The trial that gripped Australia

By Maggie Fergusson

REPORTAGEThis House of Grief by Helen Garner, Text, trade paperback, out now. On Father’s Day 2005, Robert Farquharson was driving his small sons home to his ex-wife when he veered off the Princes Highway near Geelong and plunged into a dam. He managed to swim to the surface; the three boys drowned. His trial gripped Australia. Had Farquharson been overcome by a paroxysm of coughing, and lost control? Or was he possessed of a “dark contemplation”—an urge to inflict unbearable suffering on an unfaithful spouse? Compassionate and dispassionate in equal measure, Helen Garner takes us into the courtroom and shows a melting-pot of venality. She writes with a profound understanding of human vulnerability, and of the subtle workings of love, memory and remorse. In remaining alive, Farquharson has perhaps committed greater violence against himself than against his three dead boys.

BIOGRAPHY The Story of Alice by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Harvill Secker, hardback, out now. “My constant aim is to remain, personally, unknown to the world,” the Reverend Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, once wrote. One hundred and fifty years after the publication of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” he remains elusive, and fascinating. This triple biography—of Carroll, of the imaginary Alice, and of Alice Hargreaves, who spent 70 years in her own fictional shadow—explores the triangular relationship initiated by a fastidious Oxford mathematician with a speech impediment, a flair for stories and an obsession with little girls. Carroll was, by his own admission, “an inveterate child-fancier”; today he’d be condemned as sad and sleazy. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst presents Carroll’s motivations as sentimental rather than sexual, and leaves you grateful that the Victorians, supposedly so censorious, made room for his eccentricities and enabled his genius to flourish.

NATURE Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane, Hamish Hamilton, hardback, out now. Robert Macfarlane is a shape-shifter: a mountaineer who lives in the flattest city in Britain, a seeker after solitude perfectly at home heading up the Man Booker judges, a Cambridge don who is also a sparky columnist (see Landscapes of the Mind). Now he becomes a linguistic Noah, constructing a book to shelter precious words and phrases about the countryside against a rising tide of urban indifference. Travelling in the company of the literature he loves, he first explores a landscape, then sets out its glossary. He finds tiny words that contain whole stories: èit is Gaelic for the practice of placing quartz in moonlit moorland streams to sparkle and attract salmon. “Landmarks” is both a celebration and an elegy, and its effect is cumulatively spell-binding. There’ll be a word for that in Doric or Manx or Norn.