Review – Short stories

Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes: Five stories of music and nightfall

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Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005 (Courtesy: Mariusz Kubik CC-BY-SA 3.0)

I like Kazuo Ishiguro – and have read 5 of his 6 novels – so I was looking forward to reading Nocturnes, his first published collection of short stories. Nocturnes, as the subtitle describes, comprises five short stories, each focussing in some way on music, and on a day’s end.

The five stories – a couple of them with overlapping characters – are unmistakably Ishiguro. All have first person narrators, and in all cases the narrator is either unreliable or in some other way not completely across what is going on. This is the Ishiguro stamp … as is the overall tone of things not being quite right, of potential not being quite achieved, of people still looking for an elusive something but not necessarily knowing quite what that is.

When reviewing a short story collection I don’t necessarily feel the need to list each story but with there being so few in this case, I think I will, so here they are:

  • “Crooner”: an aging crooner, with the narrator as his accompanist, serenades his young wife from a gondola at a time when their marriage is breaking down
  • “Come rain or come shine”: a nearly 50-year old ESL teacher visits old university friends, only to find that their relationship is under stress
  • “Malvern Hills”: a not-yet-successful young rock guitarist visits his sister and brother-in-law in the country, and meets some Swiss tourists who are also musicians and whose marriage is a little rocky. (Hmm… see a theme developing here?)
  • “Nocturne”: another not-very-successful musician (this time a saxophonist) finds himself in the same hotel as the (now ex-)wife from the first story, while they are both recuperating from plastic surgery
  • “Cellists”: a cellist with potential is mentored by another cellist who is not quite what she seems

While there is a similarity in the tone of these stories, there are also differences. “Come rain or come shine” and “Nocturne”, for example, are a little reminiscent of When we were orphans in the sense that Ishiguro slowly (even in a short story!) but surely leads his characters (and we readers alongside) into increasingly bizarre, if not almost surreal, behaviours. Moreso than the other stories, these two have a comic, albeit tinged with pathos, edge.

The technique Ishiguro uses to present his notions of failing or missed potential is one common to most of his writing: he explores and exposes the gap between appearance and reality. This gap is given literal expression in “Nocturne” where two would-be stars are both bandaged for most of the story as a result of their plastic surgery, but it is there in all the stories: from the first story’s Tony and Libby Gardner who are separating for the most “superficial” of reasons to the last story’s self-described virtuoso cellist. It is found in Ray Charles’ version of the title song in “Come rain or come shine” “where the words themselves were happy, but the interpretation was pure heartbreak”. This gap is also conveyed through the prevaricative words commonly used by Ishiguro’s narrators, such as “I guess”, “perhaps”, “maybe” and “probably”:

I guess it showed in our music (“Crooner”)

Perhaps it was simply the effect of receiving a clear set of instructions (“Come rain or come shine”)

Maybe they were just tired. For all I know, they might have … All the same, it seemed to me (“Malvern Hills”)

… that probably means … and Maybe it was plain spinelessness. Or maybe I’d taken on board … (“Nocturne”)

Maybe there was a tiny bit if jealousy there … and … well, maybe there’s something in that (“Cellists”)

Ishiguro’s hallmarks of misconceptions and misconstructions, assumptions and self-deceptions are all evident here…sometimes in the narrator, sometimes in the other characters, sometimes in both.

The stories stand alone but, somewhat like Tim Winton‘s The turning, there’s a feeling that these stories go together, not just because of the recurring characters in two of them, and the apparent similarity of setting in the first and last stories, but also because of the recurring musical motif and the consistency in theme. If I were a musical expert rather than dilettante I might have tried to relate the five stories to some sort of musical structure but, fortunately for you, I am just the dilettante! That said there are some neat little links between the first and last stories which round them off nicely, just like a well-conceived piece of music.

There are no twists in the tail or crashing codas in these stories. This may disappoint some readers but, for me, they are deliciously conceived quiet, subtle stories that cleverly draw you into their characters’ lives while at the same time leaving you with the impression that you should keep your distance lest you too suffer from their malaise and disappointments.

