Archive

Welcome again to Morris Lurie’s global village: Melbourne, Paris, New York, London, Tangier, Tel Aviv, Melbourne again, London. Lurie is one of our most reliable entertainers, but he is also, in the recesses of his stories, a chronicler of inner loneliness. The round world for him is signposted with stories; as one of his characters says, ‘everything is a story, or a prelude to a story, or the aftermath of one.’ The sheer variety of narrative incidents and locales in this collection is, as usual with him, impressive in itself. His characters play hard with experience in those bright or familiar places, a Tangier of easy living and surprising acquaintances, a London of the sixties fierce with contrasts. Yet finally they are always partly detached from it all and able to set themselves free, curiously able to resume the role of spectator of life. Many of Lurie’s characters give the initially disconcerting impression of possessing that ultimate detachment of a certain kind of writer, even when, as is usually the case, they are not actually cast as a writer or artist.

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.

It is astonishing how many major works of Australian fiction – and often major works in themselves – are out of print at any given time. Angus and Robertson and Penguin, occasionally assisted by smaller firms like the specialist feminist press Virago and the university presses, have done fine work in drawing attention to novels and writers undeservedly out of print. One writer who seemed out of fashion for a time but whom Penguin are systematically bringing back into print is Martin Boyd. The latest is their series of reissues of his work is a relatively little known and lightweight novel with the misleadingly enticing title of Nuns in Jeopardy (first published in 1940).

The legend of Lasseter’s Reef is a strand of Australian folklore that has been transformed from its original oral state largely through the fascination of the mass media with the events of 1930–31, and with lost treasure tales in general. A number of books, newspapers, and magazine articles, together with some fiction and documentary films have been produced on the Lasseter story. In fact it was the 1956 Hollywood ‘B’ movie, Green Fire, (about fabled treasure in South America) that first sparked Billy Marshall-Stoneking’s long interest in Lasseter.

Humour is much too serious business to be left to humourists; it is up to others to find it funny, while the comic goes about his trade with desperate lugubrity, Thus humour that goes out of its way to be funny falls flat: dryness is all.

At times I was delighted by this novel and at others was absolutely irritated. It is a novel which swerves between metaphors of wit and wisdom and crass punning. It is interesting structurally and it is crudely constructed. It is a novel of commitment, keen observation and loving sympathy. In some ways it is a novel of simple faith reminiscent of the Christian novels I was given as Sunday School awards which emphasised salvation through acceptance of a life of no smoking, no drinking, no dancing and certainly no going out with those who did them. But I’m putting this too strongly, for Gary Langford is not as simple minded as to attack modern medicine as the invention of the devil and doctors as the devil’s disciples. But the central thesis is that the protagonist, Mary Stewart, is the victim of our faith that the doctor knows best.

The apocalypse might have seemed like pretty stimulating stuff when St John was writing about it, but these days. the post-Apocalyptic landscape is a well-trodden literary territory. This fact notwithstanding, Colleen McCullough’s latest screen-fodder epic, A Creed for the Third Millennium, goes back to the future one more time, to the year 2032, when mankind is under threat, not from nuclear war but from an incipient ice age. This is because the world’s glaciers have put on an uncharacteristic turn of speed, but curiously, this improbable and unexplained phenomenon is one of the few indications that the setting is the future – otherwise the impression one gains is that technology has stood still for fifty years. As is so often the case it is the Department of Environment, which is fostering a secret plan to find a man of charisma and use him as a messiah to bolster the flagging morale of the people of America. The person in charge of this program is Dr Judith Carriol, and the man eventually chosen for the job of messiah is Dr Joshua Christian. If the significance of those names goes unnoticed, it should be remarked that Dr Christian lives with, among others, his brothers, James and Andrew, and his sister Mary. McCullough is very much a proponent of the bludgeon approach to symbolism, as if the difficulties inherent in successfully rewriting the story of Christ’s preaching years weren’t great enough without this fatal tendency to make every allusion so painfully clear, and to drag the plot out in a similarly unsubtle fashion.

Smokey Dawson, a millionaire, is a Mason.

He is also a country music singer/songwriter, knife thrower, whipcracker, cartoon strip, voice in radio programs well remembered by those over 35. He is still a kind of media institution reincurring the value of … precisely what? Cowboy kitsch?