This movie was available on the plane on my recent trip, but I wanted to save it for the cinema, when I would have people to talk to about it afterwards. I’m glad I did. When I read the book, I wondered how a novella of such interiority could be depicted on the screen. The answer is simply Cillian Murphy, who is absolutely brilliant. As is Emily Watson, who plays the Mother Superior, with such menace below her icy exterior. The film depicted his anguish more as a breakdown than in the book, but I guess that film, by its nature, encourages visual representation of inner pain rather than internal dialogue, as occurs in a book. The sound was very well done too, although to be honest I could barely understand a word they said and found myself craving subtitles (I think I have been spoiled by subtitles). But in terms of reflecting his inner torment, and the stultifying presence of the Church, the sound was excellent. As with The Quiet Girl, it was a movie that had so many levels, and such poignancy, with an ending left ambiguous and yet satisfying at the same time.
There’s a particular frisson of delight when you’re reading a novel set in your own town. You recognize the streets and you have a mental landscape painting of the setting, even if it is set 160 years earlier. Jane Sullivan, herself now a Melbourne resident after emigrating from England decades ago, takes us to post-Gold Rush Melbourne, and in a way not unlike Kerry Greenwood with her Phrynne Fisher novels, introduces us to a feisty, intelligent amateur detective who is less sidekick and more spur to her co-investigator Magnus Scott, a journalist who styles himself as ‘The Walking Gentleman’.
The novel starts in a bedroom, as a doctor tries to revive a beautiful young actress Marie St Denis from what appears to be, and is later characterized as, an accidental laudanum overdose. Her closest friend, aspiring actress Lola Sanchez, is not satisfied by such a neat explanation, and she enlists the help of journalist Magnus Scott, one of the few people who wrote a sympathetic obituary for Miss Dennis, to investigate. Fired up by the techniques and success of the detectives in the penny-dreadful crime literature she enjoys, Lola undertakes some amateur sleuthing to uncover multiple footprints in Miss Dennis’ room- but to whom do they belong? Lola devises a list of possible suspects, many of whom belong to the highest echelons of Melbourne society, and disguising herself as a young boy, breaks into houses and sneaks around bedrooms looking for clues. In the meantime, Magnus himself is on a rollercoaster of financial events, and it seems that indeed, there are shadowy forces at work, who may or may not be the same men that Lola is suspecting.
I was thinking about 19th and early 20th century crime fiction, and its reliance on plot, coincidence and red herrings, especially compared with the detective stories of the 21st century and their emphasis on the character and motivations of the detective, just as much as of the perpetrator. This book is truly in the former category, complete with cliff-hangers and diversions that at times strain credulity.
For the historian of Melbourne, it is gratifying to see that Sullivan has done her research, and acknowledges the assistance and friendship of writers like Lucy Sussex, whose recent Outrageous Fortunes: The Adventures of Mary Fortune, Crime-writer, and Her Criminal Son George is dealing with a similar time-span and genre. I found myself thinking of Barbara Minchinton’s work on Madame Brussells and The Women of Little Lon, although these both look at a later date. A couple of times I found myself raising a sceptical eyebrow, only to find that Sullivan was right: cold cream in 1868? ( Yes, and before then too), the Menzies Hotel? (Yes, opened in 1867) and so, yes, Sullivan has done her work.
I enjoyed Sullivan’s playful tweaking of real-life characters in creating her own Lola Sanchez and Magnus Scott. The name Lola Sanchez of course evokes the Gold-Rush performer Lola Montez, and Magnus Scott as ‘The Wandering Gentleman’ and editor of the New Bohemian bears more than a passing resemblance to Marcus Clarke. She integrates historical figures as well, most notably the enigmatic Redmond Barry, patriarch of Melbourne’s cultural scene but with his own domestic ambiguities, and Dr Nield, the coroner. She takes us to Redmond Barry’s house in Rathdowne St Carlton that later became integrated into the Royal Childrens Hospital, the Theatre Royal, Chinatown and the eponymous Punch Lane, running between the current-day Exhibition and Spring Streets. And as Sullivan explained in a talk that she gave to the Ivanhoe Reading Circle in April, there was indeed an actress Marie St Denis who died of laudanum poisoning, and the story sprang from historical events, with equally heavy doses of research and imagination.
