Conclave

I just realised I forgot to write about Robert Harris's novel Conclave, which I finished about a week ago! I borrowed it from my daughter and gave it back to her when I'd finished reading it, so it vanished from my various book piles -- it's out of sight, out of mind, with me. My younger daughter saw a preview of the recent film, starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and Isabella Rossellini, and then took me to see it because she thought I'd enjoy it, which I did.

The film is mostly faithful to the novel, which follows a straightforward timeline. There are several likely candidates for the role of new pope, but as the conclave proceeds over several days, one by one doubts arise about the integrity or suitability of each frontrunner. The outside world intrudes by means of a terrorist attack nearby; Dean Lomeli (Lawrence in the film) is racked with his own crisis of faith and dabbles in a little detective work. When the last vote is taken, everyone is happy with the final decision -- but there is one more mighty twist to come...

Conclave is a highly readable, engaging glimpse into a world that most of us know little about, with its arcane rituals, shameful secrets and strange leadership role in an increasingly secular world. It was an undemanding read (it was my daughter's 'tram book') but a very enjoyable one, even though I already knew what was going to happen!
 

Upheaval

I've read almost all of Jared Diamond's comparative history books, starting with Guns, Germs and Steel, which had a profound effect on the way I saw the world, but also Collapse, The World Until Yesterday, and The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee. In Upheaval, which was actually published in 2019, Diamond takes seven case studies of nations that have faced various crises (military coups, invasion, sudden contact with the outside world) and compares how successfully (in his view) they have handled them. Interestingly, one of his case studies is Australia, and the slowly unfolding challenge this country has faced in separating our identity from Great Britain (and re-attaching ourselves to the US instead, which is not looking like a great idea at the moment). He also examines the histories of Indonesia, Finland, Chile, Japan and Germany.

The last part of the book was most interesting, because Diamond turned his critical lens on his home country, the United States, and wondered how well his own nation might handle a crisis. Upheaval was written before the Covid pandemic (which the US handled badly), and before Trump's second presidency (though during his first). Diamond pointed to the biggest problem, in his opinion, in the US being the growing polarisation of political opinion, and the loss of the ability to compromise -- it's hard to disagree that this situation has indeed led to catastrophe, just a few years after Upheaval was published. I'm sure Diamond feels no satisfaction in seeing his predictions come to pass, but his observations were so astute that I feel a new respect for his insights on other matters, too -- even Australia.
 

Deep is the Fen

Lili Wilkinson just gets better and better. Deep is the Fen is a novel set in the same universe as A Hunger of Thorns, with magical 'mettle' (like a life force or energy) controlled by a handful of corrupt corporations. Merry's father and her best friend have been co-opted into a male only organisation called the Toadmen, whose silly bonnets and secret rituals mask a more serious and sinister power.

Deep is the Fen is a perfect combination of fantasy, fast-paced action and romance (side note: I was briefly quite cross with Lili for naming one of her characters Caraway, because I've been working on a fantasy-adjacent novel also featuring a character called Caraway -- however, her Caraway is a boy and mine is a girl -- and mine may never be published, so I guess it doesn't matter!)

The Toad magic is deeply nasty, brown, marshy and pustulent, and I enjoyed the women's power uniting to challenge it (the boys also fight). I get the same 'safe hands' feeling with Lili's work that I do with other writers I trust and admire, and I'll be very pleased if Deep is the Fen wins the recognition it deserves.
 

Comes the Night

To my shame, I've only read one other Isobelle Carmody title, despite her being the 'queen of YA fantasy' as proclaimed on the cover of Comes the Night. But as soon as I started reading, it was obvious that I was in the safe hands of an experienced and accomplished author.

I would classify Come the Night as science fiction more than fantasy, though it does contain a fantasy element in the form of 'dream-walking,' whereby some individuals can enter a kind of collective consciousness known as the dreamscape and even enter into the dreamspaces of other people. There are some baddies looking to manipulate politicians and take over the world using the dreamscape, and I must confess that I became a little lost in the intricacies of their plot towards the end of the novel.

