Stella Rimington, former director-general of MI5, has been called Britain’s most famous spy. She’s also rumoured to be the inspiration for Judi Dench’s character M, in the James Bond franchise. But Rimington is not a fan of Bond; she says it’s ridiculously unrealistic and that anyone who tries to join any intelligence service inspired by 007 ‘should be rejected at the first hurdle’.
John Le Carre’s George Smiley is more her style. ‘The intelligence service of John Le Carre’s Cold War books really is quite reminiscent of the MI5 I joined,’ she told Kerry O’Brien on her last visit to Australia, in 2009. ‘There were people around quite a bit like Smiley … And the closed nature of the community he creates is also something that I can relate to.’
Rimington was ‘tapped on the shoulder’ to join the MI5 (as a clerk) while living in India, with her husband. The invitation came at a cocktail party, which sounds impossibly glamorous. She accepted because she was bored, passing her time doing ‘amateur dramatics and running jumble sales’. When she moved back to Britain, she approached an MI5 recruiter and asked for a job, which she got.
It was a ‘two-tiered system’, she recalls, with very separate careers for men and for women. ‘The men did the sharp-end intelligence work and the women’s job was to sit at the desk and deal with the papers.’
Things changed in the early 1970s, when the women mounted a ‘quiet revolution’ and asked why they couldn’t do the same work as the men. ‘Our bosses of the day had to scratch their heads for an answer, because there wasn’t one,’ she told a Dymocks Literary Lunch in 2009. ‘If you think about it, some of the skills you need to deal with human beings who are often in difficult and dangerous sitations requires just those skills we think of today as ‘female’ skills: warmth, empathy, the ability to encourage and bring people along, an understanding of people, and a certain degree of ruthlessness, which I think is also a female quality.’
Rimington was the first woman allowed to go on the training course that taught the skills needed for on-the-street work, with ‘human sources’. The course was geared for men, she says: the trainees were assigned pubs, where they had to create a cover story for themselves, then engage patrons in conversation and find out about them. Her pub, she recalls, was a ‘sleazy dump’ full of ‘men in dirty macs leaning on the bar’. She duly chatted up one of the men, who was ‘very surprised by the approach from a seemingly respectable lady, who he then thought was something other than a respectable lady’. That was the beginning of her career as an ‘agent runner’; it got better from there, she says. For one thing, she could pick her own venues to meet agents.
The MI5 heroine of Rimington’s four espionage novels, Liz Carlyle, is partly drawn from Rimington’s own experiences, but is operating in a very different world. ‘Liz is a modern MI5 officer,’ she says. ‘She didn’t have to wait to be tapped on the shoulder; she could look on a website (which now exists), see what jobs are available and apply online. And she did.’ Like her creator, Liz’s adventures in espionage are juggled with a private life that always seems to come off second best.
While Liz finds it hard to hold onto her lovers, Rimington divorced in 1986 and brought up her two daughters as a single mother. It was the kind of life where she got phone calls about umbrella stabbings while cooking dinner and was faced with decisions like whether to rush to hospital, where her young daughter had been taken seriously ill, or meet a defecting Eastern European agent at a London safe house (in the latter situation, she did both – ‘the safe house was quite near the hospital’).
‘All working mothers – and nowadays many fathers too – find themselves struggling to juggle things and I suppose I did have a few dilemmas like everyone else,’ she told the Australian.
Rimington began writing novels after the publication of her 2001 autobiography, Open Secret, a publication her former employer tried to stop. The MI5 still vet all her novels, to ensure she’s not revealing state secrets.
It’s ironic, given that it was MI5 who outed her in 1992, when she was the first director-general to be publicly named (resulting in the tabloid nickname ‘housewife superspy’), with little warning given. It was the only time Rimington ever felt her life was in danger, she says; the IRA were still active in London at the time, and the media quickly found out where she lived. She had to move house, along with her younger daughter, who was still living with her.
Liz Carlyle’s latest adventure is Rip Tide, involving Somali pirates and Islamic terrorists. What next for Liz, and Rimington? The 77-year-old author says she’s not sure how much longer she wants to keep it up, though there will definitely be at least one more novel.
Her many fans will be hoping that idleness appeals as little now as it did when, many years ago in India, she was tapped on the shoulder at a party …
Stella Rimington will be appearing in a double bill with Hisham Matar on Wednesday 16 May at 6.30pm, at the Comedy Theatre. Tickets are $35 for the two back-to-back events. Book now.
What’s bigger news than the awarding of a major prize? The decision not to award a major prize. The literary world is agog with the news that the Pulitzer prize for fiction will not be awarded in 2012, for the first time in 35 years.
Why? The Pulitzer board couldn’t reach a consensus on the three books nominated by the judges: Karen Russell’s idiosyncratic, wildly imaginative debut Swamplandia, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously completed The Pale King, and Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams (first published, in full, in the Paris Review in 2002, first published in book form in 2011).
‘I don’t think any decision like this is a statement about literature or fiction in general,’ Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer prizes, told ABC’s PM yesterday. ‘I don’t think you should extrapolate from that some sweeping statement about the nature [or] condition of fiction in America.’
‘Most readers will not assume it was a deadlock. They’ll just figure it was a bum year for fiction,’ writes Ann Patchett in the New York Times today. ‘As a novelist and the author of an eligible book, I do not love this. It’s fine to lose to someone, and galling to lose to no one.’
Ann Patchett: ‘Most readers will not assume it was a deadlock. They’ll just figure it was a bum year for fiction.'
Patchett’s latest novel, State of Wonder, was released in 2011. (She may take some comfort from the fact it was included in this year’s Orange shortlist, announced today.)
Former Pulitzer fiction judge Laura Miller, a senior writer for Salon, believes that the result may say more about the the state of American reading in 2012 than the quality of American fiction published in 2011 (she calls it ‘an exceptional year’).
The Pulitzer is unusual in that there is an extra tier of decision-making above the level of the three judges (usually an academic, a critic and a writer), who come up with three titles to recommend to the Pulitzer Board, who pick the actual winner.
The board consists not of literary insiders, but of working journalists and journalism professors, ‘most with a deep respect for literature but relatively little familiarity with the literary world’.
