Category: Fourth Estate

Author, Book review, essays, Fourth Estate, Holly Ringland, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Self-help

‘The House That Joy Built’ by Holly Ringland

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Non-fiction – hardcover; 4th Estate; 288 pages; 2023.

Self-help books, even if they are about creativity (one of my pet subjects), aren’t normally my cup of tea, but when I picked up Holly Ringland’s The House That Joy Built in my local independent bookshop, attracted by its beautiful cover, I started to read the first page — and was hooked.

Many of you may be familiar with the author, who is Australian and grew up in Queensland. She has two international bestselling novels to her name — The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (which has been adapted for TV) and The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding — but I haven’t read either of them.

The book is a clarion call to just do that creative thing  — write a book, design a garden, draw a picture, knit a jumper — that you have always wanted to do but keep putting off, because you’re scared of failing or think you don’t have the time or are just waiting for the right circumstances.

In fact, Holly’s advice could be boiled down to a simple sentence: feel the fear and do it anyway.

The urge to create

In her opening chapter, she says The House That Joy Built is aimed at anyone with a creative urge “at any stage of development and engagement”.

It’s for writers, but it’s also for gardeners, carpenters, sculptors, jewellery-makers, yoga teachers, fashion designers, florists, songwriters, dancers, cooks, painters … anyone with a desire to create but who, like me, sometimes stumbles to engage with that desire because of fear. Fear of feeling afraid, of vulnerability, of criticism and judgement of others, of shame, of facing the past, of facing ourselves, of not being good enough, of not having enough, of having ‘bad’ ideas, of having ‘good’ ideas, of being ‘too much’. That is who this book is for — those who are stuck creatively, who long to create but don’t know how to find a way into, or back to, their imagination.

The book expertly marries memoir with hard-won advice and is easy to read and engaging. I was worried it might be riddled with new age/wellness/spiritual drivel, sending my bullshit detector into overdrive, but it’s very much based on first-hand experience and feels authentic.

And Holly is always quick to point out that what works for her, may not necessarily work for you, stating that “none of this is prescriptive”. It’s that kind of self-awareness I appreciate.

This isn’t a how-to book. Neither is it a workbook full of exercises. It’s not a step-by-step guide to creative writing, or writing a novel, or being a ‘good’ writer, or becoming any kind of artist. It is not written by a neurological, behavioural or social science expert. This book doesn’t assume that we have the same circumstances, come from the same childhoods or backgrounds, or have equal privilege and opportunities.

Interconnected essays

There are eight chapters, each of which explores a particular type of fear and reads like a standalone essay (there’s a helpful endnotes section where all her sources are carefully cited).

Although it’s clearly been written with an overarching narrative in mind (that is, the essays are connected), you don’t necessarily have to read it in order — you could simply cherry-pick the bits you were most interested in:

  • Fear + Play
  • Self-doubt + self-compassion
  • Failure + nothing is wasted
  • Procrastination + presence
  • Inner critic + inner fan
  • Outer critic + resilience
  • Creative block + daydream machine
  • Imposter syndrome + you belong here

At the end of each chapter is a page of questions — which are called Provocations — for reflection. Admittedly, I baulked at this, but I appreciate some readers might find them useful.

A friendly guide

Overall, it’s a well-researched book, full of insight and personal knowledge. It’s upbeat and inspiring.

It’s occasionally repetitive (that is, we are told the same thing multiple times but in slightly different ways) and sometimes strays into pop psychology. There’s also a tendency to wear its sincerity too obviously on its sleeve. But I liked the intimate tone, almost as if Holly is a friend letting you in on some big secrets.

If I learned anything from The House That Joy Built it is this: creating things is good for us, but we have to make the time and effort to do it (a bit like maintaining this blog for almost 20 years). We should never feel guilty about creating things. Or, as Holly puts it:

Giving ourselves permission to create and to revel in the joy of creating is a powerful act of resisting cynicism and scarcity. To choose to make art when there’s so much grief, despair, suffering, cruelty and tragedy in the world is to choose to connect with the best parts of ourselves and each other as humans.

Author, Book review, Fourth Estate, History, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Reading First Nations Writers, Reading Projects, Stan Grant

‘The Queen is Dead’ by Stan Grant

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Non-fiction – paperback; 4th Estate; 304pp; 2023.

Stan Grant’s latest book, The Queen is Dead, blends lived experience with factual journalism and memoir to tell a compelling story about Australia’s colonisation under Empire.

It asks important questions about the monarchy and why Australia so willingly accepted (and promoted) the seamless transition of King Charles III reign without properly considering the perspective of First Nations people, both at home and abroad, of this news.

I began reading it just days before Grant, a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi man, announced he was stepping back from his role presenting the panel discussion show Q&A on ABC TV because of the racism he’d experienced following the King’s coronation.

Toxic racism

That racism, mainly via social media, came as a direct result of his contribution to the TV coverage of the coronation in which he discussed the Crown’s legacy — massacres and segregation of his people, invasion and theft of their land. Taken out of context, his commentary (or “truth-telling” as I call it) was viewed as being unsuitable for the occasion in the same way as saying horrible things about someone at their funeral would not be wholly appropriate.

The ABC failed to come to his defence even though it had invited him on the show to talk about this specific issue (italics are mine), and so he was left to deal with the toxic social media comments, or “racial filth” as he describes it, alone. But Grant claims he was speaking “truth with love”. (You can read his statement, published on the ABC website, here.)

