Picador

Dorothy Porter’s verse novels are delicious and distancing, formal, fiery and frenetic. With the possible exception of What a Piece of Work (1999), they get better and better. Early on, El Dorado smacks you in the face and strokes your imagination with a ‘little girl’s / dead hand / … sticking stiffly / up / as if reaching / to grab an angel’s / foot’. Framed by epigraphs from Gilgamesh, Peter Pan and Wallace Stevens, an enigmatic gesture of thanks ‘for the magic snakes’, a stanza from Yeats’s ‘The Stolen Child’ and a prologue invoking the ‘thick alien ice’ of Europa, Porter’s latest verse novel is contextualised with multiple, allusive legendry. This is a work that invokes and reimagines, iconoclastically, various fantasies (Atlantis, Neverland, El Dorado), mythologies (Greek, Roman, Christian) and pop-ular culture fantasists such as Disney, the Beatles, the Flintstones, and literary allusions to Shakespeare, Keats, Donne, Dickinson, Stevenson, Doyle, Carroll, Twain. El Dorado is as much about how fantasy works as it is a fantastic detective narrative.

In the early 1980s, Clive James met William Shawn – at the Algonquin, of course. Shawn, the long-time editor of the New Yorker, invited James to become the magazine’s television critic. James, though awed by the offer, quickly said no, perhaps the first time this had happened to Shawn since World War II, he speculates in North Face of Soho, the fourth volume of his Unreliable Memoirs. Had James accepted, his life would have been very different, and this ‘brilliant bunch of guys’ (as the magazine later dubbed him) might still be in New York. But his wife’s work was in Cambridge, and he knew America wouldn’t suit him, or rather, might suit him too well. (‘America appealed too much to my sweet tooth.’)

Anyone who has read Simone Lazaroo’s novel The Australian Fiancé (2000) will find many echoes in her latest work, The Travel Writer. That earlier book follows a young Eurasian woman, who had been kept by the Japanese as a comfort woman during the war, while she is being courted by a wealthy Australian. He lures her back to Broome with the promise of marriage, but the relationship collapses under the twin burdens of Australian racism and her traumatic past, which comes back to haunt her in devastating ways.

Richard Flanagan came to prominence some years ago like a collective delusion. Death of a River Guide (1994) sent a thrill through the literary community because of the raciness of its never-ending stories and in 1995, the baleful Year of Demidenko, we found ourselves giving the last of the Victorian Premier’s Prizes for new fiction to the Tasmanian arriviste who wrote fabulism like a Douanier Rousseau among the thylacines. Not long afterwards, Flanagan persuaded the producers to allow him to direct the film of his second novel, The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997) with nothing but a few supervisory tips from Rolf de Heer by way of experienced guidance, a feat of Cocteau-like virtuosity or snake-oil powers of persuasion all but unprecedented in national (let alone Tasmanian) history.

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.

Anson Cameron’s Lies I Told about a Girl may not bend the public record enough to qualify as ‘alternate history’, but it does take off from an intriguing speculative premise. What if the young Prince of Wales, sent ‘down under’ for a term at an exclusive boarding school deep in Victorian logging country, had arrived in 1975, the year of the Dismissal? And what if the prince – known here as Harold Romsey, or YR (‘Your Royal’) – had become romantically involved with a fellow student who happened to be the daughter of the federal opposition leader?

Erich, a sixteen-year-old German, narrates the adventurously plotted The Dolphin People, by first-time novelist Torsten Krol. Wishing to escape the aftermath of World War II, Erich, his younger, effeminate brother, Zeppi, mother and Uncle Klaus (soon to become his stepfather) crash their plane over the Amazon. A primitive tribe called the Yayomi discovers them and takes them for rare dolphins. Their status as such earns them respect, and they have little option but to exploit it in order to settle into Yayomi life.

Clive James once said that the problem with being famous is that you begin by being loved for what you do and end up thinking that you are loved for who you are. Quite possibly, it is to avoid such a fate that James has returned in the past few years to the thing that got him noticed in the first place – writing dazzling prose. Absenting himself from the Crystal Bucket, he has become once more a full-time writer, popping up in the Times Literary Supplement and Australian Book Review with gratifying regularity. The title of his latest collection of essays refers to its first and final pieces, both of which deal with the crucial difference between celebrity and recognition, a subject currently dear to his heart, partly for the reason outlined above, partly because the current media is saturated with noisy nonentities. Since James is no doubt frequently recognised by people ignorant of the very achievement for which he really deserves recognition, his thoughts on the subject are clearly invaluable.

The mortality rate for individuals is always one, but for populations it varies from time to time and place to place. London is one of those cities where the mortality rate is high, though not because it has ever been, like the Gold Coast, a city to retire to. For centuries, young people have gone to London seeking riches, celebrity and opportunity. Some, like Dick Whittington, found the streets proverbially paved with gold, but others made their way promptly to the gutter. From the gutter to the grave is but a short step, but not the last one in London during the early days of modern anatomical science, as James Bradley’s new novel illustrates.

Disaster has always shadowed the traveller. Today’s adventurers differ from their forebears only in the kinds of calamity they have cause to fear. Arabella Edge’s second novel – like her first, the award-winning The Company (2000) – will have readers thanking their lucky stars that shipwreck, at least, has gone the way of history. As its cover suggests, The God of Spring centres on Théodore Géricault’s masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa (1819) – its painting, its painter and the real event it depicts.