‘Though I disagreed with some of the strategies and was as troubled as I should have been by some of the more fundamental conflicts [of feminism], it was not until feminists of my own generation began to assert with apparent seriousness that feminists had gone too far that the fire flared up in my belly.’

Thus, Germaine Greer on the origin of her latest book. For Australian readers, this statement positions The Whole Woman as a response to Helen Garner’s book The First Stone. Greer’s response, though, owes nothing to the right-wing backlash feminism which prevailed in the United States in the early 1990s and found its way into Australian public life via a, by and large, misinformed and naïve media.

Anyone can write a book, a cynic once remarked, but bringing off the second is a devil of a task. Most novelists at the outset of their careers would agree, I think – especially these days when a market-driven publishing industry often demands that authors of successful first novels should come up with more of the same ASAP.

I was a trifle apprehensive, therefore, when James Bradley’s second novel arrived. Two years ago, Bradley achieved considerable success with Wrack, a fine, atmospheric work that stood out from the ruck of run-of-the-mill first novels. As it turns out, I had little cause to be uneasy. With this much more substantial second work of fiction Bradley confirms that Wrack was no mere flash in the pan.

Peter Pierce’s concern in this critical study is with two periods – from the second half of the nineteenth century, when most of the myths of the lost child began to appear, and the second half of this century, when a quite different kind of narrative emerges. The period in between he regards as largely a consolidation of the late nineteenth-century examples. Ranging widely over not only literature but pictorial art and contemporary factual accounts, he shows the striking changes that take place in the forms in which the legend appears.

Pierce sees the idea of the lost child as having deep symbolic significance. Girls and boys of European origin who strayed into the Australian bush are emblematic of ‘essential if never fully resolved anxieties within the white settler communities of this country’. He goes on, ‘Symbolically, the lost child represents the anxieties of European settlers because of the ties with home which they have cut in coming to Australia, whether or not they journeyed here by choice.’ The figure, in other words, is both literal and metaphorical.

This idea is repeated constantly.

Recently I have had a number of enquiries from readers who want to submit books for review hand the enquiries came from people unfamiliar with the reviewing process. So for those readers who are unfamiliar with the reviewing process, a few words about it.

First the publishers send us copies of their books in the hope that they will be selected for review. That applies also to self-published books. It is essential that first the book be sent to ABR, so it can be assessed in relation to all the other books we have received. And we receive many. Last year some 7,000 books were published, an average of 700 per issue of ABR – and I am referring only to Australian titles, since ABR only reviews Australian books or books with some Australian connection.

It’s interesting how many comic autobiographers are theatrical, like Barry Humphries, Clive James, Hal Porter, and Robin Eakin, whose Aunts up the Cross (1965) is a minor masterpiece and very funny. Eakin’s belated follow-up, An Incidental Memoir, published under her married name of Dalton, compares interestingly with Dulcie Deamer’s posthumously published The Queen of Bohemia.

The Hanging of Jean Lee is the third verse novel I have reviewed recently, except that this one is closer to the verse documentary.

As one might expect, it is a grim, tough story of the deterioration of a young woman’s life and its brutal end. It is divided into four sections with deliberately cold-hearted titles, Personal Pages, Entertainment Section, Crime Supplement and Death Notices. The Hanging of Jean Lee is economically and imaginatively conceived with a strong narrative drive. In a series of short connected poems, Jordie Albiston has made a heart-breaker out of her material, ringing the verse changes, using rhyme and blank verse in short chopped lines, colloquial language, reportage, and newspaper headlines with considerable skill.

Dave Warner, one-time singer and satirist, has been at work as a detective story writer for a few years now, penning long excoriations of West Australia Inc. style shenanigans and, according to reports, working pretty much in the shadow of that L.A. master (with all his fizz and stammer and sparkle), the great James Ellroy.

McKenzie Wark had the good fortune to ensconce himself in media studies just when those who once would have busied themselves with Stendhal or John Tranter began to envy his terrain. And his various journalistic gigs, notably his column for The Australian Higher Education Supplement, give him the advantage over other academics of being able to cobble together a book every year or two. Or, as he puts it, ‘Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace is a book that was written in its own peculiar way, as a series of experiments with fitting events and ideas together, conducted in public, through a wide variety of print and electronic media.’

During that torrid season when I was trying to place my forever unplaced and ultra-controversial novel Complicity (now called The Blood Judge, with good reason) one well-known and basically sane Fiction Editor comforted me. ‘You see, we don’t just publish a book, we have to market a personality.’ He later became even more famous for trying to market a white author (whom he had never met) as a black one.

I would still do many things to have that novel published but, I’ll tell you what, I still wouldn’t try to turn myself into a ‘personality’.

Just when you have been assured, and have believed, and have claimed in print in The Sydney Morning Herald that mainstream publishers no longer bring forth volumes of verse by individual poets, along comes Allen & Unwin to confound you. Well, it is good thus to be confounded. I might not have pointed out, but the publishers remind us, over Luke Davies’ name and over his title, running with light, that this book is ‘from the author of Candy’ (also published by Allen & Unwin). So, we have a case of prose piggybacks poetry, which is all right by me. Those who read Candy, that antipodean version of Romeo and Juliet on smack, for prurient reasons may, however, find running with light not their cup of tea or drug of choice. Those, on the other hand, who responded to Mr Davies’ absolute control over and cool towards his fevered material, will warm to this collection of poems. Candy was, assuredly, a poet’s novel.

Over the years, Garry Disher has made his considerable reputation as a crime novelist on the strength of his taciturn, emotionless, lone wolf criminal, Wyatt. It seems Wyatt has taken some sabbatical, or maybe he’s just lying low, planning his next heist, because The Dragon Man showcases all new characters in a new setting. Instead of a gritty, underworld perspective we have a law-enforcement point of view, mainly per medium of Inspector Hal Challis, whose beat is the Mornington Peninsula beachside area outside Melbourne.

All too few books about Australian children’s writers and writing manage to find a publisher. They’re unlikely to sell enough copies, is the standard explanation. All the more reason, therefore, to welcome an even greater rarity – a book which focuses on the work of a single writer. Even if Gary Crew might not necessarily be everyone’s first choice as the subject of such a volume, all those interested in Australian children’s literature will hope that Strange Journeys meets with a success which will encourage the publication of similar analyses of other contemporary writers’ work.

Unfortunately, the book’s success is not a certainty, for it’s far from being an ideal example of its kind. It suffers too much from the declared closeness of its authors to their subject, approaching in the introduction the reverent tone of a publicist’s blurb. Things improve when the authors explore the religious (specifically Christadelphian) underpinnings of Crew’s work and build some understanding of how his experience in the small sect gave him an awareness of being separate, other, outside – a recurring theme in his books.

At the end of The Glade Within the Grove, D’Arcy D’Oliveres coughs his way towards death from lung cancer. With him dies David Foster’s benign alter ego, the narrator of his comic Dog Rock novels. Of course, the ‘Arcy who narrated The Glade had become less sociable and considerably more learned than the postman of Dog Rock, but it seemed reasonable to assume that his demise marked the end of Foster’s fictions in the comic mode. Not so. In his latest novel he mixes a good-humoured third person narration with the kind of colloquial dialogues which dominated the MacAnaspie sections of The Glade. In the New Country gives us a funny, more accessible, and more conventional Foster.

His obsessions – the place of the spiritual in contemporary Australia, the emasculation of rural men through unemployment, the deforestation of Australia and Ireland before it – shadow the comedy. But the comedy remains good-natured and broad, as Foster sits back and enjoys his own characters. These are almost entirely male and, with the narrator content to narrate, they are allowed to talk.

Garry Disher is at it again: following the Personal Best short story collections (1 and 2) with this one, Below the Waterline. Broadly speaking, he’s attempting to highlight in this one authors who have come to prominence since the 1980s. Again, he allows the chosen authors to pick a favourite short story, and to include a sort of postscript that explains why it’s a favourite.

Tom and Audrey McDonald have shared a life of commitment together, promoting what they consider to be the political, social and economic interest of the Australian working class.

The vehicle for both these true believers was the Communist Party of Australia, especially as it operated through the trade union movement. While Tom laboured tirelessly with the Building Workers Industrial Union (BWIU), most of Audrey’s political activity was via the Union of Australian Women (UAW). In the early 1970s, when the CPA split, both joined the Socialist Party of Australia (SPA), a body which was formally recognised and endorsed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).

With Gift of the Gab, Gleitzman continues the saga of Rowena Batts, the feisty twelve-year-old who previously appeared in Blabber Mouth (1992) and Sticky Beak (1993). Ro is the daughter of an apple farmer, a child with character, immense energy, and several problems: chiefly her inability to speak (she was born with 'some bits missing' from her throat) and her loving and much loved Dad. She copes with her vocal handicap through fluent sign language and a notebook at the ready, but Dad – an ardent country-and­western enthusiast, given to cowboy boots, loud satin shirts and a penchant for off-key renderings of his favourite ballads at every opportunity – is harder to handle.

The publication of this book has created somewhat of a storm in a teacup. Melbourne  researcher, Maja Sainisch-Plimer, demanded its recall, claiming the book misrepresented the findings of her research over the twenty years. The publisher, Graeme Ryan, placed a Notice to Bookshops in the book pages of The Age claiming unfair practice and advising bookshops ‘to confidently display and sell Anya: Countess of Adelaide’. Subsequently the book has been reclassified by the National Library from biography to fiction.

It tells the story of a German girl who came to Adelaide in 1883, by then a place of some physical substance, boasting university, public library and art gallery. Agnes Klevesahl survives a loathsome ten-week voyage in steerage, retaining her physical and social integrity against all odds. She takes up employment as a waitress in a cafe and there meets one Charles Rasp, also of German origin who, in his meanderings as boundary rider on McCulloch’s Mount Gipps run, discovers silver lead and becomes the ‘Silver King’ and a founder of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited. Agnes, heart and mind won by his new-found wealth, promptly accepts his hand and becomes his ‘Anya’.

The devil, as we know, quotes scripture for his own ends, and there was something devilishly confronting about Andrew Masterson’s first novel, The Last Days: the Apocryphon of Joe Panther (1998). It kept you on your toes, ducking and weaving with the punches of its arguments, its cleverly orchestrated quotes from the New Testament and the early church, its tossed off histories and heresies, its ultimate ‘what if .. .?’

But writing a novel with a putative Jesus Christ as the main character – resurrected but never ascended, still in his thirties a couple of millennia on – is not something you can do twice, and with his second Masterson has relinquished the edge and thrown in his lot with the cinematic blockbuster ending of Joe Panther rather than with its more thought­provoking though still wild and comic bulk.

The Letter Girl takes us forward to the often devastating ends of paths the world seems already poised to pursue. Looking back from a few generations beyond 2010 it recalls a ‘long forgotten’ prime minister’s ‘idealistic wish’ to turn the country into ‘a nation of shareholders’. Now even parliament is privatised, sold off in Telstra-sized packages every mum-and­dad investor could afford – and sell on at a profit to multinational corporations like CII (Consolidated Industries International), the demon in the plot. In logical corporate consequence, only shareholders have voting rights or access to the privatised services of ambulances or hospitals.

Masterson arms his black comedy with two epigraphs, one from Sallust which includes the comment: ‘Yonder is a city put up for sale, and its days are numbered if it finds a buyer …’, the other from Roland Barthes which notes in part: ‘... some went as far as the pure and simple scuttling of the discourse, silence ... appearing as the only possible weapon against the major power of myth: its recurrence.’ The contemporary concern of writers and readers over the disappearance of the backlist and the speed with which books are allowed to go out of print is stretched here to an edict against any book published before l900. Possession of such banned material results in mandatory credit cancellation and a jail term that lengthens with the antiquity of the book.

The situation has led to disillusion and despair among novelists, many of whom have either suicided or starved to death, but it has also raised the black market value of old books. When a long-lost copy of Julius Caesar’s De Analogia, dating from 50BC, falls into the hands of feisty five-foot barmaid Jet Black, it is the write-your-own price-tag which tempts her to brave the corporate Big-Brothers and make contact with a legendary book-fence known as the Polymath.

The reader first meets the Polymath (aka Paul Masanov) when he is having bookish phone sex with a nubile fantasist called April. Depression and loneliness are the not unnatural concomitants of a necessarily low profile and a plastic prosthetic foot two sizes too large, and Paul rings April for company at $5.25 a minute, seducing her with the sexual connotations of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the more salacious bits of Catullus, Apuleius and Juvenal’s Satires. Meanwhile Jet is making a living as the Letter Girl, penning missives at a price for the illiterate who left their privatised schools at 10 when education moved out of their financial reach, and heading for a secret meeting with Paul, providing she can survive her introduction to Mother Mayhem and her forest-dwelling Ferals and outwit the pursuit of a predictable pair of goons hired by the eavesdropping and upwardly mobile Execrable Crichton (does anyone in this day and age, much less the next, remember the Admirable variety, I wonder?)

Crichton’s employer, chief baddie Fortescue Shagg-Naste, Vice President (Information Services) of CII (Pacrim), has his own pirated copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince and an ever-so­sneaking respect for the printed word, daily enhanced, no doubt, by the ludicrous results of his attempts to recycle fact into fiction with a software program called ProseMaker, but it is more than his aspirations are worth to interfere with his henchman’s crusade against Jet and De Analogia.

The publicists have dubbed the book a road movie and there’s plenty of déjà vu about some sections of the plot, particularly the stock film-character goons and Ferals. It is also oddly similar in shape and style and pace to The Last Days, quotes from Catullus and Cicero taking the place of the words of the fathers of the church, but without the depth that readers themselves could bring to that first novel. In its satirically inventive construction of the future, however, and its reduction of the notion of the deconstructed text to the absurd ultimate blank page of the magically powerful Empty Manifesto, it is admirably cautionary and hugely entertaining. Can we ensure that our politicians read it before it’s too late?