Tag Archives: book-review

‘The Casual Vacancy’ by J.R. Rowling

Posted on August 20, 2025 | 1 comment
2012, 503 p.

As I have related several times in this blog over the years, when I was young I read Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen. In that story, a shard from an evil, broken mirror entered the eye of a little boy, Kay, who from then on could only see ugliness in everything. I think that J. R. Rowling may have a similar shard in her eye, at least in this book. It was her first book for adults, written after the Harry Potter series that had captured young readers and accompanied them into adulthood. It is ugly, snarky and ends in a tragic melodramatic conclusion. I was hooked, after a very slow start, but in the closing pages of the book, I just thought “this is ridiculous”.

I’ve always thought that Rowling is very good with her beginnings, particularly in her Cormonan Strike books- three pages and you’re in. She starts well here too, with a death in the first few pages, but instead of jump-starting the book, the impetus dissipates as various people in the fictional town of Pagford learn that their local councillor Barry Fairbrother has died. The ‘casual vacancy’ caused by his death prompts a local election to fill his seat, and Rowling introduces a wide range of people who are taking a particular interest in this election.

Pagford is an older town, established in the days when ‘parishes’ were the backbone of local government, but time has brought many changes. A council estate called rather ironically The Fields, with low-income and social housing, had been built nearby and had been attached to the Pagford Parish. At the time of Barry’s death, the council had been engaged in negotiations to sever The Fields, and have it come under the jurisdiction of the larger, more modern city of Yarvil. For many Pagford ratepayers, this would shift the problem of drug addiction and social dislocation onto another council but Barry Fairbrother, as a former Fields boy himself, was leading the push to have The Fields remain in Pagford. The now-vacant seat on the parish council was a means to influence the outcome.

There is a huge range of characters in this book, and it took quite a while for me to embed who-was-who into my mind. They’re a rather unsavoury lot: the morbidly obese Howard Mollison who is angling to get his son onto the council; Colin ‘Cubby’ Wall, the school principal, who is tortured by the fear that he may have molested students without retaining any memory of the fact; local doctor Parminder Jawanda who supports keeping The Fields in Pagford, although her opinion is possibly influenced by her infatuation with Barry Fairweather; and Terri Weedon, a drug addict and prostitute from The Fields, whose daughter Krystal takes responsibility for caring for her young brother Robbie- among many other characters. Their partners and children resent each of them, all for various reasons, and there is barely a happy person amongst them. It’s all rather sordid in a petty, pathetic way. It’s not surprising, then, when posts under the name ‘The Ghost of Barry Fairweather’ begin appearing on the parish’s online forum, spilling the dirt on one person after another.

The narrative swings from one family constellation to the next, and gradually tightens its focus on two tragic deaths that make the election seem tawdry and petty. By this time, the pace of the book had really picked up and the majority of the characters were firmly established. But I just found myself saying “This is stupid!” as the ending became increasingly fast-paced and melodramatic. The ending was just as bleak as the whole scenario had been, and I felt as if some of the grubbiness of the book had rubbed off on me.

I gather that much of the ire against this book comes from a disappointment that it had none of the magic of Harry Potter. There’s certainly no magic here. Because of its provincial town setting, some have likened it to Middlemarch which likewise has a large cast of characters, going about their small, ultimately insignificant lives. But this is much grittier and nastier than Middlemarch, with its complexity laced through with snarkiness.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: a gift.

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‘Everything lost, everything found’ by Matthew Hooton

Posted on August 15, 2025 | 1 comment
2025, 304 p.

Are there more books being published about the slide into dementia and confusion, or it just that I perceive it that way because of my own fears? Writer and academic Matthew Hooton is rather too young to be facing this situation himself, but he captures well the slipperiness of memory in this beautifully written book. If you’re looking up ‘Matthew Hooton’ to find out more about him, you’ll find that unfortunately for him, he shares his name with a former National Party politician from New Zealand. But there’s a certain irony in that because Jack, the narrator of Everything lost, Everything found also shares a name with another Jack in Henry Ford’s rubber plantation in the Brazilian Amazon, where he travelled with his parents in 1929.