While this is one of the prize’s strengths, says Miller (including its ‘excellent record at singling out literary works that also appeal to a lot of readers’), it is also a limitation.
Geordie Williamson: ‘‘What’s happened is a disconnect between … reading communities and the people who actually it falls on to decide the award’.
‘Past boards might have been able to settle on a title that most of them had read even if it wasn’t offered as a finalist by the jury; reading at least a few of the ‘big’ novels published during the year was something a lot more people did before the internet and cable TV came along’.
Geordie Williamson, chief literary critic of the Australian, agrees. ‘What’s happened is a disconnect between … reading communities and the people who actually it falls on to decide the award,’ he told PM.
Miller concludes that the fact that the board – representatives of the average educated American reader – don’t read widely enough to agree on an alternate choice when they disagree with the three books put forward, is the really worrying thing about this year’s lack of a Pulitzer winner.
The fiction jury was comprised of Michael Cunningham (who won a Pulitzer for The Hours in 1999), former books editor Susan Larson and critic Maureen Corrigan.
‘When I heard, the first word that went through my head was “inexplicable”. Then the second reaction was just anger on behalf of those three novels,’ Corrigan told the New York Times.
Susan Larson told NPR that all three judges are ‘shocked, angry and very disappointed’. She said, ‘This was a lot of work … I think we all would have been happy if any of [the three] books had been selected’.
There was speculation that the Pulitzer board might have considered the selected titles to be too unconventional to be worthy of a Pulitzer.
Reacting to this, Corrigan said, ‘If they didn’t think these three nominations were somehow within the regulations that they have set out, then they should have made that clear at the time we nominated them.’
John Mullan, a former Booker prize judge, told the Guardian that withholding the UK’s top literary prize is ‘absolutely never an option’. He said, ‘You go into it with the knowledge that some years are better than others. Some are very good, some are duff, and you just pray you get a good year.’
The Pulitzer for fiction has been withheld ten times since its inception in 1917, and three times during the 1970s.
Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin, has been withheld twice, in 1973 and 1983. There was also controversy over last year’s uncharacteristically short shortlist, of just three novels (out of a longlist of nine.
‘If I feel disappointment as a writer and indignation as a reader, I manage to get all the way to rage as a bookseller,’ said Ann Patchett, who opened a bookshop, Parnassus Books, in Nashville last year.
She pointed out that the Pulitzer sells books like no other literary prize – and that with both the bookselling and publishing businesses increasingly under pressure, it’s particularly bad timing to withhold the prize.
‘I can’t imagine there was ever a year we were so in need of the excitement it creates in readers.’
‘The Pulitzer Prize is our best chance as writers and readers and booksellers to celebrate fiction.’
‘This was the year we all lost.’
In the absence of a Pulitzer-picked fiction winner, many commentators are stepping in to suggest their own picks.
Ann Patchett’s favourites include Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award – and Dennis Johnson’s Train Dreams, one of the three titles nominated by the Pulitzer fiction judges.
Ron Charles, fiction editor of the Washington Post (And Totally Hip Book Reviewer), tweeted, ‘I think it’s an outrageous insult. Only one finished real novel among the finalists, AND they can’t pick a winner. DO YOUR FRAKKIN' JOB.’ He added, ‘Incidentally, I would have been perfectly happy with SWAMPLANDIA! winning. Wasn’t my absolute favorite, but would have been a reasonable choice.’
Ron Charles, pictured as Totally Hip Book Reviewer: ‘I think it’s an outrageous insult.’
His top picks were Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River or Mary Doria Russell’s Doc.
Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot was seen as another worthy alternative by both Patchett and Charles.
Publisher’s Weekly has published a list of ‘the good books the Pulitzer didn’t pick’.
What are your picks? What do you think of the decision to award no prize?
Who are your favourite literary sleuths? Sherlock Holmes is a perennial favourite, but after that the field opens right up. The Guardian has come up with its top 10 literary sleuths. The list is sure to provoke debate among crime fiction’s loyal fans. Compare it to some others and you begin to appreciate how broad the field is. If lists aren’t your thing, try this alphabet.
Taken broadly, this most ancient of genres arguably traces its origins as far back as the Bible, but the first undisputed tale of detection is found in the Arabian Nights, in a story called ‘The Three Apples’. The genre’s Golden Age is considered to be the early 20th century, although it still boasts some remarkable writers, including one of the genre’s foremost contemporary practitioners, Henning Mankell. Earlier this year, Andrew Nette took us on a tour of Australian pulp detective and crime fiction.
Learn more about the genre here.
In a Crikey report published earlier this week, Guy Rundle lamented the fall from grace of the Man Booker Prize. Rundle compared the prize’s first jury in 1969, consisting of the standard-bearers of high literary culture, and its current jury, headed by Stella Rimington, a former spy chief who’s gone on to writing spy novels, and comprised in the main of names associated in one way or another with genre fiction. He concluded that this year’s Booker, with its emphasis on “readability”, signalled the death of a certain kind of culture:
“What was that culture? It was, for want of a better term, one ruled by the notion of ‘reflexive humanism’ – that modernity posed a series of existential challenges to us, personal, ethical, political, and that the novel was not only a way of thinking those things out, it was a form that experimented with new ways of thinking about how that thinking might occur, i.e. not wild aleatoric experiment, but innovation in form produced and producing innovation in content. That is not only a manner by which the novel matters, it is, these days, the only way by which the novel matters.”
Is the highbrow literary novel dead? Joe Fassler, writer of an essay on the subject in The Atlantic magazine, seems to think so. Fassler argues that literary fiction is being cannibalised by genre fiction.
Fassler’s essay traces a brief but compelling history of the rise, and rise, of genre fiction. The origins of the shift, writes Fassler, are the publication in 2003 and 2004 of two McSweeney’s anthologies of genre fiction by a mixture of genre bestsellers and highbrow auteurs. But there’s a broader shift going on, too, writes Fassler, which he sums up as follows: daily life resembles science fiction more than ever; pop culture is at least as important an influence on writers now as literary culture; literary tastes are more global than ever; stories with mythic dimensions are timeless; and genre is more lucrative, while financial returns on literary fiction are diminishing.