Knowing this background lends The Queen is Dead a particular potency. It exposes the awful truth of the monarchy’s impact on First Nations people, not just here in Australia but around the world, and highlights the disconnect between the Crown, represented by Queen Elizabeth II, and the legacy of impoverishment and imprisonment experienced by Indigenous Australians created in its name and which she never acknowledged in her lifetime (italics are mine).

Death of a monarch

Grant begins his book with Queen Elizabeth II’s death after her 70-year reign, but this is not really a story about the Queen per se. Yes, it’s about what the Crown represents, especially under Empire, and yes, it argues that there’s no place for it in a modern forward-thinking world.

But the crux of The Queen is Dead is less about monarchy and more about Whiteness (it is capitalised in the book) and the West, both of which are social constructs and can, therefore, be changed (as Grant’s logic suggests).

Some of his arguments are confronting, especially if you are White, a royalist, British or a combination thereof, and the anger is palpable, but in laying bare the truth, he shows us a path to reconciliation. He argues that the Queen’s death — she is described as “the last White Queen” throughout — offers a chance to reset, end the monarchy in Australia and redress the bitter legacy of colonialism for Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

What is Whiteness?

Here’s how he describes Whiteness, which he claims is an invention of the British:

In her land [the Queen’s], under the rule of her ancestors, Whiteness was born. No, invented. Because Whiteness is an invention. It was created to crush other people. Whiteness made the world, a world dominated by force, and then it made its domination legal. It wrote laws that underwrote the theft of other people’s land, It wrote laws that put chains around the necks of Black people and put them to work to make untold riches for White people. The great destructive power of Whiteness was to decide who was White. It divided up the world and placed Whiteness at the top.

Later, he adds that Whiteness is not White people:

It is an organising principle. It is a way of ordering the world. It is an invention. An idea. A curse.

Grant asks whether it is possible to be ever truly post-racial, suggesting that even those White people who are allies aren’t fully aware of their own unconscious bias. When reporters, for instance, claim it is the colour of someone’s skin that got them killed by a terrorist, Grant says that logic is wrong:

There is nothing in the colour of their skin that should mean they are gunned down in broad daylight. Their skin has nothing to do with it. They were killed because of what the crazed White man with a gun believed about Black skin.

Later, he argues that White people are “tempted by amnesia” and he is often asked why he simply can’t move on when he mentions the negative legacy of the Queen’s rule.

I know why forgetting is so prized. Because the past is too ugly to look upon. While ever there is the past, there can be no peace.

Angry and profound

The book is heavy going, not in its prose style, which is clear and concise and often elegant, but in the heft of its ideas and the weight of its anger. And yet, I found it utterly compelling and read it in two sittings. But afterwards, in the wake of what I’d just read, I had to let it sit with me, I had to process and digest it before I was comfortable enough to write about it. (How long did that take? The answer: six weeks.)

I feel angry on Grant’s behalf. I see images of the royals now and I feel a deep loathing for them in a way I never loathed them before (don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been a fan but I kind of tolerated them as figures of fascination).

I can’t understand the Australian media’s obsession with them and the almost near sycophancy of the coronation and everything Charles has done since his mother’s death. The pomp and ceremony of the recent Trooping the Colour, for instance, just looked like an anachronistic throwback, completely inappropriate and utterly frivolous at a time of world crisis. I can’t even begin to imagine what my First Nations colleagues at work think — and dare not ask.

The Queen is Dead is subtitled “The Time has come for a Reckoning”. My hope is that Australians will rally behind this idea when the Voice Referendum is held later this year. The eyes of the world will be watching.

I read this book for my ongoing #ReadingFirstNationsWriters project, which you can read more about here. You can see all the books reviewed as part of this project on my dedicated First Nations Writers page. 

Australia, Author, Book review, Fiction, Fourth Estate, Jacqueline Maley, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘The Truth About Her’ by Jacqueline Maley

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Fiction – paperback; Fourth Estate; 356 pages; 2021.

The summer after I wrote the story that killed Tracey Doran, I had just stopped sleeping with two very different men, following involvement in what some people on the internet called a ‘sex scandal’, although when it was described that way it didn’t seem like the kind of thing that happened to me.

So begin’s Jacqueline Maley’s The Truth About Her, a story about a newspaper journalist whose work — and messy sex life — comes back to bite her.

Journalist in trouble

This literary-novel-cum-psychological-thriller is set in Sydney and follows the pursuits of Suzy Hamilton, a hardworking investigative journalist who normally writes about politics. Indeed, when the novel opens, she discovers that she’s being sued for defaming a retired media mogul in a 400-word piece she wrote covering a former prime minister’s funeral.

But she steps outside her normal reporting expertise when she gets a tip-off that Tracey Doran, a local wellness blogger, organic food expert, social media influencer and podcaster, isn’t all she’s cracked up to be. The story is too good to ignore, so she writes one that exposes the truth behind Tracey’s lies.

Tracey, it turns out, hasn’t cured herself of cancer, as she claims, because she never had cancer in the first place. (If this sounds vaguely familiar it’s probably because it borrows heavily on the Belle Gibson scandal in which an Australian wellness guru was found guilty of fraud. You can read more about that on Wikipedia or watch the documentary ‘Bad Influencer’ which is currently available on BBC iPlayer in the UK and ABC iView in Australia.)

