This can't be happening!

Hello, dear readers!

I’ve been having a lot of fun lately not doing RQF reports and (obviously) not blogging. I have been, however, indulging a little too vigorously in my own selfish pass-time of being amazed at the true drongos out there floating around the internet, leaving anonymous comments on Audrey's excellent blog. Which you must all read. If you glance at the bottom of the comments on my last birthday invitation post, you'll see the confusingly hilarious extent to which these debates run.

Aside from that I've also been wrestling with mixed feelings about the election. I realise that I should be happy, ecstatic that K-Rudd got in, that a Labor government probably won't treat its citizens like naughty children. But there's a pause in that sentence, around the word 'probably'. I have lived my entire politically interested life under Howard. My understanding of the words 'government', 'politician' and 'representation' are enmeshed with the words 'disappointment', 'disillusion' and 'resentment'. For me, elected members of parliament are people who look after other people's mortgages at the cost of the next generation's education and health. I never stopped being angry with the federal government for as long as I could understand that what was going on in Canberra effected how I felt about my country and my future. I did stop hoping though. Even on election day when we drove down to Port Elliot to watch it all unfold on a friend's TV, I felt less excited than simply resigned. I had voted. I had done all I could bring myself to do to stop the tide of Australia's trained, ingrained selfishness for yet another election. But if Howard had scraped it in again, I would have nodded and gone back to my studies and my writing and looking out for myself and the one's I care for.
'That's what he's turned Australia into,' I would have said. 'We're not interested in how we look to other countries, we're not interested in art or soul or each other. A few are, but the majority of us just want to work and watch TV. Not even the threat of exploitation could stir us from our conviction that if we all just work hard enough and look out for ourselves and our families, then everything will be great and comfortable forever.'

Now that the unthinkable has happened - a Labor government - I literally don't know what to believe. It is as though the sky were suddenly legislated green. Kyoto, an apology to the Stolen Generations, scrapping of Work Choices - they are all happening, but I still don't believe it. There must be a catch in it somewhere. I'm almost almost hard-wired to think like this. I say almost because ... I don't know. Nothing I know tells me that my government will perform in my name as I would like them to. I'm almost waiting for Kevin to support the capital punishment of drug smugglers or privatise the roads or something so that I can stop floating around in this political dream world where the rest of the country isn't taught to distrust higher education.
I am the man on the right:



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I mentioned earlier that I've been enjoying Audrey's latest blog posts, not just for their lively comments pages, but for the fact that they are reprints of her published work as the latest opinion columnist for the Sunday Mail (Radelaide's local Sunday tabloid). So she has inspired me! Not to write opinion pieces for the local arm of Murdoch's Minions, but to publish on my own blog, things that I've had printed on real paper in real life. I've done this once before, my review of Randa Abdel-Fattah's Does My Head Look Big In This? actually secured me a regular reviewing spot in the young adult book reviewing magazine Viewpoint, printed by Melbourne Uni and also received a few comments about how harsh I was being on a fellow first-time young adult author. Rest assured that I have continued on my quest to "tell it like it is" in the world of young adult novels, publishing the following review in the latest edition (available in your local library ... maybe) on an adventure book aptly named The Cursed.

The Cursed by Michael Panckridge (Black Dog Books, 2007, 9781921167553, $16.95) has one of the most imaginative ideas for an adventure novel on the shelves today. An invisible tribe in the Amazon jungle, a sinister, secret society which has vowed to rid the world of evil and the twelve-year-old schoolboy whose destiny is entwined in both. The concept is intriguing and exciting for readers of all ages. Any author talented enough to dream up these elements and brave enough to combine them in a 300-page adventure novel must surely produce tale of worth telling, indeed, worth reading!

