I’m delighted to say my novelette, Beauty’s Sister, which was published as a digital-only Penguin Special last year is now available as a nifty orange Penguin paperback. You can see the rather lovely cover on the right (I know it’s been said before, but the orange Penguin livery is one of the truly great pieces of design), and if you’re in Australia you should also be able to buy it at your local bricks and mortar bookshop (elsewhere you’ll have to check out online retailers or buy it in digital form for Kindle, iBooks,Google Play, or Kobo (or for Kindle in the UK)).
As the blurb below explains, ‘Beauty’s Sister’ is a reworking of ‘Rapunzel’, but along with ‘Catspaw, or The Rakshasa’s Servant’, it’s also one of a series of “tales” I’ve been working on over the past year or two. At some point they’ll hopefully form a cycle of some kind, but for now I’m just enjoying exploring the things they let me do with magic and fables.
Anyway, the blurb is below. If you’d like to buy a copy check out your local bookshop or take a look on Booko. And as I said above, if paper is no longer your thing you can also buy it for for Kindle, iBooks,Google Play, or Kobo (and for Kindle in the UK)).
“A story of jealousy, passion and power, Beauty’s Sister is a dark and gripping reimagining of one of our oldest tales, Rapunzel, from acclaimed novelist James Bradley.”“Juniper, living deep in the forest with her parents, is stunned to discover that the beautiful girl living isolated in a nearby tower is her sister. When the two girls meet, what begins as a fascination and a friendship ultimately develops into something truly sinister.
I hope you like it. I’m thrilled it’s now in paperback.
I have to thank Sean Williams for alerting me to this video about the astonishingly beautiful work of Dutch sculptor, Theo Jansen. Called Strandbeest (Stranbeests? Strandbeesten?) they are crafted from plastic piping and walk and move using systems of sails to harness the wind.
Even on video they’re extraordinary things: marvellously intricate, improbable, strangely weightless, but what really fascinates me about them is the quality Jansen himself is alert to, which is the way their motion and delicate skeletal structures seem to elide the boundary between the biological and the mechanical. Nor is this just a matter of appearance: Jansen designs them using a computer program that utilises genetic algorithms to improve their design and selectively “breeds” them to improve their performance. Little wonder that as they shimmer along the beach it’s so easy to believe you’re seeing some form of alien life possessed of its own presence and purpose.
This quality is also present in many of the creations of roboticists at places like M.I.T. (or this robotic pack mule designed for use in Afghanistan and other mountainous areas (and indeed drones like the ones featured in the final moments of the same video)), and, in rather different form in the work of artists such as Patricia Piccinini (whose bizarre Skywhale has been hovering over Canberra for the past week or so) and Miyo Ando’s beautiful work with bioluminescence, all of which seek to grapple with the way the once clear divisions between life and non-life, biological and artificial are breaking down (interestingly Jansen’s creatures are created from plastic tubing, itself, and artificial substance made from organic compounds). These are questions I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, partly because the novel I’m working on is set across the next century, and is very much concerned with many of these questions and the intersecting notion of the Anthropocene (as was my Aurealis Award-shortlisted story, ‘Visitors’), partly because I’m hoping to write something rather longer on the subject later in the year. But in the meantime you should take the time to watch the videos below, and to visit Jansen’s website, which has more information about him and the project.
I’m 46 tomorrow. Perhaps because of that I’ve spent a lot of the past couple of years working my way back through a lot of the books and music I loved as an adolescent. For the most part that’s been a fascinating and often genuinely exciting process: rediscovering The Beatles after 25 years was magical, as was working my way through the backlists of New Wave writers such as Robert Silverberg (if you haven’t read Downward to the Earth, run don’t walk).
But one of the most unexpected – and joyous – moments was watching Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey again as research for a piece for The Australian.
