Tim Winton’s Eyrie - a review

Tim Winton’s Eyrie

On first blush this latest book by Winton tells, perhaps, what might be a typical story of a man (Keely) who has lost his bearings in middle age, down-at-heel and down-on-his-luck. He is now living in a bleak and seedy high-rise apartment at the outskirts of Freemantle, cultivating his newfound isolation while below is that society from which he's retired hurt and angry.

Page by page it is an engrossing novel; the reader is moved and enraged in equal measure by a human story of Keely and his beautiful, battered adoptive family. The story tells of how one day he runs into some neighbours: a woman he used to know when they were kids, and her introverted young boy. Here are two strangers leading a life beyond his experience and into whose world he falls despite himself. The encounter shakes him up in a way he doesn’t understand.

What follows is an amusing, confronting, exhilarating and haunting – populated by remarkable characters. It asks how, in an impossibly compromised world, we can ever hope to do the right thing.

However Eyrie is much much more than just a great story – it talks to an insidious existence that pervades modern life. A sprawling suburban world of this older generation, has been tidied up, boxed in, the ecology of childhood imagination narrowed down to computer games and paid TV. But ecology alone doesn’t excuse the main subject. We learn quite early that Keely is flawed, his reliability as a narrator questionable.

He is a man wounded in heart and mind: divorced and unemployed - "just another flannel-tongued Jeremiah with neither mission nor prophecy, no tribe to claim him but family" - shut away from friends and former colleagues, spending his days staring out from his upper floor apartment. Whether it is incipient madness or some physiological woe he suffers from is never made clear. What counts, however, is the extremity of his despair and the way it colors the narration. He is a sieve of leaking memories and his version of events is filled with empty gaps, forgotten conversations and missing hours, weird visions, and waking dreams.

The Alchemists: Inside the Secret World of Central Bankers

The Alchemists: Inside the Secret World of Central Bankers

By (author) Neil Irwin

After a dramatic reconstruction of the beginning of the credit crunch, Washington Post journalist Neil Irwin, who has an MBA from Columbia Business School and a master's degree from Columbia's journalism school, where he was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism gives us a tour of how central banks became such a critical part of the global financial system.  The bulk of the book deals with the shadowy and unknown world of the most influential bankers on the planet. Men who were never elected to public office suddenly became the real masters of the universe.

Ben Bernanke of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Mervyn King of the Bank of England, and Jean-Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank. Over the next five years, they and their fellow central bankers deployed trillions of dollars, pounds and euros to try and contain the waves of panic that threatened to bring down the global financial system.

The Alchemists is a fascinating account of the most intense practice in economic crisis management and at the same time an insight of the role and power of the central bank. This is an exclusive, behind-the-scenes view of their work, and a better understanding of banks and their significance in our lives and livelihood.

This large book presents a high-drama, panoramic story of history of the relationship between capitalism and the state. It is definitive, revelatory and riveting. The Alchemists shows us where money comes from and where it may well be going. It tracks the story of the last five years from the vantage of the central bankers as they worked in close coordination to try to keep ahead of unfolding events, the global financial crises.

Parramatta, Coffee and Dvořák's New World

How could I have thought I was somehow learned, knew the works of the great composers, even to go as far as to assume some understanding of the history and plight their work expressed; and yet only today I discover the hauntingly beautiful New World Symphony of Dvořák.

You see much (perhaps I’m being a little hard on myself) of what I’ve learned about the classics can probably be best described as a series of Slumdog Millionaire moments. For example, Mozart’s Don Giovanni popularized by the 1984 period dram Amadeus film which I loved. My erudition of the classics gets even better; Bo Derek's character listening to Ravel's Boléro tells Dudley Moore that “it's the perfect music to make love to.” in the film 10. Bach’s The B Minor Mass, perhaps in one of my more scholarly years -  reading and much later reviewing (click reviewing to read the book review) Douglas Hofstadter’s hugely influential tome, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid came to appreciate a pure language called music. You begin to get the picture…
 

For me, Dvořák and the Symphony No. 9 “from the New World,” 2^nd movement brings with it delight somewhat paralleling Dvořák’s gentle, spiritual, uplifting, lyrical and highly optimistic outlook. A joy to listen to.

Incidentally, Neil Armstrong took this symphony to the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission, the first Moon landing in 1969. The Opera Babes used this song's melody in their song "There's a place". "There's a place" was subsequently used in the Schools Spectacular.