There are two threads to this book. One is Jack’s memories of Fordlandia in Brazil, a cookie-cutter American suburb transplanted into the Brazilian jungle, under the control of the morality agents charged with carrying out Henry Ford’s vision for a colonial outpost to establish rubber plantations in the jungle, while gradually easing out reliance on native rubber-gatherers. The second thread is that of Jack’s life in Michigan, in what is now a deserted Ford Factory town, as his wife Gracie is sliding into dementia and a slow death with cancer.

The descriptions of the jungle are just gorgeous, and the jungle itself seems to take on a personality. But it is a malevolent personality: taking Jack’s mother’s life in a caiman attack on the river, and driving Jack’s father into his own madness in searching for his wife’s body in the jungle. A man half-dead from exposure and the jungle’s flesh-eating insects staggers into Fordlandia, and Jack himself is not sure whether it is his father or not. Young Jack himself is forced into a battle with the jungle as he and Soo, a young Korean girl who had worked in the sanatorium laundry, try to escape the morality agents who have shopped her to the Japanese.

I read this book because I had recently read Hooton’s Typhoon Kingdom (review here) and at first I was struck by the difference in setting between his earlier book and this one. But Korea (where Hooton lived and worked for some time) works its way into this book as well, when Soo explains that she is Korean royalty has escaped the Japanese in their takeover of Korea early in the 20th century. I’m not sure whether this strains credulity or not.

But there is no difficulty at all in watching the older Jack, seventy years later, defiantly trying to stay in his family home as his life revolves around visiting his wife in the nursing home. Jack’s relationship with his divorced daughter Jess is strained, and his grandson Nick is a mixture of solicitous and off-hand adolescence as he is trying to negotiate his own relationship with his father.

In fact, one of the things that really impresses me about Hooton’s writing is the way that he is able to emotionally inhabit someone that he clearly is not: a Korean comfort woman in Typhoon Kingdom and an old man here. His characters have an authenticity and layers of complexity, and their dialogue and tone is distinctive and convincing.

The two story lines become increasingly intertwined, as Jack himself becomes more addled, and as the past colonizes the present, not unlike the colonization attempt of Fordlandia. Jack’s narrative voice is comfortable and engaging, and as a reader you want things to be better for him.

I really enjoyed this book. In one of those little twists of coincidence, I read a review from 1925 of Henry Ford’s rather burnished autobiography, which was written before the establishment of Fordlandia and some of the more unsavoury aspects of Ford’s politics. Moreover, I had only recently read Hooton’s earlier Typhoid Kingdom, and so the Korean aspect was familiar to me as well. But quite apart from that, I just enjoyed the beauty of the descriptions, the poignancy of loss and grief, and the sheer humanness of it all.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: I enjoyed Typhoon Kingdom and I saw that he had a new book out

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

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‘Oscar Wilde’ by Richard Ellman

Posted on July 13, 2025 | Leave a comment
1988, 554 p & notes

I can hardly believe that I have read this enormous tome not once, but twice. The first time was in 2002, when I read it for an online Literary Biography book group, and this second time was for my former-CAE bookgroup (which I nicknamed ‘The Ladies Who Say Oooh’, which is what my daughter used to call us). The CAE has disbanded its bookgroups and farmed out its book collections to groups, no doubt to save themselves the hassle of getting rid of thousands of books. None of us actually chose this book, but we were happy to read it. That was before the group members realized how long it was, and how small the font was. I think that I was the only one to actually finish it, largely because I knew that I enjoyed it the first time. But I think that I was more impatient with it this time.

Richard Ellman’s biography of Wilde won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It has been described as the ‘definitive’ biography, and I certainly don’t think that another Wildean fact could possibly to be dredged up that hasn’t been included in this exhaustive and exhausting book.

The first time I read it, I was largely unaware of Wilde and his story. I knew that he wrote plays, that he wrote ‘The Happy Prince’, that he was homosexual and that he ended up in jail. Perhaps my enjoyment of the book the first time was that it was all new to me then, although I have since watched Stephen Fry’s wonderful performance in the movie ‘Wilde’, seen an excellent local performance of David Hare’s The Judas Kiss and read Fanny Moyles’ Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde.

