Reviews
The Dancer From the Dance: Between a Wolf and a Dog
The novel’s title is the translation of the French expression l’heure entre chien et loup, ‘the hour between dog and wolf’. It refers to twilight, the dusky hour when you can no longer see clearly and might easily mistake a dog for a wolf or vice versa. Between a wolf and a dog: the uncertain space between faithful companion and savage predator, between civilisation and wildness, darkness and light, the known and the unknown, life and death. And on the day that most of the action in this novel takes place, every main character is in such a liminal zone, a place of flux and cusp, moving through a scary transition from one state to the next.
Cloud Cuckoo Land Pastoral: The Last Garden by Eva Hornung
In place of the dystopian world of post-Soviet Moscow in Dog Boy, Hornung’s new novel land us in a cloud cuckoo land pastoral. Of course, pastorals, no matter how Arcadian, always have their darker sides. This is no exception. The Last Garden begins with a murder-suicide.’
Swaying Ground: The Restorer by Michael Sala
The Restorer is dramatically immersive, thematically confronting and — despite its flaws — moving. Like The Last Thread, it is in large part about difficult reckonings with family histories, and the challenge of wresting back control of a precariously positioned life. Sala highlights what I take to be a core moral of the story insistently, but perhaps good advice is worth repeating. For most readers, the skilful characterisation will outweigh all instances of heavy-handedness. I only hope that in future treatments of similar themes the vile men are friendly-seeming white collar workers who patronise the arts. I hear they exist. After all, what use is a topical novel unless its readers are made to feel uncomfortably close to—and complicit in—the issue it addresses?’
A Reckoning: A Change in the Lighting by Amy Witting
‘In capturing Ella, Witting captures how any of us might look or think at our worst, holding ourselves up against any available measure in a desperate effort to find some argument for, some defence of who we are or what we’ve done.’
Piling It On For Posterity: 4321 by Paul Auster
Auster’s attempt to borrow from the chronology and geography of his own life to create a masterful multi-noded bildungsroman is an interesting idea, but 4321 is ultimately far too long-winded and sententious for that idea to properly work.’
Legal Fiction: The Woman on the Stairs by Bernhard Schlink
The key distinction between The Woman on the Stairs and Schlink’s earlier fiction is that the past acted on those characters in ways that were hidden to them, but drawn out through the narrative. Here, an unspoken past acts on the protagonist and the narrative asks us to believe that his conversion to a man of empathy occurs without any direct confrontation with his personal and national history.’
What Ghosts We Might Rise: No Way But This
In writing No Way But This Sparrow seeks to reanimate not only the ghost of Paul Robeson but those of his family, friends and comrades. In other words, this book has an avowedly political goal. It revives Robeson as a model of integrity and bravery – someone who, despite the precarity of his social position, risked his life and career for the ideas of workers’ rights, black liberation, anti-colonialism and international socialism.