Anson Cameron’s Lies I Told about a Girl may not bend the public record enough to qualify as ‘alternate history’, but it does take off from an intriguing speculative premise. What if the young Prince of Wales, sent ‘down under’ for a term at an exclusive boarding school deep in Victorian logging country, had arrived in 1975, the year of the Dismissal? And what if the prince – known here as Harold Romsey, or YR (‘Your Royal’) – had become romantically involved with a fellow student who happened to be the daughter of the federal opposition leader?
Erich, a sixteen-year-old German, narrates the adventurously plotted The Dolphin People, by first-time novelist Torsten Krol. Wishing to escape the aftermath of World War II, Erich, his younger, effeminate brother, Zeppi, mother and Uncle Klaus (soon to become his stepfather) crash their plane over the Amazon. A primitive tribe called the Yayomi discovers them and takes them for rare dolphins. Their status as such earns them respect, and they have little option but to exploit it in order to settle into Yayomi life.
There is every reason to admire this novel’s intent, but with the best will in the world I couldn’t recommend the result. Linda Jaivin’s current affairs comedy about the Villawood Detention Centre is so conscious of its pedagogic goals that it fails to offer a decent story. And it’s not funny. Believe me, I wanted to like it. Jaivin is a terrific writer with an enviable range, capable of the witty, surrealist smut of Eat Me (1995) and the kind of nuanced cross-cultural analysis that underpinned The Monkey and the Dragon (2001), her undervalued biography of Chinese rock’n’roll dissident Hou Dejian.
Steven Lang has a fine sense of the Australian vernacular and creates believable characters. This novel forges a new genre (maybe it’s just new to me): the environmental thriller. Protagonist Kelvin was a street kid and rent-boy in Kings Cross. Now twenty-one and beautiful, he fetches up, after years of aimless drifting and casual work in remote locations, in his home town of Eden, which he fled eight years before. He joins the labourers setting up a commercial pine plantation after the area has been clear-felled, but then becomes involved with a group of hippies who live on a commune – ‘the farm’. Here he falls easily into a sexual relationship with Jessica, an environmental activist and writer. She is older, educated and politically sophisticated, in a way that engages Kelvin’s imagination but compels him to hide his past.
Canberra-based Dorothy Johnston is an accomplished writer who has twice been short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award. Her talent for spare, casually evocative prose and slyly complex characters shines through in this surprisingly elegant novel about a single mother who turns to prostitution to earn a living.
Berlin, 1948; the Iron Curtain has slammed shut, bisecting a city still pitted and scarred from the calamities of World War II; the Soviet blockade of Berlin and the subsequent Allied airlift are imminent. Around these tectonic moments in history and politics, first-time novelist Greg Flynn sets his thriller, The Berlin Cross.
Vernon God Little (2003) was the striking first novel everyone said it was, and seemed to promise better things to come. D.B.C. Pierre had a preternatural way with language, even if it wasn’t always under his control. You could tolerate the sophomoric and tritely executed satire (America is full of fat, stupid, venal people; America is just a great big television show), as it seemed the flawed trying-out of someone who hadn’t found his way to the things he really wanted to write about.
These are both second novels by previously successful authors. Each has an atmospheric sense of place and a dominant female figure. In Beyond the Break, it is the flamboyant and dangerous Irene. In Out of Place, the matriarch Eve, a postwar Italian migrant, keeps her family together through her insistence upon the traditions and the healing rituals of the old world, including especially the cooking.
There is a scene in Kate Lyons’s The Corner of Your Eye in which the narrator, Lucy, watches her daughter, Flo, being comforted over the death of a bird by their kind but bumbling friend, Archie. As Archie soothes Flo, hugging her and talking to her about what they will do next, Lucy stands apart, not knowing how to act. She feels negligent and guilty: ‘I felt like a pretend mother,’ she says. ‘A bloodless cut out.’
For a while it seemed that the reign of the saga novel, a form once so vital for narrating and propagandising the Australian past, was over. The pugnacious Xavier Herbert was now a wandering shade; Colleen McCullough had removed herself to Norfolk Island; Eleanor Dark and ‘M. Barnard Eldershaw’ belonged to a literary history known to too few. The saga had ceded its cultural place to the television miniseries. That summation held until very recently. Billy’s Tree, Nicholas Kyriacos’s first novel (a creative component of a Doctorate of Creative Arts, although it appears too unguarded to have come from that treadmill), bravely seeks to reinstate not only the saga form but its language and its valuation of what ought to matter to Australians who are alert to the burdens of their history.
