• About
  • The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard
  • My novel: The Fur

Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth

~ The life of Katharine Susannah Prichard, the art of biography, and other things

Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth

Tag Archives: Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan’s The Children Act: a perfect aeroplane read

22 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Ian McEwan, The Children Act

Children-Act

I no longer call Ian McEwan my second favourite novelist as I did from about 2006 to 2009, not after Solar, not after falling out of love with Saturday. But even if On Chesil Beach is his last masterpiece, I will probably keep reading every novel he publishes. Continue reading →

[Book Review] Ian McEwan’s Solar

07 Wednesday Apr 2010

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Ian McEwan

I wonder if Ian McEwan has done his twelfth novel a disservice by calling it a ‘climate change novel’? It raises the stakes too high, creates the expectation of some startling insight into climate change itself – when it’s unlikely a novel can do such a thing.

I read Solar more as an amusing drama, a better version of his worst novel, Amsterdam. It’s the story of the downfall of Nobel Prize winning scientist, Michael Beard, who has done very little since he won his prize. We get three snapshots of his life in 2000, 2005 and 2009 and it’s McEwan’s skill to capture the passage of years, the shifts in time and world events. Beard is incapable of fidelity and in 2000 his fifth marriage is breaking up. In one of those McEwanian moments, a random and fatal accident suffered by one of Beard’s colleagues gives him a chance at revenge, cover-up and the stealing of valuable scientific secrets, that by the end of the novel he is developing into a lucrative alternative form of solar power.

Michael Beard is an anti-hero who reminds of Rabbit Angstrom, John Updike’s character. John Updike is one of McEwan’s favourite writers, and like Rabbit, Michael can’t control his appetite for food or women or his pettiness. In the vein of the Rabbit books, Beard gives the pulse of the time at spaced intervals; the main difference between them is that Rabbit is a car salesman while Beard is a scientist who was at least once something of a genius.

For me the novel had many moments of McEwan’s strength – startling insight into the moods and thinking of a person. I read the climate change aspect as simply a background for the exploration of an unlikeable but believable and engaging man’s downfall. Yet then on last night’s Bookclub show on ABC, Jennifer Byrne pointed out the obvious reading that I missed. It is a climate change novel because Beard represents us all, too greedy and carnal to prevent the disaster looming over us. Climate change is not just a background; it’s built allegorically into the novel.

A lot of critics have reviewed Solar poorly, but as a McEwan fan, I enjoyed it. 7.5/10.

The reckless pessimism of youth

08 Wednesday Oct 2008

Posted by Nathan Hobby in life, writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan

Two quotes I’ve come across in recent weeks sum up something I’ve been trying to capture about youth in House of Zealots. It’s a particular sense of aliveness I thought all of life would have, but which I now fear dries up. I was writing about something I was experiencing when I started the book in 2002, but now I have to look back and write about it from a distance. Ian McEwan said this in an interview on the Book Show regarding the difference between his early writing and mature writing:

I was young, reckless, I had a kind of reckless pessimism which I think you can afford first of all when you’re young and before you’ve had children. You don’t care what happens to the world, you just want to stir it up. You don’t mind a revolution. I wouldn’t even have minded much a nuclear war. I really wanted things to shake up.

He’s exactly right; it’s how I felt for a time. Anything to make a dent in the world. It’s what Leo in House of Zealots wants to do.

And there’s a slightly different mood, but a related one, that Don DeLillo beautifully describes at the end of Underworld:

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did thing slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.

Nick, the character talking, becomes a middle-class, middle-aged man with sadness in his heart, but none of the anger, the readiness and the danger. In a sense the novel is an archaeological dig, taking us back from his present self to the youth that lay behind, as the chapters go circuitously backward in time. How did the boy who shot a man become a manager of a waste disposal company? How do any of us who once were young become what we are now?

Book review: The Innocent by Ian McEwan

08 Saturday Mar 2008

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review, books

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Ian McEwan

Graham Greene-ish. A 25 year old British man who has lived with his parents up until now is sent to work on a secret tunnel in 1950s Berlin, a joint project between the British and Americans. He falls in love with a divorced German woman who introduces him to sex and love. Their relationship is threatened first when he rapes her (having tasted power and wanting more of it) and again when her ex-husband turns up and he feels pressured to be the strong man he has never been.