However, the struggles of Will and his friend (or more than friend?) Ender to discover what happened to Will's dead uncle Adam, the mystery of the extraordinary kite Adam left behind, who has abducted Ender's gifted twin Magda, and why, are all absorbing and exciting. This story, like We Do Not Welcome Our Ten Year Old Overlord, is set in an alternative Canberra, this time in the future (2070) when cities are protected by domes from the damaged environment resulting from climate change. People communicate with ophones, use and are monitored by household computer hubs, and travel by tubeway between domes. But they still go to see films, exercise on climbing walls and ride buses.

The world-building, as you'd expect from Carmody, is highly detailed and meticulous, and I enjoyed being immersed in this slightly dystopian world. I wondered if some of its features might have been influenced by Covid lockdowns, with intensive surveillance and the possibility of protective measures being abused by authorities. But most of all I appreciated the name of Will's beautiful and technologically sophisticated kite, Lookfar, the same name as Ged's boat in the Earthsea books.
 

Rodham

I felt a bit iffy about Curtis Sittenfeld's Rodham, as I always feel about novels that take real people as their protagonists, especially people who are still alive. (Actually I even felt a bit iffy about Geraldine Brooks using Mr March from Little Women -- though I don't have any reservations about Percival Everett's James from Huckleberry Finn, so I am not consistent at all.)

Having said that, my friend Bridget recommended it and I trust her judgement, and as usual, she was right. I really enjoyed Rodham, which is narrated by Hillary herself and interweaves real events and people with invented ones. It pivots on a crisis in Bill and Hillary's relationship, where Hillary admits she could have just as easily stayed with him or left. In real life, she stayed; in the novel, she goes, and her life from then on takes a very different trajectory. She becomes a law professor, then a senator, and runs for president several times. She continues to cross paths with Bill and also, amusingly, with Donald Trump. Sittenfeld's channelling of Trump's voice results in some of the novel's most hilarious moments (whoops, pun unintended). 

I wonder if Hillary Clinton has read this book; I'm pretty sure she wouldn't be able to bring herself to do so, and I'm equally sure that there were plenty of people in her life who were eager to read it and report back to her. She has no need to worry. This is a highly sympathetic portrait of what might have been, though Sittenfeld probably underestimates the level of hostile sexism and prejudice that Hillary would have faced, even in a fantasy alternate universe.

Look Back With Gratitude

The final volume of Dodie Smith's autobiography, Look Back With Gratitude, is the only one not available from the Athenaeum library, so I took the liberty of buying myself a copy as a Christmas present. Gratitude covers what might be called 'the American years.' Smith's partner, later husband, Alec Beesley, was a conscientious objector, and when World War II broke out, they decided to stay in the United States so that he would escape imprisonment (this became complicated later in the war, when the US joined the fight and Alec faced even more stringent rules around conscientious objection). This was not a decision taken lightly; Smith was horribly homesick and was tormented with guilt about missing out on her country's wartime sufferings. Then, when the war ended, neither could face the prospect of quarantining their three beloved Dalmatians for six months (journalists found this difficult to believe, but it was true!)

Smith's income was erratic; she earned huge chunks of money consulting on screenplays, but the last section of the book is largely concerned with the failure of her play, Letter From Paris, in London after the war. It sounds absolutely agonising, juggling cast, director, set designer, producer -- it made me realise how many elements need to gel to produce a theatrical hit and just how chancy it can be. 

It's been so odd reading these memoirs; my conception of Dodie Smith is as a fiction writer first and foremost (and Gratitude also deals with the writing of I Capture the Castle), but clearly she saw herself as principally a playwright. I have never seen or read a single one of her plays and have no idea if she was actually any good or not (I mean, she must have been, she was popular in her time and made a good living from it). Yet all those plays she fretted over and which so consumed her energies have largely vanished without a trace.

Gratitude ends with Dodie, Alec and the dogs returning to live in England in 1953, she says hopefully forever, and I think it was.

Can Any Mother Help Me?

