Review

Oswyn Murray’s book The Muse of History is subtitled ‘The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the present’, but this period of some three centuries represents virtually the whole of the modern historiography of Greece. The primary reason for this is one that is easily forgotten today: from the medieval to the early modern period, Greek civilisation, with its literature and art, was mainly understood from a Roman perspective. Even the gods were known by their adopted Latin names, and in an age when everyone who went to school could read and write Latin, a relatively small number were ever fluent in Greek.

In this impressive, 1,000-page volume, Christopher Childers has collected almost all that remains of the highly prized verses that were written in Greek and Latin to accompany performance on the lyre. This collection of ‘lyric verse’ provides a roll-call of the greatest poetic voices to emerge in antiquity. Some names, such as Sappho, are still familiar to many today. For others, such as Ibycus, their star has unjustly fallen and the fragments that survive tantalise us with their potential.

Evocations of artists, art history, and the art world have become a near staple of the literary novel, nationally and internationally. Local examples from the past decade include Emily Bitto’s The Strays (2014), Gail Jones’s The Death of Noah Glass (2018), and Katrina Kell’s Chloé (2024). Alex Miller’s novel The Deal, his fourteenth, is the latest to probe the alluring, sometimes shady art world. It is not Miller’s first such foray; Autumn Laing (2011) was based on the machinations of the Melbourne Heide set.

In Richard Powers’ fifth novel, Galatea 2.2 (1995), a fictionalised version of the author ‘educates’ a computer program, named Helen, by reading it canonical literary texts – which it learns to analyse – and by telling it the story of his own life. In the celebrated The Overstory (2018), Powers explores the surprisingly broad and interconnected lives of trees and forests, and their varied significance to a cast of characters who are wedded to tree-life for reasons both personal and universal. The Overstory features a woman scientist who writes a book that inspires small and large forms of environmental activism, alongside a physically ailing and solitary tech genius who is responsible for the most popular computer game in the world. Throughout, Powers suggests that the ability to tell a ‘good story’ is essential to individual and social transformation. His more recent novel, Bewilderment (2021), focuses on a form of behavioural therapy that resembles a computer game, where participants perform cognitive tasks that can drastically modify their personalities.

How do we reconcile our ideals with the way we live our lives? What should we do when we discover that artists whom we revere turn out to be deeply flawed human beings? How do we continue to love and respect our mothers while acknowledging their shortcomings? Are desire and shame intrinsically linked? Which is the more powerful? These are some of the many issues Michelle de Kretser, twice winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award (in 2013 for Questions of Travel and in 2018 for The Life to Come) grapples with in her seventh novel, Theory & Practice.

There must be something in the post-Brexit air encouraging British novelists to take the long view. Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings joins recent doorstopper works – from Ian McEwan’s Lessons (2022) to Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road (2024) – that explore postwar Englishness from a standpoint of jaded retrospection. While they function as a kind of summation or reinforcement of their authors’ talents, they also offer a stinging critique of the nation’s propensities and historical prejudices. It is even possible to discern in the margins a note of contrition, an acknowledgment of the perspectives these writers have overlooked or neglected until now.

The recent discovery of Neanderthal remains in a cave in France is timely for Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, Creation Lake, which opens with the question: ‘What is a human being?’ Timely, because this novel deals with the question in a largely archaeological manner, focusing on that nebulous point in history when Neanderthals and Homo sapiens parted ways. The former, it seems, went quietly into extinction; the latter, with their cunning intellect and knack for not knowing what is good for them, went on to create the socio-environmental mess we find ourselves in today.

In November 1997, Bryce Rose was travelling for work in northern New South Wales. Rose was a technical officer with Telstra, and his help was needed in the Armidale area to address a surge in reported faults. Required to spend a few nights away from home, he arranged to share a hotel room with a colleague. On the third night, the pair went for dinner and then on to a nightclub. Much alcohol was consumed, and there was an altercation between them. Around 3 am, Rose returned to the hotel room, only to find the other man waiting for him. The furniture had been rearranged to create a space in the middle of the room. ‘Well, that’s your boxing ring if that’s what you want, mate,’ Rose’s colleague told him. There was a scuffle, and Rose began bleeding. He ultimately needed twelve stitches at the local hospital. Rose appears to have been the more innocent of the parties; his colleague was later convicted over the altercation.

A book connecting Artificial Intelligence with storytelling around a Stone Age campfire certainly piqued my interest, especially given the stratospheric success of its author’s earlier works. Indeed, historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2011) was so successful that in 2019 he and his husband, Itzik Yahav, cofounded ‘Sapienship’, an initiative advocating on global challenges through focused conversations and global responsibility. In this spirit, Harari’s latest book, Nexus, focuses on the AI revolution. His Homo Deus (2015) also tackled this theme, but here Harari recapitulates ideas from both these earlier books and then develops them using an innovative framework that reviews history in terms of the impact of information networks. It is the relaying of information, says Harari, that connects Stone Age storytellers and AI.