Author Interview: In Conversation with Chloe Hooper

Sam talk to Chloe Hooper about The Tall Man, and what it’s like to discover the heart of darkness in your own country.

Sam Ruddock: First up, can you tell us a bit about The Tall Man?

Chloe Hooper: One morning, in the Far-north Queensland Aboriginal community of Palm Island, a local man called Cameron Doomadgee was arrested for swearing at a white policeman, and forty minutes later lay dead in the island’s police station with injuries of the kind sustained in a car or plane crash. The officer, Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley, claimed his prisoner had tripped over a step. The Tall Man tells the story of Palm Island, of the enigmatic Hurley– and of the struggle to bring him to trial.

SR: What was your inspiration for writing The Tall Man? Was there a moment when the need to write it struck you?

CH: From the first day I arrived on the island I knew the dimensions of this case would only fit a book: the collision between Hurley and Doomadgee told a much bigger tale about Aboriginal history, religion, cosmology; the destructive forces of white settlement; and the state of racial reconciliation in early twenty-first century Australia. Right from the start the story was under my skin, and I wanted to know what had really happened between those two men in the Palm Island police station.

SR: Your first novel, A Child’s Book of True Crime, was a convincing fiction of hatred and death. But it was still fiction. In The Tall Man that hatred and death becomes chillingly real. What, to you, were the big differences between writing the two books? Is there a clear distinction between fiction and non-fiction or do they blend into each other?

CH: My first novel was a parody of a true-crime book, so I couldn’t miss the irony when I found myself writing a real one.  In non-fiction, it’s useful to think as a novelist might about the best ways to confront and arrange material, but you have to paint within the borders of fact. That is not to say necessarily that those boundaries limit the writer’s canvas—on the contrary, what I saw on Palm Island, and what happened in this case, was often beyond the reach of my imagination.

SR: Most islands off the Queensland coast host tourists visiting the Barrier Reef. Palm Island is different. Formally an Aboriginal reserve it is today the home to around 2,500 inhabitants, 90 per cent of whom are unemployed. Alcoholism and violence are common. Could you say something of the factors that have led to such cataclysmic social breakdown?

CH: Palm is a stunningly beautiful tropical island—a tourist brochure paradise like the others, but with a hellish history it can’t escape.  In the 1920s it was settled as an open air jail for Aboriginal people from over forty different tribes around Queensland. (By the early twentieth century all “full blood” Aborigines and “half- caste” women and children were required by law to live on one of the mostly mission-run settlements throughout the state, under government control.) If an Aborigine ‘misbehaved’ on a regular reserve— for instance, he asked about his wages, or was caught speaking a traditional language—he was sent, often in leg irons, to Palm Island, or Punishment Island as it was known. In its isolation the settlement became increasingly authoritarian: a kind of tropical gulag. Even in the early 1970s it was still completely segregated. After decades of failed government policy, it’s now a place with terrible health, life-expectancy, education, and economic prospects.

SR: For research you spent a long time living amongst Aboriginal women. What experiences and impressions have you retained from that time?

CH: I didn’t actually spend a long time living amongst Aboriginal women, but when I did travel to Palm Island or other Indigenous communities, I formed strong relationships with many women, including Cameron Doomadgee’s sister, Elizabeth.  There’s a scene in The Tall Man where I go to a prayer meeting with Elizabeth and hear a group of older women singing Amazing Grace: I’ve certainly retained a sense of how graceful people can be in the midst of grief, or rage, or ongoing hardship.

SR: The police officer at the centre of this book, The Tall Man himself, Chris Hurley refused to talk to you at any point during the writing of this book. Yet you are scrupulously fair to him. Can you tell us a little more about him? While writing In Cold Blood, Truman Capote famously found great humanity in the character of Perry Smith. What are your thoughts and feelings towards Hurley?

