Fiction

Popular fiction is often character-driven. An immediate distinction between these heavily-populated novels would be that if I met the main protagonist of Scott’s book I’d want to have coffee with him whereas if I met Aitken’s I’d want to slap him.

Gleeson is an award-winning novelist for young readers, winning the 1991 Australian Children’s Literature Peace Prize for Dodger and the 1997 Children’s Book Council Book of the Year for Younger Readers with Hannah Plus One. Her other novels include I am Susannah and Skating on Sand, and her picture books include The Princess and the Perfect Dish and Where’s Mum. She is an accomplished writer, which is reflected in her latest novel for older readers, Refuge.

‘Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow, I’m sick of wearing yellow!’ declares the pomposity of puffed-up Mr Toad, intends staying in bed until he gets what he wants – a new blue suit, like those worn by the Moon. Meanwhile, the roosters haven’t crowed, the cows need milking ... saplings want their dew and it’s bitterly cold, and so Mother Nature, Father Time, King Neptune and the Moon set out to solve the problem, with help from the Celestial Tailor. The results are ridiculous and enjoyably rude.

As the co-publisher of Mean Streets, Australia’s ‘crime, mystery and detective’ fiction magazine, I have, like Garry Disher, occasions when I wonder what the various terms actually mean and what separates them. It’s something Disher addresses in the author’s note to this very fine collection of stories which are amongst the best writing Disher has done. As Disher says:

In his third novel, Steven Carroll continues to work on those questions, obsessions, scenes and images that preoccupy him as a writer – the characters and personalities of women, and in particular that figure of a sexually charged and sophisticated young woman so disturbing to Helen Garner in The First Stone; the language of infatuation; the placement of characters in their particular city; mismatched lovers as the centre of a love story; and a certain trick Carroll has of overlaying the inner lives of characters with the narrative of events in the story being told. It is as though his characters swim, groggily, up out of their fantasies into the harsh, ironic events that have been provoked by their inner dreams. Life in his novels operates as a merciless commentary on the evasions and hubris of each character's consciousness.

The funny ways we have of writing about sex and how rarely it really works. The memory of how it feels, what is involved, what it means. How strenuously we, as writers and as people who have done it and then talk or write about it, try to capture the movement and intensities we remember. And how ludicrously it so often comes out at that second division, once removed from the flesh and heat.

This quote from Buddha opens Tasting Salt, Dowrick’s second novel, and freedom is its main theme. But the freedom in question is of the quiet domestic kind rather than the revolutionary clenched-fist-and-anthem kind. Cordelia, preparing a cocktail party for her seventy-third birthday, suddenly finds herself a widow after fifty years of marriage to George. George’s departure precipitates a crisis of self. No longer able to define herself simply as ‘George’s wife’ or even ‘George’s widow’ she finds herself confronted by the past and unresolved questions of identity, sexuality, and gender. Cordelia’s odyssey, frequently confusing and sometimes painful ultimately brings her a modicum of joy and renewed faith.

A new novel from the author of Julia Paradise, of Prince of the Lilies, and most especially of Billy Sunday, aroused in this reader an excited sense of eager anticipation. Yet I was pulled up brutally short by Nightpictures’ opening sentence: ‘When we look at other people we either want to fuck them or kill them.’ It is not merely that the sententia of this sentence is demonstrably untrue, or that ‘either’ might be more elegantly placed after ‘want’, but that the sentence is, aesthetically speaking, brutal and ugly. Perhaps it is those ‘k’ sounds. This is, however, a novel narrated in the first person, and the qualities which distressed me may be those of its narrator, ‘Sailor’, who fulfils in his individual career his universal generalisation, and my reaction may be intended.

The fifth book in a planned series of seven would not be surprising if it were science fiction or fantasy. But Burning for Revenge is neither, rather its connections are with the much more currently unfashionable genres of adventure and war stories. And what a war adventure series it is. This fifth volume, in hardback, has been on the bestseller lists in this journal and daily newspapers since its publication – not usual for young adult books. The first, Tomorrow When the War Began, is fourth on Angus & Robertson’s Top 100 Books Voted by Australians – after Bryce Courtenay, but before the Bible!