Especially in the wake of the centenary of WWI, there has been no shortage of books about men’s experience in war. They’re usually big fat books, often named for a battleground in large letters, with the (male) author’s name is letters much the same size. Women’s experience- especially the experience of women who didn’t go to war but instead stayed home waiting- is less often documented. And the Women Watch and Wait is based in suburban Coburg in Melbourne, and it captures well the dissonance between suburban life and battlefields far away, the agony of curtailed and delayed communication, and the emotional peril of allowing yourself to fall in love.
Kate is a young country girl who has been sent down to Coburg as company for her Aunt Mary, whose two sons have volunteered and been sent overseas as part of the first contingent of soldiers to be deployed. As well as the excitement of staying in Melbourne, Kate is excited that her boyfriend from Gippsland, Jack, has been sent to the nearby Broadmeadows Training Camp, and there are more opportunities for them to meet up before he leaves than there would have been had she still been in Gippsland. Time is rushing on, as the rumours of the trainees’ departure mount, and she is excited when Jack proposes to her. At this stage, there is still hope that ‘the boys’ will be back by Christmas, and there seems such pressure of time to commit, to get married and start up a married life. Jack leaves with his detachment, and Kate is left with her aunt, working in her aunt’s grocer shop, teetering between excitement to receive mail, and yet fearing what news the mail might bring. News does arrive, and she, along with the women among whom she is living, has to readjust her hopes for the future.
I’m probably a particularly critical audience for this book, because as it happens I’ve been writing a column for the newsletter of my local historical society for the past ten years or so that looks at events at the local Heidelberg level one hundred years previously. Just as Catherine Meyrick would have done in researching this book, I’ve followed the local newspapers closely, consciously looking for women’s experiences, reading every page and even the advertisements and classifieds. This has given me a close-up knowledge of one suburb, (albeit a few suburbs away from Coburg) and how the world-wide events of WWI impacted the social and political life of a community. I must say that she has nailed the local aspects, and I found myself nodding away to parallels that arose in her book which also occurred in Heidelberg.
The book is arranged chronologically by year, starting in 1914 and going through to 1919 with an epilogue. It has over sixty short chapters- too many, I feel- and the frequent changes of location made it feel a little like a screenplay. She integrates political events of the day, like the conscription debates, into her narrative and, again, she captures this big event playing out in small halls and conversations so well. I particularly liked that she explored the WWI experience from the Catholic viewpoint, something that is not represented well in the local newspapers that I have read.
It’s a difficult thing to undertake huge amounts of research, then to let it go in case it smothers the narrative (an advantage that historians have over novelists). At times I felt that small local details were made too explicit, but I’m also conscious that I may have read this book differently to the way that other people might read it. At an emotional level, the book rang true with love, fear, vulnerability and strength being lived out not in trenches but in suburban houses and streetscapes.
Well, not only have I fallen behind with my Waking Up Challenges, but I’ve fallen behind in writing about them as well.
Day 5’s challenge was to sit it somewhere for five minutes and write down exactly what I saw,—objects, movement, colors, textures, light- then to write about what emotions or expectations might be influencing what I saw, and how. Well, I sat at my desk, the same desk that I’m typing this at. I have slimline venetian blinds, and so the light was being sliced up horizontally. What I could mostly see was mess: printoffs of music, little notes to myself, piles of folders, books I’ve read and haven’t decided what to do with. Around me, more piles of books and an assortment of ukuleles. My feelings about them all? Obligation and “I should”s. The one thing that made me smile was looking at my desk calendar which I had printed off with photographs of my grandchildren. Listening to the reflection that accompanied this challenge, I must be a person who sees through a glass darkly (which is not, I must admit, how I perceive myself). Or perhaps I should just clean up this desk (another should).
I skipped Day 6 but it looks interesting, and I might come back to that one.
Day 7 was called ‘Leveraging Boredom’ and the challenge was not to use my phone FOR A WHOLE DAY. Well, I soon decided that I couldn’t possibly do that, but what I could do was to not go onto social media, no Wordle, no Google, no Solitaire, You Tube or The Guardian website for a day. It was disturbingly difficult but I’ve been hating how much time I waste each day, especially at night when I get tired. So, instead of scrolling, I finished reading a book I’ve been enjoying and felt much better for doing so. Instead of watching TV and playing Solitaire at the same time, I actually watched the Foreign Correspondent episode I was watching.
