The style of Astley’s novels typically evokes a world of energy, force, colour, clearly delineated movement and sharply distinguished sound. In this world ideas, sensations and emotions impact upon characters – and readers – with the same ‘instress’ that characterises the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Although Astley has said, ‘I want there to be a God because otherwise it would seem to me completely pointless’, the energy of inner and outer life that impresses itself on her novels does not derive from quite the same apprehension of God represented in Hopkins’s poetry. Rather than evoke a world conscious of its kinship with divinity, her novels more often represent a society in which people elect to show themselves as all too human, and at the worst, as in An Item From the Late News, as lesser animals endowed with human appetites and greed.

At such times, the stylistic energy of the writing images a world in which energy, misdirected or perverted, is turned against itself. Incipiently present in Girl With A Monkey, this stylistic energy develops throughout the successive novels, and is horrifically demonstrated in An Item from the Late News, her most desperate vision of the destructive forces of humankind, which seemed then to concentrate in the threat of nuclear annihilation.

The tendency of Astley’s novels to foreground male characters is partly explained by her comment to Candy Baker in Yacker that when she began to write she could not imagine that men would willingly read a woman’s writing, and hoped to give her work ‘validity’ by concentrating on the male characters. Astley did more than that. She concentrated on those qualities and tendencies in society that relate to forms of psychological, social and physical aggression and violence. These destructive tendencies include many female practitioners, but, on the whole, they derive from some form of what is now called masculinist aggression and competitiveness. In her novels, the results of this intellectual and emotional aggression are seen in characters who are self-centred, egoistic and insensitive to others, and they include many female figures.

Girl with A Monkey covers the last day spent in Townsville by Elsie, a twenty-two-year-old schoolteacher who had asked for a transfer to escape the attentions of her ‘monkey’, a labourer named Harry with whom she has been amusing herself. Harry’s coarseness and lack of education, and the possibility that he might attack the girl physically do not represent the destructive forces in this book. Although the energy resides in Harry, it is Elsie’s unthinking callousness that turns his natural energy into violence. Elsie the schoolteacher is a metonymic figure for the intellectual resources, social power and sensitive delights that are denied Harry because of his lack of education, a deprivation of which he is subtly conscious. The narrative sympathises with Elsie’s release from the tropics, from which she escapes with nothing worse that an ulcerated leg, but it does not conceal the coarseness of her immaturity and intellectual snobbery and her fearful delight in finding herself the centre of a drama. The novel ends with a wonderful image of Harry’s energy deployed in a last clumsy gesture of love:

Harry, panting as if at the end of a long race, drew level with her compartment and almost superhumanly kept pace with it for a few seconds. He was thrusting a brown paper bag at her, and she, looking neither to right nor left, heard only his last words as the packet fell through the window onto the seat. ‘Elsie/ Elsie/ Here’s some fruit I brung yer.’

In A Descant for Gossips (1960), also centred on a woman schoolteacher, the violence which derives from callousness, pettiness and bigotry results in the suicide of a schoolgirl. In the later novels male figures dominate, although women sometimes have significant roles, as in An Item from the Late News and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Reaching Tin River (1990) again foregrounds a woman, the librarian Belle who, independent of male support, somewhat painfully constructs her life using her own energies. In this novel the style cheerfully demands attention and its exuberance suggests a full-bodied engagement with life.

In the intervening novels, however, the energy of the writing often becomes a threatening disruption of the reading process and acts as a critique of the various forms of aggression and violence shown in the narratives. When violent incidents, attitudes and emotions are narrated, the energy of the prose is felt as an aggressive assault on the act of reading. This precludes any masculinist admiration of violence, the kind evoked by literature and film that set out to glorify destruction in the name of justice and human good. Astley’s prose in these passages has an intellectual edge that may cause readers profound unease simply because intelligence is supposed to withdraw at moments of violence and give the instincts free play.

The prose, or the reading of it, does not proceed on two separate levels, which would allow readers to assimilate or experience the violence and then assess it intellectually or morally. Rather, the aggressively, intellectually alert style demonstrates that intelligence and violence are incompatible human functions, and that the exercise of one necessitates the denial of the other. The frequent attempts of men and women to make violence intellectually acceptable or to rationalise or justify it pervert the concept of what it means to be human. Aficionados of Rambo violence would find no joy in An Item From the Late News, despite the violence which has forced even a seasoned male reviewer to admit he could hardly bear to take the novel up. Those who get a frisson from emotional violence or literature with a sadomasochistic bent will find The Acolyte uneasy reading, although some of the relationships in this study of a blind pianist and his entourage, one of Astley’s most brilliant and incisive critiques of human emotions and motives, exploit sadomasochistic emotions.