Like many people I’ve seen 2001 a number of times, and each time it’s been a different film. The first time, as a 13 year-old in Adelaide in 1980, I found it majestic but baffling, the second, in my late teens it seemed dated and odd, the third, about 15 years ago (when I sat next to George Miller at the Cremorne Orpheum) I thought it was a boring and portentous exercise in 1960s faux-profundity.
Yet this time (or times, actually, since I ended up watching it three times) I found myself transfixed and astonished, right from the first moments. As I half-understood 15 years ago what I was seeing was very much an artefact of its times, but it was also much, much more than that. The music, the imagery, the strange plasticity of the environments, Keir Dullea’s brilliantly minimal performance, the wonderful, nested imagery of eyes and observation, Ligeti’s shimmering music, all seemed part of a seamless whole. Even the pacing, which I had mistaken for an exercise in Kubrickian perversity seemed visionary, an attempt to push past everything we know about the rhythms of cinema and demand we see again (to be honest I suspect the pacing is also Kubrickian perversity, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive). And although I’ve mentioned its effect on films like Prometheusbefore, it was also startling to be reminded how deeply it has influenced science fiction film and television over the past four and a half decades.
All of which is a long-winded way introduction to my piece about the film, which I’ve just posted in the Non-Fiction section. You can read a little bit below, alternatively just hop over and read the whole thing.
And since I’ve completely failed to write the piece I meant to write about David Bowie’s The Next Day I’m going to take a moment and point you to the Bowie2001 project, which mixes footage from the film with remixed version of a series of classic Bowie tracks. You can download the remixed tracks, the mixtape or torrent the movie from the Bowie2001 website. Alternatively I highly recommend Rick Moody’s encyclopaedic article about The Next Day.
And here’s the introduction to the piece itself:
“Even 45 years after its release it is difficult to know what to make of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Is it, as polls such as Sight & Sound’s recent survey of the greatest films of all time declared, one of the most important cinematic works ever created? Or is it, as Pauline Kael, who described it as ‘monumentally unimaginative’, and Rock Hudson – who surely spoke for a great many when he leapt to his feet at one early screening and demanded ‘Will somebody tell me what the hell this is about?’ – believed, a baffling, over-long exercise in directorial hubris?
“The answer, of course, is that it is both. Stretching from the dawn of time to (what was then) the future, from the Earth to the moons of Jupiter and (as the title of its dialogue-free fifth and final section, asserts) ‘Beyond the Infinite’, it is a film that demands the viewer give away many of their assumptions about what they are watching and how to watch it, to surrender themselves to its rhythms and its mysteries. It is a point Kubrick himself made in an interview at the time of the film’s release, when he ’You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film – and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level – but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he’s missed the point.’” Read more …
And finally, here’s the extraordinary scene in which the Monolith on the Moon communicates with its twin in orbit around Jupiter.
Just a quick note to say I’ve got a story in the May issue of Aurealis, which hits the interwebs today. Entitled ‘Catspaw, or The Rakshasa’s Servant’, it’s basically a contemporary folk tale, and was inspired by a post on Lev Grossman’s blog which reproduced the image on the right, an image that will be immediately recognisable to anybody who played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in the 1980s (next up, a story called ‘The Unbearable Squareness of Gelatinous Cubes’).
Anyway, you can purchase Aurealis from Smashwords for AU$2.99, which seems an absolute bargain for a story that features duelling shapeshifting tiger demons. And which is really a tribute to my many years as a devoted player of role-playing games.
I have to confess I haven’t been a huge fan of the last couple of Iron & Wine albums. Despite the occasional marvellous song (‘Flightless Bird, American Mouth’) they’ve felt caught somewhere between the hushed intensity of And the Creek Drank the Cradle and Our Endless Numbered Days (apparently the distinctive whispered vocals on the former were because Sam Beam’s baby daughter was asleep in the next room) and the more expansive arrangements he seemed to be pursuing on The Shepherd’s Dog and Kiss Each Other Clean. But right from the looselimbed, sun-warmed zig-zag of its opener, ‘Caught in the Briars’, his new album, Ghost on Ghost, is a revelation: gorgeous, warm, even a little bit funky, a combination in which the more complex musical ideas Beam has been exploring in recent years finally serve to reveal his real strength as a songwriter.
For now at least you can stream the full album on NPR’s First Listen; alternatively you can check out the video for the album’s third track, ‘Joy’, below.
When I began this site part of my plan was to use it to publish short pieces of fiction, either drawn from works in progress or harvested from other published and unpublished sources. In the end that didn’t happen, mostly because the moment never really seemed right, but just lately I’ve been thinking I might start to post a few things here.
To that end I’ve just uploaded my story, ‘The Flats’, which was published a couple of years ago in the Get Reading! anthology, 10 Short Stories You Must Read in 2011. I’ve chosen it as the first one partly because I like it, and partly because a translation by Jorge Salavert has just been published in the Spanish-language literary magazine, Hermano Cerdo, so it seems sensible to have the English-language version available as well.
You can read ‘The Flats’ online now. If you’d like information about some of the other stories I’ve published recently you can check out my new Short Fiction page, or you can go direct to the source and grab a copy of my Aurealis Award shortlisted story, ‘Visitors’, from the Review of Australian Fiction or read ‘The Inconvenient Dead’ over at Overlandor in Best Australian Stories 2012. Australian (and I think, US) readers can also grab copies of my Rapunzel novelette, ‘Beauty’s Sister’ for Kindle, iBooks, Google Play, and Kobo, while UK readers can download it for Kindle.
At Perth Writers’ Festival a few weeks back I had the pleasure of hosting a conversation with the depressingly brilliant, charming and multi-talented China Miéville. If you’re in Australia and you’re free at 11:00am tomorrow, it’ll be screening on Big Ideas on ABC 1, otherwise you can check out a preview below and watch the full interview or download video and audio versions of it from the Big Ideas website. It should also be available to Australian viewers on ABC iView later this week as well.
Obviously being on the shortlist is pretty fabulous in itself, but I’m doubly pleased because it feels like a real vote of confidence in the time and effort the Review’s editor, Matthew Lamb, has invested in the publication. Matthew’s now editing Island (a process he spoke about recently) but in his time at the Review he helped create a space in which both new and established writers could stretch themselves and try new things, a process that’s paid off in spades over the past couple of years.
You can read the full list of finalists over on the Aurealis Awards website, and if you’d like to read the story itself it’s available for $2.99 through the Review of Australian Fiction (or you can get the whole of Volume 2 for $9.99). My congratulations again to all my fellow finalists (and in particular Margo Lanagan, whose novel, Sea Hearts, was also shortlisted for the Stella Prize earlier this week) and my thanks to the judges and organisers for all their hard work.
Oh, and the picture of the pitcher plant? If you read the story you’ll understand.
This is a little late in the day (although it’s been that kind of month), but if you’re in Perth and heading to the Writers’ Festival over the weekend I’m doing a few sessions you might want to check out.
And while we’re on the subject of the Stellas it was great to see the release of the inaugural longlist for the award. It’s a really interesting and diverse collection of books that span fiction, non-fiction and memoir. Big congratulations both to everybody on the list and to all the people who have worked so hard to make the award happen.
“With Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band finished, the group left Abbey Road at dawn bearing an acetate and drove to ‘Mama’ Cass Elliott’s flat off the King’s Road where, at six in the morning, they threw open the windows, put speakers on the ledge, and played the album full blast over the rooftops of Chelsea. According to Derek Taylor, ‘all the windows around us opened and people leaned out, wondering. It was obvious who it was on the record. Nobody complained. A lovely spring morning. People were smiling and giving us the thumbs up’.”
Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties.
If you haven’t you must see these two extraordinarily beautiful videos from Icelandic group Of Monsters and Men’s fantastic debut album, My Head is an Animal. The ‘Little Talks’ clip was directed by Mihai Wilson of We Were Monkeys and has already been nominated for a number of awards, the video for ‘King and Lionheart’ was directed by Wilson and Marcella Moser. You can read a little about the background to the ‘Little Talks’ clip on the We Were Monkeyswebsite.
I mentioned the other day I was leaving this year’s roundup of my best books until the last minute because The Weekend Australian wasn’t running its selections until today, and I didn’t want to preempt what I’d written for them.
My lists are possibly a bit truncated because six weeks of my year was devoted to reading all 5000 pages of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, a task that not only never felt onerous (except perhaps during the endless sequences in the East in A Feast for Crows) but left me howling with rage that the next part, Winds of Winter, isn’t due until 2014 at the very earliest (and let me just say that if ol’ George dies before he finishes the final book I will personally dig him up and kill him again).
I want to write something more substantial about the series at some point; for the moment I’d just say that I think they’re a pretty remarkable achievement. Martin gets praised for the skill with which he controls his incredibly complex narrative, and for the richness of his characters, but in a way I think the real achievement of the books is their capacity to make you admire characters you may not particularly like (the obvious example is Stannis, but the transformation of Jaime into a sympathetic and even admirable character is one of the real achievements of the series, as is the manner in which the reader comes to sympathise with Cersei by the end of A Feast for Crows). It’s a quality that’s made even more effective by the skill with which Martin frustrates the reader’s narrative expectations, changing the rules by killing characters you assume can’t die and demonstrating the way the actions of minor characters can throw even the best-made plans into chaos (in a way the series is really about the sheer unpredictability of political and military outcomes).
I’m not sure how much crossover there is between Martin’s readership and Hilary Mantel’s, but there are more than a few similarities between A Song of Ice and Fire and Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. Both share a fascination with the exercise of power, and with the complex and often subtle ways in which characters overreach. And while Mantel’s vision is darker than Martin’s (as books like Beyond Black demonstrate, she’s long had a fascination with cruelty and evil, in particular female cruelty and cupidity) there are enough resonances to make me wish that even half the people who’d read Martin would read Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies and vice versa.
I don’t think there’s any question Bring Up The Bodiesdeserved to win the Booker: electrically written, superbly assured, coolly subversive in a whole series of ways, it is, quite simply, a brilliant book. And I think the Booker judges this year did a good job of producing a shortlist that suggested they actually had some kind of project in mind and knew what they were looking for. But I also think it’s a pity the award’s definition of quality remains so incredibly narrow, not least because if it didn’t there would already be one standout contender for next year’s award, and that’s M. John Harrison’s terrifying Empty Space, a book that walks you to the edge of the void and forces you to look out into it until it begins to look back at you.
On the other side of the Atlantic I was hugely impressed by A.M. Homes’ May We Be Forgiven. It’s uneven and occasionally sentimental (although I suspect the sentimentality is part of the point) but it’s also ferocious and funny and quite brilliant (I’m also reviewing it so I don’t want to say too much before the review runs).
Aside from a few notable misfires, in particular the new ones from Michael Chabon, Ian McEwan and Richard Ford (a novel whose overwritten prose and deadening narrative structure seems to embody all the anxieties of the contemporary literary novel in one (very long) volume), it was a fantastic year for fiction of all kinds. I loved Lauren Groff’s vision of a failing utopia, Arcadia, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (a book filled with images such as the tide of zombies moving like a river through the streets that continue to haunt me, even a year after I finished it) and John Green’s slightly slick but incredibly moving story of two teenagers with terminal cancer, The Fault In Our Stars.
I also very much enjoyed Patrick Flanery’s imaginary exploration of the lingering effects of trauma, Absolution, Adam Johnson’s North Korean political satire, The Orphan Master’s Son and James Meek’s The Heart Broke In.
