The Slap (Christos Tsiolkas)

If Neighbours was a bicycle and modern Australian literature was one of those guys that pulls discarded bikes out of the creek and rejigs them for sale, The Slap might be the renovated Malvern Star you’d buy at Ceres.

It’s basically a soapie. Compelling, compulsive, absorbing – just like Desperate Housewives. I read it in just two sittings and it took up most of my weekend – just like the West Wing DVDs.

Eight representative Melburnians share the ramifications when a Greek businessman slaps a bratty three year old. This is a fabulous premise – literally, a barbeque stopper.

I also thrilled at the amount of action set in my own hood. Every time a character walked down High Street I gave a smug little smile.

Some of the characters are beautifully drawn – the chapter on Manolis, the elderly Greek man, brought tears to my eyes. Others, such as the Indian vet called Aisha, come across as a bit more cardboard.

Tsiolkas is trying to be all things to all men in this book. Unfortunately, that’s what lets it down. I found the female characters lacked much life. I just didn’t believe that Tsiolkas knows what it’s like to throw up with morning sickness – for the record, it is nothing like when you spew from a hangover. It’s more like you’ve eaten a bag of highlighter pens and 5 cent coins and now can’t stop belching.

I also found the sex scenes all very irritating and very much written with a gay male sensibility. By about page 300 I didn’t want to hear about any more thick cocks or fumbling for rubbers or thrusting anythings. Modelling safe sex is all very noble, but how many married couples in their early 40s rely on condoms for contraception? Come on, Christos, girls have this thing called The Pill. When you’re female, straight and monogamous (ish) the biggest thing on your mind isn’t STDs, it’s pregnancy, and you ain’t going to rely on your hubby’s fumbling for anything to protect you from that.

I think Tsiolkas writes beautiful Greek male first person narrative. His eye for pathos and tragedy and comedy and all those other Greek things is first class – as you’d expect! But he just doesn’t have the broadness of vision to write convincing female and Anglo characters. To read this book, you’d think there was hardly an Anglo to be seen in Melbourne’s north. An Aboriginal Muslim convert? It all seemed a little ponderous.

If this book was a person, it would be a multicultural officer in charge of diversity policies at Darebin Council attending her monthly Book Club meeting while wearing a beret and scribbling mysteriously in a moleskin notebook.

In a nutshell: a man slaps a bratty three year old at a backyard BBQ and repercussions multiply,

The Slap scores seven tasty chocolates out of a possible ten, but none of them are rare, expensive truffles.

Northern Aranda Traditions (Ted Strehlow)

Inspired by Will Self’s The Butt, I went in search of the controversial anthropologist Ted Strehlow. Melbourne Uni library had his major work, Songs of Central Australia, but you had to go in and read it on site, so I settled for Northern Aranda Traditions, published in 1947.

It seems to be quite fashionable to bash Strehlow. It does seem from various online biographies I have read that he went a little weird in his final years, but this book was written at the height of his abilities. He did the research in the 1930s but held off until his informants had all died before the book was published.

One of the difficulties about being a white Australian who is sympathetic to indigneous causes is the lack of information about what, exactly, Aboriginal culture consists of. It isn’t really surprising, given that so much of these cultures involves access rights to certain bits of knowledge or parts of stories, but you can feel a little in the dark about exactly what you are sympathising with.

A great struggle I have personally is the traditional owners’ requests not to visit certain places. As someone who feels intensely about the landscape it is hard to be told that there is only one way of interacting with a particular place - especially when that one way utterly excludes you. I can’t help feeling, secular person that I am, that it is crazy to expect everyone to interact with a particular place in exactly the same way. It is a bit like expecting everyone who visits the Sistine Chapel to be a devout Catholic, or everyone who sees the Taj Mahal to be an observant Muslim. Maybe they should be!

This book is obviously untouched by modern political considerations, for both good and bad. It is not so good if you’re interested in Northern Aranda women, for example, because they barely rate a mention except to point out that they are completely excluded from the religious life of the groups (although Strehlow was obviously writing without consulting any women, so it is perfectly possible they had their own initiations and special knowledge to pass on).. But as an explanation of exactly how things worked in a traditional Aboriginal society, among men who were older than contact with white settlers, it is very interesting.

It also underlined just how much has been lost. The complex initiation process is seen very much as a vetting process, to discover exactly who was worthy of access to the various secrets. If no one was deemed worthy, they weren’t passed on and died with their keepers.

Interestingly, according to this book, the traditionally inherited secret/sacred objects that represented totemic ancestors were seen as private property – the current ‘owner’ of these objects was apparently entitled to do as he pleased with them. This conflicts with a lot about what I had assumed about traditional Aboriginal culture – you do tend to assume everything must have been shared.

Strehlow also points out how unchanging the culture of the Northern Aranda was; how everything was so proscribed that there was really no room for technical or literary innovation whatsoever. He even referred to it as a ‘decadent’ culture, which surprised me a lot. We are so used to thinking of the unchanging nature of traditional indigenous culture as a strength - which it is - but of course an unchanging culture can also be an oppressive and hidebound and restrictive one.

