At the beginning of this wide-ranging collection of criticism by the novelist, critic, and academic Anthony Macris, the author notes wryly that an early candidate for the book’s title was Personality Crisis, such is its diversity of topics and styles. The implication here is that reviews and essays form a kind of autobiography. I’m not sure I would use the word ‘crisis’ to describe it, but certainly the portrait we have in this case is of a writer driven by very different kinds of curiosity: about literature and writing but also the art forms that lie beyond them – and, as centrally, by a social and political curiosity about the ways those forms change when they respond to the world around us.

Macris’s own part in that world began in Brisbane in 1962, where he grew up in a house at the back of his parents’ fish-and-chip shop. In 1998, Macris’s first novel, Capital, earned him a place in the Sydney Morning Herald ’s list of Best Young Australian Novelists. The work was the first in a series about the impact of market forces in people’s lives; the second novel, Great Western Highway, appeared in 2012. Along the way, Macris has worked as a Creative Writing academic at the University of Technology Sydney, has been a regular reviewer in the national media, and has published a memoir and, most recently, a collection of short stories.

What is the musical’s appeal? Performing arts venues in Australia’s capital cities stage them year after year; a lucrative box office seems to be virtually guaranteed. The feel-good mix of song, melodrama, and vibrant dance – not forgetting the bonus of a happy ending – can lift the spirits and entertain the entire family. Recently, Chicago (Melbourne, Brisbane), West Side Story, and Billy Elliot (Adelaide) secured packed houses.

Australian classics such as The Boy From Oz, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and Eddie Perfect’s Beetlejuice confirm the country’s stellar contribution to the art form, but the rise of the local musical and the triumphs and tribulations of those who championed the genre have gone undocumented until now.

It’s perhaps a dubious thought, but the life of an actor invariably triggers something prurient in the audience, some desperate need to peer past the mask, to see beyond the curtain. Books by and about actors indulge this prurience, whether or not they are intended to. Works like Konstantin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares (1936) or Stella Adler’s The Art of Acting (2000) deal academically with the interiority and motivations of acting, but they still offer a glimpse into the process and the perceived trickery of creation. The most fun are the intentionally salacious ones, like David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon (1971) or Scotty Bowers’s Full Service (2017), which detailed the sexual proclivities of Hollywood’s closeted élite. Anything to get us closer, to get us into the inner sanctum.

In 1973, aged six, I heard the song ‘Rock On’ by David Essex. I was obsessed by its sound. While I couldn’t have put it into words, I half understood that the song was made sonically exciting not just through its inventive arrangement (a song about rock and roll with no guitars!) but also its production techniques, especially the use of reverb and delay to ‘stage’ the vocal and instrumental performances.

‘Rock On’ isn’t mentioned in The Song Remains the Same (though ‘Rock That Thing’ and ‘Rock Your Baby’ are), but the excitement that song gave me is found throughout this superb collection of essays on ‘800 years of love songs, laments and lullabies’. Ranging from a hymn by Hildegard of Bingen to Sia’s ‘Rainbow’, the seventy-five songs discussed in The Song Remains the Same cover bossa nova, ‘art songs’, gospel, jazz, national anthems, and more. There is almost nothing, it seems, that Andrew Ford and Anni Heino can’t write about. This isn’t surprising: Ford is a prize-winning composer, writer, and broadcaster; Heino a musicologist, writer, and editor.

Where are you happiest?

At home. I’ve never much liked going out. I think better at home and can find the peace to compose. I have to go up to Sydney for two days each week to do The Music Show. While I enjoy the program, it’s a pleasure to return to the Southern Highlands.

What is your idea of hell?

Camping. I like a view, but I don’t want to be in it.

‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,’ writes Annie Dillard in The Writing Life, her timely appeal for presence over productivity in modern life. Turning the page on a new year reminds us of the seasonality of time, its familiar cycles of life, death, and rebirth. But flipping through the empty pages of a calendar can also remind us that time is a human construct designed to regulate our lives for maximum efficiency and output. In today’s attention economy, where time is treated as a currency by the technologies we use to satisfy our animal need for connection, how might we rediscover the joy of being present in a moment, a body, a community, a place? In other words, how are we to live?

Six years after the ‘transgender tipping point’ proclaimed by Time magazine in 2014, the trans and gender-diverse (TGD) community continues to surge into the spotlight. From Netflix and Neighbours to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (which named ‘they’ its 2019 word of the year), transgender experience is enjoying well-deserved recognition and representation. Visibility, however, is not without its problems. Internationally, growing awareness has triggered an anti-trans backlash, with the TGD community becoming a conservative scapegoat du jour. The United States is experiencing a spate of anti-trans violence, while ‘bathroom bills’ proliferate in red states. In Australia, the 2016 moral panic over Safe Schools was followed in 2019 by The Australian’s anti-trans campaign (with sixty-eight articles, ninety-two per cent of them negative, published in six months), as well as the transphobic fearmongering of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) over Victoria’s birth certificate reforms – not to mention Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s attacks on ‘gender whisperers’.

There are still reasons to celebrate trans visibility, not least of which is the prospect of TGD people telling their own stories. Although memoir has long been a staple of trans culture – dating back to Lili Elbe’s Man into Woman (1933) – since 2014 trans life writing has entered the literary mainstream. Today, some of the world’s leading publishers are giving TGD writers a platform to counterbalance cultural scripts that dismiss trans people as freaks or victims. Few of these trans books are, as yet, notable for their literary quality, but almost all merit reading for their insights into a misunderstood and often sensationalised identity.

Over the Top: A raw journey to self-love by Jonathan Van Ness

Simon & Schuster, $32.99 pb, 273 pp

Among the most successful of this new crop is Jonathan Van Ness’s Over the Top: A raw journey to self-love. A hairdresser, podcaster, and social-media dynamo, Van Ness is best known as one of the ‘Fab Five’ of Netflix’s rebooted Queer Eye, in which he won hearts as an ebullient grooming expert with a full beard, lustrous mane, and penchant for stiletto heels. In 2019, Van Ness came out as genderqueer and non-binary, joining pop stars Sam Smith and Janelle Monáe in the small but growing club of gender-diverse celebrities.

Over the Top, which follows the author from childhood to the present, introduces readers to a darker Van Ness than the glittering queen of Queer Eye. An effeminate child whose gender-non-conforming proclivities were far from welcome in Quincy, Illinois, he was bullied and ostracised from earliest childhood. Alongside these gender struggles, Van Ness was also a victim of childhood sexual abuse, a trauma that launched him into a troubled adolescence and early adulthood marked by PTSD, depression, sex work, disordered eating, drug addiction, rehab, and relapse. Rock bottom came as a grief-fuelled meth bender, followed by a HIV diagnosis.

From there, Van Ness’s story launches into a quintessentially American narrative of triumphant self-actualisation. Thanks to yoga, therapy, and a solid dose of Brené Brown, Van Ness shook off his self-destructive habits and became the out-and-proud gender-bender we know and love today. The takeaway is clear: self-love and self-acceptance are the cure. Is it saccharine? At times, yes. Platitudinous? Undoubtedly. But the book is redeemed by Van Ness’s signature cocktail of Midwestern sincerity and high-camp patois. Especially charming are the Russian pseudonyms employed for side characters, inspired by Van Ness’s passion for the Romanovs. The prose is also enlivened by his trademark verbal tics, including feminisation of inanimate nouns. ‘I loved the newsroom. She was hustle. She was bustle,’ he writes. Presented with such flair and fortitude, we can’t help but love Van Ness in turn.

About a Girl: A mother’s powerful story of raising her transgender child by Rebekah Robertson

Viking, $34.99 pb, 344 pp

Since publishing Over the Top, Van Ness has emerged as a formidable advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. For a primer on this new line of work, he might turn to Rebekah Robertson’s About a Girl: A mother’s powerful story of raising her transgender child, a memoir that chronicles the Australian battle to remove the Family Court’s jurisdiction over medical treatment for trans youth. Robertson is the mother of Georgie Stone, a trans woman whose story first made headlines in 2010 when she became, aged ten, Australia’s youngest recipient of puberty blockers. Bruised by their encounter with the court system, Stone and her family embarked on a marathon fight to transfer medical approvals from the courts to families and their doctors. Success finally came in 2017, when the Family Court found that hormone treatment for transgender youth no longer required court authorisation. Along the way, Robertson also founded Transcend, Australia’s first support group for trans families.

About a Girl provides an insider’s view of this mammoth law-reform campaign, while also narrating Stone’s journey as an indomitable trans girl struggling for acceptance. Told from a parent’s perspective (with a preface by Stone), the memoir functions as a moving and accessible ‘trans 101’ for cisgender readers. In conversational yet resolute tones, Robertson invokes the moral authority of the devoted mother to demolish naysayers who continue to question the existence of trans children. Georgie insisted that she was a girl from age two, Robertson explains, and never once wavered from that resolution. How could any loving parent not fight for their child in that situation?

This is a resolutely binary transgender narrative, a ‘born in the wrong body’ tale low on the self-doubt, internalised transphobia, and ambivalence over transition perhaps more typical of TGD experience. Although Robertson, to her credit, insists that her daughter’s story is far from representative, there is a danger that Stone’s ever-growing celebrity (she recently débuted on Neighbours) will lead her singular experience – binary gender, unequivocal self-knowledge – to be misconstrued as Australia’s benchmark ‘trans narrative’. As her media profile attests, Stone’s clear-cut identity and self-assured intelligence make her a compelling public face for trans advocacy. Yet it is essential that the airtime given to such trans icons should be accompanied by the social inclusion, cultural representation, and legal protections of all TGD peoples – however messy, troubled, and non-binary they may be. In a nation with a transphobic prime minister, all and any trans storytelling is cause for celebration, yet we must also ask: whose voices are being amplified and why, and who is yet to be heard?

Not Just a Tomboy: A trans masculine memoir by Caspar J. Baldwin

Jessica Kingsley Publishers, $32.99 pb, 248 pp

One group still struggling for representation are transmasculine people, sometimes known as FTM (female-to-male) or AFAB (assigned female at birth). Although AFABs have begun to flood gender clinics, transfeminine people remain the public face of global trans culture – think Laverne Cox, Caitlyn Jenner, Janet Mock. In an attempt to even up the scales, British publisher Jessica Kingsley issued a call for transmasculine content in 2017, resulting in Caspar J. Baldwin’s memoir Not Just a Tomboy: A trans masculine memoir. It is a poignant account of his ‘tomboy’ childhood, traumatic female puberty, undergraduate mental health struggles, and multi-year transition that followed his realisation, aged twenty-two, that he was transgender. Baldwin, a Northumberland-based PhD graduate without a public profile, offers a window into everyday trans existence, showing to great effect how ordinary and even mundane TGD lives can be. There are no court battles, media appearances, or celebrity cameos in his story; Baldwin’s world is a polite middle-class England of caravan holidays, school discos, uni lectures, and nights in the pub – all infused with crippling gender dysphoria.

Baldwin writes more for fellow transmasculine people than for cisgender readers, seeking to provide the sense of recognition and belonging he craved when coming out: ‘I had wanted kinship and the relief which comes with knowing I wasn’t the only one.’ In Not Just a Tomboy, Baldwin offers the story he wanted to read back in 2011. In contrast to the ‘hero’s journey’ arc of Over the Top (and, to a lesser extent, About a Girl), Baldwin tells a more subdued tale, kept from triumphalism by his English reserve and controlled fury at the outrages inflicted by a transphobic world. The resulting book brims with anger and pain, providing an emotional suckerpunch that belies Baldwin’s unassuming voice.

Read together, the three TGD narratives provide insight into the rapidity of cultural change. Van Ness and Baldwin are millennials, born in 1987 and 1989 respectively, and both stress the dearth of language and concepts to give meaning to their childhood gender struggles. As a result, neither came out until the 2010s, when they finally found words to name their difference. By contrast, Georgie Stone, born in 2000, had her ‘gender identity disorder’ (as it was then known) diagnosed as young as seven. Since then, there has been an exponential increase in self-identified TGD youth. By 2017, Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital Gender Service was handling more than 250 new referrals each year, while researchers now believe that one per cent of youth are transgender – much higher than previously thought.

Yet while recognition and support grow, the maladaptive coping strategies featured in all three narratives attest that TGD people continue to struggle under the burden of stigma and prejudice. Baldwin sought validation in academic achievement, while Van Ness used sex, drugs, and eating to numb the pain of exclusion and difference. Stone also struggled around food, experiencing a period of undereating and low weight that stemmed from her ‘desire for bodily autonomy and control’. Such experience is all too common: a fifth of trans youth have a diagnosed eating disorder, while two thirds have restricted food-intake. Even worse, three-quarters have been diagnosed with depression, while almost half have attempted suicide. As we enter the 2020s, the hope is that trans memoirs like this trio may build empathy and reduce stigma to the point where such dire statistics are no longer a feature of trans life.

When country needs burning, timing is everything, and the grasses, by how cool or warm they feel, tell you exactly when to light up. Victor Steffensen is a master of timing. His book about Indigenous fire management came out just weeks after Australia’s unprecedented fires inspired calls for more Indigenous burning to quell the danger.

Over most of Australia, Indigenous expertise was lost generations ago when Aboriginal people were forced from their lands. This puts Steffensen in a special situation. He grew up in the northern Queensland rainforest town of Kuranda, with European forebears as well as an Indigenous grandmother who died when he was five. As a restless teenager and university drop-out, he went on a fishing trip to the small town of Laura on Cape York Peninsula, and soon found himself working for the local Aboriginal corporation and lodging in the house of Tommy George (TG), one of two elderly brothers who would shape his life.

Feature-length documentary film has seldom been as commercially successful as fictional drama at the box office. Nevertheless, Nick Fraser tells us that it is now ‘common to hear documentary film described as the new rock ‘n’ roll’. It is exactly this energy, influence, and popular appeal of documentary that Fraser wants to tap into with this book. He seeks to further enliven the documentary aficionado’s appreciation of the genre and to expand their knowledge of titles and filmmakers.

In the past we have tended either to ignore or to marginalise cultural ‘expatriates’. In today’s cosmopolitan culture, we are more used to varied career paths, but it is still possible for someone who has made most of their career abroad to be overlooked. Judith Anderson is a case in point. Born in Adelaide in 1897, Francee Anderson (her first stage name) made her professional stage début in 1915 in Sydney, but from 1918 she was, virtually for the rest of her life, based in the United States. Desley Deacon’s substantial, superbly illustrated biography rescues Anderson from obscurity and reveals the full extent of her remarkable career on stage, in film, and on television.

Imagine you’re trying to make sense of the universe five hundred years ago, when astronomers believe there are just seven visible ‘planets’ wandering about the Earth: the sun and moon plus Mercury to Saturn. Intriguingly, there are also seven known metals: gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, lead, and mercury. For hundreds of years there have been just seven known ‘planets’ and seven metals. Wouldn’t you be just a little tempted to see more than a coincidence here? Take gold, for example, which ‘does not react with anything in the air or the ground, and so retains its brilliance seemingly forever’: surely its power is similar to that of the ever-shining sun?

Once, when we humans reflected on what made us special, we latched on to those qualities that distinguished us from the rest of creation. We were smarter, more rational, more cognitively capable. The philosopher Joseph de Maistre, for example, proposed that ‘the concept of number is the obvious distinction between beast and man’. More recently, with the onrush of the digital age, we have come to feel less confident in our mental powers. We may understand numbers better than other beasts, but our phones can carry out arithmetic calculations at inconceivable speeds and beat the brainiest among us at chess.

It’s late July and high over the foggy green waters of the Sea of Okhotsk, a solitary Grey Plover beats its way south. Within sight of Sakhalin Island, the former Russian prison colony documented by Anton Chekhov, she veers west, heading for a vast tidal flat in Ul’banskiy Bay, not far from the rural settlement of Tugur Village. It’s hard to imagine a more isolated situation, and yet even here, in this empty theatre of sky and water, there is an audience. Nestled under the plumage on her back is a small satellite transmitter. An aerial extending beyond her tail feathers broadcasts her progress to the world.

Plants are one of the first things you notice when you arrive in Australia: the swathes of olive-green trees and a crisp eucalypt scent on the air. It was the first thing many explorers noted, too, whether in Abel Tasman’s 1642 description of an ‘abundance of timber’ or in Willem de Vlamingh’s 1694 descriptions of trees ‘dripping with gum’ and the ‘whole land filled with the fine pleasant smell’ of native Callitris pines. It did not take long for accounts and samples of Australian vegetation to make their way back to Europe, although it took significantly longer for any systematic scientific work to be completed on our distinctive flora.

In his lifetime, Alan Rowland Chisholm was widely regarded as an Australian national treasure, and the new biography by Stanley John Scott is compelling evidence that he deserves to remain recognised as one today.

This is a book that might have languished as an unpublished typescript, or indeed simply disappeared. Its author died in 2014, having twice withheld it from publication. The first time was due to frustration with MUP, which had promised to bring it out in 1983, then dithered. Later, when a different publication opportunity arose, Scott felt it needed reworking but lacked sufficient motivation to do so. In the months before his death, he was persuaded to change his mind. Thanks to the perseverance of Wallace Kirsop, the publisher of Ancora Press at Monash University, and editor Meredith Sherlock, it is finally available.

After his success in forcing the British Natural History Museum to return skulls and bones of Tasmanian Aboriginals, the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson was asked by the Greek minister of foreign affairs to ascertain whether international law could be used to induce the British to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece. Although the project found favour with a succession of Greek prime ministers, the Tsipras government decided not to act on Robertson’s recommendations. This book is a revised version of his report, along with a discussion of demands for the repatriation of other cultural treasures.

Ivan Vasilevich Ovchinnikov defected to the Soviet Union in 1958. After three years in West Germany, he had had enough of the West with its hollow promises. He was a farmer’s son, and his family’s property had been confiscated and the family deported as ‘kulaks’ during Stalin’s assault on the Russian village in the early 1930s. Ovchinnikov managed to escape the often deadly exile, obscured his family background, and made a respectable career. Brought up in a children’s home, then trained in a youth army school, the talented youngster eventually entered the élite Military Institute for Foreign Languages in Moscow. In 1955, now an officer and a translator, he was sent to East Berlin as part of the army’s intelligence unit. This was a quintessentially Stalinist career of a quintessentially Stalinist social climber: most Soviets had something to hide about their past in this hyper-suspicious state, which opened opportunities only for children of the ‘right’ (i.e. proletarian) backgrounds. Then, catastrophe: his kulak father threatened to become known to his superiors, and Ovchinnikov used his position in East Germany just as he had earlier used the chances provided by Stalin’s state. The building of the Berlin Wall was still in the future; it was relatively easy to pass over to West Berlin.

It is no great coincidence that many of the best nonsense writers – Edward Lear, Mervyn Peake, Stevie Smith, Dr Seuss, Edward Gorey – were also prolific painters or illustrators. Nonsense poetry often seems like the fertile meeting point of visual and verbal languages, the place where words are stretched to dizzying new limits, used as wild brushstrokes on a canvas of imagination. It is no small irony, as well, that Lear, who virtually invented the genre with poems like ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, ‘wanted above all not to be loved for his nonsense but to be taken seriously as “Mr Lear the artist”’. In Mr Lear, a formidable biography by Jenny Uglow, he has finally got his wish.

What was your pathway to publishing?

My first job was with Time Life Books in London; I started there straight after university. As a junior editor on the series Library of Nations, I spent many hours checking facts in libraries. I still love libraries.

How many titles do you publish each year?

Fifteen to twenty. We like to have a new title per month so our reps have monthly contact with booksellers. It is a front-list world.

The nuclear scale of the inferno that delivered our Black Summer will be remembered as a turning point in the debate about climate change. It was the summer when the monster of energy stored up in the earth’s oceans and atmosphere revealed itself in the most dangerous climate drivers; the summer when Australia could no longer take for granted the evolution of precious species and their habitats over millions of years, with more than a billion animals dead and more than ten million hectares of forest burnt. But it was also the season in which climate-denying politics was comprehensively trumped, no matter how much spin, media massaging, and misinformation was employed to make the fires, and their link to climate change, go away.

Throughout the entire summer, different parts of Australia were burning. The size of the fires was far beyond any previous fires: Ash Wednesday, Black Friday, Black Saturday. The latter consumed 450,000 hectares and, with help from ultra high-octane eucalyptus leaves, released heat equivalent to 1,500 Hiroshima bombs. You don’t need to do the maths to figure out the forces unleashed last summer in order to understand the apocalyptic scenes or how such forces created their own weather: in one case, a fire tornado that lifted a ten-ton fire truck, killing a firefighter. These forces were unleashed at the intersection of Australia’s driest and hottest year on record, not because of fuel-load and arson. New South Wales, where most of the forest was burnt, had doubled its area of hazard reduction between 2018–19. It made no difference. No amount of clearing of forest will suffice if the entire landscape has dried out as much as it had.

Political smokescreens

As unfathomable as the scale of the fires was the response from the Australian government. In early December 2019, when the trending story was how unusually early the fire season was and how fires were starting all over New South Wales, Prime Minister Scott Morrison sought to disconnect the fires from climate change by calling it ‘political point-scoring’. However, journalists and commentators were really pointing to the physics, not the politics. That the fires could be described as political is a function of the way that the decades-long ‘culture wars’, vigorously pursued by News Corp and by the Minerals Council of Australia, have made climate change a political plaything for Coalition governments. When pressed on the scale of catastrophic fires that were burning in places they had never burnt before, government ministers insisted that ‘Australia has always had fires’. This did not cut through when it became evident that firefighters were helpless to protect all but some targeted properties.

With millions of hectares burnt and the physics obvious, Morrison was nowhere to be seen; he stayed well away from journalists who had begun to attribute the fires to climate change. Monash University research shows that, whereas only five per cent of articles about Black Saturday mentioned climate change, by mid-December 2019 the climate change references were up to forty-nine per cent. By now the conflagration had become politically dangerous for the prime minister. Social media was highlighting the link to climate change and the message that Australians had been abandoned on climate policy, reinforced by Australia’s wilful obstruction of progress at the Madrid climate summit in December 2019.

