It’s always¹ advisable, when you’re not feeling one book, to stop it at a quarter in and then go to the author’s previous title. Time of the Child, one of the picks for Christmas 2024, seemed difficult to get into; the chapters were very long, the breaks were few, and the narrative kept referring to earlier events in the village. Picking up This Is Happiness, to see what Niall Williams had previously written about the Irish village of Faha, is an instantly rewarding experience.²

Of course, eventually you will figure out that this is the second Faha novel. The first is called History of the Rain, and the entirety of the first chapter of This Is Happiness is “The rain had stopped.” But you don’t feel like you’ve lost any important information by starting here.

In 1958, the town of Faha sees sunshine for the first time in years. Seventeen year old seminary drop out Noe Crowe is visiting with his grandparents, Ganga and Doady, when the coming of the electricity is announced. Enlisted into helping lodger Christy collect signatures to allow the power poles to be constructed, Noe goes through the warm season feeling the old world inching towards the new — all from the vantage point of someone who has lived with electricity in Dublin all his life.

Told exclusively from Noe’s first person point of view at a sixty year remove, This is Happiness boasts the omniscience of age rather than of someone who knows and perceives everything. This is a folk tale told by someone who lived through part of it and gathered the rest. Noe’s surmise is the engine that powers the telling, and he is a charming host. 

This means that the parts of the novel that are explicitly “seventeen”, like his dalliances with the Troy sisters, are ill-considered and awkward. They ring true enough, but there is a largely baffling chunk about visiting the cinema in town and what ensues in the dark. Perhaps because you already know that it’s a fruitless endeavour, that Noe is merely embarrassing himself, you want to elide it; the juxtaposition of Noe’s amateur hour longing with the endurance of Christy’s throws their relative significance into relief.

What it really shows is that, in This is Happiness, Noe is primarily an observer and reporter. We feel for him and the reason for his loss of faith, but we’re more interested in him in relation to his family and to Christy than to his openly admitted hopeless romances. A Spring season spent attempting to mend a love gone for half a century, and chasing after an elusive master musician, is always going to be more interesting than a fumble in the dark — and you can tell, ultimately, which had more impact on the boy and the man.

Through Noe, Williams captures a moment in Irish history with charm and wit. With the rain gone, Faha can breathe and so too can the reader. This Is Happiness is generous and expansive, amusing and quietly touching. There is event, but it is largely defined by character; it is rare to see a novel with such exquisitely defined start and end points.

This is Happiness is such a satisfying piece that it gives strength for one to reconsider tackling Time of the Child, which was instantly denser, less inviting in its composition. Not once does it feel like homework, but rather something that might have been nice to read years ago. Still, there’s no time like the present, or like Ireland in 1958, when the crackle of electricity was in the air and young love was as foolish as it ever was.

1. Rarely. ↩︎
2. But also, and this is truly objective: maybe the lead up to Christmas and wind down of the working year isn’t the best headspace for reading. ↩︎

I don’t think we’re allowed to call Molly the Maid “autistic”, or “neurodivergent” or even “autistic coded” – she’s just another in a long line of protagonists with undiagnosed brain chemistry, something that became excessively popular when a certain sitcom that shall remain nameless inexplicably took over the world.

But I can call The Mistletoe Mystery cruel. Which it is. After the strong showing of The Maid, Nita Prose has treated her heroine as a plaything to be batted around, written as if by a child. Nobody dies, so the mystery is in Molly’s head, and every reader can see what the solution is before she even begins to get suspicious.

In the lead up to Christmas, the dearly departed Gran’s favourite time of year, Molly becomes increasingly suspicious of Juan, who is uncharacteristically keeping a secret from her, is running around at all hours, and asks her questions about her stance on diamond rings.

Of course Molly takes all this the wrong way, and her coworkers try to convince her to ignore the evidence of her own eyes. It doesn’t take much for the not-particularly-eagle-eyed reader to piece it together, but the onus is not on Molly for her misunderstanding; but on everyone in her life who knows her intimately, who knows how her brain works and how she takes everything literally and doesn’t cope well with subterfuge, for putting her through this.

There are some unexamined factors in play here, like the fact that Molly and Juan are apparently not really paid a living wage by the Regency Grand, and that they live in penury. Prose’s prose pays special attention to the squalor and tatters that her protagonists find themselves living in, shakes it out of its head, and carries on to studiously ignore it.

The one legitimately hilarious element of this is Molly’s run-ins with her nemesis who she chose not to have fired in The Mystery Guest. A regret that she was entirely within her power to prevent, and no reader would have protested. Sometimes you don’t have to be nice for niceness’ sake.

In all honesty, this review already feels longer than The Mistletoe Mystery itself did. It is understandable what Prose wanted to achieve, but there was almost certainly a way to reach the final result while having Molly investigate a different non-mystery that it is not so distressing to her and offensive to all that she stands for.

The Mistletoe Mystery is for die-hards and completists. There is no real way to justify its Australian price tag, and it puts the “stuffed” in stocking stuffer. If The Mystery Guest already put a sour taste in your mouth, this will not help in the slightest.

Dervla McTiernan’s Australian-set story is much better than her American tales, but it does smack of the grift that a series of Australian authors seem to have with Audible at the moment (more power to them) and isn’t as fleshed out as a full novel – even if it’s only 25% shorter than the execrable Nina.

Two separate narrators tell the stories of Flynn and Noah, who basically have a parade of misfortunes thrown at them in their respective youths, the sort of tribulations that would have seemed gratuitous to Job. When their stories dovetail, very, very late in the piece (seriously, by the time you get to anything in the blurb, it’s almost over), McTiernan goes into overdrive and puts in one detail too many about the web our heroes found themselves entangled in.

