Fiction

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.

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.