Category Archives: Literature

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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Arts, Books, Education, Literature, Poetry

Book Review: Look Closer

NATIONAL YEAR OF READING

Intro: Published in late 2025, ‘Look Closer: How To Get More Out of Reading’ is the latest work by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a Professor of English Literature at Oxford.

Part memoir, part masterclass, the book is a “love letter” to the act of reading. The author argues that in our age of digital distraction and short-form content, the art of “slow reading” is more vital than ever

In the era of the smart phone and other devices, reading has become a dying art. In 2024, 40 per cent of Britons did not read or listen to a book. More than a third of adults are known to have given up reading for pleasure. In this digital age, it’s easy to see why. Small, compact devices have changed how we read: skimming rather than lingering over language, and the need to look for a quick fix of information.

Today, for too many of us, reading books has become a means to an end. We need to look no further than the armada of self-help authors promising to help you do it more quickly and, by implication, to read more overall. “Read more than 300 pages in one hour,” pledges one. “Speed Reading Faster: Maximise Your Success in Business and Study,” urges another.

The advice from literary artists is simple: ditch the idea that reading faster is better. Various movements have emerged in recent years, trying to help us get more out of life by taking it at a less frenetic pace: slow food, slow work, slow travel, even slow sex. “Slow reading” may sound rather different – the sort of thing that might evoke pity or scorn – but it can help break the bad habits into which many of us have fallen.

As the National Year of Reading is now upon us, there are certain things we can do to reverse the drift.

. Look closer at familiar classics

Some literary works have become so familiar that our eyes slide over them without stopping. But if we slow down our reading, even these works retain the power to surprise us – and to make us look at the world around us in a new and refreshing way.

Take the most famous speech in Hamlet:

“To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them?”

Hamlet’s famous question isn’t carried only by what he says, but by how he says it. That’s because his speech is written in lines of blank verse, 10 syllables long, that repeatedly topple over with an extra 11th syllable – “To be or not to be, that is the quest… ion” – then start again. Over and over, it’s synonymous with someone peering over the edge of a cliff before drawing back. Listening carefully to Hamlet allows us to see life (and death) from his perspective: the rhythm represents the way he’s thinking.

. Linger on little details

Another approach is to look again at a poem that’s often reprinted or published in anthologies – appropriate, since “anthology” literally means “a collection of flowers”:

I wandered lonely as a Cloud

That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd

A host of dancing Daffodils;

Along the Lake, beneath the trees,

Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.

Wordworth’s ambition was to awaken a more imaginative response to homely or neglected corners of the world, and that aim is captured in the smallest details of his verse. The present participle “dancing” shows how something that happened in the past is still happening in his memory. His line breaks work like double-takes, as he searches for exactly the right word for what he saw: “a crowd / A host”.

Finally, his choice of “host” reveals how he detects a divine presence hovering in the background (angels as the heavenly host), while also suggesting that the sight of all these laughing daffodils has somehow made him feel more at home in the world. It’s another piece of writing that doesn’t give us a set of finished thoughts, but instead introduces us to a different way of thinking.

. Embrace the suggestive and opaque

Some literary works are so brief they function as highly effective training aids for this much more measured approach. For example, there’s a famous short story, often erroneously attributed to Ernest Hemingway, that reads: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” That’s it – a tragedy in just six words. Written more than 30 years ago, it is still being thought about today.

Like all the best pieces of writing, it works like an imaginary dumdum bullet: it enters our minds and keeps on expanding. (If you want to discover who the original author was, you’re likely to be disappointed. Versions of this story date back to the early 1900s, and a classified ad reading “For sale: baby carriage, never used” can be found in an American newspaper published in 1883.)

. Ask yourself – or Sherlock – what a good reader is

Some books even contain helpful clues about how to read them. A character such as Sherlock Holmes is a model reader, for instance, because he notices every detail and shows how they combine into a meaningful whole. He sifts life for significance. Take The Boscombe Valley Mystery: Holmes assembles a whole series of tiny clues, including a bit of cigar ash that he establishes is from an Indian cigar, and a boot print that he deduces was made by someone with a limp.