CH: When I first started researching this case, Hurley struck me as almost a cartoon “Deep North” copper. His story of tripping through the doorway sounded straight out of Jim Crow Alabama, but slowly I realised he was far more complicated. As a young officer, Hurley had been posted to the Indigenous community of Thursday Island, in the Torres Strait, where, according to the Aboriginal activist Murrandoo Yanner, who was later his friend, Hurley realised he was a racist and decided to change his ways.  He set up a sports club for local kids. And he continued serving in remote Aboriginal communities, along the way doing more volunteer work.  I travelled to some of the places Hurley worked, around Cape York and the Gulf Country, and I spoke to many people who genuinely adored him; old people who found him respectful; kids who he’d taken camping and given driving lessons in the police van. My question then became how had a young, idealistic cop transformed from his brother’s keeper into his brother’s killer?

SR: And what of the victim, Cameron Doomadgee?

CH: Cameron Doomadgee was born with a terrible legacy: his grandparents were survivors of frontier violence in far-north Queensland; his parents were the survivors of Australia’s Stolen Generation. Cameron was by all accounts a peaceful, “happy-go-lucky” man who loved his family and never looked for a fight–but he was also an alcoholic. He and Hurley were the same age the morning they met: thirty-six. The terrible statistical truth is that Cameron had another decade to live according to the odds whereas Hurley had half his life ahead of him.

SR: How difficult and how important is it for an author to remain neutral in a case that excites such passions as this?

CH: In non-fiction, it’s important for the reader to feel they can trust the authorial voice—if they smell ideology or a political agenda the trust is blown.

SR: This case, like that of OJ Simpson in the US, seems to have grown to embody all of the hurt and guilt and prejudice at the heart of relations between native and white Australia. Is that a fair statement, and could you say a little about what has happened since the book was published?

CH: Perhaps less like Simpson than Rodney King…but  I’ve often thought the Palm Island case takes Australians back to the nation’s original sin: a white man killing a black man; to a moment, as you say, full of hurt and guilt and prejudice. Certainly, the legal fight between Hurley and the Palm Island community is one neither side can give up. In 2006, a coroner found Hurley had fatally assaulted Cameron Doomadgee, but the following year he was acquitted of manslaughter. Most recently, Hurley has applied to have the coroner’s findings against him overturned. As a result, the inquest into the death in custody has been reopened. At the time of writing, a new coroner has just reheard the evidence as to what happened the morning of Doomadgee’s death, and we are waiting to see what findings he delivers.

SR: In February 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued an apology to the Aboriginal population for the Stolen Generations and “laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.” What do you think this apology meant to Australians? What do you think the future holds for the Aboriginal population?

CH: I think the apology was a very important moment for Australians—full of hope and marking a national shift in consciousness. Unfortunately, however, the economic and social gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is as wide as ever.

SR: The last line of the book is: “I had wanted to know more about my country and now I did – now I knew more than I wanted to.” Do you still feel the same in retrospect and which elements of knowledge made you feel so strongly at the time?

CH: I hadn’t truly understood the depth of racism in Australia – now and in the past – and how it corrupts everything it touches. I don’t regret having a keener awareness of this, although it can still viscerally shock me.

SR: Have you always wanted to be a writer?

CH: This does seem to have been a delusion that’s stuck…

SR: Do you have a specific place in which you write?

CH: I usually work in my study at home.

SR: How do you structure your day as a writer?

CH: I try to get to work soon after getting up. (I’ve read somewhere that Alice Munro won’t even talk to her husband in the morning before going to the desk!) Then the battle against procrastination begins…

SR: What do you write on/with?

CH: I tend to make a lot of notes, put them on the computer and then do most of the serious work on my printed drafts.

SR: You seem to choose to write about difficult topics. How do you separate work from your personal life?

CH: You can’t separate completely, but writing this book was a very rich experience. There was also a lot of poetry and beauty in the story—which I hope in some way I capture.

SR: Are there any other ‘True Crime’ books you would urge us to read?

CH: I count Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer as a sort of meta-true crime book, about crime and the ethics and psychology of crime-reporting, which I would recommend to anyone.

