High Tide: Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach

"They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy."

So Ian McEwan begins his latest novel, a short but highly charged work of fewer than 180 pages. The year is 1962 and the newlyweds are Edward and Florence, names that reek of an old world the '60s would soon transform.

When the book opens they are being served dinner in their hotel room on the Dorset coast of England by two trussed-up local lads who seem as awkward with the occasion as they are. In the distance the waves of Chesil Beach can be heard breaking, a sound of "gentle thunder, then sudden hissing against the pebbles".

Initially, McEwan's writing is restrained and formal, a quint- essentially British tone befitting the time in which it is set. One thinks of old BBC radio plays and "hears" the story being told. It would be easy to mistake this as tame fare indeed but for a sly humour and confidence percolating beneath McEwan's voice:

"This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time except visitors from abroad. The formal meal began, as so many did then, with a slice of melon decorated by a glazed cherry ... It would not have crossed Edward's mind to have ordered a red."

McEwan's intent, however, is not drawing room comedy. Ominous descriptive traces like the "hissing against the pebbles" and far rawer feelings are pulsing within a few pages. The internal mechanics of the book quickly reveal themselves as we discover who Edward and Florence are (he an aspiring historian, she a young violinist), diving into their thought patterns and family memories, reliving the romance between them and returning to the events of the wedding night as seen through the eyes of each.

Virtually everything that happens in On Chesil Beach occurs during this one evening and the tidal intensity, the back and forth between Edward and Florence, is palpable as it leads us down, finally, to the beach itself and the book's climactic scene.

McEwan exposes the rationalisations and self-deceptions we all succumb to in situations of great emotional uncertainty, the shifts in perception that show what changeable and unpredictable beings we can be to ourselves, let alone one another. In doing so, the book takes us deeper into two people's lives, counter-pointing the tensions of the present with the great backwash of their past and the surging of a future neither can fully see.

As the extent of Florence's fear of sex becomes clear - "her whole being was in revolt against the prospect of entanglement and flesh ... sex with Edward could not be the summation of her joy, but the price she must pay for it" - we are clued into Edward's long-standing awareness of her repressive personality. Florence's genuinely loving affection, along with her passion for playing the violin, has allowed him to deceive himself of what must be "her richly sexual nature" and what he mistakes for simple shyness. Florence, of course, is at pains to make it seem this way. Edward, not entirely insensitive to these tensions and resistances, tries to be understanding, to take their wedding night slowly. By the time she is moaning in disgust at his touch he is interpreting it as the sound of ecstasy.

It's hard to say more without giving away the plot of this slender book. Suffice to say the emotions and ideas are profound in what might seem like the narrowest of circumstances. And though the focus remains overwhelmingly intimate - newlyweds in a hotel bedroom, mutual concerns about when they will have sex and how it will go - McEwan summons up the Cold War atmosphere with textures like the wireless playing downstairs, from where Edward hears the word "Berlin" and to where Florence wishes she could flee, "to pass the time in quiet conversation with the matrons on their floral-patterned sofas while their men leaned seriously into the news, into the gale of history".

McEwan has always been a political writer, as demonstrated in works as varied as his film script for The Ploughman's Lunch (1983), a critique of life in Thatcher's Britain, or his last brilliant novel, Saturday (2005), an attempt to grapple with the nature of violence and human connectedness in a post-September 11, 2001, world. His reflections in The Guardian on the events of September 11 still stand out among the best things written at the time. Whether penning an elegy for a deceased author like Saul Bellow or speaking with deep ambivalence about the Iraq War, he remains committed to the engaged notion of a public intellectual.

And yet there's a provocative, almost mathematical coolness to his writing that undercuts the comforting status of a literary good guy.

His debut collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975), opened with the tale of a boy telling you, in a bemused tone, how he raped his sister. McEwan's ability to evoke the psychotic pull of a murderer in The Comfort of Strangers (1981) or a stalker's obsession in Enduring Love (1997) similarly displayed his taste for evil and violence in ways that appeared irresistible, almost mystical.

This interest in the sexually aberrant, the bizarre and the psychologically unsettling led to McEwan being nicknamed Ian Macabre early in his career. Over time McEwan's books have become less overtly strange (one of his most acclaimed short stories, Solid Geometry, deals with a man who discovers how to fold his wife up like a piece of paper and make her disappear) and more everyday in their intensities. And yet the same neo-gothic traits of lives lived in secret and looming darkness infect all his works with threat and fear.

When McEwan won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam it was largely seen as a lightweight work in his career, a tightly plotted entertainment. On Chesil Beach is similarly short, but far more serious, harking back to the compressed nature of his early and most haunting short stories, as well as McEwan's long-running interest in the random and banal ways ordinary lives can be shattered.

It is proof that no life is completely private or shut off from the world, that we can be victims of ourselves and, if we're unlucky, our historical moment, too.

- Mark Mordue

* First published in Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum Books, April 6 2007

+ Photo of Ian McEwan taken at Paris Book Fair, 2011. Accessed via Wikipedia Commons. Image made by The Supermat - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Salon_du_livre_de_Paris_2011_-_Ian_McEwan_-_003.jpg

"What will survive of us is love": Isabel Fonseca's Attachment

It's 10am in Primrose Hill, London. The author Isabel Fonseca sits in her kitchen, "tanking up on coffee". An American by birth and a New Yorker at heart, she says, "I can't believe I've lived in England for over 25 years or whatever it is. It's payment for my sins. Or maybe I just forgot to leave."

Her tone has a throwaway flash to it; just joking, right? Fonseca corrects me immediately. "I'm not, you know."

Why such resentment towards her adopted home? After all, England made her, so to speak. From a philosophy, politics and economics degree at Oxford to her role as an assistant editor at The Times Literary Supplement and the publication of Bury Me Standing in 1995, a non-fiction study of the gypsies of Eastern Europe.

That book involved five years of participatory journalism, living and breathing her subjects' lives from Albania to Estonia. Upon publication Salman Rushdie called it "a revelation: a hidden world"; Edward W. Said praised its "profound sympathy and brilliant insight".

In the meantime, Fonseca was making other news over her affair with Martin Amis. She had already picked up the nickname "Funseeker" on the London social circuit, as well as a slew of admirers that purportedly included John Malkovich, Clive James, Bill Buford and, yes, Salman Rushdie.

