Tag: Australian literature

Author, Black Inc, Book review, long form essay, Non-fiction, Publisher, Tony Birch

‘On Kim Scott’ by Tony Birch (Writers on Writers series) + launch of Kim Scott’s ‘Benang: From the Heart’ 25th-anniversary edition

kimbofo

Non-fiction – hardcover; Black Inc; 96 pages; 2024.

In recent years I’ve become a fan of Black Inc’s Writers on Writers series in which “leading authors reflect on an Australian writer who has inspired and influenced them”. I have previously reviewed volumes on Tim Winton, Helen Garner and Kate Jennings, and have many more in my TBR. They are excellent “deep dives” into writers who have shaped, and continue to shape, Australia’s cultural discourse.

The latest in this series is about Kim Scott, a Noongar writer who has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award twice — for Benang, from the Heart (2000) and That Deadman Dance (2011) — and is Professor of Writing at Curtin University in Western Australia.

Pathway to truth

In this perceptive and highly engaging essay, Tony Birch (who also has Aboriginal ancestry and is a qualified historian) discusses Scott’s novels to “explore fiction as a pathway to truth”.

In the 2020s, with ‘truth-telling’ becoming both a demand from Aboriginal people and, perhaps unfortunately, a populist buzzword, Kim Scott uses storytelling to address truths of the past that some would prefer we left silent and undocumented. (page 15)

He shows how Scott’s work has taken on the difficult questions about Australia’s past and interrogated them from a Noongar perspective.

Fiction, of course, also produces stories of national unity, whitewashing and occasional flag-waving. I value Kim Scott’s fiction so highly because I feel that his approach to fiction is to put the flags aside. (page 24)

Birch argues that Scott’s award-winning novel That Deadman Dance is not a novel of reconciliation, for instance, but a story that shows us “who we could be, collectively, in the future”.

Similarly, he suggests that Benang is a story that shifts our “collective understanding of who we are as a nation, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal”. That’s largely because his work helps us see that history is a bumpy road and not always linear and that the course of colonial justice in Australia is perverse.

Exploding national myths

He is not afraid to bust open white Australian myths of its colonial past and show how the nation is built on land theft and violence, much of it swept under the rug.

His most recent novel, Taboo, set in modern-day Western Australia, wrestles with truth and reconciliation when the nation seems reluctant to address the violence of the past.

But while his writing might be driven by anger, it is always balanced and generous. It is not about victim blaming or sensationalising events, it is simply laying it out, warts and all.

Kim Scott is a gentle combatant fighting injustice. And he is on our side — each of ours. Scott uses words, sentences, images and stories to confront racism, a blight that for him ‘burns like a pox and a plague and is incubated at the centre of how we live and organise ourselves.’ (page 32)

Power of fiction

On Kim Scott is an excellent, short book on the power of fiction to undermine falsehoods and to flesh out the truth in ways that evoke empathy and understanding. Or, as Birch so eloquently puts it, “to consider this country’s past in a mature and ethical manner”.

More importantly, while this book is about a singular Australian writer, it’s also a fascinating portrait of us as a people. It’s also an excellent clarion call about the need to come to terms with the past so that we can build a brighter future together.

If we are to shift the nation’s psyche for the better, we must embrace stories of our colonial past, rather than bury them. And if we are to overcome discriminations embedded in contemporary Australia, we will need to tell new stories. This is the work that Kim Scott has been doing for many years, and we are in his debt. (page 79)

Here, here.

Book launch: Kim Scott’s ‘Benang: From the Heart’ 25th-anniversary edition

On Friday night, Fremantle Press launched the 25th-anniversary edition of Kim Scott’s groundbreaking novel Benang: From the Heart at the Walyalup Civic Centre.

Local author Molly Schmidt, who is one of Scott’s past students, interviewed him about the book, including how he came to write it and why.

He said he wrote it as a form of “channelled aggression” after becoming increasingly angry at the injustices suffered by his people. He wanted to express that anger in a way that did not “dwell on or sensationalise” the trauma but “speak about it straight”.

He had come across A.O. Neville’s^^ Australia’s Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community — a book, published in 1947, that documents racist colonial beliefs — in which he saw a photograph of three generations of Aboriginals, each one lighter skinned than the next, to depict how Aboriginal blood could be diluted to “breed them out.”

Scott identified with the lighter-skinned individual and wanted to explore Neville’s deeply offensive pursuit — to create the “first-born-successfully-white-man” in the family line — and to explore how his colonial settler dogma had harmed Noongar culture, language and family.

