Dog days

It's the last week of the endless BC summer vacation today. For months, my blazing intentions to write this newsletter have fizzled into other scenes. I didn't write about the Netflix adaptation of My Brilliant Career, for example, even though the production and its reception left me grumbling and extremely disheartened. The series is gaudy account of pastoral life at the turn of the twentieth century and it seems to have been a huge hit, in spite of being, at best, hugely silly.

I read My Brilliant Career when I was a teenager, just after bolting from the middle-sized country town in which I'd endured a long adolescence. I loved Sybylla's impetuousness and earnest ambition, not least because I'd been so irritated by the plucky lasses I'd encountered in Federation-era literature for girls, all of them on a dutiful path to domesticity. To a reader acquainted with Norah of Mary Grant Bruce's Billabong series, to encounter the featherlight Sybylla, hellbent on getting out into the world, was a relief.

The words "period possible" got stuck in my head after I read an interview with showrunner Liz Doran. One of the production's guiding principles, she says, was whether a production or script or casting decision was "period possible". (I like the other guiding principles she mentions, "unbuttoned and dirty-hemmed," a lot better.) It's period possible, then, that rural poverty looks to be quite a lark in this production? Period possible that a wealthy pastoralist with a Chinese mother would be treated, for the most part, with respect by other landowners and his employees. Period possible that Indigenous domestic servants appear to live lives not much different from their wealthy employers. There's a lot of nonsense drafted in by that possible, as is the case in Doran's obvious points of reference, Bridgerton and Emerald Fennell's films. The daft ahistoricity is annoying, but not as much as the fact that Doran and many critics seem to believe she is making some important historical point by "updating" Miles Franklin's novels for a modern audience. The only real criticism I've seen of the glossiness of Doran's adaptation is Alison Croggon's review in The Saturday Paper.

You wouldn't know it from the reception of the Netflix series, but the legacy of Miles Franklin and My Brilliant Career has been contested over the past several decades as successive biographies, books of letters and novelisations of Franklin's life have been released. I haven't read all of these new books so didn't feel confident writing at any length about how the Netflix adaptation responded to them. It's fair to say that Franklin's political associations have been scrutinised, and her texts have been re-read through a decolonial lens. And while this has been underway, there's been a musical, a stageshow, a literary prize (another one), all honouring My Brilliant Career-era Miles! The novel has hardly been languishing in the archives, waiting for someone to bring a bracing contemporary sensibility to bear on it.

Doran's wishful update, which involves writing out the poverty and the racism that feature in the source text, strikes me as extremely ill-timed. The regional electorate I grew up in returned a One Nation federal candidate earlier this year, and in Western Australia another One Nation candidate just won a state by-election. Every time Hanson rises in the polls, we're subject to another round of rumination over whether the problem in these rural and regional electorates is the racism or the poverty, on the historical roots of this resurgent nativism. A bolder approach to adapting My Brilliant Career for the screen might have started by recognising the grim currency of its themes.

I didn't write about Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey either, mainly because I found the film surprisingly boring, too boring, really, to bother hating. I saw it alone in a cinema on a hot Sunday afternoon. If it had been a late show, I would have left early. The best moment in the film, for my money, takes place during the feast at Menelaus' palace that Telemachus crashes. Helen leans over to Telemachus and stage-whispers, Tell your mother that I'm sorry. [Pause.] You know. [Another small pause.] About the war. Sorry about the war! That's about as deep as this film goes on questions of individual and collective responsibility for violence.

Blue Giant by Jordan Prosser and I Made This Just For You by Chris Ames each walk a wobbly line between satire and melodrama as they map the contemporary experience of polycrisis. I recently reviewed them both, and enjoyed having the chance to think about them in proximity. Prosser's novel is a maximalist romp that's organised around a protagonist, Abby, who is chaotic, self-absorbed, repellent and highly relatable. Her life is falling apart, the world is burning, she is determined to join a mission to Mars: highly relatable. I wrote about it for Guardian Australia here. And I Made This Just For You is a collection of short fiction about characters figuring out how to survive as the climate collapses and the economy collapses and shadowy tech companies usurp what's left of our freedom. Similar thematic territory to Prosser, but Ames is a more restrained writer, more inclined to formal experimentalism, less inclined to body comedy. My review is here.

Both books are fun to read. For all their levity, they're each engaging in a serious manner with the cruel absurdities of our historical moment. To put it differently, these are works of fiction that are concerned with questions of politics, equality and social justice, and that I guess express a progressive critique of ecocidal platform capitalism. Inconveniently, they don't fit the stereotype of moralising political fiction that certain commentators insist dominates contemporary letters, not only because they're written by men, but also because they are so invested in capturing, thematically and formally, the messy moral contradictions of being alive right now. My mild rebuke of these books is not that they are moralising, but that they shear dangerously close to sentimentality and tweeness now and then, as if worried that the reader will lose her grasp of the human stakes of their satires.

There's not a moment of tweeness in Mine by Adam Ouston, a new entry into the annals of antipodean modernism. I wrote about it for Guardian Australia here. This is an intense and pretty austere piece of writing, one that demonstrates a fierce commitment to the author's intellectual and political project. Not so many zippy one-liners, abundant acid-washed ironies. Mine consists of a single sentence, one that takes three-hundred pages to unwind. When I described the novel's form to a pair of friends, and beheld the incredulity on their faces, I was reminded that the audience for a novel like this is self-selecting. I found it exhilarating, and also exhausting. James Ley's review of Mine for The Monthly delivers a brilliant reading of the novel's political scheme.

My kids go back to school on Tuesday; normal transmissions to resume shortly thereafter. Will I have read Life of M by Rachel Cusk by then? Maybe. I am ambivalent about Cusk's fiction, but I marvel at the way her novels not only continue to provoke genuinely interesting critical responses from a range of interlocutors, but also the way those responses themselves become tangled up in Cusk's theorisation of public and private lives. It seems to me that both Emily Witt and Parul Seghal, who have both written corkers on Life of M, are, in spite of themselves, caught in a web of Cusk's contriving.