21st century literature

Johanna Bell, Department of the Vanishing (#BookReview)

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Words can be problematical when it comes to expressing our response to literature, indeed to any of the arts. We are uncomfortable, for example, using the word “enjoy” to express our response to anything that is dark. This is understandable, and yet I think “enjoy” is a perfectly okay word for something that has engaged and moved us. If we say, for example, that we “enjoy” reading good books, then logically, if a good book is dark, as is not uncommon, it should be valid to say we’ve enjoyed it. Shouldn’t it? So, in a similar vein, when I say Johanna Bell’s Department of the Vanishing was fun to read, I don’t mean it was a fun or funny book. It is in fact a deadly serious book about species extinction, but it is so delightfully clever that I enjoyed the reading experience immensely. Let me explain …

Now, I hadn’t heard of Johanna Bell until I saw her listed as a winner in the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Awards – for the unpublished manuscript of this book. So, I searched, and found her website. She describes herself as “a writer and arts worker based in Nipaluna/Hobart”, whose “practice spans fiction, poetry, picture books, audio making and community arts”. She says she is “most interested in projects that encourage experimentation, elevate new voices and challenge the established rules of storytelling”. Well, I can tell you now that she practises what she preaches.

Her website also briefly describes this book:

Set in a time of mass extinction, Department of the Vanishing blends documentary poetry, archival image and narrative verse to explore the vital questions: Can we live in a world without birdsong, and is it possible to create a new opus with the fragments left over? 

“cataloguing the dead”

This description gives you an idea of the subject matter, and a vague idea of its form, but what it actually looks like on the page is something else. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the publisher and book designer grappled with this one. But, I’m digressing. I still haven’t explained how the book actually works. It’s told in the voice of the rather cutely named archivist, Ava Wilde (as in Wild Bird), from January 2007 when she joins DoV (the Department of the Vanishing) to around 2030. Her job is “cataloguing the dead”, that is, documenting and recreating as best as possible extinct bird species from whatever “archival and cultural materials” exist. After some introductory matter to which I’ll return in a minute, the novel starts with Part 1 of a partially redacted police interview recorded with Anna on 10/11/2029. The irony starts here, with her being told that at the end of the interview the “tapes will be sealed up” and “stored in a secure place”. A few pages later we flash back to her commencing work. The interview records are presented in 10 parts that are regularly interspersed through the text, along with various other documents and narratives, to which I’ll also return in a minute. After all, if Bell can mix it up, so can I.

So, the introductory matter. It tells us much, including that this book requires careful reading, not skimming through the bits that don’t look like story. The first epigraph is presented as a little sticky-taped note and it’s from DH Lawrence, “In the beginning, it was not a word but a chirrup”. The facing page comprises an image of museum drawers containing tagged bird carcasses. The next two pages are covered with bird sounds presented in somewhat jumbled text in different sizes and fonts, giving the impression of a cacophony of birdsong. This is followed on the next page by another sticky-taped epigraph from Stephen Garnett, Ornithologist, “After a few days of fourty [sic] degrees plus the country’s just silent”. Then comes the aforementioned police interview.

In other words, before the story starts, we have an idea of how it is going to be presented (through text in various forms, images and graphics) and what it is about (the impact of climate change on birdsong, and an archivist who has done something illegal). From here the story moves, roughly chronologically, through Ava’s working life at the DoV. The main narrative is presented via poetry in her voice, as she recounts her days – which include weekly visits to her dying mother in a hospice – and through lists and bird obits, departmental emails, images, and headlines. Some factoid, some fact. As she chronicles her increasing despair over the extinctions and her inability to keep up, she tries to unravel the story of her naturalist father who disappeared while searching for lyrebirds when she was a child. She describes the one-night stands that dull the despair for a moment or two, until along comes Luke with his bird tattoo. We also have a compassionate chorus from the sex workers in her apartment who take an interest in her wellbeing.

If you are someone who needs to know what is fact and what is not, Bell helps you out. Under her concluding “Notes and references”, she explains that her “intention was to blur the line between fact and fiction” but for those who “enjoy tracing things back to their origins” she helpfully provides six pages of notes about her source materials. When I am reading fiction, I like the blur, but my archivist-librarian self also appreciates author’s notes like this.

“weird, experimental verse novels”

In her acknowledgements, Bell thanks her family. If she could write a bestseller, she would she says, “but for now you’re stuck with weird, experimental verse novels”. Yes, Department of the Vanishing is weird and experimental, though more in form than language. That is, the language is easy to understand, but to glean the full story, you need to pay attention to the details. It is a strong story about an archivist who is unravelling under the pressure of her concern for bird loss and her increasing workload as the extinctions mount and staff numbers are cut. It is leavened by touches of irony and wit, including well-placed library stamps like “CANCELLED” or “NOT FOR LOAN” scattered across the documents.

I was left with some questions, particularly regarding Luke and his intentions, perhaps the product of seeing a story through one pair of eyes? Whatever the reason, they did not spoil the emotional power or reading experience.

Bell draws on some new-to-me writers for the quotes she scatters through her novel, but there are also the expected suspects – Orwell and Solnit for example – and contemporary writers like Jordie Albiston, Victoria Chang, Angela O’Keeffe, and Ocean Vuong. While they may not all write specifically in the eco-lit sphere, they put truth to the idea that much of today’s writing is backgrounded by ecological concerns, which brings me to some lines about a quarter of the way through, when Ava writes of looking at bird carcasses:

I make myself look
at the horrors we’ve made

if no one else does
I will pay

with an open gaze

This is why we must read eco-literature.

Johanna Bell
Department of the Vanishing
Transit Lounge, 2026
311pp.
ISBN: 9781923023550

(Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge via Scott Eathorne, Quikmark Media)

Stella Prize 2026 Longlist announced

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As I say every year, I don’t do well at having read the Stella Prize longlist at the time of its announcement. In recent years the most I’ve read at the time of the announcement has been two (in 2019). Last year I’d read one. I have read 9 of the 13 winners to date, which is a fair run for me.

As I also say every year, Stella works hard to keep their judging panels fresh, so again none of this year’s judges were on last year’s panel, though some have judged before. This year’s panel comprises bookseller, editor, and author, Jaclyn Crupi; academic and author, Sophie Gee; author, screenwriter, and broadcaster, Benjamin Law; journalist, writer, and facilitator, Gillian O’Shaughnessy; author and editor, Ellen van Neerven. Sophie Gee is this year’s Chair.