The prose only sometimes achieves the clarity and beauty which make McEwan one of my favourite writers. But I see in this novel interesting roots for later themes or scenes – Leonard rehearses a letter in much the way Robbie does in Atonement; the descriptions of Berlin resonate with those in Black Dogs; the couple have not so a disastrous wedding night as in Chesil Beach, but a disastrous engagement night for completely different reasons which still manage to tear the couple apart. Indeed, the ending of the novel is – SPOILER ALERT – quite similar to Chesil Beach.

7/10

Ian McEwan at Adelaide’s Writers Week and questions from the public

06 Thursday Mar 2008

Posted by Nathan Hobby in authors, books

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Ian McEwan

I got there early, but the seats were already filled up and there I was outside the tent in the sun again, and when he came my myopic eyes could only make out a blur. He was a good speaker, but his voice was rougher than I imagined. I thought he’d have the same smoothness as his prose, a sort of aristocratic eloquence, but it wasn’t that kind of voice.

He read from his work in progress, a climate-change novel which sounds brilliant so far, full of those McEwan tics, timeframe and style that I love so much. He covered about five minutes of narrative-time in twenty minutes of reading.

A woman taking an ego trip asked him if it was possible to write happiness, because (she claimed) Saturday was a failure.

‘I did it,’ he replied graciously, ‘and you didn’t like it.’

I disliked a lot of the questions throughout writer’s week. They seemed to be divided between the self-serving, the loony , the wannabe writers looking for The Secret – and, I must admit, the good. ‘Don’t let the public near a microphone. They’ll say all kinds of stuff.’

The woman saying how it was unfashionable to talk about the afterlife. All the boring old men who made speeches. We didn’t come to hear you!

I’m a grumpy old man. I believe in everyone having a voice, but I don’t necessarily like the outcome.

Writers’ Week panel on the Rules and how to break them

06 Thursday Mar 2008

Posted by Nathan Hobby in authors, books

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Ian McEwan, Paul Auster

This panel had Paul Auster, John Kinsella (my PEAC teacher’s cousin!), Margo Lanagan and Matt Rubenstein.

None of the writers particularly liked the question, and it was amusing to see them deconstruct it. Lanagan and Kinsella were both amusingly opinionated. I liked  Kinsella’s rabble-rousing excitability and his earnest ideology – ‘I am a vegan pacifist anarchist’ – but it didn’t go down well with the older book-club set sitting near me.

Auster was brilliant. He said there was only one truly subversive thing – clarity. And I agree with him entirely. I love clarity too, a transparent book where the words aren’t calling attention to themselves but you’ve just found yourself immersed in the narrative world. It’s what’s similar about Auster and my second favourite writer, Ian McEwan.

Auster said at one point ‘I live in such a solitary world. I’m just trying to do my work. I don’t have an awareness of the literary world.’ He talked of his indifference to critics and fame and I thought of his years living ‘hand to mouth’ working on translations and starving. For him, writing is about one person talking to another, two strangers meeting in intimacy. Well, I’m a stranger to him, but he’s not a stranger to me.

Auster’s only rule : ‘swift and lean’. He said profound things on the spur of the moment in answering questions and he was private yet generous. He didn’t want to be there, but he was making the most of it and delighting me.

Atonement: the film compared to the book

27 Thursday Dec 2007

Posted by Nathan Hobby in film review

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Atonement, Ian McEwan

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.

9/10

Book review : Atonement by Ian McEwan

21 Friday Dec 2007

Posted by Nathan Hobby in authors, book review

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Atonement, Ian McEwan

Spoiler alert 

Atonement manages to work as both a compelling narrative with popular appeal – the sort of novel you can recommend to people who don’t read literary fiction – and as an extended exploration of life and the nature of writing itself.

Compelling narrative 

The compelling narrative comes from a strong plot and masterful control of detail. It is a love story, but a love story told mainly from the perspective of the person who has come between the lovers.

McEwan gives us two very attractive characters in Robbie and Cecilia – both young, intelligent and vibrant people. We want them to love each other, we want them to be happy.

Yet Briony is likeable in her own way too. A precocious and brilliant child who is on an awkward cusp of maturity and immaturity. Her desire to make life more dramatic, to make it black and white, good and evil leads her to decide that the rapist she saw running away from Lola must be Robbie.

