I had not had much interest in reading this book, deterred perhaps by the glamour shot on the front cover. Even though I very much enjoyed Barak Obama’s Dreams From My Father, I wasn’t particularly drawn to reading a First Lady’s life story, thank you very much. But it was a Book Group selection, and conscientious Book Grouper as I am, I resolved to read the book and I am so glad that I did. There was much more in this book that I might ever have anticipated.
The preface started with really good writing. It’s post-Presidency, and Michelle is alone in the house for almost the first time (excepting the security guards down in the garage). Her daughters are out, Barak is not at home, and she decides to make a grilled cheese sandwich. There’s no one to make it for her, no-one to say “Mrs Obama, let me get that”, no one to look askance at her desire for such homely comfort food. She sits on the back doorstep, and eats the sandwich.
The book proper is divided into three parts: Becoming Me, Becoming Us, and Becoming More. Becoming Me traces her early upbringing on the South Side of Chicago, where her remarkably hands-off parents bring her up to be an intelligent, independent young woman, super-organized and conscientious, ambitious and methodical. Becoming Us chronicles her relationship with Barak Obama, and her switch from corporate law to the non-profit sector. The ‘us’ expands to include her two daughters, born through IVF, and the tension she feels between being a professional woman, and a mother. Barak is becoming increasingly involved in politics, first as a state congressman, and then as presidential candidate, although she is often angry and resentful of the demands that politics make on their relationship. Becoming More takes us into the Obama presidency, and the weird home-life this imposes on their family. She needs to carve out her own identity as First Lady, even though this is a role that is not of her choosing, and she struggles to keep some sense of normality for her daughters.
The book is very honest. Barak comes over as a highly intelligent if selfish man, infuriating in his messiness, chronic lateness and lack of attention to detail. She for her part comes over as rather controlling and chronically insecure about whether she is good enough. The awareness of being a black woman in a predominantly white political milieu accompanies her always. She talks about the strains in their marriage as her life is subsumed into his ambitions, and her eventual decision to keep some sort of family routine of dinner and bedtime which Barak has to accommodate to, instead of the other way around. Her mother is a saint: I don’t know that I would get up at 5.00 a.m. to mind my grandchildren while my daughter went to the gym- if fact, I know that I wouldn’t (just in case any of my children get ideas).
She does not even try to hide her contempt for Donald Trump, which hardened even more when he won the Presidency. Trump’s actions in demolishing the East Wing seem even more egregious now, after reading about an engaged First Lady who opened the White House up to many people, through that very East Wing that no longer exists.
At first, I was so impressed with the writing in this book that I was rather disappointed when I learned that it had been ghost-written, or at least written with other people. Does that matter, I wonder? For me, probably yes, because I feel that her writing has been mediated through the other author, and I feel disappointed that the words are not hers. But this doesn’t detract from the honesty that pervades this book. She doesn’t once mention the word ‘feminist’ but the tensions between motherhood, professionalism and politics reflect the viewpoints of a modern, engaged intelligent woman that the world was lucky enough to have as First Lady for eight years.
My rating: A rather surprising 8.5
Read because: Reading Group Book
Sourced from: Darebin Library as part of their reading groups program.
Cormoran Strike books, written by J. K. Rowling under the nom-de-plume Robert Galbraith, are for me a long-form type of comfort food. Very long-form, because like the Harry Potter books, these seem to be getting longer. Lethal White is the fourth in the series, and it comes in at a hefty 784 pages.