In many of Astley’s novels, the most obvious invasion of intellect into the space reserved for more instinctive or stupid kinds of human conduct is by the narrator’s use of scholarly learning. It is seen, for example, in the incidents and images in A Kindness Cup that convey the schoolmaster Dorahy’s attempts to teach the classics to boys who later use Roman battles to direct the strategy in planning the massacre of Aborigines. In An Item From the Late News the girl narrator whose jealousy brings about the death of the man she wants, the gentle Wafer, ironically covers her vicious emotions with evocations of mediaeval courtly love:

I am the omniscient narrator. I am the weaver of knowns and almost unknowns. I translate. I paraphrase. It’s all legal in a confessio amantis. Wafer dreamt he was inside a giant translucent stone running with blue and citrine fire, faceted so that impossibly, internally, images of himself held in glass moved as he moved, clawed as he clawed, smiled, wept and punched until knuckles echoed their bruising at the invisible barriers in multiple reduplication.

Here, too, as frequently happens in Astley’s narratives, the narrator’s direct address interrupts and impedes the process of reading. Questions, instructions to look and examine, and exclamatory phrases which mock their own surprise and energy, contribute to the assault course offered by the prose. There is no relief in spontaneity which mocks itself with the unmistakable suggestion that it is a deliberately contrived effect.

In almost all of Astley’s novels and short stories the tone is persistently ironic, slyly alluding to a literary culture which the narrative assumes it shares with a present reader, a culture whose integrity and value are questioned by the events of the narrative. Concepts and phrases evoking religious and musical cultures are used as weapons, as if to attack the complacency of those who imagine any kind of culture will prated its adherents against their weaknesses. Just as the music of Holberg, the blind musician in The Acolyte, mocks his audience in a composition depicting the culture of the Queensland Gold Coast, Astley’s prose mocks the reading process and invites her readers to learn what they can from it:

They’re baffled half of them. I detect the undertones of puzzlement when timpani spell out  is it ten bars too long?  the rubber-steel frenzy of trippers (he’s used this before: it shouldn’t puzzle them) in quest moving down to an overriding sea that swoops continually behind the string-surge and car anglais gulls; and their polite muffled relief of recognition of spasmodic nightclub ribaldry (thank God it was programmed). My dear it’s a fun thing / He’s got them boxed with a passacaglia arrangement of ‘Home on the Range’ not entirely recognisable yet irritatingly, abradingly familiar, too clever by half as I warned his arrogant truculence.

Perhaps something of the purpose of the abrading, frequently too-clever-by-half tone of Astley’s prose can be seen in the story ‘Petals From Blown Roses ... ‘from Hunting the Wild Pineapple. Brain is one of the North Queenslanders gathered at the poolside party, ‘one of nature’s dazzling failures, so injected with the fraudulent potency of his wildcat schemes he is always on the verge of financial bliss or ruin’. For two years after one resounding failure Brain tries to kill himself in many violent (and unsuccessful) attempts to ‘go out with a roar of machismo’. Towards the drunken end of the party, the narrator learns that Brain has been a singer but failed because he lacked application – ‘The naughty thing wouldn’t practise, would you, Brain?’ – and Brain is urged to sing:

His voice is so rich, so naturally beautiful, the yappers are stilled. But Brain isn’t aware of its beauty, I know it, for once again he’s grinning like a goat, sending himself up as he does mammy gestures. ‘Roun’ dat ale magnolia tree,’ he sings, ‘sang so sweet to you an’ me ...’ on he sings. On. On. He misses a phrase now and then. We prompt the words. Once he almost loses the tune. But the voice/ The depth/ The resonance! Here it is the one thing he can do and never talks about. He just doesn’t know.

Brain, the metonymy of human intelligence, surrenders himself to his appetites and the frenetic pursuit of wealth, and vents his frustration in violent assaults upon himself. Robert Ross has suggested that Astley’s prose style offers a ‘carnival of language, aptly grotesque for the misfitted metaphysical quest it depicts: the pure in heart seeking salvation admist a world flawed and damned’. Purity of heart is perhaps something to which Astley’s work hardly dares allude: nevertheless the irony of the prose often compels a reader to see how tragically the human intellect fails to recognise the one thing it was created to do.