Art

Daniel in the Liars’ Den

by Don Anderson •

March 1988, no. 98

Liars: Australian New Novelists by Helen Daniel

Penguin, $14.95 pb, 355 pp

Art

Daniel in the Liars’ Den

by Don Anderson •

March 1988, no. 98

Helen Daniel is one of outmost distinguished reviewer critics. Particularly through her contributions to The Age. she has proven herself not just an intelligent and scrupulous reader, but an open and pluralistic one. These qualities inform this very important book.

Liars is a serious and scholarly study of a generation of Australian metafictionists, or fabulists, or what you will, in the contexts both of their own individual achievements and the achievement of the body of work of this unwitting ‘school’. It is, to use a metaphor that is central to Dr Daniel’s study, a topography of the ‘most beautiful lies’ in Australian fiction in the last twenty’ years. It is not a history, not an aetiology, but a cartography.

Don Anderson

Don Anderson is the author/editor of eight books, collections of essays and reviews, and anthologies of prose, largely of texts from the Americas, Australia, and Europe. For fourteen years in the 1980s and 1990s he was a regular literary columnist in the National Times and the Sydney Morning Herald. He was for thirty years a member of the English department at the University of Sydney, where he taught American, Irish, and Australian literature, and literary theory. He was for some years a member of the Advisory Panel of ABR.