Fourth Estate

Foreign travellers in India face four inevitable questions. ‘What is your good name?’ is usually followed in rapid succession by ‘Where are you coming from?’(meaning from which country), ‘Are you married?’ and, finally, ‘What is your religion?’. Backpacking through India twenty years ago, the first three questions presented few problems. My name was easy, Australia was recognised as a cricket-playing country, and I was young enough for my lack of a wife to be passed over as a matter of only mild embarrassment. The fourth question however, proved tricky. Usually, I gave the technically correct answer that I had been baptised into the Anglican Church – a reply that generally satisfied my interlocutors and not infrequently led into rambling, good-natured discussions about the similarities between the world’s great faiths. Once, I ventured a more honest response. ‘I am an atheist,’ I told a couple of friendly young Indian men on a long train journey. ‘I do not believe in any God.’ Their shock was palpable. It was not so much my spiritual deficit that appalled them as my arrogance. How could anyone have the audacity to declare that God did not exist? Our conversation never recovered. In response to all future interrogations, I retreated to my dissembling line about Christianity. The experience did not shake my disbelief, but it did serve to engender a greater respect for the question. Religion, I belatedly realised, is an important matter.

There is every reason to admire this novel’s intent, but with the best will in the world I couldn’t recommend the result. Linda Jaivin’s current affairs comedy about the Villawood Detention Centre is so conscious of its pedagogic goals that it fails to offer a decent story. And it’s not funny. Believe me, I wanted to like it. Jaivin is a terrific writer with an enviable range, capable of the witty, surrealist smut of Eat Me (1995) and the kind of nuanced cross-cultural analysis that underpinned The Monkey and the Dragon (2001), her undervalued biography of Chinese rock’n’roll dissident Hou Dejian.

A friend called me from Beijing recently to ask advice about her novel. She had played a prominent part in the avant-garde art movement associated with the protests at Tiananmen in 1989, and had achieved notoriety in both art and life. Fifteen years on, she wanted to give her own account of events, choosing the form of a roman-à-clef that would be published first in English. But now the Hong Kong agent helping to prepare her text wanted changes to enhance its appeal to foreign publishers. The agent wanted to tart it up, and my friend was unhappy.

Carmel Bird stakes a great deal on her prose style. The delicate latticework of imagery, the fascination with detail and colour, the allusions, the linguistic gamesmanship, the florid descriptive passages (and Bird’s writing is literally florid: there are flowering plants everywhere) – these are at least as important to her fiction as narrative. Her writing does not just revel in the sensuality of language; at times, this sensuality shapes the form. In her long story ‘Woodpecker Point’, for example, the action is veiled in lush rhetoric. The intention is to tease out small correspondences and to develop an intricate verbal pattern. So, while the narrative is disjointed, the finely woven imagery is rolled out like one long strip of carpet. This is often true of Bird’s short stories. They frequently centre on strange or sinister happenings, around which grows a delicate bubble of linguistic indulgence.

Kate Llewellyn has written sixteen books, which is quite an achievement. They include poetry, fiction and autobiography. One book, The Waterlily (1987), has sold 30,000 copies, a notable accomplishment for any author. The Waterlily was the first book in Llewellyn’s Blue Mountains trilogy; the second was called Dear You (1988). I read it years ago, having borrowed it from a library because I suspected the title might be an indication of the tone. It was not the epistolary format that gave me pause: I have relished many correspondences, ranging from the passionate exchanges of Julie and St Preux in Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) to Robert Dessaix’s grapplings with life-threatening illness in his acclaimed Night Letters (1996). But for my taste, the series of missives beginning ‘Dear You’ betrayed an irritating archness. The author seemed to be caught between the heady excitement of Revealing All and a coy fear of saying Too Much.

Early in 1900, bubonic plague travelled by ship to Sydney, then erratically made its way up the coast. Ian Townsend’s accomplished first novel, Affection, traces the arrival of the plague in Townsville during the autumn of 1900. His story is factually based and is particularly concerned with three of the doctors who treated the outbreak: Linford Row, recently settled in the town as its municipal medical officer; long-term resident Ernest Humphry; and the English bacteriologist and butterfly collector Alfred Jefferis Turner. How they cope, not only with horrible and random deaths, but with politics and prejudice in North Queensland, is the dramatic core of the book.

Spacious and solidly constructed, the classic nineteenth-century novel invites revisiting. Later writers reconfigure its well-known spaces, change the lighting, summon marginal figures to the centre. Most memorable, perhaps, is Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), in which the first Mrs Rochester ...

Diane Armstrong should have stuck to the facts. The many surprising particulars that illuminated her two fine histories of the Jewish refugee experience (Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations, 1998, and The Voyage of Their Life, 1999) have been replaced, in her first novel, by clichés and banalities that turn to soap opera her account of an Australian forensic scientist unearthing the secrets of her own past.

I remember trying a few years ago to communicate to a younger friend something of the way I remember my childhood in Adelaide in the 1970s. It was a world in which an older Australia still lingered, a quiet, suburban world where men caught the tram to work at 8.15a.m. and came home at five, where the banks closed at four p.m., and where World War II veterans and their wives lived around us. In 2004 that world – somnolent, conservative, oddly outside time – seems almost unimaginable; even then, it was almost gone. Instead, it inhabits that hinterland between memory and nostalgia, lingering for me in the textures of the things and places which gave it shape, textures that are hopelessly entangled in the possibilities, pleasures and disappointments of childhood.

You have to sympathise with Nikki Gemmell. When she described her sense of liberation on deciding to publish The Bride Stripped Bare anonymously, she seemed to have in mind only a desire not to offend people close to her. She would also have liberated herself from the literary celebrity machine. But, once the game was up, she got even more of it than she would otherwise have done. It doesn’t seem to have bothered her too much. The profile in The Age and the appearance on Andrew Denton’s television show didn’t suggest that she was determined to salvage what she could from her original plan to stay invisible. Some of my more cynical friends have suggested that that was what she had in mind all along. But the book is written with a candour that confirms her avowals.