Spring Reading Guide: Zadie Smith, Jane Harper, Richard Flanagan
Clear your calendar for new books by Zadie Smith, Jane Harper and Richard Flanagan and more.
FICTION | ESSAY | NON-FICTION | POETRY
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FICTION
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The Survivors
By Jane Harper
Macmillan Australia, 384pp, $39.99 (HB), $32.99 (PB)
Review by Robyn Walton
Jane Harper’s capacity for evoking natural environments and creating characters and storylines credibly informed by these locations is on display as strongly as ever in her new novel, The Survivors.
Harper’s protagonist, Kieran Elliott, is repeatedly drawn back to a site that remains significant for him: a pair of sea caves at the base of a Tasmanian cliff, their dark mouths open to the ocean. The magnificence and power of the natural elements at this location are well suggested by the book cover.
When the tide comes in, cold water surges into these caves, rising rapidly toward their head-height roofs and inundating their downward sloping tunnels. Suddenly, if a visitor has been inattentive, there is an imminent risk of drowning. And, of course, the likelihood of death is all the greater if bad weather hits.
Twelve years ago, when he was 18, Kieran was in one of these caves with a girlfriend, taking advantage of the privacy of the place, while a severe storm was approaching. The girl, Olivia, escaped to raise the alarm.
Kieran survived also, but only just. Three people died nearby. Two were young men, the elder brothers of Kieran and his friend Sean. They were coming to Kieran’s rescue in their catamaran when it capsized.
The third was a schoolgirl, Gabby. Last sighted on the beach, she was presumed to have been swept out to sea. Her body was not found.
Harper does not invoke the archetypal or psychoanalytical resonances of caverns or summon Romantic or Gothic melodrama when her protagonist revisits this place.
Kieran’s trauma-affected memories and increasing unease inside the cave system are realistically described, and the fact that he brings his infant daughter with him compounds the psychodrama. The narrative is told almost exclusively from the point of view of now 30-year-old Kieran, with male friendship signalled early on as a thread, and males maturing into kindness and forgiveness an emerging theme.
Having returned to his hometown from Sydney to see his parents, Kieran also expects to catch up with Sean and his other long-time friend, Ash.
Kieran’s partner, Mia, is bemused that he can expect to pick up these friendships after a long interval of nothing but sporadic text messages: “Male friendships are so weird.”
Kieran is comfortable, however. If his bonds with Sean and Ash were ever going to fail, that would have happened in the days of storm and stress.
When the three men meet up there are jocular insults (Kieran’s baby is “too pretty to be yours, mate”) and mild jibes freighted with resentment.
The proximity of Sean’s belligerent teenage nephew, who blames Kieran for the catamaran deaths, rankles.
The next morning a body is found on the beach. Student and cafe hand Bronte has drowned, with bruise marks indicating she was held underwater.
With a murder case above the pay grade of the town’s familiar and lenient police, a detective inspector arrives from the city.
Soon Kieran finds her taking an interest in the caves, apparently suspecting similarities between the Bronte and Gabby cases.
The scenario of an attractive young woman’s death prompting then-and-now investigations in a fictionalised regional town struggling with social change is common in the subgenre of the psychological mystery or domestic noir.
If Harper wears it better, reasons can be found in her pacing and storytelling (the book is worth rereading to savour how clues and misdirections are doled out) and in the detailed, touching realism of her characters’ interactions.
Harper’s unsentimental evocations of how individuals deal differently with loss and shame are noteworthy. She is also alert to how small family units suffer.
Collective community reactions are addressed sparingly, however.
Here Harper uses as her commentator a journalist-turned-thriller author named GR Barlin. He is a poseur in the eyes of Kieran and his peers, but he has a sly wit and Harper has self-referential fun with him while settling the odd score.
Townspeople who had remained tight knit since the storm are now divided following Bronte’s death. Initially they were reluctant to apportion guilt to any local boy. Then they began turning against each other on their online forum, posting libellous assertions and grievances.
This is Harper’s fourth novel, following The Dry, Force of Nature and The Lost Man. She has produced a chilling story with sociopolitical nuances.
Robyn Walton is a writer and critic.
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The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
By Richard Flanagan
Knopf Australia, 304pp, $32.99 (HB)
But when asked about the origins of Gould’s Book of Fish (2001), the book Flanagan himself and many others regard as his best, he is momentarily nonplussed. After a brief pause he admits: ‘‘It came from my imagination.’’
Recall that response in relation to The Living Sea of Waking Dreams. It is the only other novel of Flanagan’s to issue exclusively from that mysterious region where the creative writer may freely notate their dreams without making the usual compromises with reality.
The result is a book in which workaday realism is increasingly marbled with magical effects. It is a novel whose efforts to be beautiful in the traditional sense — to reflect with affection, grace and insight what it is to be alive today; ‘‘to render’’, in Joseph Conrad’s unashamedly grand formulation, ‘‘the highest kind of justice to the visible universe’’ — are arrayed against another, far meaner proposition: that the world is set to be lost, because of us. That we have destroyed it through our actions and are now living through its flickering out.
This is a novel centrally concerned with the concatenation of environmental crises in which we find ourselves trapped, one that escapes the mire of consensus and dissensus that surrounds discussion of climate change by resorting to an older form of reality-shaping. It tells a story, pure and simple — at times, almost a fable — about an old woman named Francie who is dying in a Hobart hospital, and taking her sweet time about it.
The fault does not belong to Frances, to give the woman her true Christian name. It is her three grown children who have decided, following a series of turns suffered by their mother, that she must be kept alive at any cost.
Terzo, third son and self-made venture capitalist, has the money to ensure his mother’s care, while Anna, a Sydney-based architect, has the sharp-edged personality to impose their collective will. Only poor, stuttering Tommy — failed artist and part-time cray fisherman, the one child who stayed in Tasmania to care for his mother — is uncertain about his sibling’s determination to keep their mother alive.
Meanwhile, somewhere offstage, the shade of another sibling haunts each of them, albeit differently: Ronnie, the golden boy, who, decades earlier, hanged himself in the shed of the family home.
Flanagan scatters this information with studied casualness throughout the opening sections. His prose is like an AM radio dial, tuning in and out of clarity: voice, tense and pronoun shifting and mashing together before language resolves itself firmly within Anna’s perspective. She turns out to be a brilliant vessel for the novelist’s concerns.
Anna is one who has been damaged by the escape velocity required to flee her origins. As a child of Tasmania’s lovely yet impoverished northwest, she has made a point of pride out of her adult mainland exile. Returning to the island to sit by her mother’s hospital bedside is a galling reminder of the past and its ongoing claims upon her.
And as a woman making her way in architecture, Anna has been forced to work harder, display greater talent and show more ambition than her male peers. Success has cost an early marriage and a relationship with her son, a bedroom-bound gamer who, now in his 20s, has failed to fly at all.
A bright, tough woman, unflappable and unillusioned. So when early on she looks down while driving out of a municipal carpark in Hobart to discover that one of her fingers has vanished, she can only understand the phenomenon as some form of category error. Such weird enchantment does not compute.
The magical realist vein in this novel starts small — a single absent knuckle-joint where a ring-finger once was — then accelerates as it spreads: a pandemic of vanishing. Flanagan reports these phenomena via Anna’s growing sense of unease, but he does not press the point. People are reluctant to address the vanishings directly: it’s a buzz-killer, socially, and vulgar to dwell on.
The result is a vague, uncanny air infecting the world of the novel. Like those Google Streetview images where office workers and shoppers are caught, frozen in banal attitudes, except each face is photoshopped to a blur.
What is the function of this vanishing? What is its place in a novel devoted to the intimate family dance of three siblings managing the descent of a beloved parent from maternal giant to frail, addled ghost?
The answer could lie in the book’s epigraph: a few lines from the great English Romantic poet John Clare, powerfully bemoaning the changes wrought by enclosure of agricultural Commons during the early 1800s.
Enclosure is also what the digital has done to us. It has taken our attention, fenced it off and monetised it — all with our enthusiastic ascent. Never before has a single device combined work, information, communication, entertainment and eros with such total, addictive elan. Yet it arrived at just the moment when we needed to attend most to our local realities and the diminishments they were suffering.
Anna, who turns from images of bushfire and superstorm, burned animals and battered humans fleeing disaster to post a pic of her new shoes on Instagram, represents a drive we all experience to some extent: the desire to escape from an unpalatable existence into the glossy, filtered comforts of the online ‘‘real’’.
Francie, by contrast, whose shifting consciousness we glean via her children, possesses the gravity of one who has dwelled in the tangible world all her life.
Even the unravelling of her mind, a process reflected in a notebook of scribbled reminiscence, seems like a sensible retort to a moment in which insanity is reflected in a doubling down on the sterile formulations and sclerotic ideological positions, where even facts are up for furious debate: a Brezhnev era of the human spirit.
She grows to become — just as Addie Bundren, matriarch of William Faulkner’s masterpiece As I Lay Dying did almost a century ago — a locus for love and dispute who lives and dies beyond the human claims made on her behalf. Both women’s very ordinary extinctions become the vehicle for universal concerns.
Yet the most significant link between these novels, written at an antipode to one other and yet sharing so much, has to do with the misuse of important words — first among them ‘‘love’’.
Anna and Terzo believe that submitting their mother to the soft, beeping tyranny of machines that keep her in a state of suspended animation is an act of love. They are really acting out of fear. Addie, in Faulkner’s novel, says of her husband: “He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack.’’
In this, Flanagan’s call-and-response to his revered literary antecedent — the second great novel the author has sent out straight from his imagination — he explores how our failures to properly love have led us to the point of destruction. What impresses most, however, is that Flanagan’s novel doesn’t end in condemnation. It keeps searching for the proper form for love; it seeks to supply the lack Addie intuits and Anna enacts.
And it concludes, astonishingly for a story about our flaws, our blindnesses — the individual and collective fiasco that has brought us to this point — with a message of hope, frail and tiny as an orange-bellied parrot, winging indomitably through a Bass Straight storm.
Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.
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Hamnet
By Maggie O’Farrell
Hachette, 368pp, $32.99
Review by Peter Craven
The personality of Shakespeare haunts us like an enigma. He wrote the greatest body of drama and the greatest range of plays we have. Think of the last scene of King Lear, the ‘‘Howl’’ over the body of Cordelia, being written by the same person as A Midsummer Night’s Dream or either of them by the playwright who lets Falstaff quip his way through Henry IV.
Yet for all this, there isn’t much imaginative writing about Shakespeare. Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare In Love is good knockabout fun and Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun is a dramatic enough representation of the Dark Lady/Fair Youth drama from The Sonnets.
It’s all a ghostly business, as we know so little of Shakespeare’s life. In fact the greatest bit of writing ever conjured, in the vicinity of Shakespeare’s life, is the theory Stephen Dedalus spins in James Joyce’s Ulysses (with specific reference to Hamlet): ‘‘Through the ghost of the unquiet father, the image of the unliving son looks forth.’’
All of which is a backdrop to the fact Irish-British novelist Maggie O’Farrell has written a novel about the fact that Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, died a few years before Shakespeare wrote the first of his greatest tragedies, Hamlet, the one that seems uncannily personal, perhaps because every actor, every reader finds in it a mirror in which her own personality peaks.
O’Farrell’s Hamnet is a kind of folksy, homespun story of the thatch and heartbreak of life in Stratford but it has no equivalent to, say, Hilary Mantel’s artful simulacrum of 16th century speech. Nor do we feel that we’re in the vicinity of a writer who has any special intimacy with the Shakespeare story.
This is very approximate costume drama of a ye olde English countryside variety, and although it is not badly written, it pales before the shadow of its subject, much as it may please fans of O’Farrell’s rather high-toned narrative undulation and her ability to keep two time schemes in juxtaposition.
Hamnet is a cheerful 11-year-old, fair haired and thoughtful, a grammar school boy who has a twin sister called Judith. They are the children of Agnes, the wife of the young man who has had a troubled time with his bad-tempered and violent father, and who has made a life for himself in far off London.
Anne Hathaway is called Agnes in this novel because that may well have been her name, as suggested by Park Honan, the most sober of Shakespeare’s biographers. The ‘‘g’’ was silent in Elizabethan English and the names were all-but cognate (as are Hamnet and Hamlet).
Agnes is the central figure because it is she who has to suffer the desolation of the death that is crucial to the drama. And it’s certainly true that Shakespeare’s first encounter with her suddenly quickens and enlivens the narrative.
Agnes, the woman the bard will marry, is a formidable. She speaks like someone higher born and she has intuitive and clairvoyant powers that make her seem a bit of a white witch and she also wanders about with a kestrel on her shoulder.
