peteg's blog - noise - books

Kindle. I'm well past the point of diminishing returns in this series. This one is mostly heist setup in Florida then heist execution in Cuba, signalling Marlowe's shift into the spy genre. As before (as always?) our leading man does not get to keep the loot. None of the colour is in any way striking or memorable. Again well-written but very pedestrian.

Goodreads.

Kindle. The sequel of The Name of the Game is Death (1961). It reeks of being a money job. Much of it rehearsed what happened at the end of the first one. Much of the other stuff recounts our protagonist's stay in the prison wing of a hospital and the plastic surgery required for the series to continue. The first had the wit to be set post-heist but the meat of this is about the overly-familiar setup for a bank job in and around Washington DC and Philadelphia. It traded a lot of kook, specifically the incipient rise of the American pornography industry and closely-related moral panics, and tries to sideswipe the lives of the suburban middle class ala Updike and so on. What is there is well executed but none of it had the jagged edges of its predecessor.

Unfortunately it doesn't function as a time capsule for the area, unlike, for instance, Raymond Chandler's efforts.

Goodreads.

Kindle. And yet more mid-century hard-boiled noir pulp. This one is quite good in many ways: Marlowe nailed the character of his first-person narrator with a decent backstory, plausible psychology, cold-blooded calculation and competency, and as such he functions somewhat as a prototype for James Caan's character in Thief (1981). I found him hard to hate due to his soft spot for animals. The other characters are not drawn as well, often merely archetypes or worse. The two women, one a cool and incoherent blonde who seems to cop it from everyone, the other a very forgiving keeper fond of the horses, fare poorly but have more shape than the deputy sheriff. Most of the action takes place in Hudson, Florida (on the west coast/Gulf of Mexico side of the Florida Peninsula, now the northern reaches of Tampa suburbia) which could've used a few more locals. The structure mostly works but is sometimes stitched together with explicit binaries that were not exhaustive or convincing. Marlowe is coy about the sexy bits but it works in that a-gentleman-never-tells mode of telling. I wonder why they didn't make this into a movie.

The edition I have had an introduction by Charles Kelly which was unusually valuable and worth reading ahead of the main course. Kelly wrote a biography of Marlowe; here's a grab at the L.A. Review of Books (2012).

Goodreads.

Kindle. The opening sentence of Dave Kim's review at the New York Times gave me expectations that were not met. Here post-apocalyptic England still seems to function despite the destruction of the City and other bits of wish fulfilment. Strangely there is no problem refuelling a car or buying food even though most of the shops and houses are empty; that so many still have intact locks and treasure to plunder conflicts with the proposition that a fair bit of time has passed since whatever happened happened. Or perhaps the whole thing was a dementia dream of an aged spinster-aunt. The characterisation is generally weak and the focus is on scenic description and colour. I got some of the allusions but missed more as I lacked the requisite patience and concern. Perhaps incoherence was the point but I can get that anywhere these days.

Goodreads, Rachel Louise Atkin: one star, "Felt like I had forgot how to read". This was exactly my experience: I'd often read a paragraph, feel I'd retained nothing, and upon a re-read realise that my mind had judged it to lack any significant meaning. Which again may've been a goal of the author. Later: won the Booker Prize for 2026.

Kindle. And yet more mid-century pulp. This one is more hard boiled, more explicitly violent (with a fair bit of man-on-woman violence) but still coy on the sexy bits. The plot is chaotic, often tending to random as the leading man tears up a Texan oil town that has grown more quickly than the law can regulate. None of the characters are deeply drawn or make a lot of sense; at least four are interchangeable Country Club stereotypes of intemperate greed, and all the ladies need men other than the ones they have. Things get a bit screwy at times but too often I felt like Davis was just circling back to the same situations. He implied there was an arrangement of wives that may've worked for everyone (at least the men) but just let that dangle.

Goodreads. Apparently did the rounds of the blogosphere after it was reprinted in 2010.

