Tag Archives: books

‘Juice’ by Tim Winton

Posted on July 28, 2026 | Leave a comment
2025, 528p.

An unnamed man and a young girl are driving in a truck through a blighted stony landscape, surrounded by ash. When they draw into an abandoned mine site a man armed with a crossbow forces them from the truck cab and into a deep hole. The unnamed man does not trust the intentions of their captor towards the girl, and Scheherazade-like he tells his story to ‘the bowman’ both as a way of staying awake to protect the child and to gain the co-operation of his captor.

Set at some time in the future, the world has endured a horrific ratcheting-up of climate change and political breakdown. Temperatures regularly breach fifty degrees, and summer is spent underground in dark, stifling conditions, waiting out the months until winter, when it is finally safe to venture out into the open. Society seems to have broken down into small hamlets, scattered homesteads or gated armed communities. There does not appear to be any government, no religion, no music, no civic life. Cities like Perth and Sydney still exist, protected by walls, but they are fetid and dangerous.

As our unnamed narrator tells us (and the bowman), his father disappeared in a maritime accident when he was young and he was brought up by his ‘staunch’ mother – likewise unnamed- in the outback, growing vegetables in irrigated greenhouses in winter when the weather conditions are more benign. As he reaches adolescence he works salvaging parts from deserted infrastructure and taking their produce to ‘market’ where he barters for the things they need from other desperate, edgy people. It is at this market that he is approached to join the Service, a shadowy organization, that ruptures his world view completely. Brought up in an a-historical world, he learns about the phases of history that have brought the world to this point: ‘The Hundred Years of Light’, followed by the ‘Dirty World’, then the ‘Terror’. There were political choices that could have been made in the past (our present) that could have avoided this complete breakdown, and the wealthy descendants of the fossil-fuel executives, financiers and the lobby groups still shelter in enclaves surrounded by a luxury completely foreign to the depleted populations scrabbling to survive ‘outside’. The Service is committed to ‘acquittals’ – a euphemism for the assassination of whole families, including children- as vengeance for this climate collapse.

And so our narrator lives in two worlds: the spartan existence on the blighted landscape and the other world of secret missions, danger and bloodshed. He partners with Sun, and has a daughter, Esther, but spends months away, ostensibly scavenging, leaving his family on the homestead with his mother while he is called upon to embark on this campaign of murder and retribution that takes him to Utah, the Persian Gulf, and to Asia- all just ‘overseas’ places in this world without nations. The killing does not sit well with him, and each time he returns more and more disturbed, only to find that his wife and daughter have left. The Service keeps all of its operatives ignorant of each other and of the scope of their mission, and it is only as time goes on that our narrator learns that his whole life has been much more touched by the Service than he realized.

He tells all this to the Bowman, who he later learns has also been a Service man. Despite their common experiences, they are not the same. Our narrator’s life was saved by ‘sims’, hybrid simulacra who can withstand the heat and deprivation, but the Bowman believes that all sims should have been annihilated while they could be. Our narrator distrusts the Bowman with good reason, and even when I reached the last sentence of the book, I wasn’t sure quite what it meant.

Juice is similar to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road but the Scheherazade structure of the novel, alternating between the telling of the story at the bottom of a tunnel, and the story itself, means that it does not have the same grim relentlessness of McCarthy’s book. As a committed environmentalist, Winton does not pull his punches, naming the present-day fossil-fuel companies that the Service holds responsible for the climate collapse. In just one part of the novel, his religious faith and love of nature surfaces as well, when our narrator meets with one of the operatives who initially trained him. In what our narrator later says was the most interesting conversation of his life – just one- the operative says:

My mother used to tell me that when Nature dies, God dies along with Her… I guess what my mother meant is that without clean, wild, healthy things that can regenerate and renew themselves, the idea of God is impossible to imagine. (p. 346)

Does it matter if fiction is the vehicle for a political treatise? Not for me, as long as there’s enough depth to the characters to make them something more than mere mouthpieces. I don’t know whether Winton completely succeeded in this, but I wonder if his choice to keep his main characters nameless is not a way of intentionally distancing us as readers. I’m not sure that the introduction of the sims half-way through the book worked either, although it does raise questions about the sentience of artificially-created simulacra, and whether humanity’s only hope is co-existence with them, with the nature of the relation between human and sim left unexplored. There is much that he does not explain but to do so would detract from the earnest howl of despair at our present obtuseness that underpins the novel. He does not explain history, or the remnant technology, but this sparseness reflects the blighted nature of this world where there is no past and no future, just the survival of the season.

My rating: 8/10

Read because: Rosanna Readers Bookgroup selection

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

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‘My Story: Tales from a Pioneer of Montsalvat’ by Sonia Skipper

Posted on July 24, 2026 | Leave a comment
2005, 186 p.

There have been two artists’ colonies in Melbourne that have really fired the imagination of writers, participants and curious neighbours for years. One of these was at Heide, in what is now suburban Bulleen where John and Sunday Reed curated a circle of artists including Joy Hester, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval and Albert Tucker (among others). The other was at Montsalvat in what is increasingly becoming suburban Eltham, overseen by Justus Jorgensen and later his son Sigmund. Both are now open to the public. But in staid Melbourne of the 1950s and 1960s there seemed to be something exotic and rather salacious about these artists’ communes.

