With his first novel, Tiger in Eden (2012), Chris Flynn displayed an acute ear for the vernacular that was occasionally profane and equally poetic. This quality continues in his new novel, The Glass Kingdom, particularly through the central characters, Ben and Mikey. Both men are misfits of the first order. Ben, the older of the pair, runs a sideshow alley game, Target Ball, for a motley travelling carnival making its way through the backblocks of rural New South Wales, fleecing the locals and getting into the occasional bar-room brawl, all while running a relatively lucrative methamphetamine trade.

In his essay on James Bulger, the British toddler murdered by two ten-year-old boys in 1993, novelist Andrew O’Hagan tells the story of his own experience of childhood bullying – as the perpetrator, not the victim. Bulger’s ‘childish child-murderers’ remind him, he avers, of himself as a boy, and with this extraordinary expression of solidarity he launches into an account of the unremarkable violence layered into his own Scottish childhood, beginning with the story of how, at the age of six, he and a friend systematically beat a younger child to the point of serious injury.

1984 is back. George Orwell’s nightmare vision of governmental surveillance, secrecy, and deception clearly resonates with the revelations first leaked to the Guardian by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. Indeed, it is practically impossible to find an account of the Snowden affair without at least one ‘Orwellian’ adjective dropped into the mix. Sometimes it comes qualified: Justice Richard J. Leon, District Court Judge for the District of Columbia ruling in December 2013 that the bulk collection of US mobile phone records was probably unconstitutional, called the NSA program ‘almost Orwellian’. This decision is currently under appeal.

‘Dear Dr Blewett, I am writing to you ... concerning your intention to publish the diary you kept during the first Keating Government ... Whether any legal action, criminal or civil, is initiated would be entirely a matter for the Commonwealth government and relevant authorities ... Against the background of the expectations of confidentiality with which you are familiar during your time as a minister ... I am unable to lend my support to your proposal to publish diaries recording the confidential deliberations of the Cabinet of which you were a member.’

So wrote Max Moore-Wilton (Secretary, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet) on 9 June 1998, prior to the publication of this writer’s A Cabinet Diary (1999). Yet some seven years had elapsed between the events recorded in the diary and its publication. The speed of contemporary history is such that the age of Paul Keating seemed, even at the time, to belong to another world. Moreover, I had excluded from A Cabinet Diary nearly all references to foreign affairs, particularly some colourful remarks on our Pacific neighbours by the foreign minister. Contrast this with Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister, which is all about foreign affairs and which appears within twelve months of some of the events described. This gives the book a wonderful immediacy, but does it arouse the ire of powerful bureaucrats? Did Carr too receive a threatening epistle from on high?

‘You acquired the habit of disguise and now you can’t shed it.’ This observation, made by a nameless old man to Lilith Goldberg, one of the three main protagonists of The Claimant, lies at the heart of the novel, though it shares that vibrantly beating heart with much else: the implications and intricacies of privilege; the iron grip of lineage; the complexities of naming and identity; the relentlessly resurfacing dramas of the personal past; unchangeable and beyond erasure; and the persistence of the essential self, which no guiles, stratagems or journeyings will suppress or alter.

If this seems a crowded stage, it is, and there is more than can easily be detailed here. Quite early in this dense and intricate narrative, you wonder how it is all going to be held together, and how intelligibility and a sense of direction and development will be maintained through multiplying names, varying manifestations of the same characters, the tangle and inter-penetration of the past, the present, and the possible. Janette Turner Hospital is equal to the challenge: more accurately, she accomplishes it all with an ease that is not only beguiling and attractive, but often almost jaunty. She is a splendid prose stylist in command of her art, and amazingly confident in exploring and testing its possibilities – now a lush sensuousness that never turns ‘purple’, now a sort of electric, sparking precision, and, not least of all her armoury, a free-ranging referencing of literature and art, other stories, atmospheres, characters, colours, moments.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is already a well-known Melbourne voice: a fiction writer and slam poet with an enthusiastic following. Now we have her first collection of short stories, Foreign Soil – the winner of the 2013 Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript – and it is a remarkable collection indeed. While its ten stories, ranging in length from fifteen to fifty pages, are unashamedly political, they are never reductively polemical. Nourished by Clarke’s empathetic imagination, her narratives create the lived experience of suffering and despair, resilience and hope, for the powerless, the discarded, the socially adrift. And while the collection focuses on race relations and racial identity – an emphasis perhaps attributable to Clarke’s Afro-Caribbean heritage – it rejects the simple model of white oppressor–black victim. We are shown, for example, the ugly misogyny of 1960s black male activists; the distressing class arrogance of a black Ugandan doctor towards his black servant and white lover; the hard-won solidarity between a young black woman and her white employer. As well as being ideologically complex, the stories also resist easy moral judgements; Clarke encourages us to listen to the voices of those who are typically silenced. These wonderfully performative stories thus have a decidedly old-fashioned but ethically crucial aim: to refine the reader’s sympathies, to educate the heart.

The last words of the endnotes to John A. Scott’s most recent novel – earlier ones have won the Victorian Premier’s prize for fiction and been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award – and thus the last words of this book, if we exclude back-cover plaudits, read: ‘An additional narrative strand, chronicling the history of Surrealist André Breton in Melbourne, 1952, omitted from this version of N for reasons of overall length [emphasis added], appears in Southerly, Vol. 73, No 3, 2013 (“The Naked Writer”).’ As these words appear on page 599 of N, a sesquipedalian opus if ever there was one, it can only be observed, echoing Francisco in the first scene of Hamlet, ‘for this relief much thanks’, for N is already over-long, over-plotted, over-the-top, making excessive demands upon the reader’s generosity and her stamina.

