By Steven Carroll and Cameron Woodhead
Books to read this week include new titles from Stephen King, Tom Baragwanath and Heidi Sopinka.
Book critics Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll cast their eyes over recent fiction and non-fiction releases. Here are their reviews.
Fiction pick of the week
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Fairy Tale
Stephen King, Hodder & Stoughton, $32.99
A storyteller as prolific and compulsive as Stephen King was never going to let lockdowns go to waste. He emerges from the pandemic with the sprawling Fairy Tale, which should appeal equally to fans of his supernatural horror classics as well as those with a taste for a more recent sideline in fantasy.
Seventeen-year-old Charlie Reade has had it rough. His mother died in a hit-and-run when he was a child, and his grief-stricken father succumbed to alcoholism. Adventure beckons when he befriends the dog of a mean old recluse, whose creepy house sits, he eventually discovers, atop a tunnel to another world. In this nightmare realm, people are blurred into featureless husks, and a war brews between good and evil that threatens to spill over into our world.
King has written another effortless yarn: Fairy Tale begins as a fully fleshed coming-of-age tale and swells into dark fantasy that stands, among other things, as a striking homage to Lovecraftian horror.
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Paper Cage
Tom Baragwanath, Text, $32.99
This New Zealand literary thriller doubles as a compelling mystery and an atmospheric dive into small-town psychology. Its unsung heroine is Lorraine, a simple records clerk at an out-of-the-way police station. When a child goes missing, and soon another, locals fear the worst and the cops seem to have nothing to go on.
It takes the arrival of a detective from Wellington, Hayes, to appreciate that the unassuming Lorraine has quietly accumulated information that might start to crack the case. Time is of the essence, as the hunt for the children, and their kidnapper, proceeds apace.
Tom Baragwanath has mastered the craft of literary crime: this is well-paced and vividly written detective fiction with a Chandleresque grittiness to its depiction of a community in crisis.
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Utopia
Heidi Sopinka, Scribe, $29.99
Heidi Sopinka has found repeated literary inspiration in the art world. Her novel The Dictionary of Animal Languages was based loosely on the life of surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, and in Utopia she turns to the male-dominated art scene of California in the 1970s.
When Romy, wife of star artist Billy and a gifted artist in her own right, dies in suspicious circumstances, it isn’t long before Billy shacks up with another girlfriend. Paz is fresh out of New York art school, but when she moves in with her new beau, her creativity is haunted by traces of the woman she has replaced.
Suspense builds as Paz gets rattled by strange events, and she embarks on a panicked quest to uncover Romy’s final artwork and learn the truth about what happened to her. Tinged with horror, Utopia creates a terse and tightly wound artistic mystery.
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The Rabbit Hutch
Tess Gunty, Oneworld, $29.99
Set in a low-rent apartment complex in Vacca Vale, Indiana, Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch starts with an ecstatic moment. The 18-year-old Blandine has a mystical experience, leaving her body behind. From this wild core the narrative fragments, roving through lives, at once crowded and vacant, of hardscrabble residents caught in a Rustbelt town on the skids, but always circling back to the intelligent and exquisitely sensitive Blandine, whose own life has been blighted by failures in foster care and who escapes into the pursuit of mysticism and an obsession with the poetry of Dante.
There are shades of David Foster Wallace in Gunty’s consummately digressive style, her labile sense of tragicomic absurdity, and her ability to wrest the sublime from seemingly banal corners of human experience. It will be fascinating to see how her career develops as she hones her craft and gives her invention freer hand.
Non-fiction pick of the week
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Kiki Man Ray
Mark Braude, Two Roads, $34.99
Born Alice Prin in 1901, the illegitimate daughter of a Burgundian charcoal seller, Prin eventually became famous as Kiki of Montparnasse – singer/performer, artist’s model, film actress and painter, emblematic of Parisian, bohemian modernism. Most know her now for Man Ray’s photograph of her, nude with “f” shape sound-holes, suggesting she is a plaything.
But as Mark Braude’s informed and atmospheric biography reveals, there was much more to her than that. He covers her early, lowly born struggles, her relationship with Man Ray and how they informed each other’s art, her volatile life (including time in prison) and her death in 1953, partly caused by drugs and alcohol.
The writing sometimes strains for effect, but this is a vivid, astute portrait of a daringly creative woman and her flamboyant times.
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A Visible Man
Edward Enninful, Bloomsbury $32.99
One morning in London in the early days of the pandemic Edward Enninful – fashion stylist and editor of British Vogue, among other things – told a friend while walking through Hyde Park that he was writing his memoirs, about “a boy from Ghana making his way in a racist, classist industry and the struggles along the way”. His friend said no, black people need images of power and success, not struggle.
The result is a mixture of both: a portrait of family life in Ghana with an overbearing military father, emigration to Britain, the vibrancy of Ladbroke Grove in the 1980s, being spotted for a modelling job by the fashion editor of i-D magazine, coming out as gay and eventually rising to the top of the fashion industry and changing the game by injecting a long-overdue diversity as well as mixing with the rich and famous.
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Crickonomics
Stefan Szymanski and Tim Wigmore, Bloomsbury $32.99
I’ve always imagined that bowler and batter engage in a kind of class warfare – the toff at the crease, and the bowler, the toiler of the piece. This historically informed study of the game in its all-pervasive modern forms confirms my view.
Private schools – especially English ones – overwhelmingly produce batters, for a variety of reasons. It’s just one of the conundrums and trends Szymanski and Wigmore explore, asserting, for example, that the so-called radical Packer revolution was actually deeply conservative and jingoistic.
The book is broad in sweep, looking, say, at the long, influential history of women’s cricket, as well as key individuals such as Adam Gilchrist, who create pivotal moments of change. Although frequently reliant on graphs and statistics, the authors have a light, breezy and thoroughly engaging style.
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Harold Holt
Ross Walker, La Trobe University Press $34.99
Harold Holt’s disappearance at Cheviot Beach, Portsea, is not only one of the most dramatic exits in Australian politics, it’s also an enduring mystery – why would you go out in such dangerous waters?
The answer may be found in this sympathetically drawn portrait – that for all his measured talk, Holt had a risk-taking side and was always testing himself. And, as Walker shows, he was a rattled prime minister when he took his last, fateful swim.
Walker takes us from Holt’s peripatetic youth, his parents’ divorce, absentee father, school (where he was known as “Tiger” for his determination), the early death of his mother and his dedicated political career. Most intriguing is Holt’s affinity with the sea and his never-ending fascination with getting below its surface.
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