Book Review: My Brother Jack

My Brother Jack by George Johnstone (1964) 348 p.

There was a time when, as an aspiring writer, I felt obliged to read through all the “classics,” an enormous amount of which still clog up my Goodreads to-be-read list and a smaller but still voluminous amount of which have physically occupied my various homes over the years. Of course forcing yourself through The Canon is a young man’s game, one for which I’ve long since lost any motivation, but for the books I bothered to actually acquire I do still read them eventually. A second-hand copy of My Brother Jack that I probably bought in some dusty St Vincent de Paul’s has been floating around on my shelves for seven or eight years, but I only got around to it this week.

It was therefore an excellent surprise to find that My Brother Jack is not the slog I expected – some kind of antiquated family drama from a time when Australia still felt spiritually Edwardian, something that would drag me back to assigned high school English class reading – but is instead a downright literary achievement that is also a genuine pleasure to read, often reminding me of Peter Carey at his picaresque best. In what I suspect is a strongly autobiographical story, Johnstone’s novel follows young David Meredith through his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood in the Melbourne of the 1920s, Great Depression and Second World War, largely revolving around his sense of detachment and mis-belonging; especially in contrast to his older brother Jack, an effortlessly popular ordinary Australian bloke. David by contrast is a nerd, a writer, an effete; an aspirational bohemian, a boy who dreams of more than the stifling mediocrity of Australian suburbia. (I have to admit I found it very funny to consider anywhere five or six train stations from the Melbourne CBD as suburbia; but then perhaps I was lucky to grow up in the post-WWII car-oriented suburbs of Perth, as opposed to an Australian kid growing up in Port Hedland or the Wheatbelt or Oodnadatta. Mind you, David himself notes that the suburbs were “worse than slums… they lacked the grim adventure of true poverty.” Perhaps the real problem I had with Perth’s suburbs was that unlike Port Hedland or the Wheatbelt or Oodnadatta, they lacked the exoticism of true country remoteness.)

It feels curious to read literature set in this part of Australian history which is also set in a city. Our novels and films and television series are heavily weighted – unlike our actual population distribution – towards the bush and the Outback, in dutiful accordance with the national mythology. In any case, part of the pleasure of My Brother Jack – one which of course won’t chime as much with people who aren’t Melburnians – is seeing your own city, its familiar landmarks and streetscapes, as they were a full century ago:

It was an uneasy, muggy evening with a storm brewing, and the Remington seemed to weigh a ton, and the width of the carriage, which kept sliding and ringing the bell, made it very awkward to carry, and by the time I had staggered as far as Swanston Street the shops and offices were closing and it was the rush hour, with everybody pushing and jostling for the trams. The sultriness had made people irritable and nobody had much patience with me and my cumbersome burden, and it was quite some time before I was able to struggle aboard a Darling Road tram, and even then I had to stand with the typewriter still in my arms. We were crossing Prince’s Bridge when the conductor elbowed his way through the strap-hangers. The weather and the crowds had given him a fine temper, too, and he began to make a tremendous fuss when he saw me and wanted to kick me off at the next stop.

 

I found it very lonely walking the streets of my own city in a soft pale drizzle of rain… I had nothing to go back to at Beverley Grove – so I just went on despondently walking around until the dark became night and the street-lamps were blurred and blobby through the fine slide of rain, and the spires of St. Paul’s shone against the street-glow like the points of licked lead-pencils, and the coloured tram tickets at the street corners had been trampled and muddied into patchy little Braque-coloured collages, and I had the oddest sensation of being nowhere…

I don’t think this is the same as seeing, for example, New York City or London through a historical lens. Australia has an endless appetite for stories from the 19th century colonial frontier (less so the 19th century cities) or the boomer and Gen X nostalgia of the recent decades from about the 1950s or ‘60s onwards, but less so for the half-century in between those two periods. (We have plenty of war stories, but those necessarily take place abroad.) You rarely see it, and even more rarely do you see it done well – partly why I like Peter Carey’s Illywhacker so much. But Johnstone, through a combination of his personal memories and genuine raw talent, recreates the living and breathing Melbourne of a century past. He has a rare skill of bringing scenes and locations to life, whether told first-hand or second-hand: the titular brother’s desperate and impoverished journey from Sydney to Melbourne through the “grim wet forests of Cape Howe and Gippsland” after a failed attempt at fortune-hunting during the Depression; the bohemian apartment of a raffish art student on Spring Street; the neat and tidy suburbs of the respectable middle class, newly-built and with nary a tree in sight; the glorious Art Deco tower, topped by a copper cupola and statue of Prometheus, that houses a thriving print newspaper of the 1930s. (This last is based on the real-life office of the Argus, which still stands on the corner of Elizabeth and LaTrobe a stone’s throw from my own office, and which I must have walked past a thousand times without thinking twice.)

Johnstone also achieves, in a manner that reminded me of Patrick O’Brian, a way of illustrating the exterior broader world beyond the one his protagonist inhabits. When David is a rookie journalist assigned to the shipping beat he describes, in the uneasy climate of the 1930s, the first German vessel sailing into our own Port Philip Bay with the Swastika displayed, an ominous portent despite the fact that their passengers are largely “Australians or European businessmen or German-Jews fleeing from Hitlerism, and even under the new Swastika flag flying right there at the masthead they talked quite openly about the evils of Nazism…”

Yet the queer thing is that not one of the German ships was ever the same after that day. They were the very ships that I had watched in and out of the docks for years, the long graceful four-masters of the Norddeutscher-Lloyd, the Main and the Aller and the Neckar and the Mosel, and they were even the same jovial and efficient captains I had known for so long, but once they all started coming in under the Swastika a kind of sinister stain seemed to brush off on them, and one never went aboard them again without being oppressed by a feeling of uneasiness, of eyes watching, or mouths opening to ask a question, of jackboots rapping on the steel plates at the far dim ends of alleyways.

What propels My Brother Jack past a brilliantly-realised period piece and into the realm of a great novel is the way it moves from what initially appears to be the bog-standard holier-than-thou diatribe of a gifted kid straining to break free of his perceived suburban desert, and eventually makes it clear that this boy – now a very well-travelled and cosmopolitan man – is a bad person, and that in the back of his mind he knows it. The very final line of My Brother Jack must be one of the most devastating in Australian literature, delivered as it is by Jack himself, not in anger or in bitterness, but in completely and totally mistaken earnestness: “My brother Davy’s not the sort of bloke who ever let anyone down, you know.”

