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‘A crystal atmosphere reflecting a liquid blue never excelled in purity even by soft azure splendour hung over the old Venetian palaces by the magic brush of Turner, lay on the mountain tops throughout the weekend. Sunshine illumed the crags and played fantastic vagaries of colour amidst the fresh foliage, gleaming in gilded beauty on the outer fringe of fern curtains and throwing into deeper shade the bosky nooks of the laminated cliffs and mossy gorges.’

‘One day I will have to tell (my daughter) … that her grandmother is a bag lady.’ Josiane Behmoiras’s exquisitely crafted memoir of her mother, Dora, delivers its punchline in the opening chapter. Behmoiras’s childhood and youth were shadowed by her mother’s untreated mental illness and by their descent into chronic penury, loneliness and fear. Nonetheless, the overall effect of this work is of warmth and colour, and of a keen sense of the absurd. The pleasure taken in recapturing each vignette seems to reflect its subject’s irrepressible fighting spirit. Dora fostered her daughter’s artistic gifts, as well as her capacity for love, joy and compassion.

True crime is experiencing a boom these days. Its popularity is directly connected to the number of forensic investigative shows on television. The average viewer of CSI probably knows more about criminal profiling and blood pattern analysis than most retired police officers. At least one book, it seems, is published on every major murder committed in Australia. Some murders warrant the public’s attention more than others; they represent turning points in our society. A good example is the disappearance on 15 July 1977 of Liberal parliamentary candidate and anti-marijuana crusader Donald Mackay from a hotel car park in the Riverina town of Griffith. That evening, Mackay left the Griffith Hotel and headed for his van. A local accountant heard a groaning noise and three ‘whip cracks’. By eight o’clock that night, when Mackay hadn’t returned home, his wife became worried. At midnight, Barbara Mackay rang the Griffith police and reported her husband missing. She had been wary of calling the local police earlier because she didn’t trust them – and with good reason. Early next morning, Mackay’s solicitor found the locked van in the hotel car park. Three spent cartridges lay on the ground, and Mackay’s keys were nearby. Blood was smeared on the front mudguard, the side door and front wheel; the blood type matched Mackay’s. Despite an exhaustive search and a large government reward, his body was never found.

Relatively few Australians possess a criminal record, but virtually everyone in this country leads a vicarious life of crime. The greater part of our popular culture is pervaded by crime in inverse proportion to the rate of actual offending. Law and order is a sensitive political topic right now, yet at the same time never has the criminal world held such sway over the popular imagination. The bulk of television drama across all channels is crime-based, and crime is the raison d’être of endless documentaries, news reports and current affairs stories. Not even the most pedestrian soap opera is free from criminality; the rules dictate that sexual relationships must entail a period of stalking, and business cannot be transacted without skulduggery. The Hollywood dream factory, needless to say, could not operate on such an immense scale without the heavy consumption of the raw material of crime.

The Book Thief marks a departure for Markus Zusak. It is his first novel for adults, has broader concerns than his earlier work, and makes clearer his ambitions to be considered a serious writer. His first three novels, for young adults, were primarily focused on the masculinity of the boys in a working-class Sydney family ...

These are hostile times for literary fiction in Australia. New novels are well advised to don flak, not flap, jackets. And it’s not just a simple case of critics sniping from the sidelines, wanting their piece of the action. This is a full-blown civil war involving all the vested interests – publishers, editors, journalists, publicists and booksellers – not just writers and readers. The smarting adjectival arrows continue to find their targets. Current fiction is too dreamy, starchy, inconsequential, ingrown, belletristic, portentous. While our non-fiction writers have been doing time in South American jails and running the gauntlet of spy networks, our best novelists have been tending the lily-livered genres of historical fiction and fable. Many of them have been accused of skedaddling off to the library at a time when a confrontation with the forces of xenophobia, philistinism, fogeyism and greed is more than ever required. Novel-writing, in a word (and it’s one that has been flung around with a degree of passion recently), has become ‘gutless’ storytelling.

Comedy isn’t the only art that requires good timing. Poetry also requires it. Indeed, poetry might be partly defined as the art of giving things away at the right moment. Illustrating this we have The Best Australian Poetry 2005. In this elegant anthology, we find Peter Goldsworthy’s inspired description of our planet: ‘Our earthen dish is seven parts water / one part china, and a tiny bit japanned.’ We also find Brett Dionysius on the 175-year-old tortoise Harriet, which, having outlived Charles Darwin, thinks: ‘Now I’m with Steve Irwin at Australia Zoo. / I Harriet, time-lord tortoise: outlive him too.’ We find Jennifer Harrison’s arresting description of ‘grammar’s lovely utterly cold snow’. We find Keith Harrison’s ‘kind of stretched villanelle’ (as he describes it), which begins: ‘The summer night is dangerous and deep.’ We find the unsettling climax of Aileen Kelly’s ‘His Visitors’, in which ‘fetid ivies’ ‘reach up and suck out the light’. We find Anthony Lawrence’s poem about the Wandering Albatross, with its reference to ‘the compass glass of its eye’. And we find the terrible, uncomic climax of Judith Beveridge’s powerful poem ‘The Shark’.

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 ...