’Ordinary Gods and Monsters’ by Chris Womersley

Suburban Melbourne and two Year 12 students on the cusp of setting out into a world beyond school uniforms and timetables. As they wait for exam results, best friends and next-door neighbours Nick and Marion discover a very different neighbourhood to the one they thought they knew.

A coming-of-age tale, the two have hung out together never quite boyfriend/girfriend for years. Nick would certainly like to see things develop further but Marion appears to be perfectly content with the friendship between the two. University beckons for them both. But Marion’s father has been recently killed in a hit and run accident whilst out jogging – and the police have no clues.

An air of sadness inevitably pervades the family homes and, slipping away on the day of the funeral to score dope in support of his bereaved friend, Nick inadvertently puts into motion events that escalate beyond his and Marion’s wildest expectations. Ordinary suburbia suddenly becomes somethng much more intense as, from a silly Ouija session with the dealer, Nick seems to have been given a clue as to who was driving the car that killed Mr. Perry. But in deciding to follow that clue, the two teenagers put themselves in significant danger as they are led into the maelstrom of local orrganised crime.

In his sixth novel, award-winning Chris Womersley plays to his strengths in building characterisation and describing the minutaie of 1980s suburbia – the weatherboard houses, the picket fence, backyards and quiet streets where neighbours know your business. Its an aura of nostalgia. The weakness of Ordinary Gods and Monsters is the lack of any visceral intensity or empathy with and for Nick or Marion within the crime thriller aspect of the novel. The boy’s family is dysfunctional with a father living away from home and a sister who’s mental state is parlous to say the least. And with divorce on the cards, the family home will have to be put on the market. The tragic death of Mr Perry is too distant to create care – and Womersley fails to build sympathy. As the teenagers immerse themselves further and further into the strange underworld, the novel’s style verges on pedantic and matter-of-fact, thus undermining any potential ‘thrill’.

’How to Build a Boat’ by Elaine Feeney

A neurodiverse young boy on the cusp of adolescence transforms lives around him in Irish writer Elaine Feeney’s gentle, nuanced second novel.

Set in the west of Ireland and the city of Galway, a motherless Jamie struggles with the death of his mother in childbirth. A 16 year-old champion swimmer, Noelle’s pregnancy and resulting death was laid firmly at the feet of Jamie’s dad – and her family have never laid eyes on the boy since walking out of the hospital 13 years earlier. Now, all Jamie wants most in life is to build a Perpetual Motion Machine which will help him connect with his mother.

Starting a new school is certainly a challenge for the awkward teenager and dad’s worried that upsetting Jamie’s strict routine may cause problems. It’s not helped that the academic, religious school is conservative and full of bullies. As a result, Jamie initially finds most of his time is spent in the classroom of Tess Mahon, the English teacher who has her own concerns and a fractured family: a dead mother, an alcoholic father who is living on the streets of Galway and a cold, distant husband. Tess’ sense of displacement and lack of confidence provides sensitivity Jamie needs. And between them they find themselves drawn to the woodwork room (the former swimming pool) of Tadgh, a third lost soul having recently arrived from the islands and adrift from urban living.

How to Build a Boat is a tender, surprisingly complex tale of community as Jamie is slowly drawn out of himself. But in looking to provide the support for the adolescent, so the two adults provide help for each other. And with Tadgh suggesting the building a traditional currach, singular becomes communal for Jamie as not only is the boy working closely with the teachers, but slowly others are drawn into the project. Jamie adapts – as does Tess as she recognises the restrictiveness of her marriage.And it being an Irish novel, the role of the Catholic Church in all this is never far away.

Feeney’s novel was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize but disappointingly failed to make the shortlist.

’We Come With This Place’ by Debra Dank

Family, place, culture and time are beautifully and deftly interwoven into Debra Dank’s deeply personal tribute to current and ancestral family along with the Gudanji Country to which she belongs.

Nyamirniji ilinga jaburru …you listen first and then you will know.

Weaving in and out of time and place, Dank’s voyage evocatively yet at times painfully explores indigenous bush life, philosophy and history. Varied in its fractured, non-linear telling, We Come With This Place is a mosaic of experiences as she confronts ingrained racism, the result of brutal, historical colonial practice where the physical and verbal violence of today is juxtaposed with intergenerational disenfranchisement and violence. But the writer poetically incorporates memory of family and experience, good and bad.

