Shadow Tag

I've been a fan of Louise Erdrich's novels for a while now, but I hadn't come across Shadow Tag from 2010. It's unlike the other Erdrich novels I've read in that it focuses in narrowly on the dynamics of a marriage and its ultimate breakdown. Irene America is the wife and muse to painter Gil, and mother of their three children. When she realises that Gil has been reading her diary, she starts to write deliberate lies for him to read; mistrust, alcohol and violence brew a destructive mix.

The parts of this novel I enjoyed the most were probably the sections written from the perspectives of the three children, who are trying to hold it together while their parents are falling apart. Erdrich writes exceptionally well about family relationships and the currents of feeling that flow between parents and children, and between siblings. As a parent of seven children and a survivor of several relationships, she obviously has a lot of experience in this area. 

I did pick up one slip, where a side character is referred to just once as 'Louise' rather than 'May.' Erdrich has written herself into at least one other novel as a character and I wonder if she initially intended to do the same here, changed her mind, and let this one reference slide through uncorrected. Shadow Tag feels like an outlier in Erdrich's oeuvre and while at first I feared it might be a dull middle class marriage story, there was a lot more going on -- about images, art and ownership, identity and parenthood.

Fishing in the Styx

 Ruth Park's second volume of autobiography, Fishing in the Styx (great title), picks up where the first left off, after her arrival from New Zealand to Australia in the middle of the Second World War and her marriage to D'Arcy Niland. The two managed to scratch out a living, against everyone's predictions, as full time writers, chiefly by never saying no to a commission and by entering every prize going. Park wrote thousands of radio scripts for children as well as the award-winning novel, The Harp in the South, informed by her own experience living in the slums of Surry Hills. I didn't realise that this book had been so hugely controversial at the time, with Park herself being publicly vilified for daring to write on such a topic. She (probably correctly) deduced that she attracted particular vitriol for being a) female and b) a foreigner. She went on to write many more books over several genres, fiction, non-fiction, children's and young adult.

Park and Niland's struggles are very moving and quite relatable to any working author! Still, they had five children and lived in various houses, occasionally travelling back to New Zealand to visit Park's family, and Park tells a beautiful and mysterious story of a visitation at the moment when her father died. Niland was haunted by a heart complaint which caused his own death at just 50, leaving her a widow with five half-grown children and a weighty burden of grief. Not surprisingly, the rest of her life was shaped by this terrible loss. She never remarried.

Fishing in the Styx is in some ways much sadder to read than A Fence Around the Cuckoo, but it's also the joyous story of a creative couple who never failed to support and encourage each other, even though Niland did do some characteristically male things, like claim the dining table as his work space without considering where Park might do her writing (the answer, predictably, was on her lap). My God, they worked so hard! This book was published in 1993, but Park lived until 2010, when she was 93, after a long, productive and richly lived life.

Liar's Test

  

Still continuing my read through the CBCA Notables list, and I've come to Liar's Test by established First Nations author Ambelin Kwaymullina. This is a briskly-paced speculative fiction novel, plunging the reader immediately into a detailed, fully formed world, where Bell Silverleaf, a member of the oppressed Treesingers, competes with six other girls to become Queen for the next twenty five years. There is a Hunger Games flavour to this structure, but there are more layers here. Bell's world has been colonised by a group of so-called 'gods,' who have attracted followers called the Risen to their various temples. But the world is really -- I think -- a sentient kind of spaceship? Or perhaps the whole world is sentient?

I must be getting old because while I enjoyed lots of elements of Liar's Test, I struggled to follow the revelations and the backstory at times. The story, packed with action, perhaps could have done with a few pauses to let the reader catch their breath and sort out the details. That said, the parallels with First Nations culture and the use of the church's and religion to oppress colonised people were very striking and really well handled. Female friendship and matriarchal power is celebrated, but there are strong and sympathetic male characters, too. Now I see that Liar's Test is book one of a proposed series, so perhaps I'll get some of the breathing space I'm looking for later down the track, because there is almost too much material here for just one book!

