Category Archive: Fiction
The Camp of the Saints
(By Jean Raspail) (1973) [Trigger Warning] Western self-loathing has been increasingly documented, with the focus rarely on shame (the healthy recognition of past cultural excesses and infamies) but more particularly on Guilt and Submission. And white people have had their anti-racism homework set. Despite and perhaps because of this, we’ve seen, in recent decades, an elitist multi-cultural rejection of assimilation, an undocumented invasion of the West, run by an unholy trinity of criminal networks, corrupt NGOs and cynical governments (on the supply side, sending away not-their-best; on the demand side, pursuing a growth mirage and co-opting a furtive voting demographic)….
Continue Reading →The Road
(By Cormac McCarthy, 2006) [It is timely to comment on this book, as we read a report in The Weekend Australian newspaper (24/1/26) that Federal Treasurer, Dr. Jim Chalmers, planned to read it over the summer break. Appropriate, for a man under whose stewardship Australia, economically, feels like it is circling the drain.] This dystopian, post-apocalyptic fable won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007, so we were duly warned. Evocative? Perhaps. Repetitious? Certainly. Dully and deliberately so. Fatuous? ‘Okay.’ Day after day – gray, ash, cold. Gather wood, light a fire, drink water, eat from cans, walk down a…
Continue Reading →Season of Life (Jeff Janoda, 2022)
"Hancock at Gettysburg" by Thure de Thulstrup, showing Pickett's Charge
Jeff Janoda is a Canadian teacher, historian and writer whose ability to research and vitalise historical events disparate in time and space is admirable. His terrific 2005 novel Saga takes us into the world of old Nordic stories. Sundog (2019) is a gripping yarn set in the last days of World War Two. His third novel, Season of Life pulls the reader into the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. The American Civil War was known to The Varnished Culture through that historical textbook, Gone With the Wind and a few episodes of an interminable, sepia-coloured documentary tv series. Now…
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…
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…
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