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.

Life Below Stairs

Regular readers of this blog will already know that I am fascinated by servants, probably because in another life I almost certainly would have been one. So how could I resist Alison Maloney's Life Below Stairs: True Lives of Edwardian Servants?

When it arrived, Life Below Stairs proved to be a slim little volume, under 200 pages, and doubtless published to cash in on the popularity of Downton Abbey (Julian Fellowes, its creator, is even quoted a few times). It is, however, a really solid informative little source book for useful information about the exact hierarchy of roles and duties inside a house, wages and uniforms, etiquette and rules of behaviour. If I were writing a novel set in an Edwardian grand house, this would not be a bad place to start. For one thing, it would have cleared up Anna's confusion about whether or not she was a 'tweeny' in Countess Below Stairs.

To my amusement, I found quotes from other books about domestic service that I've already read, but I did find out some information I didn't know before -- like the fact that young girls hoping to secure a job as a maid had first to work and save up (maybe for a couple of years) to afford to buy the dresses and aprons they'd be expected to wear on the job! However, footmen, despite being paid more, had thier uniforms supplied. And did you know that a 'servant's bed' measured only 2 foot 6 across, compared with a standard single bed, which was 3 feet in width? (I was chuffed to see an advertisement for such furniture from Heal's, where Dodie Smith worked.)

I was really hoping for more in the way of personal stories and experiences, but I'm sure I'll find those elsewhere.
 

Metal Fish, Falling Snow

As you can see from the huge number of award stickers on the cover above, Metal Fish, Falling Snow gleaned a long list of prizes and shortlistings for debut author Cath Moore when it was published in 2020. Fourteen year old Dylan sees the world aslant, and when her beloved mother dies in an accident, she is forced to make a long road trip with her mum's boyfriend to reconnect with the only family she has left. The metal fish and the snow globe of the title refer to the only tangible mementos Dylan possesses from her parents.

Dylan's story is told in an idiosyncratic, very original voice, alive with word play and metaphor, and I can understand why the judges of literary prizes would have sat up when they opened these pages. It's beautifully written, often droll, sometimes very sad. Dylan seems sometimes much wiser than a typical fourteen year old, and sometimes much younger. For me, Metal Fish, Falling Snow falls into the category of books for adults who like YA or kidlit, which is a perfectly respectable category with plenty of readers and one I aspire to write for myself (as well as reading it :-)
 

The Sentence

Louise Erdrich has become one of my favourite authors. The Sentence, published at the end of 2021, is partly a pandemic novel, partly about Black Lives Matter, partly about ghosts, and mostly about reckoning with the past.

Links with Erdrich's life seem clear -- Tookie, our narrator, works in a bookshop owned by an author called Louise which focuses on Native American and marginalised voices, just like Erdrich's own Birchbark Bookshop (Trump will probably try to shut it down soon). Tookie spent a decade in jail and she was first arrested by the man who is now her beloved husband. Her life is now safe and comfortable, but there are elements of her past that she has never come to terms with, signified by the fact that she is being haunted by the ghost of a former bookshop customer.

The Sentence covers a tumultuous year in Minneapolis as Covid sweeps the country and then the murder of George Floyd sparks protests, riots and brutality in the streets. Erdrich expertly weaves national and even global trauma with the deeply personal story of Tookie and her family. She must have written it so fast! As always, I'm struck with admiration for the way Erdrich combines the spiritual, the political and the domestic. The Sentence is a powerful and moving novel.
 

We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord

I enjoyed this book a lot. Garth Nix has mined his own Canberra childhood, his history as a teenage D&D Dungeonmaster and put a John Wyndham-esque sci-fi twist on it all to produce an action-packed middle grade novel.

Kim (Chimera) and his younger sister Elia (Elieithyia) live with their eccentrically hippie parents on the outskirts of 1970s Canberra, spending most of their time hanging out with their friends Bennie and Madir, but everything changes one day when they fish a mysterious golden globe out of the lake. This incident is based on a true story from Nix's childhood, when he thought he saw a severed head in the murky waters one day (I think it turned out to be a motorbike helmet). Before long, child prodigy Elia is in communication with the strange sphere, which becomes progressively more and more threatening and dangerous.

