Patrick Allington

Patrick Allington reviews 'Amnesia' by Peter Carey

October 2014, no. 365 • 01 October 2014

Peter Carey’s new novel, Amnesia, is an odd-shaped – but not misshaped – tale about power and, more particularly, resistance to power. When the veteran leftist journalist Felix Moore writes the story of Gaby Baillieux, a young Australian cyber-activist, he finds himself, like Gaby, a fugitive. As if by magic, Gaby has unlocked Australian and US prison doors; it is Felix’s job, when he’s ... (read more)

Patrick Allington reviews 'The Letters of William Gaddis', edited by Steven Moore

November 2013, no. 356 • 31 October 2013

‘I do get truculent sometimes. As you know.’ So wrote the American novelist William Gaddis (1922–98) to his mother in 1950, before anybody, except perhaps Gaddis himself, suspected him of greatness. The Letters of William Gaddis, edited by prominent Gaddis scholar Steven Moore, might easily have been called Truculent Sometimes. A big book, as befits Gaddis, it contains plenty of his exquisit ... (read more)

Patrick Allington reviews 'The Double (and Other Stories)' by Maria Takolander

September 2013, no. 354 • 26 August 2013

An old woman, caught between the present and her troubled past in another hemisphere, picks herself out of a puddle of water: ‘Her head is tender, and the left side of her body still feels strange: as if she has lost half of herself. Nevertheless, she understands things again.’ The characters in Maria Takolander’s collection of short stories, The Double, often seem as if they have mislaid pa ... (read more)

Patrick Allington reviews 'The Railwayman’s Wife' by Ashley Hay

May 2013, no. 351 • 26 April 2013

As a woman and her daughter prepare to attend a memorial service for their husband and father, a railwayman, the girl offers the woman her kaleidoscope: ‘You could borrow this, Mum [...] You said it was good for seeing things differently.’ It is a resonant moment, the promise of a magical but fleeting distortion of reality both lovely and desperately sad. The scene also encapsulates The R ... (read more)

Patrick Allington reviews 'Konkretion' by Marion May Campbell

April 2013, no. 350 • 25 March 2013

Whereas many twenty-first-century novels seem way too long, konkretion is a distilled, complex gem. It is a novella full of questions and questing, most of which riff from this observation made in the context of Germany’s militant Red Army Faction: ‘what triggers the conversion from resistance to terror, flick-knife or otherwise, the jump into illegality? – oh the primacy of praxis, that rom ... (read more)

Patrick Allington on 'Great Western Highway: A Love Story' by Anthony Macris

February 2013, no. 348 • 30 January 2013

As I read the early pages of Anthony Macris’s Great Western Highway, I began to wonder if the whole novel might consist of a single central character walking along a city road (for the record, it doesn’t). I couldn’t decide whether I found such a prospect exciting or deflating. As I continued reading, and as Great Western Highway took flight from Parramatta Road, Sydney, to explore such weig ... (read more)

'Miles Franklin loosens up' by Patrick Allington

June 2012, no. 342 • 28 May 2012

Soon after the announcement of the shortlist of this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award (‘the Miles’), bookmaker Tom Waterhouse installed Anna Funder’s All That I Am (2011) as favourite. Fair enough, too: it’s an astute and absorbing Australian novel about, among other things, Nazism’s long shadow. But Waterhouse favoured Funder – oddly – because her non-fiction book Stasiland (2 ... (read more)

Patrick Allington reviews 'The Chemistry of Tears' by Peter Carey

February 2012, no. 338 • 20 January 2012

 In his closing address to the 2010 Sydney Writers’ Festival, Peter Carey made a plea on behalf of the fading ‘cult’ of serious reading. This prompted a fierce riposte from Bryce Courtenay: ‘There’s no such thing as popular writing versus literary writing. If I’m a popular writer then Peter Carey is an unpopular writer. If I’m a best-selling writer then he’s a worst-selling wr ... (read more)

Patrick Allington reviews 'Overland 200' edited by Jeff Sparrow

November 2010, no. 326 • 01 November 2010

From Menzies to Gillard, from the Cold War to Pacific solutions, the history of Overland magazine offers a leftist version of post-World War II Australian political, cultural and literary life. This issue of Overland is its two hundredth. As Jeff Sparrow, the current Editor, points out, survival is an achievement: ‘The “little magazine” is a peculiar animal. The life cycle of the species gen ... (read more)

Patrick Allington reviews 'Spirit of Progress' by Steven Carroll

September 2011, no. 334 • 23 August 2011

At the beginning of Steven Carroll’s new novel, Spirit of Progress, Michael stands on a platform of the Gare Montparnasse in Paris. Readers of Carroll’s ‘Glenroy’ trilogy will remember that Michael is Vic and Rita’s son – a boy who grew up with an unblinking grasp of his parents’ fractured marriage and who learned early to fend for himself. Now a man, Michael observes the foreign tra ... (read more)