The launch of the inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in Australia has attracted a little attention—partly for the two substantial $100,000 awards and partly for the fact that the PM himself has final say.

Most people are unconcerned by this role, but Gail Jones in The Guardian finds it troubling:

But should the Australian prime minister have a say in “his” award? Emphatically not. Judging panels are contentious enough without prime-ministerial opinion inflecting adjudication. The winning text risks being seen as content-endorsed, or in some way charged by political approval.

In part this is a hangover from the previous administration, where PM John Howard was something of “culture warrior” and had a tendency to weigh in heavily on art and literature he considered biased to the left.  New PM Kevin Rudd has shown a more hands-off approach.

The bigger question is surely “What do politicians know about books?” Politicians will occasionally write works of political science and policy—and at the end of their public life will often write scurrilous memoirs—but few engage in serious literature.

There is some hope here in my state of New South Wales, where the new Premier, Nathan Rees, has a degree in literature.  His predecessor was widely seen as a philistine, although the one before that (Bob Carr) was a self-confessed book nut—so much so that he recently wrote a book entirely about reading.  To tell the truth, I’m not sure that the writers of Sydney have really noticed the difference.

But what of the contenders in the current US Presidential campaign?  Barack Obama has written his own memoir and a manifesto of sorts.  John McCain has written a few books about his life.  McCain’s daughter Meghan has written a hagiography of the Republican candidate.  As for Sarah Palin… well, she’s expressed interest in banning a few books in her time.

I’m not sure any of them has much time for contemporary literature.  Maybe Obama does, but you can bet he won’t be discussing the merits of Junot Diaz as he campaigns for the votes of working-class Ohioans.

—David Pullar

Air travel is something of an occupational hazard in my life—partly because of (obviously) my occupation and partly because of my geographically dispersed family.  So I spend a lot of time in airports, my time there equally divided between airport bars and airport bookshops.

I don’t usually buy anything in the bookshops.  $7 is a steep price for a beer, but you can’t very well sneak one in from outside just in case your flight is delayed.  $28 for a paperback is completely avoidable when you can plan your reading needs in advance.  The generally disappointing range of books is another factor.  It’s rare that anything on display catches my attention.

I’m always reminded of the episode of The Simpsons when the airport bookshop is named “Just Crichton and King”.  Although in recent times it’s more “Just Brown and Rowling”, the idea is still the same: sell the most populist, mass-market books you can think of, in big piles.

Australian airports are particularly bad, something that was brought home to me by the excellent range in the Great Canadian Book Company at Vancouver airport last week.  At Canberra airport (a city of 300,000 people and a frequent destination) the poor range is hardly surprising, but larger airports like Sydney and Melbourne don’t have the same excuse.  Even in a major airport, the lack of competition tends to leave shops perpetuating the narrow idea of the “airport novel”.

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of trash, to be fair, and at least page-turners have the virtue of keeping you awake and engaged when on a long flight.  Many is the time I’ve attempted to read something dense and complex only to fail with the combined distractions of turbulence, snoring neighbours and intravenous airline coffee.

I probably would have had better luck with a Michael Crichton than I recently did with Robert Musil’s epochal The Man Without Qualities, a dense, misanthropic exploration of the declining Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Fourteen hours over the Pacific Ocean and I managed a mere five pages before I gave up and watched Prince Caspian on the little TV screen.  The first volume is over 700 pages and I barely made a dent.

This teaches me that picking the right book for a flight is more complex than merely grabbing whatever you’re currently reading.  It’s a special case and deserves careful thought.

Everyone would have their own unique selection criteria.  Do you like to take a couple of books and see what you’re in the mood for?  Do you trust the serendipity of the airport bookshop selection?  Can you even read on a plane or is it just a bad reading environment?

I think next time I’m going for something punchy.  With big print for my sleep-deprived eyes.

—David Pullar

Finding just the right opening sentence for a book is a challenge for any novelist.  As much as a book’s cover, the opening line is the place for snap judgements about whether to give a book your time.  Make an impression with a few well-chosen words and the reader is yours—at least until the dull patch around page 50 where they decide that they have better things to do.

