Update: Rachel MorleyWeek in Review

Tit for Tatvertising

Coyte
Leo Coyte, from the series Mystic Misfits, 2015, oil on linen, 76 x 76 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney. Photo: Docqment

It was around this time last Friday that the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian released the first chapter of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman in text and audio form, as part of an appetite-whetting pre-publication marketing campaign. As the moment approached, readers around the world literally counted down the hours to the pre-publication run, and when the chapter appeared the internet seemed eerily still for the time it took to read the 3600-odd words before it took off again with tweets, posts and commentaries. Atticus Finch was suddenly a racist, leaving everything – the collective consciousness of the internet has since declared – up for debate, and rendering questionable the naming of many a celebrity’s son.

The full text of Go Set a Watchman was finally released on Tuesday 14 July, the same day that the first close-up images of Pluto were beamed back to earth, and in many ways this seems fitting given the once improbable likelihood of either event ever happening. Pluto is 7.5 billion kilometres from Earth. It took nine years for the spaceship to get there – which is a mere fraction of the 55 years that Lee’s fans have been waiting for the follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, To Kill a Mockingbird.

The marketing and general public management of the release of Go Set a Watchman has been interesting to observe, with both the book and its author presenting the publishers, HarperCollins in the US and Penguin Random House in the UK and Australia, with a curious set of complications. On the one hand, from a publicity perspective, it might be said the publishers was in the rare position of not needing to do very much at all. Lee is one of the most popular and mythologised writers of the twentieth century. Despite her literary inactivity and reclusiveness, she has continued to be both revered and the subject of near fetishistic curiosity. Indeed, the speculation about her writing and her personal life has oxygenated her legacy so reliably that the publishers could have simply issued a press release with the words ‘Harper Lee: new book’ – and left it to readers and social media to do the rest.

More difficult, one imagines, has been the management of the public communications campaign regarding the circumstances that led to Go Set a Watchman’s sudden appearance. As I wrote earlier this year, there were initially grave concerns regarding the question of Lee’s consent and her desire to have the book appear in what was said to be draft form. Conspiracy theories began multiplying, as did the story’s villains and heroes – ransacking lawyers, a publisher who said his company had not spoken directly to the author about the book, a cognitively impaired (now dead) sister, and an old lady writer who was possibly unaware of the whole thing.

In an attempt to quell the furore, Lee reportedly issued a short statement claiming she was ‘delighted’ the manuscript had been discovered and that she remained ‘humbled and amazed’ that it would be published. Her lawyer and publisher followed suit with a series of defensive statements. With the book now in circulation, there are some who continue to see the media speculation surrounding the context for the book’s release as ‘crafty touches’, though the rumours appear not to have diminished public interest in the book, with online and in-store sales setting records in many countries around the word.

In what seems to be an increasingly rare occurrence, the publishers did not need a gimmick or a stunt to set the Watchman caravan in motion. Less fortunate was Hachette Australia, who felt a need to call on other resources, with limited success. The company recently withdrew its ‘tatvertising’ campaign, which was conceived as part of a publicity drive for the next installment of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. Hachette had hoped to tout its wares off the back – and this is not a figure of speech – of an Australian woman. Women were invited to apply to be the recipient of a permanent 200mm x 300mm black-and-white tattoo of a dragon, which would be placed on a designated part of the recipient’s back as part of a photographic and social media promotion for Larsson’s new novel The Girl in the Spider’s Web. The campaign was pulled after an overwhelming response from the public labeled the stunt ‘offensive’ and ‘exploitative’. For its part, Hachette said the campaign had attracted sizeable interest from subjects who were reputedly willing to turn their bodies into billboards. Perhaps it becomes clear why Harper Lee felt a need to keep her star out of the sky for so long.


The Sydney Review of Books returns from its mid-year break with Part Two of Matthew C. Thompson’s ‘Don’t Go To Jolo’ (if you missed Part One, you can read it here). In late 2014, Dr Thompson travelled to the Philippines, where, as he observed in the first part of his fascinating report, the ongoing War on Terror is not only ‘nothing new’ but almost ‘a state of nature’. In this latest intallment, Thompson reflects on the region’s long history of colonisation and civil strife, arranges to travel into the lawless area of Tipo Tipo, and meets members of the notorious Christian militia known as the Ilaga:

The Ilaga has been more than a little atrocity-prone – but then who here hasn’t? Its 1971 massacre of 65 people in a mosque apparently prompted Libya’s late Colonel Gaddafi to start arming and training the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), drastically increasing the scale and intensity of the conflict. Ilaga members are inducted with rituals, which include the bestowing of an amulet that they are told will protect them from bullets. The movement’s ritualistic side has been macabre, with reports and confessions of fighters eating enemies’ flesh and organs.

Our second article this week is Susan Sheridan’s review of Thea Astley: Inventing Her Own Weather, a major new biography by Karen Lamb. It is a timely book, as Sheridan notes, given that Astley has ‘all but disappeared from the public consciousness’, despite a stellar literary career that included four Miles Franklin Awards. Inventing Her Own Weather is concerned with Astley’s ‘lifelong private conversations with herself’ and the book offers some intriguing perspectives on the split between Astley’s private and public selves:

Lamb explores the contradictions of that public persona: the wisecracking, chain-smoking, self-confessed ‘people freak’ who loved to gossip – and who was acutely sensitive to slights. She remarks on the way Astley used this public persona to defend her private, vulnerable self. Astley would describe herself as ‘neurotic’ or ‘obsessive’ as a way of deflecting possible criticism by others. But she was also, as Lamb shows, prone to severe anxiety and self-doubt about her capacity for living as much as for writing. This made itself manifest in her relations with other people and her ‘strange mixture of bombast and anxiety’.

As Sheridan observes, Lamb’s insights go a ‘long way to explaining the distinctive narrative voice that recurs throughout Astley’s writing: sardonic, darkly humorous, satirical, angry, delighting equally in outrageous puns and arcane illusions to music or mathematics’.

From the Archives looks back at Tegan Bennett Daylight’s ‘Fully Present, Utterly Connected’, a review of Joan London’s most recent novel The Golden Age, which this week received the Nita B. Kibble Award. The Golden Age, writes Daylight, is ‘a book that carries the quiet assurance of a classic, which it will most certainly become’.