How lucky we were! My ‘baby boomer’ generation in Melbourne grew up on stories of the second Frank Thring (1926–94), which competed in outrageousness with the anecdotes we heard of Barry Humphries; and throughout the 1960s we had the opportunity – more so in the case of Thring, who had now settled back in Melbourne as a regular performer on stage and television, as Humphries began his lifelong commute to London – to catch both of these not-so-sacred monsters in the flesh and on their own home turf. (As I asked of the females of this species in a previous article in ABR – ‘Mordant Mots’, September 2007 – what is it about Melbourne that has produced such bizarre and brilliant creatures?)

‘Too many vampires,’ wrote Patrick White. The year was 1980; the document was a letter to Shirley Hazzard; the subject was their friend and fellow novelist Elizabeth Harrower, who had published nothing but a handful of uncollected short stories since 1966. ‘Elizabeth keeps her principles,’ he wrote. ‘Whether she is also writing, I have given up asking in case I get the wrong answer. Too many vampires make too many demands on her …’

Born in 1928, Elizabeth Harrower has published four novels: Down in the City (1957), The Long Prospect (1958), The Catherine Wheel (1960), and finally, in 1966, the novel that most people consider her best. The Watch Tower was published when she was still only thirty-eight, an age at which White himself had produced only three novels and had his own best work still ahead of him. We know that Harrower continued to write; she has said so in several interviews. What she did not continue to do was finish novels and publish them.

The vampires, or someone very like them, turn up again in a detailed and sympathetic profile of Harrower by journalist Gay Alcorn (SMH, May 6 2012), published after The Watch Tower, out of print for a long time, was reprinted earlier this year in Text Publishing’s ‘Text Classics’ series. ‘My friends thought I let other people waste my life,’ says Harrower. ‘They would try to pressure me to keep writing, which should have been encouraging, but I wasn’t easy to save.’ Who these ‘other people’ might be is never explained. ‘Writing has to matter more than anything else,’ she says, ‘and other people don’t like being abandoned. Other people have an interest in your not writing.’

A number of themes and subjects recur throughout Harrower’s first three novels: broken families, oppressed women, emotional sadism, force of circumstance, and claustrophobia both physical and psychological. Down in the City tells the tale of a motherless girl from a well-off Sydney family who finds herself in sexual thrall to a rough-mannered, violent businessman making a flashy, dodgy living. The Long Prospect is a brilliant evocation of 1950s life in a provincial Australian city, with a villain who is, like all Harrower’s villains, complex: the fiftyish Lilian is ruthless, materialistic, destructive, and cruel in her dealings with other people, devoid of an inner life of any kind but full of an instinctive, unmanageable vitality. In The Catherine Wheel, Harrower shifts her stage to the world of London bedsits and returns to the theme of the woman enmeshed in a toxic relationship with a lover.

The Watch Tower has elements of all three previous novels. Sisters Laura and Clare Vaizey are abandoned and left to their own devices by their frightful mother, Stella – mothers, in Harrower’s work, are all either dreadful or dead – when Laura is twenty-one and Clare still only fourteen. Laura goes to work for a businessman called Felix Shaw and marries him in what she seems to see as an extension of her duties as an employee; she barely knows him, has no feelings for him, and is bemused by his proposal, but is grateful for the prospect of some domestic and financial security for herself and her little sister, and is anyway an appeaser by nature and nurture: as Joan London puts it in her thoughtful and vivid introduction to this edition, Laura has been ‘groomed for victimhood’.

Felix turns out to be a sadistic drunk with a weakness for younger men and a gift for what the divorce courts used to call mental cruelty: as his wife observes, ‘he could only take pleasure in tearing people’s wings off’. The lovely house that he buys in suburban Sydney is, like his occasional affability, a façade. So intense is the psychological drama played out behind the walls of this pretty domestic prison that World War II takes place only in the background of the characters’ lives, but Harrower uses it to emphasise the couple’s isolation from other people and the main concerns of the society in which they live. She also uses it to mark the passage of time, while Hitler, of course, is to hand as a symbol of the violent and unreasoning domestic dictatorship under which they live. It is an accomplished and sophisticated novel of great power and intensity, but, as with most good psychological realism, the reader approaches the final pages with a sensation of exhausted, bruised relief. Harrower herself calls it ‘excruciating’.

One of Felix’s young men sees through him early in the book, making him a gift of a large and unusual figurine:

The china figure, fifteen inches high, represented a swarthy turbaned man wearing rich robes of red and blue, in the act of drawing a long assassin’s knife from the low-slung girdle at his waist.
‘Bluebeard!’ Felix cried. ‘Me! Peter said it reminded him of me.’ He held the small dark china face close to his own and assumed a terrible leer.

This is where the novel gets its title. As London points out, it recalls the title of Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’, released the year after Harrower’s novel was published, whose opening line is ‘There must be some way out of here.’ But Harrower’s watchtower is the one in ‘Bluebeard’, where the younger sister keeps watching the outside world in search of rescue, while the doomed wife calls out desperately from below: ‘Sister Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?’