Despite all the gloom and doom, the latest ebook sales figures indicate that that sales of fiction ebook titles is way ahead of every other book category. And of all the different kinds of fiction, literary fiction, here defined as a genre, outsells all the other genres. The figures may be masking a grimmer truth, however, as literary fiction also includes, in this case, sales of classic titles that are no longer under copyright.
Many of us have a favourite Big Issue vendor. Ours sits outside our local supermarket, is on speaking terms with all the locals, knows all the dogs' names and whether or not you can pat them, and every minute or so hiccoughs, “Het! your Big Ishoooo…” as if he had a rare, altruistic form of Tourette’s syndrome.
Once a year at about this time, the magazine the vendors are spruiking is filled with nothing but utter fabrications and shameless lies. Beginning today and for the next fortnight, the entire magazine will be a complete fiction. Featuring well-known and emerging writers, Twelve Tales, the 2011 edition of The Big Issue’s annual fiction edition, will – as the name suggests – include 12 short stories. Authored by a combination of of up-and-coming and established authors (think Chris Womersley, Frank Moorhouse, Nick Earls, Charlotte Wood, Peggy Frew and Amanda Lohrey), the stories cover a range of themes, from advertising culture and ageing, to the art of people-spotting and the laws of desire. The fiction issue has become an annual fixture – this is the seventh – and it’s played a part in fostering local talents like Chris Womersley, author of Bereft.
As always, this edition (16 pages longer than the usual Big Issue) will be $5, half of which will go into the pockets of the vendors, all people from a homeless or marginalised background.
Imagine you are a publisher of serious literature and you receive a submission for a novel that goes something like this:
“Cesar is a translator who’s fallen on very hard times due to the global economic downturn; he is also an author, and a mad scientist hell-bent on world domination. On a visit to the beach he intuitively solves an ancient riddle, finds a pirate’s treasure, and becomes a very wealthy man. Even so, Cesar’s bid for world domination comes first and so he attends a literary conference to be near the man whose clone he hopes will lead an army to victory: the world-renowned Mexican author, Carlos Fuentes.”
Yet this is the book blurb on the Readings site for The Literary Conference, a short novel by noted experimental Argentinian writer César Aira.
Aira, who will be a guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival this year, is a contrarian of the highest order. He takes a remarkably carefree approach to his literary work. And yet his output, which consists of more than 50 short, surreal novels, has somehow managed to find a small but loyal global audience – not least due to the fact that he has been championed by figures such as Roberto Bolaño. One doubts whether such a writer could publish even a single novel in Australia, but Latin American literature is a very different beast. (Here’s an introduction to the writer at Quarterly Conversation.)
Today we’re republishing an interview with Aira that first appeared in this month’s issue of The Victorian Writer, the magazine of the Victorian Writers' Centre. His ideas about writing as improvisation challenge the dominant aesthetic of a literature that is highly-wrought and oft-redrafted. The interview begins with his notion of the ‘flight forward’, a technique he uses to improvise his way out of tricky situations. Please note that any awkwardness in Aira’s responses are due to the fact that they were written in English.
Can you discuss the processes of your writing? What is the ‘flight forward’ (fuga hacia adelante) style – which seems to suggest that editing works in opposition to the art of writing, rather than to enhance it. Is this the case?
‘Flight forward’ is not a big deal. It is just going on writing and not worrying if it is not as good as it should be. To edit, correct, etc. is an illusion, or rather the abject obeisance to a social mandate of quality in the product. Art is not a matter of products; as I see it, it is a matter of artists. Why do you have to write better than how you write? A writer should be him/herself, and not another one better than him/herself, some kind of ghost. He is enough a ghost as he is.
Besides, flight forward for me is the same as flight backwards, or flight sideways, or not flying at all. I seek freedom and I don’t know any other better way that an artistic practice made by way of escape from commands and conventions. Even if they are good commands or right conventions. It is a completely individual matter.
I have not very much to say about my writing process. It is mostly improvisation and whim, not worthy of as serious a word as ‘process’, and I am not so sure it is ‘writing’, as true writers do. I could never, not even in my wildest dreams, sit and write a whole page. I play (toy) a while, mid-morning every day, in a café, with a pen and a notebook of plain white paper, and jot some words and phrases that come out of the blue sky. And that is all. After some months this adds up to something that looks like a little, strange book and someone wants to publish it.
What feelings/emotions do you seek when you read fiction; where should good fiction take you?
I don’t look so much for feelings and emotions, as for alternative ways of thinking. Emotions happen in life; art should give us instruments to handle them in the most productive way. But it does not do it. Every day I convince myself more, at least from my personal experience, that art and life take parallel roads and do not interact, except thematically, that is, superficially. It may seem nihilistic from a writer, but it is what I think: art has no effect on a person’s life, nor on society, nor on history. It is just a method to occupy time, like crosswords or watching TV, just more prestigious (and better, I can’t deny it).
What fuels your writing? Do you have your readers in mind?
You cannot generalise with the readers because reading – being an act of freedom – is so gratuitous and inconsequential, readers are all very different from one another. If you guess rightly how one reader is going to react, you will be wrong with the next one. So it is useless to think about a reader when you write. But, being useless, it is inevitable too. Writers are also readers, more readers than writers in fact, and the two things – reading and writing – are the same thing in some moments; the most creative moments. I think I create my own special kind of reader.
This is a cross-post of a piece published on the blog ‘Alephantine’ by Alex Landragin.
The ABC Radio National’s ‘Book Show’ yesterday broadcast a panel discussion called ‘The fact versus fiction debate’, on the merits of reading fiction and non-fiction. The panel included Dr Anthony Macris, an academic, novelist and memoirist; Meanjin editor Sally Heath, and consultant Jason Clarke. The discussion, chaired by Peter Mares, hinged around a recent interview with Philip Roth that quoted him as saying he doesn’t read fiction anymore.
The panel may as well have been called, Why read fiction? Because, in a sign of how much things have changed since fiction’s heyday in the 19th century, no-one is ever going to ask the question from the other side – why read non-fiction? It’s a given that we should read non-fiction. There is so much good truth out there – why would we want to give up any of our precious truth-reading time on reading somebody’s lies? Somebody’s second-rate lies, what’s more, because after all according to the conventional wisdom the truth is stranger than fiction. And why shouldn’t we throw poetry into the debate too? Because there was a time, in the history of our culture (and to this day in some others), when poetry was the most highly regarded of the literary forms.
