Power Failure: The inside story of climate politics under Rudd and Gillard

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

Scrupulously fair, brilliantly researched, based on over a hundred interviews with key players, Philip Chubb's Power Failure is a cracking read. It highlights the many failures and few successes of Australian politics. Essential reading for anyone wanting know what went wrong with climate politics in Australia.

If you're looking for a highly readable book that examines in careful detail Australia's torturous political process of putting a price on carbon, then look no further. This is the business. The author, Philip Chubb, is currently the Head of Journalism at Monash University. He's worked at The Age and the ABC's 7.30 Report, and was also the creator of the documentary series, Labor in Power.

One of the most impressive things about Power Failure is its detail, research and balanced approach. Chubb conducted over a hundred interviews with key players. Most interestingly, he interviewed Kevin Rudd once, and Julia Gillard twice. Rudd was interviewed on the condition that everything he said was taken on 'background', that is, he wouldn't be quoted. Chubb says in the introduction that he has tried to infuse Rudd's views into the text.

The book sets itself the task of finding out why climate politics under Rudd, then Gillard, was such a nightmare. The story starts with the Rudd government. Rudd centralised power in his office, didn't communicate, was poor at decision making, buried himself under so much detail that paralysis was an inevitable result and basically had a temperament not suited to working in a collegiate environment. Rudd kept much of his climate policy hidden from view, meaning that even many frontbenchers were in the dark when it came to the detail of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). Julia Gillard, one of the Rudd government's most capable ministers, had some catching up to do herself once she formed government.

Rudd made many big mistakes. When Malcolm Turnbull became Liberal leader, Rudd failed to get a bi-partisan agreement on climate policy and concentrated on simply trying to bring Turnbull's leadership down. He gravely underestimated Tony Abbott as opposition leader. When Rudd couldn't get his CPRS through both houses of Parliament, he refused to talk to the Greens to try and find a compromise. Then, when it all looked too hard, he simply walked away.

In Chubb's analysis, Julia Gillard comes through as the better leader. She was inclusive, a good communicator with colleagues, could build consensus, would compromise and treated people with respect. She never got flustered and worked extremely well under pressure. But most of all, she was courageous and would stand and fight, whereas Rudd retreated. It should also be noted that Chubb refutes the rumours that Gillard counselled Rudd to drop the CPRS when he couldn't get it through both houses of parliament. This is supported by extensive interviews he did with key players. Gillard maintains she was willing to go to a double dissolution election and fight for the CPRS.

Gillard had many flaws and made some fatal mistakes, according to Chubb. She failed to communicate effectively to the electorate what the benefits of carbon pricing would be, how it would work, and what the financial impacts would be on the ordinary voter. She put too much faith in the idea that the 'lived experience' of the tax would show people that the opposition's scare campaign had been just that: all sound and fury, signifying nothing. She also made a grave error in conceding that carbon pricing was a tax. Putting a price on carbon had been on the table since the Howard government's Shergold Report. Tony Abbott had supported it when in the Howard government. Anyone thinking about the subject knew pricing carbon, trading carbon permits or whatever system you put in place would involve imposts on business. Gillard should have said it was, in essence, the same deal as an emissions trading system.

The Greens come in for a good deal of criticism too. They voted down the CPRS, but what they got in its stead you could argue was not that much better than what they got under Gillard. A lot of political pain had been gone through because the Greens wanted to hold out for a better deal. They seriously misjudged. (Then again, they had tried repeatedly to organise talks with Kevin Rudd.)

Power Failure is a cracking read, brilliantly researched, comprehensive and fair. You will pull your hair out in frustration that so much went wrong, that so many leaders went down because of carbon pricing. It's a brilliant example of how difficult big policy is to get passed successfully into law.

Power Failure: The inside story of climate politics under Rudd and Gillard. Published by Black Inc. ISBN:  9781863956604  RRP: $29.99

To sign up for our monthly newsletter, featuring new releases, book reviews and favourite articles from around the web, click here.  

The Secret World of Oil, by Ken Silverstein

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

Investigative journalist Ken Silverstein uncovers the murky deals, collusion and money-grubbing that lies at the centre of the global oil industry.