Education for Dank was via correspondence school (Dank went on to work within the Queensland education system) living as she and her family did on a remote cattle station in a caravan that was (extraordinarily) illegal for her Aboriginal parents to own. As a young man, her father moved around, escaping violence: her grandmother was a Law Boss for Gudanji Country. But overwhelmingly, We Come With This Place is about family and the teachings passed on from generation to generation, about country, about food, the sacred stories, about the ties that bind.

Someone has walked this way before and as you walk yourself; into their footprints, their story becomes yours.

’The Crown’ (Season 6)

And so all good things must come to an end – even if the final season of the groundbreaking The Crown (with all 60 episodes written by series creator Peter Morgan) and its 50+ years of following Queen Elizabeth II and her family fails to rise to the grand finale it needed and deserved.

The Queen’s death delayed broadcast and impacted on the content of season six in spite of the series covering 1997 – 2005 – ostensibly the years of Tony Blair’s Labour government. It’s a sticky period for the royals with a known critic of the monarchy as the hugely popular prime minister (Bertie Carvel). But QEII (Imelda Staunton) must navigate his government along with a period of time when the Windsor family hit its lowest point in its popularity with the British public. It’s primarily as a result of the ostracising of Princess Di (Elizabeth Debicki) and, early on in this final season, their non-public reaction to her death in Paris in a car accident.

The problem with season six is the decision to follow sensationalism and cheap storylines, pandering exactly to the paparazzi-style reportage that contributed to Diana’s death. Much of the first half of the 10-parter focuses on her relationship with Dodi Fayed (an unconvincing, somewhat charmless Khalid Abdalla), the machinations of Fayed senior (a grasping Salim Daw) and Charles’ (Dominic West) reasonable and human reaction, supported by Camilla (Olivia Williams), to allowing his ex-wife some fun and privacy. Broad brush stroke changes to a more empathic future king duly noted in the positioning of The Crown in its politics with the Fayeds about to be consigned to history at Di’s death. It’s all somewhat The Daily Mail.

With the Queen citing family concerns for her two grandchildren that kept her in Balmoral on the announcement of Di’s death sees more softening towards the royals by its writers in The Crown. Family matters are given a level of precedence unseen before in the royal household – and barely a whiff of Blair intervention in the decision for the queen to return to Buckingham Palace. And, having done so, from there on in its all stoking of positive press as the Jubilee plans are made, Charles and Camilla are positioned as a couple and Prince William (a too old Ed McVey) comes into his own. A dig at Prince Harry (Luther Ford) is inevitable, even at this early stage, but the plotting by Mrs Middleton (Eve Best) to ensure William and daughter Kate’s (Meg Bellamy) paths cross is a splendid diversion redolent of the first season of Bridgerton.

Having said all that, season six does at least end on a high note with a superb period of self-reflection by a now lonely Queen Elizabeth (sister Margaret – Lesley Manville – having died a few years earlier). Imelda Staunton, Olivia Colman and Claire Foy (The Crown‘s three Elizabeths over its 50 year time period) reflect on a life given over to service. The problem there, however, is that it highlights just how underused Staunton has been. As recognised in season five’s review, putting it simply, the more the series focussed on the Queen, the better it was. In its first four seasons, a young Foy questioned her ability to ‘do the job’, the regal, middle-aged confident-in-herself Olivia Colman indubitably oozed ‘monarch’ but Staunton was too frequently pushed back into the shadows as the path was prepared for futures in Charles and William.

Rating: 56%

The Crown (season 4)

The Crown (season 5)

’This Other Eden’ by Paul Harding

Founded in 1792, a small island off the coast of Maine is home to a small number of racially integrated people founded by formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience. A little over a century later, their descendants, diminished in number, are faced with the cleansing of the island as authorities look to the welfare and education of the few children remaining.

This Other Eden is a powerful tale of prejudice and ‘other’, a small, relatively self-sufficient group which survives (just) outside the mainstream. And it is this very fact that is the cause for concern. Matthew Diamond, an idealistic missionary schoolteacher, arrives every summer, rowing across the short distance from the mainland and, within this disparate eclectic group of people, he has discovered one child fluent in Latin and another a brilliant mathematician. But both are female and black and no opportunities therefore exist in the wider community beyond the island. And the authorities with their brutal prejudices are without question in the process of clearing the island.

Teenage Ethan Honey is different. A superb artist and light-skinned boy easily able to ‘pass’, Diamond finds a way to save the boy from the fate of his family and neighbours, arranging for Ethan to stay with a former friend and artist some distance from Apple Island. Lyrical and pastoral his time may be on the land of Mr Hale, the young Irish maid soon becomes too big a distraction and its not long before both are dismissed from the property. Honey is never heard from again.

