Australian Book Review, September 2021 issue, no. 435 by Australian Book Review

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Megan Clement Macron’s pass sanitaire Diane Stubbings Peter Doherty’s pandemic Anita Punton Calibre Essay Prize runner-up James Ley Colm Tóibín’s new novel Yves Rees Airwave feminism

Facebook’s hubris

The imperial dreams of Mark Zuckerberg by Joel Deane

Camilla Chaudhary wins the Jolley Prize

Advances

trait of the father: a brilliant, narcissistic man, whose life was full

of contradictions. The author, his daughter, struggles to reconcile Ruminating on the inimitable critic Frank Kermode in 2020, the two halves of his life: the outgoing Olympic gymnast and the Peter Rose wrote: ‘What we read at difficult times in our lives paranoid recluse, the doting young father and the hostile man she – plague, insurrection, divorce, major root canal work, etc. – is remembers from later years. She never thought of mental illness always telling.’ One year on, our collective difficulties persist as the cause, and the suggestion unsettles her. Some remarkable (worsen even); many of us find ourselves under lockdown once photos taken by her father and hidden for decades only deepen more, isolated from the world and one another. Yet what we the ambiguity. read still matters, offering, as it always has, relief and solace during times of hardship. Fiction, perhaps more than any other As we augment ABR’s rich digital archive going back to genre, is a sort of bracing consolation. 1978, it’s good to feature some major essays and articles on the Each month, ABR celebrates and interrogates fiction. The Podcast. Many readers will have vivid memories of Elisabeth magazine also advances and rewards short fiction through the Holdsworth’s ‘An die NachgeABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story borenen: For Those Who Come Prize, one of the world’s leading After’, winner of the first Calibre prizes for an original short story. Prize back in 2007. Elisabeth’s This year the Jolley attracted a reading of her celebrated essay record field of 1,428 entries from is now featured on our Podcast. thirty-six different countries. In a More Calibre classics will follow. virtual event held on August 10, we introduced the three shortlisted Fellowship authors, whose stories all appear The ABR Patrons’ Fellowship, in the August issue: Camilla worth a total of $10,000, is open Chaudhary, Lauren Sarazen, and for a few more days. The FellowJohn Richards. ship – funded by the magazine’s Following the readings, Camilla generous Patrons – offers writers Chaudhary was announced as the a chance to publish a series of winner for her story ‘The Enemy, extended articles in the magazine Asyndeton’, for which she received under the editorial guidance of $6,000. This year’s judges (Gregory the ABR editors. The Fellow will Day, Melinda Harvey, and ElizaDonata Carrazza in her new bookshop make a broad contribution to beth Tan) described Chaudhary’s the magazine over the course of story as ‘a delightful, nimble story; twelve months. ABR welcomes proposals from emerging and the characters bristle with life, and the dialogue is crisply established Australian creative writers, freelance reviewers, rendered’. Lauren Sarazen was placed second ($4,000) for her journalists, commentators, and scholars. The Fellow’s articles story ‘There Are No Stars Here, Either’; and John Richards was will appear in the print magazine and online. placed third ($2,500) for ‘A Fall from Grace’. Our winner reads ‘The Enemy, Asyndeton’ on the ABR Pondering on the Murray Podcast. The other Jolley stories will follow in coming weeks. It’s great to hear that Donata Carrazza – a champion of the arts We look forward to offering the Jolley Prize for a twelfth in the region and an occasional contributor to ABR – is the new time in early 2022. owner of Collins Booksellers Mildura, owned until recently As always, we thank our Patron Ian Dickson for his conby John Bond. Donata has been involved for many years in a tinuing and most generous support. number of hospitality businesses in north-west Victoria, the most celebrated being the Mildura Grand Hotel and Stefano’s Podcasts restaurant. In 1995, with Stefano de Pieri, she founded the Apropos of podcasts, none has proved more popular than Mildura Wentworth Arts Festival, which soon spawned the ‘Façades of Lebanon’, winner of the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize. Mildura Writers’ Festival – a favourite of many authors, our Theodore Ell reads his essay quite shatteringly on the ABR Editor included. Podcast. Asked about her hopes for the business, Donata Carrazza In this month’s issue, we feature the runner-up in this year’s told Advances that she wants to create a space conducive to Calibre Prize: ‘May Day’, by Melbourne comedy writer Anita ‘pondering and browsing. Wall space is rather sacred in bookPunton. In their report, the judges described ‘May Day’ as shops, but I’ll do what I can to feature some of my favourite visual artists.’ a rich and moving evocation of a relationship between father and Mildurans, you know where to head for your copy of ABR! g daughter. Written with humour and flair, it offers a complex porAUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Australian Book Review September 2021, no. 435

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Peter Rose |Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au Amy Baillieu | Deputy Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au Jack Callil | Digital Editor digital@australianbookreview.com.au James Jiang | ABR Editorial Cadet assistant@australianbookreview.com.au Grace Chang | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Billy Griffiths, Johanna Leggatt, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live. Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $70 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Cover Design Jack Callil Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and comments are subject to editing. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (2019) | Sarah Walker (2019) Declan Fry (2020) | Anders Villani (2021) Monash University Interns Gemma Grant Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully, Taylah Walker, Guy Webster Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. 2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Image credits and information

Page 15: Portrait photograph of the German author Thomas Mann (DPA Picture Alliance/Alamy) Page 61: Evelyn Krape as King Lear in Melbourne Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear (photograph by Chelsea Neate)

ABR September 2021 LETTERS

John Carmody, Hessom Razavi, Josh Stenberg, Ken Ward, Clare Rhoden, Norma Pilling, Suzanne Jill Levine

FACEBOOK

Joel Deane

An Ugly Truth by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang

COMMENTARY

10 23

Megan Clement Elizabeth Oliver

Covid-19 and the pass sanitaire ‘The nature of the race’: My nomination for the Space Crone

PANDEMIC

Diane Stubbings

An Insider’s Plague Year by Peter Doherty

INDIA

Ian Hall

To Kill a Democracy by Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane

FICTION

16 17 18 19 20 21

Amy Baillieu James Ley Alice Nelson Daniel Juckes Cristina Savin Elizabeth Bryer

The Airways by Jennifer Mills The Magician by Colm Tóibín Believe in Me by Lucy Neave In Moonland by Miles Allinson Civilisations by Laurent Binet New fiction by Hugh Breakey, Kim Lock, and Sophie Overett

POEMS

22 59

Tracy Ryan Damen O’Brien

Nth Wave Carpool

ESSAY

Anita Punton

May Day

LITERARY STUDIES

Diana Glenn

Graham Tulloch

The Oxford Handbook of Dante, edited by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden Walter Scott at 250, edited by Caroline McCracken-Flesher and Matthew Wickman

GERMANY

Joachim Redner

Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man by Thomas Mann

HISTORY

34 39

Sheila Fitzpatrick Yves Rees

Fortress Dark and Stern by Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer Sound Citizens by Catherine Fisher

ESSAYS

Kári Gíslason

In the Land of the Cyclops by Karl Ove Knausgaard

INTERVIEWS

37 60

Sheila Fitzpatrick Jennifer Mills

Critic of the Month Open Page

BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

38 56

Gideon Haigh John Tang

The Vetting of Wisdom by Kim Rubenstein The Gypsy Economist by Alex Millmow

GENDER AND SEXUALITY

40 58

Zora Simic Damian Maher

Complaint! by Sara Ahmed The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan

REFUGEES

Justine Poon

Escape from Manus by Jaivet Ealom

ENVIRONMENT

43 44

Caitlin Doyle-Markwick Paul Dalgarno

The Ways of the Bushwalker by Melissa Harper Imaginative Possession by Belinda Probert

POETRY

45 46 47

Pam Brown Nicholas Jose Jane Gibian

Jennifer Harrison

Sydney Spleen by Toby Fitch The Gleaner Song by Song Lin and Vociferate | 詠 by Emily Sun What We Carry, edited by Ella Kurz, Simone King, and Claire Delahunty Whirlwind Duststorm by John Hawke

PHILOSOPHY

50 52

Janna Thompson Knox Peden

The Pleistocene Social Contract by Kim Sterelny Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought by Tae-Yeoun Keum

SCIENCE

Robyn Arianrhod

Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli

TECHNOLOGY

Joshua Krook

Futureproof by Kevin Roose

RELIGION

Danielle Celermajer

Thoreau’s Religion by Alda Balthrop-Lewis

ARTS

62 63

Robert Reid Jordan Prosser

King Lear Shiva Baby

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Susan Lever

Artful Histories by David McCooey AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Our partners

Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the NSW Government through Create NSW; the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia; and the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries. We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partner Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas, the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Arts South Australia

4 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

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Parnassian ($100,000 or more) Ian Dickson

Modernist ($2,500 to $4,999)

Helen Angus Australian Communities Foundation Acmeist ($75,000 to $99,999) ( JRA Support Fund) Maria Myers AC Kate Baillieu Anonymous (1) Professor Frank Bongiorno AM Professor Jan Carter AM Olympian ($50,000 to $74,999) Donna Curran and Patrick McCaughey Blake Beckett Fund Emeritus Professor Helen Ennis Morag Fraser AM Professor Paul Giles Colin Golvan AM QC Reuben Goldsworthy Dr Joan Grant Augustan ($25,000 to $49,999) Dr Gavan Griffith AO QC Anita Apsitis and Graham Anderson Tom Griffiths Dr Steve and Mrs TJ Christie Mary Hoban Peter Corrigan AM (1941–2016) Claudia Hyles OAM Professor Glyn Davis AC Dr Kerry James and Professor Margaret Gardner AC Dr Barbara Kamler Peter McLennan and Mary-Ruth Sindrey Linsay and John Knight Pauline Menz Professor John Langmore AM Ruth and Ralph Renard Pamela McLure Kim Williams AM Rod Morrison Anonymous (1) Stephen Newton AO Jillian Pappas Imagist ($15,000 to $24,999) John Richards Bill Boyce (in memory of Kate Boyce, 1935–2020) Dr Trish Richardson and Mr Andy Lloyd James Robert Sessions AM Emeritus Professor David Carment AM Dr Jennifer Strauss AM Margaret Plant Lisa Turner Lady Potter AC CMRI Dr Barbara Wall Anonymous (1) Jacki Weaver AO Vorticist ($10,000 to $14,999) Emeritus Professor Elizabeth Webby AM Lyn Williams AM Peter Allan Anonymous (4) Geoffrey Applegate OBE (d. 2021) and Sue Glenton Romantic ($1,000 to $2,499) Dr Neal Blewett AC Helen Brack Nicole Abadee and Rob Macfarlan Professor Ian Donaldson (d. 2020) Samuel Allen and Beejay Silcox and Dr Grazia Gunn Professor Dennis Altman AM Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO Paul Anderson Dr Alastair Jackson AM Judith Bishop and Petr Kuzmin Neil Kaplan CBE QC and Su Lesser John Bugg Peter McMullin Peter Burch AM BM Allan Murray-Jones Joel Deane Professor Colin and Ms Carol Nettelbeck Robyn Dalton David Poulton Jean Dunn Peter Rose and Christopher Menz Johanna Featherstone John Scully Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick Emeritus Professor Andrew Taylor AM Roslyn Follett Anonymous (1) Steve Gome Professor Russell Goulbourne Futurist ($5,000 to $9,999) Professor Nick Haslam Dr Michael Henry AM Gillian Appleton Professor Sarah Holland-Batt Professor The Hon. Kevin Bell AM QC Professor Grace Karskens and Tricia Byrnes Dr Brian McFarlane OAM Dr Bernadette Brennan Emeritus Professor Peter McPhee AM Des Cowley Muriel Mathers Professor The Hon. Gareth Evans AC QC Felicity St John Moore Helen Garner Dr Brenda Niall AO Cathrine Harboe-Ree AM Angela Nordlinger Professor Margaret Harris Jane Novak The Hon. Peter Heerey AM QC (d. 2021) Professor Michael L. Ondaatje Dr Susan Lever OAM Diana and Helen O’Neil Don Meadows Judith Pini (honouring Agnes Helen Pini, 1939–2016) Susan Nathan Estate of Dorothy Porter Professor John Rickard Mark Powell Ilana Snyder and Ray Snyder AM Emeritus Professor Roger Rees Noel Turnbull Libby Robin Mary Vallentine AO Stephen Robinson Susan Varga and Anne Coombs Professor David Rolph Bret Walker AO SC Dr Della Rowley Nicola Wass (in memory of Hazel Rowley, 1951–2011) Ruth Wisniak OAM and Dr John Miller AO Professor Lynette Russell AM Anonymous (2)

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Legal niceties

Letters

Dear Editor, Michael Gronow is a QC, so I suppose that it was hardly surprising that his letter (ABR, July 2021) was rather ‘lawyerly’ and literal as it expressed his objection to Hessom Razavi’s views about our obligations – legal and moral – to would-be refugees who seek asylum in Australia. If we look back over our history and recall Australia’s reluctant acceptance (and reception) of Jewish refugees from the tentacles of Adolf Hitler’s evil Reich, we might recognise that, mutatis mutandis, there then existed the same rather formalist and hard-hearted criteria that Dr Gronow now applies to our contemporaries who are fleeing tyranny and mortal danger. Those people, in the 1930s and 1940s, came mostly from Germany and Central Europe and, necessarily, had to embark from such ports as Rotterdam and Genoa; they also needed to stop at such places as Colombo, Singapore, Shanghai, and Batavia. Might not the same have been said of them, to use his phrase, that they were people ‘who came via a third country where they were not subject to “a well-founded fear of being persecuted”’? Sometimes it is essential to temper legal niceties with humanity, surely. John Carmody, Roseville, NSW

While dotted with praise and some excellent insights, the review appears to hanker after something else. Before coming to grips with the work in hand, Lynch wonders why there are not more stories of ‘the routines, joys, and grinding boredom of contemporary middle and outer suburbia’. Dark as Last Night is not that book for the reviewer. The stabby description ‘untouched by post-modernism’ is followed by a note that the stories ‘make few demands on the reader’. The reviewer then spends precious words telling us that it would be better for a character to be described as ‘shaking’ rather than ‘shaking with fear’. A late sentence flirts with the word ‘twee’ as a descriptor. But there is good news! I’d like to reassure the reviewer that even those of us who actively enjoy the brow-furrowing opacity of postmodern fiction, and who rise repeatedly and joyfully to the deliberate challenges set by such works, also have the capacity to rejoice in other styles of fiction. For example, we like well-written, well-plotted stories that engage us accessibly (not suspecting that ready immersion into a tale is a possible fault) with vivid and emotionally intelligent scenarios and resolutions. Such stories are found in Dark as Last Night. Other collections may suit this reviewer’s taste better. Clare Rhoden, Oakleigh South, Victoria

Hessom Razavi responds

Theodore Ell

I couldn’t agree more. This type of ‘hyperlegalism’ (as Macquarie University’s Daniel Ghezelbash has dubbed it) is at best myopic and uninspired, at worst deliberate, opportunistic, and callous. Whatever the intent, it needs to be called out. Thank you for doing so, in your own way.

Gough Whitlam

Dear Editor, I greatly enjoyed Ken Ward’s informative review of Peter Job’s new book, A Narrative of Denial, including the account of Australia’s role in Indonesian attitudes toward what was then Portuguese Timor (ABR, July 2021). However, I don’t think that Gough Whitlam, meeting with President Suharto in 1974, can be faulted for ‘overlooking the fact that [East Timor] was almost twice as large as Brunei, ASEAN’s smallest member-state’, since Brunei would not be an independent state or a member of ASEAN until 1984. Josh Stenberg, Sydney, NSW

Ken Ward responds

I appreciate Dr Stenberg’s comment. I stand corrected; he is quite right.

Faint Praise?

Dear Editor, As I read Anthony Lynch’s response to the latest short story collection by Tony Birch (August 2021), I wonder whether the reviewer and book are well matched. 6 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Dear Editor, Having lived and worked in Lebanon from 1973 to 1976, I was enormously moved by the images of the country evoked by Theodore Ell ( July 2021). Although his picture is of a contemporary Lebanon that is much changed, our time there during the tumultuous 1970s leaves us with memories of a beautiful country, war ravaged but hospitable and politically unfathomable – and now in ruins. Such an excellent essay. Norma Pilling (online comment)

Fine flowers

Dear Editor, The best literary anthologies reflect a vision, or perhaps the rethinking of a vision. The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories, reviewed by Alice Whitmore in the August 2021 issue, brings together many ‘fine flowers’, but the presentation does not clear a path – it seems haphazard. Not all good translators are finely tuned literary critics or anthologists. When they are, they should be commended; when they are not, they should have the intelligence to recognise their limitations. Suzanne Jill Levine (online comment)

Correction

In Michael Dwyer’s review of The Truth About China by Bill Birtles, The Beijing Bureau by Trevor Watson and Melissa Roberts, and The Last Correspondent by Michael Smith (August 2021) Trevor Watson was mistakenly referred to as Trevor Watkins.

Facebook

‘Dumb fucks’

Facebook’s long record of denial and disdain Joel Deane

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s battle for domination by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang

Hachette $32.99 pb, 343 pp

ealand calls itself a micronation. No one else does. It’s easy to see why: the ‘kingdom’ is little more than a glorified helipad. It rises from the North Sea off the coast of Suffolk like a Greek version of the letter π rendered out of concrete and steel – the sole survivor of a series of Maunsell forts built to shoot down Nazi Kriegsmarine aircraft during World War II. Abandoned by Britain in the 1950s, the fort was hijacked by pirate radio broadcaster Paddy Roy Bates in the 1960s and renamed the Principality of Sealand. Bates crowned himself ‘prince regent’ and – besides firing warning shots at the Royal Navy and fighting off a coup attempt by German mercenaries – entered into a series of sketchy schemes to stay afloat. One enterprise, launched in 2000 with the help of cypherpunk Ryan Lackey, was for the Bates family to turn Sealand into the world’s first data haven: an unbreakable digital lockbox beyond the clutches of law enforcement agencies and copyright lawyers. To cut a long story short, the data haven promised more than it delivered. Perhaps that’s why the story of Sealand has always reminded me of the broken promise of the internet in general and Facebook in particular. After all, Sealand and Facebook are both pirate endeavours built on libertarian ambitions by founders with delusions of grandeur. The main difference is that Sealand’s Bates, who died in 2012, was harmless; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is not. To appreciate the danger of Zuckerberg you have to understand the subculture he sprang from. Fundamentally, Zuckerberg sees himself as a computer hacker. Not the hackers you read about via the mainstream media – such as organised criminals holding computer systems hostage for Bitcoin, or battalions of geeks employed by spy agencies to steal industrial and national secrets – but the pure breed that arose in the United States in the 1960s. These hackers wanted to learn rather than steal. In their hippie-like quest for enlightenment, they tweaked, bent, and broke hardware, software, and networks, and they believed all information should be free. In 2010, when Steven Levy was updating Hackers (1984), his cult book on hacking culture, he sought out Zuckerberg. At the time, Facebook was a relative minnow and Zuckerberg just twenty-six. Zuckerberg, born the same year that Hackers was published, allowed Levy to characterise Facebook as a company built on the hacker ethic. Levy, in turn, bought Zuckerberg’s line that Facebook was, like the original hackers, all about making

information available to the people. In other words, Levy missed the point. Facebook was never about hacking computers. It was always about hacking data; bending people instead of software. Its modus operandi is to hoover up as much digital information as possible about as many people as possible, algorithmically tweak that data to predict and shift human behaviour, and, in the process, make money. Futurist Jaron Lanier has said that in Facebook’s business model ‘life is turned into a database’. At times, though, Facebook’s database has been more like an ATM than a data bank. For instance, between 2012 and 2014, Facebook’s Open Graph program allowed app developers to access the information of its users. That loophole delivered data harvested from three hundred million Facebook users to political consultants Cambridge Analytica via a third party. Cambridge Analytica used that data in a range of campaigns, including Brexit and Donald Trump’s first presidential bid. As Zuckerberg succinctly put it in a private discussion of the data he gathered from the first generation of Facebook users: ‘They “trust me”, dumb fucks.’

Sealand and Facebook are both pirate endeavours built on libertarian ambitions by founders with delusions of grandeur By any measure, Zuckerberg’s ‘dumb fucks’ hacking has succeeded. Facebook, which includes Instagram and WhatsApp, is one of only six companies in the world with a market capitalisation of more than US$1 trillion. It has 2.9 billion users, including sixteen million Australians, and is on track to earn more than $100 billion in revenue in 2021. Put it this way, if Facebook were a country, its gross domestic product would be larger than two-thirds of the members of the United Nations. Maybe that’s why, in 2017, Zuckerberg said Facebook was ‘more like a government than a traditional company’ and posted a 5,700-word manifesto claiming that Facebook possessed the ‘social infrastructure’ to ‘make a global community that works for everyone’. Even by the standards of tech billionaires, who increasingly behave like feudal kings or villains from a James Bond movie, Zuckerberg’s it’s-a-small-world-after-all rhetoric was gobsmacking. His messianic promise to heal the world was also poorly timed, given that it was made a month after Trump was sworn in as president on the back of a campaign where WikiLeaks, Facebook, and the mainstream media were used as proxies by Russia to illegally undermine the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. An Ugly Truth, a forensically reported book by New York Times journalists Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, goes a long way to explaining the global consequences of Facebook’s toxic combination of delusion, denial, and disdain. Frenkel and Kang don’t fall into the trap of treating the rise of Zuckerberg like the origin story of a Marvel superhero. Instead, they focus on five years in the life of Facebook, starting with the 2016 US presidential elections and ending with the 2021 attack on Capitol Hill – the rise and fall of the Trump presidency. As a result, An Ugly Truth reads more like a study of power in the AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Entries are now open for the eighteenth Peter Porter Poetry Prize, one of Australia’s most prestigious poetry awards. Worth a total of $10,000, the prize honours the great Australian poet Peter Porter (1929–2010). This year’s judges are Sarah Holland-Batt, Jaya Savige, and Anders Villani. For more information, visit: australianbookreview.com/prizes-programs First place $6,000 Four shortlisted poets $1,000 each Entries close 4 October 2021

8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Kang record, but Sandberg was the one with the most to lose. new gilded age than a puff profile of a tech company. In this Moby-Dick of a tale, Trump is the orange whale, Unlike the impregnable Zuckerberg, who holds majority stock a leviathan frequently sighted, but never landed. Trump’s campaign control over Facebook, Sandberg – seen internally as arrogant first breached on Facebook in December 2015, when his cam- and externally as self-serving – is dispensable and appears to have paign posted video of an inflammatory speech targeting Muslims. lost ground. Despite a decade of promises, she has done little to After some internal handwringing, Facebook tarted up a free- make Facebook’s staff more diverse, with just thirty per cent of speech policy one insider called ‘bullshit’ and let Trump’s bigotry leaders female and only four per cent of employees Black by the go viral. Trump never looked back. His campaign used Facebook’s end of 2018. Facebook increasingly rolls out former British polvast database of hacked humanity to deliver targeted messages itician Nick Clegg (its Vice President of Global Affairs) instead to voters and raise funds. Russia’s Internet Research Agency, of Sandberg for media duties. Reading between the lines, Zuckerberg, who first met Sandmeanwhile, complemented the Trump campaign’s efforts, using Facebook to deliver toxic anti-Clinton content to 126 million berg when he was twenty-three, outgrew his need for her once he started dealing directly with politicians such as Trump. In that Americans. Frenkel and Kang write that ‘Trump and the Russian hackers had separately come to the same conclusion: they could exploit Facebook’s algorithms.’ Call me cynical, but I doubt it’s a coincidence that Trump’s campaign and the Russians shared the same eureka moment about Facebook. As for Facebook, its security team first spotted the Russian interference in the US campaign in March 2016, eight months before Election Day, but failed to raise the alarm with authorities. Through inaction, therefore, Facebook helped Russia swing a US presidential election. The reason why Facebook failed to act can be summed up in two words: Sheryl Sandberg. Before Trump, Sandberg was a darling of Davos jetsetters and wannabes – lauded as a feminist icon and leading businesswoman. After joining Facebook from Google, Sandberg was instrumental in turning Zuckerberg’s mountains of data into rivers of gold, creating an advertising business that tracked Facebook users almost everywhere they went online, then mined the data to push people towards products and services they didn’t know they wanted to buy. But, according to Frenkel and President Donald Trump welcomes Mark Zuckerberg to the Oval Office, 2019 (Official White House photo by Joiyce N. Boghosian) Kang, Sandberg was also instrumental in politicising Facebook’s content management. light, Zuckerberg’s 2017 manifesto can seem like a milestone if Apparently, it all started with Tony Abbott. In 2011, Facebook’s content managers refused to remove a you squint and ignore the hubris. Only time will tell whether page that attempted to attack the then Opposition Leader by Zuckerberg’s promise to usher in a kinder, gentler global comvilifying his daughters. Abbott, understandably, was unimpressed. munity is cover for another round of data hacking in the pursuit In response, Sandberg dealt directly with Abbott and started of profit and power. This much is certain. Zuckerberg – who is fond of quoting leaning into content management to avoid political fallout. From then on, a Facebook insider tells Frenkel and Kang, ‘it Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone and Brad Pitt’s Achilles and is didn’t take a genius to know that the politicians and presidents a fan of the Roman Emperor Augustus – is behaving like the who called [Sandberg] complaining about x or y decision would prince regent of his virtual kingdom. For instance, Zuckerberg suddenly have a direct line into how those decisions were made’. has installed an independent committee to have the final say on Sandberg also became Zuckerberg’s political firewall. She content management – calling them Facebook’s ‘Supreme Court’ was the one sent to Washington to front congressional hearings – and plans to launch a digital currency pegged to the US dollar. All in all, it’s pseudo-sovereignty beyond the wildest dreams and glad-hand politicians; she was the one who hired a small army of lobbyists to fête Trump; she was the one responsible for of Paddy Roy Bates, but don’t feel too bad for Sealand. They get the security team that discovered Russian meddling in the 2016 by selling passports, titles, and souvenirs on the internet. They campaign; and, when Facebook came under fire for appeasing even have a page on Facebook. g Trump, she was the one who took the heat. Zuckerberg came under political fire, too, as Frenkel and Joel Deane is a speechwriter, novelist, and poet. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Comment

