Reviewed by Tim Milfull

For Kiki Fung's review of A Place of One's Own and Glamorous Youth, please click here.

For Gerald Peary's review of the PIFRESCI Award-winning film A Northern Chinese Girl, please click here.

For Tim's review of A Place of One's Own and Members of the Funeral, please click here.

There is no single way in which a visit to Hong Kong can be anything but exotic and exciting, and in a month over March and April each year, the always bustling city swells with outrageously costumed rugby fans for the Hong Kong Sevens, and salivating cinephiles looking forward to the 33rd Hong Kong International Film Festival.

It is a sad but common occurrence when great books are chopped to pieces to fit into a movie format, and all sorts of wonderful parts are cut out to turn 400 pages into 2 hours. Happily, The Da Vinci Code wasn’t a great book. In removing pages and pages of Dan Brown’s inane waffle, the movie is left with the main story of the Grail conspiracy, making the film much more palatable than the book.

Reviewed by Dan

If you’ve never heard of The Da Vinci Code, you have clearly been living in a cave for the last couple of years. The controversy surrounding this ‘novel’ has continually surprised me, considering that none of the remarkable allegations it makes (disguised in a fiction format) are new, and have in fact been discussed and even published by historians, religious scholars, writers and conspiracy theorists for decades. Regardless of the reasons, The Da Vinci Code struck a chord with millions of readers, and sparked many a heated post-dinner conversation around the world. So clearly, the film release has a been a much anticipated event, both by those who loved the book, and by Christian groups who thought the book was blasphemous and tried to have it banned. You’d think this type of publicity would be a marketer’s dream, but the movie may suffer for it. With so many critical eyes looking for the bad things, the film’s good points may well be overlooked.

Of course there are negatives, such as relentless exposition, condescending faux-history lessons, and the over-used and very annoying ‘flashback’ technique to give history and depth to the characters, but there are also positives. Ron Howard has managed to pull back his usual over-earnest approach to an acceptable level, and the film jogs along at an enjoyable pace that is very appropriate to a thriller. The opening scene, cutting between the chase and murder of Jacques Sauniere in the halls of the Louvre, and a presentation by Robert Langdon for the publication of his book, sets up the tone of the rest for the rest of the film nicely. There are some slower parts, but these are not too common, and they even make use of some much-needed humour to lighten the heavy plot.

Then there is the cast. I have been pretty dirty at Tom Hanks for a few years now—ever since Forrest Gump as a matter of fact, but as Robert Langdon he is so involved in explaining symbols and solving puzzles that he doesn’t have time to be overly emotional and irritating, which is a nice change. However, there is a distinct lack of chemistry with his co-star Audrey Tatou, who is simply charming as Sophie, the French code-breaking policewoman. Tatou, in one of her few English language roles is very beautiful, and young enough to be Hanks’ daughter, which may account for the lack of chemistry. Chemistry is not a problem for veteran Ian McKellen, who plays Sir Leigh Teabing, the aristocratic Grail expert who helps put more pieces of the puzzle into place. McKellen manages to boost everyone’s performance and clearly enjoys this role, which allows him to be both benevolent and sinister. Paul Bettany plays a wonderfully creepy Silas, the highly ascetic Opus Dei monk leaving a trail of bodies behind him, and of course Jean Reno makes an appearance as the Police Captain convinced of Langdon’s guilt. All in all, the cast is very good.

Perhaps the biggest star, however, is the scenery. The film is set in Paris, Rome, London and Scotland, and the cinematography is a treat. Grand sweeping shots of Notre Dame, the Louvre, Saint Sulpice, Westminster Abbey, the Rosslyn Chapel and the French and English countryside add a sense of majesty to the story unfolding in the foreground.

The most disappointing part of the film comes right at the end, when, after a frantic chase and some inspired code-breaking, the style of the film does a complete 180, and Howard returns to comfortable soppy territory. Hanks’ character concludes that if there’s anything to learn from this whole big adventure, it’s that Jesus was a nice guy, regardless of anything, and that faith means different things to different people. After having set it up as a legitimate thriller right up to that point, it all comes as a bit of a let-down.

If you loved the book, I’m sure the movie will appeal to you. If, like me, you thought the book was a badly-written, ridiculously-plotted load of rubbish, you’ll probably be hesitant to see to film. However, try to leave those preconceptions at the door, and you should still enjoy it. This is one of those cases where the story works better as a movie than as a book, and the (albeit unbelievable) storyline can find a dramatic backdrop, some suspenseful music, and a beautiful heroine to bring it to life.


The Da Vinci Code
Writers: Akiva Goldsman & Dan Brown
Director: Ron Howard
Starring: Tom Hanks, Audrey Tatou, Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina, Paul Bettany, Jean Reno
Producers: Dan Brown & Brian Grazer
Score: Hans Zimmer
Cinematography: Salvatore Totino

Let’s get this out there right at the start: I read TDVC early in 2005 because I felt I needed to be conversant in the machinations of the novel if I wanted to lambaste the thing. It was a painful experience involving much yelling, gesticulation and gnashing of teeth both on my part and on the part of those around me as I read. Brown’s characters lacked depth, insight and chemistry. The plot was convoluted and unconvincing, and the narrative overflowed with cumbersome exposition and backstory. Happily for those who loved the novel, director, Ron Howard has been successful in translating all of these elements to the silver screen.
Limping home at a shade under two-and-a-half hours, the cinematic version of TDVC seeks to cram a massive amount of information into the heads of its audience. Despite the fact that somewhere in the region of a hundred million people have read the novel, there are bound to be people out there who haven’t been exposed to the marketing juggernaut lumbering along in the wake of the publishing tsunami that ever so often flicks unsuspecting authors off the bestselling lists.

For the uninitiated, Tom Hanks brings to life Brown’s hero, Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor in symbology, in Paris to promote his latest tome examining the sacred feminine. Langdon first appeared in an earlier incarnation of Brown’s pulp universe: Angels and Demons. In the great tradition of popular fiction and film: when you’re on a good thing, flog the damned thing to within an inch of its life and then wring every last drop of blood out of its shrivelled corpse; so we can expect Langdon to mince and bumble his way through Freemason-related codes in the next twelve months on the release of The Solomon Key.

