5� “Everything had to be good. Had to be fine just as it was, even if it wasn’t. Always. Because any changes might be worse. So terribly much worse.�
Ma5� “Everything had to be good. Had to be fine just as it was, even if it wasn’t. Always. Because any changes might be worse. So terribly much worse.�
Make no mistake � this is a scary story. Everybody in Peaksville understood the rules and said things were fine and good, even if someone had died. Not only did they have to talk like this, they had to think like this around Anthony.
He’s a strange little boy who hears people’s thoughts � not so much a mind-reader as an unintentional eavesdropper. When he hears about trouble, he feels he needs to fix it, but he’s a kid, so what does he really know.
He’s currently using mind control to make a rat eat itself (blech), but he has his reasons.
“Aunt Amy hated rats, and so he killed a lot of them, because he liked Aunt Amy most of all and sometimes did things that Aunt Amy wanted.�
The operative word there is “sometimes�. When Bill Soames arrives on his bike with the mail, he tries hard to mumble and think mumbled thoughts so he won’t attract Anthony’s attention. He’s anxious to leave, and as he goes out the gate, he makes the mistake of thinking just that.
“As Bill Soames pumped the pedals, he was wishing deep down that he could pump twice as fast, to get away from Anthony all the faster, and away from Aunt Amy, who sometimes just forgot how ‘c²¹°ù±ð´Ú³Ü±ôâ€� you had to be. . . . Pedaling with superhuman speed â€� or rather, appearing to, because in reality the bicycle was pedaling him â€� Bill Soames vanished down the road in a cloud of dust, his thin, terrified wail drifting back across the heat.â€�
Anthony had decided to ‘help� him.
As a fan of Twilight Zone and of short stories in general, this one felt appropriately ‘out there�. When the townsfolk gather for a birthday celebration, everyone is tense.
“The next arrivals were the Smiths and the Dunns, who lived right next to each other down the road, only a few yards from the nothingness.�
“The nothingness.� Where IS Peaksville?
I mention Twilight Zone because of the reference in the introduction to the story, which I have added to encourage you to read the story (and others) yourself.
“Jerome Bixby (1923 � 1998) was an American short story and script writer who wrote four Star Trek episodes and helped write the story that became the classic sci-fi movie Fantastic Voyage (1966). He is most famous for the “It’s a Good Life� (1953), also made into a Twilight Zone episode and included in Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983). The Science Fiction Writers of America named “It’s a Good Life� one of the twenty finest science fiction stories ever written. References to the story have appeared in the Cartoon Network’s Johnny Bravo, Fox’s The Simpsons, and a Junot Diaz novel, among others.
You can read it here:
This is another from the Short Story Club, which offers a story every two weeks for discussion. Find out more here � it’s fun!
5� [This review is from my review of the print version, but the audio version is also 5�.
“When it came to which weapon of mass destruction, the atom b5� [This review is from my review of the print version, but the audio version is also 5�.
“When it came to which weapon of mass destruction, the atom bomb was simply the final choice. . . . While the world still grieves for the dead of Hiroshima, outside Japan who grieves for the firebombing of Tokyo, which saw perhaps even more die from conventional bombs than the first atomic bomb—an estimated 100,000 victims? Which is the greater war crime? Who do we remember and who do we forget?�
This amazing combination of family memoir and historical research, has been simmering away for a long time in the uniquely imaginative mind of one of my favourite authors. It is a thoughtful reflection about connectedness and how remarkable it is that he was born at all, considering his father’s harrowing wartime experiences during WWII.
“By the time Thomas Ferebee released the lever over Hiroshima, my father had somehow survived more than three years of Japanese internment. He had somehow survived Changi and the Death Railway.�
When the bomb fell, his father was a prisoner of war and slave labourer in the Ohama Coal Mine at Hiroshima. How did that man return to Tasmania, raise a family, and lead a seemingly normal day-to-day life?
Flanagan writes much about his father, his family, his youth, and his own death experience when he drowned as a river guide. Around that is the long history of Tasmania, particularly its dark days as a violent penal colony that slaughtered and tried to eradicate the local Aborigines. More questions.
