Review

Here is a kind of social experiment in fiction. Take the lowest, most abject starting point for a human life. Give the child no advantages, home or family; provide it with no regular food or care; subject it to the privations of a society with no welfare system; deprive it of any educational, emotional or spiritual training; and then, when it finally finds an occupation, make it the lowest, most socially disadvantaged and despised. And then see what kind of person it turns out to be. Oh, and set the whole thing in the Middle Ages, which, as everyone knows, was the most brutal, depraved, disease- and poverty-ridden era in Western history.

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.

Rene Baker File #28/E.D.P. is written by two women, Rene Powell and Bernadette Kennedy. Powell is an Aboriginal woman who was taken from her mother at the age of four. Kennedy, an ex-nun who is descended from Irish, English and Scottish migrants, has ‘worked with the homeless and disadvantaged in Western Australia’ for more than twenty-five years. The two women met through Kennedy’s religious work and because of Rene’s drinking problem: Rene was the first resident in a homeless women’s shelter that Kennedy helped to run.

The Stone Ship is Peter Raftos’s first book, and one of the first three books released by Sullivan’s Creek, an imprint of Pandanus Books. The Sullivan’s Creek Series ‘seeks to explore Australia through the work of new writers, with a particular encouragement to authors from Canberra and the region’ and ‘aims to make a lively contribution to scholarship and cultural knowledge’. Raftos, ‘a web developer, an academic-in-training and a journalist’, lives in Canberra and works at the Australian National University. His novel, set in an imagined time and place, doesn’t so much explore Australian universities as the absurdity of all universities. As for ‘a lively contribution to cultural knowledge’, I’m not sure what that looks like, but The Stone Ship reminded me of Terry Gilliam’s wonderful film Brazil (1985). Both are set in a ‘retro-future’ ruled by huge, incomprehensible bureaucracies, whose only work seems to be perpetuating their systems and inflicting arbitrary cruelties on unsuspecting and trusting citizens.

Anti-Americanism is one of those nonsense words, like anti-globalisation, that has become shorthand for a more complex and contradictory set of arguments and grievances. What is called ‘anti-Americanism’ generally refers to a particular set of criticisms made about aspects of the politics, economics and culture of the US. Few people have what it takes to be truly anti-American (to hate all that emanates from the US); thus anti-Americanism is more of a tendency than an actuality. However, the tendency is undeniably on the rise, with increasing numbers of people in recent times voicing their concerns around the world about US foreign policy and about Americanisation.

John Clanchy’s fictional concerns are with the large things: desire, pain, guilt, innocence, infidelity, sexuality, madness and the cost of making great art. In various guises, the spectre of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh haunts many of the stories: he appears in a biographical portrait, in the recurring echoes of his first name, in a discussion of the use of colour in his pictures and in several reworkings of his mental illness.

These two new collections are both by, and maybe for, believers. They contain passionate and interrogative poems that argue for and celebrate their respective views of the world. Both poets are, to quote Rosemary Sorensen’s term for Goodfellow on the cover blurb, ‘evangelists’ who wear their respective hearts on their sleeves and who urge or invite assent.

Fontanelle, Andrew Lansdown’s seventh collection, is concerned with the almost ineffable immanent design and intricacy of the natural and experienced world, especially of birds, insects and a young family. The role of the poet here is to explore, describe and celebrate the (almost) sacred in the mundane: ‘The words I’ve been working with / are like running water. All afternoon / I’ve been trying to scoop out / a place for them to settle …’ (‘Home’). Lansdown’s voice is earnest, reverent, wonderstruck. These are Romantic imagist poems in which the poetry defers to the empirical and ontological world: ‘Cicadas have left their cuticles / clinging to the daisy stems: / brown shells, burst at the back / of the thorax’ (‘Emergence’).

When we think of Charles Dickens, we think of London – not the imagined medieval London of William Morris, ‘small, and white, and clean’, but the contemporary London Morris described as among the ‘six counties overhung with smoke’. For Christopher Koch, in Crossing the Gap (1987), the London of his imagination was full of ‘rooms where great fires blazed in open fireplaces’. He saw it this way because ‘Mr Pickwick had warmed his coat-tails before such fires’. We know, of course, that there are plenty of other English localities in Dickens’s novels, such as the memorable marshes in Great Expectations (1860–61). We even remember that parts of his novels are set in other countries altogether, such as the American scenes of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44) and the Marseilles setting at the beginning of Little Dorrit (1855–57). Yet if we think of the quintessential Dickens setting, it is to London that we turn.

In a discussion on election advertising, an American political operative was asked whether it is preferable to run a ‘negative’ advertisement (criticising an opponent) or a ‘positive’ message (extolling the client candidate). He replied: ‘If it’s negative, it works. If it’s positive, save it for your tombstone.’ In Australia, the major political parties are similarly inclined: according to Sally Young’s research, sixty per cent of television advertisements in federal election campaigns since 1993 have been in the ‘negative’ category. The public’s general dislike of politicians facilitates this approach. For the same reason, the advertising party usually employs an actor to dish out the dirt. Young, a political scientist, has extensively researched political advertising in Australia. The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising covers the evolution of political advertising in this country and the effectiveness (or otherwise) of various campaigns over the last fifty years.

A full-blown history of sperm can’t be too long in the coming given the current academic vogue for studies of the body, and the huge spurt of curiosity prompted a few years ago by the appearance of a couple of tell-tale stains on the dress of a White House intern. It is possible the subject (or the object) first came into its own as a more than private matter when, nearly a hundred years ago, Lytton Strachey spotted a similar stain on the dress of his just-married friend Vanessa Bell and dared to name it in the mixed company of his assembled friends, the legendary Bloomsbury group in its embryonic days. ‘Semen?’ he enquired, with forensic candour, and forever after, so the legend goes, the group would never recoil from calling a sperm a sperm. ‘With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down … Sex permeated our conversation. The word bugger was never far from our lips.’ So recalled Vanessa’s sister, Virginia, about a decade and a half later, when she had long since become the wife of Leonard Woolf and was already on the way to becoming one of the twentieth century’s most famous novelists and pin-up feminists.