Archive

At the end of The Glade Within the Grove, D’Arcy D’Oliveres coughs his way towards death from lung cancer. With him dies David Foster’s benign alter ego, the narrator of his comic Dog Rock novels. Of course, the ‘Arcy who narrated The Glade had become less sociable and considerably more learned than the postman of Dog Rock, but it seemed reasonable to assume that his demise marked the end of Foster’s fictions in the comic mode. Not so. In his latest novel he mixes a good-humoured third person narration with the kind of colloquial dialogues which dominated the MacAnaspie sections of The Glade. In the New Country gives us a funny, more accessible, and more conventional Foster.

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Anyone can write a book, a cynic once remarked, but bringing off the second is a devil of a task. Most novelists at the outset of their careers would agree, I think – especially these days when a market-driven publishing industry often demands that authors of successful first novels should come up with more of the same ASAP.

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‘Though I disagreed with some of the strategies and was as troubled as I should have been by some of the more fundamental conflicts [of feminism], it was not until feminists of my own generation began to assert with apparent seriousness that feminists had gone too far that the fire flared up in my belly.’

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Peter Pierce’s concern in this critical study is with two periods – from the second half of the nineteenth century, when most of the myths of the lost child began to appear, and the second half of this century, when a quite different kind of narrative emerges. The period in between he regards as largely a consolidation of the late nineteenth-century examples. Ranging widely over not only literature but pictorial art and contemporary factual accounts, he shows the striking changes that take place in the forms in which the legend appears.

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Garry Disher is at it again: following the Personal Best short story collections (1 and 2) with this one, Below the Waterline. Broadly speaking, he’s attempting to highlight in this one authors who have come to prominence since the 1980s. Again, he allows the chosen authors to pick a favourite short story, and to include a sort of postscript that explains why it’s a favourite.

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With Gift of the Gab, Gleitzman continues the saga of Rowena Batts, the feisty twelve-year-old who previously appeared in Blabber Mouth (1992) and Sticky Beak (1993). Ro is the daughter of an apple farmer, a child with character, immense energy, and several problems: chiefly her inability to speak (she was born with 'some bits missing' from her throat) and her loving and much loved Dad. She copes with her vocal handicap through fluent sign language and a notebook at the ready, but Dad – an ardent country-and­western enthusiast, given to cowboy boots, loud satin shirts and a penchant for off-key renderings of his favourite ballads at every opportunity – is harder to handle.

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The publication of this book has created somewhat of a storm in a teacup. Melbourne  researcher, Maja Sainisch-Plimer, demanded its recall, claiming the book misrepresented the findings of her research over the twenty years. The publisher, Graeme Ryan, placed a Notice to Bookshops in the book pages of The Age claiming unfair practice and advising bookshops ‘to confidently display and sell Anya: Countess of Adelaide’. Subsequently the book has been reclassified by the National Library from biography to fiction.

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The devil, as we know, quotes scripture for his own ends, and there was something devilishly confronting about Andrew Masterson’s first novel, The Last Days: the Apocryphon of Joe Panther (1998). It kept you on your toes, ducking and weaving with the punches of its arguments, its cleverly orchestrated quotes from the New Testament and the early church, its tossed off histories and heresies, its ultimate ‘what if ... ?’

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Don Anderson’s description of Peter Rose’s previous collection as having a fin de siècle mood to it, is surely appropriate to his new collection too. There is an air of decadence to Rose’s poetry, but while this may have much larger social implications – it is the end of the century after all – the decadence seems to me to have a more definite testament to offer. ... (read more)

The Holocaust is a subject which numbs the mind and petrifies the soul. This is the point at which Inga Clendinnen starts her remarkable set of essays about it. The Holocaust is a Gorgon and the only way to destroy it, Perseus-like, is to hold it’s image on the screen of the shield and stare back. The historian of The Aztecs, this remarkable woman who has always attended to the inflections of human pain, says at the outset that extreme suffering should be paid attention. She has lived in interesting times without partaking of the horror and this is her amends. This remarkable exercise in metahistory, this sustained meditation about the nature of historiography – an essay in which criticism and representation keep coming together and breaking apart – began with Clendinnen’s sense of the inadequacy of her own response to the Demidenko controversy and it ends, not inappropriately, with a discussion of the relative claims of literature and historical writing in the face of the Holocaust Medusa.

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