Sealand calls itself a micronation. No one else does. It’s easy to see why: the ‘kingdom’ is little more than a glorified helipad. It rises from the North Sea off the coast of Suffolk like a Greek version of the letter π rendered out of concrete and steel – the sole survivor of a series of Maunsell forts built to shoot down Nazi Kriegsmarine aircraft during World War II. Abandoned by Britain in the 1950s, the fort was hijacked by pirate radio broadcaster Paddy Roy Bates in the 1960s and renamed the Principality of Sealand. Bates crowned himself ‘prince regent’ and – besides firing warning shots at the Royal Navy and fighting off a coup attempt by German mercenaries – entered into a series of sketchy schemes to stay afloat. One enterprise, launched in 2000 with the help of cypherpunk Ryan Lackey, was for the Bates family to turn Sealand into the world’s first data haven: an unbreakable digital lockbox beyond the clutches of law enforcement agencies and copyright lawyers.

I receive my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine in May, in the small town of Meaux, mostly notable for producing a luxurious variety of brie. I travel forty minutes from Paris by regional train, watching the city become the banlieue and the banlieue become the countryside, speeding towards something that for five months had felt like an impossibility. Friends in Europe had flown to New York and Kentucky to get their shots while France fumbled its way through the first months of its vaccination campaign. It would probably be quicker for me to fly back to Australia, go through hotel quarantine and get vaccinated there, I thought at the start of the year. I was very wrong.

The collective dislocation that followed the advent of Covid-19 generated (and continues to generate) a slew of books intended to make sense of the turmoil. Encompassing Slavoj Žižek’s anti-capitalist treatise Pandemic! (2020) and books for children such as Eoin McLaughlin and Polly Dunbar’s While We Can’t Hug (2020), the responses have ranged from considered attempts to apprehend the pandemic’s scientific, political, and social parameters to those designed to do little more than catch the Covid wave before it passes. Regrettably, Peter Doherty’s An Insider’s Plague Year tends more towards the latter.

Doherty – one of the most prominent Australian commentators on Covid’s pathology and spread – is well qualified to write an account of our first year living with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Having transferred from veterinary science into medical research, Doherty has for almost six decades dedicated himself to the ‘infectious disease and death game’. He has earned a host of prestigious awards, including the 1996 Nobel Prize for his discovery, with immunologist Rolf M. Zinkernagel, of the mechanism by which the immune system is able to recognise virus-infected cells.

When the first reports of a SARS-like disease affecting patients in Wuhan, China, began to surface in January 2020, Doherty was semi-retired from Melbourne’s Peter Doherty Institute (PDI). When, on January 25, the first Australian case of Covid was detected (in a traveller recently returned from Wuhan), researchers at the PDI were able to isolate and distribute to scientists worldwide a live version of the virus, a necessary precursor to the hunt for an effective vaccine.

Given its expertise in immunology and virology, the PDI was inundated with Covid-related media enquiries. Doherty volunteered to become part of the institute’s communications team, and began writing a weekly series of articles (called Setting it Straight) ostensibly aimed at a lay audience and discussing ‘all things infection and immunity’. The bulk of An Insider’s Plague Year comprises the first forty-two of these articles. Covering an array of topics – the autoimmune system, the pathogenesis of Covid, winning the Nobel Prize – the early articles are largely penetrable and proffer some interesting asides. The word ‘vaccine’ derives from the Latin word for ‘cow’, while ‘immunity’ comes from the Latin for ‘without tax’; we each produce one to one and a half litres of mucus a day; anti-vaxxers were a problem even in the nineteenth century; and in the aftermath of World War II the British government ran research experiments at the Common Cold Unit where the ‘quality and quantity of snot’ from twenty thousand volunteers bivouacked in old army huts was analysed.

In the later articles, Doherty’s focus pivots to the mechanics of our immune system. Notwithstanding Doherty’s desire to inform readers about the strategies – both innate and vaccine-assisted – by which we are able to confront viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, the writing becomes increasingly technical and abstruse. Even with a key to the acronyms and abbreviations that litter the articles, most non-specialist readers will struggle to decipher sentences such as: ‘the biochemists who were trying to “mark” virus-specific CD8+ CTLs using an isolated (in fluid phase and unattached to cell surface) pMHCI molecular complex tagged with a fluorescent dye found that this did not attach tightly enough to its “cognate” CR for the T cells to stay labelled’.

There is also a lack of basic contextual information. For example, we are not given the dates when the Setting it Straight articles first appeared, and we can thus only partially glean the underlying timeline of the virus’s spread. Covid’s worsening socio-political impact, the emergence of variant strains, and progress towards a vaccine are equally difficult to map.

Doherty lacks the gift for metaphor that science writers such as Steve Jones and Siddhartha Mukherjee deploy with such skill, and where he does offer analogies, they are generally strained. The Wars of the Roses and Macbeth are offered as a prelude to a discussion of the role of white blood cells in defeating viral infections, while a strange ‘sci-fi dream sequence’, complete with aliens docking with ‘regally attired store mannequins’, is used to explain antibody responses.

Indicative of several questionable editorial decisions, An Insider’s Plague Year opens with an expansive administrative history of the PDI, more suited to an annual report than a book aimed at the scientifically curious. There are also basic errors: for example, the date on which Wuhan doctor Li Wenliang alerted colleagues to a SARS-like disease is given as December 2021, rather than December 2019.

A concluding chapter covering those with whom Doherty liaised during 2020 – from the team developing the next generation of Covid vaccines to the minute-taker at the weekly strategy meetings – gestures towards the collaborative and cumulative nature of scientific discovery. However, without any overarching narrative – such as that in Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green’s Vaxxers (2021) – it’s a rollcall that inclines towards the desultory.

The book is padded with introductory essays Doherty contributed to various publications in 2020: reflections on the issues humanity may face over the next eighty years; an introduction to a collection of political cartoons; a foreword for a volume of science essays. While they demonstrate the personable if occasionally self-absorbed style of Doherty’s less overtly scientific writing, they add little to the Covid story.

