Fiction

First novels should be the hardest to write but, among writers, second novels have won that reputation. Second-novel syndrome can be identified by: obsessional mourning for the cocoon of anonymity; consuming self-doubt; chronic false starts; acute self-consciousness; the need for constant reassurance; and a low-level frustration brought on by mandatory participation in literary festivals.

Gerard Windsor has worn various literary hats – as reviewer, biographer and literary commentator – and in one of them does he shrink from controversy. Indeed, this provocative identity is mentioned as a matter of pride in various publicity blurbs. The history of his old school that he was commissioned to write was deemed too negative and was never printed, and he has come under fire for views expressed at both Adelaide and Sydney writers’ festivals. So it was unsurprising that with his latest novel, he has also chosen a controversial subject matter: the sexual life of a Catholic priest.

I remember trying a few years ago to communicate to a younger friend something of the way I remember my childhood in Adelaide in the 1970s. It was a world in which an older Australia still lingered, a quiet, suburban world where men caught the tram to work at 8.15a.m. and came home at five, where the banks closed at four p.m., and where World War II veterans and their wives lived around us. In 2004 that world – somnolent, conservative, oddly outside time – seems almost unimaginable; even then, it was almost gone. Instead, it inhabits that hinterland between memory and nostalgia, lingering for me in the textures of the things and places which gave it shape, textures that are hopelessly entangled in the possibilities, pleasures and disappointments of childhood.

There is often a speculative dimension to Rodney Hall’s fiction. Throughout his long career, he has tended to build his novels around alternative histories or unusual possibilities. Past works have imagined scenarios as diverse as Adolf Hitler arriving on the south coast of New South Wales and (where does he get his ideas?) Australia becoming a republic. The Last Love Story is in some respects unrepresentative of Hall’s vivid and expansive body of work. Compared to some of his earlier novels, it is concise and the natural flamboyance of his writing seems a little subdued. The novel does, however, develop from a typically interesting ‘what if?’

Philip Salom’s poetry has won many awards since his first collection, The Silent Piano, was published in 1980. His poems range widely and have often included fantastical elements, most notably in Sky Poems (1987). The opening of Sky Poems enjoins the reader to ‘Throw out the world’s laws’, promising: ‘Anything you wish, possibly more!’ Such poetry seems to proceed from the assumption that fiction can, after all, be stranger than truth. And, despite its variousness, Salom’s work often returns to certain kinds of strangeness.

His second book, The Projectionist (1983), is a kind of proto-novel constructed as a collection of poetry. It is impossible to summarise this book neatly, but it foregrounds the sensibility of a character called Mr Benchley, a retired film projectionist whose ‘reality’ is partly filmic. In this work, Salom investigates the elusiveness of human experience and reflects on how experience may be represented suggestively through audiovisual technology. He writes in one poem, ‘This playback of life’s feeding / every thread of the rough cocoon’ – the ‘cocoon’, among other things, being the self-reflexive activity of a lonely life.

Playback (1991) became the title of Salom’s first novel, recently reissued. The main protagonist is a male oral historian and folklorist living as a visitor in a country town. At the core of Playback is a mystery centred on a possible, and unsolved, crime, along with the erotic charge of an adulterous relationship between the oral historian and an artist. The novel progresses by counterpointing the past – captured in a growing, if precarious, store of taped oral histories – with the historian’s evolving and increasingly destabilised present. The dynamic is fairly merciless. Various forms of disintegration occur; the novel’s conclusion answers some key questions but leaves others unresolved. In both The Projectionist and Playback, people are shown never to be free of their pasts, even though they remember their lives poorly. They are depicted as often creating themselves and their fantasies on the ground of their own forgetting.

Zeitgeist or coincidence? Spinifex and Macmillan have both just published novels with middle-aged women centre stage. In marketing terms, they have launched a niche product, targeting the middle-aged female consumer. Poppy’s Return, by New Zealand author Pat Rosier, and West Australian Liz Byrski’s Gang of Four boldly foreground women’s midlife issues. Their protagonists bravely confront the multiple challenges of their own ageing, in addition to the care of elderly relatives.

Leo Tolstoy and Georgia Blain share an understanding: ‘Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ In each of her four novels, Blain has written about families in various states of unhappiness. Her first novel, Closed for Winter (1998), was the story of Elise, an ‘unobtrusive and unnoticeable’ twenty-eight-year-old, struggling to come to terms with the unresolved disappearance of her sister twenty years earlier, hindered by her pompous partner and her deranged mother. Candelo (1999) was the tale of the more outgoing, but no less unhappy, Ursula, whose story is heavy with the connections between a recent suicide, memories of her dead sister and the ongoing depression of her brother. The Blind Eye (2001) was narrated by Daniel, a morose healer, who is haunted by the consequences of his own deceptions and the memory of a tortured patient from a wealthy, detached family. And Blain’s new novel, Names for Nothingness, is the story of Sharn, Liam and Caitlin, an unhappy family battling with issues that are both everyday and overwhelming.

When faced with a new dictionary of quotations, I always test drive the section on heaven first.

This is despite the fact that the section on hell is generally longer and more engaging. My habit is a bit like reading travel porn about the ultimate destination. It’s also a good way to acquire wisdom without much effort as I wait for some kind soul to come to my rescue and publish Wisdom for Dummies, the next volume in that useful series which is still marred by some notable gaps. Parents will look in vain for Soothers for Dummies, and shopfitters won’t find Mannequins for Dummies.

According to some bright spark at HarperCollins, Tears of the Maasai is ‘a novel as big as Africa’, while Far Horizon, in the words of a creative Pan Macmillan employee, is apparently ‘driven by an emotion stronger than love, lust or fear: Revenge’. After such fanfare, what can the reader expect? Well, the usual ingredients of putative blockbusters set in Africa (and here I mean southern Africa): a nicely digestible Manichean view of the world, unredeemable villains, brawny, good-hearted heroes, feisty, long-legged heroines and plenty of fearsome wild animals. Rider Haggard forged the tradition in 1886 with the hugely popular King Solomon’s Mines, and Stuart Cloete and Wilbur Smith, among others, have also made good use of the exotic and seemingly anarchic qualities of Africa’s people, fauna and flora. One memorable scene in a Cloete novel featured an enraged buffalo licking the skin and flesh off the lower leg of a hapless man stuck not quite high enough in a tree. Where else but in Africa could you find such abundant and exquisite contrasts of harshness and beauty along with legends of buried treasure and the possibilities of antediluvian experience? It was perhaps, in Haggard’s day, an ur-land, where clichés sprouted and were happily swallowed by a goggle-eyed imperial audience back home.

Novel, autobiography, memoir? I imagine poet and editor Manfred Jurgensen dealing impatiently with the question – does categorisation matter? Aren’t books to be judged by intrinsic worth rather than labels? Up to a point, but in Book One especially (of two) there is enough equivocation to be annoying.