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Kindle. There is opportunity in the current chaos! But does anyone think that Australia's leadership can grasp it?

Against Mishra he provides a solid, brief bibliography that deserves a scrape. I now wonder if Fred Kaplan gave Des Ball his due (Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?, Adelphi Papers 1981). He does not cite Daniel Ellsberg or his pithy take, that nuclear weapons are used all the time, as threats. On the other hand I'm sure Mishra would argue that the extended peace in Imperial Europe and the Americas up the World War I was underpinned by extreme violence in the colonies.

Excerpted everywhere but there are not many reviews yet. White is extensively touring; for instance he spoke with Allan Behm at the ANU recently.

Kindle. Depressing. Extremely referential, even more so than his previous non-fiction works such as The Age of Anger (2017). These references come so thick and fast, and the hefty bibliography is more intimidating than helpful (quantity having a lack of quality all its own), that I just let it wash over me. This is annoying as he does give the odd intriguing pointer (such as to elements of Muhammad Asad's identity) that may be worth chasing up.

One argument he wants to make is the consanguinity of European colonialism and Nazism, that the lack of German overseas colonies after World War I motivated them to colonise Europe itself. The blowback from that was the construction of Israel by Europeans paid for with Arab lands; that is, yet another colonial project. I don't think he explained how Europe has benefited from this beachhead in Arabia. Things are not connected to the exigencies of the Cold War. I couldn't see the Holocaust as a uniquely Jewish experience given the Australian Government's historical policies towards the Indigenous peoples of this country.

Ultimately his prognosis is bleak and he explores few recognisably novel or optimistic ideas. Deep into the epilogue, when the text is almost exhausted, Mishra says:

As the climate crisis brings forth a world of barbed-wire borders, walls and apartheid, and cruelty in the name of self-preservation receives singularly wide sanction, most recently in Donald Trump’s electoral triumph, Israel will most likely succeed in ethnic-cleansing Gaza, and the West Bank as well.

Goodreads. Omer Bartov read it alongside other takes. Ben Hubbard attempted a summary for the New York Times. Charlie English, similarly for the Guardian but with more context: where do Hamas and Iran fit in this account? Mishra was at the Adelaide Writers' Week back in March after visiting UNSW in February.

Kindle. I fondly remember reading McCann's This Side of Brightness (1998) about twenty years ago. One big part of that was his excellent use of his research and empathy for the people he encountered in the tunnels of NYC; the result was (as I recall) a powerful mix of history, engineering and present-day precarity. This gave me reason to expect he'd do the same for those who repair the fibre optic cables that now bind the world together.

And he mostly does, excepting an unnecessary binding of his tale to Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) and Apocalypse Now (1979). The style is first-person autofic and I guess (as with life) the author-narrator doesn't quite know what to do with his enigmatic free-diving lead character or even himself, a long-form journalist. I didn't feel he got to the heart of anything much but it was a pleasant read; the writing is great. I wish he had developed his thoughts on Samuel Beckett some more.

Goodreads. Marcel Theroux.

Kindle. Inevitable after chewing through Dashiell Hammett's collected works and rewatching The Long Goodbye (1973). (I have yet to get to the novel for that; it's from 1953.)

Well, what can I say. He started strong with loads of similes and humour (c.f. Sarah Miles as a jazz weekend in The Big Sleep (1975)) but by the third book the rewards are diminished. All are structured like a collation of short stories; vast casts of characters with some overlaps, abundant scenic description, gnarly plots and not exactly satisfying conclusions. (I'm not here for the whodunit aspect; it feels like important details are withheld but perhaps he's fair by the standards of that genre.) Perhaps they function as a snapshot of the Los Angeles/Santa Monica region at the time. It's helped along by the odd bit of abstruse colour, e.g. a reference to Moral Re-Armament which is topical now. Fun.

Kindle. A pointer from Jennifer Szalai's review of Becker's More Everything Forever (2025) which I won't be reading now.

