5 books in 5 minutes

A SOLDIER’S story told through objects, an offbeat family memoir and a detailed look at how our DNA defines us are among this week’s books.

Five books in 5 minutes

Fiction

Anatomy of a Soldier

Harry Parker

Faber $29.99

Barnes, Captain, BA5799: to the army he’s just another object, named and numbered and used to keep the war machine rolling. So it’s apt that other inanimate objects — 45 in all, a tourniquet, a bag of fertiliser, a detonator, a bone saw, a wheelchair and a prosthetic leg among them — relate his story. In their dispassionate, objective way the items paint a complete, rounded picture of a brief moment in the war in Afghanistan which, told in any other way, would have been banal. It’s original, sad, poignant, brutal yet compassionate.

From it all emerges Tom Barnes, a human, broken and discarded by the army just like all the other detritus of war and who now has to fight a new battle to reclaim his life.

IAN ORCHARD *****

Fiction

The Butcher’s Hook

Janet Ellis

Two Roads $29.99

Janet Ellis imagines life in 1763 through the eyes of Miss Anne Jaccob +++(correct+++), the feisty 19-year-old daughter of a miserly merchant and his frail wife. Anne is destined for a life of dreary domesticity in a repugnant arranged marriage until she becomes besotted with Fub, the butcher’s apprentice. Disillusioned with her prospects, Anne now takes matters into her own hands, with increasingly bloody consequences.

Anne is a passionate, visceral creature and a strong pulse beats through every page of her story. The plot may take a while to develop but the burnished prose and strong characterisations make it worth the wait. This is an impressive debut. Ellis effectively depicts the atmosphere of Georgian London with sharply drawn details and highly sensory descriptions. The dialogue, especially, captures the cadence of the time. It’s an intriguing novel, highly recommended.

DIANA CARROLL ****

Science

Herding Hemingway’s Cats

Kat Arney

Bloomsbury Publishing $22.99

They say Ernest Hemingway was once given a six-toed cat. Apparently descendants of that cat still roam the writer’s Florida estate, identifiable by their inherited extra digit. This story launches Arney’s investigation into genes, and how they control every stage of development in all living creatures.

Arney is one of the UK’s top science communicators, and her book reflects her ability to investigate and report on complex subjects. As well as scientific explanations, she includes her own personal insights and snippets from her meetings with the world’s best genetic researchers.

This is a book for those passionate about science, best suited to readers keen to understand in detail how our DNA directs life. The general reader might well find it altogether too academic.

SARAH KEENIHAN ***

Memoir

The Argonauts

Maggie Nelson

Text $19.99

In a family snapshot, Maggie Nelson, her spouse Harry and their two sons look deceptively like a nice, heteronormative family. In fact, Nelson’s a lesbian and Harry’s not going to be nailed to any gender, indeed s/he endured painful gender reassignment surgery while the author was pregnant (via donor sperm).

The academy has given Nelson the freedom and the stimulation to rip into all the cliches of gender with which society has repressed her. Her reflections on her sufferings have that peculiar Californian delusion that the world is as keen to watch you as you are to be watched. But by the end, the book has become a song of praise for everyday, ordinary suburban life and simple pleasures: fidelity, children and devotion in sickness and in health. Who’d have thought “we” could end up so like “them”?

ROBYN DOUGLASS **1/2

Picturebook

Cyclone

Jackie French and Bruce Whatley

Scholastic $24.99

The third in French and Whatley’s powerful series on Australian natural disasters remembers the destruction of Darwin by Cyclone Tracy. Inspired by a man who held his family safe in their concrete block barbecue, it celebrates the indomitable spirit of all who stayed to rebuild and all who had the courage to return.

French’s text is in spare, atmospheric rhyme, Whatley’s painfully evocative pencil and wash pictures are streaked and splattered, macerated with rain, stripped, smashed, contorted by wind; the text, in telex-style type, lurches, broken, across the pages. Colour, like faded photographs, comes in with the morning, with the water tankers and the beginning of the clean up, and the book ends on a positive note: an accessible, informative book for young readers, and a telling memento for all who remember Christmas morning 1974.

KATHARINE ENGLAND *****

Originally published as 5 books in 5 minutes