FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK Let the Boys Play Nicholas John Turner, Savage Motifs, $34.99 Set in a dystopian Brisbane overrun by corporate interests, Nicholas John Turner’s Let the Boys Play is a propulsive satire that gets under the skin of a motley cast – cops, giants, elite private schoolkids, even babies born in a world where everything, including future obscurity, is insurable. Turner’s hypnotic style puts the flow and cadence of maximalist syntax in service to playfully minimalist observation.
(The opening gambit devotes much hairspace, for instance, to a hirsute policeman surreptitiously scratching an itchy chest.) Turner is as weird and clever a literary outlier as Miles Franklin winner David Foster, though the shadow of the late David Foster Wallace is also evident. Plot plays second fiddle to characters “in search of an answer to which no one seems to know the question”, echoing the quest for the meaning of life in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy .
Literary echoes abound, as do darkness and violence, but they’re worked into a droll and strangely compelling original. Anyone’s Ghost August Thompson, Picador, $34.99 A queer love story with the breath of doom upon it, August Thompson’s Anyone’s Ghost begins with the revelation that the love interest, Jake, has after three car crashes finally met his demise, at the tender age of 31.
For Theron, it’s the culmination of a haunting and formative friendship that began when he was 15 after newly moving to New Hampshire following his parents’ divorce. His horizons expand when he meets and instantly idolises the older Jake, a beautiful and dissolute youth with whom he connects in a haze of weed smoke and heavy metal. They meet years later, in New York, their intimate bond tempered by mutual loneliness, unspoken emotional codes of masculinity, and a drive towards oblivion that will eventually claim Jake’s life.
The genre of queer romance as coming-of-age story is well-trodden, but this unusually perceptive novel avoids any narrow schema and stands out for being grounded in the ambivalences and indeterminacies of intimate experience. Grace & Marigold Mira Robertson, Spinifex, $32.95 Another queer Bildungsroman, this one set in 1970s London, when homophobia was rampant and queer lives tended to be lived under the radar.
Mira Robertson’s Grace & Marigold follows 20-year-old Grace, who moves from Australia to London to reinvent herself but despises the idea that she might be a lesbian. When she develops a crush on Marigold, a mysterious upper-class (and seemingly straight) woman who disappears without a trace, her infatuated pursuit might just lead her from torment to freedom. It’s vivid fiction, invested with sharp period detail and suffused by the subcultural tumult and rowdy politics, the widespread squatting and bohemianism of London in the 1970s.
Nowadays, concerns about “lesbian erasure” are in the air, and it’s refreshing to revisit a poignant and exciting historical moment in queer history: the heady adolescence of the women’s and gay liberation movements. Twitchers Malcolm Sutton, Puncher & Wattmann, $32.95 Richard is a London-based advertising guru.
He’s about to return to his native Adelaide with his tail between his legs. Perhaps his campaign marketing tampons to men – however much it struck a blow for gender equality – was a bad idea. Richard is full of bad ideas.
He keeps coming up with deliberately provocative, tasteless and offensive ones because he wants to be sacked, without his high-powered girlfriend dumping him. She ditches him anyway, and soon he’s back in Adelaide where he becomes caught in complications from his dodgy past – including an arson conviction for burning the paintings of a deranged hermit artist known as the Blackwood Clown. A pyromaniac seems to be on the loose this bushfire season, with lethal results, but is it a revenge plot against Richard? And who else but the clown might have a motive to frame him? Journalist and musician Malcolm Sutton brings irreverent quirk to this black comedy steeped in the atmosphere and lore of suburban Adelaide.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK Repeat Dennis Glover, Black Inc., $26.99 Whether history repeats or rhymes, the eerie parallels between today and the 1930s have become apparent to many, and Dennis Glover’s succinct analysis of the proposition that history may well be repeating is a timely one.
We must all become historians now, he says, and draw on its lessons. Is the age of dictators reflected today in the rise of populism in the US and Europe? Glover, in what is among other things, a briskly entertaining walk through modern Western history, thinks we are “edging ever closer to repeating 1939” and is intent on waking us from our slumbers. Delusional “strong” leaders, economic instability, promises of making everything great again, lies that become “truth” and the nexus between capitalism and fascism (Hitler impossible without Krupps et al) are much in evidence today.
Repeat is an urgent, cautionary treatise. Always Was Always Will Be Thomas Mayo, Hardie Grant, $16.99 Thomas Mayo, a signatory of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, started this book the morning after the Voice referendum was lost, a constructive way of dealing with the immense sadness he felt.
Despite that, this combination of political statement, memoir and confessional is very positive, its key recurring themes being hope and progress. After all, six million Australians (40 per cent of the electorate) did vote Yes. But he’s also a realist in his analysis of the loss, especially what he calls the bad actors of the media and misinformation spread by the No campaign.
We must continue as if the campaign were still on, he writes, emphasising such things as doing everything possible to make mainstream Australia more familiar with Indigenous culture so that, for one, people are not so easily influenced by misinformation. It is dignified and circumspectly hopeful. The History of Ideas David Runciman, Profile Books, $36.
99 This is not so much a history of ideas in the classic sense of great thinkers from Plato to the modern day, so much as a study of philosophers addressing the key themes of equality and justice. David Runciman, professor of politics at the University of Cambridge, starts with Rousseau in 1775 and finishes with Latvian-born Judith Shklar in 1984. His main concern is examining how writers have approached the notion of creating a better world, whether it be Rosa Luxembourg’s brand of democratic socialism (with the emphasis on democratic) and her disputes with Lenin, or Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex dissecting what has made sexual equality so elusive – remembering that French women didn’t get the vote until 1944.
From Samuel Butler to John Rawls, this is a highly informed, engaging and entertaining survey of some serious political thinkers. A Thousand Miles from Care Steve Johnson, HarperCollins, 34.99 When the body of Los Angeles-born Scott Johnson was found at the base of a cliff in North Head, Sydney, in 1988, it attracted virtually no attention.
And it would have stayed like that had it not been for the sheer tenacity of his brother Steve. Police closed the case in 24 hours, concluding suicide. Steve never believed that and his account of the next 32 years is both a forensic record of the crime and a deeply felt memoir of his much-loved brother – a brilliant mathematician, a gay man who had come to live in Australia with his lover.
It’s an intricate tale about police resistance to further investigation, the complexities and contradictions of testimony, high-powered figures and the coronial inquests that eventually found Scott was a victim of gay hate crime and led to the imprisonment of the perpetrator. The book is gripping and moving. The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger.
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