Review

One walks a fine line between patriotism and claptrap when writing about anything to do with war. Especially when writing for young people, one tries to salute the courage of soldiers and to honour the fallen, but also to instil caution in potential young soldiers; to convey that war is hell and that it shows human beings at their worst. Of course, one wants to tell an exciting story, too, with heroes and villains and suspense – with maybe a history lesson or two thrown in. Two of the following books succeed majestically in this task; the third falls far short.

Since the early 1990s Australians have been infected with ‘affluenza’ – a virus of over-consumption that Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss characterise as ‘the bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses’, a growth fetish and an ‘epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of the Australian dream’.

To start at the beginning (that is, the dust jacket): giving the author’s name as Ingo Petzke is a misnomer. It suggests that he has written a biography of the Australian film-maker Phillip Noyce, when in fact this is neither biography nor autobiography. This indecision about its mode undermines its value. I’ll return to this.

As an eyewitness to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001, Philippe Roger was sickened when the America-hating Jean Baudrillard announced his ‘prodigious jubilation’ at the event. Sickened, but not surprised. Roger understood that Baudrillard’s crassness was rooted in a long French tradition of anti-American discourse.

At first, many of these forty-eight poems from two decades struck me as almost self-indulgent and mundane: short lyrics about family life, eating, drinking, dreaming of Valparaiso, lemons, the Molonglo River; though there was often an underside of premonition, discontent, and a stillness that made me think I hadn’t really understood. In the first group, ‘One Hundred Nights’ bothered me: ‘When will it end / this waking / while others sleep, / this herding out on the ghost fields? / the flesh / whispering / its impossible desires / the bones / murmuring their Kali mantra / love, emptiness / love, emptiness.’ However, on my next reading, some of the second group struck me with autumnal clarity. From ‘Brown Pigeon’: ‘eyes / plucked out, feathers / scattered, / maggots / when I turn it over / writhing in the black mess near the heart’, where the image of the dead bird is an iconic memento mori.

There are two approaches to public affairs. The first assumes that élites ‘have and have always had the same passions’ (Machiavelli): leaders will do whatever it takes to retain power and to attain their objectives, tempered only by knowing that the popular verdict will depend on success. Success is judged by results: resort to devious or ruthless means will be excused if the people see beneficial outcomes. You can expect leaders to be driven by ambition and self-interest, but trust them to do enough to forestall a popular uprising that might bring them down. Machiavelli was not writing about democracy.

In Dudley McCarthy’s volume in the Australian official history of World War II, subtitled Kokoda to Wau (1959), there is a wonderfully evocative passage that sets the fighting in Papua New Guinea in context:

In this important book, Elisabeth Wynhausen seeks to ‘animate the experience of a class of people who had remained invisible even as their numbers swelled’. That class is the ‘working poor’, the people who clean, cook, wait tables and deal with everyone else’s garbage. They are the so-called ‘losers’ from economic change: the men and especially the women who do the jobs the winners don’t want to do any more, like clean their own toilets.

‘Reading provides a temporary stay from hate and anger. From pain,’ proposes Celeste Walters’s teenage protagonist, Josh Sim. Yet, as a novel, Deception is far from escapist literature. Despite being set in an imaginary city, this is not the material of fantasy: Walters’s work reveals the world as a gritty, desolate and unjustly cruel place.

Readers of Joanne Carroll’s first publication, the novellas In the Quietness of My Aunt’s House and Bad Blood (1996), will not be disappointed with The Italian Romance; it is a novel of great style. There is none of the slick optimism that we associate with popular romance; instead, it deals with the most important human issues and, at times, approaches tragedy rather than romance. True love, it seems, is an irresistible but punishing force. The lovers Lilian and Nio have no regrets, and never consider their decision to have been the wrong one, but Lilian, in particular, will pay for it for the rest of her life.