L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 4

Book Review: First Person by Richard Flanagan

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I keep getting sucked into reading these books of Australian “literature”. Yes, okay, it’s my own doing and I do it in the hopes that one writer will redeem the rest of his or her colleagues. I’m still waiting for redemption.

Kif Kehlmann is an aspiring writer from Tasmania. Married with a young daughter and twins on the way, he’s plugging away at his first novel but he’s lucky to write a few hundred words a day and that’s mostly because he’s not very good and knows it, even if he refuses to admit it. To pay the bills, he works odd jobs for the local council and as a labourer. It’s the early 90s and mortgage rates are skyrocketing; he doesn’t know how he’s going to make the required repayments, especially once he gets fired from his council gig.

Then late one night, he gets a call from an old friend. Ray works as a bodyguard and general dogsbody for Siegfried Heidl, a conman who’s been arrested for a $700 million bank fraud. The money has disappeared, never to be repaid, and Heidl has six weeks before he’s going to jail. He wants to write his memoirs in the meantime and he needs a ghost writer.

Kif pretends to have a conscience for about fifteen minutes but is seduced by the $10,000 on offer. Except it could be more trouble than it’s worth. Heidl refuses to tell Kif anything about his life, merely talking in circles about nonsensical things, then creepily pries into Kif’s life. Ray has warned Kif not to tell Heidl anything personal, not to let him into his head. But Heidl is a psychopath and a sociopath and possibly a murderer and it’s harder than it sounds, especially for someone as weak and useless as Kif. There’s no way this is going to end well.

To be fair, it starts well. First Person has one of the best opening lines I’ve ever read. “Our first battle was birth.” Great, great, great opening line. And there are other moments of quotability. But they are few and far between. And towards the end, this line pops up: “Though I had nothing to say, I had read enough Australian literature to know this wasn’t necessarily an impediment to authorship.” Oh, boy, he isn’t kidding!

Even though it’s billed as a novel, the book is obviously autobiographical – when writers write main characters who are writers, they almost always are. The real story, which I looked up afterwards, is that Flanagan was contracted to ghost write the memoir of John Friedrich, known as Australia’s greatest conman, while he prepared to appear in court charged with a $300 million fraud. Basically, Flanagan doubles the money stolen, changes the names of everybody who appears in the book as well as the gender of his unborn twins from girls in real life to boys in the novel and tacks on an ending that we can all see coming.

Heidl comes across a lot like Donald Trump, selling the unsellable with a confusing word salad and managing to suck people in despite the fact that his only interest is in himself. In fact, none of the characters in the book are even remotely likeable, not even Kif, in fact especially not Kif, and as far as a complex female character, just forget it.

First Person is self-indulgent, overblown, overly long, mostly unintelligible and an excuse for Flanagan to tell us everything he thinks is wrong with publishing (which is pretty ironic since, with this effort, he is part of the problem). It’s a damn shame because the true story of Richard Flanagan’s interactions with John Friedrich would have been much more interesting and, I suspect, honest for both the writer and the reader.

On the plus side, the cover design is beautiful. That and the terrific opening sentence are about the only positive things I can find to say. I didn’t enjoy Flanagan’s writing style, there was little to no plot and the characters engendered little interest or affection.

About one-third of the way through reading this book, I accidentally dropped it open to the last chapter and couldn’t avoid seeing the words at the top of the page announcing simply that a character had died. Oh, no! I thought. I’ve ruined the ending for myself. But I hadn’t. Because it was inconsequential. As so much in the book was. Nothing in it will stay with me. Except for the sense of a wasted opportunity.

2 stars

*First published on Goodreads 2 February 2020

Book Review: One Way by SJ Morden

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This book has such an interesting premise but I suspect it will be endlessly compared to The Martian by Andy Weir and it doesn’t quite stack up.

Franklin Kittridge is serving a life sentence in prison for killing his addict son’s drug dealer. His wife divorced him soon after he was jailed and he hasn’t seen his son since. Franklin is sure he did the right thing, the only thing he could, but jail is alternatively boring and violent. So when he is offered the opportunity to leave, he takes it.

