The Varnished Culture's Thumbnail Reviews
Regularly added bite-sized reviews about Literature, Art, Music & Film.
Voltaire said the secret of being boring is to say everything.
We do not wish to say everything or see everything; life, though long is too short for that.
We hope you take these little syntheses in the spirit of shared enthusiasm.
Saltwater Μansions
(by David Whitehouse, 2025)
It is not clear how long Whitehouse’s investigation into the disappearance of a woman he calls ‘Caroline Lane’ took, but it was not a quick process. Compare that with the short time it took reporter David Jones of the Daily Mail, upon publication of “Saltwater Mansions”, to discover and disclose the real name of the woman who disappeared, the actual block of flats in which she lived and the identity of her family (one of whom is falsely and titillatingly described by Whitehouse as “a former pop star” who received “an intense level of attention” as “a regular fixture in the tabloids” for a short period. Whitehouse admits that this “blurring” is “an act of some hypocrisy on my part”).
Whitehouse says, “I had worked as a journalist before, though I’m hesitant to use the term and do so only in the loosest sense. I’d never done any serious investigative reporting”. Unfortunately, an admission of inexperience does not make 195 pages of description of frustratingly amateur sleuthing any more readable. Whitehouse makes himself and what he calls his “obsession” the story in this partially dramatised non-fiction account. The reader, however, is not breathless with anticipation along with the author (“As I opened the box I felt magnetised; the hair prickled on my neck and arms”) but bemused and annoyed.
The real “mansions” in question (pictured in Jones’ piece) are nothing like the Margate building on the cover photograph (above) which in turn is confusingly unlike the description in the book: “Saltwater Mansions was a fine example of the kind of quietly breathtaking Victorian architecture often found in British seaside resort towns. It would be an impressive place to live. The kind of place where you’d closely watch your visitors’ faces for signs of awe”. Does the block of flats on the cover take your breath away? Would it visibly impress your visitors? This sort of disorientation does not improve an already hole-riddled story. The reader suspects that Whitehouse has bent a great many facts to meet his narrative. One also feels that he is naive and, perhaps, he is sometimes taken for a ride, particularly toward the end of the story.
The reader is at first curious, like Whitehouse, about a woman who had not been seen or heard from at her usual residence for 13 or so years. She left, apparently never to return, shortly after an acrimonious building management company meeting in May 2009. Her flat is ultimately sold to pay debts, although her mortgage and other payments had continued automatically. Where had the money come from? Whitehouse obviously does not know. Nor does he seem to find it odd that Lane had not been declared dead if she really had ‘disappeared’.
So far so interesting, but ultimately this is a slight and unsatisfactory attempt at real-life mystery and citizen detective self-congratulation. There is a great deal of padding about the rise and fall of Margate, the British seaside town from which Lane disappeared, and the largely imagined stories of the family and friends of all concerned. The reader feels ultimately that Whitehouse just didn’t want to waste all that research.
It is also distasteful. While Whitehouse deplores the intrusiveness of social media he uses it himself. What is Whitehouse but one of the “grief junkies” he mentions, “‘citizen-journalists-cum-detectives, looking for a truth they were sure was being hidden from view” who gather at crime scenes, hindering the police and upsetting locals. But Whitehouse doesn’t stop there. Astonishingly, when he finally locates the missing woman’s family, he says, “it now seemed inevitable that I would need to break the news of Caroline’s disappearance – and with it the very real probability she was dead – to one of her siblings”. He sends an email along those lines, but carefully worded to be “compassionate and kind”, “in no way sensational or gratuitous”. He’s shocked when it turns out that Lane’s family knew a bit more about their sister’s fate than he, an inter-meddling stranger, did. To perfect his image though, he does feel “a little embarrassed highlighting the fact that [he’d] had some books published before as a reason to consider [him to be] legitimate”. This book is a gauge of his legitimacy.
Continue Reading →The Handmaid’s Tale
By Margaret Atwood (1986)
You’ve seen the headlines, “The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s coming true! It’s real!” It is? Women in the United States are being forcibly abducted and repeatedly raped in the name of population growth? That’s quite a surprise. I would have expected that to be on the news.