Covid-19 and the pass sanitaire by Megan Clement

receive my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine in May, in the small town of Meaux, mostly notable for producing a luxurious variety of brie. I travel forty minutes from Paris by regional train, watching the city become the banlieue and the banlieue become the countryside, speeding towards something that for five months had felt like an impossibility. Friends in Europe had flown to New York and Kentucky to get their shots while France fumbled its way through the first months of its vaccination campaign. It would probably be quicker for me to fly back to Australia, go through hotel quarantine and get vaccinated there, I thought at the start of the year. I was very wrong. I secure my slot courtesy of Guillaume Rozier, a twenty-fiveyear-old computer engineer who, having tracked the epidemic in France since Covid-19 first reached Europe, went on to build a website to help people find vaccination appointments nearby. The day before, partially at Rozier’s urging, President Emmanuel Macron had announced that anyone over the age of eighteen could take up an appointment that remained unfilled by priority groups with twenty-four hours left to go. Rozier’s website promptly crashed, but after much refreshing I grabbed the midday slot in Meaux for the following day. The enormous vaccination centre, or vaccinodrome, as the mass injection sites are evocatively dubbed here, is housed in a converted concert hall near a bend in the river Marne. A mix of doctors, firefighters, and enthusiastic volunteers shuffle the crowds along the line to get their doses in rows of white tents. My partner and I exchange a hearty high ten once the shots are in our arms. We celebrate with a wedge of brie and a baguette on a windy riverbank before heading back to Paris. By the time I return for my second dose in mid-June, the vaccinodrome is mostly empty. Those who want the vaccine have taken it by now, and those who don’t will need some more persuading. A volunteer in a Pikachu costume wanders around aimlessly, looking for people to entertain. This time, the health worker has the needle in my arm before I have sat down. Her colleague

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rolls her eyes. ‘I am so bored with giving out vaccines,’ she says. France has long had a complicated and contradictory relationship with vaccination. The birthplace of immunology is nonetheless the most vaccine-hesitant country in Europe, partly due to a series of healthcare scandals and bungles in recent decades over swine flu, hepatitis B, and HIV. Yet eleven vaccines, including those for diphtheria, tetanus, and polio, are mandatory in France, a policy that most accept. Not having the prized carnet de vaccination, a small booklet containing a person’s history of immunisations from birth onwards, is an ongoing bureaucratic headache for millions of immigrants like me. Still, the distrust of government, evident everywhere from the rise of the far right and the popularity of the gilets jaunes, or yellow vest movement, runs deep in France, periodically threatening to tip the country into disarray. And so the nation that gave us Louis Pasteur also produced Didier Raoult, the maverick scientist from Marseille who has promoted the discredited hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid throughout the pandemic. Raoult has built a mass following among vaccine sceptics, many of whom believe the government is deliberately suppressing evidence of the ‘miracle’ drug’s effectiveness so that Big Pharma can rake in the profits from a nationwide vaccination campaign. For the less conspiratorially minded, there are other reasons to refuse the jab. In a rideshare in the Camargue last summer, our driver said she was fine with the eleven mandatory vaccines, those that had been around for decades, but she wouldn’t take a newly developed formula for Covid because she didn’t trust what was in it. Anyway, she said, Covid was a disease of the elderly, no worse than the flu. Over winter, my mortgage broker advised me that he had no need for a vaccine as he always eats organic and keeps in shape. The government has made its own contribution to vaccine wariness. In January, Macron declared the AstraZeneca vaccine, developed across the channel in Oxford, to be ‘quasi-ineffective’ in those over sixty-five, without proffering any evidence to back

this up. In March, the vaccine was limited to those over fifty-five because of fears of rare blood clots that continue to hamper takeup around the world, including in those places where AstraZeneca is the only option. France recently decided to donate its remaining supplies of AstraZeneca through its humanitarian aid program rather than using them at home, a policy that will only fuel hesitancy in those countries, some of them former French colonies, where they are needed most and where people will rightly feel they are getting the rich world’s unwanted cast-offs.

The birthplace of immunology is nonetheless the most vaccine-hesitant country in Europe In May, Macron himself, who tested positive for Covid in December 2020, was vaccinated with a single dose – only one was needed due to his previous infection. At age forty-three, he will have received either Pfizer or Moderna. The AstraZeneca debacle may sound familiar in Australia, but the difference here is that there was enough Pfizer and Moderna to make up for the prevarications over the Oxford vaccine. And after being left in the dust by the United Kingdom’s lightning roll-out in the midst of its winter third wave, France is set to surpass its neighbour (forty-seven per cent of the population were fully vaccinated at the time of writing). But with the Delta variant looming in daily case numbers, the fear is always for the recalcitrant. And so, having dangled the carrot of immunity for six months, in mid-July Macron brought out the stick: the pass sanitaire, or health pass. The pass sanitaire, stored on your phone in the form of a QR code, provides proof that the holder has received a European Union-approved vaccine, or has tested negative for Covid within the past forty-eight hours, or has recovered from a past infection. When I upload my vaccination records to the app, confetti rains down from the top of the screen and it gives me an enthusiastic thumbs up. As of August 9, the pass is mandatory for those wishing to go to restaurants, bars, cinemas, museums, concert venues, or, crucially, to travel by train. The timing of the announcement of the pass was no accident. July and August are when the vast majority of French people decamp for their vacances, a tradition not even a pandemic could prevent. A large proportion travels on high-speed rail to their summer lodgings in Provence, the Pyrenees, the Alps, or the Atlantic coast. Faced with the prospect of missing out on an entire summer, the erstwhile unvaccinated crashed Rozier’s website once more. Within twenty-four hours of Macron’s announcement, 1.7 million people had booked appointments. Later that month, Macron pinned an order of national merit to a masked Rozier’s chest in a closed ceremony at the Élysée Palace. Not everyone has been willing to accept this minor infringement on their liberté. In the weeks after the policy was announced, hundreds of thousands took to the street to protest the pass. In the usual fashion, the protests were a mix of those with genuine concerns about the policy’s capacity to reinforce social inequal-

ities – the département of Seine-Saint-Denis, where I live, has one of the highest poverty rates in mainland France and also its lowest vaccination rate – and those conspiracy theorists who find it acceptable to compare immunisation to the Holocaust on the very streets where Jews were dragged out of their homes and sent to concentration camps by the Vichy regime. Still, if the summer population of Paris is anything to go by, the nudge largely worked. Just as before the pandemic, shutters are down in city businesses, emails are bouncing happily back to the sender, terraces are sparsely filled, and life has slowed to a crawl. Without the usual surfeit of tourists who make up the summer numbers, Paris is as empty as I have seen it, analogous to those eerie days after the 2015 terror attacks when locals stayed home and visitors stayed away. The real test of the pass sanitaire, of course, will come with la rentrée, those buzzing weeks at the beginning of September when families and workers pour back into the major centres.

A sign in a French window (Christophe Coat/Alamy)

Schools reopen, public transport fills up, socialising resumes, and the conditions are primed for an infectious disease to take hold. In 2020, the associated mixing that came with the autumn return caused an explosion of infections, deaths, and hospitalisations that led to an inevitable winter lockdown, including school, restaurant, and bar closures, a curfew, a limited-travel radius, and border restrictions. With little appetite left for a repeat confinement in 2021, all hopes are now pinned on vaccinations – and the social exclusion that comes with refusal – to get us through the winter. If a booster shot is required, I’ll be booking something closer to home. g Megan Clement is a journalist and editor specialising in gender, human rights, international development, and social policy. She has lived in Paris since 2015. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Pandemic

All things infectious A lazy pandemical collection Diane Stubbings

An Insider’s Plague Year by Peter Doherty

Melbourne University Press $32.99 pb, 256 pp

he collective dislocation that followed the advent of Covid-19 generated (and continues to generate) a slew of books intended to make sense of the turmoil. Encompassing Slavoj Žižek’s anti-capitalist treatise Pandemic! (2020) and books for children such as Eoin McLaughlin and Polly Dunbar’s While We Can’t Hug (2020), the responses have ranged from considered attempts to apprehend the pandemic’s scientific, political, and social parameters to those designed to do little more than catch the Covid wave before it passes. Regrettably, Peter Doherty’s An Insider’s Plague Year tends more towards the latter. Doherty – one of the most prominent Australian commentators on Covid’s pathology and spread – is well qualified to write an account of our first year living with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Having transferred from veterinary science into medical research, Doherty has for almost six decades dedicated himself to the ‘infectious disease and death game’. He has earned a host of prestigious awards, including the 1996 Nobel Prize for his discovery, with immunologist Rolf M. Zinkernagel, of the mechanism by which the immune system is able to recognise virus-infected cells. When the first reports of a SARS-like disease affecting patients in Wuhan, China, began to surface in January 2020, Doherty was semi-retired from Melbourne’s Peter Doherty Institute (PDI). When, on January 25, the first Australian case of Covid was detected (in a traveller recently returned from Wuhan), researchers at the PDI were able to isolate and distribute to scientists worldwide a live version of the virus, a necessary precursor to the hunt for an effective vaccine. Given its expertise in immunology and virology, the PDI was inundated with Covid-related media enquiries. Doherty volunteered to become part of the institute’s communications team, and began writing a weekly series of articles (called Setting it Straight) ostensibly aimed at a lay audience and discussing ‘all things infection and immunity’. The bulk of An Insider’s Plague Year comprises the first forty-two of these articles. Covering an array of topics – the autoimmune system, the pathogenesis of Covid, winning the Nobel Prize – the early articles are largely penetrable and proffer some interesting asides. The word ‘vaccine’ derives from the Latin word for ‘cow’, while ‘immunity’ comes from the Latin for ‘without tax’; we each produce one to one and a half litres of mucus a day; anti-vaxxers were a problem even in the nineteenth century; and in the aftermath of World War II 12 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

the British government ran research experiments at the Common Cold Unit where the ‘quality and quantity of snot’ from twenty thousand volunteers bivouacked in old army huts was analysed. In the later articles, Doherty’s focus pivots to the mechanics of our immune system. Notwithstanding Doherty’s desire to inform readers about the strategies – both innate and vaccine-assisted – by which we are able to confront viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, the writing becomes increasingly technical and abstruse. Even with a key to the acronyms and abbreviations that litter the articles, most non-specialist readers will struggle to decipher sentences such as: ‘the biochemists who were trying to “mark” virus-specific CD8+ CTLs using an isolated (in fluid phase and unattached to cell surface) pMHCI molecular complex tagged with a fluorescent dye found that this did not attach tightly enough to its “cognate” CR for the T cells to stay labelled’. There is also a lack of basic contextual information. For example, we are not given the dates when the Setting it Straight articles first appeared, and we can thus only partially glean the underlying timeline of the virus’s spread. Covid’s worsening socio-political impact, the emergence of variant strains, and progress towards a vaccine are equally difficult to map. Doherty lacks the gift for metaphor that science writers such as Steve Jones and Siddhartha Mukherjee deploy with such skill, and where he does offer analogies, they are generally strained. The Wars of the Roses and Macbeth are offered as a prelude to a discussion of the role of white blood cells in defeating viral infections, while a strange ‘sci-fi dream sequence’, complete with aliens docking with ‘regally attired store mannequins’, is used to explain antibody responses. Indicative of several questionable editorial decisions, An Insider’s Plague Year opens with an expansive administrative history of the PDI, more suited to an annual report than a book aimed at the scientifically curious. There are also basic errors: for example, the date on which Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang alerted colleagues to a SARS-like disease is given as December 2021, rather than December 2019. A concluding chapter covering those with whom Doherty liaised during 2020 – from the team developing the next generation of Covid vaccines to the minute-taker at the weekly strategy meetings – gestures towards the collaborative and cumulative nature of scientific discovery. However, without any overarching narrative – such as that in Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green’s Vaxxers (2021) – it’s a rollcall that inclines towards the desultory. The book is padded with introductory essays Doherty contributed to various publications in 2020: reflections on the issues humanity may face over the next eighty years; an introduction to a collection of political cartoons; a foreword for a volume of science essays. While they demonstrate the personable if occasionally self-absorbed style of Doherty’s less overtly scientific writing, they add little to the Covid story. Curiously, what is missing from many of the articles is an enlightening sense of Covid. As such, An Insider’s Plague Year often reads like Hamlet without Hamlet. Nothing of note has been gained by gathering these disparate pieces together. If not a cynical publishing exercise, it is nevertheless a lazy one. g Diane Stubbings is a writer and critic based in Melbourne.

India

Important questions

Examining the evolution of democracy in India Ian Hall

To Kill a Democracy: India’s passage to despotism by Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane

Oxford University Press $42.95 hb, 312 pp

quires the treatment of others with respect and the setting aside of differences of belief, gender, status, and wealth. It requires that we strive to ensure ‘freedom from hunger, humiliation, and violence’and the capacity to live with dignity are guaranteed for every citizen. On this basis, Chowdhury and Keane find India wanting. In vivid and compelling terms, they detail its various ‘social emergencies’ – the inequitable, stratified healthcare system, the persistence of malnutrition, the rampant pollution of air and water, the creaking, danger-laden transport infrastructure, the inadequate schools, and the paucity of decent jobs. They sketch equally distressing pictures of its politics, not least the malign influence of money, the ubiquity of violence, the unravelling of law and order, and the near disappearance of accountability. These failings, Chowdhury and Keane argue, have left India wide open to despotism. In such circumstances, all that is required to undermine democracy is a ‘cunning and tightly disciplined political party’, one equipped with a plausible demagogue and capable of presenting itself as the true representative of the people

n a recent interview, India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, was asked whether his country was heading in what his interlocutor, the Lowy Institute’s Michael Fullilove, called ‘an illiberal direction’. Bristling, Jaishankar denied the charge. India is undergoing something quite different, he argued. It is experiencing a ‘very deep democratization’. This process might be hard for outsiders to understand, but it was positive, not problematic. After decades of rule by an English-speaking, Western-educated élite, the country was at last being governed by politicians who spoke and thought and behaved like ordinary Indians. This exchange was brief but revealing. Fullilove’s query reflected growing concerns about the condition of India’s democracy, which Freedom House, an influential American think tank, earlier this year reclassified as only ‘partially free’. For its part, Jaishankar’s response betrayed both the acute sensitivity to international criticism of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, in power for the past seven years, and the deep-seated belief of Hindu nationalists that, in democratic politics, the will of the majority should Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi about to address the nation at Red Fort, on the occasion of 75th Independence Day, in Delhi, 2021. (Press Information Bureau, Government of India) prevail. That latter view, as Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane insist in To Kill a Democracy, is and their desires. Once in power, such a party can then exploit a politically toxic. It opens the door to arbitrary rule by dema- weakened system to further advantage. It can set about rewarding gogues who claim to govern for the people but who really serve friends and punishing enemies, directing judges and threatening the interests of the wealthy. It undermines public institutions, journalists, demonising enemies, within and outside the country, widens inequalities, and erodes the autonomy of ordinary and turning elections from meaningful and serious processes into citizens. It does not lead to deeper democracy, it kills it, putting ‘carnivals of political seduction’. This is precisely what Chowdhury and Keane think has despotism in its place, Chowdhury and Keane assert. Democracy, they argue, involves more than periodic elections happened in India, with the rise to power of the BJP – the aptly and majority rule. Inspired in part by the great Dalit thinker named Indian People’s Party – with Narendra Modi at its head. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, they define it as a ‘whole way of life’ The BJP’s apparently unassailable dominance of contemporary beyond the formal process of voting. Grounded in the mutual rec- India is a direct consequence, they argue, of the country’s social ills ognition of equality by all citizens, this concept of democracy re- and political weaknesses. The authors recognise that other factors AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Enter the fascinating world of Little Lon

– not least the clever manipulation of electoral politics and the backing of billionaires willing to bankroll extravagantly expensive campaigns – have played their part, but the underlying causes, they think, are much deeper and more pervasive. This argument raises some important questions to which To Kill a Democracy provides only partial answers. The biggest is probably this: does the damage the BJP has undoubtedly done to India’s social fabric and public institutions really spell the end of democratic politics? As Chowdhury and Keane show so well, India has only ever been a partial democracy at best. Cronyism, corruption, and censorship are endemic to India’s politics, as a succession of studies, some dating back to the 1950s, has laid bare. Its social and political frailties are chronic. Its politicians have exploited them for decades – not least Indira Gandhi during the so-called Emergency of 1975–77, when she contrived to suspend constitutional rights and to intimidate her critics. And many still do, including powerful demagogues like Uttar Pradesh’s Yogi Adityanath and West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee.

Cronyism, corruption, and censorship are endemic to India’s politics, as a succession of studies, some dating back to the 1950s, has laid bare

A vivid account of a remarkable but little-known chapter in Melbourne’s history O U T NOW in bookshops and online

Each one of these regimes has fallen when popular anger has risen and powerful interests – including the handful of billionaires who dominate India’s business world – have shifted their support. Public distress at political graft and administrative ineptitude swept Modi and the BJP into government in 2014. After years of anaemic economic growth and the mishandling of Covid-19, this resentment could well sweep them back out again in 2024, as Chowdhury and Keane acknowledge. Despite the BJP’s control over parliament and the media, the Modi government has failed time and time again to enact major reforms, such as those recently proposed in agriculture, now stalled after mass protests by farmers. These tendencies suggest that India’s fragile democracy could escape a slide into despotism, despite the successive polls, cited towards the end of this book, indicating growing public support for autocratic rule. To be sure, the postcolonial political settlement, predicated on elections, federalism, and government neutrality in matters of religion, continues to fray, as it has since the 1960s. The hold of India’s English-speaking and left-leaning postcolonial élite over the country’s political life also continues to weaken, though it is highly questionable whether that trend represents a deepening of democracy, as Jaishankar would have us believe. For all this, it is still hard to conclude that India will make a decisive turn to despotism. It is also telling that Debasish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane stop well short of making that claim, despite their unhappiness at the Panglossian assessments of India’s democracy that persist in the West. g Ian Hall is a Professor of International Relations at the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University. His most recent book is Modi and the Reinvention of Indian Foreign Policy (2019). ❖

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Category

F I C T I O N AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Fiction

Something in the air A haunted puzzle of a novel Amy Baillieu

The Airways

by Jennifer Mills

Picador $32.99 pb, 370 pp

here is something, or rather someone, in the air in Jennifer Mills’s dark fourth novel. The Airways represents another leap towards the uncanny for Mills, whose previous book, the Miles Franklin-shortlisted Dyschronia (2018), was already a departure from the more traditionally realist modes of her earlier novels, The Diamond Anchor (2009) and Gone (2011), and short story collection, The Rest Is Weight (2012). The Airways opens with a sudden act of shocking violence when a character (one whom readers will recognise in time) is attacked only ‘two hundred steps from home’. During this apparently random assault, they experience a beautifully rendered awareness of the ‘delicate machinery’ of their body. This accompanies awe at the ‘extravagance’ of their own existence, an existence that is over in ‘the space of a breath’. This startling chapter, ‘The body’, is written in the first-person singular, and fragmented sentences jolt across the page in response to the brutality. What follows is a ghost story unusually grounded in the corporeal experience of life and wonder at the human body. The Airways is made up of three interconnected narratives. Two of them are written in the third-person and follow Adam, a socially awkward young man with a penchant for voyeurism and self-pity. The first of these begins before the attack and is set mostly in the Sydney share-house where self-described ‘good guy’ Adam lives with, and watches, his more progressive housemates: Kate, Marita, and Yun. Adam feels drawn to the non-binary Yun, a student studying virology and microbiology, to the point where he imagines ‘clim[bing] inside them, and exchang[ing] himself ’. The other storyline follows Adam’s life five years later. He is now living in Beijing and working for a charismatic Canadian in a newly built office ‘retrofitted in a post-industrial style to give it a startup vibe’. Mills is deftly satirical about the Canadian, the company, and the broader expat community in Beijing, and Adam’s narrative is absorbing (despite the disorientated lethargy he believes is due to ‘something he picked up on the subway’). The most engaging narrative, however, is the one that opens the novel. After the catalysing moment of violence, this account follows the consciousness that springs from ‘a swarm of anger, a brief blur of pollinating fury’ as ‘unremembered, unbodied, the I becomes they’. Somehow, ‘they’ have flickered back into existence in an entirely new form. Told mostly in the third-person plural present, this immersive narrative shimmers with energy as they travel through the air and from body to body, evolving with every 16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

transition. In contrast with the depictions of Adam’s alienation in Sydney and his torpid, confused movements through Beijing, these sections are vibrant. Here, Mills offers deeply humane perspectives into other lives. These insights, which resemble a supernatural version of the reading experience, move from the impressionistic to the lyrical as the consciousness regains memories and develops an understanding of their new existence and what it might allow them to do – whom it might allow them to seek. These sections are grounded in physical sensations – clothing labels that irritate the skin, traces of old injuries, hunger, longings, pain. While in the body of a shopkeeper, they ‘open in his toothache like a flower’. Later, they feel a baby’s head ‘like a soap bubble’ in the mother’s cupped palm. At one stage, they take flight and their host’s fluttering speed is reflected thus: ‘inabird isfast’. Birds recur throughout the text, as do references to hunger, fruit, photography, trains, the connections between bodies and cities, and the human impulse to identify patterns. Like the frequently disorientated Adam, readers may find themselves confused as they seek truths in the ambiguities, but this makes the moments of clarity and catharsis more satisfying. There are many thematic similarities with Mills’s earlier politically engaged, inventive works and the novel is also reminiscent of Angela Meyer’s A Superior Spectre (2018) and Alex Landragin’s Crossings (2019), with shades of Evie Wyld’s furious The Bass Rock (2020). Other things echo as well. Specific words and phrases recur, like a linguistic reverberation, a reminder of the connections at work. However, when Adam is twice pushed aside ‘like a curtain’, or when light is twice described as forming a ‘parallelogram’, the effect can be jarring. In this haunted puzzle of a novel, Mills interrogates the nature of memory, reality, life, and death. She explores questions of consciousness, identity, and the relationship between the self and the body, and studies the spaces where different, sometimes opposing, things bleed into each other. Mills also unpacks the impact of alienation and dislocation, the morality of observation, and the desire to be truly seen and recognised. It is somewhat ironic, then, that we get to know one of the two main characters primarily through their experiences as a passenger in the bodies of others. Although this does allow Mills to present the character at perhaps their most essential, their consciousness having quite literally separated from their physical body, most of the information we receive about their earlier existence derives from other people’s observations and the motley physical possessions they left behind. A direct interaction late in the novel between the two protagonists is shocking in its clear affirmation of personal boundaries and selfhood, things that had become increasingly blurred. In this provocative novel, in which Mills explores the liminal spaces where one thing blurs into another, one constant is a sense of wonder at life and the human body. The Airways may orbit the aftermath of brutal death, but this is a novel that also embraces elements of ‘body wonder’, as opposed to the more familiar body horror. In a 2012 blog post on her website, Mills wrote that she loved fiction ‘for its metamorphic power’. The Airways offers a moving, disorientating, and sometimes extraordinary, demonstration of that power. g Amy Baillieu is Deputy Editor of ABR.

