The Shortest History of the United States of America

My knowledge of American history is, charitably, patchy. I saw Hamilton, and 1776, and I pieced bits together from Little Women and Little House on the Prairie, but I don't have much sense of the overall big picture. I never really understood how Canada ended up belonging to England, or why the Louisiana Purchase happened, or why the Minutemen were called the Minutemen, or why the Native Americans that Laura Ingalls saw were riding away across the prairie. 

Don Watson has produced a brilliant concise overview of the history of the US, from Columbus to Trump. He mostly tells the story president by president, but he also throws in information about culture and economics to give the politics more context. A lot of writing about the US assumes the reader already possesses background knowledge, which for some of us is woefully absent. I wish I could be confident that I'll actually remember all the material in Watson's less-than-300 page summary, but I know I won't. 

Still, I've come away from The Shortest History with a conviction that Donald Trump is far from the aberration he might seem to be. According to Watson, the narrative of the US is littered with '[r]ank populists, hucksters, fakers, grifters, rent-seekers, blowhards, tycoons, kleptocrats, narcissists, psychopaths and delinquents.' It becomes hard to deny that, in some ways, Trump is a natural culmination of forces that have always threatened to tear apart a fragile construction, built from the beginning on a contradiction, insisting that 'all men are created equal' in a country supported by slavery.
 

On the Calculation of Volume IV

 

With the fourth volume of Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume, Tara finds herself in a radically different situation from any she's encountered before. Squatting in an empty mansion, her small group of fellow-strandees in 18th November are inundated with more and more people in the same predicament, until the bedrooms and conservatory and kitchens of the big house overflow. They learn there are groups set up in other cities; people travel back and forth. The days are spent, no longer alone, in busily foraging for food, managing the household, and in endless conversations about their situation.

 Towards the end of this book, the group holds a conference to more formally discuss the matters that preoccupy them: matters of language (what should they call themselves? what should they call the people who live through the same 18th November unawares? Loopers? Returners? How should they mark their own eccentric passing of time? Divide the days into hundreds, or centia, or tens, decia?), preparations for their own aging, the weird similarity between everyone who's found themselves thus stuck, the possible causes. Some disturbing facts emerge as they compare notes: a mysterious earth tremor on the first 18th November, not repeated; the loss of a pregnancy. And at the very end of the novel, the most unexpected occurance of all -- Tara's husband Thomas, far away in rural France, for the first time ever on the 18th November breaks his usual pattern and calls her. 

The book ends with Tara once more aboard a train, speeding home toward Thomas. Is the glitch in time beginning to break apart at last? I love the way Balle ends each book on a cliffhanger of sorts, though again there is little in the way of plot development. I'm wondering if OTCOV is a meditation on life itself? Does it trace a journey: beginning with the infant's awareness of the isolated self, then the individual existence of a few important others, then widening out to embrace a whole tribe? If Tara can reconnect meaningfully with Thomas, will we see the (re)discovery of love?

The Appeal

I have read a few Janice Hallett novels now, with their quirky formatting and multitude of different voices, but The Appeal was her debut and the book that established her name (dare I say, her brand?). It's mostly told in emails, with other documents, a sheaf of materials given to two legal students by a judge who believes there's been a miscarriage of justice. Can they sift through the evidence to come up with plausible theories of the crime? Can they even prove that the wrong suspect has been found guilty?

The Appeal is a clever title, because it references both the legal appeal against the original verdict, and the fundraising appeal on which the events of the book centre. Alpha village family, the Haywards, reveal that their two year old granddaughter has a brain tumour and her only hope is fiendishly expensive experimental drugs from the US. The amateur drama group they run throws itself into raising money for her cure. We meet newcomers to the village, Sam and Kel Greenward, clingy Isabel who works at the same hospital, the formidable Sarah-Jane who takes charge of the fund-raising, and various members of the Hayward family, along with many others, all beautifully portrayed through their correspondence and text messages.

The Appeal is a clever, layered and hugely entertaining mystery; I was able to guess a couple of the secrets, but there is plenty here to occupy an amateur sleuth who wants to piece together the clues along with Femi and Charlotte. I'm not sure if The Christmas Appeal and The Silent Appeal feature exactly the same cast, (I'm not sure if that would be possible!) but now I'm keen to check them out.

