August 26, 2008

Combined Reviews: The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser

Reviews of The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser Allen & Unwin 2007

[This novel has been longlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. It won the Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal, and the NSW Premier's Literary Award for Fiction, as well as the Book of the Year Award.]

Ursula Le Guin in "The Telegraph": "There is no feminine for 'avuncular', but there ought to be. I want, in auntly fashion, to praise Michelle de Kretser for being good and beautiful, while scolding her for being afraid to show her goodness and beauty. What do you want to hide behind all that face-paint for, child? Do you think you have to be as skinny as a pencil and wear a ring in your navel just because other people do? The fashionable disfigurements and artificialities I complain of are, of course, literary, and they affect not her, but her novel, The Lost Dog...Kretser's native style is clear, vigorous, sensitive to mood and cadence, and strongly narrative - an excellent tool for a novelist with a story to tell."

Alison McCulloch in "The New York Times": "This book's insights are at times so thickly layered as to leave character, story and reader gasping for light and air. Which isn't to say they're necessarily bad insights. More often than not, de Kretser nails some situation or foible in 20 words or less. Consider her observation on 9/11: 'Everything changes when Americans fall from the sky.'...As de Kretser showed with her second novel, The Hamilton Case, her forte is illuminating the lives of such 'leftovers of empire', and she provides more of those delights here. But this novel also continues a steady move away from the concrete world of places and events toward the human interior."

A.S. Byatt in "The Financial Times": "This is the best novel I have read for a long time. The writing is elegant and subtle, and Michelle de Kretser knows how to construct a gripping story...This writing is new and constantly surprising, without being showy or quirky. It is exact, like Penelope Fitzgerald; it is strange, like Patrick White."

Dara Horn in "The Washington Post": "While the plot is subtle, the book's musings on modernity are anything but. Nearly every page offers observations on how contemporary Western life attempts to efface the past: faddish dress, gentrified neighborhoods, the disposability of old technology."

Mary Philip in "The Courier-Mail": "In many ways this book is wonderfully mysterious. The whole concept of modernity juxtaposed with animality is a puzzle that kept this reader on edge for the entire reading. The Lost Dog is an intelligent and insightful book that will guarantee de Kretser a loyal following."

Jane Shilling in "The New Statesman": "Ranging between the present and events of the past, whose convergence has led her protagonist to his crisis, de Kretser pursues ideas of exile, loss, disappointment, mortality; the nature of happiness and also of evil; the relation between humanity and beastliness; the significance of objects, both present and remembered; the means by which we conjure and protect identity; the shared characteristics of words and shit; ideas of duty, responsibility and attachment -- and much more."

Stephen Abell in "The Telegraph": "The Lost Dog, we are told at its conclusion, 'draws directly and obliquely on works by Henry James'. This is a risky ploy, with two obvious pitfalls: the hubris involved in setting your prose in comparison with that of the Master; and the fact that, in the reams of James's thoughtful literary criticism, there are likely to be all sorts of strictures that can be used against you."

Carmen Callil in "The Observer": "This is my favourite kind of novel. It is full of incident and character, tells a gripping story, has many touches of brilliance and can make you laugh and wonder. But it is also mightily flawed...These lapses aside, the language is full of light, colour and precise observation and, better still, the author can handle ethical and political concerns with a light touch."

Short Notices

The "Tuesday in Silhouette" weblog: "It's one of those books that hums quietly along; even though extraodinary things may happen, it really does feel like an everyday kind of travel. It just pulls you along as the characters journey through life. That's what I loved about it. The writing. The writing was quite lovely."

Despite some reservations, Dan Dervin concludes that the novel "delivers on its intriguing premises".

Estelle at "3000 books" thinks this books has helped her re-evaluate her view of Australian literature: "Considering the lyricism with which De Kretser conveyed this multi-generational tale, it was with no regret that I renounced my antipathy for Australian fiction. Even a sometimes awkward approach to dialogue enhanced her considered inquiry into personhood, revealing conversation for its brutal, dissembling self."

dovegreyreader: "Layers of significance build and build and I was constantly in awe of Michelle de Kretser's style and skill, the very right words in exactly the right order. Even that point when you might expect a book to take a bit of a yawn as it rests and gathers itself to regroup for that push to the final page, well Michelle de Kretser just pulls out even more stops and stuns all over again, the book dazzled and sparkled for me from start to finish."

Interviews

Robert Dessaix on ABC Radio National's "The Book Show" from November 2007.

Fiona Gruber interview in "The Sydney Morning Herald" from November 2007: "It is, in part, a commentary on the sanitised world in which we live, where the old, the sick and the imperfect are made to feel useless, invisible. 'We have an obsession with bodies in the West but there is a denial of bodily-ness,' de Kretser argues, saying the obsession with fitness and control of appetites is unsensual. Our animality is something we have become disgusted by, she says. Perfect teeth, straight strong limbs and glowing skin form the template that separates the Western physical orthodoxy from a more diverse cast in less affluent countries."

Rosemary Neill interview in "The Australian" from March 2008: "De Kretser says the praise and prizes her novels have attracted 'increase un-confidence, if that is the word'. When her second novel was released, she was worried it wouldn't live up to the success of the first. Now she is uneasy that The Lost Dog -- to be published in Australia, the US, Britain and Italy -- won't match the achievements of The Hamilton Case. 'The only thing I know at the end of a novel is how to write that novel; that knowledge doesn't transfer across to the next one,' she says soberly."

In conversation with Gail Jones at the 2008 Sydney Writers' Festival in May 2008.

Other

Ampersand Duck is a blogger living in Canberra who just happened to be the designer for the Australian edition of the novel. (Check out the bookcover at the top of this post, and then have a look at the pedestrian version that appears on the English edition as reproduced with Carmen Callil's review in "The Observer".) Fascinating stuff.

Posted by larrikin at 09:26 AM | Comments (4)

April 17, 2008

Combined Reviews: Saturn Returns by Sean Williams

Reviews of Saturn Returns by Sean Williams Orbit July 2007

[This novel won the 2008 Ditmar Award for Best Novel.]

From the publisher's page

Dark experiments, dangerous ruins, fleeting ghosts and deadly conspiracies...

On the edge of the galaxy in a distant and terrible future, Imre Bergamasc is reborn into a pieced-together body with the certain knowledge that he was the victim of an elaborate murder plot.

But neither his mind nor the history of his former life are as easily reassembled, so he sets out to follow the fragments of his memories and discover the reason for his elimination. Through interstellar graveyards, decaying megacities and bizarre star systems, he pursues whispers connecting the death of the worlds he once knew to his own murder.

Tracked by forces determined to thwart his efforts, Imre combs the wreckage of the future for the truth about himself -- no matter how unbearable it may be.

Reviews

Matthew Tait on "Oz HorrorScope": "Saturn Returns, the first book of Astropolis, marks a pivotal time in the career of Adelaide author Sean Williams. Like the title metaphor, it seems the author himself is going through a personal homecoming of sorts. After the debacle of the Books of the Cataclysm, Sean has revisited the path where he started - and, dare I say it, where he belongs...With honesty and aplomb Sean shows us that, unfortunately, wars will never be won: it's the human condition and mirrors the current global situation. No matter how hard we travel and how hard we evolve, human beings, at their very basic, will always be warring machines..."

Taryn on "A Storm of Words": "Orbit describes it as a 'space opera balancing cosmic-level threats with a very human murder mystery'. I think its a fast paced guns-a-blazing-mystery dealing with questions of identity PLUS a central character with partial amnesia, what more could you want?...Sean Williams has created a fascinating gothic galaxy recovering from a galactic-wide disaster. Humans have spread far and wide across the galaxy, some remaining in one body, Primes, living and dying others, Singletons, opt for having many clones and absorbing and sharing memories and then there are the group minds."

Graeme on "Graeme's Fantasy Book Review": "With science fiction; it seems that the more space travel a character needs to undertake, the 'harder' the tone will be. This is certainly the case here with characters handily able to adjust their body tempo, in order to travel vast distances, and talk of the complexity of sending communications across the galaxy. I'm not a fan of 'hard sci-fi' and will admit that any talk of 'relativity' or 'the warping affects of a neutron star's gravitational field' send me into a little daydream until someone fires a laser gun and gets things going again. There is some of that here but luckily (for me anyway) the 'detective element' of the story was gripping enough to keep me going."

Jonathan McCalmont on "SF Diplomat": "As I was reading this book, I was struck by how much it resembled two other books, namely Iain M. Banks' 1993 Against a Dark Background and Roger Zelazny's 1970 Nine Princes in Amber...Much like Against a Dark Background, Saturn Returns is a work of action-packed SF that has a good deal of wry wit and a desire to innovate. At 280 pages, the book is short and to the point. While its mystery/self-discovery elements can lead to the pace slowing, it is generally not long before Bergamasc is called upon to lead his gang into battle or use his tactical nous to solve a problem. The action sequences are exciting to read and the book's pace accelerates towards the end leaving you eager to find out what happens next in this projected three book series."

JP on "SF Signal": "Saturn Returns is the first book in Sean Williams' new space opera series, Astropolis. It has all the things you'd expect from New Space Opera: postumans, galaxy spanning cultures, conspiracies and imminent threat to humanity. The setting has some of the feel of Alastair Reynolds' Inhibitor series, but with Williams' own additions to space opera...At times I felt like I was getting info dumped instead of story progress. And while the characters are interesting, they aren't really that sympathetic. Not yet anyway...So it's a good thing that the universe Williams has created is just so darn cool. He packs a lot of interesting and unique ideas into this story. I'm really interested in seeing how the story unfolds and how the conspiracy plays out."

Other

Williams was interviewed by Tim Lloyd for "The Advertiser", soon after the book was published in 2007.

Posted by larrikin at 09:42 AM | Comments (0)

April 10, 2008

Combined Reviews: Feather Man by Rhyll McMaster

Reviews of Feather Man by Rhyll McMaster Brandl & Schlesinger

[This novel won the 2008 Barbara Jefferis Award.]

From the publisher's page

From parochial Brisbane of the 1950s, Sookie tries to escape her eccentric childhood where sinister sexuality is on the loose, and paint her way to better chances in the swinging London of the 1970s. Vastly intelligent, this dark comedy of the fictions of the heart is an edgy and dangerous work of portraiture.

