Fiction

Dorothy Porter’s new verse novel, Wild Surmise, takes an almost classic form. The verse novel is now well-established as a modern genre, and Porter has stamped a distinctive signature and voice on the verse form, particularly with the phenomenal success of her racy, action-packed detective novel, The Monkey’s Mask (1994) ...

Dorothy Porter’s new verse novel, Wild Surmise, takes an almost classic form. The verse novel is now well-established as a modern genre, and Porter has stamped a distinctive signature and voice on the verse form, particularly with the phenomenal success of her racy, action-packed detective novel, The Monkey’s Mask (1994). So it comes as no surprise to find this book setting a similarly cracking pace across some not entirely unexpected territory: an adulterous love affair between two women; and the death, through cancer, of a husband. Additional glamour and some thematic variation are provided by the women’s profession, astronomy. Both women are favourites on the lecture and television circuit, and Alex Leefson’s passionate interest in finding traces of biological life on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, generates some of the more purely lyrical moments.

These first novels, both from experienced writers, are two remarkably accomplished works. Although Borrowed Eyes and Above the Water tell very different stories in contrasting styles, the similarities are striking. Both portray a central female character whose life has been damaged by violence. And both deal with loss and memory, physical and emotional scars, and the long journey to healing.

Books such as these build more bridges between Aboriginal and the wider society than any secondary source study or essay ever could. Black Chicks Talking and My Side of the Bridge tell the stories of a diverse group of Aboriginal women, most of whose lives would not meet the traditional requirements for published autobiography. On the whole, they are neither famous nor infamous. Most do not conduct their lives in public, nor try to. Perhaps they are swept up in a publishing trend that, at last, is acknowledging this country’s hidden voices, but their stories deserve to be told.

Nobel prize winner Albert Camus played soccer for Algeria. First-time novelist Nikos Athanasou has been likened to Camus – for his writing, not his ball skills – but, on the basis of his début, this comparison is hard to sustain. A more convincing parallel between the two authors might lie in the diversity of their skills; Athanasou’s new career as a writer is secondary to his ‘day job’ as Professor of Orthopaedic Pathology at Oxford.

Many sorts of pleasure have been claimed for and by readers of crime fiction: the ratiocinative pleasure of puzzle-solving; the satisfaction of seeing morality prevail and order restored; the perverse enjoyment arising from having our suspicions about the corruption of our society, its leaders and its values confirmed; participation in the wistful hope that actions based on goodness and principle may succeed; reassurance that the domestic lives of our heroes and heroines are just like ours; and, starting with Paul Cain and Raoul Whitfield, Horace McCoy and Jim Thompson, the cold embrace of nihilism and the apocalypse.

In primary school, we were shown a video warning children not to get into strangers’ cars. We were told to note the places with Safety House stickers on the way home. I remember wondering if, on being pursued, I’d be able to run all the way to the nearest one. Every so often, we heard about a kidnapping on the news, so we took these warnings seriously.

How does Arnold Zable do it? After two finely wrought, deceptively simple books on Holocaust themes, he has brought out another, linking tales of the Greek island of Ithaca with the stories of his parents, Polish Jews, and their contemporaries who settled in Melbourne just before or just after the Annihilation, as Zable prefers to call the Holocaust.

In Youth, the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee (who has recently taken to the Adelaide Hills) continues the project he began with Boyhood: Scenes from provincial life (1997). We are told by the publishers that this is a novel; indeed, the use of the third person throughout makes this plausible ...

From at least the mid-1980s, it has been almost obligatory for Australian reviewers to bemoan the dearth of contemporary political novels in this country. In some ways, this is a predictable backlash against the flowering of postmodern fabulist novels of ‘beautiful lies’ (by such writers as Peter Carey, Elizabeth Jolley, and Brian Castro) in the past two decades ...