What a strange book. I picked it up because I had heard that it was a best seller in China, and I was curious to know why. To be honest, having finished it, I still don’t know why this memoir was such a runaway success there, and who its Chinese readers might be.
The story itself is quite simple. The author is a young college-graduate who moves from home to take up a series of poorly-paid unskilled positions over a twenty-year period. His jobs include working in a logistics firm unpacking and packing items, delivering parcels for several courier companies, working in a hotel restaurant, selling bicycles, doing computer-aided artwork on comics, working in a bakery and working in his own companies selling clothes in a shopping mall. As he shifts from province to province seeking work, his accommodation often consists of an apartment partitioned into 5 sq metre ‘rooms’ with only space for a bed and a desk with shared bathroom facilities and only sometimes kitchen facilities. Sometimes he sleeps at the workplace. When working at the bicycle shop, for a 72 hour week, his rent was 1500 yuan per month, leaving him 2000 yuan per month to live on. In some of his jobs, food was provided, although often it was food that was left over. In the logistics job, the work statistics are so harsh that there is no time for toilet breaks and the temperature is so high that he sweats continuously. The hours are punishingly long. The courier job has expectations of customer service while at the same time offering such a pittance that compliance with any customer request puts him out of pocket. Companies take advantage of a three-day unpaid trial period, sometimes there is medical insurance and sometimes not, and employers take any opportunity to ‘stiff’ their workers. Amongst his co-workers he witnesses theft and dishonesty, but says nothing because he has to work alongside them. As he says:
The moral of the this story: When disgruntled, the lowly among us only have each other to pick on, because going after the powerful will only cost us in the end. (p. 202)
I see that the author was born in 1979, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution and at the start of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms that took China from a command economy to a market economy. He mentions a sister only once, but he does speak quite a bit about his parents. I found myself wondering how parents from such a starkly different type of economy would advise and equip their children to work in a new economy, unlike anything they had known (much like us as parents and grandparents parenting children who will work in an AI economy that is foreign to us).
My parents had only ever taught me to be kind to others. They failed to mention I also had to stick up for my own interests…Maybe because nobody had ever sat me known to talk it through before. My parents wouldn’t go near the topic. They had spent their whole lives in the same work units; the market economy was completely alien to them. …The thing was, my family was from out of town and had no relatives that lived nearby. My parents are unsociable folk, too. (p. 198)… I was starting to feel like my parents were to blame for all the rotten luck I had with people and work. They should have warned me. Their lessons on how to act had zero grounding in this world. They had said nothing about going after what I wanted, only that I should be frugal. What they told me was the wrong way to behave was exactly how everybody was behaving, and society wasn’t punishing them for it but rewarding the, and not just rewarding them, punishing me (p. 222)
Nonetheless, he did have his parents as a fall-back. Burnt out by the culture of exploitation and competitiveness, intimidated by the effort of having to interact with other people and yearning to have time to read and write, he returns to his parents’ home and in his own words, stays indoors for almost two years (p. 264). He later borrows money from them to set up one of his ultimately unsuccessful businesses. He does have a couple of girlfriends: indeed, it is because he wants to be with one of his girlfriends that he shifts from Guandong Province in 2018 to Beijing. He breaks up with another girlfriend when he is living and working in the store in Nanning, and she shifts overseas. He does not have friends, beyond his workmates and at work he is just as likely to make enemies as friends. I found myself wondering if his flight back to his parents’ home was an early example of tang ping, or lying flat culture, a rejection of societal pressure to over-work, a phenomenon in China particularly after COVID.
The structure of the book is unusual and rather hard to follow with a rather strange arrangement of chapters. The book sprang from a blog post written in 2020 (Chapter 2?) so perhaps that might explain why it is structured as it is. His story starts off in 2017 while he is working in Foshan as a package handler, but the chapter is written when he has been in Beijing for three years. The second chapter focuses on his time as a delivery worker in Beijing, followed his work in a convenience store, then in a neighbouring bike shop in Shanghai in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 is headed ‘Other Jobs I’ve Had’ where he lists jobs 1-8 (1: waiter 2: clothing store assistant 3: gas station attendant 4: fast food chain delivery 5: popsicle wholesaler 6: 3D architectural renderings 7: comic book artist 8: graphic designer for a startup magazine about anime). Jobs 9-11 were:
9: copy shop attendant
10: return to the anime magazine
11: his own clothing store. He then has a lengthy section about writing and reading, complete with extracts from two pieces of his writing. He then continues with the job countdown-
12: (2011) online store
13: property management at a mall
14: bakery shop
15: deli stall
16: selling rear view car cameras and car fresheners
17: the logistics job described in Chapter 1 with D company
18: parcel delivery with S Company
19: parcel delivery with Pinjun Express, both described in Chapter 2.