Reading it the second time and knowing what was to come, I was tensely aware of all the small details that were piling up, sending events down the path that would lead to Robbie going to jail for the rape and being separated from Cecilia.  What would have happened if he hadn’t added the impulsive postscript about his sexual desire for Cecilia? Or even if he’d sent the right note, the corrected one? Would he still have ended up in that passionate tryst in the library which Briony interrupts?

What if Briony hadn’t read the note? Would she still have thought Robbie a sexual maniac?

What if the twins hadn’t run away and everyone gone to search for them? Would there have been no opportunity for Paul Marshall to rape Lola?

There are what-ifs in any narrative, but McEwan handles them so well, piling them precisely and expertly.

In part two as Robbie trudges through France trying to get home to Cecilia, the narrative drive is simple and strong: his survival, which would have been suspenseful in any case, is made even more so by the knowledge that Cecilia is waiting for him and their love has been so cruelly interrupted by years in jail.

In part three, we follow Briony as she works in the wartime hospital, ‘atoning’ for her crime by forsaking her dreams and trying to help others. The narrative drive comes from the fact that just like her, we don’t know what’s going on, whether Robbie made it, until, at the end of the section and the end of the novel as she wrote it, she visits Cecilia and Robbie is there with her.

An exploration of life and writing 

Everything shifts with the revelation in the epilogue ‘London, 1999’ that the preceding novel has been written by Briony Tallis, and that in ‘real life’, Cecilia and Robbie both died in the war. It breaks my heart. I’ve gone soft; I would rather things ended where they did and I didn’t have to think of the happy ending as a fiction within the fiction.

But it’s a profound epilogue. Full of wisdom about the experience of being old and looking back on life. And full of insight into writing itself.

Briony writes in first person, asking herself whether writing can be atonement, whether by creating happiness for Robbie and Cecilia she has atoned for her crime. The answer is ambiguous. The problem is that the writer is the god of her novel, and so there’s no-one higher to appeal to, no-one to forgive her for what she’s done.

Thus the final scene as the dying Briony witnesses the play that was never staged with all her family around her has a special poignance. It’s realistic about the consolations that are available in life.  Even if there’s no undoing what’s done, there’s still moments like these of joy and love. Not a happy ending, but a happy scene at the end of a profound life.

Atonement part two – a reading report

17 Monday Dec 2007

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Atonement, Ian McEwan, reading report

I’ve just finished re-reading part two of Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Having got of prison early in exchange for enlisting, Robbie’s in the midst of wartorn France, with death and atrocities all around him. He’s retreating to the coast and trying to focus on Cecilia waiting for him across the channel.

It’s a strange juxtaposition after the single atrocity in the midst of the civilisation of the manor in the first section; McEwan never takes us quite where we expect.  

Towards the end of the section is the key to the connection:

But what was guilt these days? It was cheap. Everyone was guilty, and no-one was. No one would be redeemed by a change of evidence, for there wasn’t enough people, enough paper and pens, enough patience and peace, to take down the statements of all the witnesses and gather in the facts… You killed no-one today? But how many did you leave to die?(261)

The tide of blood in war, the constant atrocities, drown out that one atrocity, that one event that changed everyone’s lives back at the manor. When we learn, later on, that it’s Briony writing this, the juxtaposition of her crime and the war might make us think her innocent by comparison. Or at least dilute the magnitude of what she did. (Of course, she can’t forgive herself that easily but she’d like to.) 

I found this part less compelling, less insightful than the first part, but then the first part is one of my favourite pieces of writing ever.

Atonement part one – a reading report

15 Saturday Dec 2007

Posted by Nathan Hobby in book review

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ian McEwan, reading report

Spoiler alert

Few books make me feel so deeply as Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I’ve just finished re-reading the first part, and I’m devastated again.

As the party waits for Robbie to return and be arrested, we watch it through Briony’s eyes and it’s so very frustrating because I long to know about Cecilia’s rage at her note being shown around to everyone and her passion for Robbie. I long to know what Robbie is thinking. Such a heartbreaking scene: him coming out of the mist at dawn having found the lost boys, expecting a hero’s welcome, and instead this stony faced line of people waiting with angry hatred for him.

And in feeling so angry at Briony, we forget the worst sin committed here: Paul Marshall’s rape of Lola and then the cowardly warmongering snob’s silence as an innocent man is arrested for the crime. What an evil human being! This novel affects me so much that I hate him as I read, I hate the way he’s got between Cecilia and Robbie, the way he’s destroyed Robbie and Lola’s lives.