Reviews

Kerryn Goldsworthy in "The Australian": "McMaster is particularly good at conveying states of mind: the inferiority of a child who doesn't understand what is being done to her; the unrelenting negativity and meanness of spirit of a certain kind of Australian woman in a particular time and place; the dense tangle of feelings of a child sexually assaulted by someone that she and her family know and trust. One of this book's most valuable insights is expressed in its acknowledgement that the ambivalent feelings and betrayal of trust involved in sexual assault by someone known to the victim might do even more psychological damage than the assault itself."

Rachel Slater in "Australian Women's Book Review": "The story is reminiscent of Christina Stead's 1945 novel For Love Alone in its movement between Australia and London and its strong-willed protagonist who nevertheless traipses to the other side of the world for the 'love' of a contemptuous and narcissistic man who uses her devotion and naivety to achieve his own ends...Another reviewer has suggested that there seems to be an uncomfortable mixture of feminist tract meets Mills & Boon in this part of the novel (and here again are echoes of For Love Alone). There certainly is a sense of that, just as there are moments where the narrative wobbles on its usually well-laid track, but McMaster pulls it back from the brink and delivers an impressive first novel -- rich, darkly funny and disturbing; it works."

Andrew Reimer in "Brisbane Times": "It is generally true, I think, that poets have difficulty in making the transition from the compressed, highly allusive diction of their verse to the more discursive demands of prose fiction. With this fine first novel, the noted poet Rhyll McMaster proves that she is an exception. Admirers of her poetry will find, however, any number of phrases and clusters of images that bring the best of her verse to mind...Her eye for detail, for recognising the exceptional in the most mundane of things, illuminates these pages. The seedy ordinariness of life in London is superbly conveyed. The satiric strain that distinguishes some of the earlier sections -- the marvellous comedy of a Brisbane wedding for instance -- survives the journey to London. A nightmarish episode set in a grim, ill-lit hospital is particularly vivid. And, almost everywhere, the rich texture of allusions, imagery and remembrances of things past allows this portion of her novel to rise above the predictable."

On the "LiteraryMinded" weblog: "Rhyll McMaster has had six books of poetry published, many of them prize-winning, but this is her first novel. For a poet she shows restraint and delicacy in her prose while still embellishing it with apt imagery. This is a beautiful and worthy Australian novel with absorbing characterisation and layers of resonant themes."

Short notices

Christina Hill in "Australian Book Review": "This superb first novel is beautifully written but not for the faint-hearted. In the disturbing genre of Amy Wittings I For Isobel (1989) and Jessica Anderson's Tirra Lirra by the River (1978), it is nonetheless in a class of its own."

Posted by larrikin at 10:06 AM | Comments (3)

April 07, 2008

Combined Reviews: Secrets of the Sea by Nicholas Shakespeare

Reviews of Secrets of the Sea by Nicholas Shapespeare Harvill/Secker August 2007

[This novel has been longlisted for the 2008 Miles Franklin Award.]

From the publisher's page

Following the death of his parents in a car crash, eleven-year-old Alex Dove is torn from his life on a remote farm in Tasmania and sent to school in England. Twelve years on, he must return to Australia to deal with his inheritance. But the timeless beauty of the land and his encounter with a young woman, whose own life has been marked by tragedy, persuade him to stay. They marry, and he finds himself drawn into the eccentric, often hilarious dynamics of island life. Longing for children, the couple open their home to a disquieting guest, a teenage castaway, whose presence on the farm begins to unravel their tenuously forged happiness, while at the same time offering the prospect of a much greater fulfilment. SECRETS OF THE SEA is Nicholas Shakespeare's finest novel to date.

Reviews

Jennifer Byrne in "The Age": "It is a fine thing that English writer Nicholas Shakespeare has chosen to live in Tasmania, a place that has lured many wandering souls. And it is understandable he would wish to write about it while his love is still new, that extreme, other-worldly beauty fresh to his eyes...The island's fractious, fascinating history is the subject of his recent prize-winning nonfiction, In Tasmania. Now, its east coast is both the setting and animating spirit for a novel set in the imagined town of Wellington Point (pop. 600), where old folk bask in the high daily average sunshine and the young can't wait to escape...Shakespeare is a polished writer and this is a novel of fine detail, of long walks on the seashore and moods that shift like the pink in the clouds and the dark, wheeling patterns of birds. We watch and wait as small-scale lives tangle and smooth against a bold, at times bruising landscape."

Alfred Hickling in "The Guardian": "Shakespeare takes great care not to replicate the contents of his travel book, though it's difficult to write about an island of less than 30,000 square miles without covering some of the same ground. And whereas the travelogue was a slightly chaotic work written in a burst of enthusiasm, the novel is far more crafted, considered and detached - not always to its advantage. It can be painfully slow-moving at times. And there is more than enough material on the reproductive cycle of molluscs to give you pause next time you enter an oyster bar...If Shakespeare's travel book captured the excitement of arrival, this novel is about coming to terms with the destination."

Margaret Elphinstone in "The Independent": "The opening seems to hold the sea at bay as it focuses on small-town rivalries in machismo and sexual relationships, before showing us unequivocally why we should care. The sea always comes in again and washes away the trivia, but sometimes it takes a little too long to make its appearance. Engagement with the sea, and its significance in the unplumbed depths of the human psyche, is the real, undoubted strength of this novel."

Kasia Boddy in "The Telegraph": "The story proceeds at a leisurely pace. Eighteen years are covered in five sections, but the time frame is complicated. Life is long but not all of it matters equally. Some sections cover years, some months; others - a few meaningful days in the characters' lives...To slow the tale down and emphasise significance, Shakespeare employs a variety of techniques. For every three normal-length paragraphs, for example, he breaks one into four pieces, giving each sentence room to resonate moodily...Literature looms large. After Lear's verse, the book most often mentioned is Joseph Conrad's The Shadow Line (1917), the story of a young sea captain whose ship seems haunted by his predecessor. Secrets of the Sea is proudly haunted by Conrad and develops his preoccupations with the shadow lines drawn between men who seem like doubles, between the natural and the supernatural, and, finally, between youth and maturity."

Short notices

Fuller Bookshop: "A curious and unsettling novel, you will confound yourself trying to will the non-existant East Coast town into existence."

Other

Susan Wyndham interviews the author.

Posted by larrikin at 01:19 PM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2008

Combined Reviews: Landscape of Farewell by Alex Miller

Reviews of Landscape of Farewell by Alex Miller Allen and Unwin November 2007

[This novel has been longlisted for the 2008 Miles Franklin Award.]

From the publisher's page

A hauntingly beautiful meditation on the land, the past, exile and friendship, Landscape of Farewell is the powerful new novel from acclaimed Australian author, Alex Miller.

It is the story of Max Otto, an elderly German academic. After the death of his much-loved wife and his recognition that he will never write the great study of history that was to be his life's crowning work, Max believes his life is all but over. Everything changes, though, when his valedictory lecture is challenged by Professor Vita McLelland, a feisty young Australian Aboriginal academic visiting Germany. Their meeting and growing friendship sets Max on a journey that would have seemed unthinkable just a few short weeks earlier.

When, at Vita's invitation, Max travels to Australia, he forms a deep friendship with her uncle, Aboriginal elder Dougald Gnapun. It is a friendship that not only gives new meaning and purpose to Max, but which teaches him the profound importance of truth-telling in reconciliation with his own and his country's past.

Following Alex Miller's Miles Franklin-winning Journey to the Stone Country, Landscape of Farewell is a wise and grave novel of power, beauty and truth.

Reviews

Angela Bennie in "The Sydney Morning Herald": "Miller's great strengths here are his often startling, sometimes mesmerising facility to twist the language into new patterns and images, his ability to carve idiosyncratic characters out of the crooked and gnarled off-cuts of humanity, rather fashion them from smoother timbers. Always, the novel appears to be driven by an urgent need to reveal how these kinds of beliefs -- which historically have caused us so much sorrow and, in many cases, so much bloody murder -- might instead become virtues...In these moments, Landscape Of Farewell becomes a rare experience."

Jack Hibberd in "The Australian": "On the evidence of Landscape of Farewell, Alex Miller is a sombre and sober author whose prose interlocks adroitly with his lugubrious thematic concerns. Not for him the sceptical fabrications and comic diversities of modernism or the antic relativities of postmodernism. Alex is no smart alec...Landscape of Farewell is laced and interlarded with flashbacks, dreams, prescient Jungian premonitions and binary selves, some of which knit past with present, place with place."

Hilary McPhee in "The Australian": "I suspect that, for Miller, the search for moral clarity is something like the terrible climb up the escarpment in the Expedition Ranges in his latest novel, Landscape of Farewell...Massacre is the blockage in the Australian imagination, in our sense of ourselves in this place, and the wounds are very deep. Miller is essential reading."

Lisa Gorton in "The Age": "The past haunts Miller's characters and his stories puzzle out the mystery of that haunting. They are strange, extreme novels. Yet, in the ghost story tradition, Miller creates narrators whose detached intelligence holds these fantastical elements in a close and precisely imagined world...[this book] gathers up some of the interests that have shaped some of Miller's novels: The Ancestor Game, Journey to the Stone Country and Prochownik's Dream. It teases out how the past makes itself present in the relationship between fathers and sons; it works to define what art takes from people's lives, and what it gives."

Shirley Walker in "Australian Book Review": "Landscape of Farewell has a rare level of wisdom and profundity. Few writers since Joseph Conrad have had so fine an appreciaton of the equivocations of the individual conscience and their relationships to the long processes of history. But perhaps I am over-intellectualising what is, after all, a very human story, passionately told."

Other

Corrie Perkin's interview with the author for "The Australian".

Posted by larrikin at 01:30 PM | Comments (0)

April 02, 2008

Combined Reviews: The Memory Room by Christopher Koch

Reviews of The Memory Room by Christopher Koch Random House November 2007

[This novel has been longlisted for the 2008 Miles Franklin Award.]

From the publisher's page

'What is a spy? Are they born, or are they made?'

With these words, Vincent Austin analyses his future occupation. Some spies are made, he says, but his kind is born. He is devoted to secrecy for its own sake.