In the closing pages of the book, as he loses his job with Pingun Express, he observes that he had alternated between two mutually exclusive states: working and writing. He tended to do either one or the other, spending half of his life free of work, and the other half consumed by it (p. 317). He considers the nature of “freedom”, which he considers a matter of consciousness, rather than of what you possess. He observes:
So, by freedom, I suppose I am referring to a personal pursuit of sorts, and self-realization through consciousness of our individual selves- the spiritual essence that differentiates one person from another. If more of us when after this kind of freedom, the world would be a more diverse, more inclusive, more equal and richer place. It would be all the more colorful. The pursuit of freedom is what shapes our individual trajectories, our personal goals, and stops us from having to vie for space on a single narrow path…Maybe it is something we can strive for but never quite attain, and maybe I will never reach it in my whole life, but that doesn’t matter. Because the pursuit is more precious than the attainment, and this holds true for every person and for the world as a whole- like our ideals and our convictions, it is the fulcrum of our lives, not their content (p. 315)
Is this valourization of freedom the appeal of the book to a Chinese audience, I wonder? I can’t even think of the word ‘freedom’ without hearing it come out of George W. Bush’s mouth, and it seems almost antithetical to the choreographed military displays in Tienanmen Square. Is the book’s popularity a somewhat subversive embrace of that? Or was the book a bestseller in China when the recipients of packages ordered online became curious about the lives of the people who delivered them to them? Or is the book popular with the tang ping generation, with him forging the way? At times the book reminded me of George Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris but this is no dilettante’s or journalist’s curiosity. The jobs came first and the writing emerged later, and it seems that the author is still oscillating between the two, without the choice to leave it all behind as Orwell did.
Most of all, it made me realize how little I know about China.
My rating: 7/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
Read because: I had read an article in the Guardian about it.
I had heard a lot about this book, and it hadn’t registered with me that it was written in 2010, which in these days of deluge of new titles is an eon ago. I don’t know why I didn’t read it at the time- it must not have appealed to me- and I’m not sure that it appeals to me now, sixteen years later. The title evoked a mafia, true-crime book, and the blurbs crowed with praise without actually denoting what the book was. I’m not sure that I even know what the book is, either.
The book starts with the two characters who are the linchpins of the book. The first is Sasha, personal assistant to a record producer who ‘picks up’ two things in the first chapter: a younger man called Alex whom she takes home for sex, and a wallet stolen from the handbag of another woman while she was in the toilet. The second is Bennie Salazar, Sasha’s former employer, who founded Sow’s Ear records and is still immersed in the music of the 1970s. These two characters are the linchpin, but only because the other characters have or have had a tangential relationship with them in the forty-odd years covered by this book. It’s like a book of six-degrees-of-separation, or a form of narrative doodling, where the author creates a character and then plays with them. The thirteen chapters each have a different character as their focus, slipping backwards and forwards in time, occasionally voiced in the first person, or in the format of a Powerpoint presentation. There are a lot of characters, and as you’re reading you’re not quite sure whether you’ve met them before. There are two musicians, washed up by the 1990s: Scotty, a semi-derelict who goes back to Bennie the record producer and launches a last open-air concert, hyped by influencers, and Bosco, a member of the Conduits, the bank that launched Bennie’s career who wants to commit suicide on stage but ends up recovering from cancer. There’s Dolly the publicist who holds a disastrous party and ends up in jail for negligence, who becomes a publicist for a dictator. There’s Rob, Sasha’s ‘pretend boyfriend’ at college, who dies in a drug-fuelled swim in the East River. There’s Lou, the hedonistic record producer, thrice married and the father of six children.
