Helen Daniel

Midway through Sally Morrison’s new novel, Mad Meg, I began to develop the scissor twitch, an almost overwhelming urge to cut it up and reassemble it into a new structure. Not quite the vandalism it suggests – I read Mad Meg in galley pages, which encourages scissorly desires. It is a vast, kaleidoscopic novel, which opens with a wonderful mischievous energy, full of surprises and pleasures, and laconic wit. Yet it begins to teeter midway and, in my view, ends in unnecessary disarray. Hence the twitch.

If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, then Helen Daniel came up with a wonderful recipe indeed. Invite thirty-odd prominent Australian fiction writers to respond to Jeffrey Smart’s 1962 oil-on-plywood painting, Cahill Expressway, hung in the National Gallery of Victoria. Some declined, but twenty-nine accepted, and Helen Daniel can take great pride and satisfaction in regarding herself as a ‘privileged host’ indeed. This is truly a magic pudding of a book.

Often collections of stories seem to me idle gatherings of chance acquaintances, sometimes uneasy with their companions. While the random can offer pleasures of its own, it can mean narrow-minded stories offended by their wilder and noisier neighbours, together a matter of squabble and disharmony. The four long stories that comprise Michael Wilding’s new work, Under Saturn, have instead a creative discord. Each one is self-contained, yet the movement of counterpoint among the four brings to Under Saturn the unity of a single composition, a quartet of variations on a theme.

Among the stories by seven women writers in the recent collections, Canberra Tales, there is a haunting story by Dorothy Johnston, in which, in the improbable setting of contemporary Canberra, she conjures up the figure of a mythical boatman rowing across the waters of Lake Burley Griffin. The image lingers, shimmering and numinous.

After the zany energy and comic extravagance of Moonlite, the first part of David Foster’s new novel, Plumbum, is curiously sober and the comic vision subdued. In Canberra, which his characters generally regard as preposterous, The Last Great Heavy Metal Rock Band of the Western World is born, but its birth is protracted and the narrative pace is leisurely, sometimes dangerously slow. The reader is lulled, apart from the faint, nervous suspicion that the narrative might suddenly accelerate and take off. And it does, at lunatic speed in the second half of the novel, where Foster is at his fabulous best, absurdist and zany comic.

In The Mango Tree, McKie captured through a rich and tightly controlled prose the pain and bewilderment attendant on the shifting of a child’s consciousness towards the adult. At the same time, he evoked the shapes and textures of the remembered world of a Queensland town, of a way of life in the act of changing, with a muted note of lament. In Bitter Bread, there is a curious mixture of the mellow prose of The Mango Tree and passages where McKie’s control is loose, passages which spill over into the maudlin and smudge into bathos. Its narrative has not the inner logic of the earlier novel, tending to dart off into peripheral characters and events only limply tied to the central narrative line. At times, McKie seems to be shying away from the task of exploring the central relationship of two widely different consciousnesses caught up together in Melbourne during the Depression.