On the Australian front I’ve read a lot less than I should, but I loved Margo Lanagan’s selkie novel, Sea Hearts (or The Brides of RollRock Island as it’s known in the UK) and Chris Flynn’s effortless and energetic debut, A Tiger in Eden.
I also read a lot (and I mean a lot) of short fiction, a lot of which was extraordinarily good. The four real highlights were Kij Johnson’s stunning At the mouth of the river of the bees (if you haven’t read its World Fantasy Award-winning opener, ‘26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss’, I suggest you do so immediately), Elizabeth Hand’s Errantry (the opening story of which, ‘The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon‘ is available on Hand’s website), Karin Tidbeck’s strange and quite brilliant Jagannath and Alice Munro’s new collection, Dear Life (the remarkable ‘Gravel’, a story that seems to be one kind of story until, quite suddenly, you realise it’s a quite different kind is a textbook example of Munro’s talent for misdirection). I also loved Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her, a book of stories sustained by an internal architecture that only reveals itself in the final pages.
Two other books I loved but which seem to me to elide the usual definitions of novel or short story collection are Keith Ridgway’sHawthorn and Child and Alan Garner’s Boneland. Hawthorn and Child isn’t quite a novel in stories, and lacks the unifying architecture of a collection like Diaz’s, but nor is it simply a series of interconnected stories. Either way it’s terrific: tautly written, funny and whip smart both politically and personally. Likewise, Boneland, the final part of the trilogy Garner began 40 years ago with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, is only a novel in a nominal sense, often seeming more like a journey into the disturbed psyche of its author and the landscape that has inspired so much of his work, but it’s no less powerful for it.
If there was one book of non-fiction I wish was on the Christmas reading lists of politicians around the world it would be Callum Roberts’ account of the crisis confronting our oceans, Ocean of Life: although a lot of the material in it will be familiar to anybody with an interest in the subject seeing it laid out in detail in on place is deeply, deeply confronting. Elsewhere on the non-fiction front I very much enjoyed D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story, which provided an interestingly unconventional and mercifully unhagiographic account of a troubled life (and the title of which, interestingly, seems to have been inspired by a line of Christina Stead’s), Robert MacFarlane’s stunningly written The Old Ways and Sean Howe’s smart and superbly entertaining Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.
Locally I loved Jane Gleeson-White’sDouble Entry (despite the title it’s about accounting, and despite that it’s fascinating and provocative about the significance of accounting) and Geordie Williamson’s passionate tour through the backblocks of Australian literature, The Burning Library.
On which note I might stop. I had been planning to pull together a list of my favourite music over the past twelve months, something I now suspect won’t happen, so in lieu of a post I’ve pasted in three songs I’ve been playing to death in recent weeks: Nada Surf’s impossibly joyous ‘Jules and Jim’, Band of Horses’ ‘Slow Cruel Hands of Time’ and The Lumineers’ ‘Ho Hey’. And I’d love to hear from all of you about the books you enjoyed this year.
It’s taken a while, but the Penguin Specials editions of my Rapunzel novelette, ‘Beauty’s Sister’, and my essay about Adelaide, adolescence and serial murder, ‘The Element of Need’, are now available in the UK. At the moment they’re only available for Kindle, but iBook and Google Play editions should be available soon, and as soon as they are I’ll post links. I understand they should be available in the US reasonably soon as well.
Both cost £1.99. You can buy the UK edition of ‘The Element of Need’ here and the UK edition of ‘Beauty’s Sister’ here.
If I were to make a list of my all-time favourite comic panels this one, depicting Bruce Banner caught in the blast of the gamma bomb from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’sIncredible Hulk #1 would be right up there. It’s got all the dynamism and drama of Kirby’s art at its best – there’s something immediately iconic about the image of Banner with his arms thrown up as the bomb he’s created explodes behind him – but it’s also a reminder not just of the way Cold War anxieties fed into the early Marvel comics, but of the way their imagery and grammar drew upon the legacy of the monster and horror comics of the 1950s.