Is A River Alive?

I will read anything by Robert Macfarlane, my favourite nature writer, even when he does things that are uncongenial to me, like exploring caves underground in Underland. In Is A River Alive? he is above ground, travelling along three rivers in three different continents and musing over recent attempts to protect river systems from destruction and exploitation by granting them legal status, notably in NewZealand and Ecuador.

The book unfolds in the cloud forests of Ecuador, the polluted waters of Chennai in India, and along the wilderness of Canada's Mutehekau Shipu (Magpie) River. In each landscape, Macfarlane encounters remarkable people with their own stories of pain, grief and deep connection, and in each location he allows himself to be so nakedly open to the natural world that he has experiences that can only be described as spiritual. I can't get enough of this stuff, but I can imagine that some readers might struggle with his descriptions of transcendent connection, with rushing water, with broad night skies, with wild creatures, with trees and stones.

For me, reading a Robert Macfarlane book is almost akin to a spiritual experience in itself, a potent and aching reminder of the beauty and preciousness of this planet that we are so mindlessly and greedily trashing. Needless to say, his writing is superb.

What Men Don't Talk About

I met Maggie Hamilton years ago at a literature festival, and she was a lovely, warm, thoughtful person. At the time she was talking about her latest book, What's Happening to Our Girls? and I wasn't aware of this 2006 volume, What Men Don't Talk About. It may be twenty years old, but many of its chapters are still relevant: In search of the perfect body; When men are vulnerable; Angry young men; Life after divorce; When men retire.

Informed by many interviews, What Men Don't Talk About surveys many crucial life stages, vulnerabilities and pressure points faced by men and gently asks for understanding and respect of men's point of view. Of course there is no single homogenous male perspective, and What Men Don't Talk About is overwhelmingly white and straight (though not totally). As I read it, I was constantly reminded that this was 2006, before the development of the manosphere, before 'toxic masculinity' became a catchphrase, before male looks-maxxers started hawking illegal peptides, before the tsunami of male violence against women -- there is a tide of bad stuff coming to overwhelm the  tentative hopes of Hamilton and her interviewees that men are starting to get into touch with their emotions, are starting to appreciate women as equal partners in life and work, are shaking off outdated assumptions about what's expected to be a man. 

For a while I wondered whether What Men Don't Talk About had become hopelessly dated; but then I decided, no. In fact, perhaps we need a book like this, which genuinely tries to get inside the heads of  men young, old and middle-aged, more than we ever have.

The Unbelieved

Unusually for me, I came to the book via the television series rather than the other way around. The recent ABC series Dustfall is (very loosely) based on Vikki Petraitis' novel, The Unbelieved; it was so brilliant, gripping and timely, and Anna Torv is so amazing in it, that I immediately looked for the book which provided its source.

Well, there are some elements in common, but it's not what I'd describe as a faithful adaptation. The central character, Antigone Pollard, is the same, and she's still a police detective, but the setting has changed from coastal Victoria to steamy northern Queensland. The current central crime remains the same, but the historic crime changes from a murder case to Tig's own grooming and sexual abuse as a teenager. There are numerous other small changes to peripheral characters and the unfolding plotline, but the central driving fury is at the heart of both versions -- anger at the continued, seemingly relentless, seemingly unstoppable, sexual abuse of women in all its forms.

The Unbelieved is still worth reading as a layered local crime thriller, but don't expect it to be the same as Dustfall. Now I understand why the changed the title; they are really two different beasts. 

Alice's Dreaming

Alice's dreaming was an unexpected, lovely and bittersweet book, a chapter of the long and painful history of interactions between Australian First Nations people and colonisers which for once left me with a feeling of hope. Distinguished historian Tom Griffiths tells the story of Alice Duncan-Kemp, brought up on an outback station on south Queensland's Channel Country in the early years of last century. As a child, she had an extraordinary education from the original inhabitants -- 'the landlords' as her father called them -- and shared in (some) cultural and environmental knowledge, which she drew on in later life when writing memoirs of her childhood and the history of the region.