I confess that I read this book not so much to learn about Montsalvat or Eltham, but because the opening chapters deal with Heidelberg and Eaglemont, which is of far more interest to me given my own connection with the Heidelberg Historical Society. Sonia Skipper was the middle child of author and theatre critic Mervyn Skipper and his wife Lena and she spent much of her childhood at Heidelberg, living in a house designed by Walter Burley Griffin that is now known as Skipper House.

Skipper House Outlook Drive Eaglemont

She attended Coreen, a small private school run by the daughters of a local minister and then Heidelberg State School (my own alma mater!). She was not happy at school and always had problems with spelling. As she herself admits, she did not inherit her father’s talent for writing, and this is reflected in the rather unadorned narrative voice that comes through the book. However, for my own purposes, she portrays Eaglemont in the late 1920s and 1930s well. She began attending art classes with Justus Jorgensen, and the family- parents Mervyn, Lena, and their children Helen, Sonia and son Matcham – became increasingly enmeshed with the Jorgensen circle- indeed Mervyn Skipper substantially funded it.

In 1934 Jorgensen became interested in a block of land in Eltham, 17 miles from Melbourne and still rural. ‘Jorgy’ and his wife Lily purchased the land, with Mervyn Skipper’s financial assistance and began building on the land using windows, doors and architectural features from properties being demolished in Melbourne by Whelan the Wrecker and drawing on the weekend labour of his art students. Sonia enjoyed this physical outlet for her energies, and as well as attending art classes in the city, spent much time at Eltham constructing the first buildings. The students’ quarters (later the dining room) and sleeping cubicles for the students were completed, and she seems to have spent a lot of time cooking for the groups of people who descended each weekend. Her elder sister, Helen, became Justus’ lover, and Sonia and her partner Arthur Munday moved there permanently.

However, she chafed under the patriarchal attitudes expressed particularly by Jorgy and the older male artists. This particularly came to the fore when she fell pregnant to Arthur when she was 20 years old. Arthur’s immediate response was “Oh, you will have to get rid of it”.

I was astounded. did he mean I should have an abortion? Well, I wasn’t going to be in that. When I said so he tried telling me all sorts of women had done it. It was simple, no harm done. I was most confused because it seemed to me the very opposite of what I understood the philosophy of the free life had been all about- that people had to take the consequences of their behaviour and be responsible for what came from it…He [Arthur] finally saw Jorgy and told him, and one morning Jorgy gave a long talk about the effect this happening would have on his, Jorgy’s reputation. He talked away for ages, and as far as I could make of it, it had nothing to do with my problem, nobody bothered to ask me what I thought or felt, apparently that didn’t count. Some of the arguments were for abortion, others for kicking me out, or for marriage, all reasoning was related to how Jorgy would be accepted by society, because I was one of his pupils. But what about Arthur? It wouldn’t make any difference to his acceptance. Very little of these arguments made any sense to me. It had to be a bloody comprehensible argument after that, or I didn’t believe those old men of the tribe sitting at the end of the table. They had so much to say about everything; but their only concerns, it seemed to me, were their own needs. (p.81)

She later found that her sister Helen, with whom she always had a conflicted relationship, was also pregnant- to Jorgy himself. Somehow now the fears of society’s censure were put to one side: instead it was now seen as a calculated idea, and now Jorgy said that:

Society would see how, with responsibility and forethought, a man in his situation with an invalid wife and a mistress, with their children, could live in a reasonable way, devoting their energies to the furthering of his work yet living a fulfilling life themselves. (p. 81)

The two cousins, Sonia’s Saskia and Helen’s Sebastian were born within days of each other, followed a few years later by Sigmund (all these children’s names starting with S seems a bit creepy to me). They were brought up at Montsalvat, where Lil (Jorgy’s wife) also lived with Max, her son by Jorgy. Sonia continued to work at Montsalvat, building and stone-carving and painting, while providing food for up to 25 people sitting around the dining room table.

With time, she felt that she needed to escape, and as a reader you sense how suffocating Jorgy had been:

It seemed to me that if I was ever going to be a fully functioning adult I needed to leave the safety of the family and establish my own independence. Had I learnt anything the outside world might need? What could I do to earn a living? This was a problem because Jorgy delighted in telling us we wouldn’t know how to get on in the outside world. Why should he be delighted, was it because he had such dominance over us that we couldn’t escape? Was this something that a teacher should be pleased with? I don’t think so. (p.157)

She did escape, eventually. She moved outside Montsalvat and worked locally with Alistair Knox on the mudbrick houses that Eltham is famous for. She fell in love with Joe Hannan, had a child with him, and bought a house in Research, before moving to Renmark in South Australia, where the asthma that had plagued her since a child improved. She continued to paint and work on her sculptures, and had exhibitions of her work- something that Jorgy always discouraged. Joe died in 2000, and presumably Sonia must have written this memoir prior to that because she speaks of “a romance that lasted for 48 years” (p. 169) and does not mention his death.

