ABR gets artistic

Peter Rose, Editor

October 30, Monday

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I’m back in Adelaide, not, as some might wickedly suggest, to escape any fall-out from Peter Craven’s review of Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist (our lead article in the November issue), but to co-present another lecture – and, well, heck, because I live here some of the time.

I flew over last Saturday, a day of unseasonably cold weather in Melbourne. (Yes, non-Melburnians, snow in the Dandenongs and hail in Highett still constitute unseasonably cold weather in Melbourne in the middle of spring.) As I drove through the city en route to the airport I passed dozens and dozens of amazingly filmily clad ladies heading out to Moonee Valley for the Cox Plate. These young fanatics were surely going off to certain death. On my return I expect to read headlines like ‘Scanty Racegoers Freeze at the Cox’.

This evening in Adelaide, ABR and Flinders University are presenting a lecture by Ronald de Leeuw, in association with the Art Gallery of South Australia. It’s the first time these three organisations have joined forces. And why is a literary review presenting a talk by a gallery director? Because the visual arts, like all other cultural activities, have always been of great interest to ABR and to its readers. Think of those marvellous covers and debates in the first series of ABR, when it was based in Adelaide. Think of Helen Daniel’s artfully chosen covers from the Australian Galleries. Think of good old Jeff Carter’s marvellous images from his long, long career as a photo-journalist, one of which we use on the front cover of the November issue. It’s an unusual issue of ABR that doesn’t carry at least one review of an art book. (This month it’s Mary Eagle on the new edition of Daniel Thomas’s influential monograph on the great Tony Tuckson, plus Kerry Goldsworthy on Janine Burke’s book about Freud’s art collection, and Jaynie Anderson on a major art conference she is planning for 2008.) In addition, once a year we publish an Art issue, which is dominated by reviews and essays and commentaries on artists and exhibitions and art history.

So ABR feels at home in art galleries. We are once again in the Radford Auditorium, named after another gallery director, Ron Radford, now in Canberra, trying to work out where to place the missing entrance to the National Gallery of Australia.

The Auditorium soon fills, and there’s a kind of buzz you don’t sense at all such gatherings. This isn’t surprising, given the stature of this evening’s speaker. Ronald de Leeuw has for ten years been director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Before that he was director of the Van Gogh Museum for fifteen years. He is a commanding figure in every respect. I think he’s the tallest person I’ve spoken to since I first met Len Thompson at Collingwood, in the 1960s. Ronald is so tall the Gallery staff have to move the lectern to the edge of the podium so that Ronald can deliver his lecture standing on the floor behind the podium. He still towers over it. (The other speakers rather disappear during the introductions, like John Howard at a press conference.)

Ronald de Leeuw is nearing the end of a three-month sabbatical in Australia. Most of this has been spent in Melbourne, as a fellow of Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne. He has been in great demand since his arrival. Soon after settling in Melbourne, he delivered a public lecture on ‘Rembrandt and Rijksmuseum’ which many of us felt was a highlight of this year’s lecture season. I met him afterwards and was delighted when he agreed to repeat the lecture in Adelaide before holidaying in the Barossa Valley. Ronald has been to Australia often, and has facilitated major Dutch exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria and elsewhere. His time here could well have been longer. Before he was born, not long after World War II, his parents resolved to emigrate to Australia. They settled on the name ‘Ronald’ because they thought it would ‘go’ in Australia.

The Adelaideans immediately warm to Ronald, just as the Melburnians did. He is the perfect communicator: witty, inviting, democratic, knowledgeable and very enthusiastic. He tells us about the Rijksmuseum’s history with Rembrandt: when they began collecting him; how some of the works were gifted to the gallery; how some proved bogus, while others fluctuated and came back into fashion or veracity. It’s an illustrated talk, so we all sit back and marvel at The Jewish Bride, a superb portrait of Rembrandt’s son, Titus, as a monk, and those lacerating late self-portraits. Ronald tells us about some of the ways they have come up with this year to celebrate Rembrandt’s four-hundredth birthday, including a project by Peter Greenaway, who has been given carte blanche to make a film using the Rembrandt collection. (This will be released next year.)