Alice felt a deep connection to the country and its people, and ironically her books, diaries and papers have proved an invaluable record of cultural practices, stories and even language that might otherwise have been lost. However, charges of plaigarism tarnished her legacy -- I actually groaned aloud when I came to this section of the book -- and her books, though lauded at the time, have fallen into obscurity. Griffiths delicately explores questions of authenticity, memory, and multi-sided truth as he looks at Alice's history in parallel with the life of an Aboriginal boy of the same age in the same area, Bill Gorringe.

At the end of Alice's dreaming, Alice's descendants and First Nations people come together to assess and share the mass of material left behind by Alice and members of the Gorringe family, and share a ceremony on Country. It's such a beautiful moment, and sadly an unusual collaboration. But it opens a window to other possible close relationships between First Nations people and the invaders who also came to love the land -- I really hope that there are other stories like this waiting to be told.
 

Audition

I didn't know quite what to make of this novel by Katie Kitamura but it certainly made me think. Audition opens with two people meeting for lunch in a New York restaurant: a middle aged actress and a young man. They don't know each other, but the young man at least is convinced that they have a deep bond, something the woman denies. We learn that her long-standing marriage has been undermined by infidelity, and that she is struggling to unlock a pivotal scene in the play she is currently rehearsing, a hinge scene between two halves of the drama.

With an abrupt switch, we find ourselves in part two. Time has passed; the play is coming to the end of a long and triumphant run, the difficult scene successfully mastered. But the relationship between the actress, her husband and the young man of part one is fundamentally different, and that changes everything.

I think Kitamura is interested in the roles we play, not just in theatre but in everyday life, and perhaps suggesting that we can't see ourselves except in relation to others: as wife to a husband, mother to a child, actress in a cast, daughter to a parent. I found this quite a bleak outlook as it implies that there can be no authentic sense of self, and that all our relationships are essentially performances, whether for ourselves or for the benefit of others. This in turn suggests that there are limited possibilities for authentic connection between people, and I'm uneasy with that conclusion. 

Audition is an intriguing literary exercise, but ultimately one I found difficult to relate to -- maybe that was the whole point! 

Getting Murdoched

I heard about Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson's Getting Murdoched when I went to a Wheeler Centre event a few weeks ago where Dodd and Ricketson discussed their book, along with a handful of 'murdoching' victims whose stories are told in its pages. These guests included shareholder activist and thorn in Rupert's side, Stephen Mayne, David Sharaz (husband of Brittney Higgins), and, to my delight, journalist and author Margaret Simons, who I was able to fangirl at after the event.

To be honest, I never consume any Murdoch-owned content if I can possibly avoid it, so I was largely unaware of the campaigns waged against various individuals (apart from Andrew Bolt's disgraceful invective against First Nations people he deems 'too white', and the hounding of Yassmin Abdel-Magied -- maybe because I was still on Twitter when those scandals unfolded). Getting Murdoched is a punchy, highly readable outline of many episodes of appalling behaviour by Murdoch-controlled press and television, in Australia, the UK and the US. Dodd and Ricketson point out that News reverses the usual understanding of the duty of the press to hold institutions of power to account, by focusing instead on single individuals it judges to be hypocritical, too progressive, or threatening to Murdoch's ideological agenda, and making their lives a misery until they move onto the next target.

I'd watched The Hack, a dramatisation of the UK phone hacking affair, but I must admit my head swam at the complications of the story and the account in Getting Murdoched was easier to follow. What strains belief is that the News organisation has been able to get away with lies, distortion and bullying for so long; but it's so powerful that politicians simply can't afford to offend it. One former employee recalled that, instead of journalists getting out and about to investigate stories, they were chained to their desks just making shit up.

Getting Murdoched is a horrifying but illuminating read. 

Death at the Museum

I've previously read a couple of Janice Hallett's mystery novels for adults (I was shocked to realise that I read the last one three years ago!) and her gift for writing stories using unconventional media (text messages, audio transcripts, emails) is tailor-made for children's books, especially in these days of short attention spans! Death at the Museum is actually second in a series called A Box Full of Murders -- it was published this year and I found it in a street library. Luke and Ava are brother and sister, 10 and 11, and their father has given them a box full of documents which contains a mystery to solve. 

