GatesyRead

 One of Ian McEwan’s astonishing qualities as a writer is the variety of novels he completes. Looking back through my posts, I can see I have written about Machines Like Me , an interesting alternative history novel with echoes of Frankenstein; Black Dogs , a cold-war love story; On Chesil Beach , a tragic story with a moment of sexual confusion at its centre; and Solar , a novel with a climate crisis theme and a flawed protagonist. Leaving aside Enduring Love, Amsterdam, Atonement (novels I have read but not written about) Lessons , I think, is the McEwan novel I have enjoyed the most. Roland Baines life is the subject of this book, as we follow his life from childhood to old age. Like Chesil Beach , an early sexual experience defines Roland’s life. In this case, he is seduced by his piano teacher, and however privileged this makes him feel at the time, it scuttles his future a person of high intelligence and (seemingly) astounding skill and promise as a musician. His teacher, M...

  As a reader, this is my kind of novel. Multilayered, comical, clever in plot and wordplay. It has also achieved great success – winning the prestigious Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for almost every other Australian literary awards. But famously it took ten years to publish, as Siang Lu exhausted every literary agents in Australia and the U.S. before University of Queensland Press finally published it as Lu’s second novel. I’d like to think that there are lessons to learn for all those agents and publisher who turned down the manuscript. And for writers, to appreciate that perseverance and undaunted self-belief is a job requirement for anyone with an original, quality manuscript in their hands. The novel opens in Imperial China with the coronation of Emperor Lu Huang Du. The Emperor has great power, exercised in both ruthless and ludicrous ways: ‘His first act as Emperor was to order the execution of all who repeated the rumours [of patricide and regicide]. His second ac...

Like Limberlost , Robbie Arnott’s latest novel Dusk has a small cast of characters, close siblings and a wild animal at the heart of the quest. (Here not a caged native quoll but an imported menace: a South American puma). [My thoughts on Limberlost , here ].  James Bradley compares Arnott’s prose to Cormac McCarthy, with its ‘pared-back textures’ ( Guardian , 2024). Ned Hirst sees the novel as ‘an adventure story [which] contains the narrative momentum to match Australian Beowulf’ ( Meanjin , 2024). I thought of something closer in time and place: Gerald Murnane’s 1982 novel The Plains , with its mythic landscape, its allegorical cartographical suggestions and its gentrified landowners. Iris and Floyd are children of convicts – adult orphans, nomadic and symbiotic twins. Arnott introduces them as curiosities on page 4: Their names were Iris and Floyd Renshaw, and they were both thirty-seven years old … Little was known about them at all, except for the work they did, and ...

  How to talk about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) when the plot is complicated, the ideas complex, and so much has been said already?  I started reading the novel in 2024 and carried it with me for the first hundred kilometres of the Camino de Santiago walk in Spain, only to leave it behind in an albergue in Pamplona. I hadn’t read a word, and it was weighing down my light backpack. I bought a fresh copy back in Sydney at the end of 2024 and finished reading it in the first half of 2025. In other words, my memory of the book is already fragmented, and I have no intention of revising. What has stayed with me in these circumstances is all I promise to write about.  At the heart of the book is the characterisation of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov – a student in St Petersburg, who has stopped attending university and is living in poverty. He has an overactive mind, and a high intelligence alienates him from most people and threatens to derail his acceptance of s...

 I first came across Brian Castro’s fiction in the 1990s, with the intriguing Double Wolf (1991). A long time passed and I rediscovered his writing, reading The Garden Book (2005), The Bath Fugues (2009) and Street to Street (2012) within a few years. Finally, I met Brian in person in 2018 at an artist retreat run by the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. His presentation was entirely about Coetzee -- he struck me as a modest and friendly man -- but there was a moment around a campfire where writers shared their work, and Brian was a sympathetic and encouraging listener.  Chinese Postman opens with short paragraphs that move between third person and first-person narrative, as the narrator calls attention to a ‘bitter and twisted man’ who ‘sees nothing but fragments’ (p. 1).  He is a lonely, enduring the killing zone as his friends pass away, with a neighbour and dogs for company. Soon we are told that ‘He talks mainly to himself. Clears his throat often’ (an ...

  The Plains was once described by Ben Lerner as a ‘strange Australian masterpiece’, a novel that ‘can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed’ ( The New Yorker, 29 March 2017).While Gerald Murnane locates the story in the Australian continent, its mythic qualities are such that Lerner recognises the expansive grasslands and unobstructed sky of the Great Plains of North America.   Wayne MacCauley also makes the case for a wider reading in his introduction to the 2012 Text Publishing edition to Murnane’s 1982 novel, placing it figuratively in ‘the library of alternative Australian fiction’ (vii), a reading experience he compares to ‘anything proposed by Swift, Kafka, Borges or Calvino’ (ix). Indeed, these are appropriate references. From Swift and Calvino, the sense of allegory and fable; from Kafka, the alternative world, dream-like but here more faintly oppressive; from Borges, the labyrinth library of poets, artists and writers endlessly specia...

