Best Books of the Year Tony Birch Anthony Lane’s collected New Yorker reviews (Nobody’s In a year when I did not look at much fiction, both the best Perfect, Picador) a bit too relentlessly smarty-pants, try and worst of my reading dealt with Australian culture and Ryan Gilbey’s It Don’t Worry Me: Nashville, Jaws, Star Wars history. The bad writing I will leave aside. Mark Peel’s and Beyond (Faber) for a display of prodigious erudition The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty (CUP) is an in gym-trim prose. ethical and passionate account of the realities of living poor in Australia. Colin Tatz’s With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting Alison Broinowski on Genocide (Verso) is an intelligent and mature engagement We will decide, said Stalin, what words mean and what they with a discussion that must be had in this country. Don don’t. The writers of my three best books all reclaim that right. Watson’s Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s Dark Victory (Allen & (Knopf) provides a timely warning that the issues of concern Unwin) shows that our leaders lied about Tampa and warn to Peel and Tatz will not be enhanced by using the word that, realising it worked, they can do so again. Don Watson’s ‘enhancement’ (among others). Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Language (Knopf) delves into our decayed language, and reveals an Australian Neal Blewett instinct to disguise the truth from ourselves. Clyde Prestowitz’s Two works of contemporary history — continents apart — Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of left the most lasting impressions from my reading this year. Good Intentions (Basic Books) empties the US can of words Dark Victory (Allen & Unwin), by David about war, trade and the environment, Marr and Marian Wilkinson, is a sombre, and shows that there’s worse still in there. dispassionate, yet compassionate ac- All three books provoke more independ- count of the Tampa and its consequences. ent Australian decision-making. Wide-ranging and meticulous in its re- search, this authoritative narrative of this Paul Brunton shameful and shaming affair leaves few Alan Frost’s The Global Reach of Em- of the major participants with much credit, pire: Britain’s Maritime Expansion in apart from that admirable Norwegian, Arne the Indian and Pacific Oceans, 1764– Rinnan, captain of the Tampa. Writing on 1815 (Miegunyah Press) is an enthral- a wider canvas, Paul Ginsborg, in Italy ling account of the world’s first world- and Its Discontents, 1980–2001 (Pen- wide empire, told by a scholar who wears guin), provides, through a wealth of de- his considerable learning lightly. It was tail lightly born and lucidly presented, a pursuant to this global strategy that the compelling account of Italy in the last colony of New South Wales was estab- decades of the last century. In it he analy- lished in 1788. Right from the beginning, ses a corrupt and tainted political order, we were an integral part of the wider world, the social and cultural elements that sus- no mere dumping ground for convicts. tained it, and the forces that swept it all The product of a lifetime’s research, this away — leaders, parties and electoral sys- book is a landmark. India, China, Aus- tem — between 1992 and 1994. The one tralia: Trade and Society, 1788–1850, disappointment is his failure to explain in the depth we had by James Broadbent, Suzanne Rickard and Margaret Steven come to expect how the promise of the early 1990s was frit- (Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales), breaks new tered away in the sands or, as he wryly captures it in the title ground in demonstrating, through the surviving artefacts of his last chapter, ‘From Berlusconi to Berlusconi’. I look (many of which are beautifully illustrated), the bustling inter- forward to reading his study of the Berlusconi phenomenon. change between the young colony and our northern neigh- bours. It was a colony that looked outward. David Marr and Ian Britain Marian Wilkinson’s Dark Victory (Allen & Unwin), a skilful Elsewhere in these pages, I pay tangential tribute to dissection of the Tampa affair, will be required reading for Rudolf Nureyev, the tenth anniversary of whose death is many years. Investigative reporting at its best. being marked this year in various forms around the world. Colum McCann’s Dancer: A Novel (Metropolitan) brings Inga Clendinnen Nuyerev’s galvanic presence to the page in a way I have The New History: Confessions and Conversations rarely observed in the best ballet criticism. Perhaps the most (Polity Press), a book of relaxed interviews with nine major readable critical writing today is on the movies. If you find historians — Jack Goody, Asa Briggs, Natalie Zemon Davis, Archived at Flinders University: dspace.flinders.edu.au 28 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 