Owen Richardson

Here are two novels of exile, one contemporary, the other about coming to Australia in the nineteenth century. In Carol Lefevre’s Nights in the Asylum, Miri, a middle-aged actress, escapes from Sydney and her tottering marriage, and drives back to the mining town of her childhood. On the way, she picks up an escaped Afghan refugee, Aziz, and drops him off in town, where he immediately falls foul of the inhabitants and ends up on the doorstep of Miri’s family home, uninhabited while her aunt is in hospital. The house becomes asylum for more than one outcast: Zett, the abused wife of the local cop, has already found herself there, baby in tow.

Peter Robb, in this collection of some of his journalism, quotes E.M. Forster’s remark about Constantine Cavafy: that he lived ‘absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe’. That line is half true of Robb’s subjects in this book. They have a way of existing at an angle to the universe, but they are not at all motionless. The lives in this book have trajectories and velocities that bring out an equal dynamism in the man who recounts them, as could well be imagined by anyone who has read his earlier work about Italy and Brazil (2004) or his biography of Caravaggio (1998).

Rock’n’roll romanticism can stand in for many things: the sense of lost authenticity, lost freedom, lost youth, the good old days before music was composed by machines and performed by underwear models and all the pubs were turned into gambling venues. The passion, the music, the soul: Venero Armanno’s new novel is about all that, though one of its main faults is that it is always telling you what it is about rather than making you feel it. It is not primarily self-congratulatory – Armanno makes fun of rock wannabes always on the verge of failure – but that note is never far off, and the book still seems to be trying to write its own blurb.

These two novels are both strong in their sense of locale, and take their settings as part of the subject, linked to pictures of isolation and barely functioning relationships, and with catastrophe not averted.

Vernon God Little (2003) was the striking first novel everyone said it was, and seemed to promise better things to come. D.B.C. Pierre had a preternatural way with language, even if it wasn’t always under his control. You could tolerate the sophomoric and tritely executed satire (America is full of fat, stupid, venal people; America is just a great big television show), as it seemed the flawed trying-out of someone who hadn’t found his way to the things he really wanted to write about.

Aptly, John Ashberry has described Robert Adamson as ‘one of Australia’s national treasures’. Since the late 1960s Adamson has been a vital presence in the renaissance of Australian poetry, both in his own work and as an editor and publisher. The immense command of his writing, its trajectory from the early postmodernist explorations of the poet’s voice and the possibilities of Orphic vision to the clear lyricism of his Hawkesbury poems, has made Adamson one of the reasons why Australian poetry, as Clive James often points out, is as good as any being written in English at the present time. And there is an extraordinary story behind the writing, which comes through in the poetry, and which Adamson now relates in Inside Out: An Autobiography.

The heroine of Julian Davies’s fifth novel, The Boy, which is set in New York in 1956, is a nightclub singer originally from Australia. The boy of the title, almost half her age, is Zimzam Taylor. They are both outsiders. Marian’s life in New York is a kind of exile, in which she is closest to those she has left behind, such as her painter-husband André and her insistent, disapproving aunt Flavia, whom she left behind on the estate outside Canberra in order to sing in wartime London. Zimzam, as she learns when she picks him up and takes him back to her hotel, is an orphan whose family died in a fire. Now he is a creature of the city:

You have to sympathise with Nikki Gemmell. When she described her sense of liberation on deciding to publish The Bride Stripped Bare anonymously, she seemed to have in mind only a desire not to offend people close to her. She would also have liberated herself from the literary celebrity machine. But, once the game was up, she got even more of it than she would otherwise have done. It doesn’t seem to have bothered her too much. The profile in The Age and the appearance on Andrew Denton’s television show didn’t suggest that she was determined to salvage what she could from her original plan to stay invisible. Some of my more cynical friends have suggested that that was what she had in mind all along. But the book is written with a candour that confirms her avowals.