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Articles by Jonathan Ricketson
Jonathan Ricketson
Steve Toltz might have just written the first great Australian novel of the year. A Rising of the Lights is even more entertaining than his much-lauded, Booker-nominated début, A Fraction of the Whole (2008). It is a book to inhale: indefatigably entertaining, it seizes the reader’s attention from beginning to end. The book opens with the fracturing of the Wilson family.
Jonathan Ricketson
Steve Toltz might have just written the first great Australian novel of the year. A Rising of the Lights is even more entertaining than his much-lauded, Booker-nominated début, A Fraction of the Whole (2008). It is a book to inhale: indefatigably entertaining, it seizes the reader’s attention from beginning to end. The book opens with the fracturing of the Wilson family.
December 2025, no. 482
Which books refused to loosen their grip on the cultural imagination in 2025? In our December issue, the annual Books of the Year includes nominations from Amanda Lohrey, Esther Anatolitis, Mark McKenna, Yves Rees, Clinton Fernandes, Clare Wright, John Kinsella, Felicity Plunkett, and Geordie Williamson. Nadia Wheatley takes us on a dizzying biographical journey as she uncovers a profound secret in Charmian Clift’s life.
Jonathan Ricketson
A curious feature of the creamy new edition of Helen Garner’s diaries: it carries only one blurb, and it is not by some literary heavyweight but by Nigella Lawson. At first, I found this confounding, but I soon began to see parallels between the two. Both are funny, spontaneous sensualists; both have been subjected to harsh public scrutiny and experienced a certain degree of messiness in their personal lives; and both are magnificent women.
Jonathan Ricketson
Billing itself as a ‘gay Bildungsroman’, Thomas Vowles’s Our New Gods follows Ash, a young man with a dark past, in his move from rural Western Australia to the ultra-hip enclaves of Melbourne’s Inner North. Ash immerses himself in the city’s queer scene and soon finds himself in a viper’s nest of sexual and emotional entanglements. First up is his new friend James, a rich blond Adonis; James is in an open relationship with the volatile Raf; Raf has a connection with a troubled soul called Booth.
'Henry 5: Bell Shakespeare’s production of a martial play' by Jonathan Ricketson
Is Henry V Shakespeare’s worst play? No, that unhappy honour goes to The Taming of the Shrew, an anti-comedy that grows more rancid with each passing year. Henry V is far from the Bard’s worst, but it is a second-rate work that is poorly suited to the present day. Fundamentally, the final play in Shakespeare’s second history cycle is about the glories of militarism. It follows an arrogant and thin-skinned Plantagenet monarch who, smarting from personal insult, launches an invasion of France.
Jonathan Ricketson
The title of The Empusium, the newly translated work by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is an invention. It is a portmanteau that fuses masculine and feminine literary allusions: first, Plato’s Symposium, which tells of a drunken Athenian banquet in which great statesmen give speeches on the nature of love; second, the empusa, a shape-shifting female demon who, according to Greek mythology, had the sirenic ability to lure and prey upon young men.
'My Brilliant Friend: The Story of the Lost Child: The darkly glittering world of Elena Ferrante’s Naples' by Jonathan Ricketson
The previous season of My Brilliant Friend (L’amica geniale) ended with a moment of fairytale-like transformation, with the protagonist Elena (Lenù) Greco staring at herself in the mirror of an aeroplane bathroom. She has torpedoed her marriage to run away with the man she always loved. Looking at the glass, she ages decades in the space of a heartbeat: the cherubic, adolescent features of Margherita Mazzucco replaced with the face of Alba Rohrwacher. Her eyes glimmer with a wry intelligence.
Jonathan Ricketson
Helen Garner has death on her mind. In recent decades, it has permeated her work in fascinating and unexpected ways. There is her novel The Spare Room (2008), which is about a woman’s struggles to care for a dying friend held hostage to dangerous delusions; This House of Grief (2014), a true-crime book about a devasting act of filicide; and, in her most recent volume of diaries, How to End a Story (2021), an account of the death of her marriage to the novelist Murray Bail.
Jonathan Ricketson
In 2020, John Silvester posed for a portrait by the artist Mica Pillemer. The picture is an arresting one: Silvester, in business attire, posing as a boxer. Behind him, the walls are plastered with newspapers and posters, a testament to his more than four decades of experience as a Melbourne crime reporter. His fists are raised, his dark eyes hold the viewer’s, his mouth is upturned with the faintest crook of a smile. Silvester is the godfather of Australian true crime.
Not-John
‘Sorry to disturb you,’ the figure in black said. ‘I know it’s been a long time.’ Gaping, I stepped back from the door. I didn’t recognise the person standing before me. He was dressed in dense layers of black, which I thought must have been very hot in the late December afternoon. There was a sort of ragged scarf tied around his neck, a canvas bag over his shoulder. He leaned against the doorway as if it cost him some effort to stand. He had a narrow face, the skin raw and red, the body spindly.
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