Grant Sheehan
5 QUICK QUESTIONS: GRANT SHEEHAN
Your book reflects on the role of travel in our lives, which has taken on a different meaning post-pandemic, in a time of climate crisis. We are now doing long-haul flights again. Is this a good thing?
This is a painful question to confront because the honest answer is no. As an avid traveller I wish it was otherwise. In 2019, just prior to the pandemic, the total number of passengers on scheduled flights globally reached a staggering 4.4 billion. Coupled with over-tourism, this unparalleled travel boom was having an adverse effect on our planet in multiple ways. If the world is serious about slowing the climate crisis, the number of international flights will need to be greatly decreased. But it’s hard to see an alternative. A new aircraft technology for global travel — with little or no carbon footprint if that is even possible — may be well into the future.
Should we be satisfied with looking at pictures of precious places like Antarctica and the Okavango Delta, rather than burdening those places with our presence?
There may soon come a time when that is the only option for many, as the cost of travelling escalates, and many destinations become compromised by a severe climate crisis. Travel in our own ‘backyard’ will probably become more popular, as well as travel in the Virtual Reality world. VR will become a growth industry; utilising fully immersive haptic suits will enable sensory experience, a sense of touch, temperature. It won’t be the same as actually being there, but it will become a close second. It will also be relatively inexpensive, with no limit on the destinations you can access, including space. As more people embrace it, the number of VR providers and the sophistication of the technology will grow. Apple’s forthcoming metaverse project will be one example of this.
There are lots of ifs and buts here, but one thing is for sure, the nature of travel, as we have known it, will be profoundly changed.
What does travel mean for you personally?
To me, travel has always been important. I see my travel experiences as highlights of my life. The fact that we can step outside our normal lives, for a time, and discover new places, meet new people, experience new cultures, is both life-enhancing and mind-expanding.
What is your most treasured travel memory, and why?
My most treasured travel experience was my trip to Antarctica. Being there is the closest thing to travelling off-world, without actually leaving the planet. The enormity of the Antarctic continent, the harsh uncompromising climate, the whiteness, and clear dust-free atmosphere, create the strange sensation of making one feel insignificant in this environment and time, while simultaneously intensifying and heightening one’s sense of existence. To me, it’s the ultimate travel destination.
What are the bucket list places you hope to get to?
I am very fortunate in that I have managed to visit most of my ‘bucket list’ destinations. Iceland is next, and then, the last one left, is going into space. To my regret, I am probably too fiscally challenged to ever make it off-world. With the growth of the new Space economy — involving private sector operators like SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin — space tourism lies in the not-too-distant future. It will always be expensive though, and like the early commercial flights of the 1920s, rather hazardous.
In Memory of Travel by Grant Sheehan (Phantom House Books, $60) is out now.
REVIEW
Clarke
Holly Throsby
(Allen & Unwin, $37)
Reviewed by Greg Fleming
Throsby made a name for herself as a musician in the Australian alt-country music scene over the last decade, releasing six solo albums. She tired however of the constant touring and has since settled in a small town and begun a second career as a mystery novelist.
Indeed, it’s the depiction of the fictitious New South Wales small town of Clarke in the 90s that resonates here — Throsby capturing the dull routine, odd characters, and quirky charm in sparse, moving prose.
She has described this, her third novel, as “an exploration of people trying to avoid pain” and was inspired to write the novel after listening to the popular podcast The Teacher’s Pet about Lynette Dawson, an Australian nurse, homemaker and mother who disappeared without a trace in 1982.
Despite intensive investigations her whereabouts, dead or alive, has never been determined although the podcast, which had over 50 million downloads brought to light new evidence leading to a murder conviction for her husband in August.
Clarke is not a conventional mystery — its narrative develops slowly, Throsby taking her time sketching in the background of her two lead characters. Indeed the author has described it as an “anti-crime novel”.
Her lead character Leonie was a neighbour and friend to Ginny Lawson (Throsby’s Lynette Dawson equivalent) who had disappeared six years earlier.
Lawson’s husband cites her post-natal depression and suspects suicide but Leonie is convinced he had something to do with it.
Six years on Leonie looks after her sister’s five-year-old son and works as a travel agent — advising clients about destinations she’s never been to.
Meanwhile Barney is now renting the house where Ginny disappeared and much of the novel alternates between interior perspectives of the two.
The novel begins as police turn up at Barney’s door armed with a search warrant.
They’re soon digging up the backyard of the rental looking for new evidence.
Throsby however keeps us in the dark regarding vital details of her two leads — where is Barney’s wife, why does he watch his teenage son from a distance as he serves at the local McDonalds? What happened to Leonie’s sister?