The longlist

Here is the list, in alphabetical order by author, which is also how they were presented:

  • Eunice Andrada, Kontra (poetry)
  • Evelyn Araluen, The rot (poetry) (on my TBR) (CWF Session 5 and 6) (Jonathan’s review)
  • Geraldine Brooks, Memorial days (memoir) (Kate’s review)
  • Debra Dank, Ankami: Stolen children, shattered families, silenced histories (nonfiction/memoir) (on my TBR)
  • Miranda Darling, Firewater (novel)
  • Natalie Harkin, Apron-sorrow/Sovereign tea (nonfiction)
  • Lee Lai, Cannon (graphic novel)
  • Charlotte McConaghy, Wild dark shore (novel) (Brona’s review)
  • Lucy Nelson, Wait here (short story collection)
  • Micaela Sahhar, Find me at Jaffa Gate: An encyclopedia of a Palestinian family (nonfiction/memoir)
  • Marika Sosnowski, 58 facets: On violence and the law (nonfiction)
  • Tasma Walton, I am Nannertgarroook (novel)

So, 5 fiction (including one graphic novel and a short story collection), 5 nonfiction (including 3 memoirs), and 2 poetry collections, this year. And four, I think, by First Nations writers – Araluen, Dank, Harkin and Walton. You can read about the longlist, including comments by the judges, at the Stella website.

As I did last year, prior to the announcement, I pre-loaded this post with 25 potential longlistees, partly in the hope that it would speed up writing this post if I had a goodly number of the listed titles already in the post, but I only guessed 4 of the selected books.

As always, I won’t question the selection, though I did have a couple of favourites I’d love to have seen here. But, the Stella is a diverse prize that aims to encompass a wide range of forms and styles, including some I don’t necessarily chase, and I can’t pretend to have read widely from 2025’s output. But I do have some on my TBR or in my sights. Certainly, contemporary political issues are evident in the listing, which is what we’d expect from a prize that wants to encompass good writing that reflects the diversity of Australian writing (by women and non-binary authors). Many of these writers are the brave ones confronting us with their presence and their ideas.

You can read the judges’ report at the link I’ve given above, so I’ll just share two paragraph from it:

As we narrowed the field to a long-longlist, we commented often on how virtually every book reimagined and transformed a different life story, through fine-grained attention, creative intelligence and technical skill. The twelve longlist titles reflect the excellence of all the entries, virtually all of which accomplished something moving and true through narrative, structure, voice or description.

In the other, they define what they mean by originality:

Originality consists in a book that recognisably inhabits its genre or form, and at the same time purposefully breaks it. Original writing changes the scope of what can be thought, felt and envisioned. A sign of great originality is often that, as readers, we think new thoughts, or feel changed by sentences, images and ideas. Originality reaches beyond the book itself to shift the lives of readers.

Each of the longlisted authors receives $2000 in prize money, donated by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, while shortlists will receive $5000. The winer will receive $60,000. There were over 200 submissions this year.

The shortlist will be announced on 8 April, and the winner on 13 May.

Any comments?

Aaron Fa’Aoso and Michelle Scott Tucker, Spirit of the crocodile (#Bookreview)

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Aaron Fa’Aoso and Michelle Scott Tucker’s Spirit of the crocodile is a children’s/YA book, which makes it atypical reading for me. However, I’m not averse breaking my rules occasionally, and so I made an exception for this book – mainly because of its collaborative authorship and its setting.

Aaron Fa’aoso and Michelle Scott Tucker have collaborated before – on Fa’Aoso’s memoir, So far so good. It is, apparently, the first memoir by a Torres Strait Islander to be published commercially. Last year I posted on another collaborative memoir, Some people want to shoot me, by Wayne Bergmann and Madelaine Dickie. I sense that collaborative story-telling between First Nations Australian and white writers is increasing. There are probably many reasons why these collaborations happen, but from authors’ perspectives I understand that it results in better understanding and the transfer of skills and knowledge between the participants. In good collaborations, the mutual respect for each other’s skills is usually evident. Certainly, in this novel, we can sense the different knowledge, storytelling and writing skills that have been brought to the work, but the end result is something that flows well for the reader.

As for the setting … As far as I have been able to ascertain there’s been very little First Nations fiction set in the Torres Strait, which makes this one worth considering regardless of its intended audience. But for me, specifically, is also the fact that I visited the Torres Strait last year, heard some history of the islands there, and saw a presentation by Saibai Islanders, so of course, I have additional interest in the region. Now, having said all that, onto the book …

Spirit of the crocodile is set on Saibai Island, which … well, I’ll let the book describe it:

Only a metre or so above sea level, Saibai was a magnificent low-lying wetland – a flat mixture of mangrove trees, grassy plains and salty swamps. Ezra felt connected to every part of it. It wasn’t like one of those typical tropical islands in the movies but Ezra didn’t mind. Saibai had been home to his family for thousands of years – it was part of him and he was a part of it.

It is also just 4 kilometres south of Papua New Guinea.

Spirit of the crocodile, as you will have surmised, features a boy called Ezra. He is 12 years old, and is in the last weeks of his primary school days. Change is coming and he’s anxious because there is no high school on the island. He – and his friend Mason – will have to go to Thursday Island (TI) for that, and Ezra is not so sure he wants to leave the island and his family.

This, however, is not the only change coming. Threaded through the novel is the spectre of climate change. Saibai Islanders know their country and know when things aren’t looking right. The sky looks wrong, the seasons aren’t behaving as they used to, fish numbers are falling, and, most obviously:

Little by little, as the tides rose slightly higher each year, those other Main Roads – and the homes and trees along them – had been claimed by the sea. (p. 5)

This is not future change but happening right now – and it triggers the novel’s crisis, when a huge storm tests everyone’s mettle, particularly Ezra’s and Mason’s. It is, however, Ezra’s older sister Maryanne who makes the point that these unusual storms, not to mention bushfires and excessive hot weather, are no longer surprises:

The whole world knows it’s getting worse, we can see the water rising, our land disappearing, and no one cares! (p. 234).

So we have Ezra’s life changing as he prepares to transition to high school, and the climate changing, but we have one more big change – coming-of-age.

Spirit of the crocodile is about 12-year-old boys (mostly), so we are not so much in the territory of sexual maturation though there are light hints that this is coming too. No, it’s about mental, psychological, moral growth. It’s about that transition from self-centred childhood to responsible adulthood. At the beginning, Ezra and Mason are kids, playing silly pranks and thinking only of their own fun. Ezra in particular has a lot to learn, and some of it he learns from Mason who, he notices without fully understanding, is already starting to make that transition.

Two things particular to Ezra’s life suggest this coming change. One is the appearance of a large crocodile in an unusual place. Ezra feels what Mason sees, that the croc looks straight at him. Well, as Athe Harold says, Ezra “is a crocodile himself, a member of the Koedel clan … The crocodile is his totem and kin” (p. 19). Later in the novel, the crocodile returns, and again looks “directly at Ezra”. This time Ezra is prepared and looks straight back. His mum tells him the crocodile is “a sign … of … change” (p. 116), but doesn’t explain what. Another lesson for him to learn for himself!

