Fiction

This is a novel of dissociation. It is a novel laden with symbolism. It overworks at telling one so. ‘“It’s the nature of things,” he said, “to be symbolic. Perhaps that’s Nature itself.”’, The title, Their Solitary Way, indicates the state of the world and the way of the protagonists. In the novel, Julian Croft creates a sense of emotional lassitude. This doesn’t help the reader to like the characters. To meander through the soulless corridors of disenchanted lovers while the history of the world is caught in the corners of their consciousness, is to sympathize with Georg Lukacs and see that the middleclass Australian intellectual has it all out of proportion. In one sense this is what Croft’s novel is about. Bombs explode, people starve, revolution erupts but the Australian only feels pain when he inadvertently gets caught up in a demonstration. Croft is excellent on alienation.

Leonard Mann’s account of his experiences in World War One, Flesh in Armour, has recently been reissued. It may be the case that there are certain experiences that are impossible to write about unless one has personally undergone them. The three great Australian classics of World War One – Flesh in Armour, The Middle Parts of Fortune and When the Blackbirds Sing – all convey an air of total verisimilitude when it comes to describing the conditions of battle. In comparison, even such gifted writers as David Malouf and Roger McDonald convey the impression of faking it when they come to write about war, no matter how much care they take or research they have done.

It was a comparatively easy task for Anna Murdoch to have In Her Own Image published. After all, as the critics vied with each other to point out – Rupert does own forty-two per cent of Collins. A cynical observation is that she had considerable difficulty in having it seriously reviewed – when one considers how many critics Mr Murdoch has at his disposal! Everyone wrote about it of course – after all, the Murdochs make good copy. Through her many interviews, we learn a good deal about Anna Murdoch and pick up a few pointers about Rupert the family man – but relatively little about the novel itself.

Tom Howard is a new character/pseudonymous author in the same general region inhabited so prominently by Peter Corris’ Cliff Hardy, although with the publication of his first two novels it remains to be seen how far Howard will be able to rival Corris’ talent for bringing out the local flavour of crime and corruption, and how far his books will simply have Australian settings grafted on to classic forms of the whodunnit. Of the two Howard novels under review The Health Farm Murders follows the formula of a small isolated community with its numbers dropping off like ninepins, while The Beach-Front Murders is a much more credible account of passion and loneliness, of the lure and isolation of the big city.

Welcome again to Morris Lurie’s global village: Melbourne, Paris, New York, London, Tangier, Tel Aviv, Melbourne again, London. Lurie is one of our most reliable entertainers, but he is also, in the recesses of his stories, a chronicler of inner loneliness. The round world for him is signposted with stories; as one of his characters says, ‘everything is a story, or a prelude to a story, or the aftermath of one.’ The sheer variety of narrative incidents and locales in this collection is, as usual with him, impressive in itself. His characters play hard with experience in those bright or familiar places, a Tangier of easy living and surprising acquaintances, a London of the sixties fierce with contrasts. Yet finally they are always partly detached from it all and able to set themselves free, curiously able to resume the role of spectator of life. Many of Lurie’s characters give the initially disconcerting impression of possessing that ultimate detachment of a certain kind of writer, even when, as is usually the case, they are not actually cast as a writer or artist.

Janette Turner Hospital was born in Melbourne, but has lived and travelled abroad in recent years. Borderline, her third novel, is set for the most part in Boston and Montreal. It is a mystery story which contains many of the conventional ingredients of the genre: disappearances, murder and violence, mysterious messages. However, these things are subsidiary to its dominating theme which is an exploration of the nature of reality. In this it achieves mixed results, but on the whole favourable ones.