  Paul Auster writes about chance in most of his novels, from a chance phone call in ‘City of Glass’ ( New York Trilogy ) to writing four versions of the same life, with outcomes dictated by an incident or its absence in 4321 . The Music of Chance has such elements: Nashe begins a year of driving across America on a whim, after missing a ramp on the freeway, Nashe heads in the opposite direction to where he had planned to go. Committed now to the wrong road, he understood ‘that there was no difference, that both ramps were finally the same’ (p. 5). Similarly, when Nashe picks up a beaten-up young hitchhiker, Jack Pozzi, his life changes, ‘for better or worse’ in that moment (p. 19). For the record, decidedly for the worse. The strange, the surreal, also characterise many Auster novels. In Mr Vertigo , Walt undergoes bizare and difficult trainings (such as being buried alive) before learning to levitate, earning a living a circus by making the impossible appear to be simply a tri...

  It takes a certain skill to write a historical novel that feels present. And it takes craft and heart to make the story of one man’s life feel so important – not as representative of anything, but so that the reader can experience vicariously the trials, tribulations and triumphs of one human being. That human being, Ned, is placed in a landscape and a family – both play their parts to shape the character and the life his consciousness grapples with to find the right way to live. Limberlost opens with the mythic scene of a whale believed to have ‘gone mad’, destroying boats at dusk. Five-year-old Ned is taken out to the mouth of the river by his father as he and his two brothers wait for the whale to ‘explode out of the river and paste them into the waves’ (pp. 1-3). Chapter 2 begins with a leap in time: ‘A decade later Ned lay on a wet bank watching a rabbit graze’ (p. 5). So, a fifteen-year-old boy who desperately wishes to impress his distant father. Ned’s two older brothers...

  The fact that Javier Marías died in September 2022 has no doubt impacted on how I responded to his last novel  Berta Isla  in 2024. Longer term readers of this blog might remember that I have previously spoken  about All Souls, A Heart So White,  Dark Back of Time ,  and  The Infatuations .  Suffice to say that I am one of Marías’s many admirers and was very sad to hear of his passing.  Berta Isla  may not to be everyone’s taste, but he was a writer at the height of his powers, with (one suspects) much more to say. The story concerns a couple – Berta Isla and her husband, Tomás Nevinson – from their teenage years to middle age. By the end of the story, Tomás appears much older, for reasons we will get to, while Berta’s life has passed by in waiting for his return. Most of the narrative is told from Berta’s point of view.   Part 1 – Berta (pp. 3-33) Part 2 – Berta (pp. 37-40) and Tomás (pp. 41-119) Part 3 – Berta (pp. 124-165) Part...

  The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. It’s not that I don’t admire the author: Richardson’s first novel Maurice Guest (1908) is a true favourite I read once a decade. But I baulked at Mahoney – it seemed overly long; the image on the cover looked too colonial; I liked her Leipzig tale so much it was bound to disappoint. At last, I found a reason: research for my next fictional project would require engaging with fiction and non-fiction to do with 19 th Australia. I pulled Mahoney from the shelf, opened the first page, and plunged in. ‘In a shaft of the Gravel Pits, a man had been buried alive,’ reads the opening line. A few pages later, the grim humour of the anonymous colonial death: ‘Who the man was, who now lay deep in a grave that fitted him as a glove fits the hand’ (pp. 7-9). Paul Giles writes that the novel, ‘takes the theme of the self-made man, the characteristically Victorian trope of a picaresque hero which American fiction re...

  If didn’t find Question 7 as engaging as Flanagan’s works of fiction, I blame myself. I read the book in snippets in the evening and didn’t grasp the connections and flow between fiction and autobiography as might have if I had read more continuously. There is also a feeling that a fiction writer doesn’t have to share the true stories behind the invented stories (here in particular, The River Guide  and  The Narrow Road to the Deep North ). Perhaps I mean, I’d prefer they didn’t. Others think differently, and the book has achieved high critical acclaim. In her Guardian review, Tara June Winch writes: Question 7 is Flanagan’s finest book. It is a treatise on the immeasurability of life, reminiscent of the Japanese tradition of mono no aware , the psychological and philosophical sweep of Tolstoy, and enmeshed in a personal essay that is tuned as finely as WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. In his Conversation piece, Dan Dixon provides a justification for Flanagan’...

