Carol Middleton

Carol Middleton reviews 'The Anchoress' by Robyn Cadwallader

March 2015, no. 369 • 02 March 2015

This début novel by poet and author Robyn Cadwallader has its genesis in her PhD thesis on attitudes to virginity in the Middle Ages. Set in England in 1255, it is the story of Sarah, an anchoress or religious recluse, who chooses to be shut into a stone cell, measuring seven by nine paces, for life. She is seventeen. ... (read more)

Jumpy (Melbourne Theatre Company)

ABR Arts • 10 February 2015

Jumpy, by British playwright April De Angelis and directed by Pamela Rabe, opens Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2015 season. First produced at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2011, it is a modern-day comedy of manners whose plot and subject matter owe much to the television sitcom. Its humour relies on bedroom intrigues, blunt sexual dialogue, marital dissatisfaction, and the laments of middle ag ... (read more)

Carol Middleton reviews 'Margaret and Gough: The love story that shaped a nation' by Susan Mitchell

December 2014, no. 367 • 01 December 2014

Susan Mitchell’s fifteenth book is a biography of the Whitlams, published shortly before Gough’s death in November. As a broadcaster, journalist, and author who has examined the lives of prominent Australian women, Mitchell tells the story mainly from Margaret’s perspective. This is not surprising: Mitchell had already amassed a huge body of research for her book Margaret Whitlam: A Biograph ... (read more)

Carol Middleton reviews 'Pennsylvania Avenue' (MTC)

December 2014, no. 367 • 01 December 2014

Pennsylvania Avenue is billed by the Melbourne Theatre Company as a world première, with the expectation that singer Bernadette Robinson’s new one-woman show will travel the world, like her previous one, Songs for Nobodies (MTC, 2010). In that show, Robinson inhabited several ‘nobodies’ and the famous singers they encounter. When, in November 2012, I interviewed Robinson in the run-up to th ... (read more)

Carol Middleton reviews 'Nest' by Inga Simpson

October 2014, no. 365 • 01 October 2014

Inga Simpson’s second novel is set in the lush subtropical hinterland of Australia’s east coast. Jen, a reclusive artist, goes back to where she grew up and where her father was a timber-cutter, to find peace among the birds and trees. But mysteries and disappearances trouble her idyllic life. Like her artist protagonist, Simpson has acute powers of observation and an ability to capture natur ... (read more)

Carol Middleton reviews 'The Return' by Silvia Kwon

August 2014, no. 363 • 01 August 2014

Silvia Kwon’s début novel explores the legacy of war on an Australian family, seen mainly through the eyes of the wife of a returned soldier. The prologue comprises a vivid and disturbing flashback to Burma in 1944, where Merna’s husband Frank spent time ‘on the line’. Although narrated in the third person, this is Merna’s story, told from the point of view of a wife torn between the c ... (read more)

Carol Middleton reviews 'The Lost Child' by Suzanne McCourt

April 2014, no. 360 • 27 March 2014

This début novel by Melbourne writer Suzanne McCourt is a coming-of-age story set in the wild coastal landscape of the Coorong in the 1950s. Writing from the point of view of a child, McCourt captures the heightened sensibility of her narrator, Sylvie, to portray a family in devastating close-up and a natural world teeming with smells and sounds and sights. ... (read more)

Carol Middleton reviews 'Floodline' by Kathryn Heyman

November 2013, no. 356 • 31 October 2013

Floodline is the fifth novel by Kathryn Heyman, course director at Allen & Unwin’s Faber Academy. Set in an unspecified area of the United States, it follows a proselytising family, which is on a mission to save the godless inhabitants of Horneville on the eve of their annual gay mardi gras, Hornefest, when the city is devastated by floods. ... (read more)

Carol Middleton reviews 'Letters to the End of Love' by Yvette Walker

June 2013, no. 352 • 27 May 2013

Yvette Walker’s remarkable début novel is told in a series of letters that cross time and continents, tracing the intimate lives of three couples, one straight, one lesbian, one gay. Starting in 1969 in an artist’s studio in Cork, where a Russian painter and his Irish novelist wife exchange love letters, it moves to 2011 and a lesbian bookseller in Western Australia and her estranged girlfrie ... (read more)

Carol Middleton reviews 'Madame Bovary’s Haberdashery' by Maurilia Meehan

April 2013, no. 350 • 26 March 2013

With her fifth novel, Maurilia Meehan has carved out a subversive niche of chick-lit mystery. Touted as the first of a trilogy, Madame Bovary’s Haberdashery is an amusing romp for the thinking woman, with references to Flaubert, Milan Kundera, and Agatha Christie. The decidedly feminist viewpoint is tempered by a mordant use of irony and satire. ... (read more)