The Great Fire - Shirley Hazzard (2003)

 

Rating: Excellent

Shirley Hazzard’s great achievement, The Transit of Venus (1980), is one of my all-time favourite novels and counts as one of the few books I’ve awarded a sublime rating to on this blog. The Great Fire became Hazzard’s last published novel some twenty-three years later and won the Miles Franklin Award. Set in the aftermath of WWII, The Great Fire explores the lives of a handful of protagonists who are finding their way in a world recovering from the catastrophe of war and its impact on them as individuals. Major Aldred Leith, a decorated and injured (but recovered) war veteran with a complicated back-story is in Japan, writing a book on the war’s aftermath, where he is billeted with an Australian family that includes a brother and sister, Benedict and Helen. While Benedict is terminally ill with a wasting disease, Helen shines as his loving sister and becomes connected to Leith by a deep mutual love. Of course, the world Hazzard vividly evokes with her splendid prose is both tragic and nebulous, proving to be an unfavourable environment for such love to blossom. The Great Fire finds its protagonists in a period of abeyance as they try and find their way toward peacetime lives. Leith’s wartime friend, Peter Exley, is investigating Axis war crimes and their lives intertwine for a time before post-war circumstances take them in different directions. Although the novel is essentially a post-war narrative, it is chiefly preoccupied with the characters personal lives, rather than military, political or historical machinations.

Shirley Hazzard, never to be repeated

As with The Transit of Venus, Hazzard’s thematic thrust involves love in the face of everything that can thwart its chances. Leith and Helen’s love is plagued by both tragic and practical barriers, no less Helen’s eventual journey away from Leith to Australia and then New Zealand, the literal end of the earth from Europe. The novel also explores the notion, without spelling it out, that despite the horrors of war and its disfiguring effects on the human soul, humanity can still display the redeeming characteristics of civilisation: literature, art, empathy, intelligence and most of all, love. Hazzard’s prose is exquisitely beautiful and mannered, bordering on the pretentious, featuring occasional grammatical rule bending, with capital letters in the wrong places and sudden jumps in setting. More accurately, Hazzard’s prose style comes across as an analogue of William Morris’s gorgeous textile designs from the nineteenth century; ornate and intricate, with splendid flourishes of colour.  Although I didn’t quite enjoy The Great Fire as much as The Transit of Venus, it is a wonderful jewel-like novel that requires concentration and care to fully absorb. They literally don’t write novels like this anymore; Hazzard, already ten years gone, can be remembered as a great Australian writer from another age, never to be repeated.

William Morris provides a visual representation 

Caledonian Road - Andrew O'Hagan (2024)

 

Rating: Sublime

Caledonian Road is the product of a decade’s worth of work by Scottish author Andrew O’Hagan. It was definitely worth the effort on his part, the novel is a brilliant display of modern realism with complex themes and an array of engaging characters. The novel is, essentially, an embodiment of our times as seen through the prism of London and its strata of society, from the aristocracy, Russian oligarchs, academics, politicians, journalists, actors, scenesters, gang members, people smugglers and Dickensian crones (well, one Dickensian crone). Containing over sixty characters, the novel centres around art historian and cultural theorist, Campbell Flynn. Flynn has emerged from working class circumstances (his parents steal the silverware when on holiday) to become a feted cultural commentator, a scion of the aristocracy via marriage and the author of a new book that he hopes will make him a great deal of money – Why Men Weep in Their Cars. I laughed out loud at this book title, a brilliant stroke of satire, in such a manner that people on the train looked up from their phones in a startled fashion. Such delightful displays of satire are featured throughout Caledonian Road; not only is the novel a very serious examination of our dysfunctional times, but it is also very funny indeed, featuring humour so dry that drought-stricken Europe comes to mind. Just as well because there’s no getting away from the heavy thematic thrust: the tragedy of generational inequality, the narcissistic entitlement of the younger generations, the misogyny of the older generations facing up to our era of cancel culture and the exploitation of illegal immigrants.

