More things to make you squirm

I finished Arthur and George on Friday. It continued to be full of ambiguities. There was no happy ending and even any real certainty about motives and results. Just as it should be.

There was one delightful passage where a mediun was standing on the stage of the Albert Hall channelling the thousands of spirits competing to speak to audience members. Someone in the audience of Indian ancestry wondered in puzzlement why the medium was struggling so much, swaying as if against a stiff breeze, because surely the spirits of English people would have known how to queue.

To put it baldly, the book was about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's campaign to seek a pardon and compensation for someone he considered could not have committed an offence for which they'd been convicted early in the twentieth century. At that time, not all judges had legal qualifications and not all chief constables knew about policing. This was probably the last gasp of the age of the amateur, when public schoolboys and university graduates were sent off to govern the colonies with no more qualification than their moral codes and their smatterings of Latin and Greek. Not that there's anything wrong with Latin of course.

This case led to some improvements to the system. Yay. But the book is about the protagonists as complicated individuals whose lives touched each other only briefly. I'll need a legal library to understand what really happened.

I also finally read Chloe Hooper's A Child's Book of True Crime which I've been avoiding because it seemed overly praised when it was published and I thought it would disappoint. But I was recently very impressed by her article on visiting Palm Island for the coronial inquest of a death in custody she wrote in the current The Monthly. I was amazed it made it through the lawyers. It was the sort of journalism that informed and entertained. It told me far more about a part of the world I'm really unlikely to visit than the newspapers and that heavy handed RPA show on SBS where Susie Porter played a nurse on a Torres Strait island.

The book is billed as an erotic thriller and there's a twee comment on the back about how amazing it was that someone so young could know that much about erotica. Oh please. That's all the young think about (she snips enviously). One of the best things about the book is the description of the power of young girl flesh over men and the lack of this power older women feel. At the time, we have no idea how to handle it and by the time we do understand it's already fading. That stuff was good but the rest of the book quoted a bit much from child psychologists. It was really interesting structurally with bits of a very odd children's story interspersed throughout. This wasn't entirely successful but it was interesting and that's better than dull.