We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-Year-Old Overlord reminded me of John Wyndham's classic Chocky, which scared the suitcase out of me as a child, and also fascinated me. Things never get too terrifying here, though there is certainly plenty of danger and lots of action. I raced through it and I hope plenty of young readers do the same. My only quibble is that I was never quite sure how to pronounce Elia.
 

Madly, Deeply

I first came across Alan Rickman as the superbly smarmy Obadiah Slope in The Barchester Chronicles (a performance that JK Rowling has said inspired the character of Severus Snape, so how appropriate that Rickman ended up playing him). But I fell in love with him in Truly, Madly, Deeply when he played the ghost of Juliet Stevenson's husband, and even more as Captain Brandon in Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility. For most people of a certain generation, he will always be Professor Snape; for an older demographic, he is the villain in Die Hard (never seen it). What always set him apart was his divine, languid voice -- the result of being born with a tight jaw, apparently.

These diaries run from 1993-2015. Unlike, say, Michael Palin's diaries, which always seem to have written with at least one eye firmly on eventual publication, Rickman's diaries sit in an uneasy space between being shorthand enough to seem purely personal, but elliptical enough to be frequently opaque to future readers.

It's weird to read about the actual process of film-making from the actor's perspective. I think somewhere in the back of my mind I've assumed that if the action covers a year, then they've spent a year making it... whereas of course the actor might be on set for only a few days. One gathers that Rickman wasn't always easy to work with -- he's exacting, critical (including self-critical) and he can always see how things could be better. As an actor, he chafed against directors; as a director, he demanded a lot from his actors. But his prickliness was never in service of ego, always in service of the work.

But he was a wonderful, generous friend; he was always politically engaged, and he stayed with his partner from 1977 until he died in 2015. It's worth remembering that most people only write in their diaries when they're unhappy -- I know I certainly did -- and if Rickman comes across as a bit of a grump, that's probably one reason why. He also illustrated his diaries with gorgeous coloured drawings, only a handful of which are reproduced here -- I would have loved to see them all.

A Countess Below Stairs

Eva Ibbotson's A Countess Below Stairs has also been published as a YA novel under the title The Secret Countess, and to me it perfectly straddles the ground between light adult historical romance and young adult fun -- it's a fairy tale, and utterly satisfying in a fairy tale way.

I can't remember how I heard about it, but I found it at the Ath (of course) and it was perfect, delightful comfort reading. Our heroine, Anna, is a dispossessed Russian noblewoman, forced into exile in England after the 1917 Revolution. She's a sweet, unspoiled, enthusiastic young woman who takes a job as a housemaid at a grand country house -- can you see why I couldn't resist it? Of course, her fellow servants can see at once that she's cut from different cloth, but they all fall in love with her anyway. And naturally, there is an eligible heir to the estate, survivor of the War, unfortunately engaged to a beautiful but deeply unpleasant fiancèe...

Everything plays out as it should, complete with high comedy vignettes, tearful misunderstandings and a dog called Baskerville. It's pure froth, but such deftly handled, pleasurable froth. I've never read any of Eva Ibbotson's work before, but I have a feeling she might become a favourite.

Stories

It's almost hilarious to contrast how skinny this volume of Helen Garner's collected short fiction is, compared with the companion volume of True Stories, which is about four times as fat. Lots of blank pages and huge margins in Stories, too.

Some of the pieces in Stories don't read much like fiction; as always, the border between fiction and non-fiction in Garner's work is porous to say the least. There were only a couple of these stories where I couldn't trace some kind of connection to Garner's own life, and perhaps even in those cases I just couldn't see the connection because I don't know her well enough. Does it really matter what's true and what's invented, or shaped, or curated, or edited, or enhanced? Every writer uses the clay of real life to some degree; just because Garner is more honest about her material doesn't make the final result any the less art.

I think all these pieces were new to me, so I was very happy to have read them. The final story, What We Say, was especially devastating, in that understated, elliptical way Garner has. What a superb writer she is.

Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth and Me

 

This is a book that I think I probably acquired thorough the Scholastic Book Sale while we were living in PNG; my edition is from 1974, so I would have been eight or nine. The book sale was just for books (revolutionary, I know) and it was essentially the only way I could access books apart from the library -- there were no bookshops in Mt Hagen. And of course all the books were American... though this is the UK edition, the original US version had the title, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizabeth. I have to agree with the UK publishers re the (slightly) snappier title.