Detective stories are a genre, with recurring themes which are both part of their appeal and part of their frustration. In the case of the Cormoran Strike books, how long can Galbraith keep the unresolved sexual tension (UST) between Strike and Robin going? This book starts off with Robin’s wedding to the insipid Matthew. Surely a marriage should dampen any progress in the UST realm, but this is not to be. But how many more volumes can Galbraith keep this going? And surely if the UST becomes resolved, that will be the end of their relationship because who wants a married-couple detective agency? And on an unrelated theme, why doesn’t Comoran do something about his throbbing stump where his leg was amputated? Surely additional surgery is in order, or a new prosthesis or something! Moreover, how many more times is Robin going to end up in peril as the case draws to its close? Although, having said that, poor Nikki in ‘Silent Witness’ spends much of her time kidnapped and threatened- it seems to go with the territory that the female investigator- while her male counterparts need to work out how to ‘rescue’ her. But I guess that all these formulaic aspects are part of the genre.
Set during the London Olympic Games, Strike is approached by mentally ill man, Billy, who says that he saw a child being buried years ago. Is it true? At the same time, Strike contracted by politician Jasper Chiswell (Chizzle) to investigate blackmail for something that was not illegal years ago, but now is. As it turns out, the two cases are connected.
Meanwhile, Robin has married Matthew-and she is unhappy from the start. Strike encounters his past lover, Charlotte, who is now pregnant with twins and unhappily married too. Strike is in an uncommitted relationship with Lorelei, who wants more from the relationship than he can give.
Galbraith introduces a huge range of characters into the book, but somehow manages to keep control of them all. I like the way that the author has Comoran or Robin sit down and mentally draw the whole case together, neatly encapsulating it for this reader who can find herself completely confused. It’s like drawing a deep breath, before plunging underwater again. Within this complex ensemble, Galbraith has a number of pairs (fitting, really, for a parliamentary detective story where ‘pairing’ is part of the political scene)
Each chapter is headed by an epigraph from Henrik Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm (1886). I must admit that I don’t know the play, and Dr Beatrice Groves has done the work of drawing the links between Lethal White and Ibsen’s play. As with many of Galbraith’s books, the reason for the title is with-held until well into the book. In this case, we need to wait until Chapter 42 to learn that Lethal White is not a form of cocaine, or the nick-name of a thug, but instead is a horse disease.
I’m not normally a detective-fiction fan, but Galbraiths are different. I will keep turning to the Cormoran Strike series when I have tired of other genres or want to escape from non-fiction into a well-plotted if formulaic series that keeps me reading until far too late at night.
I often find that there is a sort of brittle formality about books written in early-mid twentieth-century Australia, echoing the slightly-British, self-conscious tone of newsreaders and documentary narrators that you hear in black-and-white footage from the 50s and 60s.This book, first published in 1966, and reissued by Text in 2012 starts off in a similar way. The scenario of two sisters, Laura and Clare, being brought into the headmistress’s office to hear of their father’s death and their removal from school evoked children’s books of the past (Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, anyone?) The focus at first is on sixteen-year old Laura, who had had aspirations to be a doctor like her father, and she is more conscious of the economic and social fall in their circumstances when their fey and selfish mother turns to Laura to be the breadwinner of the family. At this stage, neither Clare nor her mother are particularly well-rounded characters, Clare (seven years younger than Laura) being merely childish and her mother Stella a languorous, demanding presence who decides to sail back ‘home’ to England, leaving the girls to fend for themselves.
Instead of a medical degree at university, Laura finds herself packed off to business college and a secretarial job at a box factory, owned by Felix Shaw. Although she feels no great attraction to him, when Felix Shaw proposes to her – largely as an economic arrangement – she accepts, seeing it as a means of financial security for herself and her younger sister Clare. Felix offers to support Clare to go to university- a dream that Laura had had for herself- but this promise is soon broken once Laura and Felix are married. I can’t really decide whether Felix is a complex character or a caricature. He almost willfully makes unwise financial business decisions, selling off mildly successful companies to spivs and incompetents, while expecting Laura to pick up a heavier work burden as a result. They are not poor: they live in a large house overlooking Sydney Harbour, and he enjoys driving luxury cars dangerously while abusing everyone else on the road. He sells the house – the one thing that Laura loved- from under her to underline her financial impotence in this dependent relationship.
