Category Archives: Book reviews

Thank God that’s over! Never have I complained so much about a book that took me so long to read. So long, in fact, that it is massively overdue and the library has blocked my account. But once I had committed to about 500 pages, I felt that I had to keep going partly out of obtuseness (no big fat 1200 page book was going to beat me!) and because, flicking ahead, I’d find parts that interested me and wanted to reach them. But after probably six weeks of reading, was it worth it? Probably not.

It started well. I was interested in the book after reading an interview with the author, well known as a Russian historian, and the sheer scope of the endeavour impressed me. Starting off with the footsteps found in Happisburgh, England, of a man and four children, dating from between 950,000 and 850,000 years old, Montefiore looks to the family – “the essential unit of human existence”- as a way of linking great events with individual human dramas. By focussing on individuals, families and coteries, he admits that the families and characters that he follows in this book are exceptional, but they also reveal much about their era and place.

It is a way of looking at how kingdoms and states evolved, at how the interconnectivity of peoples developed, and at how different societies absorbed outsiders and merged with others. In this multifaceted drama, I hope that the simultaneous, blended yet single narrative catches something of the messy unpredictability and contingency of real life in real time, the feeling that much is happening in different places and orbits, the mayhem and the confusion of a dizzying, spasmodic, bare-knuckle cavalry charge, often as absurd as it is cruel, always filled with vertiginous surprises, strange incidents and incredible personalities that no one could foresee

xxxv-xxxvi

One of the things that I very admired in this book was his attempt to cover the whole of human endeavour, looking at all the continents across time. Admittedly, Australia gets pretty cursory treatment but both Americas, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe are all dealt with in his chronological swirl throughout human history. The book itself is divided into twenty-two chronological acts, identified not by dates but instead by world population size. Within each ‘act’, there are a number of sections identified by family surname, often conjoining ruling families from very different parts of the globe. Taking Act Eight, for instance, when the world population was 360 million, its four sections set in the 1100 and 1200s are:

• Genghis: A Conquering Family
• Khmers, Hohenstaufen and Polos
• The Keitas of Mali and the Habsburgs of Austria
• The Tamerlanians, the Ming and the Obas of Benin.

Its final ‘act’ 22, with a world population of 4.4 billion takes us right up to the present day with:

• Yeltsins and Xis, Nehruvians and Assads, Bin Ladens, Kims and Obamas
• Trumps and Xis, Sauds, Assads and Kims

I had expected more of an emphasis on dynasties, which certainly do appear in this book, maintaining a presence across several ‘acts’ (e.g. Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns). Nonetheless, quite a few of his actors are not part of a multi-generational power base (e.g. Yeltsin and Obama in Act 22) but are instead individuals who flame up and then events move beyond them. He does not particularly consider ‘the family’ as a unit of analysis, or identify ways in which it changed in any great depth. However, as he points out in his introduction, by taking ‘the family’ as his frame, it is possible to pay more attention to the lives of women, both as shapers of the men who dominate the main narrative, but who also formed the sinews of dynastic control, stepping in as regents, and as court powers in their own right.

There were some rather surprising omissions. I would have thought that the War of the Roses might have been dealt with, given that family and dynasty were fundamental to it. Perhaps Australia could have got a look in with the Murdoch family that we have inflicted on the late 20th-early21st century Anglo-sphere.

But the book is already overwhelming in many ways. Not only is there the kaleidoscopic effect of shifting from one continent and culture to another, but there is just so much. I gave up trying to keep it all straight, and just let it sweep me along, not even attempting to create my own internal mental narrative while reading.

