Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin

Title: Native Tongue

Author: Suzette Haden Elgin

Publisher: Daw Books Inc. , Donald A. Wollheim, publisher

Publish date: 1984          

ISBN: (Appears to have no ISBN, says ‘Daw Collector’s Book No 589’.)

Book extract

‘Then consider this, please: to make something appear, is called magic, is it not? Well… when you look at another person, what do you see? Two arms, two legs, an assortment of parts. Am I right? Now, there is a continuous surface of body, a space that begins with the inside flesh of the fingers and continues over the palm of the hand and up the inner side of the arm to the end of the elbow. Everyone has that surface, in fact, everyone has two of them.

I will name that the “athad” of the person. Imagine the athad, please. See it clearly in your mind – perceive, here are my own two athads, the left one and the right one. And here are both of your athads, very nice ones.

Where there was no athad before, there will always be one now, because you will perceive the athad of every person you look at, as you perceive their nose and their hair. And I have made the athad appear. From now on. It exists.

Magic, you perceive, is not something mysterious, not something for witches and sorcerers… magic is something quite ordinary and simple. It is simply language.’

___________________________________________________________________

I picked this up with great eagerness, as the blurb purported it to be a book about a special language for women, created to articulate female preoccupations. Very interested in gender traits as expressed linguistically, I am.

Alas, there is almost nothing about the language in the book. #Disappointment. In fact, until about two thirds of the way through, the women barely speak. Mostly they don’t make an appearance either. HOWEVER, I nevertheless gleaned some thought-provoking insights regarding linguistic gender traits, though perhaps not what the author was intending to convey. Curious?

So, premise outline. The year is about 250 years into the future, women’s rights have disappeared (some paper has ‘proved’ that females are inferior) and are slaves. Humans are colonizing space and need endless interpreters to deal with the humanoid aliens they’re making their fortune from. The population has fallen into two categories, the ‘Linguists’ (the intelligencia) and the rest. The hoi polloi don’t like the linguists. The linguists live in a state of semi-Amish conditions of austerity and constant work, ostensibly to refute notions of them amassing great wealth at the taxpayer’s expense, but as the ruse is not working, I don’t know why they bother. For supposedly fantastic communicators and manipulators, they have a shit PR department.

As a work of fiction, this is definitely not the best. It starts, literally, in the middle of a council meeting. Yes, that’s as bad as it sounds. Backstory is explained endlessly through dialogue. Characters are ridiculous caricatures, with pretty much all men being bad and all women being good (including the one who goes around murdering people). One other reviewer put it that ‘I get this picture of someone sitting at the typewriter bashing it and yelling “all men are bastards” over and over again’, and tbh I kinda see the drift. Add to this the aching lack of any female input in the first two thirds, a plot structure assembled with all the finesse of a lean-to shelter, and the numerous impossibilities and illogicalities, you end up with something quite deeply unsatisfying.

That’s not to say that the book doesn’t have great exchanges, piercing insights, huge passion. It’s hard to see it go to waste.

However, here are some interesting aspects.

• ·         The male Linguists are described as strangely passive-aggressive in interactions with the non-linguist (males), in a manner that exactly mirrors the attitude of the linguist females when confronted with the linguist males. The book appears to be unaware of this.
• ·         Thomas the linguist can point out irrationalities of the bias by non-linguists against linguists, but is apparently completely blind to bias against females and similar nonsensical arguments. The book doesn’t seem to highlight this, as far as I can see.  I did consider whether his family name Chornyak might be a hint that there is some metatextual acknowledgement. The name would signify ‘blinky’, ‘hard of seeing’, or ‘four-eyes’ in its Slavic connotation, so maybe he’s meant not to see the obvious. However I don’t think Elgin did Slavic languages, plus if it’s just an Easter egg for the Slavic linguists it’s non-functional as a dramatic device.
• ·         Females, as aforementioned, rarely speak. When present, they conspicuously listen, or talk in sign language.
• ·         The book is scathing about the proliferation of the Aristotelian notion that the woman is the receptacle and completely subservient/passive. However, the premise of the world-building casts all the Aliens into exactly the same receptive, passive position. Apparently, no Alien ever tries to speak a Terran language. They merely sit behind their screens, osmosing into the brains of the juvenile Linguists. Again, the internal logic of the book seems unaware of this transference of ideology.

Which begs the question, are these all examples of being unable to move beyond the boundaries of what is given as a communication medium, which is precisely what the book is actually arguing? It seems to be acting out its own precepts, unwittingly. How insanely meta can you get?

There is also the curious aspect that the style of diction Elgin uses is distinctly… male. It beats about the bush, is pompous, doesn’t bother to describe the characters in any personal sense. The characters stand about like sticks of wood, spouting whatever they’re saying. Elgin accomplishes one of the most remarkable feats of ‘telling’ I’ve ever seen: watch this passage describing body language.

 ‘Any problems?’
‘No, but I have a question.’
They looked at one another, body-parling. WHY THE HELL DO WE HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS INSUFFERABLE BITCH?’ And one of them said, ‘Well, what is it?’
 

Yes, dear reader, she did it. The author has actually ‘told’ and not shown body language. ALL CAPS does it, apparently.

Now, bear in mind that the urgent, stated premise of the book is that

1) Women have not enough voice
2)      Men have too much of the running of the world, and do it badly
3)      Men don’t notice the subtle things women can

Is it not curious that this book enacts precisely all of those things on its own pages? The writing doesn’t notice the subtle things, or at least it doesn’t describe them. It uses the heavy language of pomp and convolution to garner authority. It doesn’t give its women voices.

