Australian Fiction

Still fondly remembered as one of the Doug Anthony Allstars, although most recently known for biding his time in the depths of Channel Nine between those twin peaks of high culture, Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush and Little Aussie Battlers, Tim Ferguson has obviously not been idle, instead indulging in everyone’s favourite pastime – Canberra-watching. Inspired (or possibly horrified, if Left, Right and Centre is anything to go by) by what he has seen, Ferguson has created a monster – Luther Langbene.

As the co-publisher of Mean Streets, Australia’s ‘crime, mystery and detective’ fiction magazine, I have, like Garry Disher, occasions when I wonder what the various terms actually mean and what separates them. It’s something Disher addresses in the author’s note to this very fine collection of stories which are amongst the best writing Disher has done. As Disher says:

This quote from Buddha opens Tasting Salt, Dowrick’s second novel, and freedom is its main theme. But the freedom in question is of the quiet domestic kind rather than the revolutionary clenched-fist-and-anthem kind. Cordelia, preparing a cocktail party for her seventy-third birthday, suddenly finds herself a widow after fifty years of marriage to George. George’s departure precipitates a crisis of self. No longer able to define herself simply as ‘George’s wife’ or even ‘George’s widow’ she finds herself confronted by the past and unresolved questions of identity, sexuality, and gender. Cordelia’s odyssey, frequently confusing and sometimes painful ultimately brings her a modicum of joy and renewed faith.

A new novel from the author of Julia Paradise, of Prince of the Lilies, and most especially of Billy Sunday, aroused in this reader an excited sense of eager anticipation. Yet I was pulled up brutally short by Nightpictures’ opening sentence: ‘When we look at other people we either want to fuck them or kill them.’ It is not merely that the sententia of this sentence is demonstrably untrue, or that ‘either’ might be more elegantly placed after ‘want’, but that the sentence is, aesthetically speaking, brutal and ugly. Perhaps it is those ‘k’ sounds. This is, however, a novel narrated in the first person, and the qualities which distressed me may be those of its narrator, ‘Sailor’, who fulfils in his individual career his universal generalisation, and my reaction may be intended.

The fifth book in a planned series of seven would not be surprising if it were science fiction or fantasy. But Burning for Revenge is neither, rather its connections are with the much more currently unfashionable genres of adventure and war stories. And what a war adventure series it is. This fifth volume, in hardback, has been on the bestseller lists in this journal and daily newspapers since its publication – not usual for young adult books. The first, Tomorrow When the War Began, is fourth on Angus & Robertson’s Top 100 Books Voted by Australians – after Bryce Courtenay, but before the Bible!

The point of return in this highly moveable associative novel is the London Underground, not as an instance of efficiency or even the most modest and individual progression, but rather as a static enclosure where creatures and people are delayed, starved, balked, pained by the straps or handles of their baggage and, most overwhelmingly, alone.

Just in case anyone hasn’t head of Cliff Hardy, Peter Corris leads off his new collection of short stories featuring the Sydney private eyes, Forget Me If You Can, with ‘The Hearing’ – an informative little piece in which Hardy, his license suspended, undergoes an interview with a ‘psycho-sociological profiler’ to see if he is a fit and proper person to carry on snooping. In compressed form Corris gives us the essential Hardy: aggressive, cynical, hard-bitten, rude or charming (depending), middle aged, battle-scarred, divorced, ex-smoker, drinks too much, as honest as the job allows. You get a good sense of the man’s strengths and weaknesses, most of which are expanded on in the dozen stories that follow.

It all depends. If living in an old, run-down Queenslander peopled with ten eccentric, loveable losers on government benefits is your idea of heaven, then John Birmingham’s new book, The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco, (the sequel to his 1994 bestseller He Died with a Falafel in His Hand), could be the realisation of your most fervent desires. For the rest of us, the lives of the characters in Birmingham’s latest offering roughly approximate hell on earth.

Incorporating photographs, diagrams, idiosyncratic typography, and even a list of references, Chris Gregory’s Twins is a media kit as much as a short story collection. It beings with a kind of parable about reading: