Book review: The Silent Listener by Lyn Yeowart

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The Silent Listener by Lyn Yeowart is a disturbing psychological thriller (trigger warning) set across three timelines – the 1940s, 60s and 1983.

His room smells like the orange blankets have licked up the dying odours from his body and are slowly releasing them into the air, and the semi-darkness reminds me of the day I hid in here and saw a snake on the bed, about to attack me.

In 1983, Joy Henderson returns to her family’s remote dairy farm in rural Victoria to nurse her dying father, George. From the outside George was an upstanding community member and church elder. To his children he was a mercurial sadistic abuser who used the word of god to punish them. 

If the hovering Christ saw one of them break a rule, he floated down to whisper in their father’s ear, and then it would start. The thump on the table, … the screams of eternal hell and damnation, his hot red face not ten inches away from the sinner’s.

The 1940s timeline tells the story of how George met Joy’s mother Gwen and swept her off her feet. They married quickly and he whisked her off to his isolated rural dairy farm and enforced all his ‘rules’. The couple had three children – Mark, Joy and Ruth who died in an unfortunate accident. 

Joy knew she should feel sorry for Ruth, but the truth was she felt a familiar white tremor of jealousy

Joy is 11 years old in the 1960s when her friend and neighbour Wendy disappears. The police investigation fails to solve the mystery and Wendy is never seen again. Joy’s father prays with Wendy’s parents.

Pain is a gift because it makes you angry. Angry at the ones who hurt you. Angry at the world. And angry people fight.

Upon her return to the farm, Joy grapples with her childhood trauma and vengeful feelings toward her father. She talks to her sister Ruth who is also there and goads her on to entertain revenge. She manages to get George to confess to Wendy’s disappearance, then finds him dead the following morning.

the moment he dies, the room explodes with life

When George dies, the circumstances are suspicious – he has a belt tied around his neck – and Senior Constable Shepard investigates. He was also involved in the search for Wendy years before. 

We’re all liars… It’s not a question of whether we lie or not, it’s a question of what lies we choose to tell. And to whom.

The Silent Listener is about domestic violence, religious hypocrisy, trauma and survival, the unreliability of memory, mental illness, and the duel personas of abusers. Yeowart casts the characters in vivid colour through this confronting, carefully plotted and twisty tale. 

Book review: The Night Ship by Jess Kidd

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Jess Kidd’s novel The Night Ship tells two stories set centuries apart – one in 1628 and the other 1989. It connects the lives of two motherless children via Beacon island off the coast of Western Australia. The story was inspired by the bizarre and disturbing 1628 shipwreck of the Batavia on her maiden voyage from Holland. The journey left 200 surviving passengers and crew stranded on the Houtman Abrolhos island chain. The stranding led to mutiny, the death of more than half of those survivors and enslavement of the rest. Only about 70 were till living when finally rescued three months later.

The greatest disgrace of humankind is the failure of the strong to protect the weak.

In Judd’s tale, Mayken, a bit of a wild child, and her nursemaid Imke, board a ship soon after the death of the girls mother. She is destined to live with her merchant father in Australia. While onboard Mayken undertakes as series of clandestine adventures throughout bowels of the ship dressed as a kitchen boy. It is on these adventures she discovers the mythical beast that lives in onboard – a kind of eel like creature called Bullebak. She is convinced the monster is responsible for the failing health of her beloved nursemaid and sets out to capture it. Conditions on the ship worsen, relationships deteriorate and there is mutiny in the air.

As is the way with souls confined, tempers fray and flare, ill-spoken words fester, coincidences become intrigues. Minds seethe with resentment and revenge like the worms in the water barrels. As the ship spoils, so does the air between the people.

In 1989, nine year old Gil Hurley is sent to the home off his uncommunicative fisherman grandfather, Joss, on Beacon island after the death of his mother. The island is said to be haunted by the spirit of a young girl. He also finds an old story book of his mother’s about a bunyip, an eel-like monster that preys on children. Gill does not want to be a fisherman and is isolated. He befriends a tortoise and becomes fascinated by the tale of the wreck of the Batavia. Monsters loom large for both children.

Gil knows the signs of haunting. A kid ghost will give you cold knees. A woman ghost turns silver jewellery black. If furniture’s thrown around, your ghost is a man. Gil’s knees are fine, thank you.” 

