Site Title

Tag: literature

  • The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 16: Issue 13: 15th September 2026: Some Recent Reading.

    A small selection of recent reading – two books and three periodicals

    • Quarterly Essay 100: The Good Fight: The Labor Party Before and Now: What does Labor stand for? by Sean Kelly [2026];
    • Quarterly Essay 101: Blind Spot: Southeast Asia and Australia’s Future by Michael Wesley [2026];
    • Hudson Fysh by Grantlee Kieza [pub.2022];
    • The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams [pub.2020];
    • Quarterly Essay 102: The God We Made: The Threat and Promise of Artificial Intelligence by Anna Goldsworthy [2026].

    Incidentally, readers interested in exploring the contents more fully of the Quarterly Essays referred to below, or indeed other editions, can either purchase individual copies or subscribe to them online at quarterlyessay.com/subscribe.

    January to June

    In Quarterly Essay 100, ‘The Good Fight: What does Labor Stand For’ by Sean Kelly  –  Kelly considered the enigma of the Albanese government. With wide yet shallow support, will it change the country? Does it have big ideas, or is it content just to become “the natural party of government”?  Kelly gives a definitive account of Albanese’s political style and shows what lies behind it. In speaking to a fragmented, disengaged electorate, the Prime Minister places a high value on moderation. Often that means ducking fights with entrenched interests. But this runs the risk of embedding an ever more unequal society, led by a government that can seem gutless.  Described as a subtle and brilliant essay, Kelly explores whether Labor is still up for the good fight.

    A wide-ranging essay including a look at the historical development of the Labor Party, the years of the 1980s/1990s , with principal emphasise on it’s current period of government sand it’s leader.

    A website titled Cannonball Read described the Essay as follows –  The Good Fight examines Anthony Albanese’s Labor government as it moves through its second term. Kelly argues that the Prime Minister has built his leadership style, and the modern Labor movement more broadly, around kindness, collaboration, and a soft-spoken civility. These qualities have distinguished him from his predecessors and resonated with voters who were weary of political combat. But Kelly questions whether this gentler approach has blunted Labor’s sense of purpose. His central claim is that Albanese’s government suffers from a lack of belief: it tends to make decisions based on what is achievable rather than what is aspirational. This pragmatism, Kelly suggests, makes the government safe but timid. It has allowed Labor to quietly abandon or dilute several election commitments whenever bipartisan support proved elusive. The writer notes that ‘ Listening to Kelly’s reflections, I found myself realising things about Australian politics that I hadn’t before. I follow politics casually, but his analysis illuminated the deeper tension between conviction and compromise that defines contemporary Labor. The essay is not a hit piece; it’s a thoughtful, sometimes sympathetic exploration of how belief, identity, and caution interact at a pivotal moment in our national politics’

    Certainly. the Esay attracted a broad range of opinions in the large volume of correspondence that would appear at the end of Essay No. 101 [see following review]. Kelly’s response in summarising the subsequent correspondence was that “I would encourage anybody interested in the topic to read all the responses to the essay. Each is original, thoughtful and interesting. Each one adds to my ideas and challenges them”. A great response to often quite critical reflections in his essay.

    Kelly in fact, in replying to that correspondence admits that “The writing of my essay began from a place of uncertainty; what to make of this Labor government? By the time I finished it, I was still uncertain. I had some suspicions , obviously; some instincts. I had grown more convinced that Labor might miss its chance to make significant change; and more concerned about the consequences for the country if it did. I certainly wanted to persuade readers these were genuine possibilities that should be taken seriously. But I knew, too, that my fears might be misplaced”.

    In Quarterly Essay 101, ‘Blind Spot: South East Asia and Australia’s Future’ by Michael Wesley  its suggested that  Australia has forgotten what keeps it safe. So argues Michael Wesley in this sharp and compelling essay about our place in the world.  Southeast Asia is the key to our national security and prosperity. If China dominates the region, as it plans to, Australia will be very vulnerable. So why are we following an American strategy that isolates and alienates us from our neighbours?  Wesley argues that the focus on AUKUS and sticking with Trump is a dangerous distraction. Whereas the United States has little at stake in Southeast Asia, Australia has everything to lose. How did our foreign policy elite become so wedded to the US worldview? What do our Southeast Asian neighbours have to tell us, if only we would listen? Blind Spot is described as a gripping essay about strategic folly and the future of our region.

    In writing in the May edition of the Australian Book Review, Varun Ghosh notes that ‘Michael Wesley, Professor of International Relations at the University of Melbourne and an experienced policy contributor, argues that Australia has neglected relationships in Southeast Asia to its serious detriment’  Ghosh’s opening comments in reviewing the Essay are that:

    ‘It is axiomatic that Australia’s security environment has deteriorated. Strategic competition in our region continues to grow, and our international relationships are becoming more complex and multidimensional. Traditional challenges to sovereign borders and maritime trade routes have combined with new risks to regional peace and security that have been enabled by technological advancements and changing tactics. According to the 2026 National Defence Strategy, the coming decade will be defined by ‘fracture, rivalry and disorder’, and Australia faces elevated levels of geopolitical risk. Successfully managing this increase in risk, volatility, and complexity in the region will be essential for Australia’s future, though perspectives on how to achieve this differ widely’.

    One of Wesley’s points –  that Australia is so eager to be of service to Washington  that government strategy  focuses more on North Asia at the expense of South East Asia and the Pacific region  –  an argument which would have poorly received by the Albanese government, which since coming into government could claim a long list of South East Asia policy initiatives.

    Another claim by Wesley was that  recent Australian policy has overinvested in the US alliance, and he argues elsewhere that Australia should be treating South East Asia as our primary theatre of interest. His suggestion as noted above that we have neglected the region. In subsequent correspondence about the Essay, Nick Bisley, amongst others suggests that the focus of attention on South East Asia and the Pacific has been much more focused than that of their predecessors, though he admits that whether that focus has been successful is up for debate. On that point, another correspondent, Sam Roggeveen suggests that these long list of activities, of visits, dialogues, agreements, etc, ‘are about inputs rather than outcomes’. Michael Wesley himself argues that without building a sense of enduring mutual interests with our northern neighbours, all the visits, exercises and agreements in the world will not deliver Australia continuing relevance or importance there.

    An interesting comment made by Luke Brown, in another piece of correspondence about the Essay was that “A senior former colleague in the Department of Foreign Affairs once privately summarised the problem with Australia’s  attempts to find it’s place in Southeast Asia. ;We play different sports, watch different movies, but different stuff, and neither of us are really curious or bothered enough to poke our head over the fence to see what’s going on over the other side’, “ Even the previously strong programs of Indonesian studies at university level have dwindled to the extent that such studies be soon be non-existent at those institutions

    In summarising the ABR review noted earlier, it stated that ‘The essay’s most compelling passages advocate for Australia to improve its understanding and interconnectedness with the countries of Southeast Asia. It is true that, historically, Australian governments have not been sufficiently focused on advancing these aims, particularly in the economic sphere, and Wesley is right to point to the inconstancy of these efforts. Thus the author’s frustration with perceived foreign policy missteps, and his sense of urgency in remedying them, are understandable’. 

    28th July.

