ABR Critics McFarlane

Critic of the Month

Brian McFarlane has had three sometimes overlapping careers. First was as a schoolteacher, after graduating from the University of Melbourne: he taught in schools in Victoria and England, ending this career with fifteen years at Trinity Grammar, Melbourne. Second, he became a full-time academic after several samplings as a part-time tutor while still at Trinity, and he spent his last ten years very happily at Monash University, where he taught literature, film and film-and-literature, with an emphasis on British cinema and literary adaptations on screen. Now, third, he has become a writer, and writing incessantly is what he does - when, that is, he is not reading the books and watching the films he needs to read or watch in order to write about them. A chronic incapacity to say No to anything attractive means that he usually has more to do than is good for, say, home-maintenance chores.

His major work has been the compilation, editing and writing most of The Encyclopedia of British Film (2003), which goes into its third edition in 2007. His other books have ranged over Australian literature, Australian film, literary adaptation and British film. They include: Martin Boyd's Langton Novels (1980); Words and Images: Australian Novels into Film (1983); Australian Cinema: 1970-1985 (1987); New Australian Cinema: Sources and Parallels in American and British Film (1992, co-authored with Geoff Mayer); Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (1996); and Lance Comfort (1999). As well, he compiled Sixty Voices: Celebrities Recall the Golden Age of British Cinema (1992), a book of interviews he had conducted with key personnel in British cinema; and in 1997 he produced a second, greatly enlarged book of interviews, An Autobiography of British Cinema, bringing the oral history of British cinema up to date. With John Barnes he co-edited Cross-Country (1986), an anthology of Australian verse; with Geoff Mayer and Ina Bertrand, he co-edited The Oxford Companion to Australian Film (1999); and in 2003 he edited the critical anthology, The Cinema of Britain and Ireland. The books he is currently working on are, in likely order of completion: Great Expectations: Novel and Adaptations; Michael Winterbottom (co-authored with Deane Williams); and The British 'B' Movie (co-authored with Steve Chibnall).

Apart from working on books, he writes across a range of journals scholarly and popular (not mutually exclusive terms), reviews books and films, and writes chapters for other people's books, most recently on topics ranging from Henry James to Psycho. He has been the film critic for Meanjin since 2001, a quarterly stint that enables him to gather together at leisure, as it were, impressions of recent films; he is a regular contributor to the handsome, locally produced film journal Metro, usually on topics related to Australian cinema, but he was recently asked to do a piece on film 'epics', which appeared as 'Size Doesn't Matter: Big Stupid Films'; he has often reviewed books for the Age; and, ever at the cutting edge of new technology (not), has several times been published in online journals. A recurring pleasure over the last decade has been a more or less twice-monthly reviewing stint on Radio 3RRR.

In 1999 he was elected Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy, and in 2003 he was awarded the government's Centenary Medal for 'services to the arts and literature'. He is currently an Honorary Associate Professor at Monash University, and Visiting Professor at the University of Hull, United Kingdom.

Brian McFarlane and ABR

Brian McFarlane first wrote for the ABR in the late 1980s (actually reviewing previous 'Critic of the Month' Brenda Niall's brilliant biography of Martin Boyd as his first assignment), but much more regularly since 2001. Asked what he likes about reviewing, he says that he enjoys the finiteness of it. When he knows he should be researching and arguing his way through a chapter in a book, the publication date of which looms but about which he feels strangely unwilling to tap out the opening lines, it is relief to turn to an enjoyable task which one knows must be done within a few days and within a tightly specified length.

He continues: 'On a more high-minded level, there is real pleasure in having my attention drawn to books that might otherwise not have come my way. I am always glad to have read a book, even when, as in the case of The Original Million Dollar Mermaid (2005), it can't be said to have contributed to my well-being. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't have come across George Ogilvie's very rewarding autobiography, Simple Gifts: A Life in the Theatre (2006). Mind you, one of the first books offered me by the present editor was Tim Winton's superb novel Dirt Music, which led me to anticipate a string of comparable masterworks, and this hasn't always been the case.'

McFarlane says he dislikes reviews which seem bent on parading the reviewer's erudition at the expense of the book s/he is meant to be discussing. His aim is to give as clear a sense as possible of what the book is about and how its author has approached the material of the book and to make equally clear how it struck him. That is, reviewing is not a neutral business: in the end, it requires some sense of discrimination, of evaluation, from the reviewer. Where possible he likes to quote directly from the book or film, in the hope that this gives some of the flavour of the work. He makes tediously massive notes as he reads or watches: the mere knowledge that he will never be able to make use of more than a quarter of these never seems to restrain him, poor driven creature that he is.

Brian McFarlane on reviewing

'For the most part, I'm asked to review novels or (auto)biographies, and that's fine with me. Occasionally I'll be invited to consider something different - I was recently asked to review a book about the financing of British cinema, and I tried very hard to understand its intricacies. Failed of course, as with the plot of The Matrix, which someone else asked me to write about. I greatly prefer to write about work that has excited me, like the wonderful theatrical occasion of Ariette Taylor's production of Ivanov in 2005. The pleasures of putting in the boot, however well deserved, are short-lived; no one sets out to write a bad novel or make a bad film, however much the evidence of the finished product may lead you to suppose that.

'On the whole, a reviewer's lot is a happy one. He gets to do what he likes doing - writing, that is, about things that interest him - that is, books and films; sometimes perhaps draws a reader's attention to a pleasure that might otherwise have been missed; has the chance to air his views publicly; and even gets paid for doing so'.

Some ABR reviews by Brian McFarlane

A Personality Junkyard: on Tim Winton's Dirt Music (November, 2001)

The Day of the Chimp on Andrew Humphreys' Wonderful (February, 2004)

Some Kind of a Man on Peter Conrad's Some Kind of a Man (March, 2004)

Flaunting Your Perfections on Emily Gibson's The Original Million Dollar Mermaid: the Annette Kellerman Story (June-July, 2005)

Laughter That Freezes on the Lips on Ariette Taylor's production of Ivanov (November 2005)

Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip (December 2006)