Battlelines, by Tony Abbott

This book purports to provide future intellectual and policy directions for conservative politics, or more to the point, future direction for the Liberal Party. I thought the book would have more ideas and an overall modern conservative program. Afterall, the blurb on the back of the book asks ‘What’s next for the conservative side of politics’.

If that’s the kind of book you’re looking for, this is a pretty potted effort. It’s more of a mixed bag of personal history, restrained opinion, first hand ministerial experience and a list of prescriptions to improve government bureaucracy. The centrepiece of the book is a call to, if not abolish the states, at least reduce their power. The appendix of Battlelines contains a proposed bill to allow more Commonwealth power in areas of shared responsibility with the states.

This may strike the reader as ironic, seeing Abbott is such a staunch Monarchist. One of his main criticisms of becoming a republic is that it would give too much power to a newly elected president, especially if we had a directly elected model. (I agree with this, by the way.) Yet he wants to concentrate more power in Canberra.

Tony Abbott can seem unusually modern at times. For example, I was surprised to read this rather extraordinary line:

"In politics, what’s not reported might as well not have happened."

Then again, it may explain why he seems to constantly pop up for television interviews.

Much of Battlelines reads like a long love letter to John Howard. Abbott goes over much of the Howard government’s achievements, and unequivocally thinks John Howard the exemplary style in leadership. (How interesting to contrast this against Peter Costello’s memoirs, where Howard is a shadowy, ill defined figure.) You get the impression that Howard is a bit of a father figure to Abbott. What else can explain this unblinking devotion?

There is much that is salutary in Abbott’s effort to write this book, but by the time I got to the end I realised why I could only go so far with the author. Abbott writes in a nice plain style, and his thinking comes across as neatly organised, yet every now and again there is a surliness in the writing. It’s subtle and passes you by, but sometimes its very weirdness sticks out and cries for attention.

For example, in a section where Abbott suggests that maybe a different category of marriage should be envisioned, one with a no-divorce option, the author writes:

"Certainly, if the law is to establish a new type of legally recognised relationship for gay couples, it might also manage to enshrine once more, for those who want it, a type of marriage that approximates to the Christian ideal."

Does he really see gay marriage as being a precursor to ‘Christian ideal’ marriage, a ‘death-til-us-part’ marriage? No, he’s just having a subtle back-hander at gay marriage advocates.

Then there are silly sub headings like ‘Environmentalism might hurt the environment’. I mean, this kind of irony is so lame and we know what the subtext of it is: environmentalists are a bunch of economic vandals who don’t have a clue about what they’re doing. Why not just come out and say it rather than sulking?

Another sub heading is called ‘Kings in Their Own Cars’, and pursues a defence of car drivers against any type of critic, legitimate or not: ‘For too long, policy makers have ranked motorists just above heavy drinkers or smokers as social pariahs.’ Really? Abbott fails to discuss the volatility of oil prices, time wasted in traffic congestion and the car fumes we all now breathe. Not to metion the heath impacts of taking in so many toxins along with our oxygen. No, because car drivers are absolute monarchs. It seems Abbott wants to keep car drivers wrapped up in cotton wool about the negative aspects of our car culture.

The impression I get at the end of this book is of a man with nowhere to go intellectually or ideologically, and he’s angry about his limited options. The Postscript is called "Days from Hell". He airs a few grievances over the fact that his colleagues did not think he would be suitable as a leader for the Liberal Party.

"Six years’ hard work in parliament as Leader of the House of Representatives, nine years as a minister managing fraught portfolios, and regular intellectual advocacy on behalf of a sometimes rhetorically challenged government seemed to count for little or nothing."

It seems to me Tony Abbott is in a world he can’t possibly change (think green politics, Aboriginal rights, feminism, gay rights). He wishes it wasn’t that way, and he would like to be able to think he could wish upon a star and these political and cultural realities would vanish. His problem is to fuse his antipathies to gay rights, environmentalism, feminism etc. with his own cultural agenda. And it seems he can’t possibly do it. He has to be civil about gay rights and the environment, paying a polite kind of lip service. He may tolerate these movements, but perhaps secretly finds them intolerable.