The private company that runs the prison has won a government contract to build the first colony on Mars and rather than use astronauts, given all the dangers and unknowns, they’re going to send expendable prisoners with the requisite skills. Frank was in construction, Alice was a doctor, Marcy was a truck driver, Zero grew weed (which gave him the skills to be in charge of the hydroponics set-up), Zeus was a plumber and so on. After six months of training on Earth, eight people are sent – seven cons and the man in charge, Brack.

From the moment Frank is woken from eight months in suspended animation, it’s clear that every second, every minute, every hour, every day on Mars is going to be a challenge. The modules containing their supplies are spread across eighty miles of the planet’s surface and the fuel cells of the buggies won’t let them travel that far. Some modules crash-landed, destroying the contents, and some modules are just missing entirely.

But they can’t give up. Their lives depend on making the best of what they’ve got. So they work hard. They build the buggies. They construct the habitats. They set up arrays of solar panels, a plant to generate breathable air and a greenhouse to grow food. Eventually, the real astronauts will arrive to conduct exploration and experiments and the cons take a certain amount of pride in what they’re achieving.

But one by one, deaths start occurring. And Frank isn’t the only murderer among the bunch. Is it the planet killing them… or is there a psycho on the loose?

I found the first third of this book a bit difficult to get into but once I pushed through, the last two-thirds were a breezy read. It’s probably no coincidence that the first third is the offer in the prison setting and the training on Earth and the last two-thirds takes place on Mars. The science and the practicalities of life on Mars seem realistic enough to me (someone without a scientific background), realistic enough to make me never want to live anywhere but Earth.

Even though there are just a few handfuls of characters in this book, the author made it a little confusing by naming two of the convicts Zero and Zeus and another two Declan and Demetrius (and then shortening one of them to Dee every now and then). Even after turning the last page, I’m still not sure which was which.

Frank is really the only character we get to know well since most of the book is from his perspective and the other characters go to significant lengths to conceal their backgrounds. They all know they’re criminals but none of them seem to revel in it, which probably means they’re the kinds of criminals you want to be around if you absolutely have to be around criminals. But it also means we barely even scratch the surface of their motivations. So it’s hard to care a lot when they start dying. And the character of Brack is a one-dimensional, boorish, lazy hard-ass. You’ll be cheering for his death long before the prospect of it ever arises.

In the end, the villain isn’t that much of a surprise and it’s actually multiple villains with that most boring of all villainous goals: money. So it’s lacking in poetry.

And the result is yet another book in a long line of books – millions of them, in fact – that aren’t terrible, aren’t great but fall somewhere in the middle, a diverting read for as long as you’re reading it but quickly forgotten afterwards.

2.5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 14 January 2020

Book Review: Company by Max Barry

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Max Barry is the king of satire and this is another in a long string of his books that deserves high praise. But the problem with satire these days is the world is so ridiculous that satire now resembles the horrible reality. So anyone who has ever had a job will read the first half of this book and recognise the hell that is being an employee.

Jones is fresh out of university with a business degree and it’s the first day of his first job as an assistant to a sales rep at a company called Zephyr. His division is Training Sales and they sell training modules. They don’t deliver the training – that’s done by the Training Delivery division – and their only customers are other divisions within Zephyr.

He wants to know what the company actually does but nobody in Training Sales or any of the other employees he comes across seem to know. They don’t really care either. They might have cared when they first started but now they just do their jobs and don’t ask too many questions. They’ve mostly had the will to live beaten out of them. And if they haven’t, they’ve become the ones beating the will to live out of others – aka management.

Every manager at Zephyr has a book about the Omega Management System – a thinly veiled version of Six Sigma – on their desk, which Jones thinks might be the key to success within the company and he’s absolutely right but not in the way he imagines.

After one too many times being fobbed off, Jones decides to go directly to the CEO for some straight answers. But no one has ever met the CEO and his office is in the penthouse suite at the top of the building, unable to be accessed without the right security clearance pass for the elevator. He climbs the stairs all the way and when he finds the door at the top locked, he kicks it open. What he is confronted with sets up an ethical dilemma he never saw coming. Still, he’s lucky. Even though what he finds is sickening, it’s the best possible reason for why Zephyr treats their staff so badly. A reason that no company in the real world can fall back on.