Following the publication of the story, Tracey commits suicide. (This, by the way, isn’t a plot spoiler — it happens in the first chapter. The novel is about the outfall of this event, not the event itself.)

Suzy, shocked by the news, tries not to take it to heart — everyone, after all, keeps telling her it’s not her fault.

But when she starts receiving intimidating messages and items in the post reminding her that Tracey is dead, it’s hard to ignore the consequences of writing the story. When Tracey’s mother starts pursuing her, demanding she write Tracey’s story the way she wants it to be written — a form of redemption, if you will — it all gets a bit messy and stressful.

While all this is going on, Suzy is juggling single-motherhood, worrying about her financial situation and anxious that the house she lives in rent-free, courtesy of an aged uncle, is about to be sold out from underneath her feet. Then there’s her judgemental mother, alcoholic (but kindly) father and two different lovers to worry about.

All of Suzy’s anger, guilt, shame, frustration, anxiety and stress resonate off the page.

UK edition (published by Borough Press)

Densely written story

The Truth About Her is a densely written novel, and despite the suspenseful nature of it — is Tracey’s mother, for instance, going to wreak violent revenge, and what is “the incident” Suzy keeps referring to which brought about the end of her marriage — I found my interest waning in places. There are too many detailed scenes and conversations, which help develop the characters but don’t do much to move the story along.

I sometimes felt that the author couldn’t make up her mind as to whether this was a book about mothering or a book about the consequences of a journalist’s actions. Trying to do both just made for a long, not always absorbing, tale — for this reader anyway.

That said, I did like the way the novel explores the ethical dilemmas faced by journalists, including the “ownership” of stories (and images), the boundaries between subject and story, and the difficulties associated with telling the truth. Ultimately, this isn’t a book about journalism, but a book about power: who has it, how it’s acquired, how it’s lost and why it’s important.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Fourth Estate, literary fiction, London, Meg Mason, Publisher, Setting

‘Sorrow and Bliss’ by Meg Mason

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Fiction – paperback; Fourth Estate; 346 pages; 2020.

Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss is one of those novels that seemed to be everywhere in 2021, earning rave reviews and hitting the bestseller charts around the world.

It’s the story of Martha Russell, a woman who struggles to maintain her sanity in the face of an undiagnosed mental illness.

After a short-lived, unconsummated marriage to a “total fuckwit”, she gets married to a childhood friend, Patrick, whom she’s known since she was 16. But while that marriage lasts considerably longer than her first, it also fails when her husband walks out two days after her 40th birthday party.

Disintegration of a marriage

The novel charts the disintegration of the marriage in tandem with Martha’s increasingly bizarre behaviour, which goes up and down like a roller coaster, and her quest to get answers to her psychological problems, which include crippling depression, unexplained bouts of sudden anger and suicidal thoughts.

Normal people say, I can’t imagine feeling so bad I’d genuinely want to die. I do not try and explain that it isn’t that you want to die. It is that you know you are not supposed to be alive, feeling a tirelessness that powders your bones, a tiredness with so much fear. The unnatural fact of living is something you must eventually fix.

It’s written in the first person in an engaging, likable voice full of mordant wit. There is something starkly funny on every page, and it’s this dark sense of humour, expertly balanced with a sense of pathos, that elevates the narrative into something surprisingly upbeat despite the bleak subject matter.

It expertly weaves Martha’s background into the story, so that we get a full rounded picture of her upbringing, the product of a Bohemian London family — her father is a failed poet, her mother a struggling sculptor — largely supported by a rich aunt, who lives in Belgravia, on the same square that is home to Margaret Thatcher.

The passing of time is measured by the number of Christmas Day dinners hosted by Aunt Winsome and the number of children her sister, Ingrid, has with her husband Hamish — “a man she met by falling over in front of his house while he was putting his bins out”.

She is pregnant with her fourth child; when she texted to say it was another boy, she sent the eggplant emoji, the cherries and the open scissors. She said ‘Hamish is non-figuratively getting the snip.’

It’s her close relationship with Ingrid, who is 15 months younger than her, that gives shape to Martha’s life. They have each other’s backs, but there are tensions, petty fights and falling outs. It’s tender and touching — and often blackly funny.

The story is deeply rooted in London life — the family home, for instance, is on Goldhawk Road — and the various neighbourhoods are faithfully depicted to provide a richly atmospheric novel.

Laughter and sadness

There’s a lot to like in Sorrow and Bliss, not least the way the author explores family loyalty, the forces that shape our personalities and how having it all doesn’t automatically bestow happiness upon us. It’s the kind of book that makes you cry on one page, laugh on the next — and sometimes do both at the same time!

That said, around the halfway mark I began to find the voice wearisome. Perhaps I have just read one too many books about women losing their grip on reality?

According to Amazon, Sorrow and Bliss was “an instant Sunday Times bestseller and a book of the year for the Times and Sunday Times, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Mail on Sunday, Evening Standard, Spectator, Daily Express, Irish Times, Irish Examiner, Irish Daily Mail, Metro, Critic, Sydney Morning Herald, Los Angeles Times, Stylist, Red and Good Housekeeping”.

And it has scored rave reviews from all and sundry, including celebrities (hello Gillian Anderson) and authors, such as Jessie Burton, Anne Patchett and David Nicholls.

For another blogger’s take on this novel, please see Tony’s review.

If you liked this, you might also like:

‘The Trick is to Keep Breathing’ by Janice Galloway: A young woman suffers a profoundly disturbing mental breakdown following the death of her secret lover.

