Text Publishing

Pornification, The Porn Report and Princesses and Pornstars are three recent entries into the burgeoning academic field known as ‘porn studies’. All three books aim to move beyond the simplistic ‘for’ and ‘against’ arguments that have traditionally surrounded pornography. Instead, each text explores the challenges and complexities of living in a world where sexually explicit material is more prevalent than ever before.

Addition is a trojan horse of a novel. It has a cutesy cover (featuring amorous toothbrushes), a kooky love story and a ‘hot’, wisecracking blonde heroine. There is a ‘hunky’ Irish love interest, Seamus O’Reilly, and a push-pull attraction of opposites between the romantic leads – whose first meeting, of course, is a witty war of words. But the heroine, Grace Vandenberg, is no ditsy Bridget Jones everywoman. She is an obsessive-compulsive counter who lives on a dis-ability pension; her only friends are her mother, her sister and her niece. And she is devastatingly smart.

Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell famously deplores Ernest’s loss of not one but both parents. The great polymath would approve of Peter Temple’s easy mastery of not just two but three popular literary genres. In the Jack Irish series, Temple created a likeable rogue who approximates a Melbourne private eye, and with The Broken Shore (2005) he won crime writing awards for a disciplined police procedural set in rural Victoria. In the Evil Day is an international thriller that moves mainly between Hamburg and London. Again, Temple’s control is strong and deft.

In 1880, Turgenev visited Tolstoy at his country estate after a long period of estrangement, only to discover that the great novelist had, in the interim, renounced art in favour of ethical enquiry. Turgenev was appalled, and dashed off a letter complaining that ...

Sucked In, the sixth instalment in Shane Maloney’s Murray Whelan series, is just what fans will be hoping for – a fast-paced mystery (with the obligatory dose of political wheeling and dealing) that never lets blackmail, violence or possible murder stand in the way of a laugh.

Adrian Hyland spent many years living and working among indigenous people in the Northern Territory. His affection for and affinity with the people and the country are immediately evident. But whatever possessed him, in his first novel, to write in the voice of a young, half-Aboriginal woman? It is a testament to his skill and finely balanced writing that more has not been made of this fact, and that the reception to his novel has been mostly positive.

‘As far as books are concerned, I find life no help at all. Books grow out of other books.’ So said the great Ivy Compton-Burnett, and her comment is at least partly pertinent in relation to Lloyd Jones’s luminous Mister Pip, trailing as it does clouds of Dickensian glory. Increasingly, there seems to be a sub-genre of novels that have their roots in other novels. Some of these are vile, like Emma Tennant’s vulgarly opportunist Pemberley Revisited: or Pride and Prejudice Continued (2005) and Emma in Love (1996), which traduce two great novels. Others work more evocatively, like Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a post-colonial reimagining of Jane Eyre from the point of view of the madwoman in the attic, or Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), which, with elliptic brilliance, re-situates Magwitch at the heart of the narrative of Great Expectations (1860–61).

The Australian soap Neighbours maintains its popularity overseas. Busloads of UK tourists bound for Vermont South attest to this. The soap’s popularity lies in its reflection of the domestic and the mundane. It provides a safe means for overseas viewers to explore the exotic: the trials of the Ramsay Street clan are not so different from their own. Soon, thanks to author Célestine Hitiura Vaite, Tahiti may have its own busloads of tourists, searching for the petrol station in Faa´a PK55, location and setting for the domestic, everyday dramas of Breadfruit, Frangipani and Tiare.

Inga Clendinnen came rather late to Michel de Montaigne, the man she acknowledges as ‘the Father of the Essay’. When the professional historian began reading the great amateur, she did so, Clendinnen admits, ‘in that luxurious mood of piety lace-edged with boredom with which we read the lesser classics’. The boredom quickly dissipated as the writer in Clendinnen met a master: ‘It is hard to explain what makes his essays so enchanting, but I think it is the lithe, athletic movement of a naturally intrepid mind.’

The first thing about Deborah Robertson’s first novel, Careless, that strikes the reader is the way that her prose style cuts like sand. The story of three individuals united by the murder of six children is compelling, but what impresses is Robertson’s love of language, the precision of her sentences, as well as her gentle philosophical imagination and the deeper questions her book seeks to answer.