Some things just don’t appear to go together, unless you are good at puzzles. A fox, a goose, and a bag of beans, for instance; or maybe a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage. Then there are Australia, love, and poetry. Australians and poetry can’t be left alone together, can they, and don’t expressions of love lose something when uttered out of the side of the mouth?

Donna Ward, publisher of Australian Love Poems, and Mark Tredinnick, its editor, reject both propositions. Part of the problem, Tredinnick writes in his introduction, is that ‘there has been a good deal more head than heart in Australian poetry for a while, a good deal more mind than body, more wit than wisdom’. This project, he suggests, allowed poets to bring forth work they might previously have felt wasn’t quite acceptable in the rarefied world of poetry publishing.

Any sequel, much less the final book of a trilogy, intensifies the dilemma presented to a reviewer who does not wish simply to provide a plot summary, but for whom it’s impossible to say anything coherent about the book without giving some idea of what happens in it. For any reader who might not have read or can’t clearly remember the first two books in this trilogy, Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009), it’s fortunate that brief summaries of plots and characters are given at the beginning of this third and last volume. The plot of Atwood’s trilogy is particularly complicated, stretching as it now does across three novels and involving events, concepts, and creatures that all require explanation. Who are the Crakers, and why do they purr? Are the wild bees really listening when Toby talks to them? And what is a rakunk?

The word ‘MaddAddam’ is a palindrome, containing a number of words including synonyms for ‘father’, ‘mother’, and ‘crazy’ as well as the name of Biblical Adam, the fallen man. It’s exactly the kind of tricky name you’d expect from a mysterious online identity who runs a macabre game called Extinctathon: ‘Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones.’ Parenthood, madness, and the origins of humanity are indeed among the many topics that this scintillating novel either touches on in passing or explores in depth.

Many of the other names in this novel are also jokes, black or otherwise: three of the minor characters – the brothers Crozier, Oates, and Shackleton – are named after an assortment of Antarctic explorers, and anyone familiar with these names won’t be surprised to learn that Oates is the one who has not survived as far as the third volume. The innocent child who comes to represent hope for the future is a sweet-natured, affectionate, luminously green-eyed little boy whose name is Blackbeard.

One of the several ragtag groups who make up Atwood’s post-apocalyptic society comes from the remains of the Maddaddamites, an organised group of bioterrorists led by the late Crake, who were eventually responsible for the genetically engineered plague that wiped out most of humanity. They are fully human, as are three other groups: the eco-friendly God’s Gardeners, the survivors from the underclass of the Pleeblands, and the viciously murderous Painballers – though there’s some discussion about whether the lives and crimes of the Painballers have stripped some essence of humanity from them.

And there is another humanoid group: the Crakers are partly human but have had a number of the more troublesome human traits removed, genetically engineered by the mad genius Crake. Characters central to the first two novels recur in this story, notably Adam One, Jimmy, and Toby. The innocent Crakers are the most charming thing about this book, and their interactions with other characters provide much of the humour, though the wisecracking conversation of the lively lovers Toby and Zeb is also a product of Atwood’s rapid-fire wit.

There is another part-human group: readers of the earlier books will remember the Pigoons, the large pigs whose brains contain human matter and who are, in consequence, extremely smart and strategic enemies, though there’s a startling, touching twist towards the end. The landscape is littered with genetically spliced creatures, but it’s interesting to note that the humanity of the murderous and sadistic Painballers is questioned despite their biological integrity; it isn’t only genes that make a person what we think of as human. One of the very big ideas explored in this trilogy is the question of what it is that does make us human, and where the boundaries between the human and the non-human actually lie, if boundaries there really be at all.

Readers familiar with Atwood’s work will not be surprised to learn that one of the most troubling aspects of this book is the unresolved question of female autonomy, sexuality, and reproduction: women continue to be used, abused and threatened in a world where sexual jealousy bites as sharply as ever, and women are still the vessels of reproduction in a world where conception could be the product of brutal rape or of an excess of innocent enthusiasm from a pack of part-human Crakers and their wagging blue penises.

‘Atwood is not only a novelist and storyteller of vast experience, but also an experienced writer of dystopias, and her breadth of knowledge and depth of intellect make her management of this sort of narrative invention look effortless.’