Unwilling to face the cameras, Morrison’s decision to take his ‘quiet Hawaiian’ holiday during the crisis drew anger and contempt, even from some conservatives. Upon returning, the prime minister’s photo-ops with the exhausted and the mourning, soon after paying $190,000 to consultants on how to show compassion to farmers, came undone as firefighters refused to shake his hand and communities berated the government’s abject failure to protect them. Such efforts at stage-managed remorse would not have gone down so badly with the public had Morrison taken a stand on real policy reform on emissions reduction. But this would have meant ceasing the culture wars and listening to the science. Instead, the government recycled the clichés that Australia was meeting and beating its Paris commitments. These are founded on a web of fact-checked zombies that has shielded Australia from accountability on responsible C0₂ abatement for more than two decades.

When the firestorms really started

In 1997 the Howard government brokered such a low Kyoto target on emissions that it was mandated that Australia’s emissions could actually rise as long as it reduced the amount of land-clearing. Since then Australia’s emissions have increased in most years, with the largest annual rises occurring since the Coalition came to power in 2013. Because the Kyoto targets were so modest, meeting or beating them was always going to be easy, partly because so much renewable energy had been introduced by state government initiatives.

Most concerning here is that many Australians don’t appreciate how poorly Australia is performing. To do so requires addressing the science and ignoring misleading soundbites. The best that journalists have to work with are the international rankings that reveal that Australia has gone from bad to worse. In 2014 Australia was ranked ‘bottom of the barrel’ in a Globe International report on sixty-six countries; in 2019 it was ranked last out of fifty-seven countries in the Climate Change Performance Index.

If these metrics aren’t bad enough, what the domestic target hides are scope three emissions that are generated out of exports of coal and gas that bring Australia’s total emissions to 4.8 per cent of global emissions. Because Australia plans to use its surplus credits from Kyoto towards Paris commitments (out of step with nearly all other countries), and because only domestic emissions of 1.3 per cent are counted in the process, it is misleading to claim that Paris goals will be met ‘in a canter’. Even with all of this dubious national accounting, recent analysis shows that the government still won’t meet its targets. What makes Australia’s situation so much worse is the fact that in just three months to February the fires alone had released almost a year’s worth of C0₂ emissions. In addition, the forests that have been lost won’t be able to recover C0₂ from the atmosphere.

With its abundant wind and sunshine, Australia could be a renewable energy superpower, but it shows no signs of transitioning away from coal. Instead, in the lead-up to the fires, Adani won approval for a coal mine in a coal basin the size of the United Kingdom in the Galilee Basin. Adani is significant not only because it opens up the basin but because Clive Palmer, who bought up the voting margin for so many of the seats the Coalition needed to win at the 2019 federal election, has now put his hand up for another coal mine in the mega-basin. After spending $60 million on election advertising – more than all the other political parties combined – the Coalition owes Palmer for their unexpected majority. 

Fixated on coal

Clive Palmer is merely a symptom of the Coalition’s broader commitment to coal and mining, which has been a policy fixation for years now.

Scott Morrison may well be ridiculed for brandishing a chunk of coal in Parliament in February 2017, but the subsidies to the mining industry in Australia are something both the ALP and the Coalition have been party to for over a decade. For every dollar that mining companies provide to the major political parties, they receive $2,000 in return. Rebates for diesel fuel for Australian mining is $2.5 billion annually, almost $1 billion of which goes to coal companies. Yet substantial funding for fighting the fires only began to flow when it was clear the government had to save its political skin. It remains dwarfed by funding that is directly compounding the problem.

Even on purely economic terms, decades of not putting serious money into addressing climate change has now damaged the economy, with tourism, summer sports, and outdoor events being compromised.

Ironically, during the 2019 federal campaign, the government became a mouthpiece for big oil by declaring that the electric car would become a war on the weekend – ‘It won’t tow your trailer. It’s not going to tow your boat’. Now, it seems, climate change has declared a war on Australia’s entire summer, regardless of what car you drive.

With ten out of Australia’s 132 million hectares burnt by fires, with much of the forest not likely to recover owing to climate change-induced heat stress, there is much more forest still to burn. How many animals, humans, and communities must suffer before Australia changes direction on climate and puts behind it the culture wars? With the environmental, emotional, and economic toll already apparent, if 2020 is not the time to act, then when is?

In spite of the hundreds of scholarly articles, dozens of monographs, and two biographies on the life and work of Christina Stead (1902–83), critics, curiously, have not generally sought to divide up Stead’s career into her Australian, European, and American periods for the purposes of their analysis. Most of them have regarded her career as more integrated, recognising the fact that Stead responded to all the places in which she lived and that her interest in the people around her drove her approach to her work, informed her settings, and nourished her understanding of ideology and its impact on human behaviour. In this compact study of five of Stead’s novels, Fiona Morrison seeks to explore Stead’s particular interest in American politics and culture and their specific influence on her writing.

Yes, death was a good career move for Mr Elvis
Presley, but for those of us yet to leave the building,
cancer offers a lifeline, bringing family fame,
at least, and a careering mind, especially during
the long night-watch, when what happened in Vegas
comes home from Vegas, as always, and takes roost
in the witness coop, fluffing its lurid ostrich feathers
like a goose, and the self sits in judgement of itself
and rules against it, on every count, offering neither
amnesty nor amnesia, at least for the natural term
of your jellied memory, and you realise yours
is no minority opinion of yourself, when even the bed,
whose support you took for granted, but which always
seemed to like you, tosses you out, and you find
a safe seat next to a misty-eyed pot of tea, and set down
words such as these, in big print so you can read them
in the morning, although soon enough your goose quill
begins to whisper across the paper, as if thoughts
brewed so long, in darkness, needed no second thinking,
spilling out complete, like music, like words dusted
with a little night magic, a sparkle of dandruff shaken
from the shoulders of Mr Amadeus Mozart himself,
who wrote notes with this same smooth single-draft ease,  
and would have loved Vegas, and you feel less absolved
than cured, all over again, and even your bed
takes you back, conditionally, and you sleep till dawn,
when you remember that Mr Mozart has also long left
the building, cut down mid-career, and that cancer
is not just another job, like dying, but a way of life.

Three recent début novels employ the genre of the Bildungsroman to explore the complexities of female experience in the recent historical past.

Melting Moments by Anna Goldsworthy

Black Inc., $29.99 pb, 240 pp

Anna Goldsworthy, widely known and admired as a memoirist, essayist, and musician, has now added a novel, Melting Moments, to her list of achievements. Set mainly in Adelaide from the 1940s until the end of the century, the novel charts the life of Ruby Jenkins from youth to elderly widowhood during a period of rapid social change. The title refers to sweet biscuits and acts as a metaphor for the domesticity with which Ruby defines her identity and sense of purpose. But while she remains a model of feminine compliance and middle-class respectability, she also has ‘moments’ of yearning or regret. Her discontent is partly symbolised by a recurring memory of sexual frisson with a married man, which she describes as ‘a summons. As if she had somehow misplaced her life.’ Her compensation is her ‘dream home’ and garden: ‘It seems to her that if she had this house – this one thing – it would allow her to give [her husband] everything else.’

Ruby also becomes adept at avoiding the unpleasant or disturbing. One striking example is her refusal to hear the details of what she intuits as her husband’s wartime trauma. When he finally gives her the opportunity to ask, she ‘suddenly feels dizzy’ and makes a cup of tea. The novel implies that there is a price to be paid – in this case, the loss of a more meaningfully intimate marriage – for adhering to bourgeois seemliness.

Ruby’s story is also that of a changing social landscape, sometimes plotted through the contrast between the lives of mother and daughter. A child of second-wave feminism, daughter Eva chooses to become a doctor; disdainful of traditional ideas of femininity, she reads Gray’s Anatomy with ‘an avidity that strikes Ruby as unladylike’. Her expectations of marriage also differ from those of her more conservative mother. Indifferent to public opinion, Eva divorces her unfaithful husband. When her mother praises him for continuing to be a good provider, Eva protests: ‘Is that the best I can hope for? Provision?’

A skilful blend of wit and pathos, Melting Moments is also a formally interesting narrative. Unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, which works through a gradual unfolding and amplification of events, the novel’s dominant mode is the moment or the scene. This narrative strategy makes for many deeply moving insights into Ruby’s inner and external worlds, from an early scene of fumbling marital sex to a late scene in which Ruby bathes the body of her elderly father. But this mode can also create gaps in which significant events tend to be summarised rather than imaginatively realised. This includes Ruby’s loneliness as a young mother; her son’s maturation; her husband’s physical decline; and a granddaughter who changes from a toddler to a university student with startling alacrity. Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy in this accomplished novel: resonant moments of tenderness or acerbic observations; the contradictions and complexities of character; and a stylistic poise that makes the writing feel uniformly, deceptively effortless.

The Light After the War by Anita Abriel

Simon & Schuster, $32.99 pb, 320 pp

In contrast to the familiar setting of Adelaide, Anita Abriel’s novel The Light After the War is set in ravaged, postwar Naples and various locations across the globe. Based on the true story of Abriel’s mother’s escape from a train bound for Auschwitz and her struggle to forge a new life, the novel follows the journey of a young woman, Vera, and her childhood friend Edith as they search for emotional stability and financial security in Naples, and then in economically prosperous but stiflingly patriarchal Caracas in Venezuela, and then, for Vera, a more liberated and autonomous life in 1950s Australia.

There are sections in the novel of considerable ethical and emotional power, in which survivors of concentration camps recall the dehumanisation to which Jews were subjected. Here is one anguished recollection: ‘First they took my suitcase with the photographs and pieces of jewellery sewn into dresses … Then I was taken into a dormitory with nothing but a prisoner uniform, and I thought, they can’t hurt me anymore, they have taken everything … But every day they took something more: the gold fillings in my teeth, the flesh that covered my bones.’ Such moments, rendered with eloquent simplicity, remind us of the ethically imperative injunction – one that Abriel recalls in the preface – that we must ‘never forget’.

What also matters in this novel is courage, resilience, and a fundamental belief in human goodness. However, the depiction of romance – a central source of hope in the novel – is marred by the use of pulp-fiction clichés. Bodies tremble; hearts race or pound; a man’s eyes are ‘liquid brown’, his cheeks ‘smooth as butter’. Pedestrian dialogue is further weakened by the fact that the characters rarely ‘speak’; in distractingly overwritten speech tags, they variously retort, muse, soothe, murmur, announce, declare, protest, gush, or implore. There is also a problem with narrative priorities. The arrival of Vera and Edith on Ellis Island, for example, is dismissed with a mere reference to ‘pass[ing] the health test’, while descriptions of social outings, glamorous dresses, and handsome suitors are often lavishly detailed. Even allowing for the youth of the characters and the novel’s focus on hope, such choices are symptomatic of a novel that at times hovers uneasily between Holocaust literature and popular romance. While the ethical intentions of The Light After the War are laudable, these stylistic and formal problems detract from the powerful story it wishes to tell.

Wearing Paper Dresses by Anne Brinsden

Macmillan, $32.99 pb, 387 pp

Anne Brinsden’s novel Wearing Paper Dresses returns us to Australia. Set mainly in the Mallee region in northern Victoria in the 1950s and 1960s, the novel is a sensorially vivid evocation of nature’s influence on the rural community. The creation of the social environment is similarly convincing: resisting the temptation of nostalgia, the rural community is represented as insular as well as emotionally generous, as shadowed by domestic violence while also supportive of the vulnerable.