I wonder if this is the first in a series? There’s scope, and plenty of other Melbourne murders to explore…
The Ezra Klein Show. I’m over in Phnom Penh surrounded with little ones at the moment, and it seemed a particularly apposite time to listen to Ezra Klein’s interview with Jonathan Haidt Our Kids Are the Least Flouishing Generation We Know Of. Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness was on the best seller list for a year. Haidt’s work has been picked up by many on the right, although it really transcends a left/right binary, and it’s interesting that he often references the certainties (for good or bad) promulgated by traditional religions. I don’t know if it’s my age, or my affiliation with Unitarian Universalism, but I find much to agree with here.
The Rest is History Episode 538 Horror in the Congo– 3 parts. I had already read Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost which Tom and Dominic defer to in these episodes, and so I was already familiar with quite a bit of material. However, listening to it at more than 20 years remove, it seems even more relevant today with Trump’s naked shake-down of compromised countries for their rare earths (somehow, everything I read seems to come back to Trump). I had forgotten the degree of privatization and the sheer exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold, and the role of Roger Casement in publicizing the atrocities. The first three episodes deal with the story of the Congo, while Episode 541 Part 4 Fear and Loathing in the Congo looks in detail at Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness which I read over fifty years ago. I remember the feeling of impending doom in it, but I didn’t particularly see it as the masterpiece that Tom and Dominic do. Of course, it was written in 1898, and new literary and historical lenses are trained on it now, with some commentators seeing as racist and imperialistic.
In the Shadows of Utopia. I’m in Cambodia, but Episode 4 of Season Two deals completely with Vietnam. In The Path to the Second Indo-China War Part I The Two Vietnams, Lachlan promises a shorter episode dealing with the years immediately following the Geneva Accords. He starts with the heavily-choreographed photograph of the monk self-immolating in 1963, which most people associate with the Vietnam War, but it was in fact a protest against the actions of the South Vietnamese government before the Vietnam War had even started.
He then moves to examining first North Vietnam, then South Vietnam. Between 1953-1957 the North Vietnamese Government under Ho Chi Minh, following the example of the Soviet and Chinese revolutions, embarked upon a land reform program. This involved cleaning out ‘the reactionary and evil landlords’, but perhaps with not quite the same ruthlessness of Russia and China, with the suggestion that perhaps 1 in 1000 people would need to be executed. Although the numbers of victims may have been lower, it followed the same process: denunciation, land confiscation and redistribution, and later collectivization (which, as in Russia and China the newly landed peasants deeply resented). However, there was so much internal protest that the government admitted its error and abandoned the program and turned its attention instead to the writing of a new constitution which would cement the role of the Communist Government.
In South Vietnam, although under the sponsorship and patronage of the United States, the Diem government undertook a very similar program (albeit less violent). The Geneva Accords were undermined from the start, and the planned elections never took place. The nascent-fascist Diem government was elitist and rife with nepotism. There was a similar land reform program, complete with denunciations and arrests for possible disloyalty, and it too was abandoned when it failed. The formation of the National Liberation Front gave a focus to the armed struggle, and many former South Vietnamese with communist sympathies who had fled north returned to South Vietnam and the civil war resumed.
I visited South Korea with my son and his family, so I thought that I’d embark on a bit of South Korean literature before I went. Other than Pachinko, which is partially set in Korea, I don’t believe that I’ve read any other books set in or about Korea.
I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but My Brilliant Life ended up being a completely different from what I thought it would be. As it turned out, I was reading it in Large Print edition (the only one I could find) which gave it an air of being a rather light, speedy read. It is narrated by sixteen year old Aerum, who is suffering from progeria, a rare inherited disease that causes premature aging. As his body gradually shuts down, he decides to write his family story, drawn together from what his parents have told him about their lives in a rural village, their meeting and early marriage and his childhood. He is a lonely child: he cannot attend school, and has no friends of his own age – for what indeed is his age in a body that is accelerating towards a premature death? The family is not rich, and the hospital bills are mounting up, and so he decides to make a paid appearance on a television show, which alleviates the financial pressure and launches him into a rather voyeuristic celebrity. Following the program, he receives many emails, and he begins corresponding with Seoha, who is suffering from cancer, and in the absence of other age-appropriate relationships, he becomes infatuated with her.
I will not divulge the end of the story. It is sad and inevitable. It’s a book about life, love and presence.
Although this is book was in Large Print format, it could possibly be an interesting Young Adult book- after all, there’s no shortage of books about teenagers dying of incurable diseases. I don’t know that I learned much about South Korea from it, but I did learn about progeria.
We’ve been on holidays for the last two weeks of March, and so most of my listening has been in the car, with another passenger. I mainly indulged my love of current affairs with the UK and US variations of The Rest is Politics, but I did manage to get a couple of other podcasts in.
One was the ABC’s six-part series Conspiracy?: War on the Waterfront which deals with the waterfront dispute between Patrick Stevedores and the Maritime Union of Australia in 1998. I’ve mainly been left with the image of men in balaclavas and attack dogs, and I’d forgotten about the role of the National Farmers Federation and Dubai. It’s quite chilling hearing the familiar voices of John Howard and Peter Reith matter-of-factly telling lies. Interestingly, all sides claim to be winners, except the contract workers brought in to break the strike, even the unions and the waterside workers who, to me, seem to have lost more than they gained.
While we’re on the ABC, it’s worth listening to David Marr’s thoughtful interview with Associate Professor David Slucki from the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University who was part of the working committee that developed the Universities Australia definition of anti-semitism. Yes, there I was shouting to myself as I listened to the podcast, frustrated by Slucki’s inability to define certain activities and attitudes as antisemitic or not, when students’ lives and careers are being held hostage to such judgements.
I was in Tasmania during this period, so it seemed fitting to listen to an episode Convict Mutineers Part 1 from Australian Histories Podcast hosted by the rather giggly non-historian Jenny which is rather a little too Convicts, Gold and Bushrangers for my liking. Nonetheless, she has an interesting episode on William Swallow, a man with a string of aliases who managed to escape imprisonment in Hobart Town to return to England, only to be arrested again and returned to Port Arthur where he plotted yet another escape. It’s part of a two-part series Convict Mutineers, and the second part continues with Swallow’s story.
Just recently I listened to an interview by the New York Times with Curtis Yarvin, who has been name-checked by a lot of Trump’s acolytes. He talks quickly and rather disjointedly, and is fond of throwing out historical references to defend his views and give them the sheen of academe. People are quick to bring out the old saw “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” and there’s a danger of cherry-picking when computer engineers (in Yarvin’s case) and social philosophers (in Krznaric’s case) look back to history to bolster a present day argument. But that is unfair to Krznaric: unlike Yarvin, he admits that he is not a historian, and he acknowledges that he is very much standing on their shoulders while surveying present-day society. His book has footnotes, references and an index, and he includes in his footnotes references that make a different argument to the one that he is making. And unlike Yarvin, this is a quiet, considered, optimistic (too optimistic, I fear) book that piques your interest rather than bludgeoning you into silence with names and dates that you have no way of challenging.
Krznaric acknowledges the dangers of cherry-picking but argues that:
All writing of history is selective- requiring choices about topics, time periods, relevant actors, the importance of race and gender, the role of culture and technology, the use of quantitative data and other methodological issues. What matters is being clear about the approach. From the myriad of historical contexts, I have consciously selected events and stories that offer inspiration for tackling the ten major crises facing humanity in the twenty-first century, and actively focus on the collective struggles and initiatives of everyday people, since this is the realm in which we have the greatest potential agency. (p.7)
So what are these ten major crises, and what historical events does he use to discuss them? His opening chapter ‘Breaking the Fossil Fuel Addiction’ draws parallels between the vested interests supporting the continuation of slavery in Britain in the early 19th century, and the fossil fuel interests that are undercutting action on climate change. I’ve though about this connection previously, and the distasteful thought that, as with slavery, it may be necessary to ‘buy out’ fossil fuel interests, in the same way that the compensation for slavery went not to the enslaved, but to their enslavers. As well as emphasizing the importance of creating coalitions across party lines and the potency of the ‘radical flank’ to make the comparatively moderate thinkable, he also notes the place of violence. The Captain Swing civil disobedience led to the 1832 Reform Act, which diluted the power of the slavers and their lobbyists in British Parliament; while the Caribbean slave revolts made continued enslavement unattainable. I think that this chapter was the strongest in the book, and it stands alone well.
