It's all over

February 14th 2010 and it's all done! There can be no suitable comment on the eight months of neglect this blog has suffered; and it started so well! I thank those of you who have read it: I think I was a bit miffed at the time that not more people responded to my big launch, but I forgot the few who did, and now, I thank you!!

My approach next will be to fill in the many books I have read retrospectively - I do intend to finish this project and I have been reading exclusively Australian all this time. It's been tumultuous at times, I have almost faltered out of necessity once or twice, but on the whole I've loved exploring many more Australian writers than I would have, and read some great books along the way. From tomorrow, my year is over, so questions arise...

I am actually tempted to keep it up, I'll explore why that's not an option in a later post. I'm also very interested in doing this year thing again with another guiding principle: Irish writers intrigues me, also debut novels, or perhaps another region of the globe, or a narrative style, or books from a particular decade. What does entice me is that I now know the ease of having a principle - so quick when buzzing through a library, such a justifiable excuse when not really wanting to try some new author or personal favourite foisted by a friend. For tomorrow, when I will be taking the bus, what do I read? I do have my trusty Monthly (thanks for the Xmas gift, Mum) so I won't need to read the bus ads.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to filling in the gaps; for the few who read this, and for my own sense of finality about the project. It's the end, it's been great, but ready to move along!!!

Welcome to my reading Blog!

Thanks for attending the launch party for my infamous Blog!!!

I say infamous because some of my potential readers have known about this for a while but I haven't been ready to launch it until it was...just...right. And its not yet! So rather than keeping on writing into the ether I may as well invite others to sample and damn the consequences. My life has become a little calmer lately too so I guess I have the intellectual clarity to start sharing my highly opinionated jottings with whoever drops by. If you like what you read, you may want to become a Follower (it has a faintly Lord of the Flies-like flavour, this thing we call the 'net), which generates an email when I create a new post, I think. The link is at the bottom right of the page.

And remember, blogs are meant to be read in reverse-chronological order, so it'll take some clicking to follow the story from the very start - or you can use the archive function on the right hand column. Whatever you do, I hope you enjoy the party, and your visits here. Tell your friends! Leave comments! Start your own "Stephen's Blog Sucks" blog if you so desire! I'll keep on writing this until the year's up anyway so thanks again for visiting.

Sydney Loch/To Hell and Back

The story of its release and the controversy that surrounded it is an added reason to seek out this excellent first hand account of the horrors of Gallipoli. Iconic, almost nation-defining in the courage shown by Australian soldiers in the face of an impenetrable enemy and strategic ineptitude, the landings at Gallipoli and ensuing months of fighting are the background for this soldier's story, told with honesty by Victorian farmer Sydney Loch. And I mean an unflinching, unsettling honesty that renders accounts of rotting corpses and smoke-filled sunsets with equal detail. It was this honesty that led to the book being banned on it's second release in 1919 - the War Department not keen for Australians to have access to the dark side of the story this close to the end of the Great War.

This modern release of the book re-titles it, and adds a brief biography by the writers Susanna and Jake de Vries, where we learn about the controversy as well as Loch's life and career after the war, primarily as a philanthropist helping the many dispossessed in Europe who took years to recover from the destruction and loss that surrounded them. This post-war selflessness adds an interesting perspective to the person we come to know from the original book, who is humble and loyal and not a little bit brave as he survives one of our most costly battlefield disasters. Loch serves as a runner for an Australian Colonel, putting him in many precarious situations but also making him privy to some of the higher level tactical decisions made at headquarters. He is remarkably supportive of the Colonels and Majors as they toy with men's lives, remaining silent and only allowing himself the briefest flashes of annoyance at the posturing and cowardice he sees.

Of course, the book was gleaned from his diaries, and perhaps the editor's pen has saved some of these commanders from further criticism, some of whom were still serving or remained on the peninsula in cemeteries. Loch doesn't set out to criticise his leaders anyway, his focus is more on the living conditions of the men, the daily grind of battle and survival, the constant reminders of a momentary and violent death. But he is no pedestrian diarist, and the text is littered with tight descriptions and illuminating observations, to the point where the great writer Miles Franklin pronounced it a "literary" work on its release. This is fair, as the different tone to other survivor's accounts is clear - Loch didn't know he would survive yet there is a poetry and a conscious development of anecdotes and even dialogues that is definitely writerly. He is struck by the calm scenes of ships in the harbour by night, the orderly tent cities that spring up on the occupied beaches, the expressions on men's faces as they prepare to attack or contemplate the loss of a mate. Some of these passages are unforgettable.