    A biography – Hudson Fysh by Grantlee Kieza, published in 2022, of 403 pages.  Hudson Fysh was a decorated World War I hero who not only founded Australia’s national airline, Qantas, but steered it for almost half a century from its humble beginnings with two rickety biplanes to the age of the jumbo jets. More than anyone, Fysh shaped the way that Australians saw the world.

    I found this an interesting read, which perhaps would prove even more enjoyable to someone with at least a basic knowledge of the mechanics and types of aircraft, described in much detail throughout the whole book, basically from the beginnings of ‘flight’ and following the generations of aircraft development, and the constant search and fight to obtain sponsorship and government and/or organisational funding needed to fulfill the dreams that Fysh and others of his generation worked towards.

    Hudson Fysh began life in Tasmania, a sickly boy traumatised by his parents’ broken marriage. Born in 1895, his father’s failure as a businessman would have been a sobering lesson to a boy raised by a mother from a wealthy family that had flourished through her father’s entrepreneurial abilities.

    As portrayed by Amazon, One of Australia’s celebrated Light Horsemen at Gallipoli, Fysh went on to fly death-defying missions for Lawrence of Arabia with the Australian Flying Corps and battle Germans in deadly dogfights in the skies over Palestine. On his return from the Great War, Fysh launched his bush airline, the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd (Qantas), with the help of a wartime pilot friend and some western Queensland graziers. After flying the first scheduled Qantas passenger flight in 1922, he ushered in the Flying Doctor Service [after an initial approach by the Rev John Flynn]  that still assists remote communities and the first Qantas international airmail services, which revolutionised Australian communications. Fysh went on to guide Qantas through the dark days of the Great Depression, the perilous years of World War II, when the airline flew dangerous missions for the Allies, and into the great boom in international tourism that followed with the jet age, giving millions of Australians their first experience of international travel.

    The book contains brilliant descriptions after WW1 of the month long drives in early motor-vehicles that regularly broke down to charter a course through the outback regions of Queensland and the Northen Territory for future planes to fly –  obtaining the services of isolated rural landowners and Indigenous personnel to clear spaces of land for use as future aerodromes, etc,

    • The Model T then travelled on a narrow camel track for another eighty-five kilometres before McGinness and Girham camped for the night. The reached Daly Waters on 27 October [1919] to plot out the next landing field. The site as covered with small stones that could have torn the fabric or damaged the wheels of aircraft, and McGinness gave a group of Jingili women  at the station Turkey red material to make dresses after they spent the day sweeping the stones away. He gave a group of local men , who had watched from the edges of the field, plug tobacco.
    • At Matarnka Station, McGinness left some white calico  with the manager, as well as instructions on how to use this cloth to mark out the landing area with a circle fifty meters in diameter and a large T. He also left instructions on how to prepare an oil-burning choofer so that an approaching pilot could see the direction of ground winds in the thick plumes of smoke the oil produced.

    These kind of instructions and site searches continued over many months through the outback travails of northern Australia through the 1919/1920 period, as aerodromes and routes were prepared for future planes and their pilots.

    Hudson Fysh remained at the controls of Qantas, the airline he founded alongside his friend Paul McGinness and first backer Winton grazier Fergus McMaster in 1922 in Western Queensland, until 1966.

    He flew the first scheduled passenger flight from Longreach to Cloncurry in that year. What we take for granted with aviation today had its origins in the dreams of men who saw the future for aviation. Those early years were not without their accidents and flying tragedies, and through the reading such events seem to come through on a regular basis as new planes and methods are tested, the challenge of attempting long distance flights over oceans and hostile land masses.

    As indicated, an interesting, but quite lengthy read – to my mind mainly because of the aircraft technical and type references, an essential aspect of the  Hudson Fysh story.

    As for Grantlee Kiera, he is the author [amongst other biographies and histories] of critically acclaimed bestselling biographies of Monash, Banjo, Banks [next review], Macquarie and Lawson.

    6th September

    In 1901, the word bondmaid was discovered missing  from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is the story of the girl who stole it, and other discarded and previously disregarded words during the construction of the Oxford English Dictionary and created her own The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams [published in 2020] of 423 pages. I wasn’t sure what to expect with this story, purchased on the basis of the  ‘library and literary  connotations’ from the book title. It proved to be a wonderful and fascinating read!

    Basically – The Dictionary of Lost Words is a historical novel by Pip Williams that explores the hidden stories behind words excluded from the Oxford English Dictionary, particularly those reflecting women’s and common people’s experiences.

    The novel follows Esme Nicoll, a motherless girl raised by her father, a lexicographer working on the first Oxford English Dictionary in a garden shed called the Scriptorium in Oxford . Esme’s mother died giving her birth, so she is brought up by her father. She spends her childhood under the table in the Scriptorium, where James Murray and his team of lexicographers, including her father, are compiling the Oxford English Dictionary.

    As a child, Esme notices that certain words—especially those related to women, domestic life, and everyday speech—are overlooked or discarded by the dictionary compilers. She begins secretly collecting these words, creating her own Dictionary of Lost Words   The story highlights the power of language and how it shapes history and social perception. It emphasizes that words used by women, the poor, and marginalized groups were often ignored, reflecting broader societal biases Set during the women’s suffrage movement and the lead-up to World War I, the novel intertwines personal growth, social change, and historical events, showing how language can both include and exclude voices 

    Let’s have a look at the storyline.

    Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.

    Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.

    Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.

    Some of the women from whom Esme discovers these words are heavily involved in that suffragette movement, or from the local markets, or brothels where she learns many of the more crude and sexually explicit  words in use, that the men compiling the Dictionary would refuse to allow any recognition of. They were initially disinterested in words that had not been written in some format and attributed to an individual. Many of the words that Esme came across were spoken only – she would note them on small pieces of paper that she always carried with, and write the name of the woman [usually] who had introduced her to the word, thereby attributing it to that individual irrespective of their position in society.

    The Dictionary of Lost Words is a 2020 historical novel by Australian author Pip Williams. It was her debut novel and is based on true historical events surrounding the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the suffrage movement for women’s voting rights, and World War I. The novel won numerous awards, including the MUD Literary Prize for best debut novel and General Fiction Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards, both in 2021.

    Back in 1857, the Unregistered Words Committee of the Philological Society of London called for a new English dictionary to succeed Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language [1755]. In 1879, James Murray was appointed as Editor, and he and his family [including two daughters who continued with his work] lived on site and feature prominently in the novel. It was in 1885 that James and Sada Murray move from London to Oxford and erect a large corrugated iron shed in the garden of their house. The house became known as Sunnyside. The shed is known as the Scriptorium. Over the next 43 years, the alphabet of words is slowly and gradually worked through with Volume 12, V to Z published in 1928.  The publication of the Oxford English Dictionary is celebrated that year, some 71 years after it was proposed.

