Fiction review

Of these three début novels, John Honey’s Paint is by far the richest: the only one that has the feel of a world turning as its pages ever more rapidly must be turned. Honey has created characters that matter to the reader and offers a truly immersive reading experience.

Tobsha Learner, the author of three books, is best known for her collection of sexy short stories Quiver (1997), which is not to be confused with Nikki Gemmell’s Shiver (1997). Learner’s latest effort is also a compilation of sexually charged tales. Tremble, however, is more ambitious than her previous offering. Instead of assembling all her characters in one city (Sydney) and in a contemporary setting to perform naked gymnastics with one another, Learner scatters her new cast all over the globe and within various time frames. From somewhere off the Cape of Trafalgar in the early nineteenth century to a stuffy British museum in 1851, from the dustbowl of Oklahoma to a tiny Greek island, Learner’s lusty protagonists gasp and moan their way throughout the night.

Belinda Alexandra’s first novel, The White Gardenia (2002), was a ‘word of mouth best seller’. It may not have been picked up by certain critics, but it was nevertheless favoured by the book-buying public. Its subject was exotic – the fortunes of the daughter of a White Russian refugee family in Harbin and Shanghai – but the Mills & Boon cover was a bit of a worry. Now Wild Lavender appears, the second instalment of Alexandra’s two-book contract.

Despite predictions that globalisation would homogenise cultures, ethnicity continues to split states asunder. Democratic theorists fear that consensus, equality and social capital are retreating before competition, materialism and resentment. The 2004 federal election campaign became a festival of individualism as alternative governments courted voters not with visions of a richer community but with promises of greater disposable household income after health and education costs.

Stories of children in the maelstrom: the horror of mandatory detention; the appalling cruelty of how some orphans are treated by those responsible for them; and youngsters caught in the heartbreak and dislocation of family breakdown – such is the stuff of these three important novels for young people. No coy sensibilities are spared in these reflections of modem life. Here are ordinary adults and children caught up in extraordinary events. All three books show how life can be hard, but that one must meet its sorrows and afflictions with courage, good humour and good friends. Each story is about what happens when a child becomes a victim to events beyond his or her control, be they personal or political, dramatic or mundane.

After nine books, Nick Earls is renowned for his slacker-male novels and his short stories of twenty-somethings in various stage of arrested development. Like his English equivalent Nick Homby, Earls specialises in a particular emotional state of the male psyche: a post-adolescent, pre-adult period usually spent chasing unobtainable women, getting drunk on green alcoholic beverages and behaving badly in amusing ways. Written with self-deprecating wit and dollops of humour, Earls’s previous books are the equivalent of a fizzy soft drink, easily ingested and with a sugary residue.

One of the most outlandish Hollywood action films, relatively speaking, is The Final Countdown (1980), in which the nuclear-powered US aircraft carrier U.S.S. Nimitz is enveloped in a bizarre electrical storm in the Pacific and transported back in time to 1941, conveniently just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. The ship’s commander is played by Kirk Douglas, with Martin Sheen in the role of an enigmatic civilian who just happens to be on board. One memorable exchange between the two Hollywood heavyweights occurs just after the crew has realised that something strange has happened. Douglas muses that it could all be a Russian plot, perhaps involving parapsychology. ‘Excuse me, Captain,’ interjects Sheen with an impeccably straight face, ‘we also have to consider one alternative possibility: the possibility that what is happening here is real.’

Any novelist prepared to name one of his characters ‘Fish Lamb’ and to have that character come back from the dead is obviously interested in Christianity on some level. It is also true that several of the big themes that run through Tim Winton ‘s fiction – guilt atonement, forgiveness – have a religious flavour. Nevertheless, Winton’s symbolism tends to have an open-ended quality. When his characters experience moments of spiritual awareness, moments that Winton has said are meant to be taken literally, these experiences are often depicted as a nonspecific form of mysticism or pantheism.

For those of us drawn to tell the stories of the past, seventeenth-century England has a great deal to recommend it. It is distant enough to offer the frissons of historical exotica, yet so close that the minds of the time are recognisable to us. In addition, it is hard to think of a period in one country so packed with incident. Where else, in a single lifespan, can a novelist convincingly have his character experience wars – both foreign and domestic – fire, pestilence, regicide and Restoration?

First novels should be the hardest to write but, among writers, second novels have won that reputation. Second-novel syndrome can be identified by: obsessional mourning for the cocoon of anonymity; consuming self-doubt; chronic false starts; acute self-consciousness; the need for constant reassurance; and a low-level frustration brought on by mandatory participation in literary festivals.