James Ley

In Doubling The Point (1992), one of J.M. Coetzee’s earlier collections of criticism, there is a long, closely argued essay titled ‘Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky’. It has a more scholarly flavour than much of Coetzee’s subsequent non-fiction – collected in Stranger Shores (2001) and his latest volume, Inner Workings – but it is a characteristically lucid piece of analysis that throws an interesting light on his ideas about the imperatives of writing.

The title of Richard J. Lane’s guidebook contains a small allusion to the changes that have occurred in literary studies over the past half-century. There was a time when universities trained critics; these days, everyone is a theorist.

David Malouf’s fiction has been justly celebrated for its veracity. His prose, at once lyrical and precise, has an extraordinary capacity to evoke what a character in an early story called the ‘grainy reality’ of life. For Malouf, small concrete details convey a profound understanding of the defining power of memory. He has a strong sense of the way the most mundane object can embody the past, how its shape or texture can send us back to a specific time and place and mood, just as Proust summons a flood of memory from the aroma of a madeleine dipped in tea. This tangible quality to memory is essential to our sense of self. The prisoners of war in The Great World (1990), for example, cling to their memories as a bulwark against the potentially overwhelming horror of their experiences. They treasure anything, however small, that provides a physical link with home, knowing that these relics help them to reconstruct the past and thus retain a grip on their identity and their sanity.

In 1993, when he was editor of Quadrant, Robert Manne published a short essay, which is collected in his recent book Left Right Left (2005), called ‘On Political Correctness’. The essay rehearsed some familiar right-wing arguments against this ‘highly intolerant’ doctrine and the threat it posed to academic freedom. Manne’s political opinions have, of course, undergone a considerable realignment in the intervening years, and so has the national political landscape. While the term ‘political correctness’ has proved far too convenient to disappear completely, these days it is heard less often and is generally invoked with less heat. This is partly because, over the past decade or so, it has done its job of denigrating any leftish sounding opinion so effectively.

When Frank Moorhouse took over the editorship of The Best Australian Stories in 2004, he promptly announced that he would be accepting submissions from anyone, regardless of whether they had a publishing history or not. He received and read, by his own estimate, about 1000 stories and gave six unknown writers the chance to be published for the first time. To his credit, he also took it upon himself not only to talk up the edition, but to make the case for the importance of the short story as a distinct literary form – one that is often underappreciated. There was no doubting Moorhouse’s enthusiasm for his new role. Having read the work of around 600 writers, he could claim with some authority that short fiction was thriving, despite limited opportunities for publication. Indeed, the 2004 edition, he boasted, ‘set a new benchmark in the standard of the short story’. Now steady on, Frank.

Slow Man begins with an accident. Paul Rayment is cycling along an Adelaide street when he is struck by a car. When he emerges from a daze of doctors and painkillers, he discovers his life has been transformed by this random event. His crushed leg is amputated above the knee. From now on, he will ...