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. 

Falling Man - Don DeLillo (2017)

 

Rating: Admirable

The attack by terrorists on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 was a momentous event in the history of the clash between civilisations. Like most people I was shaken to the core by the scenes of the attacks. I was called by a friend and was told to turn on the TV, just in time to witness the plane hit the second tower and then both towers eventually collapsing. It was incredible, disturbing and historically momentous. Then later I remember reading about the photo of the falling man, an image initially used in the media, but then suppressed due to various moral concerns. Seeing the image is certainly powerful and it makes sense that America's pre-eminent novelist would both write about 9/11 and use that image as an inspiration for its title (although apparently he refutes that notion). Being DeLillo nothing is that simple, of course, with the image being used as a metaphor for the life trajectory of Keith Neudecker, both before and after the event. Another very typical DeLillo trope is the performance artist who falls from buildings dressed in a suit, with just a simple harness for support. This falling man appears at various times during the novel, including a scene in which Keith's wife, Lianne, observes him setting up and waiting to 'perform' for an oncoming train of passengers, a scene imbued with gnostic symbolism open to interpretation. Falling Man is mostly set in the aftermath of 9/11, and the performing falling man acts as a ghostly reverberation of that day, a day that completely changed everything for New Yorkers. Keith goes back to his estranged wife, having survived the attack in the south tower, their son spends the days with other children looking for more planes with binoculars, talking in hushed tones about Bill Lawton, the misheard name they give Bin Laden. Typically for DeLillo this comes across as both a dark, ironic joke, but also imbued with nebulous meaning.

The infamous falling man photo

Falling Man has been criticised for not being as monumental as the 9/11 event itself, however DeLillo had already produced 'monumental' work about America and its citizens, such as Mao II (1991), Underworld (1997) and White Noise (1985), which reads like a guide to postmodernism filtered though the American sensibility. Falling Man's focus is more about the human psychological response to the terrorist attacks, both overt and subtle, in particular during the aftermath. Like the slowly fading circular waves in water after a stone is dropped, DeLillo shows how the characters go on living after the shocking event, eventually being reabsorbed into themselves and their quite ordinary and unimportant lives that were revealed, for a while, in stark relief. There are also sections focussing on one of the terrorists, his drift towards jihad; and then at the very end, a depiction of the attack itself, which is as visceral as the novel gets. As usual DeLillo's prose is minimal and exacting, with dialogue that makes the characters seem like they are revealing insights into the very nature of humanity, our very essence; or, conversely, about nothing at all, merely the minutia of human obsessions in the twenty-first century. Although, as DeLillo novels go, Falling Man is fairly satisfying, there's some extra level of DeLillo frisson that is absent. It's certainly not up there with his best novels, but it is, after all, a DeLillo novel, and therefore worth reading for that reason alone.