Unfortunately, Langdon is quickly implicated in the murder of Sauniere, a Louvre curator, who not content to lie down after being shot in the guts by a mad albino assassin monk—what message are we meant to take away here about albinos—stages an elaborate code-riddled tableau in his death after staggering bleeding footprints all over the Louvre in the process of leaving complex clues.

And so begins what is supposed to be an exciting cinematic version of what many claim is an epic page-turner; in one word—itself an outrage to all that is great about the English language—“unputdownable”. Well, I wouldn’t go so far. I think ‘inexorable’ fits the bill far more comfortably; if I was feeling nasty, perhaps even ‘execrable’. Oh, it’s not that bad.

The problem with this film, as with the book, lies in its wordiness. In fact, one could quite easily sit back in the cinema and simply listen to the dialogue and not really miss any action. Perhaps the most glaring evidence of this lack of visual stimulation lay in the press kit for the film. Normally, an image set would offer several dozen choices for the print and Internet journalists to add colour to their copy. In the case of TDVC, a scant thirty or so were on offer, and almost all of them featured Langdon and Sophie (Audrey Tautou) talking or looking puzzled.

Nothing else happens in the film. To his credit, Howard has tried to inject colour of his own in the form of flashbacks to accompany the convoluted theories and very dodgy history spouting from the mouths of Langdon and Grail historian, Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen). McKellen also manages to spice things up a little with his duplicitous character. But each time the bland Langdon launches into another puzzled bout of astonishment, I found myself fading out. Tautou makes a valiant effort to enliven her French cryptologist, Sophie Neveu, but in an ironic tilt at his own efforts to glorify the feminine form, Brown has managed to suck his heroine dry of any substance. Even as he tries to celebrate the idea that Jesus may have been man enough to love a woman and bring forth a royal line, Brown’s Sophie—ostensibly the latest in that supposedly glorious and hotly disputed line—flounders as little more than a one-dimensional imagining of what might have been.

I had thought, in the lead-up to the film’s release, that TDVC had the potential to give Star Wars, Titanic or even Harry Potter a run for their money; the marketing machine behind Sony’s film certainly thought so, given their relentless campaign. But there’s always that risk of overkill to threaten a film’s opening weekend figures, and judging by the dozen or so punters at the screening I attending in the middle of the first day, TDVC might not live up to expectations.

While I’m sure that there is no let-up ahead in terms of the Western public’s hunger for conspiracy theories, perhaps the lesson that might come out of the cinema version of TDVC is that faux-intellectual themes aren’t necessarily enough to hold audience interest over two hours. Howard and Brown should take a leaf from Oliver Stone’s book and be a little more discerning when blurring the line between fact and fiction.


The Da Vinci Code
2006

Director: Ron Howard
Producers: Dan Brown & Brian Grazer
Writers: Akiva Goldsman & Dan Brown
Score: Hans Zimmer
Cinematography: Salvatore Totino
Starring: Tom Hanks, Audrey Tatou, Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina, Paul Bettany, Jean Reno

Kimberley Starr’s The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies very nearly lost the Queensland Premier’s literary award for best unpublished manuscript to another competitor, The Means of Exchange. If that were the case, Kingdom would not have been published by UQP, and wouldn’t have won One Book One Brisbane. But the most interesting fact about Kingdom’s near-defeat is that Starr herself wrote the other competing novel.

“I was told that the other one [The Means of Exchange] had won,” Starr says. “So it wasn’t until a couple of days before that it was this one [Kingdom]. I have to say, this is the one that I wrote earlier, and it was the one that I spent most time on, so I was happy for this one to have won. The other one, that was also shortlisted, I have worked on so much since; although it’s going to be my second novel, it’s only got one, or maybe two chapters the same as the shortlisted version.”

Whether or not The Means of Exchange would have made One Book One Brisbane is a moot point, but it does raise the point that Kingdom is a very Brisbane-based novel. In fact, Starr (on her website, www.kimberleystarr.com) says “I think I will always regard [Kingdom] as my ‘Brisbane’ book.” A certain poetic justice is served by the fact that this homage to Brisbane will now be read by a large portion of its population, although Kim is glad that she wasn’t picked as last year’s Two Books One Brisbane winner.

“Nothing like that [the Two Books One Brisbane debacle] has happened so far this year, so I think my mind is in ease about that. As a young writer, I would have been petrified in Rebecca Sparrow’s position. But she handled it very well; she’s got a knack for marketing ... She’s the sort of person who could get through that sort of thing, but I think I would have found it very traumatic, so I’m glad that this year has been smoother.”

Unlike Sparrow, Starr does not relish publicity. When asked about what OBOB will do to her book’s sales, she remains taciturn: “I’m not sure of the exact details. Apparently they’re expecting sales to be better, so I hope they are.”

She becomes effusive on the subject of influence. On Ian McEwan: “He’s certainly one of my favourite authors, and one of the writers currently working whom I most respect.” However, she is quick to deny any direct link between Kingdom and McEwan’s novel of child-abduction, The Child in Time: “I’m trying to remember when I read that. I read that a number of years ago, so if there are a lot of influences in there, they weren’t influences that I was consciously aware of ... I wasn’t writing from the perspective of the parents who have a missing child, so the emotions he goes through are quite different from mine.” She chuckles over the gap between what critics read into her work and the experience of writing it: “When you talk about someone’s thematic concerns, I’m having difficulty remembering what his thematic concerns were!”

“I think when you’re dealing with the theme of relationship between adults and children, and missing children as a subject lends itself to the theme of that relationship, you do start to have to deal with how people relate to their memory of their own childhood self. Yourself as a child is the first child that you have to establish some sort of relationship with. And that, in turn, means that you are dealing with issues of memory.”

When asked about the intention of the title—whether it is ironic, considering the amount of death that surrounds Maddy’s childhood, or whether a death in the child’s life signals the end of childhood—Starr replies: “I enjoy the fact that it can be read two ways ... You can do your own childhood in two ways. You can feel as if what you’re remembering is literally what happened, or you can relate to it as narrative; it’s a natural part of human psychology to look at your own past and tell it as a narrative. That it in turn becomes history. And so that means that there are multiple ways of looking at our childhood depending on what narrative we’re constructing at any particular time. So I like that the title can be read in in two ways because it refers to that.”

