Reviews

Devadatta’s Poems is written from the perspective of Devadatta, a lesser known figure in Buddhism, who seeks to displace Siddhattha without success. Beveridge takes him from the margins, placing him at the centre of her volume. Moreover, she gives him possession in the title: the collection is his.

Like Hall’s previous novels, The Wolf Border is set in the high, wild border country of Cumbria and is deeply informed by the physical and social textures of the region. At its centre is zoologist Rachel Caine.

Steve Toltz’s second novel Quicksand is not a radical departure from his remarkable debut A Fraction of the Whole, at least in terms of style, tone and subject matter. It features a similar range of hyper-verbal characters whose conflicts, schemes and misunderstandings build with a snowball-like momentum, smashing through into new frontiers of awfulness and hilarity.

At the centre of each of these narratives – nine short stories and three novels – is a woman or a girl. Some are empathetic, others cruelly selfish; some are extroverts and others aloof; some are acerbically witty and others dangerously naive. Despite their diversity and their different locations in history, place and time of life, most of them are far more resilient than they perceive themselves to be.

It is a quandary of the currently abounding place-literature that by bringing such softening frames to so-called ‘wild’ places, and by writing so charmingly about them, authors are in fact robbing these places of the ‘wildness’ and the psychogeographical freedom they purport to love. Or are they?

While Ellroy works on a big canvas – war, love, unsolved murders – his narratives do not have a long novel’s turning circle. They burn through plot, through false leads and easy answers and obvious betrayals. The first 100 pages of Perfidia are likely denser and more knottily arranged than most crime novels are in their entirety.

Much of Globes is concerned with questions of scale. Human societies are not static in size. What changes or deformations, Sloterdijk asks, must occur in a society when it grows from one of the smallest units – the tribe or clan in which everyone knows each other – into much a bigger grouping: a city, nation or empire?

Riddles are at the heart of Les Murray’s poetry: that language-gift of his, which shows words to be sounds that strangely hold for us those meanings that we attribute to the world. As he remarks in his poem ‘The Meaning of Existence’: ‘Everything except language knows / the meaning of existence’.

If Howe’s primary target in ‘This Age of Conformity’ was the incipient neoconservative milieu, by the mid 1960s he had turned his attention to, and trained his guns on, the embryonic New Left. In his 1965 essay ‘New Styles in “Leftism”’, he isolates and analyses some emergent trends on the progressive side of politics, and finds little cause for celebration.

In The Buried Giant, a fog of forgetfulness has engulfed the people of Britain so that the characters are struggling to understand their fears and the moral logic of their world. They have no past, and the novel reaches for the connections that may create a narrative, both public and personal, for them.