Sorry, there was a point to that last post

Anyway, the "noisy/quiet" distinction was sort of relevant last week when I was reading Misfortune by Wesley Stace (confusingly, the nom de plume but REAL name of a comparatively well-known musician John Wesley Harding* which is in fact his stage name (nom de scene??))

This is an excellent book. I bought it because I fell in love with the cover but I don't understand how I missed hearing about it in because it got very positive reviews in the US at least.

It is a "noisy" book with lots of quirky characters who talk funny like in a Dickens novel and with the aristocracy behaving atrociously in a way reminiscent of Thackeray. As commonly happens in books by both of these guys, the plot relies on a large number of coincidences to resolve itself.

As a pastiche, it's really good but it does far more than that. Stace plays games with the expectations of the form to shift back and forth from omniscient to first person narration (and talks about this too). One of the characters is a balladeer and there's a lot about song writing. One chapter has someone in a fever speaking only in traditional songs. Another character is obsessed by a very peculiar poet.

It's the story of a foundling raised by an eccentric lord who decides, despite all physical evidence, that he has adopted a daughter. Because he's the richest man in England and quite peculiar, the servants, his wife and eventually the child collude to keep the illusion alive because the truth would too much for him to bear. This causes much confusion and consternation eventually.

Themes of hermaphroditism, cross dressing, and sexual awakening are handled really imaginatively. Stace talks a lot about Ovid's Metamorphoses which retell the Greek myths of changes (girls turning into trees, boys into flowers, gods into swans). There are also implicit parallels to Virninia Woolf's Orlando such as living the life of Reilly in an old English country house, a change of gender identity and a journey to Turkey where odd things happen.

It's also really funny in places.

Stace has also written something about Laurence Sterne I've resolved to track down. And another book is coming soon, hurrah!

*By which I mean that, while I hadn't actually heard of him or his music, when I got to the last page of the book and read out loud that John Wesley Harding had released 14 albums, my Beloved said "oh yeah, he's a really good folksinger" and that's saying something because B hates most folk music.

And another thing

The other day elsewhere contrasted her idea of the "noisy" plot-driven novel with heaps of characters like Shantaram* it to the "quiet" novel which depends on beautiful writing and thoughtful character development where nothing much may actually happen. She was trying to establish whether there was a trend in Australian lit towards preferring "noisy" to "quiet" and I don't know the answer but I realised that after a decade of tending towards the "quiet" books (Marion Halligan, Drusilla Modjeska, even the quite marvellous Shirley Hazzard) I've been reading an awful lot of these "noisy" books lately. I mean, in between the dodgy sci-fi and thrillers, there was The Ballad of Desmond Kale and Vernon God Little, both pretty "noisy" books.

So, even if there isn't such a trend in publishing, I suspect I've moved on from navel-gazing emotional delicacy to wanting THINGS TO HAPPEN to LOTS AND LOTS OF PEOPLE meanwhile complaining loudly about the clunkiness of plot devices and ridiculousness of some of the cardboard cutout characters.

*which I haven't read but a guy on the train was carrying it round for weeks so it will probably take a really long time

More books

Still reading away the summer. Last week it was The Raphael Affair by Iain Pears which is the first in a series of seven books about art forgery and theft in Italy. This one was quite sweet if slight. Jonathon Argyll, a fish out of water English student in Rome, tries to prove that someone stole a painting by Raphael in the eighteenth century for the sake of his academic reputation only to be foiled by dastardly forgers who are trying to profit from his discoveries in the twentieth century.

We're introduced to the dedicated and specialist (fictionalised) Art Theft Squad of the Italian police who trace stolen national treasures. Flavia da Stephano, one of its researchers, is quite strong on keeping Italian art in Italy despite four hundred years of legal and illegal exports. These poor public servants struggle against public apathy, incredibly lax museum security and the fabulous wealth of the international art market.