It fuels the global economy, but do we really know much about how the oil business is run? How are the deals done, interests protected and most importantly, who are the characters making all the money? Ken Silverstein, a senior investigative reporter with First Look Media, travels to all corners of the globe to interview key figures and conduct research into the murkier side of the oil trade.

Silverstein concentrates on the fixers, lobbyists, PR agents and other players who work in an area where transactions are borderline legal and often morally questionable. Energy resources are often found in Third World countries, which means that dictators, crooks and gangsters are the powerful deal makers. Western democracies, ever eager to get access to oil and gas, are ready to hold their noses while schmoozing these unsavoury characters.

Tony Blair (“the human cash register”) is a case in point and gets a whole chapter devoted to his pecuniary interests. Since leaving parliament he has made a motza in consulting and speaking fees, with clients including several Caspian Sea oil companies.

Arguably the best chapter is the last one on Louisiana, a petroleum rich American state. Silverstein speaks to lobbyists, politicians, PR agents, lawyers and businessmen, drawing a depressing picture of environmental vandalism and an oil industry powerful enough to virtually set the legislative agenda. Silverstein shows that wherever there is oil in abundance, corruption, collusion and deal making are sure to follow.

The Secret World of Oil brims with top class investigative journalism. Ken Silverstein’s work shows careful research and a willingness to travel all lengths to get an interview and a story. His writing helps to pull back the veil and show the reader what happens behind the scenes in the all-powerful oil industry. It’s a scary story of greed, vandalism and corruption that’s not to be missed.

The Secret World of Oil, by Ken Silverstein. Published by Verso Trade. ISBN: 9781781681374  RRP: $32.99

To sign up for our monthly newsletter, featuring new releases, book reviews and favourite articles from around the web, click here.  

The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began, by Stephen Greenblatt

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve covers issues of momentous cultural, intellectual and religious significance over a 1500 year period. It's also a deeply satisfying read, with Lucretius's liberating Epicurean philosophy forming the book's core.

If you’re a hopeless booklover, then you’ll most likely find this a richly rewarding read. The subject, on the face of it, doesn’t really seem like much: a fifteenth century Italian scholar, named Poggio Bracciolini, discovered in a German monastery in 1417 a forgotten book by the Roman poet Lucretius (99BC – 55 BC). The book was called De Rerum Natura, or as commonly translated into English, On the Nature of Things. From these simple historical facts Stephen Greenblatt spins out a most splendid book, discussing in depth subjects integral to the development of Western religious and intellectual thought.

The Swerve really turns between two worlds, the Roman world of Lucretius, and the Christian world of the fifteenth century. Poggio Bracciolini as a scholar who worked under seven popes, was a book hunter, someone who trawled through the libraries of monasteries trying to find interesting books. To the modern reader, this all seems quite extraordinary, especially now in the age of Google where everything is at your fingertips. Greenblatt gives a fascinating history of the production of books during these times. Monks would copy out books by hand and were also the guardians of these libraries. The classical texts that have come down to us today, Plato, Aristotle etc. were never recovered in their original or contemporary forms. They were rather copies.

The production of books in the ancient world also has an amazing story. I’ve read many classical authors, but never given too much thought to how books were produced in those times. I just presumed Plato chiselled Greek characters onto a tablet somewhere. Book production was quite an industry in the classical world. They were written onto papyrus, which was a fairly sturdy paper and could last for decades if carefully looked after. Teams of copyists would produce a book by having someone (usually a slave) read the book aloud. What happened to all those original books by the Greeks and Romans? As Christianity rose, libraries, with their Pagan books, fell into disfavour. Their upkeep diminished and the books crumbled away, mostly eaten by bookworms.

The Renaissance, however, saw a surge in interest in these classical texts. Despite this, there were tensions. Frequently the subject matter and philosophical direction of these works were not in harmony with Christian theology. Nowhere is this more striking than with Lucretius’s philosophical poem, De Rerum Natura. In it he espoused the philosophy of Epicurus, who believed we should live for pleasure and the simple things in life. On a more heretical note, it espoused a theory of atomism which proposes that everything is broken down into indestructible parts. In essence, this theory posited that the world was a pretty random place, not the well planned cosmos of a single Christian God. Advocating such a theory, as did the Dominican friar Giordano Bruno, could get you burnt at the stake, which is just what happened to him. I felt a cold hand gripping my heart as I read the horrible fate of this highly original thinker. The church was obviously interested in nothing less than absolute power. Alternate views to life and the universe the church felt should be dealt with by the most agonising death.

