Michelle Griffin

A smattering of cultural theory is helpful when reading Gail Jones. The academic bones of her writing always show through the thin padding of her concept-driven stories: deconstructed photography in Sixty Lights (2005), technology and intimacy entwined in Dreams of Speaking (2006). It is more than disconcerting when the narrator of Jones’s third novel, Sorry, starts to interrogate the text with the aplomb of a Cultural Studies postgraduate, especially as the said narrator, Perdita, is a twelve-year-old girl living in Perth, in 1942, curled up in bed with a copy of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. ‘Since the first reader is the author,’ Perdita thinks to herself, ‘might there be a channel, somehow, between author and reader, an indefinable intimacy, a secret pact? There are always moments, reading a novel, in which one recognises oneself, or comes across a described detail especially and personally redolent; might there be in this covert world, yet another zone of connection?’

On Valentine’s Day, the State Library of Victoria will host its third literary speed-dating dinner, an event that makes explicit something that has long been implicit in contemporary courtship chatter: you can judge a lover by their book. Participants in these events have about three minutes to impress each potential partner with the one book they brought along for show-and-tell. At the first such dinner, one man brought along The Story of O, which at least made it clear that he was there for a good time, if not a long one.

There is every reason to admire this novel’s intent, but with the best will in the world I couldn’t recommend the result. Linda Jaivin’s current affairs comedy about the Villawood Detention Centre is so conscious of its pedagogic goals that it fails to offer a decent story. And it’s not funny. Believe me, I wanted to like it. Jaivin is a terrific writer with an enviable range, capable of the witty, surrealist smut of Eat Me (1995) and the kind of nuanced cross-cultural analysis that underpinned The Monkey and the Dragon (2001), her undervalued biography of Chinese rock’n’roll dissident Hou Dejian.

Just how old is John Egan? In a letter to the Guinness Book of Records, he says he is eleven. But the narrative voice of this queer, tormented Irish lad is not that of other boy heroes on the cusp of puberty, the opinionated braggarts whose boasts and fears and primary-coloured perspectives propel their stories. Instead, John’s story lurches from the distractions of the very young to a kind of preternatural knowingness. No wonder John makes everyone around him uneasy. He makes the reader uncomfortable, too.

Slow in the writing and slow in the reading: it is so easy to drift on the tides of Beverley Farmer’s book, and also to lose your bearings. The three long essays that make up The Bone House are prose poems organised by biorhythms, it seems, rather than by any architectural design. They carry all sorts of startling images in on their tides, like the fragments the writer finds washed up on the shores: ‘A figleaf burning in a patch of sun on the path, a ribbed shell like a boat, balanced on its stalk, a crumple of brown on one side, all its freckles and veins clear in a green pool of light.’

I could always rely on Gerald Murnane for a beautiful quote. Nine years ago, when I was researching a piece on writers and technology, he told me he wrote all his books on a manual typewriter with the index finger of his right hand: ‘My favourite word to type, as a one-finger typist, is “afterwards”,’ Murnane told me over the phone. ‘It’s a beautiful whirly movement with one finger.’ Afterwards, as I transcribed his perfectly weighted sentences, it was clear that Murnane had probably already written the words he spoke to me. ‘I tend to think of words as written things rather than spoken things,’ Murnane writes in ‘The Breathing Author’, one of the more recent pieces in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, his first book in a decade. ‘While I speak, I often visualise my words as being written somewhere at the same time.’

The Vogel Prize shares a reputation with the rest of the company’s products: nutritious, worthy, a little dull. But the prize’s earnest image is unfair. Any glance at the roll-call of winners over the last twenty-five years would show that the makers of soggy bread and soya cereals have done more than anyone to introduce fresh literary DNA into Australia’s tiny gene pool of published novelists. But reviewers, mostly, and the public, generally, don’t get excited when the new Vogel is published. This year they should. Julienne van Loon’s desperate joyride, Road Story, is the best Vogel winner to come along since 1990, when Gillian Mears’s The Mint Lawn, equally confident but very different, won first place.

Diane Armstrong should have stuck to the facts. The many surprising particulars that illuminated her two fine histories of the Jewish refugee experience (Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations, 1998, and The Voyage of Their Life, 1999) have been replaced, in her first novel, by clichés and banalities that turn to soap opera her account of an Australian forensic scientist unearthing the secrets of her own past.