In Ecstasy is Perth author Kate McCaffrey’s second novel for teenagers. It was released in April of this year by Fremantle Press, and should be widely available in W.A. and elsewhere. McCaffrey is a high school English teacher like myself (and a lot of other writers, apparently) and her novel seems directed toward students in the 14-17 age group.

In Ecstasy mainly concerns two Year 11 girls, Mia and Sophie. The novel is narrated from both points of view, and they aren’t always in ‘time sync’ with each other. This is done to heighten tension and to withhold certain information at particular times, and for the most part I thought it was done well. Without being a teenage girl myself, I felt that McCaffrey has done a good job of appealing to the particular target audience. The language and slang seem appropriate, and there was nothing that seemed out of place or jarring.

Sophie and Mia are going in different directions. At the beginning of the novel they are close friends, and have been for some time, but they drift apart over the course of the narrative. Sophie is initially confident and perhaps the more popular of the two, but this changes rapidly. Mia is initially shy and reserved, envying her friend’s looks and demeanour, but her confidence blossoms, in no small part due to the drug Ecstasy.

This book is a virtual travelogue of the pitfalls of teenage life, including but not limited to drug use (ecstasy, marijuana, alcohol, cocaine), underage sex, date rape, and teenage pregnancy. As the novel progresses, we begin to see the two girls drift apart as Sophie withdraws from the drug/party culture. (Interestingly, a similar thing happened to myself at a similar age.) Mia, however, becomes more and more embroiled in the world of drugs and parties, and her health eventually suffers as a result.

Mia’s sense of self seems to come from a couple of sources: firstly, the ecstasy itself; and secondly her relationship with the ultra popular and rich Lewis Scott. This propels her into the popularity stratosphere, but it doesn’t last long. Without wanting to spoil the novel for potential readers, everything goes pear shaped for Mia. Consequently, her story is the dominant one in this novel, and here I encountered a potential problem. Sophie ends up becoming the more sensible of the two girls, and her narrative withers away to virtually nothing. Some of her sections are less than a page in length. But Mia’s story is interesting enough to sustain this reader’s attention.

I’m not sure if McCaffrey intended to address the idea of patriarchy and sexual equality at all, but I thought the novel did so in an implicit way. Most of the girls and women in this novel are in some sense slaves to men, be it physically or emotionally (or both). There is a reverse example, in which young Dominic seems to fawn over Sophie. I have noticed myself that ‘equal rights’ has gone backwards a long way in the past twenty years or so in this country, and In Ecstasy seems to reflect that in the enormous pressure these young girls feel to conform to notions of beauty and fashion sense. It’s very sad to think that we live in a world where girls are put under these kinds of pressures, but there it is.

Ultimately, In Ecstasy is a successful novel. It manages to cleverly interweave a tale around a number of important issues teenagers may face. It avoids being too blatantly an ‘issues novel,’ while carefully mapping this terrain. Most importantly, McCaffrey does this as an insider, not an outsider to the worlds of teenage experience. Any parent with teenage children should read this, as should the teenagers themselves. Hell, my daughter isn’t yet three, and I’m already worried by some of the material in this book, such as the odious Glenn. Highly recommended.

Kate McCaffrey has a wordpress blog of her own at katemccaffrey.wordpress.com

Hemingway is one of the most famous writers of the twentieth century and yet it seems to me that his books are no longer as widely available as they once were. He has fallen out of fashion in a way that Joyce apparently never will. And yet his presence in the history of literature is immense. Regarding Hemingway, people generally want to talk about his style of writing, and so shall I.

Fiesta, or The Sun Also Rises (a better but only obliquely relevant title), is my first Hemingway novel, and for the most part it reads well in spite of its vintage (1927). It is easy to say that the best writing never ages, but of course this is not so: all writing ages, but not at the same speed. For the most part I found Fiesta easy to read, fairly enjoyable but ultimately unsatisfying.

