Fifteen minutes from the Las Vegas Strip, into a tranquil gated community, up a red-brick driveway, past the palm trees that touch the Mojave Desert sky, through the veil that separates the astral plane, and here he is: the man they say gained and lost a $150 million fortune; who owned castles in Europe and the most haunted house in America and the Shah of Iran's Lamborghini and two albino king cobras and a rare two-headed snake; who had to return his prized dinosaur skull upon learning it was stolen from Mongolia; who went on an epic quest for the actual Holy Grail; and who—when his singular, fantastical life eventually comes to an end—will be laid to eternal rest in a colossal white pyramid tomb in New Orleans.
Nicolas Cage greets me at his door, wearing a kung fu suit.
Cold Enough for Snow is constructed as a mystery, but the puzzle is its two central characters: a mother and a daughter, who arrive separately from an unnamed country to spend a short autumn holiday together in Tokyo. The novel is Melbourne-based Jessica Au’s UK debut, elliptical and ghostly, gleaming with beautiful imagery as bright as a shoal of tiny tetra fish. It is typhoon season, and the pair’s every action – sharing meals, walking, visiting art galleries, talking obliquely about the past and the present but never the future – appears veiled, as if through a delicate, persistent mist.
The reader is left with many questions at the end, but that feels like one of the points of the book. Companion Piece, like life, is messy, funny, sad, beautiful and mysterious.
This is not the book that Sarah Hughes intended it to be. Aged just 46, the journalist learned that her recently treated breast cancer had not only returned and spread, it had become incurable. She went on to defy statistics and live with it for more than two years (the median is just 11 months) but it wasn’t long enough to complete the work she had originally outlined. And yet, while they’re clearly as nothing compared with some of her life’s other incomplete endeavours – most poignantly, the raising of her two children – missing chapters such as Financial Advice from an Unrepentant Gambler and The Secret Lives of Catholic Saints are also fully eclipsed by what she did manage to achieve.
Maybe McGonigal remains so buoyant because she sees play everywhere. She writes about leading a quick game of “When does the future start?” That, to me, sounds like a question — an exercise at best. But maybe that’s her point: A game can be anything you approach with a sense of fun. McGonigal seems like one of the few interested in gaming’s potential to foster collective well-being, rather than filling corporate coffers. Play for play’s sake — but also for the sake of solving world problems — is an uncommon self-help angle. In “Imaginable,” there’s no tangible reward save the feeling of readiness itself. Which, right now, is certainly appealing.