Author: Michael Springer
Publisher: Echo Books
Reviewer: Stephen Keim
The Flower Bed is an epic story of one man’s life. It spans more than 60 years from 1971 when Louis O’Brien turned 10 in the harsh environment of the Midtown West area of New York City until, as Louis Montgomery, he is living on a substantial property in Lincolnshire, England.
For a book that is focussed very much on the tribulations of one person, The Flower Bed, through telling Louis’s personal story, manages, also, to track and reference many events of the times spanned by Louis’s life.
The company for which Louis works for much of his adult life is BMI which looks, in its emerging phase, a lot like IBM as it transforms from a world of adding machines and typewriters to the brave new world of super computing. And an event happens in New York in September 2001 which leads to the destruction of a building and the loss of many lives but which does not involve the intervention of aeroplanes.
Louis’s early life in New York was particularly inauspicious. He lived with his father, Joseph, who was a low level organised criminal boss who was viciously cruel both in his work and in his treatment of Louis. He also lived with Aunt Mary who was not Louis’s aunt but was Joseph’s partner in a manner of speaking and shared Joseph’s proclivities for alcohol and sordid sexual activity not necessarily restricted to two people.
Louis had two faintly bright spots in his life. One was Mrs Fitzgerald, the across the corridor neighbour who treated Louis with kindness and fed him at night which was important because neither Joseph nor Mary were concerned for any aspect of Louis’s welfare. All too soon, Mrs Fitzgerald was taken from Louis’s life and this world.
The second was the local public school which Louis attended and where he excelled academically. His intelligence and willingness to learn were noticed by Louis’s teachers and there was talk and hope that scholarships to higher education might provide Louis a pathway out of the predicament that life otherwise offered.
That hope was short lived. Louis had been unmercifully bullied by a particular individual and his hangers on resulting in Louis being ambushed and badly beaten a number of times. On the one occasion that Louis decided that he had to fight back, his talent as a fighter proved too much and his impromptu methods went too far and he found himself on assault charges in the local juvenile court. No young man with a conviction could ever hope to win a scholarship such that that pathway was, forever, lost.
Joseph insisted, when Louis was 12 years old, that Louis spent time working at the Shed which was a workplace used for furthering the purposes of organised crime. Louis ran messages and delivered and received parcels but that was insufficient for his father. Louis was required to commit arson and stand cockatoo when murders were being committed. He witnessed violent acts that would have traumatised hardy individuals of a much less tender age.
When Louis was 17 and all hope had evaporated, a maternal uncle, Phillip, stepped from the shadows. Phillip informed Louis of the true identity of his mother and her fate. Phillip informed Louis of other important aspects of his heritage and even of an inheritance from his mother’s family.
Thanks to Phillip and the inheritance but, equally, at great cost to Phillip, Louis found himself with a new identity on a merchant ship working his way to Sydney, Australia. The new identity included a high performing, albeit, fake graduation certificate from a prestigious private American high school.
So, Louis escaped the life of poverty, cruelty and crime that had been foisted upon him. He escaped the clutches of his cruel and criminal father. When he arrived in Sydney, he was able to achieve entry into the business school of Sydney University. Louis had been given a fresh start that few people who experience circumstances of the kind he had endured ever receive.
Louis, through his widowed landlady, Mrs Smith, even found another kind and elderly lady who loved and looked out for him.
From his fresh start, Louis Montgomery achieved academic acclaim. He found good employment in the business world and he achieved great worldly success.
Socially, Louis found confidence in speaking to women such that his amatory success outnumbered the proverbial hot dinners for much of his university career. And, notwithstanding the crassness that excessive popularity can bring, Louis had the insight to identify the one woman he had met whom Louis’s heart recognised was the one for him.
Louis received his fresh start and he made full use of it. But he carried mental scars from the traumas of his early life and this led to flaws in his personality which would cause him and others much pain among those worldly successes.
The flower bed which gives its name to the book appears in the very first chapter of The Flower Bed and is visited by an older man and a five year old child who are mysteriously not identified. The reader wonders for much of the book where that flower bed fits into the whole narrative and the question is not fully answered until the very last chapter when the narrative returns to the side of the garden and the man and the girl are identified and reveal the thoughts in their hearts.
The Flower Bed is a gripping narrative and the reader is, throughout, keen to find out about the latest adventures that life has in store for Louis and those around him. Both the trajectory of the novel and the style of story telling reminded this reviewer a little of a Thomas Hardy novel. In The Flower Bed, the omniscient narrator is very much in control and foreshadows events to come and takes the reader into the inner workings of the characters’ hearts and minds. In style, The Flower Bed is unlike many modern novels in which enigmatic slices of action are revealed and the reader learns to put the greater picture into place, themselves.
The omniscient narrator also assures us that Louis is a sympathetic character for whom we should feel empathy and concern. I did feel that empathy and concern although the more rational aspects of my personality, at times, wondered whether Louis was deserving thereof as his lack of insight into his flaws and unwillingness to address them brought more chaos to his world.
The Flower Bed is not a short work at just over 400 pages. It is, however, an enjoyable and compelling read and, for those of us who have lived much of the last six decades or so, its tracking of life and technology and the interaction between the two will bring out a degree of nostalgia.
Author: Kate Grenville
Publisher: Black Inc[1]
Reviewer: Stephen Keim
Kate Grenville is a distinguished Australian writer of fiction and other genre. She has published fifteen books. Her 2005 novel, The Sacred River, won many prizes including the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was adapted for the stage in 2019 and toured by the Sydney Theatre Company. Her novels have been published worldwide and translated into a number of languages.
The Sacred River was based on research into an ancestor, Soloman Wiseman, who had been transported to Australia for theft and who went on to settle in the Hawkesbury River district and gave his name to the town of Wiseman’s Ferry. The Secret River was dedicated to the Aboriginal people of Australia and dealt with the impacts of contacts between First Nations Australians and the continually widening stream of colonial settlers.
Unsettled is a return to the actions of her ancestors and the impact of their actions on the First Nations people they displaced. Unsettled, in form at least, is the story of a road trip. Grenville heads north to Wiseman’s Ferry, observes various landmarks associated with Soloman and then she heads further north. Just as successive generations after Soloman had headed of to find new land to occupy unheeding of those who worked and occupied that land, Grenville follows in their tracks and looks to visit landmarks associated with each of those generations.
The chapters in the book carry place names and they mark the points along the journey: names such as Wisman’s Ferry; St Albans Common; Jerry’s Plains; the Myall Waterholes (not the same place as Myall Creek); Gin’s Leap; Guyra; and, finally, Myall Creek, the site of the famous massacre and the only massacre of Indigenous people for which anyone was brought to account.
None of Grenville’s ancestors were associated with the events at Myall Creek but, as the road trip proceeded, it became obvious to Grenville, that any level of the understanding and consciousness for which she was seeking necessitated that she visit Myall Creek.
