Geordie Williamson

For the inhabitants of mainland Australia, ‘history’ is often complicated by the sheer fact of geography. Instead of one central node, European colonisation expanded from multiple centres, each isolated in space and founded on differing socio-political premises over staggered periods of time, and each with populations too various in background to allow much in the way of agreement about some völkisch collective past.

Carol Mavor is professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester: a specialist in the field of Victorian photography who has written two earlier books on the subject. She is also one of those rare figures capable of subverting orthodox academic research by stealing some of autobiography’s subjective insight and creative writing’s imaginative reach.

Michelle de Kretser’s third novel opens with a man and a dog in the Australian bush, an image whose hooks are sunk deep in our national psyche. Recall the Edenic first chapter of The Tree of Man (1955), with its portrait of Stan Parker settling on a patch of virgin wilderness with only his dog for company. In the Australian Garden, Eve is a subsidiary companion.

In 1880, Turgenev visited Tolstoy at his country estate after a long period of estrangement, only to discover that the great novelist had, in the interim, renounced art in favour of ethical enquiry. Turgenev was appalled, and dashed off a letter complaining that ...

Britain’s Prospect magazine recently canvassed a number of leading thinkers on the question of what, in coming decades, would replace the great twentieth-century schism between left and right. In an overwhelmingly pessimistic field, the contribution of Pakistani scientist Pervez Hoodbhoy stood out in its cold-blooded concision. ‘Global and national politics will turn simple and Hobbesian,’ he predicted. ‘In the interim, energy hunger will drive the US and European countries to squeeze out, and steal, the last drops of oil from under Muslim sands. As bridges between Islam and the west collapse, expect global civil war and triumphant neo-Talibanic movements circling the globe.’

The idea that literary journals gain something by being yoked to a single theme seems to me one of the mildly dubious aspects of the enterprise. I suspect the tendency grows from a fear of disorder – ‘the anarchy of randomness’, as Adam Phillips puts it. But if these organs do require some unifying concept, it should ideally be a determination on the part of their contributors not to be herded into acquiescence with any one position. The true pleasure to be had from their pages is the jostle of selfhoods, the dust and din of competing subjectivities, rather than a communal reinforcement of, or opposition to, the status quo. As with any muster, it is the breakaways that provide the best exercise.

However respectful its intentions, literary biography invariably takes on the character of a siege, laid by oneself against another. Every biographical subject, unwittingly or not, builds fortifications to repulse such invaders, and George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was no exception. He did, however, adopt a characteristically sly defence. His castle was regularly open to the public. Inside, he would be on hand to guide visitors through its rooms, an amusing if distant squire, knowledgeably arguing the architectural merits of his own, not insubstantial, additions, and giving the punters their money’s-worth with polished tales of eccentricity, debt and alcoholism for each of the family portraits. He was both garrulous curator and living artefact in a museum of his own design.

If history is a graveyard of dead aristocracies, the novel is their eulogy. It is now, for instance, a critical commonplace to explain the young Proust’s entry into the closed world of France’s nobility as an occurrence made possible by its dissolution. Close to death, holding only vestigial power, the fag ends of the ancien régime lost the will or ...