Chris Flynn

Those accustomed to dismissing video games as frivolities may be alarmed to discover that, on a global scale, gaming generates more revenue than the film, music and book industries combined, by an order of magnitude. Games have become the dominant cultural force. We have come a long way since Space Invaders. Despite this prevalence and influence, there is a paucity of writing on gaming. Notable exceptions are Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022) and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011), now joined by Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon’s welcome collection of essays exploring the societal impact of the form.

It is fair to say that graphic novels are now an accepted form of literary endeavour. One could even argue that this happened quite some time ago, with the benchmark publishing event that was Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986). Comics had long been threatening to make the leap of legitimacy into the publishing mainstream, and Moore’s unashamedly adult opus was the perfect platform for DC comics to market a collection of twelve slim comics as a full-length ‘graphic’ novel. Their gamble has turned out to be prudent, as evinced by Watchmen’s faithful transition to the silver screen this year. With special-effects technology finally able to capture the fantasy world of comics, and with a guaranteed audience, it is little wonder we are witnessing an endless onslaught of Hollywood blockbusters based on successful graphic novels.

Everything about Chris Flynn’s Mammoth – the characters, plot, and structure – should not work. But it does, and beautifully so. Mammoth is narrated by the fossilised remains of a 13,354-year-old extinct American Mammoth (Mammut americanum), who likes to be addressed as Mammut. On 24 March 2007, the eve of his sale at the Natural History Auction in New York, Mammut finds himself in a room with Tyrannosaurus bataar (who prefers to be called T.bat).

Two of the greatest Australian crime writers died within six months of each other in 2018. Peter Temple authored nine novels, four of which featured roustabout Melbourne private detective Jack Irish, and one of which, Truth, won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2010. Temple died on 8 March 2018, aged seventy-one. Peter Corris was more prolific, writing a staggering eighty-eight books across his career, including historical fiction, biography, sport, and Pacific history. Forty-two of those highlighted the travails of punchy Sydney P.I. Cliff Hardy. Corris died on 30 August 2018, seventy-six and virtually blind.

Elliot Perlman’s fourth novel is tentatively billed as a corporate satire and has a striking opening line: ‘I am absolutely terrified of losing a job I absolutely hate.’ The man in this all-too-familiar predicament is Stephen Maserov, a former English teacher turned lawyer. Maserov is a lowly second year in the Terry Gilliam-esque law firm Freely Savage Carter Blanche, which, apart from sounding like a character in a Tennessee Williams play, is home to loathsome dinosaurs in pinstripe suits and an HR department referred to as ‘The Stasi’.

Playwright and author Lucy Caldwell raises the issue of national identity early in her introduction to this long-running anthology series. She grew up in Belfast but lives in London. Her children sing Bengali nursery rhymes and celebrate Eid. She holds two passports, neither of which adequately captures who she is ...

Halfway through Minotaur, Peter Goldsworthy’s jauntily satisfying novel about a sharp-tongued former motorcycle cop blinded by a bullet to the head, Detective Sergeant Rick Zadow gropes his way to a shed behind his Adelaide cottage. Inside lies a partially dismantled 1962 Green Frame Ducati 750SS ...