Catharine Macaulay (1731–91), a celebrated historian in England, was acquainted with leading political figures and intellectuals in Britain, America, and France. American revolutionaries were influenced by her republican principles, and the feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft was inspired by her views. Today she is a largely forgotten figure, at most a footnote in histories of the period and not regarded as significant enough to be included in the Enlightenment pantheon among the luminaries she supported or criticised. Melbourne philosopher Karen Green claims that the neglect of Macaulay is not only an injustice to a historian and philosopher whose works deserve attention. She regards her as an important advocate of a form of Enlightenment thought that cannot be reduced to an apology for the possessive individualism of capitalist society.

Richard Fidler

Richard Fidler is a writer and broadcaster. His interview program ‘Conversations’ is broadcast on ABC Radio and podcast around the world. He was a member of the comedy trio The Doug Anthony All Stars. His previous books are Ghost Empire (2016) and (with Kari Gislason) Saga Land (2017). His new book is The Golden Maze: A biography of Prague (ABC Books).

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

The moon, of course (spacesuits are provided under this deal, right?). Feeling moon dust crunching under my boots while looking down on the big blue marble would be an incomparable thrill.

To his obvious surprise, John Wood became a household name playing ordinary, reliable Aussie blokes – most memorably Sergeant Tom Croydon on Blue Heelers and magistrate Michael Rafferty on Rafferty’s Rules – two of television’s best-loved everyday heroes. (I confess to writing about the latter in The Bulletin and describing him as ‘the thinking woman’s crumpet’.)

Less well known is that Wood was also a busy playwright and screenwriter for much of his more public life. It’s this talent that shines here in vivid observation and shrewd evocations. Telling of the family’s move to the semi-rural outskirts of Melbourne, he conjures the unself-conscious innocence of a child: ‘I don’t think my sister Glenys was yet born. I do have a memory of going to the hospital with Dad to bring Mum and the new baby home, but it could have been Kaye’s birth two years later.’

The announcement in June 2000 that a first draft of the human genome had been completed was rightly recognised as a landmark in scientific endeavour. Predictions were that the sequencing of the genome would allow for the pinpointing of genes responsible for conditions such as Alzheimer’s and heart disease, and lead to finely targeted, even personalised, treatments for a range of disorders. That these ambitions are still some way from being met doesn’t make the discovery any less remarkable. The Human Genome Project (HGP) gave us the capacity to read the basic building blocks of life. Research into the human genome is teaching us that the relationship between our approximately 30,000 genes and who we are is enormously complex, the result not merely of the action of individual genes but also of the ways in which those genes interact with each other and with their environment.

In The Genes That Make Us, Edwin Kirk reminds us that virtually everything ‘that afflicts human beings, and everything about us that is not an affliction, too, has genetics at its core’. Interpreting genetic sequencing data is at the heart of Kirk’s practice. A Sydney-based medical geneticist and genetic pathologist, he works with patients to determine the underlying genetic source of their conditions and to advise them of their treatment options. Both an account of the human stories at the heart of Kirk’s practice and a beginner’s guide to genetic medicine, The Genes That Make Us tells of the significant progress that has been made in genetics over the past two decades, while also signalling how far there is left to travel.

On May Day 1955, two years after his death, a colossal memorial to Joseph Stalin was unveiled on a prominent site north of central. Towering above the city and containing 14,000 tons of granite, it was the largest statue of the dictator ever created. Stalin was depicted at the head of a representative group of citizens, dubbed by some as a bread queue. Otakar Švec, a prominent Czech sculptor, had won the commission in 1949. After the work’s stressful gestation, he killed himself shortly before the work was unveiled; there had been constant interference and police surveillance, and his wife committed suicide in 1954.

Švec had intended bequeathing his possessions to the Prague Institute for the Blind, possibly knowing that the recipients would never see his socialist-realist monster, but the secret police destroyed the contents of his apartment and the Institute received nothing. Following Stalin’s fall from favour, the memorial was detonated in 1962. The podium survives (it’s now used as a bar), and the platform above houses a modern sculpture of a gigantic metronome, installed in 1991.

This is a remarkable book – not so much for its subject matter as for the intensity of the passionate involvement of one writer with another. From the beginning, it is clear that this is not a conventional biography or book of criticism. A.N. Wilson approaches Charles Dickens through seven different mysteries about his life. The principal one, which underlies the whole book, is the mystery of what makes Dickens such an utterly compelling writer.

This is obviously a question of deep importance to Wilson. At its root, he is asking, what is the secret of how Dickens affects him? To put it in my own personal terms, which this book forcefully elicits, what is it that makes me weep every time I read the account of the death of Jo in Bleak House, despite some misgivings (though only in one part of my brain) about his being taught the Lord’s Prayer as he dies? Or, to take a broader canvas, what makes me take the improbable story of Pip – exploited by a woman who has stopped time at the point she was jilted, and sustained by a fearsome transported convict who has made good in Australia (along with all the other unlikely characters and events of the novel) – as somehow totally real and as a profound reflection on childhood, class, shame, guilt, and, above all, love?

‘Even if truth be drawn from the work,’ writes Maurice Blanchot, ‘the work overruns it, takes it back into itself to bury and hide it.’ This strange, poetic movement to conceal what is manifest brings to mind another statement, by the psychiatrist and author Judith Herman: ‘The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.’

Early in Kate Lilley’s début collection, Versary (2002), two short poems appear verso-recto that feel misplaced, the ‘I’ nearer the poet, the scenes more nakedly historical. In ‘1972’, schoolchildren leave a dance and ‘cross the oval in pairs / to the steep bank behind the softball field’. ‘It’s cold on the ground,’ the speaker concludes, ‘my buttons loose to the sky.’ The impact of these final adjectives carries to the poem opposite, ‘Panic Stations’, whose first line has the speaker ‘rattled, shaken up’ after an unnamed incident. There is a lurch to the present tense, the speaker ‘holding my breath on the bottom of the pool’– the impossible peace of this state – while ‘horror’s breaking through’.

Change Machine is an exceptionally strong third collection. To the extent that a schematic of thesis–antithesis– synthesis applies to poets’ books, this one both exceeds and incorporates the work that came before.

Intriguingly, the title poem seems a late addition, citing the pandemic in three clipped lines, borne on the shoulders of two innocuous words, should and but:

I’m broke. And everything should be contactless.

We breathlessly await the new vaccine,
but no-one disinfects the change machine.

Title poems are often the punchline of a book. Characteristically, this one begs to differ, puncturing any grandeur the metaphor suggests. ‘Change machine’ seems to be a trope for life and death – as the epigraph tells us, ‘Machine, or Engine, in Mechanicks, is whatsoever hath Force sufficient either to raise or stop the Motion of a Body’. It is certainly the engine of language, which raises and halts the spectres of perception. But it is also just the coin machine that gives the poet access to a public restroom. The poem’s irritable ‘I’ takes on a world in which little can be changed – every should is countered by the tough luck of a but – yet it matters to put words to an irrational world.

The poet’s mots d’esprit are offered in the spirit of an antidote to rage, if not its sublimation:

The word
we used
was mellowed

and maybe he really had
towards the end –
but Victor took the jug cord

to the boys for years. For half a life he whirred
like a rowing machine.
          (‘Hard Water’)

Armed with wit and erudition, Savige launches visions of damage, dystopia, and occasional joy. These are common enough; what sets Change Machine apart is the exquisite marriage of feeling to linguistic ambition and an exuberant gift for verbal generation. This combination is rarely distilled to such proof: the reader senses the pressure behind the mechanisms. The wit, range, and verbal polish occasionally calls to mind that other London-based Antipodean, Peter Porter; at other times, a fellow Joycean, and likewise expatriate, Paul Muldoon. As with Porter, the lexical wizardry (‘A carousel of oral cues, / these spinning sonic coins. // A slide show of old wishes’) papers over pain. But more than either, these poems recall American poets’ early twenty-first-century tussle between Language and lyric verse, as anthologised in a Norton anthology, American Hybrid (2009), and promulgated by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki in Verse magazine through the same period. Maintaining the tension between language as material means, and meanings that matter, Savige focuses his powers in the service of a hybridising, tragicomic vision. By the end of ‘Spork’, the poet has become that vision, conceived in a fuck-you gesture to a bigoted grandfather. The poem opens:

Chimera native to our plastic age, crossbred ambassador
from the planet of blur,
both and not either or –

There is a masculine jocularity to some of the poems. ‘Starstruck’ comes to mind (‘plough into a murder / of gowned undergraduates on the crest / of the bend; or swerve, and be poleaxed / by a singular hackney car. I veered like a wakeboarder // from the kerb’). But then there are poems such as ‘Tips for Managing Subsidence’ and ‘The Cobra of Djemma el Fna’, dedicated to his partner, Emma, which apply the poultice of wit to the loss of unborn children with a harrowing finesse reminiscent of Muldoon’s The Annals of Chile (1994). Neither bears quoting; these must be read in full.