Kazuo Ishiguro
Nocturnes: Five stories of music and nightfall
London: Faber and Faber, 2009
221pp.
ISBN: 9780571244997

William Trevor, The woman of the house

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[WARNING: SPOILERS, if you think it matters]

According to Wikipedia,William Trevor’s characters “are usually marginalised members of society: children, old people, single middle-aged men and women, or the unhappily married.” This is certainly the case with Trevor’s short story, The woman of the house, which was published last year in The New Yorker. All four characters in the story are marginalised, two are middle-aged to old, and two are young, but all live on the edge of society struggling to survive in one way or another. In fact it is said of the two young men that:

Survival as they were was their immediate purpose, their hope that there might somewhere be a life that was more than they yet knew.

Pretty grim stuff. The plot is simple. Two young men of “stateless” origin  are employed to paint the house of an old disabled man whose carer/companion is his nearing 50-year-old cousin, Martina. By the end of the story the old man has disappeared from view … we have a pretty good idea of what has happened to him and it ain’t pretty.

The story is perfectly set up. The two strange men who appear to know little about painting – and who we are told are somewhat like “gypsies” – have clearly been shown where the money of the house is kept. The woman, Martina, is (to be euphemistic) taken advantage of by the local butcher and in return receives some special meats. Aha, we think, here is a case of two con-men facing some easy pickings…but, this would clearly be too cliched for Trevor. They don’t steal the money and she is not so down-trodden as it seems. Trevor makes no judgement – just tells it like it is when life is hard and people make pragmatic decisions in order to survive.

And that’s all I’m going to say about this tight little story…except of course that it has inspired me more than ever to read a Trevor novel.

Tessa Hadley, Friendly fire

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TessaHadleyMacmillan

Tessa Hadley (Courtesy: Macmillan Books, via their “noncommercial” terms of use)

“Friendly fire”, a short story by the English writer Tessa Hadley, is a simple story of two middle-aged women cleaners in an industrial warehouse, Pam who owns the cleaning business and her friend Shelley who is helping her out for the day. The story focuses on Shelley and nothing much really happens – it’s more about what goes through Shelley’s mind as she cleans the factory floor and its toilets.

The first thing that strikes about the story is the language: the stars are “like flecks of broken glass” and “she let the cold creep into her as if she were made of stone”. Very quickly we get the sense that Shelley is not the happiest person on the planet. Hadley also uses double negatives – “they didn’t make a bad team” and “it wasn’t that she wasn’t proud” – further conveying Shelley’s less than joyous feelings about life.

So, what happens? Shelley and Pam go to the warehouse, clean (one upstairs and one downstairs) and then leave for home. While she is cleaning, Shelley thinks about her son Anthony who is a soldier in Aghanistan, and we realise that it is her fear for his safety that occupies her mind day and night, that colours her emotions. The title of the story comes from her worry that her son might have been involved in a friendly-fire incident. Her husband tells her: “Why d’you have to make up trouble … as if there wasn’t enough already?” In between, she thinks about the ups and downs of her marriage, her daughter’s teen pregnancy, her menopausal loss of libido. Life certainly seems rather circumscribed these days for Shelley. Even her husband’s playful phone messages – about funny place names like the Fishmonger called “A Plaice to Go” – fail to lighten her spirits. Perhaps she’d like to be in a different place?

At the end of the day, they return to the car and “the sky was a blue so pale that it was almost no colour”. Muted like her sense of her life! So, what is it about? Primarily, it is about the worries of a mother for her son engaged in an arena of war. It’s not dramatic, but it’s a nicely observed story that conveys the wider implications of our engagement in war, and how women – the mothers – bear much of that.

Price Warung, Tales of the early days

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Tales of the early days (Cover: Courtesy Sydney University Press)

Tales of the early days (Cover: Courtesy Sydney University Press)

Okay, I admit it, I have convict ancestors (plural even!). Consequently, I was particularly interested to read Price Warung’s 1894 collection of short stories, Tales of the early days, when I discovered it was part of the Australian Classics Library recently published by the Sydney University Press. My convicts include John Warby who, with another labourer, stole two donkeys and was transported to Australia on the Pitt in 1791, and Sarah Bentley who stole several items of clothing from her mistress in 1795 and was transported on the Indispensable. In 1796, John married the 16-year old Sarah. Fortunately (for me and for them), they were a hardworking pair. John had been given land by Governor Phillip in 1792, and he and Sarah made a good life for themselves, so much so that there is now a primary school named after him, the John Warby Public School in the Campbelltown area west of Sydney.