The ‘goon squad’ of the title is not a bunch of mafia thugs, as I suspected, but instead is time.‘Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?’ Two of the characters- Scotty and Bosco- both question how they started off at one place and ended up at another. When Scotty, disheveled and disturbed turns up in Bennie’s plush office he says
…I came for this reason: I want to know what happened between A and B…A is when we were both in the band, chasing the same girl. B is now. (p. 107)
Bosco wants to produce a new record ‘A to B’
The album’s called A to B, right? And that’s the question I want to hit straight on: How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about? Let’s not pretend it didn’t happen…Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression? (p. 134)
This question lies at the heart of the book- and indeed, in the heart of anyone over the age of, say, fifty who can look back at their life and wonder how they got there. What are the hinge-points; what are the inevitabilities? What if…what if.. It’s a big question but I don’t know if this multi-layered, tangled story is the best way to address it. There is a discipline to the book, and an overarching structure, but you have to work very hard to find it.
This book was discussed at the recent Ivanhoe Reading Circle meeting (which I missed) and both the presenter there, and several blogs I’ve read (including Louise at A Strong Belief in Wicker) felt that the book definitely deserved a second reading. Indeed some people have spent an inordinate amount of time reconstructing the timelines of the characters of the stories. I can see, just by flipping through the first chapter, that a second reading would yield a tapestry of threads that I hadn’t noticed on the first reading. But for me, a first reading should bring its own rewards, rather than needing a second reading to make it intelligible. As it is, each chapter is self-contained, and reads almost as a short story in its own right (indeed, several were published in the New Yorker as stand-alones). In a world drowning in new publications, I don’t know if any author has the right to demand two readings of any book to make it coherent: a second reading should be a joyful choice, not a post-requisite.
My rating: 7/10
Sourced from: purchased second hand from Brotherhood Books
Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle August 2026 selection.
How wonderful to invent a term, and then find out that it has been declared Word of the Year, as the Macquarie Dictionary did in 2024. ‘Enshittification’ captures perfectly our frustration and impotence when huge multinational create and change their own rules, deliberately degrading their products and holding us hostage to price-hikes, leaving us to rue that we had ever been drawn in by what seemed to hold such promise.
Enshittification has four stages:
First, platforms are good to their users
Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers
Next, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves
Finally, they have become a great pile of shit (p. 10)
His main targets are Facebook, Amazon, IPhone (Apple), Twitter and Google. He addresses the first four as these as separate case studies, but for all of them the process of enshittification is the same. But it’s not just these four companies: in effect, anything that is ‘smart’ holds you hostage to the manufacturer, even though you have purchased it. So we see a SNOO Smark Sleeper ‘smart’ basinette that rocks a baby to sleep suddenly demanding $20 per month for them NOT to disable the features, if you should dare to use it for a second child, or sell it to someone else. We see ‘smart’ cars requiring mechanics who have the capabilities to repair them to apply (and you to pay) for a code to override the engine being disabled. Even artificial eyes, grafted onto patients’ eyes, can be ‘bricked’ by the company should it fall into difficulties. If “there’s an app for that” then use of the app propels you into a different legal realm where the design of the app pre-empts all other claims to intellectual property of the content.
The constant screwing of competitors, users and customers; the cynical takeover of competitors and quashing of their products; the ongoing adjustment of ‘terms and conditions’ where ongoing participation signifies consent – these companies are appalling. But the cost of leaving, and the withdrawal of face-to-face alternatives by government departments and banks draws us more and more under their control.
The book is not necessarily about AI but he introduces the idea of ‘reverse centaur’ here, which he takes up in more detail in his most recent book The Reverse Centaur’sGuide to Life After AI. The mythological centaur, you’ll remember, was a man on top with the legs of a horse, or in automation terms, a worker who has some kind of tool that lets them do more than they could do on their own (p. 121). A farmer with a tractor is a centaur, and so too is a cashier using a register that adds up the groceries and tells how much change to give (oh! how I would have loved such a machine when I worked the register at a neighbourhood hardware store!) [On the other hand, I could and still can work out change, which is something that I doubt many cashiers could do today]. But a reverse-centaur is a machine that uses a human to accomplish more than the machine could manage on its own (p.120). In particular he looks at the working conditions of Amazon delivery drivers, as exposed on the documentary The Great Amazon Heist, which you can watch on SBS On Demand.
He picks up on Yanis Varoufakis’ thesis expressed in Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, where technology was transformed after the 2008 GFC from a primarily profit-seeking enterprise to a primarily rent-seeking enterprise (p. 197) Because the tech giants control the ‘factors of production’, they are imposing a form of rent onto the rest of us. Microsoft Office can now only be bought as a subscription, not an outright product that you own; a purchased e-book can be removed from the platform whenever the app decides; a digital subscription to a magazine only gives you access to the archive as long as you keep paying the subscription fee.
