Australian Fiction

Ten years ago historical novels were an unwanted rarity in Australian children’s publishing. Instead, there was a vogue for time-slip novels where a contemporary kid went travelling back into the past, as though history would be too hard for younger readers to handle without some sort of tour guide.

There is an experiment at the heart of Angela Meyer’s second novel, Moon Sugar. Without going into spoiler-level detail, it unlocks something in her protagonists, offering them new ways to connect with each other and the world around them. This experiment is a neat metaphor for Meyer’s own; by slipping between genres, her fiction strives to upend readerly expectations, expanding the possibilities for engagement.

Philip Salom, now in his early seventies, has been a steady presence in Australian literature for more than four decades. Until a few years ago he was mainly known as a poet. He has published fourteen collections and won two awards for lifetime achievement in that field. Having turned to fiction in 2015, he has now published six novels. In Sweeney and the Bicycles, he returns to themes that have woven their way through much of his fiction: identity and selfhood, family and friendship, damage and healing, unlooked-for and unlikely middle-aged love.

Admirers of Carol Lefevre’s earlier books, and nostalgists in general, will delight in her latest offering. Her artistic eye evokes the patina of a silvering vintage mirror reflecting societal and literary traditions. Both in tone and preoccupations, The Tower (Lefevre’s sixth book) continues traditions cast in several Australian literary classics. Familiar, too, is Lefevre’s favoured form. Several of the book’s chapters have previously been published as short stories, but Lefevre has worked them seamlessly into this novel’s overarching chronicle.

Our high school art teacher would often look at a student’s work and judge it ‘interesting’. Sometimes this was a written comment, accompanied by a lacklustre mark like 14/20, which led us to suspect – perhaps rightly – that ‘interesting’ was a euphemism for ‘inept’. Now I wonder if it occasionally meant: curious, out of the ordinary, sui generis, hard to grade or categorise, or distinctive if not fully achieved. If so, Luke Carman’s short story collection An Ordinary Ecstasy is ‘interesting’: eclectic, uneven, at times ungainly. You have the sense that Carman is following the maxim ‘write for yourself’. Past success has earned him that privilege and, as Carman’s tumbleweed talent rollicks untamed across the streets of Sydney’s Inner West out to Blacktown and as far north as Byron Bay, the results are never pedestrian.

In 1917, at the height of World War I, a fire destroyed the Greek city of Salonika (Thessaloniki), a staging post for Allied troops. The centre of an ‘Ottoman polyglot culture’, Salonika was at the time home to large numbers of refugees, many of them Jewish and Roma. It was in one of the refugee hovels that the fire started, an ember from a makeshift stove igniting a bundle of straw. From that single ember grew an inferno that burned for thirty-two hours, obliterating three-quarters of the city and leaving 70,000 people – by some estimates half the population – homeless.

To an appreciable extent, this is a book that can be judged by the cover. In the auto-interview accompanying the publisher’s media release, Anthony O’Neill explains that he was motivated to write his second novel by a desire to ‘emulate certain classic tales of the macabre that emerged from the nineteenth century, arguably the greatest century for novels’. In particular, he states that The Lamplighter is ‘my attempt to write something like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, without it being a homage – I wanted it to live and breathe in its own right’.

Alasdair Duncan’s Second novel, Metro, opens as a perceptive and witty portrait of the urban, metrosexual scene. Once again, the main character is a repressed homosexual: this time his peers are twenty-something business and law students. The novel palls around chapter four, just maintaining interest in loops of nightclub scenes, bawdy behaviour and skin-deep insights. The vernacular tone is refreshing, given today’s stuffy publishing landscape, so it is unfortunate that the cynical and superficial misrepresentations of the contemporary sexual mores undermine the novel’s social commentary.

Why ‘Wyatt’? An evocative enough name for an Australian career criminal, but evocative of what, or whom? Of Wyatt Earp, perhaps, another gunman and homicide, if occasionally and famously on the right side of the law? Or Sir Thomas Wyatt, Tudor courtier, sensitive lover, diplomat and poet, who witnessed the execution of Anne Boleyn while himself a prisoner in the Tower of London? Garry Disher’s Wyatt has been in prison, and witnessed many deaths; indeed, facilitated some of them.

This highly ambitious first novel exists within a fine web of literary influences and allusions. The publisher invites comparisons to The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s novel set in a university Classics department. The novel’s narrator, Julia, a student enthralled by the glamorous, moneyed family of a classmate, echoes that of Brideshead Revisited. Self-conscious references to detective noir and nineteenth-century romance novels abound. All of these comparisons have some merit, but another takes precedence, not only flavouring the text, but providing a skeleton for the characters and plot