By Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp
October 26, 2023 — 12.00am
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Let’s Never Speak of This Again
Megan Williams, Text, $24.99
Let’s Never Speak of This Again won the Text Prize for YA fiction. It’s a bittersweet and relatable portrait of adolescence, and what an awkward comedy of errors it can be. Sixteen-year-old Abby is happy enough. Sure, her mum’s a bit of a helicopter, and she herself makes mortifying moves, like that time she kissed her cousin’s cousin at a wedding, but with her best friend Ella, she’s convinced to muddle through. When a new girl, Chloe, enters their friendship circle and seems to supplant her bond with Ella, Abby’s jealousy surfaces. She wishes some dire fate would befall her BFF. When it does, the tragedy forces Abby into a more mature perspective. Typical teenage concerns consume Abby’s attention, like sex and parties, pushing boundaries, tensions with parents, the intrigue and drama of high-school socialisation, and the book’s great strength is her endearing internal monologue, full of the humour and vitality and confusion of teenage years, with a hint of elegy at their transience.
Pearl
Sian Hughes, UQP, $27.99
Longlisted for the Booker, this delicate meditation on grief takes inspiration from the late medieval poem Pearl, composed by the unidentified author of Gawain and the Green Knight.
Where that work is a dream vision of a father mourning his daughter, Sian Hughes’ novel focuses on a child losing her mother at a formative age. Marianne looks back on haunting moments from her childhood in rural England in the late 20th century. Now a young woman on the cusp of motherhood herself, she reflects on how obsessed she became by her mother’s disappearance and her father’s secrecy, how she discovered the medieval poem of the book’s title and undertook to illustrate it, a task she could never bring herself to complete. If grief is portrayed as always unfinished, the consequence is drawn with melancholy intensity, and Hughes is acute on the dreamlike quality of dissociated states and legacy of traumatic memory.
The Modern
Anna Kate Blair, Scribner, $32.99
Millennial angst hovers like some narcissistic fog over Anna Kate Blair’s The Modern, a debut novel that follows Sophia, a 29-year-old Australian woman working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s a plum if precarious job, and Sophia’s engagement to a rich Ivy Leaguer, Robert, has a similar vibe: the sheen of status gleams over hollowness and insecurity. When Robert leaves for an extended hike through the Appalachians, Sophia meets the streetwise Cara by chance, and soon becomes infatuated by her. She takes to tracking her new crush on socials, in one of the sharper passages, although the love triangle remains oddly undeveloped and the themes it raises aren’t elaborated through character. Almost clinically obsessed by what others think of her, Sophia has lost sight of her own identity to a degree that’s likely to frustrate readers.
Bali – Ashes to Ashes
Kerry B. Collison, Sid Harta, $24.95
Indonesia is an obsession for Kerry B. Collison, a former Australian military and intelligence operative who worked there during the so-called “years of living dangerously”. He has written numerous novels since, many steeped in Indonesian history and politics, and in Bali – Ashes to Ashes, Collison reaches back to the early 20th century to a brutal episode. In 1904, Dutch colonial authorities used the pretext of a shipwreck to subjugate by military force the remaining rajas in Bali’s south. Many committed ritual suicide (puputan) in battle against overwhelming odds. Meanwhile, that wrecked ship disgorges an American artist, Christopher Barton, who’s washed ashore and saved by locals, beginning a family saga that will result in unwitting incest. Bali’s turbulent past is mashed into lurid historical fiction. The book doesn’t shrink from Orientalist views or terminology and, alas, the prose itself is often comically purple with syntax that can be difficult to follow.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Eventually Everything Connects
Sarah Firth, Joan, $34.95
Language is so structured around binaries – good/bad, happy/sad, love/hate – it can be hard to escape its rigid, black and white logic.
Which is why a graphic essay, such as those found in this collection, can go where words can’t, capturing life in all its inexpressible messiness and transforming abstract concepts into vividly realised images. Sarah Firth isn’t afraid to tango with the big questions of existence. How to reconcile the horror in the world with the beauty, how to find joy amid the Sisyphian labour of daily chores and mundane demands. Questions about the nature of consciousness, reality and selfhood, about sex and sensuality and about our responsibility for the state of the planet are made visceral and urgent through Firth’s commanding graphics, her creative interrogation of her own mind and experiences, and her willingness to see life as an ongoing experiment.
Technofeudalism
Yanis Varoufakis
The Bodley Head, $36.99
In the early 1990s, when Yanis Varoufakis went to his parents’ home in Athens to install a modem to connect their computer to the internet, his father asked him the killer question that inspired this book: “Now that computers speak to each other, will this network make capitalism impossible to overthrow? Or might it finally reveal its Achilles heel?” With disturbing persuasiveness and a teacher’s flair for explaining difficult concepts, Varoufakis argues the latter. The internet shattered capitalism’s evolutionary fitness, he says, replacing it with technofeudalism which has turned us all into “cloud serfs” who generate the stock of cloud capital – stories, videos, photos and other material – for free. Under this regime, “we no longer own our own minds”. It’s a grim diagnosis but, in the final chapter, he offers a glimmer of hope in the potential for democratic rebellion inherent in the cloud itself.
The Twat Files
Dawn French
Michael Joseph, $36.99
Dawn French hears that her friend Ben Elton’s first play is going to open at the West End in London and is desperate for a role. When they next meet, he tells her, “I want to ask you to play the lead...” French is over the moon, thanking him profusely, promising she won’t let him down. A bemused Elton replies, “I want to ask HUGH. Hugh Laurie.” Elton does end up writing a play for French. It is called Silly Cow. This is a classic example of the kind of excruciatingly funny anecdotes that Dawn tells about her stuff-ups over the years and what they have taught her about herself. Story after laugh-out-loud story in this wise, exuberant and therapeutic book shows that realising you’ve been a twat and not being afraid to admit it can be utterly liberating. She urges us to start allowing our own mistakes to amuse us. “I promise you,” she writes, “there is abundant joy to be found in our flaws.”
Zero Risk
Tony Loughran
Echo Publishing, $34.99
As a boy growing up in Liverpool, Tony Loughran longed for his father’s approval. Determined to prove himself, he channelled his fascination with danger into his work as a medic in the navy, as a commando and as safety and security advisor for the BBC working to protect journalists, especially in war zones.
While his attraction to risk and later, his desire to manage it, made for a high-octane existence, it also came at a cost. As he acknowledges in this briskly told, action-packed memoir, risks also provided him with “a way out of difficult personal situations – better a flight to Bangladesh or Afghanistan than facing a tough discussion with your partner.” There is no such thing as zero risk, which makes the title of this book somewhat ironic. Yet it signals Loughran’s drive to minimise it as much as possible and to raise the bar on how much risk is considered acceptable.
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