Ellmann certainly leaves no stone unturned, starting right back with Wilde’s birth and and going through to rather graphic details of his death. He draws parallels between Wilde’s writing and his own life, and then (as now), I found myself regretting that I have never read The Picture of Dorian Gray. The courtcase that led to his downfall does not appear until about 4/5 of the way through the book, so there is plenty of time for Ellmann to establish Wilde’s large circle of artistic friends – including even Australia’s Charles Conder and Dame Nellie Melba- and Wilde’s conscious creation of ‘aestheticism’ as a cultural movement. In the late 1880s-early 1890s, he seemed to be everywhere: in print, on the stage, amongst the wealthy, the glittering and the cognoscenti. Ellman’s sympathies are clearly with Wilde, although he shows us his fecklessness (especially in relation to his wife Constance), his recklessness and his odd mixture of weakness and doggedness.

This second reading, however, found me impatient at the denseness of the prose and overwhelmed by the minuscule level of detail. It is as if he could not bear to leave a single fact out, and if he couldn’t squeeze it into the text, then he would carry it on in the lengthy footnotes at the bottom of the page. (That said, I was grateful that he included translations of the French in the footnotes as well). I read now that Ellman completed the book just before his death with Motor Neurone Disease in 1987, and that he was not able to revise it or correct errors which have since been corrected by another writer. Perhaps, had he had more time, he might have stripped the book back a bit, which would not have harmed it in any way and indeed may have enhanced it. As it is, Ellmann has covered Wilde’s life so exhaustively that any further biographers could not compete in thoroughness, only in incisiveness.

My rating: First time 8.5. This time round 7.5?

Sourced from: ex-CAE bookgroup stock

Read because: book group selection.

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‘Station Eleven’ by Emily St John Mandel

Posted on July 3, 2025 | Leave a comment
2015, 384 p.

I had heard about this book during the COVID pandemic, and no wonder. Published in 2014, some six years before the world locked down, it describes a world where 21st century Western industrialization has collapsed in the wake of a virulent influenza that has wiped out 90% of the population. What cheering reading during a pandemic!

However, reading it ten years later and with those COVID years behind us, does Station Eleven stand on its own two feet? I think it does. Right from its opening chapter, which starts with a Shakespearean actor, Arthur Leander playing King Lear, collapsing on stage, I was hooked.

As Arthur falls to the floor, a member of the audience, Jeevan Chaudhary, a trainee paramedic rushes to give him CPR, watched by a little girl Kirsten Raymonde who stands in the wings. Returning home, he takes a phonecall from a friend who is a doctor, who warns him that the Georgia flu is rampant, and to take his girlfriend Laura and his brother, and to get out of town.

The narrative then jumps ahead twenty years and takes up again with Kirsten, now an adult, with only scattered memories of that night at the theatre, before everything changed. She is now part of the Travelling Symphony, a rag-tag group of actors and musicians, who move from settlement to settlement to perform music and plays. Electricity, gasoline, the internet and all the things enabled by these had ceased, and in the first years after the pandemic, life had reverted to a light-governed, subsistence struggle against other frightened groups, who were themselves fighting for existence. After twenty years, things had stabilized, albeit at a stagnant level, but a level of menace had been recently introduced by the rise of the Prophet, drawing on a mixture of messianic religion and violence to consolidate his power.

If this sounds at bit like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it is. I certainly had the same feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach as I read. But unlike The Road, there is not the same relentless hopelessness. This is a world that is trying to hold onto the best in music and literature, and trying to collect as many artefacts from the old world as possible so that the ‘before’ world is not completely lost. The world still looks for beauty. The book’s ending, while ambiguous, is hopeful.

It is beautifully written with strong control of the narrative, as Mandel slips back and forward between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ worlds, moving from one character to another. How prescient she was, and how chilling it must have been to pick up this book in the early days of COVID. But as a piece of writing, it doesn’t need the experience of the last few years to give it strength: it’s a very human, well-crafted book that celebrates creativity and the best of being human, giving hope without sentimentality.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: the op-shop.

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‘Sneaky Little Revolutions’ by Charmian Clift

Posted on June 28, 2025 | 1 comment
2022, 448p.

[Warning: discussion of suicide]

This book, edited by Clift’s biographer and former daughter-in-law Nadia Wheatley, is marketed as ‘selected essays’. More properly, they are a selection of 80 of her 225 newspaper columns published mainly in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s Herald between 1964 and 1969, when they came to an abrupt halt with her suicide.