The Cursed, while being a story worth telling, is not a book worth reading. The standard of editing is such that there doesn’t seem to have been any kind of intervention between the author printing out his manuscript and Black Dog Books giving the go-ahead for a print run. Ignoring the punctuation that veers from clumsy to incorrect and the many instances in which words were missing from the text, it is almost as though the author were deliberately trying to break every commonly-accepted rule for readable writing. For example: ‘Show don’t tell’ is a mantra for anyone who has ever come in contact with the supply end of fiction. After a sentence describing one of three hostages telling diverting stories of travel and adventure to his fellow prisoners, Panckridge felt it necessary to add: ‘He was trying to lighten the mood’ (p.219). Apparently the motive for telling diverting stories to one’s fellow captives in a hostage situation was unclear. Clichés are another aspect of writing that should begin disappearing once the author can think of their own descriptors. Panckridge actually has a laser beam slice through metal ‘like a hot knife through butter’ (p.74).

Moving on to characterisation, but staying with clichés, the schoolboy’s mentor and guardian warns the bad guys that they ‘won’t be getting away with this’ on two separate occasions. In the previous issue of Viewpoint I recommend readers watch a Jackie Chan movie instead of reading Jimmy Coates: Revenge. In the case of The Cursed I believe that an old Scooby-Doo cartoon will suffice. It was a surprise at the end when the villain didn’t complain that he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids (which, predictably, is the very reason he does not get away with it).

On the back cover James Moloney himself claims that the arch bad guy, Raymond Brampton, is ‘surely the most sinister villain since Voldemort’. Voldemort is an evil wizard who enslaves, tortures and kills. Raymond Brampton is Richard Branson but without the beard. The only difference is the spelling and pronunciation of their names. Voldemort heads up the Death Eaters, an order of wizard murderers and torturers mainly concerned with ethnic cleansing. Raymond Brampton heads up a multi-national corporation that only makes masks and yet has somehow managed to survive for over a century and turns a higher yearly profit than Westpac Bank.

Lewis Watt, the central character, barely has any character to speak of. He spends more than half the novel reading a very detailed letter from his mother that tells the story of her own run-in with the invisible Amazonians in prose that, were it not italicized, is barely discernable from the regular narrative of the book. This example of telling instead of showing is not just unskillful, it is utterly perplexing. In a book aimed at younger teens about a twelve-year-old boy and an invisible Amazon tribe, why send the boy’s mother to have the adventure? And instead of actually having the adventure with her, he only gets to read her descriptions of it after the fact. The book is 278 pages long, yet Lewis doesn’t leave for the Amazon until page 201. His mother spends more time having jungle adventures than he does. The closest Lewis comes to real action before he is finally chauffeured to Brazil is stealing the school’s four-wheel motorbike to chase the bad guy, using the GPS ‘tracking thingo’ (p.186) he just happens to build himself. This scene itself is a great contender for the silliest moment in the book. Lewis rides the quad bike into a narrow street ‘cobbled and crowded with speed jumps, tyres and ramps’ (p.191). Maybe, maybe ‘speed jumps’ instead of speed ‘humps’ or ‘bumps’ can be put down to bad editing. But I guarantee that there isn’t a city in the world that installs ramps in its narrow streets for no reason.

As amusing as it is to poke fun at the enormous list of authorial bloopers (and there are dozens more examples), it is only hollow laughter. The Cursed is a great and worrying disappointment. Not just for its poor editing, lazy writing, forgettable characters, sloppy dialogue, conflicting information, all-too-convenient technology and even-more-convenient action scenes. I suspect that this low, low standard of book was published in the first place because Michael Panckridge has sold over 100,000 copies of young teen books set in and around sport. He has probably been instrumental in encouraging boys to keep reading during an age where they traditionally stop. But sending out an undercooked second-draft like this is capitalising on Panckridge’s name as a popular author, rather than anything to do with his ability to write adventure fiction. This shows his audience a great disrespect by treating them as young buyers rather than young readers.

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GTH - To River, as usual, for trying so darn hard! Not a seafood buffet, just the local deli's fare at Cinque Terre.