Fiction

This volume of Southerly, combining the first two issues for 2007, is a celebration of Elizabeth Webby’s contribution to Australian literature. Noel Rowe and Bernadette Brennan, the editors principally responsible for this issue, describe it as ‘a tribute to a brilliant career’. There are contributions from academic colleagues, generations of poets and writers of short fiction, and a number of ex-students, many of whom ‘have gone on to distinguished academic careers’.

Childhood, Freud taught, becomes us, but our earliest memories can be sly; they resist us when we seek them, and pounce when we are unprepared. It is thus only by chance that Proust comes upon his first recollections, those idyllic scenes revived in long wafts of hawthorn-scented nostalgia. The legacy of childhood and its fickle reminiscence has always been prominent in Charlotte Wood’s work. In The Children, childhood is remembered as a grim affair, something the three siblings at its centre would rather leave behind. Yet much of this novel hinges on the idea that childhood is something we never escape: old memories involuntarily impinge upon us, and the self that defined us as children, the book suggests, constitutes us throughout our lives.

Graham Swift’s fine novel Last Orders (1996) is propelled by the motif of a group of middle-aged men, with a shared past, brought together again by a single goal. In their case, it is the matter of casting the ashes of a dead friend into the sea. The narrative dips into the characters’ past to acquaint us with the nature of the ties that bind – have bound – them to each other and to the dead man.

Graeme Kinross-Smith, the author of Long Afternoon of the World, is a prolific writer, perhaps best known for his poetry – and it shows. This narrative is infused with the poetry of landscape and the joy of music: ‘Down the rooms of the past I hear music ... Music informs landscapes, the patient streets, the city’s lights spreading across the hills.’ The world of Tim Menzies comes alive on the page, and it is quintessentially Victorian. He recalls the Melbourne of his childhood, ‘shop and vacant block, rare beach, street games, lumbering planes in the sky that sound like the War’; present-day Melbourne, ‘its relentless, tired, opportunist rhythm’, and the family farms in the Mallee and the Wimmera. Most of all, Tim’s mind lingers on the wild coast of western Victoria, where he meditates and writes in an old church. The seascapes, as well as the notion of the healing power of the sea, account for some of the most lyrical passages in Long Afternoon.

In 1880, Turgenev visited Tolstoy at his country estate after a long period of estrangement, only to discover that the great novelist had, in the interim, renounced art in favour of ethical enquiry. Turgenev was appalled, and dashed off a letter complaining that ...

It is a treat to see ten of Laurie Clancy’s short stories collected in this volume, his third. Given their quality, it is not surprising that seven of them have already been published in magazines and anthologies. But to read them together is to see their interdependence, their thematic patterns. All deal with male experience, beginning with that of the fourteen-year-old Leo, on the brink of sexual knowledge; and moving on to stories of middle-aged men contemplating the emptiness of their lives. The collection concludes with two stories about death, one from cancer, one from AIDS.

Once upon a time, identifying a good picture book was simple: it had bright-coloured illustrations, an easy-to-read text, and it dealt with things relevant to a child’s life. While these elements are still important, the genre has developed to such an extent that simplicity is no longer the prime criterion. As some recent titles show, picture books can cover a multitude of styles and themes; however, whatever their subject, the overriding criteria should always be artistic and literary excellence, and an ability to touch the reader.

Rhyll McMaster established her considerable reputation as a poet in the 1970s and 1980s.  Feather Man is her début novel. In a first-person narrative, the protagonist recounts her life story from the time when she was a child living in suburban Brisbane in the 1950s until her emergence as a painter in London in the 1970s. It is a Kunstleroman divided into four parts, each named for a significant male character who shapes her relationship to art. The narrator’s name is withheld until near the end, when we learn that, somewhat ambiguously, her classically educated father named her ‘Lyce’, from Horace’s Odes on Love.

When Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française was first published in France in 2004, it created extraordinary interest for at least three reasons. Firstly, there was the story of the survival of the manuscript, preserved in an unopened suitcase for almost sixty years by Némirovsky’s daughters, Elisabeth and Denise, who had assumed that the papers in their possession were personal notes that would be too painful for them to read. Secondly, there was the documentation, provided in Myriam Anissimov’s preface and in a rich appendix, about Némirovsky’s life as an identified foreign Jew under Nazi occupation. Arrested in July 1942, interned in the Pithiviers camp, and deported almost immediately to Auschwitz, she died barely a month after her arrest, even as her husband and friends, ignorant of her fate, tried frenetically to save her. Finally, there was the novel itself, or rather, the two completed sections of what was intended to be a five-part epic narrative: a brilliantly rendered fresco of the French collapse in 1940 and the first years of German occupation, which earned Némirovsky, posthumously, the unparalleled honour of the prestigious Renaudot prize. With the English translation of the novel in 2006, she became an international celebrity. A Némirovsky biography, therefore, could hardly be more timely.

Aphelion can be called a family epic in that it is long and has many characters. The title of the novel refers to the sun; a character explains that ‘there is a point in astronomy when a planet is at its furthest point from the sun, the slowest point in its orbit. It’s called aphelion. I guess it’s the darkest point.’ In this, her second novel, Emily Ballou uses overlapping and intersecting voices. Six characters – five of them female – contribute to the novel’s complex chorus of memory and reflection over time.