These actions are not self-aware. Which makes them piss-poor as an attempt at fiction, but extraordinarily successful as a demonstration in vivo of exactly what it is trying to prove.

Isn’t that intriguing? Now, to the scoring. Honestly, if you’re not too interested in the effect it has, I can’t score it above a two out of five hoofs up. The main downside is the plot and illogicalities, but there are some good exchanges. Your choice.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Title: Fahrenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

Publisher: Harper Voyager          

Publish date: 1953

ISBN: 978 0 00 830369 3

Book Quote: 

‘Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilisation, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation-Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico.’

…

‘But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority.’

____________________________________________

How can I put it politely? No, I can’t. This ‘novel’ is a hysterical torrent of man-flu sploshed onto a climate of cold-war misogynistic terror. However, I’m glad to have read it, as it has many interesting points. I’m taking antacids now, but it’s a price I’m prepared to pay.

The Good

·         Within the mish-mash of words, there are some nice passages. The stream-of-consciousness, poetic chunks that rely on iteration and resonance, are pleasurable. Say, the passage where Montag is trying to remember a phrase from Matthew (they toil not, neither do they spin) on the underground, when everyone is humming away to a toothpaste ad. Or quite a few passages describing scenery or setting. It’s interesting that in so misogynistic a work, the best sections are those in traditionally ‘feminine’ styles. But more of that anon.

The Bad

Where to start? At the beginning?

- By page 2 we’re choked on the fumes of so many adjectives and bombastic adverbs our heads are spinning and we can scarcely hold onto the book. They’re absolutely out of control.

- To have an experimental writing style is acceptable. To toss anything into the pot all in a novella, without a thought to the overall flow, is not. From adjective overload, to impressionism, to film-script, to monologue, to stream-of-consciousness, and then straight into diatribe shoved into the mouths of puppets. If the style differentiation had some reasoning, it would be acceptable. It hasn’t. That’s just how the words hit the page.

·         - Characterisation is nil. It’s on the level of Pilgrim’s Progress, and indeed the hysteria, self-aggrandising, and self-pity ties the two works together convincingly. OK, you can write an allegory, but don’t pretend it’s a novel in any traditional sense.

 -Plot goes no further than the initial idea of a prosecutor having a change of heart and becoming a transgressor. Which is fine. But then the author obviously doesn’t know how to end it all, so blows stuff up and leaves it all down to a plucky band of Harvard bums to re-build the word. Honestly, a blank page would have been better. As it is, it’s infantile.

The Ugly

The misogyny. Untrammelled. If the women aren’t idle sponging ignorant leeches like Millie and her cronies, they’re equally dismissive constructs like Clarisse or the woman who immolates herself with her books. Both type’s only function is to spur or spurn males. There is not even the hint of a notion that something other than procreation or inspiration may come from a female. When Montag thinks of the book burned, the phrase is that ‘behind each of them is a man’. Nothing to do with women. The unnaturalness of the female spongers is accentuated by their unwillingness or dislike of offspring. The wholesomeness of Clarisse is accentuated by her off-screen family, and her interest in love. There is no other dimension.

OK, so what are we complaining about, when we’ve just said that the entire work is an allegory? None of the other (male) characters are clothed in realistic flesh at all, including the main protagonist. Captain Beatty is a laughable travesty of improbability, and as for Faber, let’s not even go there.

The difference is the lack of agency. Males are allowed agency, females are not. It’s not a thought-out thing, it’s taken for granted. The inspirational agency one could say Clarisse and the self-torching woman have is not independent. It needs a male vehicle to achieve anything. The spongers need male vehicles to keep them in their inactive state. The inactive state itself is highlighted in the anecdote of the memorable grandfather and the hands: the recollection of all the things the hands had made, and now would not, as opposed to Millie’s hands, which are still and create nothing. So we can say that in this novella, the female directly inherits the Aristotelian notions of being an empty vessel for the agency of the male to work on. OK (deep breath), let’s work with that. Not the first and not the last to expound this notion. Where does that lead?

To the interesting part. Their inactivity and lack of agency is both forced onto them, and is made into their culpability. Apart from Clarisse and Millie, none of them have a given name. They are all named after their husbands. There is no option for them to do otherwise than they are doing, yet it is violently held against them. The other males in the general background are presumably all also zombies (when they’re not working, which is seems women don’t), but this is never mentioned. When it’s the zombie population at large, it lacks a sex. When it’s the individual, it’s female.  It’s quite clear that the resentment for the zombification has found a channel: the female form.

But what is even more interesting, is that this is not merely an expression of misogyny. The misogyny is simply the most prominent part of a fundamental flaw in the logic of the notions that purport to underpin the work’s sociological theory. 

The theory is, that the dumbing down (leading to zombification) came from excessive pandering to minorities. The book was published in 1953, and we still hear this notion everywhere. No-one was allowed to be offended, so freedom of speech was silenced. In other words, the minorities should have allowed themselves to be offended. Or should have been made to be open to offence. 

Yet, when it’s the (male, obviously) residual intellectuals, who are now in the minority, they are to rise up. They are inspirational. The women in the book are not a physical but a practical minority, due to their lack of agency. Nope, that minority is still bad. As per before. They need to stay down. There is not one instance of a female remembering one of the ‘books’ in the chain of resistance. It is always ‘a man’, and the term is not being used as a synecdoche for humankind. It is literally male. When the intellectual hobos walk off into the distance, fantasising about how they’re going to build a new world ‘generation after generation’, there are neither females present at the time, nor any thought given to anything feminine whatsoever. It’s an entirely male creative process. The males both force the fire onto the females/minorities, and hold them responsible for the resulting imbalance. And violently fear the state of being a ‘minority’ themselves, and instantly take on the mantle of the oppressed-in-need-of-adulation-and-support at the first opportunity.

