People shuffled between knees and seats and walked across in front of the stage as my computer played the easy-listening tunes piped into the auditorium. Finally the music faded out and a light applause was heard. Then Simon Longstaff from the St James Ethics Centre introduced the debaters and opened proceedings.

The Intelligence2 debate has shifted definitively into cyberspace with tonight's face-off being streamed live from the venue and advertised ahead of time on the Sydney Morning Herald's website's front page. Organisers might have to come up with some sort of audience activity to add more value now. Who would want to go out if you can watch it live on your computer?

The story that led me to the video website appeared on the Herald's website at about 6.15pm. The debate started at 6.45pm so there was plenty of time to prepare. Not that there's much to do. A fresh cup of coffee is all that I needed to get ready for the fireworks. The Herald decided to include three unlikely collaborators on the affirmative side: David Marr, Janet Albrechtsen and Peter Jensen. The topic? 'Freedom of expression must include licence to offend'.

On the negative are a law academic, Fleur Johns, a special-interest figure, David Knoll, and Donald McDonald, director of the Classification Board.

Voting tickets were provided for the audience to lodge a preference 'for' or 'against'. The vote is counted before audience questions and presented at the end of proceedings.

One glitch at 6.52 stopped play for a few seconds. At 7.19 and 7.21 there were more short glitches. More glitches at 7.53, 7.58, 8.02, 8.03, 8.06 (twice), 8.10, 8.11 (three times) and 8.16. I wonder where these are occurring – at their end or at mine.

Convenience is a boon when watching streamed video. I got up to make food for a few minutes (no, not cup noodles!) during Albrechtsen's address. I wonder if I missed much...

I got the microwave running while David Knoll was answering audience questions, so the slight advantage the negative side got earlier was nullified.

Female voices are slightly less easy for hearing words clearly, particularly the sibillants which sometimes explode in the speakers obscuring what comes next.

McDonald's defense fell short of the high standard adhered to generally by being almost a defense of his own job – that of chief censor.

The applause following David Marr's address was conspicuous by its force and despite the fact that the rice interrupted my attention during the journalist's address, I thought he'd be the critical factor in ensuring a win for the affirmative.

However, I reasoned, given the purported bias of the audience – online viewers can't vote – it seemed possible that the negative would win. This sounds odd considering that the only things I could see during the lead-up to the debate were a few profiles, a number of bobbing shoulders as people moved along the rows looking for their seats, and the scuttling dark forms of people looking for their seats further up toward the stage at the front of the auditorium.

Marr was compelling because he was funny. The only funny thing McDonald said was to refer to Marr ironically. His method didn't differ significantly from that of the others, who all used examples – colour and texture – to illustrate their point. In terms of pure sophistication I think the laurel should go to Johns. At some points her address was more complicated than the low-res video (it's difficult to lip-read online) allowed for.

I anticipated problems with hearing the audience questions as they would be looking in the opposite direction but it turned out that the only difficulty was created by the fact that many of them stood in shadow while speaking.

Knoll's concluding remarks got a good applause but that may have been due to relief that the debate had finally ended. I missed the SBS Insight program about the government's proposed web black list, unfortunately.

And the vote? 76 per cent voted for the affirmative side, 19 per cent for the negative and 5 per cent were undecided.

As to the other question – who would go to these debates – Longstaff exhorted people to book early as demand now outstrips the number of seats available.

Curiously, when I'd finished watching there was no link back to the SMH website, only to the BusinessDay website. This seems like a curious – if not sneaky – way to get people to visit the website.

Another reason to watch at home? I had a long conversation on chat - though not so disrupting as the food as I could listen while typing - and you can't really do that if you sit in the audience. Although some people might like the chance to get away from their computer long enough to just sit for a while without electronic interference.

The boys raised their right arms, fingers pointing outward, as they left the dock via the door in the wood panelled wall to return to the cells. The magistrate stood, we stood, and the court cleared - through the swinging doors back into the waiting area. I chatted with The Daily Telegraph's reporter for a few minutes on the steps outside the building. A group of dark men pulled their sunglasses over their eyes as they marched past toward George Street.

The 15 year old boys will stay in jail for at least 18 months as they are due for release on parole in late spring next year. The salutes were a type of defiance in the face of a harsh justice system but they should have known it would end up like this when they took an axe and a machete into Trinity Catholic College a month ago and smashed the place up.

