Reviews

The Wonders is an allegorical novel with worthy intentions. However, O’Reilly’s attempt to unpack a surfeit of twenty-first century issues – including animal welfare, human rights, the cult of celebrity, ecology, conservation, disability and gender politics – is marred by over-simplification and a tendency to parrot clichéd and prosaic opinions.

Booth’s point is simple enough: Larkin projected multiple personas in his life, many of which summoned up images of old Englishness, while at the same time getting on with being a modern person and an important poet. Some of this has been obvious for some time. Though he projected the approved Movement-style philistinism and Little-Englandism, the poems of The Less Deceived are the obvious product of someone steeped in French symbolism, pre-war surrealism, and the explosive effects of apocalyptics such as George Barker.

Like The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation before it, This House of Grief proceeds from Garner’s first instinctive response. All three books are grounded in the idea that to feel something is a kind of fact. All wonder about the meaning and the status of that subjective fact. In this sense, they might be read as essays that question the concept of rationality.

Chast burrows into this feral old age and draws it out with uncanny, page-expanding, emotional precision. It is not reporting from the trenches, or a facing-down of the last frontier, but something else. Chast is giving over a whole multi-tracked, multi-voiced, sensory feast of a book to something – something barely bearable sometimes, and infused with pain and dread always; something that gets sprinted past, or poeticised to within an inch of its life, or else chronicled with a deadly, breathless earnestness – and she does it in such a way that I could not tear myself away from her book.

The Tribe tells stories of people of largely Lebanese Muslim origin, stories of the young narrator’s immediate and wider circle of family, friends, associates. In relating the lines of agreement as well as the points of dissension and tension among his people, Ahmad shows that there are various streams of belonging, some that flow fiercely, some that are shallow to the point of being non-existent.

Two lessons may be learned from American military lawyer Michael Mori’s account of his defence of David Hicks. Neither of the lessons is new, but each requires constant reaffirmation. The first is that power corrupts. Despite its high-flown rhetoric about freedom and the ideals of the Founding Fathers, the United States refuses to join some of the most potentially powerful international instruments of justice, including the International Criminal Court… The second lesson is that in contemporary liberal democracies, things are rarely done because they have intrinsic organisational or ethical merit. Rather, it is strategic usefulness that rules.

Intrinsic to Tóibín’s work, from The South and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe through to Nora Webster, is a social realist reformulation of what were known in Catholic circles, once upon a time, as ‘holy mysteries’. You will find no cheap irony in Tóibín about this. He has made himself a conduit for the concept, with its rootedness in ordinary human failure, loss and vulnerability.

Exhibits of the Sun is well-named; the poems are all sunflowers of a kind, drenched in light, or seeking it. For a Metaphysical Poet, Edgar has a surprisingly painterly eye. He especially loves the way light rebuilds the world – or the consciousness that perceives it – in the light of morning.

The Book of Strange New Things is immersive, lightly surrealist and carefully plotted. It features well-realised characters and delicately carved sentences. The narration is more restrained and focused than in Faber’s epic bestseller, The Crimson Petal and the White, partly because he employs a single focaliser (his other large novels are multifocal), and partly because the bizarre content of the book requires a consistent point of view to render it coherent and credible.

In 1950, ASIO’s Canberra office could record only two telephone lines from the Soviet embassy at any time. By contrast, in a single month in 2013, according to Edward Snowden, the US National Security Agency acquired data from more than 3 billion calls and emails. Perversely, the staggering gulf between then and now makes ASIO’s history more relevant than ever. We do not (and cannot) know what the secret organisation does today, but its record allows us to extrapolate.