Book critics Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp cast their eyes over recent fiction and non-fiction releases. Here are their reviews.
Fiction pick of the week
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The Colony
Audrey Magee,Faber,$29.99
Audrey Magee’s latest novel is set on a tiny island off Ireland’s west coast where the dwindling local population still speaks Irish as their first language.
Two outsiders arrive one summer in 1979. Mr Lloyd is a London artist whose marriage and career are in a rut;he has rented a cottage to paint the rugged coastal landscape. Jean-Pierre Masson is a French linguist,a defender of endangered languages,who has devoted successive summers to recording spoken Irish there. James,one of the island’s few teenagers,becomes a go-between when the two men take an instant dislike to one another,and as his artistic talent becomes clear,the terrorist violence of the Troubles rears its head.
The Colonyis a luminous neo-colonial parable,though its light is blanched and wan and draws bleak relief from the weight of Irish literary tradition.
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Careering
Daisy Buchanan,Sphere,$32.99
The double meaning in the title of Daisy Buchanan’s second book encapsulates it in a word.Careering is about spiralling out of control,but also partakes of the millennial trend for performative verbification:it covers “careering” in the same sense as “adulting”.
Buchanan has written a sharp-eyed satire on toxic work culture in journalism and publishing. Two women,Harri and Imogen,are exploited by the industry they love. Harri has slaved away atPanache magazine,sacrificing her happiness in pursuit of ambition,only to be sidelined when the top editing job comes up. Sex blogger Imogen has always had to hustle to survive as a writer among the precariat,and when Harri offers her a secure gig,it seems like a lifeline.
But dream jobs don’t exist,and the novel’s savage,black comic critique of contemporary workplace culture would make anyone look twice at the anti-work movement.
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The Teeth of a Slow Machine
Andrew Roff,Wakefield,$29.95
South Australian writer Andrew Roff debuts with a suite of speculative short stories that blends formal invention and dark humour,often using bizarre gambits to capture the absurdity and melancholy of the way we live now.
It’s a rangy collection featuring everything from capitalist satire to more intimate experimental stuff. Clandestine operatives of a KFC-like fast-food company plot vengeance on any who would dare steal the corporation’s secret recipe. An archaeologist paid by a mining company to work against Indigenous cultural interests is visited by a strange disorder that makes her faint and commit extraordinary acts of kindness. Other stories offer the keys to love through puzzle-like narrative structure or computer code.
Roff writes with precision,and this volume possesses an imaginative scope that consistently defies category,upends expectation and rebels against any sort of formula or received idea for what Australian fiction should look like.
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Run and Hide
Pankaj Mishra,Hutchinson Heinemann,$32.99
Class tensions and the rising tide of illiberalism in contemporary India are laid bare in Pankaj Mishra’sRun and Hide.
Translator Arun and his friends come from poor backgrounds – one is a Dalit,an “untouchable”,who becomes a Wall Street billionaire,another has reinvented himself as a novelist and pundit who speaks to the petit-bourgeois aspirations of India’s sizeable middle class. But Arun himself resists the pursuit of wealth and,while he proves a stark observer of the rise of nationalist sentiment that swept Modi into power,of the corruption and arrogance of India’s elites,his perspective can also be annoyingly schematic and lacking in nuance.
Mishra imbues him with a single-minded social imagination,less apt for fiction than one capable of delving deeply into complexities of human experience,and the novel is hamstrung by it.
Non-fiction pick of the week
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The Jane Austen Remedy
Ruth Wilson,Allen&Unwin,$32.99
While Ruth Wilson would never make such a claim for herself,she emerges from this discreet,wry memoir as quietly defiant as any heroine from the Jane Austen novels she so admires.
A passionate reader who had absorbed Austen’s ideas about companionable partnerships,she was shocked to feel like “a second-class citizen in the republic of marriage”. She had expected to be the author of her own life,but it was the 1950s and her husband had the final word. In her seventies,she finally began to grapple with the malaise that had slowly overtaken her,retreating to a cottage in the country where she revisited Austen’s oeuvre.
With her favourite author as her guide,she found a way to live on her own terms. All lovers of literature will relish Wilson’s skilful study of how the books we love become woven into the fabric of our lives,evolving with us as we age and helping us to keep growing up.
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How to Lose Friends and Influence White People
Antoinette Lattouf,Vintage,$34.99
“You’re not here to make friends,or keep the ones you have,” a powerful male media figure told Antoinette Lattouf,journalist and outspoken co-founder of Media Diversity Australia. Were these words of encouragement,warning or both?
Living with these mixed messages is part of life for Lattouf,who knows too well the consequences of speaking truth to power about racism. Giving an ironic twist to the self-help classicHow to Win Friends and Influence People,she offers savvy and hard-earned advice on how all of us can play a part in challenging and dismantling the systems and assumptions scaffolding white privilege.
Real change starts,she argues,with self-education,especially on the part of whites,and with the understanding that it “won’t always be easy or comfortable”. A valuable roadmap for venturing beyond our comfort zones,as individuals and as a society.
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Rebel
Rahaf Mohammed,Macmillan,$34.99
The day before she fled her oppressively strict life in Saudi Arabia,18-year-old Rahaf Mohammed saw the ocean for the first time. As she sweltered under the tent of her head-to-foot robe,her brothers cavorted in the waves. She swore to herself that when she got to Australia,she would buy herself a bikini and immerse herself in this “natural splendour”.
The story of her escape to Bangkok became news around the world when Saudi authorities tried to force her to go back. Australian journalist Sophie McNeill played a crucial role in getting the support of the United Nations for Mohammed’s claim for asylum. Sadly,the Australian government’s slow response to her visa application put her in too much danger and she took up a Canadian offer for asylum there.
In this nail-biting tale,Mohammed not only exposes a brutal regime but also how the extreme misogyny it enforces corrupts the whole society.
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Elizabeth Macarthur’s Letters
Edited by Kate Grenville,Text Publishing,$34.99
To Kate Grenville,Elizabeth Macarthur’s letters are a kind of fiction,a veil cast over the hardships of her life to present a story of a “sunny life without shadows”.
She is particularly struck by Macarthur’s use of irony to convey something of her real feelings that social conventions prevented her from expressing openly,particularly about her husband,John Macarthur. But there is also a sense that the trauma of the nightmare voyage out – she gave birth to a daughter who died and she was forced to stay in her cabin after her husband had a falling out with the captain – rendered some experiences unspeakable,and that her always composed persona in the letters was a way of dealing with turmoil and asserting a control over her life.
She talks of worries over their young son’s health as “indescribable”,and in a later report of how “no language can express ... the misery I experienced.”
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