The book has lots of detail about living in Rome: the suicidal traffic, the food (a day without ice-cream is a day wasted!), the coffee, the good sense of living within walking distance of work and the joy of the times of the year when the tourists aren't about. It also visits Siena where the characters get incredibly lost driving round looking for a hotel and end up reversing up a one way street. This reminded me of one of the most difficult hours of my life where I valiantly tried to advise an extremely stubborn male driver how to navigate through Siena in rapidly falling dusk while reading a tiny Lonely Planet map. We did something like half a dozen illegal u-turns - twice in front of the Cathedral - and ended up abandoning the car to ask directions as I'd suggested doing in the first place.

So, a good fun potboiler but not anywhere near the same level as The Instance of the Fingerpost.

"Mary should pay more attention to detail"

Last week, I was wondering why it always seemed to be snowing, raining or sleeting in Barry Maitland's Brock and Kolla books. Mystery's solved: I read another one on the week-end called The Malcontenta and actually bothered to read the author bio which said he'd been a lecturer at the University of Newcastle since 1984. Further "research" shows that now he lives in the Hunter Valley. Of course England would seem cold, dark and miserable to an emigrant sitting amongst the ripening grapes on a typical 40 degree day in January there.

The Malcontenta wasn't my favourite of his books. The plot was a bit experimental and felt awkward. An unexplained death in a large Palladian-style English mansion now used as a health farm leads to Brock going undercover to find more clues. This reminded me of one of the early Sean Connery James Bond movies where he's been sent to the fat farm but dastardly evil geniuses track our hero down! It's very unlike the normally solid procedural approach Brock takes. There's also a trip to Italy which just seemed to be an excuse to see La Malcontenta, the original model of the English house and to talk about some nice weather. It was written in the early 1990s and seems a bit odd and dated now because the police characters don't have mobile phones and hacking into computers is described in very plodding and unconvincing terms.

That aside, Brock and Kolla are exciting, complex characters and it's good to fill in another gap in their stories because later books refer to earlier events without explaining them.

Just as well I'm not in the Liberal Party then

From the SMH website just now:

The decision to dump Senator Vanstone leaves only two female cabinet ministers - Julie Bishop and Helen Coonan.

But Mr Howard denied he was overlooking women.

"I don't think talented women in the Liberal Party do these sums every time there's an adjustment made and I think that is a rather patronising, old-fashioned view to take," he said.

No, it's clearly just the time-serving talentless whingers who mention these things.

Deep sigh.

Charmed, I'm sure

Last week I succumbed to the first of the Isabel Dalhousie novels by the too charming for his own good Alexander McCall Smith.

I've resisted for a long time because I found his Precious Ramotswe series (beginning with The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency) addictive, expensive and sadly, ultimately unsatisfying. Precious is convincing heroine (a "traditionally built lady") in an exotic African city trying to make her way in a man's world as a detective. The sleuthing is incidental to stories about tales of life in Botswana told with what seems to be real affection. But I found the tales themselves got slighter and slighter with each adventure and I was spending what seemed like a lot of money on books I was reading in a couple of hours. (I know, I know, that's what libraries are for. But these were such PRETTY books that I wanted to own them. One (Tears of a Giraffe?) even had a picture of my favourite animal on the cover.) So I stopped reading them, probably at about the same time as two other McCall Smith series turned up in Australia. (The man is a publishing phenomenon and deservedly so. Apparently he doesn't get writer's block. He just sits down and writes and then stops when he thinks it's done and his editor puts a cover on and releases another best seller to the world.)

Anyway, The Sunday Philosophy Club is also very charming. It's a love letter to Edinburgh (where I've never been). Its heroine, Isabel Dalhousie is an independently wealthy editor of a philosopy journal. This means there are plenty of opportunities for her to bring profound philosophical thoughts to events as well as heaps of time for her to take us on a tour of the city. (Unlike real academics who are too overworked and real people of inherited wealth who would be more likely to hang around with the jetset.)

Once again, the sleuthing isn't that important and I was a bit disappointed in the resolution of the mystery. But now I really really want to go to Edinburgh, in summer anyway.

More summer reading

I'm not technically on holidays but most of the people I need to talk to are. This means that, after a tedious day of not getting much done, I go home to find that there's nothing to watch on television* and have heaps of mental energy left for books. But all I feel like reading at the moment are the sort of things people read at the beach. Good holiday reading. Comfort books. Nothing wrong with that I guess.

