Review

The design of this book is something of a mystery, not least because it presents as a critique of design, seeking to recuperate something that has been lost through ‘the graphic orthodoxies of cartography and architectural drawing’. This lost cultural component, the ‘dark writing’ of Carter’s title, is variously evoked as mythological, participatory, creative and recreative, as a body, a form of movement, a certain kind of substance.

In eleven-year-old Grace’s world, the ‘saved’ number 11,423 people. Four of those are part of her immediate family; her twin brothers, her mother, and her father, who encourages his daughter’s inquisitive nature and who ‘probably has more interesting thoughts than any other home lighting warehouse manager in Australia’.

This edition of Griffith Review is one of several local journals to take the ‘global financial crisis’ as its latest theme. A range of writers address this ‘crisis’ and other ‘major recessions’ throughout history. The journal opens with Julianne Schultz’s essay about how the global economy has worsened following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Other contributors investigate the impact of recession upon the media, consumer culture, the banking industry and the workplace. Examples are drawn from Australia, Britain, America, China and Dubai. Reference is made to Gordon Gekko, the anti-hero of Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (1987). Gekko’s mantra, ‘Greed is good’, has come to define the 1980s, but viewers, as Schultz observes, tend to ignore the battle between ‘local enterprises’ and ‘clever schemers’ that is central to Stone’s movie. Schultz suggests that the schemers appear to have won.

Hilda, a seventeen-year-old living in Los Angeles, is obsessed with dead celebrities. She and her friend Benji collect remnants from sites of tragedy or scandal – bricks, tiles, photographs of bloodstains – material suggestive of the enigmatic past. This ‘trivia’ deadens the things Hilda would rather not think about, including the death of her own parents. Hilda befriends an old man named Hank, who harbours his own dark secret and has met celebrities in his job as a Hollywood pool cleaner. Later in the story, a screenwriter named Jake feels like a conflict-creating device or distraction.

Gerald’s murdered great-aunt has left him her entire fortune of £20 billion, and an envelope full of clues. Instead of enjoying a trip to the snow in Australia, thirteen-year-old Gerald finds himself heading to London on a private jet with his parents to attend her funeral. Meanwhile, the world’s most valuable diamond has been stolen, rather comically, from the British Museum, and no one can figure out how. With the help of two new friends, Sam and Ruby, Gerald must solve this double whodunit.

This accessible new anthology collects the work of 125 women poets writing on the theme of motherhood. As well as having general appeal, it will introduce younger female readers of poetry to topics close to their own bodily, emotional futures.

One of the best things about the latest issue of Westerly is the cover, a detail from Helen Norton’s painting The shores of the excommunicated. Norton’s image is a wonderfully disquieting take on the modern Aussie beach. It inspires fresh ideas and imaginings, it unsettles, it punctures complacency, it provokes counter-reactions, but it also entertains – typifying what literary magazines should do.

Every book implicitly asks its reader a question: What am I? Sometimes this is an easy question to answer, but at other times, as with Andrew McGahan’s new novel, one must reply, ‘I have no idea; I’ve never seen anything like you before.’

The setting of Wonders of a Godless World is an old hospital housing the mad. Somehow the old-fashioned notion of ‘madness’ suits this story; it’s the word McGahan uses most often to describe the patients, and there is more than a whiff about this isolated hospital of the medieval Narrenschiff – the Ship of Fools. The hospital is under a volcano on a tropical island with a harbour city. We are not told the names of any of these places, and, like everything and everyone else in this book, its heroine also has no name; rather, she is identified, as are all the other characters, by her defining characteristic, and is thus exclusively referred to as ‘the orphan’. Other key characters are identified by their roles in a mundanely realistic way: the police captain, the old doctor, the night nurse. Still others have labels more redolent of fairytale and myth: the duke, the witch, the archangel, the virgin. And then there is the mastermind and perhaps the villain of the piece: the foreigner. As far as archetypal characters and symbolic settings are concerned, this book contains an embarrassment of riches, and the fact that none of them is individually identified or named means that all kinds of significance can be projected onto them.

What we might call ‘ordinary Australians’ produced a stream of novels about Asian countries in the 1970s and 1980s, but this is now a mere trickle. Some of the flow may have been dammed by the effect of market forces on publishers; some of it may have been diverted to Middle Eastern channels; some may have drained into the pools of Asia-enthusiasm that stagnated during the Howard years; and some may have dried up in the face of Asian diaspora fiction of the 1990s. Among the few Anglo-Saxon Australians who kept writing novels about Asia, several have turned to narratives set in a historical comfort zone, where they may still have a chance of competing with Asian Australians like Brian Castro, Teo Hsu-ming and Michelle de Kretser – although they too write of the past – or with Nam Le, Alice Pung and Aravind Adiga, who concentrate on the here and now.