Review

The world conjured by first-time novelist and veteran journalist Kate Legge in The Unexpected Elements of Love is disturbingly familiar. It is peopled by frantic working mothers, lonely single women battling the biological clock, ageing couples ‘rowing against the tide’ of dementia and ill health, and sensitive small children swallowing pill-packed marshmallows for ADHD, all set against the backdrop of an increasingly extreme weather system, frequently referred to as ‘the warming’. It seems odd that this blazingly topical book, published in a year when the effects of climate change have been headline news, was written five years ago.

Longing is the central player in these interlinked short stories, set in India and Australia. Liz Gallois’s characters are questing individuals, resisting the hand that life has dealt them. They negotiate relationships that are fraught with tension – sexual, racial, cultural – all affected by the frailty of their understanding of who they are and what they want.

Western writing that uses India and Indians as counterpoints often veers towards exoticism, but there is a refreshing lack of sentimentality and stereotypes in Gallois’ stories. An individual and confident voice, she often challenges assumptions, sometimes distorting the lens through which the West views ‘India’.

These two novels are both strong in their sense of locale, and take their settings as part of the subject, linked to pictures of isolation and barely functioning relationships, and with catastrophe not averted.

Once the prerogative of connoisseurs and bibliographers, the study of the book has become an increasingly popular field of cultural history. Earlier scholarship was concerned with rare and variant editions of canonical texts; recent work is more inclusive, comprehending a wide range of popular and ephemeral literature that extended the reach of print. Attention has turned from production to consumption, tracing the spread of literacy and analysing the changing interests of readers. Hence Martyn Lyons and Lucy Taksa’s Australian Readers Remember (1992) sits alongside a number of similar studies for other countries.

Despite the rhetoric of globalisation, it is impossible to buy an airline ticket online in the United States with a credit card issued abroad. When I needed a ticket from Boston to Washington last year, and after numerous unsuccessful arguments with airline websites and 1800 numbers, I dropped into the local Harvard travel agency. There was a welcome familiarity in discovering that it was a branch of STA, one of more than 400 branches operated around the world by the Australian-based company.

The first thing about Deborah Robertson’s first novel, Careless, that strikes the reader is the way that her prose style cuts like sand. The story of three individuals united by the murder of six children is compelling, but what impresses is Robertson’s love of language, the precision of her sentences, as well as her gentle philosophical imagination and the deeper questions her book seeks to answer.

If this is love, then we are all in trouble. Addiction, infidelity, cruelty, violence, obsession, depression, repression, jealousy, impotence, the neglect of children and a whole lot of hysterical personal correspondence are features of the love affairs conducted by the eight writers who are the subject of this disconcerting book.

I love travelling overseas. I like the whole flying thing: the taxi ride to the airport wondering what I forgot to pack, the queuing at check-in, the thrill of getting through security. Then there’s the flight itself. The rush of take-off, the first free drink, the little plastic tray with little plastic dishes and plastic knives and forks – just like a picnic in the clouds. Whether the destination is familiar or exotic, I like arriving, too. But one thing I have learned over the years is that no matter where I go, I’ve been there before. Different airport, same old Nick. It must have been much the same two thousand years ago when the Roman poet Horace wrote Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt – Those who fly across the sea, change the sky but not the me. In the nineteenth century, though, if we are to believe Jem Poster, things were very different.