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Absolutely Revolting

August 2024, no. 467

The August issue of ABR includes the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize shortlist – three stories chosen from more than 1,300 entries worldwide. We celebrate James Baldwin’s centenary with an essay on his matchless legacy and Juno Gemes’s cover photograph, taken on a London rooftop in 1976. Robyn Arianrhod surveys the parlous state of Australian science writing and Peter Goldsworthy recounts his first encounter with film director Stanley Kubrick. Our non-fiction reviews include Marilyn Lake on Nuked, Zora Simic on Personal Politics, Nick Hordern on The Trial of Vladimir Putin, and Zoë Laidlaw on The Truth About Empire. We review novels by Jordan Prosser, Rachel Cusk, and Evie Wyld and poetry by Judith Beveridge. ABR’s arts reviews – on King Lear, Paul Gauguin, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? – are not to be missed.

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Cassandra Atherton reviews ‘To Sing of War’ by Catherine McKinnon
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Article Title: ‘I am the jungle’
Article Subtitle: A deft take on Virgil
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In an exquisite, braided narrative, Catherine McKinnon’s To Sing of War reanimates World War II in a paean to the environment. Set between December 1944 and August 1945, the narrators experience the ways ‘Violence is malleable, it is everywhere’, but find healing and resilience in ‘the heart of the earth’. Importantly, Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, is the key intertext and provides the central conceit and structure for the novel. Where The Aeneid concerns the building of Rome after the destruction of Troy, closely linking the fates of the two cities, To Sing of War grapples with rebuilding lives in a post-atomic world.
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Book 1 Title: To Sing of War
Book Author: Catherine McKinnon
Book 1 Biblio: Fourth Estate, $32.99 pb, 454 pp
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In an exquisite, braided narrative, Catherine McKinnon’s To Sing of War reanimates World War II in a paean to the environment. Set between December 1944 and August 1945, the narrators experience the ways ‘Violence is malleable, it is everywhere’, but find healing and resilience in ‘the heart of the earth’. Importantly, Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, is the key intertext and provides the central conceit and structure for the novel. Where The Aeneid concerns the building of Rome after the destruction of Troy, closely linking the fates of the two cities, To Sing of War grapples with rebuilding lives in a post-atomic world.

Read more: Cassandra Atherton reviews ‘To Sing of War’ by Catherine McKinnon

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Seumas Spark reviews ‘The Lucky Ones’ by Melinda Ham
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Article Title: Stories unknown
Article Subtitle: The Australian response to refugees
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On the second page of this book are startling facts about Malawi. In the 1980s and 1990s, this country of around ten million people sheltered more than a million refugees, many of them having fled civil war in Mozambique. Malawians, already suffering the crippling effects of poverty and poor health, provided safe haven to waves of displaced and desperate people coming across their border. Perhaps this succour was not always offered happily, but what mattered is that it was offered. Melinda Ham’s placing of this example so early in her book is surely deliberate. With thoughts of Malawian tolerance and generosity echoing through the text, she forces the reader into making unsettling comparisons with recent Australian responses to refugees.
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Book 1 Title: The Lucky Ones
Book Author: Melinda Ham
Book 1 Biblio: Affirm Press, $34.99 pb, 254 pp
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On the second page of this book are startling facts about Malawi. In the 1980s and 1990s, this country of around ten million people sheltered more than a million refugees, many of them having fled civil war in Mozambique. Malawians, already suffering the crippling effects of poverty and poor health, provided safe haven to waves of displaced and desperate people coming across their border. Perhaps this succour was not always offered happily, but what mattered is that it was offered. Melinda Ham’s placing of this example so early in her book is surely deliberate. With thoughts of Malawian tolerance and generosity echoing through the text, she forces the reader into making unsettling comparisons with recent Australian responses to refugees.

Read more: Seumas Spark reviews ‘The Lucky Ones’ by Melinda Ham

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David McCooey reviews ‘Tintinnabulum: New poems’ by Judith Beveridge
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Contents Category: Poetry
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Article Title: Summoned by bells
Article Subtitle: Poetry’s auditory affordances
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Bells are often associated with the sacred. A resonating bell marks out a space for reverence to inhabit. It calls for attention on the part of the devotee, for a shift in perception from the mundane to the sanctified. A ‘tintinnabulum’ is a small bell, and it is the name that the acclaimed poet Judith Beveridge has given to her latest collection of poems. ‘Tintinnabulation’ – the lingering sound of bells – is a word I first came across in the liner notes to Tabula Rasa, an album of music by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt that explicitly brings together sound and sacredness.
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Book 1 Title: Tintinnabulum
Book 1 Subtitle: New poems
Book Author: Judith Beveridge
Book 1 Biblio: Giramondo, $27 pb, 81 pp
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Bells are often associated with the sacred. A resonating bell marks out a space for reverence to inhabit. It calls for attention on the part of the devotee, for a shift in perception from the mundane to the sanctified. A ‘tintinnabulum’ is a small bell, and it is the name that the acclaimed poet Judith Beveridge has given to her latest collection of poems. ‘Tintinnabulation’ – the lingering sound of bells – is a word I first came across in the liner notes to Tabula Rasa, an album of music by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt that explicitly brings together sound and sacredness.

