Next of Kin by John Boyne

John Boyne appeared at the 2023 Adelaide Writers’ Week.

Irish writer, John Boyne.

Half way through this fourth novel of John Boyne’s, Next of Kin (2006) I thought, ‘What a grubby little tale.’ That turned out to be quite unfair. It’s a crime novel but not a crime mystery; well, it is to everyone except the protagonist and you, the reader; it’s not a ‘who-done-it’ but a ‘will-he-be-caught’. One of Boyne’s major themes in all his work is family, whether it be happy ones or unhappy ones; this one is definitely of the latter.

Set in 1936 in London and the Montignac’s estate, Leyville, it’s a story of an orphaned boy taken in by his wealthy relatives and brought up as one of the family, in fact, the most favoured one, but of course, nothing goes to plan, except the crime. Or does it? No spoilers here. Owen Montignac is a clever handsome man made all the more so by a head of startling white hair. He is conspicuous wherever he goes. He runs a contemporary art gallery, and does quite well, even though his contempt for the overpriced scratchings of the mediocre artists he exhibits is j-u-s-t kept in check by his paper thin charm. He, along with his cousin Stella, are the sole survivors of the Montignac dynasty, Stella’s brother Andrew having been killed in a shooting accident many years earlier and the story opens at the funeral and wake for Stella’s father, Owen’s uncle, Peter Montignac.

This opening scene is a test for the reader. The cast of characters at the funeral is extensive since a lot of the significant backstory and attitudes to the deceased and, of course, the inheritance are exposed via the conversations of the mourners. If you are a reader who usually skips over names you’ll get yourself into serious trouble here. Boyne doesn’t make it easy for you: there are two characters at the wake called Marjory Redmond and Margaret Richmond, one is a minor character, the other a major one, but you don’t know that then. Stay alert! And, as if to test your memory for names, this early scene is juxtaposed with a court case where you will meet more people, the well-respected Judge, Mr Justice Roderick Bentley KC, his wife Jane, always on the lookout for social advancement, especially if it involves The Palace, and their lay-about son Gareth.

What sets this novel above others of its ilk is the important sub-plot of King Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson and the dilemma for the country, and in particular, for the constitutional judiciary, that the King places everyone in: will he or won’t he marry her?

Boyne has never shied away from incorporating real historical people into his fiction: Buffalo Bill in The Congress of Rough Riders (2001), Captain Bligh and Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty (2008), also published as The Cabin Boy, Tzar Nicolas and the Romanov’s in The House of Special Purpose (2008) and Gore Vidal in A Ladder to the Sky (2018).  

How the plot-lines of the Montignacs, the Bentleys, and the future of the English monarchy are interwoven around a crime, its motive, delivery, and resolution is what keeps the reader enthusiastically turning the pages. It’s. Very. Well. Done.

You can purchase the book in various formats here.

by Categories: 20th Century Crime Fiction, Book review, British Literature, Literary criticismTags: , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Shadows on our Skin by Jennifer Johnston

Jennifer Johnston’s Shadows on our Skin (1977) was shortlisted for the Booker. The winner that year? Iris Murdoch’s The Sea The Sea.

Irish novelist and playwright, Jennifer Johnston

There is so much going on on Johnston’s Page 1: The protagonist, young Joe NOT paying attention in maths class; writing a daring poem about hating his father and wishing him dead; Miss McCabe, the frustrated teacher, squeaking her chalk to demonstrate the glories of the equilateral triangle – each image illuminating an unwritten, but acknowledged, back-story. Joseph Logan has such a miserable home life (a ruined, bitter, and abusive father and a disappointed, sour, but high-principled mother) but dispite his dour life, almost McGahern*-ish, the writing is so vivid. Everything is so clear. Johnston puts sound (squeak squeak of the chalk), thoughts of the characters (Because I hate you so), little telling actions (Hot fat spotted the floor) into the narrative, as well as comments from the narrator (The conversation wasn’t exactly swinging). You have to be vigilant and take notice of the tiny singular quotation marks: it’s important that you know what is said and what is thought, and who thinks it. It’s a rich and full tapestry of little black marks, full of meaning, that make up a page of narrative. But the most telling and useful writer’s tool she uses is dialogue. I know of one Australian teacher of creative writing who advises her students (or used to) to steer clear of dialogue. What a misguided and anti-creative piece of advice! Dialogue is one of the most effective, useful, and versatile tools a writer can have. A line of speech can paint a character more effectively than a paragraph of description. Needless to say, I enjoyed it immensely; more than half of this text has people talking, with very few adverbs. It’s clear, by the words they use, how they are spoken.

