*************
February 2000
A N MBA turned humorist (a pretty funny concept in itself), Bruno Bouchet unveiled his satirical eye in All Sorts, his "collected portraits" of gay and lesbian life. In The Beauty of Truth (Hodder, 406pp, $18.95), he gives his burlesque bent full rein when an Aussie Joe Average marketing manager reinvents himself as international lust magnet - the most beautiful man in the world no less. The novel, essentially a traditional morality tale garbed in chic-speak (John Bunyan meets Jackie Collins), delivers the Keatsian glibness of its title with fin de siecle aptness. There's sex 'n' drugs 'n' rocky roles, backstabbing and bitchery, and lots of cynical asides on media/marketing manipulation and the cult of the personality. Hodder has thrown its own marketing weight behind this title (which raises interesting life/art imitation questions), and there's talk of American film interest. It's not Bonfire of the Vanities material, but it will certainly win an audience. Read it together with Sharon Krum's recent Walk of Fame, and rue the oleaginous slickness that western culture has become.
DAVE Warner is another career-change man, adding writing to his musical repertoire. And his latest novel, Exxxpresso (Picador, 376pp, $18.95), continues his Hiaasen-like take on the local crime genre. It's also his most accomplished work thus far - addictive, dry-humoured, with a manic edge. From the ex-crim hero with designs on a cappucino kingdom and his laconic side-kick, to the drug-dealing loan shark, his henchmen, the grasping ex-wife, her lover and an enigmatic mystery woman, Warner's cast of desperados rollicks around the west in a high-speed haze of double, triple and quadruple-crosses. Coincidence has a starring role, certainly, but even at the most contrived it works - the plot is a knotty weave of continual catastrophe and imminent disaster, of dirty deeds and thwarted intentions. Off the wall but on the pace, it's escapism with considerable cinematic potential.
COLIN Macpherson has changed career (and countries) several times, and his CV includes stints as a physicist, farmer, boat-builder and inventor. And now novelist with his debut The Tide Turners (Mopoke Publishing, 242pp, $17.95). Despite a modern setting and up-to-the-minute scientific underpinning, it's curiously old-fashioned in style, a hybrid in tone, perhaps, of The 39 Steps out of Brave New World. Overpopulation and its consequent eco-terrorism of the earth is the core of story billed as one "of morality, innovation, sex and friendship", as told by the hero-narrator. Whose voice is stilted at times, and veers into the proselytising. Nevertheless, it's a proficient page-turner with an intriguing - and important - message.
AS a counter to the high-drama hysteria of books like Not Without My Daughter, Michèle Drouart's Into the Wadi (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 376pp, $19.95) is a refreshingly calm insight into cultural complexity. Part memoir, part discontinuous narrative, her tale of life and love amid a large extended Muslim family in Jordan has the intimacy of stolen diary pages. But a discerning intelligence prevents hagiography. Instead, Drouart engages the reader with accessible affection, layering episodes, personal per-ceptions and sensuous deliberation into a deft exposition of marriage, female friendship and community. And because she presumes neither to possess the cultural "other" nor judge it from her own cultural precepts, her book resonates with a clarity that feels authentic.
D UALITY is the key to Kathleen Stewart's Rubik's cube of a novel. With precise skill, she plots a tale that slowly intensifies from quiet evocation of suburban inertia and mother-daughter tyrannies into a Gothic gallop through the border zones of sanity and insanity, good and evil, normal and abnormal, doctrine and despair. The Red Room (Allen & Unwin, 315pp, $22.95) is mysterious and provocative, and ranks among the most accomplished fiction released this year. Stewart demonstrates that there is much more to horror than Stephen King-like pyrotechnics. Her unravelling of the psychological warfare, obsessions and repressions that bind the oppressed Eleanora to her manipulative, mendacious mother is masterly. Yet it's not all bleakness: there's light and shade, astute characterisation, deft dialogue and leavening humour. All of which lingers long in the mind after the tale is told.