Wearing Paper Dresses is also centrally concerned with gender. Rural masculinity in 1950s Australia, embodied in husband and father Bill, his father Pa, and the schoolboy Jesse, is either stoical and emotionally inarticulate, curmudgeonly, or compassionate. But it is troubled femininity that dominates the novel. Bill’s wife, Elise, is a psychologically astute and deeply moving portrait of the creative urban outsider who, isolated and frustrated, descends into depression and psychosis. Her daughter Marjorie, at first defiantly unconventional, becomes a pitiable figure of abjection. Stricken by an irrational sense of guilt, she leaves the family farm for the city and for a life of anonymity and emotional paralysis.

Here, too, there is the possibility of hope in a blighted psychological landscape. Hope is symbolised by the ‘magic’ of Elise’s paper dresses, made for the local school play; the Juliet costume she fashions is ‘a work of art, drifting in the late-afternoon light, surrounded by the ministering spangles of Mallee dust’. A ‘delicate papery creation’, the dress symbolises Elise’s creative ingenuity and her gift of beauty to the community. Hope also underpins the steadfast love of the father and grandfather, and the skilfully rendered meetings, late in the novel, between Marjorie and her mother. Marjorie’s friendship with Jesse is also tenderly affirming; they are two young people who ‘sculpted a tiny, secret life for themselves in the middle of the night, hidden inside the reality of their wintry daytime lives’. The tentative intimacy of these relationships is one of the highlights of this increasingly dark but ultimately uplifting novel of suffering and recovery. In real life, and some years ago, Brinsden has referred to the encouragement she was given by the acclaimed Indigenous writer Bruce Pascoe, who having awarded her first prize in a short story competition, urged her to ‘keep writing, girl’. Wearing Paper Dresses – an intelligently written, thoughtfully paced, and moving novel – is evidence of Pascoe’s faith in its fledgling author.

True West is the latest historical crime thriller from David Whish-Wilson, author of The Summons (2006), Perth (2013), The Coves (2018), and the Frank Swann series.

True West is set in Western Australia in 1988, the time when Jack van Tongeren’s Australian Nationalist Movement (ANM) was papering the city with hundreds of thousands of racist posters, and when John Howard and Ian Sinclair were calling for a reduction in Asian immigration. True West ’s protagonist, seventeen-year-old Lee Southern, is on the run from the Knights, a Geraldton-based bikie gang whose marijuana plantation he torched in retaliation for his father’s murder. Southern tries to set himself up in business in Perth as a rogue tow-truck driver, listening in on police radio for reports of accidents in the hope of getting there first. He falls foul of drivers from True West Towing.

In a 2013 interview with British literary magazine Structo, Anglo-Australian author Evie Wyld recalls lamenting to a writing tutor that she wanted to write a big action thriller, ‘something with Arnold Schwarzenegger and machine guns and blood and explosions’ but was always writing ‘really quiet little paragraphs about Dads’. These paragraphs evolved into her haunting début novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice (2009). Wyld’s Miles Franklin Award-winning second novel, All the Birds, Singing (2013), was followed by a graphic memoir produced in collaboration with Joe Sumner, Everything Is Teeth (2015), detailing childhood summers spent on Wyld’s grandparents’ sugar cane farm and her shark fixation. The Bass Rock, her new novel, may not be a big action thriller either, but it is far from quiet and there is plenty of blood.

From the mainland, the fictional Chesil Island appears to float on the horizon. Perched above its bay, a statue of the Virgin Mary spreads its arms, its robes ‘faded and splintered by salt’. This icon of the miraculous and maternal, crafted from trees and symbolic of the invasion and settlement of Indigenous land, is imposing and worn, revered and neglected.

The sometimes-narrator of Catherine Noske’s potent début novel is Hannah Mulvey, who was raised on the island but left to finish school on the mainland. Her narrative is like the salt-worn Madonna’s presence. Like the statue, it is a faded, uncertain imposition.

Collected Stories is a misleading title for Louis Nowra’s new publication. It’s nothing as uniform as that. Apart from poetry, is there any genre in which Nowra has not made his mark? He’s a playwright, screenwriter, novelist, memoirist, local historian, essayist, reviewer, feature journalist – and the author of one enduring Australian gem in Così (1992), in all its multiple forms. Yet he has scouted out other territories and the results jostle together in Collected Stories. Such a title conjures up a lifetime’s labour in the genre – gatherings of Anton Chekhov or John Cheever or Alice Munro. But Nowra’s volume is essentially a ragbag of disparate writings.

Leah Purcell has described how her lifelong fascination with Henry Lawson’s iconic 1892 short story provided her with abundant creative ammunition. Her mother read her the story when she was five; it held a special place for them both. ‘I’d say the famous last line: “Ma, I won’t never go drovin ... she’d tear up”.’

If you haven’t read Lawson’s story or need a refresher: a nameless woman is left by her drover husband in an isolated hut with their four young children. Engulfed by sundry threats, she spies a snake. She and her dog Alligator sit up all night to guard the sleeping children.

W.H. Auden once rebuked Percy Shelley for characterising poets as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. To think this way is to confuse hard with soft power, coercion with persuasion. Poetry, as Auden famously wrote, ‘makes nothing happen’; he instead bestowed Shelley’s epithet upon ‘the secret police’. But in an age of surveillance and information warfare that has militarised the channels of everyday communication, the line between hard and soft becomes more difficult to draw. The very notion of a random or innocent signal seems laughably naïve as we are inundated by new suspicions and suspicions of news. But the state of mind in which there is always more meaning to be had is one that poetry invites us to inhabit. For Shelley, poems were ‘hieroglyphs’ and the poetic imagination an ‘imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man’. Is the poet an agent, then, of this secretive control? Perhaps Shelley was on Auden’s side all along.

This latest suite of poems by Jennifer Maiden deals with the political, cultural, and sexual drama of espionage. The Espionage Act invites the reader to view an array of contemporary events (from the arrest of Julian Assange to the Syrian Civil War) through the prism of twentieth-century intelligence history. Maiden shows herself immensely literate in the varieties of jargon employed by spies and their agencies; one of the pleasures afforded by this volume is its constantly shifting lexical register, from the cartoonishly slangy ‘honeytrap’ (sexual entrapment) to the techno-bureaucratic scientism of ‘the Overton window’ (the range of acceptably ‘mainstream’ policies).

Since Maiden’s celebrated book Friendly Fire (2005), her work has consistently sought to dramatise the aftershocks of geopolitical upheaval at the level of the domestic and intimate. The Espionage Act continues in this vein: we have the return of the couple, George Jeffreys and Clare Collins, aid workers blown about by the hurricane of American force projection. In Friendly Fire, they found themselves in New York on 9/11. It is a testament to Maiden’s tact and humane imagination that one can still read this sequence of poems without wincing at sentimentalised overstatement or aesthetic opportunism.

The Espionage Act also continues two genres peculiar to Maiden: the ‘diary poem’ and the imaginary conversation. Unlike the conversations composed by Walter Savage Landor, Maiden’s pieces pit contemporary with historical figures: in The Metronome (2017), Maiden had Hillary Clinton consulting with Eleanor Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, Jeremy Corbyn with Constance Markievicz, Malcolm Turnbull with William Bligh. The element of fancy is married to a concrete formula; each conversation typically begins with X waking up in Y next to Z. As Maiden has noted, critics cannot resist ‘being arch about the woke-up thing’, but as the conversations in the latest volume suggest, the fringes of sleep are important for lending the colloquies not only their veil of surrealism, but also an air of vulnerability. Waking up is not only an immensely private experience, it also marks a recovery of innocence – that first moment of free and fresh apprehension before the clouds of calculative forethought gather. The possibility of such a recovery in a world webbed with murderous design is the unspoken hope that marks so many of the new poems.

One of Maiden’s great strengths is her ability to preserve a tender awareness in the midst of privation and intrigue. It is there in Gore Vidal’s solicitude towards a sleeping Assange in ‘Gore Vidal Woke Up in Belmarsh Prison’: ‘Assange’s face had gentled younger, perhaps / due to the lack of close eyesight, to white light / from the barred window, the small television / with its simplifications like childhood.’ In ‘Dorothy Wordsworth and the critic’, the latter catches ‘her eyes show[ing] the wall a compassion that she must / have wished for herself’. Animals and children are often privileged objects of such awareness. In another instalment of the ‘Brookings’ poems, the poet basks in the reflective innocence of her pet marsupial: ‘And who am I to take away his comfort, / who has offered me such comfort with his trust?’ But as with ‘Diary Poem: Uses of Alan Turing’, innocence is shadowed by complicity; the poet’s pet is named after a political thinktank and Turing’s relish for the fairy tale of Snow White foretells his doom. The arc of such poems bends toward satire, but they leave enough room for sentiment to be unstiffened from the wry sangfroid with which most of the political commentary is intoned.

Maiden’s best lines have a fierce eloquence, but The Espionage Act is marred by occasional sententiousness. That ‘it is not the dark / that makes us mad, nor waiting’s violence, but still what terror / always springs in sudden police arrival, the new fatal manacles’ veers towards literalism. When the poet asks ‘Is / loyalty to corruption in itself corrupt?’, one wonders if this would even be a question for anyone other than Donald Trump. Still, one is grateful for ‘the nude’s kinetic honesty’, a phrase memorably inserted into the mouth of Jackson Pollock. In Assange’s ‘casual baritone / deferential with explanatory energy’, Maiden wrings music out of recalcitrant syllabic material and shows the intuition of a keen moral psychologist.

‘Literature,’ Ezra Pound once said, ‘is news that stays news.’ While Maiden’s poetry has never failed to be topical, the demands of keeping up with every twist in the bowels of the deep state have been a drain on her rhetorical powers. Weariness has set in for the poet and her characters. Whether it is a ‘weariness that draws old energy from sea beaches’ remains to be seen.

Philip Pullman must be one of the weirdest figures to emerge from the sometimes dark woods of children’s writing. Not the least striking thing about him is that the woods can be very dark, Dante-dark, indeed. At the same time, he does not have the ballast of those two mutually despising inklings to whom he is routinely compared, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, in having the deeper comforts of anything like the Christian mythology that feeds into the Narnia books, or the way in which The Lord of the Rings summons up a universe of Gothic and Germanic ring-lore and then shows how it works with tremendous moral force and with snow-white magic against all the putative and primeval Nazism in the world.

But these are the parallels with Pullman. At the very moment when J.K. Rowling showed herself to be a phenomenal popular writer on a par with, say, Agatha Christie, the trilogy of Pullman’s His Dark Materials (1995–2000) proffered some kind of literary masterpiece that was immeasurably deeper and more disturbing. The title came from Paradise Lost, and Pullman’s vision was in sharp contrast to the essentially Catholic benignities of the other two, so radically protestant that it looked like an atheism atomising itself into a hailstorm of mythopoeia all the weirder for being homemade in the radical, bewildering way that William Blake is.