Go Set a Watchman

Is it really ten years since the controversial posthumous publication of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman? Not a sequel to To Kill A Mockingbird, as it was marketed at the time, even though it is set years after Mockingbird and with largely the same cast of characters -- if anything it's an early draft of that well-beloved book. I remember when Watchman was released and there was an outcry that this story had ruined the other, particularly by destroying the nobility of Atticus Finch.

So. What did I make of Go Set a Watchman? As a novel, it's ... not great. To Kill a Mockingbird is a deeper, better structured, more thoughtful, better developed story in every way. Go Set a Watchman revolves around twenty-something Jean Louise (Scout) becoming disillusioned with her father when she sees him being complicit with racism. It's all about growing up, standing by your own opinions. Atticus doesn't try to argue Jean Louise out of her New York liberal attitudes; instead he patronisingly explains why they won't work in Maycomb. Worse, her kindly uncle gives her a smack round the chops -- for her own good, you understand.

It's hard to read, and I can understand why so many people felt that wise, just Atticus had been besmirched. To Kill a Mockingbird has been a white saviour fantasy for so long, it's very hard to let it go, or at least to see it in a different context. It's a book of its time, and even though the attitudes it expresses would have been progressive for that time, they now seem timorous and wrong-headed. I winced more than once, and perhaps it would have been better to have left it in that bottom drawer, but reading Go Set a Watchman was an interesting exercise.
 

Ghost Wall

I saw Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss recommended by Penni Russon, who teaches it at uni, and instantly grabbed it from the library. Penni assured me I would love it, and I did. For such a short novel (less than 150 pages), it's incredibly powerful, weaving together questions of class and privilege, power, gendered violence, history and politics, into a seemingly simple but deeply charged situation.

Seventeen year old Sylvie is camping with her family, a handful of students and a professor, attempting to re-enact Iron Age lives -- fishing, foraging, hunting rabbits. Somehow the adult men end up doing the more exciting activities: hunting, drumming, constructing a 'ghost wall' hung with skulls to frighten the Romans away. Meanwhile, Sylvie and her mother, and the single female student, Molly, are stuck with washing the dishes, cooking, and searching for berries. But Sylvie's father, a bus driver with an unsavoury passion for what he imagines to be a more 'pure' British past, is simmering with frustration and the need to impress the professor, and violence is not far away.

Ghost Wall is a masterclass in tension -- even the first couple of pages are brimming with horror -- which builds like summer heat. References to the recently fallen Berlin Wall locate it in the early 1990s, perhaps a less informed time, when concepts like consent were not at the forefront of consciousness. Sylvie's dad is horrible, but he's also a fully rounded character, denied the privilege of a 'proper education' by entrenched class prejudice, trapped in a job that prevents him from spending time outside. I felt for her mum, too, walking on eggshells and longing for a 'sit down' (something Sylvie doesn't appreciate!)

Above all, Ghost Wall is shot through with the eerie presence of those former inhabitants whose lives the re-enactors are trying to imitate. This is a political and domestic novel, but it's also very creepy. Loved it, loved it, loved it.
 

Attention All Shipping

Attention All Shipping is a book I found in my father's collection, though I don't know if he ever actually read it. Published in 2004, it's a cute idea -- Charlie Connelly decided to travel around all the thirty-odd areas of the shipping forecast and report back on what he found, in a Bill Bryson-esque whimsical style. The shipping forecast is such an institution in Britain (I think it's only recently been removed from the main national radio broadcast) that even I was aware of it, though I was very hazy on the details. Some people fall asleep to the enigmatic near-poetry of the forecast, which follows a strict word limit and formula. An example might be: 'Tyne, Dogger. Northeast 3 or 4. Occasional rain. Moderate or poor.' This refers to the areas Tyne and Dogger off the east coast of England; wind direction and strength on the Beaufort Scale; precipitation; and visibility. The forecast follows a strict anti-clockwise order, and Connelly sticks to this order for his expeditions.

Because (der) the areas are all bits of sea, this means Connelly mostly visiting various islands, though sometimes he ticks off an area by crossing it on a boat or even flying over it. His adventures are gently entertaining, interspersed with pieces of history and geography, so the whole book is quite educational as well as amusing. It was a big hit in the UK, and it appears that Connelly has also turned it into a one man live show. I'm really glad he seems to have made a success out of the concept, it's so sweet and funny, but also occasionally poignant and even tragic. I enjoyed Attention All Shipping even more than I expected to.
 