Ronald de Leeuw quickly emerges as the very model of an innovative gallery director. He is clearly mindful, as we all are (even tiny magazines), that if we don’t keep up with the digital age we won’t survive. He takes us on a visual tour of the new Rijksmuseum, which leaves me rather giddy but still determined to revisit Amsterdam as soon as I can after the new building opens in late 2009. It looks so much lighter than the old, somewhat forbidding Rijksmuseum. They have ripped out the buildings in the two internal courtyards (‘the lungs of the building’, as Ronald describes them), thus losing acres of display space. It’s a rare and brave director who reduces the amount of floor space in a rebuilding project costings hundreds of millions of euros. Quality, not bulk, is what motivates Ronald De Leeuw. How refreshing in such a blandly and boastfully size-ist age. He doesn’t go in for dreary percentages. (I worry about my surfeit of them in the November ‘Advances’, unavoidable perhaps when summarising the results of our reader survey, which I felt obliged to do given the size and warmth of the response.)

We hear about other changes in Amsterdam. Earlier this year the Rijksmuseum juxtaposed Caravaggio and Rembrandt in a exhibition. This was not uncontroversial, for Caravggio and Rembrandt never met and were in fact not contemporaries. ‘Tendentious’, hissed the doubters; ‘Blockbuster’, cursed others. But the analogies are obviously there, and the critics were duly blown away, like every one else. Four hundred thousand people saw the show; I wish I’d been one of them.

Ronald de Leeuw, most generous with his time and insights, speaks for an hour, but welcomes questions, and there are many. Eventually I call a halt and take Ronald and his partner, Gerlof Janzen, back to our place for dinner. There are nine of us. I wonder how we are all going to fit around our smallish dinner table, especially Ronald. So it’s a relief when the evening stays mild and we can dine al fresco.

Over dinner I ask Ronald de Leeuw how big his staff is. It fluctuates between three and four hundred. I refrain from asking Anne Edwards, the vice-chancellor of Flinders University, how many people she employs and how many students she has. It must be many thousands. I sit at my end of the table quietly refilling my wine glass and pondering little old ABR, with its staff of three, two of us part-time. Comparable literary reviews in other countries have dozens of people working for them. When I visited the office of the London Review of Books in 2004 I swear there must have been eight or ten editorial eager beavers, not to mention their cousins in marketing and advertising. How do they do it? Well, populations that would bring a big complacent smile to Peter Costello’s face surely help. Big populations, and the odd moneyed owner. Maybe when we launch our Patrons’ Scheme in early 2007 we will get a pleasant surprise. (Readers, you have been warned.)

Still, smallness has advantages: focus, energy, commitment, desperation even, and no bloody meetings. ABR meetings are a bit like those in The West Wing, though possibly not as well scripted. They always take place on foot, usually involve someone flashing past a door urgently needing information, and they are never filmed with anything other than a hand-held camera.

Most days ABR’s tiny staff is augmented by our trusty volunteers: many of them still at university, or recent graduates, all curious about the editorial and publishing life, and willing to help a needy little outfit that isn’t solely motivated by the bottom line. Amy Baillieu and Marina Cornish were in last Friday as usual, both of them Melbourne University students who have been with us for about a year. They came in expecting to do some editing and to continue indexing this year’s issues for our February number. Little did they know they were about to be co-opted into a photo shoot. We needed willing models for our new (wait for it) Youth Campaign, and they were the only bona fide young people in the vicinity. At first we asked them to pose in the library, studiously reading copies of ABR (despite the fact that they had edited and proofed them so many times they would probably have been happier reading The Da Vinci Code). Then we opted for a slightly more kinetic look, and took a leaf out of Jennifer Byrne’s promotional book, the one where she nonchalantly tosses a great stack of recent releases up in the air (where some of them belong perhaps) in order to persuade us to watch her reading group on ABC TV. Off we went downstairs to our admittedly rather unphotogenic little car park and practised tossing stacks of old issues of ABR in the air: the February 2006 issue, to be precise; the one with Tamas Pataki’s somewhat notorious essay ‘Against Religion’ advertised on the front cover. Such animation requires orchestration, even a degree of direction. This tested the editorial staff, but after two or three false starts (during one of which a dozen copies caught a rare Richmond zephyr and rained on Amy’s head!), the models performed expressively, and the magazines behaved in the breeze, and the Deputy Editor informed the crew that she had enough stills to play with. What our neighbours made of this bizarre rite doesn’t bear thinking about. The osteopath and the Epworth lawyers and the boys in shipping may have made up their minds already. We’re literary, after all.

