Fiction

What can we make of the fact that, of the forty-seven stories selected by Robert Drewe for this year’s The Best Australian Stories collection, thirty-three are written in the first person? The influence of Creative Writing classes has to figure in any stab at an answer. It would be interesting to do the rounds of the universities to discover whether the teachers of such courses actively encourage the use of ‘I’, or if it happens obliquely, resulting from the way that writing exercises are structured. One wonders, too, if that old saw, ‘write what you know’, is discussed in the first week of these courses, and if such a practice contributes to the writer’s feeling more comfortable and secure when deploying the first person.

Rock’n’roll romanticism can stand in for many things: the sense of lost authenticity, lost freedom, lost youth, the good old days before music was composed by machines and performed by underwear models and all the pubs were turned into gambling venues. The passion, the music, the soul: Venero Armanno’s new novel is about all that, though one of its main faults is that it is always telling you what it is about rather than making you feel it. It is not primarily self-congratulatory – Armanno makes fun of rock wannabes always on the verge of failure – but that note is never far off, and the book still seems to be trying to write its own blurb.

Ocean Road ruminates on the abrupt demise of a marriage. Narrated by the only child of the union, the account is detailed and poignant. Toby, now a young adult, attempts to settle his parents’ competing claims to his allegiance, and finds himself drawn into the world of their past. Striving to represent his parents impartially, he realises that much of their story is also his. The few years since the collapse of the marriage have brought Toby independence as well as the chance, if not the need, to revisit the events that propelled him into adulthood.

Andrew Hutchinson’s Rohypnol, which won the 2006 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript, follows a self-professed adolescent ‘monster’ as he dabbles in drugs, crime and violence while peddling ‘The New Punk’ philosophy. The pharmaceutical drug of the title is used by the narrator and his ‘rape squad’ to sedate and assault women.

This marvellous first novel may be historical fiction, but its themes and concerns are by no means limited to the past. Sara Knox interweaves questions of gender and identity, sexuality, class and the overarching issue of morality in times of war.

There has been talk recently about the loss of regionalism in Australian literature and culture, and about the decline of Australian literature generally, but these two novels suggest that not only is Australian fiction flourishing but it is finding new ways to engage with the cultures of the region. They represent innovative interactions between Australia and Asia, for a popular audience.

Creative Writing courses – those ostensible hothouses of creative ferment whose methods and very existence have been so heatedly debated in these pages and elsewhere – often appear to those of us on the outside as the breeding ground for several subspecies of writer. On the one hand, there are the determinedly postmodernist, whose highly ironic and heavily footnoted metafiction is, on average, about fifty per cent less clever than they like to think it is. On the other, there are the magic realists and wannabe lyricists, whose lilting, pastel-coloured prose seems more at home in the pages of a teenager’s personal diary than it does in those of a serious anthology. Then there are the plain-speaking reporter types, who should probably be doing journalism but, for one reason or another, have chosen Creative Writing instead.

Napoleon’s Double, by Antoni Jach, is another in the series of fictions inspired by the larger-than-life figure of Napoleon Bonaparte. It would be wrong, however, to think that this is an historical novel about Napoleon the man. The operative word in the title is the word ‘double’, and the imaginative writing in the novel ‘doubles’ history, illuminating it. Doubles abound in the work: of the characters, but also of central themes and meanings.