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2. Certainly, this is high drama, and skilfully rendered by Mr Lewis. I have not chosen to recount it here for that reason, however. I reproduce it because the breast, probably the only breast Ambrosio has encountered – aside from his mother’s when he was an infant – appears to him as an enigma of […]

1. A very literate friend of mine once described The Monk as the most boring book ever forced upon him by an educational institution. Any book that comes to take up that kind of notoriety is often contingent on timing: my friend was 19 when he encountered The Monk, and it may have become his […]

2. The golden rule of commercially successful narrative art is that the writer has to push their characters into insoluble situations, and have them find their escape. Those escapes are the watermark of quality. Jake and Vince’s decisions evolve through crisis to ever greater crisis, drawing you deeper into circumstances as the stakes get ever […]

The eponymous Black Rabbit is a restaurant, a ‘nightclub for grownups’, to quote protagonist Jake Friedkin. While the business is a hit, proprietor Jake (played by Jude Law) is painfully over-extended. When the opportunity to take over a second prestigious restaurant emerges in the wake of a glowing New York Times review, Jake is trying […]

Yesterday, ‘John’ Wayne Parr and I were interviewed at the 1:35:20 mark of the embedded audio clip as a warm-up for our Brisbane Writers Festival appearance, which will also be chaired by the illustrious Mr Austin. Listen up – and enjoy!

2. Technology, specifically the railroad and the telegraph, is shrinking the West into a place where bandits can no longer freely operate. The Bunch are trying to make one last score so they can afford to retire, but the brutality central to their existence is catching up with them. They seek to make one last […]

‘I reckon Terry Real got it wrong. ‘When I saw Taxi Driver, I thought that scene doesn’t make viewers laugh the first time they see it. I think it’s more uneasy like he looks clearly unstable and like his muttering and posture I thought was meant to reveal isolation and paranoia if I did laugh […]

2. I thought it was time to pay him a visit and see if he could freak me out like he used to. To be frank, it felt a little colour-by-numbers. I think this is the problem with commercial publishing, and producing books to sell requires an author give their reader want they want. More […]

I love J.G. Ballard. I’m not talking about the J.G. Ballard who wrote Empire of the Sun, transformed into a family-friendly classic by the king of cheese, Steven Spielberg. I’m talking about the J.G. Ballard who, for whatever devious reason, used his own name for the protagonist of the outrageous, profoundly shocking Crash, made into […]

‘You’ll love the new Blade Runner – unless you’re a woman.’ There was much ‘feminist’ criticism of Blade Runner 2049. I found it almost as astonishing as the pissweak rejoinder from its director, Denis Villeneuve in Vanity Fair, November 25, 2017: “Blade Runner is not about tomorrow; it’s about today. And I’m sorry, but the world is not kind on […]