Men fairly wilted before Fonseca and to this day, at age 46, there is not an article on the internet from The Sunday Times to W Magazine that does not still remark upon her beauty. A formidably intelligent brunette, her dark looks reflected the heritage of her Uruguayan father, a highly regarded sculptor, and her Jewish American mother, a painter and heiress to the Welch grape juice family-company fortune.

Amis would eventually leave his first wife, Antonia Phillips, and their two sons; get a hotshot American agent, a seriously big American publishing deal and even get his teeth fixed. Fonseca was the scarlet woman behind this scandalous Americanisation of a British icon, a cliche that ignored Amis's long-running transatlantic obsessions, not to mention the fact Phillips was an American academic. Fonseca and Amis would go on to marry in 1998 and now have two daughters, Fernanda, 11, and Clio, 9.

When I ask Fonseca about her antipathy to England, she's quick to refine it into something more good-natured: "Oh it's all right. London's just too expensive to be loveable … Actually we just spent a few years living in South America. And it was wonderful, charming, heaven. But I don't mind being in the wrong place. I think for a writer being in the wrong place is often a very good thing."

Back in 2004 Fonseca and family decamped to Uruguay for 2½years in the wake of her father's death. There Fonseca attempted to write and then abandoned a major non-fiction work on her extended family. During that time she turned to "what was, I thought, a short story at first" before it evolved into the highly intimate book she now calls Attachment.

Attachment is not only Fonseca's debut novel it is her first major work since Bury Me Standing. In it she quotes these crucial, if ambiguous words from Philip Larkin's An Arundel Tomb: "What will survive of us is love."

Like the Larkin poem, Attachment takes a somewhat anti-romantic view of romance, before leaving us with a bittersweet and defiantly fragile ending. The book's central character is Jean Hubbard, a syndicated American health columnist married to a high-achieving British advertising executive called Mark. Mark is described as "six feet four in bare feet and striking with his grayed hair swept back, wind-eroded dune grass above the expanding beach of his face". This alone sounds like an awfully good depiction of Amis with a height boost, not to mention a more commercialised slant on his and Fonseca's literary preoccupations.

Like Fonseca, Hubbard has a background that includes having once worked as a paralegal for the summer in New York; she similarly buys pot as a teenager in Washington Square; studies at Oxford; is shadowed by a brother who has died tragically young; deals with a father who is critically ill; and copes with the unexpected appearance of a young woman who might be her husband's daughter (Amis discovered he had an unknown daughter called Delilah Seale in 1997). That the opening of Attachment is set on the imaginary island of St Jacques - supposedly located somewhere near Mauritius, but also a hot, exotic place not unlike Uruguay - brings it even closer to home.

When Attachment begins, Hubbard discovers a sexually provocative letter that leads her to a secret email link and an affair her husband has been having. To find out more about it Hubbard begins writing to "Giovanna" as if she were her husband. This incites Hubbard to abandon herself to a night of infidelity back in London, and to later flirt with an old lover in New York while her father hovers on the critical list in hospital. "Everything was sullied and she was rotting from within," Hubbard reflects as she delves into a world of internet affairs and online pornography. Later, as she embraces a path of disillusionment to license her own betrayals, she admits "this was the consequence she most feared: her own revulsion for her world, for all that she had. Auto-eviction."

Britain is already abuzz with Attachment as an adulterous and confessional insight into a less-than-happy marriage - as well as the critical complications of dealing with a work that may or may not be a roman-a-clef. Attachment is a novel of great promise but it ebbs and flows in its intensity according to the proximity one feels between the author and her "truths". In short, the things Fonseca seems to have experienced are powerfully evoked; the things she appears to have imagined feel forced or contrived.

Fonseca runs a nice line in self-deprecating humour and frankness. But in the course of an hour's conversation she puts herself to the test of her own thinking repeatedly and seems to find herself wanting. Talking on the phone there's that strange, floating sense you have not so much entered her home as her headspace: an inner world so thoughtful and honest it can leave you feeling cowardly by comparison.

"There's a long period of merger in the beginning of any relationship," Fonseca says. "Then with children you sense you have to keep a united front. My daughters are nine and 11 now. Old enough to get your space back a little. You see that you still have a long way to go - I hope! That I'm only halfway … But you also ask, 'Is that it?' Not as a matter of complaint, more as a matter of stupefaction." Fonseca almost laughs. "Here I am, I've made babies, but who am I now that I am on my own again?"

She's adamant "adultery is not the subject of Attachment, but ageing is. There's this disappointment about your decrepitude, this realisation you are going to die which you have never quite accepted. Adolescence and middle-age actually share a lot of parallels. The unease about the body and the sexual awareness that's associated with it, only you have this death awareness that gives it a particular pungency in middle age. Things like the way your parents suddenly demand your attention with their mental or physical fragility or both; or something as simple as the way your children won't do what they're told any more."

Coincidentally Bury Me Standing and Attachment both resound with a quest for home. "Whenever you write it is to investigate some anxiety. Writing about the gypsies there was some public anxiety with identity. Fiction is more about scratching about in a silent anxiety. And your sense of identity often relates to what home means, I guess. I didn't set out to do that. But I see now there's a lot of homesickness in the story [of Attachment] … Maybe it's a cliche of fiction that the past is another country. But this nostalgia for the time before is so often identified with place as much as time."

"You know I still go to New York about four times a year for various reasons. One of the real, but less legitimate reasons I do it is you can imagine life before it happened to you, when things could have gone 19 different ways. I think that's why I'm lucky to be a writer. Because you can think about and write about such things, just to see how you feel."

-                  -  Mark Mordue

·                  *  First published as ‘Well written in the Wrong Place’,

    Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum, June 14, 2008

The Lost Worlds: Anna Funder's Stasiland

"I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station. Several times I miscalculate my width, scraping into a bin, and an advertising billboard. Tomorrow bruises will develop on my skin, like a picture from a negative."

And so we begin. Caught inside a "headspace." Having trouble with our borders, as if the damaged compass of our narrator will map its own unpleasant realities across us the further as we move into her story. Bruises of another kind.

In the company of the Australian writer Anna Funder words have a cool poeticism and metaphoric sharpness that prick deep, reflective emotions inside the reader. It is the language of ice, winter, enclosure, and, of course, death.