The newspaper columnist was (is?) a curious beast. Although there are innumerable bloggers and sub-stack writers, there seemed to be something rather special about turning over the page of a print newspaper, and seeing an article by a regular columnist, in its accustomed place on the page. I used to enjoy the columns of Sharon Gray (who I see is actually Adele Hulse), Pamela Bone and Gillian Bouras who ended up living in Greece – all women- and Martin Flanagan in the Age. I know that Anne Deveson wrote a regular column, but I only know of her through her daughter Georgia Blain. The only physical newspapers that I still receive are the Saturday Paper and The Age on Saturdays and although they have a stable of staff writers and comment columns, the only one who comes close to my perception of the ‘newspaper columnist’ in the Charmian Clift mould is Margaret Simons with her gardening columns in the Saturday Paper, and perhaps Kate Halfpenny and Tony Wright in The Age. Somehow you feel as if you know them, and that you could plonk down beside them in a coffee shop and just take up talking with them.

Of course, it’s all artifice because despite the appearance of confidentiality and intimacy, columnists project a particular view of themselves, and one that is often quite removed from reality. This is the case with Charmian Clift whose columns brim with confidence and warmth, when instead she had lived, and was still living, a life that was far removed from the suburban Australian life of many of her readers. She and her husband, writer George Johnson, circulated in an artistic and intellectual milieu on the Greek island of Hydra that could simply not be found in Australia (barring, perhaps, the communal living at places like Heide in Bulleen). There’s little sign in her columns of the infidelities and arguments that wracked her marriage. She never mentioned her family members by name, and referred only obliquely to her husband’s long hospitalization with TB. The birth of an illegitimate, and relinquished, daughter when she was 18 years old was coded as “a wrong road…that led me to disaster”.

I could find only one mention of her alcoholism:

A whole human life of struggle, bravery, defeat, triumph, hope, and despair, might be remembered, finally, for one drunken escapade.

One can only read with hindsight her essay about her husband’s forthcoming semi-autobiographical second book Clean Straw for Nothing, which she had not dared read, for fear of what he might reveal about her through the character Cressida Morley

I do believe that novelists must be free to write what they like, in any way they liked to write it (and after all who but myself had urged and nagged him into it?), but the stuff of which Clean Straw for Nothing is made, is largely experience in which I, too, have shared and … have felt differently because I am a different person …

Indeed, several commentators have linked her apprehension about the publication of this book with her suicide in July 1969 at the age of 45- a suicide that seems so paradoxical with the fiesty, intelligent personae that she had curated through her columns.

Wheatley has titled this book ‘Sneaky Little Revolutions’, echoing a rather condescending but also self-effacing comment that Clift made about her own columns to her publisher in London:

I have been making my own sneaky little revolutions …writing essays for the weekly presses to be read by people who don’t know an essay from a form guide but absolutely love it….

Some of her essays are disarmingly suburban, but there are many others that are subversive and indeed, “little revolutions” for the mid-1960s, deep in the midst of the Menzies-era. She resisted the smugness of white-Australia that expected her gratitude for returning to comfortable Australia from a ‘foreign’ country; she supported the rights of women and decried their ‘second-class’ status; she said “sorry” some forty years before the Australian government did; and she revelled in young ‘protestants’ (i.e. protesters) who challenged the complacency of the 60s. In an essay that was not published at the time, she criticized the contingency and unfairness of the National Service draft, which left some men untouched and diverted the life course of others.

As a middle-aged (who am I kidding?) woman myself, I loved her essay ‘On Being Middle Aged’.

…the middle-aged drag time around with them like a long line of fetters, all the years that they cannot escape, the mistakes that can never be undone, the stupidities that can never be uncommitted now, the sames and humiliations and treacheries and betrayals as well as the prides and accomplishments and happinesses and brief moments of wonder…. I often think that middle-aged people have two lives, the one they’ve lived, and a parallel life, as it were, that walks around with them like a cast shadow and lies down with them when they go to sleep, and this is the life they might have lived if they had made different choices in that time when time was so abundant and the choices were so many.