Indeed, I sense that his default position, going by the below quote, would be that of a morals campaigner. Here’s a line from the Days From Hell postscript:

"As an ambitious politician, I had never had the slightest intention of becoming a morals campaigner."

I’d be more interested to see Tony Abbott as a morals campaigner. It’d be fascinating to hear his views on a range of subjects, without the check his own political ambitions have put on his (perhaps?) true calling

Emily Climbs, by Lucy Maud Montgomery

This is the second in the series of Emily novels by Lucy Maud Montgomery and covers its heroine’s teenage years. In order to go to Shrewbury College, Emily must promise not to write fiction, or made up stories.

In Emily Climbs Emily very much starts putting in the hard yards required to make it as a professional writer. This means dealing with the heart break of endless rejection slips. But all the hard work pays off in the end, and Emily gets her work published and is even in the end offered a lucrative writing job. Surprisingly, she knocks it back.

Like the first novel, one of the chief charms of Emily Climbs is how authentic a description it is of the writer’s ambition. For this alone it makes fascinating reading.

I looked up the Wikipedia page for Emily Climbs and was interested to find see this quote from Montgomery:

"People were never right in saying I was Anne. But in some respects, they will be right if they write me down as Emily."

Apparently at the time of writing, Montgomery was transcribing all of her early journals, material which very much influenced the writing of the Emily series. And boy does it show.

I perhaps enjoyed this novel even more than the first one. Unfortunately, from what I hear, the third novel is not as strong as the first two. No matter, that should not discourage readers from enjoying the first two.

You can find my Lucy Maud Montgomery files here.

The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, by Peter Singer

In this book Peter Singer argues that we should all as a minimum give 5% of our income to charities that assist people suffering dire poverty in developing countries.

Quite reasonably, Peter Singer goes through the psychological reasons that bar us from assisting people who are for the most part out of sight and out of mind. Because we don't rub shoulders with starving children on our streets everyday, it means we can neatly compartmentalise this poverty as an abstraction. We are more likely to help people who are in our vicinity, people with whom we are sympathetic.

To try and overcome this inbuilt aversion to giving away money to people a half world away, Singer appeals to the more rational side of our nature. With an array of ethical examples, he shows how spending money on useless Western frivolities could be money employed to actually save lives, or greatly increase quality of life for many.

A tragic example is the women who suffer fistulas due to becoming pregnant too young, or having bodies not well enough developed due to poor nutrition. They leak urine or faeces and no matter how much they wash themselves they cannot get rid of the smell. They become ostracised from their communities, until they can get an operation for the fistula. Reading about this sort of terrible misfortune really is heartbreaking.

The offputting thing about this book is that Singer does seem to frame most of his ethical arguments around numbers. This amount of money could save this many lives or perform this many operations. Even those who give huge amounts of money, like Bill Gates, still get some criticism. Singer goes over the value of Gates' property and some of his expensive toys. Is it right, Singer asks, for Gates to have these expensive toys when he could save so many more lives by selling his luxury goods and donating the money. It leaves you with the feeling that no matter how much you give away, there's still more you could give, still more economies you could make in your life to make way for giving to others.

Also, Singer seems to be saying that the economies of these poor countries can be fixed purely through charity. Would we almost be turning them into welfare dependencies? Singer looks at the argument from a rather narrow perspective. Issues like how developing countries feel about receiving so much welfare come to mind.

But these are small points. I'm a fan of Singer, and some of these examples of Western waste juxtaposed against the suffering of poor countries are startling.

For me, the most engaging parts of the book highlighted the creativity people used to solve the problems of poverty. I think this is a way where people can really become engaged in a problem and feel a part of the solution. Like the two people who started up the GiveWell website, that does assessments on how well charities use their money.

If I’d been writing this book, I’d have taken it from that point of view. Show people things they can help to build and make which would improve lives and then I think you’d get more people involved. Giving money on a regular basis reminds me of my Catholic upbringing, where the collection plate was passed around.

