Jeffrey Poacher

There is something to offend everyone in the latest issue of Meanjin. Several contributors boldly tackle religious questions – always plenty of kindling for the fire there. Jeff Sparrow takes on the so-called ‘New Atheists’, in the process throwing a few Marxist haymakers at Bush, Rudd and ‘the Israeli apartheid state’. The ‘religious undergirding’ of secular thought is considered by the Sydney academic John Potts, who finds that greenies, old-style lefties and post-structuralists are much closer to Messianic Christianity than they might think (along the way, he is snide about vegetarians, too). Elsewhere, Paul Mitchell contrasts the spiritual impulses at work in contemporary Australian fiction, though some of his assumptions are bound to get nonbelievers offside.

After abandoning its ideals, the Australian Labor Party ‘degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power’: that was the diagnosis of Vere Gordon Childe, the polymathic party insider, and he was writing in 1923. The brutality of Labor machine politics is hardly news, but it remains relatively unexplored territory in Australian fiction. Matthew Karpin’s latest novel gives us the blackest of the factional black hats – the right – doing deals and scheming schemes in an imaginary New South Wales state government during the mid 1990s. Satire is the usual Australian response to the venality of those who govern us, but Karpin’s approach, by contrast, is intensely serious, as he presents the inner lives and inner demons of a large cast of parliamentarians and apparatchiks. In that respect, The Right is as much a psychological novel as it is a political one.

In one of Kenneth Slessor’s surviving notebooks now held in the National Library, there is a curious entry consisting of approximately eighty names. This appears to be a list of those people the poet counted as friends over his lifetime; many of the names are marked in pencil with the forlorn abbreviation ‘d’. What might a literary historian make of such a list? It might be evidence of a romantic sensibility, a sign of Slessor’s faith in the commemorative powers of language, arguably the precondition for writing elegiac poetry. On the other hand, the list might be held up as proof of a bleak modernism, indicative of Slessor’s existential anxiety, the names being little more than fragments shored against the ruins of time. Of course, the question of whether a particular poet should be regarded as a romantic or a modernist depends entirely on what is meant by those loaded terms. This is one of the pitfalls of literary history: its basic terms of inquiry are often equivocal.

Living as a displaced person in Berlin during the early 1930s was no picnic, especially if you happened to have a Jewish wife. This was the situation Vladimir Nabokov found himself in, so it is hardly surprising that at one point he considered emigrating to Australia. Had he done so, how different would our literature look today? Perhaps we would have more novels like Brian Castro’s latest, for The Bath Fugues is so stylish, cosmopolitan, sinister and funny that it could justly be called Nabokovian in its lineage. This is not so much a departure for Castro as an amplification. His narrators have always been a slippery bunch and his prose invariably lavish, but rarely has his tone been as darkly comic as it is in this new novel.

‘I like sad girls,’ confesses the creepy narrator of ‘His Blue Period’, the story by Deborah Robertson that opens the latest anthology of short fiction from Black Inc. It is never entirely clear what form this liking took. The narrator’s intentions were undoubtedly sexual, but not just that. What he seemed to desire most of all was the story of each girl’s sadness – the telling of her particular tale of woe, ‘the full, heavy, sad, sweet works’ which blossomed (at least in his mind) like a magnolia. And how did he elicit such revelation? Simply by asking each of his melancholy companions about her childhood; it is there, he supposes, that true sorrow first takes root. Robertson’s story is sinisterly opaque, not least because the tables are eventually turned on the predatory narrator (the past tense of his opening confession is surely significant in that respect). Things start to fall apart after his brief encounter (a late-night quickie) with a woman who boldly describes her childhood as ‘lots of laughs’. This entanglement precipitates such a crisis of confidence in him that he suddenly has the urge to redecorate his yuppie apartment: ‘I wanted to go downstairs and take the car from the garage and drive out of the city to the suburbs, and in the unfamiliar streets I wanted to find a Bunnings.’ There is a deft comic touch here, but the dominant note is indeed a blue one, suggesting a vast metropolis of inexplicable sorrow.