‘Flight Path’, which takes as its subject the death of a stowaway who fell from a plane over London, keeps at arm’s length that image of ‘a real day’ through its verbal decoration of a horrifying fall. The James Dickey poem ‘Falling’ addressed a similar event; both focus our attention on the surreal spectacle of these awful deaths:

Above the High Street’s summer dioramas
did he twist like a samaroid
seed, or whistle like a samurai sword,
swiftly and without words?
          (‘Flight Path’)

‘A real day’ is differently present in the poet’s gift for perception, trained on the natural world. Evident from his first book onwards – the upshot, perhaps, of being raised on Bribie Island – it bubbles up in lines such as these, where the scene is imagined but vividly present:

Home is the hoof-crushed water mint,
the hard rushes, and an adamant stonechat
declaring mid-morning’s parliament
again in session.
          (‘The Convict Lying Low by Hampton Court, Speaks’)

A typical strong book might have two or three standout poems. Change Machine has a more impressive number. Among them I would count ‘Hard Water’, one of the most powerful poems about domestic violence I have read; ‘Ladybugs’, a poem on self-harm (‘you’d say it was her prep for an exam / on how to use her skin to hoard the rain’); ‘The Offing’, a holiday poem, told with a verbal relish to rival Les Murray’s; ‘Tips for Managing Subsidence’, mentioned above; and two original and lovely poems for the poet’s son, ‘Infant Speech Bubble’ and ‘Bach to the Fuchsia’ (yes, Back to the Future). A similar number of poems, all in the opening section, could have been omitted without damage to the whole – they are too slight or over the top and indigestible (‘the wild albino leech of my eyeball / gorges on glare’). These only highlight the accomplishment of the stronger poems, which use similar means but apply much greater pressure.

The choice to end the book on a faux-phonetic poem (‘inspired by the recurrent “Mutt and Jute” episodes in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake’) seems puzzling at first (‘Less faith it, y’aint // cart hut for these kinds of sillygigs’). But it’s almost certainly a variant on the deflationary move the poet makes in ‘Change Machine’. The book’s see-sawing ride between loss, pain, and humour – a balance so perfectly poised in many of the poems – gives the final hurrah to ‘sillygigs’. Could we be lost in the funhouse of language? Savige’s mirroring and anagrammatical poems suggest such a vision. ‘Sure it was funny, but not ha-ha // funny, more funny-sad, like the elegy for Ford Ford / in William Williams’s The Wedge (’44)’. This poet’s ability to dazzle through the damage is ‘ROTFLMAOWTRDMF’ in verse: ‘rolling on the floor laughing my ass off / with tears running down my face.’

Until recently, Australian prose poetry hasn’t attracted much attention – we’re not sure why. Having written prose poetry for years, we’re both fascinated by the form, which can be loosely defined as poems written in paragraphs and sentences rather than in stanzas and lines.

Getting a handle on the larger tradition of Australian prose poetry is not easy. Many prose poems are buried in out-of-print books or lurk in slim volumes mainly comprising more traditional poetry. The many anthologies of Australian poetry published in recent decades have mostly included few prose poems. It was as if prose poetry had not been fully accepted as a legitimate part of the Australian poetry landscape.

This mattered to us: as prose poets, we felt we were working in the shadows, if not in the dark. Like many other exponents of the genre, we had a limited sense of the Australian prose poetry tradition.

The store of knowledge available to humanity has never been so immense and accessible as it is today. Nor has it been so vulnerable to neglect or erasure. That, in essence, is the message of this book, written with urgency by the most senior executive at the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford, one of the largest and oldest library systems in the world.

In Burning the Books: A history of knowledge under attack, Richard Ovenden explains that while competing impulses to preserve and destroy knowledge are nothing new in human history, the invention of the internet has brought with it the potential for loss of knowledge on a scale never before seen. In the historical equivalent of the blink of an eye, we have come to depend on the internet despite the basic instability of information technology. This is a fine thing – except when it suddenly fails.

A creeping association might doldrum
your bullet points and action items
resembling life grid passing then gone
change my number leave me alone
give no ear to charms
slip the bridle ungirth the saddle
the x of the x blows
sit at my desk and think there is more to come
a spreadsheet fringe exposure
seemly as introduction exactly so
talking invents its outstretched
necessities breezy pictures and other
objective objects
those who are marked with the tokens
whose houses are plague houses
passing-bells salute

‘It is necessary in each situation,’ Jacques Derrida stated in 2007, in one of many instances of writing on writing, ‘to create an appropriate mode of exposition … to take into account the presumed or desired addressee.’ This was the phenomenon I sought while reading Susan Lever’s book on screenwriting for Australian television drama.

The various bookends among which to stack the text’s potential readers – writer, academic, student, and sentimental Australian of a certain age – are the disciplines of creative writing, media, culture, and history, and the purposes of knowledge and entertainment. It is a book for wannabe scriptwriters, television buffs, and Australian-nostalgia tragics. As a tragic myself, among the shows I immediately looked up were Pastures of the Blue Crane (1969), Bellbird (1967–77) and Sea Change (1998–2000).

Reviewing Oliver Stone’s film Salvador for The New Yorker in 1986, Pauline Kael detected a ‘right-wing macho fantasy joined to a left-wing polemic’. That same compound, a politically unstable one, bubbles under the surface of Stone’s autobiography, Chasing the Light. Generally speaking, it is hard to separate judgement about an autobiography from that about its subject, since reading an autobiography is like a long stay at someone’s home, listening to them detail their life story around the dinner table, night after night. The problem is twofold when its author is so politically conflicted. As distinct from a film review, to review Oliver Stone’s autobiography is undeniably to review ‘Oliver Stone’.

Stone’s self-narrative is many-layered. Its early chapters offer a candid remembrance of his childhood, his bonds with his parents, the impact of their divorce, his years in an academically intense boarding school. Then comes his dropping out of Yale and his departure for Vietnam, first as a teacher, then as a soldier. Since the subtitle promises a ticket-of-entry to a filmmaker’s ‘fight’, the main event shows Stone struggling into Hollywood, dodging and weaving through the twists and turns of independent film financing, peppering the bout with punchy celebrity anecdotes. At times the book smacks of an award speech run long: a careful list, too exhaustive. At others it reads like a Borgesian riddle of mentorship, a career manual for an industry that doesn’t quite exist anymore. But the book’s interest lies less in these formal qualities than in the social implications of reading it, of spending three hundred pages with the man, of having to navigate the political fantasies that Kael saw in Salvador, that left-right combo of a masochist’s violence and pacifist’s plea.

Jeremy D. Popkin, a historian at the University of Kentucky, fittingly begins his account of the French Revolution with a printer in Lexington enthusing in late 1793 about the ideals of the Revolution of 1789 in his Kentucky Almanac. The printer’s geographic distance from the events in Paris meant that his idealistic vision of the Revolution coincided with its most violent and repressive period in 1793–94, later dubbed ‘the Reign of Terror’. This juxtaposition of 1789 and 1793 is useful for Popkin to make his key point that, ‘despite its shortcomings, however, the French Revolution remains a vital part of the heritage of democracy’.

The explanatory power of Popkin’s richly detailed account comes from ‘deep narrative’: the interplay of ideology and circumstance, choice and necessity. While Louis XVI’s regime was mired in financial crisis and corroded by ‘Enlightenment’ challenges to traditional sources of authority, the Revolution of 1789 was not inevitable. Rather, Louis’s government mismanaged crisis, offering the prospect of sweeping reform without a clear strategy for achieving it.

Last spring, as the harbingers of a dangerous season converged into a chorus of forewarning, I decided it might be a good idea to keep a diary of the period now known as ‘Black Summer’. The diary starts in September with landscapes burning in southern Queensland and Brazil. Three hundred thousand people rally across Australia, calling for action on climate change. I attend a forum of emergency managers where, during a discussion about warning systems, a senior fire manager declares: ‘We need to tell the public we cannot help them in the ways they expect, but we’re never going to tell them.’ Next week, Greg Mullins, the former NSW fire and rescue commissioner, comments on ABC radio, ‘We’re going to have fires that I can’t comprehend.’ Federal politicians assure the nation that we are resilient.

Victoria and South Australia then experience the hottest October days in eighty years. At the beginning of November, several people having lost their lives in fires, Prime Minister Scott Morrison offers his ‘thoughts and prayers’. Like some of those affected, journalists link the fires to climate change and the deputy prime minister is quick to remind everyone that ‘we’ve had fires in Australia since time began’. Friends in Melbourne and Sydney text me about ‘PM2.5’ and ‘N95’ masks. Hospital presentations for asthma rise throughout south-east Australia. After a brief trip to Hawaii, the prime minister announces the need to focus on ‘how we manage native vegetation’ to avoid future infernos. Much of eastern Victoria is soon alight. My diary entries become sporadic.