    The author notes at the end of her story – 

    • Perhaps the biggest challenge in writing this book  was being true to the real-life people who inhabited its historical context.
    • This book began as two simple questions. Do words mean different things to men and women? And if they do, is it possible that we have lost something  in the process of defining them?
    • In initially reading about the Oxford Dictionary, she writes: ”I was left with the impression that the Dictionary was a particularly male endeavour. From what I could glean, all the editors were men, most of the assistants were men, most of the volunteers were men and most of the literature, manuals as newspaper articles used as evidence for how words were used, were written by men. Finally, the delegates of the Oxford University Press – those who held the purse strings – were men, Where, I wondered, are the women in this story, and does it matter that they are absent? It took me a while to find the women, and when I did, they were cast in minor and supporting roles”.

    Those women feature in this novel   and together with Esme’s father, form the basis of the story presented by Pip Williams.

    Well worth a read if you have the time – not just about words, but of the times, romance, the giving up of as child born out of wedlock  – who at the end of the story, after having many  years previously been told that Esme was her real mother, appears on a stage in Adelaide, Australia in 1989 at the tenth Annual Convention of the Australian Lexicography Society,  From her jacket pocket, Professor Megan Brooks, takes a white envelope , and from it she carefully slides out a frail slip of paper, yellowed with age. This, and only this, she places on the lectern, gently smoothing it with her gloved hands.

    She picks up the slip.  “Bondmaid”, she says. “For a while, this beautiful troubling word  belonged to my mother”.

    11th September

    Quarterly Essay No. 102  –  ‘The God We Made: The threat and promise of Artificial Intelligence by Anna Goldsworthy   This is a crucial topic, which in recent weeks and days has been receiving more and more attention in the media and elsewhere, including a recent article in the ‘Age’ newspaper by journalist Toby Walsh headed ‘Will AI kill us all? Doubt it, but we can’t ignore the risks’.

    This Essay,  written by noted journalist, author and musician, Anna Goldsworthy, asks the question ‘How will we be changed by the rise of artificial intelligence?’. She argues that AI is a rupture that makes us confront what it is to be human – what we do, and want. As it learns human ways, AI raises big questions about work, leisure and education. It brings new existential, social and ethical risks. Above all, it invites us to consider what is irreplaceable in us, starting with the body and the friction of others.
    The God We Made is a brilliant inquiry into identity and a transformed future. How can we learn to live with AI? And will AI be happy to live with us?……………………………………………………………………………………………………….
    “The experts have spoken, but many of us remain curiously unprepared, burying our heads in the sand – Look at its hallucinations! It’s never going to be as smart as us! – or imagining that the only issue is plagiarism. AI is not just another tool: it is a paradigm shift, a ceding of our superiority.” —Anna Goldsworthy, The God We Made
    Some of the comments and/or praises for the Essay include

    ‘Before the Pope turned to AI, Anna Goldsworthy got there first. This is one of the most important conversations we need to have, and Goldsworthy has it with her trademark grace, rigour and originality. The God We Made is that rare beast, writing that makes even the experts see their field anew.’ —Toby Walsh, author of the forthcoming God AI: Boom or Doom? What to Expect When Machines Outsmart Us
    ‘A humane and penetrating essay, grounded in the kind of convivial sensibility AI is pushing to the margins of our world.’ —Richard King, author of Brave New Wild: Can Technology Really Save the Planet?
    ‘Exquisite and troubling and stimulating and frightening and beautiful’ —Bri Lee, author of Seed
    ‘Goldsworthy’s literary humanism brings perspective to an often breathless story.’ —The Saturday Paper
    ‘A serious, elegant and unsettling essay about humanity at the edge of a technology it does not fully understand and may not fully control.’ —The Conversation

    A few brief quotations from the early parts of Anna’s Essay.

    • There’s an unknowable risk that AI will end human civilisation – But that’s a risk worth taking. Without AI, humanity’s expiry date is probably quite soon, and this could extend it, maybe indefinitely [p.13].
    • Many of the people building these systems are strikingly young: brilliant kids whose business is the optimization of data and the scaling of systems, but who are now entrusted  with decisions that will shape the future of our planet. A similar concentration of power attended the development of nuclear weapons.in which the scientists and military assumed responsibility for a technology that could destroy us all [p. 13].
    • And there is no shortage of ways in which AI could harm us. Nuclear hacking and bioterrorism aside, it will be uniquely equipped for blackmail and human manipulation: an exponential , algorithmic Einstein …….AI will have learnt from all the novels that were ever written, all the books by Machiavelli, all the pollical connivances……….A version if this already operates in our social media, engineered to keep us optimally engaged or gratified, but this promises to be another order of mind control again. [p.14].
    • From a  2023 Statement of AI risk, signed by many experts in the field  ‘Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war’., [p.16]  
    • Speaking of suggestions that AI will provide an automation of most of humanity’s tasks and referring to her own talent as a musician and the fact her piano talent was not ‘bought off the shelf’  – ‘They were lessons in slowness and patience, in discipline and concentration  and embodiment’.  But it is one thing to be delivered of busy work; it is another to be relieved of meaningful occupation. There are many way we find purpose in work, ranging from the satisfaction of a job well done to the sense of contributing.  Will all that be lost under AI? [p. 24-25].
    • In 1930, John Maynard Keynes in a essay titled ‘Economic Possibilities  for our Grand Children’ that “Thus, for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure , which science and compound interest  will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well’ [p.27].
    • Humans are herd animals and attracted to conformity. It is this that has allowed us to flourish. But whst happens when a tendency towards conformity meets a tool predicated on statistical averages? Does it steer us all further towards the mean? [p.34];
    • Illustrating the conflicting views of despair and hope as expressed throughout the Essay, Anna Goldsworthy ends with the note that “Those grandchildren are my central  source of anxiety about this issue. They are also my source of hope”[p.85].

    Again, referring to the Australian Book Review, August 2026, Flynn Shan Benson, in reviewing this Essay begins with the following paragraphs.

    ‘Among the many harms wrought on our world by artificial intelligence is the fact that the act of reading any text is now a Turing Test: we cannot now read something free of the suspicion that its ideas and syntax are merely aping human expression. So, we look askew at em dashes and pat phrasing, we hear countless stories of writers passing off slop as the genuine product, and we live in a world where everyone has used ChatGPT and everyone is insulted by the claim ‘You sound like ChatGPT.’

    If we must live like this, then let us test the following paragraph, which comes a third of the way through the new Quarterly Essay, The God We Made, in which Anna Goldsworthy considers the future of both humanity and the humanities in light of artificial intelligence.

    As with so many of our metrics – from our ten-fingered decimal system to the heartbeat of a second – our words are imprinted with our bodies. Our bodies are our yardstick, our tools of calibration. Across many cultures, a baby’s first word is mama or mum mum mum, the bilabial hum of a mouth clamouring for the breast. From mama we build our palaces of language. And then – as if there were not enough – we seek to recreate them on paper. A strange practice indeed.

    The conceit is distinct, if not necessarily original: our measurements are part of our biology, rather than something to be universally replicated. (A sufficiently precise chatbot prompt might get you to the same argument.) But I’m inclined to think the phrase ‘the bilabial hum of a mouth clamouring for the breast’ could only be the product of a human mind, not only for its particularly elegant construction but also for its uneasy erotic undercurrent. Given the myriad biases bequeathed to artificial intelligence, the emphasis on the maternal, the leap from ‘mama’ to ‘palaces of language’, could suggest a mind free of programmed misogyny. The final sentence is indicative of the idiosyncrasy and care that Goldsworthy brings to her practice, both as a concert pianist and a writer.