I read the first half of this book with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach because so many of the situations and people Barry writes about here as fiction are situations and people I experienced in my previous corporate career in the real world. For someone who has never been through it, it probably seems ridiculous and over the top. For those of us who have, it’s unbelievable that we ever allowed ourselves to be sucked into the vortex. For those still stuck inside, get out now because it doesn’t get any better! (There’s a stolen donut storyline that ends up getting someone fired in the first few chapters and continues to be brought up until almost the very last chapter and if it weren’t for the fact that we’ve all heard about similar things in our real jobs, we’d shake our heads at the imbecility of it.)

The author worked at Hewlett Packard “conducting secret research for this book”, according to the author bio (no doubt his pre-writing career that he never imagined would be the basis for a fascinating story) and the dedication is to HP (no doubt as a form of apology to them for exposing all their secrets – not the intellectual property secrets, just the things that their HR department would probably prefer potential employees didn’t know).

Once the big reveal comes about half way through, the book descends into farce but a very enjoyable farce. As with all Max Barry books, there’s no happy ending – the worlds in which he sets his books are too far gone for happy endings. It actually gets the ending that Jones was threatened with when he found out the big secret and told he couldn’t tell anyone else. Jones eventually does tell everybody else and nobody’s happy, not the company or the employees. But nobody was happy before so it seems almost fitting. At least, in the end, they know the truth.

In my review of another Max Barry book, Jennifer Government, I wrote, “It’s a frightening and extreme version of a place the world is approaching. Money is the end goal and there are no limits to the measures to which people will go to get it… It’s a cautionary tale for us today.” It’s just as relevant for Company.

Read this book and the veil of ignorance will be lifted, if you haven’t already figured it out, to expose the horrors of the work hierarchy. It doesn’t have to be this way. But currently, more than ever, it is.

In a word: chilling.

4 stars

*First published on Goodreads 13 December 2019

How Much of Our Characters Are Really Ourselves?

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When I was ten years old, I was in a car accident. My mother, stepfather, siblings and I were on a freeway driving out of the city after visiting my grandparents when a drunk driver side swiped us.

Considering it happened over three decades ago, I still have a pretty clear memory of it. The car was a green and creamy white van, possibly ex-army, with lots of khaki double bench seats and an aisle down the right side. Big families need big cars. Because there was so much room, we kids tended to move around a lot, even while we were in transit. Because of that, we weren’t always wearing our seatbelts when we should have been.

We lived in a little country town about two hours outside of the city and we were barely on the outskirts. It was just starting to get dark. There was a police car somewhere nearby and my mum turned around in the front passenger seat to look at it. That’s the last thing I remember before the accident. When I woke up, I was on the inside lane of the freeway, face down, trapped underneath a car with my foot caught in its engine.

It must have been horribly traumatising for the driver of that car. Not for me. I was unconscious while it was happening. I was told later that the drunk driver side swiped our van, causing it to roll several times. Because I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, I crashed out of a window and was flung onto the road where the car that hit me couldn’t stop in time. The wheels didn’t run over me – they did a really good job of steering perfectly so they avoided that – but my foot managed to tangle itself in the engine and they pushed me along the freeway for about a hundred metres.

That’s when I woke up. I knew something bad had happened. There was pain. And I was stuck. I couldn’t free my foot, meaning I couldn’t pull myself out from under the car. I passed out again. When I woke up again, I was in the back of an ambulance and they were inflating a temporary cast around my right ankle just in case it was broken.

They needed several ambulances to ferry us all to hospital but, surprisingly, our injuries were relatively minor. My mother had stepped on a piece of glass after the accident and was hopping around the emergency room from child to child, refusing to let the doctors near her (she is very afraid of needles and knew they would try to give her several). My stepbrother Brian had a cut over his eye. A centimetre lower and he would have been blinded. My stepsister Michelle had lacerations around her mouth and couldn’t eat, drink or speak without pain. My sister Natalie had bruised ribs. Everyone else was fine. Shocked but fine.

I was the worst hurt. I had a severe abrasion high on my left cheek from being dragged face first down the highway. And I hadn’t broken my ankle but I had chipped off a piece of bone that to this day floats freely in there. I couldn’t put any weight through my leg. I certainly couldn’t walk without crutches. I stayed in hospital for four days while the swelling went down and the pain abated.

