Longlisted for the 2026 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, John Banville’s latest novel Venetian Vespers is a curious tale indeed. I can’t say that I was much invested in the mystery that bears the plot, but was puzzled enough to keep reading to discover what Banville was on about. I kept sensing allusions to other novels set in Venice, (most obviously but not only The Turn of the Screw), and a narrative voice channelled from Henry James, but I could not fathom any preoccupation of significance.
I’m not sure that I do now. It’s not Banville at his finest, it’s just what Graham Greene used to call an ‘entertainment’: genre fiction written for the commercial market rather than the literary fiction which made his name.
Banville is a hit-and-miss author for me, and this is a miss. It’s deliberately transgressive, in the sense that it has a central character of #understatement dubious character, whose narration is narcissistic and unsavoury, to say the least. Venice as a gothic destination is overdone, and so is the depiction of an Englishman abroad as an uncultured boor who is not only scornful of everything about the city (including St Mark’s Basilica) but even the Italians who have a preference for speaking their own language.
If there is anything much to take from this novel, it’s that tourists project their own culture onto the places they visit. For Evelyn Dolman the city of romance is a tawdry destination, tainted by his own slime.
Not even an allusion to Monteverdi’s Venetian Vespers can save this novel.
I’ve read some of the other nominations for the 2026 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and I would rather they made the shortlist when it is announced in April. The longlisted titles are:
Venetian Vespers by John Banville (Faber & Faber)
The Two Roberts by Damian Barr (Canongate)
Eden’s Shore by Oisín Fagan (John Murray Press)
Helm by Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber), reserved at the library
The Pretender by Jo Harkin (Bloomsbury)
Boundary Waters by Tristan Hughes (Parthian Books)
The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly (Bloomsbury), reserved at the library
Edenglassic by Melissa Lucashenko (Oneworld Publications)
Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Polygon)
Once the Deed is Done by Rachel Seiffert (Virago) (I have this from the library to read next)
The Artist by Lucy Steeds (John Murray Press), see my review
Author: John Banville
Title: Venetian Vespers
Publisher: Random House, 2025
Cover design by Kelly Blair
ISBN: 9798217170166, pbk, large print edition, 400 pages (Normal size print editions are about 350 pages)
Source: Bayside Library
Longlisted for the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Awards, Wonderland is Tracy Farr’s third novel. It won the 2024 NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize: a prize set up by the family of novelist, playwright and poet Laura Solomon in her memory. Open to NZ citizens and permanent residents, the prize calls for new writing with a ‘unique and original vision‘. The winner receives a cash award of $2000 (as an advance) and a publishing contract with The Cuba Press. Runners-up receive $1000 and it appears that some of them achieve publication too. (See below for previous winners.)
Wonderlands is such a refreshing book, and it does indeed have a unique and original vision. It feels refreshing because there is nothing strident or agenda-driven about it. There are no dysfunctional characters, they are all just human. It is a family story of love, kindness, generosity and the strength of what the term female friendship fails to convey… we used to call it The Sisterhood because it implied being at one with women around the world, not just the ones you like. And — miraculously —the novel achieves all this without being sentimental.
This is the book description:
Doctor Matti Loverock spends her days and nights bringing babies into the world, which means her daughters—seven-year-old triplets Ada, Oona and Hanna—have grown up at Wonderland, the once-thriving amusement park owned by their father, Charlie. Then a grieving woman arrives to stay from the other side of the world, in pain and incognito, fleeing scandal. She ignites the triplets’ curiosity and brings work for Matti, diverting them all from what is really happening at Wonderland. In a bold reimagining, Marie Curie—famous for her work on radioactivity—comes to Aotearoa and discovers both solace and wonder.
The narration is sheer genius. I nearly wrote that it is written from three points of view because there is one third person perspective, (the mother Matti’s) and two first person perspectives, (Marie Curie’s and the triplets’) but no, it’s five, because Ada, Oona and Hanna burst onto the page as one voice that is somehow three.
The sound of a bell ding-ding-dinging down the road, closer to home, wakes us. We leap from the bed at the sound of our father’s familiar morning call—Rally, rally, rally, ratbags!—and slither bedwarm into our knickers and vests, then run through the house and stop in a pile by the front door to step our feet into cold canvas slippers. We open the door, and there is our mother, propping her bicycle against the verandah post, home and weary after her long night shift at the baby hospital in Newtown. She bends to kiss each of us in turn, then straightens to kiss our father last and longest. We watch her pause at the Lady’s door, listening, but not opening it. Her doctoring bag looks heavy in her hand, unbalancing her.
On the first few days of the Lady’s visit, our routine was abandoned. But today it’s business as usual, starting with the calisthenics that our mother and father insist on, for health and vitality. We step off the verandah, past our mother’s big black bicycle, and sing our way into the day. We sing an exercise song
wind! rain!
sun! fog!
calisthenics, whatever the weather!
as we march across the road to the beach, through the low dunes, and onto the flat of the tide-wet sand. Our father is close behind us, his long-ago-wrestler’s belly (now pie, pork and beer belly) barely contained by his neck-to-thigh black stretch woollen swimsuit. Look at him! The fluff of his chest, the wire of his legs, the ham of his arms! And look at the three of us! What a fine advertisement for modern life we make, our sleek, strong limbs, brown to the edge of our vests, our lily-white torsos underneath. (p. 38)
All these narrative voices combine their limited perspective to form a coherent whole. The joyous, exuberant voice of the three children quietens when they are listening to the muffled anxieties of their parents or the conversations of their mother with The Lady. (Though Marie Curie is here incognito, using her Polish name Marya Skwodovska, they are supposed to call her ‘madame’ or ‘professor’ but having overheard their impulsive, exasperated father refer to her as ‘Lady Bloody Radium’ — they call her ‘Lady’ as their private joke.) Through Matti’s private perspective we learn about the state of Marie Curie’s health and Matti’s own concerns: managing the extra work while soothing Charlie’s views about Ernest Rutherford imposing their guest upon them. We also learn about her friends with whom she occasionally lets down her hair for some boozy, raucous downtime. (My goodness, there are so many references to smoking, I thought that disaster would strike when Matti fell victim to lung cancer, but no, it’s a different tragedy that derails the family.)
Marie Curie is multilingual, but her English is rudimentary, and so is Matti’s French, so there are moments of mutual incomprehension and Farr has fun with the Lady’s mishearing of verandah when she calls the ‘balcony’ a Miranda’. But the depiction of her sickness, even as it gradually improves, is a chilling reminder of the real-life death of Marie Curie from radiation poisoning. And the real-life poison of gossip and innuendo.
Early 20th century Wellington is superbly realised, making me remember once more how lucky we were not to have experienced its infamous wind when we were there in 2019. Charlie’s Wonderland was a real amusement park on Wellington Harbour, but even if the triplets don’t join the dots and Matti doesn’t realise the extent of it, the reader can tell that it’s in financial trouble because the girls pester their father to open it for a Winter Wonderland… and that means there’s not enough patronage for it to be a year-round operation. By the time we realise this, we readers are invested in the fortunes of this unforgettable family… and devastated by the disaster that befalls them.
So much so that the ending seems just right and not contrived at all. That’s masterful writing!
Wonderland deserves a wide readership and I hope its nomination for NZ’s most prestigious literary prize gives it international attention.
Update, later the same day: I’ve just had an email from Tracy and she tells me that
The Cuba Press have just this month released the e-book of Wonderland (so recently that I haven’t updated my website yet!) – it’s on most of the usual platforms incl Kobo, Apple Books, though possibly not Kindle? [LH: No, I’ve just checked and it’s not there yet], as well as from the publisher.
Author: Tracy Farr
Title: Wonderland
Publisher: The Cuba Press, 2025
Cover design by Paul Stewart and Tracy Farr
Cover image: Wellington’s Wonderland at Miramar, The Water Chute by Zak (Joseph Zakariah), 1907 (modified)
ISBN: 9781988595931, pbk., 310 pages
Source: personal library, purchased from Fishpond, $29.95 +postage
Here are the previous winners of the Cuba Award. Links are to Goodreads, except for Wonderland which links to Fishpond because that’s where I bought it from. I have assumed that if I couldn’t find a title at Goodreads it hasn’t been published (yet) but as always am open to correction if I’m wrong.
2021: Lizzie Harwood, Polaroid Nights.
2022: Rachel Fenton, Between the Flags. Runner-up: Philippa Werry, Iris and Me.
2023: Lee Murray, Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud. Runner-up: Melanie Kwang, Faultlines.
2024: Tracy Farr, Wonderland. Runner-up: Abigail von Ahse, Flawless.
2025: Susanna Elliffe, Relic Party. Runner-up: Belinda O’Keefe, Trespassers Will Be Baked, Scrambled, Fried and Eaten
The Cuba Press has a very tempting list. It’s based in New Zealand so the best place for Australian readers to find their publications is at FishpondAU but note that they now charge for delivery. International buyers should choose Fishpond.com
Today was the last straw: on top of bullying its hapless users into using its horrible Block Editor, today I discovered that WordPress had removed my subscribe-by-email widget. They removed my blogroll widget a while ago too. No courtesy notification, they just did it.
So now I’ve had to cave in and waste an afternoon finding a new theme that approximates what I had — and there’s not much to choose from. (This is the one I wanted, it’s called Pilcrow, but ‘search themes’ couldn’t find it. I may try again later when I’m not so grumpy.)
I loved my old theme. Appropriately called Ocean Mist, it used my favourite colour blue, and it suited me perfectly. We were all used to it, my readers and me. It had a nice small header which I had customised with a photo of some books that represent the best of Australian literature. More importantly, you didn’t have to scroll down to get the waste-of-space header out of the way. This new intrusive header is too big and too fat and it’s ugly and I dislike hate it. I had a look at it on my phone and you can hardly see my lovely books behind that clunky black heading. So apologies to anyone who uses a phone to read my blog.
Plus the bottom footer which showed major categories has gone too.
Maybe I can get it back, and maybe I can restore my old blog roll and rearrange the widgets so that they are where I want them but I have already wasted enough time, because what I wanted to do today was to write my review of Tracy Farr’s terrific new book, Wonderland which has been nominated for the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
That is why I am here, that is why I do what I do. I don’t want to spend my time responding to changes I never asked for and don’t want.
Why can’t things that work well just be left alone?!
Many years ago when we were having one of those ‘Did we do the right thing?’ conversations that migrant families inevitably have about leaving their birthplace, my mother said something that I did not really understand at the time. ‘I don’t ever want to live again in a country that can’t feed itself.’ I knew she was referring to wartime food rationing in Britain, but I didn’t know then that Germany and Finland deliberately used starvation as a military strategy in the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944).
Well, according to the Introduction to Barbara Whitton’s Green Hands (1943), even before war, [and certainly before the brutally effective German strategy of trying to starve Britain into surrender by targeting the Merchant Navy convoys], the Brits had worked out that food shortages were going to be a problem.
The WLA [Women’s Land Army] had originally been formed during the First World War. It was re-established in June 1939 when it was identified that if war came, an extra two million acres of productive agricultural land was needed to offset the loss of imported food from the empire. Without a substantial number of women helpers, this would have been impossible. To make up the labour shortfall (although being a farmer was a reserved occupation, being a farm labourer was not) Land Girls found themselves working alongside older male labourers, German and Italian prisoners of war, and even schoolchildren, who were allowed up to 20 days off school each year to help on the farms. (p. viii)
The first thought that sprang to mind from that paragraph was: huh? a women’s land army formed during WW1??! A quick search and I found that others have been there before me, and at the Women’s Land Army website there is a history called Holding the Home Front, the Women’s Land Army in the First World War by Caroline Scott. The accompanying photo shows some women wearing trousers as they fork some hay, which must have been rather risqué at the time. From there I also learned that in WW2 there was also a Women’s Timber Corps, formed in 1942 after the German Occupation of Norway caused a shortage of timber. The women were called Lumber Jills, and the page includes photos of them hard at work, including one that shows a woman wearing shorts.
The issue of clothing is not as trivial as it might appear…
The Introduction also tells us that for the first time ever, in WW2 single women were conscripted into the services, and could choose to join the female versions of the military services i.e. WAAF, the ATS or the WRNS), or work in a factory manufacturing war production essentials, or join the ‘Land Girls’. But recruitment for the Land Girls ceased in 1943 because it was more popular than the other options. This was possibly because of the idealised ‘healthy outdoor life’ promised by the recruitment posters, but also because women liked the WLA uniform. Many of us have seen this in TV re-enactments, such as this one:
However… as any reader of Green Hands will immediately see, the uniform that was issued was #understatement lacking. Written from personal experience by Barbara Whitton (the pen name of Margaret Hazel Watson (1921-2016), the novel begins on a freezing cold farm in Scotland, but the women have not been provided with warm clothing, rainproof outerwear, tough gloves or even boots that fit. In stark contrast to the idyllic sunshine portrayed in the recruitment posters, Bee and her co-workers Pauline and Anne are soaked through to the skin from their first day when the sleet arrives at about eight-thirty. Deployed without any training, they are billeted with stingy hosts in shabby accommodation where there isn’t even hot water for a bath at the end of their day’s labour, which began at six in the morning, with no breakfast until nine o’clock. The work, harvesting mangolds (a root vegetable used for feeding cattle and pigs), is back-breaking.
So, given the real-life experience of the author, the novel could have been a barely disguised misery memoir, but it’s not. It is laced with dry humour, though that’s a bit too often at the expense of Pauline who is mocked relentlessly by everyone. But it’s also fascinating to read a slice of wartime life from the perspective of someone who actually did this work for the best part of the year, first in Scotland, and then in somewhat more congenial conditions on a dairy farm in England. The work was still physically taxing, but at least they were fed generously, and there were opportunities for a bit of recreation and the chance to meet a nice man or two.
