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While she was writing her novel, Angela Malone pinned a panorama photo of Hill End, the small NSW goldmining town, over the window near her desk. The photo seemed empty of life until Malone took to it with a magnifying glass and – as authors do – playing the giant game, discovered shadowy traces of some of her characters. No wonder, since the town lies on a bed of quartz which common wisdom invests with certain powers of invocation, much like the magic of the silver particles of photography. Hill End became the novel’s Reedy Creek, a place infinitely embroidered with the history and folklore of its predominantly Irish community.

Sometimes ‘good’ girls just have to be ‘bad’. The ‘heroines’ of both these novels desperately want ‘to fit in’, but eventually discover that ‘fitting in’ involves accepting yourself for who you are, not changing into someone else. This seems an obvious lesson, but of course it’s one of the hardest to learn. Both books are jacketed in gorgeous fashion; the matte photographic images are enticing and every bit as seductive as the CD cases and video clips they emulate. But where one is brash and vibrant the other is muted and subtle – a description which could aptly be applied to the plots, too. For Walker and Clark deal with the age-old concern of self-identity in very different ways.

Blackout is a poem written (deliberately, I think) in transition – or even perhaps in transit. Structured such that it lacks a singular, personal voice, it could be read as a response to the question: What is a poem in the era of digital media? Or more particularly, more precisely –Where does such a poem start? What’s its language, how does it end? Blackout, for example, is left unfinished: after the ninth section it just breaks off with a colophon indicating that there could be more words one day, or perhaps not. It’s left unfinished too in the sense of being a work which never resolves into a coherent narrative or even a coherent thought-structure. The polyphony of the text is left jagged and juxtapositional, much in the manner of block music. Or more likely in the manner of a downloaded text where many voices have criss-crossed in a many-timed, interactive way.

This is a drum I’ve been beating for some time, but it’s worth thumping it again here: now is a good time, if you want vigorous intellectual debate, to eschew highbrow literature and dive into popular fiction.

Harold Bloom’s comment on one of Poe’s stories that ‘the tale somehow is stronger than the telling’ came to mind during my reading of the nineteenth century mystery, The Murder of Madeline Brown. In spite of unevenness in the writing and some irritating Latin affectations, the story has a haunting quality which lingered long after the reading.

This is both an exciting and a sad collection. Kenneth Mackenzie, like those later Western Australian writers Randolph Stow and Tim Winton (and, I might add, Griffith Watkins), first appeared in print with work composed at a remarkably young age and which was extraordinary in its poetic intensity and command of language. And like Stow and Watkins (but not, fortunately, like Winton) the early achievement was matched only in fits and starts by the later work. Griffith Watkins committed suicide in his thirties, Randolph Stow has been beset by long periods of silence, and Kenneth Mackenzie drowned in a river near Goulburn, aged forty-one. He had become an alcoholic.

From Masefield to Beaver, the anapaestic metre of a double unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one is often used in poems about the sea. It reproduces the rhythm of waves and also suggests a reflective but eager mood. Brook Emery’s strongly crafted collection is often based in anapaestic metre (‘a pelican, flying a loose ellipse / … sets his head / and great hooked wings lift him into sleepy light’) which tightens into iambic (single down stress plus up stress) when he wishes for a feeling of conclusion. One would not normally begin a review by discussing metre, but in this case I felt the metre was intrinsic to the authorial tone and perhaps reveals why the work’s effect is of much memorable insight, beauty, and precision in conflict with strategic monotony.

It had to happen – a rush of books about the Olympics. But that doesn’t mean they’re all bad or that they won’t last now that the fuss is over. Celeste Walters’ The Last Race, her second book for young adults, should certainly be around for a while. The cover alone could sell the book and word of mouth should do the rest.

As bookshops and bestseller lists fill up with new biographies about celebrities, criminals, tycoons, and sporting heroes, Pluto Press has come out with the story of a small, fat, generally unheard-of priest, Monsignor Martinho da Costa Lopes. Unlike the mega-books it fails completely to surprise us with the sexual preferences of the famous or inform us how to make a million dollars over lunch. Its subject, Dom Martinho, is free of such ordeals as poorly executed facelifts, nosy tax officers or greedy agents. His main concerns are cruder – how to stay alive and to help others stay alive when faced with the brutality of an oppressive, harsh regime.

The note from Text’s publicist read: ‘Hope you enjoy this.’ I did. I did. (I read it twice.) The note continued: ‘There’s no other Australian novel quite like it.’ I couldn’t quite bring myself to agree with that. Garry Satherley’s (as in ‘satherley buster’, no doubt) first novel suggests, to my perhaps over-convoluted consciousness, Murray Bail’s Homesickness, Anthony Macris’ Capital: Volume 1, Glenda Adams’ Dancing on Coral and, drawing a long bow, Henry Handel Richardson. I will let Text Publishing and anyone else interested chase up the resemblances, which are casual rather than causal. That The Arch-Traitor’s Lament more pertinently suggested to me Czech novelists such as Josef Škvorecký and Ivan Klíma, for example, was a different matter, they not being Australian, and they have earned their right to their political fictions on the decks of those two dreadnoughts, hardship and censorship. That was my grumpy not-quite-convinced first reading. My second reading convinced me that Satherley was doing something quite different from the Iron Curtain callers. He was writing an Australian novel (well, he was born in New Zealand, but we are masters of ethnic appropriation across the Tasman) with European facts and fictions as pan of its subject matter.