Starr positions the figure of the lost child within an Australian artistic heritage: “I think that some artwork ties into Australian mythology in a similar way to literature. I’m thinking of that McCubbin painting, Lost, which is in an Australian bushland setting and there is a lost child in it ... I think the artwork itself does have some narrative capabilities. I’m not an art historian myself, and I can’t paint, but from my understanding of art, and in the way I appreciate art, I think that art, like music, can share a lot of sensibilities with literature.”

“There was a book by Peter Pierce [The Country of Lost Children: an Australian Anxiety] about the lost child as an archetype of Australia. I haven’t read that book, to tell you the truth. I’ve read parts of it, when I was researching my own story, I went flipping through, looking for ideas and connotations for my story. But I do think the lost child is part of Australia, it pops up again and again in literature, and even the news we find fascinating is all around the figure of the lost child.”

“A couple of people have asked me if my story was based on the Daniel Morcombe case, and I’ve had to say, you know, it was written, and it was already edited; it was at the printer when Daniel Morcombe went missing. But even my sons talk about that quite often.”

Starr relates how she created the paedophile figure in Kingdom: “I went to the library over some period, and I read a lot of books, a lot of interviews, and a lot of psychological background cases on people who were paedophiles. And it was something that I actually found quite distressing to write, and at one point I was wishing I’d chosen something quite different, because it is a horrifying topic. So I was conscious of treading carefully through that material. But at the same time, thematically I was interested in how a social illness like that is created within society. I just wanted to know how—I think in my story it’s quite clear that its because of the situation in his neighbourhood, its because the people he knows, that he became as bad as he did. I though that perhaps in a society that notices people more that someone like my particular character might not have developed the way he did.”

“I feel that the paedophile is foremost an archetype, in the sense of the Big Bad Wolf and Little Red Riding-hood stories, that there is that archetype of the person who is not quite human, which is the wolf who can talk, who preys on children. And this is a deep archetype embedded in not just recent culture, although recently we have become more aware of paedophiles. That archetype is in fairy tales, and rooted way back in really early western culture. People need villains, don’t they? Villains are one of the main groups of archetype, a way of measuring up our own behaviour and saying, you know, ‘I’m not bad; I don’t do that.’”

About the interviewer: Chad Parkhill is undertaking an Honours degree in Creative Writing at QUT. He is the co-editor of SOOB :: New Writing, an anthology of Brisbane writing published by Straight Out of Brisbane, and is an editor of Utopia, the QUT Student Guild magazine.

The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies
Kimberley Starr
UQP, 2004, 233 pages
ISBN: 0-7022-3474-5

Reviewed by Chad Parkhill

Kingdom Crowned

‘The child’, Henry Jenkins (1998: 457) argues, ‘is often a figment of the adult imagination, a figure of adult desire, a focus of adult anxiety, and the object of adult political struggles.’ In short, we can’t leave the figure of the child alone, always using it for some purpose or another. Even fiction is guilty: in popular fictions, the child is a locus for barely-hidden desire (Kincaid, 1998: 122-37), while in literary fiction it can be an agent loaded with cultural significance, ready for subversion (one example is Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, a book to which The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies owes more than a passing nod of influence). So what, then, are we to make of this stylish literary thriller? Is this yet another vacuous paedophile-killer story ready to exploit our cultural need for the paedophile-gothic narrative (as clearly articulated by James Kincaid’s ground-breaking Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting)? Or is it something else, one of the narratives that will “jar loose the present [narrative] … drain its power by drawing it into the trap that scandal can set and then spring” (Kincaid in Jenkins, 1998: 251)?

The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies opens with psychologist Madeleine Jeffries dropping her son, Lachlan, off at his father’s flat. Lachlan is to stay with his father, Flip, and Flip’s fiancée, the painfully childish Nicole, as Madeleine is called to Brisbane to profile the recently-captured Brisbane Boy-Killer. There is a marked sense of unease around Madeleine’s return to Brisbane, something to do with the disappearance of Cameron Seymour twenty years previously.

This opening effectively sets up the tension which will drive the narrative: Madeleine’s painful separation from her much-loved child, versus her need to confront the ghosts of her own past, where she was peripheral to the disappearance of the first of the killer’s victims. Starr uses this tension to the full, delivering two neatly-paced narratives that alternate with precision. One problem that faces the writer of an alternating dual narrative is that one narrative soon becomes far more interesting than the other, but Starr skillfully avoids this trap by revealing a tantalising plot detail before shifting time-frame and investing each narrative with equal creative energy. The past plot is not merely backstory, neither is the present plot window-dressing to give a historical fiction an air of contemporaneity. Rather, the two narratives are tightly-integrated, and they heighten tension by constantly revealing telling details which force re-appraisals and re-readings of what has come before.

This personal investment in the narrative gives The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies its compulsive readability. Although the story itself is not centered around detective-work, the reader is an active agent in untangling the novel’s complicated narrative. The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies is not so much a whodunnit (the who is fairly obvious from the outset) as a whydunnit—as befits a psychologist who specialises in profiling, Madeleine’s main quest is to understand why the Brisbane Boy-Killer is driven to sexually abuse and murder children. In doing so, she will have to deal with the implications of her own actions. As she narrates:

Now I realise we don’t leave anything behind. We bring the past with us, towing it along. For a while we may not pay attention, but it never goes away. When life makes us look in the rear-vision mirror, there it is. (50)

The title of the book comes from Edna St Vincent Millay’s Wine from these Grapes (reproduced as the novel’s epigraph):

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Nobody that matters, that is. (vii)

This, initially, seems to be placed in irony. Madeleine’s childhood is one steeped in death. Her move to Brisbane is precipitated by her mother’s death from cancer, and within days of her arrival in the fictional suburb of River Pocket, Cameron Seymour goes missing. This is followed, with brutal certainty, by the death of Daniel Coleman, father of Maddy’s best friend, Brigid, and her love-interest, Andrew (who is injured in the same car crash).