I was also disconcerted by infelicities that I could detect that undercut my confidence in him as a historian somewhat (and who knows how many went undetected). He starts with Egypt, Africa, Athens, Persia and India, and I must admit that this part read a bit like the ‘begats’ section of the Old Testament. For me, it was only really with the arrival of the more familiar (to me) Romans that the narrative seemed to become more human-based instead of “one damned thing after another”. Now, I am no expert on Rome, beyond listening regularly to two podcast series on Ancient Rome, but one thing that the historians in these podcasts have highlighted is the slanted nature of the remnant narratives available to us today, shaped by the agendas and perspectives of their classical authors. There was no hint here of the cautiousness with which these historians embroider every statement: instead contested events and interpretations were presented as fact. So, likewise, I found myself reading of the truly horrific cruelties imposed by powerful men on the powerless with a similar twinge of skepticism. While not at all doubting man’s ability and perverse imagination in torturing other men, what was the purpose of counting and recounting these chilling punishments?

My wariness was increased further when I learned that:

The first outsiders to reach Australia were not Europeans (the Dutch landed there in 1606), but African sailors from Kilwa [near Tanzania], as evidenced by the discovery of copper Kilwan coins, inscribed in Arabic with the name of an amir of Kilwa, dug up on Marchinbar Island, Northern Territory.

p. 268

What???? Thanks to Google, I found that indeed copper coins, inscribed in Arabic were indeed found in the Northern Territory, but even though their origin remains a mystery, there is little credence given to the idea that they were brought by African sailors in the tenth century CE. Who was he reading? I wondered, to come up with this rather out-there hypothesis, but there was no bibliography. I only found out once I finished the book that there was an online bibliography available so as not to add to this already lengthy book.

Of course, a book focussing on the family is going to deal with sexuality, which was often only tangentially linked to marriage and the passing-on of DNA. But I did find myself wondering what was the point of frequent tales, especially in the footnotes, of perversion and sexual oddity, and the narrative and political purpose such anecdotes served in the histories from which they were drawn. In fact the footnotes, while often interesting and quirky, seem to act as a bit of a catch-all for the facts that he had uncovered that he couldn’t bear to leave out, even if they were only obliquely related to the text.

However, one thing that came through clearly was the distorting effect of slavery – probably the most anti-family activity man ever invented. Not just Atlantic slavery, but across all societies and often as a by-product of warfare, slavery enriched some families and dynasties, and the consequences of that wealth stretched across centuries, furthering further empire-development and discovery.

This book was published in 2022, and particularly the last chapters are narrowing in on Ukraine and Russia, the author’s specialty. I suspect that events yet to come will render these chapters out-of-date and possibly downright wrong. In a book which has travelled so far, across so much time and geography, I am surprised that he is risking rendering his scholarship obsolete by such presentism. His frequent coy references to “this author” in referring to his own interviews with influential political actors remind us that his work has not just been desk research, but that he has been a player in present-day politics as well. That said, I was interested that in a footnote in the closing pages, he rebutted Putin’s argument about Ukraine’s Muscovite and Russian origins by pointing out that Ukraine has, over time, been ruled by Ottomans, Habsburgs, Polish kings and Lithuanian dukes, and peopled by Cossacks, Tatars, Poles, Jews, Italians and Greeks, as well as Russians and Ukrainians (fn. p.1231)

This book was written “during the menacing times of Covid” (p. xxviii) and perhaps that accounts for its length. I was drawn to keep reading but I found myself resenting the sheer weight and length of the book, and the relentless piling on of actors and actions. I found myself wishing that he would take a break from the narrative, to take stock and analyze for commonalities and change, before continuing on.

Am I glad that I read it? Probably, in that I will probably take away flickers of recognition of names and cultures, and from the effect of seeing events that occurred contemporaneously that I had only seen in isolation previously. But it was damned hard work and I just don’t know -yet- whether it was worth it.

My rating: My God, how does someone rate a book about the whole of human written history? 7/10?

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library. Please, YPRL and the borrowers waiting for me to return it, forgive me for holding on to it for so long. But I bet that few future borrowers will be able read it in four weeks either.

This book is set in a very specific timeframe: from Wednesday 5th November 2008 to Tuesday 20th January 2009. Ring a bell? Probably not. I’ll help you out. It’s the time between the election night that saw Barak Obama elected as President of United States, and the day of his inauguration the following year.

