Understood backwards: Everything Is Changed by Nova Weetman

Can there be any drama to a story when you know the ending right from the beginning?

Everything Is Changed answers this question with a resounding YES. When I closed the book after the final page, I had to pause and catch my breath. My delirious review on Goodreads: "Cinematic and devastating."

Everything Is Changed is told in reverse, chapter about, as Alex and Jake (and occasionally Alex's girlfriend Ellie) move backwards from the moment when everything truly does change finally and forever towards the place where the changes began. The story navigates the near past to the seemingly insignificant, thoughtless moment that sets in process an avalanche of shame, clumsy grief, and regret. It's a chronicle of choices both careful and careless, the unravelling of a friendship and the loss of first love.

And yet, much like Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, this is a story which appears to put back together the lives of its characters, to make whole the brokenness which becomes clearer just as it dissolves, chapter by chapter.

It is gripping and compelling and acutely painful because, in spite of their choices, Jake and Alex are good boys, beautiful boys who love their families and each other. Jake is the sort of kid who watches crime shows just so he can chat to his single mum about the plot. Alex cares about his sister and his education. 'Jake and I are the good kids,' Alex says. 'We get mostly okay marks. We're involved in extra-curricular activities. Last night was a mistake. And now I'm not sure what to do with that.' Both of them are fiercely loyal to one another, a best-friendship for the ages. Until there is no friendship left to speak of.

Because of the format -- the reversed timeline, the alternating voices -- Everything Is Changed should be confusing. But Nova Weetman is a masterful writer and, instead, the story is simply powerful and unsettling. Alex's and Jake's voices are distinct and finely drawn. There is drama, pathos, and suspense. It is beautiful and it is terrible, a powerful fictional exposition on Kierkegaard's belief that life can only be understood backwards.

Everything Is Changed
Nova Weetman
Published October 2016 by UQP Books
262 pages 

For the love of short stories -- and bad men.

I first encountered the power of the short form during high school. The curriculum covered a cross-section of English literature from Shakespeare through to Dickens, George Eliot and beyond. It also dipped into the short fiction of some truly great writers, and I was captivated. Something-something years later, I can still remember the feeling those stories left me with, even when the details of the narrative are fuzzy. It’s a sense of deep satisfaction at an arc of discovery perfectly executed. It’s that little gasp at the twist I didn’t see coming. It’s the unsettledness of a non-resolution that is somehow more right than a happy ending. It’s Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace. O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi. Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party. Tolstoy’s Where Love is, There God is Also. Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. These stories cling to me even now, bearing a sense of wonder and breathless appreciation.

Yet, in spite of their power, I often forget to read short stories. I think, perhaps, that the form is not as appreciated now as it once was, and certainly not as celebrated and honoured as longer fiction. Which means that it’s not as much in conversation, even though the writing of short fiction requires an entirely different element of mastery than the writing of longer forms. So I’m grateful for anything that pushes me back into the biting embrace of short fiction and reminds me anew of how fantastic it is.

The last few months have done exactly that for me as I’ve dipped into short stories both new and old. Over the next little while I’ll be telling you about the short story collections I’ve encountered. This week, it’s The Love of a Bad Man, an August release from Scribe Publications by ridiculously-talented author, Laura Elizabeth Woollett.

The Love of a Bad Man is a collection of twelve short stories, each of which focusses on a woman in love with one of history’s notoriously “bad” men. There's Eva Braun, Hitler’s young wife; Blanche Barrow, a “fringe member” of Bonnie and Clyde’s gang and married to Clyde’s brother Buck; Charles Manson’s sister-wives. The stories of these and nine other women cross countries, generations, and settings to tell their tales in a blend of true crime and literary fiction.

The voices are flawless, each one unique yet linked by a sense of destructive destiny as each woman surrenders her morality for the love of a man. These women follow their men willingly because they genuinely believe they must; it’s their allotted path.