SR: What do you think the appeal of True Crime books is? Is it the reportage aspect, or something murkier?

CH: Probably something murkier…I think people find true crime fascinating in part because it reveals the limits of human behaviour. There can also be a Hitchcockian element to the stories – a sort of “it could happen to you” element: people wake up, like Hurley probably did that morning, and think the day will be just like any other to find, however, that their lives will slip off their carefully laid tracks and they’ll be out of control.

SR: Which writers do you admire?

CH: Alice Munro, JM Coetzee, Charlotte Bronte…

SR: Are there any up and coming writers you are particularly excited about?

CH: It’s terrible, but I tend to read writers who are more established, partly to see if they have any tricks I can steal!

SR: What are your five favourite books?

CH: The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm; Disgrace, JM Coetzee; As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner; Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte;  The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer

SR: Finally, are there any questions we should have asked but didn’t? Is there anything more you would like to say but haven’t had a chance to?

CH: I don’t think so, but thank you for asking.

SR: Chloe Hooper, thanks for giving us this fascinating insight into The Tall Man.


This interview was conducted by Sam on behalf of Writers’ Centre Norwich as part of the Summer Reads programme launching in June. For more information, please see www.summerreads.org.uk

Book Review: The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island by Chloe Hooper

Read: May 2010


Palm Island, November 2004. A 36 year old Aboriginal man, Cameron Doomadgee, is arrested for swearing at a police officer. He is drunk, and as they arrive at the station he strikes Senior Sergeant Christopher Hurley in the face.

45 minutes later Cameron Doomadgee is dead, his liver cleaved in two as you might see after a fatal car crash. The police say he fell on a step but others disagree. A week later there is a riot during which the police station is burnt to the ground and Hurley’s residence with it. A relief team is sent in and Hurley goes into hiding. But the case doesn’t go away. An inquest is launched, then a criminal trial. It’s the first time in Australian history that a police officer has been brought before the law to answer for the death of an Aboriginal prisoner in their care. In the process the trial comes to embody all of the hurt and guilt and prejudice that underline relations between native and white Australia.

The Tall Man is the story of what happened on that fateful morning, and all that followed. It is about Palm Island, a tropical ‘paradise’ off the Queensland coast, and the horrendous legacy of disadvantage it has been bequeathed by history. It is about Hurley and other frontier police officers, and the communities they serve. It is about Australia at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Fusing personal story with anthropology, history with mythology, and the literary acumen of a novelist with the clear eye of a reputable journalist, Chloe Hooper has written a stunning work of narrative non-fiction.  In the pantheon of the true crime genre it sits right up there with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

Like the Holcomb of Capote’s work, Palm Island is an ‘out there’ sort of place, easily, and perhaps conveniently, forgotten. For much of the twentieth century it was used as a sort of island gulag reserve and missionary for Aboriginals who digressed from white rule – such offences as speaking a native language, getting pregnant to a white man, disruption or being born of mixed heritage. Although this ceased in the mid-1980s and the island now has semblance of self-rule, the impact of these ‘stolen generations’ has led to social breakdown of a quite startling proportions. The unemployment rate is somewhere around the 90% mark, incidences of alcoholism and domestic abuse are rife. When Chloe Hooper – middle-class suburbanite from Melbourne who had spent much of her twenties living abroad and “knew very little about indigenous Australia” – arrived there she describes herself as feeling “incandescently white.” Yet one of the most notable, and laudable, aspects of The Tall Man is that it is primarily about people rather than issues. Hooper gives a human face to statistics and couches much of the book in personal accounts. At one point, reflecting on the fact that Hurley and Doomadgee were each 36 years old on the day they met, she realises that if one were to deduce their life expectancy based on that of their wider communities’, Cameron had only another decade to live whereas Hurley had half his life ahead of him.

