Richard Flanagan/The Unknown Terrorist

I have been a fan of Richard Flanagan for a while, and would rate Gould's Book of Fish as one of my top ten Australian novels. However, I read Wanting, his latest, late last year and started to feel a bit uncomfortable about his writing. Not that I didn't enjoy it, I think it developed into a very solid and almost profound novel, too short to be a masterpiece but definitely a powerful example of speculative historical fiction. It was more that it felt too speculative, with too much of the writer's presence, too didactic. Which is precisely the problem with The Unknown Terrorist, and in this case I would have to say I didn't enjoy it.

Flanagan's intentions are forgivable - he dedicates the book to David Hicks and it is a precise snapshot of metropolitan Australia during Howard's reign of terror - but he manipulates his characters and episodes in an almost Machiavellian way and thus, I had no sympathy for any of them. I suppose the book is really a thriller, so the characters are meant to be cardboard; or any fleshing out is used merely to explain their actions, usually after they have committed them, which doesn't help. The frustration for me came in Flanagan choosing to interlock the lives of his main six or seven characters, in increasingly unlikely circumstances. You just don't believe some of the coincidences and this distracts from the sincerity of the message.

And even the message starts to wear thin. This feeling was weird for me as a fervent opposer to Howard and his post September 11 actions, and particularly as a believer in intellectual freedom. Flanagan does manage to capture the temper of the time: the paranoia, the doublespeak, the teflon-coating of the police and other agencies, and the time deserves to be documented as a part of our history. But did he have to make it so simplistic, so pat? A pole dancer called the Doll with great expectations has a one-night stand with a swarthy man who may or may not be a terrorist and as a result of their tryst she is mercilessly hounded and pilloried by the press. A pole dancer? A dark, handsome lover? An unethical and sensationalised media? Surely Flanagan is kidding if he thinks we haven't moved on from these predictable plots and configurations. It gets worse - there's an adulterous but otherwise incorruptible drug squad detective, a megalomaniacal TV presenter, a Chinese triad big boss, a suspect nightclub owner, even a deluded wheelchair-bound millionaire who collects artefacts from world terrorist hotspots! And they all end up mingling together in one breathy, titillating, and ultimately unbelievable mess.

But even less forgivable is Flanagan's need to flex his God-like muscles, looming over his story with conclusions, judgements, and protestations that may be interesting in a op-ed piece but are tiresome and repetitive and incongruous in a work of fiction. Flanagan even starts and ends the novel with short essays on love, as if we need to have the impossible story located in our own sensibilities if we are to accept the actions of its characters. The novelist intrudes elsewhere also with the frustrating definition of brand names, labels, and corporations used on almost every page. The notion that we are swamped by capitalism, advertising and product placement? Got it Richard! Had it already, didn't need to be reminded of it. And the utter bastardry of the media? Also an admittedly regrettable but cliched complaint about modern society.

So with these familiar three targets - big business, the media, and over-governance - Flanagan assures himself a ready audience, poised to rail at the severe treatment of the Doll, dreading the possibility that they too may fall foul of "them". I agree with this position, but it could have been presented with so much more subtlety, grace and originality. Flanagan is a very good writer, I enjoyed many of his sentences, presented as they are with an old-school instinct for careful construction, but this novel is too conscious, too self-conscious, so easy to read and understand that it almost feels like a "young adult" novel. Perhaps Flanagan's anger at Howard's government and all its correspondent horrors blinded him to the fact that many of his readers didn't need to be convinced of his position, and that others wouldn't be convinced by such an exaggerated storyline.

A great novel about the early years of the twenty-first century in urban Australia needs to be written, and this isn't it.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - This novel could possibly relate to many other conservatively-governed populaces of the world, especially the UK and the US, as it reads like a film script, albeit a Hollywood-funded one.
Australian characters - Yes, the characters are all Australian, but so am I, and I didn't recognise many of them at all. See above.
Australian settings - The novel is set exclusively in Sydney, but a documentary-style, simplistic Sydney peopled only by bums, erotic dancers, cops and robbers. Its recognisably Sydney but even the social criticism of our true Capital is two-dimensional.
Australian voices - The dialogue in this book is just plain bad. The only believable voice is the author's and that's the one we don't want.
Australian focus - As I've said, this is an Australia that needed to be documented but the situations, characters and settings don't ring true. I hope he sells it to Hollywood and they set it in New Jersey or San Francisco or some other flawed seaside metropolis.