The first section, in which we are introduced to a small cast of characters who will stay with us throughout the novel, is set in Paris in the mid-twenties. I am reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby in the way that this opening section plays out, and a little of Henry Miller and William Burroughs in the way that Paris is used as the set for numerous drunken roamings and ramblings. This is Paris between the wars, and for the expatriate Americans and English, it is a fine life indeed. In fact, I found myself wanting to travel back in time to 1927, to experience these ‘Roaring Twenties’ for myself. Fine dining, heavy drinking and jaunting around Europe sounds ‘jolly good’ to me, and yet Hemingway would caution us as to the dangers of leading a life such as this.

Our narrator is called Jake Barnes, and he is a newspaperman and veteran of the First World War. Although it is never addressed directly, we come to realise by degrees that Jake is sexually impotent due to some form of war injury. This does not seem to bother Jake unduly, although we do begin to wonder whether he is lying to himself in this regard. Jake is stable, sane, and something of a doormat for another character who will be discussed shortly.

Robert Cohn is a Jewish writer and amateur boxer, and we are positioned to dislike him intensely. In fact, much of the novel consists of Cohn’s childish behaviour and the various rebukes he endures. Cohn has fallen for Lady Ashely, a.ka. Brett (a rather confusing name for a woman, I thought), and he spends the novel chasing her around and hanging around like a lost puppy dog. It’s all rather nauseating. One might say that Hemingway’s characterisation of Cohn shows signs of anti-Semitism, and while this is probably true, I found it to be far milder than in some of Hemingway’s contemporaries. My example here is Graham Greene, a writer I admire greatly. Greene’s early novels of the twenties offer far cruder Jewish stereotypes. But I digress.

Brett is the focus of the novel. She is an English aristocrat, loved by all and touched by some. She and Jake are in love, but it is a peculiar love owing to Jake’s impotence. As a result, Brett is all over the place, to-ing and fro-ing in various debauched ways (most notably with a nineteen year old Spanish matador). She is unhappy for the most part, happy at times, and usually drunk. This is a good time to mention that a vast quantity of liquor is consumed over the course of Fiesta, much of it very expensive. There’s even some Absinthe. It’s enough to give one a liver hemorrhage.

Mike is Brett’s soon-to-be-husband, and yet their relationship is a bizarre one. Mike, a Scot, doesn’t seem to mind that Brett is sleeping with all and sundry and conducting herself in an unseemly manner. As we discover, MIke is the biggest drunk of them all, and quite a bore too. There’s a rather poignant scene toward the end of the book in which Mike is so drunk and tired that he can’t talk properly. It’s clear that Mike uses alcohol to obliterate his problems. He’s also bankrupt.

Then there is a Bill, a rather affable fellow whom I can’t remember a great deal about, and a host of minor characters. It’s a reasonably good cast, but not as memorable as those in The Great Gatsby, I don’t think. But Fitzgerald’s novel is probably an appropriate frame of reference for this one. As I said, the first part is set in Paris, and it’s all rather aimless. We get to know the main characters on their drunken adventures, and soak in the scenery. It’s pleasant reading, but not especially memorable reading, at least not to my mind.

About style. Hemingway’s prose is very distinctive with its clipped sentence structure and declarative manner. Things are described in simple and straightforward fashion. This is a strength and a weakness, and to illustrate my point I will use a couple of examples. At its best, this is powerful writing with a kind of self-evident clarity: “Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.” (p 43) At its worst, this seems like prose written by someone who was dropped on their head as a baby: “The cab stopped in front of the hotel and we all got out and went in. It was a nice hotel, and the people at the desk were very cheerful, and we each had a good small room.” (p 103) And so Hemingway is Hemingway: in some ways searingly powerful and clear, and in other ways disappointingly bland and stripped of emotion.

The best part of the novel, for me, was the middle third, in which the main characters make the trip from France to Spain for the Fiesta season. Before the season begins, there is time for a fishing trip in a remote town. This is where I felt Hemingway’s talents were best deployed: in accurately describing visually detailed settings and complex events, such as precisely how to catch a fish. Here I saw Hemingway the master. Elsewhere, I felt that the novel fell a little flat.