But then again, I don’t know much about this topic. There are billions of people around the world in desperate want. Locating a charity that you know does good, and then giving them money, will obviously help poorer people. The task is how to make this an activity that people can genuinely feel an integral part of, rather than as someone who merely holds a pen that writes a cheque.

The Water Dreamers: The Remarkable History of our Dry Continent, by Michael Cathcart

The introduction to this remarkable book says early sections of The Water Dreamers were published in various publications between 1995 and 2006. That’s a long gestation period for a book, some fourteen years, and it shows in the text’s nuanced and considered approach.

Cathcart has obviously meditated long and deeply about his subject, illuminating his thoughts with a reading list that often resembles a cabinet of exotic and bizarre curios. (The details of the Burke and Wills funeral make for Gothic horror: two glass-topped coffins displayed the corpses for public mourning. Wills’ skull was missing; Burke’s hands and feet were eaten by dingos. The Age called it ‘indescribably disgusting’.)

In one section that deals with late nineteenth and early twentieth Australian novels, stories of uninhibited imperialism and racism, Cathcart notes, ‘I suspect that most readers will be startled to learn that such a literature exists in Australia.'

As the title suggests, The Water Dreamers is very much a portrait of the white Australian subconscious. When the first fleet landed, they brought with them an attitude formed by the wet climate of their homeland. To turn Australia into a Garden of Eden, one that abideth forever, there must be an abundance of water. The fevered dreams of settler imagination soon clashed against reality, as Australia proved to be unforgivingly dry.

This led many heroic explorers to search out water, and later when that project was found wanting, nationalist hopes turned to hydro-engineering. To talk realistically about the limits of water in Australia was seen as verging on treason.

A good case in point is Griffith Taylor, an analyst in climatic conditions, who claimed that Australia’s central arid zone was too hot and dry to permit farming or settlement. This was deemed dangerously unpatriotic talk. For his intellectual honesty, Taylor found his book A Geography of Australasia (1914) banned by the Western Australian government from the state’s schools and university.

As Cathcart writes, ‘The equation was clear. An optimist was a patriot. A pessimist was a traitor. Taylor was libelling Australia.’

Taylor’s career was soon stymied by the Senate of the University of Sydney (one of his enemies was a member). In 1928 he accepted a chair at the University of Chicago. Australian populism had won out over reality. The Sydney Morning Herald confessed itself blessed to see him go.
While one half of this book highlights 200 years of Australian water folly, of wild dreams ending with a 21st century water crisis, then the other half of The Water Dreamers is a vividly imagined history of Aboriginal dispossession.

On this Cathcart writes in a powerful and poetic vein, describing how Aboriginals struggled to retain their land against creeping white usurpation. While whites would continue to carpet Aboriginal lands with all the trappings of European civilisation, their delusions of superiority meant no one considered that the Aborigines’ 40,000 odd years of experience in Australian water management might yield some insights.

Rather, Europeans continued to see most of Australia as a dead, arid land haunted by a death-like silence. This is a secondary theme of The Water Dreamers. The introduction states, ‘This is also a book about silence’. We are frequently asked to imagine the sounds and silences of the past.

Cathcart extensively describes what the Australian landscape sounded like. The quotes from contemporary sources repeatedly demonstrate a gloomy dread of the timeless silence. It sends a shudder through many an explorer’s soul.

‘The land did not whisper seductive entreaties into the ears of the explorers. In fact, it often repelled them with a mighty and ‘death-like silence’ – a vast indifference that threatened to reduce the men themselves to silence, or to bone.’

In much of these accounts there is almost a hostility to the natural environment, a wish to erase the deathly silence with the busy hum of capitalist industry. It highlights how Australians have struggled to harmonise with their natural environment, carpeting it over with English gardens, Empire architecture and sprawling motorways.

Notes Cathcart, ‘In fact, the explorers’ journals express anxiety, tedium and alienation more often than they proclaim a triumphal geography.’

