Allen & Unwin

Alex Miller, twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award for Journey to the Stone Country (2003) and The Ancestor Game (1992), is one of our most profound and interesting writers. His latest novel, Landscape of Farewell, tells the story of Max Otto, an aged and disillusioned German professor of history, devastated by the death of his beloved wife. He knows now that he will never write the historical study of massacre that was to have been his crowning achievement. Instead, paralysed by a sense of guilt-by-association – he has good reason to think that his father took part in the atrocities of World War II – he has retreated to a remote and bloodless historical study, that of intellectual upheaval during the twelfth century.

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.

Childhood, Freud taught, becomes us, but our earliest memories can be sly; they resist us when we seek them, and pounce when we are unprepared. It is thus only by chance that Proust comes upon his first recollections, those idyllic scenes revived in long wafts of hawthorn-scented nostalgia. The legacy of childhood and its fickle reminiscence has always been prominent in Charlotte Wood’s work. In The Children, childhood is remembered as a grim affair, something the three siblings at its centre would rather leave behind. Yet much of this novel hinges on the idea that childhood is something we never escape: old memories involuntarily impinge upon us, and the self that defined us as children, the book suggests, constitutes us throughout our lives.

The only salutary effect, it seems to me, of the evolution of religious fundamentalism over recent decades is the current reaction of some scientists, philosophers and public intellectuals. Since the end or the Enlightenment, interest in reasoned polemic against religion (which excludes communist attempts to extirpate it) has largely waned, possibly on the false supposition that the quarry had been mortally wounded. But the emergence of ruthless Islamist ambitions and terrorism, and the malign influence of elements of the Christian right and of right-wing Jewish groups, especially in George W. Bush’s America, appear at last to have spurred intellectuals to produce books and documentaries, to confer and to organise, to engage in resistance to what is rightly perceived as a religious assault on reason and liberal values, as the dying of secular light. The most prominent of the current critics are the philosophers Daniel Dennett and Michel Onfray, the biologist Richard Dawkins and the versatile Christopher Hitchens.

Set in a seaside town whose name changes with the vagaries of its fortunes (Salvation, Ruination, Ridicule), Andrew Lindsay’s Slapping Man is a simpleton called Ernie who discovers a remarkable use for his gargantuan jaw. Determined to transform this facial liability into a money-making asset, he positions himself at the local market next to The Human Pincushion and The Man That Never Laughs and transforms himself into The Slapping Man. As the rhyme on the cover explains, Ernie’s spruiking patter relies on the desire for cathartic violence: ‘Feeling poorly, sick or weak? Just come down and crack my check! Don’t be sad, Don’t need to Frown, The Slapping Man has come to town!’ Owing to the circumstances of his conception and the size of his jaw, Ernie seems to have been destined for a career as a human punching bag, an easy and willing target for malcontents to vent their anger upon. And there are plenty of candidates, considering Salvation’s disaster-riddled history.

East Timor’s former Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri has a knack of hiring international advisers who win access to his inner circle then publish tell-all books on leaving his employ. First there was Lynne Minion, whose Hello Missus: A Girl’s Own Guide to Foreign Affairs (2004) lampooned him mercilessly and sold like hot cakes. Now Paul Cleary follows the pattern, but in a more respectable book, worthy of serious attention.

Perhaps the most enduring memory of the Australian Wheat Board’s Iraq misadventures is the picture of its paunchy former chairman, Trevor Flugge, stripped to the waist and pointing a gun at the camera. Flugge was in Iraq, to all intents and purposes representing Australia. Selected by the Australian government with a tax-free salary package of just under a million dollars, he was there because, in the prime minister’s words ‘our principal concern at the time was to stop American wheat from getting our markets’.

There is always someone watching someone else in Belinda Castles’ Vogel Award-winning novel, The River Baptists. Most of its characters choose to live on the Hawkesbury because of the peace and seclusion, but the river setting allows a variety of vantage points and approaches to the scattered houses and rickety jellies that line the banks. It is a tranquil and picturesque setting, but Rose’s friend Ben sees it in a rather different light: ‘Subzero temperatures, mud, a pub full of guys who look like Cousin It.’

I recently went back to New England. It is a long drive from Melbourne, but as I passed through Coonabarabran and Tamworth and began the ascent up the Moonbi Ranges, my gaze responded to the strange and familiar landscape. I periodically wound down the car window to smell the air – crisp but still warm for autumn. I grew up in a few different New England towns – Inverell, Glen Innes, Armidale – so I am familiar with the territory covered in the fascinating essays in High Lean Country. The high elevation of the Tableland makes the winters cold, summers mild. The dramatic landscape is dotted with granite mounds and monoliths. It is edged to the east by the escarpment and the gorge country of Judith Wright’s poems.