A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Contemporary Portraits by Murray Bail

2026-10-16T14:32:38.744+11:00

Contemporary Portraits by Murray Bail

St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 1975 ISBN 0702209783

I've now read quite a bit of Murray Bail, and I have to state I'm still not sure what to make of his writing. Self-consciously avant-garde in some respects, but in others very much a narrative storyteller, his novels have met with varying success, and he has also written a much-praised biography of the artist Ian Fairweather.

This collection of stories, published five years before his first novel, lean much more toward the avant-garde Bail. Some are absurd, some are surreal, not one is a mere "story". There is no real theme in the content of the stories, but there is an over-riding concern throughout the book with language - what it is, how it is constructed, and what meaning it conveys.

Several of the stories convey the sometimes absurd ways that language fails to convey meaning, and how familiar tropes can be turned inside out. When basic premises that we take for granted are turned on their head, all of a sudden one is without moorings and floating free in quite disturbing ways.

Bail is not afraid to do these things, which makes the stories always interesting if not always entertaining or understandable. It's no surprise that his most successful work (Eucalyptus) was much more mainstream in style and structure.

This one is for for Bail aficionados, but still worth reading. Brief descriptions on each story below -

Heubler

Heubler is a photographer who announces that he is determined to photograph everyone in the world, beginning with 23 specific types of people. The narrator claims he knows at least one of every type, listed in short biographies. Bail plays with meaning (the person that hears voices is a switchboard operator, the person who is beautiful and dumb can't speak, and so on). Everything about this story is absurd - Heubler's premise, and the narrator's responses.

Life of the Party

Owner of a house in a middle-class suburb, wife and kids at the beach house - he returns home and sets up a BBQ party, then climbs into a tree house to see what happens. Watches his invited friends get drunk, cook the BBQ and have a good time ("I've never been so drunk in all my life!"). As they leave he wonders if they would have had as much fun if he'd been there.

The Drover's Wife

The author recognises his wife as the subject of Drysdale's painting. She left him for reasons he can't fathom. He writes about her, what she looks like, her habits, and how her likes differed from his "she had a funny way about her". He describes when she killed a snake at a beach house they rented (homage to Lawson). He describes a trip beyond Port Augusta, where she had a cup of tea with a drover while he waited in the car.

Zoellner's Definition

Description of Leon Zoellner via dictionary definitions of physical attributes, compared to his attributes. Final sentence - "Words. Verbal expression; used in language to denote a thing, attribute or relation." Story shows how difficult it is to use words to actually describe those things.

Portrait of Electricity

Going through a museum dedicated to a great man, who is noticeably absent throughout (no pictures, no real sense of what he looked like). Everybody knows about him and his thoughts, but the museum (in his house?) has things like pieces of carpet he stood on etc. Final exhibits are a piece of his excreta and a telephone handset.

The Silence

Joe Tapp camps in the desert trapping rabbits. Every two weeks Norm Treloar comes in his truck to pick up the carcases. The story covers six weeks, and three visits. The first visit Norm turns up with his usual "how'd you be?" - Joe finds that Norm talks too much. The second visit Joe doesn't say anything to Norm, but Norm continues to talk. The third visit Joe hides in the sandhills until Norm leaves, and vows to do that every time the truck comes.

The Dog Show

Story of a long-running dog show where the people and dogs swap positions - the people become more dog-like in their habits and looks as the show goes on - eating dog biscuits while the dogs eat pies.

Paradise

Merv Hector is the bus driver on the route to Paradise. He is happy in life, slow but steady. He crashes the bus. He is next a lift man in an office building. He likes going up rather than down, takes his lunch on the roof. He crashes the lift, and after sleeping during a lunch break is fired. He then gets a job changing weather signs. He feels fine, so changes it to that even though it's raining...."The phone began to ring."

Ore

Wes Williams a stockbroker who falls ill while contemplating the oncoming copper boom, taste of copper in his mouth. Goes to the doctor, who tells him he has a fever. Then a section describing the doctor and some mining types (surveyors etc.) drilling into his skull for ore. He wakes up feeling better.

Cul-de-Sac (uncompleted)

Apart from the first, all paragraphs in this story are numbered, beginning at 78 through to 108. Roy Biv is a draughtsman who at first seems to be drawing a street plan for a cul-de-sac. He has blue hands and orange hair, and his watch strap is held together with rubber bands. The paragraphs seem to be a fever dream of him trying to walk to the cul-de-sac but never quite getting there, getting advice from people he meets, and observing strange things about the city (conveyor belts of rubbish running through it, live people taking shifts as statues). The final paragraph (108) seems to return to "reality" with Roy again drawing the plan.

The Partitions

Strange surreal story about a group of people walking and crawling along the top of partitions in what seems to be an endless office space. All sorts of things happen, they see all sorts of things happening. Nothing makes sense.

A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z.

A story of Kathy Pridham, working at the British Council in Karachi as a Librarian. She falls in with an Indian painter, Syed Masood, and "goes native". Masood is a drunk, and drags her away from her expat friends and lifestyle. He abuses her, and in the end she loses her job and ends up back in London. The story is also about language, about words and the meanings we attach to them.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Kelly Outbreak by John McQuilton

2026-10-12T14:03:34.233+11:00

The Kelly Outbreak 1878-1880: the Geographical Dimension of Social Banditry by John McQuilton

Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1979 ISBN 0522841805

After recently reading Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang I thought I would temper fiction with fact, and pulled out the book under review to get closer to the truth not only of Ned Kelly and his adventures, but also to the situation he found himself in, which led to many of the choices he made during his life.

As the title suggests, McQuilton has gone much further than a re-hash of Kellys life and crimes. He firstly sets the scene by discussing the history of settlement in North Eastern Victoria, describing the interaction between squatters, selectors and miners, particularly the failure of the laws around land selection to either provide the selectors with enough land for survival or enough freedom to create a prosperous life for them and their families. Meanwhile the squatters actively tried to discourage selection, and often gamed the rules for their own benefit.

This antagonism played out in various ways, from selectors duffing squatter's cattle for food and profit, and squatters (who were often also councillors and magistrates or justices of the peace) using the heavy hand of the law to get their way and intimidate any who opposed them. While McQuilton downplays ethnic and religious differences, these also fed into an "us against them" feeling from the selector class, with "them" including the police, who became very unpopular with many selector families.

The police themselves were a distinct group in the North East. Many were not from the area (due to a policy decision made in Melbourne), and most were not trained properly for the tasks they were required to do (McQuilton describes a lack of ability in the bush, and to use their firearms). Their strategies to control those they perceived to be behind much of the illegal activity in the area was one of continual harassment, which fell on some families more than others.

One family/clan that garnered particular attention from the police were the Quinn family, of which Kelly was a part (his mother was a Quinn). They were seen by the police as both cattle and horse thieves, and members of the family were constantly being hauled before the courts. In an appendix McQuilton lays out every instance where members of the Quinn clan were arrested between 1856 and 1880 for charges such as stealing, assault and abusive language. The thirteen people listed were arrested 73 times for various offences. Forty one times (56%) the arrested person was discharged. This fact goes not only to the incompetence of the police, but also to a definite perception, if not a reality, of persecution of the family.

The police were also not above framing the Quinns as well. It seems clear that Alexander Fitzpatrick created or at least massively exaggerated an incident at the home of the Kellys during which he was shot. What Fitzpatrick claimed was attempted murder Kelly always claimed was an act of self-defence on his part. It seems Kelly's version of events is probably closer to the truth than Fitzpatrick's.

This incident was the beginning of the two years when Ned and his brother Dan went bush to evade capture. Soon afterwards were the Stringybark Creek murders. That Ned shot and killed three police is not under any doubt. The full circumstances of the incident will never be known, but once done there was only ever going to be one ending for the members of the Kelly gang.

McQuilton well describes the shambolic police response to the Kelly outbreak - a mix of incompetence, petty jealousies between officers and heavy-handed actions that antagonized the public - the beginning of the divide between those who praised Kelly as some kind of Robin Hood, and those who demonized him as a psychopathic killer. He was neither.

The mystery surrounding why Kelly donned armour and faced the police at Glenrowan occupies McQuilton, because he subscribes to (and tries to fit the Kelly outbreak into) Eric Hobsbawm's theory of social banditry. It does seem that Kelly might have intended the Glenrowan affair to be the start of some sort of uprising in the region, given McQuilton's evidence of other armed men gathered around the Glenrowan Inn during the siege. It could also be that Kelly was staging this event to try and bargain for his mother's release from prison, which is a theory that has some support.

For a person and events that are so deeply ingrained into Australian culture, it can be surprising to a neophyte just how much of the Kelly story is unknown, or contested. I thought I knew a fair bit about the story, but I have certainly learned some new things reading this book. Some of the things I learnt from the excellent apparatus that comes with this book: the appendices have already been mentioned, one of which is a wonderful bibliographic essay which gives much insight into where Peter Carey gained a lot of his inspiration for his fiction - in fact fictional works have formed an integral part of the legend, and trying to separate the real from the imagined in this story is an ongoing effort.

There is no doubt that Ned Kelly is one of the more interesting figures of white Australian history. The Kelly Outbreak is a comprehensive look at not only Kelly's life and crimes, but an excellent piece of social history. Highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - City of Women by David Ireland

2026-10-07T12:24:13.449+11:00

City of Women a Novel by David Ireland

Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Books Australia. 1981 ISBN 0140058214

I think I might have tackled David Ireland's works the wrong way around. Not long ago I read A Woman of the Future, (review here) the first Ireland novel I had read, and have now just finished the book under review, and both books have been strange experiences.

City of Women is a short novel of episodes, possibly written in the form of letters by Billie Shockley to her lover Bobbie, who has left Billie to advance her career as a water engineer. Disturbingly, as the novel moves on, the reader is brought to the realisation that Bobbie is also Billie's daughter. This trope continues an undertone of incest that occurred in A Woman of the Future, and seems, to me at least, to be there perhaps for shock value, as it adds little to the story. Another trope that carries from book to book is that of the leopard - after Bobbie leaves, a leopard turns up at Billie's doorstep and moves in... she calls the leopard Bobbie as well, which leads to (intended) reader confusion as to whether Billie is addressing human Bobbie in a letter or leopard Bobbie as she walks the city.

Confusion and skewed horizons are definitely one of the things Ireland is trying to achieve in City of Women. The title alludes to the fact that in the novel the centre of Sydney is a female-only zone - men have been excluded. Men are seen both as threats (they come into the city to attack women, and the women routinely talk of wiping them out), and also as sexual toys (women routinely kidnap men and rape them). As is the case in A Woman of the Future, this strange sci-fi situation is not clearly explained - it is up to the reader to fill in the many gaps as to why and how this situation has come about, how it is enforced and the relationship between the city of women and the suburbs, where marriage, kids and "normal" life seem to continue (in fact we learn of several women that have gone out to the suburbs to live that life, as well as women including Billie who have come the other way).

The novels structure consists of short chapters, which are each about a different woman, although they always loop back to the pain Billie feels at losing Bobbie. The women who Billie describes in her letters are all strange characters in their own ways; many of them have come to Billie because she is some sort of healer - the strange maladies of the city of women such as tooth abatement or vaginal stirring are another trope throughout the book. Much of the action of the novel occurs in pubs, particularly the "Lover's Arms". Interestingly, although all the characters are women, they act out in seemingly male ways, drinking, fighting and treating lovers more casually than they should. I can't decide whether Ireland is deliberate in this or not.

In fact that is the problem I have had with both A Woman of the Future and this novel. I personally can't believe in the female-ness of his female characters. To me, he has turned them into men, they just don't ring true as women in their attitudes, the way they live or indeed the way they love - Billie's longing for Bobbie to me seems a male rather than a female desire.

While A Woman of the Future won a Miles Franklin award, it seems that City of Women (which was his next novel after A Woman of the Future) had a more mixed reception. After reading it, I can understand why. Whereas A Woman of the Future, despite it's quirks, was breathtakingly adventurous, City of Women lacks a narrative thread, and lacks any sense of a developing story. The unfilled gaps in the situation become frustrating rather than intriguing, and I was left unfulfilled at the end.

That stated, the writing is good and at times striking, and some of the individual vignettes are wonderful little set pieces.

I'm not sure that David Ireland can be classed as a great Australian writer, but he is certainly a significant one. His experimental fiction might seem a little dated now, and I think that if you choose to try him out, I wouldn't start with City of Women. I will give him another run though at some stage.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

2026-09-29T14:22:56.635+10:00

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2001 (first published 2000) ISBN 0702232637

I've never been a great Peter Carey fan (prior to this book I had only read Oscar and Lucinda, and found it only vaguely enjoyable), but I do remember when True History of the Kelly Gang came out primarily because an acquaintance of mine began to talk about Ned Kelly's wife - when I pulled them up on that, they protested that indeed he did have a wife as it was in Carey's book!..... beware anything that's title mentions it's true...

