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2017, 532 p.  Translated by Margaret Jull Costa

SPOILER ALERT

I’m not really into spy novels, but Berta Isla turns the spy novel on its head, because it’s not really about the spy at all. Instead, it’s about the people he (or she) leaves behind as another operation begins, another identity is adopted  and other deceptions are woven.

Tomás Nevison is Anglo-Spanish, and has a very good ear for languages and mimicry. While over in Oxford, he is ‘approached’ by a tutor who sounds him out about working ‘for the good of the Realm’. He shows little interest. He has his long-term girlfriend, and later wife, Berta Isla waiting for him in Madrid, and it has been just assumed that they will end up together, even though they both lose their virginity to someone else. But when Tomás finds himself accused of a crime he says he did not commit- charged by none other than Inspector Morse, no less!- he finds himself entrapped into working with MI6 after all.

And thus Tomás is launched into a strange half-world where he leaves his wife, Berta, and their children for years at a time. At first believing that he is away on business, Berta soon starts to suspect that Tomás’ other life is more shadowy than she could have imagined, especially when she comes into contact with other equally mysterious characters. She is unable to reach him: he reappears without warning, and leaves just as abruptly. Meanwhile, time goes on. Franco dies, the Northern Ireland Troubles rage, the Iron Lady has her Falklands Island victory, the Berlin Wall falls – and Berta waits.

And waits. And waits.  This is a long book – 532 pages- and I would estimate that half of it is just waiting. It’s a self-consciously literary work, with many references to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. It is told sometimes in the third person, and sometimes from Berta’s first person perspective. Yet, the narrative voice is very much the same – a  prolix, long-winded, introspective voice, where the self is constantly watching and monitoring, and where thought is much the same as the spoken word.

Its wordiness is not just in the content. The sentences are lengthy and labyrinthine, and strangely flat. By the end of the book, you are almost inured to the wordiness, which seems to just clang now, without meaning, not unlike Tomás and Berta’s lives.

I did find myself wondering half way through this book when and whether anything was going to happen. It probably could have been cut by half, without any loss of effect.  I saw the ending ahead of time, although I was unprepared for the hollowness that I felt – and that no doubt Marías intended  – when I finally got there.

My rating: 7.5/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

2020, 109 P.

I find that, on finishing a book, I usually take an image away with me and it tends to be that image that I remember later. Margaret Simons writes evocatively of the Murray-Darling river system in this Quarterly Essay: the variation of farming uses, the high cliffs overlooking a meandering river, the mirages of water in red plains, the sand dunes and crashing ocean at the South Australian end. But what I will take away is the image of an effigy of the then-Water Minister David Littleproud being thrown into the water at Tocumwal and left to bob his way down to South Australia. Fitted with a tracking device, the effigy had acquired glasses and a suit on the way, was fished out near Swan Hill and taken for a drive around Nyah before being launched again, probably to be caught on a snag further downstream. Who knows- he may be there still.

But this is probably the only light moment in this essay, which teases out the politics that make management of the water of the Murray-Darling river system such a wicked problem. Not only are four states involved, but even within New South Wales, there is a Lower Darling (more regulated) and Upper Darling (boom-and-bust) split. There are big bolshie “outspoken” personalities, like Chris Brooks from Barooga in N.S.W or cotton-industry lobbyist Ian Cole; spokespeople for different lobby groups; the quaintly-named Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder Jody Swirepik; indigenous traditional owners; academics like Peter Gell who has fallen out with former colleagues over a study he produced with them;  and politicians who have, for better or worse, left their fingerprints on the policy without actually effecting real change.  Are there baddies? Yes, the water thieves, and possibly some corrupt politicians and bureaucrats who have fallen under the eye of ICAC, and the NSW government, which is threatening to withdraw from the whole program. But, as cotton cultivators, almond growers, and farmers pointed out, people have only done what they have been allowed to do by governments and policy makers.

In the Murray-Darling Basin, the authorities joke, everyone downstream is a wastrel, and everyone upstream is a thief. Only I, the person drawing water in this spot, for these crops, in this way, truly understands the value of the water and how to use it. (p.5)

Dispute over the Murray-Darling was hardbaked into the 1901 Australian Constitution, when the states were given ownership and management of the water, with the Commonwealth having a limited role. The founding fathers left it to the High Court to determine the competing rights of each state- something that still has not happened.  The creation of the Murray-Darling Basin Agreement under several Labor governments in 1987 took advantage of a narrow window of Commonwealth power to give effect to international environmental treaties. This environmental framing of reform continued with Turnbull’s Water Act in 2007, which relied for its constitutional validity on the international RAMSAR wetlands act, and it rather surprisingly passed in the dying days of the Howard government which expected (rightly) that it would lose. Despite all the argy-bargy that has followed, the Water Act still stands, with its rather contradictory aims of protecting the ecological values of ecosystems at the same time as promoting “economic, social and environmental outcomes”.

