Monthly Archives: December 2009

Everybody else is doing it, so here are my eleven top reads for 2009. Why eleven? Because I had three 10/10s, one 9.5/10 and the rest were 9/10 and it seemed churlish to omit one just to get to ten.  I notice that I haven’t read as much this year as in previous years- 53 compared to over 100 in other years.  I shall attribute this to actually doing some writing on my thesis (as distinct from reading away merrily in the meadows of literature) and an improvement in health in the second half of the year.  Both thoroughly good things.

So here they are, folks with links to the posts if I’ve written them:

1. Nam Le  The Boat 10/10

2. Leo Tolstoy War and Peace 10/10

3. Richard Holmes The Age of Wonder 10/10

4. Grace Karskens The Colony 9.5/10

5. Peter Godwin When a Crocodile Eats the Sun 9/10

6. Richard Flanagan Wanting 9/10

7. Kate Atkinson Case Histories 9/10

8. Louis Nowra Ice 9/10

9. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby 9/10

10. E. P. Thompson Whigs and Hunters 9/10

11. Wendy Moore Wedlock 9/10

Not a bad little list, if I say so myself.  A few of the classics there- Tolstoy and Fitzgerald; three recent Australian fictions – Le, Flanagan and Nowra; and a historian/biographer or two- Thompson, Holmes, Karskens.

2009, 345 p.

‘Document Z’ opens with an image instantly recognizable to Australians-of-a-certain age, even if we were not born at the time.  It’s the image of Evdokia Petrov on the tarmac of Mascot Airport, flanked by a burly man each side of her, clutching her handbag, hand across her chest as if she is heaving, with one shoe lost.  For those of us brought up in the black-and-white certainties of Menzies’ world, it captures the fear of the Communist enemy: that they’ll come and get you and hustle you onto an aeroplane.

But whatever misconceptions we attach to the picture, it is not the full story.  She was not so much frightened of the men, as frightened of the crowd surrounding the plane, and she was a woman torn just as much by conflicting emotions as the physical presence of the people surrounding her.  What a dreadful situation to be in. Her husband and fellow-spy had defected and was no doubt talking to the Australian agents about her;  she was frightened for her family back in Russia, and she was wary of official censure when she returned irrespective of her husband’s actions.

The title ‘Document Z’ plays on Documents H and J that were tendered to the Royal Commission that followed the Petrov defection.  I wonder if it is, as the title rather cheekily suggests, the last word- certainly since Robert Manne’s book The Petrov Affair, the debate seems to be over.

The book is a fictionally reimagined telling of the Petrov defection from the perspectives of the participants- Evdokia, her husband Vladimir,  Michael Bialaguski the doctor go-between and the various agents on both sides.  Croome has obviously done his homework (occasionally a little too obviously) and I marvel at his courage in describing a time long before he was born that is still within living memory today- lots of scope for slips and false notes there.  He captures well the sterility of 1950s Canberra with the claustrophobic and enmeshed atmosphere of the Soviet Embassy enclave.

I’m not sure if it’s a failing of the book, or the nature of the relationship he is describing, but there is a flatness to the relationship between the Petrovs themselves.  They worked alongside each other, and they shared the same career trajectory for better and for worse but there’s an emptiness at the core of their marriage as Croome depicts it.  And again we run up against the dilemma with writing within a historical event, but I feel that Croome has shaken free of those restraints.  I was puzzled that he didn’t use ‘that’ picture on his front cover (cost? copyright?) but it liberates him from having to stick only to the historical sources.  If the relationship is sterile perhaps he meant it to be, or perhaps he could not, for whatever reason,  make it otherwise.

I enjoyed this book, and this is from someone who loathes spy-novels.  I liked the atmosphere- the juxtaposition between the bright light outside and the whispers and fears inside.

2009, 310p + notes

The author of this book is a journalist, not an historian, but she’s certainly done her homework.  It is the story of Mary Eleanor Bowes-Lyon, daughter of the Earl of Strathmore, and her violent marriage to Andrew Robinson Stoney.  Stoney was the inspiration for Thackeray’s book The Luck of Barry Lyndon, which was turned into film by Stanley Kubrick.  ( I strongly encourage you to follow these Wikipedia links- it will give you a much better idea of the plot than I could).

But Barry Lyndon the book was fiction: this was true life, even if it reads like fiction today.  There’s everything here: scandal, kidnapping and duping of heiresses, midnight horseback rides through the Pennines, coffee shop pamphlets, court cases etc.  Wendy Moore does this rich material proud, starting her story with a mysterious duel in a public house, and introducing each of the main characters one by one before turning around to deconstruct the duel completely and expose it as a completely faked scenario, intended to lure the wealthy heiress Mary into an ill-advised marriage.  Andrew Robinson Stoney, who changed his name to Bowes in order to access Mary Eleanor’s fortune, was almost unbelievably cruel, vindictive and scheming and a thorough rotter.

Moore is firmly on Mary’s side and portrays her as the victim both  of domestic violence and a legal system that strongly favoured rich men.  But the sources that Moore draws on are deeply problematic and themselves part of an ongoing propanda war, played out in the full glare of publicity.   She relies heavily on Jesse Foot, the author of The lives of Andrew Robinson Bowes Esq and the Countess of Strathmore who was himself deeply implicated in Stoney’s schemes, and seems to have changed his allegiences several times.  Mary’s “confession”, which was also published, was apparently forced from her at the point of a gun but was also published. In fact, the whole scenario brought domestic violence amongst the aristocracy out into the public domain, and it played out through, and itself fed,  the appetite for gossip and innuendo. Mary, however, was no innocent and could play the game of gossip and publicity just as well as her husband could: while not cruel or violent, she was just as cavalier with her emotions and children as her husband was.

The story is carefully and well told.  After its particularly well-constructed beginning, it is a fairly straight chronological account and, to its credit, the story is so well told that you rarely lose track.  A family tree would have been useful, but no doubt it would have ended up looking like a family thicket!  The author wanders off into some interesting little byways- e.g. contraception in the late 1700s; the coffee-shop culture etc., but I do wish that she’d picked up more on the nature of her sources, the 18th century public sphere and the expectations of the aristocracy.   I think that she could have upped the analysis, but then perhaps it would alienated its bodice-ripper audience. As it stands, it’s a rattling good read, with the edginess of knowing that it was based on a real marriage among real people.