17 Years Later

 

I was waiting for months for this book on reserve at the local library, not just weeks -- so long, in fact, that I now can't remember where I heard about it (though its evident popularity assured me it would be worth waiting for). In the intervening time, I somehow got it onto my head that it was a non-fiction book, a true crime story, and I was quite startled when I eventually picked it up to discover that it's actually a novel.

J.P. Pomare has only been published for a few years but he's quickly become a crime writing sensation. 17 Years Later has as its central detective a crime podcaster (this seems to be becoming the sleuth type de jour, I've come across this idea several times now), an Australian ex-journalist who travels to New Zealand to investigate a long ago case involving the murder of a whole family, and Bill, their Maori chef, who may or may not have been wrongly imprisoned for the crime.

It was fun to read a murder mystery set in this part of the globe, and there are so many twists to the plot that I began to feel dizzy. It's fast-paced and full of tension, but not annoyingly convoluted, and Pomare does an excellent job in letting us see the story from different angles, squirming at the Primroses' condescending attitude to their local staff and the subtle Oz-Kiwi rivalry. Turns out I retrieved from the reserve shelf at the right time after all, 17 Years Later is a perfect summer read.

The Bee Sting

What a remarkable novel. I heard it recommended all last year and finally managed to borrow it from my local library, though I must confess I gulped when I saw the size of it -- 650 pages! These days a novel has to be pretty gripping to hold me for that long, and The Bee Sting was.

The novel centres on four members of an Irish family: mother, father, teenage son and daughter, and the story is told from the point of view of each in turn. The backdrop is horrible family dysfunction, the threat of violence, and climate change -- the summer is too hot and dry, the winter brings floods (this is the second Irish novel in a row I've read with an unnaturally hot summer). There is a mounting sense of impending dread, from which Murray pulls back each time, but the structure is very clever in that each section becomes shorter and shorter until it feels as if we are hurtling toward certain doom. Someone smarter than me pointed out that this is how the catastrophe of climate change also functions -- we experience a threat, we feel panic, but we survive, and we kid ourselves that we're safe... but the next wave is coming, and it's bigger and deadlier than the last, and one day it will be too late to escape.

From what I've said so far, you will gather that The Bee Sting is a bleak novel, and in many ways it is. But it's also rich and funny and shocking and beautiful, and though I'm still reeling from the final scenes, I'm so glad I went along for the ride. This is a novel that will stay with me for a long time.
 

We Are the Beaker Girls & Hetty Feather's Christmas

 I've been aware of Jacqueline Wilson for a long time, but it took a chapter of The Haunted Wood to prompt me to actually read a couple of her (many, many) books. They are aimed a bit younger than I would usually go for, and they are a very attractive package -- big print, nice short chapters, interspersed with charming illustrations by Nick Sharratt. 

Bolshie child-in-care Tracy Beaker has become a classic in the UK, and We Are the Beaker Girls features Tracy all grown up and with a daughter of her own, but still as bold and fiery as ever, and still involved in the care system, this time as a prospective foster parent herself. I really enjoyed the way Tracy and Jess gather a family around them in their new home, and the way Tracy, though she's an adult, is shown to be still growing and learning.

Hetty Feather's Christmas seems to be a kind of bonus story, a Christmas special, in a series about Hetty's life as a Victorian era foundling -- not an orphan, not abandoned, but a victim of a society that wouldn't allow her and her mother to be together. The cruel matron of the foundling hospital is contrasted with kind benefactress Miss Smith, who whisks Hetty away for a magical Christmas day with the artistic Rivers family. At least, it's fairly magical, but issues of class, gender and neuro-diversity are gently present to give the reader food for thought.

I can see why Jacqueline Wilson's books are so popular. They are effortlessly engaging, lively and very relatable, with ordinary kids who act up, are sometimes kind and sometimes thoughtless, lots of humour and a bit of action. It's a fabulous formula. They probably wouldn't have appealed to child-me -- I liked a bit of magic or some history in my reading, in fact I tended to shy away from 'modern' books (books I now read as historic fiction, ha), but Wilson's massive popularity speaks for itself.