He said he played with “language from the archives” which he considered to be “profoundly hostile” and used dark humour to lighten the load.

It was a privilege to listen to the discussion — he clearly has a great rapport with Schmidt, who was warm and generous but also unafraid of asking delicate questions — and to hear him read from sections of the book. He has a remarkably entertaining reading voice and animated style. If you ever get the chance to hear him read, clear your diary to attend!

An interesting fact from the discussion is that we’ve all been pronouncing “Benang” wrongly. Scott pronounced it as “Ben-ung” (to rhyme with “hung”).

Fittingly, we also discovered that Benang means tomorrow.

 

^^ Neville was Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia from 1915 to 1936 and Commissioner for Native Affairs from 1936 until his retirement in 1940. He is a recurrent figure in much First Nations literature.

Australia, Author, Book review, Eugen Bacon, Fiction, literary fiction

‘Serengotti’ by Eugen Bacon

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Transit Lounge; 288 pages; 2023. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Eugen Bacon’s Serengotti is a rare and unique novel.

The author is African-Australian and her writing marries the rhythm, colour and folklore of her native Tanzania with Melbourne’s sporting obsessions, Aussie slang and dry wit. The result is an intriguing cultural mix.

The narrative is fluid — it moves from black comedy to surrealist adventure to a love story to a murder mystery, and back again — making it hard to pin down. Nor does it follow a traditional structure.

Even the prose style — often disjointed, littered with wisecracks and full of “colourful” language — coupled with the use of a second-person point of view, gives the book a fresh and original edge. Suffice it to say, I’ve never read an Australian novel quite like it.

Distinctive protagonist

The central character is as distinctive as the story. Ch’anzu is 39, open-gendered (pronouns are zie/hir), wears a nose ring and has a box-cut hairstyle. On the same day zie loses hir presumably lucrative job as a computer programmer (how else could zie afford to live in a swanky apartment on Melbourne’s St Kilda Road?), Ch’anzu finds hir girlfriend Scarlet in a bed with a man and sends her packing.

Then Ch’anzu’s twin brother, Tex, starts harassing her by leaving drunken voicemails and text messages, claiming he’s broken up with his own girlfriend and could Ch’anzu lend him “some dosh?”

Ch’anzu is downhearted, feeling sorry for hirself (“God, it hurts”) and yearns to “pull on hiking boots, sling on a backpack, go away and not come back for six, ten years”.

You feel as though your whole life you’ve missed the train, like you should be somewhere you’re not. Nothing is sound. You’re like a kid whimpering at Burgerland, I said a double whammy with no onions or mayonnaise! The attendant saying, Sorry, kiddo! And you’re still stuck with stinkers and mayo. (page 37)

But then a job opportunity building a community health app in Wagga Wagga (“say it twice”) comes up and zie applies.

A woman with the kindliest voice calls back – it’s like talking to a friend. She’s wearing an accent you can’t place. Valarie, she introduces herself. ‘What do you know about black people?’
‘Yikes. Isn’t that like a bit —?’
‘Politically incorrect? You could say, but not really.’
‘Then I’m black. Afrocentric.’
‘Great!’ she says. ‘Job’s yours if you’ll take it.’
‘Just like that?’
‘What more is there? We love your CV.’
‘Do I get a company car?’
‘You don’t need one in Serengotti.’
‘Zie/hir,’ you say.
‘I beg yours?”
‘My pronouns are zie/hir.’
‘You can take whatever pronouns you like, dear, as long as you can code.’ (page 39)

Life at Serengotti

And so that’s how Ch’anzu moves about 500km north (on the Victoria/NSW border) to Serengotti, a (fictional) migrant African outpost in rural Australia, which recreates an African village, complete with a beauty salon, healing centre, restaurant and supermarket.

Many of the residents are deeply traumatised, having escaped war and violence of their homelands, or, as Valarie puts it:

“Hitler wasn’t the last zealot enacting a vision of ethnic cleansing. And you’d think people would learn from Bosnia. Rwanda. Liberia.” She spits her disdain on the ground. “The things people do for diamonds.” (page 94)

In Serengotti, Ch’anzu reconnects with elements of hir African culture — the cultural rituals, the folklore and superstitions, the food and drink — but zie also understands zie’s an outsider, and when mysterious things begin to happen in the village, Ch’anzu knows zie’ll be blamed for bringing bad luck with hir.

The book takes a suspenseful turn toward the end, when the (creepy, unbalanced) first-person voice of Ch’anzu’s brother Tex acts as an interlocutor, suggesting he’s committed a terrible crime and justifying his reasons for doing so.

