Fiction

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.

Dreamland is the first foray into crime fiction of British-born writer Tom Gilling. His earlier novels, The Sooterkin (2000) and Miles McGinty (2001), were historically themed. His closest brush with the world of crime was Bagman, the posthumous memoir of the corrupt Queensland cop Jack Herbert, co-authored in 2004.

Barry Oakley, in his brief introduction to Families: Modern Australian Short Stories, tells us that the quality he was seeking in the fiction was ‘vitality’. This seems a rather broad filter: surely all good writing must possess vitality if it is going to hold the reader’s attention? Notwithstanding, many of the stories here are good, even excellent.

For the inhabitants of mainland Australia, ‘history’ is often complicated by the sheer fact of geography. Instead of one central node, European colonisation expanded from multiple centres, each isolated in space and founded on differing socio-political premises over staggered periods of time, and each with populations too various in background to allow much in the way of agreement about some völkisch collective past.

It is quite extraordinary how often in this country we resort to caricature in our cultural expression. Think of the hammy acting in Australian films and television, the switches in levels of reality in Patrick White’s novels and plays, the new lead William Dobell gave to modern Australian painting or Keith Looby designs for Wagner. Peter Carey has made his fortune from it; Bill Leak has made it his trademark. And no, we won’t start on the politicians, thank you.