Reading Green Hands from a 21st century perspective, despite Whitton’s light touch, we notice the explicit and casual sexism; we notice the women accepting the prevalence of ‘a slap on the rump’; and we notice the disparity in pay which meant that they barely had pocket money after paying for room and board (which in Scotland was rudimentary to say the least). But we also notice working conditions for all the workers, that no one would accept today. Extremely long hours, without weatherproof clothing, and without proper training in the use of tools and equipment that could be perilous. On the dairy farm Bee’s role is in part to do the daily deliveries, and she gets one day to learn to drive the van and the route and no written instructions about who gets how much milk!
After half an hour has gone by, the van is at last started; but not until it has been pushed down the hill and hauled back up again many times, and we are all feeling very warm.
We take it back to the yard and the crates are once again loaded. By this time, milking has stopped, and wonderful smells of cooking breakfasts are being wafted out of the cottage doors. I am ravenously hungry after all our exertions, but we have already dallied too long. Leaping into the driver’s seat, Charlie drives away like a madman. We rocket down the road. I cling desperately to the swaying van, and my springless seat leaves my tail and hits it again repeatedly. We shoot round a corner, the milk bottles banging in the back with a noise like a machine gun, and the crates rattling together, so that I am almost deafened.
‘Have to be careful round this bend,’ says Charlie, accelerating at it on the wrong side of the road. ‘Nasty in the winter when the wet leaves are about.’
I long to point out that wet leaves and snow have much the same skidding tendencies, but we fly round it on two wheels. (p.87)
Aspects of this novel make me wonder who its intended audience was in wartime. People of Whitton’s own class, I expect. She wrote under a pen-name, but her real-life companions had the names Pauline and Anne, and the Introduction says that despite the mockery of their characterisation in the book, they remained in touch for many years. Call me cynical if you like but I suspect that the butt of Whitton’s humour is actually based on some other Land Girls who worked with them, and not her friends at all (who would have enjoyed the joke).
Whitton writes with humour about the rivalry between the women and some boys who are more experienced and competent than they are, but would she have been as sanguine about them missing school if they had not been workingclass lads? There’s not much biographical detail to be found out about her, but what there is (due to study Art in Paris, her training was curtailed by the outbreak of the Second World War), suggests she was upper middle-class or more.
Despite these reservations, I enjoyed reading Green Hands and I’d be interested to know if there were any other accounts of Land Army experiences.
Was there an Australian Women’s Land Army? Yes, there was, and they waited a long time for recognition of their service too.
Author: Barbara Whitton
Title: Green Hands
Publisher: Imperial War Museum 2020, first published 1943
Introduction: Imperial War Museum i.e. not credited to the individual who wrote it
Series: Imperial War Museum Wartime Classics
Design by Clare Skeats
Cover illustration by Bill Bragg
ISBN: 9781912423262, pbk., 195 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased via AbeBooks
Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted on Reviews From the Stackson the first Saturday of each month, but that’s the day for #6Degrees, so here we are, a week later instead. This month, is a ‘Freebie’ themed Month…
So I’ve chosen to do a kind of ’round the world’ theme. The books below are by authors who come from countries that begin with letters from the month of February. I’ve chosen to make it harder for myself by not choosing the obvious countries that come to mind for F, B, R and U. Links go to my reviews.
There is discussion about dying with dignity when dementia has been diagnosed.
Melbourne-born but based in Western Australia since the 1970s, Steve Hawke is an Australian writer who deserves more attention than he’s had so far. He’s a playwright, screenwriter and author, and has published nine books, mostly non-fiction, and some in collaboration with Indigenous communities. But of course it’s his fiction that I like because he tackles most interesting themes, and I’ve reviewed The Valley (2018), and The Brothers Wolfe (2023).Out of Time was published in 2019 but I didn’t come across it until I spied it at Ulysses Bookshop in Hampton on Love Your Bookshop Day in 2023.
This is the book description:
Joe and Anne’s relationship has finally found the sweet spot and they are looking forward to what retirement brings. But time is not on their side. Inexplicably, Joe – a gifted architect – finds himself losing things, making miscalculations, blanking parts of his day. As Joe’s condition worsens, he and Anne face the agonising question: what is the point of no return?
Sometimes, in fiction, a character with dementia is mentioned as part of a patchwork of human experience: as long ago as 1948, Ruth Park did this with the characterisation of Granny Kilker in The Harp in the South, while more recently Catherine Chidgey’s The Beat of the Pendulum (2017) documents her day-to-day life while revealing the encroaching tragedy of Nana’s encroaching Alzheimer’s. Sometimes dementia is used as a device to interrogate the reliability of truth and memory, as in Our Shadows (2020) by Gail Jones, and in Miles Allison’s In Moonland (2021) which depicts the frustrations of seeking out a father’s history from dementia-addled friends.
Less common is a novel devoted to the experience of coming to terms with dementia, usually via a character who has a loved one with the condition. The award-winning Delirious (2024), by Damien Wilkins features a man haunted by memories of his dead mother who had dementia, while The Spoon and the Sea (2025) by Rachel Caplin, shows us a character who learns from carers about ways to keep communication going for as long as possible.
Even less common are novels that depict the experience of a character who articulates encroaching dementia. Thea Astley’s Coda, (1994) is the earliest example that I know of, but there is also A Hundred Small Lessons (2017) by Ashley Hay and the more recent You Must Remember This (2025), by Sean Wilson. It’s written from the confused perspective of Grace, portraying her chaotic thoughts in a non-linear way, while readers can deduce the present from the perspective of her daughter Liz, who struggles to navigate the loss of her mother’s capacities.
1994
I don’t know of many novels that depict early-onset dementia. There is A House Built on Sand by Tina Shaw, which alternates between Maxine’s confusion and distorted reality while at the same time showing that her daughter Rose often doesn’t understand what’s going on either. Steve Hawke’s Out of Time, however, is the first novel I know of that is written from the perspective of a man with early-onset dementia, and more significantly, it portrays the terror that people can feel about the looming diagnosis, while confronting the moral complexities of wanting to take action to forestall an intolerable future.
Last year at an author talk, I had a glimpse of what might be Kylie Ladd’s next novel. Because her day job as a psychologist is diagnosing dementia, she was toying with the idea of writing a novel about the moral complexities of Australia’s laws about Voluntary Euthanasia, which — so far — prevent people from using its provisions for dying with dignity when dementia has been diagnosed. That is the dilemma that Joe faces, and Out of Time portrays the experience of his loving wife when she realises what he wants to do.
The book explores how Joe thinks he is the first to notice the gaps in his thinking and his memory lapses, and it shows his efforts to manage at work without anyone knowing that something is wrong. His period of denial lasts longer than is good for him, and the novel shows how hard it is for his wife Anne, who struggles with wanting to respect his wishes and having some certainty in her own life. She hates his desire to keep the diagnosis from his daughter because she hates keeping secrets but also because it denies her the support that her daughter can provide.
Out of Time, however, is not all doom and gloom. Joe and Anne are a loving couple who share a good sense of humour. Along the way there is the stuff of family life: managing projects for Joe’s architectural practice and his mentoring of a successor; Anne’s work as a teacher; not getting along with a son-in-law, and the excitement about a grandchild on the way. Anne is a keen bird-watcher, and she takes solace from getting out into the Kimberley to catch a glimpse of rare birds. But there is also a terrible moment when Joe reveals what he wants to do and how he wants to do it, and I had to close the book and put it aside while I processed the confronting dilemma that this family faces. I think we all know people who say that they would like to pre-empt their fate in this situation, but this novel doesn’t shy away from what that might really mean.
Steve Hawke’s mother Hazel — the very popular and respected first wife of Prime Minister Bob Hawke AO (1929-2013) — was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease when she was only 72, and had made the decision to go public about it in 2003 to raise awareness of the disease. She died ten years later aged 84. The dedication in the book reads Always thinking of you, Mum. In the Acknowledgements he writes:
Perhaps inspiration is not the right word in the circumstances, but my mother Hazel was an inspiring person to me and to many others. Being a witness to her journey into the badlands of dementia is fundamental to why I decided to tackle this book, and has informed its writing in many ways.
Hazel Hawke’s daughter Susan Pieters-Hawke also published a book called Hazel’s Journey: A personal experience of Alzheimer’s (2004, co-authored with Hazel Flynn.)
Update 15/2/26: We have learned not to get too excited about ‘promising breakthroughs’ in dementia research, but using a new CAR T-cell therapy to fight brain tissue inflammation in mice, may have potential to treat numerous neurodegenerative disorders.
Author: Steven Hawke
Title: Out of Time
Publisher: Fremantle Press, 2019
Cover design by Nada Backovic
ISBN: 9781925815283, pbk., 290 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Ulysses Bookstore, $27.99
One day in the future, our bloody dance will continue in the free and joyous laughter of our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, even when we are forgotten. (p.513)
It is hard to read these final lines of Shokoofeh Azar’s magnificent new novel The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen, right now when it appears that the theocratic regime has crushed the protests that began in December 2025, with a death toll of at least 3000 according to official sources, and somewhere between 6000 and 25000 according to reports that are unverifiable due to the internet blackout imposed by the regime. America, which promised help to the protestors, is instead now ‘in talks’ which appear to be more about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Freedom for the Iranian people seems a long way away at the moment, and my heart goes out to the diaspora who do not even know the fate of their loved ones.
And yet, I finished reading The Gowarkan Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen with hope in my heart.
Shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Shokoofeh’s novel sets the scene for these events. It’s an historical novel, but not as you know it. Fabulous events (somewhat like those in Rushdie or Marquez) occur alongside the story of a large and dynamic family, who live in a large mansion in the provinces from the waning years of the Shah to the Iranian Revolution (1979) and the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). The spirits (and the machinations) of people long dead are the voices of the silenced, and they are there in the novel to show that they will not be forgotten.
The family’s mission is to keep alive ancient Iranian culture, traditions and artefacts despite the encroaching imposition of Islam, which in fundamentalist Iran and elsewhere tolerates no other religions. As Zoroastrians, believers in an ancient monotheistic religion, they are the guardians of the sacred fire, and it is their ethical responsibility to protect books and artefacts from seizure by the Revolutionary Guards. You know of this religion’s prophet if you recognise Richard Strauss’s tone poem, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Op 30,(1896).
Detail from Raphael’s The School of Athens, 1511
After I’d read the book, I found that clicking on this link at the BBC enriched my understanding of some aspects of the novel such as the significance of birds in burial traditions and the power of the Ball of Light, given by the matriarch Khanom Joon to Shokoofeh when she sets out on her perilous journey to find her brother Mehrab, missing in the war. Aunty Malek, who is only sane when she sees the need, gives her a centuries old jade stone, and I learned about pre-Islamic jade and its power to ward off the evil-eye and ensure victory for its wearer here. Not that it matters, this is the kind of novel where strange things happen and don’t immediately make sense. Shokoofeh uses magic realism, mythic texts and ancient Iranian lore to develop her theme of celebrating the culture and artistic beauty of Iran and the necessity to confront the imposition of authoritarian power. There are some explanatory footnotes but the wise reader leaves Google alone and just reads on.
(It is helpful, however, to jot down the names of the characters as they emerge, to form a family tree.)
Trees, BTW, are significant in the novel, and not just the Gowkaran tree that emerges in the middle of the kitchen. It is a symbol of permanence, rooted in the country’s soil and nurtured by an indefatigable family. Its diverse fruits and birds represent luxuriant life, and opportunity. (One of the siblings climbs its branches to a future that no one can see.)
#Digression: Oh. Oh no! I had almost finished this review yesterday, and all that was needed was to prune it a bit because it was too long, but I did not want WordPress to do it for me and chew up more than half of it! I suspect that the changes they have made to access the Classic editor, means that it no longer automatically saves changes to a draft, which could be accessed using the Revisions feature. So a momentary loss of power because of a thunderstorm means that hours of work can disappear. Forever.
#DeepBreath. #FirstWorldProblem. #Moving on…
Narrators come and go as the years pass, but the voice that emerges is a strong female voice. Even when she is just a teenager mulling over the mysteries of love, her voice is confident, determined, and impressive. She has a mind of her own and some very forceful opinions, and while others struggle with the dilemma between resistance and capitulation, she has no hesitation in rejecting injustice. At school, she refuses to obey the command to reject a girl of the Baha’i faith despite the principal’s firm orderthat nobody was to shake Monireh’s hand, play with her, or talk to her, because she was unclean. And like Monireh, when she’s had enough, she leaves.
For some time I had been experiencing an emotion that was novel to me. The ten-day nervous madness had abated but had given way to something more deadly: disgust. Disgust for school. Disgust for my classmates. Disgust for the streets. Disgust for Behnam.* Disgust for the television, the radio, the newspapers. (p.192)
*Behnam is the young man she fancies, but like many who were opposed to the corruption of the Shah, he supported the revolution. He believed it would lead to a better, fairer and socialist society. What he was not expecting was that a pro-Western secular monarchy would be replaced by an anti-Western theocracy dedicated to the destruction of Israel and determined to enforce Shi’ite political ascendancy and Sharia Law. Shokoofeh helps Behnam to smuggle dissenters across the border to the USSR, but she doesn’t agree with his political opinions, and not just because her parents as ‘capitalists’ would lose everything they have. It’s because of her family’s role as guardians of Iran’s ancient history and culture.
Restrictions under the Islamic regime pile up. Even as a young woman she chafes under the intolerance towards all other religions including Zoroastrianism. As I showed in a Sensational Snippet last week, the dress code is unbearable. ‘Divine justice’ means mass public executions, and there are book burnings to stamp out any autonomous thought. What she hates most of all is the ugliness of it all: the grey buildings devoid of colour and imagination; the women shrouded in black chadors, never allowed on the streets except in the company of a male relative; the men screeching ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’ and old men in beards justifying their isolation from the rest of the world. She wants colour and light and music and beauty, and she decided that she will focus only on that.
