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CREDIT: Brian Harris (Alamy) Freakily, reading Tim Winton’s Dirt Music is like reading about myself. Looking back, it’s not difficult to find a time when I was a little lost, a little trapped, a little aimless and a lot unsure. This is what Winton does so well. He’s the master of the awkward, the displaced and the stuck, so while Dirt Music is an Australian story, it’s a universal one too.  If you like your characters neat and clean and sure of themselves, he’s not your guy. The characters in this novel are imperfect beings held in place by their pasts and weighed down by guiltRead More →

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Even with the benefit of the past, we are wading knee deep through our present. We embrace the new normal, but as we do, it’s already ageing, nearly passe. Where does our gaze rest and why? What are we admiring? Is the future a distraction from our past or the present a distraction from our future? These are the questions which bubbled to the surface during and after reading Michelle de Krester’s, wonderful mind-stretching and form-warping novel, Scary Monsters. With Halloween approaching, I thought now was the time to bring it up. What we scare ourselves with might serve to distract us from what isRead More →

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What takes us back to another time? I’m not talking about a memory, something viewed from afar. I’m talking about us slotting back into the skin of our younger selves, looking through those younger eyes and taking it all in with our younger minds. It’s so rare, I think, this kind of transportation, but when it does happen its powerful. It lingers for days. This is how I felt after reading Tim Winton’s, The Turning. My own childhood, my adolescence came back to me. I know it is partly because he is Australian and a coastal dweller and that he is just a tad olderRead More →

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How is it that the child’s eyes have the wonder still attached? Reading Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The Cat’s Table reminds me of this. I’m jealous of his story. I want to be that eleven year old aboard a great ocean liner with no adult supervision. I do. The freedom of it, the waking early to swim in the first class pool, napping in the afternoon down in the turbine room so as to stay up late and catch glimpses of a transported prisoner as he exercises on deck. It smells of childhood. To be considered the least important of passengers and placed at ‘the cat’sRead More →