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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The Death of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee

South African born writer, John Maxwell Coetzee, relocated to Adelaide, South Australia in 2002 and became an Australian citizen in 2006. He won the Booker Prize twice: for Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and for Disgrace in 1999. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003.

The story is simple. The language is simple but with purple patches – “silvery spheres too many to count rotating about each other with an unearthly hum, in neverending space”: simple words describing a cosmic image. This and oft used Spanish words and names together with the present tense and an absence of contractions gives the narrative a strange tone, a mysterious placement. This is heightened by a curious grammatical pairing of pronoun with proper noun: ” …says he, Simón” (but only for this character, no other) hinting at a possible translated text from an old time. Halfway through the book you will discover that although this book you are reading is in English, the story is in Spanish. Only the 10 year-old boy has an English name: David, an orphan, who plays football well because he also dances. He is a strong willed and serious boy.

Unlike most novels there is a lack of detail. Clothes, the weather, the place, and surroundings are minimally described, if at all. This has a further curious effect of making the work sound like a fable.

He is in the care of Simón, also a dancer, and Inès; they try to behave like real parents. David becomes enamored of Dr Julio Fabricante, the proprietor of a local orphanage and football team, who has a liberal free-thinking but anti-book learning attitude to raising children. David is attracted to the idea of orphan-dom and decides to live at the orphanage. Simón can’t stop him and Inès is angry at him for not trying harder. Their relationship, tenuous but stable but only because of the boy, is further strained.

When David’s legs mysteriously stop working the orphanage gives him back to the couple. David is broken. In hospital his condition is mysterious but he gathers attention from other patients, visitors, and staff, including a reformed murderer of David’s early acquaintance working as a janitor. He tells them stories from his head about Don Quixote, the only book he has ever read and it remains the only book he reads. They all gather around his bed listening to him. He is called ‘Young Master’ and he has an old dog who, along with the reformed murderer, are the only ones who understand him.


What does it all mean? There are parallels with the life of Jesus: a boy whose parents are not his parents, a boy of a weak body but a strong mind, a boy who garners followers, a boy who befriends sinners, alianates authorities, and has a life infused by an old text.

Some writers, John Boyne, the writer of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), in particular, have been heavily criticised and even beleaguered and verbally abused for not, according to his abusers, getting his facts straight. His detractors obviously expect a novel to be ‘in’ the same universe as they are. This is an unnecessary assumption. Made-up stories about witches and elves, vampires and blood-drinking, walking talking trees and ents are obviously NOT in the universe of the reader. Why then assume that other made-up stories must be? Just because the world of a novel ‘looks like’ the world of the reader, readers should not assume that it is.

Every made-up story exists in its own unique universe. It is an example of speculative fiction.

Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus (2019) is a made-up story. It’s universe is similar but not the same as ours. Strange things happen and strange ideas are championed for reasons that go to the heart of the work. Readers need to find their own unique meaning of what they read. This is part of the joy of reading fiction. This understanding, which few people understand, is the sole responsibility of the reader. It has nothing to do with the writer. When you read it and discover your own meaning it will be very different to mine. I’m sure.

Its futile wondering what Coetzee meant – it’s very likely, Coetzee being a novelist (a conduit of literary creativity), that he doesn’t know what he meant.

Although the title may give away how the story unfolds, it is not as one would expect. In fact the ‘end’ of the story loses narrative tension, but still the expectation of what you don’t expect serves the same purpose.

Whatever it is, it’s a bloody entertaining and intriguing read.

Recently established at the University of Adelaide is the J M Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice where its namesake is the Patron. It is a research centre devoted to understanding creativity and a cultural hub where leading literary, musical and multimedia scholars and artists can learn from one another and collaborate.

You can hear the man himself pronounce his name here. (John Cortzee – jon kert SEE)

You can buy the book in various formats here.

Here you can watch a short reading by J.M. Coetzee at the University of Adelaide’s Traverses conference in 2014.

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The Boat by Nam Le

Vietnamese-Australian writer, Nam Le

The thing is not to write what no one else could have written, but to write what only you could have written.

When this book came out in 2008 the Australian literary scene lit up! The collection of longish short stories heralded a major new writer of extraordinary scope and skill. He was 27.

The first story, Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice is as one would expect. The narrator, Nam, a Vietnamese Australian living in the US and studying writing at the Iowa Writers Centre is hosting his father, a Vietnamese war veteran whose relationship with his son has been fractious. It is now better but still not grounded and never easy. References to the other stories in this collection make this first story work like a preface to the book itself. When Nam, then a lawyer, told his father that he was quitting his job in Melbourne to go to Iowa to become a writer his father said ‘The captive buffalo hates the free buffalo.’ He was prone to talk in proverbs.


