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N
The accidental death of MP Norman Cole precipitates a hung parliament allowing a core of extreme right-wing politicians to seize power. Telford, a high ranking but unworldly public servant is approached by Cole's wife who believes her husband was murdered and asks him to investigate on her behalf. The reward for this, he hopes, will be her love. Despite the bizarre and threatening nature of his investigations, he remains convinced that the "scribbled note" about the meeting with "N" holds the key to what he seeks.
600 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
101 people want to read
About the author
John Alan Scott
18 books4 followersJohn Alan Scott (who has published under the names John A. Scott and John Scott) is an English-Australian poet, novelist and academic.
Scott was born in Littlehampton in Sussex, England, migrating to Australia during his childhood. Over several books of poetry his work developed in an 'experimental' direction unusual in Australian poetry, owing partly to his interest in translation. Indeed he has translated a volume, Elegies, of the contemporary French poet Emmanuel Hocquard. However since the 1990s he has concentrated on producing novels.
His work has won him the Victorian Premier's Award twice, in 1986 and again in 1994. The collection of novellas What I Have Written has been filmed from his own screenplay and he has been translated into French, German and Slovenian. He has taught in the Faculty of Creative Arts at Wollongong University but now writes full-time.
Scott was born in Littlehampton in Sussex, England, migrating to Australia during his childhood. Over several books of poetry his work developed in an 'experimental' direction unusual in Australian poetry, owing partly to his interest in translation. Indeed he has translated a volume, Elegies, of the contemporary French poet Emmanuel Hocquard. However since the 1990s he has concentrated on producing novels.
His work has won him the Victorian Premier's Award twice, in 1986 and again in 1994. The collection of novellas What I Have Written has been filmed from his own screenplay and he has been translated into French, German and Slovenian. He has taught in the Faculty of Creative Arts at Wollongong University but now writes full-time.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
September 12, 2024
I found this 600-pager hard to put down, to use the old cliché. I recall when I purchased this one many years’ back being attracted to the cover blurbs premise and the comment that it was a “masterpiece”. It is not for me a masterpiece, but it sure has a certain literary je ne sais quoi.
This is an alternative history of the death of an independent parliamentarian that causes a fascist takeover of the Australian government during WW2, this government then negotiates a disadvantageous truce with the Japanese. Read how Curtin became Australian PM during the war via the wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtin_...
This states that “Labor under Curtin formed a minority government in 1941 after independents crossed the floor, bringing down the Coalition minority United Australia Party-Country Party Coalition government which resulted from the 1940 election.”
In this alternative it is the Curtin government that falls after the death of MP Norman Cole and then into that void authoritarian takes over.
It is difficult to write too much about the story itself as to do so would give away the plot and so many other events of interest in this fascinating political and cultural thriller. There are few main characters and many that come in and out of the tale. Many are based on real life characters in both the political and the artistic world. The point of those worlds being that the fascist government is typical of fascism in that artists and intellectuals are the mortal enemies and treated as such.
There are two major characters that both tell their story in the first person. Very middle-class public servant Robin Telford tells his in a kind of British University educated manner that I did not at first recognise as Australian but then after a while realised that he was of his times when Australia was still very much part of the British Empire. Britain playing a less than hands on role in the war in Asia and the Pacific plays a large part in the Curtin government falling and later of the decisions of the fascist government and its capitulation to Japan. The second main character is Missy Cunningham the wife of firebrand anti-fascist artist Roy with whom she has a loveless marriage. Telford and Missy’s are parallel telling of events that at times join.
The author is a wonderful writer and the structure of the story is very layered in that we move rapidly from one character to another and one event to another very quickly. It makes for compulsive reading in the “what happens next” needs of the reader. There is use of many literary tricks, we get many characters referenced from their times with both the fictional and the real. Roy Cunningham for example is based on Noel Counihan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Co...
Even literary nods such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and David Meredith of My Brother Jack fame make fleeting appearances. One of the stranger nods to something obscure is that there is a sanatorium called Graylingwell. This is a nod to a place of the same name in Chichester, West Sussex, England. I was intrigued that the author used this as a device, and it turns out he came from Littlehampton, not too far away from the original Graylingwell. I wonder as to how many other nods to names and places I have missed.
What just stops this being a masterpiece? It just lacks a little realism in certain areas. The vast majority of the book is a serious alternative history but, for example, the use of a Bunyip at one point? I could see no metaphor or analogy in its use other than magical realism as a device. We also got a seer who is important to the intrigue, but I just felt that a more realistic device could be used to bring the story together and into its, admittedly fulfilling, conclusion.
Be that as it may, I have enjoyed this immensely and would read again.
Recommended specifically to Australians who know their local art and literature and who looking for an exceptional alternative history. (That cuts out just about the entire reading public on the planet☺.)
Addendum. To give an idea of the research that the author put into this long read, I have attached his notes on research in the spoiler below.
http://melbourneblogger.blogspot.com/...
https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/the-...
http://www.australianpoetryreview.com...