‘A Line Made by Walking’ by Sara Baume: A 25-year-old woman, who is chronically depressed but refusing to take medication, decamps to her late grandmother’s house in the countryside to get better, but her mind slowly unravels.

‘Nobody is ever Missing’ by Catherine Lacey: A young Manhattan-based woman escapes her crumbling marriage to hitchhike around New Zealand, but her journey descends into a kind of madness as she grapples with her past, her present and her future.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Fourth Estate, literary fiction, New York, Publisher, Setting, Virginia Feito

‘Mrs March’ by Virginia Feito

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Fiction – paperback; Fourth Estate; 304 pages; 2021.

I have been reading some quite serious and heavy books recently (some of which are yet to be reviewed), so how delightful it was to pick up Virginia Feito’s Mrs March for some wickedly good fun!

Set in New York’s exclusive Upper East Side, this debut novel tells the story of the titular Mrs March, who is married to celebrated author George March, a man 11 years her senior, to whom she is devoted, mainly because of the status and wealth his success brings. (They’ve been married a long time and it’s fair to say her love for him has waned somewhat.)

So imagine her horror when one day, out buying her regulation olive bread from the local patisserie shop, she discovers that readers believe that Johanna, the lead character in George’s latest bestselling book, is based on her. She’s outraged because Johanna is a whore past her prime, and Mrs March is a fine upstanding citizen, albeit slightly fake and needy, who believes that appearances are everything.

Distraught by this news, she comes home and pulls George’s book from the shelf. In the acknowledgements she notices that she has been thanked as “a constant source of inspiration”:

Mrs March clutched her breast, breathing hard, faintly aware that tears were falling amidst convulsive gasps. Then she shook the book, smashed it against the desk, opened it to the author photograph on the jacket flap, clawed out George’s eyes, scratched out the threaded spine, and pulled out fistfuls of pages—which flew around the room like feathers.

Losing her grip on reality

From this moment on, Mrs March’s behaviour becomes increasingly more bizarre and deranged. Having snooped in George’s study for more evidence, she discovers a newspaper clipping of a young woman who has gone missing and she somehow gets it into her head that her husband has murdered her. What follows is a slippery slope of mental anguish and upset, morphing into paranoia and a conviction that her husband is guilty.

Mrs March’s behaviour becomes farcical. But there’s nothing she won’t stoop to — including impersonating an investigative journalist from the New York Times — in a bid to get to the truth.

Of course, a story like this can’t help but be wildly funny. I tittered a lot through this novel. The abhorrent behaviour of Mrs March, her undisguised but unconscious snobbery, made me laugh. Take this simple example:

As the party progressed, the living room fattening with each new arrival, Mrs March tasked Martha with attending to the guest bathroom regularly, to fold the towels and freshen the toilet seat and floor with a light ammonia solution. The sharp antiseptic vapors merged with the sticky, sappy scent of pine, creating a smell so distinct that guests would, on future visits to hospitals or upon passing a storekeeper emptying a bucket of mop water onto the street, instantly recall that last party at the Marches.

Or this little snide remark about the noise of clacking high heels in the apartment directly above:

She didn’t know who owned the apartment right above theirs, but every time she saw a woman in heels in the lobby she would consider approaching her, maybe befriending her so that one day she could mention, in a casual, offhand manner, the surprising benefits of house slippers.

As you can tell from these quotes, the story is written in the third person, but very much from Mrs March’s point of view. We really have no idea what goes on in the head of her husband, nor her young son, Jonathan, with whom she has a rather detached relationship.

A black comedy of manners

This is a book about manners, a black comedy, if you will, with a dark twist, and it’s written with a big nod to Patricia Highsmith and perhaps even Michael Dibden.

I really loved following Mrs March’s increasingly outrageous antics, but I also worried for her sanity — and wanted to let her know that maybe she should just take a chill pill! It’s unsettling and disturbing, hugely suspenseful and a terrific page-turner. Most of all, it is simply great fun.

A movie adaptation, starring Elisabeth Moss, has been slated. I suspect it will be a hoot!

For other takes on this novel, please see:

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2021), Author, Book review, England, Fiction, Fourth Estate, historical fiction, literary fiction, Penelope Fitzgerald, Publisher, Setting

‘The Bookshop’ by Penelope Fitzgerald

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Fourth Estate; 156 pages; 2006.

A good book is the precious life-blood of a masterspirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond
life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.

A book about a bookshop seems hard to resist, right?

Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop — first published in 1978 — has languished in my TBR for years, but I was only encouraged to read it after I watched the film adaptation last week (it’s streaming on SBS on Demand for anyone in Australia who fancies checking it out). Unfortunately, the film was a bit on the dull side (despite great performances from Emily Mortimer and Bill Nighy), so I wanted to find out whether the book was better.

And it was.

While the film is faithful to the novel in terms of dialogue, characters and plot, it somehow fails to capture the subtle humour and the little digs at busybodies and those who wish to keep a good woman down, as it were.

And it also neglects to even mention the supernatural element of the storyline in which the lead character, Florence Green, is pestered by a poltergeist (or “rapper” as the locals call it)^^. Perhaps the filmmakers thought that might distract from the main storyline, which is a bittersweet tale about a widow who opens a bookshop against the wishes of the community “elite” who would rather an arts centre was established in the town.

