Ivy Ireland’s Tide

Ivy Ireland, Tide (Flying Island Books 2024)

Tide may seem like a quietly generic title for a book, especially one that has a number of poems about the sea, but a laconic note on sources suggests a dark subtext:

The title of this book, Tide, and the title of the poem, ‘A Shallow Boat’, are both taken from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lady of Shalott’ (1832) with the necessary reverence.

I decided to read the Tennyson poem. I’m pretty sure I hadn’t read it before, but many of its lines (‘the mirror cracked from side to side’, ‘The curse is come upon me’) were familiar, probably from young Dorothy Hewett’s romanticism as recorded in her autobiography, Wild Card. Certainly Ivy Ireland’s compressed, science-related poems, with close observations of the real world, are not at all like Tennyson’s flowery, relentlessly rhyming lines. The word ‘tide’ occurs only once:

For ere she reach'd upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
       The Lady of Shalott.

The note on sources, then, leads one to expect something death-related: the tide is metaphorical, bearing us inexorably away. The book only partly meets that expectation. There’s a lot of life here, and not much death.

The book is divided into four sections of unequal length named for tidal phases: ‘Ebb’, ‘Low’, ‘Flood’, and ‘High’. If I had to pick favourites, I’d say I enjoyed the poems in ‘Low’ most: in ‘Lake Poet’, in the context of the climate emergency (not explicitly named, but definitely there in my mind) the lake is less a thing of sublime beauty than a place that will hold the poet to account, as opposed to the city, where ‘nobody has to answer for anything; in ‘Cane Toad’, the poet and her young daughter encounter some teenagers on Valentine’s Day:

She asks me,
of all people,
if they are going to marry,
those beatified ones,
out decking each other in posies
in the quiet toilet paper aisle.

‘Killing Plovers’ is a yarn about family life that takes on a fable-like quality about humans’ relations to other animals; ‘The Birth of the Universe’ is a wonderful poem about a) the Big Bang and b) giving birth.

The section ‘Flood’ comprises six prose poems, including ‘I Am John Is Dead’, long enough to be called a short story, about a young woman’s encounter with a New Age guru in the outback, which accurately describes itself as ‘like a Jim Jarmusch film’.

Page 47* is the title page for the book’s final section, ‘High’. The section includes just one poem, ‘A Shallow Boat’, in which the narrator with one other person goes sailing off the Queensland coast. Since the note on sources mentions this poem, I looked at the Tennyson poem again, and found:

In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
       Over tower'd Camelot;
Outside the isle a shallow boat
Beneath a willow lay afloat,
Below the carven stern she wrote,
       The Lady of Shalott.

This is the boat on which the Lady of Shalott floated to her doom.

Happily, the speaker of Ivy Ireland’s sailing excursion survives, having had a very nice time, even if it is sometimes scary and perhaps humiliating as she feels her incompetence.

Here’s the first of the poem’s 12 parts, from page 48:

A Shallow Boat

1.

Out on the water, 
wind shocks with volume.
Waves whip-crack me to sleep, 
hustle me awake at all hours.
The boat screams in joyous bells 
beyond twelve knots.
I lack words to remark on 
the changeability of air and temper, 
the tang on my tongue
as words are taken from my mouth 
as sharp as the smack of cormorants 
hitting water 
in free-fall.

All I really want to say about this is that I love it. I have no desire to go sailing. I breathe a guilty sigh of relief when I realise that the Emerging Artist gets seasick very easily, so is unlikely to be urging me to do it. But I love it as evoked in this poem.

The poem is almost a sonnet. The first six lines describe the wind, the waves, the sounds of the boat. Then there’s a turn, and in the next five lines the poet tries and fails to articulate a response. Then there’s a three-line equivalent to a sonnet’s final couplet – rather than a witty encapsulation of what has gone before, here it’s the cormorants, ostensibly a metaphor for the poet’s speechlessness but actually just there, smacking the water.

Every verb, every adjective, every noun is carrying its share of the meaning-load, and the sound design is wonderful. The echoing Ws bind the lines together, with a little respite for Ts (‘temper’, ‘tang’, ‘tongue’, ‘taken’, and then ‘cormorants’) in lines 8 to 11. Back to W and then the Fs in the last line introduce a new, final sound.

The Tennysonian hints of doom may be realised in later parts of the poem, as in these chillingly succinct lines from part viii:

There's a point 
where climate emergency, 
once witnessed, 
ticks over from 
possible to inevitable;
anything else is inconceivable.

But that’s context rather than substance. The joy in this poem, as in the whole book, is in celebrating engagement with the natural world, vulnerable, dangerous, fragile, awesome, beautiful, breathtaking (sometimes literally). From section ix:

Orange shifts over the horizon, and here we are: 
alive, while countless others are not.
Who am I to deserve daybreak. This happening here, 
sea eagle fishing beside the boat,
sea turtle snorting to the surface. What's it for, 
to be so honoured.

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I wrote this blog post on land of the Gadigal and Wangal clans of the Eora Nation. I’m posting it on a day that has shifted from bright blue sky to heavy downpour within hours. From my window I can see wet gum leaves reflecting the afternoon sunlight as they have been witnessed by First nations peoples here for tens of thousands of years.

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* My blogging practice for some time has been to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age. A focus on just one page seems to me to be almost necessary with books of poetry, where the parts are so often greater than the whole. As Tide has fewer than 77 pages, so I’m focusing instead on my birth year, ’47.

The Essays of Montaigne, progress report 2

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics 1991, translated by M. A. Screech) Book 1, from part way through Essay 26, ‘On educating children’, to Essay 41, ‘On not sharing one’s fame’

I’m enjoying my morning read of Montaigne, now at the end of my second month.

As expected, his name has cropped up elsewhere. The time I noticed was on Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens’s podcast The Minefield, when talking about the recent stabbings in Sydney. Scott referred to the essay that M. A. Screech translates as ‘On Affectionate Relationships’ to illustrate something he was saying about grief.