In Camus’ The Plague, the character Joseph Grand agonises endlessly over his novel’s first sentence ("One fine morning in the month of May...") hoping to make an editor exclaim “Hats off, gentlemen!” He probably should have been content to avoid the fate of Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

Despite such contributions to the English language as “the almighty dollar” and “the pen is mightier than the sword”, Lord Lytton has been immortalised as the creator of the worst opening sentence ever.

To be fair, “It was a dark and stormy night” (from Paul Clifford) isn’t all that bad—and Lytton isn’t to blame for the cliché it’s become.  But a byword for bad writing it is, with San Jose State University’s annual Bulwer-Lytton Prize for worst opening sentence in an imaginary novel recently announced for 2008.

At least this prize is made-up, unlike the true brutality of Auberon Waugh’s Bad Sex Award—which exists to bring down actual writers.  This is a prize to stretch the imagination—and apparently we can imagine some truly awful first sentences.  What the rest of the novels would be like had they existed is best not considered.

The winning sentence (from Garrison Spik of Washington DC) is priceless:

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped “Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.”

The full list of notable entries is overwhelming and full of horrendous metaphors, similies and even the occasional single entendre:

She had the kind of body that made a man want to have sex with her. (Barry J. Drucker, Bentonville, AR)

There’s a true art in creating something so atrocious and it can only make you wonder what these writers generate when writing “properly”.

—David Pullar

Despite being restricted to members of the British Commonwealth, the Man Booker Prize is a hell of a lot more prestigious than the Commonwealth Games is for sport.  There are those who accuse it of being a B-league by omitting the United States and any number of non-Anglosphere countries, but it carries a remarkable amount of prestige, mainly because of the continued dominance of the United Kingdom in the literary world.

The other major difference with the Commonwealth Games is that in sport Australia runs rings around the competition but in books it’s not nearly as influential.  Nevertheless, Australia has won the second most Bookers out of any country—with either four or six prizes, depending on whether you count J.M. Coetzee’s two.  I don’t, because he moved here subsequent to his prizes, whereas Peter Carey, Tom Keneally and D.B.C. Pierre are Australian-born.  Pierre is another strange case, having been raised in Mexico and the USA with only a short stint as an adult in Australia.  I guess that’s what comes from being a nation of immigrants.

This year is a good one for Aussies, with locals Michelle de Kretser (for The Lost Dog) and Steve Toltz (for A Fraction of the Whole) both on the long list of 13.  The odds aren’t good, however, with the bookies favouring Salman Rushdie, whose Midnight’s Children was recently acclaimed the best Booker winner ever.

Of course, the long-odds books do occasionally win over the judges and the big names can be overlooked.  There were not a few critics that saw Midnight’s Children as a very safe choice for the Best of the Booker and the panel could be conscious of the need to give attention to some lesser-known writers.

The big surprise for the Australian industry is the omission of Helen Garner’s astonishing return to novel-writing, The Spare Room.  Garner is one of the few “big name” Australian writers still residing here rather than in the UK or USA.  In that sense, she’s clearly “one of ours” in a way that Carey or Pierre or Coetzee aren’t.

Of course, the Booker judges aren’t so interested in national pride and literature is (fortunately) less jingoistic than sport.  I still can’t help cheering on one of my own.

—David Pullar

We were nothing like the quirky characters in the BBC TV series The Book Group, but we did meet every month or two to discuss a book we’d all planned to read.  The key difference with the TV show was that we weren’t all sleeping together.  The main similarity was that often a whole night would pass with us barely mentioning the book of the month.

Back in 2004, I was invited along to a group by my then-housemate and my overactive sense of responsibility quickly made me one of the “reliables”, the three or four who would turn up every time and have read the book without fail.  The rest of the group was made up of semi-regulars who mostly just wanted to hang out for a beer.  It was a great group.

If you’ve ever been a member of a book group, you will likely have encountered the same issues that we did.  How do you keep everyone interested?  How do you pick a book that everyone wants to read?  Do you bother rescheduling for people who never turn up anyway?

Picking books was definitely the biggest challenge.  The two men in the group weren’t so keen on some of the more Oprah’s Book Club-type selections.  No one was especially keen on books over 400 pages long—who has time?  Finding enough copies for everyone was always a challenge, especially for anything left-of-centre.