One of them, seated closest to me, sports a mullet and a short goatee. He was wearing a red T shirt, which contrasted with his dark skin and long eyelashes, high cheekbones and powerful nose. But regardless how grown-up the boys look they were treated like children, in a children's court and using children's justice.

Magistrate Gary Still read his decision to the court, where members of the boys' families sat on the side opposite the reporters, among whose number I sat. One boy among them wore a shell ankle bracelet and his right earlobe carried a stud.

Both boys are of Tongan descent, like the boys who had attacked Merrylands High School a year earlier. They were, apparently, happy that their attack had made the media. A copycat crime, it fetched its perpetrators a slightly stiffer sentence, possibly in consideration of the similarity. The major difference was that at Merrylands there was no axe.

Earth Hour may bring on the darkness in cities worldwide but in Australia the event highlights longstanding rivalry between the two main news media companies here. While The Sydney Morning Herald, a founding sponsor of the event, posted multiple images with its story on last night's big switch-off on its web page - 83 cities and one billion people participate, it crows - News Limited vehicles The Australian and The Daily Telegraph register nothing at all. Who said the media are biased?

A Facebook data capture story posted on Facebook by a friend is not as hilarious as it first appears as so much law in Australia is imported from overseas, especially from Britain and the US.

The story contains some devastating inconsistencies.

The government is "is considering making ... sites [like Facebook and MySpace] keep data about their users' movements". On the other hand the government "was not seeking the power to examine the content of messages sent via the sites".

Strange.

Surely if the data was to be collected and stored in some sort of dark satanic data centre it would be prudent to allow law enforcement authorities access to it. And if this did happen (by some odd convergence of conflicting priorities) then said data would, at some point, be examined.

The "data about users' movements" would presumably include text, which would have to be read by a human. It would therefore be examined by a human. QED.

Lawmakers are keeping busy. They are also intent on collecting the content of every telephone call and email sent by everyone living in Britain.

That means you, Kim :)

Sure, data exchange mechanisms have changed the way we talk to one another and the police are struggling to keep up. It's only a matter of time before commercial TV catches up with reality and uses Facebook in a police drama.

But a storage facility for all Facebook exchanges is just as bad, if not worse, than Facebook's recently-retired terms of service.

In the bigger scheme of things, that is.

It was painful to watch a once famous - now infamous - judge twisting round like a live prawn on a skewer in a vain attempt to evade any honest appraisal of his own motivations for having committed perjury - for having lied in court - in an attempt to avoid paying a small traffic fine. Kudos to the ABC's 4 Corners program for securing the privilege of following Marcus Einfeld around for a few days in the lead-up to his sentencing hearing.

But no glory, even no redemption, for Einfeld. It was "a moment of madness" that made him, repeatedly and over a long period of time, not admit to the truth. His hubris escalated to fever pitch when he looked down his nose at the media, telling the ABC that when talking to a journalist about the dead Teresa Brennan - the woman Einfeld said was driving his silver Lexus at the time it was caught speeding - he did not feel any remorse about lying "because I was talking to a journalist and you don't feel the same obligation in that circumstance".

Einfeld actually got off easy with three years' detention and a non-parole period of two years. He pleaded guilty to perjury and thus avoided the other lies he had told others - through equally false statutory declarations - being made public in court. He "may have" lied at other times but he is "an honest person". Right.

Brett Stewart has been charged with sexual assault after tackling a girl in the aftermath of the Manly Leagues Club's season opening party at a local hotel. He caught a cab home, saw a girl smoking a cigarette outside the apartment block where he lives, and jumped on her.

He says he doesn't remember anything about the incident. Fans have rallied to his support and academic and League adviser Catharine Lumby has written publicly in his defence, saying that the problem's more widespread, but the fact remains that the guy's been done big time. His image has been erased from a season-opening TV commercial full of positive images of League and its links to the littlies.

Stewart may be classified as a 'significant adult' by those who work with children. If so, he is more accountable for his actions than the average guy who threatens a woman or beats up on his wife. He's very much in the public eye, and unless he is fully cognisant of his reponsibilities, we're likely to see abusive relations between kids at school continue in the frightful manner we've become used to seeing.

Kids tend to become less aggressive after year 9, statistics tell us. But if they're surrounded by images and patterns of behaviour that validate violence against others we can't hope to see the alarming numbers of assaults by school aged children fall. Footballers are responsible to this 15 year old demographic. Until they can get a hold on their alcohol consumption, and curb it, we're likely to see more assaults like the one that occurred last Friday.