That essay was one I read this month. Though its discussion of grief is wonderful, the thing that stands out for me in it is his exalted notion of friendship. The meeting of souls that these days tends to be identified, hopefully, as part of romantic love he sees as quite distinct, and separate, from the love of spouse (he says ‘wife’) or children. Revisiting them now, I see that the paragraphs on grief are wonderful. For example:

I drag wearily on. The very pleasures which are proffered me do not console me: they redouble my sorrow at his loss. In everything we were halves: I feel I am staling his share from him. (Page 217)

The essays I have just read are ‘Reflections upon Cicero’ and ‘On not sharing one’s fame’. I wish my Latin teachers could have told me about the Cicero one in high school: it would have made it much more fun to study that ‘Cui bono?’ speech if I’d known how Montaigne despised its author. speaking of Cicero and Pliny the Younger, he writes:

What surpasses all vulgarity of mind in people of such rank is to have sought to extract some major glory from chatter and verbiage, using to that end even private letters written to their friends; when some of their letters could not be sent as the occasion for them had lapsed they published them all the same, with the worthy excuse that they did not want to waste their long nights of toil! How becoming in two Roman consuls, sovereign governors of the commonwealth which was mistress of the world, to use their leisure to construct and nicely clap together some fair missive or other, in order to gain from it the reputation of having thoroughly mastered the language of their nanny! (Page 279)

Then, wonderfully, two pages later in ‘On not sharing one’s fame’, in discussing the way ‘concern for reputation and glory’ is the most accepted and most universal of ‘all the lunacies in this world’ he writes this, without a trace of his earlier disparagement:

For, as Cicero says, even those who fight it still want their books against it to bear their names in the title and hope to become famous for despising fame.

But then, he regularly says that he has a poor memory.

The very last thing I read this morning is a wonderful example of how Montaigne can surprise and delight (though it’s also an example of the violence that permeates Montaigne’s world). He has been piling on examples of people (all male) who have acted to enhance someone else’s fame and glory, often to the detriment of their own. Then, in the last couple of sentences he swerves off into a comic non sequitur:

Somebody in my own time was criticised by the King for ‘laying hands on a clergyman’; he strongly and firmly denied it: all he had done was to thrash him and trample on him. (Page 289)

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This blog post, like most of mine, was written on Gadigal-Wangal land as the days grow shorter and spiderwebs multiply, even in the heavy rain. I acknowledge the Elders past, present and emerging of those Nations.

The Book Group & Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, page 77

Richard Flanagan, Question 7 (Knopf 2023)

Before the meeting: Richard Flanagan is a giant of Australian literature. His non-fiction work has been transformative. He has won the Booker Prize and many other awards.

Before this year, I had read one and a half of his novels and had no desire to read any more. My blog posts on The Unknown Terrorist and Wanting speak for themselves.

So, bidden by the Book Group, I came to Question 7 bristling with prejudice.

I was not encouraged by this passage on the second page:

Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings – why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of why.
But there is no truth. There is only why. And when we look closer we see that behind that why is just another tapestry.
And behind it another, and another, until we arrive at oblivion.

Oh really? Other opinions are available, but this struck me as the kind of thing Les Murray meant when he described another of Richard Flanagan’s books as ‘superficial, showy and pretentious’ (link here)?

But what the Book Group wants, the Book Group gets … I read on.

I found a lot to dislike. The whole Question 7 schtick struck me as ‘superficial, showy and pretentious’ (more about that later). There are a couple of pages that could have been written by a self-righteous teenager, denouncing Oxford holus bolus as misogynist, racist and imperialist; a sneer often hovers at the edge of Flanagan’s descriptions of other writers; there’s a muddled insistence that all time is now – a kind of mix-up of Kurt Vonnegut in The Sirens of Titan and co-opted Indigenous notions. Regularly, out of the blue, there will be a bit of ‘philosophising’ about the uselessness of words, or a portentous one-line paragraph: Chekhov’s non-sequitur, ‘Who loves longest?’ or the sub-Vonnegut refrain, ‘That’s life.’

It could have been an engrossing book. There are powerful portraits of his grandmother, his mother and his father, and a gruelling, operatic account of near-death as a young adult. Above all, there’s the way Flanagan sets out to explore his own origins in the context of world history.

His father was a prisoner of the Japanese in 1945 and would have died in the camp if not for the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – Flanagan owes his existence to that massively destructive act.

The book comes at that painful paradox from a number of angles: his father’s reminiscences of the camp; his own visit to its site, including an encounter with a former guard; stories about H. G. Wells, who coined the phrase ‘atom bomb’; the life of Leo Szilard, the scientist who first conceived of a chain reaction and after 1945 became a tireless campaigner for nuclear disarmament. It’s a fascinating tapestry of interlacing lives, thoughts and actions.

Flanagan is a Tasmanian, so he also owes his existence to the genocidal dispossession of the First Nations of luwitja. (In one of the recurrences that the book delights in, H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds was inspired that history.) There are powerful passages about colonisation, which (to my mind) he undermines by describing the term settler colonial society as lazy thinking because it hides the inequalities on which what he calls ‘the new Martian world’ was built. His point is that many of the first non-Indigenous arrivals were convicts, suffering terribly under the British system – and among them he counts his forebears. IMHO, settler colonial society is a fine term: patriarchy doesn’t hide inequalities among men; capitalist society doesn’t hide inequalities in our current world. The fact that you suffer doesn’t change the fact that you play an oppressive role. Not that Flanagan denies that, but he want to make it clear that his people were primarily victims rather than perpetrators.

But I’m getting irritated again.

Page 77* does not show the book in its best light. It falls in the midst of an excursion into historical fiction involving H. G. Wells.

The much younger Rebecca West has come into Wells’s life, and they are mutually entranced. After a first passionate kiss, he withdraws – not so much because he already has a wife and a mistress as because, according to Flanagan, she is too much his equal.

All that is evidently true to the known facts. West and Wells’s relationship was to endure. She had a son with him and they remained friends until his death. But at page 77 that’s all in the future, and she is struggling with his rejection of her:

Rebecca West, though, was not for defeat. For her, love and victory were synonyms. And she was not one for losing. She coupled audacity and ambition with an idea of stability she would forever after mistake older men as offering. She held herself to a high standard. She had written only a few months earlier how unrequited love was pathetic and undignified, adding as proof her contention that Christianity lacked dignity – and by implication was pathetic – not because Christ was crucified, but because his love for the world was unrequited. ‘A passion that fails to inspire passion,’ she wrote, ‘is defeated in the main object of its being.’

Having dispensed with God, she wrote to Wells that she was going to kill herself after being rejected by him, that all she could do was love. She had tried to hack the overwhelming love she felt for him back to the little thing he seemed to want. But even that, she realised, was too much for him.

Does that feel to you like a real person? Is it respectful of the historical Rebecca West? Does it use its sources fairly or even accurately? On the latter point, I looked up the essay it quotes (in The Freewoman, July 2012). It’s a brilliantly witty takedown of a book of literary history, in which the reference to Christ is cheeky, but not dismissive and not meant to prove anything. Flanagan is being snide, and not pretending otherwise. His Rebecca West is basically a comic character.