This sounds, en précis, as lurid as recent Neighbours plot twists, but it is a testament to Starr’s light touch that these plot machinations remain believable. Maddy doesn’t express her grief by screaming expository dialogue. Instead, she paints, and it is through art that the novel achieves much of its emotional resonance, and, surprisingly for a book which deals with the activities of a serial-killing paedophile, its humour. Take, for instance, Maddy’s self-deprecating title for her abstract painting, A Little Blue on a Lot of Black, or the painfully-earnest Mrs. White’s efforts to make Maddy view art as catharsis: “It’s the idea that art is a sort of therapy. Let’s have some quiet music, students, and paint” (36). These little gems of grim levity are the countervailing force of the narrative, reminding us that the quotidian, with its absurd comedy, is never too far off.

Indeed, The Kingdom Where Nobodies Dies is, in the end, a celebration of the triumph of the quotidian. Maddy’s childhood may be one where many people die, or it might have been prematurely severed when her mother died (depending on the reader’s own judgment of the title’s irony), but, for all the death that surrounds her, she comes out fairly well-adjusted. The residue of guilt may linger on her mind: “The sound of [memories and guilt] rattles through my conscience like pebbles on a tin roof” (194), but, in the end, she is able to go home to her child, confident in the knowledge that the killer has been caught and will go to jail. Like Mrs. White’s notion of catharsis, guilt, for Madeleine, is something that must be properly sweated out before moving on, with no loose ends left untied.

Kincaid’s clarion call about the dangers of our culturally-accepted paedophile narrative warns against the myth-making powers of a cosy ending. Initially, Starr’s book appears to end in self-satisfied happiness, but there are a few key differences between this book and the paedophile narratives Kincaid deconstructs. The triumph of everyday life underwrites the assumption that paedophilia is a demon-seed, one passed from the abuser to the abused, perpetuating the cycle of violence. There is also a satisfying lack of pat psychoanalytical motives for the killer’s paedophilia—no missing father, or childhood abuse. He is not even presented as a monster, but as a quiet and disturbed human.

This is not, perhaps, as radical as required by Kincaid, who ends his essay “Producing Erotic Children” (in Jenkins, 1998) with a call to action: “But none of this is going to happen without a fuss, without a most distressing and ignominious set of scandals—which is where you come in” (252). Not even the wide dissemination of the book, now that it has been announced winner of One Book One Brisbane, will cause much scandal. In its quiet, reasonable way of shifting attitudes, this well-constructed and gently-persuasive book may do something altogether better: it may change, even if only imperceptibly, the framework of the paedophile narrative. If Kincaid demands that we use brute force to change society, Starr responds with a novel that is subtle and mesmerising, and is all the better for it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Jenkins, Henry. “Sourcebook: Introduction” in The Children’s Culture Reader, ed. Henry Jenkins. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Kincaid, James. Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

McEwan, Ian. The Child in Time. London: Vintage, 1997.

St Vincent Millay, Edna. Wine from these Grapes, in Starr, Kimbeley, The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies. St Lucia: UQP, 2004.

About the reviewer: Chad Parkhill is undertaking an Honours degree in Creative Writing at QUT. He is the co-editor of SOOB :: New Writing, an anthology of Brisbane writing published by Straight Out of Brisbane, and is an editor of Utopia, the QUT Student Guild magazine.

Shot: A Personal Response to Guns and Trauma
Gail Bell
Picador, 2003, 251 pages
ISBN 0330364413

Reviewed by Trudi Plaschke

A Successful Shot

There’s a callous irony inherent in Gail Bell’s life. The two experiences that seem to define her—discovering the truth about her grandfather William Macbeth, who allegedly poisoned his two sons in 1927; and being shot in 1968 by a still unknown assailant as she walked home from a train station—have become outstanding creative non-fiction books.

Bell’s 2001 The Poison Principle is a fascinating depiction of her efforts to finally unearth the truth of the Macbeth family legend. Her pharmaceutical background gives her a position of authority as she follows the trail of poison throughout history, but many of her musings and sideline stories are tedious and distract from the narrative. However, in Shot Bell is judicious with the background information and related stories that she includes. In fact, her interactions with other shooting survivors only add to the complexity of the book. Bell clearly has an angle from which to approach survivors considering her own history, but she portrays herself as more of a confidant than a reporter.

Wendy, who was shot herself and watched her husband die; Jean, who works for the RSPCA and “shoots the creatures she loves”; Lisa, a pharmacy colleague of Bell’s who had a gun put to her head in a supermarket robbery; Vietnam vets Billy and Mal; Bell’s own shooting at seventeen years old—each story collages together to provide readers with an insight into the world of survivors. The honesty with which all the interviewees speak is part of what makes Shot so powerful. Bell is also not afraid to share intimate details of her experiences, and readers are rewarded with candid but lyrical prose.

Bell’s retelling of her own shooting and the aftermath has a strong narrative. There are many questions to be answered and Bell endeavours to piece everything together in an engaging manner. One of the most remarkable aspects of Bell’s shooting is her strained relationship with the detective working on her case. She makes it clear that Detective Hamer investigated her shooting because every other detective at Blacktown Police Station was working on a Pitt Town murder case. This other incident is deftly weaved into the book towards the end, and again, a cruel irony strikes Bell. Her dealings with Hamer, his disbelief that she didn’t know who shot her combined with his somewhat farcical investigation of the case, meant that the shooter was never found and it is this that haunts Bell still.

It would be an oversimplification to state that it is the scientist in Bell that requires explanation and rationalisation, and there is much more to her journey. Bell admits that in the last thirty years she’s “done very little talking about being shot”, and she uses this book to expel much of the suppressed emotion that is tied up with that night in 1968. Her cathartic reliving of the incident is morbid and dramatic, but it also reassures all of us that have never experienced anything like it that we are the lucky ones. Shot is a fantastic exemplar of powerful creative non-fiction as it is not only a valuable resource, but a great read.

Bell has had impressive, and warranted, success with her two books. The Poison Principle won the 2002 NSW Premiers Award for Non-Fiction, and Shot has been nominated for One Book One Brisbane. There is certainly a reasonable argument for selecting a book that is relevant to Brisbane culture, but this doesn’t require it to be set in Brisbane, or written by a local author. Bell’s journey is a universal one, and Shot is as compelling as it is disturbing.

About the Reviewer: Trudi Plaschke completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Production last year. She is currently undertaking an Honours project at Queensland University of Technology.

