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Absolutely Revolting

July–August 2007, no. 293

Welcome to the July–August 2007 issue of Australian Book Review.

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Contents Category: Letters
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Article Title: Letters – July–August 2007
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What’s your point?

Dear Editor,

John Carmody, in the June issue, writes a letter loaded with tendentious and pejorative language to accuse me of thundering and provocation in my review of Richard J. Lane’s Fifty Key Literary Theorists (March 2007). Carmody portrays me as self-satisfied in the same breath as he refers to his own wryness. He advises me to use words more ‘clearly and carefully’, and then composes a sentence in which ‘eliding’ creates a ‘mélange’. He charges me with portentousness in a letter that consists almost entirely of windy rhetorical questions. I have only one question: what is his point?
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What’s your point?

Dear Editor,

John Carmody, in the June issue, writes a letter loaded with tendentious and pejorative language to accuse me of thundering and provocation in my review of Richard J. Lane’s Fifty Key Literary Theorists (March 2007). Carmody portrays me as self-satisfied in the same breath as he refers to his own wryness. He advises me to use words more ‘clearly and carefully’, and then composes a sentence in which ‘eliding’ creates a ‘mélange’. He charges me with portentousness in a letter that consists almost entirely of windy rhetorical questions. I have only one question: what is his point?

Read more: Letters – July–August 2007

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Geoffrey Blainey reviews A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 by Andrew Roberts
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Contents Category: Australian History
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Article Title: War and words
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It is such an obvious subject for a book. The two most powerful peoples in the world in the past thousand years have been the Chinese-speaking and the English-speaking peoples, and in the past hundred years those speaking English have been the more influential. While Winston Churchill wrote four volumes, which were bestsellers in their time, on the history of the English-speaking peoples up to the year 1901, I know of no other book which has surveyed this century of their greatest power.
Book 1 Title: A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900
Book Author: Andrew Roberts
Book 1 Biblio: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $59.95 hb, 752 pp, 9780753821749
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Readings Link: https://www.booktopia.com.au/a-history-of-the-english-speaking-peoples-since-1900-andrew-roberts/book/9781474614184.html
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It is such an obvious subject for a book. The two most powerful peoples in the world in the past thousand years have been the Chinese-speaking and the English-speaking peoples, and in the past hundred years those speaking English have been the more influential. While Winston Churchill wrote four volumes, which were bestsellers in their time, on the history of the English-speaking peoples up to the year 1901, I know of no other book which has surveyed this century of their greatest power.

The book can’t have been easy to research and write: it is a big hamburger of a theme. The countries whose main language is English differ in size and influence, they are far apart and their loyalties are often in conflict. An historian who is a specialist on Britain is very unlikely to be also an authority on, say, the United States or New Zealand. Moreover, a historian tackling this theme has to be interested in military, political, economic and social history – now a rare combination of interests, academically.

Read more: Geoffrey Blainey reviews 'A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900' by Andrew Roberts

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Article Title: Questioning the template
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It is pleasing to see the following publishing advice in the report: ‘a book should contain a poet’s best work. It is better to have a good, small collection than a bigger one with weak pieces that are there because of theme or because the poet liked them too much’ (or, maybe, because someone once admired them). First-timers tend to be more careful about this than some poets who have made a name. I know that major poets, in tune with their audience’s level of acceptance, will sometimes rightly present lesser and better work together, to show the spectrum. That aside, there is a myth among poets that a short book doesn’t look good, as if bulk is the proof of something. Yet the buyers of poetry are sensitive to padding – a good book, whether lengthy or not, is as long as there are strong poems for it. Has it been forgotten that such a landmark book as Judith Wright’s The Moving Image (1946) comprised just thirty-one pages of poems?
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Congratulations to the talented winner and commended poets in the recently announced Anne Elder Award for a first book of poetry from 2006 (names, titles and judges’ report by Lorraine McGuigan and Earl Livings at www.writers.asn.au).

