Fauna is a compelling novel, I started it last night and loafed in bed today until I’d finished reading it. The really interesting thing about it, is that although you find out what happens in the end, you don’t, not really, and that is very creepy indeed. The novel is a highly intelligent work of fiction which made me think of the disconcerting issues raised by Paddy O’Reilly’s remarkable novel The Wonders which also raised questions about what it is that makes us human.
Fauna is set in a very near future, in a world so very nearly like the present. It begins in the everyday Perth suburbs, with a family eating takeaway in the messiness of daily life, the kids Emmy and Jake going to school and weekend sport, Isak (the father) busy with work and paying the bills, and Stacey, newly pregnant ad wholly absorbed in her future child. There are brief allusions to the messiness of the world on TV, and to the comfort and relief of watching people cook and renovate houses.
But with the birth of the infant, the family takes up an offer of a lifestyle far beyond their means and they move to a beautiful but isolated property in southwest WA where the family’s predicament is less likely to arouse interest. This suits the researchers who are operating on the edges of legality but it exacerbates Stacey’s loneliness. Like The Wonders, this novel draws attention to the intrusive media which can make life hell for anyone who is different, and she fears interaction with anyone outside their small family in case awkward questions are asked. Because what this couple have done is to assuage their longing for another child by participating in an IVF research project which mixes their genes with those of some other creature. It’s part of a project to reverse the extinction of creatures like the Tasmanian Tiger. LifeBLOOD® does not tell them much about what they are in for, but with the arrival of Asta, their anxieties move far beyond worrying about whether their semi-human offspring will be hairy or not.
The novel traces Asta’s development year by year in successive chapters, and what becomes clear is that the confidentiality provisions of the contract they have signed have turned their lives into something resembling a witness protection program. Stacey has had a difficult childhood due to her mother’s peripatetic lifestyle, and her only family connection now is with a brother who also fled Australia but—unlike Stacey—stayed overseas. She cannot share her anxieties with him, and as the novel progresses their predicament impacts on her relationship with Isak as well as on their other two children. The economy with which Mazza conveys this is more powerful for being open-ended. When Stacey sends photos of her new house to Alex, he replies with ‘Did you win the lottery and not share with me?’ Stacey does not reply.
In some ways she is her own worst enemy, choosing not to take advantage of opportunities to get to know well-meaning locals who assume that Asta is a special needs child with a rare genetic disorder. That’s how the couple have been advised to counter curiosity about her appearance, but unlike Isak, Stacey isn’t comfortable with this. Like most of us, Stacey has not read the fine print, and finds the explanatory website alienating and confusing. But as Asta grows, her future as an investment by LifeBlood® becomes harder for Stacey to deny, and eventually she takes extreme action to protect the child to whom she is utterly devoted, at the expense of everything else.
The setting is evoked in beautiful prose, contrasting the nature that surrounds them with the nightmarish use of technology for obscene profit. On the day Stacey drops her kids off at their new school, there is a violent storm:
Veined with sea foam, the waves curl and crash, spraying high into the wind. Mist hurls back, dampens my shaking car. Black coastal rocks bathed and tangled in a lacework of foam. An endless race of breaking water headed for the coast one after another. A great queue out there across the expanse.
The sea has risen with the storm, grown as if there is more of it. It triggers images of the future. Perhaps somewhere across the ocean there is a coast depleted when we are overwhelmed.
A band of sunlight falls on the green horizon, distant flecks and sprays of white-capped waves tell me this churning will go on for a few hours yet.
The car windows have misted over with our breath. The lovely child fills her baby seat with her broad body. She sleeps soundly, her wide lashes fanned against her pale cheeks. Mothers with blond children walk by, their little ones packed tight against the wind, and she is here, hidden from view in the still-cold air of the car. (p.177)
I couldn’t find book group notes at the Allen & Unwin website but I doubt if they would be needed. Start by asking ‘what did you think?’ and the discussion will outlast the wine and nibbles, for sure!
Author: Donna Mazza
Title: Fauna
Publisher: Allen & Unwin, 2020
ISBN: 9781760876302, pbk, 312 pages
Source: Bayside Library
Available from Fishpond:Fauna and good bookshops everywhere
I stumbled on this intriguing book at my local library, attracted firstly by the name (because I like Indian fiction) and then by the blurb. It’s a kind of contemporary Canterbury Tales, i.e. stories told by a group of strangers, but in this case they are linked by being trapped in a building damaged in an earthquake.
