Category Archives: Book Reviews 2025

‘The Dust Never Settles’ by Karina Lickorish Quinn

Posted on January 4, 2026 | 1 comment

2021, 352 p.

I don’t very often read a book just on the basis of a blurb alone, but in this case I did. Paul Lynch, the author of Prophet Song spoke highly of Quinn’s book in author interviews and his blurb describing it as ‘a mesmerising feat of imagination and a masterful debut’ graces the back cover. It’s a beautiful front cover, and the yellow butterflies evoke Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to whom this book owes quite a debt.

Anaïs Echeverría Gest has returned to her childhood home in Peru after an absence of several years in England. The family is expecting her to sign the papers authorizing the sale and inevitable demolition of her grandmother’s house, la Casa Echeverría in order to free up the inheritance. The house, which is a character in its own right, is a large yellow colonial mansion and garden overlooking the shacks and slums built by squatters on the dry plain behind the house called Los Polvos de Nadie y Nunca (the dusts of no-one and nothing) during the Agrarian Reforms of the 1960s. As soon as she steps over the threshold, she is assailed by the memories of the house- not just her life in that house, but the memories of the house itself- and the ghosts of family members and employees who had lived and worked there. Time seems to stretch and contract in the house; one minute the rooms are intact and the furniture dusted and lights illuminated, and the next minute the house is derelict and dark.

Anaïs has left her fiance Rupert Napier, a thoroughly English gentleman, in order to come home to Peru. She is curiously detached from Rupert, telling herself that she loves him but never really feeling it, and she is likewise ambivalent about her pregnancy. The future baby exists as a little pink fish in the corner of her vision, and as her pregnancy progresses the little fish changes shape until it is a huge, snapping lobster. When Rupert comes over to Peru, probably at the request of the extended family who are frustrated by Anaïs’ refusal to sign the papers, he brings with him all the Englishness of his family, an Englishness that Anaïs resented in her own English father’s refusal to acknowledge his second family in Peru, choosing instead to stay with his wife in England.

The house, built at the turn of the century, has seen multiple deaths, that are only just hinted at: a baby whose cries still echo through the house, the suicide of her Aunt Paloma and most importantly, the death of a 17 year old maid, Julia Álvarez Yupanqui who died when she fell (jumped?) from a window. As Julia falls from the window, the Earth falls away from her and is like a sheet of cloth; she sees Time “spread like an ocean, flowing this way and that, tossing up moments, driving them forwards on the crest of a wave then swallowing them again, pulling them back into the deep“. (p. 96) A disembodied presence, Julia wanders unseen through generations of the Echeverría family, right back to the Conquistadors and through centuries of dispossession, enslavement, poverty and violence. The people of Los Polvos, who saw her fall, believe that she has become a saint- and indeed, it seems that she has, as she walks unseen through history dispensing kindnesses as she passes.

It was not only the Polvorinos who saw her fall: Anaïs did too, crouched under a geranium bush. She becomes electively mute, and is seen by a succession of psychiatrists and doctors who try to make her talk. Anaïs could see the ghosts in the house and the adult Anaïs has a tenuous grasp on reality, and you are never really sure whether she is going mad.

So the story shifts back and forth between two realities: that English reality (denoted by chapters with English numerals) and the Peruvian reality in chapters with Spanish numbers. The Spanish chapters follow the disembodied Julia Álvarez Yupanqui and take us on a meandering journey through Peruvian history. There is an exhaustive list of characters in the appendix of the book, divided into the Echeverría family and a longer list of historical and imagined characters who feature in small, passing vignettes as Julia crosses the earth. These vignettes are beautifully written and draw you in just enough to feel disappointed as Julia passes by, leaving that narrative thread hanging loose. Reflecting the tragedy and complexity (and complicity) of various generations of the Echeverría family, there is a convoluted family tree that challenges the one found in One Hundred Years of Solitude with its seventeen Aureliano Buendías.

The complexity of this book is both its great strength, and its greatest weakness, particularly as the book goes on. The last quarter of the book is Julia’s journey through history, and Anaïs’ story drops away. I found myself having to consult the list of characters at the back of the book, having ‘met’ these characters earlier in the book but having forgotten them in the cavalcade of ghosts passing by. I enjoyed the frequent use of Spanish, which she paraphrases in the following sentences, but I don’t know if I would have felt that way had I not been able to read Spanish.

Because this book is just as much about time, land and colonialism as it is about individual people, it reminded me of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, which was similarly shape-shifting and which caused you to think “am I even understanding this?” In fact, I often said that out loud while I picked it up each night, enjoying the experience of reading it, but unable to hold it all in my head.

I like magical realism, but many people do not. This is a really ambitious, fearless book, and I suspect it is more memorable for its overall shape than for its details. It is flawed, but it’s very good.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: I loved Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song and I thought- if he loves this book, perhaps I will too. I did.

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‘The Season’ by Helen Garner

Posted on December 30, 2025 | Leave a comment
2024, 208 p.

