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Most so-called feminist critiques of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart reduce men to husbands, and women to wives. Even progressive movements like the struggles converging on marriage for same-sex couples, centralize this biblical relationship, and in a biblical way, there’s nothing progressive about that. If we sincerely count gender and gender relations, we should count correctly. It may be a Christian fixation that prioritizes the heteropatriarchal marriage over all other relationships as individuals and with kin and Klan. In addition, in the Things Fall Apart society, these other relations were contributors to individuals’ identities. Certainly, this is riddled with conflict, the same as any relationship faces conflict, and perhaps confrontation. One might even argue that the misogyny in the pre-colonial society was, too, an unresolved conflict—a narrative within a narrative of conflict resolution.

Over four books, Achebe demonstrates a spiral of conflict and resolution, layering these stories, and having them mirror one another. This means that the internal conflicts mirror the ones the characters face in the world, and brilliantly, Achebe breathes life and depth to his characters by demonstrating how their internal dialogue informs their views of themselves as well as their actions. So, fate is a clear matter of cause and effect in the Things Fall Apart cosmological world.

—Diepiriye Kuku

Enthusiasm is an excellent quality to find in a non-fiction writer.  So many books are either drily specialised or glib and workmanlike.  It’s a real pleasure to read a book and feel that the writer is discovering facts mere minutes before you, relating them in real time with all the passion of new knowledge.

If nothing else, Australian writer Gideon Haigh is an enthusiast.  His journalistic background means that he’s used to flipping from one topic to another and acquiring knowledge on the fly.  If he has an area of specialisation, it’s cricket, about which he has written over a dozen works.  But he also writes widely on business and social issues, working as a well-informed amateur.

Watching him speak at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in 2008 was a revelation.  At several points in a panel discussion, he completely abandoned answering questions on his previous book (Asbestos House)to read large selections of court transcript from a forthcoming work on abortion.  It was entertaining to watch someone become completely caught up in a topic.  There’s only one way to describe it: Haigh was geeking out.

The book in question, The Racket: How Abortion Became Legal In Australia (Melbourne University Press), was released toward the end of last year and it’s mostly a continuation of Haigh’s festival geek-out.  The list of sources and information at the end of the book is prodigious and Haigh seems determined to use every single detail he has found.  Reading it, you experience the same feeling as watching Haigh speak—a writer joyously throwing out facts to the audience.

The Racket details the web of corruption and crime connected to the underground abortion trade and how a range of activists, politicians and doctors eventually saw it dismantled and abortion legalised.  Using transcripts from abortion trials, memoirs and first-hand testimony, Haigh manages to assemble a comprehensive picture of how events unfolded.

At less than 300 pages, the barrage of information and anecdote can be a bit overwhelming and it’s easy to lose track of the colourful characters that made up Melbourne’s abortion trade in the 1950s and 60s.  Haigh’s sources are incredible and he is able to recreate the era and the events with remarkable complexity, if not as much clarity.  He seems intoxicated by his findings and it mostly rubs off on the reader.

For such a grim and confronting topic, Haigh’s light touch is welcome.  While the details are often difficult to stomach, the amusing digressions and sub-plots ease the difficulty.

While imperfect and a little overstuffed, The Racket is a fascinating insight into another world—and the highly active mind of an exceptional journalist.

—David Pullar

There are movies based on books that encourage people to go back to the source material and others where it’s almost irrelevant.  They might as well have been based on the doodle a studio exec drew on his napkin at lunch.

Even after winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (and everything else), Slumdog Millionaire doesn’t seem to have driven a surge of interest in Vikas Swarup’s “Q&A” (now republished with the film’s title).  In fact, not many people seem to be aware of the film’s literary origins at all.

Unlike Revolutionary Road, which had a long history of readership and acclaim prior to adaptation, Q&A is a recent book without much pedigree.  I read it as part of a book group on its release in 2005 and was fairly unimpressed.  Swarup paces the book well and the situations and plot arcs are colourful and enjoyable enough.  The problem is that it’s all pretty implausible and a bit silly at times.

The reason why Danny Boyle’s film is more effective than Q&A is that it takes the novel’s absurd concept and elevates it to symbolic fantasy.  The original novel’s problem was that the thriller-like tone seemed at odds with the fanciful plot arcs.

Salman Rushdie agrees, calling Q&A “a corny potboiler, with a plot that defies belief”.  He goes further, arguing that Slumdog is just as absurd as its source material.

