Bali Low

In the left hand corner, the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the Enlightenment. In the right hand corner, Confucianism. Javanese animism and the Buddha. Oh, we can argue about the sources, but this week’s news underlines clear differences between Asian and European cultures on the crucial issues of forgiveness and redemption.

Drug couriers are the rank and file foot soldiers of the crime world, and by definition foolish, not very bright, and a little bit evil. But should a child of seventeen, or even twenty-five, pay for a serious moral error with their life? Most thoughtful Europeans would say no. There is always time to repent, be forgiven and begin again. Justice and mercy.

These archaic phrases retain their relevance and moral power, the more so in a post-religious world: indeed paradoxically today it is the religious fundamentalists who dole out death so casually, while we modern secular moral relativists will always favour the medieval paradigm of confession, repentance, forgiveness and absolution.

Does reflection on these issues, or indeed any shred of careful moral reasoning, inform the actions of the Federal policemen who delivered a bunch of young Australians so readily into the callous and corrupt arms of their Indonesian colleagues? And can we rely on our Western, civilised courts to unwaveringly condemn their actions even as Indonesia's shadow puppet courts line their sad victims up before the rifles?

A Fine Line

Bought this one to read in the plane on the way to Singapore. Just continuing the Booker Prize fetish really – this was last year’s winner, passed over at the time principally because the subject matter was entirely distasteful: the tired Notting Hill lifestyles of upper class Brits, Margaret Thatcher, the Victorian novel, and the anatomical intricacies of gay sex. All the stuff we really don’t need to read about.

How wrong can you be? What saves this novel and makes it a deserving winner is the only measure which actually matters: the quality of the writing. Exquisitely constructed, ironic, indirect, nuanced, beautifully observed. Full of resonances, very funny and still a grand/petty tragedy.

Impossible to read rapidly, each paragraph needs to be savoured like a glass of old Crozes. So no alternative now but to pay Hollinghurst the usual compliment and read through his previous three.

Slings and Arrows

Four days in sunny Singapore... all hotel (the Copthorne Waterfront, not that well known but not that bad), all work, no play

... well apart from the Tuesday night dash to eat chili crab at Famous Seafood and then meander on to the Long Bar at Raffles. Oh, er, and a brief visit on Wednesday to the night safari just to see the hippos, the tapirs, and one of those sad anthropomorphic animal shows.

Ah, the Singaporean sense of humour, the desperate attempt to be cool and interesting, just a notch or two below Carry On Up the Jungle.

Manuale or Automatico?

Manuale d'Amore is a charming, silly Italian film directed by Giovanni Veronesi which was chosen to open the short Italian Film Festival currently running in Sydney. Using the old formula so common in Italian movies of the sixties it is a series of interlinked stories about aspects of love. Think Love Actually for a recent UK example. It's fun because it's so beautifully acted and the settings are such a delight, but the stories are rather cartoonish and trite. Commercial fare rather than festival fare then, and slightly disappointing in that regard.

Crying Woolf

Classic whodunit, classic plot, classic setting, classic cast, classically told by a classic 85 yr old baroness, whose neurones are clearly in better shape than some other baronesses we could mention

With respectful nods to Marlowe, Virginia Woolf and Auden this is - of its sort - just a classic.

Unsolicited advice to my sons and nephews - Part I

When approaching young ladies at parties the following words never fail to astonish:

If I profane with my unworthiest hand
this holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

(Last tested December 1968: worked just fine)

Jerry Can

Quite a good read actually, if you like health policy, pharmacoepidemiology, risk-benefit and so on.

Breezy style, lucid analysis. And as he mentions, he's been at Harvard Medical School continuously since 1969, so what would he know?

Or save yourself a few dollars and just visit his site.