Sometimes deceptively sweet, these stories place softness and hardness side by side. The muted horror underplays the moral black holes these characters have stepped through and the focus is, instead, on the ordinariness of love and the magnetism of woman to man. It reveals the deceptions these women don’t even realise they’re believing -- or choosing not to examine -- coupled with woman’s capacity to love even the most undeserving of creatures."Ray always had a plum way of mixing his lies up with something like truth," Martha says, at once acknowledging and pardoning.

There's a chilling normalcy to the crimes that offers insight into the question, "But how could anybody do that?"  For better or for worse, these stories bring out the person within the monster, and not the other way around. In other moments, evil lies right there on the surface, provoking revulsion and despair. Sometimes the darkness was so black I had to turn away and look at the sun for a moment – which says as much about the impact of these stories as it does about my own squeamishness.

It is not surprising, then, that these stories will not be for everyone. What is surprising is how much empathy Woollett draws from these characters, showing how the women rewrite the meaning and significance of their actions to shape the narrative through the lens of their relationship.

For the women of these stories, theirs are not acts of moral degradation but of love. Their crimes are not the taking of something from a victim but the giving of something to a lover. There’s a sense of sacrifice here which makes the stories and their characters at once disturbing and compelling. In The Love of A Bad Man, love is truly blind.

The Love of a Bad Man
Laura Elizabeth Woollett 
Published August 2016 by Scribe Publications
240 pages 

The Australian sensibility and Becoming Aurora:

At uni, I spent a semester studying the Australian sensibility. I remember that it woke me up -- as never before -- to what it means to write Australian literature, to make Australian films, to create Australian art. Of course, it also showed me that the Australian sensibility is quite unpindownable, a sort of indefinable something that is somehow imbued with the spirit of this country. When you see it, you recognise it, yet it would be impossible to define it according to a set of absolute characteristics. But ever since I spent fourteen weeks looking at it, I now unconsciously seek it out everywhere.

In Becoming Aurora, a recent release from UQP books by author Elizabeth Kasmer, the Australian sensibility makes itself felt in the ever-presence of Queensland humidity during the mad summer season of the Christmas holidays. The sweat is tangible, as is the salt spray coming off the Sunshine Coast beaches near the characters’ homes. The looming majesty of the Glasshouse Mountains reminds us that, in Australian stories, the land is always a character, even if it never speaks. Just as powerful is the interplay between white Australia, indigenous Australia, and immigrant Australia, a complex combination of cultures and back stories that carries with it beauty and grief, hope and shame, warring emotions that may always be part of the Australian narrative.

Rory is still grieving the loss of her dad four years ago. She is constantly disappointing her mum, and alternately frustrated by and desperately protective of her little brother. And when she is singled out for her role in an act of racist vandalism towards a local curry house, she is forced to bear the penalty, alone. Outwardly defiant, inwardly unsettled, and feeling betrayed by her best friend Cam and the crowd she has always hung out with, Rory turns up to fulfil her community service obligations with an enormous chip on her shoulder.

 

Aurora's story plays out in those crystalline weeks as the year is ending and a new one beginning, a season of finishes and a season of starts. As Rory is pulled from the comfortable familiarity of what she knows and is thrown into entirely new settings, she meets new people – among them a grumpy old man and a dark-eyed Iranian boy – whose growing place in her life shape this into one powerful summer.

Becoming Aurora captures the vast sense of possibility that hangs in that time at the end of school, over Christmas, with the promise of a new year’s fresh beginning. It also captures what it means to grow up, and how growing up often looks like stepping out from your own protected hiding place and examining life from another’s point of view. It means putting aside your own biases or discomforts and recognising the hurt and lostness in someone else. It means taking responsibility for your own actions and breaking a new path for your future. It's as much about becoming an adult in Australia as it is about becoming Aurora.

Australia’s future, just like Aurora’s, will be peopled by a multitude from the world over. Books like Becoming Aurora are an important and beautiful way to engage our hearts in this conversation. They make us consider what it means to be Australian, and what it will look like to build an Australian sensibility we can be proud of.

Becoming Aurora
Elizabeth Kasmer
Published August 2016 by UQP Books
224 pages  

Shakespeare season:

I love it when I’m reading a book, and then I stumble across an interview with the author on the radio, or I catch a film set in the exact location and historical period of the text, or someone loans me a book by another author from the same school of thought as the first. It feels like a holistic education into this author’s world. I’m no longer dipping my toe into their ideas; I’m being dunked completely, and it’s great.

