowledge to the new (to him) field of novel writing. I’m pretty sure someone said that there’s a big overlap between his target readership and people who go on cruises. (We had an interesting digression into the sociology of cruise ships.)

When it was observed that when Australian comics try to replicate those British game shows they don’t always come up with a winner, we realised that their Englishness is at the heart of their charm. And that is also true of this book. Our one English-born and bred group member spoke eloquently on this point. There’s a character who can be relied on to give details of which roads he takes to get from one village to another: this, our group member assured us, has the ring of authenticity. The book is firmly rooted in a particular place – a village in the New Forest. Another chap who lived for some time in an English village testified that, just as in the book, in a two-pub village most pub-goers were loyal to one establishment and wouldn’t dream of visiting the other. What I read as cosiness is also a celebration of something distinctively English. And they did say ‘English’, not ‘British’.

Someone asked, ‘Did you laugh?’ No one said yes. On the page, the book is often funny but not laugh-out-loud. We shared stories of books that did make us laugh out loud – a Georgette Heyer regency romance and the The Traveller’s Tool by Sir Les Patterson were mentioned. (There was another interesting digression about Barrie Humphries.) But we had a sense that a movie, or preferably a TV series, might be on the way.

One of the non-attendees summed it up well in a WhatsApp post: ‘No thinking, just chorkling. The goodies win / the baddies get their come-uppence. Very English.’

The Book Group met, and I wrote this blog post, on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation as the days are growing suddenly warmer. I acknowledge Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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Jock Serong’s Rules of Backyard Cricket

Posted on 4 Sep 2025 | 1 comment

Jock Serong, The Rules of Backyard Cricket (Text 2017)

I was given The Rules of Backyard Cricket as a gift some years ago. Friends had told me it was excellent, but I knew nothing about it. The cover illustration, which shows two small boys in silhouette, one of them pretending to shoot the other in the back of the head, suggested that it might be less benign than the ‘Cricket’ episode of Bluey.

The opening chapters have a lot in common with that episode. Two brothers in the suburbs spend endless hours playing cricket with makeshift equipment and their own idiosyncratic rules. Like Bluey‘s Rusty they become excellent and go on to bat for Australia.

But that’s where the similarity ends: the brothers, Darren and Wally Keefe, are locked in vicious mutual combat even while their brotherly bond is strong, which puts the book in a long tradition of stories about quarrelling brothers: think Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Romulus and Remus, William and Harry. As they come to prominence in the cricketing world, Darren, the younger brother, attracts headlines for his off-pitch misbehaviour with drugs and chaotic relationships, and a terrible hand injury excludes him from cricketing heights. Wally becomes captain of the Australian team and can be depended on to present the ideal face of professional sport, though his personal life suffers under the strain. They typecast themselves: ‘Wally as responsible, grave: a leader. [Darren] a force of nature: a talented freak with no mooring.’ (Page 73)

In the background is the world of organised crime, match-fixing and corruption – embodied in Craig, their friend from teenage years who now lives a shadowy criminal life. Also in the background is their single mother, whose unfailing belief in both of them has been crucial to their success, and their long-suffering women partners, where I choose the word ‘suffering’ deliberately.

At the start of the novel, Darren is locked in the boot of a car, on the way to an unknown destination where, he assumes, he is about to be killed. He’s not sure who is going to kill him or why, and as he tries to work his way free he thinks back over his life, and in so doing narrates the book. Each chapter begins with a brief report on what’s happening in that boot, a device that both reassures readers that the story is something other than a biography of two fictional sportsmen, and challenges us to spot the moment when Darren falls foul of someone murderous.

I’m not a cricket fan, but I can follow a conversation about it (unlike the AFL in Helen Garner’s The Season). I loved the descriptions of cricket matches here – the fast bowling, the sledging, the many technicalities. Some readers will need to skim those bits. I’m with them in not getting most of the references to famous cricketers, but it didn’t worry me.

On page 78*, about a quarter into the book, the teenaged brothers have recently moved out of home. Wally is being recognised as a cricketer of ‘phenomenal self discipline’ but, according to Darren, when they play in the back yard he’s still ‘vengeful, savage and petulant’. They are in a sports-gear shop where Wally has a job, and where Darren visits to play with the cricket gear.

Two things happen on this page, one to do with the boys’ relationship and the other introducing a character who will play a crucial role. First, Wally sneers at Darren for believing an improbable story about a Test cricketer being given a transfusion ‘from a coconut’:

I look around and ensure there’s no one else in the shop, then I charge straight at him and throw him to the ground. He’s still laughing while I try to get a hand free to hit the smug bastard.
Three minutes later, a lady with two small boys has entered the shop and Wally’s standing behind the counter smiling politely with his hair all over the place and one ear bright red from being crushed in my fist only seconds before. I’m standing slightly off to stage right, breathing hard and rearranging my shirt.
The woman looks askance at us, but leaves a tennis racquet for restringing.

