GatesyRead

This was one of those impulsive purchases that come from a quick search of the crime fiction section of a local bookshop. The Gunman , published earlier as The Prone Guman , is back in the shops thanks to what sounds like a fairly poor film version, starring Sean Penn, and premised (rather incorrectly) on a good man who has become a hired killer and straightened out, only to be forced to return for one last job due to circumstances beyond his control. Jean-Patrick Machette’s novel has no such redemptive character, although there is something more to the novel that the action-plot which fires it forwards. The novel’s assassin does “want out” but the powers-that-be don’t want to let him go, and betray him to a mafia family whose son he has taken out, some years back. Violence begets violence. The pay-masters are rather sinister, government agencies, with the suggestion of the Cold War behind the scenes (and largely out of sight). Rather than developing the political machinations in

I picked up a second-hand copy of A Single Man in a bookshop in the Blue Mountains. I had wanted to read Christopher Isherwood since quoting from Goodbye to Berlin in my own novel, The Copyart Murders. What I found in this novel surprised me on a number of different levels. First, there was the frankness of the depiction of a gay man who has just lost his partner, Jim – we find out how later in the novel. This is 1964, and I thought about how the issue of gay marriage, topical as it is, is not new in the sense of couples like George and Jim having lived together in all-but-wedlock for years now. The description of the suburban life they have been living, with George’s silence to his neighbours about the true reason for his ‘room-mate’s’ absence is poignant, yet saved from sentimentality by the irony of George’s natural outlook on life. This leads to the second surprise in the novel – the moments of real human insight, hopeful and profound in nature. In this respect, I should have ex