The Haunted Wood

First non-fiction blockbuster read of 2025! After a review from the reluctant dragon, I arranged to receive Sam Leith's 'history of childhood reading,' The Haunted Wood, as a Christmas present. At 550 pages, this one is a blockbuster in the physical sense as well as in terms of enjoyment.

I admit I was slightly daunted to open the list of contents and see a number of chapters devoted to early childhood reading (that is, early in history) -- fairy tales, Aesop's fables, improving tales -- but Leith keeps this section short and sweet before plunging into my real area of interest: the books I've read myself.

The classics are well covered: Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Beatrix Potter. But Leith really hits his stride with what I suspect were the favourite books of his own UK childhood, as well as my own, focusing on twentieth century writers. I did have one quibble when he described Noel Streatfeild as churning out a whole series of 'Shoes' books after the success of Ballet Shoes, though in fact only Tennis Shoes really followed that template. Several of her books were rebranded later by publishers to capitalise on Ballet Shoes -- for example, Curtain Up became Theatre Shoes. But that's being very pedantic.

Most of my favourite authors are discussed here: Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, Philippa Pearce, CS Lewis, Lucy M Boston. Even Elizabeth Goudge gets a mention, albeit in a quote from JK Rowling (there's a level-headed and insightful chapter on Harry Potter). Leith rounds out the book with a quick survey of some of the best picture books. 

Even at 500+ pages, this can only be a partial overview, but I thoroughly enjoyed Leith's balance of discussing stories, authors, and broader social context. It's sent me scurrying to the library to hunt out some authors who had passed me by (like Jacqueline Wilson). The Haunted Forest is a gorgeous brick of delights. I can't wait to lend it around to my kidlit friends.
 

The Ministry of Time

 The first blockbuster read of 2025! I was waiting months for Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time to arrive on the reserves shelf at my local library (it was always out at the Athenaeum, too) and now I understand why. Sometimes these very popular reads end up being slightly underwhelming, but not in this case. I loved it, and I gobbled it down.

The Ministry of Time had me at time travel, honestly, but there's much more to it than that. The premise is that in our near future, the UK government has discovered the secret of time travel, and used it to bring five 'travellers' into our time. These are all people who were about to die in their own timelines anyway, so their sudden absence won't change history -- a plague survivor, a victim of the French Revolution's guillotine, a soldier from the Western Front, an Arctic explorer. The story centres on the latter, a real man called Graham Gore, retrieved from 1847, and his never-named 'bridge,' our narrator, whose job it is to help him adjust to the twenty-first century. 

There is a lot of fun with the time travellers' difficulties with modern customs. There is a pretty spicy love story. There is a thrilling plot. I might have slightly lost track of the complexities of the story towards the end, but this in no way impaired my enjoyment of this terrific, clever, more-ish novel, which also comments on outsider status, racism, family and history in interesting and subtle ways.

Mean Streak

When the robodebt Royal Commission was running in 2022-3, my husband and I became a bit obsessed with following the livestream of the proceedings. Often we didn't fully understand exactly who a particular witness was, or what part they'd played in setting up or perpetuating the scheme; sometimes we found the counsel's line of questioning hard to follow, or had trouble disentangling the self-justifications, half-lies and fudges produced by the witnesses.

We weren't directly affected by robodebt, though my sister receives Centrelink payments and my husband works for the public service (the Tax Office was tangentially involved in the saga, as the source of the data that the department of Human Services relied on to produce their 'debt' figures, and it was possible at one time that my husband's boss might be called to give evidence). I guess we had just enough skin in the game to be appalled and fascinated. During the sittings, I relied on Rick Morton's tweets to decipher what was going on and explain the broader context, and now he has produced Mean Streak, which sorts out all the confusions of the out-of-order evidence and sets out a brutally clear chronological account of how robodebt evolved, its cruel consequences, and the persistence of a few activists and lawyers that finally brought it crashing down.

