In the ‘Author’s Prologue’ to Book III of Gargantua and Pantagruel (trans. Urquhart, pub. 1693), Rabelais considers the plight of the philosopher Diogenes the Cynic at the siege of Corinth, who, prevented from action in the battle by dint of his occupation, retired towards a little hill or promontory, took his famous tub and ‘in great vehemency of spirit, did he turn it, veer it, wheel it, frisk it, jumble it, shuffle it … ’ and so on for some hundred further verbs, thus relieving tension generated by inaction. This is the philosopher who gave cheek to Alexander the Great, who in turn said: ‘If I were not Alexander, I should wish to be Diogenes.’ One can only relish Rabelais’s irony: he must perforce use words to draw attention to the simultaneous impotence and agency of words.

Many see John Tranter as an important, if slightly peripheral, figure in contemporary Australian poetry. He is well known for his long involvement in the Sydney poetry scene, as well as for his role as an editor, particularly for his editing, with Philip Mead, of the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991) and, more recently, of the internet poetry journal Jacket.

Tranter’s prominence in the history of Australian poetry is related to the institution of a largely American-inspired late modernism which introduced Australian readers to certain innovative devices – among them, Olsen’s projective verse and the casual, ‘jazzy’ freev-erse voice – but also to the relationship between popular culture and the politics of personal experience. It is partly thanks to the Tranter/Mead anthology, its emphasis on the precedent of the ‘hoax’ of Ern Malley, that the many (post or hyper) modernist poets presently writing are able to see themselves within a tradition of modernist experiment, within a context in which Australian poetry is more or less a product of the same factors that produced modernist, and hence ‘post’-modernist, poetry elsewhere in the world.

Who was it led us to overestimate the New?

As the grand navigator steps back in his boat,
As the last notes march to Heaven on a page,

Wallace Stevens once remarked: ‘One of the essential conditions to the writing of poetry is impetus.’ It’s a statement worth keeping in mind when confronting a new book of poems, because thinking about impetus helps us locate the concerns of the poet and the orientation of the book. Since poems are not objects so much as events, what drives a poem helps govern how it arrives at its destination – how, in fact, it is received by that welcoming stranger, the reader. Poems reveal their origins, whether they intend to or not. What Emerson says of character, that it ‘teaches above our wills’, that ‘we pass for what we are’, is true for poems as well. So it is not an idle question to ask of these books – these poets – their impetus, remembering that ‘impetus’ derives from the Latin ‘to seek.’

‘People are not entitled in a civil society to pursue a malicious campaign of character assassination based on a big lie.’ This was Andrew Clark, son of the historian Manning Clark, expressing understandable outrage on behalf of his family. The issue was the infamous allegation, based on nebulous evidence, that Manning was ‘an agent of Soviet influence’ and had been awarded the Order of Lenin. Unfortunately, as the Clarks will know, the big lie, even when refuted, spreads across generations. Although the onus is supposed to be on the accusers to prove their allegations, in reality it is easily, plausibly reversed.

Laurie Duggan’s study of ‘imagined space’ in Australian visual culture arrived on my desk, with a certain synchronicity, the day after I saw the film Memento. In their distinctive ways, both these works seem indicative of our age, offering unstable and fractured accounts of space and time at a moment when virtual reality seems to be untying our formerly fixed Western notions of these concepts.

Gerard Windsor had a rocky start to his writing life. Out of the Jesuits after seven years, he scored a contract with his old school, Riverview, in Sydney, to write its centennial history. I was one of the alumni he interviewed; I remember suggesting that he take steps to guarantee the publication of his text. After all, I argued, a school run by a religious order was like a family commissioning its history: it would have tender feelings towards its dead and be wary of any diminution of their legends.

Why bother reading Who’s Who in Australia? Obviously, it’s a tool, a standard reference, a source of information, a biographical detail, a register – a social register – a place to find an address, or to wonder who’s in, who’s out, who calls the shots. It is also a social symbol in its own right. To read it, to browse or peruse it, is to receive some sense of its own significance and pertinence in Australian social life.