So, as you can see, lean outfits can still generate a kind of weird energy and dedication, and endless hilarity. Less is more, perhaps. (I swear I promised last New Year’s Eve never to utter that phrase or to permit any of our writers to use it in the magazine, and here I am using it in a blog! So much for editorial resolution.)

Back in Adelaide, it’s getting late but still beautifully mild, and no one seems to want to go home, which suits me fine. Gerlof Janzen, a senior psychiatriast in Amsterdam, tells me about another great passion of his; translating the English Romantics into Dutch, often for the first time. Among them are Byron and Shelley and Keats’s letters. Ronald and Gerlof are tremendous bibliophiles. I don’t think there is an antiquarian bookshop in the land they have not depleted during their stay.

We comment on a solitary bird strangely cheeping in a tree just beyond our fence, the sole tree in the street at the end of which the impressive old Norwood Oval seems to glower at us, as if we are being far too frivolous on an October night and not turning our attention to the coming Ashes contest or to next year’s football season.

The birdsong persists, an odd effect at midnight. I ask Gerlof if he thinks it’s a nightingale. He knows his Keats after all. ‘No,’ Gerlof says firmly, ‘that is not a nightingale.’

Shiny bits of language

Monday, 22 October

Dan Toner (editorial assistant, ABR)

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I am brain-deep in the creation of my first novel at the moment, the imaginary memoir of a decayed Australian with an Irish memory. Paddy is the name of the man who is telling the story. He does so via a peculiar, idiosyncratic and highly confused version of the English language that I have come to think of as Irishish. In striving to make this Irishish as interesting as I possibly can, I have become something of a bower-bird, collecting and comandeering the shiny bits of language that I come across in conversation, in observation and in books. What follows is a patchwork of some of the more invigorating treasures that bookshelves have yielded.

The Farthest North of Humanness: Letters of Percy Grainger 1901–14, edited by Kay Dreyfus, 1985
Percy Grainger was an Australian composer and concert pianist of note, though he is becoming increasingly notorious for his skewed ideas on race, his adoration of his mother and his obsession with flagellantism. Grainger was also a dynamo with languages, and could speak English, Danish, Icelandic and Maori, among others. He even invented a language of his own, ‘Nordic’ or ‘Blue-eyed’ English. His letters are full of his blazingly original and evocative way with words, as this description of a fellow passenger on the R.M.S. Omrah well demonstrates.

There’s a gorgeous Australian New Birth of the OLDEN GOTH on this. A loose-kneed, stoop-necked, headforward, slackhanded, diamond-fingered, sprawl-sitting, shuffleslouching, browncoloured… tall swine with a shut mouth opened alone … to cuss and brag Australia forth. A scoffer, a snarler, a rank Flesher … A specimen of home …

The Sweet Science, by A.J. Liebling , 1951
Abbott Joseph Liebling was a journalist and commentator most famous for his work with the New Yorker. Although his interests ranged far and wide, he was most passionately invested in food, scoundrels and the maligned ‘sweet science of bruising’ – boxing. This book, a collection of his finest pieces on that noble art, is required reading for anybody with even a passing interest in the milling game. Although he does not subvert and stretch the English language as violently as some of the authors on this list – or Paddy himself – Liebling has made the cut for his sublime turn of phrase, and his ruddy romanticism.

If a novelist who lived exclusively on apple-cores won the Nobel Prize, vegetarians would chorus that the repulsive nutriment had invigorated his brain. But when the prize goes to Ernest Hemingway, who has been a not particularly evasive boxer for years, no one rises to point out that the percussion has apparently stimulated his intellection. Albert Camus, the French probable for
the Nobel, is an ex-boxer, too.

Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, The Pogues, 1985
Not strictly a book, not even remotely a book in fact, this is nevertheless a collection of some of the finest Irish writing I have ever read. In particular, the songs and ballads of Shane MacGowan, who has surely earned himself a place in the Irish pantheon of poets with lyrics like these:

The years passed by the times had changed I grew to be a man
I learned to love the virtues of sweet Sally MacLennane
I took the jeers and drank the beers and I crawled back home at dawn
And ended up a barman in the morning.
I played the pump and took the hump and watered whiskey down
I talked of whores and horses to the men who drank the brown
I heard them say that Jimmy’s making money far away
Some people left for heaven without warning.