    It is this kind of questioning that Goldsworthy enacts and inspires in her wide-ranging consideration of artificial intelligence and artistic life. As someone who has devoted her life to music and literature – and one of the many writers whose work was stolen to train Large Language Models – Goldsworthy draws together thinkers, podcasters, myths, and conversations with family members to calibrate the hope and despair that she feels’.

    Finally, as noted in The Conversation: Books & Idea of 26 June past ‘Just as we always suspected”, writes musician and writer Anna Goldsworthy in her new Quarterly Essay on AI, “the god that may destroy us is the god of ourselves.” This sentence captures the core of the essay: a personal meditation on what AI reveals about humanity. She ponders not logic gates or quantum chips, but the technology’s moral, creative and even theological implications’.

    A worrying topic indeed –  not so much for myself, but thinking more of what the future holds for my children and grandchildren under the auspices of AI.

  • The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 16: Issue 2:  28th January, 2026 – THE ODYSSEY BY HOMER – a New Translation by Emily Wilson

    I have not read The Odyssey completely, and really can’t assess the accuracy of truthfulness of the following article, but I found it an interesting summation and perhaps worth some studious examination. In fact at this stage of my life, I’m not sure that I will ever get around to tackling Homer’s ‘poem’. As with Homer’s ‘The Iliad’, both books were purchased back in 2012, and while I did make a start in each case, other reading at the time proved more enticing!

    The copy I have is presumably an example of one of many translations that Emily Wilson is revising. It is a translation by George Chapman [who also translated my copy of The Iliard]. Perhaps the comments made in the Introduction to my copy by Dr Adam Roberts of the University of London, give an indication of some of Wilson’s criticisms that follow. Roberts notes that “Chapman’s Odyssey has an unfortunate reputation as a relatively inaccurate rendering of Homer’s original…[but]..The consensus of most critics is that the tone and timbre of Chapman is more ornate, more quaint and more explicitly moral than Homer. Moreover, there are reputed to be many places where, according to critics, Chapman deliberately or otherwise shifts the emphasise, adds to or subtracts from, or flat-out mistranslates his source”.

    This aspect of mistranslation, in reading the following article, appears to my mind, to be the major emphasise of Wilson’s translation   In any case, for what it is worth, the following is her interpretation of the way Odyssey should be read, presumably the first interpretation by a woman.

    For 400 years, every English translation of The Odyssey was done by a man. Then one woman translated it, and suddenly everyone realized how much had been quietly changed.

    When Emily Wilson sat down to translate Homer’s Odyssey in 2017, she knew she was entering territory that had belonged exclusively to male scholars for centuries. Chapman in 1616. Pope in 1726. Fitzgerald in 1961. Fagles in 1996. Brilliant minds, all of them. Translators whose work had shaped how English speakers understood one of Western civilization’s foundational texts.

    But Wilson, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to ask a question none of her predecessors had seriously considered: What if centuries of male translators had been quietly editing the story to match their own assumptions about heroes, women, and morality?

    She started with the very first word Homer uses to describe Odysseus: “polytropos.”

    Every major translator had rendered it as something flattering. “Resourceful.” “Versatile.” “The man of many ways.” Words that made Odysseus sound admirable, heroic, the kind of protagonist you’d want your children to emulate.

    Wilson translated it as “complicated.”

    One word. But it changes everything.

    Suddenly Odysseus isn’t just clever—he’s morally ambiguous. A man who lies even when honesty would serve him better. A survivor who manipulates, deceives, and rationalizes violence. Still the protagonist, still fascinating, but no longer simply heroic.

    That’s what “polytropos” actually means in Greek. But for four centuries, translators had smoothed it over because complicated heroes made readers uncomfortable.

    Wilson realized she’d stumbled onto something bigger. If they’d changed the first word, what else had been altered?

    She kept digging.

    The answer was staggering: almost everything involving women.

    Consider what happens when Odysseus finally returns home after 20 years. He discovers that enslaved women in his household were forced into sexual relationships with the suitors who had occupied his palace. He and his son Telemachus execute these women in a brutal mass hanging—strung up together, left to die slowly.

    Homer’s Greek uses the word “dmôai,” which has a precise meaning: enslaved women. People who were property, who had no legal rights, no power to refuse, no agency over their own bodies.

    But English translators wrote: “maids.” “Maidservants.” “Servant girls.” One even wrote “guilty maids who made love with suitors.”

    Do you see what happened? The language made it sound like these women had chosen to betray Odysseus. That they were complicit. That they deserved execution.

    Emily Wilson translated the word exactly as Homer wrote it: “slaves.”

    Suddenly the entire scene shifts. This isn’t justice—it’s a powerful man murdering enslaved women who were raped by invaders. Women who had no choice, no power to resist, no way to protect themselves.

    That’s what Homer wrote. But for 400 years, English readers never knew because translators couldn’t bring themselves to call slavery what it was.

    Or take Penelope, Odysseus’s wife who waits 20 years for his return. Earlier translators portrayed her as the ideal patient wife—faithful, pure, suffering nobly, the perfect Victorian woman.

    But Homer’s Greek describes her as “periphron.” The word means shrewd, strategic, prudent, circumspect—someone who thinks several moves ahead.

    Wilson’s Penelope isn’t just waiting passively. She’s manipulating over a hundred suitors, buying herself time through elaborate schemes, gathering intelligence, positioning herself politically for survival. When Odysseus finally reveals himself, she doesn’t collapse in grateful tears. She tests him. She demands proof. She makes him work for her trust.

    Because she’s smart. Homer said she was smart from the beginning. But translators kept making her passive because intelligent, strategic women made Victorian readers uncomfortable. So they emphasized her tears and her weaving, and downplayed her brilliance.

    Then there’s Calypso, the goddess who keeps Odysseus on her island for seven years. The Greek word Homer uses is “katechein”—to detain, to restrain, to hold captive against will.

    But generations of translators wrote that Calypso “loved” him. That they had a “relationship.” That she “cared for” him.

    Wilson translates it clearly: Calypso “kept” him as her captive. She “owned” him. She forced him to sleep with her.

    Suddenly it’s obvious—this wasn’t a romance. It was imprisonment and sexual coercion. A goddess using her power to trap a mortal man who wanted to go home.

    Homer said that explicitly. But translators softened it, romanticized it, because it complicated the heroic narrative they wanted to tell.

    When Wilson’s translation was published, the literary world erupted. The book became a New York Times bestseller. Critics called it revelatory. Readers discovered they could finally hear Homer’s voice clearly, without centuries of editorial interference.

    There was backlash, of course. Some scholars accused Wilson of imposing modern feminist values on an ancient text. Of “updating” Homer for contemporary audiences. Of distorting the original to make a political point.

    Her response was devastatingly simple: Read the Greek.

    Every single choice she made was defensible from the original language. She wasn’t adding feminism—she was removing centuries of anti-feminist bias that previous translators had inserted without acknowledging it.