 

Can Any Mother Help Me? was such a fascinating book! In the 1930s, an anonymous, lonely mother wrote a letter to a UK parenting magazine, which resulted in a group of women in similar situations beginning a correspondence club that lasted until 1990.

The way it worked was that the women would write 'articles' or letters to the group in general, which the editor would bind up in a lovely embroidered linen cover and post off to the first name on the list, who could then add her own comments or notes if she wished, and post it to the next person. New volumes were sent off fortnightly, so there were always various editions in circulation. In a way it functioned like an early kind of community internet forum, without the immediacy of response, of course, but bonds of lively interest, sympathy and friendship grew between these women who came from all backgrounds and different parts of the country. Most, however, were well-educated, intelligent women who were denied careers by the demands of family, and consequently felt frustrated.

The author, Jenna Bailey, discovered an archive of the letters and has compiled these extracts into a thoroughly absorbing book, covering the years of World War II and after, through domestic heartbreak, career success, worries about children and money, and everyday experiences. One episode is especially striking -- one member who developed a romantic crush on her doctor, which seemed to be reciprocated, though nothing ever happened beyond meaningful glances. She finally, after much inner torment, told him it would be better if they didn't see each other again, whereupon the doctor called her husband and Told All (not that there was much to tell...) The woman relayed this whole saga, in installments, years afterwards, and it reads like part of a novel.

It might not be everyone's cup of tea but I was completely gripped by this book, part memoir, part diary, part potted biographies of a host of everyday women. One woman, known to the club as Angharad, wrote successful TV screenplays and also several books on the 'aquatic ape' theory of human evolution. And I was amused that Heal's furniture store made another appearance -- one woman's husband made bookends for them (which seems like a very niche way to make a living).

Birdy

Birdy is South Australian author Sharon Kernot's second verse novel, after her acclaimed debut, The Art of Taxidermy. I'm not usually a fan of verse novels, but Birdy won me over, packing in a huge amount of plot, backstory, mystery and emotion into relatively few, but well-chosen, words. 

Maddy has been mute ever since 'the Incident,' which we gradually learn involved some kind of sexual assault and social media exposure (she seems more traumatised by the social media aspect than the assault). But as she gradually thaws in the peace of the countryside, and befriends young Levi and old Alice, she begins to heal. Alice says that Maddy reminds her of her missing daughter, Birdy, and Maddy feels an affinity with the other long-departed girl, and it's through Maddy that the mystery of Birdy is finally brought to closure.

I enjoyed Birdy much more than I expected to -- it wraps up pain, grief, betrayal, nature, secrets and friendship in a beautifully judged package. It might even be my top pick of the CBCAs so far.

A Shilling For Candles

Of course I found this Josephine Tey mystery at the good old Athenaeum. A Shilling For Candles is the second Inspector Grant novel and when I went hunting for a cover image, I found about a gazillion different editions since it was first published in 1936.

A Shilling For Candles kicks off with the discovery of a body on the beach, but was successful young starlet Christine Clay murdered or suicidal, or was her death a terrible accident? As always, the real interest for me in a period mystery story is the historical detail: 'cranks' (hippies and vegetarians), 'fanatics' (anyone overtly religious) and unfortunately, a light vein of anti-Semitism. I'm struggling with whether to call it anti-Semitism, since the Jewish character I'm thinking of is very sympathetic, but attention is continually drawn to his 'race' and his alleged racial characteristics, in a way that shines a horrible light on the general mood in 1936.

I particularly enjoyed the character of Erica Burgoyne, self-possessed, serious, seventeen year old would-be-detective, daughter of the Chief Constable, practical and not at all girly. I'd read a whole series about her, please.

And apparently there is a whole mystery series by Nicola Upson which features Josephine Tey herself as the detective! Of course they have them at the Ath -- I might need to check them out, too.
 

A Wreck of Seabirds

Karleah Olson is a young, first time author whose manuscript for A Wreck of Seabirds was shortlisted for the Fogarty Literary Award in 2023 and was subsequently published by Fremantle Press. This is a very WA novel, set in a coastal town and filled with the presence of the sea in all its moods -- beguiling, sunny, violent and threatening.