  After the epic nature of 4321 (900 + pages) Baumgartner is a light work, yet still with Auster’s characteristic depth of thought and playfulness with fictional form.  We open with a writer at his desk, ‘pen in hand … midway through a sentence in the third chapter of his monograph on Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms’ (p. 1). A New Yor intellectual, in other words – but one distracted by something burning on the stove downstairs; the call of UPS (Baumgartner orders books to have a moment of Molly’s company); and a young visitor whose father has severed off some fingers and so Rosita has come instead of her mother, his cleaner (how Auster ). As the reviewers in The Guardian and The New York Times note, the novel begins at pace. Soon Baumgartner has fallen down a staircase in his basement, and has been rescued by a young man on his first day in the Public Service Electric & Gas Company. Chapter 2 introduces a metaphorical idea about phantom limbs and how this might help Baumg...

  I was curious to re-engage with  French Lieutenant’s Woman , having read the book at the age of eighteen and not since (closer to 1969, when it was first published, than today). I remembered the novel in different ways to how I experienced it afresh – perhaps the central romance struck me more deeply then, or perhaps I appreciated the little writer-tricks more now. Fowles draws us immediately into the coastal setting of England’s Lyme Bay, where a provincial society is as close minded as the forbidden nature is liberating. In the second chapter, the betrothed Charles and Tina spy the mysterious figure dressed in black – the French Lieutenant’s Woman – so-called because of a known liaison at a time when women of a certain class kept their names intact at all costs. This allegedly fallen-woman is defiant, doubling before Charles with her, “unforgettable face, and a tragic face” (p. 10). From that moment, Charles is smitten (though it will take him some time to admit to the f...

  I’ve been reading Julian Barnes all my adult life and it would take a lot for me to express disappointment in one of his novels. Professional reviewers aren’t paid to be as loyal or generous. Sam Byers describes the novel as dealing in evasion: ‘vagueness layered on vagueness’ ( The Guardian , 14 April 2022). Helen Elliott uses the phrase ‘exasperated sign’ in her heading and concludes that Barnes is out of touch: ‘In 2022 sincerity and authenticity are rumbling irony as the preferred mode for many highly literate readers and writers’ ( Sydney Morning Herald , 7 April 2022). I might confess that a novel that deals with ambiguity and irony would be more likely to appeal to me as a reader than to make me sigh, and although I did wonder about whether there was enough meat on the bones, I still enjoyed the delicate little meal that it was. In Part One we meet Neil, our narrator, and Elizabeth Finch, a dynamic History lecturer – as well as Neil’s immediate companions, conservative...

  Like Second Place ,   The Museum of Modern Love was recommended to me by a fellow writer at Varuna House after I had read from my own work-in-progress (a novel about a disappeared Australian painter). Heather Rose’s work was a complete revelation. For one thing, she manages that rare genre of Australian internationalism, with the work set almost entirely in New York (specifically, the Museum of Modern Art). What fascinates Heather Rose is an extraordinary and true MOMA performance by Marina Abramovi ć, the Serbian “grandmother of performance art” (so-named after a four-decades long career). “The Artist is Present” was held between March and May 2010, and during this time 1545 people had the opportunity to sit opposite the artist who held their gaze (and was just, one supposes, present in the moment). Around this true event, Rose creates several characters who visit the performance regularly and whose lives are then revealed to the reader. Arky Levin is a composer of some rep...

  This is the first of two books about artists recommended to me after I performed a reading of my then work-in-progress-novel which features an Australian artist.  Second Place is a strange little work form a well-reputed author, Rachel Cusk, with ten previous novel publications, as well as works of non-fiction. The plot is summarized on the back cover: “A woman invites a famed artist to the remote coastal landscape where she lives … But as a long, dry summer sets in, his provocative presence soon twists the human patterns of her secluded household”. The Afterword tells us that Second Place “owes a debt” to Mable Dodge Luhnan’s 1932 memoir Lorenzo in Taos , a text that deals with the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay with her in New Mexico. In other words, this book leans on another, and the shared theme is the desired and then regretted presence of the artist figure in one’s second home. (Like having an artist-in-residence in your own backyard, complete with ego, vision, and ...

  I am not sure if I needed to read S weet Tooth , but as a literary spy novel (not quite a thriller) it entertained me well enough. One thing Ian McEwan seems to manage – I say this without proper qualification – is to write a novel from the point of view of a young woman quite convincingly. There’s a bit of a twist on this premise at the end, which you are most welcome to guess at. Serena Frome is a bishop's daughter. The bishop seems a decent man but clearly not close to his family, and embarrassed by anything he can’t sort out from behind a desk. She heads to Cambridge to study Mathematics, being good at it, but sadly not a genius. At university, she starts to write a column on her reading of literature in what one imagines are well-phrased but not necessarily wise reviews. She meets her first boyfriend, and then falls for a married professor – an MI5 man – and so her secretive career begins. It is the 1970s and the Cold War is in full swing. Frome’s conservative beliefs, c...