Day 3 of my Real Attention Challenge. Today I had to do one task about 80% as well as I otherwise would, and let that be good enough. Huh!
This is my bed. I loathe doonas: give me blankets any day. And don’t get me started on the absence of a top sheet in hotels. Layers, people, layers.
Anyway, we make the bed every morning: sheets (bottom and top), two blankets and a doona in a doona cover more for appearance than anything else. I tuck my blankets in, but Steve doesn’t. Worse still, you can see the blankets hanging out of the side of the bed reflected in the mirror because there’s never enough doona on his side. So every morning I spend a little while walking around the bed, making sure that the doona is even on both sides and tucking in any errant blankets on Steve’s side. I smooth out the wrinkles from the doona, and all is right with the world.
Did it matter? You bet it did. Every time I walked into the bedroom, I’d see the blankets hanging out of the side of the bed and it took every bit of self-control not to run round there, tuck them in and straighten up the doona. It put me in a bad mood for the whole day.
Then just to add insult to injury, I listened to the short reflection that went with this activity, where a man with a smooth voice rationalized his failure to wake up on time on a Saturday morning and get his kid out out of bed to go to kick-boxing by saying that it didn’t REALLY matter. Yes it did! You’re the father- show some responsibility! And if that kick-boxing instructor was a volunteer, that’s a million times worse. That’s the deal: you get your kid here on time, and I’ll teach him.
Does it matter? Yes.
Grrr. I don’t think this challenge is very good for me.
It’s interesting that my copy of The Man in the High Castle should be issued under the Penguin Science Fiction impress, because it doesn’t seem particularly science-fiction-y to me. It was first published in 1962 and envisaged a world in which Germany and Japan had triumphed during WW2, with the action occurring taking place in 1962- i.e. contemporaneously. To my mind it was more an alternative history or counterfactual than science fiction.
The narrative traces through several characters who live in an America partitioned into three. Nazi Germany controls the East Coast, as well as Russia and Western Europe. The east coast itself is divided in two: the remnant United States of America up to the Canadian border, and ‘The South’, both ruled by puppet regimes under Nazi control. The West Coast had been annexed by the Japanese as the Pacific States of America. Between the two regimes is the buffer Rocky Mountain states, where American citizens continue a depressed, oppressed existence.
The novel starts in the Pacific States of America, where businessmen Robert Childan runs a business selling pre-invasion Americana, most of which is counterfeit and manufactured by the Wyndam-Matson Corporation. Childan is contacted by Japanese trade official Nobusuke Tagomi, who seeks a gift to impress a Swedish industrialist named Baynes, who is coming to visit. Baynes, however, is really a Nazi defector who is coming to warn of the incipient activation of Operation Dandelion, a plan for Germany to attack Japan and attain world domination. Meanwhile, there is a banned publication, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy which is circulating surreptitiously, which posits that in fact, the Allies did win. Ostensibly the book is written by Hawthorne Abendsen, the eponymous ‘Man in the High Castle’. Juliana, the ex-wife of secret Jew Frank Frinke, is fascinated by the book, and travels unwittingly with an under-cover Nazi to meet the author, unaware that her companion Joe Cinnadella, has been sent by the Germans to execute Abendsen. It is a repressive and violent society, which has reverted to almost-magical times, with the I-Ching, a book of Chinese divination, guiding the actions of many of the characters, both Japanese and American.
The scenario is fascinating, but unfortunately the characters are not. I confess to losing track of who was who, and I am still bemused by the authorship of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, although I think that the author intended this ambiguity. The characters are rather mechanical, and it is difficult to feel any connection with any of them. The end of the book becomes bogged down with a fairly metaphysical exploration of the I-Ching.
