Peter Carey’s first novel, Bliss, will be self-recommending to all admirers of his astonishing short stories. The Fat Man in History and the even better War Crimes mark Carey as the most genuinely original of our storytellers – a fabulist and, in some corners of his imagination, a surrealist of disturbing power. Part of his achievement and, arguably, a sign of his freshness of vision is that his fictions manage so adroitly to slip through the critic’s webs of explication. They tend to resist any simple yielding up of their inner meaning at the same time as they touch the nerves of our general experience and social fears. The central figures of his narratives are typically trapped in the labyrinths of their obsessions or delusions, they are solitaries, often, like the fat men in the title story, both victims and perpetrators of their condition.

These characteristics are again to be encountered in Bliss, and it is interesting to see them emerge in the extended novel form, sometimes to their disadvantage. Harry Joy, the central character and intended hero, ‘was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect upon him’, we are told in the novel’s arresting opening sentence. He runs a moderately successful advertising agency, is offered as the average ‘Good Bloke’, and at thirty-nine has his first coronary. Before he is revived from this first medical death, he discovers in his bodiless state that there are many worlds ‘layer upon layer’ and that ‘bliss and punishment, Heaven and Hell ‘somehow exist simultaneously within reach. The moral allegory is deft enough, and for the succeeding 290 pages Harry Joy is offered as a kind of moral hero who discovers in his second lease of life that the material and spiritual conditions of his existence are to be identified as Hell, and that to counter Hell one must of course be Good.

Carey’s capitalisation of the word, with its inevitable aura of irony, points to one of the problems of a novel that is curiously uneven, if nearly always entertaining. It is not clear how seriously we are to regard this often comic novel with its fluctuating shifts of tone. Carey rarely writes badly, but it is difficult to take Harry Joy’s moral odyssey seriously, and it seems that the author, for all his defensive irony, certainly wants us to do that. The lineaments of Hell, for Harry Joy, are discovered in the innermost workings of his family, and in particular in the ruthless ambitions of his wife Bettina with her drive to get to New York, her shorthand term for her ‘glittering visions of capitalism’. Carey, as usual, is very good at dramatising the psychology of obsession and the night demons of the furtive private life, both in Bettina and in the teenage children David and Lucy. Harry, exploring the topography of Hell, turns spy; and one of the funniest and most appalling scenes occurs when Harry, in a catastrophic ascent of his backyard tree of knowledge, discovers through the windows his wife’s unfaithfulness and the incestuous activities of his son and daughter.

The trouble is that, as a moral activist, Harry Joy Jacks purposiveness and credibility. He constantly feels more like a fictional idea than a fully and coherently created human being that the moral quest would imply. He reminds one sometimes of an Australian Great Gatsby with his silk shirts and flashy white suits, his moral overdrive, and his ambiguous relation to the high life and to material possessions. He has some good comic scenes, it is true – one at a police station where his propensity for retelling or inventing enigmatic stories stupefies the bully in charge, and is perhaps a sly allegory of Carey’s relationship to the interpretative critical industry. Harry also has his moments of depth. He perceives, for example, that at bottom Hell is a ‘waste of life’, leading to an encompassing vision of an acceptance of everything under the auspices of death. Carey has him poignantly recall the early years of marriage, the times of the young children and the symptomatic acts of making and planting associated with those days. Yet for all this, Harry is too often seen as passive and unintelligent, a two-dimensional figure wavering in conception before the narrative events that sweep him forward. Locked up by his family in a mental home, he is unbelievably helpless, as suddenly wooden as Huck Finn at Phelps’ farm. His final redemption with and by the simple Honey Barbara is about what he deserves.

Honey Barbara comes from the land of the rain forests to which, in the end, she returns with Harry. When we first meet her, she is the familiar good-hearted whore of fiction, a grass-growing hippie type who works the city in the off-season. She is associated with most of the tedious pages in the novel, yet her values are offered, one supposes, as positive counters to the urban, acquisitive and materialistic pursuits she is made to oppose. Carey ironises her to some extent, but not much. The reader is not likely to share his apparent positive feeling for her self-regarding rituals and opinionated airs. She has a vision of city life, city air, and processed food that she sums up in the collective noun ‘shit’, a word that is the keystone of her vocabulary, impoverishing her speeches, occluding her thought, and habitually substituting prejudice and denunciation for rational discussion or analysis. Carey captures the hippie complacencies of her outlook and idiom with fidelity; but one suspects that her sweeping condemnations of modern urban life are also Carey’s condemnations in this novel, compromising with their simplicities the serious moral questionings raised early in the book by the Harry Joy figure.