I can see now, after reading the book, why my acquaintance might have been fooled if they had approached the book with no context. Carey has set out the novel as if it was a transcription of various manuscript papers held in the State Library of Victoria, written by Kelly himself to explain his life to his daughter, interspersed with newspaper clippings and other material.

Kelly did famously dictate a self-justifying treatise when he held the town of Jerilderie to ransom during his bushranging days, known as the Jerilderie Letter. Carey has studied this letter and has tried to replicate the style of Kelly's voice, as well as trying to get into his mindset via what he had written in that missive, so that he can create a fiction that re-creates not only Kelly, but his milieu.

That milieu is one of poor Irish selectors. I won't get into a history lesson here, but Carey evokes well the absolute poverty that many people of convict origins had to suffer on their poor parcels of land, constantly walking the line between starvation and criminality in their quest to survive. He very much paints Ned Kelly as not only someone who suffered, but someone who was of the opinion that it was the system that made him suffer, rather than anything else. Carey's Kelly feels very Irish, but also very Australian in the sense that he will not take a backward step and will fight what he sees as injustice.

It's a truism in Australia that depending on your view of our society, you see Kelly as either a vicious murderer, or a champion of the little people against the toffs who run the joint. Carey views Kelly as a complex character, but definitely veers towards the champion of the people narrative. His crimes, as described in the novel, were all committed for noble reasons, with the murders at Stringybark Creek very much portrayed as self-defence.

Which is not to imply that Carey has written a hagiography: Carey develops Kelly's unmistakeable megalomania, which increases as the story moves along. In the novel Kelly is ruled by his mother, who is also portrayed as a strong woman who took what she wanted from the world. His relationship with her is portrayed as complex: Kelly constantly seeks affirmation from her, and is gutted at the moments when she seems to reject him (Ellen is psychologically wounded by her experiences with men and poverty, and periodically lashes out at her children).

The climax of the novel is when Kelly has to choose between his pregnant wife and his mother - choosing the latter will doom him, but that is the decision he makes, and his (fictional) writings are all to try to explain why he did so.

It's a brave decision for an Australian author (Carey was born not far from my hometown, but was living in New York when he wrote this book) to write about perhaps the most famous Australian story. He has done so with considerable verve and narrative flair, but I think the message behind the story (the repression of the masses by the system and the English) is perhaps overdone - Ned is portrayed as nobler than he was, and the police and the "squattocracy" perhaps more villainous than they were.

That stated, True History of the Kelly Gang is a good read as a story, and as an insight into early settlement of Australia. It won the Booker Prize in 2001, which is accolade enough. Recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - M: Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati

2026-09-16T09:30:35.721+10:00

M: Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati, translated by Anne Milano Appel

London: Harper, 2021 (original Italian publication 2018) ISBN 9780062956118

Wow. What a book! The first book in a five-part series of novels that deals with the political life of Benito Mussolini, M: Son of the Century is a massively gripping (as well as being, at over 700 pages, simply massive) description of Mussolini's rise to power, beginning with the first meeting of the fascists, and concluding with him gaining a total grip over parliament after the murder of Giacomo Matteotti in 1924.

While this is a novel, it has a very documentary feel, with the short chapters evoking real events, with interspersed newspaper reports, telegrams and other archival material. The effect is a little like a kaleidoscope, each chapter (from a different character's viewpoint) adding a piece to the chaotic picture that was Italy after World War One, and on into the 1920s.

And chaotic it was - Scurati evokes the turmoil of a country that "won" the war but gained no dividend from the peace that followed. Veterans particularly were disaffected, as socialism gained ground - Mussolini had been a high ranking socialist before the War, but left precisely because they didn't support it.

The violence of the rise of Fascism, the ineffectiveness and fatal factionalism of the Socialists, and Mussolini's constant shifting of his alliances and strategies are what drives this book forward. The internecine power plays within the Fascists, especially when power beckoned, and Mussolini's struggle to control his party are especially well described. The characters of the main protagonists are also well drawn; not only the Fascists such as Mussolini himself, but also Balbo, Dumini, Marinetti and Rossi, but also Fascism's political opponents such as Bombacci, Turati, Croce, Salandra and of course Matteotti. Mussolini's lover Margherita Sarfatti is a major character in the novel - mentor and perhaps even eminince grise in the early part of the novel, but discarded once Mussolini ascends to the Prime Ministership, she becomes somewhat of a tragic figure, as does Rachele, Mussolini's wife, who is not much more than a cipher in the book.

If you are interested in Italian history and literature, I can recommend this book - there is also an Italian television mini-series that is worth catching up with.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Little Field Marshal by Richard Holmes

2026-09-07T14:51:00.373+10:00

The Little Field Marshal: A Life of Sir John French by Richard Holmes

London: Cassell, 2005 (first published 1981) ISBN 0304367028

Who has heard of Sir John French now? Virtually no-one, and yet at his peak he commanded the British Army on the Western Front at the beginning of World War One. This after a storied career in the cavalry, where he fought in Sudan and most famously in the Boer War (where he made his name), and stints as Inspector-General of the Army and Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS). Richard Holmes' book is a thorough look at both the personal and military sides of a complex man who generated loyalty and disdain in almost equal measure.

French in many ways was not the typical cavalry officer of the late Victorian era. He didn't come from a privileged background, and in fact transferred to the army from a burgeoning naval career. He was a serial womanizer which quite often got him into trouble in his early years, and led to a long estrangement from his wife and his children. His passionate nature was something that surfaced again and again during his career; several times he threatened resignation to get his way on various issues.

French's first time in battle was during the campaign to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum, when he commanded a troop of cavalry against the Dervishes. He carried himself well, and this led to him becoming an important commander during the Boer War, during which he became a hero after leading several brisk cavalry actions against the Boers. He was a cavalryman through and through, very much a believer in the role of the cavalry to both reconnoitre, and to take advantage of any breakthroughs by the other commands. These tactics worked well in South Africa, but were useless in France a decade and a half later.

That intervening decade and a half is for me the most interesting part of the book. French went to work modernising the army as he saw it - in some ways visionary in imagining how it was to be deployed in a Continental war, and in some ways quaintly reactionary in his steadfast refusal to countenance the cavalry giving up their lances (to become, as he saw it, mere mounted infantry - a fascinating part of that debate was that Erskine Childers, of Riddle of the Sands fame, wrote a book opposing French's ideas).

It was during this period that French came up against the limit of his abilities. A good tactical commander of cavalry, he could not effectively make the leap from that level to the broader job of CIGS. He had no feel for, liking of, or skill at the staff work that was required to make the most effective use of large forces of troops. He was fortunate in South Africa that he had Haig under his command, who was an excellent staff officer (and a close friend until their falling-out in 1915). French was the type of officer that liked to lead from the front and leave the staff work to others.

This in many ways was to bring about his downfall in 1915 - he failed to grasp that industrialised warfare required an industrialised approach to logistics, manpower distribution and planning. He wasn't up to the task, but as Holmes points out it is unfair to judge him too harshly for the reverses of the British early in the war, as nobody really knew what the new warfare looked like. French was too optimistic about the ability of troops to attack, and couldn't take the long view of some of his colleagues, yet when he was sent back to England to command the Home forces, he had enough vision to pave the way for the creation of the RAF, as well as keeping up the numbers of trained troops for the Front.

French was Anglo-Irish in descent, and always loved Ireland. He had a part to play in the Curragh Incident, where again he didn't cover himself in glory as far as the politicians were concerned - French had a tin ear for politics, as well as for money (he was perennially broke). In 1918 he was sent over to Ireland to become Lord Lieutenant, to try and quash the incipient rebellion that bubbled through the country. French flattered himself that he understood the Irish, and thought that Sinn Fein was not actually a popular movement. He favoured military control, but felt he had not enough troops to enforce it. Once again he couldn't read the political tea-leaves and was on the wrong side of most of the decisions taken during his time there.

It was an adventurous life, and one that Holmes captures well. He has a lot of sympathy for French and is prepared to go into bat for him when necessary, but is not afraid to criticise his decisions and actions when required.

The best way to sum up the man is to quote from the final paragraph of this book - "French was not a great general. He was a brave man and a good cavalry leader, and cared deeply about his profession. But in many respects he never transcended the nineteenth century, and his attempts to solve the tactical and strategic conundrums of 1914-15 were fatally marred by his undisciplined intellect and mercurial personality. Yet he should not be allowed to sink, disdained, into oblivion. Even those who knew him warts and all agreed that, whatever his shortcomings as a tactician, strategist, or indeed politician, 'French, in the sacred fire of leadership, was unsurpassed...'"

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper by Simon Leys

2026-08-20T15:47:38.676+10:00

The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper by Simon Leys

Melbourne: Black Inc., 2005 ISBN 1863951504

I picked this book up for a little break from the two rather heavy books I'm reading at the moment, which will not doubt grace these pages in due course. It's small size (both in page length and dimensions) fitted the bill, and it's something I've wanted to read for ages.

As the title suggests, the book consists of two essays, that are not related other than they are both to do with the sea. They were written many years apart - Prosper written in the 60s, The Wreck of the Batavia after the release of Mike Dash's Batavia's Graveyard, when Leys realised that his long-standing project (or thought) to write a book about the Batavia in which he would lay bare the entire episode was no longer viable.

In The Wreck of the Batavia, Leys provides a short and pithy overview of the voyage, wreck, and insanity that occurred to the survivors while awaiting rescue. His main point though, is to try and get under the skin of Jeronimus Cornelisz, the brutal leader of the mutiny. He makes much of his potential relationship with Johannes Torrentius, a brilliant painter who was arrested for blasphemy and atheism not long before Cornelisz signed on to sail in the Batavia.

Prosper is a short essay about Leys' trip in one of the last sail-powered tuna fishing boats (a yawl) out of Brittany. It's more of a character study than anything else, with Leys describing the (mostly) old crew - their histories, their relationships with each other, and how their particular skills were being overtaken by technology. It isn't much more than a fragment, but vividly brings to life a time, a place, and a crew.

This book was just the tonic as a break from some more serious reading. Leys was a fine stylist and knew how to write - and the physical book is a pleasure as well, with some nice plates that add to the experience.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson

2026-07-31T16:47:31.948+10:00

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017 ISBN 9780393089059

Thanks to Christopher Nolan's film, The Odyssey is having a little time in the sunshine of notice. As I write this review, I've yet to see the film (although I've read/seen quite a few reviews!), but in preparation I thought I would read the poem for the first time since my early twenties (i.e. several decades ago).

I chose the Emily Wilson translation for a few reasons - it's current, it was of interest on the internet because it's the first translation by a woman and I wanted to see what the fuss was about and whether the sex of the translator made a difference (it doesn't really), but mostly because it was the copy closest to hand when I decided a re-read was on the cards.

On the whole, it is an excellent translation for the twenty-first century. Wilson has used iambic pentameter as her metre, but it's not a self-consciously poetry, she has used (mostly) a very slightly heightened language, but the story is very easily understood and very readable, and she has provided the reader with a good introduction to the poem and the milieu in which it was written, what it might mean both then and now, excellent notes, glossary, pronunciation guide and useful maps. It's a complete package.

Of the apparatus, it is the Translator's Note that is most interesting. It is an excellent essay on the difficulties not only of translating the poem and making it accessible to a modern audience, but also on the weight that earlier translations bring to bear on anyone who attempts it. It's well worth reading, and would serve as a good guide for readers of any translation of anything, especially poetry.

The poem is best-known for Odysseus's adventures fighting the Cyclops, hearing the Sirens, skirting Scylla and Charybdis, the Lotus Eaters etc., but in many ways those are minor bits of excitement in what is a much bigger story that Homer (Wilson's introduction speculates well on who Homer might have been) is trying to tell.

Whereas The Iliad is a story about war and glory, The Odyssey is much more a story of overcoming the difficulties life throws up at us, the choices we make (and the ones we don't) and the consequences of our actions. Like much of the greatest literature, within it's narrative The Odyssey gives the reader pause to think about their own life and reflect on how much all of our stories can be seen to be reflected in Odysseus's struggles. Everyone should have their own interpretation of The Odyssey, it seems to me.

