Fiction

The mystique of the Roman Catholic Church has been thoroughly exploited by the likes of Dan Brown and writers of the medieval monastic murder mysteries that gained a certain popularity following the English publication of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose in 1983. Carmel Bird’s latest book contains a mystery, though not a murder. It is set mostly in 2001, but monks, convents, rosaries, black madonnas, and miracles fill the pages of The Child of Twilight, along with artificial insemination and air travel.

Sydney Peony Kent, the narrator, is the product of assisted reproductive technology, both of her genetic forbears being anonymous donors; her parents, habitually and oddly bundled together as ‘Avila/Barnaby’, are infertile. Sydney has a couple of imaginary friends, a Mexican nanny, and a collection of snow globes containing black virgins. And she writes novels.

Suspenseful, heartrending, and transcontinental, Come Back to Me’s dynamic scenes extend from debauchery at an office part to a shocking outback crime. A complex psychological tale, Sara Foster’s début novel – forged from her years as an editor and a life lived in Britain and Australia – throws us head first into marital distress.

Keeping Faith, Roger Averill’s first novel after his non-fiction debut, Boy He Cry: An island Odyssey (2009), is a quiet and resonant piece of work. Befitting a novel set partly in a labour ward and beginning with a description of a stillborn baby, it proceeds with the knowledge that finding the right words can be difficult. It speaks carefully and tactfully, in a spare language of great focus.

Peter Goldsworthy justly commands a seat at the big table of the Australian hall of literary achievement. This was underlined on Australia Day with his gonging as a Member of the Order of Australia for service as an author and poet. It is a prize that should glitter comfortably on the mantelpiece alongside the likes of his South Australian Premier’s Award, his Commonwealth Poetry Prize, his Bicentennial Literary Prize for Poetry, and his FAW Christina Stead Award for fiction.

For someone who has practised half-time as a writer and half-time as a GP for the past thirty-five years, his output is admirably prolific: eight novels, including one co-written with Brian Matthews, five collections of short stories, half a dozen poetry collections, two novels adapted as plays, two opera libretti, and a spot of essayistic Navel Gazing (1998). He has also done time on literature’s administrative front line, his committee stints including four and a half years as chairman of the Australia Council’s Literature Board. All of which mark him out as a littérateur of the first order.

Shira Nayman’s first novel is full of echoes and resonances. There may even be an echo of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader. Set at more or less the same time, The Listener has the same immediate backdrop: World War II, its atrocities and aftermath.

Two years after the end of the war, Dr Henry Harrison – the narrator and listener of the piece – encounters a man who will become his most memorable case. Dr Harrison is the director and chief psychiatrist of Shadowlands, a private mental hospital located at White Plains, not far from New York. The exclusive institution is grand, more of a country club than an asylum, with beautiful buildings, extensive woods and formal gardens. Inmates, though voluntarily committed, are known as ‘patients’, not the more egalitarian ‘clients’ or euphemistic ‘guests’ of the present day. Many of them are suffering from war neurosis, a condition that Dr Harrison has been treating for many years. During the war he was required to treat mentally disturbed or shell-shocked officers and to send them back, supposedly cured, to the front. This was to ‘staunch the wastage’, according to the army. Over time he has come to doubt the efficacy of this treatment. By researching complex cases such as that of Bertram Reiner, he seeks to refine his methods.

It is surprising how many people seem to think that reviewers read only the first and last chapters of books to which they will devote several hundred words of critique. They look sceptical when informed that critics read every word of, and often go beyond, the featured book, searching out earlier works by the same author or books on the same subject by other writers. Thea Welsh being previously unknown to me, I have now read one of her earlier novels, and a memoir, but not her prize-winning first novel, The Story of the Year 1912 in the Village of Elza Darzins (1990).

The memoir, The Cat Who Looked at the Sky: A memoir (2003), was about ‘three cats, two households and the great truths of life’, according to the blurb. It does not appear to have much in common with Welsh’s new novel, The President’s Wife: Welcome Back (1995), however, was very relevant. Briefly, the novel is about Janey, an upwardly mobile Sydney woman who harnesses fierce ambition to more than one stroke of luck in her pursuit of a cherished goal. This is to become president of the charity committee that puts on Sydney’s social event of the year, the élite and glamorous Goldfish Ball. Although Janey is considered ‘too young’ and inexperienced, she is nevertheless successful. Her apotheosis occurs on the night to which all her efforts have been bent: seated on an elevated ‘throne-like chair’, she is ‘happily aware that she looked quite imperial in her emerald-and-pearl necklace and her green taffeta evening-gown’.

A good detective series depends on the author’s ability to devise canny plots with attendant clues and blind alleys, but of greater importance is the central detective who acts as a charismatic guide through the miasma of murder and mystery. There are many compelling detectives in crime fiction: think of Inspector Maigret, Hercule Poirot, Adam Dalgliesh, Kay Scarpetta and Stephanie Plum. However, with the exception of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, and, more recently, Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, memorable couples are rare in the sleuthing game.

Cath Keneally’s second novel, Jetty Road, is set in the beachside suburb of Glenelg, South Australia. Her subject is the relationship between two sisters in early middle age, and the narrative is fabricated from the daily happenings of their lives. Evie, the older sister by several years, has no children and ekes out a living in a number of part-time jobs as a child-care worker. Paula, matron of an aged care home, has two children: Bert, aged nineteen, and Rosie, six. Neither of the sisters is married.

If you believe the hyperbole surrounding her novel – Christos Tsiolkas has pronounced it ‘masterful, poignant, powerful and true’ – Kalinda Ashton is, at thirty-one, her generation’s answer to Helen Garner: a novelist of everyday Melbourne who makes sad, daily truths pleasurable to read because her writing is so easy to consume.

In life and in literature, Peter Carey has been as attracted by the pull of the past as by realities of the present. Then there is his recurrent fascination with the two-country divide, where the lure of exile vies with the sentiment of ‘home’, and the schism between country of choice (or country that ‘chooses’ you) and country of birth means that neither is ever fully suitable.