Bronwyn Rivers

These two first novels confront the ongoing complaints of literary commentators that new novels are too often set in the past rather than dealing with present realities. Moving from the criticism of ‘literary grave-robbing’ by American author Jonathan Dee, Malcolm Knox has complained that most major Australian novelists tend to mine fantastic or historical subject matter rather than examining the culture of our daily lives. Knox takes Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, a popular and critical success, as his model for a perceptive fictional treatment of popular culture. More recently, David Marr urged novelists to use contemporary settings to address what he calls the ‘new philistinism of John Howard’s Australia’. 

Chandani Lokugé’s second novel touches on a theme common to such varied texts as Michel Houellebecq’s Platform (2002) and Alex Garland’s The Beach (1997): the Western fascination with, and exploitation of, the communities of beautiful Asian beaches.

Turtle Nest takes the postcard-perfect idyll of a Sri Lankan beach as the setting for a far from idyllic tale about exploitation and family tragedy. Aruni journeys to this beach from Australia in order to find out more about the history of her mother, Mala, but her pilgrimage does not give her peace.

‘I felts as if I had fallen into hell,’ reflects the Keeper of the President’s Clarinet of his visit to the city of Baha. The statement is almost redundant. The sun cannot penetrate the toxic pollution of this city; he has just passed a group of children betting on the imminent death of a fly-infested man; and he is there to kidnap an hermaphrodite child-prostitute. However, his words could be voiced by most inhabitants of the fictional land of Abaza; this novel is filled with such baroque, nightmare imagery.