This novel is ambitiously structured into three threads. One is set in the present day, centred on the growing relationship between Ren, who has lost his younger brother, and Briony, whose sister has disappeared. One is set in the past, tracing the troubled history of Ren and Sam's family, and the last is ambiguous, following what has happened to Briony's missing sister. The different chapterlets are all very short, usually no more than a page or two, and until I twigged that each thread was labelled differently, I sometimes found myself a little lost.

A Wreck of Seabirds contains some beautiful writing and fits perfectly into the Coastal Gothic genre (Olson is studying this for her PhD). The mystery at the heart of Briony's sister's disappearance isn't fully answered, but perhaps, like the unresolved mystery of Picnic at Hanging Rock, this is what gives the story its submerged power? I'll be interested to see what Olson does next.

A Way Home

For the last few years, I've been neglectful of new children's and YA fiction; I've burrowed into the comfort reading and nostalgia of my childhood and steered away from recently published titles. But my new resolution is to do a bit of catching up, and my means for doing so is to read the current CBCA Notables list. (I'm very well aware that this method means I will miss some gems which the committee don't see fit to include (cough Tumbleglass) -- not that I bear a grudge or anything...;-)

I'm proceeding alphabetically, so the first cab off the rank is Melbourne author Emily Brewin's A Way Home, her first YA novel (she has previously written two novels for adults). Sixteen year old Grace is homeless, sleeping on the streets of the city -- technically, on a ledge under a bridge. Melbourne definitely has a terrible situation with homeless people at the moment, and it was bracing to see them through Grace's eyes, as friends, acquaintances or threats, but always as fully rounded people, not just shapes to hurry past.

Grace finds some solace and kindness in a city library. It's always cheering to see libraries and librarians championed, even though I struggled with the likelihood of the sympathetic librarian being able to hand out casual work to a homeless teenager (and also the non-fiction books being filed alphabetically??) Grace's mother has a serious mental illness, and the story if them losing their home is very moving. Less successful was the sub-plot concerning Grace's father, which ended in anti-climax. Again, Grace sometimes seemed a little young for her supposed age, but I guess this book's intended readership is probably in the early teens. A Way Home is a cry for the power of music, friendship and the compassion of strangers, and while Grace doesn't find a fairy tale ending, Brewin offers a plausible amount of hope.

Making Sense

David Crystal has written dozens of books about the English language (there are a couple already on my shelves) but I wasn't aware of this smart little series in matching covers. The orange Making Sense deals with grammar; Making a Point (red) is about punctuation; Spell It Out (teal) -- you can guess that one; Sounds Appealing (blue) is about pronunciation; and there is also The Story of English in 100 Words (green) which I've already read without realising it was part of a series.

I was sceptical about the implied promise of the subtitle (The Glamorous Story of English Grammar) to make grammar interesting, and he did mostly succeed. He cleverly starts each explanatory section with the example of his little daughter learning how to speak -- first in single words, then stringing two words together, then more -- and unconsciously picking up principles of grammar along the way. He points out that so many of the 'rules' of grammar traditionally taught were misapplied to English from languages like Latin and Greek, and paid little attention to the way English was actually spoken. Crystal strikes a nice balance by conceding that language is an ever-evolving, living system, and at the same time gently demonstrating that some rules are necessary for clarity of meaning.

I'm fighting a continual battle in my house with my younger daughter, who is definitely from the 'language is always evolving' school, while I'm often fuming in futile pedantry because some radio announcer has said 'less' instead of 'fewer,' or 'different to' instead of 'different from' (I do have to admit defeat on that one, the horse has well and truly bolted there). David Crystal has persuaded me that I should loosen up a little, but I reserve the right to fume -- I'll just have to fume silently!
 