There is no recognition in the book of the volta performed in the ideology. The Captain’s ‘minorities’ speech is taken at face value, and there is no tie-back to him being the later-described tyranny of the majority, and therefore out of whack. The reason for the zombification is still squarely on the shoulders of the minorities. The minorities of back then, who are not white intellectual males. The minority now is the right one to rise up.  

Rarely have I read a clearer example of the connection between misogyny and minority oppression, as coupled with fear and abnegation of culpability. In today’s world, where we are waking up to the statistics of how male violence against females is directly linked to attacks on minorities in mob violence and mass shootings, surely this is an important template of thought to bear in mind. Perhaps for all the wrong reasons, but nevertheless.

Scoring: for pleasure, one moose-hoof up out of five, but read it nevertheless if you haven’t. It’s an appalling piece, to be visited as one would visit a holocaust museum. 

And can someone explain to me the author's obsession with Marcus Aurelius?

Holes by Louis Sachar

Title:  Holes

Author: Louis Sachar

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Publish date: 2000

ISBN: 9 781408 865231

Another one for the admirable-YA-books pile. I have some recollection of seeing the movie of this, but the text was a considerably more memorable and pleasurable.

Hapless kid from hapless family gets sent to a boot-camp when wrongly convicted of petty theft. Forms friendships, and perhaps ironically ‘builds character’ because this is the (presumably fallacious) opinion of the detention center staff. In process of caring for others, rectifies an ancestral wrong, all ends well.

It’s a lovely, satisfying read. The touch is light, and often lyrical, despite portraying characters who use shoulder-shrugs more than words. The pieces are put together in as obvious a manner as possible, and even if you’re a kid with no thought to literary craft or linguistic techniques, you can’t help but connect the themes and the images that the author puts your way. Even if you don’t register them as such.

Sachar claims this is about friendship, and the importance of reading. For me the strongest motif that really ties all the strands together is the discovery of self – in this case, the reconciliation to the ancestors who emigrated from their home countries to the new continent all those years ago. The psyche of the States is continually in a state of yearning for a past it feels has eluded it. A massive nation of people whose very existence is owed to leaving their origins behind, coupled with the main theme of adolescence, a search for the self, creates a thumping rhythm of hammering away at the strands of ‘mystery’ in the novel. 

The recurring motifs of the song, the carrying, the 'training’ and changing physical form, the peaches, the onions, the pig, the lizards, the rattlesnakes, and of course, the holes. Holes in every physical and metaphorical sense. These are clear, unambiguous sign-posts for a friendly, sympathetic read.

Why not give it a five moose-hoof up? No reason at all. 

Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Title:  Wolf Hall

Author: Hilary Mantel

ISBN: 987 0 00 729241 7

Published: Fourth Estate, HarperCollins

Date: 2009

And

Title: Bring Up The Bodies

Author: Hilary Mantel

ISBN 978 0 8050 9003 1 52800

Originally Published by: Fourth Estate, 2012

Book quote (from Bring Up The Bodies):

‘If you intend to kill me in public, and mount a show, be quick. Or I may die of grief alone in this room.’

He shakes his head. ‘You’ll live.’ He once thought it himself, that he might die of grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But the pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

I had read Wolf Hall a number of years previously, and on reading the second in the series, Bring Up The Bodies, wished to refresh my memory. So I looked in my book blog. Where was Wolf Hall? Not there. Hmm. Odd.

I checked the back-up files. Ah, there’s a file, not in the ‘posted reviews’ folder but out in the cold. Five pages of increasingly incoherent notes, exclamations and jotted observations. And then I remembered. Wolf Hall was so complex, so daunting, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to utter an opinion or post a review.

So here’s the start of that review, on Wolf Hall. A few years later.

This novel flouts – no, openly beats and throws out of doors with curses – so many of the rules that as writers we’re told to stick by it almost makes me seasick with the turmoil. In the scheme of things, the reader is at the very bottom of order of importance. There is absolutely no pandering to the needs of anyone so inconsequential.

Follow the current trend of segmenting reading chunks into small portions, so the book can be put down conveniently? You must be joking, you’ll have hold onto the tome for all you’re worth and be grateful if it’s not bucking you off physically. Shorten sentences? (What?) Clarify your pronouns? Indeed, specify your pronouns? (That’s for wimps.) Quite often, there’s simply no indication at all of who ‘he’ is – you’ll just have to read on, guess (or give up), and perhaps at the next reading you’ll know. (Work for it, dammit.) Any concessions to a lack of intimate knowledge of Tudor life? (Get off my book if you don’t know what’s going on, it’s not for you.) Well, how about timeline and tense, is it clear who we’re talking about and what period of their life it is? Of course not. Well, not immediately, you have to read on, in faith, and then think about the bits that went last, piece it together to realise that although you had just been reading a piece of writing in the past tense on 1527 events, you’re now reading a body of narrative in the present tense about earlier events, which itself contains another chunk in the past tense that probably refers to about 1492 or so, even though the chapter heading states it’s 1521-1529. I even found a few typos. It’s absolutely merciless. The reader is tossed into the brine with not the slightest regard as to whether they will sink or swim. If they sink - well, tough. They should have learned to swim ere they were tossed.

