Non Fiction

Given V.S. Naipaul’s status in the literary world, and the prolific commentary on him and his writing, you might ask what is different about Gillian Dooley’s book, V.S. Naipaul: Man and Writer. Dooley’s sympathetic attitude liberates both Naipaul and his writing from critical analyses and from critics with explicit post-colonial and political agendas. She is more than aware of how ‘the reductions of political analysis’ have negatively stereotyped Naipaul’s writing. Rather, she focuses on Naipaul’s genius as a writer, which is not separate from the high standard of ethics, courage, fastidiousness, insecurities and prejudices of the man. For it is these very attributes that Naipaul has inherited from his colonial background that make his writing so rich, remarkable and controversial.

Divas and scholars is the work of a scholar who is no stranger to the world of divas. Philip Gossett is a music professor at the University of Chicago and is principally in the business of preparing scholarly editions of nineteenth-century operas by Italian composers. We might think of the academic institution and the opera house as antithetical spaces, but Gossett is frequently called upon to advise and assist with the staging of works that belong to his area of expertise. In other words, not only does he know the operas of Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi as historical artefacts and texts that take all manner of forms –fragments, drafts, complete manuscripts, variant manuscripts – but as phenomena that take shape on stage and in the orchestra pit in contemporary realisations that, as he argues, owe a responsibility to the fruits of scholarship. Divas and Scholars, then, is part personal and professional history, part history of nineteenth-century Italian opera (and operas in French by Italian composers), part manifesto, treatise on the transmission of opera and handbook for present-day singers, conductors and opera producers. In a happy coincidence, the author’s surname is a near-homonym for gossip, and this excellent book is leavened with timely and beautifully judged accounts of vanity, ignorance and arrogance: three vices which, while not indigenous to the opera house, are often depressingly at home within its gilded ambience.

Writings on globalisation have so far been of three principal types. First came the fables of discovery: bold, confident and romantic. Next came the stories of resistance: variously decrying the consequences of the new order, or denying that there was anything particularly novel about this globalisation malarkey. More recently, however, we have entered the age of elaboration. These fresher writings extend the now familiar idea of globalisation onto new terrains. Just as concepts such as ‘space’, ‘postmodernism’ and ‘the body’ were once taken up by earnest specialists, so the idea of ‘globalisation’ is now used to revive tired topics and to attract jaded publishers. Bookshelves groan under the weight of fresh volumes promising to disclose the secrets of ‘globalisation and food/sport/religion/sex/politics etc.’. Thus the concept has itself been exported and capitalised on a remarkable, networked industry. Some of this work is opportunistic and shallow. Fortunately, however, Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert’s entry to the field (which might be retitled ‘Globalisation and Individualism and Emotions’) attempts to say something new, serious and important.

Gough Whitlam is idolised, Bob Hawke respected, and Paul Keating admired, but Barry Jones is undoubtedly the most loved by the Labor party rank and file, a lovability which puzzled many of his colleagues in the Hawke government (1983–91). Insofar as they recognised it, they qualified it – labelling him ‘a loveable eccentric’ – a characterisation of ...

This is a selection of the quotations Mark Latham collected during his time in local and federal politics. The quotations are arranged alphabetically by subject, from ‘Aboriginal People’ to ‘Working Class’. Given Latham’s career, it is not surprising that the emphasis is on political quotations and quotations from politicians.

Some quotations are quite familiar, as with Winston Churchill’s comment on a former Conservative MP who was seeking to stand as a liberal: ‘The only instance of a rat swimming towards a sinking ship.’ I was touched by Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s incisive critique of colonising missionaries: ‘When the missionaries first came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray” and when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land.’ Charles de Gaulle demonstrates Gallic culinary wit: ‘How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?’ Readers will find their own favourites.

Michael Gurr was Victorian Premier Steve Bracks’s first senior speechwriter. I am his latest. Gurr worked for Victorian Treasurer John Brumby when he was leader of the state opposition in the mid-1990s. So did I. Gurr wrote the launch speeches for Steve Bracks’s successful 1999 and 2002 state election campaigns. As I type this review, I am also, coincidentally, in the midst of ballpointing my way to the summit of my first draft of the launch speech for the 2006 campaign (a campaign that I cannot know the result of as I type, but you will already know as you read this). The coincidences do not end there.

Gurr’s speech for the 1999 campaign – one made famous by the unexpected defeat of Premier Jeff Kennett – was launched in Ballarat. The 2006 campaign will be launched in Ballarat. Gurr is known in Labor circles as a ‘creative type’ (read: prolific, award-winning playwright of works such as Jerusalem and Sex Diary of an Infidel). I am also known as a ‘creative type’ (novelist and poet). And yet, despite all these coincidences and intersecting lines, not to mention the backbench of associates we have in common, Gurr and I had never met when a speech request landed on my desk a while back with the title ‘Michael Gurr book launch’. Of course, I knew of Gurr. Sort of.

In the early 1980s, Clive James met William Shawn – at the Algonquin, of course. Shawn, the long-time editor of the New Yorker, invited James to become the magazine’s television critic. James, though awed by the offer, quickly said no, perhaps the first time this had happened to Shawn since World War II, he speculates in North Face of Soho, the fourth volume of his Unreliable Memoirs. Had James accepted, his life would have been very different, and this ‘brilliant bunch of guys’ (as the magazine later dubbed him) might still be in New York. But his wife’s work was in Cambridge, and he knew America wouldn’t suit him, or rather, might suit him too well. (‘America appealed too much to my sweet tooth.’)

Reading Mark Twain on Australia in the 1890s is a bit like watching Shane Warne bowl these days: you sense the playing up to the audience and an undignified element of hustle; a tendency to rely on the old tricks to fill the space and manufacture the laughs/wickets. And yet there’s no doubting the copiousness of the art, no resisting the tarnished genius on display. Sure, it would be nice to have more of the early Twain’s concentrated wit, and less reliance on showmanship, but to unwish this account of his antipodean travels would be aesthetically, emotionally, even morally wrong.