The flashbacks have a certain panache. What’s happening in the present has a dreadful encroaching reality that takes on a weird topicality when we discover that Hamnet’s twin Judith has contracted the plague. Appalled, Agnes feels the swollen buboes on the girl as she lies on what looks like her deathbed.
But twins, like Judith and Hamnet, pick up and put down an apple at the same time. And Hamnet lies down with the sister who is his mirror and other self. It would be wrong to indulge in spoilers when it comes to a book that assumes no intimacy with the facts of Shakespeare’s biography, even the most famous ones.
There is a death. There is the terrible suffering of the mother who is in effect the far removed wife of a chap — call him Shakespeare if you will — who makes a new start in a place of stench and circuses and horrifying decapitated heads.
O’Farrell has written a heartfelt, partly sombre, partly breezy historical novel, which re-imagines and tries to give a new, sometimes rusticised tilt to one of the question marks of the great biography we don’t have a clue about.
We don’t know how Shakespeare reacted to the death that is the foundation of this book. Park Honan thinks he “seems never to have recovered from the loss’’ and that it allowed him ‘‘to identify with those in extreme, irremediable pain’’ and somehow enabled him to go on to his greatest work.
Peter Craven is a writer and critic.
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Little Eyes
By Samantha Schweblin
Translated by Megan McDowell
Oneworld, 256pp, $29.99
Review by Adam Rivett
An often upsetting and haunting novel, Little Eyes, by Argentine writer Samantha Schweblin, nonetheless possesses a curious problem: it doesn’t quite go far enough.
A tale of loneliness and false connection in a tech-addled world, the speculative imaginings of the novel don’t have to work hard to resemble our present historical moment, but there’s also something slightly timid and measured.
Philip Roth’s famous words about the challenge of portraying our new reality come to mind: “The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.” Not for the first time, a talented writer has been mugged by reality.
The novel’s title derives from the small device with a name cutesy and odd: the kentuki. What looks on first impressions as no more than a stuffed animal – available in the form of a panda, rabbit, or any number of other choices – is in fact, in the words of one of the novel’s characters, “a cell phone with legs”.
And just like a cell phone, it watches and records more than the owner (or “keeper”, as they’re referred to) is initially aware. On the other end of the line, so to speak, watching through animal eyes and hearing with animal ears, is a total stranger, a “dweller” for each “keeper”.
Anyone can buy a kentuki, and anyone desiring to dwell inside one just has to log in and be randomly assigned a new plush toy body.
A bored elderly woman in Peru can, with the owner’s consent, watch the inside of a Berlin apartment. An Italian man in need of company will happily let his kentuki – this one in the form of a mole – follow him around his house. The relationship only ends when the toy is destroyed or is not recharged.
It’s a fantastical premise, and entirely credible. Any initial hesitations a reader might have about the ease with which an adorable surveillance device is invited into this many homes need only consider the nonchalance with which very real people use Amazon’s Alexa, and the ways in which frequently cruel and invasive technologies are wrapped up in deceptive and cloying marketing campaigns.
From the start Schweblin’s sees only malice and unease in the relationship – in the book’s first scene, one of its best, three teenage girls flirt with a kentuki, seeing themselves as wised up users of a system, before quickly realising the power runs entirely the other way.
The book is strongest in these earliest sections, offering the reader a portrait of a global community united only in a common and humbling loneliness. The novel is witty about the technology’s flattening effect on language and culture. Among other things it is a parable about the limits of global capitalism: you can go anywhere, in a mediated form, but everywhere starts to feel like everywhere else after a while.
There’s a cunning lack of traditional “scene setting”. For the most part, accurately enough, it’s a book about staring at screens or being stared at by screens.
There are limits to the approach, however. While the internationalist approach feels initially sweeping, the novel never settles on any character for long enough. Each is given a hasty dash of backstory, a splash of unfulfilled desire, then left to their technological ends.
The prose can begin to feel limited too. It’s the kind of spare, focused but often plain writing that lends itself to easy translation and the international market.
The neat declarative sentences and familiar constructions pile up but the writing never matches the strangeness of its conceit. The is disappointing given the uncanny voice of Schweblin’s first novel, Fever Dream, and the often surreal textures of her short fiction.
It’s the absence of that surrealism that is most profoundly felt here, and connects to the larger problem of how a writer like Schweblin, dabbling with the speculative and vaguely sci-fi, can look a reality such as ours straight in the eye.
Technology deforms our world in profound and banal ways. The characters in Little Eyes find themselves taking slightly strange turns, slowly overtaken by their devices, but there’s no true horror to the conversions.
It’s akin to a lecture from a parent about smartphones: the points are convincing, but familiar. What is being permanently altered in us is the very conception of the self, and unlike Fever Dream this new work cannot locate the uncanny.
It’s possible the tech parable can no longer unnerve us. Deep down, every tech-besotted soul knows the deal they’ve made, but is happy with the loss for all that convenience and fleeting pleasure. Merely illustrating the trade off is perhaps no longer enough. Little Eyes, while often compelling, falters at delivering the true terror that lies behind our shiny modern toys.
Adam Rivett is a writer and critic.
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ESSAY
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Intimations
By Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton, 96pp, $12.99
Review by Vanessa Francesca
“What is it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently loveable as a people, as a species?” With its echoes of Virginia Woolf, this was the question posed by the narrator of Zadie Smith’s breakthrough novel of the new millennium, White Teeth (2000).
Then, in her 2005 novel On Beauty, Smith used the frame of EM Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End to tell the story of a black rapper drawn into an Ivy League university community that tries to nurture his talent.
In her new book, Intimations, a collection of six essays, Smith returns to these themes in another act of literary homage, a meditation on Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
Her reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic and the civil rights demonstrations in response to the death of George Floyd raises questions about the illuminating philosophy of the young people she portrays.
If this essay collection is more mournful, more fatalistic, more ironic about the lives of multicultural young people than Smith’s fiction is, it’s the times rather than a failure of language on the part of the author.
Aurelius’s Meditations speaks with grace and dignity about the challenges of enduring suffering and growing moral character. If in 2020 Smith conveys the pith without the hope, perhaps that’s the global moment. At the time he wrote, Aurelius was an enlightened ruler who Machiavelli would describe as ‘‘one of the five good emperors’’ of Rome.
Smith is sometimes called a novelist of the New Sincerity school, and the fate of multicultural, particularly black, young men is the object of that sincerity in this book of reflective snippets. But 20 years after White Teeth, her descriptions of her community are shot through with more and more despair.