The novel incorporates two passages of apocalyptic impulse and vision. In one, a coldly enraged Bettina, now a cancer victim, destroys with a petrol bomb the executive board of Mobil oil; and in the other, the narrative moves briefly into a future mode to tell of the cancer epidemic which was to prove the ‘last straw’ for the whole industrialised Western world, reducing civilisation to looting bands. It is a remarkable passage, focusing much that has gone before and explaining its insistence. Carey’s prophetic myth, however, repeats the false notion that the vast majority of cancers are environmentally caused, that (in Susan Sontag’s words in Illness as Metaphor) ‘cancer signifies the rebellion of the injured ecosphere. Nature taking revenge on a wicked technocratic world’. This paranoid view of cancer as the evil retributive force lurking at the heart of industrial capitalism underlies much of Bliss, directing to the title its own set of ironies.

In the end, Harry Joy does find a kind of bliss, dying a second time into a new life and old age with his Honey Barbara in the sub-tropical forests, in touch with the spirit of the land, learning the Jore of the trees and the uses of their wood, talking to them courteously before he cuts them down. This is of course the familiar either-or solution to the problem of the Australian cities, the myth of a return to the source, veined through our culture and enshrined in our classical literature and its derivations.

Bliss has some excellent minor characters and an interesting pattern of small, digressive sub-plots. The most successful of these concerns David Joy, Harry’s complex, over-emotional son and his subsequent adult history of Colombia. The characterisation here is richer and more satisfyingly complex than anything in Carey’s earlier fiction. Curiously, the whole David Joy story is touched with small echoes of Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, not only in the final Colombian setting but also in elements of its phrasing: ‘David Joy remembered the night his father took him to see lightning. It was his first memory’ ... ‘years later, Harry’s son would tell his captors that he had been born in an electrical storm’, and so on. I am not sure what to make of such apparently deliberate references except to register them, and to say that they co-exist with Carey’s often inventive and moving writing in this section. Harry Joy categorises the inhabitants of Hell as ‘Captives, Actors and Those-in­Charge’, categories immensely suggestive for any analysis of Carey’s entire fiction to date. David Joy is patently an actor. So too is Carey in this book for much of the time, offering us some of his most tender and serious things together with some turns of burlesque, one or two experimental acts, and a conventional end piece. The book is beautifully presented in celestial silver, as sumptuous as a Deutsche Grammophon.

Gerard Lee’s first novel True Love and How To Get It follows his promising collection of stories Pieces for a Glass Piano. It is a smartly written sexual picaresque in which the central character, disarmingly called Tom Jones and often referred to as ‘our hero’, pursues his infatuation, Christine Calton, a cover girl, through a sequence of Brisbane sub-cultures. Lee moves the story adroitly and with appropriate implausibility, through communities of hippies, punks, and butch feminists, catching the characteristic accents and extravagances sharply. His bold insistence on the local tone is the opposite of Carey’s troubling elusiveness about time and place, and in fact Lee is a social satirist of some penetration. There is one particularly telling scene set in a ‘sexual roles workshop’, and an evocative satirical excursion to a Queensland outback town in which fifties’ nostalgia is combined with contemporary observation.

The double entendre of the title more or less sums up the novel’s interests. Tom wants to scour himself of the inessential, but he never does; and he wonders if he equates glamour with love: he does, he does. Still, Tom and his creator are capable of brief episodes of tender and even lyrical insight where sex and love do get sorted out, moments quickly covered over by the up-beat style of the narrative and its excesses. Lee mocks Tom from time to time to remind us (unnecessarily) of the fictionality of his fiction. There is a good cast of minor characters, each one more or less emblematic of a particular anti-bourgeois way of life, although the ocker friend Mick and the glamour-puss Christine finally emerge with some depth of characterisation. Lee’s world is a brightly entertaining one and his enjoyment of it is infectious, even if its subliminal premise is that anyone over forty is geriatric and that history is a recent development.