McEwan casts this villian so well by giving Marshall plausible pomposity and this delicious detail of him being the gleeful inventor of that disgusting counterfeit – compound chocolate – and his desire for war so that the demand for his chocolate increases.

McEwan is a writer who has such superb control and pacing. He knows how to create narrative hunger in the reader, and yet once he’s done this, he also knows the precise speed at which to release details to us to keep us enthralled and desperate for more.

Some people I respect a lot find the first part slow and boring. I wonder if this is because their experience of the world is too different to McEwan’s. For me, McEwan so precisely gets to the experience of being alive when he talks of his characters’ motivations and thoughts that I don’t mind if a perfectly ordinary day occurs. However, I also am always aware that some menacing event that’s about to change everyone’s lives is hanging in the air.

← Older posts

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 269 other subscribers

Nathan on Twitter

My Tweets

Categories

  • academic (9)
  • archives and sources (8)
  • autobiographical (58)
  • biographers (10)
  • biographical method (24)
  • biographical quests (16)
  • biographies (16)
    • political biography (1)
  • biographies of living subjects (2)
  • biographies of writers, artists & musicians (11)
  • biographies of writers, artists and musicians (20)
  • biography as a literary form (8)
  • biography in fiction (2)
  • biography in the news (2)
  • books (229)
    • authors (19)
    • book review (167)
    • reading (23)
  • creative nonfiction (9)
  • daily life (2)
  • Daily Prompt (2)
  • death (21)
  • digital humanities (3)
  • fiction (6)
  • film and television biographies (5)
  • film review (48)
  • found objects (3)
  • historical biographies (1)
  • history (20)
  • In the steps of KSP (4)
  • Katharine Susannah Prichard (97)
    • My KSP biography (23)
  • Katharine Susannah Prichard's associates and connections (14)
  • Katharine Susannah Prichard's writings (33)
  • libraries (4)
  • life (20)
  • link (22)
  • links (39)
  • lists (28)
  • local history and heritage (1)
  • media (4)
  • memes and urban myths (1)
  • memoirs (9)
  • meta (2)
  • music (18)
  • news (9)
  • news and events (27)
  • obituary (1)
  • Old writing found on a floppy disk (1)
  • poetry (5)
  • politics and current affairs (24)
    • climate change (1)
  • prologues and introductions (2)
  • psychological aspects of biography (3)
  • quotes (22)
  • R.I.P. (9)
  • reading report (3)
  • religion (1)
  • religious biography (1)
  • research (5)
  • role of the biographer within the biography (2)
  • Series: A-Z of Katharine Susannah Prichard (26)
  • Series: Corona Diary (1)
  • Series: Saturday 10am (14)
  • Series: Short Stories (2016) (6)
  • Series: The Tourist (2013) (6)
  • Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009) (35)
  • structure of biographies (3)
  • technology and the digital world (2)
  • television (3)
  • the nature of biography (4)
  • this blog (10)
  • Uncategorized (31)
  • Western Australia (26)
  • writing (41)

Archives

Recent Comments

Harold Coppock on Wandu, the lost manor in …
Faith Peters on Used tea bags for missionaries…
The Red Witch: A Bio… on Signed copies of The Red Witch…
Seasons Greetings, 2… on An A to Z of Katharine Susanna…

Bookmarks

  • Adventures in Biography
  • ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
  • Bernice Barry
  • It only goes up to your knees
  • Jane Bryony Rawson
  • Jenn Plays Recorder
  • Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre
  • Laura Sewell Matter: Essayist and Biographer
  • Mutually said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist
  • Resident Judge
  • Speaking Thylacine
  • The Australian Legend
  • Timothy Parkin Poetry
  • Treefall Writing – Melinda Tognini
  • Whispering Gums
  • Wrapped up in books: the home of Guy Salvidge

Top Posts

  • Paul Auster's Moon Palace : an overview
  • [Thursday 3pm #21] Belle Costa Da Greene : 'Girl Librarian'
  • The Joy of Knowledge Encyclopedia
  • Reader's Digest Condensed Books: 'as difficult to dispose of as bins of radioactive waste'
  • The Cruelty of the Game: David Ireland, 'The Great Unknown'

