Rebecca Starford

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. 

According to a recent government survey of child and youth health, around five per cent of young people over the age of twelve suffer from a major depressive illness. Sources of such depression, according to the survey, include stressful events, trauma and heredity. Increasingly, the origin of the illness remains unknown. These disconcerting figures indicate the need for intelligent and accessible discussion about mental health in young adult literature. Both GriEVE and What Does Blue Feel Like? oblige. The first investigates the painful mechanisms of grief and mourning; the other, clinical depression triggered, amongst other things, by abortion.

The Wheeler Centre recently hosted ‘four provocative nights’ based on the assertion that Australian criticism of film, theatre, books and the visual arts is, in its own words, ‘failing us all’. The series was entitled ‘Critical Failure’. For ABR readers unable to attend, here is one person’s account of the books-related panel.

When pressed during a Radio National interview last year to identify how Kill Your Darlings differentiates itself from other Australian literary journals, editor Rebecca Starford said, ‘We want to be publishing fiction and non-fiction that has a fearlessness to it, that is frank, that is offering alternative perspectives.’ The fourth issue of this journal pursues this mission with thought-provoking commentary, fiction, and reviews.

Early in M.J. Hyland’s new novel, This Is How, Patrick Oxtoby joins his landlady, Bridget, in the lounge room. They watch a game show, and Patrick feigns interest in the contestants’ fortunes. It is an awkward scenario he wishes Bridget would talk more and he prattles on, making a faux pas. ‘You’re in a strange mood,’ Bridget says, eyes on the television. Bewildered, Patrick excuses himself. ‘You all want me to talk more,’ he silently complains, ‘and when I do this is what happens. I can’t keep up with life.’

Since its establishment in 2003, Sleepers Publishing has made quite a name for itself. Coordinating literary salons and the annual publication of the Sleepers Almanac, which garners contributions from some of the country’s most esteemed practitioners, the small press is now branching out into the domain of full-length fiction, with Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming as the opener.

Twenty-four-year old Ella arrives in sweltering Ho Chi Minh City. It is 1994; the United States has just lifted the crippling trade embargo. Ella sets herself up in a grungy hostel and begins teaching English at a local school. She has come to Vietnam ostensibly in search of information about her father, a veteran, who abandoned the family years ago. ‘What does it mean to miss so much something you barely knew?’ Ella ponders. This narrative foundation – tenuous in the wrong authorial hands – proves a powerful driving force in Myfanwy Jones’s assured debut novel. The search for her father is more one for Ella’s own sense of self and place in the world.

Marisa Raoul’s memoir recounts the ten years she spent living and working with her husband in France. With French travel memoirs lining bookshop shelves – such as Ellie Nielsen’s Buying a Piece of Paris (2007), Mark Greenside’s I’ll Never Be French (no matter what I do) and Lucy Knisley’s French Milk (both 2008) and, of course, Peter Mayle’s wildly popular A Year in Provence (1991) – Raoul is treading safe, and commercially viable, waters.

The Woman in the Lobby lacks the satirical punch of Fabulous Nobodies (1989) and the blithe esprit of Wraith (1999) that has made Lee Tulloch such a diverting storyteller. This overlong novel, entertaining in places, engages in some of the lowest common denominators of popular fiction – fashion, drugs and lots of sex.

Reflecting the nineteenth-century obsession with death and the afterlife, thousands of British men and women turned to spiritualism and psychical research. This was, in part, a consequence of many educated people's unease with orthodox religion. From crowded public halls to private drawing rooms, practitioners were present during putative ‘messages’ from the dead, rapped out on tables, walls and floors, scribbled on slates and, occasionally, expressed in garbled song. Tennyson wrote, ‘the veil / is rending and the Voices of the day / Are heard across the Voices of the dark’.