Grenville explains the purpose of her journey and Unsettled in her preface. It’s about the questions that come from being a non-Indigenous person in Australia. What do we do with the fact that we’re the beneficiaries of a violent past? If we acknowledge that we are on land that was taken from other people, what do we do about that?
The preface goes on to set out many difficulties to which the questions give rise. These include the settler-centric nature of the questions, placing us in the centre and pushing to the fringes those people who have suffered from the impact of that theft and violence for nearly two and a half centuries. Despite the difficulties, Grenville regards the quest for answers, on balance, worth pursuing and Unsettled is the result.
Grenville has the advantage of the deep research conducted for The Secret River and other of her fictional works. Her knowledge of the places that she visits and through which she passes is much deeper than the reader might possess if she chose to pursue the tracks of her ancestors. Grenville is also guided by a family history which she received from her own mother. Her knowledge of the family story is reinforced by Grenville’s efforts in placing her mother in front of a tape recorder on repeated occasions and inviting her mother to talk.
The family story, as told by Grenville’s mother, was a history of events spanning generations told from the viewpoint of white settlers who were party to or benefitted from the dispossession of the original land on which the settlers came to raise their sheep and make a comfortable living. Of all the many things missing from the narrative, the acts of dispossession and even the original owners of the land are crucially important.
Unsettled proceeds, in many respects, as a dialogue between the family story and other colonial settler narratives on the one hand and Grenville’s search for a place to stand[2] in her own imagination on the other.
As with any road trip narrative, the book is not written en route. Years of research precede starting the ignition for the first time and at least months of dreary writing follow before the finished product is available. But, as with all great road trip stories, Grenville manages to keep her narrative sounding spontaneous and as if every thought put down on paper came into existence at the very point in the road journey indicated in the text.
In accord with the difficulty of the task, Grenville speculates and counter-speculates. She comes to a realisation and then realises that this conclusion is cheap or, at least, incomplete. The process, however, feels honest and the reader feels at home with the contradictory realities being progressively uncovered in the text.
The final event of Unsettled is the visit to Myall Creek including to the plaque erected, there, “on 10 June 2000 by a group of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians in an act of reconciliation, and in acknowledgement of the truth of our shared history.”
The plaque also says that it is “in memory of the Wirrayaraay people who were murdered on the slopes of this ridge in an unprovoked but premeditated act in the late afternoon of 10 June 1838”.
In the presence of the memorial, Grenville is able to make some tentative conclusions. She acknowledges that her journey has just begun. People like Grenville, herself, this reviewer and many of our readers, have to come to belonging not by right but by a journey into some hard places of the spirit.
But there is no way forward without acknowledging the things that were done. The memorial shows what can happen when dark things are brought into the light. People can come together.
And the land, itself, is a memorial. The ground, itself, the actual hills and valleys and rocks and trees and streams of water where the past happened.
The truth is right here, in front of our eyes, still written on the landscape.
We just have to look.
It is difficult to disagree.
[1] An imprint of Schwarz Books Pty Ltd
[2] “There is no decent place to stand in a massacre”: Leonard Cohen from The Captain: https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-the-captain-lyrics.
Editors: Jackson Ryan and Carl Smith
Publisher: NewSouth Books
Reviewer: Stephen Keim
An anthology of recent articles on science should almost be a compulsory activity, to be undergone every six months or so. From a young age, I thought that science was an unadulterated good, the pathway to a better life for all human kind. I was always a sucker for the Whig view of history. I now know that science is like everything else that promises and provides power, capable of being misused, corrupted and of bringing death and destruction upon the world.
I still think we should read science writing on a regular basis. I am not as sure about my arguments to support that proposition but, maybe, The Best Australian Science Writing 2024 (“BASW24”) provides some clues.
Scientists tend to do interesting things. Sometimes, they do make discoveries and achieve things that make other people’s lives better. While it is true that a person could know all the science there is to know and know nothing about the world, the scientific view of reality is one way of seeking understanding, albeit, that such understanding is incomplete on its own. If art and literature provide other pathways to understanding, it is heartening that BASW24’s collection includes Poetic Constellations – An Exploded-Sonnet Sequence (which is indeed a series of related poems) by Shey Marque and Origins – of the Universe, of Life, of Species, of Humanity, a libretto for a short opera by Jenny Graves and Leigh Hay. There are several other contributions in BASW24 which establish that great science writing need not only take the form of prose.
Apart from the Foreword by Corey Tutt OAM and an introduction by the editors, Ryan and Smith, BASW24 contains 33 contributions, the whole thing packed into 293 pages. There is room to touch upon a plethora of areas of science endeavour and the editors have delivered.
One of the loveliest pieces is Liam Mannix’s essay about Sarah Lloyd, a woman who has established, near Devonport in northern Tasmania, Australia’s largest collection of slime moulds outside a research institute. The essay expands its focus and introduces the reader to the world of slime moulds and their remarkable abilities. Slime moulds may not have discernible organs much less a brain but can nonetheless make rational life decisions and solve puzzle mazes as a means of obtaining optimum access to food resources.
Falling into the “I really needed to know that” category is Elizabeth Finkel’s This Little Theory Went to Market which analyses all the evidence and speculation about whether the Covid pandemic was the result of a virus leaking from the laboratories of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or whether the virus transferred itself to humans from a dead wild animal on sale at the Huanan Seafood Market, in the city of Wuhan, itself.
While Finkel’s verdict is that the evidence favours the Seafood Market as the most likely source, the most interesting conclusion was not scientific but political and economic. Finkel reveals that, despite the slanderous impact of the laboratory leak theory on China and its scientific institutions, local politicians were not displeased when that theory was born. This paradoxical attitude is because the food trade in locally captured wildlife is very profitable to the city of Wuhan and locals preferred the laboratory to be blamed rather than the thriving wild food trade be diminished.
A number of heart warming stories in BASW24 involve important advances in health science. The Heroes of Zero by Cameron Stewart maps the amazing progress achieved by the Children’s Cancer Institute in Kensington, Sydney over forty years in finding cures for an increasing number of the remaining cancers which cause the deaths of children. As well as portraying the work of the institute, the Heroes of Zero (zero deaths is the avowed aim of the Institute’s work), provides charming introductions to executive director, Michelle Haber, and a number of other people who have contributed to the Institute’s work and continuing success.
Angus Dalton’s How Scientists Solved the 80-Year-Old Mystery of a Flesh Eating Ulcer is the story of a small group of scientists attacking a very difficult problem and facing down scepticism all the way through to solving the mystery. The Buruli ulcer has been a painful scourge present in parts of Melbourne for over 80 years but which, in the early years of this decade, has been spreading its geographical presence.
The scientific team confirmed the presence of the ulcer in possums; confirmed that mosquitoes were the vector from possums to humans; and, ultimately, were able to identify an almost complete genome sequence of the bacterium that causes the condition. The mystery has been solved. Control of mosquitoes in the affected areas provides a means of control and, no doubt, the knowledge of the genome will enable the development of better treatments for the ulcers.