Blog Stats

  • 161,143 hits

Tag Cloud

9/11 19th century 33 1920s 1921 1930s 1950s 1970s 1971 1981 2000s 2004 2011 2015 2017 20000 Days on Earth A.S. Byatt Aboriginals activism Adam Begley Adrian Mole adultery afterlife Agatha Christie Alan Hollinghurst Alberto Manguel Alfred Deakin Amazing Grace Americana Amy Grant An American Romance Andre Tchaikowsky Andrew McGahan angela myers anne fadiman Anne Rice Arabian Nights archives art arts funding A Serious Man Ash Wednesday ASIO atheism Atonement Australia Australian film Australian literature Australian Short Story Festival autism autobiography autodidact Barbara Vine beach Belle Costa da Greene Bell Jar best best-of Bible Big Issue Bill Callahan biographical ethics biographical quest genre biographies birthday birthdays Black Opal Bleak House Blinky Bill blogging blogs Blue Blades Bodega's Bunch bog Booker book launch booksale Borges Brenda Niall Brian Matthews Brian McLaren Britney Spears Burial Rites Burke and Wills buskers C.S. Lewis C.S. Lewis canon capitalism Carol Shields Carson McCullers Catcher in the Rye Catholicism celebrities Charles Dickens Charlie Kaufman childhood Child of the Hurricane children's books Choir of Gravediggers Christianity Christian writing Christina Stead Christmas Christopher Beha Cinque Terra Claire Tomalin classics cliches climate change Coen brothers coincidence Collie Collyer coming of age Communism concert Condensed Books consumerism Coonardoo Cormac McCarthy Corrections cosy fiction Dara Horn David Copperfield David Ireland David Marr David Suchet death Death of a president definition demolition Dennis LeHane dentist diaries divorce doctorow Doctor Who documentaries donald shriver Don DeLillo Don DeLillo Donna Mazza Donna Tartt Don Watson Dostovesky doubt drama dreams of revolution Drusilla Modjeska E.M. Forster ebooks editing Eichmann Eisenstein Elizabeth Kostova email empathy ensmallification existentialism faith Falling Man fame families fantasy fiction film and television folk football Frank Barscombe Fremantle Press G.K. Chesterton Gabrielle Carey Gallipoli genealogical fiction Genesis Geoff Nicholson George W. Bush Gerald Glaskin Gilead Golden Miles Goldfields Trilogy Graham Greene grandad great novels Greenmount Guinness World Records Guy Salvidge Hannah Arendt Hannah Kent Hans Koning Hans Koningsberger Harper Lee Haxby's Circus Hazel Rowley He-Man headers heaven Heidegger hell Henrietta Lacks Henry Morton Stanley Herman Hesse heroes Hey Dad! historical fiction history Holden Caulfield holidays Homer & Langley Home Song Stories House of Cards house of zealots House of Zealots Hugo Throssell humour Ian McEwan In between the sheets Indonesia Infamous Inside Llewyn Davis interstellar interview Intimate Strangers Invisible Ireland ISBNs Ishiguro itunes J.D. Salinger J.M. Coetzee J.S. Battye Janet Malcolm Jennifer Egan JFK JFK assassination Joanna Rakoff Joel Schumacher John Burbidge John Fowles John Howard John Kinsella John Updike John Updike Jonathan Franzen journal writing JSB Judgment Day Julia Baird Julian Barnes Kafka Kalgoorlie Kate Grenville Katherine Mansfield Kevin Brockmeier King's Park KSP Writers' Centre language last ride Laurie Steed Left Behind Leonard Cohen Leo Tolstoy Libra Library of Babel Library of Babel Lila Lily and Madeleine links lionel shriver Lionel Shriver lists literary fiction literature Lleyton Hewitt lost book Louisa Louisa Lawson Louis Esson louis nowra love letter Lubbock Lytton Strachey Madelaine Dickie Man Booker man in the dark Margaret Atwood Margaret River Press Marilynne Robinson mark sandman meaning of life Melbourne Mel Hall meme memorialisation memory MH17 Michael Faber Mike Riddell Miles Franklin mining boom missionaries moleskine Moon Palace morphine Mother Teresa movies Music of Chance My Brilliant Career names Napoleon Narnia narrative Narrow Road to the Deep North Narziss and Goldmund Natalie Portman Nathaniel Hobbie national anthem Nick Cave Nina Bawden non-fiction nonfiction noughties novelists novels obituaries obscurity On Chesil Beach Parade's End Paris Hilton Passion of the Christ past patriotism Paul Auster Paul de Man Perth Perth Writers Festival Peter Ackroyd Peter Cowan Writers Centre phd Philip K. Dick Philip Seymour Hoffman pierpontmorgan poetry slam politics popular fiction popular science Possession postapocalyptic postmodernism Pride prophetic imagination publications Pulp Purity Queen Victoria Rabbit Angstrom radio Radio National Randolph Stow rating: 5/10 rating: 6/10 rating: 7/10 rating: 8/10 rating: 9/10 rating: 10/10 ratings reading fiction autobiographically reading report Rebecca Skloot recap red wine reincarnation juvenile fiction rejection review - music reviewing rewriting Richard Flanagan Richard Ford Rick Moody Roaring Nineties Robert Banks Robert Hughes Robert Silverberg Robert Wadlow Robinson Crusoe Rolf Harris romance Rome ruins Russell Crowe Ruth Rendell Sarah Murgatroyd scalpers science fiction Science of Sleep secondhand books Secret River sermon illustration sex short stories Silent Woman Simone Lazaroo Simpsons Siri Hustvedt slavery Smashing Pumpkins social interactions social justice some people i hate sources South Australia souvenirs speculation speech speeches sport status anxiety Stephen Lawhead Stranger's Child subtitles Subtle Flame Sue Townsend suicide Surprised By Hope Suzanne Falkiner Sylvia Plath Synecdoche TAG Hungerford Award tapes teabags Ted Hughes The Children Act The Cure The Fur The Imitation Game theology The Pioneers The Revolutionary Thomas Disch Thomas Hardy Thomas Henry Prichard Thomas Mann thriller time Tim La Haye Tim Winton Tolstoy Tom Wright top 10 Towering Inferno Tracy Ryan Trove Truman Capote tshirts TS Spivet Twelve Years a Slave underrated writers Underworld unwritten biographies urban myth USA vampires Venice Victoria Cross Victoriana Victorian era Victorianism Victoria Park video Voltron w Wake in Fright Walkabout Walter M. Miller war War and Peace war on terror Water Diviner Wellington St Bus Station Westerly Western Australia West Wing What Happened to Sophie Wilder? Whitlams wikipedia Wild Oats of Hans William Wilberforce Winston Churchill Witches of Eastwick Working Bullocks workshop World War One writers writing Writing NSW youth Zadie Smith Zeitgeist Zelig