Eleanor Jones Can't Keep a Secret

Eleanor Jones Can't Keep a Secret by Amy Doak is another from the CBCA Notables list, and one I really enjoyed. It's a sequel to Eleanor Jones Is Not a Murderer (great title!) and there is a third volume due soon, Eleanor Jones Is On Fire. It's a classic small town mystery, with Eleanor digging into a possible long-ago murder uncovered when a resident at the local aged care facility seems to be remembering something traumatic from her childhood.

I loved the way that Eleanor uses the library for her research, and also that she is such an avid reader, frequently referring to her latest book. Doak also skilfully interweaves an historic abusive relationship with Eleanor's uneasy interactions with a new acquaintance and shows how tempting it can be to slide into a potentially dangerous situation out of politeness. There's a strong message of friendship and accepting help from others -- something I gather carried over from the first book. There's a satisfying twist to the conclusion of the mystery, a nicely tense climax, and a gentle hint of (proper) romance. I would have been happy to see Eleanor Jones on the shortlist, it's a very accomplished and engaging novel.
 

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

I've read and enjoyed many Anne Tyler novels over the years, but somehow Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, long time staple of high school readings lists, had passed me by. My husband was astonished when I said I'd never read it; it's one of the few books he'd read and I hadn't (not anymore, ha ha). This copy, which I found in a street library, was clearly a high school text -- it was almost destroyed with highlights, underlinings and graffiti in the margins, not to mention chewed and folded corners. I have to say this is by far the least attractive cover for this novel I've seen, too -- presumably this character is supposed to be scrappy tomboy Ruth, but this Ruth has a far too knowing smirk, when really she's a kind of innocent.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is essentially a story of intergenerational trauma. It opens with Pearl Tull on her deathbed, reflecting on the amazing job she's done raising her three children alone after her husband Beck walked out on them. But we soon see, in flashbacks of the family history, that Pearl is a pretty terrible mother -- violent, abusive, volatile, prickly. Each of her three children carries the legacy of their childhood in a different way, but all are scarred to some degree, and we see that damage passed on in turn to their own children. I can see why it was such a popular set text -- mind you, my husband couldn't recall anything from his Year 11 study, so it didn'tmake that much of an impression.

In many ways, Dinner at the HS is the quintessential Tyler novel -- family dynamics, set in Baltimore, the passage of time, misunderstandings and wilful contradictions, but at the end of the day, the ties of family and shared history (even when it's experienced very differently between the players) create some kind of wavering, uncertain bond.
 

James

James is an utterly remarkable novel. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Pulitzer, it is both a deep literary conversation with an American classic (Huckleberry Finn) and an engaging, powerful story in its own right. In preparation for reading James (I had to wait months for it at the library), I read Huckleberry Finn -- well, most of it -- for the first time. While I appreciate that Mark Twain was trying to accomplish something new with this novel, and I acknowledge its place in the American canon, I didn't love the book. I found the dialect difficult to read, and much of the incident was frankly boring. I'm glad I didn't persist to the very end, after hearing the Secret Life of Books podcast describe the ending as really tedious!

James retells the events of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Huck's companion for much of his adventure, the escaped slave 'Jim'. The first and cleverest thing Everett does is have James and the other enslaved characters speak two languages: a slave patois when there are white people listening, and an articulate English when enslaved people are alone. This immediately recasts 'Jim' as highly intelligent. We also come to appreciate the intense, life-threatening danger of James' situation as an escapee. It's like a dark mirror image of the Huck Finn story, showing us everything that the first novel leaves out or only hints at.

There is a lot going on in James, but it's completely readable, fast-paced and totally engaging. I'm glad I read Huckleberry Finn first -- even the contrast in the first scene is stark, but telling. I also highly recommend the Secret Life of Books episodes on both Huck Finn and James, which were fascinating and enlightening. Coincidentally, I was reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Message at the same time as James, another thoughtful and ferocious Black author wrestling with America's racial past. Well worth the wait.