He writes about a world of love and passion and brutality and consequences. He quotes Russian author [author:Anton Chekhov|5031025] about the purpose of literature.
“One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s question 7 is typical:
’Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?�
Who?
You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why do we do what we do to each other?
That’s question 7.�
That is Flanagan’s real question. Why? This is almost the way children will keep saying, “But, why?� no matter what answer you give them. With kids, it's partly because they can keep you talking and partly because no answer is ever enough� until of course you get to the usual grown-up’s last word, “Because I said so!�
Flanagan was born and raised in Tasmania, and much of his focus is on his unusual father, who comfortably blended Catholicism with his belief that people return to the world as animals.
After his father's death, a family letter said his father’s mother had Aboriginal heritage, but it would have been kept secret in those days. His father was dark enough that he was nicknamed “Nugget� (a shoe polish) and “half-caste�. Could that explain anything about the man, his keeping things to himself, his endurance?
Flanagan's great-great- grandfather, Thomas Flanagan, came as a convict slave to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania). It was the worst of all convict hellholes, if such a thing can be measured. What stuff was he made of that he survived?
How might inherited and/or intergenerational trauma affect descendants? Richard’s father was obviously made of strong stuff (his mother was a bright, resourceful woman, too).
Researching his questions about the bomb, Flanagan explores a warren of rabbit holes, including the story of how science fiction writer H.G. Wells's long love affair with Rebecca West influenced his writing, which in turn inspired a student of Einstein, which in turn led to the development of nuclear fission and Hiroshima.
“The US only did what it did creating the atom bomb because a man called Leo Szilard, haunted by questions, persuaded its president it should and then helped make the impossible possible. And Leo Szilard only did what he did because he had once read a novel. The novel was written out of a terror of love and it terrified Leo Szilard and entranced him in equal measure until it became his destiny. The novel was written by H. G. Wells.�
He writes at length about the Wells-West affair and of Leo Szilard’s background, fictionalising scenes as he does. About Wells seeing West, he writes:
“…women made him quiver like a fish and the one now smiling at him from the sitting room door—top teeth slightly prominent in her gypsy face and her bottom somewhat more prominent in a blue silk hobble skirt—electrified him. She was a question mark he intended to answer.�
He also covers Leo Szilard's own story, how his thinking was nudged as he watched traffic lights change, how he discovered the nuclear chain reaction, what happened to the patent and how. How it ended up in American hands.
He moves back and forth between stories, always marking breaks between thoughts, chapters, essays, reminiscences. It’s easy to follow and makes sense when we accept that
“all writing is trapped in tenses when life isn’t. Life is always happening and has happened and will happen, and the only writing that can have any worth confounds time and stands outside of it, swims with it and flies with it and dives deep within it, seeking the answer to one insistent question: who loves longer?�
In the acknowledgments, he writes about something I’ve heard of before, which relates to an Aboriginal concept of time.
“Some years ago I was sent a remarkable essay by a then eighteen-year-old Yolnju woman, Siena Stubbs, about the use of a fourth tense in the Yolnju language. It was, in its own way, the equivalent of Szilard’s traffic lights for my thinking, and it informs this book deeply.�
I love Flanagan’s writing. I was unsure if this non-fiction book was going to be too much dry information. How silly. Of course I found it fascinating. I listened to the author read a lot of it, because he has a manner of speech which seems to give his words even more impact. It’s worth finding one of the many interviews and podcasts out there.
But to really appreciate it, I had to read it for myself as well. Wonderful....more
5� “But some children never feel at home in the family they were born to, and I was one of such. I found more solace in the unnameable openness of the 5� “But some children never feel at home in the family they were born to, and I was one of such. I found more solace in the unnameable openness of the sea, on the little beach on the island that Endo-san would one day make his home.�
Philip Hutton is telling this story. An elderly Japanese woman has told Philip she knew his friend Endo-san when they were young and has only recently received a letter from him, written to her decades earlier, and she wants to know what happened to him during the war.