After the fishing is finished (I am skipping over a hell of a lot of plot here) it is time for the Fiesta, which is when the bullfighting and general merrymaking occurs. Hemingway seems to be very interested in bull-fighting, but I found that his enthusiasm did not enliven the topic for me. A matter of taste perhaps. All the while we are getting bits and pieces of conversation and often argument centering around wayward Brett, pathetic Cohn and boorish Mike. There’s a great deal of inconsequential conversation in this book, but perhaps it can be said that it has a cumulative effect on the reader.

Increasingly, I found that I was interested to read about the way the toxic relationships would unfold, and disinterested by the descriptions of bullfighting. It all ends rather badly for all concerned. Nothing really decisive happens (well, Cohn the Jewish boxer does beat up all three of his rivals for Brett’s affection, not that it helps) and yet there is a sense of resolution. Something in these people is badly broken. This is decadence. I noticed that Jake alone seemed to have found some meaning in life in the form of his Catholicism, and yet it doesn’t seem to stop him from carrying on almost as badly as the other characters found here. This is a bleak novel in the final analysis, and one that doesn’t seem to offer much hope for the future.

I’m not totally sold on Hemingway, but at least I can say I’ve read one of his novels now. I have Farewell to Arms here to read too, but I think I’ll give Papa Hemingway a rest for a little while now. I would be interested to hear any comments on the above, especially as I don’t consider myself an expert on this author by any stretch of the imagination. Recommendations as to his best work would be appreciated also.

Well, my reading has ground to a halt. It was bound to happen after reading so many books in the first half of the year, but now I’m spending my free time playing old computer games instead. Despite this, I got out a few books from UWA yesterday. They are:

The Albanian - Donna Mazza - this will be my seventh Hungerford winner, although it’s true that I only got through four of the previous six. Mazza won the award in 2004. Incidentally, Alice Nelson’s Hungerford winner, retitled The Last Sky, is due to be released next month. I am thinking about actually handing over some coin for that one.

In Ecstasy - Kate McCaffrey - this recently released novel by a Perth writer is about…you guessed it, ecstasy use. There seems to be quite a buzz about McCaffrey and her novels (her first is called Destroying Avalon) so I thought it’d be prudent to check this out. I would have thought that this would be something to use in school. The Woolridges rep seemed pretty enthusiastic about it.

Fiesta - Ernest Hemingway - J. J. DeCeglie seems to have a high opinion of Papa Hemingway, and it occurred to me that I’ve never even tried to read one of his novels. The One Man and the Sea has been sitting on my bookshelf for ten years now. So here goes. This is also known as The Sun Also Rises.

Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway - another classic novel that I’ve never read. I wasn’t entirely sure where to start with Hemingway, but I thought this and Fiesta might be an appropriate sampler.

And I’ve still got The White Earth, Underground and Lazaroo’s The Travel Writer to read. I’ve gotten bogged down with McGahan. I read about 50 pages of The White Earth, and while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, it seemed to me that McGahan has really lost the narrative drive that had me reading Praise and 1988 virtually straight through.

Well, this tends to happen quite a bit. I start reading a novel, finding it fairly interesting at first, but then my interest tapers off dramatically. It’s interesting that I should struggle with McGahan’s Last Drinks, because I found the subject matter (corruption in 1980s Queensland and its aftermath) quite compelling. How is it that Praise and 1988 could be so gripping and this novel so easy to put down? I haven’t got an answer for this. Last Drinks seems like a transitional novel, by a writer learning how to write about something other than himself. It’s clunky and slow in places. And I’m pulling the pin.

Onto The White Earth.

In the Same Streets You’ll Wander Endlessly is J. J. DeCeglie’s first volume of short stories and second book overall. In some of these stories we are re-introduced to Sep (the sea is not yet full’s protagonist) or at least someone very much like him. Many of these stories overlap in their physical and thematic terrain, but a number are notably different in their style and genre. This is important because it shows that DeCeglie has range as well as depth.

Around half of these stories follow roughly the same direction. In “Early Lasting Sunlight,” the unnamed narrator is in New York, far away from his native Fremantle. He drinks coffee, thinks about Kerouac and Bukowski, and chats up a waitress at a cafe. There’s some sex, some writing or discussion of writing, and a fair bit of drinking. This is what I would term the typical DeCeglie story, in that the writer appears to be charting territory (both physical and mental) that is personally familiar to him. This is a strength and a weakness: a strength in that the stories seem concrete, actual; and a weakness in that, as a result, the narratives aren’t ’sculpted.’ This is DeCeglie in realism mode.

“Lights Behind the City” is a short piece that is highly reminiscent of the sea is not yet full. Here DeCeglie depicts a night on the town in powerful, relentless prose. Some descriptive passages are especially vivid (”Rain spraying from above pattering the everything around us and lifting the heat from the orange glow road”) and DeCeglie uses direct reader address to encourage us to imagine the scene (”Even before you get into the starkness of the streets after nightmarish taxi trips you’re so very inebriated that you articulate spun gold and drip mistrust”). Here again we witness the DeCeglien staple of literary discussion interspersed with drunken debauchery.

“Summer Spent” is much the same. Here Sep is mentioned by name, but he may well have been the unnamed protagonist of the first two stories as well. His friends Stone, Irish, Chase and others keep turning up, suggesting that most of these stories are interrelated. But this reads less like a short story and more like a few pages from a novel. “Underground” is the first story in this volume to change things up. Here DeCeglie describes a train bomb in convincing detail. One thing I noticed here is that this writer is able to depict personal injury exceedingly well. These are no metaphorical injuries, they are actual (”the wound was packed with shrapnel, he could feel it still hot on his fingers, tried to dislodge it slightly, he could tell it was interfering with bone”). This lurches between visceral description of the train and recollection of an earlier time as a swimming instructor.

“Unforced Error” is among my favourites in this volume. One reason for this is that here DeCeglie alters his style from Kerouac to Hemingway. A matter of taste perhaps, but I will always champion prose that is clear over that which is murky (”There was no sleep to be got that night and it came with the heat and noise and weight of other things”). Some of these sentences run-on to an extent, but not to the same extent as they do in the sea is not yet full. The narrator’s voice is clear and strong here: “Sometimes life was tough he thought, this is tough, it’s awful, but he felt it had to happen even so and was why life was tough because even though you knew things would end up badly you still did the things that made them that way.” I noticed in the publication details that “Unforced Error” appears to be the only story in this volume not previously published. Is this because it is a more recent story than the others?

“Dark Shadow Off the Fire” is the best story in In the Same Streets You’ll Wander Endlessly. There, I’ve said it, stated my opinion. Why is it the best? Because here DeCeglie invites us into an unknown (and terrifying) world. Is this set in the past, present or future? I can’t tell. But it’s a kind of rural apocalypse, full of murder, rape and revenge. And it’s gripping in the extreme. We are hit with this story’s intensity from the first line (”The sun struck down on him like a wall of scalding water”) and it never lets up. Our protagonist is in desperate trouble. His family have been killed, his home destroyed, and he is in great danger. Floating into his mind, however, are images of something else entirely (”her perfumed creamy skin lends through with the pale rich blue of veins in her breasts and the underside“). A man called Smith has left our narrator to die tied to a hitching post in the desert sun, in a situation that reminds me of Gabrielle Lord’s novel Salt. His crimes seems to be carousing with Smith’s girl, a crime punishable by death. Despite some serious injuries (which are depicted with conviction), our narrator manages to free himself and wreak revenge on Smith. After that, things seem to descend into some hellish pit of Aboriginals versus whites, whites versus whites, and man against man. This is extraordinary, and I will need to read it again to appreciate it fully. In this story, DeCeglie offers us a dark vision far outreaching the urban angst of modern life.