At its heart, The Tall Man is a personal journey – for both Hooper and the reader – into the heart of darkness in Australia, and an investigation of the uncomfortable troubles that lurk there. She is the perfect sort of narrator: an outsider wherever she goes who is determined to understand the wider situation and has the skill to get people to open up. Her approach is an interesting one. Neither journalist nor anthropologist, she is not content to remain on the sidelines, to look but not touch. Over the course of the book she meets people from all sides and grows close to Cameron’s family. Although originally brought in by the lawyer representing the Doomadgee family, and feeling great solidarity for them and their cause, she doesn’t let this inherent bias cloud her reportage and remains scrupulously fair to all involved. This is particularly noticeable where Christopher Hurley is concerned. An enigmatic giant standing at 6’7”, he is presented as an ambitious man who has devoted his career to working in some of the most remote and difficult communities. Hooper travels to these Torres Strait and Gulf of Carpentaria communities and meets people who describe him fondly, and tell stories about him setting up local sports clubs and taking children on trips. She meets a prominent Aboriginal activist who describes an early situation in which Hurley was confronted by his inherent racism and decided to change. Yet others who knew Hurley talk of a megalomaniac policeman with a temper, ready and willing to administer “frontier justice” should anyone transgress his authority. Hooper talks to people who celebrate this sort of no-nonsense policing as the only way to get by in hard, hard deep north, but others describe him as a bully. One of the most interesting aspects of The Tall Man is that the reader quickly comes to perceive that, while race may have been a driving factor in the public response to the case, Doomadgee’s death may not have been racially motivated at all.

It is just one of the many factors that muddy the water and leads directly to one of the many seems that run through The Tall Man: an investigation of frontier policing, and the contradictions at its heart. Hooper quotes Norman Mailer and George Orwell amongst others, and reflects upon the difficult questions that arise when one person or small group of people holds all the legal power in a community. Particularly a community as difficult as Palm Island.

“Can you step into this dysfunction and desperation and not be corrupted in some way? In a community of extreme violence, are you, too, forced to be violent? If you are despised, as the police are, might you not feel the need to be despicable sometimes? Could anyone not be overcome by “the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate?””

While Hurley emerges as a multi-faceted and complex character about whom we suspend our judgement, the Queensland Police Union does not. Their behaviour, as told by Hooper, is a scandalous mix of blind ‘defend our own’ attitudes with menacing threats should the courts find against Hurley. The chapter on a rally they held in support of Hurley makes for incredibly disconcerting reading.

Indeed, The Tall Man is packed with affecting moments of all sorts. Scenes to make one angry with impotent rage, disgusted, uncomfortable or sad. But in-between these, there are passages of great humanity: a day in church with Doomadgee’s sister Elizabeth, a letter from an officer who doesn’t support the Police Union’s response. There’s a second of eye contact in court between Hooper and Hurley, the funeral of Cameron’s son who kills himself two years after his father’s death. One of the most encompassing of these is a comparison between two witnesses at the trial which comes to represent so much of the racial divide. First there is Hurley, “like TE Lawrence back from the wilderness, smooth and upstanding at the London Club.” And against him a resident of Palm Island, who was there when Doomadgee was arrested that November morning:

“Hunched slightly in her faded clothes, rolls of fat on her back, Gladys Nugent stood for everything white Australia doesn’t want to know about black Australia. She was alcoholic, diabetic, and she had heart trouble. She told the court about drinking all day and night, being bashed, binging on methylated spirits; about her partner, Roy, being in jail; about her nephew Patrick sniffing petrol and hanging himself. She had a plain, obstinate dignity. And fleetingly it was not clear who was more abject here – Gladys or the lawyer paid to hector her.”

Ostensibly about the death of Cameron Doomadgee and the case that followed, it is really about what this case says about Australia at the beginning of the twenty-first century. What Chloe Hooper finds is a nuanced and complex situation in which there are few straight-forward answers and none of them are particularly palatable. Like the case at its heart, The Tall Man is full of contradiction and inversion. Hooper seeks to understand without judgement, and to reflect without distortion. It is a thoroughly researched and important work, but one that reads like a novel. The Tall Man presents a passionate, engaging, and incredibly moving account of life on Palm Island and it is humanity that shines through brightest, even – or perhaps particularly – amidst the most vociferous outrage.

