Jane Sullivan
Jane Sullivan is a Melbourne author and literary columnist. Her latest novel is Murder in Punch Lane. www.janesullivan.au
A stranger rides into a one-horse town on a shiny new motorbike. Cue Ennio Morricone music. Except it’s not a stranger, it’s that skinny dark girl Kerry Salter, back to say goodbye to her Pop before he falls off the perch. The first conversation she has is in the Bundjalung language (translated for our benefit) with three cheeky crows. One bites a dead snake in the head and its fangs get wedge ... (read more)
Rupert Murdoch is one of those towering but flawed figures of power beloved of dramatists. Shakespeare would have used him, if he’d had a time machine. David Williamson had a go in his play Rupert (2013), and he is reported to be writing a screenplay for a US television mini-series. Now the Brits have tackled him, in the shape of James Graham’s play Ink, which has had its world première in Lo ... (read more)
An odd thing happened after I had finished reading this short story collection. I came back to it a couple of weeks later, intending to write this review, and found I had almost completely forgotten some of the stories. Such amnesia is unusual for me. Good short stories generally set up a resonance that lingers, even if not all the details stay in the mind. Does that mean, then, that these are not ... (read more)
I’ve been reading Margaret Drabble’s novels with great pleasure for most of my life, and we’ve all been getting on a bit: Drabble, me, her readers, her characters. So I suppose it was inevitable that we would get to a novel about old age and death. When I discovered that these were indeed the subjects of her eighteenth novel, The Dark Flood Rises, and saw the sinister black-lace design on th ... (read more)
'Why do we write?' asks David Brooks at the start of this exhilarating collection of short stories. 'What are we groping for?' The entire collection seems like an attempt to answer a question that the author acknowledges is unanswerable. Yet there is no futility here. His groping, as he calls it, charms and disturbs and conjures up images of extraordinary, if fleeting, power.
As the publisher's b ... (read more)
Kazuo Ishiguro recently sparked off a literary row about whether 'serious' writers should dabble in fantasy when he insisted rather too strongly that he was not writing fantasy in his latest novel The Buried Giant (2015). All those giants and pixies, knights and dragons were but a means to an end.
A strange controversy, considering a galaxy of 'serious' stars have been liberally using fantasy for ... (read more)
One of the most potent stories we can tell is a story of migration. With the exception of indigenous people, every Australian originally came from somewhere else. Take just one source: the emigrants from England. Kate Grenville writes about her convict and settler ancestry in her Secret River trilogy; in The Golden Age, Joan London writes of European refugees in Perth in the 1950s, a time she can ... (read more)
Two aggrieved Islamic men follow a foreign cause and wage jihad on their fellow Australians. Shouting Allahu akbar, they stage an ambush, raise a home-made flag and open fire on hundreds of men, women and children. They escape and die in a final shoot-out. They leave four dead and seven wounded.
It could be ripped from today’s headlines – except it happened a hundred years ago. On New Year’ ... (read more)
If you think of writers as constructors, then Hilary Mantel is surely a builder of cathedrals. Two cathedrals, in fact: her two Man Booker Prize-winning novels about Thomas Cromwell and his England, Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), are soaring, intricate, and gigantic. And there is another cathedral, a third in the trilogy, on the way. Vast as these enterprises are, Mantel can also ... (read more)