The Chain, Adrian McKinty

Newtown Review of Books published my review of Adrian McKinty’s The Chain this week!

This is one hell of a ride. If you’re looking for a book to keep you up and turning the pages, this is for you. Adrian McKinty, author of the Sean Duffy series set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, has shown his versatility in producing a tight, intricate thriller which unfolds with escalating horror.

Rachel Klein is pulled into a waking nightmare when her child is kidnapped and will only be released when she has paid her ransom, kidnapped another child, and then demanded that child’s parents pay a ransom and in turn kidnap another child. As a sinister plot device, harnessing the lengths to which a mother will go to protect her child is genius. It is also limitless, and Rachel has just become its next link.

Who runs this psychopathic business? The reader gradually finds out through McKinty’s agile shifting of perspective. For some chapters we are in Rachel’s point of view, living her collapsing world, but then we meet a pair of twins who, as children, delight in the manipulation of other kids. Who are they? We also enter the lives of the reluctant kidnappers and get into the headspace of Rachel’s daughter, the victim. Kylie’s voice is authentic.
She knows she shouldn’t have gotten into the vehicle. That’s how girls vanish …You don’t get in the vehicle, you turn around and you run, run, run.
But she doesn’t. She has a gun to her head.

While The Chain is a twisted adaptation of cyber extortion, its trade being children, the business model is not too far from the truth. I read this book, serendipitously, while covering a seminar on cyber-crime and Internet security. McKinty has done his research. The profile of The Chain’s criminal masterminds is accurate. Hackers are not hoodie-clad misfits living in their mothers’ basements. They are smart, tertiary educated, and use their cyber skills to solve more and more arcane intellectual challenges. The spyware, malware and intricate cyber breaches used to take over data systems is now so sophisticated that these extortionists set up helplines, hire translators and develop navigation tools to allow their victims to make the transaction as smoothly as possible. The corporate crowd attending the seminar I covered were advised to ‘park the criminality’ and see them as businesses.

McKinty prises open a conundrum: we have used information to defend ourselves, to minimise our vulnerabilities, but have we become hostage to it? Social media that broadcasts our every move has now been overtaken in its sheer scope by the Internet of Things: baby monitors over a cradle can tell you where a baby is, when she is sleeping, and how far away her parents might be; GPS trackers in kids’ shoes; doorbells that record every coming and going. McKinty’s commentary on the technology is timely. We have become accomplices to our own surveillance—we enter the Panopticon willingly.

And if one turns to crime—to rescue a child, to kidnap another, to buy narcotics—the information you need is there. When Rachel breaks into a house, Pete, her brother-in-law, asks how she learnt to break the lock. ‘Google,’ she replies. Of course. When searching for a child to kidnap, she turns to Facebook:
There are a breathtaking number of people whose profiles and posts are public and can be viewed by anyone. George Orwell was wrong, she thinks. In the future, it won’t be the state that keeps tabs on everyone … it will be the people … We are our own secret police.
As the reader becomes aware of the operation of the Chain, the secrecy, the reach of its tentacles, it is impossible not to think of Stasiland, Anna Funder’s powerful examination of East Germany’s secret police. At its height, it was thought that one person in four was in its fold reporting on their own community—family, friends, neighbours. Anybody can be watching. When Rachel sees a strange man look at her and then nod ‘grimly’, she thinks, ‘Is he another one of The Chain’s agents?’

Another time, Rachel is fiercely punched in the stomach, in public, by another stranger. A message from The Chain. The Chain is a perfect example of the gig economy, our outsourced culture where the victims themselves do all the work. Once corrupted by their own complicity, they cannot turn to authorities. The operation runs on fear and they are self-policing.

While The Chain multiplies, its corruption spreads like an oil slick. Doing evil makes us evil. Its insidious takeover of our ‘better nature’ is part of the its power. Rachel becomes aware of the contempt in her voice as she discusses the mother of the boy she is about to kidnap: ‘She remembers that Tacitus line about how you always hate those you have wronged.’

Rachel is on the road when she realises what she has to do to get her child back. She pulls ‘Into the slow lane, into the medium lane, into the fast lane.’ You will too, and don’t forget: the best kept secrets are those hidden in plain sight.