There is a darker history yet: the activities of the lawless squatters and their impact on the first Australians. The success of the pastoral industry was built on Aboriginal blood. Ironically, it’s the squatters that produced the colonial economy that genteel urbanites, liberal in their attitudes, would live on. An inheritance we all now take advantage of.

The Water Dreamers is a haunting and thought provoking history of a dry land that refuses to yield to the fevered imagination of its colonisers. With our current water crisis do we continue to dream on, or do we submit to the land and live within it?

The first Australians have had some 40,000 years of experience in understanding Australia’s eco system. According to Cathcart, there is still hope for us, even if it has taken 200 years for the realisation to dawn that Australia is a dry land that will shape us, and not we it.

Wake In Fright, by Kenneth Cook

Wow! You have to read this book, especially if you’re Australian or come from a country that has a nihilistic drinking culture and high suicide rate. I read this riveting page-turner in two sittings. One half in the morning with my cup of coffee, and the other half in the evening. The novel is written in a taut, economical prose that has a menacing, suspenseful atmosphere. You just keep waiting for the next bad thing to happen, and wonder how bad it will be.

Wake In Fright chronicles five days spent by school teacher John Grant in the outback mining town of Bundanyabba, or ‘The Yabba’ to locals. Grant was only to spend one night in the town before catching a flight to Sydney for his holidays, but gets waylaid by a bout of gambling and drinking. Losing all his money, he finds himself destitute. Not to worry though, in Bundanyabba there are always men ready to buy you a beer.

In fact, you could almost say that beer is almost one of the main characters in the novel. Everyone drinks and drinks and drinks. It made me sick just contemplating all the drunkenness.
Here’s my favourite quote on the subject. Page 142:

"Peculiar trait of the western people, thought Grant, that you could sleep with their wives, despoil their daughters, sponge on them, defraud them, do almost anything that would mean at least ostracism in normal society, and they would barely seem to notice it. But refuse to drink with them and you immediately became a mortal enemy. What the hell?"

The scenes describing a drunken gang on a kangaroo shoot are amazing and terrifying. Again, alcohol plays a major part.

"Being drunk is warm and soft and there is no pain and it does not really matter about the kangaroos that are shot and breathe horribly and disappear in the night, or about little kangaroos that you cut to pieces before they die.

Grant killed many kangaroos that night and once even made a disastrous attempt to eviscerate one before he was sure it was dead; and it flopped about with its entrails spilling.

Everyone laughed, and they laughed again because Grant was covered in blood and they drank all the whisky and all the beer and their shooting became wilder.

Someone fired a bullet through the roof of the car and someone else fired one through the windscreen, and everyone laughed again."

None of the men eat the meat, except for the creepy alcoholic doctor Tydon, who we are led to believe is a closet homosexual. Tydon takes care to always cut off the testicles of the kangaroos, put them in his pocket and save them for later eating. He claims they are the best bit to eat. The meat is actually used to feed their dogs, being ‘too gamey’ for human consumption.

In a later scene, Grant is sexually molested by Tydon, and remains forever polluted by this experience. Again, this happens after a night of nihilistic drinking.

Words cannot express what an amazing book this is. Media reports today talk about Australia’s drinking problem, especially with its youth and culture of binge drinking.

This book so fundamentally resonates that it could have been written today, and still be considered shocking, cutting edge literature. Anyone who has grown up in Australia and found themselves at a barbecue or party or pub with the slabs of beer piled high and the men drinking and drinking and laughing and turning red in the face from all the booze, will recognise so much of the culture described in Wake In Fright.

This is a truly shocking book. More shocking is that it was published in 1961, during Menzies’ long reign. I thought that period just produced genteel tea parties and men in suits going to boring office jobs.

This is the kind of Australian literature that leaves all other Australian novels in the dust, as far as I’m concerned, bringing out into the open a heart of darkness never discussed in Australian life.

Forget your Helen Garners, your Tim Wintons and David Maloufs. Here’s the real deal.