The main feeling I got from the book, however, was just a sadness at the complexity and interestingness of what has been lost, all over Australia, over the last two centuries. Strehlow deserves all credit for insisting on the intricacy and significance of Aranda culture at a time when this was anything but fashionable.

The Butt (Will Self)

A lot of domestics are our place are caused by either Will Self or smoking.

My husband Will loves Will Self. I don’t love him so much as read him, which is a more intimate and long-term proposition. Reading an author means you end up in bed with him for hours, after all.

My husband Will also likes to smoke, which drives me insane. Our little chats titled Why Don’t You Just Give Up and Will Self isn’t a Novelist, He Just Writes Extended Conceits never end well. Usually they end with Will heading, affronted, out into the garden with a Will Self book in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

You can imagine my delight in finding a Will Self book on the topic of smoking…

The Butt is yet another extended conceit, but with some special features that intrigued me. The flimsy premise is that an American tourist, Tom Brodzinski, chucks the butt of his final cigarette over the balcony of his holiday apartment, where it hits another man on the head. In a series of Kafkaesque repercussions, this means he ends up facing tribal justice and a charge of attempted murder.

Intriguing special feature number one: the book is about Australia. Other reviewers have claimed it is about ‘the colonial experience’ or ‘a combination of Iraq and Australia’. Nonsense: it is about Australia. Will Self is the king of the thinly disguised real; this was blatantly inspired by, and perhaps written on, a holiday to FNQ or NT. He isn’t capable of a genuine synthesis. It is about the weirdness of the traditional Aboriginal laws that try to coexist with the laws of Australia.

Special feature number two: the book draws heavily on the story of Ted Strehlow, the anthropologist of the Arrernte people of Central Australia who was controversially made the final custodian of Arrernte traditional law by elders in the 1930s. Other reviewers (fools!) have imagined it is Kurtz from Heart of Darkness who is the mad anthropologist at the apex of the book. But that is just a reflex reference. The beating heart of the inspiration for this is blatantly TGH Strehlow. (You can read more about him here).

The nightmarish Australia of the book contains some insurance-derived badlands. ‘Tontine’ insurance is a policy under which the last living policyholder is entitled to a payout, causing the local tribes to indulge in an orgy of degenerate killings. This is how Strehlow came to ‘own’ the Arrernte traditions he wrote about: “In accordance with the Aranda rules of tjurunga inheritance, these traditions would be regarded as becoming my personal property after the deaths of their original owners.”

Will Self’s use of language is HOT. No one does flesh-crawling metaphors like Will Self. It is worth reading his books just for these gems – and I do.

His use of actual narrative and character, on the other hand, are RUBBISH. The only good novel he has written, in my opinion, is How the Dead Live. That one is good because, like all transcendent satire, it contains some humanity – it is about his relationship with his mother and other family members. A naff topic that makes for an awesome read.

The story of The Butt is stupidly long and exhausting. Many have remarked that The Butt’s description of a roadtrip through a hot featureless desert is similar to embarking on such a roadtrip oneself. Similarly, its description of a labyrinthine legal system is not unlike reading labyrinthine legalese for real. Neither are much fun. However, I was giving this book the benefit of the doubt until page 301, when it seems like Self just got bored and hastily scribbled the unsatisfactory – in fact downright irritating – ending.

My husband still smokes. We still argue about his smoking. We did manage to agree, however, that The Butt really lets itself down in the last 50 pages, coming to an incoherent and rather silly conclusion.

If this book was a person, it would be my husband Will, promising yet again to give up while sneaking up to the shop ‘to buy some milk’….In a nutshell: in a nightmare that looks a lot like Australia, a bumbling tourist chucks away the butt of his final cigarette and unwittingly becomes the butt of a series of hideous legal consequences.Planet 8 scores four chocolates with pretty wrappers that turn out to be slightk

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (Doris Lessing)

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
- But who is that on the other side of you?

I had always found this stanza from The Waste Land mysterious and evocative. In some ways it is only a more posh version of that cheap ‘Footprints’ poem that everyone’s aunt has on her refrigerator, but something about those lines just thrills me every time I read them. Who is the third who walks always beside you? Who is that on the other side of you? It made me think of the tales told by survivors of nature’s extremes: that when you are alone with death, you are not alone at all.

I went through a major ‘disasters in the cold’ phase a few years back. I read stories by people like Edmund Hillary and watched Touching the Void, about a rock climber who falls into an enormous crevice, just to see what it is like at the extremes of human experience, and for the thrill of wondering: What would I do? Could I shoot and eat my faithful husky dog? Could I eat my fellow plane passengers? In extremis, who would I be? I have never read The Worst Journey in the World, an account of Scott’s disastrous Antarctic expeditions, which in part inspired Planet 8, but I think it would fit right into that category.

Planet 8 is easily the best thing I’ve read so far this year. It is simple, devestating and brilliant and made me realise afresh why Doris Lessing deserved to win the Nobel Prize for literature. I finished it two days ago and still I think about it every time I close my eyes. The story is ringing in my ears like a thunderclap.