So it is that you don't just browse through the Stasiland's pages on some idiosyncratic tour of present-day, techno-grooving Berlin (as the sexy cover art for the Australian edition might suggest); instead you pass through a netherworld of bad historical memories and the damaged lives that still inhabit it.

With a fearlessness that seems guileless for someone so perceptive, as if Funder has never been truly hurt or endangered before, the author dives into the history of the laughably named "German Democratic Republic" and its former security force, "the Stasi", whose surveillance culture dominated East Germany during Communist rule and continues to haunt many of its populace today. She does this simply by posting an advertisement in the local paper "seeking former Stasi officers and unofficial collaborators for interview." It is the opening act on the proverbial can of worms.

"People here talk of the Mauer im Kopf or the Wall in the Head," Funder writes. "I thought this was just a shorthand way of referring to how Germans define themselves still as easterners and westerners. But I see now a more literal meaning: the Wall and what it stood for do still exist. The Wall persists in Stasi men's minds as something they hope one day might come again, and in their victims' minds too, as a terrifying possibility."

Stasi headquarters was known as "the House of One Thousand Eyes." Funder explains, "At the end, the Stasi had 97,000 employees--more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million people. But it also had 173,000 informers among the population. In Hitler's Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin's USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have put the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens."

In this kind of world, secrecy and surveillance were not without their bureaucratic absurdity. At one point Funder cites a Stasi file note from 1989, the year the Wall finally fell, in which "a young lieutenant alerted his superiors to the fact there were so many informers in church opposition groups at demonstrations they were making these groups appear stronger than they really were. In one of the most beautiful ironies I have ever seen, he dutifully noted that it appeared that, by having swelled the ranks of the opposition, the Stasi was giving the people heart to keep demonstrating against them."

The preying density, the absolute complicity of it all, leads Funder through a world of broken and repressed lives that no shorthand summary can do justice to: a mother separated from a critically ill son by the building of the Wall in 1961; a budding young linguist denied a career, then a love life, and finally the ability to love, by the encroaching thuggery of the State; a maverick rock star refused his public existence by the annulling force of the security apparatus. You meet them all in Funder's strangely permeable company; feel something of their lost quality as one might feel the hurt of familiars. At one point Funder admits, "No one can ever tote up life's events and calculate the damages; a table of maims for the soul." But in Stasiland she most certainly tries.

Beyond the victims she speaks to collaborators, propagandists, apologists and people who felt they were just doing their job, as well as Stasi men still living a secret life, still absorbed in the possibility of another turning point back into history: a nostalgia for the ice age of totalitarianism that is surprisingly prevalent beneath the surface of east German life today. I'd argue the successes of Le Pen in France, let alone the mood beneath the regimes of China and Russia, suggest this mood is not so delusional--or exclusively Teutonic in flavour.

Funder certainly gives it chilly credence here. She visits office spaces and torture rooms, has murky assignations with Stasi men at bars and churches and curtain-drawn homes, places that emanate a banal evil all their own. Human coldness is manifest in the architecture around her, in bereft public spaces, even an empty chair. Everything feels soiled.

Finally she meets "the puzzle women in Nuremburg" who seek to piece back together the shredded documents of the most bureaucratized police state the world has ever known, the stories of lives that were destroyed--often covertly--by the Stasi: thickly plotted "mysteries" of lost jobs, suicide, murder and divorce, all puppet-pulled from invisible strings above people's heads. Indeed many of the victims Funder meets exist themselves in fragments and gaps, as unrestored to meaning as the shredded dossiers and files on their lives. Never to be put back together again.

One of the most interesting themes to Stasiland is the way "many people withdrew into what they called "internal emigration." They sheltered their secret inner lives in an attempt to keep something of themselves from the authorities."

For Funder's young and beautiful landlady Julia this defensive response has become a prison of its own. "It's the total surveillance that damaged me the worst," Julia confesses to her in one of the many startling set-pieces of the book, a kitchen scene choking with regret and claustrophobia. "I know how far people will transgress over your boundaries--until you have no private sphere left at all. And I think that is a terrible knowledge to have... That's probably why I react so extremely so approaches from men and so on. I experience them as another invasion of my intimate sphere."

On that masculine point it's interesting to reflect that the GDR had the world's oldest leaders at the time the Wall was brought down and the Communist regime finally collapsed. Julia speaks of her earlier dreams that they would all eventually die off, though later she discovered they were injecting themselves with sheep cells, taking oxygen, doing anything to prolong their creepy grip on power. A female cleaner attending to the old Stasi headquarters--now a museum--speaks of how when she first arrived all the rooms emanated "the smell of old men."

One feels in these irksome descriptions--along with the spidery quality beneath Funder's own encounters with aging Stasi men--the incontinency and anxiety of this culture at its very end, its repulsive dankness and needy aggression. If there is meta-psychology to the book, it's a view of the state as a people held tight in daddy's oppressive fist. It's this perspective that leads me to wonder if only a woman could fully negotiate and sensitize the political mystery of totalitarianism in the manner Funder has achieved. But perhaps that's being way too Freudian and deterministic for such brilliant inquiry into the soul of a nation at its lowest depths.

By the end of Stasiland Funder is weighted by the sorrows she has heard and the death of her own mother back in Australia. Grief comes down upon her "like a cage." She leaves Germany with no great wisdoms to offer, but when she returns almost three years later it is spring, not the winter she lived through. Berlin is now "green, a perfumed city," a place she knows yet does not know at all from the winter-world she previously passed through. Though there is the vague feeling of Funder self-consciously looking for meaning in these final chapters, a flicker of her narrative control losing confidence, she still delivers a heart-rending denoument: a recognition of other, humbler human secrets, infinitely lighter than the world she submerged herself into.

The queen of Australian literary journalism, Helen Garner, has rightly acclaimed this book with a cover note that states it "makes us love non-fiction." With her debut Stasiland Anna Funder has certainly announced herself as one of the leading non-fiction writers of the present day, Sydney's very own answer to Joan Dideon. Like Dideon at her early best in books like Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Funder's writing persona is taut and pale, interior and existential, yes, but absolutely enmeshed in history. We are fortunate to witness her arrival.