Notionally Becker aims to dispel any lingering belief that the Copenhagen interpretation is a viable account of how quantum mechanics relates to reality. The key difficulty, as Becker admits semi-regularly, is that this interpretation is too ill-defined to wrestle with. That Becker proceeds to do a poor job with the wrestling does not help us understand why so many big-brained physicists let it ride. (Sure, this is a matter for philosophy, not physics, but even so.) Alloyed with too much assertion and insufficient argumentation, the bulk of the text is an attack on strawmen and a championing of the multiverse and pilot waves. The prose often gets bogged in short-order repetition; a hefty edit was in order. I mostly didn't feel like I was thinking. It's never made clear what might count as real. The major historical figures were drawn more incisively by Labatut (2021).

I wasn't impressed with his take on the philosophy of science, especially his sinking the boot into the Vienna Circle; this is particularly tiresome when fecund philosophers like Rudolf Carnap are name-dropped without any discussion of their contributions. Yes, verificationism, logical positivism, whatever are long bankrupt but it's not so easy to dispense with conceptual analysis and Popperian falsification (to me a necessary but not sufficient quality of a scientific theory), especially on the basis that we can never figure out the specific parts of a theory that deserve revision; Ehud Shapiro showed how to operationalise falsificationalism back in the 1980s (see MIS) and of course this problem is most of what training an AI has always been about. Perhaps Becker needed to peruse Chalmers's classic.

Broadly reviewed. James Gleick for the New York Times. Goodreads. Yes, the appendix is the best part of the book. If I'd read Peter Woit's take ahead of time I would've read something else, or maybe put my big-boy pants on and dug into the SEP articles.

Kindle. Inevitable after reading his latest. This is a collection of nine short stories, mini-portraits, tenuously linked, of blokes in various states of unsuccess. None go anywhere spectacular or surprising; the devices are entirely Chekhovian, so you know the attractive and not the unattractive ladies are the bit players, the youth tend to vacuous hedonism, a delimited scope of action is just a space for the exhibition of cowardice, the luxe lifestyle models an absence of imagination and creativity, nasty is just an ineffectual stuffed-shirt pose, death nothing but inchoate terror and incomprehension. One focuses on muscle-bound security, prefiguring Anora (2024). The prose is effective and clearly Szalay knows his Europe. Again, all to what end? Man is more than this, even under ironic duress.

Dwight Garner at the time. Szalay is good on the status markers and food. Goodreads. And so on.

Kindle. Prompted by the many positive reviews.

Szalay goes about it with clear intent: this is a portrait of a bloke, just like Small Things Like These, whose interiority is inaccessible to us. Life mostly just happens to him and he is mostly not disappointed, perhaps because it's mostly about sex and he rarely has to ask. He starts out in spartan post-Communist Hungary, living with his mother, where the cracking (and much remarked upon) first chapter reveals his irresistibility and easy facility with violence. (All descriptions are specific, sparing and not especially lurid.) After a bit more scene-setting but no foreshadowing or forethought we're taken to London for what I expect are Szalay's favourite topics: extreme wealth, luxe consumption, brand names, high-end real estate/development deals, art of the kind that is hung on walls, inheritance, shamelessness, blameless rise and fall. He doesn't hold the hands of those of us who don't live this stuff.

Szalay's prose is fine but never achieves the necessity of Atticus Lish's. It is often amusingly reductive. Presenting István purely as a surface works well but less so for the secondary characters such as Helen, the socialite married to a plutocrat; we see her reflected in her son's surprise that she's gone for such a protozoac man and wonder what her besties think. Nobody has a real job or career which means Szalay skips the most time consuming part of life that just maybe undergirds and circumscribes the substance. Despite its relevance to a bloke from Europe BREXIT goes unmentioned. The semi-solitary drinking "parties" ameliorate the COVID lockdowns for Helen. Almost all of it could have happened in the 1980s or, excepting the helicopter commutes between London and country piles and other inessential technological things, the nineteenth century.

But to what end? Is this supposed to be a Martin Amis sort of thing, a social commentary, a time capsule? (It's been too long for me but perhaps Money?)