This is an alternative history of the death of an independent parliamentarian that causes a fascist takeover of the Australian government during WW2, this government then negotiates a disadvantageous truce with the Japanese. Read how Curtin became Australian PM during the war via the wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtin_...
This states that “Labor under Curtin formed a minority government in 1941 after independents crossed the floor, bringing down the Coalition minority United Australia Party-Country Party Coalition government which resulted from the 1940 election.”
In this alternative it is the Curtin government that falls after the death of MP Norman Cole and then into that void authoritarian takes over.
It is difficult to write too much about the story itself as to do so would give away the plot and so many other events of interest in this fascinating political and cultural thriller. There are few main characters and many that come in and out of the tale. Many are based on real life characters in both the political and the artistic world. The point of those worlds being that the fascist government is typical of fascism in that artists and intellectuals are the mortal enemies and treated as such.
There are two major characters that both tell their story in the first person. Very middle-class public servant Robin Telford tells his in a kind of British University educated manner that I did not at first recognise as Australian but then after a while realised that he was of his times when Australia was still very much part of the British Empire. Britain playing a less than hands on role in the war in Asia and the Pacific plays a large part in the Curtin government falling and later of the decisions of the fascist government and its capitulation to Japan. The second main character is Missy Cunningham the wife of firebrand anti-fascist artist Roy with whom she has a loveless marriage. Telford and Missy’s are parallel telling of events that at times join.
The author is a wonderful writer and the structure of the story is very layered in that we move rapidly from one character to another and one event to another very quickly. It makes for compulsive reading in the “what happens next” needs of the reader. There is use of many literary tricks, we get many characters referenced from their times with both the fictional and the real. Roy Cunningham for example is based on Noel Counihan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Co...
Even literary nods such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and David Meredith of My Brother Jack fame make fleeting appearances. One of the stranger nods to something obscure is that there is a sanatorium called Graylingwell. This is a nod to a place of the same name in Chichester, West Sussex, England. I was intrigued that the author used this as a device, and it turns out he came from Littlehampton, not too far away from the original Graylingwell. I wonder as to how many other nods to names and places I have missed.
What just stops this being a masterpiece? It just lacks a little realism in certain areas. The vast majority of the book is a serious alternative history but, for example, the use of a Bunyip at one point? I could see no metaphor or analogy in its use other than magical realism as a device. We also got a seer who is important to the intrigue, but I just felt that a more realistic device could be used to bring the story together and into its, admittedly fulfilling, conclusion.
Be that as it may, I have enjoyed this immensely and would read again.
Recommended specifically to Australians who know their local art and literature and who looking for an exceptional alternative history. (That cuts out just about the entire reading public on the planet☺.)
Addendum. To give an idea of the research that the author put into this long read, I have attached his notes on research in the spoiler below.
http://melbourneblogger.blogspot.com/...
https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/the-...
http://www.australianpoetryreview.com...
February 12, 2015
I'll be surprised if I read a new release I like better this year. 'N' is an extraordinary, ambitious effort. The story opens at a Cabinet meeting: ministers are debating what to do with a boat-load of refugee children in an unseaworthy vessel, moored off Fremantle. For political expediency they decide to send it back out to sea to sink. It's 1941, and Australia is about to become a fascist police state sharing its land and power with the invading Japanese army. Artists, intellectuals and Aboriginal people are sent to camps; the Australian people become suspicious of independent thought; torture of dissidents and suppression of free media become common-place. The novel follows many different characters - an artist's wife whose world has fallen apart, a public servant unwittingly administering the rise of fascism, a playwright who has begun to see visions, a war artist, a guerrilla Australian solider, a ghost writer with far-right dreams of immortality. There is a love story, a mystery story, strange and fantastical happenings, brilliant rewritings of Australian history and myth and, in the end, a plea for us to take a bloody hard look at ourselves and the kind of country we're creating.
Maybe it was because I'd just read this article about the treatment of asylum seekers https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/n..., but at the end of 'N' I burst into tears. What terrible things we are blithely allowing to happen.
Maybe it was because I'd just read this article about the treatment of asylum seekers https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/n..., but at the end of 'N' I burst into tears. What terrible things we are blithely allowing to happen.
January 19, 2016
I loved this book! It’s a great big chunkster of almost 600 pages but it is utterly absorbing from beginning to end.
John A Scott is the author of The Architect, a small gem of a book that was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2002. Before that he won the Victorian Premier’s Award twice, in 1986 for his poem St Clair and again in 1994 for his novel What I Have Written (which I’m now going to track down). He has apparently spent ten years writing N., a different book entirely to The Architect…
N. has been described elsewhere as a political thriller, but it’s not genre fiction. Far from it. It’s intellectually sophisticated, enticing the reader with delicious allusions to characters from real life and from literature, and it explores big issues, the most prominent of which is the tension between popular rule and decisive leadership. This tension occurs in the context of an alternative history of Australia’s WW2…
Phillip Roth explored this idea in The Plot against America which I read some time ago (see my review). In Scott’s novel, Japan has occupied Australia’s northern states and a fascist regime is running the rest of the country from the tasteful surrounds of Mt Macedon. This bizarre turn of events comes about because of a hung parliament caused by the unexpected death of Norman Cole, one of two independents supporting Prime Minister Curtin. The fascists grab power in the vacuum. From complacent 21st century Australia this looks like a daft plot, but Scott makes it convincing, – and there are, alas, plenty of historical precedents. (The fact that we’ve just emerged from three years of a minority Federal parliament kept in power by independents, only to have it replaced by a government behaving in wholly unexpected ways is probably too recent to have influenced Scott’s book).