This book should have ticked all my boxes: set in Melbourne, written by a much-loved Australian author, written with a nanna’s-eye (and I do embrace my nanna-dom). But it sounded as if it would be a bit slight, and I probably wouldn’t have read it had it not been an Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection, read and discussed amongst all the other nannas.

Even Garner herself sounded a bit ambivalent about the whole project, admitting that she wrote the book because she needed something to do, but didn’t have the energy to embark on one of her investigative non-fiction books. It traces the footy season of her grandson Amby’s under-16s footy team, at the J. J. Holland reserve in Kensington. As she always does, Garner conveys a strong sense of suburban place, and in this case, the football ground she describes so closely fitted with the oval that I walk through to my volunteer job in Kensington that I actually researched the club and found that, indeed, it is the J. J. Holland reserve. She’s there for the team’s matches; she’s there for their training sessions on cold weekday nights, and she’s there for the conversations in the car driving there and back.

Although ostensibly about football, it’s even more about young men growing into masculinity, and at under-16 Amby is at that liminal stage, with signs of the little boy still visible under the swagger of adolescence. Garner’s daughter lives next door, and she has a strong and enviable relationship with her grandchildren, especially Amby. At the same time, she is aging and feeling irrelevant and frustrated by her increasing deafness. In places she veers into idealization of these young men, seeing them as warriors, and even admitting to a slightly ‘off’ recognition of their adolescent sexuality (Garner has always been, and remains, perhaps more honest than she should be).

It is the football season that gives this book its beginning and ending, and the book was more a reflection than a plot-driven story. I had feared that it would be slight, and unfortunately it was.

My rating: 6.5/10

Sourced from: purchased e-book

Read because: October 2025 selection for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle.

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‘The Shortest History of the United States’ by Don Watson

Posted on December 27, 2025 | Leave a comment
2025, 266 p plus notes

I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the ‘Shortest History’ part of the title of this series of books published by Black Inc dealing with world history, many written by Australian authors. Declaring to be the shortest history seems rather definitive and pugnacious, and almost a challenge to later authors to become even shorter. The blurb for the series claims that the books can be read in an afternoon -something that I doubt, in this case – but certainly they are a work of concision and discipline on the part of the author, in being able to confidently assert a fact or event in a single paragraph instead of hedging with qualifications, nuances and debates. Of course, much is elided in such an approach, but there is also a bracing forthrightness about a sweeping history that needs to tie together so many small details into an overarching narrative.

Don Watson comes to the task as a historian in his own right, political speechwriter, and a commentator on current-day American society and political culture. As well as his American Journeys published in 2008 (my review here), he has been a regular contributor to the Black Inc./Schwartz stable on American politics with three Quarterly Essays: No.4 Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America (2001), No 63 Enemy Within: American Politics in the time of Trump (2016) (my review here) and most recently in 2024 with No. 95High Noon: Trump, Harris and America on the Brink, which I reviewed here. With The Shortest History…. he is writing as an outsider, and a long-term, well-informed watcher as well.

His outsider status is most apparent in the opening chapters of the book, where he makes clear that there were competing European powers – England, France, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden- that put ‘boots on the ground’ on what was to become American territory. Drawing the distinction between the 1776 establishment of the United States, and the history of ‘America’ starting in 1492, he goes even further back 20,000 years to the first peoples, and the early introduction of enslavement that followed early European ‘discovery’. In what, perhaps, might be characterized as ‘black armband history’, he continues to turn the spotlight around onto First Nations and Black experience as the narrative of United States history marches forward…always forward.

The book progresses chronologically, but the chapters are thematic. In his introduction Watson notes that:

While the history of the United States is to an uncommon degree a history of ideas, it is equally the story of men and women testing the truth of those ideas against experience: in politics, in churches, on frontiers, in cities, in industries, in battle, in homes, in schools, in Hollywood, in literature and in music. (p. xiv)

Watson places strong emphasis on ideas: on the intertwined Puritan ideas of harsh punishment and discipline set against competing ideals of individualistic self-reliance, which in turn existed alongside traditions of social justice, education, communitarianism and democracy. He notes the influence of Enlightenment philosophers and the scientific revolution in providing an intellectual framework for their grievances and the language to express it through the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and the Federalists papers. He puts his historian hat on to discuss Turner’s Frontier thesis on the ‘freedom’ of the frontier in the popular imagination and he notes the recurrent waves of religious ‘awakenings’ and the struggle between order and chaos-‘ the American id and the American superego’ (p 58). Challenging these were the ‘maniacal appetite for wealth’ whetted by the financial opportunities following the Civil War, and especially during the ‘Gilded Age’ of the 1890s which pushed aside “the restraining influences of conscience and religion, or the egalitarian principles implied in the country’s democratic creed” (p.94) The Civil War, in his telling, had a long advent of compromises on the part of the North, which was well aware of the incompatibility of slavery with the ideals espoused in the republic’s founding documents.