Well that’s true enough.  After all, what is the likelihood of a chaiwallah from the Mumbai slums winning a quiz show based on the fortuitous coincidence of each question relating directly to a life event?  Effectively zero, you would think. 

Yet all plots are contrived to suit the ends of the writer, and most require some suspension of disbelief.  Rushdie’s own works like Midnight’s Children and The Ground Beneath Her Feet are completely ridiculous from any rationalist standpoint—but we accept the implausibility because it opens us up to some greater truth.

Slumdog’s message isn’t nearly as profound as most Rushdie works (it’s mostly that “life teaches you things”).  Yet it’s also an homage to the classic rags to riches tales of Hollywood and Bollywood, plot contrivances and all.  We want to be swept up in the romance and we’re not going to be too worried about probability.

It’s been said that good novels make bad films and bad novels make good films.  It’s definitely true that what makes a great novel is often the use of language and the insights into people’s interior worlds—things that translate poorly to film.  And many trashy novels, owing too much as they do to Hollywood romance and suspense, sometimes make an easier transition to the screen.

Do you agree?  Do you find your favourite novels are butchered?  Do you enjoy movies where you’d never dream of picking up the original novel?

—David Pullar

For what sounds to most like an extraordinarily arcane issue, parallel importation of books is generating a lot of concern among Australian authors.  In fact, many of them are being driven to rhetorical heights unscaled in their regular work.

In submissions to the Productivity Commission review, Kate Grenville warns about becoming an “impoverished and stunted society” and Gary Disher forecasts a loss of local flavour to “cheap mass culture from overseas”.  Matthew Reilly’s heavily underlined and italicised submission warns that parallel importation is “tantamount to legalising copyright piracy”.

What is it that has made them so worried?  What is parallel importation?

Like many English-speaking countries, Australia has copyright rules that protect the local publishing industry from cheap overseas editions.  Essentially, publishers have 30 days following international publication of a book to release a local edition, after which that edition is the only version to be sold in Australia.

There are moves afoot to remove this rule, allowing importation of books from anywhere in the world—the philosophy being that people do it via Amazon anyway and in theory it would make books cheaper.

On the other side of the debate, local authors are concerned that this will make Australian books uncompetitive price-wise with overseas works, that it will relegate local publishers to mere importers and that their books will be swamped in the market by remaindered foreign editions for which they receive no royalties.

In reality, both the promise of lower prices and the threat of local industry collapse are likely to be overstated.  Australia allowed parallel importation of CDs ten years ago and while this has led to some discounting, most new CDs are still in the range of $25-$30 (US$17-$20).  Regarding the feared consequences, Australian music is just as successful as in the 1990s, if not more so.  The rise of labels like Modular, with their global-impact roster of artists such as Cut Copy, shows how little difference the end of protectionism has had.

Making a living as an Australian writer is hard and maybe it’s about to get harder.  Perhaps the protection of the local sector has fostered any number of brilliant authors who might otherwise have given up their career for something more lucrative.  But as with too many public debates, the argument is verging on shrill.

The track record of protected cultural industries is not good.  Australia’s film industry had a taxpayer-funded golden age in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, but over time fell into a rut of making mediocre films perpetuating the same national stereotypes.  Much our subsidised arts scene is irrelevant to average, or even culturally-savvy, Australians.  Australian music is in a healthy state, but this is hardly the result of years of mandatory Australian content on the radio stations that simply pick local imitators of mainstream US acts.

The fact is that there will always be a market for good books and good writers.  For generations, Australian writers have struggled with the small size of the local market, the need to connect with overseas audiences and the frequent necessity of moving overseas to chase success.  Yet authors keep coming along, telling stories people want to read and making a living (or at least a part-time wage).  To attribute all this to a single element of copyright law is simplistic.

There may be no need to fix something that isn’t broken, but I suspect that any change won’t stop Australia from giving the world exceptional writers.

—David Pullar

Everyone has a novel in them, they say.  That particular idiom doesn’t make any judgement on whether it’s a good novel people contain.  If you have ever dabbled in fiction writing, you’ll know how much harder it is than you could have ever expected.  Great writers make it seem so natural and effortless.  How could we anticipate the hard slog, lack of inspiration and ease with which we slip into cliché and banality?  Think about how a good idea suddenly seems thin and flimsy the moment you try and write a chapter on it.