Dwight Garner. Peter Craven: "No finer novel will be published this year." Keiran Goddard: "Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat." (Not much?) All bone. Sean O'Beirne: "not one of Szalay’s best books; the best, by far, is All That Man Is." Too much plot (and I concur). Goodreads.

Kindle. The greatest hits of wartime Sài Gòn from the 1930s to the 1970s. Specifically we follow the titular Chinese headmaster Percival Chen as he does little more than whore and gamble in Chợ Lớn while his brotherly lieutenant, fellow Chinese Mak, runs his English school. For whose benefit, we are supposed to ask, but it is always clear that Mak has deep roots in the Vietnamese independence movement that transcend the partition of the country.

As a semi-authentic, sentimental dynastic tale it's fairly engaging. The prose is flabby and needed a good edit; the repetition-in-the-small (paragraphs that repeat the previous paragraph but with a tad more colour) recurs so often, too often. Regularly stuffed in the middle is a tendentious sentence that asserts this is how things went, how things must go, as if the author lacks faith in the persuasiveness of his narrative structures. And of course so much could go other ways and did. The characterisation is generally weak; Percival is a muppet and Mak is underdrawn. The women are just sex objects or madams, all creatures of the demimonde, mostly victims. The dialogue is highly suspect: there's no chance that Chen would identify as Viet Cong to the occupying forces of Sài Gòn. It seems unlikely "Việt Minh" is the right term for Mak's network. Such inaccuracies are just laziness this late in history.

In a broader context, Andrew X. Pham provided a lot more colour and historicity in his recent Twilight Territory. The Chinese perspective is far more valuable than that of the Western journos of, for instance, Koch's Highways to a War (and see also Neil Sheehan's memoir) and I'd be keen to read a better treatment. I vaguely recall Violet Kupersmith mining a similar vein.

Goodreads.

Kindle. Thin Brunner is always a risk, as are any of his late-career works; apparently this was his final novel. Here he attempts a zany quest in the mode of Douglas Adams. There's a bit of lightweight social commentary that may've been insightful in the early 1980s. It was hard work to get through.

Goodreads.

Kindle. In an afterword Koch billed this as a "companion novel" to Highways to a War (1995), calling the "double novel" / "diptych" Beware of the Past.

The novel has it that the aristocratic Irish revolutionary Robert Devereux was transported to Bermuda then Van Diemen's Land in 1848. This is his journal through to 1851 when he escaped to the United States. He left behind a bastard son who was the grandfather of Michael Langford from that earlier novel. Koch apparently drew inspiration from the actual Young Ireland movement.

All this we learn in a brief "Editor's Introduction" — Koch again adopts a secret document gambit — and the ensuing journal entries just put somewhat flabby flesh on that skeleton. Somehow he managed to keep me engaged despite the excessive foreshadowing that robbed the events of suspense. (All devices are Chekhovian which makes the diarist conceit completely implausible.) The repetition within each section, often within a paragraph or two, is a grind but I just moved on whenever my eyes glazed over.

Perhaps reflecting the limitations of the journal/diary format, the characterisation is generally weak and there's too much attention paid to the details of clothing and room furnishings, almost as if Koch is writing stage directions for a cinematic adaptation. Perplexingly for a revolutionary there's not much analysis of the colonial politics of the day though many words are spilt on gesturing at the French theorists and random parts of the canon of Western Civilisation; the Tasmania/Antipodes-as-Hades duality/doubling is overworked. This and the prolix prose made me doubt that Devereux was capable of inspiring the Irish people as Koch claims he did.

I couldn't tell if the occasional bout of nonsense was Devereux's or Koch's; for instance the claim that Tasmania was a "still-virginal island" in 1850 was unsustainable at the time given the (observed, diminishing) presence of the Aborigines and the immense suffering of the convicts, and even more so by 1999. Koch probably meant that it had yet to be despoiled wholesale by the (Anglo) profit motive, and he is keen to identify lands with women. (Devereux's violated Kathleen embodies Ireland, somewhat crassly, and only really comes alive in her Wuthering Heights scene.) Devereux is not an unreliable narrator so much as a tendentious one.

