Hodder

On the night of 13 September 1993, flight lieutenants Jeremy McNess and Mark Cairns-Cowan were killed when their F-111 crashed at Guyra, in northern NSW. Written by Jeremy’s mother, The Thirteenth Night dwells on the complex fatality of that night, which permanently changed several life stories in an instant. For his mother, who had coped with his exceptionally difficult childhood, winning through in his early teens to a remarkably close relationship, Jeremy’s death was and remains a dark frontier. Beyond lay a strange and cold country. Totally disoriented at first by devastating grief, she found the courage and stamina to pursue the true story of the accident’s cause for five years in the face of institutional defensiveness and media ignorance. This book began as a story for the family, but it is an important book for other readers on several counts.

Awareness of the tension between fantasy and realism in fiction has been heightened in recent years by the trend in young adult novels towards gritty urban realism. The tension itself is not new, however: in America half a century ago it was known as the ‘milk bottle versus Grimm’ controversy. Although there is a clear distinction between extreme examples of fantasy and realism, the intervening grey area encompasses a great deal of fiction which successfully mingles the two. Thus Sparring with Shadows, though on the face of it another example of contemporary realism, is peopled with characters who are clearly shaped to serve the author’s intentions; they’re believable but they’re not as ‘real’ as hyper-realists might prefer. Black Ice, on the other hand, is built on elements of the fantastic – spirits, poltergeists, séances, and the like – but it sets those elements against a recognisable late twentieth-century background in which a teenage girl is struggling to understand the disintegration of her parents’ marriage.

Mark Bowling was the ABC’s man in Indonesia from 1998 until 2002, and this book is an excellent account of the period of his posting. It covers a turbulent time in Indonesian life from May 1998, the end of the thirty-year Suharto regime, until May 2002, when the newly fledged nation of East Timor spread its wings. An epilogue adds his involvement in reporting on the most significant event in Indonesian affairs for Australians, the Bali bombing on 13 October 2002.

Todd Alexander’s début novel, Pictures of Us, ambitiously tackles a smorgasbord of weighty issues – mortality, grief, adultery, homosexuality – through the experiences of one family. The sudden death of Marcus Apperton, husband to Maggie and father of Isabel and Patrick, forces his wife and adult children into an uncomfortable reunion. Left to piece together a fractured family past, the Appertons begin to uncover some unsettling truths about their relationship to each other.

Australia has never been so prodigal of great men that it can afford to let even one slip into oblivion; yet George Hubert Wilkins (1888–1958) is now hardly a household name. In a life of ceaseless activity, he was a photographer, naturalist, meteorologist, geographer, aviator, submariner, war correspondent, religious thinker, and writer, but he was best known as a celebrated polar explorer. His first biographer, John Grierson, a professional writer, dealt adequately enough with the many lives of Wilkins in 1960, at a time when his subject was still well known. Four decades later, Simon Nasht, a documentary film-maker, offers the Australian reading public an expanded version of Grierson’s biography. Nasht has the advantage of a growing library of polar studies, and his book appears at a time when climatology and extinction of species are subjects of scientific and popular concern.

Garry Disher’s Snapshot continues his police procedural series about Mornington Peninsula detective Hal Challis, begun with Dragon Man in 1999 (before that, Disher wrote an excellent series of thrillers about a career criminal named Wyatt, starting with Kickback, 1991). Snapshot is 100 pages longer than Dragon Man, but, paradoxically, it is much more pared back, leaner and smarter about what a police procedural (PP) can be.

Relatively few Australians possess a criminal record, but virtually everyone in this country leads a vicarious life of crime. The greater part of our popular culture is pervaded by crime in inverse proportion to the rate of actual offending. Law and order is a sensitive political topic right now, yet at the same time never has the criminal world held such sway over the popular imagination. The bulk of television drama across all channels is crime-based, and crime is the raison d’être of endless documentaries, news reports and current affairs stories. Not even the most pedestrian soap opera is free from criminality; the rules dictate that sexual relationships must entail a period of stalking, and business cannot be transacted without skulduggery. The Hollywood dream factory, needless to say, could not operate on such an immense scale without the heavy consumption of the raw material of crime.

Some generals in Australia’s ‘culture wars’ have appointed themselves defenders of a mythical identity against the incursions of multiculturalists and ‘black armbanders’. Literary skirmishes over national identity have been more mundane, concerning mainly eligibility for awards. Certainly, three recent crime novels suggest that Australian writing benefits from adoption of a broad definition. That these three novels vary widely in plot, setting, characterisation and style is understandable given the authors’ disparate backgrounds.

There is a trick to the trite title of Death by Water, the fifteenth volume in Kerry Greenwood’s series about the hedonistic 1920s private detective Phryne Fisher. Contrary to expectations, no murder occurs for more than two hundred pages. In the meantime, the nominal plot involves the hunt for a jewel thief aboard a cruise ship bound for New Zealand, but far more attention is devoted to meals, cocktails, cigarettes, clothes, dance music, maritime scenery, anthropological chit-chat and recreational sex. Literary quotes of approximate relevance head each chapter, while ratiocination occurs as an accompaniment to life’s more sensual pleasures: ‘Phryne ate a thoughtful croissant.’

Working-class settlements north of Sydney are the common setting for these two family sagas. Between them, they take us from the 1880s to 1951. Jack Wallis, who labours in a quarry in the sandstone country that gives Stephen Lacey’s book its title, is born in the early twentieth century; Edmund Shearer, a Newcastle miner of the coal or black diamonds of Greg Bogaerts’s title, nears his death by that time. Both novels might have been designed to answer recent calls for Australian writers to turn their attention to the lives of ordinary people. How many other recent novels explain to working-class readers how their own parents and grandparents, not those of the social élite, thought and acted? Where else, for instance, could today’s renovators read about how their progenitors built their own homes?