It’s probably the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon at work, but it feels like serendipity. And for the past few months, my serendipitous Baader-Meinhof encounters were all about Shakespeare. He managed to find his way into everything, and I couldn’t be happier.

In my work as a private tutor, I got to walk with a number of high school students as they met Macbeth and absorbed The Taming of the Shrew. I also worked with some middle grade students as they started on an introduction to Shakespeare, exploring Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet. I was careful not to delve too much into Shakespeare’s cheeky sexual allusions – which are kindly oblique for a younger audience – but I was thoroughly impressed with how willing these students were to wrap their minds around Shakespeare’s language, to master the nuances of iambic pentameter.

Here were kids twelve and under, some of them still mastering basic English spelling rules, delighted to read lines together, to be assigned roles as characters in the plays, and to mark up the rhyme schemes of a Shakespearean sonnet. When we discussed how most of the women’s roles were played by men in Shakespearean times, an eight year old piped up, “So that means Viola would’ve been a man acting as a lady acting as a man? How confusing!” Yes, adorable clever cookie, you nailed it.

The Shakespeare love continued in my short commute to work, as I listened to Bolinda’s audiobook of Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl. If you’ve not experienced audiobooks before, you might not realise just how much reading you can power through in a twenty or thirty minute trip. And Vinegar Girl proved to be ideal for pre- and post-work listening, a perfect blend of drama and comedy.

Vinegar Girl is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series launched in October 2015, reinventions of some of the bard’s greatest works, newly imagined by incredible authors including Margaret Atwood and Tracy Chevalier. Vinegar Girl is Anne Tyler’s take on The Taming of the Shrew, tweaked to tell the story of twenty-something Kate Battista.

Kate is stuck in a job she’s intellectually over-qualified for, does too much chasing around for her absent-minded professorial father, and is frankly concerned about her spoiled and occasionally vacant younger sister, Bunny. That her father and her sister take Kate for granted is a given. What Kate does not expect is her father’s sudden request that Kate fill the role of wife in a hastily-arranged green card marriage to Pyotr, Dr Battista’s soon-to-be-deported research partner.

Vinegar Girl is truly a delight. It manages to strike all the high points and hilarity of Shakespeare’s play, but somehow avoids the ickiness that jars in the original plot. Vinegar Girl also captures what feels like a recent and relevant confusion, the sense of delayed adolescence and the challenge of hitting that magical space between reality and expectations. I did not expect Vinegar Girl to be so relatable, but I found myself first horrified by the proposition Kate is offered, then cheering for her as she claims agency for herself and makes brave and daring decisions. This was a seriously fun book to hear, with a very satisfying conclusion.

Finally, the Shakespeare joy continued when I was able to see Twelfth Night performed locally by the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble. My mother and I spent a mesmerised evening thoroughly transported by QSE’s interpretation of this beloved, ridiculous tale of mistaken identity. It was incredibly funny and incredibly musical – fast-paced, uproarious, traditional yet contemporary. And it was a special treat to see theatre-goers of all ages laughing and relishing every Elizabethan moment. The power of Shakespeare is truly alive and kicking.

Tonight, I’m off to see Othello with a friend. Two Shakespeare plays in as many months – what luxury! Tonight’s performance is by the Bell Shakespeare Company, so I know that we’ll be in for a treat. Then, of course, I have Jackie French’s The Diary of William Shakespeare burning a hole in my to-be-read pile. I absolutely must catch up on the other books in the Hogarth Shakespeare series. And I bought King Lear in Pelican’s gorgeously-redesigned editions. I guess the season of Shakespeare is set to continue for a little while longer…

"We feel like old friends now": Writing Caramel Hearts, an interview with ER Murray

Fourteen-year-old Olivia Bloom is not living the high school dream. Her dad is out of the picture, her mum is a relapsed alcoholic struggling to pull herself together in rehab, and her sister has had to leave university to come home and keep things in order. Complicating things further, Liv is trapped at school between old friends, bullies, and the possibility of first love. It’s a lot for one girl to carry, and Liv is close to crumbling. But when Liv stumbles across a book of handwritten recipes, curated and collected by her mother years ago, it provides an unexpected link to her parents as they once were – and perhaps a pathway to the Liv she could become.