Although we know the political landscape in the United (huh!) States today as being Republican and Democrat, the meaning of both words has changed over time. To be ‘republican’ was to champion the idea of the American republic, and it was not necessarily democratic. The nature of the parties changed over time, with the immigrant influx between 1890 and 1920 shaping the cultural and political evolution of urban America:

The Democratic Party evolved into the party of both the burgeoning multiethnic cities and the reactionary South, while the Republicans remained the voice of white Protestant provincial America. (p. 112)

Looking at the policies of Presidents over time, particularly in the Progressive era, it is not easy to distinguish to which party the president belonged. For example Woodrow Wilson was a southerner from the Democratic Party, and a progressive as well as a segregationalist. Kennedy did not like Martin Luther King, and he had little interest in domestic politics. Nixon was mad, but he was the most liberal republican of the century excluding Teddy Roosevelt (p. 187). Some Presidents receive more attention than others. Probably because of current-day parallels, President Andrew Jackson receives more attention than he might have in a book written 30 years ago. For a former speechwriter for Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating, I was surprised that he was so critical of FDR. It seemed to me that the emphasis on presidential personality and actions received more emphasis in the latter part of the book, within the time of Watson’s own memory, I would guess. Interestingly for a historian, he ascribes ‘luck’ as an important factor that determined a President’s actions and reputation.

This is not just a political history because Watson interweaves popular culture, including music, Hollywood and literature, as well as broader social movements including Communism and anti-Communism, evangelical religion and protest movements. However, the political emphasis does mean that it is a predominantly male history, with political actors Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton receiving more attention than other women in his narrative. As the book moves on, the early emphasis on indigenous and Black history is muted and where it is mentioned it is mainly in political terms. Particularly in the post-WW2 years, he integrates conformity, consumerism and commercialization into the “American Dream”, which was very much restricted to white America:

Nothing spoke more eloquently of the American dream than the bustling heartland towns, their Main Streets lined with mom-and-pop stores, barber shops, diners, ice cream parlours, theatres and movie houses, with Fords and Chryslers and De Soto Coronados parked in rows; and, just beyond them, unlikely numbers of regularly attended churches, schools, sports stadiums and public swimming pools (p. 154)

Watson started his book in the introduction, with the attack on the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. At first, I thought that this reflected Watson’s own expertise and reputation as a commentator on American affairs, but when he returns to 6 January at the end of the book as part of his argument, it is as a historian.

The United States was born with one foot in the Christian church and the other in commerce. It might equally be said that it had a foot in the high ideals of religion and the Enlightenment and a foot in the frontier philosophy of whatever it takes. The loathing felt for the liberal elites, and for intellectuals in general, was an old one, and the failure of liberals and intellectuals to understand either the people who loathed them or the degree of their loathing was just as old. The ‘Washington swamp’ was not new [and] …the coonskin hats and the shaman’s horns in the Capitol building were as if lifted from a picture in my childhood Davy Crockett book…All these gestures to contemporary grievance connected to threads of belief and myth, and patterns of ideological dispute, that are as old as the country itself. Extraordinary, even ‘unprecedented’ as the insurrection of 6 January 2021 seemed, it occurred in the same grindhouse of uncrossable divides and undying fixations.” p. 261

I guess that only time will tell if Watson’s decision to start and finish the book with Trump was a narrative framing, or whether it is a historical analysis in its own right. Only in coming years will we know whether Trump II marks a whole new phase, or whether as Watson suggests in 2025, the Trump presidency reflects a continuity that flows across the United States’ history. By its very nature, a ‘short history’ with its abridgments and encapsulation, is probably best placed to provide an answer.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: review copy from Black Inc.

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‘Any Ordinary Day’ by Leigh Sales

Posted on December 22, 2025 | 1 comment
2019, 272 p.

Whenever I drive past the flashing lights of ambulances and police at a road accident, I think of the couple of minutes before that collision: the conversation that would have been abruptly cut short, the reason the occupants were in the car, how they would have got up that morning oblivious to how their lives were going to change in the next 12 hours.

This is pretty much the same impulse that led Leigh Sales to write this book. As a journalist, she had been on the media side of many interviews and stories about people whose lives changed dramatically. She had also had her own brush with death when a placental abruption in what had been a normal pregnancy led suddenly to a life-threatening situation, and fears for both her baby’s life and her own. Shaken by the experience, she came to believe that we are all vulnerable to sudden, unexpected change and yet we do not live that way. Why?

Her book revolves around the case studies of various people, some of who became caught up in ‘newsworthy’ events, others who experienced the death of a loved one (something that we all face) or had suffered a catastrophic injury or illness. The chapters are re-tellings of her interviews, interwoven with some ‘easy to digest’ research which veers at times into pop-psychology, and her own reflections of how she would have responded in similar circumstances.

Some of the people and the events described are well-known: Louise Hope, who as well as suffering from MS, was also one of the hostages in the Lindt Cafe siege in Sydney in September 2002; Walter Mikac who lost his wife and two daughters in the Port Arthur killings; James Scott, the ‘Mars Bar’ man who disappeared in Nepal and Stuart Diver, who survived the Thredbo landslide but his wife did not. Others are less well-known, Matt Richell, who died in a surfing accident, Juliet Darling whose husband was killed by her psychotic step-son and Michael Spence, the vice chancellor of the University of Sydney, whose wife died within 3 weeks of her cancer diagnosis, leaving him with five children.