O'Hagan and his insightful literary gaze

O’Hagan delivers Caledonian Road’s dark thematic undertow with such verve and aplomb that any misgivings regarding its size (over 600 pages) and narrative density fades away. The novel features some brilliantly insightful and erudite writing, and it is a total pleasure to be immersed in such a rich and fully realised world. Another strength is how O’Hagan brings to life even the most minor characters, such as the lorry drivers who move the illegal immigrants, giving them a life story with hopes and dreams. Of course, the major players are all brilliantly rendered, in particular Anthony, Duke of Kendal, nickname ‘Snaffles’, who crops up everywhere; with one particular interaction with Flynn being a highlight – “He emitted ghastly opinions from a mouth filled with distressed teeth. Seeing his face and the crimson faces of all his friends, as well as the pinkly depraved ancestors looking from his pictures, made you want to set fire to it all and go home.” Flynn has his own journey to endure, one that only becomes fully evident right at the novel’s startling dénouement. Of all the novel's characters, Flynn represents the hollow man at the heart of our times, undone by his outward gaze that keeps him from any having significant self awareness. Caledonian Road is a deeply cultural, political, sociological and psychological narrative that brilliantly encapsulates our times and will no doubt go down as one of the great novels of this particular decade. Thoroughly recommended for those who love their literary fiction to be a rich tapestry of insight, ideas and detail.

2666 - Roberto Bolano (2004) Parts 1-3

Rating: Excellent

The late Roberto Bolano was a unique writer, who produced compelling narratives that were often experimental, particularly in terms of form and featured complex thematic threads with meanings that hovered like literary mirages over wrecked narrative landscapes. Bolano's themes usually concerned the nature of art, writing, poetry, writers, politics, morality, fascism and nitty gritty of life and death, often set in an immoral or amoral landscape of human folly. 2666, his last work, completed as a first draft before his death in 2003 from liver failure, was meant to be published as five separate novels, mainly because Bolano believed that it would benefit his family financially, but after his death the managers of his estate decided that the novel would be published as a whole, with the proposed novels presented as parts. My edition complicates the matter, being a special edition presented in a slipcase and divided into three volumes. Due to the sheer size of the work, well over a thousand pages, I decided to read and review the first volume (which contains the first three parts/novels) and then read the other two volumes later. Also 2666 is challenging conceptually, with dark undercurrents of violence, mental illness, existential bleakness and death, written in a style that blends beautiful poetic turns of phase with realism that borders on straight ahead reportage. Stylistically, Bolano was one of those writers of which you can say his prose was very much an extension of himself and when you read him you become fully immersed in his world; indeed, my experience reading 2666 was one of total immersion.

The special slipcase edition

The Part About the Critics

The first part of 2666 is the longest featured in the first volume and perhaps the most fully realised. Here the mysterious German writer, Benno von Archimboldi is introduced, a cult writer who has managed to build an ever increasing readership, including four Europeans who become critical and academic experts of his oeuvre, Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, Liz Norton and Pierio Morini. This part is precise, yet sedately paced as we are immersed in the lives of the four critics, their friendship, their work, petty jealousies and love-life. All four characters are well fleshed out and there's some beautiful writing here, in particular some evocative passages of description and mood setting. The four critics meet Archimboldi's publisher and then a Mexican who tells them that he knows someone who encountered the writer in Mexico. They decide to pilgrimage to the border-city, Santa Teresa, in the hope of meeting the elusive writer. Important elements (in terms of being keys to understanding the overall meaning of 2666, from my perspective in any case; having read about the novel and Bolano in general, no one, it seems, really knows for sure...) in The Part About the Critics are the cult artist, Edwin Johns, a disturbed individual admired by the critics; a violent incident involving the critics and an Arab taxi driver and then their experiences in Mexico, which are ultimately futile and imbued with disturbing background elements. In the first part, as with the others, what is not said and not shown is perhaps more important than what is; also the mundane and the extraordinary is, essentially, treated in the same way.

A youthful Bolano

The Part About Amalfitano

The critics meet fellow academic Oscar Amalfitano in the first part and he his seen through their eyes, so all we know about him is from when they interact with him, or he appears within their circle; one of the critics thinks that he is having some kind of a breakdown. In the second part Amalfitano becomes the main protagonist and we learn about his life in Spain, prior to taking up his teaching position in Santa Teresa. He's an intriguing character with a tragic background - his wife, Lola, having left him and their daughter, Rosa, to search for an insane homosexual poet whom Lola and another woman admire to the point of blind worship (one of the main thematic thrusts of the novel is, I believe, the notion that art and artists of all sorts should not be set apart from humanity as exemplars of virtue, reason and morality, nor do they have the answers to life's great mysteries; Bolano himself was very cynical about the latin American literary scene and could be a harsh critic of literary pretence). Amalfitano appears damaged by his life experience, he finds life in Mexico difficult and worries that his now teenage daughter may become another victim of the hundreds of femicides occurring thought the city. The key aspects of The Part About Amalfitano are the mysterious book Amalfitano finds in his belongings, Rafael Dieste's Testamento Geometrica (1975), which he decides to hang from his clothes line (therefore recontextualising it in a manner reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp, perhaps as a fulcrum for the geography of the horror, male dysfunction and murders occurring in the city), the moral depravity and insanity of the poet and the emerging awareness of the femicides, which Bolano based on Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican city in which five hundred women were murdered during the 1990s and 2000s. 