The story is set during The Troubles, in the early 1970s, in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. There’s always gunfire in the distance. Joe sees a young woman sitting on a wall. He’s noticed her before but one day he sits down next to her. Her name is Kathleen, she’s a teacher, a chain-smoker, and family-less. All three attributes alien to the boy. This meeting and their growing relationship provides the catalyst for the narrative. His older brother Brendan comes back from England but what he does when out at night remains a mystery. The father lives on his past triumphs as a fighter against the British, but now that his health is rapidfly declining it’s only his memories, or fantasies, that sustain him. The mother is stoic and sour, bitter about her lot as bread-winner and carer of a useless man but diligent in her responsibilities. Love seems as alien as good weather. And the British soldiers and gunshots get ever closer.

And then one day Brendan meets Kathleen… no spoilers here.

I was convinced that the narrative would end tragically, and yes it doesn’t end well but quite differently to what I expected.

My book-fairy (an Irishman retired to Brussels who comes to my island home bearing books twice a year) introduced me to Johnston via her 1974 novel How Many Miles to Babylon?, a WWI tale of class, affection, and betrayal. I now want to read more. Her last published book was Naming the Stars (2015). She lives near Dublin.

Some years ago, I received an email from an English writer; she obviously found my contact details on this blog. She wasn’t having much success with getting her work published so she founded her own publishing house. She was impressive and obviously determined and entrepreneurial. She asked me to review her novel and post it on my blog. I was happy to oblige. My expectations were misguided. The writing was long-winded and verbose. It appeared the writer’s main aim was to impress the reader with her vocabulary and lengthy sentences. I read the prologue twice; there was tension in the text, but still I had no idea where the two characters were nor what they were talking about. I replied to her carefully but pointed out that simple and clear sentences were the best way to tell a story. I ultimately blamed myself telling her that ‘I was not the reader for her.’ I should recommend this book to her.

The BBC filmed it in 1980, directed by Jim O’Brien with a screenplay by Derek Mahon.

Here is a short, but surprising, clip of Jennifer Johnston talking about writing.

You can purchase the book in various formats here.

*John McGahern (1934 – 2006) the Irish writer famous for his bleak settings: the squat Irish homes of the rural poor, usually dominated by a deeply religious, unforgiving, and brutal husband and father.

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Lessons by Ian McEwan

It’s going to be difficult to talk about this book, Lessons (2022) without giving away too much of the plot; no spoilers. I’ll try.

The story is about Roland Baines and with a title of Lessons, it’s appropriate that it begins with a lesson: a piano lesson, but this one has lifelong repercussions.

The story isn’t linear but it progresses like a complex cable-knit from that piano lesson when he was 14 years old right into his early 70s.

The writing is dense and not conducive to the one and a half page read in bed before you go to sleep. This book demands your time and attention. It’s also a bit of a history lesson as world events impinge on Roland’s life from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, through the fall of the Berlin Wall 1989 to the lockdowns of the 2020 pandemic. Roland was born in 1948, a real Baby Boomer, but only a few years before me; there’s little bits of my history that match Roland’s and those little bits are mainly reflected in his mistakes. It’s Roland’s mistakes – or, if you like, the lessons he didn’t learn – that lay down the path of Roland’s life.

For readers of Roland’s age you too will, I predict, see little bits of your own history as we all can’t be immune to the world and what goes on in it.

Roland’s life, in its teenage beginnings, has enormous potential as a pianist, a tennis player, and as a writer. What he does with that potential and how those choices affect him and those around him make up the spine of the story.

There is, of course, the piano teacher, Miriam, then his first wife Alissa and her German family, his only child, Lawrence, his second wife, Daphne, and an unknown brother, Robert, are all dragged along by the history around them; some do well, others do not.