Vincent is orphaned early, and his boyhood in Tasmania is spent with an elderly aunt. His fascination with secrecy and espionage -- and much else besides -- is shared to an uncanny degree by Erika Lange, daughter of a post-World War German immigrant. She too has lost her mother, and she and Vincent see themselves as twin spirits, inhabiting a shared, platonic world of fantasy and ritual.

At University, Vincent aims to enter Foreign Affairs - an ambition shared by his easygoing friend Derek Bradley. However, in his final year, Vincent is recruited by ASIS -- Australia's overseas secret intelligence service -- and his adolescent dream becomes reality. Erika becomes a journalist, eventually entering the overseas service as a press officer. She is an attractive and magnetic woman, but her emotional life is chaotic.

She, Vincent and Bradley meet again in 1982, when they are in their thirties, and have all been posted to the Australian Embassy in Beijing. Here, Erika and Bradley begin an affair which is ultimately doomed to fail. At the same time, Vincent attempts an espionage coup which ends in disaster for himself and Bradley.

Both men are expelled from China, and are based in Canberra, where Vincent is confined to the ASIS Registry: the 'memory room' of the book's title. This is the year of Star Wars, and the final phase of the Cold War.

Erika, also returning to Australia, becomes a television journalist, and enjoys a period of national prominence. The fantasies of youth have become reality for Erika and Vincent, and lead to a tragic climax for them both. It is left to Bradley, who inherits Vincent's diaries, to contemplate their fate.

Although THE MEMORY ROOM deals with espionage, its aims go far beyond those of a thriller. A psychological study of a brilliant but eccentric secret intelligence operative, it is also an exploration of the mystical nature of secrecy itself, and of the consequences of a shared obsession.

Reviews

Nikki Barrowclough in "The Sydney Morning Herald": "The mystique of secrecy has always fascinated Christopher Koch. It has glimmered in books he has written in the past, such as Highways to a War, and it lies at the heart of his mesmerising new novel, The Memory Room, set in the last days of the Cold War...Most writers are spies, in the sense they are always listening and watching, composing characters in their heads and working out their motives. And by living in their imaginations, writers, too, lead a sort of secret life. Koch's examination of what motivates the brilliant if eccentric Vincent Austin, an orphan who grows up in Tasmania with an elderly aunt and is recruited by ASIS, Australia's overseas secret intelligence service, is written partly as a memoir."

Michael Williams in "The Age": "Fans of Koch's earlier work won't be disappointed, but somehow The Memory Room never quite amounts to anything much. It just doesn't find the author hitting the high notes that he's previously shown himself capable of, contenting itself with a meditation on a group of characters who never fully come alive...Too often we're told about the characters' individual qualities without ever being shown them...As a book about the banality of espionage, a glimpse of the somewhat futile bureaucracy of Australian foreign affairs and the loneliness of the spy's life, this is a solid and rewarding read."

Leonie Kramer in "The Australian": "Christopher Koch's latest novel, The Memory Room, is a tour de force. It continues his exploration of the purpose he wrote about in an essay, The Novel as Narrative Poem: 'to reach into the hearts and secret lives of ordinary men and women'. The continuity of his search, and the quality of his writing in this novel, represents the deepest exploration of these secret lives in a fast-paced narrative set in the real world of spies, intrigues and secrets...This is no ordinary spy story, though at times it is tempting to turn over a few pages to see how a problem is solved or the tension relaxed. The inventive structure of the novel introduces changes in narrative voices, movements of the characters and unexpected shifts in chronology. These features, however, are an essential part of the meaning, as are some very precise dates. The difficulty for the reviewer is to avoid playing a guessing game with the narrative because this is a book that invites individual interpretations and doesn't have a whodunit ending...Koch's detail is never merely ornamental but essential to the meaning of the narrative and the unveiling of the characters."

Adrian Mitchell in "Australian Book Review": "Consider the plight of the established novelist. The readership (that's us) comes to recognise a particular style, a particular set of themes, and presumably that is one of the reasons to go on buying the writer's books. Should the next book always be in the same mould -- in which case we might become a tad bored -- or should there be something quite out of character, causing us to gasp with disbelief? After all, it is usually disastrous when a diva starts singing popular songs. Christopher Koch's new book sets up these kinds of tension. Something new about what is remembered?...The pattern of Koch's thinking has been shaped by the writers he reveres, Dostoevsky, Kipling, Greene and Fitzgerald among them. He has always been ambitious to advance deep issues. They are certainly to be found across the pages of this novel; yet, because such action as there is happens at a remove, the impact of the leading ideas has to be assumed."

Other

Jason Steger profile of Christopher Koch in "The Age".

Interview with the author from "The Metro", a UK newspaper.

Posted by larrikin at 01:51 PM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2008

Combined Reviews: The Widow and Her Hero by Tom Keneally

Reviews of The Widow and Her Hero by Tom Keneally Random House May 2007

[This novel has been longlisted for the 2008 Miles Franklin Award.]

From the publisher's page

'I knew in general terms I was marrying a hero. The burden lay lightly on Leo, and to be a hero's wife in times supposedly suited to the heroic caused a woman to swallow doubt . The Japanese had barely been turned away. It was heresy and unlucky to undermine young men at such a supreme hour.'

When Grace married the genial and handsome Captain Leo Waterhouse in Australia in 1943, they were young, in love -- and at war. Like many other young men and women, they were ready, willing and able to put the war effort first. They never seriously doubted that they would come through unscathed.

But Leo never returned from a commando mission masterminded by his own hero figure, an eccentric and charismatic man who inspired total loyalty from those under his command. The world moved on to new alliances, leaving Grace, like so many widows, to bear the pain of losing the love of her life and wonder what it had all been for.

Sixty years on, Grace is still haunted by the tragedy of her doomed hero when the real story of his ill-fated secret mission is at last unearthed. As new fragments of her hero's story emerge, Grace is forced to keep revising her picture of what happened to Leo and his fellow commandoes -- until she learns about the final piece in the jigsaw, and the ultimate betrayal.'

Reviews

Andrew Reimer in "The Sydney Morning Herald": "The Widow and Her Hero reveals a writer who has lost none of the skill and talent he has been demonstrating for decades in a seemingly unending stream of books. In some of his more recent novels, however, Keneally has shown a tendency to rely on mechanical plots and stock characters - An Angel in Australia is a case in point, I think. In this book he has avoided most of those pitfalls. Even the conceit of a group of prisoners, Leo and his friends, who are facing the prospect of execution, rehearsing a play - a throwback to Bring Larks and Heroes - proves to be apt and successfully integrated into the novel's structure."

Barry Oakley in "The Australian" : "It's a compelling story but because Keneally has assembled rather than unfolded the narrative, most of it takes place at one remove. Perhaps that's his intention: to present a study rather than a story, an exploration of character and heroism and how one interacts with the other...The Widow and Her Hero is a patchwork of a novel, often penetrating, sometimes powerful but never gaining the momentum to carry the story along. Keneally, however, is such a cunning artificer that he's very readable even when not firing on all cylinders."

James Ley in "The Age": "Keneally's freely fictionalised version is an attempt to marry this dramatic tale of military adventure to sober reflections on the meaning of honour and heroism. In particular, he is interested in exploring the hold these concepts have on the male psyche...[the novel] is thus an account of bravery and sacrifice that attempts, through the duality of its narrative structure, both to acknowledge the genuine heroism of its male protagonists and to resist any simple glorification of their exploits."

Adair Jones in "The Courier-Mail": "Keneally's skill as one of Australia's most versatile and interesting literary figures rests in such ambiguities. The author questions our need for heroes and the price we all pay for needing them...For the generation of Australians who lived through the terrible war and survived, men and women like Grace who are now past 80, this novel acknowledges the awful price they paid and gives us a glimpse into the cold shadow of a war that has never quite disappeared."

Ed Lake in "The Telegraph": "Keneally can be a bit of a hack, and his work here bears marks of haste. Gobbledygook abounds -- the Memerang men "knew how to paddle... like angels on pinheads" -- and Grace's voice is strangulated and writerly...Even so, the novel comes off. It evokes something of the magnificence of heroism, and more of its awfulness. For that, it deserves a salute."

David Robson in "The Telegraph": "In terms of its overall effectiveness, The Widow and Her Hero is probably a notch or two below Keneally's very best work. The narrative is neatly constructed, but the scenes in the Far East lack a certain immediacy: you should be shocked by the beheadings, so redolent of modern Iraq, but they do not reverberate through the story as much as perhaps they should. But any new work by this master of moral complexity is a matter for rejoicing. He looks into the heart of the human condition with a piercing intelligence that few can match."

James Bradley in "Times Literary Supplement": "An unflinching clarity and moral purpose has long given shape and purpose to Keneally's fiction; it is what lifts it above the narrow territory of the historical novel. Without it, the considerable number of his books which follow history closely would be little more than the faction Schindler's Ark has sometimes been accused of being."

Posted by larrikin at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2008

Combined Reviews: Sorry by Gail Jones

Reviews of Sorry by Gail Jones Vintage May 2007

[This novel has been longlisted for the 2008 Miles Franklin Award.]

From the publisher's page

In the remote outback of Western Australia during World War II, English anthropologist Nicholas Keene and his wife, Stella, raise a lonely child, Perdita. Her upbringing is far from ordinary: in a shack in the wilderness, with a distant father burying himself in books and an unstable mother whose knowledge of Shakespeare forms the backbone of the girl's limited education.

Emotionally adrift, Perdita becomes friends with a deaf and mute boy, Billy, and an Aboriginal girl, Mary. Perdita and Mary come to call one another sister and to share a very special bond. They are content with life in this remote corner of the globe, until a terrible event lays waste to their lives.

Through this exquisite story of Perdita's troubled childhood, Gail Jones explores the values of friendship, loyalty and sacrifice with a brilliance that has already earned her numerous accolades for her previous novels, DREAMS OF SPEAKING and SIXTY LIGHTS.

Reviews

Kerryn Goldsworthy in "The Age": ""The great beauty and depth of Jones' writing, in this novel as elsewhere, has simultaneous appeal for lovers of intricate, elegant thought, and lovers of verbal style. There's also a great deal of her signature literary 'sampling', with quotations, allusions and echoes from fiction and poetry vying for space inside her own sentences: Emerson, Dickinson, George Eliot and of course Shakespeare, who haunts these pages like a colossal, chanting ghost." But there is more to Jones's work than just fine writing, "it's also hard not to read this book as Jones' own personal, formal and explicit statement of apology: to see it as a kind of enactment in fiction of her ideas about Australian race relations and reconciliation, and as a suggestion that if the country's government cannot bring itself to offer an apology then perhaps its artists, at least, might step up to fill the gap."