Fiction

Buttons on a coat

Dramatising the life of Thomas Mann James Ley

The Magician by Colm Tóibín

Picador $32.99 pb, 448 pp

olm Tóibín’s eleventh novel, The Magician, is a dramatisation of the life of Thomas Mann. It begins in 1891 with the death of Mann’s father, a successful businessman from the north German city of Lübeck, whose last agonised words to his fifteen-year-old son are, ‘You know nothing.’ It ends in 1950, five years before Mann’s death at the age of eighty, when he returns to Europe after a long period of exile in the United States, by which time he is one of the century’s greatest novelists and a respected public intellectual. Cop that, dad. In between, Tóibín gives us an unvarnished and more or less comprehensive portrait of his subject as a man and writer. Much of his interest in Mann springs from a natural curiosity about the inner life and creative processes of a major artist. The Magician explores these themes with great subtlety, depicting Mann as a quietly observant, self-scrutinising, uncertain, and instinctively cautious character. As with Tóibín’s fictionalised portrayal of Henry James in The Master (2004), Mann’s closeted homosexuality provides the novel with its psychological undercurrent. Many complexities of his personality are traced to the exquisite tension between his private desires and his outward existence as an eminently respectable bourgeois father of six. Tóibín is no less interested in Mann as an influential historical figure. Like every other European who lived through the first half of the twentieth century, Mann was caught up in catastrophic events, yet he is an intriguing case study, Tóibín recognises, because he lived a privileged life that insulated him from the worst ravages of his era. The family’s fortunes declined for a time following the death of Mann’s father, but Thomas was not destined to be poor. His literary career was an immediate and spectacular success. His first novel, Buddenbrooks, published when he was twenty-six, was hailed as a masterpiece and became a runaway bestseller. A few years later, he married Katia Pringsheim, the youngest daughter of a wealthy industrialist family. He never had to worry about money. As The Magician unfolds, it gradually becomes a reflection on the ambiguous position and ethical responsibilities of the artist in times of great ideological conflict and social upheaval. One of the key transformations in the novel is Mann’s belated political awakening as Germany succumbs to the tyranny of Nazism. As an eminent public figure, he is torn between feeling obligated to comment on current events and reluctance to taint his idealistic conception of the artist as someone who stands apart from the

messy compromises of politics in the service of a higher truth. The underlying irony is that his personal reticence, patrician insularity, and lack of political acumen combine to make his instincts unreliable. He is swept up in the nationalistic sentiments inspired by World War I, adopting a reactionary stance that dismays his older brother and literary rival Heinrich, who sees the dark side of such fervency with greater clarity. Thomas subsequently realises his mistake and moderates his views, but still underestimates the rising threat of National Socialism. ‘He had misunderstood Germany,’ he reflects as he flees with his family in 1934, ‘the very place that was meant to be inscribed on his soul.’ The second half of The Magician is set in the United States, where Mann saw out the war in a state of ‘material comfort and spiritual unease’, as Tóibín wrote some years ago in a review of Evelyn Juers’s House of Exile (2008), one of many sources for the novel. It becomes a kind of structural irony that the clarifying condition of exile finally allows the ‘nonpolitical’ Mann to reconcile himself to his role as a public figure and accept that, under the circumstances, ‘his task was to spread a higher kind of propaganda’. Towards the end of The Magician, Mann is dining with the Roosevelts and his name is being mentioned as a potential head of state for postwar Germany. Mann’s four most famous books – Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus – address (broadly speaking) the themes of the social, the psychological, the philosophical, and the artistic. Tóibín’s considerable achievement in The Magician is to represent these themes as facets of Mann’s character. The novel is at once an ersatz biography and a creative response to Mann’s work, in which the fictionalised author can at times resemble Gustav von Aschenbach and, at other times, Hans Castorp. It is also a richly populated book. Mann is orbited by a host of sharply drawn characters who serve as his intellectual foils and act as counterweights to his rather staid presence. The novel’s dynamic is established in the interaction between his reserved nature and various family members, most of whom are more forthcoming, charismatic, passionate, and troubled than him: the smart, practical, and understanding Katia; his brother Heinrich, the committed leftist; his two eldest children, Erika and Klaus, who embrace the bohemianism and sexual openness of Weimar Germany; and, memorably, his son-in-law W.H. Auden, who marries Erika to assist her escape from the Nazis, and who makes a droll cameo appearance in which he unsettles Mann with his ironic demeanour and ability to deliver a flawless off-the-cuff parody of Virginia Woolf ’s prose. Towards the end of The Magician, Tóibín has Mann grumble that ‘it is a grubby business writing novels. Composers can think about God and the ineffable. We have to imagine the buttons on a coat.’ The trick, as Tóibín well knows, is to show how such mundane things coexist with the most important questions of life, art, and politics. On that score, The Magician acquits itself very well. g James Ley is the author of The Critic in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2014). On page 33 of this issue, Joachim Redner reviews the new edition of Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Fiction

Dark shapes

nancy and disgraced exile to a home for unmarried mothers in Australia and her dramatic efforts to keep her baby and forge a life for herself in a strange country. Lucy Neave’s refreshing novel In a literary landscape where so much contemporary fiction Alice Nelson is merely competent and corrigible – what Nabokov called ‘weak blond prose’ – Neave’s authoritative and idiosyncratic style is a refreshing surprise. The language is powerful and richly allusive, full of visions of the horseman of the apocalypse, dreams of drowning children and lightless water, lake air and darkening skies. The characters read Leviticus, snow falls, the grass freezes, signs and omens are everywhere. In this first section, Believe in Believe in Me Me has the radical strangeness of a Marilynne Robinson novel; by Lucy Neave the narrative carries the reader along with the dramatic thrill of University of Queensland Press a wild biblical tale. $32.99 pb, 306 pp The raw, visceral experiences of the first half of the novel alfway through Lucy Neave’s new novel Believe in Me, give way to a more restrained accumulative realism as the twin there is an astonishing scene in which an orphaned foal narratives of Bet and Sarah’s lives in Australia are unspooled, is dressed in the skin of a newly dead foal, the skewbald and the novel follows the women through various loves, losses, coat threaded with baling twine and the strings knotted under upheavals, and reckonings as they try to find some semblance of the throat and chest. Disguised in this fleshy coat, strands of contentment, across several decades and moving from place to bloody muscle still clinging to it, the foal is presented hopefully place. After the pleasures of the first section of the novel, one canto its foster mother. The novel’s main protagnot help feeling that the engine of this second onist, Bet, is sceptical: ‘It’s condescending: as part idles too slowly. Despite this, Believe in if a mare could be fooled by putting her dead Me is a skilfully rendered and richly layered foal’s skin on another foal.’ Sure enough, the narrative about the complex bonds that unite grieving mare rejects the starving foal, stampmothers and daughters and the fractures that ing her hooves and moving around uneasily in cleave them asunder. the stable. Later that night, when Bet goes to There is an occasional difficulty with percheck on the animals, she finds them nestled spective. The novel is ostensibly Bet’s attempt together: ‘Dark shapes, they moved together, to make sense of her mother’s life with the aid away from me, as though they’d been startled of the scrapbooks that Sarah has left behind, from a dream.’ Stunned at this unexpected and naturally the account is partial, with Bet communion, Bet retreats into her own solitelling us on the first page of the novel; ‘I travtude: ‘I turned off the light, bolted the door erse a tightrope high above the ground and and walked back through dew-soaked grass to have to fill in the empty air beneath so that bed, seeing again the mare and foal, nose to I can move from one known place and time tail. They had no need of me.’ to another.’ Any reconstruction of a life is by Lucy Neave (Hilary Wardhaugh/UQP ) It is what the characters in Believe in Me necessity part invention, but the problem in are yearning for: this shedding of skins and the triumphant re- Believe in Me is that sometimes the narrative swerves intimately birth of an authentic self; this dazzling surprise of unexpected, close to Sarah’s perspective, while at other times Bet is unable unconditional love. But this kind of loving bond only seems to to access her mother’s thoughts and feelings. She makes obserbe available to the animals in the novel; the human characters vations like: ‘Sitting up high, Sarah feels the space grow around are left striving for connections that continually elude them, for her, as if she has room to expand’, while a few pages later Bet a kind of self-actualisation that seems forever out of their reach. says: ‘I can’t tell what thoughts are ricocheting around Sarah’s They are all shadowed by ghosts and disfigured by scars – unable head.’ This leaves the reader with a faint uneasiness regarding the to feel themselves whole, unable to love wholly. source of Bet’s story; the novel is either an imaginative inhabThe narrative follows Bet as she attempts to piece together her iting of a mysterious life, or it is a partial retelling bound by its mother Sarah’s story as a way of understanding and accepting her gaps and absences. It’s somewhat confusing for the reader when complexities and of making sense of Sarah’s frequent distances Bet appears to inhabit both poles. Perhaps in the end, Neave is and failings as a mother. ‘If I can inhabit her consciousness, even trying to teach us something about the essential unknowability a little, it might help me see who I am,’ Bet tells us. ‘Imagine that of another person – that all we can ever intuit is circumscribed, I’m creating a reversible figure; within a silhouette of a candle- and the wordless communion we crave is only possible for the stick, for example, there lies hidden the profiles of two lovers. animals. g Sarah is the candlestick.’ The first part of the novel follows the young Sarah on Alice Nelson’s most recent novel, The Children’s House, was puba journey accompanying an evangelical preacher from her home lished by Penguin Random House in 2018, and a new one is in upstate New York to small-town Idaho, through to her preg- forthcoming in 2022.

18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

Fiction

‘Smoke in the head’

Allinson plays on, with myriad popular culture references as well as repeated nods to the tyranny and potential of screens. Some scenes, like those in which Joe dulls himself with YouTube and Miles Allinson’s new novel sinks into watching brutal, historical boxing matches, tread a fine Daniel Juckes balance: the prose remains beautiful, but also stark and harsh. Part of the burden of the book is revealed: that in the twentieth century banality has been pushed beyond what would normally have seemed commonplace. Even the moments that occur in the manic ashram where Vincent lived during the 1970s are dealt with perfunctorily, at a third-person distance. (This is the Shree Rajneesh Ashram, run by the many-named and deeply divisive In Moonland Osho.) In the age of Netflix, with its addiction to cult-related by Miles Allinson content, these moments are the least interesting in the book. Scribe What is interesting are the reasons why Vincent was drawn to $29.99 pb, 256 pp such a place, why Joe is drawn to Vincent, and why, in the end, n an ABC interview to promote his previous novel, Fever some families work like lodestones. of Animals (2015), Miles Allinson shares a brief anecdote. Cinema pervades the novel in other ways. Joe visits the Screen When Allinson was aged sixteen or seventeen, a teacher told and Television Archive in Melbourne to watch films made by him that everyone turns conservative eventually. Allinson recalls his father’s friend, and describes the fragility of even these more his repulsion at the notion of this inevitable slide towards ortho- official, archived steps into the past. Here, the narrative strains doxy. His new novel, In Moonland, feels like a rebuttal. Joe, the gladly at the flickering of a VCR, as the crew and actors of the narrator of the first part of the book, is caught somewhere be- film Joe is watching break to sit around a campfire and discuss tween consent and revolt: though ambitious, he feels trapped by what they might do next. At another moment, watching all the the flickering lights of his own computer, by the suburbs, and footage he can of the ashram, Joe describes the by his run-of-the-mill job. Orbiting him is a way ‘images pulsed like something that was coterie of questions relating to his new status alive’. At these closer, more active points in as a father, coupled with one more profoundthe novel, In Moonland ’s own intertextuality ly unanswerable question: why did his father, is cleverly signalled. Vincent, kill himself ? Only some of these For Joe, screen time serves another funquestions are answered across a narrative that ction: to distort clock time. ‘Maybe films uses four different perspectives and three difmeasure time – or dissolve it,’ he says. This disferent timelines, from the present back to the solving is doubled when the film in question 1970s and into the near future. is poorly preserved, deliberately destroyed, or Vincent gambled and was violent and used to put a banner across reality. (In the closangry. But, says Joe, ‘If you were to ask me ing section of the novel, set in the near future, what sort of father he had been, I would say Allinson filters things even further, through that he was a good one ... and that he was a ‘skin suits’, ‘Vistas’, and ‘Xtended reality’.) troubled person, with a loneliness that could In this way, competition between reality Miles Allinson (Scribe) not be cured.’ To Allinson’s credit, this kind and its proxies helps Allinson skewer both of complex character populates the novel. culture and counterculture. The commune and Another complexity pulsing throughout is also first asserted by the cult are shown to be mostly futile in the face of what they Joe: on becoming a father to Sylvie, he describes the terrible love resist, which is both the slipperiness of the present and the forces a parent has for their child, alongside the more nonchalant love a that shape it. If there is hope, it is faint, and it exists in smallness: child might have for their parent. But this nonchalance is belied in the ways in which family and memory offer meaning in the by the single-mindedness of Joe’s search for Vincent, and his fear face of monomaniac mystics and neoliberal hellscapes. that something is missing from his family’s history. In the novel, Osho declares that ‘the past is just smoke in the Allinson describes with delicacy a hard truth of new parent- head. It is nothing.’ In Moonland works to disprove this statement: hood: that the past is erased and that the future is exorcised too. the past shouldn’t shape us, but does; it shouldn’t linger, but does, ‘Is this how my own father felt when I was born?’ Joe asks. ‘As lost exhibiting itself in our bodies and in the various traces we manas this? ... Like his life had shrunk to the size of a blackened pea?’ age to leave behind. The memories that mosaic the text go some This feeling of being lost and isolated increases alongside another way to demonstrate this; they work as explosions of connection of the novel’s central concerns: an endemic untetheredness that and consciousness that feel authentic. This is strange, given the compels Joe backwards even as the pressure and tensions of family flimsiness of the past. But the result is the suggestion that Joe is life bend him out of shape. not as alone as he thinks. g In Moonland unfolds cinematically and is, on occasion, overly visual. Perhaps this is due to the nature of memory or Daniel Juckes is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at UWA and imagination in an over-heated, graphic age; certainly, it is a trope Associate Editor at Westerly magazine.

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Fiction

What if ?

An adventure in counterfactuals Cristina Savin

Civilisations

by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor

Harvill Secker $32.99 pb, 310 pp

cclaimed as the most original novel of the 2019 rentrée littéraire, and recipient of the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française, Laurent Binet’s most recent book, Civilisations (2019), is a cleverly crafted uchronia, or speculative fiction. The author is inviting us on an epic journey that devises alternative key moments in history, from a Viking tale to an Italian travel diary, and from the Inca chronicles to the capricious destiny of Cervantes. Let the adventure of counterfactuals begin … The year is 1000 ce. Erik the Red’s daughter, Freydis Eriksdottir, a red-haired, ferocious Viking woman, leaves Greenland on a ship to Vinland, in search of new territories. During her ambitious exploits, she encounters the Skraelings and befriends them by gifting them a pearl necklace and an iron brooch. The Greenlanders and the Skraelings exchange skills and knowledge: Freydis and her people teach the Skraelings to ‘extract iron from peat and to transform it into axes, lances and arrowheads’. In return, the Greenlanders learn to grow barley ‘by pushing the grains into little piles of earth, alongside beans and marrows’ and to build up stores for winter. By a cruel twist of fate, the Skraelings become almost extinct, for the Greenlanders also ‘gift’ them deadly diseases. Instead of returning to her homeland, Freydis, who has inherited her father’s wanderlust, sails south to Cuba, then Panama and finally reaches Cajamarca, where her ascent continues. The year is 1492. A pious Christopher Columbus weighs anchor for the island of Cuba in search of gold, spices, and trade opportunities. His journal records wondrous stories of mountains, valleys, and beaches of unparalleled beauty. But the sailor from Genoa who crosses the ‘Ocean Sea’ to prove that the world was round never returns to his benefactors, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. He falls into the hands of the Inca. Despite the suffering, he remains true to his mission and to ‘the great Castile and its glorious, enlightened monarchs’. The year is 1531. The Inca emperor Atahualpa departs Quito, passing through Cajamarca and Cuba, to begin his quest for the New World (Europe). His troops reach Lisbon at the time of the devastating earthquake, when the earth ‘had trembled and opened up and then an enormous wave had hit the coast’. They then proceed to Toledo, where the Spaniards and the Quitonians engage in battles of unspeakable cruelty. The Inca are unstoppable through Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and beyond. It is not just hard-fought wars and slaughter of the populace. Atahualpa is also a reformer; he understands that ‘it is more difficult to reign than 20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

to wage war’. Sterile lands in Europe are replete with new crops and canals, granaries are established to feed the hungry in times of need, and plots of land are given to peasants or to communities, while new tax reforms are put in place to reward ‘the merchants who funded the army with loans’. There is a celebration of life and compassion for the disabled, the elderly, and the infirm. As Atahualpa advances across the New World, languages, religions, traditions, and cultures meet, and new connections are formed. Titian, Tintoretto, and Cranach immortalise the power and glory of the emperor and his entourage. Atahualpa is introduced to money and quickly realises its importance in achieving his imperial dreams. Vinho, the black drink, becomes a favourite of his. The Inca Temples of the Sun emerge as new places of worship. But not everyone is willing to accept this new world order. An indignant Thomas More is awaiting death in the Tower of London, having refused to support the blasphemy of replacing monasteries and abbeys, throughout the kingdom of England, with Temples of the Sun. Atahualpa’s formidable reign reaches an epic finale in Seville. The epilogue: a young Spaniard, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, flees his country and sets out on an adventure with his friend El Greco. Upon crossing the Ocean Sea, Cervantes reaches Cuba, a land full of marvels and abundant riches. The structure of Civilisations, and Binet’s literary style, bring to mind a four-movement opus of varied tempos and motifs. The first two movements are short and sharp, the third by far the longest and most action-packed, while the finale is soulful and idyllic. Civilisations is a refreshing work that pushes the limits of historical fiction. The language is crisp and polished. There are shifts in style, most notably prompted by the insertion of epistles between Erasmus of Rotterdam and Thomas More, the intriguing Ninety-Five Theses of the Sun (a complete rewrite of Luther’s ninety-five theses?), poems in old Norse, and gentle strophes called ‘The Incades’. From time to time, the chronicles of Atahualpa are crowded with a plethora of names and events, making it somewhat challenging to keep up with the narrative; yet they contribute a successful crescendo to the overall tone of the book, which befits the story of the Inca emperor. Under the deft touch of Sam Taylor, the translator, we indulge, much like the Inca with the intoxicating vinho, in the novel’s langue exquise. Nowhere perhaps does the skill of the translator comes to the fore as much as in the graceful rendition of the verse (The Incades, Book I, Verse 20): When Thor, the god who with a thought controls The raging seas, and balances the poles, From heav’n beheld, and will’d, in sov’reign state, To fix the Eastern World’s depending fate, Swift at his nod th’Olympian herald flies, And calls th’immortal senate of the skies; Where, from the sov’reign throne of earth and heav’n, Th’immutable decrees of fate are given.

Finishing this ambitious saga of counterfactuals with a sense of exhilaration, we wonder if this innovative tale will pave the way for another uchronia. g Cristina Savin is currently undertaking a PhD in Translation Studies at Monash University. ❖

Fiction

Fantasies and flaws Three new novels Elizabeth Bryer

y the end of Hugh Breakey’s The Beautiful Fall (Text, $32.99 pb, 349 pp), it is hard to remember that the prologue hinted at stimulating possibilities. In it, Robbie’s past self writes to his present one, explaining that he suffers from recurring amnesia, which strikes every 179 days. Readers could be mistaken for thinking they are in for meditations on time and memory, maybe even on the meaning of a life lived episodically. When it is revealed that Robbie is building an intricate arrangement of 83,790 dominoes in his living room, readers might even imagine a novel that touches on metaphysical themes in the vein of Jorge Luis Borges. Instead, what we get is a teenager’s fantasy, delivered in a plodding realism (wake up, eat breakfast, work out), that turns into a middle-aged man’s anxiety dream, complete with the pitfalls of heteronormative marriage and the attendant suspicions of entrapment and manipulation, not unlike the central dread of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012). It is the premise of the romantic comedy 50 First Dates (2004) but with the genders switched, and for this reason, efforts by the Partner Who Remembers to woo the Partner Who Forgets must surely be sinister rather than cute, because – see above, re: gender inversion. How do we get from the adolescent fantasy to the domestic horror? This development hinges on the character of Julie. Robbie’s condition has left him a bit socially awkward, but that’s okay because he is a human sculpture. We know this because he reminds us about his ‘muscles’, aka ‘guns’, which he tries to modestly hide beneath his shirts after appraising his hot bod in the mirror. He also reminds us repeatedly that Julie, who delivers his groceries and says ‘hmph’ a lot, is both beautiful and slim. Miraculously, she is not threatened or deterred by Robbie’s oddball ways. She cheerfully becomes part of his life, even lending a hand with his weird domino project. She turns out to be highly capable to boot: she can sling a heavy leather tool bag over her pretty summer dress (a dress that inexplicably flutters upward) and problem-solve Robbie’s domino woes by constructing helpful platforms. Cool chick! She even teaches him how to ‘lubricate the screws by spitting on them’ and suggests they keep the ‘drill bits in [his drill] and the screw bits in [hers]’. Whoa! Except, Julie is not a cool chick: she is in fact Robbie’s wife. Instead of being delighted by this revelation, Robbie gets suspicious. He now must decide whether he can trust the traces left by the past version of himself or those shown to him by his

significant other. Who holds the key to his identity? Whom can he trust? This woman is a strategist. Or should that be conniving? She is funny. A humorous, capable (but thankfully not pants-wearing or drill-bit-wielding), beautiful wife. One who does nice things like pay for dinner, making him resent that she constantly has ‘all the power’. One who might have an issue or two of her own, making her a selfless caregiver only ninety-six per cent of the time. One who shows him a key to his past in the form of dancing. Red flags! (In case you missed it, this last effort is evidence of her plan to ‘sink her claws into [his] soul’.) I should probably let you know that a puff quote by Graeme Simsion calls this novel ‘moving, intelligent and entertaining’. I think there is some message in it about honesty being more important than smarts, especially if you are a woman; about there still being romantic hope for masculine men who boast zero interpersonal skills; and about the importance of being a Man of Principle. Or, a chastening lesson that the bedrock of a good marriage is submitting to another, entrusting one’s identity to another (oh dear). At one stage, Robbie says he wants to be ‘free from the haphazard interventions of past lives – past wives’. If you like your books silly, this one is for you.

novel that bears greater resemblance to Simsion’s work is Kim Lock’s wholesome The Other Side of Beautiful (HQ Fiction, $29.99 pb, 358 pp). Like the clanking campervan at its heart, it starts out a little shaky, perhaps overburdened by some of the narrative challenges set up by its premise, but those flaws don’t detract from the fondness with which it is likely to be remembered. Mercy suffers from an anxiety so severe she has not set foot outside her Adelaide home for two years. When that house burns down, and the living situation at her former husband’s proves too fraught, she takes to the road in a Daihatsu Hijet with only her sausage dog for company. There are some painstakingly plotted points that lead to her decision to make the Arafura Sea her destination, which, if a little fussy, accrete in a way that makes the choice feel plausible for someone living with debilitating fear. By creating a succession of overbearing individuals who won’t take no, or silence, for an answer, Lock resolves a key problem: how to engineer encounters when the protagonist is someone who takes great pains to avoid all contact with strangers. At such times, the mechanics of the writing are laid bare, and the chitchat can be tedious – even if the stakes are intolerably high for Mercy. But the nature of campervan travel, especially the way it facilitates repeat encounters, means that this dynamic dissipates after the first third of the novel. By the time a romantic interest appears on the horizon, and revelations about Mercy’s past gather momentum, the motor is humming and all efforts to get into gear are forgotten. This is a recovery narrative meets road novel, sprinkled with affirmations about how to rebuild one’s life in the wake of loss, whether of a loved one, self-esteem, or security. Readers facing a turning point in life may be especially receptive to its feel-good designs.

ophie Overett’s The Rabbits (Vintage, $32.99 pb, 327 pp) is a lushly written family drama set in Brisbane during a summer that permeates everything. Following the disappearance of AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

her son Charlie, the narrative homes in on art teacher Delia, on her angst-ridden school-leaver daughter, Olive, and on her youngest son, Benjamin. The story is full of heat and secrets, and it laments the way loved ones are forever at the limits of the knowable. It is only with peripheral characters (a neighbour, a workmate, a classmate) that Delia, Olive, and Benjamin can grapple with their feelings and attempt to express themselves, tasks that are almost impossible within the family unit. In a magical realist touch, Charlie turns out to be not gone but invisible. He becomes something of a cipher, the absence everyone else orbits. His indiscernibility invites reflection on the pieces of ourselves we keep from view, and, in the context of the novel’s intergenerational trauma and Delia’s artwork, it shares commonalities with the workings of memory; not just memory’s omissions, but its insubstantiality, the many ways it falls short of reality. This is a highlight of the novel. Less interesting is the portrayal of a student–teacher relationship, which, with its seemingly uncomplicated view of the power differential, feels oddly out of step with the times. Overett moulds words into parts of speech ordinarily foreign to them. Certain metaphors slowed this reader down, forcing a languid pace to match the slow burn of the narrative. While the surprise of words used figuratively is diminished upon repetition – examples include ‘mouth’ as a verb, as well as ‘yawn’ and ‘mothy’ – overall it signals the care and skill of a writer worth paying attention to. Of course, what may prove evocative for some readers may alienate others, e.g., ‘The sun is just starting to raise its head against the hills, fanning its golden locks across the sheets of the suburb.’ At one stage Overett writes, ‘The day is alive in a way it wasn’t earlier, a wild city thrumming inside a man-made one.’ It is the glimpses that Overett offers of this wild city – the subtropical heat working its power on characters throughout, the air and grass teeming with the sounds and sights of insects, reptiles, and birds – that are especially memorable. g Elizabeth Bryer is the author of From Here On, Monsters (Picador), which was joint winner of the 2020 Norma K Hemming award. She is also a translator from Spanish, including of novels by María José Ferrada, Aleksandra Lun, José Luis de Juan, and Claudia Salazar Jiménez.