A comedy of manners

Set in East Anglia, in 1959, the book is essentially a comedy of manners. It’s about petty-minded villagers who rail against Florence’s plan to open a bookshop in the small town of Hardborough on the coast — although it’s never made entirely clear why they think it is so objectionable.

Florence is kind-hearted but she’s also determined to do her own thing. (And maybe that’s why the locals are so against a bookshop being set up — women, after all, should be home makers and looking after children, but Florence is widowed and child free and she has a dream she wants to fulfil.)

She buys the Old House — “built five hundred years ago out of earth, straw, sticks and oak beams” — which has been vacant for years and is rumoured to be haunted by a poltergeist.

The noise upstairs stopped for a moment and then broke out again, this time downstairs and apparently just outside the window, which shook violently. It seemed to be on the point of bursting inwards. Their teacups shook and spun in the saucers. There was a wild rattling as though handful after handful of gravel or shingle was being thrown by an idiot against the glass.

Florence isn’t put off by this. She ignores the noise and the unexpected occurrences and gets on with the business of opening her shop, which also includes a lending library. She hires a local school girl, the forthright 10-year-old Christine, who helps out after class even though she doesn’t like books and isn’t particularly studious. Her working class parents, it seems, need the money.

The relationship between the older woman and her young charge is one of the sweeter elements of the book. Florence tolerates Christine’s rudeness and her sharp manner and tries to help her study for her 11-plus exam which will determine whether she goes to a grammar school or a technical school.

Other relationships develop over the course of the book. A strange older man by the name of Mr Brundish becomes a loyal customer and helps Florence decide whether she should stock the controversial Lolita to sell to the inhabitants of Hardborough. “They won’t understand it,” he tells her, “but that is all to the good. Understanding makes the mind lazy.” She orders 250 copies.

By contrast, the charming (read slightly sleazy) Milo North, who commutes to London where he works at the BBC, is often on her case. When they meet at a grand party for the first time he asks her whether she is “well advised to undertake the running of a business” and claims that he will never visit her shop. He’s on the side of Mrs Gamart, “the natural patroness of all public activities in Hardborough”, who wants the Old House to be used as an arts centre for chamber music, lectures and art displays even though the building had been on the market for six months and no one but Florence had expressed an interest in buying it.

A successful business

Despite the local animosity and the challenges that confront Florence, including from her own solicitor and the opening of a rival store in a nearby town, the business is a relative success, and the story, while not exactly light-hearted, has a vein of gentle comedy running throughout it.

‘I don’t know why I bought these,’ Florence reflected after one of these visits. ‘Why did I take them? No one used force. No one advised me.’ She was looking at 200 Chinese book-markers, handpainted on silk. The stork for longevity, the plum-blossom for happiness. Her weakness for beauty had betrayed her. It was inconceivable that anyone else in Hardborough should want them. But Christine was consoling: the visitors would buy them – come the summer, they didn’t know what to spend their money on.

Sadly, there are greater unseen forces at work which put Florence’s livelihood at risk and the novel, for all it’s comic moments, nuanced observations and evocative descriptions of the Suffolk landscape, ends on a terribly sad note.

I enjoyed its commentary on class and ambition, courage and optimism, and think it’s probably the kind of story that benefits from a close second reading. The introduction to my edition, by novelist David Nicholls, is worth reading (but only after you have finished the book), as is the preface by Hermione Lee, who has written a biography about the author.

The Bookshop was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978. The winner that year was Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea.

^^ Update 20 August: Apparently the supernatural element wasn’t ignored, I just did not notice it when I watched the film.

This is my 17th book for #20booksofsummer 2021 edition. I bought it in paperback so long ago that I can’t remember the date, but I also have it on Kindle, which is how I read it for the purposes of this review.

Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2021, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Fourth Estate, Leah Swann, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, Southern Cross Crime Month 2021

‘Sheerwater’ by Leah Swann

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Fiction – paperback; Fourth Estate; 308 pages; 2020.

Sheerwater by Leah Swann is one of those rare treats of a novel that marries beautiful prose with wonderfully realised characters and then combines this with a compelling, fast-paced plot and lots of thought-provoking current issues to lend it relevance.

It’s probably best described as a literary crime novel, though it also ticks boxes for suspense and psychological thriller, too.

The third-person narrative spans three tense days and culminates in a shocking, yet totally credible ending, the sort that could have been lifted from today’s news. I came away from it reeling and I have been thinking about it ever since.

An eventful drive

The story is framed around Ava, a young woman, who has quit her job and left her husband. With two young children, Max and Teddy, in tow, she makes a long drive towards the coast, where she plans to begin a new life in a little town called Sheerwater, somewhere off the Great Ocean Road.

But en route Ava witnesses something that will thwart her plans: she sees a light plane go down in a field and decides to stop and help. Imploring her boys to remain in the car with their pet dog, Winks, for company, she attends the accident scene, but when she returns to the car, having done all she could to help the injured, she discovers that her boys are gone. Only the dog remains.

The police are called and an investigation ensues. The boys’ father is number one suspect, but how did he know Ava’s whereabouts? And why is she on the run from him?

Multiple points of view

While the story is largely told from Ava’s point of view, we also get to hear from her husband, Laurence, and her son, Max, in standalone chapters written from their individual perspectives. This is a clever device because it not only lets us see what happens to the boys and gives us some background on Ava’s marriage, it also makes the reader question who is telling the truth? Which perspective is correct?