Mostly, in my view, it's a book about coming home, and about not giving up on that ideal. Homer is too sophisticated to give us a happily ever after, but coming back to where you are known and loved and wanted is at the heart of the story. Fear of what it means to not be those things is also here - for much of the poem Odysseus, through his deceitfulness and trickery is trying to ascertain whether his home does indeed know him, love him and want him.

Wilson has her own views on this, and on other things, which don't necessarily gel with mine, but which like the poem itself are worth thinking about and responding to in a thoughtful way. One of the interesting things about The Odyssey is that there are so many powerful women portrayed in it, many of whom have a lot of control over Odysseus, which seems remarkable for something written thousands of years ago. I think the depiction of women in the poem speaks to age-old questions that, even in patriarchal warrior societies, still need to be reckoned with, and Wilson has thoughtful things to say about that, as well as on the depiction of slavery and the actions of the gods.

This is an excellent book in every way - a great translation well supported with supplementary material. If you have watched the film and want to go deeper, I can highly recommend this book.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Slim the Standardbearer by Ronald Lewin

2026-07-13T13:58:05.755+10:00

Slim the Standardbearer: a biography of Field-Marshall The Viscount Slim by Ronald Lewin

Ware, Herts.: Wordsworth Editions, 1999 (first published 1976) ISBN 184022214X

This is a workmanlike biography of an interesting man. The major part of the book focusses on Slims' Burma Campaign, which in a sense is right and proper, but I when I finished the book I felt a little short-changed, as Slim has written so well about that himself. I was hoping for a little more insight into the man than this book delivered, but it was still worth reading to remind oneself of what an extraordinary life he led.

The son of a failed businessman, Slim dreamed of an early age of joining the army, but funds (lack of) seemed to scupper that wish, until the advent of war in 1914. Despite the myth that Slim became a Field-Marshall from the ranks, he was actually commissioned immediately as a second lieutenant owing to his time spend before the war in the Birmingham University OTC (despite not being a student at the University - the first example of "Slim's luck"). He was sent to Gallipoli, where he was wounded: after his recovery he was sent to Mesopotamia to assist in the relief of Kut, where he was wounded a second time.

After the war he was transferred to the Indian Army where he served with Gurkhas. It seems that this was one of the happiest times of his life - there was much low-level action against rebellious tribes, he met and married his wife, and slowly made his way through the ranks, impressing at Staff College in Delhi and at the Imperial Defence College.

Interestingly he also spent these years writing short stories for money (even though Lewin's book is only just short of a hagiography, Slim's nose for cash runs through the book, from ensuring expense accounts were suitably large, to augmenting his pension in any way he thought he could), which I think is a fascinating insight, although one that Lewin doesn't ponder too much.

Although he is famous for his campaigning in Burma in World War Two, he also served in Ethiopia against the Italians (where he was wounded yet again), and in Iraq, before being sent East. There, in Burma, he famously led the retreat back to India, and then the advance back to Rangoon, through a series of excellent strategic and tactical manoeuvres, and (with the close support of Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Commander of the South East Asian Theatre) working his way through the politics of logistics, supply and recalcitrant commanders (Wingate, Stilwell).

This is the major part of Lewin's work, and he describes well what is required of someone commanding an Army, and how the fighting is just one part. It was in Burma that Slim's ability to get people to follow him, his ability to listen, to plan on the run, and to connect with the average soldier were so much on display. Burma in many ways was (and is) a forgotten campaign, and so Slim's capability has been lost in time as the European and Pacific Campaigns have garnered most of the glory. He was probably the best British field commander of the War.

After the War Slim finally got the job for which he had been destined for a long time - Chief of General Staff. It was a difficult time to undertake the role, with the Army moving from a wartime footing to understanding what it's role would be during the Cold War. Slim instituted many reforms during this time.

Then seemingly out of the blue he was asked to be Governor-General of Australia. He took on the role with gusto, and was again a trailblazer, being the first of the "modern" G-Gs, touring the country and being a force for unification, while trying to stay outside of politics.

His final years as Constable of Windsor Castle were ones of enjoyment and social activities, before his decline and death in 1970.

Lewin's book covers this all in appropriate detail, but with little verve or insight - there is a later biography by Robert Lyman which may be better than this one.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Gatton Man by Merv Lilley

2026-06-27T18:30:26.451+10:00

Gatton Man by Merv Lilley

Ringwood, Vic.: McPhee Gribble Publishers, 1994 ISBN 0869143344

I first read Gatton Man many years ago, not long after it was published. I had at the time just read Rodney Hall's Captivity Captive which had begun my long-term fascination with the Gatton murders. On my first reading of Gatton Man I was convinced that Lilley may have indeed been the son of the murderer, but on this re-reading many years later it seems to me a much thinner claim.

Which is not to dismiss this book as a waste of a reader's time. Part memoir, part biography of his father, Gatton Man is a story of the other Australia that doesn't make it into what we tell ourselves of our white beginnings - no pastoral stations and glorious cattle runs, no comfortable suburban life with weekends at the beach or the footy, but a life of hard scrabble on small acreages, scratching the barest of livings, and growing up with little education and fated to live a hard life amongst hard people.

In Lilley's case, the small acreage he grew up on was near Rockhampton in Queensland. He was the youngest of four children, who all worked (slaved) for their psychopathic father, W.J. Lilley. W.J. was extremely violent, a schemer who charmed his way into and out of trouble, and was a pederast and a rapist. Merv Lilley's tales (the memoir is more a series of vignettes than a chronological narrative) are about the drudgery of work mixed with fear of what W.J. might do, a world in which each child looked out for themselves before anything or anyone else. Lilley's mother did what she could, always at the risk of a thrashing from W.J., which could (and did) occur at any moment.

The other characters around the farm, itinerant workers, tramps, tin scratchers and gold miners and other farmers, created an ever-changing dynamic of people who could help, might need help themselves, who could be a friend or an enemy depending on the situation. Merv managed to extract himself from the situation entirely by joining up in World War Two. The "skills" he learned from growing up, both with his fists and his brain, served him well during his stint in uniform, and later when he became a communist and committed union activist around Queensland (Merv Lilley eventually married the author Dorothy Hewett and became a member of the left-wing literary scene in Australia).

All of this is fascinating and worth reading in and of itself but what of Lilley's central claim about his father, that he was the perpetrator of the triple murder of the Murphy siblings at Christmas time 1898 near the town of Gatton? The first section of the book provides the reader with a study of a man who could certainly be capable of such a crime. The second section attempts to prove the case.

This section of the book quotes verbatim quite a lot of evidential statements made to the commission of enquiry into the murders. Lilley is very interested in a man called William Day, who arrived in the Gatton area just before the murders, gaining work with Clarke, the butcher. Day left soon after the murders. He was, as they would say now, a "person of interest" at the time, and as Lilley lays out the various statements of detectives and others at Gatton, it does seem to a reader that he would indeed be a prime suspect in the case. After Day moved on, he eventually disappeared into history, although there were people who said he joined up to fight in South Africa and was killed there.

Lilley suggests that it was in fact his father that was William Day. He explains how he may have come up with the nom-de-plume, links the witnesses statements as to Day's cantankerous character to his father's own ways, and lets us know that his father did join up to fight the Boers. Lilley posits that W.J. did so to escape any heat that might be lingering in the investigation, and to cover his tracks. On his return, so Merv writes, he was careful for quite a few years with how and where he presented himself, until he was sure that he no longer could be linked to William Day or to Gatton.

While this all seems plausible, Merv has no hard evidence to back up any of his claims. On this re-reading, I see much more clearly the straw men that Lilley has set up so that he can knock them down all the more easily. He has no confession, he really has nothing to hang his hat on which could be accepted in a court of law as proof, beyond the fact that his father was working itinerantly around Queensland at the time, vaguely fits the description given by (some of) the witnesses who may have seen the killer, and that he soon joined up to go to South Africa. There would have been many young men who could fit that bill.

So, while Gatton Man fails in its main premise, it is still a wonderful insight into pioneering Australia, as well as into one of the most notorious crimes of the Nineteenth Century, which to this day remains unsolved.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - To the Islands by Randolph Stow

2026-06-19T12:37:15.440+10:00

To the Islands by Randolph Stow

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975 (first published 1958) ISBN 0140700013

There can be little doubt that Randolph Stow is in the top tier of Australian novelists. His works are in turn spiritual, allusive and wonderfully descriptive. Tourmaline is one of the best Australian books I have ever read, and The Merry-go-Round in the Sea is universally recognised as a great coming-of-age novel. To the Islands is another remarkable book, and it's astonishing he wrote a novel with such insight into aging and the approach of death when he himself was only in his mid-twenties.

(Before I go any further I'll mention that Stow heavily revised his novel for the 1982 re-publication: this review is of the first version of this book, published by Penguin in the 1970s.)

Stow quickly sets the scene in this book: a remote mission settlement in the north of Western Australia, where the long-serving superintendent Heriot has lost his faith in the ability of the government or the church to improve the conditions of the native inhabitants. We learn that he lost his wife and pregnant daughter over the years, believing his daughter was killed by her husband Rex. We learn in the first pages that Rex has just returned to the mission for the first time since Heriot's daughter's death.

When Heriot hears of Rex's return, his bitterness and anger overflows, and in a fit of anger confronts Rex during a cyclone and leaves believing he has killed him. He flees the mission during the storm, but is followed by one of the natives, Justin. Heriot had intended to commit suicide, which Justin's presence prevents, and so they journey through the country together. The journey, for Heriot is physical, mental and spiritual. He by turns strips away the layers of his personality, his grief and his anger. He is assisted in the process by Justin's presence - Justin's purity of spirit and focus on what is important in life help Heriot to move to a place of peace, where he no longer is angry with what has happened to him, or at the petty injustices that occurred during his life. At the end, by the sea, almost in sight of the Islands (the mythical Islands that the dead travel to in the native beliefs of the area), he is ready to pass on, acknowledging that "my soul is a strange country."

Interspersed with Heriot's journey is the story of the search for him undertaken by staff and natives from the mission. It turns out that Heriot's attack had not killed Rex, who joins the search, reflecting on what he has done wrong and hoping for a reconciliation, which does occur after a fashion.

To the Islands is many things, one of which is a foray into and an examination of the ethics of white colonialism in Australia. As the narrative develops, we learn that Heriot originally joined the mission to expiate the racial guilt he felt over not being able to forestall a massacre of the local black population which occurred in the 1920s. Heriot was the first of a new generation of whites that entered the black story at that time, determined to help Aborigines rather than kill them, even if that help was paternalistic and ineffective. Now, at the time described in the book, Heriot is the last man standing of that generation, and dealing with the ascent of the next generation: moving from paternalism to a more partnership-based relationship. The Aboriginals too, embodied in the character of Rex, are becoming more assertive in that relationship, beginning to demand to be heard, and to have agency in their own lives.

Heriot has spent so long and put so much into the mission that it has hollowed him out - he cannot connect with the new generation of white residents, but because of the approach the mission took with the natives he has no true and meaningful friendships with them either, even though Stow makes it clear during Heriot's journey that Justin, with his uncomplicated loyalty and love, could have been such a friend.

Stow captures and describes many things in this book - the tragedy of the circumstances of the native peoples, the experience of a man losing his reason to live and suffering a complete breakdown, the feeling of despair that comes when there is nothing to be done. The simple depth of this story is wonderful - I emphasise that Stow was only about 23 when he wrote this, which takes my breath away.

Stow's skills in descriptive writing are immense - this is a big story in a short book, with description of the physical world and the mental world within concise, but with a limpid clarity that makes you go back to try and work out how he did it.

This is a marvellous book. Highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Good-Bye Dolly Gray by Rayne Kruger

2026-06-14T21:42:43.185+10:00

Good-Bye Dolly Gray: the Story of the Boer War by Rayne Kruger

London: Pan Books, 1974 (first published 1959) ISBN 03300238612

Apart from (even in?) South Africa, how many of the combatant nations remember the Boer War of 1899-1902? My hometown has a magnificent memorial in the main street commemorating the 250 Victorians who died fighting in South Africa, but I'm sure most passers-by these days assume the memorial is to World War One if indeed they notice it at all.

The Boer War was the progenitor of many things: blockhouses and barbed wire entanglements, concentration camps, armoured trains, mounted infantry, and not least the participation of most of the Empire. Kruger's book, originally published when some combatants were still alive, is a good "traditional" narrative history of the conflict, covering the military and the political quite well, the social less so.

"The Boers said the war was for liberty. The British said it was for equality. The majority of the inhabitants, who were not white at all, gained neither liberty or equality." This quote from the final pages of the book is pithy, and is not far from the truth. The Great Trek, undertaken the generation previous to that fighting this war, was undertaken so that the Boers could maintain their independence from the British, who had taken the Cape Colony and Natal for their own. The Orange Free State and Transvaal were in nearly all senses independent states, which both sides found acceptable.

