The September Issue

Mr Andrew Riemer
Chief Book Reviewer
Sydney Morning Herald


Dear Mr Riemer

Thank you for many hours of enjoyment over the years of reading your thoughtful and erudite reviews. This week-end's review of the Best Australian Essays 2010
was particularly helpful, especially for its comment:

The only disappointment amongst these frequently anthologised writes is so and so's pretentious and condescending demolition of the Minogue sisters. I wonderered: why bother?

This article was orginially published in The Monthly magazine.

I've subscribed to this magazine since it was launched, not without mixed feelings as it has sometimes lost its way and changed editors with great chaos last year. Its fiction selections are very uneven and its poetry choice is woeful but its long essays on politics and crime are often really good and Robert Forster's music reviews are usually the best thing in it.

I had a single issue left on my current subscription after the September issue. The pointless over-long article on the Minogues was enough for me to resolve not to renew. Then of course the October issue was really good so I changed my mind.

Your review made me realise I wasn't alone in disliking this article.

In answer to your question, I think the new young gun editor trying to attract new readers from newstand browsers with his cover.

I'm surprised Rhianna isn't on the current issue.

Yours sincerely

Mary

The Illywacker challenge

Finished!!

Finally!

And do I feel better?

Is there a sense of achievement that I can cross Illywacker off my list after four long weeks of not enjoying reading?

Well no actually.

And knowing the ending - which was actually the bit before the ending - didn't ruin it because well I didn't care at all by then.

Scrivener Avril Rolfe reminded me last week that part of this could be that he's not really that nice to his female characters. Or apparently, to his ex-wife.

I might go and read something sweet, lighthearted and life-affirming now. Back soon.

Illywacked

A long time ago, probably not long after it was published in 1985, I overhead my mother telling my father what happened at the end of Peter Carey's novel Illywhacker.

I was cross because I'd wanted to read it and at that stage still thought that there was no point in starting a novel if you knew the ending.

Now I can't quite remember what she said so I thought I should give it a go when a copy turned up at home. After all I've read most of his other novels and some of his stories and essays and usually found his work interesting and funny if a bit disturbing in places (I mean The Tax Inspector was just a bit too icky in ways I don't like to think about even now).

But I can still remember enough of her description of what happened to look for clues to see how we're going to get there from here or here or here.

I'm wondering if this is why I'm reading it far slower than usual. After three weeks I'm only two-thirds of the way through its 600 pages.

It's not like the prose is any less engaging to that in the books of his that kept me reading all night. He has a lovely way of putting words together but this is the first one of his that I've been able to put down. And not just once. Every day on my bus ride, I've got up to something I don't want to read and just

stopped.

This book won heaps of prizes and had great reviews but at a distance of two decades if you know how it turns out, it just seems to be trying too hard to reflect "Australianess" in a novel.

There's a broad sweep of historical events from the Gold Rush to the Depression (so far). There's heaps of geography with descriptions of Melbourne, Geelong, Sydney and dozens of small towns from South Australia into south-east Queensland. (Maybe he'll get to WA). There's the "national character" of larrikinism compared to the experience of migrants from Europe and Asia. The lives of country folk and would-be communists are compared to the bourgeois and bohemian. There's drought (haven't got to flooding rains yet but there's time), There's exploitation of fauna and aknowledgement of the land belonging to the as yet invisible indigenous peoples. There's even a child lost in the bush.

So it just feels a bit like he was ticking the boxes of what used be called the Great Australian Novel.

I hope I change my mind by the end.

That's better

I've been a bit shall we say critical about how women's sport, particularly the so-called W-League football is promoted here and, more tragically, here.

This season I think they have different marketers.

Or maybe they've just given up trying to get blokes along to watch women play sport.

Either way, I'm pleased that my three-year-old is getting emails from girlsfc every week because there's nothing remotely resembling last year's OTT glamour photography.

I don't even mind the "girl" business because it's meant to be for kids.

Well done!

Excuse me, I have a question

Last Sunday I was pushing a pram around the Melbourne CBD with my first hangover in years waiting until it was time to go to the airport to fly home.