American women of child-bearing age have to wear outlandish costumes, act as a devout mob and are not educated? Oh, no, I’ve got that wrong. That’s only the howling, rainbow-clad sufferers of TDS.
The Handmaid’s Tale, apart from its apparent prescience, is vaunted as a feminist tale of great power and brilliance. It is nothing of the kind. It’s a mildly entertaining potboiler, built on a ludicrous and misandristic premise. Our protagonist (known only as Offred because at this time she belongs to a “Commander” in the new order known as Fred, get it?) endures a lonely and futile existence. She is a mere vessel, her sole purpose to produce a child for the Commander and his wife.
The USA has become Gilead, which, we vaguely understand, is a hyper-fundamentalist, militarised Christian state, after a few years of rumblings and then a massacre of the government. Canada has stayed out of this and treats Gilead as a tourist stop. The rest of the world seems to be a toxic dump where naughty women are sent.
Atwood sweats to make it clear that the regime is extraordinarily vigilant and brutal. Unfortunately, this traps her protagonist in such repression that she has to break the rules time and time again without being caught. Or there is no story. After Atwood has impressed upon us the all-seeing nature of Gilead’s enforcers, Offred gets away with breach after breach of the apparently inescapable laws.
As a thought experiment this fails badly. It’s a bitsy, unconvincing polemic. Like Offred we wait. We wait for the inevitable black van to snatch someone off the street. It does. We wait for the Nazi reference. It comes. We wait for the big character reveal. Here it is.
Really, leave it to Orwell.
Continue Reading →The Thread
(Directed by Daniel Auteuil, 2024)
It was hard for The Varnished Culture to dislike this court-room thriller. After all, it stars the terrific Daniel Auteuil as Jean Monier, a kind of French Rumpole, stepping-in for his overworked barrister wife (ex-wife?) defacto? (Sidse Babett Knudsen), to take over the defence of a befuddled father of five, Nicolas Milik (Grégory Gadebois), charged with the murder of his flakey wife, who tends to go on benders and sleep-it-off at a bench in the heart of their village, but one night turns up dead, throat slashed. Auteuil also directed. The cast is full of the Gallic types we know and love from French cinema, and styled as a thriller whodunnit, with additional drama provided by virtue of the rather bizarre manner in which the inquisitorial criminal justice system operates in France.
As we said, hard to dislike. But we managed it. There is nothing compelling about it – we neither know nor care much about the victim, and the trial proceeds as if drawn, not from life, but some random high-school play. The actors are all good but there’s not a lot going on. Auteuil’s character looks like a sad abandoned basset hound. Well before the time we reached the denouement, and then the obligatory ‘aftershock’ (cf. Conclave), we were peering at our watches.
Continue Reading →Coonardoo (Katharine Susannah Prichard)
(First published 1929; 2013 edition published by Angus & Robertson)
In two of the three forewords* to the 2013 A&R Australian Classics edition of “Coonardoo”, we are told that Prichard, in both her own (the third) foreword and the novel that follows, uses terms and makes assumptions that, while widespread in the nineteen-twenties, are not so popular now. Prichard is not criticised for that, nor should she be. Those were the words and the beliefs of the time. Some of them should be readopted by us, even in our woke wisdom. Naturally we should no longer tolerate the genital mutilation of children. Nor can we accept the practice of men abducting aboriginal women or buying them from their fathers and husbands for a couple of blankets. But perhaps we would all be better off if we ceased turning a blind eye to the truth that some of those conducting the mutilation ceremonies and the abductions were black, as were most of the fathers and husbands who took the blankets. It might even be useful to revive the idea that indigenous people should live (more or less) as they want, without their lives being ruined by ‘sit-down’ money, alcohol and the other joys with which they are today beleaguered by virtue-signalling bureaucrats.