That is, until gold was discovered in the Transvaal. The rush brought many foreigners (Uitlanders) to the state, mainly British. Fearing loss of control, the Transvaal government restricted the franchise of non-Boers. The Uitlanders complained to the Crown. The British had long harboured a desire to unite their colonies with the Boer republics to create a South African state. They thought that supporting the Uitlanders in their claim for representation may be a way to achieve such an outcome via the franchise and demographic takeover. So, like many other wars and revolutions throughout history, the fundamental cause of the Boer War was essentially about taxation without representation.

Militarily, the British Empire was always going to win a long drawn-out struggle. The best the Boers could hope for was to make Britain pay such a price that they would make terms. Eventually this is basically what happened in 1902, when the Boers recognised the suzerainty of the English and South Africa became a reality, but the Boers maintained their culture and language and eventually gained political preponderance over the new territory via their own demographic takeover. The War spilled much blood and spent much treasure to only reach a position that could realistically have been negotiated.

The opposing military forces could not have been more different in 1899. The initial British force, under General Buller (whose reputation suffered an irretrievable collapse during this conflict owing to his caution and tactical blunders) might have been wearing khaki and carrying modern Lee Metford rifles, but were old-fashioned in other ways. Their huge columns, with baggage trains consisting of thousands of carts drawn by oxen, officers that ensured that they brought with them champagne, baths and other luxuries, were no match for the Boers. Boer mobile commandos, who lived off the land (supported by many residents), were incredibly mobile owing to their horsed infantry that travelled without impedimenta, and were tactically supple as everyone had a say in how battle was commenced and fought.

Unfortunately the unique structure of the Boer fighting force also became a weakness as the war developed. With no fixed military structure, Boers came and went from the battle-ground as they pleased, and each commando could decide to engage how it chose to, whether that supported Boer strategy or not.

The British eventually dominated the battlefield through combining two seemingly opposing principles, which they fused into a strategy which eventually brought the Boers to the negotiating table. The first was to create units that copied the Boer way of fighting: mobile columns of mounted infantry, lightly equipped, that could cover distance quickly to bring the enemy to heel. The second was the construction of thousands of blockhouses - small forts that linked together into a military fence across the country. By using the mobile columns to push the commandos onto the lines of blockhouses, the British eventually wore down the Boer forces so much that their will to continue fighting began to fail. The Boers had hoped since the start of the war that their cousins who lived in Cape Colony and Natal would rise in rebellion and support them. This support did not materialise even after the Boers "invaded" the Cape and caused much trouble there. This fact also helped seal the fate of the Boers.

The British, while eventually "winning", also paid a heavy price. As many wars have, the Boer War brought down a government, and also a way of governing. The many failures of both politics and military during the war led to the British public losing faith in the rule of the upper classes. The Liberals took over politics, and the British officer class, where commissions were bought rather than earned, was dismantled after the war by Kitchener, who was the modernising leader of the forces in South Africa.

Kruger's book lists a catalogue of military blunders, with the British consistently underestimating the capabilities of the Boers, and the Boers suffering from too much or too little caution, often failing to press home their advantage or fruitlessly attacking points that were too strong. Early in the war the Boers laid siege to Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberly. They failed to take any of these places, and if they had the war may have taken a different turn.

By the same token, if Buller had moved more decisively and had more tactical nous, the Boers may not have won their early victories and in fact might have suffered defeats that may have led to them putting down their rifles much earlier than they did.

Kruger spends a few chapters on the political aspects of the war, particularly in England, but glosses over the politics of the participation of the Empire in the war, as well as the politics of the Cape Colony and Natal during the conflict. While he describes the concentration camps, again it is a side-issue in this book to the descriptions of the military activity.

If you want to get a grip on the military progression of the Boer War, Good-Bye Dolly Gray (the title comes from a well-known song from the era) is not the worst place to start.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre

2026-05-28T14:11:05.805+10:00

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated from the French by Robert Baldice

London: Penguin Books, 1990 (first published in French in 1938, this translation first published 1963)

ISBN 0140181806

My first foray into Sartre, and Sartre's first novel. A novel that I'll mull over for quite some time. A story of angst, a struggle to find the meaning of - or at least some meaning in - life. The claim on the back cover of the edition I read is that this is Sartre's first foray into the ideas and philosophy that became known as existentialism. The novel takes the form of a diary of Antoine Roquentin, who is temporarily residing in Bouville where he is undertaking research into a biography that his is writing of an aristocrat from the Revolutionary era.

Antoine is going through a crisis, through which he is stripping away the layers of his life one-by-one. As the diary moves on he becomes less and less sure of his place in the world, of his views about his fellow man and society more generally, and finally about the physical world itself.

He grapples with these questions via interactions with people in the town, in the cafes, the library and on the street, and with the physical buildings, parks and trees that surround him. What does it mean to be a person - if the present is the only thing that actually exists, how can a human life have a trajectory or meaning (we create ourselves and the world through storytelling).

But what is it that we are telling ourselves? How can we be sure of anything when the past doesn't exist or things are merely things and cannot hold other meanings? "Every existent is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance." The book, and Antoine, seem to be heading to the most nihilistic of endings - Antoine even moves beyond the idea of suicide, as to do the deed is just as meaningless as anything else.

The climax of the diary is Antoine meeting his former girlfriend Anny in Paris. She has come to the same conclusions about life as Antoine, and is resigned to "mere existence". Antoine hopes for some sort of reconciliation, as during the meeting he realises that he has in fact missed her presence, but their meeting concludes with Anny explaining how that part of their life is over. Having long since realised that his book is pointless, Antoine returns to Bouville one last time before moving to Paris, and, in what I see as a deliberate ironical twist, begins to think about writing a different sort of book, a book very similar to the one the reader is reading...

Nausea is, I think, both a product of its time and its author. Sartre's existentialism - Antoine's ennui and disaffection - spring from the trauma of World War One: what is meaning after such slaughter, what meaning can the past have and what does the future look like when the old certainties no longer hold? It is also a young man's book. Many of Antoine's insights are not revelatory to someone older, so I wonder if some of the dramatic impact of the thought in this novel was lost on me. I actually bought this for my eighteen year old son who has an interest in philosophy, so I will be interested in his reaction once he has read it.

As someone who has read quite a bit of modernist fiction, it is interesting that so many different people in Britain and Europe were working with fiction in a similar way at a similar time - it really does reflect a change in how people (middle-class people to be sure) viewed themselves, society, and the world at large. In my opinion Nausea fits into that tradition.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

2026-05-24T12:20:29.584+10:00

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

London: Jonathan Cape, 1998 ISBN 0224051709

A novel that was not at all what I expected and perhaps an outlier in terms of winners of the Booker Prize. This is the first Ian McEwan book I have read, and for some reason I had in my mind that he was only a writer of serious, "worthy" and dense fiction. Thinking about that I wonder if that's because I formed an opinion entirely from looking at the covers of his books, not to mention the portentous (usually one-word) titles.

So to Amsterdam, with its image of nineteenth-century duellists on the cover of my (second) hardback edition. The first pages of the book, where four lovers of the same woman (Molly) attend her funeral, are indeed portentous. The lovers are: an editor of a London newspaper, a famous composer, the Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom and Molly's husband, a publisher.

We soon learn that Vernon (the editor) and Clive (the composer) are friends even if they were rivals at one stage for Molly's affections. We learn that both of them loathe Julian (the Foreign Secretary) both for his politics and the fact that he took Molly away from them. Naturally they feel unkindly toward George (the husband) for officially "winning" Molly, and for refusing them permission to visit during the final days of her illness, which we learn was both physically and mentally degrading.

In the next section of the novel the reader discovers that Vernon is engaged in a battle with his staff to turn around his paper's fortunes - he intends to take it more "downmarket", to the disgust of much of the longstanding staff ("the Grammarians"). Clive meanwhile is working on a commission to write a symphony. Rocked by the manner of Molly's death, Clive asks Vernon if he would see Clive euthanized if he sunk to Molly's level. Vernon agrees, on the proviso that Clive would do the same for him.

Meanwhile George, who happens to have a financial interest in the paper Vernon runs, shows Vernon some pictures Molly had taken, of Julian in drag, which as it turns out is his secret vice.. Vernon realises this is his chance to destroy Julian personally and politically. He goes to Clive for advice and they have a blazing argument - Clive cannot see Julian's point of view at all.

Clive goes to the Lake District to try and get inspiration to finish his symphony all the time brooding over his row with Vernon. While walking, Clive witnesses a man attacking a woman at the very moment he receives the inspiration he needs to finish his symphony. Instead of helping the woman, he chooses to write down his thoughts.

Vernon goes ahead with the plan to publish the photos of Julian, and the pre-publicity begins to turn around the paper's fortunes. A junior staffer comes to him to let him know that much of the staff is in fact behind him but too fearful of the Grammarians to speak out, which fortifies Vernon. However, the day before publication Julian's wife holds a press conference where she reveals the photographs and stands by her husband. Julian has been out-manoeuvred by his junior staff who takes over the paper. Clive sees the paper and is disgusted in Vernon and sends him a postcard stating he should be sacked.

Meanwhile, thinking back to a conversation with Clive about his trip, Vernon realises that Clive had witnessed an attack from a serial rapist, and rings Clive to tell him to go to the police. Clive refuses because he is in the middle of finishing his symphony. Another argument ensues, and Vernon rings the police to let them know Clive was a witness.

These actions destroy the friendship, with both Clive and Vernon (illogically) feeling that the other had sabotaged their careers. It's here the story turns to farce. They both independently determine that the other had gone mad, and so under the terms of their pact it was their duty to euthanize the other.

They meet in Amsterdam, where Clive is rehearsing his symphony (which is a failure because Vernon had sent the police around just as Clive was inspired for a grand finale to the piece, which he never got to complete). Both of them have employed dodgy euthanasia doctors to do each other in, which is duly what happens.

The novel ends with Julian and George escorting the bodies home. While riding out the photograph scandal and staying in parliament, Julian's dreams of becoming Prime Minister are dashed. George has the final lines, relishing his "victory" over the other lovers, and contemplating a memorial service for Molly where his relationship with her takes centre stage.

The story is clearly absurd, yet it is compulsively readable. It starts very much as a novel of middle-class manners and morals, populated by the sort of people you might meet in a book by Le Carre. McEwan has indulged in his love of music and the countryside with the character of Clive - we are treated to many pages of description of composing, and walking through the Lake Country, which well convey the deep sense of joy that can come from those activities. McEwan also has a fine grasp of the particularities of middle-class England which he describes well.

Is there deeper meaning in this book? It's a short book with a strong narrative drive, but it does delve into the meaning of friendship, the moral choices we make, and how we have an endless capacity to deceive ourselves. Vernon thinks he's outsmarting everyone while he's being outsmarted by his junior, Clive starts to think that he is a genius, only for the reader to be told at the end of the novel that his symphony was a pastiche.

The fragility of friendship and our failure to grasp other's point of view are also on display, coming from an impossibility to truly know one another - "[w]e lay mostly submerged, like ice floes with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white." Ultimately the book centres around the moral choices the characters make - while he takes all this to absurd lengths, he makes his points with sharp painful jabs - the choices make the reader gasp at times.

All that being written, I'm not sure how to take this novel - is it a comment on middle-class morals, is it a comment on being wary of judging other's choices, or is it just a good, darkly humorous, story? It's definitely a page-turner but perhaps, for a Booker winner, a little too lightweight. A good novel, but not a great one.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Henry Lawson: the Man and the Legend by Manning Clark

2026-05-20T16:20:31.572+10:00

Henry Lawson: the Man and the Legend by Manning Clark

Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995 (first published 1978 as In search of Henry Lawson)

ISBN 0522846955

There is no doubt that Henry Lawson is one of the formative figures in the great flowering of Australian literature that bloomed from the 1880s through to the early years of the Twentieth Century, and one of the writers to describe what it was like to actually live in Australia during this time, especially in the Bush.

His life in many ways was a long drawn out tragedy - the life of an alcoholic writer - early promise, a period of intense successful activity, and a long decline to an inevitable early death. Although their stories are different, the arc of Lawson's life is similar to other such writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald (You can read my review of The Thirsty Muse, which goes into detail about these three writers and others, here).

