Reviews
Enter the swine: Demons by Wayne Macauley
In appropriating Demons for the title of his fourth novel, Wayne Macauley alludes not only to Dostoevsky’s Demons (which he also quotes in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation), but to the title’s biblical provenance. Near the end of Macauley’s Demons, in the holiday house off the Great Ocean Road where he traps his characters for the weekend, a secret is exposed and the cabin fever gives way to a physical confrontation.
You Can’t Kill Myths: The Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia by Don Watson
This is a book every Australian should read. The kind of people we are, the kind of nation this is, the big myths and the way they have been forged – these are the stones with which Watson’s builds his book.
In Hot Water: Death Fugue by Sheng Keyi
Death Fugue is a tale of two Chinas, but not the usual contrast of urban and rural or rich and poor in one of the world’s most unequal societies. Rather, it is a contrapuntal figuring of two opposed dreams of what China could be. ‘China Dream’ is the current mantra emanating from the country’s new supreme leader, Xi Jinping. The promise is an economically rich, militarily powerful and ideally civilised China, run by and for the Communist Party. This replaces the other dream of democracy that was crushed in the protests of 1989.
Fully present, utterly connected: The Golden Age by Joan London
It is important to note that despite its setting, The Golden Age is not a misery novel. It does not tell a story of abuse, and although it gives us a candid and painful account of Frank’s suffering, both as a small boy hidden from Nazis in 1940s Budapest and a few years later as a polio patient, it does not ask us to be either voyeur or fellow-sufferer. The Golden Age is a story about Frank’s dawning and intensely vivid realisation of self.
Rise of the Über-book: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
Readers familiar with the British novelist David Mitchell will find that The Bone Clocks bears many of the hallmarks of his work. It is structurally complex, readable and inventive. Its plot is ambitious in scope, crossing time periods and blurring genre categories. It is also impossible to summarise without making it sound completely ridiculous.
Years of Lead: Leonardo Sciascia
25 years after Leonardo Sciascia’s death, Granta has reissued most of his translated titles. These short, acrid tales are written in a dry Stendhalian style. Braided around their assured plotlines are philosophical dialogues on morality and politics, justice and mortality: universal themes with a distinctive Sicilian inflexion.
Not for children? Golden Boys by Sonya Hartnett
Sonya Hartnett has never been one to shy away from controversial subject matter. Her latest novel, Golden Boys, is the story of what unfolds when a new family moves into a suburban Australian neighbourhood one summer. Set during the mid-1970s or early 1980s, it explores a time when children roamed the streets freely, the only constraint on their movement a mandate that they return home for the evening meal. Although this recent past might be romanticised by some as a more innocent time, Hartnett examines its darker side.
A user of masks: Poems 1957 — 2013 by Geoffrey Lehmann
Geoffrey Lehmann’s Poems 1957–2013 is a great opportunity to do two things: enjoy a lot of memorable Australian poems ranging across more than half a century and to examine the trajectory of a long and now completed career.