The Foreword to BASW24, First Peoples and STEM, is written by Corey Tutt, the founder of DeadlyScience. The article stresses the importance of the very long term contribution of First Peoples to STEM studies and the need for the ongoing contribution by First Peoples to STEM disciplines to be properly recognised by the science community.
The theme is further pursued in Joseph Brookes’ contribution, Indigenous Science Must be a Standalone National Science Policy, the title giving a clear indication of the argument contained within Brookes’ article.
The editors’ introduction, Voyagers, All, emphasizes the importance of story telling by reference to the Mesopotamian text, Gilgamesh, and to Australian First Nations story telling. The introduction also laments the dwindling personnel available to report science as news outlets continue to cut back on their writing staff. Despite this, as the editors note, BASW24 indicates the great work being done by the writers still working in the field.
In The Consciousness Question in the Age of AI, Amalyah Hart discusses, with very well informed speculation, the long running (but more acutely relevant) question of whether the computers will take over the world; turn on their masters; and kill us all. The article is fascinating and draws on great research. One cannot help but think, however, another relevant question is whether computers will get their chance to destroy the planet when we are doing such a great job at it, ourselves.
The most important and challenging contribution in BASW24 from a policy making point of view is Jacinta Bowler’s Science in the Balance which explains the difficult and often untenable lives of young scientists who, in the post-doctoral phase of their careers, find themselves living off short term funding provided by project research grants. The lack of security has the potential to make the young researchers susceptible to pressure to be less stringent in ensuring the integrity of their research and, also, leaves them financially insecure and unable to obtain housing loans because no lender will lend to someone whose position might come to an end within the next month or two. The article is a persuasive call for changes in the way young scientists are employed and their wages are funded.
Every contribution to BASW24 is full of interest. Many of them are fascinating. The variety of contributions provides a range of entertainment and education that makes the anthology a worthy project for publisher, editors and contributors and, most importantly, for the reader.
Author: Lorin Clarke
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Reviewer: Stephen Keim
My generation were shocked when news came through, on 9 April 2017, that John Clarke had died from a massive heart attack experienced while bushwalking with his wife and friends in the Grampians at Dunkeld, Victoria.
The body of work produced by Clarke is immense. My particular memories centre around hearing him do Fred Dagg sketches played on ABC radio on Saturday mornings; religiously watching Clarke and Bryan Dawe doing their Clarke and Dawe mock interviews after the 7.30 Report on weekday evenings and The Games,that very close to the bone, comedy series.
By the time Fred Dagg was being played on radio in Australia, both Clarke and the character were household names in New Zealand.
The author, “Lorin”, to avoid confusion with her father, is the oldest of Clarke’s two daughters and a writer reasonably well-known for her series of audio fiction podcasts, broadcast on the ABC, portraying life in inner suburban Melbourne, The Fitzroy Diaries.
The epigraph to Would that be Funny? comprises the single line, “Tuck early and keep your feet together”. Perhaps, not obviously, that is advice on the how tos of high board diving. The source of that advice was Clarke, himself.
The epigraph is symptomatic of the type of unexpected things that Lorin shares with the reader about her father, a person we, in many ways, thought we knew well if only because of the strength of his own persona as well the strength of the characters he portrayed across his career.
Clarke, it turns out, was, as a young man, excellent at sports. One of the sports was diving. In middle age, he decided, at a Melbourne pool where he happened to be, to demonstrate whether he could still do it. Turns out, luckily, he still had it and his demonstration dive for no one in particular was near perfect despite the passing of all those years. “Tuck early and keep your feet together”, then, is good advice perhaps only bettered by something like: Don’t try high board diving at any age.
Would that be Funny? is a daughter’s tribute to her famous father. It is a portrait of the impact within a family of a sudden death of one of the members thereof. While Clarke is the acknowledged star of the piece, Would that be Funny? presents Clarke in the context of his family. Lorin goes to pains to place emphasis on all parts of that context as well as on Clarke, himself. The family consists not only of Clarke, his academic art historian wife, Helen, Lorin and her younger sister, Lucia. The four grandparents form key parts of the context since they all played key parts in Clarke’s development and life. Even the pets get to play important roles in Would that be Funny?
Clarke’s own parents suffered in various ways during the Second World War. It affected them and affected their relationship and resulted in their marriage and subsequent marriages failing. Clarke’s father treated Clarke and Clarke’s mother poorly. Remarkably, Clarke managed to remain close to both parents and both mother and father got to spend lots of time in the houses in which Lorin and Lucia grew up and play big roles in the life of the girls and the family as a whole, albeit, that it was arranged that their visits not coincide in temporal terms.
Clarke’s in laws were much kinder and Lorin has Clarke crediting that kindness and the acceptance that they showed him when Helen first brought him home as being crucial to his rebuilding the confidence that had been sapped by the difficulties Clarke had experienced growing up.
In presenting Clarke in the context of his family, Would that be Funny? also presents the dynamics of that family. From the viewpoint of the older daughter, Would that be Funny? also manages to present Clarke in and out of the family and between the family context and his creative work context.
“Would that be Funny?” is actually a quote from Lorin of something said when very young and, like many historical phrases within the family, used for friendly mocking down the years. Would that be Funny? is also a guide to the psyche of the person whom the reader mourns as having been incredibly creative and massively funny. Between chapters of narrative, Lorin provides a glossary revealing a private language of abbreviations and mispronunciations shared by everyone in the Clarke extended family. Clarke’s propensity to leave recorded phone messages scannable in free verse is also illustrated by numerous examples.
The opening chapter of Would that be Funny? starts in the sharp pain of the recent sudden death but it ends with the heart warming of experience of receiving in the post a bundle of every letter that Clarke had sent to his daughters’ primary school asking for permissions and money for excursions and other extra-curricular activities. Every one of these is a creative masterpiece. Every one is side splittingly funny. A principal of the school had instructed the lady in the office to collect every note Clarke wrote for posterity and the lady in the office carried out her part of the deal and returned the bundle by post after Clarke’s death.
At the end of Would that be Funny?, the reader has learned that it is no coincidence that we love every piece of creative endeavour that Clarke ever embarked upon. We learn that Clarke and Dawe is not an astonishingly original piece of comedy that has emerged from the brain of someone who is otherwise a boring dolt.
Rather, the reader has learned that John Clarke was an amazing observer of life and that he saw, in everything he observed, the joys and sadnesses and odd things of life that we humans can best deal with mediated through humour.
John Clarke understood what was funny and knew how to recreate that humour through creative activity. At the end of his day, his humour and creativity came from his capacity also to be an amazing human being.
Lorin has directed a feature length film, But Also John Clarke, about her father which was released at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August 2025.
Author: Philip Glazebrook
Publisher: Penguin Travel Library
Reviewer: Stephen Keim
I relocated Journey to Kars (“Journey”) on my bookshelves, a few days before Christmas. My memory suggests that I purchased it at a second hand book store, sometime in 2012, when my interest in travel writing was strong. I believed it to be a classic of modern travel writing and was determined to read it. It seems that life intervened and Journey was left unattended and unloved on my shelves.
Philip Glazebrook was born in 1937 and died in 2007. Glazebrook wrote at least four novels: Try Pleasure (1968), The Eye of the Beholder (1974), The Burr Wood (1976) and, according to the blurb of my Penguin Travel Library edition of Journey, Byzantine Honeymoon (1979). In Glazebrook’s obituary in Encyclopedia.com, Glazebrook’s travel writings in addition to Journey (which was first published by Viking in 1984) , include Journey to Khiva: A Writer’s Search for Central Asia (1994), The Electric Rock Garden (2001), set near the India-Pakistan border in the 1970s, and, somewhat surprisingly, Byzantine Honeymoon: A Tale of the Bosphorus (1979).
It suggests a certain talent and versatility for a writer to be able to write books which some people conceive of as a novel and others conceive of as a travel book. Glazebrook references Byzantine Honeymoon in Journey. Glazebrook’s return journey from Kars takes him through Istanbul and he records how his first trip to Istanbul, the basis for Byzantine Honeymoon, started poorly with Glazebrook so unenamoured of the city that he and his companion considered returning early. The passage is part of the key analysis that emerges in Journey of both travel and travel writing in which Glazebrook states that the impressions that we have formed that drive the traveller to visit a particular place seldom mesh with the reality experienced by the traveller. The magic of travel is often found in unexpected sights and experiences quite different from that which was so deliciously anticipated. Such knowledge can guide the traveller as to how to conduct themselves in the place so as to give the magic the best chance of revealing itself.
This is an important insight from which we can all benefit. It does not, however, assist in knowing whether Byzantine Honeymoon was intended by its author to be displayed in the fiction or travel sections of bookshops.
The blurb also describes Glazebrook as intrigued by nineteenth century accounts of adventurous journeys through the Ottoman Empire and, as a result, fascinated by the heroic characters which travellers developed for themselves in their writings. This fascination expresses itself, not only by multiple discussions of the many ways in which travel writers project themselves as heroes throughout Journey, but, also, by making specific mention of the way in which a particular writer described their experiences in the very place at which Glazebrook had arrived in his narrative.
The discussion is pursued at some depth. In his bibliography, Glazebrook lists some 54 different travel writers and their works published between 1829 and 1902. Most of the travels in these were focussed on Turkey and the Levant. All of the writers in the list are discussed at some point in Journey.
There is merit in the thesis. Other people’s lives are generally of little interest to us. The same is true of other people’s holidays and trips abroad. Some of us are old enough to remember being bored almost to death by our friends’ never ending slide shows. Even now, being regaled by a colleague with their latest adventures at Queenstown or Aspen tests my pain tolerance levels. So, a travel writer must make the uninteresting story of British Airways losing one’s suitcases into something much more interesting and a tried and tested way of doing that is to cast the writer/traveller as a hero in a world out to get them.
Kars, the focus of Journey as well as Glazebrook’s trip, lay on Turkey’s eastern frontier with what then was still the Soviet Union. In that sense, it represented farawayness but, also, a sense of a real frontier. Kars is also famous for being a city within sight of Mt Ararat, the famous resting place of Noah’s cruise ship. Kars also permitted a journey from one side of Turkey to the other across Anatolia. Notwithstanding that, by 1980, Turkey had been a member of NATO and, thereby, the American and Western Empires for nearly thirty years, Glazebrook’s sense of heroism was that he was travelling through the former empire of the Ottomans which his Victorian role models had regarded as the dark country to which no person, apart from their intrepid selves, dared to venture.
Glazebrook did his best to recreate at least some of the rigours and uncertainties of earlier times. He spoke almost no words of Turkish and did not book either accommodation or transport ahead of time. In the same way as the May 2022 Brisbane flood assisted Simon Cleary in stimulating our interest in his journey down the Brisbane River, Turkey did its best for Glazebrook by hosting some kind of rebellion and declaring martial law.
Notwithstanding that Glazebrook lived and did his writing in Dorset, Journey commences in Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia. In keeping with the theme of Journey, the view from the Serbian fortress of the confluence of the Danube and the Sava displayed the frontier between Christendom and Islam, between Austrian Semlin (now Zemun, a suburb of Belgrade) and Belgrade, itself, which was under Turkish suzerainty. This is where Glazebrook’s Victorians commenced their real journeys, in the words of James Fraser who made the crossing in 1836, “quitting the living for the dead” and imagining oneself to be crossing the River Styx in the company of Charon.
Glazebrook travelled by train from Belgrade to Athens and by boat to Rhodes where he stayed in the house of a friend. His crossing of the River Styx involved a private boat passage to Marmaris which is now marketed to tourists as part of the Turquoise Coast or Turkish Riviera.
Glazebrook’s account of his journey across Turkey is interesting mainly because he brings to us the lives of ordinary Turkish people despite his inability to communicate with such locals at any depth. Glazebrook does encounter soldiers and weapons most particularly in Urgup in Cappadocia where he was forced to sit and wait for a whole day. But those military who he personally encountered had little interest him as a foreigner since it was rebellious locals for whom they were looking and in whom they had interest. Enduring buses crowded with locals and local taxi like transport which was even more crowded constituted the main challenges to Glazebrook’s wellbeing.
Glazebrook did spend some time with “a handsome if melancholy Turk”, Monsieur Mestan, who spoke fluent French so that Glazebrook and M. Mestan had no trouble communicating. The trauma revealed by Mestan who ran a business providing accommodation, was that local villagers, including Mestan, himself, had used ancient building components as raw materials for their own houses but had been forced to cease such plundering by the local Antiquities Department. Hardly the Dark Ottomans that gripped the imaginations of those Victorian self-made heroes. Glazebrook spent considerable time at Mestan’s establishment for want of a bus to take him on his way. Mestan also managed, with the help of another local, to sell coins and other artefacts to Glazebrook which, despite Glazebrook’s best intentions not to get scammed, turned out to be fakes.
Glazebrook made it to Kars and, among other things, visited the Russian quarter, a leftover of military operations after the Crimean War.
Glazebrook, through much of the book, points out the British imperial and anti-non-European prejudices of the Victorian writers. At times, however, he seems to share some of those prejudices, himself. An incident with a bank manager in Trabzon, in which Glazebrook won the day and was vindicated showed, perhaps, a little more of his personality than his reflections on the shortcomings of other people did.
Before long, however, he was on his way home. A bus to Erzurum allowed Glazebrook to catch another bus through the high mountains to Trabzon, an ancient port city on the Black Sea. And, from Trabzon by boat to Istanbul before heading to Bucharest and Budapest by train. This was before the collapse of the Soviet Union and both these eastern European capitals remained under communist rule. When he got to Basle in Switzerland, he felt his journey was over.