In her 2012 novel NW, written in the wake of the biggest London riots since the Gordon riots of 1780, Smith had a hopeful young charmer die and another young black man — homeless, but remembered by his childhood friends for his vitality and beauty — accused of murder.
Smith, in her writing, begins to become unconsoled and inconsolable. This continues in Intimations in everything from memes about Mel Gibson to Donald Trump’s statement on deaths in the pandemic.
Smith moves through the six essays in various voices. There’s an uneven balance between the irony of an essay that compares writing to baking banana bread and describes it as a craft (though one which her students will mortgage their futures to learn) that is still just “something to do”. But then there’s the dawning rage of a group of short essays about young people, particularly in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, young black people, and despair.
These five short essays she calls ‘‘screengrabs’’ with a postscript on the global pandemic. In the first, A Man With Strong Hands, Smith juxtaposes the luxury of getting a chair massage with the guilt of complaining to the young masseur about the relatively paltry indignities of an upper middle class life.
There’s more of this in A Hovering Young Man, where Smith details the human beauty of a New York University IT professional and reflects on style in fiction and in the world. However, she ultimately concludes, “The enviable style of the young is little protection against catastrophe … their style is all they have”.
She goes further in her postscript, titled Contempt as a virus. “I used to think there would one day be a vaccine [against racial inequality]. I thought that if the knowledge became as widespread as could possibly be managed or imagined we might finally reach some herd immunity. I don’t think that anymore.”
Such sincerity transcends the aesthetic but in its transcendence also makes it problematic. It’s not unlike the scene in Smith’s novel On Beauty, where a poetry professor watches a group of young Haitians rap about the corruption of their government, and observes the aesthetic dilemma presented by a rage that breaks a form in two.
The despair about the fate of the young is unassuageable but there is a dilemma of interpretation for Smith in Intimations. What can we make of a collection of essays about Stoicism which chooses irony over Stoicism?
The preoccupation with witnessing the desperations of multicultural and young black people sits uneasily with the privileges of academic attainment and Smith’s self-consciousness about this can sometimes seem guarded. Inevitably, given her success and the authority of her position, she has moved further away from the experience of the multicultural young people on whose behalf she seeks to speak.
At least Smith’s guardedness is sincere. She comes closest to reconciling the theory of Stoicism with despair in a section that most closely resembles Meditations, while writing on her other great subject, female friendship.
Smith itemises her friend’s philosophical gifts: “To consider yourself lucky, even in situations which almost anyone else would consider extremely difficult and unfair. To think, reflexively, of whoever suffers. To forgive anyone who has wounded you, no matter how badly, especially if there is any sign whatsoever that a person has, in wounding you, also wounded themselves.” This sort of reflectiveness, this kind of Stoic forgiveness, is surely what is required at this historical moment in this new unlovable century, if we are to move beyond jokes and protests and towards an art that contains our society in its multicultural multitudes.
Vanessa Francesca is a writer and critic.
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NON-FICTION
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Merle Thornton: Bringing the Fight
By Merle Thornton and Melanie Ostell
HarperCollins, 288pp, $29.99
Review by Colin Oehring
Merle Thornton, mother of the famous actor Sigrid Thornton, is something of a star in her own right. She is the woman who gained notoriety when she and her comrade-in-arms, Rosalie Bogner, chained themselves to a bar rail at Brisbane’s Regatta Hotel in 1965.
The footage of this act of insubordination has become so iconic that U2 on their most recent Australian tour projected an image of Thornton on an enormous backscreen. And it’s terrific that we now have Merle’s inspiring story told in her own inimitable voice in book form.
Merle Thornton ascribes to herself no great wisdom –– and she thinks those close to her would agree –– but her experience is vast and varied and every page of Bringing the Fight is interesting.
She admits to being opinionated and always ready to confront, which might well have been exhilarating and fatiguing in equal measure (for herself as well as others).
Her story begins in 1930 in Melbourne. She was a honeymoon baby and tells us that her parents rarely praised her but took her intellectual development seriously.
There are other developments, too, and this memoirs sings when it explores Merle’s love of sex and reading. It’s a joy to rediscover passages here from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, thought it’s part of Thornton’s intellectual stringency that she does not shy away from Lessing’s adjuration that the book was not intended to be read as a feminist text.
The yin to Merle’s yan was her husband Neil Thornton who came from a country background and liked a drink. Theirs, she says, was a sometimes open, always companionable marriage but that she will tell no tales on that score.
He certainly seems to have been a steadying force and it soon becomes apparent that much of Merle Thornton’s passionate activism issues from her own sense of feeling slighted or overlooked. She captures marvellously well what it is to begin with a politics of the personal and translate it into a very impressive form of feminist vociferation.
As an undergraduate at Sydney University in the late 1940s she fell under the spell of John Anderson, the libertarian philosopher who would influence the Push, and whose study groups seemed to set everyone free –– until the day Merle saw Anderson himself shut down a debate. And this example of the limits of tolerance is rendered with the vividness only personal experience can command.
She did an English honours degree and was going to write a thesis at ANU on Ben Jonson with AD Hope as her supervisor who is evoked in a lovely way when she says that he tended to look at trees outside the window rather than into people’s eyes.
Her portraits both of other people and her own mood swings have a kind of flickering novelistic richness that adds to this portrait of a woman who couldn’t be told.
One of the most enjoyable things in Bringing the Fight is how Merle Thornton’s discovery of sex and her experience of motherhood –– which are bracingly frontal and direct –– are never separate from her intellectual rage to understand.
It’s typical of her that she declares that she has always loved to swear and the legendary incident at the Regatta Hotel in Brisbane was like an obscenity shouted in the face of a reactionary and misogynist world.
The classically benighted Queensland law effectively forbade women from being in a public bar and so on the 31st of March 1965 Merle and her friend Rosalie Bogner chained themselves to the public bar footrail.
The upshot was certainly dramatic, with uniformed police smashing the padlocks on the chains to free the pair, but it was influential in having the law changed, just as Merle later lobbied successfully to change the barbarous public service regulation that meant women had no job security after marriage.
This aspect of Thornton the demon stirrer yields up the wonderful story of how at her daughter’s graduation, when Joh Bjelke-Petersen, premier and walking caricature, comes out with something Merle disapproves of, she stands up and shouts, “That’s a f..king lie!”
It’s interesting to learn that Merle wrote several episodes of the TV series Prisoner and that when Merle and Neil Thornton went to London –– where Merle studied at University College –– she was prepared to exile her daughter to New Zealand for a year which Sigrid later told her mother did leave a perceptible imprint on her psychologically.
