Fiction

What a pleasure to be reviewing Kate Grenville’s collection of stories and her novel!

First, Bearded Ladies: The stories are a delight. Ranging with ease over four continents, they portray women in a variety of relationships – girls brought face-to-face with a sexual world, women coping with men, without men, women learning to be. The writing is witty, satirical, compassionate, clear as a rock pool and as full of treasures.

A reviewer’s prejudices are rarely so obvious to him as are mine in the case of these two books. I have an instinct of sympathy with Peter Goldsworthy. Our first books of stories received a joint review from John Tranter in the Sydney Morning Herald. The venerable poet was, let us say, splendidly discouraging: Windsor’s and Goldsworthy’s joint faults made them ‘like so many hundreds of forgotten Australian short story writers before them’. We have been victims together. In the case of Archie Weller, I have to admit to negative prejudices. Weller is promoted as someone who nearly won the Vogel Prize, and I am suspicious of all the media hype and puff that surrounds that award. The price of greater publicity, runs my prejudice (conviction?), should be sharper critical attention.

An Illywhacker, Peter Carey reminds us at the start of his latest and by far his longest novel, is a trickster or spieler. Wilkes cites it in Kylie Tennant’s famous novel of 1941, The Battlers. The other epigraph to the novel is also preoccupied with deception and is familiar to anyone who knows Carey’s work: Brian Kiernan used it as the title of his anthology of new Australian short story writers, The Most Beautiful Lies, an anthology in which Carey himself was represented: It is from Mark Twain and reads in part: ‘Australian history … does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies; and all of a fresh new sort, no mouldy old stale ones. It is full of surprises and adventures, the incongruities, and contradictions, and incredibilities; but they are all true, they all happened.’

After listening to Dorothy Johnston being interviewed on radio on her experiences in a massage parlour one would have expected a different kind of novel from Tunnel Vision. No doubt part of Johnston’s appeal as an interviewee came from the publicity blurb which announced that “she worked for a time in a massage parlour in the late 70s, and became involved in a conflict in St Kilda over whether prostitution should be legalized. She helped form a Prostitutes’ Action Group. Though Tunnel Vision isn’t autobiographical, the inspiration for it came partly from this experience.”

The dust jacket puff tells us that Gary Langford’s new novel is “in the richly bizarre vein of John Irvine”. For some this will be a less than enticing recommendation. But Vanities is a less sentimental book than Irvine could have written. Irvine’s humour is the measure of his characters’ uuntrammeled imaginativeness in an otherwise pedestrian world, a measure this reader finds fatuous. While Langford does have a tendency towards Irvine’s brand of brittle whimsy, his characters’ wit is a dissembling, defensive style, an indication of their vulnerability. He is determined to indulge neither his characters nor his readers with whimsicality.

There is nowadays the new criticism and the old, and among the practitioners of both methodologies there are good and bad critics. Lauric Clancy makes no attempt or claim to ‘re-read’ (shorthand for applying various post-structural approaches to canonical works) Nabokov’s oeuvre and hence falls four-square (puns arc de rigueur when dealing with Nabokov) amongst the Bayleys rather than the Eagletons. While this position must inevitably indicate where Clancy stands in the wider debate, there may also be historical reasons for this stance in relation to a writer like Nabokov, whose work has received comparatively little attention despite – or perhaps because of– his globally provocative reputation.

Inside Jan McKemmish there is a good short story writer trying to get out. A Gap in the Records is a novel about an international female intelligence apparatus. At its heart is the story of an assassination of a crook, Crane, by an agent of the apparatus, Mary Stevens.

McKemmish wastes no space – not a line, not an adverb – in getting Mary Stevens to Hong Kong and into the confidence of Crane. She is at the races, at the ballet, swimming in his pool, dancing at his club. Her life is ascetic (minimum alcohol, yoga, no sex) and dedicated.

In a marvellous spider’s-web conversation she lures Crane to accompany her on a shopping expedition. So she tricks the criminal into Graeme Wong’s hidden shop at the back of Mud Lane. A gun is waiting for her there in one of the jade cases. Her accomplice is there too, playing the part of shop assistant!

C.J. Koch in this powerful and evocative novel, The Double Man, has applied a psychoanalytic model of human personality to fairytales and the fantastical world of myth: the pursuit of illusion as reality. Its ingenious double life is that of a modern-day fairy tale coupled with the face of 1960s man, paralysed with the despair of his era: its inability to cope with the breakdown of shared values and beliefs. Richard Miller is both the prince of the archetypal fairytale and the prototype of modern man trying to create a private reality out of ancestral beliefs. The Double Man recalls W.B. Yeats’s dread of the ‘rough beast…its hour come round at last’, and the warnings of Goethe who foresaw a time of such chaos: when odd spiritual leaders would emerge and man would turn full circle to find popular truth in ancient myths and legends.