Whoever saw this book through the press at University of Queensland Press should be given a spell in the despatch department. The text is sprinkled with misprints, oddities of punctuation, and a confusion between the grammatical functions of who’s and whose; a famous Wordsworth line is misquoted, and there’s an amusing reference to ‘Charlie’s Angles’ [sic]. Poor Tom, poor Gerard Lee: they deserve better treatment.

How good to receive Gwen Harwood’s latest book of poems, The Lion’s Bride! Though Harwood seems to be continually active making words for music for Australian composers, a five to seven year interval lies between the appearance of each volume of poems –·here I include the 1975 Selected Poems because it gave us twenty-seven New Poems, including many that caught the imagination of readers and are already well-known: ‘The Blue Pagoda’, ‘At Mornington’, ‘Father and Child’. Selected Poems also included the tragic sonnet ‘Oyster Cove’, which, though we could not know, anticipated courageous series in The Lion’s Bride which mourns and confronts the guilt bequeathed by the black Tasmanian dead.

Aviation was a myth still in the making to my generation of Australian children. We cricked our necks watching a patch of sky for Amy Johnson’s arrival and, indeed, whenever an aeroplane engine was heard aloft, as if the watching itself was a necessary act of will, or prayer, to ensure the safety of those magnificent men and women whose photographs showed them always ear-muffed, be-goggled and leather-jacketed, smiling and jauntily waving thumbs up to us their earthbound worshippers.

People tell you one week that they liked Gallipoli, but the next they’re not so sure. Gone are the days of intuitive gut felt reaction – everyone wants to make sure their judgements are intellectually sound. They read every ‘expert’ on the subject and come back with another opinion. Reading the script gives you another variation. The skeleton is there, warts and all.

It is said that Penguin published this version of Gallipoli, which includes introductions by Peter Weir and Bill Gammage, plus two chapters from Bill Gammage’s book The Broken Years, and David Williamson’s script, because they were unhappy with Angus & Robertson’s novelisation of the film. Now it seems the time is ripe for another publication – Peter Weir and David Williamson in answer to their critics, fair and foul.

‘“No good dad,” he used to remark hopelessly, “people’ll say that you were dragged up.”’ In this way, Furphy records his son’s response to Such is Life. Furphy, in his own review of his own novel expressed a different view. ‘There is interest, if not relevancy in every sentence ... beyond all other Australian writers. Tom Collins is a master of idiom ... Originality is a characteristic of Such is Life ...’ However much he had his tongue in his cheek, Dad was of course right, as a rereading of the novel in John Barnes’s Portable Furphy will prove. The novel is ‘a classic’ as Stephens recognised, even if he did throw in his each-way bet of, ‘or a semi-classic’. Barnes has included all of Such is Life (in a photo facsimile of the original edition, which does make one long for larger type and more spacious layout, but makes possible an interesting collection of Furphy’s other writings in a comparatively small volume).

If James Joyce had ever visited Australia it is unlikely that he would have come up with anything like D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo. For one thing, as with most Irishmen, his interest in landscape was negligible; for another, his sense of play and his myopia would not have allowed him to romanticise the great Australian bush, much less the suburban sprawl. He might have felt somewhat at ease in the ‘Loo or the Rocks area, in Gertrude Street, Fitzroy or Little Dorritt Street in Carlton, or perhaps by the Yarra at Burnley. But why fantasise? The man who had to scrounge and borrow to pay his fare from Dublin to Trieste, who lived most of his life in extreme poverty and on handouts from friends, could not have afforded the passage to Australia, even had he wished. (He did, however, once apply for a job with the South African civil service.) Of his three major (and dozens of minor) money-making schemes – busking at the seaside resorts of England, establishing the first cinema in Dublin, and securing the Donegal Tweed licence for Trieste – only the latter came to reality and, to his surprise, few of the denizens of that polyglot city rushed to bedeck themselves in Irish tweed. Joyce, it appears, was not much of a traveller, a businessman, or an economic genius.

Yet Joyce did come to Australia, and in a form different from his appearance elsewhere in the Western cultural world. He came here, of course, in one of the forms he playfully chose – as instigator of scholarly theses on his works, and hence as a serious progenitor of many fine academic careers. But his most obvious showing was in a form which he himself had deliberately discarded as part of his juvenilia – that of Stephen Hero.