It’s Ch’anzu’s charismatic Aunt Maé who offers emotional support, hard-won wisdom and kick-ass advice, and the story ends on a hopeful note, with Ch’anzu realising that losing hir Melbourne job and girlfriend Scarlet were “the earthquake I needed”:

“I was getting complacent and had to plummet into a volcano. But I’ve taught myself to believe, to haul myself out of terrible situations, and thrive.” (page 260)

For reviews that are more eloquent than mine, please see Bill’s at The Australian Legend and Lisa’s at ANZLitLovers.

I read this book as part of Reading Independent Publishers Month 4 #ReadIndies, hosted by Lizzy and Kaggsy. This event, which runs throughout February, is designed to showcase the books published by independent publishers across the world.

Transit Lounge is an Australian independent press based in Melbourne. It publishes both fiction and non-fiction and has a particular interest “in creative literary publishing that explores the relationships between East and West and entertains and promotes insights into diverse cultures”. You can find out more about them here.

Allen & Unwin, Australia, Author, Book review, Deborah Conway, memoir, Music, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Book of Life’ by Deborah Conway

kimbofo

Non-fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 400 pages; 2023.

Back in 1998, not long after I first arrived in the UK, I went to Edinburgh to attend the renowned comedy festival. One day I got talking to a monk on the Royal Mile (as you do) — I think he must have been handing out flyers to a show of some sort, but my memory is vague and I can’t recall the detail.

He was Dutch and when I told him I was from Melbourne, he confessed he once knew a girl from Melbourne. He’d met her in Amsterdam and she was a singer in a band. Her name? Deborah Conway.

He had lost touch with her, so I was able to tell him she had forged a successful solo career and had achieved two chart-topping albums, String of Pearls (released in 1991) and Bitch Epic (1993). He was rather delighted by this!

Multi-talented performer

I was never a diehard Deborah Conway fan, more a casual listener, so I didn’t know much else about her, like the fact — newly discovered by me — that she’d had a fledgling acting career and had been in Peter Greenaway’s 1991 film Prospero’s Books, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Conway played Juno and sang songs composed by Michael Nyman; I’ve seen the film but can’t recall Conway in it).

Earlier, in 1988, she had also starred in The Iron Man: The Musical by Pete Townshend — from The Who — playing a character called The Vixen.

Nor did I know she’d recorded a dance album in LA in 1990, which was never released, and a third album, My Third Husband, in London in 1997, which didn’t chart particularly well.

Memory lane

Reading her memoir, Book of Life, which was Conway’s covid lockdown writing project, was a real trip down memory lane for me.

(The title, by the way, is a nod to her Jewish background — The Book of Life is a metaphorical book that God opens on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and seals ten days later on Yom Kippur after he’s inscribed the names of people he considers righteous in it.)

I had first come across her as the singer in the post-punk group Do-Ri-Mi (before she went solo) and adored the song Man Overboard, which was all over the radio in 1985, and I have vague recollections of an experimental band she formed in 1995 called Ultrasound. (I had the album, I don’t recall loving it.)

I loved all the references to other Melbourne musicians I spent my teens and twenties listening to, such as the late Paul Hester, of Split Enz/Crowded House fame, who was her boyfriend for many years; singer-songwriter ex Boom Crash Opera guitarist Richard Pleasance, who produced her debut solo album and whose own solo albums, Galleon and Colourblind, are old favourites of mine; and troubadour Paul Kelly, with whom she’d had a fling before entering a long-term relationship with his cousin, Alex McGregor.

But it also fills in a lot of gaps. I lost track of her career when I lived in the UK for 20 years, but during that time she did a load of interesting things, including playing Patsy Cline on stage, being the Artistic Director for the Queensland Music Festival,  producing a national concert series called Broad featuring all female singer/songwriters, and performing in people’s homes in a bid to break down the barrier between performer and audience.

An eye-opening chronology

The book was also curiously eye-opening because I knew so little of her background (a fairly privileged upbringing. for instance, in Toorak, one of Melbourne’s wealthiest suburbs) nor the wide scope of her talents, which extend to modelling, singing, songwriting, acting and performing.

It’s told in broadly chronological fashion, but roughly every alternate chapter is themed around a specific aspect of her life, such as her romance and marriage to singer-songwriter musician Willy Zygier with whom she has three daughters, and the complex and complicated relationship she had with her late father, a lawyer who hid his homosexuality from his entire family and treated everyone around him abysmally.

Song lyrics are also included, often at the end of chapters to show how events in her life had inspired them. (There are photographs, too, but infuriatingly, there is no index.)