The Message

  

I can't remember where I heard about Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Message, but I assume it was in the context of thinking about Gaza. It's a short book, and it's a series of reflections rather than a tightly argued essay, but it is compelling and thoughtful reading. I wasn't aware of Coates notorious article, The Case for Reparations, in which he used the example of German reparations paid to Israel to bolster an argument for reparation payments to the descendants of enslaved people, a case study he later came to regret. This article hangs over the final section of The Message, a refreshing example of an author reconsidering and admitting he might have got something wrong.

The Message is divided into three parts. In the first, Coates visits Dakar for the first time, the fabled embarkation point for many slave ships travelling from Africa to America, and tries to make sense of his own sense of a mythic African past and his own cultural connection to the home of his ancestors. In the middle section, he attends a small town meeting where a white librarian leads a protest against the proposed banning of one of Coates' books, in the name of protecting white students from uncomfortable 'critical race theory,' and is heartened by the presence of so many white allies. It's so disturbing that this rewriting of history has only gathered pace. 

In the final, longest section, Coates visits Gaza and witnesses first hand the daily oppression of the Palestinian people at the hands of Israel, and tries to understand how the victims of the Holocaust can revisit a similar fate on another group of people. The Message was published in 2024, but written before the current war/genocide in Gaza, and it was very unsettling to read in this context. Coates paints a vivid picture of pre-war life in Gaza, which was bad enough; what has happened since is utterly horrific. He makes a number of comparisons between the treatment of Palestinians and the Jim Crow era oppression of Black people in the US. I felt I did gain a deeper understanding by reading The Message; highly recommended.

Unapologetic

Years ago I fell in love with Francis Spufford's memoir about childhood reading, The Child That Books Built, and I also loved his 2021 novel, Light Perpetual. But I was surprised to hear him talking about being a Christian on an ABC religion program on the radio, where they also mentioned a non-fiction book he'd written: Unapologetic: Why Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. The title appealed to me and I ordered it immediately (yes, I know, I'm not supposed to be buying books this year).

Weirdly, just as I'm writing this, there is another scientist on the radio talking about a possible gene for religiosity, or at least spirituality... I wouldn't be surprised. I've never felt comfortable with the Richard Dawkins school of militant atheism; it's not that I have any strong belief in God myself, but it's never sat right with me that anyone could so contemptuously dismiss a whole region of human experience. Whether or not there is anything there, clearly the feelings of faith and connection to something bigger are genuine, and need to be accounted for. This is more or less the position that Spufford takes -- he says quite plainly that he has the beliefs because he feels the emotions, not the other way around. Which seems to me a sensible position to take.

Spufford caused a bit of a stir with this book, partly because of the free use of swear words. Instead of 'sin,' he talks about humans' HPtFtU (High Propensity to F*** Things Up), which apparently offended a lot of Americans. Unapologetic is a fierce counter-argument to the Dawkins camp, retelling the story of Jesus in a fresh, unvarnished way, stripping it of the familiar, stale imagery and assumptions that inevitably cloud the reception of someone like me who went to a lot of Sunday School and attended a church school. Spufford is lively and punchy and fiesty, and he almost persuaded me. I still can't quite bring myself to make the leap all the way, but if I'm going to be sucked in, it will be through the emotions (looking at you, Elizabeth Goudge). But given how much Spufford loved the Narnia books as a child, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised at where he's ended up.
 

Raymie Nightingale & Louisiana's Way Home

 I found both these Kate DiCamillo books in a street library -- what a score! Unfortunately, the third volume of the trilogy, Beverly, Right Here wasn't with them, and I can't get it from the library either. It's only available on eBook, which is no good to me. However, Raymie Nightingale and Louisiana's Way Home were so good, I desperately want to read Beverly now, and I'm hoping I know someone who can lend it to me (hint, hint...)

These books are gorgeous, so poetic and easy to read, with very short chapters, sad and sweet and funny. Raymie is sensible and anxious, a rescuer; Louisiana is fey and scatty; Beverly is emphatic and bold. The three girls meet, improbably enough, at baton-twirling class at the age of ten, where Raymie is struggling with the abrupt departure of her father. Louisiana's story picks up two years later when her erratic grandmother whisks her into another state and then abandons her. I gather that Beverly's novel is set two years after that again, when the friends are 14, and this time it's Beverly herself who runs away? But perhaps I'll never know for sure.