An older Bolano, contemplating 2666

The Part About Fate

This part follows black American journalist, Oscar Fate, and his assignment in Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match after the violent death of the newspaper's sports journalist and the tragic death of Fate's mother. Death stalks this part much more obviously than in the first two parts. At this stage the novel reads like a descent into the dark, violent environs of both the human psyche and Santa Teresa itself (one and the same?). Fate comes across as a mostly passive observer, trying to navigate a world that is, at the very least, against him just for being black. Fate is an outsider in his own society, coming into a foreign city of horrors, which emphasises his outsider nature even more. Fate makes some Mexican acquaintances, such as fellow journalist, Chucho Flores and Guadalupe, a female journalist who is terrified of the prospect of being sent on assignment to a prison to interview a chief suspect of the femicides. As this part progresses it becomes darker and darker, with Flores becoming mercurial, menacing and with an array of suspicious characters being added into the mix. The Part About the Critics and The Part About Amalfitano intersect when Flores introduces Fate to Rosa, Amalfitano's daughter, whom is sexually involved with him. By this stage it occurred to me that the characters and the plot was heavily influenced by David Lynch; something that was confirmed later when Fate finds himself in the strange house of eccentric film buff, Charly Cruz, watching bizarre cult movies while discussing the oeuvre of David Lynch. The end of this part takes on an intense forward momentum, a creeping dread prevails, filled with tension; of particular note is the reappearance of Amalfitano and a visit to prison for an impactful scene involving the femicides main suspect, who, if you are paying attention, seems very familiar indeed (or typically, not at all). 2666 and Bolano's writing certainly makes for a challenging and disturbing ride, but for readers who enjoy a conceptual and philosophical challenge, 2666 is a brilliant literary achievement, particularly considering that Bolano was severely ill during its writing and it is a first draft. Amazing. 

The Children's Bach - Helen Garner (1984)

 

Rating: Excellent

This is my second read of Helen Garner’s novella, The Children’s Bach, the first time was as part of the Modern Australian Literature unit I completed at university in the mid-nineties. I enjoyed it greatly at the time and on my second read I’ve enjoyed it even more. When I first read it, I was actually, in hindsight, a novice reader when it came to Australian literary fiction, and literary fiction in general. It opened my eyes to the possibilities of a certain kind of literary storytelling, serious, yet playful, told simply, but with mysterious literary mechanisms lurking underneath it all. I was intrigued and impressed by the tale of the Fox family, the married couple Athena and Dexter and their sons, Arthur and Billy, who are living out their lives in Melbourne’s inner suburbs. The novella stayed with me for decades, often coming to mind when I visited Melbourne. The Fox family’s lives are altered by the appearance of Elizabeth, an old university friend of Dexter’s and her much younger sister, Vicki. Both end up being drawn to the Fox’s house, an old run-down weatherboard (my internal image of the house anyway), with cramped rooms and a large, dishevelled back yard. This then brings the cock-sure rock musician, Philip, who is loosely involved with Elizabeth, into their lives, who provides just the louche distraction Athena needs to break free of the restrictions of domestic life.

Helen Garner, in the inner suburbs

Set in the early eighties, The Children’s Bach is culturally fascinating, both in terms of Garner’s portrayal of inner-city Australia and her singular writing style. Garner presents as an Australian writer developing her own literary landscape, particularly when taking into consideration her breakout debut Monkey Grip (1977), which mined a similar, but darker urban milieu. Garner’s style is impressionistic, with characters appearing abruptly and scenes flowing into each other. The novel will perhaps not make sense to readers expecting a linear notion of time and setting (something this critic had a great deal of trouble with, so much so it made me think that he has a limited understanding of narrative), however it’s not that radical, rather it comes across as a more modest and pared back emulation of Patrick White’s high modernistic stylings. The novel is thematically rich, exploring family values vs. the nonconformity of counterculture lifestyles, sexuality and the yearning disaffection of middle-age, mostly played out through Athena’s lust for what lays outside of her established life with the loving, yet overbearing Dexter and their disabled son Billy (who presents as autistic). Of course, music runs all through the novella, with Athena’s attempts at learning to play Bach on a rickety piano a metaphor for attempting to master living one’s life in the face of a complex world. The Children’s Bach is a beautiful, rewarding reading experience and underlines that Helen Garner is rightly celebrated as a talented and important Australian writer who appears as both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time, somewhat like the characters she created for The Children’s Bach.

