Jennifer Mills (1)Critiques

This book had potential, but it is in need of serious culling. I found myself losing interest after one too many long overstayed trips down memory lane. The main character was so caught up in her memories that practically nothing at all happened in the present. I also didn't find her to be a believable 70 year old, neither did I believe her relationship with Grace to be anything worth the 384pages written about it; it felt cold to me.

The Airways is a book that rewards patience and some re-reading.  The reward is that the novel triggers some very interesting ideas.

This is the blurb:

I had a body once before. I didn't always love it. I knew the skin as my limit, and there were times I longed to leave it.

I knew better than to wish for this.

This is the story of Yun. It's the story of Adam.
Two young people. A familiar chase.

But this is not a love story.
It's a story of revenge, transformation, survival.

Feel something, the body commands. Feel this.
But it's a phantom . . . I go untouched.

They want their body back.

Who are we, if we lose hold of the body?
What might we become?

The Airways shifts between Sydney and Beijing, unsettling the boundaries of gender and power, consent and rage, self and other, and even life and death.

It's only fair to warn you, however, that in the beginning, I could not make sense of it.  I read two chapters at bedtime, put it aside and read something less challenging, and started again in the morning.  Trusting this author whose work I've admired since I read Gone in 2011, I just kept reading and slowly the dual narratives came together to form an intriguing whole.

I hesitate to declare Adam the central character even though the narrative about his physical and mental states in Sydney and Beijing is central to the story.  That's because another narrative that runs alongside Adam's, features a presence in pursuit of him.  They are certainly not a 'character'. This presence is too corporeal to be called a ghost, too diffused to be nameable, and too nonspecific to have a gendered pronoun or one that's singular or plural. The reader learns that we do not need to know this but that we cannot assume that they are or were a non-binary human or even living or dead.

This presence moves among the people who cross their paths, entering strangers' bodies in various ways and gradually learning to master them in some ways, at the very least making them feel uneasy or dizzy without knowing why.  Are they benign?  It seems not.  Some kind of vengeance is in play.

The sequences in Beijing are superbly claustrophobic.  The air pollution we hear about is pervasive: it clings to skin and eyes and throat and airways and there is no escape from it.  Adam's physical vulnerability is exacerbated by his inability to learn even rudimentary Chinese; it makes him dependent on others.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/08/06/the-airways-by-jennifer-mills/

Could not get into this one

Big Ship

31 December 2019

I loved this book, and I'm still thinking about it. That's a sign that it has some important things to say, I think. There are also many phrases that I noted as worth re-reading, and adding to my list of cool things written by excellent authors.
The story in this novel is like a cracked mirror - there are shards of time and we don't always exactly know where or rather when we are - but every piece shines with reflections of reality that we almost recognise, but of course everything looks different now that reality has been broken apart and reassembled.
This novel charts the dystopian future of a careless Australia, where the environmental damage is so gross that there is no future to be had. The wondrous, worrying dreams of local girl Samandra (Sam) are dismissed as, Cassandra-like, she debates how much to tell the people around her, people who prefer not to believe. Her mother Ivy in particular is determine dto be head-in-the-sand, spending years trying to have Sam's migraines diagnosed correctly. The resulting pronouncement of 'dyschronia' never quite settles the question, for Ivy, of whether Sam is truly foreseeing the future or just dreaming vividly and strangely. The entrepreneur Ed (who is meant to be charming, but I have pre-raised hackles about this kind of guy) is a credible saviour-cum-villain - or is it villain-cum-saviour? - of the town. Sam's best friend Jill is probably the most likeable of all the characters. I loved the device of the 'chorus' of locals whose comments intersperse Sam's dreams and Sam's story.
Equally prescient of a dire future and nostalgic of the simple ignorance of the past, this elegant story of loss and the inevitability of bad choices deserves an enduring place among the best Australian books of recent years.

The first thing to say about Jennifer Mills’ fantastic new novel is that you should not be put off by its title. You don’t need to know what it means, you don’t need to worry about pronouncing it properly because even if you do get it right, the librarian or the shop assistant will probably look puzzled anyway. Best to write it down on a piece of paper!
(And no, it’s not the name of that blue creature on the front cover. That’s a type of cephalopod, better known to us as a cuttlefish, the internal shell of which people who keep birds in cages use for the birds to nibble on).
It’s a most disquieting novel. The people of a coastal town wake up one day to find that the sea has gone from their coastline. The sands are covered with putrescent creatures and rubbish and everyone goes indoors to avoid the revolting smell. The scene of devastation is too big to contemplate a community clean-up, but these people don’t work together as a community anyway. The first person plural narrator who tells us this is world-weary and fatalistic: speaking on behalf of the town this voice conveys a sense of hopelessness and of people no longer in control of their destiny. The only time these people are ever proactive is when a young girl called Sam foresees a great flood and they all take out flood insurance so that they can cash in on it.
Sam’s real name is Samandra, a name with echoes of the Greek oracle Cassandra, who was doomed to have her prophecies disbelieved. Sam’s narrative is told from her point-of-view but not in her voice. Her perspective is limited because she’s only seven when the novel begins, and she doesn’t understand the visions that come to her when she has dreadful, disabling migraines. She sees the future only in fragments and when she tries to explain what she’s seen of course her mother doesn’t believe her. She takes Sam on a round of medical appointments to deal with the migraine, and she either dismisses everything Sam tries to convey or she comes up with a rational explanation for it.
Until, that is, Sam foresees six men fall to their death from a tower in the asphalt works.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/03/13/dyschronia-by-jennifer-mills-bookreview/

The Rest is Weight is a collection of short stories that explores the ordinary and the surreal, the search for human connection, the weight of loneliness, with a mix of wry humor and dark longing. Evoking a sense of place – the dry dusty outback of Australia, a Beijing street, these stories have diverse settings, Mills drawing on the places author Jennifer Mills has spent time in, including Mexico and Russian. There are twenty seven stories included in The Rest Is Weight, mostly around a half a dozen pages long. Some have been previously published but the majority are exclusive to this publication.

I found all of the stories beautifully written, Mills demonstrates a wonderful facility with language, deftly conjuring time, place and personality. I was surprised at how easily Mills slips into to such a wide variety of characters, her protagonists are female and male, young and old, gay and straight yet they all convincing.

While I enjoyed each of the stories, each very different from the others, a few did stand out for me.

‘The capital of missing persons‘ has my favourite beginning:

“It used to be known as the murder capital of Australia, but these days Adelaide is the capital of missing persons. Are people getting better at hiding the bodies? Or are the victims leaving, deserting the city before the murderers have a chance?” (p52)

I think Hello, Satan (p98)resonates with me because of the small town in which I live, where for some, a bargain with the devil may seem to be their only option to escape the cycle of poverty and dysfunction they are trapped in.

Moth (p192) took my breath away and listening to Mills read it on her blog here gives it extra impact.

Other favourites include The Milk in The Sky, The Opposite of Peace and Heat.

The Rest is Weight is a remarkable read, the stories are literary yet accessible, and speak to a wide audience. This is a volume you can dip in and out of at will but I was compelled to read it cover to cover. As I don’t often read short story collections and I will admit to initially being nervous about reviewing this book but I am pleased to say The Rest is Weight is easily one of the best collections of short stories by a single author I have ever read.