Archive

This is a crime novel written largely in headlines. Lethal Factor is replete with references to such choice items as bio-terrorism, the conflict in the Balkans, paedophilia, Nazi war criminals, strange goings-on in the Catholic Church and academic plagiarism. Such manifold topicality is no guarantee of success in a thriller, and the particular merit of Lethal Factor lies not in its wide coverage of current affairs but rather the attention it pays to the detail of everyday life and relationships.

Thanks to Alison Broinowski and Scribe, we now have an Australian booklet that seeks to make sense of the recent war in Iraq and of Australia’s participation in the war. Whatever shortcomings the book has – and shortcomings are inevitable when the slow art of book publishing seeks to keep up with contemporary events – its presence in the public arena is important, and both author and publisher have been brave in producing it so quickly.

Kevin Brophy shows us his skills as an entertainer in Explorations in Creative Writing. He has read widely and has a diverse collection of tales to tell, from the mundane to the fantastic. The story, anecdote and fragment are all part of his performance. We shift between a reading of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, to the ‘agenda of the couch’ and even to writers’ accounts of visits to analysts (Lacan’s consulting rooms – shabby!). Like the best entertainers, Brophy knows how to tell a good story. His writing has an admirable lightness of touch, alternately reflective and playful, and conveys a sense of the vitality of its subject matter.

It is one of the paradoxes of our history that the battle for New Guinea between 1942 and 1945 – so much harder but so much more successful than Gallipoli – is so little studied or understood. It has made such a relatively shallow impression on our national consciousness, compared with Australia’s 1915 expedition to Turkey. The New Guinea campaign was, if not unique, certainly one of the most extraordinary conducted by any belligerents during World War II because, as Alan Powell notes, it ‘relied upon the muscle and sinew and bushcraft of the local people for success’.

In some ways, Sue Woolfe’s new novel, The Secret Cure, deals with similar themes to her last novel, the award-winning Leaning Towards Infinity (1996). The central character of the novel is a young laboratory technician, Eva, unqualified but desperate to be a scientist. She nurses an obsessive love for a professor of immunology who has a professionally disadvantageous but compelling desire to find a cure for autism. Like the mother and daughter amateur mathematicians in Leaning Towards Infinity, the passion for research is transmitted unwittingly by the parent figure (in this case the professor and lover) to the younger. Eva takes up the professor’s genetic research into autism long after he has given up, defeated by academic and professional enmities. Each has a deeply personal reason for wishing to find a cure: the professor has the disease himself, and so does the daughter Eva has from their affair.

In 1519 the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés marched into Tenochtitlán (Mexico City), heart of the Aztec Empire. Thus began the often tragic history of European colonialism in the Americas. Anna Lanyon’s previous book, Malinche’s Conquest (1999), retraced and recovered the extraordinary life of Cortés’s translator and lover, the native American woman Malinche. The present book does the same for their child, Martín Cortés.