Wood Green by Sean Rabin, podcast and review

Sean Rabin was recently in Hobart for the launch of his new book, Wood Green. Here is my interview with him and below, a review of the book. 

Wood Green is a novel with a magnificent twist, a ripper story and some very familiar scenery.

Michael arrives in Hobart to take up a job with an aging, irascible writer, Lucian Clarke who lives up Mt Wellington in the hamlet of Wood Green. Michael has a PhD into the work of this writer, who has lived up the mountain for longer than he can remember, returning home after interludes of dancing the light fantastic of an international literary lifestyle. He has employed Michael to help him remember his affairs, to order his books and life, and assist with the completion of his latest novel.

Michael is a writer himself, and he pursues the writing of his novel, as he is pursued by the girlfriend he abruptly left in Sydney. Rachel tracks him down in Hobart and comes to visit. She is one of the many smaller but still exquisitely drawn characters who plump out this narrative and her sharp Sydney ways draw Michael’s deepening into the experience of living up the mountain, into sharper relief.

There is also Andrew, the proprietor of the quaint and coddled b and b in Battery Point. He is both highly strung and sinister as he bumbles his way around his visitors. We get insight into his thoughts and an eerie analysis of his guests through his neurotic mind. Carl the South African is fleeing an unmentioned white collar crime and his crimes are not known in Wood Green, where he buys the shop, after Maureen and Tim, whose marriage is decaying, finally close the sale. All these are characters who help build this novel to its curious crescendo.

The book has many pathways through the woods, all of them coming back to the same, unexplored path of the lives of Lucian and Michael. It is a book compelling both by the staggered introduction of clues to the story itself, as well as by the rich pickings that Rabin has delivered in terms of a cast of well-drawn, unique and believable secondary characters.

Let go of your expectations for a single narrative, this book is woven of many human lives and has the most exquisite sound track too. Eclectic, diverse albums are introduced throughout the pages, and it is worth seeking the sounds out as you read. It becomes a sensory experience, it deepens the reading experience, which is already rich from characters, as well as from descriptions of place.

This is also a book that provides a commentary to what it means to be a reader and what it means to be a writer. It talks about the desire on the part of the author for immutability, and more pertinently for the reader familiar with the setting, it talks about the “thick syrup of familiarity” when it comes to ‘the real’. It successfully interrogates the beast that is the novel, that is fiction and it also plays most marvelously with the notion of what it means to be a writer.

Wood Green is a successful first novel and it tells a ripper yarn. Readers who know Hobart, who know kunanyi/Mt Wellington are also in for a treat; to read known places in a work of literature always deepens a sense of place.

The link to the interview again - 

Variations of this review will be published in The Mercury, June 2016 and Warp, July 2016

(Wood Green by Sean Rabin, Giramondo, 9781925336085)

Bryce Courtenay interview

Quite some time ago* I interviewed best selling Australian author, Bryce Courtenay. Here is the interview.


































*2008

The Natural Way of Things

Late last year I sat down and chatted with Charlotte Wood about her new novel, The Natural Way of Things. 
This is a dark, compelling and sharp portrait of a contemporary manifestation of misogyny. Listen here

Ten young women are drugged and taken to what seems to be an asylum or a prison, surrounded by a tall, potent electric fence and far away from anything. The women slowly realise they are there for so called ‘trangressions’; such as having an affair with a politician, taking drugs and being raped, group sex with footballers. These events, many of them inspired by contemporary events remind us that the vilification of women is live and well. 

Listen to the full interview here.

Here is a link to an interview I did with Charlotte in 2012 about Animal People.

(Allen and Unwin 9781760111236)

Professor Stephen Reder, international expert in linguistics

Professor Stephen Reder is an international expert in linguistics who visited Tasmania in 2014. In this interview, we chatted about some fascinating aspects of language and communication, including tipping points in literacy, Tasmanian literacy, written language in rural Liberia and literacy as an aggregate of social and economic inclusion.
You can hear the full interview here.
(first broadcast on Edge Radio, late 2014)

Paddy O'Reilly discusses Peripheral Vision

Paddy O'Reilly's short stories in her latest collection, Peripheral Vision left me breathless again and again. You can listen to the full interview here. 

