Fiction

Ian Donaldson’s The Rapes of Lucretia is a book so rich in ideas that a review can only be unfairly perfunctory. It starts from ancient accounts of the rape of Lucretia and tracks the transformations of the myth through two millennia. This is no wearisome catalogue, no tedious grinding of PhD mills. Donaldson is, as he puts it, “especially interested in the close relationship that may exist between the creative and the philosophical processes of mind; between art and argument”. What emerges is a sturdy contribution to the history of ideas, a book showing how a myth which sustained Roman ideas of heroism and political liberty was used at different periods of history to reflect and embody changing political and sexual ideas.

Thomas Shapcott uses as a basis for his novel the fascinating life story of Karoly Pulszky, who left Hungary as the disgraced Director of the National Gallery of Art and who committed suicide after two months in Queensland. Pulszky, a forceful and flamboyant man, followed in the footsteps of his distinguished father in building up Hungary’s art collection. He was married to Emilia Markus, ‘The Blonde Wonder of Budapest, the Greatest Actress in Hungary’. Financial mismanagement enabled his family’s political enemies to bring him down and he left Hungary in shame. Years after his death, one of his two daughters, Romola, married Nijinsky, and she wrote extensively about her own colourful life. Shapcott draws on her writings with considerable skill.

Gary Catalano is perhaps better known for his poetry and art-criticism rather than as a writer of short fiction. The Woman Who Lives Here, a book which contains five short stories and sixteen ‘Sketches’, will do little to alter this. For though the writing is stylistically unexceptionable, Catalano's material is perilously thin, lacking in dramatic situation, intellectual vigour and point. Of the five stories which comprise the opening section of the book, four deal with those ubiquitous themes of ‘modernism’: alienation and absence. Given the by now long and rich literary heritage which concerns itself with these concepts it is hardly surprising to find that Catalano's various formal devices rely heavily on earlier models. Techniques of discontinuity, fragmentary notes and deliberate concealments are variously used in these stories giving them an air of unresolved mystery and sometimes menace. But unlike the pioneers in such forms Catalano seems to be experimenting for experimentation's sake; no pressure of feeling informs the writing, leaving the reader with a sense of the writer's ennui, as well as that of his characters.

Douglas Stewart is one of the great all-rounders, perhaps the greatest, of our literature; one recalls that Nancy Keesing once described him as probably t

Foremost as a poet, the subject matter of his poetry is astonishingly wide-ranging from ballads and narrative poems to the most delicate and delightful of nature and love lyrics. He has been a notable and inspiring literary editor; in a period that has now passed into history he so exploited the creative potentialities of radio to communicate culturally that he achieved an international reputation as a verse playwright; and his literary criticism down the years has been consistently respected by his peers.

In Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, Colin Johnson presents the invasion of Australia by white men, referred to as ‘nums’ or ‘ghosts’, through the eyes of the Aborigines, ‘humans’. With the central character Wooreddy and his wife Trugernanna, (Truganinni) we witness the annihilation of a race of people, the breakdown of their culture.

Nigel Krauth’s first novel is an intriguing blend of fact and fiction – or rather, a reworking of a little known set of factual events. As the novel explains, in 1895 the famous Australian poet ‘Banjo’ Paterson travelled to Queensland to visit his fiancée. Two events of importance occurred during that short period: Paterson’s engagement was broken off, and while there he wrote what was to become his and the nation’s most famous song, ‘Waltzing Matilda’. Paterson always refused to speak of the period in later life so that what exactly happened between himself and Sarah Riley remains unknown and Nigel Krauth feels free to speculate. There are ethical problems, I feel, in the fictional reconstruction of an historical personage and Krauth’s portrait of Paterson, while by no means wholly unsympathetic, is that of a man in many ways vain and narcissistic; certainly, it enraged the poet’s descendants to the point where they refused Krauth permission to quote the words of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in his novel. Copyright does not run out until 1991 when, presumably, if the novel is still in print Krauth will fill in the blank spaces he has left.

We have to thank Julian Croft for this selection of Slessor’s light verse first published in Smith's Weekly between February 1928 and November 1933. Here is a worthy successor to Slessor’s Darlinghurst Nights, until now the only selection of frivolous Slessor available to the general reader. The verses here are no less charming than those of the earlier selection and their omission from Darlinghurst Nights, first published in 1933, seems merely to be based on the fact that they do not fit easily into the theme of that volume. They are certainly no less delightfully capricious in their rhyme schemes and no less artfully artless.

Greek and English, the Greek father and Australian mother, the child in the middle who looks at one object and sees different creatures – no catch-phrase like ‘culture conflict’ says much about what is happening in Ismini’s life at this moment. The story does, however, in the strong, unblinkered prose of Beverley Farmer as she writes with unfaltering sensitivity about Greece, about Australians in Greece and Greeks in Australia, and, painfully, about couples and the families who mix their cultures with their love and hate.

Brilliant Creatures is not so much a novel – a first novel, as the title page coyly points out – as it is a presentation pack. The text itself is bookended by an introduction at the front, and a set of extensive, very boring notes and index at the back. A set of notes and an index for a novel, a first novel? Yep. Clive James has heard of Nabokov and Pale Fire. He has also, as the four-page introduction makes clear, heard of his ‘illustrious ancestor Henry’: of Gide, Montaigne, Sterne, Peacock, Firbank, Trollope, Joyce, Shakespeare, and Nietzsche.