Robyn Arianrhod, author of Einstein's Heroes, launched My Sister Chaos at Readings Books & Music Carlton most elegantly last month. Here's her speech:

I’ve always greatly admired fiction-writers for their use of language, and their inventiveness in creating and telling stories. However, although non-fiction writers cannot invent stories, we can try to be inventive in the way we tell them. Certainly in my own writing, I try to combine the novelist’s art of storytelling with ideas about the language, the people and the history of mathematics. So you can imagine how delighted I was when I discovered in Lara a novelist who has made use of the mathematician’s art!

And I do mean mathematical ‘art’ rather than ‘content’, because there are no equations in the novel; nor is Lara’s story about a sympathetic mathematical character – on the contrary, the main character uses map-making and the idea of mathematical proof to create an obsessive, emotionally dysfunctional kind of security. Actually, I’m usually wary when the pursuit of mathematics is assumed to be synonymous with a lack of emotion, but it turns out that My Sister Chaos uses the traditional divide between science and art in a transcendent way. I’ll talk more about that later, but to get back to my point about the ‘mathematician’s art’, it seems to me that Lara has used cartographic and mathematical metaphors to tell a story with two of the hallmarks of a good piece of mathematics: economy of expression, and conceptual complexity or intellectual sophistication. 

By 'intellectual sophistication', I don't necessarily mean difficult or absturse. One of the beauties of Newton's law of gravity or Einstein's E=mc2 is that these equations can be understood by anyone who has studied elementary algebra. This type of simple, economical way of expressing deep ideas gives the mathematical language its spare beauty and elegance. Similarly My Sister Chaos is not difficult or abstruse, but what Lara has done is to create an intellectually elegant and economical way of telling an important but difficult story.

We are used to hearing every day about the huge ethical and practical dilemmas in responding to the twenty-first century’s horrifying number of wars and refugees – we are often overwhelmed by this knowledge and we don’t always know how to respond on a personal level. We may not want to think about such a difficult topic when we sit down to read a novel – but this is where the sophistication and economy of My Sister Chaos comes into it. There is no sensationalism; rather, Lara’s imaginative use of scientific metaphors facilitates a spare, economical story that enables readers to focus on the mental world of one refugee who, on the face of it, is just like many of us. She has a house and a job in a profession that she loves – but she has a secret inner life. Indeed, she lives almost completely in a world of the mind, albeit a fractured world torn apart by war, and papered over by the seeming normality of life in a country like Australia. It makes us wonder anew how many of the people living around us have terrible secrets that we know nothing about.

These awful secrets are also embedded in the mysterious way in which the story is told. We don’t know the names or nationality of the two sisters at the heart of the book – all we know is the bare outline of their history. And yet, in a way this outline is very dense: it is the sisters’ lives pared back to their essence, just as a few symbols in a mathematical equation can express the essence of a complex idea. This pared-back narrative expresses not only the effects of war, but also the essence of being an outsider, of the use and abuse of power, and the psychological effects of dislocation, discrimination, and trauma. These are huge issues that apply in various situations, and which often overwhelm us in their details. By using the mathematician’s art of focusing on universal patterns, however, Lara has enabled us to look at these issues in a different way.

As I’ve just indicated, the cartographer has a sister; she is an artist, and here Lara builds tension by drawing on the apparent divide between the arts and sciences. And, as I’ve already mentioned, it is only an apparent divide, a stereotype in which mathematicians are seen as logical and unemotional, while artists are supposed to be spontaneous free spirits.  But Newton and Einstein, the most iconic mathematical physicists of all, were sometimes quite out of control emotionally, and in many ways they were completely free spirits. More importantly, they could not have built their rigorous mathematical theories with logic alone: they needed a goodly dose of ‘artistic’ imagination and intuition. However, as an emotional person myself, I do know the calming joy that comes with the complete certainty of pure mathematical logic and proof. So I understand why Lara’s cartographer turns to precise maps and the idea of proof in her quest for security and stability as she tries to heal after the appalling chaos of her recent past.

As for the tension between the obsessive, seemingly logical cartographer and her artistic, apparently free-spirited sister, the cartographer cannot allow herself to succumb to any emotion that might feed her fear of chaos. But as I said before, Lara ultimately transcends this traditional stereotyping of artists and mathematicians. On the one hand, her cartographer ultimately uses ‘logic’ in a way that embodies chaos, which fascinated me because in mathematics, too, logic can be used to analyse truly chaotic ‘systems’. On the other hand, mathematical ‘chaos’ is not always as chaotic as the term ‘chaos theory’ might suggest: it is true that in some applications, some mathematical models of reality cannot make accurate predictions over the very long term – recall the famous image of the flapping of a butterfly’s wings changing the long-term weather prediction half a world away – but this does not mean these mathematical models are chaotic or unreliable in all situations. Analogously, Lara’s artistic character is not as chaotic as she seems – and the reader discovers this in a denouement that is as thrilling as it is original.

Of course, all this is just my view: I’ve spoken about the beauty of mathematics, but one of the beauties of literature is that it often means different things to different people!

Spinifex director Susan Hawthorne meets Bella and Edward and is not convinced by what she sees...

On a recent flight I had the chance to see the film Twilight. I’d heard about Stephenie Meyer’s book, heard mixed reports, some damning, some complimentary. Since watching the movie I’ve been thinking about how to process this strange phenomenon.