Lastly, of course, there is the poem, which as Greenblatt digests its contents, sounds like essential reading. The author warns that the language can be a little difficult, but that perseverance is handsomely rewarded. I’m not sure if I’ll ever get around to reading On the Nature of Things, but I certainly hope to. Its Epicurean philosophy of living simply in the here and now, enjoying pleasure where you can, watching life in a detached manner, sounds very liberating.

The Swerve is a book you enjoy slowly and that rewards handsomely with its author's erudition and passion for his subject. 

The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began, by Stephen Greenblatt. Published by Vintage Arrow. ISBN: 9780099572442 RRP: $19.99

To sign up for our monthly newsletter, featuring new releases, book reviews and favourite articles from around the web, click here.  

The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

John Green's The Fault in Our Stars miraculously mixes humour, fatal disease and teenage love to create an almost perfect novel.

The subject matter of this young-adult novel is really quite daunting: teenagers living with cancer. It seems like a subject you could get very, very wrong unless you really knew what you were doing. Green drew inspiration for the subject when he was working as a student chaplain in a children’s hospital. The novel’s main character is based on Esther Earl, a teenage friend of the author who contracted thyroid cancer.

The novel is in essence a simple love story, but complicated by the deep uncertainty of the protagonists’ lives. Hazel Grace Lancaster has thyroid cancer which has spread to her lungs. When her mother nudges her into going to a support group for teens with cancer, she meets the amusing and charismatic Augustus Waters. He’s had osteosarcoma, which has resulted in a leg amputation. They both have a mutual friend in Isaac. He’s had eye cancer and has had to have both removed. His girlfriend has also dropped him because she couldn’t cope with his condition.

A secondary plot involves the author Peter Van Houten. His novel, An Imperial Affliction, is Hazel’s favourite. She re-reads it obsessively. The main character in this novel-within-a-novel is Anna, a girl who has cancer. Hazel loves the book, as she thinks it’s an accurate description of what it’s like to have cancer, but is frustrated at the novel’s abrupt end. Augustus manages to communicate with Van Houten, and Van Houten becomes involved in the drama of their relationship.

It’s almost impossible to find any faults in this compelling novel. John Green doesn’t go beyond the bounds of his literary brief in simply trying to show the humanity of teenagers living with cancer. It’s this commitment to realism that makes The Fault in Our Stars such a success. In so many respects the characters in the novel are just normal people like you and me, but having to deal with life and death issues at too young an age. There’s a real tenderness and sensitivity in his writing that is quite palpable. It’s a cliché to say it, but it’s true: Green’s novel makes you realise how fragile life is and how important it is to prioritize the right things.

John Green also gives his story plenty of comic touches which makes The Fault in our Stars genuinely funny in places. It’s quite a miraculous feat that he can juggle humour, fatal disease and teenage love into such a seamless mix. The secondary plot about the novelist Peter Van Houten is smartly woven into the story as well, highlighting the importance of literature as therapy and as a way of making sense of the world.

A brilliant and humbling book.

The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green. Published by Puffin. ISBN: 9780143571629 RRP: $19.99

To sign up for our monthly newsletter, featuring new releases, book reviews and favourite articles from around the web, click here.   

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 remains an extraordinarily visionary work. In it he sees our current addiction to technology and media, and how disengaged we have become with politics and reality. The only thing missing today, thankfully, is the burning of books.

Cold War Fears and Tensions

Fahrenheit 451 is the classic dystopian science fiction novel by Ray Bradbury, first published in 1953. The writing and publication history of the novel is quite interesting. Bradbury said the novel essentially developed from a 1951 short story called “The Pedestrian”. This story was inspired by a real life event. While taking a late night walk in 1949, Bradbury was asked by a suspicious police officer to explain himself. In the short story, the suspicious walker is taken to a psychiatric centre. Most people, it is understood, should be indoors watching their ‘viewing screens’ – televisions. To be out walking is seen as quite bizarre when you have a mass media to consume.