Greek myths are entirely predictable: Actaeon offends Artemis and is hunted down by his own hounds; Pentheus refuses to worship Dionysus and is ripped apart by his mother; Antigone disobeys the king, and dies for her crime. Beginning, middle, and end: so familiar, so inevitable. The trick was never really in the plot, but in what you did with it. And what Helen Morales does with Greek myth deserves our fullest attention.

With the dazzling, restorative energy of Beyoncé taking over the Louvre, Morales gives us storytelling for our moment. This book is thoughtful, passionate, human, and humane. It is no kneejerk tribute to the glory that was Greece or fawning shrine to ancient wisdom. In Antigone Rising stories are – rightly – bound up in social structures. The Greek myths hurt, enslave, subdue. They have been, and still are, used to shape bodies, tame minds, train ethical imaginations. They are a still-living tradition, and in living with them, some of us are harmed more than others. Yet there is an ultimate hopefulness here as well, and for this reason too this is a necessary book for our moment. Myths belong to us; change is always possible; narratives morph; the power of stories lies exactly in their capacity to do unexpected things.

Sandy Grant (Hardie Grant)

Co-founder of Hardie Grant, Sandy Grant has had a distinguished career in book publishing and media. He was formerly MD of Heinemann, Octopus, and Reed Australia, and CEO of Reed Books UK. Sandy is also a former director of Meanjin, the Australian Republican Movement, Chair of the Melbourne Writers Festival, member of the UNESCO City of Literature Bid Committee, President of the Australian Publishers Association, and Chair of the Copyright Agency.

What was your pathway to publishing?

My older brother Jamie, who is now a poet, was working for Cambridge University Press. When I finished my degree in economics and philosophy, he introduced me to a publisher he knew, who was looking for staff. I took a job opportunistically in 1977, but then enjoyed it from day one.

Melburnians above a certain age will remember Coles in Bourke Street. Unknown to most of them, it stood on the site of another Coles, Cole’s Book Arcade, for half a century probably the most famous shop in Australia. Its founder, Edward William Cole, is now the subject of an engaging biography by Richard Broinowski.

E.W. Cole was born in Kent in rural poverty in 1832. His real father was unknown, and his stand-in father was transported to Van Diemen’s Land for stealing a legendary handkerchief. (As fate would have it, both father and son would later be in Melbourne at the same time, unknown to each other.) Independent and enterprising, young Edward went to London and became a streetseller.

While on the campaign trail against Hillary Clinton in 2016, Donald Trump appeared to deviate from a scripted speech he was delivering in Dimondale, Michigan. What followed was remarkable: ‘At the end of four years, I guarantee you that I will get over ninety-five per cent of the African-American vote. I promise you.’ Undaunted by six decades of black voting behaviour and his own poor standing with African-Americans, not to mention the fact that he had yet to defeat Clinton, Trump promised a ‘new deal for black America’ that would spark a decisive black shift to the Republican Party. African-Americans had long been the nation’s most partisan racial group: since 1964, no Republican presidential candidate had won more than fifteen per cent of the black vote, and no Democrat less than eighty-two per cent. Yet Trump, a man with a long and divisive racial history, vowed that he would soon rival Barack Obama for electoral appeal among African-Americans.

In making his pitch to black Americans, Trump focused on some of the stark realities of black urban life – ‘You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs … What the hell do you have to lose?’ – before pledging, ‘I will produce for African-Americans.’ Better jobs, great schools, safe neighbourhoods: these, Trump proclaimed, would be his top priorities for black America.

Pale ankles in the mountains, divergences
on a quarry. We are witness to it
land and witness to it
some fact of further summer
or things a truck driver might say
                                            ‘Ossa ashiver
                      and no one knows why
speaking, coughing: it is a throat, after all, writing
poems is nothing like gladness.
Take posture, gesture from the rib
how the body is – it is hard
here shrubs heave like lungs, the young
men fly in, flown in quarry throat-deep folly
so it happens. Black glass
of the vitrified brain, in the earth-shaft
critique in pure resin, boiled stone; no time
is ever resolved and still we find it
in ore, grate it as glass, itemise it as
sand, grind it until it’s suave as paste.
A poem hardly written.

The phrase ‘no time is ever resolved’ comes from a speech by Jeanine Leane delivered early this year in Cambridge.

In the garden of a hotel twenty minutes from Yogyakarta, a group of hopeful, middle-aged Westerners gyrate anxiously to the strains of LaBelle’s greatest hit. Unlike their young Balinese instructor, they are fighting a losing battle. Why bother? Robert Dessaix wonders. Next morning, his travelling companion answers in her husky smoker’s growl, ‘It’s death they’re afraid of – or at least dying.’

Do we most fear negation or the ‘broken hips, the strokes … the dementia and painful feet’ – the debilitating pain of ageing? Dessaix’s search for answers takes the reader on an eclectic journey through Western and Eastern literature, art, and thought, from Epicurus to the Japanese concept of yutori – ‘having the time and space – and even the resource – to do, with a sense of ease, whatever it is you’d like to do’; from Borobudur to Tasmania; from Dante’s concept of hell to absurd contemporary visions of paradise; from Leo Tolstoy and André Gide to Diana Athill and Eva Hoffmann. In between, Bette Davis quips ‘old age is certainly no place for sissies’, and Dessaix’s delightful cast of Virgilian guides impart skerricks of their hard-won wisdom. Hungarian Sarah, ‘looking more and more like Maggie Smith’; Katharina, ‘gaunt but full of life’; Gide’s granddaughter Sophie Lambert: all these glorious, elderly women, whose gusto for living remains undiminished by shrivelling prospects, seem to have achieved contentment, ‘blander than happiness but more reliable’.

When Alex Miller first thought of writing about Max Blatt, he imagined a celebration of his life. But would Max have wanted that? He was a melancholy, chainsmoking European migrant, quiet and self-effacing, who claimed nothing for himself except defeat and futility.

Max died in 1981, but for many years he was Miller’s mentor, inspiration, and best friend. As a fledgling writer, Miller looked up to the older man for advice, criticism, and confidence. His first published short story was based on a wartime incident in Max’s life. Later, as an acclaimed novelist, Miller often spoke of Max, in interviews with myself and others, imitating his friend’s slow raspy voice and eyes narrowed against cigarette smoke. Max turns up in his writing in various guises, notably the character Martin in his autobiographical novel The Passage of Love (2017).

Eddie Jaku looks out benevolently from his memoir’s cover, signs of living etched across his face. The dapper centenarian displays another mark, one distinctly at odds with his beatific expression and the title’s claim: the tattoo on his forearm from Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Less discernible is the badge affixed to his lapel bearing the Hebrew word zachor; ‘remember’. The Happiest Man on Earth blazes with the pursuit of memory, of bearing witness, but it is also determinedly oriented towards the future, its dedication inscribed to ‘future generations’.

As I read Jaku’s book, the same sensation struck me as when I read Hans Keilson’s memoir There Stands My House (2011): it is perhaps best described as the privilege of experiencing someone’s remarkable company and being entrusted with his story. Keilson was also a German Jew who survived the Holocaust, but one who did so by hiding. Jaku’s experience was one of hiding, betrayals, internment, the crushing brutality of Auschwitz and the Buchenwald concentration camp (twice), the death march, and myriad other horrors. Following the Shoah, the lives of both men are formed out of the memory of their parents, shadowed by their murder and also influenced by their embodiment of compassion. Jaku and Keilson cleave to a belief in humanity as a resounding reply to hate.

Writer Liam Pieper has deftly allowed Jaku’s singular speaking voice to emerge unfiltered. Jaku ushers the reader to go with him as he extends his fellowship, each word resolutely countering the darkness of oblivion and intolerance. The book is an extension of his almost four decades-long volunteering at the Sydney Jewish Museum and of his 2019 TED talk.

The miraculous seems a concept at odds with the telling of a narrative so mired in suffering, but the word ‘miracle’ often nudges its way into Holocaust survivors’ accounts, as it does here. Jaku addresses survivor guilt and the fraught existence of a survivor, asserting that those who held on to their belief in an inherently evil world did not wholly survive their experience. His experience as a refugee and migrant reverberates in our contemporary world.

In The Happiest Man on Earth, Jaku continues to ask questions for which there are no answers. He acknowledges suffering but resists being defined by it, adhering instead to his philosophy of choosing a radical form of humanity, a resistance both potent and infectious.

Miles Franklin used to delight in relating an anecdote about a librarian friend who, when asked why a less competent colleague was paid more, replied succinctly: ‘He has the genital organs of the male; they’re not used in library work, but men are paid more for having them.’

