Review

In E.L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks (his 1994 novel of post-civil war America), the narrator McIlvaine addresses the reader: ‘We did not conduct ourselves as if we were preparatory to your time. There is nothing quaint or colourful about us.’ Doctorow reminds the reader that our sense of modernity is an illusion. As Delia Falconer has eloquently noted apropos Doctorow’s novel, the contemporary historical novelist has a valuable role to play:

In early 1971, two Newcastle teenagers are overcome with sapphic appetites. Each is inflamed with lust for her childhood best friend, the literal girl next door. What to do about this forbidden desire? The first – Limb One – acts on her hunger. She enjoys a golden summer of covert fucking, before being discovered by her parents in flagrante delicto. After being beaten and kicked out of home, she hitches a ride to Sydney. True to herself, she is homeless and alone at sixteen. The second – Limb Two – follows the more well-worn path of repression. She buries her desires, acquires a boyfriend, studies hard. The good girl, beloved by her parents. One conundrum, two choices. How will the dice fall?

In scene-setting a discussion of Lia Hills’s The Desert Knows Her Name, it is difficult to avoid going straight to the matter of genre. What we have is postcolonial, outback-noir eco-fiction. This genre mash-up isn’t new and is arguably a defining fictional mode of post-settlement Australia’s third century. As a form, it provides a meeting place where authors, both Indigenous (Melissa Lucashenko, Julie Janson) and non-Indigenous (Alex Miller, Tim Winton, and Gail Jones), meet to worry through complexly entangled fears around colonialism’s dark legacy, personal trauma, social dysfunction, and environmental degradation. And it isn’t territory new to Hills, as readers familiar with her previous (second) novel, The Crying Place (2017), will be aware.

‘But I think there’s sometimes more emotion in a whisper. It doesn’t cause a fuss.’ So says Teller, the narrator of Bendigo writer Amanda Creely’s novel Nameless. Her story, Teller tells readers more than once, is not nice. She is right: set in an unnamed and unrecognisable country and in a world that seems not to have sophisticated technologies for war or peace, Nameless is the story of everyday citizens facing an invasion by a hostile, brutal, and powerful neighbouring army.

Enniscorthy, a town in County Wexford, was Colm Tóibín’s birthplace in 1955. His father was a schoolteacher and local historian. Martin Tóibín died young, when Colm was twelve, an early loss explored in Tóibín’s novel Nora Webster (2014), in which the eponymous widow’s son Donal is likewise twelve and a stammerer. In 2009, Tóibín published Brooklyn, which moves between Enniscorthy and New York City. The very modesty of Tóibín’s middle-class settings and characters – their constrained lives, village absorptions, small defeats – could not obscure Tóibín’s subtle artistry or his forensic interest in psychology, especially that of his women, many of whom are so complex, so contradictory, as to make the male characters seem extraneous, unimaginative, stolid.

British politics is back in the limelight, after a brief hiatus of relative sanity. The current election campaign will divert attention onto the main parties and key personalities. However, this shouldn’t mask important challenges to the very integrity of the United Kingdom that have occurred since David Cameron took the keys to 10 Downing Street in 2010.

It was a young Abraham Lincoln’s prediction that the United States ‘must live through all time, or die by suicide’. Nick Bryant wants us to believe the latter is coming true. America has been popping pills from the very beginning. Now the fatal overdose is inevitable. This time, we are reaching an ‘extreme polarization … 250 years in the making … a second civil war’. Rather than the hysteria for and against Donald Trump being an aberration, ‘the hate, divisiveness and paranoia we see today,’ Bryant argues, ‘are in fact a core part of America’s story’. It has been on this path since 1776; Trump is less a waypoint than a destination.

If we adopt a charitable view about political memoirs, it is generally preferable that serving or newly departed politicians should pen their reminiscences. If they are any good, it is a bonus. To have their particular ‘take’ on events and personalities is a valuable addition to the historical record, even if such products err on the side of self-indulgence and egocentricity. Most politicians, unfortunately, take their secrets with them when they go. Moreover, to write, or collaborate in, one’s memoirs while still in public office is a remarkable achievement – undertaken only by Peter Beattie and Bob Carr in recent times.

Decolonising has reached the classics. Complexity, diversity, and entanglement are in. Greece and Rome are, well, out. The movement to ‘reclaim’ Antiquity began with noble aims: to emancipate the ancients from the prism of politics and war through which we like to see them, to emphasise the role of technology and trade in their lives, and to make women and people of colour visible among them again. Alas, decolonisation all too often seems to have descended into ugly arguments over restitution of artefacts (Elgin marbles, anyone?) or the skin shade of this or that Roman notable (Septimius Severus or St Hadrian of Canterbury, for example). Books such as Josephine Quinn’s are the sensible, balancing side of the equation, an antidote to so much virtue signalling and grievance mongering. Quinn’s is an ancient world decentred – provincialised, to invoke Dipesh Chakrabarty’s celebrated term. Greece and Rome remain, but must jostle with others for attention, space, and significance. The argument is simple. Antiquity was far more multipolar, dynamic, and integrated in reality than in the civilisational – and, indeed, civilising – narratives that Europeans since Petrarch have been telling themselves about it.

The ‘Bastard of Bingil Bay’ features on no banknote or coin, nor is he listed in any roll-call of ‘important Australians’, and yet, if it were not for John Büsst, it is likely that twenty-odd national parks and rainforest reserves on the far north-east coast of Queensland would not be so designated and might in fact have been obliterated. It is also probable that, without Büsst, today’s fight for the Great Barrier Reef would have already been lost, the vast ecosystem fragmented into a slew of cement quarries and cheap limestone pits. Considering the extent to which this vast coral labyrinth has shaped the identity of modern Australia, the relative absence of Büsst’s influence from the historical record is doubtless representative of the many such travesties historians seek to rectify.