ABR is now online

This month we launch our online edition. ABR OE, which complements but in no way replaces the print version, is probably the most important innovation at ABR since its revival in 1978. With this additional resource, ABR is well placed to maximise its potential and reach those readers and institutions that prefer electronic forms.

Much work has gone into ensuring that the online edition is versatile and user-friendly. Further modifications will occur in coming months to enhance its appeal and functionality.

Subscribing to ABR OE is quick and straightforward. To subscribe or to purchase access to the current issue alone go straight to our website. All subscriptions should be completed online, unless you are adding ABR OE to your current print subscription ($20 per year), in which case you should call us on (03) 9429 6700.

ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

Due to the generosity of one of our Patrons, Mr Ian Dickson, we are able to increase the prize money for our short story prize, now renamed after one of Australia’s finest writers. Total prize money for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is $8000 – with a first prize of $5000. Short story writers will join us in thanking Mr Dickson for his magnificent support.

Peter Porter Poetry Prize

For the first time, two poets have shared our Poetry Prize. The judges – Morag Fraser and Peter Rose – couldn’t separate Judith Bishop (‘Openings’) and Tony Lintermans (‘Self-portrait at Sixty’). Each poet receives $2000. Almost five hundred poems were entered this year, and all five shortlisted works appeared in our March issue.

Judith Bishop – who becomes the first person to win ABR’s Poetry Prize twice – told Advances: ‘To win a prize dedicated to the memory of a poet of Peter Porter’s calibre, range, and emotional depth is deeply humbling.’

Tony Lintermans likewise reflected on Peter Porter’s legacy, and humanity: ‘What a joy to share the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. The only time I met Peter Porter, at an Adelaide Festival years ago, he was typically generous and thoughtful in his comments. I think of this poem as a small and sadly belated answer to his kindness.’

Vale Hazel Rowley

ABR was shocked to learn in late February of Hazel Rowley’s grievous and unexpected illness. Within days she was dead, aged fifty-nine. Dr Rowley, who lived in New York City, was due in Australia to talk about her new book, Franklin & Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage (MUP). When she wrote for Open Page in February , this stylish, forthright writer and thinker was already planning her next book. Now there is talk of a memorial lecture or scholarship to honour her life and work. Meanwhile, Lucy Sussex reflects on Hazel Rowley’s stellar achievements in this issue.

Patrick White

Australia’s most celebrated writer may be ‘scandalously’ unread abroad – and little read in his own country – but he is never far from the news. This interest will surely mount as we approach his centenary in 2012. One highlight will be the publication of The Hanging Garden, begun and put aside in 1981. David Marr has described this 25,000-word story as ‘a masterpiece in the making’.

In our cover story, Professor Charles Lock of the University of Copenhagen derides the ‘almost comically restricted way’ White’s local critical custodians seek to measure and justify his works ‘only by Australian standards and terms of comparison’, and laments the fact that this inimitable modernist is virtually unread outside Australia.

Chong’s cover portrait of Patrick White is available in a limited edition. Interest in this portrait is particularly high, so don’t delay if you wish to acquire a copy. Call us on (03) 9429 6700 or order your print online.

Perth and Adelaide

Early last month, Advances was in Perth for the Writers’ Festival. The University of Western Australia must be one of the finest venues for a literary festival. Laura Kroetsch, the new Executive Producer of Adelaide Writers’ Week, was there too. Ms Kroetsch joins Adelaide after many years as Program Manager of Wellington’s highly regarded literary festival. Change is in the air at Adelaide, which is very welcome. Writers’ Week will now be an annual affair. The site of Writers’ Week (all but sacred to many) remains unchanged, but Ms Kroetsch and her colleagues are planning many improvements to the venue and the program. These will broaden the festival’s appeal, lessen crowd congestion, and improve audibility and sightlines.

Signed books by David Malouf

Ten new print subscribers in April will receive a signed copy of The Happy Life (Quarterly Essay 41), written by David Malouf, with thanks to Black Inc.. We have two giveaways for other new and renewing subscribers: fifty double passes to the film Brighton Rock, which Jake Wilson reviews in this issue (courtesy of Madman); and ten copies of the film tie-in edition of Graham Greene’s novel (courtesy of Random House). Call us now to subscribe: (03) 9429 6700.