A truly excellent book. It’s always a pleasure to read a classic that turns out to deserve its reputation.

Book Review: The Terraformers

The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz (2023) 335 p.

I should have steered clear when the review quotes on the back were from Martha Wells and John Scalzi. I’m surprised there wasn’t one from Becky Chambers, since her narrative style of insufferable happy-clappy Super Best Friends is what Newitz’s book most reminded me of, but these authors are all much of a muchness: a novel in which all the concepts and dialogue feel like they’re being explained to you by somebody who self-identifies as part of “nerd culture” at a board game cafe or a video-game-themed bar or (in Newitz’s case) a furry convention.

I don’t want to sound like a crusty old conservative, so I’ll be clear: the issue is not people introducing each other with their pronouns, or that everybody is vegan, or that at one point a character almost reaches orgasm just because her partner asks for verbal consent (yes, really). The problem is that a novel purporting to be about the terraforming of a planet and the messy business of creating a new society 60,000 years in the future is so uninspiringly copy-pasted from the progressive American discourse of the 2020s, in everything from gender identity to public transit to urban design to gentrification.

More disappointing is how shallow it all is; there’s a Saturday morning cartoon vibe of evil corporate villains vs morally upstanding best buddies who are always calling each other “friend” and (a la Chambers) talking about their feelings. The result is that there are basically no stakes, except when Newitz decides to deus ex machina an orbital laser beam into proceedings, which nonetheless remain boring. None of this works as a science fiction novel. I don’t care if your politics are different from mine, but if you’re going to nail your colours to the mast like this, at least be more politically interesting about it.

Book Review: Dog Soldiers

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone (1974) 342 p.

1. You will note that 90% of the reviews about this book use the word “counterculture,” by which they mean it’s set in the 1960s and is about drugs and California and the Vietnam war. That’s a joke; I know what it really means and I know it had its relevance, but it’s more or less the first time I’ve re-encountered it since having to spend a whole semester on it in 2006 for a bachelor of arts at a university where the curriculum was designed by boomers who naturally thought the decade of their early adulthood was the most important in world history. Looking back across the past 17 years this now seems morbidly ironic.

2. During the fall of Kabul, countless photojournalists and TV crews picked out good spots to keep an eye on the US embassy, and even, I recall, explicitly anticipated whether we would see helicopter evacuations from the roof. They were fixated by the iconic images of Saigon’s evacuation a full 45 years earlier and wanted to replicate them. Of course the actual iconic imagery of that week occurred at the airport, where Afghan civilians clung to the wings of departing cargo planes and horrifically fell from the sky; but journalists and writers and talking heads had (justifiably, mind you) compared the Afghanistan War to the Vietnam War for decades, and thus expected its closing days to play out similarly even on a visual level. This fundamentally boomer mindset deeply irritated me.

3. In the (perfectly enjoyable) 2022 blockbuster Avatar 2: The Way of Water, James Cameron has his villainous Marines attempt to root out our heroic partisan fighters by arriving at remote villages by future-helicopter, conducting brutal and ham-fisted interrogations, and burning down the villages on accusations of harbouring fighters. This imagery is straight out of the Vietnam War, a full 49 years after US forces left Vietnam, and with two Vietnam-esque US military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan having both started and concluded in the interim. It’s also a full 26 years after Cameron already cribbed Vietnam-era imagery and vibes for the film Aliens. Cameron, born in 1954, is of course classic mid-range boomer.

4. Dog Soldiers is a perfectly fine novel, a crime caper about fairly ordinary people motivated by greed and getting themselves mixed up in some serious money and serious shit, akin at its best to No Country For Old Men. (At its worst, you will have to sit through some stream-of-consciousness passages and listen to characters talk about what they think the meaning of America is, or whatever.) Stone is a good writer and I cannot really fault him for writing this book all the way back in 1974. I am just unsure, in 2023, after a 20-year period of enormous change in our own political, media, financial and even narcotics culture, whether this book really needs to remain in the literary landscape, and indeed whether anybody who isn’t a boomer reminiscing about their youth needs to spend much time reflecting on the counterculture of the 1960s.

5. I will reiterate that Stone is a good writer. This passage nicely articulates how I feel with the adrenaline rush of a near-miss on the freeway, or when reading police blotters about the random and terrible things that can happen to people:

In the course of being fragmentation-bombed by the South Vietnamese Air Force, Converse experienced several insights; he did not welcome them although they came as no surprise. One insight was that the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death. Existence was a trap; the testy patience of things as they are might be exhausted at any moment.

Discworld Re-Read: The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett (2001) 304 p.

It’s arguable that the Discworld books were always sort of YA, before YA became a marketing term: certainly they’re not difficult reads and I hoovered up the entire extant series between the ages of twelve and fourteen, as I suspect most fans did. For that reason – and because despite its short length it’s a genuinely good book – I can’t really name a meaningful difference between The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents and any of the other Discworld novels, apart from the fact that it’s shorter and that it was marketed to younger readers at the time but subsequently seems to have been subsumed into the general sequence. Unlike The Last Hero, I think that post-facto rearrangement into the canon is deserved.

Animals straying too close to magic and becoming self-aware and capable of speech is at this point an established trope in the Discworld, largely because of Gaspode the Wonder Dog. The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodent takes that concept and applies it to a mean old alley cat, a whole bunch of rats, and a maybe-not-as-dumb-as-he-seems kid with a musical pipe. The story begins well into the existence of an ongoing criminal racket in which Maurice, the titular tomcat, has established a scam which travels from town to town. The rats infest the joint, the kid shows up as the convenient Pied Piper, he gets paid off and dutifully shares it with his four-legged conspirators, and they all move on to the next town. The first problem for Maurice – both for himself and his business venture – is that sentient thought comes with lots of other problems, like the development of conscience and doubt and religion, and this applies both to himself and to the increasingly diverse society of rats. The second problem is that these issues are just starting to bubble over as the “Clan” arrives in the town of Bad Blintz, where in the classic Discworld fashion of “this is a funny book but there’s also a great mystery and dramatic story here,” something very mysterious is occurring. There are dry old traces of rats in Bad Blintz – nests and spoor and scent and traps – but there an no actual rats, anywhere in the town…

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is a solid book, as we’ve come to expect from Pratchett at this stage in his career. It’s probably only because I knew it was originally marketed (and probably at least partially conceived) as YA that I noticed slight differences. A longer book might have included more flashbacks about how Maurice and the Clan first established themselves as swindlers, and also expanded the role of the real Pied Piper who ominously swaggers into town on horseback in the third act like the man in black in an old Western. It’s rare to see a book (even, I have to admit, a Pratchett book) which I think could have been expanded rather than cut down, and interesting that in this case it’s specifically because the publishers wanted to market it as YA.

