Review

Gavin is a Breton sailor, with much salt on his skin from the squally weather he must submit himself to over towards the coast of Ireland. But other salt is on their skins, as these two find themselves irresistibly drawn to each other, despite the dreadful gap between their life experiences and expectations. More often than not, at the first sign of a scene of sexual doings, you can begin cringing, as writers search for dubious imagery usually more redolent of the kitchen than the bedroom. But there is something naively successful about George’s descriptions and explanations. It’s all rather hearty and pleasing.

Nothing very much happens; outside of their various coming-togethers, they marry other people, have children, work at their separate lives, move around the world. But back they come, and the passion is, as they say, rekindled, so they’re at it again, with gay abandon.

The tone is set in the opening chapter when George warns: ‘… there’s no way I can tell my story without describing the sin of firkytoodling, as sexual play was known in the sixteenth century.’ And firkytoodle they do, as often as time and tide allows. The translation, by the way, is superb. Goodness knows what firkytoodling was in the French, but this kind of totally right transition from the original French into English signals the translator, Mo Teitelbaum, to be chouette.

The enigmatic Ingrid Theyrsen takes her own life one summer in Milan. Eighteen years later, the memory of this suicide explodes in the memory of a man who knew her briefly. Jean, a professional explorer, engineers his own disappearance without leaving his hometown (Paris) in order to piece together what he knows of Ingrid’s existence before her death. But is he constructing a life or succumbing to the same inexplicable force that destroyed his subject? This is the theme of Honeymoon, a highly-acclaimed novel by French author Patrick Modiano.

THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 

Ian Hicks, the assistant editor of the Herald, took over the literary editorship after the brief reign of Chris Henning, who went back to work on page one, and the very lengthy incumbency of Margaret Jones. He remains assistant editor, and sees his books job as a short-term ‘appointment. His policy over embargoes on imported books is controversial. Like Valerie Lawson in her heyday at the Times On Sunday, he ignores them, especially if the book can be seen as having ‘some news interest’. Disregard of embargoes quite often drives overseas publishers to airfreight in the entire Australian run of a book and drive up its cost unconscionably. Hicks says he attempts to publish a new poem each week. But Australian fiction and poetry get more lip service than serious attention in the Herald. Often they’re dealt with in job-lot reviews of four books. Recent victims include Robert Gray and Gerard Windsor.

Hicks has employed a number of European expert reviewers, which is a healthy sign, but he relies too much on the old Herald standby of giving an inordinate number of books to ex-editors Pringle and Kepert. Reportedly, he has not changed another of the Herald’s legendary policies – demanding return of reviewers’ copies.

Christopher Pearson

Like many students of Australian film, I became aware of Cecil Holmes’s work through the viewing of a scratched print of Three in One in a lecture hall in one of our tertiary institutions, many years after it had failed to gain general release within Australia and killed off the dream of an indigenous film industry, yet again. A brave and naïve film, it was clearly well-made, stylish, and addressed a local audience without condescension or parochialism. Three in One was an early hint of what an Australian cinema might look like, and is now held to be one of the landmarks in the history of Australian film. To those who see the film now, though, its maker must seem to have suffered the same fate as its optimistically named production company, New Dawn Films. There is some satisfaction, then, in reading One Man’s Way to see what did happen to a substantial talent squandered by an insecure and conservative Australian film industry.

Paul Salzman has wit and judgement. He knows his chosen period is usually thought of as a lean one for prose fiction; he is anxious not to be typed as ‘the indefatigable in pursuit of the unreadable.’ He sees himself as the cartographer of a largely uncharted region: his main aim is to give us an idea of what is there.

A writer in this situation would like to be able to report on neglected masterpieces. Salzman is too sensible to make extravagant claims: the claims he does make are the more believable because they are modest. If he fails to find a seventeenth-century rival to Clarissa or Middlemarch, he nevertheless turns up some long and short fictions that deserve to be better known than they are. Mary Wrath’s Urania, ‘a feminist reading of the romance form’ which exposes ‘the less salubrious underside of the courtly code’, is one. It is apparently the earliest published work of fiction written in English by a woman. (It was suppressed soon after publication because it allegedly played ‘palpably and grossly’ with the reputations of certain influential people whom it portrayed under fictional names.)