Helen Garner/The Feel of Steel

I managed to miss Helen Garner's early fiction so I came to her brilliant non-fiction via Joe Cinque's Consolation stunned by her intelligence, bravery, and unerring sensitivity to the travails of others. These qualities are also evident in The Feel of Steel but even further pronounced is her personal honesty and fearless self-revelation. This might sound self-indulgent, and there are times that the book strays close to wankery, especially when she berates writing and writers with her back-handed compliments that only a professional writer could get away with. But on the whole, it is a moody, thought-provoking writing exercise that is altogether too brief.

The book is also quite sad for a lot of the time. It roughly charts the breakdown and repercussions of Garner's third marriage - even though she is far too original to bore us with details or wailings of "why me?". Although it goes close at times, and the slow but apparent paring away of her former life in Sydney and return to her home in Melbourne is sometimes extremely moving, but never cloying. She manages to retain an admirable joie de vivre most of the time, ruminating on the motivations of birds and describing her feelings more than once as "unbearably thrilling". It's this optimistic spirit that keeps the reader close to her - no turgid descriptions of days lost bitterly crying or shopping here - this is certainly not chick-lit.

The stories, mostly brief, some longer, take as their studies the emerging experiences of an older woman/person coming to terms with inexorable aging. There are lovely observations about grandmother- and mother- and daughterhood, glittering reminiscences, wry acceptances of lessons learned. I enjoyed them all, as far from my experience as they are, and it was only one story that lost me, the last and one of the longest, which documents a session spent with a friend at a bridal salon. I actually feared, as I bogged down in descriptions of fabrics, tantrums and weeping mothers, that maybe I was the bitter one. Perhaps I was not generous enough to allow her just one story with an unforgivingly female focus. Possibly I had Garner wrong all along and this was chick-lit, just really well-written. To explain, the story cycle that touched me the most was the eponymous The Feel of Steel (in three parts) which explains Garner's return to her childhood sport of fencing: an admittedly masculine venture. But on re-reading it, I realised it was in fact the female perspective that I found most scintillating - this is voyeuristic non-fiction at its very best; the feel of steel is palpable.

So I can allow her the one exclusive story. Helen Garner is one of our premier storytellers, and I can't wait to delve into her fiction, old and new. But I will seek out her other non-fiction first, including the controversial The First Stone. She is a renegade, a shit-stirrer, uncompromisingly original and brutally honest. I think she is very brave and very clever, and we are lucky she's all ours.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - Garner is way too worldly to become parochial so she invests universal themes with a local flavour - the ennui of Ausralian suburbs could be any developed country.
Australian characters - You will recognise all of the characters that populate her life, but the most dominating character is Garner herself, constantly straining against the fetters of an orthodox existence.
Australian settings - Apart from an hilarious foray into Southeast Asia, the settings are post-war and modern Melbourne and Sydney.
Australian voices - Yep, she's Australian alright. If only all of us were so eloquent!
Australian focus - Garner sets her sights on many of the facets of Australian life - and is sometimes harsh in her criticisms, but her humour and wonderment win through: she is genuinely fascinated by all of us.

The truth

Just wanted to drop in unannounced on the schedule here to tell a few truths about this blog and my reading so far. I've dropped off a bit and am now blogging about a week after than I've finished each book. Work, home, hobbies, habits...

So I'm still doing the reading and loving all the books so far, just not following strict deadlines, keeping it loose. My main crisis with this has been which book to read next - I have a pile of about 25 here, bought, borrowed, loaned and owned - whether to have an established order, or a top 20 to read by the end of the year. I definitely have some favourites that I'm really looking forward to but it would be laborious to mention and explain them all, maybe I'll just do a plain list. I'm taking it fairly "organically" at the moment, picking up the next one that grabs my attention, or seems to beg to be read next, like the chosen card in a magician's deck.

I do have some hope for a semi-method I have been attempting. So far I've read two fiction, then two non-fiction, now my next fiction - I think this sort of thing will keep me alert. Too much fiction can turn your brain to jelly, and a surfeit of non-fiction? Well, my mind liquifies to a different sort of jelly - more of the consistency of brain matter, or the endless unfolding of synapses tryin g toc onne ct. So, a healthy diet of non-fic leavened with plenty of fic, methinks.

