This will hurt me...

Experiments with light # 27. Geilston Bay, March 2013. F lashforward by Robert J. Sawyer Look, this isn’t a well-written book. I shall list some of the challenges: leaden characters; pedestrian dialogue; impenetrable digressions on the nature of physics; and an approach to female characters and their motivations that make me wonder if the author has ever spoken to a woman. It is a testament to the appeal of that central narrative premise that I enjoyed it so much. That premise? Picture this: a pair of brilliant physicists working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, utilising the world’s largest particle physics laboratory in the endeavour to isolate the Higgs boson elementary particle (at least, I think that’s what they were trying to do, I forget). Anyway, at the very moment that they fire up the Large Hadron Collider to smash that boson, everything stops. For the next two minutes and seventeen seconds, every person on Earth blacks out. Cars and...

Hard at work. Geilston Bay, December 2020. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows After a run of books focused on a grave and wrought subject matter, this one was a blessed relief. Sure, it contains its own fair share of tragedy and anguish, but at its heart lay an optimism and romance that always shines through. The classic epistolary novel, it weaves its tale through the many voices found in the correspondence. It runs chronologically, and the authors use the medium effectively to establish time, place and a colourful cast of characters. The cynical may choose to raise an eyebrow as to the relative ease with which these relationships develop across class, gender and age lines. Still, I say that this is testament to the power that comes with the love of reading and the magic of books, which forms the whole piece. I enjoyed it immensely and found its charm and sincerity far outweighed any concerns over ‘authentic voice’ or plausib...

  An experiment in light. Hobart, December 2020. Dawn by Elie Wiesel . A brief meditation on the nature of 'justice' and 'vengeance',  Dawn  is Wiesel’s attempt to reconcile how a Holocaust survivor might decide to spend the rest of his life. Unlike Wiesel, the protagonist Elisha joins the paramilitary forces committed to securing an independent state if Israel from British colonial control. The novella's plot is straightforward: 18-year-old Elisha will shoot a British officer at dawn, in retribution for the British execution of a colleague. From here, we explore the inner tumult that this task has produced. This is an oddly quiet book. Although set in the immediate post-WWII period (1948), it was published in the shadow of the Eichmann trial of 1961. At its heart, it gives some sense of the brutal logic that Israel uses to maintain their repression of the Palestinian people (who are noticeably absent in the text). Our protagonist is quite aware that what he is aske...

The big blue sea, Peron Dunes, St Helens, Tasmania. January 2019. Flames by Robbie Arnott There is a halfway-decent book in this book. Unfortunately, that book is spoiled by some pedestrian drivel that somehow made the final copy. I scratch my head at how an editor has allowed some of this to make the final copy. I must confess that I find magical realism approaches more tiresome than playful, but I am always prepared to give an author some license to tell their story. Alas, amidst some beautiful writing, there is a lot of guff here. Elements of the book resemble a range of exercises assigned to young writers cobbled together to make a coherent whole. I shall start with the  bad . The chapter  Fur  – an epistolary exchange of letters – is dominated by the exhausting voice of an idiosyncratic and boorish artisan coffin maker. It reads like the kind of Year 12 creative writing piece that you can get away with when training your muscles, but you’d never publish. It does litt...

  Life goes by, Brick Lane, Tower Hamlets, London. April 2018. White Teeth by Zadie Smith White Teeth  is one of those books I have meant to read for the past twenty years. Dickensian in scope, the mass of the novel seems like one very long series of digressions. Stories lead to sub-stories, which themselves sprout a seemingly infinite series of detours that – while consistent with the overarching theme of the perpetual motion of history and the lives lived within – occasional threatened to spin out of control. Despite the sprawling narratives, Smith somehow manages to hold it all together. I feared that the entire project had run off the rails during the final chapters, as the lengthy and complicated inventory of colourful characters and plotlines seemed fit to burst. While I might quibble with a few dead ends for our cast (what becomes of the lesser Chalfens? Is that it for Hortense and Ryan?), she somehow manages to stick the landing with satisfaction. This is a f...