David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon is his eighth novel, his first since The Great World (1990) which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger. It is approximately two-thirds the length of that book but is longer than his first three fictions, Johnno, An Imaginary Life, and Fly Away Peter. Its length is important, as in its 200 pages it packs one of the most powerful punches to be found in any contemporary novel. Astonishingly compact and almost feverishly lucid, Remembering Babylon is a searing and startling literary parable, in my opinion destined to endure as one of Australia’s literary commandments.

What begins as a child’s game and child’s eye view of personal history becomes a metaphor for a civilisation struggling to emerge. Lachlan Beattie plays the heroic child-soldier who encounters the tattered figure of Gemmy Fairley – half-man, half-beast, half-black, and half-white – in the outback of mid-nineteenth century Queensland. He leads this strange figure back to the crowd of settlers who marvel at the nature of his appearance. In the schoolroom Gemmy is interrogated by the minister, Mr Frazer, while an ill-at-ease, ungainly, nineteen-year-old schoolmaster takes notes. Seven closely-written pages amount to Gemmy Fairley’s life, which 180 typescript pages later has been refracted through a number of different eyes.

It transpires that, as a child on his passage from England, Fairley was washed overboard on the coast of Australia and taken in by blacks. He quickly learnt to adapt to his new way of life and spent several years in their midst, and indeed he had done this so successfully that on entering the white settlement his new compatriots do not know what to make of him and cannot work out whether Gemmy is making fun of them or is just slow-witted. He is befriended by the family of the children who found him and forges a strange and silent friendship with Lachlan and Janet. He shows them skills he previously learnt, such as how to track, and instinctively these children pick up on Gemmy’s adaptability and intelligence, qualities to which the adults are slow to react.

The settlers’ wariness and dismal view of Gemmy, fostered by their poor relations with the blacks, materialises when after almost a year of tranquillity Gemmy is seen with some blacks and rumours spread through the settlement with the speed of a bush fire. Attracted by the brief heat (and indignity) of notoriety, Andy McKillop breathlessly tells the Mclvor’s neighbour that Gemmy has been conspiring with the blacks who actually handed a stone over to the dangerous trouble-maker. Again the adults in the settlement act towards Gemmy with the habitual passion of inviolable hatred while the children’s innocence allows them to maintain their friendship. After a midnight disappearance Gemmy is ostracised and made to live elsewhere. George Abbot, the schoolmaster, having learnt humility from the minister and subconsciously seeing Gemmy’s victimisation as similar to his own plight, vows to see him safely home. Gemmy disappears and fifty years later an event that has hung heavily in the hearts of the two children is exposed in all its squalid tragedy.

These bare bones cannot begin to suggest the brilliantly subtle qualities of Remembering Babylon. Throughout Gemmy is, figuratively and literally, at sea – from being cast overboard to recognising things from his past life, when ‘occasionally some object would come floating back and bump against him’. The aquatic metaphors, made stronger by the sense of impossible escape from the harsh island terrain, subtly dovetail with the book’s strongest message; erode the skin and see the man beneath, life itself is not a face-value judgement. When he is spotted with the blacks after a year with the whites (he is ‘run aground’), the white onlooker seems to Gemmy exactly as Gemmy was to the children. This mirroring of behaviour from seemingly diametric opposites suggests surface inaccuracies. This is compounded by the apparent ignorance of the children which actually emerges as empathetic understanding of the situation.

Malouf’s writing conveys the brutal power of the geography and countryside, and how it can be both friend and foe, blazing sun and lush vegetation. It is as if the terrain is also a character, sometimes white, sometimes black, protecting and exposing the foolish foibles and misadventures of those on the land. There are several superb cameos of the supercilious schoolmaster, contented Governor and understanding clergyman. Moreover, in a climate where ‘it was mere naked endurance that best revealed the qualities of man’, there is a touching and finely handled evocation of female longing and loneliness, the moving bond of individual woes of Gemmy and Ellen McIvor as her own isolation propels her towards him.

When Gemmy Fairley’s life was being recorded by George Abbot in that hellishly hot schoolroom, thousands of miles away Edgar Allan Poe wrote, ‘It is not beauty if it requires to be demonstrated as such’. Let Remembering Babylon, by the power of its prose and humanity, demonstrate to you its unforgettable and deeply significant message.