Nonetheless, it works very well as a solid and enjoyable entry in the series. Maurice in particular is quite a good main character. Pratchett’s sympathetic protagonists in his one-off novels often run to a groove (Keith, the piper boy, is his familiar Sensible Voice of Reason character in this one) but Maurice retains enough of his inherently catty nature to be interesting. As Granny Weatherwax observed some ten or fifteen books ago, “if cats looked like toads everyone would see them for the cruel bastards they are,” and Maurice’s instinctive selfishness battling against his burgeoning empathy is fun to read. The rats themselves are also sketched across enough of a diverse spectrum to be interesting as individual characters. The elderly rat leader Hamnpork (as they gained the first magical stirrings of intelligence, the rats took their names from the labels of discarded cans in their rubbish dump; I thought this might have been cribbed from the musical Cats but apparently not!) is a particularly interesting one: an unintelligent and angry old rat who’s suspicious of change and bitter about the younger and smarter rats supplanting him as leader, but who still has a brave and admirable end to his story arc – he may be a grouchy old man, but sometimes society needs grouchy old men. I also really liked the supernatural villain of the piece (which I had no memory of from my initial read back in the day), the genuinely unsettling way that villain speaks to the characters, and the way Maurice manages to – at least briefly – figure out how it works and outwit it. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is one of the best kinds of Discworld novels, like the Witches or City Watch arc: one which is funny, sure, but is mostly enjoyable because it has a really good and interesting fantasy plot.

Discworld Re-Read: The Last Hero

The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett (2001) 176 p.

As the century turned, and the Discworld was riding the height of its popularity (Pratchett was Britain’s best-selling author before Rowling took the crown), there was a cottage industry of supplementary works published: Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, The Science of Discworld, The Streets of Ankh-Morpork. Among this number were a couple of narrative features that were not, at the time, considered part of the main series, but have subsequently been brought into the fold. Hence, while my memory indicates that Discworld #27 should be Night Watch (in my opinion, probably Pratchett’s magnum opus) it is instead The Last Hero.

The Last Hero is an over-sized book shaped like a graphic novel, but isn’t quite one; there’s a lot of Kidby illustrations, but it’s still a text-based story, though of course the illustrations mean the book is more of a novella than a proper Discworld novel. This is amplified by the fact that the story is quite an odd one, a bit of a throwback (as Rincewind/Cohen the Barbarian stories often are) to the early days of the series when Pratchett was having fun experimenting with fantasy tropes. The story is basically that Cohen and his coterie of geriatric barbarian warriors are angry at the notion of time, ageing and death – and by the way, “what if Conan was an old man” is a joke that has well and truly run its course by now – and have therefore decided to take out their revenge on the gods: returning (the Discworld equivalent of) Prometheus’ fire to their home at (the Olympus-equivalent) Cori Celesti, “with interest.” The wizards of Unseen University catch wind of this plan and warn the government of Ankh-Morpork that setting off explosives on the mountain of the gods would trigger a magical effect that would obliterate the entire Discworld, and so the full forces of the state are arrayed to stop them. This ends up involving a slingshot space travel manoeuvre, in a prototype vehicle designed by Leonard of Quirm and staffed by Rincewind the Wiz(z)ard and Captain Carrot of the City Watch, to reach Cori Celesti ahead of the Cohen’s barbarian horde and prevent the catastrophe.

A Discworld book which features regular illustrations and is the size and shape of a graphic novel is unusual enough; add in such an outlandish plot (these are generally not Pratchett’s best) and it begins to feel like a forgettable lark, which is more or less how I remember it being published and marketed at the time. Has Captain Carrot, of the City Watch arc, actually gone to space and set foot on the moon? Sorry, I don’t think he has. The entire thing feels like it’s not really canon, like a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode. That’s fine – it’s a perfectly amusing sideshow that I flicked through across a weekend – but that’s all it is.

Next up is another retcon kicking the Night Watch can down the road: The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents is apparently no longer a separate YA novel that happens to be set on the Discworld, but one of the main sequence. I read it but barely remember it, so we’ll see!

Book Review: Blue at the Mizzen & The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey

Blue at the Mizzen by Patrick O’Brian (2000) 262 p.

And

The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey by Patrick O’Brian (2004) 192 p.

I’ve long had a habit of saving my reading of the Aubrey-Maturin series for holidays, because they’re books that deserve to be read in the life-affirming circumstances of a refreshing break from the daily grind, in warmer and more exotic locales. I finished the series this past January, travelling around the south-west of Western Australia after my sister’s wedding; completing the “true” ending of Blue at the Mizzen sitting on a balcony in the deep karri forest outside Pemberton, and completing the wistfully incomplete ending of The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey* on a remote and deserted stretch of coast at Cathedral Rock Beach. I know that sounds wanky and faffy but I’m right, right? I started reading this series on a park bench in London when I was twenty-six. I’m now thirty-four. It’s been too long and enjoyable a voyage to conclude it when I’m half-asleep on the train to the office at 7:30am on a bleak winter’s morning.

(*The title of this book is a frankly shocking affront by the publisher: it is the final unfinished voyage of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin and there is not a fan of the series alive who would deny that.)