Man Bites Dog
Adam Ford
Allen & Unwin, 2003, 203 pages
ISBN: 186508686X


Reviewed by Stuart Austin

The Bite Stuff

It’s always your first job that makes you realise your real worth. For Steven—the main character in Man Bites Dog, Adam Ford’s first book—it’s delivering mail (bills mainly, but the occasional postcard) by push bike to houses. And avoiding man-eating Dobermans. The dog, ‘Satan’, is determined to rip Steven apart, but is kept at bay by lobbed raw chicken breasts courtesy of his owner’s postie. This is reality for Steven. Sure, he is an artistic guy who writes comics and pines after poet chicks, but at the end of the day, this is his everyday life.

Dog dies. Steve is in the shit at work. Love develops. Mystery and detective roles unfold. Hilarity ensues.

The book is a fun, light read and the author has taken obvious inspiration from Brisbane author Nick Earls and Queenslander Andrew McGahan’s books Praise and 1988.

Man Bites Dog has all the essential ingredients for a piece of the 20-something-living-in-a-big-city-discovering-life genre pie:

1. Share household living:

"I do want a shower, but there’s the whole housemate thing to take into consideration. I don’t know if Emma lives alone or not, or if her housemates are awake and moving around at the moment, but I’d rather avoid bumping in to them right now. It’s always awkward being ‘the stranger that so-and-so brought home last night’. I don’t think I’m up for the polite nods and surreptitious exchange of knowing glances that come with the situation."(103)

2. Real characters that everyone seems to come across in their lives at this age (like, for example that group of UQ Arts students desperately attempting to out-do each other with academic takes on popular culture):

[Discussing the merits of the TV soap/drama The Secret Life of Us] ‘‘Bullshit. All the hype is this “never been done before, gritty realism, something for young people to identify with”, but all the characters they’ve written are vapid, self-absorbed dickheads’. ‘Well, at least all the vapid, self-absorbed dickheads will have something to identify with,’ says Emma’(123)

3. The question of what to do with your life:

‘‘So what do you do when you’re not delivering mail?’ ‘Just stuff, I guess. Go shopping, watch TV, go out drinking, that sort of thing. I draw comics sometimes.’’(90)

4. Flirtation and the need to impress potential partners:

“Oh my god, it’s the cute Stereolab T-Shirt girl… ‘You were wearing a Stereolab T-Shirt’, I offer lamely. She nods. ‘It was a nice T-Shirt.’ She smiles. I think I can see her eyes flicking around. I’m losing her.”(88)

5. Dealing with big-ego crap bosses with crap rules in a crap job:

“ ‘Sorry, baby, no crunchies for you. The big bad boss-man wouldn’t approve.’ It’s a shame, really. As if a handful of dry crunchies for a spunky pusscat could ever be a bad thing. Dave’s just an arsehole by making me stop carrying crunchies. But he’s the arsehole I work for.”(137)

6. Everyday life philosophy:

“There’s a silence and then the Telstra robot lady tells me to leave a message and then to press hash or hang up. I’ve never understood the point of the first option. I mean, you press hash and it ends the message, sure, but that just leaves you standing there with the phone in your hand. If you want to make another call you have to hang up anyway, so what’s the point of the hash-then-hang-up sequence? The illusion of choice, I suppose.” (62)

7. Sex:

“The sex last night was different again. We’re more familiar with each other’s bodies, but there’s still a lot to learn. It was even more lucid than the last time.” (102)

The book uses ‘fast-forward’ and ‘reverse’ symbols throughout the text (remember, those buttons on the VCRs of the days-of-old?) to demonstrate changes in time, of which there are many. Possibly too many. Although it’s a great technique that so many authors and filmmakers use, I didn’t really see the point of it in this story. The plot is not complex enough to justify all the jumping around in the story line. It would have read just as well if it were written in a purely linear style. I certainly wouldn’t have been less interested in the story if it was, put it that way.

Although the book is set in Melbourne and Ford is from Melbourne, the book has a distinctly Brisbane feel about it, possibly because it reminds me so much of Zig Zag Street and the characters remind me so much of UQ Arts students. I can see young Brisbane readers enjoying this book.

The characters are vivid and the plot is strong and well structured, but one thing I can’t help myself from pointing out is that phone numbers in Brisbane start with ’3’ not ‘9’, as is written in the book. It’s the small details of research errors that stick with you.

Man Bites Dog is a great observational humour that is perfect for the young Brisvegas person eating their way slowly through the 7-piece pie of life that so many of us have overindulged on. I look forward with bated raw-chicken-breast-and-cat-biscuit-crunchies breath to the time when Ford releases his next novel.

About the reviewer: Stuart Austin holds a graduate diploma from the Writing, Editing, and Publishing program at The University of Queensland.

Let me say, first off, that this book is such a crock – such a shameless, ridiculous, patently pathetic attempt to sell off second-hand, second-rate baloney conspiracy theories as truth – that it staggers belief any reader would take it seriously. Baigent and his pals use false rhetoric, false evidence and elaborate propaganda to mount an argument that, while vaguely thrilling and appealing in the way a cryptic crossword can be appealing on a Sunday morning, makes no more sense than other half-baked theories such as Intelligent Design or Flying Spaghetti Monsters.

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln
Arrow (Random House), 1996
ISBN 0099682419


Reviewed by Nike Bourke

I first read this book when I was a teenager; as gormless and eagerly naïve as any girl of my generation looking for reasons to doubt any of the tenets of my parent’s faith. I swallowed Baigent et al’s theory whole, at the time, ignoring the niggling doubts about the vague, circumspect, wishy-washy arguments. I had no tools, then with which to refute the emotionally-appealing high-dudgeon arguments.

I first read Holy Blood, Holy Grail at about the same time I read von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods – the late-60s conspiracy work, which argued – among other things – that alien gods had built the pyramids and genetically-engineered early humans. I should have read The Book of Mormon at the time, too, or perhaps Dianetics. All of these books – which purport to reveal ‘truths’ of one kind or another are really the mangled outpourings of confused, dishonest or cynical individuals. Sometimes all three.

Erich von Daniken, for example, the author of Chariots of the Gods first drew critical attention as a small boy, when he stole money from the Boy Scouts. By 1967 – the year before Chariots was released – he had been convicted of fraud, petty theft, large scale embezzlement, and tax evasion. Nevertheless, the great unwashed readership of the 70s lapped up his wacko theories. It may have been the drugs, though it seems not much has changed.

