Review

In 2023, a broken engagement might be followed by tears, the division of possessions, and a reliance on family and friends. It might even involve a few trips to the therapist. But up until the mid-to-late twentieth century, Australian men and women’s heartbreaks could also see them take a trip to court to charge their partner with breach of promise of marriage.

In 2019, Smithsonian magazine published a profile of an American inventor, entrepreneur, and undersea explorer named Stockton Rush. Rush and his company, OceanGate, had recently celebrated the successful descent of their experimental manned submersible Titan to the extraordinary depth of 4,000 metres. Titan’s design was innovative in two important ways: its body was composed centrally of carbon fibre, which made it light and comparatively inexpensive to operate, and it was a cylinder. A spherical sub might have had ‘the best geometry for pressure’, observed Rush, ‘but not for occupation’ – and this represented an unpalatable check on OceanGate’s plans to deliver groups of high-paying tourists to the wreck of the Titanic. ‘I had come across this business anomaly I couldn’t explain,’ Rush reflected: ‘If three-quarters of the planet is water, how come you can’t access it?’

Andrew Sant is a substantial yet somewhat elusive figure in contemporary Australian poetry. Born in London, he arrived in Melbourne with his parents at age twelve in 1962. Over the years, he has published at least eleven collections, co-founded the literary magazine Island, and been, for a time, a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. More recently, Sant has lived and worked in the United Kingdom, but he clearly retains links with Australia, particularly Tasmania, where he first became known as a poet. 

Too often poetry is valued as if it were prose, exclusively by virtue of its subject matter. Such discussions miss the poetry itself, which my wife calls ‘the speech that brings us to silence’, a kind of accuracy beggaring what we say about it. Simon West is a poet who understands this distinction. His essays collected in Dear Muses? (2019) explore ‘the uneasy way my allegiances lie with my language as much as they do with the places in which I dwell’. He knows how complicated such terms as language and place must be, so his landscapes – particularly riverine Victoria and Italy – never seem limitations. ‘The task of the poet is to scrutinize the actual world.’ I read him for the pleasures of both world and word.

Dennis Altman’s new novel, Death in the Sauna, begins with, yes, a death in a sauna. The respected virologist Pomfrey Lister is found lifeless in a London gay venue, days before a major AIDS conference that he is chairing. His naked corpse is transported home and a death certificatepronouncing natural causes is produced. This hasty denouement is ostensibly aimed at concealing the salacious nature of Lister’s demise, which might overshadow both the conference and his legacy.

The potential for Australian literature to address the history of colonised people in this country and elsewhere is of great consequence. New perspectives not only rewrite history to include ‘herstory’, but also reconsider what we believe and broaden our view of ourselves as active contributors to our collective and individual past. A spate of recent books has attempted to do this: Anita Heiss’s Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray: River of Dreams (2021) and Geraldine Brooks’s Horse (2022) are two that come to mind.

Melanie Saward, a Bigambul and Wakka Wakka writer living in Tulmur (Ipswich), is a fresh and insightful storyteller. Her first Young Adult novel, Burn (Affirm Press, $34.99 pb, 296 pp), is a tumultuous narrative about an Aboriginal youth, Andrew, and his obsession with lighting fires. It has a touch of Trent Dalton’s Brisbane struggle street, but the story draws us into psychological observation in Goori Andy’s cries for help and his longing for his parent’s attention. The novel begins with a bushfire lit by an unknown arsonist, in which a boy dies. This tragedy frames the narrative as we go on the journey with Andy and his mates Trent and Doug, wild teenagers who like to smoke dope and eat at McDonald’s. They are innocents in a world that ignores them as the author interrogates relationships between the lads and several irresistible young females.

Elena Ferrante declared Elsa Morante’s début novel Menzogna e sortilegio (1948) ‘fundamental’ to her literary formation. The novel is now available unabridged in English for the first time as Lies and Sorcery, in a brilliant translation by Jenny McPhee.

Like Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Morante’s novel begins with the loss of the woman closest to the narrator, propelling a first-person epic to recover a shared past. However, this novel has little of the visceral realism that Ferrante has become famous for in the Anglophone world. It is instead a delirious mix of ghost story, romantic epic, and Künstlerroman that remains almost as difficult to categorise today as when it was published at the height of Italian neorealism.

Through the gates of a kindergarten in Melbourne’s inner-north, a man strikes up a conversation with two little girls, which violently alters the course of their lives. The bolder of the pair, a child who ‘runs at life’, goes with him. The meeker stays behind, becoming the serial predator’s only known survivor.

Max Easton’s second novel begins in early 2022 when an ensemble of thirty-somethings loosely connected through mutual friends and subcultural scenes decide to lease a four-bedroom share house. The house in Sydney has its flaws. Mould colonies grow on ceilings and walls in a ‘rich spectrum’, aided by a series of La Niña weather events. Situated just off a main road and surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings, the property offers little in the way of privacy. The fascia gutters are blocked by champagne corks popped from the apartment balconies above.