Fiction

Jessica Anderson’s One of the Wattle Birds celebrates the painful arrival into adulthood of Cecily Ambruss. Cecily is nineteen years old. She lives in a flat with her boyfriend, Wil, who, appropriately in view of his name, is studying Law. Cecily is an English student and during the three days over which the novel is set they are both preparing for end-of­year exams. They are a bright, intelligent, attractive couple. The previous year they backpacked through Europe and India with four friends. Workmen are making a racket in the building where they live (this novel moves between noise and silence) and things are a bit hectic and scattered but not unbearable. In fact, Cecily’s life seems to be following a fairly conventional path towards marriage and a comfortable future in one of Sydney’s pleasanter suburbs.

Is it possible for love to flourish between an oppressor and one who is oppressed? J.M. Coetzee, in his novel Waiting for the Barbarians, thought not, but Coetzee provided some compensation for his hero by ennobling him to an almost mythical degree in order to present the argument that power can be used equally to fight injustice and brutality, or to inflict it. The main character in Coetzee’s novel, the Magistrate, recognises the pathology inherent in his love for a captured ‘barbarian’, and chooses to return her to her·people. He then becomes a victim himself as he fights the atrocities being perpetrated around him.

Midway through Sally Morrison’s new novel, Mad Meg, I began to develop the scissor twitch, an almost overwhelming urge to cut it up and reassemble it into a new structure. Not quite the vandalism it suggests – I read Mad Meg in galley pages, which encourages scissorly desires. It is a vast, kaleidoscopic novel, which opens with a wonderful mischievous energy, full of surprises and pleasures, and laconic wit. Yet it begins to teeter midway and, in my view, ends in unnecessary disarray. Hence the twitch.

Janine Burke in Lullaby, is writing about writing-out. Her character, Bea, is a writer with a block, seemingly precipitated by the failure of a marriage and the temporary loss of a recent lover, but the author is trying for much more than just this one story, which looks, on the evi­dence of the first chapter, to have more than enough fuel in it for a novel.

Ever since the publication of Margaret Atwood’s first novels, The Edible Woman and Surfacing, she has been seized upon as a writer who articulated the predicament of being female in contemporary western societies. Her Canadian origins were no barrier for many Australian women, who read her as though she spoke with their voice. Atwood was like a ‘sister’ who didn’t fail them – someone who’d been there and could help light the way.

Each of the three parts that make up Thea Astley’s new novel, Coda, is prefaced by a newspaper report, real or imaginary, detailing cases of ‘granny-dumping’, the ruthless abandonment of old, frail, and disoriented people by their unidentified children. This sets the scene for a reflection on old age and the rejection of those whose physical and mental capacities no longer meet the stringent requirements of the standard economically viable unit of modem civilisation. The manifest duty of such objects is to be as discreet as possible, providing minimal inconvenience to others (especially their adult children) until they can fade into oblivion.

Every adventurous reader of fiction ought to have a private hoard of novelists, preferably from a non-English writing background, who have escaped the appalling nonsense of Booker-style PR hype. Luckily, publishers like Collins Harvill set about promoting such writers; unluckily for Australia, though, our major literary pages often neglect to review the bulk of such output. You will have your favourites in such a category, but let this reviewer recommend the following: Jose Donoso, Etienne Leroux, Jose Saramago, Eduardo Mendoza, Saiichi Maruya, and Haruki Murakami.

The faded but still brave word ‘grand’ in the title of Frank Moorhouse’s new novel gives a signal from another age, the 1920s, when after the war-to-end-all-wars there were grand ideals and grand hotels. It is also fitting that the League of Nations, the setting for the book, should in the 1920s have had its headquarters in Geneva in a former luxury hotel, while its own rather unfortunately named Palais was being built.

We are introduced to the eponymous hero of Jacko by an Australian narrator who is writing a novel about China and teaching a writing class at New York University. The students in his class hero-worship Grace Paley, Alice Munro, and Raymond Carver and compose pieces for submission to the New Yorker.

In 1868 John Heaps (alias Muley Moloch), a preacher, self-styled prophet, and trained bootmaker, left England with a group of eight women bound for Australia. Their intention was to set up a mission dedicated to the development of their own perfection and a preparation for the Second Coming of Christ ...