There’s something to be said for book-choice-by-committee, though.  That group and its democratic selection process were responsible for me reading a dozen books that I never would have picked up otherwise.  Sometimes this only confirmed my initial impression of the book (My Sister’s Keeper was compulsive but very superficial) and other times it blew my preconceptions away.

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton was the biggest surprise.  It’s a phenomenally popular book and one of the biggest landmarks in recent Australian fiction.  For some reason, I figured it would be dull and very middle-of-the-road.  Instead, it was engaging and beautifully told.  Rather than relying on the worn clichés of Australiana, it dug deep into the world of post-war Perth and turned up all sorts of unique characters and situations.

Being in a book group and reviewing books are similar in a few ways.  Firstly, you have to read to a deadline and somehow fit a book in with all your normal activities.  The deadlines for our group weren’t too strict—every meeting was delayed at least two weeks—but once you factored in sourcing a copy and the rest of modern life, it could be difficult.

The other similarity is being forced to verbalise your opinion on a book.  Once we’ve finished with the rigours of High School English Lit, most of us are more than happy to just enjoy a book and leave any analysing to our subconscious.  But talking about a book in a group takes you away from vague feelings and impressions and requires you to put boundaries around those feelings.  Once you’ve expressed an opinion out loud, it feels more fixed but also more dubious.

This is a mixed blessing.  Some books open up under that kind of analysis and you find yourself loving them in a deeper way.  Other times you realise that your positive feelings evaporate once they’re aired, especially when you have to defend them.  My good feelings regarding Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised didn’t survive the questioning.

It doesn’t matter, really.  Some books will change your life, others will amuse you briefly and others will let you down.  But talking about a book over a beer in warm pub on a frosty winter with good people, well it’s one of life’s little pleasures.

—David Pullar

Sam De Brito keeps a blog called All Men Are Liars over at the Sydney Morning Herald website.  It’s popular and very interactive.  He posts most days with something provocative, usually about masculinity and gender issues, and his sizable readership will run with it for a few hundred comments.

I read it pretty regularly, not without a certain guilt.  The generalizations about gender roles can be pretty crude and it’s mostly entertaining from a voyeuristic angle.  Occasionally he’s right on the money and it’s those moments of insight that keep me coming back.

Now he’s branched out into fiction with a novel called The Lost Boys.  De Brito has tried his hand at a book before: No Tattoos Before You’re Thirty is a little pocket-sized volume of advice that Sam would give his unborn (and unconceived) offspring.  Now he’s trying something more ambitious.

If you’ve read All Men Are Liars for any length of time, you’ll have a pretty clear idea what’s in store.  Sam’s not shy about talking up his past and there’s a strong autobiographical element to The Lost Boys.  Young blokes go out, do stupid things, keep doing stupid things and wake up in their thirties wondering what happened.  There’s a lot of sex, drugs and general misbehavior.

I’ve picked up a copy in a bookshop, flicked through it and put it back on the shelf on a few occasions.  I’m sure there are some interesting insights into the psyche of young Australian men, but the passages I’ve read are so full of misogyny and unrelenting squalor that I just couldn’t be bothered.

That’s the problem with “gritty” literature.  In some shorter art forms, say films or photography or journalism, grime and unpleasantness can be exciting—over a 400 page book, it can be draining.

That might be worth it for a brilliant statement about society, but De Brito doesn’t really speak for Australian Masculinity, if there is such thing.  He speaks for a subculture of lower middle-class urban thirtysomethings, the products of a very specific time and place.  There are any number of Aussie males who would struggle to see much of themselves in these lost boys.  There are big themes involved, but they tend to get buried in all the extreme behavior.

Most of us have a tendency to universalize our experiences and writers only more so.  It goes something like “I’m a man, therefore this is what men are.” Maybe De Brito’s goal is something less grand, but from his blog and the publicity around the book, it seems as if he’s trying to take the pulse of an entire gender.

Who will The Lost Boys appeal to?  Probably not the Maroubra Beach toughs that De Brito is depicting.  Readers of new Australian fiction tend to be a more sensitive lot.  Maybe a lot of men will read it with a sigh of relief, “Thank God I’m not like that.” I don’t think that was the author’s point.

—David Pullar