In Pullman’s universe, dominated by a sinister and morally ambivalent Oxford, where the gargoyles loom amid the vision of grace in stone, everyone comes with a daemon equivalent to their soul but taking the form of an animal that communes and confronts and fights for them. The world is ruled by a ghastly life-denying Magisterium that represents the face of the Church at its most authoritarian, kindling the flames to quench heresy. Conservative Christians wanted the film of The Golden Compass (2007) banned, while its Catholic star, Nicole Kidman, denied that it was anti-religious. Pullman, who says he would hear the voice of God in the St Matthew Passion if he believed it existed, presents a vision that might almost be Calvinistic in its grimness. A vision, too, where the face of the mother is like the face of Clytemnestra.

Philip Pullman (photograph by Bryan Appleyard/Penguin UK)

Recently, Pullman has been at work on a new sequence. In La Belle Sauvage (2017), the first volume of The Book of Dust, Lyra, the twelve-year-old heroine of the original trilogy, is a baby. In The Secret Commonwealth, the action is set ten years on from the trilogy. Lyra is at Oxford and finds herself in conflict with her daemon Pantalaimon, the pine marten. The Magisterium is limbering up for new acts of world-enslaving horror with the suave and sinister Marcel Delamare pulling the strings. It is also a world where Lyra Silvertongue, formerly known as Lyra Belacqua, is in fact in love with a stalwart scholar, Malcolm Polstead, who appeared as a boy in La Belle Sauvage. Lyra becomes separated from her soulmate Pan and goes in quest of him to lands of Roses (which are mysteriously treasured). The book also makes much of the atomised treasure Pullman calls ‘dust’. It is all as weird and as self-generated as the prophetic book aspect of Blake, and it is not for nothing that the epigraph is from him: ‘Everything possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.’

The weird thing about Pullman, who, on one level, represents the fantastication of something like a Christopher Hitchens–Stephen Fry level of atheism, is that he is superabundantly imaginative, and every strange byway or epically defiant lurch he takes into a world of conjured horrors is embodied in a way that defies the mind, dazzles the soul, and tugs at the heart in a way that recreates, as if by some principle of recapitulative miracle, the danger and darkness and spellbound excitement with which we meet King Arthur or discover the Holy Grail at the age of eight or ten. Pullman really is that sheerly talented and remarkable. God knows what he is doing concocting these parabolic extravaganzas at a moment in literary history still dominated by the afterglow of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, by Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, and all that unpredictable suburbanisation of a postmodernism that seemed to be fading.

Somehow, against all the odds, Pullman is a master storyteller who is also a writer of great emotional range and moral gravity. He has a sheer command of narrative that is some distance ahead of most literary novelists who can do plot; he is also a writer where all the imaginary gardens not only have real toads in them but where the toads glow and gloat and mutate.

All of this will sound very odd indeed to anyone who wouldn’t go within cooee of fantasy or anything written for children, but they will be mistaken. This is fantasy writing that is either great art or something that overleaps the category. One clue to this is that many millennials think of Pullman as their Homer figure. Some of their parents would be appalled at the darkness of the vision he discloses; others might have discovered that he speaks to something deeper in them in this ongoing saga of innocence and experience than can usually be seen through any glass darkly. And it does not depend on the things of childhood or an outmoded idiom of simplicity.

Anne Enright has never been able to resist the tidal pull of mothers; her novels are animated by complex, ambivalent maternal presences, women rendered on the page with duelling measures of hatred and hunger, empathy and censure. There is the mercurial tyrant Rosaleen Madigan of The Green Road (2015), ‘a woman who did nothing and expected everything’. There is the hapless, hazy Maureen Hegarty of the Booker Prize-winning The Gathering (2007), erased by her endless pregnancies and too many children; ‘a piece of benign human meat, sitting in a room’.

‘If you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart’

Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich would never write again. The National Book Award-winning author was bereft of ideas and exhausted by a tenacious winter virus. She surrendered to sleep, heavy with the certainty that her literary career was over. ‘Hours later, I was jolted awake by some mysterious flow of information,’ Erdrich explains in the afterword of her new novel, The Night Watchman, a glorious rebuke to her fever-addled defeatism. A message beat in her brain: go back to the beginning. ‘I made myself a shaky cup of tea,’ she writes, ‘and then, as I’ve done so many times in my life, I began to read letters written the year I was born, my grandfather’s letters.’

As I write this, Canberra is once again under threat from the Orroral Valley fire south of the city. This comes after a summer of intense and incredibly destructive bushfires and, for Canberra, endless days of smoke haze, followed by a damaging hailstorm. The coronavirus also dominates the daily newsfeeds as a global health emergency takes hold.

Our public language in the last months has been transformed by these crises. Here at the Australian National Dictionary Centre, we continually monitor the language, looking for new words and studying the various changes in our ways of speaking.

The papacy’s role in international affairs is often underestimated. A recent example is Pope Francis’s participation in the 2015 negotiations leading to a détente between Cuba and the United States. It helped, of course, that Barack Obama was president and that Raúl Castro had replaced his brother Fidel in Havana; but it was Francis, building on the work of his predecessors who had maintained continuous relations with the Castro regime, who brought the two sides together, and who persuaded the United States to drop its sanctions against Cuba.

Eighty-one per cent of American evangelicals are said to have voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election and, with little variation, plan to do so again in November 2020. That number sparked four years of intense debate and a slew of books, signalling the latest chapter in a fascination with evangelicals and politics dating back to at least 1976 when Newsweek proclaimed the ‘Year of the Evangelical’ upon Jimmy Carter’s election. Whatever one wonders about just who counts as an ‘evangelical’ and what might be said about the broader movement in the age of hyper-partisanship, it has certainly been a boom time for histories of evangelicalism in the United States.

Retired, my father
tells me things.
He saw, far out to sea,
a great Pacific gull,
hefty, hook-beaked,
hound a crow,
slim brushstroke of ink.
Then, from the saltbrush,
a shadow. A second crow,
                arrowing in fast – in my father’s voice
the thrill of the rescue rising –
you could not tell
if they were even friends, or it were just
a question of iron martial honour
                that crow
always fights for crow.

When I am old,
I will have no children to tell
what he did to me. Did you know
a man can pick a child up
                by the head? I think
we are born with an honour
that means we cannot know that
                till we do.

What do we call this terrifying summer? The special bushfire edition of ABC’s Four Corners predictably called it Black Summer. Perhaps the name will stick, for it builds on a vernacular tradition. Firestorms are always given names, generally after the day of the week they struck. There are enough ‘Black’ days in modern Australian history to fill up a week several times over – Black Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays – and a Red Tuesday too, plus the grim irony of an Ash Wednesday. The blackness of the day evokes mourning and grief, the funereal silence of the forests after a firestorm. Black and still. And when the fires burn for months, a single Black Day morphs into a Black Summer.

But does this name truly capture what is new about this season? The recent fires have left a black legacy, but the terrifying thing about them was that they were relentlessly red. Red and restless. The colour of danger, of ever-lurking flame. Acrid orange smoke and pyrocumuli of peril. The threat was always there; it was never over until the season itself turned. The enduring image is of people cowering on beaches in a red-orange glow. It was the Red Summer.

In early January, in an essay for Inside Story, I called it Savage Summer; I was writing while the fires were still burning and there was no sign of a black day-after. Stephen J. Pyne, a great wordsmith of fire, reached for another alliteration, calling them the Forever Fires. That name signals the change Pyne perceives in fire behaviour, from occasional visitations to total engulfment, which is the predicament of the Pyrocene, a new Fire Age comparable to past Ice Ages. His term ‘Forever Fires’ also reminds us, as James Bradley did in the Guardian, that ‘this is not the new normal. This is just the beginning.’ The future will be worse than this, much worse, unless we swiftly address the cause.

Whether we call the summer black, red, or savage, we shouldn’t forget that the fires started in winter. Even the season was ruptured. Where can language go once a whole summer is declared black and the fires are forever? What will we call the next eruption of fire? Will the black days that fused in a red summer become nameless, seamless years of inferno?

Gospers Mountain bushfire. NSW, 2019 (photograph by Nick Moir)

There is something personal about fire, something frighteningly irrational and ultimately beyond our comprehension. It roars out of the bush, out of our nightmares. Not only do we give the great fires names, we also assign them the characteristics of monsters: they have flanks, fingers, and tongues; they’re hungry; they know where we are; they lick and they devour. In reports of the fires of 1919, 1926, and 1939, houses were ‘swallowed’ and people were ‘caught between the jaws of the flame’. Fire ‘with its appetite whetted … sought more victims, and fiercely attacked’, and ‘with each change of wind … made a thrust towards the township, threatening to lick up the scattered homes on the fringe’. Bushfire makes its victims feel hunted down and its survivors toyed with. Why did the fire destroy the house next door and leave mine unscathed? A Black Saturday survivor who lost his home confessed, ‘I felt as if the fire knew me.’ A book about the 2003 Canberra fires took as its title a child’s question: How did the fire know we lived here?

Fire is the genie of the bush ready to escape, ‘the red steer’ jumping the fence and running amok, the rampant beast that can savage and kill. Instead of the sprites, elves and wood nymphs that populated the forest folklore of the Northern Hemisphere, Australian colonists found that their bush harboured a rather different creature. As poet Les Murray put it, the ‘gum forest’s smoky ambience reminds us that the presiding spirit who sleeps at its unreachable heart is not troll or goblin, but an orange-yellow monster who forbids any lasting intrusion there’. People on the New South Wales south coast referred to the Currowan fire, which rampaged for seventy-four days, as ‘the beast’.

During this searing summer, we have seen the best and worst of Australia: the instinctive strength of bush communities and the manipulative malevolence of fossil-fuelled politicians. The clash between the two – symbolised by a prime minister forcing handshakes on survivors – added to the trauma of the fires. As we watched our political establishment double down on denial, we were forced to realise that even the shock of this season may not change our national politics.

Where does this Australian intransigence come from? It is embedded so deeply in our history that we can hardly identify it. It comes from a conquest mentality that was built on denial, the denial of Aboriginal sovereignty and cultural sophistication. It comes from a frontier mining history and an economic dependence on coal. And it comes from enduring puzzlement about the nature of Australia, a nature that British settlers slowly learned was prone to climatic extremes that were natural rather than aberrant. Dealing with the traumas of flood, drought, and fire, and learning to expect and fight them, was part of becoming Australian. Many farmers and bush folk have been slow to accept climate change because they have spent their lives coming to terms with extreme natural variability. Their rural experience makes them sceptical about a different variability, especially when it is global, one-way, and unnatural. It’s like the rules of the game have suddenly changed. Thus, the history of modern Australian settlement sedated the populace against recognising its greatest peril.

But there are signs of hope in the exponential growth of quality Australian writing about fire. Black Friday 1939 produced one outstanding literary statement: Judge Stretton’s powerful and poetic Royal Commission report that was included in anthologies of nature writing and became a prescribed text for Matriculation English. Ash Wednesday 1983 found its greatest literary expression in Pyne’s Burning Bush (1991), which was written in its long afterglow. Black Saturday 2009 produced a crop of fine writing, impressive in its range and cultural depth, notably Adrian Hyland’s Kinglake-350, Karen Kissane’s Worst of Days, Robert Kenny’s Gardens of Fire, Peter Stanley’s Black Saturday at Steels Creek, Chloe Hooper’s The Arsonist, and Peg Fraser’s Black Saturday: Not the end of the story.