“I had wanted to know more about my country and now I did”, Hooper reflects at the end. “Now I knew more than I wanted to.”

Vintage Books, January 2010, 9780099520764, 258pp

8.5 out of 10

Theft: A Love Story - Peter Carey

Read: September 2006

You can see what Peter Carey is trying to say here – the struggle for Australian stars to crack the international scene – but for me he does not quite pull it off. This is the story of Michael Boone, aka Butcher Bones, and his struggle to be taken seriously on the world stage. It is also the story of his ‘broken’ brother Hugh, and his adventure with the world. While this has a good mystery plot set in the corrupt world of international art dealing, it never seems to go further that that. I was hoping for more from my first foray into Peter Carey. Read this, enjoy this, but do not expect it to live long in the memory.

4 out of 10

Slow Man - J.M. Coetzee

Read: December 2006

Cycling one day, Paul Rayment is hit by a careless young driver and after he ‘flew through the air with the greatest of ease’ finds his body maimed and his mind mired in the quicksand of regret. Nothing can lift his spirits until he employs a Croatian nurse and falls (absurdly) in love. When he succumbs to the myth that speaking ones love will transform his life, he finds himself leeching onto her surrogate family in the hope of rectifying his regrets. But when an elderly writer arrives to cast him as a character in her latest novel he is forced to listen to his conscience and analyse what is left of his disfigured life.

Coetzee loves getting into the minds of cantankerous old men whose staunch opposition to the mindset of the time leaves them adrift in a world they no longer see as their own. This is a typical Coetzee novel, full of his incisive analysis and evocative language; a good book, well worth reading.

5 out of 10

The Songlines - Bruce Chatwin

Read: July 2008

In 1987, Bruce Chatwin published The Songlines. It went straight to number one and spent the next eleven months residing in the Sunday Times top ten. Part fictionalised travelogue, part metaphysical exploration of the nomadic lifestyle, Chatwin writes with real passion and conviction about one of the most fascinating and romantic of Aboriginal mythologies. The Songlines stretch across Australia, invisible pathways which criss-cross the land telling stories of ancestral journeys and the creation of the terrain itself. The Songlines charts Bruce Chatwin’s journey to unravel their meanings, and understand their significance.

We join Bruce as he arrives in Alice Springs. In an art shop there he comes across the commonplace perception of Aboriginal culture: the white westerner buying a piece of Aboriginal artwork to take home and demonstrate their romantic anthropological experience. But Bruce is having none of that. He meets a Russian/Australian man named Arkady who works for the railway company, and joins him as he journeys through various tribal lands, meeting elders and trying to find a way of building a railway which does not cross the songlines. Over the course of the journey, Bruce speaks with all sorts of Aborigines, as well as many of the people who work with them. The picture he builds of their amazing songlines both debunks some of the new age mysticism that surrounds them, and at the same time manages to make them even more remarkable than you could ever have imagined.

So that is where we are half way through the book. So far, so good. In fact, so far, great! The tale is involving, packed full of fascinating information, and human stories. But then Bruce Chatwin decides to tie in the lessons he has learnt about the songlines with his grandiose notions of the importance of nomadic lifestyle to the human psyche. So suddenly we get some sort of unedited slush pile of all the notes he has taken over the years for a book he never published. From a fascinating travel journal, the book becomes a dense socio-philosophical treatise on the glories of travel.

“Our nature lies in movement, complete calm is death.”
Pascal, Pensees

“To live in one land, is captivitie,
To Runne all countries, a wild roguery”
John Donne, Third Elegie

“He who does no travel does not know the value of men.”
Moorish Proverb

“This life is a hospital in which each sick man is possessed by a desire to change beds. One would prefer to suffer by the stove. Another believes he would recover if he sat by the window.
I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.”
Baudelaire, ‘Any Where Out of this World!’