- Mark Mordue

Review first published online at Freezerbox (USA) on 16.06.2003. http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.php?id=272

All Quiet on the Eastern Front

Silent House 


by Orhan Pamuk 


Penguin Books Australia

There were things I had forgotten about Orhan Pamuk. I suspect this forgetting arises from the fact the Turkish novelist is such an elegant writer and heroically bookish figure.

Yet close to the surface of Pamuk's work lie much darker forces such as anger and violence and misery, a deep, shocking, spiritual misery that shakes through everything and inevitably shakes you.

In this misery Pamuk combines the influence of literary forefathers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky (orchestral, even manic depth), Albert Camus (presence with detachment), Vladimir Nabokov (an eerie eye for detail) and Thomas Bernhard (ecstatic diatribes) with the more enraged and forsaken empathy he feels for the dispossessed of the Middle Eastern world and the culture it has spawned, be it Islamic or nationalist in flavour.

Not for nothing does he resort to the phrase "a double soul" when talking of himself, his country, the characters he writes of and even the nature of his novels. A poet of damnation as much as hope, Pamuk is truly a beast in bejewelled skin.

Now 60, the 2006 Nobel laureate retains a boyish look and academic demeanour that appears reassuring in photos. Invariably shown in his magnificent personal library wearing a dark suit and reading glasses, Pamuk emerges as the picture of Enlightenment reason. Sometimes these signature portraits reveal his window view of the Bosphorus and the bridge that unites Asia with Europe. There he sits in Istanbul on the brink of it all.

Pamuk has been more appreciated in the West for his noble gestures as a public intellectual and his melancholy writing style rather than his seething existentialism and ambivalent political rage. The international success of an Ottoman-era fable such as My Name is Red (2001) and a postmodern love story such as The Museum of Innocence (2009) have added to his jewellery-box lustre, as has his grand autobiography of self and place, Istanbul: Memories and the City (2005).

The last has become a go-to text for many who consider visiting that city, though it is in fact the type of travel book that should be read after going there. Moving in either direction it's likely to exhaust readers with its titanic ebb-and-flow of personal memories and historical observations. Yes, it is a wonderful book, but it is no place to start with Pamuk, even if it has strangely confirmed his cultivated image.

If his most beloved works tend towards glitter, gloom and charm, conjuring up the authorial image of an intellectual Gatsby sadly beckoning to us from the Bosphorus, then a novel such as Silent House - now translated into English for the first time - unleashes Pamuk's far more turbulent side. No doubt a part of this lies in the fact he wrote it as a young man.

First published in Turkey in 1983, Silent House is the second novel Pamuk wrote. It is devastating to realise he was only 31 at the time it appeared, and that all the elements of his writing style and vision were already powerfully in place. Any wrong-headed generalisations about his early, untranslated work being little more than a studious mimicry of naturalistic 19th-century novelistic conventions must now be well and truly thrown into the flames.

In structure alone Pamuk makes dazzling use of first person narrative, shifting the perspective between five primary characters who are kaleidoscopically engaged with their past, their dreams and the people around them.

Fatma is a grandmother consumed to the point of dementia by her memories and her vicious disgust for modern life. Recep, her dwarf house-servant, is clear-eyed and passive, profoundly alone. Faruk, Fatma's raki-swilling grandson, is a historian surrendering himself to filicidal dissolution and his failure to tell meaningful stories. Faruk's younger brother Metin is a hard-partying high school student ashamed of his middle-class family's slide into poverty, a fantasist utterly unable to distinguish between the furies of lust and love. Hasan is a former childhood friend of Metin and his sister Nilgun (not given a voice, but the focus of much male projection), a lower-class kid now caught up with right-wing thugs and his own swirling loops of idealism and hatred.

One could compare Silent House with a major contemporary novel such as Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and the American author's attempts to create a socially and politically engaged book of the moment built on a series of intertwined lives and perspectives. Pamuk works with similar intentions, writing and setting his novel during the savage lead-up to a military coup in Turkey in 1980. He does this by oscillating between persuasive naturalism, fits of melodrama and far more experimental writing styles than Franzen ever attempted. The word "genius" escapes the lips, if only in recognition of Pamuk's age when it was published. His second novel!

The subject matter clearly springs from autobiographical experiences: Pamuk's circle of young friends and the indolent summer beach holidays he went on with his family. It gives the writing a dreamily recalled veracity that can turn confronting. That Pamuk chose to zero in on such intimate energy with a political vision in mind and write about it as Turkey was careering towards anarchy, then chose to publish this work during the fragile democratic transition out of military rule in 1983, shows just how bold he was.

With one foot in the West and another in the East, it is no wonder Dostoevsky is frequently cited by Pamuk as one of his most favourite writers. In his 2007 essay collection Other Colours, Pamuk observes that, "The originality of Notes from the Underground issues from the dark space between Dostoevsky's rational mind and his angry heart." He also says that Notes from the Underground is the book where Dostoevsky "finds his true voice", leading him on to his greatest works, Crime and Punishment, Devils and The Brothers Karamazov.

In Silent House it is similarly possible to witness the dark space between Pamuk's rational mind and his angry heart that will eventually find its full, aching dimension in what I believe to be Pamuk's best and bleakest novel, Snow (2004). For those who wish to turn back to Silent House, Pamuk invokes a folk saying in its pages that could serve as a prophecy, as well as a warning to fans of his more aesthetically decorative work: "The tree is bent when it's young."

- Mark Mordue

* First published in The Weekend Australian Review, October 20th 2012  under the title 'Genius in a turbulent dance to the music of Eastern time'.

Lust for Life: German Expressionism Before, During and After

AT THE HEIGHT of German hyperinflation in 1923 and 1924, people would sit on the streets ready to barter with crates of paper money. It was sold by weight and worth more than old bones but less than rags.

This was a hell of a year to be alive in Berlin: Franz Kafka was an obscure figure, ill with tuberculosis and consulting the Talmud, preparing a retreat home to Prague where he would soon die; Vladimir Nabokov was arriving as a young student, returning to his Russian emigre family from London; Joseph Roth was surviving, hand-to-mouth, describing city life in newspaper columns known as feuilletons, a model he defined as "saying true things on half a page".

