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Travel the world in this week’s reviews, from Pakistan and regional Australia in our fictions titles to the remote mountain passes of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in non-fiction.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
This Is Where the Serpent Lives
Daniyal Mueenuddin
Bloomsbury, $32.99
An intergenerational saga that slithers between the highest and lowest social strata of Pakistan, This Is Where the Serpent Lives is the long-awaited debut novel from acclaimed short story writer Daniel Mueenuddin (In Other Rooms, Other Wonders). It begins in the 1950s, with an abandoned boy, Yazid, adopted by a tea-stall operator at a Rawalpindi bazaar. Yazid’s charisma and cunning make the stall a popular hangout for privileged schoolboys, before a youthful, class-crossed romance forces him to take up service to a colonel in faraway Lahore. The story then shifts to the next generation of that colonel’s family: his nephew, Rustom, returns from studying in America and struggles to revive his wastrel father’s estate in the countryside, where he must navigate violence and land disputes, corrupt local police and gangsters accustomed to acting as the family’s muscle. Rustom’s cousin Hisham, along with his formidable wife Shahnaz, offer support and advice. The novel’s final section returns to Yazid – whose service Hisham has inherited – and the charming Saquib, a poor boy, not unlike Yazid, who has been adopted by the rich childless couple. There’s an almost Dickensian quality to observations of character and the social inequality which shapes it; the narrative unfolds with an immersive admixture of seductiveness and brutality.
All Her Lives
Ingrid Horrocks
UQP, $34.99
Ingrid Horrocks’ All Her Lives is a delicate yet expansive collection of nine stories foregrounding women (and relegating men to supporting roles). In the first story, war nurse Evie returns to rural New Zealand after serving in Europe during World War I. Her brother is there to greet her, but everything has changed in her absence, with her father dead and the family farm run by her brother and his new wife. A vivid sense of dislocation, of the impossibility of homecoming, pervades the tale, which among other things sutures psychological trauma into wounding physical description. Horrocks’ twinning of psychology and environment continues in moody close-up with Concrete Box, a climate-inflected 21st century story about a mother of two young kids living in a leaky flat, as rain relentlessly falls. The takes us back to 1795, where an adventurous Mary Wollstonecraft, then in a sham-marriage to rakish chancer Gilbert Imlay, undertakes a voyage to smuggle silver in a plot linked to the French Revolution. It’s an ambitious and meticulously drawn story, with a brief sequel story providing an imagined coda – an exchange between Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley. Horrocks’ gifted collection roves across centuries, creating fully fleshed portraits of women through a feminist lens.
The Woman in the Hall
G.B. Stern
British Library, $22.99
The British Library’s Women Writers Series is republishing works, largely by 20th century women, that were often popular in their time but have fallen into relative obscurity. G.B. Stern’s The Woman in the Hall introduces a mother, Lorna Blake, in 1930s London. Lorna embarks on a career as a con artist to afford life-saving treatment for one of her two daughters. Her swindles rely on instrumentalising victimhood – she alternately claims her husband is violent or has abandoned her or is simply dead, hoping to wring charity, love and money from every bleeding heart she can find among the wealthy of London. Eventually, Lorna comes to believe her own lies, and her daughter becomes implicated, to a disturbing degree, in ever-more-elaborate schemes that ripple from London mansions to achieve an international reach. Will the web of deceit Lorna weaves ensnare her, as the number of her victims continues to mount? Stern creates a psychological game of cat-and-mouse that plays ruthlessly with paradoxes of power and vulnerability at a social, familial and individual level. A sharp and beguiling book that stands the test of time.
A Change of Pace
J.A. Stevens
Echo, $34.99
Remaking Regency-era fiction has become fashionable post-Bridgerton, and J.A. Stevens’ A Change of Pace builds a bridge further still between the socially inclusive sensibilities of today and the novels of Jane Austen and her contemporaries. Georgina “George” Pace is a London socialite and notorious rake, noted for seducing married ladies, her penchant for wearing male attire, and walking on the wild side when it comes to other sybaritic pleasures Regency London has to offer. When her friend, Arthur Coombes, gets fleeced by a dodgy gaming house, the fiercely protective George steps in to restore his fortunes and bring justice to the scoundrels responsible. Along the way, she encounters Lady Elizabeth Mortimer – an intriguing woman, curiously resistant to George’s charms – who assists her, while veiling her private life, and perhaps her true involvement in the affair. George’s valour in saving a friend might just lead her into danger, or into unexpected romance. Period novels embrace modish anachronism at some risk – no one wants virtue signalling to overtake storytelling, or to whitewash ugly truths of history – but Stevens’ romp does have an infectious readability as an affectionate homage to Regency fiction.
