Fiction

Books such as these build more bridges between Aboriginal and the wider society than any secondary source study or essay ever could. Black Chicks Talking and My Side of the Bridge tell the stories of a diverse group of Aboriginal women, most of whose lives would not meet the traditional requirements for published autobiography. On the whole, they are neither famous nor infamous. Most do not conduct their lives in public, nor try to. Perhaps they are swept up in a publishing trend that, at last, is acknowledging this country’s hidden voices, but their stories deserve to be told.

Nobel prize winner Albert Camus played soccer for Algeria. First-time novelist Nikos Athanasou has been likened to Camus – for his writing, not his ball skills – but, on the basis of his début, this comparison is hard to sustain. A more convincing parallel between the two authors might lie in the diversity of their skills; Athanasou’s new career as a writer is secondary to his ‘day job’ as Professor of Orthopaedic Pathology at Oxford.

Many sorts of pleasure have been claimed for and by readers of crime fiction: the ratiocinative pleasure of puzzle-solving; the satisfaction of seeing morality prevail and order restored; the perverse enjoyment arising from having our suspicions about the corruption of our society, its leaders and its values confirmed; participation in the wistful hope that actions based on goodness and principle may succeed; reassurance that the domestic lives of our heroes and heroines are just like ours; and, starting with Paul Cain and Raoul Whitfield, Horace McCoy and Jim Thompson, the cold embrace of nihilism and the apocalypse.

In primary school, we were shown a video warning children not to get into strangers’ cars. We were told to note the places with Safety House stickers on the way home. I remember wondering if, on being pursued, I’d be able to run all the way to the nearest one. Every so often, we heard about a kidnapping on the news, so we took these warnings seriously.

How does Arnold Zable do it? After two finely wrought, deceptively simple books on Holocaust themes, he has brought out another, linking tales of the Greek island of Ithaca with the stories of his parents, Polish Jews, and their contemporaries who settled in Melbourne just before or just after the Annihilation, as Zable prefers to call the Holocaust.

In Youth, the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee (who has recently taken to the Adelaide Hills) continues the project he began with Boyhood: Scenes from provincial life (1997). We are told by the publishers that this is a novel; indeed, the use of the third person throughout makes this plausible ...

From at least the mid-1980s, it has been almost obligatory for Australian reviewers to bemoan the dearth of contemporary political novels in this country. In some ways, this is a predictable backlash against the flowering of postmodern fabulist novels of ‘beautiful lies’ (by such writers as Peter Carey, Elizabeth Jolley, and Brian Castro) in the past two decades ...

These two novels can be read as intelligent manipulations of the crime genre, exploring the inarticulacies as well as the betrayals, real or imagined that can precipitate acts of violence. Chloe Hooper’s impressive début, A Child’s Book of True Crime, explores, in her words, ‘the twilight space between childhood and adulthood’. The means for interrogating this porous and ambiguous zone include a primary school teacher complicit in her own infantilisation, school children with steadier insights and clarity than their teacher, a faux children’s story narrating the details of a gruesome murder, and adults participating in games of emotional brinkmanship that their children would probably play as variants of ‘chicken’. Regret, by contrast, is more concerned with the isolation that occurs once the growing up ostensibly has occurred. While Chloe Hooper is at the beginning of a career with the potential to produce exceptional work, the experienced Ian Kennedy Smith is the more accomplished storyteller with Regret.

There is something irresistible about trying to trace a connection between notorious lover and memoirist Casanova and notorious lover and poet Lord Byron in Venice – the seductive city where both men worked their way through galleries of women. Casanova estimated that he had had more than one hundred and thirty in 1798, the year of his death, although that was his lifetime’s count, not just the Venetian episodes. Byron, on the other hand, reckoned that he had got through more than two hundred in Venice alone – and in less than two years – before he stopped counting. Between their frenzied trysts was a tantalisingly small gap of thirty-odd years: Casanova was sent into his final exile from Venice in 1782, before Byron was born; Byron arrived in 1816. People who had known the Italian must have met the Englishman.

Mardi McConnochie’s first novel is a strange strain of literary adaptation. In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys manufactured a life for Charlotte Brontë’s madwoman in the attic, Bertha Rochester. McConnochie goes one step further and hijacks the Brontë sisters themselves, transplanting them from their Yorkshire home to an island called Coldwater somewhere off the colony of NSW. There the sisters are literally and metaphorically imprisoned; Coldwater is a penal settlement and their father is the prison warder. Desperate to escape their probable futures as ‘bush wife, town wife or military wife’, the sisters decide they fancy their chances as authors. Coldwater facilitates this ambition by providing a backdrop where fact and fantasy can be unhappily wedded. The idea is that the collusion of isolation, violence and romance will offer these quasi-Brontës the requisite inspiration for future books. Hence a new prisoner, Finn O’Connell, ‘feral, untamed, unbowed, yet somehow noble’, becomes the prototype for Heathcliff and the desolate, inhospitable island is reconstituted as the whispering Yorkshire moors.