It is pleasing to see the following publishing advice in the report: ‘a book should contain a poet’s best work. It is better to have a good, small collection than a bigger one with weak pieces that are there because of theme or because the poet liked them too much’ (or, maybe, because someone once admired them). First-timers tend to be more careful about this than some poets who have made a name. I know that major poets, in tune with their audience’s level of acceptance, will sometimes rightly present lesser and better work together, to show the spectrum. That aside, there is a myth among poets that a short book doesn’t look good, as if bulk is the proof of something. Yet the buyers of poetry are sensitive to padding – a good book, whether lengthy or not, is as long as there are strong poems for it. Has it been forgotten that such a landmark book as Judith Wright’s The Moving Image (1946) comprised just thirty-one pages of poems?

Read more: Comment - John Leonard on the 2006 Anne Elder Award

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Brian Matthews reviews National Treasure by Michael Wilding
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Deep purple
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I was thinking a while back about some of the ways novels begin; not just the famous ones – ‘Happy families are alike’ etc, ‘Call me Ishmael’, ‘Unemployed at last’ – but also some contemporary examples. If I had read Michael Wilding’s National Treasure at that time, I would have conscripted it immediately: ‘Plant slipped down lower in his car seat as the man down the street was beaten up.’ Resounding first sentences often create the problem of where and how to proceed. Wilding manages very well: ‘He was quite a young man being beaten up, and the men beating him up were quite young too. So was Plant for that matter. Young. This was a young country. A young culture.’ These few lines signal quite a lot about how things are to unfold: the blandly matter-of-fact nature of the observation, so at odds with the nastiness of what is being observed; the non sequiturs breaking wildly beyond the apparent bounds of the narrative; and that isolated word ‘Young’, with its insistence, its tinge of impatience lest an obvious point be missed. My little burst of close critical reading is intended to foreshadow that among National Treasure’s various treasures is some wonderful writing.
Book 1 Title: National Treasure
Book Author: Michael Wilding
Book 1 Biblio: Central Queensland University Press, $25.95 pb, 259 pp, 192127400X
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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I was thinking a while back about some of the ways novels begin; not just the famous ones – ‘Happy families are alike’ etc, ‘Call me Ishmael’, ‘Unemployed at last’ – but also some contemporary examples. If I had read Michael Wilding’s National Treasure at that time, I would have conscripted it immediately: ‘Plant slipped down lower in his car seat as the man down the street was beaten up.’ Resounding first sentences often create the problem of where and how to proceed. Wilding manages very well: ‘He was quite a young man being beaten up, and the men beating him up were quite young too. So was Plant for that matter. Young. This was a young country. A young culture.’ These few lines signal quite a lot about how things are to unfold: the blandly matter-of-fact nature of the observation, so at odds with the nastiness of what is being observed; the non sequiturs breaking wildly beyond the apparent bounds of the narrative; and that isolated word ‘Young’, with its insistence, its tinge of impatience lest an obvious point be missed. My little burst of close critical reading is intended to foreshadow that among National Treasure’s various treasures is some wonderful writing.

Read more: Brian Matthews reviews 'National Treasure' by Michael Wilding

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Gay Bilson reviews Autobiography of my Mother by Meg Stewart
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Contents Category: Biography
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Article Title: 'Forget the housework'
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If you didn’t read Meg Stewart’s gentle, courteous Autobiography of My Mother when it was first published in 1985, no matter. This second edition was precipitated by the research of others. ‘What My Mother Didn’t Tell Me’, the title of the additional chapter, is that Margaret Coen, Meg’s mother, had a long affair with Norman Lindsay in the 1930s. Lindsay was married, in his fifties; Margaret in her early twenties. The first edition is hardly altered, and only the new chapter challenges Coen’s reticence, causing us to think hard about oral history.
Book 1 Title: Autobiography of My Mother
Book 1 Subtitle: 2nd edition
Book Author: Meg Stewart
Book 1 Biblio: Vintage, $27.95 pb, 356 pp, 9781741668230
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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If you didn’t read Meg Stewart’s gentle, courteous Autobiography of My Mother when it was first published in 1985, no matter. This second edition was precipitated by the research of others. ‘What My Mother Didn’t Tell Me’, the title of the additional chapter, is that Margaret Coen, Meg’s mother, had a long affair with Norman Lindsay in the 1930s. Lindsay was married, in his fifties; Margaret in her early twenties. The first edition is hardly altered, and only the new chapter challenges Coen’s reticence, causing us to think hard about oral history.

Read more: Gay Bilson reviews 'Autobiography of my Mother' by Meg Stewart

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