Chapter 1: What are the themes explored in Sayaka Murata's Earthlings?
This is an ABC podcast. All right, this is going to be good, isn't it?
I love rereading. It's my favourite kind of reading.
So I think, if anything, it's actually a time for poetry. It's a time for slow text. It's a time for difficult text. It's a time for text that take a long time to read. So I think it all has to do with words in a way. And I think she is amazing. The most extraordinary writer.
That is such a brilliant novel. It's got her intensity.
I mean, his writing is so crisp, is so matter-of-fact. It goes down so easily.
Fiction has become this delicious bath of otherness that I am swimming in. It's taken up half my heart, you know. MUSIC Hi, welcome to The Bookshelf on Radio National, on air, on ABC Listen and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kate Evans and for the first time since March, I am actually face to face with you, Cassie McCullough. Hello.
Hang on, I've got to put my glasses on because I don't think I can recognise you anymore. Hello.
The same, only a bit COVID fatter.
Oh, thanks a lot.
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Chapter 2: How does Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies reflect on American identity?
And times when I was sort of doing horrified laughter at things that were so unexpected and, well, compelling. I couldn't look away, but I did not know what was... I didn't know what to expect.
Perhaps best summed up by Three Go Wild in Akashina. Look, I recommended this book to my mum. I had a spare copy of it for some reason and I was like, this is so great, this book, and I gave it to her. Look, it's really interesting. And then I finished it and I had to send mum this text message. Okay, so that book I gave you gets, capital letters, very weird. Yeah.
maybe it's not for you but if you do plow on i'll be interested to hear what you think perhaps it's best if i give you a replacement book This is only because my mum is a fantastic reader, brilliant reader, but she doesn't like violence. She can't handle violence, even on television at all. So, yeah, that's all we can really say, Kate.
Well, can I just give one line?
Yeah, please.
This is from page 129. She says, so all I can do is keep my head down and pretend to live as a nursling.
That's all anyone can do. But she didn't do a very thorough job of being an earthling. I can tell you.
So we were surprised. There were weird things that happened.
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Chapter 3: What is the setting and premise of Thomas McMullan's The Last Good Man?
Funny, engaging.
But like she had me. She had me so into the palm of her hand. And I just thought, oh, this is brilliant. This is, I can see where this is going. It's like, no, you couldn't see where it was going. No, you could not. Look out, Murakami. I mean, you think you're weird. Hello. Hello. It's worth a look, definitely worth a look.
And I will read her next work because I think she's a very distinct talent and there are edges of genius there.
And you know how people often pick up a book and say, this is predictable. We know where it's going. We can see the end. Well, guess what? You can't. You cannot.
Yeah. But also the morality is wild. Like actually there is none, which is wonderful in a way. Like people will write essays about this. This will launch doctoral theses, this book.
You heard it here first. Sayaka Murata's Earthlings, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takamori, is published by Granter.
Love of mine, someday you will die, but I'll be close behind. I'll follow you into the dark.
You're listening to The Bookshelf here on Radio National. I'm Cassie McCullough here with Kate Evans, actually really Kate Evans in the studio, and we're ready to meet this week's guests, beginning with George Aranda, who is a science education academic from Deakin University and one of our most active members on the ABC Book Club Facebook group. Hello, George.
Hello.
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Chapter 4: How does the narrative structure of Earthlings challenge traditional storytelling?
What would he have thought? If he hadn't already died, he would have died of apoplexia, I think. Because it's interesting, and people have quoted the things that he used to say about George W. Bush and then said, look at these same terms, the ways in which Donald Trump, you know, George W. Bush looks so reasonable and intelligent and articulate by comparison. Yes.
But I do love that image of Gore Vidal's head spinning off. Yes. He was so sort of angry and witty. The mind boggles as to how he would be responding right now. But what we want to do is find examples of how both of your specialisation and special interest play out in your reading, in your own personal reading.
So, George, what type of reader are you and what have you read this year that you can recommend?
I am someone who has always been really interested in nonfiction and science fiction, so I really have to try and work to make myself read fiction. Otherwise, I miss out on all the classics and all modern fiction Pulitzer Prize winners and all these kinds of things. So I do do that during the year.
And I guess the books that have really sparked my interest this year have had to do with dystopias, funnily enough. The first one probably would have been The Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, obviously inspired by the pandemic situation. that we're in at the moment, which was a truly fascinating recount of how life changes and stays the same in these kind of tumultuous eras.
And the other one that I read, I hadn't read, I'd read a couple of Atwood novels. So I decided to sit down and read the Mad Adam trilogy back to back, which is really enlightening kind of way of looking at how the way that we splice DNA and the end of the world and how it's represented is portrayed in fiction.
Yes, I really like that trilogy by Margaret Atwood, but I also particularly like the way that you're never quite sure what it is that Margaret Atwood is going to write next, given that she has these well-realised dystopias, but also writes some fantastic sort of classic historical fiction as well. But Heather, do you have time to read outside your course reading and research?
Not very often, to be honest. Most of the reading I do is more or less directly related to teachings. But one of the things I did read which is not related to teaching earlier this year was a new novel by the American writer Jay Parini. who was a protege of the late Gore Vidal's. And Perini is a very prolific writer in a lot of different genres.
And if Australian listeners are familiar at all with his name, it's probably because of the film called The Last Station, based on the last days of Tolstoy's Life, which starred Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren. That film was based on Perrini's novel. That's really how he kind of got famous to a certain extent in the United States.
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Chapter 5: What societal critiques are presented in Homeland Elegies?