Under the free-market water licence reforms, the water could be unbundled from the land, and sold separately. With Penny Wong as Water Minister, many irrigators sold their water to the Commonwealth in the “Pennies from Heaven” buyback period. Tony Windsor used water politics as part of his deal with the Gillard government, and no sooner was the guide to the proposed Murray-Darling Basin Plan released, with its recommendation of 3000 to 4000 gigalitres of water returned to the environment, than everyone (including the government and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority itself) began backpedalling from it. A final figure of 2750 gigalitres was ‘fixed’ (literally), even though no-one thought was actually congruent with the science. With a change of government, Barnaby Joyce  moved water buybacks behind the curtain, and to his credit David Littleproud (he of the effigy) at least tried to hold it all together. The National Party in particular has not covered itself in glory but the chances of a Liberal party prising water from the cold dead hands of the Nationals is very unlikely.

This essay is told from a personal viewpoint, as Simons travels throughout the river system, but not in a geographically methodical way from headwaters to mouth. She interviews farmers, lobbyists, bureaucrats and academics, and spends lots of time on country roads, striding over paddocks, scrambling up dams, and in pubs.  After describing the plan and the politics, she starts at what she describes as “one of the saddest places in Australia”, the middle section of the Lower Darling around Wilcannia and Bourke. This is where we get the images of the fish-kills, and the government-purchased Toorale station. She then moves up into Queensland to Cotton Country, where floodwater harvesting has become a controversial practice, and where the ‘old school tie’ still matters. Then she goes down to the Murray that separates Victoria and New South Wales where, perversely, the water efficiencies encouraged by the plan have reduced the run-off which has fed the whole system. Finally, she ends up in South Australia, her own home state, where some believe that the attempt to ‘save’ the Murray should be abandoned and that the sea should be allowed to flood the lakes.

I’m not sure that there is a solution to the Murray Darling and I don’t think that Margaret Simons does either.  Her subtitle is “The Tragedy of the Murray-Darling Basin”, which evokes the idea of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ where individual users, acting in their own self-interest, spoil the shared resource. The Plan, while not perfect, does exist, which in itself is an achievement. The sticking point is its implementation.  The Murray-Darling is never going to return to ‘before’ because it is already a heavy plumbed and engineered water course. She is not hopeful:

Rural Australia, no longer the heart of our national narrative, is too easily neglected. It has been governed piecemeal, and with cynicism, and the National Party has contributed to that. some of the producer groups have made positive contributions, and some have been aggressive and short-sighted- on the wrong side of history. Developing visionary policies for rural Australia would take courageous leadership and enlightened politics. It is hard to find much evidence of either in the history of the Murray-Darling Basin. The exception, perhaps, is the fact that we have a Basin Plan at all. (p. 102)

This essay is valuable for taking a whole-of-system approach, integrating the perspectives and realities of a river that crosses four states and even more landscapes. It includes personal perspectives as well as the politics, and it provides a good background for watching as the next steps in this sorry, conflicted saga play themselves out.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: My Quarterly Essay subscription

I have included this on the 2020 Australian Women Writers Challenge.

I have been absolutely loving the 10-part series ‘Cancelled’ that is screening on Facebook. Each episode goes for about 8 minutes or so. The whole thing was filmed on an i-phone by the three protagonists themselves (Luke, Maria and Luke’s mother Karen) in their Valencia apartment earlier this year, when Spain went down into a hard lock-down.

Luke Eve is a film director (and it shows) and he and his fiance, Spanish actress Maria Abiñana were planning their wedding in March. His mother Karen had arrived for the wedding, and was staying with them in their AirBNB apartment. As the deaths mounted, and the lockdown was announced, they felt that they had to cancel the wedding. Disappointed and frightened by the rising numbers of cases, they had to negotiate a new relationship with Luke’s mother in a confined space.

This is absolutely beautiful, intimate storytelling, released week-by-week in real time. This video here tells you how it was made. I originally started watching it for the subtitled Spanish, but it drew me in with its honesty and humility. It’s great.

Here’s the Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/watch/cancelledtheseries/

Heather Cox Richardson Her History and Politics Chat on 29 July was a commentary on the events in Portland and the Republican Jim Jordan’s showing of a manipulated video showing the violence there. She was asked how to respond to REAL fake news like this, and she talked about the importance of changing the narrative back to reality. As far as moving the Feds in, she reminded her listeners of other events, e.g. Waco Branch Davidian siege, and the preceding Ruby Ridge siege, that act as a warning that the optics of a Federal intervention are always bad. She then moved on to whether the Russian bounty scandal is real. She notes that Trump isn’t really engaging with it, and wonders why. Finally, she addresses the question of Trump refusing to leave office. She is not overly concerned about that at the moment, noting that lots of things can happen between now and the election  e.g. Trump’s finances, Portland. etc.