But what is she doing in this book at all? Maybe she’s there to establish that Wells was a truly complex, flawed human being (‘flawed’, to be specific, means physically ugly and using high-sounding ideals of free love to justify his promiscuity). It also serves the purpose of having a strong female presence in the historical part of the novel, which is otherwise full of men. This particular passage may owe something to her reference to Jesus echoing a repeated line in Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist: ‘the innocent heart of Jesus could never have enough of human love.’

The West–Wells story also, confusingly I think, seems to relate to the book’s title. That title is a riff on an early Chekhov short story, ‘Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician’, an absurd parody of a mathematics quiz. The seventh quiz item starts with trains leaving stations at various times and ends with the non-sequitur question, ‘Who loves longer, a man or a woman?’ Because it’s posed as a question about gender, the Wells–West story (the only romance in the book) seems to hark back to it, but I think now probably not, as the version of the question that pops like a refrain, is simply, ‘Who loves longer?’ (Incidentally, the only version of Chekhov’s story I could find online, at this link, translates the question as, ‘Who is capable of loving?’ I’d be interested to know if the gendered version of the question is more a product of the gendered nature of the Russian language than of Chekhov’s intention.)

In the rest of the page, we follow the West-resistant Wells to Switzerland:

Wells arrived at his mistress’s magnificent Swiss retreat with his two sons and half a suitcase of scientific reprints concerning the recent discoveries about radium – discoveries that, he told Little e, as he called the diminutive Elizabeth, pleasantly took his mind as far away as laudanum once had Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s and which would form the basis of the novel he would write – the story of man summoning a power equivalent to the sun.

Wells runs from West to write the novel that is his reason for being in this book. It’s The World Set Free, in which he will coin the term ‘atom bomb’ and imagine with amazing accuracy the devastation such a bomb was to create. (I’m depending on Flanagan’s description. The novel is available at Project Gutenberg for the truly dedicated.)

Presumably the real-life Wells is being cited here, but what sense does it make to say that his lifelong interest in science was like a drug? In the immediate context, the implication seems to be that his interest in radioactivity is a distraction from the emotional turmoil associated with with Rebecca West. Am I wrong to read this as a sneer?

So, I look forward to having the virtues of the book made clear to me by people who have not been blinded by their own grumpiness.

After the meeting: After a wonderfully eclectic dinner over which we had exchanged important information about dumplings and life in general, we had one of the most interesting and spirited Book Group discussions ever.

Evidently it’s a love-it-or-hate-it book, and we were fairly evenly divided.

One man had hated the Wells-West thread so much that he re-read the book leaving it out, only to discover that he still hated the book, and spent days trying to figure out why. As I understand it, he realised that he regularly came up against a closing off of possibilities – just as Flanagan proclaimed he was opening up to complexity he would shut things down with a piece of certainty.

Another, on the contrary, read the book as an anti-narrative. Those shutting-down moments were a way of frustrating our quest for simple answers in an impossibly complex world. It’s important that Question 7 is about love, because all through the book there’s a dreadful intertwining of love and brutality.

Where some felt Flanagan was arrogant and withheld, others read him as exposing his own vulnerability. One loved the Rebecca West story; another loathed it. One read out a passage he particularly loved eliciting sympathetic nods from some and groans from others. Some felt that the book spoke directly to their own experience as colonial settlers, others not so much. I had to admit that I had got fixated on the things that annoyed me, and disregarded things that otherwise would have fed my soul.

None of us had previously heard of Leo Szilard. One of us said he now has Family Matters, by Flanagan’s brother Martin, on his to-be-read list, as a supplement to Richard’s account of his parents.

It was amazing! I don’t think anyone left feeling bruised. For myself, I intend to reread the book. But not for a while.

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* My blogging practice for some time has been to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age. Surprisingly, this page often reveals interesting things about the book as a whole.

Alan Kohler’s Great Divide

Alan Kohler, The Great Divide: Australia’s Housing Mess and How to Fix It (Quarterly Essay 92, 2023) – plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 93

Alan Kohler appears regularly on the ABC News, the genial presenter of largely incomprehensible finance updates. He usually flashes up a chart or two, giving the impression he’s doing it for his own amusement as much as our enlightenment, and then signs off, ‘And that’s finance.’

This Quarterly Essay has some of that trademark geniality, and it has graphs, but it’s a long way from incomprehensible. As someone who is near-illiterate about economics, I found it wonderfully instructive about the background and causes of the current housing crisis, and while his proposed solutions seem unlikely to be implemented I could follow their logic.

The key issue is probably obvious, but it’s a joy to see it named so clearly:

The houses we live in the places we call home and bring up our families in, have been turned into speculative investment assets by fifty years of government policy failure. (Page 3)

The notion of a home as investment goes back further than 50 years, as the essay describes, but as with so many of the ills of contemporary Australia, it got a big boost under the prime ministership of John Howard. Then, around the turn of the century, three main things pushed up demand for housing and consequently the price:

A sharp life in immigration that increased the number of people needing a place to live; capital ganis tax breaks and negative gearing, which represent a $96 billion per year subsidy for buying houses;and federal first home buyer grants, which represent a $1.5 billion direct addition to house prices each year. (Page 7)

Add into the mix the conflicting concerns of the three different levels of government, particularly the stalemate that results when state governments push for medium density housing in areas where local governments insist on restrictive zoning regulations.

On the reluctance of politicians to do something about the cost of housing, Alan Kohler quotes John Howard’s bon mot (or mauvais mot if you like): ‘No one came up to me to complain about the increase in the value of their home.’ A sizeable portion of the electorate – home owners and many aspiring home owners – have a vested interest in having prices continue to increase.

Kohler expands lucidly on all these matters, and goes on to propose solutions: of course, to increase the supply of housing, for which he makes a number of suggesrtions; ‘a big investment in trains designed to at least double, preferably triple, the commutable distance from the capital cities and industrial inner suburbs where people work’; ‘reducing demand by restricting negative gearing and increasing capital gains tax’, which ‘should happen, but probably won’t; ‘increasing the supply of medium density in existing suburbs through better zoning and planning’ (which is ‘still more talk than action’); and more abstractly, for government to set an ‘affordability target’, to reduce the ratio of house prices to wages.