Max’s voice is particularly well done because we get to see the complexities of the scary adult world through a sensitive nine-year-old boy’s eyes. It is, by turns, warm and tender, heart rending and brave. I can’t be the only reader who didn’t want to step into the pages to give him a protective hug.

The ending, which draws together this trio of narrative threads, is unexpectedly shocking.

Sheerwater is a truly memorable read. It’s devastating but beautiful, too, and I’m hoping this debut author turns her hand to something else soon. If it is half as good as this novel, I will be clamouring to read it.

Sue at Whispering Gums has reviewed this one, too.

About the author¹: Leah Swann is the award-winning author of the short story collection Bearings, shortlisted for the Dobbie Award, and the middle-grade fantasy series Irina: The Trilogy. Her short fiction and poetry has been published in numerous literary magazines, and she works as a journalist and speech-writer. Sheerwater is her debut novel. Leah lives in Melbourne with her family.   (1. Source: Harper Collins website.)

Where to buy: Currently only available in Australia and New Zealand.

This is my 9th book for #SouthernCrossCrime2021 which I am hosting on this blog between 1st March and 31st March. To find out more, including how to take part and to record what you have read, please click here. It is also my 7th book for #AWW2021.  

Allen & Unwin, Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2019, Book lists, Book review, Catherine Jinks, dystopian, Fiction, Five fast reviews, Fourth Estate, Heather Rose, historical fiction, literary fiction, Meg Mundelle, Michelle de Kretser, Nikki Gemmell, Publisher, Setting, Text, University of Queensland Press

5 Fast Reviews: Michelle de Kretser, Nikki Gemmell, Catherine Jinks, Meg Mundell and Heather Rose

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The past two months have been fairly hectic around here, mainly because I started a new job and I’ve had to learn a whole new role in a new industry and I’ve really not had the energy to read books much less review them.

The books I have read haven’t exactly set my world on fire — perhaps because I’ve been distracted by other things — so I haven’t been inspired to write proper full-length reviews. Here’s a quick round-up of what I’ve read recently:

‘Springtime: A Ghost Story’ by Michelle de Kretser

Fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 96 pages; 2017.

I’ve read a couple of Michelle de Kretser’s novels before — The Life to Come was one of my favourites last year — so I was delighted to find this novella in my local library. Billed as a ghost story, it’s not typical of the genre. Indeed, I’d argue it’s not a ghost story at all but a richly written tale about what it is like to begin a new life in a new city. The “ghosts” — for want of a better word — are the memories associated with the place you leave behind.

The story is about a married couple, Frances and Charlie, who are grappling with a move from Melbourne to Sydney. Everything feels unfamiliar and strange to them. Frances spends a lot of time exploring on foot with her dog — there are lots of lush descriptions of the city’s parks and gardens coming into bloom written with de Kretser’s typical literary flourishes  — and it’s while she’s on her wanderings that she comes across a haunting sight in a neighbour’s garden. This “apparition”, which alarms her greatly, could also be seen as a metaphor for the ghosts in her husband’s past, which she is trying to decipher.

Easily read in a sitting, Springtime is about ghosts of the past haunting a marriage as much as it is about the eerie goings-on in the neighbourhood. I’d argue that it’s really only for die-hard fans of de Kretser; it felt slightly too ephemeral for me to get a real handle on the story. For a more detailed review, please see Lisa’s at ANZLitLovers.

‘The Bride Stripped Bare’ by Nikki Gemmell

Fiction – paperback; Fourth Estate; 375 pages; 2011.

Originally published in 2003 under the author “anonymous”, The Bride Stripped Bare is an erotically charged tale about a married woman’s sexual awakening. Written in diary form as a series of lessons numbered from one to 138, it tells the story of a young woman who has never felt sexually fulfilled in her marriage and then acts, somewhat foolishly it has to be said, on her impulse to take a lover.

Her relationship with Gabriel, a handsome older man who turns out to be a virgin, gives her the chance to explore her own needs and desires without fear of judgment. Intoxicated by the power of her newly developed sexual prowess, she begins to take chances she shouldn’t and the double life she’s leading pushes her perilously close to the edge.

Admittedly, this book got me out of a reading slump, probably because it’s written in a compelling tone of voice (in the second person) and surges along at an octane-fuelled pace, helped no doubt by the exceedingly short chapters, but I didn’t love it enough to want to read the two follow-ups, With My Body and I Take You. And the whole idea that you could find a willing 40+-year-old virgin hanging around London seemed too ludicrous for me to take the story all that seriously…

‘Shepherd’ by Catherine Jinks

Fiction – paperback; Text Publishing; 240 pages; 2019.

Shepherd tells the tale of a teenage poacher from Suffolk who is transported to New South Wales as a convict in 1840. The narrative swings backwards and forward in time, detailing Tom’s old life in England, and then contrasting it with his new life assigned to a shepherd’s hut, where he helps to protect a flock of sheep with a trio of violent prisoners.

This fast-paced story is essentially a chase novel, for it follows what happens when Tom becomes caught up in events that may lead to his death at the hands of a vicious killer known as Dan Carver.

Initially, I really liked this tale, especially Tom’s warm, empathetic voice, his wisdom, his concern for the “blacks” and his desire to know the plants and animals of the Australian landscape, but it soon began to wear thin when I realised there was not enough show and too much tell. There was too much violence in it for me, too, and the chase dragged on for too long to sustain my interest. Without wishing to damn it with faint praise, it actually felt like a novel that teenage boys might like, so it comes as no surprise that the author has several award-winning children’s books to her name.