� ‘Tell me about your life. Tell me about the life you and Endo-san led. The joys you experienced and the sorrow that you encountered. I would like to know everything.�
The moment I had been waiting for. Fifty years I had waited to tell my tale, as long as the time Endo-san’s letter took to reach Michiko.�
Philip’s narrative about the past is interspersed with conversations and tours of Penang with Michiko.
As a boy, he often didn’t fit in anywhere. He was born in Penang to a prominent English businessman and his father’s young, much-loved, second wife, whose Chinese family had come to Malaya to escape the poverty and politics of China. The first wife had died, leaving Noel with three English children.
Philip’s mother also died when he was very young, so Philip was raised in an English family, all of whom loved him, but he knew he looked different. People obviously thought he seemed to be neither one thing nor the other. Even the ancient soothsayer’s prophecy could be interpreted two ways.
� ‘You were born with the gift of rain. Your life will be abundant with wealth and success. But life will test you greatly. Remember � the rain also brings the flood.��
As a young man, he found peace on ‘his� island.
“There was a small island owned by my family about a mile out, thick with trees. It was accessible only from the beach that faced out to the open sea. I spent a lot of my afternoons there imagining I was a castaway, alone in the world. . . . Early in 1939, when I was sixteen, my father leased out the little island and warned us not to set foot on it as it was now occupied. It frustrated me that my personal retreat had been taken from me.�
Philip was home alone (except for servants of course) while the family was in London for several months, when a man with an unusual accent came to the house and asked to rent a boat. He introduced himself as Hayato Endo, pointed to the island, and said he lived there, but his boat had broken. Philip wasn’t happy, of course.
“I got up from the wicker chair and asked him to accompany me to our boathouse. But he stood, unmoving, staring out to the sea and the overcast sky. ‘The sea can break one’s heart, ²Ô±ð³ó?â€�
This was the first time I heard someone describe what I felt. I stopped, uncertain what to say. Just a few simple words had encapsulated my feelings for the sea. It was heartbreakingly beautiful.�
This was the beginning of Philip’s hero-worship. Endo-san was older and took Philip under his wing offering to teach him martial arts and how to focus his mind.
“I felt no connection with China, or with England. I was a child born between two worlds, belonging to neither. From the very beginning I treated Endo-san not as a Japanese, not as a member of a hated race, but as a man, and that was why we forged an instant bond.
I began my lessons in ‘a¾±°ì¾±Âá³Ü³Ù²õ³Üâ€� the following morning, entering into a ritual of learning that would continue largely unbroken for nearly three years.â€�
While his family was still away, he met the son of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce.
� There were the usual speculative glances when I entered � ‘here comes the half-caste, � I thought wryly.� . . . I knew people called him Kon, which I now did. He looked at me with a curiosity I found disconcerting. He radiated a sense of confidence for someone so youthful. . . . We talked for a long time on the beach that night; although we did not know it then, it would be the start of a strong friendship. It was only when Uncle Lim was driving me home that I realised Kon had not asked me a single question, that he had seemed to know all about me and perhaps even about Endo-san.�
This is a story about men � Philip and the men he reveres. The closeness between him and Endo-san is never spelled out as love, but there are scenes and incidents that hint at something more than comradeship.
Kon is more of a best pal. Thus, this English-Chinese boy became very close to his Japanese â€ÈÙ±ð²Ô²õ±ð¾±â€� and to an up-and-coming leader of the Chinese community, representing the two countries already at war in China.
The British seemed oblivious to the danger the Japanese posed to Malaya, and when the invasion began, it was shocking and brutal, just as it was on the Thai-Burma Railway and in Changi prison, and everywhere else I’ve happened to read about WWII atrocities.
“When would I find a sense of my self, integrated, whole, without this constant pulling from all sides, each wanting my complete devotion and loyalty? �
Philip had to make terrible choices, trying to save his family and friends. Through it all, are the lessons he absorbed in his training. Endo-san had once told him that the sword is always the last option.
�‘We use swords in training,� I pointed out.
‘What am I teaching you?�
‘To fight,� I said.