Mistakes Were Made by Liam Pieper, review

Mistakes Were Made is a short collection of essays by Liam Pieper. It is a small paperback, a gorgeously designed Penguin Special, teal and cream, featuring the death card of the tarot on the cover. It is a collection of essays on diverse subjects –the perfect paperback to roll into your pocket.

Liam Pieper, whose first book was a memoir Feel-Good Hit of the Year. This was deeply personal, raw, and mildly scandalous recount of his young life, which included the overdose of his brother and his own, extensive experiences with many aspects of his life with drugs.

Mistakes Were Made and the essays included are life after the Feel-Good Hit, they make both light and dark of some of the ensuing ‘adventures’ of the author experiencing himself as “…famous, for a week and a half, in the middle of my thirtieth winter,” as he describes himself in one of the essays.

He interrogates his own racism in a strangely cohesive yet rambling essay called ‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Being.’ A self proclaimed “white, lefty Australian, who’s fit to burst with his own sense of egalitarianism,” he recounts the experience though describing a promotional tour he is on for his book, in the United States. In the concise dissection of racism, this essay takes you, the reader, from the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, to a school camp at Uluru, to the rough, ready racism in Australia and the visible and entrenched one Pieper observes in the States.

In David Niven’s 1974 autobiography The Moon’s A Balloon there is a scene, where Niven and his army mate, Trubshawe, are drunk and dressed as a goat at a regiment party, where the others are mainly Bo Peep or Mini Mouses. It is WW2. The formal dance is moving in a circle, Trubshawe and Niven wheel off into the centre of the large circle and drop some small olives behind them and move off. Re-reading this scene makes me laugh and laugh. The out loud laughter that can arise from silent reading is a true pleasure to experience – and Pieper made me do it. In the essay and there is a scene in the essay ‘Fame! (I’m gonna live forever)’ where he describes a ludicrous and true moment in his local bookshop, which he visits on the advice of “another friend, this one a media personality turned bestselling author” who urged him visit bookshops and sign copies of his own book. “They love it, the shiny, popular celebrity assured me.”
What follows at his local bookshop, while possibly mortifying for him at the time, makes for an extremely funny – and perfectly retold vignette which made me laugh. I laughed and laughed, then I read it out loud to friends and laughed more.  

Do yourselves a favour – essays are a wonderful invitation to consider our world in a different manner, with a different voice. They can bring short, sharp insight into our world, generally less than 5000 words (a bus trip into town) Pieper has a sharp wit, perspicacious mind and he brings clarity to varied subjects.

I interviewed Liam for The Book Show on Edge Radio. You can listen to the interview here.

A version of this review was first published in Warp.

Mistakes Were Made

by Liam Pieper
Penguin
9780143573128

Van Diemen's Land, an Aboriginal History by Murray Johnson and Ian McFarlane

Van Diemen's Land, an Aboriginal History, is actually another white man's history of Aboriginal Tasmania, but in this case it is written by two men, who are extremely knowledgeable in the area of Aboriginal Tasmania, both of them having lectured in the area for many years.
 The book would make a wonderful text book, covering history as well as the current situation for aboriginal groups in the state, offering some new research on historically contentious opinions such as the consumption of fish, the making of fire and the use of fish traps for example.
  While discussion and criticism are crucial for healthy debate, it is unfortunate that, some of the criticisms of the authors' peers are strident and a bit petty,
  I interviewed Ian McFarlane when the book was released, for The Book Show on Edge Radio. You can hear the full interview here.

Van Diemen's Land, an Aboriginal Historyby Murray Johnson and Ian McFarlane9781742234212 .
UNSW Press