Patrick Allington

Cambodia is best known for the Angkor temple complex, and for Pol Pot. This primer incorporates the famous monuments and the Killing Fields into 2000 years of history, from pre-Angkorean Funan to the present. As John Tully suggests, it suits ‘tourists, students and general readers’. Writing a ‘short history’ presents specific challenges: the author must balance a narrative that tells a comprehensible story with the reality that history is messy and contested. While Tully cannot avoid discussing eras, issues and personalities with haste, the chapter on the Angkorean civilisation is especially crammed. In part, this reflects his obligation to acknowledge scholarly disagreement, but a more detailed and leisurely account of the Angkor era would have been welcome. In contrast, the chapter on the French protectorate (1863–1953) is assured and authoritative, which is unsurprising since Tully previously wrote the majestic France on the Mekong: A History of the Protectorate in Cambodia, 1863–1953 (2002).

Pham Thi Hoai, now a resident of Berlin, writes about her Vietnamese homeland with a sardonic yet affectionate eye. While not overtly political, these short stories explore every-day life in a restricted society that is opening slowly and selectively. Sunday Menu is full of observations that, without preaching, flag the complexities of modern, modernising Vietnam. For example, regarding a group of locals touting for tourist dollars on a beach, the narrator in ‘The Toll of the Sea’ writes: ‘My heart fell heavy as I saw in each of them a former teacher now looking for a better income.’ Such asides represent a challenging form of dissent. As translator Ton That Quynh Du writes in his helpfully contextual afterword,: ‘her detractors have charged her with holding an “excessively pessimistic view” of Vietnam, of abusing the “sacred mission of a writer” and even of “salacious writing”.’

These writer’s scribblings, handsomely reproduced, cover two distinct periods in Murray Bail’s life: London from 1970 to 1974; and Sydney from 1988 to 2003. The notebooks from the London period, which represent roughly two-thirds of this book, were previously published as Longhand: A Writer’s Notebook (1989). While readers may find some interest in comparing the formative and the mature writer, the older Bail’s reflections on ageing and death represent the most consistently penetrating writing in Notebooks.