If you’ve ever been to an election-night function as a volunteer, you’ll recognize the awful, chin-trembling bleakness of defeat when the balloons, the music, the party pies all of a sudden take on a bilious yellow hue. For white, racist, life-long Republicans that election night -more than any other before it- must have seemed like the world was shifting on its axis. And so we meet Hitchens, nick-named “The Big Guy” who decides that something must be done. He calls on his mates, fellow-Republicans, entrepreneurs, a crackpot historian, a tax lawyer etc, all rich, entitled, puffed up with their delusions that they can change history if they get the right people onside and pull a few strings. And so they launch into a series of sleazy meetings with ‘fixers’ and quasi-military figures where men talk in catch-phrases and allusions, plotting to somehow over-turn Obama’s election, to set the world right again. If we hadn’t seen Rudy Giuliani sweating away in the All-Seasons Garden Supply car-park, or January 6th, this would just seem like farce. Not any more: as the author of this book, published in 2022, knows only too well.

While all this is going on, the Big Guy has his own problems at home. His wife Charlotte is an alcoholic who finally seeks help for her addiction; his daughter Meghan is at boarding school and starting to question her own views on life and politics, after joining the family jaunt to the polling booth to vote for John McCain. The family has its own secrets and it is forced to face up to them, while Big Guy is escaping reality through his ham-fisted political manipulations to try to go back to the good old days.

This book read very much like a play, with a heavy reliance on dialogue. There are no chapters, but instead a series of ‘scenes’, each identified by date and location. There are probably a lot of political references and in-jokes that escaped me, and I felt my Australianness keenly while reading the book. What an unsavoury group of people. How depressing that they’re still here.

My rating: 6/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I heard the author on a BBC Start the Week podcast (see my response to the podcast here). This podcast has a lot to answer for.

I have only read one other James Meek novel, The People’s Act of Love, although I’ve often seen his articles in the London Review of Books. I read The People’s Act of Love before I started blogging. It was set during the Russian Civil War that followed the Revolution – a time when fortunes and allegiances shifted in response to the global political situation, and when loyalty and survival were pitted against each other. Meek’s most recent book To Calais, in Ordinary Time is likewise set in 1348, a time of political flux, but this time politics is rendered hollow by the threat of plague. This book was published in 2019, before our own world was to face its own plague, and to read it in 2022 is to find resonances of which the author would have been unconscious, as the plague is at first just a rumour, dismissed, politicized or seen as divine intervention. But by the end of the book, the plague dominates, throwing into question social distinctions, faith, and the nature of commitment.

The book involves a journey from South-West London to Calais, two years after the battle of Crecy where a group of archers under Edward III routed a larger French army and went on to capture Calais. A band of battle-hardened archers is gathered together by knight Laurence Haket to return to Calais, and young serf Will Quate is nominated by his liege lord to join them. The other archers, led by Hayne, had been involved in the sack of Crecy two years earlier and had taken captive French noblewoman Cess, who was forced to accompany them back to England. Now they are heading back to Calais again, and they are joined by Lady Bernardine, Wills’ master’s daughter who is escaping an arranged marriage to an older man; Thomas, a clerical administrator on secondment to an abbey who, while not an actual priest, is steeped in the church; and Hab, a swineherd with desires of his own. While they are heading to France, the plague is heading towards them.

The narrative is told in different voices. The cleric Thomas writes his first-person narrative on parchment, in a high, intellectual tone; while the third-person narrative depicts Lady Bernardine as speaking in a lofty, French-inflected language. Will, Hab and the archers, on the other hand are depicted as speaking a form of dialect : not quite Chaucer, but with many unfamiliar words (‘neb’ for face; ‘steve’ for voice) and a curious sentence-construction. Meek sustained this well throughout the book, although I confess that it often tangled my reading.

What I found most confusing, though, was the names. Hab (the swineherd) is very similar to Mad (one of the archers); Mad (the archer) is very similar to Madlen (Hab’s ‘sister’); Hayne (the leader of the bowmen) is very similar to Haket (the knight). Add to this abbreviations (Cess for Cecily; Berna for Lady Bernardine), some gender-bending, and a play within in a story- and I didn’t know where I was for much of the book. In a way, my own confusion mirrored the other-worldliness and the unfamiliarity of the 14th century setting. It did resolve, particularly as the plague set in and different characters dropped away.

