Review

Of all art forms, photography has probably had the most contentious and complex reception. Graduating from the ‘bastard child left on the doorstep of art’ in the 1840s to the darling of the art world for some 170 years, the critical understanding of this quintessentially modern medium is in a constant state of flux.

These thoughts occurred to me as I read this lavishly produced hardcover book. Indeed, as the rather prosaic title, states, this is photography that self-confidently declares itself as art. Blair French, who co-authored Twelve Australian Photo Artists with Daniel Palmer, brings one of the touchiest aspects of the medium to the fore when commenting on the work of Pat Brassington: ‘the relationship between photography and the world may appear transparent, but photography is in fact an opaque medium with its own material qualities ... it is an act of fabrication and construction.’ This is the sticking point that still brings the medium into contention: photography as a reflection of the world or as a construction. Or, to use a more crude conjunction, document verses art.

When Donald ‘Donny’ Pinelli’s mother dies, he returns to Glasgow and confronts his past. Donny has been scarred by a dysfunctional family: mad clairvoyant mother; absent gangster father; shallow brother; belligerent sister. As a set-up, this is not particularly original, but Gary Bryson’s novel, Turtle, is full of surprises.

Red Dress Walking is the promising début of Western Australian author S.A. Jones. A revealing look at friendships and love affairs, and the cumulative minutiae that make and break them, the novel consists of the alternating narratives of Will and Emily as they reflect upon their relationship and trace it from its unlikely origins to the coup de grâce.

The Best Australian Political Writing 2009 is a collection of articles about the political climate in Australia over the course of twelve months. In 411 pages, a range of prominent Australian writers analyse the events that made headlines in this country during what editor Eric Beecher describes as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime-year’.

The Bible is not a book. Its title comes from the Greek biblia, books; it is a collection, or library. That the Bible has become a single book, or even the book for some, is a remarkable and sometimes problematic accident, and the premise for this engaging tour through one part of its history.

As Israel began its assault on Gaza last year, the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, launched the offensive by declaring: ‘There is a time for calm and a time for fighting.’ His declaration alluded to Ecclesiastes, but overturned the order of the verse. Not so long ago, however, in an era that has since been largely misrepresented by its detractors, there was a time for peace; a time when, at a deal-signing ceremony between Israel and the Palestinians in Washington in 1993, the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, used the same phrase from Ecclesiastes but was able to leave it intact.

A popular myth holds that all librarians are inspired by a love of books. As with all such stereotypes, it doesn’t take long working in the profession to realise that it is only partly true, only slightly more so than the cardigan, bun and glasses with which we are usually endowed in the popular imagination. Librarians, in fact, whatever their initial sentiments about books, commonly become blasé about the volumes they are responsible for and can be pitiless in weeding out the less attractive, useful and popular books from their collections. David Pearson’s new book sets out to make librarians and others who have books in their care think again about their value as cultural artefacts and pieces of historical evidence, especially at this moment in history when they are beginning to lose their primary role as repositories of the world’s knowledge.

If you felt there was a touch of hubris in Baz Luhrmann’s naming his movie Australia, you may think the opening sentence of Christopher Bigsby’s biography of Arthur Miller even more startling in its pretensions: ‘This is the story of a writer, but it is also the story of America.’ Not, observe, ‘a story’, but ‘the story’. This grandiose proposition helps to account for nearly 700 dense, uncompromising pages – and they only take in the first half of Miller’s long life (1915–2005).

Young children often use the word ‘sad’ to describe negative or confusing emotions. ‘What you did made me sad,’ they will say. But children, as they get older, learn to offer richer explanations of interior states: grief, exasperation, shock, bewilderment, hurt, ecstasy and joy. It is language that gives us this flexibility of response. The best books offer us language that matches and sometimes even exceeds the richness of our experiences.

Rarely does an image on a novel’s cover appear exactly as you, the reader, imagine the character to look. But Mae Ruth Perkins, on the elegant scarlet cover of Linda Jaivin’s new novel, definitely does. Bordello eyes, boudoir lips and all: the face in an early 1900s photograph is Mae’s own. The jewellery, faintly visible, is hers too, just as Jaivin describes it: ‘He helped her tie a black ribbon with a silver horseshoe charm around her neck, the open part facing upwards … She asked him to fasten a delicate platinum chain with a vertical triplet of gold hearts around her neck as well.’