“River into Sea” is reasonably good, but it’s too similar for my liking to what has gone before. “Disturbed Reminiscence and Existence in Broad” seems like a different take on “Lights Behind the City.” “By the River” strips the usual DeCeglie plot down to its barest essentials, tersely describing a sexual encounter. “In the Same Streets You’ll Wander Endlessly” is well written, but by this stage in the volume I was tiring of what seemed to me to be the same plot rewritten and reimagined. I suppose this is a matter of taste, but I prefer it when DeCeglie envisages something more than yet another turbulent romance.

I did like “The Wench is Dead,” however. If I am critical of the ’sameness’ of many of DeCeglie’s stories, it is partly because they depict a line of thinking at a similar stage of development. “The Wench is Dead,” however, takes some of these ideas further, to good effect. Here we see our narrator gambling recklessly (but apparently quite successfully), thinking about “when girls weren’t just a rough smacking thump or regretted sorrow.” The prose is bare and stark, the mood despondent: “Working he was a partial automation. Never sleeping sufficient, thinking relentlessly of the return. Of the way the cards would arrive. The structure of the sentence.” A life lived in a state worse than Thoreau’s quiet desperation. I am reminded here of a writer I doubt DeCeglie would have heard of, Barry N. Malzberg, whose depressive worlds and gambling jaunts seem similar to the one depicted here.

“Spoken Biography of J. J. DeCeglie” is a minor piece, mildly amusing but nothing more, and “Still in the Fury” is an extremely short but effective piece that seems to co-inhabit a universe with “Dark Shadow Off the Fire.” In summary, this is an uneven volume but one which offers great promise in this writer. To my mind, too many of these tales tell essentially the same story, and as such would be better merged into a single narrative. Several, however, break the mold in sometimes spectacular fashion. “Dark Shadow Off the Fire” deploys DeCeglie’s dark vision to greatest effect, and “The Wench is Dead” impressively depicts life during and after a fall from grace. From the publishing notes, I can’t help but notice that the stories I think strongest were published more recently, and the minor pieces in 2005 or 2006. This can only be a good thing.

the sea is not yet full is the first novel by Perth writer J. J. Deceglie. Published in 2005, it is a story about a young man named Sep. Sep is in his early twenties, has a girlfriend named Sarah and a job as a teacher. He lives in Fremantle, Western Australia. Sep and myself seem to have a bit in common, in that we’re probably the same age, both have jobs as teachers, both live or have lived in the Perth Metropolitan area, and both support the Fremantle Dockers. What I’m saying here is that the terrain this novel covers will seem very familiar to anyone who has grown up in Perth, with its slew of pubs and nightclubs, in the late nineties and early two-thousands. Streets are explicitly named, pubs go by their actual names. This is a world I know.

Contrasted with the world of Perth and specifically Fremantle circa 2000-05 is the literary world of twentieth century literature. Famous names are dropped throughout the sea is not yet full: Hemingway, Miller, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, Joyce and others. Co-incidentally, Sep’s account reads somewhat like the work of many of the above names, but especially, to this reader, the writing of James Joyce and Jack Kerouac. Parts of this novel are told in Joycean stream of consciousness word associations, and part in breathless, sentence-less sections that stream forth for several pages. J. J. Deceglie has written the first Beat novel about Perth, or at least the first I have had the pleasure to read.

Not that the sea is not yet full is necessarily a perfect or ideal work, however. While I don’t have a problem with most of the literary innovations herein, such as sentences (and sections) that begin without capital letters, or speech without quotation marks, or sentences that habitually run on for half a page or more, the combination of some of these techniques occasionally lessens the readability of the text. For example, Deceglie is in the habit of having speech embedded within sentences without any form of demarcation as to which part of the line is spoken. Furthermore, as the sentences often run together, it was occasionally difficult to decide who was saying what. Of course this is a literary device like any other, but I did find at times that I needed to re-read or re-interpret a sentence to decide what was going on. There were occasionally minor spelling errors (’too’ rather than ‘to’) as well as minor typographical errors regarding apostrophes. These are minor quibbles–for sure–and perhaps I am rubbing against the grain of the novel to highlight them, but they were things I noticed nonetheless.