Kindle. More mid-century pulp. Written in the style of The Catcher in the Rye (1951). A bloke from the wrong side of the tracks discovers that basketball is a path to small-time riches and dolls. Watch out for those small-time hoods! Well-executed as far as it goes but it didn't aim to go far: everything was entirely predictable, right down to his time in college where a working lady's time tracks his prospects. Or schedule, in their preferred locution. There's not a lot to recommend it.

Goodreads.

Kindle. A valiant and entertaining effort to pick at the seams of Gupta's financial shenanigans. Barry does not get to the nub and can't really as the corporate structures are too opaque and public accounts too inadequate. Perhaps half draws on Duncan Mavin's Pyramid of Lies (2022) about Lex Greensill and the collapse of his financing bromance with Gupta. Quite often some diagrams would've helped to make the money and notional ownership structures clearer. Some chapters malfunction; chapter 23 Sanjeev's Last Stand is a theatrical take on some court proceedings, which is jarring after the 10,000 foot view of the financial dealings we got up to that point. I think he could've dug into the InfraBuild situation some more.

In any case I was less interested in Gupta per se and more about what's happening with the steelworks at Whyalla. Barry interviewed the S.A. Premier Peter Malinauskas and minister/righthand man Tom Koutsantonis but did not interrogate their version of events. For instance, did it make sense to bet the state's energy storage/green steel transition on Gupta in February 2024, knowing what was known then? (Greensill's operation had collapsed in 2021, for instance, and Gupta was already zombie-shuffling funds amongst related entities, sucking funds out of InfraBuild and the Tahmoor Colliery.) Have they sold the generators from the hydrogen plant yet? And how much was spent on not getting the blast furnace going again? (It was already struggling in March 2024 after Gupta's operators reduced production too much.) Why has the sale date slipped from the end of September 2026 to the end of the year or perhaps March 2027? Barry observed but did not dig into KordaMentha's rushed sale of the steelworks to Gupta in 2017 — a decision that Koutsantonis claims here he did not like but could not influence — and provided us with no reason to believe they'll do a better job this time around. Barry is keen to moralise over Gupta's appropriation and misallocation of Other People's Money (and fair enough too) but gave the politicians and administrators too much of a pass.

Obviously the story is not yet complete; Barry updated a chapter recently with more details about the lawsuits over the insurance on some relevant delinquent financial instruments. It reads like the purest farce. The snail-paced UK Serious Fraud Office investigation into GFG is apparently still live. Tahmoor has been sold to a consortium including M Resources who is one of the final two-or-so bidders for the steelworks. (Does their proposal to generate hydrogen and solid graphite from natural gas make sense for anyone other than Santos? Does their technology scale? Is their financier Golden Energy and Resources sound?) And of course Gupta is still out there somewhere making promises that some choose to believe. And so on and on.

Goodreads. Barry visited Whyalla a couple of months before the steelworks got sent into administration in 2024. (This formed one chapter of the book.) Reviews are legion but do not grapple with the flaws, Myriam Robin's a notable exception. Most witlessly cheer on the government intervention. It is all very fascinating.

Kindle. More mid-century hardboiled pulp noir. Short punchy sentences. Third person. Little humour. The action starts in Chicago but doesn't loiter. The author implies that the University of Chicago is close to Division (where I used to live) but it isn't. Riding the rails, like Scarecrow (1973) to some small-town shenanigans in Ohio, near the border with Michigan, where all the ladies would be rich if only someone let them. (This jag made little sense as the protagonist claimed to be aiming for Mexico.) The main thread is essentially Lolita (1955). It is emphasised that the bloke's cognition is failing due to lust and a lack of sustenance which is just to say that the plot got weaker. The mystery parts mostly consisted of withheld information that is not very imaginative. I couldn't believe this guy was the brains behind the prison break at Joliet.

Goodreads. Apparently (re-)published alongside Chaze's Black Wings Has My Angel (1953).