Coonardoo (even the name is a problem now) is born on Wytaliba station in Western Australia. Lithe, dignified and loyal, she lives in the ‘uloo’ or camp of her tribe on the grounds of the station. Astonishingly, they all rub along pretty well, black and white. No-one gets a wage; the indigenous people help out on the station, generally working only mornings unless they are mustering. The aboriginal people eat bread and salt beef, but so do the whites. Coonardoo is taught good housekeeping by the frugal, watchful Mrs. Bessie, usually called Mumae, who inherited the farm from her late husband. Mrs Bessie is unnaturally obsessed with her son, Hugh (“Youie” to the aboriginal people of the station) and is determined to leave Wytaliba to him without debt. Mumae has Coonardoo in mind as the ‘good, faithful soul’ to care for Hugh when he grows to the ownership of the station. Although Mumae – “a little woman, wrinkled and weathered, with eyes of the flame in her, blue-green, clear, shining, unquenchable, she had steered the station through dry years and dust storms, rain flooding the creeks and clay-pans; good seasons and bad” – is generally portrayed as the saintly all-seeing, dogged, woman of the bush she seems to the reader, and indeed some characters, to be in fact rather cruel, stingy and self-righteous; “a regular skinflint.” She runs Hugh’s fiancé off the property with cold deception, when Jessica’s fault seems to be simply that she’s a bit dismayed when she first comes to the dry, ugly, poor station. We rather suspect that Mumae does not want her adored, docile Hugh to be married at all. Unfortunately, her clever move leaves Hugh free, after her death, to marry vicious Mollie: “But so sour and hostile had her mind become towards Hugh that she found pleasure really, a secret mean joy, in following the suspicion which had risen against him, and piecing the evidence for and against it. There was much more for than against. She realized her knowledge would mean power. It was a whip she could use against Hugh. She knew well enough how to scourge him with it.”
Painting by B E Minns (1895)
The women and Hugh (assured, stoic) are all types. The other men are perhaps more rounded. As a percipient writer, Prichard does not want us even to hate the vile nearby station owner, Sam Geary: “A tall, heavy man, wearing his belt under a loose flabby paunch, Sam still carried himself with a swaggering jollity, and liked to air his argument for polygamy in hot crowded hotel bars, and on sprees, up and down the river. He enjoyed nothing more than to take a dilapidated Bible from his pocket and read aloud the story of Judah, or recite the number of Solomon’s wives and female accessories.”
We positively like kind, hopeless old Saul Hardy from whom Mumae bought Wytaliba for a song when he was broken by drought. (Even if Prichard is a bit sentimental about him). “Over eighty and deaf, Saul prowled about the garden and yards doing little odd jobs as he pleased. He had brought cattle west from the Queensland border in the early days, and tramped up and down the Nor’-West, droving and loading stores…he was not cut out for a squatter, Saul himself said, He had been a rolling stone too long to sit down in one place, breed cattle and wait for them to grow. ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss,’ he said, ‘but a sitting hen loses feathers.’ Now he was old and could roll no more, his only desire was to sit down on Wytaliba and moult peacefully.”
Cock-Eyed Bob rouses our sympathies, and Hugh’s : “Hugh admired and respected the grit and spirit in that slight, crooked body. He could make allowances for the swagger and lies with which Bob bucked himself up; and watched curiously in half-hearted affection as Bob bent over his instrument, trying to pick up the air Jessica was singing.”
Coonardoo and Hugh have a bond; “She was like his own soul riding there, dark, passionate and childlike. In all this wide empty world Coonardoo was the only living thing he could speak to, Hugh knew; the only creature who understood what he was feeling, and was feeling for him. Yet he was afraid of her, resented a secret understanding between them.” When Hugh is lost, Coonardoo follows and watches over him. She is his fate. “Hugh sat down again. A trembling seized him. He had a swift vision of passion and tenderness stalking him through all the lonely misery of his wandering,”
There are extensive descriptions of horse-breaking, mustering and droving which might perhaps be showing off on the part of the author, but we get the sense of the life of the station and of the station itself as an indomitable, living being. “There was not a breath of wind. The windmills struck hard lines against the sky, their fans motionless, although roofs of the buggy shed, harness-room and smithy shivered in the heat. Stones on the plains, glistening in the clear white light, shimmered and danced together.”
In the latter half of the book there is a shocking betrayal. From the gentle rise and fall of the farm work, the ebb and flow of rural time, comes an appalling upheaval. It is not quite credible, but is necessary for the final scenes which are all too believable, familiar to us and genuinely horrific.
