Cover notes
The Sunday Age
Sunday October 18, 2009
HARDBALLSara ParetskyHodder, $32.99Will Obama read Hardball? This 13th novel in the V.I. Warshawski series is set in his power base of Chicago and is profoundly concerned with race relations. It can be read as a companion to her Writing in an Age of Silence, a memoir that linked Paretsky's political activism to her crime writing. Hardball revisits the time Paretsky first came to Chicago, 1966, a year of race riots that radicalised her. In the novel, Warshawski reluctantly agrees to investigate a missing person case from that year. She soon stumbles across a murder during a Martin Luther King rally, and the horrible possibility that her adored police father might have been involved. Hardball is painted on a wide canvas, a panorama encompassing the Democratic Party machine, the homeless, and the urban black poor. Nobody will be straight with Warshawski, and for most the reason is that they are compromised by the case. More complex are those constrained by race or religion. Even the artless, like V.I.'s young cousin Petra, a creature of Facebook and "post-feminism", have their secret agendas. The book mixes furious action with an unflinching look at America, past and present. It is not pretty, but profound.WONDERS OF A GODLESS WORLDAndrew McGahanA&U, $32.99McGahan made his name with the dirty realism of Praise and later won a Miles Franklin with The White Earth. Then he started experimenting with the fantastic. Underground was a political satire in dystopic form. This new novel is fabliau, with some of the intensity that Praise brought to relationships. On an unnamed tropical island, a young girl, apparently retarded, works in a madhouse. She ministers to people even more damaged than she is until a new patient arrives, a foreigner. He communicates with her telepathically, and so chaos starts. The foreigner claims to be immortal and to be able to sense approaching cataclysm. The island is visited by eruptions, earthquakes and worse, while the patients undergo their own personal catastrophes. It could become silly very quickly. That it doesn't is due to McGahan maintaining control of his apocalypse, even while loving it madly.PERFECTING SOUND FOREVER: THE STORY OF RECORDED MUSICGreg MilnerGranta, $9.95Recorded music started in the 1800s, with Edison's first phonograph. It would dominate the next century through a variety of formats: 78s, CDs, MP3s. Throughout, the concern has been with verisimilitude, and then with manipulating the sound. Milner's approach is to pick highlights of the story. Thus we get deaf Edison, gripping the phonograph with his teeth in order to hear. Or the paternalism of Leadbelly's producers. The range is wide, from Stokowski to Bing Crosby to Def Leppard. High fidelity battles with the notion of improving on nature, removing those bum notes. But the medium dictates how the message sounds, and via iPods and computer speakers it is increasingly tinny. Music for free? muses Bob Dylan on Napster. Why not? It ain't worth nothing any more. For the hi-fi geek in the family.
Β© 2009 The Sunday Age
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