‘Whiskey & Charlie’ by Annabel Smith

August 12, 2015August 12, 2015 / jtul. / Leave a comment

I heard about Annabel Smith a couple of years ago during an online book giveaway hosted by a group of writers from WA, where by subscribing to Smith’s blog (as well as the blogs of Natasha Lester, Dawn Barker, Amanda Curtin and Sara Foster), you could win a bunch of novels. I didn’t win, but I now read each of the blogs regularly and am making my way through the writers’ novels. Whiskey & Charlie (originally published in Australia as Whiskey Charlie Foxtrot) was Smith’s second novel, and I picked it up in the States instead of back home to support her international sales!

The story is basically a character study of Charlie, whose twin brother Whiskey is in a coma as a result of a bad car crash. Charlie and Whiskey have been estranged for years, so when Charlie is faced with the prospect of Whiskey’s potential death, he yearns to make amends with his bro. The story follows Charlie as deeply assesses why he and Whiskey became estranged in the first place, working out that his brother isn’t entirely to blame, then forgiving his bro and forgiving himself.

If the plot doesn’t sound action-driven, that’s because it really isn’t – Whiskey is unconscious for nearly the entire novel and most of the dramatic tension derives from Charlie’s inner emotional cycle – the grief, anger and guilt he experiences over and over as he mulls over his brother’s condition ad infinitum, to the point where it starts annoying his other relatives. But despite not being a novel one might read for plot, Smith has written an interesting and very moving story, primarily, I think, because she does such a great job at making the audience care for both Charlie and Whiskey. They’re both utterly infuriating, in their own ways; Whiskey for his arrogance and sense of entitlement, Charlie for his inability to recognise his own flaws, his tendency to blame Whiskey for every mishap that befalls him. But they’re also both likeable and endearing. It’s complicated. It’s good.

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‘Anchor Point’ by Alice Robinson

June 6, 2015June 6, 2015 / jtul. / Leave a comment

I read this book in one sitting, finishing late at night, and am still reeling from it. In fact, I’ve actually been trying to write this review for a couple of weeks and have been struggling with it because the novel just encompasses so much. Anchor Point is a powerful story about how humans, both individually and as a society, relate to the land – how we connect with it, how we destroy it, and how the state of the environment exerts control over our lives whether we like it or not. But it’s also a very personal story of an individual woman, Laura, and her own connection to the sheep farm she grew up on, as well as her relationship with her family, her work, her lover. The whole story is also about climate change. I’m impressed at how Robinson wove all these elements together into a cohesive, almost seamless whole.

The impetus for the story is an unwanted letter. Laura’s mother, Kath, goes missing from their rural property in western Victoria during a terrible storm. After hours of searching the nearby bush and gully to no avail, Laura finds a note from her mother: Kath hasn’t disappeared, she has abandoned them. In her ten-year-old hurt and confusion, Laura burns the note and keeps it secret from her father and sister, for the next forty years.

Even though I found the whole letter-burning ordeal a little clichéd, the way that Laura deals with her grief, shame and guilt about her mother is really convincing. The character feels so real. I was constantly thinking ‘ahh, YES! That is exactly how a person would respond in that situation!’ even though her actions were complex and not always predictable. But, Robinson manages to convey Laura (and other character’s) inner feelings without being too explicit – Laura as a character ‘accumulates’ over the text, so that by the end I felt quite deeply whatever she was feeling.

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Review: ‘The Strays’ by Emily Bitto

June 4, 2015June 4, 2015 / jtul. / 2 Comments

It was hard to approach Emily Bitto’s debut novel The Strays without any expectations. People have been raving about it since it was shortlisted for the 2013 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and the hype got even crazier since the story won this year’s Stella Prize (it was also shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards and is on the Dobbie Award shortlist). So I couldn’t help but enter the book expecting it to be flipping amazing. Also, I was super excited to read it because the story is about a group of bohemian artists living together in the early 20^th century in Melbourne – I grew up right near Heide, and even though The Strays is not actually based on those artists, it certainly seems to draw inspiration from the activities and shenanigans that went on there.

For the most part, all my expectations were met. One of the most notable (and best) things about The Strays is how well Bitto created an unsettling narrative that left me deeply disturbed and feeling kind of icky. The story is narrated by Lily, a middle-class girl whose family is struggling after the depression. Lily befriends Eva, daughter of provocative modernist artist Evan Trentham, at primary school, and the two become best buds. Lily becomes seduced by the crazy world of the Trenthams and the other artists that live with them – their sexual freedom, disregard for rules, reckless drinking and drug use and of course, their seemingly unbounded creativity and artistic momentum.

The commune is idealistic and appears to function well initially, but soon begins to decay and collapse. This is where Bitto excels. She builds tension exceedingly well, and slowly reveals the consequences of a lifestyle of such abandon, particularly the way it affects the children, who are not only thoroughly neglected but also treated in increasingly inappropriate ways. Since the story is narrated an adult Lily, it’s awful to see how the effects of the childhood years reverberate irreparably through the children’s lives as they grow up.

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Enjoyable and troubling: ‘Fetish’ by Tara Moss

April 17, 2015April 17, 2015 / jtul. / Leave a comment

Get your ’90s on.

Last year my goal was to write ten book reviews for my blog, and I did three. Three. Yes, I had lots of other work to do (i.e. my thesis, and writing I was actually getting paid for) but still. Ten blog posts in fifty-two weeks should not be a difficult goal to achieve regardless of how busy a person is. (I also spent a good portion of 2014 watching New Tricks repeats in my pyjamas, which may have had something to do with it). In any case, in trying to remedy the situation, here’s a review of a book I read ages ago and which I can’t really remember that well, but which I do remember thinking was kind of good and also kind of troubling. Also I’m participating in the Australian Women Writers Challenge again (an initiative that encourages people to read and review books by Australian women, in order to combat the gender bias in book reviewing culture) so you know, trying to do my bit.

The book is Fetish by Tara Moss, and it was actually her very first novel, published in 1999. It’s the first crime novel in what has become known as the ‘Makedde Vanderwall’ series. Makedde, or Mak, is the protagonist, a young model whose best friend is murdered in Sydney after Mak arrives there for some modelling gigs. Mak, who’s obsessed with crime solving thanks to her cop dad, gets stuck into the case, much to the chagrin of the local police. The story that follows details not only the solving of the crime, but Mak’s own personal development as she works through her relationship with her father, issues of sexism in her modelling career and life more generally, and problems from her past.

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