Question Two involves the nurturing of tolerance. He starts off with his own family story, with his father arriving in Melbourne from Poland in 1951 as part of Australia’s post-war migration, a story which seems from the distance of 70 years to have been successful but which may not have felt so rose-tinted at the time. He looks back to the Islamic kingdom of Al-Andalus, where Muslims, Jews and Christians co-existed, although the backlash of the Reconquista is a salutary warning, I think. He looks to the early years of Chinese immigration when, as Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds note, Australia led the world in ‘drawing the global colour line’ at the turn of the 20th century (a reference that he should have referenced, but did not). He also looks at Ghana and the post-independence leader Kwame Nkrumah, who came to power in 1957 and embarked on a series of policies and programs to create a unifying Ghanaian national identity. He talks about the importance of city design in nurturing tolerance, looking at Singapore’s public housing which even today has a quota system where each estate must reflect the national percentage of Singapore’s main racial groups.
The third question is that of over-consumption in ‘Kicking the Consumer Habit’ where he turns to the Edo period of Japan between 1603 and 1868, which ran on a circular economy where almost everything was reused, repaired, repurposes or eventually recycled. Rationing during WWII prompted similar behaviour.
Chapter 4 ‘Taming Social Media’ looks back to the printing revolution and the rise of the coffee house culture in Georgian times as examples of disruptive technologies that drove political change. He notes that the development of print formed the ‘typographic brain’ that is linear, sequential and rationalist; and suggests that the digital age could prompt changes in the way we connect ideas and organize information.
Chapter 5 ‘Securing Water for All’ is subtitled ‘Water Wars and the Genius of the Commons’, and it’s an important chapter, warning in its opening sentence that “we are a civilisation heading towards aquacide”. He looks back to China’s Qing dynasty in the mid-18th century where Chen Hongmou, a government official, managed the building of irrigation and drainage systems. He championed the construction of water wheels and ensured regular repair work on ditches, dams and wells (p. 109). But his work could not survive the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, and the El Nino of 1876-8. He looks to Valencia’s Tribunal of Waters, which meets every Wednesday outside the Cathedral to resolve water conflicts as it has since the fifteenth century. However, water can be used as a tool of war, like the Cochabamba Water War in Bolivia in 2000 which led to civil unrest when the water services were privatized in 1999 under pressure from the World Bank and the IMF. Israel has long used water as a tool against Palestinians in the territories that they occupy, but he looks to initiatives like the Good Water Neighbours Program in the Lower Jordan Valley as cause for hope (although I wonder how it’s holding up now) and the International Commission for the Protections of the Danube River. However, seeing the debacle that our own Murray River scheme in Australia has become, I am not hopeful.
Chapter 6 ‘Reviving Faith in Democracy’ involves rediscovering the communal democracy of the past, and he goes way back to Djenné in West Africa between 250 BCE and 1400 CE, a complex trading centre which at its height was home to 40,000 people. He points out that the modern ideal of representative government was designed to prevent democratic politics, not enable it. He goes back to Athenian democracy and the Rhaetian Free State which emerged between 1524 and 1799 in what is now Switzerland, and even Kurdish confederations and the Rojava Revolution in Syria- although I’m not sure what the status is since the fall of Al-Assad. I see that their jailed revolutionary leader Abdullah Ocalan has declared a ceasefire of the PKK against Turkey- one of the problems with writing a topical book!
‘Managing the Genetic Revolution’ looks back to medieval alchemy, in essence returned as genetic engineering. He sees the genetic revolution as one of the rare turning points in history that fundamentally changes the trajectory of the human journey (p. 153). He turns to the past for warnings, looking first at the Eugenics movement and the Better Babies Contest, and Nazi Germany’s adoption of eugenics as the basis for its race-based state in Germany. Rather more hopefully, he looks at the March of Dimes and the crusade against polio where medical innovation was directed towards the common good. He warns of the ‘enclosure movement’ related to biodata, and the Wild West commercialization of the US biotech sector.