Curiously, what is missing from many of the articles is an enlightening sense of Covid. As such, An Insider’s Plague Year often reads like Hamlet without Hamlet. Nothing of note has been gained by gathering these disparate pieces together. If not a cynical publishing exercise, it is nevertheless a lazy one.

In her 1976 essay ‘The Space Crone’, Ursula K. Le Guin imagines the highly advanced aliens of Altair landing on Earth. Politely, they seek a human being to accompany them on their long journey home so that they may ‘learn from an exemplary person the nature of the race’. As a palliative care doctor, I often ponder what constitutes an exemplary life, so my choice of Space Crone may not be a conventional one.

Space was Le Guin’s place of business and pleasure. An acclaimed fiction writer, essayist and critic, and housewife with three children, she transformed the science fiction and fantasy genres. Her stories traversed gender, anthropology, and morality as well as space. I am sure she would have had edifying things to say about the recent phallic probings by the plutocrats.

Le Guin excelled in scientific speculation and intellectual experiment, but she never countenanced their separation from creaturely love, pain, or fear. Her choice of earthly paragon was based on an intimacy with adaptation, for ‘only a person who has experienced, accepted and acted the entire human condition – the essential quality of which is Change – can fairly represent humanity’.

So whom does she suggest we send on the spaceship? Not a ‘fine, bright, brave young man, highly educated and in peak physical condition’. Not even a young woman who may volunteer ‘out of a profound conviction that Altair couldn’t possibly be any worse for a woman than Earth is’. She flirts with the idea of a Russian cosmonaut, since American astronauts are generally too old. But that’s still not quite right.

In the end, what she wants is a working-class grandmother from behind the ‘costume jewelry counter or betel-nut booth’, someone who has worked at tasks like cooking, cleaning, raising children. ‘She was a virgin once … then a sexually potent fertile female, and then went through menopause. She has given birth several times and faced death several times – the same times.’

Change has been forced on the Crone throughout life by both biology and society. She changed once from virgin to mature woman, or perhaps wife, or whore; then again at menopause into a state of uncertain fiscal or reproductive value. Le Guin describes menopause as a practice run at death, both menopause and death being the experience of uncontrollable Change.

Le Guin felt that those who had lived in daily contact with the human condition were most qualified to describe it. She compared Virginia Woolf, a woman who participated in an intellectually, politically, and sexually active society, with the cloistered James Joyce, who ‘took responsibility for nothing but his own writing and career’. She deplored Joseph Conrad’s demand to be fed, bathed, and sequestered while he ‘wrestled with the Lord for my creation’, contrasting him with Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the kitchen table. She reproduces with palpable disdain Conrad’s description of his creativity as ‘a lonely struggle in great isolation from the world’. Most of the literary canon has come to us from these insulated rooms, with female labour tending a sterile environment in which powerful men speak to each other from an ever-diminishing experience of life.

The aliens don’t need our scientific or technical wisdom, for theirs is demonstrably superior to ours. They want to understand the human experience, which is one of Change and Death. I am biased – obstetricians may prefer a midwife – but I will nominate the post-menopausal hospice nurse as our representative of the human condition. These Grand Mothers have been both witness and subject to Change, and therefore embody the nature of our race. Jeanette Winterson observed recently that ‘the male push is to actually just discard the planet: all the boys are going off into space. But … love is also about cleaning up your mess, staying where you are, working through the issues.’ The pioneer dream of a Mars colony is mostly a craving to find a new way and new place where one has the power to stay the same.

To care for the dying is to be invited daily into outer space. Dying is the hardest voyage and death the last frontier; to be in its presence is to be up against the bone of human life. Not ‘up against’ to conquer or crush, but rather ‘be adjacent to’, as you lie with your back against your lover’s and feel their long warmth down the length of your body. In dying the ego is unmade, what you knew is proved false. The landscape is truly foreign, littered with your own failing bodily functions, uncontrolled saliva and stomas, the secretions of dissolving lungs. The journey is marked by visions and charged words and above all, inexorable Change. In hospice, this carnage of the body is loved, cleaned, respected, and witnessed. The nurses do not fight the dying process: they share it. They assist the traveller to wake up for the family and to sleep when the terror or exhaustion overwhelms them. They smooth the agitation of the dying brain.

A young woman in the hospice entered her last hours. In what we call a state of ‘terminal agitation’, she fought to sit up. Nurse Dipti lifted the limp, sighing body against her shoulder, and they sat together in the dark, waiting for her annihilation. ‘She needed to put her feet on the floor,’ said Dipti later, as she prepared for the funeral directors. ‘She knew she was disappearing, she needed to feel the ground.’

As I leave for the long night during which Dipti will bear witness to two more collapsing empires, I consider the Altaireans’ arrival and mentally slip her name into the ballot. She is the exemplary person to represent Earth in Space, for she has actually lived on Earth and has already been to Space.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Listen to this article as read by the author.

The real estate agent told me not to bother cleaning the house. All the serious buyers would be developers, he said: they’d only knock it down. They’d cut down the row of feijoas and the Japanese maple and build all the way to the fence on three sides. And they’d go up, of course, to take advantage of the views. A corner block on the highest hill in the inner east? Tell your dad he’s laughing.

He was trying to be kind, this real estate agent. He said developers would see past the fuzz-covered cereal bowls that were cemented onto the benchtops, and the sodden carpet and the caved-in ceiling. The stench wouldn’t put them off, either. I should give myself a break, he said. Don’t kill yourself cleaning. Just get rid of the rubbish and make sure it’s safe for potential buyers to walk around.

In a recent interview, India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, was asked whether his country was heading in what his interlocutor, the Lowy Institute’s Michael Fullilove, called ‘an illiberal direction’. Bristling, Jaishankar denied the charge. India is undergoing something quite different, he argued. It is experiencing a ‘very deep democratization’. This process might be hard for outsiders to understand, but it was positive, not problematic. After decades of rule by an English-speaking, Western-educated élite, the country was at last being governed by politicians who spoke and thought and behaved like ordinary Indians.