Art forms have life cycles. They exist in relation to other art forms and technologies. The birth of the modern novel is often considered to have been the publication of ‘Don Quixote’ in 1605 and 1615 – about the same time as Shakespeare was turning his tricks further north. The novel, and Shakespearean drama, where quintessentially modern in that they focussed on the subject. Cervantes' novel took an old, ossified form – the chivalric romance – and turned it into a timeless comedy of the essentially deluded nature of human experience, and the duality between fantasy and reality. The words ‘quixotic’ and ‘Shakespearean’ have become adjectives, as have ‘Kafkaesque’ and ‘Proustian’, because these writers and their works were able to describe what it is like to be alive in a way that many of us find useful – more than useful, indispensable. I am quixotic; my family Christmas was Shakespearean; my job is Kafkaesque; my lunch is Proustian – all of these words tell us something no other word can tell us.
Image of Don Quixote attacking a windmill via Wikipedia
Fiction’s apogee was the 19th century. This was when the novel came into its own in a quite new way: as vicarious experience. The 19th century was when the European bourgeoisie asserted its moral supremacy, or at least its aspiration to moral supremacy, and in so doing asserted its right – and its intention – to colonise the entire world (chicken, meet egg). It was the century European culture developed its forensic obsession with otherness – within and without itself. But fiction had the edge on non-fiction: an imagination could travel further, more quickly and safely, than any individual could in the real world.
Two things changed in the 20th century: the written word was superseded by the image, and mass travel and mass media became more efficient means by which we could feed our thirst for knowledge. The response was modernism: non-fiction forms might be able to describe the objective world, but the novel – and poetry, music and the filmic and visual arts – would remain the favoured forms of the subjective world. In the course of that century, the arts relinquished to varying degrees their claims on reality, focussing almost exclusively on subjectivity – nowhere more so than in the novel. In modernist novels, subjectivity was endlessly dissected so that it seemed at times to be the catch-all form for playing out the latest psychological, philosophical and/or political theories. By the century’s seventh decade, the obsession with subjectivity seemed completely exhausted, while the torrent of information becoming available to us in the realm of non-fiction was becoming a flood. We were finally at the point where we could legitimately ask the question we are still asking, why continue to read fiction? Still, great novels continued to be written and published, and it began to be apparent to many readers that part of the greatness of a novel was the very way in which it addressed this question.
I’ll admit there have been times in my life when I would have found it difficult to answer that question at all. And there are times even now when I wish more novels would try to answer it. Because that’s where the novel is at now: every novel must address the question, why continue to read fiction? In the case of too many novels, their answer is either escapism or ornamentation. Neither, I think, is satisfactory for very long. Then there are those novels that answer the question by reverting to seriousness, or to cliches of what ‘serious’ art ought to be. They can be spotted a mile off and must be avoided at all costs because they’ve contributed more than any other kind of novel to the form’s so-called demise. But every now and then I read a novel that answers the question with another question: what does it mean to be alive? And it asks this question in two ways: what does it mean to be alive right now? And also, what does it mean to be alive, ever?
And that is precisely why we should read fiction: only fiction can find the forms to be able to answer those questions, and really only a tiny sliver of fiction, the best of fiction, probably (as Nabokov reckoned) only a handful of writers every generation, can do that. Poetry’s scope is too intimate and fragmentary, and too constrained by its continuing unease with meaning. Only the invented story can continue to roam far and wide, unconstrained by budget and form, creating collages of competing structures and images and ideas and characters that together simulate the chaos, the fun, the exhilaration, the wonder, the horror and the heartbreak of what it is to be alive – right now, and forever.
Alex Landragin is the Wheeler Centre’s online content manager.
(Click to watch video.)
The Wheeler Centre recently hosted an event in our series, ‘The Late, Great…’, on Ruth Park. Today, as we publish the video/podcast, Marion Halligan reminds us we must preserve the legacy of Ruth Park, and other pioneers of Australian writing.
“One boiling day I was writing in my garret when the murderer knocked on the door below.”
This is the opening sentence of Ruth Park’s second volume of autobiography, Fishing in the Styx. She goes on to describe the murderers who lived in the vicinity, including “the rabbity women who had done in their newborns but got off on a plea of insanity. In those days of the second World War it was widely believed that women who had just delivered could reasonably be expected to be off their heads.” It’s a bit of a worry for the pregnant Ruth. “I was outa me mind,” the women say. “All me milk went to the brain. I suppose it curdles.”
The murderer knocking at the door runs a few girls but is mainly an enforcer, the most feared underworld figure in Sydney. He has come to inquire, courteously, if Ruth’s landlady can put a few stitches in the torn lining of his coat pocket.
This keeps you turning the pages. It is full of energy, is funny, and wonderfully black – like a lot of Park’s writing. She began as a journalist and was on her way from New Zealand to a job in San Francisco when the bombing of Pearl Harbour put a stop to Pacific travel. So she went to Sydney instead and married D’Arcy Niland, another writer. They resolved they would make their livings by writing, a near-impossible task then, as it is today. But they managed it, by putting their heads down and just doing it. Not for them the luxury of sitting in despair in front of a blank sheet or suffering the anguish of writer’s block. Park sat at the ironing board, with children underfoot, at the kitchen table with the onions and the carrots, churning out anything and everything. Articles, plays, radio scripts (more than 5000), serials, children’s programs. When, after the war, the Sydney Morning Herald offered a £2000 prize for a novel, Park knew she had two subjects: journalism and the slums of Surry Hills where she was living. She was afraid she might be sued for libel if she wrote about journalism, so that left the slums.
When The Harp in the South (1948) won the prize it was a scandal. I was a small child at the time, and I remember it. The problem seemed to be a woman writing about such things, and one from New Zealand at that. Drunkenness, wife beatings, abortions, prostitution, sly grog, all the life of the streets about her, not from a judgmental point of view but as an inmate, the details intimate, comical, forgivable. Slums? said authorities, there are no slums in Sydney, and then proceeded to clear them away and move people out west, which filled her with guilt. The priest of her church preached a sermon against the novel, saying that the Virgin Mary in her lifetime would never have stooped to write a book of any kind, let alone one published in the Herald.