A novel inspired by the true story of the residents of Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, This Other Eden is an extraordinary story of resilience by the islanders stuck in their own struggles of survival. Apple Island is no easy place to live: the North Atlantic coastline is no walk in the park. The prophetic Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who lives in a hollow tree carving biblical scenes, is a longtime survivor as are the nocturnal Theophilus and Candace Larks and their children, living by night, sleeping as a mass huddle in a decrepit cottage by day. Their lives may not be ‘normal’ according to social mores, but it remains ‘theirs’ and each knows nothing else. The fact what is theirs is about to be taken away from them is the fundamental injustice at the core of Paul Harding’s novel.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize but lost out to Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.

’Scrublands’

Stereotypical Australian ‘stranger in outback town’ tale as investigative journalist Martin Scarsden looks to write an article on the recovery of a small town 12 months after a mass shooting that left five dead.

Traumatised and in recovery from a story that went tragically wrong months earlier, Sydney reporter Scarsden (Luke Arnold) is dispatched by his paper to interview residents and file a human interest story – 2 nights tops at the local motel. But nothing is what it seems as, initially, he is met with suspicion and hostility.

Hunky priest Byron Swift (Jay Ryan) was the shooter but the so-called random killings is soon apparent to be anything but. Through flashbacks from locals prepared to talk to him, Scarsden pieces together events leading up to the fateful Sunday. With support from single-mom and local bookshop owner Mandy (Bella Heathcote) and, unexpectedly, local police constable Robbie Haus-Jones (Adam Zwar), the jigsaw slowly fits together. The results, with a couple of more deaths along the way, escalate into something far wider in scope than ever anticipated.

Irritatingly, Scarsden fits the story together a little too easily and the final 15 minutes descend into melodrama that almost unravels everything that came before it. Yet, with all four episodes of Scrublands directed by Greg McLean (Wolf Creek, Rogue), it’s a cohesive, well-paced miniseries that, for the most part, holds attention. The location adds to that sense of uncertainty – a regional town long past its prime even before events 12 months earlier and where phone and WiFi reception is sporadic.

Rating: 59%

‘The Well’ by Elizabeth Jolley

Obsession, jealousy, growing old and loneliness are explored in Elizabeth Jolley’s Miles Franklin-winning novel as an ageing spinster and her teenage ward struggle to live their lives in a rural farming environment.

Lonely after the death of her elderly father, Hester Harper shares her home with a teenage orphan girl, Katherine. Set on a remote sheep and wheat farm in rural Western Australia, the Harper family were treated like royalty in the town living as they did on the sprawling property. But, with just Katherine to indulge, and Hester’s wants limited, she succumbs to the suggestion by the family financial advisor, Mr Bird, to sell the too-big property and move to a cottage on the furthest edge of the farm.

Hester adores the dynamic teenager, indulging her every whim. But with its opening pages, we are already only too well aware that something dramatic has happened. A body – animal or human – has been pushed down the well, hit by Katherine whilst the two were driving home from the local dance. Instead of stopping to explore the accident or even make judgement, Jolley whisks us back to the first arrival of Katherine in the homestead, partly out of pity and partly from fancy.

To say their relationship is unconventional is an understatement. Hester immerses herself in the training of the adolescent (whiffs of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion with the older women as Professor Higgins readily springs to mind) and completely indulges her. Katherine herself is seemingly naive (although as the book is told only from the older woman’s perspective, any feelings or emotions are not forthcoming), coming across as an Anne of Green Gables with boundless enthusiasm and love of everything proposed by Hester. Selling the homestead makes sense but a normally careful Miss Harper ignores Bird’s advice and prefers to keep most of the cash sale in the house rather than tying it into investments.

And so the night of the accident looms and their relationship becomes strained after the incident. Money is found to be missing – with the assumption that it went into the well with the intruder. Their plans go awry, more so when Katherine begins to hear the voice of the man unceremoniously disposed of a few nights earlier.

An eccentric psychosexual love story (on the older woman’s part) evolves as Hester reminisces about her own childhood and feelings for the German governess, Hilde – or possibly something less overt, an understated commentary on women’s lives and friendship. It’s never clarified (in spite of intimations from the locals on Hester’s rare foray into town). But The Well remains something of an oddity – a rambling imbalanced narrative of an unclear relationship that changes when Hester’s carefully contrived world unravels.

Winner of the 1986 Miles Franklin Award (the last year where only the winner with no shortlist was announced).

‘In Bruges’

A dark black comedy as a murder that goes wrong sees the two hitmen involved lie low, on the order of their boss, in Bruges. On the eve of Christmas, it’s the last place Ray wants to be as they await instructions.

