Review

On the second page of this book are startling facts about Malawi. In the 1980s and 1990s, this country of around ten million people sheltered more than a million refugees, many of them having fled civil war in Mozambique. Malawians, already suffering the crippling effects of poverty and poor health, provided safe haven to waves of displaced and desperate people coming across their border. Perhaps this succour was not always offered happily, but what mattered is that it was offered. Melinda Ham’s placing of this example so early in her book is surely deliberate. With thoughts of Malawian tolerance and generosity echoing through the text, she forces the reader into making unsettling comparisons with recent Australian responses to refugees.

Bells are often associated with the sacred. A resonating bell marks out a space for reverence to inhabit. It calls for attention on the part of the devotee, for a shift in perception from the mundane to the sanctified. A ‘tintinnabulum’ is a small bell, and it is the name that the acclaimed poet Judith Beveridge has given to her latest collection of poems. ‘Tintinnabulation’ – the lingering sound of bells – is a word I first came across in the liner notes to Tabula Rasa, an album of music by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt that explicitly brings together sound and sacredness.

In his book Bereavement: Studies of grief in adult life (1972), psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes wrote: ‘The pain of grief is just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.’ His words received a royal edit when Queen Elizabeth II, speaking at a memorial for the victims of 9/11, said, simply: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’ Being the queen, she could take such a liberty, denying Parkes his preamble and his ‘perhaps’. She whittled his words into a more essential and potent truth at a time when it was needed (if there’s ever a time when it’s not), ‘queensplaining’ his question as a comforting answer to the bewildered and bereaved.

Shortly after the unexpected death of her husband in 2014, Ailsa Piper put on a grey dress which she wore each day for the next six months. Of all the recurring and often exquisite motifs in her memoir, For Life, this prosaic re-worn grey dress speaks most eloquently of the dullness, constraint, and repetition of grief. Late in the memoir, Piper mentions a photograph that her husband took of her on holiday. She is naked in a thicket of tea-trees, and although she is not, at that point, a swimmer, she is wet from the ocean and thrilled. The contrast between the solitary costume of bereavement and this bare delight could not be more marked.

Richard Sennett is a distinguished American-born sociologist who has in the past written compellingly about ways in which social and economic developments have shaped larger cultural frameworks. This new work, which the publishers advertise as ‘the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression’, is even more wide-ranging in its scope, attempting as it does to cover how the nature of performance has shaped not only politics but also the creative arts and ‘life’ itself. Sennett’s first words are taken from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, ‘All the world’s a stage’, and he aims to track the implications of Jaques’s words across different periods of history, looking for ‘the bonds between people that stretch across time as well as space’.

Andrew Ford is a musical polymath. On his website he identifies as a ‘composer, writer and broadcaster’. I suspect the Australian public knows him best as a broadcaster, given his three decades at the helm of the ABC’s Music Show. That broadcasting longevity does not diminish his continuing acclaim as a composer, as seen in the rousing première of his Red Dirt Hymns before a capacity Canberra Festival crowd on 2 May. Nor does it discount his run of hundreds of essays, and a dozen or so books. Some of those books are edited accumulations of his own press articles and reviews, often drawing on his well-researched Music Show interviews. But most of his books are devoted to particular musical passions: memory, harmony, noise, and, most repeatedly, song (David McCooey reviewed Ford and Anni Heino’s The Song Remains the Same [2019] in ABR, March 2020).

There might be a million stories in the naked city, but the early childhood of Stanley Kubrick was one of the more typical: born in 1928, in the Bronx, to upwardly mobile, artistically sophisticated Jewish parents, one generation out of the Pale. ‘I’m not Jewish but my parents were,’ he liked to joke.

If Louis-Ferdinand Céline were around today, he would almost certainly be cancelled. So why publish a previously unknown fragment of his? Unlike some writers, whose views are inferred from their work, Céline’s anti-Semitism was beyond doubt, if at times a little confused. He wrote two anti-Semitic novels and a pamphlet, and associated with collaborators and Nazis. He was, however, not a card-carrying member of any political partyand did not subscribe to fascist ideology, beyond the notion of the expulsion of the Jews from France. He certainly didn’t believe in the possibility of some master race. Humans are vile, was his central belief. As the character Ferdinand says in War: ‘Your instinct is never wrong when it faces the ghastliness of man [sic].’

In the opening pages of Michelle See-Tho’s début novel, Jade and Emerald, an unnamed narrator is avoiding someone’s gaze. That someone is ‘pristine, poised like a goddess’ to the narrator’s vision of herself: haircut ‘like an eight-year-old boy’s’, smudged make-up, dress the wrong colour. There is a secret between these two young women, blown open by the prologue’s end.

When we first meet Max in Evie Wyld’s The Echoes, he is dead. He does not believe in ghosts, he tells us, yet that it precisely what he is: ‘a transparent central nervous system floating about like a jellyfish’. Max lingers in the house he shared with his partner, Hannah. He tries to make his presence felt, to signal to Hannah that he is still there, but he lacks any supernatural ability. Hannah moves on with her life, and all Max can do is ‘watch as the flat becomes the home of others – the moths, the spiders, the silverfish, the dust motes and … the leftovers of the dead’.