Remembering Babylon is an astonishing, horrifying, and yet finally uplifting masterpiece. It is composed with a poetical elliptical bravura resonant with almost biblically prophetic tones which perfectly match the period in which it is set. It tells us about our past and about ourselves. I pray it will have legions of readers of all colours, creeds and ages.

‘One day in the middle of the nineteenth century, when settlement in Queensland had advanced scarcely more than halfway up the coast …’ The opening lines of the novel seek to place it and us squarely in the discourse of history; to require that we lay aside the credulity with which the reader welcomes in romance and fantasy and become fellow-enquirers into the world of factual record, population figures and dates, marks on maps, important conflicts and the names of governors.

The settlers are introduced immediately but, as it were, by proxy, in the persons of their children. This is significant since, despite the no-nonsense opening, David Malouf’s novel is really a parable about becoming as little children in the new Promised Land.

For the parents of Meg and Janet (guardians to Lachlan Beattie), the strange country ‘even in full sunlight … was impenetrable dark’, despite their knowing that ‘six hundred miles away in the lands office in Brisbane, this bit of country had a name set against it on a numbered document, and a line drawn that was empowered with all the authority of the Law’. It may be that the children will see differently.

Malouf is adding layers, with hindsight, to the two-dimensional Genesis story of how ‘we’ came to be here and how ‘we’ whose touchstone of normalcy was Mother England made heroic adjustments. Remembering Babylon of course recalls the psalm about remembering Zion, modulated by the epigraph from The Four Zoas: ‘Whether this is Jerusalem or Babylon we know not.’ The prophet in this wilderness who comes closest to perceiving the true lineaments of the Promised Land is Mr Frazer, minister and naturalist. His flock includes many who cannot or will not see.

Gemmy Fairley, who appears as ‘something extraordinary’ to the children playing ‘at the edge of a paddock’ in the first paragraph, is the messenger from beyond who precipitates the crisis of perception in Jerusalem or Babylon. He is a Shakespearean or, more accurately, Darwinian image of unaccommodated man, ‘this brutish specimen’, ‘naked essential humanity’, as the schoolmaster first feels (later coming to believe himself a ‘high-minded, fastidious little theorist’).

Gemmy is white but has lived among the blacks since his early teens, now retaining only a modicum of whatever the whites consider sets them apart, and having adopted to an alarming degree the characteristics of his erstwhile hosts (even their features; a modified jawline allegedly due to eating their foods). The children observe the stir he creates among their elders and wonder ‘if some new set of rules was in operation, and the blackfella’s arrival among them was to be the start of something’. Schoolmaster and minister between them patch together from Gemmy’s scraps of English a mostly-fantasy account of his experiences.

The parable about lost and found identity that follows turns on language. Gemmy is drawn to the settlement by overheard words. ‘It was the words he had to get hold of. It was the words that would recognise him.’ Gemmy’s estrangement from himself seems retrievable by words that might ‘catch the creature, the spirit or whatever it was, that lived in the dark of him’, and he runs towards the children ‘to prove that all that separated him from them was ground that could be covered’. In this, of course, he is deceived, and at last demands back the words on paper which he understands to be imprisoning him, looking back to the land for ‘the word … that would let him enter here’.

As Malouf unfolds the consequences of Gemmy’s first impulsive rush, he is often inside his character’s head, populated as it is with blackfella notions of what it is to be in and of the landscape, intuitively aware of how impotent transplanted nineteenth-century empiricism is by contrast. Mr Frazer is happy to take instruction on these ontological matters from Gemmy, for whom the country throws off ‘luminous flares’ even ‘in the deepest shade’. Gemmy casts light ‘only in patches for Mr Frazer, leaving the rest undisclosed’. While he respects Mr Frazer’s botanical drawings for the humility they reveal towards their subjects, he understands that the blacks who, unseen, watch their expeditions, see the minister as ‘the land itself saw: a shape, thin, featureless; that interposed itself a moment, like a mist or cloud, before the land blazed out in its full strength again’.

Here is the mystical heart of the book. Mr Frazer is a spiritual brother to Mrs Godbold and White’s many nature mystics, but Malouf is seeking, respectfully, to incorporate elements of blackfella perception among our visions of the land. Choosing Gemmy, whose double-vision is muddled and inarticulate, avoids blasphemy; Gemmy who jumps the boundary fence, who encapsulates dream-essences of two worlds (though what he retains of his Dickensian childhood is only nightmare). The play of Mr Frazer’s and Gemmy’s ways of seeing animates the book.

