As The Kyoto Bell made The Australia Institute’s 2021 Essential Reads list, I thought I’d return a favour with a list of some escapist reads which got me thru 2021.
Not every book on the list was published this year – my reading habits are random and I stray down rabbit-holes when an interest is sparked.
The Animals in That Country – Laura Jean McKay
A vi-fi novel (as opposed to cli-fi) which won the 2021 Arthur C Clark award, this fine piece of writing is about a virus called zoo-flu which lets humans understand animal “language”, either though noise and song, or reading body language. The sudden flu-borne ability drives us mad, either with guilt or enchantment when we’re able to understand what other sentient beings on this earth are saying. In one dark passage the siren-song of whales leads to a mass drowning event as crowds follow a pod of humpbacks out to sea. The narrator is Jean, an alcoholic and rather unlovely grandmother who takes her “queen” dingo Sue on a quest (yes a quest narrative) to find her granddaughter. *Spoiler* Sue and Jean bicker a lot during their road trip as they vie to be Alpha bitch. Guess who wins! What I love about her novel are McKay’s imaginative leaps, translating animal talk into English via a beautiful minimalist poetry. All written before Covid and completely different to the current pandemic, the authorities do come up with a zoo-flu vaccine, and vaccine politics do enter the plot as well.
The Mermaid of the Black Conch– Monique Roffey
Another book that indulges in litres of magical realist bodily fluids is this adult “fairy tale”, published in 2020 – a love story between a rather hideous (at first) mermaid Aycaia and a fisherman David, who form a bond as he sings to her from his fisherman’s tinny. I guess in 2021 I was trying to travel through books, this time to a small island in the Caribbean. A brutal American game fisherman catches the mermaid off the Black Conch Island and claims her as his own. David rescues Aycaia, and hides her in the bath where she appears to shed her mermaid curse and stinky tail (all excellent writing) and become a simple, tattooed pre-colonial Indian woman. She learns to walk and tries to work out who’s who in a rather incestuous town. Lots of lovely West Indies patois in the dialogue. The narrative flicks between the story in the early 1970’s, Aycaia’s own story and songs, and David’s memory of events. There’s also a hurricano for the heavy weather afficianados.
Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir
Hard sc-fi by the bloke who wrote The Martian, Weir’s 2021 book Project Hail Mary is a somewhat similar, man-versus-vacuum-of-space yarn. Using an excellent “slowly recovering from amnesia” narrative strategy to tease out the back story, our hero, Ryland Grace, deals with a sunlight eating lifeform that threatens the galaxy and Earth. Grace befriends a large crablike alien named Rocky, sent by his crab race to the same point in the galaxy on the same rescue mission. Grace and Rocky collaborate to discover how to stop the sun-munching life-forms. There’s much nerdy science which may annoy some people but my deep-down 15 year-old self loved it, while my older self found the interspecies friendship endearing … awww. Project Hail Mary is hilarious and will make a great movie – I believe it has already been optioned.
The Labyrinth–Amanda Lohrey
I do love Aus Lit and the 2021 Miles Franklin winner is labyrinthine in plot and execution, as Erica Marsden escapes to somewhere on the NSW South coast, close to where her adult son is incarcerated in a private prison. The narrative is a finely nuanced first person telling of Erica’s story. Her life is a tangle and her son’s horrible crime has brought on her self-enforced loneliness, so she decides to build a walking labyrinth to perhaps help with her crushing guilt and anxieties. We meet some of the characters in the town including the elusive stonemason, Jurko, and other figures from her past. The writing is beautiful and Lohrey builds an evocative portrait of solitude, the melancholy of a storm wracked beach, grief over the living, small town life, and yes, the journey is more important than the destination.
The Game: A portrait of Scott Morrison–Sean Kelly
Now some non-fiction – I can’t go past The Game written by my mate Sean Kelly. It’s a long hard look at Scott Morrison who has confected his own reality-denying persona to win elections. This was why, half way through the book, I felt I was reading a mockumentary novel about a cynical yet complex fictional politician. Unfortunately The Game isn’t some dark novel – Scott Morrison is real, just as Donald Trump was real yet fictional at the same time. The Game is a forensic trace by Sean through hundreds of transcripts and interviews of the PM and his alleged flow-brain, and a philosophical reflection on the way, for a certain cohort of politician, getting into power is the only game in town and why that matters to a nation beset by multiple 21st Century challenges.
Total Chaos– Jean Claude Izzo
I love French crime writing (and crime movies). I was put onto this 1990s classic when, during lockdown, I was watching the Marseille episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown in my attempts to vicariously travel and eat greasy street food. In the ep, the late Tony interviewed the late Izzo 
who exuded a love for his mongrel city. A hard boiled cop, Fabio Montale, is assigned to community policing duties, but his two childhood (criminal) besties Ugo and Manu are murdered so he seeks vengeance in a Chandleresque lone-wolf manner. Plenty of beautiful women and sweaty sex, near death experiences, and a tangled noir plot but as in all the best French crime genre, there’s the food – mostly simple fish dishes. And cheese.
1979 – Val McDermid
Set in a thinly disguised Glasgow Herald newsroom in that famous winter of discontent, a young female reporter, Allie Burns, fights misogyny, homophobia, murder and the IRA to land scoops and solve crimes. McDermid captures an era, a dissolute profession and a down at heel Glasgow. A crime writing pro and musician to boot, Val also sticks her best songs of 1979 as an kind of epilogue and its almost the same playlist I also used run on rotation on the 4TTTFM Townsville night-shift, so while it misses a few notable 1979 Aussie songs, I can heartily recommend her selection. Someone (probs her publisher) has also Spotified it, for those interested in cranking music.