The Power And Passion

The Age

Saturday May 24, 2008

Kate Holden

My Reading Life: Adventures in Books

By Bob Carr

Viking, $35

Bob Carr wants to inspire us with his favourite books, says Kate Holden.

YOU WOULD EXPECT BOB Carr, the former premier and intellectual eminence grise of the NSW Labor party and former journalist, to have read a lot. He has read broadly, deeply and astutely. And he wants to tell us all about it, to introduce both novice and experienced readers to treasures he believes are essential to an informed life.

As a guide through the great literary bazaar, in some ways My Reading Life works very well. In others, it is the kind of book that reeks of vanity project. And yet among some confused indulgence there are many illuminating and inspiring moments.

The book is a kind of reference work, with its entries for particular works or themes gathered under such categories as The Silence (good versus evil), Magic Moments (20th-century American fiction) and Labor in the Modern World. In a meditative tour through his bookshelves Carr includes works about, inter alia, the Holocaust; political biographies of obscure presidential candidates; historical fiction about ancient Rome; Shakespeare; the fiction of Patrick White, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal; ancient epics such as Gilgamesh; the Bible; histories of Stalinism and Chinese communism; and the comedic value of Chekhov.

He eclectically blends personal reviews, autobiographical anecdotes, mini-essays and a kind of school-text crib style. And he is adamant that his selections, even the ones he dislikes ("Cormac McCarthy is overrated"), are worth discussing.

Those who expect a literature-inflected political memoir will be disappointed but there are motifs throughout of Carr's preoccupations, such as an ongoing lament for the perils of socialism and a dedication to humanism. He is haunted by the Holocaust and the devastation wrought by Stalin and Mao; he celebrates heroes of political clear-sightedness, citing de Tocqueville and Disraeli.

In an interesting but impassive discussion of Labor's history, he asks: "What is the ethos of the ALP?" In answer he nominates "a lot of egalitarianism but at the same time a cult of the leader". This from experience, the reader presumes.

The book opens with big guns: Primo Levi's If This is a Man ("the most important book of the 20th century") and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Both these have had a deep impact on Carr, and he uses them to launch into a serious discussion of good, evil and the place of God.

And from there to a great meaty stew of chapters devoted to what is obviously Carr's great passion, political history and biography. The man has read everything, even the oddest out-of-print monographs. As a primer for the subject, it probably beats anything outside of a political science reading list but, interesting and surprising as they are, perhaps these chapters might be merely browsed by those not quite as obsessed as Carr.

He is more idiosyncratic on fiction and the classical canon. In these chapters Carr is passionate and perspicacious but sometimes his enthusiasm confounds things. He gives an odd bullet-point list of the most amusing lines in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time ("This 12-volume novel may be the best I have ever read"; one wonders how many 12-volume novels are in his collection), which are not, out of context, funny at all; he adds non-sequitur remarks; there are accounts of personal encounters with authors that approach name-dropping.

Some reviews are considered and polished, or pedantic, while others read like jotted notes. And he has an irritating tendency to direct attention with imperatives, frequently commanding us to "read such-and-such" - including one such directive to his own work.

There have been several books published recently on Great Works One Must Read, and more digressive works such as Alberto Manguel's brilliant A Reading Diary. Carr's is less coherent. But he succeeds in piquing curiosity and inspiring the reader to follow his suggestions, and that is, after all, his intent.

"What you are about to read is better than the book," he declares at the start of one review. Carr has given a broad, piquant and informative survey of some of the world's great (incidentally, mostly male) literature, and as a gift to a student, for example, it would serve very well as a starting-point to a life of vigorous reading. His zeal is persuasive and his erudition impressive. While the personal approach makes for a lively style, sometimes the personality talks over the message.

Kate Holden's In my Skin is published by Text..

© 2008 The Age

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