The Walking Dead

I usually follow librarian Nancy Pearl's 'Rule of 50' when it comes to reading books. This rule says if you are 50 years old or under, you need to read 50 pages before deciding whether to continue or give up on a book. If you are over fifty, subtract your age from 100 and use that number. I am fine with deciding not to finish a book, and have often put aside books that I couldn't get into, did not like, or felt life was too short to waste on time on. 

I offer this preamble because there were a number of times during reading Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011) where I almost gave up, and probably should have. I did not enjoy this book and kept waiting for it to get better. About 60 pages in, I looked at some readers' reviews who promised it would improve (they lied!), so I persisted.

Set in New York City over three days, Zone One is a literary zombie novel. A few years ago a global pandemic caused the rapid end of the modern world. Humans infected with the plague turned into living dead 'skels'. Some, who didn't fully become carnivorous zombies, are 'stragglers' caught in a loop, tethered to their old life. The survivors of 'Last Night', the origin of the plague, have been trying to rebuild the world. In Buffalo NY a government has begun to form and work has begun on reclaiming lost territory. The army was sent into Manhattan and established Zone One in the Southern end. Barriers have been built along Canal Street and skels have been cleared in the Zone, in the hopes of eventually repopulating the city. 

Here we meet protagonist Mark Spitz and his colleagues Kaitlyn and Gary. They are a team of sweepers whose job it is to go floor by floor in the skyscrapers and make sure no skels or stragglers have been left behind. They know what to look for -  barricaded offices, dark stairwells - and if they find any living dead they dispatch them and place them in body bags to be incinerated. 

Mark is an average guy. He is nothing special. Over three days Mark's memory goes back and forth in time as he reflects on his Last Night experience, his life before and his existence since. We learn bits and pieces about Kaitlyn and Gary as they all try and survive.

I had high-hopes for this novel. I admire Colson Whitehead and was interested in reading this when I heard him speak about his work at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2023. I like the way Whitehead experiments with genre. He is a thoughtful, intelligent writer, with a gift for cinematic descriptions. 

In Zone One, Whitehead has included some intriguing elements. The 'American Phoenix' campaign with its anthem and merch, designed to instil a sense of comradeship and American can-do spirit in the survivors. The frozen stragglers which provide the sweepers with a morbid guessing game of how they ended up there. The Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD) which plagues the survivors and accounts for their insomnia, addiction, and depression.   

Despite this, the novel did not gel for me. Zone One is strangely paced, and I found is so slow and boring, with a lot of description that goes nowhere. Like a dud episode of The Walking Dead, I found myself wanting to fast forward and get to the action. I only wish I had followed Nancy Pearl's advice.

My reviews of Whitehead's The Nickel Boys (2019) and Harlem Shuffle (2021) are available on this blog.

Booker Prize Shortlist 2024

The Shortlist was announced last night for the 2024 Booker Prize. The thirteen titles on the Longlist have been whittled down to six:

• Percival Everett - James (America)
• Samantha Harvey - Orbital (UK)
• Rachel Kushner - Creation Lake (America)
• Anne Michaels - Held (Canada)
• Yale van der Wouden - The Safekeep (Netherlands)
• Charlotte Wood - Stone Yard Devotional (Australia)

 

Chair of the judging panel, Edmund de Waal, said of the shortlist:

“I am enormously proud of this shortlist of six books that have lived with us. We have spent months sifting, challenging, questioning – stopped in our tracks by the power of the contemporary fiction that we have been privileged to read. And here are the books that we need you to read. Great novels can change the reader. They face up to truths and face you in their turn. If that sounds excessive it reflects the urgency that animates these novels. Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity. The fault lines of our times are here. Borders and time zones and generations are crossed and explored, conflicts of identity, race and sexuality are brought into renewed focus through memorable voices. The people who come alive here are damaged in ways that we come to know and respect, and we come to care passionately about their histories and relationships."

I am delighted with this shortlist. First, last year the shortlist was dominated by guys named Paul. Here, we have five women on the list. Most of the authors are established, with van der Wouden the only debut novelist. I am also thrilled that Charlotte Wood is on the shortlist. Her books deserve a wide readership and I hope this boosts her profile internationally. 

Thus far I have only read Wood's Stone Yard Devotional and Everett's James - both brilliant. My sincere hope is that Everett wins this year's prize. James is a triumph. 

The Winner of the Booker Prize, and recipient of £50,000, will be revealed on 12 November 2024. Happy reading!

Prime Minister's Literary Award Winners 2024

The winners of the 2024 Prime Minister's Literary Awards were announced this week. These awards have a significant prize pool ($600K) and serve to recognise 'established and emerging Australia writers, illustrators, poets and historians'. 

The winners are:

• FICTION - Andre Dao - Anam
• NON-FICTION - Daniel Browning - Close to the Subject: Selected Works
• AUSTRALIAN HISTORY - Ryan Cropp - Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country
• CHILDREN'S LITERATURE - Violet Wadrill (and co-creators) -  Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country
• YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE - Will Kostakis - We Could Be Something
• POETRY - Amy Crutchfield - The Cyprian

 

See the Creative Australia website for more information. You can also watch the winner's announcement on YouTube below.

Who Loves Longer?

I love Australian author Richard Flanagan. His Booker Prize winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) is one of my all-time favourite novels. I have had the good fortune to see him speak at various festivals and events. I have read most of his work and have tremendous admiration for his advocacy. 

