Fiction

The chief protagonist in Robert Wallace’s Art Rat is a character about as savoury as Sid Vicious at his worst. The Art Rat begins life as Glyn, then transforms himself into Matthew and finally Lupo, psychopath disguised as conceptual artist. With each new identity he sinks further into madness and obsession.

Where women lead, men generally have the sense to follow. Eventually. Feminist fiction, lesbian fiction have developed ahead of gay fiction in Australia. This is one of the many ideas acknowledged or explored in Dennis Altman’s welcome addition to literature about homosexual relationships.

There are some pretty ambiguous rats in this collection and most of them are male but ultimately, it’s the writer’s own unease that cumulatively gnaws away at happiness and achievement.

It’s high time that bookstores set aside a section for novels that document the increasingly familiar territory of the inner lives of middle-class white Australian women who grew up in the 1960s.

These stories are well written and rather depressing. That makes them, I guess, rather representative of what one might call the current state of short-story writing by urban males. One thinks immediately of recent collections by Garry Disher and Nick Earls. There seem to be a few basic starting off points, the most notable being in the delineation of defensiveness and insecurities that give the male characters, who are often the narrators, a sensitive but decidedly uptight response to, well, almost everything. Women, parents, children (their own), and particularly the drab world that has snuffed out some early spark of liveliness or vitality (which is usually rubbed for sympathetic magic in moments of nostalgic recall).

Herb Wharton’s first novel is a highly readable account of the lives of three stockmen in far west Queensland. Sandy is a white man, Bindi a Murri, and Mulga related to both of them through his parents.

This account of the lives and work of four women who followed in the rather large footsteps of Freud, the man with the beard and pipe who named that pesky enigma, the unconscious, is delightful on many counts. Or perhaps delightful is not the right word: but who cares, Lacan would make my word a wrong word anyway, so let it be delightful.

Now over seventy, Benoîte Groult of the fierce name and fiercer disposition, has written a delightful story about sex and desire that is sure to turn heads. Its central character is a woman named George – as in Sand, and she is small and chic like that writer. (If you thought that George Sand was a formidable hulk of a woman with coarse hair and thin lips, this book points out that she was a little woman, with tiny feet, apparently.) The other half of the story is Gavin Lozerech, or at least that’s what he’s called for the purposes of this retelling of their passionate, life-long love affair. George toyed with Kevin, Tugdual and Brian Boru before she chose the pseudonym Gavin, as in the Gawain of the Breton cycle.

Gavin is a Breton sailor, with much salt on his skin from the squally weather he must submit himself to over towards the coast of Ireland. But other salt is on their skins, as these two find themselves irresistibly drawn to each other, despite the dreadful gap between their life experiences and expectations. More often than not, at the first sign of a scene of sexual doings, you can begin cringing, as writers search for dubious imagery usually more redolent of the kitchen than the bedroom. But there is something naively successful about George’s descriptions and explanations. It’s all rather hearty and pleasing.

Nothing very much happens; outside of their various coming-togethers, they marry other people, have children, work at their separate lives, move around the world. But back they come, and the passion is, as they say, rekindled, so they’re at it again, with gay abandon.

The tone is set in the opening chapter when George warns: ‘… there’s no way I can tell my story without describing the sin of firkytoodling, as sexual play was known in the sixteenth century.’ And firkytoodle they do, as often as time and tide allows. The translation, by the way, is superb. Goodness knows what firkytoodling was in the French, but this kind of totally right transition from the original French into English signals the translator, Mo Teitelbaum, to be chouette.