I noticed Melbourne University Press have a very cool tagline: ‘Books with spine’.
Cool tagline
06 Thursday Mar 2008
Posted in books
Book review: The merry-go-round in the sea by Randolph Stow
24 Sunday Feb 2008
Posted in book review, Western Australia
Published in 1965, The merry-go-round in the sea is a superb novel. It manages to be both simple and complicated in its themes and prose.
Rob Coram is six at the beginning of World War Two when his favourite cousin, Rick, goes off to war. The novel follows them both over the next eight years, as Rob grows in his awareness of the world and Rick comes home depressed and restless.
I’ve read few novels which have evoked the landscape so well as this one. Stow manages to describe all the smells and sounds and sights and perceptions of the Geraldton town and countryside, and reproduce them as a precocious child would sense them. His prose is both precise and poetic.
As a coming of age novel, it works well too. Stow shows how the passage of time alters Rob’s perception of the world, captured well in the title. Rob thinks that the mast of a wrecked ship out at sea is a merry-go-round and he’d like to one day swim out to and play in it. He clings onto the belief even when his mother tells him it is not so. A few years later he manages to swim there with his friend and can look back with a bittersweetness at his old innocence.
But it’s also about Rick growing up, or refusing to grow up; coming home from the war and realising that he can’t settle down into what he sees as the suffocation of the suburbs.
As well as this, it’s a novel about family, a large and extended family which has stayed close and has its own web of folklore and custom.
One thing it’s not is a page turner. The prose is so pristine and the scenes so self-contained that it didn’t have a strong narrative drive for me.
Film review: There will be blood
15 Friday Feb 2008
Posted in film review
Don’t be misled by the title. There’s a lot more oil than blood. An oil driller, Daniel, ruthlessly makes a fortune in the early years of the twentieth century in southern USA, while locking heads with an ambitious young preacher.
I understand the great reviews this film’s getting. It’s excellently made: such beautiful scenes and accomplished film-making. It has the confidence and feel of a truly great epic.
Yet it didn’t connect with me. I didn’t feel much for the characters, except perhaps the preacher, who I wanted to be good. I wanted him to show there’s hope and goodness in the world, but there isn’t in the world of this film. Or maybe a bit, in the form of Daniel’s adopted son and Mary, the girl who befriends him.
7/10
Status Anxiety
15 Friday Feb 2008
Posted in life
I watched the documentary of the book with Alain De Botton this week and it’s ironic to be blogging about it, because blogging is probably very tied to the status anxiety he talks about. We want success; we want people to think we’re good (or witty or insightful or intelligent or brilliant); we want to be noticed; we want to be remembered; we want attention.
So some of us keep blogs.
If I get over status anxiety it will probably mean not ever, ever, checking my blog stats. And that’s just for a start.
I’m going to read the book, because I’m really impressed. He gets to the malaise of society and of me with insightful and clear analysis, while also being interesting.
House of Zealots
07 Thursday Feb 2008
Posted in writing
The PDF file of the first five chapters of my new novel wasn’t working. I think I’ve fixed it, so if you have been trying and you’ve had no luck, please try again. Or wait around to 2011 or so and it might be published.
I’m not there
04 Monday Feb 2008
Posted in film review
Bob Dylan has been so many personas, so many people, that Todd Haynes’ film uses different actors playing different characters to represent him – the black kid who calls himself Woody Guthrie after the musician, Arthur Rimbaud the precocious teen poet, a movie star who’s lost his way, a folk singer who’s sold out (or not), the born again Christian (briefly) and Billy the Kid.
It is a beautiful film, made with such skill. I was mesmerised by the torrent of images, the unexpected twists, the variety of genres employed. It is a film for film-lovers.
It made me wonder what it takes to be as famous, enduring and influential as Bob Dylan. It made me feel so inadequate in how I’ve lived my own life. I don’t want to be him or even like him, but I would like to have his energy and capacity for adventure.
The part I liked best was the single scene representing Dylan’s born-again phase. He gives an impromptu, incoherent talk to the congregation about Jerusalem and faith and God and then sings this wonderful song from an album I don’t have. It looks just like a church in the 80s, and the idea of the legendary singer playing out his days in a small church is fascinating.
The film doesn’t resolve, though. There’s no climax, and I think there should be. The way Magnolia brings its strands together – just slightly – into a glorious chorus and a plague of frogs. Haynes needed something like that to lift this film from being interesting and inspiring to brilliant.
8.5/10
Randolph Stow
02 Saturday Feb 2008
Posted in authors, book review, reading
I’ve stared reading Randolph Stow’s The Merry Go Round in the Sea. I can’t remember why I stopped reading it four years ago. I knew then that it was brilliant, but for some reason I didn’t have the energy.