I found Glazebrook’s writing and the travellers’ tales he told about his return journey the most interesting part of Journey. Perhaps, once the burden of travelling through darkest post-Ottoman country had been achieved, he relaxed and his natural joy of travelling came to the fore.
I found Journey an extremely interesting read. I suspect it provided interest to me that was different to that which might have been obtained from a more contemporary reading. I was, perhaps, less interested in the musings of the Victorian travel writers and their experiences than if I had read it in 1984. On the other hand, Journey offers an insight into travel of fifty years ago when there were places in the world where tourists were not a cliché.
Author Salena Godden
Publisher: Canongate
Reviewer: Stephen Keim
Mrs Death Misses Death (“Mrs Death”) was a gift to me by a friend who recognises my propensity for reading and, periodically, tops up my pile of unread books. My friend characterised Mrs Death, on the accompanying card, as Max Porter meets Elif Shefak.
I had very much enjoyed Porter’s Lanny.
I still haven’t read anything by the Turkish/British Shefak although I consider this an omission to be rectified in the future.
Saleena Godden is a British performative poet with a Jamaican and Irish heritage. At time of writing this review, Godden is about to go on a With Love, Grief and Fury performing tour. Mrs Death is her first novel and is described by Godden as partially fiction, partially non-fiction. Published in 2021, it was written mostly during and in lockdown.
The seminal artistic statement of Mrs Death is that, while Death has been, traditionally and universally, portrayed as male (vide the Grim Reaper), death is properly understood as female: “For surely only she who bears it, she who gave you life, can be she who has the power to take it. The one is she. And only she who is invisible can do the work of Death. And there is no human more invisible, more readily talked over, ignored, betrayed and easy to walk past than a woman; than an old black woman, a homeless black beggar-woman with knotty natty hair, broken back, walking ever so slow, slow, slow, pushing a shopping trolley full of plastic bottles.”
Mrs Death has, essentially, two main characters. They are connected by a childhood tragedy. Wolf Willeford is a writer struggling for recognition and living a difficult and chaotic life. Willeford was a child who had just lost his first tooth when his mother died in an apartment fire which Willeford escaped with his life. That night, Willeford, standing on the street shivering in his pyjamas, saw a vision of Mrs Death, a kind black lady smiling down on him even as he screamed in pain and despair.
As the acknowledgments infer, the fire in which Willeford’s mother died is a reference to the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017 which resulted in massive deaths and was caused by the scandalous way in which contractors had been allowed to use highly flammable materials on the 24 storey tower of apartments, thereby, creating a massive fire hazard which wreaked its full potential for death and destruction.
Willeford and Mrs Death are reunited as, now an adult and a writer, Willeford wakes up on a sticky kitchen floor after a days long party and, discovering it is Christmas Eve, walks the streets of London. He finds an antique store in the throes of closing down and writes a note to express his interest in an old desk which he suddenly realises he must have. On the same walk, he is joined by the kindly figure of Mrs Death who leads him on a much more elongated journey through London and regales him with stories of London’s past including its deaths.
The desk turns out to belong to Mrs Death and, through it, Willeford has access to Mrs Death’s secret thoughts and diaries. It is the desk through which he accesses the information he requires to write her memoirs.
Willeford, in an early chapter, described Mrs Death as the collected memoirs of Mrs Death edited and compiled by him. Mrs Death, as it has turned out, is also an anthology or pastiche, containing short stories and poetry, as valuable in their own right as they are in contributing to an overall narrative.
One such short story is of a young girl, Tilly Tuppence, who was exploited by her mother by being rented out to gentlemen to spy on her through peepholes at tuppence a peek. Tilly is linked in an unsuspected way with the young Jack the Ripper.
Another short story involves identical twins, Marsha and Martha, of West Indian heritage who are slaves of a Scottish lord. While one twin was good and mild and the other was bad and mild, yet no one could be sure which one was which.
The title, Mrs Death Misses Death, as well as being an outrageous pun, is also a reference to every occasion in which we escape death by narrow margins. It is a statement that, not every time that Mrs Death comes to collect our soul, is she successful in her function. Sometimes, death is averted. Willeford regards his own survival of the fire which took his mother as just such a miss.
Mrs Death has a high level of philosophical content. Ideas are expressed about how we should view death; how we should treat death; how we should mourn deaths; and how we should speak about death and dying. Mrs Death and, one presumes, Ms Godden, do not like euphemisms like “passed on”. Neither do they like cliches such as “he or she had a good innings”.
The reader suspects, however, that all deaths and all dying are not equal. The deaths of the poor and the put upon are more worthy than those who inflict oppression for the purpose of profit.
The dedicatory pages at the end of the volume include references to those fighting for justice for those who died in Grenfell and to the families of the Windrush generation. The list goes on and includes dedications to those fighting to make a stand for the survival of the planet and to everyone working to save the NHS. Godden is a social activist and her values have rubbed off on the characters of Mrs Death, including Mrs D, herself.
The final pages of Mrs Death contain 23 short poems purportedly written by Willeford in a scary old tower in Cushendall, a small town on the north eastern coast of Northern Ireland as part of an opportunity granted to him by a philanthropist to advance his writing.
It also turns out that Godden had the opportunity to spend time in Curfew Tower in Cushendall to put the finishing touches on Mrs Death. (The Tower is owned by and made available to artists by Bill Drummond, of the Scottish Band KLF.)
The poems reflect their dual purpose containing Willeford’s reflections on his experiences with Mrs Death and the themes thereby raised but, also, deal beautifully with the experience of an artist or writer visiting and working within the environment constituted by the Tower and the town and countryside in which it finds itself.
Mrs Death is an unusual novel. It combines narrative with speculation and philosophy and poetry. We find in the text that Mrs Death’s sister is Life and that her one time lover is Time. In those few fragments, the poetry, philosophy and narrative each finds their respective place.
Author: Ocean Vuong
Publisher: Vintage (imprint of Penguin Random House)
Reviewer: Stephen Keim
Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American poet. He was born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1988. The chronology hints at the complexity of his heritage. His mother’s father was a United States soldier and his maternal grandmother was Vietnamese. But, by the time then Saigon fell, Vuong’s grandmother was alone in Vietnam with her partner stuck back in America.
Vuong’s mother was pregnant with him when she was 18 and working in a salon washing men’s hair to make ends meet. Her mixed race heritage made it illegal for her to work in Ho Chi Minh City and it was necessary for her and her young son to leave Vietnam for the United States.
Briefly Gorgeous is Vuong’s first novel and was first published in 2019. Its list of prizes is impressive including being long listed for the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award.
Vuong’s reputation as a poet is very strong. His 2016 collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, won the Whiting Award, the Forward prize for the Best First Collection; and the TS Eliot Prize.
Briefly Gorgeous is an epistolary novel. It commences “Let me begin again. Dear Ma, I am writing to reach you …” And, though the narrative curls into the detail of many corners of the epistle writer’s life such that the words may not seem quite so directed to and for the benefit of his mother, the reader never quite forgets that this is a letter and the text returns, from time to time, to more directly addressing itself to Ma.