I was reminded of this when I found that the subject of Vida, Franklin’s friend Vida Goldstein, had preserved a piece of doggerel in a newspaper from around the same time, which begins: ‘She was pretty / She was fair / Tailor-made and debonair.’ After listing her favourable attributes, it finishes with what was missing: ‘No she hadn’t / Really hadn’t / Poor Vida hadn’t pants.’ These gems come from more than a century ago, but how much has changed for women, at least in the world of politics? Who can forget Julia Gillard’s ‘misogyny speech’ of 2012?

These three Young Adult novels differ wildly in tone, execution – even their grasp on reality.

Loner by Georgina Young

Text Publishing, $24.99 pb, 256 pp

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Georgina Young’s début novel, Loner, won the Text Prize for an unpublished Young Adult manuscript in 2019, and was a deserving winner. Text has decided to market it as adult fiction, but it works well as a crossover novel. Her protagonist, twenty-year-old Lona (does not sound like loner!) Wallace is bookish, socially gauche, a virgin, and a self-declared weirdo. In many ways a typical Bildungsroman, Loner maps the convoluted path of an emerging adult uncertain about her future. Set in contemporary Melbourne, the book examines different ways of self-creation: with Lona moving out of home (and back again), falling in (and out of) love, and failing and succeeding in understanding what she wants to do with her life. She’s a work in progress.

When her friend Tab takes a photo of her, it turns out blurry and unfocused, much like Lona herself. For a host of confused reasons, she has recently dropped out of university and now castigates herself for being ‘unqualified and spineless’.

In the liminal world that is post-school but pre-career, Lona ekes out a precarious living in the gig economy, dwelling for a time in a share house where privacy is minimal. Trying to deduce the rules of adulthood, she wonders why working three part-time jobs is still not enough to secure a flat of her own.

Lona is a relatable and engaging character, socially maladroit but funny and spirited in spite of her desultory ways. It’s not surprising that she’s a fan of Daria, the 1990s animated character whose deadpan delivery and cynical outlook made her the poster girl for outcasts everywhere. Lona is similarly world-weary and sardonic, though it’s hard to figure out if she is being sarcastic or not – ‘sincerity never leaves her mouth fully intact’. Proudly defiant about her radioactive blue hair, a confrontational hue that’s admired by the tweens in the skating rink where she works, she thinks, ‘To all the girls who aren’t brave enough. It’s coming. The not giving a fuck.’

Loner canvasses the various dramas of friendship, romance, and family with insight and wry humour, and the secondary characters are skilfully drawn. That its twenty-five-year-old author is not much older than her wannabe rebel artist makes the book even more verisimilitudinous. Special mention should be made about the matter-of-fact and non-tokenistic handling of Lona’s cross-cultural relationship with George, her Asian boyfriend.

The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love by Davina Bell

Text Publishing, $19.99 pb, 288 pp

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Davina Bell has written picture books and junior and middle-grade fiction, but her first Young Adult novel, The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love, is a shape-shifting effort that’s hard to categorise. It’s a beguiling and confusing blend of magic realism, fairytale, and dystopian trauma. Set some time in an otherworldly future when Antarctica has lost the last of its ice, the Amazon forest has been razed, Paris bombed out of existence, and there’s a killing illness called ‘The Greying’, the book follows the musings of identical twin teenagers, Summer and Winter, who have been left to fend for themselves on a remote island after the disappearance of their father, a quasi-mad scientist/techno whiz. His top-secret work is said to affect ‘the seas, the Earth’s tilt, the shift of its axis, the turning of the world’. Holed up in a church with beds made out of communion cushions and subsisting on fancy canned food instead of having to eat the slurry that most of humanity is surviving on, the girls try to ride out the geopolitical disaster. The narrative is alternated by the sisters; both are unreliable witnesses as to what had happened, what is happening, and will happen.

The trans-seasonal twins while away the hours with their absent mother’s classic and improving literature collection, books like The Diary of Anne Frank and Alice in Wonderland, and there are several moments where whimsy (a talking beached blue whale) interrupts a tale that’s often morose and ponderous. Bell has created a detailed and evocative universe; The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love is darkly framed. There’s a bear-like creature whose presence threatens to weaken the twin’s tightness, and violence and death are never far away. Depending on your tolerance for surreal and amorphous storytelling, Bell’s slipperiness can feel invigorating and inventive, or frustrating and evasive. That the title itself could easily be flipped around to read The End of Love Is Bigger Than The World is a measure of its open-ended nature.

You Were Made for Me by Jenna Guillaume

Pan Macmillan, $17.99 pb, 328 pp

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So, from post-apocalyptic despair to frothy silliness. Popculture journalist Jenna Guillaume’s second novel, You Were Made for Me, is breezy and cheesy.

Sixteen-year-old Katie Camilleri, dreaming of a perfect boyfriend out of sheer boredom, decides to sculpt one herself. The magical recipe involves a hunk of clay and some contributing gloop delivered by an eyedropper from her friend Libby. After a stormy night, Katie awakes to see her creation has become a talking, walking, anatomically correct dreamboat (though missing a belly button – an oversight). He smoulders like ‘a long-lost Hemsworth brother’ with ‘floppy hair that always sits just right. And eyes like the sky on a clear Summer’s day.’ He’s ready-made to lavish attention upon her, but now that he’s lying naked on her bed, what to do with this Ken doll?

Aside from the weird science that’s never explained, Guillaume deploys every trope of the 1990s teenage rom-com: as well as competing love interests for our hopelessly insecure heroine, there’s a pack of bitchy alpha girls to contend with (‘the devil and her demon minions’), a formal school party, a falling out and subsequent rapprochement of besties, and the first and subsequent kisses for the lovelorn.

Narrated in the first person by Katie, with frequent interjections from Libby, the book plays for mortified laughs. Guy, the Pygmalion-cum-Frankenstein creation, has no agency and is happy to be ordered about, with Katie and her friends having to introduce him to the niceties of modern Australian life (including being taught fourteen different connotations of ‘mate’ and how to do a Tim Tam slam.)

In terms of themes, You Were Made For Me touches upon real life and cyberbullying as well as body image, racism, and parental loss.

For the most part, it’s a light and predictable tale about adolescent romances wherein a chastened Katie duly learns about the deceptive allure of perfection.

In perhaps the most tender story in this textured, interconnected collection, an adolescent son spends the summer sunbathing in the backyard and sneaking glances at the paperboy while his working-class, stay-at-home father, who reads detective fiction and likes to ‘figure things out before the endings’, gently attempts to make it known to his son that he can tell him anything.

This develops into one of the missed opportunities that are emblematic of the collection: the son is too caught up in his longing for other boys, and his relief on learning at school that same-sex attraction is a ‘phase’, to notice that he has a sympathetic ear in his father. The summer rolls on, his sexuality unresolved.

The stories collected here often detail the moments between events in a life: the uncertainty before the revelation; the friendship after it nearly became something else; the intrigue that almost led somewhere. ‘I considered knocking again. Just one more time. I think about it sometimes, I wonder what might have been had I tried that third time.’ Residues, memories, suspicions unconfirmed. While each story features a relatively brief moment, together they cover the expanse of an entire life, from early childhood to old age, suggesting that the collection might be read as an examination of the passing of time.

Taken together, the stories become meaningful in other ways. For the elderly protagonist of ‘Playful Arrangements’, for example, the monotony of life is punctured when a decrepit man, his gaze potentially malevolent, notices him, causing him, ‘no coward, but sensible’, to turn and run. A story such as this, on its own, raises more questions than it answers. Do the men know each other? Is the protagonist unhinged, seeing threats where none exist? In the context of the collection, more evocative possibilities are suggested: Is the protagonist hyper-aware because of a lifelong need to detect, and protect himself from, homophobia?

If the writing, periodically, becomes slightly mannered, there are also phrases of considerable beauty, such as ‘you have to crane your mind a little to understand what he is saying’. With so much left unsaid between characters, a sense of mystery permeates the everyday that they inhabit, making this a captivating début.

It is day one hundred and seventeen of the official ‘Shelter in Place’ order in Berkeley, California, when I finish Susanna Clarke’s surreal, heartbreaking novel Piranesi, having rationed the final pages over several days.

There is something about lockdown and its strange effects on the mind that makes every text seem like a code for the situation of quarantine, every story an allegory of constriction, captivity, or exile. But Piranesi speaks to these themes with unique sharpness: it is literally a story about a man trapped in a house of endless rooms, who no longer remembers that another world exists.

The narrator has forgotten his real name and is called Piranesi. The name references the eighteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi and the House described in the novel seems to embody his monumental, uncanny architectural images, especially his collection of etchings titled Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons, 1750). In these haunting engravings, as in the novel’s House, massive stairs and walkways connect gothic archways and innumerable vast halls filled with statuary.

