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his week’s reviews range from a stunning work from a new indie Australian publisher to speculative YA, a history of the Spartans, and an optimistic call to arms for how to make Australia better.
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
House of Day, House of Night
Olga Tokarczuk
Text, $34.99
The oeuvre of Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, is a stylish, stimulating constellation of fact and fiction. The publication of her 1998 novel House of Day, House of Night in seamless English translation should be a red-letter event to anyone beguiled by later works such as Flights. In House of Day, House of Night an unnamed woman and her husband move to an isolated village in Silesia – a part of Poland that used to be another country. She advertises in the local rag, seeking to collect people’s dreams, and is rewarded with eccentric slices of life (and death), in a work that meanders dreamily through the surreal metamorphoses of local folklore, through mushrooms and medieval saints, exoplanets and erstwhile borders, and much besides. There’s an encyclopaedic quality to Tokarczuk’s imagination that feels more comprehensive for emerging from such a tiny community, and her episodic narrative instils a sense of the vastness and inevitability of story in even the most unassuming places. Newcomers might want to start with one of her more famous books. The initiated will need no encouragement to let the mind wander and wonder with this inimitable writer.
My Heart at Evening
Konrad Muller
Evercreech Editions, $37.99
A new indie Australian publisher is something to celebrate. Founded by Adam Ouston to promote “boldly defiant” new writing, Evercreech Editions launches with a novel that springs from a mystery in Tasmanian colonial history. My Heart at Evening investigates of the suicide of prominent architect and explorer Henry Hellyer in 1832, despite years of distinguished service as a surveyor with the Van Diemen’s Land Company. In the novel a former convict with demons of his own has been commissioned by Governor Arthur to inquire into Hellyer’s death. The trail leads to a web of pettiness, envy and malicious gossip, including rumours that Hellyer committed sodomy with convicts, while the dead man’s surveying activity and exploration reveal a terrible contradiction: the rugged beauty of the landscape on one hand, and the horror of colonial violence against Aboriginal people on the other. This poisedliterary work combines the formal eloquence of a Victorian novel with an atmosphere of brooding existential fiction. It’s elegant, deeply troubling and the most accomplished colonial-era historical novel I’ve read in a while.
Twisted River
James Dunbar
Echo, $32.99
An unknown nemesis has set out to destroy a married couple in the latest from Scottish-born crime writer James Dunbar. Cate and Rory Porter are in their 30s. She works at a charity; he’s in web design. They seem too unremarkable to hate but someone despises them enough to plan a deranged scheme to destroy their peace of mind. When the couple returns home from a European vacation, a nightmarish situation awaits. Credit cards cancelled. Bank accounts emptied. Phone and internet disconnected. And it gets worse. Cate discovers someone has forged an inflammatory resignation letter in her own handwriting and delivered it to her workmates. The cops don’t take their plight seriously, so it’s up to them to outwit and track down their persecutor as a deadly game of cat-and-mouse begins. Enmity is a strong motivator, and the wicked appeal of Twisted River’s premise should attract crime fans, even if it’s stronger at black comedy than as a suspenseful thriller.
Kings of This World
Elizabeth Knox
Allen & Unwin, $26.99
Kings of This World is a tense and rather Gothic schooldays thriller in which a motley group of teens enters the elite Tiebold Academy to hone their powers. The world of the novel is roughly contemporary, so magic and technology sit side by side. For Vex, magic has been a source of complicated feelings. She and her schoolmates have a power known as “P”, which can push or persuade people to do things you want them to do. Unlike her friends, though, Vex’s power feels tainted – her father’s a notorious mass murderer who used his “P” to kill, and she was raised in foster care. Surprising herself, the outsider makes friends easily, including her ambitious roommate Ronnie, sensitive Ari and imperious Hannu, the son of a billionaire. Things take a turn when Vex and her gang are kidnapped by unidentified assailants and find themselves locked in a factory basement. Who kidnapped them? Why? And how can they escape? Though some world-building (and the plot resolution) can feel rushed, Elizabeth Knox has created a memorable YA low fantasy setting, and a likeably spiky heroine fighting to find her place in it.
The Book of Lost Hours
Hayley Gelfuso
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
The central premise of The Book of Lost Hours bears comparison with the Borgesian library. Rather than being a library of every book that has ever or will one day be written, Hayley Gelfuso imagines the “time space”, a library where all memories of the past are stored in books. Eleven-year-old Lizavet Levy is hidden by her father in the time space for her own safety on Kristallnacht in 1938. He doesn’t return and she grows up surrounded by other people’s recollections of the past. One day, she discovers special “timekeepers” who have been entering the library’s precious collection with sabotage in mind, hoping to remove inconvenient truths forever. Incensed, Lizavet decides to create a book of lost memories, hoping to preserve knowledge that someone wants suppressed. Meanwhile, in mid-1960s Boston, Amelia Duquesne is still grieving her father when she’s approached by Moira, the head of a top-secret CIA department. Moira alerts her to the time space, shows Amelia how to access it and asks that she retrieve a sought-after book. The two strands intersect in a love story, and speculative fantasy adventure, that’ll divert its YA audience.