Adrian McKinty The Chain Hachette 2019 PB 368pp $32.99

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Wedding Puzzle, Sallie Muirden

I recently reviewed Sallie Muirden’s gentle and thought-provoking book, Wedding Puzzle, for The Newtown Review of Books.

How does anyone ever manage to choose a partner for life? Given the imperfections of every choice, given that we are all complicated individuals with our own distinct bundles of neuroses, Muirden asks how anybody ever manages it at all.

Beth Shaw, who has spent her life so far trying to avoid decisions in love, preferring to be passively chosen than to choose herself, must answer this in Wedding Puzzle. The book opens with her driving to her childhood home in a pretty seaside town, on her way to her own wedding. The town’s mock Tudor hotel is where she and Jordan, her fiancé, had impulsively decided to marry a few months earlier. But the night before the wedding, she has received an anonymous letter telling her something shocking about the man she is about to marry.

Sallie Muirden Wedding Puzzle Transit Lounge 2019 304pp $29.99

Read the full review here.

Dying in the first person, Nike Sulway

First published in the Newtown Review of Books (18 July 2017), my review of Nike Sulway’s luminous novel, Dying in the first person.

This is a powerful and extraordinarily beautiful story of family, love and sacrifice. Sulway has created a world we enter slowly, uncovering the past and its hurts in small steps. It draws the reader into a place of mystery and wonder as Samuel is brought face to face with an emissary, Ana, who brings news of his long-estranged twin brother.

We learn of Morgan’s death in the canal near their home in Amsterdam in the opening lines —‘A woman came across the field, carrying the body of my brother, who had drowned.’ Ana’s first contact is through letters, then telephone calls. Samuel and his mother, Solange, have had no first-hand contact with Morgan for many years but on accompanying Morgan’s body back to be buried, Ana stays, allowing herself to rest, to be loved. In Sulway’s depiction of her growing relationships with Samuel and Solange, there is a longing and vulnerability that all readers will recognise.

Sulway explores ideas of sacrifice and the accompanying notions of obligation, commitment and entitlement; these are part of loving somebody. Her characters’ offerings to those they love are almost biblical in their scope—life, freedom, memory and voice—but we can see echoes of them in our own lives. We all make huge, yet unrecognised, sacrifices every day, for love.

It is through the book’s gradual unfolding that we learn of Morgan’s life, his self-imposed isolation from his family and why and how he died. Ana’s complicated relationship with Morgan is teased out. Ultimately, she has wanted to save him: ‘I believed I could rescue him, restore him to himself, simply by being patient and kind.’ Sulway’s examination of Morgan’s mental state reminded me of Jeffrey Euginides in his 2011 book The Marriage Plot where Madeleine, who wants to save Leonard, is told: ‘But you can only save yourself.’ Sulway is acutely aware of our limitations in treating emotional pain.

The book’s central theme is the power of language. Sulway portrays its role, through narrative, in recording truth, or lack of truth, which then, in turn, allows us to see reality and change and grow. As children, the boys develop a secret language, sophisticated and complex. As adults, Morgan writes books in this language and becomes famous; the language has taken on a life of its own, studied by linguists, the focus of international conference. His books are translated by Samuel who is conflicted about his role in appropriating words not his own. Who owns these stories?

As boys, they had developed an entire world in this secret language—the island of Nahum—inhabited by men only. Sulway’s examination of the roles of men and women, their strictures and freedoms, is light and deft. She never hammers home a message, leaving nuance and murkiness to allow us to reach our own conclusions. While her attachment to her women characters is evident—Solange, in particular, her talents, intellect, resourcefulness, independence—she tells her story through men and their agency. Women’s stories and powers, the influence of a mother in shaping her children, is always present but in the background.

One spring morning,’ my brother would intone, holding his tiny craft aloft in this wide, pale hands, ‘the father leaves his son sleeping and goes to the sea. He does not know, when he steps onto the deck, whether he will return, whether it will be a good day, or a bad day, but he goes down to the sea, because that is what men do.

And at the end, we are left with Ana’s sacrifice, her selflessness as she, too, goes into the storm.

Sulway’s writing is beautiful and evocative. She forces her readers to slow their pace, to absorb every detail through her recreation of scenes in real time precision: the trappings and formalities of a funeral, the basting of a turkey.