However, there’s a reason it’s taken me a few months to get around to reviewing them: after twenty books, you know what you’re in for, and if you’d like to read my effusive praise of the series there are nineteen other reviews you can read. I find myself, anti-climatically, with little to say. I noted at the end of The Hundred Days that it’s a strange way for the series to pause, with nineteen books about the Napoleonic wars and then one-and-a-half about what comes next. Obviously this was driven by O’Brian’s own passing, and if history had played out differently then perhaps we’d have a more robust five-or-six-book career-postscript of Jack’s adventures in South America, but instead Blue at the Mizzen is a bit of an odd duck, one which has largely faded in my memory since reading it in January. It has aspects reminding me of many of the Mediterranean books in the middle stretch, when Jack is obliged to play diplomat with local lords and power-brokers, in this case assisting revolutionary factions in Chile and Peru; the strongest part of the book is when another Royal Navy captain attempts to unlawfully assert authority over him. The novel nonetheless ends on a proud and thoroughly deserved moment – made all the better by the fact that Stephen is the one given the pleasure of informing Jack – which I won’t spoil here, but which any astute reader will have guessed from the title.

The Final Unfinished Voyage… is, by its nature, the more interesting book to talk about. There’s an argument about unfinished work in general (and I’m sure it’s been made about this book) which is that it’s not morally right to publish the work-in-progress of a deceased author. In this case I believe it’s justified, partly because it’s very clearly presented as an unfinished work – a curiosity rather than a long-awaited new adventure – and partly because O’Brian himself, as we learn in this peek behind the curtain, was an exceptionally polished writer even in the early stages of a work. The Final Unfinished Voyage… is not even a quarter of a regular book’s length, and it literally ends mid-paragraph, but what we do see is almost indistinguishable to the casual eye from any other given chapter in the canon, and a reminder that what truly drove the pleasure of this series was not the weave and weft of the grander plots, but rather the day-to-day life of the characters in a vanished time and place. In fewer than a hundred pages we see Stephen’s combined sadness and delight at the unexpected specimens provided by a flock of brilliant green parrots literally flying dead into the maintops; encounters with grumpy Latin American quarantine officers and local “witches;” and, according to Wikipedia, we also see Stephen best a rival in a duel. (I regret that I read this as an ebook, in which these final handwritten pages were impossible for me to decipher; this is definitely one to buy in paperback.)

O’Brian is one of the few writers where I can pluck a book off the shelf and read a chapter alone, satisfied simply to inhabit his world; and it’s for this reason that The Final Unfinished Voyage… doesn’t merely feel like an academic curiosity. In fact, it ultimately feels appropriate as an ending despite not really ending at all: because what have these novels been but one long, ongoing, perpetual meta-novel? What really separates the opening chapters of The Final Unfinished Voyage…, thematically or tonally, from the closing chapters of Blue at the Mizzen? The series has been one beautifully unfinished voyage since Jack and Stephen first weighed anchor in Madeira – all those books and all those years ago – and in my view there could be no better place for it to ultimately “end” than the very locale from which Stephen always signs his letters:

Surprise, at sea

Rereading Discworld: Thief of Time

Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett (2001) 378 p.

The “arcs” of the Discworld got a bit blurry towards the end. This is technically a Death/Susan book, but a solid half of the narrative is given over to the Monks of Time, who’ve been briefly hinted at but never given their own novel (and will play a minor but important role in the next book, Night Watch, which sort of takes place contemporaneously to this one.) Thief of Time more comfortably feels like a Death book, though, since although the big fella himself gets very little screen time, his enemies the Auditors are front and centre in their clearest role yet as antagonists.

Thief of Time begins with two different people whose lives revolve around time: Jeremy, a brilliant but disturbed clockmaker in Ankh-Morpork, and Lobsang, a thief plucked from the Thieves’ Guild in Ankh-Morpork and whisked away to the Discworld’s equivalent of the Himalayas to be trained as an apprentice history monk. The history monks, in their obscure monastery, are manipulators of space-time: dividing it up and spreading it around, taking it from where it isn’t needed (the bottom of the ocean) to places where there’s never enough time (like bustling cities) and generally keeping an eye on the nefarious elements of the cosmos who would seek to tinker with the fourth dimension in more malevolent ways. Which is where Jeremy the clockmaker comes in: hired by a human avatar of the Auditors to create a truly perfect clock which will stop time itself. Under the guidance of Lu-Tze, the humble sweeper and personification of kung fu tropes about unassuming but deadly lethal old sages, Lobsang travels to Ankh-Morpork to prevent this from happening.

This is the kind of book that sort of works in practice but sounds a bit weird when you describe it like that. One of its biggest problems, I think, is that the concept of the history monks never quite takes off. Pratchett has managed to turn joke ideas into serious stuff before, but the long setpieces in which the history monks use their machinery to handle time is not much divorced from, say, reading about people weaving the Source in a Wheel of Time book, or using magic in any other fantasy: basically not real and therefore uninteresting. I found the book on much stronger ground in Ankh-Morpork, where Susan has found her calling as a schoolteacher (but is bothered by how her bizarre heritage and eerie powers have turned her into a social hermit); the Auditors’ human avatar is increasingly enchanted by the temptations of physical experience; and Jeremy is a great illustration of an obsessive, one-note mind who is utterly happy as long as he’s just left alone to tinker with his clocks and is probably best left to do just that, carefully watched over by the Clockmakers’ Guild after hints of unpleasantness in the past. (When told the legend of the last perfect clock which was wiped out of reality by the history monks after being built, so that it never happened at all, Jeremy says “Things either exist or they don’t. I am very clear about that. I have medicine.”) The moment when Lobsang and Lu-Tze arrive in Ankh-Morpork just as the clock tolls and subsequently have to traverse a world frozen in time is neat; there are some great cameos from Nanny Ogg, called to serve as a midwife across several decades by a stranger knocking at her door for whom no time seems to have passed at all; and a very nice conclusion to a semi-romantic subplot for Susan and Lobsang.

Ultimately, though, I never much liked Thief of Time the first time around and didn’t this time either. It’s fine, and at this point in the series I never outright dislike any of Pratchett’s work, but it’s oddly out of step with the books around it – as we are dragged kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat in what some term the “industrial revolution” phase of the Discworld, Thief of Time is a throwback to the weird-and-wonderful fantasy tropes of the series past; a metaphysical story with universe-breaking stakes in which an excessive chunk is spent in the halls of a distant faux-Buddhist monastery.

It’s worth noting that apparently my view is very much a minority one – it was one of thirteen Discworld books which placed in The Big Read, a 2003 survey run by the BBC of 700,000 Brits to determine the country’s 200 favourite books; and it ranked first (!) in Pratchett Job’s Discworld re-read when he came to numerically ranking the series. No accounting for taste!