Illywhacker, by Peter Carey, 1985
I was steered towards this book by my university lecturer, Antoni Jach, a font of wisdom and good humour, who thought that Carey’s charismatic and repulsive protagonist, Herbert Badgery, had something in common with Paddy; whether it was the repulsiveness or the charisma I’ve yet to discover … Carey is a technical master, and one who lets his reader see the machinery working. This novel is on a grander scale than I would ever presume to aspire to for my own work, but it is inspirational to know that the man who wrote it emerged from Bacchus Marsh.

My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity. They come and look at me and wonder how I do it. There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time. It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die.

Ulysses, by James Joyce, 1922
Hmmm, speaking of grand scales … The Irish colossus of English literature. I couldn’t count the amount of times I have tried to complete a reading of this book, the jewel in the crown of modernist fiction. It is not that I don’t enjoy reading it, am not moved and amazed by Joyce’s power over language; it’s just that I feel I am not penetrating its depths with any success, am in fact drowning in the shallows of my inadequacy. It must take a wise, an experienced and learned being to fully appreciate this novel. I can only hope that some day I will be equal to the task.

His hasty hand went quick into a pocket, took out, read unfolded Agudath Netaim.
Where did I?
Busy looking for.
He thrust back quickly Agudath.
Afternoon she said.
I am looking for that. Yes, that. Try all pockets.
Handker. Freeman. Where did I? Ah, yes. Trousers. Purse. Potato. Where did I?
Hurry. Walk quietly. Moment more. My heart.
His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap lotion have to call tepid paper stuck. Ah, soap there I yes. Gate.
Safe!'

The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), The Unnamable (1953), by Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett is the man whose copyright I will be accused of breaking, without a shadow of a doubt. I freely admit that these are the three greatest novels I ever expect to read, and that I am in full thrall of the mind that birthed them. I have an oil painting of Beckett sitting atop my middle bookcase, and it is to this shrine that I turn when wrestling with language, attempting to liberate the cosmic and universal secrets that language locks away. ‘I am lost. Not a word.’

Editor's Blog

12 October , 2006
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Sunday, October 8. Back to Adelaide for the third, and final, delivery of the 2006 Australian Book Review/La Trobe University Annual Lecture. (High time, you might well think, for an acronym.) This year's lecturer is Professor Ian Donaldson, the noted authority on biography and on Ben Jonson. Ian has been untiring, first delivering the lecture in Canberra, at the National Library; then at La Trobe University; finally at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Somehow Ian also finds time to run the ANU's Humanities Research Centre and to finalise two not insignificant projects - the twenty-five volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (CUP) and the first major biography of Jonson in several decades, all to be published over the next two years.

I lunch with Ian and his wife, Grazia Gunn, in the Gallery Café prior to lecture. Soon the café begins to fill with familiar faces: ABR readers, the ever-loyal volunteers (deeply chic in ABR T-shirts) who will help us to move them in and move them out. Also present is Professor Anne Edwards, Vice-Chancellor of Flinders University - our other university sponsor - along with many members of the School of Humanities, where ABR has an office. Good attenders, Adelaideans. We'll do more events here in 2007. Indeed, there are still two to come this year: Ronald de Leeuw, Director of the Rijksmuseum, on Monday, October 30 (Radford Auditorium); and Professor Glyn Davis, who will deliver the inaugural ABR/Flinders University Annual Lecturer on Thursday, November 30 (Flinders University).

The partnership with Flinders came about last year when (for personal reasons, as they say) I began commuting between Melbourne and Adelaide. Talks followed between Flinders and the magazine. We liked their approach, and they seemed to like our direction, so this led to the third of our formal sponsorships (NLA being the other sponsor). When I announced in the magazine that ABR was returning to Adelaide (where it began, back in 1961), some readers assumed that we were in complete retreat from Melbourne, which had never been envisaged. 'What are you doing back in Melbourne?' people would ask me during my long stints there. ABR's headquarters remain in Melbourne (glorious, insalubrious Richmond, to be precise), but I spend about a third of my time at Flinders, sharing an office with Ruth Starke (Writer in Residence). Ruth writes for us from time to time, reviewing swags of children's books, so the working day often begins with a useful exchange of literary gossip and with mutual incredulity at the frequency with which certain authors publish children's books in this country.

We present most of our Adelaide events in the Radford Auditorium, on Sunday afternoons. Situated behind the Gallery, this was built in the nineteenth century and has previously housed the state archives and the Gallery's library. It seats about 140 people and is nearly full today. Once the audience has assembled, I get up to introduce Ian Donaldson, with a nasty sense that something viral is brooding in my throat.

This is the fourth ABR/La Trobe University Annual Lecture since Peter Porter inaugurated the series in 2002. The previous lecture happened just down the road, in the Mortlock Library, within the State Library of South Australia. This was in December 2004, during the second Adelaide Ring Cycle. It was one of the rest nights during Wagner's tetralogy. It must have been, because the Maestro on that occasion, Israeli Ascher Fisch, was seated in the front row for Peter Goldsworthy's lecture. Peter's theme was the old and vexed, even operatic, one of 'words versus music'. That lecture ended memorably, if unconventionally, with a massed sing-along. I had never thought of Peter Goldsworthy as Bryn Terfel, but he got us all going like the great Welsh ham. Lyrics were handed round, and before long all of us were singing 'Some Enchanted Evening' - not too badly either. Somewhat bizarre it was to look around and see the distinguished audience belting out Rodgers and Hammerstein's great melody. We should have recorded it: our first CD!

Anyway, back in the Radford Auditorium, I warn the audience that anything can happen at these occasions, but Ian Donaldson, duly introduced, quickly disabuses them of this idea, and sticks to his script. His theme is 'Matters of Life and Death: The Return of Biography'. Ian discusses the changing fortunes of biography in recent decades, especially at an academic level, and introduces his five dissentient voices - Terry Eagleton, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Roland Barthes and Stefan Collini - all of whom, in different ways, have questioned biography: its datedness, its relevance, its 'remorseless linearity', its 'Hoovering' tendency, its eschewal of social history. He also covers the myriad forms of the 'new biography': Peter Ackroyd's London: A Biography and Curry: A Biography (not to be confused with the recent biography of the Curies). The range of subjects is awesome: from William Shakespeare and Dr John, to Julian Barnes and Jonathan Coe, to the newly online ADB and a website called 'Pizza Biography'. The audience, at the conclusion of the lecture, is every bit as enthusiastic as the ones in Canberra and Adelaide. I tell them we will publish the essay in our November issue, and online.

Ian Donaldson is worked hard during his short stay in Adelaide. On Monday, he delivers a lecture for Nicholas Jose at the University of Adelaide, then heads out to Flinders for a lunch with members of the School of Humanities. Ian hasn't been back to Flinders since a brief stay in 1974, but his recall of departmental personalities and politics seems to be as acute as his mastery of the rarest masques by Ben Jonson (two of which, newly discovered, he is adding to the General Edition; one of them written, Ian tells me later, to celebrate the opening of a kind of Elizabethan shopping mall).

Lunch over, we move to the Stockdale Room, with its commanding, if slightly dusty, view of Adelaide and the Gulf of St Vincent. Ian delivers his third lecture in thirty-six hours, this time on a subject close to his heart: William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and the invention of authorship. It whets the appetite for the new biography; and for more orations from this remarkably erudite scholar.

On Monday night, putting on another hat, I head off to the city to take part in one of Ken Bolton's regular 'Lee Marvin' series of readings. These take place in the Gallery de la Catessen, down a little lane off Waymouth Street, just opposite New Ltd's impressive new headquarters, whose glassy façade is reflected internally, so to speak, with transparent floors, which must be slightly disconcerting for some employees. The Gallery de la Catessen is much more modest: an old shop now devoted to contemporary music and occasional readings. It seats about thirty or forty people. Everyone is remarkably punctual and orderly. I spot a couple of Creative Writing students from Adelaide who were at Ian Donaldson's lectures. They tell me that the poetry reading scene in Adelaide is quite healthy, which can't be said for Melbourne, I fear.

Ken Bolton asks me to go first - always a relief. By now I have so little voice I feel I should apologise to the audience for croaking at them. Clutching my water bottle like a broken-down athlete after a marathon, I clamber on to the podium. This is set up in front of the shop window. I've never felt like a window display before. Ken Bolton performs the introductions, and we're off.

Critic's blog: Tamas Pataki

2 October, 2006
Tamas Pataki, ABR critic

Tamas Pataki is best known to ABR readers for his La Trobe University Essay ‘Against Religion’, published in the February issue to an unusually heated response. Here, he writes about his background, his critical approach, his reaction to the controversy caused by ‘Against Religion’, and his views about what makes a good book review.