I would walk in the forest and repeat to myself, ‘I am only eighteen. I am only eighteen and I want to live happy and free. That’s it. I shouldn’t have to feel guilty without reason. I should not let the laws of the Sharia that are served up to me and us all day and night on radio and TV penetrate my body and soul and thought. My body depends on me. I organise my own thoughts.’
<snip>
I must not surrender to the uglinesses and narrow-minded laws and bad news. I promised myself that I would not allow fear and sorrow and despair — in short, the common culture of those days — to penetrate me. All of a sudden I would shout in a loud voice, ‘My duty is to be joyful.’ (p.204)
But for Azedah, Uncle Bijan’s only daughter, it is also a duty to bear witness. And when in later years she becomes a journalist, she sends copies of a cassette tape to exiles in Europe as evidence of the crimes carried out by this regime, in the hope that one day an international court would condemn them. [Indeed. That would be something to see…]
However, the time comes when staying at home celebrating beauty has to come to an end. Brother Mehrab went off to fight in the Iran-Iraq War, and in Book 2, when he is missing, she goes to find him. There are some very confronting scenes in this second part of the novel, but they should not come as a shock when we know how violent the regime is, and how laws that oppress women do nothing to protect them from hypocritical male assault and state-sanctioned violence. Any woman alone is fair game, and though the author imagines a fellowship of women offering comfort and a punitive role for the Ball of Light, these scenes are hard to read.
Still, there are also scenes of great beauty and it is fascinating to learn about Iran’s ancient achievements. Eblis, a character from ancient lore, is like a sort of fairy godmother, who prays to the earth and food and wine appear. She conjures up a time before the Arabic colonisation of Persia, when the ancient Iranians invented scripts for all sorts of different purposes — one that was exclusively for recording the sounds of nature, animals, birds, rain and streams; another that was for correspondence between kings, one for science and philosophy and another for religious texts.
I thought of how, despite all these lost sources of pride, being Iranian was still a great reason to feel proud. As usual she read my mind, and said something I have never forgotten. ‘All the same, bear in mind: you are Iranian with what you build, not with what you have lost.’ (p.289).
I loved The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree, and I love The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen even more. Yes, it’s long, and it’s complicated, and it’s demanding, but it is magnificent.
Author: Shokoofeh Azar
Title: The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen
Translation from the Farsi: anonymous, for security reasons
Publisher: Europa Editions, 2025
Cover design: Ginevra Rapisardi
Cover image: detail of a painting by Shokoofeh Azar
ISBN: 9781787706040, pbk., 513 pages
Source: Kingston Library
It’s Hungarian Lit Month, hosted by Stu from Winston’s Dad and although I’ve read a few books from Hungary, I didn’t have anything on the TBR. So I explored the lists at Goodreads, and found Escape from Communist Hungary (2013) by Zsuzsanna Bozzay and (after a lot of mucking about with the download), I was able to acquire a copy using the Kindle Unlimited subscription that I intend to ditch the day before the trial expires. It really is a dead loss, because the range is so limited, and the majority of them are self-published.
Anyway…
Escape from Communist Hungary is a self-published memoir by a refugee who managed to escape with her mother Mimi during the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The Cold War politics of this revolution is known to many Australians because it took place shortly before the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. Although the Melbourne Olympics were marketed as ‘the friendly Olympics’, it became infamous for the ‘Blood in the Water’ water-polo semi-final between the Soviets and Hungary. To the approval of the crowd, Hungary defeated the USSR 4-0 in what was a brutal match, and there literally was blood in the water when one of the Soviets punched one of the Hungarians in the final minutes of the game.
With some similarities to the recent uprising against an oppressive government in Iran, the Hungarian Revolution had been crushed by Soviet tanks and troops and thousands were killed. Among the quarter of a million Hungarians who fled the country were Zsuzsanna Bozzay and her mother.
The memoir begins with a brief recapitulation of Hungary’s postwar history when it became part of the Soviet buffer zone, as agreed at the Yalta Conference by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin. Bozzay refers to this as Hungary once again [being] punished for being on the wrong side of the war, without acknowledging that being ‘on the wrong side’, in WW2, meant being complicit in one of those most evil regimes in history.
Wikipedia’s page about Hungary during WW2 explains that Hungary entered the war as an Axis Power in 1941, and fought on the eastern front for two years. In 1943 when it became obvious that the Germans were losing the war, Hungary attempted to forge a secret peace deal with the Allies, but when Germany learned about this in 1944, they occupied Hungary, and installed a puppet government. Later in the book, Bozzay makes a scanty reference to this abortive peace deal with the Allies in the context of her friendship with an aristocratic family who had connections with one of the negotiators.
Although the title suggests a book about the evils of communism in Hungary and why one would want to escape it, some historical context would have made this a better book. For example, to put food shortages in context, and to clarify what is meant by ‘life returning to normal’ it would have been helpful if the memoir noted that while postwar reconstruction was funded in Western Europe by the Marshall Plan, Hungary (however unwillingly) was part of the eastern bloc and therefore not eligible. According to Wikipedia:
The Soviet Union had been as badly affected as any other part of the world by the war. The Soviets imposed large reparations payments on the Axis allies that were in its sphere of influence. Austria, Finland, Hungary, Romania, and especially East Germany were forced to pay vast sums and ship large amounts of supplies to the Soviet Union. Those reparation payments meant the Soviet Union itself received about the same as 16 European countries received in total from Marshall Plan aid.
Born in 1941, Bozzay would of course have been only a child at the time, preoccupied by school and ballet lessons and so on, but as an adult writing this memoir in 2013 after completing a Creative Writing course at the Open University, she might be expected to provide some explanatory details for a 21st century English-speaking audience who probably know little about Hungary’s war and its postwar period. It’s not readers who should have to do the research!
The war left Hungary devastated, destroying over 60% of the economy and causing significant loss of life. In addition to the over 600,000 Hungarian Jews killed, as many as 280,000 other Hungarians were raped, murdered and executed or deported for slave labour. After German occupation, Hungary participated in the Holocaust, deporting nearly 440,000 Jews, mainly to Auschwitz; nearly all of them were murdered. The Horthy government’s complicity in the Holocaust remains a point of controversy and contention. (See Wikipedia’s Hungary/history page.)
Bozzay’s mother Mimi had Jewish relations who perished in the Holocaust except for her brother Feri who survived in time to be liberated from a concentration camp by the Soviets, though Bozzay doesn’t name which one it was, and seems to have little to say about her mother’s trauma.
Anyway, moving on…
The memoir details the oppression of the Soviets, determined to replace a postwar coalition government with communists in power.
It took two years to achieve their aim by starting a reign of terror; deporting, imprisoning and executing leaders of the opposition as well as ordinary people. My father’s brother was imprisoned for political activities with the Smallholders Party and held in the headquarters of the secret police, the AVO on Andrássy út 60, which is now the Terror House, a museum and memorial for the victims of communism who were tortured and died there. My mother had a cousin who was a high ranking communist official there and she persuaded him to release her brother-in-law. Later this cousin committed suicide when he realised that communism was not what he thought it was.
People had to be careful of what they said in public places in case they were accused of being anti-communist and thrown into prison. We were frightened if there was a knock at the door, especially late at night in case it was the secret police. If we happened to be listening to the BBC we not only switched off the radio, but we also changed to a different station, because listening to western radio was punishable and could result in a prison sentence. But we knew that the only reliable source of news came from the BBC World Service. People could be imprisoned for no apparent reason, maybe because someone with a grudge against them accused them of being ‘enemies of the people’ and that was enough for the secret police to call and take them away. (p. 7)
Her parents’ first attempt to escape was in 1949.
The only way to get out of Hungary was to walk through the border illegally which was very dangerous, especially crossing into Austria in the west where the border was well guarded. But apparently it was easier to cross from Czechoslovakia into Austria. The border between Hungary and Czechoslovakia was not especially well guarded in the east, close to the Ukrainian border, as most people did not think of crossing there from one communist country into another. (p.8)
Their plans included a failed attempt to send treasured possessions to England with friends, and this sequence reveals one of the dilemmas faced by refugees. Apart from the problem of leaving financial assets behind, most people have property that has sentimental value too, and Bozzay’s tells us that her parents were in dispute about this. Her mother thought that possessions can be replaced but her father felt differently about pieces of furniture that were family heirlooms.
I had to grit my teeth when reading the casual way in which Bozzay recounts moving into a furnished flat that once belonged to a friend called Serényi Aranka, a Jewish lady, who left for London before the war. No mention of the reasons why she might have left: no mention of the Horthy government’s pre-war oppressive laws that excluded Jews from almost all aspects of everyday life. Some of these are briefly mentioned later in passing in the backstory about her mother, but there should have been an explanation in this part of the book where it is relevant.
Bozzay seems to lionise her mother as the hero of this family history, and she accepts what she has been told at face value. She states that Mimi would have liked to emigrate to Israel but was frustrated by the requirement to be able to speak Hebrew. This is not obviously not correct because it would have denied Holocaust survivors from migrating, even if they could read it as a sacred language. There was then and still is a Right of Return for all Jews in the diaspora, regardless of language proficiency in Hebrew.
Whatever, that plan was abandoned for reasons Bozzay hints at, i.e. her parents’ differences about wanting to leave Hungary:
It takes a very special kind of person to leave all their possessions behind and move to a new country but she was not frightened by the prospect. It took all her powers of persuasion to convince my father of her plan. He was a staunch Hungarian, with very deep roots in Hungarian culture, had no talent for languages and found it hard to imagine living anywhere else, but eventually she had her way as she always did. (p. 13).
The chapter about the first escape attempt when Bozzay was eight details the plan for her parents to leave separately, the journey through Czechoslovakia, their capture near the border with Austria, and — reading between the lines — the somewhat naïve trust in a people smuggler. Her mother was imprisoned only for a couple of months because she had a convincing story about wanting to leave her husband after a row, but in the interim Bozzay was placed in an orphanage until her father could collect her, and there she caught polio.
From here, the narrative becomes more of a family history, obviously drawn from her mother’s memories, and some of it is repetitive. The chronology breaks to provide the back story of Bozzay’s grandparents, and her paternal grandmother’s opposition to her son marrying a Jew. It covers her mother’s brief sojourn in Paris in more nostalgic depth than it needed to be, and then Mimi’s dutiful return to Budapest to look after her ailing parents. It goes on to cover her parents’ marriage and some happy childhood memories of her father, but it also includes her childhood memories of the battle for Budapest and the vicious behaviour of their Russian liberators. Any euphoria about the end of the war was short-lived.
The narrative then switches back to Bozzay’s experience as a victim of polio, and her mother’s remarkable efforts to help with her rehabilitation, supplemented by a physiotherapist who had trained in the USA under Sister Kenny.
Bozzay was fifteen when the Hungarian Revolution broke out, and her vivid memories of it are the best part of this memoir. But optimism evaporated as the tanks rolled in and once again it was Bozzay’s mother who had the foresight to take advantage of the chaos to flee. Again leaving her father behind, they managed to cross the border into Austria and to seek asylum at the British Embassy.
In England they were taken in by Mimi’s brother Raoul and his wife, and despite communication difficulties because Bozzay had refused to learn English at school, she soon became friends with her cousins. The usual adjustment problems were exacerbated by the Hungarians’ complete ignorance about British life and the privations suffered during the war. But her mother’s multilingualism meant that she soon found good work and (having fudged her birth year on official documents) was able to keep working until she was 75.
Meanwhile Bozzay herself went to a convent where she received a very good education and went on to make a success of her life. She gained a degree in Chemistry at London University where she met her husband Michael Snarey and went on to have a career in teaching while raising their family, followed by a second career in chiropody.
All through this book, which privileges Bozzay’s mother’s point-of-view, I kept wondering what had happened to Bozzay’s father because I knew from other sources that the Soviets severely punished the relations of those who left illegally. Though late in the book we learn that after six years he was eventually given permission to be reunited with his wife and daughter, and that despite not knowing English he was able to get a job, there is nothing about his experiences during the separation or his feelings about his new life in Britain.
I’ve been hard on this book because I was disappointed by the inadequate editing, the failure to consider its audience, and its over-reliance on a selective family history at the expense of the expectations I had from its title.
Author: Zsuzsanna Bozzay
Title: Escape from Communist Hungary
Publisher: Self-published
ASIN: B07NCBRZQS
Purchased for the Kindle from Amazon.
You can find out more about Zsuzsanna Bozzay from her profile at the Open University here.
It doesn’t often happen but for once I have read the starter book for #6Degrees, hosted by Kate at Books are My Favourite and Best.Flashlight, by Susan Choi was nominated for the Booker and I reviewed it here.Flashlight features a father who disappears in mysterious circumstances, so I could start the #6degrees chain with any one of countless books featuring lost family members, though few would have an explanation as strange as in Choi’s novel. However…
Sometimes this trope can be inverted to explore other aspects of modern life, as Gail Jones did in The Name of the Sister, (2025) where a person not known to be missing is found. As I wrote in my review…
The Unknown Woman given the placeholder name of ‘Jane Doe‘, is found in the Outback, not lost. Hers is an appearance, not a disappearance. But she is a mystery because she cannot speak. She can’t be identified, and authorities don’t know what trauma lies behind her emergence onto the road, where Terry Williams (known as Tezza to his mates), almost ran her down. Angie, the freelance journalist, is interested in approaching the story from a different angle. She wants to explore the stories of people who ring Crime Stoppers, people who are convinced that ‘Jane’ is a long-lost loved one.