His description of peak-hour traffic: it’s rinse of noise.
His smile was as stiff as his suit.
… their amusement, coughing it around their circle like a wet scrap.


The second story, Cartagena, is set in Colombia and is very unexpected. It knocks your socks off!
The syntax is simple, no contractions, the occasional use of favela Spanish, restricted punctuation – no quotation marks, and a recurring misuse of a verb: ‘Luis, who had the same age,” makes it sound like a mistranslation. All these grammar tricks conspire to give veracity to this 1st person narrative. It feels authentic, belying the fact that the author is not a young Colombian thug, but a young Vietnamese Australian. The narrator is Juan Pablo, fourteen and a half years old, a sicario – hitman – who has been obedient, a faithful soldado and loyal to his agent, El Padre, except recently. He did not make his last hit. He said he could not find him. He lied to his agent whom he has never met. The hit is his best friend, Hernando. Juan Pablo is in deadly trouble. He knows this because he has been summoned. Everyone knows this can only mean one thing. No spoilers here but, well, a devastating climax. It was this story that was scorched in my brain from my first reading over a decade ago.


And then comes Meeting Elise. A completely different tone, more traditional grammar and another 1st person narrative: a middle aged artist whom women leave and who’s having trouble with hemorrhoids and colon polyps. He fucks things up by talking too much, mostly the truth, he reckons – too much verbiage, too much booze. He’s getting ready to meet his long lost 18 year old daughter, a musician, whom he hasn’t seen for 17 years. He’s exhilarated but scared, sorry but expectant. It all sounds like the work of a different writer.


Halflead High
This story is a 3rd person coming of age; a coastal high school student full of raging hormones, adult disappointments, and life getting in the way; an ill mother, high school jealousies, loves, lusts, and betrayals. It’s touching, recognisable, and insightful. 


His mother was dying and seemed torn between ignoring it and rushing towards it.


It’s lines like this, and those above, that for me cements a writer’s worth. Something clicks in the reader – it did with me – simply stated but describes an unrecognised truth made manifest in a line like that.

Story No. 5 is a 1st person narrative: this time a young Japanese girl in an evacuation centre sleeping “four mats away from the radio”. She and all the other children scrub the wooden floors of the temple till they shine and press their hands together for the glorious Imperial Forces who fought the reviled enemy China and now the cowardly enemy, America. Soybean rice with mugwort grass is better than pounded rice cakes. Do without until victory.  Honorable death before surrender. It’s the last days of the war. The text is dense, no delineated dialogue, just a stream of consciousness from a little girl. Short, plain sentences. Present tense. Subjects jump around: scrubbing floors, running during exercise, Big Sister, Mother covered in dust, rice soup, Imperial heros, the wind, the loud warnings, Big Brother who has gone to Confidential Place, sore knees, the sounds of  B24s, or is that a B27? cicadas, hunger. The rabbity mind of a little girl, named Little Turnip. The title, Hiroshima, is ominous.


The 6th story is the least successful; Tehran Calling follows a young American woman travelling to Iran to see her old university friend only to be caught up in youth unrest, Iranian hypocrisy, and self-deception. However, the syntax and form is different from each of the other stories. It’s as if Le is searching for his voice, his tone, his style, the work he feels most comfortable with. But astoundingly each story has a style that is different but authentic, authorial, with weight and verisimilitude.

Style is everything. Style is eye, window, and view. And, of course, when it serves its purpose, style is beside the point, is rightly subsumed by subjectivity and subject. Perhaps the handiest definition of literature is language where style and subject are inseparable. (2021) He certainly proves it.

‘Why do you write about Colombians, Japanese, and Iranian girls? What about us!” says his father in the first story. So he does.

The last and title story, The Boat; I was forced to schedule daytime reading time for it. Reading it before sleep was impossible. The opening scene of the view from the crowded bilges of an unstable refugee boat on the very high seas is terrifying. In appalling, almost unimaginable conditions where bodily functions are just part of the boat’s geography. Drinking water is rare and hallowed; human relationships based on nothing but instincts. A little boy obsessed with counting heads after every splash overboard. A little boy, like an old man squeezed within a skeletal frame.

It was a face dead of surprise. 

The range, skill, and boldness of these stories is breathtaking. Seventeen years ago a novel was eagerly anticipated as if short stories weren’t somehow good enough. How stupid is that? If Le writes nothing ever again what he has written here will cement his name in Australian literature as a voice to be honoured. Along with Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, every Aussie home needs this book on their shelf.