LIKE the PM, The Australian columnist John Harms is a cricket tragic whose wit-fueled, left-field takes on sport provoke as they entertain. More importantly, he's a "life tragic" with an ironic eye for foible and an engaging if droll self-awareness. His Confessions of a thirteenth man (Text Publishing, 305pp, $17.95) is no dry dissection of the last Ashes tour. Mid-life crisis and thwarted love life notwithstanding, Harms - a park cricketer whose dream of a call up to the test team remains unbowed - heads off in his last-legs Camira to follow the test circus around Australia. By Kerouac out of Cardus, his account of that idiocy and odyssey is bred to stay. Charming, funny and touching, it's a primer for those who understand that to love and understand cricket is to love and understand life. More than this, it is an entertaining and perceptive portrait of our culture.
LAURIE Clancy's Night Parking (Bystander Press, 157pp, $18) is a departure from his previous fiction, which majored in the sharply satirical. There's limited parody in this tale of the urban underside, an exploration of nihilism, emotional alienation and urban malaise. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except that in changing direction the normally astute Clancy has conspired to strand himself in a no man's land between significance and ennui, between cinema verite and caricature. The protagonists, an attractive but emotionally flawed woman who rebounds into prostitution and her life-disengaged and thwarted admirer, are barely believable characters who do not sustain interest; the plot teeters between overheating and indolence, sometimes veering towards crime novel, sometimes towards grunge expose. It's all a bit paint-by-numbers, and occasional passages of inspired insight are not enough to save it.September 4, 1999
M ERRILL Findlay spent seven years' on her debut novel, Republic of Women (University of Queensland Press, pp280, $19.95). And it shows in the books' astounding historic and socio-political range. Unapologetically literary (sometimes self-consciously so), this post-modernist pastiche is rigorous, playful and emotionally complex. A little bit Joan Makes History but more ambitious, Republic reinterprets myths and western philosophies from a female-centric viewpoint. A virtual madrigal of music and metaphysics, it explores and then subverts accepted notions of war, nation states, environmentalism, love, sexuality, relationships and betrayal with unflinching honesty.Findlay weaves the disparate threads of inner-city Melbourne chic with Sumero-Babylonian allegory, Verdi's La Traviata with Plato's theories, and professorial dissertations with street wisdoms into a tapestry that is kaleidoscopic. But not flawless. Occasionally the pace lags, operatic passages can be a chorus too long, philosophic expositions sometimes verge on navel-gazing. Overall, though, this is an exhilarating expedition into territory beyond the reach of most contemporary Australian fiction. It rewards the discerning well.
IRONY enlivens Bruce Russell's The Chelsea Manifesto (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, pp288, $17.95), a black comedy with subtle intent. In late middle age, Ben Wallymacher is a Fremantle-based survivor of 70s excesses, of drugs, alternate life styles and dissolution, of the psychodrama of prison and the prisons of psychodrama. Disengaged from life, he mooches aimlessly in pseudo-SNAGish self-delusion until forced to confront the presence of his past. Russell has an easy style and a penetrative eye that dissects social mores with unassuming clarity, and his novel braves the minefields of family and friendship, love, envy and self-delusion with panache. And humour, and a fond cynicism that often touches on pathos. This tangle of reflection and reaction, of memory's miasma, and of lost opportunity and the opportunism that engenders loss, is accomplished. And it will have a satiric redolence for those of "a certain age".
EXPATRIATE author Kathryn Heyman's The Breaking, a passionate evocation of violence and childhood, was long-listed for the prestigious Orange Prize, Britain's richest prize for women authors. Her second novel, Keep Your Hands on the Wheel (Phoenix House, pp307, $ 22.95), visits similar territory of dysfunction when a weight-obsessed opera singer at Yale and a raucous London telegram girl are summoned to their mother's Sydney wedding. Heyman is gifted at merging the lyrical and the colloquial, her characters (particularly the protagonist sisters) are unconventional, her knack for the telling detail adds authenticity. Memory and its effects (overt and repressed) drive the complex confusions of family reunion, amid sassy humour and astringent emotions. There's pizzazz and poignancy here, and probably 50 pages too many. But also writing of the most assured kind.