At one point he says to Watson, “you see…”, and although it’s only a passing remark, it also works like a miniature version of the whole story. A literary detective makes us “see”, in the sense of showing us how to use our eyes more carefully, and then makes us “see” in the sense of understanding more about what we’ve just been reading (“Oh, I see!”).

In his 1881 book Daybreak (Morgenröthe), Friedrich Nietzsche explained that he was “a teacher of slow reading”. In an age of work, he wrote, “that is, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-scurry, which is so eager to ‘get things done’”, what was needed was an approach that would teach people “how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar”.

Nearly half a century and a half later, slow reading is something we need more than ever. We need to break the habit of reading just for information, on the page as well as online; we must get out of that horrid, uneven rhythm of scanning and skipping.

For when we pick up a book, we aren’t only trying to lose ourselves in it. If we’re willing to look closely enough, and to leave our mental doors ajar, we might find ourselves there.

– Look Closer by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is published by Fern Press, 352pp

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Arts, Books, Culture, Drama, Films, Literature

Hamnet

FILM REVIEW

Intro: This film adaptation is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s deeply moving historical novel that reimagines the life of William Shakespeare’s family, specifically focusing on the death of his only son, Hamnet, and how that tragedy may have influenced his most famous play, Hamlet

In 1596, William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, died at the age of 11. Sometime between three and five years later, Shakespeare wrote a play which almost shared the boy’s name, and which has since become one of the most lauded dramatic works in existence. The possible link between these two events was the subject of an acclaimed 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell.

Now comes this quietly astonishing screen adaptation – with a script sensitively adapted by O’Farrell and the film’s director, Chloe Zhao – and with Jessie Buckley as Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, and Paul Mescal as Shakespeare.

As in the book, Hathaway is here called Agnes, the name she was given in her father’s will. Her husband, meanwhile, is no famous playwright yet – his name is not mentioned for more than an hour – but the educated son of a Stratford glovemaker keeps pootling off to a London theatre for work. Agnes, meanwhile, remains with their three children – daughter Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet – close to the ancient woodland with which she shares a deep and strange bond.

– In cinemas now

We see in this play that Zhao has swapped the Terrence Malick-like lyricism of Nomadland and The Rider for a less insistent style that allows the story’s emotions to naturally drift to the fore. These emotions are often tough – Agnes’s life, alongside her mother-in-law (a superb Emily Watson), can be hard, even before the plaque comes that will claim the life of one of her children. But there are also constant flashes of everyday wonder and joy, many of which we’re invited to imagine might have inspired elements in Shakespeare’s future work. (The twins often disguise themselves as one another for a game: very Twelfth Night.)

The slow start to this production is groundwork, and the sober visual approach puts a greater burden and expectation on Zhao’s leads, but they don’t so much rise to the challenge as spiral above it. Mescal has never been better, while as Agnes, Buckley seems to discover her character before your eyes: every moment she plays rings transparently true.

This is a category of film that is described as devastating, heartbreaking, even hard to watch – and at times it is certainly all of these things. But, without any doubt, it isn’t a downer, thanks in no small part to the sublime final reel.

Here, Agnes makes the journey to her husband’s playhouse in London – only for her grief to be both complicated and clarified by this play he has written called Hamlet, and is now staging with acutely moving variations on the same two-humans-swap-places trick that the couple’s children once adored.

One of these springs from the casting: the actor appearing as the young Danish prince is played by Noah Jupe – the real-life older brother of the child actor, Jacobi Jupe, who portrayed Hamnet in the earlier scenes.

The play’s speeches are raw and revelatory, despite being among the most worn in the English tongue: that sense of freshness is one of the film’s wildest achievements. What Hamnet leaves you with isn’t sadness, but joy – at the human capacity to reckon with death’s implacability through art, or love, or just the basic act of carrying-on in its defiance. It blows you back on to the street on a gust of pure exhilaration. 

Hamnet U cert, 125 min

Verdict: An exceptionally delivered adaptation ★★★★★

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