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.