The Silent Invasion by James  Bradley

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The premise for this book is intriguing - the notion of an infection which alters human personality and behaviour is a fascinating one. The prospect of the Earth's ecosystem being altered by the introduction of alien bioluminescent organisms seemed like a promising scenario for a dystopian novel.

Unfortunately, the first novel in the trilogy was disappointing. There are a few interesting ideas buried in this story, but in order to find them you have to wade through a couple of hundred pages of tedious and somewhat cliched narrative of a young girl running away and making a perilous journey in order to save her younger sister from being detained by the authorities tasked with preventing the spread of the infection.

This novel is really a road story, a tale of a teenager leaving her home and traveling through unfamiliar territory towards an unknown future. For the adolescent reader (the target audience being "young adult") this theme is probably an appealing one. But for older readers, its all too familiar and predictable.

There is very little in this book about the alien life forms or their influence on the people infected by them. I'm sure they will be explored in the second and third volumes in the trilogy, and I would hope that the later installments in the story demonstrate the intrigue and imagination that I was anticipating when I picked up the first volume.

The sad thing about this book is that it is so boring, that many readers will not bother to read the second book in the series, yet that is where I would expect the story to get interesting, since it takes place after the protagonist has reached "the Zone", where the infected people are held in isolation from the rest of the population.

I think it would have been preferable if the three parts of this novel were published in a single volume, and the editors had cut the length of the chapters relating the story of the heroine's escape with her sister. This first volume merely hints at the story that might emerge from the later chapters.

Publishing novels aimed at the Young Adult market in multi-volume format has become standard practice in recent years. But for this particular story, the introductory chapters just do not work as a stand alone novella.



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work in progress

Life has a tendency to take the form of lengthy periods of extreme tedium which make you yearn for some drama to alleviate the boredom, punctuated by bursts of anxious melodrama of such intensity that you long for the tedium to return. Work, unsurprisingly, generally follows the pattern of life, so predictably you'll find yourself bored and idle one day, and suffering from PTSD the next. You might even say that the pattern of work takes the pattern of life to its ultimate, with the typical work week being either soporific or nerve shattering in its impact. Only rarely do we get those moments of blissful contentment, when we're "in the zone", being engaged and energised and brimming with enthusiasm.

The sad thing is that much of the time we have no choice in how we spend our time. The task that is making you yawn, like the one that sends your blood pressure skyward, is the one that you can't avoid - usually because it pays the bills. The activity that would generate in us some level of enthusiasm is almost always the one that we don't have time for. So we live out our lives frustrated, bored, tense and exhausted. Then we die.

At the moment I'm frustrated because I don't have time to do anything creative, like painting. On the other hand I'm spending many hours a week bored, often because I'm waiting for somebody else to give me feedback for work I've already done but can't finalise until that somebody gives the OK. I'm also spending many hours a week trying to decipher the hieroglyphic scrawl of a senior member of staff whose pedantic alterations punctuate my drafts in a most undecorous manner. The imperative to obey these scratchings, combined with the inertia which comes from being unable to read or comprehend them, induces a level of anxiety only matched by the weekly sojourn up and down the Hume Highway so that I can pursue something in the nature of a personal life outside of work. I have this overwhelming urge to put my head on a pillow and sleep and wish away the whole scenario. If only it were possible.

For the time being I'll plod along in my tedium, punctuated by instances of high anxiety, in the certain knowledge that millions of other people are plodding along beside me. Strangely, I don't find that knowledge in the least reassuring.

A shock to the system today as I struggle to readjust to being back in work for the first time in exactly one year - I was made redundant at the end of the 2008-2009 financial year and I started a new job today, 1 July. I woke up at twenty to five - practically the middle of the night - on a freezing cold winter's day. Coffee, dress, brush teeth, do makeup, grab backpack, handbag, phone, iPod, coat, jump in car, find place to park, jump out of car, shove notes in ticket machine, jump on train, kill 80 minutes on train (trying not to fall asleep). Present self at new workplace with smile painted on face, even though filled with murderous thoughts re those Kafkaesque bureaucrats down at Centrelink.

I realise with dismay that I'm going to have to share a pokey office, something I haven't had to do for seven years. During the course of the day I discover that the office computers are blocked from checking Facebook or even webmail. No email AND no Facebook! I'm going to feel even more isolated than I was sitting at home by myself for the last twelve months.

Still, the new colleagues seem congenial enough. But the biggest shock is yet to come: No coffee in kitchen! Now, how can I get any serious thinking type work done when there's no coffee? I'm obviously going to have come prepared tomorrow. Where did I put that spare espresso machine?

The 2IC presents me with something I hadn't expected - my very own Blackberry. Ah, but its an old model which has had a previous owner, and it shows. When Blackberries first appeared they were a status symbol, like having a sports car or the corner office. But this model's looking pretty tired. I can't work out how to configure it to get the office email. That's just one more login I have to add to the half dozen I've been given to access various computer and online facilities. I write all the passwords down in my diary and make a note of the new mobile number.

In due course I scurry back to the station, wait with all the other wage slaves for the train to arrive. I climb aboard, squeeze into one of the few available seats, and steel myself for the grim commute home. Before the train has ferried its payload of workers halfway to their destination the sky has turned black as pitch and its impossible to divine the proximate location by looking out the window - all you can see is darkness punctuated by the occasional point of light. I stumble out of the train and back into my car.