There is something, or rather someone, in the air in Jennifer Mills’s dark fourth novel. The Airways represents another leap towards the uncanny for Mills, whose previous book, the Miles Franklin-shortlisted Dyschronia (2018), was already a departure from the more traditionally realist modes of her earlier novels, The Diamond Anchor (2009) and Gone (2011), and short story collection, The Rest Is Weight (2012).

Colm Tóibín’s eleventh novel, The Magician, is a dramatisation of the life of Thomas Mann. It begins in 1891 with the death of Mann’s father, a successful businessman from the north German city of Lübeck, whose last agonised words to his fifteen-year-old son are, ‘You know nothing.’ It ends in 1950, five years before Mann’s death at the age of eighty, when he returns to Europe after a long period of exile in the United States, by which time he is one of the century’s greatest novelists and a respected public intellectual. Cop that, dad.

In between, Tóibín gives us an unvarnished and more or less comprehensive portrait of his subject as a man and writer. Much of his interest in Mann springs from a natural curiosity about the inner life and creative processes of a major artist. The Magician explores these themes with great subtlety, depicting Mann as a quietly observant, self-scrutinising, uncertain, and instinctively cautious character. As with Tóibín’s fictionalised portrayal of Henry James in The Master (2004), Mann’s closeted homosexuality provides the novel with its psychological undercurrent. Many complexities of his personality are traced to the exquisite tension between his private desires and his outward existence as an eminently respectable bourgeois father of six.

Tóibín is no less interested in Mann as an influential historical figure. Like every other European who lived through the first half of the twentieth century, Mann was caught up in catastrophic events, yet he is an intriguing case study, Tóibín recognises, because he lived a privileged life that insulated him from the worst ravages of his era. The family’s fortunes declined for a time following the death of Mann’s father, but Thomas was not destined to be poor. His literary career was an immediate and spectacular success. His first novel, Buddenbrooks, published when he was twenty-six, was hailed as a masterpiece and became a runaway bestseller. A few years later, he married Katia Pringsheim, the youngest daughter of a wealthy industrialist family. He never had to worry about money.

As The Magician unfolds, it gradually becomes a reflection on the ambiguous position and ethical responsibilities of the artist in times of great ideological conflict and social upheaval. One of the key transformations in the novel is Mann’s belated political awakening as Germany succumbs to the tyranny of Nazism. As an eminent public figure, he is torn between feeling obligated to comment on current events and reluctance to taint his idealistic conception of the artist as someone who stands apart from the messy compromises of politics in the service of a higher truth. The underlying irony is that his personal reticence, patrician insularity, and lack of political acumen combine to make his instincts unreliable. He is swept up in the nationalistic sentiments inspired by World War I, adopting a reactionary stance that dismays his older brother and literary rival Heinrich, who sees the dark side of such fervency with greater clarity. Thomas subsequently realises his mistake and moderates his views, but still underestimates the rising threat of National Socialism. ‘He had misunderstood Germany,’ he reflects as he flees with his family in 1934, ‘the very place that was meant to be inscribed on his soul.’

The second half of The Magician is set in the United States, where Mann saw out the war in a state of ‘material comfort and spiritual unease’, as Tóibín wrote some years ago in a review of Evelyn Juers’s House of Exile (2008), one of many sources for the novel. It becomes a kind of structural irony that the clarifying condition of exile finally allows the ‘nonpolitical’ Mann to reconcile himself to his role as a public figure and accept that, under the circumstances, ‘his task was to spread a higher kind of propaganda’. Towards the end of The Magician, Mann is dining with the Roosevelts and his name is being mentioned as a potential head of state for postwar Germany.

Mann’s four most famous books – Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus – address (broadly speaking) the themes of the social, the psychological, the philosophical, and the artistic. Tóibín’s considerable achievement in The Magician is to represent these themes as facets of Mann’s character. The novel is at once an ersatz biography and a creative response to Mann’s work, in which the fictionalised author can at times resemble Gustav von Aschenbach and, at other times, Hans Castorp.

It is also a richly populated book. Mann is orbited by a host of sharply drawn characters who serve as his intellectual foils and act as counterweights to his rather staid presence. The novel’s dynamic is established in the interaction between his reserved nature and various family members, most of whom are more forthcoming, charismatic, passionate, and troubled than him: the smart, practical, and understanding Katia; his brother Heinrich, the committed leftist; his two eldest children, Erika and Klaus, who embrace the bohemianism and sexual openness of Weimar Germany; and, memorably, his son-in-law W.H. Auden, who marries Erika to assist her escape from the Nazis, and who makes a droll cameo appearance in which he unsettles Mann with his ironic demeanour and ability to deliver a flawless off-the-cuff parody of Virginia Woolf’s prose.

Towards the end of The Magician, Tóibín has Mann grumble that ‘it is a grubby business writing novels. Composers can think about God and the ineffable. We have to imagine the buttons on a coat.’ The trick, as Tóibín well knows, is to show how such mundane things coexist with the most important questions of life, art, and politics. On that score, The Magician acquits itself very well.

Halfway through Lucy Neave’s new novel Believe in Me, there is an astonishing scene in which an orphaned foal is dressed in the skin of a newly dead foal, the skewbald coat threaded with baling twine and the strings knotted under the throat and chest. Disguised in this fleshy coat, strands of bloody muscle still clinging to it, the foal is presented hopefully to its foster mother. The novel’s main protagonist, Bet, is sceptical: ‘It’s condescending: as if a mare could be fooled by putting her dead foal’s skin on another foal.’ Sure enough, the grieving mare rejects the starving foal, stamping her hooves and moving around uneasily in the stable. Later that night, when Bet goes to check on the animals, she finds them nestled together: ‘Dark shapes, they moved together, away from me, as though they’d been startled from a dream.’ Stunned at this unexpected communion, Bet retreats into her own solitude: ‘I turned off the light, bolted the door and walked back through dew-soaked grass to bed, seeing again the mare and foal, nose to tail. They had no need of me.’

It is what the characters in Believe in Me are yearning for: this shedding of skins and the triumphant rebirth of an authentic self; this dazzling surprise of unexpected, unconditional love. But this kind of loving bond only seems to be available to the animals in the novel; the human characters are left striving for connections that continually elude them, for a kind of self-actualisation that seems forever out of their reach. They are all shadowed by ghosts and disfigured by scars – unable to feel themselves whole, unable to love wholly.