Unsurprisingly, given Atwood’s intellectual energy and prodigious imagination, this book is bursting with ideas. At its heart is the story of Zeb and Toby – their survival thus far, their romance, and their relationships with the other survivors – but ideas about technology, survivalism, political power, scientific anarchy, religion, literacy, ecological awareness, and the nature and culture of genetic material are the platform on which this imaginary world is built, and many of these fields are already familiar territory in Atwood’s work. She is far more aware than many writers who venture into the future that in order to write a good and convincing dystopia you need to provide a solid back-story: a convincing and logical account of the processes – political, social, technological – by which the world got from where we are now to the time and place where the imaginary future occurs. Atwood is not only a novelist and storyteller of vast experience, but also an experienced writer of dystopias, and her breadth of knowledge and depth of intellect make her management of this sort of narrative invention look effortless.

In Rendezvous with Destiny, Michael Fullilove, who is executive director of the Lowy Institute in Sydney, has taken the familiar story of the gradual entry of the United States into World War II and fleshed it out through an emphasis on the key emissaries used by Franklin D. Roosevelt to build an alliance with the United Kingdom and, somewhat later, the Soviet Union.

1. You are going to die

Malcolm has every reason to believe that he’ll be fine. The word ‘fine’ laps gently in his mind like the outgoing tide in a sheltered bay. From resting heartbeat to penile erection, Malcolm’s wiry forty-nine year old body has never given him cause to complain. Things Malcolm can’t see too, those that slide around in darkness, have always done so, smooth and effortless. And while his temperament is inclined to melancholy and rumination, not once has this made its way into any public realm – certainly it has never required professional intervention. Malcolm has always been functional.

In many ways, Steven Soderbergh could be described as an exemplary postmodern film-maker: smart, prolific, and pragmatic, at ease with Hollywood blockbusters and low-budget experiments alike. He knows enough about the nuts and bolts of technique to serve as his own cinematographer, and enough about the science of deal-making to sustain a parallel career as a producer (thirty films and counting, including such notable titles as Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven [2002]).

I walk in the door and Gran tells me that a month ago Leslie Mulligan was taken by a shark while trying to save a stranger. Imagine, a national hero. She actually says that. As though dying in a world of pain in an ocean filled with his own blood was a heroic choice.

Later, Katherine seemed to remember a run of light around the box, the way desert air shimmers on the horizon. What she did remember clearly were the two women walking, flat-footed and rolling-hipped, dark limbs like animated hieroglyphs inscribing the space through which they moved, an inflated plastic bag capering at their heels like a family pet. It was one of those ubiquitous white supermarket bags that festooned the low wattle scrub surrounding the community. Simon said they were the deflated skins of white people who had been sucked dry and discarded. The bag bounced and leaped, higher and higher, until it could no longer resist its own euphoric elevation and went on up into the deep of the sky. She watched it until it had blown far out over the cliffs, as if out to sea. When she dropped her eyes, she saw the blue truck from the Twin Lakes community with Adam Sinclair at the wheel, wearing the wide-brimmed black hat that made him look like an extra in a spaghetti western. He swerved to avoid a cluster of children playing in the road, one wheel clipping a discarded cardboard box on the edge of the road.

The past two decades have seen Richard Flanagan stride confidently into the first rank of Australian writers. His novels are notable for their historical reach, the boldness of their conception, and their willingness to tackle big subjects. They have won him many admirers. But they have also tended to divide opinion, often quite sharply, and this would seem to be a consequence of the fact that they have not always lived up to their promise. The grotesque comedy of Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) proved to be more fun in theory than in practice; while The Unknown Terrorist (2006) was an unhappy example of an author using a novel as a bully pulpit – not a purpose to which it is well suited. There was audacity in the attempt to contain the book’s outsized intellectual pretensions and finger-wagging condemnations within the populist form of a generic thriller, but ultimately it succeeded only in grinding its political message into unconvincing simplicities.

Ten years ago, if you moved in certain journalistic circles, calling yourself a blogger was about as popular as leprosy. Few in the industry had respect for the platform, and fewer still would have read your work. Print journalists seemed divided on whether blogging was a joke or a threat. Either way, it was a sure-fire way to end a conversation fast. But the digitisation of the media and its attendant upheaval of the newspaper business model changed everything. The occupational clichés of ink-stained fingers and the printing press were swiftly replaced with scrolling RSS feeds and the ubiquity of smartphones, constantly aglow. Circulation figures – and the dubious methods used to calculate them – were deemed irrelevant. Page views and time-stamps became the new metrics of an article’s (or an author’s) worth.