Next up is my own pick for the best book in the series: Night Watch, which is very specifically a Sam Vimes story rather than a City Watch story, but which I remember serving in many ways as the true denouement of his character arc.

Re-reading Discworld index

Book Review: Lockdown

Lockdown by Chip Le Grand (2022) 234 p.

Plenty of people were surprised to see I was reading this, and were happy to express an opinion on what they’d rather do, usually of the arm-in-a-woodchipper variety. Nobody enjoyed the Melbourne lockdowns, even though most of us thought they were necessary, and whatever your political opinions on the matter at the time the prevailing mood now is that it was a shitty period in our lives which we’re just happy to move on from. I totally understand that sentiment, but on the other hand: it was a hugely unprecedented, intensely strange and (not to be a drama queen about it) deeply traumatic time in Melbourne’s history, and therefore in our lives. It would be kind of weird if we never looked back on it at all. It’s a period which deserves thoughtful reflection, a careful examination of the decisions which were made at all levels of government, and a consideration of what it meant as a collective experience. Unfortunately you won’t find much of that in Chip Le Grand’s Lockdown, a book which presents itself as a piece of serious investigative journalism and occasionally manages to accomplish that, but is for the most cherry-picked, agenda-driven and fundamentally shallow, serving only to arrive at the conclusion Le Grand had clearly already settled on when he was on the editorial board at the Age in 2020 and 2021, let alone by the time he was sending this off to the editors in 2022. That conclusion, more or less, is a vague and insipid notion that we went too hard and too far, an unspoken implication maybe we should’ve been a bit more like Germany and Sweden, without actually having the guts to present the facts on what that would’ve entailed or what it would’ve meant for Australia at large.

Let’s begin with that last part, in fact. It’s fair enough that a book focusing on the uniquely long lockdown experience of Melbourne and Victoria should, well, focus on Melbourne and Victoria: but Le Grand comes as close as possible to ignoring the existence of the rest of Australia, continually implying that the policies Victoria pursued were determined in Spring Street alone. Early on he bemoans the existence of a false “binary proposition: either you supported protracted lockdowns in pursuit of COVID-zero – an epidemiological nirvana where you have no local transmission of the virus – or you supported no public health interventions at all.” Describing COVID-zero as a “nirvana” (the first of many weasel words creeping into a supposedly objective book) implies that it was an impossible heavenly dream, automatically presenting it as an un-serious option. It ignores the fact that at the time that policy (framed as “no community transmission”) was unanimously agreed upon by National Cabinet, in June 2020, Victoria was the only state failing to achieve it. Every other jurisdiction bar New South Wales was already joyously revelling in its fruits, and New South Wales was only experiencing outbreaks – about a dozen or so a day, which they would keep under control with contact tracing and then eliminate by October – because Victoria’s hotel quarantine breaches had spread across the Murray. This is merely the first of many times Le Grand implies that Victoria should have pursued a suppression policy, which would’ve required less aggressive interventions, rather than an elimination policy. If Victoria were an island nation-state in the South Pacific, that would be a perfectly valid point. It is not. It is the second-largest state in the federal Commonwealth of Australia, bound not just by geography but by supply lines; while the other states could close their borders to us for non-essential travel, they could not reasonably do so for freight, and if we’d bucked the trend and gone softly on policy and accepted thousands of cases a day, those other states would not have remained COVID-free for long. (This basic fact was made plain in mid-2021, when the hubris of New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian allowed a Sydney outbreak to spiral out of control and ultimately condemned Victoria to another long, hard winter lockdown.) Nor was it a secret to Victorians in mid-2020 that Australia in general, compared to the outside world, was a COVID-free paradise. In July 2020 I watched a BBC News package about pubs reopening, with capacity limits and ordering from QR codes and social distancing remaining in force, all that general anxiety of “living with” a strange new virus nobody was vaccinated against, a bleak mockery of returning to “normal”; and I also looked at Instagram and Facebook and saw my friends and family in Western Australia (or basically any other part of Australia plus New Zealand) gloriously living life as though it were 2019 again. I knew which outcome I wanted Victoria to strive towards. The decision of the state government to agree to a national de facto COVID-zero policy was not just a matter of patriotic altruism: it was an acknowledgement of the fact that the other states would fiercely defend their COVID-free status, and that if we couldn’t get our own situation in hand we would be cut off from the rest of the country indefinitely. To present that policy decision in isolation (and later in the book Le Grand will, irrelevantly, compare Victoria’s death rates to other nation-states) is either naive or dishonest. This Victorian solipsism feeds into Le Grand’s engagement in the very same Sydney/Melbourne-centric thinking that has long plagued Australia and continued to plague us during the actual plague: as Bernard Keane put it at Crikey, a view that Victoria and New South Wales are the only places that matter and “what happens outside the south-eastern corner of the country is seen as a provincial eccentricity at best.” In describing what it meant to lock down Melbourne, Le Grand presents this deeply weird passage:

Before the pandemic, greater Melbourne had just nudged past five million people and was forecast to overtake Sydney as Australia’s most populous city. Not everyone was comfortable with how fast Melbourne was growing and but it was a measure of the city’s success that so many people wanted to come here: to live, to study, and just to have fun. Where the economy of Western Australia is built on digging stuff out of the ground and selling it overseas, are two largest export industries are education and tourism. Put another way, our primary business is bringing people here, in massive numbers, through temporary migration schemes. At least, it was before the pandemic.

It’s extremely dishonest to stick the word export before the word industries and then claim that tourism and education are Victoria’s “primary business” (neither are – or ever were – anywhere close to it). But never mind the bean counting: it’s just deeply weird and very telling to insert an irrelevant sledge at WA into your explanation of why it was bad for Melbourne to lock down.

