A few of my books

This is the strange tale of the life and death of one of the world’s greatest concert pianists. A neurotic Jewish New Yorker, William Kapell died in 1953 in an air crash on his way home from an exhausting tour of Australia. But A Lasting Record is a quirky story: a Melbourne lipstick salesman cut a disc of Kapell’s last performance on amateur equipment at home. His raw material was a radio broadcast, and the recording, eventually bootlegged, immortalized Kapell’s genius. Pulitzer-prize-winner Tim Page called the book ‘fascinating’. It was ‘scholarly, impassioned and good storytelling’. Richard Egarr, director of the Academy of Ancient Music, called it a ‘thoroughly engaging book’, a ‘must’ for any musician’s bookshelf. Jerome Lowenthal of New York’s renowned Juilliard music school called it a ‘splendid new biography’. Maurie O’Connor in FOOD WINE TRAVEL wrote that there are ‘many intriguing threads to this story and Downes weaves them together in a way that makes you wonder at the phenomenon of chance in our lives’.

Though fewer than 200 pages, Blackie is the hardest piece of extended writing I've done. It’s about the life, illness and demise of one of our family cats. Blackie had a brain tumour removed – unusual enough for a pet, I suppose – and I felt especially responsible for nursing him back to life. Unfortunately, he didn’t recover, which devastated me but gave me the chance to write in more depth about the responsibilities of carers towards pets and what animals bring to our lives. It was hard work, and the front of my t-shirt was often stained with tears. My friend Jeff Masson, one of the world’s best writers about animals and their psychology, called Blackie ‘deeply moving...honest and courageous’… Jeff wrote without needing a cheque in the mail. Blackie has been translated into Italian, Dutch and Greek. Colin Climo in ‘The Bulletin’ said the narrative was ‘a compelling tale that is ultimately transformed into as honest and searching a self-analysis as any writer would be prepared to undertake’. John Morrow in the ‘Armidale Express’ called Blackie ‘my pick for 2003!’ It was the best book he’d read about the love between humans and animals, and the writing was ‘beautiful’. For Sascha Perry, Blackie was a ‘compulsive read’.

A ‘gastronomic’ diary of a dozen days in the French capital, Paris on a plate leans heavily on nostalgia about – and memories of – my early years living in Paris, where I worked, fell in love, and got married. But underpinning these memories and observations of the street life of a great city is my meal-by-meal inventory of that fortnight. I eat at three great restaurants, several famous ones and a few that are downright ordinary. The book also outlines how the restaurant business has changed in France and the effect of big money on France’s alleged leadership in things culinary. Readers have loved Paris on a plate.

This is another book I very much enjoyed writing. It allowed me to experiment with a narrative style that comprised fiction, biography, autobiography, musicology, Nazi history, travelogue, and time dislocations. In short, it’s a novella influenced by the style of the great German novelist W. G. Sebald. At the story’s centre is my rediscovery of my father’s clarinet and my setting myself the goal of learning to play a short piece on it. The narrative explores what might motivate such a solipsistic challenge. Fundamentally, of course, its theme is father-son relationships. Michael McGirr, esteemed Australian critic and the author of Bypass, called the book ‘as humanly rich, thought-provoking and deftly structured as anything I have read in a long time’.