Olive and Ross

Dear Editor,

I very much enjoyed Helen Ennis’s article about Olive Cotton at Spring Forest (July–August 2013). I stayed there with Geoffrey Lehmann when, in the early 1990s, I was interviewing Ross McInerney and recording Geoff’s poems for an ABC radio feature. At one point Olive popped out of the back door and snapped a photo with her old camera. Helen Ennis’s article made me dig it out of the bottom drawer. It shows Ross in expansive mood, telling us one of his Spring Forest stories that became the basis of Geoff’s book Ross’s Poems, later renamed Spring Forest.

When Mark Twain arrived in Watsons Bay in 1895, he called out from his ship that he was going to write a book about Australia. ‘I think I ought to start now. You know so much more of a country when you haven’t seen it than when you have. Besides, you don’t get your mind strengthened by contact with the hard facts of things.’ I expect it’s an injustice to Twain to explain his joke, but one reason it works is because you can feel the temptation: stay on board and, before you see anything, decide exactly what you’re going to find and what you’re going to say about it. Much of the wonder of A History of Silence lies in its steady revelation of what can happen when you choose, instead, to question what you know and allow places, and the secrets they contain, to speak to you afresh.

Lloyd Jones’s memoir comes as an important addition to a remarkable and wide-ranging oeuvre from probably New Zealand’s best-known writer. We meet family members who may, as Umberto Eco put it, want to ‘migrate’ from this work of non-fiction to our reading of Jones’s novels. Certainly, a very moving portrait of his mother, who, at a young age, was given up for adoption, seems to support the author’s view that ‘a writer’s works have a way of tracking back to his wellsprings’. It’s hard not to think of Mr Pip (2006), a novel in part about a girl’s loss of her mother at the same time as she falls in love with reading and storytelling. Or, indeed, Hand Me Down World (2010), in which a woman is tricked into giving up her son for adoption.

Both works, the author’s most successful novels, won a suite of awards, and Mr Pip has been made into a film (2013). But Jones’s career to date witnesses an immensely varied writing life seemingly animated by a desire to experiment with form and voice, a stylistic openness much on display in A History of Silence. The memoir brings together what might at first seem rather disparate subjects: the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch and certain omissions that have, until now, remained in the account that Jones’s family gives of its past. That Jones manages to relate them in an organic way is the reward of years of thoughtful and at times unconventional use of long-form prose, but also I think a result of the work’s third, quieter strand: the author’s reflections on what it means to write about places and the ‘hard facts of things’ in an open, responsive way.

Lloyd Jones's mother, Joyce (image courtesy Text Publishing)

One wonders whether doing so becomes more complicated with success. In his capacity as a cultural figure with an international presence, Jones might well feel bound in some way to speak about the Christchurch disaster on behalf of the nation. At the beginning of the book, he describes being asked to write about the quake shortly after it happens, but ultimately declining the offer. It seems that Jones, a master of intimate perspectives, doesn’t quite suit the role of author–spokesman, however flattering it is to be asked. In the first days after the quake, he wants more than anything to help out.

A small army of student volunteers appears to make this unnecessary, but, five weeks on, Jones decides to leave his home in Wellington and travel to the site of the disaster. By now, he goes also as a writer researching and shaping a story. Perhaps that’s why the first part of this memoir reminds me of an author’s apology that might once have prefaced a travel book: partly, Jones is giving us a key with which to read the remainder of the work. He recalls a painting by William Hodges, the artist on Cook’s second expedition to the Pacific. X-ray images have revealed that Hodges’ picture, a ‘romantic invention’, is in fact painted over ‘perhaps the first ever sketches of Antarctic icebergs’. It seems that the artist had failed to realise the startling originality of his first picture, and so was able to make the ‘devastating step towards easing the wilderness into pastoral familiarity’.

It is devastating, one supposes, because the artist’s first, authentic response has been replaced by a return to convention, but also, perhaps, because Jones is on the verge of doing something similar. Before leaving home, he’s heard stories about the earthquake and its aftermath. His hairdresser tells him about an aunt with a broken leg and how a toilet seat has had to be made for her out of a beach chair – one of those narrative-rich images around which a novel might just gather. When Jones travels to Christchurch, he takes the image with him: ‘like Hodges, I found myself seeking to overlay what I had seen with a story I’d heard.’

