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By definition, chiaroscuro is Italian for lightdark; in practice, it is a technique wielded by painters and graphic artists, whereby dynamic applications of highlight and shade are contrasted for dramatic impact. Along with Rembrandt and Caravaggio, Audrey Evans proves herself to be a master of chiaroscuro in her memoir, Many Lifetimes. One can see the hand of the artist as she sketches her truths in simple, yet striking, strokes; Evans writes with a raw honesty that turns a spotlight onto chosen moments in her life, and allows others to remain enveloped in darkness.

In 1685, in São Paulo, Brazil, a boy was born called Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão. Sent north to Bahia to study with the Jesuits, who had constructed, in the steep-cliffed port of Salvador, an amazing ‘levador’ capable of hauling goods and people from ground-level to the heights above, Bartolomeu learned as much about physics as theology. Finding the fathers’ dedication to higher things, both spiritual and material, immensely attractive, Bartolomeu became a priest who dreamed of building not just a hundred-metre lift, but the first vessel capable of sailing through the heavens. The ambition stayed with him even in Portugal.

In the last essay in this collection, Robert Macfarlane touches on the main reasons why Peter Carey’s novels ‘have proved so very attractive to academic exegetes’, in their combination of the postmodern and the postcolonial. Just how attractive is demonstrated in the sixty-page bibliography, which is sure to be one of the most used parts of Fabulating Beauty, especially by overseas readers without access to the invaluable AustLit. Editor Andreas Gaile, a young German academic, notes in his introduction that Carey is now ‘the most widely commented-on living Australian author’. While Patrick White is currently well ahead, with more than twice as many critical items published on his work, Carey is catching up fast. Visit any bookshop, whether in Melbourne, London, or New York, and you will of course find many more titles by Carey than by White. If, as Simon During has argued, White was the perfect novelist for those wishing to argue for the academic significance of Australian literature in the 1950s and 1960s, then Carey has just as obviously caught the dominant theoretical currents of the past thirty years. While Tim Winton may sell just as well and, if ‘favourite book’ polls are any guide, be more loved, no one has yet published a major critical study of his work.

This novel is about the redemption of a man believed to have committed murder. E. Annie Proulx, in her discontinuous novel Postcards (1993), sympathetically traces the tragic life of a protagonist who raped and accidentally killed his lover. Heather Rose poses a similar ethical question about a protagonist who was a real person; she imagines a post-murder existence for the infamous Lord Lucan, who in 1974 was accused of murdering his children’s nanny and of violently attacking his estranged wife.

Clive James once said that the problem with being famous is that you begin by being loved for what you do and end up thinking that you are loved for who you are. Quite possibly, it is to avoid such a fate that James has returned in the past few years to the thing that got him noticed in the first place – writing dazzling prose. Absenting himself from the Crystal Bucket, he has become once more a full-time writer, popping up in the Times Literary Supplement and Australian Book Review with gratifying regularity. The title of his latest collection of essays refers to its first and final pieces, both of which deal with the crucial difference between celebrity and recognition, a subject currently dear to his heart, partly for the reason outlined above, partly because the current media is saturated with noisy nonentities. Since James is no doubt frequently recognised by people ignorant of the very achievement for which he really deserves recognition, his thoughts on the subject are clearly invaluable.

Sometimes the best place to get a true picture of what Peter Carey is really thinking about his writing is in the international press coverage, in the slipstream of a book’s reception, when he is at least partly preoccupied with the next writing challenge. At such times, Carey’s sensitivities are vulnerable to exposure, as they were in an interview with Robert Birnbaum in an American regional newspaper after he won his second Booker Prize, for True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). Carey is speaking about readers and reviewers (whom he reluctantly acknowledges are also readers). Australian reviewers, he explains to his interviewer, are usually just journalists and therefore subject to literalness and plot summary, an approach that doesn’t work with his fiction.

Shadowboxing is a collection of discrete short stories charting the arduous journey of the narrator, Michael Byrne, from childhood to fatherhood. Living in the inner-Melbourne suburbs of Carlton, Richmond, and Fitzroy in the 1960s was for many a tough proposition – and the Byrne family is no exception. Their household is headed by an embittered alcoholic whose violent tendencies are a source of constant dread. Money is always tight, and the family’s grip on any sort of security or comfort is invariably tenuous. Yet when the stories have been told, what we are left with is not a litany of woe but rather powerful examples of resilience and resourcefulness provided by the inhabitants of these impoverished communities.

Alexander Downer, when asked on the ABC in February 2003 about the legality of military measures against Iraq, was keen to emphasise Australia’s fidelity to international law: ‘We’ve reached a point where you either take international law seriously and ensure that Iraq does comply with international law or else you abandon the whole concept, at least in this case, of trying to enforce international law.’ But only a month after these comments, the federal government demonstrated its commitment to ‘enforcing’ international law by participating in an invasion characterised as illegal by the preponderance of states and international lawyers.

Gerald Walsh’s book is an unabashed celebration of seven young Australians, golden boys who died during the first decades of the twentieth century. Five sporting heroes, one medical researcher and one soldier make up Walsh’s miniature hall of fame, early death being the common thread. The oldest of them was not quite twenty-seven when he died.

In 1993, when Victoria Haskins undertook research into the relationship between Aboriginal and white women, she was ‘plunged into the argument that white academics were only perpetuating colonialism by writing Aboriginal people’s history … that white Australians should not, could not, try to speak for Aboriginal people, nor try to represent the Aboriginal experience’. Left floundering by ‘the difficult politics of writing Aboriginal history as a white Australian scholar’, Haskins was unreceptive to her grandmother’s pleas to embark on the despised ‘trivial bourgeois pursuit’ of family history, dismissed as ‘middle-class … the province of mildly ridiculous ageing relatives, searching for the dates of their ancestors’ arrival in the colonies’. But curiosity about an old photograph of her grandmother as a fair-haired toddler with an Aboriginal nanny prompted her to root out her great-grandmother’s boxed papers, then languishing in an aunt’s garage.