So what is the sea is not yet full actually about? Firstly, I discovered that the title is part of a passage from the Bible, specifically Ecclesiastes 1:7: “All the rivers run into the sea yet the sea is not full unto the place from whence the rivers come thither they return again.” Now, I’m no Bible scholar, but I know someone who is, so perhaps I shall ask him to enlighten me as to the meaning of this passage. But the novel is straightforward enough, at least to begin with. When we first meet Sep, he is about to embark on his cherished summer holidays from his teaching job. Primarily, for Sep, this will entail drinking, talking about literature, fishing, but above all else, it means fucking or thinking about fucking. If this seems blunt, then so is the sea is not yet full. This is not for the squeamish, but then true literature rarely is. This material reminds me of another Beat, or perhaps the Godfather of the Beats, William Burroughs.

Imagine Naked Lunch without the heroin and with girls instead of boys. Change the set from Tangiers and New York to Fremantle and Perth. Voila! You have the sea is not yet full. This is intended as a compliment, for if Deceglie might not yet have attained Burroughs (or perhaps Genet’s) level of spiritual effluence, then it is not for the want of trying. And so this is a book about cocks, cunts, toilets and mouths. It is a book about vomit, saliva and buckets of semen. It is a dirty book and a degrading one. This is no use in denying this. And if Sep is trying to transcend his grimy reality through girls and booze and filth, then he isn’t getting very far. A single sentence on page 86 seems to sum up the novel perfectly: “Upward holy thoughts brought down by male human cunt lust.” And therein lies the hinge on which the sea is not yet full swings: the high and lofty versus the low and dirty.

Throughout this book, Sep is pining after an earlier girlfriend, Sully. We are given snippets of information about this, and it becomes clear that Sep is in some kind of moral freefall. He knows he is sinking and yet he continues to sink. He cheats on his current girlfriend Sarah with an array of young and old women alike, in beds and in one instant in a toilet. But Sep seems to derive little satisfaction from these encounters, instead spiraling down into an increasingly bleak cycle of drunken debauchery, guilty reflection, renewal (in the form of fishing trips with his brother Chris and other outdoor pursuits) and back to debauchery. If this seems grim, then it is because life is often like this, and this is often how people treat one another. Sep seems to long for something more, which is mainly defined in his longing for the purer Sully, but he is at the bottom of a deep well looking up at the sky.

The lifestyle is the problem, with its drinking and drug taking and debauched drudgery. Sep knows this and yet he struggles to escape from it. I am reminded here of Andrew McGahan, with his depressed, nihilistic characters and their futile obsessions. But where McGahan is prosaic and pedestrian (with his appealingly frank straightforwardness), then Deceglie is more cunning, more literary, more high-brow. It is a potent mix and, for the most part, a successful one. There is a clash occurring in the sea is not yet full, between the world of twentieth century European and American literature and twenty-first century Western Australia, with its vacuousness and nihilism. This is an age after history is finished, Deceglie seems to be suggesting.
It is a time when there’s nothing left to tell. And yet our small lives flicker on.

I liked one passage so much that I will reproduce it in full here in closing:

“I say fuck you, trying to turn the world into a pile of sameness, into little read stale waste balls of toe crust; all of you with anything inside you, rush to the libraries and read the greats, make note to read the ones the publishers rejected, the ones who refused to give in the to the suited devil average hack, who wrote til their fingernails bled and then sold their manuscripts door to door, send in your manuscript with the vomit stains you added whilst revolted by the indiscretions of everyday bookshop blurbs [...] ” (p 88 )

If that seems disgusting, then you need not apply here. Deceglie is railing against the smug world of publishers and contracts and signings, and I hear him. If you would like to hear him too, then you can contact the author directly at jjdeceglie@yahoo.com.au

J. J. Deceglie is a Perth writer, author of two books: “the sea is not yet full” (a novel), and “In the Same Streets You’ll Wander Endlessly” (short stories). According to the biographical note in the front of the book of stories, “his works have been published in France, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia.” Many of those short stories are freely available on the net, and they have been collected for the first time in “In the Same Streets You’ll Wander Endlessly.”