However, the book does form the political and ‘historical’ background to the excellent Prime four-season series, which managed in its first episode to evoke more sympathy and coherence to the characters than the whole book did. Interestingly, they turned The Grasshopper Lies Heavy into a film, instead of a book, which in a way made the whole scenario more implausible- who has a film projector hanging around in their apartment? Surely a book would be more portable and thus more dangerous. To eke four seasons of the TV series out of a fairly slim volume, obviously it was taken far beyond the original book, but to my mind so far, with far more success in character development than the book. So, for me, The Man in the High Castle is a book with a really fascinating premise which didn’t quite manage to develop its characters, or integrate its metaphysical aspects.
My rating: 6/10
Sourced from: My husband’s bookshelves. I had heard about the book, but never read it or seen a copy.
The twentieth anniversary republishing of this book has come and gone, it having first appeared in Dutch in 1995. I had heard of it, and knew that it dealt with Nazism, and assumed at first that it would be set during World War II. It came as a surprise, then, that it was set in the present day (in 1995) with themes that are probably even more resonant and urgent today than they were in 1995. My copy, collected no doubt from my local little library, had obviously been a school set-text, and the book won many Young Adult awards on its publication.
Lucas has accompanied his mother to Montourin, a small Belgian provincial town, to clean out his late grandfather’s house. The book opens with Lucas standing by the side of the road as his friend Caitlin is brought back from hospital after an accident that occurred three weeks earlier. The narrative then spirals back to explain who Lucas and Caitlin are, how she was injured, and Lucas’ part in that injury. It is written in first person, from Lucas’ viewpoint, thus aligning us as readers with his perspective of events in the weeks leading up to Caitlin’s injury.
On arriving at Montourin, he finds that there is an unspoken edge of hostility towards him and his family, exemplified by Soeur, an old nun in the nearby convent in which American-born Caitlin is staying. He does not understand why, and as he sees his mother sorting through and destroying his grandfather’s documents and belongings, he knows that something is being kept from him. He gradually learns that, after the death of one of his children during the hungry days of WW2 occupation, his grandfather denounced fifteen Jewish children and the nuns who were hiding him in the neighbouring convent, out of grief and resentment that these Jewish children were taking food rations that could have saved his daughter. Some in present-day Montourin shunned his grandfather for this action; others supported it.
Their support was generally unspoken, but outright admiration was voiced by Benoit, a young man older than Lucas, who combines menace, charisma and manipulation in his neo-Nazi outlook. Lucas is drawn into Benoit’s sphere and becomes involved, with varying degrees of culpability, in Benoit’s terrorist plans against the Moroccan refugees who have moved into the town. At the same time, he is attracted to the inscrutable Caitlin who fluctuates between flirt, friend and heartbreaker as she, too, seems to be becoming friendly with Benoit. But when Caitlin is involved in a single-car accident- the reasons for which are unclear- Lucas acts decisively, if precipitously, in a way that will change the rest of Caitlin’s life. I’m not really quite sure about the ending of the book, which is deliberately left obscure, but which struck me as a little melodramatic.
Since 1995 the presence of African refugees in Europe has only increased, as has the prominence and apparent electoral acceptability of neo-Nazi parties. This book is a warning against the slow slide towards fascism, especially for young men with no responsibilities who yearn acceptance from other young men. I can see why it would be chosen as an upper-school text, especially given its urgent relevance today. I’m not sure how it would be received by high school students though- it moves fairly slowly, and I wasn’t particularly satisfied by the ending.
Cormoran Strike books, written by J. K. Rowling under the nom-de-plume Robert Galbraith, are for me a long-form type of comfort food. Very long-form, because like the Harry Potter books, these seem to be getting longer. Lethal White is the fourth in the series, and it comes in at a hefty 784 pages.
Detective stories are a genre, with recurring themes which are both part of their appeal and part of their frustration. In the case of the Cormoran Strike books, how long can Galbraith keep the unresolved sexual tension (UST) between Strike and Robin going? This book starts off with Robin’s wedding to the insipid Matthew. Surely a marriage should dampen any progress in the UST realm, but this is not to be. But how many more volumes can Galbraith keep this going? And surely if the UST becomes resolved, that will be the end of their relationship because who wants a married-couple detective agency? And on an unrelated theme, why doesn’t Comoran do something about his throbbing stump where his leg was amputated? Surely additional surgery is in order, or a new prosthesis or something! Moreover, how many more times is Robin going to end up in peril as the case draws to its close? Although, having said that, poor Nikki in ‘Silent Witness’ spends much of her time kidnapped and threatened- it seems to go with the territory that the female investigator- while her male counterparts need to work out how to ‘rescue’ her. But I guess that all these formulaic aspects are part of the genre.