I've hung onto this book all these years, but I don't think I've actually read it since we left PNG. As a child, I loved Jennifer, Hecate, but there was plenty in it to mystify me -- Pilgrim costumes for Halloween, apartments with elevators, quarts of water, New Math, snow and school at Christmas time and the fact that watermelon at New Year was strange. I was intrigued by witches, too, and I also experimented with magic potions, so I found that very relatable. I can't remember what I thought about the fact that Jennifer was Black and Elizabeth was white, though I was also living in a highly segregated community at the time.

Reading some more recent reviews, I found that some reviewers looked askance at this book because they took the view that Jennifer was 'bullying' Elizabeth by putting her through her 'witch apprenticeship.' Give me a break! Elizabeth has to eat strange foods (a raw egg every day, raw onions). But Elizabeth is well able to stand up for herself, and she undertakes her witch 'trials' willingly -- she adds the egg to milkshakes, and she loves onion sandwiches anyway. Elizabeth is just as sarcastic and feisty as Jennifer is cool and sardonic -- they are a great pair, a fact I only appreciated properly this time around.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Published in 2007, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian has become something of a modern classic. It's the semi-autobiographical story of Arnold Spirit (almost the same initials as Sherman Alexie) who makes the difficult decision to leave his school on the reservation and attend the mostly white high school in Reardan, 22 miles away. His community see him as a traitor, his new school mates see him as a misfit, but gradually, mostly with the traditional mechanisms of fisticuffs and sport, he becomes accepted.

There are plentiful illustrations, Diary of a Wimpy Kid style (ooh, apparently they were published the same year! interesting...) but the content is much darker. There are deaths on the reservation, none from natural causes, Arnold's parents are alcoholics, and they are so poor that often they can't afford to pay for petrol to drive him to school. The toughness of the material is made bearable by Arnold's ironic, self-deprecating style, the humour of the drawings, and the loose, readable printing -- short chapters, lots of space on the page. No wonder it's a hit with reluctant readers.

It was disappointing to discover that Alexie is yet another author whose personal behaviour has come back to bite him, though at least he seems to have been willing to apologise and try to make amends. I really don't want to have to cancel this one!

Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia

Black Inc has a whole series of these Growing Up in Australia books: Growing Up Asian, Growing Up Queer, Growing Up Disabled and more, only some of which I've read. 

Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, edited by Anita Heiss and published in 2018, was a sobering read. It includes dozens of firsthand stories, from people born in the forties right up to teenagers, and while the narratives of the older generations included some desperately sad accounts of stolen children and even passed-down memories of brutal massacres, the most recent life stories are also full of racism, low expectations and relatives lost to suicide and despair, as well as loving families, community support and individual achievements.

One common theme was the exasperation and anger at being constantly asked to justify their own Aboriginal identity, especially, but not only from fair-skinned people: being required to quantify what 'percentage' of heritage they possess. I must admit I thought this was something that had gone out with the census referendum and I was shocked at how often even the youngest writers complained about this sort of interrogation.

There are many different kinds of stories here. Some writers have a strong, joyous sense of culture and belonging; others feel adrift. There are accomplished authors here, including Tara June Winch, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Jared Thomas and Tony Birch; celebrities like Adam Goodes and Miranda Tapsell; political figures like Celeste Liddell, and many others. Some stories are warm and funny, some are angry and sad, but all are worth reading.

A Month in the Country

J.L. Carr's short novel (just over 100 pages) was first published in 1980, and I studied it for either English or English Lit a few years later. I remember loving it, and it was safe on my shelves, but I hadn't revisited it for forty years, until I was prompted to do so by a Facebook friend.

A Month in the Country is a beautiful, elegiac little book, set in an idyllic English summer in 1920. The narrator, Tom Birkin, is restoring a painting in the church; Charles Moon is excavating someone's lost ancestor in the grounds outside. Both are survivors of the War, and both are deeply scarred. Nothing much happens, but gradually some things shift and begin to heal; in fact, what happens is that Birkin begins to make connections in the village, and these connections continue to nurture him long after that magical summer is gone.

