Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Australia, Books, Literature

Book Review: A Far-flung Life

LITERARY REVIEW

– The story is a sweeping epic that follows the MacBride family on a million-acre sheep station in Western Australia, exploring themes of secrets, tragedy, and resilience across several generations

In ML Stedman’s immensely popular 2012 debut, The Light Between Oceans, moral ambiguity was the eddying undercurrent, in a story about a couple who discover a baby on the shores of their remote island home off the coast of Western Australia. That novel spurred an international bidding war and sparked a lacklustre film adaptation. In her second publication, A Far-flung Life, Stedman remains just as preoccupied by what governs our understanding of right and wrong, as well as how we define our sense of family and identity.

Also set in Western Australia, A Far-flung Life begins in 1958 and follows several generations of the MacBride family on their million-acre sheep ranch, Meredith Downs. Here, small decisions have vast consequences: when the patriarch, Phil, swerves to avoid a kangaroo while driving home from the market, he and his eldest son, Warren, are killed. Matt, the youngest son, only just survives. Lorna, suddenly a widow, takes over the reins of the ranch, now the sole parent not only of Matt, whose amnesia from his head injury forces him to redefine who he is and the life he had once hoped for, but also of her “fiery, mercurial” daughter, Rosie.

As the years pass, other figures drift in and out of the MacBride orbit: there’s the taciturn Pete Peachey, a former prisoner of war in Japan who culls the kangaroos on the family homestead; and Miles Beaumont, a dapper Englishman of noble blood who’s learning the ropes on the station. Everyone has their secrets, the albatross they carry. Rosie’s causes her to flee to the outback, though she returns not long after, with a newborn in tow. She, too, will make a decision that reverberates for the MacBrides over the decades – particularly for Matt, who must learn what it means to live a life indelibly marked by unfathomable events.

A recurring theme through this attentive novel is a “forgetment”, a Stedman coinage and idea not for a memory but for a “thing you forget”. The struggle of writing our own narrative when it is violently altered and the way we are shaped as much by conscious knowing as by unknowing (what we hope time will dissolve) – these richly human notions are handled with skilled care. Just as the unflinching land can “rearrange itself without warning or permission”, so can our lives, our sense of self. As Pete Peachey reflects, “’Us’ is an ever-changing thing.” Throughout A Far-flung Life, the at-times herculean labour of weathering that change is shown as not an interruption of life but a part of it.

Time and its fickle passing are insightfully examined. The nature of loss and its temporal warping – where “one minute didn’t have the same length as another” – stands in counterpoint to the indifferent, relentless passage of time on the land. Hours, days, weeks: these human-made creations, the contours of which seem to blur, are only one way we mark our passage. There’s also “the gradual curl of a ram’s horns”, “the stretching and the shrinking of the light”. Stedman elicits, too, how when dazed by grief, one can experience time as stasis: for Matt, forever tied to a cataclysmic single moment, “maybe the roo was always going to bound in front of the truck; was still bounding in some eternal present”.

As the MacBrides learn how to endure the challenges besetting them, it’s a testament to Stedman’s deftness and skill that A Far-flung Life, racked with calamity, only occasionally approaches the mawkish. Every loss feels earned, and what may have otherwise been a syrupy saga is instead a palpable examination of loss, memory, and identity. Her breadth of research is also fully alive in the novel’s expansive detail: the landscape is rendered with intimate familiarity, as is the quotidian minutiae of life on the station. Stedman’s masterful control of perspective, shifting between multiple characters as well as expanses of time and place, culminates in a remarkable, poignant tale.

The moral ambiguity animating the novel lies in things which are best left buried; which parts of a life are allowed to become “forgetments”. This isn’t a question of feigned ignorance but rather of what role forgetting plays in forgiveness – not only of others but of oneself. The author holds the inquiry up like a glimmering piece of quartz, illuminating its shadowed recesses and fractures. The answers, she suggests, aren’t important as the life lived in pursuit of them.

– A Far-flung Life by ML Stedman is published by Penguin, 448pp

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Artificial Intelligence, Arts, Intellectual Property, Publishing, Technology

Authors should be protected over big tech

COPYRIGHT LAWS AND AI

Intro: Creative artists and writers are voicing their anger at AI theft of their work with ‘Human Authored’ logos and an empty book. The government must listen

DURING last week’s London Book Fair, The Society of Authors stamped its books with “Human Authored” logos, in scenes that might have come from a dystopian novel. They described its labelling scheme as “an important sticking plaster to protect and promote human creativity in lieu of AI labelled content in the marketplace”.

Entrants to the fair were also given copies of Don’t Steal This Book, an anthology of some 10,000 writers including Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, Malorie Blackman, Jeanette Winterson, and Richard Osman. The pages of the book are completely blank, but the back cover states: “The UK government must not legalise book theft to benefit AI companies.” The message is clear and simple: writers have had enough.