This is very much the memoir of an older woman. The copyright date is 2005, and she died in 2008 at the age of ninety. Enough time to carve out a life beyond Montsalvat, and to look back at the Monsalvat experience and its influence on her family and life with a mixture of resentment, pride and nostalgia.

Do I know what’s true about my life at Montsalvat? It has been somewhat sandpapered by time, so what is the reality I’m trying to arrive at, what events have I overlooked? The events that I thought important then, are they the ones I should concentrate on now? The ideas have become part of the person I am now. Just exactly what were Jorgy’s teachings or the added experience of living at Montsalvat I do not know. I’m not an ideas person after all, I am more of a “doer”. (p. 157)

My rating: 7/10 (not for the writing because it’s pretty ordinary, but because I found the subject matter fascinating)

Sourced from: Brotherhood Books.

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‘What We Can Know’ by Ian McEwan

Posted on July 19, 2026 | 1 comment
2025, 320 p.

Ian McEwan might have eighteen books under his belt, but I think that he’s right at the top of his form with his most recent book What We Can Know. It reassures me that (so far) AI could not generate a book with so many twists and so much complexity, humour and erudition. And that’s something that the characters of his book, set in 2119 would heartily agree with.

A book set in two parts, the first part is written in 2119 by literature professor and researcher Thomas Metcalfe, a scholar of the literature of 1990 to 2030, a period viewed by his undergraduate students as particularly dull. Metcalfe’s research interest and obsession is the British poet Francis Blundy, who regaled his dinner guests at a dinner party held in his country house in 2014 with a poem he had written especially for his wife Vivien. This poem, written in the form of a ‘corona’ involved fifteen sonnets on a theme, where the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the succeeding sonnet, linked together by a final sonnet which gathers the first lines together to make something new. It is a circular structure, gradually revealing something new, just like McEwan’s book. Only one copy of the corona had ever existed, written on vellum as a gift to Vivien, and it has disappeared. Metcalfe, like other Blundy scholars who had preceded him, has dreams of finding this corona poem, hailed as a vanished masterpiece. Instead his research is deluged by the digital sludge generated by 21st century daily life: the emails, the databases, the digital footprints that we leave without noticing. In the face of so much dross that tells so little, Metcalfe faces the dilemma of all biographers: how much to stick to the documented facts, and how much to indulge his imagination. The epigraph that McEwan has chosen for his book – reflected in the title- comes from one of my favourite biographers Richard Holmes, in his book Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. The author of many literary biographies, Holmes says of biography:

It concerns the kind of human truth, poised between fact and fiction, which a biographer can make as he tells the story of another’s life, and thereby make it both his own (like a friendship) and the public’s (like a betrayal). It asks what we can know, and what we can believe, and finally what we can love.

So Metcalfe proceeds in his research, inventing conversations and events, much to the disapproval of his fellow-academic and partner Rose, who takes a far more doctrinaire view of biographical research. The first part comprises alternating chapters when Thomas reflects in first-person narrative on his academic endeavour and progress, intersected with his own imagination-fired writing on Blundy. Blundy, in Metcalfe’s reconstruction, is a literary lion, somewhat pompous and vain, who revels in his literary fame and who subjects his dinner guests to a long recitation of the corona poem which he himself thinks “too good not to escape into the public realm one day”. Metcalfe imagines the dinner party, later characterized by literary scholars as ‘The Second Immortal Dinner’ with a nod, I think, to Mrs Dalloway as his wife Vivien prepares for the dinner party, and as the guests arrive. They all have different responses to the lengthy recitation of the poem- boredom, jealousy, bemusement- which they disguise with the clinking of glasses and raising of toasts of congratulations at Blundy’s brilliance. Vivien, on the other hand, Metcalfe sees as a brilliant woman who has subjugated her own career as an academic in order to support her husband’s, evoking shades of Anna Funder’s Wifedom or Drusilla Modjeska’s Stravinsky’s Lunch. This is her second marriage, her first having ended with the death of her husband Percy after years of dementia.

But all of this was long ago, and of only minimal interest to the undergraduate students of 2119. We learn that the world has changed much since the Second Immortal Dinner in 2014. An Intercontinental Ballistic Missile aimed at the USA exploded in the Atlantic Ocean, triggering ocean tsunamis that inundated the major cities of the world, leaving just peninsulas and islands in a flooded landscape. Networks were broken and the industrial system collapsed, resulting in a drop in population- something unforeseen in the doomsday predictions of the time. Then followed a number of wars: India against Pakistan; Saudi Arabia and Israel ranged against Iran (rather prescient, yes?) and China against the United States over Taiwan. The dust that rose from multiple nuclear explosions on several continents cooled the earth until it didn’t, as carbon emissions continued to climb. The students of 2119 have nothing but contempt for the pre-Inundation people:

Those ancients were ignorant, squalid and destructive louts. As one of the brighter students pointed out, surely they could have done something other than grow their economies and wage wars. Behind this, though never stated, is the nation that they deserved the mega-deaths they brought upon themselves.

An attempt to evoke some sense of empathy for the pre-Indudation people backfires, and Thomas and Rose’s relationship breaks up. Thomas throws himself back into his Blundy research and is on the verge of a breakthrough… then the narrative stops.

