Australian Fiction

A purveyor of second-hand literature-cum-reluctant sleuth is an attractive proposition. We first met Jack Susko in Lenny Bartulin’s first novel, A Deadly Business (2008). Susko, a one-time employee of the notorious Ziggy Brandt, had finally established a legitimate (albeit struggling) business, Susko Books. Rarely troubled by customers, Susko was entertained by the music of Miles Davis and Muddy Waters, and alcohol. 

Welcome to Moriarty country. This is our fourth visit to Ashbury High, in New South Wales, which is peopled with smart, sassy teenagers given to commenting on their lives and those of their friends, family, and teachers in many modes and many (far too many this time) words. Moriarty has been tracking three of these private-school girls since Year Nine. Now they are tackling Year Twelve.

In the introduction to this latest Best Australian Stories, Delia Falconer – in her second and, she advises, last year as editor – contends that the short story has greater affinities with the poem and the essay than with the novel. She rightly identifies the story as often ‘misunderstood in the public imagination as a kind of less demanding novel-in-miniature’. Stories, Falconer argues, are akin to poems in ‘picking their moment’ rather than working in the novel’s ‘great swathes of time’. The short story advances an argument in the way of an essay, while ‘artfully [hiding] its workings’.

Alan Gould’s imagination has been steeped in a wide range of reading, from Shakespeare, Milton, Kipling, and Auden to less well-known works such as the sophisticated verse of the Cavalier poets. His recent novel, The Lake Woman, also reveals the influence of the tough and tender lyricism of Thomas Wyatt.

In keeping with his successful début fiction, Shaun Prescott’s Bon and Lesley is set in a declining regional Australian town filled with oddball characters and plagued by otherworldly phenomena. The Town (2017) was published in seven countries and garnered apt comparison to, among others, Franz Kafka and László Krasznahorkai, as well as Australian writers Gerald Murnane and Wayne Macauley. Like these influences, Prescott’s work eludes definitive categorisation, though his second novel maintains distinctly ontological and surrealist emphases.

There’s a theory that short fiction is the perfect panacea for modern life. As our attention spans grow weak on  a diet of digital gruel and as our free time clogs up with late-night work emails, enter the short story as an efficient fiction-booster administered daily on the commute between suburb and CBD. I love this theory, and I will forever resent Jane Rawson for exposing its flaws in a 2018 Overland article on the subject. Rawson explains that most time-poor readers prefer to dip in and out of long novels, where they can greet familiar worlds without the awkward orientation period required by a new text. In contrast, says Rawson, collections of ‘stories plunge you back into that icy pool of not-knowing every 500, 800, 2000 or 5000 words. Who wants that? Pretty much no-one, if bestseller lists are anything to go by.’

Salt and Skin is the fifth novel by Victorian-based writer Eliza Henry-Jones. Following the death of her husband, Luda moves with her two teenage children, Darcy and Min, from Australia to the remote Scottish islands. Luda, a photographer, is employed by the local council to document the effects of climate change on the islands and to raise funds for related activism. They will live on Seannay, a small tidal island off the main Big Island, in the isolated and ramshackle ‘ghost house’ that bears centuries-old markings on the ceilings, ‘witch marks’ thought to ward off evil.

A third of the way through Jock Serong’s sixth novel, The Settlement, a woman asks her new husband a pointed question about Wybalenna, the desolate Tasmanian community in which she finds herself, a community of duplicitous, expedient, and brutally deranged white men and the First Nations Tasmanians they seek to subjugate. ‘How will it end? His wife had asked him when she first arrived. Will the paddock fill and the people empty? Will there be another paddock after this one, if there are more people coming?’ Her husband, the storekeeper of the settlement, is witness to the grim activities of the governing group. He sees terrible cruelties he is largely powerless to prevent. The paddock she asks about is a cemetery.

Limberlost opens with an image of nature as dangerous: a whale, reportedly driven mad or feral by a harpoon in its side, is alleged to be destroying fishing boats in a vengeful spree. Ned is five, and the whale stories haunt him so much that his father takes him out to see for himself. The frightened child waits in a small boat for the animal’s power to show itself.

Blyton got rid of them, Dahl demonised or mocked them but adults are definitely central in  the lives of young people in this recent trio of books for the emerging to the retiring adolescent.

The Keeper (Lothian, $12.95 pb, 160 pp) is aimed at the younger end of adolescence, perhaps written with the view that such readers will be willing to suspend disbelief as they will need to in this romantic story of a troubled young boy’s search for a father. Joel is twelve and lives with his grandmother on the Yorke Peninsula, and fishing is his love but fighting his tormentor, Shawn at school, and generally being disruptive, takes up much of his time. However, from the outset we are alerted to Joel’s essential goodness when he defends the meek Mei who will not fight back.