The Resident Judge of Port Phillip

My mother died with Alzheimers. One day, when I wasn’t quite sure whether she knew who I was or not, she became quite agitated and said “It’s getting late. My mummy will be worried about me”. It was poignant: her mother had died when she was about 7, and I had never once in my life heard her refer to her “mummy”.

You Must Remember This is written from experience of child with a parent with Alzheimers- you can tell. The chapters are not in chronological order, with the book starting with Chapter 10 as Grace is heading along a busy road at night. This prompts her daughter Liz to put her into aged care, where she is bewildered by the presence of strangers, including her daughter. Memories come fleetingly, before she can put them into words.

As she struggles to find a firm footing for her memories, she goes back to her childhood with her alcoholic parents. Her father had been in the war and her mother worked as a nurse, but with such an alcohol problem you wonder how she held down a job. She met her husband Howard when she was working in an office although she didn’t remember that he had since died. She loved him all her life. These chapters are interspersed between the present day chapters, in no particular order.

The book is set in Western Australia and it ‘feels’ Australian. Wilson has a lovely turn of phrase: he describes an old man as having “cheeks like billiard balls” (p. 33) and when someone coughs, they make a sound “like an empty spray can” (p. 78).

This is only a small book – at 169 pages it’s a novella really- but it rings with authenticity. It was short-listed for the Miles Franklin but I don’t know if it has the heft to be a winner (and it didn’t). But it is sad, tender and you just know that it’s absolutely true.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: Miles Franklin shortlist.

I can’t think of a book that I have read recently that has annoyed me yet affirmed me in equal measure as much as this book did. I still haven’t worked out which response is stronger.

Near the end of the book Wilson sums up her argument in a nutshell:

Facing collapse…allows us to finally get around to exploring the beautiful questions we ache to answer within ourselves. It very literally forces us to confront what matters most. What matters when we ‘lose it all’… Climate collapse has gotten us to confront truth in a fully adult way. The AI threat has us reckoning with what actually makes us us. I feel now that it is all steering us- with considerable urgency and force- to live simpler, more connected lives. To rise into a fuller, more mature, evolved expression of ourselves- as many other tumultuous, liminal, revolutionary times in history have tended to do (p. 253-4)

Even looking at this quote evokes both the things I really disliked and things I embraced in this book.

Let’s start with the ‘dislikes’ first, so that I can end on a more uplifting note.

Sarah Wilson is an Australian author and journalist who wrote I Quit Sugar, a book about anxiety First, We Make the Beast Beautiful and a book about forging a radically hopeful life forward This One Wild and Precious Life. For once, the library’s category sticker of ‘Wellbeing’ is spot-on, and I loathe wellbeing books. Warning sign number one.

This book emerged out of her Wild with Sarah Wilson podcasts, where I gather she interviews interesting people and collapsologists (who knew there was such a field) and has created her own community of podcast and Substack listeners and commentators. I am a podcast listener myself – and may indeed subscribe to her podcast feed because she does have interesting people- but the narrative tone of this book doesn’t rise above the gushing, please-like-me tone of a podcast (much as the tone of this review would be inappropriate for the Australian Book Review). Warning sign number two

She uses ‘overwhelm’ as a noun. Often. The whole book very much about her. Here she is, talking about what she is doing in order to remain faithful: meditate, dance, maximize her menstrual cycle, cry, hurt, cry more, move out of the house when she is frozen in fear, hyperventilate with nervous energy. (p.277). All part of the wellbeing trope that I dislike so much. Warning sign number three.

Moreover, much of the book is a pastiche of other people’s writing. Of course, all academics and writers draw on the work of other people. But this is more than footnoting: she describes this as ‘soul nerding’:

the practice, or art, of absorbing the considered reflections of smart, deep minds who have wrangled as we do now (p. 157)

But when does this move from drawing on knowledge and wisdom to becoming little more than a commonplace book? Even the layout of the book, with sections rarely longer than 2 pages and sometimes as short as a paragraph, separated by an asterisk, suggests a lighting upon one thought, then another, then another. Warning sign number four.

Enough griping. What did I like about the book?

I accept and agree with her perception of the world as rushing towards collapse. It terrifies me. I had to pull myself up at one stage and think “Hold on. I’m a historian. I know about this stuff”. It pushed me into thinking about Cambodia after Pol Pot; I thought back to Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14^th century; my area is 19th century Australian colonial history which saw the collapse of societies that went back millenia and millenia and millenia; I’ve been listening to podcasts about the Roman Empire for years. Humans do survive. Not all of them- indeed, a minority of them. Things do not ‘go back to normal’ but they do not stop either. Some things remain – the most important things – and they are woven into something completely different. Not without pain and sorrow – so much pain and sorrow- but they go on.