A couple of years after I studied the book in high school, and unbeknownst to me, they made a film out of it, starring Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh in very early roles. I'm very excited to see it (though apparently it's not as magical as the book). It's so weird what survives in the memory -- as I re-read it, I remembered reading about Alice Keach's father testing her on obscure types of apple, and the fig leaves pressing up against the windows of the vicarage like hands, and one character being found 'in bed with his batman,' and what that implied, and I remembered what was particular about the missing ancestor and how he featured in Birkin's altarpiece. But loads of more dramatic scenes and details had vanished from my mind completely. I found myself thinking, oh, that's where that came from.
 

Honour & Other People's Children

Honour & Other People's Children was Helen Garner's follow-up to her immensely successful Monkey Grip: the difficult second album. Apparently she originally intended to write something similar to her first novel (I guess that meant mining her diaries in the same way) but couldn't make it work, so the noven-in-progress was split into two separate novellas. (I always have trouble remembering that Honour is one story and Other People's Children is another.) 

Honour, the novella I prefer, centres around a separated couple and the challenge to their amicable, long-standing relationship when the man wants to marry his new partner. Other People's Children concerns friendship and share-house politics, the breakdown of a friendship between Ruth and Scotty, and a possible new relationship for Scotty with the unattractive Madigan. Unfortunately I found Madigan so unappealing that I had no interest in whether or not he and Scotty would get together.

The autobiographical elements are not difficult to discern, though it seems that Ruth and Scotty both contain elements of Garner herself. Scotty seems closer to Garner in personality, but Ruth is the one with children, to whom childless Scotty is deeply attached and is likely to lose if the household breaks down. There's less meat in these novellas than there is in Monkey Grip, and I don't think Other People's Children entirely succeeds, but even a flawed Helen Garner book is always worth reading.
 

Impossible Creatures

I'm late to the party as far as Katherine Rundell is concerned, but Impossible Creatures is pretty nearly a perfect middle grade fantasy novel and I would have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone. 

Impossible Creatures opens with a bestiary of gorgeous mythological beasts, both traditional and invented by Rundell, and then plunges immediately into a fast-paced adventure with characters relatable and colourful -- Christopher comes from our own world, and is the unwitting heir to a guardianship he knew nothing about, while Mal comes from the walled-off Archipelago, a hidden part of our world where the magical creatures live. Mal herself is another unwitting heir to a weighty legacy. Helping these two young people in their quest are an array of supporting cast, human and not human, but in the end, Christopher and Mal have to reach deep to stop the leaking of magic from the other realm.

This is a novel I wish I'd written myself -- vivid, moving, pacy and magical. It's wonderful stuff.

True Stories

Wow, what a collection! When this hefty brick arrived on the reserve shelf, it was like getting the Fitzroy pool itself delivered, promising hours of bliss to dive in and swim around.

As a Helen Garner devotee, there wasn't much in this volume of forty years of short non-fiction pieces that I hadn't already read -- a handful of reviews, maybe a couple of articles for obscure magazines. But the fact that most of it was familiar didn't detract at all from the pleasure of re-reading it. Garner's prose style is exemplary; her eye is so keen; her intellect is astringent. She can be judgey, but she is also compassionate, and she is very aware of her own flaws. 

There is a grab bag of subjects here -- reviews and portraits, quotidian experiences, bits of diary, newspaper columns, murder and death, relationships and encounters. True Stories is 650 pages long, but every page was a treat to read. I've decided that if I were marooned on a desert island, I could survive without any new books to read as long as I had the collected works of Helen Garner, Elizabeth Goudge, Rumer Godden and Alan Garner to see me through.

The Children's Bach

The Children's Bach (for the longest time I vaguely thought that 'Bach' might refer to a NZ beach shack. But it doesn't.) is a short and exquisitely formed novel, only 160 pages of quite big print, and it was met with great acclaim when it was first published in 1984 (my edition is branded as a Modern Classic). I got great pleasure from recognising the Melbourne setting: Merri Creek, St Georges Rd, Melville Rd, the Fitzroy pool (again).