The other day, I read Barry Maitland's latest Brock and Kolla called Spider Trap.

I've talked about this series before, here about Babel and here about No Trace. Brock and Kolla are old friends by now and it's good to see them still fighting the good fight. Brock gets the chance to revisit cases from much earlier in his career in this book.

Spider Trap is set in a part of south London with a large West Indian community. Maitland does a fantastic job of bringing this neighbourhood and its inhabitants to life. We go to street markets and a dance hall and hear about the Brixton riots from the 1980s. One of the characters is an MP so we also get a tour of the Houses of Parliament and a ringside seat at an unfeasibly exciting committee hearing!

The weather is usually bad in this series. I don't know if Maitland summers in the Mediterranean so only sees English winters. Maybe crime only happens in bad weather? The only other unusual thing about this book is that the publishers use the image of a spider as a section break. This was realistic enough to make you catch your breath if you saw it out of the corner of your eye. At one point, my Beloved reached over my shoulder to brush one off the page. Not for the arachnophobes.


* I know there's tennis on but I have real trouble watching it. Unlike cricket and soccer, I used to play tennis and when I look at the shiny blonde hair and brown limbs of the grunting women slamming the ball at each other, I inwardly hear my father saying when I was 15 "you know, you could play like them if you'd only take it more seriously." Of course, if I had listened rather than doing my homework, getting an after school job and seeing boys, I'd probably have retired with ruined joints and skin cancer by now

So many books, so little time

Lately I've been reading far faster than I can bring myself to blog. It's not really that I'm reading more books; I just can't always think of something constructive to say about them. For instance, last week I finished An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears. It's amazingly good and an international bestseller and I liked it heaps more than I liked his more recent Dream of Scipio. But I can't think of much to add to the dozens of reviews already out there. Read it if you want an exciting historical murder mystery that keeps you turning pages to the very end.

Sigh, Of course I can't stop there though. The books is about a death in Oxford in 1663. There are four separate accounts from four people with very different philosophies and motives: an Italian doctor attempting to use the scientific method, a deeply superstitious young nobleman, a cryptographer and an historian. Each of these is completely convincing at the time but each separate account highlights contradictions in earlier ones. Pears has just put so much knowledge in there from such a wide range of fields, from architecture, religion, philosophy and political history, that I'm in awe that someone's head can hold that much stuff and he can still write a good book. I'm looking at you, Neal Stephenson with your overblown Baroque trilogy. Grr.

I'd even go as far as to say that this is the best book I've read so far this year.

Dratted Internet

For a week or so, I've been meaning to talk about another "Christmas Book", Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things, a collection of his "short fictions and wonders". I haven't done this yet because I haven't been able to find a picture of the Australian edition online (just when I've come to rely on the internet for all my needs) and have my usual hamfisted excuse about not being able to get my camera to talk to my computer because I'm anachronistic so there.

It's an issue because the Australian edition is far far prettier than the design hodgepodge of the UK hardcover pictured. The cover of my book is almost totally white with a green leaf skeleton on it on the top half. Each section reproduces the leaf in black and white. This made reading the book really delightful visually.

The colliection is a bit of a miscellany and probably one for the fans. My favourite story revisited the hero from American Gods , Gaiman's major novel of a few years ago. This was masterly but some of the stories are misses or jokey pastiches. I found myself not minding this uneveness so much because Gaiman is refreshingly honest about his process and provides an explanation for why he wrote each piece (to paraphrase:"someone asked me to put a story in a collection", "we thought we'd try something together" and, my favourite,"my daughter asked for a unique present for her 18th birthday but, knowing me very well, said that it didn't need to be finished on the day and I'm only 18 months late"). There's plenty to enjoy in this book and I especially enjoyed the fact that it was a gift. Thank you!

Dear Diary Maker, or letter from someone without Outlook

I still use a paper diary to organise my life. I'm so oldfashioned I find it far easier to write things down in a book than on a calendar attached to an email program. This is partly because our work computers use a fairly odd program that doesn't communicate with people using Outlook very well so I find myself agreeing to meetings at the wrong times (Consequently, I have conniptions when people try to check my availability by looking at my blank online calendar.)