We of the Never Never & The Little Black Princess, by Mrs Aeneas Gunn

After reading Michael Cathcart’s brilliant book on the Australian landscape, The Water Dreamers, I was inspired to try and read up on some of the literature he discussed.

Jeannie Gunn, a Melbourne school teacher and later tireless welfare worker for returned service men from the First World War, wrote only two books in her lifetime. Prompted by friends to recount her experiences in book form, the very able Mrs Gunn produced the autobiographical novella The Little Black Princess in 1905. Three years later, in 1908, We of the Never Never was published, after being rejected by no less than six publishers.

The Angus and Robertson edition I got from the library published both autobiographical novels, in an abridged version, together in 1982. It seems odd that an abridged version would be published of an Australian classic, by an Australian imprint, for Australian readers. However, on further inspection, abridgement is probably a euphemism for having purged the book of some of its more unpalatable details, that is to say, its use of the racist N-word.

For example, a chapter originally titled ‘A N----- Hunt’, has been retitled ‘A Surprise Party’. You can guess who is going to be surprised. Apparently the N-word has been dropped from other parts of the text. This is rather curious. Even the Americans don’t purge the ‘N-word out Huckleberry Finn.

Okay, let’s not linger on Australian denialism. What to make of We of the Never Never? Well, it’s an odd book. Gunn writes in a vigorous, witty style, and there can be no denying she’s an entertaining and sharp writer. She’s sort of like a Nancy Mitford of the outback. You always find a smile involuntarily curling on your lips as you read her descriptions. So this is in many ways a romantic and sentimental portrait of the remote Elsey cattle station Mrs Gunn lived on for a year, a place she never again returned to. I say the book is odd because it juxtaposes this flighty style, that of the urban Melbourne school teacher, and uses it to describe the toughness of bush life. You feel Gunn must be pulling a gauzy material over her lens to soften things a bit and give the landscape and its people a more dreamy appearance.

Not only has Gunn put vaseline on her camera lens. So have the future editors of the book. I’ve just downloaded a copy of the novel from the Gutenberg press site. The N-word appears some 18 times. I feel cheated now. I wish I’d read the original version.

Here’s a section that I can’t find in the abridged version, from the chapter titled A Surprise Party which is the only chapter in the book that deals with frontier violence.

"I wasn't going to say anything about it before the "boys," he said, "but
it's time some one gave a surprise party down the river;" and a
"scatter-on" meaning "n------ in," Maluka readily agreed to a surprise
patrol of the river country, that being forbidden ground for blacks'
camps.

"It's no good going unless it's going to be a surprise party," Dan
reiterated; and when the Quiet Stockman was called across from the
Quarters, he was told that "there wasn't going to be no talking before
the boys."

The shocking thing is that the book is so extraordinarily popular. I think it’s sold about a million copies. Yet it has been sanitised.

The Little Black Princess is not written in the witty, flighty style of Never Never. It deals more directly with her experiences of Aboriginal life. Her attitude towards ‘the blacks’ is at once romantic and condescending. She talks about how wonderful their sign language is, and how there is a method in the madness of some of their cultural practices. But at bottom she thinks they’re basically stuck in an immature, childlike state.

Worse still for the Aboriginals, they are without a Christian God.

‘It is very, very hard work to teach any blackfellow the truth of God’s goodness and love. They have no god of any sort themselves, and they cannot imagine one.’

At the back of all of this there is the unspoken sense that they really are a dieing race, just waiting for civilisation to take over, ‘when bush-folk will have conquered the Never-Never and lain it at the feet of great cities’.

Interesting, Mrs Gunn’s dream of conquering the land with civilisation was turned on its head in 2000 when the land, including the original Elsey homestead that appeared in We of the Never Never, was returned to the original owners, the Mangarrayi people. It took over a decade for the Mangarrayi people to achieve it, but they did.

Writing this post has been a bit of a lesson for me. Thanks to the Internet I could pull up an original edition of Never-Never.

Thanks also to the astute Mr Chris Hubbard for bringing to my attention the fact that I was reading an abridged version of Mrs Gunn’s work, and suggesting that the reason for the abridgement was that the novels might contain what would now be considered now racist language.

