Judith Brett The Enigmatic Mr Deakin
Although a charmer, a gifted orator and committed to public service, he was profoundly introspective, forcing the reader to consider the serendipitous nature of recordkeeping. Had Deakin not been overtaken by dementia while still relatively young, he may well have destroyed the contents of his locked cupboard, leaving a biographer only his public utterances, some private letters, and others’ recollections to work with. What then would we know of the inner life of the man three times prime minister and the driving force behind Federation?
If Brett is stern with the conflicted Deakin, holding him to his own impossible spiritual and intellectual ideals, she is stern, too, with the reader, stressing the “need to exercise our historical imagination” if we
are to grasp how, for example, nationalism – as embodied in the White Australia Policy – could ever have appealed to a social progressive such as Deakin as a force for good.
In An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic,
a classics professor, Daniel Mendelsohn has written a memoir that’s as pedagogical as it is personal. If that sounds like a bad thing, it’s anything but. Mendelsohn’s father, Jay, a gruff retired mathematician, asks to sit in on a term-long seminar his son is teaching on Homer’s Odyssey. When the term ends, the pair embarks on a “Retracing the Odyssey” cruise. Then, within months, Jay suffers a stroke and dies.
In composing their stories, Mendelsohn tells us, the Greeks often used “ring composition”, the elaborate winding, looping technique used by Homer in telling “The