Other dramas – the lives of the McIvors and the predictable violence Gemmy precipitates – are set out, but recorded for the most part in another register. Mr Frazer’s credentials are dogged ‘accuracy and attention’ devoted to keeping up ‘with the tumbling complexity of things’, and the capacity to write in the fluent tones of prophecy ‘under the hiss of the evening lamp’ when ‘the lines run crooked … and might come from another hand’. In this mode he sees the limitations of the English ‘habit and faculty’ of apprehending the world. Gemmy is ‘a forerunner’, an ‘exemplum of the simplest and most obvious sort’ of future’ children of the land’.

It’s a gently messianic tale, with Gemmy not so much John the Baptist as himself an inadequate Christ, dumbly embodying the new message of immanence rather than transcendence; reverence before the land which is, was and always will be. The echoes of Patrick White are strong, but grandiloquence is mostly avoided. Loads of romance here, though, despite the implicit disclaimer in the first lines. For some reason I felt the book might have been written in one long stretch. It has that unity of ‘feel’ about it and also a hint of repetitiveness.

Malouf disclaims origins ‘in fact’, except minor ones, but he attends carefully to surfaces and detail in this clash of paradigms. There’s a strong lyricism about the result, which mostly compensates for the (even if unconscious) didactic intent and a rather too neat symmetry, and for a certain heavy-handedness about some central metaphors, such as Janet McIvor’s beekeeping. Making her a nun seemed to be gilding the lily.

This is the 150th issue of ABR since its revival in 1978, and so it would seem appropriate for us to look back on that time in order to come to some wise conclusions about the state of book reviewing, of literature, of communication and culture in this country.

Appropriate can go jump, however. 150 is splendid, and here’s to another 150 of them.

Connoisseurs of lapidary prose and the fine art of understated narrative are unlikely to enjoy this risky passionate novel. Nor will they enthuse over sentences such as, ‘The agony was so extreme I was numb with it, as if I had fallen into a vat of molten steel and could not immediately feel the enormity of the burn’, or, ‘Flooded with embarrassment, desire, delight, I thought stupidly, no wonder men go so wild over women, no wonder they dream continually of being lapped in that heavenly softness as they go about the hard world.’ However, Rosie Scott has made her own priorities clear in a 1991 essay called ‘Come and see the blood in the streets’. She expresses her admiration here for what she defines as a broadly ‘political’ tradition of writers from Dickens and Lorca to Alice Walker and Patricia Grace; and comments such as the following also provide a useful introduction to her own latest novel:

There is a luminescence in their writing which is almost overwrought sometimes, but which informs every line and produces brilliant language ... to read that sort of writing feeds a hunger I have for literary extremes, unashamed commitment, courage, an instantly recognisable and burning relevance.

Jay Parini intended this collection of critical essays to be a Festschrift for Vidal’s sixty-fifth birthday in 1990. Its lateness may suggest he found some difficulty in obtaining suitable material, and account for the mixed quality of the essays. There is, however, so little available about Vidal that we must be grateful for this collection, which contains previously unpublished material and reprints some essays which would otherwise be difficult to trace.

Vidal has been writing for nearly fifty years, and his output has been remarkable, both for quantity and content. His general neglect by academia and the refusal of critics to judge him by his own standards, but rather by their own prejudices and preconceptions, results largely from his espousal of causes before their time, and his refusal to belong to ‘schools’ of writing, a trait which has led academics and critics alike to brand him as ‘old-fashioned’.

People who have read John Banville’s Book of Evidence tend to pale and take on a manic look when they’re told that there is a new Banville out. When they learn that it’s linked with that earlier book, almost a sequel, their ears pinken, their lips tremble, and, most disturbingly, their fingers begin to twitch. At this stage, the holder of an advance proof backs away, calmly, as smoothly as possible, never turning until the door is reached. Then she runs, and they’re in hot pursuit.

Only a writer bold and clever as Banville can have this effect. It’s not that he writes thrillers or titillators, but he writes unexpectedly, with an almost grim passion for that most alluring of literary themes, ordinary nastiness. As in The Book of Evidence, he takes an ordinary life and delicately prods its rottenness. The deliciously disturbing thing is that he doesn’t appear to have to prod too hard to inspire a shiver that tickles and stings.

