Scribe

Once mainly associated with shrill killjoys and desiccated reductionists, atheism has recently received a jolt of adrenaline from Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. Yet while these writers delight in exposing religion’s philosophical deficiencies, their tone is predominantly negative. Fortunately, The Australian Book of Atheism goes beyond simply rehashing the New Atheists’ explanations of Why God Doesn’t Exist. Divided into ‘Overview’, ‘Personal’, ‘Education’, ‘Social and Cultural’, ‘Politics’, ‘Philosophy’, and ‘Religion and the Brain’, this collection offers a more nuanced picture of atheism than does the recent crop of celebrity-authored blockbusters.

The two narrators in this intense novel are the same person at different ages: the child of eight years who struggles against sibling displacement; and his twenty-eight-year-old self, scarred by his early years and obsessively revisiting them. The narrative documents these two periods of emotional turmoil in the unnamed protagonist’s alternating monologues. This anonymity may signify a lack of a more integrated self, and will not be a problem for the reader. As reviewer, I will simply use personal pronouns when referring to him.

World War I is lodged in the minds of Australians with mythic power. Chris Womersley, in plain and startling yet tender and lyrical prose, has constructed a moving narrative that opens up the wounds of war, laying bare the events that pre-date the conflict and reach forward into the collective memory. I was reminded of A.S. Byatt’s recent novel The Children’s Book (2009), which also foregrounds in poetic language the Great War and etches forever the horror of broken bodies and minds on the consciousness of its readers.

‘My problem is that because of my anxiety disorder, publicity is close to torture,’ Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek tells Ben Naparstek, explaining why she informed a newspaper in 2004 that she hoped she wouldn’t be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (she was). With or without anxiety disorders, writers face a conundrum. They communicate through the written word, but increasingly they also talk aloud in public and in the media. When writers are interviewed, they often traverse an awkward middle ground between adopting a public persona and revealing the inner sources of their inspiration. There is a tension – frequently evident in the pages of In Conversation – between a writer’s need to publicise, explain or defend his or her works and beliefs, and a desire to allow the writing to speak for itself. For many writers, there is also the challenge of making their verbal communication as erudite as their writing. As Norwegian novelist Per Petterson tells Naparstek, ‘Talk is entirely overvalued, I think.’

On the inside of the title page, we learn that this is a work of fiction to be shelved alongside other books about horse whisperers. Together with the schmaltzy subtitle, this is a less than promising start. Not that I am fundamentally opposed to animal stories. But horses? I distrust whatever parades as noble, whether beast or human. Horses are for viewing from a distance.

In this novel, young Tag Wardell becomes renowned for his marvellous way with horses, both in his native Gippsland and later in the army. I am none the wiser about what exactly he does, or why he is so exceptional. He treats animals decently, talks to them and doles out oats from his pocket. Give him the chance, and he’ll brush them down. Once he even gives a nurse the same treatment. There is no magic in this. What it translates to is that everything and everyone has their price.

The resounding metaphor in The Low Road is that of a bullet wound and ‘the shock waves it sends through the body, often creating a cavity ahead of where the bullet stops. Almost as if the body accommodates the object’s anticipated trajectory and manufactures its very own injury.’ Chris Womersley’s intentions are suitably applicable to this laparoscopic image: to examine the cycle of crime, social alienation and despair, set against an uncanny dystopian landscape.

Whoever wins the federal election later this year, it is likely that at some stage in 2008 we will be looking back and post-mortemising the Howard government. One strand in the reviews will surely be the Howard government’s impact on the quality of public debate in this country. Whether it has been a contributor to Howard’s long ascendancy (and I think it has), this government’s ability to goad large numbers of academics and commentators into unbalanced and increasingly hysterical denunciations of nearly all aspects of its operations is unprecedented in Australian political history.

That quintessential Australian–American, Rupert Murdoch, recently counselled Australians against ‘the facile, reflexive, unthinking anti-Americanism that has gripped much of Europe’. While I confess to a certain Schadenfreude when the chief propagandist for the second Iraqi war, which has contributed mightily to that European alienation, seeks to come to grips with the war’s consequences, I think it unlikely that Australia will go down the European path. For Australians, the American relationship looms much larger than it does for Europeans. As Dennis Altman shows in his elegant and argumentative essay 51^st State?, the relationship is deep-rooted in our history, psyche, and culture. We were, after all, one by-product of the American War of Independence. For him, the danger is not so much anti-Americanism but that, in ‘a world dominated by the American imaginary’, we, like Rupert’s News Corporation, might lose our national identity.