Alison Broinowski

The Gooneratnes’ mountain bungalow, overlooking rippling tea plantations, is called Pemberley, after Mr Darcy’s mansion. A wall plaque commemorates Elizabeth Bennet’s description of it. In the style of a modern Jane Austen, Yasmine Gooneratne takes up the enduring and universal question of who will marry whom, as Vikram Seth did in his mega-novel A Suitable Boy (1994), and at similarly entertaining length. The topic is Bollywood’s favourite too, but before writing The Sweet and Simple Kind, Professor Gooneratne, a specialist in eighteenth-century fiction and poetry, had not seen the film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

Rarely does an image on a novel’s cover appear exactly as you, the reader, imagine the character to look. But Mae Ruth Perkins, on the elegant scarlet cover of Linda Jaivin’s new novel, definitely does. Bordello eyes, boudoir lips and all: the face in an early 1900s photograph is Mae’s own. The jewellery, faintly visible, is hers too, just as Jaivin describes it: ‘He helped her tie a black ribbon with a silver horseshoe charm around her neck, the open part facing upwards … She asked him to fasten a delicate platinum chain with a vertical triplet of gold hearts around her neck as well.’

In the beginning, says a much-repeated joke, was The Plan. Deemed excellent, at first, it passed through many reinterpretations at successive levels of bureaucracy, and ended up being derided as a crock of shit. Britain’s plan for reconstructing Iraq in 2003 might have met the same fate, only there wasn’t one. Don’t laugh: Australia had no plan either, excellent or crock.

Roma Mitchell came first in nearly everything. Not only at school and university, but in becoming Australia’s first female OC, Supreme Court judge, Boyer Lecturer, university chancellor and state gover­nor. But she had no inside track to success. Her father was killed in World War I, her mother survived on his pension and the generosity of friends, and Roma and her older sister were taught by the Sisters of Mercy for nothing.

Whoever wins the federal election later this year, it is likely that at some stage in 2008 we will be looking back and post-mortemising the Howard government. One strand in the reviews will surely be the Howard government’s impact on the quality of public debate in this country. Whether it has been a contributor to Howard’s long ascendancy (and I think it has), this government’s ability to goad large numbers of academics and commentators into unbalanced and increasingly hysterical denunciations of nearly all aspects of its operations is unprecedented in Australian political history.

The United Nations’ eighth secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, has just taken over what has been called the world’s worst job. But it is one that attracts fierce, devious and polite competition. Why would anyone seek, for less than $400,000 a year, to be the chief administrative officer of a non-government that cannot govern, a non-corporation that cannot borrow or invest? The UN’s total budget is about the same as the New York City school system, and the secretary-general has to beg 192 national stakeholders for funds even to carry out what they instruct him to do. Who would want to be answerable, as well, to a fifteen-member board, five of whose members use their permanency to frustrate others and advance their own interests, rather than those of the organisation?

The timing of Peter Manning’s book, in which he seeks more Australian empathy with Muslims, was exquisite. The mufti of Australia in September urged the opposite, telling his flock that Jews and Christians were ‘the most evil of God’s creation on the face of the earth’. He also had colourful things to say about women being responsible if men turn to crime, or commit rape or adultery. Of course, the media overlooked Taj Din al-Hilaly’s interesting view that the axis of evil is Jewish and Christian. They also ignored his peculiar take on criminology. As usual, sex was what sold, giving the government a useful diversion from its floundering on climate change and the quagmire in Iraq.

If we lived in the kind of country – and there are some – where people not only chose their presidents but chose as leaders poets, philosophers and novelists, a new novel by Brian Castro would be a sensation, even a political event. Students would be hawking pirated copies, queues would form outside bookshops, long debates would steam up the coffee shops, and the magazines would be full of it. Alas, China and Australia from the 1930s to the 1960s, where Castro takes us in memory, were not such places then any more than they are now.