James Ley in "The Sydney Morning Herald": "The word 'sorry' has become so contentious in recent times that Gail Jones's decision to adopt it as the title of her fourth novel must be interpreted as a political statement. The book is, however, much more than this. It can be read as having an allegorical dimension that comments on Australia's shameful treatment of its Aboriginal population, yet it is not a political novel in the didactic style of recent works by Andrew McGahan and Richard Flanagan. Jones is not that kind of writer...Sorry sometimes labours under its thematic burden and Jones's writing has its flaws. Her tendency to talk over her characters is less evident than in some of her earlier novels but is still there. Her frequent use of dreams, though conceptually important, can come across as a creaky fictional device. And her prose, though beautifully wrought, operates at such a consistently high pitch that it strays occasionally into pretentiousness, perhaps due to a mild contamination from the clotted theoretical prose that Jones doubtless encounters on a regular basis in her day job as lecturer in cultural studies at the University of Western Australia...She is, nevertheless, one of the most interesting and talented novelists at work in Australia today. Her writing has flaws, in part because she is daring enough to express a complex, original and passionate vision; she writes with a belief in the power of fiction to express meanings unavailable to other forms of art or inquiry."

Kathy Hunt in "The Australian": "Technically, the main problem with Jones's writing is that there is just too much of it. She leaves no phrase unturned in her attempt to gild what is an ordinary tale...Title or apology, Sorry is a failure. Its form has been corrupted with skill and probably the best of intentions. Unfortunately, the result is what too many people think of as good writing: the book you buy but never read, the novel you can't see for the words."

Miranda France, in "The Telegraph": "Any novelist who takes risks with language deserves to be celebrated. Jones has the nerve to use constructions that feel both arcane and new. There is no doubting her descriptive powers. However, in some passages, words grow so luxuriantly over the story that linguistic secateurs would have come in handy...This is Gail Jones's 'sorry' to her aboriginal compatriots. I admire her for it, but for all her sincerity, her afterword elucidating the word in the context of Australian politics strikes a pious note. Mary is a powerfully drawn character, sympathetic and convincing enough to speak for herself. There was no need for the author to step in."

Michelle Griffin in "Australian Book Review": "This is a novel of ambitious seriousness, and with serious ambitions, some of which are achieved. Regardless of her academic bent, as a novelist Jones excels at structure: everything happens in this book for a reason, and its four parts fit together beautifully, meshing ideas about history, speech reading, memory and family."

Short notices

Gillian Dooley on "Writer's Radio" [PDF file]: "Gail Jones' last novel, Dreams of Speaking, was interesting and intelligent. Sorry is on an altogether higher level. It is a brilliant evocation of childhood, loss, language, humanity and inhumanity. It is poetic without being precious, and totally engrossing without any sacrifice of intellectual profundity."

Posted by larrikin at 07:56 PM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2008

Combined Reviews: Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital

Reviews of Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital HarperCollins May 2007

[This novel has been longlisted for the 2008 Miles Franklin Award.]

From the publisher's page

Leela is a gifted mathematician who has escaped her small Southern town to study in Boston. From the first moment she hears Mishka, a young Australian musician, playing his violin in a subway, his music grips her, and they quickly become lovers.

Their souls, bodies, lives are fused, and love offers protection of sorts from the violence and anxiety around them, until Leela is taken off the street to an interrogation centre somewhere outside the city. There has been an 'incident', an explosion on the underground; terrorists are suspected, security is high. And her old childhood friend Cobb is conducting a very questionable investigation.

Now he reveals to her that Mishka may not be all he seems. That there may be more to his past than his story of growing up in the Daintree with an eccentric musical family. Leela has already discovered that Mishka is spending some evenings not at the Music Lab but at a cafe. A cafe, Cobb tells her, known to be a terrorist contact point.

Who can she believe?

In this compelling re-imagining of the Orpheus story, Leela travels to an underworld of kidnapping, torture and despair in search of the truth -- and the man she loves.

Reviews
Judith Armstrong in "Australian Book Review": "With this, her eighth novel (several of the earlier ones having won distinguished prizes), Hospital shows her dazzling skill at thriller writing. This is not a generic put-down. The myriad twists and turns of the compellingly logical plot, the psychological scaffolding which convincingly underpins behavioural veracity, the darts from one country, one generation, one kind of wildly different mind to another -- all are handled with the ease of a master-planner who never falters for an instant. Nor do the pace and intensity let up. While the events might sometimes be described as hectic, and some of the later scenes as lurid, they are no more so than the contents of today's newspapers."

Andrew Reimer in "The Sydney Morning Herald": "On one level Orpheus Lost is a clever political thriller - with the usual contrivances, coincidences and occasional improbabilities of the genre - which will amuse and entertain many readers. They will also find within its pages several vivid passages describing the underhand tactics and dirty tricks employed by all sides in the war against terrorism...Unfortunately, Turner Hospital had greater ambitions than this. Her novel is weighed down with meditations on the redemptive nature of music, on the mysteries of the world of numbers and on how music and mathematics may come to be abused and perverted by religious fanaticism of several kinds."

Stella Clarke in "The Australian": "Hospital is hypnotic as she traces the relationship between music and mathematics, to an extent that borders on mysticism. Terror and torture amount to awful sacrilege in this universe. They attack and destroy the intricate, beautiful and sublime mechanics of life. She manages to communicate tragedy on a conceptual macro-scale as well as bring it home in the personal lives of her characters...This superbly gripping novel alerts us to the real cost of terrorism. Beyond immediate damage and death, we could allow an erosion of freedoms that we take for granted. The terror of terrorism, Hospital suggests, is causing tectonic shifts beneath our feet."

Peter Craven in "The Age": "Turner Hospital has a beautiful lightness of touch through the nightmare contortions of the plot she spins and twists like a rope of destiny...If the story is not quite as sure-footed as Grahame Greene in comparable territory, if it swerves farther from the articulation of thriller-like enthralments, it is nonetheless almost as satisfying as it is involving...Part of what is so refreshing is the way the characterisation glows with such an easy, tacit humanity. Her characters are instantly alive, whatever hate or grief or lust it is that makes them pant through their masks and cavalcades...And the fact that the action is in part breakneck and full of dark intrigue makes this one of those serious books that should command the attention of people who read for pleasure."

Short notices

"Mostly Fiction: "Filled with rich action scenes related to contemporary issues, wonderful images, and themes dealing with illusion and reality, the ways our pasts govern our present, the importance of our parents in the shaping of our lives, and the prices we are willing to pay for love, the novel is exciting and tension-filled."

"Aust Crime Fiction": "Where ORPHEUS LOST becomes less of an interesting book is in a device that the author uses a lot -- where characters move rapidly from real life events into dreams / dream sequences / imaginings of events. There is certainly a lyrical flavour to these sequences but they also jar within the pace of the general book -- driving the reader out of the story."

Posted by larrikin at 09:19 AM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2008

Combined Reviews: Love Without Hope by Rodney Hall

Reviews of Love Without Hope by Rodney Hall Pan Macmillan February 2007

[This novel has been longlisted for the 2008 Miles Franklin Award.]

From the publisher's page

The elderly Mrs Shoddy suffers acute depression as a result of a bushfire that kills her beloved horses. A capable countrywoman, she loses her grip and is living in squalor when the district nurse finds her and has her committed to an insane asylum. The time is 1982; the place, a country town in NSW. The NSW Department of Lunacy is still in operation, headed by an official with the title The Master in Lunacy.

In this powerful novel, finding herself pitted against the power of the state, Mrs Shoddy calls on her memories of her missing husband, on the spirit of her horses and on the recovery of her self-respect and resilience to create a world in which she can remain sane, even against the institutional brutality she is subjected to. And the characters in her mind become as palpable as the real people she is surrounded by.

A hymn of praise to human tenderness, the power of memory and the power of music, Love Without Hope confirms Rodney Hall's status as one of Australia's finest storytellers.

Reviews

Rosemary Sorenson in "Australian Book Review": "The theme of the pageant is love, which looms large as a subject for this writer's investigation, as he makes clear with titles such as this, and his previous novel, The Last Love Story (2004). It is not love and romance, but love as the ephemeral gathering of human desire; love as an excuse to avoid confrontation with what is too grand and terrifying for our understanding. We may come close to feeling our sympathy spill over into love for characters such as Lorna Shoddy and others (the doctor, for example, who is central to an astounding scene); but this is not writing -- or a writer -- that gives in to the siren song, and the reader must also be strapped to the mast. Lorna is a little creature whose predicament is pathetic, and we are on her side, but she is to be symbolically sacrificed on the pyre created for the funeral of hope... Hall's novels, like White's, are uncompromisingly unconsoling. The bleakness of love illuminates not just this new novel but much of the Yandilli books and Just Relations. Maybe, looking at it from a sharp angle, you could say Love without Hope leaves us imagining that there may be a little after all -- hope that is, if not love. But Hall paints a grim picture of a vicious society where the dream of love is a weakness exploited by the cruel."

Andrew Reimer in "The Sydney Morning Herald": "Where I have no doubt or reservation comes in a number of almost surrealistic episodes in which Hall's writing betrays a crisp, often sardonic intensity that also has parallels in some of White's work. One such passage - too long to quote here - describes an impromptu autopsy in the madhouse where poor Mrs Shoddy is shackled inside a hideous oubliette. There, as elsewhere in Love Without Hope, Hall's prose reveals poise, a dark wit and an accomplished writer's authority in impressively cadenced sentences."

James Bradley in "The Age": "..Love Without Hope -- and indeed much of Hall's writing -- resembles no one so much as Patrick White. More than any other Australian writer working today he shares White's sense of brooding mysticism and interest in the grotesqueries and folly of everyday life...Yet while the intensity of White's vision can be overwhelming, there is an essential delicacy and humanity to it that Hall's novels often lack, for all the filigree of their imagining. In Love Without Hope this is particularly true -- Hall drives the proceedings so hard, so maniacally, that there is little space for the reader to take their breath, or indeed for the language to unfold itself.""