Lawson very much saw himself in his moments of grandeur as the voice of Australia, as did the author of this biography of him. Manning Clark saw himself as an oracular historian of our land, with his theories of "enlargers" and "straighteners" and a view of Australian history that was intensely nationalist. These views, aligned with Clark's orotund and florid prose style, mean that this book is at times lop-sided, more difficult to read than it needs to be, and conclusions reached that don't necessarily follow the known facts.

Firstly I have to address misogynism - not Lawson's, but Clark's. He consistently downplays or slurs the women in Lawson's life, particularly his mother Louisa. Louisa Lawson was a pioneer for the rights of women in Australia, a successful businesswoman, and a litterateur in her own right (there is a great biography of her written by Brian Matthews, which I have reviewed here), but Clark paints her as the ultimate straightener in Lawson's life. On the other hand, Clark praises Lawson's father, who was an itinerant drunk. He doesn't describe Lawson's wife Bertha in a kind light either, although she worked hard as she could for Henry and especially their children. It's very noticeable and very odd, and an indication that Clark has a particular story to he wishes to tell, rather than necessarily following where the story leads him.

Clark sees Lawson in this book as a genius with a terrible flaw (the "monster" - alcohol). In terms of literary output, Clark sees the short stories - especially those written in the 1890s about the Bush - as the pinnacle of his achievements, comparing them in some ways to Chekhov and Dostoyevsky in their insights into human nature and the struggle to survive. He also shows how they reveal a developing purely Australian character type, which Lawson's stories helped solidify as the mythical "true Aussie" - phlegmatic, tough, and always ready to help his mates in their times of trouble.

His poetry gets less praise from Clark: although he lauds the sentiments, he notes that in terms of craftsmanship he was somewhat lacking - his disease meant that he quite often would dash off verse (especially later in his life) for money.

Indeed for his whole life money (the lack of it) was a problem for Lawson. He was unable to hold down any "normal" job, and as he continually pointed out there was not enough money in poetry and prose in Australia to make a living. This led him to write for newspapers both as a regular job (with The Boomerang in Queensland) and also to contribute to muck sheets such as The Truth. As he descended into full-blown alcoholism he took to begging and borrowing from friends and strangers to not only pay for the drink, but maintenance for his wife and children (the failure to do so landed him in jail on more than one occasion).

Clark is desperate in this biography to portray Lawson as a true great, a gifted genius with real insight into the human condition. I think that he fails to make the case, even though he has skewed this version of Lawson's life to try and do so. Which is not to state that Lawson was a minor figure - far from it.

Is this book a successful biography of Henry Lawson? On so many levels it isn't... yet, it has given me the desire to go back and read his stories and poetry again, so it isn't all bad.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Hitler's Army by Omer Bartov

2026-05-18T14:11:07.696+10:00

Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich by Omer Bartov

New York: Oxford University Press, 1991 ISBN 0195068793

This book was written at a hinge-point in our modern history: published in 1991 when the certainties of Cold-War Europe were disappearing and a new united Germany was allowed to come to be. This change in the political scene led to a wellspring of historical effort and post-revisionism about Germany's recent history. It had suited Cold-War confrontation to paint the horrors of the Third Reich as the result of an appalling dictatorship imposed on an unwilling populace - the Germans were all "victims" of the Nazis. This view posited that the soldiers that served in Hitler's army were not Nazis or Nazi sympathisers, did not willingly partake in the horrors of the regime, and were in many respects dupes of the hierarchy, such was the revisionist history of the mid Cold-War era.

In Hitler's Army Bartov sets out to question this idea, positing that - especially on the Eastern Front - the Wehrmacht was indeed more than willing to engage in criminal acts, spurred by an internalization by the troops of the tropes of Nazi propaganda and ideology.

Bartov's first steps in setting out this argument require him to dispel the idea that the Wehrmacht was merely an army rather than an instrument of Hitler's will. He demolishes the idea that Germany fought for so long because a) they were highly mechanized, and b) the army was organized around a "primary group" of soldiers drawn from the same area, and that these two things helped make them better fighters.

Through the use of simple statistics Bartov successfully demolishes both positions. Even in June 1941 when Germany invaded Russia, it was the Soviets who were the more mechanized army. This gap widened dramatically as the Germans failed to replace lost materiel and the Russians (and Americans via Lend-Lease) massively increased their production.

The staggering losses of men during the war in Russia (losses which rapidly rose from the very beginning of Operation Barbarossa) very quickly made the idea of a "primary group" impossible to maintain. In fact even by 1943 many groups were already ad-hoc, with whole regiments disappearing and joining with other remnants into "battle-groups".

So, if the revisionist historians were wrong: that it was not technical prowess and group cohesion that kept the Wehrmacht in the field, what was it that did? This is the major focus of Hitler's Army. Bartov contends that far from being duped by the Nazis, many (most?) soldiers duped themselves, by twisting reality to the point where they almost saw the War backwards. Soldiers saw Russian brutality and squalor at the Front as confirming what their propaganda had told them, without reflecting that what they were seeing was the brutality and squalor inflicted on the Russians by Germany.

They even came to believe in a sense that they were engaged in a preventative war, stopping the invasion of Europe by the Untermensch. The soldiers came to believe that they had a civilizing mission (even while destroying villages, massacring Jews and "Partisans") and so became increasingly frustrated when Russians continued to fight.

This combined with an almost religious belief in the rightness of Hitler became in the end a fatal self-delusion: for example the thought that Hitler would sacrifice his soldiers pointlessly (in Stalingrad for example) was too absurd to be believed, so it wasn't.

Some of this thinking - this self-delusion - has an internal rationality when looked at from the viewpoint of an individual soldier. No soldier can find it easy to admit that their sacrifice will be in vain, or is in pursuit of an evil cause. Irrational belief in a final victory when all the evidence suggests the opposite must be maintained to avoid despair. These are in some ways natural responses.

As is the attempt after the defeat to try and deflect any responsibility for their actions, or indeed responsibility for believing in the cause. When your victors in pursuit of their own ends allow that deflection to stand, and indeed re-use some of the same men in rebuilding German armed forces, then alternatives to the truth easily become the accepted version of events.

A lot of the above is now well known and accepted by the serious student of Nazism and World War Two, but in 1991 Bartov was one of those scholars (like Goldhagen and Evans) who brought a new unprejudiced light to bear on the evidence. His arguments are mostly sound.

This is one for the serious student of World War Two.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Oxford History of Ireland edited by R.F. Foster

2026-05-06T20:53:00.003+10:00

The Oxford History of Ireland edited by R.F. Foster

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 ISBN 019285271X

(The text of this edition first published 1989 in The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland)

If I check out my DNA profile on Ancestry, it tells me that I'm more than fifty percent Irish. My father's family is almost completely Irish (with a little Danish), while my mother is Scottish, English and Welsh. Because I grew up in my mother's home town rather than my father's, it is the Scottish connections that I absorbed growing up, so I know more history of Scotland than I do of Ireland. In fact the only Irish history I've absorbed is the internecine battles between Catholic and Protestant in Ulster which have been in the news, and the Dublin of James Joyce which has been in my books.

I mean to set out to correct that, and I have started (as you would) with the Oxford history. It's a relatively short book into which to pack a few thousand years of history, and so it's fair to say that parts of the book can seem like a list of "kings" rather than a true history. In fact in many ways, despite attempts by the authors to move away from an "old fashioned" history that focusses on political and military machinations, that's mostly what the reader gets, sometimes to their confusion as the roll-call of petty rulers adds up as one turns the pages.

History is what happens from day-to-day, and it's the job of the historian to try and knock events into shape to tell us a story - particularly in a book like this; a narrative of the creation of a people and a state. The authors in this book question the hackneyed themes of Irish history - the perfidy of the English and the iron control of the Catholic Church over the faithful, and the inevitability of sectarian conflict.

Rather than iron control from over the Irish Sea, this book portrays an England that, while seeking profit for sure, rarely had a coherent strategy for dealing with the land and the people that it had taken centuries to control. It was the internecine warfare between rival chieftains (probably a more appropriate term than kings) that led to the intervention in Irish affairs by the English, who arrived initially with thought of plunder and ongoing riches.

Once the English realised that Ireland was not as rich as was thought, it rapidly became an afterthought in English affairs, only brought to the forefront when rebellion threatened. The Irish began the long process of trying to accommodate themselves to English norms, if they lived East of the Shannon. The more unproductive lands of the West were, generally speaking, left to themselves, which created a wealth and status divide that existed well into the modern era.

It was really only after the Act of Union in 1800 that Irish nationalism began to grow, and that sectarianism became an issue. The Catholics looked for equality, and when moves were made in that direction the Protestants began to fear for their privileged place in society, and the downward spiral of English rule began, culminating in the creation of a "two-state solution" in the twentieth century, which left many of the festering issues unresolved.

This book is clear, but very dry and formal in style, which for me as a neophyte had too much detail without enough explicatory material to make full sense of it. That said, I now feel that I have an overall structure in my mind of Irish history with which to continue my journey.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

2026-04-27T21:45:00.000+10:00

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

London: Fourth Estate, 2010 (first published 2009) ISBN 9780007230204

Of course I had heard of Wolf Hall before I had read it, after all, who hasn't? It's my contrarian nature rather than anything else that has led to fifteen years elapsing between the publication of this book and my reading of it. To my detriment, I have an irrational reluctance to read prize-winning novels. As is often the case, it was my wife who led me to read this book, and as is usual I'm glad she did because it's a magnificent book (and dare I say a worthy prize-winner...).

Wolf Hall takes as its subject Thomas Cromwell, his rise to power and his machinations in the Court of Henry the Eighth. Specifically, the book covers the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, the annulment of Kathryn of Aragon's marriage to Henry, the rise of Anne Boleyn, and all that this meant for those in the Henrician Court.

The difficulty that arises when a novelist takes on a historical subject is for them to successfully straddle the lines between historical fact, literary necessity, and narrative flow. In some senses Thomas Cromwell is an excellent subject for such treatment. We know what he did when he was in power, just enough about his early life to weave a good tale, but little enough about his character to enable a good writer to go to town.

And Hilary Mantel is a good writer. I haven't read any of her other works, but if they are all this good I will read them all. She deftly creates a believable milieu for the court not only of Henry, but also of Wolsey, and of Cromwell himself. Her use of language is not too old-fashioned, but nor is it jarringly modern. She can evoke a scene or a character in a few words, or if needed spend pages creating the tension required to move the plot forward. Most of all she creates believable characters not only of Cromwell and those around him, but also of Wolsey, More, Kathryn, Anne and Henry himself.

Cromwell is the "hero" of the book, and is by no means portrayed as the heartless reformer that historical legend has given us to believe. He is a man of much experience, and excellent reader of his fellow man (although perhaps not so much of women), not afraid to send men to their death if required, but preferring to take the path of mercy and pragmatism when he can. He is, in this book, a complete and complex man. Mantel delineates all her characters well, giving the reader an understanding of why they have turned into who they are. Anne Boleyn is a creation of her class-climbing and grasping family; Mary Boleyn is a victim of the same family, used as a tool against her wishes. Henry is a creation not only of his family history, but has also been enabled by Wolsey. Wolsey thought he could control Henry to his own advantage, right up until the moment he couldn't. Cromwell was intelligent and ruthless enough to step in and enable Henry's wishes when no-one else could.

Of course we the reader know the outcome of this saga, but Mantel is adept at portraying the story and history on the move with many possible outcomes, not just the one that came to pass.

Wolf Hall really is a wonderful book on every level. Highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

- some quotes from the book that made it into my commonplace book are listed below -

"Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's uncollected sins."

"There it is: if you are so lenient with yourself as to insist on living with a woman, then for the sake of your soul you should make it a woman you really don't like."

"At some point he must have slept. When daylight came, the room felt so empty it was empty even of him."

"He doesn't believe that the dead come back; but that doesn't stop him feeling the brush af their fingertips, wing tips, against his shoulder."

"Flint-face and keen-eyed, he is lean as a gnawed bone and as cold as an axe head."

"His eyes are drawn unwillingly to the cheese; it is pitted and wobbling, like the face of a stable boy after a night out."

"But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to complain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frighten people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires."

"... it's all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it's no good at all if you don't have a plan for tomorrow."

"If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy;"

Book Review - Boon: in the Firing Line by David Boon and A. Mark Thomas

2026-04-10T16:43:00.000+10:00

Boon: in the Firing Line an autobiography with A. Mark Thomas

Sydney: Sun Australia, 1993 ISBN 0725107243

I've read quite a few cricket books and it's fair to say the quality is variable, especially when it comes to cricketers writing about themselves. This "autobiography" falls more toward the disappointing side of the ledger, despite the fact that David Boon is one of the all-time-great Australian cricketers with, I am sure, a fund of excellent stories to tell.