On page 77*, Kohler expands on that last proposal:

House prices need to stay put for a while and allow incomes to catch up. Average weekly earnings are currently rising at about 4 per cent a year. For the national median house price [at time of writing the essay] of $740,668 to be 3.5 times income, the average wage would have to be $210,000, more than double what it is now. At 4 per cent growth in incomes per year, that would take about eighteen years.
The only time house prices remained unchanged for that long was from 1930 to 1949 – that is, during the Great Depression and the period of price controls in the war. Even after the recessions of 1982 and 1991, it took less than half that long for prices to start rising again.
So fifteen to twenty years of static house prices would be unprecedented, but that sort of time frame might also get Australians out of the habit of thinking that house prices always rise and that housing is the best way to build wealth. And if housing affordability is to be properly dealt with, we have to change that mindset, because house prices won’t stop rising at twice the rate of incomes unless we stop expecting them to.

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Alan Kohler’s 86-page essay generated more than 50 pages of correspondence in the next Quarterly Essay (Lech Blaine’s Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics). The correspondents range from qualified approval, such as Joseph Walker’s description of the essay as ‘sober, necessary and broadly correct in its conclusions’ to this scathing ‘stay-in-your-lane’ dismissal by Peter Tulip, chief economist at the Liberal-Party aligned Centre for Independent Studies:

Public discussion of housing policy suffers from undisciplined eclecticism. Too many commentators provide long, unstructured lists of multiple causes or conclude that the truth lies between competing explanations. This muddle reflects an inability or an unwillingness to distinguish the important from the unimportant. Alan Kohler’s Great Divide and the accompanying media coverage are examples.

There’s a lot of robust discussion, which (did I mention that I’m ignorant about economics) I can only watch in dismay. Everyone agrees that there is a problem – that, as Kohler says in the essay, ‘the high price of housing is undermining social cohesion and the proper functioning of the economy and the nation.’ And it’s heartening to see so many people who have invested so much thinking and action in the issue. I’ll give Alan Kohler the last word (it is the last paragraph of his gracious Response to Correspondence):

The process of researching this subject and then engaging with responses to my essay has confirmed that this is a subject about which a lot of people have been thinking deeply and expertly for a long time, and Australia is well served by them. It’s just a pity they are not listened to more. We are less well served by the politicians and bureaucrats whose job it is to do something about it.

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* My fairly arbitrary blogging practice is to focus on the page of a book that coincides with my age. This page often reveals interesting things about the book as a whole.

The Book Club and Paul Murray’s Bee Sting

Paul Murray, The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton 2023)

Before the meeting: Grandparenting during school holidays has left me with very little time to write about The Bee Sting before the Book Club meets, so this may be sketchy.

I loved it. It’s a beautifully written Irish novel, a family saga in which each chapter focuses on a family member in rotation, with a couple of other characters taking a chapter each. A teenage girl, Cass, can’t wait to leave her tiny village behind and go to University in Dublin with her unreliable best friend. Her younger brother, PJ, is in a world of trouble at school. Their father, Dickie, is in much worse trouble as his Volkwagen dealership, inherited from his tough-man father, is falling on hard times, and – as we discover – that’s the least of his worries. Their mother, Imelda, formerly a stunning beauty, is bitterly discontented. There’s adultery, blackmail, teenage alcoholism, survivalist adventures in the woods, small-town scandal-mongering, a malign version of the Terence Stamp character in Pasolini’s Teorema, and a final chapter that feels like a version of the opening of Act Two of Sondheim’s Into the Woods …

A friend of mine who worked as an assistant director on TV says he usually has to read a novel twice: the first time he is in professional mode, taking note of the locations; only on the second reading can he attend to characters and plot. I’m pretty sure he would love his first read of The Bee Sting. The locations are brilliantly realised: a shed in the woods that is in turn a place for young people to hang out, a site of sexual danger, a survivalist project, a place for a secret stash, and the focus of the book’s final movement; the prestigious but grungy ‘Rooms’ at Trinity College; the elegant, dilapidated family home; the contrasting house where Imelda grew up; some new project homes that have been left unfinished when the Celtic Tiger failed.

What kept me in thrall, though, was the way characters’ back stories unfold like petals on a surprising flower, involving among other things the tragic death of Dickie’s elder brother (a local sports hero who had been engaged to Imelda and who was, we believe, the apple of his father’s eye), a car accident that injured Dickie in his days at Trinity College, and the titular bee sting that meant Imelda’s face remained hidden under her veil at her wedding.

The story of the bee sting turns out to be just that: a story. And the same goes for almost every story from the family’s past.

Rather than saying any more about the book in general, I want to focus on one moment. It involves a minor character named Willie. As a young man at Trinity he embodies the brilliantly witty, ironic, flamboyant element of university life that intimidates and entrances young Dickie fresh from small-town life. When Dickie leaves university after his brother’s death, Willie disappears from the book, only to turn up much later to give a talk that Cass attends almost by accident. The talk goes for roughly five pages, and is a brilliant example of a scene that does many things at once: it brings us up to date with WIllie’s life, showing him to us in a new light; it gives his perspective on a key incident that until now we have only seen from Dickie’s point of view; it moves Cass along decisively on her trajectory; it brings to the fore the book’s preoccupation with climate change and – possibly – allows the author to put an argument that’s dear to his heart. At least, it spoke to me as if from his heart:

Here’s a little from toward the end the speech:

Togetherness is crucial, if we’re to tackle something as total as climate change. Banging your own little drum, demanding everyone look at your mask, be it a consumer status symbol or one of sexuality or race or religious belief or whatever else, that will do no good. Division will do no good. You may gain some attention for your particular subgroup, there may even be minor accommodations made. But you are moving the deckchairs on a sinking ship, diversity deckchairs. Global apocalypse is not interested in your identity politics or who you pray to or what side of the border you live on. Cis, trans, black, white, scientist, artist, basketball player, priest – every stripe of person, every colour and creed, we are all going to be hit by this hammer. And that is another fact that unites us. We are all alive together in this sliver of time in which the human race decides whether or not it will come to an end.

I just love that. The fact that a few pages later a young character characterises the speech as loathsome fascist rhetoric only deepens my awe for Paul Murray’s story-telling.

After the Meeting: The Bee Sting shared our agenda with Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos (link is to my blog post). We generally liked this book much more than the other, though more than one thought it was a good yarn but not much more than that. The Emerging Artist and I definitely liked the book more than everyone else.

One person singled out Willie’s speech, though for a very different reason from me. She saw it as symptomatic of the way the book is contrived, its world kept deliberately narrow. Why bring that character back in? she asked. I don’t see that as a problem – it’s not even up there with Dickensian coincidences – Ireland has a small population, and the same people will keep on turning up.

