Jane Rawson

Image: ‘Lost’ by Catherine Nelson https://michaelreid.com.au/art/lost/, which is the cover illustration for Elizabeth Knox’s novel, ‘The Absolute Book’.

For the past year or so, the question I’ve been hoping to answer in my own mind (both for my current writing project and for my life) is something along the lines of ‘what are humans for?’. We have got the world into a terrible mess and created a way of living that seems to be making it impossible to get out of that mess. Is there a way to be human and not make things worse? If there is, how do we make our way there? So before we get to the ‘best books’, here are some of the things that have helped me think/feel through this:

• The Heavens, by Sandra Newman (also one of the ‘best books’) – Kate lives in two worlds. The first is like our own, but more decent, kind, cleaner and more thoughtful; the other is her dreamlife, in Elizabethan England (including Will Shakespeare, which I would normally hate). Kate’s dreams are vivid and coherent, but every time she dreams her other world gets worse. Can she exist and not break the world? Writing a satisfying ending for these kinds of stories is incredibly difficult, but I think The Heavens did it perfectly. And this book is incredibly complex in content but such a light and delicious read at the same time.
• Russian Doll, by Natasha Lyonne (not a book) – this TV series felt like a kind of twin to The Heavens. Nadia can’t stop dying, and every time she does it gets harder to fix the mess her life is becoming. The series probably isn’t about the mess we’re making of the world – it’s probably about addiction – but to me it felt like an insightful story about how love and connection and trust and putting aside cynicism might offer some help. Again, such a good ending.
• The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox – Elizabeth Knox is one of my favourite writers, endlessly imaginative, thoughtful and inventive, never afraid to try something difficult. The Absolute Book is a massive undertaking – for the writer, mainly, but not something to enter into lightly as a reader either – that goes very, very deep into the question of what we’ve done to the world and how we might fix it, or have it fixed for us if we won’t do the job ourselves. ‘Would it be so terrible if revolutionary changes were made for our own good?’ she says on twitter. It’s Elizabeth Knox, so the revolutionaries are demons and strange, terrifying fairies. You have never read anything like this before, in style or in content.
• Utopia, by Dennis Kelly (not a book) – thank you to excellent author Corey J White who recommended this to me. A giant conspiracy is afoot and the bad guys will kill anyone who gets in their way. But what if their giant conspiracy is a solution, of sorts, to ecocide and climate change (‘would it be so terrible if revolutionary changes were made for our own good?’)? Are they the bad guys if they’re trying to fix everything? Well, yes: I mean, they’re killing a lot of people and digging people’s eyes out with spoons. But still, I mean, are they? I’ve only watched season one and apparently I’m going to have a lot more to think about in season two, but this has got me thinking about whether great change can be made in a spirit of loving kindness or whether it always involves torture and poisonous gas.

And now to the five-star books I read in 2019, all but one of which are novels because fiction seems to be better at making me think than non-fiction:

• When one person dies the whole world is over, by Mandy Ord (published 2019, Australian) – for about six months I was Mandy’s housemate in Ainslie and it was great, but that’s not why I loved this detailed, thoughtful graphic memoir. Mandy draws three panels about her life, every day, for a year and it accrues into a tender portrait of how important the tiny things are.
• Riddance, by Shelley Jackson (2018) – also slightly a graphic novel; at least, there are a lot of illustrations. A really creepy, almost narrative-free, horror story about… about… OK I’m not sure what it was about, though ostensibly it’s about a school for children who can’t speak but who are being abusively ‘trained’ to tell the stories of dead people. They leave strange wax secretions on their pillows. Their headmistress keeps travelling to inexplicable worlds. It’s so confusing and unsettling and never at all comfortable.
• Normal People, by Sally Rooney (2018, Irish) – I have nothing to say that hasn’t already been said, but I read it in a day instead of doing a lot of things I should have been doing.
• Simpson Returns, by Wayne Macauley (2019, Australian) – I never get tired of satirical investigations of the Anzac myth, and this is probably the best one.
• Wolfe Island, by Lucy Treloar (2019, Australian but set in the US) – remember when people used to write about climate change as though it was a science fictional future? Those were the days. Finally (ok, that’s an exaggeration: there have been some others) an Australian author is writing a realist, literary novel about contemporary climate change. It’d be better if she didn’t have to, but she does such a good job of it. Lucy writes very, very good sentences.
• Lanny by Max Porter (2019, UK), Pollard by Laura Beatty (2008, UK), The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018, US) – books about trees by people who care about trees for people who care about trees. Is it insane to care a lot about trees? No. These books think about why. Pollard is hard to find but definitely worth searching out. When will there be a great Australian novel about trees? (No, not Eucalyptus.)
• Women Talking, by Miriam Toews (2019, US) – women talk about ethics and how to live and whether men should be any part of it, in a paradigm of religious fundamentalism that probably means nothing to you, a progressive atheist, but somehow makes you think very, very hard about a lot of things you might have taken for granted.
• Tin Man, by Sarah Winman (2017, UK) – It’s just so very beautiful and sad.
• The Porpoise, by Mark Haddon (2019, UK) – I wasn’t going to read it because isn’t Mark Haddon kind of overhyped? And then it got shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, and those guys are really good at choosing books I like, and then I needed an audiobook to listen to because now I have to drive to work instead of getting public transport, and then I was listening to it and then it got really, really odd and I was very happy. Not at all without flaws but with masses of ambition and reckless risk-taking, as well as some of the best descriptive writing I’ve read (heard?). Lots of people hate this book, and fair enough.
• Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry (2019, Ireland) – I’ll read anything Kevin Barry writes, because he is a genius of voice and wit and muted anguish and he is very interested in the ethics of why we do what we do. Not quite as good as Beatlebone, which is one of the best books ever, but nearly.

If you want to see graphs of everything I read in 2019 (really?) then go here.