The whole story is of course an outline of an old Australian way of life, changing with the times. The powerful and touching ending raises this book to five stars.
A final word of warning – do not read the Forewords. They give too much away and the great point of the story is the uncertainty of how all of this is going to play out.
[*Drusilla Modjeska (1990) and Douglas Stewart (1964)] [Editor’s note: On this evidence, Prichard was a better novelist than she was a Communist activist. Better to reflect real life in fiction, than promote social justice fallacies…] Continue Reading →The Penguin Lessons
(Directed by Peter Cattaneo, 2024)
(Thanks to White Rita, our ‘off-budget’ film reviewer, for this comment).
The Penguin Lessons is a beautiful, moving film made all the more poignant by the fact that it is a true story. Set during the “Dirty War” in 1970s Argentina, it revolves around a middle-aged English teacher and the delightful little penguin that imprints itself on him.
Steve Coogan delivers a wonderful performance and is supported by a delightful cast of characters. This important story is sad, happy, humorous and at all times, engaging.
An Evening Without Kate Bush
(Adelaide Fringe, Garden of Unearthly Delights, 13 March 2025)
Kate Bush, is, like one of her influencers Emily Bronte, both genius and mystic. Her look, her voice, her entire unique and brilliant oeuvre, have entranced us ever since her debut in 1978, aged 19.
Sarah-Louise Young is clearly a Kate obsessive, and her show, a dizzy mash-note, is clearly for fans (we mean that in a good way), the Fish People, but it is witty and vibrant enough to please those ignorant of Kate-World.
Whilst the music is pre-recorded, Young is not: her voice is strong and she inhabits the Bush persona brilliantly, engaging and interacting with an appreciative crowd and sharing personal anecdotes regarding her Kate fetish. Effects are minimal but effective, as are her frequent costume changes (we reserve judgment on the rather alarming red leotard) and her array of comic props.
Highlights were And Dream of Sheep, shrouded and in darkness but for a winking red light; James and the Cold Gun in said leotard; Babooshka (sung beautifully, in Russian!); Running Up That Hill ; Army Dreamers replete with a pair of over-sized, luminous eyes; Wow; Hounds of Love, accompanied by yelps and squeals, with audience participation; Don’t Give Up (cf. Keep Trying by Brian Pern and co.), assisted by a couple plucked from the front row to slow-dance à la Kate and Peter Gabriel; Cloudbusting; Sat in Your Lap, with 3 ladies from the audience, complete with Dunce Caps; and a lovely version of The Man With the Child in His Eyes.
The closer, of course, was Wuthering heights, which was imagined more than performed, but who could outdo Kate’s original, either on vinyl or film? At a little over an hour, this is a worthy tribute act, and more.
Almost the Real McKate: pigmented photograph of Kate Bush by Clive Arrowsmith
Krapp’s Last Tape
(Directed by Vicky Featherstone; Adelaide Festival, 7 March 2025)
Less is more with the great reductionist Samuel Beckett, although sometimes less is less. James Wood observed of Beckett’s late work that he had “smothered longings for riches, and [made his] reductions seem like bankruptcy after wealth rather than fraud before it.”* Take the best of Kafka and Jimmy Joyce, stir, and simmer.
Stephen Rea stars, if one can call it starring. In The Crying Game, he was upstaged by a penis; in V For Vendetta, by a Guy Fawkes mask; and a burning theatre in Interview With a Vampire. Here, he is a sad, lonely old man, on his 69th birthday, checking his old reel-to-reel tapes of years gone, from decades ago. It is a grand theatrical device, theoretically, with Rea’s voice recorded aeons ago, to capture the timbre of a younger man, as the current emanation rattles around and eats bananas, but it palls over the course of an hour, because, frankly, modern sensibilities, extremely fragile and self-absorbed as they are, can’t engage with nostalgic reveries about old Dublin town, the girl with the eyes (Irish eyes, put in with a smutty finger) whom he laid, mum, and so on, even with great lines like the closing ones, in which a lifelong atheist perhaps reveals a tincture of doubt:
“Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.”