Part Two then takes up in a completely different format, written by a different voice in a different time. It took me longer than I like to admit to work out what exactly I was reading. I’m not going to spoil the book for you by explaining…read it yourself!.. and consequently, I’ll say less about the second part of book that the first even though I enjoyed them both equally. Suffice to say that we find, as Richard Holmes suggested, that “what we can know” is very limited. Events and observations are subverted by another voice, and that absent corona poem takes on a whole other meaning and purpose. There is some harrowing and all too realistic writing about dementia, and events presented in the golden glow of dinner-party candles become far more sinister.

McEwan has taken us on such a varied narrative journey: from literary mystery, a dystopian future, a reflection on history and biography, knowledge, truth and invention. I think that he’s having rather a lot of fun with the literary scene of the 2020s as well because he would know it well. His prose is so accomplished and seemingly effortless as he ranges so widely across genres and times. It reminded me of A. S. Byatt’s Possession in its intelligence, density and sheer erudition. It’s one of the best books that I’ve read in ages.

My rating: 10/10 (is it too early in the year for a 10?)

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection

Sourced from: purchased e-book.

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Movie: A Private Life

Posted on May 31, 2026 | Leave a comment

It’s all a bit silly, really. Jodie Foster plays Dr Lilian Steiner, a Jewish-American psychiatrist, and she speaks in French here, sprinkled with the occasional English swearword. (Foster has been speaking French since childhood. She used the money from Taxi Driver to buy an apartment in Paris, and it has been her second home ever since).

Dr Steiner’s practice isn’t going well. A long-standing patient is angry with her for stringing out his appointments for years, after a single session with a hypnotherapist cured him of his smoking habit. Another patient, Paula, has committed suicide- so it is said- and the family blames her. She finds herself unable to stop crying, so she has an appointment with the hypnotherapist who was so successful in curing her ex-patient of nicotine addiction. Under some very rapid hypnotism, she falls into a sequence in an orchestra where she and her patient Paula are lovers, shot by Paula’s husband, and Nazi henchmen, led by her son, invade the orchestra pit. All rather strange.

Moreover, the now dry-eyed Dr Steiner begins to suspect foul play in her patient’s death. First she thinks that Paula’s daughter murdered her, and then she turns her suspicions on her patient’s philandering husband who stood to benefit from his inheritance from Paula, which had been bolstered by a legacy she had recently and conveniently received from her aunt. And so Dr Lilian goes on her hunt for evidence, dragging along her ex-husband Gabriel, and together they indulge in some amateur sleuthing which I think finally resolves the mystery of Paula’s death. Along the way she falls in love with her ex-husband again, and embarks on a better relationship with her son. (Really, she’s a pretty crap mother and grandmother).

It was okay, although it felt longer than its 103 minutes. Jodie Foster was very good, although during the movie she seemed to transmogrify steadily into Julia Gillard. It was a bit silly, though

French, with English subtitles.

My rating: 3/5

Watched because: I was interested to see Jodie Foster acting in a French film.

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‘The Dream Hotel’ by Laila Lalami

Posted on May 4, 2026 | Leave a comment
2025, 322 p.

At the moment there’s a Senate inquiry into the new computer Integrated Assessment Tool that is being used to assess eligibility and assign funding levels for aged care service. It is completely automated, and there is no human over-ride function when the algorithm spits out an assessment that is inappropriate, insufficient or just plain wrong. At the inquiry, the first assistant secretary of the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Robert Day, said

The no override comes from the fact that that is an objective outcome….If you have these scores from your assessment, you get this level of classification … there’s no discretionary element (Guardian, 3 April 2026)

SPOILERS

I was reminded of this when reading Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel. My library has designated it ‘Science Fiction’, but there’s not much science fiction about it: it’s just an extrapolation of what is already here. Set in an alternative present day and in response to moral panic about the rising crime rate, The Risk Assessment Administration has been charged with investigating suspicious individuals in order to prevent future crimes, and it can draw on myriad data sources in order to do so. American citizen Sara Hussein is pulled from the arrivals line at the airport because her risk score is too high. An archivist by training, she has been attending a conference, and she bristles and pushes back at being flagged as a risk. The risk assessment has picked up on a complaint from a fellow passenger on the plane who was off-loaded before take-off because she assisted him when he was having trouble breathing; her response that her employer paid for her flight was questioned because, technically, she had not yet submitted the receipts to recoup her expenses. But most damaging of all for her assessment was the information that the authorities could access from her Dreamsaver, a device that she -along with many other Americans- used to maximize the value from her sleep. As the mother of young twins, trying to keep her career afloat, she had turned to this device to overcome her insomnia and although she didn’t realize it, there among the terms and conditions was her permission for the data to be handed on to a third party if required by a legal enforcement authority. Her dreams revealed a propensity to violence, they claimed, and so she needed to be assessed further in Madison Retention Centre.