From the moment one reads that this book is dedicated ‘To the worm that first gnawed at the cold flesh of my cadaver’, it is clear that The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, first published in Rio de Janeiro in 1881, is a novel like few others.

The novel is a landmark in Latin American literature, prefiguring the works of canonised writers such as Borges, Lispector, Rulfo, and García Marquez by decades. The fact that it – and, indeed, the entire oeuvre of its author, Machado de Assis (1839–1908) – is largely unknown outside the Lusophone world has bewildered generations of writers and critics, from Harold Bloom to Susan Sontag to Salman Rushdie. In his foreword to this excellent new translation by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, Dave Eggers is the latest to add his name to that list.

Contrary to what one might expect of a tale narrated by a dead man – ‘not exactly an author recently deceased, but a deceased man recently an author’ – the story itself is deceptively simple. Told in 160 short, titled chapters, The Posthumous Memoirs presents itself as the autobiography of an unremarkable member of the Brazilian aristocracy, focusing primarily on the narrator’s love affair with the beautiful Virgília. Echoing Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a work to which this novel is openly indebted, the eponymous Brás recounts his own birth and genealogy, his amorous adventures, and his various half-hearted efforts to make something of himself.

Malcolm Knox told Kill Your Darlings in 2012 that with The Life (2011), his celebrated surfing novel set on the Gold Coast, he wanted to write a historical novel about the Australian coastline and ‘that moment when one person could live right on the coast on our most treasured waterfront places, and then all of a sudden they couldn’t’. In Bluebird, set on a northern beach a ferry ride from ‘Ocean City’, this brutally undemocratic transformation is promoted from a minor theme to the engine that drives the highbrow soap-opera narrative.

Gordon Grimes and his wife, Kelly, separate in the aftermath of their shared fiftieth birthday party, at which Kelly sleeps with Gordon’s best mate, Dog. Kelly takes their fifteen-year-old son Ben and moves from their rented ex-housing commission house to The Lodge, the childhood home she hates and Gordon loves, as the community hub of his own childhood. A crumbling beach shack bordered by mansions, The Lodge is two-thirds owned by Kelly’s hated stepmother, Leonie, who gifts Gordon a third on the occasion of the separation, propelling him into The Lodge with his goddaughter, Lou, in tow – and an obviously doomed, hopelessly under-resourced mission to save The Lodge from the ravages of time, and defend it against ‘the real enemy, the money that landed in Bluebird freshly laundered and itching to renovate’.

The first three chapters of William Boyd’s beguiling new novel, Trio, are devoted to the waking habits of three people: a novelist called Elfrida Wing, stirred from slumber by the brightening morning sun; a film producer called Talbot Kydd, jolted into a new day by an erotic dream taking place on a beach; and an American actress called Anny Viklund, who, it seems, hasn’t had the time to consider sunrays or reverie. Anny, the only one of the trio not to wake up alone, has spent a vigorous night with a younger man called Troy Blaze.

We soon discover that, despite their dawn chorus of assorted groans, creaks, and flatulence, the members of this trio are acutely dissimilar in almost every other respect. Their one connecting filament – more a strip of celluloid, really – is that they are all in Brighton, England, on the shoot of a film called (deep breath) Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon.

Our stories are not working. Whether they be the kind we tell in fiction, or the larger canvas of culture twittering away across the global village, our present reality – the seismic planetary shifts, the pandemical turmoil – evades our collective narrative comprehension. We are clearly at a critical moment in history, the consequences of which will ripple through time in unimaginable ways. In preparation for what is to come, we urgently need to view the frightening present with clarity. Only then, by extrapolating the likely future of our planet, might we begin to imagine a better world. There may not be a more qualified living writer to do this than Kim Stanley Robinson.

In his ground-breaking New Yorker essay ‘The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations’, Robinson, invoking Raymond Williams, reflects:

The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling … we’ve been overdue for such a shift. In our feelings, we’ve been lagging behind the times in which we live … the age of climate change … wrecking our one and only home in ways that soon will be beyond our descendants’ ability to repair. (New Yorker, 1 May 2020)

Robinson’s latest novel, The Ministry for the Future, attempts to articulate the societal transformations, the collective shifts in thought, that will be necessary in order to confront and therefore change the shared future of the earth and all life therein. This is by no means a novel departure for the Californian, who from as early as his Nebula and Hugo Award-winning Mars trilogy (1992–96) has contended with and, as much as a novelist might, fought against our Anthropocene moment, the trajectory of which we continue along today ‘despite the 2020 dip’ in emissions referred to early in the novel. But while much of his earlier work this century – Science in the Capital Trilogy (2004–7), 2312 (2012), Aurora (2015), and New York 2140 (2017) – deals with similar climatic and existential fears, none is as ferocious or clear-sighted as The Ministry for the Future.

Set just a few years from now and spanning multiple decades, The Ministry for the Future recounts the rise of the eponymous ministry, established in Zurich in 2025 to work with the IPCC, the United Nations, and all governments signatory to the Paris Agreement. Headed by Mary Murphy, a no-nonsense Irishwoman appointed to the unenviable task of guiding her team of experts from across a range of disciplines, the ministry’s singular purpose is ‘to advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens … all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves’. Of course, Mary’s team soon discovers the present impossibility of its mission, the mere symbolism of its formation against the intractability of international policy and of the very systems through which our current world order is organised. To be blunt, neoliberalism is the primary problem. Robinson is unwavering here, the sweeping sequence of events by which the ministry attempts to trigger immense societal transformations as clear a critique of present-day capitalism as you will find in fiction.

Kim Stanley Robinson speaking with attendees at the ASU Center for Science and Imagination in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2017. (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)

Although the ministry – along with Frank May, the sole survivor of the novel’s opening climate horror – provides the novel with its recurring core of radical ideas, this only scratches the surface of Robinson’s remarkable achievement, a work sufficiently radical in form to convey both the immensity and the complexity of anthropogenic climate change, a world ‘trembling on the brink’. Told almost entirely through eyewitness accounts, dozens upon dozens of interlinked characters and events, the novel’s scale is exceptionally expansive, cycling kaleidoscopically through entire worlds: Mary’s ministry, Frank’s climate-induced PTSD, ecological destruction, climate catastrophes, eco-terrorism, clandestine government operations, geo-engineering and carbon drawdown projects, riddles told from the points of view of inanimate objects and matter, climate change refugees, the reconfiguration of the world’s banks and rewilding movements, to mention just a few.

Constructing a novel, a towering future history, from more than one hundred short story-like vignettes might be disorienting, even distressing, given the subject; but in so doing Robinson appears to have arrived finally at an ideal hybrid of forms. Short-form fiction tends to occlude the long-term processes of climate change, focusing rather on what Robinson, in discussion with Gerry Canavan in 2014, referred to as ‘moments of dramatic breakdown’ precisely because these ‘are narratisable’. This might explain why post-catastrophic fatalism features so strongly in short climate fiction. But, as Robinson himself elaborated, ‘if we do that we’re no longer imagining the peculiar kinds of ordinary life that will precede and follow’ those moments. The novel form, he concluded, is generally better suited to the grander narrative demands of anthropogenic climate change because ‘the novel proper has the flexibility and capaciousness to depict any human situation … That’s what the modern novel was created to do, and that capacity never leaves it.’ By subsuming shorter, more dramatic forms of storytelling into a larger, meaningful narrative architecture, Robinson leaves little chance for soothing denialisms and the various narrative closures that pervade climate fiction more generally.

It makes for painful reading. As much as The Ministry for the Future could be seen as a work of future realism, laced with traces of disaster dystopia, it is ultimately a utopian novel. What is particularly distressing is that the meticulous, encyclopedic steps by which Robinson’s ministry ushers in a greener and more equitable – though still far from perfect – post-capitalist age feel distinctly possible, and yet just out of reach.

Correction: An earlier version of this review referred to Kim Stanley Robinson's essay as 'The Coronavirus and Our Future' rather than 'The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations'.

During Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the Germans occupied Yasnaya Polyana – the former estate of Leo Tolstoy – for just forty-five days and converted it into a field hospital. The episode features in the war reportage of Ève Curie (daughter of Marie), and sounds like tantalising, if challenging, source material for a novelist. There’s the brutal irony inherent in the home of a world-famous prophet of non-violence being occupied by, of all people, the Nazis. There’s the human loss and horror of the deadliest military operation in the deadliest war in history. And there’s audacity in invoking and responding to Tolstoy’s great epic of another – Napoleon’s – doomed invasion of Russia: War and Peace (1869).

With his second novel, The Tolstoy Estate, Steven Conte has ignored those challenges altogether and tried to write a bestseller. It’s an odd choice, given the literary invocation of the premise, and one that is likely to appal Tolstoy enthusiasts.