I think for your own good, I won’t tell you about how the narrative of this book unfolds. If I told you, you might not read it. It is like a news story you can’t bear to watch because it is too sad. But the story is ultimately one which asks the same question that Elliot asked in those lines from The Waste Land: Are we all there is? Is anyone watching over us? How can we transcend ourselves?

Unlike Elliot, however, Lessing is bold enough to provide an answer.


If this book was a person, it would be a hot actor playing Captain Oates, the man who famously – and selflessly - left Scott’s tent saying: “I’m just going out. I may be some time.”

In a nutshell: a once fertile planet is beleaguered by a surprise Ice Age. International space organisation Canopus assures the population they will soon be relocated – but how long can they hold out?

Planet 8 scores an entire box of your favourite chocolates, plus an empty house, six hours of babysitting and a rainy day.

City of Illusions (Ursula la Guin)

Now THIS is, for my money, the best of the le Guins I’ve read lately. What an awesome premise! A naked alien emerges from the forest. He has no memory of who he is. The local people – a simple-living bunch – take him in and teach him to speak and read. They call him Falk.

It turns out the local people are simple-living for good reason. The planet Earth is ruled by the Shing. The Shing are liars. They are not to be trusted. They let humankind live, but not do anything too technological. If humans start getting uppity, building vehicles and the like, the Shing come by on an airship and raze the place. So humans live in insular, disparate little communities and no one really knows who to trust.

Falk heads off on a quest to find out what is really going on. Now to explain any more would give away the fantastic plot of this book, so I won’t, but it’s great! Really fascinating. Because no one has ever seen a Shing. Maybe there ARE no Shing. But maybe the Shing WANT people to THINK there are no Shing because it makes it EASIER for the Shing…etc.


If this book was a person, it would be a cold-eyed alien who looked exactly like you, but who might not be an alien at all...

In a nutshell: an alien with no memory sets out to find his true identity – but to do so he must enter the City of Illusions.

City of Illusions scores nine chocolates out of a possible ten…or does it? Perhaps they are carob drops, perhaps they really are chocolates, but one thing is certain: they are delicious.

Planet of Exiles (Ursula le Guin)

I was on a le Guin bender for a few weeks there. But like last month’s pub crawl, now that I come to think about the details, I find it’s all a bit hazy. Which establishment’s toilets did I throw up in? The Retreat? The Napier? Which aliens were in this book? The barbarians? The weird dwarves? Weird barbarian dwarves?

Flicking through the book again is a bit like checking the gallery in my mobile phone for the photographic evidence. Ah yes, the barbarians, with their high-falutin’ speech. The settlers from another, more sophisticated, planet. The love between an alien and a local – forbidden, naturally.

So yes, a dwindling colony of aliens stuck on a barbarian world. They came, they saw, they settled, they got the phone cut off. Fifteen year seasons, a sixty year year. A very long winter ahead. Threats from the north (or was it the south?) from even MORE barbarian aliens. Loads and loads of fighting with sticks and swords.

If this book was a person, it would be dressed as Conan the Barbarian holding a ray gun with a big ghostbusters symbol around it.

In a nutshell: a shrinking group of alien colonists are forced to work alongside the local barbarians to defeat an attack from the even more barbarian locals.

Planet of Exiles scores five chocolates out of a possible ten, but I can’t remember which ones.

Rocannon’s World (Ursula le Guin)

Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound. I might as well finish reading the sci-fi classics of le Guin now that I’ve started.

This one dates from the mid-sixties. Rocannon is another exiled alien, stuck this time on a low-gravity planet populated by a group of divergent humanoid species that end up kind of suspiciously like the inhabitants of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. There are the dwarf-like Claymen, the elf-like Gdemiar and a bunch of others who are a bit like leprechauns and goblins. This allows le Guin to tell what is essentially a tale of heroic odessey set in a fantasy world, but have a scientific basis for everything. Nice.

Rocannon himself is an anthropologist who has arrived to study the various intelligent life forms. The ship that holds his team is unexpectedly blown up and he realises the planet is the base for a hostile war with the League of worlds for which Rocannon works. He loses all his weapons and his communication devices. That leaves him, without any of his usual techologies or tools, to undertake a dangerous mission to find the aliens and steal their intergalactic fax machine in order to warn the League of what is going on before the danger spreads.

This book has quite a charming feel for colonisation from the aboriginal peoples’ point of view. The dismay and incomprehension of the feudal, elf-like Gdemiar as their castles and keeps are blown up must be something like the feelings of nineteenth century Afghan tribesmen as the colonial powers played their Great Game across the Panshijr valley.

The book is exciting and fairly short, although in places it strayed a bit too much into the ‘fantasy’ genre for my taste. It was a reasonably fast paced read though, and well worth the four or five hours I put into it.


If this book was a person, it would be Charles Darwin dressed in a wizard costume.

In a nutshell: An alien is trapped on a fantastic world of dwarf- and elf-like species – but a sinister presence from beyond the galaxy is invading.

Rocannon’s World scores seven chocolates out of a possible ten, mostly M & Ms which I gulped down all at once.