WA and its premier Mark McGowan came in for plenty of stick from commentators in Melbourne and Sydney during the whole run of the pandemic, as did Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, for their refusal to open their borders to states suffering COVID outbreaks; strangely, Tasmania and South Australia, which also had strict border rules for much of the crisis, never seemed to cop much flak from the press for preserving not only the lives of their citizens, but also their freedom to attend a packed stadium or sweaty nightclub or a university lecture theatre, and to do so in total safety. Tasmania and SA are both smaller states, so there were fewer sad stories of people being refused entry to see dying families etc; but they also had Liberal governments. Draw your own conclusions. Le Grand, predictably, only has harsh words for McGowan and Palaszczuk. (He also later falsely claims that WA “sealed itself off for nearly two years from the rest of Australia;” in 2021 WA’s borders were only closed to the two states recording cases, not the other three, which is why I watched on social media as my friends and family members went holidaying in the Northern Territory and Queensland; but I shouldn’t really be surprised that someone like Le Grand considers Victoria and New South Wales to comprise “the rest of Australia.”) I personally think it’s extremely poor form to say (or actually imply, because he never has the cojones to outright say it) that Melbourne should have just abandoned elimination and run a European-style mitigation policy, but also that it was selfish and un-Australian for the COVID-free states to protect their own. “Parochial” was a word that got thrown around a lot during the pandemic by people in Sydney and Melbourne. That means “having a limited or narrow outlook or scope,” and that shit runs both ways.

And I know I’ve been harping on about this for a while now, but I think it’s indicative of Le Grand’s unexamined bias that permeates every aspect of the book, and this one really annoyed me: possibly the most irritating demonstration of WA-bashing in the book is Le Grand’s sympathy for the two Melbourne Demons supporters who were jailed in Perth after engineering an elaborate plot to travel to the Northern Territory, change their driver’s licenses, and then enter Western Australia in order to attend the relocated AFL Grand Final; across the book Le Grand cracks the violin out for them no less than three times, noting that “the Demons had not won a premiership for fifty-seven years,” as though anybody gives a fuck, and demonstrating that he not only doesn’t care about the majority of Australians who don’t live in Melbourne or Sydney but also has his finger nowhere near the pulse of general public sentiment: the attitude of Western Australians towards those two was that they were reckless fuckheads, and the attitude of Victorians towards them was that they were entitled fuckheads. But just as you can determine Le Grand’s voting habits from the way he talks about Dan Andrews, you can determine which team he barracks for by his repeated use of this incident (of all things!) as a demonstration that WA had lost the plot. It’s weird and it’s telling.

Anyway, let’s move away from the negative for a moment and focus on one thing Le Grand does well: the third chapter, Woefully Unprepared, in which he actually engages in the kind of good local investigative journalism the Age used to be useful for. This is a chapter which focuses on two of Australia’s biggest objective failings of the pandemic, certainly the two biggest in Victoria: our inferior contact tracing system and our poorly-managed hotel quarantine system, which together were to blame for the second wave that plunged Victoria back into lockdown while the rest of the country spent the rest of the year in that COVID-zero “nirvana,” or something very close to it. Much anger ensued from the comments of then-prime minister Scott Morrison (already deservedly in Australia’s bad books because he more or less relinquished all responsibility to the states and became the invisible man during the pandemic) that New South Wales had a “gold standard” contact tracing system, which stung in part because it was true: over and over again, New South Wales managed to contain and eliminate outbreaks while Victoria fumbled. Why that was so is extremely complicated in the way that only a situation involving the public health bureaucracy can be – and no doubt a firmer answer will emerge in the inquiries and royal commissions to come – but the short answer is that New South Wales simply had a better-funded and decentralised public health system that understood its local communities better and could more easily scale up a department to handle an obscure practice better-known from the (relatively glacial, compared to a respiratory disease) HIV crisis of the 1980s and 1990s; whereas Victoria’s health department, after decades of cuts and restructuring by governments on both sides of politics, was blindsided. The hotel security guard issue is a bit murkier (and again, Le Grand only contrasts it against New South Wales, ignoring that other states also used contracted private security guards without issues) but appears to boil down to departmental buck passing. It’s clearly a deeply complex story and I don’t necessarily trust Le Grand’s account to be unbiased, since he certainly isn’t elsewhere, but it’s good nonetheless to see him take a solid crack at it. The contact tracing and hotel quarantine failures are arguably the most impactful public policy catastrophes of our lifetimes, and it feels strange that most Victorians probably still don’t know anything about it.

It’s also good, in theory, of Le Grand to focus on the underexamined vulnerable populations. He opens another chapter with an anorexic who suffered severe deterioration during lockdown, and in discussing outbreaks in aged care homes (a major driver of deaths in the 2020 wave and another major failing of both state and federal government) also argues that in attempting to protect “the elderly” at all costs we robbed them of what made life worth living in their final years. This is a fair point on the face of it, but drifts towards the morally gross yet dismayingly prevalent notion that COVID was only ever a danger to 90-year-olds with but a few years left to go at the nursing home anyway. Le Grand doesn’t deign to give a voice to the 60-somethings or the 70-somethings or the 80-somethings who weren’t in nursing homes, which is most of them; the people at high risk of death from COVID who were living full and active lives but wouldn’t have been if the virus had been running as rampant as it was in most other countries: forced to cut themselves off, pre-vaccination, from the rest of society for their own safety. Nor do we hear from the disabled, the immunocompromised, the cancer patients, the organ donor recipients and all the other people who fit into the category of “vulnerable,” who lived otherwise normal lives but – had they been living in a laissez-faire zone like the US or UK – similarly would have had to withdraw from society. Le Grand simply ignores them, preferring to imagine a more convenient world in which the people we were trying to protect didn’t actually want our help at all. This is not to say that the experiences of the young, the anorexic, and the nursing-home-bound are not worth telling: of course they are. But to fail to balance that with the other side (and in terms of numbers, I’m not sure it is a “side”) is dishonest and frankly gross.

Le Grand further puts his thumb on the scale with talk of “protracted lockdowns.” That was something which only became clear in mid-2021, after New South Wales’ fuck-up. The Victorian government was not sat down at the start of the pandemic and informed precisely what the outcome of its policies would be, in terms of days in lockdown vs days of COVID-zero freedom. Hindsight is 20/20, and from our emergence in the spring of 2020 to the onset of Australia’s FedEx-delivered Delta outbreak in May/June 2021, life in this country was pretty fucking sweet. Unlike in Europe (much of which spent the winter in lockdown or semi-lockdown) or North America, you didn’t have to worry about catching the virus; you didn’t have to enter every situation with a personal risk assessment or a consideration about which disabled or elderly friend or relative you might pass it on to because you went to the pub. I missed out on Christmas 2020 with some extended family in Sydney because they live on the Northern Beaches, a neighbourhood which went into lockdown for a few weeks (Australia’s biggest lockdown, during that period) after an outbreak; but since half of Europe was back in hard lockdown at that point it hardly seemed unfair, and by mid-January the good burghers of Narrabeen and Dee Why were back at their gyms and cafes. Australia’s states and territories had gladly coalesced around the notion that – at least for the time being – COVID-zero was worth preserving and a short, sharp lockdown beat a long, protracted one. (I still remember watching BBC Breakfast – at work, not for fun – and seeing the hosts amazed that Melbourne went into lockdown during the Australian Open for just “a single case;” as British journalist Mike Bird who was based in COVID-zero Hong Kong noted, this suggested people still didn’t quite grasp the whole “pandemic” thing.)