She writes in the same frank and forthright way as she has lived her life. There are tales about drugs and sex and, obviously, rock and roll, for which she makes no apologies. She’s loud and proud — and often contrary.

I remember always being impressed by her authenticity, her flagrant disregard for the norms, never afraid of just saying what she thinks and being her true self. This comes across tenfold in the book.

Doing her own thing

There’s a great example in Book of Life that shows her independent streak and unwillingness to bow to conventions or to be sexually commodified by the music industry. It’s 1991 and she turns up at a golf course in Melbourne to film the music video for It’s Only the Beginning — the first single from her first solo album — wearing pink plus-fours.

Michael Gudenski, the head of Mushroom Records, was not impressed. He had expected her to wear something more flattering and feminine and told her as much. She refused to change her outfit.

It certainly didn’t stop that song from doing well — it peaked at number 19 on the Australian music charts in August 1991 and was nominated for four Australian Recording Industry Association awards. It still gets radio airplay today, more than 30 years on.

Later this month, Deborah Conway will be starring at the opening night of Perth Festival’s Writer Weekend. I’m so looking forward to being in the audience.

Finally, here are some of my favourite Deborah Conway tunes for your entertainment.

“Man Overboard” by Do-Ri-Mi (1982)
The bass line is incredible…but be warned, this song is a complete earworm!

“It’s Only the Beginning’ by Deborah Conway (1991)
There are those plus-fours I mentioned earlier! I love the upbeat nature of this song. The video is supposed to be a homage to the Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn comedy Bringing Up Baby.

“Alive and Brilliant” by Deborah Conway (1993)

An hour-long interview with Conway where she talks about her life in music (2023)
Interestingly, despite being inducted into the National Live Music Awards Hall of Fame in 2019, made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2020 and inducted into the Music Victoria Hall of Fame in 2022, she mentions none of this in her book. She might be opinionated and powerful, but she’s also humble.

Book chat

Australian writer Gerald Murnane gets a much overdue turn in the spotlight

kimbofo

Proving that it’s never too late, it seems Australian writer Gerald Murnane — at 84 years old — is finally getting his time in the international spotlight.

His 1988 novel, Inland, has been reissued in the UK by small indie press & Other Stories, and has been widely reviewed in the Guardian UK, the Guardian UK again (they often review books twice), the Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph (paywalled) and the online journal Curatorial Affairs.

Murnane has also been interviewed in the Irish Times (paywalled) by former blogger and now lit critic John Self.

The London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury (one of my favourites) has even made him their Author of the Month

To top it all off, Murnane has granted a rare interview to BBC Radio 4’s Open Book programme, telling Chris Power about his writing life, how his books are NOT postmodernist because he doesn’t “know what postmodernism is” and the importance of Wuthering Heights in his final year at school.

He also explains how reading Ulysses when he was 20 liberated him from thinking that fiction had a strict framework and a set of rules.

“Don’t mistake me for a well-read man,” he says. “I’ve read a lot of books but most of them — and I say this unashamedly — most of them I have completely forgotten.”

His recent resurgence has caught him by surprise, but there’s a mischievous sense of delight in his voice when he recalls how he’s got the last laugh on the Australian critics of yesteryear who dismissed his work, calling him “an example of how not to be a writer” because he “turned inwards on myself instead of looking outwards”. Those critics are no longer around, meanwhile, his books are still being read, often by people young enough to be his grandchildren!

It’s 10 minutes of joyful listening.

Listen here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0h62p28

In Australia, Murnane is published by Giramondo Publishing and some of his work is available in Text Classics. I have previously read and reviewed The Plains (1982) and Border Districts: A Fiction (2018). If you’re keen to buy a collection of Murnane’s books — Australian, American and English editions — there’s a collector’s set going for $12,000 at a secondhand bookshop in NSW.

Allen & Unwin, Australia, Author, Book review, Charlotte Wood, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Stone Yard Devotional’ by Charlotte Wood

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 320 pages; 2023.

Stone Yard Devotional, by Charlotte Wood, is a gentle, deeply contemplative novel but it’s not about gentle things. It’s a chronicle of slights and the wrongs we do other people, and asks how do we atone and rectify our wrongdoings?

Seeking solitude

The story takes the form of a diary written by an unnamed woman on a “retreat” — from her marriage, from her city life working for a threatened species charity, from the noise, clutter and busyness of 21st-century living.

She’s staying in the guest “cabin” attached to a cloistered religious community. The small community of nuns, together with two or three other guests, live on the plains of Monaro, in rural NSW, where the narrator grew up.