Last note:

You can read Alan Ramsey’s article on the long battle for the original Aboriginal owners to regain their land at the below link:

http://www.mail-archive.com/recoznet2@paradigm4.com.au/msg00471.html

Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America’s Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It, by Kelly D. Brownell, PH.D and Katherine Bat

This is an interesting book to contrast with Gina Kolata’s ponderously titled Rethinking Thin, which I reviewed recently for this blog. Rethinking Thin basically had an ‘it’s all too hard’ attitude to weight loss, and summed up with the bizarre argument that Americans are probably better off being of a chunkier persuasion. She kind of saw it as a sign of economic progress.

In contrast to Kolata’s laid back attitude, Kelly D. Brownell (Director of the Yale Centre for eating and weight disorders) and Katherine Battle Horgen sound off every alarm possible and end every chapter with an impassioned call to action.

For these authors, there is no doubt as to why we are experiencing an obesity crisis. It’s mostly to do with environment. An environment that bombards us at every turn with food advertising, and from a very young age. Making matters worse, most of the food information we get comes from the mega advertising campaigns of the big food companies. Government advertising campaigns simply can’t match the dollars put up by the likes of McDonalds.

So you get the situation where people make nutritional decisions based on what they see written on a packet of chips. Anyone who reads the blurbs on a lot of junk foods will be amazed at the growing list of silly information that is provided for consumers. Like lollies saying they are 99 percent fat free, leading people to think they are a good health choice.

That’s the media environment. The authors also note that the physical environment is more and more tailored to cars and less and less to exercise and physical activity. We need more bike paths and places to take a walk.

To make all of this happen – less advertising, more parkland to play in – will take action from citizens. Hence the book’s repeated calls to action. Leaving obesity management to government on its own will not get nearly enough done. Also, government is in thrall to the big food producers, who have enormous power.

The text of this book is pretty messy. The authors pile up lots and lots of statistics and information, so you get quite a wallop. Yet I wish the book had been neater and didn’t have such a rushed and breathless way about it.

That’s a shame, because this is the sort of book I’d be reluctant to recommend to the lay reader.

The authors should go back to the drawing board and writer a simpler, more user friendly version, with a neat guide at the back on where further information can be obtained.

Brownell and Horgen are preaching to the converted at The Chris Saliba Web Experience. However, with Food Fight, I don’t know who they’re trying to appeal to - the average punter or industry specialist.

A messy pot of factoids.

The Case for God: What Religion Really Means, by Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong is a tireless writer on religion - historical and contemporary. In this new book she expresses her exasperation with what Armstrong calls the often 'facile' modern day debate on God and religious belief.

In our own scientific, rational era, we are hamstrung when approaching religion. Our debates are tit-for-tat, unable to approach subjects like religion that demand nuanced thinking. Even amongst fundamentalists themselves, they take a literalist, scientific approach to the holy texts, reading them in a way that would be completely foreign to earlier ages.

In a way, our modern era tries to evaluate the validity of religion by testing whether it can be scientifically 'proven' to be true. If I have caught Armstrong's argument correctly, this is like trying to prove scientifically that Shakespeare is a great writer, or Aretha Franklin a great singer. It simply makes no sense.

Armstrong likes to draw this analogy between art and religion. Like literary critic Harold Bloom, she seems to read the sacred texts as great literature. (Bloom I think referred to characters in the bible as literary characters, akin to Shakespeare's Hamlet.)

We should approach religion, Armstrong says, like we do a great work of art, to try and elicit meaning and derive comfort for life's sufferings. Science may help us to successfully treat cancer, but it can't assist us in coping with the trauma and grief such a diagnosis brings us.

Armstrong closes her book with a critique of writers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and their narrow-minded atheism. She claims that the scientific rigour they claim to bring to their thinking is glaringly absent when dealing with religion.

Moreover, this narrow-minded atheism, with its sweeping condemnations, is only helping to inflame the religious debate. Rather than engaging in a nuanced conversation, these writers are indulging in heavy-handed tactics. Nor is their knowledge on the subject that deep.