The other thing also occurs early in the novel, a beard-shaving ceremony (Ubu Poethay) which marks the initiation of young men into manhood. It’s a few years off yet for Ezra and Mason, but during the novel Ezra’s dad makes the first gentle steps towards introducing him to Men’s (or spirit) business.

So, Spirit of the crocodile is many things. It’s a work of eco-literature documenting the reality of life on Saibai Island right now, and a call to arms, evoked through Maryanne who explains the value of education in a prestigious school:

It might give me an easier way through to the whitefella world … So I can learn how to use their stuff to help our people. Like Eddie Mabo did … I want to learn how to use their rules, their laws, their knowledge. (p. 226)

It is also a coming-of-age novel, that feels like it would appeal to kids of many backgrounds. And it generously shares culture. This does involve a little bit of telling, but is not didactic. When First Nations people tell the rest of us to educate ourselves about their culture, it is to books like this that we can go for some of that knowledge and understanding.

Superseding all this, however, is the fact that Spirit of the crocodile is a warm-hearted story about family and community. It has some important messages but they are wrapped in a story that feels real. Recommended.

Bill (The Australian Legend) has also reviewed this book.

Aaron Fa’Aoso and Michelle Scott Tucker
Spirit of the crocodile
Crow’s Nest in Cammeraygai Country: Allen and Unwin, 2025
248pp.
ISBN: 9781743317099

Samantha Harvey, Orbital (#BookReview)

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Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novella, Orbital, is one of those novels you want to keep by your side after you’ve finished it, hoping that its calm beauty and quiet provocations will stay with you just that little bit longer. And here, in this opening sentence, I am channelling the “you” voice that she slips into occasionally but so effectively throughout her novel.

I am late to this book but I have wanted to read it for a long time, so was thrilled when my reading group scheduled it for February. I had avoided reading about it – sorry all you bloggers out there – but had heard enough to know it was different, that it didn’t have a strong narrative but involved a few astronauts orbiting the earth in a spacecraft. I wanted to come at this difference with a clear mind, ready to see what I thought, uninfluenced by the opinions of others. This is my usual modus operandi, but for “different” books, I find it especially beneficial.

Now, when my reading group meets, the first thing we do, before we start the to-and-fro of discussion, is briefly share our first impressions. Mine were that it is a beautiful book about earth and a deep book about humankind, and that I loved how Harvey balanced multiple paradoxes – science versus wonder, human inventiveness versus our rapaciousness, the beauty of the planet versus its exploitation. I also commented that it is another book that pushes what a novel is. It is not one thing or another, but combines many things – nature writing or eco-literature, philosophical treatise, literary realist novel, the one-day-novel, and more, all without a strong narrative arc or major character development, though there is a story and there are characters.

So, where to start? I’d like to start halfway in with Orbit 7, but I should explain that the novel is told chronologically over a 24-hour period during which the craft (based on the International Space Station) orbits the earth 16 times. Each chapter is named for an orbit, or part of an orbit, as in “Orbit 7” or “Orbit 3, descending”. We start with “Orbit minus 1” which sets the scene. It is early Tuesday morning in early October, and there are six astronauts on board, “nothing unusual about this anymore, routine astronauts in earth’s backyard”. Routine perhaps, but the chapter ends by telling us that they will return to earth “full of stories and rapture and longing” albeit “their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner”. Immediately, this sets up the push-pull nature of this remarkable book.

Over the next 6 orbits we are introduced to the six astronauts/cosmonauts – Roman and Anton (Russians), Nell (English), Chie (Japanese), Shaun (American), Pietro (Italian) – and to some of the “events” that loosely frame the novel, a typhoon building over the Philippines, Chie’s mother’s death, and the launch of the first lunar expedition in decades. We are also introduced to life on board the spaceship, to something about the astronauts’ personalities and their roles on board, and to how microgravity affects the body. And, through Harvey’s glorious prose, we feel the magic and awe of being in space and see the gorgeousness of the earth:

this thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness … An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright (“Orbit 7). 

This thing, with sights like the auroras,

the flexing, morphing green and red of the auroras which snake around the inside of the atmosphere fretful and magnificent like something trapped (Orbit 4, ascending).

But …

“humanity doesn’t know when to stop”

This is a novel that accommodates paradox. Alongside beauty and wonder, we are early introduced to other thoughts and perspectives. In the second chapter, “Orbit 1, ascending”, the idea of perspective is introduced through a postcard Shaun has depicting Velázquez’s “Las Meninas“, a painting which poses more questions than it answers about who is looking, who is being looked at, what is the subject, is there a subject, what is real and what is not. (This is one of a few images referenced in the novel that stimulate questions about perspective, that encourage us to see things from different angles.) By “Orbit 4, ascending”, this question has developed into a recognition that their view is “half-mast”, that we are not at the centre of it all. The thinking is existential:

we grow out of the royalty of childhood into supreme normality; we find out about our own unspecialness and in a flash of innocence we feel quite glad – if we’re not special then we might not be alone … And so, in loneliness and curiosity and hope humanity looks outwards.

By “Orbit 5, descending” through to “Orbit 7″, we are around halfway through the novel, and Harvey moves us on to thinking about the other side of the equation, which is not how humans feel but what we do. The push-pull tension between wonder and destruction, between the potential power of curiosity and the more negative “force of human want”, comes to the fore. Chie’s mother, who was born because her mother survived Nagasaki, tells her daughter “be afraid my child at what humans can do; you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn’t know when to stop …” (Orbit 5, ascending).

Then, two chapters later in “Orbit 7” comes this:

One day they look at the earth and they see the truth. If only politics were a pantomime … Instead they come to see that it’s not a pantomime, or it’s not just that. It’s a force so great that it has shaped every single thing on the surface of the earth that they had thought from here so human-proof.

… Every retreating or retreated or disintegrated glacier, every granite shoulder of every mountain laid newly bare by snow that has never before melted, every scorched and blazing forest or bush, every shrinking ice sheet, every burning oil spill . . .

The hand of politics is so visible from their vantage point that they don’t know how they could have missed it at first.

And there we have it, “the hand of politics”,”the amazing force of human want” that has “sculpted and shaped” every part of the planet. From this point on, the paradoxes – or tensions – that we had been subtly led to become more overt, but this is not a depressing novel. The book’s power and beauty lie in Harvey’s ability to inspire us with earth’s beauty while also posing, through her outsider-insider astronauts, our most pressing question: how do (or can) we harness the positive power of human wonder and curiosity without also embodying the negatives.

