Fiction

Lohrey has spent more than three decades chronicling Australian masculinity with a curious and sympathetic eye, but The Labyrinth is in large part about what it feels like to be a woman in Australia.

In both Down The Hume and The Pillars, there are none of those happy endings that cheerfully bridge the challenges of multicultural existence. Characters from down-and-out circumstances don’t eventually triumph over their difficulties. Instead, by portraying characters who don’t represent easy moral positions, Polites’ work annihilates the assimilationist fantasy of ‘togetherness’ that is so often parroted in liberal discourse, and the fallacy that disenfranchised people are automatically ‘good’ or innocent.

The appearance of Evie Wyld’s novel in Anne Brontë’s bicentennial year prompts thoughts about the relation between the writings of these two angry women. The continuities are striking. Deeply religious, Anne used the back of her prayer book to record, in tiny letters, her response to all she had witnessed: ‘sick of mankind | And their disgusting ways’. We can’t know for certain whether, when she wrote ‘mankind’, she had the human species or the male sex in mind, but I lean towards the latter. Now, reading The Bass Rock, I feel as if Wyld had written boldly underneath Anne’s words: ‘Me Too’.

If Lindsay’s novel was as much a knowing pastiche of the lost girl narrative as a compulsive repetition, the latest addition to the canon, Catherine Noske’s debut novel The Salt Madonna, quickly announces itself as a self-conscious work of genre revision.‘ Once upon a time, a girl called Mary lived on an island called Chesil,’ the framing narrator Hannah Mulvey tells us, before confessing, pages later, that Mary is not her real name.

These stories are written in what might be called the deliberately unambitious style of contemporary realism. What is original in them is their structure: they work like fables, though they have a novel’s pacing. They are set in London, Wollongong, Moscow, Sydney, Azabu, on the Atlantic coast of Spain, in Hong Kong, in Kyushu, in Oxford, in a small town near Mount Kosciuskco; even on Mars – and, like fables, they are set nowhere. The characters pay strikingly little attention to place; they speak to each other in much the same way in Wollongong and on Mars. There is rain to be seen, but it is soundless, it has no scent; it does not touch the skin. In these stories, the fable’s clarified settings – a well, a tree, a trap – find their equivalents in the settings of the global city: rooms – bars and restaurants and cafes – and people talking.

The Yield is about the elementary miracle of rediscovering oneself; of finding, in the neon-lit recesses of lived and historical pain, a home. It is about the history of this continent as told through the history of Wiradjuri culture. And it is about the fact of this culture existing as a living, breathing work in progress.

His characters are men I have known, men with whom I have lived, hooked-up, been frustrated. They skirt around what they ought to say and try to reinvent themselves and downplay their opportunities and make geographical excuses for their oddities.

History runs in parallel tracks: there is the way things have been told, and the way things were. As in: not colonised, but civilised. And to be made civil, to be made ‘adequate in courtesy and politeness’, as Merriam-Webster defines it, makes it sound like a favour. Language obfuscates. It’s a way of controlling the narrative, forcing the eye into a narrow aperture. A single perspective becomes the singular perspective, which is how colonial literature came to skew mainstream cultural understandings of that period. Mirandi Riwoe seems determined to widen that aperture and, then, to shift the perspective entirely.

In relentless succession, Yumna Kassab’s fictions scrutinise the psychopolitics of displacement in a political landscape fortified by a warrant for Islamophobia.

‘This novel haunts crossing spaces, the liminal zones of libraries’ public privacies (laundering, humming, existential despair), hallways and elevators. And many of us are reading Weather in locked-down homes without much sense of what might happen next. Kazim Ali, writing about the magic of the poetic line, notes: “Something exists in the here and now with no dependence on before or after.” This is the space Offill observes, collecting shards and slivers of questioning.’