The rhythms and rituals of this way of life provide structure to her days, as well as a kind of comfort. The outside world is dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, but here the seclusion acts as a safe “bubble”.

In the church, a great restfulness comes over me. I try to think critically about what’s happening but I’m drenched in a weird tranquility so deep it puts a stop to thought. Is it to do with being completely passive, yet still somehow participant? Or perhaps it’s simply owed to being somewhere so quiet; a place entirely dedicated to silence. In the contemporary world, this kind of stillness feels radical. Illicit. (p15)

There’s no real plot; the story simply charts the narrator’s experience living this new way of life, where the most stressful thing is battling a mouse plague (warning: some of the scenes involving mice are gruesome) and trying to wean the nuns off prepackaged foods.

Paying penance

Interestingly, she hasn’t been called to the monastery by religion — she’s an avowed atheist — but by a need to escape the trappings of modern life and “to find a place I had never been but which was still, in some undeniable way, my home”. Scratch deeper and that need is really to pay penance for past wrongs by giving something back, to serve others in a way that her late mother served others.

Indeed, it’s the ghost of her mother that haunts the pages of this novel. She’s there in the narrator’s thoughts and memories like a living presence. And because she thinks about her mother so much, her thoughts naturally turn to her childhood — her rural upbringing, her family life and school, and things she would rather forget but hasn’t.

These recollections take on a greater meaning when Helen Parry, a girl she went to school with and treated unkindly, arrives at the monastery. Helen is now a kind of celebrity nun and an activist and is a stark reminder that our narrator can never quite escape her past.

Deeply reflective 

Stone Yard Devotional is a quiet, introspective novel, one that is as much about the past as it is about the present.

Admittedly, when I began it I wondered where the narrative was heading and what the whole point of the story was about.

It feels like a memoir given all the anecdotes and recollections of childhood guilt and parental influences, coupled with diary entries that come right out of the Helen Garner school of observational writing. But I soon became hypnotised by the meditative prose and the clear-eyed self-analysis that pulls no punches.

It’s a tale about being human and overcoming troubling emotions — grief, despair and guilt — so that we can heal, regain a sense of peace and move forward in life.

I really enjoyed it and thought it most closely resembled Wood’s 2004 novel, The Submerged Cathedral, which I now believe was based on her mother’s life.

Stone Yard Devotional will be published in hardback in the UK on 7 March; the Kindle edition is already available.

Lisa at ANZLitLovers has also reviewed this one.

Book launch in Fremantle

As reported via my Instagram account, in November Charlotte Wood was in Fremantle to launch the book.

In a great conversation moderated by local journalist Gillian O’Shaughnessy, she talked about the meditative quality of the work, her love of the Monaro plains where the story is set and a little about her mother, whom the mother in this book is based on.

Australia, Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Helen FitzGerald, Orenda, Publisher, Setting

‘Keep Her Sweet’ by Helen Fitzgerald

kimbofo

Fiction – Kindle edition; Orenda Books; 238 pages; 2022.

Australian writer Helen Fitzgerald writes slightly surreal and often blackly funny psychological thrillers mainly set in Scotland, where she lives.

Keep Her Sweet — her 15th novel — is a dark tale about a toxic family living in rural Australia.

Like most of her previous work, it doesn’t fit neatly into a box. It’s not strictly crime and it’s not strictly a psychological thriller either. In the past, the author has described her work as “domestic noir”, so that might give you some idea about where it fits.

At its most basic level, Keep Her Sweet is about a severe case of sibling rivalry that turns murderous, but it’s also a wider examination of taboo subjects, including family and psychological breakdown, criminality, drug use, violence, religious belief and dysfunctional relationships.

The author uses three intertwined narratives to tell her story, which is framed around a married couple, Penny and Andeep, empty-nesters who have downsized to a place in Ballarat.

The first narrative thread is about Camille, “the second-born” who moves back into the family home to save money; the second is about Penny, “the mum”, and the third is about Joy, “the therapist” the family hires when Cam and her older sister, Asha, come to blows.

Sisters behaving badly

The central focus is on the 20-something sisters who do not get along. Both have moved home — much to their parents’ dissatisfaction.

Asha wears a tag on her ankle, having belted up the religious pastor she was having an affair with, so there’s always a threat of violence in the air, and because she cannot leave the house without the tag going off, Camille is at her beck and call, running errands for her, buying booze and so on.

But for me, the more interesting story is the one about the two older women, Penny and Joy, both of whom are struggling with the burden of motherhood long into middle age.