Roth would eventually write a tart letter in 1926 explaining his approach to an editor: "I don't write 'witty columns'. I paint the portrait of the age. That's what great newspapers are there for. I'm not a reporter, I'm a journalist. I'm not an editorial writer, I'm a poet."

Almost 100 years on his journalism is collected in book form as What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33. It is a testament to his abilities and to the fact the capital of Weimar Germany thrilled as much as it appalled. Certainly there was a harshness and inhumanity to the city that would cause Roth to observe: "Berlin is freezing even when it's 60 degrees."

Two-dozen daily newspapers quickened the pulse of the city, a fever of communications. Pamphlets, periodicals and street posters were also rife. Artists embraced this new "age of mechanical reproduction" - to use German philosopher Walter Benjamin's phrase - with limited-edition portfolios and printmaking techniques, lithographs, etchings.

A part of this activity had sprung out of the immediate post-war period when political advocacy and social instability engaged artists in street-level protests. Every party and cause under the sun needed a rallying image. Later, when money proved to be worthless, their drawings, prints and portfolios were as a good a currency as any to enable artists' survival, while easily reproducible works were publishable as well as capable of reaching a larger audience.

It was a trend that connected to a graphic impulse deeply embedded in the woodcut experiments of early 20th-century expressionism, and a latent national pride that associated these craft-oriented forms with 15th-century gothic masters such as Albert Durer; a venerable German tradition. In a defeated and indeed crushed country such processes offered up their own vague consolations for cultural identity.

Those following the Communist Party-influenced 1919 manifestos of the Berlin dada group saw it rather differently. For the dadaists, satire and protest emerged out of collage and photomontage - then a radically new technique - the necessary pathways to confront the mass media developing around them. By rearranging imagery, a suppressed reality could be made manifest; lies could be exploded.

If such applied cultural theories seem dated now, they were then as radical as shooting a feature film on an iPhone appears today. It had not been done before, it had not been seen. In any case, oils and canvas had come to cost more than most artists could afford. The new way was also the cheap way.

Bouncing back rapidly from the economic insanity of the early 1920s, Berlin would re-establish itself as the third largest city in Europe after London and Paris, a metropolis thrumming with corruption and opportunity.

It was not just the capital of the Weimar Republic of Germany; it was the most exciting city in the world, its sins and sorrows visible to anyone who cared to see. Suitably inspired, Berlin's trinity of hyper-realist art - George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann - would depict disfigured war veterans, corpulent businessmen, the sex trade and acts of suicide with an illustrative, almost sinister relish.

Two million German soldiers had been killed during World War I; another four million were wounded. Amputees and beggars were everywhere, shell shock and nervous breakdowns part of the social disorder. About 700,000 people had died of malnutrition and starvation between 1914 and 1918, many of them towards the war's end.

The assassination of Jewish foreign minister Walter Rathenau by right-wing extremists in 1922 added to the grim tidings. An urbane and brilliantly conciliatory figure, he had personified hopes for the fledgling democracy. The year of hyperinflation then smashed whatever slender economic security people - especially the old - thought they still had.

After all this, it is hardly surprising anything like good times should be grasped with a desperate, almost manic lust for life, and everything else be damned.

Inevitably painters, writers, musicians, dancers and bohemians of all stripes were drawn into the vortex. Almost 20 per cent of the German population was composed of  foreigners by the mid-1920s. Berlin was the cosmopolitan capital, a doorway to revolutionary Russia, whose changes shook Europe in seismic waves. Refugees flooded in from across the border; so did ideas about art and design, such as were seen in constructivism. The reality of homelessness and unemployment made itself felt as a countervailing force to any internationalist spirit among the bohemians.

As history would prove, Berlin was on the edge of the most important existential and political struggles of the 20th century. Zeal and antipathy, hedonism and repulsion, would drive the bipolar character of the city's inhabitants regularly to the brink.

The Weimar's unsteady life - racked by punitive war debts and 20 government cabinets in 14 years - was ultimately destroyed by the worldwide Depression that began in 1929, paving the way for the National Socialists to seize power in 1933.

Grosz, Dix and Beckmann, photomontage artist John Heartfield and playwright Bertolt Brecht were among those who recognised what was happening.

Inevitably their work put them on a collision path with the Nazis. They weren't just making art; they were fighting for their lives and for their world as it staggered out of one cataclysm and back into another in the interval of barely more than decade. Everybody was up to their necks in it.

WITH AN EXHIBITION at the Art Gallery of NSW entitled The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910-1937, curator Jacqueline Strecker tries to stretch beyond the 14-year measure of the Weimar Republic from 1918 to 1933 to examine the pre-war years and World War I itself as part of the deeper cultural force that led to so much great art.

Along with this exhibition there will be a concurrent production of Brecht's The Threepenny Opera - the Malthouse and Victorian Opera production from Melbourne is being presented by Sydney Theatre Company - and a screening at the Opera House of Fritz Lang's Metropolis with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. The print of Metropolis, the most expensive silent movie made, is yet again improved with 30 additional minutes of footage discovered in 2008 and never seen before in Australia.

Numerous other events and talks will feature across the city, with gallerists Rex Irwin and Ray Hughes presenting subsidiary shows.

A below-the-radar highlight will be a screening of Walter Ruttmann's experimental film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, essentially a visual poem filmed from morning until night in 1927. Jazz pianist Stu Hunter will play a live score to it with fellow musicians at the AGNSW's Domain Theatre.

The intent of all this is to re-create the ambience of a city ignited by art across myriad disciplines, a hopeless cause for present-day Sydney, but an admirable feast for those who want to immerse themselves in Weimar life.

Ironically the "metropolis" of Berlin, as Lang's futuristic parable suggests, was an inherently frightening development in a country that had been far more rural before industrialisation and World War I.

Words and phrases such as nerves, nervy and nervous energy crop up frequently in the catalogue to The Mad Square. The title of the exhibition puns on the name of a Felix Nussbaum painting from 1931 to look at what the "mad square" might have been: be it insanity in a public place, or rage within the frame of a painting, or something else as the Nazis loomed closer to power and artists responded in a frenzy amid a newly urbanised life.