The narrative follows Bet as she attempts to piece together her mother Sarah’s story as a way of understanding and accepting her complexities and of making sense of Sarah’s frequent distances and failings as a mother. ‘If I can inhabit her consciousness, even a little, it might help me see who I am,’ Bet tells us. ‘Imagine that I’m creating a reversible figure; within a silhouette of a candlestick, for example, there lies hidden the profiles of two lovers. Sarah is the candlestick.’

The first part of the novel follows the young Sarah on a journey accompanying an evangelical preacher from her home in upstate New York to small-town Idaho, through to her pregnancy and disgraced exile to a home for unmarried mothers in Australia and her dramatic efforts to keep her baby and forge a life for herself in a strange country.

In a literary landscape where so much contemporary fiction is merely competent and corrigible – what Nabokov called ‘weak blond prose’ – Neave’s authoritative and idiosyncratic style is a refreshing surprise. The language is powerful and richly allusive, full of visions of the horseman of the apocalypse, dreams of drowning children and lightless water, lake air and darkening skies. The characters read Leviticus, snow falls, the grass freezes, signs and omens are everywhere. In this first section, Believe in Me has the radical strangeness of a Marilynne Robinson novel; the narrative carries the reader along with the dramatic thrill of a wild biblical tale.

The raw, visceral experiences of the first half of the novel give way to a more restrained accumulative realism as the twin narratives of Bet and Sarah’s lives in Australia are unspooled, and the novel follows the women through various loves, losses, upheavals, and reckonings as they try to find some semblance of contentment, across several decades and moving from place to place. After the pleasures of the first section of the novel, one cannot help feeling that the engine of this second part idles too slowly. Despite this, Believe in Me is a skilfully rendered and richly layered narrative about the complex bonds that unite mothers and daughters and the fractures that cleave them asunder.

There is an occasional difficulty with perspective. The novel is ostensibly Bet’s attempt to make sense of her mother’s life with the aid of the scrapbooks that Sarah has left behind, and naturally the account is partial, with Bet telling us on the first page of the novel; ‘I traverse a tightrope high above the ground and have to fill in the empty air beneath so that I can move from one known place and time to another.’ Any reconstruction of a life is by necessity part invention, but the problem in Believe in Me is that sometimes the narrative swerves intimately close to Sarah’s perspective, while at other times Bet is unable to access her mother’s thoughts and feelings. She makes observations like: ‘Sitting up high, Sarah feels the space grow around her, as if she has room to expand’, while a few pages later Bet says: ‘I can’t tell what thoughts are ricocheting around Sarah’s head.’ This leaves the reader with a faint uneasiness regarding the source of Bet’s story; the novel is either an imaginative inhabiting of a mysterious life, or it is a partial retelling bound by its gaps and absences. It’s somewhat confusing for the reader when Bet appears to inhabit both poles. Perhaps in the end, Neave is trying to teach us something about the essential unknowability of another person – that all we can ever intuit is circumscribed, and the wordless communion we crave is only possible for the animals.

In an ABC interview to promote his previous novel, Fever of Animals (2015), Miles Allinson shares a brief anecdote. When Allinson was aged sixteen or seventeen, a teacher told him that everyone turns conservative eventually. Allinson recalls his repulsion at the notion of this inevitable slide towards orthodoxy. His new novel, In Moonland, feels like a rebuttal. Joe, the narrator of the first part of the book, is caught somewhere between consent and revolt: though ambitious, he feels trapped by the flickering lights of his own computer, by the suburbs, and by his run-of-the-mill job. Orbiting him is a coterie of questions relating to his new status as a father, coupled with one more profoundly unanswerable question: why did his father, Vincent, kill himself? Only some of these questions are answered across a narrative that uses four different perspectives and three different timelines, from the present back to the 1970s and into the near future.

Acclaimed as the most original novel of the 2019 rentrée littéraire, and recipient of the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie Française, Laurent Binet’s most recent book, Civilisations (2019), is a cleverly crafted uchronia, or speculative fiction. The author is inviting us on an epic journey that devises alternative key moments in history, from a Viking tale to an Italian travel diary, and from the Inca chronicles to the capricious destiny of Cervantes. Let the adventure of counterfactuals begin …

The Beautiful Fall by Hugh Breakey

Text, $32.99 pb, 349 pp

By the end of Hugh Breakey’s The Beautiful Fall, it is hard to remember that the prologue hinted at stimulating possibilities. In it, Robbie’s past self writes to his present one, explaining that he suffers from recurring amnesia, which strikes every 179 days. Readers could be mistaken for thinking they are in for meditations on time and memory, maybe even on the meaning of a life lived episodically. When it is revealed that Robbie is building an intricate arrangement of 83,790 dominoes in his living room, readers might even imagine a novel that touches on metaphysical themes in the vein of Jorge Luis Borges.

With its finely honed critical readings and ‘transversal connections’, The Oxford Handbook of Dante is a timely and masterful collection of forty-four chapters presenting contemporary critical insights from a broad choice of intellectual fields that range from Italian and European perspectives to Anglo-American approaches. Highlighting Dante’s expansive outreach over the centuries, the editors, Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden, have assembled an impressive array of scholarly voices whose contributions offer a robust critical collection not exclusively intended for specialist readers.

Walter Scott, born on 15 August 1771, turns 250 in 2021. This event has been celebrated in Scotland with events such as a ScottFest at ‘Abbotsford’, his home, and a major international conference. But Scott, almost certainly the most popular and widely known author in the world in the nineteenth century, fell disastrously in public and critical esteem, to the point that E.M. Forster, in his influential Aspects of the Novel (1927), could sum him up with the wearily dismissive question ‘Who shall tell us a story?’ and the equally dismissive answer ‘Sir Walter Scott of course’. For Forster, Scott had ‘a trivial mind and a heavy style’.