Caramel Hearts is a book as sweet as its name suggests. It doesn’t shy away from tough issues, yet manages to remain engaging and full of optimism. I was delighted to catch up with the author, ER Murray, through the magic of the internet.

Elizabeth wrote to me from her home in West Cork, Ireland, a place that’s definitely on my list of Someday destinations. Her interview below offers some beautiful insights into Caramel Hearts, but also provides heartening encouragement for young writers and a strengthening hug for those who might be living through experiences like Liv’s.

DC: As I finished reading Caramel Hearts, I couldn’t help but notice how, even though the story deals with some challenging topics, there’s an inherent sweetness there, a sense of warmth that makes the entire picture less bleak. Addiction and mental illness are tough topics to address for a young audience, but Caramel Hearts manages to do so in a way that feels both honest and age-appropriate. Was that gentleness a conscious decision on your part as an author? How do you avoid getting too dark when writing about hard things in the life of a young adult? 

ERM: It was a conscious decision to include hope as an important element. We have lots thrown at us in life, from the moment we’re born, and how we react determines how we cope. Hope is our one true weapon. I didn’t want to shy away from the darkness – we all experience darkness in our lives – but I also didn’t want the story to be bleak. For Liv, I wanted hope, the chance to improve her life. Mad Dog [once Liv's friend, now a domineering bully] is the balance in the story – does she have hope? Does she want her life to be different? I’ll let the reader decide.

DC: This warmth comes across through Olivia’s personality, too, which manages to be endearing and relatable even when Olivia is making poor choices or becoming the kind of person she loathes. It’s possible to see Olivia as both a product of her life experiences as well as an agent of her own destiny. Bad things happen to Olivia and her worldview is shaped by those things, but Olivia also takes charge of her own future. Which aspects of Liv’s character do you relate to, and which feel more foreign? 

ERM: I really relate to the way Liv makes stupid decisions for well meaning reasons – I did a lot of that at her age. I believe that most people are inherently good, but that we’re also prone to making wrong decisions for what we see as good reasons. If we can see that and accept that as part of our nature, we can also give ourselves the freedom to apologise for our mistakes and put things right. But if not, that’s when bitterness and resentment set in and we go on a downward spiral. I wanted to show this through Liv; that we can’t always make the right choices, that sometimes our life experiences will override what we know we should do for the best, but that we can always make amends – or at least try. Our pasts shape us, but they don’t have to define us indefinitely. It’s difficult to find something foreign about Liv – after all, she lived in my brain and fingertips for two years. We feel like old friends now.

DC: And of course, a necessary follow-up: do you have your own handwritten book of treasured recipes? Which are your favourites? 

ERM: I created all the recipes in Caramel Hearts and when I was first working on the manuscript, I made a handwritten cookbook like the one in the story, to get a feel for it. I don’t have one of my own, as I amend every recipe to suit my own tastes, but I do like cutting out pages of magazines and filing them away. I’ll only ever cook the recipe as it’s meant to be once, however, as I love playing with spices and flavour. I always collect recipes when I travel – I love asking people from other cultures to show me how they make their food. I have more of a savoury tooth, with chilli my favourite flavour, so my favourite recipes are usually really spicy. But I also attach sentiment to them, so my real favourites would be collected from special places -- such as a gazpacho recipe from a writing retreat in Torrox, Spain, a spicy bacon and butterbean dish a friend’s lovely parents used to make, and a spicy chicken salad collected from Koh Yao Noi island, Thailand.

DC: I’m perennially fascinated by processes, so I’d love to know more about your process in writing Caramel Hearts. Was Liv’s story one that simmered in your imagination for a long time, or did it fall onto the page in a hurry? When you began telling Liv’s story, did you know it would be a young adult tale? And are you a plotter or a pantser? What inspires you? 