Merle remarks that when Iris Murdoch came down from Oxford to London once a month to lecture she said –– arrestingly–– that the thing about moral philosophy is that you have to have mastered it in advance of any crisis if you are going to use it.
Among the most moving pages are when Merle presents the heartbreak of the death of her husband who suffered from a condition that seems to have been related to his posting to Hiroshima after the war and was probably what we would now call post traumatic stress disorder.
We should be grateful to have this story told in Merle’s trenchant voice for future generations. They will learn from it the sorrows and struggles (as well as the victories and joys) that have come before them and be inspired by a persistent and irrepressible impulse to bring the fight.
Colin Oehring is a writer, poet and critic.
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The Golden Maze: A Biography of Prague
By Richard Fidler
ABC Books, 580pp, $39.99 (HB)
Its history in Central Europe, however, is far less well known than Berlin’s, thanks to the two world wars in which Germany loomed large and after the fall of the eponymous wall came to symbolise the dramatic end of the Cold War.
Yet Prague’s history is a maelstrom of the key turning points in European history: from Bohemia’s establishment as a minor power to its conversion to Christianity, to the rise of Protestantism and its place in the religious wars that ensued, its absorption into the Hapsburg Empire and the DNA-distilling intermarriages of the royal dynasties that overlapped there, its shocking anti-Semitic pogroms, the rise of industrialisation, of modernism and the peaks of satirical modernist art and literature that flourished in response to occupation by the Nazis and incorporation in the Soviet arena.
It is no accident that those great satirists, Franz Kafka (The Trial, The Castle and Metamorphosis) and Jaroslav Hasek (The Good Soldier Schweik), were both Czech.
What’s more, since the Hussite rebellion in the 16th century, the Bohemians, with Prague as their capital, always had a liberal streak despite their religious fervour. Czechoslovakia was the only country to ratify the Minorities Treaty, drafted after World War I by the League of Nations to protect millions of refugees who were crisscrossing Central Europe seeking safety.
Nor could it shrug off Czechoslovak leader Alexander Dubcek’s reforms after Nikita Krushchev, who rolled back some of the extremes of Stalinism, was replaced by the doctrinaire Leonid Brezhnev. Prague’s obstinacy in the rebellious euphoria of the 1960s led to the only invasion by the Soviets (with Polish, Hungarian and Bulgarian reinforcements) of another Warsaw Pact country.
The anchor of ABC Radio’s In Conversation program, Richard Fidler, has published a new history of Prague. Fidler has an eye for detail, including irresistible gossip and intriguing geopolitical connections that span centuries. He has written two other best-selling books, a history of Constantinople and the other about a journey with his friend and colleague Kari Gislason through the latter’s Icelandic homeland.
Like his previous books, The Golden Maze: A Biography of Prague begins with a personal impulse. Fidler was living in London with music-comedy trio the Doug Anthony Allstars, of which he was a member, in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. He chose Prague in which to observe the euphoric moment. The experience never left him.
“I was twenty-five years old at the time,” he writes, “and this was Europe’s season of miracles. Over the preceding six months, a wave of mass protests had rolled across the police states of central and eastern Europe and expelled their failing governments one by one. First Poland, then Hungary, East Germany and now Czechoslovakia. The regimes, foisted on those nations by Stalin at the end of the Second World War, had been sustained by the organs of state security and, in the last resort, by Soviet military power.” Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, too, swept all before it. “The masses of protesters were led by students, musicians, workers, artists, actors and, above all, writers,” Fidler writes of Prague. Dissident playwright Vaclav Havel, a stalwart of the democratic Charter 77 movement, was eventually elected president. “It was my first time in Prague,” Fidler writes, “and we were struck at once by the city’s fabled loveliness, the absence of advertising and the carnival atmosphere in the streets, bars and cafes.”
The book begins with a description of the Slavs who came to Bohemia to live peacefully alongside the Germanic tribes that had arrived in the time of Julius Caesar. The Slavs had established thriving communities by 800. Although Prague is farther west than Vienna, Czech is a Slavic language, more commonly associated with eastern Europe. In 805, Charlemagne, who had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope, absorbed the Bohemian Slavs into his empire, ordering them to become Christian in the process.
They were slow to obey. Bohemian queen Libussa — who fought with women in her army — could do little to reverse it. With her husband Premsyl, who was the titular prince, however, Libussa established the first Bohemian dynasty, the Premyslids. The first duke, Borivoj, self-declared in 867, was still a pagan but converted when it put him at a disadvantage with surrounding nobles. The Glagolitic script was formalised in his time, intended to introduce Christian scripture and written law to the locals.
“Good King Wenceslas”, as he was known — not a king at all but a duke — was a pious Christian and began the greater influx of Germans and the German language. Not so popular with his Slavic nobles, the German influence deepened and took root, intensified over the centuries by Bohemia’s engagement with the Holy Roman Empire and Hapsburg rule. Intellectuals such as Kafka were still writing in German in the 20th century, though more nationalistic artists spurned it: composer Antonin Dvorak ensured his librettos were written in Czech.
So Prague progressed through the centuries, alternating with Vienna as the seat of the Habsburg Empire, eventually known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire until it was dismantled after World War I. What had become Czechoslovakia was dissected at the 1938 Munich conference by Britain, France, Germany and Italy — in its absence. Its German-speaking regions, Sudetenland, which included 800,000 ethnic Czechs, were handed to Germany in what historian Norman Davies has described as an agreement “under pressure from the ruthless, the clueless combined with the spineless to achieve the worthless”.
After World War II ended, Czechoslovakia was absorbed into the Soviet sphere despite some desperate manoeuvring to have American troops enter Prague first. Then came 1989 and the Velvet Revolution. And, at the beginning of 1993, Czechoslovakia split into two nations, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, in what became known the Velvet Divorce
Attempting to encapsulate such a long and vivid history in a generalist book leads to ellipses and controversial emphases. But the second half of the book, devoted to the 20th-century, is exhaustive. Fidler’s narrative is compelling. He writes in short sections, arching across time, and comparing and contrasting the politics, religion and art of different eras. The entire journey is propelled by the same combination of wide-ranging general knowledge, intellectual rigour and the ease of expression of an experienced journalist that makes him such an intriguing radio host.
Miriam Cosic is a journalist and author.