Less can be said, sadly, about the accompanying biography, which was possibly rushed or consciously underwritten to lend focus to the main part of the book. Whatever the reason, it is clunky writing and unsatisfying in both its detail and execution. The female de Vries is the writer of a series of books on women in Australian history which I had wanted to read - I'm less keen now. If only Loch himself could have written a full autobiography! In fact, he did, but it remains unpublished. War, and war stories are not to everyone's fancy I know but if you have never read a Gallipoli diary or need to have the story of this part of our history revived for you, Sydney Loch's is a most engaging and readable example.

The wrap-up:

Australian themes - Despite our long history of involvement in wars, there aren't all that many full accounts written by participants of these conflicts.

Australian characters - Loch doesn't set out to write a character piece but he manages some very perceptive studies of his comrades and commanders, mostly Australians.

Australian settings - There are some interesting observations of life in pre-war rural Victoria but the majority of the book is set in the Dardanelles, which has become sacred ground to many pilgrims.

Australian voices - Loch has an ear for dialogue and sets down some exchanges verbatim - a great resource for those interested in the lost inflections of a time gone by.

Australian focus - As a soldier, Loch has both a healthy disrespect for his battlefield commanders and a begrudging loyalty. His respect for the fighting Australian soldier, however, is immense and could be seen as the lingering message of his book.

Sam de Brito/The Lost Boys

Coming-of-age stories usually bore the hell out of me. I dutifully read the canon of Australian, UK and American books as a younger fella and could never quite figure out why they didn't seem to speak to me, or echo my own experiences. Not that they had to - other people's lives are always interesting - but they were almost universally promoted as...universal. I found, however, that in most cases fiction writers would mix a youthful naivete of the passing of events with a wry older understanding that smacked of memoir, rather than fiction. I don't know why this annoys me, in fact, it has probably been a factor in my own resistance to writing a novel-length project: I didn't want to sound like one of those self-satisfied narcissists that have decided their own proclivities or immature observations are worthy of a 80,000 word novel. Examples? Many of my favourite novelists have resorted to this tawdry device - and I call it a device because the essential element is this: I am writing this novel about growing up in London/Tallahassee/Bathurst because my upbringing was so unique/depressing/remarkable that everyone who has been a kid/teenager/young adult will find something in it to relate to. Or, they may be writing on the advice of their therapist. Whatever the reason, these books are too often thinly-veiled memoirs of the authors own lives, autobiographies masquerading as fiction. You could play "spot the actual experience" or Google the author's life and work out the person or event the are alluding to in their "novel", if you so desired. But I am being bitter. Perhaps I am jealous of the jetset lifestyles of some of these "characters", or their early sexual experiences (much earlier than mine), or their uncanny foreknowledge that afforded them the capacity to choose the right friends or lovers or job opportunities. I just generally find these sorts of stories lack the observance of the many periods of pure boredom, the powerlessness, the formless playing or watching of TV or eating or going to school or talking on the phone that defined my childhood years - and many others I have shared this idea with. True, these are not engaging topics for modern novels, and when you think back to that time they are not the occasions that first come to mind, but yet they do form the bulk of our coming-of-age, and are most decidedly universal.

You might argue that I would probably be quite content with the new genre of biography that is so successful nowadays - the Difficult or Oprah Childhood Autobiography - with titles such as Shame, Disgrace, Wasted, or my favourite title Ma, He Sold Me For a Few Cigarettes. While worthy, and clearing allowing their authors the chance for closure, these are dire, often badly- or ghost-written pieces that turn my theory of why writers enjoy fictionalising their own coming-of-age on its head - these guys revel in the candour of revealing their painful and masochistic lives. And the books are quite clearly non-fiction.