Pärt is not mentioned in Beveridge’s new book, but musical references, from the celestial to the earthly, are everywhere. The susurration of cicadas (in ‘Listening to Cicadas’) is – among other things – ‘all the accumulated cases of tinnitus suffered / by fans of AC/DC, Motörhead and Pearl Jam’. In one of numerous poems concerned with maritime themes, Beveridge refers to the ‘dubstep / of the surf’, while in ‘The Walk’, a creek ‘played over stones a tune / from a decrepit piano’.

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Theodore Ell reviews ‘George Orwell’s Elephant and Other Essays’ by Subhash Jaireth
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Article Title: Bridge over nothing
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On the second page of this book are startling facts about Malawi. In the 1980s and 1990s, this country of around ten million people sheltered more than a million refugees, many of them having fled civil war in Mozambique. Malawians, already suffering the crippling effects of poverty and poor health, provided safe haven to waves of displaced and desperate people coming across their border. Perhaps this succour was not always offered happily, but what mattered is that it was offered. Melinda Ham’s placing of this example so early in her book is surely deliberate. With thoughts of Malawian tolerance and generosity echoing through the text, she forces the reader into making unsettling comparisons with recent Australian responses to refugees.
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Book 1 Title: George Orwell’s Elephant and Other Essays
Book Author: Subhash Jaireth
Book 1 Biblio: Gazebo Books, $29.99 pb, 318 pp
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Subhash Jaireth is both a writer and a geologist. This collection of essays draws inspiration from the international roaming his geological work has involved. Most of the essays explore memories of the Soviet Union, where he studied, or ancient landscapes in Australia, where he has lived and worked since the 1980s, with personal detours to India and Spain.

Jaireth’s writing is not merely an accessory to his scientific career, and not just because he studied literature as well as geology. Jaireth is a writer for the same reason he is a geologist: his chief interest is world-building. Whether reminiscing about the metro stations of Moscow that he knew as a student, or describing the mingling of eucalypt woodlands and suburbia in Canberra where he now lives, Jaireth’s instinct is to read, in intensive detail, the relationship of the physical environment to its historical-cultural legacies. In Jaireth’s world, any physical feature, be it a hillside or an avenue, is incomplete without its imprint on the imagination. These essays recount journeys through places Jaireth has known intimately. In the best passages, there is quiet drama in the struggle to reconcile the disarrangement of physical places, their cultural meanings, and what the author remembers (or thinks he remembers).

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Tracy Ellis reviews ‘Love, Death & Other Scenes’ by Nova Weetman
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Contents Category: Memoir
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Article Title: Love’s aftermath
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In his book Bereavement: Studies of grief in adult life (1972), psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes wrote: ‘The pain of grief is just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.’ His words received a royal edit when Queen Elizabeth II, speaking at a memorial for the victims of 9/11, said, simply: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’ Being the queen, she could take such a liberty, denying Parkes his preamble and his ‘perhaps’. She whittled his words into a more essential and potent truth at a time when it was needed (if there’s ever a time when it’s not), ‘queensplaining’ his question as a comforting answer to the bewildered and bereaved.
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Book 1 Title: Love, Death & Other Scenes
Book Author: Nova Weetman
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, $34.99 pb, 279 pp
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In his book Bereavement: Studies of grief in adult life (1972), psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes wrote: ‘The pain of grief is just as much a part of life as the joy of love; it is, perhaps, the price we pay for love, the cost of commitment.’ His words received a royal edit when Queen Elizabeth II, speaking at a memorial for the victims of 9/11, said, simply: ‘Grief is the price we pay for love.’ Being the queen, she could take such a liberty, denying Parkes his preamble and his ‘perhaps’. She whittled his words into a more essential and potent truth at a time when it was needed (if there’s ever a time when it’s not), ‘queensplaining’ his question as a comforting answer to the bewildered and bereaved.

Writers are usually looking for answers – writing to find out what they think or to reach a deeper understanding. They tend to be people whose curiosity overcomes their caution; ‘red pill’ people, who would rather know than not know.

Read more: Tracy Ellis reviews ‘Love, Death & Other Scenes’ by Nova Weetman

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