Australian Fiction

How do you give a plot description of this book without entering into the very language that it problematises? Ari is young, unemployed, Greek and gay ... Or Ari is a poofter wog, a slut, a conscientious objector from the workforce ...

More than ever books on today’s market have strong competition – particularly so if the title is intended for the 10+ reading audience. Publishers of children’s literature are responding to the need to entice a reading audience from the many technological forms of vivid and spectacular entertainment. Jigsaw Bay deserves a mention in this capacity.

The puzzle of Jigsaw Bay begins on an autumn morning as Danny McCall sets off, not to school, but to a secret place on the bay where he is playing truant with Yoko and Sam who will soon be part of the mystery. The plot is a good action one, strongly based in environmental ecology, corruption, and power. Danny, Yoko, and Sam with the help of greenie school teacher Bob and some slick court room tactics eventually win out and the murky details of corruption in Billington are revealed. The ideas in the plot kept me reading to the end of the book which is intended to attract readers by its directness and lack of complexity. I question, however, whether in an effort to succeed, the author has underestimated his audience and with the very best of intentions has ended up short changing readers.

Lilith Norman’s exquisite novella was first published in 1978 and was an IBBY Honour Book in 1980. Set in a lovingly realised Bondi, the archetypal seaside suburb, the book packs a huge amount into its seventy-eight pages: life, death, love, grief; a question of focus; and, drawn in spare and beautifully controlled strokes, the disparate two worlds that touch at the shoreline.

In her previous Phryne Fisher instalment, Blood and Circuses, Kerry Greenwood took advantage of her knowledge of circus and carnival life to weave an intriguing tale spotlighting a whole host of oddball types. Now in Ruddy Gore she uses her insider’s familiarity with the precious world of the theatre to similar effect. Greenwood always handles her material with a deft, almost disdainful assurance, and this book is no exception. The year is 1928, and a special performance of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera Ruddigore is being staged at Her Majesty’s to honour the famous aviator, Bert Hinkler. On her way to the theatre Phryne intervenes in a fight involving a Chinese man, then during the show two of the actors are poisoned, one fatally, and Phryne’s services are engaged by Management to solve the mystery.

This is a fascinating publication. The first book by Wiradjuri author John Muk Muk Burke, Bridge of Triangles, is really free-form short fiction than a novel proper. Novella length, it is episodic, impressionistic, often poetic and open­ended. And, while it has many strengths, this 1993 winner of the David Unaipon Award for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors is ultimately a disquieting piece of work.

Like Drusilla Modjeska’s earlier book, Poppy, this is a book that resists easy classification. It’s the sort of book that may infuriate those who like their ideas served up in separate self-contained portions: fiction, history, biography, criticism. It’s also likely to confound librarians and booksellers, faced with the problem of where to shelve it. Modjeska’s ideas are not answerable to the Dewey Decimal System.

Okay I’ve just finished reading Tim Winton’s The Riders. I’ve scribbled notes on pages all the way through, but I don’t want to go back and consult them. Who wants to return to hell?

This is a dazzling book. A sprawling, sensual, rambunctious marvel of a novel, it drives its readers out of their everyday world and every comfortable preconception. It takes enormous risks, not least that of demanding our understanding for the monstrous.