Sterling work from Ben Chapple and Harriet Gordon-Anderson grounds the story somewhat, but you do have to wonder how bloodthirsty and sensational the modern McTiernan is. There are some absolute clunker sentences that would never make it on a page, but The Fireground is keen and some of the characters eventually make somewhat sensible decisions. Really, how long can the silliness last?

It’s hard to say if writers still have origin stories. TJ Newman wrote Falling, the jingoistic thriller about getting blackmailed into terrorism that almost displayed cognisance of the USA’s complicity in the shambolic state of the modern political atmosphere, in the downtime on long haul flights as a flight attendant. A variation of this was cribbed for the insulting fictional story for “Elly Conway”, who “wrote” Argylle between waiting tables. (I will fully admit that I spend a lot more time thinking about Argylle than most people, especially Matthew Vaughan)

Falling was a success in a time when no one was flying anywhere, let alone attempting to crash their plane into America’s beating heart. Two years later, Newman returned with Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421, a different aviation disaster: a plane sinking into the ocean and the people racing against time to save the few passengers who remained aboard. Frankly, it’s a budget version of The Poseidon Adventure for people who either haven’t seen or can’t remember anything about it (there was a song; Shelley Winters was there). It’s the sort of book that you maybe don’t regret reading, but you also can’t bring yourself to think that it was very good. And it’s awfully convenient.

Finland is a very dry country. Droll, if you will. This, at least, is the impression that writer-director Aki Kaurismäki (The Other Side of Hope) would like you to get from Fallen Leaves, the fourth film in his Proletariat trilogy. The last one was in 1990, and he claims to have retired in 2017, so you know he’s been cooking this up for a while. This is the sort of movie that you see if you enjoy two people coming together very slowly over a relatively short run time, filled with tiny delights and small victories.

Ansa (Alma Pöysti, Tove) is a supermarket worker reduced to eating expired food; Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) is an industrial site worker who drinks on the job. A couple of chance encounters between the two sparks a mutual interest between the two, but between Ansa not leaving her name and Holappa instantly losing her number, will chase ever allow them to meet again?

Fallen Leaves is a tight 81 minutes. It almost completely lacks event, and when something happens it’s so understated that you almost have to ask if it actually did. This is all part of the charm, as the dialogue is delivered in complete deadpan, declarative statements with almost no emotion backing them up. 

Near equal time is given to Ansa and Holappa, but it’s easy to think that Pöysti is the star of the movie. She is a woman without much, but she knows exactly what she wants and how much she will tolerate. Her ambitions may be small, but you want a win for her; it’s hard not to respect a woman who knows her rights and won’t allow herself to be cowed by petty tyrants.

For Vatanen’s part, he gradually makes you care about Holappa’s quiet tragedy. What is initially played for laughs eventually becomes apparent as a legitimate problem. Most importantly, when all hope seems lost for the whatever number time, you still want things to work out for him, and you want Ansa to find him again if she can.

Fallen Leaves sounds like it should be depressing by any metric, but it is actually very gently funny. Holappa’s wingman Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen, The Other Side of Hope) has an entire sideline at karaoke where he argues with Ansa’s wingwoman Liisa (Nuppu Koivu, The Other Side of Hope) about how his face lies about his age. Holappa is accused of being four minutes late for the third time in a week by his boss, and the only retort, handily ignored, is “it’s Monday”. The way that Ansa and Holappa dance around each other is so otherworldly that you have to wonder if they’re aliens, but of course it’s not that sort of movie. It is the sort of movie that features deadly earnest karaoke delivered in multiple languages, and a repertory theatre playing the most sincerely random films.

Kaurismäki litters the film with rituals and signifiers that mean everything and nothing, and highlights the drudgery of piecemeal work that his characters subsist on. It’s a world devoid of dignity, but Ansa, at least, won’t surrender her self-respect. Any despair that it makes you feel is counterbalanced by the thought that maybe some light will shine into our fated pair’s lives, and you have to have faith in Kaurismäki that it will. It’s not a vocally political movie, but it definitely is a statement piece.

It’s difficult to say if a Kaurismäki film would be thought of as odd in his native country or if that’s just what Finland is like. To an international viewer, it’s the eternal question. Fallen Leaves is a delightful oddball, an unorthodox love story between two nice people barely scraping by on the economical underbelly of their country. Its quiet, lackadaisical pace won’t appeal to everyone, but Kaurismäki has cultivated such a specific feel to this movie that is intoxicating if you get swept into it. 

Fallen Leaves opened in Australian cinemas on February 14, 2024

Directed by: Aki Kaurismäki

Starring: Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen

Henry Cavill has not had much luck as the face of franchises. Between non-starters like The Man From U.N.C.L.E., re-cast leads like The Witcher, and whatever trainwreck the DCEU has ended up with, there was a time when the man didn’t have a franchise to his name. This all changes in 2024, with Matthew Vaughn’s (The King’s Man) new flagship, Argylle. Cavill plays the titular hero, he’s front and centre on the poster, and … he’s barely in the movie. There’s a marginally different movie behind this artifice, but it’s one that you’ve already seen before. There’s barely a mind here, let alone a twisted one.

Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite) is an acquired taste, to say the least. Even if he’s presenting a relatively mundane story, there’s a sense of unease hanging around proceedings. Poor Things, however,is not a mundane film. It is a nightmarish and outré work delivered under the dark cover of having a name cast. Whether audiences are suspecting or not is up to them, but they really should have learned their lesson by now: Lanthimos has made a hypnotising tour de force that demands you get with its rhythms or die. 

Choose life.