In David Malouf’s second and perhaps most celebrated novel, An Imaginary Life (1978), of which this new novella is so reminiscent, the Roman poet Ovid is exiled to a primitive village named Tomis. Ovid, ‘called Naso because of the nose’, has been banished due to his unspoken affronts. In Tomis, Ovid, doomed and apart, senses that he must acquire in simplicity a new kind of wisdom:

A poet friend, getting wind that I was reviewing the two latest ‘Bests’ and wishing to satirise the reviewing platitudes that sometimes greet the arrival of such anthologies, offered the following advice: ‘Remember to say that both collections are a welcome addition to the literary landscape and that both editors have included some welcome new voices in Australian poetry.’ Peter Rose’s The Best Australian Poems 2008 and David Brooks’s The Best Australian Poetry 2008 provide commendable surveys of a year in Australian poetry. Both include ‘new voices’ as well as sonorous old ones. Variations in quality inevitably occur, but many of the ‘new’ offerings are excellent and few, if any, are duds. This can only be welcomed.

In early 1980, Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin undertook yet another concert tour. One of their last concerts together was in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. There was a dismal yellow standard lamp for light and a revolving stage so that all the patrons could get value for money. The master of ceremonies introduced them as ‘Ham-erica’s own ... Yoohoo and Heffi Menhoon’. These exceptional siblings had been playing music together since 1932, usually in more salubrious venues. Yehudi often spoke of their liaison spirituelle and their ‘Siamese soul’. Their first public concert took place in 1934, in the Salle Pleyel in Paris. By 1980 it had become one of the longest and richest partnerships in the history of chamber music.

It is hard to become excited about Peter Carey’s new novel, and that is a hard notion to entertain. We are used to being tested, and vastly entertained, by Carey. For a quarter of a century he has written distinctive and highly original fiction, including two or three books (notably True History of the Kelly Gang [2000] for this writer) that triumphantly fulfilled the novel’s enduring claim on our attention. This new work – though comparably imaginative in places – seems to mark not so much a falling-off as a kind of marking time.