The usual Koch preoccupations appear in half-hearted form. Devereux is, of course, doubled ("I am a man of double nature") but to no end. Are fairies and faery lore Irish preoccupations that occlude the actual? Koch asks the same via his French-Jewish survivor/repository of wisdom Lenoir. Bushrangers! The essentialism, the contention that revolution is misguided, that democracy is a sham, a front for mob rule. Could it be that nothing is an improvement on ancient aristocracies, some kind of self-perpetuating ruling class? It would seem that Irish revolutionaries are not, in fact, better in the tropics. The sheer unmentionable irrelevance of science.

Goodreads dug it.

Kindle. Mishra's first novel in twenty years! — and in many ways coextensive with The Romantics of 1999 and his explication of Buddhism of 2004.

Notionally Mishra uses the divergent paths of three low-born blokes who make it into the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi to explore the horrors of the New India and the changing fashions among high end cosmopolitan dynasties, some of whom share his literary aspirations. Much of it looks like hard work for risible returns.

The prose is mostly OK, leaving aside an excess of adjectives that often tip reasonable descriptions into overly-precise incorrectness. And a heavy, deadening referentialism. And the short-order repetition. And the hefty foreshadowing, the selective drip of information. The ambient context is assumed known: temporal anchors are mostly provided by real-world political events.

The main flaw is weak characterisation. The three undergo a shock-and-awe initiation at IIT. Dalit Virendra Das (the lonely computer science major to the two mechanical engineers) remains shallowly drawn as a generic, cultureless, deracinated Wall St billionaire. Aseem Thakur is marginally more real as an editor of a literary journal of some kind. He's a fan of V.S. Naipaul and an all-in predatory, hedonistic individualist who somehow still feels a duty to improve the country. The author/narrator Arun Dwivedi (with the highest entry rank of the three) retreats to literary translation in the Himalayas after not making it in the Delhi social scene. In shades of David Williamson the latter two are more influenced by an encounter with a literature professor than anything in their degree programs. Indeed Mishra completely avoids engaging with the content of the exact sciences in any form; technology is reduced to brands, finance to insider trading. (If he'd done his research he'd know that everything is securities fraud.)

But all this is just a precursor to a painfully adolescent romance between late-40s pseudo-Brahmin Arun and mid-30s dream girl, Muslim/scion/social media star-not-influencer Alia Omar who has sown her wild oats and is now in need of a serious man. The death of his mother is messier but as conveniently timed as Charlotte Haze's in Nabokov's Lolita. The male insecurities that (inevitably) bring things unstuck put me in mind of Julian Barnes's Before She Met Me. Arun's retreat to a remote Tibetan-Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas was a severe and under-explained overreaction, though I guess his usual stupefacient, fiction, was shown to be ineffective during their London bout.

Mishra wants to examine the beast as a perennial outsider, in contrast to Mohsin Hamid's How to get filthy rich in rising Asia (2013) where the inside view was shown to be more powerful. The ascetic Buddhism portrayed here is not critiqued. The Tibetan situation is sketched but not engaged with. There's nothing in the way of resolution. I wish he'd either stick to his essays and social diagnostics or move past autofiction.

Bharat Tandon. Jonathan Dee hides behind some hefty extracts. Abhrajyoti Chakraborty: "new India, old ideas" — damn straight and ouch-y. At some point the fake is itself the substance. The anxiety of the narrator may be that of an author anxious to be understood. Goodreads: reviews are generally positive, the ratings entirely dire. (krn gives it a good hard working over.) A general flaw of the commentary is that these three blokes are not mates so much as frenemies.

Kindle. I thought El Akkad's last novel What Strange Paradise (2021) was a solid improvement on his first and was hoping for another delta. This is instead a memoir of El Akkad's (remote but nonetheless) heartrending experience of the (ongoing, perpetual) conflict in Gaza, salted with the odd life event. The title is bang on and a sentiment for all times. Unfortunately many of the ensuing, similarly syntactically-tortured sentences with convoluted tenses are not as sound. It struck me that once again he was a couple of steps behind Mohsin Hamid (Exit West, The Last White Man, talks at Georgetown University in April 2024).

