Review of Little Books on Big Themes for the Sydney Morning Herald (published August 2008)

Little Books on Big Themes (MUP; $19.95 each; $60 box set):
David Malouf, On Experience (86pp)
Germaine Greer, On Rage (108pp)
Blanche d’Alpuget, On Longing (80pp)
Barrie Kosky, On Ecstasy (86pp)

Brightly coloured and with a dainty handle, the Little Books on Big Themes box set looks as if it might contain chocolates. What sort of chocolates is a diverting question. On Experience, perhaps, is a Hazelnut Praline: soft on the outside but with a nuggetty centre. By contrast, On Rage is a Toffee Deluxe: delectable yes, but hard to chew. On Longing is a Caramel Heart, or possibly a Strawberry Kiss. Only On Ecstasy resists the analogy, though Monty Python’s Whizzo Chocolate Factory is on hand with its groundbreaking Ram’s Bladder Cup: ‘Fresh Cornish ram’s bladder, emptied, steamed, whipped into a fondue and garnished with lark’s vomit.’

In On Experience, David Malouf attempts, not only to anatomise experience – especially the experience of the creative writer – but also to contextualise it. In the past, our knowledge of the world extended no more than a few miles in each direction. Now, with information on everything literally at our fingertips, we know the world as never before. This change has effected a change in perception, as what is going on elsewhere becomes a kind of ‘second-order’ experience, casting a shadow over our everyday lives.

For Malouf, it is the shadows of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that loom the largest and it is here that his essay comes full circle. For it is to the writers – the poets and novelists – that we turn to interpret that experience for us. Doing so, they reassert the primacy of individual experience – the very thing that totalitarianism seeks to wipe from the human record. (I should add that I read On Experience on the day that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died and that doing so felt like a fitting tribute.)

It is to a tragedy much closer to home – the dispossession and immiseration of Australia’s indigenous population – that Germaine Greer turns in her essay On Rage. Greer’s thesis, brilliantly set out as always, is that the problems facing Aboriginal Australians – alcohol, violence, suicide, abuse – are largely the result of male rage. This rage, Greer argues, is itself the result of the damage done to indigenous communities by whites’ interference with Aboriginal women, the effect of which has been to ‘drive a wedge’ between those women and Aboriginal men.

Greer’s is an important argument (and far more nuanced than my précis suggests) but at times her own rage weakens it. For example, in order to illustrate her point that black men do not bear sole responsibility for sexual assaults on black women and children, she describes giving a lift to two runaway girls, adding, ‘It would have been a rare truckie who would not have extracted his pound of flesh.’ This is an unbecoming slur and – as important – a lazy thought.

For Blanche d’Alpuget, the women’s movement of which Greer was a driving force was clearly an important influence. But it was, she writes, ‘a two-edged sword’:

while it strengthened one’s sense of self, it sharpened one’s dissatisfaction with life-as-it-is – and that, invariably, meant one’s male partner. A million silent longings revealed themselves in consciousness-raising meetings, then rose up, flew off and transformed into divorce statistics.

D’Alpuget’s own longing was for M (‘Muse’), her affair with and eventual marriage to whom is described in detail in her essay On Longing. Why she calls him M is unclear, since it isn’t even an open secret that d’Alpuget’s lover was, and is, Bob Hawke. This ostentatious discretion, however, is not the principal problem with this essay. The principal problem is the principals, whose predicament invites neither sympathy nor interest. Only some passages on spiritual longing lift the essay above the mundane.

Theatre director Barrie Kosky is a man of quite exceptional tastes. From his breathless riff On Ecstasy:

Body odour of every imaginable flavour, sweat, socks, Dencorub, hot water, cheap soap, the wet old wood of the lockers. All clashing in my nostrils, all fighting to get up my nasal cavities … the smells of the Melbourne Grammar School Changing Rooms were the most intense thing that’s ever been up my nose.

Well, whatever floats your boat. I’m a fresh basil man myself. But the problem here is the prose, not the content. What is ‘nasal cavities’ doing, other than making an Olympic bid for the most inelegant variation of all time?

Kosky’s essay is essentially a description and exposition of his own productions. I’m sorry to say that he comes across as rather enamoured of his own iconoclasm. Describing his scatological production of György Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, Kosky is in his element: ‘[Nekrotzar] sat on a white plastic toilet while a never-ending stream of brown excrement poured out of the toilet and over him.’ I’m tempted to say that I know how he feels, though that would be overstating it. Suffice it to say that On Ecstasy really got up my nasal cavities.