Mean Streak is not an easy read, though Morton does his best to leaven the material with personal interviews, wry asides and even the odd joke. But he is furious, and exhausted, and it shows. A few individuals (given a right of reply at the end of the book) emerge as merciless architects of a scheme that targeted the most vulnerable in our society, though they all deny any wrong-doing, and I suppose most of them actually believe that they were doing the right thing -- stopping 'fraud' (though welfare fraud is actually vanishingly small), clawing back 'overpayments' from undeserving bludgers to be returned to 'honest taxpayers' (hm, I have another whole set of views about that categorisation...) But people died. And still no one has been held accountable.

Robodebt was a horrific, shameful episode of Australian public life, and I applaud Rick Morton for his tireless, unflinching examination of the story, and his faithful chronicling of it. He says working on this story has made him sick, literally, and I'm not surprised. But there are still shining moments among the dishonesty and lack of compassion -- a lowly worker who tried to draw her superior's attention to the unfairness of the scheme, an online activist drawn into protest almost against their will. There is still hope, and there still are decent people doing their best, people who care.
 

The Lady and the Unicorn

The very observant reader of this blog might have noticed that I started Rumer Godden's second novel, The Lady and the Unicorn, months ago, and then set it aside for a long time. The reason is quite a daft one: I peeked at the last page and thought I saw something that indicated the death of a little dog. Immediately I shut the book and couldn't bring myself to pick it up again until just before Christmas. This was even before we found out that our own little dog won't be with us for much longer -- maybe it was a presentiment of doom, which would be quite fitting for this novel, which is haunted by ghosts and visions, premonitions and misguided guesses.

It's was Godden's third novel, Black Narcissus, that brought her real success, but The Lady and the Unicorn is a beautiful, sad little tale that contains much of the trademark Godden atmosphere and subject matter. An Anglo-Indian family, caught awkwardly between two communities, live in part of a decrepit mansion, occupied by other families and their landlord. They struggle for money and the white father gambles away anything he finds. Newly arrived from England, Stephen Bright is captivated by the shy younger daughter, Rosa, and by the romance of her dilapidated home, until pressure from his friends and family, and misunderstandings inexorably drive them apart.

The Lady and the Unicorn such a sad novel, but not in the way I first imagined. It's a perfectly constructed ghost story, a mystery, a love story, a keen observation of family and class, a little gem of a novel.
 

Craft for a Dry Lake

Kim Mahood's first book, Craft For a Dry Lake, was much awarded when it was published in 2000, but somehow it passed me by. I came to Mahood's writing via her other books, Position Doubtful and Wandering With Intent, but Craft For a Dry Lake really sets the foundation for the later books and fills in much of the detail of Mahood's early life that has led her to where she is now.

The influence of Mahood's late father, Joe, looms large over these pages. Kim was raised in the Tanami Desert, though her family later moved to Queensland, and the struggle she has returned to the desert to face is rooted deep in her childhood. This land belonged to her family, but it's not their land (the cattle station has been returned to Aboriginal ownership). All her life, she has worn her unusual childhood with both pride and otherness -- yet returning here after many years, she is unsure how to integrate her memories, her sense of self, with the intellectual knowledge that this place was never really hers. She is pulled back to the familiar places, and yet deeply conscious of how alien is her presence there.

It was particularly interesting to read about this inner conflict, because I was aware from the later writing how she has resolved it -- she spends part of the year in the desert, living and making art with the First Nations community, and part of it back in the city, where she can live out the other part of her identity. Mahood has a nuanced, complex understanding of the intensely complicated relations between white and Black Australia, between history and present and future, between personal experience and the weight of the past, and I hope she keeps writing about it. I'm hungry for more.
 

Reading Roundup 2024

Okay, so it's that time again, time to cast a look back at what I read over the last year. In 2024, I turned to my bookshelves and revisited a lot of old childhood favourites: Joan Aiken, Penelope Lively, Susan Cooper, Susan Coolidge, Antonia Forest, Mary Norton, Diana Wynne Jones. This will no doubt account for a preponderance of British lady authors in the re-read category.