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 269 other subscribers

Pages

  • About
  • My novel: The Fur
  • The Red Witch: A Biography of Katharine Susannah Prichard

Categories

  • academic (9)
  • archives and sources (8)
  • autobiographical (58)
  • biographers (10)
  • biographical method (24)
  • biographical quests (16)
  • biographies (16)
    • political biography (1)
  • biographies of living subjects (2)
  • biographies of writers, artists & musicians (11)
  • biographies of writers, artists and musicians (20)
  • biography as a literary form (8)
  • biography in fiction (2)
  • biography in the news (2)
  • books (229)
    • authors (19)
    • book review (167)
    • reading (23)
  • creative nonfiction (9)
  • daily life (2)
  • Daily Prompt (2)
  • death (21)
  • digital humanities (3)
  • fiction (6)
  • film and television biographies (5)
  • film review (48)
  • found objects (3)
  • historical biographies (1)
  • history (20)
  • In the steps of KSP (4)
  • Katharine Susannah Prichard (97)
    • My KSP biography (23)
  • Katharine Susannah Prichard's associates and connections (14)
  • Katharine Susannah Prichard's writings (33)
  • libraries (4)
  • life (20)
  • link (22)
  • links (39)
  • lists (28)
  • local history and heritage (1)
  • media (4)
  • memes and urban myths (1)
  • memoirs (9)
  • meta (2)
  • music (18)
  • news (9)
  • news and events (27)
  • obituary (1)
  • Old writing found on a floppy disk (1)
  • poetry (5)
  • politics and current affairs (24)
    • climate change (1)
  • prologues and introductions (2)
  • psychological aspects of biography (3)
  • quotes (22)
  • R.I.P. (9)
  • reading report (3)
  • religion (1)
  • religious biography (1)
  • research (5)
  • role of the biographer within the biography (2)
  • Series: A-Z of Katharine Susannah Prichard (26)
  • Series: Corona Diary (1)
  • Series: Saturday 10am (14)
  • Series: Short Stories (2016) (6)
  • Series: The Tourist (2013) (6)
  • Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009) (35)
  • structure of biographies (3)
  • technology and the digital world (2)
  • television (3)
  • the nature of biography (4)
  • this blog (10)
  • Uncategorized (31)
  • Western Australia (26)
  • writing (41)

