By Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Director and the Daemon
Pitaya Chin, Puncher & Wattmann, $32.95
Pitaya Chin’s The Director and the Daemon is a rare bird in Australian fiction – a novel of ideas – and anyone involved in the arts “industry” will find it stimulating, provocative, and darkly funny. One strand blends satire and romance, as the director of a sci-fi TV series pursues their passion for a young lead actor, Kit, while facing ethical scruples over corporate sponsorship for the show. Another follows an anonymous radical group that strays into violence targeting “climate imperialists” and begins to fray over tactics.
Chin blends an assortment of literary modes. Mini-essay, poetry, manifesto and micro-fiction leap from the narrative. The need for rebellion is urgent – the climate nightmare has intensified in Chin’s vision, with heatwaves reaching lethal temperatures – but disunity and poverty of discourse would seem to limit possibilities for meaningful change. Overheard dialogue between arts workers touching diversity issues, social inclusion, and allyship seems particularly Orwellian, revealing complex tensions lurking behind correct form.
Death in the Air
Ram Murali, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
Fans of The White Lotus will enjoy this entertaining resort-based murder mystery. Cultivated, charming, Oxford-educated Ro Krishna has left his job in hectic circumstances and descends upon Samsara – an elite spa, meditation and yoga retreat in the Himalayan foothills.
Movie stars and politicians rub shoulders with the impossibly wealthy at the exclusive hideaway. Alas, promised tranquillity turns to alarm when one of the guests, the beautiful Amrita Dey, is found dead. Police do their thing, but at the request of Samsara’s owner, the indomitable Mrs Banerjee, Ro uses his legal smarts to conduct a shadow investigation.
What follows is an Agatha Christie-style locked-room mystery that threatens a higher body count, and doubles as a wicked satire on the foibles of the ultra-rich. Murali has written a comic crime novel that mixes elements from two popular genres into a colourful and clever detective story, full of memorably eccentric characters.
Bear
Julia Phillips, Scribe, $29.99
The follow-up to Disappearing Earth, a National Book Award finalist in 2019, Julia Phillips’ Bear tells a dark fairy tale of two sisters. Sam and Elena are two twenty-somethings stuck on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest, with their dying mother.
Sam is bitter and easily irritated about their predicament, not to mention her dull routine working on a local ferry. Dullness subsides when she spies a rare grizzly bear swimming alongside the boat, but when the bear begins to hang out near their home, the sisters have divergent reactions to it. Elena is entranced by the creature, putting out food for it, going for walks in the forest; Sam goes into survivalist mode, buying bear repellent and a gun.
What the bear represents remains enigmatic and ambiguous, but the dramatic encounter will test the bonds of sisterhood and evoke the dark and untameable quality of Grimm Brothers fairy tales, rather than the sanitised franchises of contemporary pop culture.
Brothers and Ghosts
Khue Pham, Scribe, $29.99
Brothers and Ghosts portrays an intergenerational reckoning with diaspora and the legacy of the Vietnam War. Kieu can’t pronounce her own name – Vietnamese-speakers look confused when she says it and the Germans can’t wrap their tongues around the delicate tones either. She changed it to Kim growing up in Berlin.
But when she receives a letter addressing her as Kieu, Kim is sent on a journey that lays bare her Vietnamese heritage and conflict within her own family. Her grandmother is dying, and the funeral reveals estrangement between her father and uncle – two brothers who took opposite sides during the war, one supporting the Americans, the other the Vietcong.
Khue Pham’s family saga skips across decades and continents, from Berlin to “Little Saigon” in California, bringing into focus the complexities of migration, and Vietnam’s turbulent history.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Piano Player of Budapest
Roxanne de Bastion, Robinson, $34.99
When Roxanne de Bastion’s father died in 2020, the Berlin-raised, London-based singer-songwriter was drawn into the history of her mostly secular Jewish family. The connecting motif is the family piano and the central character, her grandfather, Stephen. The pivotal moment is listening to a tape recording of Stephen, a professional musician, playing the Bluthner. She immerses herself in the tapes of Stephen narrating his story before, during and after World War II.
Simply but vividly told, de Bastion recreates bohemian 1930s Budapest, with Stephen playing in ritzy hotels, having affairs, and writing film scores. The war blows that away, and he is suddenly a forced labourer on the Russian Front and at the Mauthausen concentration camp. He survives; so does the piano.
This is an impressive first book, with no tricks, just admirably controlled, evocative and moving writing.
Rock and Tempest
Patricia Collins, Hachette, $34.99
Just after midnight on Christmas morning 1974, when cyclone Tracy hit Darwin, 19-year-old WRAN Patricia Collins was curled up in her wardrobe to avoid flooded floors, horizontal rain and winds that reached 300 kilometres an hour. If that wasn’t terrifying enough, after the eye of the storm passed, she experienced the “unnerving” calm of going from cyclone to clear weather in an “instant”.
It’s just one of the images – taken from personal experiences and numerous interviews – that give us a vivid impression of what it was to be there and “hear the wind sounding like a freight train passing directly overhead”.
From the tragedy of death and cleaning up Darwin, to the absurd and scary of being on naval sentry duty to ward off looters, this really puts you on the ground during the storm and its aftermath.
Peripathetic
Cher Tan, NewSouth, $34.99
The title of this mix of essay and memoir – frequently the two blending into each other – is a play on words telling us that Tan is interrogating language as much as the continuing theme of “unbelonging”. In non-linear narrative, she traces her peripatetic life – Singapore, Adelaide, Melbourne – often through the “shit” jobs she’s had, from water girl at the footy to life drawing model.
When she looks at the “subjectively constructed nature of the self”, especially online, it reinforces that notion of shifting realities, selves and social roles that thematically underpins much of the book, including the paradoxes of the writing life.
There are times when this can get a bit too wordy, the informing cultural theory poking through unnecessarily, but it’s invigoratingly thoughtful, playful and stylistically uncompromising in the best of senses.
Searching for Novak
Mark Hodgkinson, Cassell, $34.99
Mark Hodgkinson begins the Novak Djokovic story in 1999, in a Belgrade basement where the young Djokovic sheltered during the NATO bombings in response to Yugoslavia’s persecution of Albanians. Out of this came the resilience and positivity that are key to his success on the court. Hodgkinson documents the side of his subject that has drawn international condemnation – such as a 2008 post that “Kosovo is Serbia”, after the former declared independence.
But his focus is on Djokovic’s glittering prizes and $200 million in winnings. Most of the friends and mentors interviewed offer unqualified praise, and sometimes silliness – some suggesting that his detention in Melbourne in 2022, when he was unvaccinated and had unsatisfactory exemption papers, was a political conspiracy. It’s an attempt to get inside the enigma of Djokovic, but remains pretty glowing.
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