My picture is of a calm, gracious St Petersburg in the late summer of 1993.

Shostakovich's 11th Symphony, which we heard on Saturday evening, commemorates the slaughter of unarmed petitioners in St Petersburg in the depths of winter, 1905.

Our exposure to Shostakovich's extraordinarily powerful music started last year when we heard his 10th. The 11th is no less dramatic.

It opens on an icy-cold, still morning, from which begin to awaken the drums and cornets of military might. It develops into a depiction of a full-blown catastrophe.

The MPO's motto is "music that moves you". Well, this was "music that scares you". Literally. I challenge anyone to hear those drums, hear the defiant determination of those string strokes, hear that brass, and not feel his/her heart quicken a little in fear.

I'm pretty confident I didn't know about the events of 1905 when we visited the city. I found it entrancingly beautiful, but I guess its elegant palaces and gardens and fountains reflect just the very top of the heap -- just one side of a tyrannical inequality that would eventually find release only in a revolutionary explosion.





Another -- later, and ideologically different -- tyranny stalks The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a flawed but ambitious novel by Richard Flanagan about the building of the Burma railway.

For me, ultimately, the book doesn't work. I wouldn't go so far as to say this "is the novel in an advanced and showy state of dissolution". But it is a trifle pretentious; its banal moments are annoying; and nothing the author has given me makes me care in the least about Dorrigo's love affairs.

What I admire, however, is its convincingly rendered banter of mateship, its unflinching look at the horrors of the death camps, and its brave attempt by no means to exonerate, but at least to understand, the motivations of the camp commanders and the way culture, politics, and religious zeal can pave the way for atrocity.

On the same subject matter, I much preferred Mark Dapin's Spirit House.

Again, this is the story of memories that are locked up and corrosive. They need to be released in some way, and the way that the narrator's grandfather happened upon was to build a symbolic Thai-style spirit house, where all the ghosts could rest their heads. While building, he told the associated story to his grandson. At first, granddad's mates and wife pooh-pooh the idea. But slowly, they start to contribute their own objects of remembrance, and it becomes a joint act of recalling and celebrating and propitiating.



Dapin, too, very realistically captures the old guys and the way they talk (the repetition of stories and catch-phrases reminds me of Dad). And the horror of surrender -- the frustration, the guilt, the shame, the fruitless attempts to understand -- is sympathetically and evocatively depicted.

Whether they're flawed or not, we need these books.

May the victims -- on all sides -- rest in peace.