Holy Blood, Holy Grail has two main, interdependent theories that it propounds, claiming that the revelation of these ‘truths’ about human, and in particular Christian, history, have the potential to blow apart Christian faith and doctrine – to rattle the very foundations of civilisation (or at least that portion of it that has its cultural roots in Anglo-Europe). These two claims – bluntly summarised – are as follows:

1. That a secret society was founded in 1099 – the Prieure de Sion, or Priory of Sion, whose military arm was that other familiar bogey of conspiracy theorists – the Knights Templar. 2. That the Prieure de Sion are the guardians of the second secret – the marriage of Jesus Christ to Mary Magdalene, and the family tree that resulted from their union.

There are, of course, other assertions that follow from these two key ideas: that the Prieure was headed by a series of Grand Masters – including such eminent figures as da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo and Jean Cocteau – whose role it was to guard these secrets, though, for some unspecified reason, each of them chose to liberally scatter hints and clues about the secret they jealously guarded about the place. That Mary Magdalene (who is identified in Baigent with May of Bethany and with the Mary who washed Christ’s feet – the same conflation Mel Gibson makes in his film, The Passion of the Christ, though it is not a conflation made by Eastern Orthodox Christians, or Protestants) was the chief apostle of Christ and was intended by Jesus to be the head of his church after his crucifixion – and that, by extension, women, were intended by Jesus to form a more central, powerful role in the Christian faith from the beginning.

Baigent and his co-authors use as their main source in this book a dossier of papers held by the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris – the ‘dossiers secret’ as they call it. The dossier includes parchments and other documents pertaining to the Priory of Sion, the Merovingians and the family history – the bloodline – of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Unfortunately, what they fail to reveal is that these documents and their contents are an elaborate though not particularly well-constructed hoax by their principal source – Pierre Plantard. Like von Daniken, Plantard had a less-than-illustrious history of fraud and embezzlement, he was also the member of a number of extremist, ultra-conservative, anti-semitic, semi-mystical Catholic groups who sought the reunification of Europe of a divinely-ordained leader of the Roman Catholic Church – preferably himself - once it was revealed that he was not, as all evidence seemed to indicate, the humble son of a cook and a butler, but the true heir to the line of Christ and Mary Magdalene – and a descendant of the Merovingian line. Plantard founded – invented – the Prieure de Sion – on July 20, 1956. The offices of the Priory of Sion, and its dubious journal, Circuit, were within Plantard’s modest council flat.

With the assistance of an expert forger – Phillipe de Cherisey – Plantard and de Sede (in all - the three known members of this ‘ancient’ secret sect) fabricated a range of documents regarding the Priory of Sion. Among other wonderfully playful sleights of hand, Plantard later claimed that the documents had been discovered in a hollowed-out Visigoth pillar, which was later found to be solid. Cherisey later confessed on camera to the whole scheme, and displayed some of the faked documents.

Henry Lincoln, one of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, came across these documents during his research and convinced the BBC’s Chronicle to support him in making a series of documentaries. The documentaries generated intense interest in viewers, and brought Lincoln together with Baigent and Leigh to write the book. Whether Baigent and his co-authors were duped by Plantard and his elaborate falsifications at the time of the first printing of the book is a matter for speculation, what isn’t clear is why a new edition – the edition I read was published in 1996 – would not have incorporated or acknowledged such pertinent, if tragic, outcomes as the search of Plantard’s home in 1993, which revealed a plethora of forged documents, some of which proclaim that Plantard is the true kind of France. Under oath, Plantard admitted that everything had been a fabrication – the whole writhing, messy false history of the Priory and the secrets of the Magdalene's ancestors, his lineage and the 'secrets' the false sect he had said the Grand Masters were protecting. He was ordered to cease and desist all activities related to the Priory of Sion.

Instead of acknowledging these problems with their evidence chain, the 1996 edition of HBHG claims to include ‘explosive new discoveries’. In the introduction, the authors also claim that their work influenced such well-known figures as Martin Scorcese and Umberto Eco – claiming – quite astonishingly for this reader, at least – that Eco had “clearly discerned the extent to which our research had constituted a ‘semiotic exercise’ and … ingeniously adapted aspects of it to a fictitious ‘semiotic exercise’ of his own.” This has to be one of the most astonishing claims of the book – almost warranting the work ‘shocking’ being blazoned across the cover.

Baigent et al are not afraid of a little dubious research. Among the plethora of misleading scholarship they cite as ‘evidence’, is the use of the word ‘companion’ in the Gospel of Philip to describe Mary Magdalene. The gospel translation is cited as, “there were three who always walked with the Lord; Mary his mother and her sister and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion.” The authors insist that this use of the word ‘companion’ should be translated as ‘spouse’ from the Aramaic use of the term current at the time the gospel was written (this they cribbed from a Protestant theologian, William Phipps – who published his own religious potboiler in the early 1970s – Was Jesus Married?). This translation relies on the assumption that the Gospel of Philip was in fact written in Aramaic, when the Gospel in question was written in Coptic and the particular word in question is borrowed from the Greek – it does not mean ‘spouse’ or ‘lover’ or ‘wife’, but ‘companion’ (or, in the Australian vernacular, mate) – a word commonly used to refer to friends.

If you’re fond of conspiracy theories and confused argument, not afraid of a little dubious, arcane ‘research’ that cites forged documents as if they are real, relies heavily on secondary, innacurate translations of Gnostic and uncanonical texts, and uses as its main evidentiary source a man radically out of touch with reality, then make yourself a pot of tea and settle in for a tepid thrill-ride through religious history. In fact, if you’re a lover of conspiracy theories – a person, like me, who thinks it’s great fun, on a Sunday afternoon, to suspend one’s critical faculties in order to enter the wacky world where weak inductive reasoning replaces good scholarship, where the evidence of history, truth, is no obstacle to a good story – then this may well be the perfect book for you. And it’s certainly more well-written than its fictional love-child – The Da Vinci Code.