Short notices

Perry Middlemiss in "Matilda": "A novel of our times dealing with the relationship between individual and state, the effects of mental illness, and the strengthening power of love."

"The Blurb": "What makes this book unique is the fact that the storyline is very original and ambitious. While it is not a feel-good read, it is a thought provoking and emotional read."

Michael Jordan in "The Epoch Times": "Those who believe that Australian writing is second-rate need only read Rodney Hall to be quickly persuaded otherwise. The two times winner of the Miles Franklin award has always been praised for the sheer beauty of his work, and his latest, Love Without Hope is no exception...Mr Hall's novel is at once universal and intrinsically Australian, reminiscent of other local writers such as Peter Carey and Sonya Hartnett. The complexity of themes and ideas which Mr Hall explores will prevent Love Without Hope from being completely accessible and enjoyed by the majority, but this is a moving account of life and longing which keeps him at the forefront of Australian writing."

Posted by larrikin at 09:31 PM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2008

Combined Reviews: The Time We Have Taken by Steven Carroll

Reviews of The Time We Have Taken by Steven Carroll Fourth Estate February 2007

[This novel won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Novel for the South-East Asia and South Pacific region. It was shortlisted in the Fiction category of the 2007 Age Book of the Year awards, shortlisted for the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction in the 2007 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and has been longlisted for the 2008 Miles Franklin Award.]

From the publisher's page

One summer morning in 1970, Peter van Rijn, proprietor of the television and wireless shop, pronounces his Melbourne suburb one hundred years old. That same morning, Rita is awakened by a dream of her husband's snores, yet it is years since Vic moved north.

Their son, Michael, has left for the city, and is entering the awkward terrain of first love.

As the suburb prepares to celebrate progress, Michael's friend Mulligan is commissioned to paint a mural of the area's history. But what vision of the past will his painting reveal?

Meanwhile, Rita's sometime friend Mrs Webster confronts the mystery of her husband's death. And Michael discovers that innocence can only be sustained for so long.

The Time We Have Taken is both a meditation on the rhythms of suburban life and a luminous exploration of public and private reckoning during a time of radical change.

[Note: this is the third volume in a trilogy by Steven Carroll, following The Art of the Engine Driver, and The Gift of Speed, each of which made the Miles Franklin Award shortlist.]

Reviews

Michael McGirr in "The Age" compares Carroll's work to Elizabeth Jolley's in a favourable light: "It has the emotional stamina needed to draw life from the same characters over three independent novels...Carroll writes the kind of still prose that invites the reader into a contemplative space. The irony is that his subject matter is restless...He details the life of a suburb nine miles north of Melbourne, from the late '50s to the early '70s. It is, as Carroll notes, an age enthralled by progress and, even more, by speed. But he insists on telling the story slowly...The result is a deeply satisfying encounter with the empty spaces that the suburb failed to fill both between people and inside them. The surface of Carroll's writing is deceptively calm."

The problem with a lot of trilogies is that you need to be fully aware of the backstory before getting to the later works. Katharine England in "The Advertiser" doesn't find that a problem here: "Each novel stands on its own, but they are more interesting considered together, making up as they do not only a history of that 20th century phenomenon, the suburb, but also a slow-moving, Proustian meditation on being and time...The repetitive accretion of detail, like the brush strokes of a pointillist, the echoes within the novel and from book to book, the use of tenses which base time in the present but refer constantly to past and future, contribute to the hypnotic effect of the whole."

In "Australian Book Review" Christina Hill finds reflections of other artistic works in the novel: "While George Johnston's suburban Melbourne in My Brother Jack (1964) of the 1920s and 1930s is tacitly acknowledged as an influence on this novel, echoes of Gerald Murnane's work are also discernible in the subject matter and in the insistent specificities of the diction. This makes the prose mannered at times, but the suburb is represented with some of the inscrutable beauty of Howard Arkley's paintings of suburban houses."

Short Notices

Readings: "While Carroll's work is not overtly political, memory and the mythologising of the past are central themes, and he subtly but surely undermines the simplistic pre-lapsarian dream of the culture warriors while at the same time drawing his characters and their desires for escape or transcendence with humour, affection and empathy -- and without a hint of condescension."

Australian Online Bookshop: "The Time We Have Taken is a celebration of the rhythms and intricacies of suburban life, and a meditation on its limitations. Steven Carroll achieves a luminous intimacy with his characters as he explores both a society teetering on the edge of radical change, and the richness and complexity of that most common of Australian experiences -- the suburbs."

Other

"The Advertiser" ran a profile of the author in March 2007, just after the book was published.

Posted by larrikin at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)

March 17, 2008

Combined Reviews: The Fern Tattoo by David Brooks

Reviews of The Fern Tattoo by David Brooks University of Queensland Press Publication date: August 2007

[This novel has been longlisted for the 2008 Miles Franklin Award.]

From the publisher's page

Evidently she knew who I was, or thought she did, since I had apparently needed no introduction and certainly hadn't received one... She told stories. One could almost say she rushed into them, on the merest of pretexts, as if the world was ending very shortly and they had to be got through before it happened.

A century of family secrets starts to unravel when Benedict Waters is summoned to an audience with an old friend of his mother. He is seduced by her storytelling and it takes time and an astonishing revelation before he realises that it is his own family he has been hearing about, his own life that is being undone.

From the Blue Mountains to the Hawkesbury and from Sydney to the south coast of New South Wales, The Fern Tattoo takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey through several generations of three families. We meet a range of extraordinary characters including a bigamist bishop, a librarian tattooed from neck to knee, a young girl who kills her best friend in a tragic shooting accident and a pair of lovers who live each other's lives for years after they have separated. As with all families, there are lost loves, tragic passions and unspoken - sometimes unspeakable - histories.

The Fern Tattoo is a beguiling novel about the certainty of fate and the randomness of love that announces David Brooks' return as one of Australia's most distinctive literary novelists.

Reviews

Kevin Rabelais, in "The Australian", finds the novel difficult to get into at the start, but he warms to the style and concept as he goes: "One of the achievements of The Fern Tattoo, Brooks's second novel and fifth work of fiction, resides in its refusal to distinguish between truth and lies...The novel proceeds slowly, with meandering sentences -- at times needlessly long, for Brooks tends to reiterate -- and minimal dialogue. His prose demands patience and aspires to a lyrical quality that it often fails to achieve. While rhythmic, his sentences are laden with the kinds of inessentials, most notably a plethora of adverbs, that weaken the narrative's authority. Brooks is a stylist in the sense that he writes as much for his reader's ear as for their eye. His sentences can evoke several senses at once, as when he describes the 'continuous scream of summer heat'...With The Fern Tattoo, Brooks has given us an ambitious novel about how stories outlive and form us."

Judith Armstrong in "Australian Book Review" tends to concur: "This is a novel structured like a mosaic, each chip, big or little, complete in itself, but deriving its ultimate significance from a larger, as yet undisclosed, scenario. Not until most of the pieces are in place does the overall schema become even half clear, and then you must take a pencil and paper and do a lot of working out for yourself, in an effort to give to somthing resembling a jigsaw puzzle, disordered and fragmentary, the teleology and linearity associated with both history and narrative shape.' Which may sound like a lot of work for the reader, but Armstrong concludes that "..the writing is simply too masterly not to be, in itself, a spectacular reward."

Short notice

Readings: "Meticulously plotted, The Fern Tattoo carefully unveils a story of the inescapable burden of ancestry and family heritage."

Which isn't a lot of reviews for a major novel such as this. And there's no way of telling if this is because none of the other major papers thought it worthy of a review or if the publisher didn't send out many review copies.

Posted by larrikin at 08:58 AM | Comments (4)

March 21, 2007

Combined Reviews: Careless by Deborah Robertson

Reviews of Careless by Deborah Robertson.

[This novel has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific) Best Book category, and longlisted for the 2007 Miles Franklin Award.]

Description from the publisher's page:
"In the midst of her life with her small brother and unpredictable mother, Pearl is a child who strives to get things right. But the events of one summer's day are about to change her life, and nothing may ever be right again. In ways connected but unforeseen, this child's tragedy will also enter the lives of two strangers. Sonia lives in a cooler, greener part of the city, where she is learning to live alone after the death of her famous husband. And at the edge of the city, close to the beaches, in a run-down building, the young sculptor Adam Logan contemplates the celebrity that his artwork has brought to him.

"Through a seductively woven plot that reflects the interlacing nature of our lives, Careless explores the ties of caring and responsibility, for the living and the dead, that are formed, and broken, in our society."

Emily Ballou, in "Australian Book Review", published the most detailed review of the novel, though, maybe not the most understandable. "The first thing about Deborah Robertson's first novel, Careless, that strikes the reader is the way her prose style cuts like sand." Rubs, maybe, but cuts? I'm not so sure. Anyway, she gets to the point straight afterwards: "The story of three individuals united by the murder of six children is compelling, but what impresses is Robertson's love of language, the precision of her sentences, as well as her gentle philosophical imagination and the deeper questions her book seeks to answer." This might well be a first novel, but it appears to have been some time in the crafting, and is better for it. "Robertson's prose has been well honed, polished to shine. It has the capacity to shift suddenly, to for unexpected shapes from a thousand glittering grains." And yet, at the end, Ballou feels disappointed, calling the novel's ending "ultimately disappointing".

In "The Age", Juliette Hughes is impressed: "Careless, by Deborah Robertson, is, paradoxically enough written with great care. Each plot part is assiduously interwoven with another: themes of grief, loss, responsibility and betrayal recur as characters do the work that she has set them in slow-moving, hyper-observant present tense."

Similarly, Peter Pierce, in "The Bulletin" found much to commend in the novel: "With Proudflesh, a prize-winning volume of short stories behind her, Robertson is an experienced writer. Yet little could have prepared her previous readers for the ambition, intelligence and confidence of structural touch of Careless."

Unusually, for a first Australian novel, Careless was also published in the UK. Rachel Moore in "The Guardian" was quite moved by it. As Moore puts it, the author "is fascinated by ways we memorialise the dead...[but]...the author does not dwell on death itself, rather on the care and responsibility that people do or don't exercise towards one another in life. She is best as a miniaturist, in the style of Helen Dunmore, her observations as carefully chosen and charged with feeling as pebbles placed on a grave...Careless is an elegy for the lost and the grieving, but it also offers hope."