CONTENTS: APRIL 2011

Behind the screen

Dear Editor,

Questions of objectivity and subjectivity are a burden borne equally by anthologist and reviewer, so it was with some surprise that I read Chris Flynn’s oddly unsympathetic and bathetic review of two recent collections in ABR (February 2011). Flynn seems under the common misapprehension that two books reviewed in the one piece need to be presented in opposition to one another: a literary horse race where one must necessarily be taken behind a screen and shot at proceedings’ end.

The gist of the review, for those who wisely skimmed past in search of nuanced criticism, was that the Black Inc. collection Best Australian Stories 2010, edited by Cate Kennedy, was humourless and unsuccessful. In contrast, Scribe’s New Australian Stories 2, edited by Aviva Tuffield, was a triumph. I have read both collections and found much to recommend, and a little that left me cold. Such is the way of anthologies.

Unlike Flynn, I found Michael McGirr’s story in the Black Inc. collection extremely humorous, Anna Krien’s contribution deftly funny, A.S. Patric’s wryly witty. That’s just me. Arguing about comedy is even more futile an undertaking than arguing about literary merit, but surely that’s the point. The headmasterish tone adopted by Flynn to scold the Black Inc. collection for being merely made up of Kennedy’s ‘favourites’ is puzzling, to adopt one of his terms. In contrast would he have us believe that the Scribe collection – a ‘diverse, hugely enjoyable compendium’ – is not composed of Tuffield’s favourites?

It would be unkind and, one hopes, unfair to question Flynn’s motivation for his strident advocacy of the latter collection. Far be it for this reader to question whether propriety might demand moderation or self-reflection in the reviewer’s enthusiasm for a story by a close personal friend (whose work appears on the following page of the same issue). Only the self-righteous and easily offended would question whether mention might have been made of Tuffield’s former role as Deputy Editor of ABR. And it would be utterly scurrilous to shine a light on Flynn’s own writerly aspirations and publication hopes. A confession in the interests of transparency; I have submitted, unsuccessfully, stories to both publishers. I have no horse in this race. Can Flynn (and ABR) vouchsafe the same?

But the above is beside the point. The review was mean-spirited, pompous, and arrogant.

Any suggestion that ABR would engineer a laudatory review of a publication by one of its former employees (or by anyone, for that matter) – or that any of its contributors would be so foolish as to succumb to such inappropriate pressure – belongs in the Faber Book of Fantasy. Ed.

Chris Flynn replies:

That two independent Australian publishing houses should choose to release their annual short fiction compendia simultaneously invites an obvious critical comparison. In my ignorance,

I had no idea until quite recently that Aviva Tuffield was a former employee of ABR – not that it would have made an iota of difference. I treat all reviewing assignments with the same critical dispassion and, as all critics should, declined to review a dozen books last year due to the fact that I knew their authors (albeit often fleetingly).

Mr McLeish’s insights into the personal life of this reviewer are most illuminating (indeed, some might say disturbing), but whilst his support for my future prospects is cheering, it is sadly misplaced. I do not have a manuscript under consideration by either of these splendid publishing institutions, in the main due to the fact I would have to write one first.

Glib dismissal

Dear Editor,

Timothy Roberts’s review of Christopher Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster (March 2011) is both curiously belated (the book was published twenty months ago) and wrongly dismissive.

The reviewer fails to even mention Booker’s central thesis: that climate change orthodoxy has for a decade caused UK and European governments to burden their economies with high future electricity prices by putting total faith in wind power and failing to renew ageing base-load coal and nuclear capacity. By doing so in face of declining North Sea gas production, they have placed Europe’s energy future at the mercy of the thugs that control Russian and North African gas supplies, and of the French nuclear industry, which alone can backstop unreliable wind generation.

This is the public policy disaster that Booker lays bare. Nearly two years after his book was published, European governments of both the left and right are now confronting the realities he predicted. They are scrapping unsustainable subsidies for wind and solar power, and scrambling to build or refurbish nuclear power plants. Many early champions of wind power – such as Denmark – have completely abandoned their reliance on wind because of cost and unreliability.

Booker’s work also dissects the ideological politics behind the creation and operation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and questions its methodologies. Many of Booker’s concerns were vindicated over the past year by revelations of unscientifically based IPCC claims about the rate of change in Himalayan glaciers and Amazon forests, not to mention the questionable academic integrity revealed by the emails emanating from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. You don’t have to be a climate sceptic to view these revelations with concern. Six months before the Copenhagen conference débâcle, Booker also predicted precisely what would happen at the conference and why.

