Vivienne Kelly

Vivienne Kelly’s short story ‘Passion Fruit’ was included in The Best Australian Stories 2007. In 2008 she won The Australian Women’s Weekly/Penguin short story competition for ‘The Third Child’. Cooee, her first novel, is further confirmation of her remarkable talent.

In the deceptively simple opening, the reader is introduced to Isabel Weaving – grandmother, mother, sister, daughter and divorcée. Isabel, reflective and stubbornly opinionated, considers her various relationships with family, her ex-husband, and Max, her absent lover. The reader is lured into Isabel’s world as childhoods – her own and those of her offspring – are dissected with cold detachment; her failed marriage is dredged up and pulled apart. Her love affair with Max is remembered fondly, but not without trauma.

We’re all interested in people; misanthropy is not trendy. Contemporary interest in people may be manifested by the success of reality television, the media coverage given to celebrities, and books such as these, which set out to investigate people and what makes them tick.

Sally Neighbour wrote this book as a direct response to the Bali bombing in October 2002. She was convinced, by that event and its aftermath, that fundamentalist Muslims’ hatred of Westerners was creating an unfamiliar world whose rules she and most Australians did not understand. We are in her debt. In clean prose, informed by meticulous research into a wide range of sources, Neighbour stitches together countless loose strands until they cohere persuasively into a dismaying pattern. Her courage, dispassion and skill present us with conclusions as unpleasant as they are inescapable. Journalism is a term frequently used pejoratively, but this is a thoroughly journalistic book in the best possible sense: it presents evidence, shapes arguments and distils information – a vast amount of information – intelligently and responsibly. Neighbour’s disturbing claims are founded on hard evidence and sober analysis.