Having accidentally killed a young boy during the murder of a priest, Ray (Colin Farrell – Tigerland, The Banshees of Inisherin) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson – The Banshees of Inisherin, The Guard) high-tail to Belgium where they’re to await orders from the ruthless and foul-mouthed Harry (Ralph Fiennes – No Time To Die, The Dig). The two, forced to share a hotel room due to the busy holiday period, bide their time with Ray slowly climbing the walls from boredom – until he meets Chloe (Clémence Poésy – Tenet, Harry Potter) and things change dramatically.

The debut feature film from writer/director Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin, Seven Psychopaths) is a semi serious brutal comedy with a manic Farrell perfectly counterpointed with the mellow, laidback Gleeson as the two attempt to safeguard their futures.

Nominated for the 2009 best original script Oscar.

Rating: 68%

‘Cold Enough For Snow’ by Jessica Au

A deceptively simple novella, the second from Melbourne writer Jessica Au, Cold Enough For Snow sees a mother and (unnamed) daughter visit Japan, with the younger woman looking for a lost connection with her parent.

As the organiser, the daughter feels pressure to ensure her mother takes pleasure in the trip but not overtaxed. The days they have together merge into limited sight seeing, food and travelling to off-the-beaten track museums and galleries. As it is the onset of winter, Japan is cold and wet – an overnight trek, taken alone by the daughter whilst her mother stays at a traditional inn, is not quite the pleasurable experience hoped for.

It’s calm and zen-like, rarely raising above ‘quiet’ on the volume control in its telling. Now living in different countries, memories and recollections of shared experience unwind – but there’s little in terms of direct conversation between the two women. The daughter searches to know someone and to have them know me beyond the intimate detachment that exists.

Cold Enough For Snow looks to the carefully observed and is full of meditations of the minutiae of that shared experience. But in its quietness and lack of connection, Au’s novel is distant and, like the time of year they choose to visit Japan, cold. Calm control replaces emotion – not helped by the indirect communication that exists throughout its 70 or so pages.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Award.

‘Losing Face’ by George Haddad

A drifting Western Sydney teenager faces challenges at home and among his friendship group.

Joey is close to his mom and younger brother but he’s at the age that’s just not interested in family ties – and anyway, mom (Amal) is distracted as she needs to keep up with her mates and save for a boob job. Elaine, his grandmother, is a proud Lebanese widow with problems of her own. Dad Simon is nowhere in sight, having abandoned the family many years earlier.

Secrets current and past bubble to the surface as Joey dips in and out of focus – a part-time job at Woolworths, attending raves with best mates Kyri and Emma, nights with a spliff at Kyri’s place, dropping in to see his grandmother. But a reluctant night out where Joey finds himself in the company of the feared, dead-end Boxer is about to upend his life. A violent crime under the influence of drugs sees Joey in court and facing an extended prison sentence.

Losing Face is very much a narrative of place and time by debut novelist George Haddad set as it is among the have-nots of Western Sydney:

In the Abu Salim car park, Sudanese quarrelled with Egyptians about their parking prowess. Chubby Lebanese children chomped on sour plums as their mums loaded boxes of tomatoes and gallons of ghee into giant four-wheelers. The Syrian employees dragged the smoke of their cigarettes deep as they unpacked cartons of coffee off a battered truck…Going to Abu Salim meant you had to prepare yourself for a riot.

Young, naive, laid back, Joey is as much a victim of circumstance as his own indifferent behaviour. His is a rites of passage, a coming-of-age tale questioning identity, masculinity and sexuality within Australian Mediterranean/ Middle Eastern communities as he navigates his mixed cultural background.

Elaine has no doubts about her heritage – one of 13 children from rural Lebanon. On Joey’s arrest, she is desperate to save face. But her gambling addiction makes that particularly difficult as she secretly heads-off to distant pokies to avoid recognition.

It’s a multi-layered novel and relatively hard-hitting. Haddad as a novelist shows promise even if his prose in Losing Face does not always hit the mark or reach the levels he is undoutedly hoping to reach. Luminous at times, inconsistency undermines. Key, however, is the level of engagement he achieves and the investment in, in particular, the vulnerability of Joey and a proud but flawed Elaine.

The writer does not look for glib answers in his narrative of Joey’s journey or his grandmother’s recognition of her addiction – there is no ultimate happy ending. but nor should there be. Losing Face is grounded in real life experiences.

Haddad’s novel was longlisted for the 2023 Miles Franklin Award.