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Nth Wave

This time around they say, we won’t be at loggerheads,

we’ve understood you can’t measure up, we’ll do maths & spelling and that’s enough, afternoons, we’ll make cake, play in the yard, there’s only so much you can ask of your child; yourself. This time around we’ll know what we lost on the swings we gained on the wild roundabout of this pestilence where no one gets out till the whole thing’s done: the hurdy-gurdy’s wonky & the child’s cry goes either way. Terror and joy. No walk in the park. The more the big doors close, the more images of outside pile up, like some malware you can’t stop blossoming across your mental screen: a backdrop of beaches meadow or mountaintop, anything with vistas those places we shouldn’t have been burning up earth to visit anyway as if the earth were ours and it is, but not only.

Tracy Ryan Tracy Ryan’s most recent collection is The Water Bearer (2018).

22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

Commentary

‘The nature of the race’ My nomination for the Space Crone Elizabeth Oliver

Ursula K. Le Guin (Marian Wood Kolisch/ Oregon State University)

n her 1976 essay ‘The Space Crone’, Ursula K. Le Guin imagines the highly advanced aliens of Altair landing on Earth. Politely, they seek a human being to accompany them on their long journey home so that they may ‘learn from an exemplary person the nature of the race’. As a palliative care doctor, I often ponder what constitutes an exemplary life, so my choice of Space Crone may not be a conventional one. Space was Le Guin’s place of business and pleasure. An acclaimed fiction writer, essayist and critic, and housewife with three children, she transformed the science fiction and fantasy genres. Her stories traversed gender, anthropology, and morality as well as space. I am sure she would have had edifying things to say about the recent phallic probings by the plutocrats. Le Guin excelled in scientific speculation and intellectual experiment, but she never countenanced their separation from creaturely love, pain, or fear. Her choice of earthly paragon was based on an intimacy with adaptation, for ‘only a person who has experienced, accepted and acted the entire human condition – the essential quality of which is Change – can fairly represent humanity’. So whom does she suggest we send on the spaceship? Not a ‘fine, bright, brave young man, highly educated and in peak physical condition’. Not even a young woman who may volunteer ‘out of a profound conviction that Altair couldn’t possibly be any worse for a woman than Earth is’. She flirts with the idea of a Russian cosmonaut, since American astronauts are generally too old. But that’s still not quite right. In the end, what she wants is a working-class grandmother from behind the ‘costume jewelry counter or betel-nut booth’, someone who has worked at tasks like cooking, cleaning, raising children. ‘She was a virgin once … then a sexually potent fertile female, and then went through menopause. She has given birth several times and faced death several times – the same times.’ Change has been forced on the Crone throughout life by both biology and society. She changed once from virgin to mature woman, or perhaps wife, or whore; then again at menopause into a state of uncertain fiscal or reproductive value. Le Guin describes menopause as a practice run at death, both menopause and death being the experience of uncontrollable Change. Le Guin felt that those who had lived in daily contact with

the human condition were most qualified to describe it. She compared Virginia Woolf, a woman who participated in an intellectually, politically, and sexually active society, with the cloistered James Joyce, who ‘took responsibility for nothing but his own writing and career’. She deplored Joseph Conrad’s demand to be fed, bathed, and sequestered while he ‘wrestled with the Lord for my creation’, contrasting him with Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the kitchen table. She reproduces with palpable disdain Conrad’s description of his creativity as ‘a lonely struggle in great isolation from the world’. Most of the literary canon has come to us from these insulated rooms, with female labour tending a sterile environment in which powerful men speak to each other from an ever-diminishing experience of life. The aliens don’t need our scientific or technical wisdom, for theirs is demonstrably superior to ours. They want to understand the human experience, which is one of Change and Death. I am biased – obstetricians may prefer a midwife – but I will nominate the post-menopausal hospice nurse as our representative of the human condition. These Grand Mothers have been both witness and subject to Change, and therefore embody the nature of our race. Jeanette Winterson observed recently that ‘the male push is to actually just discard the planet: all the boys are going off into space. But … love is also about cleaning up your mess, staying where you are, working through the issues.’ The pioneer dream of a Mars colony is mostly a craving to find a new way and new place where one has the power to stay the same. To care for the dying is to be invited daily into outer space. Dying is the hardest voyage and death the last frontier; to be in its presence is to be up against the bone of human life. Not ‘up against’ to conquer or crush, but rather ‘be adjacent to’, as you lie with your back against your lover’s and feel their long warmth down the length of your body. In dying the ego is unmade, what you knew is proved false. The landscape is truly foreign, littered with your own failing bodily functions, uncontrolled saliva and stomas, the secretions of dissolving lungs. The journey is marked by visions and charged words and above all, inexorable Change. In hospice, this carnage of the body is loved, cleaned, respected, and witnessed. The nurses do not fight the dying process: they share it. They assist the traveller to wake up for the family and to sleep when the terror or exhaustion overwhelms them. They smooth the agitation of the dying brain. A young woman in the hospice entered her last hours. In what we call a state of ‘terminal agitation’, she fought to sit up. Nurse Dipti lifted the limp, sighing body against her shoulder, and they sat together in the dark, waiting for her annihilation. ‘She needed to put her feet on the floor,’ said Dipti later, as she prepared for the funeral directors. ‘She knew she was disappearing, she needed to feel the ground.’ As I leave for the long night during which Dipti will bear witness to two more collapsing empires, I consider the Altaireans’ arrival and mentally slip her name into the ballot. She is the exemplary person to represent Earth in Space, for she has actually lived on Earth and has already been to Space. g Elizabeth Oliver is a doctor specialising in palliative medicine and general practice. Her essay ‘All These Little Deaths’ was shortlisted for the 2020 Calibre Essay Prize. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Calibre Essay Prize

May Day by Anita Punton

he real estate agent told me not to bother cleaning the house. All the serious buyers would be developers, he said: they’d only knock it down. They’d cut down the row of feijoas and the Japanese maple and build all the way to the fence on three sides. And they’d go up, of course, to take advantage of the views. A corner block on the highest hill in the inner east? Tell your dad he’s laughing. He was trying to be kind, this real estate agent. He said developers would see past the fuzz-covered cereal bowls that were cemented onto the benchtops, and the sodden carpet and the caved-in ceiling. The stench wouldn’t put them off, either. I should give myself a break, he said. Don’t kill yourself cleaning. Just get rid of the rubbish and make sure it’s safe for potential buyers to walk around. So it was a choice between exhaustion or humiliation. I chose humiliation. I talked myself into letting strangers see the squalor, but I couldn’t stomach them seeing, figuratively, the interior of my father’s head. I cleared out all his stuff. It took four months. What was left was a filthy, unfamiliar, haunted house. I hid in my car during the inspections. I watched my father’s neighbours, some I had known all my life, go inside and come out again, covering their noses with the backs of their hands. Some weeks before, I made the long drive to the hospital to see Dad. I planned to watch him for a bit, to see what I was dealing with, but he clocked me in the doorway. He looked very thin, hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked, but he was tucking into a hot lunch. He shook his head in disbelief. ‘The food in this joint,’ he spluttered. ‘Sensational! ’ This was a new development. He had forgotten to be outraged by me. Our last encounter had ended in a walk-off; now I seemed to be someone he had taken a shine to. He agreed enthusiastically with the paramedic’s report that the house was unlivable. He acted like he wanted to be rid of it. Emboldened, I brought up the subject of aged care, but he cut me off, saying he thought he might go back to his home town, the one he’d left sixty years ago, 24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

five hundred kilometres away. ‘I know for a fact they’re building a beautiful retirement village in the area. For all I know they could be naming it after me! I’m a local hero up there!’ I knew what he was referring to. He had done something heroic once. Perhaps ‘heroic’ is gilding the lily. Certainly remarkable. It was the 1950s. My father was in his early twenties at the time, newly arrived in Melbourne to take up a position as a clerk at the State Savings Bank. His looks were striking; he could have passed for an actor in one of the Italian films of the era. Thick brown hair, high cheekbones, patrician nose. It was an aristocratic face, at odds with his origins in a remote Sunraysia town, a working-class boy from a strict Methodist family. The first thing Dad did in Melbourne was take a room at the YMCA on the corner of City Road. The Y offered cheap rent and a wholesome, collegiate atmosphere. It also offered Keep Fit and Gymnastic classes in the evenings, and my father took advantage of these. Muscular and flexible and unusually self-motivated, he began to excel at gymnastics. The Y’s equipment was almost entirely sub-standard, and the hard, wooden floors made for bone-jarring dismounts and painful forward rolls. But he persisted. He built up his strength by practising conditioning exercises in his room at night, in the narrow space between his bed and the wall. He learnt what he could from books, and pasted newspaper articles about European gymnastics into a scrapbook. His subsequent success was as much a feat of character as of athleticism. By the time he was twenty-four, he was Victorian champion on the parallel bars, floor exercises, pommel horse, vault, and rings. When he was twenty-five, he was selected for Australia’s first Olympic gymnastics team, one of only six men and three women. The Australian gymnasts expected no medals at the 1956 Games. They trained in their coach’s backyard, still on the shonky equipment, and most had full-time jobs. They understood that they were rank amateurs compared to the Russians or the Hungarians. Nevertheless, Dad got to march into the MCG in front of a hundred thousand people, sign the autograph books

of breathless children, and shake Prince Philip’s hand. It was the time of his life. After that, nothing. But that’s not quite true: he coached gymnastics for a while, travelled a little, studied ballet. He married a ballet dancer, my mother. They had me. But his life seemed to cleave into two halves, and throughout the second half, all his gymnastic medals and trophies, his Olympic memorabilia, indeed any record of his past achievements, were packed away in boxes under the house. They were rarely referred to, and never taken out and admired. This second-half father kept to himself. His personality seemed entirely unsuited to his job as a salesman for an electrical supplies company. He often came home furious, and he never made a friend at work. He prevaricated if required to attend social events. He cut his own hair and rejected the doctor, preferring to diagnose himself with a copy of The Reader’s Digest Family Medical Adviser. It was clear to my mother and me that he had set himself impossible personal goals. He strove to master the most difficult piano pieces, frenetic ragtime twosteps that required his fingers to swarm all over the keys. He stood in front of his easel for hours, agonising over the details in his oil paintings, never satisfied with his efforts. Only high art was good enough. Instead of family photos on our mantlepiece, we had miniature busts of Brahms and Beethoven and a featherlight plaster copy of The Discus Thrower of Myron. When the Games returned to Australia in 2000, Dad was invited to carry the Olympic torch for a stint as it made its way across Melbourne. Nearly seventy, he trained hard for the run. I joined Mum at the side of the road to watch him go past, expecting him to look serious and uncomfortable, eyes riveted to the bitumen in front of him. But when he appeared on the crest of the hill, he was smiling and laughing and waving, not just to us but to all the other bystanders cheering him on. When he finished the run, he was put in an official minivan and driven to the local park, where the torch-bearers were being

honoured with a formal presentation. Mum and I made our own way. We made sure we had film in our cameras. We worried about getting a good spot in the crowd. Somewhere between getting off the minivan and entering the marquee, Dad disappeared. The official at the microphone

The author’s father in Cairo, 1960

called his name and everyone waited, but he didn’t show up, embarrassing us and confusing the organisers. When we finally got home, he was watching television like nothing had happened, and was annoyed that we were upset. The nurse caught my arm as I was leaving the ward. Could I bring in my father’s keys, wallet, glasses, and teeth tomorrow, she said, as if this were the easiest thing in the world. He had nothing but the clothes on his back when he climbed into the ambulance, she said. ‘I’ll give it a red hot go,’ I told the nurse. She gave me a withering look, as if she’d met arseholes like me before. She didn’t have time for me to explain Dad to her, and I didn’t know how to do it anyway.

Patrick White’s Theatre Australian Modernism on Stage, 1960–2018

DENISE VARNEY Photo: State Theatre Company of South Australia

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

I hadn’t set foot in my childhood home for five years, not since Dad had marched me to the door and said that (a) possession was nine-tenths of the law, (b) he was changing the locks and (c) he knew what I was playing at. We were supposed to be going through Mum’s things together. I had brought the list of instructions she had written for me before she died, detailing what was to go to whom. Dad took forever to read the list, then said I had forged Mum’s handwriting. I pointed out her distinctive, loopy lettering, but his mind was made up. My childhood home had what we called a sunroom. Nothing flash, just a room at the back of the house with a wall of windows facing north, where Mum would sit reading her book, still and serene, her hair sparkling in the sunlight. Now the sunroom looked like the set of one of the neverending Theatre of the Absurd plays I had acted in at university. All the blinds were down as far as they could go: broken, from being tugged too hard. A hole in the ceiling, two-metres wide, was fringed with tufts of pink ceiling batts, like bedraggled fairy floss. Below, a disordered grid of twenty-three plastic tubs filled to the brim with brown water. The sound of dripping. A deadlocked door. A missing key. A chair and a single saucepan next to the only open window, where the old man had been throwing out the fetid water onto the garden below. [A phone rings. THE OLD MAN stands and moves stage right.] THE OLD MAN: Yep.

The last time I rang him, a few weeks before he called for the ambulance, he had sounded the same as always: magisterial, mocking, utterly credible. DAUGHTER: How are you, Dad? THE OLD MAN: You tell me. How should I be? Beat. DAUGHTER: Anything I can do to help? THE OLD MAN: What if I don’t want your help?

He said he didn’t want anything from me. He had everything under control. I realised I was still pinching my old house key between my thumb and forefinger. All that talk about changing the locks had been bluster. I stood between the kitchen and the sunroom, looking all around. The only thing I could see that showed any semblance of order was the fridge door. Using little button-shaped magnets, my father had created a collage of cut-out newspaper headings, a kind of motivational ransom note to himself. It took four hours to find his wallet. His teeth would take six weeks. I drove back to the hospital with the wallet, and, sensing I was still in his good books, asked him how the house had got into such a state. He said that a pair of shady Irish builders had climbed in a window, drugged him, and hobbled his ankles as he lay in bed. ‘I had to walk on two smashed ankles all the way to the hospital!’ he said. ‘They would have waited until I was gone, then backed up their truck and pumped the house full of all that stuff.’ Conveniently, they had pumped the house full of all the 26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

stuff Dad was into: cheap classical music compilation CDs and heavily discounted art books and copies of New Dawn magazine (‘The #1 magazine for people who think for themselves’) and all his half-finished paintings that used to be in the garage. Then his giddy mood subsided. He looked me straight in the eye, unblinking. His voice went down an octave. ‘You don’t throw anything out. Not a single thing.’ ‘I won’t.’ ‘Because I’ll know.’ Then his mood flipped again, and he launched into a story I would hear several times over the next few months, as if he had been stewing over it, or reliving it. It seemed to take place in the early 1970s, when he still caught the train to work. He was walking home one night, he said, up the steep incline of Tower Street. Something was wrong with the footpath. He went over, hard. ‘I hit my head!’ he shouted at me, as if affronted, as if he couldn’t believe how unreasonable life could be. For my second visit to the house, I had a plan. First, take photos of every room. I wanted evidence, something tangible I could show the doctors in case Dad managed to persuade them he could take care of himself. Although they had already told me there was no way he’d be allowed back home, that he suffered from ‘lack of insight’, I knew the power of his authoritative voice. To be fair, it was far more likely that he’d convince me, so the photos would also serve as a reminder, an insurance policy against doubt and vacillation. Afterwards, I showed them to some friends and watched for their reactions. ‘That’s not normal is it?’ I asked. ‘Er, no?’ they said, using the sort of upward inflection that suggested I was losing my mind. They also thought I was mad for not scooping up everything in the house and taking it to the tip. But the plastic tubs in every room that seemed to be filled with rubbish also included, on closer investigation, items like watches, wads of cash, and Olympic memorabilia. I didn’t want to miss anything important. And I didn’t want to be in a situation where Dad might ask me for something and I’d be unable to produce it. That scared the pants off me. But my most pressing motivation for going through everything methodically was to find something amid the chaos that might explain him to me, some item that would make all the pieces fit together, absolve me of guilt, maybe even make me feel some compassion for him. I was going to need it if I was to be his advocate and power of attorney. Otherwise, we had a long haul ahead of us. If I was looking for compassion, I felt a stab of it when I came across all the unopened flatpacks of shelves, plastic filing trays, and expandable files. He was clearly desperate to get organised, and at some point had been motivated enough to do something about it. This explained all the cream-coloured manila folders I kept finding, neatly labelled with titles like Electricity and House Insurance. Except there were five separate Electricity folders, all with a single notice in them, all in different rooms. Other folders were harder to explain. One was labelled Eyes. When I opened it, a shower of cut-out newspaper eyes fluttered onto my shoes. Another was labelled with a single letter: H. All it contained was an article about the 2013 child abuse Royal Commission.

Once I’d taken the photos, I tried to stick to the plan but became distracted almost immediately. I started picking up all the scribbled notepapers that confettied every room in the house. I was trying to construct a narrative out of them. Many were dictionary definitions (Debase: to lower in character and to degrade); others were advertising slogans he had copied down (Clean out your insides for a flatter tummy). Some were records of phone conversations I remembered: unwieldy, semantic affairs that went for hours, during which he implied that I was a villain, a con artist, a potential housebreaker. One note simply read: my daughter’s superior attitude. I threw myself back into the plan, starting with the books. I noticed a row of familiar-looking paperbacks on a low shelf. Despite the thousands of books he had amassed, Dad was not what you’d call a reader. He liked books you could dip into; he rarely read one from cover to cover. But these paperbacks had certainly been read; their spines were thoroughly cracked. One title rang a bell: Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken. Others included Return to the Stars, The Flying Saucer Vision, The UFO Enigma. I laughed out loud. What the hell were these? We are Not the First. Science fiction? Dad was never into that. I pulled out my phone and googled. All the books were published in the late 1960s and early 1970s and seemed to be based around a theory called the Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis. The idea was that in ancient times, intelligent extraterrestrials visited the earth and got busy doing everything from exterminating the dinosaurs to building the pyramids. I googled a bit more and clicked on a Smithsonian magazine article that called it ‘evidence-free idiocy’. I had a flashback to the 1980s, of Dad watching television documentaries about the pyramids, marvelling at the miracle of their existence. ‘Mind-blowing!’ he’d exclaim. ‘Unbelievable!’ In response, my mother would murmur politely and my child’s mind would be spinning, trying to work out if Dad’s silent-movie frown and dramatic head-shaking and tsk-tsking meant he was pleased or displeased. It was the same kind of thunderstruck reaction he’d have when he’d watch the ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov or listen to Luciano Pavarotti – or when he couldn’t believe what had just come out of my mouth. Unbelievable! Tsk-tsk-tsk. I was aware that Dad had visited the pyramids once, but I wouldn’t know any details, or see any photos, until many years later. In 1960, he took the SS Orcades, an ocean liner that had been an accommodation ship during the Melbourne Olympics, to Naples, stopping in Cairo on the way. It was his first time overseas. After travelling through Western Europe and the UK, he took one of the first ever tourist buses through Russia, ending up back in Italy in time to watch the opening ceremony of the Rome Olympics.

I put all the ancient astronaut books in a plastic tub bound for the storage facility. But I kept thinking about them, the incongruity of their long life in our house. How could my intelligent father, who liked facts and evidence – indeed, who demanded facts and evidence from me with our every interaction – take seriously the ideas in those books? It was not as if he had bought one just to see what all the fuss was about. He had kept buying them. I tried to remember what he was like in the early 1970s, when I was a toddler and he still thought I was wonderful, but of course that was impossible. By now, most of the people around me assumed that my father was living with dementia. But it didn’t seem like dementia to me. To me, it was just a magnification of his everyday behaviour, only

Nikita Krushchev, Moscow, 1960

devoid of its former subtlety and strategy. I figured that the trauma of losing my mother, his umbilical cord to the world, had opened the floodgates. Or maybe it was simply because he didn’t have to behave himself in front of her any more. He could finally let rip. It never occurred to me that he might have a mental illness. All my life, Mum and I and our extended family and friends acted as though everything was normal with Dad, the only concession being that he was an ex-Olympian and not like other people and we should all respect that. So, whenever he pointed a finger in my face and told me that he knew what my game was, or demanded I define every second word in the remark I just made, I saw it only as an exercise of his power, letting me know once again how intelligent and perceptive he was. It just sounded like he had a very low opinion of me, and somewhere along the line I must have forgotten something terrible that I had done to him. Now I was beginning to come around to the idea that something was seriously amiss. I was forty years old. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

I found a nursing home that would let him set up his easel so he could paint in his room, but he refused. ‘I’m not a performing monkey,’ he said. For a while he had a girlfriend, another resident, who seemed almost as angry as him. There was no relaxing of tensions between us, no reconciliation, not even a workable coexistence. The day I told him the house had finally been sold, his anger boiled over into undisguised hatred, and stayed that way. ‘You tricked me!’ he screamed at me. I heard a nurse start running down the corridor. ‘You duped me!’

May Day, Moscow, 1960

The two and a half years in aged care were the worst of my life. And his, no doubt. After he died, and his story had an ending, I made an appointment with a psychologist. Talking about him seemed more manageable then. I brought with me all my preoccupations and suppositions from the last three years, but mainly I wanted to talk about narcissistic personality disorder. It was the only thing that made sense to me, and I gave the psychologist examples that I thought proved my theory. I told her how Mum had always said that Dad had adored me until I was about three years old, and I had hundreds and hundreds of professional-looking

baby photos to prove her theory: 8x10s Dad had taken himself. Mum said, ‘It was when you began to really talk, and it was clear you had a mind of your own … well, I think he got a bit of a shock. You weren’t afraid to disagree with him. He didn’t like that.’ The psychologist nodded. ‘That certainly fits with a narcissistic diagnosis. A narcissist doesn’t like to be challenged. How old would he have been then?’ ‘About forty-one.’ ‘That’s interesting. Early forties is often the age for late-onset schizophrenia.’ That shut me up. ‘What?’ I croaked. And then, ‘Oh!’ I remembered something. I remembered that first time I saw him at the hospital, when he was tucking into his hot lunch, and a young doctor had pulled me aside and asked me if Dad had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I was still staring at the psychologist. ‘I can’t believe I forgot about that.’ The young doctor had asked me if Dad had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and I had laughed. Laughed at the idea that Dad had been diagnosed with anything, because Dad never thought there was anything wrong with him. It was everyone else who had the problem. And then I had forgotten about it. But that was not the only time, because now I remembered a carer at the nursing home saying that word again and I must have looked confused, so she took me to the nurses’ station and opened his bulging file and there was the word, written down in the notes, staring back at me. I had forgotten that too. ‘What the hell is wrong with me?’ I said out loud. Why had I forgotten that word, and instead obsessed over books about ancient astronauts, stories about falling over in the street, a manila folder containing a single article about a child abuse royal commission, and a condition I first heard about while watching daytime television? ‘Well, people often have a very narrow idea about what it is,’ said the psychologist. ‘But when you first described your dad

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– the social isolation, the disordered behaviour, the aggression, the sense of superiority – I did wonder whether we were talking about schizophrenia.’ Again I reeled at the mention of that word and instinctively pushed back on it. The psychologist asked me what I was feeling right now. I didn’t know. I just knew that one word was too feeble to describe him. I felt compelled to speak in his defence. Yes, he had been awful to grow up with, but he had also been biblical and operatic, a suburban King Lear, pushing the lawnmower around in his Stubbies, bare-chested, stopping to do a handstand on the grass, then going to his easel, grinding his teeth over his brushstrokes, angry at the world, angry at us. He was proud and selfaggrandising and flawed and self-sabotaging and sometimes too scared to ask a stranger for directions, scared of all sorts of things. I couldn’t help asking: ‘Do you think he did fall over and hit his head and that triggered a kind of psychic break that brought on the … It would have been around the same time, early forties.’ ‘Who knows,’ she said. ‘There could be any number of scenarios.’ She changed the subject. She wanted to talk about me. Three years after his death, I still have Dad’s paintings, his Olympic memorabilia, two boxes of Kodak slides. and a sheaf of old, mixed-up letters. These are all dated 1960 and written in Dad’s hand. They are addressed to a Mr Moodie, the secretary-general of the Melbourne YMCA. One includes a notation at the top of the first page: Another excellent letter received. I imagine Mr Moodie pinning them to a noticeboard in the old Melbourne Y for all the residents to read. I start with the second page of a letter in which Dad is in the middle of describing his trip to Moscow. These were the five days that would feed his lifelong obsession with Russia and its culture. I was fortunate enough to get a close-up photo of Mr Khrushchev as he was walking through the Kremlin, he writes to Mr Moodie. The Kremlin houses the museum of the tzars, and it is amazing to see the wealth those fellows accumulated. I chuckle at ‘those fellows’. I remember that the Kodak slides are carefully labelled and organised, so I can easily find the images that correspond to Dad’s descriptions. I have kept his battery-operated Hanimex Super Hanorama slide viewer, so I drop the slide labelled Khrushchev into the slot. I lean into the viewer, shutting out all the light around me, and I am tunnelled into an alternate present, where Mr Khrushchev is walking purposefully across Red Square right in front of me, a woman in a peach-coloured coat only slightly spoiling my view. I swirl the letters around and find the first page of the Russia letter. We flew over to Belgium on a Bristol freighter, and then by a brand-new bus to Moscow … On the way, we had stops at Brussels, Helmstedt, Berlin, Poznan, Brest, Minsk and Smolensk. There were 45 people on our bus made up of eleven nationalities. Amongst these people were a variety of beliefs and occupations, so the trip was of such interest.