Ultimately, while not denying the underlying challenges, Orbital reads as a hymn to our “wild and lilting world”. We, like Harvey’s astronauts, see the news and have lived our lives – but, this does not make our hope naive (to paraphrase “Orbit 7”). Lovely.

Kimbofo and Brona have also reviewed this book.

Samantha Harvey
Orbital
Vintage, 2024 Original. pub. 2023)
136pp.
ISBN: 9781529922936

Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper, and Sarah Krasnostein, The mushroom tapes (#BookReview)

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Chances are I’m not telling you anything when I say that The mushroom tapes is about an Australian murder trial that took place over two months in the middle of 2025. However, if you don’t know, this trial concerned a woman named Erin Patterson who was accused of murdering three relatives and attempting to murder a fourth, by serving them toxic-mushroom-laced beef Wellingtons for lunch, in July 2023. The victims were her estranged husband’s parents and aunt, with the survivor being his uncle, Ian Wilkinson. The estranged husband, Simon, had also been invited but pulled out the day before. You can read more at the Wikipedia article, Leongatha Mushroom Murders.

This was one of those cases that captured local and international attention, so when it went to trial coverage was intense. Not only were there the usual news reports on television and radio, and in print and online newspapers, but there were also podcasts, social media threads, and of course conversations everywhere you went. Within weeks of the trial’s conclusion, the books started coming out. People were, as Helen, Chloe and Sarah* write, either obsessed and consuming all they could or repulsed and doing everything possible to avoid it. I was in the middle-ground. I certainly wasn’t obsessed. I didn’t seek out reports but couldn’t miss hearing snippets of news. If it came up in conversation, I took part with whatever information I had recently heard. It’s not that I didn’t care. It’s a terrible and devastating story – for the families involved and particularly for Erin and Simon’s two young children, who were 14 and 9 when the murders occurred. However, having lived through the Lindy Chamberlain days, I’d rather let the court do its job as unhampered as possible. I am increasingly uncomfortable with pronouncing on controversial situations, because the sources are often questionable or incomplete.

Then I heard that Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein – all writers of thoughtful narrative nonfiction that I have loved – had decided to write jointly about the case. This, I knew, would interest me, because I could trust them to engage in honest and open-minded thinking that would consider the greys. I hoped, too, that they would reach beyond this particular case to offer something more. I didn’t have a preconceived notion of what this might be, but just wanted them to tease out something bigger than this case for us to take away and ponder. Did they? Read on …

“a rent in the social fabric” (Hannah Arendt)

In the book’s opening pages, the three discuss what they are doing, whether, in fact, they should be doing it. After their first day in court, a few days into the trial, they talk about what they have seen in the witness, Simon – the grief, horror, incomprehension. Invoking Hannah Arendt, they suggest they are “bearing witness to a rent in the social fabric and how the law is going to deal with it” (p. 15). Nonetheless, they are concerned at this early stage, and revisit it often throughout the process, that they might be “just perving”. Helen admits there is an element of “perving” of course,

but you hope that by the time you’ve got a certain degree of skill as a writer, you can become useful. I think it’s useful work. These trials are excruciatingly painful. Your [Sarah’s] description of that journalist, going to drink at the pub – that’s defence, isn’t it, defence against the pain. The pain that you volunteer to witness. (p. 16)

Chloe adds that another issue is the transformation of the town by the media pack. These are just two of the many ideas these three explore amongst themselves as the trial progresses – because this book is completely framed by the trial.

“our eyes will go to different places” (Chloe)

This brings me to the book’s structure and form. It is divided into 6 parts which follow the trial, chronologically, through to the verdict. The parts are themed around the focus of the trial at that point in time, such as mushrooms or the victims. They tease the theme out, while also interrogating wider thoughts that their process was generating.

And their process was an interesting one. When they decided to jointly write this book, rather than individually, they recognised that by working together their eyes would “go to different places”. During the conversation I attended with Helen and Sarah, they talked about these different “places”. Helen’s tended to be “Shakespearean”, and personal, concerned with questions like where is the line that an ordinary person crosses to commit such a crime, while Chloe’s tended to the sociological (as in, what in society created this). No surprises for guessing what legally trained Sarah’s was! These are loose divisions, because they are not one-dimensional women, but it does mean that the discussions are wide-ranging.

The overall tone is one of reportage: “we” drove to Morwell, or “in her opening address for the Crown, Nanette Rogers had told the jury …”, or “Helen and Chloe are still on the phone with Sarah”. These reports, which provide facts, describe the scene, or establish bona fides, are interspersed with conversations selected from hours of recordings and other communications like email. They are introduced by the speaker’s name, as in “Chloe: The public gallery wants a plot twist… ” (p. 109). This might sound disjointed, but in fact the book flows well, which is impressive given the time-frame in which it was produced.

“it has everything in it that’s human, including absurdity” (Chloe)

I have never sat on a jury nor attended a trial, but these writers conveyed a real feeling of what being in that courtroom was like – of the tedium of long days of evidence about mushrooms and dehydrators, of the little communities of people attending court, of the cafe where attendees would go for coffee or lunch, of attendee Kelly the dairy farmer who gets a mushroom tattoo, and so on. It’s both life-changingly serious and oh so ordinary.

But, of course, the centre is Erin. Their discussions about her, as their thoughts waver and shift through mounting evidence, convey just what a strange case this was. As Chloe comments near the end, “it’s a miasma of why?” (p. 222). Who is she? Why did she kill her parents-in-law who had treated her with much kindness? What happened in the marriage? Why does she lie? Is she a “monster” or “a broken person”? They can’t decide. Sarah says, as they wait for the verdict:

“We should be nervous – we’re finding out how much we’ll never know” (p. 226-7)

So, back to my question: Did I come away from this book with some meaningful takeaways? I do think it suffers a little from its rapid production. It is fresh and immediate, but not quite as complete as I was hoping for. Many ideas were touched upon, rather than fully explored – including the impact on a community of being at the centre of such a tragedy and then of intense media attention, the bigger issues about what makes someone (particularly women) kill, the moral questions about what they were doing, not to mention questions about the legal system.

However, meaningful questions were raised, and I enjoyed spending time with these three. On their own, they are some women, but together, they are a force. It was like eavesdropping on the sort of intelligent, compassionate and open conversation that we all aspire to. And they ended on the hopeful note that, despite the horror and the “appalled sorrow”, there was survivor “Ian Wilkinson’s offer of kindness – an enlargement of the field”. “An enlargement of the field”. What a beautiful thought.

Brona, Jonathan, Kate and Rose have all posted on this book.

* I use first names because that’s how they present themselves in the book.

Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper, and Sarah Krasnostein,
The mushroom tapes: Conversations on a triple murder trial
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2025
240pp.
ISBN: 9781923058750

Jessica White, Silence is my habitat (#BookReview)

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Those of us who follow Jessica White have been waiting for the biography of nineteenth century botanist, Georgiana Molloy, that we know she has been researching, but then, almost out of the blue, appeared something a little different, a collection of ecobiographical essays titled, Silence is my habitat.

Published under the beautiful Upswell imprint, Silence is my habitat takes us on a journey with White as she navigates her grief over her mother’s death, tying into it, as she goes, the many strands that have comprised her life to date. Like her hybrid memoir, Hearing Maud (my review), Silence is my habitat defies easy categorisation. It’s not straight biography or memoir, and while it presents as a collection of essays, they are not, for all their careful end-noting, your typical formal essay. This is why I like White. She is out there in the vanguard thinking about what makes us who we are and about how to write about it, honestly and openly. On her website, she explains her book thus:

While a biography chronicles a person’s life, an ecobiography details how a person’s sense of self is shaped by their environment. My forthcoming essay collection, Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays, details how deafness shapes my relationship with different environments, such as the bush, bodies of water, archives, and institutions.

In this book, then, the self is herself, not Georgiana Molloy, though Molloy makes frequent appearances all the same. The book comprises eleven essays, some of which have been published before, in their entirety or in different forms.

Many strands

I wrote above that in Silence is my habitat, White incorporates “the many strands” of her life to date. They include, of course, her biography – her family-farm childhood, becoming deaf at the age of four, finding her partner, the motherhood question, and the wrenching death of her mother. They also include her academic and research life which have taken her around Australia and the world, and various other events and issues, such as the pandemic or, even, architecture.

Then, threading through and linking the essays (and these strands) are three main motifs – deafness, grief, and nature. Importantly, White opens with an Author’s Note in which she briefly discusses the “deaf” versus “Deaf” issue, advising that she will use the lowercase version for herself, but uppercase where it is the preference of people she references. Identity and nomenclature, as we know, is a fraught issue, so it is worth being upfront, as White is, clearly and respectfully.

So the essays … we start with scene-setting, in an essay appropriately titled “Grounding”. It gives us, effectively, her origin story, ending with the expected, but nonetheless devastating death of her mother. Referencing the etymology of the word “essay”, she concludes:

To write an essay is to make an attempt, to test or try out one’s responses to a subject, emotionally, intellectually and psychologically … Perhaps this is why I turned to the form in the year following my mother’s death. (“Grounding”)

Essays, though, can take many forms, with White adopting here a discursive style, which, in this case, relies largely on vignettes and digressions to explore that essay’s main theme. This approach encourages us to see the world holistically – to look for connections (and perhaps find more for ourselves) – rather than follow one line of argument. In “Hostile architecture”, for example, White starts by referencing two specific uses of architectural features to deter, respectively, pigeons and homeless people. Then, through vignettes which shift between her own experiences and the research of others, she explores ways of “accommodating” workers with disabilities. She talks specifically about DeafSpace, a concept developed at/for Gallaudet College, and closes by bringing these personal and informational strands together to make the essay’s main point about Universal Design that just might suit us all.

These are elegantly written essays, which is easier to say than to explain because, to some degree, it’s indefinable. But, I’ll give it a try. I see it as a combination of several things. The language, for one. White interweaves straight information from academic research with small narratives from moments in her life, gorgeous descriptions of nature, and expression of deep, sometimes heart-breaking emotion.

Then there’s the way White develops her essays. For example, “Intertwining”, which follows the aforementioned “Hostile architecture”, starts very differently – on something personal, with White scrambling over rocks in Cumbria, and thinking about Georgiana Molloy who had left that region for Western Australia in 1829. The rest of the essay focuses mostly on Molloy’s life, but told through personal and ecobiographical perspectives which include White interweaving her own painful journey to non-motherhood with the story of Molloy, who buries two children and distracts herself from grief “by turning to the natural world”. Another recurrent perspective appears here, the colonial project, because the Molloys were, of course, part of “the colonisation [that] crept across the south-west like a parasitic vine”, and has resulted in ongoing stress on “weathered soils … never meant to sustain large numbers of humans”. The essay ends, neatly, with White standing on Cape Freycinet, near where the Molloys had lived, and coming to terms with her own life and choices.

And finally, there’s the sophistication of the ideas being explored through this ecobiographical framework. The concept – of understanding how a person’s sense of self is shaped through their interaction with their ecosystem – is easy enough to grasp, but conveying that in a nuanced way for any particular individual is the challenge.

For White, the self has, since she was four, been framed by her deafness. It made her, from that young age, “observant and quiet” which, given she was a farm girl, meant she developed the kinship with the natural world that imbues all the essays. Deafness also made her dependent on her family until she was in her mid-thirties. From this she develops ideas about interdependencies – between people, between people and culture, and between people and the environment. Through her essays, White teases out how these facts of her life – deafness and dependencies/interdependencies – make her who she is including informing her understanding of the world. They give her a particular way of seeing that she translates for us. For example, she writes of research into ecoacoustics, and how even soil has sound. Degraded soils, however, are quieter, which causes her to suggest:

If ecosystems are quiet, it seems that we should pay attention to them. (“On the wing”)

Silence is my habitat is the sort of writing I enjoy. It’s intelligent, heartfelt, confronting and confident – and, by the end, White has found not only the space to grieve but a way forward. That way forward includes recognising the interdependence of all things:

If silence is our habitat, it is one that engenders contemplation, compassion and creativity. It prompts us to seek connection, for we understand innately that to be alone is dangerous. Our lives are intimately bound up with, and depend upon, other creatures. In losing them, we lose ourselves. (“Balancing”)

Ecobiography, I can see, has much to offer.

Jessica White
Silence is my habitat: Ecobiographical essays
Perth: Upswell, 2025
170pp.
ISBN: 9781763733121

Carmel Bird, Crimson velvet heart (#BookReview)

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If you have read Carmel Bird’s memoir Telltale (my review), you will know about her love of story, particularly of history, and fairy story, and legends. You will also know about her love of objects, of beautiful objects or strange ones, and of the meanings embodied within them. And, if you have read anything by Carmel Bird, you will know her light touch, even when dealing with the most serious subjects. All these coalesce beautifully in her latest novel, which is also her first work of historical fiction, Crimson velvet heart.