‘Bridging the Inequality Gap’ starts with the Black Death, which brought about such huge economic changes. But as he notes, the idea that substantive reductions in wealth inequality can only be brought about by warfare, state failure and pandemics is depressing and disempowering, because it suggests that all well-intentioned peaceful attempts to tackle inequality are unlikely to change the status quo. He looks to the Indian state of Kerala which was a global pioneer of mass education in the 19th century, with women at the forefront. Its government has alternated between a Communist Party and a Congress Party generally supportive of social democracy. In the Global North, the spotlight usually falls on Scandinavia, and especially Finland, which has also been at the forefront of women’s education and egalitarianism.
Chapter 9 ‘Keeping the Machines Under Control’ looks at the rise of capitalism and the extraordinary capabilities of AI- two phenomena that have deep connections. He looks to financial capitalism with the Dutch East India Company, Scottish financier John Law and his schemes under King Louis XIV of France. He argues that both financial capitalism and AI develop into a vast, complex supersystem, with the risk of contagion where any problem in one area spills over into other areas, especially with fake information, mass technological unemployment, and the potential for military use. The final similarity is that both are non-sentient human creations. He looks to the early distributed ownership models like the co-operative movement and mutual aid societies, although he admits the difficulty of breaking the ownership model of the AI industry- even worse since Trump came to power.
His final chapter ‘Averting Civilizational Breakdown’ ( a rather gloomy title) tells us that we face the Great Simplification, where too many ecological limits have been breached. Will society bend or break? He admits that we are currently facing the break scenario. He reminds us that
No civilization lasts forever: empires and dynasties are born, they flower and then die, sometimes abruptly but usually over decades or centuries. (p. 223)
He suggests that there are three broad features that are likely to give a civilization the ability to adopt and transform over time. The first is asabiya, or the power of collective solidarity, which was described in 1375 by an Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun. We see this in the wake of natural disasters (when every country proclaims that the united action of its citizens reflects that specific nationality and its ‘spirit’). It thrives on competition between states, but the problem is that the ecological emergency does not have an external enemy that we can act in solidarity against. The second is biophilia where we develop a sense of ecological stewardship for the whole web of life (or as the 7th principle of Unitarian Universalism puts it “respect for the interdependent web of all existence”). He looks back to the mass planting that took place after the publication of John Evelyn’s book Sylva in 1664 and the vestiges of pagan traditions of nature worship, as well as indigenous worldviews of intimacy and independence between humankind, the land and the living world (p. 230). The third feature is crisis response, when we think historically about the meaning of ‘crisis’ itself, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s popularization of the idea of a ‘tipping point’. He looks to radical change undertaken during war (e.g. WW2 industralization), in the wake of disasters (the Dutch government response to the floods in 1953), and in the context of revolution (Chinese land reform- not a good example; the Cuban National Literacy Campaign).
Krznaric makes no secret of his politics or his priorities. He has been personally involved in Extinction Rebellion, which he characterizes as the ‘radical flank’ of the environmental movement, and he himself was involved in citizens’ assemblies on Biodiversity Loss, even though he ended up being rather disenchanted with them. He calls for ‘radical hope’ because
Disruptive movements can change the system (e.g. slavery, the women’s movement)
‘We’ can prevail over ‘me’ (e.g. Valencia’s Tribunal of Waters, al-Andalus, soup kitchens in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake)
There are alternatives to capitalism (e.g. Edo Japan, the ‘entrepreneurial state’)
Humans are social innovators
Other futures are possible (classical Athens, the West African city of Djenné-Djeno, and the Raetian Free State in Switzerland.