This savage summer has already germinated a very different forest of literary reflections. Writing sprouted immediately from active firegrounds, and it described something that was neither an ‘event’ nor just ‘Australian’: it was a planetary phenomenon. Fire is no longer a local or national story. Australia is the canary in the coal-mine, a belated warning of planetary peril. The world is watching us. We are the burning frontier of a warming world, the perilous cliff-edge of the Sixth Extinction. This may be the first fire season that Australians have tried to calculate the mortality of wildlife.

Fire was not just more extensive, intense, and enduring; it went rogue. Australia burnt from the end of winter to the end of summer, from Queensland to Western Australia, from Kangaroo Island to Tasmania, from the Adelaide Hills to East Gippsland, in the Great Western Woodlands and up and down the eastern seaboard. The season did indeed represent something new or ‘unprecedented’, to use the word avoided by denialists, who used history lazily to deny that anything extraordinary was happening. But our long history of bushfire is significant precisely because it makes us the prime site for a global eruption. Bushfire is integral to Australian ecology, culture, and identity; it is scripted into the deep biological and human history of a land of drought and flooding rains. But reciting Dorothea Mackellar does not forestall heeding Ross Garnaut. They are not in tension, for one amplifies the other. Of all developed nations, the sunburnt country is the most vulnerable to climate change because of her history of ‘flood and fire and famine’ and the chemistry of ‘her beauty and her terror’.

In a searing piece of reportage from the New South Wales south coast for The Monthly, Bronwyn Adcock was witness to ‘Australians doing everything they could, even when their government didn’t’. If the fires revealed the strength of bush communities and the innate goodness of people in extremis, so too did they reveal the absence of federal leadership and the weakness of our parliamentary democracy. As if neglect and omission were not enough, coalition politicians hastily encouraged lies about the causes of the fires, declaring that they were started by arsonists and that greenies prevented hazard-reduction burns. Yet we know that these fires were overwhelmingly started by dry lightning in remote terrain and that hazard-reduction burning – which is far from a panacea – is constrained by a warming climate. The effort to stymie sensible policy reform after the fires has been as pernicious as the failure to plan in advance of them.

The recent fires delivered a liminal moment for the nation, landing us on the beach of a fearsome planetary future. There can be no evacuation. Whatever we call this summer, will we make it a season of reckoning?

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A disturbing omission

Dear Editor,

I read Sophie Knezic’s review of the Haring/Basquiat exhibition with admiration but also a sense that it avoided the tragedy of these artists’ lives. Jean-Michel Basquiat died aged twenty-eight of a heroin overdose; Keith Haring died at thirty-two from AIDS, years before effective therapies existed. Both men lived through an extraordinary period of transition in New York City, which ended prematurely for so many. This is reflected in their work, most obviously in Haring’s safe-sex messages. To review their work without acknowledging this is a disturbing omission.

Dennis Altman, Clifton Hill, Vic.

Blowback and 9/11

Dear Editor,

While Andrew Broertjes’s review of Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire is mostly considered in its analysis, I consider the couple of paragraphs dealing with the 9/11 terrorist attacks to be disingenuous at best and egregiously partisan at worst. To characterise the murder of almost 3,000 people as ‘blowback’ against some perceived injustice is wilfully inaccurate. Al Qaeda was quite open about the role of 9/11 in prosecuting an expansionist Islamist agenda – conveniently ignored in the article – and prior to 2003 the United States was not a colonial power in the Arab world, notwithstanding the positioning of military bases in friendly territory, unlike, for example, the French, British, and Turks. I am surprised and disappointed that ABR allowed the unamended publication of that part of the article.

Matthew Castle (online comment)

Andrew Broertjes replies:

Thank you for your response. Your issues with my review are twofold: the claim that the United States ‘prior to 2003’ was a colonial power in the Arab world, and that the 9/11 attacks were ‘blowback’ to ‘perceived injustice’ against the Arab world/the Middle East. You allege that I made these claims across ‘a couple of paragraphs’, although ‘a couple of sentences’ may be nearer the mark. But to address these points in turn:

At no point in the review did I claim that the United States acted as a colonial power in the Middle East prior to 2003. The closest I came was in the following: ‘A new international order had been formed, as former European colonial empires collapsed and transformed into the proxy battlefields of the Cold War. America’s imperialism would be as much cultural and economic as martial during what was dubbed as “the short American century”. Terms like “coca-colonisation” were coined to describe the spread of American culture and ideals around the globe.’ In case it wasn’t clear in the review, ‘coca-colonisation’ is a term that Daniel Immerwahr has borrowed to describe the use of soft power by the United States. Neither I nor, presumably, Immerwahr uses the term to mean colonialism in the classical sense of the word.

As I stated in the review, I borrowed the term ‘blowback’ from the Chalmers Johnson book of the same name. In the first edition of that book, published prior to the events of 9/11, Johnson wrote, astutely in my opinion: ‘World politics in the twenty-first century will in all likelihood be driven primarily by blowback from the second half of the twentieth century – that is, from the unintended consequences of the Cold War and the crucial American decision to maintain a Cold War posture in a post-Cold War world.’

Little has happened since then to prove Johnson wrong. Osama bin Laden had a list of grievances, including the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia (and therefore the proximity of the infidel to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, as expressed in his 1996 manifesto), the sanctions on Iraq post-Desert Storm that had resulted in ‘a million children dying’, and the Israeli occupation of historic Palestine. To pretend that these grievances did not exist, or that Islamic terrorism (or indeed any terrorism) exists in some sort of historical vacuum, is far closer to a position that is ‘disingenuous at best and egregiously partisan at worst’ than anything contained within my review.

Porter Prize

Suspense reigned on January 26 when a capacity audience joined ABR on its home turf, the Boyd Hub Community Centre, for the announcement of the winner of the sixteenth Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Our judges – John Hawke, Bronwyn Lea, and Philip Mead – had shortlisted five poems from a record field of 1,050 entries, from thirty different countries. The shortlisted poets were Lachlan Brown, Claire G. Coleman, Ross Gillett, A. Frances Johnson, and Julie Manning.

The night began, as always, with readings from Peter Porter’s work. Poet Philip Mead was followed by Morag Fraser (former ABR Chair and principal supporter of the Porter Prize for several years) and Ian Dickson, who together read memorably from Porter’s 1973 collection Jonah. Then John Hawke (ABR’s Poetry Editor), representing the judges, spoke powerfully about the importance and vulnerability of poetry. ‘We’re all aware that this is a time when the institutions that support culture are being tested,’ he said. ‘Poetry – always the most marginal of literary forms, when judged in relation to the market – is especially vulnerable in this climate.’ 

Morag Fraser then named A. Frances Johnson as the overall winner. Her winning poem, ‘My Father’s Thesaurus’ – for which Johnson received $7,000 – is a moving chronicle of her father’s experience of Alzheimer’s – a ‘bushfire inside the brain’, as she describes it.

A. Frances Johnson wins the 2020 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

Receiving the award, A. Frances Johnson remarked:

‘Despite the confusions and word salads, in Dad’s last months, we were lucky that there were still ways of finding him, being with him, holding him. I know others have gleaned similar precious communication with loved ones in the last stages of this terrible disease. Poetry and of course music are often used in aged-care settings to enable sufferers to de-scramble, to maintain a hold on language. Poetry has certainly helped me hold Dad close.’

Threats to poetry notwithstanding, the Porter Prize will be back bigger and better next year.

Jolley Prize

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, one of the world’s premier awards for an original short story, is now open. Worth a total of $12,500, the Jolley Prize is open to all short story writers writing in English. This year (following indications from past entrants that a more even distribution of prize money is preferred), the winner will receive $6,000; the runner-up will receive $4,000; and third place will receive $2,500.

Our valiant judges this year are Gregory Day, Josephine Rowe, and Ellen van Neerven. The three shortlisted stories will appear in our August or September 2020 issue. For more information, please read our Terms and Conditions and Frequently Asked Questions.

The Jolley Prize is fully funded by ABR Patron Ian Dickson, whom we thank warmly.

ABR Podcast

We’re grateful for listeners’ warm responses to The ABR Podcast. Released fortnightly on a Wednesday (next up, March 11 and 25), it’s home to some of our major reviews, commentary, and creative writing. If you enjoyed reading features such as Tom Griffiths on Australia’s ‘Season of Reckoning’ or Beejay Silcox on Margaret Atwood’s novel The Testaments, tune in. Coming up we have Grace Karskens reading her Calibre Prize-winning essay ‘Nah Doongh’s Song’ and Peter Rose’s review of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, the final novel in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy – perhaps the most anticipated sequel since The Testaments.

If you haven’t already done so, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or Google Podcasts, or search for us on your favourite podcast app.

Yarra Valley

Writers’ festivals seem to be almost as prevalent in this country as literary prizes, but there is a welcome new one in the vinous Yarra Valley. Programmed by playwright Hannie Rayson, the Yarra Valley Writers’ Festival will be held in picturesque Healesville from May 8 to 10.

Rayson has put together an appealing selection of writers, including Helen Garner, David Williamson, and Clare Bowditch.

Visit their website for more information: www.yarravalleywritersfestival.com.

Calibre Prize

We surrender! The Calibre Prize closed in January after receiving nearly 600 essays – a record field. Judging is now underway. The winner will receive $5,000; the runner-up $2,500. Podcasts will follow the announcement in the May issue.

The opening dedication in Carmen Maria Machado’s ground-breaking memoir In The Dream House reads: ‘If you need this book, it is for you.’ Here, Machado offers a gift but also a clue. She wrote this book because she needed to. For close to two years, she was in a lesbian relationship in which her partner was abusive to her. In making sense of it, Machado found a few books here and there, but mostly there was nothing – a meaningful silence. In deft strokes that should humble historians and other theorists of the archive, Machado contemplates the ghosts that haunt it. The ‘abused woman’ only became a ‘generally understood concept’ fifty or so years ago. Since then, other ‘ghosts’, including the female perpetrator and the queer abused, have become legible, while remaining shadows. She offers her own memoir – by design, ‘an act of resurrection’ – to the archive of domestic abuse, placing herself and others into ‘necessary context’.

In the Dream House débuts and exits as queer history, with necessary caveats about the specificity of Machado’s experience and further reading provided in the afterword. Throughout, and like other queer thinkers she cites with admiration, such as the late José Esteban Muñoz, Machado finds new ways to ‘queer’ the evidence, including by finding meaning in and for what otherwise might be dismissed as ephemera. Various encounters with pop culture – ranging from the original version of the film Gaslight (1940) through to the 1980s pop hit ‘Voices Carry’ by ‘Til Tuesday – are mined for the insights offered into patterns of abuse. Machado also pursues conventional modes of historical enquiry – she knows her landmark cases and has read her way through lesbian magazines – and respectfully consults existing literature. Yet as vital and illuminating as these chapters are, In The Dream House is both too multivalent and too singular to be easily reduced to the descriptors of memoir or queer history. In transcending genres and trying many of them on for size, Machado creates a new one altogether.