Sinking Fund

Didn’t read Berendt’s first bestseller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil¸ discouraged by the unbearably pretentious title. This one was harder to resist at the Philadelphia airport bookstore last week – promising the story of the rebuilding of the Gran Teatro La Fenice after the catastrophic fire of 1996

In fact it is a kaleidoscope (or perhaps just a mish mash) of reportage about a variety of connected and unconnected aspects of Venice and the Venetians – stories that caught his eye or his ear during a lengthy stay. The blurb on the fly leaf says Berendt is a journalist: that’s the key: his prose comes straight from Time magazine. Every subject’s clothes and hair are documented, and the contents of every room. Every conversation is meticulously transcribed – presumably a taperecorder never left his side.

The spaces, inferences between the ponderous observations are left for the reader to fill in, as he describes all the venality and vanity which present themselves to his unflustered gaze. So this more recent title turns out to be a rather unsubtle metaphor for the human descents from grace documented so carefully in its slow-turning pages.

Venice
La Fenice
The reconstruction
John Berendt

To Phat

As we say in Vietnam: heaven, I'm in heaven...

Pancreatic Duck

So to the book every bleary Aussie is reading – the Latham Diaries – unlike most political memoirs, an actual bestseller, more than 13,000 copies gone in the first week – second only to the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet (19,800 copies) and way ahead of the 2006 Guinness Book of World Records (7,800).

Latham has consistently seemed quite consistently inconsistent and largely loathsome in his posturing and spouting on the Australian political stage – a rather unfortunate mix of arrogance, intolerance, inexperience, misplaced self-confidence, lack of self knowledge and vulgarity.

But in his diaries, attempting an approximation of the truth, he is occasionally unexpectedly honest and insightful. Certainly the fundamental structural flaws of the Australian Labor Party are spelt out clearly: with seats in parliament in the vice-like grip of a tiny group of increasingly irrelevant back-room union fringe manipulators, success at the ballot box and in government has to be achieved in spite of the political talent pool rather than because of it.

These days, most of us don’t belong to unions. Maybe we should, but we just don’t. So the contemporary voice of the left (or even just the voice of those of us who can't stomach John Howard's immigration policy) really urgently needs another forum which doesn’t rely on corrupted Fabian dreams. Which, according to the Gospel According to Mark, just isn't going to happen.

It helps that he writes well with a larrikin sense of humour and is no respecter of dignity or privacy. It’s a rambunctious read, and while it may not help your waistline, it sure has helped his, and the world’s shortest political picnic is of considerably more interest than the world’s longest picnic table.

Pinter bitter? No way.

Well after 29 plays including a couple of really quite memorable ones, Harold Pinter gets the Nobel Prize for literature to widespread astonishment and muted applause. Apparently the big money was on the Syrian poet Adonis (che? Can that be his real name? Or is someone sending someone up?)

Anyway how strange that The Guardian is pleased but various American thinkers are not. One disappointed US critic even has the temerity to quote a very very rude poem Pinter wrote about the Iraq war (warning: really very naughty words in poem so don't click on the link if you hate rude words).

...of course, if you do link to the very rude poem, quoted by the disappointed American (who felt it important to mention that she did understand the sporting metaphor, she really did) you will benefit from a couple of investment opportunities as well, because unlike this one that site is supported by a vigorous and free marketplace: you can buy up Iraqi dinars - which used to be worth $82,000 and are now worth $45 - bargain! Or if you want a sure thing rather than mere speculation you could purchase a snugly fitting 'conservative tee' emblazoned with the peace sign, a B52 and the motto Peace through superior firepower.

Dear old Harold surely would be pleased (pause).

Dynamite!

While we're obsessing about prizes, here's the complete list of Nobel Prize winners for literature since 1901. Divides nicely into three:

The Clearly Deserving.

Yeats
Shaw
Mann
Hesse
Gide
Eliot
Faulkner
Hemingway
Camus
Steinbeck
Beckett
Neruda
White
Bellow
Golding
Grass
Coetzee

The Give Me A Breaks.

Rudyard Kipling
Rabindranath Tagore
Sinclair Lewis
John Galsworthy
Pearl Buck
Bertrand Russell
Winston Churchill

The Who Was That Agains.