I read on, but I’m starting to feel profoundly uncomfortable. Maybe this is because I’ve been sitting cross-legged for too long, or because of the unfamiliar sound of my father’s happy voice.

He is coming across as a nice guy. Rather formal, a little unworldly, but unmistakably open to life. His descriptions of people are generous and good-natured; they are ‘wonderful fellows’ and ‘chums’. He is having fun and enjoying getting to know people. Everywhere one finds somebody who knows somebody and it is a wonderful and surprising thing how much good relationship between individuals from different countries exists. The more I read, the more I feel undone. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to find any explanations or revelations in these letters, which, due to some kink in my personality, I still seem to be looking for. But I do feel as though I’ve found something – a sense of what he was like in the first half of his life, and of what he might have been like if things had been different. In Moscow I saw the May Day parade, and I would not feel I was exaggerating if I said there were 5 million people in the Parade. The Red Square was fed from five different streets. Five million people, like five great rivers pouring into a lake.

I put more slides in the slot, one after another. Some I put to one side: too blurry, too nondescript. But many of them are astonishing. I’m breathless at how good they are, how immediate they feel. I can almost hear people speaking Russian, a muffled announcement over a tinny public address system, the far-off rumbling of an approaching tank. I have to prise myself from the viewer, take a breath, and dive back in for more. Is it too much to say that Dad was a very good photographer? He had an eye for composition, that was clear, but he was perceptive enough to realise that there was more to capture than just the staggering enormity of the occasion. There were also small and very human moments. Like his trophies and medals, these images have remained unseen for the best part of fifty years. I think of all that time he spent struggling with his painting and piano playing, and meanwhile these photos, with their effortless artistry, were hidden away, unable to be admired. Maybe he had not seen the merit in them. Maybe he was scared of being judged. Maybe he thought they were too easy, that proper art needed suffering, anguish. I drop another slide in the slot. A river of people surging forward, green flags, red armbands and multicoloured balloons. In the centre of the frame, an old man in a black coat and flat cap, clutches a battered suitcase with both hands. He has a similar face shape to my father, the same rounded, high-set cheeks. But why is he carrying a suitcase? Perhaps he’s not from Moscow. Perhaps he has just arrived, just in time to join the parade. The suitcase looks strangely empty, as if it would sound hollow if you tapped it. But he clutches it anyway. This old man has noticed my father in the crowd, a young, handsome man in a Western suit, holding a 35mm camera pointed in his direction. g Anita Punton has been a television comedy writer and producer for many years, and is currently part of the writing team for the ABC’s Shaun Micallef ’s Mad As Hell. She has a Diploma of Professional Writing and Editing and a Masters degree in Creative Writing from RMIT, and her short stories have been published in Australia and the United Kingdom. She lives in Melbourne. ‘May Day’ was runner-up in the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Literary Studies

Il sommo Poeta

Seven hundred years after Dante’s death Diana Glenn

The Oxford Handbook of Dante

edited by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden

Oxford University Press £125 hb, 776 pp

ith its finely honed critical readings and‘transversal connections’, The Oxford Handbook of Dante is a timely and masterful collection of forty-four chapters presenting contemporary critical insights from a broad choice of intellectual fields that range from Italian and European perspectives to Anglo-American approaches. Highlighting Dante’s expansive outreach over the centuries, the editors, Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden, have assembled an impressive array of scholarly voices whose contributions offer a robust critical collection not exclusively intended for specialist readers. The volume explores contemporary theories related to a vision of Dante and his Commedia that is ‘[made] open to interpretation, unbound from the shackles of completion and wholeness haunting it’, whereby the authors interrogate the teleological status of the Commedia, probe canonical assumptions, and question the wholeness and all-encompassing status that generations of commentators have assigned to the poem. Dante emerges as a writer–reader of extraordinarily broad appetite, whose fashioning of his masterwork in the vernacular reveals his hybrid approach, stylistic plurality, and traversing of literary boundaries. The authors challenge interpretations of Dante’s oeuvre, foregrounding the collective influence and interconnectivity of his complete works, and reminding the reader how a number of these works, such as the Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia, are often overshadowed and relegated to ‘minor’ status by the prodigious achievement of the Commedia. The chapters offer philological, historical, and religious frames for reading the poem, highlight post-colonial, feminist, and queer studies, explore art history and philology, and give comprehensive accounts of Dante’s trajectory in translation studies, reception, and adaptation, as well as providing other compelling perspectives. A multivalent critical lens is in evidence across all seven categories of the volume in which the second and third, and the fifth and sixth, categories function as diptychs: I, ‘Texts and Textuality’; II, ‘Dialogues’ and III, ‘Transforming Knowledge’; IV, ‘Space(s) and Places’; V, ‘A Passionate Selfhood’ and VI, ‘A Non-linear Dante’; VII, ‘Nachleben’. The introductory essay by the co-editors portrays a Dante who ‘situates himself always in “our” present – the present of reading’, thus offering a counterpoint suggestive of transmutability. There follows a discussion in Part I of reading, writing, and editing in Dante’s day, and engagement with textual practices across time, 30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

with Parts II and III examining the myriad ways in which Dante transforms existing cultural and intellectual practices in order to create new forms of knowledge transmission. Part IV delves into the question of physical and spatial locations and the momentum and counter-motion imbuing Dante’s exilic quest, while Parts V and VI highlight the notion of fluidity by exploring selfhood and relationality in Dante’s writings aligned to notions of difference, subjectivity, and the challenging of paradigms expressive of narrow posturing. In Part VII, entitled Nachleben (indebted to art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg), the focus is on transformation and revelation in underscoring the latent quality of Dante’s masterwork.

Dante emerges as a writer of extraordinarily broad appetite In Part I, Justin Steinberg’s portrayal of the Poet as a scriba Dei outlines an ‘unnerving’ authorial persona. Lina Bolzoni offers an analysis of the art of memory as personal and prophetic in the Vita Nova, maturing to an impassioned memory in the Commedia. This chapter is complemented by Mary Carruthers’ detailed discussion about memory and Luca Fiorentini’s positioning of the practice of commentary, which is at the heart of Dante’s authorship and reception by glossators. Martin Eisner’s chapter on Dante’s material context and manuscript culture links to Fabio Zinelli’s analysis of the manuscript tradition by means of which Dante’s texts ‘altered and moved through time and space’, ultimately positing the notion of ‘a continuum vision of literature’. Fiorentini captures the nature of figuration and the approach of the commentary tradition to Dante’s allegorical dimension. Akash Kumar elicits the intersection of Dante Studies and Digital Humanities and speculates that Dante’s Commedia draws digital scholars to it through its ‘attention to embodied experience’. He summarises the history of digital Dante projects commencing with Robert Hollander’s pioneering work, the Dartmouth Dante Project, and concludes with a future focus on game design and virtual experience linked to the Commedia. In Part II, Zygmunt G. Barański discusses the classics and Dante’s esteemed predecessors, highlighting how Dante’s hybrid work in exile is not ultimately imitative but sets out to create a new centre of poetic achievement. Antonio Montefusco addresses Dante’s encounter and ongoing relationship with the Roman de la Rose and the Detto-Fiore diptych, while William Burgwinkle explicates Dante’s engagement with the poetry of the troubadours, and Roberto Rea looks at the links between the poet and the lyric tradition. Fabian Alfie explicates the influences of vernacular comic literature on Dante, including vernacular comic tropes and scatological humour. Gervase Rosser’s discussion of visual culture argues against representations of an aniconic Dante and proffers ‘a dynamic interrelationship between word and image, in Dante and in the cultural world he inhabited, which was intimate and profound’. Part III ranges over questions of Dante and the encyclopedist tradition, medical knowledge, visual theory, the law, political life, philosophy and theology, and religion and poetry, always with a view to the original, irreverent, hybrid, and convergent approaches expressed by Dante and lucidly explicated

Literary Studies by this section’s authors: Franziska Meier, Natascia Tonelli, Simon Gilson, Diego Quaglioni, Tristan Kay, Pasquale Porro, Alessandro Vettori, and Elena Lombardi. In ‘Space(s) and Places’ (Part IV), the contributions by Giuliano Milani, Elisa Brilli, Karla Mallette, Brenda Deen Schildgen, Johannes Bartuschat, Theodore J. Cachey Jr, and Peter Hawkins span Dante’s relationship with cities, notions of civitas/ community (predominantly in Rome and Florence), the influence of the Mediterranean in his works, his engagement with the East, and the central question of exile, deemed ‘the foundation for Dante’s mission’, whereby Dante’s wanderings and spatial dislocations are the catalyst for his creation of a cosmological poem and a challenging Other World. In Part V, Gragnolati explores the concept of eschatological anthropology and the complexities inherent in the notion of embodiment in the Commedia, while Heather Webb sheds light on Dante’s linguistic panoply. Bernard McGinn’s discussion of mysticism and ineffable consciousness offers valuable insights. Lastly, Cary Howie analyses the notions of Dante’s plasticity, the resurrected flesh, and the experience of divine awakening. In their analysis of a ‘non-linear Dante’ in Part VI, Nicolò Crisafi, Jennifer Rushworth, Southerden, and Teodolinda Barolini offer stimulating commentary on the poem’s narrative structure, its ‘openness to futures, alternatives, and paradoxes’, the presence of ‘footprints, traces, vestigia’, and the poet’s intensification of the lyric mode that reaches its zenith in the third canticle, and a case is made by Barolini for evidence of Dante’s ferm voler. In Part VII, the authors trace the history of translation of the Commedia in English (Martin McLaughlin), Dante’s inspiring influence in the performing arts (Rossend Arqués Corominas) and on screen ( John David Rhodes), and Dante as a precursor in relation to a selection of modernist authors (Daniela Caselli), including twentieth-century Afro-Caribbean writers ( Jason AllenPaisant). In ‘Dante and the Shoah’, Lino Pertile captures the bizarre appropriation and manipulation of the figure of Dante at the hands of the Italian fascist propaganda machinery, set against the legacy of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, author of Se questo è un uomo (‘If This Is a Man’). There follows Cestaro’s discussion that considers both the queer in the Commedia and a range of queer engagement over the centuries. Fittingly, the Handbook is dedicated to the memory of distinguished scholar Marguerite Waller, whose chapter, ‘A Decolonial Feminist Dante: Imperial Historiography and Gender’, draws the collection to a close. Waller argues that in the ‘development of a “decolonial” alternative to the historiography and sex/gender system upon which imperial sovereignty depends’, Dante’s Commedia proposes ‘interactive, nonhierarchical, nonexclusionary relation and community’. The seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death in 2021 is being marked by a diversity of international and local events interspersed throughout the year. A brilliant endeavour, the Handbook constitutes a remarkable and edifying contribution, not only to the myriad seven-hundredth-anniversary celebrations but as a portal for new generations of readers to discover the sommo Poeta and his achievement. g Diana Glenn is National Head of the School of Arts, Australian Catholic University.

Scott-land

The ubiquitous Walter Scott Graham Tulloch

Walter Scott at 250: Looking forward edited by Caroline McCracken-Flesher and Matthew Wickman

Edinburgh University Press £75 hb, 239 pp

alter Scott, born on 15 August 1771, turns 250 in 2021. This event has been celebrated in Scotland with events such as a ScottFest at ‘Abbotsford’, his home, and a major international conference. But Scott, almost certainly the most popular and widely known author in the world in the nineteenth century, fell disastrously in public and critical esteem, to the point that E.M. Forster, in his influential Aspects of the Novel (1927), could sum him up with the wearily dismissive question ‘Who shall tell us a story?’ and the equally dismissive answer ‘Sir Walter Scott of course’. For Forster, Scott had ‘a trivial mind and a heavy style’. When I first encountered Scott through my aunt and uncle’s collection of the Waverley Novels, everyone I knew had heard of him and could name at least Waverley (1814) and Ivanhoe (1820) among his works. This is no longer the case, though Tony Blair nominated Ivanhoe as his favourite novel. It is true that Scott’s critical reputation, as least in universities, has risen again over the past fifty years or more, but that hasn’t translated into a revival of his popularity with readers. The contrast with Jane Austen is striking: as Scott’s readership has fallen over the last two centuries, Austen’s has risen spectacularly. Scott will never recover the position he held in the nineteenth century, but it is to be hoped that this anniversary will bring some attention and some readers back to him. Against this background comes Walter Scott at 250: Looking forward, the most wide-ranging of several books on Scott that have appeared in 2021. It is a big ask to produce a book that proclaims itself to be ‘looking forward’ when its subject is best known as a historical novelist. Yet all the writers in this collection of ten fascinating chapters aim to show the ways in which Scott and his work can be said to be looking forward. Like so much of recent critical writing, they demonstrate how complex Scott’s writing is and how far he is from having a trivial mind or even a heavy style. Five chapters examine the novels for the way they provide insights relevant to our troubled present. Somewhat surprisingly, two chapters that bring Scott close to our lives today do so through economics. Anthony Jarrells suggests that Thomas Piketty might have usefully looked at Scott, just as he looks at Balzac and Austen, for information relevant to his Capital in the Twentieth First Century (2013). As Jarrells neatly puts it, ‘Piketty, the bestselling economist who writes about novels, leaves out Walter Scott, the bestselling novelist who writes about economics.’ Alongside this, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Celeste Langan draws a parallel between Scott’s compulsion to pay off his debts by unremitting work on his massive life of Napoleon (1827) and the pressure on academics in the neo-liberal university of today to write more and more to pay their ‘debt’ to funding agencies and the universities that employ them, a message with implications that extend beyond the academy. Taking different approaches, Susan Oliver makes the ‘bold claim’ that Scott ‘speaks meaningfully to a twenty-first-century anthropogenic world’ and supports her claim by a specific study of his references to species loss; Matthew Wickman takes Scott’s novel Redgauntlet (1824) as a treatment of the unthinkable, relevant to our world as it faces the unthinkable things that might happen now and in the future; and Fiona Price links Scott’s treatment of political and gender performance to our own time ‘preoccupied by “gender performativity”, “precarious lives” and empty political theatricality’. Another three chapters find looking forward within the novels themselves and in our experience of reading them. Ina Ferris discusses how reading is itself a forward-looking activity as we progress towards the end of the text, but she also shows how Scott controls the pace, often as we follow the characters moving slowly through the landscape. Penny Fielding explores the intriguing notion of the future anterior – what will have happened in the future but has not happened yet – in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819). Ian Duncan considers how as readers we anachronistically experience the past as part of our present: through the act of reading we place our modern consciousness within the past. All three are dealing with how we experience history through reading historical fiction, an important issue today when novels set in the past are again a popular genre. The remaining two chapters look forward in yet other ways. Alison Lumsden discusses what we might learn and have already learnt from the new edition of Scott’s poetry now underway, and in particular how the many and varied notes, an integral part of Scott’s long poems, seem to act as a reminder that no one account of the past is sufficient in itself. Finally, Caroline McCracken-Flesher reminds us that, from Scott’s time to the present day, visitors to ‘Abbotsford’ have so often ignored the presence of the women who have made the household function over two centuries. It is a timely reminder. In recent years Abbotsford has been carefully restored and equipped with a splendid visitor centre. Perhaps a visit there can bring people close to Scott and his world and maybe encourage them to start reading his writings again. The anniversary and this book prompt me to think about Scott in Australia. The evidence of his huge popularity and influence in the past is easy to find. All we need do is look at the map. Anyone who lives in the many towns or suburbs in Australia called Ivanhoe, Waverley, or Abbotsford participates – knowingly or, more likely, unknowingly – in the commemoration of Walter Scott. For anyone who wanted to associate their residence with a favourite writer, Scott had the enormous advantage of having deliberately chosen names for the heroes of two of his best-known novels that had no earlier literary associations, as well as coining a previously unused name for his house. Giving a house, a suburb or a street one of these names confers on it an unambiguous association with Scott. The same is true of less common names like Deloraine, Rotherwood, Ellangowan, 32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

and Lochinvar. Moving beyond these most visible of signs to Australian newspapers, a search of Trove will reveal thousands of references to Scott and his novels and poems. Some of them exhibit a certain ignorance of his work – only a year after the publication of Ivanhoe, a novel set in twelfth-century England, ‘the tune of Ivanhoe’ apparently ranks among ‘Scotch tunes and dances’ at a ball in Sydney – but other references show deep knowledge of his writing. Works derived from Scott, plays and burlesques, poems and paintings, also figure prominently in the newspapers. Australian writers adopted pseudonyms from Scott, including Rolf Boldrewood, who took his name from Scott’s poem Marmion (1808), and others embraced Scott’s medieval world to provide a literary ancestry to their writing, as Louise D’Arcens, for example, has shown in her Old Songs in the Timeless Land (2011). Scott in fact had strong personal connections with colonial Australia: he wrote to Governors Macquarie and Brisbane, and supported people like George Harper, who gave the name ‘Abbotsford’ to his own house near Picton, and the convict Andrew Stewart, a minor poet whose life was saved by Scott’s intervention after he was condemned to death. However, it was Scott’s literary influence that is his most important contribution to Australian life and culture. Of course, the imposition of so many of Scott’s names on the landscape reflects how deeply his writing was implicated in the colonial enterprise. In a land far from home that they thought held no history, the new arrivals sought to endow that land with familiar associations. Scott’s work offered multiple associations with literature and history, but writing these names onto the map inevitably involved overwriting Aboriginal names which had been there for centuries before. Using a name derived from Ivanhoe, such as Rotherwood, endowed a place with a spurious medieval pedigree that completely ignored the much older Indigenous connection with the land. Given the implication of Scott’s writing in the erasure of earlier Australian Indigenous identity, what, then, can he offer us today? Ironically, it is precisely in the area of national identity that Scott can perhaps offer us a model. His writing was so influential in establishing modern Scottish identity or identities that Stuart Kelly’s recent book is named Scott-land, a pun used by others as well. Astoundingly, Scott not only helped define (some would say simply ‘defined’) Scottish national identity for his age and ours, but also contributed powerfully to the definition of English identity. His most influential novel, Ivanhoe, presented an enduring myth of English identity as the merging of Anglo-Saxons and Normans. But Scott did this by looking to the past of both nations. He was not afraid to confront (if not always full on) the dark moments of the past, like religious persecution in seventeenth-century Scotland or Norman oppression in medieval England. Walter Scott at 250 offers many ways to connect Scott with our world today, but if we could look for one single message in the book it would be that to understand the present and look forward to the future we must look to the past, including its darkest moments. It is a message with continuing relevance for us in Australia. g Graham Tulloch is Emeritus Professor of English at Flinders University and has written about Scottish literature and language in Australia.

Germany

‘The voice of the times’ Thomas Mann’s peculiar patriotism Joachim Redner

Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man by Thomas Mann, translated by Walter D. Morris

NYRB Classics US$22.95 pb, 578 pp

obel Laureate, author of The Magic Mountain (1924) and Doctor Faustus (1947), Thomas Mann (1875–1955) needs little introduction. His books have long been available in English. Yet one work, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), a series of confessional essays on which he laboured throughout World War I, is rarely praised. Mann (not known for his modesty) pointed to its importance as a historical document: ‘By listening to my own inner voice,’ he says in the prologue, ‘I was able to hear the voice of the times.’ Mark Lilla, editor of this new edition, accepts Mann’s claim, but warns it is not the voice of the liberal public intellectual who opposed the Nazis during World War II. The Mann we hear in Reflections is fulminating against democracy. Lilla asks us to listen nevertheless, for we are living in reactionary times ourselves and have something to learn from Mann’s thinking in the darkness of those years. But listen, he suggests, rather like a therapist. It is good advice, for what lies behind Mann’s peculiar brand of patriotism during the Great War is soon audible. It is fear: ‘If Germany were beaten … her belief in herself broken … I would not want to live.’ Mann’s belief in himself is at stake too. Like many others, Mann welcomed the war initially. In his 1914 essay ‘Thoughts in Wartime’ (included in this new edition), he declared: ‘The world, our world could no longer go on as it had.’ And he develops this theme at length in Reflections. The old burgher culture – with which he identified – was being undermined by modernisation. Looking back on Death in Venice (1912), he describes it as ‘the late work of an epoch on which the uncertain lights of a new era were falling’. The old era, like Venice, was in a state of terminal decay, and he who had been ‘appointed to be a chronicler and analyst of decadence’ was ‘bound in pessimism to it’ – so he was facing an impasse. The war arouses apocalyptic visions; it is a revelation, a great ‘visitation’: a victorious Germany would (somehow) revitalise Europe’s dying culture. Then, as the war drags on, it gradually dawns on Mann that he, too, needed to change. Reflections becomes the record of his search for a new mission as a writer. The search was greatly complicated by a bitter contemporaneous quarrel with his brother, Heinrich, author of satirical novels, such as The Loyal Subject (1918). Heinrich believed that all writers, Thomas included, should stop agonising about the state of the soul – Europe’s and their own – and work together to end this catastrophic war. He was part of an international pacifist

network that included Albert Einstein and that was predictably ineffectual. Heinrich’s politics and aesthetics were anathema to Thomas. For him, writing was ‘an intellectual-moral effort on behalf of a problematic ego’, which involved exploring the effects of conflicting ideas within the minds of individuals. This was only possible, he said, if writers were above politics, like Goethe, who had famously warned: ‘The politician in you will eat up the poet.’ Thomas could never be ‘political’ in the way his brother expected. They were rehearsing an old nineteenth-century argument, promoted by German thinkers and poets, that opposed the Romantic notion of the ‘soul’ to Enlightenment ideals and the ‘spirit’ of the French Revolution. This idea developed gradually into a mythical overvaluation of German culture as deeper and richer than the mere civilisation of other Europeans. This argument took a nasty turn during the war. French propagandists declared they were fighting for ‘civilisation’ against German militarism; German intellectuals saw it as a war against their ‘culture’. Mann sprang to its defence. He thought he could serve his country best by developing an ideological justification for war. Describing it as ‘a fundamental life force’, truly daemonic, just as ‘intimately connected to art as religion and sex’, he gave the already loaded term ‘culture’ a nationalistic, militaristic twist – which would later lead German reactionaries to think of him as an ally. By 1916, millions were dying in the trenches, but the only echo of the guns of Verdun in the Mann household in Munich was Thomas thundering at his brother. Heinrich had published an essay celebrating Zola’s political courage and criticising apolitical aesthetes as mere ‘entertaining parasites’. Outraged, Mann retaliated in Reflections: a certain partisan of French ‘civilisation’, a ‘radical literary man’, was a mere dilettante and – since he was so keen on French-style republican democracy – also a ‘Jacobin’. The writing is bitter, shrill, self-pitying, but undeniably moving: ‘How do you then stand before me, human being, artist, brother … ossified in bigotry … Have you no regard for suffering, for experience?’ Fearing that he will be left behind by history, his identity as defender of ‘true’ German culture denied, Mann engages in identity politics with a vengeance. But it is not all vengeance. Mann laughs at himself occasionally: ‘Thunderous words do not suit me … they are probably best reserved for cannon’ – a hint of the wry self-irony characteristic of pre-war stories like Tonio Kröger. But Mann did not recover his equilibrium until he realised how potentially dangerous Reflections could be, with its description of democracy as inimical to the German soul. In 1922, he delivered a remarkable speech, ‘On the German Republic’ (included here), which urged Germans to support their fragile new democracy. The warring brothers were reconciled and turned to face the vicious extremist enemy together, united by a common concern for humanity. While Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man is too tormented to be a well-made work, it is a truthful account of a fearful time when ideological confusion almost overwhelmed a brilliant mind – a cautionary tale that, as Lilla remarks, is indeed ‘timely’. g Joachim Redner translates German literature. He co-translated The Specter of Capital by Joseph Vogl (Stanford University Press). He is currently working on a translation of Alfred Döblin’s novellas written around the time of World War I. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

History

Miracles on the home front Free and forced Soviet workers Sheila Fitzpatrick

Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet home front during World War II by Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer

Oxford University Press £26.99 hb, 515 pp

hen I was a graduate student in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, Russian friends used to talk a lot about World War II. Their stories were of hardship and suffering stoically borne by the population and finally vindicated by victory in 1945. This was not dissimilar from what was published in the Soviet press on the subject, but without the press’s obligatory references to the wise leadership of the party. Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer tell basically the same story as my Soviet friends. Invoking the image of a ‘levée en masse spirit’ in the wartime Soviet Union, they admit that ‘strict discipline and repression certainly played a role’ in the state’s ‘unprecedented feats of mass mobilization’, but they put their interpretative emphasis elsewhere: ‘without the support of the vast majority of people and workers in particular, the great achievements on the home front would not have been possible’. This is an unusual tone in recent scholarly histories of the Soviet Union in World War II. British historian Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War (2005) reported vivid memories of frontline camaraderie made possible by the conviction of fighting for a just cause recounted by the veterans she interviewed, but also presented a seemingly contradictory picture from the archives of the chaotic and harsh treatment of conscripts within the armed forces. The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 disclosed the ‘dirty secrets’ that Soviet propaganda had attempted to hide and that Soviet archives, once declassified, unwittingly revealed – among them, defeatism on the outbreak of war, deportations of small nationalities, anti-Semitism, the willingness of Soviet prisoners of war to enrol in the Vlasov Army and fight under German command, and the postwar resistance to repatriation of POWs and forced labourers in Europe. Not surprisingly, such topics have largely monopolised historians’ attention over the past thirty years. A notable contribution comes from German- and US-trained Mark Edele (now University of Melbourne’s Hansen Professor), whose book Stalin’s Defectors (2017) pointed to high rates of desertion and defection from the Soviet Army in 1941–42 and raised the question of whether this was compatible with the image of a monolithically loyal Soviet population rallying behind its government to fight the Germans. American social historians Goldman and Filtzer, teaching respectively at Carnegie Mellon and the University of East London, are of an older scholarly generation than Edele. They were formed in the clashes between so-called ‘revisionists’ interested in invest34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

igating history ‘from below’ and their critics who asserted that anything that really mattered in Soviet history came ‘from above’. (Full disclosure: I was one of this group too, but, unlike Goldman and Filtzer, not in its Marxist wing.) Goldman’s specialty is the history of Soviet women, while Filtzer is a labour historian who has authored a series of important monographs on Soviet workers under Stalin. At least initially, his standpoint was close to the (non-Soviet Marxist) view popularised in Leon Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed (1936): that the Revolution had failed in its promise to give power to the working class. The two authors are thus well qualified to undertake this study. With due respect to the pioneering volume of British historian John Barber and economist Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945 (1991), the thoroughness of Goldman and Filtzer’s archival research, focused mainly on economic agencies of government, has no equal in the scholarship in any language. For Goldman and Filtzer, the ‘home front’ means primarily production and labour in support of the war effort, and ‘the people’ (often synonymous with ‘the workers’) are viewed mainly in a labour context, leaving other aspects unexamined, such as the impact of war and enforced absences on marriage and the mass phenomenon of single motherhood. Thus, despite Goldman’s expertise on Soviet women, the gender aspect of their story is rather muted: still more women were drawn into the labour force than before the war, of course, but given that the breakthrough in women’s employment had occurred in the Soviet Union a decade earlier, World War II was less of a watershed moment in the Soviet society than was the case for its Western allies. Taking off from Harrison’s conclusion that the Soviet state accomplished ‘a wartime production miracle’ on the home front, the basic question for Goldman and Filtzer is, ‘How did the state and people accomplish this miracle?’ The early chapters of the book deal with the evacuation of industry and people (in that order of priority) from west to east after the German attack of June 1941. With the Germans swiftly occupying territory that was home to forty per cent of the Soviet population and generated a third of Soviet industrial production, the challenge to evacuation planners would have been monumental even without the added problem of Stalin’s unwillingness to recognise the likelihood of a German attack in the summer of 1941. Perhaps a little more than a third of the occupied regions’ industrial plant was salvaged and re-established in the Urals and Siberia. Meanwhile, twelve million people had somehow scrambled out of the area into the Soviet hinterland by the end of 1941, largely through their own efforts plus some involuntary help from the NKVD, with little thanks to the evacuation authorities (whose efforts to persuade their superiors to the contrary leave a somewhat misleading archival trail). This is an extraordinary story, quite vividly told with illustrations from individual experience, but for Soviet specialists not an unfamiliar one. From the standpoint of specialists, the book’s three chapters on labour mobilisation are the most interesting, though they may be heavy going for many ordinary readers. The Soviet war experience was unique in that it involved not only conscription into the armed forces of all able-bodied men between the ages of eighteen and fifty, but also drafting of the remaining civilian population – mainly women and teenagers – for labour. This

Essays applied not only to the rural population, which had already been intermittently subject to a labour draft in the 1930s, but also to the urban. It often involved being sent far away from home to live in wretched conditions (the accounts of sandal-wearing Central Asian villagers who didn’t speak Russian arriving at factories in the Urals to work in freezing conditions is particularly harrowing). The extent of the wartime upheaval is nicely captured in the authors’ comment that ‘very few Soviet citizens awoke on Victory Day, May 9, 1945, in the same beds they slept in the night the war began’.

American social historians Goldman and Filtzer were formed in the clashes between so-called ‘revisionists’ interested in investigating history ‘from below’ and their critics who asserted that anything that really mattered in Soviet history came ‘from above’ Two other factors of the labour draft are particularly worthy of note. First, the Soviet Union drew on the labour of convicts in the Gulag as well as deportees mobilised into a ‘Labour Army’, so the Soviet labour force ran along a continuum from free workers through draftees to convicts. But because harsh labour laws of 1940 and 1941 had criminalised worker absenteeism and unauthorised changing of jobs, the distinction between free and unfree labour was blurred: ‘workers were not prisoners, but they were bound to their place of employment’. Second, the labour drafts provoked mass flight on the part of conscripts: ‘the state had to mobilize more than three people in order to add just one worker to the permanent workforce’. Many of those who fled ended up in more congenial jobs closer to home, where the efforts of the state’s conscription authorities to find and recapture them were thwarted by the desire of other state authorities, their new labour employers, to keep them. The authors conclude that desertion ‘was never synonymous with lack of support for the war’ and that ‘there is scant evidence that [those who fled] viewed desertion as an act of resistance’. Perhaps not (why should labour deserters volunteer such evidence and thus court prosecution?), but these are not the conclusions that most naturally spring from the data that has been presented. In fact, Filtzer took a different line himself in his 1992 book on Soviet labour in the 1950s (Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization), where he suggested that the harsh circumstances in which teenagers were drafted into the industrial labour force in the 1940s produced the first cohort of workers since the Revolution that felt little or no identification with the Soviet system. But there are no such heterodox thoughts in this book. Dedicated to all those who fought ‘on the home front and the battlefield, in the forests, camps, and ghettos’, it ends with an evocation of the monument to Soviet Home Guard volunteers in the desperate defence of Moscow in October 1941, which ‘commands the living never to forget that they died so that future generations could live in a world without fascism’. g Sheila Fitzpatrick’s next book will be The Shortest History of the Soviet Union (forthcoming in 2022)]

Shades and nuances The ambiguous art of Knausgaard Kári Gíslason

In the Land of the Cyclops by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Harvill Secker $39.99 hb, 304 pp

nce, during a teaching exchange in Germany, I found myself learning as much from my students as I was trying to teach them. This is not unusual. Delivering my thoughts to others, and then having them modified during discussions, helps me to understand what I want to say. By the end of the class, I begin to see what I probably should have known from the start. On this particular occasion, I was teaching essay writing. My students kept insisting that the German tradition was different from mine, an Anglo-American one that says you should assert all your main points early on, and then support them through a careful staging of the argument. In contrast, they had been taught to allow the argument to evolve in the piece itself. Wasn’t it rather crude to pretend you knew it all at the beginning? Ten years on, that lesson has informed my reading of this impressive collection of essays by Norway’s best-known living author, Karl Ove Knausgaard. Given that he is known principally for My Struggle, a six-volume collection of novel-memoirs, his first book of essays to be published in English offers a different perspective on his work and intellectual outlook. As importantly, it demonstrates how ideas on the page can exist in an evolving and dynamic way. ‘I want to see the world the way it is,’ Knausgaard writes, ‘which is something that is forever in the making, chaotic and incomprehensible, steered by laws we know absolutely nothing about and which steer us.’ Similarly, he seems drawn to art and writing that shake him out of his assumptions and accept a degree of uncertainty as a guiding principle. Thus, a writer such as Knut Hamsun, who, in his commentaries, could be ‘ruthless and unsubtle in his opinions’, is redeemed by a writing style that ‘always sought out the shades and nuances’. Knausgaard’s outlook, as it emerges in this collection, is also focused on searching and possibilities rather than on answers. Art is not about perfection or fixed positions; criticism needn’t be, either. This approach can be endearing, such as when he admits, in an essay on Michel Houellebecq, to having not read Houellebecq before having to write about him (the reason, he tells us, is that he doesn’t want to know how brilliant Houellebecq is), or when he is dismayed by the ‘narcissistic’ autobiographic reading he gives in Beirut when the other invited writers offer work that speaks much more directly to events in the region. It is unlikely that the organisers expected anything less personal from a renowned memoirist. Readers of these essays will anticipate very personal works, and it’s true that they often integrate AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

personal experiences and textual analysis. But the Knausgaard of the memoir–novels, who often seems unable to stop himself saying whatever is on his mind, isn’t present here in quite this way. Instead, he places his experiences in the service of broader ideas. Many of the essays have their origins in introductions to books and collections; they are commissioned pieces with a more direct purpose than his other writing. When he does appear as a character–narrator, his experiences offer a way for him to ground interpretation in specific moments and encounters with art, and to maintain critical closeness, rather than the distance we might usually expect in such works.

Knausgaard’s outlook, as it emerges in this collection, is also focused on searching and possibilities rather than on answers His essays on photography, which bracket the whole collection, include extended meditations on the relationship between the constancy of works of art and the changeability of their subjects; on the way great works respond to the world around them; and on the ability of works to defamiliarise even the most familiar environments and situations. There is nothing particularly new or revelatory about these topics; the contribution lies, instead, in the way he performs the thinking – alive, as it were, on the page. An analysis of Francesca Woodman’s photographs, for example, is as much the story of Knausgaard’s changing encounters with the pictures as it is his attempt to understand them. What seems to surprise him most is how Woodman’s work can alter his understanding of other, seemingly unrelated artworks. Impressionist paintings are suddenly ‘dead’ in the face of photographs that now speak more urgently to him. He tries to understand why, but there aren’t clear-cut answers. Instead, we get a list of possibilities that all hinge on the momentary nature of interpretation itself: the playfulness of the pictures, their materiality, his own reaction to seeing the physical realities of the female body. Only in the title essay does this method falter. Knausgaard takes aim at the various ‘cyclopes’ who’ve criticised him on the basis of the subject matter of his novels. The cyclopes are those who ‘don’t want to know about areas of reality that aren’t as they think they should be’, or commentators who ‘can’t handle ambiguity’. Knausgaard’s début work, Out of the World (1998),

won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, but its storyline – a teacher falling in love with a thirteen-year-old pupil – has, Knausgaard tells us, led to accusations of literary paedophilia. While it’s understandable that he wants to counter such views, his explanation of the genesis and writing of the work is out of sync with the rest of the collection, because it puts Knausgaard in the position of defending art rather than accepting the uncertainty of how it will be interpreted, an aspect he usually celebrates. It is a relief when Knausgaard leaves off explaining and defending his writing and returns to searching for possible meanings in the work of others. The contingent nature of that approach lets readers make up their own minds. It frees Knausgaard to roam widely, from Dante to Kierkegaard to the medieval Icelandic sagas; from literature to painting and photography. Art, he insists, ‘is as much about searching as it is about creating’. Ultimately, the artfulness of this collection is that it, too, is searching, like a photograph or a watercolour or a novel that responds in immediate ways to the lives that we are living now. In this way, Knausgaard

Karl Ove Knausgård in Lund, Sweden, 2010 (Robin Linderborg)

goes some way to suspending his own position of authority as a well-known writer and allows himself to learn. g Kári Gíslason is an Associate Professor at QUT.

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Critic of the Month with Sheila Fitzpatrick

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s most recent books include On Stalin’s Team: The years of living dangerously in Soviet politics (2015) and White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War history of migration to Australia (2020). The Shortest History of the Soviet Union will be published early in 2022. She is a professor at Australian Catholic University.

When did you first write for ABR?

In September 2013, six months after returning to Australia after forty-eight years away, mainly in the United States, I wrote a piece for ABR on being a returning expatriate. Actually, this wasn’t my first piece for the journal (that was a review of a biography of Ryszard Kapuściński seven months earlier), but it was a piece that had particular importance for me. Rereading it recently, I was struck both by the conversational tone, as if I already thought ABR readers were my friends, and by the underlying seriousness of the effort to explain myself. I didn’t write like that for American publications.

What makes a fine critic?

Probably style and personality, in addition to knowledge. The London Review of Books, the other journal I regularly write for, gives you more or less unlimited space but wants not only a critique of the book under review but also an interesting, perhaps personally inflected, essay on the topic. ‘Can’t you take it somewhere?’ they asked me once when I said the book they had offered me was too slight. But that approach only works if you have 3,000 words to play with.

Which critics most impress you?

The Germans. If I read reviews in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – a daily newspaper! – I am overwhelmed by the erudition of the reviewer (generally a journalist with a PhD equivalent in the area). That’s not to say I want to write like that, or even that I particularly enjoy reading such reviews. The French are also pretty highbrow, but with less erudition and more beautiful, ambiguous phrase-making.

Do you accept most books on offer or are you selective?

I do turn things down, mainly for lack of interest/expertise in

From the Archive

(Black Inc.)

Interview

the topic, but sometimes because I know the author’s previous work and expect to dislike this one.

What do you look for from an editor?

I like editors who are on the same wavelength and don’t mess around too much with my copy (but do pick up any glaring errors). That’s why I like writing for ABR and LRB. The New York Review of Books, with its well-known insistence on a house style of thought/expression and obsessive copy-editing, would be at the other end of the spectrum.

Do you ever receive feedback from readers or authors?

Authors sometimes email to thank me for having understood the book. One wrote, apropos of a criticism I’d made, that she absolutely agreed with me, but that her publisher had made her do it.

What do you think of negative reviews?

I try not to write them too often, but there are rare occasions when I think a hatchet job is in the public interest.

How do you feel about reviewing people you know? You’re almost bound to know people in your field to some degree. If they are more than casual acquaintances but there’s something I particularly want to say about their book, I still sometimes review it, with due disclosure in the text and having told the editor beforehand.

What’s a critic’s primary responsibility?

Taking the trouble to understand what the author is trying to do, and then stepping back to consider how well it’s come off. Also – if we’re talking about reviewing outside of specialised professional journals – putting the work in context for nonspecialists and explaining why it matters. g

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Biography

Labour of love

The biography of a pedagogical innovator Gideon Haigh

The Vetting of Wisdom: Joan Montgomery and the fight for PLC by Kim Rubenstein

Franklin Street Press $39.95 pb, 399 pp

im Rubenstein’s biography of Joan Montgomery, the venerable former principal of Melbourne’s Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC), has been thirty years in the making and is the definition of a labour of love. It involves Rubenstein, a distinguished and worldly legal scholar and human rights campaigner, revisiting scenes from her own life. She was a pupil at Montgomery’s PLC. As a first-year law student, she addressed the remarkable public meeting in April 1984 that opposed Montgomery’s defenestration by Presbyterian reactionaries, who were avenging the formation of the Uniting Church seven years earlier by asserting control over the school. Rubenstein’s subsequent career has been that of a distinguished old girl following the tenets of a liberal education. Montgomery, who recently celebrated her ninety-sixth birthday, is almost as much an educational institution as PLC, where she was herself a schoolgirl. A spinster who was eighteen when her widowed father died, she has always exuded a powerful autonomy, as serene as the Dudley Drew portrait that adorns the cover of The Vetting of Wisdom. Rubenstein rather nicely parallels her with Queen Elizabeth, whose coronation Montgomery saw as a young Australian traveller; the new monarch was ‘a role model, kindred spirit and virtual mentor’. In Australia, Montgomery taught at Frensham and Tintern before taking over at PLC in January 1969 after a decade running Clyde. She also acted as president of the Association of Independent Girls’ Schools of Victoria and president of the Association of Heads of Independent Girls’ Schools of Australia. Montgomery is recalled by generations of students for her exemplary dignity, seasoned with compassion. My favourite story retailed by Rubenstein is of a boarder who was found with an illicit bottle of Marsala rolled in her sleeping bag. As PLC maintained zero tolerance of alcohol on school premises, the girl was instantly expelled. But Montgomery allowed her to complete her year by correspondence, housed her personally during exams, rang her directly after one to see how she had gone, and was the first to congratulate her on good grades – justice tempered with mercy. At PLC, Montgomery was also a pedagogical innovator introducing syllabi in ‘liberal studies’ and adventurously incorporating comparative religion, and ‘human relations’, including sex education. Neither endeared her to ‘Continuing Presbyterians’ who refused to join Methodists and Congregationalists in the tripartite denominational merger of 1974, and who extracted Scotch College and PLC as what might be considered the spoils of defeat,

38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

led by episcopal intriguers who would have made Obadiah Slope blush. They believed that PLC had come to offer not an appropriately ‘bible-centred’ curriculum but an ‘élitist secular education clothed in the trappings of Christianity’. Worthy as Montgomery is as a subject of Rubenstein’s admiring glances, The Vetting of Wisdom only really develops a genuine narrative tension in the presence of her nemesis, Melbourne barrister Max Bradshaw. His photograph appears early on, fleshy and lordly, obscuring an overpowering urge to control beneath a veneer of piety and traditionalism, outwardly reminiscent of Albion Gidley Singer in Kate Grenville’s Dark Places. Bradshaw’s clique did not sack Montgomery; rather, they ensured that her contract ended when she turned sixty. But their ‘whatever it takes’ campaign ran the gamut of harassment and intimidation, legal confrontation and media manipulation, a foretaste of the culture wars. In the middle of it up popped David McNicoll, that dreadful old Bulletin proto-Bolt, writing aslant the facts; PLC’s curriculum was impugned as ‘Marxist’, in anticipation of the parrot cry today when anyone takes a position to the left of the Institute of Public Affairs. This enmity struck some as eerily personal. Rubenstein traces it to the 1950s, when the Montgomery sisters were parishioners at the dour Hawthorn Presbyterian Church, where Bradshaw was Session Clerk – the church’s senior lay role. Bradshaw actually attended the wedding of Joan’s sister Margaret, though she viewed him as ‘decidedly odd’. Margaret and her sister Anne decided that the Toorak parish might be more congenial. When Joan, after returning from a first visit to the United Kingdom, also tried to move to her sisters’ new parish, Bradshaw would not grant permission, as the church required. ‘Have I been excommunicated?’ Joan chirped. Rubenstein believes that Bradshaw ‘long nursed the perceived slight of Joan’s spirited independence’, and had a ‘general disdain for assertive women in a church steeped in the culture of male dominance’. I dare say that Rubenstein is probably right. ‘Misogynist’ has become a kind of two-dollar word for anything that would once have been designated merely ‘sexist’, but Bradshaw surely was one, and the concept of collateral damage held no meaning for him. A telling aide-mémoire concerning the observations of another barrister in chambers depicts him as a tireless schemer determined to establish a ‘bible-centred’ curriculum at PLC, come what may. ‘Parents may not like what Max has planned’, it is recorded, but ‘it doesn’t worry Max and what the parents want is of no interest to him at all, in fact Max wouldn’t worry if he had an empty school’. There is something to the dynamic of the characters that eludes a factual retelling of events, something fathomless. In the way that sometimes happens, Montgomery and Bradshaw are comparable figures: solitary, scrupulous, driven, charismatic, frankly unknowable. Montgomery’s ouster, including Bradshaw’s role in it, could also be regarded as the making of her. Not only did it do nothing to curb her influence – no fewer than five of her students went on to become principals themselves – but it made her story still more inspirational. The Vetting of Wisdom embodies this paradox. Had Montgomery not departed PLC as an involuntary martyr, would Kim Rubenstein have written it? g Gideon Haigh’s latest book is The Brilliant Boy (Scribner, 2021).

History

Airwave feminism A history of women broadcasters Yves Rees

Sound Citizens: Australian women broadcasters claim their voice, 1923-1956 by Catherine Fisher

Australian National University Press $50 pb, 194 pp

n the era of perpetual Covid lockdowns, many of us can relate to the isolation of the mid-twentieth-century housewife. Like her, we’re stuck at home, orbiting our kitchens, watching the light move across the floorboards. Each day mirrors the last, a quiet existence spent mostly in the company of the immediate household. Yet whereas we can flee our domestic confines via Netflix or TikTok, last century’s housewife had fewer avenues to the wider world. There was reading, of course – books or magazines or newspapers – but this was usually reserved for the end of the day. For most waking hours, her hands and eyes were needed for cooking, cleaning, mending, childcare, and a thousand other tasks. Enter radio: the perfect accompaniment to the domestic grind. From 1923, when radio arrived in Australia, until 1956, when television appeared on the scene, radio was the unrivalled queen of daily household entertainment. For women who didn’t work outside the home (the majority), radio was friend, companion, entertainment, education, and, above all, a portal to the outside world. It injected the public sphere into the domestic, turning wives and mothers into engaged citizens. It broke down the isolation of individual women and fostered female community and solidarity. In short, the wireless was a vehicle of women’s advancement. The feminist potential of radio was well recognised by women at the time. As Enid Lyons reflected in 1954, radio ‘created a bigger revolution in the life of a woman than anything that has happened any time’. A politician and broadcaster, Lyons was part of a cohort of radio women who shaped this revolution from behind the microphone. Alongside the likes of feminist Jessie Street, internationalist Constance Duncan, and ABC Women’s Session host Ida Elizabeth Jenkins, Lyons was one of many white women activists and broadcasters who used radio to make their mark in the public sphere and edify their largely female audiences. These radio women are the focus of Catherine Fisher’s début monograph Sound Citizens: Australian women broadcasters claim their voice, 1923–1956. Developed from Fisher’s PhD thesis, Sound Citizens is an eye-opening history that details the myriad ways women broadcasters engaged with radio, across both the ABC and commercial stations. The examples are legion. During the Great Depression, radio clubs such as the 2GB Happiness Club founded by Eunice Stelzer provided solidarity and mutual aid. As war clouds gath-

ered in Europe, pacifists like Ruby Rich used radio to call upon women to demand peace. Later, in the 1940s, the first cohort of elected female politicians, including Lyons and Senator Dorothy Tangney, deployed radio as a campaign tool to further their political careers. In the 1950s, women’s show hosts Irene Greenwood and Catherine King crafted highbrow (and in Greenwood’s case, explicitly feminist) programs that brought art, politics, and ideas into the home. Importantly, this broadcasting normalised women’s voices in the public sphere. At a time when public life was almost exclusively a male domain, radio became a rare space where women spoke with authority to a vast audience. As Fisher writes, ‘radio provided a platform for Australian women to speak and be heard in public on a scale not previously experienced’. As such, women’s broadcasting can be regarded as an inherently feminist act, no matter the content, as the mere fact of a having a woman behind the microphone challenged the norm of female deference to male speech. Radio helped women ‘claim their voices as citizens’, Fisher declares. Fisher is not the first to make this argument. Sound Citizens sits within a growing body of revisionist scholarship that debunks earlier assumptions that women had scant presence on the airwaves. Both within Australia and around the world, the long-held truism was that radio reflected and reinforced existing gender norms. Male announcers were presumed to be the norm, with women allowed on air only to dispense recipes on lightweight women’s shows that trained listeners to be good housewives. In recent decades, this idea has come under scrutiny from a growing wave of feminist historians. In the United States, Britain, and Europe, there has been a deluge of scholarship testifying that women were in fact heard on radio in sizeable numbers and regularly tackled topics far meatier than the Sunday roast. This female presence extended to the early BBC, as British historian Kate Murphy shows in her book Behind the Wireless (2016). From the early 2010s, interest in the neglected history of women’s broadcasting also took off in Australia, with pioneering research conducted by Jeannine Baker, Kylie Andrews, and Justine Lloyd. Fisher is part of this new wave, and her monograph is the first full-length Australian history on the topic. Despite the perennial challenges of radio history (little audio survives, leaving historians to stumble along with textual sources such as radio magazines), Fisher’s meticulous research eradicates any doubt that radio benefited women as both listeners and broadcasters. This was true of the ABC and commercial stations; however, the latter were often better vehicles for feminist messaging as they lacked the script vetting and managerial oversight that hamstrung announcers on the national broadcaster. The chapter on rural broadcasting is a particular highlight, with Fisher tracing how radio women in areas such as the Riverina and Western Australia’s wheatbelt fostered distinctive regional identities and mitigated the isolation of farming life. Indeed, Western Australia emerges as the national star of women’s broadcasting, home to legends such as Irene Greenwood and Catherine King – a striking fact that merits further analysis. The inimitable Greenwood, whose lengthy radio career culminated in her own show, Woman to Woman (1948–54) on Perth station 6PM, surely AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