If you are interested in reading these books, then you can contact the author directly at jjdeceglie@yahoo.com.au

I’m taking a short break from McGahan’s Last Drinks to read some of J. J. Deceglie’s work. Interestingly, I am finding Last Drinks a LOT harder to get through than McGahan’s earlier novels, but I will persevere.

Last thing. If you are a young or newly published writer and want someone to read and review your published book (be it self published or otherwise), all you have to do is leave a note hereabouts. If you wish to send me a copy of your book, I will be only too happy to read it and review it here. You can expect a review of somewhere between 800-1500 words. This serves a mutual self interest in that you get a little bit of exposure for your work and I get a free book to read. Works for me.

1988 is McGahan’s second novel and prequel to his Vogel award-winning Praise. It’s written in the same straightforward style, with the same frankness and absence of guile, and with a similar sense of narrative drive. Exactly where this narrative drive comes from is a mystery to me, as there’s nothing especially interesting about the events of 1988. Despite this, I managed to rip through the book in around five hours.

We are reintroduced to Praise’s protagonist, Gordon, at an earlier stage of his life. He is living in a share house with an increasingly large number of Chinese migrants, and working part time in a bottle shop. This is familiar terrain for readers of Praise. Early on, Gordon decides to take up his friend Wayne’s offer of a six month stint at a lighthouse in the Northern Territory. I should also mention that Brisbane is in preparation for the Bicentennial celebrations. Gordon and Wayne are an unlikely duo - Gordon is depressive, straight-forward and competent, and Wayne is moody, artistic and suave. Gordon is supposed to be a writer and Wayne a painter, but neither of them get a great deal of work done in this book.

The first few chapters detail Gordon and Wayne’s road trip from Brisbane to Darwin. Nothing especially interesting happens. Upon arrival at Darwin, they discover that they will have to share the job as weather station workers at Cape Don, which is a remote part of NT. There seems to be some kind of sexual feeling between the two young men, but nothing comes of it. Gordon spends a night being jealous that Wayne is apparently off with a couple of young backpackers, but again, nothing comes of it. Finally they make it to Cape Don, where they will work for six months.

Things start off fairly promisingly, as the job is easy, but it isn’t long before isolation and boredom begin to eat away at Gordon, Wayne, and the incumbent bushranger Vince. Things fall into a pattern of very heavy drinking and general slobbery. Gordon’s physical and mental wellbeing deteriorates as the novel progresses, a pattern that mirrors Praise. McGahan seems to be saying that this kind of lifestyle is toxic in the extreme, and yet no one seems to care enough to do anything about it.

Gordon even takes up smoking, despite his chronic asthsma. This is self destructive and nihilistic, and yet McGahan offers no real commentary on the right or wrong of the situation. This is both a strength and weakness: a strength in that McGahan is able to describe a certain lifestyle and state of mind extremely accurately; and a weakness in that, as a consequence, the book seems to lack a moral compass. Gordon’s life becomes increasingly wretched. His writing has stagnated, his body is falling apart, and his mind is a shambles. This mirrors the ending of Praise, but here there is a small glimmer of hope in the form of the trip to Cobourg with Allan Price and the rest of the Gurig clan. McGahan isn’t one to ram a theme down your throat, but he seems to be suggesting that the lifestlyle (and perhaps spirituality) of the Aboriginals is preferable to the ennui and self-destruction of the whites.