The way in which Jones changes his mind and responds to the scene before him, provides the philosophy of this book, but also its thematic link to the events in Christchurch: there will come a moment in life when you have to look openly and directly at past foundations, even if those foundations seem long to have disappeared out of view. A silent history is not the same as a lost history. ‘Nothing had been lost after all, just hidden.’

Lloyd Jones (photograph by Carolin Seeliger)

Walking through the ruined city, Jones finds himself shocked by a perfectly suburban scene, one that in this context seems strange because of its normality: a woman crouched at a flowerbed. For, as suddenly, it’s a vision of the street of his own childhood. He abandons the project he’s brought with him, and as convincingly institutes a new one, a work that at its heart will try to better understand his mother and father, and the circumstances in which they were separated from their parents.

When I interviewed Jones at the Brisbane Writers Festival this year, he said that the earthquake had provided him with ‘a language by which to comprehend and write about the ancestral silence’ in his family. I think it also gave him a structure, one in which a series of childhood recollections are allowed to collide with the author’s present-day research into his family’s past. ‘Out of the vanished or vanishing world of my childhood, figures come and go.’ In A History of Silence, they come and go rather in the way that the strangely familiar figures of everyday life – a postman, a gardener – make their way through a radically altered city.

Together, Jones’s personal search for his origins and his impressions of the earthquake frame a wonderfully patient and tense discovery of his family’s central fault lines. Perhaps the most startling of these relates to the illegitimacy of Jones’s mother and a decision by Maud, Jones’s maternal grandmother, to give up her daughter at the request of the man she later married. But throughout this brilliant memoir, the ultimate impact of the book lies with how openly and humanely Jones responds, as an author and a son, to a truer picture of his family. In this, it does what I suspect we’d like all family memoirs to do. Before filling the silence, it listens for what might lie behind it.

Jolley Prize

This year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize attracted about 1200 entries. They kept busy our three judges: Tony Birch, Terri-ann White, and Maria Takolander, whose new collection of short stories, The Double (Text Publishing) – which Patrick Allington reviewed in our September issue – was commissioned on the strength of her own Jolley Prize win in 2010.

We have much pleasure in publishing the three shortlisted stories. They are Rebekah Clarkson’s ‘The Five Truths of Manhood’, Kim Mahood’s ‘The Accident’, and Michelle Michau-Crawford’s ‘Leaving Elvis’.

The overall winner (who will receive $5000) will be named at Gleebooks on Monday, 28 October (6 pm). This is a free public event, and we hope you will join us. All three writers will read from their stories. See our full list of events for more details.

Readers’ Choice Award

To celebrate the Jolley Prize (which is generously supported by Mr Ian Dickson) and to find out which story our readers like most, we are also presenting the Readers’ Choice Award.

You will have until Friday, 1 November (5 pm) to nominate your favourite. To do so please email us with the title of the story, a comment if you wish, and your full name, address, and telephone number: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

We are offering three special prizes: first up, a wonderful library of fifty Text Classics, courtesy of our friends at Text Publishing for a lucky voter (living in Australia). We also have two three-year print or ABR Online subscriptions to give away.

ABR in Adelaide

Adelaideans will have a chance to hear Rebekah Clarkson read from her shortlisted story when SA Writers Centre presents ‘ABR in Adelaide’ on Friday, 11 October (6.30 pm). Peter Rose will also discuss publishing options in the magazine sector and what he looks for in new contributors. Apropos of which, writers seeking review work at ABR might like to consult the Editor’s desideratum on the website.

This is a free event, but reservations are essential: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We look forward to seeing you there.

Fact or fiction?

Bring Dennis Altman and Christos Tsiolkas together for a conversation about ‘The End of the Homosexual: Fact or Fiction?’ and you are guaranteed a capacity audience. They will be in conversation on Wednesday, 9 October (7.30 pm) at Hares & Hyenas, in Fitzroy – (03) 9495 6589.

Robert Reynolds reviewed Dennis Altman’s new study of homosexuality in the September issue. Rosemary Sorensen will review Christos Tsiolkas’s new novel, Barracuda, in the November issue.

Godfather Gore

Gore Vidal at age 23, 1948 (photo: Carl Van Vechten)

Gore Vidal – novelist, memoirist, scriptwriter, actor, provocateur, essayist par excellence – was surely the most quotable of modern writers. We all know his four favourite words in the English language: ‘I told you so.’ And his three saddest? ‘Joyce Carol Oates.’