In her blurb for the book, Hilary Mantel wrote:

Fans of intelligent historical fiction will be enthralled by a story so original and so fully imagined. Meek shows the era as alien, which it is, and doesn’t falsify it by assimilating it to ours. But his characters are recognisably warm and human.

I confess that I found myself wondering if I was “intelligent” enough for this book, because I did find it challenging. But as Mantel points out, Meek has created a world on its own terms, with disorienting little twists, that reinforces that his characters are not just ‘us in funny clothes’ and he sustains this across the whole book. And, by chance, we bring to this 14th century world our own 21st world view of plague which, for me, only enhanced the book further. It’s a remarkable- but challenging- book.

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

My rating: 8.5/10 (….eventually….)

Although this book purports to be about a curmudgeonly old man, the American film (renamed ‘A Man Called Otto’) stars Tom Hanks so he certainly couldn’t be too curmudgeonly. As someone who has experience of Grumpy Old Men (Reader, I married one) Ove is only eye-rollingly annoying with a heart of gold. It was altogether too saccharine for me.

There are advertisements at the end of the book for the author’s other publications, My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologizes and Britt-Marie was here. They sound just like this book with an misunderstood older person covering a hidden warmth who blossoms under the attention of others. Pardon my cynicism.

Sourced from: purchased e-book (it was on special)

Rating: 5/10

Denise Scott is one of my favourite comedians – no, she’s my FAVOURITE comedian. I enjoyed All that Happened at Number 26 and when I was looking for a book to read quickly to round out my Goodreads Challenge for 2022, this seemed a good choice. There’s quite a bit of repetition here from All that Happened at Number 26 but that didn’t stop me laughing out loud in bed and on the train and bus on a 3 hour journey.

We were both born in the same year, and she grew up in Watsonia/Greensborough which is just up the road from my own house, so many of the schools and places she mentions are familiar to me. So, too, are the experiences of facing the death of parents and the bodily indignities of aging. It was interesting to read of the frequency of sexual assault, that of course underpins the whole “me too” movement, but was almost taken for granted by women of our age. I suspect that a younger woman today would conceptualize and write about it very differently.

It’s not high literature but she’s funny and human and I wish that I were sitting beside her, just listening to her and laughing.

Sourced from: purchased as a e-book

Rating: who knows.

Photojournalist Andrew Quilty had been thinking about writing a book about Afghanistan since late 2020. The Doha agreement had been signed in February 2020, thousands of Taliban prisoners had been released, and the Americans were pressuring Kabul to take more responsibility for ‘active defence’ so that the US troops could withdraw as planned. In this book that he imagined writing, he intended following the theme that he’d been following for several years in his reporting: that the US refusal to deal with the Taliban had ignited the insurgency, as it had in Iraq. He would follow the lives of rural Afghans, who had experienced a very different war from that experienced from Kabul, and bring their experiences to attention.

But then August happened, and that book was put aside and this one written instead. Biden had specified a withdrawal date of 31 August, but as the Taliban took Kabul, the date was brought forward. By mid August foreign embassies were closing, expatriates were being brought home, and crowds of people desperate to escape the return of the Taliban surrounded the airport, standing in a canal of sewage, clinging to the undercarriage of airplanes. We all saw it, but the sheer press of humanity turned these people into a ‘mob’. Andrew Quilty gives them back their individuality.

The book is written chronologically in three parts, with each chapter set at a different location, with some locations appearing in all three parts. Part I is set in early August, as the rumours of the return of the Taliban become stronger; Part II is set in mid-August as the government falls apart; and Part III is set in late August as the Taliban take Kabul and those who can, try to flee. In Part I in particular, he captures some of what he intended in his earlier planned book, interviewing soldiers protecting the Antenna Post in Maidan Wardak Province, but also the villagers who, because of their own conservative beliefs and lifestyles, saw no threat from the returning Taliban. In the later sections he focuses his attention on Kabul, not only because the provinces are now Taliban-dominated and thus less accessible to him, but also because it is city-dwellers and those who had assisted the US and other foreign troops who have more to fear and more to lose as a result of the return of the Taliban after two decades.

The journalistic leanings of the author are clearly visible. Each chapter is written almost as an object of long-form journalism, with interviews and stories of colleagues and antagonists interwoven with each other. It reflects my own cultural blinkers, I know, but I did become a little confused between characters whose names seemed very similar to me, and I would have appreciated a list of characters with an identifying paragraph at the start of the book. However, the index was very useful, and most of the acronyms were spelled out in the index as well. I was bemused, though, by his insertion of a chapter of historical background which appeared in Chapter 8, two-thirds of the way through the book. I would have thought that it would have been more useful earlier.

And I don’t know if it is because I am a woman, or whether the recent closure of universities and NGO jobs to women in Afghanistan has heightened our awareness, but I responded most to the stories of women, in particular Nadia, whose oppression within the family became more suffocating as the Taliban approached. It was as if her brother was emboldened within the family home by the appearance in the streets of the Taliban perched on their jeeps, bristling with guns. The power of her older brother within the family is frightening, as he cajoles his father into stricter discipline of his daughter, and her mother averts her eyes. Then there is Hamed, a presidential staffer, who watches as all the framework of government melts away as men decide to look to their own safety first by taking advantage of opportunities of escape that were not available to those crowds surrounding the international airport. Quilty takes us to those people at the airport, some of whom manage to get inside and escape to a new, if uncertain, future and others who after days of heat, dehydration, crowding and sloshing through that foul canal of sewage decide that it is futile and return home.

There are many dangerous places in the world, but surely the most perilous time must be as one regime gives way to another. If you have made a commitment to either side, all traces need to be expunged without hesitation or sentimentality, and it becomes clear where the limits to loyalty lie. And now, as the Taliban reneges on its promises about women and as the world struggles with how to deal with this inexorably hardline government, I wonder what happened -and will happen – to the people that Andrew Quilty has brought forward into Western consciousness.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library. Read because I read a review of it somewhere.

Had I given up on this book half-way through, which I was tempted to do, I would have agreed with the author’s rather rueful reflection on how the plot of this story would appear to his two older brothers, should they return from WW2

As far as his brothers would ever know – when Toby came back, if Bill came back – their warless little brother had spent a pleasant few months killing rabbits, buying a boat, repairing and then selling it before he went back to school. To them, that would be the extent of his work. That would be the story.

p. 202

That’s what I felt for much of this story. Fifteen year old Ned West lives with his widowed father and older sister on an orchard in Tasmania during World War II. Ned’s two brothers Bill and Toby have gone to fight, and no news has been heard of Bill for some time. Set over the summer school holidays, Ned embarks on his own bloodbath in trapping and shooting rabbits, selling their pelts in town, ostensibly as part of the war effect, but in reality to perhaps, one day, buy a little boat of his own. He inadvertently traps a quoll, which he hides and feed, even though it is savage and more burden than joy. Shamed by his sister into taking his limping horse to the vet, he shows the quoll to the vet who treats both the quoll and his horse without charge on condition that Ned shoots the rabbits that were overrunning her property. As a result, he accumulates more and more money until he is able to buy a shabby little boat which, after he strips the paint off, turns out to be a beautiful Huon Pine boat. But between the shooting and the sanding-back, nothing much seemed to be happening in this book. There were flashbacks and leap-forwards which made little sense, and I was just tiring of this tedious, if beautifully described, summer.

It was only in the last third that the book came together for me. Those obscure flashback/forwards all of a sudden made sense, and lifted the book into a broader story of loss, regret and love. By the end, my frustration had dissipated into admiration for how beautifully the book was written, and the control that Arnott has of a deceptively complex narrative. I don’t know if the shift was in me, or in the writing, but I’m glad that I persevered.

My rating: 8 – would have been higher had the book not taken so long to get going.

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.