Here you can watch Nam Le reading a short excerpt from the 1st story.

And here you can hear Nam le talk intimately about writing and why he does it.

You can buy the book is various formats here.

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The Broken Shore by Peter Temple

Australian writer Peter Temple 1946 – 2018

I’d forgotten I had this book on my shelf. I read it when it first came out in 2008 with trumpets blaring and accolades galore. I remembered little about it. I don’t read much crime fiction but made an exception with this one. I lost my entire library on our move to Bali twelve years ago so don’t know how this copy got onto my shelf, nor what made me read it again.

Temple is famous for his Jack Irish crime series, but this is a stand alone work which won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award: the UK’s Crime Writers Association’s best crime novel of the year (2007)

My copy is looking a bit faded and world-worn, a bit like its protagonist, Joseph Cashin. He’s a good guy cop, unambitious, world-weary, smart, a body racked with past injuries, but with a healthy disrespect for authority.

It was darkening when Cashin reached home, the wind ruffling the trees on the hill, strumming the corrugated iron roof. He got the fire going, took out a six-pack of Carlsberg, put on L’elisir d’amore, Donizetti, sank into the old chair, cushion in the small of his back. Tired in the trunk, hurting in the pelvis, pains down his legs, he swallowed two aspirins with the first swig of beer.

Short sharp sentences separated by commas, semicolons too posh for Joe Cashin. It gives the narrative that staccato American punch epitomised by the famous American crime writer, Dashiell Hammett. But 3rd person here, not 1st.
His dialogue between Aussie men is perfectly obtuse, as if each alternative line has been omitted. I was surprised at the extent of the ‘foul’ language, although appropriate for these Australian male characters. The rural setting and tone belying its contemporary (2005) release.

A well respected and wealthy local is found dead in his home. What seems a simple break-in-gone-wrong, exacerbated by a botched police chase which leaves all three suspects dead, leads everyone to think case closed, despite or because of police efforts. All except Joe Cashin that is. The crime formula is honoured: tight-lipped family, newly exposed secrets, increased sinister misdeeds, a seemingly unrelated but vicious murder, a dead man proves not to be, lies and police corruption, a few red herrings, and a sexul dalience. Good crime fiction stuff. It’s staying on my shelf.

You can buy the book in various formats here.

A television movie was made of it in 2013 staring Don Hany and Claudia Karvan, directed by Rowan Woods from an adapted screenplay by Andrew Knight. You can watch the trailer here.


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Amongst Women by John McGahern

Irish writer John McGahern (1934 – 2006)

And so continues my love-affair with Irish fiction.

“John McGahern is the Irish novelist everyone should read”, says Colm Tóibín and, considered by some as, arguably the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett. I’m a little bashful to then admit this is the first McGahern work I have read; it won’t be my last.

McGahern’s work has universally been praised. I often think to myself when I hear or read comments about ‘good writing’; so that is good writing, yes, I can see that, but what makes it good?

Recently, I was contacted by a British writer who wanted me to review her recently finished novel. I assume she had come across this very blog where she obtained my contact details. If I agreed to her request she would send me her eBook free of charge. I did; she did. She had created a publishing house in order to publish and promote her work which I thought was very entrepreneurial of her. I began reading with rosy expectation. It began with a Prologue which I read. I read it again. I then wrote to her to apologise but I was not the reader she was searching for and that I would not be reading the rest. I was polite and blamed myself for my lack of understanding and appreciation.

I had just began reading Amongst Women (1991) and hurried back to it.

What makes writing good is an economy of language: clear and apt sentences of time and place; plain words, character-building skills via close writing1 with evocative dialogue; and the necessary understanding of the importance of the narrative voice. Oh, and a deep understanding and interest in human nature. Of course, grammar and syntax are also important but secondarily so.

John McGahern’s Amongst Women is an example of good writing.

Out of the many false starts her life had made she felt they were witnessing this pure beginning that she would seize and make true. No longer, exposed and vulnerable, would she have to chase and harry after happiness.

You could not successfully trim even one word, nor would you need to add another.

Michael Moran, based largely on McGahern’s own father, is an aging Irish farmer from the north west. He has five children: three daughters, Mona, Shiela, and Maggie – and two sons, the estranged eldest, Luke, and the youngest, Michael, still at school. This is a story about a strict father confident in his position as the head of the house and a God-fearing Catholic. The latter underpins and authorises the former. He is a tyrant, grumpy one minute, then playful, then grumpy again. His women both love and fear him. Words of love and understanding are rare. As a widower he marries a woman, Rose, visiting from Scotland. She succumbed to his handsomeness and learns to tolerate his moods. She, in fact, becomes like another daughter. Moran among his four women.