Vidal, who died in July 2012, lived to be eighty-six despite bad emphysema and the execrations of the American right. Much will be written about him in coming years, but meanwhile we have a neat little book of interviews to enjoy: I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics: Interviews with John Wiener (Counterpoint [NewSouth Books], $17.99 pb, 9781619021747). Advances enjoyed this anecdote. Wiener asked Vidal what he said when actors Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins asked him to stand godfather to their son. ‘Always a godfather, never a god,’ quipped Vidal.

$250,000 n.o.

Since 2005 ABR has distributed more than $250,000 to the winners of our three literary prizes, our Patrons’ Fellows, and our editorial interns. This is in addition to payments to contributors. Such largesse is only possible because of the generosity of our Patrons, our donors, various philanthropic foundations, and Copyright Agency. We look forward to dispersing another quarter of a million dollars in coming years. And we are always keen to hear from prospective Patrons!

In conversation

Early next year we will have a new international open-access online literary journal devoted to interviews. Editors Gillian Dooley (a frequent contributor to ABR) and Nick Turner (from the University of Central Lancashire) are seeking interviews with ‘writers of all kinds’ for their first issue of Writers in Conversation, which is due to be published in February 2014. Prospective interviewers should contact Dr Dooley (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), who is a librarian at Flinders University and editor of another online journal, Transnational Literature.

Cassandra Atherton, who is one of the new journal’s editorial advisers, is undertaking a series of interviews with major publishers for ABR. We look forward to publishing her interview with Random House’s Nikki Christer. This will be an occasional series.

Give a free gift subscription to ABR

We’re feeling generous again! For the next three months, those subscribers who renew their subscriptions will be eligible to give a free six-month subscription to a friend or colleague. Renew your current subscription at any stage (even before it lapses) to qualify for this special offer. Renew for two years and give away two free subs, etc. Introduce ABR to younger readers in your family or circle.

All you have to do is fill in the back of the flysheet that accompanies this issue, call (03) 9699 8822 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (quoting your subscriber number). We will contact your nominated recipient to establish whether he or she wants the print edition or ABR Online.

This special offer, perfect for Christmas, lapses on 31 December and is open only to current print and online subscribers who renew before the end of the year.

The writing of a novel, Alex Miller has said, ‘is a kind of journey of the imagination in which there’s the liberty to dream your own dream … There’s always got to be a model located somewhere in fact and reality … But some of your best characters are what you think of as being purely made up, just characters that needed to be there.’

There is no way of telling and no need to know if Robert Blewitt – whose mother called him Bobby Blue – is ‘purely made up’ or owes something to ‘fact and reality’, but he is certainly one of Miller’s most memorable characters, as striking in his own special way as Annabelle Beck and Bo Rennie (Journey to the Stone Country [2002]), John Patterner (Lovesong [2009]), Max Otto (Landscape of Farewell  [2007]), or Autumn Laing, whose first-person narrative begins: ‘They are all dead and I am old and skeleton-gaunt. This is where it began fifty-three years ago.’

Ten years ago, if you moved in certain journalistic circles, calling yourself a blogger was about as popular as leprosy. Few in the industry had respect for the platform, and fewer still would have read your work. Print journalists seemed divided on whether blogging was a joke or a threat. Either way, it was a sure-fire way to end a conversation fast. But the digitisation of the media and its attendant upheaval of the newspaper business model changed everything. The occupational clichés of ink-stained fingers and the printing press were swiftly replaced with scrolling RSS feeds and the ubiquity of smartphones, constantly aglow. Circulation figures – and the dubious methods used to calculate them – were deemed irrelevant. Page views and time-stamps became the new metrics of an article’s (or an author’s) worth.

Garry Wills is a distinguished American historian whose writings over the past twenty years or so on the frailties of the Catholic Church, notably in such books as Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (2000) and Why I Am a Catholic (2002), have provided stinging critiques of the institution to which he still steadfastly belongs. His new book, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, continues the theme by rejecting the validity of the very idea of the Catholic priesthood. And if this is not sufficiently radical, Wills’s subversion of the priesthood also involves a critique of the doctrine of the Real Presenceof Christ in the Eucharist, the status of the sacraments, of mainstream accounts of the Atonement, and of the standing of Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews.

