Fiction

The enigmatic Ingrid Theyrsen takes her own life one summer in Milan. Eighteen years later, the memory of this suicide explodes in the memory of a man who knew her briefly. Jean, a professional explorer, engineers his own disappearance without leaving his hometown (Paris) in order to piece together what he knows of Ingrid’s existence before her death. But is he constructing a life or succumbing to the same inexplicable force that destroyed his subject? This is the theme of Honeymoon, a highly-acclaimed novel by French author Patrick Modiano.

As novels such as Lucky Jim attest, universities provide a fertile setting for excursions into bizarre humour. Even at the best of times they seem somewhat divorced from reality, so sending them further off the planet by depicting them through the jaundiced eye of satiric exaggeration fits nicely.

            Exit Points by Nick Gray is set in a university. But it is not about tertiary education as such. The novel – often hilarious, usually funny, sometimes ludicrous – is an extravagant attack on the structures of reality, undertaken in an academic context for the reasons I’ve already suggested. Like Alice in Wonderland – towards which it nods deferentially – Exit Points digs a way at ordinary human assumptions until the reader is dropped into the chaos of thoroughly enjoyable nonsense. But, as in Alice, we remain aware that reality is the real issue here, even though its structure might be utterly discredited.

Who does this book think it is? Fiction or autobiography, for teenagers or adults? Every book has an idea of its own identity, established by its author, editor, and publisher, and proclaimed through its cover, the style and form of the text, and the accompanying publicity. A Long Way Home seems to suffer from an identity crisis.

Over the past four months, three homeless men have been murdered in Melbourne, apparently without motive, and Detective Sergeant Dennis Gatz is determined to apprehend the killer. The action starts immediately with Gatz in big trouble for shooting at three fleeing thugs in Banana Alley during an all-night stakeout. Leon Cranston Harle is killed and his mates, Warren and Troy Stimson, swear to seek out this homicide cop and avenge ‘Harley’s’ death. Gatz’s superiors are not too happy about the whole incident either.

Harley Morrison has never had much luck with women. His mother, a specialist in family law, abandoned him at a tender age and then when he began following her around, at the height of the bomb threats to Family Law Court judges, she called him a little sneak and threatened to sue his father.

For its double epigraph, Rock’n’Roll Heroes combines a couple of lines of Midnight Oil’s Hercules – ‘my life is a valuable thing / I want to keep it that way’ – with six wonderfully numinous sentences from Thomas Traherne:

When, the opening pages of The Butcher Boy, it becomes clear that the narrator is an uneducated toughie whose sorry history is going to be the subject of the book, the reader’s danger flags are likely to be unfurled. To sustain such a voice without losing credibility is a tricky task. But the first chapter establishes that voice with exceptional skill, and this success continues through almost to the final scene, which curls back to the beginning, with the narrator an old man, remembering slowly, frighteningly, his tragic life.

These two books could stand as period pieces for their times, reflecting rigid moral codes and the limited expectations of women. If we wonder how far we have come towards changing the narrowness of female existence, we have only to compare everything implicit in the expression of the societal mores as depicted here.

Nancy Cato’s Marigold is a swashbuckling heroine’s tale; Winsome Smith’s Rachel Weeping is a flatly stated realistic account of a heroine’s woe, with emphasis on realism. Cato’s book is written with an underlying sense of humour, while Smith’s is restrainedly serious.

Alex Miller’s third novel treads some complex and difficult territory, staking out the past, memory, and the creation of self. It is also an incursion into the shadowy borderlands that lie between history and fiction, and the way in which, for every individual, the past has a different face ...