Everyone else


BUT WHERE IS WYSTAN AUDEN?


...this year's winner will apparently be announced Thursday.

Fifty thousand pounds dumped into The Sea

Well, the hot news is that my least favorite book of the lot has won the Man Booker prize...

Here's Banville's modest comment:

"It's nice to see a work of art winning the Booker Prize "

...so seems as if its not just his novel that's insufferable.

Just for the record, here are the 35 previous winners, presumably not works of art but works of something else altogether - Satan, perhaps? Cast your eyes down to 1978 and you will note that Banville's book is just on half of Iris Murdoch's winner.

Perhaps I should back my judgment and bet on my least favorite next year? At 7-1 Banville was a rank outsider and would have paid nicely.

'This was a travesty of a result from a travesty of a judging process.'
Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

Martha & Ira

The winner of the Man Booker prize for 2005 will be announced in about 45 minutes time at a glittering ceremony at the Guildhall in London - it will be around 10pm local time. BBC2 is providing live national television coverage. Will Good Morning Australia be crossing over to cover it? Perhaps not.

At any rate, this green cloth-covered eccentricity by Julian Barnes is the bookies favorite to win. But while it is hard not to include Flaubert's Parrot (1985) in any list of all time greats, Barnes has been spiralling downwards ever since and this workmanlike, enjoyable tale doesn't really reverse the trend.

Actually it's rather reminiscent of David Lodge's recent retelling of the last years of Henry James' life, and his unfortunate foray into the theatre - Author! Author! (2004)- which had the same oddly disengaged authorial stance. As in, hmm, time to write another book, don't care about much anymore, how about a historical reconstruction?

Or is to say that to naively miss the allegorical dimension, the commentary on injustice and race in contemporary Britain? Don't think so, sorry, no.

Muddy waters

Well meaning offers of 292 pages of ghastly Flanders and Ypres and Irish teenagers dying for England in 1918 are usually politely declined, even when they come as this one did from Barnes and Noble on Rittenhouse Square courtesy of a friendly concierge.

But self-imposed arbitrary Booker duty called and just as well, as this lovingly crafted brief text flows around the meaningless nastiness and the memorable voices and the rest of it. Soaring above the other candidates in terms of technical brilliance, depth of thought, beauty, austerity and compassion, this one wins round here…

…with Zadie Smith proxime accessit and most improved player.

Except of course that apparently The Accidental is not available in Sydney, or the States, not for love or money or other negotiable currencies. So exclude that, add in Coetzee’s Slow Man and McEwan’s Saturday if you like, and for this punter little Willie Dunne still dies winning.

On Zadie

One of several unfair crticisms levelled at Zadie Smith at the time of the storming success of her first novel White Teeth (2002) was that the fuss was more about her, as a brainy beautiful black 20 something East Ender, than about the book.

So perhaps she is hitting back by titling her third novel On Beauty? At any rate it’s another sprawling, technically assured success, and the breathtakingly beautiful brainy young black girl who sashays through its pages does wreak a certain amount of havoc.

A large cast of (yes, largely black) characters and a complex plot, set mainly in academic Boston not inner London and all the better for it. And though long it’s a zippy and intensely enjoyable read. For this reader most of the characters perhaps lack that extra layer which makes them live on outside the page, but how many writers can achieve that? Only the very best, which Our Zadie is surely well on her way to becoming.

Thought this was the clear Booker winner until I read the Barryman, and perhaps for most judges it will indeed be the one.

Shall We Creak

Firstchosen by young Anthea for a run on the DVD player at Moss Vale out of a box of five F&G musicals bought late at night at Tower Records on Broad St Philadelphia for $US59 – this creaking 1937 flummery has its moments, true, but Bringing up Baby was 1938, while 1939 saw The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind and La Règle Du Jeu... not quite in the same league.