Aboriginal poet and activist, Kevin Gilbert, died in Canberra on 1 April 1993 after a long battle with a respiratory disease. He was sixty years old.

Kevin was the figurehead for an entire generation of Aborigines, having overcome incredible odds to become an educated and fluent spokesman for land rights and other Aboriginal issues, as well as the man most widely considered to be Aboriginal Australia’s greatest poet.

His writing was marked by a passionate and uncompromising desire to communicate black anger and frustration and his direct, often highly witty, manner made him Black Australia’s most powerful advocate. Whether one agreed with him or not, it was impossible not to respect his beliefs, and the way he expressed them.

He emerged from a troubled childhood and early adulthood to become one of the few internationally recognised Aboriginal writers. His play The Cherry Pickers (1971, reprinted Burrambinga Books, 1988) was the first written Aboriginal play, two acclaimed volumes of poetry, Because a White Man’ll Never Do It (A&R, 1973) and People Are Legends (UQP, 1979) followed, and he compiled a book about the Aboriginal experience, Living Black (Penguin) in 1978. He was also the editor of the Penguin bicentennial anthology of Aboriginal writing, Inside Black Australia (1988).

Hyland House has been Kevin’s publisher since the publication of The Blackside: People Are Legends and Other Poems (1989, reprinted 1992). More recently, of course, we have published Child’s Dreaming (1992), a well-received poetic work for children on which Gilbert collaborated with his wife, the photographer Eleanor Williams.

Ironically, his death came only a week after we received confirmation of an Australia Council grant to publish what was to have been his most ambitious work yet, Black Hole & Beyond, a collection of new poems and photographs which will be published posthumously in September.

Al Knight, Anne Godden, and I will miss him. He was a great poet, in that he addressed himself to great issues of life – freedom, rights, power, and beliefs – with a fervour and integrity that could not be ignored. In this UN International Year of the Indigenous Peoples, the work Kevin has left behind will stand as testament to the depth of feeling amongst Australia’s indigenous population, and testament also to a truly unique man.

I have had a haunted week reviewing the The Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore; haunted by a host of inadequately credited or totally omitted characters and folklore subjects clamouring for their status and value to be recognised. Thus, in that vast penumbra of lost souls, the plaintive cries of characters such as Ginger Meggs, the Magic Pudding, and the Banksia Men, Rolf Harris and Barry Humphries, together with subjects such as Strine, Rhyming Talk, Hanging Rock, Ghosts, and Oral History, have begged for their recognition! And swelling their ranks are those who only got a toehold in the door, so cursory is their mention: Dad and Dave, Joseph Jacobs, Marion Sinclair, Clancy of the Overflow, the Man from Snowy River, et al.

Dear Editor,

I was encouraged and shamed by your account of Mabel Edmund’s comments about violence against women. You are so right, even if you understate it a bit, in saying ‘if we don’t get the gender stuff right, then we’ll never get any of it right’. Bodo Kirchhoff’s smug sexist fantasy about finding a Filipina beauty in the monastery kitchen is important, because it says something not just about Kirchhoff but about all men. He is not Robinson Crusoe but Everyman.

Originally published in French in 1939, Coup de Grâce is a subtle book, ‘a human, not political, document’ written with absolute assurance and remarkable skill. That the book is filled with a disturbing inhumanity portrayed (without irony) as nobility, makes it a disturbing experience for the contemporary reader.

As part of his quest to gather information about the ‘famous Dr Warson Holmes Jackamara’ – a Detective Inspector of police, a government official, and the holder of a doctorate in criminology – an Aboriginal oral historian interviews an erstwhile Queensland real estate broker and aspiring politician, for whom Jackamara once worked as a ‘minder’. The transcripts of the resulting thirteen monologues comprise the substance of a novella which presents the reader with an object lesson about the dangers inherent in the greed for power – in hubris – and in white Australian’s failure to recognise the strength of the Aboriginal spirit beings. As such, despite what some might see as its overstrained mythicism, this work has a compelling, and uniquely Australian, quality.

After twenty-five years of political exile, Doris Lessing returns to her homeland – once Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe – following the 1980 Marxist revolution. African Laughter documents four visits spanning the first decade of black majority rule, providing an intimate view of the birth, progress, and growing pains of a comparatively successful modern African nation. African Laughter also chronicles Lessing’s personal journey, a search for the landmarks of her memories.