After his trite little book, Nutshell (2016), which I thought was way below par, so much so that I didn’t bother with his next one, Machines Like Me (2019) Lessons is a return to the classic standard of his Enduring Love (1997), Atonement (2001), Saturday (2005), and The Children Act (2014). It’s not a return to his early work which was full of darkness and the macabre, but it’s a mature and serious work that delves into what it really takes for a person to fulfil their dreams and how easy it is for those dreams to turn to smoke.

The complexities if its timeline annoyed me a little in the first third, but there is a rhythm there you need to tap into but once you do the book rollicks along to its conclusion; well it did for this reader, anyway. I loved it! (But, please, make time for it and attend to it wholeheartedly)

Lessons is his most autobiographical work, about a quarter he says, and you can hear him talking about the book and his writing life here, in a short but fascinating video from the CBS Sunday Morning program.

You can purchase the book in various formats here.

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This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham

Australian writer Sophie Cunningham
Australian writer, Sophie Cunningham

If you find Virginia Woolf fascinating, as I do (Don’t be Afraid of Virginia Woolf), it’s almost impossible not to find Leonard Woolf fascinating too. That is what drew me to Sophie Cunningham’s book This Devastating Fever (2022). She wanted to tell the story of Leonard Woolf and she’s been trying to tell his story for 15 years. Then along came Covid19 and the parallels between the Woolf’s trying to be writers during a pandemic (The Spanish Flu of 1918), and Cunningham’s own troubles writing during a pandemic were too good to resist.

This Devastating Fever has two narratives: then, the story of the Woolfs, of course, and now, the story of Alice, a writer writing the Woolf story; both stories deal with similar themes. The pandemic, mental illness, and writing. It’s a novel structure and a very interesting and effective one. Alice while globetrotting for research, and then in lockdown, sends excerpts of her Woolf novel, also called This Devastating Fever, to her Australian agent, Sarah, who keeps urging Alice to include more sex, and given the group of people the Woolfs were part of, The Bloomsbury Set, including more sex wouldn’t’ve been difficult. Bed-hopping and fence-jumping were rife.

However, sex concerning Virginia Woolf was problematic. It’s entirely possible that the Woolf’s marriage was never consummated, yet their relationship was loving, strong, and long-lasting – her suicide note is proof of that! Virginia found sexual release with women, and – possibly – Leonard did too.

Cunningham’s metafiction story of Alice is very modern, but Virginia’s writing, in her own era, was also very modern. Virginia’s mental health, always tenuous, is explored against Alice’s attention to the woman that once cared for her but is now demented and in care. There are parallels galore.

The most effective and moving parts are when Virginia and Leonard are together. Cunningham’s imagined dialogue is wonderfully evocative, intriguingly revealing, and utterly believable. Fiction at its best.

I only have one complaint. Cunningham has Leonard and Virginia ‘appear’ to Alice in her story and the resulting conversations are wonderful and enlightening. However, she calls them ‘imaginary Leonard’ and ‘ghost Virginia’ as if us readers wouldn’t understand what was going on when Leonard appeared and spoke in a chapter headed 2021. Annoying, but a minor gripe.

I highly recommend this unique novel.

Here is The Wheeler Centre interview with Sophie Cunningham from late 2022.

You can buy the Kindle or paperback editions here.

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Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout

American author, Elizabeth Strout

I’m not sure why, yet, but I don’t have a lot of American writers on my shelf and in my line of interest. However, Elizabeth Strout has been there on my literary horizon ever since I saw the film version of her novel Olive Kitteridge (2008) starring the magnificent Francis McDermott. And I’m not sure how but the sequel, Olive Again (2019) is in my pile of books on my bedside table. Then my sister, an avid reader, praised Strout’s Oh William! (2021) – shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize – and a visiting friend left me this one, Lucy by the Sea (2022) when she returned home. I read it.

It’s my first pandemic novel. By that I mean it’s the first novel I’ve read that, to some degree, is about the pandemic. Lucy, and her ex-husband, William, leave New York and set up a home in a small house on the Maine coast. He was worried about her and wanted to get her away from the danger.