Kindle. Prompted by James Walton's review of Nathaniel Rich's Cloudthief (2026) in the New York Review of Books, and curiosity about mid-century hard-boiled noir. And to break up the interminable slog through Philip Mirowski's Machine Dreams (2001).

Much is made early on of the song If You've Got the Money, Honey, I've Got the Time (1950) which more-or-less summarises the dynamic between the leading man (who recounts in the first person) and his lady-love. They meet in proximity to a bathtub in the South (Louisiana, Mississippi) and head West (Colorado) where their heist goes off like clockwork. She's an NYC moll and takes to affluence in New Orleans like an Australian but he's more of an outdoorsy bloke who is soon weighed down by the ashy proceeds of crime. The ending was a bit lame. Some of it functions as a time capsule (the wilds of Colorado before it became an enclave) with a fair bit that's generic (the timeless demimonde of New Orleans).

I guess it could be read as a commentary on post-war drifting, the failure of stuff to palliate, satiate or otherwise make the time pass agreeably. He wasn't born bad (this is a bit Natural Born Killers (1994)) but went wonky due to the irremovable shrapnel in his head or perhaps thirty-four months in a Japanese PoW camp on Luzon; there's still the need to fend off the childhood sweetheart, to give her a good enough reason to finally, totally lose heart. Much of the doing was committed but the undoing seemed more accidental or perhaps was a matter of decreased concern. Most of the good lines are mostly in poor (or at least non-PC) taste.

Goodreads. Later I discovered that Don Walker adapted the lyric for Cold Chisel's You Got Nothing I Want (1981).

Kindle. Unferth's first novel. It's a bit underbaked: a bloke chases another bloke from NYC to Syracuse, NY and then to Nicaragua on the very thin premise that the latter is somehow involved with the former's wife. There's a sideline in dolphin untraining (reconditioning for release into the wild) that prefigures the concerns of her later works. Very occasionally she comes out with a great line but the bulk is a lot of foreshadowing and circling the drain. By the two-thirds mark it's clear there's not going to be a payoff that makes slogging through all the mystifying, fragmentary setup worthwhile.

Madison Smartt Bell at the New York Times: the characters are so abstract that the contrivances are assets. Unferth's take on human connection is bleak. Goodreads.

Kindle. Notionally about underground/experimental/avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger's short Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) but more on the California/San Francisco counterculture that Kobek mined a few years previous. Brand new you're retro! — as someone once said. This one is Haight/Ashbury, LSD, occult, the end of the Summer of Love, Manson-adjacent, like Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (2019). I guess Ken Kesey never did fit that frame.

The book has three parts, a structure that imitates the film as explained towards the end. The focus is on Bobby Beausoleil who Kobek interviewed recently. There are also snippets of an interview with Anger. The thesis is that this movie, or at least a falling-out between these two men, had a major causal role in the Manson Family murders. The first part Therefore is a ramble through the SF and LA scenes and was a bit of a slog. The second [Filmic Material] is an analysis of the film in Kobek's signature style. That was fun and worth the entry price. Finally Because lays out the causal argument. It leans too heavily on some counterfactuals. The whole show is heavily footnoted and referenced, mostly to web resources of dubious veracity. So much tat, ecumenical between DC and Marvel, like the MCU four decades early. Kobek mentions but does not dwell on the Thelema, Aleister Crowley, etc. aspects which link Anger to, for instance, Jimmy Page.

After reading the book I watched the film itself (YouTube). It runs about 11 minutes and is visually more interesting (overloading) than I expected. I would have been totally mystified without Kobek's close analysis of it; the Batmen, for instance, are hilarious while Anger's theatricality in his "The Equinox of the Gods" ceremony was quite boring, as were the cremation of the dead black cat, the Rolling Stones concert footage, Marines exiting helicopters in Việt Nam, the Orkustra. I had expected to see more of Anton LaVey who represented the more commercial end of Thelema. Some of the visual compositions are great but it's all too much too quickly. The music is quite good; it's a Moog synth loop with authorship ascribed to Mick Jagger but Kobek claims it was actually just a demo loop set up by the salesman. Whoever heard of Jagger working for free?

