This week in Australian book news — and it feels like a perfect storm for anyone who still believes literature matters — young adult author Craig Silvey gets done for being a paedo (allegedly) and mass walk out of Adelaide writer's festival due to an uninvited writer who might just say something negative about Israel which worries Australian Jews post Bondi massacre, and someone misspells a word from Dorothy McKellar's oft quoted poem which they used to prove climate change isn't real, plus AI is used to check possible AI written posts and declares it is AI written when a human wrote it.

It’s chaos, confusion, outrage, and moral panic — all colliding at once, coupled with a concern that people aren't reading anymore, just regurgitating what they've read in the comment section or in Chat GPT. We need people who think deeply more than ever, because we seem to be in a hell of moral outrage without thinking deeply about what any of it really means.

Western Australian writer Craig Silvey was charged last week for possessing child exploitation material, which means the entire bookworld has disowned this much loved author whose books have been taught in schools and made into films. Oof. My heart goes out mostly to his wife and family. I mean, it doesn't sound like research. His books must be burnt at the stake, of course. Just like Marion Zimmer Bradley, who posthumously got accused of child abuse. The Mists of Avalon was such a good read, as well. I best scrub it from my mind, immediately. It does make you feel dirty somehow.

But we need to feel uncomfortable, don't we? And to sit with it, not immediately cancel it or run from it. Sure, when an author does something inherently wrong or evil, we want to rid them from our lives - but should we?

Think about Lewis Carroll, whose photographs of young girls in the nude and close relationship with young children could have been grooming. Yet can we cancel Alice in Wonderland? I mean, we do want to separate creative genius from criminality, but we want morality to mean something. Do we focus on the work that meant so much to our lives, or do we try to scrub out the darkness altogether?

This is the central moral tension of literary culture.

Then there's the furore of the Adelaide Writer's Festival. The board uninvited Palestinian-Australian author Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, saying her presence would was culturally on the nose in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack. I guess they meant well, right? Too soon, maybe, for a writer to be saying the Israeli culture has no right to exist. Yet the board was subsequently accused of not thinking carefully - ironic, given they're all lovers of writing and ideas, and were meant to be celebrating such things. A wave of cancellations, including the director, and notable writers like Zadie Smith and Helen Garner, and even NZ former PM Jacinda Ardern, suggested that maybe they jumped the gun a little. None of them said they cancelled because they agreed with Abdel-Fattah - that was beside point. They just understood what was at stake.

Obviously, just because you invite someone to speak, doesn't mean you endorse their ideas — just like reading Mists of Avalon doesn't make you an abuser of children. Of course, you might not want to finance Craig Silvey by buying his novels, but we must remember than in either instance, literature isn't about being safe. Some of the most important books in history — think Nabokov's Lolita, JG Ballard's Crash, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, even The Handmaid's Tale — weren't safe. They disturbed people deeply, challenging moral certainties, particular power structures and the myths we tell about our cultures and societies, and indeed ourselves.

Being disturbed is fucking delicious. Any bookish person here will remember the thrill of reading a challenging book with challening subject matter, and not wanting to burn it because they didn't like the character or what they did. Imagine if we'd grown up with conformist, cautious books - how dull! Many of us would never have become avid readers.

Literature that never risks offence eventually stops saying anything at all - and this is also true for any kind of writing or public speaking.

We're living in an age where we trained to think fast, read fast, to avoid discomfort, and to sit inside algo bubbles. Books and reading asked more of me than that — and still does — in the space of a few days of reading a novel, I would learn more about a place, time and people than I could in a twenty second reel. I'd be forced to sit with discomfort, and to imagine a life beyond my own. It wasn't about being outraged daily, about instantly judging a behavior or action, but about slow deliberation, about walking in the shoes of people we may not like. It wasn't about excusing harm, but about helping us understand why it happens and why people might justify it.

It gave us literacy.

It also steers away from the world we see on Facebook and other social media where clarity is demanded — things are so black and white, safe or unsafe, right or wrong, and that grey nuance isn't there anymore. Real life is messier — and that mess can be found also in the pages of literature, and indeed in conversations about literature, where there's more space for contradictions and loose ends and less about people dogmatically clinging to their beliefs that they've likely just picked up in an algo bubble. If we can allow that, then maybe we have more room in society for possibility, becoming less bloody minded and dogmatic and arguing stupid points in the comment section and misquoting poems to prove points about science or believing something was written by AI because AI told us that even though we darn well know our way around a sentence, an essay, an idea.

I also think about the cancel culture age in which we live. Governments — and festivals and media — are all about managing risk. God forbid we allow diversity of voice when we might have one group of people donating to an institution that might get upset, for example. Literature doesn't — and shouldn't — cancel. It keeps ALIVE experiences that are shameful or unresolved, like child abuse or colonisation or war — but helps us think about these experiences in mindful, intelligent ways, to reflect on such ideas and histories without outrage or fear, to read something and be able to say: 'look, I don't agree with you, but I understand where you are coming from, and can incorporate parts of your story into my own world view'.

In moments like the Adelaide Writers’ Week collapse, or the horror of criminal writers, it's kinda worrying. Maybe it's easier to cancel, to forget about literature and ideas and the people who come up with them, because they make us feel discomfort, forgetting that feeling like that isn't such a bad thing - but that intellectual laziness absolutely is going to destroy us.

If we can't think for ourselves, what culture do we end up with? It's not by accident Orwell gets referred to over and over. Trim down our words, our language, what we read, what we are allowed to say, and we end up with a society that doesn't need books at all - because we're too dumb to read them, and we allow the nefarious forces than be to teach us how to think instead.

With Love,

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