Towards the end of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975), at the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher’s funeral on an April day in Chicago, Menasha Klinger, one of three mourners, points to a spring flower and asks Charlie Citrine, the novel’s narrator, to identify it. ‘Search me,’ Citrine replies, ‘I’m a city boy myself. They must be crocuses.’ This exchange has stayed with me for some thirty-five years. I, too, am a city boy, and couldn’t identify a crocus if I saw one.

Our instinctual reaction to parents who leave their children is one of suspicion. ‘Child abandonment’ elicits such images as a swaddled foundling in the woods, a parent in a train station losing hold of her child’s hand and disappearing into the crowd, or an anonymous baby hatch in a hospital. The presumption is that a mother (fathers are usually spared this judgement) abandons her child because of some shortcoming: poverty, selfishness, capriciousness. Eleanor Limprecht was prompted to write this novel by a newspaper headline at the time of the birth of her first child when a baby was abandoned at Dandenong Hospital. It asked, ‘How Could She?’

Seamlessly extending from the French occupation of Cambodia to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge and the current tourism industry, Laura Jean McKay’s début short story collection, Holiday in Cambodia, is a powerful portrait of a country long-affected by war and poverty. McKay’s knowledge of the Cambodian landscape underpins the collection. She evokes peak-hour from a motorbike, where ‘everything looks like bushfire, like nicotine’, and notes the forgotten landmines of neighbouring paddocks, which ‘travel like worms’ through loosening earth. In one of the shortest and most affecting pieces, ‘A Thousand Cobs of Corn’, a Cambodian woman looks down at her husband’s hands in the night, ‘which have shaken since he was a boy soldier’.

D ark Horse is the latest book from Victorian author Honey Brown. The novel tells of lust and lies between two strangers who come together in an appropriately secluded rural location.

Sarah Barnard has recently left an unhappy marriage, and is spending the Christmas period camping with her horse, Tansy. Sarah’s solitude is interrupted by the arrival of a man who calls himself Heath. Sarah is immediately captivated by his good looks; despite her initial caution, the two embark on an affair. Heath tells Sarah: ‘You come across as strong and sexy.’ He is certainly more desirable than Sarah’s ex-husband, who is described as a ‘cheating bloody liar’. Yet she begins to worry that Heath might in fact pose a threat to her existence. What secrets might this handsome stranger be hiding?

‘Trust’ between voters and their elected representatives must seem rather arbitrary to politicians, whose success depends on its maintenance. Our simplistic expectations of honesty are belied by the ways in which our subconscious perceptions are herded into different narratives. Julia Gillard was either inherently untrustworthy because she benefited from Kevin Rudd’s political assassination and ‘lied’ about the carbon tax, or she was a victim of appalling sexism and a scheming predecessor. Tony Abbott is either a secretive DLP operative about to turn the clock back half a century and a smarmy would-be womaniser, or a refreshing mix of cheeky larrikin and pragmatic conservative. John Howard was either the greatest liar in modern politics, or the most trusted economic and national security manager in the postwar era.

 Drive one nail out with another,that’s our only hope.
We can’t live any more like birds on a branch,
because the murderous past never stops,
not even at night.
Every day we expect to be accused of unspeakable things and turned adrift.

What is it about laughter that makes us lift
As if the burden might be gone or the weight
Be somehow alleviated? Laughter is just noise.

It’s not just history that is written by the victors, but the encyclopedias, too. The eighteenth-century encyclopedias, such as Diderot’s Encyclopédie, were the projects of emergent superpowers, evidence of both the Enlightenment dream of universal knowledge and burgeoning colonial impulses. (That the Encyclopedia Britannica was an initiative of the Scottish Enlightenment only supports this idea, Scotland having been part of the British Union since 1707.) In our own time, the relationship between nation and knowledge remains present. Even Wikipedia, for all its open, global nature, is an American venture, with most of its servers in Florida.

Judy Johnson’s sixth collection of poetry brings us a strong range of closely observed, powerful poems. As the title suggests, they are all linked together by elemental themes: the apparent solidity of stone, the persistence of scar tissue, the promises of air, and the complex gifts of water. In their often very different ways, each of the poems negotiates something of this elemental field, either in terms of an actuality of landscape and the specificity of place, in relation to particular narratives of history or as an archaeology of the emotions.

