Short Stories

Every adventurous reader of fiction ought to have a private hoard of novelists, preferably from a non-English writing background, who have escaped the appalling nonsense of Booker-style PR hype. Luckily, publishers like Collins Harvill set about promoting such writers; unluckily for Australia, though, our major literary pages often neglect to review the bulk of such output. You will have your favourites in such a category, but let this reviewer recommend the following: Jose Donoso, Etienne Leroux, Jose Saramago, Eduardo Mendoza, Saiichi Maruya, and Haruki Murakami.

This is the finale to ‘The Death of Daffy Duck’, one of the stories in Peter Goldsworthy’s latest collection. ‘The Death of Daffy Duck’ outlines the end of a friendship between two bon vivant couples whose years of dining out together had come to an end in a restaurant, during dinner, when one of the men almost choked to death on a piece of food (the ‘Scene’ referred to), and the other saved his life. From that time on, the saved man will not speak to his rescuing friend.

Works of Indonesian fiction, whether set in Indonesia or written by Indonesians, are still comparatively rare in Australia, and can therefore be difficult to read sensitively. In her collection of three novellas set in New Caledonia, Adelaide/Bandung and Bali, Melbourne writer Dewi Anggraeni attempts to explore the ground between cultures and the way people straddle cultures and come to an accommodation and understanding of each other. She is not always successful.

These stories are well written and rather depressing. That makes them, I guess, rather representative of what one might call the current state of short-story writing by urban males. One thinks immediately of recent collections by Garry Disher and Nick Earls. There seem to be a few basic starting off points, the most notable being in the delineation of defensiveness and insecurities that give the male characters, who are often the narrators, a sensitive but decidedly uptight response to, well, almost everything. Women, parents, children (their own), and particularly the drab world that has snuffed out some early spark of liveliness or vitality (which is usually rubbed for sympathetic magic in moments of nostalgic recall).

For its double epigraph, Rock’n’Roll Heroes combines a couple of lines of Midnight Oil’s Hercules – ‘my life is a valuable thing / I want to keep it that way’ – with six wonderfully numinous sentences from Thomas Traherne:

There’s a lot to be said for plain writing for writing in such a way that the reader is nudged along through nuance and observation to perception. Plain writing tends to make the reader feel as if they too are watching impassively what the writer sees. It’s a little like standing in shallow water, not noticing the tide coming in. Plain writing involves the reader; any shocks, or passions, come from within the story not from the use of highly coloured words or manipulative tricks.

There used to be a saying: Penny plain; twopence coloured. It came from the sale of cardboard prints in a London toyshop. The uncoloured prints were considered inferior, less exciting. They left too much to the imagination.

‘When Australians run away, they always run to the coast.’ Robert Drewe has already debunked the myth of the bush as Australia’s heartland, and in The Bodysurfers pictured us living and loving on the very rim of the continent, precariously perched in salty, sweaty, and essentially temporary hedonistic bliss between the threat of the empty outback, the incendiary bush, and the menace of the ocean with its sharp­toothed predators and secret stingers.

Collections of new Australian short stories by a single author have become a regular feature of Australian literary publishing in recent years. They are a welcome addition to the range of new writing available to the reading public. Collections that have unity of style, are thematically coherent and present a linked set of perceptions from the one creative source offer the reader much more than a light or fragmentary experience. Instead of the sustained characterisation of the novel, they can achieve a dazzling variety of episodes and mood. Robert Drewe’s Body Surfers and Helen Garner’s Postcards from Surfers are outstanding examples of how good the best collections of stories can be. It was a great delight to pick up I am a Boat by Sally Morrison and find that, although it is only her second book, in style, originality and literary quality, Morrison is fast approaching the Drewe and Garner class.

Stephanie Johnson writes short stories and writes mainly about women. It’s as though there’s a specific genre in current writing that ties together these two kinds of writing, for women writing about other women in short prose pieces make up a distinct category that includes almost all of the familiar names of women writing in Australia now. These women writers include migrants who have made their homes in Australia and write from that position. Johnson, for instance, is a New Zealander.

I first made the acquaintance of Olga Masters’s writing some years back when a judge of the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, for which her collection of stories The Home Girls had been submitted. I was immensely impressed by the control, passion, and implicit violence of the stories, and was of the impression that the book should win. But another judge, of considerable seniority, carried the day with the opinion that all the stories in the book were ‘at the same pitch’. It seemed to me at the time, and still does, that her objection could equally be levelled at, say, Flannery O’Connor or Dubliners, but that’s water under the bridge.