Irish Catholic rural life, and its decline, at a time of great change, women’s emancipation, the authority of the Church, and the practical considerations church-goers have to make to get on with their lives; these are the themes expertly depicted. There is no narrative curve, no climax, just the rhythms of family life; a McGahern specialty. It is his most famous and best loved work.

Amongst Women was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won The Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literary Award (1991). It was adapted for television in 1998 and won Best Television Drama at the Irish Film and Television Awards.

All the episodes of the television series can be found on YouTube. Simply search for Amongst Women.

Here is an interview with John McGahern presented by The Howard Poetry and Literary Society of Columbia Maryland, USA in 1993.

You can buy the book in various formats here.

  1. Close writing (or free indirect discourse) describes a special type of third-person narration that slips in and out of characters’ consciousness. In other words, characters’ thoughts, feelings, and words are filtered through the third-person narrator into the narrative style. The opening few lines of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) by James Joyce is a grand and famous example of close writing.
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Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Irish writer Claire Keegan

There is something about Irish fiction that presses buttons in me that I can’t quite name. Whatever their names I’ll keep searching, reading until I discover them. Of course, the all-out Irish fiction writer is James Joyce. I’ve yet to tackle Ulysses (1920) – it’s s t i l l on my to-read pile – but if you haven’t read his masterful and very accessible short story collection, Dubliners (1914) you should. And his autobiography, unusually but intriguingly written in the 3rd person, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is also richly accessible. I have an Irish friend living in Europe who usually visits every year and is due again later in this one who invariably brings me books; I call him my book fairy. An avid reader himself he keeps me stocked in established and new Irish writers for which I am very grateful.

Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, John Boyne, Edna O’Brien, Sebastian Barry, Donal Ryan, Nuala O’Faolain, Anna Burns, Colum McCann, Sally Rooney, Niall Williams, Eimear McBride, and John McGahern (reading him now) and their sideways-up names all look down at me from my bookshelf above.

Claire Keegan is a new one for me. However, this book cover is dotted with praise for another of her works, Foster (2010) and, like this one, is a long short story but given kudos by being lovingly solely published as a handsome hardcover. Thank you Faber & Faber. However, Keegan calls Foster a long short story; she calls Small Things LIke These (2021) a novel: “… something needs to be as long as it needs to be.”

It is also reminiscent of a Joyce story: simple everyday people and their simple everyday lives are explored until something astonishing happens, sometimes only in their minds, and they are changed dramatically. Such is the plot-line of Small Things LIke These.

With the onset of winter – every Irish novel is essentially determined by the weather – Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, devout Catholic, and father of five daughters is so run off his feet he fears the tyres on his delivery truck will wear to the rim causing his wife Eileen to miss out on her essential domestic repairs. He himself was fatherless but he and his young mother were taken in by a wealthy widow and brought up, if not lovingly, then certainly with care and consideration so whenever he goes to deliver coal to the convent and the laundry and staffed by young husbandless mothers he feels something disquieting but resembling kinship. On one such occasion he is confronted by a wayward young mother, dressed shockingly inadequately given the weather who pleads with him to take her to the river so she can drown herself. So serious and desperate is this mother, a mere child herself, that his automatic refusal disturbs him and rakes his mind well into the next day.

I won’t tell you what he finds himself doing on the next chilly evening – no spoilers here – but in keeping with the tragedy of those notorious Irish nun-run institutions and their work-house laundries his decision will change his and his family’s life forever.

The language is remarkably simple but every now and again contains an oyster of verbal surprise and recognition and you are forced to stop for a moment to contemplate the enormity of the insination of a few deft-chosen words. A characteristic of Irish prose.

“When I was young,” she says, “my mother taught me that if I went to the butcher and was choosing a piece of beef to roast, it should be marbled with fat. And I actually see good prose in the same way – marbled with what doesn’t seem to be necessary.” The Guardian. That ‘marble’ is detail, precise and essential, to give the work verisimilitude: the appearance of being real.

Keegan is already being hailed as one of the best short story writers of the 21st Century.

You can read Claire Keegan’s short story ‘So Late in the Day’ courtesy of The New Yorker and/or listen to her read it here.

Here is an interview with Claire Keegan from 2010 about her writing.

