Fiction

Ashley Sievwright’s The Shallow End, an often entertaining début, casts a wry gaze over a steamy Melbourne summer. Narrated by an unnamed observer, the novel attempts to capture an authentically idiosyncratic gay male voice while traversing a myriad of issues, such as heartbreak, sex, media sensationalism, love, cruising and happiness. Both witty and easy to read, the novel, though largely superficial, is filled with moments of droll sagacity.

The Great Arch has considerable if unlikely charm. It is a history of the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in a novel about real and imagined people living near its construction site. Hastrich brings to life (potentially dry) detail about huge steel plates, creeping cranes, rivets and cables. We see this mostly in the writings and photographs of her central character, an Anglican vicar who records the progress of the bridge-building in his parish paper and also writes a two-volume book about it. The Reverend Ralph Anderson Cage, rector at St Christopher’s at Lavender Bay (based on a real person, Frank Cash), is an endearingly hapless yet decent man who becomes obsessed with the unfolding engineering marvel that reshapes the population and topography of his once-thriving parish.

Faced with the publication of her first novel, the narrator of Stepping Out has a terrifying thought. ‘I was about to be unmasked,’ she realises. ‘End of my double life. Everyone was about to dip into my world and find out what was really cooking there ... I felt like I’d placed a bomb and was waiting, under cover, for it to explode.’

Sonya Hartnett is one of the most various of good writers. In particular, she is good at creating atmosphere: a distinctive world for every story. As a consequence, every book she writes is a different style of book. Take some recent examples. The Ghost’s Child (2007), with its plot like a fable, reads like an old tale told in an outdated language of ‘sou’westers’ and ‘fays’. Its form, language and style are so consistent its oddity seems like part of its simplicity. In contrast, Surrender (2005), a horror story, has a style of calculated Gothic, playing narrative games to manufacture menace.

While the children’s picture book is a relatively recent literary phenomenon, most picture book authors still tap into the strong traditions of oral storytelling. Multi-award winning author Mem Fox is particularly good at this. Fox’s picture book texts are firmly grounded in the three R’s – the traditional rhythms, rhymes and repetitions found in children’s songs and verses throughout the ages. This, combined with Judy Horacek’s inspired illustrations, was what made Where is the Green Sheep? (2004) such a success.

Just as God created the earth in seven days, Simmone Howell’s Everything Beautiful rebuilds the life of sixteen-year-old Riley Rose in a week spent at a Christian summer camp.

Two years after the death of her mother, Lilith (an allusion to Adam’s first wife), atheist Riley has become the quintessential bad girl – smoking, drinking and getting arrested. On the advice of her father’s new girlfriend, Riley is sentenced to a seven-day stint at the Spirit Ranch holiday camp, with nothing but a new hairstyle, a copy of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and, courtesy of her best friend, a bus ticket home.

In 2006, forty years after the publication of his first novel, Rappaport, which featured the comic misadventures of a Melbourne Jewish antique dealer, Morris Lurie was awarded the Patrick White Award. He is one of those remarkably durable Australian writers who have extended their careers into a fifth decade. Principally known as a short story writer, published widely in Australia, but also in the New Yorker, Punch and, appropriately, the Transatlantic Review, Lurie’s latest work is his first book of fiction since Seventeen Versions of Jewishness: Twenty Examples in 2001. From Hybrid Publications, To Light Attained is, in its formal essence and central moral issue, a novella, and a fine one.

Bright comedians quickly learn that to explain a joke is to deprive it of its humour. If the gag doesn’t make an audience laugh without a laboured punchline, a good performer will swiftly modify her delivery for greater effect.

In his début novel, Street Furniture (2004), Matt Howard displayed a certain droll, youthful touch that endeared him to readers and critics alike. Taking Off sees him continuing in the same vein, taking another twenty-something protagonist and pushing him into unfamiliar territory, to clever effect.