The power of these tech companies over politics is daunting. When Doctorow was half-way through the writing of this book Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term where, with Elon Musk, he set about dismantling the legislative restraints that had been placed on some of their power during the Biden era. The legal power they wield is disproportionate too, and often wielded against third parties: a blind person is allowed to break proprietary software to upload it to a text reader, but a sighted person risks huge fines in assisting them to do so. The financial penalty for an author allowing a purchaser to move their purchased audiobook to another platform break DRM software would cover the purchase of thousands of CDs.
After cataloguing this world of woe, Doctorow finishes by outlining the ‘cure’: a noble enterprise, but one which he does not carry off convincingly. He argues that competition, regulation, interoperability and tech worker power are four forces which discipline technology firms. The only competition I can see amongst the tech firms is their race to enshittify everything they touch. Thank heavens for government-owned enterprises like ABC, BBC and to a lesser extent SBS, but they are under huge pressure from tech firms and the media companies that are in a love/hate relationship with them to enshittify their own offerings. Competition regulators all over the world seem to be toothless. Privacy policies are presented as an all-or-nothing ‘agreement’ and I don’t think that it’s in the conspiracy-realm theory to suspect that your phone is listening to you when an email advertising something you discussed suddenly appears in your inbox. When tech-bros parade around with their heavy-framed smart glasses, all privacy is gone. Attempts to force tech companies to pay for news led to Facebook pulling community pages before grudgingly allowing access again- and this fight hasn’t finished. Attempts to limit social media for children (which I always saw as more a way of empowering parents and schools to say ‘no’ than actually outsmarting a tech-savvy adolescent) are being adopted, but always under scrutiny for their ineffectiveness- which lies in the lands of the tech companies anyway. He looks at the successful Silicon Valley tech workers who walked out a Google as a form of power, but he’s looking at dead men (because they are overwhelmingly men) walking. AI will sap any power they might have.
This is an eye-opening book, but I came away feeling enshittified, rather than empowered. I know that his next book The Reverse Centaur’sGuide to Life After AI takes up the issue of AI, but I fear that his faith in ‘cures’, which are being dismantled and rendered impotent before our very eyes, is not reassuring. But if you want specific examples of enshittification (an index would have been much appreciated) and to feel oppressed and angry, then this is your book.
My rating: 8.5/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library (at least he’ll get the Lending Rights payment directly, I guess)
Read because: I had heard the hype about the term.
I don’t think that I’ve ever started a review of a history book with a spoiler alert, but in the case of Alice’s dreaming, I do. You might think that there could not possibly be spoilers in a history, but when a history is as multilayered and reflective as this one is, you’re best off reading it yourself without knowing what’s going to come next. A master historian- one of my favourites- Tom Griffiths takes us on a journey through anthropology, history, literary production, detective work, personal biography, family history and historiography all in one book. Like Griffith himself in writing this book, I found myself alternating between having my eyes opened, and then stepping back with skepticism and disillusionment, until being persuaded to join Griffiths where he sits historically now.
So don’t read my review- read the book yourself, and then come back to me.
2026, 320 p. & notes
SPOILERS
As a fourteen-year-old, the future historian Tom Griffiths came across a dusty book on the ‘Australiana’ shelf of his school library called Where Strange Paths Go Down. It was written by Alice Duncan-Kemp, drawing on her childhood memories from the 1900s growing up among the Mithaka people on Mooraberrie station in the Channel Country of outback south-west Queensland. Little was Griffiths to know that the information in the book that he held in his hands in 1971, and the other volumes published by Alice Duncan-Kemp, would be drawn upon (albeit not exclusively) when the Mithaka people finally gained Native Title over 33,752 square kilometres of Mithaka Country in 2015. Nor could he have known that he, himself, would be writing about Alice’s work in 2026.
Alice Duncan was born in 1901, one of three sisters and one brother who died of diphtheria in 1903, aged four. Her parents were Scottish-born William Duncan and Laura Davis, the daughter of a Sydney solicitor. William had managed pastoral properties in the outback, and in the early 1900s purchased Mooraberrie. Although he owned Mooraberrie, he always considered the Mithaka as the rightful owners and referred to them as the ‘landlords’. He died in 1907. Although Laura considered selling Mooraberrie after her husband’s death, she instead stayed there with her daughters. The children were brought up by First Peoples nursemaids, particularly Mary Ann who, with her head wrapped in a scarf and her long skirts, took the three girls on Country, with the other children who lived around the station where their parents worked either as domestic labour or as stockmen. When she was older, Alice joined the pastoral workers, both Black and white, camping out during mustering. Thus Alice was imbued with a strong sense of Country that never left her: observant about plants and animals, alert to colour and landscape, free to accompany the station workers on mustering work around neighbouring stations and waterholes, curious about the stories, practices and lifestyles of the Mithaka people but aware that some knowledge was kept from her.