The good side of this is that my diary isn't hooked up to my phone so that when a phone beeps at three in the morning to remind us that someone has to remember to be somewhere that day, it's my Beloved or one of his colleagues and NOT MY FAULT AT ALL.

The bad side is choosing a diary that works. Every October I'm asked to choose a diary from a fairly short list. I always get a smallish week to a page one that costs my boss about $2.50. Every January I wrestle with how I'm going to use it (is there room for appointments, contacts, reminders to pay bills?) and how the stuff the diary makers put it is ever so slightly inconvenient (No, I emphatically do not care how to convert hogsheads to litres. International paper sizes are pointless. Why is there no space for email addresses, in 2007!!??)

Last year my Beloved gave me a very expensive English diary that was absolutely perfect - for me anyway. It was featherlight so lots of lots of pages weighing not very much. Each page had space for daily appointments and a facing page for notes. Dozens and dozens of pages at the back for notetaking in meetings. It also told me the best vintages for wine around the world (2002 was the best for South Australia but not so good for NSW wine, apparently), British mileage, English University terms, London sunrise and sunsets and principal London clubs (Annabel's but not Bouji's!). I found this funny rather than irritating and it also had a good accurate selection of international public holidays.

Sadly, this spoiled me for going back to the $2.50 diary from the stationery cupboard. For a week, I've struggled and struggled. Finally, yesterday, I gave in and bought a refillable week to a view "diary system" in a zip up case with room for a pen, 300 business cards and probably a nail file, comb and lipstick. It has a big address book at the back, separate yearly, monthly and financial planners and a To Do list section. All good, until you get to the stupid "important details" page at the front which has space for you to put your name, address, phone number, passport number, medicare number, blood group. (What? No tax file number down here. The manufacturers clearly have more faith in my ability not to lose the diary and my identity than I do) and then "important phone numbers" of doctor, dentist, bank manager (WHO has a "Bank Manager" and who would put them THIRD on a list of most important people?), accountant and solicitor (actually ditto for those too).

There's no space on this page for me to put my Beloved, my hairdresser, the vet or helpful things like all the bloody passwords I can't remember if I don't use them every day. Just as well I have a phone to keep these in - and where did I leave that then?

Oh Martin, what can I say?

Of course, the trouble with Christmas books is that sometimes you get expensive hardcovers that you don't like all that much.

I read Martin Amis's House of Meetings last week. It has a very attractive cover. But the insides look more like this photo of Mr Amis.


(I love this photo.)

As I've said before, I'm rather fond of Martin Amis, even though it's not a very rewarding relationship. In this book, he's tries to be as clever as usual but the protagonist is a shambling, sentimental Russian giant whose better impulses make him repent his former misdeeds and the cleverness comes off as a sort of defensiveness, as if he's hiding behind the careful prose.

The book is narrated by an octogenarian former gulag inhabitant made good in the US. He's writing a valediction to a much (if problematically) loved American stepdaughter from a cruise to the sites of the former gulag. This gives Amis the chance to explain everything that happened in Russia since the War and talk about the gulags and how life in the US is very different. In short, the gulags were terrible and brutal. He kept his wimpish half brother alive through the horrors even though the brother was a pacifist and had married the one woman he himself really wanted. Oh, and it's very cold in the Artic circle and Russians drink far far too much and have a bad history of persecuting Jews and using secret informers to denounce people. And former prisoners found it difficult in Soviet Russia if they didn't bribe anyone for a rehabilitation certificate. And crimes change people, even if people do them solely to save their own lives. And you can't make people love you. And invading Afghanistan was a mistake. Um, oh and America is a different country.

Amis's books provoke lots of strong criticism - I vaguely remember his Yellow Dog making it onto several "worst book" lists. While trying to sort out my own reactions to the book, I ploughed through Daniel Soar's "Bile, Blood, Bilge and Mulch" in the London Review of Books.* Soar's excellently-titled article compares Amis's novel with his recent non-fiction book called Korba the Dread and shows how the same sources are used in different ways. Soar doesn't think the book works because Amis tries to give characters hearts and he doesn't have one himself (awww!). I don't actually agree but it's an easy enough conclusion to draw.