As it happens, the first two case studies are both of people with deep Christian faith. In the case of Michael Spence, it was precisely because of his religious faith that she interviewed him, even though Sales herself is not a believer. As a former-believer myself, I found myself dreading that the book was going to become religious tract. It didn’t, but I still found it strange that she was to organize her case studies in this way, giving such prominence to faith and a belief in a higher purpose for suffering.

She locates herself as a journalist in these retellings, having presented many of the news stories herself. She tells us that she often becomes tearful during her interviews, perhaps as a counter to the perception of the sang-froid of the television presenter. The intensity of media scrutiny led several of her interviewees to engage a publicity agent to manage media appearances. This did not always work out well: you glimpse the newshound in her when she talks about James Scott, dubbed ‘Mars Bar Man’. He was advised by his agent not to name the chocolate that was his only food, in the hope that he could secure a sponsorship deal later. It wasn’t actually a Mars Bar, but instead a Cadbury’s chocolate, but when he fudged (terrible pun) the brand of the chocolate in an interview, the interviewee (Richard Carleton) sensed obfuscation and toughened his questions. Although Carleton came in for criticism for the ferocity of his questioning, Sales admitted that she would have done the same thing once she sensed evasiveness.

She returns several times to the idea that, having had one dreadful thing happen to you, you were inoculated against further trauma. Statistically, this is not logical even though emotionally, it is. She seems to feel that Louise Hope’s MS should have been enough, without the Lindt siege, and she spends some time on the idea of the ‘jinx’ on the women that Stuart Diver (Thredbo) has married, his second wife having died with breast cancer. Diver speaks of being a ‘memory locker’- capturing and keeping happy times for when the bad times come – but Sales seems somewhat resistant to such a stoic and clinical response to pain.

She devotes several chapters to people who helped: Detective Norris who accompanies a grieving wife to the morgue; counsellors Jane Howell and Wendy Liu at the morgue; Mary Jerram at the coroner’s office; pastor Father Steve who has a strong belief that families should see the body.

All of this is told in an intimate, rather confidential tone of voice. I used to listen to Chat 10 Looks 3, the podcast she made with political commentator Annabelle Crabb (still going, I see) and this book had much the same sort of feel to it. Interesting, personal but something that you could listen to (read) without much effort or challenge.

My rating: 7/10

Read because: Bookgroup Ladies selection. Now that the CAE has wound up, we have no identity!

Sourced from: Darebin Libraries Book Group collection.

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‘Prophet Song’ by Paul Lynch

Posted on December 15, 2025 | 1 comment
2024, 320 p.

SPOILER ALERT

I am writing some weeks after I finished reading this book, and I really regret that I didn’t sit down and write it immediately afterwards. My response to it has dulled with time, but I do remember slamming it shut and announcing “Fantastic!!” I read it for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle immediately after finishing Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross (review here) and the two books complement each other beautifully. In fact, I think I will always link them mentally because they seemed to be a similar response to an uneasy, suffocating situation, separated by nearly ninety years.

The book is set in Dublin, at some unspecified time, two years after the National Alliance Party has passed the Emergency Powers Act, which gives expanded powers to the Garda National Services Bureau, (GNSB) a new secret police force. Eilish, the mother of four teenaged children, the last only a baby, answers the door to two policemen seeking her husband Larry, a teacher and trade union organizer. Within the first chapter, her husband disappears after a peaceful union march, and her attempts to find where he has been taken fail. Eilish is a mother, daughter, wife, scientist and a long-time resident of Dublin. For much of the book, and as the world becomes a sharper place, she concentrates on the mundane, the quotidian, trying to keep routines together. She holds on to the life that she had before, that she thought was immutable, too afraid to look beyond her house, her community, her family. Catching sight of herself in the mirror in the hallway

[f]or an instant she sees the past held in the open gaze of the mirror as though
the mirror contains all it has seen seeing herself sleepwalking before the glass the
mindless comings and goings throughout the years watching herself usher the
children out of the car and they’re all ages before her and Mark has lost another
shoe and Molly is refusing to wear a coat and Larry is asking if they’ve had their
schoolbags and she sees how happiness hides in the humdrum how it abides in
the everyday toing and froing as though happiness were a thing that should
not be seen as though it were a note that cannot be heard until it sounds from
the past seeing her own countless reflections vain and satisfied before the glass (p.43)

Her friend Carole, whose husband has also disappeared, urges her to resist and to look at what is going on around her as people in her street beginning hanging National Alliance Party flags from their windows, and as her house and car is vandalized. People stop talking:

…the brilliance of the act they take something from you and replace it
with silence and you’re confronted by that silence every waking moment and cannot
live you cease to be yourself and become a thing before this silence a thing waiting
for the silence to end a thing on your knees begging and whispering to it all night and
day a thing waiting for what was taken to be returned and only then can you resume
your life but silence doesn’t end you see they leave open the possibility that what you
want will be returned someday and so you remain reduced paralysed dollars an old
knife and the silence doesn’t end because the silence is the source of their power that
is its secret meaning silence is permanent. (p.165)

Eilish’s father Simon is living alone and subsiding into dementia, but he still has flashes of clarity which pierce through the domestic cotton-wool that Eilish is trying to cocoon herself within.

