Picador

With biography and memoir, it seems that readers are buying a certain kind of truth –call it authenticity, the authority of fact. Yet all reading is escapism, even when we are escaping to what we consider true; even in non-fiction, we seek some of fiction’s satisfactions. This is the challenge: to find a theme and structure that will shape the story without sacrificing a sense of intransigent reality.

Any novelist prepared to name one of his characters ‘Fish Lamb’ and to have that character come back from the dead is obviously interested in Christianity on some level. It is also true that several of the big themes that run through Tim Winton ‘s fiction – guilt atonement, forgiveness – have a religious flavour. Nevertheless, Winton’s symbolism tends to have an open-ended quality. When his characters experience moments of spiritual awareness, moments that Winton has said are meant to be taken literally, these experiences are often depicted as a nonspecific form of mysticism or pantheism.

Over the last couple of decades in Australia, short fiction has been a poor cousin to the literary novel. While this country continues to produce fine writers of short fiction, many of them struggle to achieve book publication of their works. Larger publishers often seem no more interested in collections of short fiction than they are in poetry collections. Their argument: short fiction, like poetry, does not sell. It has often been left to smaller Australian publishers to produce and promote short fiction writers, who are sometimes taken up by a major publisher if they achieve a notable success with a longer work.

Matthew Flinders, arriving in Sydney in 1803 after circumnavigating Australia, wrote to his wife bemoaning ‘the dreadful havock that death is making all around’. The sailors in Peter Mews’s Bright Planet have a more phlegmatic attitude. At least twelve of the ship’s complement of sixteen fail to survive the expedition. There may be more, but death becomes an everyday occurrence hardly worth mentioning. By the end, we are not entirely sure whether the remaining characters are alive or dead.

Someone once described Clive James as ‘a great bunch of guys’, a joke worthy of James himself, although he is probably tired of hearing it. Some of those guys – the television comedian and commentator, the best-selling memoirist – are better known than others, and there’s little doubt that their fame has obscured the achievement of two of the quieter guys in the bunch.

Elliot Perlman made a bit of a splash a few years ago with Three Dollars (1998). Parts of the novel were underfictionalised in the most blatant way, parts of it seemed to represent nothing more than the fervencies of what Perlman thought (most of it staunch stuff agin globalisation), but it seemed undeniable that the life and times of these south suburban Melburnian wine and cheesers represented, in Australian terms, a piece of subject matter worth biting off.

It was a bit ridiculous that a book of fiction of rather manifestly modest literary ambitions should be published as the crême de la crême of literary fiction and then pretty much accepted as such. Perlman’s new book confounds the pretension and makes it well and truly the author’s own by purloining the title of one of the twentieth century’s greatest works of literary criticism and adding insult to injury by calling the protagonist’s dog Empson. One of the only times I have been cut by the The Age on the basis of something other than length was when I wrote about William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) – because of the obvious topicality, given the barbarous appropriation – and concluded: ‘So in future, Elliot Perlman, call your dogs something else.’ But then, we live at a time when the latest wannabe fiction is more likely to command reverence than the work of a notable critic and poet. Not the least paradox, though, is that Perlman would be likely to agree.

Comedy, Angela Carter once quipped, is tragedy that happens to other people. Laughter is both an expression of our hard-bitten knowledge of the random cruelty of a universe that stubbornly resists our attempts to control it and an act of defiance in the face of that cruelty. Or, to put it in simpler terms, if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.

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.

From at least the mid-1980s, it has been almost obligatory for Australian reviewers to bemoan the dearth of contemporary political novels in this country. In some ways, this is a predictable backlash against the flowering of postmodern fabulist novels of ‘beautiful lies’ (by such writers as Peter Carey, Elizabeth Jolley, and Brian Castro) in the past two decades ...