As ever with Karen Armstrong's books, it is fascinating to follow the thinking and reading of this brilliant and illuminating scholar. Armstrong's erudition is awesome. I also love the way Armstrong really engages the reader, working very much as an educator. She breaks down words and meanings wonderfully into their basics. We are always provided a detailed etymology of the words used, and how their meanings have changed over time.

This is one of the main themes of the book. Studying religion is hard and takes time and commitment. It's not easy. However, the rewards for the persistent are very great.

Many readers should find this both a compelling history of various religious practices and a passionate yet calmly reasoned argument in favour of a more mature and informed religious debate. Fans of her books I don't think will be disappointed.

Emily of New Moon, by Lucy Maud Montgomery

This is the first in a series of three autobiographical novels by Lucy Maud Montgomery, about growing up in rural Canada. I don’t know much of the biographical details of Montgomery’s life, so I don’t know how much of Emily of New Moon is fact and how much fiction. In fact, I don’t even know if the novel is supposed to be autobiographical, it’s just that it very much reads that way.

The story is about a young orphan, Emily Byrd Starr (I know, what a name!), who goes to live with relatives at New Moon Farm (again, the sort of literary excess that Emily herself would be scolded for by her teacher Mr Carpenter.)

That accounts for Emily’s exterior life. As far as I know, Montgomery was not an orphan. So this can’t be an autobiographical detail. Yet she imagines it so much in her fiction (counting the newly exhumed and published 9th novel in the Anne of Green Gables series, that makes some 12 novels whose main character happens to be an orphan.) it seems that Montgomery may well have thought herself to be at least spiritually an orphan.

The interior life of Emily Byrd Starr is quite obviously autobiographical, for it tells of the young orphan’s desire to be a writer. This is, I would venture, what really drives the novel: the questing writer in search of herself.

Montgomery describes the naked desire of the writer to achieve wealth and fame. To be adored by the multitudes for your genius and creativity and sheer ability. Gertrude Stein put it better: when asked why writers wrote she exclaimed, ‘For the praise, for the praise.’

But at core, the real reason that Emily writes is simply because her daemon drives her. This is what the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called one’s ‘will’.

Emily has this compulsion, the need to write everything down – everything from her day to day observations, right up to the flowery and affected poetry she indulges in. For Emily, the threat of running out of paper can almost bring on an anxiety attack.

As I was reading these passages, I was distinctly reminded of a passage I read in a biography of Charlotte Bronte. A local shop proprieter described the sisters -–Anne, Emily and Charlotte – on their frequent visits to pick up supplies. The one thing that made them anxious was that there should be enough stocks of paper for them to buy. In fact, as I read Emily of New Moon Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre kept coming to mind, and I was pleased when a line from Jane Eyre was actually quoted in the text.

So, in a way, this novel is very much about the process of writing, or more accurately how writers bring themselves into being. For the reader, the joy is to be invited along on this romantic quest. We get to be a part of the creative process by imagining along with Emily.

If you’re like me, and dabble in the occasional literary composition, you may find that Emily of New Moon prompts you to ruminate on reading as an act of creativity in itself. Again, I say this because the novel invites the reader to imagine becoming a writer. With no one to look over our shoulder and giggle at this flight of fancy, we as readers let ourselves go and imagine ourselves as artists in the act of creation.

I’ve long been a fan of the French artist Marcel Duchamp’s theory that the artist is only half the work of art – the viewer is the other half who completes the work. The artist and musician, Prince, has made similar statements in the liner notes of his albums. In the liner notes to Prince’s The Rainbow Children album he lists the instruments as being played by ‘Prince and ……U’. That is, he considers the listener to be equal in the technical and creative process of making the album. The Canadian writer, John Ralston Saul, notes that a good novelist makes the reader feel almost like they had written the novel themselves.