I was also surprised to realise that Amis is 59. FIFTY-NINE! And he was only a Wunderkind a decade or so ago!

Anyway, the next entry will be back in the land of Faerie.

*There are heaps of other reviews here.

Call me shallow...

but this is pretty.

I love Christmas, because this is when I give people and occasionally receive CHRISTMAS BOOKS. It's the one time of year when I put aesthetics above value for money and buy books with HARD COVERS. Sometimes people give me hardcovers too.

My best present this year, because it was a surprise (apart from the Daniel Jackson action figure complete with removable glasses, magnifying glasses, scroll, walkie talkie, bush hat and strange Gouald* weapon which was even more of a surprise) was Susanna Clarke's new book The Ladies of Grace Adieu, a collection of short stories about people's encounters with the world of Faerie. The special edition came in a box and had a pale pink cover embossed with the same floral decoration picked out in pink on the first picture. I was worried about dirtying it so I had to read it incredibly quickly. At least that was my excuse for gulping it down in two sittings on Christmas and Boxing Day.


Clarke's books are delightful because she plays games with assumptions about historical fiction and class and with people's expectations of fairies being all innocent and fey and delightful. Her fairies are quite different, not bad exactly, just different...

She (or her publisher) also pays particular attention to the appearance of her books. This one has delightful line drawings of most of the stories. As I was reading, I regressed to primary school age and just sat and looked at these pictures until I'd absorbed every detail. And now I'm wondering if it would be too selfish not to lend this book to anyone because it's just too pretty to damage. Usually I just don't care what happens to my books because they weren't that nice to start with. They get read until the covers come off. This sounds like a short step to having a locked bookshelf full of first editions I wouldn't dream of reading...

In Australia her first book, Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell, was printed in paperback with either a black or a cream cover. I bought the black one because I thought it would show the dirt less. It's been read by four people and is still holding up quite well. (This UK multiple volume set has a volume in each of the colours I mean.)


Later on, when I wanted to give a copy to my sister, I could only find copies with the incredibly disappointing colour cover (in this picture).



Now, I don't usually care about the way books look but I couldn't bring myself to buy this for her because the monochrome cover with the raven image was so important to how I enjoyed reading the book. Around then, my Beloved went to England for a meeting and I made him go to bookshop after bookshop until he found a copy with a better cover. I think he found the red one which (of course) is now in all the shops here.

The point of all this is to say that sometimes publishers games work and I can be distracted by pretty things. And I'm not sure that's a good thing.


* I'm enough of a nerd to admit to watching Stargate but not to bother learning how to spell the alien words

Dante in America

Before he left home this morning, my Beloved made sure my shoes matched. I got through all of yesterday with only one odd look from a stranger in the street and that mightn't have been shoe-related.

In other news, over the break I read The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. This was a rollicking murder mystery set in Boston in the 1860s. A team of scholars, led by the poet Longfellow (the only one I'd actually heard of), is translating Dante's Divine Comedy into English for the first time in America (although quite why this is such a big deal when there were already an awful lot of British English translations never really convinces me). Someone is using the Dante's punishments of the wicked in the circles of Hell as the models for murders! Can the translators stop him or her before it's all too late?

What's good fun about this is that the novel uses real literary men (with lovingly described facial hair arrangements) as the detectives. Some of them find it extremely difficult to get out of their fireside armchairs and traipse around the dangerous back streets of Boston. What's not so good is that I thought it was one of those mysteries where you can pick the murderer out but it's more of a Sherlock Holmes revelation at the last minute mystery so there was no need to think much at all.

There is a lot of cool period detail. I've been to Boston in the depths of winter and could visualise walking through the same locations. It was really interesting to read about the social pressures caused by the soldiers returning from the civil war and how the underground railway worked. One of the main characters is the first black policeman appointed to the Boston Police force because of his conspicuous bravery during the war but he wasn't allowed to wear a uniform, carry a gun or arrest a white man. It was disappointing to find out this character was fictitious. But some of this detail was a bit on the "I read this fascinating detail so I have to put it in" side - do we really need to know there was an outbreak of distemper among Boston horses in 1865?