Park made her dream of living by writing a reality. The Harp in the South has never been out of print. She has won a Miles Franklin and an Age Book of the Year for non-fiction. The Muddle Headed Wombat was a long running and beloved radio serial. Playing Beattie Bow has been devoured by generations of children, in print and on screen.
Park was 93 when she died in 2010. She spent her life spellbinding her readers with her story-telling. We need to make sure we are the grateful heirs of her legacy, something we are not always good at in this country. When writers get old we tend to forget them, and when they die they pass from our consciousness. Park showed us our world as it was, and we must not forget either the writer or her subjects.
The next event in our series, ‘The Late, Great…’ is on Marcus Clarke, 16 August.
(Click to watch video.)
He’s written 24 novels and created two of crime and mystery fictions best-known contemporary heroes, Harry Bosch and Micky Haller. In Australia alone, as of early 2011, he’d sold 1.25 million books. His novels now sell an average of 85,000 copies. He’s Michael Connelly, a colossus of his – and indeed any – literary genre, and in this video he’s in conversation with the Wheeler Centre’s head of programming, Michael Williams.
How did it all begin? “I got interested in crime when I was 16 and I was witness to part of a crime, and I spent a night in a police station dealing with detectives… After that night I started reading crime news and newspapers, I started reading non-fiction books about crime, and then I got to fiction.” Connelly attributes the start of his literary crime obsession to Raymond Chandler, whom he came across at university: “Something about reading those books was like an epiphany or a light going off.” He read all of Chandler’s novels in little more than a fortnight, and a career was born.
The Wheeler Centre, in partnership with the Melbourne International Film Festival, will be hosting UK film critic Adrian Wootton in five events, in one of which he’ll be speaking about Raymond Chandler on the silver screen.
Screenshot from the trailer of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious [1946], via WikiCommons
It’s Bloomsday. People all over the world – including Melbourne – are attending public readings of the novel Ulysses, despite the objections of James Joyce’s descendants. Why, even Joyce himself was recorded reading it aloud – and why not? It is a very read-out-loud-able kind of book.
So Bloomsday gets us to thinking about Ulysses, which gets us to thinking about Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, which you can read here and listen to here. This gets us to thinking about our favourite last lines in novels.
Here’s how Molly Bloom ends Ulysses: “… I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ending sentence for The Great Gatsby is a thing of beauty: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” And Samuel Beckett’s ending to The Unnameable is a conclusion in both senses of the word – an ending and a summation: “…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
Sheet music of ‘Stars & Stripes Forever’ by John Philip Sousa, from the Library of Congress via WikiCommons
The debate over Philip Roth’s legacy continues following his win of the Man Booker International Prize last week, honouring his overall achievement. One of the prize judges, Virago founder Carmen Callil, quit her position following the announcement, as we reported last week, saying, “he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book.” On the weekend, Callil explained in the Guardian that her reservations about Roth were not political but literary. “Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there,” the report quotes Callil as saying. “His self-involvement and self-regard restrict him as a novelist. And so he uses a big canvas to do small things, and yet his small things take up oceanic room. The more I read, the more tedious I found his work, the more I heard the swish of emperor’s clothes.”
In her overview of the story, Salon’s Laura Miller says that although it’s unfair to presume Callil was motivated by ideology, her reaction was inappropriate: “insulting an author (any author) by name in such a context is uncalled for. There are enough readers who love Roth’s work to make him a reasonable choice for an important award, even if Callil can’t personally endorse that choice.”
An even more interesting reaction is by Anis Shivani in the Huffington Post, who connected the story to an older story about the resistance of the Nobel committee to US writers on the basis that American literature is too introspective. The permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, Horace Engdahl, recently said, “The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature…That ignorance is restraining.”
Shivani agrees, adding, “Our publishing model, like that of the lapsed auto industry, is a failed one. It survives only because of our gigantism – mere volume is sufficient to ensure a certain amount of financial success, but it is not producing a worthwhile cultural product. Just as we might have 500 television channels but not one will ever offer the challenging movies of Buñuel or Godard, or a Wagner opera, we might produce 175,000 books a year, but quality is elusive.” Shivani says US readers overestimate the importance of the recent greats – Roth, Updike, DeLillo, Pynchon – but that because these writers restrict themselves to an American version of reality their global significance is limited. “What recent American novel – by an American, not an immigrant, writer – accepts or even acknowledges the new global reality, even with America at its center?” asks Shivani, answering, “There is none.”
US author Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Home at the End of the World, The Hours, Specimen Days and, most recently, By Nightfall, is appearing tonight at the Wheeler Centre from 7:30pm. Tickets are free.
Image of c1880s stereo-optic view of Burmese pagodas via WikiCommons
By Unpublished Manuscript Fellow Michelle Aung Thin
Four years ago, I started writing my first novel, set in colonial Rangoon of the 1930s. In my writing I explore what it was like to be a young woman of mixed race – a sexual icon – in a place ruled by European men. In the private space of my imagination I was interested only in the truth of things – those ways of being in the world obscured by familiar and unchallenged worldviews. I wanted to mess with modern perceptions of how men and women belong: to show that things were never as rigid as they seemed. I wanted to subvert things. I wanted to redirect the discussion. In other words, I did my best to write like a woman.
My novel will be published this September by Text and I am currently working towards the final draft with my editor, Mandy Brett. One of the things we’ve been talking through is the title – in the rush to finish the book I was happy to leave it until last. Text has suggested The Monsoon Bride. They love it. My writing and reading friends think it has a certain ring to it, the hint of a satirical edge. Brian Castro, my PhD supervisor at the University of Adelaide, reckons ironically that it is a title that will sell. But I have all kinds of reservations. It’s the word ‘bride’. It seems too girly. You see, while I write like a woman I find that I am worried about being read as one.
This is not some exercise in self-loathing, or a wringing of hands over my political marginalization. My misgivings are all about avoiding pigeonholes. I want to sell lots of books. But I also want my work to be part of the literary conversation – the main conversation, not an alternative sidebar. I think that my novel has something to contribute to debates around race and cultural belonging; that it is worthy of the conversation. So will the word ‘bride’ in the title limit the way it will be read and reviewed? Will being read like a woman also mean being sidelined or dismissed?