The book is a pastiche of literary styles and forms, with a multitude of characters. (Though it’s a measure of how well-written N. is that I had to resort only three times to the Dramatis Personae at the front of the book.) Some of these characters are real people from history, with their own names or invented ones, while other characters are products of Scott’s imagination. The most compelling of these characters are Missy Cunningham and Robin Telford, both of whom are struggling with the tension between love and duty. Their narratives feel like diaries or memoirs though never named as such, and they are complemented by documents that Telford unearths in his role as a public servant recruited as private detective: phone transcripts, radio scripts, newspaper reports and articles, and Hansard. There are also letters, memos, a photograph, scraps of poetry and epigrams. Missy Cunningham’s son Ross writes his short contribution like the Boys Own books he’s read (Treasure Island, Gulliver’s Travels), and Telford alternates his much more extensive contributions between dry bureaucratese and his idea of romance. Missy writes like the poet she might have been had she lived in a different era...
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2014/05/27/n-...
John A Scott is the author of The Architect, a small gem of a book that was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2002. Before that he won the Victorian Premier’s Award twice, in 1986 for his poem St Clair and again in 1994 for his novel What I Have Written (which I’m now going to track down). He has apparently spent ten years writing N., a different book entirely to The Architect…
N. has been described elsewhere as a political thriller, but it’s not genre fiction. Far from it. It’s intellectually sophisticated, enticing the reader with delicious allusions to characters from real life and from literature, and it explores big issues, the most prominent of which is the tension between popular rule and decisive leadership. This tension occurs in the context of an alternative history of Australia’s WW2…
Phillip Roth explored this idea in The Plot against America which I read some time ago (see my review). In Scott’s novel, Japan has occupied Australia’s northern states and a fascist regime is running the rest of the country from the tasteful surrounds of Mt Macedon. This bizarre turn of events comes about because of a hung parliament caused by the unexpected death of Norman Cole, one of two independents supporting Prime Minister Curtin. The fascists grab power in the vacuum. From complacent 21st century Australia this looks like a daft plot, but Scott makes it convincing, – and there are, alas, plenty of historical precedents. (The fact that we’ve just emerged from three years of a minority Federal parliament kept in power by independents, only to have it replaced by a government behaving in wholly unexpected ways is probably too recent to have influenced Scott’s book).
The book is a pastiche of literary styles and forms, with a multitude of characters. (Though it’s a measure of how well-written N. is that I had to resort only three times to the Dramatis Personae at the front of the book.) Some of these characters are real people from history, with their own names or invented ones, while other characters are products of Scott’s imagination. The most compelling of these characters are Missy Cunningham and Robin Telford, both of whom are struggling with the tension between love and duty. Their narratives feel like diaries or memoirs though never named as such, and they are complemented by documents that Telford unearths in his role as a public servant recruited as private detective: phone transcripts, radio scripts, newspaper reports and articles, and Hansard. There are also letters, memos, a photograph, scraps of poetry and epigrams. Missy Cunningham’s son Ross writes his short contribution like the Boys Own books he’s read (Treasure Island, Gulliver’s Travels), and Telford alternates his much more extensive contributions between dry bureaucratese and his idea of romance. Missy writes like the poet she might have been had she lived in a different era...
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2014/05/27/n-...
July 21, 2016
Massively ambitious, comprehensively researched and frighteningly plausible alternative history of Australia during WWII. A key independent in a narrowly held government dies, and in the chaos of a hung parliament, a viciously right-wing government siezes power, before negotiating a truce with the invading Japanese. The story unfolds from about five main angles: from the perspective of artists, politicians, soldiers, dissidents and public servants, with the threads occasionally interweaving, but mostly telling separate pieces of a grand story. The pace is slow - I feel like it could have dropped 100 pages without losing much (e.g. sections told from the perspective of a cat!). In the author's notes he acknowledges dropping a whole other strand of the story to keep things at a managable length, but I still felt like it dragged in a few places.
The last few pages make explicit the allegory with modern-day Australia's inhumane and unjust treatment of refugees - it seemed a bit unnecessary to hammer home this point, which came through relatively clearly anyway - the whole book is a warning about how easily populations are manipulated through fear and unncertainty. For all my minor issues, it's wonderful to read something this self-consciously BIG - I'm surprised it hasn't made a bigger splash.
