Fourth Estate

‘I write best from place,’ Catherine McKinnon told Fairfax newspapers in a recent interview. Her second novel, which concerns centuries of human interaction with the New South Wales coast region between Wollongong and Lake Illawarra, makes this abundantly clear ...

This début novel by poet and author Robyn Cadwallader has its genesis in her PhD thesis on attitudes to virginity in the Middle Ages. Set in England in 1255, it is the story of Sarah, an anchoress or religious recluse, who chooses to be shut into a stone cell, measuring seven by nine paces, for life. She is seventeen.

If you think of writers as constructors, then Hilary Mantel is surely a builder of cathedrals. Two cathedrals, in fact: her two Man Booker Prize-winning novels about Thomas Cromwell and his England, Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), are soaring, intricate, and gigantic. And there is another cathedral, a third in the trilogy, on the way. Vast as these enterprises are, Mantel can also do small and beautiful: here are ten lustrous short stories to prove it. I can’t think of any kind of architecture that compares. They seem more like a string of dark pearls.

Deeper Water delivers on its title’s promise of immersion, sensuality, and the liminal. Narrated by Mema, an innocent twenty-two-year-old living on an isolated rural property, the book opens with the arrival of Hamish, a city sophisticate whose car has been washed down a flooding creek. Mema saves Hamish from drowning and takes him into her family home until the floodwater recedes. He soon becomes a catalyst for Mema’s sexual awakening and for her widening understanding of her place in the world.

Telling the stories of brothers Tyler and Barrett, with interspersing brief moments from their lovers and mothers, Michael Cunningham’s The Snow Queen reunites its author with a familiar subject: the sublimity of the ordinary.

Barrett is a failed academic whose scholarly pursuits have dried up long before they should have begun to do so, while his romantic life is one mostly mediated by text messages and bottles of Pepsi. His brother fares no better, with dreams of a future career in music and an ever-growing drug habit. Tyler’s girlfriend, Beth, meanwhile is deteriorating before him, afflicted by a terminal cancer and existing like one of the many snowflakes that blows into his bedroom window – beautiful and present but inevitably destined to melt away in his hands.

‘You acquired the habit of disguise and now you can’t shed it.’ This observation, made by a nameless old man to Lilith Goldberg, one of the three main protagonists of The Claimant, lies at the heart of the novel, though it shares that vibrantly beating heart with much else: the implications and intricacies of privilege; the iron grip of lineage; the complexities of naming and identity; the relentlessly resurfacing dramas of the personal past; unchangeable and beyond erasure; and the persistence of the essential self, which no guiles, stratagems or journeyings will suppress or alter.