The year 2001 marks the centenary of the Federation of Australia and the fiftieth anniversary of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. There are important linkages between these milestones. Australian Federation was driven, among other factors, by the desire to gain sovereign control over immigration. Despite the demise of the White Australia Policy and Australia’s early support for the Refugee Convention, Australia’s present-day treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers shows us to be a nation that is still defined in negative terms, through the exclusion of others.

A Vexing Theme

Dear Editor,

I write in reply to Anne Pender’s review of my book, The Enigmatic Christina Stead, under the title ‘A Vexing Theme’ in the May edition of ABR. While I appreciate that my book offers an unconventional, even controversial, reading of Stead’s work, Pender’s review seriously misrepresents my argument. In particular, Pender fails to note that my argument is built upon detailed and cumulative readings of Stead’s published and unpublished work. Moreover, while I attend to the inevitably complex relationship between authors and their texts (to which current critical and theoretical debates are witness), at no point do I make ‘startling assertions about Stead’s sex life’. I regret that Pender’s review did not respect the subtleties of my work in the way that I have tried to respect the subtleties of Stead’s.

The Missing Translator

Dear Editor,

I was shocked that there was no acknowledgment of the translator in your piece on the success of the French edition of Robert Dessaix’s Night Letters, let alone any recognition of Ninette Boothroyd’s undoubted contribution to the book’s critical success (‘Advances’, ABR February–March 2001).

It is a sad fact that translators are rather used to this neglect, though they constantly hope that worms are turning. Will ABR please set the example in future, rather than being an offender?

J-P Kaufmann

Dear Editor,

When I was writing about J-P Kaufmann’s La Lutte avec L’Ange for the May issue of ABR, my head was filled with E.T.A. Hoffman, whom I was reading at the time. I notice, to my shame, that M. Kauffman was transformed into Hoffman halfway through my piece. I extend my apologies to him, though I doubt whether he is a regular reader of ABR.

Andrew Riemer, Sydney, NSW

Gilbert White, in 1789, declared that ‘the language of birds is very ancient and, like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical: little is said, but much is meant and understood’. How then to portray the speakers of such language? How to give them meaning and understanding as well as plumage?

In my student days in Europe, I often heard the name Eileen Joyce bandied about as a figure of respect, eccentricity and past pianistic accomplishment. Geoffrey Parsons, one of my enduring musical mentors, regularly spoke of her; it came as no surprise to read in Richard Davis’s recent biography that Parsons collaborated in Joyce’s last major public appearance, at a fund-raising concert at Covent Garden, late in 1981. I rather doubt, however, that many familiar with Parsons’s pianistic stature would readily agree with Davis’s judgment that the ‘power and dexterity’ of the seventy-three-year-old Joyce, who had not performed in public for over a decade, ‘easily’ matched Parsons’s own.

A brief moment of reflection on the quantum of grief in Australia associated with wars of the twentieth century is, to say the least, unsettling. Nearly 100,000 killed in combat, many seriously wounded, many dealing with the physical and mental consequences long after the cessation of hostilities. Lives snatched from the everyday and made into noble sacrifices. The darker dimensions of the Anzac legacy have seeped into the national imagining in recent years, and we are now more open to the poignant melancholy of remembrance, undercutting the bellicose flag-waving of former years. But our sense of the costs of sacrifice has largely been focused on those who served. Joy Damousi in this and her previous book, The Labour of Loss (1999), opens our eyes to those others who have borne the pain of grief most acutely: the wives and families of those killed and those forever transformed by the experience of battle. These illuminating books are a long overdue acknowledgment of the burden of mourning that many Australian families have had to bear.

The intriguing story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party began the day before the first Federal Parliament convened in Melbourne on 9 May 1901. At 11 a.m. on 8 May 1901, Labor’s twenty-two federal parliamentarians met in a stuffy basement room in Victoria’s Parliament House. This historic first Federal Caucus was chaired by Queensland Senator Anderson Dawson who from 1 to7 December 1899, as premier of Queensland, had led the first Labor government in the world.

In February 1996, as Australians prepared to elect the Howard government for the first time, Paul Keating addressed a trade union rally at the Melbourne Town Hall. Keating, knowing but not accepting that he would soon be ejected from the prime ministership, ran through a commentary on the leading figures in the Liberal–National coalition. Keating’s message was that these people were second-rate and would disgrace Australia if they won power. In reference to the National Party leader, Tim Fischer, Keating attracted a big laugh when he averred: ‘You know what they say – no sense, no feeling.’ Keating, who had previously described Fischer as ‘basically illiterate’, regarded his opponent as a joke. He was not alone. There were worries about whether Fischer would be up to the task of holding down a senior ministry, especially his chosen portfolio of trade, and of serving as acting prime minister when John Howard was ill or out of the country.

The only organised crime boss I ever knew was Perce Galea, in the mid1970s. He owned illegal casinos and raced thoroughbreds. ‘Colourful racing identity’, the polite broadsheets called him. My dad raced horses too and would go to Randwick at dawn to watch them work. I’d tag along on Saturdays and there Perce would be – Windsor-knotted tie, brown cashmere long-coat, and porkpie hat – straight from his gambling dens without having gone to bed. That impressed me. Every second word he used was ‘fuck’, and no one stopped him. That impressed me too. ‘He never swears in front of women,’ my mother would say. She called him a ‘thorough gentleman’. I liked standing next to him. I told everyone at school that I knew a crime boss. Perce told me to ‘piss off’ with a wink once, so he could talk business. When I didn’t, he gave me $5 and said ‘Scram’. You must have heard of Perce. He’s famous for having thrown a fistful of bills into the crowd when his horse Eskimo Prince won the Golden Slipper in 1964. He was a natural PR man for the vice trade.

April 16, Ghana. We arrive to the pandemonium that is Accra Airport. It is as if a coup has happened and everyone is fleeing the country. The general dilapidation of the place seems vaguely familiar. Suddenly, I remember a BBC documentary series on airports around the world, which featured Accra. Nick changes US$100 at an exchange rate of 7000 cedis to one greenback. He returns with a huge wad of worn notes stashed in a large brown bag helpfully labelled with large dollar signs for all those milling around, eyeing us sharply, to see. We manage to negotiate our way into town via porters and taxi with 5000 cedi notes peeling off us in the form of tips.

Before slotting into the Commonwealth Writers Prize (CWP) program, we spend several days in Accra getting to the heart of the matter, then travel down to the ancient fortresses in Cape Coast, first built by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, taken over by the Dutch in the seventeenth, and later turned into slave dungeons.

From the grim fortresses of Cape Coast, we return to Accra and the five-star, $500-a-night, Golden Tulip Hotel (also built by the Dutch). I pick up my CWP itinerary in the hospitality room. A huge package contains thick wads of cedi notes, enough to fill a small suitcase – the equivalent of $80 per day spending money. I feel like a gangster’s moll, sitting on the bed counting all this loot.

Far from lounging around the hotel pool, reading the CWP Best Book and First Book nominees, (I have been given a set of the nominated novels), I find the program action-packed, with reading panels each night at the British Council, the Pan-African Writers’ Association, the University of Ghana, various high schools. The days are crammed with media interviews, affording me a fascinating insight into Ghana.

Day one kicks off with the CWP opening ceremony, a four-hour marathon: speech after speech from the Minister of Education, the British Council Director, the CWP coordinator, the local coordinator and the chief of the area, whose tribe we are to visit on the last day. Each speech is punctuated by musical intervals, a format we soon get used to during our interminable reading panels, some of which last for hours.

There are three of us from the first book category: Pearl Luke from Canada (author of Burning Ground), K. Sello Duiker (Thirteen Cents) from Johannesburg, and myself. Zadie Smith has not shown up. Only one author from the Best Book section has deigned to participate: Anita Raw Badani, (also from Canada) whose readings from her novel, The Hero’s Walk, enchant us and the audience, which by and large remains the same throughout the week. On day one, we are told not to feel as if we are dining with our executioners, the four judges who will decide the winners. By day three, however, it feels tantamount to picnicking with cannibals, faced with the looming question as to who will be voted off the island.

All of us, as it turns out. After a surreal five am breakfast television show, the four of us return to the hotel (haggard, sunnies on, looking like extras from Pulp Fiction) to find envelopes in our rooms. Zadie Smith and Peter Carey are the winners.

It is not as if the mood changes when we board the courtesy bus to take us to the chieftain’s lair in the mountains, where tribal dances are promised. It is just that we don’t feel like being charming any more. We clump in the back and leave our accompanying spouses to make the required light conversation.

That night, dressed in my gala-night frock, I go down to the lobby and, to my astonishment, there he is, looking slightly crumpled and rumpled in a fawn-coloured suit – The Great Man Himself. None of the other writers seems to have recognised him. He stands alone. One CWP organiser advances towards him. As I walk past, I am summoned. The introduction is over in a flash and I shake hands with Peter Carey.

At the Gala Night dinner, hosted by the vice-president of Ghana in a grand state reception room surrounded by armed guards, Carey and the CWP judges sit at one table beneath the dazzling glare of television cameras. Still no sign of Zadie Smith. I sit on a table with the Professor of English Studies at the University of Ghana. He tells me that the university library is understocked and asks whether I would consider donating any books. I offer to give him a copy of White Teeth. He smiles and says he is very pleased as it will be the fourth copy he has received. ‘You writers are very generous,’ he says with a mischievous smile.

The next day, we board the bus that will take us on a shopping tour to the Markola Markets. To our surprise, Peter Carey accompanies us. He sits next to me. Desperately racking my brains for something to say, I ask him whether, having had to fly to Accra at the last moment, he found obtaining the necessary visas a problem. In my own experience, after filling in a multitude of forms that would make emigrating to Australia look like a breeze, I spent a nerve-wracking five days waiting for my visa to be couriered from a consulate in Perth. It arrived on the day before our flight.

At my question, one of the CWP delegates interjects with: ‘Had the president on the phone, done in a jiffy, wasn’t it?’ (He doesn’t actually say ‘old chap’, but his inflection sounds as if he had.) I look out the window, at the open drains lining the streets, the clamour of hawkers, beggars, amputees, hollow-eyed children pounding their fists on the side of the bus, the milling crowds, and I am struck with a thought. Turning back to Carey, I inquire whether he managed to have his yellow fever shots in time. We were told in no uncertain terms by our travel agent that we needed them ten days before flying out.

There is a stunned silence. Peter Carey shoots me an appalled glance. ‘No, I haven’t,’ he replies. Again, the CWP official takes his cue: ‘It’s merely a formality, they’re not really bothered here, you know.’ His jovial tone does not soothe Peter Carey’s ruffled look.

In a country possibly plagued by silent outbreaks of Ebola virus, of course they’re not bothered here, I feel like saying, but the question is how do you get back without vaccination papers? Such is the look on Peter Carey’s face, I decide to remain silent. I realise that I have inadvertently ruined his day.

After that, yellow fever becomes the general theme of our conversation. ‘Can you catch yellow fever from buying CDs?’ Peter Carey asks in a light, bantering tone. We don’t answer. We’ve all been to Markola Markets before, a teeming labyrinth of a place, where you have to run a gauntlet of stalls selling pigs’ trotters, horses’ hooves, giant black snails (alive and squirming on fly-infested pewter platters), while the crowd teems with women carrying pyramids of fruits, eggs, nougat, and pastries on their heads. They sashay past, elegant as catwalk models, their vibrant dresses swishing about their ankles. Only in the innermost bowels of the market itself do you reach the fabrics, Ashanti woven cloth, stacked tier after tier, a shimmering display of every conceivable colour.

My last vision of Peter Carey is of him with a handkerchief clamped to his face, staggering through a crowd of coughing, rheumy-eyed beggars who cling to his jacket and paw his shirt. I wonder if he will manage to return to New York without being quarantined and, if he does, if the subject of yellow fever will be raised during his fifteen-minute interview with the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

May 10. To Melbourne for the world premiere of the opera Batavia. I try not to feel nervous before the evening panel at Reader’s Feast convened by ABR and also featuring the librettist of Batavia, Peter Goldsworthy, and its composer, Richard Mills. Seated on a vast armchair, I assess the audience, as advised by my public-speaking book, Performance under Pressure. Getting to know your audience is supposed to make you feel more confident and relaxed. I am sure it does, except that I am looking at Melbourne’s A-list, with a strong Opera Australia component.

Just as I am beginning to gain a small grip on my composure, our moderator, Peter Rose, announces that the session will be recorded for Radio National’s ‘Books and Writing’ program. I take another gulp of water and try to ignore my thudding heart.

Peter Goldsworthy and Richard Mills are consummate performers, born raconteurs. They speak with such ease and charm you feel as if you are having a quiet drink with them in a bar. Both are very generous to the star-struck novice. Richard Mills even mentions that he gave Michael Lewis, who plays the deranged Jeronimus Cornelisz, a copy of The Company for his birthday. It is astonishing to think that while I was struggling with my version of the wreck of the Batavia, Peter Goldsworthy was writing his libretto. I am fascinated by the ways in which our radically different approaches to fictionalising this dark story diverge and converge. Both of us were tapping into a universal and timeless horror which, at the same time, celebrates the triumph of the human spirit in the face of evil.

And thus to the State Theatre. Nothing can describe the excitement in a world premiere, especially one inspired by the very events that have been my own private obsession for so long. Only two weeks ago, I was staring at the sinister monogram of the VOC sign inscribed on a tablet of stone in a fortress in Ghana, and here I am seeing that same insignia in vast lettering, used to brilliant effect as a central feature and theme in the opera design. I am mesmerised by the power and scale of it all.

When the curtain falls and Peter Goldsworthy and Richard Mills take their bows on-stage, the entire auditorium rises like a wave in a thrilling standing ovation. Before we can recover, we are whisked backstage. Perching on a sofa, I realise I am sitting next to Simone Young. Bruce Martin, still in costume after playing a moving, world-weary Pelsaert, is being hugged by his colleagues. Then on to the cast party. First, speeches by Adrian Collette and Simone Young, followed by Peter Goldsworthy and Richard Mills, all the while champagne flowing. Peter Goldsworthy comes up to me and asks me how I found the opera. I say it’s a work of genius, and he kisses me on the cheek. On this high note, I take myself home.

Back to Sydney. After listening to my tales, my agent, Lyn Tranter, asks how my writing is going. Ignoring my bemused look (writing – who wants to sit alone in a room and write when there’s a glittering world out there?), Lyn tells me that a poet friend of hers in Tasmania is off to Cambridge for six weeks and needs someone to housesit his property in Sandy Bay. ‘There will be no distractions there,’ Lyn says. ‘I said you would be perfect for the job.’

Accra, Melbourne, Hobart. There is something dreamlike about this new life I am leading.

This is a large yet very readable book. There are three strands to this work: a demonstration of the inexorable tendency of a market economy to oligopoly; an explanation of the ease with which money can set ethical consideration aside; and an account of the development of the companies that make and market Coca-Cola. While McQueen has strong opinions, he is careful to separate his critique from his account, and he supports both his opinions and his account with extensive referencing and a substantial bibliography.

Humans, or at least most humans, are not naturally competitive; rather, we are trusting, suggestible, and disposed to be cooperative. We are not, however, unconditionally trusting. The betrayal of trust will arouse deep resentment and, where feasible, active retaliation. A minority of humans are significantly less trusting and cooperative, and more competitive, than the rest of us.

Purists and lawyers, sit down. You may need smelling salts or whisky, according to taste. Ready? All right. I predict that your children, or perhaps your children’s children, will read in grammar textbooks that they is the third-person singular pronoun when referring to a person, as well as being the third-person plural pronoun. It will be confined to an animal or a thing.

Appalled? I admit to sharing some uneasiness about sentences such as ‘Each student may collect their course materials from the school office’. It could have been entirely plural, and avoided the seeming slide in number.

Sally Muirden’s second novel sits well with her first, Revelations of a Spanish Infanta. In each case, the author works through an elaborate historical lens to construct a multi-layered narrative in which the focus is the intimate life of a woman.