At a personal level, history can do much more than help us realise that there is hope for transformative change: it can also spur us to become one of the changemakers ourselves. Whether in our communities, or workplaces, or anywhere else where we may want to make a difference, we can look to the past as an array of possibilities. From joining a protest movement or setting up a cooperative enterprise to taking part in a citizens’ assembly, history reminds us that we are part of the great traditions of active citizenship that stretch back into the past. (p. 253)
I wish that I shared his ‘radical hope’. While I acknowledge that the past does give examples of alternatives, using them as templates is fraught with contradictions and impossibilities. They can only be shards of hope, and the fact that so many of his examples are drawn from societies than no longer exist is not encouraging. As he admits, no civilization lasts forever, and I’m very much aware that our epoch of industrialization, democracy, and post WW2 peace is just a fleeting smudge on the timeline of human existence. I’m reading this in early March 2025, when the world is becoming a darker place, and at the moment those forces of untrammeled power wielded by strongmen, tech bros and lobbyists seem too strong for ‘radical hope’.
My rating: 8/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
A personal aside: Krznaric grew up in Sydney and Hong Kong, and he’s a player of real tennis. My brother’s family is very involved in real tennis too. I wonder how the real tennis fraternity deal with this colonial’s radical views?
History HitWhy Isn’t Canada the 51st State? Trump thinks it should be, and in this episode Dan Snow goes through the various attempts that have been made in the past to achieve this end. When the 13 colonies rebelled, they hoped that the French colonists in North America would join them and rise up against the British. But the Catholic French were not keen to align themselves with these land-hungry Puritans and so they stuck with the devil they knew. In 1775 the first US military action was an attempt to annex Canada, and in 1812 with Britain at a low ebb after the Napoleonic Wars, they tried again. The 1812 War ended with the boundaries remaining much as they were when the war started. In 1844 President Polk, the successor and protege to Trump’s hero Andrew Jackson, wanted to take all the west coast up to Alaska as part of America’s ‘manifest destiny’. During the Civil War, the British in Canada were friendly towards the Confederates and after the Civil War Charles Sumner demanded the whole of Canada in reparations payments. Instead, the US settled for 15 million pounds and an apology. In 1911 Canadians wanted lower tariffs but big business wanted Protection, and when the Conservatives won, they wanted higher tariffs against US goods. In 1948 Newfoundland had a referendum about self government or integration with Canada, but joining the USA was not one of the options. So, although Trump’s rhetoric about making Canada the 51st state is not new, he is drawing on older sentiments like small government, tariffs and manifest destiny. I hope that Canada stands strong.
The Rest Is HistoryEpisode 230 Portugal: Football, Fado and Fascism? (Part 4) By the 1820s, Portugal had lost Brazil, and although it still had a few enclaves throughout the world, it called itself a ‘pluri-continental nation’ rather than an empire. There was a sense of stagnation and nostalgia, exemplified by saudade , a sense of longing for something that will never come again, and expressed through Fado music. There was a Republic in Portugal during WWI, but it was a disaster. Portugal supported Britain and France during WWI but it was a time of tension between the Liberals and devout Catholics. It was the time of Our Lady of Fatima, who prophesied the Russian Revolution (and gave 2 other prophesies as well, which are in the keeping of the Vatican). In 1926 after years of chaos under the Republic, there was an army coup and they called on Salazar, a professor of economics to fix their problems. A deeply conservative man who disliked modernity, he only lasted 5 days, so to keep him, the army generals kept giving him more power. By 1932 he was Prime Minister, but interestingly, never President. He did sort out the economy, and was seen as an important and useful tool by the army, landowners, the church and the conservative forces in Portuguese society. Although he copied much of the iconography of Fascism, he doesn’t fit neatly into the category of Fascist. He always served at the pleasure of the President, and although he had secret police and political prisoners, only about 50-100 prisoners died as the result of torture or assassination- bad enough, but nothing compared with the other Fascist leaders of the time. He hated both Franco and the Communists, and was benign towards the Nazis and flew the flag at half-mast when Hitler died. However, Britain was more important as a long-time ally, and so Portugal remained neutral during WWII, although its diplomats did provide visas for Jews to escape Hitler. He was a founding member of NATO as part of his anti-Communist stance, and he knew the importance of popular events and so championed football (soccer) with Portugal winning several World Cups. But he was becoming increasingly politically isolated, eventually having links only with South Africa and Rhodesia at a time when no-one else was talking to them. In 1968 he suffered a stroke from which he was not expected to recover, and so the President dismissed him and appointed another academic technocrats. But no-one told Salazar, who believed that he was still Prime Minister. He is an unsettling, ambiguous figure: not a clear ‘baddie’ but backward looking and deeply conservative in a world that had changed.