    Wilson imposed one iron rule on herself: consistency. If a Greek word means “slave,” translate it as “slave” every single time. Not “slave” when it’s a man and “maid” when it’s a woman. If a word indicates captivity, don’t call it love. If a character is described as intelligent, don’t emphasize their beauty instead.

    Translate what Homer actually wrote, not what later cultures wished he’d written.

    The result is an Odyssey that’s sharper, stranger, more morally complex—and more honest.

    Odysseus isn’t a noble hero or a villain. He’s a complicated man who does both terrible and remarkable things, exactly as Homer presented him.

    Penelope isn’t a passive wife waiting for rescue. She’s a strategic thinker navigating impossible political circumstances with intelligence and resolve.

    The enslaved women aren’t guilty betrayers. They’re enslaved women murdered by the man who owned them, victims twice over.

    Calypso isn’t a romantic interest. She’s a captor who abuses her power.

    For 400 years, English-speaking readers thought they understood The Odyssey. But they were reading Homer filtered through Victorian morality, Edwardian gender assumptions, and translators who judged women more harshly than men while excusing male violence.

    They were reading translations that reflected what those translators believed, not what Homer said.

    Emily Wilson didn’t modernize The Odyssey. She de-Victorianized it. She stripped away four centuries of accumulated bias and let Homer’s Greek speak directly.

    And it turns out The Odyssey is a better, more interesting, more morally challenging poem than we realized.

    Not because Wilson added anything—but because she finally stopped letting centuries of male translators quietly edit the women out of their own story.

    She became the first woman in 400 years to translate The Odyssey into English. And in doing so, she became the first translator in generations to simply tell the story Homer actually wrote.

  • Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 15: Issue 17: A modern view of a classic novel

    I studied the Russian novel ‘Crime and Punishment’ back in 1964 as part of an English Literature course that year, so was interested to find the following article published as the Friday Essay in the on-line edition of ‘The Conversation’ earlier this month. Written by Kevin John Brophy, the Emeritus Professor of Creative writing at the University of Melbourne, on December 5th, he also was returning to the novel after 60 years, and claimed to be still ‘awed’ by it.

    I share his reflections of ‘Crime and Punishment’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky below. Whether I ever make the time to reread the novel remains to be seen, perhaps Brophy’s return to it may suffice!

    The old woman who once sliced our front garden hose with a knife has just walked past our home without pausing. Not long after the hose incident I confronted her with what she had done and she denied ever walking along our street, let alone cutting anyone’s hose, or even carrying a knife.

    In fact she emptied her bag for me and there was no knife in it. I had been searching on the web about strange behaviour among the elderly and one source noted that it is not uncommon for aged women to carry a knife in their bag. I am not sure what this means, but each time I see the old woman (and I see her often on our street), I feel reassured when she manages to pass by our front garden without a glance in the direction of the hose – though the lingering question of the motive for her crime remains.

    I am rereading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment 60 years after first being enthralled by it, with the idea of testing myself against an experience I’ve long been convinced upended me as a teenage reader, then shaped me as a university student of the 1970s who channelled his version of Dostoevsky’s protagonist, Raskolnikov – a name that means something like “heretic”, or one who cuts themselves away from their community.

    Rereading is a risk, of course, for the book might fail to stand up to my memory of it as powerful, original, frightening, scandalous and utterly compelling. It might no longer surprise me and I might have to shrink it back to a diminished place among books that are not, after all, lastingly great in my reading life.

    Early on, a first surprise for me is that Raskolnikov was handsome. In my memory his figure is physically as repulsive as his psyche. But no, on the first page of the novel Dostoevsky is at pains to tell the reader that his student was attractive. Later, Raskolnikov’s sister, Dunya, who looks just like him, is repeatedly the subject of men’s desires on account of her beauty.

    My second surprise in these early pages is the drunkard, Marmeladov, saying he’s drinking up his eldest daughter’s income from “the yellow card”, that is, from her work as a prostitute. Did I even know what the man was talking about when I was 14?

    I was a Catholic boy from a family of nine children and being the first son, I was the one who would go into a monastery at 18 and last there for two years of study, silence and prayer. How was it that I had even come across such a novel on the faintly rural fringe of early-1960s Melbourne in the outer suburb of Watsonia, where soldiers of the second world war had been given blocks of land at bargain prices?

    I had been a comics reader as much as a book consumer through my childhood and early teens, and Classic Comics had introduced me to a world of “classic” stories, including Dostoevsky’s. Classic comics made the stories look dramatic and serious. I wanted intensely to go further into that realm.

    Like any young reader discovering the world’s rich history of storytelling I wanted to read what was beyond my understanding and capacity. The thick weightiness of Crime and Punishment (first published in 1866), a handsome paperback, its ultra-thin pages, the adult gravity of such small print and the dully serious, high-art cover, all of this made me feel I had arrived at something worth curling up with for days on end. The novel took a grip on me even through the fog of a devout Catholicism and the security of a tightly-guarded family circle.

    Soon after we meet him, Raskolnikov receives a long letter from his mother promising money in a few days’ time, while going on to narrate a brief and apparently fortuitous courting of his sister by a vain and forceful businessman more than twice her age. And yet, his mother writes, this suitor appears to be kind and, as he says himself, without prejudice. She ends her letter remembering Raskolnikov as a child babbling prayers on her lap. “I fear in my heart”, she writes, “that you may have been affected by this latest fashion of unbelief.”

    Not softened by his mother’s love, her generosity, or even by her fears, Raskolnikov goes out into the streets of St Petersburg with a face “distorted” by a “nasty, lugubrious, jaundiced smile snaking across his lips” as he vows never to allow his sister’s marriage to take place.

    Throughout the first vodka-soaked chapters, not only does a man confess to living off his daughter’s prostitution, but a drunken teenage girl on the street, only partly dressed and most likely already abused, is openly followed by a man who wants her for his pleasures, and Raskolnikov recalls, or dreams (it is unclear) the beating of a horse to death, after remembering that he used to play in a certain cemetery where his brother, who died at six months, was buried.

    In each episode, Raskolnikov seems to be both an element of Petersburg’s abject street life and a lone figure of sobriety, decency and compassion. He protects the young girl on the street until she is safe. He suffers for the horse. But we are also witness to the fact that he has already condemned his own soul for indulging in the desire to kill an old woman.

    Reading anew the passage describing the beating of a horse outside a drinking house, (in my Penguin edition, translated by David McDuff), I remember that as a child I had seen a man do just this to a horse. Is it a true memory though? When I was a child I used to accept rides on a milkman’s cart in the mornings on my way to the local church to serve as an altar-boy at early mass, so it was not unusual to see horses in mid-1950s Melbourne.

    Or perhaps while reading this passage I was reliving my first encounter with it as if it was a scene I had witnessed myself. I can’t be certain. The scene in the novel, horrific and gothic, is barely realist though utterly real. In my memory I have an image of my father driving me past a patch of grass outside flats along Murray Road in Coburg where we passed a man flogging a horse. My memory is that this was the first time I fully realised humans had absolute and merciless power over animals.

    The beating to death of the horse works as the first murder in the novel, a climax to the phantasmagoria of cruelty, immorality, decadence and drunkenness we have been witness to in the early pages. The beating of the horse, so unsettling to Raskolnikov, is an uncanny rehearsal of the wanton brutality he’s contemplating committing himself. The novel swings between chaos encountered on the streets and an inner world of tormented thoughts with such pressing vertigo that one becomes a mirror of the other.

