Laurie Clancy

The prolific David Malouf, another of our poets turned novelist, just had two short prose works published within a few months of one another. Although Child’s Play (which also includes two short stories) is set in Italy, where Malouf now resides, and Fly Away Peter in Brisbane where he grew up, the two books are thematically related, not only to each other but to the author’s earlier work.

Xavier Herbert is probably the most enigmatic of Australian writers, but there is nothing enigmatic about Laurie Clancy’s treatment of the man and his works in Twayne’s World Authors Series. This is the best assessment of Herbert since Vincent Buckley’s article ‘Capricornia’ (Meanjin, 19, 1960) forced critics to take Herbert seriously as a writer of stature and an experimentalist with the form of the novel, and since Harry Heseltine’s Xavier Herbert (OUP, 1973) drew attention to what Heseltine saw as the ‘deep motive’ of Herbert’s writing in the works that preceded Poor Fellow My Country.

It should be cause for congratulation that a study of Christina Stead is among the first four titles appearing in a series called ‘Essays in Australian Literature’ (general editor John Barnes). Because only two of her novels have Australian settings, because she has lived abroad most of her writing life, because her work evades the usual categories of fiction, because she has no time for the literary marketplace – for a whole complex of reasons Stead’s extraordinary achievement has never been adequately recognised in the land of her birth.