Without wanting to unnecessarily damn this deliciously inventive book as ‘meta’ or ‘experimental’, In The Dream House is at once a ‘real’ story and an extended adventure in storytelling. As a book-about-writing-a-book, Machado plays with points of view and sometimes moves the writing process and her present self to the foreground, but never for the flashy sake of it or at the expense of an unfolding story that needs to be told. The story of her relationship with the ‘woman in the Dream House’ and how to best tell it are entwined. Machado’s higher purpose is truth-telling, which, as she superbly demonstrates, can be highly compatible with her other calling: telling stories. She merges form and content to dazzling and clarifying effect. To a wider world that still asks the same condemning questions about domestic abuse and the people who find themselves subject to it – questions she has asked herself, like why not leave or say something – Machado tells her story in as many forms and from as many angles as it takes to get across what she needs to understand and say. The healing or transformative power of stories has been reiterated to the point of cliché, but on this front Machado prefers to show rather than tell. Via occasional footnotes, she also aligns her story to the folkloric tradition, as catalogued in American folklorist Stith Thompson’s multi-volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (1955–58), but never labours the point. Machado does not need to: her narrative skills mean that she knows how to keep her reader’s attention.

Carmen Maria Machado (photograph by Art Streiber/AUGUST)

Machado’s identity and development as a writer are central to In the Dream House, as is her evolution as a queer woman. She meets her soon-to-be lover in Iowa City, where Machado is a graduate student at the world-famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Both are writers. Addressing her past self, Machado’s prose drips with unabashed desire: ‘she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time’. Soon, the new lover ‘haunts’ her ‘erotic imagination’. They are both ‘perpetually wet’. Their mutual delight with one another extends to their shared vocation: ‘You love writing across from her, the two of you tapping away with verve and purpose.’ The story would not make sense without these details. As Bildungsroman – another literary form that Machado brazenly releases from its historical masculinist grip – In the Dream House is a narrative about the end of innocence and the coming of hard-won wisdom, where ‘Everything tasted almost like an epiphany.’

The glorious opening phase of her new relationship affirms Machado’s queerness, but as her lover’s abusive side reveals itself, the fact that it is a woman doing this to her compounds her confusion and isolation. Machado’s account of domestic abuse confirms and enlarges what is already known about the topic, including that many abusive relationships are not necessarily or primarily physically violent. Much of what she describes should have resonance with any person who has had firsthand experience. To select one passage, Machado writes: ‘She makes you tell her what is wrong with you. This is a favourite activity; even better than her telling you what is wrong with you. Years later, it is a habit that is hard to break.’ Yet Machado makes it clear she is not aiming for a universal story about domestic abuse, and it is in this commitment that In the Dream House attains its greatest power. Against a culture that ‘does not have an investment in helping queer folk understand what their experiences mean’, Machado writes with bracing honesty and focus about what happened to her, how it felt, and why it matters.

Machado’s first book, the audacious short story collection Her Body and Other Parties (2017), continues to be justly lauded, and its genesis is woven into In The Dream House. As companions, they share a risk-taking spirit, but whereas Her Body occasionally floundered into failed experiment, In The Dream House maintains its force. She has taken her father’s exam advice to ‘write down everything I know about a topic’ into her literary life to remarkable effect. As an insight into Machado’s process, and her astonishing memoir, it’s as good as any: ‘Where I had doubt, I’d fill the space with what I remembered, what I knew to be true, what I could say … Let it never be said I didn’t try.'

Few media institutions are revered across the mainstream political spectrum quite like The Economist. Since its founding in London in 1843, The Economist – which insists on calling itself a newspaper despite switching to a magazine format in the mid-twentieth century – has developed a reputation for intelligent, factual reporting and forthright advocacy for free trade and economic expansion. And it has weathered the digital storm far better than most publications, with print circulation now higher than it was prior to the arrival of the internet.

It is also, as City University of New York historian and New Left Review editor Alexander Zevin shows in this outstanding new history, an excellent prism through which to study and evaluate the record of ‘actually existing liberalism’. The Economist, Zevin writes, is where the bourgeoisie has spoken, ‘not as the only, or purest, expression of liberalism, but as the dominant one, with the greatest global impact for 175 years’.

Specifically, Zevin analyses how The Economist has responded to the three broad material and ideological forces that have shaped liberalism since the mid-nineteenth century: ‘radical demands for democracy, the ascent of finance in the global capitalist order, and imperial expansion, conflict, cooperation and continuing dominion’. His conclusions make for uncomfortable reading for all those who cherish their subscription to The Economist as an indicator of their capacity for reasoned and civilised thought.

Scottish hat-maker James Wilson was initially moved to establish The Economist as a way to campaign against Britain’s protectionist Corn Laws, but the enthusiastic free marketeer and internationalist, soon had much grander ideas. ‘We seriously believe,’ he wrote in his prospectus for the newspaper, ‘that FREE TRADE, free intercourse, will do more than any other visible agent to extend civilization and morality throughout the world – yes, to extinguish slavery itself.’ The Economist’s founding, writes Zevin, was ‘a milestone in political and economic thought, a bugle blast of the first age of global capitalism’.

The influence of the publication – and its editor – grew quickly. Wilson entered the House of Commons in 1847, and thereafter advised prime ministers on economic matters in both formal and informal capacities. Amusingly for Australian readers, he was later put forward for the role of governor of Victoria, but the appointment was blocked by the sovereign herself: Queen Victoria was not having a commoner in charge of the colony that bore her name.

Instead, Wilson was sent to India to work on taxation and financial matters in the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1857. Here, in Zevin’s telling, Wilson resembles a proto-neoliberal, relishing the power of his office and ‘seeking to apply in under one year policies that had taken decades to enact in England’. One is immediately reminded of the shock therapy carried out by Milton Friedman’s ‘Chicago Boys’ in Pinochet’s Chile, or imposed by the International Monetary Fund on the former Soviet states in the 1990s.

For all of Wilson’s passion and influence, however, it was his son-in-law, Walter Bagehot, editor from 1861 to 1877, ‘whose output and reputation are in a class by themselves in the history of the Economist’. Bagehot carried on Wilson’s habit of exerting political influence, with Gladstone calling him a ‘supplementary Chancellor of the Exchequer’ and consulting him on matters of finance. Bagehot’s reputation continued to grow throughout the twentieth century, and his The English Constitution (1867) is still considered a seminal work on the British political system. (Many students of politics have no doubt returned to it in the futile hope of making sense of the Brexit mess.)

While acknowledging his contributions as a prolific writer on an extraordinarily wide range of topics, Zevin presents Bagehot as somewhat less of a model liberal thinker than his admirers choose to imagine. He was an unabashed élitist, hostile to all attempts to expand the franchise to the ‘lower classes’. Virtually alone, he regarded Louis-Napoléon as a genius, and praised his Second Empire to the bitter end. During the American Civil War, he was scathing about Abraham Lincoln and sympathetic to the Confederacy. With regard to the British Empire, ‘Bagehot showed the same breezy, flexible confidence in imperial destiny as he did in English political economy.’

As Zevin demonstrates with great panache, this strain of imperial adventurism has been a mainstay of The Economist’s pages ever since. Whether Britain was seeking to prolong its centuries-long subjugation of nearby Ireland, or conquering far-flung territories in southern Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, East Asia, and almost everywhere in between, The Economist urged it on. An exception to the rule occurred in the lead-up to and during World War I, when editor Francis Hirst urged neutrality and then a negotiated peace. For such heresy he was sacked in 1916.

The Economist became even more jingoistic as Western imperial power shifted across the Atlantic, forcefully backing the United States as it invoked the communist threat to bully smaller nations into serving its political and economic interests. It was outrageously wrong about almost every aspect of the US débâcle in Vietnam: the massacre at My Lai was a ‘minor variation on the general fallibility of men at war’, it shrugged. The Economist maintained its support for the war long after most sensible observers had acknowledged its immorality and futility.

As American imperial incursions and atrocities piled up – Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, Greece, Cambodia, Chile, Nicaragua, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan – the cheerleading continued. The Economist ‘never saw a war it didn’t like’, as its veteran foreign editor Johnny Grimond said to nervous laughter at his retirement party in 2012. Even after the disaster of the second invasion of Iraq in 2003, it remained adamant that US military might is a force for good in the world.

The Economist was similarly unrepentant in response to the global financial crisis of 2008. The near-total collapse of the international banking system did nothing to shake its belief in neoliberal economic orthodoxy and the institutional power of unregulated finance. ‘Steadfast,’ writes Zevin, ‘it acted as a kind of automatic stabilizer for a liberal ideological order suddenly racked with self-doubt.’

So, how has The Economist responded to democratic demands, imperial expansion, and the ascent of finance over the course of 175 years? Zevin persuasively and comprehensively shows it to have been spectacularly wrong on all three questions. Further, it remains blissfully unaware of the consequences of its worldview: ‘Averting their gaze, liberals have scratched their heads at the political volatility of the present, unable to recognize their handiwork.’

‘The Economist,’ we are told on its website, ‘considers itself the enemy of privilege, pomposity and predictability.’ Zevin has proved the emptiness of such claims with this masterful book.

At seventy-six, Paul Theroux drove from his home in Cape Cod to Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican road trip is his account of this adventure, at times misinformed, on occasions tedious, with moments of entertaining, well-researched discussions about the scintillating complexity of Mexico.

From the outset, Theroux eschews tired tropes and delves into elements of Mexican life and culture that are seldom examined. He discusses the causes and consequences of the rising cult of la Santa Muerte (Holy Death), a new religious movement said to have ten million followers. Theroux scrutinises the idiosyncrasies of small towns in the south-east of Mexico. There is Santa María Ixcatlán, with locally made straw hats used as currency; and Camula, where images of saints can be excoriated if they are unresponsive to their supplicants’ prayers, part of the Zapotec–Mayan–Christian religious syncretism endemic to the town. One of the most interesting passages in the book describes a meeting with Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the separatist Zapatista Army of National Liberation, a charismatic figure who has dedicated the last thirty years to defending the rights of the Mayan people.

Notwithstanding Theroux’s interesting anecdotes and clever dissections of Mexican culture, lengthy sections in On the Plain of Snakes are clogged with tedious details. Do we really need page-long descriptions of the assignments Theroux’s students produced during his writing workshops in Mexico City? Plaudits to Theroux for taking Spanish classes in Oaxaca, but must he include transcriptions of his conversations about Dan Brown’s works with fellow students? Putting aside the tedious, Theroux’s commentary on the social fabric of Mexico is contentious. Yet some of his observations are acute. For example, when he examines the consequences of Mexico’s culture of corruption, he goes beyond the patina of obvious malfeasance of funds and lack of infrastructure and grasps the subtle effects that living in such an environment has for ordinary citizens: a focus on self-sufficiency, creativity, and resilience; dependence on friends and family, the only ones who can be trusted. Unfortunately, nuanced observations such as these are few, and they are interspersed with shallow generalisations. Throughout the book, for example, Theroux homogenises the socioeconomic complexities of Mexico. In a patronising, reductionist way, he implies that ‘the poor’ are good, hard-working victims dependent on tradition for a sense of identity, while ‘the rich’ are their unequivocal exploiters, immoral and heartless, ‘fat cats, for whom life is a shuttling back and forth in limousines’. In Mexico, like everywhere else, privilege and poverty exist in a complex spectrum. To reach conclusions about the moral character of individuals based on their wealth is as misguided as doing so on the basis of their poverty. It is the opposite side of the same coin, and the currency is prejudice. Unquestionably, Mexico has dire issues of inequality and injustice, exacerbated by, inter alia, internal racism, interventionism, and a colonial legacy that has not been properly dealt with, points that Theroux ignores in his analysis.

