Fiction

How I Became the Mr Big of People Smuggling is sold as a crime novel, but this is a crude categorisation for an unusual book. Mr Big is more like a fictional memoir; the story of Nick Smart, a high-school graduate who signs up to work as a jackaroo at the remote Palmenter Station, but quickly discovers that it is a front for a people-smuggling outfit. He then kills the station’s murderous namesake and takes over the operation.

Telling the stories of brothers Tyler and Barrett, with interspersing brief moments from their lovers and mothers, Michael Cunningham’s The Snow Queen reunites its author with a familiar subject: the sublimity of the ordinary.

Barrett is a failed academic whose scholarly pursuits have dried up long before they should have begun to do so, while his romantic life is one mostly mediated by text messages and bottles of Pepsi. His brother fares no better, with dreams of a future career in music and an ever-growing drug habit. Tyler’s girlfriend, Beth, meanwhile is deteriorating before him, afflicted by a terminal cancer and existing like one of the many snowflakes that blows into his bedroom window – beautiful and present but inevitably destined to melt away in his hands.

A multi-generational saga straddling numerous countries and political régimes, Leila Yusaf Chung’s first novel, Chasing Shadows, largely alternates between middle child Ajamia’s viewpoint and her father Abu Fadi’s memories, thus giving an evocative portrait of Middle Eastern life in the late nineteenth century. Abu, a middle-aged Polish-Jewish man, fled his barren marriage in Łódź for British Palestine, where he subsequently converted to Islam and married Keira, a carefree Palestinian girl of only thirteen. Months later, the Jewish state of Israel was created, and the subsequent disarray seeped into Abu Fadi and Keira’s marriage, irrevocably changing their lives.

Over half the stories collected in Between My Father and the King have not been published before – whether through reluctance, initial rejection, or restraint – and are only now, with this posthumous publication, reaching an audience. Others have appeared everywhere from the New Zealand School Journal to The New Yorker, from the mid-1940s through to 2010.

‘Six lives, six loves and a precious garment that binds them all’ are words on the cover of expatriate Sri Lankan Su Dharmapala’s second novel. The book’s six sections follow the sequence of tying a saree – knot, first drape, pleats, second drape, the fall, and the finishing. Six lives are cleverly connected by a precious silken saree in Sri Lanka, India, and Melbourne. Initially, one imagines that the characters will be drawn from the young aspirants selected to compete for apprenticeships at a progressive saree mill in south-west Sri Lanka. Several, with their tutors, will reappear, sometimes surprisingly; others will vanish.

Everybody knows by now that the eBook may soon become as significant to literature as recording is to music. The copyright problems are evident, but on the positive side the tired old market-driven canon is being given a rude shake-up.

Quality speaks for itself. Recent welcome revivals include editions of David Ireland’s The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971) and Kenneth Mackenzie’s flawless evocation of adolescent love, The Young Desire It (1937). Now, for the first time in seventy-eight years, J.P. McKinney’s novel of the Great War, Crucible, has been reissued by a small Canberra publisher as an eBook.

The last words of the endnotes to John A. Scott’s most recent novel – earlier ones have won the Victorian Premier’s prize for fiction and been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award – and thus the last words of this book, if we exclude back-cover plaudits, read: ‘An additional narrative strand, chronicling the history of Surrealist André Breton in Melbourne, 1952, omitted from this version of N for reasons of overall length [emphasis added], appears in Southerly, Vol. 73, No 3, 2013 (“The Naked Writer”).’ As these words appear on page 599 of N, a sesquipedalian opus if ever there was one, it can only be observed, echoing Francisco in the first scene of Hamlet, ‘for this relief much thanks’, for N is already over-long, over-plotted, over-the-top, making excessive demands upon the reader’s generosity and her stamina.

Maxine Beneba Clarke is already a well-known Melbourne voice: a fiction writer and slam poet with an enthusiastic following. Now we have her first collection of short stories, Foreign Soil – the winner of the 2013 Victorian Premier’s Award for an Unpublished Manuscript – and it is a remarkable collection indeed. While its ten stories, ranging in length from fifteen to fifty pages, are unashamedly political, they are never reductively polemical. Nourished by Clarke’s empathetic imagination, her narratives create the lived experience of suffering and despair, resilience and hope, for the powerless, the discarded, the socially adrift.

‘You acquired the habit of disguise and now you can’t shed it.’ This observation, made by a nameless old man to Lilith Goldberg, one of the three main protagonists of The Claimant, lies at the heart of the novel, though it shares that vibrantly beating heart with much else: the implications and intricacies of privilege; the iron grip of lineage; the complexities of naming and identity; the relentlessly resurfacing dramas of the personal past; unchangeable and beyond erasure; and the persistence of the essential self, which no guiles, stratagems or journeyings will suppress or alter.

With his first novel, Tiger in Eden (2012), Chris Flynn displayed an acute ear for the vernacular that was occasionally profane and equally poetic. This quality continues in his new novel, The Glass Kingdom, particularly through the central characters, Ben and Mikey. Both men are misfits of the first order. Ben, the older of the pair, runs a sideshow alley game, Target Ball, for a motley travelling carnival making its way through the backblocks of rural New South Wales, fleecing the locals and getting into the occasional bar-room brawl, all while running a relatively lucrative methamphetamine trade.