Fiction

Most fiction treats workers as fully external creatures, carrying their physicality as a symbol of their position within the division of labour; Weiss presents them as the authentic bearers of our collective human cultural destiny. It is a question of how these workers, who pay for the very possibility of culture with the surplus created by their labour, attain it, and even come to represent it, themselves. By sheer force of will, and the necessity of an inner compulsion, these young men and women return from the shop floor, physically exhausted but spiritually on fire, to study, debate, and reflect.

In the context of the now more-or-less complete collapse of the New Left, the pulp novels of the fifties and early sixties deserve reconsideration, since, in some ways, contemporary pop culture today occupies a similar space, in that it’s produced almost entirely by commercial businesses with no relationship to any real social struggle.

Did the student say the Outline trilogy was rendered mostly in indirect speech? Perhaps that is why – to quiver between the untruth of getting it all down and the truth of not getting it down in the right words.

It is to Zable’s great credit that, in giving voice, he does not deign to speak for the marginalised but, rather, writes to amplify.

There have been, in recent years, many attempts to explain when a novel makes the definitional leap from ‘fiction’ to ‘autofiction’. It has turned out to be a difficult task. Writers of autofiction write about their lives, but then so do many authors who escape the label.

Culture might not live off Country, in the city, but all culture will be lost if the child is taken; a child taken by the welfare system loses Country anyway, and at the same time they lose their family.

But the Cavafian corpus resists the absurd opposition that is imposed on it – erotic versus historical, homosexual versus patriotic. Rather, Cavafy’s erotic sensibility actually defines his outlook on society and history, and is not separate from it.

Invented Lives is structured around a series of upheavals. The characters’ worlds change and they must decide whether to take a risk or keep their lives as close as they can to before.

It is fitting that McGahan’s final novel should draw together several of his defining themes, and that he has fashioned those themes into a satisfying slab of genre fiction.

Climate change, migration, activism, terrorism: for people living in a small country at the bottom of the world, what does hope for the future look like in the teeth of that gale?