And more arrests. It'll be interesting to see if Stewart is now pulled by the club from the opening match against the Bulldogs. We'll wait until tomorrow, when the shit will have well and truly hit the fan.

Another bogus recap of Australians' reading habits appears in today's Sun-Herald under David Dale's byline. And bizarrely he's stuck in a couple of celebrity pics to sex the thing up just that little bit required so that you don't feel like a geek if you bother to click on the link to read it.

To start with, Dale's only looking at bestseller lists. Among the bestsellers in this country you'll usually find a cookbook. Recently, there was that mega-selling book about how to clean everything from lace to lawnmowers, but it's not listed now.

What we get, instead, are Rowling and Meyer. No surprises here. Meyer's book Twilight was adapted recently for film and everything else she'd written is riding on the generous wake of this major cultural event. It's a major movie tie-in situation and make no mistake.

Thankfully, one of Dale's readers took the time to post a comment reprimanding him for his sloppy research. "That list is rubbish," says Jimbo. "A cook book does not count as reading, and neither does the Telegraph, or Woman's Day." Jimbo unfortunately thinks that reading is "a dying art". Readers of a recent post here will know that even niche booksellers can do well, given the right marketing and title selection strategies.

Other commenters make good sense, too. Lilith reads and Teresa has had a good experience with the Sydney Online Book Club which can be found at the social site meetup.com. Similarly, Darryl Mason has serialised a novel called ED Day "and with almost no publicity it still managed to pull in about 5000 regular readers, some of whom were extremly anger when I was late posting the latest chapter".

Bookworm, who works in IT, doesn't like Meyer, like Jimbo. And prefers literary fiction to other forms of publication. Doesn't like reading onscreen, which bucks a trend Dale postulates, that we are reading more online. But will Google classify as 'reading'? I don't think so. Most people scan when they get online. Bookworm's aversion to screens is also based on science, as the vibration inherent in your computer screen is not conducive to the extended periods of intense concentration required to get through a book.

Personally, I think that Dale's readers exhibit more intelligence than his column, which feels as though it was knocked up in about 20 minutes on a Saturday night before going to dinner.

As for Project Gutenberg, blogsprog, I don't really think many people use it to read a book. Although both Bookworm and Becks think books are too expensive, there's not going to be much competition in terms of convenience when it comes down to actually reading a full length novel. You can buy a Jane Austen for $10 now, when printing a Gutenberg version of one of her novels will take hours using a regular inkjet printer. Then how do you bind it? (most staplers aren't big enough.) Use a folder? (Trip to the newsagents required here.) And what if you don't want to read Austen again? (Gutenberg's selection is ridiculously small compared to what's available in a good bookshop.)

The San Francisco Chronicle costs twice as much to produce and deliver as customers are paying for it, reports the newspaper. Owner The Hearst Corporation wants staff cuts across the board to reduce overheads, or it will shut down the paper, which it purchased in 2000.

The staff report, which clearly aims to impress unions as much as inform readers, says "the loss of classified advertising to Craigslist and other online sites" combined with the global financial crisis to create very unfavourable conditions for the paper, which has been published since 1865.

In other bad news from Stateside, Novella Carpenter ponders the dwindling fortunes of book publishers, naming HarperCollins as especially hard hit by the slow economy. Carpenter had a particular reason to look into the case as her book is due out in mid year.

Staff at Random House "have been holding their breath, worrying about whether the axe will come down on them", a correspondent told her.

Carpenter meets Linda O'Connor, a Las Vegas stand-up comedienne who is self publishing her memoir, Bastard Husband: A Love Story. "The economy isn't going to stop me," she said. "People are going to pay $15 for my book -- that's not going to break anyone's bank."

Bucking the negative trend is a small New York publishing house, Europa Editions, which has turned "a loyal following" into a profit. The company only publishes books in translation and has had its first bestseller, Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which has sold 71,000 copies.

The novel "had been a sensation in France" and the company had already turned that success into positive returns by translating it into Italian for that country's market.

Europa Editions was founded by an Italian couple, Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola Ferri. The publisher in New York is Kent Carroll, a veteran of Grove Press.

The inaugural "interdisciplinary and 'inter-formal'" Warwick prize has been awarded to Naomi Klein for The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007). The 50,000 pound prize was awarded to Klein amid a field of books that are not all non-fiction.

There is no other prize of its kind.