There is an irony to the letter form in that the narrator’s mother is revealed to have never learned to read in English. The irony deepens when one finds from sources external to Briefly Gorgeous thatVuong’s mother died of cancer shortly before the book was published. The irony adds meaning to the continuation of the words quoted above: “… even if every word I put down is one word further from where you are.”
All autobiography is, at some level, fiction. By deciding what stories to tell and which ones to leave out, the writer decides upon the impression they wish the reader to receive about the writer’s life. For that reason, Briefly Gorgeous is a novel. But every external and internal indicator suggests that both the novel and much of Vuong’s poetry is deeply autobiographical.
Briefly Gorgeous is a lot about names. Vuong is nicknamed by his grandmother, Lan, as “Little Dog” and the name sticks. Lan, who suffers from bipolarity, named herself Lan (which means “orchid”) when she ran away from home, aged 17. Her family name was the comparatively boring “Seven”.
Lan named her daughters Mai and Rose continuing the flower theme. The best name story, however, starts with Rose, Vuong’s mother, who worked in unhealthy conditions and for low pay in a nail salon, telling a co-worker that she planned to go to the beach. Her accent made the word sound like “bitch” much to the amusement of the co-worker who then explained that it might be better to refer to the coastline as “the ocean”. Rose so loved the sound of “Ocean” that she renamed her son to make his given name, Ocean. And, as the reader can see from the cover of Briefly Gorgeous, this name has stuck, as well.
Briefly Gorgeous is a family memoir as much as it is a personal memoir. It emerges early in the text that Rose’s form of discipline of her son involves slaps and hits. Lan who is close to Little Dog tries to shield him from the worst of that violence. It only ends when Vuong is 13 years old when he is big and confident enough to insist that it does not continue.
Lan gets her grandson to remove her emerging grey hairs with a pair of tweezers. His reward for that and other kindnesses to his grandmother is to be regaled with stories of the past. It is these stories which allow Briefly Gorgeous to chronicle the struggles of Lan and Rose, in the years before his birth, in war torn and then post war Vietnam.
Briefly Gorgeous is the story of a specific Vietnamese American experience. The bulk of Vuong’s own experience emerges and plays itself out in down town decaying Hartford, Connecticut. Once famous as the insurance capital of the world, Hartford, according to Briefly Gorgeous, has, with the coming of the internet, seen the companies take their office staff off to places like New York leaving behind poverty and joblessness.
(Indeed, the modernist poet, Wallace Stevens, managed to write his brilliant poetry while working in Hartford as an insurance executive.)
It was in this decaying Hartford that Vuong and his family conduct their struggling existence.
Briefly Gorgeous is a story of a family. It is about the relationship of a child and his mother and grandmother living a difficult existence in a country which is, in many respects, alien to each of them. It is about holding things together and the importance of love and family loyalty.
Briefly Gorgeous is also a coming of age story. Vuong is bullied dreadfully at school but, somehow, manages to survive. As well as the difficulties of being Vietnamese (yellow) in working class America, Vuong also had to cope with being gay.
Much of Briefly Gorgeous is about a first love affair. Working on weekends and holidays as part of a tobacco picking crew on a farm, an hour’s bike ride out of Hartford, Vuong meets Trevor, the grandson of the farm’s owner. Their relationship is told with clarity and beauty. Trevor’s relationship with his alcoholic Dad; the journeys they take in and around Hartford on bike and in Trevor’s Dad’s old utility truck; their varying tastes in music; and their love making in the shed where the drying tobacco is stored is shared in intimate detail with the reader.
Vuong’s prose is sparse and precise. Incidents are narrated simply. Hardship and pain suffuse the text. But a sense of Buddhist acceptance prevents sadness from ever taking over, completely. It is not at all surprising to find that Vuong is a brilliant poet. Briefly Gorgeous could be understood just as appropriately as a prose poem as it is as a novel. When one reads Vuong’s poems, one finds the same feeling of beauty tinged with sadness as one finds in Briefly Gorgeous.
Author: Matthieu Aikins
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions (by arrangement with Harper)
Reviewer: Stephen Keim
The title of The Naked Don’t Fear the Water (“Fear the Water”) also provides the epigraph of the book. The epigraph advises that “the naked don’t fear the water” comprises an old Dari proverb. Dari is the form of the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan.
Fear the Water is the product of Aikins’ decision in October 2015, to join his Afghani friend and translator and fixer, Omar, on the smuggler’s road to Europe with Aikins’ travelling without his Canadian travel documentation and posing as an Afghani refugee. The journey commenced in 2016 and lasted a year. Both the first edition (Harper) and the second edition (Fitzcarraldo Editions) of Fear the Water were published in 2022.
In 2022, Aikins won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting as part of a New York Times team that investigated civilian casualties from US airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. He was also a finalist in the same category in the same year for a cover story for the New York Times Magazine on the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. In 2025, Aikins won his second Pulitzer Prize, on this occasion, for Explanatory Reporting, for “an authoritative examination of how the United States sowed the seeds of its own failure in Afghanistan, primarily, by supporting murderous militia that drove civilians to the Taliban”.
Aikins had travelled overland from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan in 2008 and commenced a career reporting from the region. This gave plenty of time for his friendship with Omar and his family to develop.
Aikins’ ancestors came from Japan and Europe. But he looks uncannily Afghan. As his Persian improved, he was continually mistaken by border guards and other officials as being Afghani and, just as often, assumed, as a local, to be involved in some illegal smuggling activity. This combination of circumstances clearly added credence to the idea that he could pose as a refugee on the overland route to Europe.
The first quarter of Fear the Water provides background to the proposed journey by retelling aspects of Aikins’ 8 years of reporting from Kabul and other parts of Afghanistan including the background to stories he had published in Canadian and American outlets and which had won him journalism prizes. From these descriptions, the reader also gets a picture of the foreign journalist’s dependence on his translator and a particularly intimate picture of Omar’s contribution to Aikins’ success as a journalist in Afghanistan. One also experiences the nature of life and social life in Kabul during the years between when the Taliban abandoned the city to American backed armed factions and when the Americans abandoned the country to the Taliban’s second coming.
Aikins also provides a detailed background of Omar and his family and Omar’s experiences and hopes and dreams, growing up. The reader also is introduced to the passionate, reciprocated but non family-approved love affair between Omar and Laila. There is a contradiction between Omar’s desire to obtain Laila’s family’s approval and his desire to find a new life in the west but he is hopeful that both objectives can be obtained. This intense romantic interest story never quite leaves the pages of Fear the Water.
Part II, The Road, commences after 90 pages. The original plan had been for Omar to obtain a visa for entry into Turkey. Upon a coup occurring in Turkey, all such visas were put on hold and there was no option available other than the overland route across the land border with Iran and then over the mountains into Turkey. The latter part of the journey involved travel on foot. The land route would take at least two weeks and was exceedingly dangerous.