Having said that, I could see how an impatient reader or someone who likes a clear plot might feel frustrated with this novel. We are presented with an outwardly almost perfect family, and then witness how they crack and buckle under the influence of Dexter's old friend, Elizabeth, her much younger sister Vicki and Elizabeth's musician lover, Philip (musician -- there's your first red flag, ladies). Almost nothing is explicitly stated, almost everything is implied. As Philip advises a young songwriter, 'Don't explain everything. Leave holes. The music will do the rest.'

I think if Garner were writing this novel today, forty years later, she might reconsider the way she writes about Dexter and Athena's child Billy, who seems to be neurodivergent; and she might (or then again, she might not!) reconsider a sexual encounter between a forty year man and a seventeen year old girl, however insouciant the seventeen year old might seem the morning after.

I'm coming to the conclusion that Garner is more of a natural observer than an inventor, but I might talk more about that later.
 

Flames

Robbie Arnott's debut novel, Flames, came to me via a friend's child who studied it for VCE, so this copy is nicely annotated, underlined and highlighted so that I couldn't possibly miss anything significant. My only previous exposure to Arnott's writing was Limberlost, which I absolutely loved, but I didn't realise that that book was a bit of a departure from Arnott's usual magic realist style. It was a wonderful surprise to read a novel set in Tasmania that is shot through with shimmers of the uncanny and the magical; it felt unusual, but at the same time, so right.

Flames switches points of view with each chapter: a fleeing daughter, a dogged son, a tough (female) detective, a mad wombat farmer, and most surprisingly, the spirit of fire itself. Arnott's writing is extraordinary in its lyricism and beauty, but the ideas and the unashamed embrace of magical and supernatural elements are just as powerful. Flames was greeted with superlatives on its publication in 2018, but it's astonishing to note that Arnott has only got better since then. I really need to read the rest of his books, and it's good to know I have some treats in store.

We Didn't Think It Through

WINNER: 2024 MARION ACT Book of the Year, Books for Older Readers
WINNER: 2024 Readings Young Adult Prize
SHORTLISTED: 2024 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature
SHORTLISTED: 2024 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Indigenous Writers' Prize
NOTABLE BOOK: 2024 CBCA Book of the Year, Older Readers
SHORTLISTED: 2024 Prime Minister's Literary Awards, Young Adult Literature

Just look at that list of awards! And yet when I picked up a copy from the shelf at the Athenaeum, there were no stickers on it and I was completely unaware that We Didn't Think It Through by Gary Lonesborough was such a lauded novel.

Having read it now, I'm not at all surprised that it's garnered so many plaudits. We Didn't Think It Through takes us into the world and mind of a young First Nations man (Jamie is sixteen) who is teetering on the very edge of becoming lost in the justice system. Impulsive and drifting, Jamie takes part in a fateful car theft and is sent to 'juvie.' He's angry, he's sad, he's resentful, he's lonely. But there's also something thoughtful and tender inside Jamie that a few key relationships can draw out and build upon to turn him from the path he seems set upon following.

Jamie is a totally relatable kid who's been dealt a hard hand by life so far -- taken from his parents, living in a dead end town where First Nations kids aren't given second chances. But he does have some good things on his side: a loving foster family, a caring older brother, a teacher who sees his potential, a friend he makes in juvie, a social worker who takes the time to connect with him over poetry, and parents who are flawed, but do love him. The way ahead may not be easy for Jamie, but by the end of the book, you get the sense that he's going to make it.
 

Monkey Grip

Thirty five years ago I was squatting in a shared flat in a dark Edinburgh winter with a friend from Melbourne when the movie of Monkey Grip came on the TV: sunshine! The Fitzroy pool! Melbourne! We cried from homesickness.

When I first read Helen Garner's debut novel I felt all at sea. Despite sharing some elements of the Melbourne share house milieu (albeit about a decade after Garner's Nora cycled through those familiar streets), in other ways her world was completely alien to me. I shrank from the drug-taking, I was baffled by the partner-swapping, the casual falling in and out of bed together (which was actually much more emotionally fraught than the characters were striving for it to be), I had no experience of the relentless demands of motherhood. And everyone was so much cooler than me, it was intimidating.