Everybody knows by now that the eBook may soon become as significant to literature as recording is to music. The copyright problems are evident, but on the positive side the tired old market-driven canon is being given a rude shake-up.

Quality speaks for itself. Recent welcome revivals include editions of David Ireland’s The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971) and Kenneth Mackenzie’s flawless evocation of adolescent love, The Young Desire It (1937). Now, for the first time in seventy-eight years, J.P. McKinney’s novel of the Great War, Crucible, has been reissued by a small Canberra publisher as an eBook.

It is curious that the Great War (generally credited with a central role in defining the nation) should have produced so little literature: so few poems and so very few novels. Both the rarity of Crucible and its admirable qualities make this an event to celebrate.

‘Six lives, six loves and a precious garment that binds them all’ are words on the cover of expatriate Sri Lankan Su Dharmapala’s second novel. The book’s six sections follow the sequence of tying a saree – knot, first drape, pleats, second drape, the fall, and the finishing. Six lives are cleverly connected by a precious silken saree in Sri Lanka, India, and Melbourne. Initially, one imagines that the characters will be drawn from the young aspirants selected to compete for apprenticeships at a progressive saree mill in south-west Sri Lanka. Several, with their tutors, will reappear, sometimes surprisingly; others will vanish.

The book is populated with characters among the most cruel ever encountered, their barbarism hard to credit. Abominable behaviour knows no bounds, but some aspects of South Asian life and society seem Dickensian, for instance the treatment of mental illness in asylums resembling Bedlam. The book plunges into fairy tale, particularly evocative of the Brothers Grimm, charming in part, utterly horrifying in others. Elements of ‘Snow White’ appear, there is an evil queen and at least one dwarf, and Nila’s role as household drudge has much in common with Snow White and Cinderella. The latter’s role as persecuted heroine also fits the unfortunate Nila, whose sister, mother, and brother bear more than a passing resemblance to the ugly sisters. Raju is clearly Prince Charming. Hans Christian Andersen’s far milder story ‘The Ugly Duckling’ presents the model of virtue and fortitude in the face of adversity, and the possibility that any plain little chick may turn into a beautiful swan is also very appropriate for Nila Mendis.

In Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Sandcastle (1957), a young artist called Rain Carter is commissioned to paint a retired schoolmaster, Demoyte, an eccentric with an offbeat sense of humour. Instead of his usual attire – a shabby red velvet jacket with tobacco stains and bow tie – Demoyte turns up wearing a nondescript grey suit, explaining to a friend: ‘Am I to be summed up by a slip of a girl? ... I’m going to lead her up the garden [path] … She shan’t know what I’m like if I can help it!’

In Australia, thinking ‘landscape’, ‘country’, and ‘place’ virtually interchangeable is the hallmark of a migrant society. This is obvious because of the skeleton at our feast, the contrast between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ways of seeing land. Both can agree that ‘there’s no place like home’, because ‘place’ here means ‘a place’, a particular place, home. But non-Aboriginal writing commonly separates ‘place’ and ‘home’ – two centuries ago because that was literally so; now often as proof that Australia is multicultural.

I remember Amirah Inglis agreeing that her memoir An Un-Australian Childhood (1983) stood a better chance of being published than if she’d had an Australian childhood. ‘Place’ and ‘home’ are far apart in Amirah’s book. Sometimes mind does follow body to a new home, but equally some, born here or not, accept being migrants. This splits us all from the land, making us as likely to equate ‘country’ with ‘nation’ as with ‘place’. Immigration turns us sideways: the national effort focuses on integrating them with us, rather than us with the land. That’s been broadly so for 225 years, and it’s why most of us live in cities, whereas most Aborigines don’t, or if they do it’s commonly because a city has come to them. It takes time and memory to convert ‘landscape’ to ‘a place’, then to ‘place’, and finally to ‘country’. We have far to go.

Small talk

Dear Editor,

Your reviewer, Colin Steele, was too kind in his appraisal of Professor Helen Small’s disturbingly inadequate attempt to make a case for the humanities in her book The Value of the Humanities (May 2014).

Claims based on moral improvement and promoting democracy are certainly attractive and undoubtedly make humanities practitioners feel good about themselves. It is conceivable that we might one day live in a society that thinks these are a good thing for a government to invest in, though we seem to be some little way from that nirvana at present. Given the exclusive focus of our educational funders on short-term economic outcomes, Professor Small’s determination to ignore the very real value of a humanities education for commercial careers seems culpably negligent.

When did you first write for ABR?

September 1991.

Which critics most impress you?

As a journalist, I have been constantly thrown in the deep end and expected to review everything from books to shows to films to restaurants. I still admire some classic figures I idolised when I was starting out in England and didn’t know much about anything: Kenneth Tynan on theatre; Pauline Kael on film; Clive James on television. More recently, James Wood on literature. And many Australians!

Reports about the Mossad often have the unfortunate trait of reading like a John le Carré novel. We hear of spies assuming false identities and injecting poison into the ears of Israel’s enemies, or of a Mossad director beginning his weekly meetings with the question, ‘Who are we going to assassinate today?’ Unfortunately, most of these stories are true. As well as enhancing the agency’s notoriety, the Mossad’s outlandish methods serve to distract from their less exciting but more consequential activities. They also obscure the more worrying truth about intelligence agencies: they are run by ordinary people, and ordinary people make mistakes.

A number of such mistakes are evident in the story of Ben Zygier, the Australian–Israeli man who recently died in an Israeli jail under mysterious circumstances. Zygier grew up in Melbourne, found Zionism, and moved to Israel to work for the Mossad. A few years into his career, however, he was arrested on unknown charges and secretly held in isolation in an Israeli prison, where he committed suicide on 15 December 2010.

Sometimes the simplest of mistakes reveals far more of our preconceptions about human acts and motives, and about the complex relationships that make a human society, than we could have imagined. Such was the case with what journalist and lawyer Julie Szego dubs the ‘tainted trial’ of Farah Jama, a young Somali man who spent eighteen months in prison for a rape that almost certainly never happened.

Jama, who was accused of raping a woman found unconscious in a locked toilet cubicle in a Melbourne suburban nightclub in 2006, is the most notable Australian victim of what has been called the ‘CSI effect’: an uncritical regard for scientific techniques in the collection and analysis of evidence in criminal cases. His conviction relied solely on DNA testing, and almost nothing to corroborate it was cited at his trial. The fact that no one in the nightclub on the night in question remembered seeing a tall black man on a dance floor thronged with white faces, and that the club’s closed-circuit television tapes showed no such person entering or leaving the premises, apparently did not bother the jury or the trial judge. Nor did the fact that the woman had not even a hazy memory of the ordeal she was believed to have suffered.

Coinciding with the World War I anniversaries, Malcolm Fraser’s book will polarise Australian opinion on a fundamental issue. It has never been raised in this way, for Australian leaders have not discussed decisions to go to war in public, nor sought popular approval of Australia’s alliances. Yet successive generations of young Australians have fought in British and American wars to support our allies and to ensure that they would defend us. In Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the enemy were people who did not threaten Australia. But, as Fraser is not the first to observe, cowed countries do as great powers demand, while in return great powers do what suits their own interests.

Even before Federation, some had forebodings about what Australia was letting itself in for. H.B. Higgins, anticipating the 60,000 dead Anzacs, wondered if Australia would be expected ‘to contribute valuable lives and money in aid of wars which may not interest us directly’. Malcolm Fraser, who quotes him, puts up some equally pithy statements of his own, which delineate this theme. Here are some examples: ‘Why should we expect a great power to treat a dependent nation, even if an ally, as an equal?’; ‘The United States achieved true independence and true sovereignty whereas our sovereignty was heavily circumscribed’; ‘We need the United States for defence, but we only need defence because of the United States’. The United States, he tells Bob Carr (in Diary of a Foreign Minister) is ‘good at losing wars’.

Do the ends always justify the means? And if the boats really have stopped coming, should we see the death of Reza Berati and the suffering of thousands as the collateral damage of a successful policy?

Paul Toohey’s panoramic sweep of this human, ethical, and political terrain begins with a visit to Cisarua, a small resort town in the mountains south of Jakarta that has become a major centre for people seeking asylum in Australia. Some are awaiting the outcome of formal applications for refugee status. Others are preparing to risk a boat. It is July 2013, two months before the federal election. Toohey spends time getting to know people, listening to tales of their journeys and, later in the essay, talking to survivors plucked from the ocean after a boat is lost at sea. If for no other reason, Toohey’s essay should be read for this; as a powerful, necessary reminder that ‘asylum seekers’ have stories, loves, fears, names, and faces.

This book by Nigel Biggar, Anglican minister and Oxford Professor of Theology, is in the rich and broad tradition of thinking about war known as Just War Theory (JWT). JWT sees war as justifiable, but holds that decisions about going to war, as well as about the way it is fought, are subject to moral constraints. While it has its roots in classical philosophy, and has incorporated elements of chivalric custom, its theoretical superstructure was developed by early Church fathers as they tried to reconcile their spiritual commitments with an acceptance of the need for a well-regulated political order.

Any Christian attempt to justify war must of course account for the pacifistic implications of Jesus’s gospel of love and his apparent rejection of the use of force in his injunction to turn the other cheek if struck. St Augustine provided such an account in the fourth century. For Augustine, a Christian, motivated by love, will try to prevent others from falling into, or remaining in, sin. Since, on occasion, the only way to achieve this will necessitate the use of coercive force, Christians can be justified, indeed required, to use violence, including military violence, provided that they do so in response to the right kind of cause (a sinful act), with the right motive (love for the sinner), the right intention (to stop them sinning), and with the authorisation of the sovereign, who has ultimate responsibility for securing the just and peaceful order of his society. These fundamental elements of JWT, put in place by Augustine, were systematised by Aquinas in the thirteenth century and were elaborated in the early modern era by philosophers who grappled with the dilemmas produced by European confrontations with the peoples of the New World.

Some of the wildly successful historical novels of Robert Harris are counter-factual, like Fatherland (1992), which assumes a successful Nazi invasion of Britain. By contrast, his most recent work, An Officer and a Spy (2013), builds on a highly detailed account of the Dreyfus affair, which convulsed France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, was in 1894 convicted of espionage by passing military intelligence to the German Embassy in Paris. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, a rocky outcrop off French Guiana. Subsequent evidence pointed clearly to a Major Esterhazy as the true culprit. The Dreyfus cause was taken up by many political and literary figures, notably Georges Clémenceau and Émile Zola, who published his famous polemic J’accuse in 1898. There followed a trial of Esterhazy (acquitted), a libel prosecution of Zola (convicted), litigation in the civil courts, and a further military trial of Dreyfus (convicted again). Finally, he was pardoned in 1906. Dreyfus returned to the Army, served in the Great War, and died in 1935. Such is the sensitivity of the affair that a secret file was not released by the French authorities until 2013.

Alfred Dreyfus
(photograph by Ullstein Bilderdienst)

Harris tells the story through the mouth of a French officer, Colonel Georges Picquart, who, shortly after Dreyfus’s conviction, becomes head of the euphemistically titled Statistical Section,in truth a spying unit. Picquart, a forty year-old bachelor, is the youngest colonel in the French Army (in the Australian Army, most who obtain this rank would do so in their late thirties, perhaps an indication that the French peacetime army of the Dreyfus era was a somewhat ossified organisation.)

The true Dreyfus saga of deception and forgery, bravery and cowardice, is so gripping that Harris wisely lets the events speak for themselves. In this age of WikiLeaks, the espionage of the era has an almost innocent artlessness. The Statistical Office had an agent who was a cleaning lady at the German Embassy. She would empty the contents of embassy wastepaper baskets and hand them over each week in exchange for 200 francs. The embassy staff would have been better advised to burn the documents rather than just cut them up into small pieces (which the Statistical Office painstakingly reassembled).

According to the London Daily Telegraph, the genesis of An Officer and a Spy was a lunch in Paris at which Harris asked Roman Polanski, who had directed the film of the novelist’s The Ghost (2007), if he had considered making a film on the Dreyfus affair. Polanski said he had never been able to find a story in it. Harris decided to have a look. He immediately saw ‘at the heart of the whole thing … a brilliant spy story, which has tended to be lost in all the social commentary about anti-Semitism’.

Robert Harris
(photograph by Random House UK)

This perceptive approach is brilliantly validated in the finished product. The dramatic narrative and cast of characters are absorbing, and Harris deftly paints in the occasional detail which illuminates the social setting.

We are reminded of the humiliating defeat of France in the Franco–Prussian War of 1870, with the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. Desire for revenge against Germany, combined with enthusiasm for a Russian alignment, ran strong. The husband of Picquart’s mistress was a Foreign Office official who managed a triumphal Parisian visit by the tsar. The pomp and circumstance of the visit are vividly brought to life by Harris in a brief pen picture.

Picquart is a decent man, but his personal feelings towards Dreyfus are revealing of the attitudes of even the most civilised of French Gentile society.

Some years earlier, Picquart had been a professor at the École Superiéure de Guerre, where Dreyfus was a student. Picquart says that Dreyfus was ‘what my mother would call “a regular Jew”’, by which she meant such things as ‘new money’, pushiness, social climbing, and a fondness for ostentation.

Dreyfus invited Picquart to social occasions, including ‘top-class shooting’ he had rented near Fontainebleau. Picquart declined. ‘I didn’t much care for him, even less so when I discovered that the rest of his family had elected to remain in occupied Alsace, and that Germany was where his money came from: blood money I thought it.’ His voice struck Picquart as his ‘least attractive feature: nasal and mechanical, with a grating touch of Mulhouse German’.

Illustrating another gulf in French society, Picquart is rather anti-clerical. He takes his elderly mother to Mass and tells her he will see her after the service: ‘She peers at me with moist grey eyes. Her voice quivers. “But what shall I tell God?” ‘Tell Him I’ll be in the Café du Commerce in the square over there.’

The detective story that initially struck Harris remains at the core. The first-person, present-tense narrative conveys immediacy and a sense of involvement. Like many readers, the present reviewer was only vaguely aware of L’Affaire Dreyfus. At each twist and turn of the story, he was as astonished, and frequently outraged, as was Picquet. As the cliché reminds us, truth is stranger than fiction. Harris does full justice to this immortal story of injustice.

As Carol Freeman notes in a footnote to her chapter in Animal Death, ‘what the term “animal studies” defines is still being debated’. The seventeen chapters of this edited volume range across historical, scientific, cultural, and artistic animal-related subjects. They reflect a self-conscious commitment on the part of editors Jay Johnston and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey to the transdisciplinary nature of this inchoate field of scholarship. Although the title and unifying theme of Animal Death might seem to betoken a narrow focus on confrontational questions surrounding the killing of animals by humans – which are at times addressed unflinchingly – in actuality the book’s compass is far wider. It is a text that will be of great value to novices and experienced animal studies scholars alike: the kind of book a reader should be wary of opening with a pencil in hand, lest she find herself underlining the whole thing.

There is currently a very appealing trend in publishing with books about cities written by creative writers: fiction writers, novelists, and essayists. In Australia we have had the Cities Series from NewSouth Publishing: personal, writerly books that capture the spirit of our capital cities (and Alice Springs) and take us along pathways, with the idiosyncratic accompaniment of a local who is also a writer.

In recent years there have also been books of this type on Indian cities, including Mumbai and Delhi. This fascinating genre can carry along with it many different aspects of mythmaking; of history; of the daily movements and habits of the author. They aren’t travel guides, more like reflections on quotidian matters. Most of them necessarily also spin around an idea of what home is.

On the rear jacket of this fascinating and important book is a picture of Winston Churchill at his desk at Chartwell, his house in Kent, just a few months before the outbreak of World War II. Apparently caught in the moment of literary creation, cigar in mouth and concentrating on his papers, the photo credit – to a Picture Post photographer – leads to the obvious suspicion that this was actually a staged shot. For Churchill, his country home was not merely a place of repose but a writing factory, the output of which would earn him the large sums of money necessary for its upkeep. At the same time, his image as a man of letters served to advertise the product as well as to suggest the existence of a non-political ‘hinterland’ of the kind appropriate to a statesman of fertile brain and broad views.

In 1966 as a young first-year cadet at the Royal Military College, I purchased Anzac to Amiens by C.E.W. Bean, which had been published twenty years earlier. Bean had been Australia’s Official Historian for World War I, and Anzac to Amiens was his masterly condensation of the twelve-volume official history of which he had been the general editor and principal author. It was to be many years before I purchased the twelve volumes or could find time and commitment to read them. In the meantime, Anzac to Amiens was my guide to the history of Australia’s involvement in the war. I still refer to it.

In a 2011 lecture, David Crystal, a leading authority on the English language, spoke about the possibility of a ‘super-dictionary’ of English – a dictionary that would include every word in global English. Such a dictionary was, he acknowledged, a ‘crazy, stupid idea’, but an idea that seemed somehow possible in the electronic age, where the constraints of print no longer apply.

Dictionaries in the mould of Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and James Murray’s Oxford English Dictionary (OED, first volume 1884) have shaped our understanding of what a dictionary is. Dictionaries of the twentieth century, from Webster’s to the Chambers Dictionary to the Macquarie Dictionary to the Australian Oxford Dictionary, have followed in their footsteps.

Shy is a strange beast – part memoir, part journalistic investigation, part cri de coeur. Reading it, you are immersed in the interior life of an intelligent and sensitive woman. The experience is unsettling, almost voyeuristic. You wonder whether you should be sharing such an intense and honest self-scrutiny, and often feel as if you were breaching the sanctity of the confessional. But discomfort is Sian Prior’s aim: she wants the reader to feel the unease and embarrassment she has had to cope with all her life. For Prior suffers from a common but crippling social anxiety: she is painfully shy.

Prior is a well-known media personality. She has written opinion columns for the broadsheets, covered arts for ABC radio, hosted literary forums, taught creative writing at RMIT. She appears, on the surface, to be cool, calm, collected; one colleague described her as a ‘sphinx’. But that, Prior tells us, is the calculated façade of a professional woman determined to show that she is completely in control.

John Carey’s The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books has three intertwined components: autobiographical memories from Carey, a prolific author and book reviewer and former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford; his six-decade interaction with that university; and ‘English literature and me, how we met, how we got on, what came of it’. The book is also a microcosm of twentieth- century Britain and its educational, intellectual, and class systems. Carey, born in 1934 into a far from wealthy family, benefited from the grammar school system that enabled him to win a scholarship to St John’s College, Oxford, where he gained a congratulatory first in English.

Never heard of him – that’s the most common reaction when I mention Gerry Glaskin. Some Western Australians remember him, as they should: he was born and spent his last years there. Yet in between he was a bestselling novelist in the 1950s and 1960s. He was translated into French, German, Swedish, Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Danish, and Norwegian. Doubleday commissioned him to write a book about northern Australia. He was also a prolific short story writer, with two published collections. All of this is documented in the appendix and reference list of Dare Me! So how and why has Glaskin been erased from the Australian literary consciousness?

That is the question driving John Burbidge’s revealing yet compassionate biography. The conundrum for Glaskin was that he was much more successful outside Australia than within. Australian critics were also very unkind. In reviewing his first novel, A World of Our Own (1955), the Southerly critic, writing only under initials, said Gerry lacked ‘almost all the qualities of the novelist’. Yet the book received a favourable review in The Times and sold 75,000 copies in Norway. Nor did it help that his main claim to literary fame was written under a pseudonym. That book, No End to the Way, was published in 1965 with the author listed as Neville Jackson. Published in London, the novel’s subject matter, homosexuality, caused it to be banned in Australia. But it was Australia’s first gay novel, and it is also a brilliant example of that rarity, a successfully sustained second-person narrative.

I was a part-time pilgrim on John Eliot Gardiner’s extraordinary year-long journey, from Christmas 1999 to New Year’s Eve 2000, when he took Johann Sebastian Bach on the road. Gardiner’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, with his fifteen-member Monteverdi Choir and the twenty instrumentalists of the English Baroque Soloists, performed in Britain, Europe, and the United States all of JSB’s 198 surviving sacred cantatas on the liturgically appropriate days for which they were composed.

 At the time, I was engaged on a smaller, more personal devotional journey. The 2000 Melbourne Festival was marking the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death with a substantial program of his works. It seemed a good idea to write about JSB from the point of view of his heartland. That’s why, on a Saturday after Easter, I was in the Peterskirche in Görlitz, a small town on the German–Polish border – the latest stop on Gardiner’s pilgrimage and, indeed, mine. The pilgrims played three cantatas, the town choir joining in the chorales. The minister described the event as one of the greatest days in the cathedral, which is saying something, since there has been a church on that site since the thirteenth century.

For H. Tamvakeras

I was reading a poem in that upstairs sunlit room
when I looked up and thought I saw you, Harry,
standing beside the window across from the apartment
where laundry hung outside like a fireman’s ladder snaking

down the brickwork. The man had your narrow shoulders,
the same frail back, your steel-grey hair. His head was covered
by a baseball cap. He was missing your glasses. It’s not
the first time I’ve seen your ghost around books –

in that Sydney apartment up for sale, where shelves
spilled into each room, crammed full of cookbooks,
histories and biographies, I’d thought it was you
smiling in the photographs. You’d fit right into

this windy city. You’d meet with the philosophers
on Wednesday nights, shop the farmers’ markets
on weekends, hold court in the downtown bars
over glasses of ouzo. You would shrug on 

your cracked leather jacket before winding your way
home up the hills, some steep as the hills of Lesbos.
The city lights shiver like so many eyes
before they close up against the darkness of the night.

Nothing is whiter,
like clouds with the sun inside them.
Nothing is smoother,
like clouds and the moon beside them.
But they aren’t pure either.
There is lily-green underside them.
This is the start of an ASIO poem.
Borges said living under dictators
made him expert at metaphors.
But lyricism is direct, adores
the physical, the real. When young,
one knew to recognise a worker
for an intelligence agency because
they knew thorough Marxist-Leninism,
either in favour, or in Encounter,
analysing it at length as if it were
a present threat or promise. No one
else cared about it too much, even
Ho Chi Minh. All our revolutions
were agrarian, unorthodox: Nimbin
or Saigon. So being under fire
from new Marxist-Leninists again,
I naturally think: ASIO. However,
I like much post-colonial anger,
although it dates with colonial power.
Nothing is whiter
than post-colonial angers,
like clouds with the sun inside them.
Nothing is smoother,
like clouds and the moon beside them.
The anti-lyricism of the Leninists
and their Amish dislike of fiction
seem more like that of the occupation
of Prague than of Wall Street later.
I laugh: they’re Diego without Frida,
but that assumes the ASIO position
is not as it always was: too solemn.
And what stories do I know
talking to you of ASIO?
There is lily-green underside them.
When I tutored at uni, the lecturer
asked a guest to speak on poetry, a man
I’d not heard of much, but the explanation
was that he directed ASIO. He came
to talk on his verse, which was pure
no-experiment representation. She wanted him,
being journo, on account of his other function.
I wished her luck, let it go. Another
spy was a young man courting a writer
at an early literary festival, so certain
to be ASIO that a dinner party giver
asked him politely, ‘And you work for
ASIO, do you?’ He blushed to murmur,
‘Yes’, no doubt had prepared a lecture
on the need for Marxist-Leninism
in bookish, demure Melbourne. White cyclamen
are like clouds and the moon beside them,
and seem to survive forever. Here
is the last of an ASIO poem.

The springing point was where they took off from,
where the impost, set on good footings,
joined the arch and assured its leap and span
of water’s being there yet flowing on.

And though the weight of flight thrust back
so that each ounce of stone knew pull,
still to the eye the curve sprang free
and satisfied. And does yet. As if

there were grace in holding gravity at bay
and a certain poise in being in between.
My ideal landscape has room for bridges and hills,
spires, birds and echoes: halfway things.

Goats are ubiquitous in the work of Patrick White. Start looking for them and they appear everywhere, staring out, page after page, with wise, tranquil eyes, pellets scattering like secrets into dust.

U nder the Skin is adapted from Michael Faber’s eponymous speculative fiction novel (2000) in which an alien disguised as an attractive woman hunts hitchhikers in the Scottish highlands. Once she has determined that a man is appropriate prey, she drugs him and delivers him to a subterranean abattoir hidden beneath a farm where, in a disturbing allegorisation of factory farming, he is castrated, fattened up like foie gras, and prepared for shipment back to the alien home planet where human flesh is an expensive delicacy. This adaptation of Faber’s novel is the long-anticipated third feature film from director Jonathan Glazer.

He painted Kate Moss naked. The Kray twins threatened to cut off his painting hand over bad gambling debts. He was officially recognised as father to fourteen children by numerous partners, but the unofficial tally could be as high as forty (three were born to different mothers within a few months). He is Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund Freud, born in Berlin on 8 December 1922. All of his gambling disasters came from using his ‘lucky’ birth number, eight. Fittingly, he died at the age of eighty-eight in 2011.

Freud said of Kate Moss that he was ‘very aware of all kinds of spectacular things to do with her size, like amazing craters and things one’s never seen before’. He had many, many models. Some were thin as whippets, some were actual whippets, there was a brace of Lords of the Realm, an assortment of bookmakers (painted in lieu of debts that sometimes reached as high as $5 million), a gorilla, the queen, Harold Pinter, Freud’s many children (naked and clothed), lovers, and fellow painters. Robert Hughes described Freud’s portrait of Francis Bacon as ‘a grenade a fraction of a second before it explodes’. But it was another Australian, Leigh Bowery, who was inadvertently the key to Freud’s aesthetic and financial success.

I have been looking at the world through tartan frames recently, thanks to the current exhibition ‘For Auld Lang Syne: Images of Scottish Australia from First Fleet to Federation’ and its accompanying catalogue ($75 hb, 335 pp). Actually, to call it a catalogue doesn’t do it justice; its 335 pages ransack dozens of different angles of the Caledonian experience, with essays by its curators,Alison Inglis and Patricia Tryon Macdonald, the Art Gallery of Ballarat’s director Gordon Morrison, and a dozen others.

Ballarat (which I have always thought of as a predominantly Irish town) has gone all highland-flingy over the show; a new plaid for the city has been specially commissioned to coincide with the event, in grey, blue, and gold; and Prince Charles, in his capacity as Great Steward of Scotland, has written the catalogue’s foreword, in which he laments not being able to come over, and describes the early illustrators of flora and fauna as artists, scientists, and explorers all in one.

In the heyday of Manhattan hotels, the Chelsea Hotel had its own special niche. The Pierre exuded wealth and exclusivity, the Plaza a sort of bourgeois glamour as the place where the bridge and tunnel crowd would throw caution to the wind and rent a corner suite for big occasions, and the Algonquin, with its round table and Hamlet the cat, radiated intellectual chic. The Chelsea had a sleazy, dangerous style, a place where almost anything went, where famous edgy artists got up to no good. It is no surprise that when, on a hot summer night in 1953, Gore Vidal and Jack Kerouac decided that they owed it to literary history to have it off, they chose the Chelsea for the momentous coupling. Even in late 1970s Manhattan, among a certain group to have sex at the Chelsea was considered almost a rite of passage.