You need to read the novel in order to understand fully the sisters’ psychological impasse, but the claustrophobia of this novel is not only emotional and interior; the house that Laura keeps preternaturally clean is Felix’s property and Felix’s domain, in the pre-feminist Australia of the 1940s and 1950s where the availability and type of housing, like so much else, was determined by a rigid view of society as being made up exclusively of nuclear families. This also determines the even more terrible claustrophobia in The Long Prospect, where a single man with a good job must still board in a private house for want of independent living space, and the very idea of a woman living alone in a flat is regarded with deep suspicion. In the interview with Alcorn, Harrower expresses impatience with feminism, which, like many, she appears to regard as the preserve of complaining extremists, but almost in the same breath she expresses impatience with contemporary readers who ask wonderingly why Laura and Clare in The Watch Tower don’t just leave and go and get a job. ‘It’s irritating,’ she says. ‘You really have to put yourself in the time, not judge it from several decades on when you’ve been given untold opportunities. It was a different world altogether.’ What is not acknowledged here is the fact that the ‘untold opportunities’ have been largely the result of the hard work done by feminists over the last forty or fifty years.

Women occupy a prominent place in the history of Australian fiction, but that seems to come in waves. The 1930s and 1940s were a highly productive time for women writers, but when Harrower was publishing in the 1950s and 1960s, the only other female novelists whose work got much critical notice or wide exposure were Thea Astley and the expatriates Hazzard and Christina Stead. By the 1980s, fiction writers of Harrower’s generation were getting a new lease of life from the forces of second-wave feminism, and such writers as Astley, Elizabeth Jolley, and Olga Masters flourished in the changed conditions. It is ironic and sad that Harrower, who would likewise have benefited from this kinder climate, should have found herself unable to publish any more novels.

She did, in fact, finish one more novel after The Watch Tower. Its fate would be regarded by many as incomprehensible now, in an age where ‘being a writer’ is becoming increasingly professionalised and engulfed by the values of a celebrity culture, and ‘getting published’ is generally regarded as the ultimate goal. But there is something heroic in the story she told Jim Davidson, then-editor of Meanjin, in 1980: ‘I did write another novel, and it was accepted by Macmillan’s in London … but I withdrew it very shortly after the letter from the agent accepting it. I really didn’t like it very much. I still don’t regret that.’

‘If Indonesia were a person,’ a good friend in Jakarta said to me, ‘it would be Goenawan.’ I know what she means. There is nothing black and white about him. He is a complex man, multi-faceted, charming and exasperating, full of conviction and contradiction, at once deeply patriotic and critical of his nation (which was born just five years after he was), someone who has weathered and helped forge the upheavals that Indonesia has undergone since then.

Murray Bail’s fiction has often been interpreted in light of its explicit rejection of a prevailing tradition of Australian realism that someone once described as ‘dun-coloured’. This rejection has manifested itself in his willingness to appropriate some of Australian literature’s hoariest tropes – the harsh beauty of the landscape, the issue of national identity, the inherited cultural anxieties of the New World – and subject them to the ironising pressures of fictional constructs that wear their conceptualisation on their sleeve. The result is fiction that occupies the shifting ground between the formal rigours of modernism and the reflexive playfulness and generic self-consciousness associated with postmodernism. Bail’s later novels, in particular, beginning with his best-known book, Eucalyptus (1998), are concise, concentrated affairs that organise themselves around the kinds of overt structuring oppositions whose apparent simplicity seems to invite allegorical readings.

Peter Steele once described his teaching and writing as ‘acts of celebration’. He is – and was – quite literally a celebrant: in his role as a Jesuit priest, and as a poet of praise. Those acts of celebration extend to his prose works as well, both his homilies and his literary essays, especially those that take up the matter of poetry. Peter Steele passed away, after a long illness, in June of this year, but not before his latest offering was presented at a book launch he attended the week before he died and a few days after he received a national honour. Unable to speak, he had his brother read a list of five major concerns that animated his poetry and which he looked for in others: ‘Imagination; learning from experience; fascination with experience in all of its many forms; the world imagined in a different way; and earth and spirit interlocked.’ This new book, of eighteen essays and six poems, bears out those concerns, establishing his voice among us in a kind of afterlife, not of fame, but of familiarity, someone we might turn to, that is, as an intimate or a familiar.

Boyd and beyond

Coming ABR events include another Fireside Chat – this time with Wayne Macauley, author of The Cook (Text), which has been shortlisted for several prizes, including the Melbourne Prize Best Writing Award. This Fireside Chat will take place at Boyd on Wednesday, 10 October (6 p.m.).

In our first collaboration with Melbourne’s hugely popular City Library, on Flinders Lane, ABR will present Peter Fitzpatrick – author of The Two Frank Thrings – with film historian and ABR regular Brian McFarlane on Tuesday, 20 November at 6 p.m. Reviewing the dual biography, Ian Britain writes: ‘In Fitzpatrick’s expert hands, their stories count among the saddest as well as the most scintillating in our annals.’

Full details of these and other free events appear on our Events page. We encourage readers to RSVP, as these ABR events fill up quickly.

Civic literature

Don’t miss your chance to vote for your favourite author in the Melbourne Prize Trust’s Civic Choice Award, worth $5000. Voters can nominate one of the finalists for the Melbourne Prize for Literature 2012 (worth $60,000) or the Best Writing Award 2012 (worth $30,000). Voting is now open via the Melbourne Prize website. Winners of the Melbourne Prize for Literature and the Best Writing Award will be announced on November 7; the winner of the Civic Choice Award will follow on 23 November. Finalists include Alex Miller, Peter Temple, Tony Birch, and Anna Goldsworthy.