Penny, who ends up kicking out her husband, resents her daughters because they haven’t left home and are infantilised to the point of behaving like teenagers.

Similarly, Joy has a 43-year-old daughter with a meth problem whom she constantly has to “rescue”. She’d love to return to her native England and spend her retirement close to her own sister, Rosie, but her obligation to her “druggie” daughter Jeanie always wins out and she never gets on the plane.

A dark turn

These multiple threads do restrain the pace of the story up until about the three-quarter mark. That’s when the book takes a very dark (and gruesome) turn and the urgency goes up a gear. I simply couldn’t turn the pages quick enough to find out what was going to happen next.

No, it’s not a high-brow read. I’m not even sure I’d call it fun. But Keep Her Sweet, with its witty one-liners and deeply unlikeable and narcissistic characters, shows us how easy it is to cross the super-thin line between civility and savagery.

This is a good palate cleanser, and the perfect read for those times you just want to check your brain at the door.

Australia, Author, Book review, crime/thriller, David Whish-Wilson, Fiction, Focus on WA writers, Fremantle Press, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting

‘True West’ by David Whish-Wilson

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Fremantle Press; 264 pages; 2019.

We all know that teenage life can be angst-ridden and problematic, but for the 17-year-old protagonist in True West, by David Whish-Wilson, it is positively deadly.

In this gritty crime thriller, Lee Southern is on the run from the Geraldton-based bikie gang he betrayed. His father was the first president of that gang, but now he is missing and rumour has it he has been murdered. As payback, Lee torched the gang’s marijuana crop and now there’s hell to pay.

The story is set in Perth in 1988 against a backdrop of abhorrent hate crimes associated with the neo-Nazi Australian Nationalist Movement (rebranded here as the Australian Patriotic Movement, APM). This lends True West a visceral, political edge and a ring of authenticity.

Perth underworld

Lee, unfortunately, gets caught up in the APM’s extremist agenda. As he flees hundreds of kilometres south in his uncle’s old Ford F350 truck, he finds himself in Perth, an unfamiliar city, where he tries to make a living as a rogue tow truck driver. But when he unwittingly competes with an existing monopoly, he’s severely beaten up.

From there, it’s all downhill as he is coerced into the “employ” of people who don’t have his best interests at heart. Instead, they want to use him to progress their own hate-filled white supremacist agenda, roping him into all manner of violent crimes, including armed robbery, firebombing Asian-owned businesses and murdering a high-profile political figure.

Living on his nerves and doped up with illicit substances, Lee uses the survivalist skills — instilled in him by his father, a Vietnam vet with a “prepper” mindset — to navigate his way through Perth’s violent underworld. It’s touch and go whether he will come out the other side in one piece.

Compelling story

If it sounds like a page-turning dramatic story, it is! But it also incorporates a tender love affair between Lee and his teenage sweetheart, Emma, which showcases his humanity and softer side.

There’s no doubt that True West is a tense, suspenseful read, full of not-very-nice people doing not-very-nice things, but it’s the teenage protagonist that lends the novel a certain charm.

As a likeable rogue, Lee is resourceful, practical, a roll-up-your-sleeves type of kid. He might do dubious things on the wrong side of the law, but he’s got a good heart and knows racism is a repellent justification for horrific acts of violence.

This is a terrific read — and I am now looking forward to the follow-up, I Am Already Dead, which was published earlier this year.

David Whish-Wilson is a local writer, who lives in Fremantle and teaches creative writing at Curtin University. I read this novel as part of my #FocusOnWesternAustralianWriters. You can find out more about this reading project here and see what books I’ve reviewed from this part of the world on my Focus on Western Australian Writers page. 

Allen & Unwin, Australia, Author, Book review, Christos Tsiolkas, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘The In Between’ by Christos Tsiolkas

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 400 pages; 2023. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Australian author Christos Tsiolkas is known for bold storytelling that is provocative, salacious and socially aware. But as he matures, so, too, does his work.

His latest novel, The In-Between, is a tender love story between two middle-aged men who have been damaged by past relationships.

Yes, it still maintains Tsiolkas’ trademark edginess and carnality, but it’s certainly softer and less risque than anything he’s written before.

I ate it up in the space of a weekend and loved its depiction of an unlikely relationship between two very different people essentially seeking the same thing: love, companionship and to be “seen” for who they are, not what they are.

The cover of the forthcoming UK edition

Nervous date

This character-driven story begins with a nervous internet date between Perry, a translator newly repatriated from France, and Ivan, a landscape gardener who runs his own business.