The last few pages make explicit the allegory with modern-day Australia's inhumane and unjust treatment of refugees - it seemed a bit unnecessary to hammer home this point, which came through relatively clearly anyway - the whole book is a warning about how easily populations are manipulated through fear and unncertainty. For all my minor issues, it's wonderful to read something this self-consciously BIG - I'm surprised it hasn't made a bigger splash.
July 10, 2015
Another in the long line of single letter titles ( V, C , Q all spring to mind, but of course there must be others ) JAS' N is a marvellous beast full of postmodern playfulness and pynchonesque pastiches. And not just that: it's a marvellous Australian beast! By gollygollygosh we have few enough of those.
So... It has recently occurred to me that I almost never read Australian novels. Out of the whathaveyou number of books I've read/finished/documented on GR it seems only a handful are by Aussie authors. Born an Antipodean myself I wasn't really sure how this happened. Then I tried to find good Australian fiction. I was sure it must be out there. Right? It just had to be. ???. And, yup, it turns out it is. It's just covered by piles and piles of outback cattle station/Son'f-uh-gun/red-dirt-luvin'/Suburban WhoDunnit/gently-centre-left/Surf's up but I'm oh so down/undeservedlyawardgarnishedgobbdlygook. And not that you can't write something great with any of those ideas as your central thingy, but it just doesn't seem to happen here. Australian Literature (Publishing?) seems to have turned away from (never really got started with) the experimental novel, favouring instead to publish and republish bland Eggers type things full of good-will but with none of the joy in language. Blame Ern Malley ?
N is the first book I've read that has made me think that modern Australian authors can stand toe-two-tow with their less sun soaked counterparts. It is an impressively vast tale of Australia’s (alternate - shudder) history told through multiple perspectives. Each chapter, sometimes a fraction of a page, jumps between characters, the first and third person, detailed documents and transcripts, it inhabits artists, politicians, right-wing wackos, a clairvoyant author, his cat, and soldiers fighting a land war with invading Japanese troops. Thankfully, N is less concerned with answering the what if of Japanese invasion in WW2 and more about questioning the moral compass of our modern nation, playing with predetermination, and solving a convoluted political-noir mystery.
It was only in the last 100 pages that things started to unravel for me. Scott becomes determined to clear up all the loose plot threads neatly and often over-explains himself in the process. The length of time spent in any one character increases and the novel stops feeling like a dizzying ride of literary possibilities and more like standard thriller fare. The last few pages slap you in the face with the criminality of Australia’s current boat people policies and well, jeez, anyone who’s made it through 600 pages of literary wingle-wangle probably already knows that it ain’t good.
John Alan Scott is a relatively oldish poet cum novelist whose previous works are also fatally unknown on GR. He looks like quite a nice chap from the small photo on the back of the book. I will be reading more. This reader hopes something more complex and equally heavy comes next and somehow finds publication.
So... It has recently occurred to me that I almost never read Australian novels. Out of the whathaveyou number of books I've read/finished/documented on GR it seems only a handful are by Aussie authors. Born an Antipodean myself I wasn't really sure how this happened. Then I tried to find good Australian fiction. I was sure it must be out there. Right? It just had to be. ???. And, yup, it turns out it is. It's just covered by piles and piles of outback cattle station/Son'f-uh-gun/red-dirt-luvin'/Suburban WhoDunnit/gently-centre-left/Surf's up but I'm oh so down/undeservedlyawardgarnishedgobbdlygook. And not that you can't write something great with any of those ideas as your central thingy, but it just doesn't seem to happen here. Australian Literature (Publishing?) seems to have turned away from (never really got started with) the experimental novel, favouring instead to publish and republish bland Eggers type things full of good-will but with none of the joy in language. Blame Ern Malley ?
N is the first book I've read that has made me think that modern Australian authors can stand toe-two-tow with their less sun soaked counterparts. It is an impressively vast tale of Australia’s (alternate - shudder) history told through multiple perspectives. Each chapter, sometimes a fraction of a page, jumps between characters, the first and third person, detailed documents and transcripts, it inhabits artists, politicians, right-wing wackos, a clairvoyant author, his cat, and soldiers fighting a land war with invading Japanese troops. Thankfully, N is less concerned with answering the what if of Japanese invasion in WW2 and more about questioning the moral compass of our modern nation, playing with predetermination, and solving a convoluted political-noir mystery.
It was only in the last 100 pages that things started to unravel for me. Scott becomes determined to clear up all the loose plot threads neatly and often over-explains himself in the process. The length of time spent in any one character increases and the novel stops feeling like a dizzying ride of literary possibilities and more like standard thriller fare. The last few pages slap you in the face with the criminality of Australia’s current boat people policies and well, jeez, anyone who’s made it through 600 pages of literary wingle-wangle probably already knows that it ain’t good.
John Alan Scott is a relatively oldish poet cum novelist whose previous works are also fatally unknown on GR. He looks like quite a nice chap from the small photo on the back of the book. I will be reading more. This reader hopes something more complex and equally heavy comes next and somehow finds publication.