Nobel Laureate, author of The Magic Mountain (1924) and Doctor Faustus (1947), Thomas Mann (1875–1955) needs little introduction. His books have long been available in English. Yet one work, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), a series of confessional essays on which he laboured throughout World War I, is rarely praised. Mann (not known for his modesty) pointed to its importance as a historical document: ‘By listening to my own inner voice,’ he says in the prologue, ‘I was able to hear the voice of the times.’

World War II drew the still-marginal profession of psychiatry into the war effort, with psychiatrists screening recruits for mental disorders and predisposing histories. Trauma, or the fear of trauma, hovered. But after treaties were signed and soldiers returned to their loved ones, and the memory of war faded for those not condemned to be visited by it daily, what role was psychiatry to play? In Mad by the Millions, historian of science and psychiatrist Harry Yi-Jui Wu writes about the peace time ambitions of postwar psychiatry, which were marshalled in the unlikely, bureaucratic setting of the International Social Psychiatry Project (ISPP) run by the Mental Health Unit of the World Health Organization.

When I was a graduate student in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, Russian friends used to talk a lot about World War II. Their stories were of hardship and suffering stoically borne by the population and finally vindicated by victory in 1945. This was not dissimilar from what was published in the Soviet press on the subject, but without the press’s obligatory references to the wise leadership of the party. Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer tell basically the same story as my Soviet friends. Invoking the image of a ‘levée en masse spirit’ in the wartime Soviet Union, they admit that ‘strict discipline and repression certainly played a role’ in the state’s ‘unprecedented feats of mass mobilization’, but they put their interpretative emphasis elsewhere: ‘without the support of the vast majority of people and workers in particular, the great achievements on the home front would not have been possible’.

Listen to this review as read by the author.

In the era of perpetual Covid lockdowns, many of us can relate to the isolation of the mid-twentieth-century housewife. Like her, we’re stuck at home, orbiting our kitchens, watching the light move across the floorboards. Each day mirrors the last, a quiet existence spent mostly in the company of the immediate household. Yet whereas we can flee our domestic confines via Netflix or TikTok, last century’s housewife had fewer avenues to the wider world. There was reading, of course – books or magazines or newspapers – but this was usually reserved for the end of the day. For most waking hours, her hands and eyes were needed for cooking, cleaning, mending, childcare, and a thousand other tasks.

The feminist philosopher Nancy Bauer once asked her female students why they spend ‘their weekend evenings giving unreciprocated blow jobs to drunken frat boys’. They tell her that ‘they enjoy the sense of power it gives them. You doll yourself up and get some guy helplessly aroused, at which point you could just walk away. But you don’t.’  The question Bauer wants to ask, but can’t, is: ‘Why the fuck are you all doing this?’ She can’t ask it because she does not want to patronise her students, she does not want to moralise, and she does not want to presume how they ought to be having sex. Yet, in the face of her students’ silence, their own failure to make sense of their desires, she wonders if what they do – be it narcissism or self-effacement, a substitution of sadism for masochism, or just a grown-up version of ‘Mommy will kiss it better’ – is what they really want? Or have they been made to want it? Have they been made to believe that this is what women want to do: kiss men’s booboos better?

Jennifer Mills is the author of the novels The Airways (Picador, 2021), Dyschronia (Picador, 2018), Gone (UQP, 2011), and The Diamond Anchor (UQP, 2009) and a collection of short stories, The Rest Is Weight (UQP, 2012).

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

Home to Kaurna Yerta (Adelaide). I should be there already, but when the federal government halved the international arrivals cap my flights were cancelled at the last minute. I’m now one of many thousands of Australians stranded overseas – in Italy, in my case.

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s most recent books include On Stalin’s Team: The years of living dangerously in Soviet politics (2015) and White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War history of migration to Australia (2020). The Shortest History of the Soviet Union will be published early in 2022. She is a professor at Australian Catholic University.

When did you first write for ABR?

In September 2013, six months after returning to Australia after forty-eight years away, mainly in the United States, I wrote a piece for ABR on being a returning expatriate. Actually, this wasn’t my first piece for the journal (that was a review of a biography of Ryszard Kapuściński seven months earlier), but it was a piece that had particular importance for me. Rereading it recently, I was struck both by the conversational tone, as if I already thought ABR readers were my friends, and by the underlying seriousness of the effort to explain myself. I didn’t write like that for American publications.

What makes a fine critic?

Probably style and personality, in addition to knowledge. The London Review of Books, the other journal I regularly write for, gives you more or less unlimited space but wants not only a critique of the book under review but also an interesting, perhaps personally inflected, essay on the topic. ‘Can’t you take it somewhere?’ they asked me once when I said the book they had offered me was too slight. But that approach only works if you have 3,000 words to play with.

Kim Rubenstein’s biography of Joan Montgomery, the venerable former principal of Melbourne’s Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC), has been thirty years in the making and is the definition of a labour of love. It involves Rubenstein, a distinguished and worldly legal scholar and human rights campaigner, revisiting scenes from her own life. She was a pupil at Montgomery’s PLC. As a first-year law student, she addressed the remarkable public meeting in April 1984 that opposed Montgomery’s defenestration by Presbyterian reactionaries, who were avenging the formation of the Uniting Church seven years earlier by asserting control over the school. Rubenstein’s subsequent career has been that of a distinguished old girl following the tenets of a liberal education.

Writing this review of John F. Kennedy’s formative years soon after the end of the Trump regime has evoked some surprising parallels between these two one-term American presidents (and perennial womanisers). They were both second sons born into wealthy families dominated by powerful patriarchs. Against the odds, they emerged as their fathers’ favourites and were groomed for success. Thanks not just to their wealth but to their televisual celebrity and telegenic families, they managed to eke out close election victories at a time when just enough disenchanted voters were looking for a change of direction in the White House. Despite their administrations’ profound disparities in competence and their differences in political outlook, they shared a deep distrust of senior bureaucrats and military officials, as well as an inability to work effectively with Congress. Bullets and ballots, respectively, ended Kennedy’s and Donald Trump’s presidencies, but not the cults of personality they had inspired. In the space of just over half a century, they have tilted the trajectory of American democracy and diplomacy from the tragic to the tragicomic.

