James Ley

James Ley reviews 'Every Move You Make' by David Malouf

October 2006, no. 285 • 01 October 2006

David Malouf’s fiction has been justly celebrated for its veracity. His prose, at once lyrical and precise, has an extraordinary capacity to evoke what a character in an early story called the ‘grainy reality’ of life. For Malouf, small concrete details convey a profound understanding of the defining power of memory. He has a strong sense of the way the most mundane object can embody the pas ... (read more)

'A curse on art, a curse on society: Government contempt for the ABC, the arts, and the academy' by James Ley

August 2020, no. 423 • 24 July 2020

It is curious the way certain books can insinuate themselves into your consciousness. I am not necessarily talking about favourite books, or formative ones that evoke a particular time and place, but those stray books that seem to have been acquired almost inadvertently (all bibliophiles possess such volumes, I’m sure), and taken up without any particular expectations, books that have something ... (read more)

James Ley reviews 'On Evil' by Terry Eagleton

October 2010, no. 325 • 01 October 2010

One of the more robust responses to what has come to be called the New Atheism has been that of the influential literary critic Terry Eagleton. He weighed into the argument early with an aggressive and widely cited critique of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006) in the London Review of Books, in which he charged Dawkins with theological ignorance. He extended his argument in a series of le ... (read more)

James Ley reviews 'The Trials of Portnoy: How Penguin brought down Australia’s censorship system' by Patrick Mullins

June–July 2020, no. 422 • 26 May 2020

Listen to this review read by the author.  Okay, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this country. For a start, we have this profoundly stupid and deeply irritating myth that we’re all irreverent freedom-loving larrikins and easygoing egalitarians, when it is painfully obvious that we have long been a nation of prudes and wowsers, that our collective psyche has been warped by what Patric ... (read more)

James Ley reviews 'The Ghost Writer' by John Harwood

April 2004, no. 260 • 01 April 2004

There is a species of Victorian mystery story that is as pure an expression of nineteenth-century rationalism as you are likely to find. A strange event occurs which, at first glance, appears to admit no rational explanation; by the end of the story, it is revealed to have a logical explanation after all. Thus foolish superstition is banished by the pure light of reason. But there is another side ... (read more)

'"How small the light of home": Andrew McGahan and the politics of guilt' by James Ley

April 2006, no. 280 • 30 October 2019

Andrew McGahan’s first novel, Praise (1992), concludes with its narrator, Gordon Buchanan, deciding – perhaps accepting is a better word – that he will live a life of contemplation. This final revelation is significantly ambivalent. The unresponsive persona Gordon has assumed throughout the novel is something of an affectation. On one level, he is playing the stereotypical role of the inarti ... (read more)

James Ley reviews 'The Slap' by Christos Tsiolkas

November 2008, no. 306 • 01 November 2008

In early 2018, Christos Tsiolkas published a long essay as part of a series commissioned by the Sydney branch of PEN, an organisation dedicated to freedom of expression. ‘Tolerance’, which appeared in Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear (2008), is an interesting document, not least for the way it highlights how compelling yet exasperating a writer Tsiolkas can be. Like much of his work, it is fired ... (read more)

James Ley reviews 'The Death of Jesus' by J.M. Coetzee

October 2019, no. 415 • 25 September 2019

It is commonly accepted that the modern European novel begins with Don Quixote. Lionel Trilling went so far as to claim that the entire history of the modern novel could be interpreted as variations on themes set out in Cervantes’s great originating work. And the quality that is usually taken to mark Don Quixote as ‘modern’ is its irony. It is a fiction about fiction. The new sensibility it ... (read more)

'The tyranny of the literal' by James Ley

April 2005, no. 270 • 01 April 2005

For there is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own selves. These words appear towards the end of Erich Auerbach’s study of representation in Western literature, Mimesis. First published in 1946, the book has become a classic of twentieth-century literary criticism, but is almost as famous for the circumstances under which it was co ... (read more)

James Ley reviews 'Breath' by Tim Winton

May 2008, no. 301 • 01 May 2008

One of the intriguing things about Breath, Tim Winton’s first novel in seven years, is that it has a number of affinities with his very first book, An Open Swimmer (1982). Both are coming-of-age novels that attempt to capture some of the confusion and melancholy of youth. Both feature boyhood friendships which the characters outgrow. In both, the main protagonist, whose parents are emotionally d ... (read more)