Lily, the latest novel from prolific English author Rose Tremain, (b. 1943) is a cautionary tale about the perils of revenge.
Set in a Dickensian 19th century England of punitive welfare for the children of fallen women, Lily brings us the story of a child whose mother wrapped her in sacking and abandoned her in freezing weather at the gates of a park in the East End. Rescued by a passing policeman, she is taken to the London Foundling Hospital. Her first six years are spent with a kindly foster mother on a farm in Suffolk, and then — of an age to start work — she is returned to this so-called hospital and begins a life of brutal drudgery and abuse. An attempt at escape fails, her only friend dies, and the most vicious of the staff sabotages an offer of adoption.
As in the best of Dickens’ novels, this catalogue of misery arouses feelings of compassion for the victim and contempt for the perpetrators, but (like Dickens) Tremain has greater ambitions than that. The reader knows from the first page that Lily is a murderer. No one else knows this, but she is tormented by her crime.
She does not fear being caught: authorities are not even certain that a crime has been committed. She fears herself. What she has done has brought no release. She does not feel the satisfaction that she had anticipated.
Lily cannot unburden herself to anyone. She cannot fall in love when she knows the fate that lies in store. No hard work or good deeds can save her, not least because she knows in her heart that she won’t be able to bear the burden forever and will confess.
Any thoughts of justification have lapsed, and dreams of the noose that awaits her haunt her nights and sabotage her days.
She dreams of her death.
It comes as a cold October dawn is breaking in the London sky.
A sack is put over her head. Through the weave of the burlap, she can take her last look at the world, which is reduced to a cluster of tiny squares of grey light, and she thinks, Whyever did I struggle so long and so hard to make my way in a place which was bent on my destruction ever since I came into it? Why did I not surrender to death when I was a child, for children’s pictures of death are fantastical and full of a strange beauty?
She feels the noose, made of thick hemp rope, go round her neck and knows that the noose’s cunning is to be in perpetual coitus with a huge and bulbous knot behind her head. The knot nudges the base of her skull. Soon, a trap beneath her feet will open and she will drop into the void, her legs dangling like the legs of a doll made of cloth. Her neck will snap and her heart will stop. (p.1)
Revenge has brought her no peace of mind.
Author: Rose Tremain
Title: Lily, a Tale of Revenge
Cover design: no credits except the source of the images (Bridgeman and Alamy)
Publisher: Chatto and Windus (Penguin Random House UK) 2021
ISBN: 9781784744571, pbk., 288 pages
Source: Kingston Library
‘China is an emergent empire of a kind never seen before … It’s not a gunpowder or dreadnought battleship or B-52 bomber empire. It’s an information empire, propelled by commercial interests.’ –John Keane
In my idle moments, I’ve been watching Series III of the Danish TV program 
The first part of the novel brings Johnny’s childhood to life, and while this is a book intended to entertain, there are aspects of this childhood that will give a reader pause. We have, sadly, been made only too well aware of historical institutional abuse and exploitation of indigenous and parentless children; and while A.B. Facey’s autobiography 
How should one review a published version of a writer’s journal?
With thanks to 
Readers who know The New Moscow Philosophy by Vyacheslav Pyetsukh, translated by Krystyna A. Steiger, will remember how family homes were subdivided after the 
Sombre notes occur only intermittently in Klostvog. Some could be easy to miss, such as the gift of a Mazuzah (Mezuzah) for Marik’s birthday. Maya catalogues all his gifts as a measure of her status, and she is very cross when her daughter Ellochka removed it from its hiding place to show her friend that it’s ‘true’ that ‘Jews have expensive jewels’, and then threw it away. What is unsaid in the novel is that it had to be hidden because to display it on the front door would identify theirs as a Jewish household and invite peril. It was made of silver, and very valuable—and a ‘souvenir from the war’ a delicate inference that it was looted from an abandoned Jewish home.
This month’s 
Anyway, it’s an easy segue to the 
After that she compounded my irritation with a fictionalised life of Elizabeth Macarthur. FWIW Elizabeth Macarthur was IMO an Australian pioneering woman of sufficient importance in our history to warrant reading about her real life, interrogated from a 21st century perspective that explores how the work of pioneering women farmers has been overlooked. Margaret Scott Tucker’s wonderful biography, Elizabeth Macarthur, a Life at the Edge of the World is the book to read for that. As you can see 
Most of the biographies that I read are literary biographies, (though I make an exception for anything that Brenda Niall and Hazel Rowley have written). The LitBios I like best are the ones that show how the writing emerges from the life, such as Nathan Hobby’s recent bio of Katharine Susannah Prichard, The Red Witch. 
Just recently in the 
Clearly, I must segue to one that I found rewarding, but oh! which one of Flanagan’s multiple novels which have stayed with me as indelible memories? Perhaps with one not reviewed on this blog, because I read it back in 2002: Gould’s Book of Fish, famously canned by the literary critic Peter Craven before it hauled in a mass of prizes, including the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards (2002), the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal (2002), the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book Overall (2002), and a nomination for Miles Franklin Literary Award (2002),
Well, Peter Craven is not the only literary critic to be out of step; *chuckle*, while not in his league, I’m out of step myself often enough. (Most recently with Sarah Winman’s
Literary criticism of an author’s work is not my usual fare these days, though I read a lot of it in my university days. I credit it with my ongoing love of literature because it showed me that there is always more to discover in a book that you admire. 
