Archive

'Why read Emile Zola?’ asks one of the contributors to this volume. ‘Because his representation of society’s impact on individuals within it memorably depicts what it means to be a human being in the modern world.’ The publication of The Cambridge Companion to Emile Zola, edited by Brian Nelson, Professor of French Studies at Monash University, will be of great assistance in reading and rereading this realist writer, and will doubtless become an indispensable tool for researchers and students.

What do these essays reveal? The fascination which the naturalist novelist Zola (1840–1902) still exercises on his readers because of the profoundly organic nature of his writing. Despite the meticulous planning and the scientific method and framework underlying his enterprise to describe the social and familial milieux (the subtitle of the twenty novels [1871–93] comprising Les Rougon-Macquart is The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire), Zola’s art stems from its evocative power, its descriptive force, in a word, its ‘excitement’.

Katherine Barnes’s book on Christopher Brennan (1870 – 1932) is unusual in the Australian academy in that the work does not much concern itself with postmodern theory, or the kinds of questions that might arise from Brennan’s oeuvre for a modern reader. It bypasses the more familiar kind of enquiry, such as the intriguing questions that Brennan might be seen to raise in relationship to psychoanalysis, and whether or not he might conceivably have been a first-wave feminist. It is something quite different: an enlivening scholarly engagement with Brennan’s sources, especially those available to him in Australia, in particular his esoteric sources.

What a pleasure it is be transported from mundane life and traverse the realms of the imaginary with a good guide. Mind you, some guides and imaginations are better than others, and so it is for these four journeys into the fantastic, which cover a variety of treatments, from Isobelle Carmody’s quest fantasy of small creatures, to the parodic melodrama of Gary Crew, to Emily Rodda’s intertwining of the fantasy world and our own, and Juliet Marillier’s romantic historical fantasy in the inspired setting of Istanbul at the time of the Ottomans.

Shakespeare the Thinking is the final and posthumously published book of the Oxford critic A.D. Nuttall, who died unexpectedly in January 2007. Pitched at a wider readership than most of his earlier writings, the book is the culmination of Nuttall’s lifetime thinking about Shakespeare, and the work by which his remarkable originality as a critic will no doubt be most widely recognised.

‘I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it. I wanted it to be a gripping narrative, even suspenseful.’ So says Hanna Heath, protagonist of Geraldine Brooks’s latest novel, about her search through time and place for the history of ‘the Sarajevo Haggadah’, the ‘Book’ of the title ...

When G.B. Barton presented his two works concerning the literary history of New South Wales to the Paris Exhibition of 1866, he hoped that they would enable readers ‘to form an exact idea of the progress, extent and prospects of literary enterprise among us’. The words are succinct, unobjectionable, and their sentiments influenced much of the literary history of the next century, much as the productions of that time were usually annals rather than analysis. Barton’s civic-minded project linked the maturing of Australian literature with its political culture. Implicit in his endeavour, though numerous others would use the metaphor outright, was the notion of ‘coming-of-age’. This chimera had as long a life as the search for the Great Australian Novel.

If we keep hearing about our famous expatriates, the Greers and Jameses and Hugheses and the like, it is because they have made it their business to ensure we do. Gone but not forgotten. Others such as Randolph Stow or Alan Seymour were less busy at self-promotion. But Ray Mathew was a mere rumour. You saw his books here and there in the antiquarian bookshops, especially the short stories, A Bohemian Affair (1961), and the joint collection with Mena Abdullah, Time of the Peacock (1965). Some of his plays were eventually gathered into representative collections. Mathew himself seemed to disappear into thin air. Tom Shapcott’s project is to retrieve a writer he believes we should have paid more heed to.

Readers of this review will likely know of this book as a result of the howls of outrage reported in the media at the beginning of December concerning Max Hastings’s claims about Australian performance in the fighting in 1945. It is not fair to judge a long and complex book on the basis of a single, ten-page chapter, but since that is the section of the book that has attracted attention in this part of the world, it seems best to deal with it first before moving on to the rest of Hastings’s lengthy and detailed account of the final year of the war against Japan.

Under the umbrella of the State Library of New South Wales, the Mitchell Library in Sydney is one of Australia’s great cultural and collecting institutions. Opened to researchers in March 1910, the Mitchell Library was founded on the ‘peerless collection’ of books, manuscripts, maps, and pictures relating to Australia and the Pacific bequeathed to the then Public Library of New South Wales by the reclusive and wealthy Sydney book collector David Scott Mitchell (1835–1907). The bequest brought with it a generous endowment of ₤70,000 to fund additions to the collection. Since then, a veritable Everest of Australian research and scholarship has been built on the foundation of the Mitchell collection – the materials that  Mitchell himself had acquired and those added subsequently by several dedicated and ambitious generations of library custodians. In the ninety-eight years since the Mitchell Library opened its doors to the public, Mitchell’s original collection of 40,000 volumes – amazingly rich in its day – now stands at 590,000. Great acquisitions, many of them formidably expensive, continue to be made and to be hailed in both the Sydney press and in national news. It is right that a sense of local and national pride continues to be felt in the achievements of this singular Australian library.