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.