Set during the London Olympic Games, Strike is approached by mentally ill man, Billy, who says that he saw a child being buried years ago. Is it true? At the same time, Strike contracted by politician Jasper Chiswell (Chizzle) to investigate blackmail for something that was not illegal years ago, but now is. As it turns out, the two cases are connected.
Meanwhile, Robin has married Matthew-and she is unhappy from the start. Strike encounters his past lover, Charlotte, who is now pregnant with twins and unhappily married too. Strike is in an uncommitted relationship with Lorelei, who wants more from the relationship than he can give.
Galbraith introduces a huge range of characters into the book, but somehow manages to keep control of them all. I like the way that the author has Comoran or Robin sit down and mentally draw the whole case together, neatly encapsulating it for this reader who can find herself completely confused. It’s like drawing a deep breath, before plunging underwater again. Within this complex ensemble, Galbraith has a number of pairs (fitting, really, for a parliamentary detective story where ‘pairing’ is part of the political scene)
Each chapter is headed by an epigraph from Henrik Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm (1886). I must admit that I don’t know the play, and Dr Beatrice Groves has done the work of drawing the links between Lethal White and Ibsen’s play. As with many of Galbraith’s books, the reason for the title is with-held until well into the book. In this case, we need to wait until Chapter 42 to learn that Lethal White is not a form of cocaine, or the nick-name of a thug, but instead is a horse disease.
I’m not normally a detective-fiction fan, but Galbraiths are different. I will keep turning to the Cormoran Strike series when I have tired of other genres or want to escape from non-fiction into a well-plotted if formulaic series that keeps me reading until far too late at night.
I often find that there is a sort of brittle formality about books written in early-mid twentieth-century Australia, echoing the slightly-British, self-conscious tone of newsreaders and documentary narrators that you hear in black-and-white footage from the 50s and 60s.This book, first published in 1966, and reissued by Text in 2012 starts off in a similar way. The scenario of two sisters, Laura and Clare, being brought into the headmistress’s office to hear of their father’s death and their removal from school evoked children’s books of the past (Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, anyone?) The focus at first is on sixteen-year old Laura, who had had aspirations to be a doctor like her father, and she is more conscious of the economic and social fall in their circumstances when their fey and selfish mother turns to Laura to be the breadwinner of the family. At this stage, neither Clare nor her mother are particularly well-rounded characters, Clare (seven years younger than Laura) being merely childish and her mother Stella a languorous, demanding presence who decides to sail back ‘home’ to England, leaving the girls to fend for themselves.
Instead of a medical degree at university, Laura finds herself packed off to business college and a secretarial job at a box factory, owned by Felix Shaw. Although she feels no great attraction to him, when Felix Shaw proposes to her – largely as an economic arrangement – she accepts, seeing it as a means of financial security for herself and her younger sister Clare. Felix offers to support Clare to go to university- a dream that Laura had had for herself- but this promise is soon broken once Laura and Felix are married. I can’t really decide whether Felix is a complex character or a caricature. He almost willfully makes unwise financial business decisions, selling off mildly successful companies to spivs and incompetents, while expecting Laura to pick up a heavier work burden as a result. They are not poor: they live in a large house overlooking Sydney Harbour, and he enjoys driving luxury cars dangerously while abusing everyone else on the road. He sells the house – the one thing that Laura loved- from under her to underline her financial impotence in this dependent relationship.
Harrower skillfully juxtaposes the glittering sunshine of the Harbour, with the darkness of their house. It is as if a shadow lies over this beautiful home and its extensive gardens. The book is set in the 1940’s and 50’s, and although neighbours are aware of the arguments next door, nothing is done to help them. In fact, in spite of living in the midst of other houses and working with other women, Laura and Clare are socially isolated, with Felix’s happiness their main concern.