July 2, 2019
John A. Scott's vast novel is set in a re-imagined World War 2 Australia. One of the two independents supporting the Curtin government, Norman Cook, dies suddenly and the war government is thrown into chaos. Strongman Mahoney steps into the power vacuum, declares an emergency and establishes a dictatorship, while Curtin and his colleagues flee to New Zealand.
At the same time, the Japanese land in Australia and rapidly move from north to south, capturing Canberra and forcing Mahoney to decamp with his Emergency Committee to rural Mount Macedon, well to the south of te front line.
The major characters in Scott's tale mostly come from the bohemians and dissidents of inner Melbourne, who are among the first to feel the effects of Mahoney's wrath. Missy and her partner Roy try to advance the cause of anti-Fascist art, tempting a terrible fate. Writers and artists are disappeared or turn up in internment camps. Others, such as Missy's lover Vic, enlist to fight the Japanese.
Public servant Telford finds himself at the heart of Mahoney's administration. He meets Norman Cook's widow, who insists that there was more to Cook's death than is being made public, and seduces him into taking up her cause and trying to find the truth of her husband's death. Telford agrees to do so, and finds himself gradually being immersed into a snake-pit of covert skullduggery.
Scott's characters and the various loves that motivate them are well conveyed and his sprawling plot warrants the 600 pages that it takes to recount. He grounds his ahistorical scenario so well in the real Australia of the time that it all seems eminently plausible. The indignities and hatred directed at outsiders by the Australians in his book have echoes in the present, and Scott does not let us forget that.
At the same time, the Japanese land in Australia and rapidly move from north to south, capturing Canberra and forcing Mahoney to decamp with his Emergency Committee to rural Mount Macedon, well to the south of te front line.
The major characters in Scott's tale mostly come from the bohemians and dissidents of inner Melbourne, who are among the first to feel the effects of Mahoney's wrath. Missy and her partner Roy try to advance the cause of anti-Fascist art, tempting a terrible fate. Writers and artists are disappeared or turn up in internment camps. Others, such as Missy's lover Vic, enlist to fight the Japanese.
Public servant Telford finds himself at the heart of Mahoney's administration. He meets Norman Cook's widow, who insists that there was more to Cook's death than is being made public, and seduces him into taking up her cause and trying to find the truth of her husband's death. Telford agrees to do so, and finds himself gradually being immersed into a snake-pit of covert skullduggery.
Scott's characters and the various loves that motivate them are well conveyed and his sprawling plot warrants the 600 pages that it takes to recount. He grounds his ahistorical scenario so well in the real Australia of the time that it all seems eminently plausible. The indignities and hatred directed at outsiders by the Australians in his book have echoes in the present, and Scott does not let us forget that.
August 19, 2020
A well-written exercise in futility.
During the chaos of World War II, (real-life) Australian Prime Minister John Curtin is deposed when one of the independent MPs in Parliament dies, thus depriving Curtin of his slender majority. As the narrative diverges from our reality (the independent MPs are historical, but the death is fictional), the new Prime Minister reveals himself to be far-right nationalist who sets about making a truce with the Japanese, a truce that involves ceding vast swathes of the country over to them. All manner of horrors - death camps, ghettos to imprison artists, nationwide repression - follow. Over the following four years, we follow the lives of numerous characters, but primarily two. Missy Cunningham, a woman living in Melbourne's artistic community, and Telford, a civil servant installed at the Prime Minister's mansion in country Victoria. Telford is drawn into an amateur investigation when the deceased MP's widow approaches him, convinced her husband's death was not accidental.
I'm trying to resist just calling this novel "overlong and inane", because that's not appropriate for a reviewer of my stature. Yet I can find very little to recommend it. In the minds of its supporters, N is a post-modern masterpiece. And certainly, it resembles such. Clocking in at 600 oversized pages, Scott flirts with magical realism (Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay mysteriously retreats one day, leaving 2000 square kilometres of sand and dead fish), Zola-esque symbolism (an Australian soldier and then a Japanese one are pitched against a kangaroo in a boxing ring), allegories of Fascism (the Prime Minister recalls Ancient Rome by re-enacting WWI battles at the MCG for a screaming mob, giving the "Australians" real bullets and the "Turks" blanks), intertextuality (during a picnic at Hanging Rock, the characters hear the "mirthless" laughter of seemingly spectral girls), generic ambiguity (a writer whose scripts turn out to be visions of the future, and a hard-boiled style detective narrative, butting up against a realist war drama), allusions to contemporary politics (politicians complaining that refugee advocates are using the "misleading term 'children'" to "cloud the issue of filthy foreigners"), and playful mimicry (an unexpected sequence takes us inside the head of an otherwise minor child character, whose narrative is written in a style fondly recalling Dickens' David Copperfield). Yet if I were honest, the clash of styles merely feels arch. It does not mesh, but it also rarely feels like Scott has set out to create a dissonant patchwork.
