January 2015

April 2014

Extract fro a Guardian review:
Barracuda is the writer's fifth novel and follows the previous four, especially The Slap and Dead Europe, in conducting a loud and provocative argument about what it means to be Australian. Half-Greek, gay and dubious about sport, Tsiolkas has the perspective of a triple outsider and, in both the Olympics opening ceremony scene and at a tense meal that takes place on Australia Day, characters challenge, with blistering invective, the image of the nation promoted by its politicians and marketers. In words that make John Pilger seem like a spokesman for the tourist board, a friend of Dan's concludes of her country: "We are parochial and narrow-minded and we are racist and ungenerous and we occupy this land illegitimately and we're toadies to the Poms and servile to the Yanks."
Novelists may of course disagree with their characters, who may also dispute between themselves, and what makes Barracuda a profound work of fiction rather than an anti-government pamphlet is that the attractive aspects of the Australian character – wit, vigour, optimism – and the astonishing beauty of the light and landscape are also given their due: characters who try to leave Australia are generally drawn back.

From another Guardian review:

One of the most striking themes is what a devil of a lot of plastic there is floating around in the sea. In the past few years the World Federation of Scientists, he writes, added plastic contamination to its list of planetary emergencies. "Also on the list: missile proliferation, cultural pollution, and defence against cosmic objects." Some of this plastic washes up by the ton on remote beaches; much never comes ashore. Vast currents such as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre swirl around, and in their becalmed centres floating material accumulates. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a thousands-of-miles-wide wilderness of plastic water bottles, old trainers, TVs, and foam packaging material in various degrees of disintegration. Plastic, Hohn writes, is "intended to be thrown away but chemically engineered to last. By offering the false promise of disposability, of consumption without cost, it has helped create a culture of wasteful make-believe, an economy of forgetting."
This is as much a literary as an environmental expedition, though. It isn't a book that bludgeons you so much as seeks to seduce you in – invites you to drift companionably alongside the author and his Floatees. It won't be for everyone: it's a baggy and structureless piece of work, and some will find the whimsy wearing. I liked it. At its best it is sublime, and if at its worst it's pseudy, it is at least self-mockingly pseudy. Here's something original and eccentric and multi-faceted that tells you a good many interesting things about the world – and then, not having an index, maximises your chance of forgetting them. That is, in a way, in keeping.

From one reviewer:

My favorite Iain Banks novel is Whit, the story of a young girl who grows up as the Elect Of God in a cozy techno-phobic cult in Scotland. She's supposed to inherit the leadership of the cult eventually, but her brother Allan is trying to muscle her out. And her grandfather, the cult's founder and leader, turns out to be a lying dirtbag who tries to sexually assault her at one point, in a completely disturbing scene that sticks in your mind forever afterwards:

He gave a grunt and twisted his hand free of mine; it dived between my tightly clenched legs, trying to finger my sex; I heaved and wriggled out from underneath him, rolling away over the bed; he grabbed at me, catching my ankle as I tried to stand, bringing me down on all fours. 'Submit, Isis, submit! Prove your love for God!' He tried to mount me from behind but I wrestled him off.

And yet there's something genuinely transformative as well as horrifying about Whit, as Isis ventures out from her sheltered religious community into the "real" world and sees "Babylondon" from the vantage point of someone who's used to seeing magic everywhere. And Isis' journey learns to her discovering her own voice and taking on the power her exalted religious title always implied, so that by the end of the book she has as much stature as any great fantasy heroine.

From one reviewer:

The title of this book is not about me,’ the author modestly avers in the prologue. ‘It is about the elephants – it was they who whispered to me and taught me how to listen.’ 
Except I’m not entirely convinced he’s sincere. Anthony’s stirring tale – of a game reserve (South Africa’s Thula Thula, near Durban), a herd of rogue elephants and one man who battled to understand and protect them – is told in the voice of one used to having an audience. 
As a narrator, Anthony is keen to dispense titbits of personal detail – about his wife, Françoise, and their dogs, mostly – along with his insights into animal psychology, generally along faintly mystical lines; he attributes to the eles' powers of intelligence and communication far beyond those generally accepted by science. Sometimes it’s charming; often, a little irritating. 
That said, you’d need a heart of stone not to be charmed by the sense of place and enthralled by the episodes recounted from the lives of Nana, Frankie, big male Mnumzane and their family. Strong personalities, whisperers they’re not; natural leads, certainly – and with a cast this strong, the script doesn’t need to be great literature to provide a gripping show.