This is something which bothers me a lot about the armchair rear-window critics of Australia and New Zealand’s elimination strategy: a consideration only of COVID deaths vs the costs of lockdown, never taking into account the (considerable) time we spent out of lockdown in a society that was by default much freer than anywhere else in the Western world, and the benefits that came from having that. Le Grand spends several pages on the impact of the snap Melbourne lockdown announced before a Sunday Valentine’s Day in Melbourne in 2021, and fair enough, those would’ve been devastating – but would those business operators have preferred to be in London across that timeframe? A better journalist, when posing the question, might have asked them that, or even asked restaurateurs in London (or Berlin or New York or whatever), instead of just airing the grievances of Melbourne hospitality operators who concede that it was necessary to save lives but ignore that (and this applies to a discussion of any aspect of COVID-zero policy) it was never a choice between lockdown and business as usual. If the virus were rampant, it doesn’t matter if a bar or restaurant or nightclub were allowed to open: you would not be seeing the same patronage you did in 2019. Le Grand himself cites movement data tracked by Jack Thompson at the University of Melbourne, showing that immediately after snap lockdowns it took quite some time for life to return to the city as it had been before. Le Grand presents this as a criticism of the COVID-zero policy rather than a demonstration that people were scared of the virus. What, I wonder, would that movement data have looked like if Victoria were recording hundreds or thousands of cases a day like the rest of the world, in a country where very few people had yet had the opportunity to get vaccinated? I know I certainly wouldn’t have been doing much. As it stands, instead, I spent that summer and spring at beer festivals and movie theatres and restaurants and a very rewarding in-person internship, secure in the knowledge that there was no COVID anywhere near me. It’s perfectly fair to examine the costs of extended lockdowns and ask whether it was a worthwhile transaction; but to consider “lives saved” as your only metric in the positive column, with no consideration of the other benefits, is simply dishonest.

Lockdown contains some good examinations of the failures of the Victorian public service and the Victorian government, and it’s not exactly a polemic; but it’s certainly a book littered with inaccuracies, blind spots, an anti-Labor bias that keeps appearing like rising damp, and a tiresomely predictable failure to consider that the rest of the country exists and matters beyond New South Wales and maybe Queensland. Most annoyingly of all, it increasingly feels like its conclusions were reverse-engineered; a pre-determined outcome informed by the personal opinions Le Grand formed during the lockdowns rather than any of the investigations and interviews he conducted while writing it. There will be better books by better journalists to come about the unique and bizarre experience Victorians endured – but this one, I think, is ultimately destined for the bargain bin and the pulping machine.

Book Review: The Hundred Days

The Hundred Days by Patrick O’Brian (1998) 281 p.

The Hundred Days is a good book, just like every Aubrey-Maturin book is a good book, but it has two gigantic elephants in the room I want to discuss and I cannot do that without spoilering the entire series. My opinion on the novel itself its that it’s another chapter in the brilliant, excellent, genius etc long-running metanovel that is the Aubrey-Maturin series. There you go, done and dusted. If you haven’t already read The Hundred Days then stop reading now.

So: at this point O’Brian was steadily cranking Aubrey-Maturin novels out at about one every year or two, and had only just relinquished what he called his “1812b” – a permanent frozen timescape that allowed his characters to sail around the world on adventures, their children growing older, their careers and relationships progressing, while the Napoleonic wars themselves remained frozen in amber. (O’Brian later said that had he know to begin with that Master and Commander would spark such a voluminous series, he would’ve started it far earlier than 1800.)

The Yellow Admiral ended with Napoleon’s escape from Elba; The Hundred Days ends with his final defeat at Waterloo, and with it, the end of the Napoleonic wars entirely. It’s a decision which suggests O’Brian either felt it was time to begin wrapping the series up, or felt he could no longer plausibly draw out that period. Thomas Cochrane – the real-life captain who served as the inspiration for Aubrey – spent his career after the war leading the Chilean colonial navy in its rebellion against the Spanish, and O’Brian has for several books now laid the groundwork for his fictional hero to continue following Cochrane’s path.

This makes one wonder whether O’Brian intended to write another five or ten or twenty books in that vein, or whether he might only write a few more before concluding the series. In actual fact he passed away in 2000, so there’s only one and a half books remaining – Blue at the Mizzen and The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey, published posthumously in 2004 and which I understand effectively ends mid-paragraph. It makes for an odd reading experience, to have the novel end with a triumphant victory and conclusion to the wars which have marked the series’ entire backdrop, with a relatively short way to go until the end of the series itself.

But the really odd part about The Hundred Days – one which will come as a shock to every faithful reader of the series – is the two deaths, and the sudden and rather unnecessary nature of them. Both are quite different, in their inherent nature and in their execution.

Diana’s is relayed to us second-hand, by chatty observers watching the Surprise come into harbour in the opening chapter; by the time we see Stephen and Jack it is clear they have learned of it off-screen. There is some perfunctory third-hand reference to it, but Maturin’s internal thoughts allude to his wife’s untimely demise perhaps only three or four times across the course of the novel. I found this bafflingly – almost callously – surprising, since O’Brian expertly detailed Stephen’s heartbreak in previous books merely from losing Diana to another man. It makes more sense when you understand that O’Brian’s own wife died while he was writing the manuscript, but even so, it felt fundamentally wrong in a way that nothing in the series has thus far.