Harrower skillfully juxtaposes the glittering sunshine of the Harbour, with the darkness of their house. It is as if a shadow lies over this beautiful home and its extensive gardens. The book is set in the 1940’s and 50’s, and although neighbours are aware of the arguments next door, nothing is done to help them. In fact, in spite of living in the midst of other houses and working with other women, Laura and Clare are socially isolated, with Felix’s happiness their main concern.
The term ‘coercive control’ did not exist when Harrower wrote this book, but all the signs are there: the emotional blackmail over the prospect, later withdrawn, of Clare’s university education; the changeability of mood; the oscillation between extravagant generosity and meanness; the rigidity in expectations for the women in his life compared with his own recklessness. Felix is physically violent towards Laura, and the possibility of sexual violence towards her sister Clare lurks in the shadows.
Most insidious of all is Laura’s own coercion of Clare to remain in the family home as a peacemaker and mediator, and her adoption of Felix’s own sense of victimhood as a reason to make her stay. Felix has made his own wife the enforcer. At times Laura dreams of an escape, but faced with the consequences, she represses her own will and becomes an extension of Felix.
Meanwhile, as the novel progresses, Clare becomes the main focus when she resists the narrowing of her own horizons and as all of the colour leaches out of Laura. The arrival of Bernard, a young refugee, to stay in the house to convalesce breaks the spell, even though for a while it seems that he, too, is going to be lured into Felix’s orbit by the promise of academic support, similar to that offered to Clare. In fact, there is a latent thread of repressed homosexuality in most of Felix’s relationships with other men, be they fellow entrepreneurs or employees.
The threat of violence runs through this book and it is clearly felt by Laura and Clare as they scramble to meet Felix’s standards and demands. Knowing, as we do, the physical danger to women at the point where they finally decide to leave a coercive partner, as readers we feel unsafe as Laura, and increasingly, Clare contemplate an escape
The title ‘The Watch Tower’ is interesting, because it can be interpreted in many ways. It has connotations of punishment and incarceration, which the beautiful house on the Harbour becomes. But it also suggests a lookout as well, and as the book progresses Clare is increasingly looking out, to a wider world, even while Laura becomes more deeply entombed in her relationship with Felix.
So, for a book which I thought was going to be rather insipid and old-fashioned, I found a book that in many ways predates Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do (my review here). I read this as part of the Ivanhoe Reading Circle’s program, and one of the questions raised was whether we know of another Australian book of similar vintage that deals with the issue of what we now recognize and name as ‘coercive control’. I haven’t read it, but I suspect that Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera treads similar ground (The Pastor’s Wife (my review here) does too, to a lesser extent. I can see why Michael Heyward at Text Publishing re-published this book. Unfortunately, it reads just as true today – possibly even more true now – as it would have sixty years ago.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: Brotherhood Books
Read because: November book selection for Ivanhoe Reading Circle.
When my son said that this was his favourite book of 2025, I took notice. When I told him that I had borrowed it from the library, he hedged a bit, saying that he didn’t know if I’d like it. He’s wrong: I loved it. I could barely put it down over the three days that I read it: sand, beach and grandchildren notwithstanding.
I’m not a particularly science-y person, but this book is far more than ‘just’ science. Like a Mark Kurlansky book (think Salt, Cod etc.) it combines science, history and travel, but it also packs quite a bit of political analysis as well. I’m writing this on 5 January 2025 as the reality of Trump’s bombing of Venezuela and imposition of US oil interests is sinking in, and Conway’s comments about autarky (i.e. the policy of being self-sufficient that underlies Trump’s ‘America First’ policy) seem particular apposite right now. Ed Conway is the economics and data editor of Sky News and a columnist for The Times (London), which are right-wing connections that do not engender my trust. However these contexts are not particularly apparent in Conway’s book, except perhaps for the ultimately optimistic viewpoint with which he ends the book. Quite apart from his politics, his journalist background equips him with the eagle eye for a good anecdote and the ability to bring the narrative back onto more general-reader territory when it threatens to wade into technologically and scientific details.
