Article Title: Neville and Joh: Compulsory reading
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For a reform politician, these three books should be compulsory reading. They are not, for such a reader, heartening. But they do ‘serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate’.
Brian Dale’s Ascent to Power, very much less than fair to Neville Wran, is an unintended expose of the nature of political journalism in this country and its practitioners.
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Ascent to Power by Brian Dale
Allen & Unwin, $8.95 pb, 148 pp
For a reform politician, these three books should be compulsory reading. They are not, for such a reader, heartening. But they do ‘serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate’.
Brian Dale’s Ascent to Power (Allen & Unwin, $8.95 pb, 148 pp), very much less than fair to Neville Wran, is an unintended exposé of the nature of political journalism in this country and its practitioners.
The Bunburyists is a reminiscence of the author’s five years’ escape from the ‘dependent worlds of politics and journalism’.
I had fled with my family to the bush … where we sought to escape the present by returning to the past and setting ourselves up in business as dealers in antiques. Or at any rate, a superior kind of junk.
Today, as the novel opens, he finds himself again perched in the Parliamentary Press Gallery – ‘I have come back to work, to all I had sought to escape. The admission of defeat is self-evident. One more among many failings.’
Book 1 Title: The Bunburyists
Book Author: Anthony Hill
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin, 216p., $6.95 pb
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The Bunburyists is a reminiscence of the author’s five years’ escape from the ‘dependent worlds of politics and journalism’.
Article Title: Reading the Signs: Defeated by symbols
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This is a novel of dissociation. It is a novel laden with symbolism. It overworks at telling one so. ‘“It’s the nature of things,” he said, “to be symbolic. Perhaps that’s Nature itself.”’, The title, Their Solitary Way, indicates the state of the world and the way of the protagonists. In the novel, Julian Croft creates a sense of emotional lassitude. This doesn’t help the reader to like the characters. To meander through the soulless corridors of disenchanted lovers while the history of the world is caught in the corners of their consciousness, is to sympathize with Georg Lukacs and see that the middleclass Australian intellectual has it all out of proportion. In one sense this is what Croft’s novel is about. Bombs explode, people starve, revolution erupts but the Australian only feels pain when he inadvertently gets caught up in a demonstration. Croft is excellent on alienation.
Book 1 Title: Their Solitary Way
Book Author: Julian Croft
Book 1 Biblio: Angus & Robertson, $12.95 pb, 88 pp
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This is a novel of dissociation. It is a novel laden with symbolism. It overworks at telling one so. ‘“It’s the nature of things,” he said, “to be symbolic. Perhaps that’s Nature itself.”’, The title, Their Solitary Way, indicates the state of the world and the way of the protagonists. In the novel, Julian Croft creates a sense of emotional lassitude. This doesn’t help the reader to like the characters. To meander through the soulless corridors of disenchanted lovers while the history of the world is caught in the corners of their consciousness, is to sympathize with Georg Lukacs and see that the middleclass Australian intellectual has it all out of proportion. In one sense this is what Croft’s novel is about. Bombs explode, people starve, revolution erupts but the Australian only feels pain when he inadvertently gets caught up in a demonstration. Croft is excellent on alienation.
‘The Man of Slow Feeling’ is the title story of a selection of Michael Wilding’s short stories published between 1972 and 1985.
These stories vary widely in setting, content, character, tone, but Wilding’s voice is consistent. By ‘voice’ I mean that if I was given an unidentified story in an envelope I’d be able to tell if it was Wilding’s before I was halfway through. It would be a plain, sealed, brown-paper envelope, of course.
The voice I hear is that of the writer as condemned observer. It records experience, it records itself in the midst of experience, it records itself recording. The title story is apt: the man of slow feeling is broken in the attempt to record and experience at the same time. The voice telling the stories is so distinctive that very soon I gave up trying to keep writer and writing separate in my mind. Whether they are first person narratives or not, the stories are intensely personal. They always seem to reveal what the writer chooses to expose of himself.
Book 1 Title: The Man of Slow Feeling
Book Author: Michael Wilding
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin Books, 303 pp, $8.95 pb
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‘The Man of Slow Feeling’ is the title story of a selection of Michael Wilding’s short stories published between 1972 and 1985.
These stories vary widely in setting, content, character, tone, but Wilding’s voice is consistent. By ‘voice’ I mean that if I was given an unidentified story in an envelope I’d be able to tell if it was Wilding’s before I was halfway through. It would be a plain, sealed, brown-paper envelope, of course.
The voice I hear is that of the writer as condemned observer. It records experience, it records itself in the midst of experience, it records itself recording. The title story is apt: the man of slow feeling is broken in the attempt to record and experience at the same time. The voice telling the stories is so distinctive that very soon I gave up trying to keep writer and writing separate in my mind. Whether they are first person narratives or not, the stories are intensely personal. They always seem to reveal what the writer chooses to expose of himself.
It may still be useful to begin by describing what Hugh Lunn’s book does not set out to do, then there can be no misunderstandings as to whether or not he has achieved his objectives.
The book is not an account of the Vietnam War in the sense that it at any time attempts to explain who is fighting whom, for what reasons and by whatever tactics and strategies. You will learn next to nothing from Lunn about the causes of the war, the reasons for American and Australian involvement or anything else of a significant political, historical or military nature.
Book 1 Title: Vietnam: A Reporter’s War
Book Author: Hugh Lunn
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, $19.95
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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It may still be useful to begin by describing what Hugh Lunn’s book does not set out to do, then there can be no misunderstandings as to whether or not he has achieved his objectives.
The book is not an account of the Vietnam War in the sense that it at any time attempts to explain who is fighting whom, for what reasons and by whatever tactics and strategies. You will learn next to nothing from Lunn about the causes of the war, the reasons for American and Australian involvement or anything else of a significant political, historical or military nature.
Neither is the book an attempt to describe in graphic detail a series of military engagements, though there is no shortage of battle action.
Ascent to Power by Brian Dale 