In the kitchen, our mother laid out her ingredients, as well as her needles, skewers, scissors and string, her long-handled, flat-faced spoons and glass bowls. She had taken out her recipe form its hiding place, where it lay folded all year, cheek-to-cheek with a page clipped from the newspaper in 1949, which had detailed instructions on how to truss a turkey. Once everything was in place, she opened a bottle of dry Semillon, poured herself a shallow, golden glassful and began.

In many ways, this is a book about the complexity of human relationships and the little that children ever really know of their parents’ lives.

Sulway, Nike, Dying in the first person, Transit Lounge Publishing, Melbourne, 2016, ebook and paperback (304 pages), RRP $29.99

Sunshine, Kim Kelly

The lives of three men and a women, returned from the front after World War I, intersect in a new offering from Kim Kelly – an historical novella set in the fictional hamlet of Sunshine in far north-western New South Wales, ‘out the back of Bourke’.

Snow, Grace and Art are each looking for something real in their lives to fill the holes left by war. Snow blames himself for the death of a dear friends, Art’s trauma left him hospitalised and shamed by a nervous paralysis, and Grace, a ‘surgical nurse and do-it-yourself butcher’ has seen too much.  A fresh start is offered by the Australian Government’s Solider Settlement scheme—a well-meaning though ill-considered plan to give returned soldiers parcels of land on which to farm.  Many divisions were worthless, unable to yield a decent crop and the scheme was eventually abandoned. Kelly’s gentle examination of a nascent modern Australia reminds us also of its founding on theft through the Scheme’s dispossession of the Indigenous population. These intertwined stories about citrus crops along the Darling River illustrate some of its hopes and successes.

After serving Australia in a foreign war, Aboriginal horseman Jack Bell returns to a nation which has broken his family and removed his livelihood. On five shillings a day, signing up was a leap into riches, and respect, impossible at home. He muses, ‘No such distinction as black of white but yes sir and no sir, get on with the friggen job. Why did it have to take the insanity of war to make things so equal and reasonable as that? Stupid friggen question.’ Now, the Government wants him ‘looked after’ on a mission. Bucking at that, he returns to the land of his birth and finds it divided and apportioned to other returned soldiers. White soldiers.

Snow McGlynn receives such an allocation. He has retreated within himself, wants no company, and needs to throw himself into his farm to forget the pain of war and loss. Snow muses early on, ‘He didn’t have anything against blacks, not really, but they always made a mess and had their hand out … ‘  Through his developing relationship with Jack, Kelly opens our eyes to Australia’s rank hypocrisy as Snow becomes alive to Jack’s knowledge of and connection with the land, and the racism underpinning Snow’s own good fortune. Both returned soldiers—one rewarded, the other stripped of his dignity and self-determination.

Art Lovelee has been hospitalised with a  phantom paralysis. Shamed and infantilised, the prevailing medical view was to ignore their symptoms and jolly them along, like children. Through Art, Kelly quietly reminds us that the ‘deranged’ have forever been feared, their illness taboo. ReadingSunshinebrought back Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy(Penguin 1996) which powerfully evokes soldiers’ trauma in the First World War and Kelly includes in her epigraph a verse from Siegfried Sassoon, the wartime poet who features so strongly in Barker’s work.

Art finds himself in the care of Grace who coaxes him back to health, then follows him to Australia. She has her own demons. She remembers too well the screams of the boy whose eyes she had to wash of poison gas from ‘the green cloud, from the devil’s very breath that swept across Flanders Fields.’ She remembers the amputees and the men carrying metal bullets in their bodies.

Kelly’s writing is clear and joyous. While she writes of dispossession and death, her message is hopeful. There is beauty all around—Grace, transplanted from cold, damp England to a parched and hot land looks to the future. Bending down to pick up a scrap she thinks has come from her washing, she sees it is a daisy,

… a little blue daisy, sitting in a sparse and thirsty-looking clump of grass. She crouched down to peer at it: a baby-blue wheel, so stark, so fabulous, here upon the rich red timeless soil: and such a surprise: she reminded herself all joy was surprising, never coming as dreamed or planned.

Kim Kelly Sunshine Jazz Monkey Publications 2019 PB 222pp $20.53

First published by the Newtown Review of Books  on 5 March 2019

The Museum of Modern Love, reviewed in Newtown Review of Books

I was late to this party. I’d heard about this novel, and when I finally found time for fiction this year, I lost myself in it immediately. Heather Rose has written a masterpiece of introspection. The reader pauses to look up from the page and reflect, to remember a passage over the course of the day and stop for a moment, or longer, to ask us why? What would I do?

