Category Archives: Everything

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The Shadows of Suburbia are Long

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THE LIVES OF WOMEN
Christine Dwyer Hickey
Allen and Unwin/Atlantic Books, RRP $27.99
May 2015

the lives of womenSome books have language that submerges the reader into their world from the first sentence. The Lives of Women by Christine Dwyer Hickey was one such book for me. One moment I was cracking open the cover for the first time wondering what was to come, the next I was ensnared in the world of our narrator Elaine.

As an adult Elaine has returned to care for her invalid father in her childhood home, a place where her teenage life remains a ghostly overlay. The landscape of family and the family home are clearly spaces which Elaine has been detached from—both emotionally and physically—for many years and it is time to unravel the cause of this detachment. The adult Elaine’s narrative is interspersed with snippets of her younger life as a teenager coming of age in a suburban estate during the 1970s and her life as an adult in New York and Paris. The different threads of Elaine’s life slowly reveal the tragedy which occurred during her last summer living with her parents. Continue reading

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Today Will Always Be Tomorrow

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THE WATCHMAKER OF FILIGREE STREET Book Cover THE WATCHMAKER OF FILIGREE STREET
Natasha Pulley
Bloomsbury Circus, RRP$29.99
July 2015

For those of you who were hurtling toward adulthood in the mid-90s listening to Blur’s The Great Escape over and over again, you may recall the quiet melancholy tune sandwiched between the poppier sounds of ‘It Could Be You’ and ‘Globe Alone’. It went a little something like this:

“Ernold Same awoke from the same dream in the same bed at the same time
Looked in the same mirror made the same frown
And felt the same way as he did every day
Then Ernold Same caught the same train at the same station
Sat in the same seat with the same nasty stain next to same old what’s his name
On his way to the same place to do the same thing again and again and again
Poor old Ernold Same”

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You Won’t Have to Follow Me

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The Origins of Political Order
Francis Fukuyama
Politics
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2011

the_origins_of_political_orderWhen contemplating books on politics to read which I knew I would disagree with, international studies heavyweight Francis Fukuyama was someone I considered but briefly.  Somewhere along the way I’d received the impression that Fukuyama had softened in his views and become somewhat more leftist later in life.  Having read the first of this recently completed mammoth duology, I’m left wondering if perhaps the centre has just gravitated right and left him behind.

The Origins of Political Order is an ambitious attempt at understanding how and why human societies have developed such diverse political structures.  The question Fukuyama seeks to answer over all is, why do some societies form state-bound structures, particularly democratic ones, and why do others remain tribal?  It’s a question that many historians, philosophers and various other theorists have attempted to tackle in the past and there is a proliferation of theory on the matter; Fukuyama’s take combines a number of those approaches with his own views.

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Northern Soul

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ANNA OF THE FIVE TOWNS
Arnold Bennet
Penguin. First published 1902

anna_of_the_five_towns_london

Anna of the Five Towns is the first of Arnold Bennet’s five novel series set in the Staffordshire potteries. It has the authentic ring of someone who really knows the town and its people, and this is true for Bennet who was writing about his own beginnings and the people he grew up with. What a wonderful gift for a writer, to grow up amid such writing fodder.

The titular heroine, Anna Tellwright, is the cowed daughter of Ephraim Tellwright, a miser and small-time tyrant. There is a beauty and inner goodness to Anna which puts her at odds with the hypocrisy and shallowness of the God-fearing folk of ‘the five towns’—a string of pottery-producing towns along a winding river.

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The Apple Tart of Teenage Angst

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THE APPLE TART OF HOPE
Sarah Moore
Hachette/Orion Children's, RRP $15.95
Apr 2015

the_apple_tart_of_hopeAlthough I am not a teenager anymore, I was drawn to The Apple Tart of Hope by my love of fantasy and the promise of magic its title evoked.

The Apple Tart of Hope was slow to begin and hit its straps, but ultimately delivered the slice of magic I yearned for. Although it is not magic in the fantasy sense, the ‘magic’ is in the resolution of the twists and turns, which happen in the relationship between the star-crossed central characters of Meg and Oscar. Meg returns from New Zealand to discover her best friend, Oscar, maker of the eponymous apple tart, is missing, presumed dead. She holds on to hope, refusing to accept her friend’s apparent demise, and goes in search of answers. Through her inquiries Meg discovers that a new girl in town, Paloma (who has been rocking the boat it turns out) holds a clue to Oscar’s disappearance.

The plot is driven by the misunderstandings that arise from teenage timidity, awkwardness, jealousy and vindictiveness that can lead to serious consequences. The universal themes of unrequited love, grief, loss, separation, bullying and suicide are magnified by the lens of teenage angst. Whilst such experiences can stay with us for a lifetime the intensity of the teenage years brings them into sharp relief.

The beautifully woven story engrossed me and left me wanting to see how the increasingly knotted state of affairs was going to be resolved. My indignation at a cruel and vindictive teenage act and my wishing that it be righted spurred me to read on. And I’m very glad I did, to ultimately find those wonderful moments of magic and joy in the world of teenage angst.

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Broken toe

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BROKEN TOE
mrblo

Nature breaks even on the feet. The real money comes from the replacement toes.

Who hasn’t sauntered barefoot past a chair and bent his or her little toe sideways against its leg? Dividing my age by the number of breaks, I discover that I’ve broken one toe, on average, every eight years of my life. By the time I get to forty, it’ll have proved cheaper to replace the whole foot.

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Being Cruel to be Kind

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THE KINDNESS
Polly Samson
Bloomsbury Circles, RRP $29.99
May 2015

the_kindness_4Last year I wandered to the cinema with my housemate, and regular movie viewing buddy, to watch the film adaption of the latest book sensation Gone Girl. I was breaking my own rules of not reading before watching but I didn’t think it would matter so much as, one: rules were made to be broken, and two: I don’t read much in the crime or thriller genre anymore. Or so I said then.

The movie of Gone Girl was actually really absorbing (colour me surprised) and it got me thinking about dipping my toe back into what I label ‘twisty’ fiction. Though not technically crime or thriller, The Kindness by Polly Samson fits into the purview of the Edie-created genre of ‘twisty’ fiction and so down the rabbit hole I went emerging a very happy reader. Continue reading

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Flempybungling and Doodlesnatching

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FLANIMALS Book Cover FLANIMALS
Ricky Gervais, illustrated by Rob Steen
First published 2004

A short while ago I threw three and a half years worth of university notes into recycling. This may not seem like a big deal to most people but know this—those little ribbons sewn onto the inside of tops to hang them up with; I cut those off and keep them… just in case. That’s right. I’m a just-in-caser. I might use them one day, you don’t know.

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The Walking Men of Melbourne

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I grew up in Melbourne’s inner west in the 1990s, back when it was still a hotbed of heroin addiction and burglaries.  Before it was cool.  I’ve gotten a bit defensive about this since the area started becoming über trendy, because once upon a time no one knew where Yarraville was and I always had to define it by its proximity to Footscray.

“Oh,” people would say.  “Oh.”

Now it’s all, “Yarraville’s so lovely!  That must have been so great!”  And I have to remind them that back in those days, Yarraville was basically the same thing as the rest of the west.  Think Sunshine, think Braybrook.  Explaining it all to people from the other side of the river, who just don’t understand, is the burden I bear for existing in an area before it started gentrifying.

But this isn’t a piece about the east/west divide or the development of my class consciousness, or even about that time in my creative writing class (at the University of Melbourne, for added context) our tutor asked, “Raise your hand if you’re from the eastern suburbs”, and I was the only person who didn’t.  No, this piece is about a unifying oddity I have noticed in the various locales around Melbourne, not one specific to the west.  From what I can tell, anyway.  I lived in Heidelberg for a total of 6 months and found it weird.  There were too many white people*, it was too far from the city, and it was just weird, okay? You can take a girl out of the west …

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Social Justice with Vegetables

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GREEN VALENTINE
Lili Wilkinson
Allen & Unwin, RRP $16.99
August 2015

GreenValentine_sm

Green Valentine is a beam of sunshine through the dark cloud of cynicism. Let’s face it; fiction these days, and in particular young adult fiction, can be pretty bleak. There’s The Hunger Games, where a totalitarian region maintains order through fear by forcing children to slaughter each other. The Harry Potter series, known for its quirky humour, also straddles dark territory with beloved characters dying during the terror of war. These are poignant stories which allow the reader to ride waves of emotion; fear, anger, sadness; and feel just that little bit more alive, to exist wholly in the moment. But when the worlds we read are always dark they can shape our perception until, perhaps, we then see only darkness in our own world.

So in the landscape of distrust that real life is becoming, perhaps we owe it to ourselves to find stories that celebrate the joy and excitement of life, to surround ourselves by inspiration rather than despair. Which brings us back to Green Valentine. Lili Wilkinson has written an unapologetically optimistic story of finding love, learning acceptance and changing the world, one strawberry at a time, and it’s like a warm shower after a week’s worth of camping in the rain. It could possibly even be the sweetest story ever written. Continue reading

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Differential Psychology of Character

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One of the hardest things to do when writing fiction is to get your head into the space of someone who thinks completely differently to you. It is all too easy to characterise another person’s way of thinking with splashes of parody, misunderstanding or cartoonish mockery. To this end, I think an interesting experiment is to have a look at some of the categories that psychologists use to define people’s outlooks on life, and mix and match a few of them to try and give you a genuinely different psychological perspective from your own. This will tend to not be easily done: even writers who are able to master distinctive dialogue and voice tend to fall prey to giving all their characters the same perspective on time, or the same ideas about pleasure. Without reflecting hard on your own perspective of time, it may be difficult to realise you even have such a thing, and that it may define how you see the world.

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      GRASS FOR HIS PILLOW Lian Hearn (Hodder, 2003) ISBN: 0 7336 1563 5 Taking up directly after the events of Across the Nightingale Floor, Grass for his Pillow finds Kaede in a state of hypnotic sleep and Takeo working for the ninja-like Tribe which has claimed him for their own.  … Continue reading