It’s written in the first person and it reads like a journal. Lucy shares her inner feelings and expectations, usually unfulfilled, along with what she did, who she met, and what she said. It wasn’t long before I realised that she isn’t a very easy woman. I always admire a writer who can create an unlovely character through a 1st person narrative. (The last time I experienced this was in Tim Winton’s Breath (2008)) However, she is self-reflective and so knows not to voice her dislikes too much. She dislikes most things. But she likes Bob, a near neighbour, but not his wife, Margaret. She certainly dislikes the house William has brought her to, the weather, most of the furniture, the grey light, and the loneliness. Lucy’s life is her family: two daughters, their husbands, one she likes, one she doesn’t, William, of course, her ex, and her late second husband, David, whom she misses dreadfully. William also has an ex-wife – she left him taking their daughter – and a half-sister he’s only just met. Needless to say Lucy’s family world is complicated.

Lucy is also surprisingly unaware of the seriousness of the pandemic, even when friends and New York neighbours die because of it. She feels displaced, uneasy, and wonders when she can return to her New York apartment. Set against this general feeling of displacement is the narrative of the events around her and her family told in very plain, uncluttered, and conversational language.

It’s a soft book, and a handsome volume.

By the end she is slightly more aware and accepting of her situation even though her life has changed dramatically.

Strout has written about these characters before in My Name is Lucy Barton (2016), and Oh William! of course; even Olive Kitteridge makes a small appearance in this one.

I enjoyed it, yes, but the interest is solely due to the character of Lucy: how will she deal with hardship, what will she say to her daughter who is mad at her, and what will she do with William after she’s put her nightie back on?

You can buy the ebook or hardback version here.

Here is an interview with Elizabeth Strout about Lucy by the Sea, if you can manage to forgive the rather verbose interviewer.

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All the Broken Places by John Boyne

Irish writer, John Boyne.

Yes, this, Boyne’s latest novel, is a sequel, of sorts, to Boyne’s incredibly successful 2006 YP novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas – 11 million copies sold world wide – but All the Broken Places (2022) is a novel for adults.

The story follows the adult life of Bruno’s sister, Gretel, post WWII and up to the present day, in her 90s.

Until the devastating climax of Part 1 the tension propelling the reader’s interest, keeping it bubbling away, is almost solely due to the secret Gretel Fernley holds and we readers understand; if you had read this book’s prequel, that is. The narrative begins in Paris 1946, when Gretel is 12, and also in London 2022, where she is in her 90’s. But it’s the Paris story that takes you into her nightmare. There is also tension in the London plot too, again fuelled by Gretel’s secret: her real identity, but I thought when reading it that the payoff would be the book’s climax too: at the end of Part 3.
No. I was wrong. The book’s climax was totally unexpected, to this reader, but delivered in the most unsensationalist way: almost as an aside. It’s novelistic decisions like this that set apart great writers from the rest.

Although Gretel’s post war story is basically in three parts: Paris 1946, Sydney 1952, and London 1953, her present story, London 2020, runs along with them, and following her throughout is her past and the guilt she feels because of it. It’s the defining theme of all Gretel’s life decisions and the major theme of the book.

After the fantastical saga, A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom (2020) which followed a cast of the same characters over 2000 years, and the almost, slapstick humour of Boyne’s last, The Echo Chamber (2021) – soon to be a TV comedy series, scripted by Boyne – I can happily report that Boyne is back at his narrative best which, for this reader, was his 2017 book, The Heart’s Invisible Furies.

Boyne almost always leads you confidently along his narrative path hand in hand, but with … Furies, and now with ... Broken Places he grabs you by the scruff of the neck.

It would be impossible to relay the plot without giving away the book’s major surprises, of which there are three, and which occur solely when Gretel’s past breaks through, or threatens to break through, into the present. Yet towards the end of her life, it is her own incredible decision, not one forced on her, that finally gives her peace, the redemption she so desperately needs, and the home she believes she deserves.

Here you can purchase the book in various formats.

And here you can buy the audiobook for free by signing up to Audible.

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Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965) British novelist, playwright,
& short story writer

I used to have a serious crush on the works of W. Somerset Maugham. I’ve read most of his fiction, novels, and short stories and always find something fresh on re-reading them. I usually don’t mention this past-passion: Maugham is very much now out of fashion. However, a recent conversation with a student about short story writing sparked my interest again and serendipitously I discovered this novel Cakes and Ale (1930) in my local second hand bookshop. I bought it.