We tended to agree that there were longueurs and improbabilities when Dickie, PJ and another man go on their survivalist project.

Spoilerphobia stops me from airing one genuinely puzzling thing that occurred to me during the discussion. But two, and only two, of the characters have names that seem to mock aspects of their story – not so much them, as perhaps one of the Club members thought, as the act of creating their story.

When someone said that the book would make an interesting TV series, there was general assent.

Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos and the Book Club

Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos (translated by Michael Hofmann, Granta 2023)

Before the meeting: The Emerging Artist read this book before I did. She hated it, couldn’t finish it, and threatened to divorce me if I ended up liking it. Though I wouldn’t say I absolutely loved the first 166 pages, by page 167 (of 292) I was pretty sure our relationship was safe.

In a prologue, the book’s narrator, Katharine, learns that a former lover has died. She is unable to attend his funeral as she has promised, but soon after the funeral two boxes of material are delivered to her door by a weeping woman. Here’s how she describes the project that becomes this book:

Kairos, the god of fortunate moments, is supposed to have a lock of hair on his forehead, which is the only way of grasping hold of him. Because once the god has slipped past on his winged feet, the back of his head is sleek and hairless, nowhere to grab hold of. Was it a fortunate moment, then, when she, just nineteen, first met Hans? One day in early November, she sits down on the floor and prepares herself to sift – sheet by sheet, folder by folder – through the contents of the first box, then the second.

What follows, based on the contents of those boxes plus a suitcase of Katharina’s own memorabilia, is the story of her relationship with Hans, a married man who is ten years older than her father, 51 to her 19. Two things inclined my expectations against the Emerging Artist’s distaste. First, the set-up linked nicely to other recent reading – mainly Annie Ernaux’s The Young Man (link is to my blog post), a memoir of a relationship between the author and a much younger man. Second, it’s set in East Germany in the 1980s in the prelude and aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, so I thought (correctly) that the book would capture something of the flavour of that time and place.

The book starts with a cute meet in a downpour in Berlin in 1985. There’s a period of mutual bliss, which blossoms all too quickly into a physically and psychologically abusive nightmare, to which Katharina is inexplicably committed, so that by page 167 without any explanation she has evidently consented to being tied up and beaten with a belt, and later with a riding crop. Until that point, the historical context was enough to keep me afloat as a reader. The hideous mind games move up a notch as Hans convinces Katharina that she is cold, selfish and deceitful and sends her a series of cassettes detailing how terribly she has made him suffer. Instead of pulling the plug, she listens to the tapes, takes careful notes (hence the narrator’s ability to recall them even though he destroys each hour-long diatribe by taping the next one over it), and writes a self- abasing reply, thereby provoking another cassette.

The hideous gaslighting continues for many pages. Several times the reader breathes a sigh of relief as it seems the relationship is finished, and then it’s on again with occasional moments of joy and endless rounds of blame and accusation on his part and wretched self-abasement on hers. Maybe its an allegory about East Germany, as Neel Mukherjee says on the back cover, but I can’t see it.

I’m glad I persisted, because a) the worm does finally turn, if ever so slowly and slightly, and more importantly b) there are several wonderful pages about how the reunification of Germany was experienced by the Easties. Maybe for German readers the relationship between the central relationship and the historical moments would be clearer, but I couldn’t see it as more than a gruelling account of a vulnerable young woman being exploited by a self-obsessed and cruel much older man, with the broad sweep of history barely impinging on their lives until massive change happens all around them.

Page 204: I usually blog about page 77. It would have been interesting to linger on that page in Kairos, where Katharina first visits the West, foreshadowing the final movement. But this time I want to give you a bit of page 204, which is the moment when I first began to hope for something other than abuse and submission, and catch a glimmer of the book’s intention to capture what it was like to have lived through first the Nazi and then East German Communist regimes. It’s the closest Hans comes to introspection:

The abolition of a pitiless world through pitilessness. But when does the phase after begin? When is the moment to stop the killing? … To be arrested or to carry out arrests and believe in the cause, to be beaten or to beat and believe in the cause, to be betrayed or to betray and believe in the cause. What cause would ever again be great enough to unite victims and murderers in one heartbeat? That it would make victims out of murderers and murderers out of victims, until no one could tell any more which he was? Arrest and be arrested, beat and be beaten, betray and be betrayed, till hope, selflessness, sorrow, shame, guilt, and fear all make one indissoluble whole … And if beauty can only be bought with ugliness, and free existence with fear? Probably, Hans thinks, turning aside, and hearing Katharina mutter something incomprehensible in her sleep, that’s probably what it took to produce the deeper experience that you can see here in every woman, every man, every child even.

After the meeting: After a pleasant meal of mussels and pasta, we dutifully turned to a discussion of the books (Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting was also on our agenda, blog post to follow). Only two of the five of us had finished the book. There was some discussion about whether Book Clunb members had an obligation to read the books. I think the position that ended up being accepted was that yes, they do, except if a book offends their value system intolerably. Kairos was such a case for at least one of last night’s non-completers.

Generally we agreed that it was an awful read. I tried to argue that the final section, in which the Wall comes down, made the whole book worth reading, but I didn’t even convince myself. I also argued that the eerie lack of internality in the characters was not a bug but a feature: the narrator is reconstructing a painful episode from her youth, which she no longer understands or perhaps can’t bear to imagine herself back into. So she meticulously recreates a narrative from the documents, including details of places, times, food eaten, drinks drunk, transport caught, the content of cassette tapes and letters, and leaves it to the reader to imagine the emotional content beyond the broad outlines of ‘love’. I pretty much convinced myself that this was an accurate reading, but no one else bought it.

We didn’t talk about the translation at all. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that the book would almost certainly speak more forcefully to German readers, not so much because of the language as because of their connection to the history.

In short, not a recommended read.

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I wrote this post on Gadigal-Wangal land, not far from the Cooks River, in a place that was once wetland teeming with birdlife. I finished it after a long walk through Gadigal land to the waters of Sydney Harbour/Warrane on a beautiful autumn day. I want to acknowledge the people who have looked after this place for tens of thousands of years, their Edlers past presnt and emerging.

Chris Mansell’s Foxline

Chris Mansell, Foxline (Flying Island 2021)

Chris Mansell is an Australian poet with an impressive list of books and awards to her name. She has also played a significant role in fostering and publishing other poets. Here’s a link to her website. Foxline is part of Flying Island’s Pocket Poets Series, small enough to fit into a shirt pocket, but offering a substantial reading experience.

