Morag Fraser

Morag Fraser reviews 'The Secret Chord' by Geraldine Brooks

October 2015, no. 375 • 24 September 2015

Geraldine Brooks credits her son, Nathaniel, with sparking the idea and title for her latest novel. For his bar mitzvah, Nathaniel chose to play an arrangement for harp of Leonard Cohen’s famous ‘Hallelujah’. It begins with these lines: ‘Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord / That David played, and it pleased the Lord.’ Music is crucial to Brooks’s novel – the warp to its narra ... (read more)

A Schubert Journey, Three Song Cycles (Melbourne Recital Centre)

ABR Arts • 13 July 2015

When the stars align, in art as in astronomy, the results can be exhilarating and revelatory. This winter in Melbourne, as July’s ice began making itself felt, you could hear some of the greatest music ever written out of seasonal and psychological darkness – Franz Schubert’s three song cycles, Die schöne Müllerin (The Lovely Miller-Girl), Schwanengesang (Swan Song), and Winterreise (Winte ... (read more)

War Requiem (Melbourne Symphony Orchestra) and Ian Bostridge (Melbourne Symphony Orchestra)

ABR Arts • 23 June 2015

‘Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges,’ wrote Herman Melville. The truth about war, as Benjamin Britten ‘tells’ it in his War Requiem, is ragged indeed. A glance at Britten’s score is indicative – there on the page are the black skitterings of brass and strings, a motley percussion, a solo soprano voice soaring over Latin choruses that alternate (or intersect) ... (read more)

Reading Australia: 'Journey to the Stone Country' by Alex Miller

Reading Australia • 20 May 2015

There is no recommended apprenticeship for writers. Nor are there any prescribed personal or professional qualifications. Hermits, obsessives, insurance clerks, customs officers, women who embroider, men who write letters, public servants, soldiers, drunks, provincial doctors and gulag inmates have all become great writers. How? A mystery. But avidity – about the world and the people in it – h ... (read more)

Morag Fraser reviews 'Can't and Won't' by Lydia Davis

March 2015, no. 369 • 01 March 2015

Reading Lydia Davis’s stories is akin to getting new glasses – or glasses for the first time. Suddenly the world shifts into sharp, bright focus. Disturbing. Disorienting. What you see, or understand, won’t necessarily gladden your heart. It may pique it, but you may not want to be brought so close to life, to the poignancy of it all. Not at first, anyway. Davis seems to think so too. Or sh ... (read more)

Handel’s Messiah (Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra)

ABR Arts • 17 December 2014

The huge Town Hall crowd who surged to their feet to applaud – and go on applauding – the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic’s twilight performance of Messiah did not do so ‘like sheep’, nor like a last-night-at-the-Proms booster crowd. Their gesture had more in common with King George II’s reputed rising in glad awe for the Hallelujah Chorus during the London première of Messiah in 1743. ... (read more)

Morag Fraser reviews 'Stone Mattress: Nine tales' by Margaret Atwood

November 2014, no. 366 • 01 November 2014

One swallow doesn’t make a summer, as the stark proverb cautions, but a cockatoo flocking of short stories suggests that the form is perhaps enjoying a revival – and the publishing industry has seized an opportunity. As it should. In 2013, Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for literature, lauded as ‘the master of the contemporary short story’. Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object appeared in ... (read more)

Morag Fraser reviews 'Country Girl' and 'The Love Object' by Edna O'Brien

April 2014, no. 360 • 26 March 2014

In the 1960s she was deemed an Irish Jezebel. After the publication of her début novel, The Country Girls (1960), the local postmistress told her father that a fitting punishment would be for her to be kicked naked through the town. Now, a half century later, her litterateur countryman John Banville has introduced Edna O’Brien’s Collected Stories with unalloyed tribute: ‘She is, simply, on ... (read more)

Sweet honey and guns

March 2014, no. 359 • 26 February 2014

Indiana’s State Route 67 is a highway straight out of Alfred Hitchcock, an open-skied strip through flat country, bordered by desultory malls, a ‘drive-thru’ Taco Bill, a county jail and sheriff’s department, a pedimented Walgreens and – most intriguing – the Mooresville ‘Lost Inn Motel’, and the ‘Lost Name Steak-house and Saloon’. (Google risks no tariff information for t ... (read more)

Morag Fraser reviews 'The Accursed' by Joyce Carol Oates

July–August 2013, no. 353 • 25 June 2013

If, hardy reader, you make it through the 667 pages of Joyce Carol Oates’s The Accursed, you will see, on page 669, that she prefaces her acknowledgments with this gnomic utterance: ‘The truths of Fiction reside in metaphor; but metaphor is here generated by History.’ I’m not sure that I get Oates’s gist exactly, and those striding allegorical capitals (Fiction, History) don’t help, b ... (read more)