Undercover

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday May 17, 2008

Susan Wyndham

SON OF A GUN

When Simon Littlewood, the international director of the Random House Group, visited from London last week, the book he was plugging was a first novel by Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World (William Heinemann, hardcover in June, paperback August). The author's name won't ring any bells but it is the nom de plume of Nicholas Cornwell, the son of John Cornwell, better known as John Le Carre.

The 530-page novel is well described as "equal parts raucous adventure, comic odyssey, geek nirvana and cool epic". Its mixture of fantasy, realism and humour has been likened to that of Douglas Adams. It is also beautifully written and not at all the lean prose of Le Carre, though it is in part a global thriller. In a world destroyed by nuclear war, a narrow band of life is supported by the mysterious Jorgmund Pipe and when the pipe catches fire Gonzo Lubitsch and the narrator investigate.

Harkaway (pictured), born in Cornwall in 1972, is the son of Le Carre's second marriage to Valerie Jane Eustace, a book editor. He studied at Cambridge and his previous writing includes film scripts and "a brochure for a company making modular bottle-capping machinery". He was paid #300,000 ($622,000) for the novel. In an interview with The Observer, he distinguishes his writing from his father's: "I might inherit some spleen, but Dad writes very spare, elegant, concentrated books that have an incredible through line. My book is whimsical and full of digressions. I can get terribly excited about the structure of a squid's eyeball."

FIRES OF IGNORANCE

This week marked 75 years since the Nazi book burnings of May 1933, covered in Book Burnings (Palgrave, July) by an Australian academic and rare book dealer, Matthew Fishburn (pictured). He is interviewed on AbeBooks.com, where he explains the burnings as a Nazi propaganda stunt started by students and carried on by citizens.

"They have become a cultural benchmark, a popular analogy, a common insult (to burn a book is to be fascist), and even now, anyone caught burning books must expect comparisons with the regime," he says. "But are they the worst in history? I am not keen to make a league table of burnings. In terms of strict censorship, the efforts in the Soviet Union, beginning in the 1920s, would certainly make the most obvious comparison. In my experience, the most well-known book fires are: the burning/burnings of the Library at Alexandria; the burning of the Library of Congress by the British; the loss of Louvain Library in the German advance of 1914; the attacks on Salman Rushdie; and the recent artillery bombardment of the library in Sarajevo."

HELP BEAT MS

After its success last year, Throw the Book at MS will raise more money for research into multiple sclerosis next month. The major Sydney event will be at Paddington RSL on June 4 at 7.30pm (bookings 9360 4128) with a literary trivia quiz for book-club teams. Or you can donate funds raised at your own book-club meeting in June. Groups that have already pledged support are called Novel Approach, Literature Ladies, The Naked Readers and the Sunday Arvo Book Club. Register interest at throw.the.book@hotmail.com. See www.msra.org.au and www.f5m.org.au.

YOUNG WRITER AWARD

Randa Abdel-Fattah (pictured) has won the $7500 Kathleen Mitchell Award 2008 for her novel Ten Things I Hate About Me. The judges of the award, for writers under the age of 30, chose Abdel-Fattah's book about being a young Lebanese Muslim woman in Sydney's western suburbs because "her writing style is perfectly suited to the form of the popular young adult novel and she tackled a number of tricky issues -- teenage sexuality, family relations, politics and cultural identity - in an entertaining and stimulating way."

They were disappointed that only six novels were entered. Many young people are now writing for film, television, zines and games or are blogging, they said.

www.smh.com.au/undercover