It’s not surprising that many people’s early (and later) efforts at writing are terrible in one way or another.  “How Not To Write A Novel”, a new book by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman, is something of a prescription for bad writers, setting out “200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them”.  From the Guardian’s review, it sounds clever and insightful:

It will have a ludicrous plot, of course, or none. It will have characters who are unbelievable or extremely tiresome, or both. It will be studded with clichés and riddled with the author’s prejudices. Newman and Mittelmark make up typical examples of dreadful prose, often so accurately that even the vainest are likely to recognise their own howlers and lapses of taste.

Naturally, this is going to be hard medicine for most of us to take.  Such a brutal assessment is pretty confidence-destroying at the outset.  Should this book have really been titled How To Not Write A Novel?  Is there any point writing at all?

If you have any pride in your writing, you might get a little defensive.  Aren’t your efforts at least as good as the appalling dog turds that adorn bookstore shelves everywhere?  Think of all the risibly bad books that make it past the publishers for a variety of reasons—celebrity authorship, easy categorisation, general trendiness.  Let’s face it, though.  You and I are not celebrities and no self-respecting publisher is going to take a chance on a self-indulgent, badly-constructed debut novel.  You need to write something good.

There is a point, however, when it all becomes a matter of personal taste.  What Newman and Mittelmark consider inessential digression may be another reader’s climactic scene.  We’ve witnessed this before, in countless works on what novels are supposed to be like.

James Wood, acerbic critic par excellence, recently published “How Fiction Works”.  It’s full of Wood’s own unique prose style and fuelled with his intense literary passion.  It’s also heavily biased towards Wood’s own preferences and tastes—in particular a love of description and characterisation over plot and story.  As Louis Bayard in Salon points out, characterisation and description alone do not great novels make.  Even the most sublime writer needs a plot or story to give the words purpose and shape.  In the end, we’re free to regard or disregard Wood’s (or any other critic’s) opinion at will.

There’s undoubtedly a lot to be learnt by reading about novel construction and learning some basic dos and don’ts.  But in the end, you’ve just got to chance it that someone else is going to like what you do.

—David Pullar

Six months after it was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, I’ve finally managed to read Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole.  When I first came across it, I had no particular interest, suspecting it of being overlong and a little pretentious.  Over time, I began to question my snap judgement and I’m thoroughly glad I did.

A Fraction of the Whole is big, it’s true, but not excessively.  Despite involving two separate narrators and spanning forty-something years and three continents, it maintains a remarkable cohesion.  That’s probably because narrators Jasper and Martin Dean, the father-and-son duo at the novel’s centre, are far more alike than either would like to recognise.

Attempting to draw but one theme out of the book (and it’s stuffed full of the things) is a challenge, but it’s probably the power of inheritance and the difficulty of escaping its influence.  Sure, that’s two themes, but they’re closely related. 

Jasper commences the novel as a young man, imprisoned for reasons unknown.  At a loose end, he begins to reflect on the curious legacy of his father Martin and Uncle Terry, Australia’s most hated and most admired man respectively.  We’re not initially told how this eccentric rural family managed such notoriety, but it all comes out in Toltz’s discursive and rambling narrative.  If Jasper is a little bit prompter as an autobiographer than Tristram Shandy in reaching the event of his birth, it’s still a long way into the book.  There’s a lot of family history to cover.

The picture that emerges is of an intelligent boy completely denied a chance of normality by a brilliant but unhinged father.  Martin Dean’s equally strange childhood has left him conflicted by powerful urges—a tendency to megalomania and an overwhelming cynicism about the entirety of human endeavour.  Jasper is really just trying to stay out of trouble.

Toltz’s creations are brilliant.  They are true to life, unpredictable and likeable in spite of their visible failings.  Subtly, Toltz is nudging us towards the question “Is normality all it’s cracked up to be?”

The dysfunctional Deans’ abnormality often looks like good fun.  They create publishing scandals, build mazes, join the criminal underworld, break hearts and have their hearts broken in return.  There are precious few “ordinary” people in A Fraction of the Whole and they’re not nearly as fascinating.

While creating a portrait of a family, Toltz almost accidentally assesses a half-century of Australian history.  There’s our love of outlaws and “larrikins”, our obsession with sport and our tendency to cut down achievers or “tall poppies”.  There’s also our uneasy place in the world—both our fear of cultural inferiority and our fear of refugees in leaky boats.  It’s a lot to cram in, but Toltz manages it easily.

For all my scepticism about literary awards, there’s often good reason for their selections.  A Fraction of the Whole is an amazing achievement.  Spending time with the Deans and their skewed view of the world will make your life a little bit richer.

—David Pullar