I was born in Sarvar, a small town in the west of Hungary. My parents were Jewish Holocaust survivors and rather demolished by the experience. My father was a skilled tradesman but an indecisive man. He had been planning for years to escape Hungary with his family, but did not act until 1956, at the precise moment the revolution erupted. This coincidence, combined with my once blond hair, has tended to induce suspicions in fellow émigrés that I descended from a family of fascists fleeing Soviet tanks.

My education in Brighton Road Primary State School was essentially Victorian. Ceramic inkwells, nibs and copperplate script were on the way out as I was learning English, but biros were still strictly prohibited. The few poems I know by heart are by Tennyson and Charles Kingsley. I was taught what a bowyang was. In Elwood High we calculated sin, cos and tan using logarithmic tables. At Melbourne University, it was my half-hearted intention to be a mathematician, but I discovered there what novels were and, falling between two stools, took an honours degree in philosophy, and subsequently a doctorate. For the latter I chose to travel, and was supervised in Melbourne by Graeme Marshall, an educated philosopher (now a very rare bird) with a serious interest in the philosophy of mind and action, and, in London, by the late Joseph Sandler, one of the most eminent of psychoanalytic theoreticians. Their interests became mine. I went on to do stints in the Australian federal and Victorian public services ('organisation development', in the main) and to lecture in philosophy in various universities, something I still do intermittently.

I have published several philosophical articles in good academic journals and in five or six academic anthologies, and co-edited (with Michael Levine) Racism in Mind (Cornell University Press, 2004). Whilst Robert Manne was editor of Quadrant, several of my pieces on psychiatry, art, pornography and other topics appeared there. I have reviewed for The Australian, The Age, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Metascience and, of course, Australian Book Review. A review essay, 'Narcissism Incarnate', in The Australian's Review of Books (August 1999) won the Australasian Association of Philosophy Media Prize.

The La Trobe University Essay 'Against Religion' (ABR, February 2006), provoked unusually heated controversy in a literary journal. My purpose was polemical, so the reaction was pleasing. Religion is seeping into almost every corner of political life, and its influence requires exposure and examination. Much that we count as religion contains, in its psycho-social expressions, seeds of destruction. Much of it shares the same underlying psychological structures as various forms of racism and other kinds of prejudice. And yet, there is a great difficulty in censuring religion: the acute awareness all people have of the immense consolations provided by it, especially to those whose lives are blighted and without hope. The belief that enabled me to write the essay - very probably a true belief - is that if I was right about the wishful and delusional foundations of the kinds of religion I targeted, then nothing I or anyone else could write would in the least deprive such people of their consolation.

Essays and critical discussions (in which the reader's familiarity with the text is presupposed) are quite different animals from reviews, especially short ones. It's a humdrum thought, but I think that the first task of a book review is to give the reader a reasonably detailed idea of the subject. Any good book is about many things, of course, and most reviewers instinctively sift for - what is in their lights - the main thing. This will vary according to genre, and in other ways.

Books of philosophy or of ideas (which are mostly what I review) usually seek truths about fairly abstract matters using rational means: they present germane observations and arguments, and reason to conclusions. If I can understand them, I try to give some account of the chief conclusions and arguments, and try to place them and their author in historical and philosophical context. If there is space and occasion, I try to give some sense of the work's organisation, texture and style. If there is still more space, I try to engage the work critically from my own perspective, something of which will have rubbed off on the exposition in any case.

Undoubtedly, reviews should aspire to be intelligent, well written and entertaining. It is often easier to achieve those aims if the review is used mainly as a springboard for the exploration of the critic's own related ideas, which may well be more interesting than the book's. But if a review fails to assist the reader in deciding whether the subject is worth reading about, it fails to be a good review, although it may still be a worthy, or even wonderful, piece of writing.

Inaugural blog: reading round-up

7 August, 2006
Jo Case, Deputy Editor

Working at Australian Book Review, I feel a bit of a duty to read Australian books. I have to admit that at times, when there's nothing around to take my fancy, it's a chore. But recently, I've been more than happy to bury myself in the offerings that land on my desk, rather than venture into my local bookstore and think for myself.