In the interests of time, I have narrowed down my complaints to the core essentials. First is a problem that perhaps Scott had no way of winning. With rare exceptions, we see the events of this monstrous War through the eyes of bystanders. Missy, in Melbourne, is away from most of the chaos, and so is relying upon second- and third-hand knowledge. Telford and some of the supporting cast are more intimately linked, but none of them has a broad view of the situation. This feels deliberate, recreating the "fog of war" that we feel even now, in a 21st century where malevolent political interests are everywhere. The horror of what is happening in N is precisely that any good Australian should be opposed to it, but the average citizen has been emotionally manipulated by evil politicians and media barons, while also being denied the evidence to decide for themselves. Yet, in creating this framework, Scott denies himself the ability to create a coherent narrative. This is 600 pages of people guessing at what might be happening, concluding in an unsatisfying denouement that seems to be determined to return things to established history, so as not to cause any messy questions. In a different kind of alternate history novel, in which we the reader are equally unaware of what the clues mean (see, for example, Claire G. Coleman's utterly fantastic The Old Lie), this kind of structure can be a great success. Yet, eighty years after the War, any reader in the West only needs to hear phrases like "people being rounded up in trucks", "elections postponed", "enemy of the state", and our cultural history provides entire volumes of information. When the characters are actively behind the reader in terms of knowledge, your story will only work if you're Columbo!
Which leads to the next issue: it's 600 pages long. I keep saying this, but frankly if you're going to write a gorilla of a novel, you have to have a gorilla of an idea. And Scott simply does not. Is Cole's widow correct that he was murdered to precipitate a political crisis that would allow the far-right to take over? Guess what, it really doesn't matter! Because even if Telford is able to prove it, what will it change? Will the War suddenly come to an end. Will the Japanese profusely apologise and retreat? "Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't realise that one accidental death three years ago had been a murder. Our expansionist plans were built on a lie. How shameful!" Of course they won't. And if Telford discovers Cole's death was an accident? That life is actually just an endless slew of ironies? Well, we'll all learn a valuable lesson, but it will be a lesson we could have enjoyed in a much more concise format.
Now, of course, it is not a reviewer's job to ask a novel be shorter, or less dense, or more direct. It is their job to analyse what the author was trying to do, and determine if they achieved it. And here is where I must confess my main complaint: N is forever torn between being an experimental novel and being a bog-standard epic. I mentioned the David Copperfield parody, which is one of the most clever sections herein. And these literature imitations appear relatively frequently: letters smuggled out of POW camps, scripts discovered in various formats and drafts, transcripts from political speeches. If Scott had chosen to write the entire novel in this style, perhaps we could talk. Instead, he retreats from innovation just as often, reluctant to challenge literary norms on a grand scale. At the same time, these more standard entries often fall over themselves to be self-consciously literary, drawing attention to the failings of the narrators but without rewarding us in turn.
One conversation stood out to me, of which I recreate here only a couple of lines:
If one is attempting to write a B-Grade Wildean takedown of contorted language, there's something to that. But this kind of chatter is deployed haphazardly, often amidst pages of generic prose, to the point where this reader was driven to despair trying to keep my balance while deciphering which parts of the prose were deliberately off-kilter, and which accidentally so. I could accept 600 pages of remarkable prose. I could also accept 600 pages of adequately but cumulatively brilliant writing. This is neither. (In Scott's closing notes, outrageously, he indicates that another sizable chunk was removed "for reasons of overall length"(!) and published in a literary journal as a standalone piece instead.)
As I ran down the clock on N, I began to wonder what it was all for. As we discover that the motivations for the coup were the usual motley crew of capitalists and crazies, why did we take this journey? And then Scott surprised me. The final few pages are set in 2001, during the (real) "children overboard" scandal, a series of appalling lies by political conservatives targeted at asylum seekers, which for many Australians marks the beginning of 20 years of very public and very ugly policies on turning away refugees from Australia's shores. Now, you'll get no dispute from me that my country's approach to refugees is inhumane, barbaric, and unarguably illegal. Perhaps it is worth reiterating in literary format that fear of the "other", fear of those foreigners coming and taking our land has been a crucial part of the Australian psyche since the year 1788, when my ancestors... came and took other people's land. (Yeah, it's never been an internally logical argument.) Still, I struggle to believe that this was the best method of making that claim. 595 pages of prologue to a cutting jibe at a government that had been out of office for 7 years by the time this book was even published? Odd. Most odd.
I was born in 1987. Scott was born in 1948. In neither of our lifetimes has there been a more perilous precipice for Western democracy than the point at which we now stand in 2020. On that, I suspect he and I agree. There is a fight which every ethical human must join to protect our institutions and conventions from populists and savages, while at the same time radically restructuring them to eliminate the long-held biases and inequalities which - when left unchecked - will devolve into the abhorrent sentiments expressed during WWII and, worryingly, in many parts of the Western world today. Sadly, N seems to be trying to reiterate that fact, rather than provide a solution. And at 600 pages, that's an exorbitant demand on the reader's patience.
"Turn the page. Begin another story. For I have worn down. Exhausted by the telling. It wears me down. The telling of it has wearied me. My mouth opens to speak and there are no words. Nor are there the sounds of any description."