In fact, it is better not to approach the work with the great writer in mind at all. Although Conte describes it as the ‘love child’ of War and Peace and Curie’s accounts, the result is a middlebrow romp which includes a love affair between a Nazi doctor and a Bolshevik writer, their reflections on Tolstoy, and a lot of usually crass ribaldry on the side. (Nazi characters walk around saying things like: ‘Good God, man, what’s the point of being the master race if we can’t ogle a lady subhuman?’)

Gail Jones’s new novel, Our Shadows, provides readers with another virtuoso performance, showing a writer fully in control of her medium. It is a poetic and beautifully crafted evocation of shadowy pasts whose traumatic effects (in the world and in individual lives) stretch deep into the present and the future.

Set in Kalgoorlie and Sydney, the novel’s focus on mining provides both historical context for the present-day narration and a complex metaphor of dispossession and despoiling on the one hand, and ‘discovery’ and ‘luck’ on the other.

Just before I left sleep behind
I borrowed a series of chords
so I could swerve my way through
the days I saw yawning in front
of me like graves freshly dug
and I declined to ask permission
and I declined to apologise
and refused to offer recompense
because I was convinced the chords
were mine or, if not mine, common,
as in communal, as in common law,
the commons and so on, a case
of breathing the air we breathe
without asking where it came from,
of drinking the water falling from
a cloud, and I walked through my days
past the open coffinless graves
with that music inside me,
it was for the moment mine,
and while I intended to let go
of it, to share it with those around me,
I was alone when I arrived, afraid
to give up what I had carried
so far, across hours and hours
of pain, regret, and self-hatred
which would have led me dirtward
without this series of chords,
the simplest but most delicate
progression of sounds, tones
I abandoned when I forgot the cause
of my misery, the origin
of my disappointment, the source
of my daily failure to exert
my self in any meaningful way,
and for that music I am thankful
even as I hold onto it too firmly
and for too long, as I overstay
what little welcome I was offered.

In early August, deep in the winter of Melbourne’s stage-four discontent, journalist Rachel Baxendale became the story. The Victorian political reporter for The Australian newspaper was attacked online for questioning Premier Daniel Andrews on his government’s hotel quarantine program, as an explosion of new coronavirus infections caused unprecedented economic shutdown and the curtailment of civil liberties. As thousands of people watched the premier’s live press briefings from their living rooms, Baxendale assiduously probed Andrews about the use of security guards instead of Australian Defence Force personnel to guard returned travellers.

It was an uncontroversial line of questioning; reporters, after all, are not responsible for telegraphing the government line, for emollient Dorothy Dixers, or for solicitous enquiry. But many on social media thought otherwise and for five days straight they flooded Baxendale’s Twitter account with invective. Some accused Baxendale of being a Murdoch shill, hell-bent on dismantling Andrews’s Labor government, while others berated her for failing to ask the premier ‘one single supportive question’. (Some of the more disturbing comments contained explicit death threats, which Victorian government health minister Jenny Mikakos alerted her to). As Baxendale told ABR: ‘While I am not actively attempting to undermine the government’s health message, my job is not to ask supportive questions. In fact, I will often ask questions that are not reflective of my own personal stance, but are part of my job as a journalist to hold all politicians to account.’

Many have come to Australia in strange circumstances, but the two thousand or so who arrived on the Dunera and Queen Mary in 1940 have one of the most unusual stories. With the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Germans and Austrians living in the United Kingdom became enemy aliens. In May 1940, with the British Army on the Continent facing destruction and with invasion a very real threat, Winston Churchill ordered every enemy alien in the country arrested and detained. It was, he later realised, a mistake, as most Germans living in the United Kingdom were Hitler’s enemies rather than his supporters, and many were actually refugees from Nazism. But some had already been sent out of the country on ships bound for Australia and Canada. Not since the last convicts had been dropped at Fremantle in 1868 had the British government banished people judged as undesirable to Australia.

I am a great fan of archives, and so is John Fahey, a former officer of an Australian intelligence service (the Defence Signals Directorate) turned historian. His previous book, Australia’s First Spies (2018), covered the same time period (1901–50) but focused on the good guys (our spies) rather than the bad ones (their spies). His itemised list of Australian, British, and US archival files consulted runs to several pages. Most of these are the archives of intelligence agencies. And here’s the rub: intelligence files contain many names, but not necessarily the names of actual spies. They include people whom intelligence officers have their eyes on and would like to recruit but so far haven’t, and people they suspect the other side may have recruited, without so far having been able to confirm their suspicions. Can we call someone a spy just because his or her name shows up in an intelligence file? I will return to this question. But first let’s look at what Fahey has to offer on espionage and corruption in high places in Australia in the bad old days before ASIO, under Colonel Spry’s direction, brought, in Fahey’s account, order and proper procedures to the Australian intelligence world after 1949.

There are two main tracks to Fahey’s story. The first is the failures and deficiencies of Australia’s small and fragmented pre-war and wartime intelligence agencies. The second is the ever-present threat of Soviet espionage, linking up with home-grown Australian communists and fellow-travellers.

In year four of their respective terms, George W. Bush and Barack Obama enjoyed a mixed press. Some accounts lauded them, others were sceptical. The assessments were uniformly partisan. The titles of contemporary books reflected how Republicans backed Bush (he was ‘The Right Man’), Democrats Obama (for successfully ‘Bending History’). Donald Trump, on the other hand, stands as one of the most vilified presidents in American history, from all points of the spectrum. Indeed, these books together make the case that the forty-fifth president is a man so psychologically flawed he poses a clear and present danger to American democracy.

These three books represent a broad, frontal assault on the Trump presidency. They come from the progressive left (Mary L. Trump), the media-left (Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig), and the right (John Bolton). Worse for Trump supporters is the proximity each author has to their subject. These books deal in firsthand accounts of his character and behaviour, before and during his White House tenure. Given this, their accounts are not easily dismissed as ‘fake news’, as Trump has predictably done. Mary Trump is his niece. Rucker and Leonnig, journalists, have spent hours in the White House Press Room. Bolton was the president’s longest-serving national security advisor (2018–19). These are people who know Trump well in the major settings of his career: family, media, and office.

They do not paint a flattering picture.

Too Much and Never Enough: How my family created the world’s most dangerous man by Mary Trump

Simon & Schuster, $32.99 pb, 236 pp

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Mary Trump, in her book Too Much and Never Enough: How my family created the world’s most dangerous man, depicts a bipolar family. At one pole is Fred Sr, the sociopathic patriarch. At the other, the saintly Fred Jr, his elder son, Donald’s brother and the author’s father – the victim. The book is an accounting of Jr’s demise at the hands of Sr and his ‘toxic’ patriarchy. This bipolarity makes the book intelligible, predictable even, but at the price of psychological nuance. Mary’s first concern is the grinding of a familial axe. The legal travails of father and then daughter linger across the narrative. She feels, probably rightly, gypped out of her share of her family inheritance – though one suspects this book will earn her much more.

The defence of her father is genuine and sustained throughout. Indeed, the book makes clear that both Fred Jr and his brother Donald were differently victimised by Fred Sr. Donald turned his father’s bullying, status-is-everything parenting into an emotionally cold but highly successful pursuit of wealth and then power. His brother (‘Freddy’) was crushed by it, dying of alcoholism at the age of forty-two. (Donald has been resolutely teetotal, in part, in reaction to this.)

Despite Mary Trump’s credentials as a trained clinical psychologist, the psychological profiling is humdrum – can there be an easier discipline to sound vaguely competent in than psychology? Bad dad produces children variously affected by that badness. The stories are voyeuristically fascinating – all family dynamics, because of their essential privacy, are. None of us knows what is really going on next door. So to be told in gory detail what afflicts America’s First Family holds the reader’s attention.

In 1953, when Donald was seven, Freddy, in a bid to stop his young brother’s taunts, tipped a bowl of mashed potato on his head. The humiliation of this, according to Mary, still stings the president. ‘From then on,’ Mary tells us, ‘he would wield the weapon [of humiliation], never be at the sharp end of it.’

The psychological profile and compilation of anecdotes would just about hold the work together. The book is very readable, and compact. What greatly reduces its cogency is the plodding partisanship the author thinks matters to her account. This becomes a study in tedium. A fan of Hillary Clinton, ‘the most qualified presidential candidate in the history of the country’, who, like her, was denied a rightful inheritance by Donald Trump, Mary Trump wants us to know her book is animated by the justice of Hillary’s cause. Their respective accounts of being swindled by Trump have netted them millions, but, according to Mary, have cost the United States much more: lives, dignity, reputation.

