Novel

There is every reason to admire this novel’s intent, but with the best will in the world I couldn’t recommend the result. Linda Jaivin’s current affairs comedy about the Villawood Detention Centre is so conscious of its pedagogic goals that it fails to offer a decent story. And it’s not funny. Believe me, I wanted to like it. Jaivin is a terrific writer with an enviable range, capable of the witty, surrealist smut of Eat Me (1995) and the kind of nuanced cross-cultural analysis that underpinned The Monkey and the Dragon (2001), her undervalued biography of Chinese rock’n’roll dissident Hou Dejian.

The mortality rate for individuals is always one, but for populations it varies from time to time and place to place. London is one of those cities where the mortality rate is high, though not because it has ever been, like the Gold Coast, a city to retire to. For centuries, young people have gone to London seeking riches, celebrity and opportunity. Some, like Dick Whittington, found the streets proverbially paved with gold, but others made their way promptly to the gutter. From the gutter to the grave is but a short step, but not the last one in London during the early days of modern anatomical science, as James Bradley’s new novel illustrates.

Disaster has always shadowed the traveller. Today’s adventurers differ from their forebears only in the kinds of calamity they have cause to fear. Arabella Edge’s second novel – like her first, the award-winning The Company (2000) – will have readers thanking their lucky stars that shipwreck, at least, has gone the way of history. As its cover suggests, The God of Spring centres on Théodore Géricault’s masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa (1819) – its painting, its painter and the real event it depicts.

Just how old is John Egan? In a letter to the Guinness Book of Records, he says he is eleven. But the narrative voice of this queer, tormented Irish lad is not that of other boy heroes on the cusp of puberty, the opinionated braggarts whose boasts and fears and primary-coloured perspectives propel their stories. Instead, John’s story lurches from the distractions of the very young to a kind of preternatural knowingness. No wonder John makes everyone around him uneasy. He makes the reader uncomfortable, too.

Here is a rich vein of strange rococo fantasy in recent Australian fiction. Tom Gilling (The Sooterkin, 1999), Andrew Lindsay (The Breadmaker’s Carnival, 1998, and The Slapping Man, 2003) and Gregory Day (The Patron Saint of Eels, 2005) have all imagined tragicomic country towns in which miracles and monsters infiltrate the sleepy lives of unsuspecting villagers. The genre can be a trap for inattentive authors: the lines between quirky and cute, touching and twee, are perilously easy to cross. With this comic apocalyptic fantasy, Catherine Rey – who writes in French but lives in Perth – avoids this trap and achieves something more. In an idiom that is part Rabelais, part Old Testament and part Ocker Pub, she creates an hilarious, troubling fable with a distinctly Australian taste.

Where are the great menopause novels? In The Change (1991), Germaine Greer described menopause as the ‘undescribed experience’, but then noted that it had in fact been described extensively, mostly ‘by men for the eyes of other men’. Wendy Harmer’s Farewell My Ovaries is written by a woman for the eyes of other women, but it does not really aspire to greatness. It is unashamedly ‘chick lit’ – or ‘chick-making-the-uneasy-transition-to-hen-lit’.

Sylvia Lawson is a distinguished cultural critic and essayist. Her award-winning The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship was published in 1983, and her collection of essays, How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia, won the 2003 Gleebooks Prize for literary and cultural criticism. In selecting the latter volume among my best books of 2002 for the Sydney Morning Herald, I claimed that it was characterised by ‘complex, spacious, committed, convincing, intellectually riveting speculations and reflections’. Many of these qualities may be found in The Outside Story.

‘History always emphasises terminal events,’ Albert Speer observed bitterly to his American interrogators just after the end of the war, according to Antony Beevor in Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002). Few events in recent history were more terminal than the Holocaust, it might be urged. Yet the singularity of that ‘terminus’ has been questioned in recent years. Is it, however, perilous for someone not a Jew to talk about it? Nell, the goyische lover of Jewish Laura Lewin, puts her foot right in it in Melbourne at the end of the century dominated by the Holocaust and its memories. ‘So the Holocaust is sacred Jewish ground? Complete with an electric fence around it for all eternity?’ Laura, in a not particularly deft similitude, reacts with a sharp response worthy of a ‘partly exposed landmine’. Nell can only put her unexploded foot further into it. ‘You Jews don’t do forgiveness, do you?’ Laura ‘was incredulous: Nell had clearly understood nothing. And would never understand.’ Is that sentiment intended to be generalised to all non-Jews?

Dorothy Porter’s new verse novel, Wild Surmise, takes an almost classic form. The verse novel is now well-established as a modern genre, and Porter has stamped a distinctive signature and voice on the verse form, particularly with the phenomenal success of her racy, action-packed detective novel, The Monkey’s Mask (1994). So it comes as no surprise to find this book setting a similarly cracking pace across some not entirely unexpected territory: an adulterous love affair between two women; and the death, through cancer, of a husband. Additional glamour and some thematic variation are provided by the women’s profession, astronomy. Both women are favourites on the lecture and television circuit, and Alex Leefson’s passionate interest in finding traces of biological life on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, generates some of the more purely lyrical moments.