In "The Sydney Morning Herald", Angela Bennie interviewed the author in the middle of 2006.

Other novels on the 2007 Miles Franklin Award longlist:

Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey
Silent Parts by John Charalambous
The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan
Beyond The Break by Sandra Hall
Dreams Of Speaking by Gail Jones
The Unexpected Elements Of Love by Kate Legge
Careless by Deborah Robertson
Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

Posted by larrikin at 10:55 AM | Comments (1)

January 12, 2007

Worthy Books Unnoticed: Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

Reviews of Carpentaria by Alexis Wright.

Description from the publisher's page:
"Alexis Wright is one of Australia's finest Aboriginal writers. Carpentaria is her second novel, an epic set in the Gulf country of north-western Queensland, from where her people come. The novel's portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centres on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight's renegade Eastend mob on the one hand, and the white officials of Uptown and the neighbouring Gurfurrit mine on the other.

"Wright's storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, farce and politics. The novel teems with extraordinary characters - Elias Smith the outcast saviour, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, the murderous mayor Stan Bruiser, the moth-ridden Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist and prodigal son Will Phantom, and above all, the queen of the rubbish-dump Angel Day and her sea-faring husband Normal Phantom, the fish-embalming king of time - figures that stride like giants across this storm-swept world.

"Alexis Wright is a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her books include Grog War, a study of alcohol abuse in the outback town of Tennant Creek, and the novel Plains of Promise, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize, the "Age" Book of the Year Award and the NSW Premier's Award for Fiction, and translated into French as Les Plaines de l'espoir."

In the "Australian Book Review" Kate McFayden is impressed by the way Wright is able to incorporate an ancient story-telling technique into her novel: "Wright recognises the strength of the oral tradition as a satirical and ironic tool. The combination of storytelling on a mythic scale with the guile of the knowing look generates the energy required to drive this genius epic." You might get carried along with the story but don't expect an easy ride. "Carpentaria is that rare kind of novel which opens up an entire world to the reader, a place that is both familiar and strange. Wright expects her readers to work, to keep up. If you stumble and lose your bearings, you just have to trust the narrator and let the eddies of digression flow around you until you can regain your toehold. The rewards are plenty. It is the most exhilarating book I have read in a long time."

Liam Davidson attempts to put the book into context in his review in the "Sydney Morning Herald": "Alexis Wright's second novel is a vast, sprawling affair that extends magically beyond its hefty 500 pages. It takes you outside the expected scope of narrative time to a place that is simultaneously familiar and astoundingly new. So comprehensive is Wright's vision that reading it is like looking at her world from the inside. It's an unashamedly big book - big in scope, ambition and physical size - and well-suited to the Gulf country it sings. It is also an important book."

Carole Ferrier finds a lot of "burlesque" humour in the book in her review in the "Australian Women's Book Review". That, and "a dry ironic humour at many points, in almost throwaway lines." She also agrees that "The novel works at many levels, through from this humour and irony to a lyrical and poetic evocation of the age-old presence of the rainbow serpent. The shifts in register produce a heteroglossia that is beautifully unified through a narration that has great confidence and authority."

On Adelaide's Writer's Radio program, Gillian Dooley casts one of the few criticisms at the book, finding that it takes some time to draw the reader in. Dooley thinks this might be a mistaken technique that might well drive away some impatient readers. However, in the end, even she finds that it is "a moving and involving book and amply rewards the reader's persistence

Jane Sullivan profiles the author in the "Sydney Morning Herald". As does Michael Fitzgerald in "Time".

Posted by larrikin at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

June 09, 2006

Worthy Books Unnoticed: The Ballad of Desmond Kale by Roger McDonald

Reviews of The Ballad of Desmond Kale by Roger McDonald.

[This novel has been shortlisted for the 2006 Miles Franklin award.]

Description from the publisher's page:
"In the early 1800s, out of the prison society of governors, redcoats, English gaolers, Irish convicts, and the few free settlers of Botany Bay, one had entured much farther inland than a few dozen miles from Sydney into the vast territory claimed, New South Wales. Or so it was believed until the escape of Desmond Kale and the vengeance of his rival, the wildly eccentric parson magistrate Matthew Stanton. THE BALLAD OF DESMOND KALE is Roger McDonald's broad-sweeping novel of the first days of British settlement in Australia. At the centre is Stanton's pursuit of Kale - an Irish political prisoner and a rebelliously brilliant breeder of sheep. The alchemy of wool fascinates, threatens, and transforms when it is discovered that fine wool thrives in New South Wales as nowhere else in in the world, producing veritable gold on sheep's backs. The laying to waste of Spain (Britain's chief supplier of fine wools) at the end of the Napoleonic wars, opens vast new opportunities of supply. THE BALLAD OF DESMOND KALE is both a love story of unusual interest and an epic novel of greed, ambition, conceit, and redemption. The novel is rich in its characterisations and the rawness of its settings, vigour of language, and vividness of personality. The action moves from the early Australian bush to the halls of Westminster, the mills of Yorkshire, the sierras of Spain, the wilds of the Southern Ocean, and returns at last into the far outback for its finale. Once the ballad is sung, ordinary experience is heightened, the world can never be the same again. A brilliant and inspired recreation of the early days of white Australian settlement by one of Australia's finest writers working at the height of his powers."

There don't seem to be any reviews of this novel which react badly to it. All reviewers seem to think it's a pretty impressive piece of work. Peter Pierce in "The Age", can lead us off as well as anyone, and probably better than most: "McDonald's is a big, ambitious book, a winding tale that takes its due time. There are detours for intriguing subplots - a pregnancy, a feud between half-brothers, a shipwreck, the attempted theft of a map to the fabled inland of the colony, political intrigue over the governing of NSW. There is much detail about the breeding of sheep - the quality of their wool in consequence, the character of the men who are expert in this."

In "Australian Book Review", Michael Williams starts off a bit fixated on the sheep aspect: "How much do you care about sheep? I mean really care about sheep. Because The Ballad of Desmond Kale is up to its woolly neck in them." He does go on from there, which is a blessing: "It's an unusual and inspired variation on the classic Australian colonial novel of hunters for fortune, for identity and for redemption." But Williams does have a few words of caution to impart along with the praise. "This is a big book that spends a little too long luxuriating in the fun of its grandeurs and at points fails to sustain its narrative drive. The big historical novels that it seems to be emulating have a much clearer sense of focus and of forward momentum. But McDonald does embrace adventure, and at its best, with betrayals and love, ship-wrecks and double-crosses, this is a rollicking good read."

Stella Clarke also considers at the novel in "The Weekend Australian" and is pretty impressed: "Roger McDonald is a riot. This story is balladry of distinction, laid out in prose. He combines a love of intrigue and high adventure with a defiant, lyrical, vigorous way of telling...Here are art and excitement, mixed to magnificent strength. Here are pain and passion, eased through the circumspect medium of a charismatic, old-fashioned style, then springing at you in a gutsy twist of phrase."

Phil Brown, at "The Brisbane News" probably sums it up for all of us: "This is one of the must-read Australian books of 2005." And it comes as no surprise, to me at least, that I'm still to read it and it's now mid-2006.

Posted by larrikin at 09:31 AM | Comments (2)

May 03, 2006

Worthy Books Unnoticed: The Wing of Night by Brenda Walker

Reviews of The Wing of Night by Brenda Walker.

[This novel has been shortlisted for the 2006 Miles Franklin award.]

Description from publisher's page:
"All over the south-west, soldiers' wives were learning to sleep alone. Sleeping themselves back into the nights before their weddings . . . In 1915 a troopship of Light Horsemen sails from Fremantle for the Great War. Two women farewell their men: Elizabeth, with her background of careless wealth, and Bonnie, who is marked by the anxieties of poverty. Neither can predict how the effects of the most brutal fighting at Gallipoli will devastate their lives in the long aftermath of the war.

"The Wing of Night is a novel about the strength and failure of faith and memory, about returned soldiers who become exiles in their own country, about how people may become the very opposite of what they imagined themselves to be. Brenda Walker writes with a terrible grandeur of the grime and drudge of the battlefield, and of how neither men nor women can be consoled for the wreckage caused by a foreign war."

The literature of this country would be totally lost without the magazine Australian Book Review. Time and again the only substantial review I can find of a particular work appeared within its pages. Such is the case with Brenda Walker's fourth novel The Wing of Night. Aviva Tuffield is very impressed with the novel, especially as it doesn't concentrate solely on the front line, but "directs as much attention to the home front and to the women left behind...Shifting between scenes from the military theatre and from the domestic sphere, The Wing of Night plays out the devastating impact of war on both those sent to fight and those abandoned to lonely, anxious lives. War is depicted as a great leveller, breaching class and gender boundaries that were once considered robust".

In order to do this properly, the author has to be conversant with both fronts, while still ensuring that the tale is told properly. This is a novel of men, and women, at war, based on accepted history. As such, the writer has to get the details right without flooding the reader and ruining the effect: "This historical novel has clearly emerged from extensive research, yet it does not try to parade its knowledge or to bombard the reader with military details. It is not concerned with painting the big picture of the war but of sketching the specific experiences of a handful of characters."

Tuffield is of the view that the author here has brought it all together quite beautifully. "If one of the aims of literature is to enable us imaginatively to inhabit other lives, perhaps occurring in different times and places, The Wing of Night is a remarkable achievement. Walker has taken the facts of history and transformed them into a novel replete with its own set of truths. She has done what historians cannot: invented characters to tell us exactly how it felt to live in a particular historical moment, one that sheds light on our own times."

The reviewer from Abbey's Bookshop would seem to agree: "The Wing of Night is a novel about the strength and failure of faith and memory, about returned soldiers who become exiles in their own country, about how people may become the very opposite of what they imagined themselves to be. Brenda Walker writes with a terrible grandeur of the grime and drudge of the battlefield, and of how neither men nor women can be consoled for the wreckage caused by a foreign war."

The author was profiled by Jane Sullivan in "The Age", which gives some very interesting insights into where the book had its beginnings.

Posted by larrikin at 02:05 PM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2006

Worthy Books Unnoticed: A Case of Knives by Peter Rose

Reviews of A Case of Knives by Peter Rose.

[This novel has been longlisted for the 2006 Miles Franklin award.]

