Fiction

I’d wager that if you offered men the opportunity when they died, of being reunited with their deceased father, many would find the prospect unattractive. A surprising number of men fear their father and spend most of their life coming to grips with the complex. Hardie, the protagonist of this story was a bad father. He meant no evil nor was he evil by his own lights, yet he did systematically, emotionally at least, destroy every member of his family.

Randolph Stow’s latest novel, The Suburbs of Hell, may be read as a simple whodunit: a simple allegorical Whodunit. Like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, like David Lodge’s Small World, this novel sets out to intrigue the reader. The new genre, nouvelle critique, teases the reader’s vanity, the reader’s erudition at the same time as it engages with questions of a metaphysical kind – the nature of truth, reality, and for those concerned with literature – the purpose of writing today.

I must declare an interest. Dickins was once a student of mine and is still a friend. Readers of this review are invited to exercise their reservations.

I believe The Crookes of Epping is in the tragi-comic tradition of Charlie Chaplin which reaches back to one of the world’s greatest books, Don Quixote. In it pathos is as important an element as humour, wit and absurdity. It also has a connection with the earliest Greek Comedy in which the celebration of the God Dionysus was an important element.

Serpent’s Tooth is a massive, sprawling novel. It is panoramic in its vision of twentieth century social and political history, and meticulous in its rendering of one man’s struggle to sustain the mighty ideal his father has inspired in him.

The name of this collection, with its pastoral associations, is ironic. Here we have no neat opposition between the country and the city; instead the lyrical evocation of the countryside serves merely to emphasise the brutality that women suffer there as men exercise their economic power through sexual cruelty. This is particularly obvious in the first six stories, set in the previous generation, which lead up to the experience of the central character, Anne. Bella, for instance, of the story ‘Isabella’, has degenerated under the tyranny of her father from the proud Edwardian beauty in the parlour photographs to a ‘lazy fat slag’ (his words). Her ‘lair’ is a rural slum, her brain a swamp into which every scandal scarcely percolates: ‘… the pinpoint gleams of interest receding into the sluggish brain where she will mumble at the information for the rest of the day.’ Her death from gangrene parallels her mental decay. Mrs Scarr of ‘That Woman’, let down by her ‘gutless’ lover Lennie – ‘Usually he climbed through the rough orchard just after lunch and came to her back door red in the face and breathing hard. Today he came late …’ – must now find a new home for herself and her children. The child Danuta of ‘A Bad Influence’, pregnant at ten, having been exploited by all her male relatives – uncles, fathers, brothers – mimes her nocturnal experience to her school friend:

The characters in Helen Garner’s new novella The Children’s Bach make up the kind of social molecule in at least one of which all of us feature as an atom.

Those who read the gloomy criticisms of modern education by some educationalists might be pardoned for wondering whether any but the most privileged children nowadays can hope to gain mastery of their language or development of their mind and talent. Meanwhile, the talented young blithely make nonsense of crabbed and intolerant age. Paul Zanetti, aged twenty-three, wins the Walkely Award for a political cartoon. Paul Radley, while still in his teens, and Tim Winton, barely older, won Australian Vogel Awards and continue writing with force and imagination.

Winton is now twenty-four. Shallows is his second good novel. It is set in a fictional West Australian whaling town called Angelus. Although I have never been to Albany (where Winton had part of his education), I suspect I might find it recognisable after reading Winton’s devoted and detailed account of Angelus. The time of the action is now, or a year or so ago, but the story ranges through much history. Change is inevitable for whaling ports and industries but whether it should come abruptly or gradually is still debatable.

With her first book, the short story collection The Home Girls, Olga Masters has made her ‘own’ a particularly neglected area of Australian life and a special way of seeing it. She also became an award winner in the 1983 NBC Awards for Australian Literature. Now, with her first novel, Loving Daughters she confirms the impression that a unique voice and an important one has joined the ranks of our major storytellers. Her territory is confined to the lives of ordinary country-folk in the period between the wars, in the present work the period around the early 1920s and the place a small farming township on the south coast of New South Wales.

Apart from the theme of growth and adolescence (with which it often merges), perhaps the most common preoccupation of Australian novelists is the progress of a young man (usually) or woman towards artistic achievement and fulfilment. Frequently the field of art is pictorial. Patrick White’s The Vivisector, Thea Astley’s The Acolyte, Tony Morphett’s Thorskeld, and Barbara Hanrahan’s The Scent of Eucalyptus and Kewpie Doll, to name only those, all deal in some form or other with a painter of either actual or potential genius. It is, of course, one of the classic themes of twentieth-century fiction everywhere, but its pervasiveness among our writers suggests a self­conscious need to articulate the Australian experience and identity. Who better than the great artist to do it?