Verity Burgmann’s Power and Protest is an evocation of the major social movements that have arisen and thrived in Australia since the late 1960s, the black, women’s, lesbian and gay, peace and green movements. The writer is a well-known historian of Australian radicalism as well as a political scientist, and in combining history and politics she joins other social scientists such as Terry Irving, Judith Brett, James Walter, Murray Goot – an interesting tradition. In each chapter she offers an evocation of the various movements, outlining origins, developments, aspects, divisions, conflicts, difficulties, dilemmas, successes, achievements, as well as the opposition and resistance to these movements in the wider society. Burgmann writes with ease and energy, often with enjoyable irony and sarcasm. I liked her reference to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970) as ‘ovarious’. Power and Protest is entertaining as well as clear, and will surely prove indispensable for teaching.

Who made the best Sachertorte in the world? Andrew Riemer’s mum. The recipe is lost now, but it came from the Ursuline nuns in Sopron, a small Hungarian town where Andrew Riemer’s mother grew up. This information comes early in The Hapsburg Cafe, which is an account of the author’s second visit to the places of his childhood (the first account being recorded in Inside Outside). I waited and waited for him to go to the Ursuline Convent in Sopron and get the recipe, but the duffer never did. Even though he called a part of the book ‘Remembrance of Things Past’. Men. What’s a Madeleine when you could have a Sachertorte?

A new series called Interpretations, published by Melbourne University Press, aims to provide up-to-date introductions to recent theories and critical practices in the humanities and social sciences. Series Editor, Ken Ruthven, answers some questions about the role and reception of critical writing.

Does the brief introduction to the series, which says it is ‘clearly written and up-to-date’, respond to the constant criticism that critical theory uses élite language?

As books by Christopher Norris and Jonathan Culler indicate, even the most complicated types of critical theory can be written about clearly, providing those who undertake such tasks include among their expository skills a mastery of English syntax. Sentences that require to be read twice before they can be understood will be edited out of the Interpretations series. Each book will explain the meanings of appropriate technical terms as they come up, and then use them wherever necessary without further ado. This procedure will depend, of course, on cooperation between writers capable of explaining what they’re on about and readers willing to grant the humanities what has never been denied the sciences, namely, the right to introduce new technical terms in order to articulate new types of knowledge. I believe it’s time to put an end to those recurrent standoffs staged by the Australian media between philistine journos out of their depth in the newer critical discourses and arrogant critical theorists who (to adapt a phrase of Sir Peter Medawar) behave like voluptuaries of the higher forms of incomprehension. What any reader of an Interpretations book will learn is how to use a particular set of critical terms in order to engage with otherwise elusive or obscure issues.

Each book in the series will focus on some aspect of those new developments in the humanities and social sciences which have come into existence by the application of critical theory to traditional preoccupations in these fields. As you know, there was no ‘critical theory’ in the current sense before the late 1960s. And although a few Australian intellectuals were engaging with this largely French phenomenon in the 1970s, it was not until the 1980s that tertiary institutions here started to offer courses on critical theory, and their campus bookshops began to stock the very first guidebooks to it written in English. The series will be up-to-date to the degree that critical theory itself is a recent phenomenon continuously in the bibliographies for the benefit of readers who want to go into matters more thoroughly.

MUP announced the change of general editor, following Stephen Knight’s departure for the UK, by suggesting that ‘Sailing the seas depends upon the helmsman’. How do you see your role?

The nautical metaphor wouldn’t be my favourite choice, although I suppose the general editor might be imagined as steering the series through discursive seas made treacherous in the 1990s by ideological conflicts. Personally, I prefer to think of the series as a space in which some of the newer developments in the humanities and social sciences can be discussed and analysed by people who know about them for the benefit of those of us who do not. In that case, the task of a general editor is to ensure that the available space is filled over the years by as many varieties of the new as possible.

Are these titles in the series literary, social or cultural theory?

To put the question this way is to assume that knowledge can be compartmentalised in ways made familiar by a traditional fragmentation of the humanities into those discrete disciplines which are institutionalised in university departments with names such as History or Philosophy or English. Had there not been problems with such disciplinary arrangements, interdisciplinarity would never have flourished. Such moves were accelerated when scholars located in different disciplinary departments began to study the same critical theorists and to collaborate in the production of certain types of knowledge that don’t ‘belong’ in any of those traditional departments. The Interpretations series will try to accommodate well-informed studies of such highly theorised practices, irrespective of how they might be categorised, on the assumption that they will be of varying interest to people from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.