Description from the publisher's page:

"The cast

Julia Collis: a brilliant but unconventional publisher, more than a little controlling of her ménage
Candy Collis: an opera singer with a bright future and a dark mother
Matthew Light: a young actor, taken under Julia's wing as a teenage boy, obsessively in love with Roman Anthem
Roman Anthem: the 21-year-old grandson of a legendary Australian prime minister, renowned for his good looks, despised by Julia

The scene

Valhalla: an incestuous household of steely alliances, lopsided infatuations, and dark impulses

The plot

Roman Anthem is missing and no one knows why.

Witty, satirical and full of intrigue, set against a backdrop of opera, publishing and politics, Peter Rose's first novel is unlike any other Australian fiction."

Michelle Griffen in "The Age" was very impressed with the novel. She notes that Rose has been associated with the Australian publishing scene for some years, currently as editor of Australian Book Review, and wonders if the novel might be read as a sort of roman a clef: "It is cheap entertainment to wonder, in passing, if Julia is based on any of the women who have run Australia's publishing houses, but I think - hope - it unlikely. This may be a novel about a missing man called Roman, but this is not a roman a clef. Rose has written an operatic libretto set in an Australia askew. He has cut out the silhouettes of the figures that loom large in the cultural reference bank and filled in the spaces with his own more vivid characters...In the end, former publisher Rose has written the sort of book publishers always wish their authors would deliver - a clever, juicy thriller with lots of sex and intrigue and just enough 'guess-who-won't-sue' buzz to attract interest beyond the bookstore. It is so completely different from his previous book that it could have been written by his evil twin. It must have been fun to write - it was fun to read."

Gillian Dooley in "The Adelaide Review" seems a little thrown by the very existence of this book, slightly surprised it's a crime novel rather than "a slim, poetic volume". In any event she finds something to like about it: "I'm not sure how seriously Peter Rose wants us to take this novel. Less care has been taken with the editing than one would normally expect from someone of his experience in publishing. Nevertheless, this background has provided a setting he satirises with obvious relish, along with other institutions like politics, the media, the theatre world and the AFL. And despite a few technical faults, A Case of Knives is engrossing and entertaining with some sharply drawn characters. Though more finely written, it could take its place alongside popular melodramatic blockbusters in the airport newsagent."

Denise Pickles, in the Mary Martin Bookshop newsletter, was also a bit confused at the start, but for a different reason: "It is fortunate that the author was considerate enough to present a cast of characters at the beginning of the book. I must admit I had to resort to it continually, to begin with." But she moved on from that and discovered that "This is a witty, sometimes malicious, romp, well written (the author has previously won an award for his biography Rose Boys) and plotted, with excellent characterisation. The themes being what they are, it is possible readers may never again regard the worlds of politics, publishing, theatre and opera in quite the same light as hitherto."

Posted by larrikin at 03:00 PM | Comments (2)

March 30, 2006

Worthy Books Unnoticed: Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany

Reviews of Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany.

[This novel has been longlisted for the 2006 Miles Franklin award, longlisted for the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Best First Book Award for the South East Asia and South Pacific region of the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.]

Description: "It is 1934, the Great War is long over and the next is yet to come. It is a brief time of optimism and advancement.

"Billowing dust and information, the government 'Better Farming Train' slides through the wheat fields and small towns of Australia, bringing city experts and advice to those already living on the land. The train is on a crusade to persuade the country that science holds the answers and that productivity is patriotic.

"Amongst the swaying cars full of cows, pigs and wheat, an unlikely seduction occurs between Robert Pettergree, a man with an unusual taste for soil, and Jean Finnegan, a talented young seamstress with a hunger for knowledge. In an atmosphere of heady scientific idealism they settle in the impoverished Mallee with the ambition of proving that science can transform the land.

"With failing crops and the threat of a new World War looming, Robert and Jean are forced to confront each other, the community they have destroyed, and the impact of progress on an ancient and fragile landscape.

"Erotically charged, and shot through with humour and a quiet wisdom, this haunting first novel evokes the Australian landscape in all its stark beauty and vividly captures the hope and disappointment of an era."

In "The Age", Judith Armstrong initially thinks the book may have something to hide: "You can't see a title such as this without suspecting its author of playing games. What lies behind the joke? Carrie Tiffany, who regards her own name as 'ridiculously flaky', is a first-time novelist who has already received some excellent publicity." But she soon comes to realise that the book is far more than just a funny title, and that it is "a highly accomplished, adroit and funny-serious novel, which, unlike a Mallee farm, works almost perfectly."

The general consenus of opinion amongst reviewers of this novel is that it is an impressive debut. At AussieReviews, Sally Murphy found that "Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living is a powerfully haunting novel. Set in the period between the two worlds, in a community struggling through the depression and drought, this is a gripping first novel from a new Australian talent."

A claim that was echoed by Publisher's Weekly in the US, which called it a "rich and knowing debut novel." And which then went on to state: "Acclaimed Australian story writer Tiffany writes in a deceptively simple style, notable for its craft and heartbreaking clarity; that as well as her unusual yet utterly believable period characters make for a stunning debut."

Posted by larrikin at 03:50 PM | Comments (3)

March 03, 2006

Worthy Books Unnoticed: The Patron Saint of Eels by Gregory Day

Reviews of The Patron Saint of Eels by Gregory Day.

Description: "A contemporary fable, this book shows that when life seems dull and cruel it is the power of the natural world, and our ability to imagine it, that can bring the wonder back into living.

"In the southern Italian village of Stellanuova, in the 1700s, a Franciscan monk, Fra Ionio, becomes known as the Patron Saint of Eels when he brings a distraught fisherman's yearly catch of eels back from the dead in the village market. When Stellanuova's inhabitants emigrate to Australia in the post World War II migrations of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, the immortal saint is left looking down on an abandoned town. To fulfil his calling, he decides in heaven to migrate with his countrymen and now looks down on the state of Victoria, where he intercedes in matters relating to eels.

"In the southern Victorian town of Mangowak, Noel Lea lives with the melancholy inheritance of a place undergoing the gentrifications of contemporary Australia. Along with his oldest friend, Nanette Burns, he longs for a time when life was less complex and unexpected magic seemed to permeate the ocean town and its people. When spring rains flood a nearby swamp and hundreds of eels get trapped in the grassy ditches around Noel's family home, he and Nanette encounter the vibrant Fra Ionio and get more magic than they bargained for."

In "Australian Book Review", Sarah Kanowski finds a lot to like with the novel but then determines that the author's approach may be a limiting factor: "Gregory Day depicts a country world of pub yarns, simple happiness and a deep, if unarticulated, connecton to the land. Its heroes are old bush characters still in possession of 'that vast and intimate family knowledge born out of the gifts of improvisation and bushcraft, of getting by.' The rendering of everyday speech is not easy, and Day handles its blunt cadences well. However, a perception of the world that is dominated by telling silences necessarily falters when called on to articulate the miraculous".

On the other hand, Lisa Gorton in "The Age" doesn't have the same problems: "Day is a musician as well as a writer and The Patron Saint of Eels is composed like music, with a pattern of recurring phrases and images that carry his theme in different keys. In this way, it is a highly deliberate work, with its depths all brought to the surface, as it were. If this extreme clarity is to some extent the novel's limitation, it is also part of its charm. For it is the self-consistency of Day's style and theme that allows him to bring together so many quirky and various things: comical accounts of local characters and pious reflections on the meaning of landscape; Mangowak history and the story of how a Franciscan monk in the southern Italian village of Stellanuova became the Patron Saint of Eels."

In the Australian, Liam Davison is quite impressed with the work: "In [this] wonderful first novel, the enigma of the eel becomes the central metaphor for the charming contemporary fable about migration and belonging, and mortality and belief." Which, on the face of it, seems to stretch the bonds of credibility somewhat. But Davison is a major novelist himself so he knows where a reader might be a little dubious: "In another writer's hands, this quasi-religious fable with its veiled social and environmental agenda might have tested the credulity and goodwill of its readers. Day, though, understands the power of the story and the way local mythology and folklore invests a place with its own magic."

Michelle Griffin profiles the author in "The Age".

Posted by larrikin at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)

February 22, 2006

Worthy Books Unnoticed: The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Reviews of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

This novel was shortlisted for the Best Book of the South East Asia and South Pacific Region award in the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Description: "It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still.

"Liesel Meminger and her younger brother are being taken by their mother to live with a foster family outside Munich. Liesel's father was taken away on the breath of a single, unfamiliar word - Kommunist - and Liesel sees the fear of a similar fate in her mother's eyes. On the journey, Death visits the young boy, and notices Liesel. It will be the first of many near encounters. By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery.

"So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found.

"But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jewish fist-fighter in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down."

One thing this description doesn't tell you is that the book is narrated by Death himself. Death has rescued Liesel's autobiographical journal which allows Zusak to explore, according to Lorien Kaye in Australian Book Review, "the other theme of the book, the nature and importance of books, words reading and writing."

As Kaye goes on to say: "His first four books were more literary than much writing for young adults, and the essence of Zusak's prose style has remained the same: at once muscular and poetic. Sentences are often short but are structurally plain or complex. Zusak enjoys inventive language use and delights in describing the world on a slightly skewed angle.

"It is easy to wring emotion and narrative drive from this grander scope, the raw suffering of World War II and the Holocaust. It is harder to create something more substantial. Markus Zusak goes well beyond the superficial, at least partly due to his prose style, but there are depths that remain just beyond his reach."

Which I read as saying that Zusak has reached for the heights and just failed to reach them. Peter Pierce in "The Age", on the other hand, considers that "The Book Thief is a triumph of control, and for the most part of tact, although Death is at liberty to breach any decorum. Its oblique angle on the German homefront never exalts the courage of the young, but quietly tells of how days and months are managed.

"Zusak has written, in his 30th year, one of the most unusual and compelling of recent Australian novels. He gives its last words to Death, who confesses 'I am haunted by humans'. Those whom we encounter in The Book Thief have that power over the reader, too."

You can read an interview with Markus Zusak in "Publishers Weekly", conducted by Judith Ridge. The novel is due to be published in the USA in March 2006. Ridge, a Sydney based writer, also publishes a weblog and she has posted about the meeting she had with Zusak.

Posted by larrikin at 02:02 PM | Comments (0)

February 14, 2006

Worthy Books Unnoticed: The Garden Book by Brian Castro

Reviews of The Garden Book by Brian Castro.