Joyce’s rejection of this his earliest alter ego in favour of Stephen Dedalus indicates the quantum leap in his work from writer to artist. Stephen Hero (or that part of him which remains in the incomplete manuscript left to us) is, as the name suggests, the romantic ­martyr-hero. He is a loosely veiled adolescent Joyce, serious, pompous, self-important. His crises – those with his religion, his family, and his nation – are worried through with intensity of rhetoric and a pretence at high drama. His self-regarding concentration is almost priapic, and his martyr-hero stance is narcissistic in the worst traditions of romanticism.

Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the transitional alter ego between Stephen Hero and the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses. He is the young man, the learner, much more like the brash, gormless Icarus than the crafty, sagacious Dedalus. But he is the artist as a young man, whittled and shaped into being by Joyce the author, who portrays him with irony and gentle, loving humour.

Stephen Dedalus entered Australia mainly through university syllabi, and his entrance coincided with the great influx of Irish-Catholic youth into the Universities in the 1950s and early 1960s. For example, for various socio-political reasons, the major topic of interest to students at Melbourne University during this period was religion. Lunchtime debates on The Existence of God could draw between 500 and 600 participants, and the Catholic intellectuals of the time, Vincent Buckley, Max Charlesworth, Bill Guinnane, Paul Simpson, Jim Griffin, Peter Wertheim, John Ryan etc., were intent on showing the conservative Catholic establishment, as well as the secular institutions, that religion could be the Benzedrine of the masses.

It is not surprising then that Stephen Dedalus should have become something of a prototype artist-hero to many of the younger generation of Catholic students. After all, he was sensitive, serious, intellectual, brilliant, and he fought against the complex web of Catholic upbringing, family, and nationalism to win artistic freedom and independence. Joyce’s novel portrays him standing up bravely against the brutal and unfair punishment meted out on him by his teachers, suffering and tormented by the brilliant rhetoric of the sermon on hell and tearing himself free from the belief system into which he was born. To many young Catholics brought up in the close-knit web of Catholic school, parish and family social life, and DLP politics, the university represented a kind of religious, sexual, and intellectual freedom that was difficult to combat. Protective groups, such as the Newman society, attempted valiantly to demonstrate that students could maintain and develop their faith within the fierce secular atmosphere, but that most famous and widespread of Irish institutions, ‘the Split’, soon fragmented the protective group spirit, and by the mid to late 1960s the fervour once reserved for religious debate had shifted to the political sphere. About the same time, the ‘Catholic upbringing’ novels started to appear, and were warmly welcomed by the Australian reading public, since they confirmed several strongly held prejudices: that Catholic schools were brutal and insensitive; that Catholic attitudes to sex were distorted and unnatural and that to free oneself from the bonds of Catholicism was a remarkable and heroic feat achieved only by individuals of the Ubermensch variety.

In Stephen Hero, the young Joyce delivers his recantation of faith in the following conversation with Cranly.

- Then you do not believe any longer?

- I cannot believe.

- But you could at one time.

- I cannot now.

- You could if you wanted to.

- Well, I don’t want to.

… I am a product of Catholicism. I was sold to Rome before my birth. Now I have broken my slavery but I cannot in a moment destroy every feeling in my nature. That takes time. However, if it were a case of needs must – for my life, for instance – I would commit any enormity with the Host

… If I mum it is an act of submission, a public act of submission to the Church. I will not submit to the Church.

- You could be a rebel in spirit.

- That cannot be done by anyone who is sensitive.

Cranly here acts as a concerned friend seeking devious ways whereby Stephen can hold his views, but not cut himself off dramatically from friends, Church, and family. Stephen resists these blandishments with a stem display of heroic will, sensitivity, and honesty. The situation is serious and earnest.

In Portrait of an Artist, the discussion between Stephen Dedalus and Cranly is long and wide-ranging. Cranly acts as an older, tougher and wiser friend, and his comments on Stephen’s remarks are amicable but consistently mocking.

(Cranly) What are our ideas and ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why that bloody bleating goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. Every jackass going down the roads thinks he has ideas.

Stephen, who had been listening to the unspoken speech behind the words, said with assumed carelessness:

Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.

- Pascal was a pig, said Cranly.