In We Too Shall Be Mothers, the dominant narrative operates as a picaresque and dreamy fairy tale in which the life journey of Marie-France, a young woman living in Avignon during the French Revolution, is rich with magical, romantic, and fantastical incidents. This narrative is anchored in the beliefs and ambivalences of Marie-France, articulated thus: ‘We live in a magical world but once you start believing in it you’re truly done for … What if the opposite were true, and once you stop believing in magic you’re truly done for?’ Reader beware. This is a daring dance of a novel, and it requires you to take part. A character remarks: ‘That’s a maze, that dress. There’s a secret way out you’ll have to search for.’ If you willingly give yourself up to the novel’s mazes, you will discover secrets and delights.

I’m not keen to be at this dinner party at Carol’s. I find her hard to take sometimes, with her endless stories about her life in Maningrida. Her husband is away. Instead, there’s Graham, who’s been here nearly ten years; Laurie, who has visited the community from time to time since the 1970s; and Lisa, who is a few years older than me and who runs the art centre where I work. Five of us at a round table eating curry and rice and chapatis. Conversation meanders along at dinners like these. We’re not a naturally coherent group of people. These are not people I’d eat with normally.

Leonardo Da Vinci, Elvis Presley, the Tarot, unsettled weather, love, ducks and a megasupermarket: they’re not subjects that one would often be moved to mention in the same breath, but it is on just this unlikely affiliation that Julie Capaldo’s cunningly plotted second novel is based.

The seed of the novel, planted over five years ago, was something quite different again. A blue glass vase that sat on Capaldo’s kitchen window sill and changed colour with the light gave the author an idea. The blue glass vase features significantly in the book, but one suspects that the novel’s other elements (I can do it too) may well have first accumulated in the form of outrageous puns and wild associations: Elvis as the ‘raining’ King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, for example. And did the presence of Elvis suggest the Tarot – first written, according to one theory, on golden leaves in a temple near Memphis (the ancient capital of Egypt rather than its modern counterpart in Tennessee) – or vice versa?

Pun, however, always balances on the brink of metaphor, and whatever its conception the novel is an overtly allegorical account of the battle between good, in the form of old, loving and affirming wisdom, and evil as go-getting, middle-aged, hyper-materialism. The tone is refreshingly upbeat and the writing flexible and fluent, playing confidently, joyfully, with language and allusion; the author never falls into the trap of taking herself or her New Age extravaganza too seriously.

This is not to say that Capaldo does not have a serious point to make: indeed, she makes it perhaps a tad too often. The message of the blue glass vase is to do with relationships: relationships, Elvis sums up, are our weather.

Someone comes along, stands next to us, illuminates us, so we can then see ourselves and let our true colours show. Or we can stand next to someone who, rather than illuminating us, is like a huge storm cloud that blocks the light. Turns our day to night. But both, whether they enlighten us or cast shadows, come upon us out of the blue …

(I did warn you about the puns.) Lighten up, the characters admonish one another, and they mean it in a more literal sense than the colloquial ‘relax’: lightness, suggests Capaldo, is the only way to clarity, luminosity the only way to the other side. ‘Don’t settle for just “okay”,’ Ruby Seabourne tells her son. ‘Shine.’ Light as a metaphor for love and as a model for our relationship with God are both touched upon – lightly, and it is the lightness and confidence of the author’s touch that makes it all work.

The reader is initially taken in hand by a bronzed and occasionally quacking narrator. His italicised commentary explains the basic attributes of the Tarot and helps to align particular cards with the novel’s characters – and with Leonardo da Vinci, an enigmatic but not unwelcome presence whose role doesn’t become clear until the end of the book (and who even then is likely to cause the reader the most camel-swallowing difficulty). Tarot cards – like the blue glass vase, like the characters in the novel, like us – change their nature according to the company they keep: the Eight of Pentacles on his own is a quiet, dogged chap; put him next to the Hanged Man, however, and he instantly becomes a bit of a wolf.

