Lisa Temple

First, the good news or the bad news about this novel? Perhaps the bad. Presenting the worst face of a character to the world is not in itself fresh or especially amusing any more. We are overrun with sitcoms reflecting us, warts and all. Bridget Jones was among the first of these types of characters in popular fiction, and I was variously amused and pained by her hapless and heart-warming antics. More recently, the anonymous Bride Stripped Bare startled me for the statutory fifteen minutes, and left me wondering where all the attractive taxi drivers were hiding. In Alison Says, a conflation of the above, I found the central character, Maggs, to be a bit tiresome – and tired. Maggs is a 24-year-old drama teacher who has recently been dumped. Two months later, Jamie, the ex-inamorato, becomes engaged to Lorelei, aka ‘the Rhine slut’. In the wake of these events, Maggs is emotionally vulnerable, but it’s all rather in the manner of someone in an arrested state of adolescence. Suzanne Hawley’s Maggs is a stock characterisation based on the humour of self-absorption and victimhood, narcissism and obsession. Hawley’s novel does not fully realise the key ingredient of chick lit: a central character that the reader either loves or loves to hate.

While less is usually more with poetry, there’s no denying the power and even magnificence of longer pieces produced in Australia in recent years by Les Murray, Luke Davies, Geoff Page, Dorothy Porter and others. Susan Hampton’s ‘The Kindly Ones’ belongs firmly on this A-list. The title-piece comprises the second half of the book, but the shorter poems that precede it, while standing separately, can be seen as a kind of preface in their concerns. The ‘Kindly Ones’ are the three Furies – Tisiphone, Magaera and Alecto – on holiday from vengeance in contemporary Australia. Tisiphone’s narration is incisive, pacy and always underscored by irony. It is this balance of sentiment and the ironic eye that is a masterful achievement in this and various of the shorter poems. Hampton’s constant juxtaposition of the deeply disturbing and the ordinary also results in irony that ranges from the charming to the razor-edged. Much of this is achieved by her excellent control of voice. Her finely tuned ear for the vernacular sits comfortably next to layers of classical erudition, and exposition on the nature of tragedy – ancient versus modern. Hampton matches her free verse form to content quite effortlessly and Tisiphone is convincing as she seeks her better self. ‘On the Bright Road’, a shorter poem, foreshadows Tisiphone’s quest: ‘The vast erasures of the self / contain somehow in their deep hold / the – I hesitate to call it a god – / the second self, a post-colonial god, / no longer a queen or king but an acting subject / in the realm of subjectivity, where / your best god is met after your worst self.’