Re-reading Monkey Grip now, with my share-house days far in the distant past, I think I understand the book much better. It helps to realise that the novel is a thinly fictionalised version of Garner's diaries from the time -- on the first reading, the kaleidoscope of characters made my head reel. Reading it as a diary is much more straightforward for some reason. However, there were many times when I longed to shake young Helen/Nora by the shoulders and beg her to give up on these selfish, self-absorbed men! One serious mistake by the film-makers was the casting of Colin Friels together with Noni Hazlehurst -- addict Javo is only twenty three in the book, nearly ten years younger than Nora, and this is an important dynamic of their relationship, one which I think the movie will struggle to reproduce. I say will because I can't actually remember much about the film; I'm going to re-watch it today.

Abandoned!

Sometimes a book is just not for you. I had heard a lot of praise for Paul Lynch's Prophet Song, and it won the Booker Prize in 2023; it was not too fat, and I was intrigued by the premise of the story, which charts the gradual disintegration of a Western democracy and the irresistible creep of tyranny. And I am, I was, interested in the story -- the progress of the narrative kept me reading for the first sixty pages, as Eilish's husband is arrested and the family's passport renewal is denied.

But then I stopped.

I was defeated by Lynch's writing style. Long run-on paragraphs stretching across several pages, almost no punctuation, no speech marks, even when there's more than one speaker. Maybe the fault is mine -- I read fast, I like to immerse myself in the text so it feels like swimming effortlessly through the story. With Prophet Song, I kept stumbling over the prose, I had to stop and go back and pick up the thread again. Maybe that was the author's intention? Perhaps the reader is supposed to slow down and reflect, rather than skimming across the surface of the story?

But in the end, I felt so frustrated by the reading experience that I decided not to persist. Lynch has won the Booker, I don't think my decision will cost him any readers, and there are so many more books I would rather be reading. I gave up.

Judy B's Books

A few years ago my mum's friend Judy gave me a box of her childhood books from the 1950s, some gorgeous Girls' Own annuals as well as school stories and assorted other novels. I gobbled up the annuals immediately but I only got around to reading some of the novels recently, and what a trip back in time they proved to be. None of the above volumes are real 'classics,' just ordinary stock shelf-fillers and Sunday School prizes, but they were a lot of fun to read.

White Holiday by Viola Bayley sees a young brother and sister invited on a snowy holiday in Switzerland befriend a young skiing champion who happens to be the great-grandson of a countess who has a couple of crooks on the trail of her lost emeralds... There are abductions, moonlight chases, attempted assassination, disguises and secrets galore for our young protagonists. Will and Otto get plenty of action but Rosamund, though plucky, faints several times and is described as 'modest' as well as 'extremely pretty' and doesn't have a lot of personality. Which doesn't prevent dashing Otto from falling in love with her... in a couple of years time, naturally.

Myrtle's Guest lulled me into a false sense of security by describing how Myrtle, from a humble family on Jersey, gets a summer job in a guesthouse. Then suddenly, boom, at the end of the third chapter, Jane Rogers springs a new character on us: God! 

Mrs Moisin would train her to be a good and tidy maid, but could she help the real Myrtle -- the Myrtle who was an immortal soul -- to be the best that she could be, the best that her Creator intended her to be?

Luckily for Myrtle's immortal soul, a lovely kind and generous Christian (English) family arrive at the guesthouse and bring her to Jesus. Phew!

The Highland School by Marjorie Taylor seems to have been written as Girl Guide propaganda, as the common thread through an eventful novel, as well as outrageous coincidences, is pride in the principles of Guidedom. Christine writes and acts in a play in front of a major London producer, faces down her fear of fire when the cottage she's staying in suddenly goes up in flames, and manages to find her missing amnesiac brother among some gypsies at a local fair in the middle of France -- oh, and did I mention that her best friend is the daughter of the famous scientist that her brother most wants to work for? The Highland School also introduced me to the concept of the 'Post Guide,' which I can't find any more information about, but seems to be something like a guide-by-correspondence for disabled girls? Christine's troop invite a disabled girl from the slums of Glasgow to join them on their camp, and of course Elspeth teaches Christine valuable lessons of courage and patience which stand her in good stead later on. And the burglar who breaks into Christine's house turns out to be Elspeth's father, who instantly repents and is able to get his old job back with Christine's family's help. Again, phew.

Nothing deep or literary here, but I got some good laughs and a bit of history from these books from yesteryear.

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.