At the centre of the story is the World MegaSupermarket, ‘the largest one-stop shop in the Southern Hemisphere’ and the consumerist wish-fulfilment of multimillionaire property developer Kenneth Horcheque (names tend to mean what they say in this novel: what price Ruby Seabourne, the wise and virtuous woman in Ken’s opposite corner?) Ruby’s son Cosmos, desperately seeking the comfort of conservative conformity, has fallen under the shadow of his boss Horcheque and changed his name to Colin and his nature for the worse. Anna the check-out chick is mourning Gilbert who has vanished, and resisting Harmony, whose enthusiasm for every new New Age fad is exhausting but surprisingly fruitful. Myles is worshipping Anna from afar; stalwart Bob Browne is doing much the same to Ruby at close hand. And Horcheque’s wife, Estelle, has been shaken into a silence relieved by a mere ten words, a repertoire that, in Capaldo’s capable hands, lends itself to an amazing amount of communication.

With these raw materials, plus the enriching figurative underlay of the Tarot, the expository interpolations of the narrator, and the elemental interference of the energetic Spirit of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Capaldo weaves a suspenseful, satisfying and most engaging fantasy. In literary terms Weather is not deep (pace, back-cover publicist), but it is certainly deeper, as well as better focused and more intricately plotted, than Capaldo’s first novel, Love Takes You Home (1995), while sharing that runaway success’s warmth, optimism and grace of execution. It strikes me as the sort of novel the self-help gurus would love to have written – and perhaps could, if they would just lighten up a little.

In the sixteenth century a Swiss physician and alchemist by the name of Paracelsus claimed that everything was potentially poisonous, as long as you took enough of it: ‘the right dose differentiates a poison and a remedy.’ There is plenty of evidence to support this point of view. Legal claims for damages caused by asbestos and passive smoking are reminders that what may be a safe environment for some can be toxic for others. Indeed, one of the most common forms of contemporary poisoning is known as an ‘overdose’. The substance was fine. The amount was wrong.

But some substances are surely more lethal than others. And so are some people. Reading Gail Bell’s account of scores of poisonings found both in literature and medical history, you begin to wonder if it is simply circumstances that distinguish a poisoner from the healer.

The failure of the current system of drug prohibition was evident right from the start. Quong Tart, tea importer, socialite, lacrosse champion, and indefatigable anti-opium campaigner, insisted that banning its import would ‘stamp out the evil within twelve months’. That was in 1894.

The manifest improbability of the proposition has done nothing to cure succeeding generations of their naïveté. Drug laws come in cycles, just far enough apart to prevent us from remembering the conspicuous failure of previous attempts.

Drug books likewise come in cycles. Every couple of years, we see a new book dedicated to urging changes in the current approach, begging for rationality and balance. Drugs and Democracy: In Search of New Directions is the latest in a long line. It is an edited collection, and its eleven chapters, involving a wide range of contributors from many disciplines, tell us little that we did not know five years ago, or ten or twenty. Jacques Lacan describes psychoanalysis as ‘the talking cure’. The theory appears to be that if we talk about our problems long enough, they will lose their hold over our subconscious and allow us to behave more rationally. Perhaps this is the theory behind such a book as this. By demonstrating – yet again – the failure of the regime of prohibition and its catastrophic effects on our society, the authors provide us with no revelations, but they are at least part of a process that may eventually bore us into submission.

How different South-East Asia looks in 2001, compared with just four years ago. The economic crisis of 1997 gave the region a terrible shock. There is an entirely new country, Timor Loro Sa’e. Indonesia, that former bastion of stability and economic powerhouse, is now racked with unrest. It may well no longer exist in its present form a few years from now. The Philippines has just ejected another president, although its eternal problem of a landowning elite and an impoverished populace never seems to get addressed. Colonial borders are a problem everywhere in the region, incorporating tribes and peoples that would likely be better off if the whole map were redrawn.

There are also positive signs in systems that looked intransigent. Cambodia seems to be settling down under its particular version of authoritarian leadership with occasional elections. In Vietnam, greater openness and tolerance has become a theme, of government rhetoric at least. Even the Burmese government may be making tentative moves to-wards an accommodation with Aung San Suu Kyi. Everywhere in the region, the pressures of globalisation and CNN put governments under the spotlight. A lot is going on.