‘No. That is the last thing I am teaching you. What I wish to show you is how not to fight. You must never, ever use what has been taught to you, unless your life is in danger. And even then, if you can avoid it, so much the better.�
He made me promise him that I would always remember that.�
This is a story, rich with history, that is brought to life through a boy growing up, caught between cultures and loved by both sides of his family, facing a world war.
Something that stood out to me was how many people spoke so many different languages. There are dialects within cultures, of course, and I lost track of who spoke what, although the author often pointed it out. Philip could use it to advantage because people often didn't expect him to understand them.
It is not all ‘plot�. The setting, the sights, the foods, the many cultural influences are all celebrated.
“Instead of going through miles of jungle, my father decided to drive around the island, heading to its westernmost tip before turning south.The road rose up on the shoulders of low hills and faithfully followed the curves of the coastline. Below us the thick green of the trees was stitched to the blue of the sea by a seam of white, endless surf. Light splattered like careless paint through the trees above us and the wind through our open windows smelled clean and unblemished, tasting of wet earth, damp leaves and always, always the sea.�
The Gift of Rain was longlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize. I’m currently reading some award-winners and nominees that sound interesting, and this certainly deserved a spot. ...more
3.5� “Some detectives, perhaps, solve crimes like fireworks: one lit fuse exploding everything at once. I solve crimes like a ten-car rear-ender on a b3.5� “Some detectives, perhaps, solve crimes like fireworks: one lit fuse exploding everything at once. I solve crimes like a ten-car rear-ender on a bumper-to-bumper freeway: one car slams into another, and another and another, all the way up the line.�
Yep � that’s Ernest Cunningham for you - amateur sleuth and author/storyteller who speaks directly to the reader. His first book, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, introduced us to his rules for writing mysteries (what is or is not allowed � no 'deus ex machina' or surprise villain we never met), and his second, Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect, follows the same pattern.
This one adds some rules for a holiday story, and while he makes a point of sticking to the rules, he is adept at skirting them a little here and there just to trick us. But on to the story.
Since the first book, his now ex-wife Erin, has suffered from PTSD from murders and bodies and has moved on with a new partner, Lyle Pearse. She has called Ern in desperation because she’s just been arrested for the extremely bloody murder of Lyle, whose body was found on the kitchen floor, and blood has been trailed up or down the staircase.
â€�‘E°ù²Ô±ð²õ³Ù,â€� she said, and it was all over. I am cellophane around Juliette; she sees right through me. I have no idea how people have affairs.â€�
She knows his ex-wife lives up there, but he gets away (for now) with his ridiculous explanation. The bit about the band is true, but it’s not only a band � there’s a big magic act, which is what Lyle was involved with.
There are a fair number of characters to keep track of, including twins. Normally, he says, the rules don’t allow twins, but since he introduces them early and promises they won’t switch places, it’s okay. It takes a few people to keep a magic show like Rylan Blaze’s working smoothly. There are props and equipment, so most of these people are working offstage.
He starts interviewing and collecting information, but the heat (Christmas is hot in Australia), his nervousness for Erin, and his lousy accommodation are getting to him. He often foreshadows what is coming � sort of.
“I wish I could lean into my own narrative here and tell myself that I do indeed solve the crime, a feat that will be accompanied by both being shot in the chest and witnessing another death. I’d tell myself that I will, eventually, be writing it all out with shortbread in one hand and a pen in the other. But motel-me, dawn-hours-of-22-December-me, doesn’t yet know the solution to two impossible murders.�
He's tried finding information on Lyle’s computer, but no luck.
“The screen shuddered in denial. One of the rules of murder mysteries is that the detective cannot succeed by virtue of luck or coincidence. My amateur hacking doesn’t cut the mustard.�
There is another murder, a particularly gruesome one, and obviously Erin couldn’t have done that, locked up as she is. Her relief at hearing she’s off the hook for that is short-lived when Ern explains she’s still the obvious culprit for the first murder. She is seriously distressed.
I enjoyed this in both print and audio, but I like having the text to refer to so I can remember characters and select quotations. I found this one pretty far-fetched, and I had to suspend a fair bit of disbelief about some of the explanations, but for a quirky holiday read, it’s entertaining.
Each of these mysteries is a standalone, but I liked meeting Ernest and his family in the first one and then taking The Ghan in the second.
4.5� “Baz darted in and pinned the head with his crook. Then he crouched and used his other hand to flick away lumps of concrete until the snake was fr4.5� “Baz darted in and pinned the head with his crook. Then he crouched and used his other hand to flick away lumps of concrete until the snake was free. He picked it up, keeping the whipping front section clear with his crook, and poured it into a hessian sack.
‘Piece of cake,� he said, grinning at the others. Who were more interested, it seemed, in a depression under the middle section of the slab.
‘What, we got a whole family of the buggers?�
He looked. What they had was a rotting cotton shirt over a rib cage, and a wrist bone encircled by a knock-off Rolex Oyster.�
The young couple who lived in the house never questioned why there was a slab of concrete in the backyard, but it made a handy place to park a chair and sit outside with the baby, until:
“On a mild October morning near Pearcedale, south-east of Melbourne, a snake slid over the edge of a veranda on a shortcut to somewhere.�
Somewhere was under that slab. Cue the snake-catcher, Baz, in the opening quotation. Next, cue the cops.
Detectives Alan Auhl and Claire Pascal have been assigned as partners in the new Cold Case Unit to investigate what is clearly an old crime scene. He’s been brought out of retirement to relieve the burden from the younger police, who refer to him as “Retread�, while Claire, considerably younger, has transferred from Homicide.
Initially they have a scratchy relationship, each haunted by past cases, but they are both committed to this new unit. They find a 2008 coin under the bones, so that gives them a time frame around which they can gather other evidence.
As well as countless phone calls, door-knocking, and tracking down past residents of the area, they also attend the pathologist’s examination of the remains to find cause of death, possible signs of poison and the like.
“Under the cold bright ceiling lights and in the chilled air of the autopsy room, they pulled on ill-fitting smocks and overshoes and waited. . . . The bodies were stored on steel trolleys in refrigerated units. Even the gleaming steel added to the chill in the air.�
They ask a lot of unanswerable questions and wish they could get a facial reconstruction, but where’s the budget for things like that?
�‘Come on, doc,� Auhl said. ‘Haven’t you got any tame PhD students in the building?�
The pathologist gave it some thought. ‘Actually, yes.�
‘They might get a kick out of joining the fight for justice,� [Senior Sergeant] Colfax said.
‘They might get a kick out of a few dollars, too,� Karalis said, and Auhl could see him considering the paperwork, the budget, whom to sweet talk. ‘I’ll see what I can do.��
Auhl has a couple of other interesting cold cases he still wants to follow, and the story moves between these three cases and his complicated home life.
He inherited his parents� huge old house with many rooms, now home to his daughter, his ex-wife (occasional lover when the spirit moves her), students, and assorted waifs and strays, like women and kids escaping abusive partners.
I began this book as a library audio, and I admit I got confused. As the story moved through the three cases and the many characters. I nearly gave up, until I thought, hang on - this is GARRY DISHER, a favourite author � he’d never let me down. So I bought a copy and am glad I did.
Auhl seems to be one of those guys who attracts extended family, and not just because he’s solvent and generous. He listens, he cares, and when necessary, he’ll get between you and the bad guy. He’s one of Disher’s good guys (unlike Wyatt � great character but a crook). Also, people care about him.
I ended up loving it. The narrator was fine, but for some reason I didn't engage with the story as well in the audio. I think that is more to do with me than with the narration. In a perfect world, I'd have both. ...more
4� “The man talked too much. . . . The man laughed, dropping the small nugget into a black plastic film canister and pocketing it. ‘Plenty out there, if4� “The man talked too much. . . . The man laughed, dropping the small nugget into a black plastic film canister and pocketing it. ‘Plenty out there, if you have the patience to go look.� . . . …the two men still sitting silently in the corner. Their eyes were firmly fixed on the man with gold in his pocket. He was on his phone now…�
Outback Western Australia’s goldfields still attract prospectors and tourists. This fellow is so excited with his find, that he has attracted exactly the wrong kind of attention. When he doesn’t show up at his daughter’s as expected, she contacts police and then Gabe Ahern.
