Allen & Unwin
J.R. Carroll reviews 'The Dragon Man' by Garry Disher and 'Black Tide' by Peter Temple
Over the years, Garry Disher has made his considerable reputation as a crime novelist on the strength of his taciturn, emotionless, lone wolf criminal, Wyatt. It seems Wyatt has taken some sabbatical, or maybe he’s just lying low, planning his next heist, because The Dragon Man showcases all new characters in a new setting. Instead of a gritty, underworld perspective we have a law-enforcement point of view, mainly per medium of Inspector Hal Challis, whose beat is the Mornington Peninsula beachside area outside Melbourne.
... (read more)Just when you have been assured, and have believed, and have claimed in print in The Sydney Morning Herald that mainstream publishers no longer bring forth volumes of verse by individual poets, along comes Allen & Unwin to confound you. Well, it is good thus to be confounded. I might not have pointed out, but the publishers remind us, over Luke Davies’ name and over his title, running with light, that this book is ‘from the author of Candy’ (also published by Allen & Unwin). So, we have a case of prose piggybacks poetry, which is all right by me. Those who read Candy, that antipodean version of Romeo and Juliet on smack, for prurient reasons may, however, find running with light not their cup of tea or drug of choice. Those, on the other hand, who responded to Mr Davies’ absolute control over and cool towards his fevered material, will warm to this collection of poems. Candy was, assuredly, a poet’s novel.
... (read more)On the evening of 14 November 1984, the body of young mother and housewife Jennifer Tanner was found by her husband Laurie slumped on a sofa in their farmhouse at Bonnie Doon, a tiny hamlet near Mansfield, in Victoria’s high country. It looked as if she had shot herself: there was a gunshot wound in her forehead and a bolt-action .22 rifle between her legs. One of her hands was partly around the barrel. Uniformed police on the scene declared it a suicide, detectives were not called in, no photographs were taken, no forensic tests were done, the place was cleaned up next day – and that was that.
... (read more)A title like Duckness summons expectations of the quirky, the paralogical, and the obliquely enigmatic, and this collection delivers all three – though somewhat unevenly. It traverses imaginary heterotopias which both are and are not Melbourne, and which centre, for the most part, on disturbing and difficult questions of simulation and authenticity.
... (read more)David McCooey reviews 'Sandstone Gothic: Confessions of an accidental academic' by Andrew Riemer
In retrospect it’s not surprising that Andrew Riemer wrote so insightfully about Shakespeare’s comedies. Those green worlds of transformation are expressive of longing and nostalgia, of social order being restored through the acceptance and reconciliation of opposing forces. That the brute, material world is partly dealt with through nostalgia, fantasy and parody is an idée fixe of Riemer’s elegantly written autobiographical books.
... (read more)Cassandra Pybus reviews 'This Whispering in Our Hearts' by Henry Reynolds
I remember a conversation a year or so ago with an Australian scholar who had recently returned after a stint in Europe and was astonished to hear colleagues refer to Henry Reynolds as a ‘populariser’ and not true historian. I’ve heard it myself. Now that Reynolds has become a full-time writer we can expect to hear it more often. All of which goes a long way toward explaining why academic history is in decline.
... (read more)Ross Fitzgerald reviews ‘The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from origins to illegality’ by Stuart Macintyre
The fascinating remembrance of the first two decades of the Communist Party of Australia is the first general history of Australian communism since Alastair Davidson’s The Communist Party of Australia: A short history appeared in 1969. Stuart Macintyre’s The Reds is both erudite and, as befits a former CPA member of Presbyterian background, is infused with moral vision.
... (read more)Peter Pierce reviews 'The Brisbane Line Controversy' by Paul Burns
The title is not provocative: The Brisbane Line Controversy, but Paul Burns’s subtitle flags the partisanship that will mark his study. This is a case, he contends, of ‘Political Partisanship versus National Security 1942–45’. His conclusion is unobjectionable: ‘belief in a “Brisbane Line” was our barometer of fear about the vulnerability of our own continent which no Australian Army could negate’. In political demonology, the Brisbane Line signifies the intention of the Menzies–Fadden conservative governments of 1939–41 to abandon all but the south-east corner of Australia to the Japanese, should an invasion come. Burns is keen to absolve Menzies and his colleagues of blame and to find where, and with whom, the notion of the Line originated. In the process he indicts Labor front-bencher Eddie Ward, whose allegations about a Brisbane Line led to a Royal Commission in the election year of 1943.
... (read more)Stuart Coupe reviews 'Straight, Bent and Barbara Vine' by Garry Disher and 'Raisins and Almonds' by Kerry Greenwood
As the co-publisher of Mean Streets, Australia’s ‘crime, mystery and detective’ fiction magazine, I have, like Garry Disher, occasions when I wonder what the various terms actually mean and what separates them. It’s something Disher addresses in the author’s note to this very fine collection of stories which are amongst the best writing Disher has done. As Disher says:
... (read more)Kevin Brophy reviews 'The Love Song of Lucy McBride' by Steven Carroll
In his third novel, Steven Carroll continues to work on those questions, obsessions, scenes and images that preoccupy him as a writer – the characters and personalities of women, and in particular that figure of a sexually charged and sophisticated young woman so disturbing to Helen Garner in The First Stone; the language of infatuation; the placement of characters in their particular city; mismatched lovers as the centre of a love story; and a certain trick Carroll has of overlaying the inner lives of characters with the narrative of events in the story being told. It is as though his characters swim, groggily, up out of their fantasies into the harsh, ironic events that have been provoked by their inner dreams. Life in his novels operates as a merciless commentary on the evasions and hubris of each character's consciousness.
... (read more)