Michael Wilding

‘Even when there’s simultaneity,’ as one of Michael Wilding’s characters says, there’s still linearity that needs to be found, and linearity is difficult to find in this group of books. So, it is better, as Wilding’s book also suggests, to let the books perform and then see the pattern they make. Pacific Highway, in fact, is a kind of haiku novel, which coheres into a single expressive emblem, the emblem of the dance its narrator offers us at the end.

I found this a book of uncertain trajectory. On the one hand its target seems to be a broad readership, for these forty-three short stories were first written for the periodical, Tabloid Story, whose method of distribution has been the effective one of being hosted by student and national journals of wide circulation. On the other hand, the collection includes a long self-conscious explanation of itself whose apparent interest in a secure perch on a tertiary syllabus would exclude the popular audience. In it the editor outlines why these stories represent a revolution in Australian short fiction, anatomises the causes and course of this upheaval, locates its European and Latin American antecedents, names its genres – in short tells why his authors should attract serious study rather than serious enjoyment. The ruse, of course, is to hallow an episode in Australian literature, a manoeuvre that I found as transparent as it is indicative of shaky confidence. A revolution with genuine roots will hallow itself.

In Tirra Lirra by the River, an elderly woman, Norah Porteou, returns to live in her childhood home in Brisbane after forty years as a ‘London Australian’. The house is empty, so is her life. Norah is a ‘woman whose name is of no consequence’. She is sensitive, vaguely artistic, slightly superior (‘Mother,’ she appeals in a childhood scene, ‘don’t let Grace call me Lady Muck.’) The novel consists of a review of her past, with interruptions from half-remembered neighbours offering curious and resentful help.