Modern short stories tend to be more like anecdotes. Maugham’s stories are very neat, some would say old-fashioned: with a definite beginning, middle, and an end. So, to anyone interested in writing, especially short stories, I would highly recommend reading a lot of W. Somerset Maugham.

In his day Maugham was the most famous, the most successful novelist and playwright. His early success was in the theatre. In 1908 he had four plays running simultaneously on the West End. After writing thirty two plays he abandoned the theatre in 1933 to concentrate solely on writing fiction, many of which have been produced for film and television. His greatest fiction masterpiece, some say, is Of Human Bondage (1915), the film adaptation (1934) – the first of four – featured a then unknown actress called Bette Davis.

Cakes and Ale (1930) with an alternative title, The Skeleton in the Cupboard, is a satire on the literary world of Maugham’s day. The 1st person narrator is a writer and ex-medical student called William Ashenden – a name Maugham had used several times when writing autobiographical flavoured fiction.

The plot swings around a noble writer, Edward Driffield who has reached the lofty accolades of his literary career and is considered the ‘father’ of British literature. However, he came from very humble beginnings which Ashenden can attest to as he knew the Driffields, Edward then an unknown writer, but more importantly he knew the first Mrs Driffield, an ex-barmaid and very forthright woman called Rosie. The story opens with the literary rumblings about who will write Driffield’s biography now that the grand old man of British letters has died. It is Ashenden’s recollections of his student days when he knew the Driffields that provide the background and understandings of the great man’s past, and especially the skeleton in his cupboard: Rosie.

The book created a furor when it first appeared as is was believed it was a blatant jab at the recently deceased British writer, Thomas Hardy. “Trampling on Thomas Hardy’s Grave” and “Hitting below the Shroud” were only two of the vindictive reviews that appeared at the book’s publication. Maugham denied the association, of course. He asserts it began as a short story about a notable writer whose famous works were all written while he was married to his first ‘common’ wife but whose second wife, his secretary, ‘made him into a figure’.

Maugham took his title from a line of Sir Toby Belch to Malvolio in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” Cakes and Ale were literary symbols (thank you Aesop, whoever you were) for the good life.

It’s written in the literary style of the day and despite the often self-deprecating remarks from the narrator Ashenden, he (Maugham) comes across as a self-serving sarcastic ponse. Yet, the highlight of Cakes and Ale is the character of Rosie. Maugham was particular good at creating ‘common women’. He gave them self-awareness, honesty, and the ability to undermine the pompous men who usually sought their company.

It’s as entertaining as any of Maugham’s work but doesn’t quite meet the standard of his most famous, his novels The Moon and Sixpence (1919) and The Razor’s Edge (1944). The curious characteristic of both these novels is that they are both about someone who isn’t there: in the former it’s about a painter (based on Paul Gauguin) who is dead, and the latter is about a young American, Larry Darrell who is always abroad searching for the meaning of life. Their stories are told by those who were left behind.

You can buy the book in various formats here.

Here is the link to the W. Somerset Maugham page at The Gutenberg Project where you can find most of his novels, plays, and short story collections, all ebooks and all for free.

The BBC dramatised it for television in 1974 starring Michael Hordern and Judy Cornwell.

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Young Mungo by Douglas Stewart

Scottish – American writer Douglas Stuart

After I’d finished reading Shuggie Bain, Stuart’s Booker Prize winning novel from 2020, I imagined his second novel might be ‘Shuggie Bain grows up and falls in love.’ That’s exactly what Young Mungo (2022) is like, and what the rather audacious cover photo fortells. There is the same Scottish estate bleakness, an older brother, Hamish, this time one not so accommodating, and, of course, a child-like drug-addled and flirtatious girl-mother who doesn’t want to be one, a mother, that is. The characters are all different but to some degree similar. But, here there is also a sister, Jodie, desperate to get to university and not only away from her childhood and family but also away, far away, from ending up like her mother and the deathknell to any girl in her position is getting pregnant. That would seal her fate, as it did the fate of most girls her age and that of the mother, Mo-Maw – she hates being called Ma.

Writing a similar second novel to an extremely successful first is a sure way to consolidate a writer’s reader base. Hanna Kent did it very successfully with her second novel The Good People (2016) after her debut hit, Burial Rites (2013).