Both men are in their 50s but are like chalk and cheese — one is the son of Greek immigrants, the other is the son of Serbians; one is highly educated, the other is not; one has travelled the world, the other has only ever left Australia once; one is cerebral, the other is practical; one lives in Melbourne’s inner north, the other lives in a southern bayside suburb; one has never had children, the other has an adult daughter and a grandchild.

Yet both men have something important in common — they have been damaged in love and are almost at the point of giving up on ever finding love again. Perry is still recovering from a long-time affair with a married man that went sour, while Ivan is constantly at loggerheads with his ex-wife over a past affair that ended in theft and violence.

It then charts the course of their relationship over many years in a series of sizeable chapters, each one told from a different perspective and at a different point in time so that the reader has to fill in the gaps about what might have happened in between (hence the novel’s title).

The class divide

Through the prism of the relationship, Tsiolkas examines the class divide. There’s a dinner party in chapter 3 which brings all this to the fore — and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever read. The dialogue is cracking, and the tension and suspense are absolutely nerve-shredding!

The party is particularly excruciating for Perry because in introducing his new lover to his old university friends, Yasmine and Cora, he is opening himself up to their judgements (and aspersions) — and he’s not sure if he can take it.

During the first course, the conversation is “genial, curious, and does not stray into any controversial or difficult terrain”, but as the evening progresses there are moments of high tension as the guests, which include an additional heterosexual couple, discuss matters in which Ivan has next to no experience.

Perry finds he cannot settle that sense of unease. He is too aware of Ivan, who answers the questions asked of him with courtesy and calmness. Yet he conspicuously refrains from contributing to the discussion. Jed is an academic, a professor at the School of Biological Sciences at Monash Unversity. Perry is conscious of the assumption of a shared language and system of beliefs among the five at the table who have university degrees. At one point, just as Yasmine rises to take the plates away, Evelyn asks Ivan, “Where did you study?”
Perry freezes […]
“I did trade school at a horticultural college. I started my apprenticeship when I was sixteen.” Ivan takes a piece of flatbread, piles hummus onto it. “I hated high school — couldn’t wait to leave.” (p153)

Cue a pin dropping — and Perry disappearing to the bathroom so he can avoid the questioning looks and quietly swallow his own anger.

In another chapter, we learn of Ivan’s dependence on extra-curricular sex, which also casts him as an outsider, and there’s the constant hint of a violent past. But there’s no doubt that the love between Perry and Ivan is profound and life-changing.

Typically Tsiolkas

The In-Between is written in Tsiolkas’ usual unflinching style. His descriptions of sexual encounters are typically pornographic, which might come as a shock if you have not read his work before. But there’s a new vulnerability in his writing, a willingness to reveal the hunger for human connection in emotional, not just physical, terms.

He lays bare the need to be kind and gentle with one another, to accept differences, to forgive others their trespasses and to live with candour and verve.

I think this might be his best work yet.

The In-Between will be published in the UK by Atlantic in May 2024.

Book launch in Fremantle

As reported via my Instagram account, last month I saw Christos in Fremantle. He was in conversation with local writer Holden Sheppard, who was an impressive moderator, steering the conversation in interesting directions and asking great questions.

I loved these insights:

  • Tsiolkas’ father, who did not speak English, would buy him random books to read, such as Dickens, Xavier Herbert and the “wildly inappropriate” Henry Robbins because he wanted his son to have an education.
  • His mother was so shell-shocked by a cinema screening of Loaded (an adaption of his debut novel renamed Head On) that she took him to a pokies pub where they both got drunk on whisky and “had the best and most important conversation of my life”.
  • If you want to be a writer be “thy excellent reader” and read often and widely and out of your comfort zone.

In the signing queue afterwards, I reminded him that we had previously met at a publishers’ dinner party in London to celebrate the launch of Barracuda in 2014 and I had also seen him at the launch of Damascus in Fremantle in 2019. He remembered me and then embraced me in a giant bear hug!

Australia, Book review, Fiction, Giramondo Publishing, literary fiction, Max Easton, Publisher, Setting

‘Paradise Estate’ by Max Easton

kimbofo

Fiction – paperback; Giramondo; 288 pages; 2023.

Max Easton’s Paradise Estate practically pulses with modern-day life. It’s been a long time since I read a book that felt so “of the moment”.

This shouldn’t be a surprise given it’s set in 2022, but its unabashed widescreen examination of the issues facing Millennials — a generation grappling with a precarious job market, unaffordable housing and soaring student debt — gives it a meaning (and a complexity) sorely lacking in so many other contemporary novels I’ve read this year.

There’s so much to unpick in this multi-faceted story.