Carrying this mountain of novel-writing faux-pas, it won the 2009 Booker Prize.

Deserved? You bet. In fact, for me, it’s one of the most encouraging prize-awards I’ve seen in a long time. Why? Several reasons.

The trend is, long novels don’t win the booker. (Why that is so one scarcely dares to speculate… it couldn’t possibly be that the judges can’t be bothered, could it?) This is certainly in keeping with the influence that the internet has had on literature: tearing prose into smaller and smaller chunks, leaning towards sound-bites, word-bites and all sorts of informational snacking.  Flash fiction didn’t even exist when I last looked – now it’s everywhere. Wolf Hall weighs in at 650 pages and every word is a gem – that in itself is an achievement but the fact that it’s been acknowledged as such is truly surprising. And heartening. (I for one appreciate a decent meal, not a snack).

In general, you have to take your reader by the hand, and cosset them. Consider who you’re writing for. Usually one would try to make whatever section of society this is as broad as decently possible. Who is the target audience for Wolf Hall? Specialists in Tudor history with a background in politics, psychology and social development, it seems, and ones who have plenty of time on their hands at that. And yet it’s a bestseller.

Now I have to admit, I can’t quite understand this. I really don’t see how such a proportion of people can read and understand this book. There are numerous passages where there’s simply no way of knowing what is going on or who is doing what unless you know very intimate details of the period. Like, which Bishop was in residence at what house during which years. Who worked for whom. Most of it is Goggle-able (and I had to resort to this frequently during the course of reading) but I wonder whether the average reader would bother to do this. Now, if I were the author, I would be perfectly pleased that people are at least buying the book, but I would have a sneaking suspicion that perhaps it’s being left unread on the shelf, or skimmed through, in quite a few instances.

This very same ‘drawback’ to the book is of course also its greatest forte and innovation. It utilises the technique of creating imaginative room within the text in the sphere of historical knowledge. The best pieces of writing are where the reader is left to fill in the blanks, to join in the creative process, participate in determining the story and its implications. Hamlet’s mysterious lure, for example, is largely down to the ambiguities within it: it could be called a play about gaps in silences in many ways. Many writers give the reader ‘breathing space’ in this way, to draw various possible implications from ambiguous writing. I’ve never before seen assumed historical knowledge used like this before. It gives the novel an almost four-dimensional quality. The narrative (1^st dimension) dialogue between reader and novelist (2^nd), pre-emptive knowledge the reader possesses historically (3^rd) and implications of how history is created questions into the nature or perceived reality (4^th).

Which leads to the often-discussed issue of the makeover Mantel has given to Thomas Cromwell in this book. I’m nearly a thousand words into the review and haven’t given a synopsis yet, and should leave it that way to be in keeping with the style of the book. But here we are. Synopsis: Following the life of Thomas Cromwell (Henry VIII’th eventual Chancellor of the Exchequer) up till the execution of his contemporary, Thomas More, in 1535. Well that was easy, wasn’t it?

That’s as far as I wrote… coherently. There followed here various excepts from the book, illustrating portrayal of the rise of meritocracy, the validity of the dissolution of the monasteries, the role of food as a binding agent to relationships and its visceral nature in becoming part of the body, the differences between reality and concealment, and concealment of reality even if there is nothing to conceal, the giddying uncertainties of an age of unthinkable change of thought, mercantilism, and other topics. I was evidently overwhelmed.

Bring Up The Bodies is not quite so abstruse. The same concerns pervade the novel. The time is a little later on, up to the execution of Anne Boleyn. I didn’t realize until nearly the end (where it crops up) that the title refers to habeas corpus, the legal term. Suddenly it is a most fitting title.

The obsession with bodies is everywhere. It sticks to you like a sludge as you go through the book. Bodies that are active, ingesting, failing, dissolving, pervading everywhere. The body of the King, that metonym for the country, is literally the central theme of the work, along with the other bodies that central one interacts with. Henry isn’t described so much in terms of a character, but a force. He is a central verb, verbing away at all the other greater and lesser embodied verbs that surround him and form the body politic, and the body of the land. Within this central dynamic fit all the other concerns. Loyalty, treachery, truth, innocence, skill, fear, sex, appetite, will and power.

The tenses and the POV have calmed down. You don’t feel as if you’re about to be thrown off at any moment. The narrative is condensed, the timeline is short, the focus intense. Without doubt, an easier read. The language continues an embarrassment of riches.

And now I hear that the third in the trilogy (I didn’t know it was going to be a trilogy) is due out in March 2020. Guess where I’ll be heading!

Five out of five moose hoofs up for both, but don’t blame me if you need to take a Travelcalm along the way. All worthwhile.

The Titan's Curse by Rick Riordan

Title: The Titan’s Curse

Author: Rick Riordan

Publisher: Hyperion Books New York     

Publish date: 2007

ISBN: 978-142310148-2

You can tell I like this series, as it’s the third one I’ve read in a row. They go down like sherbet fizz: very quickly.

Another fun tale. Percy learns the importance of deference and self-sacrifice through the medium of a rescue-mission for a goddess and uncertainty of whom trust – including his own impulses.

This author is extremely good at judging how to mix-and-match characters that offset each other. Also at the rate at which to introduce those characters. You never have someone turn up on Page 10 and are never seen again, while someone whom you haven’t heard hide nor hair of pops up mid-book and takes over the narrative. There is of course the character of Nico, who appears at first and then only comes back as a book-end, but that’s his function in this novel: to backstoried, without being a part of it directly.

The author has a forte in characterisation, and in balancing differing moods throughout the narrative. This is a large portion of the reason that the narrative runs along at such a brisk pace. The reader is never bogged down in the same slurry of mood for long, nor do they have to wallow in endless examination of one mood of one character. Light, deft brushstrokes with a very generous amount of good-natured humour. Never goes amiss. Not to say that the narratives lack emotional input. It’s simply not laboured.

By this third in the series, the ease with which the backstory so fat is acknowledged is accomplished with greater ease. It feels a bit more self-confident. Not apologetic, just light.

In sum, another great romp, with admirable skill. What’s to detract? Five out of five moose-hoofs up.

Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan

Title: Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters

Author: Rick Riordan

Publisher: Hyperion Books New York     

Publish date: 2006

ISBN: 13: 978 142310334-9

The follow-up to the first in the series, Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief. Another rip-roarer but somehow it feels like an ‘inbetweener’… which I suspect it is. Nice portrayal of self-acceptance leading to acceptance of other in the relationship between the MC and the new character of Tyson. In fact the character of Tyson is altogether a good move, as it is sufficiently different to all the others to create a multi-faceted foil quite effectively. I won’t bother with a synopsis: something will inevitably be a spoiler and anyway it only takes a few hours to read through this book, you might as well find out fresh for yourself.

As is, perhaps, inevitable in a series, there is some back-explaining and story that gets a little annoying, but it’s not too intrusive overall. Good thick, solid brushstrokes and blistering pace, as per the previous book. It might be an inbetweener, but hey, it does its job and guess what, I’ve already reserved the next in the series at the library, so that must say something. Got it out for the daughter but she’s ignored it – going to get the next one out for myself. Stuff the kids.

4 out of 5 moose hoofs up, with the one deduction only because it has that awkward feel to it.

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Title: Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

Author: Rick Riordan

Publisher: Puffin

Publish date: 2013

ISBN: 9780141346809

This is a good fun book, and I look forward to reading more in the series. Kids’ modern-day Greek hero stories, with the main protagonists being demi-god Halfling issues of the endlessly lustful pantheon of Greek gods – all masquerading as human teenagers, of course.

Quite unnecessary to give a synopsis. It’s one adventure-and-getting-out-of-impossible-scrapes after another. Don’t get me wrong, they all hold together nicely, and every 20 paces you see a nice firm link to a future idea dropped along the way. (Hence the interest in reading more. Well, that and the pretty decent writing.) The only peeve I can think of is that it’s heavy-handed with the pointing-out of links and references, but hey, one can well see why that would have arisen, with the current level of understanding of Greek mythology. It’s still fun and nod-wink for those who know, and seems to be a successful come-on and entertainment for those who don’t. Lovely fun characterisation, nice focus and no redundant back-story, elaboration or side-tracks… apart from for pure amusement. Each character has its own comfortable amount of attention. Plus (and here’s a rare thing these days) they’re LIKEABLE. Even the villains are fun. The author’s tongue is never out of their cheek.

I’m sitting here wondering why I wouldn’t give this a five out of five. Because it’s not Kafka or Milton? That’s not what it’s aiming for. It’s a bona-fide YA romp with good rewards and a desire to inspire more education, it’s not condescending, and attains all its goals with flying colours. Love it. Five moose-hoofs up out of five.

The Odyssey by Emily Wilson

Title: The Odyssey

Author: Homer/Emily Wilson

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co Inc.

Publish date: 2018

ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9

This is by far and away the best rendition I have read. It matches the original line for line, and flattens bullshit archaisms like a cyclone. It’s fast, it’s immediate, it’s frankly stunning.

But you don’t just get the poem. Oh no. The Intro and the notes are all as thought-provoking and precise as the other work. I wish I could photocopy the entirety of that knowledge straight onto my brain, but as it was I had to settle for taking copious notes and resigning myself to the fact that I’ll have to keep going back, and back, and back.

Frankly, I don’t want to talk about it with my flat-footed prose. Just read it yourself. Cover to cover. At the risk of sounding like an idolatrous stalker, Wilson’s every word appears to be a gem: can she not open her mouth without complete and concise mastery? I flicked through an interview she gave on the book, and this passage pretty much gives you an idea:

‘There is a lot of agonizing among humanities faculty, maybe especially classicists, about “outreach.” That term in itself strikes me as patronizing and misguided, as if academics were always donating priceless gifts to the intellectually impoverished masses. I don’t see it that way. We (i.e., human beings who have the privileged position of spending our lives on teaching/scholarship/writing) should be engaged in multi-way conversations with other people who do other things, trying to listen as well as talk without talking down, and we should make the boundaries between different peoples as porous as possible. “The public” includes me; it’s not some separate sphere out there somewhere.’

About five thousand moose hoofs up out of five for this one. Scale just broke.

Away by Michael Gow

Title:  Away

Author: Michael Gow

Publisher:  Currency Press

Publish date: 1986

ISBN: 0 86819 2112

Another work I checked out because it’s on the school curriculum. Year 9 in this case. And I’m finding it hard to control intense irritation.

Not necessarily at the play itself, but at its treatment by the critics.