The Constant Gardener

In high school I read a lot of John Le Carré novels. I enjoyed their meaty sophistication, their hints of insider knowledge to a mysterious world of secrets and disillusion. They made me feel very grown up. And they were nice and thick and complex, something I valued in those days when I would tear through a novel at breakneck speed. I haven't read a spy/thriller novel for a long time, but I was going away for a couple of days and when I spotted The Constant Gardener in a street library, it seemed like suitable holiday reading. I might also have been influenced by a recent viewing of The Night Manager, based on a 1993 Le Carré novel.

It's weird to think that Le Carré started writing novels before I was born, and he was still pumping them out until his death in 2020. After the end of the Cold War, he switched to writing about international crime cartels, conspiracies and corruption, and The Constant Gardener centres on Big Pharma shenanigans in Africa, where a bereaved husband sets out to solve the mystery of his activist wife's murder. I really enjoyed the early part of the novel, in the immediate aftermath of Tessa's murder, with various players in the diplomatic corps observing the reserved Justin and speculating on the situation and his inner state. And I also liked the middle part, where Justin starts investigating and we find out exactly what Tessa was up to and the truth about her relationship with African doctor Arnold, who has disappeared. But the last section, which became a pure thriller really, with chases and confessions, was less interesting to me, though I'm sure it probably formed the core of the movie adaptation.

I'd be quite interested to see the film version now; I was definitely picturing Ralph Fiennes as the mild-mannered but steely Justin all the way through. It's a pity there weren't more actual African characters in the story to give a different perspective to the world of aid workers, corporations and foreign diplomacy.

 

Thus Far and No Further

This was a treat for myself and to plug a gap in my Rumer Godden collection. It was first published in 1946v as Rungli-Rungliot, then reissued in this edition under the title Thus Far and No Further in 1961. This is another book adapted from a diary. Godden and her two young daughters (plus various staff and servants, some who travelled with them and some who were acquired on the spot) spent only a few months in this isolated house on a tea plantation in Kashmir, but though their stay was brief, it made an indelible impression.

The events of their time in Kashmir also formed the basis for Godden's later novel, Kingfishers Catch Fire, but there is no whisper of that drama in these pages (one of their servants apparently tried to poison the family with ground glass). Instead, the focus is on the utter physical beauty of the mountains, the quiet serenity of their lives there, Godden's gradual calming after a turbulent period in her life. It's a very meditative book, short passages, sometimes no more than a sentence or two, or a brief snatch of dialogue. Godden reflected that this time was valuable in truly getting to know her children, and 'Rafael' and 'Sabrina' emerge as vibrant characters.

Godden returned again and again to this precious, brief time in her writing; it was obviously both a golden period of joy and beauty, and a harrowing crisis. Though she doesn't talk about the bad side, that emotional intensity colours Thus Far and No Further.
 

What The Dog Saw

Picked up from a local street library, What the Dog Saw is a collection of articles and essays published in 2009. For a few years I've been a fan of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, Revisionist History, and the pieces in this volume are very similar in style -- I can hear Gladwell's voice in my inner ear while I'm reading.

Gladwell says he wants to provoke and challenge his readers (and now his listeners, presumably) to think about aspects of the world in a new way, and something from this broad range of topics will surely needle any given reader. The pieces here discuss everything from the seemingly trivial (why is it so hard to market different kinds of ketchup while many different styles of mustard flourish?) to the socially important (if it's actually easier, and cheaper, to solve the problem of homelessness by giving homeless people somewhere to live, why don't we do that?). I was slightly appalled to read Gladwell's efficient demolition of FBI crime profiling (nooo, Malcolm, don't tell me that Mindhunter is garbage!) and fascinated by his account of the way the contraceptive pill was developed to seem more 'natural' (to get the approval of the Catholic Church) when in fact it's not 'natural' at all to expect a modern woman to endure hundreds of periods over her lifetime.

The difference between panicking and choking; the evolution in strategies for selling hair dye to women (especially interesting if you happen to be re-watching Mad Men at the moment); the secrets of dog training; the flaws of the job interview system -- there is something here to amuse, puzzle and yes, challenge, every reader.