This is Where the Serpent Lives - Daniyal Mueenuddin (2026)

 

Rating: Excellent

Daniyal Mueenuddin is a US born Pakistani author who has managed to produce a brilliant and seriously literary debut novel in This is Where the Serpent Lives. In part based on his own experiences, having moved back to Pakistan from the US to take over the family farm and as an individual who straddles both east and west; This is Where the Serpent Lives encompasses sixty years of Pakistani history (1955-2013) from the point of view of both the wealthy land-owning classes and the servant classes. Told via four interlinking sections, the novel begins in 1955 with ‘The Golden Child’ when the owner of a tea stall, Karim Khan, takes in orphan, Bayazid (mostly known as Yazid). Yazid goes on to be the significant and sympathetic character who provides a link throughout the novel's different sections. Yazid, humble and observant, goes from being a tea stall holder to chief driver for the Atar family, principally Hisham Atar and Shahnaz Atar, important characters who feature in the third and fourth sections. Although only some 343 pages long This is Where the Serpent Lives reads like a Russian epic, both stylistically and thematically. Critics have compared Mueenuddin to Chekhov, particularly due to the author’s vivid realism, unclear narrative resolutions and the complex relations between landowners and servants in feudal rural Pakistan. Simply put, This is Where the Serpent Lives is an extraordinary novel, full of complex characters and fascinating historical and cultural detail; one could say that it’s lapidary in its attention to detail. 

Spanning decades of Pakistani history during the post-war period when modernisation and Westernisation was making inroads into societies that had long entrenched social hierarchies, Mueenuddin creates a complex dramatisation of societal tensions, ambition, decadence and thwarted social mobility. Once we've been introduced to Yazid and his world, the second section, ‘Muscle’, acts as a scene-setting exploration of class, hierarchy, and engrained corruption via the young sophisticate, Rustom, a character who is thrown into the deep end when he returns from America to take over the family farm (the author has acknowledged the autobiographical nature of this section). This section introduces the Atars, who, along with their young servant, Saqib, then dominates the third and fourth sections, ‘The Clean Release and ‘This is Where the Serpent Lives’, which, as one would imagine, has well developed, but not cliched black and white biblical themes. When the attentive reader takes in the complex interrelationship between the wealthy and amoral Atars and the humble, but underhand Saqib, it is not clear just who is the serpent in question, although this is part of the point. Having never read any works by Pakistani authors, nor read any novels set in Pakistan, This is Where the Serpent Lives was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, especially Mueenuddin’s beautiful and precise prose, which at times was just exquisite in its jewel like clarity. As the novel comes symbolically full circle in its dénouement, one can only admire the novel’s brilliance and hope that Mueenuddin, already in his early sixties, can produce more novels of such a high standard. The book club attendees loved This is Where the Serpent Lives, awarding it high scores; I very nearly gave it a sublime rating, but it’s somewhere between excellent and sublime and would get four and a half if I used a numerical system.

 

The Ganymede Takeover - Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson (1967)

 

Rating: Excellent

Some part of me that desired, no, actually needed a shot of paranoid weirdness that only Philip K. Dick can provide. This happens at least a couple of times a year. Fortunately, Dick was prolific, so there are still plenty of his novels I’m yet to read, despite being an avowed ‘Dickhead’ for decades. The Ganymede Takeover is one of the few novels that Dick collaborated on with another writer, in this case Ray Nelson, who was an interesting character in his own right, as an author, cartoonist and the inventor of the propeller beanie hat that went on to become emblematic of science fiction geekdom. Nelson and Dick were friends from childhood and it was after Nelson gave Dick his first LSD trip (I read somewhere that Dick didn’t have a particularly good time, no surprise there...) they decided to collaborate and apparently Dick rounded up some in-progress story fragments and they came up with The Ganymede Takeover. Set on a future Earth that has been invaded by reptilian worm creatures from, you guessed it, Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede. The Ganymedian invaders are also aided by a ‘Creech’ slave race of ugly bipedal monsters. There’s only one area (a ‘bale’) left on Earth in Tennessee that resists the worms from Ganymede, where a ‘Neeg’ leader called Percy X leads a small army of black Americans. There’s also another rebel group called the ‘World Psychiatric Association' (of course) who end up collaborating with Percy X. This premise is merely the framework for hanging all of the typical Dickian tropes from, such as flying cars (ionocraft), telepaths (Percy X and Mekkis, one of the Ganymedian's), vidphones, androids, liberal drug taking and, of course, half deranged doctors who design weird brain warping machinery; everything you’d want from a Philip K. Dick novel basically.