The Road chroniclesOmar and Aikins’ experiences on the land route to Turkey. They are together for the early part of the journey but are separated. Fear the Water narrates the experiences of both men. It also provides a sociological and political history of asylum seeking, generally, including the impact of political changes in a country or the world on the numbers of asylum seekers and the nature of their experiences. The end notes are extremely informative about this history and the politics and sociology that surrounds it.
The journey, as experienced, was as dangerous and arduous as was anticipated. This reviewer took comfort at times in the apparent fact that, since Aikins was writing the book, he must have survived.
Part III is entitled The Camp and refers to life in the refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos where refugees are detained for long periods of time with no apparent legal pathway to other parts of Europe. Part IV, The City, refers to life in a grotty suburb of Athens with a similarly very restricted set of prospects of getting to parts of Europe where one does have prospects of being granted asylum and, eventually, a pathway to legal residence and even citizenship.
Aikins got to Turkey. His boat trip across to Lesbos and Greek maritime territory may have been a lot shorter but was just as dangerous and harrowing as the land journey. The time spent by refugees in Moria refugee camp and in Athens are studies in heart breaking frustration and numbing boredom.
Aikins provides the same level of political, historical and sociological analysis in the subsequent parts of the journey as he did for the overland section, discussed above. He describes in detail the finding, on 3 September 2015, of the body of toddler, Alan Kurdi, on the Lesbos shore and the social impact of that event as photographs of Alan’s body appeared on front pages across Europe and the world.
Aikins also describes the political circumstances and forces that operated in Greece which allowed the suburb of Exarcheia to become an anarchist stronghold and no go zone for police and, thereby, allowed various groups and collectives to come together to support refugees with food and accommodation and other services all on the basis of everybody chipping in to help run the place. This provided Aikins with a zone of safety until the next part of the journey could be arranged.
Fear the Water is an astonishing piece of journalism. It is also an astonishing piece of political and sociological writing. Seven years ensued from when the trip was envisaged until publication. Even though Aikins came to his task with the knowledge and experience derived from seven years of reporting in Kabul, when he arrived safely to the end of that journey, he engaged in a gargantuan research project to provide the necessary context to what he and his fellow travellers had experienced and he had observed.
It is not at all surprising that Aikins has won two Pulitzer Prizes and been short listed for a third. His style of reporting constitutes the best and bravest form of journalism. As the world seems to be disappearing into untold horrors that peel the illusions from our eyes that, for many decades, we had preserved, it is almost trite to say that we would be much better off with many more Mathieu Aikins to inform us and many less of the hacks who serve up most of the contents provided by our legacy media.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10102990425066801
Author: Phil Brown
Publisher: Transit Lounge
Reviewer: Stephen Keim
Phil Brown, who lives a few streets from me, will be known from his writing to many of Hearsay’s readers. Many will know his work as long time Arts Editor of the Courier-Mail and many from his column in the Brisbane News.
Kowloon Kid is a memoir which focuses mostly, but not exclusively, on a patch of Brown’s childhood, from 1963 to 1970, during which Brown, born in 1956, lived the privileged life of a child of Empire among the primarily Asian population of what was still one of the last outposts of that same Empire.
Brown was born in 1956. He had, until the family’s uprooting and transfer to Kowloon, to further Brown’s father’s construction business, lived in the relatively small Hunter Valley town of Maitland in New South Wales. After the seven years in Hong Kong, the family moved back to live on the Gold Coast in Queensland requiring Brown to return to the persona and lifestyle of an Aussie teenager.
Very few people have had seven of their formative years spent in the exotic environs of Hong Kong sandwiched between years of mundanity, living in Australia. It is not surprising that Brown retains a deep love of those years of his childhood as well as great affection for and deep interest in Hong Kong, itself, now a unique outpost of the Middle Kingdom.
Kowloon Kid opens on one of Brown’s many visits back to Hong Kong in the company of his wife, Sandra, and their son, Hamish. Suffering from a bad case of flu, Brown is feeling sorry for himself in the lobby of the Peninsula Hong Kong Hotel, a place of refined luxury, hosting the remains of the Hotel’s famous High Tea.
It turns out that the Peninsula is a symbol of the life that the Brown family lived in the sixties. The same lobby doubled as Brown senior’s de facto business office where Brown senior not only conducted his appointed meetings but, also, hailed fellow well met movie stars and states people and any other famous or interesting person who happened to be, otherwise, having a quietly anonymous time within the lobby’s classy and classical décor.
Brown and his siblings were also familiar with the Peninsula dining there with their parents on a regular basis.
Brown introduces the reader to a number of other famous institutions of Kowloon among them the Kowloon Cricket Club. Not unlike the Peninsula, the Cricket Club was a familiar destination for Brown and his siblings as children. Also, characteristically, the Cricket Club displayed the type of self-importance and stuffy traditions which hundreds of years of empire is particularly good at developing.
Just as Brown introduces the reader to the Peninsula through his illness (accompanied by Sandra’s skepticism developed through years of Brown’s hypochondria), Brown’s contemporary experience of the Cricket Club is ventilated through his embarrassment and annoyance at being called to account for breaching the stuffy tradition that receiving phone calls is strictly off limits in the green and pleasant land that is the Cricket Club.
Brown’s narrative technique is recognisable for his self-deprecation and his use of the much more recent past to give contemporary relevance to the distant past (the focus of the narrative). And, Brown, the likeable fool who makes so many missteps to the scorn of loved ones doubling as travel companions, is a source of humour that shines throughout the text and gives a lightness and interest to the essential narrative.
Kowloon Kid is not just about respected institutions of the Empire. The ordinary and daily life of Brown and his siblings as children living in Kowloon is as important as the streetscape and the institutions. As was de rigeur for Europeans living in Hong Kong, the Brown family had servants. The children had closest contact with their amahs or child minders who looked after them on an ongoing basis. Despite this close contact, Brown marvels at his complete lack of knowledge of anything about Ah Chan and Ah Moy, the two amahs who, between them, served the family for most of the seven years. Amahs traditionally wore a “uniform” of black and white clothing. They were wholly dependent on their employer family so that, if an Australian or British family transferred back to their country of origin, the amah may have faced a lengthy period without employment.
Brown’s years in Hong Kong almost coincided exactly with the years in which the Beatles were a band. Brown’s love of rock music in general and the Beatles in particular is a highlight of those years. Kowloon Kid details the occasions when singles and albums became available for the first time on the streets of Kowloon as well as the experiences of Brown and his friends in discovering the magic that lay within those discs. He reminds the reader that the White Album was actually called, simply, The Beatles” and that it was the world of fans who christened it by reference to the defining colour of the album cover.
Rock music was not just a listening experience. A group of school friends, led by an American friend of Brown, formed a group and performed, at the invitation of a cool and empathetic teacher, on one occasion only, a number of popular songs of the time. The Hutchence family, including young Michael, were friends of the Brown children and Michael and Brown attended the same school. In his characteristic, self-mocking manner, Brown suggests that, not only was he a performing rock star years before Michael Hutchence, but, just maybe, it was Brown’s musical prowess that inspired the young Hutchence to the major musical successes he experienced before his tragic death.