In the introduction he identifies himself as a denizen of what he calls ‘the ethereal world’:
…a rather lovely place, a world of ideas. In the ethereal world we sell services and management and administration; we build apps and websites; we transfer money from one column to another; we trade mostly in thoughts and advice, in haircuts and food delivery (p.13)
He distinguishes this from ‘The Material World’, which undergirds our everyday lives by actually making things work, often through companies whose names are unknown to us, but which are more important than the brands that use their output:
…operating stuff in the Material World….you have to dig and extract stuff and turn it into physical products…a difficult, dangerous and dirty business (p.14)
He chooses six raw materials – sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium- which are not only important substances in the world, but are the primary building blocks of our world and have fuelled the prosperity of empires in the past. They are the very hardest to replace. These six materials form the basis of products several steps up the chain: sand, for instance, is the basis of silica which underpins optical fibre and the concrete and cement that makes modern high-rise cities possible. In analysing these materials, he traces back their ‘discovery’ to ancient civilizations, often by accident or through observation, before being intentionally created with processes that often form the basis of present methods. Concrete, for example, was ‘discovered’ three times: there is evidence of cement use in Neolithic ruins in Turkey that date back more than 10,000 years; the Bedouins created concrete-like structures in 6500BCE, and the Roman used a form of concrete in many of their buildings before the recipe was lost for hundreds of years following the fall of the Roman Empire. The discovery of On Architecture by Roman architect Vitruvius, and its translation into French and English, triggered the 18th and 19th century quest for new concoctions to replicate or surpass the Roman recipe (p. 75). Perhaps because he is a British journalist, he highlights deposits in the British Isles rather more than we would think of today, and both German and British ingenuity are highlighted, as well as American. Thomas Edison makes several appearances, but the complete absence of any women at all highlights the male-dominated nature of science and invention.
The structure of the book has a sense of symmetry that I find appealing: six raw materials examined in six parts, each with three chapters, an introduction to the book and a conclusion. I can’t vouch for the reliability of his information, but each time I exclaimed “Hey, did you know…?” to my much more scientifically-oriented husband, he already did know and what he knew aligned with the information in the book.
Unlike many in the media companies and publications he works for, Conrad does not deny the reality of climate change and the environmental degradation that occurs as part of the mining and extraction of his six materials. However, as he points out, the production of an environmentally harmful material was often prompted by the desire to replace an earlier, even more harmful energy source which would have brought about an even more devastating environmental impact. e.g. coal replacing wood, kerosene replacing whale oil, or polyethylene replacing gutta-percha from the rapidly disappearing Malaysian guttapercha tree. It is this pattern that contributes to his optimism about our ability to mitigate climate change in the long term, if we can overcome the short-termism of the political cycle and make financial and lifestyle sacrifices for an unborn generation- actions for which there is equivocal evidence so far.
However, he is not completely Panglossian. Australia, and Rio Tinto in particular come in for trenchant criticism over the destruction of the Juukan Gorge for the extraction of iron ore. As he points out, part of the luxury of living in the ‘Ethereal World’ is that we can shunt the environmental impacts of our lifestyle into the ‘Material World’ which often happens to be a third world country. Wealthier countries, like Chile and Australia to a lesser extent are starting to question the environmental costs when the extraction occurs in their country instead of someone else’s.
Despite the shift towards autarky promoted by Trump in particular, and turbo-charged by the world’s realization of the precariousness of supply chains during COVID, the story of these six materials is also the story of globalization. Here in Australia we see the shipping out of raw materials (especially to China), but the circulation is much broader than this, with the finished product integrating multiple processing steps from right across the globe. Such processes make the world more inter-connected than America/Australia/China first politicians might desire.