I struggled with El Akkad's motivations. Why does he doomscroll the horrors of this conflict? Why did he become a U.S. citizen? He shows no awareness that all of what is troubling him troubled others not so long ago — the iconic photography of the Việt Nam war (presently being relitigated), the drive to bear witness, liberal hypocrisy. The age of anger may've started with the economically disenfranchised but is now thoroughly democratised.

In brief, it struck me that El Akkad had no awareness of Asia. His hopelessness, expressed in sentiments not too distant from George W. Bush's with-us-or-against-us, yields a just-walk-away nihilism that precludes consideration of alternatives — live-and-let-live! — which just might lead to paths out of this mess. If he truly felt that, why write this book? Yes, the abiding humanistic optimism that another generation could always be squeezed in before things went completely tits up has unravelled, but give us an argument for why you still had your child. I wanted to know why he remains in the U.S.A.; Hamid made for unruly Pakistan a while back.

Someone with more awareness of Asia may've made common cause with the concept of tang ping. Another more analytically-minded or less despairing may have dug into the will to ignorance and America's sense of its own morality. Still another would mourn for lessons unlearned and (self-reflectingly) the role of the press in the unwinding ("is it still possible to enlarge cognitive capacity within the dwindling kingdom of Western journalism?"). It felt like reading computer science literature, a blinkered, write-only medium that fills me with dismay.

Fintan O'Toole at the New York Times mostly refers back to El Akkad's American War (2017). A "polemoir, a fusion of polemic and memoir." — please no. Goodreads dug it with spades.

Kindle. A pointer from Kate back in 2016 or so.

We're in Southern California, a suburb of Los Angeles, with a bloke with a reconstructed face. Using an iterative deepening strategy and interspersed with excess discursion he tells us how it came to be destroyed, what he used to do for fun (read Conan stories) and what he does now (tell a choose your own adventure story to subscribers via snail mail). He spends a lot of time ruminating on school and his failed transition to post-school life. The author mostly steers clear of gross outs.

Well what can I say, I hate the use of brand names, especially when used to enumerate the pharmacopeia. The first-person narrator made it abundantly clear that there's no point to his stories, that he never went anywhere and isn't about to start now. Somehow it reminded me of Catcher in the Rye and David Ireland's The Chantic Bird — just maybe someone got something out of it? The review of game-adjacent fantasy/scifi trash culture was better done by Michael Clune and Jarett Kobek. And of course, for 1990s slacker/futureless/developmentally-stalled culture one can't go much past Douglas Coupland (Generation X, Microserfs).

Goodreads. Ethan Gilsdorf summarised it at the New York Times. "Accident" is thrown around a lot but everything sounded intentional to me.

Kindle. Koch's breakthrough novel and easily the best I've read by him so far. Famously made into a movie by Peter Weir that I saw about 15 years ago.

As with Highways to a War (1995), Koch expects his readers to be far more familiar with history and culture than is reasonable. This gambit somewhat works by highlighting the memory hole that Australia-Indonesian relations regularly falls into but frustratingly flattens the players and stakes to a colourful backdrop for a pedestrian romance between an Anglo-Australian journalist and an English secretary at the British Embassy. (Once again she's the only available European woman in the whole town.) The elegiac tone emphasises a fondness for the Indonesia of the day that the events do not, but actually it's a fondness just for the comfortable parts of Java and the hills south of it. (Lombok has too much unpleasant poverty.) Some ethnicities are sketched; the Chinese are mercantilist. Islam is mentioned but nothing is made of it. (Booze is omnipresent for instance, and there are no muezzins.) Koch takes it as obvious that they would oppose the communist PKI which left me wondering who'd support the PKI. Bali, Borneo, Papua and Timor (etc.) do not feature. Something's brewing in Việt Nam but that need not concern us here.