The Mithaka considered Alice to be ‘twice-born’ because as a two-year-old she escaped drowning in the flooded Bulloo River when the buggy in which she was lying collided with a bauhinia tree in the swirling waters. When she was a little older, she was given a secret name ‘Pinningarra’ in a ceremony on a sacred flat-topped lookout, and she was called ‘Mingari’ in everyday life. At the age of five, she experienced a vision, with an authoritative voice declaring ‘You must go among these people and learn from, and about them, before it is too late’. She believed that she ‘was endowed with the breath of the Dreamtime’. (p. 60-61) She was to have a third revelation when she returned to Mooraberrie after two years schooling in Sydney and saw it all afresh (p. 159)
Part One of the book, titled ‘Alice in Wonderland’ draws on Duncan-Kemp’s writings to describe the world of Mooraberrie. In three chapters ‘Walkabout’ ‘Mustering’ and ‘Dreamings’, Griffith has crafted an integrated picture of Duncan-Kemp’s childhood from her works. The world that Alice describes is, indeed, a ‘wonderland’, with a bounty of food available, full of birds and studded with plants that burst from the soil when the water arrived, and criss-crossed by people. She describes the goose corroboree of the Pelican people at Kingadurka Lagoon, where 1000 magpie geese were killed as part of the ceremony- but importantly, only 1000 birds as these were breeding birds. She is told the Dreamtime stories, particularly that of Yammacoona, who Mary Ann told her was “Mother- all the same- you and me” (p. 65)
This Wonderland was not to last. In Part Two ‘War and Peace’, Griffiths steps into his Historian Shoes to locate Duncan-Kemp’s books amongst the historiography of Indigenous/Settler relations. Chapter 4 ‘Invasion’ places Mooraberrie station among the spread of cattle, “the shock troops of empire” (p. 56) as pastoralists followed the footsteps of white explorers who were themselves following the Aboriginal routes pointed out by their guides (p. 89). There was a link between the pastoralists of the Western District of Victoria and the Channel Country as the sons of the 1840s Port Phillip pastoralists followed their fathers’ example in ‘opening up’ the outback in Queensland and northern NSW. In fact, one of the Mooraberrie workers, Moses, had been taken down to Victoria and educated there (possibly at Scots College?) and could break into a clipped, English accent when he wanted to. Along with the pastoralists came frontier violence. There had always been violence on the frontier, but “on the Australian frontier, early violence was often intimate and personal. You generally knew who you were killing” (p. 95)
This wasn’t the case with the Native Police, described variously as a ‘paramilitary’ or ‘counter-insurgency’ (p. 95) force, comprised of men drawn from other districts, under the control of white commanders (see David Marr’s Killing for Country review here) who acted under the direct control of the Executive Council of the colonial administration (p.95). More than a dozen massacres are known and remembered in the Channel Country, targeting large ceremonial gatherings, transforming the waterholes -‘the precious jewels of the arid country’- into a grim rollcall of places of death.
Massacres are not bullet points on a map with great blanks in-between in spite of the ubiquitous settler folklore that ‘there were no massacres here.’ Rather, they were rivers of blood flooding the whole landscape, braided streams and channels of violence greater than we know and more horrific than we can imagine. War was everywhere at once and more than human, desecrating the Dreaming and eviscerating the ecology. Massacres were epicentres of disruption that generated aftershocks that are still felt today. (p. 100)
Into this tragedy, Alice Duncan-Kemp brings us two points of light. The historian in Tom Griffiths takes both these events, and locates them amongst other similar events that took place in other places in Australia.
The first event is the Debney Peace, a gathering that took place on a tract of Country, the ‘Common Ground’ of the Pharmaleechie Channel in May 1889, some twelve years before Alice’s birth, and thus unwitnessed by her. George Debney, the white leaseholder of Monkira Station rode 100 kilometres to participate in a Mulka-mukana, meaning ‘the vow of peace and the seal of goodwill’ orchestrated by First Nations people, and grafted onto an existing event in the Aboriginal calendar. It was possibly as much about the relationships between various First Nations clans as about dealing with the white intruders (p.109) but Debney played his allocated role in this highly orchestrated and ritualized ceremony as a pastoralist who was known for his protection of local people from the Native Mounted Police.