…if you change ownership of the institutions then you can
change ownership of the facts you can alter the structure of belief what is agreed
upon that is what they’re doing Eilish it’s really quite simple the NAP is trying to
change what you and I call reality. If you say one thing is another thing and you say it
enough times, then it must be so and if you keep saying it over and over people
accept it as true this is an old idea of course it’s really nothing you but you’re
watching it happen in your own time not in a book. (p 20)

Her sister Aine in Canada is urging her to leave while she can, but Eilish feels rooted to Dublin, still hoping that her husband Larry will return. She tries to protect her eldest son Mark by sending him away; and it is only when her thirteen year old son Bailey is killed -and she finds his body in the morgue, tortured- that she finds the strength to act. And here we come to Lynch’s purpose in writing the book. As the world hardened against refugees, he asks us to engage in ‘radical empathy’ by seeing the leaving and flight from a repressive regime from the perspective that it could happen to us, just as it has with Eilish, just as it has again and again throughout history:

…it is vanity to think that the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet ranging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house, and becomes to other but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore… p. 304

There is only one perspective in this book- that of Eilish- and as you can tell from the quotes, it is told in a breathless, relentless suffocating urgency with no punctuation and few paragraphs. Yet, it was not hard to read once you relaxed into it- just as the people of Dublin relaxed into autocracy and violence, I guess. I can think of few books that frightened me as much as this one did. Absolutely fantastic.

My rating: 10/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection

Sourced from: own copy

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‘Crooked Cross’ by Sally Carson

Posted on December 13, 2025 | 1 comment
380 p. 1934 republished 2025

It’s happened a couple of times that I have read two books in close succession, only to find that the books speak to each other, and are long afterwards fused together as a reading experience in my mind. This was the case with Crooked Cross, first published in 1934 and recently re-released by Persephone Books this year. It might be 90 years old, but it soon became a publishing phenomenon- and I can see why.

It must have been as close as possible to being contemporary when it was published in 1934, as it deals with a six-month period between Christmas Eve 1932 and Midsummer night 1933. Of course, we know what is going to happen, but neither the characters in this book nor its author do. As it is, there is something queasily anxious about Christmas Eve in a small mountain town in the Bavarian mountains, where the Kluger family – parents and three young adult children eldest son Helmy, daughter Lexa and much-indulged younger son Erich- are celebrating Christmas. The family has been in straitened circumstances: the father’s wages have been reduced and eldest son Helmy has been unemployed for several years. Giddy with the prospect of soon marrying her fiance Moritz, Lexa has resigned her job, while Erich has returned for Christmas from his seasonal job as a ski-instructor, with the occasional dalliances with clients on the side. In amongst the carols and the snow and the midnight church service, there is a photo of Hitler on the piano, adorned with holly. Just a mention, an aside, but National Socialism is to embed itself within the family, and change the trajectory of their lives.

Lexa finds herself forced to choose when her fiance Moritz, a converted Jew, is sacked from his position at the hospital, and is increasingly confined to a small flat where he lives with his father. Meanwhile, her two brothers, and eventually her father too, join the Nazi party which provides jobs and identity to a generation of men who were emasculated by the years after WWI. The party becomes more and more embedded and normalized in everyday life, and the cost of being outside the party and its ideology becomes steeper.

It is impossible not to draw parallels with current events, which is no doubt why this book has been republished now. It ended on a cliff-hanger, and I was excited to find the next book, The Prisoner, which was published in 1936, followed by A Traveller Came By which appeared in 1938. Unfortunately these books, which like Crooked Cross were published almost in real time, have not yet been re-released. As it is, they form a little time capsule of contemporary awareness, shaped only by events and perceptions at the time rather than historical fact seen in retrospect. They came to an end with the author’s death of breast cancer in 1941 at the age of just 38. She was not to know just how prescient she had been.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: Lisa at ANZLitLovers reviewed it.

Sourced from: Kobo ebook.

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‘The Sympathizer’ by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Posted on December 7, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Have you read The Sympathizer?” asked my son as we were planning our trip to Vietnam. Great book, he said although I did have a qualm or two as I packed it. Would it would be viewed as suitable reading matter should the Customs Officers at Ho Chi Minh city airport decide that my cases needed to be inspected? It is a great book, and no one had much interest in my suitcases at the airport after they had been scanned. It was the winner of the Pulitizer Prize for Fiction in 2016, and a worthy one too.

2016, 384 P.

Framed as a confession written by an unnamed Vietnamese double agent for the shadowy Commandant, the narrator is a Vietnamese army captain who is working under cover for the North Vietnamese. We do not know who the Commandant is, or in whose custody our narrator is, or why.  He is obviously being told to rewrite his confession because there is something missing, so it is a slippery narrative.