    That the murder of the old woman happens so early in the book startled me then and still does. I remember wanting to know from the inside the mind of a character capable of such a crime. There was something of the voyeur to my desire, but something too of a hint that through this reading experience I was in connection with a real and dangerous part of myself.

    And now, so much later, from this end of life, I perceive Raskolnikov not so much as a possible me, but as a victim of his thinking, reading, youthful extravagance, boundless ambition and of course his fashionable unbelief. The novel was possibly a dangerous one for me to be reading as a naïve 14-year-old.

    It was nearly another ten years beyond my first reading Crime and Punishment when a late 20th century version of fashionable unbelief took me from the Catholic Church towards what I experienced as freedom from belief in God.

    Through my twenties I lived at least partly as a version of Raskolnikov: a student, chronically poor, renting rooms in share houses, intense to a fault, absorbed in a feverish imagination, dressed in worn-out clothes. And like Raskolnikov, I chose to live this way. In the 1970s there were whole suburbs of students living like this around inner-city universities. But the murderer in Raskolnikov was seemingly forgotten by me at this time, perhaps in denial, but just as it is ignored through long passages of the novel.

    Re-reading now the scene of the murder of the old woman, I am shocked that I had forgotten it was a double murder, and that the second murder was so cold-bloodedly executed on the old woman’s younger sister, the one whose life might have been, in Raskolnikov’s earlier thoughts, saved and transformed by the death of her miserly, oppressive, older sister.

    At the moment of the double murder all sympathy for Raskolnikov should disappear. In fact, perhaps at this point of the novel some readers would simply abandon the book unwilling to go the journey with such a character for another 500 pages. In 1866, when it appeared in monthly instalments in The Russian Messenger, then an influential, progressive literary journal, the book caused a sensation. Some readers were so affected they felt ill. Many put the novel aside, though most, like me a century later, were unable to put it down.

    The attraction of the book might have something to do with it being almost a crime, one feels, to keep reading after the murder scene. Other later works of fiction such as Nabakov’s Lolita, Robert Block’s Psycho, Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, or Anais Nin’s diaries also powerfully attract as much as they repel and distress.

    In hindsight, this was my introduction to intimations of a dark side to literature, leading me to writers such as Franz Kafka, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Sigmund Freud, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf and the agonied loneliness of so many characters in modernist novel after novel, on to the suicidal ruminations of Thomas Bernhard’s fiction, and even the tortured and hilariously desperate isolation of Gerald Murnane’s young men in his early works. Raskolnikov showed the way ahead to a century and more of misfits and misanthropes.

    In a new biography of composer and writer Erik Satie, Ian Penman makes a plea for re-balancing the story of modernity:

    Why this general tendency to fetishise ‘darkness’? Why is so much reflection about modernity tangled up with melancholy? Why do we overstress the abject, the obscene, the transgressive? […] I mean, don’t we all want to be happy? Why fight against it?

    His plea for relief makes good sense, especially perhaps for music, but the crises in the hearts of characters from Mary Shelley’s monster onwards, through Charles Dickens’ villains, to the grotesque creations of Wilkie Collins and later Camus’ murderous Meursault, are too urgently conjured for this reader to turn entirely from them.

    So I do keep reading this time and not out of any sense of duty to literature or my former self, but because the novel does, once again, grip. It compels me forward by the force of scene after scene that screws Raskolnikov closer and closer to whatever might be the punishment promised in the title.

    And if his conscience does bring him to punishment, how are we to know what is just? And how might his heart or his thinking bring him to embrace his punishment? What would it mean for my feelings about him if he gets away with it or does not feel something like remorse and revulsion over what he has done?

    And was it, after all, a motiveless crime? Was it an act of unfeeling pride so misguided and mangled that one has to feel equal horror and sympathy for a killer who can sometimes act so selflessly? Is Raskolnikov finally as capable of love as he is of murder?

    Current events snag on the novel as I read it this time. Its questions swirl around the criminal trial and sentencing of Erin Patterson, found guilty of murdering three members of her extended family with a carefully prepared meal of death cap mushrooms (a conviction she is now appealing). An almost unimaginable crime. Everyone with an interest in the case must imagine for themselves what might have been going on inside her as the murder was planned. A growing number of videos and podcasts explore what might have been Patterson’s motivations. At her public sentencing, Justice Beale at last addressed her directly on the reasons for her crimes with: “Only you know why you committed them.”

    And as with Raskolnikov, Patterson is smart, but she was clumsy too. When Raskolnikov defends himself against accusations of being a lecher, accusations manufactured by his sister’s suitor, Luzhin, he remarks about him (but equally about himself), “He’s a clever man, but in order to act cleverly, cleverness alone is not enough.”

    I don’t sympathise with Raskolnikov, but I don’t turn from him as a monster either. He can be compassionate without being saintly, generous to his last kopeck, honest to his own detriment, and instinctively respectful of those who suffer – and yet there he was with the axe in that room.

    At almost breakneck speed Dostoevsky lets the murderer loose on the streets, where he encounters more prostitutes, gives away money, mock-confesses to committing the axe-murder at a night club, watches a suicidal woman jump into the city’s main canal only to be rescued against her will, possibly saving him from the same experience.

    Then, as he is on his way to the police station to make an actual confession, he rescues the drunken Marmeladov from under the panicked horses of a barouche and delivers him, dying, to his destitute family, summoning a doctor and leaving the new widow with all the money (his mother’s gift) he has in his possession.

    In almost every respect he seems an innocent in a world of depravity. Of course Dostoevsky is playing with his readers, daring us to sympathise with this young man, to witness his compassion, and to put aside for pages at a time the knowledge of the double murder he has committed. This is such a risky skating across thin ice that one does not want to stop following until the far bank is reached. I have no idea what my young self was making of all this beyond deciding to read on through it trusting the storyteller and trusting that the story would be a large and lasting one because it is, well, Russian, a masterpiece, and a “classic”.

    I am shocked all over again by the fact that Raskolnikov himself does not seem to remember that he killed not just “one old woman”, but two women. He is repeatedly far too ready to minimise his crime.

    When the young, accommodating docotor Zosimov begins talking at length out of vanity and pride, as most characters in the novel do when they launch into speeches, he tells Raskolnikov’s mother and sister, that Raskolnikov might be displaying a certain idée fixe, suggesting a case of “monomania” – a condition so interesting that he, Zosimov, is conducting a special study of it.

    Monomania? I don’t remember this word quite popping out at me that first time the way it does now. It is strangely medical, strangely decisive. After some reading on it I discover that this was a relatively recently invented psychiatric diagnosis introduced to medicine in the first two decades of the 19th century partly through a Dr Etienne-Jean Georget who first defined Monomania as an idée fixe – a single pathological preoccupation in an otherwise sound mind.

    After Georget’s published speculations on whether criminals could be defended on the basis that a monomania might diminish their culpability, French lawyers took up this line of defence so enthusiastically that the diagnosis had become discredited by the 1850s. You might say that monomania became a legal idée fixe.