- Aloysius Gonzaga, I think, was of the same mind, Stephen said. And he was another pig then, said Cranly.

The church calls him a saint, Stephen objected.

- I don’t care a flaming damn what anybody calls him, Cranly said rudely and flatly. I call him a pig.

Joyce’s use of Cranly, the intelligent, mature, honest friend able to mock, argue, cut down to size, is a masterpiece of invention in his portrait of Stephen. Cranly’s presence helps us place Stephen and his youth in the context of irony and humour, whilst not allowing us to condemn him utterly as immature and pompous. In Stephen Hero, the bantering and the chiack of Cranly are missing. Similarly such contextual means of distancing ‘the hero’ are absent from our Australian novels of Catholic upbringing. When humour is attempted in the general context of the novel such as in Barry Oakley’s A Wild Ass of a Man, it is singularly lacking in those actions which deal with the crisis of faith or the influence of the Catholic Church. What we have is a kind of savage bitterness and a sense of heroic achievement in the struggle to cast off the evil wrappings of a distorting belief system.

James Joyce did visit Australia and made a kind of permanent home here. But he did so in a form which he himself saw as immature, romantic and essentially silly and humourless. That form is the form of Stephen Hero – a young man who wanted to be and was trying hard to be an artist, but who remains for all time just a young man, trying to be an ex-Catholic.

Scarcely a week passes without reference in the media to Aboriginal land rights. The tone of the reporting varies from the outraged indignation of those who see their rights to exploit and control land being curtailed, through eloquent pleas for simple justice, to forceful demands for the return of land which was illegally acquired. Comment is not confined to Australia: the rights of indigenous peoples are matters for comment in international forums such as the United Nations and the World Council for Indigenous Peoples. Yet despite this coverage ignorance, prejudice and paternalism abound. For this reason, a comprehensive volume on land rights Australia-wide is welcome.

Aboriginal Land Rights, a handbook, edited by Nicholas Peterson, will no doubt become a standard text for those seeking an understanding of this complex phenomenon and while the volume contains a splendid array of factual material, the blandness of the editorial pen has removed one critically important dimension from the volume: Aboriginal perceptions. Their distress at loss of land, their anger at the tardiness of restitution and their ambivalence about the white experts who plead their cause and cases are absent. However, at the May 1980 AIAS biennial conference, the occasion for which the papers in the handbook were prepared, this was not the case.

When I was a small boy in Hobart, my mates and I would often go down to the Tasmanian Museum after school; and one of the exhibits that interested us most was what we called ‘the human skeleton’. It stood in a glass case on the stairs, and it was only when we were older that we took in the fact that these were the remains of ‘Queen’ Trucanini, last of the Tasmanian Aborigines. There was no general notion abroad then that there was anything wrong with exhibiting these bones; but I remember a vague sense of unease – of being in the presence of something shameful. Such a sense exists in all of us; but there is no god so powerful as science in persuading men to suppress it.

When the ABC asked me to adapt Roger McDonald’s novel 1915 into a major seven-part serial, I declined. Ray Alchin, producer and head of the ABC’s film studio in Sydney, looked at me with disbelief and asked me to read it again. So I read it again, twice, and thanked him for having the good sense to see its possibilities, and gratefully accepted. My first reaction was totally wrong. I saw it as an artistic piece of work without the dramatic highlights to sustain it through seven hours of television. On the second – and third – reading, I found nuances of drama I had totally missed in the first cursory reading. Each time I picked up the book I found, sometimes within a sentence, depths and complexities in the characters that expanded into major scenes.

The first major decision was how to narrate the story, whether to jump forward and backward in time, as Roger McDonald had done in the novel, and indeed had suggested in an outline he had prepared for a television adaptation, or whether to make the story progress consecutively. I decided that although the former technique had attractions, it really wouldn’t be acceptable to an audience over six or seven weeks. In Television, unlike the theatre or films, the audience are not captive. They have alternatives, if what they see does not hold them with an increased feeling of expectation. They do not like to be confused. In between each weekly episode they see other programs. They cannot be expected to remember a show in such detail that they know precisely where we are in a complex structure that jumps time and events. In all television shows there is what a friend of mine once called the shit point. It is when this mass audience in their various armchairs say ‘O shit’, and get up and change channels.