Our narrator is a man of divided loyalties on many sides: his father was a French priest who took advantage of his young, now deceased mother, and he is shunned as not being ‘properly’ Vietnamese. His closest friends were Man and Bon, and they shared the scar on their hands that they made as blood brothers.  They did not, however, share their politics, as Bon becomes an ardent South Vietnamese patriot in exile in America with our narrator. During the war, our narrator worked with the American troops, and after the war he infiltrates the South Vietnamese diaspora community based in America. He becomes a sort of cultural consultant for a film which sounds very much like ‘Apocalypse Now’ (and indeed, books about Coppolla and the making of the the movie are credited in his references) and at times the book is quite funny as the Auteur reveals his complete disregard for the Vietnamese people who are just fodder to his film-making vision.

But the confessor’s hands are not clean. When suspicion arises that there is a mole in the diapora community, he fingers a man he calls ‘the crapulent major’ instead, and assassinates him. When a journalist called Sonny moves in on a woman he has fallen in love with, he assassinates him too. According to this clearly self-serving and written-to-order confession, he is haunted by these two deaths, although early crimes committed in his presence are left unnamed.

The ending of the book is graphic, but I found myself wanting to push through to find out who the commandant, and his superior the commissar were and how he found himself in this situation- a sign that the narrative strength of the book could overcome my own squeamishness.

My enjoyment of the book was probably enhanced, having read it in Vietnam, immersed in museums commemorating the struggle for independence and the end of the war, and moving through areas that were just names in the news reports of the 1960s and 1970s. But even had I read it in cold old Melbourne, I still would have been fascinated by the split nature and slipperiness of the narrative, and the situation that led our confessor to write this tract.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: I was in Vietnam

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‘The Tiger’s Wife’ by Tea Obreht

Posted on December 1, 2025 | Leave a comment
2019, 368 p.

To be honest, I don’t know if I understood this book. I enjoyed it enough while I was reading it, but whenever I tried to conceptualize in my mind what it was about, the whole thing just seemed too slippery and unformed.

The frame story revolves around a young doctor, Natalia, who is travelling back to an unnamed country in the Balkans, after the region has been torn apart and clumsily reassembled after the civil war. She, and her friend (partner?) Zora are moving into remote villages in order to vaccinate children whose childhoods have been disrupted by the war. Far from home, she learns that her beloved grandfather has died. Her grandfather had been a pivotal part of her childhood, taking her to the zoo to see the tiger, who held a special fascination for her grandfather.

With her grandfather much on her mind, she recalls two stories that her grandfather, also a doctor, had told her. One was of the Tiger’s Wife, a young deaf-mute woman married to a brutal man, who somehow (don’t ask me how) becomes the wife of a tiger that had escaped and was terrorizing the surrounding villages. He had met the Tiger’s Wife as a child. The second story was of the Deathless Man, who warns people that they are about to die, even though he cannot die himself. Her grandfather encounters the Deathless Man several times in his life.

War is an ongoing presence in the book. Natalia is living in the wake of the most recent Balkans war, but war is threaded through her grandfather’s life as well. In the villages, people are digging up the remains of their relatives buried in the fields, and war has claimed the tiger that Natalia visited as a child as well, as it gnaws off its own paws through stress.

The narrative switches backwards and forwards, and even though the individual stories were engaging, eliciting your sympathy for characters who were otherwise unlovely, they do not hang together into a coherent whole- or if they do, I couldn’t detect it. I am not uncomfortable with magic realism but it seemed incongruent in this dark, war-haunted country. If there was a deeper meaning connecting the stories, I couldn’t find it, even though I felt that it was just beyond my grasp.

Very clever, or too tricksy? I think the latter.

My rating: 6/10

Sourced from: my own bookshelves

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‘The empty honour board: a school memoir’ by Martin Flanagan

Posted on November 25, 2025 | Leave a comment
2023, 208 p.

When it comes to the Catholic Church and sexual abuse of children, there is little space for nuance without it being mischaracterized. However, nuance is what we find in Martin Flanagan’s memoir of his school days at an un-named Tasmanian Catholic boarding school between 1966-1971. As he says in his opening line “I was warned against writing this”. Not only was there the danger of stirring up pain and controversy, but there was the danger of being forced to rethink one’s own story that had seemed certain.

By the time you get to my age-67 at the time of writing- people’s sense of their personal history has taken a mythological turn. Most of us cling to the notion that there is meaning in our lives and, whether we know it or not, arrange the furniture in our minds- our memories- accordingly. We acquire a personal mythology, and personal mythologies, when they clash can do so violently. This is a region where demons lurk. (p. 2)

But as a stream of claims from former student from his school surfaced, the demons found him:

Each disclosure took me back to a time in my life when I thought I inhabited a concrete reality. Now that concrete reality was bending and breaking like buildings in an earthquake. (p.3)… Behind the issue of what actually went on at my school on an island off the southern coast of the world’s most southern continent, global forces were at play- ancient controversies to do with the Catholic church, the Pope, the authority of priests, celibacy, the Vatican’s exclusive maleness and the epidemic of sexual abuse that has followed it around the world. Somewhere inside all that of that, being thrown about like a leaf in a storm, was me, my story. (p.8)

Flanagan was not sexually abused himself – or at least, he did not perceive that he had been sexually abused. But at the age of sixteen he was invited into the room of one of the priests where the priest, Eric, gave him a massage with his pyjama bottoms removed, face down on the priest’s single bed, nude from the waist down. After a vigorous massage of his legs with oil, he rolled over and the priest glanced at his limp and uninterested cock. “End of story” (p. 86)

Completely inappropriate though this clearly is, Flanagan did not consider himself to have been sexually abused, even though other people thought that he had been. As far as he is concerned, “to be abused you must surely feel as if you’ve been abused”. He feels that he was inoculated from a strong response because he never did believe in the Catholic church, and because by then he was already quite certain in his own sexuality.