When I was a teenager, I attended a theatre workshop organised by Australian Theatre for Young People. Nick Enright, who led the workshop, told a story about seeing the opening-night production of David Williamson’s The Removalists (1971) from backstage. Twenty years on, Enright’s description of the look on the audience’s faces as they contemplated the grisly dénouement of Williamson’s play stays with me. ‘They were the faces of people witnessing a car crash,’ he said, with a forthright sincerity that was utterly convincing. That moment, Enright said, had been a key milestone in his own development as a playwright.

Of the innumerable books on the design work of William Morris (1834–96) that have appeared since the 1980s, the one that has remained the best and most informative is Linda Parry’s William Morris: Textiles (1983), published early on in her career as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Since then, there has been much new research on Morris and many exhibitions of his work (at least six in Australia alone). In 1996 he was the subject of a centenary retrospective at the V&A, for which Parry was the curator and editor of the exhibition book. Two major biographies by Fiona MacCarthy – William Morris: A Life for our Time (1994) and The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (2011) – add substantially to our understanding of Morris and his firm, Morris & Co. Interest in this remarkable Victorian – poet, novelist, artist, socialist reformer – appears to be stronger than ever, and demand for Morris-designed textiles and wallpapers is insatiable; many remain in production either as reproductions or adaptations. This new, extensively updated and rewritten version of William Morris: Textiles benefits from all these later publications and exhaustive new research, deftly contextualised by Parry.

The last twelve months have seen some notable film reworkings of classic literary texts, with Anna Karenina set in a theatre, a black Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, and a gorgeous Much Ado About Nothing enacted in monochrome contemporary California. Now we have a compelling version of Henry James’s novel What Maisie Knew (1897), which reminds one of what a good run he has had with film adaptations. Hapless as he was as a stage dramatist, James would have been delighted with such potent film versions as The Heiress (ex-Washington Square, 1949) and The Wings of the Dove (1997).

In many ways, Steven Soderbergh could be described as an exemplary postmodern film-maker: smart, prolific, and pragmatic, at ease with Hollywood blockbusters and low-budget experiments alike. He knows enough about the nuts and bolts of technique to serve as his own cinematographer, and enough about the science of deal-making to sustain a parallel career as a producer (thirty films and counting, including such notable titles as Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven [2002]).

David Cannadine is a distinguished transatlantic historian, the author of books on modern Britain and its empire, the biographer of G.M. Trevelyan and Andrew Mellon, and he recently wrote a perceptive account of the persistent anxiety over school history. An iconoclastic thinker and urbane stylist, Cannadine excels in the extended essay that overturns a conventional interpretation. These qualities are evident in this book, which derives from the Trevelyan Lectures he delivered at Cambridge in 2007.

On 18 July 2013the Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny was sentenced to a five-year jail term on corruption charges. Navalny, in a speech to the court castigating the dispensation which has emerged in Russia since Vladimir Putin first became president in 2000, attacked a ‘system of power in which 83 percent of the country’s wealth is in the hands of half of one percent of the population’. Widely held to be the result of political persecution by the Kremlin, Navalny’s conviction was condemned inside and outside Russia.

In this short and accessible book, Steven Nadler, an accomplished historian of seventeenth-century philosophy, turns his attention to René Descartes (1596–1650) and his cultural milieu in Holland in the 1630s and 1640s. His angle of approach is to take the familiar portrait of Descartes, attributed to Frans Hals – versions of which grace the covers of the vast majority of textbook editions of Descartes’s works – and to illuminate the three intersecting lives to which it bears tribute.

Pre-teen and early teen years had me and many others enjoying Ross Campbell’s witty column in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper about the goings-on in ‘Oxalis Cottage’, a fictionalised version of his Sydney home. Robert Drewe’s often hilarious columns for The Age and The Weekend West are a kind of modern equivalent, and a selection of them is brought together to form The Local Wildlife.

If Michael Pollan were a terminal illness, I’d be in the fourth stage of grieving. He has had a brilliant and successful run until now, producing seven books in just over twenty years, taking up a university teaching position (yes, food-related), writing long articles, mostly for the New York Times, and all the while cooking and thinking his way to self-fulfilment.

I reviewed The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-eye View of the World (2001), his third book, charmed by his easy, enthusiastic, conversational style, and his marshalling of information, but sceptical of his central idea, that the foods and plants we choose to grow as major crops (he nominates apples, potatoes, marijuana, and tulips) have increased their own longevity as much as we have benefited by manipulating them to suit large-scale, industrialised agriculture. The plants, Pollan suggests, are using us as much as we are using them. Plants, as far as I understand them, are marvellous and complex organisms, but not self-aware. Pollan edges uncomfortably towards gifting them an anthropomorphic voice. Surely we have dramatically reduced the biodiversity of food plants, rather than allowing specific varieties to multiply?

