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James Ley

The title of Richard J. Lane’s guidebook contains a small allusion to the changes that have occurred in literary studies over the past half-century. There was a time when universities trained critics; these days, everyone is a theorist.

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Dennis Altman

In any given year we will read but a tiny handful of potential ‘best books’, so this is no more than a personal selection. Here are two novels that stand out: Stephen Eldred-Grigg’s Shanghai Boy (Vintage) and Hari Kunzru’s Tranmission (Penguin). Both speak of the confusion of identity and emotions caused by rapid displacement across the world. The first is the account of a middle-aged New Zealand teacher who falls disastrously in love while teaching in Shanghai. Transmission takes a naïve young Indian computer programmer to the United States, with remarkable consequences. From a number of political books, let me select two, both from my own publisher, Scribe, which offers, I regret, no kickbacks. One is George Megalogenis’s The Longest Decade; the other, James Carroll’s House of War. Together they provide a depressing but challenging backdrop to understanding the current impasse of the Bush–Howard administrations in Iraq.

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David Malouf’s fiction has been justly celebrated for its veracity. His prose, at once lyrical and precise, has an extraordinary capacity to evoke what a character in an early story called the ‘grainy reality’ of life. For Malouf, small concrete details convey a profound understanding of the defining power of memory. He has a strong sense of the way the most mundane object can embody the past, how its shape or texture can send us back to a specific time and place and mood, just as Proust summons a flood of memory from the aroma of a madeleine dipped in tea. This tangible quality to memory is essential to our sense of self. The prisoners of war in The Great World (1990), for example, cling to their memories as a bulwark against the potentially overwhelming horror of their experiences. They treasure anything, however small, that provides a physical link with home, knowing that these relics help them to reconstruct the past and thus retain a grip on their identity and their sanity.

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Reflected Light: La Trobe essays edited by Peter Beilharz and Robert Manne

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September 2006, no. 284

In 1993, when he was editor of Quadrant, Robert Manne published a short essay, which is collected in his recent book Left Right Left (2005), called ‘On Political Correctness’. The essay rehearsed some familiar right-wing arguments against this ‘highly intolerant’ doctrine and the threat it posed to academic freedom. Manne’s political opinions have, of course, undergone a considerable realignment in the intervening years, and so has the national political landscape. While the term ‘political correctness’ has proved far too convenient to disappear completely, these days it is heard less often and is generally invoked with less heat. This is partly because, over the past decade or so, it has done its job of denigrating any leftish sounding opinion so effectively.

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When Frank Moorhouse took over the editorship of The Best Australian Stories in 2004, he promptly announced that he would be accepting submissions from anyone, regardless of whether they had a publishing history or not. He received and read, by his own estimate, about 1000 stories and gave six unknown writers the chance to be published for the first time. To his credit, he also took it upon himself not only to talk up the edition, but to make the case for the importance of the short story as a distinct literary form – one that is often underappreciated. There was no doubting Moorhouse’s enthusiasm for his new role. Having read the work of around 600 writers, he could claim with some authority that short fiction was thriving, despite limited opportunities for publication. Indeed, the 2004 edition, he boasted, ‘set a new benchmark in the standard of the short story’. Now steady on, Frank.

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To celebrate the best books of 2005 Australian Book Review invited contributors to nominate their favourite titles. Contributors include Morag Fraser, Peter Porter, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Nicholas Jose and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

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Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee

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October 2005, no. 275

Slow Man begins with an accident. Paul Rayment is cycling along an Adelaide street when he is struck by a car. When he emerges from a daze of doctors and painkillers, he discovers his life has been transformed by this random event. His crushed leg is amputated above the knee. From now on, he will ...

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Australian Literary Studies edited by Leigh Dale & Meanjin edited by Ian Britain

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September 2005, no. 274

In his Structure of Complex Words (1951), William Empson counted fifty-two uses of the words ‘honest’ and ‘honesty’ in Othello. Nikki Gemmell, the publicity-shy cover star of the latest edition of Meanjin, manages to cram ten references to honesty (her own) into five lachrymose pages of her essay ‘The Identity Trap’, in which she explains that she refused to publish The Bride Stripped Bare (2003) under an assumed name because ‘a pseudonym is a lie’. How comforting it is to know that a writer of fiction should be possessed of such integrity, even if she does say so herself. Gemmell’s revelation does, however, constitute a severe blow to the reputations of George Orwell, Henry Handel Richardson and those lying Brontë sisters.

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It is eight years since Delia Falconer published her successful début novel, The Service of Clouds. Eight years is a long time. It took James Joyce eight years to write Ulysses (1922). Eight years is one year longer than Joseph Heller laboured over Catch-22 (1961) and about six years longer than it took George Eliot to knock out Middlemarch (1871-72).

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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.

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