Kids'/YA v Adult

As usual, due to my patented three-books-at-a-time reading system (one kids'/YA, one adult fiction, one adult non-fiction), I read about one third kids' books and two thirds books for adults. Though as the kids' books are a bit quicker to get through, it's actually just over a third.

Gender

Sorry, blokes, no attempt at even-handedness this year at all! Lots of lady authors, a handful of non-binary authors or books with mixed male and female writer, and... some gentlemen.

Fiction v non-fiction

No surprises here, as usual, a split of about one third non-fiction to two thirds fiction (I hardly ever read a non-fiction children's book.)

Book source

I made good use of libraries this year! About half my reading came from either my local library (where I tend to reserve new releases) or from the Athenaeum library in the city, where I love to browse the shelves. The Ath doesn't hold reserves for long, and it's not always convenient for me to come in and pick them up when they arrive, so I'd rather relax with some old books from there. I borrowed nine books from friends, and 24 came from my secondhand stash, which is still mysteriously as high as it was at the start of the year, despite my vow to pause buying. I'm not very good at keeping resolutions. It's satisfying to see that I used the Ath so much, it's well worth the membership. No e-books this year because my Kindle has died.

Author origin

Weirdly, this was the first year for a while that I gave up consciously trying to read authors with more diverse backgrounds, and quite by chance I ended up reading a reasonable spread of origins: German, Canadian, Irish and Turkish, as well as the usual mountain of UK authors and a good chunk of Australians. This year I separated out First Nations authors for the first time.

Highlights

I very much enjoyed my trawl through old favourite children's books, especially The Little White Horse and Joan Aiken's Dido Twite stories.

In adult fiction, the standouts were Fiona McFarlane's Highway 13, The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, Alison Goodman's The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies, The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, and Louise Erdrich's The Night Watchman.

I read lots of amazing non-fiction in 2024, including Helen Garner's The Season, Nova Weetman's Love, Death and Other Scenes and Would That Be Funny? by Lorin Clarke (all Melbourne women). David Marr's Killing for Country was devastating. Rumer Godden's autobiographical memoirs, A Time to Dance, A Time to Weep and A House With Four Rooms were absolutely beautiful. Dodie Smith's memoirs were very different in tone and moreishly funny. Ursula Le Guin's essay collection, Dreams Must Explain Themselves, gave me lots to chew on. Isabella Tree's Wilding gave me hope that nature can repair itself, given a chance. Inga Simpson's Understory was very moving, as was Kathryn Moore's book about death, With the End in Mind.

The Little White Horse

The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge was one of the formative books of my childhood, and it was a such a joy to revisit it for the first time in many years, though I regret that my current copy doesn't have the delightful illustrations that were included in the edition I used to borrow over and over again from the Mt Hagen library.

One scene unfolds after another, each one a vignette of pleasure. Maria Merryweather, a thirteen year old orphan, her governess, Miss Heliotrope, and her self-satisfied spaniel, Wiggins, rattle through the night to their new home. Maria's bedroom in a tower of the manor house has a tiny door, just big enough for her, and has stars on the ceiling (I see from reviews that I was far from the only child reader who sighed for that perfect little bedroom).  Maria goes riding and rescues a hare, Serena, from the clutches of the Wicked Men of the pine forest. In due course, the Wicked Men are steered from their evil ways, pairs of lovers are reunited, and after some hair-raising adventures, peace and happiness are restored to the valley.

Early in the book, the author remarks that there are three kinds of person: those who receive consolation from clothes, those who receive it through food, and those who seek it in the written word. There is ample satisfaction for all three in The Little White Horse. Clothes are lovingly described, from Maria's trim riding habit to Loveday's white satin wedding dress to Sir Benjamin's embroidered flowery waistcoast. There is plenty of delicious food for humans and animals alike (the book was published just after the Second World War, when everyone was thinking longingly about food). And the story, though simple, is deeply satisfying, filled with complementary characters and images. 

