Fiction

Her previous work, A Patch of Blue, became a Hollywood film with Sidney Poitier, and another, Child of the Holocaust, was recently serialized by the ABC. Neither was short on social awareness, which makes her latest novel all the more inexplicable. All the characters of The Death of Ruth are stereotypical. The twists and nuances come in the plot, not in the characterization.

Crank back on roller, belt left front ...’ So begins the sequence. Stuart’s novel, the fifth in a series of six called The Conjuror’s Years, depicts Colin of Drought Foal and Wedgetail View following the instructions for preparing his Vickers gun to fire against the Vichy French in the 1941 AIF invasion of Syria.

Rites of Passage qualifies for a notice in ABR because, although it is written and published in Britain, it is among other things an account of the adventures of one Edmund Talbot who has taken a passage to Australia sometime during a lull in the wars with France, towards the end of the eighteenth century.

Dust jacket blurbs are usually misleading, but at least one point made by the back cover of Blanche d’Alpuget’s new novel, Turtle Beach, is authentic. It refers to the ‘Graham Greene sense of inevitability’ of the events of the work. As an admirer of Greene, especially in his Third World novels, I can confidently recommend Turtle Beach as a worthy successor to such socially important novels as The Quiet American and The Comedians. D’Alpuget has the same keen sense of the inadequacies, irrelevance and wrongheadedness of Western involvement in the East, the same wryly ironic depiction of the frailty of human nature regardless of class, colour, creed or sex.

As she did so vividly in Tirra Lirra by the River, Jessica Anderson uses a returning expatriate woman to cast fresh eyes on the social and urban landscape of Australia. Here, it is Sylvia Foley who has spent some twenty years in Europe eschewing the comforts and constraints of suburban life, teaching Italian and conducting tours of the British Isles and the Continent. On a whim, she abandons her peripatetic life to return to Sydney for a few months prior to her plan to settle in Rome. Unbeknown to her, her autocratic father, Jack Cornock, is dying and she is immediately suspected by other members of her dislocated family of returning to benefit from the will – which she ultimately does as the recipient of her father’s vindictive gesture to spite his wife. And Sylvia’s ‘family’ is considerable. There is her illiterate mother Molly, now married to Ken, her brother Stewart, and her stepsiblings: Harry, Rosamond, Hermione, and Guy, the children of her father’s second wife, Greta.

The slump, it seems, has hit at last, the slump occasioned by the competition of television, films and the theatre have felt it for some time, but here it is being registered in literature. In its own way each of these three books represents an attempt to capture the popular imagination.