Fiction

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.

The novel’s central love arc (between a two-party leftist and a ‘radical’), and the centrist protagonist’s personal chem-sexual odyssey towards a revolutionary politics, sketches out an account of what a Marxist, or communist, sexuality could be like in pretty specific terms.

This is an author who has long been interested in the nexus between publishing and technology; Ex Libris is the cumulative, and – arguably – the most ambitious result of all his hybrid ventures.

‘Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own,’ Tove Ditlevsen wrote in Childhood (1967), the first volume in her autobiographical trilogy, an account of a lonely, impoverished Copenhagen upbringing. It’s a grim assessment, one that I returned to as I immersed myself in the world of Favel Parrett’s fiction. Across three novels, the Australian author’s concern has been the vulnerability of children, dependent upon the mercy of adults as they navigate an inscrutable, forbidding world.

Unified by the author’s fine writing and lively, non-judgemental voice, we have a narrative of transience that poses an elemental challenge to the demarcations of fiction and non-fiction and, in that way, to the politics supporting the inhumanity of the Australian migrant detention system today.

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.