Fiction

The decision to write in a semi-autobiographical style raises inevitable questions. Is this fiction or autobiography? To what degree can we speak of the narrator ‘Luke Carman’ as a ‘character’ in the author Luke Carman’s collection of vignettes?

Silence pervades much of Alex Miller’s Coal Creek. Characters, in particular our guide and narrator, Bobby Blue, rarely vocalise their thoughts. And this silence is golden, if we accept Bobby’s world view.

All That Is is both sweeping – a man’s entire adult life is covered, beginning from the age of eighteen and ending in old age, just before serious illness might begin – and minute. Despite the span of time covered in the book, it is under 300 pages. It is a book of small breaths.

It seems, on the face of it, a bit bizarre that Blanche d’Alpuget should have written what is clearly the first of a series of novels about Henry II, and a bit odd too that she should have called it The Young Lion.

At the centre of these books, then, is the paradox of a man trying to be objective about his own subjectivity. The paradox is inherent in any autobiographical endeavour, but there are a number of factors elevating Knausgaard’s intimate revelations above the common run of first-person narratives. The most obvious is the ambitious scale of the project.

Eyrie’s central character, Tom Keely, is defeated and ineffectual, a pill-popping and lonely one-time idealist who has fallen out of his own life. He is also arguably a haunted version of Tim Winton.

Barracuda continues the unlikely project, initiated by Tsiolkas’ fourth novel The Slap, of bringing troubling ideas about the Australian mainstream within the view of a mainstream readership. Tsiolkas is better than anyone else writing in Australia today at thinking about the affective pull and the sharp edges of communities: ethnicity, family, friendship, class, nation.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is Flanagan’s literary offering to history and national culture. It works hard to turn the memoirs of the prisoners of war into a work that is emotionally charged and accessible for readers too young to remember the aftermath of war.

The classic Saunders story, like a classic Dr Seuss, is most easily distinguished by the author’s use of language, where he is brilliantly at work on several levels. Saunders has what Thomas Pynchon calls ‘an astoundingly tuned voice’.

How do we understand the critical response to Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites? In order to distinguish authentic aesthetic judgements amongst the reviews it will help to consider the way the advance for Burial Rites fits into the logic of trade book publishing.