Archives

Recent Comments

Harold Coppock on Wandu, the lost manor in …
Faith Peters on Used tea bags for missionaries…
The Red Witch: A Bio… on Signed copies of The Red Witch…
Seasons Greetings, 2… on An A to Z of Katharine Susanna…

Bookmarks

  • Adventures in Biography
  • ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
  • Bernice Barry
  • It only goes up to your knees
  • Jane Bryony Rawson
  • Jenn Plays Recorder
  • Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers' Centre
  • Laura Sewell Matter: Essayist and Biographer
  • Mutually said: Poets Vegan Anarchist Pacifist
  • Resident Judge
  • Speaking Thylacine
  • The Australian Legend
  • Timothy Parkin Poetry
  • Treefall Writing – Melinda Tognini
  • Whispering Gums
  • Wrapped up in books: the home of Guy Salvidge

Top Posts

  • Paul Auster's Moon Palace : an overview
  • [Thursday 3pm #21] Belle Costa Da Greene : 'Girl Librarian'
  • The Joy of Knowledge Encyclopedia
  • Reader's Digest Condensed Books: 'as difficult to dispose of as bins of radioactive waste'
  • The Cruelty of the Game: David Ireland, 'The Great Unknown'

Blog Stats

  • 161,143 hits

Tag Cloud

9/11 19th century 33 1920s 1921 1930s 1950s 1970s 1971 1981 2000s 2004 2011 2015 2017 20000 Days on Earth A.S. Byatt Aboriginals activism Adam Begley Adrian Mole adultery afterlife Agatha Christie Alan Hollinghurst Alberto Manguel Alfred Deakin Amazing Grace Americana Amy Grant An American Romance Andre Tchaikowsky Andrew McGahan angela myers anne fadiman Anne Rice Arabian Nights archives art arts funding A Serious Man Ash Wednesday ASIO atheism Atonement Australia Australian film Australian literature Australian Short Story Festival autism autobiography autodidact Barbara Vine beach Belle Costa da Greene Bell Jar best best-of Bible Big Issue Bill Callahan biographical ethics biographical quest genre biographies birthday birthdays Black Opal Bleak House Blinky Bill blogging blogs Blue Blades Bodega's Bunch bog Booker book launch booksale Borges Brenda Niall Brian Matthews Brian McLaren Britney Spears Burial Rites Burke and Wills buskers C.S. Lewis C.S. Lewis canon capitalism Carol Shields Carson McCullers Catcher in the Rye Catholicism celebrities Charles Dickens Charlie Kaufman childhood Child of the Hurricane children's books Choir of Gravediggers Christianity Christian writing Christina Stead Christmas Christopher Beha Cinque Terra Claire Tomalin classics cliches climate change Coen brothers coincidence Collie Collyer coming of age Communism concert Condensed Books consumerism Coonardoo Cormac McCarthy Corrections cosy fiction Dara Horn David Copperfield David Ireland David Marr David Suchet death Death of a president definition demolition Dennis LeHane dentist diaries divorce doctorow Doctor Who documentaries donald shriver Don DeLillo Don DeLillo Donna Mazza Donna Tartt Don Watson Dostovesky doubt drama dreams of revolution Drusilla Modjeska E.M. Forster ebooks editing Eichmann Eisenstein Elizabeth Kostova email empathy ensmallification existentialism faith Falling Man fame families fantasy fiction film and television folk football Frank Barscombe Fremantle Press G.K. Chesterton Gabrielle Carey Gallipoli genealogical fiction Genesis Geoff Nicholson George W. Bush Gerald Glaskin Gilead Golden Miles Goldfields Trilogy Graham Greene grandad great novels Greenmount Guinness World Records Guy Salvidge Hannah Arendt Hannah Kent Hans Koning Hans Koningsberger Harper Lee Haxby's Circus Hazel Rowley He-Man headers heaven Heidegger hell Henrietta Lacks Henry Morton Stanley Herman Hesse heroes Hey Dad! historical fiction history Holden Caulfield holidays Homer & Langley Home Song Stories House of Cards house of zealots House of Zealots Hugo Throssell humour Ian McEwan