Outline: set in 1960s Australia, four families as representatives from varying classes, two of them currently with teenage children. One family has lost a son to the Vietnam War, and the mum’s gone not coping. One family is soon to lose a son to leukaemia. The background is set with heavy reference to several Shakespeare plays: MSND, The Tempest, R&J, and (most inappropriately) Lear. Oh how literary. Supposedly, the characters all find some kind of reconciliation and forgiveness at the end. There are plenty of more detailed synopses kicking about it you want to know more.

Fine, so the use of the Shakespeare is valid – just as any textual or other reference would be. It’s OK to use valuable shorthand like that to pack a bunch of implications into a relatively short space. I’m all for metatextuality.

But what, in the name of all that is wonderful, is the point of cramming it down the gullets of kids, unless they know the plays it’s referencing, backwards? Which I doubt they do, as the very critics themselves miss most of the references and points. So far I haven’t seen a single acknowledgement of the storm in the play (duh) being from The Tempest, and not MSND. Not even with the Ferdinand and Miranda scenarios, the very name of the character ‘Coral’, the firewood…. The list is too depressingly long to continue. But this is not the worst impact of the critics.

The ‘reconciliations’ at the end are utterly unconvincing. The kids are told that it’s ‘a play about forgiveness’. Sure, just as The Tempest is a play about forgiveness – kinda. Prospero doesn’t forgive, it’s just the easiest and most practical way out, rather than massacring the offenders. Pity, exactly as per Ariel’s ‘Mine would, sir. Were I human’, sure. Pity of the audience for the characters. Not so much the characters for each other.

The play is about love, the kids are told. Sure, just as much as MSND and R&J and The Tempest are about love. Love that means nothing and is an illusion given and taken by arbitrary spirits and plant extracts. Love that is inevitable simply from the circumstances the characters find themselves in. Love that is grudging and possessive and exclusive and domineering. Having schmaltzed out Shakespeare, I guess it’s not surprising that critics blindly glaze Gow’s work in vanilla icing.

So what is the play really ‘about’?

It’s about selfishness. It is a good, solid, insistent portrayal of selfishness.

The obvious characters scarcely need explaining: Gwen, proud of her efforts to up-me-one on the Joneses; Roy, fully prepared to lock his wife up and subject her to EST because she’s not upholding his image as a schoolmaster; Meg, who’s perfectly happy to continue the selfish curve her mother’s set. The critics rave about Tom’s family being salt of the earth bona-fide lovvies. But all the parents (Vic and Harry) are interesting in for the much-lauded anticipated holidays is for their dying son Tom to pretend he’s enjoying himself – for the sake of the other parent. Why? They literally don’t care if he has a good time. They know they’ll be left behind and need to deal with their lives and consciences afterwards, and they need their other half to think that their son’s last summer was spent enjoyably. Whether it was or not, is irrelevant. They’re sacrificing their offspring just as much as Coral and Roy have to the Vietnam War – so they, the parents, can have a better future.

So what about Tom? He’s talented and dying. Some sympathy there? Nope. He uses Meg as nothing more than a self-aggrandising instrument. Firstly when he gives her a present and makes it all about himself. Secondly, and unbelievably, he tries to pull a Keats-and-Fanny-Brawne on her to get a leg over. Seriously? And we’re meant to think he’s OK? Just because you’re young and dying of leukaemia doesn’t mean you can’t be an arsehole.

The theme of selfish social climbing and exclusion is by far the strongest throughout the play. The campers, the presents, the segregation of the characters carefully into their social strata. Insistent echoes of sacrificing the offspring for power and wealth dominate the entire work.  Tom, who is told to go on holiday and show just how great his short life was, Rick who has willingly submitted to being a mindless cog in the machine, Coral’s son who has been offered up to the Draft, and the Shakespearean echoes of Ferdinand who is taken away for his father’s transgressions, the Midsummer lovers who flee the parent’s ire (‘on pain of death’)… nothing is left out. If we hadn’t got it by the end, the ridiculous little Flying Dutchman/Little Mermaid playlet at the end insists we notice that even the ghost of the young man has to sacrifice his own well-being in the afterlife so that the woman who loves him can have a good life (i.e. walk on land again – even though it was her choice to throw herself into the briny). Sacrifice the younger generation, step up on others and overcome, survive, don’t look back. If you do, pretend it’s something else.

How much of this is actually acknowledged by Gow is debatable. But that’s the point of a work of art. It might show things the artist wasn’t necessarily aware of, or wanted to display. And this central message certainly says something about a perception of Australian society that isn’t the most pleasant. Perhaps that’s why the theme tends to be ignored in favour of ‘reconciliation’, ‘love’, and ‘forgiveness’. Not once is there any reference to anything Aboriginal, but their ghosts haunt the play’s characters’ bitterness and insecurity. I would posit that the play itself is a perfect example of the ‘play-acting’ and shying away from reality so insistently portrayed within the work itself.

All over, for itself, three and a half hoofs up out of five. A poor man’s Beckett with a bit of kitchen sink thrown in. Not too bad.

Amazon Adventure by Willard Price

Title:  Amazon Adventure

Author: Willard Price     

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Publish date: (First) 1951

ISBN: 0 340 16303 8

This is Steve Irwin in text form, for colonialists.

What, more detail?

The hero of the piece (‘Hal Hunt’, would you believe) goes on an animal-collecting expedition to the Amazon with experienced, reliable Dad, and his rapscallion younger brother. Guess who always comes out shiny-conscienced and knowledgeable in the various scrapes they get into? Dad gets called away on an emergency, the two boys carry on the collecting expedition on their own, succeeding exultantly against impossible odds, hostile tribes and even more hostile Gringos. Cue triumphant music as they board the ship home.