Brian Castro started his literary career with his first novel, Birds of Passage, winning the 1982 Australian/Vogel Award. The Garden Book is his eighth novel.

Description: "Brian Castro's new novel is set in the Dandenong Ranges in the years between the Depression and the Second World War. The story revolves around Swan Hay, born Shuang He, daughter of a country schoolteacher, her marriage to the passionate and brutal Darcy Damon, and her love affair with the aviator and architect Jasper Zenlin. Fifty years after her disappearance, Norman Shih, a rare book librarian, pieces together Swan's chaotic life from clues found in guest house libraries, antiquarian bookshops and her own elusive writings. But what exactly is his relationship to her?

"The Garden Book is about loneliness, addiction, exploitation; it is about the precarious nature of Australian lives, when gripped by fear and racial prejudice. Yet underlying the story, and commanding it, there is the assured beat of Castro's prose, evoking an ideal world beyond these fears, full of richness and power."

Peter Pierce, in "The Age", found that, even though the subject matter of the novel has been mined many times in the past, "as always in Castro's hands, a rich and strange narrative emerges". And "The Garden Book is another triumph of intelligence and imagination by one of the most exacting, yet rewarding of Australian novelists, and when the mood is on him, one of the most amusing as well."

Pierce backs up his previous review with another in "The Bulletin", in which he concludes: "For all its aesthetic preoccupations, The Garden Book is political, and underneath the aphorisms and martini-dry puns is a despair at a country that, in moments of crisis, becomes nationalistic to the point of provincialism, ungenerous to the point of cruelty, pragmatic to the point of philistinism. To defer to Norman Shih, the collector of fragments in The Garden Book itself, 'remarks are made that turn me away from any humanistic ideology, towards the margins of subversion. I smile back, I write, and I move on.' In that, a script for being."

In "Australian Book Review", Melinda Harvey uses her review of the novel to sink the slipper into current Australian literary works as a lead-in: "Novel-writing, in a word (and it's one that has been flung around with a degree of passion recently), has become 'gutless' storytelling." But she seems to be of the opinion that this novel is not so gastrically challenged: "Brian Castro's The Garden Book is that rare species: a new Australian novel with moxie...[It] is also bold because it manages to look our nation directly in the face without a single reference to the three 'Rs' - reconciliation, republicanism and refugees. As a consequence, the book is cool-eyed rather than nostalgic, even when the prose turns purple."

Brian Castro was profiled by Susan Wyndham in "The Sydney Morning Herald".

Posted by larrikin at 11:38 AM | Comments (0)

February 08, 2006

Worthy Books Unnoticed: Sandstone by Stephen Lacey

Reviews of Sandstone by Stephen Lacey.

This book was shortlisted for the Best Book award in the South East Asia South Pacific region of the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Description: "Sandstone is set in postwar Australia -- a time when people held hopes for the future, based largely around the dream of home ownership.

"Jack, Ruth and their family imagine that their lives will change the day they move into the new home they are building in the small coastal village of Point Henry. They hope the fibro cottage and shiny laminex will bring them happiness and a new start for their family. But as Jack and his sons labour over the foundations for their new life it becomes harder and harder to block out the dark events in their past.

"With a fine eye for detail and a terrific cast of Australian characters, Stephen Lacey reminds us that while we all dream for greater things, sometimes true contentment can be found at home."

At Boomerang Books, Annelise Balsamo is intrigued by the novel but finds that some readers may not be: "Sandstone reads as a family saga that begs for resolution. There is so much mystery, so many bad eggs, so much injustice that you continue to turn the pages in a kind of fever to learn the 'truth', to see 'justice' meted out. Ruth and Jack (and their many children) are haunted by a past, particularly by an event that the novel, in the first twist from the path of resolution, never quite explicates. They decide that they will begin again by building a new house, where no-one has ever died, where no-one will ever fight. This house is a long-running metaphor, we learn about the foundations of sandstone, the joists of warped timber, the walls of fibro-cement and so on. Life, however, is not quite so neatly layered, and the novel is much more interested in this ambiguity than an easy resolution. Indeed, the novel offers a counter position to the structure of the house and the temptations of resolution through Ruth’s disaffection with God, and her belief that there is no plan, no central design. The reader is stranded between the impulse of 'what happened and who pays' and deeper possibilities on offer in nuance and intimation. I think this conflict makes the novel, but it may alienate readers who feel that the saga elements are never properly fulfilled."

If it's handled properly I don't have a major problem with that approach, so long as the author doesn't give the impression that he doesn't know how to finish. That's the "kiss of death" in my view.

In the September 2005 edition of "Australian Book Review", Allan Gardiner puts the novel into literary context: "Lacey...[makes] some effort to present [his] particular chunk of the past as a prelude to contemporary situations, and [to] try to present a vision of a community that does not build its solidarity on the scapegoating of outsiders." But he has some reservations about the success of this: "The bush legend still haunts [this novel], modified to include praise for those bush workers with a 'spiritual' feeling for nature. This reads like an attempt to sidestep rather than confront the role played by early settlers in displacing the Aborigines, who had a real claim to such feelings for the land."

Which reads like a criticism of what the book is not, rather than what it is. We have a novel here that is set during the time of the Second World War, rather than the 19th century.

"The Weekend Australian" considered that Lacey "uses brand names too often as proof of his research: the real period register in this fine novel resides in the emotional encasement of its characters". And "The Age" called it "...a well-researched historical drama that evokes an Australia that has long since passed away".

Posted by larrikin at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2006

Worthy Books Unnoticed: Snowleg by Nicholas Shakespeare

Reviews of Snowleg by Nicholas Shakespeare.

This book has been nominated for the 2006 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize.

Description: "A young Englishman visits Cold War Leipzig with a group of students and, during his brief excursion behind the Iron Curtain, falls for an East German girl who is only just beginning to wake up to the way her society is governed. Her situation touches him, but he is too frightened to help. He spends decades convincing himself that he is not in love until one day, with Germany now reunited, he decides to go back and look for her. But who was she, how will his actions have affected her, and how will her find her? All he knows of her identity is the nickname he gave her - Snowleg."

David Robson's review in "The Telegraph": "Hard-bitten readers will probably find the novel impossibly schmaltzy and get exasperated by the love-sick hero. But Snowleg offers more than high romance: it is a portrait, and a good one, of the East Germany of the Stasi, with its bleakly beautiful landscapes, its casual betrayals, and its subtle capacity to dehumanise. In such a cold political climate, who can blame lovers for going slightly mad?"

Colin Greenland's review in "The Guardian": "Manic plot devices, literary tics and grammatical sprains not-withstanding, Snowleg is a considerable achievement: a dark, dense account of arrested development and mid-life crisis; a shrewd study of institutionalised paralysis and political psychosis; a humane perspective on the rusting away of the iron curtain. What's curious is that it's also a thoroughly conventional romance novel: a heart-warming tale of rich, enabling coincidence and conquering love; love without frontiers."

James Bradley's review in "The Age": "Shakespeare is a writer who is deeply concerned with the inner dimensions of our lives, of the moral choices that we make and the weight of those choices. For all the complexity of the book's plotting and its slightly dissociated prose, the questions Shakespeare wants to ask are profound ones about the precise ways in which repression deforms the spirit and about the extension of compassion to those so affected...Shakespeare has taken on a series of questions that resist easy or glib responses, questions that should make all of us uneasy, not just about the ease with which we condemn the actions of those who suffer under totalitarian regimes but about whether we ourselves might behave any better."

Wingate Packard's review in "The Seattle Times": "Snowleg is an admirably organic novel, well-seeded with richly idiosyncratic characterizations and finely evoked places (the dreary East German exteriors and interiors are wrenchingly pathetic). Snowleg is a delicious mystery, not only in genre but also in the ways that people separated by personal or public barriers carry on after life-altering schisms."

Posted by larrikin at 01:23 PM | Comments (1)

January 20, 2006

Worthy Books Unnoticed: The Philosopher's Doll by Amanda Lohrey

Reviews of The Philosopher's Doll by Amanda Lohrey.

This book has been nominated for the 2006 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

"The Age" describes it as a book that "focuses on a professional couple in their late 30s struggling with the issue of when to have children. Much of the book deals with an intense few weeks in which the wife, Kirsten, has actually become pregnant and is deciding when to tell her husband, Lindsay, while he, completely unaware of this biological incident, is arranging to buy her a dog in order to temporarily satisfy her procreative yearnings."

As Rachel Slater puts it, the novel "novel poses some big questions. How much free choice do we really have? What does it mean to be human? What do we know about consciousness? These philosophical stalwarts are unravelled alongside the lives of two suburban professionals grappling with their own big questions - questions of potential parenthood, infidelity and desire." But it seems clear that it is not the novel's intention to tie up the loose ends and "the reader is not offered definitive answers to any of the questions raised in the novel, but in addressing the argument - so prevalent in Western culture - that choice equals freedom and therefore happiness, Lohrey provides more than a little food for thought."

So it certainly sounds like the author is treating the reader with a great deal of respect, providing no easily digestible answers and allowing the reader to make up their own mind.

Tony Smith, reviewing the book in Australian Book Review is certainly enthusiastic about the result: "Lohrey is so perceptive that there is nothing superfluous in this superbly structured novel. Every event, every word is necessary and there are constant echoes that remind the reader of the complexity of the plot and the sophistication of the author's technique...Many novels display some of the characteristics that encourage readability: consistency of theme, soundness of structure, steadiness of pace, depth of characterisation and elegance of style. In The Philosopher's Doll, Lohrey demonstrates that she has consummate control of all these skills. Lohrey's beautifully balanced, expertly crafted novel is a treat for head and for heart."

Amanda Lohrey was interviewed by Ramona Koval on ABC Radio's Books and Writing program on May 16, 2004.

Posted by larrikin at 12:07 PM | Comments (0)

January 06, 2006

Worthy Books Unnoticed: A Private Man by Malcolm Knox

Reviews of A Private Man by Malcolm Knox.

This book has been nominated for the 2006 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It also won the award for Best First Novel at the 2005 Ned Kelly Awards.

Description: "It is two days since Dr John Brand's death and his eldest son, Davis, suspects a cover-up. 'Survived by two sons', the dea