Another short story, written between 1947 – 1948 and called “Bright Phoenix”, contains the theme of book burning as a means of censorship. Bradbury conflated the two themes of “The Pedestrian” and “Bright Phoenix” to write the novella “The Fireman” in 1951. The first 25,000 word draft was written on a library typewriter that he rented at the cost of 10 cents per half hour. Urged by a publisher at Ballantine books, he expanded the novella to its current length. It was published as a paperback in 1953, then the following year it was serialised in Playboy magazine.

As you can imagine, Fahrenheit 451 is drenched in cold war fears and tensions. The early fifties was an era of McCarthyism and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Many American writers had their careers ruined by the committee’s investigations. Bradbury would also have been influenced by the the Nazi book burnings and Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge, which saw artists, writers and poets arrested, some even executed.

Technology Addiction and Political Disengagement

The plot of the novel follows Guy Montag, a “fireman” hired to burn books. He clearly has doubts about what he’s doing. He’s married to Mildred, who’s hooked on sleeping tablets and addicted to what we would perhaps call in our day reality TV. They have a parlour where three of the walls have giant TV screens that boom out dialogue. Mildred wants to get the fourth wall covered with a screen as well.

The reason that it has been deemed necessary by the government to burn books is that they add too much complexity to life. They provoke thought, demand serious intellectual attention and are often controversial in their contents. Government would rather everyone be zoned out watching their screens or listening to their musical shells (like today’s iPods).

Meanwhile, a huge nuclear war is being planned. Yet the whole populace is so hooked on mind-numbing mass media trivialities, that they don’t see the looming danger. Many of Mildred’s set of friends fail to grasp what a war will really mean for them.

It all ends rather apocalyptically. Ironically enough, a purifying fire allows the first steps of a new literary book culture to emerge.

I must admit to not really being a big science fiction fan. You really have to believe the world that has been created, and I sometimes find it hard to stay convincingly in that science fiction world . Maybe it's a failure of imagination on my part. Some of the things that happened in Fahrenheit 451 seemed a bit corny, like when Morag meets a group of exiled drifters who have memorised books in the hope of using their knowledge to create a new society.

A Visionary Book

Having said that, you really have to take your hat off to Bradbury’s prescience. What a visionary! So much of the world we live in today is pretty much there in Fahrenheit 451: the mass media, the populace anesthetized by it, the lack of interest in politics, the reducing of complex information to soundbites and tweets, even technical inventions like ATMs and iPods. No wonder people keep reading it today.

The book is perhaps best read as a critique of 20th century mass media and the political culture that has grown hand in hand with it. It’s very much of its time, but maybe belonging to our time even more, which is quite a scary thought.

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. Published by Voyager. ISBN: 9780007491568 RRP: $24.99

To sign up for our monthly newsletter, featuring new releases, book reviews and favourite articles from around the web, click here.   

The Golden Apples, by Eudora Welty

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

The Golden Apples is both a strange and highly original work of fiction.

Eurdora Welty (1909-2001) wrote short stories, novels and essays. She was born in Jackson, Mississippi. She would live there for the rest of her life. During the Depression she worked as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration which was part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal program. In this job she conducted interviews, collected stories and took photographs of the people of Mississippi. In addition to her literary work, she published books of her Mississippi photography.

It was her experiences working around the state of Mississippi during the depression that inspired her first stories. Her first collection, A Curtain of Green, was published in 1941. The following year Welty published her debut novel, The Robber Bridegroom.

The wonderfully titled The Golden Apples was first published in 1949. It’s a collection of seven interrelated stories, with many of the characters appearing in different stories at different times of life. Its format and organisation are highly original, as the book is really suspended somewhere between being a novel and a story collection. Eudora Welty was inspired by Virginia Woolf at the time, and she does bring Woolf’s shimmering, impressionistic style to The Golden Apples.

The book is set in the fictional town of Morgana, and concentrates on a set of families and their internal dynamics. The stories also examine the relationships between the family groups. There are several outsiders to these Morgana families, and there are stories that concentrate on them and their relationships to the townsfolk. Welty likes to focus on otherness and has her characters daydream about slipping into different personalities. For example, when Nina in “Moonlake” muses on what it would be like to transform herself into someone else:

"The Orphan! she thought exultantly. The other way to live. There were secret ways. She thought. Time's really short. I've been only thinking like the others. It's only interesting, only worthy, to try for the fiercest secrets. To slip into them all – to change. To change for a moment into Gertrude, into Mrs Gruenwald, into Twosie – into a boy. To have been an orphan."

