Three non-fiction books

In this fascinating and irritating book, Elizabeth Farrelly hits out at almost everything about the modern world. She is an architect, and urban sprawl and ugly buildings are her bêtes noires, though obesity, kitsch and fakery also attract her coruscating attention.

Blubberland is a curious mixture of diatribe and philosophical treatise on cultural theory. Farrelly makes many good points: tight-knit cities, for example, are more energy-efficient than sprawling suburbs, and the ‘sea-change’ fad destroys beauty spots with little increase in happiness. She wonders ‘[w]hy we demand a built lifestyle whose habitual over-indulgence is, by even the standards of our parents’ generation, extraordinary? … Why these houses, and the suburbs full of them, are so ugly? Is it an aesthetic or a moral repugnance?’ Notice the shift from ‘we’, meaning ‘you’ or ‘them’, to a subjective point of view where ‘our’ houses are viewed with repugnance. The most unattractive aspect of the book is this accusing tone couched in the inauthentic first person, used not to include herself with the faulty human race but as a rod with which to beat the rest of us. Musicians will be surprised to read that ‘only architects still revere beauty’, and anyone who believes that ‘times when sacred music, liturgy and architecture were troves of transcendent beauty are long gone’ is oblivious to Australia’s vibrant choral music scene. Criticising another writer’s work, Farrelly says, ‘Western cultural crisis is like mid-life crisis; perpetual, over-reported and often mildly enjoyable.’ Indeed.