The reasons why this book is not what it could be are several-fold. Firstly, it's a book written before Boon's career was over - much is made of his lost opportunity to score a century at Lord's in 1989, but of course he scored a magnificent 150 on his next visit, so time has healed that wound. There is nothing about his fielding to Warne (famously catching the hat-trick ball in Melbourne), or watching him bowl, because this is a halfway-house of a book.

The main reason why this book is less than it could be is the fact that despite being termed an autobiography, I'm sure David Boon didn't write a word of it. It's clearly a book written by Thomas, based on interviews with the man himself and other people considered significant to the story. Unfortunately, Thomas has a clunky formulaic style of writing, and spends a lot of the time discussing the matches in general, instead of Boon's part in them.

It is also a curiously constructed book - a brief chapter on formative years, and Boon's time playing for Tasmania, before sections on playing England, the West Indies, and New Zealand before a final section where various people (Geoff Marsh, Richard Hadlee, the commentator Neville Oliver, Boon's wife and his first coach) write their opinions of the man.

Boon is famously a shy man and one of few words, but by far the best parts of the book are when he relates a story about a particular match, with a comment that is simultaneously cutting and funny. The book shows him as a team man first and foremost - a firm friend, but someone who's wrong side you should avoid if possible.

As a cricket tragic of a certain age (the same generation, if slightly younger) than David Boon, the description of particular matches and players brings back some great personal memories of watching those series, through both painful and glorious times for the Australian cricket team.

It's just a shame that the book provides no real insights into Boon the man, or Boon the player. I picked this book up for two dollars in my local op-shop, and that's about the worth of it.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Be

Book Review - The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham

2026-04-09T21:02:00.000+10:00

The Scramble for Africa: 1876-1912 by Thomas Pakenham

London: Abacus, 1992 (first published 1991) ISBN 0349104492

If ever there was an over-used phrase, it is "Tour de Force". I've probably over-used it myself over the years, along with everybody else. However, if any book truly deserved to have that phrase applied to it, it is surely this one.

Most of us of a certain age think we know the story of colonial Africa: Livingstone, Stanley and Brazza, Rhodes and the Boer War, and of course the horrors of the Congo. The fact that is most impressed on my mind after finishing this book is how quickly it all happened: Brazza helped discover the Congo for Europeans and lived to present a report on the horrors of the concession system there, while Lugard, who won Uganda for the British lived to see the outbreak of the Second World War.

So what did happen in those forty-odd years? Interestingly, most of the time is was not the activity of countries willingly expanding their empires, but (mostly) people chasing the almighty dollar that dragged Europe into the heart of Africa. Many of the colonies mentioned in Pakenham's book began as concessions for business interests, who were trying (and often failing) to make money from the land.

Until the advent of the Europeans, the main way money was generated in Central Africa was via the slave trade. While the Europeans ostensibly abhorred the trade and tried to stop it, in practice they often collaborated with the (mostly Arab) traders and turned a blind eye to the practice. In fact many of the companies effectively enslaved their workers while subjecting them to horrible punishments.

The attempt to abolish the slave trade was one step in brining to Africa Livingstone's three "Cs": Civilization, Christianity, and Commerce. "Civilization" was brought to the natives in the form of commissioners and troops to keep them in line, and sometimes education up to primary school level, but always suppression of native rights (and rites). "Christianity" came along and worked hand-in-glove with the civilizers, and often turned a blind eye to the excesses and atrocities that took place. "Commerce" mean that the Africans were expected to work for virtually nothing, getting "paid" in cheap consumer goods and useless fripperies.

Nothing that occurred during these years was good for the native populations of land taken over by Europe. And in fact not much good came from Africa for many Europeans. The enormous amounts of money expended on the colonies by the European powers was not expended on lifting their own poor out of misery, and many of the administrators and troops sent to Africa suffered long periods of isolation, usually disease and sometimes death. The only winners in the end were the businessmen, who usually found a way to at least get their money back, by selling out to their governments.

The question that this raises is why did governments condone, support and then take on these colonies? It is a good question to ask, and several answers can be attempted.

For England, the key to all its moves in Africa was - India. Strategically, England needed ports and way-stations to enable their Fleet - both naval and merchant - to traverse between India and "home". Hence their early occupation of Cape Colony and Natal. Once the Suez Canal was built it became strategically necessary for England to control Egypt as well. Then they needed to control the Nile, and so were drawn into the Sudan.

Further south, Rhodes's creation of his own state north of the Boer Republics meant that these intransigent people became a thorn in the side of British dominance, especially when it was becoming clear back in Europe that Germany was no longer a dependable friend of England. The fact that many inhabitants of the Cape were Boers added to the mix, and the result was the second Boer War (Pakenham also describes the First Boer War in detail).

For Germany and for France, Britain was the reason they made their moves in Africa, for the most part. France in particular tried to thwart British expansion in West Africa, often without a clear idea of strategic intent: the expedition to take Fashoda being a classic case-in-point.

Then there was Leopold II of Belgium. He wanted an empire because, well just because he wanted one, and he could afford to buy his own. The Congo became his personal fiefdom, a money-making exercise, and a catalogue of horrors that inspired Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The story of the exposure of the abuses that occurred in The Congo is a model of all the abuses that happened elsewhere as well - slaughter, dispossession, exploitation, cruelty, all in the name of personal and imperial aggrandisement.

Pakenham has written a gripping and readable story in this book, but it is by no means the complete story of Europeans in Africa: the Portuguese are hardly mentioned and Africa north of the Sahara is not a major part of the work. The focus is on Central Africa: the Niger and Congo, through to Uganda, Ethiopia and the south, with the Mahdi, Gordon and Kitchener thrown in for good measure.

The pathos of the story - the inevitable destruction of the local populations and ways of life - is well-related by Pakenham. The people that drove history forward in Africa: Stanley, Rhodes, Kruger, Brazza, Cetshwayo, Goldie, Jameson, Lugard, Morel, Menelik II, Mwanga, Carl Peters, Tippu Tip, and those in Europe that pulled the strings - Gladstone, Leopold, Salisbury, Chamberlain, Grey, Bismark, Delcasse are all delineated well and seem to speak with their own voice in the book.

The final chapter briefly covers the dissolution of these empires over an even shorter period (about 12 years) than it took to acquire them. The book (in the edition I read) has useful apparatus - good maps, a useful timeline and bibliography, as well as photographs of most of the leading players.

It's now over thirty years since this book was written, but if you want a (relatively) comprehensive overview of how Europe "ate" Africa, this book is well-worth reading.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Not After Midnight: Five Long Stories by Daphne du Maurier

2026-03-25T09:45:00.000+11:00

Not After Midnight: Five Long Stories by Daphne du Maurier

London: Victor Gollancz Limited, 1971 ISBN 0575007656

I know my mother was a big fan of Daphne du Maurier's books when I was a child, but as an author she passed me by as I came to adult fiction. She continued to pass me by, until my wife recommend that I read this book, which she enjoyed very much.

A collection of five stories which are too long to be short stories but too short to be novellas, there is a touch of the Tales of the Unexpected about these stories. Du Maurier uses the idea of psychic abilities in a few of the tales, which add to the eeriness and mystery.

The stories are set in various places (Venice, Crete, Ireland, Jerusalem and England), but the protagonists are always middle-class English of the post-war period, with the mannerisms and expectations that come with that.

The stories - apart from the last one, which I'll get to - are very well written, with the reader not knowing what's happening until the end. The characters, in this shorter format sketched rather than fully-formed, are believable and mostly of a type that one recognises quickly. Du Maurier definitely had a skill in mapping out a scenario quickly without it seeming forced.

The only caveat I have about the book is the last story. The premise is too hard to swallow, and the writing seems less.... revised? The characters seem less real, and as a reader you are aware of the structure and machinery of the story much more than when reading the other stories.

All told though, Not After Midnight is very good.

Descriptions of each individual story below -

Don't Look Now

An English couple are on holiday in Venice, trying to recover their equilibrium after the death of their daughter. They run into a couple of old Scottish women, one who is blind and has psychic abilities, who tells the wife that she can see her daughter with them, looking happy. The husband worries that the old women are somehow trying to scam them, as they re-appear in the evening at their restaurant, where they tell the wife that her husband is also psychic, and must not spend another night in Venice. On leaving the restaurant, they get lost and the husband sees what he assumes to be a child running away from an apartment from which they had both heard screaming

The couple return to their hotel where they receive a message that their son, back in England at school, has appendicitis and needs an operation. The wife arranges to fly back to England, while the husband will pick up their car and return via train.

As the husband travels up the Grand Canal on a vaporetto, he sees his wife with the two women on a vaporetto going the other way. Confused, he returns to his hotel, assuming that his wife had missed the plane. She is not there, so the husband goes to the police with his suspicions and initiates a search. While waiting at the police station he overhears that the police are chasing a murderer.

When he rings England to check on his son, he is surprised to hear that his wife is there, and he speaks to her. He then returns to the Police, who have found the Scottish women. The husband apologises profusely, and walks the women back to their pension. On the way they explain that what he had seen in the Vaporetto was a vision of the future.

On his way back to his hotel, which he has booked because he can't make the train, he sees the child, apparently fleeing from a man chasing her. He follows her into a room, where he realises it is not a child but a dwarf, and that the man banging on the locked door is a policeman. As the dwarf throws the knife that pierces his throat, he thinks "what a bloody silly way to die".

Not After Midnight

Our protagonist, a schoolteacher and keen amateur painter, has booked a holiday in Crete to spend time painting. He books a chalet at a seaside resort, finding out that the previous resident of the chalet drowned. He is disgusted by an American couple, the Stolls. Mr. Stoll is a rude drunk, and his wife silent and deaf. He notes that they head off from their chalet every day to go fishing.

As he travels around the island painting, he notices the Stoll's boat off the coast. As he gets closer he sees that Mrs. Stoll is diving and bringing items up from the seabed, while Mr. Stoll, naked on the shore, engages in a kind of weird dance. After the Stolls leave on the boat, our protagonist goes down to the beach to investigate the hut that Mr. Stoll had been dancing next too - inside he finds empty bottles, and pottery sherds covered in barnacles. The Stolls return, and notice him

Mr. Stoll then contacts our protagonist, and accuses him of being a spy, as was the previous resident of his chalet, which leads our protagonist to wonder what indeed happened to him. Stoll explains that they are diving on a wreck, and offers a relic in exchange for silence. Our protagonist refuses.

Later that night he sees Mrs. Stoll snorkelling outside his chalet. He hides inside, and when he ascertains that she's gone, he goes outside to find she's left him a package, containing a rhyton (a Greek drinking vessel), with an image of "Silenos, earth-born satyr, half-horse, half-man, who unable to distinguish trught from falsehood, reared Dionysys, god of intoxication, as a girl in a Cretan cave, then became his drunken tutor and companion."

Our protagonist has a night filled with nightmares, and in the morning determines to return the rhyton to the Stolls, only to find that they have left the hotel. He determines to return to the site of the shipwreck. Feeling dehydrated, he drinks some barley water he found from the rhyton, and rows out to the shipwreck site, where he sees Mr. Stoll drowned and held down by the anchor of the ship. He looks up and sees Mrs. Stoll and their Greek companion watching him from the cliffs. He realises then that Mr. Stoll was Silenos, and now Mrs. Stoll has decided that our protagonist is to be the new Silenos.

A Border-Line Case

Shelagh Money is in her father's sick-room, when he suddenly calls out to her in horror and dies. She can't understand what it was about her that horrified him so much. During the days that follow, the reader understands that Shelagh is an actress, she doesn't get on with her mother (an attention seeker, Shelagh can't understand what her father saw in her), and truly loved her father.

Going through some old photographs, she focusses on the best man at her father's wedding, Nick, whom she knew her father had a falling out with over him not recommending Nick for a promotion when both were in the Navy. Her father had regretted the loss of contact, and Shelagh determines to find him and see if she can have a post-mortem rapprochement for the sake of her father.

She determines that Nick is now a recluse in Ireland, after suffering a car accident in which he lost an eye. She travels to a remote village, where she discovers that Nick is living on an island in the local Lough. As she explores the area, she is kidnapped by two men and taken to the island. Fearing what might become of her, she invents a story that she is a journalist who has been sent to interview him as a retired naval officer. While in his study she sees her parent's wedding photo, but altered to show Nick as the Husband and her father as the best man, which gets her quite worried. Nick thinks she looks familiar.