Despite the fact that there was a police officer who had witnessed the entire accident, the drunk driver was never charged with causing it. He had been allowed to speed off, with the police officer electing instead to stop, to help us and to manage the scene. The drunk driver was pulled over several hours later, still way over the legal blood alcohol limit, but nobody could prove definitively that he was the same driver and it was the same car.

I spent several weeks, possibly months (my memory gets a bit fuzzy on the timeline here), on the crutches before graduating to a walking stick. Yes, I was ten years old and I had a walking stick. I went to sessions with the physiotherapist where they made me balance on a board with a ball stuck through it (and probably other things but that’s the piece of equipment I specifically remember). Eventually, I was able to discard the walking stick. My ankle still swells every day, even now, but the pain is long gone.

The psychological side effects were more long lasting. For years afterwards, whenever I sat in the front passenger seat, I was sure the car next to us, the car coming to a stop at the t-intersection as we were driving past, the car approaching us from the opposite direction, was going to side swipe us. After a few years, I settled down.

At least, I thought I did. What actually happened is that I spent a lot of that time being driven in the back seat or driving myself. What actually happened is that I spent barely any time in the front passenger seat.

A couple of weeks ago, my dad invited me to go see his new house in the country. My stepmother wasn’t able to come because she was working. So instead of sitting in the back seat like I normally would when I spend time driving with them, I sat in the front passenger seat.

I completely freaked my dad out. I gasped and shrunk back as we drove up and then down the side of a mountain on the way there and on the way back. I closed my eyes and shrieked as he passed slow cars with plenty of clearance, sure we were going to collide. I yelled several times, “Stop, stop, stop!” as I misjudged the speed and how quickly we were coming up behind the cars in front of us.

My dad is a perfectly competent driver, a much better driver than me, but sitting in the front passenger seat and not being in control of the vehicle brought out all those fears I thought I’d gotten over but had just shoved deep down and avoided by hardly ever riding in the front passenger seat.

I hadn’t thought about these fears for years. Except subconsciously. How do you think about something subconsciously? Well, when you’re a writer, it comes out in your characters. In one of my books, the main character was in a car accident several years ago and reacts very badly whenever she travels in the front passenger seat of a car. Not when she drives. Not when she sits in the back. Just when she’s in the front passenger seat. Yet again, I’ve been writing a main character who is essentially myself.

I actually thought I was past thinly veiled fictional versions of myself. I hope for the most part that I am and that these things just slip through now and then rather than all the time. I’ll leave it to people who know me and read my writing to be the judge. Fingers crossed.

Book Review: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

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I can’t quite figure out this book. There’s a lot of young adult, more than a smidge of chick lit and loads of mystery. It’s also beautifully written. But the most interesting character is frequently ignored by all the others as well as the author and so much of her is left unexplored and unexplained.

Mia Warren and her teenage daughter, Pearl, have just arrived in Shaker Heights, Ohio. It’s a planned community, a little progressive but a little Stepford at the same time. They rent a home from the Richardsons and immediately become entangled in their landlords’ lives. Mother Elena is a local reporter, father Bill is a lawyer and the kids are spoiled and mostly ungrateful. And the youngest, Izzy, is also frustratingly rebellious. The book opens with her burning down her family home (she sets “little fires everywhere”) and then rewinds to the day the Warrens moved into town to show how all the events before lead up to that moment.

The Richardson kids have never lived anywhere but Shaker Heights. Mia, an artist, and Pearl have never stayed longer than a year in one place and it’s usually more like four or six months. Once each art project is done, Mia needs to find inspiration in a new location. Or so she says. But Pearl wants to stay put this time.

Mia picks up work at a local Chinese restaurant to supplement the income from selling her pieces and when Mrs Richardson hears this, she insists Mia come work at her home as a part-time housekeeper, mornings and afternoons, to leave her plenty of time for her art. She thinks she’s doing her tenant a favour. But during her chores, when Mia overhears that friends of the Richardsons are in the middle of adopting an abandoned Chinese baby, she realises it’s the baby of one of her co-workers at the Chinese restaurant. A bout of postnatal depression made her think she couldn’t cope but she’s since received treatment and has been searching for her child for almost a year without success.