This delicious combination of duty and pleasure began when I thought Ishould read Deborah Robertson's Careless and see what all the critics have been raving about (including Fatherlands author Emily Ballou, in our current issue). Robertson has been noted for her skilful short stories in the past, particularly her acclaimed collection Proudflesh. Coming to an author known for building up a small but respectable fan base through published short fiction is the literary equivalent of discovering a hot 'new' band that's worked their way into the spotlight after years of gigging in pubs. You know that the groundwork has been done, and that is no flash-in-the-pan Next Big Thing dreamed up by a marketing department. So it was no surprise to find that Careless lives up to the hype.

Robertson explores some pretty big issues - new millennium parenting, the responsibilities of motherhood, how individuals (and the wider society) cope with death and the grieving process, personal privacy in our prurient media age. She deftly explores these complex issues, leaving plenty of room for nuance and creating multi-faceted and compelling characters at the same time. It's a combination that can be difficult to pull off - exploring social issues without sacrificing character development - but Robertson does it with aplomb. This is bound to remain one of the books of the year: expect it to resurface in several 'Best of 2006' lists this Christmas, including ABR's in the December/January issue.

Another author who handles complex social issues in the mad modern world is Walkley award-winning journalist Kate Legge, a newcomer to fiction with a long background in newspapers (including political reporting from Canberra and Washington, feature writing, and editorship of something idly called The Australian's Review of Books). Legge's fictional debut was always going to be one to watch. And it's no surprise that a writer whose everyday life is so involved with wider social and political trends has decided to include them as themes in her fiction. I was discussing Legge's book (which I'll review at length in our September issue) with a friend over coffee last week. She asked me what it was about. 'Pretty much everything,' I replied.

The central theme of The Unexpected Elements of Love is global warming. The main character, Janet, is a weather reporter on cable TV. Her eight-year-old son has an irrational fear of the weather. Another central character, ageing sculptor Roy, is similarly obsessed with climate change, which will form the theme for his final work, a controversial commission for the federal weather bureau. Other contemporary themes covered include: post-feminist mothering; IVF; ADHD; ageing and society's attitudes towards the elderly; voluntary euthanasia/assisted suicide; gentrification of the inner-city; and descent into senility. It's a lot to pack into one relatively short novel (256 p), but, once again, it works. Legge is an intelligent and skilful writer, capable of sharp, often sardonic, observations and evocative imagery. The constant references to 'the warming' and the weather can feel laboured at times, but overall this is a marvellous book, with plenty of food for thought.

Another first novel dealing with issues of motherhood and senility (or bringing up children/looking after ageing parents) is Kate Veitch's Listen, released in September. Rosemary is a young mother of four, unhappily mired in 1960s suburban Australia, while the grim London she left behind has transformed into the hub of the swinging sixties. One dreary Christmas Eve, a car pulls up in the driveway. Rosemary tells the kids she is going out for Christmas tree lights, but she never returns. Decades later, her four children have families of their own and are each dealing in their own way with the loss of their mother. At the same time, their much-loved, mild-mannered father is slowly losing his grip on reality. Each of the children starts off as stereotypes - the do-it-all career woman; the beautiful artist; the nerdy school principal and the alcoholic baby/black sheep of the family. But, as the unexpected happens, and they each must take control (or, in one case, relinquish control) of their lives, they develop into much more nuanced characters. It's a simple enough story, but beautifully told and thoroughly enjoyable. Ignore the off-putting Women's Weekly Book Club sticker on the cover - Listen is much better than that and can be enjoyed by readers who wouldn't touch a Women's Weekly if their lives depended on it (or, more likely, if stuck in a doctor's surgery).

Border Street is the first novel from Sydney lawyer Suzanne Leal. It follows the traditional 'semi-autobiographical-first-novel' trajectory more closely than those previously mentioned - but, thankfully, Leal actually has an interesting story to tell. A young couple, Kate and Cameron, snap up a prime Sydney rental property thanks to Kate's instant affinity with their elderly migrant landlords, who live adjacent to the property. The instinctively curious Kate is soon drawn to find out all she can about her neighbours' dark history - their experiences (as Jews) in occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II, their subsequent trials under the Communists (dealt with only fleetingly) and their resettlement in Australia in the late 1960s. The core of the book revolves around budding writer Kate's weekly sessions with Frank and a dictaphone, as she gathers material for a loosely planned writing project. As Kate grows increasingly preoccupied by his tale, and her own moral questions about what she would and would not do under Frank's circumstances, I was sucked in. Frank, in particular, is wonderfully multi-faceted. He is compassionate and generous, but also nosy, broadly judgmental and temperamental, with the political affinities of a talk back radio host. Perhaps the fact that Frank's story is based on Leal's real-life series of interviews with an elderly acquaintance has helped - she has captured rather than created this wonderful character. Complete with glowing recommendations from Gail Jones and Markus Zusak, this is another auspicious debut, with an enthralling story to tell.

