Lorien Kaye

It is surely impossible to read a new work of Australian historical fiction without doing so through the lens of Inga Clendinnen’s much-discussed essay The History Question (2006). One of Clendinnen’s arguments is against claims for the superiority of fiction over history because the former brings the past to life through imaginative empathy, allowing readers to ‘get inside the experience’, while history is merely a desiccated ‘world of facts’. Clendinnen also sets out the differences she sees between fiction and history, which are standing on either side of a ‘ravine’. In her response to correspondence in the following Quarterly Essay, she expressed her position concisely: ‘Fiction carries us deeply, effortlessly into imagined individual subjectivities. History is the sustained attempt to penetrate the minds and experiences of actual others.’

Sometimes, the middle ground is a good place to be. The Shifting Fog is classy commercial fiction that sits happily in the space between literary fiction and mass-market trash. It might occupy the middle ground, but it’s far from middle of the road. First-time author Kate Morton (recipient of the six-figure sums for deals in eleven countries that publisher Allen & Unwin is happily hyping) has skilfully and intelligently created a novel that is indeed, as the publicity has it, ‘compulsively readable’.

The Book Thief marks a departure for Markus Zusak. It is his first novel for adults, has broader concerns than his earlier work, and makes clearer his ambitions to be considered a serious writer. His first three novels, for young adults, were primarily focused on the masculinity of the boys in a working-class Sydney family ...