A court battle ensues. The community is divided. And Mrs Richardson knows Mia was the one who stirred up all this trouble. There’s something not quite right about her tenant. So she decides to find out who she really is.

Little Fires Everywhere is a literal title but it’s also metaphorical, a reference to how moments in people’s lives spark embers and can end up becoming an all-consuming fire when they join together and catch up with you if they aren’t put out. The sparks in this story are all the result of selfish actions and the all-consuming fire feels cleansing. I really struggled to feel much sympathy for any of them at all.

Except for Izzy. We barely see Izzy for most of the book but what we do see of her showed me she should have been the main character. Instead we are subjected to her siblings, moody Moody (what else can you expect when you name a character that?), popular Lexie and sporty Tripp. And Pearl slots into the family unit, wanting to be one of them, immediately shedding her outsider status and becoming boring, too.

The mothers are stereotypical, Mia artistic and cool, someone the kids can go to for advice and not be judged, Elena thinking she’s progressive when she’s actually settled into the comfortable white middle class. The fathers are stereotypical, too. Bill is at work most of the time and Mia’s father… well, she doesn’t actually know who her father is.

Half this book feels like what a teenager would write imagining the complex lives of adults, the other half feels like what an adult would write imagining the complex lives of teenagers. It’s not a bad effort but it’s not a great effort. It’s just okay.

I will say that the art Mia makes sounds amazing. At the end of the book, she leaves an envelope for the Richardsons of the art she’s been working on while she’s been in Shaker Heights and there’s a piece for each of them, a snapshot inside each of their souls. It makes me wonder whether this, like so many other books, could benefit from being shaped and taped, that is cut down a little and made into a movie. Watch this space, I guess.

So in the end it’s another one of those books that I don’t regret but that won’t linger in my memory for long after I close the back cover.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 2 December 2019

Book Review: How to Make a Movie in 12 Days by Fiona Hardy

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This book has the best crafted opening chapter I’ve read in a long time. From there it settles into a pleasant middle grade novel with enough touches of brilliance to make up for a few problematic areas.

Eleven-year-old Hayley is obsessed with films and wants to be a director. She and her grandmother were writing the script for a horror film about a killer rose bush, which her grandmother was also going to star in, when she unexpectedly died. Hayley is devastated. But part of Hayley’s inheritance is a brand new video camera so that she can start making her movie. Hayley suggests to her mother that they throw a party to celebrate her grandmother’s life and screen the movie at it. The only date they can get at the function hall leaves Hayley just twelve days to film all the scenes, edit them together and finalise the movie. Thus the title of the book.

Hayley has prepared well though. It’s the summer holidays, she has roped in friends and acquaintances to act, do special effects and write the score, and she has hired a real actor from her school to play the main role (even though Rissa is friends with jerkjacks, as Hayley refers to them). But things start going wrong almost immediately. A key goes missing, completed footage is deleted, crew members receive instructions to meet in the wrong locations, the composer’s instrument is sabotaged, there are even injuries. Somebody clearly doesn’t want this movie to be made. Dun dun dun!

First, the positives. There are some wonderfully drawn characters. There’s Theo, who has a beautiful rose bush in front of his house and lets Hayley use it as a primary filming location. His speaking style must have been very difficult to write because it was unique as well as being great to read. And there’s Jennifer, Hayley’s five-year-old sister. She has a crucial role in the film, being attacked and killed by the rose bush, she’s obsessed with oranges and she comes out with gems like, “They’re not farts, I am releasing ideas.”

It’s also a very modern setting. Hayley’s mum works and her dad stays at home and looks after the kids. Hayley’s grandmother’s best friend, Nannabel, has a podcast. Hayley’s dad edits out all the nasty bits in M-rated films so the kids can watch truncated versions of movies like Kill Bill.

And I know book reviews are supposed to focus on the story but the cover design is stunning and I think Jess Racklyeft has more than earned a mention for her efforts.

Now for… not the negatives but the things that perhaps didn’t work as well as they could have. If you don’t like movies, then you’re probably going to be lost from the first chapter because this book starts dropping film names from the second page and doesn’t stop until you close the back cover. I personally love movies so it wasn’t a problem for me but a lot of the references are very old and since the target audience of this book is ten-year-olds, it could be an issue.

