Category Archive: Classic Books
The Odyssey
(Directed by Christopher Nolan, 2026) My Ancient Greek class attended the Adelaide premiere of “The Odyssey” on the IMAX screen at Palace Nova East End, Adelaide. We are a hard audience. Our excellent teacher Dr. B (originally from Rome) has shepherded us from the alphabet to Plato via his amusing (but rigorous) methods over the last dozen years. So, By Zeus, Nolan had better do Homer right! He did. We had some minor quibbles – apparently Agamemnon’s black armour is not correct for the time, (but Benny Safdie made an amazing, surreal figure in it. Sauron eat your heart out)….
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…
Continue Reading →Black Mischief
Reflections on the Rainbow Nation, South Africa ‘You know,’ he added reflectively, ‘we’ve got a much easier job now than we should have had fifty years ago. If we’d had to modernize a country then it would have meant constitutional monarchy, bi-cameral legislature, proportional representation, women’s suffrage, independent judicature, freedom of the Press, referendums . . .’ ‘What is all that?’ asked the Emperor. ‘Just a few ideas that have ceased to be modern.’ (Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief, (1932), p. 128). South Africa’s once diamondiferous soil was always leavened with blood, running down the anthill to the lowest point of Kimberley’s…
Continue Reading →Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(By Robert Louis Stevenson; Sydney Theatre Company adaption and direction by Kip Williams: Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, 5 March 2023) Stevenson‘s 1885 fable of the dangers of suppressing the id “is for ever being recalled, throughout the English-speaking world, to signify man’s divided nature.”* Filmed, staged and broadcast hundreds of times, the story is superior to the telling, and in this adaptation (by the team that presented The Picture of Dorian Gray) we are treated to a Gothic glory, vivified for the stage by dark demonic videographers, swarming hornet-like about the players. So it is not quite a two-hander. Stevenson’s…
Continue Reading →Never Let Me Go
Book written by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) Film directed by Mark Romanek (2010) Ishiguro, Romanek, please let us go, you heartless bastards. Not since Chris Lilley killed Pat Mullins (We Can Be Heroes: Finding the Australian of the Year of the Year, ABC TV, 2005) have we at TVC been rendered sleepless by an afflicted fictional character. And we could laugh at Pat. Laugh at any of the characters in Ishiguro’s book or Romanek’s film of the book and you will go straight to hell. It is best perhaps to watch Romanek’s realisation before reading Ishiguro’s pitiless novel. The film transforms…
Continue Reading →