We peer now into the abyss of the Weimar Republic through the prism of its phenomenal art, literature, design and theatre with strange longing nonetheless. It is a revealing feeling, and not so far from Otto Dix's accounts of his experiences as a machine-gunner during World War I: "The war was a horrible thing, but still something powerful," he wrote. "Under no circumstances could I miss it! You need to have experienced men in this unbridled state to really learn something about man."

Black-and-white works from Dix's portfolio War (1924) provide a salutary and gruesome rebuff to simple-minded voyeurism. Neither a pacifist nor a warmonger, Dix lays out the facts like a deck of cards, a fractured nightmare that enters fully into a bloody domestic painting such as The Felixmuller Family (1919).

This is a world stained by war that soon enough will stampede its way towards another, despite the artist's best efforts to disillusion people.

As usual the AGNSW will also run a program of films to parallel The Mad Square. Modern-day classics such as Cabaret will help to re-create the dark vibrancy of the era, a bridge to arguably even darker experiences such as Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930), with Marlene Dietrich as the archetypal nightclub femme fatale.

The latter explored a common theme: desire and anxiety, focused on the Neue Frau (New Woman), urban, independent and granted voting rights for the first time with the advent of the Weimar Republic in 1919. Hannah Hoch, who was reluctantly accepted into the dada group, would question this stereotype in her freakish collages, reaching a more melancholy high point with her painting Imaginary Bridge (1926), an exploration of a failed relationship and her two terminated pregnancies.

The convergence of sex and death, explicit or implicit in so much of the work, inevitably leads to a detached eroticisation of the era, and much of its magnetism. Christian Schad's Self Portrait(1927), with a naked woman on a bed behind him, a scar on her face, while he stares out at the viewer as if glancing into a mirror, sets the tone. It is one of the key works in a Berlin painting movement of the mid-1920s known as the Neue Sachlichkeit (translated as New Objectivity or, more correctly, New Matter-of-Factness).

One ultimately has to ask how much beauty there is to be experienced at an exhibition such as this, or if it is all one long slide into the approaching darkness.

"I don't subscribe to the view that these works are culturally pessimistic," Strecker says. "I don't see that as the overwhelming quality. The artists were acutely aware of what was around them, of course. The extraordinary thing was the artists were responding so quickly to so many dramatic changes, and even though they existed on the fringes there was a feeling what they were doing could change things or influence society.

"And it was that belief in creative expression and the role of the artist in revealing and even changing things that was unique to this period. I think that idealism has actually gone now from a lot of contemporary work."

She admits: "There is a lot of resistance in Australia to this kind of art. It's edgy. For some people it will be ugly and too political. But it's that edge and that engagement with society that I find more satisfying as a brand of modernism than 'art for art's sake'. You look at some of the works now and you can see that they could only be created in that place and time."

Strecker fingers the pages of the exhibition catalogue and even wonders if the work will have the same impact for a modern audience inured to images of violence and pornography as part of their casual entertainment. Rudolf Schlicter's The Embrace (1927-28), for example, shows two women in tight sexual coupling. Strecker says: "The overwhelming quality of it is the way it has been drawn. The subject matter has almost become secondary."

The same, perhaps, may be said for the early Grosz lithograph Murder in Ackerstrasse (1916-17), which depicts a beheaded prostitute on her bed while her goonish killer washes his hands. A cartoon grotesque, it shows the influence of children's illustrations and toilet graffiti that Grosz turned to in rejecting bourgeois ideas about art. Not so oddly, the image feels as if it has grown out of a tabloid newspaper report: part horror story, part grind-house amusement.

Despite her mixed thoughts on how people may respond - aesthetically, morally or emotionally - Strecker is intrigued by "the power of the work in the exhibition and how much of it does still speaks to us so directly".

She senses "that quality of embracing the new and being excited by modern life, but also fearful of it. We're in a similar period in a way with technology transforming things at such a rapid pace".

As if it is so obvious it barely needs saying, she shrugs and says, "Artists were facing similar changes back then."

BRECHT WAS RIGHT. In a 1930 film version of The Threepenny Opera he adds a final verse to Mack the Knife to explicate his interest in the lives of the rich and poor in Germany:

There are some who are in darkness
And the others are in light
And you see the ones in brightness
Those in darkness drop from sight.

The verse serves just as well as a eulogy for the artists of the Weimar Republic. The Nazis, who favoured neoclassical Roman and Greek art as their ideal, began a savage rollback against anything remotely tainted by modernism as they rose to power. By the time the National Socialists were burning books and artworks in 1933, many artists had wisely left.

Jews, communists, homosexuals and "degenerates", they were the un-Germanic filth that would form part of a great cultural exodus that transformed the West in theatre and music (Brecht and Kurt Weill), film (Lang), photojournalism (August Sander), political satire (Grosz), philosophy (Benjamin) and painting (Wassily Kandinsky). All of them had made Berlin their focus, a generation it is hard to imagine gathering in one place again.

Those left behind would enter into a state of internal exile to survive, or kill themselves if they weren't already being shipped off to concentration camps.

These suicides were not simply a matter of historical defeat, they were also the logical conclusion to a nihilism that was born in the trenches of World War I, then cultivated as a political and psychological aesthetic that left them nowhere else to go. People had been hanging themselves and jumping out of windows since the war. Things had gone from bad to worse. The lucky ones cringed behind doors, working in watercolours rather than oils so no one could smell what they were up to.

To see this exhibition is to be excited nontheless by the artistic project of social engagement. It is not all murder, sex and protest either, as the beauty and elegance of the Bauhaus school in everything from architecture and furniture design to teacups painted by Kandinsky make clear.

Indeed it's a surprise to realise Paul Klee and Kandinsky were both teaching at the Bauhaus school during the 20s, and to see their interest in "other worlds" of colour and form were as much a part of the era as more obviously intense social commentary. Eventually the Bauhaus was closed down by the Nazis for its supposed communist sympathies, a little too much talk of affordable design serving the working masses.

This elegance and beauty and, yes, this spirituality noted, there is still something about most of the works that calls to mind film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's phrase, "fear eats the soul". For The Mad Square is ultimately about a culture squeezed between two apocalyptic dramas, World War I and the coming of the Nazis. It cannot be denied.

It's instructive, therefore, to dwell again on the end of World War I. After the ruling kaiser had fled in defeat, a series of spasmodic and violent upheavals occurred, all of which were brutally suppressed. Thousands were injured and killed in street fighting and the jostling for power from late 1918 well into 1919.

A moderate Social Democratic Party, propped up by the same generals who had prosecuted the war, was able to establish the basis for a parliamentary democracy. It was this that would become known as the Weimar Republic, but there was always a feeling the SDP never washed the blood of these associations off its hands. The murder in custody of communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by a paramilitary unit nominally controlled by the SDP in 1919 had such symbolic freight all public signs of grief were immediately banned. In the longer run it would prevent the political left from ever forging a united opposition to the Nazis.

Among the many standout works in the exhibition is a black-and-white woodcut, Memorial for Karl Liebknecht 1919-20.

Invited by the Liebknecht family to sketch him at the mortuary, artist Kathe Kollwitz would note in her diary how "he was lying there in a coffin in the hall beside other coffins, with red flowers around his bullet-holed head. His face was proud, his mouth slightly opened and twisted in pain."

Her woodcut emanates a religious grief of near medieval darkness, intensified by an empathy that had grown out of the death of Kollwitz's own son during the war. The work is stark, powerful and, in the context of the times, an act of humane bravery.

It may sound grand, but there is a larger feeling of bravery running through much of the work: for its aesthetic boldness, its ecstatic principles in the pre-war years and later challenges to the bourgeois order and corruption of the Weimar period that saw right-wing nationalism fester and triumph.

The Mad Square culminates in a documentation of The Degenerate Art show of 1937, an event critic Uwe Fleckner flags as "a defamatory exhibition" by the Nazis.

Paintings, sculptures, collages and other works were hung in a purposely slap-dash and ramshackle fashion, crammed into a few rooms and surrounded by numerous, shrill signs declaring things such as: "Revelation of the Jewish racial soul"; "The ideal - cretin and whore"; "Madness become method"; and "The Jewish longing for
the wilderness reveals itself - in Germany the Negro becomes the racial ideal of degenerate art".

Much earlier Joseph Roth had written in fury and pain from Paris in 1933 as the Nazis threw books and artworks into great bonfires: "We have sung Germany, the real Germany! And that is why today we are being burned by Germany!" Called The Auto-da-Fe of the Mind, it is actually one of his least controlled pieces, as if Roth's own writing is breaking apart before the horror.

By the time of The Degenerate Art show it was all over for them. In bearing witness to the art still with us in The Mad Square, we're strangely fortunate to see the ones in brightness that survived. Those in darkness drop from sight. Burned.

- Mark Mordue

* This article was first published under the title 'Lust for Life' in The Weekend Australian Review, July 30, 2011. It was inspired by the exhibition, 'The Mad Square', held at the Art Gallery of NSW August 6 - November 6, 2011.

American Frankenstein: Bret Easton Ellis and Imperial Bedrooms

If I were to have a nervous breakdown and come apart, I can see how reading too much Bret Easton Ellis would help me along.

I've spent the past few weeks wandering through his novels, alternately amused by his wit (there is never enough emphasis by critics on how funny he can be), depressed by his detachment, and ultimately disgusted, somehow soiled, by the violence he elaborates with such clinical precision. More than once it crossed my mind that the body of his work is a preparation for suicide: of an individual, and of a culture. His message is simple: either we pull the plug or someone should do it for us.

American Psycho (1991) remains the most famous expression of this bleak and relentless ethos. There's still a "Category One: Restricted" sticker on my copy, which I had to buy shrinkwrapped from over the bookshop counter when it came out, as if it were hardcore pornography. No doubt this arcane process gave the item a degree of groovy cultural voodoo all its own: a marketing triumph in the age of appearances.

In Ellis's books there's certainly an overarching notion that identity is nothing more than a role we adopt to move across the surface of this world. Or, more truly, an interchangeable set of roles we change, masks we wear, as we pass from place to place, scene to scene. Until it's clear we are not anything at all. Which may be why the star of his first novel, Less than Zero (1985), and its much-heralded, just-published sequel, Imperial Bedrooms, is named Clay.

To reinforce its veracity as a saturnine midlife return, Imperial Bedrooms builds on references to Less than Zero. From the start of Imperial Bedrooms there's an emphasis this is Clay's monologue for real and not some secondhand author's version or Hollywood homogenisation. With that in mind, best run for the Hollywood Hills, everybody, because the truth is the Harold Robbins of postmodern oblivion is back in town, as this superb Ellisian opening declares:

They had made a movie about us. The movie was based on a book by someone we knew. The book was a simple thing about four weeks in the city we grew up in and for the most part it was an accurate portrayal. It was labelled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our names weren't changed and there was nothing in it that hadn't happened. For example, there actually had been a screening of a snuff film in that bedroom in Malibu on a January afternoon, and yes, I had walked out onto the deck overlooking the Pacific where the author tried to console me, assuring me that the screams of the children being tortured were faked, but he was smiling as he said this and I had to turn away . . .

As for the morality Ellis espouses -- the antagonism to materialism and narcissism that obsesses him to the point of a fetish (what an irony) -- it once again climaxes in self-dispersing acts of violence, momentary ecstasies that allow us to bathe in a sex-and-death abyss where we finally recognise ourselves. Maybe.

Which means that although Imperial Bedrooms is promoted as a sequel to Less than Zero, what it feels like is a prequel to American Psycho, and part of some larger meta-novel that Ellis has been weaving for an entire career. When this larger vision is glimpsed, it's possible to sense genius in Ellis, however flawed and inconsistent his writing can sometimes be.

The author has been toying with postmodern games that link all his books for some time, culminating in Lunar Park (2005), his mock celebrity memoir. Blurring fact and fiction altogether, the novel is an hallucination of what an autobiography can be. This could be incredibly tiresome, yet another hall of mirrors project that numbs us as we are taken for a wildly distorting turn through literary puns and cross-references. But Ellis saves himself by being amusing, then eerie if overly inclined towards a Stephen King pastiche, and finally distressingly poetic as he reaches out futilely for an imaginary son he has lost.