The one thing that really rankled was the fact that Hayley knows movies and plot lines like the back of her hand but seemed to dive head first into cliché after cliché after cliché. Things are going wrong but instead of talking to her parents about it, she insists she’s fine and soldiers on alone. She thinks her friends are turning on her, so she turns on them instead of asking them what’s really going on and later finds out it was all a misunderstanding. She literally talks about how writers make people in movies do silly things to create conflict and that’s exactly what Hardy has done to her.

In a former iteration, this novel was shortlisted for the 2016 Text Prize. It didn’t win and it’s gone through several rewrites to get it to this stage, which is pretty good. But I actually think it has great potential to be made into a movie itself to get it to a state of near perfection. It’s a very visual story and reading about the movie being made really made me want to see the finished product. Plus being able to include little clips of all the movies that get mentioned would be a fantastic way of introducing the next generation to classic films.

In a word: charming.

3.5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 12 November 2019

Book Review: All That I Am by Anna Funder

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I spent the first half of this book almost positive that it was an entirely unnecessary literary contribution. It’s a fictionalised version of real events and real people so why not just read a history book? It does a lot of info dumping, just like a history book, with too much telling and not enough showing as a means of proving the immense amount of research that has clearly been done. But by the time I finished, none of that seemed to matter. I was utterly seduced.

Ruth is coming to the end of her life in Sydney’s Bondi Junction. She unexpectedly receives a manuscript in the mail; it’s an autobiography written by revolutionary Ernst Toller, someone from her former life. And suddenly she’s swept back to growing up in Germany as the Great War rages. The most important person in her life is her older cousin, Dora. Together, they become part of the resistance that watches the rise and rise of Hitler and is determined to fight him.

By 1933, Hitler is in control and the members of the resistance are being kidnapped and murdered. Ruth, her husband, Hans, and Dora flee to London where they live in limbo. Their status as refugees means they can’t work but Ruth’s parents, who are German but live in Poland because of a changed border, are wealthy and send money to support them. Their status as refugees also means they aren’t supposed to engage in political activities and getting caught doing so could see them sent back to Germany to face certain death. It doesn’t stop them though; they know how important it is to show the rest of the world what’s really going on.

The story is told in alternating chapters narrated by Ruth, who remembers her story through the distant lens of old age, and Ernst, as he updates his previously written autobiography from a New York hotel room in 1939 to include details he had left out in order to be discreet. Ruth has the naiveté and hope of a young resistance fighter but Ernst is wracked with depression and despair because he already knows how it all ends (or at least how the war begins).

When I started reading this book, I didn’t realise that they were almost all real people. I foolishly googled Ernst Toller just to check if he was one of them and then got caught up in reading his Wikipedia entry. I would highly recommend not doing it. It didn’t ruin the book but it would have been a better experience for me if I hadn’t pre-empted the ending.

If you’re expecting a comprehensive history of Hitler’s impact on Germany, All That I Am isn’t that book. It’s specific to a very small group of upper class resisters and their experiences. But you will likely still learn plenty, particularly that the Second World War didn’t just come out of nowhere. The people in this book foresaw the brutality and then experienced it firsthand all before the war ever started and under a legitimately elected government. But no one would listen to them. There are lessons in there that seem especially relevant for today’s incredibly uncertain times where we are crying out for leaders we can rally behind for the greater good of everyone instead of just ourselves. “Fear is the psychological foundation of dictatorship,” Ernst Toller wrote.

Even though the book is set in a very specific period of time, it has a timeless quality, which probably comes down to the beautiful writing because sometimes the characters – despite their noble cause – aren’t always easy to empathise with. But perhaps it’s their flaws that make their lives and their deaths so much more heartbreaking.

I imagine this book is studied in high school English classes and it is perfect for that purpose but it doesn’t seem to me to be the kind of book that reveals more layers in further readings. Its power is in the way it builds up, revealing its layers as it goes. Because of that, it doesn’t feel like the kind of book anyone would want to read over and over. But once is enough. Once was remarkable.

Verdict: a worthy Miles Franklin Prize winner.

