Scribe Publications

Aldous Huxley often prioritised the expression of themes and ideas over the development of character and plot in his fiction. Ape and Essence (1948), one of his less well-known novellas, was no exception, but it was also funny and thought-provoking. The Island of Four Rivers, by Christopher Morgan, has none of these redeeming features.

Adrian Hyland spent many years living and working among indigenous people in the Northern Territory. His affection for and affinity with the people and the country are immediately evident. But whatever possessed him, in his first novel, to write in the voice of a young, half-Aboriginal woman? It is a testament to his skill and finely balanced writing that more has not been made of this fact, and that the reception to his novel has been mostly positive.

The former co-chair of scientific assessment for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Houghton, declared in 2003 that global warming is a weapon of mass destruction that is at least as dangerous as chemical, biological or nuclear weapons and, indeed, terrorism. It is therefore no small irony that two prominent members of the ‘coalition of the willing’ and the world’s two highest per capita carbon emitters – the US and Australia – should choose to devote so many resources to eradicating conventional WMDs, yet do so little to address global warming. Australia’s stance on climate change is logic-defying, unprincipled and lacking in remorse. The Howard government has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol because of the short-term economic costs to Australia, but it claims that Australia will seek to meet its Kyoto target anyway. But Australia’s Kyoto target is so generous relative to other developed countries that it does not have to do much to meet it.

Bill Leak’s first novel, Heart Cancer, is a quasi-picaresque larrikin’s progress that unexpectedly turns into a tale about addiction and self-destruction. It is an enterprising book, but Leak has the difficulty any novelist might in getting the two tones – the comic and the serious – properly balanced.

Garry Disher’s Snapshot continues his police procedural series about Mornington Peninsula detective Hal Challis, begun with Dragon Man in 1999 (before that, Disher wrote an excellent series of thrillers about a career criminal named Wyatt, starting with Kickback, 1991). Snapshot is 100 pages longer than Dragon Man, but, paradoxically, it is much more pared back, leaner and smarter about what a police procedural (PP) can be.

Peter Rodgers, Australia’s Ambassador to Israel from 1994-97, has produced a flimsy and flawed anti-Zionist tract that tells the reader much about his mindset but does not provide anything approaching a reliable historical or contemporary guide to Middle Eastern realities. Rodgers maintains a veneer of even-handedness, but his underlying point appears anything but balanced. Israel, apparently, was born in sin through dispossessing another people. Herzl’s ‘Zionist dream came at terrible cost to both the Jewish and Palestinian peoples’, according to Rodgers, who is now firmly rooted in the ideological terrain of those diplomats and journalists who believe that Israel deserves all the pain it is suffering. Herzl’s Nightmare is nothing more than a skewed anti-Israel diatribe that builds its case by means of a selective presentation of some facts.

An unfamiliar character from a strange land is barred from setting foot on mainland Australia. Desperate to land, he leaps from ship to shore, breaking his right leg in the process. A conservative attorney-general desperate to protect our borders, pursues this man, now on crutches, through the courts. The charismatic stranger wins his court case and holds the government up to ridicule. Shadowed unrelentingly by Canberra’s spooks, he urges Australians to look past their government’s pronouncements and discover for themselves the real dangers to world peace. Whilst history, even in Marx’s cycles of tragedy and farce, never neatly repeats itself, these duels between Egon Kisch, Czech communist, and Robert Menzies, Anglophile attorney-general, do have contemporary import. No doubt this explains why Kisch’s adventures in 1930s Australia have been told several times through film, theatre and books. In this new and enjoyable recasting of the drama, Heidi Zogbaum reminds us of the bare bones of Kisch’s Australian sojourn, focusing for the most part on his successful courtroom battles and European background. These are interspersed with detailed summaries from spies such as ‘Snuffbox’, charged with dredging up the evidence on Kisch’s European activities that led to his eventual deportation.

His handsome and expanded edition of John Carroll’s Humanism (1993) is given added weight by an epilogue about the meaning of September 11. It can now be read alongside his recent The Western Dreaming (2001), which tried to chart a way out of the spiritual atrophy of late modernity in which, as this book argues, the unfolding of humanism from the Renaissance on has left us – with its egoistic individualism, its rationalistic blindness to limits and its rancorous hostility to the sacred.

One of the hardest things a reviewer can be asked to do is to produce copy about a book that is so beautifully done that commentary on it seems both ridiculous and vaguely offensive. That is my predicament here. It is with a certain wry delight that I can report that this is the second time I have been in this position in recent months. The other book was a first novel, too. It is tremendously heartening to know that creative writing not merely good but of the highest order is being produced in these dismal times.

One of the hardest things a reviewer can be asked to do is to produce copy about a book that is so beautifully done that commentary on it seems both ridiculous and vaguely offensive. That is my predicament here. It is with a certain wry delight that I can report that this is the second time I have been in this position in recent months. The other book was a first novel, too. It is tremendously heartening to know that creative writing not merely good but of the highest order is being produced in these dismal times.

Shantaram is based on the life of its author, Gregory David Roberts. A heroin addict, Roberts was sentenced in 1978 to nineteen years’ imprisonment as punishment for a series of robberies of building society branches, credit unions and shops. In 1980 he escaped from Victoria’s maximum-security prison, thereby becoming one of Australia’s most wanted men for what turned out to be the next ten years.