Theroux dedicates part of his book to discussions on Mexican literature and the genre of magic realism. These are some of the most disappointing passages in the text. Describing authors of magic realism as abused children who hide the brutal reality of their homes through stories, Theroux refers to the genre as a literature of denial, ‘a fiction that has arisen out of embarrassment, a literary reaction to shameful circumstances or origins’. Quoting Joyce Cary, he goes on to compare the works of Gabriel García Márquez to ‘farting “Annie Laurie” through a keyhole. It may be clever but is it worth the trouble?’ It is disappointing to see an author who can be analytical and witty engage in crass, obtuse statements of this nature. Theroux does not touch on Cuban author Alejo Carpentier’s development of lo real maravilloso (the marvellous real) in the 1940s or his attempt to create a uniquely Latin American literary style. There is no mention of Jorge Luis Borges or Julio Cortázar, no understanding of how these literary influences converged to propel the Latin American Boom of the 1960s.

Magic realism is not a literature of avoidance but of belief. It portrays a mindset where belief in the supernatural permeates the way people live. This does not necessarily entail ignorance, denial, or intellectual immaturity: it can be a conscious decision to focus on the possibilities of the unknown. García Márquez explains in The Fragrance of Guava that his novels do not present metaphors but nuances of reality that realism cannot convey given its ‘static and exclusive ... vision of reality’. Magic realism does not shrink from pain or suffering. What of the Banana Massacre of 1928, where 3,000 workers were murdered by the United Fruit Company, an event discussed in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) when José Arcadio Segundo ends up in a train full of corpses ready to be dumped in the sea? Or Isabel Allende’s denunciation of the sadism suffered by the victims of Augusto Pinochet’s regime in The House of Spirits (1982)? It is clear that magic realism is not to Theroux’s liking, presumably because he missed the point. To write with contempt simply because he doesn’t understand seems puerile for a writer of his calibre.

The assertion that ‘love is strong as death’ comes from the Song of Solomon, a swooning paean to sexual love that those unfamiliar with the Old Testament might be startled to find there. Songwriter and musician Paul Kelly has included it in this hefty, eclectic, and beautifully produced anthology of poetry, which has ‘meaningful gift’ written all over it. 

In a brisk but friendly and content-rich introduction, Kelly addresses the anthologist’s Big Three: parameters, ordering principle, and criteria for inclusion. The first involves a decision ‘… not to include song lyrics … However, when you make the rules, you’re allowed a few exceptions,’ he says, listing the handful of songs included. The ordering principle is simple and strong: the poems appear in alphabetical order by title. This is partly because Kelly didn’t want the book to look ‘textbooky’, but also, he says, because it allows the poems ‘to jostle one another in a democratic manner … [the poets] all get to hang out together and have sparky conversations’.

Kelly’s main criterion for inclusion is also very simple: ‘… if I love a poem, it goes in, no matter how worn out others may think it to be’. This book is a kind of memoir, a self-portrait created not by looking in the mirror but by pointing to the bookcase. It’s clear that his imagined readership is made up of general readers: of people who might choose the book because it was Paul Kelly who chose the poems.

Many of those poems are indeed about love or death, but sex and language also get a good run. ‘Immigrant Blues’ by Li-Young Lee begins: ‘People have been trying to kill me since I was born / a man tells his son, trying to explain / the wisdom of learning a second tongue.’ But Moushegh Ishkhan puts the case for one’s cradle tongue in ‘The Armenian Language is the Home of the Armenian’:

The Armenian language is the home
and haven where the wanderer can own
roof and wall and nourishment. 
He can enter to find love and pride,
Locking the hyena and the storm outside.

Like language, sex makes a frequent appearance in this book, often in poems that are ostensibly about something else. Some of the titles are quite startling in this respect, notably ‘Ode to the Clitoris’, and the mystifying ‘Keats Is Dead So Fuck Me From Behind’. There’s also Donne’s classic ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’, the seventeenth century’s high-culture equivalent of Joe Cocker singing ‘You Can Keep Your Hat On’. Australian poets are also well represented in this field: there’s the tender ‘Why I Love Your Body’ by Dorothy Porter, a breathtakingly erotic poem by Kevin Hart – ‘Your Kiss’ – and another by Alison Croggon, whose ‘Seduction Poem’ is a direct invitation: ‘Unbutton all your weight, like a bird / flying the night’s starred nakedness’.

The alphabetical juxtaposition of poems can enrich the reading of them in unexpected ways, especially if this involves poems you already know well. I felt physically jolted by the sight of two poems I’ve loved since my teens, Yeats’s ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ and Cavafy’s ‘Ithaka’, sitting side by side. Each of these is a gently closing fist around the heart, and here they reveal their common preoccupations: the idea of home, and the balance of movement and stasis in narratives of progress and moments of equipoise.

Even more surprising is the joint appearance of ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ (hymns and psalms, it seems, get a pass) with ‘Leda and the Swan’, where the newly canonised Cardinal Newman’s gentle, regretful plea for guidance is followed by Yeats’s sonnet about bestiality and rape. But they have something weighty in common: considered in the light of each other, both of them are about obedience and submission to a god.Within the alphabet’s solid and immovable structure there is room for many poems to move across cultures, countries and centuries. Aboriginal writers are well represented, as are poets from across the world. There is a lot of Irish verse, including three mesmerising female laments: translations from the Gaelic of two ancient, anonymous poems, ‘Donal Og’ and ‘The Hag of Beare’, and contemporary poet Paula Meehan’s ‘The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks’:

But on this All Souls’ Night there is
no respite from the keening of the wind.
I would not be amazed if every corpse came risen
from the graveyard to join in exaltation with the gale,
a cacophony of bone imploring sky for judgement
and release from being the conscience of the town.

There are cinematic scenes from The Iliad and The Odyssey side by side with the twentieth-century Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, clearly a favourite of Kelly’s along with Thomas Hardy. There are poets you’ve never heard of and poems you know by heart. Most of all, there is Shakespeare, represented by a number of sonnets and many of the best-known speeches and soliloquies: Cleopatra’s burning throne; Julius Caesar’s friends and Romans and countrymen; Portia’s quality of mercy; Macbeth’s tomorrows; and Henry V’s speech to his band of brothers upon St Crispin’s Day. 

Buy this book of riches and give it to the people you love. Then nag them to learn some of these poems by heart, and learn some yourself. (‘By heart’: what a revealing expression.) If you find yourself in a terrible situation, if you get arrested or your lover leaves or the car breaks down or the fire traps you or you must sit patiently waiting in the emergency ward for news, poetry remembered and recited can lift you up and away, out of the murk to better times.

To some it may seem solipsistic to be reviewing what is, in effect, a collection of reviews, but when the reviewer in question is as smart as the late Clive James and the subject is as substantial as Philip Larkin (1922–85) this is unlikely to be the case.

Even if Somewhere Becoming Rain were not as good as it is, the very fact of its existence would still be moving. Knowing he is in his final months of life, a poet more famous for almost everything else but who believes his poetry to be his most important achievement pays tribute to a poet whose work outshines, and will continue to outshine, his own. A further dimension is how the dedicated and admiring reviewer of the poet’s work is to defend that poet’s reputation when posthumously published letters reveal Larkin to have been something of a racist and misogynist. It can be difficult to defend the work against such personal shortcomings without seeming to excuse them – or indeed, at worst, to be seen to share them.

It’s unfortunate, then, that James spends so much time defending Larkin’s poetry against those who would seek to belittle it because of its author’s personal failings. James concedes that Larkin’s serial and ongoing deception of several women caused them real pain, but he insists that Larkin appears to have been unfailingly polite to everyone he met, irrespective of race or sex. Significantly, the published poems are resolutely free of any such blemish.

In the second paragraph of Somewhere Becoming Rain, James addresses the point directly with his observation that Larkin ‘was just an ordinary man – too often he thought himself less than that – but behind his show of diffidence ... there was a well-developed sense of duty to his gift ... Would he really have put such ingenuity and effort into hoodwinking the several women who loved him if he had not realised his need for affection was matched by an equally consuming need to be alone?’

Although this compilation only runs to a hundred pages, one of its virtues is its comprehensiveness. Clearly James, like most of us, considers Larkin’s best poems as his main achievement, but he also pays full, if passing, tribute to Larkin’s two early novels (Jill [1946] and A Girl in Winter [1947]), his writing on jazz (All What Jazz [1970]), and his incidental prose (Required Writing [1983]). Through all three areas, James notices the continuing importance of Larkin’s incisive, though not flippant, wit (a matter close to James’s own heart, as we know).

To those few readers who (like this reviewer) have an equal love for both poetry and jazz, being reminded of Larkin’s smart but unfair (even tin-eared) dismissal of modern jazz greats such as Charlie Parker and John Coltrane will undoubtedly be annoying. James makes a persuasive case, however, that Larkin’s real ars poetica is to be found in these now somewhat fugitive pieces praising pre-modern jazz masters (such as Sidney Bechet) while rejecting bebop and what followed. It’s hard to be convinced of Larkin’s insight, though, when he declares that Coltrane ‘sounds like nothing so much as a club bore who has been metamorphosed by a fellow-member of magical powers into a pair of bagpipes’. Coltrane could be relentless at times (especially at the end of his career), but that does seem excessive.

Once or twice the book risks losing focus when James turns aside to a rela- tively peripheral issue, such as whether Larkin was more influenced by Hardy or Yeats (a needless binary), but some of the border regions surveyed (e.g. James’s review of Tom Courtenay’s ‘verbatim’ play about Larkin, Pretending to Be Me [2003]) are definitely of interest.

More central to the life, if not the work, are James’s reviews of the two biographies of Larkin – Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A writer’s life (1993) and James Booth’s Philip Larkin: Life, art and love (2014). Both books provide grist to the seemingly ineluctable ‘Is the work vitiated by the life?’ mill, with James concluding that Booth’s biography has probably been the less damaging of the two.

It’s all an issue that James repeatedly wishes away but to which he cannot help returning. Of course, Larkin’s poetry, if not the man himself, needs to be defended and not allowed to slip from the canon because the writer’s ‘personality’ is now seen to have been less than adequate. It can be hard to ignore the Twitterati these days, especially the academic ones, but too vigorous a defence can, unhappily, begin to seem as if the warrior ‘doth protest too much’.

A nice sense of James’s overall view of Larkin can be had from his five-page poem ‘A Valediction for Philip Larkin’, also included here. In it James regrets, in considerable journalistic detail, that he was on a television safari in Africa when Larkin died. Significantly, the artificiality of the poem’s slightly rough rhyme scheme enabled James to say much that is true about the recently deceased Larkin – and about himself.

It’s hard to sample fairly, but these five lines are a good point to close on: ‘The truth is that you revelled in your craft. / Profound glee charged your sentences with wit. / You beat them into stanza form and laughed: / They didn’t sound like poetry one bit, / Except for being absolutely it.'