The second event was her description of Kooroongoora, a resistance cult that emerged around the turn of the century, where First Nations workers who had been ‘taken in’ by the pastoral stations were challenged to return to traditional practices and to resist the power of white culture and white law. There is no ‘smoothing of the dying pillow’ here: instead it is an act of rebellion and resistance, drawing on traditional law rather than the white man’s weapons.
The Kooroongoora sang and danced its way across Country; it was a cult, a millenarian movement anticipating social change; a travelling series of storytelling performances that strengthen the Law. It brought bird and wind corroborees and vivid historical pageants that were practised and perfected in secrecy among the sandhills and then performed with power and precision. (p.146)
Part 3 ‘Stranger than Fiction’ returns us to Alice and her writing- and here, things take a strange turn. Alice began writing her first book Our Sandhill Country in 1910, carrying a notebook with her, and creating a “midden of fragmentary scribblings” that she left for her descendants (p. 162). It was a book that would not be published until 1933, just before and as part of the wave of interest in outback Australia, exemplified by Walkabout magazine (1934-1974) whose tattered copies lingered in the doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms of my childhood. By now she was married, with her own children, and there was talk of selling Mooraberrie to Sidney Kidman, who had coveted it for years. Her next book did not appear for nearly twenty years, although she had conveyed her knowledge through correspondence with Dr L. P. Winterbotham, the honorary curator of anthropology at the University of Queensland, who peppered her with questions about rituals, ceremonies and beliefs. She was aware of the work of pioneering white women anthropologists like Daisy Bates, Olive Pink (see my review here), Ursula McConnel, Phyllis Caberry and Catherine Berndt. She was also part of the lineage of daughters of pastoral families who became champions of Aboriginal people, like Jessie Street, Mary Bennett (see my review here and here), Mary Durack and Judith Wright. Where Strange Paths Go Down was printed in 1952, followed by Our Channel Country in 1961. In 1964 a large combined volume of Alice’s first two books was released, with a rearrangement of the chapters and the insertion of drawings and illustrations drawn from all over Australia, mixing up rare photographs of Mithaka people that Alice would have known, with generic portraits from anywhere.
But it was her next manuscript, submitted to Angus and Robertson, that was to change the course of her career, and Tom Griffiths’ research. Although originally accepted for publication, it was then returned to her and her contract cancelled when similarities were noted between her work and that of the Laurens Van der Post (much admired to Prince and now King Charles). Duncan-Kemp did not challenge the claim and said that she had not understood copyright. Griffiths provides samples of Van der Post’s and Duncan-Kemp’s work side by side, and it’s quite clear that there are identical phrases in both. But who copied whom? Van de Post has himself been described as a serial plagiarist, liar and fabricator (p. 194) Did he draw on Duncan-Kemp’s work, or did she draw on his? Here Griffiths turns detective, looking at the circulation of Duncan-Kemp’s drafts. It seems that she drew on other authors here in Australia too, and the uncertainty about the provenance of her work has led to it occupying an ambiguous position: dismissed by some as scribbling, yet by others including Dr Winterbotham who described her letters to him as “the fullest and most scientific knowledge that I have received from any correspondent”.
So what is a historian to do? Griffiths, who has been deeply influenced as a historian by what came to be known as the ‘Melbourne School’ of ethnographic history could not be further from the Keith Windschuttle-led History Wars of the late 1990s, where errors and infelicities were seized on with glee. But parts of Duncan-Kemp’s work do lie at the intersection of history, politics and legal process. If her work is fraudulent, then that matters. As Griffiths points out “Detail matters very much in history…No detail, no history:
It is detail that imprints the story in memory and song. History, like ecology, is grainy and organic: it is earthed in locale and it’s about intimate communities and relationships, both visible and unseen. To glimpse an understanding of history’s workings, you need to build a whole picture, detail by detail. A single detail can change things, releasing chaos in the system. So yes, detail matters. (p.248)
And so, in Ch 9 he embarks on a slow reading of the whole of Alice Duncan-Kemp’s writings- published and unpublished, working page by page, with pen in hand. He draws maps; he records minor figures, he looks for collaborations, he checks again meteorological and astronomical data, and verifies Alice’s observations against more ‘scientific’ observations.