The book fair arrived before the government is due to deliver its progress report on AI and copyright, after proposals for a relaxation of existing laws caused outrage last year. Philippa Gregory, the novelist, described the plans for an “opt-out” policy, which puts the onus on writers to refuse permission for their work to be trawled, as akin to putting a sign on your front door asking burglars to pass by.

– 10,000 authors publish an empty book to protest against the theft of books by tech companies to train AI models

According to a University of Cambridge study last autumn, almost 60% of published authors believe their work has been used to train large language models without consent or reimbursement. And nearly 40% said their income had already fallen as a result of generative AI or machine-made novels, a digital incarnation of Orwell’s Versificator in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Factual books are clearly most susceptible to ChatGPT and other AI generative tools. While sales in fiction are rising, sales of nonfiction were down 6% last year compared with 2024. But three nonfiction books, all by female authors, bucked the trend: Nobody’s Girl, Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir of abuse; A Hymn to Life, Gisèle Pel icot’s testimony and account of her ordeal at the hands of her ex-husband; and Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s exposé of working at Facebook. The success of these first-person narrations show the powerful reach of nonfiction beyond the world of publishing. These are painfully human stories; readers must be able to trust in the authenticity of their voices.

Last year, novelist Sarah Hall requested that her publisher Faber, print a “Human Written” stamp on her latest book, Helm. “AI might mimic the words more rapidly, but . . . it hasn’t bled on the page,” she said. “And it doesn’t have a family to support.”

Writers’ livelihoods must not be sacrificed to the promise of economic growth. The UK’s creative industries contributed £124bn to the UK economy in 2023, of which £11bn came from publishing. The Society of Authors is requesting consent and fair payment for use of work, and transparency as to how a book was “written”. These are hardly radical propositions. But in an era of fake news and AI slop, they are sadly necessary. Writers and creative artists need more than sticking plasters. They need robust legislation.

A House of Lords report recently published lays out two possible futures: one in which the UK “becomes a world-leading home for responsible, legalised artificial intelligence (AI) development” and another in which it continues “to drift towards tacit acceptance of large-scale, unlicensed use of creative content”. One scenario protects UK artists, the other benefits global tech companies. To avoid a world of empty content, the choice is clear.

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Arts, Broadcasting, Culture, Opera, Theatre

Fires of the Moon

MUSICAL-THEATRE

– Fires of the Moon is powerfully imagined and atmospherically shot Credit: Channel 4

This powerfully imagined and atmospheric new piece of music-theatre, with an outstanding cast of Welsh singers, is a rare creation that blends film, opera, and drama. A screening such as this rarely makes it to television.

Originally an opera commissioned by OPRA Cymru, first shown as a film at the Edinburgh Film Festival last summer, Fires of the Moon (Channel 4/S4C) is not an example of an opera setting a book, but rather a free imagining of some scenes from Un Nos Ola Leuad (1961) by Caradog Prichard – a modern classic that has become familiar in translation as One Moonlit Night. It was a novel initially criticised for its unrelenting view of Welsh life but became accepted as a realistic reflection of a changing world.

Haunting and elegiac, the visual style conjures up the bleak landscapes of Wales – slate quarries, gloomy pubs, shining lakes and distant hills, with the evocative steam engine of Blaenau Ffestiniog puffing through. In the 1950s, a son Hogyn returns by train to visit his mother who, a generation ago, was confined to an asylum. But why? The story unravels from a youthful romance between Hogyn and Jini, replayed in a cinema that he watches with Jini as the usherette, and the tale pulls no punches in its depiction of an unforgiving society.

Commencing with what sounds like a deliberate homage to the music of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius (and even a nod to his unfinished Third Symphony), the beautifully judged score by Gareth Glyn nourishes the narrative. Most will not know how well the Welsh text is reflected musically, except that its subtitled vocal lines sit perfectly within the framework that Glyn creates in his idiom, at once romantic and eclectic, that draws on everything from film music to Britten and Berg.

The orchestral playing by the Welsh National Opera Orchestra is vividly textured and strongly audible under conductor Iwan Teifion Davies (who is also the co-librettist with Patrick Young). The scenario by Marc Evans, though arguably lacking in contrast, allows for a choral number in the pub, a tense tea-time scene, and an intricate quartet in the car on the way to the gloom of the asylum.

Tenor Huw Ynyr is outstanding as the grown Hogyn, as is Dylan Jones as Hogyn the child, writing the story on the old typewriter as well as living it. Annes Elwy is Jini; the tormented figure of Mam is powerfully drawn by soprano Elin Pritchard. The attack by her brother and the scene of her awkward removal to the Denbigh Asylum are the most painful parts of the story.

Chris Forster directs; the black-and-white cinematography under Ben Chads is consistently excellent, and the synchronisation of the voices – always the trickiest aspect of opera with the voices shot separately for film – is pretty good.

This is an absorbing piece of music-theatre which demonstrates the distinctiveness and best of Welsh music and film-making. It also offers a way forward for transforming the medium of staged opera into compelling film.

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