Meanwhile, Nick has arranged for her luggage at the local hotel to be transported to the island, where she is forced to stay. The next day Nick shows her an excavation he is undertaking of an ancient Irish burial - he is a recognised expert on them. He takes her for a boat trip on the lake, and Shelagh feels herself falling for him.

When they get back to the island she is left alone while Nick and his workers are having a meeting. After a time he calls her in and confronts her with the fact that he knows she isn't a journalist, and he knows that she had a list of dates that concerned Nick (which she had found in her father's effects). Shelagh changes her story to make it seem she was trying to win a bet.

Nick, with his cronies, then force her to go with them on a boat ride, and then in a van. When they arrive at their destination she is shown explosions in the distance and she realises that Nick is an operative for the IRA. She gets him to talk about her father, and finds out that he was not upset at being passed over for promotion, and that he had a one-night stand with Shelagh's mother. Shelagh is by now hopelessly in love, and is devastated when Nick drops her back at the hotel and leaves.

Shelagh heads back to London, and to her acting, hoping (but failing) to hear from Nick until her opening night as Viola/Cesario, when she gets a letter from him letting her know he's going to America for a time, and asking her to look at the photo enclosed, which solved for Nick the reason why she seemed familiar. It is a photo of Nick playing Viola/Cesario in his youth, and Shelagh realises with horror that not only is she Nick's daughter, but that it was that realisation that killed her father.

The Way of the Cross

We follow a tour group through a night and a day in Jerusalem. Organised by a parish priest who becomes incapacitated and can't go with them - his place taken by another priest, Babcock.

We are introduced to the members of the party one-by-one. Lady Althea and her husband Colonel Mason (who served in Jerusalem with the British Army in 1948) are travelling with their precocious nine year old grandson Robin. The Fosters, a middle-class slightly gauche couple, the Smiths, on their honeymoon, and Miss Dean, an elderly lady of the parish who dotes on her priest and is upset that he can't make the pilgrimage owing to his illness.

Babcock does not want or feels able to guide this group around Jerusalem. At their dinner in the hotel Robin mentions that it is the eve of Passover, and suggests a night-time walk to the Garden of Gethsemane. During the walk Mr. Foster and Mrs. Smith have a dalliance, the Colonel overhears his wife mention that he was not only not fit for promotion in the army, but that he's not much use at anything. Miss Dean overhears that her beloved priest can't stand her attentions. Mr. Smith confides in Babcock that he feels his marriage was a mistake.

The next day they begin to tour the historical sites. The Colonel, at the site where Christ was scourged, is reminded of a boy he tortured in 1948. Mr. Foster has a nasty turn in a crowd, Mrs. Smith is ashamed of what she did the previous night and can't bring herself to go into the churches. Miss Dean falls into the Pool of Bethesda trying to collect some of the water thinking how much her priest would like the gesture.

Lady Althea, a frightful snob, arranges to meet some aristocratic friends who happened to be in Jerusalem, and is desperate to get away from the rest of the group. Eating some bread, she loses both her front teeth just as they turned up - destroying her pride.

Meanwhile Babcock is drawn along by the crowd into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where owing to food poisoning he soils himself. Going to help him, Mr. Smith is separated from Robin.

Robin has a theory of where the true Golgotha was, and navigates himself to that site, unaware that the Smiths had joined forces to search for him.

Eventually all the group are reunited: the Colonel looking after his wife, Mrs. Foster looking after Miss Dean, the Smiths reconciled, and Babcock pondering his shame, reflecting the shaming of Christ during his crucifixion.

The Breakthrough

Steven is seconded to a mysterious research facility. Gradually he understands that the leader of the group, Mac, is intending to capture life force of someone as they die. He has built several computers that enable him to do so.

He has already tapped into the life force of the living, being able to communicate with a dog, and a retarded girl Niki, who is a surviving twin (so her life force is doubled). He has linked her hypnotically to Ken, who has leukemia and is the guinea pig who's life force will be collected when he dies - Mac hopes that Niki will be able to communicate with the life force of Ken after her goes.

Mac succeeds in capture Ken's life force as he dies, but disturbingly Niki has a very bad reaction, and keeps asking Mac to "let me go". At the same time some government inspectors turn up, tipped off that something funny was going on. Mac decides to pull the pin and release Ken's life force.

Steve is left wondering what might have been.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - A Sicilian Man by Caroline Moorehead

2026-03-23T10:59:00.003+11:00

A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy's Soul

by Caroline Moorehead London: Chatto & Windus, 2026 ISBN 9781784745042

I have read a few books by Sciascia, and have found his allusive and cryptic style very appealing. His fictional chronicling of the truths of a Sicily dominated by the Mafia led him to become in some senses the conscience of decent Italians, in opposition to the forces that led the country into financial, political and moral corruption.

In this easy to read and well-written book, Caroline Moorehead traces Sciascia's life, both public and private, along with the development, growth and exposure - via the activities of some brave people - of the Mafia in Sicily and beyond.

Sciascia was a man of Sicily and so not only understood the Mafia mindset, but shared in it. A quiet and observant child, Sciascia closely watched the world around him in Racalmuto: listening to the gossip of his aunts, observing how residents interacted with each other, and the glaring inequality that was exacerbated by the control the Mafia had over society.

Moorehead explains how Sciascia's left-wing views were formed by these early experiences, as well as through the anti-fascist views of his family, and witnessing at first hand the lives of the sulphur miners of his local area both as a teacher of their children and through his father's work as a mine accountant.

Sciascia's time as a teacher was hard for him. He tried but mostly failed to instil a love of literature and the Enlightenment into his pupils, many of whom were going hungry because their parents could not afford to feed and clothe their children. Sciascia had always had the desire to be a writer, and his first major foray into literature, The Day of the Owl, set the tone for his early career. A story where a "man alone" works against society and the State in the pursuit of justice, only to be thwarted.

Sciascia's stories exposed the rotten heart of the Italian State, where corruption ruled, and nothing positive was ever achieved for the people of the country. Sciascia spent some time in political office, both in Sicily and in Rome, and on both occasions his terms ended with him fearing that Italy in many respects was a failed state, with the apparatus of government only there to support those with their snouts in the trough, whether that was the politicians themselves, businessmen, or the all-pervasive Mafia.

Sciascia, through his fiction, came to be seen as an expert on the Mafia. He became a kind of Twentieth Century Italian Cassandra: all of his predictions came true, but no-one ever believed his prophecies. Moorehead tracks the public Sciascia's feuds and polemics, mostly run and delivered through newspaper articles - she does this well, with enough information to put them in context for the English language reader.

She does likewise with her tale of the Mafia through Sciascia's life. From the crackdown during the Fascist years, to the accommodation with the Americans during the War, also explaining how it managed to intertwine itself with the government and the Christian Democrats, Moorehead lays out how the Mafia did everything Sciascia said it would do, how it, rather than the government, police or judiciary became the "truth" in Sicily.

She tracks Sciascia's views of the progression of the Maxi-trial, which finished just before his death, and how the aftermath fulfilled the prophecies of a man who by the end of his life had become very pessimistic about whether Sicily could ever drag itself out of it's predicament. As he famously stated he could neither live in Sicily or outside of it.

About Sciascia's personal life, Moorehead does not say much - perhaps because there is not much to say. He was happily married with two daughters, and a wife who was his helpmate and to whom he was devoted. He was a great friend and a great enemy in that true Sicilian way - if he felt betrayed by any of his friends he cut them off completely. For someone who was famously taciturn he was much valued as a friend to spend time with, enjoying wandering through art galleries or antiquarian booksellers, or sitting around a table at a publishers or newspaper office. Many of his best friends were artists - he seemed to enjoy their company more than his fellow novelists.

The idea behind Moorehead's book is a clever one: a slightly different take on the Mafia to many, and a decent biography of one of the best Italian writers of the Twentieth Century. It didn't quite reach the heights for which I was hoping, but it is informative and interesting.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Lost Kingdom by Serhii Plokhy

2026-03-11T12:19:00.003+11:00

Lost Kingdom: a History of Russian Nationalism from Ivan the Great to Vladimir Putin by Serhii Plokhy

London: Penguin Books, 2018 (first published 2017) ISBN 9780141983134

This is an interesting and, even nine years after it's publication, timely book. Serhii Plokhy has delved into the murky waters of Russian nationalism with a view to explain its development to the uninitiated. To a great extent he has succeeded in unravelling the twisted skein of Russian, Belarussian and Ukrainian ethnicity, culture and history, in explaining why it matters, and how the different ways people interpret that history have a huge geopolitical effect that echoes down to today's world.

Plokhy begins this book with an overview of the beginning of a sense of Russian identity, when the Slavic people that became Russian, Belarussian and Ukrainian were under the rule of the Mongol Khanate, and follows on with the formation of Russia under the Tsars, and the gradual increase of territory that was Russian.

From the beginning, Russians were divided into three - "Great Russians" in what we today call Russia, "White Russians" in today's Belarus, and "Little Russians" in Ukraine. For centuries these three groupings despite at time being politically separated (for much of the time Belorussia and Ukraine were part of the Kingdom of Poland), saw themselves as one Slavic unity, with both White and Little Russia looking to their Great Russian counterparts for religious leadership, and recognising the Tsar as the overall sovereign to their people.

It was not until the Nineteenth Century that the question of nationality began to come to the fore, driven in some respects by the wider European milieu. The liberalisation that was slowly taking place in Russia awakened nationalist thinking, and the issue of what it actually meant to be Russian, as opposed to merely a subject of the Tsar. The nationalists based in Great Russia saw the origin of the Russian nationality beginning in Kyvian Rus, and including both Belarusians and Ukrainians. They cited history and the similarities between languages as the core holding them together as one.

It was just at this time that, in Ukraine in particular, a flourishing of the language and the belief that their Cossack heritage made them different to Great Russians gave birth the the thought that Ukraine could be a separate entity from Russia as a whole. This movement grew in fits and starts: at times repressed by St. Petersburg when it became problematic, but at other times supported, when St. Petersburg thought that a heightened sense of Ukrainian nationality could help destabilise their neighbours, who had many Ukrainians living within their borders.

This changing attitude to dealing with both Belorussia and Ukraine continued into the Twentieth Century and communist rule - at times when it was advantageous to the centre, the idea that Ukrainians and Belarusians were separate nationalities was promoted, and at other times repressed. Quite often, as Plokhy explains, it was Ukrainians and Belarusians that were engaging in the repression of their own people.

In the Twenty-First Century, the notion of a greater Russian people spread over three countries has fractured. Ukraine in particular has decided to go in a different direction to Russia (Belarus has stayed much closer to Moscow). Plokhy explains that, even though there may be many Ukrainians who's mother tongue is Russian rather than Ukrainian, they still feel that they are not Russian, but something different. Vladimir Putin on the other hand continues to think in Nineteenth Century terms, denying that there is any difference between the three Russias, with consequences we can all see.

If, like me, you are interested in the deeper politics surrounding the current turmoil in Ukraine, and indeed in how Russians think and behave, this book is worth reading. Plokhy moves through a lot of material in a thoughtful and digestible manner, and his conclusions are clear.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - A Dream More Luminous than Love by Rodney Hall

2026-02-19T13:44:00.003+11:00

A Dream More Luminous than Love by Rodney Hall

Sydney: Picador Australia, 1994 ISBN 0330274910

(The Second Bridegroom first published 1991, The Grisly Wife first published 1993, Captivity Captive first published 1988)

Every time I read Rodney Hall I am reminded how good a writer he is - whether it's his poetry, or the novels I've read over the years, his descriptive power and skilful narrative style has sucked me into a different and challenging world, that stays with me long after I've put down the text.

A Dream More Luminous than Love is a collection of three novels (The Second Bridegroom, The Grisly Wife, and Captivity Captive) that cover over a hundred years of white settlement at the fictional Yandilli, on the South Coast of New South Wales. While each novel is of a piece (in fact Hall wrote the third part of the trilogy before the first, and the second after the other two), as a collective they trace the settlement of Australia, the dispossession of the natives, and the development of a particular type of Australian character, born from the origins of the settlers and the vicissitudes of the country they found themselves in.

Which brings me to the issue of reviewing this work - three separate stories, yet linked through time, and more especially, place. I've decided to write some general comments on the trilogy, and then append separate reviews of each book at the end of the general comments.