The term ‘coercive control’ did not exist when Harrower wrote this book, but all the signs are there: the emotional blackmail over the prospect, later withdrawn, of Clare’s university education; the changeability of mood; the oscillation between extravagant generosity and meanness; the rigidity in expectations for the women in his life compared with his own recklessness. Felix is physically violent towards Laura, and the possibility of sexual violence towards her sister Clare lurks in the shadows.
Most insidious of all is Laura’s own coercion of Clare to remain in the family home as a peacemaker and mediator, and her adoption of Felix’s own sense of victimhood as a reason to make her stay. Felix has made his own wife the enforcer. At times Laura dreams of an escape, but faced with the consequences, she represses her own will and becomes an extension of Felix.
Meanwhile, as the novel progresses, Clare becomes the main focus when she resists the narrowing of her own horizons and as all of the colour leaches out of Laura. The arrival of Bernard, a young refugee, to stay in the house to convalesce breaks the spell, even though for a while it seems that he, too, is going to be lured into Felix’s orbit by the promise of academic support, similar to that offered to Clare. In fact, there is a latent thread of repressed homosexuality in most of Felix’s relationships with other men, be they fellow entrepreneurs or employees.
The threat of violence runs through this book and it is clearly felt by Laura and Clare as they scramble to meet Felix’s standards and demands. Knowing, as we do, the physical danger to women at the point where they finally decide to leave a coercive partner, as readers we feel unsafe as Laura, and increasingly, Clare contemplate an escape
The title ‘The Watch Tower’ is interesting, because it can be interpreted in many ways. It has connotations of punishment and incarceration, which the beautiful house on the Harbour becomes. But it also suggests a lookout as well, and as the book progresses Clare is increasingly looking out, to a wider world, even while Laura becomes more deeply entombed in her relationship with Felix.
So, for a book which I thought was going to be rather insipid and old-fashioned, I found a book that in many ways predates Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do (my review here). I read this as part of the Ivanhoe Reading Circle’s program, and one of the questions raised was whether we know of another Australian book of similar vintage that deals with the issue of what we now recognize and name as ‘coercive control’. I haven’t read it, but I suspect that Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera treads similar ground (The Pastor’s Wife (my review here) does too, to a lesser extent. I can see why Michael Heyward at Text Publishing re-published this book. Unfortunately, it reads just as true today – possibly even more true now – as it would have sixty years ago.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: Brotherhood Books
Read because: November book selection for Ivanhoe Reading Circle.
When my son said that this was his favourite book of 2025, I took notice. When I told him that I had borrowed it from the library, he hedged a bit, saying that he didn’t know if I’d like it. He’s wrong: I loved it. I could barely put it down over the three days that I read it: sand, beach and grandchildren notwithstanding.
I’m not a particularly science-y person, but this book is far more than ‘just’ science. Like a Mark Kurlansky book (think Salt, Cod etc.) it combines science, history and travel, but it also packs quite a bit of political analysis as well. I’m writing this on 5 January 2025 as the reality of Trump’s bombing of Venezuela and imposition of US oil interests is sinking in, and Conway’s comments about autarky (i.e. the policy of being self-sufficient that underlies Trump’s ‘America First’ policy) seem particular apposite right now. Ed Conway is the economics and data editor of Sky News and a columnist for The Times (London), which are right-wing connections that do not engender my trust. However these contexts are not particularly apparent in Conway’s book, except perhaps for the ultimately optimistic viewpoint with which he ends the book. Quite apart from his politics, his journalist background equips him with the eagle eye for a good anecdote and the ability to bring the narrative back onto more general-reader territory when it threatens to wade into technologically and scientific details.
