Books Read May 2024

Rachel Mead: The Art of Breaking Ice: A Novel, p/b, South Melbourne, Affirm Press, 2023

Exceptional story of Nel Law, the first Australian woman to travel to Antarctica, joining her husband Phil Law in 1960-61 initially as a stowaway. In 1965 Nel founded the Antarctic Wives and Kinfolk Association of Australia. 

Phil Law was a visionary Antarctic leader, Director of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE) from 1949 to 1966. He established Mawson, Davis and Casey stations an lead expeditions that explored over 5000 kilometres of coastline and approximately 1,000,000 square miles of territory as well as establishing world-class scientific facilities in Antarctica. 

Nel Law was a talented Australian artist with a solo exhibition at the Leveson Street Gallery in Melbourne. Rachel Mead has access to Phillip Law’s papers which were donated to the Australian National Library including diaries, reports, press cuttings and scrapbooks including material about his wife and also Nel’s own diary.

Having said all this Rachael Mead reminds us that her novel is a fictional account of Nel’s first journey to Antarctica and the outline of Nel’s interactions with the various events and individuals in the novel is purely fictional.  The result is a thought provoking and entertaining novel which keeps the reader on edge constantly throughout. It is difficult to contemplate what it would be like for just one female working and painting amongst a team of some 300 men for over a year. Rachel Mead has given us an impressive account of what that first experience might have been for Nel Law.   5 stars. 

Saul Bellow: Herzog, p/b, Ringwood, Penguin, 1967 (1964)

Canadian/American Saul Bellow who died in 2005 was born of Russian Jewish parents. His many widely read novels have placed him in the highest order of American literature winning the Noble Prize and the Pulitzer along with many other literary awards. 

Bellow’s Herzog, about a world weary academic unhappily in love and with a penchant for writing, but never sending letters to a vast array of academics and writers alive and dead, is a remarkable novel, impossible to put down.

The erudition and intensity of Bellow’s writing challenges the reader to follow up his remarks made in several languages as well as feeling left behind by his knowledge of just about everything that matters about the world and human life. In Herzog the reader finds humour, sympathy, sadness, amazement, empathy, wisdom and so much more. This is a rare book I once read as a teenager and again now in my 70’s and enjoying it even more now than I did then. 

Herzog had many girl friends and two failed marriages and as the novel draws to a close he is perhaps getting ready to marry a third wife.  Saul Bellow ought to know about these things as he had five marriages himself!  Herzog is a novel to read far more than once because each time you read it a whole new set of ideas opens up.   5 stars.