The Night Ship unfolds in alternate chapters linked by the children’s parallel experiences and monster representations of their fears. It is an atmospheric and melancholy coming of age story. The Night Ship explores grief, survival and human cruelty, but it’s not all grim. Kidd also injects humour, and as always, I love a bit of magical realism.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

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Psychological historical thriller, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, is a creepy, claustrophobic yet compelling tale set in 1960s rural Netherlands. 

That’s what happens when people die. They take themselves with them and you never ever find out anything new about them ever

Unmarried and almost 30, Isabel lives alone in the family home of her deceased parents in Overijssel. The house is willed to her older brother, Louis, upon marriage – making Isa’s habitation tenuous.

She belonged to the house in the sense that she had nothing else, no other life than the house, but the house, by itself, did not belong to her.

Isa is isolated and lonely and wound up like a spring. Her inner discomfort plays out through a desperate possessiveness of the house and its contents. She demands the maid, Neelke, keeps it in the way her mother liked it. She counts the spoons to ensure none go missing and accuses the maid when she can’t find things. Overall Isa is unlikable – a brittle, awkward and acerbic woman.

She was pretty in a way that men thought women ought to be pretty.

Louis is a man who falls in and out of love easily. When he turns up with Eva and installs her in their mother’s bedroom, Isa takes an immediate dislike to the women. She finds her grating and overly familiar. 

There isn’t a version of me that could’ve looked away from you.

Then Louis leaves the two women together and Isa’s anxieties escalate as Eva gets under her skin. But soon irritation turns into passion. To give more away would be a spoiler, suffice to say the third act focuses on Eva and has a brilliant twist.

She had held a pear in her hand and she had eaten it skin and all. She had eaten the stem and she had eaten its seeds and she had eaten its core, and the hunger still sat in her like an open maw. She thought: I can hold you and find that I still miss your body. She thought: I can listen to you speak and still miss the sound of your voice.

The Safekeep is a beautifully written story that delivers an emotionally resonant and complex read. But, in case you haven’t picked it up from the quotes, The Safekeep is also saucy. So if you can’t tolerate explicit sex scenes, it may not be for you. 

Book review: The Siren, the Song and the Spy by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

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Fantasy novel, The Siren, the Song and the Spy by Maggie Tokuda-Hall is the sequel to The Mermaid the Witch and the Sea. In The Siren, the Song and the Spy there are more characters, the stakes are higher, and the story bigger than the first book.

The Sea is forever destined to forget. And I am forever destined to remember.

The Sea worries about the continued hunting of mermaids for their blood, Alfie has been helping pirates stage a rebellion against the Empire, and the Empire has been quelling rebellions as fast as it can.

I don’t believe we can beat them. Not because we are not fierce enough, but because in order to win, we’d have to abandon everything that we are.

Meanwhile Genevieve washes up on the Red Shore of Wariuta. Koa who finds her decides to spare her life even though she had a crack at his and his sister, Kaia. Kaia doesn’t trust her. As Genevieve begins to discover things are not all as she believed in the Empire, she has to decide where her loyalties lie.

Let’s go make something of this world.

The Siren, the Song and the Spy is an action packed, emotionally complex and rich story told from multiple points of view. There is deep diversity in the characters, and the world building is impressive and large scale. Themes include colonialism, oppression, imperialism, resistance,racism, ableism, 

Book review: The Phoenix Pencil Company by Allison King

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History, magical pencils, memory, stories, computer science, family drama, identity, culture, and queer romance are all packed into Allison King’s debut, The Phoenix Pencil Company. Duel timelines and multiple narrators reveal a family sage full of secrets and betrayal. The story is told in an epistolary format via blog-journal entries (Monica Tsai) and letters written by Monica’s grandmother (Wong Yun) to her cousin (Meng).

Written words are incredible in this way—they take a whole idea and condense it down with the help of the writer’s mind. The writer pulls in only the important parts. Each word is efficient, each tells the reader something.

Monica Tsai, a computer engineering college student, leaves school to care for her aging grandparents who raised her. Her grandmother, Wong Yun, has developed Alzheimers. While caring for grandma, Monica works for her professor’s tech company on a program called EMBRS – online diary software.

if our stories will be lost, no matter how hard we try to preserve them, then the only thing that really matters is the people in our lives, and how we treat them in this moment in time.

While searching for a gift for her grandmother’s ninetieth birthday, Monica finds her grandmother’s cousin, Meng via a young woman called Louise Sun. Louise is a student studying memory at Princeton and has interviewed Meng. She has a gift from Meng for Wong – a pencil. The two young women connect.

I couldn’t reconcile the Taiwan I knew with the Taiwan that EMBRS was trying to show me, a history of martial law and terror, its citizens disappeared or mysteriously killed for protesting, or simply for attending one wrong gathering.

Monica discovers a secret kept by her grandmother. Wong was involved in running the Pheonix Pencil Company in 1930s Shanghai when she was young and can ‘reforge’ pencils. This is a process by which she can access all the content ever written by the pencil as they retain the memory of the words put to paper. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, which led to WWII then the Chinese civil war – the pencil forging was used to support espionage by the Chinese military.

We heard about the forced confessions of business owners, how everyone was once again paranoid, trying to sniff out any capitalist leanings among their neighbors.

The Phoenix Pencil Company was inspired by King’s grandparents who ran a pencil company in Shanghai. A genre-bending story with insight into Chinese history, data, and privacy. The novel also asks who owns our stories?

Comedy review: SLAM MACHINE

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Last night I caught comedy show SLAM MACHINE at the Motley Bauhaus. SLAM MACHINE is sketch comedy to make you guffaw and cringe. Eight young comics do a great job of inhabiting their absurd characters and bringing them to technicolored life in the intimate space of the Motley Bauhaus theatrette in Carlton. 

SLAM MACHINE delivers well executed, tightly directed, high energy worlds in miniature – think regional book club; getting an MRI; sad cowboys; wizards and knights; dodgy allies at a pride month party; pet psychics and more.

On stage are Bailey Bliss, Nancy Curtis, Gabby Angelone, Sam McDonald, Matthew Thompson, Julian Consiglio, Jackson Downing and Niamh Schofield. The team work very well together to deliver a performance that has echoes of the likes of Tim Robinson, Chapelle’s Show, and Monty Python throughout. 

The Motley Bauhaus in Elgin Street Carlton is a great place to see independent productions, with plenty of options for a meal before or after a show nearby. We ate at The Green Man’s Arms which does delicious vegetarian fare.

Go along to the Motley Bauhaus in Carlton to see these eight young comics and support independent artists.

SLAM MACHINE is on till 3rd May. You purchase get tickets via the Motley Bauhaus website.

Book review: Things in Jars by Jess Kidd

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The Victorian era gothic crime fiction novel Things in Jars by Jess Kidd is a great read. Set in London, the atmosphere is vivid, there’s plenty of magical realism, and Kidd’s grasp of creative language is enviable as well as witty. 

London is awash with the freshly murdered. Bodies appear hourly, blooming in doorways with their throats cut, prone in alleyways with the head knocked in. Half-burnt in hearths and garroted in garrets, folded into trunks or bobbing about in the Thames, great bloated shoals of them.

Bridie Devine, former surgeons apprentice, is a pipe smoking detective. She has a dagger strapped to her thigh and sometimes cross dresses to gain access into male only spaces. She also sees things, ghosts mainly. She chats to them, in particular a recently deceased boxer called Ruby Doyle who has the hots for her. She is not interested, but still he stays as her protector.

The raven turns in her element and the world turns too, confirming what she already knew: she is the centre of everything.

Bridie takes on a case to find Sir Edmund Berwick’s missing child called Christabel. For some reason Sir Edmond has kept the child in hiding her whole life. It turns out Charitable is no ordinary child.

Sir Edmund’s home is an architectural grotesque, the ornate facade the unlikely union of a warship and a wedding cake. A riot of musket loops, carved shells, liquorice-twist chimneys, mock battlements, a first-floor prow, and an exuberance of portholes. On the carved stone pediment above the wide front door Neptune cavorts with sea nymphs. The lower-floor windows are festooned with theatrical swags of stone starfish and scallop shells. For all this, the house looks unlived in.

Things in Jars is a dark, strange, whimsical, and compelling novel. I’ll be reading more of Jess Kidd’s work – I’m hooked.

Book review: Graft by Maggie MacKellar

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Graft by Maggie Mackellar is beautifully written memoir about life on the land. The story carries us through an annual cycle of seasons on a Merino sheep farm in Tasmania. Maggie reflects on the land on which she lives and her life in a year of drought.

My older brother had pebbles in his mouth instead of words. His tongue is thick. It sticks out when it shouldn’t. At this time I am remembering, he smashed and grabbed and pinched and pulled and broke the world every day, over and again. 

Maggie’s youngest child is on the cusp of adulthood and heading out into the world. As her son’s world opens up, Maggie must come to terms with his loss to the world and recraft her identity as an empty nester.

I am hollowed by his going. By my children’s passage through me and out into the world. With their birth I put on the cloak of motherhood and now it’s time to take it off. I feel naked without it, a person I don’t recognise.

Anyone who has experienced farming life knows it is both beautiful and brutal because it brings us into an intimate relationship with nature, birth and death and how they interplay with the seasons and climate. These elements are rendered strikingly.

In my mind I walk over the land. I run my hands through the grass as if it were the hair on my head. I dig my fingers into the dirt as if the soil were the crust of my skin.

Lambing season inevitably results in the lambs of some sheep dying and the mothers of some lambs dying. Part of Maggie’s job is to try to match up the orphans with sheep whose lamb died, with the hope that both will thrive.

Today we found a ewe cast. Her lamb had come with both legs back. She’d managed to push his head out but now he was stuck fast. 

Graft combines meditative nature writing and personal essay on themes including loss, mothering, identity and resilience. The memoir is the first of Maggie Mackellar’s books that I have read, but I will be adding more to my reading list.

Comedy review: Hello Mr Radio

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Walking into the theatre to see Hello Mr Radio, on as part of Melbourne International Comedy Festival, is visually arresting. The stage has been turned into a radio studio using colour blocking. Three characters motionless stand on the stage, cleverly camouflaged. All have identical beards. There is a sign advising the audience to keep their mobile phones on for the duration of the show.

Tune into 98.5 1/2 every Tuesday for a dose of absurdist comedy. Fergus Mackerel, pony tail flying, delivers an hour of absurdist comedy, along with a string of wacky guests, including a spellcaster, and audience members who call-in to talk about road haulage and their mums chopping boards. Think 1970s fashion and style – around the time of the introduction of colour TV.

The show has an off-beat nostalgic feel. It’s like getting in an old car that only has one radio station and a slightly dodgy aerial, and going for a drive you weren’t expecting on a sunny day. Hello Mr Radio is dry, character driven, humour, with clever language play and great timing. 

Hello Mr Radio is created and performed by Handful of Bugs with Alex Donnelly, Ayesha Harris-Westman and James Colbourn-Keogh on stage. The show is produced by SKINT with music and sound design by Thomas Bradford.  

Hello Mr Radio is on at The Malthouse Playbox until 19th April.

Book review: The Mermaid the Witch and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

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I read The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall with my book group and loved it. Queer + Pirates, what more could you want? 

There’s freedom in stories, you know. We read them and we become something else. We imagine different lives, and while we turn the pages, we get to live them. To escape the lot we’re given.

The story is a young adult swashbuckling, fantastical, sapphic, girls own adventure. There are pirates, mermaids, greed driven, despotic overlords, hero’s and villains. Not that different to the real world really…colonialism, imperialism, misogyny. 

Corsets are stupid

Flora and her brother became pirate crew in order to have a place to live and food in their bellies. Gender fluid and black, Flora disguises herself as a man called Florian (think Pope Joan?) and falls in love with one of the passengers – Lady Evelyn Hasegawa. 

If Florian was the wall that guarded Flora, then Evelyn had scaled his heights.

Evelyn is on board supposedly to be wed in an arranged marriage at their destination. In actual fact her parents had sold her to the highest bidder due to her difference (code for lesbian). There’s a catch as the wealthy passengers are about to be told they are to be sold as slaves. So of course Florian has to rescue Evelyn. 

After that, she wondered, how improper was it — really — to slap a man in the face for staring?

The pair make a daring escape, rescuing a mermaid in the process, who then along with the sea (a character with thoughts and feelings) rescues them – spitting them out on an island shore where a witch revives them.

There’s nothing out there to punish evil, no one out there to reward the righteous. We’re all just adrift.

The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea is brimming with diversity, adventure, romance and a good lashing of the kind of violence, blood and guts colonialism is famous for. A fun read and other worldly adventure.