Allen & Unwin

There’s a joke that comes up in westerns about the book that saves: a thick volume in the chest pocket that takes a bullet. Bem Le Hunte introduces her second novel about a small band of World War II refugees: ‘This book was written as a prayer for those people who could not live to tell their tales. It was written, too, as a prayer for the future of our world, in the hope that stories like this have the power to save us.’ Certainly, this is a book that teaches hope against the odds, but when you consider how human cruelty has survived even the greatest stories, Le Hunte’s prayer sounds forlorn – unless she was thinking of saving us from boredom, in which case both There, Where the Pepper Grows and Hsu-Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon work most effectively.

‘Time will tell’ is an old adage that, in a peculiar way, links and separates these three different tales. While Victor Kelleher’s moving and poetic Dogboy lures readers into the harsh ‘Dry’ of a time that never was and never will be, Jutta Goetze’s story plunges into snow-bound Bavaria, in a time both familiar and strange to contemporary audiences. Kerry Greenwood, on the other hand, situates her futuristic sci-fi in a place and era at once known and yet irrevocably altered; creating an anachronistic story that is both challenging and exciting. All of these writers rely on temporality to both weave and anchor their stories with differing results.

True crime is experiencing a boom these days. Its popularity is directly connected to the number of forensic investigative shows on television. The average viewer of CSI probably knows more about criminal profiling and blood pattern analysis than most retired police officers. At least one book, it seems, is published on every major murder committed in Australia. Some murders warrant the public’s attention more than others; they represent turning points in our society. A good example is the disappearance on 15 July 1977 of Liberal parliamentary candidate and anti-marijuana crusader Donald Mackay from a hotel car park in the Riverina town of Griffith. That evening, Mackay left the Griffith Hotel and headed for his van. A local accountant heard a groaning noise and three ‘whip cracks’. By eight o’clock that night, when Mackay hadn’t returned home, his wife became worried. At midnight, Barbara Mackay rang the Griffith police and reported her husband missing. She had been wary of calling the local police earlier because she didn’t trust them – and with good reason. Early next morning, Mackay’s solicitor found the locked van in the hotel car park. Three spent cartridges lay on the ground, and Mackay’s keys were nearby. Blood was smeared on the front mudguard, the side door and front wheel; the blood type matched Mackay’s. Despite an exhaustive search and a large government reward, his body was never found.

The Vogel Prize shares a reputation with the rest of the company’s products: nutritious, worthy, a little dull. But the prize’s earnest image is unfair. Any glance at the roll-call of winners over the last twenty-five years would show that the makers of soggy bread and soya cereals have done more than anyone to introduce fresh literary DNA into Australia’s tiny gene pool of published novelists. But reviewers, mostly, and the public, generally, don’t get excited when the new Vogel is published. This year they should. Julienne van Loon’s desperate joyride, Road Story, is the best Vogel winner to come along since 1990, when Gillian Mears’s The Mint Lawn, equally confident but very different, won first place.

In the last twenty years, the belief in a transformative left – socialist, communist, whatever – has collapsed more comprehensively than at any time since its beginnings in 1789. The Western working class is overwhelmingly oriented towards individual life, acquisition and consumption; the working class of the developing world has not developed major radical parties in the face of substantial repression of trade union organisation; faith in central planning, market socialism, interconnected cooperatives and the like drained away in the late 1970s, and no alternative plan for running the economy is on the table. 

Some generals in Australia’s ‘culture wars’ have appointed themselves defenders of a mythical identity against the incursions of multiculturalists and ‘black armbanders’. Literary skirmishes over national identity have been more mundane, concerning mainly eligibility for awards. Certainly, three recent crime novels suggest that Australian writing benefits from adoption of a broad definition. That these three novels vary widely in plot, setting, characterisation and style is understandable given the authors’ disparate backgrounds.

There is a trick to the trite title of Death by Water, the fifteenth volume in Kerry Greenwood’s series about the hedonistic 1920s private detective Phryne Fisher. Contrary to expectations, no murder occurs for more than two hundred pages. In the meantime, the nominal plot involves the hunt for a jewel thief aboard a cruise ship bound for New Zealand, but far more attention is devoted to meals, cocktails, cigarettes, clothes, dance music, maritime scenery, anthropological chit-chat and recreational sex. Literary quotes of approximate relevance head each chapter, while ratiocination occurs as an accompaniment to life’s more sensual pleasures: ‘Phryne ate a thoughtful croissant.’

The publisher’s puff to actor Michael Craig’s autobiography, a ‘fascinating, wittily wicked memoir of his life in film, theatre and television’, is unfortunate: not only is its conventional hyperbole on this occasion a cruel overstatement, but it misleadingly suggests a meaningful structuring of the events of Craig’s long career – in three media on two continents – that is nowhere apparent. Craig himself calls it more modestly a ‘rambling discourse’.

Judi Farr – one of the fourteen interviewees who appear in Terence Crawford’s Trade Secrets: Australian Actors and Their Craft – reflects on the unpredictable nature of performance, and on the way in which an actor can become so immersed in a role and so apparently truthful to the emotion of the moment that, contrary to what we might expect, the connection with the audience is broken rather than reinforced. ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘you can do a play where tears will be pouring down your face, but you haven’t really affected anyone.’ Wendy Hughes makes a similar point: she recalls having to cry for a scene in a Paul Cox film, and how she prepared herself by getting deeply into the mood beforehand. During the first take, the tears flowed, and everything ‘felt so real’. Then she went through the scene again, but this time she ‘didn’t feel it the same and didn’t cry as much’. When the takes were compared afterwards, Hughes was struck by the fact that the one in which it all felt ‘really real’ was not the best. ‘The other one where I was in control was better.’

The experts may prognosticate, but reality makes fools of them, too. Paul Roberts, in The End of Oil: The Decline of the Petroleum Economy and the Rise of a New Energy Order, reviews several scenarios for the future of oil that were advanced in late 2002 by the US National Intelligence Council. The two most bleak ones had the price of oil reaching US$50 a barrel, the first sometime between 2010 and 2015, the second somewhat earlier, following convulsions in the Middle East. As we know, US$50 was reached only a few months after The End of Oil was published in the US; at the time of writing, the price is around US$60 a barrel. Reading these two books confirms the certainty, speed and completeness of change. The unknowable for oil is: when?