Fiction

A generation of Australian schoolchildren knows Peter Skrzynecki’s poetry. The simple, direct language of Immigrant Chronicle (1975) speaks of both the desolation and optimism of the postwar migrant. Boys of Summer, Skrzynecki’s third venture into book-length fiction, treads similar thematic terrain.

The cover-blurb is a genre all its own. No sensible publisher would grace the cover of a book with the assertion, ‘This is a pile of crap’, even if it is. So we should all take a blurb cum granum salis. The blurb for John Dale’s Leaving Suzie Pye reads: ‘Rips along with verve and confidence … funny, energetic and full of life.’ The signatory is Helen Garner. Can this be the same Helen Garner who gave us The Children’s Bach and The First Stone, I asked myself, as I persevered with Dale’s lacklustre novel. What significant omissions are concealed behind those three periods in her remark?

Kate Veitch’s first novel, Listen (2006), was a richly detailed examination of family and the repercussions of a single, fateful decision. Her second, Trust, continues her exploration of these themes and also focuses on feminism, forgiveness, religion, sexuality and the importance of recognising the truth about one’s own character and motivations. Divided into two sections (‘Before’ and ‘After’), the new novel follows the lives of Susanna Greenfield and her family in the lead up to, and aftermath of, an unexpected and tragic event.

Martin Westley takes a walk one day and accidentally triggers a series of events, transforming the walk into a tragicomic life-changing expedition. While strolling along the coastal path between the beaches at Bronte and Clovelly, Martin is struck on the temple and loses consciousness. On waking he gradually realises that he doesn’t know his name, has lost his memories and has no idea who he is. He meets his wife, Alex, who is indifferent to, indeed contemptuous of, him and just as mysterious as before to Martin. The family home is unnervingly free of any intimate traces of his existence. His son ignores him. Only his daughter Emily shows any concern for his well-being.

Colin McLaren has already published two books drawing on his own remarkable experiences as an undercover policeman – On the Run (2009) and Infiltration: The True Story of the Man Who Cracked the Mafia (2009) – the former a work of fiction, the other autobiographical. In this latest work he merges the two forms to create a biographical novel of his beloved grandfather George Bingham, who, with a few mates, was among the first to enlist, in an Anzac battalion filled from rural Victoria within a fortnight of war being declared.

From its opening line – ‘It had been a shit of a day for Sister Annunciata and Sister Clavie’ – Marie Munkara’s collection of stories about life on an island mission in northern Australia is a raw, hilarious and penetrating chronicle. The two nuns stare at the sky waiting for the bishop. His plane overshoots the airstrip and lands with a ‘resounding crump’. It is as if the bishop – ‘his Most Handsome and his Most Distinguished’ or ‘his Most Sleazy’, depending on which nun you ask – represents wave after wave of invasion. Apart from God and His earthly representatives, the islanders over the years also confront an anthropologist, Indonesians, a naked French couple, Spanish workers, marijuana, rum, the flu and even John Wayne.

There are a number of strands at play in this curiously titled novel set in postwar London in the Coronation year, 1953. The well-to-do Mrs Harriet Wallis, convicted of the murder of her husband, Cecil, becomes the second-last woman in England to be hanged. The last woman to be executed for murder in England was Ruth Ellis, about whom Mike Newell made the film Dance with a Stranger (1985), with Miranda Richardson as Ellis.

Lost children appear (or disappear) everywhere in literature and film: in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) and Clint Eastwood’s Changeling (2008). Wendy James’s new novel, Where Have You Been?, concerns a lost teenager, and Carmel Bird’s Child of the Twilight (which I reviewed in last month’s ABR) explores the mythic status of the lost child. However, Stephen Orr’s novel Time’s Long Ruin goes to the harrowing core of one of the most disturbing mysteries in twentieth-century Australia – the disappearance of the Beaumont children.