It’s easy to look down the snoot at something like this. With its now-distasteful ideas about… so many things, its less-than-literary style, and excessive use of character foils and diversions, Tolstoy it ain’t. But the genuine enthusiasm for the animals described is endearing, and there’s some lively anthropomorphic imagery going on there in the individual scenes. The near-messianic zeal to get its audience on side while they’re still a tender age has to be admirable. Hey, if it gets my son reading (which is seems to be doing), I’ll vote it as a top novel. Mr Price done good.

Three moose hoofs up out of five. Which is not a bad score at all, for a 1950s boys-own adventure.

Against the Tide by Irene Savvides

Title: Against The Tide

Author: Irene Savvides

Publisher: ABC Books

Publish date: 2008

ISBN: 9 780733 322907

‘We float on fat expectations

And big helpings of nostalgia

To a land memory has rendered perfect

By absence and a good dose of bitter wine.’

I’m going to get a tad vehement here. This is a bona fide world-class Australian YA offering, and yet wherever you look, it’s out of print. You can scarcely find a review of it, and when you do they focus on appreciating the depiction of the struggles of young people, specifically immigrants.

It’s so much more than that.

Firstly, no-one is mentioning that it’s a blatant (and successful) homage to The Odyssey. From the very first pages, the descriptions of wine and sea, and the direct and insistent reference to the exported Greekness, along with the obvious similarity the verse format, make the allusions inescapable. The longing for home, regardless of where ‘home’ is, is the central theme of the book, not the struggle of young people specifically – even though these are indeed the main protagonists. Travel, distance, memory, and overcoming monsters. These are the themes.

In addition to the usual techniques, the characterization is accomplished partially through the clear differences in verse form for all the man characters. Which reminds me that (in my vehemence) I have gone about this review in an unorthodox fashion.

It’s a verse novel. The main characters are high school students: Katie (an ocean swimmer nut, whose mother has run off with her uncle, and who moves inland from Cronulla with her father as a result); Effie (from the Greek community at Westmead, where Katie moves to); and Christie (likewise a Greek from Westmead who is a rapper who drops out of school to continue the family baking business). In the meantime Katie’s cousin Matt (also an ocean swimmer and the son of her uncle her mother ran off with – they have similar problems, you see) and Effie fall in love with each other. The narrative revolves around the sea, with the two ocean swimmers living and breathing it and Effie not being able to swim because her baby brother drowned in it years ago. Friendships form, help is extended, mistakes are made and rectified.

The 2005 Cronulla Riots are brought in towards the close of the novel. Like with Odysseus’ homecoming, ‘home’ is made strange. The Suitors are the hire-a-mob rioters who have no place in the home and are there merely to ruin it for their own pleasure. Like Odysseus, the protagonists ultimately deal with the issues by moving away again – although, this not being the Bronze Age, there’s no vengeful slaughter in the meantime (shucks).

My own piece is now joining the throngs of lame reviews, because to do the book justice would take detailed analysis and a thorough exposition of all the themes and techniques. Which I’m not about to do. In the meantime I’ll sit back and be grateful that someone still actually takes the trouble to write work like this, even if it’s then handed out to unwilling schoolkids and left to run out of print in a dusty corner. Homer never died, after all.

The Last Thread by Michael Sala

Title: The Last Thread

Author: Michael Sala

Publisher: Affirm Press 

Publish date: 2012

ISBN: 978 0 9871326 8 0

‘One of Michaelis’s fingers gets wedged between concrete and metal and splits open. He screams. The go-kart stops and he sits there, staring at the wound. (…) A curled leaf of skin hangs from his finger. The tears do not come straight away. The blood holds back. Both come out at once, and then he can’t stop. He is bleeding and wailing like he was made for it. (…)

The tomatoes are swollen and dark and red. Mum runs a knife along each one, before she drops it into boiling water. A thin cut in the flesh, barely visible. The skin of the tomato unfurls when it hits the water, like a flower blooming.’

This is the autobiographical story of a migration and re-migration from the Netherlands to Australia, back again to the Netherlands, and back again to Australia, from the viewpoint of a child of Dutch-Greek heritage, set from the 1970s onward. The first two thirds of the story is told in the third person, and concerns the story of the protagonist as a child. The last third is in the first person and shifts (generally) to events further towards adulthood.

By far the greatest strength of the book is in the spare and evocative language, which is mainly deployed in the third person section. The example above, where disparate scenes or thoughts are linked by visceral images into an impressionist collage of fears and pains, is typical. Most of the initial section is satisfyingly close to poetry. The spaces between the words are given exactly the right amount of room for the reader to create their own experiences, and assimilate the force of often confused emotion behind the language.

This strength ebbs rather dramatically in the latter section. Whether the intention is to impose a more ‘adult’ structure on the thoughts, to seem more detached, more in charge or further along the path of understanding, or some other reason, for me this was a disappointing development. Not only is the language less dense, but the structure is strangely confusing. The narrative about the half-brother Tomos has been shoehorned in awkwardly, with no attempt to fit it into the rest of the story. Possibly this imitates the awkwardness and immobility of the character being described, but for the reader I didn’t find it translated into greater appreciation – it was just like having a filing cabinet out of order. Likewise, the story about the quasi-stepfather Brian is spattered messily across the latter pages, leaving the reader in a sense of confusion about when exactly the events are happening. Again, perhaps this is intentional, as it creates a nightmarish loop of different iterations of the same events taking place over and over again, which is redolent of the character of Brian. But from the consumer’s perspective, it gives but a half-hearted satisfaction.