The paths of James Macarthur and Philip Gidley King crossed in 1801 when Macarthur was a very small boy. King, then governor of New South Wales, sent Macarthur’s father, John, to England for trial for illicit duelling, fearing that Macarthur Senior had too many allies in the colony to secure a conviction there. Young James Macarthur was six by the time his father returned, far from the chastened man King had hoped. In fact, he brought with him instructions that he was to be granted additional land, making his holdings the most substantial in the colony. It was not exactly the victory that King had envisaged (or that his biographers seem to think he won.)

Later King’s son, Phillip Parker King, who was more of an age with James Macarthur, settled in New South Wales and the two found some common cause as landowners. Thereafter however the Kings’s main claim to greatness was their robust reproductiveness, and hundreds of descendants will form the initial readership for this basically commemorative life of the founder of the family.

It seems that going to the theatre has always been a popular activity with Australians. Popular theatre during the period covered by this book (1834–1914) staged a remarkable variety of Australian plays: operettas, melodramas, burlesques, sensation plays, and extravaganzas. On Our Selection, the first play to be called ‘Australian through and through’, opened to an audience of more than a thousand and achieved tremendous popularity.

What an absolute wealth of detail this volume contains! There are colour and black and white photographs of every ballet personality to dance in Australia since the war and a comprehensive index for both performers and works. No dancer or performance of note is left out and, assuming all these facts to be correct, it could be used as an encyclopaedia of ballet in Australia.

For those who think that opera in Australia only began to get off the ground this book will come as something of a shock. There was a time, over a hundred years ago, when enthusiastic audiences drawn from across the social spectrum supported ‘regular seasons of the world’s best musical theatre’ by a resident, commercial opera company which played in all the major capital cities. W.S. Lyster’s Opera Company which flourished for twenty years was, in all but name, Australia’s first national opera company. In its first seven years forty-two major operas were included in its repertoire. All this at a time when Australia’s population was a mere fraction of what it is today and without the benefit of government subsidy or private sponsorship. Strange, isn’t it?

Cricket is a remarkably fickle game. As Greg Chappell went about season 1981–82 collecting ducks as successfully as any Balinese farmer, Ray Robinson might well have rued his final line on one of Australia’s most-ever favoured batsmen: ‘At thirty-two he had achieved the kind of fame that needs no Academy Award of a foot-high golden statuette.’

The dilemmas of pre-final career assessment aside, this is a most welcome edition of the book first published in 1975. It is a collection of sketches to turn cricket players into meaningful people, something not readily available in Australian cricket writing, the late Jack Fingleton apart.

Relationships is a worthy book, scattered with sensible observations and reassuring comments, but locating them is like chewing through sawdust to find sultanas.

Terry Collings has splendid credentials. Clinical Director of the Marriage Guidance Council of NSW for the past seven years, he has taught family counselling to both professional and lay groups, and lectured in Britain and the US. His phone-in session, ‘City Extra’, is one of the ABC’s most popular programmes. He would undoubtedly be invaluable in a face-to-face or even a phone-to-phone encounter, but he has failed to adapt his experience and skills to print.

Literary theory is in for an exciting time in Australia. While the Leavisites in the older English departments were wondering what happened to the British ‘Great Tradition’, literary studies went General and Comparative in the 1960s, establishing a fertile context for the development of genuine theoretical developments such as those brought about by the encounter with structuralism, phenomenology and Marxism.

The debates continue to be initiated overseas: structuralism (Barthes, Culler) is on the way out and phenomenological criticism (Iser, Fish) is ascendant, but with a strong challenge from Marxist fronts (Eagleton, Macherey).

Here is all you ever wanted to know about Chinese theatre and didn’t know whom to ask! Who better anywhere to ask than Professor Colin Mackerras? A distinguished sinologist, Chairman of the School of Modem Asian Studies at Griffith University, he speaks Chinese fluently, taught English in Shanghai from 1964–66, and has visited China regularly since then totting up a remarkable miscellany of visits – to theatres, academies, conservatoria, cinemas, commune, and factory performances and talks with dramatists, critics, composers and ‘the masses’.

Cat Tracks was originally intended as a novel for young people. It has, however, attracted a wider audience, partly because of its well-constructed story and partly because of its excellent presentation of an important conservation problem.