Part 4: The Way Home draws together family and country history. In a way, these chapters seem a little out of place- particularly the ‘Family’ chapter, but as Griffiths points out:
Under Australian law, the winning of Native Title requires family history. It requires proof of social and geographical continuity in a landscape of savage dispossession…In 2015 Native Title was awarded to Mithaka people after a decade and a half of hard work in archives and the bush, much of it documenting family history, discerning genealogies and mapping connections to Country. (p. 286)
Chapter 10 ‘Family” starts with Griffiths visiting Channel Country in 2000, hoping to meet Aboriginal residents of the district, only to be told that they had ‘disappeared’ and that any Aboriginal people who might happen to be there had drifted in from elsewhere. (In fact, we had a similar experience in Cobram in Victoria about 10 years ago when we were told with a straight face that there were no Aboriginal people there). In a rather stinging rebuke, he takes aim at the commemorative histories written by Peter and Sheila Forrest, including one for the Barcoo Shire Council in 2014, which Griffiths sees as a
…third wave of dispossession, following murder and removal: a tsunami of white history commissioned by government. Just as squatters seized land in a flood of registered documentary claims, so have shires consolidated conquest by publishing official histories (p.260)
And so Chapter 10 is a counter to these commemorative histories and the family histories of pastoralists by bringing forward the parallel family histories of Mithika families as a counterpoint to that of the Duncan-Kemp family. In these ‘other’ family histories, we see the history of Indigenous policy writ large. Bill Gorringe, who probably would have known of the Duncan family on Mooraberrie and possibly even met young Alice, was born under a giant coolibah tree near Eyre Creek at around the same time as Alice was born. His father, a white boundary rider on the rabbit-proof fence, had to struggle against the state authorities to marry Nuncaleer, a Mithaka woman who was removed from him several times. Bill was educated at Birdsville, and boarded at the Bluff, a station managed by young Celsus Morton, known for his casual violence and cruelty (whose story was told by his great-great grandson Rick Morton in One Hundred Years of Dirt– my review here). Within Bill’s extended family we see removals and exile to Palm Island, the fractionalization of identities into ratios of blood, and the geographical and social separation of pastoralists from their workers. Uncle Bill and his second wife Aunty Ivy became important teachers of culture to the Aboriginal diaspora, and the Gorringe family was interlinked with the Debney family of the Debney Peace.
Chapter 11 ‘Country’ returns to where Alice started with her descriptions of plants, insects, water and humans. Griffiths had visited it in 2009, when
I had to look at everything out of the corner of my eye. Every historical fact and insight had to be gained against the inclination of the pastoral landholders (p.306)
But by 2019, he visited at the invitation of Josh Gorringe as part of a research team led by Mithaka people, and he found that his “eccentric private interest had become a vital common quest” (p. 306) Alice’s identification of the numbers of original Aboriginal populations had been supported by records of Europeans visiting the regions; her archeological reports had been bolstered by archeological studies on Mithika Country. And so how does Griffiths himself locate Alice’s writings?
Alice was trying to write a world outside the text into text, and a world outside her culture into the history of her country- and, indeed, into the history of the world. It was an act of translation, fraught and difficult, imperfect, a labour of love (p. 235)…Alice struggled all her life to deal with the strangeness and immensity of her childhood experience, which was so out of kilter with her society and so readily denied by it. She wrestled with ways of understanding and depicting the Mithaka world and was in awe of its majesty. She was not in control of her material: it overwhelmed her. Every thread of culture she tried to follow was unending and so intertwined with other threads that she became entangled- not in a mess, but in a deeply complex, cohesive world undergoing traumatic change. A world she knew only partially and was challenged to encapsulate (p. 238)
Yes, she drew on other works, especially those of Lauren van der Post as a stylistic device to ‘improve’ her own writing; and yes, she co-opted the work of other anthropologists without attribution. Yes, she included things that she did not witness herself, although others did. But
…Alice participated in the most profound and important of Australian conversations: that between extraordinary First Nations individuals and curious newcomers like the Duncans who were identified as potential brokers of knowledge under threat. For Alice it was a respectful conversation about everything that matters- about life, cosmology and Country, about the earth and the stars, the past and the future (p. 320)
This is beautifully written, restrained, reflective book invites us into this conversation as well. I fully expect to see it up there next year on the various prize lists for Australian history. Read it.