Enough about my family, though. What about Price Warung? He was, in fact, William Astley, and was born in Liverpool, England, in 1855 but came to Australia with his family in 1859. He became, according to the succinct little biography at the back of the book, a radical journalist and short-story writer, with particular interests in transportation (or, convict) literature, and the Labour and Federation movements.

Now to Tales of the early days. This was his second published collection, and comprises 8 stories set in Norfolk Island, Hobart, Sydney and London. They explore various aspects of convict life, and many draw on real people and events. In fact, my city’s new (and first) prison is named after the penal reformer/prison commandant, Alexander Maconochie, who features in the first two stories. The eight stories are worth listing for their titles, most of which convey a strong sense of personality:

  • Captain Maconochie’s ‘Bounty for Crime’
  • The Secret Society of the Ring
  • In the Granary
  • Parson Ford’s Confessional
  • The Heart-Breaking of Anstey’s Bess
  • The Amour of Constable Crake
  • The Pegging-Out of Overseer Franke
  • At Burford’s Panorama

These stories can be described as “historical fiction”. In a new introduction to this collection, Laurie Hergenham quotes Thomas Keneally, who has written a deal of historical fiction. Keneally says:

the novelist need not prove his reliability to scholars … the only warrant a writer needs for his ideas about the past is that they reek of human, poetic, dramatic, symbolic veracity and resound in his imagination.

Like many writers of historical fiction, Warung draws on documentary fact. He writes largely in the social realism style that was typical of the nineteenth century. A strong theme runs through the book, and it can be best described by quoting Robert Burns’ “man’s inhumanity to man”. Warung’s particular argument is that this inhumanity is worse in the “System” (aka The Establishment) than in the convicts.  As one of the convicts says in the longest and, generally regarded to be, the best story, “The Secret Society of the Ring”:

Th’ System finds orl its orf’cers men, an’ leaves ’em orl brutes. Orl o’ we don’t get ‘ardened, but there ain’t one o yer wot doesn’t.

And so Warung, with his own apparently anti-British sentiment in the lead up to Federation (and Australia’s independence), perpetuates the myth that the convicts were poor souls turned bad by the System: “the beast-nature with which the System had superseded that granted unto him by his Creator”. It is true, if you read the histories, that some (many?) convicts were victims of poverty in Britain and were transported for comparatively minor offences, but there were also many who were violent, serial offenders. It is also true, though, that the treatment of convicts in Australia was, overall, very harsh – particularly in the secondary penal establishments like Norfolk Island and Hobart (at nearby Port Arthur). It’s not for nothing that Warung, with the fire clearly in his belly, chooses these as the settings for most of his stories of horror.

The first story, “Captain Maconcochie’s Bounty of Crime” serves as a useful introduction to the longest and most complex in the book, “The Secret Society of the Ring”. It introduces us to Maconochie and his desire to improve “the monstrous conditions of penal life at Norfolk Island” but, we are told, the System does not want him to succeed because his failure would mean “that the System was right and its administrators were wise”. And so, the cynicism (or is it simply realism?) starts:

Therefore the failure was only to be expected. Men do not care about being proved wrong, even if it could be shown that a few dozen souls were saved in the process of correction.

This truth, as Warung conceives it  and which encompasses related truths relating to the behaviour of men in power, is played out again and again in the stories that follow – but it is no more ironically conveyed than in “The Secret Society of the Ring” in which the Ring, which is the convicts’ own “system”, turns out to be every bit as cruel and inflexible as the System that controls them. Maconochie’s attempt to appeal to convicts’ (“society’s wrecks”) sense of fraternity and loyalty to each other – and along the way provide them with a more comfortable prison life – is undermined by the loyalty demanded of the Ring. This is a devastating story – and the most sophisticated in the collection in terms of style and structure.

The third story, “In the granary”, is no less devastating, and turns on the irony of a granary, designed by “a genial officer”, being put to far from genial purposes. This story has an interesting, given Warung’s own work as a journalist, discussion of the power of newspapers. “Parson Ford’s Confessional” is the only one of the collection that doesn’t focus on convicts. Rather it explores corruption among those in power just, I suppose, to make sure we know that this corruption does not only occur in relation to convicts. The next three stories chronicle events in the life of a particular character: Anstey’s Bess, a convict woman whose maternal love nearly brings her down; Constable Crake whose lust does bring him down; and Overseer Franke, the ironically nick-named Cherub who selects the architect of his downfall (but the triumph here is rather Pyrrhic). The final story is set in London and nicely shows us what those “at home” were seeing of the colony while also providing a final opportunity for corruption and power to again ensure that the downtrodden remain that way. (It is also the only story to refer to the Aboriginal people of Australia – and the reference is surely ironic when he describes the “Savage King” Bennelong’s recognition of “the new era of civilisation”!)

