Fiction

These are hostile times for literary fiction in Australia. New novels are well advised to don flak, not flap, jackets. And it’s not just a simple case of critics sniping from the sidelines, wanting their piece of the action. This is a full-blown civil war involving all the vested interests – publishers, editors, journalists, publicists and booksellers – not just writers and readers. The smarting adjectival arrows continue to find their targets. Current fiction is too dreamy, starchy, inconsequential, ingrown, belletristic, portentous. While our non-fiction writers have been doing time in South American jails and running the gauntlet of spy networks, our best novelists have been tending the lily-livered genres of historical fiction and fable. Many of them have been accused of skedaddling off to the library at a time when a confrontation with the forces of xenophobia, philistinism, fogeyism and greed is more than ever required. Novel-writing, in a word (and it’s one that has been flung around with a degree of passion recently), has become ‘gutless’ storytelling.

Slow Man begins with an accident. Paul Rayment is cycling along an Adelaide street when he is struck by a car. When he emerges from a daze of doctors and painkillers, he discovers his life has been transformed by this random event. His crushed leg is amputated above the knee. From now on, he will ...

With broadly similar subjects – Australians in South-East Asia – and related themes that touch on culture shock and existential angst, you could be forgiven for thinking that Noble Sindhu Horses and 98% Pure might have something in common. But these two first novels are a lesson in the difference that self-control and sensitivity on the part of the writer, and good judgment on the part of the editor, can make. To draw on the Asian motif for a moment, Noble Sindhu Horses is a delicate Asian broth, restrained and subtly flavoured, while 98% Pure is street-vendor chop suey – a bit of a mess and not so good for your health.

Of all places on earth, Pitcairn Island must surely have the strangest history. Everyone knows about the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789 (not a bad year for uprisings) and about the settlement founded by the mutineers and their Tahitian consorts on this remote Pacific island. Now Peter Corris has created a fiction based on a distant family connection between Fletcher Christian and Corris himself, through his Manx ancestry.

The Young Adult ‘issue novel’ is a difficult thing to do well. To write one that rises above the mediocre requires a careful avoidance of both sentimentality and sensationalism, and the better books succeed by either tackling an unusual or topical issue, or by looking at a situation from a novel angle. These two books – though covering very different terrain – are good examples.

The Vogel Prize shares a reputation with the rest of the company’s products: nutritious, worthy, a little dull. But the prize’s earnest image is unfair. Any glance at the roll-call of winners over the last twenty-five years would show that the makers of soggy bread and soya cereals have done more than anyone to introduce fresh literary DNA into Australia’s tiny gene pool of published novelists. But reviewers, mostly, and the public, generally, don’t get excited when the new Vogel is published. This year they should. Julienne van Loon’s desperate joyride, Road Story, is the best Vogel winner to come along since 1990, when Gillian Mears’s The Mint Lawn, equally confident but very different, won first place.

A friend called me from Beijing recently to ask advice about her novel. She had played a prominent part in the avant-garde art movement associated with the protests at Tiananmen in 1989, and had achieved notoriety in both art and life. Fifteen years on, she wanted to give her own account of events, choosing the form of a roman-à-clef that would be published first in English. But now the Hong Kong agent helping to prepare her text wanted changes to enhance its appeal to foreign publishers. The agent wanted to tart it up, and my friend was unhappy.

Some generals in Australia’s ‘culture wars’ have appointed themselves defenders of a mythical identity against the incursions of multiculturalists and ‘black armbanders’. Literary skirmishes over national identity have been more mundane, concerning mainly eligibility for awards. Certainly, three recent crime novels suggest that Australian writing benefits from adoption of a broad definition. That these three novels vary widely in plot, setting, characterisation and style is understandable given the authors’ disparate backgrounds.

The Singing is the inaugural publication in the Varuna Firsts series, a collaboration between the Varuna Writers’ House and Brandl & Schlesinger. Both should be applauded for bringing a distinctive new voice into Australian writing; not to mention the honour due to the prodigious talent of Stephanie Bishop herself. Bishop has written a haunting novel with a seemingly simple story: love gone awry. A woman runs into an ex-lover on the street (neither protagonist is named), and this meeting throws her back into the story of their past. The two narratives – her solitary life now and the tale, mainly, of the relationship’s end – run in parallel. The novel’s energy, however, is ruminative rather than linear, circling around the nature of their love, pressing at the bruises left by its collapse.

Kate Grenville is a brave woman. For some years now, the representation of Aboriginal people by white writers has been hedged about by a thicket of post­colonial anxieties, profoundly problematic and important but too often manifested as hostile, holier-than-thou critique, indulging, at its most inept ..