This brings me, finally, to my latest review: Sam be Brito's The Lost Boys. With obvious knowledge of the current climate (the post-James Frey world) de Brito writes leaving you no doubt that these experiences and events are from his own life. The book charts the experiences of first a teenage boy completing and leaving school, then his older self who hasn't moved much beyond the suburb, friends, and self-abusing habits of his youth. It's a good effort, and I enjoyed it, and I'd like to explain why it got past my memoir radar. I should have put the first two paras of this in brackets so you could choose whether to read it - not wanting to get you offside if you love a good coming-of-age story, or even a Difficult Childhood Autobiography, or if you can forgive James Frey. Firstly, de Brito is not a Great Writer, its his first novel so you are not expected to be familiar with his style or seek out his pithy observations. I'm not sure if he is even a Very Good Writer, maybe that's what I like about him - he doesn't make me feel lowly by comparison. But he is a Good Writer, and I suspect edits have been made to tie the book together more neatly. Its a very warts'n'all, almost Gonzo-style novel, where the self-deprecation of the author successfully removes the need for the reader to judge them.

A style emerges, however. Its a staccato, short chapter construction where time vacillates chaotically between the main character's ages as schoolboy, thirty-something, and the current time, within a few years of the thirty-something chapters. Its a successful technique, particularly since the message of the book is that we keep repeating ourselves and seldom learn from our mistakes. A chapter will often start and its not until a few sentences in that you can tell which time period the characters are in. The technique works a bit like our memory, linked by feelings, faces and symbols more than chronology. De Brito is careful not to bleed the drama out of his novel while doing this, creating a unique sort of tension in that he focuses on characters or events briefly then leaves them suspended in time - to be fleshed out later or never returned to as he desires.

But this is never achieved with cynicism or cleverness. He is almost a writer who doesn't appreciate his own power as the novel avoids pretension and only submits to that one stylistic device. The book reads like the rantings of a literate pub drunk; disconnected, repetitive, at times tender and sometimes brutal. He adopts, or maybe tries to recreate, a hard, masculine language that is replete with expletives: the c-words, cock, cunt, cone and coke appear on almost every page. I thought this would become tiresome but it creates its own authentic harmony in a coarse kind of way. Its forgivable because the men in the story are not gangsters or even particularly hard-nosed, they are average Aussie blokes who, for better or worse, display all of the many foibles of their ilk.

And it was probably this that impressed me the most. Like a noughties Puberty Blues, The Lost Boys documents a sort of Australian youth experience that I can't say is universal, but it is very similar to mine. De Brito's Eastern Suburbs of Sydney is laced with drugs, booze, unsafe sex, and surfing - the sort of peak growing experiences many Aussie kids experienced to varying degrees - just choose your own drug, sport, or unsafe practice. It grates at times, and you howl at the book for the characters' stupid choices, but it is starkly real, and allowed me to view my own choices now and then in a comparative light. This is a refreshing reading experience: safe, yes, because I'm not comparing my youthful surrounds with Soweto or Sao Paulo, but illuminating in that I could actually discover that someone else's world view could be coloured through a similar set of events as mine. 

But is it a memoir? I can't say. I suspect it is; doctored to cut out the boring bits of course, and perhaps teetering towards the moralistic just through the absolute worthlessness of most of the characters while walking the tightrope between championing their actions and damning them. So, a warning: there is a melancholy that suffuses the book, a sense of wasted opportunities that can become depressing, if that sort of stuff has that affect on you. One of the aspects I liked about the book most is the shadowy figure of the writer attempting to produce this book. He only appears in five or six chapters, providing a throughline for the disconnected story as he paces through a day of trying to write, feeling like he cannot, reverting to online porn and trying to stop smoking rather than actually sitting down to write. With this character, who is undeniably de Brito himself trying to write the novel you are now holding, he reveals that his is a writer's soul, and that is always something to champion. I may even have to review my opinion of coming-of-age novels. Got any recommendations?

The Wrap-up:

Australian themes - Don't know, can't say. I only had one childhood and this book often echoes it so there are definitely universal Australian themes here.

Australian characters - Some absolutely classic Aussie characters are impaled by this writer's pen.