There are some fascinating quotes, in fact there are hundreds of quotes gleamed from across history. These sort of musings infuse the notebooks completely. Through a mixture of cultural anthropology, personal experience, and philosophy, Chatwin advances the argument that man originated as a nomad, and that is how he is happiest. Just as babies are calmed by the motion of their parents’ walk, so the human psyche at all ages, finds contentment and peace in movement. And this movement, not just in Australia but across the world, has left its mark on the earth, in stories and songs and culture. It is our collective history, and a lesson in our future.

However, his theories do go on. When I picked up The Songlines, this is not what I really expected. It is hard work at times, and the logic of the argument isn’t completely convincing. But no-one can deny the passion of his argument, nor the energy with which he conveys it.

The Songlines is a celebration of travel and the constant search for experience, and beauty, and meaning. If you have the travel bug, then you will love this book, it is an absolute must read. Or if, like me, you don’t but are fascinated by the almost vicelike grip it holds on some people, then it is an equally fascinating investigation into the mindset of travelling. The Songlines is a book that many, many people have absolutely loved. And with a beautiful set of newly issued jackets, Bruce Chatwin is ready for a whole new generation of readers to discover him anew.

Not just a fascinating investigation into the Aboriginal Songlines, this is Bruce Chatwin’s treatise on the imperative to travel which is common across humankind. Passionately argued and packed full of great quotes, this is one of the biggest selling travel books of all time.

7 out of 10

Review: The Lost Dog - Michele de Kretser

Read: August 2008

The Lost Dog provides one of the best lessons in writing one could hope to find. If there is ever a book you can hand to a creative writing student and say: “this is what happens when you try to be profound at the expense of writing a story. This is what happens when you let florid, pretentious prose marry complex plot lines without thought to what the reader wants to read.” If there is one lesson to learn from this book it is this: less is most definitely more. As G.K. Chesterton so wisely put it: “Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”

Tom Loxley is a childless divorcee, an insipid, self-absorbed scholar trying to finish his book on Henry James. And when his dog goes missing, he is plunged into a quandary of self analysis which leads to lots of grand sounding thoughts and few real self-discoveries. His mother is growing old and infirm, and he must confront the steady march of time. It is all very clichéd. I hate it when people criticise the ‘literary’ novel, but reading this book I can see why they do. I like books where not much happens, where there is a meditation on life and art and other metaphysical concepts, but this is just boring. 

Having lost his dog, Tom is cast back seven months, to reminisce upon the time when he walked into an art gallery and met the mysterious artist, Nelly Zhang. Soon he is visiting Nelly in her ramshackle warehouse home-come-studio, and becoming increasingly fascinated with both Nelly, and her art. The two fall in love and, fast forward seven months, search wildly for the eponymous lost dog. Confused? So was I. Especially since, interspersed with these two plots, there are many others. There is Tom’s bland childhood in India; the unremarkable search for said dog; a mystery surrounding the end of Nelly’s marriage; the invincible march of old-age upon Tom’s octogenarian mother; an investigation into the connections between art and life. The Lost Dog reads like an over-knotted shoelace; just when you think you are about to get into one of the plots, you find it densely tangled in another. And with the possible exception of the mystery surrounding Nelly’s marriage (which occasionally threatens to develop into a full-blown story but is repeatedly tugged back into the mundanity of the other plots) none of these seems to lead anywhere. The knot is impenetrable.

This is a book which is complex for complexities sake, over-written for the sake of pretension. Tom doesn’t go shopping, he strolls “along packed aisles” marvelling “at the ease with which articles changed status, transmuted by the alchemy of desire.” In a garden he encounters box hedges that contain “the kind of roses whose icy perfection was impervious to common rain.” When he sees sodden fields, they resemble “a bitch who has whelped too often.”

