James Bradley

Imagine a bookshop or library whose contents were shelved in a cross-generic way to include a section for Anthologies: this surely would be the largest division, encompassing all of the subsections of literature, science, music, philosophy ... The anthology (‘gathering of flowers’), with its impeccable classical pedigree, is the most comprehensive kind of book, catering in the contemporary reading economy to every conceivable market, from astral travelling, through gay fiction, ghost stories, long/short/tall stories, poetry of all persuasions, to travel in Turkey and Great Zoos of the World. There is a burgeoning publishers’ trade for the literary anthology – a ‘safe’ book, the serious reader’s stocking-filler, something with at least a few contributions calculated to entertain or edify.

Jeremy Mynott begins his capacious and disarming new book with a dedication to his wife, the author Dianne Speakman. ‘In all our twenty-five or so years together,’ he writes, ‘I have never yet succeeded in persuading her to take the slightest interest in birds. This is my best and last shot.’ Any ornithophile knows this feeling: the regret that his sense of wonderment remains for the most part private, something that others regard as slightly weird or ridiculous.

In 2006, a year after the publication of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, Inga Clendinnen published ‘The History Question’ as part of Black Inc.’s Quarterly Essay series. ‘The History Question’ was, as its subtitle ‘Who Owns the Past?’ suggests, a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of historical understanding, and, more specifically, its uses and abuses. But at its heart lay an extended and surprisingly savage critique of The Secret River, the claims Clendinnen believed Grenville had made for it, and for fiction’s capacity to illuminate the past; and, more deeply, of the very idea of historical fiction.

Murray Bail’s fiction inhabits a curious space. Despite its attention to the detail of the rural landscape, the ‘endless paddocks and creaking tin roofs’, it is not, in any meaningful sense, realist, either in its intention or its execution. Instead, against carefully created backdrops, it weaves something closer to fairy tales, looping meditations on the power of story, and love, whose affinities lie – for all that many of Bail’s world of pastoralists who dress for dinner and unmarried daughters wilting in the Australian emptiness sometimes might not seem out of place in Patrick White – with distinctly un-Australian writers such as Calvino, Borges and, though less obviously, Rushdie and Marquez. It is not for nothing that the narrator of Eucalyptus (1999), Bail’s best novel, bemoans the ‘applied psychology’ that ‘has taken over storytelling, coating it and obscuring the core’. Yet, where the baroque outcroppings of detail in the magical realists of the 1980s serve to highlight the artifice of their creations, the detail of Bail’s fiction does quite the opposite, providing instead a framework for his fiction’s very particular reality.

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.

Two-thirds of the way through Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2002), its characters come across a house standing in a valley high in the Queensland ranges. The house is empty, abandoned like some landlocked Marie Celeste, but in one room a library remains. Standing before the shelves, one of the characters removes a volume, only to find the pages eaten away to dust, the book, like the house, an empty shell. It is a scene of extraordinary power and implication, resonant with the peculiar energy that builds when meaning coalesces, however briefly, and we feel ourselves in the presence of something that runs deeper than words.

I remember trying a few years ago to communicate to a younger friend something of the way I remember my childhood in Adelaide in the 1970s. It was a world in which an older Australia still lingered, a quiet, suburban world where men caught the tram to work at 8.15a.m. and came home at five, where the banks closed at four p.m., and where World War II veterans and their wives lived around us. In 2004 that world – somnolent, conservative, oddly outside time – seems almost unimaginable; even then, it was almost gone. Instead, it inhabits that hinterland between memory and nostalgia, lingering for me in the textures of the things and places which gave it shape, textures that are hopelessly entangled in the possibilities, pleasures and disappointments of childhood.