To judge by John McLaren’s thought-provoking survey of 200 years of writing about Melbourne, the city’s most insidious negative feature for many observers – wrong-headed though they may be – is dullness. In George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964), the narrator David Meredith rails against the suburbs as ‘worse than slums. They betrayed nothing of anger or revolt or resentment; they lacked the grim adventure of true poverty; they had no suffering, because they had mortgaged this right to secure a sad acceptance of suburban respectability that ranked them a step or two higher than the true, dangerous slums of Fitzroy or Collingwood.’ In affluent suburbs like Malvern, Graham McInnes in The Road to Gundagai, a memoir first published in 1965, saw ‘immense deserts of brick and terracotta, or wood and galvanised iron [that] induce a sense of overpowering dullness, a stupefying sameness, a worthy, plodding, pedestrian middle-class, low church conformity’.

Westerly’s descriptive subtitle (‘the best in writing from the West’) is a modest claim given its national and international reach. A feast of poetry includes offerings by familiar locals like Kevin Gillam, Andrew Lansdown, and Shane McCauley alongside poets such as Kevin Hart and Knute Skinner. There are translations of Xi’an poet, Allen Zhu Jian, by Liang Yujing; and from Russian, by Peter Porter, of poems by Eugene Dubnov. The fiction includes work by Nepali writer Smriti Ravindra, and by Shokoofeh Azar, translated by Persian–English translator Rebecca Stengal, based in France. Hardly surprising, then, that the volume resonates with a sense of diversity and literary substance.

So many Australian scholars and writers stand tall alongside C.E.W. Bean that you have to wonder: is there much more that can be said about World War I? Well, no. And yes. Almost one hundred years on, writers such as battlefield historian Will Davies continue to seek illumination through unfamiliar characters and fresh angles. Such is his intention in his latest book, The Boy Colonel.

No matter what the state of local publishing of Australian literature and criticism, twice a year the loyal members of AAALS continue to produce the readable and enlightening Antipodes. The June 2013 issue includes some splendid poetry by Tom Shapcott, Jan Owen, and Ali Alizadeh, and several less well-known names, and a mix of stories that move beyond fiction in Jeremy Fisher’s memoir of his father’s war experience and Graeme Kinross-Smith recalling his work teaching creative writing. Lucy Neave and John Kinsella contribute engaging, if more conventional, fiction.

You think you know what Jackie French’s Refuge (Angus & Robertson, $15.99 pb, 261 pp, 9780732296179) is going to be about, with its front cover photograph of a young boy, his dark eyes full of apprehension and sorrow. You still think you know when the refugee boat carrying the boy, Faris, and his grandmother, Jedda, to Australia is swamped by a huge wave and sinks. So you are almost as puzzled as Faris when he awakes to find himself in a sunlit bedroom with palm trees and a blue sky outside, and his beloved Jedda making breakfast for him. She encourages him to play on the beach, where a strange assortment of children is playing ball, and a naked, dark-skinned youth is spearing fish in the shallows. Faris is invited to join the game, with one proviso: on the beach he must never speak of the past. Faris agrees; there is too much pain in his past to talk about it.

Kim Kane and Marion Roberts co-write this eerie Melbourne-based thriller seamlessly. In this story that is every parent’s worst nightmare, we see schoolgirls snatched from the middle of their routine, presumed safe, suburban life.

Celia and Alice don’t know the first girl taken or each other, but they connect on Facebook through their shared grief that this could happen to someone they have seen, played sport against, pushed past on the bus. As the two girls share emails, their friendship becomes about more than the tragedy of a missing friend and they begin to unfold their lives for each other, sharing their hopes, dreams, and secrets. But the teenage gossip always has a sinister overtone. A second girl goes missing, even closer this time. Alice or Celia could be next.

Why do you write?

I like words, though making music is even better. Writing is almost as good as playing the violin.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

I don’t know about vivid, but ever since I was an exchange student in Moscow in the 1960s I have had a repetitive dream about trying to pack and get to Sheremetevo airport, with my Soviet visa run out, but without an exit visa.