What a marvellous book this is! I've only read some of the late Frank Moorhouse's oeuvre, but Catharine Lumby's biography shines an insightful light on the ones that I have read, and as a good LitBio should, it makes me want to read more of his books.

According to the press release, Frank Moorhouse AM (1938-2022) had asked journalist, writer and academic Catharine Lumby to be his biographer a decade before he died...

This was an inspired choice, influenced by their decades of friendship and by

Lumby's close engagement with, and appreciation for, Moorhouse's writing. She 'got' him and his work, he said, in a way few others did.

So this is not a biography rushed prematurely into print in the wake of Moorhouse's death in June last year. This is the kind of biography that an author of Moorhouse's stature deserves.

In her introduction, Lumby acknowledges that her biography is a story of his life. Her story.

This is my version of his story: of his stories and the storeys within the multilayered, brilliant and complicated person who was home to his writing and his extraordinarily adventurous life.

Moorhouse was first and foremost a contradiction in terms. A man who was wedded to and fascinated by rules and rituals while equally prepared to rail against the overreach of the state and bourgeois morality. His major works are grounded in this productive tension, in the question of: How many rules do we need to live well? How many rules are too many? (p.1)

This preoccupation with the rules of social engagement recurs over and over again in his work, from Futility and Other Animals to his League of Nations trilogy, and, Lumby says, this was because he liked toying with the boundaries of rules. As is well known, he was an activist against Australia's absurd censorship laws (see my review of Nicole Moore's The Censor's Library (2012) to see how extensive they were), and he was a supporter of the gay liberation, feminist and Aboriginal rights movement throughout his life. But he didn't always please feminists then or now and Lumby includes a vignette from a story that expresses the casual sexism of the 70s and the way that women were not respected during the 'sexual revolution' that developed in the aftermath of The Pill.

Lumby notes that Moorhouse was younger than most members of the Sydney Push. He enjoyed its left-wing libertarianism but he also observed how that played out differently for those who challenged the traditional role of women within marriage as homemakers and mothers.

TO read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/11/21/frank-moorhouse-a-life-2023-by-catharine-lum... show less

Nov 20, 2023

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Remote Control: New Media, New Ethics by Catharine Lumby