Fiction

Sucked In, the sixth instalment in Shane Maloney’s Murray Whelan series, is just what fans will be hoping for – a fast-paced mystery (with the obligatory dose of political wheeling and dealing) that never lets blackmail, violence or possible murder stand in the way of a laugh.

If the role of myth is to elaborate an unbearable truth so frequently and variously that its burden is made bearable, it is no wonder that the story of Orpheus and Eurydice exists in a multitude of retellings and a plethora of different versions on canvas, screen, stage and disc. Most of these remain faithful to its romantic-tragic paradigm: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy does not get her back. Consumers of this myth of inexhaustible mystery willingly relive, time and time again, the magnetic pull of fathomless love and the black hole of inconsolable loss. 

Inspector Anders, the one-legged anti-terrorist expert, is back. In Marshall Browne’s new novel, he returns to Italy after being sent to the safety of a Europol desk, away from the southern Italian mafia, who had sworn, and attempted, to kill him. Outspoken right-wing politicians are being murdered, and all the signs point to serial killings with deep-seated motives.

Britain’s Prospect magazine recently canvassed a number of leading thinkers on the question of what, in coming decades, would replace the great twentieth-century schism between left and right. In an overwhelmingly pessimistic field, the contribution of Pakistani scientist Pervez Hoodbhoy stood out in its cold-blooded concision. ‘Global and national politics will turn simple and Hobbesian,’ he predicted. ‘In the interim, energy hunger will drive the US and European countries to squeeze out, and steal, the last drops of oil from under Muslim sands. As bridges between Islam and the west collapse, expect global civil war and triumphant neo-Talibanic movements circling the globe.’

A young Kenyan-born white man called Jason Conway has a revolutionary idea: he will save the African elephant from extinction by transporting the animal to the sparsely inhabited Kimberley region in Australia. Sounds far-fetched? In fact this idea, which forms the basis of Ivory to Australia, is less implausible than some of the action that surrounds Jason’s attempt to fulfil his wild scheme. Early in the novel, Jason foils an attempted robbery in a Nairobi restaurant by disarming and shooting one of the gunmen, only to go home to bed wondering if he should sneak in next door and conquer his one-time girlfriend, Jane. The action doesn’t stop there, as Jason, full of idealism, battles against Somali Shifta poachers and sceptical politicians in order to get his beloved elephants safely onto Australian shores.

In September 1943, seventeen commandos of Z Special Force, led by Lieutenant Commander Ivan Lyon, attacked and sank with limpet mines seven ships in the Singapore harbour. A year later, in October 1944, when the Pacific War had only months to run, a repeat performance failed and all those involved were ...

It is surely impossible to read a new work of Australian historical fiction without doing so through the lens of Inga Clendinnen’s much-discussed essay The History Question (2006). One of Clendinnen’s arguments is against claims for the superiority of fiction over history because the former brings the past to life through imaginative empathy, allowing readers to ‘get inside the experience’, while history is merely a desiccated ‘world of facts’. Clendinnen also sets out the differences she sees between fiction and history, which are standing on either side of a ‘ravine’. In her response to correspondence in the following Quarterly Essay, she expressed her position concisely: ‘Fiction carries us deeply, effortlessly into imagined individual subjectivities. History is the sustained attempt to penetrate the minds and experiences of actual others.’

In this tongue-in-cheek version of world history, Jesus Christ was originally baby Warren, until a celebrity representative came knocking at the manger door to help spin Mary’s unlikely tale of immaculate conception. Jonathan Biggins has examined world events from an Australian perspective, from the dawn of time, when God beat out Satan as chairgod in a narrow recount, to the reign of the pioneering environmentalist Robin Hood, to a rather subdued meeting of the Millenium Doomsday Cult. Through the imposition of modern bureaucracy onto historical events, As It Were lambastes the red tape and political correctness that stifle modern society. We discover that the works of Dickens do not translate well to adaptation by magical lantern, since there are not enough prospects for sequels; Monet is blighted by the cost of absinthe, as the tax auditor refuses to allow it as a tool of trade, and the first run of Kitty Hawk is delayed while the Wright Brothers apply to occupy limited airspace.

A number of books have been published of late that theorise the function of literature in contemporary society (a trend indicative of an anxiety about literature in public culture, which is itself worth speculating on). In Why We Read Fiction: Theory of the Mind and the Novel (2006), Lisa Zunshine argues that reading provides us with cognitive practice for our lives as social beings, in which we are called upon to interact with and interpret others. Characterisation, then, would seem to be an important component of the appeal and function of a text. Henry James recognised the importance of character to narrative long ago. In his famous essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’, he asked: ‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?’