peteg | blog 2026-03-31-KaranMahajan-Complex.autumn

Karan Mahajan: Complex. (2026)

Kindle. I remember (perhaps faultily) enjoying his previous novels: Family Planning (2008) and The Association of Small Bombs (2016). This one is perhaps a lengthy and not great expansion on the first.

After a first-person intro that sketches how things are going to go we get a series of character studies intermingled with some minor-note action. It's set mostly in the airless Delhi complex that appears to be the sole legacy of nation-builder SP Chopra to his children with a completely vanilla take on Desi in London and nowhereland Michigan, from (ballpark) the 1970s to mid-1990s. I didn't feel any of the characters popped and none did anything particularly interesting or novel; stuff just happens. The politics is mostly described and not explained, excepting one incident where the BJP needed to manufacture a distraction. At times he seems to be drawing a line from the Nehru regime to Modi via the naysayers, Hindutva and Sonia Gandhi. Humourless.

Jonathan Dee at the New York Times. Goodreads.

Henry Reynolds: Looking from the North: Australian history from the top down. (2025)

I figured I should try more history since reading Dean Ashenden's view from the north, and having enjoyed David G. Marr's excellent work. I was hoping Reynolds would provide an overview of evolving conceptions of sovereignty and property across the Australian continent and lay out just what native title is and allows, but this is not that book. (This text suggests I consult Reynolds's Aboriginal Sovereignty: Reflections on Race, State and Nation (1996) but surely that lacks reflection on the impact of the Wik decision of the same year and anything that has happened since.) Indeed Reynolds's (revisionary) focus is on the British/European settlement of the country and race relations; he does not discuss, for instance, the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese in World War II, the Kokda Track, Cyclone Tracey or other natural disasters, anthropology, science, culture/arts (no Gulpilil!), why treaties weren't signed, etc. Perplexingly he takes the Northern Territory to be just the Top End (the Yolŋu of Arnhem Land), despite Alice Springs being just short of his Tropic of Capricorn demarcation and Ashenden's Tennant Creek well in scope.

Overall I didn't find it as good as his essays; a few chapters needed another round of editing and I often wished he'd expanded on the assertions and self-citations in this text. In brief his thesis is that the indigenous peoples of Australia's north generally remained on their lands while working for cockies/squatters on a mutually-beneficial or at least placatory basis, in contrast to the south where the connections were mostly severed. This was due to labour shortages, of the unwillingness of the young colonials to settle in the harsh northern climate, which of course led to misunderstandings in the faraway centres of power about how things actually worked in the north. There is also an account of nineteenth-century multiculturalism in the new tropical towns: Chinese merchants, tailors, miners, railway constructors, etc., Japanese pearlers, South-East Asians, Pacific Islanders working the cane fields; Australia is forever short of agricultural labour.

The final chapter is the best as it is succinct and clear like his essays. We're told the pastoral leases of the mid-nineteenth century already required that access be provided for cultural purposes but this provision was not enforced. (Reynolds asserts that plain-vanilla common-law leases would have extinguished native title which makes it all the more perplexing that the imperial regime (out of London) did not sort out their intent towards the indigenous peoples well before Federation brought White Australia in 1901.) He does not explain why the British colonial powers took three goes at claiming sovereignty over the continent. I also wanted to understand what the native title regime provides for; from the little I understand it is a very degraded notion of property, at least by the standard of freehold. This may be a reasonable or at least workable compromise in the context of pastoral leases, etc. (I don't know) but the legal regime in places where the people have never been dispossessed (cf the peoples of the Kimberley, the Yolŋu, the Torres Strait Islanders and elsewhere) needed more explication.

The north is now being occupied; where the romantic propaganda failed the military (specifically the U.S. military) is pulling people in and aiming to stay. At least until the next big one.

Broadly reviewed when it was released in November 2025. Glyn Davis. Mark McKenna sounds like he's read all Reynolds's books and can't separate this one from its predecessors. Judith Brett summarised it. Indeed it does add to the why-Queensland-is-different canon. And so on.

John Brunner: Players at the Game of People. (1980)

Kindle. Flabby Brunner: he had some mystery in this book that he did not want to reveal too soon, leading to extreme repetition of scenes that don't progress anything. The delay in uniting his main character with the interlocutor that enables the exposition dump is unmotivated. The intro was sufficiently disjointed that I was intrigued by how he was going to stitch it all together but soon enough (20% or so) it became a slog. I didn't come away with a clear sense of what he was trying to say.

I think it's set in a present-day London that never recovered from World War II: there are aspects of 1984 privation and lifts from Doctor Who (a room that functions much like the TARDIS) and Douglas Adams's contemporary Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980). We'll make great pets, some of us anyway. There's a rocket attack with effects perhaps somewhat like those in Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual (2021).

Goodreads. Faust, Mephistopheles.