I'm also almost ready to promote this blog to the world, or my little cosmos at least, just a few more books and lots more confidence. Enjoying writing this a lot, so far.

Anna Funder/Stasiland

This book has always caught my eye, not just for its provocative cover, but also for its tough title and promise of an investigation of the Stasi and the plight of Eastern Germany during the Cold War. It doesn't disappoint; Funder writes in a tight, terse style and explores her own darker thoughts as she haunts the featureless buildings and lonely byways of the former GDR, meeting and talking with participants in the 40-odd years of the "republic".

The book is driven by their stories, and linked rather beautifully by the sinews of Funder's tentative friendship with Miriam, who suffered horribly at the hands of the Stasi, the GDR's secret police. The relationship between writer and subjects is actually blurred at times, things are left out, withheld, but this fascinated me and left me wanting more by book's end.

Stasiland would be a wonderful first step in anyone's reading about this period, even those who haven't read a lot of non-fiction. It reminded me of why popular non-fiction matters: it is written to explore and reveal and celebrate nothing less than the whole world!

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - None except the universal "stranger in a strange land".
Australian characters - Anna Funder only discusses her nationality briefly.
Australian settings - Much like the character in Geraldine Brooks (and maybe Brooks herself), there is a strong sense of home.
Australian voices - All other voices are "East" or "West" German.
Australian focus - Try the many other books in this style that are related to Australia.

Alex Miller/Journey to the Stone Country

This book came via my old friend Kate - a passionate supporter of Australian literature as well as holding a doctorate in Aboriginal social history - who recommended it to me almost tearfully, having just read it. And I see now where that feeling was coming from. I have read no better exploration penned by a non-Aboriginal person of the Aboriginal link to land and country. In a story that has no real conflict, few major dramatic episodes, and a climax that plays more like an emerging iceberg, Miller breaks almost all the rules of fiction to create a profound achievement that may be one of the few legitimate candidates for the gong of The Great Australian Novel.

In a very gentle narrative style, full of whimsical descriptions of the land and weather, the story leads you further and further from its beginnings in drizzly suburban Melbourne, where the character Annabelle Beck receives a shock, to the dry and starkly beautiful wilds of central Queensland, the stone country of the title. Miller is careful not to make the transition too severe: trappings of city life are remnant throughout the first half of the book but by the second it is all campfires, lonely country roads, and sleeping rough. In this way it mesmerises the reader, and you are taken on the journey also; away from the familiar and the urbane into a new world that lives alongside the coast-hugging concerns of most of us. There is a love story, where family and even colonial history are melded, sometimes uncomfortably, but where the otherness of both lovers is constant, like in real life. It is in this powerful recreation of "real life" that the book spends most of its time, and hooks the reader so successfully. Slow but unlaboured descriptions of meal preparation and eating, the consideration of the movement of insects, and conversations consisting of murmurs and parts of speech left hanging are so common as to create the main refrain of the book.

But this is belying the greater purpose of the novel: this exploration and explanation of what Australia means to the characters, and, by default, us. From ancient cultural links, through colonisation and the arrogant attempts at settlement by Europeans, to the eclectic mix of both that has resulted in our modern outlook on home and Australianness, Miller succeeds in giving all claims equal gravity, despite their unequal status. These feelings are often in the mouths of characters, but the writing never becomes didactic - like the country it seeks to define, it speaks volumes by simply presenting itself and saying what do you make of this? I was by turns moved, horrified, informed and reminded by the facts of white colonisation of this country, and the climax I spoke of earlier had me gulping with despair.

When you read this, however, and you must read this if you're interested in the country you live in, don't expect a strident good talking-to, Mother Greer-style. You will be entranced by the journey and relate to all the characters, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. It is a love poem to Queensland and to Australia, a sometimes melancholy tribute to what has been, and, in the consummation of the central story, a cry of hope for what could be.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - Doesn't avoid any of the big issues facing us today. Bravely direct.
Australian characters - A small but select group of Australians from all walks of life.
Australian settings - Expect evocative descriptions of the Queensland outback but also beloved big and small towns: Townsville, Mackay, Brisbane, Melbourne.
Australian voices - Perhaps the best literary representation of how Australians actually speak? A treatise on Aboriginal English?
Australian focus - Alex Miller obviously loves his adopted country and you will love it more too.