Wrapping her stories around the work of a living artist—Rose sought, and was granted approval—is a gift. To read is to learn, and the book is set around the life and work of the performance artist Marina Abramović, specifically her performance ‘The Artist is Present’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010. Over 75 days, she sat in a simple wooden chair. When a visitor took the seat opposite, she would lift her head, open her eyes as a veil lifting, and sit in that stance for as long as her counterpart stayed. ‘Is it a staring competition?’ ask visitors to the Museum.

What is art? A question surely as old as art itself. Abramović suggests that art is life. And just as the artists invited those who sat with her to participatein the art, Heather Rose asks us to turn inwards. We are not observers. We are participants who need to reconcile with life. The Museum of Modern Loveasks us, How do we learn to see what is before us?

Rose invites the reader into the life of Arky Levin, a famous NY composer. Arky’s perspective guides us though the exhibition and he forms a companionable, though disinterested bond with Jane Miller, a tourist and fellow gallery visitor. They are both distracted, lost andcontemplating uncertainty.  Jane’s husband has died, too young; her grief, one year on, still palpable. Jane ‘has always liked certainty. It was one of the pleasure of being a teacher…’ She wants more time: time with her husband, time for her own life.

Levin is flailing. His wife, suffering an inherited degenerative condition has removed herself from his life,  admitting herself to fulltime care in an institution.  ‘She had been certainty. When everything fell apart, she would be there. It was partly why he always felt so angry when she got sick. He didn’t like that the whole world wobbled when that happened, and he felt small. Small and alone.’

There were questions that terrified his sense of order. His deepest sense of how life should be lived. Ought to be lived. But should and ought were words for certainty. What words belonged to uncertainty?

Abramović, their mirror, faces uncertainty each time she takes up her position in the performance, opening the door to new knowledge. The intensity of their Museum experience forces both Jane and Levin to focus their gaze, to see what cannot be avoided. And finally, Levin understands, ‘with vivid clarity that the best ideas come from a place with a sign on the door saying I don’t know…’

In a further twist on the role of observer and the observed, occasionally Rose draws back and follows the participants going about their day through different narrators, hovering on the edges. One is perhaps the muse, or a higher consciousness. ‘I drew Levin’s attention to the day outside … For all he wasn’t listening to my musical suggestions, he was amendable to an interruption…I watched him. There is nothing more beautiful than watching an artist at work….’  Yet another is from Marina’s past who shows us how a childhood of physical and emotional deprivation in times of war shaped her performance art. We are reminded of the power that the dead have over us.

Other characters, students and commentators seamlessly integrate the artist’s background and body of work into the story taking the reader on a journey through her life. And Rose has held a mirror to us, the reader, through the very ordinariness of those who sit opposite. A young man slumping, ‘[Jane] wanted to tell him to sit up straight’, ‘a young woman with a tiny pair of shoulders and long lank hair…she appeared to be bowed under the weight of a short and exhausting life….’, those frail, and others defiant.

This is also a New York story. For those who love the city, from the residents’ style and beauty —‘three-day growth on his perfect jawline’—to the  food—onion bagels get more than one mention, to the buildings, streets and avenues, every page is a delight. Levin knows that New York’s light obliterates a darkness, a void that is both the universe and his own sense of aloneness. For Jane, the visitor, it is a temporary haven.

Rose has written a powerful story of lives interrupted and of seeking, and finding and learning. The Museum of Modern Love is about both understanding our choices and finding the strength to make them.

First published in The Newtown Review of Books.

The Museum of  Modern Love, Heather Rose (Allen & Unwin 2016 RRP $27.99)

 

Pre-release review of The Rosie Result – the final in the Don Tillman trilogy

The Rosie Result, Graeme Simsion, 2019, The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne.

It’s been four years since The Rosie Effect(Text 2014) and it’s a joy meeting up again with Don Tillman in this third and final instalment. The Rosie Result is Graeme Simsion’s clever way of bringing us a young Don Tillman, in today’s world. After 12 years in New York, Don and Rosie have returned to Melbourne where Rosie has landed a plum role. Unhappily uprooted from his childhood home and friends, Hudson, their ten year old son, is having ‘issues’ at his new school. Showing many of the same characteristics Don had in his childhood, the reader gets to delve into Don’s past as he and Rosie are torn between different ways to help.