The action starts media res. The Indonesian revolution (the expulsion of the Dutch colonialists) is going sour due to increasing poverty, inappropriate spending and a distancing from Western aid. The men of the international press, generally lacking language and culture skills, wait for the big one (presumably the fall of Sukarno) in the Wayang Bar in the Hotel Indonesia. New Chum Hamilton has been sent by the ABS (ABC) to cover the instabilities. We quickly meet Koch's most interesting character, cinematographer Billy Kwan, a dwarf with a Chinese father and Australian mother who has big plans for Hamilton. He symbolises much, not the least humanism and utopianism, and moves mysteriously through Jakarta and the plot. Against him Hamilton and squeeze Jill are woefully bland and underdrawn and it's all downhill from there.

The structure is the same as Highways to a War (1995) but far better executed. There's a masterful and somewhat jarring movement between the first and third person omniscient narration as well as some complex tenses that are very satisfying. Nevertheless it always felt like the more fascinating things lay just beyond Koch's frame.

The heavy emphasis on motif and metaphor is wearing after a while. Again we get the "doubled" concept (c.f. The Doubleman (1985)) but more literally; apparently mirroring Hindu myth, Kwan is the dwarf variant of Hamilton's giant. There's the Left and Right of the Wayang, along Western political lines, but what does that mean to the locals? And for all we learn here the Konfrontasi may've been between man and woman, East and West or some struggle within Jakarta. Hamilton's loss of an eye at the end, a halving or echo of Odin, suggests he has gained something of value (wisdom, love) but we're left guessing at its content and sceptical of its worth. I guess Koch was railing against charismatic dictators who lose sight of the starving masses, and perhaps revolutions in general.

Goodreads: some truly brutal reviews. The threads of intrigue throughout are all so heavily foreshadowed you're always asking when and never what-if. There's a fair bit of unresolved ambiguity about who is screwing who and why. Esoteric. Essentialist. Again it seems probable that a decent history would be superior to these fictional accounts.

Kindle. The first of Koch's Miles Franklin winners and the second for me to read. The followup to his breakthrough The Year of Living Dangerously (1978).

A fair bit of this is autofiction, going by his Wikipedia bio, and perhaps a (further) revision of his debut The Boys in the Island (1958, revised in 1974). We start in 1940s schoolboy Tasmania with narrator, polio-affected Richard Miller, slogging it up the hill to the Catholic school in Hobart run by the (brutal) Christian Brothers. Soon enough he encounters a lusty married woman from Sydney, and then a pair of local musos and their mysterious teacher Clive Broderick. All proceed to the mainland in pursuit of predestined destinies. Melbourne is a barely-there way station. Sydney amounts to no more than its cliches; Kings Cross an eternal seedy Bohemia sliding into the abyss, though the affordable rents in subdivided Elizabeth Bay mansions caught my attention. The CBD itself went unnoticed as the skyscrapers closed in.

Miller's role is to get the band coverage on the ABS, where he has smoothly risen to his station in life. (I take that to mean the Australian Broadcasting Service; it's unclear why Koch doesn't just call it the ABC.) The girl next door turns out to be an Estonian beauty who happens to sing and is in desperate need of a husband. What do you know, the band badly needs a female vocalist. Similarly Mrs Lusty has a step-son who handily slots in as the drummer. There's a sense that TV is rapidly eclipsing radio plays for prestige and status. Alongside excess foreshadowing, shallow characterisations that fall away (Ms Estonia, Miller's mother) and some very convenient disappearances, this is to say that the plot mostly just moves the pieces into place.

The music these guys play is folk, as a deviation from the dominant rock music of the day. They're not allergic to electric instruments and they bring the folkies with them, unlike Bob Dylan. Pentangle is a named source but not Roy Harper. (The mandatory Have a Cigar scene occurs in North Sydney.) Much is made of their virtuosity. There's a certain wry nostalgia about the gigs but I'm not sure it is intended as a requiem for the Sydney music scene. The locale and mourning of the state of art and humanity reminded me a little of Patrick White's The Vivisector.

Despite the words spilt on all these other things, the main concern of the novel is occult Faery lore, which struck me as weird beyond all imagining. The years go by in sevens. The women are witchy and idealised. Nobody ever really grows up. There is some blurring of dreams with reality but it feels forced; Koch should probably have adopted magic realism wholesale. Also this mythology is old-world Celtic; what's it doing in Tasmania? And Christianity comes in for a flogging.