We meet a dog, Wrolf, who is really a lion, and the little white horse that Maria glimpses from the carriage in the first pages proves to be a unicorn. There are pairs of hearty, energetic 'sun' Merryweathers, and pale, proud 'moon' Merryweathers. Everything fits together neatly in the end, and the harmony in the valley and the village of Silverydew gave me, as a child reader, a picture of Paradise on earth. Perfect comfort reading.
 

The Season

 

Our Christmas was kiboshed by Covid. Half our presents still sit under the tree, waiting until we're all clear to see family members -- my sister, my daughter, my dad. Thank heavens that Helen Garner's new book, The Season, was being given to me by my other daughter, who also tested positive, because I couldn't have waited any longer. Once I cracked it open, I tried to spin it out as long as I could, but I finished it within a day.

It's so kind when your favourite living author writes a book especially for you: in this instance, a Melbourne book, about footy and families and getting older, about masculinity and violence and war, about stories and heroes and, like Tabitha Carvan's book, about being into something, whether or not you understand it 'properly,' but just because it gives you joy. Extra points because Garner's team is the same as mine, the Western Bulldogs, and little vignettes about players I know and love pepper these pages.

Garner's style looks effortless, but oh, the craft, the blood, that has gone into creating these apparently simple snatches of dialogue, these glimpses of scenes. A news report, a memory, little shards artfully arranged to resonate and glitter off each other, but made to look as if they've just been scattered carelessly and fallen haphazard. Forgive me, I'm not coherent, I'm blaming Covid, but I absolutely relished this book. The writing is so beautiful, and Garner loves footy the way I do (I feel vindicated), she tells people this is 'a nana's book about football.' She's in it for the stories, for the moments of ecstasy and despair, for the sweep of the narrative, the heroic battles and the noble characters, just like I am.

That Bont. His quiet, faithful brilliance. Where does such a man come from? Cody Weightman kicks six goals and executes a magnificent screamer: he romps up the back of North's Griffin Logue in great strides, like a man bounding up a staircase.

But really the book is not about football as much as it's about Garner and her grandson, Amby, fifteeen and growing into a man before her eyes, and her finding a way to accompany him for a little way on the journey, to find a language they can speak together.

Steps

Steps, the debut novel from Australian author Sam A.D., was a Christmas present from a friend (he went to the book launch and I suspect I'm the only person he knows who reads novels). 

Steps is a darkly absurdist parable with a killer premise, protected by copyright separately from the text itself (I didn't know you could even do that): every person has a lifetime allocation of 60 000 000 steps. Once you've used them all, you drop dead instantly. People become obsessed with their step trackers and go to great lengths to minimise their step usage. Cars have been outlawed, so people use wheelchairs or pogo sticks, roll along the ground or stalk on stilts. The very rich pay to be carried everywhere; some selfish types bounce around in those inflatable plastic bubbles. Sex has disappeared, and people go dancing at the Forever27 club when they've had enough of life and want to go out with a bang.

Steps tracks a frenetic 24 hours in Sunshine City, the day of the annual lottery when some lucky souls will win extra steps, or the chance for sex, and everyone has their trackers paused so they can enjoy an hour's free dancing. Agnes and Aksel are new friends; teens Elio and Sarita are freshly in love; gross Derek can steal others' steps; the conniving mayor, Turquoise, has her own sinister agenda.

Steps packs an incredible amount of violence and action into less than 150 pages, and it seems to have been written with an eye to screen adaptation. There are a few holes in the world-building (there are no children in the story, and I wonder how they're cared for) but I suspect we're not intended to examine the logic of the plot too closely. It's a rollicking, no holds barred thought experiment, with some unexpected consequences.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny

Well, this was a strange book. First published in 1972, reissued in 1985, The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny is a not very scholarly, highly anecdotal, frankly psychoanalytical account of the history of nannies and nannying. I have a fascination with the British servant class (I wouldn't be at all surprised if my ancestors were 'in service') so I couldn't resist this one.