    For Dostoevsky’s readers it might have been a medical-sounding word, but one that also rang of sham psychiatry. In this scene the diagnosis washes through mother and daughter and Zosimov leaves in a hurry. But reference to the diagnosis keeps recurring, and oddly it will finally be tangled with Raskolnikov’s fate.

    In a remarkably tense scene in the central police station, Detective Porfiry Petrovich exposes Raskolnikov’s authorship of a philosophical article that argued for the superiority of certain rare individuals above the norms of common humanity. These individuals can and apparently, must, commit crimes in order to do the work that will benefit humanity.

    Raskolnikov tries to say his article is no more than a mild acceptance of what history has demonstrated, until, from the corner of the room, Amyotov, to whom Raskolnikov had made his mock confession, says, “Perhaps it was some budding Napoleon who did in old Alyona Ivanovna with an axe last week.”

    Reading this now, it is difficult not to think of the sovereign citizens movement, far right conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, cults of the Christian kind and others who consider themselves to be outside norms and law – an often smart and always disturbing minority presciently described in Dostoevsky’s novel. Raskolnikov is an outrageous outsider, and like many of the far right conspiracists now, initially his complaints and suspicions about the hypocrisies of the powerful are acute and accurate until the line of argument takes him to its farthest reaches, to murder.

    Sometimes an image seems to have been thrown into a novel just to see what will happen. Like a stone into a pond, a fishing line into surf, a boot into a crowd, a hat into the air. The troubling and provocative figure of Svidrigailov appears, a wealthy widower infatuated with Raskolnikov’s sister, possibly guilty of murdering his wife, and almost certainly guilty of raping a disabled girl – a twisted mirror image of Raskolnikov if Raskolnikov ever fully embraced the nihilism and exceptionalism he wrote of in his journal article. It is Svidrigailov who suggests eternity might be a small room no larger than a country bathhouse with soot on the walls and spiders in every corner. In fact, he says, this is the way he would have it if he had been given the job of designing things.

    Do I remember first encountering this image of eternity? I think I do, and it connects for me with room 101 in George Orwell’s 1984, only here it is not the ultimate in torture, it is all there is that can be hoped for. The lasting effect of this image of eternity might have had something to do with the standard Catholic versions feeling, to me, either bland or illogical or too medieval.

    Svidrigailov’s empty, cobwebbed room said more about the frightening nature of the idea of eternity than anything I had come across.

    Sonya, Marmeladov’s prostitute-daughter, takes an increasingly central role as the book nears its end. She might herself be a lost soul, or a figure of Christ himself, perhaps a type of Mary Magdalene, a figure of blind faith, or of stubbornness beyond sense, and loyalty beyond reason.

    Progressive critics at the time of publication condemned the novel for attaching Sonya to conservative (that is, peasant) Christian beliefs. But, as with much literature, the story is open to many ways in, so that reading it in 2025, Sonya for me is a figure simply of love, and of the simplest most willing love offered to one person from another. She doesn’t ever ask Raskolnikov to pray to her God, but only to accept love. If monotheism could be a form of monomania, she is not disfigured by it, despite her faith.

    When Raskolnikov comes to confess his crimes, it is to her, and it is the killing of her friend, Alyona’s younger sister, Lizaveta, that he must most shamefully explain: that she was killed for simply being there. “How, how could you, a man like you […] do a thing like this?” Sonya has to ask.

    Raskolnikov takes himself through the reasons: he killed because the money to be stolen would see him through a university degree in style. But no, he did not even rob the woman properly and the little he did take he buried away. He says he killed her to know if he could kill “without a thought”; or he killed the old woman because she was after all “a louse – a loathsome, useless, harmful louse”.

    Sonya makes the only reply possible: “But that louse was a human being!”

    Her statement echoes all the way to Kafka’s Red Peter, the killers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Patrick White’s Mr Voss and Lionel Shriver’s Kevin. Even if there was no conscious connection with Crime and Punishment for Kafka as he wrote The Metamorphosis, I cannot but think that Kafka’s story is a long meditation in response to Sonya’s cry.

    To Sonya the only way out for Raskolnikov is to confess and accept the suffering that comes with shame. But the novel spins on possibilities to the very end as a scapegoat emerges who might stand in for the murderer, thus creating a last opportunity to avoid both punishment and even conscience.

    On the final pages of the novel this time, I had tears in my eyes. I was exhausted, wrung out, needing Raskolnikov to be punished, but still hopeful for the young man he sometimes was, and I had for a time thought I was.

    Perhaps the novel, in the end, inspires the reader to match Sonya’s love for a man who in all reasonableness does not deserve love or for that matter faith or respect. Having uncovered that flip side of pride, which is shame, in justice we should leave him in that state. But I felt tender towards him.

    I suspect that as a 14-year-old I felt this tenderness too, and perhaps in response to Sonya’s love for him. This feeling though has never diminished my horror at his act, a horror mingled with a strange sense of relief that the act took place in a book of fiction so that I could bear it.

    Some others have asked me how I could have ever wanted to emulate a murderer or side with a man who thought he was a superior exception to all moral values. I ask myself this question too and the only answer I can reach for is that reading the novel is something of a chaotic experience and that to be open to this figure of Raskolnikov is to find something dark within oneself that’s not easy to shrug off or deny.

    In literature a subterranean world of wild emotions and thoughts normally repressed, controlled and civilised can be given explicit and shocking presence – and this might be one aspect of the book that helped make me, for life, a reader.

    The novel this time has done a different kind of work on a different me, but again it has been a powerfully affecting work. I remain grateful to it and in awe of it.

    Sometimes these days I stop to talk with the hose-cutting old woman as she passes along our street. I have learned her name and some of her history, including her grief for a son suddenly lost. I’m not sure that she always remembers who I am, but in speaking to her she comes alive for me in new ways. She is not dangerous, she is not insane or useless, and definitely not harmful. No need for us to talk any more about the knife. She is someone I am coming to know a little and I hope our encounters on the street help her to feel the safety of recognition.

  • The Coachbuilder’s Column: Volume 15: Issue 11: 15th July, 2025:  about the author Graham Greene, letters and novels.

    I’ve just read  ‘Graham Greene: A Life in Letters’ edited by Richard Greene [no relation], published in 2007 [446 pages]………….I’d never read any of Greene’s novels though knew I had one somewhere, eventually tracked it down, a Penguin paperback of The Honorary Consul’, first published in 1973, which I refer to later, as I decided I had to read at least one of his novels.

    As revealed through his letters, his novels were generally based upon people he’d met, or places and international conflicts that he found himself involved in. And as revealed through the letters, a vivid portrait of a fascinating writer, a mercurial man of courage, wit and passion. 

    As Amazon describes it – “One of the undisputed masters of twentieth-century English prose, Graham Greene (1904-1991) wrote tens of thousands of personal letters. This exemplary volume presents a new and engrossing account of his life constructed out of his own words. Impeccably edited by scholar Richard Greene, the letters–including many unavailable even to his official biographer–give a new perspective on a life that combined literary achievement, political action, espionage, travel, and romantic entanglement. The letters describe his travels in such places as Mexico, Vietnam, and Cuba, where he observed the struggles of mankind with a compassionate and truthful eye. Letters to friends such as Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark offer a glimpse into the literary culture in which he wrote, while others reveal the agonies of his heart. The sheer range of experience contained in Greene’s correspondence defies comparison”.

    These letters, as published by his namesake, were written over 70 years, from September, 1921 to the 21 March, 1991 [14 days before he died]. As a prolific writer of diaries, personal notes and reflections myself, I guess that was the reason I was attracted to the book. He was not just an author – but a journalist, reporter, investigator, confidante of the famous in both literary and political circles, constantly travelling around the world, usually to political hotspots and war or revolutionary zones in Asia, Central and South America, Africa, Russia and other Communist controlled countries during both the years of World War II, and the subsequent Cold War period, with his life and personal safety often at risk. His letters generally pulled no punches, many of a highly personal and romantic nature.  His correspondence relationship with so many great authors [many of whom I was not familiar with] including in particular that great novelist and diary writer, Evelyn Waugh [whom I always believed was a woman for some reason] provided for me, a fascinating insight into the world of writers, publishing and books in general.

    [Incidentally, I don’t have any of Waugh’s novels, but do have a massive volume of his life’s Diaries, which admittedly, I’ve not yet tried to tackle!!].

    In addition to the actual letters, there are footnotes on most pages. Providing either a brief biography of the person to whom he is writing, or where it was known why he was writing in particular instances. These notes of course do slow down the reading process, but are an invaluable aid to understanding [usually] the purpose of the letter and Greene’s connection with the recipient.

    Grahame Greene himself notes that – There have been a number of Graham Greene biographies, but none has captured his voice, his loves, hates, family and friends–intimate and writerly–or his deep understanding of the world, like this astonishing collection of letters…………………………………………………………………..
    Graham Greene is one of the few modern novelists who can be called great. In the course of his long and eventful life (1904—1991), he wrote tens of thousands of letters to family, friends, writers, publishers and others involved in his various interests and causes. A Life in Letters presents a fresh and engrossing account of his life, career and mind in his own words.

    In summary a comment from Google.books provides another encouraging description of the book  –  ‘In several letters, the individuals, events or places described provide the inspiration for characters, episodes or locations found in his later fiction. The correspondence describes his travels in Mexico, Africa, Malaya, Vietnam, Haiti, Cuba, Sierra Leone, Liberia and other trouble spots, where he observed the struggles of victims and victors with a compassionate and truthful eye. The volume includes a vast number of unpublished letters to authors Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Anthony Powell, Edith Sitwell, R.K. Narayan and Muriel Spark, and to other more notorious individuals such as the double-agent Kim Philby. Some of these letters dispute previous assessments of his character, such as his alleged anti-Semitism or obscenity, and he emerges as a man of deep integrity, decency and courage. Others reveal the agonies of his romantic life, especially his relations with his wife, Vivien Greene, and with one of his mistresses, Catherine Walston. The letters can be poignant, despairing, amorous, furious or amusing, but the sheer range of experience contained in them will astound everyone who reads this book.’

    While from the book cover – “When he loved, he loved fervently, but he also struggled  to manage the  unpredictable mood swings, the highs and lows of bipolar disorder that drove him from exalted happiness to despair. Letters to friends like Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spak, Anthony Powell and R.K. Narayan offer a glimpse 

    into the literary culture in which he wrote. Other letters reveal the agonies of his heart, how his manic depression wreaked havoc on his marriage to Vivien Greene and injured his relations with his mistress Catherine Walston.”

    A book that gives new perspective to a life that combined literary achievement, political action, espionage, travel and romantic entanglement….following him through joy and turmoil, from the gnarled and fissured forests of Indo-China to war-torn Sierra Leone, from the mountains of Switzerland to hotels in Havana and a connection of sorts with leaders like Fidel Castro, and various revolutionary characters from South America.

    The letters also reveal much about his support at times, and other times, conflict with the Catholic Church, and his inter-action with a couple of the Popes of his era, and other religious intermediaries.

    A brief comment on The Honorary Consul by Grahame Greene [published in 1973, of 268 pages [my Penguin edition].  After having read Greene’s letters, I expected his novels to be essentially based on parts of the world he had travelled to, often with the purpose of exploring those areas and lifestyles for incorporation into a planned novel. I wasn’t sure what to expect, not having read him previously.  This story, I found somewhat enjoyable, if at times, realistically unpleasant in terms of the subject matter.

    A gripping tragicomedy of a bungled kidnapping in a provincial Argentinean town, considered to be one of Greene’s finest novels. The story is set in the provincial city of Corrientes, part of the Argentine Littoral, on the shore of the Paraná River. Eduardo Plarr is an unmarried medical doctor of English descent who, as a boy, fled to Buenos Aires with his Paraguayan mother to escape the political turmoil of Paraguay. His English father remained in Paraguay as a political rebel and, aside from a single hand-delivered letter, they never hear from him again. Throughout the novel, there is much reflection by various characters on the absence of ‘father figures’ for numerous reasons. I believe the story is also set on the eve of Argentine’s ‘dirty War’ in the early 1970’s.

    In this provincial Argentinian community, Charley Fortnum – a British consul with dubious authority and a notorious fondness for drink – is kidnapped by rebels in a case of mistaken identity. Fortnum, 61 years old is married to Clara, a young ex-whore from Senora Sanchez’s brothel. The young but world-weary Doctor Eduardo Plarr, is left to pick up the pieces and secure Fortnum’s release, wading through a sea of incompetence and unearthing corruption among authorities and revolutionaries in the process.

    First published in 1973, The Honorary Consul is a British thriller novel, and  was one of Greene’s own favourites of his works and is regarded amongst his finest novels, with Plarr perhaps the most moving and convincing figure in his fiction.  The story is set in an unnamed city in northern Argentina, near the border with Paraguay which can be assumed to be the city of Corrientes.

    In what is described as a ‘perfectly executed narrative’, Greene explores the repercussions of the bungled kidnap, and gives special attention to Dr Plarr whose deficient emotions form the heart of the story.

    While I won’t go into the article itself, a piece written on a site named literarysum/com and titled ‘Unveiling the Layers: A Comprehensive Literary Analysis of The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene’, introduced the subject as follows – ‘The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene is a complex novel that delves into the themes of love, betrayal, and political intrigue. This article provides a comprehensive literary analysis of the novel, exploring its various layers and uncovering the hidden meanings behind its characters and plot. Through a close examination of the novel’s themes, symbolism, and narrative structure, this article aims to provide readers with a deeper understanding of Greene’s masterpiece’ which all indicates we have more than just a ‘British thriller novel’, another indication of Greene’s literary talents.

    As described at the time of publication, by the Daily Mail: ‘The prose is monkishly spare and taut.  The minor characters are brilliantly and sardonically drawn, that ever he has given us’. It sounds as though I made the right choice, in being introduced to Greene’s writings [apart from his letters].

    The book was made into the 1983 film The Honorary Consul (also released as Beyond the Limit), directed by John Mackenzie, with Richard Gere as Plarr and Michael Caine as Fortnum.[3][4] The soundtrack theme was composed by Paul McCartney and performed by John Williams.