Fiction

Charmian Clift, this novel’s muse and model, was born the same year as Elizabeth Jolley. If she had lived to see the 1980s, that decade would almost certainly have given her a new lease of life as a writer. It was an idyllic time for Australian women writers; second-wave feminism brought in its wake a different kind of readership, a generation of adventurous publishers, and many opportunities for women writers to use new kinds of voices to say new kinds of things.

After nine books, Nick Earls is renowned for his slacker-male novels and his short stories of twenty-somethings in various stage of arrested development. Like his English equivalent Nick Homby, Earls specialises in a particular emotional state of the male psyche: a post-adolescent, pre-adult period usually spent chasing unobtainable women, getting drunk on green alcoholic beverages and behaving badly in amusing ways. Written with self-deprecating wit and dollops of humour, Earls’s previous books are the equivalent of a fizzy soft drink, easily ingested and with a sugary residue.

One of the most outlandish Hollywood action films, relatively speaking, is The Final Countdown (1980), in which the nuclear-powered US aircraft carrier U.S.S. Nimitz is enveloped in a bizarre electrical storm in the Pacific and transported back in time to 1941, conveniently just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. The ship’s commander is played by Kirk Douglas, with Martin Sheen in the role of an enigmatic civilian who just happens to be on board. One memorable exchange between the two Hollywood heavyweights occurs just after the crew has realised that something strange has happened. Douglas muses that it could all be a Russian plot, perhaps involving parapsychology. ‘Excuse me, Captain,’ interjects Sheen with an impeccably straight face, ‘we also have to consider one alternative possibility: the possibility that what is happening here is real.’

Any novelist prepared to name one of his characters ‘Fish Lamb’ and to have that character come back from the dead is obviously interested in Christianity on some level. It is also true that several of the big themes that run through Tim Winton ‘s fiction – guilt atonement, forgiveness – have a religious flavour. Nevertheless, Winton’s symbolism tends to have an open-ended quality. When his characters experience moments of spiritual awareness, moments that Winton has said are meant to be taken literally, these experiences are often depicted as a nonspecific form of mysticism or pantheism.

For those of us drawn to tell the stories of the past, seventeenth-century England has a great deal to recommend it. It is distant enough to offer the frissons of historical exotica, yet so close that the minds of the time are recognisable to us. In addition, it is hard to think of a period in one country so packed with incident. Where else, in a single lifespan, can a novelist convincingly have his character experience wars – both foreign and domestic – fire, pestilence, regicide and Restoration?

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.

Stories of children in the maelstrom: the horror of mandatory detention; the appalling cruelty of how some orphans are treated by those responsible for them; and youngsters caught in the heartbreak and dislocation of family breakdown – such is the stuff of these three important novels for young people. No coy sensibilities are spared in these reflections of modem life. Here are ordinary adults and children caught up in extraordinary events. All three books show how life can be hard, but that one must meet its sorrows and afflictions with courage, good humour and good friends. Each story is about what happens when a child becomes a victim to events beyond his or her control, be they personal or political, dramatic or mundane.

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.

Literary trends are frequently and cyclically trumpeted on the Australian publishing scene: the memoir boom, the decline of fiction, the death of the literary novel. Gail Jones’s work proves that rumours of the latter’s demise are exaggerated. Jones has published three previous books and each has made a splash locally; both collections of stories – House of Breathing (1992) and Fetish Lives (1997) – and her début novel, Black Mirror (2002), garnered prizes. Jones’s second novel, Sixty Lights, is set to enhance her reputation, especially as she is now published by the prestigious UK publisher Harvill Press.

The Scheherazade figure is a familiar and celebrated presence in literature. The power of her stories can be healing, redemptive, enabling. But what if, as in Sarah Armstrong’s Salt Rain, the storyteller is your mother, and she’s damaged? What if the fantasies she tells you are, consciously or unconsciously, presented as fact, while truths are withheld? Would you revere the storyteller as a great creative force, or feel betrayed by her lies?