This book came to my attention when I saw the author was scheduled to speak about it at a writers festival.
As it turned out, I had to miss Kate Holden’s session but I bought her book, anyway, The Ruin of Magic.
I knew of Holden from her writing for The Saturday Paper, where since 2014 she’s been publishing excellent interviews with interesting people.
She’s previously published two memoirs and The Winter Road, for which she won the 2021 Walkley Book Award and the 2022 Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction.
Whereas The Winter Road was a work of carefully researched, journalistic, narrative non-fiction about the 2014 shooting of an environmental officer by a farmer, The Ruin of Magic is a collection of six essays subtitled “Longing and Belonging in Strange Times”.
As the book is 265 pages long, these are not short essays but extended ruminations on broad themes related to what it is to be an Australian these days. And by “these days”, I mean very recent times, often referring to events that have happened in the last few years.
The topics of the essays overlap and can be broadly described as including home, nationality, nostalgia, art, culture, the modern and ancient world, the disappearance of magic from our lives, migration, light, water, and belonging.
Other themes that are explored include architecture, archaeology, history, technology, landscape, ecology, faith, mythology, design, darkness, and desire. In other words, a lot.
Each essay is divided into what I can only describe as thoughts: reflections, opinions, and philosophical perspectives drawn from Holden’s personal experiences and her extensive reading.
When I say “personal” experiences, she’s unafraid to discuss or reference life events we don’t usually encounter in these kinds of essays, including a period of heroin addiction and associated prostitution. She dissects her changing family relationships from childhood to middle age, and analyses her own behaviour over time, including her feelings for her parents, her partner (Tim Flannery), and her son.
And when I say “extensive” reading, Holden is dauntingly well-read, from the ancient classics through every era to the modern day. She liberally uses quotations from poetry, non-fiction and fiction to illustrate a thought, often in the original Greek, Latin, French, German, or Italian.
She’s as likely to cite Patti Smith as Dante Alighieri, David Malouf as Petrarch, Nick Cave as Sigmund Freud. Writers and thinkers of all kinds provide quotes that give the reader something to consider, as do Holden’s own original statements – sometimes firm, often tentative. A bonus is the citation and reading list at the end of each essay.
Written in the first person, there’s no narrative, as such, other than occasional anecdotes from her childhood, youth, or adulthood and even then they’re there to help her communicate an idea or reach an point of view.
What there is, is a great deal of cogitation, reflection, and deep thought. She refers to and ponders not only what others have written but what she takes them to mean, their significance and intent, in context.
She sometimes rambles to the extent I wondered where she was going with a thread of thought but always comes to something at least resembling an interesting insight. She’s smart enough to consign sufficiently tangential thoughts to footnotes so as not to interrupt the main flow.
Extremely erudite, literate, and articulate, I personally find this kind of writing utterly compelling, even if I have to look up the meaning of an occasional word.
What especially appealed to me is that Holden is a writer of my generation and location, and I found myself identifying with her often and admiring her constantly.
It’s not that she comes to any great conclusions (although she offers many opinions), it’s more that she takes the reader on a journey through her incisive thoughts on some of the most significant or even critical topics related to being Australian in the modern world.
I don’t want to make it sound like The Ruin of Magic was hard to read – quite the opposite. Holden’s writing style flows elegantly across the pages, with a convesrational tone that kept me fully engaged even as she addressed complex philosophical and psychological concepts.
The Ruin of Magic goes a long way to explaining where we are now and how we got here.
Highly recommended.