The book’s last page has a note describing its genesis:

I came across a fenceline of foxes scalped and strung by their hind legs on the boundary fence of a farm. There were about two hundred dead and even dead they were beautiful. … I imagined the farmer, perhaps less articulate than the fox. I imagined him walking the paddocks in stolid opposition to the creatures that were taking his sheep.
It is real and it is also traditional. It is in his blood as it is in the blood of the fox to hunt and feed their young.

Each of the book’s 30 poems is spoken by the farmer or a fox. In most of the fox poems the speaker is a female fox; occasionally we hear from a young male, and even once or twice a flying fox. Both Fox and Man (they are capitalised in the marginal notes) are interested in more than each other, but mainly the poems deal with their relationship: their antagonism, their attempts to understand each other, and their recognition of what they have in common. They even manage to learn from each other.

In one poem (‘Dark Solo’) a young male fox becomes the fox in Ted Hughes’s poem ‘The Thought-Fox’. But the literary work I was most strongly reminded of is Roald Dahl’s The Marvellous Mister Fox. In some ways Mansell’s book could be read as an adult response to Dahl’s. Here there is no easy resolution to the conflict between Man and Fox and, contrary to what you might expect from Mansell’s account of the book’s origins, both characters elicit our sympathy.

Before I talk about page 77*, I want to name my favourite stanza in the book. It’s the beginning of ‘Surprise’, one of the Man’s poems, and is a haiku-like stanza (or more accurately senryu-like, as haiku aren’t supposed to mention people):

we are always surprised
here every winter
we are amazed it's cold

The poem goes on to arrive, elegantly, at how we are ‘astounded / by death especially’. I love the way the poem makes poetry from an often-heard New-South-Wales joke, then takes it somewhere unexpected but completely right.

Page 77 is the beginning of the poem, ‘He relates their conversation’.

HE RELATES THEIR CONVERSATION

Like every poem in the book, this one has a note in the margin telling us who is speaking and offering a brief summary, the way some 18th century novels do, as if acknowledging that the semi-articulate protagonists don’t always make themselves clear:

The Man 
recounts the 
Fox's wisdom

The italics on this page signify that though the Man is speaking, he is relating the Fox’s words. The Fox’s ‘wisdom’ is paradoxical:

fox says sometimes of our friendship
I think it is failure that keeps
us together

In what way are they together? And whose failure does she mean? An obvious meaning is that ‘together’ really means ‘both alive in the same locality’, and the failure is that of the Man – he has failed in his quest to kill the fox. But the word ‘friendship’ in the first line suggests that something else is going on. Its cryptic possibilities provide the impetus to read on.

that I should fail in certain ways 
be unkept and poor to be less 
approved of in the field

Before she gets to ‘friendship’, the Fox expands on what she means by ‘failure’. She is the one who must fail. To understand ‘in certain ways’ we don’t need to think beyond the Fox’s activity as sheep-killer. If she succeeds in killing or even damaging the Man’s livestock that’s the end of any fellow-feeling. ‘Unkept’ is an example of the way the Fox’s language is interestingly off-kilter throughout the book. It’s not quite ‘unkempt’ though it possibly includes that. It suggests the opposite of ‘well-kept’ as in well-fed. The fox needs to be bad at her job – ‘less / approved of’ in the field’ by other foxes, perhaps.

you have the rifle 
your freedoms and fiefdoms are
what you choose_ your limits

and your boundaries are bought 
owned certified and succinct

(The double space in the third line here acts as a break in the meaning – a full stop.) But yes, the Man must also fail in his quest to eliminate the fox. He has the means, but he can choose to act freely or according to an imposed order. ‘Freedoms and fiefdoms’ is a wonderfully evocative phrase: is this farmer a free operative or is he pretty much a serf in the current economic order? It’s his choice. the limits and boundaries are those of the farm, but they are also limitations and constrictions on himself that he has bought into.

I wear the orange and you the black

On first reading, I had no idea what this meant. Now that I’ve pondered the previous lines, its meaning leaps out at me. The Fox is making an analogy to sporting teams – Australian cricketers wear the baggy greens, Indians the bleed blues. The Fox and the Man belong on different teams.

I won’t go on in detail about the remaining page and a bit. In short, the man now speaks in his own voice, expressing a wish to become the Fox, and they recognise the similarity between the rifle and the fox’s ‘whitesharp teeth’. According to an explanatory side note:

They know 
they have a 
tense 
commonality

‘Tense commonality’ is an excellent human-prose translation of the Fox’s term ‘friendship’.

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* My blogging practice is to focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age. This page often reveals interesting things about the book as a whole.

Robbie Coburn’s Ghost Poetry

Robbie Coburn, Ghost Poetry (Upswell Press 2024)

Ghost Poetry‘s back cover blurb includes a discreet trigger warning:

Always vulnerable, and often confronting and harrowing, Ghost Poetry is a beautifully crafted and important work that will scar the reader.

I agree that these poems are beautifully crafted and confronting, but I wouldn’t say I was actually scarred by them. They do deal with tough subjects – self harm, addiction, the mental health system, suicidal ideation, miscarriage, abortion, rape and more. But there are also horses, a love-poetry thread, and always the sense that the poetry is doing much more than giving vent to pain and suffering, and not at all playing for shocks.

Some of the poems are presented as accounts of dreams, of nightmares really, and many others have a dreamlike quality. Perhaps more accurately, in many of the poems the border between waking and dreaming is blurred so that the emotional intensity and weird logic of nightmare suffuses the daylight world. Sometimes the speaker seems to be a ghost.

A partial list of the titles in ‘Blood Ritual’, the first of the book’s three sections, gives an idea of what I mean: ‘Dream of Human Sacrifice’, ‘Oblivion’, ‘Dream of Scarification’, ‘Cutter’, ‘Dream of Suicide’, ‘Bloodletting’, ‘Dream of Abortion’, ‘I Dreamed I Saw You on a Bridge’, ‘Asylum’. I’m not being entirely flippant when I say it was a relief to read the opening lines of ‘Poetry’, the final poem in the section:

I am tired of these poems;

you can only write your own death
so many times before
you begin to plan for its arrival.

The second section, ‘Wreck’, is filled with horses, and love poems. Again, there is a lot of pain, but also moments of delight as in ‘Foals’, where the poem’s speaker addresses a loved one. You don’t need to have been around newborn foals or calves to be moved by the poem’s final lines, though you may need to have been in love:

as I followed you
your gumboots making a space
for our feet in the wet grass

like two newborn foals
teaching one another
how to walk.