Warung’s style is not subtle – he uses irony heavily, foreshadowing, symbolism, some wordplay, the occasional repetition and understatement, and authorial intrusion – and he can over-explain at times, not trusting always that the reader gets it. It would be a very dull reader, though, who didn’t! The tales are, it has to be said, pretty black and white. The System is demonstrated again and again to be corrupt and cruel, with no attempt made to explore the privations those in power also suffered. That said, the stories are powerful and, despite their lack of “balance”, convey enough truths to make reading them worthwhile for both their narratives and the messages underpinning them. It is good to see them brought to life again.

(Review copy supplied by Sydney University Press)

William Styron, Rat beach

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I haven’t read any William Styron, though I have seen the movie of Sophie’s Choice, and so was pleased to have the opportunity to read his “Rat beach” for one of my many bookgroups this month. This short story was published in The New Yorker three years after Styron’s death and is about a young second lieutenant in the Marines training on Saipan in the Western Pacific in mid-1945. Their goal is, of course, the invasion of Japan. I should add here that Styron himself did serve with the Marines in the war.

The story starts with:

When I was seventeen, bravado, mingled with what must have been a death wish, made me enlist in the officer-in-training program of the Marine Corps.

He continues that, as they were young and considered “too callow to lead troops into battle”, they were sent to college “where, as book-toting privates, we would gain a little learning and seasoning, and also a year or two of physical and mental growth”. As he was particularly young, he was at college longer than some and so was not in the first wave of second lieutenants sent into battle in the last stages of the Pacific War. He quotes EB Sledge as saying, in his book With the old breed, that “Our officers got hit so soon and so often that it seemed to me the position of second lieutenant in a rifle company had been made obsolete by modern warfare”. And so the scene is set for a young second lieutenant arriving at Saipan with this likely fate in his mind.

The story, then, centres on the “internal conflict” of a young second lieutenant who is “scared” – scared of dying and also scared of failing as a leader of his men. With some pathos Styron writes:

As I lay on my cot, “The Pocket Book of Verse” would slip from my hand, and fear – vile, cold fear – would steal through my flesh…

This book of verse was published in 1945 and contains English and American poems, including those by the war poet AE Housman who, among other things, wrote about the futility of heroism. For our narrator, Housman’s poems contain “a note both stoical and ill-omened”.

In a highly evocative passage he describes the island’s snails – their hard shell covering their great vulnerability. They “were always getting squashed beneath our field boots, making a tiny mess that reminded me of the fragility of my own corporeal being”.  There is also a gorgeously written section in which a “desk admiral” delivers a shallow (to his listeners) motivational “spiel” under “klieg” lights and gesticulating with his “meerschaum” pipe (note the German-derived words in this section!), after which they are led on a wild, head-clearing run in the storm by their unconventional lieutenant colonel, Happy Halloran, who gives his own far more effective motivational speech. He says “I really think the world of you. When the time comes, I know you’ll do your best – that’s the best the Marine Corps has to offer”.

As short stories go, this one is fairly straightforward in its narrative and plot – but this doesn’t mean it’s simple. It’s also a powerful story, not least for the decision our narrator comes to at the end – but that, you will have to read for yourselves!

PS I really should have mentioned, here, the overall irony relating to “the bomb”. I’m not sure why I didn’t because as I read the story I kept expecting the bomb to be mentioned (or to fall, even). Was the gathering going to be an announcement re the bomb? Were the planes heard overhead going to be carrying the bomb? We readers knew that the bomb was going to change everything for the narrator but he didn’t know it. The ultimate irony.

Maile Meloy, Liliana

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[WARNING: SPOILERS IF YOU CARE]

Fun but flimsy was my first reaction on reading the short story Liliana by American writer Maile Meloy. But, after reading it a couple of days ago, I found that it kept popping back into my head. What seemed at first to be a funny little story – about a grandmother who returns from the dead – turned out to have a few things to think about.

