Review

Due to some clever product placement (James Bond and wife bashing) Diane Cilento’s Nine Lives have become public property, even before the reader picks up the book. We know it all: she is a member of a celebrated Australian family and made her reputation in some famous movies; she had three husbands, including two well-known ones; she set up a theatre commune in North Queensland. We even know from the gossip columns details that are not in the book: the farcical story of the last days of her third husband, the wonderful Tony Shaffer (worth a hundred Sean Connerys), his London mistress and the Shaffer inheritance. I flick through the book, notice the enthusiastic style, look at the not-quite-thrilling photographs, dip into the quite amusing anecdotes, and study the index in vain for the name Jo Jo Capece Minutolo, Tony’s mistress, whom everyone has been talking about. She has called the book ‘inappropriate’; Connery has called it ‘a crock of shit’.

On a cold, grey day in February this year, economist Larry H. Summers announced his resignation as president of Harvard. Though some undergraduates gathered in Harvard Yard to wave signs saying ‘Stay Summers Stay’, the rift with faculty and the governing board proved too much. Summers issued a dignified letter to the Harvard community, shook hands with well-wishers, and disappeared.

A personal renaissance, with a raison d’ệtre of such significance that it shifts the reverie of the characters in this book into a dimension of former youthfulness and revitalises the possibilities that seem to vanish with age: On a Wing and a Prayer is about friendship, loyalty and respect in the lives of three ordinary people drawn together under extraordinary circumstances in a small country town in central New South Wales. It confounds the adage that once you have reached a certain stage in life there is no further use for you.

‘Black Widow’ is the name given to the female Chechen rebels, who were widows of insurgents killed by the Russian army in Chechnya. They went on to serve under Shamil Basayev, leader of the Beslan school siege in September 2004. Sandy McCutcheon has set his latest political thriller two years later, in a story of revenge orchestrated by six female teachers at Beslan, who take on the guise of black widows to turn the tables on the hostage-takers.

Sometimes, the middle ground is a good place to be. The Shifting Fog is classy commercial fiction that sits happily in the space between literary fiction and mass-market trash. It might occupy the middle ground, but it’s far from middle of the road. First-time author Kate Morton (recipient of the six-figure sums for deals in eleven countries that publisher Allen & Unwin is happily hyping) has skilfully and intelligently created a novel that is indeed, as the publicity has it, ‘compulsively readable’.

Early in his book, Rod Barton describes his reaction to two events that showed what kind of intelligence officer he would become. In the late 1970s he was asked by the Joint Intelligence Organisation to deter-mine the winners and losers in a nuclear exchange between the superpowers. But how, he asked, could this be done without taking into account environmental, political, medical and psychological factors? The other occasion was when Barton contradicted American military intelligence assertions that ‘yellow rain’ falling on Hmong tribesmen in Laos in the late 1970s was a Soviet-supplied chemical warfare agent. His own investigations showed it was bee droppings. Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser backed his findings despite pressure from US Secretary of State Alexander Haig to endorse the American version. Barton’s view prevailed.

One thing is certain: Mussolini would not like this book. Indeed, it is exactly the sort of writing that would rouse Il Duce’s ire. In the last disintegrating days before his ignominious end, when Mussolini realised that his erstwhile allies, the Germans, had outmanoeuvred him, that members of his inner circle were frantically making arrangements to flee Italy, and that partisan uprisings had set Lombardy and the Po Valley alight, the archbishop of Milan offered what was supposed to be a soothing observation: that Il Duce should take heart that he would be remembered by history. Enraged by this assurance, Mussolini declared: ‘History, don’t talk to me of history. I only believe in ancient history, in that which is written without passion and long afterwards.’

When it was reported in 2005 that nine Australians had been arrested in Bali on charges of trafficking heroin, the public response was scornful and incredulous. In the wake of the media saturation of Schapelle Corby’s trial, such blatant attempts to flout the severe drug laws of Indonesia, with quick cash the only apparent incentive, seemed incomprehensible. As the story filtered through the press, a division appeared in ‘The Bali Nine’, as they were swiftly dubbed, between the mules – Martin Stephens, Renae Lawrence, Scott Rush and Michael Czugaj – who were apprehended with more than eight kilograms of heroin strapped to their bodies, and other members of the group, most of whom had not left the country before. These were Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, identified as the ringleaders of the operation, and Matthew Norman, Si Yi Chen and Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, who were arrested in their hotel room with more than 300 grams of heroin. The mules claimed that Chan and Sukumaran had made repeated threats against their families should they not co-operate; and that they and Matthew Norman were innocent victims of an international drug-trafficking ring.