The main subject matter of the book, if there is one, is the cultural and family life of the Morgana residents. Welty beautifully weaves together the manners, natural environment and idiosyncratic personalities of the town. Her writing is wonderfully rich and strange, full of atmosphere and organic texture. You feel like you can smell, feel and touch Eudora Welty’s world. 

There’s also quite a bit of sly humour in Welty’s writing. When a prim mother thinks a lifesaver has acted with impropriety, she says "You little rascal, I bet you run down and pollute the spring, don't you?"

The Golden Apples is perhaps the strangest and most unique work of fiction I’ve ever read. Welty’s stories are rich prose-poems. These are rare, exotic and frequently intoxicating stories that reward slow and repeated readings.

The Golden Apples, by Eudora Welty. Published by Penguin Modern Classics. ISBN: 9780141196848 RRP: $22.95

To sign up for our monthly newsletter, featuring new releases, book reviews and favourite articles from around the web, click here.   

Delta Wedding & The Ponder Heart, by Eudora Welty

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

Two classic novels by the great Southern writer Eudora Welty.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publish this lovely hardback edition of two classic works by American short story writer and novelist Eudora Welty. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, she would live there for the rest of her life. During the Depression, she worked as a publicity agent for the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal program. It was her experiences working around the state of Mississipi in this capacity – conducting interviews, collecting stories and taking photographs, that inspired her first stories.


Delta Wedding

Delta Wedding was Eudora Welty’s first full length novel, published in 1946. Set in 1923, the novel is centred around wedding preparations for a member of the Fairchild family. Dabney Fairchild is set to marry the farm overseer, Troy Flavin. Many tongues are wagging in the sprawling Fairchild family, which includes a large cast of cousins, aunts, uncles, as it is thought she is marrying beneath her.

Other dramas are unfolding as the wedding preparations get under way when it is revealed that Uncle George has separated from his wife Robbie. As Welty explicitly states in the text, it is the women in the Fairchild family that run the whole show, and so it is the gossipy nature of the matriarch-like aunts who shape much of the narrative.

The young observer of all of this rambling family mayhem is Laura McRaven. Her mother has recently died, and so she is emotionally at loose ends, but the Fairchild family seem to think it is preordained that they will adopt her.

In style, Delta Wedding is very much like Eudora Welty’s short story fiction. There is no real centre in the novel, and focus is constantly shifting like a kaleidoscope. The prose flits from character to character, perspective to perspective. The reader doesn’t follow a plot, but rather gets to float down a river of Welty’s dreamy, beautifully atmospheric prose. You get carried away.

The writing in Delta Wedding is more about providing lots of texture, imagery and mystery. It’s a novel that you experience. It’s not quite stream of consciousness in its style, but definitely has a hallucinatory quality. Another thing Welty provides that other such writers in this genre seem to miss out on: humour. Her ear for dialogue is so peerless and sense of comedy so attuned that Delta Wedding is often hilarious.

It’s hard not to think that Delta Wedding is superior to a lot of other Southern novels, such as works by Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. The only mystery is why such a work of clear genius remains absent from so many bookshelves.

The Ponder Heart

Originally published in The New Yorker in 1953, with illustrations by Joe Krush, The Ponder Heart is a 100 page novella. The story is narrated by Edna Earl, and largely follows the romantic adventures (and misadventures) of her eccentric Uncle Daniel. The novella also includes a cast of characters from the fictional Clay County, Mississippi. 

More overtly comic than Delta Wedding, The Ponder Heart is different from much of Welty’s other fiction by virtue of the first person voice of Edna Earl and her perspective on the world. She happily chugs along describing all kinds of calamitous events and doesn’t appear phased by much at all.

The Ponder Heart is very much a light, frothy fiction, but like all else Eudora Welty puts her hand to, its execution is perfect. This is a brilliantly entertaining read and a great introduction to the works of this great 20th century writer.

Delta Wedding & The Ponder Heart, by Eudora Welty. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN: 9780547555645  $29.95

To sign up for our monthly newsletter, featuring new releases, book reviews and favourite articles from around the web, click here.   

The Guest Cat, by Takashi Hiraide

Staff Review by Chris Saliba


A perfect short novel about loss and the impermanence of all things.