In fact, in the spirit of laughter and pseudo-enlightenment, I’ve put together a little reading list, just between you and I, of some of the great crackpot books to litter the second-hand bookshops of the twenty-first century. Enjoy! But please, for your sake and mine, don't take them as gospel. Though you may consider penning a poorly-written thriller based on one or two, even a lucractive movie deal with Ron Howard or Tom Cruise.

L. Ron Hubbard. Dianetics
Erich von Daniken. Chariots of the Gods
Michael Baigent. The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History
Baigent and Leigh. The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception
Immanuel Velikovsky. World in Collision
Anatoly T Fomenko. History: Fiction or Science Chronology 1 & 2
Richard Harwood. Did Six Million Really Die?
Gavin Menzies. 1421: The Year China Discovered The World
Heribert Illig’s Phantom Time Hypothesis (not in English, but you can google it!)

Due Preparations for the Plague
Janette Turner Hospital
Fourth Estate, 2003, 390 pages
ISBN: 0732277302

Reviewed by Drew Perry

The best laid plans…

In the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in September 2001, the United States of America instituted the (so-called) Patriot Act. This disturbing piece of legislation prescribes, as an antidote to terrorism, the sort of paranoiac vigilance that could ultimately erode the very freedoms and civil liberties America is supposedly waging its travelling war show to preserve. Phone taps, access to library borrowing records, searches without warrants, toll-free hotlines for patriotic citizens to anonymously inform on their neighbours, friends, and family, ethnically-biased terrorist profiling, armed air marshals patrolling the skies, retina scan bio-passports, and fingerprint records of foreign nationals are just some of the draconian protocols implicit in the fine-print of Homeland Security. Not to mention Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay: the American prisoner-of-war camp that’s become, through sheer force of rhetoric, not a prisoner-of-war camp. On the battlefield of semantics, detainees have been re-defined as foreign combatants – a technical nuance, or convenient euphemism, that permits America, a primary signatory to the Geneva Convention, to argue that in this war, the War on Terror, the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply.

Billions of dollars are being expended in every corner of the planet to increase the power and extend the reach of the free world’s intelligence communities. Meanwhile, third world poverty and unemployment, medical aid and pandemic illness, global warming, drought, and famine have all been eclipsed as real and urgent issues by the idée fixe of the War on Terror that America has exported to the world. In the current Realpolitik, international laws have been transgressed, human rights have been abused, and intelligence agencies have become effectively unaccountable for the covert methods they employ. In our zeal to best the enemy, to combat an evil that, we’re told, is everywhere, we have paid for our security in the currency of vigilantism and fear.

It’s this culture of twinned aggression and anxiety, this sustained state of Amber Alert, this obsessive preoccupation with trying to plan for every eventuality to outmanoeuvre terrorism, to outmanoeuvre danger, to outmanoeuvre Death itself, no matter what the human, ethical, and material costs, that constitutes the underlying themes of Janette Turner Hospital’s latest literary work. Although practically completed before the events of September 11 2001 transpired, the novel’s subject matter—the liability of governments for the wars they wage and the policies they sanction, the expendability of human collateral in the endgame psychology of true believers and political ideologues, and the failures of a compliant and uncritical mass media to question the claims and motives of their governments—seems uncannily prescient in this post 9/11 world of pre-emptive strikes, Operation: Shock and Awe, and nationalistic Fox News blitzkriegs.

The novel chronicles the 1987 hijacking of Air France Flight 64. For four days the passengers of the Paris-New York flight are held hostage by terrorists. Then, in Germany for refuelling, the children onboard are set free. Later, after negotiations with the terrorists break down, and their political demands are not met, the hijacking ends in a fiery explosion on the tarmac, killing everyone on board the plane. Glued to the television coverage after their release, the children witness the terrible climax, see their parents dying live on air. Years later, the child survivors of the hijacking, now grown to adulthood, remain in touch, both in person and via a website where conspiracy theories and rumours vie with wild conjecture and historical fact to sustain an interest in the fate of Air France Flight 64. The narrative is focalised through two characters whose lives are linked by the events: Samantha Raleigh, one of the child survivors who is obsessed with the hijacking, and Lowell Hawthorne, who lost his mother on the flight and whose recurring trauma of her death has contributed to the breakdown of his marriage. Under the guise of her senior thesis, Samantha requests access to previously classified information about the hijacking, and discovers strange coincidental connections between many of the passengers and evidence of a government conspiracy and subsequent cover-up of a covert U.S. intelligence operation. As she draws Lowell into her search for the truth, it becomes both a psychological thriller about excavating the events of the past while evading the unseen forces that try to stop them, and an existential thriller about how discovering the truth of the past dramatically alters Samantha’s and Lowell’s comprehension of their own identities.

The title, Due Preparations for the Plague, derives from a non-fiction book of the same name written in the 18th century by Daniel Defoe, who was 5 years old when the bubonic plague struck London with devastating effect. The experience of seeing the bodies of the infected being piled up in the streets, and the nightmarish image of the dead being hauled out of windows and collected by carts at night profoundly haunted the author, as one might imagine, for all his adult life. He remained obsessed with the fear that the plague would one day return to England’s shores. When the plague did break out again, in Marseilles in 1722, he was so afraid of the consequences that he was compelled to write a sort of plague survival manual: Due Preparations for the Plague. As Turner Hospital observes, Defoe’s book was “a kind of Red Alert of the kind now issued by the Department for Homeland Security”.

The image of The Plague as a metaphor for some other insidious social evil has, of course, a rich pedigree in literature. Camus, for example, used the plague as the metaphor for the rise of Nazism and Hitler’s occupation of France in his allegorical The Plague, which chronicled the demise of the hapless citizens of Oran. The plague in Turner Hospital’s novel is the threat of unseen terrorist attack, but also whatever unseen dangers haunt an individual’s imagination. Ultimately, the inevitable and unavoidable ‘plague’ is the ultimate finality of death itself. The novel begs the question: How do we ready ourselves for what might happen tomorrow? What possible precautions can be made?