A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s testing of America by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig

Bloomsbury, $29.99 pb, 465 pp

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For regular readers of the Washington Post, Rucker and Leonnig’s book A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s testing of America may seem like déjà vu. Because it uses their reporting as a basis for the narrative, even though buttressed by subsequent research, there is much here that will sound familiar. Although they clearly disdain their subject, their account suffers less from a liberal bias than from a mood of permanent crisis. Because the book is largely assembled from their published journalism, each episode builds toward a climax that is never realised. The fierce urgency of now, which makes newspapers so compelling, is less effective in retrospective.

The Mueller investigation (2017–19) is central to the narrative. Despite the effort to re-enact scenes they did not witness, this makes for some tired fare. Trump, though wounded, survived both it and the impeachment it presaged. These extensive campaigns to remove him fizzled. Yet reading this book, we get the impression that Trump’s crimes were so self-evident, so discoverable, that impeachment was bound to succeed.

Democratic attempts to land the fatal blow are forever imminent and inevitable. Just one more transgression and we’ll have him. But it is Trump who endures. Allies and enemies come and go; the text offers a sure guide to the highest White House staff turnover rate in US history. But Trump’s opponents are similarly revolving. Robert Mueller (a Republican), Nancy Pelosi (a Democrat), James Comey (the FBI chief sacked by Trump), and the president’s former lawyer Michael Cohen (an intimate) – none becomes the decisive or even cumulative threat the authors expect them to be.

The impeachment the book builds toward but does not cover (going to press before the hearings started in February 2020) now seems such old news. Set against the myriad dislocations of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter, the attempts by ‘the Washington élite’ (Trump’s favourite opponent) to erase the result of the 2016 election, documented by Rucker and Leonnig, look trivial.

For Rucker and Leonnig, as their book title suggests, Trump is a case study of functioning narcissism. His ‘impulsivity’ is the most indexed trait in their account (nineteen references), next his ‘image focus’ (seventeen), ‘ignorance’ (sixteen), ‘paranoia’ (fifteen), ‘lying’ (ten), and ‘hunger for praise and recognition’ (nine). This listing is not exhaustive. Despite these emphases, there is no real analysis of his psychology, as foreshadowed by the title, just the welding together of  ‘gee Trump is just terrible’ stories, with far too much time devoted to the failed Mueller report. What an exercise in futility that seems in retrospect. But for Democrats it was the key to unlocking Trump’s impeachment. The book does not get that far.

The Room Where It Happened: A White House memoir by John Bolton

Simon & Schuster, $35 pb, 577 pp

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Left-wing bias is not something of which John Bolton has ever been accused. For that reason, his indictment of Trump in The Room Where It Happened: A White House memoir should represent the severest test for the president’s supporters. When ‘Never Trumpism’ was the preserve of the liberal left, the sentiment could be dismissed as just a product of an increasingly polarised political system. But when a lifelong conservative, over nearly 600 detailed pages, expresses his frustration with the president, Trump’s character becomes unavoidably the issue.

Bolton does not describe a president thwarted by the forces of liberal internationalism – the theme of his earlier book on George W. Bush and the United Nations – but by his own conduct. Bolton’s Trump lacks strategic vision and is ‘stunningly uninformed’. The author’s claim that Trump was surprised to know that the United Kingdom was a nuclear power has entered diplomatic folklore.

Throughout the book we are presented with a president who equates his personal warmth with foreign leaders with America’s national interests. If he and Putin/Kim/Erdoğan get on, that is, ergo, good for the United States. Bolton provides a devastating account of the failure of this maxim in regard to all three strongmen. The story of Trump’s short-lived ‘bromance’ (Bolton’s word) with Kim Jong-un is especially compelling. The DPRK leader outfoxes the US president at every turn, claims Bolton, despite the NSA’s best efforts to educate him.

I note that this should but likely will not perturb Trump’s base very much. As an advocate of hawkish militarism and free trade, Bolton represents that part of the Washington establishment Trump has been chiding for decades. The wonder, then, is why he imagined Bolton would serve his purposes as national security advisor and, in comparative terms, for so long (almost eighteen months). Trump subsequently dismissed him as a ‘dumb warmonger’, echoing North Korea’s ‘human scum’ appellation. Bolton wears both monikers with honour here.

While all three books have a descriptive richness born of access and animation born of anger, neither singularly nor collectively do the authors explain the Trump phenomenon. We get much of the ‘what’, ‘when’, and ‘where’ of Trump. None applies themselves enough to the ‘why’. Each treats Trump as an aberration. This only gets us so far. This is a man, after all, love him or hate him, who has transformed American, possibly even global, politics. His ignorance, racism, sexism, duplicity, and narcissism, all asserted and documented here, have not prevented him from becoming the most consequential leader since the end of the Cold War. There is a paradox that these books illustrate but cannot resolve: why is a man so chaotic, so reviled, so malignant also so transformational?

Each author is bemused by his behaviour when the real target of their enquiries should be his support. Mary Trump invites us to think of him as Claudius, Hamlet’s wicked uncle. But one of the most important features of that greatest of plays is Elsinore’s embrace of this usurper. What is so rotten in the United States that Trump is viewed as the cure for it? The niece has not much to tell us about America’s receptivity to Uncle Donald. Her lumbering partisanship is why Democrats no longer have appeal in constituencies for whom her uncle now speaks.

Rucker and Leonnig, similarly, do not account for his transformative power. Rather than offering an account of his appeal, they retell failed steps to remove him. Even Bolton, a man simpatico with any number of conservative leaders, fails to grasp Trump’s populism. I was fascinated in different ways by each book but left all of them still unsure why nearly sixty-three million Americans voted for the clown depicted in them – and very likely will do so again.

That lacuna will be filled in the years and decades after he leaves office. Some nascent explanations include a political establishment discredited by botched wars in the Middle East, a trade policy that enabled China’s rise at the expense of too many American workers, and a financial crash in which welfare for bankers took priority over help for blue-collar mortgagees.

Covid-19 hit too late for proper treatment by the authors. What is remarkable is how far Trump’s myriad disasters in its handling have not yet signed his political death warrant. His re-election is distinctly possible, even if current polling suggests that it is improbable. To understand why that is the case, books about Trump in future will have to wrestle with a rock-solid base that does not read books. None of these three books does that.

‘Healthy People Gather for Your Freedom.’ So read the sign held proudly aloft by a young woman at a protest against coronavirus restrictions on ‘Freedom Day’ in Melbourne. Drawn to the Shrine in a symbolic gesture of solidarity with those other ‘diggers’ who defended Australia against the threat of authoritarianism, she was part of a small crowd with a big message: ‘Freedom is under threat’. A bit like coronavirus itself, perhaps, ‘Freedom Day’ was an accident waiting to happen – not least of all in Victoria. No democratic government can expect to curtail freedoms without stirring up the civil libertarians (both the sane and the crazy), and the restrictions devised and enforced by the Andrews government have been more severe than most. If one is to believe former prime minister Tony Abbott, the premier of Victoria now heads up a ‘health dictatorship’ that holds five million Melburnians under ‘house arrest’. Daniel Andrews, though in truth a champion of social justice, has of late acquired the disagreeable moniker of ‘Dictator Dan’ for putting a plague city into lockdown.

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Sober voices

Dear Editor,

Many thanks for Ben Bland’s judicious and trenchant review of Hidden Hand: Exposing how the Chinese Communist Party is reshaping the world by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg (ABR, September 2020). Sober but informed voices are acutely needed in this debate.

Kyle Wilson (online comment)

Doomsday

Dear Editor,

Thank you, thank you, thank you, James Ley (ABR, August 2020). I was beginning to think that nobody else could see the doom ahead with the changes that are escalating under the current federal government. I am in my late seventies, and my heart cries for this country as I watch it being decimated socially, culturally, and, it must be added, physically with fires and the absence of action on global warming.

The ignorance of those poor souls who consider their insistence on baring their faces during a pandemic greater than the need to have compassion for others is surely an early sign of what things will look like in the long term with the disintegration of critique and creativity in our society.

Lindy Warrell (online comment)

Music as a gateway

Dear Editor,

In Australia, the perception that classical music is the music of privilege has a genuine basis in the cost borne by parents for either private music lessons or private school fees. Instrumental music is the gateway for lifelong engagement with music as participants and audience members. The fact that it hardly features in our state school system, that there is nothing like the government support provided to sport for children, and that there is so little public pride in the achievements of our musical heroes leaves us behind many other developed countries, including both the United Kingdom and the United States.

David Malone (online comment)

Dear Editor,

In the United States we find ourselves with music education budgets being cut regularly and an emphasis on the STEM curriculum (science, technology, engineering, math). Efforts to add arts (STEAM) have not made much progress. We are ‘educating’ a generation whose only goal is to learn ‘useful’ skills and get a decent job. Arts and humanities are too often considered frivolous.