It is, I guess, both an inheritance and a second-chance story but with a difference. It is told first person by the thirty-something grandson, recently laid-off work and so functioning as house-father. Inheriting a little of Liliana’s millions would not be unwelcome (to him, anyhow). However, Liliana, the flamboyant independent one has left her money to the RSPCA – that is to animal welfare! When Liliana turns up on our narrator’s doorstep alive and well – at the beginning of the story – our narrator clearly thinks he’s still in with a chance.

In the next few pages – it’s a tight little story – we learn about the complexities of family, about need/neediness and about, really, the failure of imagination. We learn that if you don’t make it on the first chance, you are unlikely to make it on the second – particularly if neither situation is based on sincerity…and our narrator is not exactly dripping with that particular virtue:

…I thought about Jesus and Elvis. People had wanted them back, badly, and still do. But who would have willed Liliana back…

and

My wife, whose family is Jewish, says that I tricked her into falling in love with me by withholding my grandmother’s Nazi-movie past until it was too late, which is entirely true – I’m not an idiot.

Get the picture? This is a man who thinks he might get a job simply by using “new fonts with which to express my accomplishments”.

And so, our narrator, who had lived a somewhat Bohemian life as a child but had yearned for and created a “buttered saltines in front of TV” sort of life, is not the sort of person to engage his grandmother. “Well, you aren’t very much like your father, thankfully … But you aren’t very much like me either”. The story therefore ends much as it begins – no grandmother, no inheritance and no job. He knows he failed, but does he know why? Meloy doesn’t really answer this – and perhaps that’s part of her skill. She drops some choice words, and the rest is up to us.

(PS As well as being published online, “Liliana” appears in Meloy’s latest collection, Both ways is the only way I want it.)

Julian Barnes, The limner

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I’m probably going to show my ignorance here as I’m no expert in short stories. I do however like them and have read a fair smattering over the years. Julian Barnes’ The limner is interesting because it is historical, that is, unlike most short stories that I have read, it is set in the past rather than contemporaneously with the author’s time. I think, in fact, that I have read more futuristic short stories than I have historical ones, and yet historical fiction is an equally popular genre. Is it in fact so that there are comparatively few short stories that are historically set, or is it simply that I haven’t read them? If the former, why?

Anyhow, it is an ironic story, not the least because it is a story by a writer (of course) about a man (a limner or portraitist) for  whom language means little. The limner, you see, is deaf and mute – and, what’s more, does not feel he misses much by not being able to speak and hear. His view is that “the world’s knowledge of itself, when spoken and written down, did not amount to much”. It is, in fact, a story that looks at what lies beneath the surface, that explores that age-old theme of appearance versus reality.

I have only read two works by Julian Barnes – The history of the world in 10 1/2 chapters (fiction) and The pedant in the kitchen (non-fiction) – but these, together with this short story, reinforce my sense that I should read more. I like his way of viewing the world through whimsical and often ironic eyes. Wadsworth, the protagonist of this story, is an outsider: he is “industrious” and “of a companionable nature” but as time has gone on he has become less and less interested in painting his subjects – who are mostly adults, and mostly men. The plot turns on one particular, but apparently fairly typical, commission – the painting of a portrait of a customs collector. This customs collector, Mr Tuttle, is not interested in having his wife or children painted. The story commences, pointedly, with the statement that Tuttle had been argumentative about the fee and size of canvas, while Wadsworth, for his part, had agreed easily to his demands re pose, costume and background. As the story progresses it becomes clear that Mr Tuttle is a vain, pompous, self-important man who, while continually asking for “more dignity” to be represented in his portrait, in fact  exhibits little of that same dignity.

Without giving away the story, I will simply say that Wadsworth makes some decisions that enables him to preserve – though he doesn’t put it quite this way – his own dignity, and those of the lesser mortals in Mr Tuttle’s household. It is a neatly conceived story that makes its points lightly, humorously and, perhaps, a little predictably. While it’s not as challenging to read as some short stories – and I do like a challenge – it is also a little deceptive in its simplicity. It is well worth a read.

Alice Munro, Dimension

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Alice Munro, from Random House Australia

Alice Munro, from Random House Australia

Alice Munro won this year’s Man Booker International Prize. You probably know that she is a Canadian short story writer. I have read many of her short stories over the years, though not as many as I would like.