‘The Trespassers’ by Meg Mundell

Fiction – paperback; University of Queensland Press; 278 pages; 2019.

If ever a novel was to be a nod to the shenanigans of Brexit or Australia’s shameful immigration detention policy, this is it. The Trespassers is a dystopian tale set on a crowded ship bound for Australia. Onboard are Brits escaping the disease-ridden UK. They have all been carefully screened, but midway through the voyage disease breaks out, someone is found dead and an unplanned quarantine situation arises.

The story is told through the eyes of three different characters, all superbly drawn, who take turns to narrate their side of events in alternate chapters: there’s a nine-year-old Irish boy who is deaf, a singer-turned-nurse from Glasgow and an English schoolteacher in need of money.

By the time the ship gets to its destination, several people have died and there’s no guarantee the immigrants will be allowed to disembark on Australian soil. This is a riveting story that reads like a thriller but has all the intelligence and wisdom of a literary novel not afraid to tackle big issues such as healthcare, immigration, human trafficking and politics. I really loved this book and hope to see it pop up on literary prize lists in the very near future.

‘Bruny’ by Heather Rose

Fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 424 pages; 2019. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Tasmanian writer Heather Rose will be known to most people for her award-winning The Museum of Modern Love, a book I loved so much I convinced my book group to read it even though it hadn’t yet been published in the UK (we all bought it on Kindle). Bruny, her latest novel, has arrived with much fanfare, but it’s completely different in almost every possible way to what preceded it.

Set in Tasmania some time in the very near future, it tells the story of the bombing of a massive bridge being built to link mainland Tasmania with the island of Bruny, just across the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. The terrorist attack brings the bridge down, but it also brings worldwide attention to this usually quiet and sleepy part of the world. New York-based UN conflict resolution expert Astrid Coleman returns home to help her twin brother, the state premier, soothe troubled waters. Matters are complicated further by a dysfunctional family: her sister is the Opposition Leader; her mother barely talks to her; and her father, who is slowly dying of Alzheimer’s, can only communicate in Shakespeare quotes.

A sharp-eyed and intelligent political satire come thriller (reminiscent of Charlotte Grimshaw’s Soon), the book is fast-paced and written with wit and verve. But as much as I enjoyed reading it, I just didn’t buy the premise — that a massive bridge would be built in this part of the world and that terrorists would take the time to blow it up — and had a hard time taking it seriously. And even though I went to the Perth launch and heard Rose talk about the story in great depth (she was very careful not to give away crucial plot spoilers), I’ve come to the conclusion that the book is simply preposterous — but I’m sure that won’t stop it being shortlisted for awards aplenty.

These books are all by Australian women writers. They represent the 19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd and 23rd books I have read this year for #AWW2019.

Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2019, Book review, Felicity McLean, Fiction, Fourth Estate, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘The Van Apfel Girls are Gone’ by Felicity McLean

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Australian edition

Fiction – paperback; Fourth Estate; 296 pages; 2019.

Modern history is littered with true-life stories about missing children who are never found — think the Beaumont children (in Australia) or Madeline McCann (in the UK). Felicity McLean takes this idea as the focal point of her debut novel The Van Apfel Girls are Gone, which tells the story of the fictional disappearance of three blonde sisters — the Van Apfel children of the title — from the perspective of their childhood friend, Tikka Malloy.

Falsely billed as “a Picnic at Hanging Rock for a new generation” (it isn’t), I had mixed feelings about this novel.

Here’s what I liked about it

The era

The Van Apfel Girls are Gone is set in Australia in 1992, which makes it a kind of historical novel. McLean cleverly reminds us of the era, not by stating the year repeatedly, but by making reference to certain elements, such as TV shows popular at the time (A Country Practice, for instance, which is a complete throwback to my teenage years), food items (Bubble O’Bill ice-creams, which I used to love when I was about 13) and news stories. She uses the Azaria Chamberlain case, which was coming to its final conclusion in 1992, as a backdrop, reminding us that when children disappear everyone has an opinion about what happened and who’s to blame — and they’re not always correct.

The mystery element

McLean paints a realistic portrait of what happens when children go missing — the police investigation, the search parties out looking and the fear that permeates through the community — but refrains from offering any easy answers. Indeed, the girls are never found and no one knows what happened to them, but McLean drops enough clues for the reader to figure things out for themselves. (I suspect this would make for a terrific book group discussion because each reader will have a different theory about why, and how, the sisters vanished.)

The humour

The story is largely told from Tikka Malloy’s point-of-view. She was eleven and one-sixth years old when the girls vanished. Her voice is whip smart and funny, often because she’s unaware of her own naivety, but also because she wants to impress the adults around her by proving she knows more than they do about certain things. Some of the things she says — and does — are quite funny, not least the skit she puts on as part of her school’s Showstopper concert held on the night of the girls’ disappearance.

UK Edition

Here’s what I didn’t like about it

The switch between past and present

The narrative is told largely from the perspective of Tikka as a young girl, but it opens — and ends — with her as a 30-year-old returning home momentarily after more than a decade living abroad. The voice between the young Tikka and the older Tikka isn’t much different, and the switches between past and present felt a bit clunky. I wasn’t actually convinced that the older Tikka was even necessary to the storyline, because all it really shows is that 19 years on the Van Apfel girls are still missing — and that could have been done in a much simpler way.