On returning home I debate with myself as to whether its worth cooking dinner and whether or not I should just go to bed. I eagerly boot up the computer in order to get my overdue hit of mail and Facebook, only to discover that there's some technical problem preventing me from getting online. Gradually the reality sinks in that this is how my life is going to be for the foreseeable future. I groan silently and wonder if life as a homeless bum might not be that bad after all.

A Handful of Journals?

Some of you may be familiar with the "One Thousand Journals" project. If you haven't heard of it, this project is a collaborative art project. You could describe it as feral art, or organic art, or perhaps grunge art.

The project was devised by an American artist, John Copeland. He purchased a thousand blank journals and distributed them at random. The idea was that each recipient would keep the journal for a period of two weeks, during which time they would contribute to the journal. Their contributions might be a drawing, a poem, a comment, a record of their thoughts or emotions, an account of their travels or their responses to current events, or it might be in the form of a clipping from a magazine, a collage, a snapshot of their friends or family, in fact anything at all was acceptable, there were no rules. Then the journal would be passed on to another person who would also make a contribution and pass it on, and so on, until the journal was full. Then it was to be returned to John Copeland to be ultimately included in an exhibition. During the journal's travels it would be periodically scanned and the scans uploaded to a website so that all participants could view other people's contributions and discover when and where the journal was last sighted.

When I heard about this project I immediately thought that I could do my own version. Instead of having a thousand journals, I could get just two or three and ask my friends to contribute and to get their friends to contribute. As I have such an amazing and eclectic group of friends this could yield quite interesting results.

So, if you think this would be an interesting project and you'd like to participate, email me and I'll get things started.

If you want to know more about the One Thousand Journals project or its successor, go to 1000journals.com or to 1001journals.com.

Kookaburra has the last laugh

The victory by Larrikin over Men at Work in their case for copyright infringement presents a significant threat to the creative process. You think I'm exaggerating? If you've ever studied art or music or if you've ever tried to create a work of art or write a song you'll know that it's difficult, if not impossible, to do something completely unique or new. One of the frustrating things about the artistic process is that everything's been done before by someone. When people try to describe an image or a body of work they'll usually make references to other images or other artists. We learn art or music by studying the works of other artists and musicians. In contemporary literature writers invite their readers to pick up references to earlier writers. Artists will always refer to their "influences" when explaining their professional practice. Art is all about appropriation. Not outright copying, but taking a bit of this and a bit of that, adding, subtracting, changing and distorting. As artists, we look at the work of others and use it to stimulate a train of thought which leads to our own work. That is the nature of art.

Now, knowing how artists and musicians work, how do you think the creative world will continue if the Larrikin case is not challenged? Will musicians have to censor themselves when creating new works? Will rock bands have to hire copyright lawyers to "legal" songs before they can be performed in public? How can artists create new works when almost every image can be compared to an earlier image to which it inevitably bears some similarity? Creative block has always been a problem for artists, musicians and writers. After the Larrikin decision, it will be that much harder for creative professionals to push through and create new work, we'll all be staring at the blank page or the blank canvas, pen or brush poised, struggling to think of a concept which is absolutely unique and which can't be attacked for being a reference to another artist or a previous song or a previous work of art.

Copyright has its place. Art should be more than just copying someone else's work. But if artists cannot borrow a motif or a phrase or an idea from what has gone before, we are heading into a period where creativity will be smothered by the threat of legal action.

Painting with Codeine

Working in my studio

Where are the groovy intellectuals on the Central Coast?

There was a time when I only wanted to live in the groovy, hip, cool inner-city (i.e. Newtown, Paddington, Darlinghurst, Glebe, Surry Hills etc) or on the beautiful Northern Beaches (where I grew up). Then reality kicked in and I succumbed to real estate prices, interest rates and the need to have a back yard for the dog. So I became one of the thousands of refugees who've emigrated to the Central Coast in search of affordable housing (preferably close to the beach). I still have a $500 a week mortgage but, hey, I've got a backyard and a studio!

I'm more or less coping with the three hours or more a day spent sitting on the train, and I suppose I've adjusted to the fact that my beloved Sydney is now 70 km away and that fact that drivers around here don't give way at terminating intersections. But there is one aspect of life up here that has me scratching my head. Where are all the interesting people?

Now I've never been much of a socialite and I generally prefer my own company to that of others (with the possible exception of my dog). But I did have a vague notion of where, in Sydney, one might hang out in order to have a chance of having a chat with some groovy (or at least literate) persons.

Like the time I was sipping a quiet cappucino at a certain Darlinghurst cafe frequented by students of the National Art School and spied, at the next table, one notable radio personality and ex-member of the Doug Anthony All Stars who stood, in what I perceived to be a most gentlemanly manner, when a colleague arrived and joined him. Of course, I pretended not to recognize him (one of the fundamental rules of etiquette being that one pretends not to notice celebrities, since sycophancy on such occasions tends to undermines one's own air of importance). Or the time, when attending an exhibition opening in Paddington, I dropped my hat and Martin Sharpe gallantly picked it up and handed it to me.

But no, I don't mean to drop names. My point is that I prefer the company of people who've read the odd book or two, who can engage in conversation without inevitably turning to the subject of cricket and/or football and, in Sydney, I've got a vague idea of where I might find such conversations.

But the Central Coast is an alien landscape. The topography may be stunning and the climate mild but I haven't stumbled across anything which I could describe as stimulating company since I landed here. Yet I know that there must be some interesting people around here somewhere! I just can't find them. I believe that Bill Leak lives around here somewhere. I sent him a friend request on Facebook but, sadly, he did not reply (I feel utterly dejected).

Now if I could just work out which pub is the best watering hole for us artsy-political-argumentative types...