Australian Fiction

Place has always been an intrinsic element in the detective story from the Paris of Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (despite the fact that his knowledge of the city came from an exhibition and not reality) to the London of Holmes to the village of Miss Marple to San Francisco of Hammett. In many cases it is as important a component as the detective character itself, or at least the detective is so entwined in his or her geography as to be impossible to conceive without it. This aspect of the detective novel probably reached if not its penultimate then its most obvious demonstration in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and has continued through the LA detective tradition that Chandler founded (with considerable outside help from Hammett). The liveliness of that tradition together with the fact that Los Angeles is home to Hollywood have made it the most mapped city in public consciousness.

Janette Turner Hospital was born in Melbourne, but has lived and travelled abroad in recent years. Borderline, her third novel, is set for the most part in Boston and Montreal. It is a mystery story which contains many of the conventional ingredients of the genre: disappearances, murder and violence, mysterious messages. However, these things are subsidiary to its dominating theme which is an exploration of the nature of reality. In this it achieves mixed results, but on the whole favourable ones.

Expatriate Australian writer and now naturalised American citizen Sumner Locke Elliott seems to have written this novel to dramatise his own sense of cultural displacement and identity. Cutting back and forth in time (between 1978 and 1950) and place (Australia and the United States), it traces the attempt of a woman named Tanya van Zandt in New York to retrace the whereabouts and identity of an Australian, Tilly Beamis, who turns out to be (it does not take the alert reader long to recognise) her actual former self.

A reviewer is bound to behave as a different kind of reader from others, especially when dealing with a mixed collection like Unsettled Areas. Other readers can pick and choose, skip the duller bits, and take as long as they like, whereas I’ve read closely every story, at least twice, in the space of two days. Then I’ve let them settle into my imagination for another day or so to see what impressions have lasted, before taking another look. I looked especially hard at the ones I found unsatisfactory, in case my mind had changed. I’ll leave these until later.

What a pleasure to be reviewing Kate Grenville’s collection of stories and her novel!

First, Bearded Ladies: The stories are a delight. Ranging with ease over four continents, they portray women in a variety of relationships – girls brought face-to-face with a sexual world, women coping with men, without men, women learning to be. The writing is witty, satirical, compassionate, clear as a rock pool and as full of treasures.

An Illywhacker, Peter Carey reminds us at the start of his latest and by far his longest novel, is a trickster or spieler. Wilkes cites it in Kylie Tennant’s famous novel of 1941, The Battlers. The other epigraph to the novel is also preoccupied with deception and is familiar to anyone who knows Carey’s work: Brian Kiernan used it as the title of his anthology of new Australian short story writers, The Most Beautiful Lies, an anthology in which Carey himself was represented: It is from Mark Twain and reads in part: ‘Australian history … does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises and adventures, the incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.’

This is the largest and most eclectic of Wilding’s four collections of short stories so far. Its 284 pages include stories ranging from ninety pages and two. Mostly written in the first person, they range in space between England and Australia, go back to the childhood of the narrator(s) (sometimes identified as Mike or Michael, making the autobiographical inferences irresistible) and in mode range from social realism through to the surrealistic modes of ‘What it was like, sometime

I must declare an interest. Dickins was once a student of mine and is still a friend. Readers of this review are invited to exercise their reservations.

I believe The Crookes of Epping is in the tragi-comic tradition of Charlie Chaplin which reaches back to one of the world’s greatest books, Don Quixote. In it pathos is as important an element as humour, wit and absurdity. It also has a connection with the earliest Greek Comedy in which the celebration of the God Dionysus was an important element.

Serpent’s Tooth is a massive, sprawling novel. It is panoramic in its vision of twentieth century social and political history, and meticulous in its rendering of one man’s struggle to sustain the mighty ideal his father has inspired in him.