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.

The normally difficult task of reviewing first novels is compounded in this instance in that Lewitt's Come Spring is an excellent work and Kidman's A Breed of Women has very little to recommend it.

Both novels are written by women and deal with the problems of female adolescence and young womanhood. Lewitt’s work is set in Poland during the German occupation and Kidman's in New Zealand 1978 with back-tracking some thirty years to the childhood of its chief protagonist, Harriet Wallace.

‘On Saturday, January 31, 1880, the newsboys of Sydney hung about the entrance of a broken-down old building in Castlereagh-street, waiting for bundles of a new weekly paper as they were issued damp from the press. That day, for fourpence (reduced to threepence the following week), the citizens of Sydney could read, for the first time, and in very small print, the columns of The Bulletin.’

The appearance of anthologies which have the intention of representing the poetic output of a specific ‘era’ often indicates that era's having achieved a status of authority. Harry Heseltine’s Penguin Book of Modern Australian Verse anthologizes poetry of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, and just as surely as in any such anthology, the poetry of these decades becomes relegated to the past tense.

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.