Fiction

Alison Chesterton works in the Canberra press gallery. She is single, promiscuous, jaded, cynical, disillusioned; she wonders about the health of her soul. The languor of another day in Canberra is interrupted by a phone call bringing the journalist’s Holy Grail, an inside tip: the first scent of a story that will break hearts and create reputations. It is also the animating act in the narrative permitting Sonya Voumard to shift the story from Canberra to Alice Springs, and then to Melbourne, as Chesterton researches the rumour.

Since its establishment in 2003, Sleepers Publishing has made quite a name for itself. Coordinating literary salons and the annual publication of the Sleepers Almanac, which garners contributions from some of the country’s most esteemed practitioners, the small press is now branching out into the domain of full-length fiction, with Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming as the opener.

The title of Jesse Pentecost’s first novel refers not to a confidence trick but to a Conservatorium of Music. Primarily, Pentecost seems to want to talk about classical music, to offer considered criticism, to impart his knowledge of its history and practice, and to suggest the difficulties of a professional career in music. He is also keen to explore the post-Enlightenment idea of the ‘genius’.

What do you do when you can live for thousands of years, travel nearly everywhere you wish in the galaxy, and customise your environment and your body to be exactly the way you like? When there is no risk of starvation, injury, or disease? When your back-up simply takes over when, for some reason, you die? What do you do if the whole universe is your playground and you’re just plain bored?

Twenty-four-year old Ella arrives in sweltering Ho Chi Minh City. It is 1994; the United States has just lifted the crippling trade embargo. Ella sets herself up in a grungy hostel and begins teaching English at a local school. She has come to Vietnam ostensibly in search of information about her father, a veteran, who abandoned the family years ago. ‘What does it mean to miss so much something you barely knew?’ Ella ponders. This narrative foundation – tenuous in the wrong authorial hands – proves a powerful driving force in Myfanwy Jones’s assured debut novel. The search for her father is more one for Ella’s own sense of self and place in the world.

This novel is Sonia Orchard’s second book, published six years after her first, the compelling and intimate memoir Something More Wonderful (2003). For those who read the memoir – the harrowing story of her thirty-one-year-old friend’s battle with cancer – The Virtuoso may come as a surprise. Orchard has abandoned her own assured voice for that of a fictional and unreliable narrator, a young Englishman besotted with a concert pianist, slightly older than himself. The milieu is an eccentric circle of musicians and writers in 1940s London. If there is any similarity between Orchard’s memoir and her novel, it is the narrator’s stance as the observer, with a beloved and idealised friend at centre stage.

Glowing reviews of an author one is not familiar with can inspire scepticism, but in the case of David Francis these tributes are justified. Stray Dog Winter – an impressive political thriller – is set mostly in Moscow in 1984, with occasional flashbacks to Melbourne during the 1970s.

Julian Halls’s novel The Museum is a recent addition to Australian gay and lesbian fiction. The text engages with an important issue relating to same sex-attracted men and women, but it is ultimately disadvantaged by a distinct sense of amateurishness.

Katherine Johnson’s first novel, Pescador’s Wake, is a well-paced account of the pursuit of a Uruguayan vessel that has been fishing illegally for Patagonian toothfish in Australian territorial waters south of Heard Island. What follows is a stern chase. The Pescador is followed across thousands of nautical miles by another fishing boat, the Australis (from Hobart), which for six months of the year is chartered by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority to deter fish poachers. Johnson’s narrative cuts between action on the two vessels, hauling gales in waters near Antarctica, and more muted domestic dramas in Uruguay and Australia.