It isn’t long before Gordon has managed to upset the Gurig clan, however. The one thing I’ll say for this book is that there are no illusions harboured within. This is gritty realism at its…well, its grittiest. Nor is there anything approaching pretentiousness. Never is a false note struck. On the other hand, this is unrelentingly depressing. There’s no redeeming value in Gordon’s life. Nothing to be optimistic about. 1988 ends with Gordon meeting Cynthia, who we already know well from Praise. So there’s nothing good to come in the immediate future. Overall, it would appear that 1988 is a lesser book than Praise. Same style, same stark truthfulness, same nihilism. There’s no development between the two books, almost to the extent that it would appear that McGahan had painted himself into a corner. I will be interested to read Last Drinks next, to see how the author extricated himself from writing about (presumably) his own life in the bleakest of fashions.

My new reading list contains five novels, four of which are by Andrew McGahan. I didn’t exactly plan it that way, but those were the books I picked up. So you can expect to see reviews of all five of McGahan’s novels in the near future, unless I can’t get through one or more of them.

1988 - Andrew McGahan - this is the prequel to Praise. I’ve read half of it already and will probably finish today.

Last Drinks - Andrew McGahan - don’t know much about this. It’s a crime thriller, I think.

The White Earth - Andrew McGahan - this won the Miles Franklin Award and even featured in the 2006 TEE Exam! You can’t get any more ‘establishment’ than that.

Underground - Andrew McGahan - this is a near future satire or dystopia. Sounds a bit iffy, but I will read it.

The Travel Writer - Simone Lazaroo - I was very impressed with Lazaroo’s Hungerford Award winning The World Waiting to be Made, so I’m eager to read more by her. I couldn’t find a copy of The Australian Fiancee at UWA.

You have to be in the right mood for reading Beckett. What that right mood is, I’m not exactly sure, but Beckett’s ‘novels’ are about as far away from the conventions of characterisation and narrative as you can get. Molloy (first in a trilogy including Malone Dies and The Unnameable) seems to be one of his more accessible works, all things being relative. I say accessible, and yet the first part of this short novel consists of two paragraphs only, the second of which goes for more than eighty pages. No chapters, no line breaks, no relief.

And yet Molloy isn’t such a difficult book to read, if one has the requisite determination. We are introduced to a decrepit, invalid man by the name of Molloy. He’s an extremely unreliable narrator, prone to forgetting, at various times: his own name; his mother’s name; the town he lives in; and just about everything else that ‘happens’ in this narrative. Molloy is on a quest of sorts, a journey at least, but I can scarcely imagine a less appealing journey than this one. Molloy gets around by way of a bicycle, across which he rests his crutches. In one amusing incident, he is accosted by the local constabulary, demanding to see his papers. Molloy replies that the only papers he is in the habit of keeping are the ones he uses to wipe himself after he takes a shit. Not that he wipes himself all the time, mind you.

And therein is the allure of the novel Molloy. Decrepit, vagrant and infirm, not to mention callous, forgetful and timorous, Molloy is a novellistic anti-hero. The ‘quest’ involves searching for his elderly mother to obtain money. Molloy’s mother is blind and deaf, and thus Molloy communicates with her by knocking on her skull. He has a plethora of ’sucking stones,’ which he transfers from one pocket to another in the hope of periodically sucking all sixteen stones in his possession. He sleeps in the street, in caves on the beach, and for a time in the house of a woman (or maybe a man - Molloy can’t be sure) by the name of Lousse. In one passage, Molloy describes that he once counted how many times he farted in a day - the number is over three hundred, a rate of once every four minutes. But that’s insignificant, Molloy assures us.

And on it goes. Part one ends after eighty pages or so, toward the end of which Molloy is literally crawling through a forest. I suppose that’s as down as you can get. Part two is told from the perspective of a different character whose job, for some reason, is to search for Molloy. I’ve read this before, but I confess that I stopped reading here. Beckett is unique and irreplaceable but also very easy to put down. If life is without meaning, then why should we bother reading about it? Beckett’s ‘novels’ have no beginning or end, just an interminable middle.