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Fiction

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.

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Palomino by Elizabeth Jolley & The Travelling Entertainer and Other Stories by Elizabeth Jolley

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March 1981, no. 28

Palomino establishes Elizabeth Jolley as absolutely one of the best writers of fiction in this country, although it is a book that in some ways does not, I think, entirely resolve the problems it poses for itself. As I interpret Palomino one of the things Elizabeth Jolley intended to explore in her first novel, is the contrast between a person whose genes, hormones or whatever dictate that they shall for ever and irreversibly be homosexual; and a person whose sexual nature is capable of change and influence. She also pursues themes like this in some of her excellent short stories. The lovers in Palomino are Laura and Andrea, and it is Andrea’s excessive background that confuses the basic issues, a point I will return to.

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Reading Michele Nayman’s collection of short stories is like a dip into the bitter/sweet river of life. People try for the unattainable and discover they are ordinary after all – the moments of sharing and understanding fade in the light of day and leave the protagonists even more alone.

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Barbara Hanrahan is arguably the best woman writer to have emerged in Australia in the last decade, and that automatically puts her streaks ahead of most of her male colleagues. The Frangipani Gardens is her sixth novel and with the possible exception of the earlier The Albatross Muff, her best in terms of control, artistry, and characterisation, Perhaps more importantly for her growing number of admirers, Hanrahan is a masterly raconteur, handling her bizarre characters and intricate plots with ease and verve.

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An Extravagant Talent by Martin Mahon & Stigmata by Bill Reed

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March 1981, no. 28

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.

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This volume is subtitled ‘A novel About The Nature of Truth’ and thus marks Frank Hardy’s continuing concern with basic concepts, the source matter of philosophical and theological debate, rather than with the social immediacies tat inspired and formed the texture of his earlier fiction. As with But the Dead are Many, his previous novel, a tour de force of considerable proportions in which Life and Death were set forth as interchangeable terms rather than irreconcilables, the present work is intricately structured in recognition of the complexity of the issues which is being debated, or, put otherwise, the evasiveness and obduracy of the daemon with which the writer-character is wrestling. There is certainly some sense in Hardy of being more than just interested in narrative formulae, modi operandi, recapitulative tactics. (Appropriately enough, since he writes of men in the grip of obsessions which gnaw at their intellectual vitals, and, as suggested, he stands on extraordinary intimate terms with them.)

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Old fashioned dinki di Australians will view this book with mixed reactions indeed. For those of us conditioned in the popular culture of May Gibbs whose Mr and Mrs Koala featured in her ‘Bib and Bub’ drawings, Dorothy Wall’s koala ‘Blinky Bill’, and of course Norman Lindsay’s delightfully comic bear ‘Bill Bluegum’, will be decidedly startled by this latest anthropomorphic koala. For ‘Bear Dinkum’ is a nasty bear, the written and illustrated creation of Neil Curtis, a Londoner from West Ham.

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Homesickness by Murray Bail & Monkeys in the Dark by Blanche d’Alpuget

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October 1980, no. 25

I found Murray Bail’s novel Homesickness a work of brilliant and resonant artistry, which despite many unlikely incidents, succeeds in being thoroughly credible in all its parts. It is also a desolating book, a comedy, but a very black one.

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The Transit of Venus has been widely acclaimed, and justly so: it is a great novel of passion and ambition, success and failure, written with elegance and wit, and magnificently structured. Still, despite the critical superlatives, few critics have attempted to come to grips with the power of Hazzard’s writing. There have been the inevitable comparisons with Jane Austen, and some attention has been paid to the symbolic connotations of the title, but little more. The prose and structure of the novel are worth examining in some detail because, seven years in the making, it is a most crafted and sculpted work of literary art.

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Visitants marks the welcome return of Randolph Stow the novelist. Stow’s last novel, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, appeared in 1965, and since then this once prolific writer has been extraordinarily reticent.

The publication of Visitants, the promise of a sequel in the near future, and, coincidentally, his selection for the Patrick White Award for 1979, may point to a decisive break in the long silence which has puzzled and indeed dismayed his admirers.

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