Fiction

The Luminaries… is not only set in the nineteenth century; it appears to be of the nineteenth century, or as close to it as possible. It has the scope and length of a nineteenth century novel, and its central mysteries are established and explored in a nineteenth century style.

So there is a sense in which The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was an instant classic, like Psycho or A Streetcar Named Desire. How does it stand up? …more than anything le Carré had so far written, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a work of great moral power. It is full of complex, ambivalent emotion and a sense of the supremely pitiable, maybe even tragic, nature of human life.

Alizadeh is an acclaimed poet and academic, and a self-confessed ‘unashamedly political writer’… In Transactions, he uses extreme examples of disenfranchisement, disempowerment and the unrestrained exercise of power to expose the inequities of the capitalist system and shock the reader out of his or her complacency.

And so it is that every book and every writer needs their own story of how they came to be: some reason that their book was written, some reason it was published, some reason it should be picked up in a bookstore. This is particularly so for debut writers, who must try their luck in, as William Blake put it, a desolate market where none come to buy.

‘We live in a philistine nation but a civilised city,’ said the Director of the NGV, Patrick McCaughey, on purchasing Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman for $1.6 million in 1986… In Cairo, Chris Womersley has taken the theft of Weeping Woman and re-imagined it from the perspective of a young innocent from the kind of country town McCaughey was referring to when he called Australia a philistine nation.

‘Why do you invent … and tell lies?’ So asks Reno, the protagonist of Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. She has come home with the artist Ronnie Fontaine after a dinner party, during which he told an epic tale. ‘They aren’t lies,’ replies Ronnie. ‘They’re a form of discretion.’

The Young Desire It is one of the most brilliant, confident and unusual instances of a Bildungsroman in Australian literature. Nor was it a flash of genius soon extinguished. Scores of poems and three more novels followed, besides extensive unpublished fiction. But how has Mackenzie fared in Australian literary history?

The Swan Book bears all the hallmarks of Wright’s astonishing narrative powers: her linguistic dexterity, mashing words and phrases from high and low culture, from English, Aboriginal languages, French and Latin; her humour and scathing satire; her fierce political purpose; her genre bending; her virtuosic gift for interweaving stories on multiple levels, from the literal to the metaphoric, the folkloric and the mythic.

Gotland is a memoir-like novel that shuttles between Melbourne in July and October 2010, and the Swedish island of Gotland in September of that year, where Esther’s sick sister, Rosalind, witnesses Esther’s life-changing and possibly life-saving encounter with the sculptor Sven.

There is more driving this project than mere biographical voyeurism. In the same way that The Lost Life dramatises and elaborates ‘Burnt Norton’, the first poem in Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943), A World of Other People dramatises the last, ‘Little Gidding’… a literary landmark looming from the war-time rubble of the London it transfigures so keenly.