Seeing social isolation and possibly depression in Hudson’s future, Don wants to find better ‘solutions’ to those that well-meaning but ignorant adults foisted on him in his youth.  His plan is to engineer a different outcome through a series of targeted interventions to give Hudson necessary life skills. He is going to bring all his science acumen to The Hudson Project.

Don’s foibles and idiosyncrasies – so familiar to those who have read the first two in the series – charm and infuriate from the first page. Shucking oysters, in pjamas, while pondering a neglected performance review, his rampant overthinking leads him to discard ‘objectivity and intelligence’ as key strengths. He fears this might imply that his colleagues were lacking, which would be tactless and best avoided. Oh, the excruciating and endless squeezing ourselves into acceptable boxes to tick. Been there. Rosie counsels, ‘“Just say problem-solving.”’ Problem-solving is to become a key theme in The Rosie Result.

To spend more time with Hudson, Don’s plan includes temporarily ceasing his work in genetic research – where he has swum into difficult waters – and opening a uniquely themed bar (solving the income and availability problems in one hit). Then he brings Dave, a friend and refrigeration mechanic, over from New York, solving another few. Getting inside Don’s head, working through his stages of problem-identification, analysis, options and resolution, we see the world the way Don might. Simsion’s adroit use of language, especially in dialogue, dislocates the reader as characters spar on issues. When Don and Rosie go to an autism awareness evening, the sudden dissonance between the two presenters is unexpected – the language suddenly forceful – and we sit up, as indeed Don does.

Simsion has written a book about belonging. In following Don and Rosie’s exploration of whether Hudson is a boy ‘with autism’ (person-first language), or not – and whether it matters – Simsion asks us, how much of our individuality is erased by society’s demands that we fit in? While they love him as he is, Don says that is not going to be enough. He knows that his natural traits of practicality and forthrightness are valued less than the social lubricant of empathy, compromise and conformity. The escalating tensions of parenting self-doubt, bureaucratic rules and ethical dilemmas converge at meetings with the school, bringing home the irrationality, the absurdity of inflexible institutions.

Readers are given the premises of different arguments and we are asked to make a logical deduction, to find the right solution. Rosie and Don are every parent. The self-doubt is endless, as are the surprises, as they discover more about this person they are raising.  Simsion pushes our buttons on anti-vaxxers, alternative therapies, truth-telling, choice and ethics. Don and Rosie want to raise Hudson without stigma and labelling. Yet…they want the best for him too. The parents of Hudson’s new friend, Blanche who has a medical condition, are hostile to conventional treatment. Yet at what cost? Simsion asks us to think about what is ‘good’ behaviour and when is deviating from accepted norms and standards acceptable, or necessary? Simsion is asking us, is there a ‘right’ way to live?

In amongst the problem-solving, we are treated to Don’s gorgeous ability to render the bleeding obvious in new ways. When a bird is stunned flying into a window, he notes to himself, ‘ ‘birds cannot afford to carry much natural armour due to the flying requirement.’

The Rosie Result is a funny, generous and thoughtful trip through finding fulfilment and living with the choices we make. This reader found it impossible not to calculate her own BMI again, just quietly… and the many references to cocktails throughout had her looking wistfully at her watch, willing it to be that hour.

Cheers.

#TheRosieResult

#GraemeSimsion

How do you read?

Reading a book seems a straightforward thing. Be it on a page, an e-reader, on your phone, even listening to an audio recording, we’re all in the author’s hands, following the same path on this journey. Interactive multi-media books might be coming, but they’ve not taken hold of us yet.

But I’ve recently been struck by the differences in how we carry out this simple act, how we engage with this experience. Readers have favourite ways to read. And like the Sydney Morning Herald journalist who recently wrote about her book addiction, it might be an experience so intense that it takes over your life.

Making space and time

Me? I’ve learnt to slow down. I read for the beauty of language, the clever construction of words as they create meaning and bring forth worlds.

I like to read uninterrupted—by kids, partner, fellow commuters, schedules. While I appreciate Danny Katz’s observation that the toilet provides just such a space, a numb bum takes away from the pleasure somewhat…

I won’t read until I have dedicated time to wholly engage, and in a comfortable spot. During the day, a Protestant work ethic kicks in and I feel I should be doing something else, but after dinner is perfect—on the couch, with good light and a glass of wine. Bedtime is good. Holidays and plane trips are good.