Philip Salom ventured into this territory with his novel The Fifth Season (2020). Jack is a writer who has rented a getaway so that he can work on his book, but he’s not keen on the fussy décor put in place by his host Sarah.
Jack’s project is a book about ‘found people’: the Somerton Man, the Gippsland Man, the Isdal Woman, the Piano Man,Cornelia Rau. All people who are found dead or amnesiac — their identities unknown by accident or design. But in one of a series of eerie correspondences, Sarah is an activist in search of missing people, and her life is consumed by the absence of her sister. She paints massive portraits of Alice in public spaces, along with portraits of other people who are missing, in order to raise awareness of the Missing Persons Advocacy Network (MPAN).
As Salom points out in his novel, not everyone who is missing wants to be found, which reminds me of Why Do Horses Run? (2024) by Cameron Stewart. Ingvar in this novel is so overwhelmed by grief after the death of his daughter that he walks out of his own life and tramps like a modern-day swaggie for three years in the solitude of the Australian bush. He refuses all engagement with other people, including refusing permission for a kindly policeman to tell his wife that he is, at least, alive.
I was troubled by Why Do Horses Run? because I felt for the missing character in the novel: the wife, bereft of her child and then of a husband who might have consoled her in her grief. Alicia Mackenzie’s A Million Aunties (2020) offers a different way of transcending profound personal pain. Her characters are a ‘found’ family, people not related in any way, but who share a loving relationship. This is a novel that asserts that all kinds of grief can be assuaged by the love and affection of others. Successive chapters are narrated by different characters, each of whom has a story to tell. A story of damage and endurance, and a journey towards healing.
Alicia Mackenzie is a Jamaican author and that reminded me of Siena Brown’s Master of My Fate (2019). Born in Jamaica, and raised in Canada, Siena Brown is a multi-talented creative who came to Sydney to graduate from the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and wrote her first novel after discovering the story of William Buchanan. Shortlisted for the 2020 ARA Historical Novel Prize, the novel tells the story of a Jamaican slave who is transported to Australia during the colonial period. It’s a very good example of an historical novel being used to bring ‘hidden history’ to light, and it was IMHO unlucky not to win the ARA Prize.
And that brings me to another example of what I call ‘hidden history’, this time the unforgettable story of Chinongwa (2008, Australian edition 2023), by Lucy Mushita. Mushita, from Zimbabwe, is another creative, who made her way to Australia to gain her Master’s in Creative Writing and reissued her debut novel Chinongwa here. It is a powerful reminder that sentimentalising traditional lifestyles risks obscuring the very real harm done to girls and women in patriarchal societies in Africa and elsewhere.
Next month (March 7, 2026), we start with Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I know my first link already: books I loved as a teenager but #yawn am underwhelmed by the melodrama as an adult!
Well, Airana Ngarewa’s The Last Living Cannibal certainly has an attention-getting title. Longlisted for the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, it’s Ngarewa’s third work of fiction. The brief bio at the back of the book tells me that his first novel The Bone Tree (2023) was a bestseller in NZ but I abandoned it in frustration, and his short story collection Patea Boys (2024) is uniquely designed to be read one way in English and the other in te Reo Māori.
So I may as well say at the outset that The Last Living Cannibal is full of Māori words and dialogue and there isn’t a glossary. Most of the time, a reader like me who doesn’t know Māori can make sense of it from the author’s subsequent paraphrasing in English, but sometimes it’s a case of press on without understanding words that are perhaps common knowledge in NZ but not elsewhere. Just something to bear in mind.
Anyway, this is the book description:
Muru is not revenge. Muru is about balance. You put your hands on one of theirs and they had every right to take from you and yours whatever they meant to take, short of a life.
Aotearoa in the 1940s, and the Māori men of Taranaki have refused to join the Māori battalion because of the severity of their land confiscations. Koko is the oldest man in the village, a legend within his community – he’s lived through the land wars, Parihaka, imprisonment in Dunedin, and they whisper of him as the Last Living Cannibal. Koko dotes on his grandson Blackie, who has lived with him ever since Blackie’s mum left in troubling circumstances years earlier.
But the ghosts of the past are bound to come calling, and when they do, they come with muru in mind.
Richly set in Taranaki during the 1940s, The Last Living Cannibal is the epitome of a classic Aotearoa novel, from one of this generation’s most promising writers.
The story is mostly narrated by Koko, who at 90, is the oldest man in the community, and he takes pride in the warrior culture of his people. (Mercifully, there is not much about his epithet, but what there was, was nauseating.) By the 1940s, the days of warfare between tribes and against the British are over, but resentment still festers, so much so that unlike 16,000 other Māori who served with distinction, these Taranaki Māori refuse to fight in WW2.
When Koko’s grandson Blackie gets into trouble at school, Koko’s ire is roused and he rides to confront the teacher on an irascible horse called North. He dies on the return journey when the horse throws him, and from then on the story is (mostly) narrated by his ghost, which remains unsettled until the elaborate funeral rites are completed.
Māori communities have strict protocols for entering their spaces, and when these are violated by an armed tribe that turns up uninvited, it’s not to pay respect to the dead but to exact muru, a concept not listed at NZ History but I found an explanation at Wikipedia. It was a form of restorative justice, recognised by the courts for thefts and assaults in colonial times until 1893, when bicultural applications of the law were abolished. Ngarewa hints at what has caused this dispute but the reason is not revealed until much later in the novel, after there have been various tense confrontations, a show fight between two of the men, a shared meal, and then a return to the meeting house to talk it through (and reveal the backstory). Meanwhile, however, the matriarch Nanny Foreshore has been orchestrating events with two of the younger boys, which results in a devastating attack by three angry bulls released from their paddock.
As the reader learns from the narrative of Koko’s dead wife ‘Duchess’, women play an important role in community decision-making, and Ngarewa’s depiction of older women having power, agency and respect is interesting to see.
As a window onto aspects of Māori culture, The Last Living Cannibal has its interesting moments and Koko’s voice is thoughtful, engaging and sometimes droll, but some sequences like the blow-by-blow fight and the bulls let loose are stretched out with far too much padding.
But my reservations about this novel are more than that: I don’t admire ‘warrior culture’ and its justifications for violence which I’ve come across in other Maori literature, notably in Witi Ihimaera’s The Matriarch. So the concluding reconciliation seemed more like an idealisation of muru than a likely outcome. Ngarewa is not an author that I might want to read again.
The Last Living Cannibal was also reviewed by Jordan at MaoriLitBlog.
Author: Airana Ngarewa
Title: The Last Living Cannibal
Publisher: Moa Press (an imprint of Hachette), 2025
Cover design by Megan van Staden
ISBN: 9781869718312, pbk., 292 pages
Source: Kingston Library
I am too fond of reading at whim to participate much in challenges, but John Morrissey’s debut novel Bird Deity is a serendipitous addition both to Kaggsy’s Reading Independent Publishers Month, and also to the #SpeecyFicChal hosted at Book’d Out. It qualifies for two of Bec’s categories: it’s published in 2026 and it’s a speculative novella of less than 250 pages. But it’s more than just speculative fiction…
Contemporary authors keen to revisit history via a less familiar perspective on the past while sidestepping historical or cultural baggage are using two forms of genre fiction to explore it: historical fiction and speculative fiction, often blending the two.
For example, African authors of historical fiction who’ve written what I’ve labelled ‘hidden history’ include Fred Khumalo who introduced me to this hybrid genre with his article about how contemporary historical fiction is being written in South Africa as an activist’s tool and with attitude and a breathless literary intensity; a fire in its belly. I read his novel Dancing the Death Drill (2017) which uses the sinking of a ship carrying Black South African soldiers during WW1 to explore other issues. Amongst others that I’ve categorised as ‘hidden history’, I’ve also read:
I don’t read much speculative fiction and what I have read is mostly dystopian climate-change fiction, but some Australian authors that I’ve categorised as ‘genre-benders‘ have used speculative fiction to cast a different light on history:
Terra Nullius (2017), by Claire G Coleman, telling a colonisation story of from the perspective of the settlers and the people they dispossess in an utterly unexpected way.
John Morrissey’s Bird Deity is another example of speculative fiction being used to shed light on the impacts of colonialism.
This is the book description:
David is a scout. For ten years he has plundered the ruins of an alien civilisation about which he knows nothing. Now his contract is ending, and he’s ready to go home, a wealthy, successful man.
Except that everything seems to be slipping out of his control. His mentor Tom vanished on a recent expedition. David doesn’t know what has happened to him. And, as he waits for the ship that will take him away, he begins to question the choices he has made.
That’s when he is visited by a researcher, a specialist in non-human societies. She has travelled far to learn about this strange world and wants to hire David as her guide. One more expedition, one more trip to the rainswept wasteland of the plateau—and he can go home at last, rich beyond his dreams.
But he comes to realise that he may yet lose everything, as he is drawn inexorably towards an encounter with the terrifying soul of this world. John Morrissey’s Bird Deity is a novel like no other. At once disconcerting and eerily familiar, it’s a cosmic horror story about power, theft, love, loss, and destiny.
Morrissey’s achievement in rendering the exploitation of an indigenous society is to show that the taking of ‘artefacts’ is not just the removal of objects. The parasapes are not just physically hurt by the removal of bracelets and other jewellery, they are spiritually injured. What’s more, the scouts ‘harvesting’ these items have no understanding of their significance. They do not understand the complexity of the civilisation they have plundered. Through fleeting narrations by these parasapes and mystical sequences that are deliberately unexplained, the reader grasps an entirely different perspective from the dominant narrative about the project to civilise the Other:
The creature lies at the rear of the cage, in an odour of urine and straw, stupefied by heat and overfeeding, with half its body in shadow and half in sunlight. It looks out at us with dull, sleeping eyes — not, one would think, the eyes of a predator. And certainly we can stop feeding the creature whenever we please, we can refuse to refill the trough it drinks from, we can let it lie in shit until it becomes sick and weak and dies that way. If we do not want to wait we can impale it from all directions with spears pushed between the bars of the cage. Or we can shoot it full of arrows. It should be completely defenceless against us!
Except it isn’t really our prisoner. It’s only lying there in the cage out of sloth, and because it finds the situation convenient. I realise that I have just a short time in which to civilise the creature and make it harmless.
I unlock the cage, causing the rest of the crowd to flee in terror. The creature gets to its feet and I lead it by hand across the empty market. As we walk I explain the history of our city, how it was founded in ancient times by a great magician, our forefather, who invented the arts of design and metallurgy. The creature pants along beside me, not listening. It doesn’t like exerting itself.
While I talk, a cool wind begins to blow, gently lifting the awnings over the deserted stalls. Dark blots of rain appear here and there across the market square. The creature wrinkles its nose in appreciation. It doesn’t know anything about weather and its causes. (p.133)
Although complex characterisation isn’t usually a feature of speculative fiction or SF, Morrissey has developed David, the scout, as a flawed character with personal issues so that the novel doesn’t just focus on his limited perspective about this planet where he has lived for ten years. Bird Deity shows his values being tested as well.
John Morrissey is a Melbourne writer of Kalkadoon descent. His collection of short stories, Firelight (2023) won an Aurealis Award and a Queensland Literary Award.
Author: John Morrissey
Title: Bird Deity
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2026
Cover design by W H Chong
ISBN: 9781922790781, pbk., 203 pages
Review copy courtesy of Text Publishing
I’m not a great reader of SF or fantasy, but I have actually read a novel on the 2025 Aurealis Awards Shortlists!
The winners will be celebrated at the 2025 Aurealis Awards ceremony as part of GenreCon in Brisbane, taking place on Saturday February 21, 2026 at the Thomas Dixon Centre.
BEST SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL
Letters to Our Robot Son, Cadance Bell (Ultimo Press)
Arborescence, Rhett Davis (Hachette Australia), see my review
As I write today, the world waits to see what will happen in Iran, sponsor of international terrorism and supplier of arms to terrorist organisations like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis of Yemen and more. As always with the Middle East, things are complicated. But despite the regime’s media blackout, it is becoming clear that thousands of protestors have died in the uprising to topple the theocracy that has governed since the Islamic Revolution in 1978. There is footage of women, bare-headed in defiance of the Modesty Police enforcing Sharia Law. The courage of these women has been emerging for a while, see this article about research into schoolgirls turning away from compulsory hijab, but also see this video report from Al Jazeera about the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini arrested by the Modesty Police… and the aftermath.
My heart goes out to Iranians around the world who fear for the safety of their loved ones at this time.
As it happens, I am reading Shokoofeh Azar’s new novel The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen. It would be insultingly reductive to call it a family saga, but it’s a long, utterly compelling story that covers five decades about an Iranian woman called Shokoofeh and her extended family. (No, it’s not a memoir). Shokoofeh tells us what it was like to go to school after the Revolution. Devastated after the arrest and disappearance of her friend Fereshteh — whose brother Fariborz was shot during the Revolution and all they have of him is a pistachio shell that was in his pocket — she forces herself to get up and dressed. She writes about her body as if it were no longer a part of her…
…once again the maqnaeh wrapped under the chin…once again the black socks…until once again it donned the black chador and goes to school. A school where Fereshteh no longer was. My body got ready to once more head to school, where every Saturday the principal and the supervisor, after half an hour of slogans and ‘Allah is Greatest’ and blessing upon the Prophet and his family, and insulting America and Britain and the USSR and Israel, stood at the head of the morning line-up and with the patience of Job measured the turn-ups of the trousers of every one of us 250 female pupils to make sure they weren’t tighter than 35cm, to make sure that the back of our long manteaus did not stick to our behinds, that they didn’t have slits, that our hair wasn’t spilling out of the corners or sides of our maqnaehs, and that the bulge created by our tying back our hair could not be seen from up the maqnaeh. Every morning grim-faced sycophantic girls volunteered to inspect the bags of all 250 pupils for books other than textbooks, for music cassettes, romantic novels, mirrors and hairbrushes. Woe betide the pupil who brought lipstick or perfume with her. If she wasn’t expelled, she would at least have to spend two weeks at home and her parents would have to sign a Moral Commitment Sheet. If a love letter were found in a girl’s bag, then they would hand over her file to her, with no recourse. Expulsion, Finished. But worse than all this was if they found pamphlets or cassettes of speeches from political parties. This was something that could easily lead to any pupil ending up in jail or being executed. (p.188-9)
Schoolgirls being executed…
The dress code, barbaric though it be, is only symbolic of the way the regime oppresses girls and women. Later on in the novel, the contempt in which women are held if they do not abide by laws which require them to travel only if accompanied by a male relative, is depicted in a savage scene in Part Two, subtitled ‘The Ordeal of Liberty’, where Shokoofeh goes to search for her brother, missing in the war against Iraq.
The astonishing aspect of this book is that it’s irresistible reading. It is full of light and colour, love and optimism. There is even a reimagining of the mystic spirit Eblis who refuses to bow down to authority and, like Cinderella’s fairy godmother, conjures up help when Shokoofeh needs it.
This is the book description:
From International Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist Shokoofeh Azar, comes a stylistically audacious and emotionally powerful novel about one large, complicated family and a love affair lasting decades.
Spanning fifty years in the history of modern Iran, this lush, layered story embraces politics and family, revolution and reconstruction, loss and love as it recounts the colorful destinies of twelve children who get lost one long-ago night inside a mysterious palace.
Azar’s first novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (Europa Editions, 2020, see my review), was shortlisted for the Stella Prize for Fiction and the International Booker Prize; it was longlisted for the PEN America Award and the National Book Award for Translated Literature.
In Azar’s new novel, each lost child’s story unfolds against the backdrop of immense cultural and political transformation; lovers must survive war, revolution, and rigid social strictures to keep their love alive; family bonds are tested, especially those indissoluble connections between the living and the dead. The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen is also the moving story of one family’s efforts to preserve the richness of Iranian culture in the face of Islamic hegemony following the 1979 revolution.
#TransparencyStatement: The Iranian journalist Shokoofeh Azar escaped persecution and came to Australia as a refugee, and I interviewed her at the 2018 Williamstown Literary Festival after the publication of The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree. Apart from liking her as a lovely person, I admire her courage, her resilience, and her determination to continue writing despite English not being her mother tongue.
Author: Shokoofeh Azar
Title: The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen
Translated from the Farsi, by a translator who has remained anonymous for security reasons
Publisher: Europa Editions, 2025
ISBN: 9781787706040, pbk., 513 pages
Source: Kingston Library
2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards Longlist has been announced, so now begins the quest to track them down on our side of the ditch! I’ve been able to reserve three at my library so far…
Many thanks to publicist Penny Hartill who sent the information in blog-friendly format! What follows is copied shamelessly from the Press Release, (edited to add my reviews as I write them).
*represents debut authors
Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction
1985 by Dominic Hoey (Penguin, Penguin Random House)
All Her Lives by Ingrid Horrocks (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Before the Winter Ends by Khadro Mohamed (Tender Press)
Empathy by Bryan Walpert (Mākaro Press)
Hoods Landing by Laura Vincent(Ngāti Māhanga, Ngāpuhi) (Āporo Press)
How to Paint a Nude by Sam Mahon (Ugly Hill Press)
Star Gazers by Duncan Sarkies (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press), see my review
The Last Living Cannibal by Airana Ngarewa(Ngāti Ruanui, Ngā Rauru, Ngāruahine) (Moa Press), see my review
Wonderland by Tracy Farr (The Cuba Press), see my review
Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry
Black Sugarcane by Nafanua Purcell Kersel (Satupa‘itea, Faleālupo, Aleipata, Tuaefu) (Te Herenga Waka University Press)*
Clay Eaters by Gregory Kan (Auckland University Press)
E kō, nō hea koe by Matariki Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Hinerangi) (Dead Bird Books)*
Giving Birth to my Father by Tusiata Avia (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
If We Knew How to We Would by Emma Barnes (Auckland University Press)
Joss: A History by Grace Yee (Giramondo Publishing)
No Good by Sophie van Waardenberg (Auckland University Press)*
Sick Power Trip by Erik Kennedy (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Standing on my Shadow by Serie Barford (Anahera Press)
Terrier, Worrier: A Poem in Five Parts by Anna Jackson (Auckland University Press)
BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction
Atlas of the New Zealand Wars: Volume One 1834-1864, Early Engagements to the Second Taranaki War by Derek Leask (Auckland University Press)*
Books of Mana: 180 Māori-Authored Books of Significance edited by Jacinta Ruru (Raukawa, Ngāti Ranginui), Angela Walhalla (Kāi Tahu) and Jeanette Wikaira (Ngāti Pukenga, Ngāti Tamaterā, Ngāpuhi) (Otago University Press)
Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and Across the British Empire by Charlotte Macdonald (Bridget Williams Books)
Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris by Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson (Rongowhakaata, Ngāi Tāmanuhiri, Te Aitanga a Mahaki) (Te Papa Press)
He Puāwai: A Natural History of New Zealand Flowers by Philip Garnock-Jones (Auckland University Press)*
Mark Adams: A Survey – He Kohinga Whakaahua by Sarah Farrar (Massey University Press and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki)
Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street by Elizabeth Cox (Massey University Press)
Takoto ai te Marino: Selected Works 2018-2025 by Raukura Turei (Ngā Rauru Kītahi, Taranaki, Ngāti Pāoa, Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki), Greta van der Star, Vanessa Green and Katie Kerr (Raukura Turei)*
The Collector: Thomas Cheeseman and the Making of the Auckland Museum by Andrew McKay and Richard Wolfe (Massey University Press)
Whenua edited by Felicity Milburn, Chloe Cull (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāi te Ruahikihiki) and Melanie Oliver (Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū)
General Non-Fiction Award
50 Years of the Waitangi Tribunal: Whakamana i te Tiriti edited by Carwyn Jones (Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki) and Maria Bargh (Te Arawa, Ngāti Awa) (Huia Publishers)
A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin, Penguin Random House)*
An Uncommon Land: From an Ancestral Past of Enclosure Towards a Regenerative Future by Catherine Knight (Totara Press)
Everything But the Medicine: A Doctor’s Tale by Lucy O’Hagan (Massey University Press)*
Hardship and Hope: Stories of Resistance in the Fight Against Poverty in Aotearoa by Rebecca Macfie (Bridget Williams Books)
Northbound: Four Seasons of Solitude on Te Araroa by Naomi Arnold (HarperCollins Aotearoa New Zealand)
Polkinghorne: Inside the Trial of the Century by Steve Braunias (Allen & Unwin)
Ruth Dallas: A Writer’s Life by Diana Morrow (Otago University Press)
The Covid Response: A Scientist’s Account of New Zealand’s Pandemic and What Comes Next by Shaun Hendy (Bridget Williams Books)
The Hollows Boys: A Story of Three Brothers & the Fiordland Deer Recovery Era by Peta Carey (Potton & Burton)
The Middle of Nowhere: Stories of Working on the Manapōuri Hydro Project by Rosemary Baird (Canterbury University Press)*
The Welcome of Strangers: A History of Southern Māori by Atholl Anderson (Bridget Williams Books and Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu)
This Compulsion in Us by Tina Makereti(Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, Pākehā) (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
Tony Fomison: Life of the Artist by Mark Forman (Auckland University Press)
This year the General Non-Fiction judges have longlisted 14 titles, a discretionary allowance that reflects the number of entries and range of genres in this category.
The 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards shortlist of 16 titles (four books in each category) will be announced on 4 March 2026. The finalists, winners and the four Mātātuhi Foundation Best First Book Award recipients will be celebrated on 13 May 2026 at a public ceremony held as part of the Auckland Writers Festival Waituhi o Tāmaki.
The winner of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction will receive $65,000 and each of the other main category winners will receive $12,000. Each of The Mātātuhi Foundation Best First Book winners (for fiction, poetry, general non-fiction and illustrated non-fiction) will be awarded $3000.
The Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction is judged by novelist, short story writer and reviewer Craig Cliff (convenor); novelist, poet and Arts Foundation Te Tumi Toi Laureate Alison Wong; and bookseller, writer and reviewer Melissa Oliver (Ngāti Porou).
Judging the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry are poet, musician and multi-disciplinary artist Daren Kamali (convenor); poet, writer, performer and editor Jordan Hamel; and writer, musician and translator Claudia Jardine.
The General Non-Fiction Award judges are journalist, author and reviewer Philip Matthews(convenor); academic and writer Georgina Stewart (Ngāpuhi-nui-tonu, Pare Hauraki); and screen director, producer, and author Dan Salmon.
The BookHub Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction is judged by art historian and curator Lauren Gutsell (convenor); photographer, moving-image artist, writer and academic Natalie Robertson (Ngāti Porou, Clann Dhonnchaidh); and non-fiction writer and former magazine editor Rebekah White.
The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards are supported by Ockham Residential, Creative New Zealand, the late Jann Medlicott and the Acorn Foundation, Mary and Peter Biggs CNZM, BookHub, The Mātātuhi Foundation and the Auckland Writers Festival Waituhi o Tāmaki.
Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man came to my attention because it’s been longlisted for the £10,000 Gordon Burn Prize, a prize which…
…recognises exceptional writing which has an unconventional perspective, style or subject matter and often defies easy categorisation. It celebrates literary outliers and daring and experimental work that often speaks to broader societal issues.
In my haste to reserve most of the longlist at the library, I did so with only the titles to guide me, and Sarah Perry’s name was one of only two that I recognised. And I did wonder why it was on the longlist, because I wasn’t very impressed by Melmoth.
#TruthBeTold So when it came in at the library this week I was not really expecting much. I was not expecting to pick it up ‘to read just a few pages’ but become utterly absorbed and continue reading right through the night.
How did this happen? The book description tells us how the story ends so it wasn’t narrative tension that held me spellbound…
Sarah Perry’s father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he’d been a healthy and happy man: he loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was.
Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home, eventually with the help of carers and visiting nurses. They bathed and cleaned and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, prayed with him. Day by day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives.
In 191 pages, the memoir traces through Sarah’s perspective, the first moment when they realise something is badly wrong with David, who has always been robust. They walk the fine line between respect for David’s decision-making and their own anxiety about seeking medical tests. Despite the evidence of her own eyes, Sarah wavers between hope and certainty before the diagnosis, and together the family deals with that awful moment when the futility of treatment becomes clear.
Even so, they are shocked when barely a day elapses before Sarah and Robert recognise that David cannot be left alone in his home overnight. She doubts her own ability to be the practical help that David needs and emotional support for her husband Robert who is losing his father. She doesn’t know how to negotiate the rapid onset of David’s care needs with respect for his dignity, but she surprises herself. She teeters between rage about promised NHS help that takes too long to come and overwhelming gratitude when they arrive. As events move so rapidly to their conclusion, the reader does not lose sight of David as a person, which is how it should be.
As it says on the back cover:
Death of an Ordinary Man is an unforgettable account of this universal aspect of life. This is not a book about grief: it is a book about dying, and it is a book about family, and care and love.
I did wonder about the palliative system in the UK when the family of a man in (entirely predictable) agonising pain is given a script for morphine, to be dispensed at a pharmacy late at night. Sarah doesn’t drive. I know, I know, morphine is a serious drug and it needs to be dispensed with extreme caution, but why can’t a palliative care service bring it with them when they already know that it’s needed?? A man in agony shouldn’t have to wait for however long it takes to go and get it and return. That’s just not humane. Is this how it is in Australia?
… had declined to offer any words of consolation to the victims of the Bondi atrocity. They are our wordsmiths and poets, but where are the words of empathy and kindness for a community reeling in shock and horror, and to assuage the grief of the rest of us whose ideals about Australia as a place of safety and refuge lie shattered on the sands at Bondi?
Our wordsmiths were also silent about the atrocity that took place in Israel on October 7th, killing 1219 people, including 810 civilians of whom 38 were children and 71 foreign nationals.
Commemoration of children taken hostage by Hamas, Hostage Square, Tel Aviv (Source: Wikipedia)
Those authors are selective in their concerns: they have also had nothing to say about current genocides listed at Holodomor National Awareness in Sudan and South Sudan, Iraq, Central African Republic, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, and China.
Did they have anything to say, to represent us all, on the National Day of Mourning?
Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) is commemorated each year on the 27th January, because that is the day of the liberation of the Nazi extermination and concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945. As it says on the HMD website:
Holocaust Memorial Day is the day for everyone to remember the millions of people [LH edit*: six million Jews] murdered in the Holocaust, under Nazi Persecution, and [LH edit: the people killed] in the genocides which followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.
*This introduction is taken from the HMD website, but I have edited it to make clear that the Holocaust refers specifically to the murder of six million Jews.
This year’s theme is ‘Bridging Generations’:
The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) 2026, ‘Bridging Generations’, is a call-to-action. A reminder that the responsibility of remembrance doesn’t end with the survivors – it lives on through their children, their grandchildren and through all of us. This theme encourages us all to engage actively with the past – to listen, to learn and to carry those lessons forward. By doing so, we build a bridge between memory and action, between history and hope for the future. [LH: underlining mine].
Each year I commemorate this day by reading Jewish testimony from the Holocaust, but the testimony of Yitskhok Rudashevski — like the powerful testimony about life in hiding of Anne Frank (1929-1945) — is also from a teenager who did not survive. Yitskhok Rudashevski was thirteen years old when he was transferred to the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania, and he kept a diary. This is from the back cover of this Jewish Quarterly edition:
‘Today I turned fifteen and live very much for tomorrow. I do not feel two ways about it. I see before me sun and sun and sun…’
For nearly two years he used a small notebook to chronicle his hope, his despair and his experience of daily ghetto life. His diary was later discovered in an attic that was the final hiding place for him and his parents.
This remarkable translation from Yiddish by Solon Beinfeld reveals a teenager whose love of culture, history and knowledge defied the cruelty that surrounded him. Displaying empathy and intellect far beyond his years, Yitskhok confronts the terrible moral choices required for survival in the ghetto.
His diary, expertly introduced by Samuel D Kassow, is both a crucial historical document and a deeply poignant portrait of one lost soul among millions.
The first part of the diary reads more like a memoir, as if Yitskhok has realised the importance of bearing witness. Although he writes with the immediacy of the present tense, he makes occasional comments that show that he is looking back at the very recent past from the present day. For example, in the diary entry dated October 1941, when writing about the search for firewood in the first days of the ghetto, he records that:
We break up doors and floors and carry off the wood. One person tries to snatch from another. People fight over a piece of wood. People become petty, egoistic, and even cruel to one another. Soon we see the first Jewish policemen. They are supposed to maintain order in the ghetto. In time, they become a caste that helps the oppressors do their work. Over time, many things were done by the Gestapo with the help of the Jewish police. They help grab their brother by the throat; they help trip up their brother. (p.40, underlining mine)
I think it was Tolstoy who said that in war, the commanders plotting strategy don’t know what’s really happening on the ground, and those on the battlefield can’t see the big picture or its strategic importance, only their own part in it, so both disparage the other. This is true of Yitskhok’s perspective. Over and again, he mourns the helplessness of his community, without understanding that his life in the ghetto was made more tolerable by the choice of some not to be helpless but to engage in collaboration. Nor did he realise that the most prominent collaborator hoped to save lives and the Jewish culture of Vilna.
#Digression: As my review or Rose Zwi’s Last Walk in Naryshkin Park (1997) shows, Wikipedia is not the source to use to find out if they succeeded in that hope.
In the Introduction, Samuel D Kassow explains the invidious position of Jacob Gens, the controversial Jewish boss of the ghetto, [who] did what he could to buy time, save as many Jews as possible and please the Germans.
Unlike most Jews in Vilna, he spoke fluent Lithuanian. A former officer in the Lithuanian army and husband of a Lithuanian woman, Gens made effective use of his contacts with the local Lithuanian collaborators to help the ghetto. He set up workshops, organised schools for the surviving children and smuggled food into the ghetto. Although Jews in the Vilna Ghetto were often hungry, there was little of the mass starvation that decimated the ghettos in Warsaw and Lódz. (p.12)
No one could envy Gens’ position or the fraught game that he was trying to play. In his 19 October 1942 diary entry, Yitskhok blasted him and the Jewish police who participated in a selection of more than 400 old and sick Jews whom the Germans soon murdered in the Oszmiana Ghetto. Yitskhok wrote, ‘The whole ghetto is in an uproar because of this departure. How great is our misfortune, how great is our shame, our humiliation. Jews are helping the Germans in their organised, horrifying extermination.’
Yitskhok did not know the back story. Shortly before, the Germans had asked Gens to send Jewish police to carry out a selection in Kiemieliszki. Gens refused and the Germans slaughtered the entire ghetto. Next they asked Gens to send police to Oszmiana for the same job. This time he said yes: he hoped to save the many by sacrificing the few. The Vilna police, liberally supplied with alcohol, chose 406 old and sick Jews who had no hope of surviving anyway. When the police returned from Oszmiana, Gens, visibly drunk, called a meeting of the ghetto elite to explain himself.
I, Gens, lead Jews to their death. I, Gens, rescue Jews from death. I, Gens, destroy hideouts, and I, Gens try to procure more work passes and jobs. My main concern is Jewish lives, not Jewish honour. When they ask me to hand over a thousand Jews, yes, I hand them over. If I don’t, the Germans will come into the ghetto, take many thousands and leave the ghetto in a shambles… You are the people of art and literature. You people can give the filth in the ghetto a wide berth. And when you leave the ghetto someday, you’ll have clean hands and a pure conscience. But if I, Gens, will somehow survive, my hands will be soiled with dripping blood. (p.13-4)
The system of certificates indicating skilled worker protection status, is introduced. Again we see that Yitskhok is writing not in the immediate present but recalling the very recent past.
In our ghetto things are very troubled. The white certificates are replaced by yellow ones, very few of which are issued. Thus was born the yellow certificate, the bloody illusion which was such a tragedy for the Jews of Vilna. The days are filled with anticipation — days before a storm. People, helpless creatures, stagger around the little streets like animals that sense a storm. Everyone looks for a place to conceal himself, to save his life. They register themselves as relatives of those who have a yellow certificate. Fate has suddenly split the people of the ghetto into two parts. One part possesses the yellow certificate. They believe in the power of this piece of paper. It gives you the right to life. The other half — lost, helpless people who sense their downfall and do not know where to turn.
We do not have a yellow certificate. My parents, like hundreds of others, are running around feverishly. Something horrible is hanging in the air. (p.42)
The ‘something horrible’ is that when the skilled workers and their registered families have been allowed out of the ghetto for the day, the Germans liquidate the remaining people. People escape this fate by hiding in malines (cellars and attics, boarded up), Yitskhok’s family crushed in among them for six stifling hours. But when his mother gets hold of one of these coveted certificates, and they too line up for a reprieve from the inevitable, Yitskhok’s grandmother — like other old people — is not allowed to come with them, and they never see her again.
It’s heart-wrenching to see this boy’s optimism about the Red Army fighting back, and his delight in the school that starts up and fills his days with something fulfilling to do. This is what he wrote on 1st December 1942:
Today in school we had an assignment in class on the topic of ‘Images in Poverty’. I wrote extensively. I brought Reyzen’s stories up to date, related them to us and ended by saying that the ghetto is the final stage of generations of poverty. We will be the ones who will come out of the ghetto and throw off the poverty that for generations has oppressed the Jewish people. (p. 111)
And on 11th December after a club activity:
We were so happy, so happy. Song after song echoed. It is already twelve o’clock. We are as if intoxicated by the joy of youth. No one wants to go home. Songs are bawled out that simply do not want to stop. Late at night we disperse. Today we have proved we are young, young forever. ‘Behind walls, but nevertheless young, young forever.’ is our slogan with which we ‘march towards the sun’. Today we have shown that even the three little streets we can maintain our youthful fervour. We have shown that it will not be a broken youth that will emerge from the ghetto. From the ghetto will emerge a strong, hardened and spirited youth. (p. 117)
But Sarah Voloshin, his first cousin who rescued the diary when she escaped the last liquidation and was able to return to the family’s maline to find a family photo album, said afterwards that
… those final days had left Yitskhok depressed and resigned. He told her that he was ready to join his grandmother, whom the Germans had murdered in 1941. He missed her greatly, and made no effort to flee. (p.4)
Yitskhok was murdered in the Ponary massacre during the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto that took place in September–October 1943.
Today the Auschwitz Memorial Bluesky thread commemorates the brief life of Esther Polak (1937-1942) who was murdered when she was just five. Their post reads:
A Dutch Jewish girl, Esther Polak, was born in Amsterdam. She arrived at Auschwitz in a transport of 1010 Jews deported from Westerbork on 28 July 1942. She was murdered in a gas chamber after selection.
The Holocaust did not happen because Hitler was an evil man and everybody did what he said because they were afraid. It happened because there was antisemitism that stretched back into centuries, and was normalised by ordinary people who came to accept and participate in discrimination, violence and injustice against others. Click here to see the Anti-defamation League’s ‘pyramid of hate’ which shows how in our own time, biased attitudes and acts of bias, form a foundation for systemic discrimination, bias-motivated violence and genocide, which is the act or intent to deliberately and systematically annihilate an entire people.
Author: Yitskhok Rudashevski (1927-1943)
Title: The Rudashevski Diary (1941-1943), Jewish Quarterly November 2024
Introduction by Samuel D Kassow
Translated from the Yiddish by Solon Beinfeld
Publisher: Morry Schwarz, 2024, first published in English translation in 1973
ISBN: 9781760644376, pbk., 154 pages
Source: Subscription
Shortlisted for the now defunct Vogel Award, The Spoon and the Sea is Rachel Caplin’s debut novel. This is the book description:
Ashi has always lived between the Arab island of Zanzibar where he was raised by his father, and the Jewish heritage of his British mother, Rose, who left when he was a child. Now, as Rose slips into the haze of dementia, she and Ashi begin an emotional journey to trace the fragments of a life lived apart.
From the leafy streets of Golders Green to the battle-scarred streets of British Mandate Palestine, through the spice markets of Zanzibar and into the soul of Jerusalem, The Spoon and the Sea is a sweeping, intimate novel about the fragile threads that bind us across generations, time and distance.
Inspired by true events and named a finalist for The Vogel Literary Award, this novel explores the ache of separation, the power of storytelling, and the possibility of healing before time runs out.
The book is structured cleverly to enable the retelling of missing parts of the mother-son relationship. As Rosa, Ashi’s British-born Jewish mother is slipping into the fog of dementia, Ashi finds that trading memories from particular years triggers her memories. Caplin handles the segues from past times and places into the present seamlessly.
Doors in my mother’s mind closed and opened without warning, and it was incumbent upon me to accept that.
We moved back out of the gazebo, leaving her untouched bowl of tinned fruit for the excitable flies. The coffee would surely be cold already. The sun glided behind a puffy cloud with outstretched arms. I willed the warmth to come back for her.
Slowly, the cloud passed, and my mother’s skin glowed again. “Now tell me, how did you meet that woman of yours?” she said. “I love a good love story.” (p. 92)
In this way Ashi learns her story of falling in love at university — with a Muslim from Zanzibar. He discovers the impact of her decision to follow her heart — how his parents held hands over the wide valley of religion —and how it disappointed Rose’s family who had expected her to be the first person from the Jewish community in Golders Green to graduate from Oxford. She shares how easily her love for university life led her to neglect her family ties and to question the values of her community.
Rose became enamoured by how different the place was from Golders Green, a community known for uniformity and adherence to tradition. It could be inviting to those who belonged, but it often treated ‘change’ and ‘different’ as rotten words. Newnham College was hardly a diverse place, but Rose expanded her horizons here, making the acquaintance of young women from outside the fold.
After one month, Rose saw her new self as part of the Newnham landscape.
The leaves, already starting to turn red, would soon burst into full auburn plumage. The winter snowfall would then turn the grounds into a white fairy-tale. She loved the old rituals, the formal hall dinners where they dressed up and toasted in Latin, the boat races against Oxford, the way students treated the library like a temple. (p.18)
In return, Ashi tells her about aspects of his own life. He shares how the life that began in a life of privilege in Zanzibar with a non-observant Muslim father was fractured into a life of not belonging anywhere.
She shares how her life in Zanzibar led to her abandoning Ashi when he was still a boy. She tells about her frustration at not being allowed to work because it would bring shame on the Chief Qadi [judge]. Where was the man who’d always encouraged her dreams of becoming a journalist at Oxford?
As the Sultan’s most trusted and senior vizier, Faisal afforded a bounty of domestic staff to care for their every need. The Al-Majid family had six full-time domestic staff. The gardening, cooking, cleaning and driving were responsibilities appointed to a loyal team who dutifully pruned, boiled, and dusted around the clock. One staff member was devoted entirely to the service of Faisal, and another entirely to the service of Rose.
For all the kind intentions, Rose’s wings had been well and truly clipped. (pp. 99-100)
In 1947, when the UN was debating the prospect of a Jewish homeland after the horrors of the Holocaust, Rose guesses that back in Golders Green her father was an activist for the cause. But she has to hide her efforts to learn what is happening. She borrows a wireless radio from one of the British expat wives and listens to it in secret. Her joy and relief when the partition of Palestine into two states was voted into being had to be hidden too, just as her Jewish identity had to be hidden in an Arab world. But it’s not that which drives her flight home to Britain, it’s the arrival of a second wife for Faisal.
For Ashi, moving on means shedding parts of his identity:
My father’s already diluted observance of Islam had become unrecognizably watered down by the time we were driven out of Zanzibar. In hindsight, I’m glad it was so, as it was one less skin to shed later in life. (p. 93)
For an Arab boy with a Jewish mother, there seems to be no safe place to be during the upheavals of postcolonial Africa. At different times he is betrayed by both sides of the family and by both his parents.
His father was hostile to Israel especially during the Gulf War, and was embarrassed by his son’s exile in Israel. Even though he was exempt from compulsory military service because of his Arab paternal line, they remain estranged.
But avoiding the military was not enough for my proud father, and we’d not spoken for many years, since I’d first ended up here and decided to stay. After painstakingly building a new status in Oman after the Revolution drove us away from Zanzibar, for him, public knowledge of his eldest son’s whereabouts would have been a disgrace. Our new homes were at war, and I wished desperately for peace with my father. (p. 94)
Just posting a letter from Israel to Oman involves taking a risk since it involves subterfuge, and visiting a dying father is even more risky. But taking a risk has become part of his DNA.
It is remarkable how a young man can be fearless when the world’s gloss has been rubbed off. Being a refugee can do that to a person. No longer shiny, the roughness around the edges becomes a new normal. You would think a man would be more hesitant before leaping from the cliff, knowing there are rocks at the bottom.
But in my experience, once you know there are rocks there, you know they are everywhere. Rocks on the sandbank can be stonefish, poisonous berries, fuel surcharges, Shin Bet agents, or cunning old men. (p. 302).