Booker’s thesis cannot, therefore, be glibly dismissed as Mr Roberts seeks to do, much less rebutted merely by invoking the authority of Tim Flannery, whose infallibility has been more than a little dampened by the recent rains in eastern Australia, which Dr Flannery has so consistently condemned to perpetual drought.

As Australia now deliberates on how a carbon tax should reshape our energy future, this book has much to contribute to our public policy debate.

Graham Bradley, Sydney, NSW

Timothy Roberts replies:

Graham Bradley overlooks the central contradiction in Booker’s work: i.e. that man-made climate change isn’t happening, and that renewables can’t fix it. While there are legitimate concerns to be raised about renewable capacity, the argument that current technologies are inadequate for our needs proves nothing about anthropogenic climate change’s existence.

Other issues abound. ‘Amazongate’ was concocted by the Sunday Times, which published a complete retraction on 20 June 2010. Another of Bradley’s attacks on the IPCC, based on the wilfully misinterpreted ‘Climategate’ emails, is a beat-up: much was made by sceptics of Phil Jones’s offhand reference to a scientific technique as a ‘trick’, among other cloak-and-dagger ‘revelations’. ‘Glaciergate’ – one error among thousands of pages – was comprehensively corrected; other organisations would kill for that level of accuracy. So no, ‘you don’t have to be a climate sceptic to view these revelations with concern’. But it helps.

Bradley’s snarky attack on Flannery is similarly misguided. While Flannery shouldn’t have been making predictions in the first place, this does not detract from his work in The Weather Makers. Bradley’s triumphant reference to the ‘recent rains in Australia’ merely retreads the ‘it’s raining outside, therefore climate change is bunk’ fallacy.

There is much work still to be done in ensuring that renewables can power the future, but we can’t get there by basing our science on the hearsay of hucksters. The limitations of current renewables provide yet another reason to plough resources into R&D – not a licence to stop trying altogether.

That Patrick White is thought of as an Australian writer is, though regrettable, undeniable. Two problems follow: the first being that he tends to be presented by his critical custodians in an almost comically restricted way, as though White’s works needed to be measured and justified only by Australian standards and terms of comparison. Here is an example from one of the essays in Remembering Patrick White, Lyn McCredden’s ‘Voss: Earthed and Transformative Sacredness’: ‘This essay argues ... that White’s establishing of the relationship of Laura and Voss is as an idiosyncratic invocation of mystical marriage’, at which point a footnote tells us that the ‘metaphor of mystical marriage’ is an ancient one, and refers us to some elementary sources such as The New Catholic Encyclopedia, while oddly omitting to mention St Francis, whose marriage to Lady Poverty is clearly a model, and a familiar one, before continuing the sentence: ‘and that the novel is most fully understood as a mystical and human meditation on possible forms of identity forged and embodied on this continent.’

In 1970, at the age of twenty-seven, Alan Frost joined the English Department of La Trobe University. His first love had been the study of poetry, for which he earned an MA at the University of Queensland. That led to a PhD at the University of Rochester, where he wrote on ‘James Cook and the Early Romantic Imagination’. A controversy then raging in Australian history fired Frost’s own romantic imagination, because of its links to Cook’s voyages.

‘A peculiar bloke, Jack; you never knew him. You couldn’t get close to him.’ Reg Pollard, who was one of the abler members of the Labor Caucus in the 1940s, confessed his puzzlement to Lloyd Ross as Curtin’s biographer gathered personal testimony.

Wirklich, ich lebe in finsteren Zeiten. 
(Truly, I live in dark times.)

When her mother uttered that line from Bertolt Brecht’s great poem ‘An die Nachgeborenen’, Juliana – the narrator of Elisabeth Holdsworth’s first novel – knew they were in for a hard time. Janna had returned to the Netherlands from Dachau carrying a cardboard suitcase that the Americans had given her. In it was packed the rage that exploded whenever life overwhelmed her. Janna was not only Juliana’s beautiful mother; she was also her deeply damaged antagonist.

Almost two decades ago, when The Shipping News (1993) transformed Annie Proulx into an unlikely literary superstar, one might have been forgiven for thinking she was a writer whose gift lay in quirky depictions of small-town life and in the fetishisation of antiquarian and folk detail.