In between the sheets Indonesia Infamous Inside Llewyn Davis interstellar interview Intimate Strangers Invisible Ireland ISBNs Ishiguro itunes J.D. Salinger J.M. Coetzee J.S. Battye Janet Malcolm Jennifer Egan JFK JFK assassination Joanna Rakoff Joel Schumacher John Burbidge John Fowles John Howard John Kinsella John Updike John Updike Jonathan Franzen journal writing JSB Judgment Day Julia Baird Julian Barnes Kafka Kalgoorlie Kate Grenville Katherine Mansfield Kevin Brockmeier King's Park KSP Writers' Centre language last ride Laurie Steed Left Behind Leonard Cohen Leo Tolstoy Libra Library of Babel Library of Babel Lila Lily and Madeleine links lionel shriver Lionel Shriver lists literary fiction literature Lleyton Hewitt lost book Louisa Louisa Lawson Louis Esson louis nowra love letter Lubbock Lytton Strachey Madelaine Dickie Man Booker man in the dark Margaret Atwood Margaret River Press Marilynne Robinson mark sandman meaning of life Melbourne Mel Hall meme memorialisation memory MH17 Michael Faber Mike Riddell Miles Franklin mining boom missionaries moleskine Moon Palace morphine Mother Teresa movies Music of Chance My Brilliant Career names Napoleon Narnia narrative Narrow Road to the Deep North Narziss and Goldmund Natalie Portman Nathaniel Hobbie national anthem Nick Cave Nina Bawden non-fiction nonfiction noughties novelists novels obituaries obscurity On Chesil Beach Parade's End Paris Hilton Passion of the Christ past patriotism Paul Auster Paul de Man Perth Perth Writers Festival Peter Ackroyd Peter Cowan Writers Centre phd Philip K. Dick Philip Seymour Hoffman pierpontmorgan poetry slam politics popular fiction popular science Possession postapocalyptic postmodernism Pride prophetic imagination publications Pulp Purity Queen Victoria Rabbit Angstrom radio Radio National Randolph Stow rating: 5/10 rating: 6/10 rating: 7/10 rating: 8/10 rating: 9/10 rating: 10/10 ratings reading fiction autobiographically reading report Rebecca Skloot recap red wine reincarnation juvenile fiction rejection review - music reviewing rewriting Richard Flanagan Richard Ford Rick Moody Roaring Nineties Robert Banks Robert Hughes Robert Silverberg Robert Wadlow Robinson Crusoe Rolf Harris romance Rome ruins Russell Crowe Ruth Rendell Sarah Murgatroyd scalpers science fiction Science of Sleep secondhand books Secret River sermon illustration sex short stories Silent Woman Simone Lazaroo Simpsons Siri Hustvedt slavery Smashing Pumpkins social interactions social justice some people i hate sources South Australia souvenirs speculation speech speeches sport status anxiety Stephen Lawhead Stranger's Child subtitles Subtle Flame Sue Townsend suicide Surprised By Hope Suzanne Falkiner Sylvia Plath Synecdoche TAG Hungerford Award tapes teabags Ted Hughes The Children Act The Cure The Fur The Imitation Game theology The Pioneers The Revolutionary Thomas Disch Thomas Hardy Thomas Henry Prichard Thomas Mann thriller time Tim La Haye Tim Winton Tolstoy Tom Wright top 10 Towering Inferno Tracy Ryan Trove Truman Capote tshirts TS Spivet Twelve Years a Slave underrated writers Underworld unwritten biographies urban myth USA vampires Venice Victoria Cross Victoriana Victorian era Victorianism Victoria Park video Voltron w Wake in Fright Walkabout Walter M. Miller war War and Peace war on terror Water Diviner Wellington St Bus Station Westerly Western Australia West Wing What Happened to Sophie Wilder? Whitlams wikipedia Wild Oats of Hans William Wilberforce Winston Churchill Witches of Eastwick Working Bullocks workshop World War One writers writing Writing NSW youth Zadie Smith Zeitgeist Zelig

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth
    • Join 269 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...