The theme of the inaugural prize was 'complexity'. The "extremely diverse" shortlist included a "study of the relationship between women and mental illness", a history of 20th-century music, an investigation into the murder of a bishop, Stuart A Kauffman's Reinventing the Sacred, and a novel, Enrique Vila-Matas's novel Montano's Malady. The longlist included fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

Chair of judges China Miéville remarked on common themes, despite the variety of formats involved: "It was very interesting to see how so many writers on the shortlist were thinking about political corruption and corporate greed."

In other prize news, the Australia-Asia Literary Prize has been suspended. The prize is launched by the Western Australia Labour government that lost office last year.

Arts Minister John Day said the total prize money, format and timing of the Australia-Asia Literary Prize ... was under review and expected to be finalised by the middle of this year.

David Malouf won the inaugural prize last year and "pending the review recommendations" it would be offered in 2010. There is speculation the government, which is now Liberal, will not offer the prize again, seeking budget savings.

Amos Oz' Don't Call It Night (1995) is almost a perfect novel but I wonder how much I'll remember in three months. I've read other Oz novels and although I'm convinced he's Nobel material, I cannot recall much about them.

Here, plot and characterisation work closely together. The book is written in short chapters from the alternating points of view of Theo and Noa, a couple living in a small town outside Tel Aviv in Israel. Theo's an older man, a retired planning bigwig. Noa's a teacher with a predilection for colourful skirts. They met in Argentina and it seems to be a relationship made in heaven. They're not married but share quiet moments of closeness and treat each other with kindness and consideration.

Until Immanuel dies. A student of Noa's, the strange, withdrawn boy especially liked his language teacher. When his father comes to the funeral, he makes Noa a proposition: to set up a shelter for drub addicts. Immanuel suicided when under the influence. Or so it seems.

And this is where the plot really kicks in, because despite the fact that Noa assembles some supporters among the townspeople, it was always going to be a hard sell to get civic authorities to agree to establish a half-way house for the drug affected. Things drag on. Theo tries to impose some order into Noa's system of filing but she tells him to back off. Time drags and nothing seems to get finished.

The many characters involved in the work in progress impose their own tax on our patience, although it's a small tax because Oz writes so well. Nevertheless, we are irritated that Noa, having come up against a brick wall, starts spending more and more time with a young girl who she has in class, called Tal.

Theo notices, too. Even though they've bought a building for the drug centre, it seems that the town's will is stronger than the idealism of the putative founders of this worthy institution. When the mayor, a friend of Theo's, puts up objections and when one of the core members starts to speak out against it, it seems as though the game's up.

But we're never sure. Perhaps it doesn't matter. In any case, we see a society affected by the same things that afflict other Western societies, but on a small, parochial scale. How Theo and Noa deal with this is more interesting than whether it comes off. And how they interact - the small kindnesses, the thoughts they have about one another - seems, to me, to be the most important element in the novel.

The grey dust of the desert threatens to conquer all but it is the way individuals deal with its encroaching menace that matters. Oz has written another great book, and reading this is well worth the trouble.

Harry Nicolaides’ pardon saw a welcoming party (see photos from ABC’s news coverage below) at Melbourne airport including father Socrates and other family members. Nicolaides served five and a half months of a three year sentence in a murderously dirty and inhuman Bangkok prison.

Socrates Nicolaides hugged his son on camera before the 41 year old broke down in tears as he remembered the horror of his time behind bars. He received anonymous postcards, letters, gifts of food and medicines while in jail and thanked the Australians who sent them. He noted the "quintessential, iconic language that only Australians can make".

Harry plans to return to Thailand and to write an account of his ordeal. "Do you plan to write a book now?" asked a journalist. "I certainly will," said Harry. "Truth is stranger than fiction."

The pardon was mooted a week ago following front page coverage in The Sydney Morning Herald.

The release comes four days after the announcement of a plan to forward a request for a pardon to the royal palace. King Bumiphol Adulyadej finalised the pardon in quick time.

On Facebook Voula Demosthenous distributed a message at 6pm from Harry’s brother Forde to those who had joined a support group. With the subject line ‘Harry Is Free!!!!!!!!’, Forde wrote that “The Nicolaides family is grateful to his Majesty the King for the decision he has made and to the relevant Thai authorities who dealt with the pardon application in an expeditious manner.”

Harry’s brother also thanked “everyone who has supported the family’s efforts” “and in assisting with encouraging the Australian government to take affirmative action to secure Harry’s release”.

In the SMH’s 4.15pm story today, Harry was reported thanking “the Australian people for their support and the media for helping to get him released”. At the airport Harry thanked the media who had been "dauntless and courageous" and had kept up the pressure on the government to get the release approved. "We have rare privileges in this country," he said.