THE word initiation has a deceptive innocence about it, bastardisation none. Mark Taylor's Dogs Are Barking (Irrepressible Press, pp205, $15.95) strips bare the malice and brutality within military college culture, and exposes the barbaric group dynamics behind ensuring adherence to it. That it has been tacitly condoned and covered up by higher ranks is even more shameful. (This year's A Current Affairs expose is not new - the press has been reporting such incidents since 1913, albeit bowdlerised as "recruiting" or "hazing".) A retired army officer, Taylor begins his novel at full tilt and then accelerates. His writing is workmanlike, his story relentless as it unwinds with inevitable consequences. Not Pulitzer Prize material but passionate and readable, and a clarion call for changeDateline: June 26, 1999
G REED and corruption in the '80s has fed a '90s "inferno of dishonesty and ruthlessness": banks are failing, businesses closing, the unemployed and homeless tramp the streets. Former international banker Marshall Browne's portrait of Melbourne under social and financial siege has a contemporary edge, except his fin de siecle exposé, The Burnt City (Arcadia Press, 328pp, $19.95), is datelined 1893. An evocative blend of history, romance and fiscal finagling, it has multiple plots and a saga's worth of characters. Stately rather than pacy, the novel reeks of authenticity (and other 19th century delights) and invokes the era's mannered mores with minimal sentimentality. What could easily have teetered into potboiler territory is saved with adroitness: after all, anyone who can make a liquidator's trawl through bank receipts thriller-ishly engrossing is obviously adept.
PUBLISHING webmeister, Brisbane-based refugee from North America and poetic PhD - his four books include a Queensland Premier's Award-winner - David P. Reiter probes the algebraic complexity of relationships in his first short story collection, Triangles (Interactive Press, 207pp, $18.95). This narrative geometry is far from Euclidean, however, a satiric eye and deceptively understated style subverting expected QEDs. Always polished and generally spare, Reiter's expositions of love and/or lust lost and/or found amuse and sometimes bemuse. Some linger longer in the mind than others, although his take is constantly fresh, his sensibility sophisticated. A similarity in story-to-story tone is but a minor flaw in what is an impressive assembly.
ANOTHER emigré from the US, Liane Shavian's "eco-warrior" first novel, Surfing Antarctica (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 296pp, $17.95), roisters around the wilds of the west ... and Perth. Impudent and far from politically correct (despite its Greenie credentials), it's a breathless, irreverent romp treating serious issues with admirable anarchy. Easy perceptions and stereotypes are played with, and frequently subverted. Essentially a morality tale, it is swept along on an avalanche of wisecracks (some recycled), saucy sex, sassy cynicism and ambiguities. Shavian's raw-boned Aussie heroine is a riot, her raunchy self-doubts and grrl-ish ambitions undermined by a bias for truth-telling: the other characters are high camp anti-heroes with attitude. Stark fans will embrace this with gusto.
ADVANCE PR for Bloodlust (Vintage, 216pp, $16.95) - complete with media-seductive author photos in vampish poses - has Milissa Deitz noting that readers may hate her main character "but you will never forget her". She's right on both counts. This debut novel is billed as an erotic horror story, and it certainly majors in uninhibited sex and unstaunched bloodlust. Disturbing, jarring, challenging, it repels as it attracts. But it's more than a post-modernist, inner-city reworking of Bram Stoker. Behind the shock schlock and decadence is an artful observer: her gaze is uncompromising as she dissects generational malaises and emotional vagaries with telling recognition. Not for everyone, for sure, but it may well attract cultish enthusiasm.