However, he knew other boys who were sexually abused by the priests. At much the same time as this happened to him, he was the school captain, and he was led by another boy to where he found a 12 year old shaking and shuddering in his pyjamas, with a spray of semen up his back. He and other boys reported the priest to the school rector. Some thirty years later, he gave evidence against one of the three priests from the school who were charged with sex crimes.

Flanagan may not have been sexually abused but he was abused by the ingrained cruelty of the school that filtered down through the priests and bubbled up among the boys themselves. He felt ashamed of many things: his abject begging not to get the cuts for some minor misdemeanour, his failure to intervene when he saw other boys being bullied, his desperation to appease the bullies who had decided that he was a ‘teller of stories’ as a ‘fear like a sort of radiation illness infiltrated my being’. (p.74). Years later, he began having panic attacks at night. For about six months he was in mental tumult until

In the end, one hot day I was standing beside a blackwood tree in the paddock beside our little home, when a shadow hurried across the grass towards me. With it came a great fear that I was about to be extinguished or swallowed up, and I cried out ‘I have a right to be!’. Pure madness, I know, but I’m glad I did it. Glad I shouted at my shadow. At the negative imprint of those early years. I have a right to be, everybody has a right to be. What do I believe in? Human dignity. (p.102)

What saved him was sport, especially football, and writing about sport. It was through sport and writing that the boys he had gone to school with, now men, circulated back into his adult life. These men came with their own stories, their own pain and the author’s response and reconciliation with this shared, and yet so private, experience takes up the last third of the book. The report that he had made as school captain on discovering the shivering boy in his pyjamas all those years ago resurfaced as part of the controversy over the school 43 years later. He reads the letter from the rector to the head of the order detailing the report that Flanagan himself had made, which the rector described as ‘fooling around’. Here he learns about the evasions and plans to withdraw the priest from classes, to move him around the state, or divert him into working on the school magazine. As a result of the Royal Commission into Institutional Sexual Abuse that he learns about ‘Father GMG’, sent to his school to avoid the repercussions of another interaction of a sexual nature, who is moved from one school to another. There is a pattern here.

Over the years, the author attends three Catholic ceremonies. The first was a vigil at St Ignatius, Richmond as 25 year old Van Tuong Nguyen was hanged in a Singapore jail for drug running. The second was Ned Kelly’s funeral in a Catholic Church in Wangaratta in January 2013. The third was a Ritual of Lament in 2021 run by his old school. He struggled over whether to go: he didn’t like ceremonies; he feared inauthentic emotion; he feared doing it the ‘wrong way’. He went.

What is striking about this book is the way that Flanagan holds many things in tension: acknowledgement that the same men who whipped him also imbued in him a love of literature and writing; disgust at the sexual abuse and yet compassion for the situation that, at least for the priest that he gave evidence against, he

could be well described as a maladjusted, sexually immature, lonely individual… [who] had virtually no possibility of a sexual relationship with a woman given his living circumstances. (p. 7)

He accepted the word that two of the priests at the school were unaware of what was going on amongst their brother priests. He did not characterize what he observed at his school as a long display of cynical behaviour. Instead,

[W]what I see at the core of this whole business is abject human isolation surrounded by a floundering belief system. (p. 142)

The book is not divided into chapters, and although it moves forward chronologically, it is divided into dozens of small shards, separated by asterisks. It’s almost as if the truth he is grappling to explain is also fragmentary, without an overarching structure that can be imposed onto it. There is some sort of resolution – not ‘closure’- with the Ritual of Lament performed by the now-coeducational school, no longer an all-boys boarding school. He sees this book, which was almost finished at the time of the Ritual of Lament, as his way of honoring the experience from 40 years ago as he sees it now. He speaks only for himself.

The old school’s honour board doesn’t have an entry for my last year. Perhaps it’s because the following year the school started a new era by going co-ed, perhaps it’s because my last year ended in a scandal. The tide of golden print records the year – 1971- but after that are empty spaces of varnished wood. The real names in this book are my honour board, although the list, I must add, is far from complete. (p.11)

My rating: 8/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle August selection

Sourced from: own copy

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‘Miss Gymkhana, R. G. Menzies and Me’ by Kathy Skelton

Posted on November 14, 2025 | Leave a comment
1990, 153 p.

I hadn’t heard of this book, which was sent to our former CAE bookgroup as part of their mop-up operations, now that the CAE no longer runs its bookgroup program. Apparently my group read it about 25 years ago, but I hadn’t joined at that stage. I am the youngest (!!) in the bookgroup, and as the book is about ‘small town life in the Fifties’, my fellow bookgroupers probably recognized even more in the book than I did. But even for me, born in the mid-50s, there was much that was familiar but is lost now, in a world that is much more complex and hurried today.

