Commentary

Early last year, Phillip Adams interviewed the British author Pat Barker on his radio programme, Late Night Live. Pat Barker is a novelist who has journeyed into history, most famously in her Regeneration trilogy about World War I, where she fictionalises real, historical individuals. Adams asked her: ‘Which is better at getting at the truth? Fiction or history?’ Her answer was: ‘Oh, fiction every time.’ Barker is a novelist for whom violence and the fear of violence has been a recurrent, powerful theme. She argued that fiction allowed her to ‘slow down’ the horror so that she and her readers could think about it as it happened. In real life she felt that violence was often so swift and shocking that all one could do was recoil. Fiction gave her freedoms that helped her to convey truth.

The quirky kind of pleasure’ provided by coincidence; the ‘rightness’, whether logical or poetic, of connections between seemingly unconnected people, particularly connections that are inadvertent or may remain unknown to the people concerned; the ‘pleasing symmetry’, in retrospect, of various experiences we share with another human being, even when the experiences concerned were painful ones and their circumstances tragic: these are but a few of the broader observations, incidental but also integral, strewn throughout Two Lives (2005), Vikram Seth’s recent memoir of his great-uncle Shanti and Shanti’s German-Jewish wife, Henni. Integral not only to their nephew’s story of their fortuitous coming together in Nazi Germany and subsequent lives in England, but also to the life experiences of Seth’s readers, including (in my own case, certainly) the experience of reading the book itself. Such riches as are to be found in this story of ‘strange journeys’ and ‘chance encounters’ may also be found, Seth observes at the end, ‘behind every door on every street’. For me, the coincidences, inadvertent connections and serendipitous symmetries I found in the author’s trajectory and mine came to border on the uncanny.

Like all books, picture books are a vehicle of communication, narrative, information and emotions. Because of the adaptability of the picture-book genre, which communicates using both verbal and visual language systems, it is sometimes possible for authors and illustrators to challenge the underlying precepts of the role of language in the communication process.

This is one way of doing it:

No New Thing

No new thing under the sun:

The virtuous who prefer the dark;

Fools knighted; the brave undone;

In her review of Arabella Edge’s The God of Spring (ABR, March 2006), Melinda Harvey asserts that the novel is ‘classifiable as “artist fiction”, that boom genre of literary fiction ...’ a genre that involves, she declares, ‘a kind of “painting by numbers”, which is why it’s not surprising that many of its best exponents, Edge included, are graduates of Creative Writing departments’. I am not interested in arguing with Harvey’s analysis of Edge’s novel: it is her casual dismissal of works by ‘graduates of Creative Writing departments’ that concerns me. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard similarly purse-lipped comments, variations on the ‘this author is a writing school graduate (sniff) – and it shows …’ theme, I’d be – well, I’d have a jingle in my pocket. I can only assume that such jaundiced remarks spring from some misapprehensions about, or perhaps a studied indifference to, what graduate writing programmes actually involve. As a graduate of one such programme – I was in fact one of Arabella’s MA classmates— I am glad to be given the opportunity to help dispel some common, but decidedly mistaken, notions.

Biographers like to start their versions of the life of Samuel Barclay Beckett by wondering if he left the womb on 13 May 1906, as his birth certificate indicates, or on Good Friday, April 13, as he claimed. This time the master of grim humour and existential doubt isn’t having a lend of us – it was black Friday – though his claim to memories before that passage are more doubtful. Nevertheless, for me, the Beckett myth is born with the story of when he was a boy growing up in Foxrock, outside Dublin, fearlessly climbing a sixty-foot fir tree in the family garden. Standing atop, with his arms spread wide, he launches himself into the sky like an Anglo-Fenian Icarus; apparently, he had always wondered if the lower branches would catch him. Finding that they did, more or less, this naturally became the ten-year-old’s favourite pastime. To his mother’s horror, he repeated this plummet over and over again, and he didn’t always injure himself.

The Sydney Morning Herald has been ‘Celebrating 175 Years’ all year. The words adorn every front page; the Herald ran a number of commemorative features to mark the actual anniversary on April 18; and The Big Picture: Diary of a Nation, consisting of essays by journalists and photographs from the Herald’s magnificent photographic library, has been published (see John Thompson’s review in the March issue).

After attaining a low-luminosity arts degree, I worked for a year as a handyman in my university’s Research School of Physical Sciences. This was in 1972, when the new particle accelerator was being installed in its massive concrete tower; its assembly made my humble handyman job one of the most intriguing and happy employments I have had. We bolted together the sandblasted steel pipes for the SF6 (sulphur hexafluoride) coolant, first larding their joints with gaskets of white gunk. In a lofty workshop dominated by the monstrous ex-Krupps steel mill (a German war reparation), we hefted the odd magnetron on chainblocks that our master-craftsmen might more conveniently prepare it for installation. We crawled into the cavernous interior of the accelerator’s ‘tank’ to grind at weld-burrs until the steel surface had no tiny irregularity to which the fourteen million volts intended for the apparatus could distractingly zap. To this smooth surface we then applied a silver paint until we stood, spattered angels encompassed by our weird reflective heaven. We watched the precision tubes being installed through the centre of this tank by lanky experts from Wisconsin, knowing how, within these conduits, the particles were to be accelerated by that impressive voltage toward targets the size of my thumbnail in collisions that would explain the universe finely.

On December 7, the Australian parliament passed the Anti-Terrorism Bill (No. 2) 2005. According to Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, the new legislation places ‘Australia in a strong position to prevent new and emerging threats and to stop terrorists carrying out their intended acts’.¹ Most controversially, the law introduces new sedition offences. But it also grants additional powers to the security services, most notably the Australian Federal Police (AFP). Of interest to me here are the provisions allowing the police to restrict the liberty of people who have neither been charged with an offence nor detained for questioning. The AFP may now apply to a court for control orders which could require a person to wear a tracking device, place them under house arrest, bar them from working in certain professions, or prohibit their use of the telephone or the Internet. A control order could be issued for twelve months at a time and would be renewable. Anybody contravening such an order risks a five-year jail sentence. The new law also provides a preventative detention régime. In conjunction with complementary state and territory legislation, the law allows the authorities to detain suspects for up to two weeks at a time.

The future of the Australian picture book would appear to be in very good hands. The most recently published writers include familiar names such as authors Hazel Edwards, Margaret Wild and Gary Crew, and author–illustrators Deborah Niland and Roland Harvey. What makes the latest offerings stand out, however, is the plethora of new and emerging authors and illustrators who are venturing into this genre. Such a combination of experienced and innovative approaches can only be good for Australian children’s literature.