In the introduction he identifies himself as a denizen of what he calls ‘the ethereal world’:
…a rather lovely place, a world of ideas. In the ethereal world we sell services and management and administration; we build apps and websites; we transfer money from one column to another; we trade mostly in thoughts and advice, in haircuts and food delivery (p.13)
He distinguishes this from ‘The Material World’, which undergirds our everyday lives by actually making things work, often through companies whose names are unknown to us, but which are more important than the brands that use their output:
…operating stuff in the Material World….you have to dig and extract stuff and turn it into physical products…a difficult, dangerous and dirty business (p.14)
He chooses six raw materials – sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium- which are not only important substances in the world, but are the primary building blocks of our world and have fuelled the prosperity of empires in the past. They are the very hardest to replace. These six materials form the basis of products several steps up the chain: sand, for instance, is the basis of silica which underpins optical fibre and the concrete and cement that makes modern high-rise cities possible. In analysing these materials, he traces back their ‘discovery’ to ancient civilizations, often by accident or through observation, before being intentionally created with processes that often form the basis of present methods. Concrete, for example, was ‘discovered’ three times: there is evidence of cement use in Neolithic ruins in Turkey that date back more than 10,000 years; the Bedouins created concrete-like structures in 6500BCE, and the Roman used a form of concrete in many of their buildings before the recipe was lost for hundreds of years following the fall of the Roman Empire. The discovery of On Architecture by Roman architect Vitruvius, and its translation into French and English, triggered the 18th and 19th century quest for new concoctions to replicate or surpass the Roman recipe (p. 75). Perhaps because he is a British journalist, he highlights deposits in the British Isles rather more than we would think of today, and both German and British ingenuity are highlighted, as well as American. Thomas Edison makes several appearances, but the complete absence of any women at all highlights the male-dominated nature of science and invention.
The structure of the book has a sense of symmetry that I find appealing: six raw materials examined in six parts, each with three chapters, an introduction to the book and a conclusion. I can’t vouch for the reliability of his information, but each time I exclaimed “Hey, did you know…?” to my much more scientifically-oriented husband, he already did know and what he knew aligned with the information in the book.
Unlike many in the media companies and publications he works for, Conrad does not deny the reality of climate change and the environmental degradation that occurs as part of the mining and extraction of his six materials. However, as he points out, the production of an environmentally harmful material was often prompted by the desire to replace an earlier, even more harmful energy source which would have brought about an even more devastating environmental impact. e.g. coal replacing wood, kerosene replacing whale oil, or polyethylene replacing gutta-percha from the rapidly disappearing Malaysian guttapercha tree. It is this pattern that contributes to his optimism about our ability to mitigate climate change in the long term, if we can overcome the short-termism of the political cycle and make financial and lifestyle sacrifices for an unborn generation- actions for which there is equivocal evidence so far.
However, he is not completely Panglossian. Australia, and Rio Tinto in particular come in for trenchant criticism over the destruction of the Juukan Gorge for the extraction of iron ore. As he points out, part of the luxury of living in the ‘Ethereal World’ is that we can shunt the environmental impacts of our lifestyle into the ‘Material World’ which often happens to be a third world country. Wealthier countries, like Chile and Australia to a lesser extent are starting to question the environmental costs when the extraction occurs in their country instead of someone else’s.
Despite the shift towards autarky promoted by Trump in particular, and turbo-charged by the world’s realization of the precariousness of supply chains during COVID, the story of these six materials is also the story of globalization. Here in Australia we see the shipping out of raw materials (especially to China), but the circulation is much broader than this, with the finished product integrating multiple processing steps from right across the globe. Such processes make the world more inter-connected than America/Australia/China first politicians might desire.
The Material World is – well, material- but it has political implications. While the rest of the world panics about China’s dominance of the battery supply chain, China panics about its reliance on the rest of the world for its raw materials- hence China’s Belt and Road strategy. Particularly in relation to the production of advanced silicon chips, security is uppermost in the attempt to prevent industrial espionage and to make sure that China does not gain this ability. Ironically, China is unlikely to develop the hyper-pure silicon from which the silicon chip ‘wafers’ are made because the crucibles to melt it are available (so far) only from a single site at Spruce Pine, in North Carolina, operated by only two companies, Sibelco (Belgium) and the Quartz Corp (Norway). This raises the unsettling question of the effects of a landslide on the road that winds to Spruce Pine, or the malicious spraying of the mines with a particular chemical. But this single source is unusual: there is usually another source or another product to take the place of a threatened material. His six materials highlight the international reach of companies based in one country, and the diversification of such companies into new processes as part of the evolution of products and materials.