Without a family, Ashi yearns to make a new one of his own, despite an identity of not belonging anywhere:
I was the schoolboy with ants in my pants. I was the son of the Chief Qadi, with skin a few shades darker or lighter than everyone else’s. I was the brother who didn’t belong to Najat. I was a refugee in Kenya who didn’t fit in. I was the fisherman’s apprentice who defended the Jews. Forever a square peg in a field of round holes, it was time to stop trying to fit in and find something else to do, some different way to be. (p. 303)
In Israel amid so many mere remnants of family and community, he forms a wonderful relationship with Catani. But she betrays him too.
All this is a compelling story, with twists and turns and unexpected diversions. But for those of us who’ve had the experience of losing a loved one to dementia, the sections in the present are a real strength in the novel. Most of us learn the hard way, how to navigate the complexities of maintaining a loving relationship through to the end of a dementia journey. And as Caplin shows through the belated appearance of Ashi’s stepsister Dinah, it’s not learned through belated, spasmodic visits; it emerges through day-to-day experience and guidance from skilled nursing staff.
Based on the author’s experience with her own grandmother, she depicts how Ashi steers his mother through diagnosis, through going into care, and eventually through that very painful realisation that dementia is a terminal illness that shuts down bodily functions because the brain no longer issues instructions to swallow, to move and eventually to breathe.
As I was, Ashi is fortunate with staff who recognise that there is a need to care for family as well as the loved one nearing the end.
This is such a terrific book, I investigated to see who won the Vogel that year. It was A Place near Eden (2022) by Nell Pierce, which I reviewed here.
And the title? It comes from a Yiddish proverb: You cannot empty the sea with a spoon.
Rachel Caplin is an Israeli author who was born and raised in Perth, Western Australia.
Author: Rachel Caplin
Title: The Spoon and the Sea
Publisher: Independently published, 2025
Cover design not credited [LH edit 27/1/26]: Rachel Caplin**
ISBN: 9798900010632, Kindle edition, 358 pages
Source: Kindle Unlimited (trial*)
* I decided to give Kindle Unlimited a try but it is a waste of money. It doesn’t offer the full range of books, so it’s useless for the occasional book I might want to buy because I can’t get it anywhere else.
** Update 27/1/26: I had a lovely email from Rachel explaining that she was the one who designed the cover, but had thought she shouldn’t credit herself!
Before I begin, I want to thank the readers who’ve been with me on this journey. Without your encouragement I might have felt as if I were writing into the void and might not have persevered. The fact that I am here at the end of the Paradiso is thanks to you.
This canto begins with what seems like a surprising request: here at the portal to heaven which is where all good believers would like to be, Dante expresses his hope that this poetic masterpiece will enable his return to Florence and there at the site of his baptism into the faith receive the poet’s crown. This is another glimpse of the private pain his exile continues to inflict on Dante the poet.
If ever it happen that this sacred poem
to which both Heaven and earth have set their hand,
and made me lean from labouring so long,
wins over those cruel hearts that exile me
from my sweet fold where I grew up a lamb,
for to the wolves that war up it now,
with a changed voice and with another fleece,
I shall return, a poet, and at my own
baptismal font assume the laurel wreath (Canto XXV, Lines 1-9)
(That would be why we see paintings of Dante wearing a laurel crown, including this posthumous one by Botticelli).
This query prompts Beatrice to intervene. It’s time for the ‘second examination’ and she asks St James to interrogate Dante about Hope. What is Hope? What is its source? What does it promise? With a bit of help from Beatrice on the second question, Dante gets the answers right, but it’s all about hope in God which is not all that inspirational for those secular souls like mine who hopes are for a better world here on earth. Whatever about that, (Yay! some music!!) the souls all sing Sperent in te. (‘They hope in you’, but NB this Latin verb is in the subjunctive, indicating conditionality.) Here it is:
Peter, James and John join in the dance, prompting Dante to wonder about the truth of the medieval legend about St John’s body ascending to heaven with his soul. St John says no, this belief is false. His body returned to dust on earth and that until the Day of Judgement only Christ and the Virgin Mary possess both body and soul, and Dante should enlighten those on earth who give credence to it. Thanks to the excessive brilliance of this sphere of heaven, Dante suddenly find that he has lost his sight and can no longer see Beatrice.
Canto XXVI
As we knew he would (because how could he write the poem otherwise?) Dante gets his sight back when he correctly answers St John’s third question: what is the goal of love, and how and why is he drawn to it.
The instant I stopped speaking, all of Heaven
filled with sweet singing, as my lady joined
the others chanting ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’. (Canto XXVI, Lines 67-69)
I would have liked to find this hymn in a version with a soprano breaking through the male voices, but this male voice choir’s rendition of Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus is rather nice:
And now Adam joins the assembly, and it is Dante’s turn to ask questions.
Musa’s summarises these queries: Dante wants to know how long ago he was created, how much time did he spend in the Earthly Paradise, what did he do to provoke God’s wrath, and what language did he speak. Interesting questions, eh? We all know the answer to the third one (but still, it’s nice to see that he doesn’t blame Eve) but the last one fascinates anyone who is interested in how human language emerged. Dante, could not of course have known what we know now about the hyoid bone of early humans and how it’s an integral part of human speech, so his explanation is naïve.
The language that I spoke was long extinct
before that unaccomplishable task
entered the minds of Nimrod’s followers; [i.e. the Tower of Babel]
no product of the human mind can last
eternally for, as all things in Nature,
man’s inclination varies with the stars.
That man should speak is only natural,
but how he speaks, in this way or in that,
Nature allows you to do as you please. (Canto XXVI, Lines 124-132)
Musa’s notes point out that by this time Dante has moved through the hierarchy of these heavens, and is now in the eighth sphere. Adam is here at the summit of the ‘human hierarchy’ as the father of the human race and the only being created mature and perfect. Plus, that middle tercet is a reminder of medieval ideas about astronomy:
The turning of the heavenly spheres affects the operations of Nature and beneath the sphere of the moon, including the human mind, which is a variable thing. (Musa, p, 317)
Canto XXVII
The Gloria is the prayer of Benedictine monks…
But as they stop singing, the light emitting from St Peter changes to red and he launches into a tirade against the corruption of the Church.
and I heard, ‘Do not marvel at my change
of colour, for you are about to see
all of these souls change colour as I speak.
He on earth who usurps that place of mine,
that place of mine, that place of mine which now
stands vacant in the eyes of Christ, God’s son,
has turned my sepulchre into a sewer
of blood and filth, at which the Evil One
who fell from here takes great delight down there.’ (Canto XXVII, Lines 19-27)
Strong words, eh, and note that repetition of ‘that place of mine’. Dante is told that when he returns to earth he must tell about what he has seen, and then all the souls ascend to the Empyrean, leaving Dante and Beatrice to watch them go. But Beatrice does that thing where she tells Dante to look down and lo! they are transported up to the ninth sphere of the Primum Mobile. (Click here to see the diagram that shows you where they are now that they have left the Sphere of the Fixed Stars.)
Beatrice explains that the Primum Mobile is the starting point of everything in the universe:
The nature of the, which still
its centre while it makes all else revolve,
moves from this heaven as from its starting point;
no there ‘Where’ than in the Mind of God
contains this heaven, because in that Mind burns
the love that turns it and the power it rains.
By circling light and love it is contained
as it contains the rest; and only He
Who bound them comprehends how they were bound.
It takes its motion from no other sphere,
and all the other measure theirs by this. (Canto XXVII, Lines 106-116)
This sent me back to Part C of my post about C S Lewis and The Discarded Image. To quote my own imperfect understanding of this medieval concept…
God as the transcendent and immaterial power behind the First Movement, the Primum Mobile, starts the rotations of the spheres. He occupies no place and is not affected by Time. But he can’t be moving anything because this theory demands that the end point be an unmoving Mover. Aristotle solved this conundrum by saying He moves as beloved i.e. as an object of desire moves those who desire it. Therefore the Primum Mobile is moved by its love of God, and thus makes the rest of the universe move.
There are two senses of this Love of God:
the aspiring love of creatures for Him, and
His provident and descending love for them.
Beatrice then has a bit of rant about the greed of mankind and the absence of anyone governing earth as it should be governed, so the human family goes astray. She finishes up with the optimistic promise that things will be set straight before long, which gives Dante the opportunity to use the enigmatic ‘before all January is unwintered/because of every hundred years’ odd day’. (Lines 142-44). Musa explains what Dante is alluding to:
The Julian calendar made the year 365 days and 6 hours long. Due to this inaccuracy the solar year gained one day per century over the regular year. Thus, in less than 90 centuries [i.e. about 2221 AD] under this system January would have been shifted into spring. (In 1852, Gregory XIII corrected this error in the calendar.) (p.329)
So we’ve only got a couple of hundred years to go before things get sorted out here on Earth…
Canto XXVIII
This canto is a bit arcane, to say the least, but at least there’s music. Dante sees nine spheres spinning around but they don’t look the way he thinks they ought to. Musa tells us that Beatrice explains that what he is seeing is the physical universe from the spiritual point of view from God’s eye, as it were, with God at the centre. The fiery circles sing
… ‘Hosanna’ choir on choir
to the Fixed Point that holds each to its ubi [Latin for ‘where’ i.e. place]
the place they were and will forever be. (Canto XXVIII, Lines 94-96)
Beatrice gives us a dissertation about the angels. She offers clarifications about human misconceptions of angels, e.g. that angels don’t have memories because they see everything through God. Then (not quite what I expected in a heavenly realm) she goes off-piste with a bit of a rant about show-offs inflating their own self-importance with grandiose theories about the scriptures. Illustrated in this lovely miniature from Giovanni de Paolo we can see Satan lurking in the preacher’s cowl, and the figure at the back is the founder of monasticism, St Anthony of Padua, whose emblem is a hog as a symbol of the Devil’s temptations. According to Musa,
The monks of his order kept herds of swine which ran free through the towns and which the people fed and fattened because of religious superstition. When Dante says in this verse On this Saint Anthony fattens his pig, he means that these preachers now make money by playing on the credulity of the people (Line 121), just as the order of Saint Anthony long ago fattened their pigs by allowing their parishioners to feed them. (Musa, p 350)
After this digression, there’s more about the angels, who are so plentiful that the human mind can’t imagine it. (Gosh, it must be crowded up there in heaven by now, not just billions of people who saw the light or repented just in time but scads of angels as well!)
But do not think that any of this is for God’s aggrandisement…
Not to increase His good, which cannot be,
but rather that His own reflected glory
in its resplendence might proclaim I am
in His eternity, beyond all time,
beyond all comprehension, as pleased Him,
new loves blossomed from the Eternal love. (Canto XXIX, Lines 13-18)
Enough already…
Canto XXX
The nine circles fade away and we are in the Empyrean. Again Dante is briefly blinded but then sees a river of light — but what he thinks are flowers on its banks are the souls of the Elect, forming a rose.
Between the rose and God, there are angels flying ceaselessly. This image, from Experimental Theology, likens them to bees, pollinating the rose, an allusion made more explicit in the next canto.
There’s not a lot of room left in the centre of the rose, but one of the remaining spots, says Beatrice, is for Henry VII who tried and failed to reform Italy because Pope Clement V sabotaged his efforts. She predicts he’ll be damned, recalling that gruesome image of each new arrival in the Eighth Circle of Hell shoving his predecessor (in this case Boniface VIII) deeper down into his hole for simony.
‘But God will not permit him to stay long
in Holy Office: he shall be thrust down,
where Simon Magus pays his guilt, and he
shall stuff the Alagnese deeper down!’ (Canto XXX, Line 145-148)
Beatrice’s glee seems a little undignified, eh?
Canto XXXI
Well, well, it looks like Beatrice has got her spot in the rose, (#HierarchiesAgain) third from the highest tier). She is enthroned where her own merit destined her, and as Musa explains in the Notes:
The first row in the amphitheatre of the Rose is that of Mary, the second is Eve’s, and the third is Rachel’s. Beside Rachel sits Beatrice. Thus Contemplation (Rachel) and Revelation (Beatrice) are side by side. Beatrice’s position in the Rose is a matter of preordained grace bestowed upon her by God when he breathed life into her soul. (Musa p 372).
(Rachel, we learn in the Notes to the next canto, was the second wife of the Patriarch Jacob and mother of Benjamin and Joseph, who, Wikipedia tells us, were two of the twelve progenitors of the tribes of Israel.(Genesis, 29:9 and 30:1-24). She was one of the souls released from Limbo in the Inferno IV, line 60, when Christ descended into Hell, and she represents Contemplation.)
But Dante is busy enthusing about the Divine Light he can see (unimpeded by all those angels flying in between) and fails to notice that Beatrice has gone from his side until he turns around and find an old man there instead. His new guide turns out to be St Bernard of Padua who was the force behind the Second Crusade. He urges Dante to shift his gaze from Beatrice far above him in all her glory crowned/by the reflections of eternal light…but instead to end all desire and to concentrate instead on the Virgin Mary one whom his spiritual progress now depends.
‘My son of grace’, he spoke again, ‘this state
of blissful being will not be known to you
as long as you keep your eyes fixed down here;
look up into the circles, to the highest
until your eyes behold, enthroned, the Queen
who holds as subject this devoted realm.’ (Canto XXXI, Lines 112-117)
Mary’s beauty surpasses anything Dante has ever seen, and as is his wont, he can’t even attempt to describe her. Countless artists have tried it, however, including this colourised version of Gustave Doré’s etching. (The detail is clearer even than in my Barnes and Noble Longfellow translation with Doré’s B&W etchings throughout.)