“wars and princesses”

Crimson velvet heart is set during the latter part of the reign of Louis XIV (1638-1715). It tells the story of the “all but forgotten” Princess Marie Adélaïde of Savoy (1685-1712), who, in 1686 at the age of 11, is brought to France to marry Louis’ grandson, the Duke of Burgundy. Why? Well, it’s all to do with “wars and princesses”. Adélaïde’s fate was sealed by the Treaty of Turin which had been negotiated that very year between her father, the “wily” Victor Amadeus, and Louis. It ended Savoy’s involvement in the Nine Years War, and central to it was Adélaïde’s marriage. She was, effectively, a spoil of war, or, as the narrator more pointedly puts it, “a prize in a party game”. The wedding takes place the following year, when Adélaïde is 12, but is not consummated for another two years, after she becomes “a woman”. Her job, of course, is to produce an heir.

Bird’s novel tells the story of Adélaïde’s life from birth to death, but primarily focuses on her years at Court, which are cut short in 1712, when she dies, most likely of measles. She had, however, done her duty, having produced the required heir, the boy who was to become Louis XV. These are the essential facts.

However, when an author decides to write historical fiction, I want to know why. In the case of Crimson velvet heart, I see two reasons – one historical, the other more general. The historical comprises two questions which become apparent as the novel progresses but are put explicitly by the narrator near the end. They are: “Did Adélaïde really spy successfully for her father?”, and “Was the love between Adélaïde and Louis XIV ever consummated?”. The narrator then adds, slyly, “Is the second question more interesting than the first?” Now that’s a loaded question. Regardless, these two questions have occupied the minds of historians ever since, but we will never know the answers.

Crimson velvet heart, then, uses these two specific questions to frame a lively, engaging read about one of those fascinating periods in history that is populated by people – like Louis and Adélaïde – who lived large lives which have captured the imagination of people ever since. The novel portrays court life – its schemes and jealousies, excesses and dangers, and, of course, its splendour. The realities – the forever wars, the religious persecution, the disparity in wealth, the poor health (including terrible teeth) – are set against the opulence of lives lived in palaces and gardens, at balls and on horseback.

It is to Bird’s credit that she can juggle telling an entertaining story full of romance and intrigue, while simultaneously adding complexity to our thinking about history and humanity. She achieves this partly through using two narrators. One is the more traditional omniscient third person narrator, though “traditional” is not a word I’d ever use for Bird, while the other is one of the few fictional characters in the novel, a young nun, Sister Clare, who knew Adélaïde in her years at court and tells her story first person from a time after Adélaïde’s death. Whilst it’s not a rigid demarcation, the third person focuses mostly on the historical facts, including the wars and treaties, and on filling in background that Clare couldn’t know, while Clare provides the personal touch, offering (imagined) insights into who Adélaïde might have been. Clare’s picture is of a resourceful young woman, who is vibrant and enchanting, who suffers loss and pain, but who can also be manipulative and cruel.

However, Clare is also everywoman, a person who, through writing her “Storybook”, tries “to make sense of life’s bewilderments”. She’s like all of us who live through a time and only know what we can glean from our own observations and research, which in Clare’s time of course was primarily through conversations with others. Our narrator, on the other hand, has the advantage of a wider historical sweep, so understands more, though can’t know what isn’t known (if you know what I mean!) This is where Bird’s tone shows most. Her narrator offers a wise and thoughtful perspective, but with a lightly wry and knowing touch that is pure Bird. It starts early on, when the narrator reports on the priest’s blessing of the newly-born Adélaïde and her mother:

He commends them to the happiness of everlasting life. Time will tell. (p. 6)

That little addition, “time will tell”, told me I would enjoy this narrator’s point of view.

Bird also uses recurring motifs to underpin her story and its meaning. This is a story focusing on women, so domestic motifs abound. Tapestry, embroidery and weaving, knots and pincushions, are the stuff of women’s lives but they also produce wonderful metaphors for a story about war and court intrigue. As does colour, with crimson evoking both richness and blood. So, we have gorgeous images galore, like Clare trying to understand the religious hatred that has Catholics persecuted in England, and Protestants in France:

It is like … a tapestry sewn by lunatics so that it makes no sense as a picture. (p. 48)

The novel’s title, itself, refers to a crimson velvet heart pincushion in which Louis’ “secret wife”, Madame de Maintenon, keeps track of religious conversions, because “when there was one less Protestant in the world, then the world was a better place”.

There is another logic to these motifs, however, because tapestries, embroideries, and artworks are among the limited primary historical sources available to the historian of long-ago times. Bird’s narrator references these and cautions that “like the camera, the artist’s brush can lie, leaving a false trail for the historian to follow”.

Earlier in this post, I suggested there were two responses to the question about why Carmel Bird might have chosen to write this novel. My second encompasses the novel’s exploration of a universal that is uncomfortably relevant today, the complex relationship between war, territory and religion, and its comprehension of the paradoxes of human behaviour, in which love and betrayal, cruelty and kindness, reside side-by-side.

In the end, Crimson velvet heart presents just what Sister Clare set out to do when she began her Storybook, “a vision of the world in all its beauty, and with all its flaws”. It also embodies serious ideas about the art of history and storytelling. A wonderful read.

Carmel Bird
Crimson velvet heart
Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2025
309pp.
ISBN: 9781923023512

Review copy courtesy Transit Lounge.

Kim Kelly, Touched (#BookReview)

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In 2023, novelist Kim Kelly was one of the two winners of Finlay Lloyd’s inaugural 20/40 Publishing Prize, with her 1920s-set historical novel, Ladies’ Rest and Writing Room (my review). Publisher Julian Davies had hoped at the time to award one fiction and one nonfiction prize, but there was a dearth of good nonfiction entries. That was rectified in 2024, with Sonya Voumard’s book on dystonia, Tremor (my review), being one of the two winners. This year, Kim Kelly returned with a nonfiction work on anxiety, titled Touched: A small history of feeling – and won again.

There is an obvious similarity between these two nonfiction winners, given both deal with medical conditions that impinge significantly on their writers’ lives. However, as quickly becomes apparent, the similarity is superficial, probably due to their writers’ origins. Voumard and Kelly are both published authors with other books to their names, but Voumard is a journalist while Kelly is a novelist, and this I think informs their different approaches to their subject matter.

Finlay Lloyd describes Touched like this:

Why this book is different
Documenting the damaging role of anxiety in our lives is hardly new, but Touched takes us inside the destabilising riot of a three-day panic attack with such insight, honesty and humour that the perspective we gain is revelatory and overwhelmingly hopeful.

Why we liked it
This book has a wonderful breadth of understanding—of the author’s own crazily complex family, of the wider issue of anxiety across society, and of her own voyage as a highly competent yet vulnerable being in a worryingly unhinged world.

Both Voumard and Kelly use a personal narrative arc to frame their discussions. For Voumard it’s the brain surgery she is about to undertake as her book opens, while for Kelly it’s the three-day panic attack she has leading up to her Masters graduation ceremony. Kelly’s focus is this attack. She takes us into it, viscerally. It is the emotional and narrative core of this book. Voumard, on the other hand, weaves her own story through a wider story about dystonia, in which she explores its different forms and treatments through the experiences of others as well as her own. Both writers situate their conditions within a wider societal context, but very differently.