A few weeks ago I finished his latest book, the strangely enticing Question 7 (2023). Ever since I have been mulling it over, trying to figure out what I would say about it. This is a book that does not fit neatly into any genre - its is a memoir, a history, autofiction, and more. There were parts that I loved, parts that sent me down search engine rabbit-holes, and parts that I struggled to make sense of. This is a book that requires meditation and mulling, consuming in short bursts and savouring over time. 

The title Question 7 is from a Chekov story in which a mathematical problem about trains departing at certain times ends with the unanswerable question 'who loves longer, a man or a woman?'. Flanagan writes that this question 'is about how the world from which we presume to derive meaning and purpose is not the true world.' (p24). Question 7 is Flanagan's quest for meaning.

It begins in 2012 at the Ohama Camp in Japan where Flanagan's father was interned during World War II, forced to work in the coal mine as a slave labourer. There is no memorial and the local museum has no mention of the slave labourers, as if they never existed. Flanagan wonders 

'why we keep returning to beginnings-why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of why. 

But there is no true. There is only why. 

And when we look closer we see that behind that why is just another tapestry. And behind it another, and another, until we arrive at oblivion.' (p3)

In his quest for why, Flanagan reflects on his childhood in rural Tasmania and the impact of colonisation on the island. He tells of how his grandmother's family were taunted for being descendants of convicts. Growing up, Flanagan's family did not speak of his father's time as a prisoner of war, forced to work on the notorious Burma Death Railway. His father was then interred at the Ohama camp and would have certainly died there if the atom bomb had not been dropped on Hiroshima, leading to the surrender of the Japanese and release of prisoners of war. 

Flanagan's search for meaning weaves in and out in Question 7 in a series of ifs. If the bomb was not dropped, he would not exist as his father would have died in Japan. He reflects on his own near-death experience when he was trapped in a kayak on a remote Tasmanian river. If he had not had this experience he may not have written his first novel, Death of a River Guide (1994) which set him on his career path. 

Beyond this personal story, the whys take us deeper. Question 7 also presents us with the affair HG Wells had with Rebecca West which led Wells to write The World Set Free (1914) which influenced physicist Leo Szilard to patent neutron chain reactions which influenced the Manhattan Project which led to Hiroshima, without which Flanagan would not exist.  

This is a fascinating intellectual, emotional and curious book, written in bite-sized segments, stream-of-consciousness style. It is a mosaic, in which each irregular piece comes together to reveal a beautiful whole. For me, the irregular pieces were better than the whole - or to use Flanagan's analogy, I guess I preferred the threads to the whole tapestry. I am glad I read Question 7. It is a reminder of Flanagan's incredible talent as a writer. 

To Have and Have Not

It's Short Book September! I scrolled my massive to-be-read pile for books of under 250 pages and found exactly what I needed. 

Dorothy B Hughes' In a Lonely Place (1947) is a perfect noir crime thriller. Dixon (Dix) Steele has returned to the States from WWII where he served in the Air Force. Originally hailing from the East coast, a Princeton grad, Dix has come out to Los Angeles. He is living in a flat belonging to Mel Terriss, who has allegedly taken an extended trip to Rio, and so Dix has access to Mel's car, wardrobe and accounts. A great deal for a guy with champagne tastes and little money. We quickly learn that Dix is a grifter - telling tall tales and scamming his uncle for funds. 

From the outset we know Dix is a dangerous man. The opening chapter describes how he follows a woman at night from the bus stop to her home. He is decidedly creepy, with an undercurrent of misogyny and self-loathing.

We then learn that LA is gripped by tales of a strangler - a lone man who stalks young women - leaving a body each month for the homicide squad to investigate. Dix's old war buddy Brub Nicolai is now a cop on the trail of the killer, so Dix keeps him close to stay up to date on the case.

Dix meets a dame, Laurel, who lives in Terriss' building. Dix falls for her hard and is thrown because she is an independent woman, not some damsel in distress. Can Dix put his past behind him and be happy with her? Or is he forever caught in a lonely place, having to live with his actions?

In the second half the novel's pace quickens when paranoia sets it as the net tightens around Dix. He wonders if he is being followed, he questions whether he has made a mistake and left a clue behind, he is suspicious of everyone around him. He becomes more erratic in his decisions and desperate in his actions. 

Dorothy B Hughes may not be as well known as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett or Patricia Highsmith but she should be. She has crafted an incredible character study - getting deep into the mind of a killer - but does so in a way where the violence of his crimes is alluded to but not shown. We don't have to read about the grizzly details, but we can well imagine them. I also love the language she uses in this novel and some choice words and phrases like 'megrims' which I plan to incorporate in my lexicon. I am keen to seek out some of her other novels.

Of course my impression of Dix was that he looked and sounded like Humphrey Bogart, who plays him in the film. I had not seen the film prior to reading, but a still from the film graces the cover of my Penguin Modern Classics edition so I had him in my mind and could not form an independent view. 

Today, a few days after finishing the book, I watched the film version of In a Lonely Place (1950) directed by Nicolas Ray. The movie is so different from the book. In the film, Dix is a well-known screenwriter with a fiery temper, quick to throw a punch. He is questioned regarding the murder of a hatcheck girl, and his inner darkness causes those around him to be suspicious. Bogart is fantastic and Gloria Grahame is brilliant as Laurel, but the other characters are not fully explored. The film is pretty good on its own, but it is a pale imitation of the book.