Montsalvat matters

Interested in human rights, politics, social justice, and world literature? Don’t miss World Matters 2012: Silence is Betrayal (20–21 October at Montsalvat, in Victoria. Guests will include Hilary McPhee, Alexis Wright, Arnold Zable, and ABR Editor Peter Rose. For bookings or further information, contact Eltham Bookshop on (03) 9439 8700.

AustLit from the ground up

The AustLit resource for Australian literature, based at The University of Queensland, is currently being rebuilt from the ground up. This unique resource is the most comprehensive record ever created of one nation’s engagement with literature and storytelling. It provides detailed information about authors and the works they have written, and provides useful tools for anyone – scholar, author, researcher – undertaking research into Australian culture, or teaching any aspect of it.

The new AustLit will be launched in October with a new interface, much better discovery options, and exciting plans for widening access and introducing a model of community collaboration. Kerry Kilner, AustLit’s Director, will introduce the new AustLit to ABR readers in the November issue. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for guest access.

Federal flurry

Regional histories and anthologies continue to flourish, and three new ones have come to our attention. Next in NewSouth Publishing’s highly successful series of little books on cities is Alice Springs, by Eleanor Hogan, a freelance writer.

From Text Publishing comes a new anthology of stories from Tasmania – Deep South, edited by Ralph Crane and Danielle Wood. Among its ‘twenty-four of the finest stories about the island state, from the nineteenth century to the present’ are works by Carmel Bird, Marcus Clarke, and Hal Porter.

The Invisible Thread, Irma Gold’s selection of one hundred years of writing from Canberra and its surrounds, appears in the lead-up to Canberra’s centenary next year, and is something of a fillip after The Canberra Times’s decision to compromise its literary pages. Contributors include Rosemary Dobson, Bill Gammage, and David Campbell. Halstead Press is the publisher.

Vale Don Charlwood

Don Charlwood, who died on 18 June 2012 aged ninety-six, accomplished many things during his long life, as well as writing a number of books. During World War II he served in the RAAF and took part in thirty bombing operations over Germany (he writes about these experiences in No Moon Tonight, 1956). For thirty years he worked in air traffic control.

Charlwood’s best-known book is All the Green Year (1965). A constant on high-school curricula for two decades, it is ‘a beautiful evocation of Australian childhood’, writes Michael McGirr in his Introduction to the new Text Classics edition. Noting that Charlwood published a substantial essay for Anzac Day in 2012, McGirr wonders if his writing career of more than eighty years creates some sort of a record among the ranks of Australian authors.

Frank Words

This month ten new subscribers will win signed copies of The Two Frank Thrings by Peter Fitzpatrick (thanks to Monash University Publishing). Twenty-five renewing subscribers will win double passes to see The Words,starring Bradley Cooper (courtesy of Becker Film Group).

Casting our Net

To complement ABR’s new events program at Boyd, we will be uploading a series of podcasts to the website. Most recently we have added a podcast of the first Fireside Chat, with Ian Donaldson and Lisa Gorton. Future Fireside Chats and Jeffrey Meyers’ Seymour Biography Lecture will soon be available in this form – you can listen to them on your computer, or download them to a device for later listening and contemplation.

A Point of View is a weekly BBC Radio series in which invited speakers deliver ten-minute talks about ‘anything that has captured their imagination’ that week. Clive James contributed from 2007 to the end of 2009. This book is a collection of his talks. It is fascinating to read, both because of the immense range of subjects he covered and because it gives you some insights into the author himself.

Too often foreign affairs seem the realm of tedious diplomacy, impenetrable acronyms, and cynical realpolitik. So it comes as a relief to Western governments and voters if they can from time to time adopt a stance that places them on the side of the angels. Helping transform bad régimes into good, as in Burma, offers such an opportunity, and activist and author Benedict Rogers’ book is very much a tract for these times – explicitly informed, he tells us, by a moral framework.

Stephen Edgar shows us the dazzling pleasures of poetry that is ‘strictly ballroom’. Some years ago in a Greek restaurant, I was having lunch with Edgar, Martin Harrison, and Robert Gray. My fellow diners began excitedly discussing the finer technical points of a range of verse meters. Edgar said that he had written poems using sprung verse, syllabics, and regularly accented meters. I became as quiet as a nun who finds herself in the middle of an animated conversation about the Kama Sutra. Fixed forms alarm me. I have never attempted a conventional sonnet in the Shakespearean or Petrarchan form, a technical exercise that is as elementary for Edgar as is a handstand for an acrobat. My competence in using fixed forms does not extend much beyond the traditional iambic pentameter with its five reassuring dee-dums per line.

Patrick White in Adelaide

Dear Editor,

In his article on the theatre of Patrick White (May 2012), David Marr implies quite strongly that White had nothing to do with the theatre between John Tasker’s production of Night on Bald Mountain for the Adelaide University Theatre Guild during the 1964 Adelaide Festival and Neil Armfield’s production of Signal Driver, commissioned by Artistic Director Jim Sharman for the 1982 Festival. Marr goes so far as to say that the 1964 production ‘might have been it for White and theatre’, were it not for Sharman’s return to Australia, which, he says, ‘brought theatre back into White’s life’ in the early 1980s.