Bonden’s death – which comes in a relatively minor action in the last 15 pages – is equally shocking and sudden. Obviously this is different from Diana’s because he is a sailor on a man o’ war, a soldier of sorts, and unexpected death is part of his profession. But I don’t recall O’Brian ever before killing off a major character due to the vagaries of war excepting those who had been introduced in the very same book. So Bonden’s death also feels like a reaction to the passing of O’Brian’s wife playing out on the page; had he instead desired to drive home some of the reality of war, confining it solely to Bonden seems an odd choice, especially this late in the game. (Though I suppose there’s something poetical about having him die in what might possibly be the very final hostile action of a decades-long war.)

The Aubrey-Maturin series is so marvellously written, so incredibly well-realised, that it often doesn’t feel like fiction at all. Even when Jack’s career is stymied by coincidence and he’s conveniently kept away from a promotion that would land him at a desk; even when the stars always align and our heroes are saved by last-minute turns of fortune; even as the books steadily become historical romance rather than historical fiction; even through all that, they never feel fictional, if you get what I mean. I never felt like I could see the cogs turning. But the deaths in The Hundred Days are the first time I felt – really, properly felt – that I was reading fiction written by a human being who was making specific narrative decisions. That’s not to criticise those decisions: even aside from being a grieving widower, O’Brian long since earned the right to do whatever he pleased with his characters and with his series. But it’s still an unavoidably odd aspect of reading The Hundred Days.

The other odd aspect is knowing that there are only one-and-a-half books to go, even as we set sail for a new phase of life in South America. That’s even less of a criticism – obviously O’Brian couldn’t predict his own passing – but viewed in totality, it would seem a more fitting ending for the series to conclude when the Napoleonic wars did. (It goes without saying, of course, that if O’Brian had lived to 2010 and written another ten books about Jack and Stephen in Chile I would’ve happily read every one of them.)

Book Review: Inhibitor Phase

Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds (2021) 465 p.

Mild spoilers for the original Revelation Space trilogy from here onwards

I only finished reading the Revelation Space trilogy last year, and found Absolution Gap to be a disappointing conclusion in which Reynolds failed to grasp precisely what made the series so interesting in the first place. After spending three novels (if you include Chasm City) and a raft of short stories creating a fascinatingly bleak and frightening universe – a world of extinct alien civilisations and authoritarian governments and terrifying technological plagues and, ultimately, the accidental provocation of dormant galaxy-spanning machinery which quite efficiently dedicates itself to exterminating humanity – Reynolds appeared to get distracted. Absolution Gap, while it had many good points and is not what I would call a bad book, skimmed over what readers might want to see in a concluding novel about an interstellar apocalypse in favour of a story about a planet of mobile cathedrals and characters nobody cared about.

That was 2003. Reynolds went on to hone his writing skill, to publish many other rightfully acclaimed novels – particularly Pushing Ice and House of Suns – and who are we to say, at the height of his career, that an author should not revisit the series that first made his name? Perhaps he felt unsatisfied with Absolution Gap. Perhaps he felt a missed opportunity; perhaps he wanted to examine what that centuries-long slow motion extinction at the hands of the Inhibitors was like for people other than the characters at the centre of Absolution Gap’s very tight focus. These are reasonable conclusions you might draw from the blurb and the title of the aptly named Inhibitor Phase, and I for one was more than willing to read a do-over after Absolution Gap focused on dull characters in unimportant places which ignored the more interesting aspects of the plot, and culminated in a cheap deus ex machina ending.

Inhibitor Phase – to an almost unbelievable degree – focuses on dull characters in unimportant places, ignores the more interesting aspects of the plot, and culminates in a cheap deus ex machina ending. Worst of all, it’s mostly the same characters, the same places, and the same deus ex machina ending.

Strong spoilers for Inhibitor Phase from here onwards

The novel begins strongly, with our protagonist Miguel de Ruyter in a spacecraft en route to destroy a vessel which has entered the system he calls home. Sun Hollow is an underground settlement of about five thousand souls on a planet with a highly active star, founded by refugees desperate to find a place they could escape the attentions of the Inhibitors; it isn’t specified precisely when in the timeline this novel occurs, but it’s clear the lights have gone out across human-settled space. De Ruyter plans to destroy the incoming vessel lest it alert the Inhibitors to human activity in the system; a ruthless but necessary action. So far, so good – this stacks up with what I expect from humanity’s Inhibitor phase, and all the better when the vessel has a single survivor who turns out to be far more technologically advanced than the post-apocalyptic denizens of Sun Hollow, and uses that power to abduct de Ruyter on a mission to save the world.

Things fall apart when they go to Yellowstone. One of my disappointments with Absolution Gap was that it skimmed over the grand destruction of the centre of human civilisation; it’s interesting to see Reynolds revisit the world and observe it as a dead husk, but less interesting when we go on a diversion to the depths of Chasm City to revisit the criminal underworld which – more than fifty years after the Inhibitors laid waste to the entire system – appears to be getting along just fine. This is jarring, to say the least, and undercuts the sense of predation built up in the first segment in Sun Hollow; in fact it reminded me of the moment in the novel Jurassic Park (wisely absent from the film) when, after it’s been drilled into the reader how terrifyingly dangerous the velociraptors are, the main characters slide down into their breeding nest without a care in the world. And aside from being misaligned on in-universe terms, it also just feels tedious. Really? This again? We’ve been there, done that, and a crime boss in the slums of Chasm City is not remotely as interesting as the Inhibitors.

This feeling of treading old ground is unfortunately reinforced by the characters: Miguel de Ruyter turns out to be Nevil Clavain’s long-lost brother. A hyperpig encountered in Yellowstone turns out to be Scorpio. The woman they encounter at the same time turns out to be, by a different name, one of the protagonists of Absolution Gap whose name I’ve forgotten. Characters have never been Reynolds’ strong suit, but the fact he chose to return to this well (after two decades!) suggests that he thinks they are. Particularly annoying is the way the characters elevate Scorpio to an almost Christ-like figure. I read the original trilogy last year, not in the early 2000s when it was first published, and even I can’t recall precisely what he did to deserve that.

Inhibitor Phase, like Absolution Gap before it, is not a bad book. It has some dull stretches and the dialogue and repetition got on my nerves sometimes, but it’s pretty readable and has some good setpieces. But it’s a deeply frustrating missed opportunity – all the more so because it’s a follow-up, eighteen years later, to a book which was also a deeply frustrating missed opportunity.