Fiction

Incorporating photographs, diagrams, idiosyncratic typography, and even a list of references, Chris Gregory’s Twins is a media kit as much as a short story collection. It beings with a kind of parable about reading:

John Kinsella, who has made a name for himself in Australia and abroad as poet and critic/commentator, has published an extended prose sequence which his publishers describe as a novel, called Genre. It’s dedicated to Derrida, as well as Kinsella’s partner, Tracy Ryan; and it begins with quotes from Defoe (on the plague) and Dennis Hopper (on drugs). Genre reads like a kind of journal/essay with meditations on ideas of seeing, on poetry, and addiction, intercut with several narratives. ‘In the Theatre of the Imagination, all but one of the eight stages are occupied ... The Renaissance Man is writing an essay on an exhibition and thinking about his latest books on aesthetics.’ The narrator’s essay is called ‘A Public Viewing of Private Spaces’.

This attractive collection of short pieces – mostly fiction – reminded me of the old music-hall adage: start with a bang and leave the best acts till the end. Robert Drewe’s selection certainly begins with a bang. John Updike’s ‘The City’ is the story of a man who arrives in a unnamed city, and sees no more of it than an anonymous hotel room and the hospital where he has his appendix removed. By the end of this cunningly crafted fable, we realise that the city’s fascination for Carson, the central character, is directly related to its being unknown, unseen and as much a cipher (and perhaps a menace too) as it was when he arrived, decidedly queasy from the airline’s freeze-dried peanuts – or so he thought at the time.

This novel, Delia Falconer’s first, takes the form of a love lament: all about breath in bodies; textures and surfaces; clouds; mountains; photography; colour; gardens; illness. Much more, too, of course, and it is a work that certainly does not warrant such a glib cataloguing of elements and attributes. It is ambitious, and successful ...

This is a serious tale of crime and punishment from Jean Bedford, who had been working up to it. Her Anna Southwood novels have been consistently good, their light touch obscuring not at all the author’s passion for justice, an old-fashioned sentiment which always informs the best crime novels, often most palpably present in crime fiction by women.

Catherine Jinks’ new novel reminds us that humans are great pigeonholers: we like to know where everything (everyone) fits, to be able to pop them in the right slot, slap the right label on the front and relax, secure in the knowledge that our future reactions are safely prescribed by the parameters of the pigeonhole to which we have consigned them.

It takes a book like Robin Klein’s The Listmaker to remind adults that a children’s book which succeeds in conveying a child’s point of view may well not immediately engage more mature readers. In this instance, Klein so precisely articulates the self-absorbed voice of twelve­year-old Sarah, the eponymous listmaker, that it takes an effort of will for an adult reader to persist past the first few pages of what seem like overstated emotions and overdetermined plot. Children will have no trouble accepting Sarah’s voice and understanding that it’s like it is because it’s been distorted by her circumstances. Adults too, however, would do well to persevere with The Listmaker, for it turns out to be a heart-felt indictment of how our greedy me-first society can damage children.

Mark Twain did Australian literature a service when he remarked that Australian history ‘does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies’. It is an observation with which Australians are happy to identify, for it stimulates the imagination, accommodates the larrikin we like to see in ourselves, and has the effect of sanctioning the revision of a past that is not all that we might, from the vantage of hindsight, have wished. At least three writers have adopted it as an epigraph, including Peter Carey, who wove Illywhacker around the notion, and now David Astle, personalising a possible past for a corner of country Victoria.

Peter Carey has constructed a labyrinth. Let me gropingly try to lead you through it. The year is 1837. A convict, transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life, returns to London intent on finding the boy who years before did him a kindness. The boy, Henry Phipps, has grown up a gentleman ...