Myth

Wagner’s Ring is an ambitious cycle of four operas relating world history from Primal Swirl to End of Days. It took 26 years to write, takes 15 hours to perform, a double-size orchestra to play and a specially built opera house to stage. Michael Downes, the director of music at St Andrews University, places the fons et origo of the epic in Wagner’s frustration as a kapellmeister, when he wrote, unsolicited, to his boss the King of Saxony, proposing a total revamp of the royal music scene. No reply was forthcoming. A second proposal was also blanked. Furious, Wagner flung himself into the Dresden uprising of 1848, financing the manufacture

Early one morning, Alan Garner goes to let the hens out. The hens live in a hutch in the garden of Toad Hall in Blackden, Cheshire, a medieval dwelling which Garner has made his home since 1957, not many miles from where all his forebears – artisans and smiths – lived and worked for generations. Something glints in the light, catches his eye. ‘It is thin, translucent, honey-black and sharp; sharper than a surgeon’s steel.’ He knows just what it is. A flint, a tool, a precision instrument. ‘I am the first to know in the eight to ten thousand years since the last hand that held it.’ Alan Garner

It is well established that women are happy to read novels written by men but that male readers rarely extend a reciprocal courtesy. The late Mo Hayder is a case in point, since despite the extraordinary sales of the novels she wrote before her premature death in 2021, her fan base remains overwhelmingly female. It may be that the extreme violence often found in her books (‘lurid’ would not be unfair) strikes men as a trespass on what has traditionally been a male preserve. Whatever the reason, male reviewers tended to shy away – I know that, since I was one of them. Yet just ten pages into Bonehead, her

Among many other prizes for her stunningly original work, Alexis Wright has won Australia’s greatest literary honour, the Miles Franklin Award, for a novel of the highest literary merit representing Australian life. It is ironic, but sadly apt, that her epic Praiseworthy should be published in the year that Australians, offered a chance to give greater political rights to their indigenous peoples, have voted not to. Everything blends together: dream and reality, donkeys and butterflies, the Odyssey and The Wizard of Oz Wright is an Aboriginal activist as well as a writer. Praiseworthy, which has already won the Queensland Literary Award for Fiction, is an impassioned environmental Ulysses of the

Despite being a twin myself, I wasn’t necessarily disposed to love William Viney’s Twinkind, a book for which the phrase ‘lavishly illustrated’ might have been invented. Much writing on twins intended for the general reader (including recent fiction such as Brit Bennett’s bestselling The Vanishing Half) has been produced by non-twins, or writers who have twins in their family. The emphasis is often on how twins appear to the singleton majority, lazily depicting them either as freaks of nature or prodigies of psychic connection. Indeed, Twinkind’s visual component seems to be asking the reader to look at twins from the outside, while its title appears to encourage us to see