Goodreads. Someone suggested that this is Kobek's masterwork; before watching the movie itself I would've insisted on Atta (2011) but afterwards I can't disagree.

Kindle. Eventually inevitable due to the gravitation of Malick's movie (1998).

This is Jones's take on the Guadacanal campaign of 1942/1943 that was "the first major Allied land offensive against Japan" of World War II. (Guadalancal, for those of us born long after, is one of the Solomon Islands.) It's relentless, well written, never boring, sometimes hilarious and yet somehow not as iconic as Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961); Witt is a bit like Yossarian in being doctrinaire but is not as overtly philosophical about it. (Perhaps the relative lack of enduring recognition is because, like Milton Friedman and the money supply, everything reminds Jones of sex.) The cast of characters initially seems daunting but are sufficiently distinct that they're not hard to follow. His deft treatment of PTSD ("combat numbess") was perhaps novel at the time.

Goodreads. Maxwell Geismar at the New York Times at the time.

Kindle. Deb Olin Unferth's follow-up to Barn 8 (2020). A short-and-punchy holiday in post-apocalyptic sci-fi (much like Tim Winton's latest) with all the tropes, so much so that it does not seem very original or insightful. I read it in a day in the hope it would level up.

We start after the depop event, with mother dragging daughter to a solipsistic Atlantis to escape the surviving humanity. (Things are gynocentric throughout.) We soon learn that most of the men (mostly ineffectual/emasculated) have departed for Mars (Total Recall (1992) without the brunettes, blondes, Arnie, mutants, everything) but "Command" likes to send crews to the heavily degraded Earth in search of saleable tat. You'd expect it all to be heavily AI-mediated but it isn't, not really.

Escaping her mother's Hermicity our femoine escapes to the oh-so-clean desert (think Dune (1965) or Mad Max without the fashion) for an internship at a research lab. There she takes a bullshit job (futilely shovelling sand) rather than become part of "the company"'s machine, preferring to do her intellectual labour in the privacy of a container-house (Winton's The Shepherd's Hut (2018), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)) that she purchases with her inheritance. (The mechanics of food, water, sanitation, money or any other technological or economic thing are not in Unferth's wheelhouse.) On a frenemy-funded rec trip she meets the love of her life, a fake human robot who has undergone extreme beauty surgery after being stolen as a child (Rabbit Proof Fence (2002)). Later her mother uploads her consciousness to a Sputnik-esque vehicle (Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), Permutation City (1994)) and slips the bounds of this solar system.

The appearance-enhanced character is also functionally augmented (Neuromancer (1984), Highlander (1986)). This somehow leads to an all soul-and-feeling ending (Asimov's later/fat Foundations) that — and my eyes may've glazed over by this point — felt like a very modest variation on the concluding movement of John Brunner's Threshold of Eternity (1959) which also centred a female spirit, albeit one with more apparent agency.

The writing is relentless, mostly not funny but occasionally hilarious. Unferth likes the idea of human volition so the apocalypse is lowrez nuclear and not some slow-burn expiration of the ecology, and there's some point to the genetic preservation efforts. I don't think she had a moral point to make (unlike Ned Beauman), at least not one of any arresting novelty. Some clangers were clearly intentional (and amusing), others pointed to an underbaked understanding of systems: humans are natural too, and just the latest in a long line of ecocidal totalitarians.

Lincoln Michel acknowledges Unferth's derivativeness but protests that her "playfulness" cures all. Goodreads was generally unimpressed. tl;dr — just an appropriation of geek culture.

Kindle. Inevitable after Enrigue's excellent You Dreamed of Empires (2024). Once again ably translated by Natasha Wimmer. Lengthy, too much so.

