Winton's Paw Prints
It’s a funny thing working in a bookshop—you can read and read, but there’s always something new, or ancient, you haven’t got to yet. Like when you run your eyes along some other reader’s bookshelves (as readers always do) and, despite the fact that you rarely have your head out of a book, you haven’t read an eighth of what’s thereon. The list just grows and grows, the pile beside the bed gets ever bigger—and nine lives is not enough! Even eternity, with its forever growing front list, wouldn’t be. Not that I’m complaining—although I do occasionally hope some benign vampire from an Anne Rice novel will bestow the dark gift upon me so I can attempt to keep up. Anyway, I can’t remember what sent me in my current direction—perhaps a reference to Joseph Kanon in a Saturday paper’s review, but, like Sonia Lee, the Gleaner’s resident reading Granny who is on a Tana French bender this month, I am now on a Joseph Kanon binge—starting with his award winning debut novel, Los Alamos. To quote his current editor, Peter Borland: Here’s the thing about Joe’s books. They are all set in roughly the same time period—the years just after the end of World War II—but in different parts of the world: Los Alamos; Washington, DC; Hollywood; Venice; Istanbul; Berlin. Kanon’s novels provide a kaleidoscopic portrait of the West at a precarious historical moment when old alliances are coming apart, the Cold War is getting downright frosty, and moral compromise is the rule of the day. Each of Joe’s books is unique and stands on its own, but when you step back and take them all in together, the enormity of what he has accomplished is revealed: here is the story of the birth of the post-war world happening. As the Trumpster returns to a protectionist posture and reneges on all the promises made in the American ‘we’re the only ones you can trust with the atom’ ascendancy, what better time to look back on the moral questions posed on ‘The Hill’—would the world be different if the US had openly shared the bomb technology with its so-called ally the USSR? Like all good books, Los Alamos just makes ya wonder. I can’t wait to get to The Prodigal Spy, The Good German, Alibi, Stardust, Istanbul Passage and Leaving Berlin. And for those whose shelves already have Kanon in pride of place, the good news is there’s a new one due in June 2017—Defectors—this time it’s Moscow, 1961, a notorious US defector to the USSR is about to publish his memoirs... Winton John: I have just read an intriguing first novel set in Tasmania and Ireland, To the Sea by Christine Dibley. Like Elliot Perlman’s wonderful Seven Types of Ambiguity, Dibley weaves her tale from a number of points of view while exploring the disappearance of 17 year old Zoe from her family’s coastal retreat. Blending police procedural, a family history rich with mythology, a love story, and a family strangely accepting of Zoe’s presumed fate. I picked To the Sea off the shelves and read a few pages expecting something along the lines of Jane Harper’s The Dry, but was surprised by quite a different story, one that kept me interested to the end.
what we're reading
Lynndy: The Birdman’s Wife by Melissa Ashley—Amongst my mementoes from primary school I still have a Gould League of Bird Lovers badge; had I known exactly what gaining his prodigious knowledge entailed, my pride in membership of the organisation might have been shattered. Focussing on Eliza Gould, The Birdman’s Wife describes in intricate detail the entire process of John Gould’s obtaining and studying birds and nature, as well as Eliza’s contributions, especially in illustrating his finds. Historical detail abounds: of London, then Tasmania and NSW in the 1830s, revealing elements of society, art and printing, lithography, science, nature and research. I was fascinated by all this, and struck with admiration for Eliza’s strength of character and the tremendously delicate skill of her oeuvre; none of which was mentioned in those school days. In her fictional account Ashley gives true weight to Eliza’s half of the partnership, illuminating the human costs of triumphs that are often overlooked when considering Gould’s vast legacy to natural history.
Andrew: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders—Abraham Lincoln’s young son is dead and the president’s grief is so raw and debilitating that it is manifesting in ways that may just tear the universe from its hinges. Bardo is an obscure Tibetan word that approximates ‘limbo’ and this novel takes place over the course of a single night in the graveyard where young Willie is still warm in the grave. Or the tomb to be precise. Lincoln in the Bardo is simply stupendous. I haven’t been as enthralled by a novel this much in years. In form it is a bit out-there to say the least; made up of a bricolage of voices (some are authentic historical quotes, but the majority are the voices of the multitude of ghosts that inhabit the graveyard). Don’t be put off, however, if that sounds too difficult or too preposterous. The book is very accessible and wonderfully engaging; with a plot that is propelled just as competently as it would be using a more traditional narrative technique. It is, like its voices, a multitude of things. One moment it dwells on the moral ambivalences of an unpopular president sending thousands of young soldiers to war in a politically motivated, and in many circles, unpopular war (sound familiar?)—the next it ricochets off to a raucous bit of gutter humour. Outrageously funny, and yet tender and moving; macabre one moment, profound the next. In a funny way it reminds me a bit of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, a really charming novel in which the voices of actors (who are putting on an outdoor history pageant) drift and echo around the English countryside. The Woolf is a light-hearted oddity; a bit stuffy, an obtuse, acquired taste, that I adore because it regularly spills over with luminous poetic prose. Lincoln in the Bardo’s pleasures are far more manifest—it is brazen, big-hearted, and big-thinking. Vulgar, poignant, poetic, whatever you like; just read it. It could well be, although it’s only February, my book of the year.
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