Complexity. It is all around us and within us. So it seems to us, at least. As humans, we see the universe and life as complex systems and processes and would like to understand them. In doing so, we pull things apart to a level we think we understand and then put all the simple parts together and wonder why the conglomerate does not function quite as the complex system did to start with.
Dirty Fracking Business
Peter Ralph
Melbourne Books 2012
ISBN: 9781877096228
$29.95
272 pp
I need to declare, at the outset, that I edited this book for the author in preparation for publication. I also need to say that I am, on current evidence, opposed to the uncontrolled exploration for and extraction of coal seam gas, the subject of this novel. I will therefore aim to limit my review of the book to the merits of the book as a work of art.
Peter Ralph has taken a topic about which there is heated debate in at least Queensland and New South Wales (and parts of the USA) and he has written a barely-disguised fiction: names of individuals and corporations have been changed, although, in some cases, only minimally. He has turned something that is controversial to many people into a gripping drama.
I have been reading about a man who pretended to be someone other than who he was. At least, that was how he was described in the late 1880s in England. It has made me wonder how someone can not be who they are and what leads others to think this way.
Why can it be so difficult to relate to another person in a consistently positive way? On the other hand, what makes it possible for a man and a woman to stay together after the first flush of lust borne of the urge to procreate? Is the lust between individuals in a gay coupling borne of the same urge?
How do we reach a decision about what is morally acceptable and what is not? To what extent are such decisions made on an individual basis and to what extent are they foisted on us by others?
A Tiger in Eden
Chris Flynn
Text Publishing 2012
ISBN: 9781921922039
$22.95
215 pp
Anyone who has heard about this book will know that it is a rollicking, raucous and bawdy tale. But that is not what this book is about. It is Chris Flynn’s debut ‘novel’, but the term ‘novel’ gives us no inkling of the content, structure or style of the book. It is impossible to categorise and hard to describe.