He's being chased by a collection of other people who are all wearing black raincoats. So it's this really arresting opening.
Sounds like great expectations.
With a bit more violence, even. But I'm sure there are references to lots of books in this one. But George, it's a very striking opening, I think. And our man, Duncan, he stays out of sight because he's not sure what's going on either. And he sees the people wearing their raincoats capture this man. They head towards a settlement. He follows them. What does he see?
Well, as he follows this group of individuals, he sees that they bind him, that he's being dragged away, that he's resisting what they're trying to do to him. And they eventually take him back to this small kind of rural town. I mean, you get the sense that there's mud everywhere, there's greenery everywhere, there's chimneys, there's this
At first, when I was reading the book, I just didn't even know what era this book was set in because you just couldn't tell. There's no technology that's referred to or anything like that. But this really picturesque kind of village is where they're ultimately taking him.
And one of the really noticeable or sort of dramatic things about the village is that there's a huge wall there. And it's a wall that has notes and things stuck to it. But people also write things on it. And the significance of this wall, we don't understand until the book goes on. But also, he has an old friend, which is why Duncan is heading to this small town, a man called James Hale.
who he knew from childhood. So they make contact. Duncan's welcomed in, even though he doesn't really understand this strange violent scene he's seen. And then they take Duncan to some sort of village fair that's going on. There's food and drinks. Everybody's out on the green. What's it for, this village fair?
Well, the village fair seems to be a celebration. It's bringing the whole town together. It's a very communal kind of atmosphere. There's lots of shops are open. People are having a good time. And ultimately, there's a stage, which is the centerpiece of this kind of area where they're gathering. And they're bringing this person who they've caught and they're bringing him on stage.
And there are people around and they've got chests of drawers on their backs and other kind of kind of like penalties or atonements that they're making for something that they've done. And they bring the gentleman they've captured, Jeff Sharp, onto the stage and they make some sort of pronouncement about him.
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Chapter 6: How does The Last Good Man address themes of justice and morality?
Because I think that's one of the things this writer is interested in.
Yes, I haven't read the book you've just been talking about, The Last Good Man, but it's clearly got some echoes and resonances with other things that we are familiar with, even such as 1984. Yes, I was thinking of 1984 very much.
Yes, but the other book that I keep coming back to as I'm listening to you and also I'm thinking about Homeland Elegies is Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, which is both a kind of alternative history about what would have happened had America the anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh being elected president in 1940.
But it also, to that extent, it really is a dystopia because it's imagined from the perspective of a Jewish family who find themselves more and more scapegoated and feared. And so what you've been talking about is dystopia and its representation of fear. And I suppose for me, a simplistic definition of
Dystopian literature has always been at its premises in forced conformity, people being scapegoated, regarded with suspicion and fear, as George was saying, being a kind of predominant aspect of this. So there's a lot of crossover between some of these works, these alternate histories, these speculative fictions and science fiction and dystopia. There's often a bit of overlap there.
And perhaps, Cassie, we've found the line that is connecting all three novels today, because Sayaka Murata's novel that we were talking about earlier is also dealing with enforced conformity in a very strange and slightly unexpected way. Now, George, I think that you read quite a few dystopian novels. So how would you rate this one?
i really was intrigued in the first half of the book i thought it was beautifully written as i was saying before and the idea of the the kind of the law in the town and the lawlessness as well on the other side were quite were things that were really pushing the story along in a really interesting kind of way i was kind of disappointed in the second half of the book because they really spent a lot of time unpacking a couple of narratives
that to me aren't really taken to their full degree or they're not really made great use of towards the end of the book as it draws to its conclusion. So I was a little disappointed with the last part of the book there. But overall, I thought it was quite an interesting take on the dystopian novel.
So perhaps didn't bring home the promises that it had set loose at the beginning.
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Chapter 7: What connections can be drawn between the three discussed novels?
So it's not so much about the character's identity as about the identity of America seen through this character. And, Cassie, it's not a life story in that it's not chronological, but it does have an extraordinary sense of movement in it. So for a book that's 350 pages long and might sound like it's a bit of an earnest political diatribe. It transcends being didactic.
Yeah, it's quite entertaining. I mean, it's got, you know, sex and bad behaviour and drinking and meeting people and family stories and secrets.
Why didn't you say earlier?
Yeah.
So I was sort of surprised, Heather, by how entertaining it was to read because I was a bit worried that it might have just been an exploration of ideas. Very well done, but I thought, oh.
Yes, Kate. Yes, I was worried just even looking at the title and, you know, the couple of lines of biography about the author, I thought, oh, this might be worthy in quotation marks meaning sort of heavy-handed writing. or that it might kind of parade victimhood in a way that became precious. And it doesn't.
It's a really interesting mixture of fantasy, comedy, long stretches of ideas, but even some really interesting diversions. He gets really interested in the interpretation of his dreams. I thought, oh, this is going to be boring. But there's a really interesting sequence about that. And so, yes, he kind of diverges. And as you said earlier, there's this capacity for self-critique
as well as the critique of others, both Muslims and non-Muslims And coming back to the character that you mentioned, Riyaz Rind, he's a billionaire Muslim hedge fund manager whose foundation, he's got a charitable foundation to make life better for Muslims, but his business is based on the defaulting of loans. So he actually ends up rendering a lot of towns and cities bankrupt.
But he's operating just inside the letter of the law. And a later similar example of a kind of critique of American corruption comes in terms of healthcare. He's got a villain, not nearly so much a developed character, but a character who is a chief administrator of the so-called Reliant Health, a corporate healthcare network. for which actual care of patients is the lowest of priorities.
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