WARNING: SOME SPOILERS!

Her short story “Dimension” was published in the New Yorker in 2006, and was then included in the 2007 edition of Best American Short Stories. In some ways, particularly in its tone, it reminded me of Lionel Shriver’s We need to talk about Kevin. Like “Kevin” it deals with the build up and fallout after a terrible tragedy caused by a family member, but the details of the tragedy and the focus of the story is different.

Munro clues us in very early that something terrible has happened. In the second para she writes this about the main character through whose point of view we see the story: “She liked the work – it occupied her thoughts to a certain extent and tired her out SO THAT [my emphasis] she could sleep at night”. Ah, we think, why does she have trouble sleeping? And then at the end of that paragraph is: “She didn’t want to have to talk to people”. The next para is more clear that she has been involved in something terrible: she had been “in the paper”. In this paragraph we get the first mention of “he”. “He” is nameless in the first few mentions, conveying to us a sense of mystery and, yes, menace. Not naming him at this point also depersonalises him; it makes him “other” to we named people.

This, then, is a story about one of those terrible family tragedies that we see in the news and wonder about: how did it get to that point, how does the mother (or whoever is left) keep going, etc? Munro explores these questions sensitively, conveying how Doree’s youth and inexperience resulted in her making a poor decision at a vulnerable time in her life which then stunted her further development of self – with devastating consequences. And, she does a good job of building up a picture of a controlling man (the husband Lloyd), but through Doree’s eyes so that we see her growing awareness of his nature. Her awareness though is accompanied by an uncertainty born of someone who does not know enough to judge properly, to know what is “normal” and what isn’t. Munro also makes us believe in Doree’s post-tragedy path – her going-through-the-motions distance from those around her and her tie to the perpetrator who is the only person to offer her a “refuge” peculiar though that refuge is. Munro’s resolution to all this could be seen as a little melodramatic, but it is clever…and, reassuringly, somewhat hopeful.

In other words, like all Munro’s stories, this is well worth a read.

Aravind Adiga, The Sultan’s Battery

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Adiga’s next book, after his very successful, The white tiger, is a collection of short stories titled Between the assassinations. It has already been published in India, and apparently refers to that period in India between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. An abridged version of one of its stories, The Sultan’s Battery, has been published in various newspapers around the world.

It’s an intriguing little story. It’s about a man, Ratna, who sells, among other things, fake cures for venereal diseases (STDs) because this is the only way he can raise money for dowries for his three daughters. Quack doctors and “sexologists” are apparently prevalent in India, as this article explains. Anyhow, the first suitor to come forward turns out, ironically, to be inflicted with a venereal disease. From this point the story takes a turn that one might not expect from such a set-up.

The irony, fairly quiet though it is, is one of the appealing things about this story: the man who sells fake “cures” ends up caring for someone who is sick of the very thing he sells his “cures” for; the Sultan’s Battery which is a major tourist attraction is a place of fakery and misery; and the Dargah behind which Ratna sells his fake wares is a shrine built over the grave of a revered religious figure.

The story is told in third person, and the language is simple and direct, but a careful reading will see an equally careful use of words. Ratna’s sign is written in “golden words” and he arranges his wares with “grave ceremony”. The young men surrounding Ratna are described: “the crowd of young men had now taken on the look of a human Stonehenge; some with their hands folded on a friend’s shoulder, some standing alone; and a few crouched on the ground, like fallen boulders”. Hmm. Stonehenge  conjures something strong and enduring but he quickly undermines that with those final words of the paragraph.

An interesting comment, which draws our attention to the title of the collection, is made late in the story when a passing character says:

Everything’s been falling apart in this country since Mrs Gandhi got shot … Buses are coming late. Trains are coming late. Everything’s falling apart. We’ll have to hand this country back to the British or the Muslims or the Russians or someone, I tell you. We’re not meant to be masters of our own fate.

Adiga here, as in The white tiger, is not impressed by India’s ability to manage itself for the good of its citizens, but is going back the answer? Is this suggestion the ultimate irony?

The story has a somewhat open ending – but, given that it is an abridged version of the one in the book, we’ll have to wait for publication (late June 2009 in Australia, by Penguin) to see whether more information is provided in the book version. From this little taster, I’m willing to read more.