John Brunner: Threshold of Eternity. (1957-1959)

Kindle. Apparently Brunner's first under his own name, the first-first being under a pseudonym. Space opera. There's already some of his signature moves including multitrack narration and discursive smart-arse grabs at the start of each chapter. He put in a few too many underdrawn characters including a couple of token twentieth-century everypeople. Time travel, temporal inertia and surges... parallel universes with a causality repair mechanism ... oh my. God as a disembodied woman who gifts another woman to her surviving (embodied) husband. The (xenophobic) Enemy invades! The Being ... who does stuff ... ouroboric. Conceptually cracked but you can see the promise.

Goodreads. Apparently reworked by Damien Broderick in 2017.

Daniyal Mueenuddin: This is Where the Serpent Lives. (2026)

Kindle. Inevitable after Mueenuddin's debut collection of shorts. Unfortunately this novel isn't any better.

The first three chapters/parts are relatively short. Initially we're filled in on an orphan boy's origins in a Rawalpindi bazaar in the 1950s, giving me the expectation that he'd be a major player later. The second recounts the problems a youthful American-educated scion/feudal lord has with controlling his ancestral lands and serfs in the 1980s, notionally juxtaposing raw power with Western humanism. It ends without resolution, leading me to think we'll get the rest of the tale in passing later. The third is about how the landed gentry hook up, the heir and the spare. Finally the latter half of the text agonises over how a servant botched his failproof get-rich scheme in the 2010s that put me in mind of Coffs Harbour.

The central flaw with this work is that it's all been done before, not the least by Salman Rushdie in Shame (1983) and Mohsin Hamid in How to get Filthy Richy in Rising Asia (2013). There's no humour, political commentary or class struggle so we can quietly ignore Mohammed Hanif and Aravind Adiga. The anachronistic view from the upper class/feudal seat was mined by Aatish Taseer, Rohinton Mistry and many others. Pankaj Mishra recently wrote about the Himalayas as a place for romantic escapes. The servant's view palely foreshadows the one in The Remains of the Day (1989). To echo Rushdie from a long time ago: this novel does not expand the space of things that can be thought.

The writing is often OK and even more often flabby and repetitive. The voices of the characters are flattened and often indistinguishable. Neither of the female characters is interesting or well-drawn. Category errors are rampant. There are no twists. The caste system (I didn't know there was such in Muslim Pakistan) is not clearly articulated though the feudal system is. Mueenuddin's use of the third-person appears to preclude an unreliable narrator but every so often he adopts a phrasing that in other hands would signal a departure from truth. It's a bit boring and there are no payoffs or even moments of quiet grandeur.

Dwight Garner saw a lot more in it than I did but also threw in enough references to signal he knows it's a bit stale. Goodreads.

Raymond Chandler: The Lady in the Lake (1943), The Little Sister (1949), The Long Good-bye (1953), Playback (1958).

Kindle. The remaining four of Raymond Chandler's novels over several months. The collection I have includes the incomplete The Poodle Springs Story (1962) which I'll skip.

The first two are good. The Long Good-bye (1953) is clearly his masterwork: twisty and funny, a rich source for Altman's adaptation (1973). The last just has Marlowe running around in circles in Esmeralda, somewhere north of San Diego, and is quite unsatisfying; so much so that Chandler concludes with a character from a prior story propositioning Marlowe for marriage!

John Brunner: The Webs of Everywhere/Web of Everywhere. (1974)

Kindle. Thin Brunner. Not much chop. Piles on the cliches and moralism to no discernible end. Somehow Alice Springs survives a nuclear exchange, suggesting that Pine Gap wasn't common knowledge at the time (?). The Māori are once again warriors! Teleportation! The Infinitive of Go (1980). All women are mentally unwell.

Goodreads.

John Brunner: A Maze of Stars. (1991)

Kindle. Not great. A sapient ship (Ship!) has seeded the promising planets of the arm of a galaxy with humans and is now revisiting them for the nth time. There are rules of the game, of course, and Ship gets lonely so human companions are the order of the day. It's a bit fat Brunner but has more biology than sociology. The time travel mechanic does not work well; that and the exotic landscapes and biospheres evoke 1960s Doctor Who. The closing exegesis needed expansion and more weaving into the main text. There are some cute ideas (and some lazy historical lifts) that have effects too neat and tidy. Too much moralising again. You can see his interest flagged in this project as he was writing it.

Goodreads.

George Mackay Brown: Beside the Ocean of Time. (1994)

Kindle. The one that didn't win him the Booker. The edition I had (2025) included a worthless introduction by Amy Liptrot (The Outrun (2024)).

To be honest I was a bit disappointed that he didn't take things much further than he had in Greenvoe (1972) and Six Lives of Fankle the Cat (1980) which I did enjoy. Perhaps I rushed it a bit or was too insapient to grasp all his subtleties; he didn't adopt the fancy tenses of Charles Yu to travel through time, or even the slick trickiness of Murray Bail's prose for that matter, but the simple mechanism of dreamlife, later recounted for profit. The stories are sufficiently straightforward that the rewards are in how they are told. And just who is this entity that is sitting beside (and not inside) the ocean of time with the rest of us?

Goodreads. Cornelius Browne points to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957).