A 'kaddish' is a mourning prayer and Imre Kertesz' Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1997) could be interpreted - since it's a dense and difficult novel and thus interpretation is necessary - as a mournful reminiscence by a rather staid and particular writer-cum-literary translator.

We first meet him as he walks in the forest. He is staying at a retreat and he bumps into a fellow resident. Asked whether he had any children, the narrator explodes with a violent negative. The 'no' becomes a leitmotif repeated, later, when he talks about his reaction to his wife's suggestion that they have children.

His wife is a doctor who had felt something intense after having read a book the writer published. She approaches him. They become lovers. They marry and live together. And he tells his wife about his childhood. In doing so, he touches on many elements of the novel we have already come across and one of them is the fate of the Jews.

Both the narrator and his wife (finally ex-wife) are Jewish, and Jewishness is central to the novel's point of most profound importance as a text.

But in describing his lack of faith in the world, in terms of children, the narrator shows himself to be of the same nature as the 'othering' carried out by Christians in the 1930s when the pogroms started. He shuts out the world and thus reiterates his freedom, so that he can remain individual and not get caught up in the travail of earthly existence at its most humiliating and shameful.

This is just a precis. The novel is frighteningly dense and beautiful. It contains references to Nietszche and other philosophers and it is clear that Kertesz is well equipped to confront his themes.

Framing and giving structure to the mass of detail about the fate of Jewishness is the issue of children. But there is another sense of movement apart from this. In the beginning we are presented with a slightly ridiculous figure, a man with not much wordly stamina, a man used to being alone and fighting private battles in his work.

This slightly ridiculous figure transforms itself, later in the book, into a figure of commanding intellect and insight. But at the very end, as he is confronted by the children he never had, the narrator becomes something else again. He becomes some kind of slinking monster that is best ignored.

It is a frightening and dramatic transformation, and demonstrates Kertesz' immense power as a storyteller. Because this is the point he is leading to, all the time. In this sense, the novel can be considered as a fairly strong symbol of affirmation: of life, of reproduction, of love.

A thirsty Victorian koala gets a drink from a Country Fire Association volunteer. "I can't believe he's drinking all this water," says the fireo as the parched marsupial quenches its thirst from a bottle of water. The camera rolls. "Are you getting all this?" asks the guy. "Yeah," says his mate.

A friend posted this Associated Press video from YouTube, on Facebook. It's titled 'Raw Video: Sam the Koala Gets a Drink After Fire'. "You alright buddy, eh?" asks the dusty fireman as he approaches the equally dusty animal isolated amid blackened gum trees and in a total absence of underbrush.

"Come here buddy."

It's a very touching vignette of what happened on 9 February. We got to see the news videos coming out of the affected area only on Sunday afternoon. Then it was suddenly that we saw major adjustments made to news splash pages and the saturation TV coverage.

In a piece published in The Age newspaper today, Marieke Hardy criticises the extent and nature of the coverage we've been seeing. She regrets the manufactured nature of much of it and condemns TV stations for chasing stories so energetically that tragedy seems to be something put on for our benefit, rather than something we sympathise with because it happened to someone else.

But the video clip featured at the start of this blog post seems to go some way to quenching her smart. A bit of real life well lived. Ahhhhh!

Salam Pax back in Baghdad? After two years away from his native soil, the famed Baghdad blogger finds life is returning to normal. We've been aware of this for some time. It's been a while since we've seen TV vision of weddings being bombed, or crowded marketplaces.

The recent appearance of the blogger (The Sydney Morning Herald, 19 February) constitutes a signal that normality is within reach. But the pundits are silent. As Guantanamo returns to centre stage as a point of contention between the left intelligentsia and the US government, Baghdad's new-found peace is no longer deemed relevant. And it's a shame. Never let it be said that the US incursion had a beneficial effect!

Not that I'm an apologist for the incursion, far from it. Nevertheless, the decision to focus on organising a local constabulary and a local army seem, looking at the blogger's piece, to have been right on the money.

He used to carry two ID cards: one with a Sunni surname and one with a Shiite surname, in an effort to second-guess the men at roadblocks positioned around his native city. Now that a local army is manning these places, it's no longer necessary to fret in advance of stopping, trying to decide which ID to produce. Now all you need to do is remember not to talk on your mobile, since these devices can be used to trigger explosive devices.

Pax' bemusement and relief is palpable in the article published today. No more mass killings. Look! There's a family eating ice cream at 8pm! Amazing!

Two years of exile have turned the blogger who brought to us daily updates on a dire situation into an unwitting apologist for the US backed incursion: there's peace in them thar streets...

There’s a call-out for trucking poetry, reports Steve Meacham in The Sydney Morning Herald (8 February).

The Red Room Company, a non-profit organisation based in Sydney, is running it. Founded by Johanna Featherstone, the company has its roots in 2001 with a radio program on 89.7fm, Eastside Radio, called Red Room Radio Show. The company was founded in 2003.

Featherstone reckons the cab is "the perfect place" to write poems. Truckies are “ignored, repudiated and misunderstood” according to the company's website. This is true especially when they tailgate at 100km per hour on a single-lane highway.

The road may go on for a while in this uncomfortable manner but there’s lots to see and truckies, for all their faults, are in the box seat when it comes to visiting the countryside. Every day they ply their trade and are presented with aspects of Australia most people see infrequently, if ever. Cloud shadowed hills, dried out pasturage, the sun breaking out from behind a clump of gum trees to show who’s boss despite your grip on the wheel of your rig as you hurtle along at speed.

Featherstone asked John Laws, the retired radio announcer - and a bit of a poet himself - to put out a call for truckies to volunteer their work for scrutiny and inclusion via a website, dustpoems.com.

To be included in the ‘logbook’ of poetry will be work by “a wandering wordsmith” named Mick O’Brien who features in Meacham‘s story (pic).

Featherstone got the idea for the collection at a highway truck stop. “How many poets are there within the trucking industry?” she asked herself.

"People have this image of truck drivers being large, rough and covered in tattoos," said Mr O'Brien, 41. "But most of us are ordinary blokes, and there's a lot of women driving trucks these days, too."

Dust Poems “is being created in partnership with Sydney Olympic Park Authority and coincides with the Royal Easter Show,” says the website.

Construction sites, carparks and hidden locations of Sydney Olympic Park will be transformed by installations that display the six poems in interactive ways. The public will be invited into these spaces by way of a route map that navigates a Truck Poem Search. The Search will contain toy trucks donated by the public, and poems logged at the Park by roaming visitors. You can help us construct the Search by donating toy trucks to deposit points at the Red Room and Sydney Olympic Park.

Harry Nicolaides' pardon by the Thai King is pending some paperwork but at least it's in the pipeline. By the end of the week the pardon request can be presented to the Justice Minister and then to the Royal Palace.

Corrections department planning division officer Putthipong Natthajaruwit said "We are waiting for evidence from the court and we will make a petition to the minister and then send it to the King (Bhumipol Adulyadej)."

A human rights lawyer, Somchai Homlaor, said the department's recommendation was very important in that it would clear the way for the granting of a pardon.

Both stories from The Sydney Morning Herald, 17 February. I blogged about the case earlier this month.

Political observers say Nicolaides, whose book sold fewer than 10 copies, became a pawn in Thailand's deeply divided political landscape.

Over recent years the conflict has pitted the populist former leader Thaksin Shinawatra and his supporters against the urban middle class, who accuse the former prime minister of corruption and abuse of power.

The Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, who came to power in December, has pointed to deliberate steps to draw the monarchy into the country's political conflict.

Mark Dapin's Strange Country (2008) includes a number of features written for Good Weekend magazine, a Saturday supplement with The Sydney Morning Herald. Subtitled 'Travels in a very different Australia' it's a gentle comic wander through the lives of some odd people and some normal people who do things that readers of the magazine might think are odd.

Dapin's background with a lad's magazine has stood him in good stead. Comedy is not an absolute quantity and must be balanced in the measurement of virtue against the things it singles out for censure, praise, or merely for acknowledgement. There's a normative essence Dapin writes to, and it's not too different from that of most people who live in Newtown, or would like to live in Newtown, or visit Newtown occasionally.

You can see the editors thinking, 'Let's get Mark to write about cane toads' or 'What if we ask Mark to write about crossing the desert on a learner's licence?'.

There's a strange homogeneity about the pieces here, which were written over the period of several years. The framing narrative about his son - why would an Englishman want to write about Australia unless he had a schmalzy reason to do so (his son is an Australian) - is also gentle and pleasurable.

But there's more to Dapin than the gentle sentiments implied or expressed. He's a very good feature writer. He looks for the comic angles when talking to people. (He might be a funny guy himself). He asks stupid questions and gets serious answers (which is funny in itself). He has excellent timing and he knows when to stop.

All of which makes reading the book a fun experience.

Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch is a lot of fun to read. Originally published, in Spanish as Rayuela, in 1963, it appeared in Great Britain in 1967. It's part of that period of experimentation that saw Gabriel Garcia Marquez bring out his early tours-de-force but it's a very different kind of novel from One Hundred Years of Solitude.

It's an experimental novel. There are two ways to read it. Either go straight through to page 349 or read in a prescribed order the chapters that include the 'expendable chapters' that continue to page 564. I chose the first. One chapter even has lines from two separate narratives interspersed with one another, an impossible situation that made me skip forward a chapter.

Most of the novel is straightforward in its delivery but the characters are not and the essence of the story is to do with Horatio Oliveira's search for a holistic way of life. In Paris, in the first half of the book, he is involved with a fey Paraguayan named La Maga. He is then forced - we believe - to leave France, whereupon he returns to Buenos Aires.

Here he hitches up with an old friend, Traveler, and his wife, Talita. He also seems to get back into synch with an old girlfriend, Gekrepten. Everything shifts back, in Argentina, from a bohemian Paris lifestyle to the cruder, more mundane realities of day-to-day existence. He's got to make a living, for a start, whereas in Paris he seemed to move from one airy contemplation to the next, not worrying about where the money for his next packet of Gauloises would come from.

It was not always smooth sailing, to be sure. But Oliveira (it's a Portuguese name) is driven by alternative views and expends his energies in ways that are overtly unconventional. The world view of the protagonist synchs nicely with the book's alternative bent so that we are saturated by a feeling of lightness that derives its value from seeing the world through different eyes.

Oliveira's unconventional ways mean that, once back home, he will come up against the realities of others. At 40-plus, he's no longer a young man. But the age is relevant too because it means that he has already developed decided attitudes. In fact he dosen't really care if he is in conflict with others. Indeed, he seems to welcome if not precipitate conflict.

There's a lot of scope for comedy in this recipe, and Cortazar, who wrote the story 'Blow-Up' which was the basis for Michaelangelo Antonioni's famous film, revels in comedic action. Unfortunately, you won't easily find any other books by this author in book shops, and will need to rely on alternative sources, such as online secondhand agglomerators.

When Oliveira's attempt to achieve a holistic experience of life fail hilariously in the final chapters, we're launched into a kind of Gonzo world where the main character sits in the most uneasy possible attitude in relation to those who surround him. It's refreshing to meet another exponent - independently developed - of Gonzo.

Julio Cortazar, the first Gonzo novelist? Perhaps. But Henry Miller is surely an inspiration.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled struck me, at an early stage in my reading, as a book the critics would have panned. The idea snuck into the nest I was building around the book and settled there, unannounced. By the time I got to about page 200, I had a chance to put it down and use the internet.

A Wikipedia-linked profile, published in 2005 at the time his most recent novel, Never Let Me Go, was published, confirmed it. The interloper was a pest, it was true. Because as soon as I’d had that thought another emerged: the book is magnificent.

The Unconsoled (1995) creeps up on you but the story is desperately interesting. I’m not sure where the idea of a musician as a messiah came from, but it’s sort of like feedback from a strange pop band’s lead guitar. The curious logic of the device subverts more formalistic speculation as to how Ryder’s abrupt changes in direction reflect on him or contribute to an evolving set of values by which the story can be judged. It’s not going to be easy, we’re resigned to admit. It’s going to be a stretch to make sense of this novel. But we’re not without pointers, and Ishiguro must be aware of these, especially considering his youthful involvement with music and writing musical lyrics.

We’re accustomed to reading critics who invoke Shelley’s old chestnut about poets being the unrecognised legislators of the world. Here, a musician is supposed to save a small city from decay. We’re not told what sort of crisis there is, but we’re exhorted to believe that the city is increasingly filled with unhappy campers.

But that’s just the superstructure. Around it Ishiguro builds a net of unexpected outcomes. Each conversation - and they tend to be long and intrusive exchanges between two people meeting in a hallway or a crowded movie theatre - seems to announce another odd twist, another possible outcome for us to handle. As the story progresses, these intrusions cause less anxiety, and we become used to seeing how things turn out alright in the end.

Nevertheless, each encounter seems to be about to lead to a satisfying thread, something we can latch onto as we strive to comprehend the extent and nature of the city’s malaise. But each one subverts the comfortable conclusion by introducing either a new plot twist or setting up unease due to a pending change in circumstances Ryder has no control over.