And here I will leave Voumard. After all, she has her own review already!

Kelly starts her book with an (unlabelled) author’s note in which she explains that memory is slippery, so dates and details may not be precise, but “everything in this memoir is true, in essence and in feeling”. I like this, because no-one can remember all the tiny details, and in most cases – crime, excepted – they are not important. What is important is being truthful to the experience, and this, I feel, Kelly achieves.

“It’s exhausting, being human”

Touched is divided into two parts – the lead up to graduation day, and then graduation day and its aftermath. Within these parts are single-word titled chapters starting, logically, with “contact”, and her contradictory responses to “touch”, to how physical touch can settle her but can also produce anxiety when it involves people she doesn’t know well, like, say, hairdressers, doctors and dentists. As for masseurs, no way! But “touched” of course has other meanings, including:

To be in touch, to communicate. To have the touch, a skill at something. To be touched, to be momentarily captured by some sentiment. To live in a vague state of craziness. To feel. Small word, wonderfully big inside its tight dimensions of spelling and sound.(p. 14)

Kelly, who is a book editor as well as a novelist, loves words, so her memoir is written with the eye of someone who is deeply engaged with the meanings of words and how they convey feelings. As graduation day approaches, and she and her partner drive to Sydney for it, she suffers an excruciating panic attack which she describes with a clarity that is revelatory for those like me who have not experienced that degree of psychic distress. At the same time, she looks back to history – including to the Ancient Greeks and philosophers like Aristotle – for ideas on anxiety. And she flashes back to her own past, exploring how and where and why it all began. Her Jewish roots, the experiences of poverty and war in her Irish Catholic tree, the insecurities of her parents, her own childhood fears, and wider societal issues like the imposter syndrome that is particularly common among women, all come into the frame.

It’s not all distress and misery, however, because in between her mulling she shares her wins, her strategies, and her optimistic self that keeps on going. The writing is beautiful, slipping between information-sharing, straight narrative, and light or lyrical, rhythmical moments when she takes a breath and so do we.

Touched is a personal story, and so, by definition, it can be intensely self-focused at times. However, the intensity serves a purpose for those unfamiliar with what anxiety can do. Further, with a keen sense of tone, Kelly regularly reins it in so it never wallows. At the time of her writing, she tells us, around 17% of Australians had experienced some form of anxiety disorder. That’s nearly one in five of us. This book is for all those people – and for the rest of us who know someone who has experienced it, or who might ourselves experience it one day. We just never know. We should thank Kim Kelly for putting herself out there, so beautifully and so honestly.

Read for Novellas in November (as novella-length nonfiction) and Nonfiction November, but not quite finished in time!

Kim Kelly
Touched: A small history of feeling
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2025
142pp.
ISBN: 9780645927030

Colum McCann, Twist (#BookReview)

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Colum McCann said during the conversation I attended back in May that books are never completed until they are in the hands of readers who tell back what a book is about. This is essentially reception theory, which, referencing Wikipedia, says that readers interpret the meaning of what they read based on their individual cultural backgrounds and life experiences. In other words, “the meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship between the text and the reader”.

Although I don’t adhere to any theory absolutely, this makes some sense to me – as does my extrapolation from this that the reader’s background and life experiences contribute not only to the meaning they obtain from a work, but their assessment of it.

Colum McCann’s latest novel Twist was my reading group’s last book of the year. All of us were fascinated by its underlying story about the data – our data – travelling around the world via undersea cables, and the fragility or vulnerability of this data. But, when it came to assessing how much we liked the book, other things came into play, things that say as much about who we are as readers, what we look for in books, as they say about the book itself. For example, readers who look to empathise with appealing, rounded, human characters might assess Twist quite differently from those for whom ideas play a significant role in their preferences.

I’ll return to this, but first more on the novel. Twist is narrated by 50-something Irish novelist, Anthony Fennell, whose career had stalled. It “felt stagnant”, and he was feeling disconnected from life, “the world did not beckon, nor did it greatly reward”. He was, in fact, “unsure what fiction or drama could do anymore”. He needed, he tells us, “a story about connection, about grace, about repair”. Fortuitously, into his lap falls an assignment to write a long feature about a cable repair vessel, which is led by a man called John Conway (whose name, we soon realise, contains allusions to Joseph Conrad and also perhaps to that other well-known JC).

So, in the first few pages of the novel, we know we are being told a story from after the event by a writer who was there as it happened. We know this event relates to Conway because Fennell tells us on the opening page that something had happened to him, and that he is going to tell his version of what happened as best he can, which might take some “liberties with the gaps”. Conway, then, is central to the narrative arc, but we also know that the subject matter is data and the internet, and that the theme will concern ideas like connection and disconnection, brokenness and repair, fact, fiction and the limits of storytelling. It’s impressive, in fact, just how much of the rest of the book is set up in the first couple of pages.

The narrative proper then starts. It’s January 2019, and Fennell meets Conway, and his partner Zanele, in Cape Town, before joining the Georges Lacointe on its journey up the western African coast to the site of a cable break. It takes some time to get there, so we get to know Conway a bit more. He is a good leader, and his multicultural crew of men respect him. The first and main cable break is repaired at the end of Part One, and then things go seriously awry. Zanele, who was performing in her unauthorised climate-change-focused version of Waiting for Godot in rural England, suffers an acid attack. Life starts to “unravel” for Conway who cannot get away to help her. Indeed, as the back cover says, Conway disappears.

I will leave the plot there. It does get more complicated, so I’ve not spoiled it I believe. I will return instead to my opening point about readers and their assessments. Most of those in my group who had reservations focused on the characters. Conway and Zanele were too shadowy; they were not well-rounded; we didn’t know them well. And, why choose a hard-to-identify-with man like Fennell as a narrator? I understand these questions but they don’t concern me, because I read the book differently – so let’s look at that.

Twist draws from, or was inspired by, two classic novels, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The great Gatsby, with its story of a man’s obsessive love for an unattainable woman, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness and its story about the darkness at the centre of colonialism. While the narrative arc clearly owes much to Fitzgerald, McCann said during the aforementioned conversation that Conrad’s novel provides the more obvious literary parallel. Those tubes along the seabed, he said, follow old colonial routes, and suggest corporate or digital colonialism.

