Fiction

Those familiar with the previous titles in Garth Nix’s The Keys to the Kingdom series will be expecting another carefully structured, action-filled adventure. They would be half right. In the seventh and final instalment, Lord Sunday, Nix has abandoned his familiar formula. The elements are all there – the seventh key, the seventh Trustee, the seventh fragment of the Will – but the meticulous structure that has been the benchmark of the series is replaced with a mad dash to the ultimate conclusion. As a result, this book reads like a finale to the interrupted climax of book six, Superior Saturday (2008). This lends the narrative a frenetic energy that mirrors the plot, as the ever-encroaching Nothing grows closer to overwhelming the House, the Universe and Everything, while the ‘real world’ (which fans will understand isn’t really the ‘real’ world but only Arthur and Leaf’s version of it) descends into further chaos as a result.

With series titles dominating the new releases, it would seem that every author’s (and illustrator’s) ambition is to find a character and a conceit that will have sufficient appeal to carry them successfully through multiple volumes. This is a particularly achievable ambition in children’s literature, where the target readership has a high tolerance for repetition, a loyalty towards favourite characters and a seemingly insatiable appetite for more of the same.

Kally Palamas is an Australian of Greek descent; a trained and published philosopher barely coping with a personal tragedy in the man-made caves of Cooper Pedy. Estranged from her lover and living a solipsistic life, her world is disrupted when she travels to Greece to deal with the ceremony of her father’s death.

Her father, Akindynos Palamas, had been one of the many Greek migrants to travel to Australia in search of freedom and fortune. However, after achieving success in his adopted land he succumbed to the lure of the myths of his old country while his family continued their lives in Australia.

Not really? Tom Mackee? That boorish, pervy, smart-mouthed Year Eleven boy from Saving Francesca (2004), who offended Tara Finke whenever he opened his mouth, is the central character in Melina Marchetta’s new book. At least he loved music and was not a bad guitarist. Last time we met him, Tom became part of Francesca’s circle at school. Occasionally charming, a dab hand at witty repartee, he was falling for activist and feminist Tara Finke. Now he’s not sixteen anymore, but twenty-one (or thereabouts).

A generation of Australian schoolchildren knows Peter Skrzynecki’s poetry. The simple, direct language of Immigrant Chronicle (1975) speaks of both the desolation and optimism of the postwar migrant. Boys of Summer, Skrzynecki’s third venture into book-length fiction, treads similar thematic terrain.

The cover-blurb is a genre all its own. No sensible publisher would grace the cover of a book with the assertion, ‘This is a pile of crap’, even if it is. So we should all take a blurb cum granum salis. The blurb for John Dale’s Leaving Suzie Pye reads: ‘Rips along with verve and confidence … funny, energetic and full of life.’ The signatory is Helen Garner. Can this be the same Helen Garner who gave us The Children’s Bach and The First Stone, I asked myself, as I persevered with Dale’s lacklustre novel. What significant omissions are concealed behind those three periods in her remark?

Kate Veitch’s first novel, Listen (2006), was a richly detailed examination of family and the repercussions of a single, fateful decision. Her second, Trust, continues her exploration of these themes and also focuses on feminism, forgiveness, religion, sexuality and the importance of recognising the truth about one’s own character and motivations. Divided into two sections (‘Before’ and ‘After’), the new novel follows the lives of Susanna Greenfield and her family in the lead up to, and aftermath of, an unexpected and tragic event.

Martin Westley takes a walk one day and accidentally triggers a series of events, transforming the walk into a tragicomic life-changing expedition. While strolling along the coastal path between the beaches at Bronte and Clovelly, Martin is struck on the temple and loses consciousness. On waking he gradually realises that he doesn’t know his name, has lost his memories and has no idea who he is. He meets his wife, Alex, who is indifferent to, indeed contemptuous of, him and just as mysterious as before to Martin. The family home is unnervingly free of any intimate traces of his existence. His son ignores him. Only his daughter Emily shows any concern for his well-being.

Colin McLaren has already published two books drawing on his own remarkable experiences as an undercover policeman – On the Run (2009) and Infiltration: The True Story of the Man Who Cracked the Mafia (2009) – the former a work of fiction, the other autobiographical. In this latest work he merges the two forms to create a biographical novel of his beloved grandfather George Bingham, who, with a few mates, was among the first to enlist, in an Anzac battalion filled from rural Victoria within a fortnight of war being declared.

From its opening line – ‘It had been a shit of a day for Sister Annunciata and Sister Clavie’ – Marie Munkara’s collection of stories about life on an island mission in northern Australia is a raw, hilarious and penetrating chronicle. The two nuns stare at the sky waiting for the bishop. His plane overshoots the airstrip and lands with a ‘resounding crump’. It is as if the bishop – ‘his Most Handsome and his Most Distinguished’ or ‘his Most Sleazy’, depending on which nun you ask – represents wave after wave of invasion. Apart from God and His earthly representatives, the islanders over the years also confront an anthropologist, Indonesians, a naked French couple, Spanish workers, marijuana, rum, the flu and even John Wayne.