The Material World is – well, material- but it has political implications. While the rest of the world panics about China’s dominance of the battery supply chain, China panics about its reliance on the rest of the world for its raw materials- hence China’s Belt and Road strategy. Particularly in relation to the production of advanced silicon chips, security is uppermost in the attempt to prevent industrial espionage and to make sure that China does not gain this ability. Ironically, China is unlikely to develop the hyper-pure silicon from which the silicon chip ‘wafers’ are made because the crucibles to melt it are available (so far) only from a single site at Spruce Pine, in North Carolina, operated by only two companies, Sibelco (Belgium) and the Quartz Corp (Norway). This raises the unsettling question of the effects of a landslide on the road that winds to Spruce Pine, or the malicious spraying of the mines with a particular chemical. But this single source is unusual: there is usually another source or another product to take the place of a threatened material. His six materials highlight the international reach of companies based in one country, and the diversification of such companies into new processes as part of the evolution of products and materials.
This evolution of products and materials lies at the heart of the optimism of the book. We have worked out how to turn complex products into commonplace and increasingly cheap items (for example solar panels and semiconductors). Although he has chosen six materials for his analysis, they are intertwined: batteries are just as reliant on copper as they are on the lithium inside them; steel inside concrete is a better building product than either alone. Even though we need to keep extracting materials to make the very ambitious transition to net zero, with solutions like hydrogen and wind turbines requiring huge amounts of energy, there is one major difference. In the past we used fossil fuels to burn, but now we are using them to build.
For years, people assumed that it would be impossible to make iron and steel at the scale we can today. Rediscovering the recipe for concrete seemed like a pipe dream. Scientists doubted that we would ever be able to tame extreme ultraviolet light, let alone use it to mass produce silicon chips. Will we look back in a decade or two and wonder why we ever fretted about producing enough hydrogen to back up the world’s energy grids, or why we struggled to generate copious power from the hot rocks deep beneath the earth?…If there is one lesson you should take from our trip through the Material World, it is that with enough time, effort and collaboration, these things usually happen….Humankind has, since its very first days, left a visible imprint on the earth. There is no point pretending otherwise. It is part of our story. It has allowed us to live longer, more comfortable lives than ever before. It has enabled us to fill the planet with more individuals than anyone could have imagines, with 8 billion brains and 8 billion sets of hopes and dreams. We are also capable of living far more sustainable, cleaner lives, diminishing our destruction and contamination and living in closer harmony with the planet. We will do so not by eschewing or dismissing the Material World, but by embracing it and understanding it. (p. 443)
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 ofProphet 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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s literally the first Saturday of the month, which makes it Six Degrees of Separation day. This meme, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best involves Kate nominating a book I have rarely read (in this case, We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson) and then nominating six other titles of books that spring to mind.
With ‘castle’ in the title of the starting book, what else could I go for but I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith? In Grade 7 and 8, I just loved this book and kept reborrowing it from the school library. I saw the film, but it didn’t have the magic for me now that it had as a young girl. I have a copy on my shelves, but I don’t know if I want to re-read it or not. Perhaps some books are best left as memories.
Brideshead Revisited had a castle in it too. I loved the series with Jeremy Irons. I know that I read the book too, while I was at university.
L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between was set in a big house as well, told from the perspective of a visitor from a lower class who doesn’t know the ‘rules’ of the gentry. We read it in Matric (yes, I’m that old), and I think that it has one of the best starting lines in literature: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”
Like everyone else in the world, we read To Kill a Mockingbird at school too. I have re-read this one, many times, and every time I hear the music to the absolutely perfect movie, my eyes fill with tears. To me, this book is emblematic of the Deep South
Another book set in the South- New Orleans this time- is The Yellow House by Sarah M.Broom (my review here). The youngest of twelve children in a working class family, she tells the story of her family home in New Orleans, interweaving national and local history, family stories and her own story of place and identity.