For Samantha, whose memory of the hijacking and her own childhood is pieced together from the mediated evidence of other peoples’ memories, newspaper clippings, and video footage of herself and her parents, the due preparations are the obsessive unearthing of the truth of the past, of what really happened, and thus discovering who she really is. It is this obsession with the hijacking that gives her life its only structure. For the intelligence community, the due preparations are the preoccupation with planning for every enemy eventuality. It’s the endgame psychology of beating the opponent at any cost – of accepting human collateral, of constant planning and strategising, of think-tanks and international summits, of legislation rushed through at midnight. It’s the pathological obsession with preserving the world order – not necessarily the most ethical world order, just whichever world order has the greatest likelihood of sustaining global stability. For the victims of the hijacking, the due preparations are their final reconciliations with death itself: the confessions, the affirmations of love, the self-defining traits that emerge in the final moments of life as their final legacy to the world.

Elegantly written and artfully structured, with literary and historical allusions seeded throughout, this is a masterful work that is both gripping as a thriller and thought-provoking and moving as a testament of our times. This is a worthy nomination for the One Book One Brisbane title – not only because of the local connections of this now internationally acclaimed author, but also because the subject matter is as relevant to urban Brisbane as it is to any city of the world. The paranoia of terrorist attack is now common human ground. Our geographical isolation no longer preserves us. Our alliance with America weds us to the politics of the globe and, for better or for worse, it’s these choices and their consequences, these ‘preparations’ that define us.

About the reviewer: Drew Perry writes out of the Queensland University of Technology.

The Twelfth of Never
Louis Nowra
Picador, 2000, 337 pages
ISBN: 0330362380

Reviewed by Megan Cuthbert

Nowra’s Never

Louis Nowra is obsessed with December twelfth. Not only is it the day he was born, it also marks the day when, five years previous to his birth, his mother killed her father.

This is the introduction to Australian playwright, Louis Nowra’s memoir, The Twelfth of Never; it certainly incites curiosity. His story begins with the mystery surrounding this incident, as Nowra knows little about the event himself; despite his mother’s promise to reveal all by his twenty-first birthday, Nowra doesn’t find out until her death, and we, the readers, don’t find out until the end of the book. What follows from this initial mystery is an in-depth account of Louis Nowra’s early life, divided into two parts. The first deals with his early childhood, spent in the uniform blocks of small town Fawkner. The second half deals with his move while still a teenager to the much leafier suburb of Macleod, his life after he moves out, and continues until the realisation of his career and the settled happiness of his adulthood. Roughly covering twenty-five years, Nowra is frank and brutally honest when discussing such topics as his frail and volatile relationship with his mother, his disenchantment with his life and experimentation with drugs, and the never-ending puzzlement over his sexuality. Nowra deftly explores all these subjects, but manages to retain a light-hearted, entertaining tone.

The title of the novel comes from the song of the same name, which in turn becomes a motif in Nowra’s novel. As a child, he believed it to be song of sadness, and only later does he realise that it is a song of promise and constancy. Nowra’s memoir is likewise ambiguous; what could sometimes be considered a life of sadness and uncertainty also becomes life with a purpose and happiness—it’s all in how you read it.

What sits uneasily with this book is the title of ‘memoir’. Generally the term refers to a section of life surrounding a significant event. It can be assumed Nowra intended for his mother’s shooting of her father and the subsequent mystery to be the main narrative thread. However the book comes across more as an autobiography of his early years. While his mother naturally affected his life, the effect of the actual killing is minimal, and therefore fails to draw the narrative together. Nowra in effect lures the reader in under false pretences, which can be very dangerous.

It was interesting seeing how Nowra, best known for his plays, would fare with this new genre. Although his play Summer of the Aliens is semi-autobiographical, the semi should be stressed. Some people and events from his play are recognisable in his memoir, but they are mainly peripheral in his life, and so the essence of Nowra’s real life can only be found in his memoir. Still, what comes across in the novel is his extensive experience as a playwright. Memoirs are incredibly difficult to succeed at—requiring either an exciting life or good writing—and I think Nowra’s experience helps give relevance to what could be an otherwise commonplace life story.

He has a concise manner of writing, not given to great detail. The narrative is key to Nowra’s writing, and he manages to be succinct, but still expressive. The settings of the novel are extremely vivid—be it the desolate, monotonous fields and blocks of Fawkner, or the vibrant grounds of their house and the surrounding insane asylum in Macleod. It is clear the effect these landscapes had on Nowra—especially Fawkner, which played such an important role in his Summer of the Aliens.

It is also interesting to note how the playwright approaches structure. Each chapter within the novel is a story unto itself, as if Nowra has attempted to find meaning within each ‘scene’ of his life. Still, this self-containment adds to the novel, creating a story-telling atmosphere. It also helps break down the story, given the scope of Nowra’s 25-year memoir.

Nowra also has a gift with his characters. His life has been littered with the memorable—his slowly unwinding Grandmother who burns his clothes and cooks weeds for dinner, or his emotionally distant father whose taps indicate the wandering of his mind—all of them so unique and unforgettable that I continue to think of them as characters. Like his own grandfather, the pub owner who watched his eccentric patrons from afar, taking delight in the oddities of humankind, Nowra likewise excels at sitting back and observing the characters of his life.

His mother is incredibly complex and interesting, and despite best efforts, Nowra never manages to truly capture her. Given their troubled relationship, it is understandable—his inability to understand this domineering figure in his life illustrates the nature of his conflicting feelings towards his mother.

Nowra, as a character himself, is also occasionally fuzzy. While excellent at observing and drawing the other characters, it appears that Nowra is more comfortable standing outside of the story, perhaps why Nowra excels at writing plays.

It was interesting to see that Nowra’s memoir was short listed for the 2005 One Book One Brisbane. The memoir has nothing to do with Brisbane; it doesn’t even take place in Queensland. Still, it is the story of a boy growing up in Australia. But what’s most interesting about the book is that it’s not even that specific—as a girl who grew up halfway around the world, it was still an interesting and relevant read. Nowra’s book deals with the universal problems of growing up, be it parental relationships, problems with school, or lack of direction, the book is universally relatable. So if One Book One Brisbane is meant to unite the city through reading of literature especially pertinent to this city, than Twelfth of Never isn’t the book to choose. But, if One Book One Brisbane is meant to unite people through reading about universal themes, than by all means, let the Twelfth of Never be this year’s choice.

About the reviewer: Megan Cuthbert is completing a Bachelor of Arts degree in literary and cultural studies and film studies with a minor in creative writing at the Queensland University of Technology.