In Overland back in 2006, Ken Gelder singled out Michelle de Kretser’s first novel, The Rose Grower (1999), as evidence of a contemporary Australian literature in crisis. Its foreign and historical setting, horticultural fetish, focus on private manners and primped prose, he argued, flaunted a rarefied and élitist aesthetics that wanted nothing to do with the ‘political realities’ of ‘ordinary life’. With Questions of Travel, it is as if de Kretser is responding to this charge. This is a novel whose ambitions, which are considerable, are driven by a desire to engage with, not retreat from, both the wider world and the common reader. What we have here is a quite different type of Australian literary novel from the one that Gelder identified, though one that seems to be gaining ascendancy – one that is less arch, more cosmopolitan, and more seriously engaged with the larger events and problems of our times.

Questions of Travel is premised on the idea that a decade or so ago the nature of travel changed. To explore this idea de Kretser sets in motion two protagonists from distant parts of the world. Laura Fraser’s travels are voluntary, cultural, meandering: a seeking after adventure. They are fuelled by the ‘glamour’ of the souvenirs in her Aunt Hester’s sky-blue suitcase: a program from Le Lac des Cygnes at the Paris Opéra, a sea-green gold-flecked bead from Venice. London is Laura’s ultimate destination, and there she recognises its bridges from sonnets and trees from novels: ‘This is what it meant to be Australian: you came to London for the first time and discovered what you already knew.’ It is little wonder that Laura’s childhood resembles Christina Stead’s, that she wants to visit the town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz where Patrick White wrote Happy Valley, that she finds herself in Naples like Shirley Hazzard. Laura’s trip might feel self-directed, but it is in fact the well-trodden one of antipodean literary expatriatism.

By contrast, Ravi Mendis’s story runs along the rails of what has become the other dominant Australian travel narrative – immigration. It is involuntary, politically exigent, and a means to an end: freedom. Although Ravi, as a child, surreptitiously traced journeys with his finger in his younger sister Priya’s Jacaranda School Atlas, and although the possibility of work or study abroad appeals to him as an adult, travel is not something on his wife Malini’s radar. Her mantra is ‘I RESOLVE NOT TO LIVE MY LIFE IN VAIN’.For her that means fighting against human rights violations in their native Sri Lanka: ‘Bodies are always local,’ she insists. De Kretser’s previous two novels, The Hamilton Case (2003) and The Lost Dog (2007), are constructed as puzzles, verging on the too clever by half. By alternating Laura and Ravi’s narratives, Questions of Travel affords the reader the straightforward and old-fashioned, and arguably more satisfying, pleasure of simply wondering what will happen next. Will Laura return to Australia? Will Ravi leave Sri Lanka? And will Laura and Ravi ever meet?

The novel’s title is taken from a poem by Elizabeth Bishop that tests the truism that travel is a good thing, that we are the better for it. De Kretser is keen to examine this idea. Over the course of the novel, Laura travels often and widely – Indonesia, India, Europe, America – but one could hardly say she blossoms or grows wiser; this is no novel of self-development. Likewise, Ravi’s story contests the whole notion of travel as escape. De Kretser, like Bishop, is inclined to think our shuttlings rather futile, although the trouble she takes in detailing her characters’ impressions of the places they visit suggests that there might be purpose found this way. Many more smart things are said about travel and the travel experience, ranging from the particular-observational to the abstract-philosophical. There are passages on the tedium of waiting, the standardisation of intrepid travel by guidebooks, and the way sightseeing suspends chronological time. De Kretser has always been a talented satirist of the Horatian persuasion – recall the benign ribbing the literary academic Tom Loxley endures in The Lost Dog – and this time around her target is the travel industry. In a former life, de Kretser worked as an editor at Lonely Planet, and it is impossible not to see Laura’s employer, Ramsay Publications, as its fictional cognate. Front and centre is the irony of a company selling the dream of independent low-cost travel when its head honcho routinely indulges himself at luxury resorts and its employees sit ‘before big, bright screens’ with only ‘a mouse mat from the Guggenheim’ to verify ‘a casual familiarity with the planet’.

Which brings us to the really intrepid aspect of Questions of Travel: its treatment of the Internet. It is the contemporary writer’s greatest challenge: how can the fact that the average person spends nearly an hour a day on the Web – and many more staring at screens – be made to fit, and work, inside a fiction? Many authors would have us believe that the Internet is the enemy of fiction: they jam their ethernet ports so they themselves can’t wilf (surf the Web) while they write, and what they go on to write contains no depictions of characters wilfing. De Kretser, however, is curious and brave enough to explore this undiscovered territory. Much of her novel is set in the 1990s and early 2000s, in the years when the word ‘yahoo’ transitioned from being an exclamation of delight to signifying a search engine. Part of what de Kretser wants to do is to make the Internet more comprehensible by applying the metaphor of travel to it, but she also wants to show us how it permits a new kind of travel. According to Brother Ignatius, one of Ravi’s teachers at high school, ‘History is only a byproduct of geography.’ What de Kretser is testing in Questions of Travel is whether this proposition holds. Early in the novel, Ravi is inclined to think it no longer does:

He felt the insufficiency of words as he guided Malini through portals … trying to demonstrate this disembodied travel. Webcams showed them a fishtank in San Francisco; in a basement in Cambridge, coffee dripped into a pot. The world had shrunk, said Ravi, and at the same time it was vast and unconstrained … He declared, ‘The internet will free people from this.’  The sweep of his hand took in damp-stained walls, the large brutality of politics, the petty humiliations of making do.

Before Questions of Travel, de Kretser might have been categorised principally as a stylist, and in the new novel there is the same delight in selecting and arranging words with great finesse. We see it in her choice of verbs (the exchange rate ‘sentenced’ Laura to live in Bermondsey) and adjectives (boats on the hard are described as ‘thirsty’). Now and then there is a trill of affectation that shows we are in the world of rarefied literary fiction. For example, there is a tendency to indulge in needless periphrasis: a boy is described as having ‘hair that matched the sand and eyes the colour of the sea … [and] long-muscled limbs covered with golden hairs where netted light quivered’ before de Kretser says what she means with the word, ‘Swede’. Then there are the archaisms: did anybody in the 1990s, even a nostalgic fellow like Laura’s London friend Hugo, talk like this? ‘I’ve never eaten such pears as came from that tree. Perhaps there aren’t any left in the world. Solid, narrow. A sculpted look.’ But in the main de Kretser’s more poetic language serves the book’s larger themes, and doesn’t just signal that what we are reading is literary fiction. For example, the sentence, ‘Hefty eucalypts filled tiny yards: broccoli jammed into bud vases’ works not because the image is striking but because it stresses the incongruity, even discourtesy, of inflicting modernity’s idea of private property on this land. Likewise, the description of the horizon Ravi sees from his beachside ancestral home as ‘steely and thin as a wire – the kind that garrottes’ augurs the dangers he will face in trying to leave Sri Lanka.

This is a cosmopolitan novel that cares enough to say big things, grounds them in important historical moments, and takes pains to say it all well.

The first time The Engagement’s narrator, Liese Campbell, sees the family homestead owned by her lover, Alexander Colquhoun, she is struck by its imposing physical presence: ‘We turned a corner … The second storey came into view: eight upstairs windows and each chimney intricate as a small mausoleum.’ As she surveys the isolated Victorian mansion, with its English driveways and gardens, she realises that it has ‘been built precisely so one would feel at its mercy’.

It is no secret that Lily Brett has mined her past and her family history in her fiction. Her parents, like those of her current alter ego, Lola Bensky, were survivors of the Łódź ghetto and Auschwitz concentration camp; Lola, like the author, was born in a displaced persons’ camp before her family emigrated to Australia. Lola, a chubby baby, was possibly the only plump person in a camp whose other inmates were mainly Jewish survivors of Nazi death camps. Save quoting at length, it is impossible to convey the inflections that render humorous such an observation.

Humour and the Holocaust make unlikely bedfellows, but it would be a mistake to dismiss Brett’s work as lightweight. The simplicity of her style is deceptive, and sits comfortably in the tradition of Jewish or Yiddish humour, which is often crude, self-deprecating, even self-loathing. Jerry Seinfeld once said of someone: ‘I think he converted to Judaism just for the jokes.’ Brett’s humour both intensifies the shock of Lola’s anecdotes and gives the reader breathing space in which to recover.

Growing up in suburban Melbourne, Lola overhears horrors and half-truths she should not have to bear; she misinterprets silences and words whose meaning she is too young to grasp. The seminal issue for the adult Lola is how to come to terms with memories not directly related to her lived experience; and how to resolve the devastating effects of the guilt and responsibility that she feels for her parents’ trauma.

In 1967 an Australian magazine sends nineteen-year-old Lola to London to write profiles of rock stars , but she doesn’t fit into the swinging scene. For a start she is still chubby: her thighs rub together and her flesh pokes through her fishnet stockings; her sleeves cut into her arms; she gets hot and sweaty and Linda Eastman (Paul McCartney’s future wife) calls her the ‘fat Australian journalist’. Lola, who is a nice, neurotic girl, would not feel comfortable anywhere.

From London to Monterey, Los Angeles and New York, Lola has fabulously prosaic conversations with an endless parade of the rock world’s ‘who’s who’: from Jimi Hendrix to Cher, Twiggy, Mick Jagger, Mama Cass, Janis Joplin, Pete Townsend, Brian Jones, Keith Moon, Dave Dee, Barry Gibb, Manfred Mann, Cat Stevens, Jim Morrison, Andy Warhol, Lillian Roxon, the list goes on. Most of us would be in awe, but not Lola. Her disarming naïveté renders no subject off limits – diet, grooming, drugs, sex, love, relationships, parents, petty cruelties, cold-blooded barbarism – but her genuine interest and compassion make up for her exposing the foibles and vulnerabilities of her rock star interviewees.

Lola has learnt to ‘detect anguish at a distance. From the other end of the house, from the other side of the street, possibly even from a block or two away. She could spot anguish even if it came in the disguise of a smile or was hidden behind a grin.’ Empathy for the bereaved has been instilled in her from an early age. Her mother, Renia, lives with so much grief that she has no room in her heart for the living. Her father, Edek, is so bereft he would rather lose himself in crime thrillers than face the reality of a wife who avoids his affection. Renia berates Lola for being fat, then reminds her how lucky she is. No wonder Lola feels ‘wrong’: her parents are too distant to provide emotional care for their daughter.

By the age of thirty, Lola has returned to Melbourne and married ‘Mr Former Rock Star’. The personalities of this first spouse, her children, and even her beloved second husband emerge less distinctly than the reality of her famous acquaintances. Perhaps Brett is more protective of people who are still part of her life than she is of those who are accustomed to public scrutiny. Fortunately, Mr Former Rock Star is dispatched in a single chapter and replaced with ‘Mr Someone Else’, an artist not unlike Brett’s current husband, David Rankin.

Lola ought to be happy. At fifty-one she is living in New York City with the love of her life, and has become the bestselling author of a soft-boiled detective novel. In The Ultra-Private Detective Agency, two Jewish gumshoes, Harry and Schlomo, and their employer, Petrushka Inge Maria Pagenstecker, or ‘Pimp’ for short, solve routine investigations with hilarious ineptitude. Tying up the loose ends of cases and plots brings Lola a sense of control, but in ‘real’ life she still thinks ‘that being cheerful, too much of the time, [is] unnatural’. Anguish finds her, grips her by the throat, and throttles her with debilitating panic attacks and agoraphobia. In short, Lola’s family history catches up with her. Many pills and much psychotherapy later, she finally realises that she can never repair, nor compensate for, her parents’ past.

In a poignant conclusion, Lola muses on her lists of the dead – family, friends, tragic rock stars – and pays tribute to the few survivors. Lola Bensky has learnt to live with her sorrows. Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel writes that the ‘best characteristic [of the Jewish people] is their desire to remember’ and that everyone has a duty to remember, to reject despair, and to transform the experience into something else. I suspect that, for Brett, resolution has come through creative remembering and retelling, and by constructing a fine comic novel from an unspeakable tragedy.

Alice Melike Ülgezer’s début novel is both exotic and familiar: a story of journeys, physical and philosophical, of a family with its roots in Istanbul and Melbourne. The first of these is a short ferry crossing of the Bosporus taken by Ali, a young woman (or is she a young man? gender seems immaterial here) from Melbourne who is in Istanbul to visit her father’s family. Her father – variously named Akyut, Ahmet, Ayk, Baba, and Captain Schizophrenia – is present. In the pre-dawn darkness, he is troubled, not an unusual state for him. The wild behaviour of this unstable but magnetic man forms something of a catalogue aria in the book, occasionally amusing but more often horrifyingly violent.

The Midnight Promise, Zane Lovitt’s début novel, is billed not as a detective story, but as a detective’s story. It is a minor grammatical change that makes for a major shift in the focus of the tale. Here there is no major dramatic revelation – no car chase, forensic science, femme fatale. Instead, the reader is offered a character study of a man slowly succumbing to depression, apathy, and alcoholism; worn down by his cases and by his inability to maintain his independence from them.

Venero Armanno’s latest novel begins implausibly. A young man is troubled by a recurring dream about a faceless, one-armed, blob-like creature being throttled by someone wearing a pale blue shirt. This troubled dreamer is Mark Alter (the unsubtle last name underlines one of the book’s central concerns), a university drop-out estranged from his parents and now leading a grungy existence in a seaside shack. The cavalcade of unlikely events starts on page four. After watching a so-called ‘cheap slasher film’ at his local cinema, Mark decides to turn his nightmare into a screenplay about ‘a shape-shifting demon from the Id’. The title? No-Face, of course. Mark sends his work to various producer types. One of these bigwigs replies by telephone (this is a novel where implausibilities are piled very high indeed) and accuses Mark of plagiarism. According to this famous producer, No-Face has ripped off the obscure novel Black Mountain, written five years before by the equally obscure Cesare Montenero.

 Test cricket and the novel are two pinnacles of modern cultural achievement, long-haul enterprises of intricacy and complexity. Why, then, have the two rarely intersected? It is especially strange given that cricket has arguably had more books devoted to it than has any other sport. Literary-minded cricket lovers will rhapsodise over the prose style of C.L.R. James or the nostalgic elegance of Neville Cardus, but few books about cricket have been fiction, and even fewer of them have been much good. While Joseph O’Neill’s recent Netherland (2008) was a fine offbeat novel that featured cricket, there have been no great works of cricket fiction. Until now.

In To the Highlands, the second instalment in a trilogy entitled ‘One Boy’s Journey to Man’, Jon Doust provides a gripping examination of racism and male sexuality in 1960s Australia.

In the novel’s opening pages, Jack Muir arrives on some unnamed ‘islands’ to take up a banking job. Muir is barely out of high school. His early days in his new surroundings are marked by drunken carousing that, in turn, affects his work performance. Rather than sack him, Muir’s manager moves his youthful employee to another branch ‘in the highlands’. Shortly after this second relocation, Muir becomes infatuated with a beautiful dark-skinned woman named Margaret. Is this infatuation genuine or a by-product of Muir’s raging hormones? How will his desire for Margaret be received by the island’s xenophobic residents?

 In the cheeky biographical note on the press release for her first novel, The Burial, Courtney Collins expresses a wish that she might one day be ‘a “lady” poet’. If I had read that before reading the novel, I would have been slightly alarmed: with many notable exceptions, poets tend not to make good novelists. It is true that The Burial is finely written, with a lovely ear for the cadences of language, but it also has an urgent narrative drive, along with a strong awareness of place, compelling characters, and a whiff of magic realism to enliven the mixture.

Lost Art: Two Essays on Cultural Dysfunction is an absorbing and lyrical journey through the contemporary art world. Combining a sensibility that is both highly critical and deeply personal, Julian Davies and Phil Day analyse what is celebrated and what is forgotten in an increasingly ruthless and commercial industry.

Long before the era of digital media, the catalogue raisonné evolved as a virtual art museum to house the oeuvre of a single artist. Such scholarly tomes are known by the French adjective meaning a ‘reasoned’ catalogue, implying a tool for making sense. Thus by assembling each work with precise details on medium, dating, and provenance, an artist’s career can be fully understood and any attribution can be tested.

How is it that the sordid ‘familial romance’ of Laius, Jocasta, and Oedipus, or ‘daddy, mommy, and me’, came so completely to define the concept of desire in the modern West? For Deleuze and Guattari, authors of The Anti-Oedipus, that is the true sphinxian riddle at the heart of the Oedipus materials, the myth, and its subsequent interpretations from Sophocles to Freud and beyond. Forty years after the publication of their famous broadside against mainstream Freudian psychoanalysis, and notwithstanding a significant and growing body of sceptical opinion, the Oedipal complex is still widely regarded as humanity’s universal history. In fact, argue Deleuze and Guattari, it is nothing of the sort. Rather, they say, Oedipal desire is an historically contingent, socio-cultural consequence of capitalism. When psychoanalysts, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, and even dramatists reach for an Oedipalised analysis of social relations, they not only violently disfigure our understanding of desire, but also reinforce and normalise the omnivorous progress of capitalism and its patriarchal social forms.

Can a work of art be a classic without being ‘great’ – or even, by some standards, particularly good? Jane Mills has no doubt about the canonical position of Jedda (Charles Chauvel, 1955) in Australian cinema, yet admits that her own response falls short of love. This ambivalence stems not only from Jedda’s technical flaws, but also from its message: though the film may not be a white supremacist tract like D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), it is plain that Chauvel and his wife, Elsa, nearing the end of their long collaborative career, took for granted that biological ‘race’ was destiny.

Those Brontës. If they’d only had a decent agent with foresight, they could have escaped that dank parsonage on the gloomy moors of windswept Yorkshire and set up on the French Riviera in comfort. Since 1910 there have been at least forty film or television versions of Jane Eyre, most recently in 2011. Now it is Emily’s turn for the latest (seventeenth) go at Wuthering Heights (1847), that extraordinary work sui generis that so memorably sites wild Gothic strangeness in a solidly realised world of landscapes both benign and forbidding.

‘Will the real Nicole Kidman please stand up?’ Many readers will remember that line from the television game show Tell the Truth, in which celebrities were required to guess which of three contestants was the ‘real’ person. Pam Cook tells us that our ‘search for veracity is doomed to failure’ because, in this case, the celebrity’s identity is a fragmentary and contradictory media construct.

The Cookbook Library is an eminently readable and informative survey of the development of European (and North American) culinary literature from antiquity until the early nineteenth century, from Greek and Roman texts to Antonin Carême. The project, inspired by Anne Willan and Mark Cherniavsky’s extensive personal cookbook library, draws on Willan’s considerable professional cookery expertise: in addition to setting up her own cookery school in Paris, La Varenne, in 1975, Willan has published extensively on French cookery and is a leading authority on the subject. But this is much more than a catalogue of an indisputably fine private collection. It covers the subject broadly, way beyond the confines of the couple’s own substantial holdings and their linguistic comfort.

David McKee Wright is a curious figure in Australian poetry – and in New Zealand poetry, for that matter. As editor of the Bulletin’s Red Page from 1916 to 1926, he was a well-liked and -respected figure in his own time (1869–1928), but he has seriously faded since. He is thinly represented in a number of anthologies, both here and in New Zealand, and was omitted altogether from Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann’s anthology Australian Poetry Since 1788 (2011).

Why would a famous virologist and immunologist (and Nobel laureate) write a book linking birds, human diseases, and ecological degradation? The answer is partly that Peter Doherty obviously has a soft spot for birds and birdwatching. He argues that anyone with an enquiring mind and a natural history bent cannot fail to notice birds and to be intrigued by them. But the full answer is that Doherty is perfectly placed to contemplate such seemingly arcane questions because his professional life, spent deep in the intricacies of the immune system and the control of infectious diseases, has allowed him to grasp the fundamental role that birds play in research into infectious diseases, particularly influenza, in the transmission of viral diseases, and also in research into malaria and cancer. He also demonstrates a clear understanding of ecological principles and the complexities of the major conservation issues that we face. Combine this with an ability to write clearly and succinctly about complex subject matter, sprinkled with fascinating personal anecdotes, and you have a quirky and satisfying book.

When BHP Billiton announced last month that it would indefinitely shelve its proposed Olympic Dam expansion in South Australia, some said it signalled the symbolic end of the mining investment boom. South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill’s reaction was particularly revealing. With his government now staring into a $1 billion black hole, Weatherill declared that he and the community had lost trust in BHP, and that the decision was a ‘major disappointment’. Many of Weatherill’s critics have suggested that his response betrayed his party’s zeal for the mining project, to the detriment of other sectors, with the sole aim of bolstering the state’s beleaguered economy. Putting ‘trust’ and ‘mining companies’ in the same sentence may be nothing more than political aikido. After all, given the tumescent economic growth that has come from the commodities rush, Weatherill’s reaction is predictable. Yet one can’t help but feel that his trust is misplaced.

W hat book would you want to read in hell, or in one of humanity’s remarkably competent imitations of it? Tristram Shandy seemed about right to one young Yorkshireman who reached the Western Front in 1915. A year later he found an anthology for soldiers edited by Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, but it seemed so lofty in purpose, so earnest in its morality, and so abstract in its idealism that it simply wilted in the mud and blood. When World War II began, the Yorkshireman, now famous as the poet and art critic Herbert Read, assembled his own sturdier anthology, The Knapsack (1944), mixing Spinoza with Edward Lear. Read’s little volume seemed perfectly pitched to William Loh, a Western Australian soldier in New Guinea in 1943, where ‘hardship and boredom walked hand in hand’, films and concert tours rarely reached the front line, and newspapers and precious letters from home arrived far too late, or so Loh complained. He suggested getting an Australian version of Read’s book to the troops. Just give it a different title, he advised: ‘Knapsacks are too bulky up here.’

Dr Johnson wrote in his review of Soame Jenyns’s A Free Enquiry into the Nature of the Origin of Good and Evil: ‘The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.’ One could argue, in the context of contemporary scholarly writing, that increasingly the only end is to satisfy the evaluative demands of research councils and university administrators. The controversial use of quantitative publications figures, as in the 2012 Sydney University assessment of individual researchers, reflects the fact that scholarly behaviour, more than ever, is being shaped by the reward trail, one that is almost as dependent on where and how you publish as it is on the actual content.

Editing a ‘women’s edition’ of a literary journal is bound to be fraught with semantic problems. What is women’s writing? By women? About women? As Island ’s fiction editor, Rachel Edwards, editorialises, ‘there is nothing that defines women’s fiction apart from the sex of the author. Nothing!’ The politics of contriving a women’s edition of a literary journal, then, is simple: women’s voices are under-represented in the domain, a disparity which can be addressed by providing platforms for them.

Australian Poetry Journal, the biannual publication published by Australian Poetry, offers a national focus for poetry and criticism. It includes contributions from established writers and from new voices. All in all, APJ indicates a cheering and cohering centre of gravity for all things poetic in contemporary Australia.

As a result of the public works of Puncher & Wattmann, it has been established yet again that a book of poetry can andshould combine meaning and design in a shock of pleasure. Toby Fitch’s first full-length collection, especially the central title poem, does this in spades. Orpheus returns to Hades to rescue Eurydice. In ten poems, each mirroring the original Rorschach ink blot on the page facing it, they spark and spar in a very modern way that has the dankness of Hades clinging to it.

Ken Bolton has published twenty books of poetry in the past thirty-five years, including a verse novel, The Circus (2010), and an earlier Selected Poems (1992), as well as seven often hilarious poetic collaborations with John Jenkins. An art critic, Bolton edited the seminal magazines Magic Sam and Otis Rush; and he has been a publisher with Sea Cruise and Little Esther Books. Bolton’s poems amusingly undermine any sense of affected certainty or closure – ‘with none of the confidence / of Samuel Johnson, // with none of the élan of Frank O’Hara, / with only a guilty and apprehensive grin // because in part / I belong to the school that says // if you see a leg pull it // I begin this tour of my attitudes ...’ (‘Lecture: Untimely Meditations (Tentative Title)’). Rather, his work is buoyed by indeterminacy, in which a blithe surface both collapses and embodies intellectual enquiry, most apparent in his spacious, extended poems, but also in more descriptive ones, such as ‘Kirkman Guide to the Bars of Europe’, from Sly Mongoose (2011), and one not included here, ‘Happy Accidents’, which unravels his influences. ‘Perhaps my oeuvre in / large part represents / a slur on the poetry of my betters – / whose example / allows me to go wandering off, / by the reeds, ankle deep / in mud, / mumbling inconsequently – / somehow ‘licensed’ by them, / by their example – / though heedless of it?’ (‘Poem (Up Late)’).

 Michael Farrell was the 2012 winner of the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, awarded by this magazine. open sesame is his latest collection of poetry, and an earlier version of it won the inaugural Barrett Reid Award for a radical poetry manuscript, in 2008. It has 123 pages.

As the maker of the nine-and-a-half hour film Shoah (1985), Claude Lanzmann created a work of major and enduring historical importance. Through its electrifyingly tense interviews with victims and perpetrators, it opens an indispensable, if harrowing, dimension to our understanding of Hitler’s Final Solution. A work that unrelentingly has as its subject death rather than survival, it will always confront and resist any temptation to forget the terrible specificity of the concerted extermination of millions of European Jews, or to repress the knowledge that this was the work of human beings. Towards the end of The Patagonian Hare, a hundred or so pages are devoted to the genesis and making of Shoah. We find here a Lanzmann driven by passion and determination, criss-crossing the world in the service of his all-consuming idea, part detective, part spy, as he tracks his witnesses, and persuades, cajoles, or tricks them into taking part in his project. It is a story full of adventures and mishaps, of funding setbacks, brushes with police, moments of disappointment or uncertainty; the story of more than a decade of research and labour, carried out with the urgency imposed by the awareness that the people he most needed to reach could die before he got them on film. It is riveting reading.

From the first sentence of Creepy & Maud, we know we are entering a volatile world. ‘My dad has trained our dog, Dobie Squires, to bite my mum,’ Creepy tells us. What follows is a vivid peek into suburban isolation and unease. Almost every character has an addiction or psychological disturbance, from alcoholism and untameable aggression to dyslexia and obsessive compulsions. This society is one where children prefer ‘being smacked to being touched’, intimacy is avoided, and voyeurism and exhibitionism emerge as the only ways to connect.