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The Choir of the Just

Peter Craven’s review of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature has generated much comment, some of it favourable, some not. Much of the latter was concentrated on the Internet, with the kind of reflexive, personality-driven, bien-pensant umbrage that often passes for literary discourse in the blogosphere. James Joyce’s phrase ‘the choir of the just’ springs to mind. What comes through is a shrill note of intolerance, the implication that because certain people disagree with other people’s views, the latter should not be aired. So much for liberal values.

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The design of this book is something of a mystery, not least because it presents as a critique of design, seeking to recuperate something that has been lost through ‘the graphic orthodoxies of cartography and architectural drawing’. This lost cultural component, the ‘dark writing’ of Carter’s title, is variously evoked as mythological, participatory, creative and recreative, as a body, a form of movement, a certain kind of substance.

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Grace by Morris Gleitzman

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October 2009, no. 315

In eleven-year-old Grace’s world, the ‘saved’ number 11,423 people. Four of those are part of her immediate family; her twin brothers, her mother, and her father, who encourages his daughter’s inquisitive nature and who ‘probably has more interesting thoughts than any other home lighting warehouse manager in Australia’.

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This edition of Griffith Review is one of several local journals to take the ‘global financial crisis’ as its latest theme. A range of writers address this ‘crisis’ and other ‘major recessions’ throughout history. The journal opens with Julianne Schultz’s essay about how the global economy has worsened following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Other contributors investigate the impact of recession upon the media, consumer culture, the banking industry and the workplace. Examples are drawn from Australia, Britain, America, China and Dubai. Reference is made to Gordon Gekko, the anti-hero of Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (1987). Gekko’s mantra, ‘Greed is good’, has come to define the 1980s, but viewers, as Schultz observes, tend to ignore the battle between ‘local enterprises’ and ‘clever schemers’ that is central to Stone’s movie. Schultz suggests that the schemers appear to have won.

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Hilda, a seventeen-year-old living in Los Angeles, is obsessed with dead celebrities. She and her friend Benji collect remnants from sites of tragedy or scandal – bricks, tiles, photographs of bloodstains – material suggestive of the enigmatic past. This ‘trivia’ deadens the things Hilda would rather not think about, including the death of her own parents. Hilda befriends an old man named Hank, who harbours his own dark secret and has met celebrities in his job as a Hollywood pool cleaner. Later in the story, a screenwriter named Jake feels like a conflict-creating device or distraction.

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Gerald’s murdered great-aunt has left him her entire fortune of £20 billion, and an envelope full of clues. Instead of enjoying a trip to the snow in Australia, thirteen-year-old Gerald finds himself heading to London on a private jet with his parents to attend her funeral. Meanwhile, the world’s most valuable diamond has been stolen, rather comically, from the British Museum, and no one can figure out how. With the help of two new friends, Sam and Ruby, Gerald must solve this double whodunit.

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Dear Editor,

In responding to Peter Craven’s broad-brush review of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature in last month’s ABR, which I suppose you ran for the sake of controversy, let me touch on the wider debate about what’s in the book, and why.

In compiling such an anthology, where you obviously can’t have everything, a principle of metonymy comes into play, in which the one is asked to stand for the many. In the Macquarie PEN, this is a principle of inclusion, not exclusion. Where space permits no more, authors are indicated by association or citation, making the whole greater, we hope, than the sum of the parts, more open and many-layered, as anyone will discover who reads the essays and author introductions in the book. Thus Gerald Murnane’s fiction is implied by a superb piece of non-fiction, ‘Why I Write What I Write’, showing him at his best. The only other answer to why the editors did not choose this particular work is that they chose that one, after careful consideration not only of the work itself but of its interaction with other works in the collection. Nothing’s perfect, of course. If readers have suggestions or corrections, we’d be grateful to hear them. See the feedback link on the home page of the anthology website: www.macquariepenanthology.com.au.

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Like the man with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail, Xavier Pons knows what he is looking for in his monograph on sex in Australian writing, and makes sure he finds it. Pons, a lecturer in Australian studies at the University of Toulouse, is clearly expert in his subject, and renders his explorations lucidly, at times with great insight, and intelligibly to non-specialist eyes.

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This accessible new anthology collects the work of 125 women poets writing on the theme of motherhood. As well as having general appeal, it will introduce younger female readers of poetry to topics close to their own bodily, emotional futures.

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Westerly Vol. 54, No. 1 by Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell

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October 2009, no. 315

One of the best things about the latest issue of Westerly is the cover, a detail from Helen Norton’s painting The shores of the excommunicated. Norton’s image is a wonderfully disquieting take on the modern Aussie beach. It inspires fresh ideas and imaginings, it unsettles, it punctures complacency, it provokes counter-reactions, but it also entertains – typifying what literary magazines should do.

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