I felt that Lucy Maud Montgomery had a spirit of this in Emily of New Moon. The lesson that is drawn for Emily at the end of the novel is that she should only write about what she knows from personal experience. Only in this way can her writing be authentic. This is a somewhat painful but necessary lesson, for Emily and the reader alike. We don’t like to see Emily disappointed in her quest to be a writer. Yet we know the painful criticism of most of her work as rubbish by her teacher Mr Carpenter opens another door for Emily. It allows her to improve herself as an artist.
This is a novel about a young girl in the act of self-creation as a writer. It reminded me a lot of Charlotte Bronte’s Jayne Eyre, but without that novel’s unfortunate excesses. I look forward to reading the second novel in the series.

Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss – and the Myths and Realities of Dieting, by Gina Kolata

This is a weird book. I picked it up off the shelf at the library as I’m interested in learning some of the more technical aspects of dieting, from a scientific point of view. Things like calories, the efficacy of low carb diets etc. The blurb on the book made it look interesting enough – a history of diets, bracketed by the author’s close observation of a live scientific study comparing the Atkins diet against a low-calorie diet.

However, from the get-go, you could tell that the author, Gina Kolata, the science writer for The New York Times no less, was very much biased against the entire notion of dieting, or rather reducing calories, as a way to lose weight.

It’s no wonder then that, after reporting the feelings and emotions of those dieters she followed in the study, and providing a section at the end of each chapter discussing their progress and quoting at length from the subjects themselves, that Kolata didn’t even bother to provide the ultimate findings of the study!

From the way Kolata writes, it seems she felt there was no need to, as she was right all along: dieting as a way to lose weight is useless. The writing covering the dieters responses is invariably glum, with an end quote always giving a general air of hopelessness. As the subtitle of the book makes clear, this is one of the 'myths' of dieting, that it will help you to lose weight. The reality is that it won’t.

Kolata will have no truck with the idea that the reason people could be putting on so much weight in advanced Western countries is the preponderance of salty, fatty foods promoted by huge food conglomerates. Instead the answer must surely lay elsewhere, like in the obese person’s biological make-up.

Yet when you read about what the dieters are eating in the study groups, you just think: no wonder they're getting big! I mean, doughnuts for breakfast, tubs of ice-cream before bed, two Big Macs for lunch, plus fries, coke etc. One dieter is horrified at the idea of eating celery as a snack between meals.

Instead of focusing on these dense calorie foods, and the problems of a business culture that promotes them, Kolata looks to our genetic make-up. Maybe some people are wired in such a way that they are always feeling hungry and cannot stop eating. Hence we are told about scientists' discovery of certain hormones, namely leptin, that supresses the appetite. I did find all of this material interesting. It does seem to explain why some people can simply ‘forget to eat’ and not feel hungry, but others are quite often famished (I raise my hand as belonging to the latter category.)

However, it does not explain why America (and Australia for that matter), have the fattest populations. Could it be people guzzling all those unnecessary calories in soft drinks? Less and less exercise

Not for Gina Kolata. She claims that larger weights could be a sign of improved health! She quotes one study that contradicts the numbers on another study for health outcomes for the overweight. The study she prefers says that overweight people have health outcomes just as good as, or even better than, people of normal weight.

How can this be? As I’ve written before, with science you can endlessly argue back and forth the details of a study.

This book did open up my eyes to a few new different viewpoints. It seems quite reasonable to say that some people are more genetically disposed to eat more, to feel those hunger pangs more insistently. And I have read that it is possible to be overweight and still be quite healthy. Indeed, I see lots of swimmers and bike riders who are quite chubby, but keep up a mean speed.

Overall I found this book to be quite at odds with itself. Kolata says that weight is not a problem really, but still hopes that science might come up with some miracle drug that will help keep people thin. Much of the book is hostile to dieting as a ‘fad’, yet she herself longs for some new definitive scientific breakthrough.

As I said, this is a weird book. Kolata does not seem so much a science writer as some mad polemicist, hell bent on discrediting calorie controlled diets. She even gets the number of calories in a pound wrong, claiming there are 3600 when there are in fact 3500 calories per pound (check it out, on page 124.)