BEST BOOKS Keith Thomas, Danile Roche, Peter Burke, Robert Darnton, undermine enduring love between two people are also Carlo Ginsburg and Quentin Skinner — put together by Maria evident in the persecution of stateless people and refugees. Lúcia Pallares-Burke (yes, she is Peter Burke’s wife). Essential reading for romantic intellectuals who are distraught A new edition of Clouded Sky (Sheep Meadow Press), by over the inhumanity of our dark times. Miklós Radnóti, a Hungarian poet murdered by fascists in 1944, but not known to me until a month ago. Alan Frost’s Kerryn Goldsworthy The Global Reach of Empire: Britain’s Maritime Expansion As the polls go on suggesting that most Australians don’t in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, 1764–1815 (Miegunyah mind what lies they’re told as long as it keeps the Aborigines Press), which told me many interesting things I didn’t know. down and the foreigners out, my picks for 2003 are The Meet- And Hilary Mantel’s strange, turbulent, beautifully ing of the Waters (Hodder), by Margaret Simons, about the complicated memoir, Giving up the Ghost (Fourth Estate). aftermath of the Hindmarsh Island case, and Dark Victory (Allen & Unwin), by David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, about Martin Duwell the affair of the Tampa and the 2001 federal election. Both Utterly different as these two books are, they fit intimately books are exhaustively researched and superlatively well writ- together in my reading experience, perhaps because they look ten; and both are acts of resistance, in a climate where such at each other from opposed corners in poetry’s complex poly- acts seem increasingly rare. hedron. Emma Lew’s Anything the Landlord Touches (Giramondo) is made up of intense, surreal and fragmented Peter Goldsworthy dramas, each poem a brief glimpse of a barely comprehensible In the last fifteen minutes of the year came Inga Clendinnen’s world that always feels right. Peter Porter’s Max Is Missing Dancing with Strangers (Text), a subtle look at the main (Picador) is a privileged opportunity protagonists during the First Contact to visit again the complex world years of First Fleeters and original ‘Aus- of ‘Porterland’. The poems of this place tralians’, as Clendinnen, for carefully ar- are culturally and intellectually daunting, gued reasons, decides to call them. In a but always brilliant and often very recent piece in the Financial Review, moving or very funny. As one of the Clendinnen wrote: ‘The discipline of his- poems ruefully notes, ‘even my jokes tory demands rigorous self-criticism, a pa- aspired to footnotes’. tient, even attentiveness, a practised tol- erance for uncertainty.’ In this book, she Morag Fraser practises precisely what she preaches. In Death Sentence: The Decay of Public Robert Gray’s afterimages (Duffy & Language (Knopf), Don Watson makes Snellgrove) was published in 2002, but his timely, irascible case for the decline of I didn’t get a copy until it was reprinted public utterance by providing the evi- this year. How many poets can boast such dence. Alas, so much of it. What drongos early reprints? As always with Gray, every we are to put up with such outcomes and line contains things that surprise the eye enhancements. Then (and this is his coup) as much as the ear. There are prose writ- he demonstrates in his own prose how ers of similar imagistic power — Updike, witty, effective and inspiring public lan- Nabokov — but I know of no other poet guage can be. Brian Castro’s beguiling writing in English who gets anywhere near Shanghai Dancing (Giramondo) is built, Gray’s word-pictures. Still on poetry, Rob like an opportunist’s nest, out of the Riel’s Picaro Press keeps turning out shimmering lives of his forbears in Shanghai, Hong Kong, a chapbook poet a month in its Wagtail series. These sell for Macau and Australia. It’s the best kind of literary lost and three dollars (sic) each. The latest two are especially good: found department. In Drop City (Bloomsbury), T.C. Boyle, a kind of greatest hits of Peter Bakowski (Wagtail 26: ‘Some a post-hippie chronicler of California, is a shrewd guide to Beliefs of Mine’) — a perfectly wonderful read, this — and the the complexities of the state that elected Arnie. fascinating, left-field flavours of Jennifer Compton (Wagtail 27: ‘Brick’). These small books would be perfect for second- Andrea Goldsmith ary student class-sets, for stocking fillers and, perhaps espe- One wonders if the Booker judges were struck by collective cially, as readable bookmarks in big, stupid Christmas novels. idiocy to omit Elizabeth Costello (Knopf). J.M. Coetzee shows the power of fiction to unravel human truths and uncertain- Bridget Griffen-Foley ties. This passionate and readable book takes the novel Too often journalists write infuriating books — anecdotal, into lush new territory.