Fourth Estate

There is a great deal going on in Christine Paice’s new novel, The Oxenbridge King. In this narrative, we meet the troubled soul of Richard III (1452-85), unable to find rest, a contemporary young woman who struggles with loss and misjudged relationships, an angel emerging from his chrysalis after being trapped for centuries in the cellar of the family home, and a talking bird that operates as a link between characters, places, times. In what can feel like dreamlike jolts, the parallel immediacies of 500 years ago and today keep warping and collapsing into each other.

Intertextual spins on Peter Carey’s 1988 novel Oscar and Lucinda may yet be finding new reading congregations. Carey’s progenitive postcolonial novel refuted landscapes empty of First Nations peoples, less jewel horizon than abject mire and macadam, along which the failed preacher Oscar and his party moved the components of a glass church overland and upriver to Edenic rural Bellingen. A metaphor of failed settler hopes and dreams, the fabulist glass church leitmotif is symbolic of white intrusion, as an omniscient Aboriginal narrator observes in the chapter savagely and simply entitled ‘Glass Cuts’.

In an exquisite, braided narrative, Catherine McKinnon’s To Sing of War reanimates World War II in a paean to the environment. Set between December 1944 and August 1945, the narrators experience the ways ‘Violence is malleable, it is everywhere’, but find healing and resilience in ‘the heart of the earth’. Importantly, Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, is the key intertext and provides the central conceit and structure for the novel. Where The Aeneid concerns the building of Rome after the destruction of Troy, closely linking the fates of the two cities, To Sing of War grapples with rebuilding lives in a post-atomic world.

Centuries before the Kremlin had a digital presence and long before Ivermectin was trending on Twitter, an early form of disinformation campaigning emerged in medieval Europe: blood libel. These anti-Semitic accusations claimed that Christian children were being killed as part of Jewish religious ritual, a lie used to justify violence against Jewish communities.

As I write this review, Stan Grant’s name is everywhere as the media and the public absorb his decision to step aside from compèring ABC Television’s Q&A after citing the cumulative wear and tear on him and his family of weeks of online racist abuse. Yet such is the pace of the twenty-four-hour news cycle that by the time this review appears, another episode in the seemingly never-ending racist diatribe against Australian First Nations peoples will have moved Grant off the front pages. The ‘trolls of the Twitter sewer’, as Grant calls them, will have found another target for their hatred and aggression.

Shannon Molloy’s 2020 memoir, Fourteen, recounted a childhood and adolescence of grisly homophobic violence. Yet many readers of that book – a bestseller, adapted for the stage and optioned for a film production – may find You Made Me This Way noteworthy in part because it reveals what Fourteen left out: the sexual abuse Molloy suffered, beginning at age five, at the hands of an older boy. This omission underscores one of the book’s central theses, that on average male victims of child sexual abuse find it harder than female victims to disclose their experiences. A conditioned reticence with grave implications – ‘[t]here is death in secrecy’. Molloy’s book, a hybrid of autobiography and journalism, takes socially important steps in assessing – and humanising – these implications.

When a book takes its title from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, you can expect the shock of something supernatural. But although Paul Dalgarno’s A Country of Eternal Light is narrated by a dead woman, there is little here to horrify. 

'The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.’ Albert Einstein wrote these words, originally in German, in his book The World As I See It (1934). He went on to describe the ‘knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate’ as constituting ‘the truly religious attitude’, adding he ‘cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes’. 

This highly ambitious first novel exists within a fine web of literary influences and allusions. The publisher invites comparisons to The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s novel set in a university Classics department. The novel’s narrator, Julia, a student enthralled by the glamorous, moneyed family of a classmate, echoes that of Brideshead Revisited. Self-conscious references to detective noir and nineteenth-century romance novels abound. All of these comparisons have some merit, but another takes precedence, not only flavouring the text, but providing a skeleton for the characters and plot 

‘Everyone knows how it ends,’ declares Ruby ‘Red’ McCoy, the fourteen-year-old narrator of Felicity McLean’s second novel, Red. ‘What people are less interested in hearing is how it all got started.’ The ending in question is Ruby’s attempted murder of a police officer, a crime that is heralded from the novel’s outset. In this retelling of the Ned Kelly legend, McLean sets Red apart from existing depictions of the bushranger – from Sidney Nolan’s iconic series of paintings (1946–47) to Peter Carey’s novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and its subsequent punk-infused 2019 film adaptation by Justin Kurzel.