Fiction

Heather Rose’s mesmerising new novel, A Great Act of Love, draws together themes and settings that have animated her previous work, including an abiding attachment to the landscape of Tasmania, questions of how individuals reckon with the past, meditations on the nature of love, and a fascination with the life of the soul.

In Carralon Ridge, a fictional, dilapidated town in New South Wales, Sam Crowley goes missing on the day of his twenty-first birthday. Every year, the community comes together for an annual vigil, but among the mourners there may be someone who knows what happened. In the background, the incessant activity of a nearby open-cut coal mine threatens the very existence of the village.

Adorning the cover of The Wurrumbar, a début novel by William J. Byrne, is a green and brown yabby, an Australian freshwater crustacean; it emerges from slimy brown water and is at once sinister and potentially delicious. I remember catching them in much the same way as the young protagonist does in the novel, crouching by a clear pond in the bush with some bloody meat in a paper bag ready to tie on to a piece of string and catch a big fat yabby to boil in a billy on a fire. In some ways, this novel captures parts of my life, and for that reason it calls to my heart and no doubt conjures childhood memories for countless older readers.

Before writing this review, I reread Catriona Menzies-Pike’s award-winning essay ‘Critic Swallows Book’ (2022), a rare piece of Australian literary criticism with a claim to definitiveness, as it was the first clear articulation of something that was crushingly true about Trent Dalton’s début novel, Boy Swallows Universe (2018), and its successor, All Our Shimmering Skies (2020). The short version of the essay’s argument is that Dalton’s novels are, in fact, terrible. They are badly written, retrograde, juvenile, hackneyed, mawkish, and preposterous. The deeper issue the essay identifies is their moral complacency, which arises directly from their embrace of platitudes and sentimentality.

‘I think it is the art of the glimpse’, said William Trevor of the short story.

If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more.

This pointed aphorism accompanied my reading of two releases that shoulder the ongoing work of activism against colonialism and empire. Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline and Raaza Jamshed’s début novel, What Kept You?, are both set here, in Australia, but their characters are willed continually to look there, their displaced gaze stacked with invisible lives unseen by friends, colleagues, and intimates. One is urgent, desperate, and resolute; the other wracked by guilt that immobilises.

In the the current Australian publishing landscape, dominated as it is by conglomerates and mergers, the establishment of new small, independent presses has never been more important. While mainstream publishers continually laud conventional prose and consumable literary plots – giving many readers a false perception of the quality of contemporary Australian literature – numerous small presses instead champion the difficult, the unconventional, the strange and experimental. Evercreech Editions, a new press out of Hobart, Tasmania, maintains this ambition. The founder, Adam Ouston – one of Australia’s most ambitious writers – states in Evercreech’s mission statement: ‘I wanted an outlet for the out of step, the weird, the boldly defiant, a home for the homeless.’ Unfortunately, these qualities aren’t exhibited in Evercreech’s first published book, Konrad Muller’s début novel, My Heart at Evening.

Australian author Sofie Laguna has a gift for capturing the unique voices of the children and adolescents who inhabit her novels. It is a gift she attributes to her early career as an actor, when she enjoyed portraying children as much as she enjoys writing about them now. The common thread through each of her five adult novels, which have won and been shortlisted for multiple awards, is that they feature unusual, often troubled children or young adults whose lives are difficult because they have been let down or abused by the adults who care for them.

A university librarian mentioned in a recent conversation how a famous writer had sold his computer hard drive to an American archive without realising this could give future researchers a record of not only his emails but all the internet sites he had ever visited. Ian McEwan was not the author in question, but it is precisely such issues that frame the narrative of his latest novel: the first part is set a hundred years from now, while the second section consists of a fictional journal set in our own recent past. As the novel’s title suggests, a key concern here is epistemology – how lived human experience differs from knowledge in forms of representation and rationalisation.