4 stars

*First published on Goodreads 7 October 2019

How Far Should We Go to Support Writers We Know?

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I’m a writer so it probably won’t come as any great shock that I know other writers. People I’ve studied with, people I’ve worked with, people I’ve been published with, people I’ve been shortlisted for awards with. Some of these people I know better than others. Some I know only a little. But at some point in the past, our paths crossed.

Whenever these writers I know release a new book, I’m the first in line at a bricks-and-mortar book store to buy a paperback if they’re being physically published or online if they’re only being released as an ebook. Sometimes I’ll buy more than one copy and give them to other people I know. I always read them and I always review them honestly (I’m probably very lucky that none of the writers I know have ever written a terrible book so I haven’t been faced with a difficult decision in that respect.)

Books by writers that I know include Beautiful Mess by Claire Christian (winner of the Text Prize 2016), How to Make a Movie in 12 Days by Fiona Hardy (shortlisted for the Text Prize 2016), Pickle to Pie and Something Missing by Glenice Whitting (Glenice and I studied writing together at Holmesglen TAFE), the Lachlan Fox series, the Jed Walker series, the Alone series and The Last Thirteen series by James Phelan (James and I studied writing together at Swinburne University), The Girl from France by Laurent Boulanger (Laurent was one of my tutors at Swinburne University), Messenger, Visioner and Destroyer by KK Ness (KK is a friend of a friend who did a beta read of one of my books) and The Ultimate SMSF Trustee’s Guide by Reece Agland (Reece is a friend and former colleague from when I worked in the accounting industry and okay, I’m going to confess that I’ve never read his book but I did buy a copy of it and give it to my dad to read because he has a self-managed superannuation fund).

Another friend of mine has just released his first book, a non-fiction investigative piece about an industry he has significant experience in. He’s been spruiking its impending release for months and last week he announced it was finally available for purchase. He provided a link to his publisher’s website and I clicked through to the main page, fully expecting that my next step would be to find his book and order a copy.

But the main page of his publisher’s website stopped me cold. It listed all the latest books in its stable and as I scrolled through them, I realised it was a who’s who of Australian far right conservatives. People I have little respect for. People with whom I fundamentally disagree. People who have made their names discriminating against and belittling minorities and the many, many other classes of people they don’t like.

I know this friend of mine is a conservative. He watches and promotes Sky News After Dark (Murdoch far right propaganda for anyone not in Australia) relentlessly. But despite that, I’ve always found him to be a reasonable person. He likes rules, he likes fairness, he likes checks and balances. I suspect, even without having read his book, that it will be a perfectly fine book, supported by meticulous research and logical conclusions. But I am conflicted about how supporting him by buying a copy of his book might also be supporting these other authors.

My purchase – or lack thereof – won’t be the difference between this new author making it or not. It will only reflect how far I’m prepared to go. I don’t know how far that is yet. I’ll let you know.

A Few Numbers on the Occasion of My 500th Blog Post

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This piece of writing represents the 500th time I’ve posted on my blog since I began it in February 2015. Coincidentally, I recently realised there was a bunch of statistical information that I’d never really looked at before. I mean, whenever I logged in, I would see the daily numbers of how many people were looking, at what and from where. But I’d never thought about the bigger picture.

These numbers are by no means impressive. I’m a very small fish in a very large pond. But considering before I had this blog that almost nobody was reading anything I wrote, they seem massive to me.

I have 342 followers. On 499 posts, I’ve had 21,273 views from 14,101 visitors. I have 21 posts that have only ever been looked at by one person. I don’t have any posts that no one has ever looked at. That surprised me. The most views I’ve ever had in one day is 190.

The most popular page on my blog is my homepage, which has had 3,908 views. I suspect at least some of this is attributable to what I named my blog, “Single White Female Writer”. All those people searching for the writer of the movie Single White Female stumble across me instead. I think a lot of people also get to one of my posts titled “Sex Scene from Liberty’s Secret” because of a lesbian romance movie with a particularly titillating scene. I imagine a lot of the 333 people who’ve viewed that page are disappointed when what they find on my blog is the sex scene I wrote for one of my earliest novels, published nowhere else except on my blog, Liberty’s Secret. Not a naked lesbian in sight.

