Australian literature
The Harsh Light of Day: Blue Skies by Helen Hodgman
It is common for Tasmanian literature to be softlit with the kinds of autumnal colours that are so flattering to sandstone convict ruins, a contrast to the red dust and white gums of much mainland Australian writing. Helen Hodgman turns up the intensity, creating a glare under which she examines human desperation and ugliness. It is usual, in writing about Tasmania, for dawns and dusks to proliferate. Instead, Hodgman gives us broad daylight—precisely, a never-ending three o’clock.’
The Dancer From the Dance: Between a Wolf and a Dog
The novel’s title is the translation of the French expression l’heure entre chien et loup, ‘the hour between dog and wolf’. It refers to twilight, the dusky hour when you can no longer see clearly and might easily mistake a dog for a wolf or vice versa. Between a wolf and a dog: the uncertain space between faithful companion and savage predator, between civilisation and wildness, darkness and light, the known and the unknown, life and death. And on the day that most of the action in this novel takes place, every main character is in such a liminal zone, a place of flux and cusp, moving through a scary transition from one state to the next.
Cloud Cuckoo Land Pastoral: The Last Garden by Eva Hornung
In place of the dystopian world of post-Soviet Moscow in Dog Boy, Hornung’s new novel land us in a cloud cuckoo land pastoral. Of course, pastorals, no matter how Arcadian, always have their darker sides. This is no exception. The Last Garden begins with a murder-suicide.’
Canberra, Schooled
It would seem then that, after fifty years or so, the so-called ‘Canberra School’ is still loosely ‘conservative’, though that single and somewhat pejorative adjective massively oversimplifies the variety to be found here. These new collections by Alan Gould, John Foulcher, Paul Cliff and Melinda Smith are all fine examples of the strength and diversity of poetry to be found in our capital city (and its regions) at the moment. The ‘Canberra School of Poetry’ may never have quite existed but clearly something substantial has.’
Grenville on the Frontier
The Secret River is best read in terms other than those Grenville has framed for it. The historical novel in the realist mode will never escape the sort of criticism pointed at Grenville: departing from the historical record and projecting the present onto the past. The needs of plot, drama, character and so on demand such departures; for if the historian is tied to the archive, the novelist is bound by the audience. The novelist’s distortions of the historical are necessary not just for artistic purposes, however, as fidelity to the historical record was never the exclusive goal in the first place. Rather than read The Secret River as ‘true history’ by cordoning off its departures from the historical record, we might instead think of it as a critical appropriation of frontier mythology.
Swaying Ground: The Restorer by Michael Sala
The Restorer is dramatically immersive, thematically confronting and — despite its flaws — moving. Like The Last Thread, it is in large part about difficult reckonings with family histories, and the challenge of wresting back control of a precariously positioned life. Sala highlights what I take to be a core moral of the story insistently, but perhaps good advice is worth repeating. For most readers, the skilful characterisation will outweigh all instances of heavy-handedness. I only hope that in future treatments of similar themes the vile men are friendly-seeming white collar workers who patronise the arts. I hear they exist. After all, what use is a topical novel unless its readers are made to feel uncomfortably close to—and complicit in—the issue it addresses?’
A Reckoning: A Change in the Lighting by Amy Witting
‘In capturing Ella, Witting captures how any of us might look or think at our worst, holding ourselves up against any available measure in a desperate effort to find some argument for, some defence of who we are or what we’ve done.’
Monster or Mohican: Extinctions by Josephine Wilson
John Mohegan’s tragedy is that all of his family and his tribe have died. The tragedy of Frankenstein’s monster is that he never had either to begin with. These two tropes of Romantic agony lie at the heart of Josephine Wilson’s Extinctions, a novel about Australia’s Stolen Generation, but also about migration, gender, and the deep traumas of family life.