After many retail adventures where unnecessary and expensive things were bought to make a three-year-old stop yelling quite so loudly when Mummy's head was hurting, I sought refuge in a secondhand bookshop and my daughter fell asleep.

During this lull I foundJustin Evans's A Good and Happy Child for $1.

I must admit to buying it in jest to see if it would work as parenting aid. To be fair it was reasonably effective for the rest of the day to say "Look baby, it says here you've got to be good and happy."

But the other day I looked inside and realised it was really good and certainly did not deserve to be sold for so little. Evil book retailing industry that causes such disconnect between price and quality!

In the book, a man goes to see a therapist because he says he can't bear to touch his newborn child. He mentions it wasn't his first time in therapy but he doesn't like to say what happened before. The therapist tells him to write everything down and the book purports to be him recording both his present day consultations and his recollections of the imaginary friend he had in childhood who made him do bad things. The way it's told, many things could be either supernatural manifestations or psychiatric problems. It is extremely spooky. Two nights in a row I put it down because I preferred to read it in the nice safe daylight.

The trouble is that I have questions. Many questions. Things are left out or not clarified. The present day timeline is bery disjointed. The unreliable narrating means it's really hard to know what really happened. Why does the book stop there exactly? Is that a good thing or bad? What happened next? Is any of it real? What happened to his mother? What? What? What?

In the past I would have just wondered. It was always far too hard to write fan letters care of publishers and would have seem impertinent to accost someone at a book signing or something.

But now writers all have websites. It's just so easy to ask them anything.

Anything at all.

I guess my question now is do I really want to know?

My kind of kids' book

I've been reading a lot of kids' books lately.

It's fair to say my three-year-old and I have different approaches to this.

I like to read a book once then move on. She prefers the same one to be read to her ooh say 50 times in a two week period and THEN she'll move on.

She doesn't care much about character development or logical plots or animals behaving appropriately (I mean lions and tigers regularly inhabit the same environment in kids' books! sheesh!!) but if it rhymes or if the picture are good or include bottom jokes, she's stoked.

We did agree about one we borrowed rececently called Abigail goes to the Beach by Felix Pirani first published in 1988.

I don't know if kids' books were different back then and I doubt they were because I think that's when Enid Blyton started to be bowdlerised but it certainly reflects a different approach to what I usually find in library books.

It starts off like a Pamela Allen meditation on the joys of parenthood where a man and a little girl called Abigail go to the beach carrying lots and lots of stuff.

Then the dad sits down and reads a book to HIMSELF while Abigail builds the biggest sandcastle in the world.

Occasionally she asks him how his book is going.

Occasionally he gives her an empty beer can to add to her sandcastle.

Occasionally she threatens people trying to knock her sandcastle down with her father's violence.

They have an excellent time doing their own thing next to each other and agree to come back tomorrow

but there's alcohol and shouting and absolutely no moralising.

Brilliant!

It's all right! You can still trust me!

Yesterday a woman asked me where the train station was. I told her. It took a while to explain because she was more than a kilometre away and going completely the wrong direction.

She asked what street she was on. I told her. She insisted she was on another one. I explained how to get to the one she wanted. It took a while because she was more than a kilometre away and as I said going completely the wrong direction.

She asked whether I lived around there. I said a lived a kilometre in the opposite direction so she stopped listening to me and went up to someone else to ask them instead.

Now I was really miffed by this. People regularly cross streets to ask me directions. I've explained how to get to the most obscure places in the CBD to strangers with and without maps. If I don't know the precise answer I reassure people to go particular ways and then ask someone else. And not just here. On every holiday I've ever been on people have asked me where places are.I've always thought I must look like I know where I'm going even when I don't.

But yesterday I guess I didn't.

Yesterday I was pushing a pram and reading a story out loud to a little girl about going to the beach.

I knew parenthood would affect how people perceived me but this is getting silly now.

Did this happen?