It explores everything from late capitalism to gentrification, poor working conditions to the housing crisis, and sets it against a wider backdrop of global political upheaval — the rise of the far right across Europe and the US, the war in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza — climate-induced catastrophes and the COVID pandemic.

And it does so in such an effortless way by putting a very human face on it and showing how larger, systematic issues play out on a personal level and how Australians, isolated from the rest of the world, exist in a bubble of complacency so desperately in need of being burst!

Communal living

The story is set in Sydney’s inner west at the tail end of the pandemic.

There’s not much of a plot. Instead, Paradise Estate follows the lives of a group of disparate, mainly working-class 30-somethings living in a share house over the course of a year. These include:

  • Helen, newly separated from her female partner, rents the dilapidated four-bedroom house in Hurlstone Park and fills it with tenants.
  • Sunny, is a non-binary person (pronoun: they) who was once in a relationship with Helen’s late brother, Walt, and is a zine maker working on a punk music archive. She also performs in a punk band called HDPE.
  • Beth, who mainly works in bars and is addicted to vaping.
  • Nathan, a casual history tutor come political activist, who wants to turn the share house into a fully fledged commune.
  • Alice, Nathan’s partner, is a research scientist and keen gardener, keen to settle down but in a “proper” house of her own.
  • Dale, an alcoholic, is quickly booted out of the household for “unsavoury activities”.
  • Rocco, Dale’s replacement, a scaffolder who is a part-time rugby league player recently returned from Italy.

As ever with a share house, there are unspoken tensions, petty disputes and incidental privacy breaches between housemates, but there are budding romances and strong friendships too.

In the past, share houses were typically for students and younger people, but these tenants are all in their 30s. They’ve been priced out of the property market and the only way to make the soaring rent affordable is to split it with others.

This infantilising lifestyle is a recurring theme. In one scene, the landlord turns up to prune the lemon tree in the backyard.

“You’re good kids,” he said, bundling the branches.
“We’re in our thirties,” Helen replied.
“You live like kids,” he said, looking around at the state of the yard, and porch, and laundry. (p98)

Alice hates the situation, of having to fight to use the bathroom, of not having enough personal space, of tripping over wet towels on her own bedroom floor.

“I want this to be over!” Alice cried.
“What now?” he sighed.
“I want to live in a real house — I want things to be better!”
“This is a real house,” Nathan said tersely, “and it doesn’t just ‘get better’.”
“It’s supposed to! How long am I supposed to keep doing this?”
“We’ll get there,” he said, “but we need to build this thing first.”
“What are we building, Nathan?!”
He looked at her blankly. “We’re making this house a commune.” (p97)

A life on show

And then there’s the Rear Window vibe — the house, the only one left standing on the street, is surrounded by newly built apartment blocks, so there’s next to no privacy for anyone.

People cooked by brightly lit kitchen windows, the blues of TV screens flooded others, and there were the usual balcony sitters: in trackpants, or dressing gowns, Ugg boots or slippers, staring down at their yard and smoking or talking on the phone. Far below, Rocco, Beth and Helen shivered in their damp clothes, looking back up at them. (p136)

Yet for all the talk of communal living inside the share house, there’s little consideration for others outside their domain. They host noisy parties and Sunny’s band performs late-night shows in the garden.

It drew neighbours onto their balconies. As the simmering feedback began to coalesce into an extended intro, one man yelled down at them to “shut the fuck up”. HDPE [the band] responded by kicking into their first song. (p58)

Meanwhile, the house is falling apart and is beset by mould, which gets increasingly worse during the unseasonally wet winter of 2022.

Vivid characters

It’s the characters that make this novel so vivid and alive. They’re well drawn and distinctive (apart from Beth, who is the only vague one), and Easton tells their various stories in a seamless third-person narrative that switches focus from chapter to chapter.

These chapters are interspersed with small vignettes, usually no more than half a page, to give us a more intimate glimpse into what a certain character may be thinking or feeling.

It’s the conversations between characters that allow Easton to explore issues relating to class, the economy, politics and society, and to do it in a non-judgmental, this is how it is way.

Occasionally, the sections on underground music feel a bit clumsy (Easton has his own zine and podcast series exploring underground music’s ties to counterculture and subculture), but on the whole, this chronicle of communal living is an exhilarating read.

Paradise Estate is a follow-up to Easton’s The Magpie Wing, which was longlisted for last year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award, but it works as a standalone. (I haven’t read The Magpie Wing but am keen to do so now.)

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

‘The House That Joy Built’ by Holly Ringland

kimbofo

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.