E XPATRIATE Madelaine St John has a Carnegie-esque way with words. She "resents having to earn a living by writing fiction". And Australian journalists are "plague rats". A three-decade inhabitant of London who departed Australia's "insularity" as soon as possible, she was perturbed by the Madelaine Who? response to her Booker Prize-shortlisted third novel, The Essence of Things. Her fourth, A Stairway to Paradise (Fourth Estate, $24.95, 185pp) is a short, somewhat ironic look at desire and its underlying despairs. The tone beneath its contemporary grab on adultery, friendship and tortuous love triangles is quaintly old-fashioned. And while the writing can be perceptive, cloaked with a repartee of fragile facility, it's as often cloying and coy. "It [their love-making] took aeons and aeons, vast tracts of spangled time: worlds were born and died, planets described their courses around indescribable stars; they drifted and soared through another, occult universe contingent on this one," etc. Get the picture?
MARY-ROSE MacColl's No Safe Place was runner-up in The Australian/Vogel awards. Her second novel, Angels in the Architecture (Allen & Unwin, $17.95, 300pp) is a Brisbane-based murder mystery complete with heritage architecture, nuns, romance and historical flashbacks. And an uneven hybrid of subtle and clumsy characterisations, deft understatement and creaky plotting. The idea is a good one, and her lead, the spirited if ditzy-ish Harriet Darling, is likeable, smart and complex enough to sustain interest. But the tale drifts after a promising build-up into a quasi bodice-ripping yarn of cardboard villains, misunderstood heroes and telegraphed intrigue. Still, it's an enjoyable bedside read, confirming that MacColl will, with focus, convert talent into due presence on the local literary scene.
PROLIFIC Kiwi filmmaker and playwright Anthony McCarten (his co-written Ladies Night was a Full Monty-ish money-spinner) exhibits comic adeptness in his debut novel, Spinners (Picador, 264pp). Small-town New Zealand complete with latent (and not-so-latent) lusts, laconic locals and alien visitations is the backdrop for a sardonic expose. McCarten wields a Foster-like scalpel to peel back the layers of the "normal" in a rumour-riven hamlet of rural malaise and recognisable types. Mischievous more than malicious, he misses little as complications build on dilemmas. Unfortunate, then, that he hits the denouement button too soon, blunting the endgame in the last quarter. Overall, an enjoyable romp with quietly edgy undertones.
MELBOURNE-based Trek enthusiast Sally Rogers-Davidson has fabricated a bleak 21st century Melbourne-centred society of cyberforms, corporate rule and four-classed citizenry. Her second novel, Spare Parts (Penguin, $16.95, 378pp) is a lively if essentially workmanlike creation, its telepathy-and-technology ethos leavened by flashes of humour and acumen. Initially understated and suggestive, her tale is soon highjacked by a perky Girl's Own enthusiasm. But it's comfortable terrain for sf fans, not startlingly innovative but pacily proficient. And there's an edge to characterisation that devotees and genre browsers will enjoy.
I F THE FUSILLADE of first novels peppering bookstore shelves is any indicator, local fiction is a growth industry. Men's health columnist and AFL nutrionist Michael McCoy delivers the first in his two-book deal with Burning Sunday (Sceptre, 224pp, $17.95), a males' eye view of a marriage in crisis. Centred around the 40-something father's St Patrick's Day birthday in 1969, the novel's dual perspectives (father and 15-year-old son) and war letter flashbacks allow us a gradual detection of the family secrets that blind. Paul Kelly's coverline that this is a slow burn of a book is apt - it is ruminative, almost halting at times, but it does exert a subtle fascination. There's a human, pared-down stumbling towards awareness and the realisation that self-delusions and complicit illusions cannot be sustained. Not without flaws - overuse of convoluted sentences with multiple qualifiers slows the pace - it is compelling enough to keep the pages turning. How well it will lodge in the memory is more problematical.
ALTHOUGH PACKAGED as a novel, Anna Maria Dell'oso's Song of the Suitcase(HarperCollins, $16.95, 368pp) is actually a novella and six loosely connected stories. And a very fine piece of sustained and personable writing. Polished, passionate and candid, the book has the intimacy of a stolen diary as Dell'Oso writes of a Melbourne childhood in an Italian immigrant family, of life, death, birth, family ties and music. She spares no one, lest of all herself, from her incisive insight. And through this searing honesty and astute observation involves us totally. Despite its almost physical intensity, the work never cloys - it is uplifting, humbling and life-affirming. And it deserves wide readership.
