Adelaide Review

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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'.

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 125
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    2005 Reading
    (Adelaide Review, 2005-12-09) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    The best books of 2005.
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    2006 Reviewed.
    (Adelaide Review, 2006-12-15) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    A summary of the best books for 2006.
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    The Art of Persuasion
    (Adelaide Review, 2007-12-07) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    A survey of seven non-fiction titles published in 2007.
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    "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.
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    "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.
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    "Beautiful Lies: Australia from Menzies to Howard" by Tony Griffith. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2005-08-25) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    "Contemporary Australia" was the pedestrian title of a 1977 book by historian Tony Griffith. For later editions he spiced it up with a quote from Mark Twain: Australian history ‘is almost always picturesque … it does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies’. The third edition, just out, with a new, up-to-date subtitle, is "Beautiful Lies: Australia from Menzies to Howard".
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    "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.
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    Best Reads from the Past Year
    (Adelaide Review, 2007-12-21) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    Roundup of best books of 2007 from The Adelaide Review's book reviews coordinator.
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    Betting on the Booker
    (Adelaide Review, 2007-10-12) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    A feature on the six books shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2007.
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    "Civil Rights: How Indigenous Australians Won Formal Equality" by John Chesterman. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2005-09-16) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    John Chesterman’s book "Civil Rights" reinforces the message that ‘rights talk’ is often of little practical use. The symbolism is important but having the right to equality is in itself a passive concept.
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    "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.
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    "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.
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    "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.
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    "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.
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    "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.
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    "Following Them Home: The Fate of the Returned Asylum Seekers" by David Corlett. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2005-10-14) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    David Corlett has travelled to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, and even Thailand, where the Department of Immigration has sent some middle eastern asylum seekers whom they couldn’t dispose of elsewhere, to find out what has befallen those sent back. He relates the tale of Jafara, a detainee on Nauru, who could not use a telephone until given permission by the International Organisation for Migration, the multinational company engaged to run the detention centre. By the time Jafar was allowed to call his family, months after he arrived on Nauru, they had left without leaving a forwarding address. When he was sent back to Afghanistan, he had lost touch with them irretrievably. He is now living in Pakistan, at 22, with no future and no family.
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    "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.
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    "Heart Cancer" by Bill Leak. [review]
    (Adelaide Review, 2005-10-28) Dooley, Gillian Mary
    Bill Leak is a cartoonist. His droll comments on politics amuse readers daily in "The Australian". Not content with a string of awards for his newspaper work, he has decided to branch out into fiction.
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    "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!
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    "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.