The secondary storyline involving Tikka’s sister

Similarly, I wasn’t convinced that it was necessary for Tikka’s older sister, Laura, to be diagnosed with cancer as an adult. In my view, this didn’t add anything overall to the story, and Laura was too thinly drawn to give the narrative any extra weight. Perhaps all it did was give Tikka a reason to come back to her childhood home. But… so what?

The uneven tone and style

The prose is often beautiful in places, but is inconsistent, almost as if McLean is still finding her voice. The storyline felt slightly disjointed, too, and I couldn’t help thinking a few structural edits would have helped smooth things out.

All up, I was disappointed by The Van Apfel Girls are Gone. It’s billed as a mystery thriller but really it’s a coming-of-age story set in the 1990s. It’s endearing in places, and heartfelt too, but it lacked a certain panache and reading it felt more of a chore than an entertainment. That said, it will be interesting to see what McLean comes up with next…

This is my 12th book for #AWW2019.

2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2018, Book review, Catherine McKinnon, dystopian, Fiction, Fourth Estate, historical fiction, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Publisher, Setting

‘Storyland’ by Catherine McKinnon

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Storyland by Catherine McKinnon

Fiction – Kindle edition; Fourth Estate; 400 pages; 2017. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I read Catherine McKinnon’s Storyland about a month before it was longlisted for the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Award. I’ve been in two minds about reviewing it, because it’s not available outside of Australia*  — which makes it frustrating for those of you in the rest of the world who’d actually like to read it — but I’m hoping the prize listing might change that situation, for this is a superb book deserving of a wide (international) audience.

Set on the banks of Lake Illawarra in New South Wales, Storyland is essentially a fictionalised history of Australia, spanning four centuries. Its focus is very much on how people are shaped by the environments in which they live and vice versa — or, as one of the characters explains in the first chapter, “The land is a book waiting to be read. Learn to read it and you will never go hungry”.

It’s also a timely warning about how we treat the land and the indigenous people who know it best.

‘See that lake there,’ Uncle Ray says, looking along the side of his house to the water. ‘That was here before any of us, and the creek that runs down from the mountain into the lake, that was here too, and the mountain, and the trees, and the birds. We’re part of their story, not the other way around.’ ‘Like they were here first,’ I say. ‘You got it, like they were here first,’ Uncle Ray says. ‘But it’s our job to look after all this land around here. If we don’t, bad things can happen.’

Unusual structure

Many of the reviews I have read online compare it to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas — a novel I thought showy and pretentious — but the only real similarity is the structure, for McKinnon’s tale weaves together five interlinking stories, from the late 18th century through to 2717 and then goes backwards in time to the beginning.

All the characters live on the same tract of land but at different time periods, a clever device that allows the author to show how development and progress changes a place, not always for the better.

The time periods and characters are:

  • 1796: Will Martin, a 15-year-old cabin boy, onboard the Tom Thumb with real life explorers Matthew Flinders and George Bass when they discover Lake Illawarra, a large coastal lagoon, about 100km south of Sydney, which forms the setting for the rest of the novel.
  • 1822, Hawker: a desperate ex-convict, who commits a horrendous crime against a local indigenous woman.
  • 1900, Lola: a headstrong young woman who runs a dairy farm with her brother and sister, both of whom have indigenous blood and are subjected to horrific racist abuse and violence when a local girl goes missing.
  • 1998, Bel: a 10-year-old girl, who spends one carefree summer rafting on the lagoon with two neighbourhood boys and then gets caught up in a dispute between a violent man and his girlfriend.
  • 2033 & 2717, Nada: a woman whose world begins to crumble apart in a chilling — but believable — dystopian view of the future.

Recurring themes

Throughout each of the five narrative threads, there are recurring motifs and landmarks — the lake, the shoreline, an ancient fig tree and a stone axe — which helps tie the stories together, and many of the characters are related across the generations. It’s fun trying to spot the connections.

But what really marks this novel as an exceptional one is McKinnon’s eloquent and haunting prose. She’s at her best when she describes landscapes and our connection to particular places, as the following quote demonstrates:

Darkness settles on the forest that runs alongside the field. Cornhusks quiver in the cooling breeze. In this place the heat of the day runs into a noisy night full of jumping beasts with luminous eyes. Here, the night does not entomb the earth, instead it breathes alive ghostly shadows, as if the buried are rising up.

Thematically, there’s a lot going on, including environmental destruction, racism and fear of the Other — just to name a few. I loved its subtle exploration of these issues and its examination of the stories that tie us to the land. The message, it would seem, is that the land (and nature) will outlive us all, but we need to learn to live according to its rules. It will always be here, even if we are not. We mistreat it at our peril.

Down through the trees I see the roof of our home. But what makes a home? Not wood, not bricks; safety, surely. The year that has just passed, all the news reports, protests, referendums, were about national security, or about individual safety, but as if the threat was elsewhere. Yet the biggest danger came from our home itself, only we didn’t know what our home was. We thought it was bricks and mortar, but a home is more than that, it is land and sea and sky.

For other reviews of this novel, please see Bill’s at The Australian Legend, Lisa’s at ANZ LitLovers and Sue’s at Whispering Gums.

This is my 2nd book for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2018 and my 12th for #AWW2018

* I scored my copy from the publisher who pitched it to me when it was released last year. I was sent an e-copy but this got lost somehow when I switched to a new Kindle in the summer and I only rediscovered it lurking in the Cloud quite recently. Apologies to the publisher for my tardiness in reviewing!