So started her months-long stint in an ‘retention centre’ which increasingly became prison-like with 24 hour surveillance, curtailed freedoms presented as ‘privileges’, and enforced work. The organization contracted to run the Madison retention centre, Safe-X Inc., has its own internal economy. It has contracts with outside clients like film studios to have AI generated video content assessed for its verisimilitude; it has its internal laundry and catering facilities which fall under Safe-X budgets. Communications are provided and monitored by the AI-driven PostPal; there is a commissariat where Residents could purchase goods from their own money or from funds provided by their families. She can receive visitors, but the scheduling program is capricious, cancelling her visits without any recourse. Her Dreamsaver is monitored daily, and periods of detention could be extended at whim by the Attendants. In the narrative, you (and she) are never quite sure what is dream, or increasingly nightmare, and what is real.

What seems to be a Kafka-esque and dystopian situation does come to an end- the book has an ending, after all- when she resists, using time-worn tactics of strike and solidarity. In fact, the book is almost optimistic in its ending:

…isolation is the opposite of salvation…she owes her release to the women who joined together to say not….Freedom isn’t a blank slate..[it] is teeming and complicated and, yes, risky, and it can only be written in the company of others…This is what Madison has given her, even as it has taken so much from her- the knowledge that she isn’t alone, that she doesn’t have to be. (p. 321,322)

This is a fantastic book. I only had ten pages to go to the end, and so I sat on the station as my train went past, wanting to finish it. It seems that so many articles and events are converging: I just read Anna Krein’s The screens that ate school, from The Monthly, 2020; at a recent appointment my doctor asked me if I would agree to HeidiAi Co Pilot for Modern Healthcare. Do I read the screen after screen of Terms and Conditions? Did I take the doctor’s word that the recording of my appointment wouldn’t go any further than her computer? Do parents have the courage to push back against Google and Apple programs in their schools? No, no and no. This book isn’t Science Fiction: it’s a warning.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I had read excellent reviews of it.

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‘The Elegance of the Hedgehog’ by Muriel Barbery

Posted on April 28, 2026 | Leave a comment
2006/2008 320 p.

Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

I know that this book was on the best seller list for ages several years ago, but somehow or other I missed out on reading it. I think that I had it mixed up with Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes -both European animals, I guess- and I was surprised to find that it wasn’t a WW2 Jewish family story at all. Instead it is set at some undetermined time -1990s?- in a luxurious Parisian apartment block. Reneé Michel is the concierge there, a job that she she took over from her late husband Lucien after his death.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Outwardly Reneé appears to be a working class menial worker, largely invisible to the residents of the apartment block who see her as little more than one of the amenities of the building, like the elevator. But she is much more than this. A precocious child from a poor family, who was forced to leave school early and marry young, she has a thirst for knowledge of the most esoteric and philosophical kind but she hides her abilities from everyone. Her best and only friend is Manuela, who works as a cleaner in the building. Manuela does not share Reneé’s interests at all, but she is quick, observant, generous with her limited resources and a loyal friend. She also provides cover for Reneé, giving the appearance of two equally humble and uneducated women friends- which of course we know Reneé is not. An equally precocious child lives several floors up, twelve year old Paloma Josse who is a mixture of intellectual superciliousness, ennui and determination to subvert the bourgeois future that awaits her by planning to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday.

The book is told alternately from the first person perspective of Reneé and Paloma. The author distinguishes the two voices through different fonts, but the narrative voice is strong enough in both of them that there is no need for the visual cues. Both of them are exploring big philosophical questions- Reneé at a more abstract level; Paloma by observing the behaviour of people around her and gradually distancing herself from her avowed intention to set fire to the apartment buildings and kill herself at the same time.

I’ll confess that I found some of the philosophical chapters rather tedious- a long chapter about phenomenology, for example- and until halfway through the book I was wondering whether it was going to go anywhere. But then one of the residents of the apartment block died, and his apartment was purchased and renovated by the wealthy Japanese Kakuro Ozu. A man of refined and simple tastes, and an observer of beauty, he recognizes through small clues that both Reneé and Paloma are intelligent, philosophical women, both hiding their intelligence behind a surface of gruffness and ignorance, in Reneés case or adolescent moodiness and self-centredness in the case of Paloma. Manuela, Reneé, Paloma and Kakuro form a bond to which the apartment residents are completely oblivious.

Kakuro asks Reneé on a date, and with endearing awkwardness she procures a dress through Manuela’s help and goes to the hairdresser for the first time in many years. But she is increasingly uncomfortable at his attention, telling herself that such a cultured and wealthy man could not be interested in a lowly concierge. This, however, is all a defence mechanism, and we learn from her family story that her sister Lisette had died after giving birth to the child of the wealthy employer she had left home for. Shaken by her sister’s death, “Don’t fraternize with rich people if you don’t want to die” had become her watchword, but it was countered by Kakuro’s response “You are not your sister, we can be friends”. Indeed, possibly even more than friends.

I won’t divulge the ending, but it came quickly and out of left field. All of my reservations about the lack of movement and philosophical pretension in the first half of the book were dispelled. It left me in tears, wishing that I could stop the ending and just hold on to the characters for a bit longer.

I am rather mystified by the title though. Paloma watches Reneé and observes:

Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered with quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary- and terribly elegant. (p.139)

I’m no expert on hedgehogs: indeed, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one. I must say, though, that ‘elegant’ is not a word I would readily associate with them. Certainly Madame Michele is prickly, solitary, combative and self-contained but elegant?