I’m trying to put myself in the mind of a youngish reader and wondering if it might be a kind of revenge against the permissiveness of the previous generation. Is it about wanting to go back to traditional values, a rejection of feminism and critiques of colonisation? But, then my feminist self intervenes and asks why would any young woman want to participate in the male protection racket offered by this film? First the father won’t let his daughter stay out later than 4pm; then the pasty-faced Edward wants only to marry her and protect her; and then Jake is just more of the same. What explains the phenomenal success of this book with young women? There is an element of the gothic; and vampires do create a kind of adolescent frisson.

And then there’s the violence: the serial killing going on in Seattle soon followed by what can only be called a massacre in the forest.

Almost all the dialogue in the movie is like cardboard and sotto voce. It’s also incredibly boring, most of it of the “what will we do?” kind. While this is a perennial question of youth, it does nothing for plot or narrative.

The most interesting character in Twilight is the mother, the kind of mother who looks like she managed to do something with her life and has now headed for the sun. She comes across as a real person. Meanwhile, the father is not coping with his teenage daughter and just wants to control her.

Then there is the local tribe, the Native Americans, who do more than dance with wolves, this tribe knows how to turn into wolves. My reaction is what is this racist, exoticising crap doing in this movie?

So here we have it – a story that makes young women fear their bodies and have an extraordinarily narrow view of sexuality. You would never know that feminism had ever critiqued every part of the framing narrative. Sex is evil, it is one-dimensional, allowed only for procreative purposes and it makes the surrendered wife seem almost tame. Indigenous peoples are strong but might put themselves forward as a sacrifice for the greater good (nothing new here). Bella and Jake – the woman and the native – both get to offer themselves as sacrificial lambs, while the vampires (those pasty-faced ones) hunt.

In my twenties, I read a great deal of fantasy, most of it mind expanding. This is of the mind-narrowing kind and I wish its popularity would quickly wane. At one point I thought, maybe it’s ironic, meant as some kind of generational joke against people like me, but more realistically I can’t but conclude that it is racist and sexist, mind-numbing violence.

Thoughts from Kathleeen Barry as the rescue of the Chilean minders unfolded...

I am watching as the seventeenth of thirty-three Chilean miners has just emerged from a half mile under the earth. I know that I am with millions all over the world who, with all of Chile,  anxiously wait until the very last one and their rescuers is out of that mine. I look at the faces of waiting loved ones and think about what they have endured, of how they must feel at this moment while I image what each miner is feeling as he comes to the surface. I think about unfair labor standards and mine companies disregard for miners' safety that led to earlier deaths in this and other mines.  

How can we not be glued to the rescue of human beings! These are moments when we transcend nationality, race and gender. It's as if we make ourselves one with lives we had thought were lost until they responded to earlier rescue efforts. As human beings, except for those sociopaths who put greed above humanity, we value human life above all else. This rescue effort that has brought in resources from around the world is evidence of how far we will go to keep human life from being lost.

For the waiting world, this is how our empathy has been engaged. Empathy, that feeling for what others are feeling and experiencing, putting oneself in the place of the others – the miners under the earth, their families above – literally puts us there with the others.  

We do not choose to be empathetic – it is so hardwired into us as humans that when others' lives are at risk, if we do not respond as we are doing to the Chilean miners, it is because something has turned off our empathy. Those states and the US who send their soldiers to join US forces in US wars of aggression – in Iraq,  in Afghanistan – nationalism, patriotism and military propaganda become powerful social forces that try to turn off empathy for those families and villages wiped out by bombs, drones and combat soldiers. In America they become known as "collateral damage" and the rest of the world as "innocent lives" or merely "civilian casualties.

Of course many of us are concerned with the loss of civilian lives in war. But the language of war, since almost forever, has coupled that loss with the belief that war is inevitable, and unavoidable. If entire populations had not been manipulated to accept killing in war, making war would become impossible.  Human empathy would rise to the surface again and that collateral damage would be so intolerable we would not allow leaders to take or stay in office who would take us into war. That is why our leaders lie to us – Iraq has weapons of mass destruction aimed at the US, or earlier – US ships where attacked by Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin.  

But there is a deeper force that captures our empathy and holds it hostage for war – the acceptance that many of those fighting in combat will inevitably if regrettably be killed. It cannot be helped, and they go into combat knowing they may be sacrificing their lives. For that we call them heroes. If they are not willing to make that "sacrifice", they are found to not measure up to societies' standards for manhood. In Unmaking War, Remaking Men I show how we make human expendability for war a standard of manhood. 

I have asked: "How in the madness of war do so many human beings throughout the world—who share an unconditional love of life, who are connected to each other through the life force that urges us away from death to spontaneously want to save another’s life and to protect one’s own—come to accept war as inevitable? How do we sustain as valid a belief in the distinction between “innocent,” civilian, or noncombatants’ lives and the lives of those in combat? Who are we to determine who can and who cannot be killed as if the power of the state supersedes the value of human life, of every human life? How do we hold in our hearts, against our shared human consciousness, the conviction that men will be killed in combat and that it must be that way?”

These questions begin our road to recovery of our empathy for all human beings. Having our empathy blocked to justify killing in war, to validate war itself, dehumanizes all of us. Making men expendable for combat sustains their domination over lesser, not masculine lives and abets violence against women. Reclaiming our empathy is, I believe, the force that will make the world turn away from war.  It is our route back to sanity.

This is an extended version of a blog posted on Kathleen's site http://www.kathleenbarry.net/blog/43/43/