Kowloon Kid covers a lot of bases. It documents, beautifully, long past days of empire ambience in one of the world’s great cities. For boomers, it evokes a beautiful nostalgia for those days when we were young and, despite our youth, we knew everything. It also conveys a humorous but empathetic tale of family life in which trivial events carry importance for individuals and the people they love.
Kowloon Kid was published in 2019. Brown has another book being launched at Queensland Writers Festival in October 2025. Kowloon Kid is a very enjoyable read. But, despite the lightness of its tone and narrative, it is an important book, as well.
Author: Becky Manawatu
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Reviewer: Stephen Keim
Kataraina is a sequel to Becky Manawatu’s Aue. Aue is centred on the story of Taukiri and his nine years younger cousin/brother, Arama, and Taukiri’s mother, Jade. Taukiri’s father, Toko, was murdered in a gang related crime in 2005 when Taukiri was four years old.
Arama goes to live with their aunt, Kataraina and her husband, Stuart Johnson, in a household that is dominated by Stuart’s violent and dominating personality.
Aue won Aotearoa New Zealand’s top prize for fiction and an international prize for crime fiction. Reviews of Aue indicate that the book raised controversy about its discussion of gang violence among Maori communities and brought comparisons to Keri Hulme’s 1984 novel, The Bone People and Alan Duff’s 1990 novel, Once Were Warriors.
Aue was also published in Australia by Scribe. Scribe has, as part of its business plan, a policy of obtaining the Australian rights to great writing published elsewhere in the world and, by republishing in Australia, bringing that literature to a greater collection of Australian readers. It has done so with Kataraina.
Kataraina is not a sequel in the sense that a sequel commences at the point where the narrative of the previous work finished. Kataraina works the same generational timeline as Aue. Kataraina changes the focus of the narrative. The blurb on the back cover of Kataraina describes Aunty Kat as being at the centre of events in Aue but silenced by abuse such that her voice was absent from the story. Kataraina, by contrast, is, primarily, her story.
Kataraina is told in the first person plural. The narrators appear to include all of the surviving members of the family and, perhaps, one or two important friends. The composition of the group narrator shifts from scene to scene depending on which of the collective are present and privy to that part of the story.
The complexity of telling an intergenerational story is acknowledged by a partial genealogy/family tree at the beginning of the book. A reader who, like this reviewer, has not read Aue finds themselves turning back to this guiding diagram, many times, in the opening chapters to remind themselves who, exactly, Granny Liz, Grandpa Jack, Jade, Toko, Aroha, Taukiri and Arama are.
The dramatis personae complexity is matched by the chronological complexity of the narration. The key event of Kataraina is an event at the end of 2017 when “the girl shot the man”. One finds out early in the novel that this event was the shooting of Kataraina’s husband, Stuart Johnson by Arama’s good friend, seven year old, Beth Aiken. The context of that shooting emerges slowly as the narrative jumps forward and back. The reader travels back to thirty-seven years before the girl shot the man as the story of Kataraina’s birth and her enduring importance to Granny Liz and her husband, Jack and their relationship is revealed.
The narrative also starts and finishes with “many years after the girl shot the man”, the latter chapter bringing a denouement in which the various actors have found a form of resolution and self-understanding to their relationships and trauma filled lives.
A second narrative (twisted around the story of Kataraina’s life and experiences) involves a day by day description of the work taking place in January 2020 of a scientific study group researching the dynamics of Johnson’s Swamp which, two years earlier, after being drained and confined for more than two centuries, has embarked on a massive expansion reclaiming its pre-colonial boundaries. One member of the study group, Cairo, is also related to Kataraina and her family’s principal actors of the main narrative.
A third narrative is foreshadowed in short enigmatic lines that appear between some of the chapters developing the main narrative. It is of an ancestor young woman who was first offered food in the form of peaches from a newly opened can and then attacked by a white colonist. The genealogy at the beginning of the book reveals an ancestor, Tikumu, who died in 1890. Cairo’s scientific team are party to discovering Tikumu’s story. Tikumu’s story plays a role in everyone’s attempts to find understanding and resolution.
Kataraina is set in Kaikoura, a coastal town on the northern part of the east coast of South Island. It is a fishing town. Kataraina draws on Maori lore and magic. A water spirit, a taniwha, plays an important role in the novel, assisting, advising and informing Kataraina at important times in her life. A glossary of Maori terms appears at the end of the book. Again, as with the genealogy at the front, the reader, regularly, turns to the glossary to feel the full power of the writing.
Kataraina’s story includes a youth of academic promise foiled by experiences in respect of which she had little control but for which she blamed herself. Her sense of shame and lack of self-worth led to a life of bad choices. She continued to blame herself for the unkindnesses piled upon her by her violent husband. The reader while not sharing Kataraina’s harshness on herself, nonetheless, is also able to understand Stuart and his self-experiences which led him to wreak pain and misery upon himself and those with whom he came into contact, including, most particularly, Kataraina.
Kataraina asks to understand the lives of others and to avoid blaming people for the misfortunes to which they are subject. Kataraina also invites us to understand the importance of love and friendship. It stresses the importance of understanding ourselves and others. It stresses the importance of hope among our sadnesses.
Kataraina is beautifully written. The complexity of the structure and the chronology is belied by the clarity of the writing. Descriptions of simple cooking producing delicious food bring colour and texture to lives of ordinary people. Descriptions of ordinary day clothes of people make the characters real enough that the reader can almost reach out and touch. The use of dialogue, extended at times, add to the reader’s sense of the relationships that are being portrayed. Kataraina also excels in describing the beauty of the Kaikoura landscape and wetlands. And, beyond portraying the scenes and sounds of everyday life, Kataraina also manages to convey the inner life of its characters especially Kataraina, herself. The combination of these traits makes reading Kataraina a joyful experience.
One of the joys of writing a review is that the reviewer is forced to return to the pages which, a short time ago, one has left with a sense of the achievement of having got to the book’s end. That sense of achievement may be tinged with a sense of melancholy in that a unique experience has come to an end. At other times, the tinge may be the colour of relief. Nonetheless, the sense of mission to understand the story and find out what happens, that every reader carries with them, causes us to miss the particular merits and beauty of the words we are reading along the way. We forget that what we can read in a few days or weeks has cost the writer years of careful craftmanship.
Having returned to Kataraina for this review, I have discovered a magical paragraph on the very first page about the importance of story telling. I leave you with Becky Manawatu’s words on that subject:
“Telling allows us to live in the plain and pointless space of proving the moving, flailing, contesting and yielding parts of a contradiction to all be true, or at the very least honest. Tika.[1] Pono.[2] Together we listen. One of us might sometimes create the scratch, whistle, scratch of lead on paper. Who even does that anymore. She does. Kataraina.”
[1] Correct
[2] Truth