Overall, the enjoyment of language was notable in parts, and I would be happy to read more from this author. Between three and four moose-hoofs up out of five – would be a clear four, but the subject matter is a little dreary and lacks the zest to pull it into the clear.

Trash by Andy Mulligan

Author: Andy Mulligan

Publisher:  David Fickling Books

Publish date:  1988

ISBN: 978 0385 61902 8

‘I learned perhaps more than any university could ever teach me. I learned that the world revolves around money. There are values and virtues and morals; there are relationships and trust and love – and all of that is important. Money, however, is more important, and it is dripping all the time, like precious water. Some drink deep, others thirst. Without money, you shrivel and die. The absence of money is a drought in which nothing can grow. Nobody knows the value of water until they’ve lived in a dry, dry place – like Behala. So many people, waiting for the rain.’

This is a story about three dumpsite scavenger boys who find a wallet with a clue to a mystery that happens to have massive political implications.

It’s a fantastic, fast read. The story is passed on from one first-person narrator to the other, as they have parts in the action. As the boys are chased by the utterly corrupt authorities. The action is so fast you can’t help but be completely caught up in it. The author’s violent hatred for corruption and unfairness is immense, but even that can’t overshadow the brilliant personalities that populate the novel.  Mulligan has said that ‘children’s fiction needs a bit of toughness’ – and boy does it get it here.

Five moose hoofs up out of five. Strongest points are pace, characterisation, and a prose style effortless as and elf running. Not sure what the weak points are. Go for it.

Tomorrow When the War Began by John Marsden

Title: Tomorrow When The War Began

Author: John Marsden

Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia          

Publish date: 1993

ISBN: 978-1-74351-994-3

‘Then the day came when we stopped playing. We’d gone a couple of months without our usual games, but a few days into the school  holidays I got my dolls out and tried to start up again. And it had all gone. The magic didn’t work any more. I could barely even remember how we’d done it… now it was like reading a meaningless book.’

A group of teenagers go on a camping trip, and on their return, find Australia taken over by a foreign force. Their Rip-Van-Winkle realisation of the situation and awakening to the new reality mirrors the coming of age transitions for most of the characters.

It is not completely without merit. In the latter stages (as long as you get that far) there’s a fair pace of plot – even if that plot is more like a comic action-adventure episodes strung together with no particular direction. Fair enough. I struggle to find further good points, though.

This text (which for some reason is a set text in high school) is so clunky you want to go in and apply WD40 to all moving parts. Listing all the examples would be tedious, so here are just a few, in no particular order.

WHAT is the point of the character of Chris? I strongly suspect he was brought on a) to fill up the girl-boy numbers and 2) as an example of absentee rich landlords not giving a fudge about anything. The poor critter reminds me of those occasional silent characters in Shakespeare who have been transferred over from the original source but are never given any lines. He is seriously useless in plot terms.

When the kids are arguing about the rights and wrongs of the invasion, Robyn’s supposed understanding of slum dwellers being justified in wanting to ‘take over’ is totally at odds with not one of them having in the least clue what country the invaders could even be from. Clueless teenagers? Fine, believable. Clueless but suddenly full of liberal Christian forgiveness grounded in observation? Not so much. I understand the need to fudge the identity of the potential invader, but the disjunction here leads to a lack of internal credibility and logic.

The character selection is a heavy-handed pick-and mix selection, thumping down the diversity belt. Kevin represents a thuggish right-wing working class, Lee the thoughtful Asian, Robyn the Christian lefties, Ellie the narrator is the agrarian, hardworking backbone of the country, and so on. Rarely have we seen such cut-outs since characters were called names like ‘Vice’, ‘Patience’, or ‘Sloth’.

There are several examples of sloppiness. In an episode in which the supposed narrator is participating, they write ‘No-one mentioned the possibility that they might not get back.’ This is not the gender-neutral ‘they’. It’s simply the writer forgetting who is where. It’s not narrative idiosyncrasy or characterisation, either. No-one would refer to themselves in a group as ‘they’.  These things happen to the best. We all need an editor, and ‘they’ have failed here.

Lol moment. They find ‘Heart of Darkness’ in the Hermit’s hut? Seriously? Why not just read that instead?

The instance of Ellie being ‘in the habit of doing things without looking over my shoulder every sixty seconds to see if an adult was nodding or shaking his head,’ because she gets on with farm work. What kid thinks of themselves like that? Would much better have been a show, not a tell. The novel as a whole struggles with this concept, and the premise that the document is supposed to be a public record of what has happened doesn’t tally with what is on the page. No-one would carefully set down secrets and inner thoughts as part of a collective testament in case they all get blown away. It really isn’t that hard to contrive a different framework. Even if it’s a private diary, for Pete’s sake.

You get the picture. I understand there’s been a film made of this. Oh dear. Not the worst book I’ve read but was not a pleasure. Two moose hoofs up out of five.

Bad Samaritans - Ha Joon Chang

Title: Bad Samaritans

Author: Ha Joon Chang

Publish date: 2008

For a book on economics, this is very easy to read. Heaps of great examples to support the ‘Bad Samaritans’ theory, as well as a convincing amount of detour into why every situation isn’t the same and generalizations are a bad idea. It was a little bit of a duplicate of ’23 things they don’t tell you about Capitalism’ but hey, all in a good cause. Recommended. In the light of what it’s trying to do, I don’t see why it shouldn’t get five moose-hoofs up out of five.