This evolution of products and materials lies at the heart of the optimism of the book. We have worked out how to turn complex products into commonplace and increasingly cheap items (for example solar panels and semiconductors). Although he has chosen six materials for his analysis, they are intertwined: batteries are just as reliant on copper as they are on the lithium inside them; steel inside concrete is a better building product than either alone. Even though we need to keep extracting materials to make the very ambitious transition to net zero, with solutions like hydrogen and wind turbines requiring huge amounts of energy, there is one major difference. In the past we used fossil fuels to burn, but now we are using them to build.
For years, people assumed that it would be impossible to make iron and steel at the scale we can today. Rediscovering the recipe for concrete seemed like a pipe dream. Scientists doubted that we would ever be able to tame extreme ultraviolet light, let alone use it to mass produce silicon chips. Will we look back in a decade or two and wonder why we ever fretted about producing enough hydrogen to back up the world’s energy grids, or why we struggled to generate copious power from the hot rocks deep beneath the earth?…If there is one lesson you should take from our trip through the Material World, it is that with enough time, effort and collaboration, these things usually happen….Humankind has, since its very first days, left a visible imprint on the earth. There is no point pretending otherwise. It is part of our story. It has allowed us to live longer, more comfortable lives than ever before. It has enabled us to fill the planet with more individuals than anyone could have imagines, with 8 billion brains and 8 billion sets of hopes and dreams. We are also capable of living far more sustainable, cleaner lives, diminishing our destruction and contamination and living in closer harmony with the planet. We will do so not by eschewing or dismissing the Material World, but by embracing it and understanding it. (p. 443)
I don’t very often read a book just on the basis of a blurb alone, but in this case I did. Paul Lynch, the author ofProphet Song spoke highly of Quinn’s book in author interviews and his blurb describing it as ‘a mesmerising feat of imagination and a masterful debut’ graces the back cover. It’s a beautiful front cover, and the yellow butterflies evoke Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to whom this book owes quite a debt.
Anaïs Echeverría Gest has returned to her childhood home in Peru after an absence of several years in England. The family is expecting her to sign the papers authorizing the sale and inevitable demolition of her grandmother’s house, la Casa Echeverría in order to free up the inheritance. The house, which is a character in its own right, is a large yellow colonial mansion and garden overlooking the shacks and slums built by squatters on the dry plain behind the house called Los Polvos de Nadie y Nunca (the dusts of no-one and nothing) during the Agrarian Reforms of the 1960s. As soon as she steps over the threshold, she is assailed by the memories of the house- not just her life in that house, but the memories of the house itself- and the ghosts of family members and employees who had lived and worked there. Time seems to stretch and contract in the house; one minute the rooms are intact and the furniture dusted and lights illuminated, and the next minute the house is derelict and dark.
Anaïs has left her fiance Rupert Napier, a thoroughly English gentleman, in order to come home to Peru. She is curiously detached from Rupert, telling herself that she loves him but never really feeling it, and she is likewise ambivalent about her pregnancy. The future baby exists as a little pink fish in the corner of her vision, and as her pregnancy progresses the little fish changes shape until it is a huge, snapping lobster. When Rupert comes over to Peru, probably at the request of the extended family who are frustrated by Anaïs’ refusal to sign the papers, he brings with him all the Englishness of his family, an Englishness that Anaïs resented in her own English father’s refusal to acknowledge his second family in Peru, choosing instead to stay with his wife in England.
The house, built at the turn of the century, has seen multiple deaths, that are only just hinted at: a baby whose cries still echo through the house, the suicide of her Aunt Paloma and most importantly, the death of a 17 year old maid, Julia Álvarez Yupanqui who died when she fell (jumped?) from a window. As Julia falls from the window, the Earth falls away from her and is like a sheet of cloth; she sees Time “spread like an ocean, flowing this way and that, tossing up moments, driving them forwards on the crest of a wave then swallowing them again, pulling them back into the deep“. (p. 96) A disembodied presence, Julia wanders unseen through generations of the Echeverría family, right back to the Conquistadors and through centuries of dispossession, enslavement, poverty and violence. The people of Los Polvos, who saw her fall, believe that she has become a saint- and indeed, it seems that she has, as she walks unseen through history dispensing kindnesses as she passes.
It was not only the Polvorinos who saw her fall: Anaïs did too, crouched under a geranium bush. She becomes electively mute, and is seen by a succession of psychiatrists and doctors who try to make her talk. Anaïs could see the ghosts in the house and the adult Anaïs has a tenuous grasp on reality, and you are never really sure whether she is going mad.
So the story shifts back and forth between two realities: that English reality (denoted by chapters with English numerals) and the Peruvian reality in chapters with Spanish numbers. The Spanish chapters follow the disembodied Julia Álvarez Yupanqui and take us on a meandering journey through Peruvian history. There is an exhaustive list of characters in the appendix of the book, divided into the Echeverría family and a longer list of historical and imagined characters who feature in small, passing vignettes as Julia crosses the earth. These vignettes are beautifully written and draw you in just enough to feel disappointed as Julia passes by, leaving that narrative thread hanging loose. Reflecting the tragedy and complexity (and complicity) of various generations of the Echeverría family, there is a convoluted family tree that challenges the one found in One Hundred Years of Solitude with its seventeen Aureliano Buendías.
The complexity of this book is both its great strength, and its greatest weakness, particularly as the book goes on. The last quarter of the book is Julia’s journey through history, and Anaïs’ story drops away. I found myself having to consult the list of characters at the back of the book, having ‘met’ these characters earlier in the book but having forgotten them in the cavalcade of ghosts passing by. I enjoyed the frequent use of Spanish, which she paraphrases in the following sentences, but I don’t know if I would have felt that way had I not been able to read Spanish.
Because this book is just as much about time, land and colonialism as it is about individual people, it reminded me of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, which was similarly shape-shifting and which caused you to think “am I even understanding this?” In fact, I often said that out loud while I picked it up each night, enjoying the experience of reading it, but unable to hold it all in my head.
I like magical realism, but many people do not. This is a really ambitious, fearless book, and I suspect it is more memorable for its overall shape than for its details. It is flawed, but it’s very good.
My rating: 9/10
Read because: I loved Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song and I thought- if he loves this book, perhaps I will too. I did.
This book should have ticked all my boxes: set in Melbourne, written by a much-loved Australian author, written with a nanna’s-eye (and I do embrace my nanna-dom). But it sounded as if it would be a bit slight, and I probably wouldn’t have read it had it not been an Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection, read and discussed amongst all the other nannas.
Even Garner herself sounded a bit ambivalent about the whole project, admitting that she wrote the book because she needed something to do, but didn’t have the energy to embark on one of her investigative non-fiction books. It traces the footy season of her grandson Amby’s under-16s footy team, at the J. J. Holland reserve in Kensington. As she always does, Garner conveys a strong sense of suburban place, and in this case, the football ground she describes so closely fitted with the oval that I walk through to my volunteer job in Kensington that I actually researched the club and found that, indeed, it is the J. J. Holland reserve. She’s there for the team’s matches; she’s there for their training sessions on cold weekday nights, and she’s there for the conversations in the car driving there and back.
Although ostensibly about football, it’s even more about young men growing into masculinity, and at under-16 Amby is at that liminal stage, with signs of the little boy still visible under the swagger of adolescence. Garner’s daughter lives next door, and she has a strong and enviable relationship with her grandchildren, especially Amby. At the same time, she is aging and feeling irrelevant and frustrated by her increasing deafness. In places she veers into idealization of these young men, seeing them as warriors, and even admitting to a slightly ‘off’ recognition of their adolescent sexuality (Garner has always been, and remains, perhaps more honest than she should be).
It is the football season that gives this book its beginning and ending, and the book was more a reflection than a plot-driven story. I had feared that it would be slight, and unfortunately it was.
My rating: 6.5/10
Sourced from: purchased e-book
Read because: October 2025 selection for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 