For the first time in over 20 years, I didn’t finish the book for my CAE bookgroup. Partly, it was because I forgot that we had changed the day of our meeting, bringing it forward. But also it was because at 367 small-print pages this is a far longer, denser book than I anticipated.
The story is narrated by an elderly professor, Leo Hertzberg about his life in New York between about 1975 and 2000. It is prompted by the discovery of five letters written to his neighbour and friend, the artist Bill Wechsler by Violet, the woman who was to become Bill’s second wife. They were to become neighbours, with Bill and his first, then second, wife living upstairs with their son Mark, and Leo and his wife Erica living on the floor below with their son Matt, who was of a similar age. Marriages disintegrate under the pressure of infidelity and tragedy. Leo finds himself acting as an indulgent-uncle type figure to his friend Bill’s son Mark, who proves himself unworthy of the love and indulgence extended to him as he disappears into the rave culture of New York and comes under the influence of the menacing artist Teddy Giles.
Leo is an art historian (one of the wankiest genres around, I reckon) and Bill is an artist and so there are long- far too long- descriptions of Bill’s contemporary artwork. Violet researches hysteria, anorexia and representations of the body and identity, and this is described at length too. Indeed, there is much in this book about representation and reality, and it all became rather precious and over-intellectualized.
The book starts off fairly slowly as a domestic narrative within a New York setting, but becomes far more urgent and fast-paced- dare I say, a thriller?- in the second half of the book. It really feels like a book of two halves. Leo is a gracious, self-deprecating first-person narrator, and so it felt comfortable to be in his company. The second half of the book was compelling enough that I continued to read it, even though our book group meeting came and went, but I found the descriptions of art and the self-conscious intellectualizing of the book rather tedious.
My rating: 6.5/10
Sourced from: A left-over book from the former Council of Adult Education
Read because: it was The Ladies Who Say Oooh (ex CAE) bookgroup selection.
Thoughtcast I was preparing for my talk at the Melbourne Unitarian Universalist Fellowship about the Peabody Sisters, three 19th century Unitarian women living in Boston and Salem who mixed in Transcendentalist circles, but are mainly known as the wives of important men, rather than significant figures in their own right who were at the founding (and even prefigured) Transcendentalism. This interview conducted by Jenny Attiyeh is with Megan Marshall, the author of The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, and it gives a good flavour of the book.
The Human Subject. This rather gory podcast looks at The Prisoners Used for their Skin at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg prison (AKA ‘the Terrordome’) during the 1960s. Dermatologists at the University of Pennsylvania, led by Dr Albert Kligman, instituted a program where they would pay prisoners, the vast majority of whom were black and on remand, $1.00- $1.50 per day to subject themselves to experimentation. The prisoners were told that they were testing bubble-bath, but many of the experiments were funded by Dow Chemicals, but without their oversight. Kligman tested the effects of dioxin at concentrations 480 times the level recommended by Dow, and also experimented with depigmentation of black skin.
The Rest is HistoryEpisode 229 Portugal: Gold, Earthquakes and Brazil (Part 3) starts with the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which destroyed 85% of the city and killed perhaps 50,000 people. Because Portugal was now under the Spanish crown, they were at war with the Dutch, and the Portuguese felt that the Spanish weren’t pulling their weight. Because of slavery in Brazil, huge wealth was pouring into Portugal. During the Napoleonic Wars, the British (with whom Portugal had always had a good relationship) gave escort to the Royal Family to Brazil, in exchange for opening Portuguese ports to British trade. (Huh. They were doing ‘deals’ back then too.) Wellington invaded Spain successfully, but withdrew in order to secure Lisbon. With the Royal Family ensconced in Brazil, it was becoming the metropole for Portugal- a strange turn of events. In 1821 the King returned to Portugal and was forced to sign the Constitution, and Brazil achieved independence.
