Articles by Melanie Kembrey

Entertainment

Matthew Reilly orders the $76 toothfish – and settles a literary score

The move was also partly to get closer to Hollywood and to build better connections in the movie industry (Tobey Maguire once lived in a neighbouring house!). Reilly is the best kind of film nerd: enthusiastic and encyclopaedic. Our lunch is peppered with references to cinema blockbusters; he talks about cinema with a contagious, almost boyish delight. He owns a DeLorean DMC-12 (the Back to the Future car) and keeps a life-sized Han Solo mounted on his office wall. His favourite book of all time is Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, and on the flight to Sydney, he attempted the latest in the film franchise, Jurassic World: Rebirth. “I gave it 30 minutes and that was 25 too many,” he says. He is not just a lover but a student of film. A lifetime of watching making-of documentaries, reading director biographies and listening to commentary tracks helped prepare him long before he ever stepped onto a set. All of it fed into the Netflix frantic action movie Interceptor, which he wrote and directed, starring Elsa Pataky and Luke Bracey. Critics were harsh (I am intrigued to see what lunch the New York Post will have to buy him after its reviewer labelled the film “torturous”), but it was watched by 120 million Netflix accounts and hit No.1 in 91 countries. Reilly hopes to work more in screen, but he’s realistic about its fickleness – rights bought and held for years, projects collapsing days before a green light. It’s why he won’t quit writing. That, and he’s still got work to do on his golf game. “This last summer, when I was writing the sequel of The Detective. I had nothing on my plate. I had no Hollywood meetings. I said, I’m going to write every morning and play golf in the afternoon, and I just devoted myself to that,” he says. “Whereas writing a book … my wife would say it’s efficient. I can be ultimately efficient because it’s me, and I’m working hard and focused.” So there’s going to be more of our Hooters VIP Sam Speedman. But now that the debt has been settled – Reilly’s toothfish-devoured plate offering all the evidence required – it feels only fair to turn over a new leaf at lunch and ask for a scoop. Fans have been begging for more novels featuring Shane Michael Schofield, the United States Marine Corps officer (called Scarecrow because of the scars on his face) and the hero of Ice Station (1998), Area 7 (2001), Scarecrow (2003), the spin-off Hell Island (2005), plus a cameo in The Four Legendary Kingdoms (2016). And while Reilly has teased a comeback before, this time it sounds definite: he has finally found an international villain and geopolitical threat worthy of Scarecrow. “So let’s just say I’m very close, and there is a good chance,” he says, with planning under way and writing to start next year. “I think it will be supercharged because I am a lot better at it … it will be fast, it’ll be big, and it will be off the leash.” The toothfish, it seems, has done its job. The Detective is out now. The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.

Technology

Margaret Atwood keeps receipts – and she’s finally using them

“Some people were surprised that I continued with the book tour for The Testaments,” Atwood writes. “But ask yourself, Dear Reader: the busy schedule or the empty chair? I chose the busy schedule. The empty chair would be there when I got home.” Their love story runs quietly through the Book of Lives. The pair shared a daughter, Jess, and a life devoted to books, birds, adventures and the environment. Gibson had been diagnosed with vascular dementia and they both knew his time was running out. They made one final trip together to Australia in 2019 – a country they visited as a family many times before. Gibson’s mother was Australian, his father, Canadian; he had spent part of his childhood here and often returned (Atwood wrote much of Cat’s Eye during one of those visits). Together they helped shape Canada’s literary landscape, co-founding the Writers’ Trust of Canada and championing a national literature when few believed one existed. Atwood sees Australia’s own literary rise as following a similar path – a gradual claiming of confidence and identity on a world stage. There were no agents, no festivals, no author tours when Atwood started. “You kind of had to be crazy – or at least a little unstable – to think you could make a living at it,” she says. Today there’s more infrastructure for writers – and far more competition. “People coming out of creative writing schools have inflated expectations,” she says. “They think they’re going to get a six-figure contract as a matter of entitlement. When that doesn’t happen, they’re disappointed. Whereas we were not easily disappointed. Our expectations were quite low. It was a big deal to get your poem published in a little magazine, and if somebody paid me five dollars, that was paid.” Atwood manages to keep up with the kids online – she tweets, posts on Instagram and has her own Substack – though she draws the line at full immersion. ChatGPT? “I don’t have one. I’m staying away from it. I don’t want to be told it’s time for me to commit suicide,” she says. TikTok? “I don’t know how to work it, don’t tell me it’s dead simple … I’m certainly not going to do little dances on TikTok, which seems to be mostly what it is.” Online wormholes? “Oh, all the time, yes.” Phew.