By Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Parade
Rachel Cusk, Faber & Faber, $32.99
Rachel Cusk is one of the smartest and most original writers alive. Her trilogy of autobiographical novels beginning with Outline (2014) experimented with dismantling the mechanics of novel writing, and few authors are more daring and perceptive in writing about the intricacies of gendered experience.
Parade entwines loosely interconnected narratives and features artists known only as “G”, male and female. The first part is narrated by the model and wife of a painter who, suffering some Dante-like spiritual crisis, begins to paint upside-down. In this inversion, she sees “the spectacle of her own unrealised life” yet refuses to give voice to her thoughts.
But Cusk is a writer who can shift rapidly from addressing the self-abnegation of women to their capacity for violence. When one woman physically attacks another on a Paris street, the assailant’s gender influences how the assault is interpreted and understood.
Parade is, among other things, a fascinating literary exploration of gender as performance, bristling with counterintuitive truths occluded by received ideas.
Choice
Neel Mukherjee, Atlantic, $32.99
Metafiction is one of Neel Mukherjee’s fortes – his debut, A Life Apart, sported a novel within a novel – and in Choice he spirals into the mode through a distinctly un-postmodern frame.
Like some medieval altarpiece, the book is conceived as a moral triptych. The first section contrasts the values and behaviour of editor Ayush and his economist husband Luke, living in London with their children. Luke is a relaxed neoliberal type, Ayush an obsessive progressive who rejects the centrality of money and tries to live his values – severely restricting water and power in the home (something he does unilaterally) to help limit climate change, or exposing the kids to graphic footage of animals being butchered to instil vegan ethics into them. It’s a salutary reminder that our values depend not simply on our ideals.
Ayush wants so badly to be a good person he’s blind to how quantifying his virtue perverts it – quantification being, of course, a rather neoliberal notion. The parable-like story inspires two others, both delving with disconcerting persuasiveness into other poised ethical questions.
The Mires
Tina Makereti, Ultimo, $34.99
Tina Makereti’s The Mires is set on the Kāpiti Coast of Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the swamplands themselves speak to the reader, before Makereti switches to closely observed social realism and descends on a block of flats nearby.
The inhabitants are vividly drawn – single parent Keri and her strangely intense teenaged daughter Wairere; Janet, a white woman who isn’t shy about giving her two cents’ worth on any subject; and Sera and her family, refugees from a devastated Europe.
When Keri’s son Conor appears – now a skinhead with a tattoo – neighbourly tensions deepen, but only Wairere and the swamp seem to know how dangerous and extreme Conor’s views have become.
The Mires has a modest flourish of magical realism, but it’s the unflinching attention to reality that grabs you. Makereti has a gift for portraying immense social problems – from ecological disaster to the recrudescence of extreme far-right and white supremacist thinking – through the human dimensions of domestic life.
The Fists of the Father
Daniel Tamone, Echo, $32.99
Set in Western Sydney, amid the pump-up world of professional boxing, Daniel Tamone’s The Fists of the Father pulls no punches on the realities and risks of the sport, but it is outside the ring where Ted “Little Boy Blue” Taylor first learnt to fight.
His father Ron was a two-time heavyweight champion. He was also a shocking perpetrator of domestic violence (with alcoholism and more organised criminality never far away). Teddy learnt to fight as a child, defending his mum – a loss for which he still blames himself – and has been coached into a career by his grandfather, a Vietnam veteran, hard drinker and gambler. Ron is intent on a comeback, and the industry is crazy about the idea of a father-son showdown.
It seems inevitable, but when an outsider comes into Teddy’s life and gives him hope, will he find the courage to step away from the ring? Tamone strikes with absolute precision on the lingering effects of trauma and violence and the emotional toll of hypermasculinity.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Fragile Creatures
Khin Myint, Black Inc., $34.99
Poise, compassion, forbearance. These are only a few of the words that spring to mind when reading Fragile Creatures, a memoir written with the clear-eyed perspective and emotional complexity of a well-wrought novel. Khin Myint and his sister, Theda, unsettled people around them when they were growing up purely because they were of mixed parentage, their father Burmese, their mother English. Yet even as Myint describes how he was bullied savagely at school in Perth, he is alert to how his tormentors were themselves the products of their social milieu.
The damage done by racism, the pressures of conventional masculinity and their own father’s inability to accept them, however, left Myint and Theda with a profound sense of shame. As we watch this play out in their lives, the sadness of it is counterpointed by a quiet sense of hope as Myint draws strength from his own fragility.
Voyagers
Lauren Fuge, Text, $36.99
The restlessness that has driven humanity to spread out across the globe is an urge that Lauren Fuge understands in her bones. As a wanderer, she has travelled the world, spent extended periods kayaking on the west coast of Canada, hiking in the Flinders Rangers, immersed in the rainforests of Tasmania.
In this lyrical, scientifically savvy work, she probes the history of our “compulsion to discover what’s out there, a compulsion that carried us out of Africa, across the Pacific, to the Moon and beyond”. It’s an ambitious project propelled by a questing spirit and a deep need to grapple with the ongoing consequences of exploration and exploitation. The epic sea voyages that brought the first people to the Pacific rub up against the imperially driven voyages of the European Enlightenment as Fuge charts the fallout in the natural world and our understanding of our place in it.
Shakespeare is Hard, But So is Life
Fintan O’Toole, Head of Zeus, $29.99
As the boot camp title suggests, there’s scant consolation on offer here as Fintan O’Toole stares into the dark, chaotic and despairing heart of the Bard’s four biggest tragedies. Instead of the solace and moral instruction bequeathed to us by the Victorians who shaped our modern understanding of these plays, he finds something much more interesting, gritty and confronting.
With wit and zest, he debunks the cliched and misused concept of the hero being undone by their “fatal flaw”, of “imperfect men causing trouble that will be banished by their deserved deaths”. Much more bracing and historically aware is O’Toole’s reading of Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear as expressions of the upheaval and violence of Shakespeare’s own times. The glory of the plays is that amid the terror, they still stir wonder and pity at “the voices of humanity so amazingly articulated”.
Slick
Royce Kurmelovs, UQP, $34.99
If you find yourself baffled as to why the government keeps approving new oil and gas exploration projects, despite dire warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Slick offers some disturbing answers. For Royce Kurmelovs, it comes down to “state capture” whereby corporations exert undue influence over political decisions.
Although the oil industry saw the writing on the wall “long before anyone else”, they played for time, pressuring politicians and spreading misinformation through schools, universities, sports clubs and the public service. Alongside the corporate players, we meet those suffering the real-time consequences of climate change and the activists trying to stop further exploitation. While there’s nuance in how the story unfolds, Kurmelovs doesn’t pull his punches when he concludes that those in the industry “happily mortgaged [our] collective future” in the name of greed.
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