At the end of The Glade Within the Grove, D’Arcy D’Oliveres coughs his way towards death from lung cancer. With him dies David Foster’s benign alter ego, the narrator of his comic Dog Rock novels. Of course, the ‘Arcy who narrated The Glade had become less sociable and considerably more learned than the postman of Dog Rock, but it seemed reasonable to assume that his demise marked the end of Foster’s fictions in the comic mode. Not so. In his latest novel he mixes a good-humoured third person narration with the kind of colloquial dialogues which dominated the MacAnaspie sections of The Glade. In the New Country gives us a funny, more accessible, and more conventional Foster.

His obsessions – the place of the spiritual in contemporary Australia, the emasculation of rural men through unemployment, the deforestation of Australia and Ireland before it – shadow the comedy. But the comedy remains good-natured and broad, as Foster sits back and enjoys his own characters. These are almost entirely male and, with the narrator content to narrate, they are allowed to talk.