Death and Detail - Kathryn Fox
- Nick Terrell
Blood Born by Kathryn Fox
Pan Macmillan Australia, 327 pages, $Au 29.99.
Kathryn Fox has written four forensic thrillers with a strong moral agenda and a clear focus on social justice and the rights of victims. Her most recent novel, Blood Born, contains an implicit denunciation of violence against women and of the procedural failings of our legal system. Fox admits that the strong moral and ethical agendas in her work give a fair indication of her motivation as a writer. Fox’s fiction – reality fiction as she calls it – is genre writing with a very direct, almost polemical, intention to force the reader to engage with the moral and social implications of the realities she depicts. Read more
You could be happy - ‘Optimism’
- Nick Terrell
Optimism presented by the Sydney Festival, Sydney Theatre Company, Edinburgh International Festival and Malthouse Theatre.
Playing at the Drama Studio, Sydney Opera House.
Directed by Michael Kantor
By Tom Wright (“after Voltaire”)
Optimism offers up a barrage of novelties that seek insistently to divert. See the dancing monkey-men, the bubbles, beach balls, strobe lights and smoke machines, count the industrial fans and cap guns, and marvel at the cheesy dance-craze choreography. Kantor’s theatre is determined (almost to the point of neurosis) not to be dull. In a little over two hours, Wright, Kantor and their clown troupe of theatre makers serve up such a smorgasbord of theatricality it would be indigestible if it wasn’t so shiny, sugary and easily absorbed. Read more
Nowhere Man - Invisible by Paul Auster
- David Free
Invisible by Paul Auster
Faber, 304 pages, $Au 32.99.
Paul Auster is nothing if not readable. I mean this as a compliment, but it could also serve as a rather unkind gesture towards his limitations. Beyond his knack for spinning superficially compelling plots, Auster doesn’t have many conspicuous strengths as a novelist. His prose can sound a bit robotic, and it’s far from cliché-proof. His characters are types. His dialogue can be radically unconvincing. You could take the view that Auster keeps these things flat deliberately, because he wants his novels to have the texture of fables. Or maybe his novels read like fables because he has no style. I don’t think we can rule this explanation out. Read more