You can purchase the eBook and others by Claire Keegan here.

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Preservation by Jock Serong

Australia writer Jock Serong

On the north bank of the North Esk River just before it joins the Tamar in Launceston, North East Tasmania sits the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, the biggest regional art gallery in Australia. Here you can see the world’s oldest bottle of beer salvaged from the wreck of the Sydney Cove which in 1796 floundered on Preservation Island, a small island in the Furneaux Group off the NE coast of Tasmania. This book, published in October 2018, is a novelistic version of the aftermath and the journey by long boat to what is now Ninety Mile Beach in SE Victoria, then on foot for over 600 kilometers by seventeen of the survivors as they attempt to find their way to Sydney, raise the alarm, rescue the remaining crew, and salvage the cargo still on the wreck on the southern end of Preservation Island.

Only three of the survivors, more dead than alive, are rescued: Mr Figge, a tea merchant, but really a charlatan, William Clark, in charge of the cargo, mainly rum, and Clark’s manservant, a Bengali lascar, indentured sailor. A Lieutenant in the service of Governor Hunter, Joshua Grayling, is charged with the task of finding out how their horrific injuries were inflicted and how their fourteen companions died.

The story is told via several voices: the usual novelistic narrator, Mr Figge, William Clark and his journal, and the lascar Srinivas. Once the survivors are in care and recovery back at Sydney the back stories are given time to be revealed. The journey from Calcutta was horrendous; it’s a miracle the Sydney Cove made it so far. The tension of the awful journey, the possibility of death is ever present, is heightened by Mr Figge who only several lines into his story reveals his criminal past and intent. He’s the villain of the piece but only the reader knows this.

The story of the 600 mile trek along the south east coast of New South Wales is full of mystery, danger, betrayal, and friendly and dangerous natives; it’s a lawless land where anti-social deeds mean little when social norms are absent. It’s an adventure story, murder mystery of the early years of the Sydney settlement. However, it doesn’t quite meet expectations. That has something to do with the fact that the story is based on truth and although this is written as fiction, I felt Serong was inhibited a little by his aim of sticking to the historical truth. A moot point.

This is a diverting and well-written yarn. I’ll be searching out other Serong titles: Quota (2014), The Rules of Backyard Cricket (2016), On the Java Ridge (2017) and The Burning Island (2020) which won the 2021 ARA Historical Novel Prize and features an older Joshua Grayling and his daughter Eliza in another tilt at “epic storytelling.”

You can find the ebook edition here along with other formats and other Serong titles.

Here you can watch various interviews with Jock Serong about his work.

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A Perfectly Good Man by Patrick Gale (2nd reading)

British writer Patrick Gale lives in Cornwall

I first read and blogged about this book in June 2016. It led me to add Patrick Gale to my list of literary favs. I had read his Rough Music (2000) years before and read it again in 2019. Having now read most, yet not all, of Gale’s twenty one books, these two stand out, for me, as his best.

Recently I watched an interview with him in which he mentions that the devastating opening scene was based on a news item and it was this first scene that he wrote without any idea what was going to happen next … except that the two characters, the perfectly good man, Father Barnaby Johnson, and a young man, Lenny, had to be connected in some, as yet, unforeseen way.

This to me is the essence of what novel writing is: a strong scene that just has to be written and then the writer in the privacy of his own mind, experience, and in a space (room) of one’s own (thank you Virginia Woolf) lets the subconscious out for a walk and writes down what he sees and hears. This is how most novelists work; they’re called pansters (by some): they ride by the seat of their pants. I’ve yet to meet or hear from a writer who plans every detail before writing begins, although I hear that Gustave Flaubert was one.

I’ve said this before but it’s worth saying again: if you are surprised what you read on the page it’s highly likely that the writer was too.

For any would-be novelist this book is a must read. The idea of letting a strong novelistic event with only two characters and one setting plant the seed of the story of a man’s life spanning half a decade is tantalising. The timeframe of the action is segmented and re-arranged. Gale loves taking time and playing around with it. Hence chapters called “Lenny at 20” are followed by “Dorothy at 24” are followed by “Barnaby at 52” and finally, “Nuala at 52” is followed by the final chapter “Barnaby at 8”. This format makes each chapter not unlike a short story although all of them are preempted with known knowledge which allows the reader to understand and sometimes realise an important reason or revelation that is only known by the reader, and not by any of the characters. You feel privileged.

And that’s how you learn about the connection between Father Barnaby Johnson and young Lenny: it’s not stated, you work it out.

You can find many of Gale’s books, including this one, here.

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