Who is Takashi Hiraide?

Takashi Hiraide is a Japanese poet and essayist, who was born in 1950. He has written one novel, The Guest Cat, which was published in 2001 and this year (2014) was translated into English by Eric Selland.

The blurb on the back of this exquisite short novel says it was a huge hit in France. Perhaps this is no wonder. Takashi Hiraide's intricate and finely drawn prose recalls the work of one of France's most celebrated novelists, Colette. She even wrote a novella called The Cat, a story that concentrated on a young couple and a much loved cat that causes friction in the relationship. Like Colette's The Cat, Hiraide's story features a nuanced portrait of feline behaviour and psychology, and the emotions they elicit in humans.

Chibi makes regular house calls.

The story centres around a couple in their thirties who are renting a small guest house that is attached to a larger house. Their landlady lives in the large house and looks after her ailing husband. It is just a matter of time before she herself will have to sell up and think about putting herself into a retirement home. The couple work in the publishing industry, but money is tight after the husband quit his regular job, so they do their best to eke out a living.

With all this financial uncertainty underpinning their existence (the couple constantly worry about the housing boom which is pricing them out of buying a house), and their ailing landlords living next door, they make friends with a neighbour's cat, called Chibi. The cat is a regular visitor, whom they feed, provide temporary housing for and even sing songs to. The narrator explains:

“It had become one of my wife's greatest pleasures in life to go out into the garden to greet Chibi no matter how busy she might be at the moment and no matter how cold the weather.”

Yet just as this enchanting little relationship is gaining strength, the couple's life, in its own small way, is unravelling. The landlady's husband dies, and she decides to sell up. They have to start looking for another apartment, yet property prices are impossibly high. And of course there is their relationship with Chibi, which has grown more involved and complicated.

A soothing effect on the soul

This is a perfect short novel about loss and the impermanence of all things. Takashi Hiraide's writing is so modest and authentic, he only concentrates on all the very small domestic details of life. Much of the novel is set in the couple's small guest house, and Hiraide paints a breathtakingly delicate and intimate picture of every aspect of the couple's living space and daily life. Like a naturalist, he also describes the bird and insect life that visits the guest house, weaving little philosophical digressions in with his observations. Anyone who has sat in a peacefully still house on a Sunday afternoon with the sun streaming in and enjoyed the fresh breeze coming through the window will recognise themselves in all that he describes. Hiraide writes:

“Like a camera obscura, which transmitted only that which was needed, the house with its breezy interior had a soothing effect on the soul.”

All these elements, the stillness, the sharp observation of place, the inexorable sense of advancing death and decay, and finally the feeling that the world is racing on ahead while you stagnate, gives this story its extraordinary depth. Hiraide's novel is a testament to how powerful even the most simplest truths in fiction can be.

The Guest Cat, by Takashi Hiraide. Published by Picador. ISBN: 9781447279402  $19.99

To sign up for our monthly newsletter, featuring new releases, book reviews and favourite articles from around the web, click here.    

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, by Henry Handel Richardson

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

Henry Handel Richardson's extraordinary three novel cycle, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, examines our strong propensity for self-delusion and vanity, and the havoc it can wreak on others. 

Best known for her Australian classic The Getting of Wisdom, Henry Handel Richardson was born Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson in East Melbourne, 1870. She published all her novels under this male pseudonym. Her father, Walter Lindesay Richardson, was a doctor. He contracted syphilis, was admitted to a mental asylum and died when young Ethel was only nine years old. His death, we learn from the short author bio at the front of this Text Classics edition, had a huge impact on his family.

The subject matter Ethel Richardson took for her hugely ambitious The Fortunes of Richard Mahony makes this abundantly clear. A cycle of three novels that were published over an eleven year period, the plot of the 900 page story is very much an anatomy of her parent's marriage. The first part, Australia Felix was published in 1917, followed by The Way Home in 1925 and lastly Ultima Thule, in 1929. The three novels together were published as The Fortunes of Richard Mahony in 1930.