But the Chelsea has been more than just a fashionable dosshouse. Sherill Tippins’s lively history portrays a place where the ideal of a communal group of artists and like-minded people living together in harmony was regularly shattered by a combination of egos and economics, and just as regularly attempted again.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963) forged one of the most remarkable careers of his generation. Starting in the 1890s, often considered the nadir of race relations in the United States, he became the first black man to hold a Harvard bachelor’s degree; emerged as Booker T. Washington’s most eloquent opponent on the issue of segregation; published pioneering work across many genres, including The Souls of Black Folk (1903); and after founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) went on to become the dominant voice of the Pan-African movement.

In this short but nuanced study, Kwame Anthony Appiah argues persuasively that it was Du Bois’s two fellowship-funded years amid the exciting intellectual milieu of the University of Berlin, over 1892–94, that most profoundly shaped his thinking on the issues he would wrestle with throughout his career.

In the first volume of Virginia Woolf’s diary (1915–19), an entry in June 1919 mentions England’s possibly ruined strawberry crop. ‘This is a serious matter for us as we have just bought 60 lbs. of sugar, & had arranged a great jam making. Strawberries are 2/ a lb. at this moment. Asparagus 6d & 7d, & yesterday at Ray’s I ate my first green peas.’

I have always wondered who made the jam. In 1916 Nellie Boxall began cooking in the Woolf household and stayed there for eighteen fraught years (Alison’s Light’s book Mrs Woolf and the Servants [2009] is illuminating). Woolf’s diary entry does not make it clear whether the ‘great jam making’ was undertaken by the servants alone or whether she put down her pen to help.

A multi-generational saga straddling numerous countries and political régimes, Leila Yusaf Chung’s first novel, Chasing Shadows, largely alternates between middle child Ajamia’s viewpoint and her father Abu Fadi’s memories, thus giving an evocative portrait of Middle Eastern life in the late nineteenth century. Abu, a middle-aged Polish-Jewish man, fled his barren marriage in Łódź for British Palestine, where he subsequently converted to Islam and married Keira, a carefree Palestinian girl of only thirteen. Months later, the Jewish state of Israel was created, and the subsequent disarray seeped into Abu Fadi and Keira’s marriage, irrevocably changing their lives.

Telling the stories of brothers Tyler and Barrett, with interspersing brief moments from their lovers and mothers, Michael Cunningham’s The Snow Queen reunites its author with a familiar subject: the sublimity of the ordinary.

Barrett is a failed academic whose scholarly pursuits have dried up long before they should have begun to do so, while his romantic life is one mostly mediated by text messages and bottles of Pepsi. His brother fares no better, with dreams of a future career in music and an ever-growing drug habit. Tyler’s girlfriend, Beth, meanwhile is deteriorating before him, afflicted by a terminal cancer and existing like one of the many snowflakes that blows into his bedroom window – beautiful and present but inevitably destined to melt away in his hands.

How I Became the Mr Big of People Smuggling is sold as a crime novel, but this is a crude categorisation for an unusual book. Mr Big is more like a fictional memoir; the story of Nick Smart, a high-school graduate who signs up to work as a jackaroo at the remote Palmenter Station, but quickly discovers that it is a front for a people-smuggling outfit. He then kills the station’s murderous namesake and takes over the operation.

However this might read at first glance, and despite some risky plot twists, it is a surprisingly plausible story. Martin Chambers shows great perspicacity in exploring how Smart descends into people-smuggling by almost imperceptible degrees, but his insights do not stop at psychology. Every scene seems to spring from either personal experience or meticulous research, from the intricacies of building a barbecue to the repulsiveness of cleaning up the fly-blown bodies of dead refugees. This attention to detail does not entail mechanical prose, though, and at times Mr Big shows impressive flashes of lyricism.

‘Buffalo Bill and the Psychiatrist’, ‘The Story of Little-Path and Marcus Kellogg’, ‘Zorro the Chess Master’: the playful titles of Power’s stories appear to belie the seriousness of his concerns. There is light and whimsy in this collection, but how much lies beneath the surface?

Power’s stories skip from Papua to digital worlds, the Wild West to contemporary Melbourne. For all their diverse settings, however, many read as if the events are floating in empty space rather than nailed down by concrete details. Furthermore, the exotic backdrops can feel arbitrary. The orphan protagonist of ‘She Calls Her Boy Amazing’ could be growing up almost anywhere – Vietnam plays no role in either the dramatic or thematic development of the story. Often the settings in Meatloaf in Manhattan seem inconsequential, like a garnish rather than part of the meal.

Who killed Sarah Compton? She was a ‘prying old busybody’, but surely that isn’t an adequate motive for murder? When her grisly corpse is found on the restroom floor of the Melbourne Telephone Exchange, there is no lack of suspects. Could Gerda MacIntyre, the girl with the ‘tragic eyes’, be capable of such a heinous crime? What is silly, pretty Gloria Patterson hiding? Is the attractive John Clarkson too good to be true? Will Detective- Sergeant Matheson prove to be the better man? And will our plucky heroine Margaret ‘Maggie’ Byrnes uncover the murderer before he, or she, strikes again?

Over half the stories collected in Between My Father and the King have not been published before – whether through reluctance, initial rejection, or restraint – and are only now, with this posthumous publication, reaching an audience. Others have appeared everywhere from the New Zealand School Journal to The New Yorker, from the mid-1940s through to 2010.

My first encounter with concrete poetry came via Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918), specifically his eye-catching poem ‘Il Pleut’. With its gently cascading words falling down the page, it was immediately clear that the typographic arrangement of the poem was of far greater import than its semantic content.

Although the term was not coined until the 1950s, concrete poetry draws upon traditions as diverse as ancient Greek shaped poems, Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Mouse’s Tale’, and the typographic experiments found in early twentieth-century Dada and Futurist publications. Despite this, concrete poetry has historically fallen between the cracks of various critical discourses. Is it art or is it poetry?

