Kate McFadyen

The practice of making a garden is simple. Prime the soil, choose and arrange the plants, tend it, water it, enjoy it. The complications arise with the awareness of the cultural, environmental, and personal elements. Is it your land or are you renting it from a landlord? Is the soil tainted with lead or other contaminants after centuries of industrialisation? Are the plants you have selected meaningful to you or just modish markers of good taste and affluence? Will your curation withstand extremes of anthropogenic climate change or will the plants struggle and perish, become overgrown by the botanical bully boys that can adapt and dominate?

The Good Parents, Joan London’s second novel, begins with the seduction and disappearance of Maya de Jong, an eighteen-year-old who has recently moved to Melbourne from a small Western Australian town. Maya’s worried parents, Jacob and Toni, travel to Melbourne, set themselves up in her Richmond share house, and begin to search for clues to explain her absence.

The first time The Engagement’s narrator, Liese Campbell, sees the family homestead owned by her lover, Alexander Colquhoun, she is struck by its imposing physical presence: ‘We turned a corner … The second storey came into view: eight upstairs windows and each chimney intricate as a small mausoleum.’ As she surveys the isolated Victorian mansion, with its English driveways and gardens, she realises that it has ‘been built precisely so one would feel at its mercy’.

One of the things I am often called on to do as a bookseller is to make recommendations, particularly when it comes to fiction. This involves making a judgement about what a customer wants from a book, rather than what a book may want from its reader. Many readers declare from the outset that all they want from a novel is a good story they can escape into. They happily admit that they don’t want to be challenged, don’t want to work for their enjoyment.

This is the frequently offered rationale for mass-market fiction: pure escapism. It exists to entertain, not to edify. Hackneyed storylines and wooden dialogue don’t matter, so the argument goes; all that does matter is giving people the kind of uncomplicated enjoyment they crave. The writing might not be stylish, but neither is it pretentious. Fair enough, perhaps. If you are the kind of reader who sees nothing wrong with lines such as ‘a fresh spike of fear gripped him’ or ‘there was only one way to heal his thirst for revenge’ or ‘Iris has always been blindly attracted to people who don’t fit the mould’, then criticism of this book is probably redundant. If, however, mixed metaphors, clichés and melodramatic flourishes make you cringe, be warned that Fiona McIntosh’s Fields of Gold is full of them.

Literary definitions often have an indeterminate quality. To state the precise formal characteristics of the novel or the short story is almost impossible. There are some basic tenets, but these forms are fluid; open to interpretation and experimentation. Is there, then, any grounds for conceiving of the ‘long story’ as a distinct entity? Caught somewhere between two already amorphous forms, it seemingly occupies a negative space, defined by what it is not.

It is a common assumption that nothing much happens in small country towns; that they are insular places where people live their entire lives, unchallenged by the outside world. But I never found the towns I lived in to be stagnant: conservative and sometimes small-minded, yes, but never uniformly dull. Individuals and families come and go; people run away or arrive, seeking refuge; people return after years of absence to settle down again.

In the introduction to her Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990), Angela Carter considers the contrary nature of the fairy-tale form. Born of a lively oral tradition, fairy tales are not beholden to veracity, and Carter celebrates the complete lack of desire for verisimilitude in Andersen, Grimm and Perrault: ‘Once upon a time is both utterly precise and absolutely mysterious: there was a time and no time.’ Fairy tales do not beg the reader to suspend their disbelief, they baldly expect us to see the thing for what it is: a tale, a lie. It is all in the telling: which parts of the story the narrator wants to illuminate; which parts she wants to subvert or leave out completely. Carter writes of the modern preoccupation with individualising art, our cultural faith ‘in the work of art as a unique one-off, and the artist as an original’, but fairy tales are not like that. They eschew permanent ownership and the responsibility that implies.

There is always someone watching someone else in Belinda Castles’ Vogel Award-winning novel, The River Baptists. Most of its characters choose to live on the Hawkesbury because of the peace and seclusion, but the river setting allows a variety of vantage points and approaches to the scattered houses and rickety jellies that line the banks. It is a tranquil and picturesque setting, but Rose’s friend Ben sees it in a rather different light: ‘Subzero temperatures, mud, a pub full of guys who look like Cousin It.’

I recently went back to New England. It is a long drive from Melbourne, but as I passed through Coonabarabran and Tamworth and began the ascent up the Moonbi Ranges, my gaze responded to the strange and familiar landscape. I periodically wound down the car window to smell the air – crisp but still warm for autumn. I grew up in a few different New England towns – Inverell, Glen Innes, Armidale – so I am familiar with the territory covered in the fascinating essays in High Lean Country. The high elevation of the Tableland makes the winters cold, summers mild. The dramatic landscape is dotted with granite mounds and monoliths. It is edged to the east by the escarpment and the gorge country of Judith Wright’s poems.