words and images
Richard Flanagan is an important novelist by any standards but he is particularly significant in his home state of Tasmania. While I was in Hobart before tackling the Three Capes Walk recently I spent a morning in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG). The exhibition in the largest of its spaces was inspired by five of Flanagan’s novels while the more traditional art upstairs has close links to one of them. Let’s start downstairs.
One of the lovely things about the first few weeks after Christmas, at least in my corner of the world, is having lots of new books to read. This year was a little different, however, because I found myself with an odd pair of books, loving both of them but unable to read either of them straight through.
The yellow one is nonfiction. Rovelli is a theoretical physicist working on loop quantum gravity. The fact that a physicist could publish a book – any book – with such a title attracted me to him, and to it, immediately.
There Are Places turned out to be a collection of his newspaper articles, three to six pages each, on science, history, philosophy, religion and politics. Every single one was a pleasure to read – calm, lucid and enlightening – but I couldn’t read the book straight through. Continue reading “Garner and Rovelli”
Khazaria floats on the outer edges of our literary and historical consciousness, if we know it at all.
Most of us have a general idea of the histories of the Christian, Islamic and Jewish worlds, but Khazaria belongs to none of them; and we think we know Europe, Asia and the Middle East, but Khazaria is peripheral to all three; and we have a fair idea about the ancient and modern worlds, but Khazaria existed only in the Dark Ages between them.
Its semi-mythical existence is a gift to writers, who can make of it what they will.
All the Horses of Iceland (Tor, 2022) is a beautiful novella by Sarah Tolmie. As a poet, novelist and mediaevalist she is almost uniquely qualified to write about a ninth-century Icelandic trader’s journey to Central Asia and back.
Nikki Gemmell tackles big themes in her new novel – science, religion and the evils of tyranny, no less. She universalises her subject by disguising ethnic groups, religions, cities and languages and the supposed origin of her text, while simultaneously individualising it by focusing on a mother’s love for her children.
The political situation is all too familiar to us, an authoritarian regime attempting genocide against a minority within its own population. (No, I won’t call it ‘ethnic cleansing’, because that disgustingly cynical phrase attempts to give state-sanctioned racism, persecution, brutality and murder a semblance of virtue, and using the term legitimises it.) The minority is defined by both ethnic and religious affiliation — again, an all-too-familiar scenario.
One minority family is caught in the middle. Continue reading “Gemmell: The Book of Rapture”
Grace tells the story of her family’s escape from a fundamentalist Christian cult in this powerful Young Adult novel from one of Australia’s best writers in the field. She is a teenager who has never known anyone outside her church community, because its members are forbidden to speak to the ‘unsaved’ except with special exemptions. They go to church schools, marry within the church and work in church-owned businesses. They accept the Bible, as interpreted by their Elders, as the ultimate authority on every aspect of their daily lives, and they accept cruel and bizarre punishments meted out by the Elders for any questioning or infringement of the doctrine.
Grace’s father has quietly questioned this peculiar way of life and brought up his children to do the same but he has not been quiet enough and, as the book opens, is expelled from the community. Continue reading “Gleitzman: Grace”