By Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Great When
Alan Moore
Bloomsbury, $32.99
If the Nobel Prize for Literature can have a Boomer moment and give Bob Dylan the nod, Alan Moore – a legend in the history of comics – might be in the running too.
The creative force behind From Hell, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is also a fiction writer of formidable originality and breadth of mind, as his last short fiction collection Illuminations (which among other things linked the toxic superhero culture of mainstream American comics to the Trumpian turn in politics) proved.
The Great When starts in 1949 and is largely set in an alternate “Long London”, entered after Dennis Knuckleyard, a teen who works in an eccentric Shoreditch bookstore, picks up a weird book. Expect forays into hidden histories, esoterica and the occult, surreal set-pieces composed with formidable grandiloquence, anarchic screeds against the life-denying forces of the (much shorter) “real” London, and more. Mixing dark fantasy horror and satire, it’s instant cult fiction that’ll appeal to fans of China Miéville or J.G. Ballard, and casts as many counterspells at the lack of invention in contemporary fiction as it can.
The Night We Lost Him
Laura Dave
Penguin, $34.99
An uneasy alliance between half-siblings is forged as they probe their father’s murder in Laura Dave’s seventh novel. Police have investigated and found no reason to suspect foul play in the death of hotel magnate Liam Noone, who (as the reader knows from the start) did not fall to his demise from a clifftop – he was pushed by someone.
His son Sam is unconvinced. He travels to New York to visit estranged half-sister Nora, now working in neuroarchitecture (designing buildings to manipulate people into their happy place). Persuaded to return with some reluctance to her father’s Californian estate, we follow Nora as she helps Sam to unearth the truth.
In another strand, 50 years prior, a story unfolds between Liam and a woman who isn’t any of his wives. The author can write, but this comes across as a rushed, unconvincingly plotted melodrama more than a thriller; despite some energised snark between Sam and Nora, the characters aren’t fleshed out enough to be invested in them. A Netflix adaptation is said to be in the works. Maybe wait for that.
Skysong
C.A. Wright
Pantera Press, $32.99
Fairytale adapted into a full-length fantasy novel best describes C.A. Wright’s Skysong. This book takes inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Nightingale – one of the brighter flights in that author’s oeuvre, though still spiked with folly and mortality.
We follow Oriane, who lives in a remote village with a mystical legacy inherited from her mother. She can transform into a skylark, with the power to call the sun each morning. Curiosity leads Oriane into the dangers and intrigues of the royal court, where she’s worshipped as a goddess but effectively imprisoned in the role. Her maid, Andala, also has a secret and as a schism erupts in the kingdom, it transpires that our heroine is not alone as she thinks.
Wright’s tale takes the possessiveness and failure to appreciate beauty in Andersen’s original, and the motif of deception leading to feminine freedom, and builds a fantasy world in which the magical bird becomes an unwitting pawn in a political and religious struggle.
The Dream of A Tree
Maja Lunde, trans. Diane Oatley
Scribner, $34.99
The final book in Norwegian author Maja Lunde’s Climate Quartet, The Dream of A Tree takes us to the remote Arctic archipelago of Svalbard in 2110, where the Global Seed Vault is kept.
Cut off from the world for years, Tommy and his brothers and their grandmother, the current Seed Keeper, tread lightly and at one with nature in their isolated home. When their tiny community faces disaster, they are suddenly alone and fighting not just to survive but to preserve the wonders of the Vault. Meanwhile, Tao, still grieving a son lost to starvation in a distant land, must lead an expedition into the Arctic, searching for the seeds that might save her people from famine.
I only recall having read Lunde’s The History of Bees, so I’m uncertain how the Climate Quartet hangs together. Still, the books are written to be read as standalones, and this bleak cli-fi survival story is more imaginative in describing Tao’s expedition than the trials on Svalbard itself.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Mean Streak
Rick Morton
4th Estate, $35.99
When robo-debt was inflicted on Centrelink recipients by a ruthless coalition government, it was as though the infamous, automated debt calculation scheme was authored by Franz Kafka, in collaboration with George Orwell.
In this searing, forensic and moving investigation of the whole tragic fiasco, Rick Morton, senior reporter with the Saturday Paper, calls it the “labyrinth”. For good reason. Seven people took their own lives, thousands lost their jobs and others developed mental illness.
Morton, in measured writing fuelled with rage and sorrow in equal measure, walks us through one of the most shameful episodes in recent Australian politics, taking in prime ministers, pressured public servants, a whistleblower and case studies of the poor sods who were hunted down by their own government. A morality tale for our times.
Great Game On: The Contest for Central Asia and Global Supremacy
Geoff Raby
MUP, $34.99
In the original Great Game – a 19th-century imperial contest between Britain and Russia over India – the threat from Russia was more imagined than real, says Raby (our Chinese ambassador, 2007-2011). Likewise, the United States’ fears of China and Vietnam.
His examination of the new Great Game, prompted by his observations of the chaotic US departure from Afghanistan and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, examines in lively detail the rise of China in Eurasia and its implications for the US, Russia and the world, while also putting events in detailed historical context.
Has Putin demonstrated there is no such thing as a quick, decisive victory and will this affect China’s options regarding Taiwan? Has he opened the way for China in Eurasia? Aimed at the general reader, this is a seriously informed study of the major players in these “interesting” times.
Australian Ghost Stories
James Phelps
Harper Collins, $15.99
Everybody loves a good ghost story and there are hauntings aplenty in this record of paranormal activity in Oz.
Phelps bookends his collection with tales of the Hydro-Majestic Hotel in the Blue Mountains, especially the case of June Clemenger, who was strangled at the hotel in 1934 by an ex-lover, and who now stalks the place attempting retributive strangulation. Not only did Conan-Doyle conduct seances at the hotel, Sir Edmund Barton died there and has also been spotted floating around.
In between, we hear believers’ tales of a prison ghost watching black-and-white movies, families in haunted houses smelling phantom cigarette smoke, a Casper-like friendly ghost and ghost whisperers who have the happy knack of detecting the paranormal and “cleansing” the house of it. Get out the Ouija board, dim the lights, and get spooked.
What the Body Knows
John Trowsdale
Yale University Press, $54.50
Think of your immune system as a computer antivirus program, says Trowsdale (Cambridge University). It’s in every tissue and cell of the body, knows what’s foreign and harmful, and protects us from most harmful germs. But it’s not infallible. And sometimes, in the case of some chronic diseases, can work against us. May even cause many of them.
At the same time, history has proven that the immune system can be harnessed to amazing effect in developing life-saving vaccines, as with smallpox, which killed around three million people before it was eradicated. An achievement comparable to landing a man on the moon, he says. In what he calls something between “popular science and a textbook”, he examines the complexities of the defence system (military metaphors abound too), incorporating recent research and case studies.
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