I did not understand the "doubled" concept; I think he really meant something more like duality or symmetry or mirrored or dialectics or parallels or something. An example of Koch's underbaking is his twee observation that "opposites did attract, but only when commonality was hidden underneath" — can two things be genuine opposites if they share much salient commonality? At other times he seems to be grasping for some kind of essentialism: stifled, frustrated Mrs Lusty as she is against the essence of (fertile) Irish woman, the prototype/stereotype versus the actual. Whatever it was, Koch lent into it heavily. My obtusity sucked all meaning from the ending.

Tasmania might yet host the last sighting of a literary male. Some themes overlap Dennis Glover's flight of fancy (those glorious 1940s). Richard Flanagan had a lot more to say about Tasmanian Aborigines and exotic Europeans (Slovenians). And of course Robbie Arnott is all-in on the magic.

I wonder if anyone reads Koch any more.

Goodreads. Veronica Sen at the time for The Canberra Times: Koch's characters are always searching for otherness. Perhaps "divided souls" are doubled. Is Koch's text itself a cut-price revelation? Perhaps I did not recognise the stakes.

Gordon is an eminent myrmecologist at Stanford. This book is the first in the Santa Fe Institute's Primers in Complex Systems series, and as such I was expecting more than just the usual pop-sci compilation of (fascinating) ant tales of the kind that, for instance, Hölldobler and Wilson and Moffett have recounted over the years. There are no photos, just some figures taken from research papers. There is no mathematical modelling. Genetics receives minor (but interesting) coverage.

The main focus of the book is the concept of an "interaction network" — roughly a model (familiar from social networks) of how ants communicate with each other and how that feeds into behaviour. Some experiments are described and proposed, chiefly constrained by an unwillingness to destroy ant nests. (One reason amongst many is that Gordon aimed to study colonies over decades.) The encounter rate is key! Some observations seem to miss the obvious. For example, we're told that if the rate at which first-mover patroller red harvester ants Pogonomyrmex barbatus return to the nest falls below some threshold then the foragers for the colony are inhibited from departing, but not what happens if the patrollers return more quickly. (One can imagine the latter is irrelevant, ignored or signals an avoidable catastrophe like a flood or predator.) Unlike honeybee researchers, Gordon does not appear to have a non-invasive way of determining how much food is stored in the nest, leaving me wondering how the colony's hunger is signalled and what effect that had on forager behaviour; again one could imagine sufficient hunger leads to a majority of ants foraging whatever the success of that foraging.

Most interesting to me was her refutation of W. D. Hamilton's explanation for why it is genetically beneficial for workers to raise sisters rather than their own progeny (in Chapter 6, section Evolution of Colony Organization). It's straightforward: queens typically mate with multiple males, and this means that sister-workers may share less than 50% of their genetics on average (rather than the 75% suggested by haplodiploidy with a singular father). This point is so obvious that I feel it must've occurred to Hamilton.

Despite the promise of networks we're only told about pairwise interactions between ants performing particular tasks. Much is made of their limited attention span — about ten seconds — which I guess precludes much path dependency (etc) unless they too have some kind of fast and slow neurology or individuals have mechanisms for taking notes. There is a division of labour but the division is not static (i.e., not determined solely by caste). No connection is drawn to how cells in a multicellular organism specialise despite an early claim that this study and that are related. Another round of editing would've helped: often the explanation for a technical term or concern occurs well after its first use or is repeated in short order. Gordon seemed overly responsive to pop cultural representations of ants.

Generously summarised at length by Leon Vlieger. Data availability is the limiting factor. Hamilton is further demolished by Seirian Sumner in Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps (2022). Goodreads.