My most popular posts are “The Fictional Diary: Another Way to Structure Your Novel” (1,022 views), my book review of The Sheep-Pig by Dick King-Smith (1,021 views) and “Can Women Write Male Characters? Can Men Write Female Characters?” (601 views). Not wholly insignificant but certainly nothing to my most successful piece of writing, an article on LinkedIn called “Three Books Women in Their Thirties Should Read About Misinformation, Motivation and Motherhood” (nearly 10,000 views). I don’t know how to explain the popularity of that book review but the other two pieces have almost certainly been helped by the fact that a couple of universities in the US had them on the reading lists for their writing programs.

I’ve had readers from 145 different countries but, by far, my biggest audiences are in the United States (8,664 views), my home country of Australia (5,583 views) and the United Kingdom (1,547 views), hardly surprising since I write in English.

In my first three years of blogging, I posted roughly the same amount of words – 140,695 words in 152 posts in 2015, 154,307 words in 158 posts in 2016 and 141,741 words in 96 posts in 2017. In 2018, I posted 52 times and 52,600 words and in 2019 so far, I have posted 39 times and 32,994 words as I have tried to find more balance between writing for my blog and writing for my novels.

When I first started blogging, I averaged around 100 views a month. It has happened gradually but I am now averaging over 1,000 views a month, sometimes closer to 1,500 views a month.

And that’s it. In retrospect, I can’t help thinking that it’s all completely irrelevant. None of these numbers say anything about the quality of what I write. I guess that’s a blog post for someone else to write somewhere in the future.

Book Review: Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

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When I read the blurb of this book, I thought it was strangely vague but it isn’t strange at all. Vague is exactly what this book is. There might have been a story worth telling buried in it somewhere but Paula Hawkins didn’t find it. And, unfortunately, that means it suffers from the same problem that so many second books do, which is that it pales in comparison to the author’s debut.

Into the Water should have been Nel’s story. But Nel is already dead from the moment you read the first words and narration duties are instead shared by Nel’s sister, her daughter, the police, teachers from the local school, other parents from the local school, the town eccentric and the killer. And they’re all so busy keeping secrets that this book could have been half as long.

After a long absence, Jules returns to the town she grew up in when the body of Nel, her sister, is recovered from a local suicide spot called the Drowning Pool. Lena, her niece, insists that her mother killed herself and Nel’s obsession with the stories of all the women who have died in the Drowning Pool over the years tends to support that theory. But the bracelet Nel wore everywhere is missing and Jules knows something isn’t quite adding up.

It doesn’t take long to realise that what isn’t adding up is the plot. There are too many threads and Hawkins’s follows them all instead of condensing it into a tight thriller. So what should have been a murder mystery ends up being two murders (one current and one from thirty years ago), a historical rape, a current case of child molestation and a variety of other things that all get in the way of each other.

Hawkins tries to imbue the town with a sense of eeriness, tries to make it a character in itself. But it’s just another small town, like so many small towns we see in literature, with an entire community who think their problems will go away if they ignore them, and simply end up shielding a bunch of people who should be in jail. There are secrets lurking just beneath the surface of everybody’s lives. But the secrets of these people aren’t as devastating as they should be. We’ve seen it all before and quite a few of the characters seem complicit in their own suffering, thereby reducing the sympathy we feel for them. I struggled to find a single character I felt much sympathy for. And that’s down to how they were written because many of the things that happened to them were deserving of sympathy.

It’s a stark difference from Hawkins’s first book, which was populated with really well-drawn characters who made up in many ways for the deficiencies in the plot of The Girl on the Train. No such luck this time.

I read a comment by an author the other day that said they wished publishers would focus less on pursuing the next big thing (that is debut writers) and instead focus on supporting and developing the careers of writers who are already published. The best way to do that would be to stop publishing books from already published writers that aren’t worthy of being published. Stop coddling them. Stop treating them differently because they’ve had past success. Because Into the Water is two or three rewrites away from being the book it should have been. And I think the only reason it was published was to capitalise on the eagerly waiting audience because of The Girl on the Train. But instead of solidifying Hawkins’s legacy, they have damaged it. It’s going to take a spectacular effort with her next book to get back on track.

2.5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 27 September 2019