New
The Idealist is my first novel for quite a while. I’m a slow worker. Everything takes time. My last novel, Original Face, was published by Giramondo in 2005. At the launch back then I joked that it took me nine years to write and takes two hours to read. It’s a murder mystery. Writer Venero Armanno coined the term ‘Zen noir’ for it. In Zen you sit facing the wall for nine years, hoping to achieve enlightenment. Sometimes you’re helped by the thwack of a stick. The Idealist is a political mystery. I needed a goad to whip me across the finish line. A friend brought me one from Timor-Leste made of carved wood and braided leather.
The germ of The Idealist was a news item about the death of an Australian in Washington, somehow connected to the referendum in East Timor in 1999. My stories often start with a death. Original Face begins with a man being skinned. The king is beheaded on page one of The Rose Crossing. The Custodians starts with the excavation of a skull. Walter Benjamin famously wrote that ‘Death is the sanction of everything the storyteller can relate’ (Tess Lewis’s translation, New York Review Books 2019). Too portentous for me perhaps.
The news item soon disappeared but the story never ceased: independence for Timor-Leste in 2002, negotiations with Australia on maritime boundaries and resources, a dodgy treaty challenged when Australia was caught spying, and the continued persecution of Timor-Leste’s Canberra lawyer and his client Witness K. I thought about Australian behaviour in all this as a story germinated in my mind and stubbornly persisted. Thanks to Giramondo here it is. The Idealist. Fiction. You can read it in one sitting.
The Idealist is available from 1 September. Purchase here.
Reviews
The Conversation
‘A classical espionage novel with shades of Le Carré, The Idealist explores the tumultuous path to East Timorese independence‘
John Menadue’s Public Policy Journal
‘When morality and loyalty pull in opposite directions’
Activities
Berry Writers’ Festival NSW
Two Writers, Two Readings
27 October, 9:00 am
Berry Writers’ Festival NSW
Dark Materials: The Secrets of Political Fiction
26 October, 12:00 pm
Fryer Lecture in Australian Literature
Imaginary Lives: in appreciation of David Malouf AO
11 October, 5:30 pm
Boorowa Literary Festival NSW
The Occasional Wine Bar, Boorowa
20 July, 1:30 pm
NT Writers Festival
Author Spotlight
27–30 June
Meanjin, Summer 2023
ORC!
Adelaide Writers’ Week
‘The Idealist: Nicholas Jose with David Marr’
5 March, 3:45 pm
Adelaide Writers’ Week
‘Praiseworthy: Alexis Wright with Nicholas Jose’
2 March, 5:00 pm
Dymocks Rundle Mall
‘Stories from the South: Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright’
27 February 2024, 6:00 pm
Some Islands
Some Peninsula
Pearls and Irritations
Hong Kong and a tale of three museums
SA Evenings, ABC Adelaide
Interview with Peter Goers
Conversations with Richard Fidler and Sarah Kanowski
ABC Radio National
Dynasties and dynamism
The Saturday Paper
Nicholas Jose on Liu Xiaodong’s Smoker
Dymocks Rundle Mall
‘Stories from the South: Boyhood by J M Coetzee – Shannon Burns and Nicholas Jose in conversation’
26 September 2023, 6:00 pm
Friends of the State Library of South Australia Tuesday Talks
Books in My Life
Growing up in Adelaide and wanting to be a writer, I looked out for local books and writers as proof that it was possible. In those far-off days, the book trade was centred in London and literature came from there. Books expanded the mind and allowed your imagination to roam. That was their magic. Literature here was scarcely Australian back then, let alone South Australian. But there were exceptions. As I came to understand more about the importance of locality in writing—how people and place make reading and writing—I grew curious about what was distinctive about this place in that regard. From the poet John Shaw Neilson, born in Penola, to J M Coetzee and Jennifer Mills, there are writers associated with South Australia whose work has particularly inspired me, books I cherish. In this talk I will name a few. I look forward to sharing my list with you.
5 September 2023, 11:00 am
Tree Stories by Stephanie Radok
Exhibition catalogue
Bibliofile, Friends of the State Library
‘Being a writer in Adelaide’