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deserves a dedicated biography. Beyond the specifics of radio, Sound Citizens can also be read as a pre-history of the nexus between feminism and technology so familiar to us today. For as Fisher makes plain in the conclusion, the social-media fuelled #MeToo campaign was not the first time that feminists mobilised cutting-edge media, but rather one moment in a long history of feminist technology in which radio once played a critical role. Before Twitter and hashtags, the wireless was the megaphone of choice to reach the masses. Although we persist in imagining science and computing as male, feminists have always used the latest tech to speak and be heard. Yet progress remains frustratingly slow. As any glimpse of Twitter will confirm, even a full century on from the origins of Australian women’s radio speech, we still struggle to accept a woman with things to say in public. We may have moved from radio waves to internet cables, but some things remain little changed. g Yves Rees’s new book is All About Yves: Notes from a transition (Allen & Unwin, 2021). Society

Complaint as inheritance Sara Ahmed’s ongoing intellectual project Zora Simic

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Complaint!

by Sara Ahmed

Duke University Press US$29.95 pb, 376 pp

n 2016, feminist and queer theorist Sara Ahmed resigned from her post as professor at the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, University of London, in protest against the failure to address sexual harassment at her institution. Given that she was at the peak of her career and working in a centre she had helped to create, hers was a bold and surprising move, but also entirely consistent with her feminist politics. In one way or another, Ahmed has been writing about this decision, its causes and effects, ever since: first on her blog feministkilljoys; as an example of a ‘feminist snap’ in Living a Feminist Life (2017); in relation to diversity work in universities in What’s the Use: On the uses of use (2019); and now most directly in Complaint!, her tenth book. The subject of complaint is classic Ahmed territory rather than a new direction. Ahmed is prolific, but her work is best appreciated as an ongoing political and intellectual project. One book begets the next, and within each nest earlier concerns and theorising. As a site of analysis, the phenomenon of institutional complaint allows her to address her perennials, including feminism, the university, the cultural politics of emotion, and

the designation and revaluation of ‘wilful subjects’ such as ‘fem- theoreticians of their own experience, and of institutional power. inist killjoys’ and ‘complainers’. Once again, her most treasured In quoting them at length, Ahmed adds new terms like shadow thinkers are Black feminists and feminists of colour, including policies and coercive intimacy to her own evolving critical vocabulary. Audre Lorde, whose famous essay ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Integral to Ahmed’s anatomy of complaint is her dissection of Dismantle the Master’s House’ (1984) offers both an analytic how institutions respond to them. In this task, she builds on her frame and inspiring evidence of what taking a stand, or making a earlier work on, and experience of, how diversity and equality are complaint, can turn into. As per usual, Ahmed is on the side of stu- managed in higher education, but there is wider salience. Many dents, against contemporary tendencies – including among their readers will recognise the non-apology apology, ‘strategic ineffiteachers, some of them feminists – to view them as too coddled, ciency’, which can slow down processes to a glacial pace, and the too sensitive or ‘woke’, and/or powerful enough to topple a career implementation of woefully inadequate new policies or training with a single tweet or complaint. – like the federal government’s recent introduction of optional Ahmed reveals that she had embarked on this project be- one-hour sexual-harassment training for MPs. Ahmed’s analysis fore her resignation, but her decision is characteristically precise (‘Creat‘changed the nature of the research as ing evidence of doing something is well as how I could do it’. Similarly, not the same as doing something’), Ahmed’s project preceded #MeToo but where she really hits her stride going viral, but was inevitably caught is in her treatment of less obvious up in it. Many people contacted her strategies of containment. These into share their stories, and Ahmed clude ‘nonperformative’ nods, warncultivated listening with what she calls ings about ‘what would happen’, ‘a feminist ear’, that is ‘to hear what is ‘blanking’ as though the complaint not heard, how we are not heard’. The never happened, and diversionary foundation of Complaint! is interviews caricatures of the ‘complainer’. She with forty students, academics, and argues, for example, that the figure administrators variously involved of ‘Karen’, the ‘privileged white with formal complaint procedures. complainer’, can work to ‘stop Not all complaints relate to sexual complaints about racial harassment harassment, or not exclusively; sexism, from being heard’. What Ahmed racism, and bullying frequently recur, describes is ‘institutional fatalism’, as does the complaints process itself. analogous to how violence within Ahmed is also alert to how some rea family can be rationalised, ‘either quests (such as reasonable adjustments by being projected onto strangers for staff and students with disabilities) who can be removed (as if to remove or even certain words (‘race’, ‘racism’) them would be to remove violence) can be received as a priori complaints. or by being made familiar and thus There is no pretence here to social forgivable’. This is audacious but science and a representative sample – persuasive critique, which accrues that’s not the point. Ahmed describes its power by stealth. her task as receiving and sharing Complaint! is dense with inSara Ahmed at Geneva University in 2019 stories of complaint, a more radical sight, but admirably lucid. Ahmed’s (Rama/Wikimedia Commons) undertaking than it may appear at propensity for wordplay – which first glance. can be distracting – is here put to In taking complaints seriously, Ahmed reveals what so- good use, as she burrows down into the common phrases used called complainers are up against (opaque or zombie policies, to describe and dismiss complaints and complainers (rocking the closed doors, dismissive language, collegiality, and other forms of boat; broken record) and to justify unacceptable behaviour (perk gate-keeping); where complaints most often end up (folders, filing of the job). Through the portal of ‘complaint’, Ahmed advocates cabinets); and who so-called complainers are more likely to be for intersectional feminism, for ongoing transformation of uni(a clue: not straight white men). Complaint is addressed as labour, versities, and for collective action. In regards to the last, Ahmed and as trauma, including in instances where complaints are formal- takes inspiration from the archives of complaint activism and in ly ‘resolved’. In collecting complaints, Ahmed considers them as solidarity with former students and colleagues in a co-authored testimony, as biography and as history, including as part of the chapter titled ‘collective conclusions’ – rather than workplace ‘counterinstitutional knowledge of how universities work, for unions, which are barely mentioned (Complaint! is not that whom they work’. Complaint can be generative; for instance, a trans kind of book). Ahmed’s loyalty is to the complainers, not to the lecturer experiences discrimination, discovers there are no specific institutions they continue to push up against. g guidelines for trans staff, and helps initiate a conversation about their necessity. The people who share their stories – from under- Zora Simic is a Senior Lecturer in History and Women’s and graduate students through to professors – are recognised as astute Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Refugees

The calculus of numbers The indefinite detention of EML019 Justine Poon

Escape from Manus: The untold true story by Jaivet Ealom

Viking $34.99 pb, 347 pp

fter surviving two perilous boat journeys when he thought he would die, Jaivet Ealom is taken into the control of Australian authorities and given the designation EML019 on an identification card that manages to misspell his names. He will be referred as EML019 for the next three years, having arrived in Australian waters just five days after 19 July 2013, when a policy change meant that asylum seekers coming by boat would be transferred to the Manus Island or Nauru ‘regional processing centres’ to face indefinite detention and with no hope of resettlement in Australia. Escape from Manus recounts Jaivet Ealom’s story from his early life as a persecuted and stateless Rohingya Muslim in Myanmar to his odyssey through callous bureaucracies, indefinite detention, and violence. With careful planning, resourcefulness, and help from a few allies, Ealom finally reaches Canada and has his refugee status processed and recognised, giving him a chance to create a new life. As a piece of personal storytelling, this book eschews the dehumanising legal language and media reporting that treated people Australia detained offshore as a homogenous mass identified only by six letters and numbers. Escape from Manus is also a page-turner in the prison-break thriller genre. The reader is taken on Ealom’s multiple daring escapes across Myanmar, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, and Hong Kong. The most significant escape – from Manus Island – gives the book its title and forms the bulk of the narrative. At the Manus Regional Processing Centre, the physical harshness of state-run cruelty converges with the designation of a group of people as being unable to access a life in which their ambitions can bear fruit. According to Ealom, life in the detention centre was marked by arbitrary bans on phones and books, the heat of the metal shipping containers where the men slept, and lining up in the sun for hours to receive food ‘seasoned with stones and bits of gravel’. Overarching the daily humiliations is the sense of languishing through time made meaningless by the inescapable monotony of days in which nothing they did seemed to matter: ‘our futures were being systematically dismantled on the say-so of an Australian political party’. Ealom’s account of interminable waiting is punctuated by moments of violence. The 2014 attack on the detention centre, led by some of the G4S staff who ran the security services and Manusian locals, resulted in the death of Iranian asylum seeker Reza Barati and left countless others with injuries. Ealom reflects 42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

on his initial bafflement at the hostility of the locals towards the detainees, who posed no threat to them: ‘the locals had been told we were hardened criminals … too dangerous to be controlled inside Australia.’ The book illustrates the ways in which high-level political decision-making circulates on the ground, manifesting as fear and enmity between groups of people who share the common condition of not having a choice about the existence of the detention centre and the presence of the refugees there: ‘Each of us, jailer or prisoner, was trapped in our own way in that abject place, with no purpose or direction, no past or future.’

Ealom’s account of interminable waiting is punctuated by moments of violence It is this oscillation between Ealom’s experience and the larger political forces at play that gives the book its narrative power. The main cultural touchstones are, fittingly, Prison Break, the television drama that inspires Ealom’s real-life push for freedom, and Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), an account by a psychiatrist of his survival in the Nazi concentration camps, ‘with his body and spirit intact’. The quotes that head each chapter suggest a kinship with philosophers, histories of resistance and speaking truth to power, and the consolations of literature in providing explanatory power against violence. In the face of torments, the mind can still retreat and make plans. Throughout his detention and escape, Ealom demonstrates an uncommon facility for observing detail and an actorly flair for inhabiting the affectations, language, and garb of those he needed to pretend to be at any one moment. We get the sense that tending to his inner life helped support him through the dehumanising treatment meted out at the detention centre. This young man ultimately frees himself from Australia’s grinding political machinery, at the cost of separating himself from family and the fellow detainees with whom he had formed strong bonds out of hardship. Escape from Manus and Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains (2018) are stylistically very different, but both books open a crack in the government framing of who refugees are and what Australia is doing to them. The depiction of their humanity makes the reader pay attention; it counters the government narrative and the journalistic warp speed that drove media coverage. Both texts ask the reader to consider whether the detention of refugees is exceptional or a symptom of rot within a legal system that permits it. J.M. Coetzee has asked, ‘does the calculus of numbers falter when it comes to matters of good and evil?’ The Australian government may plead that the law or humanitarian concerns demand offshore detention, but that does not remove its responsibility for what happens there. Whole territories may be excised as a legal trick, but the fact remains that the government is responsible for the treatment of the people whom it captures, transfers offshore, and detains. Jaivet Ealom exhibits courage in the face of the many pitiless systems that violated his rights and tried to take away his name. His act of writing reclaims his narrative. g Justine Poon is a Lecturer in Law and Society at the University of the Sunshine Coast. ❖

Environment

Bushwalks and rambles Examining Australian walking habits Caitlin Doyle-Markwick

The Ways of the Bushwalker: On foot in Australia by Melissa Harper

NewSouth $34.99 pb, 381 pp

t what point does a ramble or meander through the bush become a bona fide bushwalk? Was my two-hour stroll near Wolli Creek during semi-lockdown – when I locked eyes with the now-maligned fruit bat – a bushwalk or just a ramble? Answers to these questions vary wildly according to the conflicting approaches to bushwalking detailed in Melissa Harper’s updated version of The Ways of the Bushwalker (2007). Harper suggests that the casual strolls early settlers took for the purpose of pleasure developed into the distinct category of ‘bushwalking’ in the late 1800s. Colonial expansion had opened up previously ‘impenetrable’ landscapes, and European ideas around the physical and spiritual benefits of being in nature had begun to filter into the minds of a growing middle and upper-middle class. From early on, arguments have raged over what constitutes legitimate ‘bushwalking’, including a thread of élitism and exclusivity still present today. Influenced by the Romantic literature of the nineteenth century, with its notion of the sublime, middle-class Australian walkers often saw bushwalking as a means of cultivating one’s finer senses and intellect away from the hubbub of industrialised cities. For intellectuals like George Sutherland, founder of the Melbourne Review, bushwalks were also social occasions, an opportunity to throw off the shackles of polite society to thrash out philosophical arguments. As interest in the natural sciences grew, it became fashionable to spend long days ‘botanising’ or examining curious rock formations as they walked. A section of upper-class bushwalkers rejected what they saw as an indulgent approach to bushwalking. These Robinson Crusoe-like adventurers valued self-sufficiency and, like the nascent Scouting movement, saw bushwalking as a means of cultivating skills needed for war. Even gentlemen bushwalkers took pride in carrying minimal supplies and subjecting themselves to Australia’s harshest landscapes. Harper makes clear that what defined self-titled bushwalkers was their ability to opt out of these hardships, unlike the swagmen and workers who walked the country roads and bush in search of work during the depression of the 1890s. The romanticisation of the swagman figure by both bushwalkers themselves and Australian literature – from Henry Lawson to Les Murray – has arguably led to the existence of a national myth conflating the image of this intrepid adventurer with the impoverished swagman, despite the marked differences in their material circumstances. Scattered

throughout some of our most prized literature is ‘a bush myth created by an alienated urban intelligentsia who then projected their values onto the outback’. Although the Australian bush and our apparent collective connection with it loom large in the national imagination, access to the bush since colonisation has remained restricted along the lines of race and class. Harper shows how middle-class bushwalkers reacted with scorn when thousands of mostly working-class people began taking advantage of day hikes organised by the railways in the 1930s. She reveals that engagement in bushwalking as a leisure activity remains low among LOTE and First Nations communities. And while Indigenous struggles to maintain access to their traditional lands have been a feature of our history from the beginning, they rarely feature in bush poetry. Perhaps ironically, most of the experiences of the bush described in The Ways of the Bushwalker, whether those of a wealthy explorer or a working-class day-hiker, are premised on the separation of nature and ‘real life’ in an industrial system imported from Britain, and on a profound alienation from the environment. Harper is careful to distinguish the walking habits of settlers from the practices of Aboriginal people, whose way of moving through the landscape wasn’t determined by a need to escape the grind of industrial cities but by a relationship with nature based on mutual reciprocity and inextricably bound up with their economic and spiritual lives. In the last chapter, Harper delves into recent debates around the concept of ‘wilderness’, or pristine nature, and how we conceive of the pre-colonial landscape and the founding myth of terra nullius. She criticises the often racist and dismissive attitudes of walkers towards Indigenous people, and rejects the absurd claims of bushwalkers to be charting new, ‘undiscovered’ territory on their adventures. Some of Harper’s cheerful descriptions of bushwalking in earlier colonial times manage to skip over the less wholesome aspects of settlers’ activities, drawing too hard a line between the innocent adventures of colonialists on their days off and the project of colonisation as a whole. Whether or not the Macquaries or Macarthurs marvelled at the beauty of the landscape they later violently expropriated seems an odd thing to focus on without mentioning the fact or nature of the expropriation. This new edition could have referenced the large post-2007 body of research detailing the Frontier Wars, which were still raging in the early 1900s. Similarly, while Harper problematises the tendency of the tourism industry to ‘monetise nature’ – as well as the conflict between equitable access and the protection of vulnerable ecosystems – discussion of the most damaging commercial practices being carried out in the same areas, such as land-clearing, is conspicuously absent. These omissions risk perpetuating some of the very myths that Harper confronts about just how healthy our relationship with nature is in Australia. If the desire of tens of thousands of people in this country to connect with the natural world can be seized upon to protect the landscapes through which they walk, perhaps there is a chance that this relationship can be turned around. g Caitlin Doyle-Markwick is a writer, theatre-maker, and publishing worker from Sydney. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Nature writing

Questions of belonging The consequences of introduced species Paul Dalgarno

Imaginative Possession: Learning to live in the Antipodes by Belinda Probert

Upswell $26.99 pb, 173 pp

anting to belong forms the root system of Belinda Probert’s Imaginative Possession, marking the terrain – how can she, as an immigrant, ever feel at home in Australia? – and producing shoots of longing for the landscapes of her English childhood. Even now, forty-five years after arriving in Perth to take up a teaching position at Murdoch University, after which she lived briefly in Adelaide before raising a family in Melbourne, that question lingers. Specifically, given that she feels at ease with the people and culture, why does she still feel needled by the natural environment? To explore this, Probert employs the triple treat of academia, bibliophilia, and gardening nous. Perhaps leaving Melbourne will make her feel more congruent with the country, an impulse that sees her, in her early sixties, buying a rural property in the Otways. Or maybe, despite the wealth of knowledge she gains there, it won’t. The book’s title and main investigative line are taken from the late Australian landscape writer George Seddon, whom Probert quotes: ‘The enduring form of possession is imaginative possession, which is fed by knowledge, understanding, associations, stories and images, affections and, finally incorporation of the environment into the self, until it becomes part of our sense of personal identity.’ Although Probert concentrates largely on Victoria, an intertextual dialogue with the Fremantle-focused Seddon continues throughout, as does an interplay with the work of historian Bill Gammage and writers such as memoirist Kim Mahood, whose work is situated in the Northern Territory. The fiction writers referenced range from Joseph Furphy to Chloe Hooper. Despite the diverse contexts, these are writers for whom the Australian landscape, bellicose or bucolic, exerts a hypnotic pull and raises a common, if sometimes implicit, concern: how to feel settled in a settler society that itself remains unsettled by the facts of its founding. The metaphor, never heavy-handed, is clear: whether plants, creatures, or people, the unintended, often disastrous consequences of introduced species spread like weeds, the intercontinental transplantation of entities and ideas presaging not only environmental degradation but an arrested development of the imagination. Rather than continue in this way, Probert suggests that it may be time to acknowledge, in Seddon’s words, that ‘We are here, and not somewhere else.’ Her own preference for the reminders of her childhood in Kent, and the changing of those attitudes over time, is fascinating – the slow, informed appreciation for Australian native birds versus introduced species such as starlings and blackbirds; the 44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

belated admiration for trees such as the mountain and alpine ash, whose gumnuts have evolved to release their seeds only under the ‘atomic heat’ of bushfires, versus the helicopter-seeded sycamores of her youth; an increasing esteem for the kangaroo and echidna versus heavy-hooved non-native livestock. The separation of what is from what was underscores the gap between Australia’s pastoral ideal and its agrestic reality, as argued through cross-analysis of the work of Arthur Streeton, whose paintings such as Land of the Golden Fleece (1926) conjure a postwar Victorian idyll. Seddon, Probert informs us, believed the near-mythical golden light infusing that work was caused by dust blowing through plains ‘denuded of vegetation, the topsoil pulverised by sheep and cattle and blown to the coast’. Given the focus on settler society, it is perhaps unsurprising that first-hand Aboriginal contributions to the Australian imaginary come late in the book, via the agricultural insights in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014), which, for the first time, present the ‘lived history of Victoria’s Indigenous population as something [Probert can] relate to directly’: ‘Everyone can imagine someone else making a fish trap and catching eels, or growing and harvesting yams. It is not so simple to understand why other people believe in skin and clan totems, or re-incarnation or the resurrection, come to that.’ And yet for every Patrick White and Katharine Susannah Prichard it is easy to cite examples of contemporary First Nations writers who do exactly what Probert seems to be craving throughout, authors such as Melissa Lucashenko, Alexis Wright, and Tyson Yunkaporta, who are deeply invested in poetically specific, imaginatively expansive renderings of the land. Though a nature lover, Probert is no bleeding heart. Nonchalantly, she steals, boils, and furtively returns blackbird eggs to nests to limit the population of new birds – a certain steeliness perhaps inherited from her Tasmanian-born maternal grandmother, ‘Mrs. Charles Russell’, who left Australia as a war widow to run, and lobby vociferously for, the Associated Country Women of the World. Probert, though, is a disarmingly friendly guide whose investment in her subject matter makes for a rewarding read. That she struggles to unearth a definitive answer in her Otways garden to the big question of belonging is ultimately reassuring. Instead, she considers possibilities beyond the colonialist mindset, within which real or imagined dominion over the land is no prerequisite for feeling at home. In this she takes heart from an account by Lebanese-Australian sociologist Ghassan Hage, who recounts visiting the garden of his Lebanese immigrant grandparents, who had settled in Bathurst in the 1930s. Seeing trees planted by his grandfather half a century earlier leaves Hage ‘feeling more Australian than ever’, as if the trees’ roots, ‘paradoxically’, were ‘an extra pair of wings’, offering him a glimpse of belonging ‘in opposition to the narrow territorial way of being rooted’. Australia is neither its ancestral past nor its settler present but the still-evolving result of horticultural grafts and latitudinal shifts, much like the elm trees now synonymous with Melbourne that have outgrown their European ancestors (more than twenty million of them died from Dutch Elm Disease in the 1960s and 1970s). We are here now, endemic or otherwise, and have to survive, adapt, and contribute. g Paul Dalgarno is an author, reviewer, and journalist.

Poetry

‘A creepy little walk’ Toby Fitch’s lyricism and versatility Pam Brown

Sydney Spleen by Toby Fitch

Giramondo $24 pb, 103 pp

ydney-based poet and editor Toby Fitch has spent much of the last decade traversing the field of radical French modernist poets, especially Arthur Rimbaud and Guillaume Apollinaire. That engagement ignited Fitch’s imagination. He began inverting, recombining, mistranslating, and mimicking their techniques in his own poetry. In his new collection, Sydney Spleen, he has made a sophisticated, fresh move that enhances his signature playfulness and tongue-in-cheek poetic antics. Under the influence of Charles Baudelaire, Fitch has swerved into a mood that is disgruntled, politically disenchanted, derisive and, consequently, outraged. Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: Petits poèmes en prose (Fitch’s favourite book) and Les Fleurs du Mal are two sources of animation that fuel the poems in Sydney Spleen, as do Apollinaire’s Calligrams. Over the past few years, the poems have accrued gradually in a desktop folder. In 2020, the beginning of the present-day pandemic was an event which, Fitch says in an author note: unearthed all kinds of splenetic moods, and so in lockdown ...I found myself writing into the nights to capture the fragmented emotions I was experiencing with my family ... as we watched and re-watched a world seemingly undergoing apocalypse upon apocalypse – megafires, 1 billion animals dying, massive hailstorms and flooding, the ongoing pandemic, the return of fascism ‘like a fossilized piece of moon’ (Ernst Bloch); all symptoms of a broken but still all-consuming capitalist system that allows the ruling classes to exploit the Earth unchecked at the expense of minorities and the working class.