My rating: 8/10

Read because: Rosanna Readers bookgroup (i.e. ex-CAE) selection through YPRL.

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‘Flashlight’ by Susan Choi

Posted on April 21, 2026 | Leave a comment
2025, 445 p.

It’s ironic that often the books that impress me the most are the ones that I delay writing about. I want the story to percolate for a while, and to really craft my response to it – and then by the time I get round to writing a blog post, it has all faded and I can’t remember enough details. However, in this case, the details (and even the plot) don’t really matter because I wouldn’t tell you about them anyway. For me, one of the real joys of this book was that I really didn’t know where it was going to take me next and by the time I got to the end, I felt as if I had been on a very long journey that crossed time and national boundaries. It’s a mystery, domestic fiction, historical fiction all rolled into one. I really enjoyed it but it really is impossible to talk about it in detail without spoiling it for you.

Suffice to say that it spans the years 1945 to 2008 across Korea, Japan and the United States, with a cast of inscrutable characters. It is based around a family: American born Louisa; her Korean-born father Serk who had been raised in Japan before emigrating to America; her mother Anne, estranged from her family and Anne’s illegitimate son Tobias who re-enters his mother’s life as an adult. There’s defiance and stubbornness, coldness and detachment, as well as a suffocating over-solicitousness and emotional games between the adults of the family. But if you’re someone who feels that you have to like a character, you’re going to be challenged because none of them are particularly likeable.

There are so many themes that come through here: secrecy and shame; language and communication; nationality; belonging; family; identity. They are never once mentioned as themes, but they emerge through the narrative and plot.

The title ‘Flashlight’ is well chosen, not just for the ‘ray of light’ motif that appears throughout the narrative, but also for the writing style. The omniscient third-person narrator moves from one character to another, but unlike many recent books that I have read that barely alight on one character before bouncing off onto the next one, this book stayed with each character for long enough that you felt you knew them, and at least can understand their perspective, even if you don’t share it. In fact, as readers, we know the characters better than the characters know each other, or than the characters even know themselves. Although there are connections between each character and the others, the emphasis is on one character at a time, in the same way that a flashlight can only illuminate one thing in isolation.

It is a long book- 445 pages- but I didn’t feel that it dragged. But perhaps that’s because I’m interested in Korean history: I know that other people in the Reading Circle did feel that it was far too long. It’s ambitious; it has a big story; the writer is control throughout and she takes responsibility for her story, instead of expecting the reader to put the bits together.

If there’s any disappointment here, it’s with myself. I know that I haven’t done justice to this book, because the surprises in the plot are the real strength of the narrative. All I can say is, read it for yourself.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: March selection for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle.

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‘I You We Them’ by Dan Gretton

Posted on April 18, 2026 | Leave a comment
2021, 1120 p.

Has anyone ever complained so much about reading a book? At 1.6kg, I found it too heavy to hold up while reading it in bed and having recently sprained my knee, I was not keen on ‘tenting’ my knees to lean the book against. At over 1000 pages long, it took two renewals at the library to complete, and even now as I write this review, it is overdue.

So why did I so willingly heft it off the floor each night, to keep reading? Quite simply, because I enjoyed the company of the author and once I gave up any idea of following an argument, I just floated along on his observations – a little bit like reading Proust, really.

The lengthy subtitle of the book is “Journeys Beyond Evil: The Desk Killers in History and Today” and this is the overall theme of the book, but it is intermingled with reminiscence, nostalgia, regret and curiosity as he travels around Europe researching his topic. It could just as easily be a travel book. Attracted to maps from childhood, he maps out the sites of concentration camps of Europe and their accompanying industrial infrastructure, he follows forced marches and places himself in massacre sites, forming his own mental and physical maps. And it could just as easily be an ecological/environmental diary of landscape. For him, the environment in which he holes up to immerse himself in his writing – the Suffolk Coast for Book One in winter; Pembrokeshire in spring in Book Two- becomes part of the narrative as well, particularly when he writes about a hurricane that buffets the cottage in which he is sheltering when the power goes out in the house he has rented.

Gretton himself is an activist as well as author and teacher. In 1983 he co-founded the political arts organization Platform, which describes itself on its website as bringing together workers and communities “to create new, liberatory systems that tackle injustice and climate breakdown”. In particular, it confronts the power of transnational corporations. You can see this emphasis coming through in this book in its focus on corporations; especially that of the German manufacturing, banking and insurance companies that still exist powerfully today, which had flourished in Nazi Germany through its contacts and contracts with the government. He also targets Shell and its influence in Nigeria that looked the other way during the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the activist who died trying to save his land and people from the destruction of Shell’s oil conglomerate. The “desk killers’ that he focuses on here are the managing directors of wealthy, multinational corporations, many of whom he interviewed after they have retired, and the often invisible bureaucrats and office workers who followed the procedures and timetables and the accountants in charge of the financial accounts that made genocide an anonymized, abstraction. There are no innocents here.