Notionally Enrigue is telling us about Geronimo, one of the last of the militant Apaches. He does this on a multitrack which allows him to defer many interesting bits to the end. The first story is an account of a Mexican recovery party on the trail of a woman who was abducted. (Those of us unfamiliar with Apache lore may harbour suspicions that she is Geronimo's mother, him being deemed so exceptional by all those who encounter him.) Another recounts Geronimo's eventual surrender to the U.S. Army in what struck me as a post-civil-war mop-up operation; putting to use the now-permanent army in settling and taming the southwest, completing the conquest of the continent. Some of the military manoeuvring and shenanigans are amusing. Other parts sink into the swamp of excessive research and/or Cloud Atlas (2004). Cinematic for sure.

Less vital but probably more important to the author is an interspersed present-day travelogue through Apachería. I struggled with his essentialism: the Apache bloodlines doubtlessly persist but I can't see this as any kind of victory if the culture has been so thoroughly disrupted if not destroyed. The ranking of manliness amongst the peoples of the area (Mexican, European settler, native American) was a bit trying.

Dwight Garner wrote a thoughtful review. "Enrigue is filibustering, leaning too heavily on his research." "This is a long book (456 pages) that feels even longer." Indeed Enrigue's take on his own citizenship status(es) could make for a great read. Goodreads.

Kindle. A reductive, generic take on wartime tedium with Sài Gòn as a backdrop. The American-GI bloke is a vehicle mechanic from Wisconsin in the rear with the gear who never does any maintenance. The Vietnamese girl has little backstory and no specificity; purely essentialised. She provides the obvious services and he the fretting. Rabe appropriated the less interesting aspects of Kim Vân Kieu. The characters are bland and the writing is banal.

Goodreads was generally unimpressed. Philip Caputo at the New York Times: Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992).

Kindle. I'm very late to this party. I hoped to understand what it was all about after not understanding a thing back in 2013. Lengthy, overly so, and the mirrored split-narrative structure made following enough details too difficult to satisfy or enjoy; it took a fair bit of ploughing. I spent the entire first chapter wondering why Mitchell was telling me these things (about colonialism in Polynesia), and the second too (English composers in Belgium). Things clicked into gear with the Raymond Chandler-esque Luisa Rey hard-boiled noir, but the later switchbacks showed he was more invested in the character than the plot or yarn. The Sonmi arc in the Korean corporatocracy sequence was familiar from the Matrix sequels that predated this novel. (I wonder if he could have separated compelled consumerism from corporate hierarchy.) I didn't get into the post-apocalyptic anthropology on Hawaii.

Too much time is spent moving characters around to no real end. The variety of writing styles may amaze some but the underlying stories and characterisation are not stellar. Everyone ends up a winner.

Goodreads. Reviews were legion.

Kindle. A collection of shorts. The writing is flat, very occasionally amusing. The stories are mostly straightforward: the early ones are guillotined and not satisfying but the later ones seem more fully realised. Much of it is very Melbourne. None are surprising or push the boundaries of conceptualising Australia: more nostalgic than imaginative, down in the dirt with the Paul Kelly classics. Birch reads like an urbanite (a Fitzroy boy), familiar with a variety of interpersonal violences but with a limited grasp of the countryside.

Goodreads.

Kindle. Somewhat inevitable after reading Sam Roggeveen's The Echidna Strategy (2023). White wrote in the lee of the ALP's election victory when just maybe it was possible to envisage a revision of AUKUS.

The essay mostly rehearses (what I take to be) White's standard position. The USA now has insufficient reason to expend the effort required to dominate Asia as the emerging multipolar order will preclude a Eurasian hegemon by itself. (He seems to lean on George Kennan to provide an argument for why this is critically important to the security of the USA.) China's economy has already eclipsed that of the USA on his preferred metric. Realpolitik therefore implies that the USA returns to the isolationism of the Nineteenth Century, entailing abandonment of Taiwan and treaty partners like Australia, Japan and South Korea to a regional order dominated by China. Australia may yet find it possible to live with that, given that there is no alternative. Corollary: AUKUS brings nothing Australia needs.