In 2016, feminist and queer theorist Sara Ahmed resigned from her post as professor at the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, University of London, in protest against the failure to address sexual harassment at her institution. Given that she was at the peak of her career and working in a centre she had helped to create, hers was a bold and surprising move, but also entirely consistent with her feminist politics. In one way or another, Ahmed has been writing about this decision, its causes and effects, ever since: first on her blog feministkilljoys; as an example of a ‘feminist snap’ in Living a Feminist Life (2017); in relation to diversity work in universities in What’s the Use: On the uses of use (2019); and now most directly in Complaint!, her tenth book.

After surviving two perilous boat journeys when he thought he would die, Jaivet Ealom is taken into the control of Australian authorities and given the designation EML019 on an identification card that manages to misspell his name. He will be referred as EML019 for the next three years, having arrived in Australian waters just five days after 19 July 2013, when a policy change meant that asylum seekers coming by boat would be transferred to the Manus Island or Nauru ‘regional processing centres’ to face indefinite detention and with no hope of resettlement in Australia.

At what point does a ramble or meander through the bush become a bona fide bushwalk? Was my two-hour stroll near Wolli Creek during semi-lockdown – when I locked eyes with the now-maligned fruit bat – a bushwalk or just a ramble? Answers to these questions vary wildly according to the conflicting approaches to bushwalking detailed in Melissa Harper’s updated version of The Ways of the Bushwalker (2007).

Harper suggests that the casual strolls early settlers took for the purpose of pleasure developed into the distinct category of ‘bushwalking’ in the late 1800s. Colonial expansion had opened up previously ‘impenetrable’ landscapes, and European ideas around the physical and spiritual benefits of being in nature had begun to filter into the minds of a growing middle and upper-middle class.

Wanting to belong forms the root system of Belinda Probert’s Imaginative Possession, marking the terrain – how can she, as an immigrant, ever feel at home in Australia? – and producing shoots of longing for the landscapes of her English childhood. Even now, forty-five years after arriving in Perth to take up a teaching position at Murdoch University, after which she lived briefly in Adelaide before raising a family in Melbourne, that question lingers. Specifically, given that she feels at ease with the people and culture, why does she still feel needled by the natural environment?

Sydney-based poet and editor Toby Fitch has spent much of the last decade traversing the field of radical French modernist poets, especially Arthur Rimbaud and Guillaume Apollinaire. That engagement ignited Fitch’s imagination. He began inverting, recombining, mistranslating, and mimicking their techniques in his own poetry. In his new collection, Sydney Spleen, he has made a sophisticated, fresh move that enhances his signature playfulness and tongue-in-cheek poetic antics.

Under the influence of Charles Baudelaire, Fitch has swerved into a mood that is disgruntled, politically disenchanted, derisive and, consequently, outraged. Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: Petits poèmes en prose (Fitch’s favourite book) and Les Fleurs du Mal are two sources of animation that fuel the poems in Sydney Spleen, as do Apollinaire’s Calligrams.

The Chinese poet is so often a wanderer and an exile. The tradition goes back to Qu Yuan (c.340–278 BCE), author of ‘Encountering Sorrow’, the honest official who was banished from court and drowned himself in a river, and it continues to our time. During the Sino–Japanese war (1937–45) a group of patriotic early Chinese modernists were displaced from their Beijing universities to an improvised campus in the south-west, where they read avant-garde Western poetry. The Hong Kong poet Leung Ping-kwan (1949–2013) later studied them, himself a Cantonese-speaking and cosmopolitan migrant from the mainland who, like so many others, crossed the border with his parents when Liberation and the People’s Republic were proclaimed. A later modernist generation – including Bei Dao, Duo Duo, and Yang Lian – left China when they could in the years between Democracy Wall (1979) and Tiananmen (1989). Song Lin is a slightly younger member of that group. Jailed for his protest activities in Shanghai in 1989, he left for France in 1991, living in Europe, Argentina, and Singapore before returning to China and a form of internal exile in Dali in remote Yunnan. The Gleaner Song offers a distillation of his poetry along the way.

On her explosive, feminist début album Dry (1992), a young P.J. Harvey sang ‘Look at these my childbearing hips’, proudly proclaiming women’s strength and physicality. The word ‘childbearing’ conjures strong feelings and images for many of us – whether of childbirth, sleep deprivation, devotion, or a whole new way of life. It signifies much more than childbirth itself and is a fitting choice for the subtitle of this anthology, Poetry on childbearing. This emotionally powerful collection covers an expansive range of experiences: infertility, conception, pregnancy, birth, and life with a baby (or not).

In the epigraph to this collection, a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre on Edmund Husserl suggests that we are entering a poetic that challenges the possibility of conscious knowledge; consciousness is itself a maelstrom that extrudes the intruder and has ‘no inside’. What follows is both a refutation and embracement of this assertion in chatoyant language that is as thoughtful and melodic as it is powerful. The reader is obliged to work hard to navigate the narrative, and I have rarely read poetry where the search for meaning has been felt so deeply.

This time around
they say, we won’t
be at loggerheads,

we’ve understood
you can’t measure up,
we’ll do maths & spelling

and that’s enough,
afternoons, we’ll make
cake, play in the yard,

there’s only so much
you can ask of your child;
yourself.

This time around
we’ll know what we lost
on the swings we gained

on the wild roundabout
of this pestilence
where no one gets out

till the whole thing’s done:
the hurdy-gurdy’s
wonky & the child’s cry

goes either way.
Terror and joy.
No walk in the park.

The more the big
doors close, the more
images of outside

pile up, like some
malware you can’t stop
blossoming across

your mental screen:
a backdrop of beaches
meadow or mountaintop,

anything with vistas
those places we
shouldn’t have been

burning up earth
to visit anyway
as if the earth were ours

and it is, but not only.

Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the rain blew you
into the backseat, steaming and boisterous, my quiet son
and you his not-friend-Dad-we-only-share-some-classes,
or late evenings, sunset dampening down the final lap
around the oval, falling into the backseat, grass-stained and
sweaty, for a grunt or two about school and other tyrannies
and then we’d have the radio on for the trip to your house,
or my one-sided conversation about the world’s events, things
I had heard. My son would roll his eyes and open a book and
you would thank me politely at the door of your dark house.
Today I heard about the caverns under the Nullarbor, plinking
cisterns and subway stations, gobleted with water, kilometres
of tunnels small as a wriggle or large as a castle. All the light
the dark keeps to itself is caught in those limestone funnels.
Cavers fly through water lucid as a dream, cold as truth, their
torchlight repeats, redoubles, pure and clear, through copepod
and brachiopod, through the blind flutter of slippery fish. None
have ever met a man. Glowing lace of slime. Fragile spiders.
All waiting for you, kilometres of undiscovered worlds
beneath the desert. All waiting for you. The fingers of a hand
and in a lifetime only a thumb might get explored. Each caver
going further than the last. You could be whatever you needed
to be. You could swim forever in these bowls buried deep
beneath the sounding holes and roaring seeps, beneath the
huddled saltbush, the wheeling, tell-tale birds, you could swim
forever and never need a breath. One tank could last forever.
Whatever troubled you, would be years away from the man
you would become, whatever you never spoke to me about
on that fifteen-minute trip to your house, would be forgotten pain.
Down each pointing finger in the rock, held out for you,
if you could wait that long. But I won’t drop you off anymore.
Your father met me where the parents wait, his eyes as old
as caves and spoke of your depression, but all I can think about
is waste, of fingers down beneath the heavy dust closing into
stony fists. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’ll talk to you and
look back but you’ll be gone and those whistling bats and
all that lightless light must wait for someone else to find them.
I look back through my rear-view mirror at a queue of parents
in their idling cars, at a recursive hall of mirrors, at my son and
at the missing boy next to him and all those fathers look back
in their rear-view mirrors, at the shape of what the future might
become, and what the future can no longer become.

Archaeologists can tell us about the tools, diets, shelters, art, and burials of humans and other hominins who lived during the Pleistocene, the geological period lasting from two million to twelve thousand years ago. But what we most want to know is hidden from view. How did they communicate? What was it like to be them? How did they become us?

Tae-Yeoun Keum’s Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought is a study well suited to the moment. The convergence of pandemic conspiracy theories with populist narratives of globalist malfeasance shows that the desire for stories that give meaning to our collective experience is alive and kicking (if not exactly well). We are told we’re moving into a post-truth age. Yet cries of ‘fake news!’ suggest that truth remains an ideal, even as it is obscured by the mythmaking of others. But whom to trust in such a situation? Can we count on our philosophers to get rid of the dross and to locate the truths that form the bedrock of our communities?

Thirty-two years since his death, Colin Clark (1905–89) remains an obscure name in Australia and the discipline of economics. This relative anonymity may strike those who know of his academic achievements as odd, even unjust, as Clark was an outspoken and occasionally brilliant intellectual. A protégé (and later apostate) of John Maynard Keynes, a British Labour party candidate for South Norfolk, a Queensland state statistician, and a scholar at Cambridge, Monash, Oxford, and Queensland, the British-born Clark was a pioneer of national accounting and made numerous contributions to various fields of economics. These were tempered, however, by his ideological conservatism, peripatetic employment, and uneven record of economic forecasting.

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli has a gift for writing short, conversational, popular physics books. His earlier works, notably Seven Brief Lessons in Physics (2015) and The Order of Time (2018), have been bestsellers, and Helgoland is continuing the trend.

Helgoland is a barren island in the North Sea, where the twenty-three-year-old Werner Heisenberg found inspiration in his quest for the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics (QM). With contributions from his peers, including his rival Erwin Schrödinger, these foundations have held firm. In the century since then, QM has ‘never been wrong’. It has also transformed our lives. Insights into the atomic realm have given us a host of technologies – not least our internet-connected computers and smartphones.

‘There is no such thing as an inherently robot-proof job,’ says Kevin Roose – a stunning admission in his new book, Futureproof: 9 rules for humans in the age of automation. We are all at risk of automation – indeed, more at risk than we think. Silicon Valley’s optimism about automation is either ‘false’ or ‘radically incomplete’. Roose says he should know: he once fell for it too.

At sixty-six years of age and best known for his books on the sociology of food, the American author and journalist Michael Pollan has become an unlikely figurehead for the so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’. In How to Change Your Mind (2018), Pollan surveyed the recent revival of psychedelic drugs as adjuncts to psychotherapy, and the emerging evidence that supports their use in the treatment of depression, PTSD, and other mental health disorders. Globally prohibited since the early 1970s and still mostly illegal, these compounds – including the ‘classic’ psychedelics LSD and psilocybin (the main psychoactive alkaloid in magic mushrooms), as well as MDMA (also known as ecstasy) and ketamine – are once again the subject of clinical trials, including in Australia where the federal government has became one of the first in the world to fund research in the field.

Towards the end of Thoreau’s Religion, Alda Balthrop-Lewis, an academic at Australian Catholic University, evokes an experience each of us has likely had in some form. The sight of a rainbow or the sound of a bird amazes you so much that you simply have to share it. Delight inspires you to share with others, so that it may alter them as well as your relationship bringing you, collectively, into a more intimate and responsible accord with the freshly encountered world. In a book about Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), the explicit aim of such a passage is to convey that, contrary to the inherited belief that Thoreau was a dour ascetic, he actually embraced delight, and that, in this spirit of delight, his writing might be understood as a type of exhortation to ‘Look!’.

The Jolley Prize

Ruminating on the inimitable critic Frank Kermode in 2020, Peter Rose wrote: ‘What we read at difficult times in our lives – plague, insurrection, divorce, major root canal work, etc. – is always telling.’ One year on, our collective difficulties persist (worsen even); many of us find ourselves under lockdown once more, isolated from the world and one another. Yet what we read still matters, offering, as it always has, relief and solace during times of hardship. Fiction, perhaps more than any other genre, is a sort of bracing consolation.

Each month ABR celebrates and interrogates fiction. The magazine also advances and rewards short fiction through the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, one of the world’s leading prizes for an original short story. This year the Jolley attracted a record field of 1,428 entries from thirty-six different countries. In a virtual event held on August 10, we introduced the three shortlisted authors, whose stories all appear in the August issue: Camilla Chaudhary, Lauren Sarazen, and John Richards.