Stephen Rea’s performance is muted and unhurried, the set and lighting is minimalist and fine, but we could have done with a bit more noise from the actor, in order to drown out the squeaking and clatter of seats in the Dunstan Playhouse. Krapp’s Last Tape would make any audience squirm and fidget a bit, so where is the WD-40, AF?
It Ends With Us
(Directed by Justin Baldoni, from the novel by Colleen Hoover) (2024)
Thanks to Guest Reviewer Rita, for sitting through this so we don’t have to. Her pithy synthesis is below, with our additional comments further on.
“What a woeful travesty! This film trivializes and romanticises the very serious subject of domestic violence and is downright insulting to the many true victims of this ongoing crime.
It fails in many ways…most notably it neglects to portray the fact that the most dangerous time for a woman entrapped in such an abusive relationship is when she summons the courage to leave. Give this film a miss.”
Lily Blossom Bloom (!!!) in her flower shop
The Rom-Com genre is tired, overworked and lazy, but this entry appears to have seized upon a new wrinkle: Woman (‘Lily’) with a Past (her first love ‘Atlas’) suffers in a relationship with a chap rather quick with his hands (‘Ryle Kincaid’) – even the names spring straight from Mills-and-Boon, which seems to be CoHo’s oeuvre – but Lily thinks her love will change his ways…However, men who say how they’ve changed, never change.
The Varnished Culture posits a new business: Brothers Inc. For a modest fee, sensitive but tough blokes (the kind Scott Ryan plays in “Mr. Inbetween”) pay visits to abusive men and give them a taste of their own medicine.
In any case, a better film would focus on the litigious violence between Baldoni and star Blake Lively, their significant others and respective cohorts. Reports of alleged back-stabbing, double-dealing, harassment, libel and slander, ‘fat-shaming,’ shameless promotional exploitation of hair care products, legal suits and cross-suits accusing emotional abuse, intimidation, civil extortion and invasions of privacy, seeking multi-million dollar damages…how about a comedy drama called “It Ends in Court“?
Where’s Justin
Social Justice Fallacies
(By Thomas Sowell, 2023)
Described by economic historian Niall Ferguson as a tour de force, Social Justice Fallacies arrives, like Spiderman, just in time, the imminent end of Peak Woke (aka Peak Stupid).
Wikipedia defines Social Justice thus (footnote omitted):
“Social justice is justice in relation to the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society where individuals’ rights are recognized and protected. In Western and Asian cultures, the concept of social justice has often referred to the process of ensuring that individuals fulfill their societal roles and receive their due from society. In the current movements for social justice, the emphasis has been on the breaking of barriers for social mobility, the creation of safety nets, and economic justice. Social justice assigns rights and duties in the institutions of society, which enables people to receive the basic benefits and burdens of cooperation. The relevant institutions often include taxation, social insurance, public health, public school, public services, labor law and regulation of markets, to ensure distribution of wealth, and equal opportunity.”
Whilst your reviewer’s chest tightens, from learned and lived experience, at the phrases “distribution of wealth,” “receive their due,” “breaking of barriers,” “assign[ing] of rights and duties in the institutions of society,” and last but by no means least harmful, “equal opportunity,” prima facie, there’s none who could quibble with these aims, right? Well, with profound respect, dive into Mr. Sowell’s book and get some perspective. Sowell, originally a Marxist, converted by a hefty common sense and preference for hard facts (plus the likes of Friedman, Stigler, Becker, and Hayek), painstakingly shows, via real data and wide reading and research, that social justice warriors, some of whom no doubt mean well, harm the very people they either wish, or pretend, to help. Yes, we’re looking at you Mr. Trudeau.
In 5 short but dense chapters, Sowell expertly shows us that, pace Orwell, “all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others;” that folks can’t, or don’t want to be, equal in many respects; that correlation is not causation; that confirmation bias reigns among the socially just; that their myriad crusades rely on the misreading or misrepresentation of data; that the lumpenproletariat aching for salvation happen not to be inert chess pieces, moving according to bureaucratic arrangements; that there are particular types of knowledge often not in the possession of central command; that every redistributive act ever deployed in history has had unintended and often parlous consequences (e.g., forcing banks to lend to people of minority groups with low credit ratings that led to the global financial crisis of 2007/08, the raising of tax rates leading to decreased tax revenues, or legislating minimum wages above market rates as a direct cause of increased unemployment); and of course, that equity is not equality, and equality has human and natural limits. And to paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke, the warriors know much about the origins of poverty but precious little about the origins of wealth.