If I had to name a single subject (always a bit of a mug’s game) of the third section, ‘Straw Horses’, I’d say it was love for someone in pain:

I want to touch your tortured bones 
as if my hands were gauze.

But my practice of looking at page 77 demonstrates that it’s not just the loved one who is in pain. ‘Love Poem to a Razorblade’ is not the only one that deals with flesh being cut, in other poems mostly by knives, in dreams, and the flesh not necessarily that of the speaker. Here the subject is definitely self-harm:

It’s a hard poem to write about. As I was drafting this blog post, an article by Rose Cartwright in the Guardian Online threw me a lifeline. It included this:

‘What happened here?’ a colleague asked innocently on set, pointing to the scars on my arm.
‘I used to cut myself,’ I said. I didn’t tell her how recently.
She glanced around. No one nearby to rescue us. ‘Really?’
‘Really,’ I said with a reassuring smile.
There was an awkward silence, which I didn’t fill, since the explanation I would have once filled it with – ‘I was mentally ill’ – no longer felt right.

I was the poster girl for OCD, Guardian 13 April 2024

This poem sets out to bridge that awkward silence. You will read it differently depending on the experience you bring to it. For myself, I’ve never had a compulsion to self-harm, at least not of the cutting kind, and my relevant experience is limited to conversations with parents of young ‘cutters’. One of the main things I’ve gleaned is that communication is problematic: the young person can’t talk about what’s happening and/or the person wanting to help can’t bear to hear what they’re trying to say. That difficulty is at the heart of this poem.

I don’t know if Robbie Coburn is writing from his own lived experience, or as an extraordinary act of empathetic imagination. Either way, the poem calls on the reader to attend to a voice that is rarely heard.

Love Poem to a Razorblade

Anyone who has ever been addicted to anything harmful – cigarettes, ultra-processed foods, chocolate – recognises the paradox. If, as a person with high blood pressure, I were to write ‘Love Poem to a Fried Dim Sim’, the tone would be different: despite the best efforts of nutritionists, a fried dim sim habit is only mildly stigmatised, certainly not seen as ‘mental illness’. But the paradox is similar. The behaviour is doing me no good, but I am drawn to it. It’s not too much of a stretch to call that love.

The first lines are full of possibilities:

As a child I knew
I could keep you hidden.

I turned away from the past 
and saw your mouth open 
and cover me.

First there’s secretiveness. This isn’t about guilt. It’s not ‘should’, but ‘could’ – there’s a kind of power there. But the question hovers: ‘Hidden from whom?’ From someone who would punish or shame the young one, probably. The next line provokes an allied question, ‘What happened in the past that I had to turn away from it?’ As I read it, the speaker had an (unspecified) unbearable experience as a child and, unable to turn to a human for comfort, somehow turned to the razor blade, to self harm.

I struggle to visualise a contemporary razor blade with an open mouth, but those from my childhood, and I’m guessing from the much younger Robbie Coburn’s, could be flexed so that the opening along the middle would open out. All the same, it’s impossible to visualise this ‘mouth’ covering someone. The lines are after an emotional truth rather than a visual image – the possibilities of the blade enclosed the young person in a protective cover against whatever he was turning away from.

you told me love wasn't a word 
to be spoken
but a scar cut into the surface 
of the body.

anybody you love in this world
will mark you.

A human comforter would have said something (‘It’s all right, ‘You’re OK,’ ‘This will pass’ …). The razor blade’s ‘mouth’ had no words, its message is conveyed, recorded, imprinted, by action.

But there’s more to these lines than that. They don’t dwell on the act of cutting – the welling blood, the pain, etc – which happens in the moment, like a word. The message is in the aftermath, the enduring scar, in the surface of the body but also in the mind, an expectation that love will involve damage. But not necessarily damage! In another context that last couplet could have a completely benign meaning: isn’t it true, and interesting, that if you love somebody they have an effect on you, leave a mark on you? Here, though, ‘mark’ carries a strong negative meaning.

I believed you;
each promise immovable, 
every moment between us 
carved into permanence.

The message from the razor blade is that those effects and marks are solid, scarlike, immovable, permanent. If there’s grief or humiliation in a relationship, you will remain grief-stricken or humiliated forever. As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be. It’s not just self-harm that lodges such messages in the mind, of course. Don’t we all have moments in our childhood that have created templates for how we expect the world to always be?

even when you were taken 
you have never left me –

It’s childhood experience that has been described so far. ‘When you were taken’ implies an intervention that stopped the self-harm, possibly at an early age. But the effect of those moments persists.

the blood was ours, 
every night we were alone, 
silently holding you in secret.

In this last triplet, having reflected on the long term effects of cutting, the speaker can at last look at the moment itself. Only now, can he name the blood, and evoke the (creepy) romance of the moment. I think of the song from Calamity Jane, ‘Once I had a secret love‘, and though I can’t articulate it I know that I’ve been taken somewhere.

While writing this, I have had to walk away from the computer every now and then and breathe for a while. You can feel the poet’s steely will as he holds his mind to this subject, honouring its complexity.

It’s a gruelling book, but rewarding.

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I am grateful to Robbie Coburn for my copy of Ghost Poetry.

Romaine Moreton, Post Me to the Prime Minister, page 77

Romaine Moreton, Post Me to the Prime Minister (jukurrpa books, 2004)

Romaine Moreton is Goenpul Yagera of Minjerribah (aka Stradbroke Island) and Bundjulung of northern New South Wales. She is a poet, spoken word performer, philosopher and filmmaker. A brief showreel from the transmedia work One Billion Beats (2016), which she co-wrote and co-directed with Alanna Valentine, gives a powerful glimpse of her stage and screen presence, as well as her incisive writing (link here). Also on Vimeo is a profound lecture she gave about that work (link here), which discusses the colonial gaze and dissects colonial cinematic representations of Indigenous people.

Post Me to the Prime Minister, a collection of poems published in 2004, 12 years before that formidable work, also deals with issues faced by First Nations people. As I was reading it, I kept wishing I could see Romaine Moreton perform them. I’ve just been told that she opened for Sweet Honey in the Rock at the Sydney Opera House on one of their visits to Australia, which makes complete sense. The short film she made with Erica Glynn, A Walk with Words: The Poetry of Romaine Moreton (2024), ends with her performing the book’s final poem, ‘I will surprise you by my will’ (you can rent or purchase the whole film at this link). The poem is in the film’s trailer:

we are here and we are many,
and we shall surprise you by our will,
we wll rise from this place where you expect 
to keep us down,
and we shall surprise you by our will.

