Fiction

Unspectacular prose

Item: Big Boys
Author: Alan Gould

by Alan Gould •

October 1978, no. 5

Big Boys by Phillip Edmonds

Second Back Row Press 1978, ISBN O 9093 2512 X

Neonline by Tom Thompson

Second Back Row Press 1978, ISBN 0 909325 13 8

Fiction

Unspectacular prose

by Alan Gould •

October 1978, no. 5

Of these two unspectacular books from Second Back Row Press I found Tom Thompson’s Neonline the more rewarding.

It is a book that resists easy identification, being neither a novella nor a sequence of related short stories, and possessing neither a total scheme nor a clutch of subplots, no climax and no emergent theme. There is however a focusing eye, and this restively pursues a loose family of characters around a credible Sydney landscape, which in the closing pages moves via Singapore and Java to Bali.

Alan Gould

Alan Gould has published nine novels, thirteen volumes of poetry, and two collections of essays. Born in 1949 of English/Icelandic parentage, he came to Canberra in 1966, where he has practiced as an author for over forty years. Among his many awards for both fiction and poetry are the NSW Premier’s Literary Award (1981), the NBC Banjo Award (1992), Philip Hodgins Memorial Award for Literature (1999), the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry (2006), and he has been shortlisted for both the Miles Franklin and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.