Review

Early Sydney has beguiled many writers, and the latest to succumb is Kristin Williamson. She has combined an interest in the Rocks area with a self-confessed ‘obsession with our feisty female forebears’, and has produced an historical novel involving several real people.

Iris Murdoch’s first book of philosophy, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, was published in 1953 when she was thirty-four years old. A year later, Under the Net appeared, her first published novel. If not for the war and its aftermath – Murdoch worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration for two years – her first published works may have appeared earlier. And yet the years 1944 to 1953 provided fertile ground for the novelist. It was the period of her deep attachments with the great writers and philosophers (Raymond Queneau, Elias Canetti and Franz Steiner) who would seed many of the fictional characters in her future work. She wrote several novels before Under the Net – four or six, she was never quite clear. And for more than forty years she wrote prodigiously: twenty-six novels, five works of philosophy, several plays and a collection of poetry.

Speaking in the context of the Quebec secessionist movement, Stéphane Dion described Canada as ‘a country that works in practice but not in theory’. Whilst particularly telling of that country’s political turmoil, Dion’s summary also points to an abiding tension in all Western democracies: the perceived gulf between the theory and the practice of modern government. Constitution and parliament, the people and their representatives, tradition and modern requirements: in theory, each pair dovetail, but in practice they tend to be loose at the edges. (Try finding, for example, any reference to ‘prime minister’ in our Constitution.) The ongoing efforts within Australia to reconcile the theory and practice of government are at the centre of this important book, which was released to coincide with the South Australian Constitutional Convention (held in August 2003).

Robert Hughes, bemoaning the contents of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1959, cast an eye over its sandstone façade decorated in bronze letters with such august names as Rubens, Titian and Raphael, and quipped: ‘Never has so large a nut housed so inadequate a kernel.’ The National Gallery of Australia was in every respect the opposite story: its collection was a fat kernel in search of a shell. Until 1968 this collection, thought to comprise some 3000 works, was strung around Canberra offices and Australian embassies like so much washing on a line. The Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, which would soon be dismantled, had been buying energetically, if conservatively, for years. However, there was no catalogue, no conservator to care for them and no established policy for the collection.

Not since Henry Parkes has New South Wales had such a literary-minded premier as Bob Carr. Parkes published his own poems and wrote two earnest volumes of autobiography. Carr, so far, has tried his hand at a novel, a memoir and a diary, as well as writing lots of occasional pieces. Carr, like Parkes, was a journalist before becoming a professional politician. Parkes, too, dragged himself from humble beginnings to a position where he could use official letterhead to arrange meetings with those he admired. Carr has sought out writers such as Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal to autograph his copies of their books and to join him at dinner. Once established, Parkes’s main aim was to stay in power. It was his only source of income, so his manipulation of factions, policies and the electorate all focused on that end. Graham Freudenberg has said of Carr: ‘Labor politics is central to Bob’s identity … if you took the politics away from Bob there would be nothing much left.’ But unlike Carr, Parkes did not have the option of moving to federal politics (he died before 1901). After Federation, NSW politics was stripped of talent as its leaders, including Edmund Barton, William Lyne and George Reid, made the move. Reid, a long-serving and highly effective NSW premier, is one of only two state premiers ever to have succeeded in becoming prime minister, the other being Joe Lyons.

For most Australians, certainly for those under the age of forty, ‘Vietnam’ is either an item on school curricula or a slightly off-the-beaten-path tourist destination. History or holiday. This may affront some, especially the small groups on either side of the 1960s cultural and political divide that cannot let go, but it is a sign of a generational shift and of the creation of the distance between ourselves and the event that is necessary for enhanced understanding and reconciliation between Australians and the Vietnamese.

At the beginning and end of The Anatomy of Truth, Kate Wild’s central character, Janey Hunter, asserts that she is ‘just trying to establish a common base from which we can communicate’. The Anatomy of Truth suggests bold investigations into vexed issues, so I will follow Janey’s lead and begin by establishing a common definition of the title of this brave first novel. For the purposes of this review, the science of anatomy is the artificial separation of parts of the human body in order to study their structure and relationship. In a more figurative sense, it is a detailed examination or analysis of the structure of an organisation. And truth is the matter as it really is, a fixed or established standard, pattern or rule that conforms to fact and accuracy, with a hint of allegiance and loyalty.

‘Dwelling in the Shape of Things’ is the title of Nicolette Stasko’s sequence of sixteen elegantly executed ‘Meditations upon Cézanne’. It could, however, serve as an appropriate epigraph to both these collections. Given that the natural world is Stasko’s and Adrienne Eberhard’s main locus for exploring and responding to ‘the shape of things’, each could be described loosely as a ‘landscape’ poet, but the character of their work is neither nationalistic nor naturalistic. They write essentially of their experience as sentient beings inhabiting, and intimately responding to, the world of things.

This is a crime novel written largely in headlines. Lethal Factor is replete with references to such choice items as bio-terrorism, the conflict in the Balkans, paedophilia, Nazi war criminals, strange goings-on in the Catholic Church and academic plagiarism. Such manifold topicality is no guarantee of success in a thriller, and the particular merit of Lethal Factor lies not in its wide coverage of current affairs but rather the attention it pays to the detail of everyday life and relationships.