AS A DECADE, the 60s has a lot to answer for - not the least its lingering corruption of the 70s. With Eric & Ian get a life (Wakefield Press, 148pp, $16.95), Rod Maclean lodges a slim volume in our burgeoning sex 'n' drugs, rites of passage library. And he does so with crisp authority, authentic dialogue and apt ambience. Trouble is, it's too much skill for too little tale - Eric and Ian's friendship owes more to an habitual collusion of loners than to emotion. Shorthand cyphers for a generational experience, they bob in an antiheroic confusion of dysfunctional homelives, educational ennui, fumbled loves, half-arsed hedonism, substance abuse and indulgent aimlessness ... All the era's issues are there but as slice-of-life realism too pithily put for engagement. Given the novel's rushed ending, even the author seems wearied by its slightness of being. A pity, because he can write.
OF A SIMILAR disposition is Feral Tracks (Mitchell Wordsmithing, 280pp, $14.95), Euan Mitchell's late-70s Gap Year factional journal of a 16-year-old's excellent adventure. The unpolished Daniel, a Melbourne surfer, drops out with nothing but half-realised yearnings, boyish optimism and $4 to support him "on the road". Touted as a male Puberty Blues, it's more a naive hitch-hiker's guide to the universal, where a gee-wizz innocence braces our hero against dodgy dialects and a cliche of characters and propels him towards self-recognition. The city-boy "finishing school'' epiphany on a Kimberly cattle station is suitably outback laconic, while the blackfella wisdom he absorbs en route escapes tokenism. If barely. Mitchell has an aptitude for landscape and narrative; these and his pithy irony almost save the day.************
Dateline: October 31O NLY a minor change and the classic reggae lyrics would be truly apt:
"I'm a steppin' Razer ... I'm dangerous, dangerous". New Age pretensions, hippies, gender mores and select media "celebrities" are among the lacerated in Helen Razer's Everything's Fine (Vintage, 186pp, rrp $17.95). Among the more acerbic-tongued scribes going around, she's stroppy and cynical (and frequently irritating): she's also vulnerable, astute and witty. And in love with language, both colloquial and literal, which makes the avalanching prose prolix at times - well, most of it actually. Ultimately, this is like a reprise of her In Pursuit of Hygiene, with her vitriolic virtuosity an overkill on soft targets. But few have a similar skill to make you cringe in embarassment and laugh out loud within one sentence. And be grateful you're not a target.
AN edgy undercurrent runs throughKristin Williamson's fourth novel, treading on dreams (Penguin, 346pp, rrp $14.95) - everything is on the brink: the mother of insanity, the narrator of adulthood, the family of financial and emotional collapse. Even their house is on a cliff's edge. A strange mix of lassitude and fervour colours the tale, set in a coastal town circa 1954. Williamson says it's "autobiographical in spirit", and it certainly captures the insular era authentically. It will appeal to many - it's literate, well-crafted, allusive and coherent. Yet if the zealous and priggish 14-year-old narrator's voice jars, you may find the style more destractingly old-fashioned than the author intended.
WITH The Night is for Hunting (Macmillan), the prolific John Marsden has doubled his originally-intended Tomorrow trilogy. And like its predecessors, this sixth in the Australia-invaded series, rocket-launched by the international hit Tomorrow When the War Began, is a certain best-seller. Some readers felt the previous two titles were down on his earlier standards, and that the series had reached a natural end when the surviving teenage guerillas were airlifted to safety in New Zealand. In this episode, Marsden has recaptured his taut control: the writing is assured, the adventure pacy. My adolescent taste panel was disturbed by the cliffhangerish ending, but still devoured the book in single sittings. As one said, "Even if he stretches it out over 12 novels, I'll read them all." Makes critical carping irrelevent, really.