Stuart’s central character, Mungo Hamilton, is a nineteen year old Protestant lad and a victim of his mother’s inexpert, and downright malicious, mothering style. To counter Mungo’s un-masculine behaviour she packs him off with two very unsavoury men to ‘make a man of him’. This narrative thread is juxtaposed with the events that lead up to this ‘camping’ trip: namely his home life with his absent mother and violent brother which sees him attach himself to a young Catholic man, and pigeon fancier, James. This friendship staggers into a clumsy but charming romantic friendship that overwhelms both of them and sets them adrift from their families and society.

Although the camping trip to a Scottish loch is certainly a coming-of-age experience its double-climax is nothing that anyone, including this reader – and the writer, I’m guessing – ever expected. When these two narrative streams finally converge both James and Mungo, both battered and bruised, stare at each other across a busy road and dare to dream about a life together, even though us readers know Mungo’s future is most probably battered beyond salvation. I suspect we may hear more about young Mungo.

Young Mungo has the assured hand of a writer steeped in his Scottish background, and like Shuggie Bain, his handling of the Scottish accent, written phonetically, is the main driving force in painting the characters so vividly. This ‘reading’ of the phonetic dialogue is worth practicing. It doesn’t take long to master it, and it gives so much weight to the characters and the tone of the book. Give it a try.

Yes, like its predecessor, Young Mungo is harrowing at times especially with its depiction of what lengths families will go to keep their own in check. Selfishness is rife; love has nothing to do with it. If such writing upsets you it can’t be denied that your strong reaction to the contents or the characters, be it revulsion or annoyance, is solely due to the strength of the writing. Good writing elicits strong reactions, even negative ones.

Douglas Stuart is going to be a major player in the literary landscape for a very long time.

In this short video Douglas Stuart introduces Young Mungo shortly before it was released.

And here, you can follow Stuart talking about writing in general and his personal take on it. It’s mainly about what made him write in the first place, and therefore is more about Shuggie Bain, but those thoughts and ideas are also relevant to Young Mungo; about truth in fiction and how fiction comes from a very mysterious place.

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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

Sri Lankan-British writer Shehan Karunatilaka

The moment I heard about the Booker win I downloaded it. The opening pages tickled my excitement and curiosity. It was written in the present tense and in the 2nd person. I had never read anything like this before. Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (2003) uses the 2nd person in its opening pages but it’s difficult to maintain.

The narrator is flippant, ironic, and mostly humorous. He (?) is talking to Almeida who is dead. He’s been murdered. They are in an In Between place which makes the narrator a ghoul too, but they can only stay here for seven moons before Almeida is reincarnated. The narrator and Almeida ‘fly’ around trying to solve the murder? People can’t see these spirits who flit from scene to scene criticising the police and trying to prick Almeida’s memory.

The excitement of the first few pages wanes very quickly. Every character, ghost or human, speaks with the same light-hearted but critical flippancy, always searching for the next one-liner. They all sound the same. There is no character development. There is no hook on which to hang empathy or interest. I didn’t care about anybody.

At about one hundred pages I stopped. I’m filing this one under Booker Judges Seduced by Newness. It can join the 2015 Booker winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings by Jamaican writer Marlon James.


I was very disappointed.

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7½ by Christos Tsiolkas

Greek-Australian writer, Christos Tsiolkas.

I have heard several heated discussions about this book. I’m a Tsiolkas fan but my appreciation has waned since his Damascus which was an ambitious work and although there were some evocative sections it was ultimately a disappointment for this reader.
In fact I’ve been reading Tsiolkas since The Jesus Man (1999) – good, then Dead Europe (2005) -fantastic, and then, of course, The Slap (2008) – brilliant, then Barracuda (2013) -good, Merciless Gods (2014) – very good, then Damascus (2019) – not so good.
I found this one in a swap-library at a modest beachfront hotel in Candidasa, Bali, my island home now for 12 years. So, I picked it up and exchanged it for several copies of The Economist.

All of these matters politics, sexuality, race, history, gender, morality, the future – all of them now
bore me.

It’s a novel about a writer going away by himself to write a novel. It’s a mixture of autobiography,
memory, criticism, natural history, angst, and confession.

