This new novel imagines the secret history of Lady Macbeth (2024)

FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Queen Macbeth
Val McDermid, Polygon, $29.99

Scottish crime queen Val McDermid has screwed her courage to the sticking-place to imagine the secret history of Lady Macbeth. In Queen Macbeth, the author attempts to unravel the violence done to this real historical figure by history and, of course, by Shakespeare’s play. In this telling, Lady Macbeth is re-established as Gruoch. Her husband did kill Duncan – but on the field on battle, not in a bedroom – and was deposed by his enemies. But Gruoch survives, accompanied by three women from her household, and must escape to Macbeth’s allies on the Isle of Mull. There’s much we don’t know about life in 10th-century Scotland, but McDermid supplements what we do know about medieval history with playful imagination and intertextual reference. It’ll be great fun for anyone who knows Shakespeare’s tragedy, offering the reader a fascinating glimpse of what lies behind the long shadow of Shakespeare’s politically motivated portrayal.

The Coast Road
Alan Murrin, Bloomsbury, $32.99
Set in County Donegal in 1994, when divorce was still prohibited in Ireland, Alan Murrin’s debut novel draws its force from precise sketches of women trapped within the confines of marriages they can’t easily escape. That doesn’t stop Colette Crowley, a bohemian poet, from pursuing an affair with a married man in Dublin, and when her husband Shaun punishes her for it – throwing her out and refusing to let her visit their youngest son – Colette rents a dilapidated shack on the wildering coast and starts creative writing workshops to make ends meet. Her landlords, the Mullens, are hardly advertisem*nts for lifelong marriage. But when she meets Izzy, who has troubles of her own with her politician husband, Collette enlists Izzy’s aid to re-establish contact with her child, unleashing a vengeful response from Shaun. The Coast Road boasts well-drawn characters, and is poignant, funny and incisive in its evocation of the oppressiveness of small-town Ireland at the time.

Antiquity
Hanna Johansson, Scribe, $27.99

Elegantly translated by Kira Josefsson, Hanna Johansson’s Antiquity features an unreliable narrator – an unnamed writer who is invited to Greece to holiday with Helena, a middle-aged artist she has recently interviewed. Along for the ride is Helena’s 15-year-old daughter Olga, whom the narrator initially treats as a distraction (and perhaps rival for Helena’s attention). In time, however, she begins to see Olga anew. Erotic desire awakens, with all the weight of the narrator’s loneliness and self-absorption behind it. This book reminded me of, and sets up a literary conversation with, works such as Death in Venice and Nabokov’s Lolita. Like those novels, plot is secondary to the meticulous creation of a predator’s interior landscape. And the narrator of Antiquity is as compelling a problem as Humbert Humbert or Aschenbach – as with them, power and responsibility are inverted and sublimated into diaphanous aesthetics, confronting the reader with pointed questions about the nature of beauty, and of art’s power to do harm.

The Changing Room
Belinda Cranston, Transit Lounge, $32.99

What explains the recent raft of coming-of-age novels set in the 1990s? It’s as if all the writers manqué from Generation X got the chance to flex their creative muscles during pandemic lockdowns. Or something. Belinda Cranston’s The Changing Room joins (without doing quite enough to distinguish itself from) the pack. We follow Rachel Mahoney, a 23-year-old from Sydney who travels to London and then backpacks around, landing in Jerusalem and spending time in a kibbutz, among other things. The strength of the novel lies in the way it presents solo international travel as a form of ID tripping, where the identity and character you assume is radically contingent on context. The waters are muddied, though, as the spectre of what may be mental illness hangs over the Rachel’s odyssey – whether a form of religious-themed psychosis or flashes of magical realism, it’s hard to say. It’s a promising, if unevenly paced, debut novel.

NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Because I’m not Myself, You See
Ariane Beeston, Black Inc, $36.99

Before psychologist Ariane Beeston had a child, she worked in child protection and felt in charge. When she had a baby and postpartum psychosis hit her like an on-coming train, she wasn’t any more. Indeed, there were times when she felt she didn’t exist. Her warts-and-all memoir, which has all the immediacy of just the right desperate words slapped onto the page, is like being taken on a Dante-esque descent into a personal inferno, and crawling your way back. Feelings of failing as a mother, feeling “nothing” and everything for the child after giving birth, treatment and medication, all create a perfect storm. But, throughout, she has an extremely supportive husband. Rage, bleak humour and love continually contend for the upper hand in this unflinching, often raw portrait of a mother in flames who cautiously rebuilds a new, stronger self.

New Cold Wars
David E. Sanger, Scribe, $45

As Sanger points out in his study of the post-Cold War world, you didn’t have to be an Einstein to see that the US/Western triumphalism that informed Francis f*ckuyama’s famously misjudged announcement that history had ended, would come back to haunt the West. A missed opportunity. The fall of the USSR was not so much the end of the Cold War as the beginning of a new one: a three-way stand-off between Russia, China and the US. More moving parts. A situation, he contends, that is a greater challenge than the East/West dichotomy of the past. History never repeats, but it can be eerie – the war in Ukraine cast as weird mix of WWI trench warfare and cyber technology, the global situation having echoes of pre-WWI power competition. But, he warily emphasises, for all its crises, the Cold War never escalated into a “hot” war.

Liberalism as a Way of Life
Alexandre Lefebvre, NewSouth, $34.99

Professor Lefebvre’s idea of liberalism is a bit like Flaubert’s depiction of the author as God in his universe – present everywhere, and visible nowhere. And he’s not talking about any political party. We swim in the waters of liberalism without realising it. It’s an encompassing term that, he says (quoting Walt Whitman) “contains multitudes”, but, overall, it pertains to liberal democracies in their many forms. With the decline of Christianity, the values that inform our pursuit of the “good life” are increasingly drawn from liberalism. He invokes JS Mill, but his consummate liberal is US philosopher John Rawls, and his belief in “society as a fair system of cooperation”. And, as much as the philosophy may be under threat (the rise of far-right, illiberal democracies, for example), he is, often humorously, optimistic.

My Father’s Suitcase
Mary Garden, Justitia Books, $34.99

This is not just a memoir about sibling rivalry – it goes beyond that into what Mary Garden defines as “sibling abuse”. The key figures are Garden and her sister, Anna, who died in 2023 in their native New Zealand. Contextualising the rivalry, Garden takes us into what emerges as a profoundly troubled family. Her father, aviator Oscar Garden, was the subject of her last book, Sundowner of the Skies. In fact, the subject of the father and their childhood became highly contested material when Anna published a book with her version of events, leading to further family divisions. This may be a fearlessly candid story - her description of being physically attacked by her sister is frightening – about the disturbing themes of mental illness and abuse, as well as the “slippery beast” of memory, but it is underpinned by an abiding, humane sensitivity.

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