P. K. Dick, staring down Ray Nelson

The Ganymede Takeover can be placed among Dick’s lesser novels; however it is a much better effort than many of his pulpy novels, which typically were knocked off under the influence of legal amphetamines to keep the money, and the amphetamines, coming in. It could very well have been the collaboration with Nelson that created a narrative that is more polished than the usual knock-off effort by Dick. It’s still a wild, schlocky ride though, particularly about halfway through, when an epic battle begins between the Neegs and the Creech led Ganymedian army, involving a herd of gigantic African Aardvarks with “...evil, glittering eyes...” and "...tongues that lick ionocraft out of the sky...", causing the greedy and slovenly character of Gus Swenesgard (a typical Dick character, well and truly trapped within the maw of his flaws) to exclaim “Oh my god, not Aardvarks!!” It becomes unbelievably wilder from that point on, with a totally crazy battle involving all kinds of bizarre creatures that emerge straight from the fevered minds of Percy X and his assistant, who are using a machine stolen from the mentally unstable Doctor Balkani that can create very real shared hallucinations. The plot becomes a bit convoluted from that point on, but it is entertaining non-the-less and it was a totally enjoyable 157 pages of Dick freakiness. The Ganymede Takeover is not the place to start for Philip K. Dick initiates, but for established Dickheads it's lots of freaky fun of the kind you’d expect and, of course, need in your life.

The Year Everything Changed: 2001 - Phillipa McGuiness (2018)

 

Rating: Admirable

I bought The Year Everything Changed: 2001 believing that I knew what would be its main focus, but when I finally got around to reading it, it turned out to be quite different to my initial impression; mostly because the text provides quite a personal examination of the year 2001, which is totally fair enough. Phillipa McGuiness lost a baby that year, a tragedy that can’t help but be the lens through which she views the significant events of that year. Like her personal tragedy, that year’s major events are still playing out as we speak. After a fine introduction McGuinness divides the year into months and then advances systematically. There’s quite a bit of Australian content, which makes a change, but also makes sense, as McGuinness is an Australian publisher and author. There’s an examination of the muted celebrations of Australia’s Centenary of Federation, which, of all the events that occurred that year, I’d completely forgotten about. After reading about the unsuccessful attempts at whipping up some public enthusiasm, I’m not surprised. More significantly there are thorough examinations of the Howard government’s weaponisation of the Tampa Affair (‘children overboard’) as a means to demonise asylum seekers and immigrants in general into an election winning ploy that the Coalition used to their advantage for decades. There’s also the dot-com bubble and the emergence of early tech-bro dominance in the form of Google (founded in 1998, but really got going by 2001) and Apple, having launched the iPod in that year. McGuinness also muses over John Howard’s obsession with Don Bradman and the emergent revelations of widespread sexual abuse by Catholic priests. It's all pretty serious, but interesting, stuff.

The one event that overshadows everything else that happened in 2001 is, of course, the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It’s one of those events where everyone alive at the time can remember where they were and what they were doing. 9/11 is the THE major event of 2001 that echoes through the subsequent decades. McGuinness handles it well, her style sitting somewhere between formal and informal, mingling the personal with the factual and getting into the raw exposed nerves of the tragedy. In Australia, due to the events of 9/11, John Howard invoked the ANZUS treaty and went all in with the Bush administration’s determined efforts to root out the perpetrators in Afghanistan. One of the main impressions I went away with after reading The Year Everything Changed: 2001 is a strong reminder of just how reprehensible the Howard government was. The moral and ideological failings of the Howard era have been subsumed by the successive horrors of the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison Coalition governments and the relative failings of the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments. The Year Everything Changed: 2001 provides a timely reminder that John Howard’s conservative neoliberal ideology helped create many of the problems that plague Australia now. Despite sometimes finding The Year Everything Changed: 2001 a bit dry, I did enjoy reading it and it can be seen as a successful attempt at examining that pivotal year from a unique perspective.