As a work of self-criticism, Lunar Park begins dutifully enough with an analysis of the opening passages to Ellis's novels up to that point. This also makes Ellis difficult to review since there doesn't seem much left to say about him that he that hasn't already said. I had, for instance, also considered beginning this review with a comparative analysis of the openings to Less than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms. It's the type of comparison that not only seemed obvious but necessary, given Less than Zero has one of the most brilliant openings in modern American fiction: "People are afraid to merge on the freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city . . ." Of course, it's a young Dante wearily entering hell. Once that journey was taken, the been-there, done-that feeling would cast a foreboding over all his novels. Rereading Less than Zero, it's all the more amazing to witness the consistency of it, something Ellis has had trouble repeating as his books have swollen in length and complexity, then bloated into failure with Glamorama (1998), a ramped-up tale of fashion models who become terrorists.

Despite this misstep, it is nonetheless possible to argue Ellis's greatest progress until now has been as a comic writer, as evidenced by his return to form in Lunar Park. But the fact remains Ellis burst out of the box with Less than Zero in a fully formed state and he remains little changed as an American existential stylist whenever he leans toward tragedy. That's devastating to see from the outside; it must be tough to negotiate from his perspective. In some ways you can read Imperial Bedrooms as an attempt to shut the door on that forever.

For all its notoriety American Psycho isn't Ellis's best novel, largely because it's too epic, teeming with everything he has to offer as a writer. The Ellis aesthetic here is more, and more again. To the point where you wish an editor had cut the book in half instead of letting Ellis's Armani-clad serial killer Patrick Bateman dismember yet another body.

Until the torture and murder really set in, however, the biggest shock was how hilarious that book was for the first 100 pages. Rather than blood and guts it featured stockbrokers one-upping each other with the quality of their business cards (fretting over the merits of bone, eggshell and off-white backgrounds), as well as drolly written chapters focused on Bateman's appreciative album reviews of Genesis and Whitney Houston. This is one of Ellis's favourite techniques, placing the comic-book mundane beside the vicious. A running gag where an advertisement for the stage show Les Miserables keeps cropping up is another sardonic example in American Psycho. Ellis loves working off this accumulated detail, until the funny becomes nasty and he buries you.

Like all of Ellis's narrators, Clay included, Bateman is unreliable. In his discussion of American Psycho in Lunar Park, the equally unreliable Ellis observes:

If you actually read the book you could come away doubting that these crimes had occurred. There were large hints that they existed only in Bateman's mind. The murders and torture were in fact fantasies fuelled by his rage and fury about how American life was structured and this had -- no matter the size of his wealth -- trapped him. The fantasies were an escape. This was the book's thesis. It was about society and manners and mores, and not about cutting up women. How could anyone read the book and not see this?

To call American Psycho a pure satire, though, is a little kind, as it's never been clear what Ellis attacks and what he celebrates.

The author plays the complicity card so closely to his chest my suspicion is he's not really sure where he stands. Maybe that's the necessary truth of his oeuvre as he lacerates everything and everyone, including himself.

The rage and fury, the wit that can curdle into something so black-humoured you wonder what the hell you are laughing at; it's not just satirical, it's brutalising.

That Ellis admits having based Patrick Bateman on his own abusive, status-obsessed father just makes this fury all the more palpable.

Imperial Bedrooms once again confirms that rage in Ellis's typically leached pulp-fiction style. It's especially notable in Ellis's commanding grasp of minimalist dialogue, with blankly counterpointing, single-line riffs of conversation that carry on like something out of an Albert Camus novel, then slide off into the scripted camp of an episode of The Young and the Restless (a soapie tone Ellis only seems half in control of). Together with Clay's point of view and alienated scenes that tend to run for barely more than a page at most -- and which Ellis has rightly called "controlled cinematic haiku" -- the amount of white space on the page adds to a deserted feeling, an LA emptiness. Like everything else in Less than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms, this is a highly visual quality, movie-like, voyeuristic, floating.

Unfortunately, the book does not sustain its opening rush, and its plot devices, featuring drug debts, elite prostitution, threatening text messages and a blue Jeep that follows Clay around, seem contrived and false, an over-loud echo of Less than Zero's more muted and believable voids. Ellis has got the voice right in the sequel, but he can't quite catch the old scene's pointless momentum.

And yet there is something strangely spiritual permeating the edges of Ellis's writing in Imperial Bedrooms, a shimmer, spooky and beautiful -- and available in only the slenderest of his passages -- that implies some regard for the haunted and even the transcendent that has always been present in his work.

Indeed, if one were to select a genre for Ellis, modern horror would seem most appropriate, conjuring as it does the attendant clash between technology and spirit, surface and soul. Which of course makes Ellis an essentially romantic artist, and typically death obsessed at that. It's just instead of the mechanistic, Industrial Age clash with science the likes of Mary Shelley originally dealt with in Frankenstein, Ellis is wrestling with late-stage American empire capitalism, television, celebrity, modern drugs, communication and identity itself as products.

It's even possible to say that Ellis's Frankenstein is himself. Which is not so far away from the original theme of Shelley's novel, if you think about it, given that she based her monster on Lord Byron and his tormented image of himself.

Very late in Imperial Bedrooms and flowing on from a deeply disturbing scene featuring a young male and female paid to be beaten and sexually violated at a desert ranch house outside LA, a scene so disturbing I'm not sure I am happy I read it at all, this reverie emerges:

The sky looked scoured, remarkable, a cylinder of light formed at the base of the mountains, rising upward. At the end of the weekend the girl admitted to me she had become a believer as we sat in the shade of the towering hills -- "the crossing place" is what the girl called them, and when I asked her what she meant she said, "this is where the devil lives," and she was pointing at the mountains with a trembling hand but she was smiling now as the boy kept diving into the pool and the welts glistened on his tan back from where I had beaten him. The devil was calling out to her but it didn't scare her any more because she wanted to talk to him now, and in the house was a copy of the book that had been written about us twenty years ago and its neon cover glared from where it rested on the glass coffee table until it was found floating in the pool in the house in the movie colony beneath the towering mountains, water bloated, and then the camera tracks across the desert until we start fading out on the yellowing sky.

Within this strange luminescence one senses another realm that Ellis might enter. A dream world rather than a nightmare, although it is couched in seductively evil terms above and so hardly light yet. The tone of initiation and ritual is similarly hard to miss. One might extend this to the act of writing and reading itself. And ask if Ellis is indeed his father's son, or someone else.

-         -  Mark Mordue

* First published in the Australian Literary Review, August 4^th 2010.