Some quotes as examples:
“Nature- as exemplified by such things as differences in geography, climate, diseases and animals- has not been egalitarian, despite Rousseau’s claim that nature produced equality.”
“We might agree that “equal chances for all” would be desirable. But that in no way guarantees that we have either the knowledge or the power required to make that goal attainable, without ruinous sacrifices of other desirable goals, ranging from freedom to survival.”
[On Eugenics and its social policy ramifications] “The casual ease with which leading scholars of their time could advocate imprisoning people for life, who had committed no crime, and depriving them of a normal life, is a painfully sobering reminder of what can happen when an idea or a vision becomes a heady dogma that overwhelm all other considerations.”“...the social justice agenda…included equalized outcomes in the present and reparations for the past…[drawing on] myths presented as history, as well as assertions presented as facts- the latter in a spirit reminiscent of the certitude and heedlessness of evidence in the genetic determinism era…The central premise of affirmative action is that group “under-representation” is the problem, and proportional representation of groups is the solution. This might make sense if all segments of a society had equal capabilities in all endeavors. But neither social justice advocates, nor anyone else, seems able to come up with an example of any such society today, or in the thousands of years of recorded history.”
“The confiscation and redistribution of wealth – whether on a moderate or a comprehensive scale- is at the heart of the social justice agenda. While social justice advocates stress what they see as the desirability of such policies, the feasibility of those policies tends to receive far less attention, and the consequences of trying and failing often receive virtually no attention.” [A recent example might be the City of Los Angeles cutting $18m from the Fire Department’s budget, which began hiring under an aggressive DEI regime, instead distributing money to various LGBTIQA+ causes and events, and demolishing dams to appease first nations peoples, resulting in a lack of qualified firefighters and available water to prevent large swathes of the city and surrounds going up in flames this month].
“Among the comments from “experts” was that “sex and sexuality have become far too complex and technical to leave to the typical parent, who is either uninformed or too bashful to share useful sexual information with his child”…[But, quoting Sargent Shriver, who led the early charge for explicit sex education in schools, having an epiphany in 1978] “Just as venereal disease has skyrocketed 350% in the last 15 years when we have had more clinics, more pills and more sex education than ever in history, teen-age pregnancy has risen.”
“Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe…self-congratulatory elites, deaf to argument and immune to evidence…For many social issues, the most important decision is who makes the decision. Both social justice advocates and their critics might agree that many consequential social decisions are best made by those who have the most relevant knowledge. But they have radically different assumptions as to who in fact has the most knowledge…feasibility…depends on the distribution of relevant and consequential knowledge…Intellectual elites with outstanding achievements within their own respective specialties may give little thought to how ignorant they may be on a vast spectrum of other concerns…as an old saying expressed it: “A fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him.“”
Sowell eloquently sets out an array of dangers arising from the work of today’s social-justice warriors, compounded by their disinclination to apply logic to test their faith and empirical evidence to their implemented programmes, seasoned with hostility to those who dare challenge their views. They almost invariably make things worse. Exhibit A: The Biden Administration.
A not-too recent photo of the great Thomas Sowell – he’s now 94
Paris, Texas
(Directed by Wim Wenders) (1984)
Virtually no one has seen this film, but those who have, love it to bits. We caught it in Adelaide at a special New Year’s Eve screening. It is not as good as Wings of Desire, but then, what is?
An alien film set in an alien landscape, ponderous and slow, it captures the heartbreaking loss of love between a couple, and reflects upon the nature of obsession. A child-like man (Harry Dean Stanton) stumbles out of the wilderness, is taken in and cared for by his brother (Dean Stockwell) who helps him reconnect – fleetingly – with his lost love (Natassja Kinski). Great performances and atmospherics can’t conceal the obliqueness and emptiness at its heart, which may be the point. Well worth watching on a rainy day.
Stanton, Wenders, Stockwell