The Lives of Houses, edited by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee is a collection of essays that emerged from a 2017 conference titled ‘The Lives of Houses’ held at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford. This conference brought together scholars from different disciplines and professions, with an emphasis on British, Irish, American and European houses. The ‘big’ names include Hermione Lee, Margaret Macmillan, David Cannadine, Jenny Uglow, Julian Barnes, and it focuses on 19th century British writers and a peculiarly British form of being ‘the writer’ in a mixture of eccentricity and domesticity. (My review here)
So somehow or other I started off with a castle and ended up in a house.
I feel a bit as if I’ve come half-way into a conversation with this book, because this memoir by Mandy Sayer is in fact her fourth (no fear of an unexamined life, here). But although it is discussing her life, it is more a love letter to her father, Gerry, addressed to him in the second person.
At my age, one attends an increasing number of funerals. I’ve often been struck by the practice in giving eulogies where the deceased person is addressed as “you”, as if they are present and listening. This is how Sayer speaks to her father, as she revisits their shared life and describes the last months of his life as she visits him daily as he moves between hospice care and her own apartment.
Her father had not been a constant presence in her life. Her parents, Gerry and Betty, separated when she was ten years old. It was an erratic, bohemian, drug-and-alcohol fuelled upbringing, and when she went to live with her mother, along with her siblings Lisa and Gene, her mother subsided further into alcoholism and toxic relationships. There were reconciliations, and further falling aparts. Her father came back into her life when, at the age of 20 she travelled with him to the United States to busk on the streets and parks of New York City, New Orleans and Colorado, he on drum, she tap-dancing. Now, in No Dancing in the Lift her own marriage has ended and she is a published author circulating in the literary scene in Sydney, and her father is dying of cancer.
Her father had been a noted jazz drummer in Sydney, playing with both local and international acts. He had a cleft lip and palate, which affected his speech badly. As I have a cleft myself, I was interested to see the child’s-eye view of the parent’s condition. It was accepted completely, and she knew that he had spent years at Westmead Children’s Hospital having surgery. (Actually, having experienced it myself, I know that surgery was more a recurrent than ongoing event, often with years in between surgeries- although it might not have been remembered that way). At one stage, her father falls asleep open-mouthed, and for the first time, she could see into his mouth and was appalled to see how incompletely the palate had been repaired.
As her father’s cancer progresses, he becomes hostile and belligerent, although this subsides after further health conditions emerge. Her siblings, having survived the same childhood that she did, are troubled people as well: either distant in the case of her sister, or manipulative in the case of her brother. Both parents had embarked on complicated relationships after the marriage breakup, and as Gerry becomes sicker, people and situations emerge from his past. But fellow musicians and writers emerge as well, and the reefers and drinks flow in what must have seemed a racketty lifestyle in the midst of the inflexibility and judgement of hospitals and institutions.
In the midst of this, Sayer meets fellow author Louis Nowra, who was married at the time and their relationship deepens from initial attraction, to a chaste and tentative friendship, then to a full-blown love affair, observed and encouraged by her father Gerry. Death and love, both becoming stronger at the same time: it is a confronting, and yet in many ways, perfectly natural conjunction.
She has not changed names in this book, and so you meet authors Louis Nowra and Linda Jaivan, musician Jeff Duff, and actors Geoffrey Rush and Cate Blanchett move in and out of the pages. It is an intensely local book, with the landscapes of Sydney and Darlinghurst described evocatively.
From the start of the book, you know as a reader how the book is going to end. What did surprise me was that these events took place twenty five years ago, as the rawness and the hollowness seemed so recent. Although I shouldn’t really be surprised because, as the child, you are always the child. Although, as she says, her father has taught her how to grow old- and in his case, unrepentantly and without necessarily growing up.
My rating: 8.5/10
Sourced from: review copy from Transit Lounge, via Scott Eathorne.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 