This story revolves around a school excursion to the Natural History Museum back in 1983 which ended with a mysterious death and lots of shenanigans, recorded partly by phone messages left between the museum staff, student notebooks and newspaper articles, which Luke and Ava use to track the events of the day and figure out what actually happened. There are locked lunch rooms, students climbing onto whales, stolen planets, people and animals apparently brought back from the dead, missing gems and misbehaving teachers to deal with.

Luke and Ava are separated during the holidays; I gather their parents split up in the previous book but are still on good terms, though they are dealing with difficult family issues and their dad's job is still a mystery. Why does he have these strange boxes in the attic anyway? That mystery is still to be solved. Death at the Museum is a lot of fun, aimed at upper primary students, and though it deals with murder, it's not very gory and an alert reader should be able to work out the clues along with Ava and Luke. 

On the Calculation of Volume 3

 It may look as if I have been reading nothing but Solvej Balle, but I assure you that's not the case! Book 3 of On the Calculation of Volume picks up where Book 2 broke off, with Tara meeting up with another person who's found themselves trapped inside the 18th November, a man called Henry Dale. The two become fellow travellers, moving in together and comparing notes on their experience, but eventually agree to part, Henry to visit his young son in America and Tara to return to her husband Thomas. But it's becoming harder and harder to maintain any connection to Thomas -- over five 'years' have passed for Tara, while for Thomas, not even a single day has gone by.

The world of the novels gradually opens out still further, as Henry and Tara discover another two people in their same predicament, and at the very end of the book, even more castaways arrive, with the prospect of a large scale project to be undertaken (I must confess I don't fully understand the impetus of this particular character, Ralf, to try to 'perfect' the day -- preventing accidents, collecting data -- when everything resets anyway?)

I'm wondering if I'm feeling attracted to this story because I myself am feeling pretty stuck at the moment with caring responsibilities? I can't say that every day is exactly the same, but there isn't a lot of variation and not much to look forward to. Anyway, I'm still loving the Calculation of Volume ride.

Yesteryear

Caro Claire Burke's novel Yesteryear is super hot right now -- there are 230 people waiting to read it at my local library, and coincidentally I ended up reading it at the same time as my elder daughter, who was lent it by her boyfriend's sister (I acquired my copy from the good old Athenaeum). For a while I was ahead, then I got a late night call: 'Mum, have you finished it? We have to talk about the ending!'

It's hard to discuss this book without giving away the twisty plot. Suffice to say that it begins with Natalie, a trad wife influencer, whose perfectly curated online life doesn't match the messy reality behind the scenes. But then it seems that Natalie has been transported back in time, to a genuine pioneer existence which is a lot less airbrushed than her internet lifestyle... I really can't say any more!

Yesterday is perfectly pitched to address our current unease with the slippage between truth and reality, deceit and curation. We have a collective longing for a simpler time, when we baked our own bread and our children played in nature; but does that have to involve constant child-bearing and submission to our husbands? There are multiple layers of deception and self-deception operating in this novel, and it unspools with dizzying and addictive pace. Yesteryear is compulsively readable, and there are powerful ideas stirring beneath its surface. For once, I agree with the verdict of the masses. Yesteryear is a wild ride, and it's one book that deserves its bestseller status. 

One caveat: I'm certain that someone, somewhere, is planning to turn this into a film or a streaming series, but I don't know how they'd be able to make that work. Stick to the book.

On the Calculation of Volume II

I think I'm becoming addicted to Solvej Balle's series, On the Calculation of Volume. I still think it's not a great title, but in part 2, it starts to make more sense as Tara begins to think of herself as living in a container: a single day, a courtyard filled with sky, the borders of the Roman Empire, with which she becomes obsessed in this book.

I'm not sure how I've become so captured by this story. There is very little incident, and the events that do happen don't have much consequence, because Tara's day resets to 18th November every morning. And yet I'm hypnotised, eagerly turning the pages to find out what she'll do next. The last volume ended with Tara having spent 365 days, a whole year, trapped in 18th November, and hoping that the next morning, time would start to turn normally again, like jumping off a carousel. On the first page of volume 2, we find that's not the case. In this book, Tara devotes herself to trying to construct an artificial year, chasing the seasons north and south to find a copy of spring, summer and winter, instead of her perpetual autumn. Then she takes a deep dive into the world of the ancient Romans, but this doesn't solve anything either. The book ends with a kind of cliff hanger, as we learn that Tara is not alone -- she has met someone else who is similarly trapped in time, but we have to wait till book 3 to discover anything more about him.

