Gary Crew

Although Fourth Estate heralds this as Gary Crew’s first adult novel, readers who have followed his long career as a celebrated writer for young people will be aware that several of his Young Adult novels could be classified as ‘crossovers’. What defines them as such is the age and experience of their narrators: Kimmy of Angel’s Gate (1993) may be ten years old, but the story is told fifteen years later by an adult, Kim. Similarly, the teenage Sarah’s evidence indicts Mama Pratchett, but she relates the story of Mama’s Babies (1998) many years after the trial. Retrospective narration allows Crew to transcend the limitations of a youthful viewpoint and to look back upon events with mature wisdom, a technique he again employs in The Children’s Writer.

There is an almost overwhelming tide of historical texts for young people being published at the moment. Fictional accounts of actual events are enormously popular, and frequently the diary form is used, as this is felt to be more accessible to young people, and also gives the writer licence to use the historical present tense with impunity.

Families are curious entities. They are, by simple definition, households of individuals bound by common lineage. But they are also complex organisms, as these three novels show. Families nurture the individual and offer a refuge from the problems of the larger world, yet they can also impede the growth of their youngest members, who seek their own place in the world and attempt to shape their own responses to it.

All too few books about Australian children’s writers and writing manage to find a publisher. They’re unlikely to sell enough copies, is the standard explanation. All the more reason, therefore, to welcome an even greater rarity – a book which focuses on the work of a single writer. Even if Gary Crew might not necessarily be everyone’s first choice as the subject of such a volume, all those interested in Australian children’s literature will hope that Strange Journeys meets with a success which will encourage the publication of similar analyses of other contemporary writers’ work.

My acid test of a good novel is how long the characters reverberate in the consciousness after the book has been put down. After I read both these books, I carried Grace Starr and Steven Messenger around in my head for weeks – both of them dangerous and mysterious persons, but in very different ways.