What kinds of topics will be covered?

No restrictions are envisaged, provided topics are of contemporary interest and written about in ways that make clear both the theoretical grounds that constitute them, and the critical methods employed in exploring them.

What’s the relevance of the series, and to whom?

The series will not interest people who believe that the world went mad in 1968 and that we should do everything in our power to bring back the 1950s. People who are more curious than appalled by recent developments in the humanities and social sciences, however, might be expected to welcome a series of books that, without patronising their readers, explain and critique some current critical practices in a well-informed and non-threatening manner. By no means all such readers will be enrolled in tertiary courses of study.

Many books of theory produced in Australia are aimed at a very limited audience and are produced on very small budgets. Is there enough of a readership to make a series such as this viable?

Given the relatively small size of Australia’s population, the local market for such books is always going to be correspondingly small, which is one of the reasons why Melbourne University Press is seeking to have the series published by an American university press and by a British press. Nevertheless, two factors are worth bearing in mind. First, and with respect to the potential academic market, it should be noted that the arts faculties of tertiary institutions continue to experience no difficulty whatsoever in attracting students, in spite of the economic hardships they endure and the government’s attempt to lure them into science; and furthermore, that by far the most popular courses in arts faculties are those that engage with the newer forms of humanities and social sciences.

Second, there is an Australian intelligentsia outside the academies that frequents bookshops such as Readings in Melbourne or Gleebooks in Sydney and buys books on critical theory in such numbers as to make it commercially viable to stock them. Much of this material is imported from the USA and the UK. Some of it, however, is produced locally, and I hope that Interpretations will be perceived as an important contribution to that endeavour.

Going Away is full of traveller's tales, the kinds that only seem bizarre when you're back home, so it's impossible not to ask, did these things happen to you?

Basically, they did, or things like them. But more bizarre things happened which I didn't write about. Either I couldn't make them credible or they detracted from the balance of the novel. The book was never meant to be a collection of anecdotes.

Travellers of this variety, the ‘I'm young and I'm questing' variety, are pretty horrible really. Why brave the horribles for your first novel?

I like young people who are questing. I like people who are prepared to explore and take risks, particularly people who are prepared to risk their definitions of themselves. I don't like people who are ostentatious about it (I would hope the book is humorous on this very point) because they're trapped in a prison of their own making. In the vernacular, they're wankers. But I like the metaphor of the journey. I hope I travel until I die.

The obvious question: what's Stephen looking for by going away?

Home. That's what the name of the book is in Irish (‘Abhaile’). I did think of calling the book ‘Going Home’, but that's the name of a collection of stories by the Aboriginal writer, Archie Weller. Good book, too.

And what does he find?

When l was growing up and at university, there was a belief that Australian intellectuals and artists had to ‘go away’ to achieve fulfilment. It was the Milan Kundera - ‘Life is Elsewhere’ principle. It still has currency. Most intellectual discussion and literary debate is Eurocentric. This is a book about an Australian who goes away, and finds he has to come back. In a sense, my book ends at the beginning: Through travelling the world, the central character perhaps learns how to travel in his own world, that is, Australia. I believe a lot of Australians, myself-included to an extent, have yet to discover this country.

Tasmania gets another serve in this novel. And so does Catholic education. How do you think both these parts of the novel will be received in the Irish translation of Going Away?

I very much hope this book isn't a case of Tasmania getting ‘another serve’. I see a lot of intellectual dishonesty in attitudes towards Tasmania. Tasmanian history is Australian history writ particularly vividly and concisely. Tasmania is the book's background; its character is part of the narrator's character. If he had been a Victorian or a Queenslander, the same principle would have applied. Nor is the theme of Catholic education meant to be as important as that of a boy beginning the transition to manhood in an exclusively male adolescent subculture (that is, boarding school). How will the book be received in Ireland? My translator, Louis de Paor, sees it as being in the tradition of Irish language writing. Irish is not a bookish language; it's a language which is heard and spoken. My book is an Irish-Australian story told by an Irish-Australian voice. Writing it, I was more conscious of telling a story than of writing a novel. Both of us are also interested in the aboriginal aspects of Gaelic culture.