I think it's safe to say that I'm hooked. Book 3 is already waiting for me on the reserve shelf at the library. 
 

The Broken Road

I snapped up the third volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor's travel memoir, The Broken Road, when it appeared on Brotherhood Books, though I have yet to read the middle book, Between Woods and Water. The three volumes recall a long trip made by Leigh Fermor on foot across Europe to Constantinople (as it was in the mid-1930s), at the age of eighteen-nineteen/twenty. It's quite a shock when he celebrates his twentieth birthday at the end of The Broken Road and you're reminded just how young he was when he made this great trek, carrying just a rucksack on his back, a few letters of introduction, and relying on the arrival of cash at the next Poste Restante. This volume traces his wanderings through Bulgaria and Romania, ending with a sojourn at Mount Athos in Greece.

Young Patrick enjoyed a lot of advantages in making this journey -- he's confident, fit, posh (or at least well-connected, and able to sometimes stay with ambassadors and the relatives of posh friends). He picks up different languages with incredible ease. He's attractive and charming, well able to talk his way into a bed for the night, whether that's with a casual acquaintance met in a local bar or a shepherd whose hut he's come upon in the middle of a rainy night. His self-confidence is stunning; it's impossible to imagine a young woman of the same age being able to undertake a similar trip, which is not to say that his long walk is without danger, because he sometimes skates perilously close to trouble. Am I jealous? Maybe a bit.

Leigh Fermor's writing is, however, equally stunning. He sketches brilliantly vivid word-pictures, so you feel you're walking beside him and experiencing exactly what he sees. His memory is extraordinary, even in this final volume where he admits there are gaps and blurs in his recollection. Of course he is also often relying on the diary he kept at the time, and the very final section, about his time on Mount Athos, consists of extracts from that diary. I wish I could have written something so lucid, so piercingly observant and erudite, when I was twenty (or now, come to that). Patrick Leigh Fermor's writing is a treat, a journey to be savoured slowly and every moment relished.

 

The Winter King

A few years ago I went on a bit of a King Arthur binge, reading as many versions of the Camelot story as I could lay my hands on. Bernard Cornwell's Warlord trilogy pinged my radar, but when I couldn't get hold of the first volume, The Winter King, at my local library, I let it slide. But now I've remembered that the Athenaeum library has lots of books that local libraries don't have on the shelves anymore, and I thought I'd check this out.

I can definitely see why Cornwell's take on the Arthur legend has been so popular and acclaimed. It's very well written, and an historically quite plausible explanation for Arthur and his knights ('warriors' in Cornwell's story). In this version, narrated by aged monk but one time warrior Derfel, Arthur is no king but a war leader, appointed to defend the kingship of High King Uther's baby son Mordred in the chaotic decades after the Romans left the shores of Britain. I laughed aloud at the unflattering portrait of Lancelot, a vain, boastful and cowardly liar who spreads tales about his own prowess on the battlefield. Arthur is a gifted strategist and inspired leader, but he is also flawed -- breaking a valuable alliance in order to marry Guinevere, maybe a touch vain and arrogant himself. Merlin, a wise but capricious Druid, doesn't appear until about halfway through the novel, though his shadow looms long over the story.

If Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon is the Arthur story from a female perspective (I'm so upset that my conscience will no longer allow me to read it), then The Winter King is told from an emphatically male point of view (though there are a respectable number of strong and complicated women). This is a brutal world of death, battle, rape and sacrifice. Druids slaughter captives to read the future in their entrails. Derfel narrowly escapes an early death when a marauding warrior hurls him into a pit of spikes as a child. Nimue is raped and loses an eye at fourteen. The narrative pivots on battles, described in gory and unflinching detail.

The Winter King ends on an unlikely victory for Arthur which seems set to award him the High Kingship of Britain. I'm not sure whether I'll continue the story through the next two volumes -- I feel I've got the flavour of what Cornwell is doing and it might be a bit strong meat for a wimp like me.