There is a run of essays in the volume about her trip to central and northern Australia. At a time before cheap airfares and mass international travel, her beautiful writing brought to life a view of Australia from above- something that not all Australians had seen. In ‘The Centre’:

Pitted pores. Dried out capillaries of watercourses. Culture slides of viridian clotting thick creamy yellow. Wind ridges raised like old scars, and beyond them the even, arid serrations of the Simpson Desert, dead tissue, beyond regeneration. And yet, the tenderness of the pinks, the soft glow of the reds, the dulcet beige and violet seeping in.

She has a distinctive voice, although one that is not completely unlike my own with her colons and lists and parentheses and made-up words. The genre of the newspaper column does impose a straitjacket of must-haves: an engaging introduction, a set word length, and a rounding-off last paragraph. I found myself longing for a longer essay than the requisite six pages in my e-book and something more thorny and less self-contained.

Is there any point to re-publishing seventy year old newspaper columns? Yes, I think there is in exceptional cases, and few newspaper columnists have that honour bestowed upon them. I think that it rescues some good thought, good thinking and prescience from the flow of ephemera and evokes a humility in us to remember that many others have held certain political positions and made similar observations in the past.

My rating: 8/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection

Sourced from: purchased e-book

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‘The Mermaid from Jeju’ by Sumi Hahn

Posted on June 4, 2025 | 1 comment
2022, 336 p.

As preparation for my trip to South Korea earlier this year, I read books with a South Korean setting, which is why I ended up reading this book. As it turns out, I read two books based on Jeju, a large island south of the South Korean mainland. It is an oval shaped island, with a large mountain Hallasan in the middle. The Jeju people are indigenous to the island, and have been there since Neolithic times. It is famous for its haenyeo, traditional women fishers who free-dive to gather molluscs and seafood in a semi-matriarchal society, where their wages formed the basis of the family income. Shamanism remained an important part of social and religious observance. Jeju was annexed by the Japanese (as was the rest of Korea) in 1910, and it became a hotbed of independence: a stance that remained when the US-sponsored South Korean government took over from the Japanese after WW2. It was this desire for independence and reunification which led to the South Korean government, led by Syngman Rhee, to see it as a potential hotbed for Communist insurgency. In 1948-9 the government led an ‘eradication campaign’ against these supposed insurgents, arising from the April 3 Incident in 1947, resulting in between 14,000 and 30,000 people (10 percent of Jeju’s population) being killed, and 40,000 fleeing to Japan.

This is the political background of the novel, which focuses on a young girl Goh Junja, who is coming into her own as a haenyeo diver. She encourages her mother to let her travel inland to swap sea produce for a pig, and on this journey she meets Yang Suwol, the son of a wealthy family on the mountain. They are instantly attracted to each other, but on her return from the mountain, she finds that her mother has died from injuries which at first she believed came from a diving accident. As the political situation intensifies, Yang Suwol becomes involved in insurgent activity, and Junja realizes that her own family is more politically involved than she realizes. The whole community is endangered by political currents at a world level that are manifested through cruelty and repression as it becomes increasingly difficult to work out whose side anyone is on.

The book is told in two parts. The first part commences with Mrs Junja Moon in Philadelphia in 2001, wife to Dr Moon, who is about to suffer an embolism. The story then backtracks to Jeju in 1944 as Junja nearly drowns while diving, then jumps ahead to 1948 and Junja’s meeting with Suwol. Part Two returns to Philadelphia, and as a reader you are wondering how Junja ended up being married to Dr Moon. Who’s he? What happened to Suwol? Dr. Moon decides to return to South Korea for the first time in many years, where he meets up with his old friend Dong Min. The book then alternates between 1944, 1948 (when Dr Moon- or more properly- Gun Joo were sent to the island as conscripts) and 2001 as the two men consult a Shaman and return to the mountain to learn the truth of what happened there some fifty years earlier.

The book starts with a timeline of political events, which is important as it frames the story. Unfortunately, it is a fairly sketchy timeline and it does not mention the word ‘nationalist’, even though it is used frequently during the book. The author does give political information, but it feels rather didactic, and I didn’t ever feel that I really understood the politics. The dual timeline, which is becoming rather hackneyed in historical fiction, made the book feel as if it were two separate books- as if she started writing one book, scrapped it, then started on another.