Although his focus is on corporations, he also hones in on individuals – most particularly Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, whose own biography and the work of Gitta Sereny has thrown up so many questions about culpability and redemption. He also spends quite a bit of time on the Wannsee Conference of 20th January 1942, which pulled together as many agencies as possible to discuss the implementation of ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish question’. Of the 15 attendees (there were actually 16, counting the unnamed stenographer), seven held PhDs in law. We only know this because just one copy survived of the thirty copies made at the time. He parallels this with a discussion of the two Washington lawyers, who prepared memos for the Bush administration discussing the legalities and grey areas of torture and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.

Then there are the individuals who survived: Primo Levi, Jan Karski, Elie Wiesel. Some of the testimony in these books kept me awake at night, after turning off the light.

He concentrates predominantly on Nazi Germany, and on Nigeria to a lesser degree. But he also turns back to history to take up Gunther Grass’ question about how young people grow up in Britain and know so little about the long history of crimes during the colonial period. He looks at the East India Company and the Opium Wars, the slave trade, the Irish Famine, and what he claims as “the genocide” and the “extermination” of the Tasmanian Aboriginals (a contested question here in Australia, where there is a continuing Tasmanian First Peoples community today)[As an aside, if you’re looking a desk killers, I would have focused more on later bureaucrats and Protectors in the late 19th-early 20th century Australia whose arbitrary and desk-bound decisions did just as much as outright massacres to distort indigenous families and expunge language and culture]. He spends quite a bit of time on Namibia (former German South West Africa) where the systematic killing, detention and forced labour of the Nama and Herero people was a forerunner to actions undertaken by the Nazi government. He looks at the French massacre of between 120 and 200 Algerian demonstrators by the French government on 17 October 1961.

All of which would be pretty grim, continuing for over 1000 pages, if this were all that this book contains. But it’s not. There’s beautiful writing about his father and a wistful recounting of his own torrid, passionate affair with a younger man. There’s information dumps at time, as if you’re reading someone’s research notes. Interwoven are his own childhood memories, his political stances, travel-journey type entries.

It’s big; it’s untidy; it’s completely indulgent but it’s also thought-provoking and very easy to read. My complaints about weight and heft not withstanding, I missed hearing Dan Gretton’s voice when I finished. But perhaps there’s more: apparently this 1000+ pager is just Volume 1 of a two-volume publication. Hopefully the next volume will have an index, which I really missed in a book of this size. Will I read Volume II when it comes out: most probably, if I still have the strength to hold a 1.6 kg book!

My rating: Hard to say. 9?

Read because: I read or heard someone raving about it- can’t remember who.

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‘Silence is my Habitat’ by Jessica White

Posted on April 8, 2026 | 1 comment
2025, 150p.

The subtitle of this book is ‘ecobiographical essays’. What a many-stranded thing biography is becoming! Jessica White, the author of these essays and other academic work in the field, defines ‘ecobiography’ on her website in this way:

While a biography chronicles a person’s life, an ecobiography details how a person’s sense of self is shaped by their environment. My forthcoming essay collection, Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays, details how deafness shapes my relationship with different environments, such as the bush, bodies of water, archives, and institutions.

This double focus – i.e. deafness or Deafness (she notes the distinctions of that capital letter) as both identity and medical condition, and the physical environment- permeates these essays, which range across both her personal and academic experiences. I admit that I’m not absolutely convinced that her approach needs the specific genre-descriptor of ‘ecobiography’ : is really a separate strand of biography or just a particular consciousness of environment on the part of the subject or on the part of the narrator?. In locating them as essays, she picks up on the etymology of the word ‘essay’ as her attempt to ‘trial’ and ‘try’ her responses to a subject, and to explore her own identity as woman and writer, after the death of her mother.

There are a number of themes that emerge through this collection of eleven essays. The first, as suggested by the title, is that of deafness. “Silence is my habitat” was a comment that the poet Judith Wright made to Heather Rusden in a 1990 interview, one of the few times that Wright discussed her increasing deafness. Reflecting, perhaps, the emphasis on identity in the intervening thirty years, White seems almost frustrated that there are no specific references to deafness in Wright’s poetry, although she and other scholars have detected it in the ‘negative poetics’ of her work- singing the praises of the natural world while acknowledging the inadequacy of words to describe it. When asked why she had not chosen to write about her deafness, Wright replied “Oh, I wouldn’t say it was a choice. I haven’t felt that it was an important part of my life in that way” (p.74). That could not be said of Jessica White. She writes of how meningitis as a three-year old robbed her of all hearing in her left ear, half the hearing in her right ear, and possibly some scarring on her brain (p. 17). She consciously seeks out writers who are conscious of sound and deafness including Fiona Murphy, poet Ilya Kamisky and the online Deaf History Collection of the writing, images and artefacts of deaf people. She explains the difficulties of architecture and the design of academic teaching at university, and how it has exacerbated the workload of a deaf tutor. She titles her essay about the shutdown of borders with COVID as “We Were All Deaf During the Pandemic”.

White shares with Judith Wright a deep environmental consciousness, which she expresses in her essay on Golden Orb spiders in her essay “Quintessence” and bird song- which she can hear- in the essay “On the Wing”. This alertness to the natural world runs through White’s academic work on Georgiana Molloy, the West Australian botanist who arrived in 1830. Molloy appears in the chapters “Intertwining” and ” Unseamed”, while White’s own grappling with her research and writing about Georgiana Molloy filters across different essays. In “Intertwining” where she describes Molloy’s experience in childbirth and loss of infant children, she explores – very honestly- her own yearning for a child, set against her partner’s refusal to have children, and her own awareness that the time for having a child was passing.