Nothing makes sense for long and we seesaw between the pleasure of making sense of the story’s threads and discomfort at the dawning knowledge that nothing will turn out as prescribed. The riffs are uncomfortable. They’re insinuating. They’re strident and evocative of the timbre and texture of life itself.

In this rather plodding but skilful manner, Ishiguro gives us a sounding board against which we can measure the depth of our own perceptions, both literary and contingent (that is, to do with life as we live it). There are also plenty of spaces that are 'like life' amid the surreal twists, and resting in these we latch onto other, more personal, elements of the story. We start to feel other things, unbidden.

If Nabokov is correct and the best literature pits not characters against one another, but the writer against the reader, then Ishiguro has written a great novel.

Little things get under our skin. It’s soon apparent that we’re in for a rough time. At one point early on, Ryder (the protagonist) is following a woman down a torturous path. He’s got a little boy with him. It transpires that the boy is his own, the woman his wife. His father-in-law is the hotel porter who met him in the very beginning, but toward the end of the story we learn that they‘d only just met recently.

But even before we know any of this, however, we realise that the woman is about to disappear and this fills us with a kind of despair.

Later he’ll get angry with her. But after they go into a cinema to watch a movie, he ends up leaving without her. He’ll catch up with her later, at the modern housing estate, but not before he meets up with the city’s outcast, a desperate man with an ambitious wife who intends to leave him. He has theories about music that the city rejects and, Ryder being the ultimate judge, that are doomed.

The things that happen are too odd. How much does Ryder know? How much do we know? How much SHOULD we know?

Ishiguro’s placing the story in an Eastern European city adds to a destabilising effect. It is masterful because we get a patina of strangeness that is nothing compared to the real strangeness the book produces in its twists and turns.

The language, too, is highly artificial but nevertheless doesn’t stray far from the normative discourse of the everyday. It’s slightly stilted but modulates easily as it inhabits the mouths of different characters. It is flexible without being weak, strong without being stiff. It’s just odd, like the story and like the book itself.

Elfriede Jelinek's novel Greed (2006) is a crime thriller but instead of merely a 'cast' of characters, Jelinek has added to the genre's regular mix a distinct 'complex' of narrative voices that are bound sometimes painfully together by her particular style of worldly pessimism. The country policeman is, from an early point, our villain. We are in no doubt about it. But it doesn't matter who did it.

It's not important who did it because Jelinek's mysterious method deftly introduces a totalising set of narratives that 'speak' to us about the murder of a young girl and the heartbreaking demise of the 'other woman'. We are not just faced with the voices of people. We see a grown buck spring in front of a moving car. We hear the story of the dead lake. We are also invited to listen to the other woman's thinking about her lonely life.

There's no starting point and no end. And just as this resembles life, the twining of disparate narratives around a solid (for fictional purposes) stalk - the story of greed perpetrated by one, evil man - also resembles life. It resembles the way you 'talk to' yourself as you walk down the street. The way different voices emerge at different times of the day.

It's this rush of narrative forces that makes the story so engrossing. Sure, we've got a greedy murderer on our hands, but we'll never understand why the young girl had to die too. Maybe he let slip to her some of his plans for the other woman who, in the end, gives him her house. Satisfying his thirst for real estate. Giving him what he wanted, in her death, because he was never happy with her in her life.

And she mourned his lost affection. Poor, unfortunate soul. But what about the girl?

We sift through images and threads of narrative searching for answers. One thing that comes back to us strongly is the sheer indifference of the world, the absence of a redeeming God, mankind's futile yearning for transcendence despite all the plausible apparatuses of worldly existence that throw themselves before us as we make our way through life. Buy this thing, make sure you purchase that. You might need it one day.

The other woman, who gave everything for the sake of her man, maybe selflessly, emerges as a hero because she tried to believe in a relationship above everything else that exists. She tried to make her link to another human being more important than her own life. If she succeeded then all the credit for the transformation from corpse to benefactor, from fallen woman to angel, belongs to her.

A consummation devoutely to be wished for? But at what cost. I guess you can't have your cake and eat it too.

Jenlinek's novel was originally published in 2000, in German and in Austria. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. This translation came out in 2006: a reward for other, better known books? Regardless, this is an astonishing novel that tries to approximate, in its telling of a terrible story, the texture of life itself. A difficult goal, but one which the author comes as close as possible to achieving.