Transnational Literature is an online, open-access journal that is published by Flinders University. The May 2014 edition certainly lives up to the title. This edition provides an overview of literary texts and theories from across the world.

The academic contributions explore a diverse range of topics. These include the work of Marion Halligan, literary representations of Islam and the veil, and the notion of ‘home’ as this is invoked in Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night (1996). There is a review essay on a selection of books dedicated to the theme of ‘world literature’, plus the paper delivered by Satendra Nandan at the December 2013 launch of Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally’s edited collection A Country Too Far (the latter is reviewed in this edition). Readers will also find poems, short stories and life narratives.

The latest edition of this exclusively online poetry journal has no theme, but Cordite’s managing editor, Kent MacCarter, makes a virtue of its lack of subject. He builds the edition around a chapbook he has collated that is called ‘Spoon bending’, arguing around and against the proposition that ‘There’s no such thing as a good poem about nothing’, and opening with a splendidly effervescent argument in favour of hybridisation and play in poetry.

Where is the pleasure in reading a book as part of a series? A long acquaintance with known and trusted characters rewards the reader with the chance to share their growth and development through multiple challenges and adversities. For teenage readers, following protagonists their own age on this journey has particular rewards. All this, and cliffhangers, too.

Barry Jonsberg’s latest novel, Pandora Jones: Admission, is the first in a series. Jonsberg is a versatile and assured writer. His gift with character is the portrayal of young people who narrate their lives with humour and self-assurance. Dreamrider (2006) was a departure for him, depicting a character who was in psychological torment from dreams, which may or may not have been real.

A NEW WEBSITE FOR ABR

We last redesigned our website in March 2013, and the increase in usage was immediate. But all websites need to evolve, and we realise that the delivery of ABR Online has not been ideal. We have heeded your comments and in June we will launch the new ABR Online.

Happily, the revamped website now hosts a speedier ABR Online. It features a newsy homepage and the contents pages are quicker to load. Logging on to ABR Online is more intuitive for subscribers, and Arts Update has greater prominence.

To mark this new upgrade, we have revived the free introductory offer. Check out ABR Online and enjoy complimentary access for three days. Meanwhile, many thanks for your interest and feedback.

DAVID MALOUF ENCORE

Those who missed our Evening with David Malouf on 23 April – when he was in conversation with Lisa Gorton – now have a chance to watch the video of this absorbing discussion, courtesy of ABC TV’s Big Ideas. All you have to do is visit their website.

PORTER PRIZE

Jessica L. Wilkinson is the winner of the tenth Peter Porter Poetry Prize. ‘Arrival Platform Humlet’, her poem about Percy Grainger, was named the winner at a ceremony on 7 May. This followed readings by three of the shortlisted poets. US-based poet Paul Kane, the fourth, was represented by Alex Miller. We also heard several poems by the great Peter Porter: a feature of these lively annual functions.

Our winner told Advances: ‘For anyone in attendance, my shock at winning the prize was apparent. I entered a state of speechlessness! But I am truly honoured that my poem was recognised in this way and immensely grateful to the judges, Lisa Gorton and Felicity Plunkett.’

Because the shortlist was smaller this year, we were able to increase the payments to Elizabeth Allen, Nathan Curnow, and Paul Kane, who each received $833. The Porter will be back – more lucrative than ever – later this year.

TRAVELLING TRIFECTA

Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel dominated the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards on 19 May, as it has done in so many other literary competitions. De Kretser’s 2012 novel won the highly coveted Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, shared the prize with the longest title in the world (the Community Relations Commission Award for a Multicultural NSW Award) – and won the overall Book of the Year.

Rodney Hall – no stranger to prizes himself, having twice won the Miles Franklin Award, among others – received the Special Award, worth $10,000. He writes for us in this issue, reviewing a new edition of J.P. McKinney’s Great War novel, Crucible.

THE EPISTOLARY CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE

Last month Jane Sullivan reviewed a book about the slightly improbable epistolary friendship between Iris Murdoch and the Flinders University philosopher Brian Medlin. ABR regular Gillian Dooley co-edited Never Mind about the Bourgeoisie: The Correspondence between Iris Murdoch and Brian Medlin 1976–1995 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing) with Graham Nerlich. The book will be formally launched at Flinders University on Thursday, 12 June.

First, though, another ABR (and Flinders) stalwart, Brian Matthews, will deliver the Brian Medlin Memor-ial Lecture, his subject being ‘The Preciousness of Everything: Remembering Brian Medlin’. Both these events are free and will take place in the Central Library, Flinders University, 5.30 for a 6 pm start. RSVP to (08) 8201 5841 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Gillian Dooley, who seems to wear many hats, also edits Transnational Literature, Flinders’ free online journal. Jay Daniel Thompson reviews the current issue.

ABR EDITORIAL INTERN 

There was much interest in our fifth paid editorial internship. We received eighty applications from a host of bright young graduates and editors. In the end, Samuel Zifchak was appointed; he has now started work at ABR. Samuel has Master’s degrees in Creative Writing (East Anglia) and Editing & Publishing (University of Melbourne).

This internship will run for a year, unlike previous ones, which were six-month appointments. We expect to be able to offer more of them in future, so we encourage young graduates to keep an eye on our website.

ONLY INNOVATE 

Express Media is once again presenting the Young Writers Innovation Prize, funded by Copyright Agency Limited. Young writers and/or publishers residing in Australia are eligible. A total of $6,500 is on offer. Applications close on 13 June. See their website for further details.

DOUBLE ISSUE

This is one of two double issues we produce each year, the next being due in January–February 2015. We’ll be back in August.