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In the Dream House
By Carmen Maria Machado
Serpents Tail, 288, $32.99 (HB)
Review by Louise Omer
Those who’ve encountered any degree of domestic abuse know a key feature is lack of clarity. Boundaries are broken down, trespasses are invisible, loving or erotic actions evolve to cruelty, personal judgment is so undermined and eroded by the perpetrator that the victim is left spinning through grey areas, questioning what is real, is it really that bad, what, in fact, is going on?
If we cannot find the language, if meaning is unclear, it can be extremely difficult to defend, to leave, to heal.
“The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection”, writes Carmen Maria Machado at the beginning of In the Dream House, her rendering of an abusive lesbian relationship.
The author, whose 2017 genre-bending gothic short story collection Her Body and Other Parties won multiple awards, turns her inquisitive and playful mind to examine the relationship she was in seven years ago. In doing so she resurrects her suffering, but reclaims her power.
As a writing student in her 20s Machado falls in lust, then love, with “the woman from the Dream House”, a thin, androgynous Harvard graduate with white-blonde hair and blue eyes who speaks fluent French.
She is worldly, experienced, an intoxicating mix of butch and femme. She takes her to sushi restaurants and introduces her to dirty martinis. In the beginning, of course, everything is wonderful. Their erotic connection is powerful, their interactions passionate and sweet: “She kisses your top lip, then the lower one, like each one deserves its own tender attention. She leans away and looks at you with the kind of slow, reverent consideration you’d give to a painting. She strokes the soft inside of your wrist.”
In the first instance of verbal abuse, jealousy and control bloom from the woman from the Dream House and darken the sky. Not long after, physical violence begins. She grabs Machado’s arm and grips tight. “It is the first time she is touching you in a way that is not filled with love, and you don’t know what to do. This is not normal, this is not normal, this is not normal. Your brain is scrambling for an explanation, and it hurts more and more, and everything is static.”
And so begins the increasing instances of violence – verbal, physical, psychological. Threats begin: “Don’t you ever write about this. Do you f..king understand me?” They talk about having children together, growing old together, as the woman from the Dream House makes her cry, whispers a tirade of vitriol into her ear in public places, chases Machado through the house until she locks herself in the bathroom while the door shakes with blows.
It is witnessed by strangers — on the street, in diners — and friends too. She finds herself discouraging concerned looks, explaining away her “complicated” relationship. “Fear makes liars of us all,” she writes.
At times it’s harrowing, but Machado’s verve for the fantastic makes for a beguiling reading experience. Her narrative is experimental, chapters are nonlinear vignettes that bounce from reflective present to past victimhood to cultural analysis.
Humour and relief comes in the book’s form and style. Play footnotes litter the pages, there is a ‘‘Choose Your Own Adventure’’ section, and the author teases out her signature strands of horror, legend and fairytale.
Toying with a gothic convention — the double — the narrator is “I” and “You”, where “I” is the healed survivor, and “You” is the victim.
“You were not always just a You. I was whole — a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts — and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved: a neat lop that took first person — that assured, confident woman, the girl detective, the adventurer — away from second, who was always anxious and vibrating like a too-small breed of dog.”
Another nod of the head to the horror genre is the Dream House of the title. It is the setting for violence — for most abuse happens in the private, secret sphere of the domestic — but it is not one house, it is all houses they inhabit together.
The Dream House is physical structure and internal symbol: in dream psychology, houses can represent the psyche, revealing how abusive behaviour can enter the mind of the victim and enchain the imagination.
The important achievement of this book is the way Machado expertly anchors her experience in culture. Abuse within queer relationships, she asserts, is rarely visible, so how to give a name to something when it didn’t exist elsewhere?
And, as survivors will know, shame can still the hand that reaches for help; what doubled Machado’s hesitation was the desire not to badmouth queer relationships during the legal fight for same-sex marriage.
In an era when her community was just gaining legitimacy in mainstream society by adhering to heterosexual norms, could it stand the public criticism potentially incurred by accusations of violence?
But she amends that silence with this brilliant memoir. To shape a degrading experience into a narrative is to find language, to give it clarity, and therefore reclaim power. A story has no end, Machado says in her conclusion, the teller simply stops speaking.
“My tale goes only to here; it ends, and the wind carries it to you.” This book is a gift to “You”, the victim — her old self, but also “young queers”, those who need the language to shape their experience into clarity.
Louise Omer is a writer and critic.
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Australian Code Breakers
By James Phelps
HarperCollins, 342pp, $34.99
Review by Michael Fogarty
The title of Australian Code Breakers is deceptive and needs to be decoded itself. This book also needs to be deciphered. It might have been more correctly described as: Dr FW Wheatley: An Australian naval code breaker of World War I.
Readers who expect an all-encompassing survey of the history of Australian code breaking, surely in WWII, will be disappointed. More details on German diplomatic codes would have given contrast. The title grasps our attention but it is disingenuous and his readers need to suspend belief and disbelief in equal terms. An obscure figure enters the heroic realm.
James Phelps is described as Australia’s # 1 best-selling true crime writer. Journalists who write populist histories for the mass market inform the private despair of many academic historians, who often plough lonely furrows in the realisation their works may not attract commercial sales or the wider recognition they crave.
But if any journalists excite public interest then who can begrudge their public success? Impressive as his contribution was, Wheatley was not our greatest code breaker.
While the images are adequate, the appendix is not. The original documents are printed on poor quality paper, which detracts from its presentation.
Spacing and text-justification are attractive. Was Wheatley a grandstander, a small cog in a big machine? He is depicted as being intuitive and counterintuitive. If he broke any codes, then he was assisted by using a captured German code book to decipher messages. A team of German-speaking women helped him. As did a few other officials. Yes. Super-encryption is like a Malay honey-cake, layers upon layers.
There is a fraction too much fiction. The author is more clever than wise as some of the narrative is as preposterous as fantastical. He writes in a boy’s own style, so the story develops with a driving thrust.
Phelps has a wonderful imagination and he deploys standard literary artifices. Australia good whereas Britain not so good. Perfidious Albion gets a woodshed thrashing. While Australia achieved its national sovereignty in 1901, Whitehall had yet to decolonise the Royal Australian Navy as the Admiralty placed it under Royal Navy control. The dominions knew their place then.
Pommy-bashing is an affectionate trait in the Australian psyche, and often deservedly so, as that altruism is extended to them for their personal betterment. For example, in cricket, our sportsmen thought that their English opponents were good chaps, as long as they did not win on the field. Any book needs a conspiracy theory and here the author entertains us.