Lots of people like this book, and it was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, but I found it dull. Perhaps this might not be so for readers who don’t already know Homer’s Iliad, but I do, so I knew exactly what was going to happen because Barker’s plot so closely follows the original story from the 8th century BC. Without the narrative tension of an unfamiliar plot the book needed other aspects to create reader engagement: it needed to be interesting because it offered the female perspective omitted from the original epic, and the writing needed to be vivid and captivating. And IMO it is inadequate in both respects, and Barker’s ambition to redress historical gender inequity in an archaic piece of literature and link that to the contemporary #MeToo movement is not enough to redeem it.
His talk was titled ‘Skepticism, Science and Scientism, and I don’t need to read it because I already have. (I have proofread all his items for publication, and his philosophy essays for uni as well.) There are other talks which look quite interesting but my eyes aren’t up to close reading today, so that’s for another time. What I was able to do today was read the other book I bought, which is called Poetry & Ideas, Text and Images, and it’s a beautiful collection of illustrated poetry. While The Spouse was doing his ‘Swing and Sway’ radio show at 3CR I went round the corner to a beaut restaurant called 
As Bill from The Australian Legend remarked just recently,
I wish, I really wish, I’d found time to read this book before last Christmas—because if I had, by now, you would all have your own copy and so would your friends because you would have given them all a copy as a present. I am not really a fan of books about reading, but The Innocent Reader has brought me so much pleasure, I hardly know how to begin.
Mark O’Flynn writes drama, fiction, memoir and poetry, and is the author of The Last Days of Ava Langdon (2016), 
I don’t usually review books I haven’t finished — but I’m making an exception with Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread, because I am so baffled by it, I’d like to know if anyone else has made any sense of it.
Gingerbread is known to most of us as a feature of the Hansel and Gretel fairytale, where it is used to lure the children to their doom, but there is also the story of the Gingerbread Man who comes to life as the longed-for but rather unpleasant child of an old man and woman. There is a kind of malevolence in these representations of the sweet and spicy baked dough, but OTOH there are gingerbread houses as a symbol of love and affection at Christmastime in Germany and the US. But…
This book came to my attention because the author is a guest at
I’ve always been a unionist because I believe that people can have power collectively that they cannot exercise as individuals. I belonged to the Australian Education Union (under various different names) throughout my career, and I joined the Australian Society of Authors soon after I had my first paid article published, long ago in 1987. And it was because I was a member of the ASA that I have a copy of a great literary treasure: the last print edition of The Australian Author, 1969-2018, Vol 50 No 2. It is a treasure not because it is the last, but because it is a commemorative edition, featuring selected reprints of articles by a pantheon of great Australian authors, from the birth of the ASA over half a century.
Anyway, what prompted me to take up my pen, so to say, was not to spruik membership of the ASA, but having revisited Barbara Jefferis’ essay ‘The people novels write’, from July 1969. Though she was the author of eleven books, I haven’t read much of Jefferis’ oeuvre, only 
* CAL is administered by the Copyright Agency Limited. It monitors photocopying in educational institutions and pays authors on the basis of the usage rates per item. 
John Kinsella (b.1963) is a well-known Australian poet, essayist, critic and novelist, but Hollow Earth is his first venture into science fiction. This is the blurb:
This month’s 
So I thought I’d go completely off-piste, and just choose a book by another author with a hyphenated surname. I looked for the first one in my list of authors and came up with 
From there, it was a no-brainer to revisit one of the best Australian books of recent times, 
The topic of medical negligence reminded me of 
The title of Shuker’s book led me to 
Talking of authors who take a long time to write, it is so sad to think that there will never be any more from Shirley Hazzard, who died in 2016. There were twenty-three years between The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, two of the best novels I’ve ever read. Alas, though I’ve reviewed 
As discussed in comments at
Next month’s book is
I 
My recent reading of Return Ticket by Jon Doust
PS I have previously read Zakes Mda’s debut novel Ways of Dying (1995). It is less artfully constructed, and despite its grim theme, a more optimistic book which celebrates the triumph of the human spirit. See my review 
Yesterday I attended a birthday party for one of our small neighbours. It was just what you’d expect: a gathering of friends and family and the relaxed bedlam of a bunch of four-year-olds hurtling about, testing out the new toys and scoffing a generous spread of delicious treats. Just what you’d wish for any child: an exciting day from which to make memories of a secure and happy childhood.
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