This will hurt me...

  Heading home. Bruny Island to Kettering on the ferry, June 2021. Rivers by Michael Farris Smith  A well-put together dystopian novel that resists many of the usual conventions, I enjoyed  Rivers  far more than is surely healthy. Set in an apocalyptic future where the climate has irrevocably changed, making the southeast part of the North American continent virtually unlivable. There are echoes of Cormac McCarthy's  The Road  here. Yet, while suitably bleak, the vibe is not quite as riven with utter hopelessness as that book. Indeed, we get a closer look at some of the grifters and miscreants, and the villains of the piece are more human than the spectres that haunt that book. In Cohen, we have a suitably complex central character equally haunted by the past and the future. A capable man, I appreciated that the ordinariness that he brings to the piece. Unfortunately, too often, the superhuman hero (or indeed villain) spoils this kind of book. In grounding ...

  Being stalked by a pademelon. Pilchers Hill, Geilston Bay. March 2021. A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet After a slow start, I found myself relaxing into this rather beguiling and disturbing tale. It moves at a languid pace and sleepwalks into an ever-growing disaster. Like the collective elders in the book, it progresses as if in an alcohol or drug-induced fog. As the name suggests, there's some heavily allegorical work driving the narrative as we have echoes of Biblical text through an increasingly dystopic scenario. While the intergenerational tensions are played in a rather heavy-handed way, the global inaction on climate change does render the recourse to heavy caricature for the 'adults' and the decision to make the children and young people preternaturally wise and capable in the novel understandable. As ever, I find the American fixation on the upper and middle-class ennui and the absence of any poor or diverse voices depressing, but somehow it seems appropr...