Following the readings, Camilla Chaudhary was announced as the winner for her story ‘The Enemy, Asyndeton’, for which she received $6,000. This year’s judges (Gregory Day, Melinda Harvey, and Elizabeth Tan) described Chaudhary’s story as ‘a delightful, nimble story; the characters bristle with life, and the dialogue is crisply rendered’. Lauren Sarazen was placed second ($4,000) for her story ‘There Are No Stars Here, Either’; and John Richards was placed third ($2,500) for ‘A Fall from Grace’.

Our winner reads ‘The Enemy, Asyndeton’ on the ABR Podcast. The other Jolley stories will follow in coming weeks.

We look forward to offering the Jolley Prize for a twelfth time in early 2022.

As always, we thank our Patron Ian Dickson for his continuing and most generous support.

Podcasts 

Apropos of podcasts, none has proved more popular than ‘Façades of Lebanon’, winner of the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize. Theodore Ell reads his essay quite shatteringly on the ABR Podcast.

In this month’s issue, we feature the runner-up in this year’s Calibre Prize: ‘May Day’, by Melbourne comedy writer Anita Punton. In their report, the judges described ‘May Day’ as

a rich and moving evocation of a relationship between father and daughter. Written with humour and flair, it offers a complex portrait of the father: a brilliant, narcissistic man, whose life was full of contradictions. The author, his daughter, struggles to reconcile the two halves of his life: the outgoing Olympic gymnast and the paranoid recluse, the doting young father and the hostile man she remembers from later years. She never thought of mental illness as the cause, and the suggestion unsettles her. Some remarkable photos taken by her father and hidden for decades only deepen the ambiguity.

As we augment ABR’s rich digital archive going back to 1978, it’s good to feature some major essays and articles on the Podcast. Many readers will have vivid memories of Elisabeth Holdsworth’s ‘An die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’, winner of the first Calibre Prize back in 2007. Elisabeth’s reading of her celebrated essay is now featured on our Podcast. More Calibre classics will follow.

Fellowships 

The ABR Patrons’ Fellowship, worth a total of $10,000, is open for a few more days. The Fellowship – funded by the magazine’s generous Patrons – offers writers a chance to publish a series of extended articles in the magazine under the editorial guidance of the ABR editors. The Fellow will make a broad contribution to the magazine over the course of twelve months. ABR welcomes proposals from emerging and established Australian creative writers, freelance reviewers, journalists, commentators, and scholars. The Fellow’s articles will appear in the print magazine and online.

Pondering on the Murray 

It’s great to hear that Donata Carrazza – a champion of the arts in the region and an occasional contributor to ABR – is the new owner of Collins Booksellers Mildura, owned until recently by John Bond. Donata has been involved for many years in a number of hospitality businesses in north-west Victoria, the most celebrated being the Mildura Grand Hotel and Stefano’s restaurant. In 1995, with Stefano de Pieri, she founded the Mildura Wentworth Arts Festival, which soon spawned the Mildura Writers’ Festival – a favourite of many authors, our Editor included.

Asked about her hopes for the business, Donata Carrazza told Advances that she wants to create a space conducive to ‘pondering and browsing. Wall space is rather sacred in bookshops, but I’ll do what I can to feature some of my favourite visual artists.’

Mildurans, you know where to head!

Want to write a letter to ABR? Send one to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Gough Whitlam

Dear Editor, 

I greatly enjoyed Ken Ward’s informative review of Peter Job’s new book, A Narrative of Denial, including the account of Australia’s role in Indonesian attitudes toward what was then Portuguese Timor (ABR, July 2021). However, I don’t think that Gough Whitlam, meeting with President Suharto in 1974, can be faulted for ‘overlooking the fact that [East Timor] was almost twice as large as Brunei, ASEAN’s smallest member-state’, since Brunei would not be an independent state or a member of ASEAN until 1984. 

Ken Ward responds

I appreciate Dr Stenberg’s comment. I stand corrected; he is quite right.

Faint praise?

Dear Editor,

As I read Anthony Lynch’s response to the latest short story collection by Tony Birch, I wonder whether the reviewer and book are well matched. 

While dotted with praise and some excellent insights, the review appears to hanker after something else. Before coming to grips with the work in hand, Lynch wonders why there are not more stories of ‘the routines, joys, and grinding boredom of contemporary middle and outer suburbia’. Dark as Last Night is not that book for the reviewer.

The stabby description ‘untouched by post-modernism’ is followed by a note that the stories ‘make few demands on the reader’. The reviewer then spends precious words telling us that it would be better for a character to be described as ‘shaking’ rather than ‘shaking with fear’. A late sentence flirts with the word ‘twee’ as a descriptor.

But there is good news! I’d like to reassure the reviewer that even those of us who actively enjoy the brow-furrowing opacity of postmodern fiction, and who rise repeatedly and joyfully to the deliberate challenges set by such works, also have the capacity to rejoice in other styles of fiction. For example, we like well-written, well-plotted stories that engage us accessibly (not suspecting that ready immersion into a tale is a possible fault) with vivid and emotionally intelligent scenarios and resolutions. 

Such stories are found in Dark as Last Night. Other collections may suit this reviewer’s taste better.

Theodore Ell

Dear Editor,

Having lived and worked in Lebanon from 1973 to 1976, I was enormously moved by the images of the country evoked by Theodore Ell (July 2021). Although his picture is of a contemporary Lebanon that is much changed, our time there during the tumultuous 1970s leaves us with memories of a beautiful country, war ravaged but hospitable and politically unfathomable – and now in ruins. Such an excellent essay.

Fine flowers 

Dear Editor,

The best literary anthologies reflect a vision, or perhaps the rethinking of a vision. The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories, reviewed by Alice Whitmore in the August 2021 issue, brings together many ‘fine flowers’, but the presentation does not clear a path – it seems haphazard. Not all good translators are finely tuned literary critics or anthologists. When they are, they should be commended; when they are not, they should have the intelligence to recognise their limitations.