Still, hmm, the way you wear your hat…

Moss Vale

Deneuve wracking again

Actually Repulsion (1965) was the other inflight movie to Philly, not from dreary Qantas needless to say, but on DVD on the new G4 iBook. Bit different from Bewitched. That this and Chinatown (1974) are Polanski’s two masterpieces hardly bears repeating. The disk came from a boxed set which also includes The Knife in the Water (1962) and Cul-de-Sac (1966).

Saw it in the late sixties when it first came out, and it did rather stay in the mind! The added attraction this time round is the audio commentary from both Polanski and Deneuve, he reiminiscing on the technical and economic challenges of getting the thing made, and she just plain reminiscing, charmingly, natch.

Polanski's first film in English (he'd made 10 previously in Polish and 1 in French) and worth watching several times to figure out why it works so extraodinarily well.

Bothered and bewildered

Watched it twice on the plane and fell asleep after the first hour both times. What is wrong with this movie? On paper it has everything it needs to be a screwball classic, cute story, classy writer/director team, cast of proven winners, great music. Nicole clearly adores cloning Marilyn (but don’t they all) and Caine/Maclean are in form. But it just doesn’t work. Shame. Best moment is during the romance montage (yeah right) when Sinatra suddenly starts singing Witchcraft and you are suddenly reminded that real greatness suddenly gives you a chill.

Philadelphia

Absurdly rapid hop to Horsham, the North Ryde of Philadelphia, for a day and a half of quasi business meetings and quasi dinner in a quasi Morrocan restaurant in a genuine suburban strip mall. Not quite MoMo. But the usual warm welcome from the dear old Park Hyatt on floors 15-19 of the nineteenth century Bellevue building on the corner of Broad and Walnut with its elegant spaces and fusty corridors. And most surprisingly welcome, a Reblochon on the breakfast buffet.

Reichs staggers

Can’t read that highbrow muck non stop without a bit of roughage to ease the digestion, not in seat 11K anyway. But oh dear oh dear, the usually reliable KR has gotten herself an attack of the Dan Browns, with mysterious married messiahs infesting Jerusalem like so many FTAs in an Evanovich. Oh, and btw Temperance Brennan has finally discovered sex. Quite enjoyable, apparently, according to her, in a series of coy veiled asides. Kathy, Kathy, bring back the angst!

Issey Fits

A coruscating collection of frocks from Japan has just opened at the Powerhouse - Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto and of course the magisterial Miyake inter alia. Quite catoptric catalogue too. Such a shame about the food - this otherwise competent museum must surely have the two worst caffs in the fine arts world.

Banville is Dullsville

At times the image of her would spring up in me unbidden, an interior succubus, and a surge of yearning would engorge the very root of my being. One greenish twilight after rain, with a wedge of wet sunlight in the window and an impossibly unseasonal thrush piping outside in the dripping lupins, I lay face down on my bed in such an intense suffusion of unassuageable desire - it hovered, this desire, like a nimbus about the image of my beloved, enfolding her everywhere and nowhere focused - that I broke into sobs, lavish, loud and thrillingly beyond all control.

If you enjoyed reading this sentence, read this book: The Sea by John Banville, one of the six finalists for the 2005 Booker Prize. For everyone else it's enough to note that it's terribly sad, terribly implausible, terribly overwritten and in fact just plain terrible.


The other Booker finalists:

Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go
Julian Barnes Arthur & George
Zadie Smith On Beauty
Ali Smith The Accidental
Sebastian Barry A Long Long Way

Winner (GBP50K) published on October 10th.

There's the rub

Went down to Dymocks at Worldy to pick up reserved copies of Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George and John Banville’s The Sea as part of a vaguely highbrow plan to read through the Booker shortlist. And Michelle behind the counter said, ‘Wanna freebee?’ and tossed Rubdown by Leigh Redhead in the bag as well. Started it with low expectations, but what a pageturner… funny, sharp, zippy/unzippy and quite rude in spots. Great sense of place (er, Melbourne)… and the right price. More on the other two some other time.