That said, the relationship between Junja and Suwol was well-handled and I found myself caring about what happened to them both, and pleased that it wasn’t tied up with an easy ending. However, the book seemed to be lacking something and I doubt that I would have persevered had I not had an interest in the setting.

My rating: 6/10

Sourced from: ebook borrowed from Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I was going to South Korea. I’m a little sorry that I didn’t go to Jeju now.

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‘Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles’ by Simon Winchester

Posted on May 20, 2025 | 1 comment
2005, (first published 1988), 336 pages.

I was going to Korea: I like Simon Winchester. So of course I was attracted to reading this book which was originally published in 1988, and has been recently republished in its second edition. However, there is little evidence that the book has been re-edited in any way, and so it was a very dated travel description of South Korea by an English writer, who spoke minimal Korean, and who reflected the sexism and anti-Americanism of the time.

The premise of the book is that Winchester decided to follow the path of Hendrick Hamel, the Dutch soldier who was shipwrecked on Jeju Island in 1653 on his way to Japan. He was prevented from leaving by the isolationist policies of the Josean emperor, and spent 13 years in what is now Korea, before escaping back to the Netherlands and writing the first western account of Korea. Winchester followed Hamel’s route up into what is now North Korea, but he could not cross the Demilitarized Zone at that time (even though, as he tells us in the preface to the second edition, he did manage to visit later). His route takes him up from Jeju Island to the central and western side of South Korea, where he meets mainly with monks and US servicemen, as well as some ‘ordinary’ South Koreans.

I found the book very dated in its outlook, and I felt uncomfortable about his pontifications on South Korean life and national characteristics from such an Anglo-centric perspectives. Although I am usually a magpie for interesting details, especially when I am travelling in a country that I have read about, I didn’t really gain much from the book to bore my fellow-travellers with (“Hey, did you know that…..”)

So all in all, a bit disappointing.

My rating: 5.5/10

Sourced from: e-book on subscription

Read because: I was visiting South Korea.

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‘My Brilliant Life’ by Ae-ran Kim

Posted on May 4, 2025 | Leave a comment
2021, 208 p.

SPOILER ALERT

I visited South Korea with my son and his family, so I thought that I’d embark on a bit of South Korean literature before I went. Other than Pachinko, which is partially set in Korea, I don’t believe that I’ve read any other books set in or about Korea.

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting, but My Brilliant Life ended up being a completely different from what I thought it would be. As it turned out, I was reading it in Large Print edition (the only one I could find) which gave it an air of being a rather light, speedy read. It is narrated by sixteen year old Aerum, who is suffering from progeria, a rare inherited disease that causes premature aging. As his body gradually shuts down, he decides to write his family story, drawn together from what his parents have told him about their lives in a rural village, their meeting and early marriage and his childhood. He is a lonely child: he cannot attend school, and has no friends of his own age – for what indeed is his age in a body that is accelerating towards a premature death? The family is not rich, and the hospital bills are mounting up, and so he decides to make a paid appearance on a television show, which alleviates the financial pressure and launches him into a rather voyeuristic celebrity. Following the program, he receives many emails, and he begins corresponding with Seoha, who is suffering from cancer, and in the absence of other age-appropriate relationships, he becomes infatuated with her.

I will not divulge the end of the story. It is sad and inevitable. It’s a book about life, love and presence.

Although this is book was in Large Print format, it could possibly be an interesting Young Adult book- after all, there’s no shortage of books about teenagers dying of incurable diseases. I don’t know that I learned much about South Korea from it, but I did learn about progeria.

My rating: 8/10

Read because: it was set in South Korea.

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‘What I Loved’ by Siri Hustvedt

Posted on April 11, 2025 | Leave a comment
2003, 367 p.

For the first time in over 20 years, I didn’t finish the book for my CAE bookgroup. Partly, it was because I forgot that we had changed the day of our meeting, bringing it forward. But also it was because at 367 small-print pages this is a far longer, denser book than I anticipated.

The story is narrated by an elderly professor, Leo Hertzberg about his life in New York between about 1975 and 2000. It is prompted by the discovery of five letters written to his neighbour and friend, the artist Bill Wechsler by Violet, the woman who was to become Bill’s second wife. They were to become neighbours, with Bill and his first, then second, wife living upstairs with their son Mark, and Leo and his wife Erica living on the floor below with their son Matt, who was of a similar age. Marriages disintegrate under the pressure of infidelity and tragedy. Leo finds himself acting as an indulgent-uncle type figure to his friend Bill’s son Mark, who proves himself unworthy of the love and indulgence extended to him as he disappears into the rave culture of New York and comes under the influence of the menacing artist Teddy Giles.