ERM: I’m inspired by emotion rather than details, so I’m a complete pantser. I don’t plot or plan anything – it kills it for me. I’ll have a character start talking to me, and I’ll instinctively know the setting and the mood – and then I just write. I have a sense of the tone I’m trying to achieve, and by writing, I find the story. I always write my first drafts in a month, stopping at around 60K words – but they’re really terrible, so I call them draft zeros. I write myself into dead ends and mistakes; once I have this initial word count to work with, I can plot and research ideas and details. It’s like an artist mixing their paint or a sculptor preparing their clay. Liv had been hounding me for a while before I started writing her story, as I was completing another manuscript, but she still had to go through the same process.

DC: If you could give one piece of advice to young writers who hope to someday see their name on the cover of a beautiful book, what would it be? 

ERM: Never give up. Read more, write more, rewrite even more – live, breathe and love books in all their glory, but never give up on your own writing. If you do, you have zero chance of succeeding. I know lots of people who started to write with the aim of getting published; of those that didn’t give up, at least 80% have agents/book deals/books published. Never give up on a dream. Make it achievable.

DC: And finally, if there are young people who encounter Liv’s story while living a similar one of their own, what wisdom or encouragement would you offer them? 

ERM: I hate people giving me advice and I don’t like to offer it, so I love that you’ve said wisdom or encouragement. Gold star for you! The best piece of wisdom I could hope to offer is to know you’re not alone – even if it feels that way – and to follow your instinct. The problem with being Liv’s age is that you feel ready for responsibilities and for your voice to be heard, but are people ready to listen? Usually, they’re not. So it’s a very frustrating time – and even more so if you’re dealing with difficult circumstances. I know, because I’ve been there. But the only peace you can find is within yourself. Look within for hope. You can’t change other people’s behaviour, but you can change your own perspective and reactions and that’s the best you can do.

I’d also encourage people to be individual. Your story is your own, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. If you’re stuck in a difficult situation like Liv and Hatty, hurt and anger are valid emotions, but don’t fall into the trap of repeating cycles. Don’t become what you fear or despise in others; your experiences and past can shape you, but don’t let the ruin you. Be kind, be thoughtful, to yourself and others. After all, if you don’t look after you, who will?

Caramel Hearts
ER Murray
Bloomsbury/Alma Books 2016, 340 pages 

The young man and the sea: One Would Think the Deep, by Claire Zorn

A big wave rolled toward them… Sam paddled for it, there was no fear. He didn’t think about what it would be like to be held down under it; he didn’t think about anything. He met the wave as it crested and popped up onto his feet with more fluidity than he’d ever managed before. He drove the weight of his left leg down like he had seen Minty do, which pushed the board forward, accelerating across the wave. He felt it more strongly than before, the sensation Minty tried so clumsily to describe: a delicate paradox where he was, for a short time, in control of his world while simultaneously being at the mercy of the ocean. 

Reeling from the sudden death of his mother, Sam is yanked from the world he knows and thrust upon an aunt and cousins he lost touch with long ago. No longer sure of who he is or what he wants from life, Sam focusses purely on survival, adapting to his new life by shadowing his cousin Minty, whose bleached dreads and easy grin are known all over the coastal town. Minty is going to make it big in the surfing world, everyone says, and because there is nothing else for him to do, Sam follows Minty straight into the surf, stuffing his messy grief down into the deepest parts of himself.

Sam’s sea is a sea of biblical might, terror, and awe. It is a living but untamed entity, a being with the power to take life and to give it, to wound and to heal. It is Sam’s friend and his enemy, the tangible representation of his grief and confusion. It is a torture chamber, wringing and refining Sam into something else, and Sam throws himself into its embrace time and again.

Yet the sea is not enough. Chameleon-like, Sam drifts into his extended family and attempts to blend in. But the brokenness Sam brings with him from his home life in Sydney meets an altogether new kind of brokenness in Minty’s family, where secrets are currency and Sam is dirt-poor. Sam’s grief simply happens to him, and his healing occurs in the same way. But it’s not without pain; as he shifts and evolves, his grief is buffeted and bruised, brought into the light and then shoved back into the dark.

Sam’s story is both a coming-of-age and a family saga. It’s a story of growing up, of first love, of race, of family, identity, and of mortality. It grapples with the seeming pointlessness of living a life that, at some point, is inevitably going to end. The writing is crisp, spare, adolescently blunt, and captivating. The characters provoke recognition; we see in Sam, in Minty, in Sam’s aunty Lorraine, in his jealous cousin Shane, and in his grandmother, something of ourselves. Our uncertainty, our fatally flawed attempts to love each other while protecting ourselves from our own fragility, are all echoed back to us. These characters are ones we love even when they are not lovable – and they are frequently not. There are teenage boys ruled by hormones and peer pressure, adults who aren’t dependable, pivotal family members who shoot through when the going gets tough. Yet somehow their stories begin to fill in the gaps of Sam’s broken past, hinting at redemption. We see these characters and their fumbling attempts at grace, and we love them for it.

And it's impossible for me to write about this book without also commenting on the fierce rush of nostalgia this book generated for me. I was transported back to small-town New South Wales -- into, in fact, my own teen years in the nineties. While I’ve never been a surfer, I spent big chunks of young adulthood in coastal towns, including a significant stint in a tiny Northern Territory town with a hearty indigenous population and a strong surf culture. My best friends at the time were a bunch of surfing sisters, and the cute, polite, intimidating older boys in the local church were half made of ocean themselves. The details of this book all ring true to my experience – the fish and chip shop, afternoons spent at the pool, the ongoing struggle to understand the opposite sex, the challenge of learning how to assert oneself, the distasteful inertia of peer pressure which recognises the distastefulness of the accepted norm but offers little clue as to how to break away from it.

This is no saccharine-sweet trip down memory lane, however. The details are grounded, vivid, and real: the music, the fashion, the pop culture references, the nineties modes of communicating and being. I know the towns Zorn writes of, I know these kinds of surfer kids. There is an authenticity which is tangible. The only moment it falters – and most likely only in my eyes – is in the romance, which somehow feels less authentic. I am a romantic at heart, but I’m a cynic too, constantly holding romance up to the light of my admittedly jaded scrutiny. Sam’s love interest and her family give Sam a glimpse of another kind of life, one that he’d never know otherwise, but these moments feel less dynamic than the clashing disharmony with Sam’s limping and angry family. The love story occasionally feels like a teenage fantasy, healing wounds that can’t otherwise be healed, but that’s okay. If anyone could do with a teenage fantasy, it’s Sam.

One Would Think the Deep is a gloriously-written, uncompromising addition to Australia’s beautiful YA fiction tradition. At its heart, it’s about grief. But it’s also a story of young adults growing up into who they are meant to be, and its ending offers a satisfying hint at a new beginning.

One Would Think the Deep
Claire Zorn
UQP 2016, 306 pages 

The week in books: The Island Will Sink and a contemporary Emma

Episode 1: the one where I finally get my reading mojo back

Winter has been a stingy beast. She promised books, blankets, and steaming mugs of cocoa, but so far all she has delivered is a six-week long flu. So my winter has felt mostly like a cycle of working, sniffling, coughing, sleeping, headaches, working. But in between, a few bookish snatches. And – joy of joys – I spent last night and this morning entirely at home, doing nothing but catching up with family, sleeping, eating, and reading.

Last night, I finished the final pages of Alexander McCall Smith’s Emma, a contemporary take on Austen’s classic of the same name. With its at times condescending and unsympathetic heroine, I feel like Emma is perhaps Jane Austen’s most contentious story, but it’s one I’ve always loved because of its humour and the fact that Emma develops and grows throughout the novel. As a love story, it feels healthy and right, because Emma is loved for who she is in spite of her flaws, and yet the man who loves her hopes for growth and carries an expectation of great things. Alexander McCall Smith’s Emma failed to capture that for me. Here’s what I shared on Goodreads (slight spoilers ahoy):

Because I had friends who had already read this one and were all unimpressed, I went into it with very low expectations. Then, as often happens, my expectations were so low that they were exceeded, and at first I had a lot of fun reading this retelling of a classic Austen tale. But about one third of the way through the book, things began to drag. What had seemed fresh and funny at the beginning simply didn't develop into anything more. The characters felt one-dimensional and boring. There was little to bring sparkle to the story. And worst of all, Emma -- already a challenging character, but with enough wit and warmth to get her by in the original Austen -- is frankly unlikeable in this story. She is selfish, entitled, narrow-minded, judgmental, and incredibly idle. Even her kindness is an act of condescension. The original Emma got herself into strife by being too interested in others' affairs. McCall Smith's Emma isn't really interested in... anything.

And this aspect of her character doesn't change throughout the story. In fact, by the end of the book, the vibe was still an introductory one, as if the pace hadn't quite picked up from the opening scene-setting. The conclusion felt hurried and unsatisfactory, a hasty declaration without any evidence of a genuine relationship behind it. What's more, there were some odd moments of sexual confusion for Emma that lent nothing to the story and, in fact, felt like a tacky attempt on the author's part to use the briefest of references to sexual diversity as a trite way to be relevant or contemporary (while still sounding quite the opposite).

 I like you, Alexander McCall Smith, but I did not like this book. At all. 

I only recently realised that this version of Emma is one book of the four-book Austen project, which includes other contemporary reimaginings of Austen stories by Val McDermid, Joanna Trollope, and Curtis Sittenfeld. I’ve been seeing Sittenfeld’s Eligible (a Pride and Prejudice story) around bookstagram a lot lately, and am keen to give it a try. But I have to say that this version of Emma left me a little less enthusiastic about exploring an Austen retelling.

The book I finished this morning, on the other hand, left me far more satisfied. The Island Will Sink is a debut novel from Australian author Briohny Doyle, and also represents literary mag The Lifted Brow’s first foray into book publishing. The Island Will Sink is out next month and I feel it will meet with a wonderful reception. Why, exactly? It’s hard to put into words.

The Island Will Sink is at once intelligent, challenging, and yet accessible. The story is beautifully-paced, unfolding with a process that feels both literary and cinematic, filmic and immersive in a way that compellingly mirrors the story – that of a filmmaker who creates immersive cinema. Max Galleon processes the world through the language of film, and it is through this language that we meet with Max’s world, a near-future landscape of a culture bent on obliterating its environmental footprint and concerned with optimising the physical and mental health and wellbeing of its inhabitants. Enhanced surrounds provide personally-tailored feeds for information and entertainment, virtual reality is the standard plaything of pre-teens, and individual monitoring systems report on, archive, and even edit personal experience and memory. Everything is within reach – and at the same time, nothing is.

Max is a man in crisis mode, obsessed with his own amnesia, neglectful of his family, and stuck in creative block as he plans his next blockbuster disaster film, the latest in a long line of films to plunge their audiences into a simulation of total annihilation. The timing of Max’s film project coincides with the accelerated sinking of Pitcairn Island into the Pacific Ocean, an environmental disaster which would signal the beginning of a new age.

The story builds with a sense of quiet foreboding, a subtle suspense heightened by the fact that Max, in his state of confusion, is an unreliable narrator. In fact, his whole world is unreliable, because when memories can be erased and rewritten, reality is a constantly shifting thing. The gaps in Max’s knowledge become gaps in the reader’s knowledge as the threads of narrative come apart and then together again.

The story plays out with a cool sterility reminiscent of films like Equilibrium, a grand sense of opera as in Tree of Life, and deliciously-balanced surrealism (think Inception). Beautifully written and even darkly humorous in places, it puts speculative fiction, often considered the domain of a specific readership, within the reach of anyone. I want to read it again and pull together the threads I might’ve missed, and I can’t wait to read others’ reviews of this one as it meets with audiences. A very impressive debut.

Finally, last night I began CS Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew, which I’m buddy-reading with my sister Andrea. It’s her first time reading and my first-time-in-a-long-time after devouring it many times in childhood. Already the story is rushing back to mind, along with those childhood feelings of wonder and fear. It’ll be so much fun to read and chat about this with my sister as we go.

How was your week in books?