I guess you’d classify it as a memoir, but it is more a memoir of a time rather than events. The author, Kathy Skelton, was born in 1946 and grew up in Sorrento, a sea-side town that still has its tourist season and its quiet season. It’s a strange place, Sorrento: there have always been very wealthy people there, but also just ‘ordinary’ small town people there as well. In her introduction, she reflects on the nature of memory. Reflecting on famous people that she was aware of at the time- President Nasser, Archbishop Mannix, the voice of Mr Menzies, the young Queen Elizabeth and the Petrovs- she reflects:

Have I printed their images, acquired much later, on a childhood, half grasped and half remembered? Have I overlaid fragments of memory with layers of stories, recounted by others, stories that in turn are their fragments of memory?

I have done all these things, yet still believe I know these events and people intimately, that I have remembered accurately, and that these memories are shared with others who did and did not live in our town. (p.4)

Her book is centred on Sorrento, but she takes a wider view as an observer. She has a child’s-eye view of politics. Her father’s family were Liberal voters: her mother’s family were Labor, and even Communist. The arrest of the Petrovs made an impression on her, although she thought that they looked a lot like Cec and Una Burley, who lived around the corner. Cec was the school bus driver, and Una Burley was the local gossip, and many paragraphs are prefaced with “According to Una Burley….”. Robert Gordon Menzies, the Prime Minister, seemed to be an immovable fixture of the 50s and early 60s, almost beyond politics to the eyes of child (I remember feeling the same way). As with the Queen, political figures were just there, unquestioned. The school turned out to see the Queen, catching the bus into Melbourne to line up along Toorak Road, only to see a “white-gloved hand and a pale face below a thatch of violets” (p. 98). The next Sunday it appeared that the Queen might be coming down to Sorrento to visit prominent resident M. H. Baillieu, but these ended up being put aside because the Royal Couple were resting “their shoes off, stretched out on a spare bed in Government House. Their intended visit was nothing more than a rumour started by persons unknown.” (p. 99)

Likewise, she observes but does not participate in the sectarian split that divided 1950s Australian society, played out at the political level through the ALP/DLP split, and at the personal level through family allegiances to either the Catholic or Protestant churches. As the child of a ‘mixed’ marriage, she attended both the Catholic and Anglican churches. She writes of the Billy Graham crusade at the MCG on 15 March, attended by 130,000 people, 15,000 more than had watched the Melbourne 1956 premiership. She was there: she made her decision for Christ, but “I knew already that I didn’t want to enter into correspondence about God and Jesus and whether I was leading a Christian life, with anyone” (p. 63)

Her description of school life, marching, grammar classes, the march through Australian history of Explorers and Sheep are all familiar to me: obviously school rooms didn’t change much in the 50s and 60s.

Her family was not rich, and her father was a “drinker”. She feared the Continental Hotel (still prominent on the hill in Sorrento) and wished that her father was one of the Men Who Were Not Interested in Drink.

The men who were interested were in the front bar of the Continental every evening, drinking more desperately and rapidly as six o’clock approached. I tried never to go past the Conti after five because of the frightening noise, the hot air, and the beery smoke that might rush out to engulf me as the door opened with men going in and out. But more than the small and the noise, I feared looking up through the golden letters on the window, PUBLIC BAR, into my father’s eyes. (p. 132)

They only had television for two weeks in 1958 when they borrowed another family’s television and kelpie while they were on holidays. They went to the movies, they listened to the radio. They had purchased a refrigerator on hire-purchase, but her father forgot to make the payments and a note was left warning that it would be repossessed unless the money was found. As a result, her mother never bought anything else on hire purchase, and so it took years for the wood stove to give way to the white electric stove, the Hoover to take over from the straw broom, or the wireless to give way to the television.

From her child’s eye viewpoint, she observes her mother’s anger and bitterness towards her father, his family and small town life, but it is somehow separate from her. She sees the young girls who win beauty contests, marry the local footballer, and suddenly are saddled with children and shabby cardigans, all the glamour gone from their lives.

Sex, politics and religion: she sees all these but they are not questioned or challenged. It’s a world that has been congealed in aspic, with certainties and truths, petty triumphs and small luxuries. A very different world. I think that much of the appeal of this book is the nostalgia and sense of safety that it evokes. You can understand why conservatives turn to the past to go ‘back on track’ or making America/ or whatever country you choose ‘great again’. There’s not a lot of analysis, but it’s not completely local either: Skelton has, as she said, evoked memories that are both local to Sorrento, but also common to other Australians at the time. At times I felt as if I were suffocating in mothballs and tight clothes, at other times I yearned for the simplicity and innocence of earlier times. I do wonder how someone born in the 1980s or 1990s would read this book. I suspect that it really would seem, as L.P. Hartley said, like a foreign country, where they do things differently.

My rating: 7/10

Read because: Bookgroup

Sourced from: Left-over CAE book.

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