Australian settings - Events occur around Sydney's Eastern suburb beaches but it could be any coastal populace - which includes most of us.

Australian voices - This is a very authentic Australian voice, unfettered by style or pomposity, and therefore immensely engaging.

Australian focus - Almost essential reading for anyone trying to understand the Australian male psyche, in the same vein as Luke Davies or Nick Earls or Andrew McGahan.

Max Barry/Syrup

I picked this up for a lightweight read after plowing (happily) through Philip Jones. Kimberley from my old work read and reviewed it a few years ago and she highly recommended it, but with the proviso that she doesn't really read any Australian fiction. This intrigued me as I didn't know anything about Max Barry, and also because Kimberley always has immaculate taste in books. But why not Australian?

It wasn't long before I understood how the book slipped through K's cultural cringe radar. Syrup is possibly the least 'Australian' book I've read this year, choosing instead to locate itself in California, and the cutthroat world of corporate marketing. Barry is a satirist, and chooses his victims well: superficial marketing execs, two-dimensional corporate wage slaves, money-hungry twenty-somethings, vacuous Hollywood stereotypes. It all revolves around the central character, Scat, and his belief that all of us have three million-dollar ideas per year. One of his is to invent a new type of cola, called FUKK, which he intends to market to Coca-Cola. He does this, and sets off a chain of events that allow him to exercise his great ideas in ever-increasingly farcical situations.

So, its a free-flowing and funky anti-establishment romp, with plenty of hip cultural references, an undercurrent of sex and fame, and a spattering of editorial-esque comments on the clandestine tools used by marketers, appearing in different fonts outside the text a la Douglas Coupland. And it was when this dawned on me that the experience started to sour. So much of Syrup has been said before, and better, by the cultural bowerbirds that preceded Max Barry - Bret Easton Ellis, William Gibson, and Coupland. I mention Gibson because Barry is remarkably prescient in some of the novel: written in 1999, it predicts the black Coke can of Coke Zero, the merging of advertising and media we see all around us nowadays, the propensity for celebrities to invent names to make them stand out from the crowd like Beyonce and Fifty Cent. But conversely the book almost feels like a dinosaur already - characters still use payphones and shoot film on 16mm stock - to the point where a member of Gen Y reading it could find some of the references quaint but not cool or clever like Barry tries to be.

This is no fault in itself - writers do not necessarily create for the generation that succeeds them - but it is a danger when the writer starts to riff on their own imagination and loses the reader. Even for a farce, the situations Scat and his partner 6 find themselves in are completely unbelievable, and Barry keeps ramping them up by placing even more unlikely obstacles in their path, and allowing his characters to overcome them, often through a brilliant 11th hour lightbulb moment. For some reason this seems to actually leech out the tension that he is trying to create - you start to expect the clever rebuttal or the cunning stunt - and this becomes boring. I read the book in just a couple of days; easy, because it lacks much in the way of description or analysis of the character's motivations and relies almost entirely on the plot and how it is played out. This smacks of an expected readership with a limited attention span, and this may be exactly who Barry wrote the book for. Funnily enough, his most recent project is a stream-of-consciousness style novel that he is writing then emailing to recipients one page at a time.

I don't know, maybe I'm just getting too old for clever, or just learning to prefer substance over style. I think Barry is a good writer, he can tell an engaging story and his jokes are pretty funny; but for the American market, where this book seems to be aimed, they already have Jonathan Franzen and David Sedaris and Chuck Palahniuk doing this really really well, while also saying some pretty important things. In this book, Max Barry reminds me a bit of Clive James, a writer I have never warmed to, who always seems to be the loudest person laughing at his own jokes.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - We are all guilty of materialism in the first world, Australians as much as any, but its interesting that Barry didn't choose to set his book here, maybe we just aren't shallow enough?
Australian characters - There is a vague reference to Scat being born in Australia but these are all ultra-American figures, instantly recognisable.
Australian settings - The book is set completely in Los Angeles.
Australian voices - Can a non-American skewer Americans better than a native? The only Australian voice is the author's.
Australian focus - In the world of these characters, nations are just facets of the global market, and nationhood is just another button to be pushed.