Sam Lipsyte is one of those authors you discover late and immediately commence locating his entire catalogue. On the basis of his fourth novel, The Ask, he is a virtuoso stylist, capable of funny and sad and serious, often on the same page. His language is worth savouring for itself.
Milo Burke, the hero of The Ask, has just been sacked from a New York university for insulting a potential charitable donor. That’s Milo’s job, to prospect for ‘asks’ from the rich with ‘gives’. An abandoned artistic career, looming mortgage default, a professional wife who is distant, a pre-school son . . . Milo’s life is spiralling into disaster. And then an old school pal surfaces from the past to request Milo as the intermediary for a huge university ‘give’. Salvation beckons; or, as Milo soon suspects, maybe not. Lipsyte has full command: his New York comes alive under his penmanship, he savages his characters yet somehow loves them, and the rollicking plot careens towards minor-key catastrophe. I laughed even as I longed for Milo’s salvation. And Lipsyte’s coruscating, gymnastic style rewards on each and every page.
Brilliant, revelatory up-to-the-minute fiction. 4 stars.
Several friends have been at me for ages to watch Last Ride, the road movie of a violent father fleeing across the vast expanse of Australia with his ten-year-old son, but somehow I’ve felt the need to be in a certain mood to finally rent the DVD. (Far better would have been to see it on its release but its local season was unforgivably short and I missed it.) Well, all the plaudits are spot on. The script, by Mac Gudgeon, is paced to perfection from the opening frame, and Glendyn Ivin’s direction wonderfully combines action, judicious flashback and sweeping cinematography. Tom Harding plays the ardent, confused little boy with great maturity, but it’s Hugo Weaving’s performance that lifts Last Ride from just another edgy Australian drama to something special. His portrayal of a tattooed loser literally unable to bring up his son with wisdom or compassion, but suffused with love for the boy, is heartbreaking. I found the build-up of tension, towards what we always sense will be a harsh ending, a wrenching experience, but somehow the movie manages to infuse the finale with the hope of the young.
Stark, brilliant and worthy of an alt-Oscar. 4 stars.
I’m in a backlash frame of mind, keen after focusing on the high and mighty to indulge in my great genre loves, crime and sci-fi. Luckily the science fiction scene keeps throwing up wonderments to latch onto. None speaks louder than Christopher Nolan’s over-the-top futuristic thriller Inception. What a brilliant concept, straight from the pen of Philip K. Dick! Dom Cobb (intensely rendered by Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor I’m belatedly coming to admire) is a dream thief, an expert at invading the dreams of his targets in order to extract secrets useful in the waking world. But his past holds a consuming tragedy and when a tycoon challenges him to go one step further with dream manipulation, Dom assembles a multi-talented team (rather like a Mission Impossible band, with some excellent supporting acting performances) to construct a dream within a dream within a dream within . . . you get the drift – a plot conceit that could have flopped irretrievably within minutes. Yet Inception pulls it off, blasting the viewer from a stunning opening scene right through its two and a half hours of length. A massively heavy-handed music score, relentless shoot-em-up scenes, brain-twisting plot complexity . . . all these could have derailed the film but instead add to its surreal, clunky grandeur. I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face, so absorbed was I in the sumptuous otherworld I was thrust into.
Like Avatar, Inception is grand sci-fi moviemaking at its best: unbridled Wagnerian pomp that somehow works magically. 4 stars.
I’ve always found the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction a reliable marker of top quality, indeed I can’t recall the last winner that disappointed me. So it pains me to report that this year’s winner, Tinkers by Paul Harding, is ambitious and brimming with literary brio, but ultimately a rather ordinary read. Anchored by the last days of a clock repairer, dying with his children and grandchildren around him, this slim volume oscillates between feverish dementia, minutely detailed memories, and the story of the dying man’s father, who travelled the countryside in his tinker’s cart and suffered epileptic fits of frightening force. With the courage of Faulkner, Harding wheels through different times, tenses and writing modes, digressing at will and indulging in brilliant set pieces of description. The writing manages to impress and puzzle at the same time, a judgement that echoes my overall reading experience. At times I was bedazzled, some sections were hypnotically brilliant, and then disorientation or boredom set in. A tour de force that never quite makes it, Tinkersfails to cohere as a complete narrative.
Impressive but dissipated. 2½ stars.
Paul Mees, passionate campaigner for public transport and researcher into transport planning, is back with his most cogent, convincing work yet, Public Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age. After being sacked by Melbourne University for criticizing Victoria’s archaic, petrol-focused transport bureaucracy, Mees has found a home at RMIT, and a real sense of peace pervades this stately analysis. Mees argues for rational policymaking geared towards what we meekly term sustainability, but which in its essence entails weaning communities off cars and replacing them with lower-carbon alternatives: train, tram, bus and foot. Special scorn is heaped upon those who claim Melbourne is too decentralized to effectively and efficiently cover with public transport; Mees provides counterexamples from diverse places such as Switzerland, Brazil and Canada. The use of faulty statistics is rife in transport planning and Mees punctures a number of canards. The chapters describing beacons of hope – cities like Toronto and Vancouver – are inspirational. Skilfully paced, well written, a judicious mix of sobriety and passion, Public Transport for Suburbia is a delight to read.
Paul Mees should be knighted and Public Transport for Suburbia is his best book yet. 3½ stars.
Who would have thought the old-style puzzler mystery is still alive in the days of CSI and serial killers and jaundiced PIs? Freeze Frame by Peter May is just that. The fourth in a destined-for-long-life series featuring Enzo McLeod, a forensic analyst tackling cold cases from the files of a journalist, Freeze Frame is written in the civilized and clear old-fashioned style of Ellery Queen, ribbed with modern sexual frankness. In this outing, Enzo journeys to a small island off the coast of Brittany to tackle the two-decades-old murder of an entomologist. The victim left behind a cryptic message suggesting his still unaltered study contains clues, and when Enzo starts fossicking for clues, laid out like an Agatha Christie puzzler, violence emerges again. The author’s plotting and pace are first rate, and all the characters, major or bit part, leap from the page. If the unravelling of clues has an air of artificiality, well, that’s the nature of puzzler mysteries, and the climax, while not a complete surprise, is suitably startling. I read the entire book in one sitting, as all good puzzlers deserve.
An intriguing, enjoyable read. 3 stars.
Predators opens with a rush: battle-hardened men and women plummeting towards ground, desperately opening parachutes, snatched from separate lives across the globe. The underlying sci-fi concept – of warriors teleported to become the sport on an alien game reserve – is as old (and, I must say, as satisfying) as sci-fi itself. I haven’t seen the other instalments of what has become the ‘predator’ franchise, not even the original Arnie version, so I cannot compare, but this instalment is simultaneously banal and shallow, kinetic and exciting. Scenes of crap characterisation (Adrian Brody is formulaic as the head hero, Laurence Fishburne does a fine cameo, and the other actors are just passable), lame plotting, and ridiculous alien gore alternate with pell-mell action scenes (director Nimród Antal sure knows how to choreograph battles) evocative filming. In short Predators, is almost as bad as, but ultimately better than, the run-of-the-mill sci-fi thriller.
Not outstanding but a rousing refuge from D&M (‘deep and meaningful’). 2½ stars.
Beautiful Malice by debut novelist Rebecca James has arrived with an almighty marketing splash, one alas undeserved. Told in the first person and up close, it’s the tale of Katherine, a seventeen-year-old Sydney girl with a crippling secret, who is thrilled to be befriended by glamorous Alice. As the relationship builds, a dark undercurrent emerges and the plot wiggles about with the introduction of boyfriends and other friends. There is plenty to admire in the setup of Beautiful Malice and Katherine is a likeable if unsubtle protagonist.
But from the outset this novel under delivers. The storyline limps along, with the expected ‘plot twists’ either foreshadowed or diluted. The writing style is simple and naive, which is quite in line with our heroine and could, in the hands of artful author, have worked really well. Instead, the flat prose irked me to the point of frustration. There is little sense of location, much of the tale being told via clunky dialogue or slow-witted inner thoughts. To anyone who regularly reads the mystery genre, the underlying puzzle, the obligatory ‘shock horror twist’ and the climax are all ho-hum.
Perhaps there is a market for Beautiful Malice in what I imagine to be the Barbara Taylor Bradford segment but it won’t offer any competition to the better books of 2010. 1 star.
Edward Rogers is an oddly positioned singer-songwriter of a type only Britain can produce. On Sparkle Lane, his third album, he pens imaginative, well-arranged songs that straddle folk-rock, Kinks-style pop and Bowie-style glam. One minute the listener is channelling Mott the Hoople in the wonderful title track, the next brings rolling modern folk like the pointed ‘Land of the Free’. Rogers’ vocal style varies with the songs, which is interesting in an era when distinctive voices reign. The arrangements are energetic and Rogers’ lyrics, of Costello ilk, are delightful. Additional highlights include the gentle singalong ‘Little Angel’ and the reflective ‘Last of the Artful Dodgers’.
Distinctive, mildly oddball Brit singer-songwriter magic. 3 stars.
What a strange, unlovely book Siberian Education: Family, Honour, and Tattoos: An Extraordinary Underworld Life is. A memoir by Nicolai Lilin of his early and teen years, during the 1980s and 1990s, in a criminal community of displaced Siberians in Transnistria (a lawless semi nation within Moldova). There is much to find fascinating in the earnest depiction of a world possessing a weird moral compass. Violence occurs almost randomly, yet is codified in hatred of police and other gangs. Endless rituals, most of them seemingly nonsensical, prescribe daily life. Guns are revered alongside religious icons. Comradeship between gang members enriches life, yet most of life is fighting and prison. Everyone is brutal and homophobic. Lilin learns to be a tattooist and the most interesting section of the book describes how Siberian tattoos can be read like a book of a person’s life.
All of which suggests an intriguing read, especially for anyone interested in true crime or the nature of evil. Yet Siberian Education fails badly at all levels of narrative craft. It is bookended by two horrific sections describing post-teen life in the Russian army, killing people in Chechnya, a structure that offers no overarching tension. Sections read like shaggy dog stories, endlessly discursive. The only three abiding characters – the author, his simpleton friend and an elderly patriarch – remain cryptic. No moral lessons are learnt or even resisted – the world is described flatly, as if via a long interview. A longish, harrowing section on prison life is particularly difficult to even read. Lilin’s ‘tell it like it is’ prose is boring. Siberian Education ends up as a turgid, unpleasant slog.
Possibly valuable as a record of a bizarre and morally dysfunctional society, Siberian Education offers very little indeed to the general reader. 2 stars.