Her History Chat of 23 July continues her History of the Republican Party into the 1930s and 1940s. Now that the Republican Party had allied itself with big business, it was happy to bask in this alliance during the 1920s when things were good (for some). But it backfired in the 1930s, when everything fell apart. There was a philosophical determination to overlay unemployment with moral overtones, and so the Republican Party couldn’t compete with FDR’s New Deal, which was very electorally popular. The Republican Party split between the Taft Conservatives (who wanted to return to the big business led affluence of the 1920s) and the Dewey Republicans (who embraced a lot of the New Deal ideas). The Democrats split too, with the Dixie Democrats from the south objecting to policies that black people were able to benefit from.

The Thread Continuing on with the thread of ‘non violent resistance’, we’ve gone back from Martin Luther King to Bayard Rustin, and now with Turning Enemies into Friends we go back further to Ghandi, who was a direct influence on Rustin.  Ghandi himself corresponded with Leo Tolstoy, who is explored in The Transformation of Leo Tolstoy. What a fundamental spiritual/political shift he made! Then finally we end up with I Will Be Heard, which looks at the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, printer of The Liberator newspaper in the 1830s, decades before the American Civil War.

The Latin American History Podcast How curious- a Latin American history podcast from Australia, presented by Malcolm Sargent. I have no idea who he is. But anyway, I enjoyed The First Circumnavigation of the Globe Parts I and Part II about Magellan’s three year circumnavigation journey in  1519. Actually, he didn’t actually make it, because he was killed in a battle with the locals in the Philippines when he became embroiled in political/religious affairs.

Lectures in History C-span. This lecture from 2013 is called Culture and Society in the 1920s. Professor Michael Kazin from Georgetown University (and co-editor of Dissent magazine) discusses Prohibition, the reactivation in the 1920s of the Ku Klux Klan as an anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant movement, the growth of  Hollywood and the Production Codes that led to sanitized bedroom scenes in American movies, and Al Capone.  Interesting.

Latin America in Focus. This podcast in English is produced through the Americas Society/Council of the Americas. Do you remember seeing a few months back those photos of thousands of semi-naked prisoners chained together, crammed together on the floor in rows? That was ordered by the El Salvadorean president Nayib Bukele, Latin America’s youngest president (39) who styles himself as being an ‘outsider’. In The Strange Case of El Salvador’s Plummeting Homicide Rate, the Central American analyst with the International Crisis Group, Tiziano Breda, argues that gangs can choose to dial up or down intra-gang violence for political ends, and that perhaps Bukele’s current very high popularity gives him political capital to institute dialogue with the gangs. I’m not sure that these photos, which Bukele tweeted himself, will help. Breda suggests that he did that to shore up his over-90% popularity, because he is not in a strong legislative position. Mmm. I’m not so sure.

2016, 336 p

This book was next cab off the rank after reading Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. A damned hard act to follow, and so I was pleased to read something contemporary and not too pretentious. And even though the name suggests something Cromwellesque, it is instead a domestic/family novel set in America spanning the 60s to the present day.

It starts in 1964 at a christening party. Bert Cousins turns up alone, without his wife, to the party held by a barely-known work colleague, ‘Fix’ Keating. There he notices Fix’s beautiful wife Beverly. None of them know it, but soon the Keating’s marriage will be ended, and Bert and Beverly will become a couple. There are children from both first marriages, and despite their anger at their respective parents, the children themselves form a group, at time united, at times jealous and resentful. The book traces the blended families over time, as further relationships fail and the now-grown children move into adult life. Their life story is not their own, and instead becomes publicized through a book called “Commonwealth”- the name of this novel. I don’t really know that the book needed this little metafictional twist: it’s only a minor part of the novel, and the title really doesn’t fit with the book as a whole. Unless, perhaps, you thought of the family as a Common-Wealth, but that’s a bit of a stretch.

As in books by Anne Tyler or Elizabeth Strout, this is a book with complex, contradictory, fully-rounded characters. They are not always likeable, but their actions always make sense, at some level, just as we know that our own actions do, however baffling they may seem from the outside.

This is a very domestic, relationship-heavy novel that captures the intricacies and frictions of blended families. It is noticeably American, bathed in a television hue. If perhaps the cohesion of the children seems too good to be true, it does illustrate the way that ties can continue, though sometimes strained, across the various permutations of family as we know it today.

My rating: 7.5

Sourced from: The Little Free Library at Macleod Station.

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