Leo is an art historian (one of the wankiest genres around, I reckon) and Bill is an artist and so there are long- far too long- descriptions of Bill’s contemporary artwork. Violet researches hysteria, anorexia and representations of the body and identity, and this is described at length too. Indeed, there is much in this book about representation and reality, and it all became rather precious and over-intellectualized.

The book starts off fairly slowly as a domestic narrative within a New York setting, but becomes far more urgent and fast-paced- dare I say, a thriller?- in the second half of the book. It really feels like a book of two halves. Leo is a gracious, self-deprecating first-person narrator, and so it felt comfortable to be in his company. The second half of the book was compelling enough that I continued to read it, even though our book group meeting came and went, but I found the descriptions of art and the self-conscious intellectualizing of the book rather tedious.

My rating: 6.5/10

Sourced from: A left-over book from the former Council of Adult Education

Read because: it was The Ladies Who Say Oooh (ex CAE) bookgroup selection.

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‘Question 7’ by Richard Flanagan

Posted on March 4, 2025 | Leave a comment
2023, 288 P.

When I first heard about Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, I thought “But that’s just a rehash of everything he’s already written”. It’s true that there are flashes of his earlier work, almost as if he’s tipping his hat to it in passing. The Tasmanian section evokes The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Wanting and Gould’s Book of Fish, his mentions of his father’s wartime experience sparks memories of Narrow Road to the Deep North and his mother’s death was explored in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, and the final chapter brings to life Death of a River Guide. But this makes the book sound like a glorified ‘greatest hits’ and it’s much, much more than that. It’s brilliant.

The title is taken from a Chekhov story, where a question is posed in the form of those schoolroom maths questions that still give me a sinking feeling in my stomach:

Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?”

Who, indeed. The real question is love, not the train or the timetable, and it’s a question that is unanswerable. So too, is the question of causality that brings each of us where we are.

Without Rebecca West’s kiss H. G. Wells would not have run off to Switzerland to write a book in which everything burns, and without H. G. Wells’s book Leo Slizard would never have conceived of a nuclear chain reaction and without conceiving of a nuclear chain reaction he would never have grown terrified and without growing terrified Leo Szilard would never have persuaded Einstein to lobby Roosevelt and without Einstein lobbying Roosevelt there would have been no Manhattan Project, and without the Manhattan Project there is no lever at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945 for Thomas Ferebee to release 31,000 feet over Hiroshima, there is no bomb on Hiroshima and no bomb on Nagasaki and 100,000 people or 160,000 people or 200,000 people live and my father dies. Poetry may make nothing happen, but a novel destroyed Hiroshima, and without Hiroshima there is no me and these words erase themselves and me with them. (p.237-8)

We meet all these contingencies and people in this book, written as a series of small shards within ten chapters: the Enola Gay pilot Thomas Ferebee, physicist Leo Slizard, the writers H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, his parents, his childhood in Roseberry, Tasmania, the Burma Railway and indigenous dispossession. Themes arise, drop and rise again, and parts of the book are an extended reflection on death and memory, encountered over and over. It’s hard to fit in into any one genre: it’s history, non-fiction, memoir and philosophy all rolled into one. The most compelling writing in the book comes at the end, when he tells his experience of nearly dying – indeed, did he die and is all this just a dream?- that he fictionalized in Death of a River Guide. My dinner was ready, and I was being summoned with increasing impatience, but I had to keep reading, even though I knew that clearly, he did, survive – and if it was a dream, then we’re all enmeshed in it too.

I have always loved Richard Flanagan’s right from Gould’s Book of Fish, which was the first of his books that I read. I’ve read interviews as part of the publicity for this book, where Flanagan said that he didn’t know if he’d write another book and I must admit that I closed it, feeling that he had written himself completely into the book, wondering how he could ever write anything else after this.

The best book that I have read in ages.

My rating: 11/10

Sourced from: borrowed for a friend (for far too long!)

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