Macmillan

I found Murray Bail’s novel Homesickness a work of brilliant and resonant artistry, which despite many unlikely incidents, succeeds in being thoroughly credible in all its parts. It is also a desolating book, a comedy, but a very black one.

As I write this, the Aboriginals have been forced to capitulate at Noonkanbah. The Western Australian Government is hell-bent that Amax should drill on the Blacks’ sacred site, and the National Aboriginal Conference is in Geneva to state its case at the United Nations. Patterns of Australia, funded to the tune of $120,000 by Mobil, one of the most powerful trans-nationals the world has ever known, could not have been published at a more appropriate time. Although author Geoffrey Dutton deals dutifully with the Aboriginals in the course of this book, Noonkanbah or what it stands for – energy resources, land rights and the exploitative activities of trans-nationals – is not one of the ‘patterns’ (along with many others) discussed in this smooth coffee table creation.

The Transit of Venus has been widely acclaimed, and justly so: it is a great novel of passion and ambition, success and failure, written with elegance and wit, and magnificently structured. Still, despite the critical superlatives, few critics have attempted to come to grips with the power of Hazzard’s writing. There have been the inevitable comparisons with Jane Austen, and some attention has been paid to the symbolic connotations of the title, but little more. The prose and structure of the novel are worth examining in some detail because, seven years in the making, it is a most crafted and sculpted work of literary art.