Most writers are glorified and bewildered by the fiction writing process. The difficulty of squeezing in the writing process into one’s life seems a rich seam of inspiration. And it is! But not, I fear, for readers. What Tsiolkas has tried to do is worthy of trying but there’s a reason that it’s not attempted more often. I’m not really interested in how a stylish but comfortable pair of shoes is made; I just want them to be stylish and comfortable.

Although he tells us there are 3 stories he wants to write we only really get to know one: Sweet Thing.

A young couple, Paul and Jemma, who met as porn movie actors, and their son, Neal. An elderly gentleman offers Paul $US150,000 for 3 nights with him. They need the money. There isn’t a moral dilemma here, the tension is the trip back to the USA, and not the encounter with the desotted man but the attempt to reacquaint himself with friends, family, and country; a trip into, and escape from, his personal idea of hell, with undertones of, and references to, Dante’s Inferno, the first part of 14th Century writer’s epic poem, The Divine Comedy.

The marketing blurbs on the covers put me in mind of a writer who isn’t comfortable with his idea, a
long held idea, he tells us, and so needs to isolate himself with only the idea for company.

…truth and imagination are enemies.

I don’t believe that: fiction, via our imagination, can help us see the truth. He says he wants to write about beauty. But what does that mean? Beautiful people? Beautiful actions? Beautiful relationships? He loves the idea of writing about beauty but doesn’t articulate how it may be achieved. What is most vivid in this book are the scenes where beauty is nowhere to be seen.

Every artist, very writer, must have an element of the superstitious to them … we have faith in
alchemy. Yes.

He gives in to the temptation of writing as therapy, yet doesn’t acknowledge that such self-absorption
sidelines the reader. All writers must know that writing is, as he says, via alchemy; writers want that
alchemy to be understandable, enjoyable, want it to resonate with the reader, and so edit it to make it
more so. I don’t know how a writer can ever ignore the reader.

I am a writer, and I believe in the utility of by accident, its necessity.

There are moments of verbosity that sound forced but can be forgiven since this is not so much a novel as a DIY manual – with examples.

Tsiolkas’s narrative jumps seamlessly, grammatically speaking, from his minute by minute existence at the beach house to the story he’s writing, Sweet Thing, to memories, some long lost, as he paddles around the beach and house while trying to write. The ‘work’ is always present. This may make the reading confusing but it doesn’t. Writers, I’m sure, know this feeling, which causes great annoyance to the people who share their lives: their current project is forever taking the writer away from, and getting in the way of, them and the present.

There are pesky little mistakes that the editors should’ve picked up but didn’t. He describes an eagle
circling the ocean and beach then diving into the sea and emerging with a fish in its beak. Is this an
attempt at writing about beauty? Eagles are raptors and so grab their prey with their feet as they skim
the water. This mistake doesn’t worry me, as it might others, since I no longer assume that the universe
of the book I’m reading is my universe. However, it does grate a little. Maybe it was a cormorant or booby; they do dive for their prey; he just thought it was an eagle, or wanted it to be an eagle. And no bird eats on the wing. But, maybe it was the image, ‘of the profound amorality of nature’ he was after: ‘… drops of blood and flesh [that] fall from the fish it has taken; they fall softly as rain …’ The image is what’s important even if the details are wrong. Anyway, I don’t let it undermine the veracity of the narrative. Some would.

There wasn’t a time when I wanted to stop reading, although I did skim the more purple prose of his
nature writing and his repetitive description of bodily odours. I’m interested in writers and their writing
processes, as some readers are, and would’ve liked more of it. We get the main bits of Sweet Thing but not the continuing, and potentially intriguing, detail. This reinforced my idea that he never quite trusted the idea to stand on its own and so wrote it into a story about the writing of it. It isn’t clear whether the work, Sweet Thing, actually was finished, or written. The end of this book is more about the end of the retreat and getting back to his partner than the end of the novel he was trying to write.

Once I finished reading, I felt like it wasn’t written to be read; it was written to be written. As a reader, I
felt a little sidelined, left out.

There’s no doubt Tsiolkas is a writer of talent, authority, and variety. What this reader wants is for him
to return to the truth-telling of family. He is SO good at that. It is, after all, a bottomless well.

Here is a longish interview, via the Avid Reader Bookshop, with Tsiolkas about 7½.

You can buy the Kindle or Paperback edition here.

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