As regular readers know, I was up to page 4 of Lohrey when I jumped ship to read The Morality of Gentlemen, Lohrey’s debut novel from 1984. My only hesitation in enthusing about it 
Morality, as I noted in my review, features detailed descriptions of the venues where events take place. In the chapter titled ‘The Politics of Renovation’, Lamond discusses the symbolism of houses which are also plot devices in Lohrey’s fiction. Renovating recurs as both a literal activity and an enactment of philosophical ideas and emotional states. Referring to an older meaning of renovation, Lamond provides a fresh insight: it also means “to cause to be spiritually reborn [or[ to invest with a new and higher spiritual nature.” That is what the central character is struggling with in The Philosopher’s Doll, (2004); 
For middle-class characters and wealthy characters alike the home becomes a site of self-discovery and reinvention. These processes are often accompanied by discomfort caused by the contradiction of desiring social mobility whilst feeling distaste for displays of such desire in others. Richard Kline and his wife Zoe scoff at ‘the lingua franca of Sydney life: real estate’. (p.49)
In Chapter Two, ‘Free Solo’, Lamond explores the way Lohrey interrogates the competing expressions of masculinity in the wake of the growth of corporate culture in the 1980s in The Reading Group (1988, 
What these men fear is the unthinking violence of their male role models. Readers of The Labyrinth will remember Jurko, the undocumented immigrant with whom Erica builds a wary friendship. 
Lohrey also shows from Morality onwards, how women are sidelined. She is brilliant, says Lamond, at detailing what it feels like to be belittled by everyday interactions between men. It was delicious to be reminded by Lamond of that scene in Camille’s Bread where Marita is thinking about the men in her life—and in the fiction she reads—who resist being ‘domesticated’.
The chapter titled ‘Fire’ explores the way Lohrey writes about our apprehension of crisis and its proximity and how the motif of fire raises questions of ethical and political responsibility for others. Fire is a symbol and a plot device, and a metaphor for crisis more generally. Lohrey doesn’t write dystopias about the endgame of climate change; she uses the form of the realist novel to consider ecological and political agency. In The Reading Group (1988) and in Vertigo (2009), Lohrey tackles climate change but also explores the causes of inaction. She has a long-held interest in the causes and conditions of political inaction. 
Have I given you a taste of this wonderful book? I haven’t discussed the pleasures of the chapter titled ‘Scenes of Reading’ nor the author’s interview with Lohrey because this book deserves to be widely read in its entirety — not just by those intrigued by Lohrey’s writing (and I haven’t even mentioned her short stories or her forays into non-fiction!) — but also as a masterclass in writing about writers. Lamond is a writer in her own right: incisive, insightful, and often amusing. 
The shortlist for the the Queensland Literary Awards 2022 has been announced. The winners will be announced on Thursday 8 September 2022.
I was expecting to like Sarah Winman’s Still Life. It’s had very positive reviews, it was longlisted for the 2022 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, and I liked her previous novel Tin Man, declaring that it was rare to find a novel that is so much about love and kindness and friendship without descending into sentimentality.
1 Book I’m (probably) reading next (for #WITmonth)
Not having left myself much time to read something for 
Barbara Kamler’s Love, Regardless is a collection of poetry with an unusual focus. It’s a collection of ‘poetic portraits’ celebrating love that lasts, a phenomenon which has fascinated the author for a long time. All of the couples she portrays have been together for twenty years or more, these couples in configurations that defy the impression that diversity is something new. The couples come from all walks of life and ethnicity, including three from the Jewish community; long-established marriages; couples surprised by love after failed relationships; gays who before marriage equality could only have a civil union; couples who’ve had to negotiate disability and illness, and people who’ve had to make a choice about which part of the world they’ll live when each partner is drawn to somewhere else.
My reading of Amanda Lohrey’s debut novel The Morality of Gentlemen (1984) was prompted by the arrival of another book chez moi: Julieanne Lamond’s 
George Quinn: Quinn is the translator of the novel 
Keith Foulcher: Foulcher said that by comparison with Quinn and McGlynn, his literary translations are ‘minimal’. His interest comes through his 40 year friendship with Putu Oka Sukanta, a notable author in Indonesia, who like 
Pamela Allen:
Toni Pollard: Pollard explained how she stumbled into translating the novella Above the Day, Below the Night by 
Isla Winarto: Winarto said that people often assume that translating is easy for her because she grew up in a bilingual, bicultural household, but she didn’t get involved professionally until she encountered George Quinn as her honours degree supervisor. Translating is not her main source of income, but again John McGlynn was the catalyst for her career as a translator. She has done 20 short stories and a novel. She loves reading in the Indonesian language and is currently reading the literary sensation Gadis Kretek by Ratih Kumala (translated by Annie Tucker) which is being made into a 
If you’re in the mood to channel your inner brat, you will enjoy Hydra, the debut novel of Adriane Howell. Here’s how it begins:
I don’t often read YA novels, but I picked this one up because it’s the only fiction I’ve ever seen that deals with the 1965 Freedom Ride in Australia.
Update 10/8/22 The winner has been announced: congratulations to Bernadette Brennan for her biography of Gillian Mears, Leaping into Waterfalls. (I always like it when a LitBio wins!!)