Near the end of her book, Helen Garner writes: “I longed to write a lament for Joe Cinque” (p.281).
And she has done so, because as she tells us many times, to keep front of mind, “Joe Cinque is dead”.
This is the third time that I have read Joe Cinque’s Consolation, and each time I see it somewhat differently.
It was published in 2004, when the term “intimate partner violence” wasn’t as common as it is today. When I read it earlier, I think that I saw it more as a deliberate murder, rather than as a manifestation of domestic or intimate partner violence. But I find myself wondering whether “intimate partner violence” which disproportionately involves a female victim, is the right description. Even though Joe Cinque and Anu Singh were intimate partners, the murder doesn’t appear to have been committed within an environment of violence or intimidation. Somehow “intimate partner violence” doesn’t do justice to the self-centredness and premeditation of Joe’s murder. Nonetheless, it something that is more visible in 2025 than it was in 2004.
When you return to a book after 20 years, you are a different reader too. I now read this book as the mother of adult children who themselves have young children. When on the news I see the stricken family of the murder victim outside the court, it seems to me to be the ultimate betrayal, and a crime that I don’t think I could forgive. How dare that person take the life of my child, and all the future that was ahead? As Garner keeps reminding us, Anu Singh and Madhavi Rao’s lives went on; they woke each morning to another day; but Joe Cinque was dead. The knowledge that Singh went on to write a PhD thesis on “Offending Women: Toward a Greater Understanding of Women’s Pathways Into and Out of Crime in Australia” is even more galling. Apparently she doesn’t write about her own case in her thesis, but it’s still all about her.
Garner’s response to Anu Singh is hostile from the start, drawing largely on the visceral dislike of some other women that develops from girlhood. There is, too, a generational aspect to it as well: an impatience with the self-centredness of ‘young people these days’. There’s an irony that it’s Helen Garner who is writing this; the same Helen Garner who wrote of her junkie friend Javo in Monkey Grip; the same Helen Garner who inhabited the world of university share-houses and parties. The Canberra Garner depicts is a meaner, edgier drug world than the inner-Melbourne 1960s drug haze of her novel, and she herself is aware that she is not the same person. Her third marriage had just broken up in 1999 when she first learned of the case, and she was living in Sydney. There is a strong element of the more mature woman here, although she finds her certainties about justice, memory and truth being shaken as she follows the case. She measures both Singh and Rao against what she thinks she would have done in the same circumstances, but finds herself unable to identify with Singh. Alongside her quickly-established empathy for and with Joe Cinque’s mother, in particular, she draws on her own moral, as distinct from legal, compass. Like Maria Cinque, Garner can scarcely believe that Singh receives an effective sentence of only four years.
I had forgotten about the Madhavi Rao case that followed Anu’s sentencing for manslaughter. She does not have the same knee-jerk reaction to her as she did to Singh- indeed, she sees her as largely invisible and pliable- but because Rao seems to be more comprehensible, that same moral compass makes Rao seem culpable because Garner can envisage what she would have done had she seen Joe Cinque lying, blue and breathing shallowly, on the bed. Yet, given that Singh has evaded the verdict of ‘murder’ (being found guilty of manslaughter instead), surely the two women’s actions are not comparable. Justice clearly cannot lie in the degree to which you can identify with the accused, and yet at gut-level Garner baulks at the clinically logical approach undertaken by Rao’s defence lawyer, Lex Lasry, that sees her acquitted of any charges.
In spite of this being my third reading of Joe Cinque’s Consolation, I found myself instantly drawn into conversation with Helen Garner. I can even see her in my mind’s eye, head cocked to one side, like a small sparrow, simultaneously morally certain and yet scrabbling to find her feet in a quicksand of competing arguments, judgements and ‘shoulds’. I want to sit beside her, to talk with her. I do find myself wondering about the title though. Consolation? Certainly, a lament for Joe Cinque; a tribute to Joe Cinque; or her own consolation for Maria Cinque? Joe Cinque is dead: he can not console, or be consoled by, anyone.
My rating: 9/10
Read because: CAE bookgroup – although it’s not CAE anymore and this is one of the ‘left-over’ CAE books.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 