NON-FICTION REVIEWS
Somebody is Walking on Your Grave
Mariana Enriquez, Granta, $34.99
In the opening tale of this combination of reportage, essay and meditation that walks us through cemeteries around the world, Mariana Enriquez remembers first visiting the Staglieno cemetery in Genoa, Italy, in 1997. It intriguingly sets the tone. She visits when she is 25, hours after meeting an Italian street violinist and falling for him. She creates an intoxicating picture of the place – with its voluptuous statues and maidens dancing with death – in which Eros and Thanatos constantly inform each other. Fittingly, she consummates the 24-hour affair against one of the gravestones. Far from being compounds for the dead, her cemeteries are alive with stories, often dark, as in Montmartre, where the old dead are dug up to make way for the new dead, their skulls tossed into a charnel house. Or the almost magically real, as in a flood-ravaged cemetery in her native Argentina in which coffins exhumed by natural forces are seen floating by. Or the hauntingly grim, as on WA’s Rottnest Island and a site where Indigenous forced labourers are buried. An evocative, often sensuously written rendering of a lifetime fascination.
Unknown Enemy
Charles Dick
Bloomsbury Publishing, $34.99
In the postwar trials of prominent Nazis for war crimes, organisations such as the SS and the SA loomed large in the public imagination. But not the Organisation Todt (OT). Named after its founder Fritz Todt (Nazi Party and SA member), the OT was responsible for all the major construction work of the 1930s/’40s in Germany – especially the autobahns (intended for military use), the epic remodelling of Berlin named “Germania” (which Hitler was obsessed with and most of which was never built) and the Western Wall or the Siegfried Line. But the OT, a paramilitary force, was also responsible for the slave labour that built these projects – all drawn from concentration camps and POW camps, most of whom were worked to death by Todt, later succeeded by Albert Speer. Millions died, exhausted, shot or gassed, but when the war trials started, the OT was largely ignored, Speer being its most infamous conviction. In documenting the scale of the OT’s horrific activities Charles Dick makes a long-overdue correction of a gross historical oversight.
Sparta
Andrew Bayliss
Profile Books, $39.99
Although often referred to as an ancient superpower, the legendary military might of Sparta – as Andrew Bayliss concludes, in this engaging history of the Greek city-state – was, in many ways, “illusory”. Even the most famous battle they fought in, Thermopylae (for which they achieved Hollywood fame in 1962’s The 300 Spartans), was really a defeat for the Greek alliance opposing the massive Persian invasion: the Spartans being remembered mostly for the bravery with which they fought against overwhelming odds. Bayliss, attempting to separate the myth from the fact, goes into the humble origins of Sparta to its emergence as a famous fighting force, taking in the rigour with which the male population was trained for war. He also incorporates the legendary strength and outspokenness of Spartan women – one of the most famous of female sayings being a mother’s instruction to a son going off to war: “Come back carrying your shield or on it.” Mind you, wives were often farmed out to increase the fighting Spartan population. Unsuccessfully, for it proved to be a major factor in the state’s demise, Sparta attempting to make up for its lack of “in-group” numbers with a system of alliances. But in the end, as Bayliss says, “there were simply too few Spartans”.
Better Things Are Possible
Jack Toohey
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
For too long, says Jack Toohey, it has been cool for Gen X-ers and Millennials to disengage from the system and embrace cynicism and apathy. No more – “Hope Punk” has arrived! When hopelessness becomes the status quo, he continues, hope becomes counter-cultural. And when he talks about hope he doesn’t mean fuzzy, wide-eyed wishful thinking. He means imagining how the ascendent and pervasive neoliberal system that has failed so many for so long can be changed for the better, and actually taking action to bring about that change. He examines the current housing crisis, for example, in considerable detail, highlighting how greedy investors and banks are complicit in soaking up the nation’s wealth – wealth that could be used for infrastructure and innovative business. As he says at the end, much of this is already starting to happen, especially in politics, with independents challenging mainstream parties. Indeed, in his vision of Australia in 2050, minority government is the norm. A timely and spirited attempt to engage with the disengaged.
Rocket Dreams
Christian Davenport
Blink, $36.99
When the space race started in earnest in the 1960s it was, looking back, fairly clear-cut: East/West, US/Russia, free world/communism. But the new space race, as Washington Post journalist Christian Davenport reveals, is far less dichotomous; not just a race between countries such as the US and China but between rival companies – the Elon Musk-run SpaceX versus Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin – not to mention the competition between the public and private sector. And the technology has changed vastly, Musk’s so-called “Big Falcon Rocket” (BFR – the “F” doesn’t really stand for “Falcon”) being developed so that it can come back from outer space, land, refuel and take off again, a bit like a jumbo jet. All of which amounts to a new, trillion-dollar form of imperialist competition, except in this case the contested territories are the moon and Mars. It’s not just the spaceships that are rocket fuelled – so, too, are the egos involved.
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