Dog lovers should lap up this brilliant and moving canine odyssey

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Dog lovers should lap up this brilliant and moving canine odyssey

By Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll

Books to read this week include new titles from Kate Scott, Seishu Hase and Bob Mortimer.

Books to read this week include new titles from Kate Scott, Seishu Hase and Bob Mortimer.

Book critics Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll cast their eyes over recent non-fiction and fiction releases. Here are their reviews.

Fiction pick of the week

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The Boy and the Dog
Seishu Hase, Scribner, $32.99

Dog-lovers will need no encouragement to pick up Seishu Hase’s The Boy and the Dog. It won the Naoki Prize for popular fiction in Japan and follows the odyssey of a dog separated from its owner after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, and the nuclear accident that followed.

First found by a young man working as an illicit courier and getaway driver, the dog’s tag announces he is Tamon – named after a Japanese guardian deity. Through a series of intense vignettes, Tamon wanders into the lives of a chain of humans – a criminal, a sex worker with a secret, and an old man dying of cancer – all the time looking to the south, and a long-awaited reunion with the traumatised boy who lost him.

The author gives a sweeping view of the aftermath of disaster in Japan, and mercifully eschews talking animals or cutesy anthropomorphic tricks. Tamon is a sign of implacable fate as well as a silent companion – both a guardian angel and a harbinger of death – and Alison Watts’ translation preserves the ambiguity with moving precision.

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The Satsuma Complex
Bob Mortimer, Gallery, $32.99

Although there aren’t talking animals per se in comedian Bob Mortimer’s comic detective fiction, his hero Gary Thorn does chat to squirrels – and goes to the effort of ventriloquising their responses.

The shy and eccentric legal assistant isn’t a detective, but after a brief flirtation at a pub with a woman who vanishes, leaving only a book called The Satsuma Complex behind, Gary decides to track her down. His quest is spurred not just by a romantic whim – Gary’s workmate Brendan was with him at the pub that night and is later reported dead in suspicious circumstances. The woman may have vital information about his fate.

As Gary embarks on the sort of hard-boiled investigation his neurotic temperament makes him ill-equipped to handle, his quirks begin to bloom, encircling a plot that deploys an arsenal of noir with surreal comedic flourishes. Fans of Mortimer’s eccentric humour will enjoy its undiluted translation to the page.

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Compulsion
Kate Scott, Hamish Hamilton, $32.99

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From Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies to Christos Tsiolkas’ Loaded, the nihilistic hedonism of youth has become a literary touchstone for each generation. Kate Scott’s Compulsion focuses on the apocalyptic partying that accompanied the turn of the millennium.

It follows a charismatic young music journalist, Lucy, caught up in the wild debauchery of the music scene. She’s riding a spiral to oblivion – fending off stalkers, making new sexual conquests, taking stonking amounts of illicit substances – when she decides to blow up her life and retire to her childhood home by the sea. There, she meets Robin, a photographer in a similar self-imposed exile, and while the stream of hedonism hardly runs dry – Lucy is a magnet for it – a more philosophical tone intrudes, as their bond deepens and risks turning into obsession.

The book captures with effortless lyricism the heady sense of decadence and doom suffusing youth culture in the early 2000s – and will appeal especially to those who lived through it.

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The One and Only Dolly Jamieson
Lisa Ireland, Michael Joseph, $32.99

Homelessness among older women is a growing problem, and The One and Only Dolly Jamieson examines how it can happen to anyone through one very particular life. The titular Dolly is a 78-year-old who warms herself (and snaffles free morning tea from authors’ talks) at her local library.

She befriends a newcomer to the library, Jane Leveson – a woman with an unspoken sadness in her eyes – and as their intimacy develops, the highs and lows of Dolly’s life story are revealed. She rose from a humble childhood in Geelong to become a Broadway star in the 1960s, before life reversed her fortunes, and when Jane offers to help her write a memoir, the two women face down separate but equally traumatic histories.

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There’s a shocking contrast between the fame and glamour of Dolly’s career and her poverty and invisibility in old age. Her story, and the issues it raises, are portrayed with a clearer eye and more dramatic flair than most books that attract the “feel-good novel” descriptor.

Non-fiction pick of the week

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John Darling: An Australian Filmmaker in Bali
Ed., Graeme MacRae & Anton Lucas, Monash, $39.99

I confess I’d never heard of Australian filmmaker and poet John Darling until now, but this splendid collection of essays, reminiscences (by family and friends) and the writings of Darling himself is an intriguing introduction to his life and work.

He was born into well-off Melbourne, went to Geelong Grammar where his father was headmaster and studied at Oxford but never finished his course – because, along the way, he was seduced by the charm of Bali where he lived much of his life. His most famous film, Lempad of Bali (1980), about Balinese artist I Gusti Nyoman Lempad, who lived to the astonishing age of 116 and who remembered Krakatoa erupting, came out of that experience.

A vivid collective portrait of the artistic life, the cultural flow between Australia and Bali, and the times (including the Kuta bombing) that Darling lived through.

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Independents’ Day
Brook Turner, Allen & Unwin, $34.99

Journalist Brook Turner writes that the triumph of so many independent candidates in last year’s federal election was a revolution and, what’s more, it was televised.

As his detailed and wide-ranging analysis demonstrates – he not only spoke to all major participants and draws on political theory, as well as quite aptly quoting Camus – something happened. Whether that something amounts to a revolution is another matter. Certainly, the two-party system has been challenged, mostly by independent women.

Turner not only goes into the campaigns and the groundswell of support carrying the independents forward to victories in blue ribbon Liberal seats, but also contextualises things historically, suggesting that since the GFC history has shifted, from a neo-liberal to a post-liberal world. An engaging documentation of political change.

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2022: Reckoning with Power and Privilege
Ed., Michael Hopkin, Thames & Hudson/The Conversation, $32.99

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This collection of the best essays from The Conversation can be a bit up and down, but it’s also got some great pieces. Michelle Grattan’s The Year Australians Turned the Page, for example, in which she looks back over the Albanese victory and its implications, reminds us of what a terrific turn of phrase she’s got as well as being one of the most astute political observers in the country.

Emma Shortis’ searing examination of gun-crazy America, the power of the NRA and the anachronistic nature of the 1791 Second Amendment (the right to bear arms) leaps off the page.

While Matthew Sussex’s at times almost jaunty study of Putin’s nuclear threats concludes that it’s “probably” bluff, but comes with a caveat about Putin’s rationality. From a feminist look at Neighbours, #MeToo and China, they cover the waterfront.

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Falling Forward
Margaret Hamilton, WestWords, $34.99

At the end of Margaret Hamilton’s memoir, depicting a full and rich life in the book world both as publisher and writer, the author, who was battling cancer, expresses the desire to be present when her story is published. She isn’t. She died last November and knowing this makes her final chapter deeply poignant reading.

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But it’s her achievements that shine through and her approach to living, encapsulated in the title, for she maintains she never had a plan, she went with the flow. And what a flow it was – from working-class beginnings in Sydney’s Surry Hills, surviving sexual assault at eight, becoming a librarian specialising in children’s literature, then a director of Hodder & Stoughton, setting up Margaret Hamilton Books with her husband and bringing up a daughter along the way.

An intimate portrait of going with the wave of life.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.

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