Follow my Tweets
Book review: “The fearsome flute players”
The fearsome flute players
I don’t often write about another of my passions – birding – on this site. But I do include book reviews here. I’ve just finished reading a fascinating book about Australian Magpies, one of our most recognisable and best loved birds.
The book is called “The fearsome flute players: Australian Magpies in our lives.” This is not a scientific thesis paper; it is written in an entertaining and engaging manner, incorporating hundreds of stories of ordinary people in South Australia telling their encounters with these wonderful birds.
I won’t give a full review here but rather refer you to Trevor’s Birding, another site I write so you can read an extensive review of this book.
Special Offer:
The publisher a special offer to readers of my birding site. Mention Trevor’s Birding when you order online and you will also receive a CD of 200 photos of South Australia, including some beautiful photos of scenery and water birds.
I strongly recommend this wonderful book.
Good reading – good writing.
Australian Magpie
Review: Searching for the Secret River
Cover - Searching for the secret river
I have recently read Kate Grenville‘s historical novel The Secret River. You can read my review here.
Straight after finishing the novel I went on to read her follow up book Searching for the Secret River.
In this second book she goes into great detail about how she researched the novel. The story is based upon the life of her great-great-great grandfather, but she took the facts gleaned from family history and extensive research both in London and in Sydney over a five year period and transformed it into fiction. She has used fact as a broad brush in the hands of her imagination and the finished novel is brilliant. It gives the reader a much clearer view of life in the early years of settlement in the young Australian colony.
Searching for the Secret River is a fascinating expose on the thinking processes of one of our leading authors. Grenville takes us on a journey from the first inklings of an idea for a book through to the finished product. At first she was planning a non fiction book but she struck so many obstacles along the way that she changed tack completely, fictionalising it and letting her imagination run. I’m pleased she did.
While she does address some of the issues faced by all writers of fiction, this is not a handbook on writing. Sure, she does explain why she changed from first to third person, but generally it was the research that so intrigued her that she recounts in the first part of the book. Throughout she grapples with her attitudes, and those of the settlers, towards the Aboriginal people who would have lived in the Sydney area during the time in which she sets her novel. She was confronted by some very unsavoury discoveries. The reader of the novel is likewise confronted by some of the events of those days. Australian history is not always the clean, lovely accounts I read as a student many years ago.
While she has drawn from actual historical records, her novel is not another version of history. ‘I was shameless in rifling through research for anything I could use,’ she writes, ‘wrenching it out of its place and adapting it for my own purposes… What I was writing wasn’t real, but it was as true as I could make it.‘ (Grenville p. 210) She has been criticised for her (alleged) misuse of history. I think she has achieved what most other writers struggle with – she has made history come alive for the reader.
Reference:
- Grenville, K, 2007, Searching for the Secret River. WF Howes, Leicester.
Book review: new edition of a popular bird field guide
Simpson and Day Field Guide to the Birds of Australia 8th edition
Many of my readers here possibly do not know that I am a passionate birder. In fact, I write a very popular birding blog called Trevor’s Birding (click here). It is one of the most popular of its type with many hundreds of daily visitors. Heaps of photos too.
One of the essential tools of every birder (bird watcher) is a reliable field guide. These books illustrate each of the bird species found in a particular country or region. I have about 10 such books covering Australia, south east Asia, the Indian sub-continent and Europe.
In Australia we are blessed with a number of great field guides. With over 500,000 copies sold since the first edition in 1984, the Simpson and Day Field Guide to the Birds of Australia has proved to be one of the successful guides. Today sees the publication of a new, fully revised and updated 8th edition.
I’ve written an extensive review of this guide on my birding blog here.
The guide has been published by Penguin Books Australia.
Book Review: “Treasure Hunters” by Allan Baillie
Treasure Hunters
A few weeks ago I finished reading the novel for teenagers called Treasure Hunters written by Australian author Allan Baillie. What an entertaining read it proved to be.
I’d read some of Allan’s books before but I forget which ones. On checking his website I found out how truly prolific his writing career has been. His list of published books is indeed daunting. The list of prizes and awards he has won for his books is truly amazing. Reading his autobiographical notes on his web site is also amazing. He has led a life that can only be described as full-on adventure – including once being arrested on the suspicion of spying!
Treasure Hunters is best described as a thriller. Sure, there is adventure there too, but the narrative carries the reader on up to the exciting climax. Masterful storytelling indeed.
The main character Pat joins his father on a quest to find the world’s richest shipwreck off the coast of an Indonesian island riddled with political and social turmoil. The dangers of diving to great depths adds yet another layer of danger and Baillie casts an exciting net over the action.
I’m not into diving and have very little knowledge in the field, but Baillie weaves in enough information along the way to help even the most ignorant reader understand what is happening, and the dangers faced by the characters.
It is a thrilling read and highly recommended.
It is also worth reading the author’s autobiographical notes on his web page here.
References:
- Baillie, A 2002, Treasure hunters. Camberwell, Victoria, Penguin Australia.
- Allan Baillie web-page, accessed 26th June 2010.
Review: Nights in the asylum
Nights in the asylum
Book review: Nights in the asylum by Carol Lefevre
It was suggested by my supervising lecturer that I read this novel. Last week we had the author as the guest speaker at our regular fortnightly seminar. These are usually critiquing sessions where we try to help each other with the novels we are each writing for our Masters of Arts. Carol, a quietly spoken author talked to us for nearly two hours, going into details of how she went about the writing of this and her subsequent novel. I found her discussion on the inspiration of each work to be very interesting, and a major work can stem from a simple thing such as a photograph. Interestingly, my own idea for my current novel came from a photograph.
The word “asylum” in the title has great significance. All three main characters in the story are seeking a different form of asylum, mirroring the differing meanings of the word. Miri, the main character, is seeking sanctuary from the turmoil of a failed marriage and the death of a teenage daughter. Aziz, on the run after escaping from a detention centre, is seeking political asylum. Suzette and her baby are seeking refuge from an abusive, violent husband. All three are thrown together by circumstances into the same house in an unnamed mining town in outback Australia.
One of the most intriguing elements of this novel is the constantly shifting point of view. Each section or chapter (some are short, others quite long) is headed with a name of one of the characters, mostly the major three (but sometimes even minor characters for a few pages). Each section has the story told from the point of view of the character named in the title of the section. It sounds like a complicated way of writing, but it is wonderfully effective. By dipping into the heads of each character in depth like this we get a much deeper understanding of the particular mental turmoil and physical torments faced by that character. We also gain a greater understanding of and appreciation for how they perceive other characters in the story. A very clever technique and masterfully handled by the author. It is a technique I initially grappled with and rejected when writing my novel. I knew the pitfalls and knew my skills were not equal to the task. (Read more here.)
Another major element of the story worth mentioning here is a device known as the flashback. Many writers love this technique and it can be overused and used poorly. This author has used flashback to great effect, filling in details from the past and helping the reader to more fully understand each character’s strengths and weaknesses.
There are many other wonderful aspects of this novel and I can only touch on some briefly.
- The powerful mining town mentality of the townspeople comes through strongly.
- It is worth reading just for the beautiful use of language.
- The sense of isolation for all three main characters is a brooding presence throughout.
- A sense of the inevitability of the ending carries the reader along – not wanting it to happen, but resigned to the fact that it must end that way.
Overall, a brilliantly written work, told with compassion and finesse. And it’s an entertaining read as well.
Reference:
Lefevre, Carol, 2007, Nights in the asylum, Random House Australia, North Sydney