There’s comedy in the way the brothers fight compulsively like much younger children. But there’s something unnerving about the way Wally laughs and recovers quickly to present a polite face to the world. By referencing stage directions – ‘slightly off to stage right’ – Darren invites us to visualise the scene: one brother stands centre stage as far as the world is concerned, while the other is a dishevelled and disreputable support actor. This is the story as seen by the latter, and the scene is emblematic of their relationship.

Then:

One night at Altona, as dusk softens the colours of evening training, were called over from the nets to the empty seats, where a girl not much older than us is waiting. We’re introduced by a club official: Amy Harris is from the local paper, a cadet journalist sent to do a story on the school-age prodigies playing first-grade for Altona.
Her brown hair’s pulled back into a tight ponytail. No makeup.
She’s tall and athletic-looking, dressed for work, not display. I like her immediately. She snorts when Wally tries to impress her by quoting from C. L. R. James: ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’
‘I dunno,’ she counters. ‘What do they know?’
Wally’s crestfallen, and I’m left with an opening to field the next few questions. She’s done her research, even knows somehow about Mum and Dad. Her questions to me are all angled at my character; Wally’s are all about his cricket. It takes me a while to latch onto this, but like an idiot I play extravagantly into her hands.

Darren’s extravagance gives Amy her headline when he says that he and Wally bring people what they want from cricket now, drama and action: ‘Bradman is dead.’ It’s one of Darren’s rare victories in their lifelong rivalry – and like all his victories it’s a bit on the nose.

If you don’t know who Bradman was, you’d be pretty lost in this book. But you don’t necessarily have to know about C. L. R. James. In fact, it feels as if Jock Serong is speaking directly here, as it seems unlikely that Darren would have read the work of Trinidadian Marxist intellectual C. L. R. James, even if he had heard James’s riff on Kipling’s, ‘What do they know of England who only England know?’ Whether Amy knows where the quote comes from doesn’t matter. She sees it for what it is, a bit of misjudged pretension on Wally’s part. She’s out for a juicy headline. She’ll continue to be out for juicy stories for the rest of the book.

Like the fighting between the brothers, the headlines get darker as time goes by. So yes, the book is about cricket – backyard, community, state, international test and one-day varieties. It’s also about the corrupting effects of capitalism on sport, about masculinity toxic and otherwise, about the damaging effects of celebrity, about the role of the media. And it moves at a ripping pace.

I wrote the blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation where the days may be be growing warmer and lorikeets are starting to make their presence known. I acknowledge Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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

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Debra Oswald’s 100 Years of Betty and the Book Club

Posted on 12 Aug 2025 | Leave a comment

Debra Oswald, One Hundred Years of Betty (Allen & Unwin 2025)

Long before the meeting: If not for the Book Club, I would have put this book aside at page 14. Betty is the seventh child in a desperately poor family in South London. Her Catholic mother dies soon after giving birth to a tenth live child. As Betty and her Protestant father emerge from church they pass the two priests who have said the funeral Mass, one ‘in a creamy chasuble with scarlet embellishments, the other sporting a gold-embroidered number’. Betty’s father delivers a tirade:

Tell my daughter Betty the truth on this day we’re burying her poor Catholic mother. Tell her that it’s all a lie and that you two – with your fancy clothes and your Latin gibberish and your snouts in the trough – you know it’s a lie. Your religion is a pack of fairy stories to bamboozle poor people and keep us in line. Tell her.

I don’t mind a bit of anti-Catholic vitriol. In my devout childhood I was intrigued by mockery of the saints in a Walter Scott novel, and as a 17-year old trainee religious I was thrilled by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. BUT this just gets too much wrong. Two priests saying Mass for a poor person’s funeral? Not likely! Even one priest standing at the door of the church still wearing his vestments? Also not likely! And even a quick google would have told the author (or certainly her editors) that priests wore black chasubles at funerals – never cream or (gasp!) scarlet.

But what the Book Club wants …

Before the meeting: I did persevere. It’s not a terrible book, and there were no other moments that felt so wrong.