One of the major plotlines is about the lack of academic freedom at Harvard. The college corporation was very resistant to studying modern languages, especially "decadent" Catholic literature. This seemed very odd, but then very little should surprise me about Amercians any more.

Anyway, it was a good, fun read but I'd take the hype on Mr Pearl's website with a bit of salt.

Time for some colourful shoes

My right foot has been a bit sore all morning but the other one is fine. I've just realised that it's not some new one-sided malaise, from sleeping strangely or crossing my legs more one way than the other. I don't even have gout.

When I looked down, I realised that my left foot is wearing the brand new flatsoled Wittner moccasin-y type thing I bought to replace the hideously uncomfortable because oddly stitched flatsoled Jane Debster moccasin-y type things I've been meaning to throw away because one of then has started to fall apart already and they'll never feel right as demonstrated by how sore my right foot is today after four hours encased in one.

When you have a cupboard full of black shoes, occasionally you get it wrong. The odds increase when you follow almost autistic shopping patterns developed from years of learing what shoes are likely to be comfortable eventually. I have black flat shoes. I have black shoes with heels of two inches and three inches. And some boots. Generally, when I get muddled, it's only between shoes of the same height but to avoid confusion in the future, my next pair of shoes will be purple and I'll just have to get a new wardrobe to match them. After all, I've got the job now.

In other news, the day before Christmas, I finished reading The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears because someone lent it to me. This isn't the cover of the edition I read but I like it better.


The book is set in Provence with three narratives, in the sixth, fourteenth and twentieth centuries. Three men of philosophical turns of mind are confronted with moral dilemmas about how to deal with the persecution of the Jews.

The twentieth century strand deals with the Nazi occupation of France. It was probably a bit soon after reading the much superior Suite Francaise to be reading this because the same basic material is handled here in a much more sentimental, almost mawkish, way. The book also relies on picking up echoes of similar emotions and thoughts in each story and the parallels seem a bit too neat. But it's more a novel of ideas than of character and narrative. And those ideas are very much philosophy lite or Neoplatonism for beginners, which isn't a bad thing at all. And it was so sad that I would have been very upset if Santa hadn't been coming in the morning.

Fun with Captain Kirk

Back in town after a week in Brisbane which did its best to make me regret leaving it in the first place. They've finally built a bridge between my old uni and Dutton Park so impoverished students of the future don't have to worry about whether they've got enough cash for the ferry fare home after lectures. (And a lovely bridge it is too, although quite why it needed to be walked across remains a mystery known only to my mother.) It stayed pleasantly cool and my hair didn't turn into a frizzy mess. They've built a very beautiful new Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) that seems ten times more convenient than Sydney's strangely poky MCA. The suburbs teemed with birds and geckos and moths and it wasn't until the last night that we saw dozens of cane toads worshipping the streetlights. (My Bleoved insisted on picking one up because he'd never seen one before. I made hime scrub his hands before doing anything else). We caught up with friends living in beautiful airy wooden houses. And, as I packed my bag to head back to my (perfectly adequate for Sydney) inner city flat, I tried hard not to think about the fact that a man who used to work for me now owns a vast house in a very nice part of Brisbane.

One of the things that helped distract me was Kill Tek by William Shatner.

Yes, THAT William Shatner, old Captain James Tiberius Kirk himself. He's written a whole series of detective stories set in the twenty-third century where people fly around the Greater Los Angeles territory in sky cars and eat food substitutes washed down with nearcaf, shooting each other the stunguns and try to avoid the drug cartels pushing "Tek", a completely addictive electronic virtual reality drug sort of like the total immersion game used in Red Dwarf.

Strangely enough, the book wasn't THAT bad. Fast paced, heaps of action. Several characters were well enough drawn for you to care about their fates. Jokes that provoked a smile, if not a laugh. The only irritating thing was a cheesy Mexican character with an inability to utter the English words "yes" and "buddy" and a propensity to say "Chihuahua" at the slightest provocation. All in all, not a bad way to spend a couple of hours on a holiday and outstanding value at the cost of 27 cents from the discount bin at Crazy Clarke's.