Al MacDonald, Denver, USA

A necessary fillip

Dear Editor,

It was heartening to read in your commentary ‘Thinking in Headlines’ (ABR, September 2020) that during the pandemic you are beginning each day with a different poem by Wallace Stevens – ‘a necessary fillip’, as you put it.

In my trauma practice, I have used lines or whole stanzas from poems to help repair people who have been traumatised. We learn how tender language generally improves information flow and enhances the chance of rational decision-making. I am not familiar with Stevens’s poetry, but some of his lines clearly offer a fork in the road and might lessen the focus on their trauma.

Similarly, your reference to Frank Kermode’s notion of banalisation (‘How many times can we speculate about what Covid clings to without going mad?’) challenges us to disrupt our gloom and to develop a more constructive, if not alternative, way of thinking. This is what poets such as Rosemary Dobson, David Campbell, David Malouf, and Peter Rose do endlessly. As Seamus Heaney wrote in his poem ‘Fosterling’, ‘So long for air to brighten, / Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.’

Roger Rees, Goolwa, SA

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Clive James to the end

Clive JamesABR was surprised when Geoffrey Lehmann – in introducing his contribution to one of our ‘Poetry for Troubled Times’ podcasts – said that he’d chosen Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘At Half Past Three, A Single Bird’ partly because it was the only poem he knew off by heart. And there we were, naïvely imagining that poets had reams of the stuff by heart and that as they pounded the beaches or, in the Victorian context, trudged around their local ovals they chanted Shakespeare sonnets to the indifferent seagulls. Not so, apparently.

Most welcome then is a posthumous collection by Clive James, who proves prolific even in death. James, who died in November 2019 after a final decade of amazing fecundity despite immense health problems, had compiled a volume of some of the most memorable poems in the English language, his aim being ‘to provide ammunition that will satisfy the reader’s urge to get on his or her feet and declaim’. The Fire of Joy (Picador, $34.99 pb) contains ‘roughly 80 poems to get by heart and say aloud’.

Certain poems select themselves: ones like John Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’, George Herbert’s ‘Love III’, a famous oneiric gift by Coleridge, Emily Dickinson herself of course (‘There’s a certain Slant of light’), and ‘An Arundel Tomb’ by Philip Larkin (whom James rates ‘the greatest English poet since Marvell’). We also have Thomas Wyatt’s ‘They Flee From Me’, most beauteous of them all perhaps.

Happily, a quarter of the poems don’t seem automatic, and here Clive James’s wide reading and sentimental leanings introduce some novelties, poems by Brian Howard, Edmund Wilson, and Dorothy Parker among them.

It’s good, in her centenary year, to meet Gwen Harwood, to whose inimitable gifts James was rightly alert: ‘She had the invaluable gift of musicality … [and] was theatrical to her roots’.

James was always a champion of Stephen Edgar, and the Sydney poet closes the anthology. ‘When I look through the splendor of Edgar’s work,’ he notes, ‘I often wish I were [Edgar], but you can’t have everything.’

Quite! He was only and ever Clive James, abidingly so. At the end of his postscript (‘Growing up in poetical Australia’), he writes, ‘I chose the right spot to be born, just as I chose the right profession – poetry – and followed it to the end.’

All about Yves

Yves ReesABR prizes have over the years attracted much interest from local publishers, with a number of prize-winning or shortlisted essays and short stories leading to book contracts.

ABR is delighted that Yves Rees, winner of the 2020 Calibre Essay Prize, will publish a memoir with Allen & Unwin. The book, titled All About Yves: Notes from a transition, will expand on Yves’s gender transition and ‘journey of re-becoming’ as explored in ‘Reading the Mess Backwards’, which appeared in our June–July issue. Jane Palfreyman, a publisher at Allen & Unwin, commented, ‘Yves Rees already has a stunning reputation as a writer, historian, commentator and public intellectual, and my colleagues and I are hugely proud to be bringing their personal story to Australian readers.’

Yves Rees also read the winning essay for a recent episode of the ABR Podcast, available on our website.

All About Yves will be published in early 2022.

Podcast chat

How timely it was for us to revive the ABR Podcast at the beginning of 2020 – this year of contemplative isolation. In recent weeks, aficionados will have noticed a more interlocutory bent in the podcast. Felicity Plunkett and Jack Callil were in conversation about Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet (Felicity reviews Summer, the final volume), and Jack also interviewed James Bradley about his review of David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue (published in the September issue).

Apropos of other content in this issue, stay tuned for Peter Rose’s interviews with Johanna Leggatt about Twitter and ‘cancel culture’, and with Michael L. Ondaatje on the subject of black Americans’ attitudes towards the Republican Party.

‘Radical, inclusive, rebellious’

Allen & Unwin has a new imprint, Joan, to be curated by writer, actor, and director Nakkiah Lui, a Gamillaroi and Torres Strait Islander woman. Joan, named after Lui’s grandmother, bears the motto ‘Radical, inclusive, rebellious’ and will commission books across all genres. ‘I want Joan to help create space for the voices that get pushed to the fringes,’ said Lui, ‘because when our most vulnerable follow their dreams, they create limitless dreams for the rest of us.’

Ultimo Press

There’s another new imprint, this time from Hardie Grant, whose co-founder and CEO Sandy Grant is the subject of this month’s Publisher of the Month. Ultimo Press will be based in Sydney and led by former HarperCollins ANZ CEO James Kellow. ‘Our ambition is serious,’ Kellow said in a statement. ‘We want to become home to Australia’s most original and creative storytellers, but we also want to be distinctive, a little bit different, to disrupt and to have fun.’ Sandy Grant noted that Kellow’s aim at Ultimo Press is to ‘create a modern, exciting, and global trade publishing list’ and said that Hardie Grant sees Ultimo Press as ‘distinct, independent and free to pursue its ambitions backed by our broader business’.

Copyright and commentary

The October issue includes three articles in ABR's new series of commentary pieces supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. In the first, Michael L. Ondaatje (Professor of History at the Australian Catholic University) reflects on Donald Trump’s failed courtship of black American voters, while Paul Muldoon looks at the relationship between freedom and security and the complexities of the Victorian government’s response to the coronavirus. Finally, amid growing disquiet about ‘cancel culture’ and censorious voices on social media, Melbourne journalist Johanna Leggatt explores the threat Twitter poses to the work of writers and journalists.

ABR – and our essayists – are grateful to the Copyright Agency.

Prizes galore

As we went to press, entries were pouring in for the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, now worth a total of $10,000. We seem to be on track for a record field (last year we received about 1,000 entries). The Prize closes on October 1. We look forward to publishing the five shortlisted poems in our January–February issue.

Meanwhile, the Calibre Essay Prize, now in its fifteenth year, will open on October 15, with a closing date of January 15. Once again we are looking for original non-fiction essays ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words.

Full details about the Calibre Essay Prize will be available on our website from October 15.

‘Our age,’ begins the epigraph to Anne Applebaum’s book Twilight of Democracy, ‘is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.’ This disarming quote from French writer Julien Benda dates back to 1927; how little has changed in a century. Just one generation after the triumphant ‘end of history’ – and notwithstanding the impact of Covid-19, fleetingly referenced here – Western democratic societies are prey to institutional decline, increasing distrust, violence, and hatred.

Applebaum’s exploration of these changes revolves around two parties she hosted for friends in Poland – one in 1999, the other in 2019. Over two decades the friends change, as do the mood, the technology, the topics of conversation, the future prospects. So too the presence, or absence, of solidarity. This use of personal anecdote to illustrate and measure broad geopolitical and ideological shifts is mostly effective. Her friends are drawn almost exclusively from a cast(e) of diplomats, politicians, intellectuals, and editors: undoubtedly influential people, yet there is scarcely an opinion floated that does not come from this rarefied air. This is a minor flaw in an otherwise succinct analysis.

I could begin with a lark stitched into a letter. It’s 2020 and ‘all manner of virulent things’ are simmering. Sixteen-year-old Sacha writes to Hero, a detained refugee. She wants to send ‘an open horizon’. Unsure what to say to someone suffering injustice, she writes about swifts: how far they travel, how they feed – and even sleep – on the wing. The way their presence announces the beginning and ending of summer ‘makes swifts a bit like a flying message in a bottle’. Maybe they even make summer happen.

Sacha writes about Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins ‘Split the Lark – and you’ll find the Music’. It says, Sacha thinks, ‘what would happen if you split a lark open? I have a vision that if you were to open a swift, metaphorically of course, the rolled-up message they carry inside them is the unfurled word. SUMMER.’

Or I could begin with Hannah in Nazi Germany, where the simmering virulence is fascism, as Ali Smith loops a thread between ‘unprecedented’ times and what precedes them. Hannah is one of the dazzling-minded, blazing characters who recur in Smith’s ouevre. She is central to this work of emotional courage and encouragement.