She talks about her own shift from being a climate change activist and trying to stop climate collapse, to instead giving up on hoping for better to contemplate that collapse and what it means for us. She discusses ‘prepping’ but eschews it because she asks the question- if I have prepped and others haven’t, what sort of person will that make me?

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about AI and humanity. So has she- along with many others.

…now the tech threat we face is forcing us to define ourselves away from the very AI that we efforted into being. This threat necessarily gets us asking, where does humanity end and artificial intelligence start? If AI can take our jobs and solve our technical and existential problems, if it can take the place of bones-and-beating-hearts lovers and replicate our most intimate art, what is left? What will AI never be able to take? Which is to ask: what is it that makes us human and what makes a human life worthwhile? We might have been avoiding the answer for some time, but can’t any longer (p. 117)

She is aware of herself (probably an offshoot of the self-absorption that I so disliked). She talks about ‘uncertainty intolerance’ and the encouragement in our culture to grasping for certitude, especially through 3-step You Tube videos and bedside self-help manuals. She reminds herself to watch herself over this tendency:

I’ve developed seductive techniques over decades of being a journalist, a story-teller and a self-anointed defender of things. I can often convince others- and myself- of whatever I set my mind to because I have the language to do so; I’ve mastered the certitude game (p. 147)

She notes a recent Brookings analysis that almost 2/3 of climate activists in the United States are women with an average age of fifty-two. She is fifty-two. I am fifty-two plus 18 years. One of my frequent declamations while watching the world news, as I see business meetings, tech bros, and the rapid disappearance of women on the world stage “All those bloody MEN!”. She makes a place for “a mature, feminised style of wisdom and leadership that all men and women can lean into and benefit from” (p. 242).

She is not afraid of spirituality. This is something I grapple with, and something that I am trying to integrate into myself through my involvement with Unitarian Universalism. How many other people, I wonder, sat with the census form, feeling that ‘No Religion’ wasn’t quite right, and yet not knowing how to define what you are? (thank heavens for the fill-in box).

She calls for us to create ‘islands of sanity’, a concept that she takes from Meg Wheatley:

…intentional spaces, conversations, even ways of being in which calm, considered, accepting, forgiving responses and approaches are lived out. These islands are not places where we fix the whole system. They are where we preserve human values, sanity and coherence in small communities in advance of the chaos ahead. They exist as a gentle invitation for anyone who chooses to lift that scab of denial and finds themselves tumbling into that lonely, frightening realm most of you reading this are in (p. 139).

I guess that’s what I’m trying to do in my own life: draw on the wisdom of other people, learn from history, create and build an island of sanity.

I do wonder where she goes after this book. I don’t think there’s any going back to writing books about sugar. Is she going to ramp it up even further or will she just repeat herself in book after book?

Rating: So, reduced to the algorithmic demand of Goodreads, or my own imperfect rating scale- what would I give this book? 9.5/10 for making me think? 5/10 for the narrative voice and self-absorption of it all? I’ll probably settle on 3/5 for Goodreads (because they rank in five stars).

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I liked the title (which comes from a poem: Sometimes as an antidote/to fear of death/ I eat the stars.) Also, my Unitarian fellowship is going to discuss it in September.

SPOILERS

It sometimes occurs that I read a series of books that seem to speak to each other. If I were choosing my books through a chatbot, then I would assume that the sequence was driven by an algorithm. But my last two books were chosen because (a) A Visit from the Goon Squad was an Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection and (b) You Must Remember This was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and I was interested to read the shortlist. Then The Heart’s Invisible Furies finally became available after literally months on hold at the library -reserved for a reason I can no longer remember- so it must be coincidence rather than an algorithm that has brought me three books in a row that ‘speak’ to each other.

It’s uncanny, though, that all three books look at a life or lives over a span of time, complete with the sliding-doors moment when things could have worked out differently. However, The Heart’s Invisible Furies, unlike the other two books, does not play around with sequencing and plotlines to show off (as in the case of Egan’s book) or to demonstrate a memory in decline (as in You Must Remember This). It’s a relief to read a book that starts at the beginning and just goes through to the end, without any narrative pyrotechnics.