The author infers that the RAN was consigned to footling policing in the South Pacific while RN ships were emblazoned in glory elsewhere. The Sydney-Emden battle is retailed as is the attack on German Rabaul.
To his chagrin, Phelps contends that an Australian ship was denied the chance to fight the German East Asia Squadron in the Battle of the Falklands in 1914. HMAS Australia was your sluttish post-arrivalist, encountering the debris of SMS Scharnhorst, after a recent empathic Royal Navy victory, in a watery Atlantic graveyard.
This was an extravagant claim as HMAS Australia had damaged its rudder, needing repairs, delaying its passage. Captain Patey rued that HMAS Australia could have had this victory if not for the Admiralty and their incompetency. The RAN was spared the Coronel disaster, when the Germans routed the British.
The counterfactual is self-defeating. Imaginary wars elicit imaginary victories. The writer hints as much in the author’s note. “The dialogue … through often taken directly from letters, texts and reports, has occasionally been adapted to help the adventure flow.” If it is an authentic story, why has he situated dialogue and terminology which was not au courant at the time in WWI?
Captain Wheatley could not be regarded as our greatest code breaker. He was as innovative as adaptive, and a firm command of mathematics and fluency in German aided his successful efforts to crack some German codes of WWI. Capturing a top secret code book from an apprehended German merchant vessel surely aided his tasks. That said, did the Germans then change their codes if they were compromised?
This review is discursive as there are limits in handling “faction.” The writer cheerfully avoided any injunction to provide comprehensive footnotes and a workable index for provenance. A writer invests a sizeable amount of emotion in any work. This will become a cult classic for those who are into prehistory, for me, anything before 1939.
While the author cites some previous groundbreaking works by several naval historians, he might have privileged Ian Pfennigwerth, for his book on Captain Theodore Nave, who might now rightly assume the mantle of Australia’s pre-eminent code breaker.
Michael Fogarty is a former naval officer and diplomat
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People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia
By Grace Karskens
Allen & Unwin, 688pp, $39.99
Against this background, she is now writing Australian history afresh, from ‘‘ground zero’’ as it were. And with great success. People of the River is a book of major significance to Australian history.
Like her earlier work The Colony, this book ranges from an immense overarching narrative to the tiny details of human existence. The focus this time is the Hawkesbury-Nepean, or Dyarubbin as the Indigenous people call the river.
Karskens, professor of history at the University of NSW, draws disciplines such as geology and archaeology into her historian’s net, to describe the creation of the land itself, along with the people who lived here before and after 1788.
Her vivid prose illuminates ‘‘the infinitesimally slow crack and rise of the western part of the Sydney Basin and the corresponding sink and sag of the Cumberland Plain’’.
Up went the rock strata laid down by the river, rising to form the plateau we call the Blue Mountains. When we look up at those great yellow cliffs of shale-capped sandstone, we are looking at what lies beneath our feet on the Cumberland Plain.
And how do we know this? River gravel, she explains. In a breakthrough moment, Karskens found a list compiled in 1829 by Reverend John McGarvie that enabled her to match Indigenous names to Hawkesbury locations today.
Just as valuable, the list also reveals that Aboriginal knowledge of place was alive and spoken about by Indigenous people more than 40 years after the invasion, demolishing ideas they were culturally destroyed immediately after the Europeans arrived.
On the contrary Karskens demonstrates that Aboriginal people showed ‘‘an astonishing cultural dynamism’’.
Why devote at least a decade to the Hawkesbury? Karskens explains, ‘‘Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean, is where the two Australias — ancient and modern — first collided and were forever transformed ... By following the river and paying close attention to its history and geography, the deep past and present may be reconnected and seen in one another’s light’’.
People of the River incorporates multiple points-of-view. We learn how the Europeans discovered Dyarubbin, how at first they thought the Hawkesbury and Nepean were two different rivers, how ex-convict couples were allocated land there to farm the rich soil.
The first incursion of white humanity was so small and tied so closely to the river, it probably seemed temporary to Indigenous people. The small clearings, the lack of fences, allowed their life and culture to continue uninterrupted. ‘‘ ... [I]t took some months or even years, for the true impact of the strangers’ presence to become apparent”:
the loss of access to Country, foods and sacred sites; the gunfire; the constant predation of white men after Aboriginal women; and the stealing of infants ... By 1816, however, it was plain that for every settler Aboriginal people killed in Law or war, the white parties with their Aboriginal allies would kill many more in response ... and would not cease ...
Karskens demolishes our too ready assumption that the massacre by soldiers at Appin in April 1816 marked the end of early conflict. In fact, the aftermath was inflamed with violence. The military had failed to capture Indigenous leaders and in the eight months after in Appin, ‘‘More farms and outposts were raided, more settlers were killed, and more warriors’ names were added to the ‘most wanted’ list’’.
Governor Lachlan Macquarie banished Aboriginal people from all settlements until the leaders were given up. Meanwhile, Hawkesbury magistrate William Cox organised relentless and brutal raids against them until, finally, they surrendered.
In November, Macquarie pardoned warriors who had been caught. Shortly after, for the first time since he started his annual feasts, Aboriginal people attended in significant numbers.
Writing Aboriginal history after the invasion is not straightforward. Karskens achieves it by ‘‘reading against the grain’’ of longstanding settler texts, a methodology that also proved effective in uncovering convict reality.
Macquarie’s Native Institution is a good example of what you can find. Established in 1814 at Parramatta, it was a direct intervention in Aboriginal families that involved ‘‘taking children by force or persuasion’’. Macquarie imagined that these children would form the nucleus of a new European style of Aboriginal family.
The Native Institution ‘‘always struggled and ultimately failed’’ for which commentators blamed Aboriginal people’s inability to become ‘‘civilised’’. But, as Karskens writes, if the perspective is reversed ‘‘a very different picture emerges: repeated evidence ... of Aboriginal parents’ steadfast refusal to give up their children. The experiment was sabotaged not by ignorance, but by strong family bonds and an unwavering determination to bring up children properly — that is, within Aboriginal culture’’.
Convict settlers also need to be ‘‘read against the grain’’, in their case to deconstruct the moral prism through which they were judged. Like the Aborigines, the Hawkesbury settlers have come down through history as a drunken, lazy lot who did not appreciate the land they were given and did not apply themselves seriously to farming.
The first judge-advocate, David Collins, described them as endlessly cavorting ‘‘consuming their time and substance in drinking and rioting”. Officials were always trying to bring them to order, from preventing illicit distilling to insisting they work every daylight hour rather than just when there were jobs to be done.
