Hurricanes hardly happen, Henry Higgins assures us in My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe’s great musical adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. Obviously, Alan Jay Lerner (the lyricist), never went to Florida, where hurricanes are positively ubiquitous. The coverage in our media is immense, the footage graphic, the consequences dire.

The recent discovery of Neanderthal remains in a cave in France is timely for Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, Creation Lake, which opens with the question: ‘What is a human being?’ Timely, because this novel deals with the question in a largely archaeological manner, focusing on that nebulous point in history when Neanderthals and Homo sapiens parted ways. The former, it seems, went quietly into extinction; the latter, with their cunning intellect and knack for not knowing what is good for them, went on to create the socio-environmental mess we find ourselves in today.

What an uneven battle! Thomas Blamey, the little guy, rural-bred, rough, rumbunctious, distrusted; Douglas MacArthur, nobly bred, imperious, destined for greatness, the darling of his own heart. Roland Perry shows the true picture. MacArthur (1880-1964) was a scheming, narcissistic, lying braggard and manipulator. Blamey (1884-1951) fought to keep his Australians from fighting with the Americans, and tried, often with little effect, to influence his prime minister to act in the interests of the Australian troops and the Australian people, while displaying worrying moral failures of his own.

For Hannah Ferguson, the real meaning of a taboo is ‘a conversation which frays the fabric of patriarchy. A subject clouded in stigma which serves systems and institutions of power.’

A dappled curve, fringed with
wattles to the left,

though the right-hand path, solid
rock, was the one.

Dogs have long been a feature of Markus Zusak’s fiction. His pre-fame trilogy of Young Adult novels, centring on brothers Cameron and Ruben Wolfe and their family, deployed the animal as a metaphor for tenaciousness. In the trilogy’s final book, When Dogs Cry (2001), Cameron and Ruben all but adopt Miffy, a Pomeranian whose scrappiness matches that of the brothers and whose death provides the book’s emotional fulcrum. There is a caffeinated hound in The Messenger (2002) and a clothesline-obsessed border collie in Bridge of Clay (2018). Even when, as in Zusak’s best-known work, The Book Thief (2006), dogs are not present, something about the way the author sees them – lovably rambunctious, all rough edges, chaos and, yes, doggedness – permeates the spirit of his two-legged characters.

Christians so often have problems with sex these days. Australians saw this when, during the Marriage Law Postal Survey, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney begged them to uphold a ‘biblical definition’ of marriage – if there were such a thing. Representatives of every denomination fret endlessly over their responsibility for enabling the sex offenders and abusers of children who were hidden in plain sight in their midst. That some do this even as they fulminate against overt sexual expression in the public sphere (the Paris Olympics opening ceremony anyone?) makes them seem even more out of touch.

In Richard Powers’ fifth novel, Galatea 2.2 (1995), a fictionalised version of the author ‘educates’ a computer program, named Helen, by reading it canonical literary texts – which it learns to analyse – and by telling it the story of his own life. In the celebrated The Overstory (2018), Powers explores the surprisingly broad and interconnected lives of trees and forests, and their varied significance to a cast of characters who are wedded to tree-life for reasons both personal and universal. The Overstory features a woman scientist who writes a book that inspires small and large forms of environmental activism, alongside a physically ailing and solitary tech genius who is responsible for the most popular computer game in the world. Throughout, Powers suggests that the ability to tell a ‘good story’ is essential to individual and social transformation. His more recent novel, Bewilderment (2021), focuses on a form of behavioural therapy that resembles a computer game, where participants perform cognitive tasks that can drastically modify their personalities.

A Voyage Around the Queen begins with the announcement in the London Gazette on 21 April 1926 of the birth of Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, and ends with a minute-by-minute account of the goings-on in Balmoral on 8 September 2022, Elizabeth II’s last day on earth. The 650 pages in between document the main events of the queen’s life, but the book is not a biography. As with Craig Brown’s earlier Ma’am Darling: 99 glimpses of Princess Margaret (2017) and One, Two, Three, Four: The Beatles in time (2020), what he has put together is closer to mass observation, but it might also be filed under anthropology (‘the whole institution’, said David Attenborough ‘depends on mysticism and the tribal chief in his hut’), psychology (she was ‘the Queen of the British psyche’, says Brian Masters), or even zoology (Virginia Woolf, Hilary Mantel, and Prince Harry have each, independently, compared the royal family to pandas in captivity).

There is something intrinsically appealing about patterns and order. Give a child a tin of buttons and they will immediately organise them by colour, size, or shape. Collect a bucket of shells from the beach and most people do the same thing. Some might choose the prettiest, largest, and most striking representatives of each type and display them prominently; others might cluster them by species and grade them in their variations from smallest to largest, darkest to lightest. Few will give much thought to the creatures that once inhabited them, the environments they came from, or how they lived.