That final pronouncement immediately corresponds with Baudelaire’s fiercely provocative piece ‘Assommons les pauvres! ’ (‘Let’s Beat Up the Poor!’), written in an attempt to materialise class struggle. Sydney Spleen begins beautifully miserably with ‘Spleen 1’ – ‘January, pissed off with Sydney, pours / steaming torrents on the lessees / of Camperdown cemetery and mortal dumps / on the tenants and landlords of suburbia’. Though contemporary Sydney is hardly mid-nineteenth century Paris, Fitch – like the most prominent flâneur, the anonymous loiterer Baudelaire – goes out on walks around the city. The cool sarcasm of ‘New Phantasmagorics’ starts: ‘Went for a creepy little walk. Navigating / a global pandemic, we go nowhere. / The future is shiny but who keeps it shiny. / The sun’s not a sphere, it’s a runnel / you get stuck in when you stare straight

into it. / My eyes are barcodes ...’ Fitch rarely writes ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Poem’. Here he can’t resist the pleasures of merging influences. The poem is anything but ordinary. It riffs on Les Murray’s 1969 poem ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’, where a man’s relentless weeping in Martin Place brings the hectic city to a standstill. When the man stops crying, ‘he simply walks’ through the crowd, post-epiphany, and hurries off. In John Forbes’s ‘On the Beach: A Bicentennial Poem’ (1988), trade unionists watch a man behead a chicken in Martin Place and, ‘not being religious’, they ‘bet on how many circles / the headless chook will complete’. To me, Fitch’s mash-up ironises old schisms. In the 1980s, Murray, ‘bard of the bush’, expressed hostility to ‘inner-city élites’ and postmodernists like Forbes, who once remarked, countering Murray, that his generation wrote about mining corporations’ destruction of the bush, not romantic nature poems. North American Mary Ruefles’s poem ‘A Certain Swirl’ provides the idea for Fitch: ‘The classroom was dark, all the desks were empty, / and the sentence on the board was frightened to / find itself alone.’ Fitch begins: ‘Martin Place was dark, all the cafes were empty, / an office above flickered with fluoro light / and the poem on the pavement was petrified / to find itself alone ...’ Like Ruefles’s sentence, the poem, even though ‘perhaps it was a shit poem’, remained unread. Fitch has worked for several years as a sessional academic for various universities. Scandalously, university casuals were not granted financial support when classes were cancelled due to the pandemic. The university, which for years had relied on casual labour, deserted them. In Sydney, with union support, the casuals negotiated their dire situation with administrators and departmental academics to no avail. The union took the university to the Fair Work Commission on Fitch’s behalf and won the case. During the months of protest and uncertainty, Fitch wrote impassioned poems ridiculing administrative behaviour. ‘A Massage from the Vice-Chancellor’ lampoons risible and condescending managerial jargon. The book’s other political poems express a general discontent with current Australian politicians. The scathing poem ‘Left Hanging at the End of the End of the World Campaign’ rails bitterly against the lack of government action on climate change. Sydney has been nicknamed ‘Tinsel Town’. More refined, David Williamson, a satirical playwright from Melbourne, called it ‘Emerald City’. Fitch looks ‘Beneath the Sparkle’, going underground on a tour of the tunnels on both shores of the harbour. Not quite the Parisian Catacombs but, ‘unused for the wetter part of the century’, the damp atmospherics do lead to an abandoned nineteenth-century cemetery below Central Station’s Platforms 26 and 27. Fitch makes a mockery of a politician’s plan to sell the city tunnels off for subterranean entertainments and eateries – ‘a fresh kind of colony in the underworld is being floated by the minister’. ‘Morning Walks in a Time of Plague’, the final poem, displays yet another slant – more sanguine in its remarkable familial intimacy, humour and discerning reflection. The alluring versatility and lyrical expansion in Toby Fitch’s new poems offer the reader many intricate intensities and illuminating pleasures. g Pam Brown is an Australian poet. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Poetry

Exiles and wanderers Two poets’ lateral moves Nicholas Jose

The Gleaner Song: Selected poems

by Song Lin, translated by Dong Li Giramondo $24 pb, 76 pp

Vociferate | 詠

by Emily Sun Fremantle Press $29.99 pb, 110 pp

he Chinese poet is so often a wanderer and an exile. The tradition goes back to Qu Yuan (c.340–278 bce), author of ‘Encountering Sorrow’, the honest official who was banished from court and drowned himself in a river, and it continues to our time. During the Sino–Japanese war (1937–45) a group of patriotic early Chinese modernists were displaced from their Beijing universities to an improvised campus in the south-west, where they read avant-garde Western poetry. The Hong Kong poet Leung Ping-kwan (1949–2013) later studied them, himself a Cantonese-speaking and cosmopolitan migrant from the mainland who, like so many others, crossed the border with his parents when Liberation and the People’s Republic were proclaimed. A later modernist generation – including Bei Dao, Duo Duo, and Yang Lian – left China when they could in the years between Democracy Wall (1979) and Tiananmen (1989). Song Lin is a slightly younger member of that group. Jailed for his protest activities in Shanghai in 1989, he left for France in 1991, living in Europe, Argentina, and Singapore before returning to China and a form of internal exile in Dali in remote Yunnan. The Gleaner Song offers a distillation of his poetry along the way. The panoramic poem ‘Providence and Poetry’ considers the cost, back to Homer and Qu Yuan, who ‘floated on the water’, and forward to Song’s own contemporaries: In all nations on this planet earth exile Runs through the history of mankind, and that of the suffering poets Occupies a significant chapter.

The poem names Lin Zhao (1932–68), the poet martyr who wrote with her own blood from prison in Shanghai before she was shot for crimes against the state. It names Haizi (1964–89), who threw himself under a train, ‘sliced through’ by ‘the mysterious number of 1989’. Others cited include Paul Celan (1920–70), whose suicide in the Seine is emblematic of ‘divine punishment’ for seeking meaning in deathly times: ‘he drinks away the root of the last word’. The river is a recurrent metaphor for Song. It flows into the large ocean that is poetry, as if, for all the grievous weight of history and politics, language – floating, drifting, ‘the suitcase [that] is your canoe’ – might be buoyant enough to survive. The language crosses to readers of English, thanks indistinguishably to the translator, the poet Dong Li, also from the 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

PRC, younger again, another migrant who now writes in English. His collaboration with Song Lin is the result of a Translation Lab residency at Ledig House in upstate New York. ‘[Song] is a curious poet who opens himself to the world around him,’ writes the translator. ‘His songs migrate … from one language to another … [in] a sensitive anthropology of our migratory world.’ Absorbing Western influences into the fabric of Chinese literary tradition, Song’s poetry is ‘a rotating brocade’ of gleanings. The translator’s job is to find an accommodating habitat in English. The last poem in the book, inspired by a walk in the countryside and dedicated by the poet to the translator, is a brilliant example. The Chinese poet who comes ‘with the cunning and curiosity of an oriental man’ turns into an American poet ‘just walking a little further / to stretch the distance from the old I’. This relaxed poem supports literary scholar Leo Ou-fan Lee’s suggestion of ‘translation’s highest and truest aspiration: friendship’. What happens when we read Chinese poetry in English? A space for interpretation is needed if the poetry is to continue to travel. There is lively debate among practitioners and theorists of literary translation in relation to contemporary Chinese poetry. I like Nick Admussen’s invocation of French philosopher JeanLuc Nancy’s concept of ‘being-in-common’ as a reflection on the creative sequence that can open up, especially in multilingual performance: The community built between the original text and the translation, between artists, translators, and audiences, exists in a social, political, and historical moment … The being-in-common between translated and original texts provokes and reflects a being-in-common between artist and translator; those commonalities … then connect local and foreign audiences.

In this spirit, The Gleaner Song reaches across distance in a tender appeal to readers to join in the relation that Song Lin and Dong Li offer – elegant, melancholy, passing on borrowed glories gathered on the road.

erth-based poet Emily Sun uses the word ‘translanguaging’ to acknowledge an aspect of her creative process in the début collection Vociferate | 詠. The result is a complex personal rhetoric unafraid to push past boundaries when necessary. Words in Cantonese and Mandarin script break through, transliterated and translated at the bottom of the page. There’s French and Latin too, and everywhere a sense of the malleab-ility of the ‘bastardised language’ that is English. The author’s biographical note alludes to the poems’ grounding in life experience. Sun was born in Hong Kong, moved to England at three, migrated to Australia at eight, and later travelled the world, including to Beijing. The language shifts involved in that journey register challenges of identity and meaning: ‘must I belong? can I belong with /so many incongruencies?’ Sun’s poetry finds points of stillness, but cannot stay still for long. It is spiky, probing, unexpected in its lateral moves. ‘Origins’ begins: ‘let’s see how we want our story to unfold … flows of stories … drifting’. ‘Perspective?’ is the question. Yet this opening poem ends with finality: ‘there has always been loss’. As in poems such as ‘Heavenly Piece’ and ‘We Need to Talk About Immigration …’, lines press to both edges of the page as

Poetry if demanding a way out. Sometimes the ‘back and forth’ resolves itself in an unarguable punctum. ‘Noblesse Oblige’, for example, a poem about Hong Kong’s beginnings in colonial rape – ‘a city (my home) born of violence’ – reduces to:

‘My childbearing hips’ An emotionally powerful anthology Jane Gibian

tearing. membranes. memories. meaning.

The amusing ‘Palatable’, about the limitations of a right-thinking Australian, ends bluntly: ‘easy tropes’. Sometimes the point is a double meaning (‘national front’, ‘one nation’) or puzzle, as in ‘Six Two Six’, a rendering of Mozart’s Requiem as raging black comedy end-of-life hospital experience that lands on this centred couplet: ‘music ceases / to explain.’ The poet knows how to deliver a full stop.

What happens when we read Chinese poetry in English? What’s in a name? The Chinese half of the book’s double title Vociferate | 詠 is the opposite of vociferous shouting. 詠, yǒng in pinyin, is an old character meaning to chant or sing. It is also the author’s given name. But, as the poem ‘Romeo Would, Were He Not Romeo Call’d’ reveals, it proved ‘too difficult’ and was ‘traded for Wuthering Heights’, that is, for Emily Brontë’s Christian name. From the name change on, Emily Sun oscillates between languages, homelands, sameness and difference. She’s the ‘Wandering Minstrel in Translation’ in one of my favourite poems, ‘a mashup of my own translations of misheard Chinese song lyrics’: ‘colour struggle, life’s sacrifice / loss of possession / yet there is still hope’. This is Australian poetry, too, with suburban settings providing material for many of the scenarios, though Australia can never simply be home. Place is layered and unstable, as fractured as the language that speaks it. Nothing can be taken for granted: I am happy to stay in this time Lie on this dried grass patched over dunes breathe clean air (with your permission of course) until the ocean reclaims the shore. (‘Property Rights’)

The book concludes with a poem called ‘Tribal Affiliations’, which returns to the question of origin underlined in the opening dedication: ‘for my mother / & / my two grandmothers’. The maternal line returns to motherland and mother tongue like an umbilical cord. What will happen to those affiliations now? ‘Where? / Which country? / … there is no reply …’ As a Chinese woman in Australia, the speaker, we guess, is determined to ‘unbound’ herself: ‘no one likes an angry woman’. Except her readers. g Nicholas Jose is most recently the co-editor, with Benjamin Madden, of Antipodean China (Giramondo).

What We Carry: Poetry on childbearing

edited by Ella Kurz, Simone King, and Claire Delahunty

Recent Work Press $24.95 pb, 226 pp

n her explosive, feminist début album Dry (1992), a young P.J. Harvey sang ‘Look at these my childbearing hips’, proudly proclaiming women’s strength and physicality. The word ‘childbearing’ conjures strong feelings and images for many of us – whether of childbirth, sleep deprivation, devotion, or a whole new way of life. It signifies much more than childbirth itself and is a fitting choice for the subtitle of this anthology, Poetry on childbearing. This emotionally powerful collection covers an expansive range of experiences: infertility, conception, pregnancy, birth, and life with a baby (or not). A cogent introduction sets out the editors’ argument that procreation provides insight into human existence. They quote Alicia Ostriker’s assertion that to consider the experiences of motherhood as trivial or tangential to the real issues of life, or as irrelevant to the great themes of literature, is a misogynist training that we should all unlearn. This anthology goes some way to celebrating childbearing as a fundamental part of the human condition. Through its inclusion of work from writers of different ages, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, and experiences, the collection offers a generous array of viewpoints. The editors have selected work from both established and emerging writers. As with many anthologies, the quality of its poetry is uneven, but there are enough complex and striking works to carry the reader’s attention, including Maria Takolander’s ‘Unborn’: … It was then I felt the tide come in, bearing silt stirred from the fetid sea floor, old with starfish and eel bones. The moon, for nine months, did not care to claim it again.

The book is arranged in sections of clearly delineated themes, such as conception and (in)fertility, pregnancy, loss, birth, and choice. This guides the reading experience quite explicitly; it’s hard to read a poem in the section called ‘Birth’, for instance, without bringing along your own experiences or preconceptions about the process of birth. It inevitably forces a close comparison of poems on similar themes that sometimes doesn’t do justice to an individual poem. Each titled section comprises one or two subsections with individual titles, phrases taken from a poem therein. For example, ‘Loss’ contains the subsections ‘Thawed promise’ and ‘My womb AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

to my heart’, and ‘Postpartum’ is divided into ‘Unmaking’ and ‘Love and wonder’. While these are less prescriptive than the main section titles, I felt that the ordering was at times more constraining than necessary. Sometimes the specific focus of a section can be a strength instead of a limitation, in allowing ample space for diverse voices on a particular theme. Strong poems stand out, such as Michelle Cahill’s ‘Stepping through Glass’: ‘The alien song of a bird along the fire trail, / the wet flag of our labrador’s tongue / and my thoughts like fallen, burnt-out logs.’ Many poems have an autobiographical quality. It is fascinating to observe this in poets like Judith Bishop and Anne Elvey, whose other work is often less direct and more subtle in subject and style. Perhaps this reflects the overwhelming emotional and physical investment required in all aspects of childbearing, from trying to conceive to holding a baby in your arms. This is not necessarily a drawback, though some poems by less skilled writers, with a confessional voice and a narrative structure, read more like cut-up prose and are thus less forceful. The anthology rightly features substantial poems relating to infertility and loss, and the choice not to have children, as expressed in Jacqui Malins’ poem: ‘a knowing so sure you were not for me. i / wondered what kind of person. of / woman my certainty made me? / it never wavered.’ Some of the poems on infertility and miscarriage are heart-rending, such as Nandi Chinna’s ‘Another Month’: ‘Every time the moon grows huge, / I’m labouring again in my stony field, / sowing the crop that never bears fruit.’ Poems cover post-natal depression, breastfeeding, and exhaustion, as well as the joy and wonder of a having a new family member. Others touch on the medicalisation of birth, and Audrey Molloy captures the experience of feeling like an object under the medical gaze: ‘the cargo / of her uterus illuminated / like a fossil on a dig.’ Poetry by Indigenous writers bookend the anthology, and other works bear witness to the abuse of Aboriginal women by white men, and the subsequent pregnancies. The steadfast lines of culture and belonging between generations of women shine through, such as in the final poem, Natalie Harkin’s ‘Thread offerings | For my children’: ‘no matter how far back or forward you go / I am with you always you will find us and this beginning can / never end.’ There is a welcome seam of humour in lines from Felicity Plunkett’s ‘Soft-tissue Stitching’ – ‘The partners, as if on a school excursion, are invited / to take turns inhaling gas and air’ – and in Esther Ottaway’s portrayal of the foetus: My difficult houseguest tramples the body’s furniture, dances until late, runs up enormous bills of oxygen and blood

Readers will have their own opinions on how many poems by male poets should be included – here there are a scattering. Like those by female poets, they differ in quality but in general they are not the most arresting in the collection. A couple suffer from 48 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

being overlong and lacking the sharpness of poems like Elvey’s ‘Birth’: ‘Between my / thighs your / scream / slides.’ There are also impressive poems by Petra White, Melinda Smith, Eileen Chong, Lucy Dougan, and LK Holt, among others. Overall, the multiplicity of experiences examined poetically is a strength of this book. What We Carry is a compelling anthology that is hard to read lightly or without emotional engagement – or even without remembering the prickle of rising milk. g Jane Gibian is a poet and librarian whose new collection of poetry is Beneath the Tree Line (Giramondo, 2021). ❖ Poetry

Details and disorientation A language to justify thought Jennifer Harrison

Whirlwind Duststorm by John Hawke

Grand Parade Poets $19.95 pb, 60 pp

n the epigraph to this collection, a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre on Edmund Husserl suggests that we are entering a poetic that challenges the possibility of conscious knowledge; consciousness is itself a maelstrom that extrudes the intruder and has ‘no inside’. What follows is both a refutation and embracement of this assertion in chatoyant language that is as thoughtful and melodic as it is powerful. The reader is obliged to work hard to navigate the narrative, and I have rarely read poetry where the search for meaning has been felt so deeply. As Sartre indicates in Being and Nothingness, existential freedom of choice defines the individual. Poems, too, emerge from poet’s choices – here, an interest in avant-garde art, movies, music, literature, aesthetics, and the politics of language (including a taste for arcane or little-used words). There is a respect for locality, the tapestry of places visited (or assumed significant), and perhaps most pressingly an awareness of the fragility of world systems: climate change, diminishing global resources, inequality. The reader is placed in an unsettled deciphering mode. Social constructivism also feels important, especially the shape of belonging to one’s time through fragmentary prismatic examination of culture and social history. The poems move fluidly in the mind; virtuosity is not the central visionary concern, but the poetry dazzles visually. Plurality of being and perspective is celebrated and mourned. Many poems allude to underground musicians and bands with polysemous titles such as ‘Running with the Pack’ (after the third studio album of English group Bad Company), ‘Underground Come-

I found a sudden lyric clarity in the final elegies of the down’ (a nod to Brown Acid’s sixth lysergic album), ‘Sea Priestess’ (a song by Coil, itself a testament to the endurance of the sea, with collection, ‘September’ and ‘Dormition’ – not a relief exactly lyrics referencing crumbling murals from an abbey in Sicily – in but a familiarity of footing. This familiarity of imagery punches throughout the collection. For example, I Hawke’s hands a Petrarchan rhymed sonnet still recall images from the poems long after dedicated to the musician Jhonn Balance), reading them: ‘a young mother / with three and ‘1979’ by The Smashing Pumpkins, a clenched children, all without jumpers’ beautiful poem of cascading disappointment, (‘South East’). These jolts of recognition ‘Now the true facts of his life sound like a lie briefly surface and are swept away but do / spiralling from a slender fluke of time.’ not disappear. In the homage to William In these hallucinatory poems, we are inFaulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’, which likely vited to honour disorientation as a linguistic references multiple Emilys, the beauty of process and encouraged to build singular the natural world is celebrated, but there insights from fragments, each poem emerging is also fragility as in Faulkner’s short story, as a unique consciousness. Each poem can which cautions that we don’t see the world be read as deconstructing a theme: environclearly when too idealistic. mental degradation (‘Boronia Sunset’), urban The first poem in the collection, ‘Axis’, adolescence (‘Running with the Pack’), illness tonally introduces the mechanics of move(‘Zero Degrees’), or de-idealised counterment around a fulcrum, a core that centres cultural aspirations (‘Upper Gully’), but this the trajectory of ideas. The titular poem, approach to critique is a difficult perspective ‘Whirlwind Duststorm’, the most politto hold ‘steady’; sometimes I hear the author ically transparent in the book, addresses remonstrating, ‘I didn’t mean that, at all.’ InJohn Hawke the fractures of late capitalism and is full terestingly, the poems can be experienced as of savage asides, such as this comment on music or textural surfaces while also read for the nature of counselling, which made me laugh aloud: ‘She’d intelligence of purpose and resistant consciousness. The prose poem/essay that centres the book, ‘The Wedding’, is had some private meetings with her workplace / psychologist, well placed. Other reviewers rightly have alluded to its Proustian just a sprinkling of aspersions, like / tripping an outside light satirical flair, and in this sense the ‘soursobs’ moment is hard to with everything exposed / in their night garden.’ Sweet Movie, the 1974 surrealist comic-drama of the Serbian overlook, but I also found echoes of a Montaigne-style poetic: a prose essay which employs a second-person observant digressive filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, which was vigorously banned on voice to satirical yet idiosyncratic effect. This work extends to release, features toward the end of the book in an elegiac poem just over seven dense pages of text and draws in social satire and that perhaps references the recent passing of the director in 2019: cultural comment with perceptive humour, but also questions poetry’s lineage within its marriage of language and experience: Homesickness is our only guide when no passage Most of us, however, struggle in our hesitation between choices of sound and sense, challenged by words which never capture our intentions – which charm the ear but miss the point, in phrasing worn smooth by overuse, shuffling cabbalistically through selections and combinations for a language which might justify thought – and always settle for an unsatisfactory evocation, suggesting a world that does not exist: a dry scattering of wind through the leaves of a tree which cannot be located in any forest.

The poems in Whirlwind Duststorm digress, fold back and out upon themselves without reaching an easy conclusion (the leaves of that unlocatable tree approached briefly and lost again). There is a not-so-gentle jab at Australian colonialism in ‘The Demolition of Hotel Australia’, with its acerbic commentary: ‘black turtlenecked women matched with a Penguin Classic / detecting tropisms in the Euclidean archiforms / of Bauhaus after the youth concert’. As the poet reminds us, ‘this is not memory / but an unforgetting’. Such skewering details are a delight not only because a period of history is so accurately observed in all its affectations and pathos, but also the demolition of the hotel is metaphorically a continual cultural process.

for return is viable or necessary: briefly windowed in the silver gleam of a gelato cup, or the apricot glow of summer light slanting through shutters

In speaking of a ‘serial Europe disembowelled by war’, this poem’s sombre mood of tragedy and disillusionment lingers and can’t be assuaged wholly by homage to art. How does poetry speak to the present? What are its necessary forms? In a recent review in The New York Review of Books (‘Poems from the Storm’, 28 May 2020), Elisa Gabbert muses (with a nod towards oversimplification) that ‘contemporary poetry’s only subject is climate change’ and that ‘whiteness and privilege are always in the background like weather and rising sea levels’. Whirlwind Duststorm offers a poetic of kaleidoscopic intellectual reach. The way Hawke plays with an ‘accelerated temporality’ together with ‘bursts of revelatory awareness’ and an acceptance of ‘unsatisfactory evocation’ raises his collection into a triumph. One is left with a sense of empathy for human frailty, a language which might justify thought. g Jennifer Harrison’s latest poetry collection is Anywhy (Black Pepper, 2018). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW SEP T EMBER 2021

Philosophy

Only cooperate

Evolutionary origins of social contracts Janna Thompson

The Pleistocene Social Contract: Culture and cooperation in human evolution by Kim Sterelny

Oxford University Press £47.99 hb, 193 pp

rchaeologists can tell us about the tools, diets, shelters, art, and burials of humans and other hominins who lived during the Pleistocene, the geological period lasting from two million to twelve thousand years ago. But what we most want to know is hidden from view. How did they communicate? What was it like to be them? How did they become us? Evolutionary hypotheses about human development raise philosophical questions about human nature, the origin of morality, and the causes that made our complex social world possible. The Australian philosopher and evolutionary theorist Kim Sterelny thinks that answers to these questions require an account of how changes in culture and biology interacted in the course of hominin history. In The Pleistocene Social Contract, he tells a story about hominin development using evolutionary theory, evidence from archaeology, and anthropologists’ accounts of life in hunter–gatherer societies. How did creatures with mental capacities similar to chimpanzees at the beginning of the Pleistocene manage to develop big brains and a complex social life? The answer, Sterelny thinks, was their increasing ability to cooperate. Cooperation can produce great advantages for participants, but it is vulnerable to bullies who try to monopolise benefits and to cheats who try to get them without doing their share. Cooperators must be able to accept and enforce norms of reciprocity. Philosophers justify these norms by arguing that rational individuals ought to agree to a social contract that gives each a fair share of benefits and burdens. Sterelny’s task is to explain from an evolutionary point of view how the norms required by such a contract became possible. The first step, according to his story, was taken by hominid groups that hunted large game with stone weapons. Everyone participated and everyone got a share. Slacking off was not possible, and bullies were discouraged by the fact that their fellows carried axes. The next stage, he thinks, resulted from the invention of projectile weapons that enabled people to hunt in smaller groups. Successful hunters brought back their kill to the group, shared it with those who were not successful, and expected to get a share when others succeeded. Reciprocity of this nature requires trust and acceptance of the norms that make that trust possible. Gossip, Sterelny thinks, played a crucial role. Group members shared information about what others did. A good reputation became important to individual fitness, and community members internalised and enforced the norms governing their exchanges. 50 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW S EP T EM B ER 2021

In the course of this development, according to Sterelny, hominins were becoming language users with mental capabilities not all that dissimilar to modern humans. Hominin social life in the later Pleistocene, he supposes, resembled relationships in forager communities described by anthropologists. By means of contacts between male kin communities were able to cooperate with each other. Community members shared resources more or less equally and violent conflict between groups was infrequent. Sterelny’s next task is to explain how many humans, starting late in the Pleistocene, came to live in unequal, authoritarian societies that made war on each other. He speculates that the change occurred when humans were able to store food, farm, and settle down. Farming went along with private property and inheritance – a recipe for increasing inequality. Violent takeover of the land of others was now rewarding, and negotiations between the ‘Big Men’ of different groups became vital for group survival. These individuals rose to a position of power aided by priests and shamans who found ways of justifying the authority of leaders. Sterelny’s account of the Pleistocene social contract is not meant to condone authoritarianism or inequality. Theorists now reject the idea that evolution justifies a belief in the superiority of modern civilisation. We are free to conclude that the Pleistocene social contract turned out to be a bad deal for most people. Nevertheless, Sterelny’s story reproduces some of the questionable assumptions made by earlier theorists. One problem is his focus on the development of the interpersonal norms that we call ‘morality’. What he leaves out are the norms that arose from an interaction of hominins with their natural environment – what Aboriginal people call ‘law’. These norms seem to be universal in societies described by anthropologists and motivate cooperation within and between groups. An evolutionary story that ignores their development is inadequate. Also largely missing from Sterelny’s account are women. The important changes, according to his story, came from hunting large game, the connections between male kin and the increasing domination of Big Men. Sterelny’s social contract, like that of classical philosophers, is largely men’s business. Perhaps he is right. But it’s also possible that he, like earlier theorists, has not paid sufficient attention to the knowledge and skills more likely to be acquired by women. People in many forager societies know how to make poisonous plants edible through complicated processes. They have learned to make medicines out of plants. These discoveries, probably made by women who used them to raise healthier children, require an ability to distinguish between what appears to the senses and an underlying reality that can only be exploited by following rules. Could these discoveries have been the basis of a belief in the existence of a law governing relations with nature? Could they have led to the developments in brain power that made scientific thought possible? This is merely speculation. We will never know what happened so long ago. But one of the virtues of Kim Sterelny’s approach is that it couples science with storytelling. We cannot experience what it was like to be a Pleistocene hominin, and we will probably never know how our hominin ancestors became modern humans, but we can use what we know to tell plausible stories that bring them closer to us. g Janna Thompson is a professor of philosophy at La Trobe.