Fiction

Knitting, the first novel from ghostwriter and former professional knitter Anne Bartlett, tells the story of a newly widowed academic and her unexpected friendship with a gifted knitter that enables her to move on with her life. Bartlett’s rich (and uncredited) experience of writing other people’s stories puts this intimate exploration of women’s friendships in a different category from your average ‘chick lit’. Age journalist Graham Reilly is another writer who transcends his genre in Five Oranges, a crime novel about the ragtag adventures of a tight-knit circle of working-class Glaswegian friends and their on–off tangles with the Saigon mob. Part of the reason that these two novels are so much better than many in their respective genres could be that they go beyond formula and caricature.

First, the good news or the bad news about this novel? Perhaps the bad. Presenting the worst face of a character to the world is not in itself fresh or especially amusing any more. We are overrun with sitcoms reflecting us, warts and all. Bridget Jones was among the first of these types of characters in popular fiction, and I was variously amused and pained by her hapless and heart-warming antics. More recently, the anonymous Bride Stripped Bare startled me for the statutory fifteen minutes, and left me wondering where all the attractive taxi drivers were hiding. In Alison Says, a conflation of the above, I found the central character, Maggs, to be a bit tiresome – and tired. Maggs is a 24-year-old drama teacher who has recently been dumped. Two months later, Jamie, the ex-inamorato, becomes engaged to Lorelei, aka ‘the Rhine slut’. In the wake of these events, Maggs is emotionally vulnerable, but it’s all rather in the manner of someone in an arrested state of adolescence. Suzanne Hawley’s Maggs is a stock characterisation based on the humour of self-absorption and victimhood, narcissism and obsession. Hawley’s novel does not fully realise the key ingredient of chick lit: a central character that the reader either loves or loves to hate.

Early in 1900, bubonic plague travelled by ship to Sydney, then erratically made its way up the coast. Ian Townsend’s accomplished first novel, Affection, traces the arrival of the plague in Townsville during the autumn of 1900. His story is factually based and is particularly concerned with three of the doctors who treated the outbreak: Linford Row, recently settled in the town as its municipal medical officer; long-term resident Ernest Humphry; and the English bacteriologist and butterfly collector Alfred Jefferis Turner. How they cope, not only with horrible and random deaths, but with politics and prejudice in North Queensland, is the dramatic core of the book.

The Stone Ship is Peter Raftos’s first book, and one of the first three books released by Sullivan’s Creek, an imprint of Pandanus Books. The Sullivan’s Creek Series ‘seeks to explore Australia through the work of new writers, with a particular encouragement to authors from Canberra and the region’ and ‘aims to make a lively contribution to scholarship and cultural knowledge’. Raftos, ‘a web developer, an academic-in-training and a journalist’, lives in Canberra and works at the Australian National University. His novel, set in an imagined time and place, doesn’t so much explore Australian universities as the absurdity of all universities. As for ‘a lively contribution to cultural knowledge’, I’m not sure what that looks like, but The Stone Ship reminded me of Terry Gilliam’s wonderful film Brazil (1985). Both are set in a ‘retro-future’ ruled by huge, incomprehensible bureaucracies, whose only work seems to be perpetuating their systems and inflicting arbitrary cruelties on unsuspecting and trusting citizens.

The Marsh Birds, by Eva Sallis, is a bleak but poignant account of one boy’s consuming loss and bewilderment as war and internal political tension separate him from his family, his home and his country. It is the story of parallel journeys in the life of Dhurgham Mohammad As-Samarra’i as he grows to manhood in an unforgiving world and searches for love and acceptance. Throughout this pilgrimage, Sallis examines concepts of anguish and hopelessness, social hostility and exclusion, fear of difference and the collision of cultures. In the tradition of Sallis’s City of Sea Lions (2002) and Mahjar (2003), themes of self-discovery, escape, constraint, and the obstacles to freedom and solace in other societies are revisited.

Spacious and solidly constructed, the classic nineteenth-century novel invites revisiting. Later writers reconfigure its well-known spaces, change the lighting, summon marginal figures to the centre. Most memorable, perhaps, is Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), in which the first Mrs Rochester ...

At the start, Catherine Jinks’s teen novel Evil Genius resembles a local edition of ‘cult’ blockbuster phenomena such as Harry Potter and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer – wish-fulfilment fantasies about misfits initiated into a hidden élite. On page one, we are introduced to Jinks’s protagonist, Cadel (Welsh for ‘battle’), a brilliant but barely socialised young boy obsessed with computers. His adoptive parents are named Stuart and Lanna Piggott, which should tell you all you need to know. Aged eight, this outwardly placid but potentially vengeful nerd learns from his psychologist mentor that his true father is a mad scientist named Phineas Darkkon, who has made millions through scams such as a line of shonky vending machines, and who subsequently bankrolls a secret University of Evil located in central Sydney, where, a few years later, Cadel precociously winds up. Among the subjects on offer are Basic Lying, Forgery, Assassination and Guerrilla Skills; the other students include a Goth chemist who is trying to turn himself into a vampire, and a pair of bitchy, telepathic twins.

Dreams of leaving can be a powerful force in the lives of young people. These four novels are each touched by the desire for other places. The idea that a more authentic self lurks beyond our familiar zones shapes these books, three of which are written by Australians, and one by an American writer who spends half his time in Australia and half in New York.

The beauty of ‘chick lit’ is the discussion of sometimes quite painful, but always familiar scenarios surrounding love, life and happiness, in an open and self-deprecating way. Apparently, it doesn’t pay to take yourself too seriously when it comes to matters of the heart, and rightly so – why weep when you can have a good laugh? In The Catch, Marg Vandeleur’s first novel, the search for happiness is complicated by the plight of the woman whose sudden desire for a child is thwarted by a clutch of eggs past their prime and nary a bloke in sight. Social commentators, researchers, religious leaders and feminists have all put their oar in over the last year or so on this topic. Now it’s time for ‘chick lit’ to have its say.

If you are regretting the passage of another summer and feeling nostalgic about the lost freedoms of youth, Sonya Hartnett’s latest novel, Surrender, may serve as a useful tonic. In Hartnett’s world, children possess little and control less, dependent as they are on adults and on their own capacity to manipulate, or charm ...