Adelaide Review

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/2328/3313

Book reviews by Gillian Dooley for The Adelaide Review.

'The Adelaide Review sees its function as providing insightful review and analysis of the issues, culture and lifestyle shaping Adelaide and South Australia; to be intelligent, informed, critical and independent; to be essential, objective and balanced; to have credibility and integrity'.

News

The Adelaide Review

Browse

Browsing Adelaide Review by Issue Date

Jump to a point in the index:
Now showing 1 - 20 of 125
  • Item
    "Women on the Rocks: A Tale of Two Convicts" by Kristin Williamson. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2004-01) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    In "Women on the Rocks", Kristin Williamson has created a novel from scraps of historical fact concerning two female convicts: Mary Jones, who arrived in Sydney in 1820, and Maria Wilkinson, alias Jane New, who was sent to Hobart Town in 1824. Using these two women as the focus of her narrative, she has woven what is known about them together with other snippets of information into a plausible fiction.
  • Item
    "Ash Rain" by Corrie Hosking. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2004-04) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    "Ash Rain" is a strong, beautiful novel about troubled and wonderful people who brim with vitality. Hosking has managed that unusual and winning combination, poetic evocative prose with a compelling narrative. The story is full of contrasts. One of the most striking is between the vast skies of the Eyre Peninsula in summer and the wet cramped spaces of wintertime Edinburgh, where Dell travels to be with her lover Pat.
  • Item
    "Mr Golightly’s Holiday" by Salley Vickers. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2004-05) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    Mr Golightly is a very reassuring incarnation of God the Father. Slightly old-fashioned and unused to modern life, he is kindly and broadminded, and likes a pint at the local, though he is reluctant to involve himself in the petty affairs of the village. He has difficulty remembering what he wrote all those centuries ago in the Old Testament. The novel is full of gentle theological jokes, but the point of the story is a serious one. However hard a creator tries, once his creatures have independent life, they are out of his control. As he is told by ‘his old rival’ with ‘eyes … like ruined stars,’ ‘no author has the last word on his own work.’ Vickers claims in her note that comedy is the province of Mr Golightly, and tragedy is his rival’s; an interesting idea in these days of black and devilish comedies. But Iris Murdoch’s notion that comedy is basic to the novel, and tragedy, however hard it might try, cannot prevail within its pages is also relevant. Beautifully written, amusing and profound, "Mr Golightly’s Holiday" is wise and disarming and highly recommended.
  • Item
    "Small Island" by Andrea Levy. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2004-05) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    The social fabric of mid-twentieth century London suffered many assaults, and not all came from German bombers. Some came, outrageously, from their ‘ungrateful’ colonies. "Small Island" concerns two couples, one Jamaican and one English, whose lives intersect during and after the second world war. The focus of the novel is on the relations between white and black at time when xenophobia was seen as an Englishman’s right – ‘darkies’ were all very well in their ‘own’ countries but why did they have to invade England and bring down the neighbourhood?
  • Item
    "Snowleg" by Nicholas Shakespeare. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2004-06) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    ‘You can make a life in a night,’ says the mother of Peter Hithersay in Nicholas Shakespeare’s novel "Snowleg", which hinges on two brief and passionate affairs, accident and impulse changing lives forever.
  • Item
    "Fire Fire" by Eva Sallis. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2004-08-31) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    Acantia, the pathological earth-mother in "Fire Fire", is one of fiction’s most blistering portrayals of the harm human beings can do to those closest to them, all the while claiming the high moral ground. As the novel begins, Acantia with her husband A. Hartmut Houdini, a famous German viola player, and their five children move to an eccentric, saltdamp infested house in the hills near a city called Toggenberg – so obviously Adelaide that the pseudonym hardly seems worth while. Fire is a central image. Twice the house is threatened by fire, firstly in the "Ash Wednesday" bushfires in 1983. A second fire destroys the house some years later. But the pervasive atmosphere in the book is cold, claustrophobic and damp.
  • Item
    "Baudalino" by Umberto Eco. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2004-09-28) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    You might have thought that Monty Python had the last word on the Holy Grail, but now Umberto Eco has offered his own version of this potent mediaeval myth in "Baudalino", his latest novel. The title character is a peasant boy in twelfth-century Italy who by chance meets Frederick Barbarossa, the first Holy Roman Emperor. The novel tells of his adventures over the next fifty years: how Frederick adopts him and sends him to Paris to be educated; how he helps his adopted father, by means of his quick wit and good nature, to extricate himself from many tricky situations. Eventually he persuades an aging Frederick to embark on a Crusade. Mired in the dangerous politics of the warring states east of the Mediterranean, Frederick dies mysteriously in the castle of an Armenian dignitary. Baudalino and his eleven motley companions set off to find the fabled eastern kingdom of Prester John, posing as the Twelve Magi. Truth or lies, fact or fiction? Baudalino relates his story to Niketas, a Byzantine historian in Constantinople, under attack from another wave of barbarian crusaders in 1204.
  • Item
    "The Dante Club" by Matthew Pearl. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2004-09-30) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    Matthew Pearl is a graduate from Harvard, summa cum laude, and winner of the Dante Society of America’s prize for his academic work. Boldly, Pearl has taken for his main characters the famous New England Fireside Poets – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes (Senior), and James Russell Lowell. The year is 1865: the Civil War is just over. Longfellow is engaged upon a controversial translation of Dante’s "Divine Comedy", the first to be published in America. Pearl uses this precise point in American history – the horrors of the Civil War fresh in everyone’s minds – and juxtaposes it with the opposition to the Dante translation from a conservative Harvard establishment convinced not only that the encouragement of modern languages poses a threat to the comfortable hegemony of Greek and Latin, but also that the Divine Comedy’s subject matter is scandalous and will undermine the morals of decent, Protestant Americans.
  • Item
    "Murder by Manuscript" by Steve J. Spears. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2004-10-29) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    "Murder by Manuscript" is the second in Steve J. Spears’ "Pentangeli Papers" series and is a delicious spoof on the detective genre. It is set in an Australian version of Gotham City, with its own redolently-named districts. Along with the extravagant parody, there is a fair dose of clever satire. Quite coincidentally, the plot of "Murder by Manuscript" bears a resemblance to Matthew Pearl’s "The Dante Club". Each features a detective from an ethnic minority, and a serial killer using a formula based on coded instructions in a literary work – in this case a bloodthirsty and inelegant manuscript of Shakespeare which, without giving too much away, I can assure anxious readers is soon exposed as a forgery. The crimes in both cases are lurid and sadistic.
  • Item
    "Magic Seeds" by V.S. Naipaul. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2004-11-26) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul has often based a novel on material he has previously written about in a non-fiction book. In "India: A Million Mutinies Now" (1990) he interviewed radicals and terrorists. Now, in "Magic Seeds", he takes his main character Willie Chandran to join the guerrillas in India.
  • Item
    "The Crimson Petal and the White" by Michel Faber. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2004-12-23) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    "The Crimson Petal and the White" is not just an historical novel. It’s the next best thing to a time machine, transporting us back to the London of 1875, surrounding and overwhelming with sights, smells and sounds.
  • Item
    "Belonging" by Isabel Huggan. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2005-02-18) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    "Belonging" is Isabel Huggan’s third book of ‘reminiscences’, A Canadian by birth, an expatriate by marriage, she finds herself settled permanently in the foothills of the Cévennes in provincial France with her Scottish husband Bob. "Belonging" is divided into twenty chapters, the first of which is titled ‘There Is No Word for Home’. Huggan uses this quirk of language deftly to introduce her theme of being ‘both home and not-home’. Interwoven into her narrative of life in France, with floods and storms, friendly, inefficient workmen, and untidy neighbours, are memories of childhood, of years spent living in Africa and the Philippines with Bob, and regular pilgrimages to family shrines in Canada.
  • Item
    "Word Map" by Kel Richards and the Macquarie Dictionary. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2005-03-04) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    "Word Map" is a dictionary of regional Australian English expressions. It is compiled from a website where everyone can contribute their own version of the local argot, and although evidence was sought for each entry – that it ‘had some kind of general currency’ – before it was included, the overall effect of the book is inevitably not rigorous.
  • Item
