Allen & Unwin

The Vogel Prize shares a reputation with the rest of the company’s products: nutritious, worthy, a little dull. But the prize’s earnest image is unfair. Any glance at the roll-call of winners over the last twenty-five years would show that the makers of soggy bread and soya cereals have done more than anyone to introduce fresh literary DNA into Australia’s tiny gene pool of published novelists. But reviewers, mostly, and the public, generally, don’t get excited when the new Vogel is published. This year they should. Julienne van Loon’s desperate joyride, Road Story, is the best Vogel winner to come along since 1990, when Gillian Mears’s The Mint Lawn, equally confident but very different, won first place.

In the last twenty years, the belief in a transformative left – socialist, communist, whatever – has collapsed more comprehensively than at any time since its beginnings in 1789. The Western working class is overwhelmingly oriented towards individual life, acquisition and consumption; the working class of the developing world has not developed major radical parties in the face of substantial repression of trade union organisation; faith in central planning, market socialism, interconnected cooperatives and the like drained away in the late 1970s, and no alternative plan for running the economy is on the table. 

There is a trick to the trite title of Death by Water, the fifteenth volume in Kerry Greenwood’s series about the hedonistic 1920s private detective Phryne Fisher. Contrary to expectations, no murder occurs for more than two hundred pages. In the meantime, the nominal plot involves the hunt for a jewel thief aboard a cruise ship bound for New Zealand, but far more attention is devoted to meals, cocktails, cigarettes, clothes, dance music, maritime scenery, anthropological chit-chat and recreational sex. Literary quotes of approximate relevance head each chapter, while ratiocination occurs as an accompaniment to life’s more sensual pleasures: ‘Phryne ate a thoughtful croissant.’

The publisher’s puff to actor Michael Craig’s autobiography, a ‘fascinating, wittily wicked memoir of his life in film, theatre and television’, is unfortunate: not only is its conventional hyperbole on this occasion a cruel overstatement, but it misleadingly suggests a meaningful structuring of the events of Craig’s long career – in three media on two continents – that is nowhere apparent. Craig himself calls it more modestly a ‘rambling discourse’.

Some generals in Australia’s ‘culture wars’ have appointed themselves defenders of a mythical identity against the incursions of multiculturalists and ‘black armbanders’. Literary skirmishes over national identity have been more mundane, concerning mainly eligibility for awards. Certainly, three recent crime novels suggest that Australian writing benefits from adoption of a broad definition. That these three novels vary widely in plot, setting, characterisation and style is understandable given the authors’ disparate backgrounds.

Much has been written on Edna Walling’s gardens, first by herself, later by garden historians, although no detailed account of her early career has been attempted, and less still is generally known of her private life. With a play on Walling to her credit (1987), Sara Hardy presents an account of her private life (1895–1973) and of her early career.

Campaigning during the 1912 US presidential election, the great labour leader and socialist Eugene Debs used to tell his supporters that he could not lead them into the Promised Land because if they were trusting enough to be led in they would be trusting enough to be led out again. In other words, he was counselling his voters to resist the easy certitude that zealotry brings; to reject a politics that trades on blind faith rather than the critical power of reason.

About to present a lecture to medical students, pathologist Dr Anya Crichton notes optimistically, in Kathryn Fox’s new novel, that the word ‘forensic’ in the title will pretty much guarantee her a full house. Sadly, when the overstressed and overambitious students discover that the topic is not going to figure on their exam paper, a significant number depart, therefore missing out on such compelling topics as how to spot the suspicious death of a diabetic, or when to accuse the family pet of snacking on the deceased.

Luke Davies is best known as the author of Candy (1997), a novel about love and heroin addiction. His poetry, meanwhile, has attracted attention for its characteristic interest in how we relate to an unknowable universe; it is also unusual in that it draws on a more-than-everyday understanding of theoretical physics. In this latest volume, which comes in two parts – a long meditative poem followed by forty short lyrics, both celebrating love – an awareness of the vast reaches of space remains, although its expression is now less factual and has acquired a new subtlety.

Several years ago, I was privy to a breakfast conversation with one of our venerable literary critics, in which he lamented the proliferation of novels in Australia by young women. Of particular concern, he announced, was the tendency of said young women to construct ‘itsy-bitsy sentences from itsy-bitsy words’. And he smiled around the table warmly, secure in venerable male polysyllabic verbosity. As a young woman myself of vague literary urges, I felt thoroughly rebuffed. The only words I could think to form were both too itsy-bitsy and obscene to constitute effective rebuttal, and they remained unsaid.