As the title suggests, the novel chronicles the 'fortunes' of Richard Mahony. Yet this title is rather ironic, as Richard sabotages his own good luck at every turn. The story starts with Richard trying his luck out on the Ballarat gold fields. He has come out from England, and is determined to make his fortune. Not all has gone his way though, and he finds himself having to make ends meet as a shop keeper. A further indignity is piled upon this failure: he's actually qualified as a doctor and hence finds himself performing work beneath his station. Here is a key to Mahony's character. His existential struggle in life is to find his rightful place in society, or where he thinks that should be. At every turn in his fortunes, however, he feels himself either unappreciated or misunderstood. He's always dissatisfied with life, yet the high value he puts on his abilities and qualities is not shared by the societies he tries to join, whether they be English or Australian. It is partly his own fault, but he finds he doesn't belong anywhere

In truth Richard is a vacillating mess of ambition, self-delusion, vanity and childish irresponsibility. His restlessness doesn't spur him to any great achievements, but rather highlights his weakness of mind and character. While he slowly unravels and eventually spins out of control, it is his wife, Mary, who must become the backbone of the marriage. She is long-suffering, practical, loyal and hemmed in by the conventions of the time. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is not an overtly feminist work, but it concerns itself very much with the status of women. The reader can't help but think Mary would be better off on her own. In some ways, Mary achieves independence at the end of the novel, but at a dreadful cost. She must lower her social status, take on paid work as a post mistress (just as Richardson's own mother did) and try to look after her ailing husband. Her burdens are extraordinary.

The end result is a humbling experience. The novel, or cycle of novels, is not a hatchet job on Richardson's father, although it's certainly not a flattering portrait, by any means. The novel very much sympathises with the plight of a smart, practical woman tied to a self-destructive and delusional man. Yet Richardson also honors the marriage as one based on true affection. Mary cares for and protects her husband, despite all the grief he has brought her. The lesson that the story teaches is to appreciate what you've got, be humble and resist getting on your high horse. When reading through Mahony's many delusions, his yearnings for status, fame and money, it's not difficult to see yourself in this fictional mirror. None of us are innocent of such desires. Richardson shows what can happen when they're given full license. 

The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, by Henry Handel Richardson. Published by Text Classics. ISBN: 9781921922282  RRP: $12.95

To sign up for our monthly newsletter, featuring new releases, book reviews and favourite articles from around the web, click here.   

The Fateful Year: England 1914, by Mark Bostridge

Staff Review, by Chris Saliba

This vivid history brings the year 1914 to life, allowing the reader to very much walk in the shoes of the average Briton during that fateful year.

Mark Bostridge's The Fateful Year provides a history of one year, the momentous one of 1914. In it he shows English society and politics before the declaration of war, then describes the quite unbelievable rush of events that leaves the population stumbling and stupefied as to how war came so quickly.

For the months before the war, such diverse events as George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and the horrific child murder of Willie Starchfield are described, helping to give an idea of the popular culture of the time. The pre-war months were also full of political troubles, in Ireland with the military resistance to home rule and the incredible activities of the suffragettes, who were not averse to slashing famous paintings and plotting other outrages on the public.

The usefulness of this excellent book lies in how it shows all facets of English life before war was declared, when conflict with Germany seemed utterly incomprehnsible. Bostridge cleverly fuses the personal and the political, focusing on such relationships as the intensely close one between Prime Minister Asquinth and his confidante, Venetia Stanley, with whom he shared all his anxiesties.

In our current era, where we seem to feel that we can predict everything, it seems extraordinary how the English political elite really had absolutely no idea of the looming dangers. The culture at large – the newspaper reading public, the politicians, the historians and diplomats – no one really had a clue as to the tinderbox Europe was sitting on. All it took was an assasination to set off a remarkable sequence of events.

This is a wonderfully vivid history that gives a devastating feel of what it must have been like to live through those times, to plod through domestic political issues – the troubles in Ireland, the violent unrest of the suffragettes – and then suddenly, as though in a nightmare, to find yourself facing one of history's most horrific and destructive wars.

The Fateful Year so skilfully brings to life the sufferings and agonies of the British public during the year of 1914, that it filled me with sadness and sympathy for them. It seems a cruel trick of fate that some are forced to live through such horror, but that us later generations are able to avoid suffering on such a huge scale.

The Fateful Year: England 1914, by Mark Bostridge. Published by Viking. ISBN: 9780670919215 RRP: $45

To sign up for our monthly newsletter, featuring new releases, book reviews and favourite articles from around the web, click here.