IN his first novel Wild Places (Ginninderra Press, 254pp, rrp $20), Jerry Olsen combines two areas of expertise: he's written three books on birds of prey and two on working with troubled students, and this Canberra-based "morality" tale involves both. A racy composite of worldly-wise and obliquely naive, the story eventually becomes overheated - perhaps one too many polishing. There's a lot thrown in here, in experience and analysis. Too often, though, plot twists are predictable, often-astute dialogue stalls in earnest attempts to clarify positions, and the metaphor of abused child/injured wild bird is overdrawn. But there's much to like, lively central characterisation, narrative flair and a deft touch with landscape among them. Less, though, would have been much more.
Dateline: October 24M ICHAEL Wilding's 25th book, Wildest Dreams (University of Queensland Press, 310pp, $18.95), is ostensibly fiction. A current of autobiographical consciousness has always underlain his non non-fiction, but in this 'Selective Memoir' it is more a cataract. Through the persona of the literary-minded Graham, a man whose history uncannily mirrors the author's, he details the plots, politics and paranoias that fuelled Australian publishing from the 'pioneering' 60s (or at least the Balmainiac subsection) to the corporate literacy of the 90s.
Few are better qualified to chronicle the changing literary alliances, ambitions and ambivalences of those sex 'n' drugs days than the publisher/professor. He has disconcerting recall, and his sardonic insights, telling tropes on life's trivia and evocations of emotional confusion add a blackly comedic air to it all. How well this tale of the self-obsessed and self-delusional will engage the interest of the General Reader is moot; essentially it's an insider's 'coming of sage' diary disguised as a prosester's progress. For those with any OzLit involvement, it's compulsory reading - with the added fillip o' fun in ID-ing the thinly-disguised Moorhouses, Adamsons, Rankens, Wooleys, Highams, et al.
POLITICAL biographies can be mind-numbing and gratuitous. Not so Hall Greenland's Red Hot (Wellington Lane Press, 324pp, $24.95). Certainly there's detail and machinations galore in this 'Life and times of Nick Origlass', inevitable given the subject's 60 years of political agitation. But it doesn't mire the tale of the prickly Trotskyist and life-long revolutionary. While the tone is admiring, it's no hagiography, despite the Queensland-born but quintessential Balmain Boy being the author's "mentor and comrade for 30 years". Origlass was tough, idealistically uncompromising, generous, irascible and flawed; he was the man "most expelled" (booted out of the Communist Party, twice from his union and the Labor Party, even from his local council), a friend and antagonist (often both) of other nationally-known social rebels, a life-long advocate of democratic 'people power' and a passionate instigator of open government. Greenland has canvassed widely, giving the story an historic context, both nationally and in the brawling backrooms of Balmain's working class evolution. Origlass was an early proponent of the 'think global, act local school", which also makes this required reading for political historians.
THE exotically-named Mandaley Perkins's Tropic Tide: An Adventurer's Life (Bantam, 400pp, $24.95) is a daughter's biography of a swashbuckling, unconventional father. It's a family history, chattily written, well sourced and unaffected, with a cast and backdrops more exotic than the norm. The author obviously reveres her subject but is not blinded to his deficiencies: a Territorian legend and anti-hero, Bruce Perkins was a Cornish-born iconoclast, a rebel whose adventures encompassed war, espionage and tragedy. After surviving the bombing of Singapore and three years as a Japanese POW, he (with his doughty Australian-born, Special Branch wife) was in Malaya during the Emergency, explored Cape York and Arnhem Land for bauxite, established an international shipping line, fought the Waterside Workers Federation ... An endearing exposition of a complex, often infuriating man, and of a world that has passed.
has delivered one of the year's better novels in Silences Long Gone (Picador, $17.95, 358pp). An expedition into the emptiness of the Australian heartland, both physical and emotional, it is a multilayered tale of loss and death that is curiously life-affirming. The humour is savage, the irony incisive. Few escape his merciless insight: multinational marauders, Aboriginal activists, rabid religionists, phlegmatic battlers, sardonic surfers, artistic airheads, cynical coppers ... yet if his sympathy for his Fosteresque cavalcade of characters is suitably sceptical, his city savvy is leavened by a real perception of the fragile ideals that keep us keeping on. At times, perhaps, the tone touches the too-clever, with excesses of ennui and enthusiasm. But the flaws are minor. Cameron has charted the longing behind the laconic, the regret behind ruefulness with dexterous acumen. You won't regret the reading.