None of this was an issue when I was writing the book. I didn’t even think about it. But now that my novel is finished, I find myself treading carefully. Instead of cutting through entrenched and biased worldviews, I have to take them into account as I negotiate my way through the marketplace. Four years of hard work is at stake. And I am wondering, how do you get in the game without playing the game? How do make sure you are part of the conversation and yet keep your self-respect?
I’ve seen the pie charts from VIDA showing how only a fraction of women are reviewed in the major literary magazines compared to men. I’ve read Kirsten Tranter’s take on the corresponding Australian magazines. I am tuned in to Leslie Cannold’s campaign for 51% representation. I saw the fallout when the shortlist for the Miles Franklin was announced (including one respondent to Alison Croggon’s piece in The Drum Opinion who maintained that “men do write better books”). I am sensitive to the suspicion that writers who complain about being overlooked are simply not good enough to be published.
It strikes me that this bias masquerades as ‘commercial reality’. Editors responsible for putting together the literary section of a newspaper or a magazine – major marketing vehicles for books – know that reviews of titles by men will be read by the broadest audience as a matter of default because, as Eileen Myles writes in her essay ‘Being Female’, “female reality always contains male and female”.
Readers also want to be part of the literary conversation. They are more likely to engage with books that are brought to their attention by taste-makers. If the majority of literary fiction reviewed is written by men, then of course it will seem like books by women are not as critically interesting – hence the partiality, unconscious or not.
But what seems equally important is not to get stuck in the narrative of winners and losers. The way this issue is reported, it can seem as if women writers and men writers are two teams playing a football match and ours is the dud side. It’s depressing.
No writer – female or male – can control how she or he is read. I know this. I also know that my name on the front cover and my photo on the back will raise certain expectations of what is on the pages inside. All I can do is: write as well as I can; be aware of my own blind spots not only in my writing but also in my reading; think critically about what is before me; acknowledge the fact that this is a complex issue, that all sorts of things get mixed up together (like, what is quality? what type of writing belongs to women?); and try to have some integrity and expect it in others.
Besides, my first novel is about to be published by a publishing house I admire. I should be happy, right? That is what irks me most; I have to think about this instead of just rejoicing in getting my work out there.
So in the end I went with The Monsoon Bride. It does have a certain ring to it. It does have sales appeal. And I really like it. I’ll just have to leave it up to readers to get the irony.
Michelle Aung Thin’s first novel, The Monsoon Bride, will be published by Text in September. This is the third and last in our series of essays by the 2010 shortlisted Unpublished Manuscript Fellows.
Nine-metre bronze sculptures of Saddam Hussein in the grounds of the Republican Palace, Baghdad, 2005, by Kim Gordon, USDoD, via WikiCommons
The comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen is making a film based on a book by Saddam Hussein. The film, due to be released in May 2012, has the working title of The Dictator, and is based on a book written by the former dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. Agence France Presse reports that the creator of the comic characters Ali G, Borat and Brüno will be adapting a novel believed to have been written by Saddam – if not actually by the man, at least by ghostwriters under his supervision.
According to Wikipedia, Zabibah and the King was first published anonymously in 2000, but its true authorship was easily divined when, soon after publication, it was announced that the novel would be adapted for the stage and screen (a 20-part television series, no less). One Amazon reviewer describes the plot as being about an “intimate friendship between a lonely, unhappy king and an unusually perceptive and spirited peasant girl [that] paves the way for the abolition of a decadent monarchy and the establishment of a popular government.”
As well as occasionally turning his pen to poetry, Saddam Hussein is commonly believed to have written and published four novels. In a 2004 review of Be Gone Demons!, Iraqi novelist and critics Ali Abdel Amir concluded, “[Saddam] was completely out of touch with actual reality, and novel writing gave him the chance to live in delusions.” Saad Hadi was one of the ghostwriting team who helped Saddam write. He says Saddam was deeply influenced by Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The dictator had a peculiar method: “He’d sit in his state room and recount simple tales, while his aides recorded his words.”
Other dictators to have tried their hand at literature include Muammar Gaddafi (Escape to Hell and Other Stories) and Kim Jong-Il, who wrote 1500 books as a university student.
For one writer, the novels speak volumes about dictatorship and its failings. US conservative Daniel Pipes, for whom Saddam Hussein was at one time an obsession, has written that hubris and ignorance are hallmarks of dictatorships. “Both these incapacities worsen with time and the tyrant becomes increasingly removed from reality. His whims, eccentricities and fantasies dominate state policy. The result is a pattern of monumental mistakes.” Or, as Guardian journalist Leo Benedictus put it, “No matter how powerful they become, it seems there is one thing that no despot can ever have: an honest editor.”
Detail of Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate, released last week
There’s no body. The body was hastily dumped. The photos are too inflammatory to be released. He resisted. He was unarmed. The death of Osama bin Laden is proving as fertile a ground for conspiracy theorists as the 9/11 tragedy. No longer can conspiracy theories be easily dismissed as white noise on the fringes of political debate – in fact, they play an increasingly central role in public discourse. There are dozens of them. Most of them are harmless, but some can fuel the flames of hatred. Two conspiracy theories in particular have loomed large in recent times.
Some climate change sceptics see a conspiracy theory lurking behind global warming. This conspiracy theory sees a cabal of researchers overplaying the causes and effects of climate change, angling for more grants, while government apparatuses hungry for more control seize the opportunity presented by the scientific cabal to extend the tentacles of their power. Of course, this conspiracy theory cuts both ways.
And recently, US property tycoon Donald Trump launched a high-profile presidential bid by weighing into the birther controversy that has plagued President Obama since his election. Trump’s bid proved short-lived after the White House finally released Obama’s long-form Hawaiian birth certificate. President Obama took the opportunity at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner to roast Trump: “No-one is happier – no-one is prouder – to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focussing on the issues that matter, like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened at Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”
Trump responded to the certificate’s release by moving the focus of his attention to President Obama’s academic record, suggesting he got into Harvard University on the grounds of skin colour rather than merit. This led various celebrities to accuse Trump of racism – a Hollywood version, perhaps, of dog-whistle politics.