There are so many riches in this collection, but I’ll stick to my arbitrary practice of singling out page 77. It’s the second page of a long poem, ‘Once upon a patriarchy’. Here’s a pic of pages 76 and 77:

The book’s title comes from the poem’s opening lines:

truth be known,
you would very much prefer it 
if I were male

oh yes you would wrap me in glad tidings 
and post me to the prime minister and say 
how proud we are

___ our son

Things have moved a long way since the moment in the 1972 movie Ningla A-Na when Indigenous women argued vehemently that sexism was a white women’s issue, that Indigenous women needed to support Indigenous men and not challenge their sexist behaviour. More than 30 years later, this poem’s speaker doesn’t have to be defensive about the ‘colonial gaze’; it’s not written with a non-Indigenous reader foremost in mind. The strength of First Nations communities no longer depends on papering over the cracks of lateral oppression.

It’s not easy to tell who ‘you’ is in this poem. At first it may be the speaker’s parents, or perhaps a part of the First Nations population that has a parent-like relationship to her. But it shifts, and by the start of page 77 it is a First Nations man, ‘our son‘, who is being addressed. He’s a man who wishes ‘to walk as the colonial / hallowed one’. I don’t think it’s too fanciful to see him as similar to the would-be assimilationist Tomahawk in Alexis Wright’s great novel Praiseworthy (2023), or perhaps as a member of Chelsea Watego’s ’emerging tribe’ of self-appointed leaders (see the essay ‘ambiguously Indigenous’ in Another Day in the Colony, also published in 2023).

for while you vie 
for the passenger seat
the cattle truck is loaded for market
you have left me golden hallowed son

dragging 
in
the never-never

This is beautifully complicated. There’s sibling rivalry – ‘golden hallowed son’ is a variant on ‘golden-haired boy’, the favoured sibling, favoured partly because he’s male. But it’s not just that. He has decided to be part of the action, be up front in the cattle truck, join in the extractive farming of the land. He’s not in the driver’s seat, not in charge of his own destiny, but has attached himself to the power. To reinforce the farm metaphor, the poem brings in the Australian colonial ‘classic’, Mrs Aeneas (Jeannie) Gunn’s We of the Never Never (1908). I haven’t read that book, but I’m pretty sure its account of Mangarayi and Yungman who were displaced by the Elsey cattle station, and worked on it, fits the tone of these lines – a place to be left dragging.

The next lines continue to reproach, and to remind the ‘son’ of the loyalty shown by Black women. (See the scene in Ningla A-Na mentioned above.)

and while I never ever forget you 
you gladly allow me – the black female
to rot

like the wife of Lot 
though I have never 
turned

I captured you to my breast 
always remembered 
what is best

for my people 
for my people

Whatever else is going on with the ‘son’ his maleness is key, as is the speaker’s femaleness. The reference to Lot’s wife (who looked back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 and was turned into a pillar of salt as punishment) broadens the picture: women have always been punished. In this case, though, there’s not even the pretext of he having done something wrong.

If you weren’t noticing the music of the poem previously, you can’t help but hear it here. These lines, with the rhyming of ‘rot’ and ‘Lot’, introduce a new rhythm that builds, with the rhyme of ‘breast’ and rest’, to the lovely repetition of ‘for my people’. When performing some of her poems, Romaine Moreton moves from spoken word to song. These lines cry out for that treatment.

One of my favourite words in poetry is ‘but’. And here it comes:

but you
golden hallowed blackened son 
more despised there is none 

The ‘son’ is not just ‘golden hallowed’, but ‘golden hallowed blackened’: sitting in the passenger’s seat doesn’t make him immune from racism. ‘Blackened’ is an interesting word here: it signifies First Nations identity, but also colonial attitudes. He may think of himself as the golden son, but his Black identity will be imposed on him and he will be seen accordingly through a colonial lens: ‘none more despised’. That’s something that the man on the receiving end of racism would readily agree to. And then the killer lines:

except one

which is me

That’s not the end of the poem, it does move on interestingly, but it’s all I’m looking at here.

Richard Osman’s Last Devil to Die and the Bullet that Missed

Richard Osman, The Last Devil to Die
and The Bullet That Missed
(both audiobooks from Audible, performed by Fiona Shaw)

These are numbers 3 and 4 of the Thursday Murder Club Mysteries, in which a group of friends an English retirement village meet of a Thursday, between the Chess Club and the Yoga Class, to solve murders. It’s like a blend of Miss Marple and the Five Finder-outers, both of which I loved with a passion, one when I was about nine years old and the other three or four years later. Even though these stories involve nastier crimes than Agatha Christie’s ancient sleuth or Enid Blyton’s ingenious children, listening to them on long car rides transported me back to those earlier pleasures.

We listened to them out of order. The Last Devil‘s first murder victim (there are several in each book) is alive and well in The Bullet, and though we understand why the club members want to solve his murder – he was a friend of one of them – it was only on reading the earlier book that we understood the nature of the friendship, and realised that what seems an improbable plot twist is actually completely in character. On the other hand, it was fun to see where Book 3 includes hints and foreshadowings of Book 4’s revelations.

Richard Osman appears regularly on UK panel shows. Pointless, the game show he developed and co-presented, was a pleasure to watch, and – to judge by the irritating quality of its Australian version – its success owed a lot to his self-deprecatory erudition. Those qualities shine through in these stories. We don’t really care about the vast quantities of lost heroin in Book 4 or the massive financial fraud in Book 3 except as MacGuffins. What matters is the way this group of people who couldn’t be more different from one another are thrown together by the accident of old age and become strong friends. There’s a former trade union official, an almost retired psychiatrist, a former spy who was high up in MI6, and Joyce who is endlessly interested in what’s cheap at the supermarket, what’s happening in her regular TV shows, the comings and goings of the village.

There are romances among the septuagenarians and especially in Book 4 some finely judged moments of pathos. Just as the reader thinks the present adventures are enough to sustain the interest, there are poignant excursions into the characters’ back stories – and one realises that the basic reality of being old is that one has a past.

Fiona Shaw’s reading – performance really – of both books is wonderful, and at the end of Book 4 she and Richard Osman have a conversation that sheds light both on his intentions in writing the books and her approach to reading more than 10 hours of text incorporating the voices of something like a dozen characters.