When I think of ‘historical fiction’, I summon up women in richly brocaded gowns, like Anne Boleyn , or perhaps thin, grey-streaked victims of the industrial revolution stepping from the pages of a Zola or Dickens. I don’t really think of the 1960s as being ‘historical’ because I was there. But historical the 1960s certainly are, and that sense of a past that is somehow separate from us pervades this book.
The winter of 1962-3 was an intensely bitter one, with England plunged into freezing conditions between Boxing Day 1962 until the spring of 1963. Juliet Nicolson’s Frostquake (read my review here) describes the time perfectly, and made me even keener to read this Booker Prize 2025 nominated book. It’s strange that I have read so many books set in a future beset by a climate emergency, but here is one set in the past- and what a difference that makes.
The book revolves around two couples in a small rural English village. Dr Eric Parry is one of the two local doctors in the village . His late father had started work on the railways early, and he had worked his way up to superintendent of the Birmingham New Street railway. He is married to Irene, whose family are of a higher social status and whose sister Veronica lives in America. Despite Dr Parry’s surface respectability, he is involved in an affair with Alison, who lives nearby, with her wealthy but thuggish husband and son.
Across the fields is the second couple: Bill and Rita. Bill’s father was a post-war refugee, probably Jewish, who had made money under suspicious circumstances, including as a slum landlord. Despite his city upbringing and his private school education and largely as a way of distancing himself from his family, Bill had purchased a small, barely-productive dairy farm. He was joined there by Rita, who had worked as a dancer in a bar. She had her own complex background: working in a bar where the line between ‘hostess’ and prostitute was faint. A tawdry and circumscribed relation with the bar owner Eugene culminated in an abortion in a nondescript house where none of the women looked or spoke with each other. We meet her father, Martin, one of the patients at the nearby asylum, and we learn that he had been one of the photographers who had documentated the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp. He was the patient who found the body of Stephen Storey, a 19 year old man due for release, who had committed suicide using the medication prescribed by Dr. Parry, the event with which the book starts.
The war is not far distant in 1962. Buildings are still bombed out, there are still Anderson shelters in people’s backyards, and conditions are still straitened. This is not at all the Britain of Carnaby Street or the Beatles which lay just ahead. Belsen and WWII had shaken not only Martin Lee in the asylum, but the influx of refugees, like Bill’s father, and the presence of people with numbers tattooed on their arms reminded everyone of what they had just lived through, even if they had not fought themselves. In the same way that the snow falls on the countryside, muffling everything and making it shapeless, so too the knowledge – spoken and unspoken- of the evil that had been exposed is silenced, made secret and not spoken of.
The action of the novel takes place over a short period of time, starting on 7 December 1962 and finishing on 12 January 1963, with an undated epilogue. The focus of attention shifts from one character to another of the quartet – Eric Parry, Irene Parry, Bill Simmons and Rita Simmons (nee Lee)- and it did take me a little while to realize which character was central in each unnumbered, short chapter. In essence: the two women, both pregnant at the same time and neighbours, form a friendship, despite the difference in their backgrounds and social standing; Bill decides to approach his father for money to establish an automated mega-dairy to replace the family-bound nature of the small farm; Irene finds out about her husband’s affair and Rita returns to her old haunts and friends in the nightclub district.
These small, crystalline domestic dramas are overlaid by the historical detail of the times and a specific weather phenomenon. Miller has really done his homework here (aided, I wonder by Nicholson’s book?) and he captures perfectly the social practices (heavy smoking and drinking, even among pregnant women), the domestic decor of houses, the clothes, the entertainments and to a lesser degree the political climate of 1962/3. The quiet shutting down of transport, power and trains, evoking for present-day readers the COVID shutdown, is a historically accurate depiction of a climate disaster, without the theatrics.
I loved the combination of this minute detail alongside characters who are fleshed out, conflicted and flawed. I really enjoyed this book, and I’m looking forward to reading Flesh which pipped it for the Booker Prize in 2025. I think that, set in a time which is not often written about – that grey, straitened England of the early 1960s- this book is likely to stand the test of time. It’s a very quiet book, and all the more powerful for its restraint.
My rating: 9.5/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library. It has taken about six months for the loan to become available.
Read because: I knew it was a Booker Prize shortlisted book from 2025, and I very much enjoyed Juliet Nicholson’s Frostquake.
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.
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)
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?)
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.
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.
