RF and Microwave Circuits, Measurements, and Modeling

To write fictionally about visual artists is one of the novelist's most tantalizing, challenging temptations - with difficulties in either an interior or a more surface-y approach. Here, talented Australian writer Malouf (An Imaginary Life, Johnno) mixes the two approaches. On the one hand, Malouf tells the story of Australian hermit/painter Frank Harland's life through Frank's own boyhood memories: of his colorful, irresponsible father Clem; of Frank's guardianship over four younger brothers; of the crumbly estate, Killarny, on which they all grew up. But Malouf also views Harland through the voice of Phil Vernon, a young lawyer who has childhood memories of a Frank Harland painting - and of going with his father to meet the painter in his studio (an old movie house on a pier). Eventually Phil comes to compare Frank's family life and personal disengagement with his own. (Phil's family is flightier in its diversity.) And this switching of narrative reins ultimately becomes a little jostling. Yet there's vigor and freshness in the very raucousness of elements here, the paragraph-sized stories which Malouf litters about. Impressive, too, are his excellent descriptions of the Frank Harland painting-process underway. ( The breath of cattle came to him, the sound of a windmill creaking, a magpie's wing black-on-white, and its cry the colour of morning, smoke after flame. And there was a quilt, mostly green, that when darkness covered it like a second quilt showed its true colors. Hands had chosen them from a drawer full of remnants. The pads of his fingers felt for ridges. They were stitches when a needle had gone through with the force of a hand behind it, and behind that a body. He mimicked, as he brought his own colours into being, the movement of that hand. ) So, though there's little story or drama in this quirky mosaic, Malouf's prose provides enough richness and panache to turn an essentially murky book into an often-pleasurable one - for a sophisticated, art-oriented readership. (Kirkus Reviews)