The book in in three long parts, each with several chapters arranged chronologically. It opens in 1945 with the narrator’s sixteen year old mother Catherine Goggin being expelled from the Catholic church on account of her pregnancy. Her own family shuns her and she makes her way to Dublin, living with Sean and his lover Jack Smoot in a small flat as she manages to obtain a position in the tearoom at the Daíl Eireann , the Irish Parliament. Chapter II takes us to 1952 when our narrator Cyril is adopted by Charles and Maude Avery, a childless couple who, while feeding, housing and educating him, never let him forget that he’s ‘not a real Avery’. Cyril does not know his birth parents, and he has no interest in finding them. Charles is serially unfaithful to his wife and shady in his business dealings, while Maude writes books that she hopes no-one will read because it is ‘vulgar’ to be popular. As a seven year old boy, Cyril meets Julian Woodbead when his father Max is acting as Charles’ solicitor, and he falls in love with him instantly. Chapter III is set in 1959 when Julian and Cyril meet again at school and share a room. By 1966 in Chapter IV Cyril has finished school and is working at the Department of Education in the Daíl Eireann building where his unrecognized birth mother works. Meanwhile Julian is travelling through Europe with one of his many girlfriends while the unwilling Cyril becomes a reluctant but celibate boyfriend to one of his co-workers Mary-Margaret Muffet. (Boyne does have fun with his names). By 1973 in Chapter V we find Cyril engaged to Julian’s sister Alice, who had previously been jilted at the altar, and on his wedding day he finally admits to Julian his attraction to him. Julian is furious; the wedding goes ahead, but Cyril flees.

Part II ‘Exile’ opens in 1980 in Amsterdam, where Cyril fled after the wedding fiasco. He has found love with Bastiaan, a trainee doctor and he is working at the Ann Frank House. They socialize at MacIntyre’s pub, owned by Jack Smoot who, unknown to Cyril, had shared lodgings with Cyril’s mother. Together Cyril and Bastiaan take over the care of Ignac, a Slovenian rentboy they find on the street who has been pimped by his father. Again, Cyril needs to flee, ending up with Bastiaan and Ignac in New York in 1987 where Bastiaan is working as a physician dealing with AIDS patients. Here he encounters Julian again, and promises to pass a message back to his erst-while bride and Julian’s sister Alice. Before this happens, tragedy strikes.

In Part III by 1994 Cyril has returned to Ireland alone.Ignac has become a very popular children’s author and his adoptive father, Cyril, is in jail again for tax avoidance. His adoptive mother Maude has died of lung cancer and, although she would have hated the thought, her works have become highly lauded and she is a towering, if deceased, figure in the Irish literary scheme. He keeps his promise to tell Alice about Julian’s death, and becomes drawn into Alice’s family with her new partner, also called Cyril, and Alice’s son Liam. In 2001 he accompanies Ignac on a book tour to Slovenia and has become even more ensconced within Alice’s new family. By 2008 he is approaching death, having experienced both loss and discovery.

The book reminded me of Douglas Stewart’s Shuggie Bain and John of John but with the sprawling riotousness of a John Irving book (to whom the book is dedicated) mixed with Charles Dickens. I laughed out loud several times and I wondered just how long Boyne could sustain the tension of Cyril’s final admission of his homosexuality, and the discovery of his birth mother. Quite a while, as it turned out, but the missed opportunities only heightened the tension. He captures very well the censoriousness of Irish society, underpinned by the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church.

Having enjoyed the ride so far, I was disappointed in the ending which lapsed into sentimentality and excessive tidiness. My disillusionment with the ending was further heightened by the Author’s Note on The Heart’s Invisible Furies which started as a ‘how I came to write this book’ but descended into a spiteful denunciation of his failed relationships. I should have stopped reading a chapter before the end.

But until then, I really enjoyed a story told chronologically, with a flawed but ultimately likeable narrator. I hadn’t realized that John Boyne was the author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which despite its best-seller status has attracted much criticism. Boyne himself has had his own battles within the culture wars. I’m not going to let that spoil my enjoyment of the book: I could barely put it down, and the disappointment I had with the ending came from the book itself, and not the controversy surrounding its author.

My rating: – how to rate it? If I’d stopped before the last chapter it would have been a 9.5 but given that I didn’t, perhaps 8?

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I think I must have read a very positive review of it somewhere. I have had it on reserve since last year, so an 8 month wait!