This volume is subtitled ‘A novel About The Nature of Truth’ and thus marks Frank Hardy’s continuing concern with basic concepts, the source matter of philosophical and theological debate, rather than with the social immediacies tat inspired and formed the texture of his earlier fiction. As with But the Dead are Many, his previous novel, a tour de force of considerable proportions in which Life and Death were set forth as interchangeable terms rather than irreconcilables, the present work is intricately structured in recognition of the complexity of the issues which is being debated, or, put otherwise, the evasiveness and obduracy of the daemon with which the writer-character is wrestling. There is certainly some sense in Hardy of being more than just interested in narrative formulae, modi operandi, recapitulative tactics. (Appropriately enough, since he writes of men in the grip of obsessions which gnaw at their intellectual vitals, and, as suggested, he stands on extraordinary intimate terms with them.)

Virtually every book examining the whole or part of Australia’s postwar foreign policy has taken the American connection as its focal point. Camilleri, a prolific scholar and well-known commentator on international politics, however, shifts the emphasis and integrates some new dimensions. Instead of centring his study on the isolated aims of Australian policy-makers, he assesses the relationship within the framework of the major partner’s global strategy. The first critical factors to isolate are the changing needs and capabilities of the world’s leading capitalist nation; how have the Americans perceived their interests and responded in a dynamic global environment?

This book of a dozen essays, with a foreword by Sir Kenneth Weare (his last substantial piece of writing before he died), concentrates on various aspects of the changing Anglo-Australian relationship.

It is an enlightening collection, for most of the essays test and in some cases challenge the ‘conventional wisdom’ which pervades recent analyses of Australian life. This is especially useful to this reviewer who, as an immigrant of two years’ standing, discovered on arrival a veritable industry of writers in various disciplines all concerned with the search for an Australian identity. Two essays, for a start, provide the leaven in reassessment of George Johnston’s literary quest for ‘the way home’, as well as Donald Horne’s ‘Lucky Country’ theme and Alan Renouf’s ‘Frightened Country’ analysis. The first is interestingly dealt with by Alan Lawson in his ‘Acknowledging Colonialism: Revisions of the Australian Tradition’, which challenges several half-truths which have become maxims. Horne and Renouf immediately spring to mind in J.D.B. Miller’s ‘An Empire That Don’t Care What You Do’. This essay is a ‘must’ for those people who view most past (and some present) Australian leaders as supine in their dealings with British counterparts.

What effect did life, does life still, exert upon Europeans in the Pacific? Does it weaken cultural bonds with Europe or does it sustain them? Does it set up alternative cultural standards by means of which European culture may be more critically assessed’) And individuals may more critically assess their own motivations? Are their lives fulfilled in the Pacific or does it destroy them’? These are among the questions which Gavan Daws has set himself, in this highly readable and elegantly written series of linked biographies of five men, Williams, Melville, Gibson, Stevenson, and Gauguin, whose fame and destiny were determined in whole or in part by their lives in the Pacific. Each of them found in the islands ‘the other side of his own civilised humanity’. The book, therefore, though it contains a great deal of factual information about the movements and lives of these men in the Pacific, is really about the romantic voyage, the voyage ‘into the self’.

Rae Desmond Jones has joined the growing band of poets now working in the more expansive medium of prose diction (thereby possibly expanding their readership as well). Others that come to mind are David Malouf, Roger McDonald, and Rodney Hall.

At just 74 pages, Rae Desmond Jones’s first story collection gives the impression of being a slim volume. The contents page lists only ten stories. Yet this impression is deceptive. There are actually twelve stories (inexplicably, two aren’t listed in the contents), and the usual typography concentrates the prose, emphasizing its density and the sense of menace underlying the narratives.