The final Australian book to have caught my attention recently was described by its publisher, Black Inc., as 'our Hoi Polloi for 2006'. That's a high benchmark, but Alice Pung's Unpolished Gem is a worthy successor, confirming that Black Inc. has a knack for the evocative coming-of-age memoir. Set in Melbourne's Footscray, Unpolished Gem traces the evolution of the author's Cambodian-Chinese family, from her parents' arrival in Melbourne, grandmother in tow, in the 1970s. Pung (like Sherborne) has a seductive way with language, an eye for telling detail, and a gift for comic dialogue. I live in Melbourne's West, near Footscray, and it was an unexpected delight to rediscover the streets and surrounds I know so well through the eyes of an utterly different household. For me, much of Footscray (heavily populated by Asian and African immigrants) is a window onto another world, one I can superficially glimpse but never fully enter or understand. Alice Pung takes the reader on a journey through the looking-glass to the 'wonderland' that is Footscray (and yes, she was named after THAT Alice) in Unpolished Gem. Readers without the extra edge of local knowledge that I experienced will feel a similar thrill of entering another world.

AND ANOTHER THING (okay, two other things …)

I want to close with a couple of observations on the (very occasionally) intersecting worlds of books and TV.
Actor William McInnes (another fellow traveller from Melbourne's West), veteran of the popular Blue Heelers, smash-hit Seachange and the critically acclaimed film Look Both Ways, must be every book publicist's dream. Television appearances? No problem! Not only has first-time novelist William done the rounds of the morning shows coveted by less marketable novelists, but I walked into the lounge room on Sunday to find him good-naturedly plugging Cricket Kings on Channel Nine's Any Given Sunday. It may be no problem for William to get valuable prime-time screen time, but it did look like he was having trouble getting his panel members to look interested in the book. I was just in time to catch swimmer Nicole Stevens pick up the book, flick through it with a blank face, and say 'Oh yeah, I'm definitely going to read this book. I'll read a couple of paragraphs later on.' I hope any members of the viewing audience who decide to read the book will (at least plan to) invest in more then a couple of paragraphs. Literary authors who complain about interviewers not reading their book before they speak to them (which I agree is both rude and slack) can now spare a thought for poor William … at least literary journos PRETEND to have read the book!

Lastly, I was fascinated to catch the ABC's latest attempt at translating arts criticism into good television, the First Tuesday Book Club, hosted by the effervescent Jennifer Byrne. I was relieved to discover that, unlike last year's well-meant (but ultimately execrable) Vulture, First Tuesday works. The panel (Jason Steger, Marieke Hardy, Jacki Weaver and Peter Cundall) represented a diverse range of views and personalities, and none of them came across as if delivering verdicts from 'on high'. They seemed aware that their opinions are just that. And as host, Byrne (ABC reporter extraordinaire and former publishing director of Reed Books) was warm and engaging, wearing her intelligence lightly without discarding it altogether. A rare combination, especially on television. The inclusion of Bret Easton Ellis's notorious satirical splatterfest, American Psycho, was a stroke of genius. It sat alongside Miles Franklin winner's Roger McDonald's far more worthy The Ballad of Desmond Kale as an unfailingly juicy talking point. The success of the inclusion is confirmed on the ABC message board, where to date there are sixty-two posts on American Psycho and just eight on The Ballad of Desmond Gale. In contrast to the old Vulture online discussion, this one is overwhelmingly positive and congratulatory in tone, though viewers seemed divided on the inclusion of token Bright Young Thing Marieke Hardy (actress/scriptwriter, granddaughter of Frank), is she annoying or a breath of fresh air? Look out for next month's double billing: The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and Dava Sobel's Longitude (which has, sadly, replaced Helen Garner's The First Stone, as originally scheduled).

Speaking of book clubs, literary 'bloggers' community' Sarsaparilla (whose rollcall includes ABR senior contributor Kerryn Goldsworthy) have started their own informal book club in reaction to the Australian/Patrick White imbroglio. Interested members will actually be reading a Patrick White novel. After much democratic discussion, the chosen novel was The Vivisector. Why did no one else think of this refreshingly sane response?