We wouldn't, of course, get through a Martin Flanagan novel without some footy. You've received lavish praise for the way you write about sport: why does it hit a chord, do you think?

I don't see the book as being written in my voice. It's written in the voice of a confused, and at times desperate young man in his early twenties. He grabs at what makes sense, without necessarily knowing why. One of the biggest temptations I had to fight in writing the book was to explain his actions. The reason I chose to write it in the first person was because I thought it made the action more immediate, less thoughtful, if you like. I regard each thing I do in writing as a step towards something else. If the next novel I write is the one I have in mind, it will be different in almost every respect.

How do you see the relationship between journalism and fiction?

Journalism, for me, is essentially learning about the world. It's about abandoning your preconceptions, or seeking to, and looking at what it is you're actually confronted with. As a form of writing, it's incredibly old. The Faber Book of Reportage starts with Plato's account of the death of Socrates and goes through to James Fenton's account-of Marcos's downfall. There are all sorts of practical problems associated with journalism, particularly in this country, but that's basically how I see it in principle. Fiction, for me, is the inner investigation, the inner construction. Fiction need answer no rules other than its own. It's closer to myth.

In pre-Conquest Mexico, the Nahua people conceived of literature as a symbol of wisdom and the scribe was recognised as a sage, a teacher, and a philosopher. Is the modern writer only an entertainer, or is it still possible for literature to embody the truths beyond the everyday?

When I told a friend I was thinking of writing an essay on pre-Hispanic literature he said, ‘Forget it. You’d have to go to university to find out how to write an essay. Why don’t you write about your Christmas holidays?’ So perhaps it’s polite to warn readers that the following words, observations, and ideas are derived solely from personal experience, reading and reflection. I am a genuine lay person, shamelessly uneducated, having left school at fifteen and not found the time (or funds) to return since.

I want to write about pre-Hispanic literature because it is relatively unknown and unappreciated. It also makes a good contrast to modern literature, not only in form and content but in concept – how it was perceived and what function it played in comparison with our literature. I believe that one of the most important questions modern day writers have to ask themselves is, what role do we play? And one way of exploring that question is by comparing our writers and our literature to those of another time and place.

The time and place this essay is concerned with is Mexico in the two hundred years or so before the Conquest. At that time, as well as the infamous Aztecs there were a number of other groups living in the valley of Mexico that were related by a common language called Nahuatl and a similar cultural heritage known as Nahua. Nahuatl literature is composed of mythology, history, philosophy, poetry, songs, and formal discourses and speeches for special occasions such as the birth of a child. It also recorded scientific knowledge in the areas of astronomy, mathematics, and the calendar, even what we might now call psychology or psychiatry, such as the interpretation of dreams.

The story of the re-discovery of Nahuatl literature, which reveals the depth of pre-conquest Mexican culture, has been compared to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Although approximately three million Mexicans still speak Nahuatl, their native literature has rarely been available to them in written form. Some would say it has been deliberately kept from public view as a consequence of colonial suppression of native culture and, in particular, native religion.

The boy’s heart sank when he saw the ship.

The daily special at the Great Northern Hotel that blustery late-November day was chicken schnitzel, mashed spuds, peas and a free pot for four bucks, but Marie’s spelling had struck again. Schitzel would not be passed up by anyone.

Martin Flanagan, well-known contributor to The Age newspaper in Melbourne, has written a peregrinatory first novel in which the narrator, Stephen, is hoping to find the connection he feels he doesn’t have with his own land, and consequently with himself.

This book opens with the pregnancy of an Irish actress in 1789 and concludes with the death of her grandson in 1888. There is mystery at both ends of the story, relating in the first case to paternity and in the second to the source of a substantial estate. In between comes a drama of marital dissonance and economic survival played out against the great crisis brought upon the musical profession in England by the collapse of its family-based guild traditions.

The chief protagonist in Robert Wallace’s Art Rat is a character about as savoury as Sid Vicious at his worst. The Art Rat begins life as Glyn, then transforms himself into Matthew and finally Lupo, psychopath disguised as conceptual artist. With each new identity he sinks further into madness and obsession.

Glyn’s sinister obsessions stem from relationships with mother and father and take an extra twist after mother and beloved uncle are blown to bits by an IRA bomb. Hence Glyn’s artistic obsession with explosions. Regrettably, Glyn’s fantasies about the perfect work of art require live ‘ingredients’ which is why he is on the run through much of the book.