Canto XXXII
Hmm, the figures in Doré’s etching don’t quite correspond to Dante’s hierarchy. Musa’s summary explains it succinctly:
A line of souls bisects the Rose vertically, separating those who believed in Christ before His coming from those who believed afterwards. The Virgin is in the highest seat and heads the half of the line containing Hebrew women (Christ to come); St John the Baptist heads the half comprised of male saints (Christ already come). When St Bernard instructs the Pilgrim to focus his gaze on the Virgin in order to acquire sufficient grace to contemplate Christ, he sees the angel Gabriel hail her with outspread wings, and all the souls respond in song. Then St Bernard points out the position of other prominent souls: Adam and Moses; St Peter and St John the Evangelist; St Anne, the mother of the Virgin; and St Lucy, who, by inviting Beatrice to come to the aid of her lover, set the Divine Comedy in motion. (Musa, p 376)
There’s music, the Ave Maria. It’s a bit anachronistic, but we are spoiled for choice with Schubert’s 1825 version of Ave Maria, gratia plena: the great Jessye Norman;Luciano Pavarotti and Renée Fleming and the angelic voice of Maria Callas:
The penultimate Canto XXXII segues into Canto XXXIII with a prayer…
Canto XXXIII
St Bernard prays to the Virgin that Dante will be able to see God’s glory.
In you in tenderness, in you is pity,
in you munificence—in you unites
all that is good in God’s created beings.
This is a man who from the deepest pit
of all the universe up to this height
has witnessed, one by one, the lives of souls
who begs you that you grant him through your grace
the power to raise his vision higher still
to penetrate the final blessedness. (Canto XXXIII, Lines 19-27)
He prays too for Dante to stay the course once he has returned to earth, and he invokes all the prayers of the other Blest:
I pray you also, Queen who can achieve
your every wish, keep his affections sound
once he has had the vision and returns.
Protect him from the stirrings of the flesh:
you see, with Beatrice, all the Blest,
hands clasped in prayer, are praying for my prayer. (Canto XXXIII, Lines 34-39)
Dante is thus enabled to see the Divine Light, in the three circles of the Trinity. He is mystified at first, until his mind is illuminated by the Truth.
As the geometer who tries so hard
to square the circle, but cannot discover,
think as he may, the principle involved,
so did I strive with this new mystery:
I yearned to know how could our image fit
into that circle, how could it conform;
but my own wings could not take me so high—
then a great flash of understanding struck
my mind, and suddenly its wish was granted.
At this point power failed high fantasy
but, like a wheel in perfect balance turning,
I felt my will and my desire impelled
by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars. (Canto XXXIII, Lines 133-145)
And so ends Dante’s journey, with a vision of the stars that were at there at the very beginning, and at the end of each canticle where his eyes were fixed upon the stars.
And now, to celebrate getting to the end of The Divine Comedy, here’s some medieval street music from Ensemble Anonymous & Strada:
The Divine Comedy: Translation, Notes and Commentary by Mark Musa,
Vol 1, Inferno, 2003 new edition of the 1984 Penguin Classics edition, first published 1971 by Indiana University Press, ISBN 9780142437223
Vol 2, Purgatory, 1985 Penguin Classics edition, first published 1981 by Indiana University Press, ISBN: 9780140444421
Vol 3, Paradise, 1986 Penguin Classics edition, first published 1984, by Indiana University Press ISBN 9780140444438. The illustration on the front over is from William Blake’s ‘St Peter and St James with Dante and Beatrice’, illustration for Canto 25, held at the NGV in Melbourne.
TheDivine Comedy translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with illustrations by Gustave Doré and an Introduction by Melinda Corey; Barnes and Noble edition 2008, ISBN: 9781435103849
The Divine Comedy translated and with an Introduction by Clive James, Picador Poetry edition, 2013, ISBN 9781447244219
A Beginners Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy by Jason M Baxter, Baker Academic, 2018, ISBN: 9781493413102, Kindle edition ASIN: B0752RVZ6R
The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C S Lewis, Kindle edition ASIN B08TCJZP5N
The Sleepwalkers, by Arthur Koestler, The Danube Edition, Hutchinson, 1968 first published 1959 ISN: 090502515
The Essential Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett, The Softback Preview, 1999, first published in this translation in 1871, ISBN: 9781582880129
The Dante Course, a series of lectures presented by Prof. Teodolinda Barolini, Lorenzo da Ponte Professor of Italian at Columbia University, 2015-6 online
Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia (1403-1482), The Celestial Rose, illustration for Paradiso (c 1444-1450), miniature in Divina Commedia for Alfonso V, king of Aragon, Naples and Sicily, media and dimensions not known, The British Museum, London. Wikimedia Commons
The Cone-Gatherers (1955) was Robin Jenkins’ fourth novel, and it is outstanding. IMHO it belongs in the pantheon of great 20th century novelists and I wasn’t surprised to learn that it featured as a set text in the Scottish curriculum for many years.
This is the book description from my King Penguin edition:
While the Second World War rages overseas, the life of a large Scottish country estate flows on, lapped by the seasons and enfolded in tradition. Ruled by the equivocal, confused Lady Runcie-Campbell and dominated by Duror the gamekeeper, it seems a world untouched by the tides of destruction.
But as he moves through the forest the brooding figure of Duror undergoes a monstrous transformation. Driven by pent-up love and obsessive hatred to hunt down the small, hunchbacked cone-gatherer, he seeks — and finds — terrible apotheosis.
Written by one of Scotland’s finest novelists, The Cone-Gatherers is an extraordinary story of violence, lost innocence and sorrow — at its heart the unresolvable mystery of evil, counterpointed by a terrible redemption.
The authenticity of this story comes from Jenkins’ own experience as a conscientious objector doing forestry work, and it seems to me that some of his concerns involve working through conflicted attitudes of the times — not only his own feelings, but also those that emerged among the other COs with whom he worked. Far from being offstage, as the book descriptions implies, the war is there in many references. The figure of Duror is evil personified, symbolising the irrational hatreds of the Nazi regime. But there are also acknowledgements of the heroism of those fighting it. The local doctor, chafing under wartime rationing, has a nephew in the Merchant Navy and is well aware that these convoys are dangerous and heroic. Tulloch the forester has a brother killed at Dunkirk, and Maggie, the stoic waitress in the café, has a sister whose windows in Greenock had been blown in by a bomb.
I’d love to be eavesdropping in a senior class that’s discussing the idea that the unresolvable mystery of evil is counterpointed by a terrible redemption. Who is redeemed by the climactic act of horror and does Jenkins resolve the complex question of conscientious objection to wars against monstrous evil? In a sequence that does not spare the reader from the disgusting, offensive thoughts of a man like Duror, Jenkins clearly represents the horror of the Nazi program of exterminating people with a disability. This passage forces the reader to confront the moral complexity of conscientious objection when there is evil that must be overcome.
Duror had read that the Germans were putting idiots and cripples to death in gas chambers. Outwardly, as everybody expected, he condemned such barbarity; inwardly, thinking of idiocy and crippledness not as abstractions but as embodied in the crouchbacked cone-gatherer, he had profoundly approved. (p.21-22)
He thought how incomprehensible and unjust it was that in Europe, in Africa and in China, many tall, strong, healthy, brave, intelligent men were killing one another, while in this dirty little hut those two sub-humans lived in peace, as if under God’s protection. He could not understand that, and he was sure nobody could. (p.22)
It’s because the narration ranges across the thoughts and conversations of the main characters, that the sense of foreboding grows in intensity.
Jenkins also makes clear that wartime manpower regulations affected everyone, including the COs who lost any sense of personal agency when they were despatched from their usual occupations and places of residence to support the war effort indirectly. In the novel some of these experienced scorn and abuse, but not from Neil and Calum. They are not COs, and Neil would enlist if not for the need to care for his brother, whom he dearly loved. But like the COs, thy are moved about like chess pieces and have no choice about the work they do, because they are poor and because there are few options for a worker with disabilities like Calum’s. Although Calum is deft and capable in the trees, their work is undervalued and so they are reliant on the good will of Mr Tullloch the forester, and on the grudging acceptance of Lady Runcie-Campbell who tolerates their presence on her estate only if they are out of sight and out of mind.
The representation of the underclass is potent. Time and again Jenkins shows how Lady Runcie-Campbell’s sense of the superiority of her class makes her blind to the way people are used without any concern for their welfare. The estate dogs are better fed and housed than Calum and Neil who live in a foul hut — small as a rabbit hutch, and as filthy —without adequate protection from the weather. Despite Neil’s plea that Calum not be dragooned into the hunt because he can’t bear to see animals harmed, Lady Runcie-Campbell won’t hear of it because she can’t tolerate the idea that a man such as Calum cares more for animals than she does for the humans she exploits.
Graham the handyman is too old and infirm to be a beater and was previously injured in a hunt but he is also merely someone to be used by Lady Runcie-Campbell for the hunt she wants on a whim — to please her brother before he goes back to war. He warns Neil:
‘Let me give you some advice,’ he said grimly. ‘When we get near the guns, drop down on your face as if you were praying for your life; and that’s exactly what you will be doing, for there’s a man yonder with a gun that’s as blind as a mole and shouldn’t be trusted with a pea-shooter. He damned near shot the arse off me. I didn’t even see the deer. I was too busy finding breath and picking bramble hooks out of my hands. The guns started banging as if I’d wandered into the middle of the war itself. I did what any sensible man would have done. I ran for the nearest tree, but this blind character took me for a deer and banged away at me. Damned if he missed too. Now you would think that that man would never be trusted with a gun again as long as he, or anybody else, lived. You’d think, in a sensible world, nobody would allow him another chance for murder. Well I’m warning you that he’s yonder, at the far end, waiting, with a gun and an itching finger, to let fly at any living thing, deer or man, that bursts out of the wood. There are men getting medals for far less than what we’re going to face.’ (p.85)
As Iain Crichton-Smith says in the Introduction, the novel has some similarities with Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), but
…because of his Scottish background Jenkins has succeeded better than Steinbeck in showing us the forces that attack the innocent and weak for, of course, it is not true, in Yeats’s phrase, that the beautiful and the innocent have not enemy but time. […] The fable of Jenkins’ book [has] more power to move us because of the complex linkage of symbols… (p.4)
There is so much more that I could say about this book, but the tradies are coming to deconstruct and then reconstruct The Shed tomorrow and the power will be on and off for most of the day, so I plan to loaf on the sofa with Shokoofeh Azar’s amazing second novel The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of our Kitchen (Europa, 2015, ISBN 9798889660989). (Readers might remember that I was impressed by her first novel The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (2017) which was subsequently nominated for multiple prizes including the International Booker.)
While I like the cover of the King Penguin edition that I read, which depicts a figure suspended perilously on a branch while a sinister figure looms at the edge of the trees, I also like the First Edition because (for those of us not so familiar with European trees) it shows the cones that were being gathered!
Author: Robin Jenkins (OBE, 1912-2005)
Title: The Cone-Gatherers
Publisher: King Penguin (Penguin Books) 1983, first published 1955
Cover illustration by Grizelda Holderness
ISBN: 9780140062922, pbk., 223 pages
Source: personal library, purchased from World of Books via AbeBooks, $2.07USD
Longlisted for the 2026 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, John Banville’s latest novel Venetian Vespers is a curious tale indeed. I can’t say that I was much invested in the mystery that bears the plot, but was puzzled enough to keep reading to discover what Banville was on about. I kept sensing allusions to other novels set in Venice, (most obviously but not only The Turn of the Screw), and a narrative voice channelled from Henry James, but I could not fathom any preoccupation of significance.
Maybe I can get it back, and maybe I can restore my old blog roll and rearrange the widgets so that they are where I want them but I have already wasted enough time, because what I wanted to do today was to write my review of Tracy Farr’s terrific new book, Wonderland which has been nominated for the 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Many years ago when we were having one of those ‘Did we do the right thing?’ conversations that migrant families inevitably have about leaving their birthplace, my mother said something that I did not really understand at the time. ‘I don’t ever want to live again in a country that can’t feed itself.’ I knew she was referring to wartime food rationing in Britain, but I didn’t know then that Germany and Finland deliberately used starvation as a military strategy in 
The first thought that sprang to mind from that paragraph was: huh? a women’s land army formed during WW1??! A quick search and I found that others have been there before me, and at 
The Introduction also tells us that for the first time ever, in WW2 single women were conscripted into the services, and could choose to join the female versions of the military services i.e. WAAF, the ATS or the WRNS), or work in a factory manufacturing war production essentials, or join the ‘Land Girls’. But recruitment for the Land Girls ceased in 1943 because it was more popular than the other options. This was possibly because of the idealised ‘healthy outdoor life’ promised by the recruitment posters, but also because women liked the WLA uniform. Many of us have seen this in TV re-enactments, such as this one:
Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted on 
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Arborescence, Rhett Davis (Hachette Australia), 
Azar’s first novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (Europa Editions, 2020, 
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The system of certificates indicating skilled worker protection status, is introduced. Again we see that Yitskhok is writing not in the immediate present but recalling the very recent past.
Today the
Shortlisted for the now defunct Vogel Award, The Spoon and the Sea is Rachel Caplin’s debut novel. This is the book description:
Following on from 
(That would be why we see paintings of Dante wearing a laurel crown, including this posthumous one by Botticelli).
The Cone-Gatherers (1955) was Robin Jenkins’ fourth novel, and it is outstanding. IMHO it belongs in the pantheon of great 20th century novelists and I wasn’t surprised to learn that it featured as a set text in the Scottish curriculum for many years.
There is so much more that I could say about this book, but the tradies are coming to deconstruct and then reconstruct The Shed tomorrow and the power will be on and off for most of the day, so I plan to loaf on the sofa with Shokoofeh Azar’s amazing second novel The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of our Kitchen (Europa, 2015, ISBN 9798889660989). (Readers might remember that 
While I like the cover of the King Penguin edition that I read, which depicts a figure suspended perilously on a branch while a sinister figure looms at the edge of the trees, I also like the First Edition because (for those of us not so familiar with European trees) it shows the cones that were being gathered!
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