His prose is exquisite; it’s amazing that such a brilliant writer has written about Western Australia, has walked these same streets as me. He evokes childhood with this preciseness of sensation and experience.
I feel sad thinking about Stow. He wrote four or five brilliant novels before he was thirty and then only a handful since. I wonder what happened. Why did he stop? Did he discover there were more important things to do? Or did his muse flee him?
A family legend has it that his grandmother boarded with my great-grandmother for a time. I must find out precise details from my Granny. I feel honoured to have a connection to him.
Book Review: Kingdoms of the Wall by Robert Silverberg
09 Wednesday Jan 2008
Posted in book review, books
I remember Silverberg fondly from the days in my teens when I lived SF. He had ideas as good as Asimov but heaps more style and strong characters. I went back to him because it was late at night, I’d been reading a lot of theology and one of his books was sitting unread on my shelf.
In short
Kingdoms of the Wall is a competent SF novel that kept me reading but didn’t astound.
The Plot
Kingdoms of the Wall has an excellent setup: a massive mountain dominates the people who live at its bottom. Each year, the village sends up forty pilgrims to attempt to reach the summit and meet with the gods they believe live there. But only a couple ever return and these are either mad or silent. Yet still four thousand people compete each year for the privilege of being one of the pilgrims. The narrator, Poilar, is courageous and ambitious but not particularly intelligent. He wants to get to the summit and achieve glory without really knowing why. His best friend wants to discover the meaning of it all.The climb toward the summit is a perfect narrative device. Reading a narrative can be so easily construed as climbing toward a summit. I expected, like the inhabitants of the village that there might be something special at the top…
Spoiler Alert
…Alas the summit was disappointing. It’s exactly as you thought it might be : the gods are humans who landed here long ago.
Silverberg is such an accomplished SF writer and I could feel him writing this in automatic, at least with the end.
I’m not disappointed I read it; Silverberg took me on an enchanting journey through strange lands where pilgrims have left their quest for the summit and made their new homes.
6/10
My ten favourite films of 2007
02 Wednesday Jan 2008
Posted in film review, lists
I feel so lucky to have seen so many good films in 2007. I loved living close to a good cinema for the first time in my life. And I am more convinced than ever that cinemas are the place to watch film. There’s something so asocial and boring about a city of people sitting in their own air-conditioned castles watching DVDs on home cinema systems. Give me the ruined grandeur of an old cinema any day.
1. The Science of Sleep
A true translation of the magic of dreams and a sweet but smart romance.
2. Atonement
A moving and beautiful drama about love, fiction and redemption.
3. Death At A Funeral
The funniest film I’ve seen in years.
4. Pan’s Labyrinth
A dark and violent parable.
5. Amazing Grace
I was inspired.
6. Noise
Engaging Australian police drama.
7. The Prestige
Elaborate and surprising steampunk thriller.
8. 28 Weeks Later
Scary thriller authentically post-apocalypse.
9. The Lives of Others
It’s rare for a film this long to hold my attention so utterly.
10. Across the Universe
An enchanting vision of a mystical sixties.
Atonement: the film compared to the book
27 Thursday Dec 2007
Posted in film review
Tags
The rest of the world got to see Atonement months ago, but its official release in Australia was yesterday, Boxing Day. The Windsor Cinema – just metres from my house – had sneak previews last weekend, and so I got to see it a few days before most of Australia.
Of course, the film didn’t live up to my experience of the novel – but I was still impressed. (There was no chance of it being an equivalent experience, because for me the strength of Ian McEwan’s writing is his description of thought processes and emotions – something that can only be represented externally in a film.)
- The film has the novel’s elegance and intelligence.
- The actor playing the young Briony is perfect. She has a slightly haughty face, yet still likeable; she does precociousness so well.
- Keira Knightley was good as Cecilia but not brilliant. She didn’t have the subtlety I was expecting, the depth behind her words. I often felt like she was talking too quickly. But this might be the effect of the book moving so slowly, giving us each character’s thoughts around each line they deliver.
- The scenes were often excellent, especially the tired troops on the dirty beach at Dunkirk in the midst of the shambolic retreat. The ruined holiday town was perfectly evoked.
- Leon, Cee’s brother, wasn’t good natured enough. The novel’s so clear on his jollyness and generosity.
- I was worried that the war scenes would be extended and become the focus (when they were my least favourite part of the book) – but they weren’t; they were actually shortened.
The ending
The most significant change was the ending, but I thought it was a good change. Briony actually publishes her version of Atonement, the one with the happy ending, whereas in McEwan’s novel she can’t publish while the Marshalls live for fear of litigation.
Briony’s appearence as an aged woman on the talkshow manages to encapsulate so much sadness, time and wisdom. It’s a compressed version of the epilogue that is nearly as profound as the original. I thought Vanessa Redgrave’s performance as the old Briony was brilliant.
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth 