Fiction

for Léger the archive and literature are mutually informing. The neutral intellectualism of the former and the subjective affectivity of the latter exist in a dyadic relationship. This tension is a source of the great power of Léger’s extraordinary short books. Profoundly recondite, they are also deeply moving. Léger understands the literary power of the image and of narrative; the thing and its multiple renderings through mediation. This flickering between the real and its representation, between subject and object, is central to the effect of Léger’s triptych. It is not surprising, then, that the three subjects of her triptych are all associated with the representational power of the visual image and of (self-) performance.

The Inland Sea is an omnivorous, heady debut dense with paradox and provocation. With no pretensions to lighting the way out of our current mess, Watts guides us into the thicket, leaves us in an anxious twilight between the material and the figurative.

As A Jealous Tide continues, MacDonald abandons the apparatus of realism in favour of a more playful and elaborate approach. The contours of time and place erode. The narrator’s watery fancies of libraries turning into vessels become hard to distinguish from the hallucinations of the shipwreck survivors she’s researching . The traffic outside filtered through the windows takes on the rhythmic sound of waves; the railing, encircling the library’s upstairs gallery, becomes a ship’s deck, listing in the breeze; the ladders are knotted ropes over the sides of a sinking ship. And her desk is now a lifeboat as she ‘magicks’ herself onto a bench seat, a sole survivor adrift in open sea.

‘Ali Smith’s decision to begin her seasonal quartet in the mellow fruitfulness of Autumn and end in glorious Summer now seems like heroic optimism. The quartet was conceived as an exercise in writing to the moment: a sequence of novels written and published at the rate of one a year, set in part at the time of their composition, responding to events as they unfolded in the wake of the bitterly fought Brexit referendum of 2016. The publishing schedule didn’t quite work out: Spring was late. Yet in the very act of aligning a creative embrace of happenstance with the cycle of the seasons there is an article of faith.’ 

Lim paints a hard-nosed portrait of middle-aged, single and queer womanhood encircled by the long tail of patriarchy, bolstered by the senseless weaponisation of cultural traditions and the burden of expectation.

Ordinary matter is what we are made of – everything we can see or detect with telescopes or microscopes or our own eyes. Such a wide descriptive ambit makes it an apposite title for this second collection of fiction by Brisbane-based Laura Elvery, which ranges far and wide, across decades and geographical spaces, and occupies the nexus between arts and science, writing and innovation.

In her debut novel, A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing, Jessie Tu paints a portrait of an artist on the brink. The neurotic protagonist, Jena Lin, was a child prodigy violinist who toured the world before her public breakdown at the age of 15. Now 22, she is rebuilding her career after detouring through a literature degree, although this time as an orchestra violinist, not a soloist.

Because this is the thing, I keep thinking, about being handed the keys to the city of oneself – keys are not particularly versatile tools. They may very well open up a set of gates, but they cannot help to navigate whatever lies on the other side. There’s no street directory, or map of any kind. Perhaps this is true to some degree for everybody, but in the case of autism, its seems like such a map might even be impossible, because the systems of cartography that such a thing relies upon aren’t designed to cover this kind of terrain: my magnetic north simply points in a different direction.

The Rain Heron is an exemplary work of popular fiction. People can be a little touchy about such designations, so let me stress that I am imputing no deficiency of craft or intelligence or imagination. Quite the contrary. What I mean, specifically, is that its considerable formal accomplishment is its ability to mould its ideas into a conventionally satisfying shape. It is a richly imaginative work that appeals to a sense of wonder and evokes important themes, but it ultimately remains within established and therefore, in the final instance, reassuring parameters.

The reliance on marriage to broker socio-economic advancement is as old as the history of the novel. In its rudimentary form, the dénouement of the ‘wedding novel’ loosens up the existing social structures to accommodate a more integrated bourgeoisie, often achieved by betraying the aspirations of well-heeled parents. Elephants with Headlights sublimates this trope with an esoteric convolution of destinies of its characters, in this world and their current and upcoming reincarnations.