Fiction

If we are to believe Aristotle, or the Chicago neo-Aristotelians (R.S. Crane, Richard McKeown, et al.), or even bluff old Squire Henry Fielding, then plot is the mainstay of drama, as of the novel. This has often been held to be particularly so of detective fiction. On the other hand, Raymond Chandler was notoriously cavalier about the ‘what, who, and why’ of narrative causation, and Edmund Wilson famously asked, ‘Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’

It would seem that voice and character (Peter Corris’s Cliff Hardy, Gary Disher’s Detective Inspector Hal Challis, Shane Maloney’s Murray Whelan, MP) are as important as plot, if not on occasion more so. Milieu is crucial: think of Hardy’s Sydney, Peter Temple’s Melbourne, Carl Hiassen’s Florida, Elmore Leonard’s Detroit and Miami. Plot Rules, OK? Not! Voice is everything. Here’s quintessential Corris:

Readers who share Helen Nickas’s view that Antigone Kefala’s fiction forms ‘a continuous narrative which depicts and explores the various stages of an exilic journey’ may be pleased to find more instalments in her fourth book of fiction, Summer Visit. The first of the three novellas is an account of an unsatisfying marriage, told with a controlled detachment that makes its title, ‘Intimacy’, seem ironic. In contrast, the third, ‘Conversations with Mother’, contains a series of elegiac apostrophes of the deceased; the connections with Braila and other congruities with a figure familiar from previous writings again encourage an assumption of autobiography.

The tradition of supplementary fiction dates at least from the fifteenth century, when supplements to the works of Geoffrey Chaucer were generated by the perception that his texts were unfinished or that he had not imposed a sufficiently firm moral closure on them. Robert Henryson famously thought Chaucer hadn’t punished Criseyde enough for her betrayal of Troilus, and set out to remedy the omission in his own Testament of Cresseid. In a more recent example, Emma Tennant’s execrable Pemberly traces the tempestuous married life of Jane Austen’s Darcy and Elizabeth, though in the style of a Neighbours episode.

A novel by Janette Turner Hospital is an event. Although her new book comes with a disclaimer, suggesting that it should be read as a thriller, there will be high expectations. Even with its cumbersome title, for which the fact that it’s a quotation from Daniel Defoe doesn’t compensate, Due Preparations for the Plague claims attention. Thrillers suggest plot-driven entertainments. Some are relatively undemanding: the sort of thing sold in airport book-shops. This one is too unsettling to be entertainment, and, because its central event is the fate of passengers on a hi-jacked plane, it won’t be a big favourite as an airport novel.

‘It sometimes seems that our whole planet has swung into the fog belt of melodrama.’ The words are Graham Greene’s, but they could equally well come from Turner Hospital. She has always been drawn to that dangerous edge where the safety fence of civilisation fails. She writes exceptionally well about fear. Like Alfred Hitchcock, she sometimes uses such moments for reversals of expectation: sometimes the terror is self-created. In Due Preparations, such a moment comes when the central character, a young American woman who has survived all kinds of threats and physical ordeals, has a panic attack in a Manhattan cab when she sees the driver’s face in the rear vision mirror and reads his name: Ibram Siddiqi.

‘Now listen carefully. I want you to think of the two most beautiful things in the world. One each – and not just beautiful but most beautiful.’ Richard Yaxley examines the nature of relationships, family and grief in his first novel, The Rose Leopard. Father, writer, self-confessed ‘groin-driven’ lover, Vincent is the dreamer; Kaz his muse and the preserver of their family. After meeting at university, they have forged a powerful partnership against those who don’t understand their shared bond of a love for stories and words. In particular, Vincent rails against Kaz’s family, which disapproves of his apparent fecklessness, and curses his pretentious agent, Stu. His other pet hates include American sitcoms, crowds, the lack of news-papers on Christmas Day and being forced to listen to people. Kaz, by contrast, is an island of calm in a sea of neurosis, an organiser of shopping and schedules.

Hannah Arendt pronounced the Eichmann trial a ‘necessary failure’; it dramatised historical trauma but revealed, fundamentally, a narrative insufficiency. The gap between testimony and history, between jurisprudential protocols and the all-too-human and inhuman complexities of murder, left behind anxieties of incomprehension, reduction, and representational limitation.

John Scott began his publishing life as a poet of considerable distinction (albeit as John A. Scott, as the second edition of The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature will not let him forget) and then changed brumbies in midstream to publish pure prose. Between 1975 and 1990 Scott delivered eight volumes of poetry; since then (there is a slight overlap), he has released five ‘novels’ (pardon nomenclatural nerves), if we include the present Warra Warra.

If we lived in the kind of country – and there are some – where people not only chose their presidents but chose as leaders poets, philosophers and novelists, a new novel by Brian Castro would be a sensation, even a political event. Students would be hawking pirated copies, queues would form outside bookshops, long debates would steam up the coffee shops, and the magazines would be full of it. Alas, China and Australia from the 1930s to the 1960s, where Castro takes us in memory, were not such places then any more than they are now.

When I was about ten, I used to devour the books of an English children’s author named Noel Streatfield. The most famous was called Ballet Shoes, which took young antipodeans onto the stage and into the wings of another world, the London theatre scene. Galina Koslova, a Russian-born émigrée to South Australia and the heroine of The Snow Queen, gives Ballet Shoes to a step-granddaughter, correctly designating it a classic. I wondered whether Mardi McConnochie’s novel was designed to fill the gap left on adult bookshelves by long-abandoned copies of Ballet Shoes, even if our reading requirements have matured.

After Ned Kelly, the story of Burke and Wills ranks high among Australians’ favourite tales of heroic failure. Simpson and his donkey are on the list, followed closely by any number of stories from the locker rooms of sporting clubs both great and small. There are strict conventions governing the telling of these stories. However pointless, futile, and even bloody they may have been, they are handed down as stories of romance. Kelly, Simpson, and Bradman all had a final stand. The hero, in his final stand, is alone on a pedestal. The other people around at the time are reduced to the role of extras. It’s a pity. Arthur Morris, the man at the other end when Bradman was dismissed for a duck in his final innings, went on to make 196. Nobody much remembers. Joe Byrne, Kelly’s closest ally and confidant, happened to speak Cantonese. An addict, he had picked it up among the opium traders of Beechworth. Byrne’s acquisition of a Chinese language is far more interesting than the dreary question that has been provoked by yet another movie version of the Kelly story – whether or not Ned spoke with an Irish accent.