Great autumn reads by Mark Laurie of South Seas Books at Port Elliot

by Mark Laurie of South Seas Books, Port Elliot.

by Martin McKenzie-Murray

Published by Scribe ISBN 9781925713831 $24.99

In his fictional memoir, Toby Beaverbrook writes of his idealism having been utterly destroyed by the all-too-immediate realisation that Australian politics operates far from the nobility of Churchill’s oratory and The West Wing’s smoothly competent liberal democracy. Turning rogue, he has brought his own serve of fear and loathing to Canberra as a gonzo speechwriter. He becomes increasingly inventive in his desire to be fired rather than resign and be forced to repay his relocation fee from Perth, that notorious incubator of policy and political purity. It has landed him in prison where his talents find him writing letters for inmates as an alternative to a shivving or being beaten with a sock full of batteries. He is also unwillingly subject to the forcefully applied and pithily expressed editorial control of his cellmate, Garry. A darkly humorous satire of the bi-partisan horrors of present-day Australian politics, it quite naturally references our ambivalence to water polo, the destructive power of decaying prawns, the barely noticeable effects of LSD on the political classes, Chiko Rolls, aqua phobia, Trump and the dawning menace of sentient PlayStations. The answer to all of this, of course, lies with a three-word slogan involving ‘growth’ and ‘sharks’. Author Martin McKenzie-Murray worked as a speechwriter himself before turning to journalism, notably as The Saturday Paper’s chief correspondent. This is his first work of fiction.

by K.M. Kruimink Published by Allen & Unwin ISBN 9781760877408 $29.99

The third son of minor English nobility searches for a lost woman in colonial Tasmania while simultaneously seeking to find and prove himself to another at home. As he travels, buffeted by experiences in this strange new place, he reflects on his life and family in England. In an inversion of the traditional frontier story, many of those he meets on this new edge of the civilised world are in some ways kinder, less grasping and more thoughtful than those at the centre of the family and tradition he has left behind, even as his trusting naivety meets with opportunism and villainy. In the quest for survival in a new land, the treachery of the title lies not in any particular country or in countries at all. It lies, rather, in those inhabiting them. More a literary work than historical fiction, this Vogel prize-winning debut novel by a young author is difficult to classify, although a lightly Gothic period piece leavened by sensitivity and wit represents my attempt to do so. In a further inversion of the frontier story tradition, the book is imbued with both feminine and feminist sensibilities while deftly avoiding the colonial trope of a menacing Australian bush. Its ending is a beautifully delivered ode to the bargain between freedom and responsibility, and to the immutable link between past and future.

by Richard Flanagan

Published by Knopf (an imprint of Penguin Random House) ISBN 9781760899943 $32.99

Francie is aged and dying but her children will not let her go, demanding ever greater medical interventions to keep her alive. As fire and extinctions blossom around them, and their own lives unravel and even disappear in parallel with all that is cool, beautiful and alive on the earth, keeping their mother with them becomes the only thing within their waning power and control. It is power they exercise ruthlessly, a ‘horrific goodness which only references their own unmet needs, of lives escapable only in the parallel worlds of dreams or social media’. In some ways this is a challenging book to read. Not for its language which swoops and climbs in easy rhythm, its beauty lulling and cajoling us through the pages; not for the storyline, its freshness and currency Tim Flannery has written a great many books and essays which draw from his ability to make science accessible, clear, contextualised, and immediately relevant, translating his considerable scholarly prowess to a body of work which has reached deep into public consciousness. Nowhere else is such ability more valuable than in dealing with climate change in Australia where a combination of misinformation, denialism, self-interest, and policy-capture have yielded destructive national politics and so many wasted years, in the face of grand scale heat, fire and floods. In this book, Flannery adds the passion of a conservationist to the evidencebased rationality of science to describe the considerable and growing climate change problem confronting us, a reality he describes as having already passed a point of no return and for which an urgent rear-guard action is now needed. He outlines convincing pathways, many of which are underway elsewhere in the world, for reducing emissions, capturing carbon, and adapting to the change already upon us. Having clearly had enough of diplomacy and appeasement, he calls out the impediments in our economy and what passes for leadership among our national polity, demanding that the science-based approach employed when combatting the pandemic be applied to the slower-moving but no less devastating climate challenge upon us. Please read this short, eloquent delineation of climate disease and cure. It will fill you with hope that much can be done as you do all you can to chase the likes of Taylor, Kelly, Fitzgibbon and Canavan from positions of influence over the future of our children and the country they are to inherit.

drawing us effortlessly along its multifaceted strands; nor for the descriptions of the beauty of the natural world it grieves. But Richard Flanagan has become our conscience and the magically real portrait he presents with his latest novel, of us, ‘the weight of our will’, of the society and environment we have wrought, is stark and unforgiving. At its heart, this is a book about loss and all the defensive mechanisms we have thrown up to deny, defer and deflect that, to mask our complicity in bringing about ‘the autumn of things’ that is now. It would take a determined degree of insensitivity to remain unmoved and unchanged.

by Tim Flannery

Published by Text Publishing ISBN 9781922330352 $24.99