This will hurt me...

Beach house, Cloudy Bay, Bruny Island. June 2021. Milkman by Anna Burns Anna Burns has pulled off a stunning achievement here. The novel emerges inside the head as (almost) a single stream of consciousness. It is equal parts funny, shocking, tender and intense. Weaving a tale of personal agency in a complex political and social dynamic - Northern Ireland during the Troubles -  Milkman  is mightily effective. I suspect that few readers will sit on the fence with this one, either loving or loathing it. Count me among the former. I enjoy the 'all-in' nature of the narrative voice, and if you're comfortable with the 'norn iron' voice in your head, it works beautifully. Perhaps I'm biased, as the repetition of skimming over events with different lenses and the constant, stringent internal monologue, enjoyment of running and shame (!) of reading while walking resonated with me. All this allows Burns to apply a persuasive critique of sectarianism, conformity, violence,...

  Night-time driving. Midway Point, Tasmania. May 2021. The Famished Road by Ben Okri There is certainly some lovely writing in Ben Okri's  The Famished Road . Lovely writing that delivers many exotic and imaginative stories. Some of these stories are rooted in the certainty of the real world. Others exist on another otherworldly plane. It's just that there is so much of it. So many words, so many deviations, departures and detours from the story and the point that I do believe that you could skip three hundred pages and you wouldn't really notice. The entire novel exists in a kind of fugue state with characters cycling in and out of death and sleep and work and life and reality and unreality that the reader themselves surely also drifts in and out of consciousness (this reader felt like he did). I suspect that this maddening aspect of the tale is itself for life in Africa, so perhaps the point is well made. However, I am not sure that 600-odd pages are required to make it...

Looking down over Hobart, kunanyi/ Mt Wellington. May 2021. The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan As I continue to haphazardly wind my way through Richard Flanagan's oeuvre, I turn towards his Booker Prize-winning  The Narrow Road to the Deep North . A book of many distinct parts, I felt the standout section was Book Three, detailing life in the Japanese prisoner of war camps with the Sisyphean task of building a railway in the jungle with no food, equipment or (for many) the hope of an ending. Other elements - mainly those centring the love affair between Dorrigo Evans and Amy - I found overly sentimental and unconvincing. Given the internal struggle within Dorrigo, his outward bravery, and generosity juxtaposed with a cold and clinical relationship with his wife and children, the constant return to Amy felt a little forced and false. I could have also done without the twist and reveal of the connection between Dorrigo and poor old Darky Gardiner towards the end. ...

  Who needs water parks? Josephine Falls, Far North Queensland. April 2021. The Gathering by Anne Enright I am not certain just how many Irish novels drenched in repression, guilt, shame and acerbity the world needs. How many tales of too many children, of too much drink, of sexual dysfunction, abuse and misuse before we give up on the whole island of Ireland and move on and leave them to it? Anne Enright writes well, but ultimately this tale of misery and woe, fractured families and nervous breakdown is too familiar by half. The narrative jumps all over the show, moving forwards and backwards in time as the shock of grief at the suicide of a sibling jolts our narrator out of her tepid middle-class existence back towards a troubled past. Moving as it is, the path is well-trodden to the point of banality. Yes, it is sad. Yes, it is tragic. But my word, it is misery piled upon misery that is all just oh so tedious. So if interminable and meandering descriptions of pale/ flabby/ sinew...

Kayakers on the Derwent, Kunanyi in the background. Little Howrah Beach, February 2021. The Discomfort of Evening   by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld This novel is tough going. Rijneveld manages to create a world that is both cold and bleak. The book is dominated by grief, the effect of which is magnified by the setting among an isolated pious Dutch reformist family out on a farm, and the story begins with the death of the oldest son. Left behind are a domineering father, a silent and withdrawn mother, an increasingly troubled brother, our narrator - the second-youngest girl Jas, confused and ridden by guilt - and the bewildered youngest girl. As the family retreats into themselves, the familial bond disintegrates along with the household's mental health, in which each member falls into a deep depression, albeit in ways that manifest quite differently for each. It's grim and disturbing stuff. The insularity and rigidity of the religious sect compound the harm and precludes any hope of...