During the chaos of World War II, (real-life) Australian Prime Minister John Curtin is deposed when one of the independent MPs in Parliament dies, thus depriving Curtin of his slender majority. As the narrative diverges from our reality (the independent MPs are historical, but the death is fictional), the new Prime Minister reveals himself to be far-right nationalist who sets about making a truce with the Japanese, a truce that involves ceding vast swathes of the country over to them. All manner of horrors - death camps, ghettos to imprison artists, nationwide repression - follow. Over the following four years, we follow the lives of numerous characters, but primarily two. Missy Cunningham, a woman living in Melbourne's artistic community, and Telford, a civil servant installed at the Prime Minister's mansion in country Victoria. Telford is drawn into an amateur investigation when the deceased MP's widow approaches him, convinced her husband's death was not accidental.
I'm trying to resist just calling this novel "overlong and inane", because that's not appropriate for a reviewer of my stature. Yet I can find very little to recommend it. In the minds of its supporters, N is a post-modern masterpiece. And certainly, it resembles such. Clocking in at 600 oversized pages, Scott flirts with magical realism (Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay mysteriously retreats one day, leaving 2000 square kilometres of sand and dead fish), Zola-esque symbolism (an Australian soldier and then a Japanese one are pitched against a kangaroo in a boxing ring), allegories of Fascism (the Prime Minister recalls Ancient Rome by re-enacting WWI battles at the MCG for a screaming mob, giving the "Australians" real bullets and the "Turks" blanks), intertextuality (during a picnic at Hanging Rock, the characters hear the "mirthless" laughter of seemingly spectral girls), generic ambiguity (a writer whose scripts turn out to be visions of the future, and a hard-boiled style detective narrative, butting up against a realist war drama), allusions to contemporary politics (politicians complaining that refugee advocates are using the "misleading term 'children'" to "cloud the issue of filthy foreigners"), and playful mimicry (an unexpected sequence takes us inside the head of an otherwise minor child character, whose narrative is written in a style fondly recalling Dickens' David Copperfield). Yet if I were honest, the clash of styles merely feels arch. It does not mesh, but it also rarely feels like Scott has set out to create a dissonant patchwork.
In the interests of time, I have narrowed down my complaints to the core essentials. First is a problem that perhaps Scott had no way of winning. With rare exceptions, we see the events of this monstrous War through the eyes of bystanders. Missy, in Melbourne, is away from most of the chaos, and so is relying upon second- and third-hand knowledge. Telford and some of the supporting cast are more intimately linked, but none of them has a broad view of the situation. This feels deliberate, recreating the "fog of war" that we feel even now, in a 21st century where malevolent political interests are everywhere. The horror of what is happening in N is precisely that any good Australian should be opposed to it, but the average citizen has been emotionally manipulated by evil politicians and media barons, while also being denied the evidence to decide for themselves. Yet, in creating this framework, Scott denies himself the ability to create a coherent narrative. This is 600 pages of people guessing at what might be happening, concluding in an unsatisfying denouement that seems to be determined to return things to established history, so as not to cause any messy questions. In a different kind of alternate history novel, in which we the reader are equally unaware of what the clues mean (see, for example, Claire G. Coleman's utterly fantastic The Old Lie), this kind of structure can be a great success. Yet, eighty years after the War, any reader in the West only needs to hear phrases like "people being rounded up in trucks", "elections postponed", "enemy of the state", and our cultural history provides entire volumes of information. When the characters are actively behind the reader in terms of knowledge, your story will only work if you're Columbo!
Which leads to the next issue: it's 600 pages long. I keep saying this, but frankly if you're going to write a gorilla of a novel, you have to have a gorilla of an idea. And Scott simply does not. Is Cole's widow correct that he was murdered to precipitate a political crisis that would allow the far-right to take over? Guess what, it really doesn't matter! Because even if Telford is able to prove it, what will it change? Will the War suddenly come to an end. Will the Japanese profusely apologise and retreat? "Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't realise that one accidental death three years ago had been a murder. Our expansionist plans were built on a lie. How shameful!" Of course they won't. And if Telford discovers Cole's death was an accident? That life is actually just an endless slew of ironies? Well, we'll all learn a valuable lesson, but it will be a lesson we could have enjoyed in a much more concise format.
Now, of course, it is not a reviewer's job to ask a novel be shorter, or less dense, or more direct. It is their job to analyse what the author was trying to do, and determine if they achieved it. And here is where I must confess my main complaint: N is forever torn between being an experimental novel and being a bog-standard epic. I mentioned the David Copperfield parody, which is one of the most clever sections herein. And these literature imitations appear relatively frequently: letters smuggled out of POW camps, scripts discovered in various formats and drafts, transcripts from political speeches. If Scott had chosen to write the entire novel in this style, perhaps we could talk. Instead, he retreats from innovation just as often, reluctant to challenge literary norms on a grand scale. At the same time, these more standard entries often fall over themselves to be self-consciously literary, drawing attention to the failings of the narrators but without rewarding us in turn.
