Cambria Press

Though he had already produced two volumes of poetry, Roger McDonald first came to popular attention with his spectacular début novel, 1915, published in 1979. A recreation of the Gallipoli Campaign from the points of view of two ...

The cover of Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire shows a vast and terrible conflagration. Flames reach high into the sky, devouring the air and seeming to set the wide river alight. In the distance, an eerily familiar pair of ghostly towers rises above the smoke. In the foreground, tiny human figures move around as a boat sets off towards the fire, perhaps in some desperate attempt at rescue. The painting is The Burning of the Houses of Parliament by J.M.W. Turner. Shirley Hazzard chose this image herself for the cover of the novel, which won both the Miles Franklin and National Book Awards in 2003.

Brian Castro has been leading his readers on an exhilarating chase since Birds of Passage in 1983, and his allusive, melancholy but sensual work leads Bernadette Brennan to being confidently: ‘Brian Castro is one of the most innovative and challenging novelists writing in English today.’ In her attempt to prove the justice of this assertion, Brennan is far too attuned to the richness of Castro’s work to try to establish any sort of total explanatory grid, and her book is less an attempt to tidy Castro up than a guide to some of the places where we might most profitably enjoy him.

One of the principal characteristics of Castro’s work, after all, is the ambition with which he calls out to his readers, inviting us to rise to the challenge and participate in the enjoyment of the dazzling multiplicity of issues, references, allusions, plays on words, and theoretical gambits that rub shoulders (and other parts) throughout his books.

When applied to art and literature, the word ‘serious’ can be used to suggest a work is substantial and important, not necessarily that it is the opposite of humorous. There is a sense in which Rabelais and Cervantes are serious writers. But the slippage between these two meanings – the fact that our language permits a casual conflation of worthiness and sincerity – reflects a long-standing cultural prejudice which relegates comedy to a second tier, as if a talent for provoking laughter were somehow less praiseworthy than a talent for inspiring pity and terror. Tragedy is often assumed to be profound and ennobling, but comedy’s levelling tendencies, the anarchic implications of mockery and unbridled laughter, are apt to be viewed with suspicion.