At one point, de Kretser has Tom ruminate that: “What he missed in images…was the passage of time. ‘Stories are about time. But looking’s a present-tense activity. We live in an age where everything’s got to be now, because consumerism’s based on change. Images seem complicit with that somehow.”

How odd then that The Lost Dog seems to have absolutely no consistent sense of either plot development, or time. Perhaps that is the point: that art and stories are different beasts. If so, this is a perfect demonstration of that. Even though the chapters are split into days of the week, there is no linear plot whatsoever. Because of the shifting time of the various plots, it isn’t even clear when Tom is searching for the dog, and when other things in his life are happening. I was about halfway through when I realised there was a seven month shift in time between some of the events. And in the past the dog is barely mentioned and clearly not a cornerstone of his life.

And this is the biggest problem: the dog is not a character in itself, but rather a literary metaphor. It is this which I found most frustrating. How are we supposed to sympathise with the loss of Tom’s dog when it doesn’t even have a name? The absent canine is referred to simply as “the dog.” Tom professes to suffer greatly from the dogs disappearance, but he doesn’t seem to have developed any sort of relationship with the dog before this. In his eyes, it isn’t even worthy of a name.

I could write for hours on what I found annoying in The Lost Dog, but Sam Jordison, writing for the Guardian’s Booker Prize blog, sums it up well:

“There are more annoyances. First: an overuse of colons. Coupled with incredibly short sentences. Full of portent. But signifying what? Nothing.
Sometimes: the problem is compounded in painfully short paragraphs.
Sometimes: another crime. Certain words are clumsily – painfully – repeated and twisted all up into oddly ungrammatical sentences.”

At one point Tom refers to his youth as “odorous, unhygienic and refusing to be disposed of with decent haste.” He need not limit himself to his youth, his pseudo middle-age crisis, in my mind, cannot be disposed of with decent haste either.

It is not all bad. There are some wonderful observations. At one point Nelly argues “doesn’t setting out to reject the past guarantee you’ll never be free of it? It’s like being modern means walking with a built-in limp.’” But these are lost amid the knot of confusion and banality. 

A.S. Byatt has written that, “whatever the literary equivalent of perfect pitch it, Michele de Kretser has it.” On this evidence she performs month long operatic works, and it is too tiring to sit and listen.

Diary of a Bad Year - J.M. Coetzee

Literary heavyweight J.M. Coetzee returns with… well I’m not exactly sure. Is it a fictionalised excuse for Coetzee to air his thoughts on the world we are living in? Is it a subtle critique of the idea that everyone should have ‘strong opinions’? Is it a biography of an aging man thinly veiled under the guise of fiction?

The plot revolves around a seventy year old writer (who happens to be Coetzee himself) who is asked to contribute to a book entitled ‘Strong Opinions’. He uses the opportunity to air his views on the world, writing essays on the nature of the state, Al Quaida, Tony Blair, and music. But he is losing muscle control in his arms and cannot type up his notes so he hires a beautiful young woman to act as his secretary come surreptitious muse. What ensues is typical old man fiction: slightly perverted, slightly pathetic. Familiar in a sense to the plots of both Disgrace and Slow Man but scaled down. It is a very short book.

Does that sound simple? I can assure you it anything but. Each page is separated into three separate sections: one the essays he is writing; one with his voice on what is happening; and one in the voice of his graceful young Philippino secretary. I am not sure if you are meant to read it page by page, or as three separate stories one after the other.

Overall it is billed as “a thoroughly contemporary novel” and in a way it is. It is post-modern in structure and airs views on the complex world we are living in. The essays are interesting, at times controversial and deeply philosophical. At one point he laments that no one reads political discourses anymore and you get the impression that this is really what he is trying to accomplish – but in a format that will reach a wider audience. If so that is a shame.

I enjoyed reading this but I fear it is a novel that will not live long in my mind. There are some really interesting topics discussed and as a work of non fiction it is intensely interesting, but as a novel, either I missed something, or it doesn’t really quite work.

4 out of 10