Such an assumption would have been mistaken. Anyone looking for the outlines of Proulx’s subsequent output would do well to avoid the heartwarming details of Quoyle’s eventual redemption – or even the tangled family histories that bind the novel’s disparate threads together – and turn to the oddly jarring opening pages, in which Quoyle’s wife, the weirdly named Petal Bear, sells their children to a paedophile before being killed in a car accident while fleeing with her lover. While less abbreviated than the staccato delivery of misfortune that has subsequently become Proulx’s stock-in-trade, this sequence captures much that is central to her more recent work: its irritable bleakness, its almost perfunctory attitude to narrative, its unsettling shifts in register, its denuded moral landscapes.

Australians quite like the idea of freedom of speech, except in almost any situation you can think of. We hold that speaking freely is acceptable and commendable except when it is rude, upsetting, unpatriotic, in poor taste, or blocks the traffic.

In the days when every Australian law student studied legal history, one of the famous cases we were taught was about James Somerset. Taken from Africa, probably in his early teens, Somerset, in 1749, was by the laws of Virginia made a chattel of his master, Charles Steuart. Twenty years later, Steuart took Somerset to England, where he continued to serve as a slave for two years until, in October 1771, he fled his bondage. Steuart had Somerset seized and put on board a ship bound for Jamaica, there to be sold in the slave markets. Abolitionists rushed to the King’s Bench in London, where they obtained a writ of habeas corpus. This required the ship’s captain to bring Somerset to court with a justification for his detention. Fortunately, the presiding judge was Lord Mansfield, who declared that slavery did not exist in England. He uttered the famous order: ‘Let the black go free.’ The law of England was too pure and no slave could live in it. Habeas corpus was the remedy.

Why do you write?

I feel deeply alive when I am being creative, despite the frustrations. I love the challenge of trying to find the right words and turning language into song.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Some of my dream landscapes have been both the most exquisitely beautiful and the most terrifying places I have ever seen. But mostly my dreams are common anxiety ones about snakes and being naked in public.

‘Arab France’ will immediately suggest to some readers debates about the wearing of Muslim headscarves in public schools and, more generally, about the place of North African migrants in contemporary French life, as well as the riots that erupted in 2005 in suburbs with substantial Arabic populations. To others, it may evoke memories of trips to Paris, of sipping mint tea at the elegant mosque near the Jardin des Plantes, visiting an exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe, or strolling through the busy and dépaysant Barbès-Rochechouart neighbourhood. For still others, Arab France may bring to mind the history of French colonialism in the Maghreb and the Middle East, in particular, the troubled history of Algérie Française, and the bloody war that brought to an end the French imperium in North Africa in 1962.

Plagiarism, like death, taxes, and hangovers, will always be with us. Tackling the problem historically, anthropologist Susan Blum demonstrates how this scourge has traditionally infested selective entry tests like fleas on rats. Her fascinating exposé of the ingenious techniques used to conceal plagiarism during the imperial Chinese court’s brain-bending entrance exams, for example, demonstrates that nothing has changed. Yet while Blum’s historical perspective prevents her from obsessively blaming ‘today’s youth’, she nevertheless acknowledges plagiarism’s increasing prevalence.

At Rajkote

from Devadatta’s poems

Smalltown Études

The language of wallpaper is entrancing: a velvet flock, a Réveillon arabesque, a Dufour panoramic. After ten years’ research and writing, Lyn Hughes’s fourth novel, Flock, is rich with the texture and imagery of wallpaper.

Jane Sullivan’s novel, which was runner-up in the 2010 CAL Scribe Fiction Prize for a novel by a writer over thirty-five years of age, blends the powerful theme of dogged maternal love with the extraordinary world of P.T. Barnum’s freak shows.

With its witty cover, showing an overturned pram, Blue Skies places itself in the era of The Female Eunuch (1971) and adds a Gothic horror touch. Written by expatriate Australian author Helen Hodgman, and published to critical acclaim and literary awards in London in 1976, Blue Skies has been rediscovered by Text Publishing’s enterprising sleuths. As with the similarly reclaimed novels of Madeleine St John, The Women in Black and The Essence of the Thing, this is a good find.

In the afterword to The Ghost of Waterloo, Robin Adair reveals what attracts him to writing historical fiction: ‘This has been a work of what I call “friction” – facts and real people rubbing along with plausible “what-ifs”.’ The term is apt. Adair does not see historical fiction as a holistic combination of research and creativity, but as a mode in which the imagination competes with the real facts. Any melding of the two is the rubbing together of opposed elements. The result is chafing. The impressive volume of research that Adair has poured into the novel is not integrated into its dramatic structure, because the farcical aspects of the plot and the colourful characters are frequently crushed by the weight of the real, and vice versa.