I won’t read on public transport because it’s just too bitty. Too fraught with having to engage with other people, or watch out for my stop. I worked for a man once who would read on the train to work, then along the footpath, and in the lift, only closing the book when he reached his office.

But me? I like to hold a finger in my page—or look up from an e-reader—and drift off into my own thoughts; I love the freedom of having nothing to keep pace with, nothing to miss if I wander away for a moment. And I love to reread a sentence over again, just to take in its wonder (and which is why I’m not remotely interested in audio books).

Respect!

I won’t read into the night when tiredness swamps comprehension and I find I am rereading a line three times. And I’ll stop when I start skating through, only reading for plot. Writing, good writing, is the hardest thing. When authors put their soul into each word, each sentence, to skim is to do them a disservice. That said, sometimes you just have to find out!

To share, and with whom…?

For me, reading is a solitary thing, an intensely private pastime. I’ve never wanted to join a book club. That kind of parallel reading, and sharing, leaves me cold. My own response to the author, what I take away, feels like my journey alone; other people’s responses are theirs.

But sometimes, of fellow readers, I will ask—‘What are you reading?’ It’s a shared understanding that one is always reading. I’ll ask because my kind of book club is between two only so when I find a reading soulmate, I ask. Like catching sunlight falling across a room, it won’t be there for long. A reader always moves on.

The sense of an ending

Do you pause between books? I recently read Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy series straight through (thank you, digital age). But series aside, when I’m between books, I’m in one world and not ready to move into another. I’m a bit antsy in those few days, a bit disconsolate.

But there’s always another. I can turn to my bookshelf that holds just those I’ve not read yet. And it’s hard to resist the lure of an e-book, always available, just one click… (I’ve heard that Amazon patented that technology and can see why).

My own reading addiction ended with a mid-career change that took a second Master’s degree, and a steep drop in income. I became a professional editor when I realised that I cared more about the words in the documents than I did about the policy, or the politics.

When I have a fresh manuscript to get on with, I couldn’t be happier.

How do you read?

 

Dymphna Cusack

Such a joy to discover a new/old writer! I am now reading everything by Dymphna Cusack (1902–1981) whose writing life was brilliantly recreated by Marilla North (Yarn Spinners, UQP 2001) at a recent Jessie Street National Women’s Library Lunch Hour Talk.

Cusack infused her literature with her passion for social justice. Women’s rights to control their bodies and their destinies was a recurring theme. Writing about poverty and power, she illuminated women’s lives in Australian society, their places taken, their freedoms ceded. Though now fifty years old, her satire and commentary on class, power and privilege remains fiercely observant and intelligent.

In The Bloody Traffic, Cusack took on the arms industry and her play, Pacific Paradise protested nuclear weapons. Though she was a well-known and popular writer internationally, Cusack had been hurt by her own country’s lack of recognition. Perhaps it is not hard to see why. She was a thorn in the side of many bastions of power.

 

If you haven’t yet read Cusack, start with Come in Spinner, co-authored with Florence James. The sheer pace of its plot, driven by a host of compelling characters, was a revelation. I recommend it highly.

For anyone who knows Newcastle, like I do, there is another reason I was intrigued. Dymphna Cusack lived in that port city for several years, literally around the corner from where my parents live today. Her books describe the parks and beaches I remember from holidays with my grandparents and she recreates them vividly.

“Seeing the whole city spread out below him, he was filled with a sense of exaltation: the harbour sparkling between the winding shores of the estuary, its waters streaked with the purplish line of the river, the twin arms of Nobbys and Stockton enclosing it like the pincers of a giant crab; the huddle of buildings along the water-front; the scatter of suburbs, thinning out between coast and timbered heights; the innumerable factory chimneys, and, towering above them all, sign and seal of Newcastle’s existence, the smoke-stacks of Southern Steel and Broken Hill Proprietary under their perpetual silver-black clouds.” (Southern Steel (1953)

 

Accidental Aid Worker by Sue Liu

2004 was a terrible year for humanity. I remember the Beslen school massacre—children shot in the back by Chechen guerillas as they escaped. And just as it was about to end, the Boxing Day Tsunami hit southern Asia. This was to become a pivotal moment in author Sue Liu’s life. Accidental Aid Worker is her story of how wanting to help a community became life-changing. It is also an exploration of the complexities of aid, both moral and logistical.

On a trip to Sri Lanka in 2004, Liu is taken with the enthusiasm and spirit of her tour guide, Bruno, a Tamil. His local tour company aims to empower people, especially women, who live and work in the tea plantations. ‘His vision is to create a society where young people have access and opportunity for education, regardless of caste, class, religion and ethnicity – with a particular mission to assist the children of poor plantation workers.’ She promises to stay in touch.

Then the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami hits. In its reach, its horror, the devastation is beyond belief. We see images of bodies lined up on beaches, faces bloated past identification; a woman holding her dead baby, shaking with grief. Liu gives us the numbers. ‘Indonesia’s death toll is in excess of 130,000, the missing in the vicinity of 37,000 and displaced at half a million people, Sri Lanka reports over 35,000 dead, 21,400 injured and 516,000 now homeless.’

Her affection for Bruno and the people of Sri Lanka galvanises her into organising an aid shipment: the Sri Lanka Appeal for Bruno. When she sends an email to her friends and family, she finds she has tapped into a vast outpouring of support from people desperate to help. Liu’s organising prowess is extraordinary. Single-handedly, she manages information on her website and through emails, she posts lists and guidelines for what is most needed, organises collections, sorts rigorously, accepts cash donations (gratefully, in the knowledge that shipping costs have to be covered) and is beset with fears the whole time that she will be getting something wrong.

She packs 75 boxes: tents, tarpaulins, wash basins, shoes, thongs, new and used clothing, toys, school stationery, toiletries, babies’ needs, and other essential items such as batteries, candles, rope, tools and laundry supplies. They go into a shipping container and she entrusts Sri Lankan logistics to sort it out at the other end.

While her intention was to bypass the big NGOs and deal directly with individuals, politics interferes. People want to know why her aid is for the Tamil regions. Is she supporting terrorism? Finding out who to trust, and who trusts her becomes fraught. The whispering in her head is relentless: ‘Are you just another well-intentioned ‘do-gooder’ taking risks, working outside the structure and making problems for the sanctioned and approved organisations?’ When she is moved to buy fans for children in desperately hot orphanages, she is asked by a local priest, ‘Why are you here and what do you want from Sri Lankan people?’ It is a question that stumps her.

Liu asks us to think about the conundrum of aid and its impact on the local economy: in one sense, it is a flood of ‘free stuff.’ ‘Would it be better to give money so that local traders can provide the goods?’ She doesn’t have an answer. The graft and corruption of developing economies makes administering cash difficult but she has her own heart-breaking discovery when her boxes eventually arrive. Is one person, operating independently, more agile than a large bureaucracy? Or is the security provided by the big NGOs necessary, in the end?

Liu doesn’t shy away from other hard questions—there is never enough aid. From her position on the ground, from following up and going into the crisis zones, she can see desperately poor and vulnerable people everywhere but her aid was intended for displaced coastal communities. How do we justify giving to one community over another?

And she asks us to think about travel and tourism. How do we travel about the world, respectfully? The curious phenomenon of visiting another country, another culture, to see and do things differently could be seen as an open and innocent experience, or one that is voyeuristic, even parasitic. ‘It is certainly hard to gauge the times you should listen to your gut and heed the warnings of your paranoia, or surrender to chance and opportunity. That’s what travel is supposed to teach you, how to hone your instincts to make better judgement calls but it doesn’t always work that way.’

For her provocative questioning alone, Accidental Aid Worker is worth reading but Liu also lays bare her thoughts on the big issues of love, family, friendship, grief and her own mental health. Its forays into the joys, or otherwise, of living in share housing, travel, self-employment and dealing with mid-life lighten the read.

Liu donates to community projects a percentage of each book sold and, as we approach another anniversary of the boxing day tsunami, think about copies for Christmas presents this year.

Sue Liu (2015), Accidental Aid Worker, Zulu Communications Pty Ltd, Rozelle

 

 

My Life and Other Fictions

My review of Michael Giacometti’s bold collection of short stories, My Life and Other Fictions, is published in the Newtown Review of Books today.

There is much to savour here. A thought-provoking gift for Christmas.