Fiction

For several years, I have bemoaned the dearth of substantial, challenging Australian novels for ‘middle years’ readers. During a recent stint working in a specialist children’s bookshop, I was frequently asked by parents of these readers – upper primary, lower secondary – for ‘books that will last longer than an afternoon’. I was hard-pressed to find many recent Australian titles that would fit the bill. Two new novels by first-time writers aiming both to entertain and challenge their audience with complex yet accessible stories, concepts and language go a small way towards filling this gap.

A couple of years ago, confined to bed for weeks with a bad case of chicken pox, I was surprised to find that all I wanted to read were chronicles of illness. A Better Woman (childbirth-induced fistula), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (shut-in syndrome), A Match to the Heart (heart failure after being struck by lightning), My Year Off (stroke) – I devoured them avidly. This was more than the egotism of the ill, I hope, although certainly a part of the enjoyment lay in seeing the fact of sickness given its own exclusive literary space. But I suspect my enjoyment had something more to do with watching those authors piece themselves back together in language. So physically altered that I could hardly recognise myself in the mirror, I took a greater pleasure than usual in the mysterious alchemy of word and flesh.

'History always emphasises terminal events,’ Albert Speer observed bitterly to his American interrogators just after the end of the war, according to Antony Beevor in Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002). Few events in recent history were more terminal than the Holocaust, it might be urged. Yet the singularity of that ‘terminus’ has been questioned in recent years ... 

‘Australia is all an illusion. A trick with smoke and mirrors, performed by demagogues and balladeers.’ So says Paul Walters, one of A.L. McCann’s main characters in this black, sometimes bleak, but very readable tale of Melbourne monstrosity and madness at the turn of the twentieth century. The White Body of Evening is sprinkled with such sentiments, uttered behind chilled hands into penurious South Melbourne, intoned at middle-class tables down the road in St Vincent Place, and wanly ruminated over in the superior cultural environs of Vienna. McCann revels in the detail, and his map of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ is rich with it: there are the Anatomical Curiosities on exhibit in Bourke Street’s Eastern Arcade; the understated shopfronts on Elizabeth Street, where disreputable booksellers specialise in the subjects of syphilis and sexual pathology; the Little Lonsdale stretch where tawdry prostitutes corrupt white-collar working men; and the numerous alleyways where fishmongers’ refuse washes in the gutters, and cadaverous human specimens occupy shadowy doorways.

In Alex Miller’s latest novel, Journey to the Stone Country, we are not in Carlton for long before being taken far to the north, to Townsville, and then inland to country that few Australians know. The short first scene is handled with dispassionateness and economy. Melbourne history lecturer Annabelle Beck comes home to ...

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.

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.

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.

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.