Gathorne-Hardy writes very much from the perspective of the nannied, despite having interviewed dozens of nannies -- as he rightly points out, the last generation of Victorian and Edwardian nannies who raised whole generations of upper and middle class children. He is very interesting on the probable effects of this phenomenon of entire classes of children being raised by people who were not their parents: the split in affection and authority between the nanny and the parents; the resulting attitude to women (he argues that many nanny-raised men became sexually fixated with 'lower class' women like their nannies); the opportunities for cruelty and abuse; the idealised, distant mother; the sense of betrayal and insecurity when a nanny left the family, and much more. He traces the famous English emotional repression and stiff upper lip to the often 'over-strict' and 'depriving' regime of the Nanny, where any pleasure for its own sake was suspect. It's an interesting theory but in Gathorne-Hardy's account, entirely without actual evidence.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny is packed with intriguing stories, bizarre facts, wild speculation and peculiar digressions (there is a whole half chapter on the nanny-related murder which was the subject of Kate Summerscale's book, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher). But one subject on which it's strangely silent is Mr Gathorne-Hardy's own personal experience of being brought up by a Nanny. We know he was, he mentions it in passing, but by the end of the book, I was dying to know how much of his sexual and psychological theories were informed by his own life.

My copy came with an inscription:

To my wife, Margaret,

Who, on balance, is a more pleasant person than the Nannies and Matrons of my experience.

Love from Peter

York, Christmas 1985

Questions upon questions!

Mansfield Revisited

Found at the Athenaeum: a sequel to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park by another JA, Joan Aiken. The first thing Aiken does is promptly remove happily married Fanny and Edmund from the action by sending them to the West Indies. Our heroine this time is Fanny's younger sister, Susan, a slightly more lively and opinionated character than her meek sister (though still virtuous and thoughtful). 

 

Mansfield Revisited is not exactly Jane Austen, but it's certainly in the same universe. Aiken does a superb job of replicating the dialogue and concerns of Austen's world, and as always, her ear for language is nuanced, playful and note-perfect. Aiken's Lady Bertram is a particular delight. The only moment that didn't ring Austen-true for me was when Susan has an internal reflection using the pronoun 'I.' I couldn't swear that Austen never does that, but somehow it didn't feel right.

Aiken brings back those attractive, selfish characters the Crawford siblings, and metes out suitable fates to them, and she does a good job of making them much more sympathetic, though still faithful to their more youthful selves. I enjoyed Mansfield Revisited a lot, though it doesn't contain quite the same depths as the original. I'm not usually a fan of other-authored sequels, but I'll make an exception for this, and also for Jill Paton Walsh's Wimsy novels.

 

The Hunter

I went through an absolute Tana French binge when I first discovered her a couple of years ago, and The Hunter is her latest. It's another book about American police officer, Cal Hooper, who has retired to a remote village in Ireland and becomes entangled in local secrets, and taciturn, stubborn teenager, Trey, for whom he gradually becomes a kind of unofficial guardian.

In The Searcher, the story centred on the mystery of what happened to Trey's older brother, Brendan. In The Hunter, it's Trey's no-good father Johnny who wreaks havoc on the community when he returns, with an associate and a scam up his sleeve. Soon the whole village is drawn into Johnny's schemes, but Trey has her own agenda for revenge.

It was very enjoyable to be back in the company of Cal, Trey, Lena and the rest of Ardnakelty, though there is so much unspoken and sinister swirling beneath the banter. Weirdly, the story is set in the midst of an unnaturally (climate change) baking summer, and as a good Australian, I couldn't approve of plot resolution by means of a deliberately lighted fire, however necessary for a dramatic climax. There is less of a supernatural flavour to this French volume, which is an element that I generally enjoy, but for this story, the strangeness of human beings was probably enough.