Life subverts subversion theory
Russell Banks leaves no quarter for comfort in The Darling, yet so controlled is his construction that it is not until the end that the reader allows the full awfulness in and mutters, like Joseph Conrad's Kurtz: "The horror, the horror." It might be that in reading the first-person narration, we know that Hannah Musgrave…
A hero to break your heart
Young Willie Dunne is an innocent abroad when he goes to Belgium with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers to play his part in World War I. Like his compatriots, he is a volunteer. Though he finds it hard to say exactly why, he knows he must play his part. Many of his countrymen are there because…
Can trust get trustier?
Trust starts out like a peony – multilayered, delicate, beautiful - and withers as we get older. Some dispose of it early, occasionally finding the odd petal hiding somewhere, and a few manage, through extraordinary good fortune and wise associations, to keep it blossoming into old age. Trust is a fragile emotion and is closely…
Search for justice in the tropics
Queensland Magistrate Cathy McLennan’s Saltwater is a fast-paced, thoughtful, riveting memoir of her early working life in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service in Townsville. McLennan grew up in the idyllic island community of Magnetic Island where she and her classmates acquired pen friends from Palm Island, a short plane ride or longer…
Hell hath no fury like
inconvenient women
How convenient it would be for many men who have wooed beautiful young girls to bed if they could dispose of them when their existence became awkward. In Charlotte Wood’s harrowing, edgy novel, the unthinkable has happened – Yolanda wakes wearing strange, rough clothes and finds herself in a locked room. Birds are singing, she…
A sacrament in the
search for truth
Some of Sebastian Barry’s characters appear in more than one book and so it is with Roseanne, one of the two first-person narrators in The Secret Scripture. We have previously met her briefly in The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, where we learned that she had been married to Eneas’s brother Tom and Eneas himself had…
