Book Reviews

Olive is a retired school teacher. She is hard-edged and difficult. She misses things. She rubs people the wrong way. Her only adult child has made a beeline across the country to avoid her and even when his marriage fails, he refuses to return. It kills her, this lack of loyalty. Her husband, Henry, has fantasised about an affair with his pharmacy assistant, but decided against it. ‘To leave Olive was as unthinkable as sawing off his leg.’ Bob says to Jane on the night of a local performance. ‘I don’t know how he can stand her.’ Later Jane says, ‘He loves her. That’s howRead More →

 It’s a kind of rage which builds and builds, until you say something or do something because you must.  It arises from humiliation and injustice that can’t find a place to go where further humiliation and injustice cannot follow.  It is the rage of James Baldwin’s,  Another Country, and it was presented to me in a way I am unlikely to forget. To enter Greenwich Village in the late 1950’s, its music and literary scene, its racial tension is to feel the pulse of change to the fingertips.   James Baldwin took me in and marooned me there with little to cling to other than his characters.  But this wasRead More →

A life is a contrary thing, resistant to a theme, don’t you think?  At times it shrinks to its single  bearer and all seems lost and then at times it billows wide to take in a crowd of rowdy, joyous others, who all meet for drinks at the club.  It’s like that, isn’t it?  We are one and then we are another.  A life is a large thing to take in, so large it has its own eras – the school years, the time spent with Jacob (mostly in bed), that job in advertising, the Sydney years, that marriage, the vagabond years, the other marriageRead More →

It’s awful to think it, but it’s true, truer than most things. The world as we know it will change profoundly, even in our own lifetimes. Those with great power will only hold it briefly. Decision-makers and their decisions may not stand the test of time. The wheel will turn and future humans will look back and wonder what we were thinking. If we live long enough, we will wonder too. Dylan knew it: Come mothers and fathers throughout the landAnd don’t criticise what you can’t understandYour sons and your daughters are beyond your commandYour old road is rapidly agein’Please get out of the newRead More →

Some people are built for a swoon-ier age. They astound me with their persistence. For them, life has no hard edges and even if it does they are willing to throw themselves on these, take a corner of the table to the hip, a shopping trolley to the ankle, a sword to the guts, all in the name of love. I am torn. I want to address the heaving obvious: that love is hard enough as it is without elevating it further. I also want to believe them. I would like to throw myself into a world where my motivations are honed to a singleRead More →

It may be the earliest of crimes. A parent says you are this kind of person and other people agree.  The story is off already before we are old enough to rein it in and when we are, it is too late. The tale of us is set in stone. Our siblings cop it too. All offspring are differentiated. One is shy; one is outgoing. One pragmatic; one a romantic. And so it goes down through the generations. Each child born, each one named and typed and sent out into the world. It’s a reading of Margaret Atwood’s, The Blind Assassin, which has me thinking theseRead More →

We can’t deny our histories come in narrative form. We don’t always mean harm. The story is how we remember and pass on the events of our lives to those we don’t live long enough to meet. But it is also true the last word on history has gone to the those in power and this version has the story rise high above what really happened to a romantic peak before it falls and lands in the minds of the majority and becomes what people remember as the truth. While there may be a political agenda behind this historical fudging, there is this also: WeRead More →