Almost halfway through Dorothy Hewett's The Toucher * I found

Why did she keep repeating the same pattern, falling for these vicious, manipulative little men? And suddenly she remembered that time in Canberra, when a friend of hers, a composer, had been commissioned to write a serious post-modernist piece for the merry-go-round in the city square. You had to put on earphones to listen. All the respectable people paid to climb on board - politicians, university lecturers, civil servants, school teachers, social workers, clerks, all dressed up in their dark business suits, sitting very stiffly, circling round and round on those prancing wooden horses, listening without a smile. Sometimes she thought life was like that, circling round and round, repeating oneself, unsmiling listening.

(1993, Mcphee Gribble p 104)

Apart from the life lesson, a concert on a merry-go-round - especially the merry-go-round I had lunch next to most sunny days for about four years - sounds pretty exciting. Of course they'd have to have had done something about hurdy gurdy music.

*About which, I'm not entirley sure what to think until I get to the end and I'm really a bit anxious becuase I have a DREADFUL feeling the March-October romance (when the October is a wheelchair bound woman relying on an unreliable ex-con for practical help in an isolated house) is NOT going to end well for her but I got such a stern look from this woman on the bus this morning when I skipped to the last page to see if October was still alive (it's third person) that I decided I should keep myslef in suspense.

It's all right for some

People have been quite mean about Martin Amis over the years. Just because he's a bit clever and got a large book advance once (for a book I haven't read) and had a famous father and he even got a bit of stick because he said he was upset that one of his extended family was murdered by a famous serial killer because some people thought he didn't know her well enough to grieve publicly for this poor woman who had been thought of as a runaway for decades until they found her body in a house of horrors in the 1990s which is a bit of closure but utterly tragic and I think if my second cousin once removed had suffered a similar fate especially if I had been at a young and tender age then I'd be a bit upset too.

Anyway, I've always been quite fond of him.

His books have made me laugh and cry and despite the pyrotechnics (I mean honestly, managing to depict everything going backwards in Time's Arrow without being tiresome was quite a trick) and the fact that he's always making me THINK a bit more than most books I'm reading for fun, I think he's rather sweet and probably a big old softie behind the tough facade.

But I do find myself with a bit of something that can only be described as resentment after finishing The Pregnant Widow

I mean, why didn't I go to university with people who happen to have castles in Italy who invite me to stay so I can spend months and months sitting by the pool reading my way through centuries of English novels?

We're assured repeateld that everything in the castle really happened and it's with the greatest amount of envy I read how much the main character read.

It was A LOT of books.

But they were chosen to make LITERARY POINTS about GENRE

Of course, I'm not sure it's meant TOO literally because with the best will in the world I doubt if anyone could read all of Austen in a week as he appears to do unless the summer is in fact eight months long...

And even though the book itself is hundreds and hundreds of pages about young folk getting it on and talking about getting it on it's such a BOOKISH book that I felt like my MIND was involved.

I mean he lends a woman he doesn't realise he fancies Pride and Prejudice

and

they

TALK about it

with quotes

and new theories about the sexual persuasion of one of the Misses Bennet (not to name names)

I mean, I once lent a boy I liked Under Milkwood and he never read it much less spend hours coming up with a dissertation on life in a Welsh village.

Sigh.

On tea and hockey and the dangers of swans

Last week I tried very very hard not to follow my usual path of wasting Jasper Fforde's latest book by reading it all at once.

I did very well for a couple of days. I limited reading to the busride to and from work and a bit before going to sleep. I didn't avoid watching telly or talking to people. But then by Sunday night, there was only about a quarter of it left. So I read a few pages then a few more then I thought "just one more chapter" and then there was such a small number of pages left that it seemed silly to save them and oops what do you know that's the end already and it's 1:00 am.

And now I'll have to wait another year until there's a sequel.

Which of course is FANTASTIC news - I mean that there'll be a sequel - because Shades of Grey is marvellous.

He's used his usual preposterousness that made the Thursday Next series such an absurdist delight. Everyone seems to drink tea and play hockey but are acutely aware of the dangers of swan attack and ball lightning.

Gradually, you realise that this is a very different society from ours that arose from the ashes of a dimly-remembered Something that Happened and the characters are not really much like you and me at all.

It's as if the coloured children from Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake were re-imagined as P G Wodehouse characters.

And it's utterly charming.