Betty works in a factory, emigrates to Australia, falls in love and makes two lasting friendships on the ship, marries a rich man who becomes abusive then kills himself leaving her destitute. She has two children each of whom is problematic, protests against the Vietnam War, joins Women’s Liberation, spends some time living in Mexico where she loves swimming in cenotes, comes back to Australia for her daughter’s wedding, works in television where she eventually becomes a writer, has her heart broken a number of times, helps out in an AIDS ward, has a severe depressive episode, develops breast cancer, finds happiness when reunited with her first love, sees friends die. Oh, and there’s a daughter she gave out for adoption before leaving England. As she moves through the phases of her life her name changes: Betty, Beth, Elizabeth, Lizzie, Liz, and finally back to Betty. Sometimes I cared and was engaged, sometimes not so much. I did laugh a number of times.

I never got a feel for the narrative voice – the voice of 100-year-old Betty. There are self-conscious moments when Betty warns us (mostly disingenuously) that things won’t turn out as they do in novels, or expects us to be surprised at her earthiness, but these don’t create the sense of an actual person telling the story.

The penny dropped for me in Chapter 16, when a friend urges 63-year-old Betty to pitch a long-held idea for a show to a TV channel. Betty realises she no longer has ‘the stamina to deal with the machinery of TV drama, the muscle spasms of hope and dejection, the delicate calculations of conciliation and obstinacy required of you’. That night in bed, her husband suggests that she could put the idea into novel form, and Betty’s career as a novelist is launched.

Ah! I thought. One Hundred Years of Betty is really the treatment for a TV show. When it makes it to the screen, which is very likely, I’ll be happy to watch it.

I’m sorry to be so negative. I may have come to the book with inappropriate expectations. Maybe I was wanting the story of an individual life told in the context of world events in the manner of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, Alan Hollinghead’s Our Evenings, or Ian McEwan’s The Lesson. Maybe I expected a fictionalised treatment of Debra Oswald’s mother’s generation, something probing and compassionate. This isn’t one of those books, and nor does it need to be.

After the meeting: Unusually, we met in a pub. As always with the Book Club, we had two books on our agenda. The other one, Susan Hampton’s Anything Can Happen, took up most of the discussion.

One of the other Catholics said she registered the problems with the post-funeral scene that so irritated me, but it hadn’t disturbed her. One of the non-Catholics said the scene felt very Anglican to her rather than Catholic.

A couple of people felt there was a box-ticking element: the songs, devices, events more or listed as a way of marking the different eras. Others felt that was a feature rather than a bug. Betty’s life touches on major events of her times, is sometimes significantly changed by them, without their ever becoming her central passionate concerns.

Someone described the book as an excellent summer beach read, engaging enough to keep you entertained without making big demands. She said it a lot better than that, and I think we all agreed.

The Book Club met, and I wrote this blog post, on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging, and gratefully acknowledge their care for this land for millennia. I welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

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China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun

Posted on 5 Aug 2025 | 2 comments

China Miéville, Un Lun Dun (Macmillan 2007)

I was quite a few pages into Un Lun Dun before I realised it’s a children’s book. It’s wonderfully fast-paced. It’s witty, endlessly inventive, full of surprising plot twists, respectful of young readers and welcoming to old ones. I had a great time from start to finish. I’d say China Miéville did too, and so would any 10 or 11 year old with the stamina for a 521 page novel and a taste for the scary fantastic.

UnLondon – like Parisn’t, No York and other abcities – exists alongside its real-world equivalent. It’s mostly constructed from garbage and discarded objects that have crossed over. Broken umbrellas are particularly significant. The citizens of UnLondon are a motley lot, not all of them completely human. They are threatened by the Smog, a sentient noxious cloud that feeds on smoke and pollutants, can break up into smoglets and possess the living and the dead. Aided by its greedy or power-hungry humanish accomplices, it plans to take over UnLondon and, later, the world. There are smombies, binjas, stink-junkies, a doughnut-shaped sun and any number of weird creatures and buildings, many of them not only described but lovingly illustrated in ink drawings by the author.

Into this situation wander young Zanna and her friend Deeba. Zanna is hailed as the Shwazzy, which we learn is a phonetic representation of the French choisie. A prophetic book foretells she will defeat the Smog. But, mercifully for the enjoyability of the novel, the book is thoroughly unreliable (much to its own regret, because of course the book can talk).

At page 78* things are just warming up, but even on this one page a gallery of characters is on display and there’s plenty of colour and movement.

Let me take you through it.

As his skin touched the metal, there was a loud crack. An arc of sparks raced down the metal into the big man’s hand.
He jerked and flew back, landing on his back, dazed and shaking. His false beard was smoking.

The skin belongs to Jones, an UnLondon bus conductor. Naturally, he also conducts electricity, and here he sends an elecric shock into the sword wielded by a big, bearded man who is attempting to abduct Zanna.