University of New South Wales mathematician James Franklin yesterday asked why the human mind is such fertile ground for the seed of conspiracy. Powerlessness and the joy of revealing ‘hidden’ truths are chief among his reasons. Another is the ultimate unprovability of conspiracy theories, which sometimes turn out to be no less fanciful than actual conspiracies – like Castro’s exploding cigars or MKULTRA. If, in the words of David Foster Wallace, truth and fiction are equally strange, then we are plunged into a world where they are indistinguishable – the paranoid world, in psychoanalytic terms, of psychosis.
Psychologists have tried to explain the phenomenon. Belief in a conspiracy theory may well be a desperate attempt to escape the logical cul-de-sac triggered by cognitive dissonance, when the gap between what we want to believe and the evidence before us can no longer be spanned. Or maybe it’s just a normal part of trying to understand an increasingly complex world: “humans remain hard-wired to look for patterns in a chaotic universe”, according to political commentator Daniel Drezner.
Ultimately, a conspiracy theory survives for as long as it is useful – and the best conspiracy theories survive because they’re useful to everyone. They cast a spell on adepts and sceptics alike. The scorn of non-believers is just grist to the mill for the believers, reinforcing rather than corroding their certainty. And sceptics find them useful too, using them to marginalise dissent and prop up their own world-view.
But here’s a conspiracy theory for you, the biggest one of all: in this one, we’re all conspiracy theorists. You want proof? Here’s proof: our insatiable hunger for stories, for narratives and fables, for theatre, literature and cinema. There are countless books and films that feed on conspiracies, from The Thirty-Nine Steps to Foucault’s Pendulum – but we’re talking about something bigger. Much bigger. Something so big, the government doesn’t want you to know about it. Maybe, just maybe, the part of the human brain that knows that seeing isn’t always believing, that power is corrupting, and that categories like history, facts and even knowledge itself are fluid and manipulable, is the same part of the brain that we use to build stories – stories that have us always wanting to know what happens next, turning the next page and the one after that, ever deeper into the infinite night.
(Click to watch video.)
Politician, pensmith, (ex-) prisoner – there are many ‘P’ words that come to mind when Jeffrey Archer is in the house. Archer toured Australia recently to promote his latest book Only Time Will Tell. He was joined by Jennifer Byrne for a conversation which turned out, for all intents and purposes, to be more of a soliloquy.
In his hour-long appearance, Archer discussed his resilience and the lessons he learned in jail, as well as his relationship with the media and the challenge of having his personal history portrayed and discussed in an even, proportionate manner. He touched on his first love — politics — and his respect for Margaret Thatcher, whom he describes as one of three women who have profoundly affected and influenced him. In the tug-o'-war he imagines between writers and storytellers, Archer comes down heavily on the side of the latter, describing himself as “an old fashioned storyteller”, with a loathing of ebooks to boot.
With over two dozen books and international sales passing 250 million, Jeffrey Archer is a publishing and cultural phenomenon. Former Deputy Chairman of England’s Conservative Party, he served five years in the House of Commons, fourteen years in the House of Lords and two in Her Majesty’s prisons.
Indigenous Tasmanians on the margins of their own country, as painted by William Gould in River Scene with Aborigines, 1838, courtesy W. L. Crowther Library, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office, via WikiCommons
Congratulations to Launceston writer Rohan Wilson. The 35 year-old University of Melbourne PhD student was announced the winner of The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award last night for his tale of a murderous expedition in colonial Tasmania, The Roving Party. Citing Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as a literary antecedent, Wilson’s novel is set during what has been called the Black War.
Based on historical events, the eponymous party, sanctioned by colonial authorities, is hunting indigenous Tasmanians. The 1830 paramilitary campaign this story is based on has come to be known as the Black Line. The party is led by a character named John Batman, based on the historical figure of the same name. Sydney-born Batman settled in northern Tasmania in 1821 and was a participant in the Black Line. He later became involved in land speculation on the mainland, making deals of dubious legality with local indigenous groups, and in the process founding the settlement we now know as Melbourne.
The novel provocatively revisits the intellectual terrain of the History Wars of a decade ago. That debate was triggered by claims by conservative historian Keith Windschuttle that Tasmania’s colonial history was much less violent than portrayed by historians like Lyndall Ryan and Henry Reynolds, and certainly not genocidal, as claimed by historians including Tony Barta, John Docker and Ann Curthoys.
In a novel twist, the ebook version of Wilson’s novel was made available on the Readings ebook website immediately following the announcement, and the book is available in print today. Here he blogs about the novel’s background.
Last week, we reported that Jennifer Egan had won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. We also reported on the kerfuffle prompted by the announcement of the shortlist for the 2011 Miles Franklin Award – a very short shortlist, consisting of three rural, historical stories, all written by men.
Jennifer Egan has prompted more debate about women and letters following comments she made in a Wall Street Journal interview shortly after receiving news of her Pulitzer win. Asked whether women writers tend to understate the importance of their own writing, Egan replied, “Anyone can say anything, that’s easy. My focus is less on the need for women to trumpet their own achievements than to shoot high and achieve a lot. What I want to see is young, ambitious writers. And there are tons of them … I’m not saying you should say you’ve never done anything good, but I don’t go around saying I’ve written the book of the century. My advice for young female writers would be to shoot high and not cower.”
In her response, Egan referred to Kaavya Viswanathan’s novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Though initially well-received, the novel was subsequently accused of plagiarising widely from chick-lit authors like Meg Cabot, Sophie Kinsella and Megan McCafferty, authors whose work Egan described as “very derivative and banal”.
Egan’s comments drew opprobrium from various bloggers (“Oh, wow am I pissed. I’m so pissed off I don’t even want to use cutesy exclamation marks to illustrate how pissed off I am”) who argue that chick-lit shouldn’t be dismissed as a second-class form of literature. Writes one defender of the genre: “Is there derivative, poorly written chick lit? Sure. But there’s also derivative, poorly written literary fiction. Slamming an entire genre of novels written by women is unsavory, inaccurate, and akin to the kind of girl-on-girl crime that women should be trying to stop, not perpetuate.”
