Reading Slivers, Shards and Skerricks, it’s hard to believe that the author was once a solicitor and spent 10 years of his early life specialising in insurance law. While the insurance industry may have lost a worthy practitioner, we can all be more than grateful that Shaun Micallef made an immensely successful career change to become a comedian, commentator, playwright and actor. I, and likely most readers of this review, have enjoyed him on television, in particular in Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell on the ABC. Slivers, Shards and Skerricks was approached with high expectations; I was not disappointed.
As the title suggests, this book, elegantly presented in hard cover, is a collection of many bits and pieces of considerable variety. They range from five lines to little more than half a dozen pages. The pieces bear no relationship to each other and their sequence makes for pleasant contrasts in style and substance. There are serious articles about politics and what Micallef thinks about politicians. He describes one as “unspoiled by concessions to Reality and the nature of Truth” who “chooses to believe whatever pleases him”, Micallef writes, continuing with “constrained by Reason and Logic and the Social Contract Rousseau writes of and most of us adhere to, he can never achieve his true potential as the visionary he knows himself to be. Not in our dimension, anyway”.
There are stories that mimic the styles of Charles Dickens, H L Mencken, Raymond Chandler and others, yet all are essentially Micallef. Every now and then, you come across a limerick. There is also a worthy sprinkling of modern verse in a variety of styles.
Micallef’s retelling of A Christmas Carol is an amusing and brilliant satire about generosity. His article ‘In Praise of Humility’ blames Americans for the “psychopathic pursuit of wealth and fame at the expense of decency and fellowship”. In ‘Life in a Post-Robodebt World’ he ponders why humans in a group tend to lose their humanity.
Some of the pieces are not contemporary, such as ‘I Was Scott Morrison’s Schnoodle’, but remain very much worth reading. In this dog’s-eye view of a prime minister, Micallef recalls irreverently – and possibly accurately – aspects of the then prime minister’s relationships and points of view.
‘Let Them Eat Cake’ takes the form of a short play in which Marie Antoinette is given advice on how to deal with the outrage caused by her famous apocryphal comment. One of my favourites is ‘Know Means Guess’, which purports to be the correspondence between Sir Christopher Wren and the staff of the King’s Surveyor of Works, in which the latter finds fault with the design of St Paul’s Cathedral, not least because the design shows nothing but contempt for the Heritage Overlay Guidelines.
In ‘Let Freedom Ring Out and Go Through to Voicemail’, Micallef refers to the 2023 referendum. He shares his memories of a member of the Stolen Generation who was in his class at school back in 1972. In this thoughtful article, he concludes that where “we run into trouble is where people think they are going to lose out in some way”.
And for the aspiring cook there is a recipe for ‘Satyricon Su’rprise’, which is unadulterated Micallef at his most overblown and outrageous best.
Read: Book review: Double Happiness, Rochelle Siemienowicz
Taken as a whole, this collection points to much that could be done better in Australia, sometimes with incisive wit, sometimes with sardonic sarcasm, sometimes with hope, and always in an erudite, tongue in cheek and remarkably humble way. Worth getting? Definitely so, even if your political views are not entirely in line with Micallef’s and you typically like your humour served up more gently.
Slivers, Shards and Skerricks, Shaun Micallef
ISBN: 9781923022300
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 256 hb
Publication date: 29 October 2024
RRP: $34.99