“The Breath Goes Now” focusses on her mother’s death: always a confronting event, the tenor of which is often shaped by the relationship between mother and child. In White’s case, it was her mother who was encouraging her to finish her book on Georgiana Molloy before she died- a comment made only half in just as her mother’s chronic lung weakness was curtailing her activities and life. Indeed, these essays emerged as a response to her mother’s death, when she found the architecture of her book and all those words collapsing. Ah Jessica- the death of the remaining parent is another event to be confronted yet, with all the questions it raises about your own identity as child when you no longer have parents.

These essays are beautifully written, as they approach her overarching themes tentatively, circling around them, advancing towards them, then retreating or splintering off to other safer ground before moving forward (literally essay-ing) again. Most of them are between 10-20 pages in length containing many short shards, like a flow of thoughts, asterisked to separate each one from the other, which is a writing style and fashion I am becoming less enthusiastic about, I must admit. They are very honest, especially those describing her relationship with her partner Bruce: perhaps too honest, when she re-reads them twenty years hence? But this honesty is also what gives the reader a feeling of intimacy with the author: a Garner-esque feeling that you have been having a good chat with an intelligent, sensitive friend.

My rating: 8.5/10

Read because: I encountered Jessica in the Australian Womens Writers Challenge a few years back, was aware of her work on Georgiana Molloy, and was interested to see what she’s doing now. Or does that just mean ‘nosiness’?

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‘The Last Painting of Sara de Vos’ by Dominic Smith

Posted on April 5, 2026 | Leave a comment
2016, 372 p.

I guess that you could say that if a historical fiction book sends you off to internet-land to find out which bits are true, then it has worked. I should have taken more notice of the author’s note which explains that Sara de Vos is a fictional, composite character. But I didn’t and so, yes, there I was half-way through the book, searching high and low for the paintings that are described in the text, trying to find out more about Sara de Vos, only to find myself directed back to publicity for Dominic Smith’s book. So, to save you the search, Sara de Vos is a 17th century fictional character and the paintings described don’t exist, although there are similarities with the few details known about Sara van Baalbergen. Like the Sara de Vos of this book, she was admitted to the the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke and married a fellow painter. None of her works have survived.

SPOILER ALERT

But in Dominic Smith’s book, three of Sara de Vos’ paintings still exist- but which ones? The book opens in New York in November 1957, as a painting by Sara de Vos is stolen from the luxurious apartment of wealthy Marty de Groot, plucked from the wall above the marital bed. It ends up in the lands of Australian art historian, Ellie who is studying de Vos, freelancing in art restoration as a sideline activity. Her rather dodgy associate, Gabriel, asks her to make a copy of it. She asks no questions about where it comes from or to whom it belongs: she doesn’t want to know. It’s an opportunity to really study a de Vos painting close-up but it’s a decision that she regrets for the rest of her life, especially as her career blossoms and she becomes a noted academic and curator of Dutch Golden Age paintings. After assuming that the copy (i.e. forgery) has been resolved through her own contact- and more- with de Groot, it seems that her indiscretion of some forty years earlier is about to bring her undone as what she fears is two copies of the same painting are heading towards Australia, for an exhibition that she is curating at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

So what was this painting, source of both desire, possession and trepidation? It was At the Edge of the Wood, thought to be painted by Sara de Vos in 1636, depicting a young girl standing against a silver birch, watching skaters on a frozen river as the sun sets. Through the flashbacks to the 1630s that are interwoven through the book, we learn that it was painted surreptitiously by Sara de Vos, who although admitted to the Guild of St Luke- something almost unheard of for a woman- was expected to paint still life pictures within a domestic setting. She and her husband Barent had been expelled from the Guild for painting unsigned landscapes outside of the Guild strictures and her life is falling apart. She is still grieving the loss of her seven year old daughter, and deeply in debt, Barent has deserted her, leaving her to make her own way.

The book, then, has three intersecting strands: Sara’s story in 17th century Netherlands; Ellie’s life in 1950s Europe and ill-advised venture into forgery and later interaction with the rightful owner Marty de Groot, and 2000 in Sydney when three de Vos paintings are heading to upend Ellie’s career. In places it reads like a mystery, and historical fiction, in other places a critique of the art scene and collecting practices, and an exploration of grief and regret. He writes exceptionally well of Ellie as an awkward, young and inexperienced girl far from home, embarrassed by her virginity and alternately attracted to and repelled by an older man who is interested in her for his own purposes. He does conversation well, and his descriptions of paintings are so crisp that you think that you might have seen them once- even though, of course, you couldn’t have. At times his description of painting and forgery techniques drag a little, but they do pay testament to the research that he has undertaken as part of writing this book.

And what was Sara de Vos’ last painting? Ah well, you’ll have to read the book…

My rating:8/10

Read because: Book Group selection, sourced from Yarra Plenty Library Book Groups collection.

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