Jones shook his finger: there was a single drop of blood where he had pricked it. He checked Obaday’s head. ‘He’ll be alright,’ he said to Skool.

Jones has injured his finger by touching the tip of the bearded man’s sword. Along with Jones and a milk carton called Curdle, Obaday and Skool are Zanna and Deeba’s companions. Obaday, who wears clothes made of paper and has pins instead of hair, has been knocked unconscious on page 77. The silent Skool, Obaday’s friend and constant companion, is invisible inside a deep-sea diver’s suit. (The meaning of Skool’s name is to be revealed in the final battle scene.)

‘It was that Hemi!’ Zanna said. ‘We saw him in the market.’
‘He was upstairs,’ said Deeba. ‘He was looking through the ceiling . . .’
‘He must’ve jumped on just as we set off,’ said Jones. ‘Maybe he was the lookout for this charmer.’ He pointed at the still-shuddering attacker. ‘That went a bit wrong, then, didn’t it?’ He took handfuls of cord and ribbon from Obaday’s paper pockets. ‘Tie him up!’ Jones shouted, and several passengers obeyed.
‘I dunno,’ said Deeba doubtfully. ‘Didn’t look like that to me . . .’
Jones looked around. ‘Well, he’s gone now, straight through the floor. Keep an eye out, alright?’ Deeba and Zanna were looking about avidly, but Hemi was gone.

Hemi is a boy who approached our heroines when they first arrived in UnLondon. He seemed friendly, but they were warned that he was a ghost boy who wanted to steal their bodies. This, is turns out much later, was only partly true. But they fled from him and now they realise that he has followed them onto the flying bus, and has somehow passed down through the ceiling of the lower deck and then out through the floor. Hemi is an ambiguious figure at this stage of the story – as Deeba’s doubts about Jones’s narrative remind us.

But Hemi and the man with the sword must now wait because the bus is being attacked by a grossbottle, a giant fly, with a platform on its back carrying a gang of heavily armed airwaymen and airwaywomen.

‘We’ll deal with that later. Have to focus now. That grossbottle’s coming. As quick as you can, stay down and hold on. Rosa! Evasion!’

Rosa is the bus driver.

The bus veered, pitched and accelerated. Passengers shrieked. Jones hooked a leg around the pole and leaned out, notching an arrow into his bow.
With a growl of wings the grossbottle came close. Jones fired. His arrows thwacked into the fly’s disgusting great eyes and disappeared inside. The insect buzzed angrily but did not slow. The men and women it carried aimed a collection of motley guns. Their faces were ferocious.

And so it goes.

There is an army of unbrellas, an infestation of Black Widows in Webminster Cathedral, a shadowy organisation called the Concern that sees the Smog’s attack as a commercial opportunity, a diabolical link between the Smog and the UK government. Things are rarely what they seem. Expectations are always met but rarely in the way you expect.

What’s not to like?

I wrote this blog post on Wulgurukaba land, the luxuriant island of Yunbenun, and have finished it with the tropical sun warming my back. I acknowledge the Elders past and present, and welcome any First Nations readers.

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

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Steve MinOn’s First Name Second Name

Posted on 10 Jul 2025 | 5 comments

Steve MinOn, First Name Second Name (University of Queensland Press 2025)

A friend told me about this book: ‘A man dies in Brisbane leaving a note that he wants his body to be taken to Innisfail to be buried. When his relatives ignore the note, his dead body rises from the grave and walks there.’

As I may have mentioned once or twice on this blog, I come from Innisfail, Ma:Mu land. Point me in the direction of a book or work of art that features it – a note from a Chinese shopkeeper, a poem by David Malouf, a social realist novel by Jean Devanny, a memoir by Rebecca Huntley, a TV series by Anthony LaPaglia – and I’ll come running. So I borrowed First Name Second Name from the library.

My friend’s description of the book omitted a couple of key points. The man who dies, Stephen Bolin, is mixed race Chinese, and the note that he leaves asks not just that his body be taken to Innisfail, but that it be strapped to two bamboo poles and then carried there by his sisters, one at either end of the poles. The other key thing my friend didn’t mention is that interspersed with the story of the reanimated corpse’s journey is the history of his family, beginning with his great grandfather Tam Bo Lin on the North Queensland goldfields.

The book progresses in alternate chapters.

The family history chapters progress by leaps and bounds. Tam Bo Lin marries an Irish woman who decides that his personal name, ‘Bo Lin’, will become their family name, ‘Bolin’ (‘First name second name,’ she says, pointing to the marriage papers). After many years he is kicked out of the marital home when his wife discovers that he has been sending money to a wife back in China, married before he came to Australia. His descendants live through Federation, the World Wars, the Depression, the Bjelke-Petersen era and the coming of Pauline Hanson, mostly marry non-Chinese partners, and over the generations they become less and less comfortable in their Chinese heritage. Stephen, who is to become the walking corpse, is a Gay man who hates what he sees as the fetishing of Asian bodies – of his body seen as Asian.