Dateline: August 16
confirming a perceptive eye. Which makes the frustrations of his first novel, The Maze of the
Muse (Flamingo, $17.95, 301pp), the greater. Certainly it contains some fine writing - the
dialogue is snappy, the scene-setting suitably exotic, the landscapes vividly realised. Yet the
plot is over-cooked, the sexual episodes limpid, the support characters insubstantial and the hero
- an Australian poet domiciled in America but emotionally forged in Spain - libidinous and
self-centred. The central conceit of the absent muse-master, poet Robert Graves (and stylistic
allusions to his The White Goddess), becomes a laboured labyrinth in which Buttrose gets
trapped; derivative nods to John Fowles' The Magus (with Kerouacian overtones) don't help,
either. Despite this, as first fiction it's better than most. And now it's out of his system,
Buttrose can - and will - do better.
has established a
standing as an astute observer of modern mores. His punchy wit, satirical savvy and eye for
life's absurdities earned him fans, critical praise and writer most promising
credentials. Some critics, however, had begun to niggle at whether promise would translate
into significance. Approaching mid-career, Condon has met the tacit challenge with The
Pillow Fight (Random House, $19.95, 269pp). A taut-toned exposition of domestic violence
perpetrated by women, it's a largely uncompromising look at a social problem that leaves
everyone scarred. To his credit, Condon never loses sight of humanness for caricature -
his characters are quietly realised, their confusion, shame and humiliations very real. The writing
is adept, the tone unhysterical; this is a brave book deserving a receptive readership.
images with deft intent.
And her droll captions and perverse puns lob timb-bombs of serious sedition. An earlier book of
cartoons, Women with Altitude, epitomised her tough-tender approach, dissecting modern
aspirations (and delights, doubts and desperations) with surreal surgicality. Yet every cartoonist,
no matter how skilled at enclosing a novel's worth of meaning in a small panel, inevitably flirts
with words en masse. Sometimes it's a risk, but not here: Lost In Space (Allen & Unwin,
$16.95, 250pp), her pocketbook collection of 25 essays (plus multiple cartoons) is a whimsical take
on the nervy 90s. Personable and perceptive, it's a gentle dose of antidote for those among us whom
life insists on treating as antiheroes.
(organising
anti-Vietnam demonstrations, resident campaigns, free Gorby write-ins) and altruistic intent
(Wayside Chapel work, etc) probably predisposed Melbourne PR marketer Robin Bowles towards
the righting injustice school. But it took a newspaper report of a questionable suicide and
possible police incompetence to propel the 50-year-old mother of four into a search for truth. The
resultant diary of discovery, Blind Justice (Allen & Unwin, 419pp, $17.95), is a gem. Candid
and personal, it plunges us into a true story that has all the suspense and intricacies of the
better crime novel. Bowles cares about people but her analysis is never rose-coloured; even in her
confusions, she is intimately honest. This is as much her story as it is of the victims scarred by
a farmhouse tragedy: warm and insightful, it is compulsive reading.
they're just that - pithy
and complete. That's often grossly underestimated by newbies, but not Tim Richards. His
first collection, Letters to Francesca, established his credentials; his second,
duckness (Allen & Unwin, 164pp, $16.95), won't harm his reputation. All is not as it appears
in his world. Brushstrokes of the bizarre, surreal sweeps, wistful longings colour the tales. At
their heart is the 'who am I, really?' question. But the standard is uneven - at worst, lassitude
of spirit bogs the protagonists so much you don't care about them; at others a perverse reversal of
expectations jolts your awareness afresh. Unfortunately, the narrative voice has a story-to-story
similarity about it, while Richards can't resist the occasional trespass into postmodernist
too-clever-by-half territory. I wish he had.