The books are structured beautifully, with the stories twisting full circle and ending in optimism, despite the sometimes dark material they deal with. Highly recommended (love the cover art of these editions, too, it's so gentle and appealing). 

We Solve Murders

Predictably, given the popularity of Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club series, there was a massive queue at the library for this new one. In We Solve Murders, Amy is a tough-as-guts bodyguard, looking out for Rosie D'Antonio, a best-selling celebrity author (think Joan Collins) and Steve is a retired policeman who happens to be Amy's father-in-law. The body count is very high, and so is the cast of colourful supporting characters, one of whom is trying to frame Amy for their murders. Cue a rollicking plot that involves a lot of cocktails, travel in private jets and international criminal intrigue -- perhaps this time Osman already has half an eye on the Netflix rights, and is planning to visit the sets?

The Thursday Murder Club has been an incredibly popular franchise. Even my friend who famously only reads one book a year raced through the whole lot without stopping (yes, I have friends who don't read). At first I did miss Ibrahim, Joyce, Elizabeth and Ron (I suspect Pierce Brosnan might be miscast, but we shall see), but I soon warmed to Steve and Amy and even Rosie, who might be a bit much in real life. Richard Osman has a knack for creating highly coloured, entertaining characters with a few words.

I think the Thursday Murder crew will remain my favourites, but I'm happy to meet some new friends and spend more time in their company. Roll on the sequels!

Sociopath

I heard Patric Gagne speaking on the radio one night and was intrigued by the sound of her memoir, Sociopath -- there was a very long wait on the library reserve list before I finally got my hands on it.

Honestly, Sociopath was a strange and unsettling read. At times it comes across almost like a novel, with reconstructed scenes and dialogues. Gagne makes the excellent point that there is a lot of grey around the diagnosis and even the definition of sociopathy. Is it the same as psychopathy, just further down the spectrum? The same test is used for assessment, but there is apparently a vast gulf between psychopathy and 'normal,' which is presumably where sociopathy sits. Gagne likes to define sociopathy as a kind of learning disability, but for emotions -- empathy, jealousy, compassion can be learned, but with difficulty (anger and happiness come more easily, at least for Gagne). 

Gane talks al lot about 'apathy,' which I found quite confusing -- sometimes it's good, sometimes unbearable. I must admit I became a bit lost at times as Gagne described her strategies for relieving the weight of apathy, though her descriptions of the rising tension, which could only be relieved by 'bad' actions (stealing a car, stabbing a classmate with a pencil), reminded me a lot of Gabor Matè's account of the unbearable tension of distress experienced by the drug users he works with. Whatever the origin of these impulses, it seems clear that the brain uses a similar mechanism to try to relieve its pain.

By the end of Sociopath, I can't claim that I understand sociopathy much better than I did, but I do have more sympathy for this maligned minority.
 

Ramona and Her Father

I was very happy to add Ramona and Her Father to my Beverly Cleary collection. I just love the Ramona stories, they have never lost their charm, and they are so much fun to read aloud. (My younger daughter has just reminded me that she loved Ramona and Beezus because they were sisters like her and her big sister, and that Ramona, Harry Potter and 101 Dalmatians were the only books they really shared.)

Cleary's stories are set firmly in the real world, and she doesn't shy away from real life problems. In Ramona and Her Father, Ramona's dad has lost his job and he's moping round the house, getting depressed because his job hunt is unsuccessful, and being quite grumpy. Ramona's mum has to start working full time to make up for the loss in income, and money is tight. None of this is Ramona's problem to solve, but it's always there in the background. I loved the sisters' campaign to stop their father smoking, and Ramona's humiliatingly half-hearted sheep costume for the end of year Nativity play (because Mum doesn't have time to sew a full suit -- hm...)

One thing that reliably makes Ramona feel better is making a ruckus, and there is a wonderful chapter where she and her friend Howie clomp around on tin can stilts, singing at the tops of their lungs. Unbearable for everyone else, but fantastic for Ramona. 

I am fully confident that if/when I have grandchildren, they will love Ramona as much as we all do.