    "The Goddamn Bus of Happiness" by Stefan Laszczuk. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2005-03-18) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    Stefan Laszczuk’s "The Goddamn Bus of Happiness" is last year’s winner of Best Unpublished Manuscript in the SA Festival Awards. "The Goddamn Bus" is set in Adelaide and familiar places come up from time to time, but it could be any Australian city: there is little real sense of the location. At heart it is a simple morality tale of growing up.
  • Item
    "The Diary of Emily Caroline Creaghe, Explorer" by Peter Monteath (ed.). [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2005-04-15) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    Historian Peter Monteath has made something of a specialty lately of rescuing forgotten narratives. In 2003 he published "Sailing with Flinders", the diary of Samuel Smith, an ordinary seaman in the Investigator, and now he has resurrected the journal of Emily Caroline Creaghe, a woman who has some claim to be called one of Australia’s first women explorers.
  • Item
    "I Have Kissed Your Lips" by Gerard Windsor. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2005-05-13) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    Gerard Windsor’s new novel presents intricate layers of mystery for the reader to ponder and perhaps solve, and one of the most teasing of the mysteries is what the novel is, at its heart, concerned with. Windsor provides a string of red herrings while he circles around the dark core of his theme. In 1971, Michael English is a young Catholic priest, only child of an elderly couple, haunted by memories of his strangely distant mother. Moving backwards and forwards across four decades or more of Michael’s life, the narrative involves dreams, stories and imagined conversations. Mothers are clearly significant, but at first the theme seems to centre on the difficulties of the clerical vow of chastity. A story of an old priest’s lapse, told to Michael by a colleague in 1980, ‘after the fateful years of his life,’ leaves him feeling ‘with a cold fear’ that he ‘could go just as decisively’, causing ‘eyes wide with distaste or revulsion or horror’ to be turned on him, however involuntary his action might be. What soon becomes clear, though, is that by this time Michael has left the priesthood, and it is a more generalised fear of sexual indiscretion which plagues him. A second theme is marriage. Michael meets a parishioner, Esme, an older married woman, who seduces him. Within a year he is no longer a priest, Esme’s husband is dead, and they are married. This is not a judgmental novel, and the narrative is deeply subjective. Through descriptions of incest, adultery, paedophilia, male sexuality, motherhood and child mortality, there is much sharp evocation of feelings and little blame for any but the worst abuses of power. I Have Kissed Your Lips is not the novel of social comment that it first appears to be. It is deeply personal, enigmatic, strongly imagined and written with direct, poetic force.
  • Item
    "Hello Missus: A Girl’s Own Guide to Foreign Affairs" by Lynne Minion. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2005-06-10) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    There is much in "Hello Missus", Lynne Minion’s memoir of her year in East Timor, that didn’t make it to Australian television screens, where the success and benevolence of the international assistance provided by the United Nations was never in any doubt. One surprise is that the foreigners – or "malae" – trying to rebuild the country aren’t universally loved. And on reflection this is not hard to understand. Many of the UN workers are ‘monstrously overpaid’, while the East Timorese are lucky to earn $1 a day. No wonder they feel some resentment and are less than co-operative with their benefactors. Then there is the little question of a huge gender imbalance: most of the foreign workers are men and the UN ‘had probably introduced HIV to East Timor and was certainly spreading it’. So much for foreign aid!
  • Item
    "The Past Completes Me: Selected Poems 1973-2003" by Alan Gould. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2005-07-22) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    Alan Gould, with ten volumes of poetry and six novels to his name, must be one of Australia’s most prolific and dedicated writers, though hardly a household name. Gould’s poetry is rarely less than impressive. He has now published a selection of his poetry, from youthful efforts from his early twenties to the mature reflections of middle age.
  • Item
    "The Marsh Birds" by Eva Sallis. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2005-07-22) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    "The Marsh Birds" is the heartbreaking story of a young Iraqi, Dhurgham al-Samarra who gets caught up in Australia’s immigration system.
  • Item
    "Dead Europe" by Christos Tsiolkas. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2005-08-19) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    Dead Europe is the third novel by Australian novelist Christos Tsiolkas. In the novel, Isaac, a 36-year-old Greek-Australian photographer, travels through Europe, from Greece to England. It is in essence a journey through Hell.