Soft Serve
George Kemp
UQP, $29.99
Billed as a “drive thru Chekhov”, George Kemp’s Soft Serve does possess formal Chekhovian qualities – characters arrested by grief or nostalgia, characters in love with the wrong person, an out-of-the-way setting, a backdrop of ecological destruction – but it doesn’t dig deep enough to qualify as Chekhovian. A sudden wind change sees three young adults trapped in a regional McDonald’s as bushfires rage around them. Fern, Ethan and Jacob have lost a friend, Taz, whose accidental death prompts a regular reunion under the Golden Arches to eat soft serves in his memory. Fern is passionately in love with her boyfriend, Ethan, who has secret desires for Jacob; and Jacob just feels numb most of the time. Taz’s mother, Pat, works at the Maccas, having given away her job as school careers counsellor following her child’s death, and her persistent grief – and whether it can be assuaged – becomes the novel’s centre of gravity, despite the focus on the younger characters. Meanwhile, the blaze is fought by courageous volunteer firefighters outside. Kemp’s blend of cli-fi and coming-of-age novel is delivered with wry humour and slightly heavy-handed symbolism, but it’s perhaps too short to fully explore fraught circumstance and contradictions of character.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Alone in the World
Miriam Lancewood
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
In this third book about her life in the wild, Miriam Lancewood decides she must “practise being alone”. So far, she has been accompanied by her husband, Peter, on her many adventures ranging from living for years in the wilderness of New Zealand to walking through the forests of Europe. But Peter is 30 years older and can no longer roam freely because of illness. While he remains behind, she hitchhikes solo across Turkey, treks through the Himalayas with a friend, and hikes with two other wayfarers across the remote mountain passes of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. In these untamed places, she is most alive as she pushes herself to her physical and mental limits. While Lancewood’s prose sometimes lapses into the travelogue cliché, it is mostly fresh and unforced, and her heart is always open to the lessons nature has to teach. “The further you stray from civilisation, the harder it is to tell where the wilderness ends, and you begin”. To journey with her, if only vicariously, is to taste a little of this elemental exhilaration and to reflect on how it might be possible to find it in one’s own life.
A.D. Hope. A Life
Susan Lever
La Trobe University Press, $36.99
When I was doing Aus Lit at university, I never really warmed to A. D. Hope’s cerebral, formal, at times satirical, poetry. But this biography has done what good biography should do – cast his work in a new light and made me want to revisit it. While Susan Lever was a friend of Hope, her affection for him is clear-eyed. We see him with all his foibles and contradictions – his sometimes savage criticism; his generous support of fellow poets; his dismissal of modernist innovation; his love of female company and his objectification of women in verse. And yet, his best work, she says, “examines sexuality in a way that reveals the poet’s own struggles to understand it”. In the 1960s, he was hailed as Australia’s best known poet and recipient of many awards. But by the 1970s, “poetic fashion had moved on” and a new generation of poets had left him looking fusty and dated. In this measured work, Lever brings Hope back into the fold of our literary heritage.
Crip Stories. An Anthology of Disabled Writers
Edited by Windon, Pettenuzzo, Wolf & Hansord
NewSouth, $34.99
Just as the slurs “wog” and “slut” have been defiantly reclaimed by those they were intended to denigrate, so too has “crip”. The well-wrought poetry and moving prose in this anthology subverts neuronormative standards and prejudices, finding freedom in the power of language to upend judgment and serve as a hotline to the inner life. The speaker of Mona Zahra Attamimi’s fine poem endures the stares at “your brown nubbin hand .../ forearm, curved like a fat moon” while subtly exposing the limitations of those who judge. As an autistic non-speaker, Sid Chandran relies on print and a speech- generating device to allow his voice to be heard. Through his essay, he draws us into his world and broadcasts his plea to the public to “give us a place in the sun”. Mario Licon Cabrera’s haunting elegy for his failing sight permits the reader to experience, if only briefly, what encroaching blindness might mean: “To stroll facing autumn sunset/ is to reach a luminous precipice”.
Born to Flourish
Richard J Davidson & Cortland Dahl
Scribe, $36.99
Despite the tedium of long periods in brain scanners and days of repetitive tests, the Tibetan monks were unflappable. When glitches in the experiments left the scientists rattled, the monks would lighten mood or calm everyone down. In material terms, they had nothing, and yet they exuded playfulness, compassion and joy. Through their equanimity, the monks were showing scientists Richard Davidson and Cortland Dahl what meditation practice yields. Out of this research, the authors developed a scientific model built around what they call the four skills of human flourishing – awareness, connection, insight and purpose. Their trials have shown that it only takes a few minutes a day of meditation to rewire the brain for positive emotion and the ability to experience pain without suffering. If we cared for our minds the way we do for our bodies, the authors say, the effects would cascade around the globe. As a user-friendly book on how to remain buoyant in stressful and turbulent times, it couldn’t be more timely.
Challenging Anzac
Edited by HobbsHolbrook & Beaumont
NewSouth, $39.99
Why has the Anzac legend endured? And what stories have been left out because they don’t conform to the mythology? The answer to the first question is most comprehensively addressed in Carolyn Holbrook’s concluding essay. It’s not what actually happened that gives Anzac its longevity, she says, but the values, group identity and sacred tropes it invokes. As a “civic religion”, the Anzac story involves pilgrimages, rituals like the dawn service and social bonding, all of which go deeper than rational thought. The extent to which ideology has shaped our understanding of Anzac is exposed in many of these essays about the untold stories: veteran suicides, Aboriginal soldiers and radical diggers whose “core Anzac trait of mateship” emerged from “socialist tendencies among the working-class ranks against military authority,” say the authors. An important addition to our understanding of Anzac history.
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