Why Gabe? He was an old dogger (dingo-trapper) whom she’d met when he was tracking people smugglers who’d set up a slave trade in the outback. Courtney is a RAN (Remote Area Nurse) and had helped him save the refugees. She’s aware that Gabe probably knows the Cue area better than the police because he grew up there.
Gabe collects his refugee friend, Amin Tahir (one of the people Courtney helped), and they drive north from Perth to Cue. At the police station, where the SES (rescue service) and other volunteers have gathered, they meet Gabe’s old friend, Antonio Vargis, a Macedonian immigrant (from 30 years ago) who still speaks with such a thick “Mediterranean accent� that the Cue locals refer to it as “Antonese�.
I enjoy Trant’s characters and his descriptions. I can ‘see� these people. Here are two.
“Antonio Vargis was a short, white-haired man with a deeply tanned and jovial face, though most of it was hidden behind a thick moustache and close-cropped beard. It was no surprise the grocery store owner was called upon to play Santa at the community Christmas tree each year � and each year the kids went home with an expanded vocabulary to complement their new toys.� . . . ‘Long way between here and Jake’s,� drawled the jackaroo-looking man. He was sprawled in his chair, long legs stretched out in front of him. Gabe got the impression he was one of those fellas so laid-back you had to line them up with a post to make sure they were moving.�
It turns out the jackaroo-looking man is the young pilot who’s been doing searches for other missing people and is now available to help hunt for Terry Drage, Courtney’s dad. All they have to go on is that Terry told his daughter he’d prospect some more around Cue and then let her know when he was leaving for the Jakob’s River community (“Jake’s�), where she works, in time for her birthday.
Since then, no word. Gabe, Amin, and Antonio make a great team. They split up in different ways, depending on where they’re needed, and talk to the locals. It seems there are other prospectors who’ve gone missing and never found, and a few who’ve been found dead, supposedly accidentally (falling down a mine shaft) or heart attack. All were known to have found and sold gold.
This is not the Outback familiar to readers. It is wet, muddy, unbelievably slippery, and it makes driving next to impossible on any dirt roads. So Gabe has hidden his ute in a safe spot and walked through the bush to spy on a campsite of people he suspects.
“Gabe glanced down at his boots, heavy with mud. Sh*t. There was no way to cover his tracks. He could see the flash of a torch rounding the van. His only option was to keep moving, doing his best not to slip. He struggled through the undergrowth, wincing at every rustling branch and each twinge of his hip. Branches snagged at his jacket like long bony fingers, scraping against the leather. They tore at his beanie and raked against his face, and the clumps of lush wanderrie grass threatened to trip him up every step of the way. He pushed onwards, the long green strands soaking his jeans with moisture.
‘Got footprints! Someone’s been here!�
There are plenty of heart-in-the-mouth moments, and with Trant, we can’t be sure our favourite people will survive. Those who haven’t survived from Gabe’s previous exploits are remembered fondly in occasional intervening chapters titled “Before�. Not only do they explain some of the background, they also remind fans of what haunts and/or drives him.
I can’t not mention Ric Herbert’s narration. I think the author covers it perfectly in his acknowledgments, where he gives thanks to, among others,
“Ric Herbert, the voice of Gabe, and who I now hear in my head when writing these stories: thank you for bringing him to life, and for swearing so beautifully. �
I hear Ric’s voice too, not only for Gabe, but for the many other distinctive voices and accents of Trant’s people � Antonio (thick, gruff Macedonian), Amir (Afghan - Pashtun Afghan, please!), snivelling cowards, tough barmaids, Heidi (his girlfriend), and the various cops and miners. He is not just a narrator, he is a voice actor, and by golly he’s good! You can listen to a preview in libraries or on Amazon, etc.
I sometimes listen while I’m reading or alternate between book and audio. I will add that you don’t need to have read the first two books to enjoy this one. Trant fills in any necessary blanks., but of course I recommend the first two.
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