There's a far bit of repetition through the essay; I wish he had instead spilt a few words on why he thinks that from power comes the motivation (and not just possibility) to dominate. On some fronts the American Imperium is a counterexample to this, but perhaps schematically White means that if China can dominate the region or the world then it will, whether there's aspiration there or not. It may be an axiom of his type of analysis which smells of pessimism but is really staking out worst cases. (The responses to this essay in the succeeding issue clearly split between those who understand this and those who want or need a more optimistic or moral analysis or a prognosis of the most likely future.) I also wondered what his position on East Timor was as Australia's intervention did not appear to have any strategic upside to Australia (but we did it anyway) and it set back our engagement with inevitable superpower Indonesia.

On the nuclear war front, White sketches the "escalate to de-escalate" strategy that is apparently the USA's and Russia's. He suggests it might work sometimes. One instance of the idea would be to use a low-yield nuke in the expectation of calling the enemy's MAD bluff. This thinking may be fallacious between the major powers but I think this puts the lie to the nuclear umbrella in a kill-the-chicken-to-scare-the-monkey sort of way: Roggeveen's expectation that the substantial reputational damage to the aggressor will stay their hand probably doesn't apply to the regional or global hegemon — as has been demonstrated repeatedly by the USA. White therefore contends that Australia cannot just ignore nuclear threats.

Most of the responses in the succeeding Quarterly Essay did not get to grips with the interesting parts. White gracefully accepted Emma Shortis's observation that his analysis lacked historical nuance and local colour. Goodreads.

Kindle. I thought I'd find out what the kids are reading these days. Billed by Amal El-Mohtar as "cyberpunk samurai in space" but actually tedious corporate sci-fi (says one of the more accurate reviews at Goodreads). The book is between 50% and 100% too long: so flabby, so much tendentious, concussive repetition in the small and the large, many chapters and excess colour that add nothing but show the author, so in love with her own voice, aims to stifle any independent thought about her constructions. Coercive reader control! The world building is dodgy and incoherent and everything is recycled and dumber than it needed to be. I couldn't tell if I was supposed to trust the omniscient narrator; the retconning in the third part showed the author didn't have a firm grasp of her project. I read the whole damn thing hoping there'd be something to it but no, it's a Sphinx without a secret. Hats off to the marketing team.

Later I realised this is the textual equivalent of a second-screen show, made for those with divided attention or overloaded working memory.

Kindle. I've been somewhat enjoying Sam Roggeveen's fortnightly sparring with Hugh White even though the latter always seems to come out on top. As with the recent Quarterly Essay by Michael Wesley (Roggeveen's sometime boss at the Lowy Institute) I'm sympathetic to the argument he wants to make: defend Australia, cut back on the expeditionary forces, get something workable going with Indonesia, develop resilience, all in the context of declining USA leadership/domination of Asia. But it's not clear how much of this is novel (see the Defence of Australia policy) or achievable, and the book would have been much stronger if it had presented and contested the cases for doing other things.

I did enjoy his take on nuclear weapons strategy in Chapter 6: one reasonable response for a "middle power" like Australia to a threat of that kind is to ignore it. This is because cracking the macadamia with that sledgehammer would invite epic blowback from others, and Australia developing its own deterrent would only attract aggression from major powers. I've never been sold on the nuclear umbrella concept, being born too late.

In any case Roggeveen is up against the dogma that it's better to fight elsewhere; in democracies the politicians would prefer the damage to be a long way away as we saw on 9/11 and the response to it. Those in power will spend an irrational amount of the nation's wealth to avoid being blamed. There's also a general absence of great-man glory in the book that is incongruent with the current era.

Goodreads. Much is absent, like climate change and the implications of dialing back Australia's integration with the US military; what happens to Pine Gap and North West Cape? Policing the Pacific requires some force projection. Joe Walker's notes contains some good points. Would future great-power Indonesia be interested in partnering with an echidna? Walker mostly comes down on Hugh White's side (How To Defend Australia (2019)).