The fact they were feeding the colony by 1795 was overlooked. Karskens delves deep into settler life with its strong sense of community, the importance of agricultural seasons and the shared rituals of births, deaths and marriages that bound people together.
She argues that the river community laid the groundwork for Australian culture in an ‘‘energetic flowering of the pastimes and sports of common people ...’’ but one whose spirit was ‘‘resistant’’. They were notorious for refusing to be told what to do, or how to do it. For disregarding judgmental pronouncements about their pleasures and continuing to gamble and drink and celebrate however they chose.
Europeans and Aborigines shared a love of singing and dancing and boisterous celebration. They were all ‘‘sports-mad’’ and some of their sporting activities were cross-cultural and held in ‘‘recycled’’ locations. The secluded Aboriginal retreat at Yarramundi (used also as a bushranger’s hide-out) hosted illegal bare-knuckle prize fights and cockfighting, as well as Indigenous ceremonies. Horseracing drew huge crowds of settlers and Indigenous people.
Karskens’s introduction to the book is a powerful meditation on colonisation. Worth reading as an essay in its own right, it explains how the image of ‘‘settlers’’ has done ‘‘a complete about-turn’’.
Overall the work is underpinned by rigorous scholarship. Perhaps Karskens’s greatest achievement is combining empathy with the dispassion necessary for a reader to have confidence in her analysis.
I have one quibble: the book is too long. Hopefully, Karskens will publish an abridged version for use in schools.
Babette Smith’s next book, Defiant Voices: How the Female Convicts Challenged Authority, will be published in April 2021.
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POETRY
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Reaching Light: Selected Poems
By Robert Adamson
Edited and with an introduction by Devin Johnston
Flood Editions, 256pp, $39.95
Here he is in the poem Full Tide, about halfway through his new selected collection, Reaching Light. It was taken from The Clean Dark (1989), his seventh book, which scooped up all the prizes back then.
My whole being’s the bay
cradled in the warm palm
the steady open hand of today’s
flood tide. Anyway
let’s tell the fishermen
something they already know —
it’s the fabled calm
before the flow: I love
a gypsy with a lithe
soul who’s difficult to please …
Upping the stakes of self-consciousness, Adamson refers to his poem as “a new psalm” that ropes in the fishermen “who recognize my strength and who say to keep an eye on me”. The poem is brazenly self-mythologising, and with miraculous brevity flows towards “my wild Magyar — genuflecting from your ancient bed”.
Imagination folds in and out of reality with Adamson. In lesser moments it is more fancy than imagination, but at his best it is full-blooded realisation from lived experience, an achievement that has amplified with each book.
Poem after poem coheres without fuss, like the scales on a fish. In his 2004 autobiography, Inside Outside, which recounts his delinquent days of first loves and incarcerations, Adamson perfectly places his grandfather, a fisherman who lived to his 90s.
The old man said the river was his Bible. Young Adamson should learn “to read” it too because “when you live here, the whole river belongs to you … Just as long as you come back — never stay away too long”. Yet at the same time, an early poem has it: “when my granny was dying / I’d go into her bedroom / and look at her / she’d tell me get out of it / leave this foul river / it will wear you out too … she said the prawns will eat you / when you die on the Hawkesbury River”.
When he was in prison his granny sent him a photo of himself as a five-year-old with the caption: “All the hope and joy of boyhood in this snap, Robert. What went wrong?” Adamson never quite knew either, and the body of his work is a moving effort to work it out or to settle with what had happened. His poems of childhood and youth in Where I Came From (1979) are fearlessly plain and as painful as a long slash of the wrist. Seamus Heaney, I believe, loved these poems most of all, and in the earthbound ease and cadence of any one of them you can see why:
Mum and dad are at it again
in the room
next to mine
their terrible sobbing
comes through the damp wall
They fight about something
I have done
So the boy takes off. He gets out of bed and pushes his boat onto the river, “the black and freezing bay / under the mangroves / that smell like human shit” and so on until “all I catch are catfish here / and have them sliding in the belly of the boat // they are the ugliest looking things / in the world”.
Wherever you look in the oeuvre of Adamson, there is the ebb and flow of ambivalence about life itself, in whatever state: as man-woman, as sober-deranged, as wild-tame, as loved-bereft, with the poet ravished and becalmed by nature even as he knows its indifference towards him. It is ambivalence that flicks in the spine of each poem and Adamson’s artistic management of it, along with his history of self-mismanagement, makes him the major poet that he is.
His fluidity of persona — a true sense of making believe — puts him in the company of the artists he adores, mimics and transcends: Arthur Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, Hart Crane, to name a few of the freedom riders who knew how to trust their senses more than most of us can say. And whatever we say, there’s no getting away from Adamson’s canny lineations, perfect phrasings and cunning literariness.
Reaching Light is his fourth selected collection. Mulberry Leaves (2001), the first, was beautifully, proudly published on acid-free paper by Paper Bark Press, which Adamson founded with his wife, photographer Juno Gemes. It was followed by Reading the River (2004), a British publication by Bloodaxe, which added more bird poems. The third, The Golden Bird (2008), a fatter book published by Black Inc on lousy paper, was notable because it indulged the author’s groupings that came with subheadings variously enlightening and redundant.
Reaching Light is a streamlined book brilliantly edited by Devin Johnston for Chicago’s Flood Editions and readers in North America, where Adamson has a following, having long cultivated friendships among some of its best poets.
It kicks off with the famous The Rebel Angel, a poem as full of attitude as all get-out (“Shit off with this fake dome of a life, why / should I remain here locked in my own / buckling cells … / back on the street in the rain — searched for / some kind of rebel angel, / some kind of law”), and it closes with the stately, potent, self-critical meditation on language and memory, The Kingfisher’s Soul, dedicated to Juno and her “blood’s iron”.
The kingfisher, Johnston writes, reminding us of an earlier poem by that name, is Adamson’s daemon. “It hunts / for souls”, yet “its life’s an edge / you can’t, / measure”.
This is the best of the selecteds. It has the poet’s up-to-date full measure. You could go fishing and birdwatching with it, letting your own soul camp by the great river at night.
Johnston remarks that line by line an Adamson poem can “build towards memorable statements of clinching power”, and I found this to be the case reading him again. If you are starting late with him, it’s the essential book to get.
Barry Hill is a former poetry editor of The Australian. His new book of poems is Kind Fire.