The corpse’s chapters, each titled ‘Jiāngshī’, are told from the corpse’s point of view. He has an irresistible drive to continue walking north, even as his body is decaying, and bits fall off, or are nipped off by a dog or eaten away by worms and insects. Every now and then he is compelled to leap on a living person and suck their life force from them. A couple of chapters in, I googled “Jiāngshī”, and found an ancient Chinese tradition of ‘hopping vampires’ that has inspired a genre of modern books and movies in Hong Kong and elsewhere. I haven’t read or seen any of those works, but I doubt if any of them depict the Jiāngshī as unwilling, agonising characters like Stephen, who takes absolutely no joy from his condition and only dimly understands it.

As the family history approaches the present and Stephen’s corpse nears Innisfail, a question arises: what does it all mean?

Of course, as zombie filmmaker George Romero said, ‘Sometimes a zombie is just a zombie,’ or he may have said, ‘A zombie is always just a zombie.’ (If you can find the actual quote please tell me in the comments.) Sure, a jiāngshī is also just a jiāngshī. It’s hard enough being compelled to walk a thousand miles while dead without having to mean something. All the same, as I read on, a number of metaphorical possibilities hung over the narrative. As a Gay man who had cut ties with his family to live first in Sydney then in London, Stephen as a corpse is compelled to do what his living self needed to do at some deep, unacknowledged level, and reconcile himself with his family, in this case symbolised by the place of his birth. Maybe, stretching it, as a settler Australian he has been deeply influenced by First People’s sense of the importance of Country. Maybe, stretching it in another direction, anyone who comes from Innisfail in particular can’t resist its call, living or dead. Or – and this metaphor is spelled out in the final chapter – having wanted so much to pass as white, he now must return to the Innisfail joss house and be reclaimed by his Chineseness. (Incidentally, the joss house, lovingly described in the relevant chapter as the somewhat neglected building I remember from my 1950s childhood, has been restored in real life and has a notice out the front asking that we not call it a joss house but ‘the Innisfail Temple’. It has a website.)

If you picked up a copy in a bookshop and turned to page 78*, you would have no idea you were looking at a zombie-adjacent genre novel. William in this extract is Tam Bo Lin’s son, Stephen’s grandfather. Christina, née Lo, is perhaps the only other Chinese heritage person a Bolin has married.

The chapter begins like all the family history chapters, with the year, and like all the chapters evokes the period and the place with a deft touch:

1938

On the wide dirt road known as Ernest Street, Innisfail, William and Christina Bolin’s house sat like an umpire’s stand, watching over a game of rounders. It was after 3 pm. School was out. When the Bolins and their cousins the Los and a couple of ring-ins got together, it was intense. Eighteen kids under the age of eight, with at least six cousins per team. Barefoot and without hats. The summer had been hot. Everyone was burnt brown except for the fair-haired ring-ins, who were pink and peeling.
Swinging the one bat they had at the one ball they owned, they smashed it into the allotment over the road. Whoever had the bat raced around the bases. Meanwhile, the chasers went for the ball and got scratches on legs and arms from the Guinea grass. Every so often a tick found its way into their hair to attach itself to their scalp.
Willie Bolin had just found one on his head. He ran to his mother, Christina, who kept tweezers in her pocket just for that.
With a dab of kerosene, she dislodged it. The tick freed its jaws, maddened by the kerosene. Christina nipped it between her tweezers and held it to the light to identify its species.

You don’t need to come from Innisfail to enjoy this, but it helps. Ernest Street is still a wide road now, part of the main north-south highway. Guinea grass is an invasive weed in North Queensland, which we used to call blady grass – I have stories about those scratches. Rounders, a poor relation of baseball, was played by the young at least as much as cricket. I would have thought ticks in the hair were less likely than on other parts of the body in those circumstances, but ticks were still an issue, if not on Ernest Street, in the 1950s.

Willy, seen here running to his mother, will fall in love with a white woman and marry her in spite of her abusive father’s racist opposition. He becomes manager of a department store in Proserpine further south, a domineering father deeply disappointed in his effeminate son Stephen.

The page gives you a sense of the quiet, assured story of the family. Add gruesome undead action and who could resist?

I was born and spent my first 13 years on beautiful Ma:Mu country. I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation,. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of both countries, never ceded.

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

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