Taken as a whole, I think A Dream More Luminous than Love looks at a few themes. The (changing) European reaction to Australia runs through each book. Escaping into the bush in The Second Bridegroom, the forger takes the country and the indigenous inhabitants as they come, adapting himself as far as possible to the country, rather than trying to adapt the country to himself, as the Atholls are attempting. In The Grisly Wife we see the land and Aboriginals becoming more peripheral to the story - Muley, Catherine and the disciples arrive determined to make a mark on society with their beliefs, but instead turn inward, owing to the noticeable "Australian" culture that was beginning to form in the 1800s. While the naked bush is still feared, the "naked savage" is more a curiosity than a threat. In Captivity Captive, it is clear that the general thought is that the land is there to be won for human use (although Nature in the form of drought still has something to say about that), the original inhabitants are now merely stock background for fairground photographs and completely excluded from life, which has become an Australian shadow of Europe's clans and religions.

The Forger, Muley and his disciples, and the Malone family are all outsiders in the societies they inhabit. All of them learn to rely on their own devices to make their way in the world. While the forger is mostly alone, the group dynamics of both the disciples and the Malones are investigated fully, and Hall comes to some disturbing conclusions about how we humans exercise control over others, and use what powers we have to wound our brothers and sisters. While there is little that is truly evil in these novels, there is precious little that is good, and those who are thoughtful and introspective are the ones that are in the most danger from the others, especially because perceptions of others can be wrong.

The dangers of love run through each book as well - driving people mad, driving them to murder, and consuming lives, misguided love destroys every protagonist in these books - the forger, Catherine Byrne and Patrick Malone all have their lives destroyed by loving when they shouldn't. It is not good to be alive in these times, whether it be as a convict on the run in the early 1800s, part of a religious cult in the mid 1800s, or the son of a harsh father on a small selection in the late 1800s. Australia may have been a land of opportunity, but it was not for those people that populate these novels.

A Dream More Luminous than Love, taken as a whole, is a wonderfully well-written trilogy of novels about time, place, and human desire - well worth reading.

Reviews of each part follow -

______________________________________________________________________

The Second Bridegroom (part 1 of the Yandilli trilogy), deals with the early settlement of New South Wales. We follow the story of a convict (a forger from the Isle of Man) who is assigned to Mr. Atholl and shipped to southern New South Wales to assist in carving out a selection from the virgin bush. The forger, taking his chance, escapes, only to by "captured" by the local Aboriginals, who treat him as some sort of king or god - waiting on him hand and foot, but not allowing him freedom. We are given descriptions of the country, and memories from the forger's youth - his father's execution for smuggling, the history of the Isle of Man, especially the Celtic legend of the Queen who took a summer bridegroom (a horse) and a Winter bridegroom (a goat), one having to kill the other to take on the mantle.

Eventually our forger is brought back by the Clan to the (now much improved) settlement. He breaks a tribal taboo by seeing one of the women, so she must be killed. That night the Aboriginals attack the settlement and burn it to the ground, spearing Mr. Atholl who in the melee attacks and tries to kill the forger, but he escapes back to the bush.

Here he runs into another convict Dean, whom the forger thought he had killed on the boat journey from Sydney to Yandilli, and who now seems to have some sort of brain damage owing to the forger's attempt to suffocate him for being overly brutal. Dean leads him back to the settlement where the forger is locked into a storeroom. It is then we realise that the story we have been reading is because the forger spends his time while locked in that room writing a series of letters to Mrs. Atholl, whom he is convinced orchestrated the attack on the settlement, shot and killed her husband so that the forger and her can be together (he sees himself as the second bridegroom of the legend).

The final pages of the novel consist of a letter from Mrs. Atholl to the newly installed Governer Gipps asking for troops to be sent down from Sydney to find the forger, who has once more escaped. In the course of the letter we realise that, far from being the romantic figure the forger perceives her to be, Mrs. Atholl is a stern taskmistress, driven to succeed, and a far harder person than her husband ever was. She wishes the forger to be caught and hanged, and if the Aboriginal tribe that harboured him is "taught a lesson" in the process, so much the better.

Hall uses the forger's story to meditate on what is genuine and who gets the right to decide in the world, and can things actually be "discovered" in the sense that was used in the early 1800s, as well as brilliantly exposing the dislocation felt by the early white settlers to this country.

____________________________________________________________________

The Grisly Wife (part 2 of the Yandilli trilogy) sees Hall move the date forward, but the place remains the same. The Grisly Wife is not a story of convicts and first contact, but more a story of belief, power, and trying to adapt to a foreign land.

This book was written to connect the two part of the trilogy that Hall had already written, and so there are some slight plot twists to ensure the connections are made which don't detract from the story.

And the story if of Catherine Byrne, daughter of a vicar in Stroud, who get married to a bootmaker and iterant preacher: they, with their "disciples" (all women), sail to Australia and make their way to Yandilli, where Catherine was hoping they would begin to convert the heathen natives to Christianity. Her husband, who has taken the name Muley Moloch in penitence for his sins, has different ideas. Catherine and the rest of the women see Muley as a prophet (Catherine firmly believes she saw him levitate on the day she met him) and he takes firm control of the group via the standard cultish methods of self and group criticism sessions, and blaming any setbacks on the sin of the members. After a short time in Yandilli itself (where they are shunned, and we learn incidentally that Mrs. Atholl did indeed murder her husband, and was hanged for it), Catherine drives Muley to purchase land in the bush where they can set up a commune.

Catherine suffers from Tuberculosis but recovers, unlike most of the other women, who die in turn through the course of the novel. While Muley is away finalizing the purchase of their land Catherine realises she is pregnant, but doesn't understand how it happened. She wishes for Muley to die so she doesn't have to confront him with this inconvenient fact, and indeed the steamer he returns on is wrecked just off Yandilli, but Muley survives, and seemingly brings a young woman back to life after she had drowned - another miracle? This woman, Louisa, turns out to be a new disciple. She names Catherine "the grisly wife" in an attempt to get Muley to shun her.

Catherine reveals her pregnancy, only to have the sect decide that she is carrying the returning Saviour. Muley arranges for the birth to be photographed. Immanuel, the child that ensues is unruly, and eventually flees the compound. In their search for him, Muley shoots and kills the forger from The Second Bridegroom, whom Immanuel was living with in the bush. Immanuel flees again (eventually writing to his mother from England, where he has connected with her family).

In the washup from this tragedy, Muley reveals that he had in fact raped his wife when she was insensible during her illness so the child is mortal after all, and Muley is merely John Heaps, bootmaker. The commune dies with this revelation, and over time the only members left are Catherine and Louisa, who have made peace with each other, and John, having returned from "exile" as their manservant.

As the story moves along, the reader understands that not only is Catherine narrating this story to a listener, but that listener is in fact the local police sergeant, who is investigating a murder. Catherine has assumed that he has found out about the death of the forger, but the police are looking for clues to help solve the murders that form the heart of the story for the third book of this trilogy.

The Grisly Wife moves the story of settlement on from The Second Bridegroom: the characters arrived in Australia by choice, not as over-awed by finding themselves in an alien land, and determined to live their own life rather than have their life dictated by the country (Muley's determination to have a lawn being the evidence of that). The Atholls and their kind have won - the forger is defeated, the natives have retreated and are only peripheral to the activities of the settlers, and convicts are fading from history as well.

This is more a story of love, jealousy, belief and disappointment. Hardship is a given - although not presented as such in the novel, the degradation of the women from genteel lives in England to hard scrabble in the dirt of New South Wales comes through in each page. The "disciples" distinctions of class and feeling rapidly become meaningless when faced with the realities of living and dying in the Australia of the mid 1800s

The thought of Yandilli being a cursed place is one that begins to form in the reader's mind as well reading the books back-to-back, a thought that will only become stronger as we move onto the last book of the trilogy.

____________________________________________________________________

Captivity Captive (part 3 of the Yandilli Trilogy) is a book I have read before. It uses as its base a real historical event, the Gatton Murders, which Hall has moved to Yandilli and tampered with to fit his fictional requirements. It is in part detective story, family saga, disquisition on life and love, but mostly a tale of increasing horror at what man is capable of.

Like the other books in the trilogy, this is a tale told through the eyes of one man - Patrick Malone - one of ten children who live at "Paradise" outside Yandilli, a small holding cut out of the bush by Patrick's grandfather and enlarged by his father, a huge dominant man who accepts no rivals to his power over the family, beating Patrick's brother William so hard that he damaged his brain.

The book revolves around the murder of two of Patrick's sisters, Norah and Ellen, and one of his brothers, Michael. They are found beaten to death, with the girls also having been raped, and no one was ever charged with the deaths.

The book begins with a death-bed confession of Barney Barnett to the murders, which is not credible. Patrick, William and Jeremiah - the surviving Malones - are at his deathbed, and so Patrick decides to write the story of what really happened, fifty years after the events, himself an old man.

The story is strange and brutal. Each of the ten Malone children is different. William was beaten because he wanted to get away. Michael is beaten because he wants to have fun. Norah is mother hen to the rest of the children. Ellen is the amoral watcher of everything. Jeremiah is inheritor of his father's world.... each of them live in fear of both their father and mother, who dominate them physically and mentally. They are outsiders from society, not mixing with others, and proud of their self-sufficiency. Their world is one of work, a private world only understood by other members of the family.

In The Grisly Wife the Protestant "disciples" felt the wrath of the mainly Catholic population of Yandilli, but in Captivity Captive we are drawn into the world of Irish Catholicism in Australia, the clannishness and connection to Irish nationalism being a more dominant feeling than any particular feeling of being "Australian". The story is set during the time when Australia was moving toward Federation, but that is clearly of no importance to the protagonists.

Morality is key to this novel. Christian morality certainly, but Malone morality particularly. With no real interactions with the outside world, the residents of "Paradise" interact with each other, and grow close - too close in the case of Patrick, Michael, Norah and Ellen.

Patrick and Michael think it is love, and on that tragic night they consummated it. In a dream-like narrative nothing is fully clear, but it seems that Norah particularly doesn't see it that way. She shoots Michael - Barney, while not guilty of the whole tragedy, bludgeons Ellen to death, having witnessed his fiance with Michael. William, who has witnessed the whole thing, bludgeons Norah, after she explains she has been raped by Patrick. William initially was looking to kill Patrick, but, in his simple-minded way understood that it was Norah who wished death, even though Patrick voiced his own wish to die.

Patrick cleans up the site, so that Norah can die blameless for the murder of Michael. He and William continue to live on at Paradise, with the ghost of their father, keeping the history to themselves, until Patrick decides to set it down.

This a short book, but the themes are complex - belief, control, love, belonging - the meaning of life in fact.

A great book!

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Travels with Epicurus by Daniel Klein

2026-02-08T10:21:00.002+11:00

Travels with Epicurus: a Journey to a Greek Island in search of an authentic Old Age by Daniel Klein

Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2012 (first published in the USA 2012) ISBN 9781922079695

My wife bought this book as she thought it might give an insight into how to approach old age, which is rapidly looming for both of us. I read it because my eighteen year old son who has an interest in philosophy, read it and enjoyed it.

Daniel Klein studied philosophy at Harvard and had co-written a couple of popular philosophy books before Travels with Epicurus. This book is a lightly-paced journey through not only Epicurus, but Plato, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and others, as well as Hindu beliefs on end-of-life spirituality.

In some ways the structure of Travels with Epicurus reminds me of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with a narrative of Klein on the island of Hydra, watching the old men there enjoying their old age - particularly Tasso, a retired judge who returned from Athens to live in his home town with (one assumes) his childhood friends. The philosophy is interspersed with these observations.

The crux of the book is Klein's contention that we in the West are trying to actively avoid old age by trying to prolong youth: missing old age altogether and going straight from an extended middle age into what Klein calls "old-old age". He shows us, using the example of Tasso and his friends, leavened with philosophy, that old age is a time for reflection and relaxation, to re-find the aspect of play in our lives, and to enjoy the people we have become.

The striving, jockeying, and pursuit of success that drives us when we are younger can be put into perspective, we can reminisce and enjoy the company of our friends without worrying about needing something from them or having to act in a certain way - no more "keeping up with the Joneses." We also have time in our old age to contemplate the bigger questions, for we have the life experience to do so.

Klein does tackle the inevitable decline into extreme old age, and the decisions we must make as we lose the capability to look after ourselves. He comes to no conclusions as to the correct course of action (I note that at the time of writing this review Klein is 86 years old, and I wonder what his thoughts on this topic might be now?).

Overall Travels with Epicurus is a light-hearted look at what awaits all of us. The message Klein has for us is that there is much to be enjoyed in old age, not much objectively to fear, and if we have the right attitude to it, helped by a judicious reading of the great philosophers, it can be very enjoyable.

If you are heading into old age, and are worrying about how you are going to face it, I can recommend Travels with Epicurus as a guide to taking the first steps.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell