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Thea Astley

Each of the three parts that make up Thea Astley’s new novel, Coda, is prefaced by a newspaper report, real or imaginary, detailing cases of ‘granny-dumping’, the ruthless abandonment of old, frail, and disoriented people by their unidentified children. This sets the scene for a reflection on old age and the rejection of those whose physical and mental capacities no longer meet the stringent requirements of the standard economically viable unit of modem civilisation. The manifest duty of such objects is to be as discreet as possible, providing minimal inconvenience to others (especially their adult children) until they can fade into oblivion.

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Thea Astley’s first novel, Girl with A Monkey (1958), signalled the arrival of a writer with a distinctive style. Astley believes that Angus and Robertson accepted the book, although it would not be a money-spinner like the work of their bestsellers, Frank Clune and Ion Idriess, because their editor Beatrice Davis took the initiative in encouraging ‘a different form of writing from the Bulletin school’. The plain Bulletin style, a consciously shaped style representing ‘natural’ narrative, was still the norm in Australian writing in the 1950s, although that decade also saw the publication of stylistically evocative novels like Patrick White’s The Tree of Man and Voss, Hal Porter’s A Handful of Pennies, Martin Boyd’s The Cardboard Crown, A Difficult Young Man, and Outbreak of Love, and Randolph Stow’s The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, A Haunted Land, The Bystander, and To the Islands.

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In the thirty or so years that she has been publishing fiction, Thea Astley has mapped out a literary territory very clearly her own, a territory that is defined in the first place by regional geography.

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Draw an outline of the Cape York Peninsula, far north Queensland. Just a rough one. An isosceles triangle, more or less. Now draw its mirror image away from the baseline. Imagine it in 3-0. Two cones. Two cyclones joined, spinning in opposite directions. Male and female vortices balancing each other, consuming each other. That’s it. Two novellas making a novel: Thea Astley’s brilliant Vanishing Points.

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Would it surprise you to know that a number of our well-known writers write to please themselves? Probably not. If there’s no pleasure, or challenge, or stimulus, the outcome would probably not be worth the effort. If this effort is writing, it seems especially unlikely that someone would engage in the activity without enjoying the chance to be their own audience.

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As I became more and more engrossed in this wonderful novel, I asked people I came across ‘Thea Astley?’ And they’d answer vaguely ‘I keep meaning to read her’ or ‘she’s meant to be good’ or ‘I don’t know why I haven’t, she’s written quite a few, hasn’t she?’ Who does read Thea Astley? Me, now; and people I come across will. I’ll make sure of it.

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Long term readers of Thea Astley have come to expect novels and short stories of finely tuned social satire which have increasingly employed Astley’s individual idiom: a richly textured and often baroque language of compressed meaning, of striking and original metaphor, of the incisively apt phrase which encapsulates character.

Her satiric themes have almost always focused on Australian society or that of the Pacific region – that ‘tropic cliché’ which she identified in her Herbert Blaiklock Memorial Lecture – ‘Being a Queenslander: A Form of’ Literary and Geographical Conceit’.

The favoured Astley microcosm is an enclosed or isolated community, the small northern town of many of her novels, or the tropic aeland of A Boat Load of Home Folk and her latest novel Beachmasters. Within this environment she is apt to place an isolated and vulnerable individual – perhaps an adolescent like Vinny Lalor of A Descant for Gossips or Gavi Salway of Beachmasters – who must, under the pressure of the social dialectic, learn the complexity of human response.

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Returning to live in Queensland seems to have done something to Thea Astley’s perception of Australian country life. In this novel, as well as in her previous one, A Kindness Cup, she gives as appalling and scathing a vision of life in rural Australia as has come from any novelist since Barbara Baynton. Although her prose is as bitingly astringent as ever in this book, it lacks the sardonic humour of her recent collection of short stories Hunting the Wild Pineapple. The pessimism and anger are almost unrelieved.

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There nine stories in this volume are rich in people, satire, compassion, and humour. And set like ambushes, unexpected and surprising, are several cameos. It is a captivating, ensnaring book, but to call it a book of short stories would be so inadequate as to be misleading. There is an uncommon coherence, slender but powerful enough to raise it above that easy classification.

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