If this is more accurately described as a mystery adjacent novel there’s much to like in Throsby’s depiction of early 90s Clarke. Her time in small regional towns has given her an eagle eye. “Leonie read the newspaper on one of the metal benches in the Plaza, next to a discarded McDonald’s drink container and an artificial plant.”
Readers seeking a gritty outback thriller (a genre Throsby is often lumped into since arriving on the Australian crime fiction scene in 2016) will be disappointed.
Throsby lets the reader in on details gradually. She gives an almost day-to-day narrative of her characters’ ordinary, small-town lives, while looping back to key incidents from the past that both are struggling to escape from.
She’s less interested in the mechanics of crime than the effects of it on those surrounding an event and what feelings it brings to the surface.
Throughout her focus remains on these two lonely, troubled neighbours — the Lawson plot sometimes fading into the background.
Clarke won’t be for everyone — those in doubt might like to search out her music on Spotify for Throsby’s novels tend to tread similar ground — folksy, moving and intimate.
If you respond to that, you’ll love Clarke.
REVIEW
Desert Star
Michael Connelly
(Allen and Unwin, $37)
Reviewed by Craig Sisterson
Pills in a drawer and a visitor at the door. Retired detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch is approaching a crossroads at the opening of master crime writer Michael Connelly’s new novel, Desert Star. Thirty years after Connelly introduced us to the Vietnam War tunnel rat turned dogged LAPD investigator, Bosch is feeling his age. All 70 years of it. Connelly has never shied away from having his jazz-loving creation — undoubtedly one of the greatest detectives in modern crime fiction — feel the effects of the passing years and slew of cases.
And it’s an old case — and the opportunity to right a horrible wrong — that lights a fire for a creaking Bosch in Desert Star when Renée Ballard comes calling to his home.
In a way Ballard (first introduced as a solo star in 2017′s The Late Show then teamed with Bosch in recent novels including 2021′s The Dark Hours) is like an unexpected cover song of Bosch, sharing some underlying traits while being her own striking, original thing.
A few decades younger, a surf-loving female, Ballard has had to stare down misogyny and battle her bosses and the politicos within the Los Angeles Police Department in different ways than Bosch ever did. But both are formidably driven detectives who see the hunt for killers as not just a good job with a pension, but a life mission. Seeking justice for all victims. As Bosch famously says, on page and screen: “Everybody counts, or nobody counts”.
In Desert Star, the victims Bosch is fighting for are an entire family. Turning up unexpectedly at Bosch’s door, Ballard baits Bosch with a final chance to harpoon his personal white whale. Almost a decade ago, the Gallagher family — husband, wife, two young children — were murdered and buried in the desert. Bosch thought he knew who did it, but could never prove it. Now with a city councilman inspired by his own sister’s murder reinstating the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit with Ballard at its head, can Bosch finally find justice? As a volunteer?
In recent years Connelly has been pulling double-duty as a novelist and TV producer (as well as sometimes screenwriter) on hit streaming dramas Bosch, The Lincoln Lawyer, and Bosch: Legacy, based on various books from his oeuvre. Despite leapfrogging retirement age himself, Connelly seems to not only be getting busier and busier, but maintaining and even elevating his leading standards as a crime novelist. Desert Star is a terrific tale, full of tension and intrigue, set against a backdrop of advancing science and worsening perceptions of police departments. Connelly quickly draws readers in and has us eagerly riding along with Ballard and Bosch as the pages whir by. Two alpha dog detectives who’d happily work alone but collaborate and clash in an authentic and entertaining way while seeking justice.
JUST OUT
Auckland Zoo: 100 Years, 100 Stories (Aotearoa Books, $55) charts the development of this beloved institution from animal park to conservation centre. Short chapters cover topics as diverse as elephant care, notable zookeepers and community outreach. The inviting cover image is a super close-up shot of native rough gecko’s skin.
That most enduring of Pythons, Michael Palin, travelled to Iraq earlier this year to record a series and produce the book Into Iraq (Hutchinson, $40). It was a two-week journey and the book is more scrapbook than travelogue, but at 78 and bearing in mind the complexities of travel produced by Covid and the war in Ukraine, you can forgive him for that.
Following the massive success of her autobiography Becoming, former US First Lady Michele Obama has written The Light We Carry (Viking, $60), in which she shares the tools she uses to cope with challenges in her private and public life. With wit and intelligence she explains the meaning behind “when they go low, we go high” and offers a glimpse into the dynamics of the Obama household.
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