One conversation stood out to me, of which I recreate here only a couple of lines:
"I was wondering", Hennigsen began, "whether somewhere amongst all your equipment you have anything which might approximate the uses of a crowbar?"
"Is it a crowbar you're looking for?", the gardener asked.
"A crowbar, or some other implement which might reasonably be harnessed to do the usual work of a crowbar".
If one is attempting to write a B-Grade Wildean takedown of contorted language, there's something to that. But this kind of chatter is deployed haphazardly, often amidst pages of generic prose, to the point where this reader was driven to despair trying to keep my balance while deciphering which parts of the prose were deliberately off-kilter, and which accidentally so. I could accept 600 pages of remarkable prose. I could also accept 600 pages of adequately but cumulatively brilliant writing. This is neither. (In Scott's closing notes, outrageously, he indicates that another sizable chunk was removed "for reasons of overall length"(!) and published in a literary journal as a standalone piece instead.)
As I ran down the clock on N, I began to wonder what it was all for. As we discover that the motivations for the coup were the usual motley crew of capitalists and crazies, why did we take this journey? And then Scott surprised me. The final few pages are set in 2001, during the (real) "children overboard" scandal, a series of appalling lies by political conservatives targeted at asylum seekers, which for many Australians marks the beginning of 20 years of very public and very ugly policies on turning away refugees from Australia's shores. Now, you'll get no dispute from me that my country's approach to refugees is inhumane, barbaric, and unarguably illegal. Perhaps it is worth reiterating in literary format that fear of the "other", fear of those foreigners coming and taking our land has been a crucial part of the Australian psyche since the year 1788, when my ancestors... came and took other people's land. (Yeah, it's never been an internally logical argument.) Still, I struggle to believe that this was the best method of making that claim. 595 pages of prologue to a cutting jibe at a government that had been out of office for 7 years by the time this book was even published? Odd. Most odd.
I was born in 1987. Scott was born in 1948. In neither of our lifetimes has there been a more perilous precipice for Western democracy than the point at which we now stand in 2020. On that, I suspect he and I agree. There is a fight which every ethical human must join to protect our institutions and conventions from populists and savages, while at the same time radically restructuring them to eliminate the long-held biases and inequalities which - when left unchecked - will devolve into the abhorrent sentiments expressed during WWII and, worryingly, in many parts of the Western world today. Sadly, N seems to be trying to reiterate that fact, rather than provide a solution. And at 600 pages, that's an exorbitant demand on the reader's patience.
May 17, 2015
N is a stunning work, intricate, deeply political and beautifully written. It was a long, slow read, but all the more enjoyable for it. A novel for activists and poets.
Full review here: http://leatherboundpounds.com/2015/05...
Full review here: http://leatherboundpounds.com/2015/05...
April 5, 2015
If you care about life, the future, the past. If you care about anything you must read this book. The final three pages took my breath away and will stay with me for a long time, if not forever. A brilliant, staggering, all encompassing work of genius. Read this now.
January 31, 2017
A great read. An important book.
Read
October 12, 2016N is a big, complicated alternate history of WWII in Australia told in multiple modes and styles from the Pynchonesque to magical realism to inserted documents to slapstick(ish) comedy.* It's set in the past but very much engaged with the present as the large cast of characters (politicians, artists, soldiers, spies) get caught up in the incremental creep of fascism and oppression accepted one moment's expediency at a time. The juxtaposition of voices, styles, and experiences creates a panoramic sense but Scott never loses the intimate, individual presense and pathos of his characters despite so many moving parts to keep track of and to keep the reader engaged. As others have noted elsewhere, it does get a bit too “tidy” at the end, tying things up perhaps more insistently than I felt like I needed, but that approach took on a gravitas of its own that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, so I wouldn’t call it a complaint.
It isn't the easiest book to get your hands on in the US but it's worth the effort (and interlibrary loan was able to find it for me). I'd love to see a US publisher bring it over (that's you, editor friends). I suspect an equivalent novel written about the US or UK instead of Australia would get far more attention, acclaim, and international republication, which is a shame.
* In particular, there's a cameo by Douglas MacArthur that manages to turn one of his most famous lines into an absolutely hilarious gag. I laughed so hard I got some funny looks on the subway.
It isn't the easiest book to get your hands on in the US but it's worth the effort (and interlibrary loan was able to find it for me). I'd love to see a US publisher bring it over (that's you, editor friends). I suspect an equivalent novel written about the US or UK instead of Australia would get far more attention, acclaim, and international republication, which is a shame.
* In particular, there's a cameo by Douglas MacArthur that manages to turn one of his most famous lines into an absolutely hilarious gag. I laughed so hard I got some funny looks on the subway.
January 20, 2015
This is a fascinating book, providing an alternative history of Australia in WWII. I feel it would have better without the various fantastical elements, the alternative story being strong enough to stand on its own, but then I always struggle with magical realism. Well written with believable and engaging characters. Highly recommended.
Read
March 1, 2015Turgid.
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