By Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Little Bit
Heather Taylor-Johnson
Wakefield Press, $32.95
Described on the cover as “part memoir, part biography, part imagination”, Heather Taylor-Johnson’s Little Bit deploys autofiction to tease out a tense, complicated intergenerational legacy of addiction, neglect, and the bond between mother and daughter. A writer, Heather, travels to Minnesota to write about her own mother Debbie’s neglected childhood at the hands of Stella. Each perspective is layered into a different narrative mode, and the project becomes impossible without Heather first acknowledging that “motherhood and writing are deeply entangled and they’re still in violent opposition”. It’s a book that wrestles critique, memoir, biography – and where facts fail to grasp psychological truths, or social truths militate against knowing the facts – and informed invention. The prose could sometimes be better crafted, but it’s a meaty exploration of the difficulties of memory, memoir-writing and history, of how gender and class play into writing and judging motherhood in art and life, that will appeal to admirers of Jenny Offill or Claire Dederer.
Double Happiness
Rochelle Siemienowicz
MidnightSun, $34.99
Ethical non-monogamy (ENM) and polyamory aren’t exactly unknown quantities in the queer community – one of the happy side effects of not having marriage as an option for so long – and the polycule has become mainstream enough that everyone everywhere knows what the word means. Journalist and film critic Rochelle Siemienowicz’s Double Happiness is a love story that begins with a monogamous marriage between Melbourne film critic Anna and her husband, Brendan, sliding into ENM as Anna takes another lover, Jeremy, and refuses to give him up. We get all three perspectives on the love triangle, and you can expect knotty negotiations and difficult feelings and role reversals, as repressed characters struggle to own truths and to harmonise the eternal dialogue between thought and feeling, ethics and eros. The novel’s intelligence and emotional honesty seem to outstrip narrative craft or a talent for humour. I found these characters annoying and their conflicts insipid, and longed for the extroverted comic derangements of Julian Barnes’ Talking It Over, which it resembles in structure, or Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Meshugah.
The Extraordinary Disappointments of Leopold Berry
Ransom Riggs
Allen & Unwin, $29.99
Author of the bestselling YA fantasy series starting with Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs has embarked upon a search for fresh ground. He finds it in the City of Angels. Leopold Berry is a traumatised teen. After his mother’s death five years prior, he took refuge in obsessing over a cult fantasy TV show, Sunderworld, inducing dissociative fugues. Leopold, now 17, thinks he has recovered when, alongside his best friend Emmett, he finds Sunderworld is real – a world where powerful channellers are needed to fight monsters and replenish a dwindling supply of arcane energy. After failing a test, the friends are exiled back to Earth. They’re supposed to have been ensorcelled so that they remember nothing, but the spell backfires badly – Leo remembers everything; Emmett suffers. Defying banishment, Leo heads back to Sunderworld to set things right. A vivid anti-heroic quest narrative, featuring elaborate world-building and a subversive mix of trash television and magical fantasy.
The Fallen Woman
Fiona McIntosh
Penguin, $34.99
Fiona McIntosh, the prolific bestselling author from South Australia, has more than 40 titles to her name, many of them historical romances. The Fallen Woman is as solidly constructed as any, and it combines with brio and assurance the kind of vivid historical world-building and the talent for romantic melodrama that make her so popular. Following botanical artist Jane Savile, it shifts from Jane as an outcast, leading an isolated and poor life under the spires of Salisbury Cathedral to salvage the family honour, into a romance with Guy Attwood. He’s a friend to the soon-to-be-crowned King George V, as well as an heir to a fortune. As their relationship blooms through a quest to discover a critically endangered species of tree, Jane must fight against her social ostracism, and the jealousies and intrigues that follow in its wake, to reclaim her reputation and self-respect. McIntosh takes in everything from lavish period detail to obscure trivia about the history of the apple in this one, and her many fans should enjoy devouring it.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Stoic in Love
Annie Lawson
Murdoch Books, $24.99
The Stoics have been much in vogue lately, and perhaps part of the reason is the common sense that informs their philosophy. Lawson’s application of Stoicism to the complexities of dating, live-in relationships, PDA, love-bombing and break-ups, is a case in point. In a light, often ironic Bridget Jones manner, she draws on her own experiences and those of her friends when discussing, for example, app-dating, the importance of due diligence, patience, recognising red flags, keeping a relationship afloat or knowing when it’s sunk – while, at the same time emphasising the virtues of singledom. The key theme running through all of this is the Stoic belief that there’s no point dwelling on things we can’t control. Likewise, recognising the importance of the “moment”, rather than dwelling the imperfect past or the perfect future. Quirky, informed.
Nexus
Yuval Noah Harari
Fern Press, $39.99
In a way, this study of information networks from the Stone Age to the present day revisits and updates Western theory from Marx to writers like Edward Said. Harari takes time to establish just what “information” may be; is it an attempt to represent “reality” as in what he calls the “naïve” view of information, or something that has always been weaponised depending on the network issuing that information, be it the Catholic Church, Stalinism or populists like Trump? Woven into this is “misinformation” and the threat of AI, a key metaphor informing Nexus being Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, in which an apprentice unleashes a force it cannot control. To create better, more “balanced” networks, he says, “we must abandon both the naïve and populist views of information”. Cautionary, but hopeful, popular theory.
There and Back: Diaries 1999-2009
Michael Palin
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $36.99
Most diaries are only worth reading in patches, and, as much as I admire Michael Palin’s impressive oeuvre in film and print, this is no exception. Volume four covers a tumultuous decade and, in this sense, it also functions as a personal record of the times. Take, for example, his experience of 9/11. He was filming in the remote “heart” of the Sahara for much of September with only shortwave radio contact. “When we returned,” he writes, “the world had changed utterly.” Among all the travel (hence the title), there’s a plethora of events, lunches and dinners, and conversations with family and famous people like friend George Harrison, whose death is upliftingly poignant and exhausting in terms of media demands on Palin. Among other things, what emerges is the sheer range of Palin’s interests, from Monty Python to Hemingway.
AI Snake Oil
Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor
Princeton, 34.99
Narayanan and Kapoor, both AI specialists at Princeton, contend that there is a lot of hype at the moment about AI – both its benefits and perils – much of it being uninformed or just plain snake oil. In a sort of Ted Talk style, they distinguish between generative AI, which gives us images, stories in the style of the King James Bible, or college essays. But, they state, AI in this sense is no more a threat to education than the introduction of the calculator. It’s with predictive AI that the snake oil comes into it, especially anything to do with predicting history or human behaviour. This kind of AI, they say, doesn’t work and can never work. They also deal with everyday AI such as auto-pilot, as well as such double-edge issues as facial recognition and fears of conscious AI getting out of control, which, they argue, “rest on a series of flawed premises.”
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