Kindle. Heavily-marketed historical fiction, apparently expanding on a brief account by Plutarch of how the defeated Athenians survived a bit longer in the quarries of Syracuse, Sicily by reciting Euripides. The first-person narrator speaks in a contemporary Irish argot, laced with much profanity, often overcooked. (Some words and phrasing recur too often, as in Preston's The Borrowed Hills, which is how people speak but does not make for great prose.) The story itself is structured like an ancient Greek tragedy, focussing on an epic bromance. Along the way we get summaries of Euripides's Medea and The Trojan Women; this book is far more modest than All Our Tragic. There's often a whiff of The Remains of the Day, clarified at the end, though the narrator's reliability is never in question. The final movement is hurried while some earlier parts are torporific.

Less successful are the romance subplot involving an erudite slave girl and the mechanism by which two penniless unemployed potters can afford to stage their production. The narrator himself is a pile of cliches and rarely surprises. I think Lennon missed a trick by not inventing or completing a missing Euripidean play, perhaps about future history. That move worked well for Álvaro Enrigue but he could deploy psychedelics and not just oceans of wine.

Fintan O'Toole reviewed it in one of his better essays for the New York Review of Books. Annalisa Quinn for the New York Times: "affectionate and fun, but bloodless." AK Blakemore: Lennon could've done better than this. Goodreads dug it.

Kindle. Prompted by Dwight Garner's review of the latter. Short shorts. Some fun, some twee. Very few memorable. I didn't have enough of a sense of Azrael to develop one from the last book; it's more about the increasing irrelevance of the Devil in any case. There's some God in the first, mostly imagined as if he incarnated as an American man. That doesn't take much imagining.

Justin Taylor on the first. Goodreads (first, second) didn't get that much into either.

Kindle. Prompted by Dennis Lehane's salesmanship in the New York Times. Less "a heartbreaker" than a defanged transplant of some aspects of Trainspotting to Mayo County in the west of Ireland. Much of the text gets lost in character studies and while it floats along in the mode of fun there's not much humour in it. (Much like Preston's The Borrowed Hills (2024) one of the central characters is a powerful but inert man.) I guess the schtick is to pick at the underbelly of outwardly wholesome country towns (here Ballina) but Barrett lacks the commitment of people like Irvine Welsh and David Lynch (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) to go all the way or at least somewhere new or interesting. Everything suggests that you head for the exits.

Goodreads: the Booker long-listing oversold it.

Kindle. Peasant/tenant sheep farming in the fells of Cumbria, better known as the Lake District. It starts circa 2001 during the foot-and-mouth outbreak that lead to huge animal culls and ends in the present day. Nearby village Bewrith in the Curdale Valley does not exist, but why not? Other mentioned locations like Kendal and Carlisle, the geographical limits of Cumberland Wrestling, do.

The sheep massacre leads to a depeopling and the hardy folk who remain are in need of new flocks. Our narrator abandons a promising career of lorry driving and abides on his frenemy-neighbour's property after being drafted into the slaughter when the paid help flees. They go a-rustling somewhere a bit south, liberating a large mob of purebreds from a tourist farm. The successive heists are wanton and the story degenerates into relations amongst violent men; we're shown that our boy is educated and isn't a victim but has never been one to make things happen. There's a bit of wish fulfilment in the form of a girl from school, now married to the neighbour but so obviously better than all that. The breaking point, when it comes, is both expected and completely arbitrary.

I enjoyed the writing, leaving aside an excess of 'owt' and 'nowt'. It reminded me a bit of Tim Winton: forceful and direct, capturing the place, people and patois, the occasional excess of metaphor and motif. It made me realise that Winton's done littoral zones, the outback and cities but not farming. Initially I thought I might be in for something as crystalline as Atticus Lish's first but things fall away with the seasons. Preston's handling of his characters is as brutal as anything Irvine Welsh has done. Leaving that aside there are parallels with Greenvoe: a similar sense of isolation, a place lost in and out of time, tourism a future that's killed the old human geography. I'm guessing the descriptions of animal treatment turn a lot of people off.

Colin Barrett for the New York Times. Christopher de Bellaigue: rewilding, cottages now holiday rental properties with all the modcons. A farmer not taking a government handout is unrealistic. Ah yes, there's a drove, just like there has to be. Goodreads seems to be warming to it. Clare Clark dug it for the Guardian.