Fiction

After abandoning its ideals, the Australian Labor Party ‘degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power’: that was the diagnosis of Vere Gordon Childe, the polymathic party insider, and he was writing in 1923. The brutality of Labor machine politics is hardly news, but it remains relatively unexplored territory in Australian fiction. Matthew Karpin’s latest novel gives us the blackest of the factional black hats – the right – doing deals and scheming schemes in an imaginary New South Wales state government during the mid 1990s. Satire is the usual Australian response to the venality of those who govern us, but Karpin’s approach, by contrast, is intensely serious, as he presents the inner lives and inner demons of a large cast of parliamentarians and apparatchiks. In that respect, The Right is as much a psychological novel as it is a political one.

In an intriguing coincidence, three recent novels by notable male writers feature central characters who, former members of world-famous rock bands, ruminate on the mess they made of the past. The notion of faded rock stars clearly provides much scope for exploring issues of male ego, sexuality and mid-life crisis. Unlike Nick Hornby (Juliet Naked) and Nick Earls (The Story of Butterfish), Steven Lang is no ‘lad-lit’ writer, though he does delve into similar thematic territory in his second novel, 88 Lines About 44 Women.

Eighteen years ago, Gerald Murnane gave up writing fiction. At least, that is what the unnamed narrator of Barley Patch says happened to him in this new work of fiction, the first to be published by Murnane in fourteen years. It is tempting to think that this book might offer some kind of insight into what led to this hiatus in Murnane’s career. After all, if Murnane is Australia’s most innovative writer of fiction, as the book’s blurb tells us, this period of silence is an absence that should interest careful readers.

Although Fourth Estate heralds this as Gary Crew’s first adult novel, readers who have followed his long career as a celebrated writer for young people will be aware that several of his Young Adult novels could be classified as ‘crossovers’. What defines them as such is the age and experience of their narrators: Kimmy of Angel’s Gate (1993) may be ten years old, but the story is told fifteen years later by an adult, Kim. Similarly, the teenage Sarah’s evidence indicts Mama Pratchett, but she relates the story of Mama’s Babies (1998) many years after the trial. Retrospective narration allows Crew to transcend the limitations of a youthful viewpoint and to look back upon events with mature wisdom, a technique he again employs in The Children’s Writer.

Jacob Rosenberg completed the manuscript of The Hollow Tree shortly before his death in October 2008. Born in Lodz in 1922, he lived there until he was deported to Auschwitz, where he lost his entire immediate family. He was later a prisoner in the Woflsburg and Ebensee concentration camps. In 1948 he and his wife, Esther, emigrated to Australia, where they raised a family and built a successful clothing business.

Having disposed of World War I in a couple of brief chapters, our shell-shocked soldiers wonder what to do next. During the war, sinister balloons carrying out surveillance had hovered over the trenches. This now gives Axel Glover and Edward Llewellyn an idea. They have become mates in an understated English way, never making eye contact.

‘The first time I saw Axel Glover he was standing stark naked in a wide shaft of sunlight,’ begins the novel, which is written in the largely monologic voice of a diary or memoir. It records the lives of these two ‘very deep friends’ who, having survived the war together, commit to the somewhat eccentric adventure of ballooning to ‘New Albion’, in the Western Pacific of the imagination.

In eleven-year-old Grace’s world, the ‘saved’ number 11,423 people. Four of those are part of her immediate family; her twin brothers, her mother, and her father, who encourages his daughter’s inquisitive nature and who ‘probably has more interesting thoughts than any other home lighting warehouse manager in Australia’.

Hilda, a seventeen-year-old living in Los Angeles, is obsessed with dead celebrities. She and her friend Benji collect remnants from sites of tragedy or scandal – bricks, tiles, photographs of bloodstains – material suggestive of the enigmatic past. This ‘trivia’ deadens the things Hilda would rather not think about, including the death of her own parents. Hilda befriends an old man named Hank, who harbours his own dark secret and has met celebrities in his job as a Hollywood pool cleaner. Later in the story, a screenwriter named Jake feels like a conflict-creating device or distraction.

Gerald’s murdered great-aunt has left him her entire fortune of £20 billion, and an envelope full of clues. Instead of enjoying a trip to the snow in Australia, thirteen-year-old Gerald finds himself heading to London on a private jet with his parents to attend her funeral. Meanwhile, the world’s most valuable diamond has been stolen, rather comically, from the British Museum, and no one can figure out how. With the help of two new friends, Sam and Ruby, Gerald must solve this double whodunit.

Every book implicitly asks its reader a question: What am I? Sometimes this is an easy question to answer, but at other times, as with Andrew McGahan’s new novel, one must reply, ‘I have no idea; I’ve never seen anything like you before.’

The setting of Wonders of a Godless World is an old hospital housing the mad. Somehow the old-fashioned notion of ‘madness’ suits this story; it’s the word McGahan uses most often to describe the patients, and there is more than a whiff about this isolated hospital of the medieval Narrenschiff – the Ship of Fools. The hospital is under a volcano on a tropical island with a harbour city. We are not told the names of any of these places, and, like everything and everyone else in this book, its heroine also has no name; rather, she is identified, as are all the other characters, by her defining characteristic, and is thus exclusively referred to as ‘the orphan’. Other key characters are identified by their roles in a mundanely realistic way: the police captain, the old doctor, the night nurse. Still others have labels more redolent of fairytale and myth: the duke, the witch, the archangel, the virgin. And then there is the mastermind and perhaps the villain of the piece: the foreigner. As far as archetypal characters and symbolic settings are concerned, this book contains an embarrassment of riches, and the fact that none of them is individually identified or named means that all kinds of significance can be projected onto them.