The stoush takes up an exchange in the Guardian last year which began when DJ Connell called the label “chick-lit” offensive: “When you call a woman a chick you diminish her as a human being and dismiss her as something less than intelligent”. Michele Gorman replied with a defense of the genre: “saying that chick-lit can’t be well-written is a little like saying that pretty girls can’t be smart. It’s ludicrous. And it’s wrong.”
Here’s an overview of the debate from the Millions. In a related article, Egan describes her writing process in candid detail.
The winners of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize were announced overnight. The winner of the prize for fiction was Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good Squad, a “an inventive investigation of growing up and growing old in the digital age, displaying a big-hearted curiosity about cultural change at warp speed.” A glowing review in the New York Review of Books called it “a moving humanistic saga, an enormous nineteenth-century-style epic brilliantly disguised as ironic postmodern pastiche”.
In journalism, the prestigious award for Public Service went to the Los Angeles Times for its coverage of “corruption in the small California city of Bell where officials tapped the treasury to pay themselves exorbitant salaries, resulting in arrests and reforms.”
1871 illustration of a Russian grave-digger by Viktor Vasnetsov [1848-1926] from the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, via WikiCommons
The publication of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King last Friday, covered by the Dailies, has prompted a diverting piece on posthumous novels in the Telegraph. The list begins with Jane Austen, some of whose most famous novels – notably Northanger Abbey and Persuasion – were published posthumously, although the Telegraph list only cites the less famous Sanditon.
Our favourite posthumous novel on the list is John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. The story behind this book – a classic comic novel set in New Orleans – is steeped in legend. After many fruitless endeavours to have it published, its troubled author eventually committed suicide in 1969. Several years later, his mother showed the manuscript to the novelist Walker Percy, who helped get it published in 1980. It won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. More recently, the three novels in the best-selling Meillennium series by Stieg Larsson were published in the three years following the author’s death in 2004. There’s talk of a fourth instalment by Larsson’s surviving partner based on his notes, pending approval from the author’s estate.
There are other classic posthumous novels that didn’t make it onto the list. The Wheeler Centre is a great fan (inasmuch as an institution can be a fan) of The Leopard – although Tony Wilson struggled with it at school. WG Sebald’s Austerlitz was published to acclaim after the author’s untimely demise, but we can’t help but feel it’s inferior to earlier novels like The Emigrants and especially The Rings of Saturn. Roberto Bolano’s 2666 was published after the Chilean author succumbed to liver disease. There’s good reason to believe the obsessively private and perfectionist Vladimir Nabokov wouldn’t have been thrilled to have his unfinished The Original of Laura in the public domain, but published it was in 2009.
Perhaps the greatest of posthumous novelists (if there can be such a thing) is Franz Kafka. Kafka, who died early because of tuberculosis, famously instructed his friend Max Brod to burn everything he wrote. Brod, less talented than Kafka but a better judge of talent, ignored his friend’s instructions and published the first of Kafka’s three great but unfinished novels in 1925, a year after his death. The Trial, The Castle and Metamorphosis went on to change the course of literary history and maybe even history itself – we’re not usually given to such grandiose statements here at the Dailies, but this is Kafka we’re talking about, after all.
Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, has posted a blog of interest to fans of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Anyone even slightly familiar with Tolstoy’s work would know that happiness is a subject that interested him greatly. His ideas earned him cultish devotion in Russia during his lifetime, even though he struggled to live according to his principles in his personal life.
These are Tolstoy’s ten “rules of life”:
(1) Get up early (five o’clock);
(2) Go to bed early (nine to ten o’clock);
(3) Eat little and avoid sweets;
(4) Try to do everything by yourself;
(5) Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater;
(6) Keep away from women;
(7) Kill desire by work;
(8) Be good, but try to let no one know it;
(9) Always live less expensively than you might; and
(10) Change nothing in your style of living even if you become ten times richer.
Butterfly illustrations by Meyer via WikiCommons
Vladimir Nabokov’s legions of fans know how infuriating their idol can be. Infuriatingly contrarian, infuriatingly secretive and, of course, infuriatingly talented.
Literature’s most famous synesthete was also a noted entomologist. Throughout his life, Nabokov’s passion for lepidoptera was second only to his writing – “My pleasures,” he wrote, “are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.” Lolita is said to have been structured as a butterfly hunt. A number of butterflies and moths were named in his honour, as is the genus Nabokova.
During his butterfly hunts in America’s southwest, Nabokov formulated theories on how a family of butterflies called the Polyommatus blues arrived on the continent. Though his ideas were largely ignored by professional lepidopterists during his lifetime, The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London last week reported that – infuriatingly – Nabokov’s postulations were, as usual, perfect.
Image courtesy Wikicommons
There’s hardly a book-lover in the world who isn’t familiar in one way or another with Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic detective has claims to being “the most famous literary character of all time”. Sherlock Holmes was a publishing hit from the beginning, although Conan Doyle had him killed, locked in a struggle with the Napoleon of crime, Professor Moriarty, as they fell down a Swiss ravine in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893).
There’s evidence that Conan Doyle did not think highly of his creation. He wrote to his mother, “I think of slaying Holmes … and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.” Pressure from the public and from publishers led Doyle to resurrect the World’s Greatest Detective, and he returned to the detective sporadically throughout his life, usually for financial reasons.
Now, 8 decades after the death of his creator, Sherlock is preparing for another return from the grave. Conan Doyle’s estate has approved the release – due in September – of another Sherlock mystery. It will be penned by Anthony Horowitz, creator of the Alex Rider series. One can only wonder what Holmes would have made of it all. Perhaps he would have quipped, “We must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception.”
Author Paul Auster (image David Shankbone via wikicommons)
As Paul Auster releases his new novel Sunset Park, Goodreads has published a rare interview with the American author.
Auster says his latest book looks at the economic and social issues faced by a post-GFC America as it looks at repossessing homes. “It’s astounding how many people have lost places to live in recent years, Auster says. "It’s an enormous social problem, confronted in my book by these young people who simply don’t have enough money to live…”
He uses his characters to critique America’s expensive tertiary education system which rather than giving people an early start in life is disadvantaging them. As Auster explains it “The thing that is so tragic about America today is that young people who go to college, unless they’re from extremely wealthy families, have to take out student loans. The great tragedy, therefore, is that young people who have been very educated start out life in debt. People in debt tend to be frightened people.”
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