Reviews
As above, so below: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
The Luminaries… is not only set in the nineteenth century; it appears to be of the nineteenth century, or as close to it as possible. It has the scope and length of a nineteenth century novel, and its central mysteries are established and explored in a nineteenth century style.
Brittle and brilliant: Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century
A new and comprehensive biography by Australian-born Britten scholar, administrator and conductor, Paul Kildea, is a worthy addition to the already significant pile of biographies and scholarly tomes on the composer. And it comes with a new controversy.
Digging a Hole in the Ocean: The Sea Inside by Philip Hoare
The Sea Inside plays with associative knowledge and pattern recognition, giving it a sometimes surreal quality as it leaps between informational clusters. Chronicled within its pages are scientists, docents, authors, bohemians, monks and adventurers, notable Indigenous figures, warriors and mystics.
The beginning is nigh: The Book of Barely Imagined Beings
Book of Barely Imagined Beasts… takes the bestiaries of the Middle Ages and uses them as the model for an attempt to tease out the way animals (and the ways we choose to think about them) are integral to our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.
Cast as a spy: A Delicate Truth by John le Carré
So there is a sense in which The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was an instant classic, like Psycho or A Streetcar Named Desire. How does it stand up? …more than anything le Carré had so far written, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a work of great moral power. It is full of complex, ambivalent emotion and a sense of the supremely pitiable, maybe even tragic, nature of human life.
Humiliations accrue: Transactions by Ali Alizadeh
Alizadeh is an acclaimed poet and academic, and a self-confessed ‘unashamedly political writer’… In Transactions, he uses extreme examples of disenfranchisement, disempowerment and the unrestrained exercise of power to expose the inequities of the capitalist system and shock the reader out of his or her complacency.
In defiance of time: The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor
The finest travel narrative of the twentieth century can at last be read in full in the second decade of the twenty-first, some 80 years after the events it describes and two after its author, Patrick Leigh Fermor, died at the splendid age of 96. These temporal perspectives are worth noting at the outset because time – its passing and loss, its magical recuperation and crystallisation through the white magic of narrative – is at the heart of Leigh Fermor’s enchanting trilogy.
The grey zone: Night Games by Anna Krien
Night Games is not simply an exploration of a particular case. It lays bare football’s problematic sexual culture, which treats women as objects for men’s sexual use. It also highlights flaws within the legal processes that are in place to deal with rape cases. In a non-judgemental and engaging style, Krien presents her book as a consideration of the wider issues of rape, sex, sport and law.