“There is no logic. The world is messy.” (Fennell)

Looking at the novel through this perspective provides a way of understanding why McCann has written it the way he has. It is not about Conway and Zanele. We only see them through the eyes of Fennell. They are established enough to draw us in but their prime role is to support the ideas – disconnection, connection, turbulence, repair – rather than to be the subjects of the story. We know Fennell somewhat better, as we need to. He is a flawed man, stalled in life and feeling disconnected from it. It is his journey through the narrative that carries our hopes for repair.

If I had any criticism, it would more likely concern the writing. McCann’s is an exuberant, epigrammatic style. It’s not hard to see what he is doing, the games he is playing with meaning and metaphor. However, I can enjoy this sort of writing. It keeps ideas to the fore. And they were ideas that interest me – zeitgeist issues about the fragility of our data; the line between doubt/certainty, connection/disconnection (emotionally, spiritually, technologically), and break/repair; and the messiness of life. It’s not hard to find quotable quotes, like “opinion, the obscene certainty of our days” (p. 218) and “the disease of our days is that we spend so much time on the surface” (p. 25). I enjoy these too!

Part Two opens with:

It is, I suppose, the job of the teller to rearrange the scattered pieces of a story so that they conform to some sort of coherence. Between fact and fiction lie memory and imagination. Within memory and imagination lies our desire to capture at least some essence of the truth, which is, at best, messy.

By the end, McCann has told a story which illuminates the messiness of our time. The truth is that there is no real coherence. There is – and probably always has been – just all of us trying to muddle through the best way we can. This is not earth-shattering news, but McCann exposes some of the issues, many driven by technology, that affect our trying today. The light he throws on these – and the personal progress Fennell makes – are why I enjoyed reading this novel.

Colum McCann
Twist
London: Bloomsbury, 2025
239pp.
ISBN: 9781526656957

Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the dead: A writer on writing (#BookReview)

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My reading for Buried in Print Marcie’s annual MARM month has been both sporadic and minimal, to say the least, but this year I finally got to read a book that has been on my TBR shelves for a long time and that I have planned to read over the last few MARMs. It’s Atwood’s treatise (or manifesto or just plain ponderings) on writing, Negotiating with the dead. Interestingly, in 2003 it won the Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) for Autobiography/Memoir. I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, though on reflection I can see it does have a strong element of memoir.

Its origins, however, are not in memoir but in the series of lectures she delivered at the University of Cambridge in 2000, the Empson Lectures, which commemorate literary critic, William Empson. (I recently – and sadly – downsized his most famous book, Seven types of ambiguity, out of my library). Atwood turned those lectures into this set of essays that was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002 (and that I leapt on when I saw it remaindered in 2010).

Subtitled “A writer on writing”, this book is probably not quite what most of us would expect, unless we really know Atwood. As she says in her Introduction, it is not so much about writing as about something more abstract, more existential even, about what is writing, who is the writer, and what are the writer’s relationships with writing, with the reader, with other writers, and with themself. It’s also about the relationship between writing and other art forms, like painting and composing. She says in her Introduction that “it’s about the position the writer find himself in; or herself, which is always a little different”. (Love the little gender reference here.) It’s about what exactly is the writer “up to, why and for whom?”

I rarely do this, but I’m sharing the table of contents for the flavour it gives:

  • Introduction: Into the labyrinth
  • Prologue
  • 1 Orientation: Who do you think you are? What is “a writer,” and how did I become one?
  • 2 Duplicity: The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double Why there are always two?
  • 3 Dedication: The Great God Pen Apollo vs. Mammon: at whose altar should the writer worship?
  • 4 Temptation: Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co. Who waves the wand, pulls the strings, or signs the Devil’s book?
  • 5 Communion: Nobody to Nobody The eternal triangle: the writer, the reader, and the book as go-between
  • 6 Descent: Negotiating with the dead Who makes the trip to the Underworld, and why?

There is way too much in the book for me to comment on, but I don’t want to do a general overview either, so I’m just going to share a couple of the ideas that interested me.

One of her main threads concerns “duality” and “doubleness” in writers’ lives. There’s a fundamental duality for a writer – a novelist anyhow – between “the real and the imagined”. She suggests that an inability to distinguish between the two may have had something to do with why she became a writer. This interested me, but it’s not what interested me most in this book. Rather, it was the idea of the writer’s “doubleness”, which she introduces in chapter 2, “Duplicity”, the idea that there is the person who writes and the other person who lives life (walking the dog, eating bran “as a sensible precaution”, and so on). She explains it this way:

All writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read. Too much time has elapsed between composition and publication, and the person who wrote the book is now a different person.

It’s obvious, of course, but we don’t often think about it. Writers do, though. Take Sofie Laguna, for example. In the recent conversation I attended, she said she wished she’d kept a diary when she was writing her novel to capture the “dance” she’d had between the conscious and the subconscious as she worked through the issues she was confronting. In other words, the Sofie in front of us was not the Sofie who had written that book. In chapter 5, “Communion”, Atwood addresses this issue from a different angle when she talks about the relationship between writers and readers.

Back to the writer, though, Atwood talks about, gives examples of, how different writers handle this doubleness, the degree to which they consciously separate their two selves or don’t. This brought to my mind Brian Castro’s Chinese postman (my review) in which he regularly – consciously of course – shifts between first person and third for the same character, a character who owes much to Castro himself but is not Castro. This may be similar to the example she gives, Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Borges and I”. It’s also something Helen Garner has often discussed, such as in her essay “I” published in Meanjin in Autumn 2002. Even in her nonfiction works, she “creates a persona”, one that “only a very naive reader would suppose … is exactly, precisely and totally identical with the Helen Garner you might see before you”. My point in saying all this is that I think Atwood is exploring something interesting here. Is it new? I don’t know, but it captures ideas I’m seeing both in statements like those of Laguna and Garner, and in recent fiction where I’m noticing an increasing self-consciousness in writers who are explicitly striving for new forms of expression.

Another double Atwood discusses – one related to but also different from the above – is that between the writer and the writing. The writer dies, for example, but the writing lives on. It brought to mind that murky issue concerning posthumous publication (which was discussed on 746 Books Cathy’s Novellas in November post about Marquez’s Until August). It’s a bit tangential, I guess, but Atwood’s separation of the writer and the writing, her sense of the doubleness of writers, puts another spin on this conundrum.

She discusses other issues too, including that of purpose, to which she gives two chapters (3 and 4), setting the art-for-art’s sake supporters against the moral purpose/social relevance proponents, and which of course touches on that grubby issue of writing to earn money!

It’s an erudite book, in that she marshals many writers, known and unknown to me, to illustrate her ideas, but the arguments are also accessible and invite engagement. I did have questions as I read, but she managed to answer most of them. A good read.

Read for Marcie’s #MARM2025

Margaret Atwood
Negotiating with the dead: A writer on writing
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002
219pp.
ISBN: 9780521662604