Writing in the Guardian late last year, Philip Pullman said this of what he regards as the dominant style in contemporary fiction: ‘What I dislike about the present-tense narrative is its limited range of expressiveness. I feel claustrophobic, always pressed up against the immediate.’ This description highlights both the virtues and the flaws in Jennifer Mills’s second novel, Gone. Frequently powerful, and highly attuned to both landscape and psychology, the method by which it conjures these forces – a relentless use of the present tense, with all its sweaty immediacy and driven focus – is also the same method that occasionally exhausts the reader. Mills has created a vivid yet punishing book.

The final offering in Patrick Holland’s first collection of short stories is also its best. In ‘The Source of the Silence’, a motor mechanic casts his mind back fifteen years; he is remembering ‘a sister who was fourteen then and has never grown older’, whose thoughts he could hear before she spoke them. The story is an account of a severed bond so enduring that it haunts the survivor’s present and, as indicated in the story’s moving ending, probably his future. Juxtaposing cedar-lined creek with barbed wire fence, Holland’s landscape writing beautifully evokes the light and shade of rural Mary Smokes – also the setting of his second novel, The Mary Smokes Boys (2010).

Having been ‘completely screwed over by men’, Libby Cutmore is on a self-imposed and inevitably short-lived ‘man-fast’. Although she loves her job at the (fictional) National Aboriginal Gallery in Canberra, memories of New York adventures with her friend Lauren (Manhattan Dreaming, 2010), and Libby’s own sense of exclusion now that her two closest friends (‘tiddas’) are in relationships, make Libby crave her own ‘international adventure’. Then she has a ‘Deadly exciting, cultural, challenging, even sexy’ idea: find a way to work at the Musée du Quai Branly, in Paris.

Prime Cut sounds like the title of a glossy Hollywood thriller. Fortunately, Alan Carter’s début novel is a gritty and engrossing look at crime and racism in a small Western Australian town. Cato Kwong is a Chinese-Australian detective who has been working in the lowly ‘Stock Squad’ since a disastrous arrest some years before. In the novel’s opening pages, Kwong is called to help investigate a brutal murder. He discovers a link between this killing and a similar crime in Britain in the early 1970s. Kwong also uncovers a murky underworld of drug trafficking and exploitative work practices.

To write about a biographer is to be aware of a presence, psychologically if not spectrally, sitting on your shoulder. This presence is not an angel, more like an imp, the minor demon that arouses bad deeds, or thoughts. In writing about a biographer we can feel not angelic inspiration, but the imp of doubt, saying: This is not good enough, I could do better.

It is perhaps not surprising that historians, as they edge towards retirement, should consider the possibility of reviewing their own life history. So, for example, among the generation of postwar historians, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Bernard Smith added powerful stories to our stock of Australian childhoods, while W.K. Hancock and Manning Clark, managing two volumes apiece, focused more on the life trajectory and career path. Now, at a time when there appears to be a growing appetite for biography and memoir, one senses that another generation of historians might be sizing up the options.

Australia’s feisty first female High Court judge

John Bryson

From Moree to Mabo: The Mary Gaudron Story
by Pamela Burton
UWA Publishing, $49.95 pb, 511 pp, 9781742580982

H.V. Evatt, on the hustings during an election campaign, was asked by an eight-year-old girl, ‘What is the Constitution?’ and later mailed her a copy. The girl was Mary Gaudron, whose path to the High Court was set from that moment.

Directed by John Boulting in 1947, the original film version of Graham Greene’s thriller Brighton Rock is as honourable an adaptation as anyone could want. The plot may be simplified, but the essentials are all there (Greene himself co-wrote the script), and so is the cheery, grimy atmosphere of a mid-century British seaside resort, captured on location. There are two unforgettable performances, by Richard Attenborough as ‘Pinkie’, the psychopathic teenage gangster with a strangely pure belief in the reality of hell; and by Hermione Baddeley as Ida Arnold, the tart-with-a-heart who vows to bring Pinkie to justice.

In the last decade, several television shows have received acclaim by being likened to a great novel. The Wire has often been compared with Dickens, several critics have made a case for ER as a contemporary Middlemarch, and now Mad Men is being praised for its version of a Richard Yates protagonist. Its leading man, Don Draper, is a character straight out of Yates: a 1960s adman with reserves of mystique and despair.

Rock music does not usually accommodate the likes of Dave Graney. Few Australian performers have been as resilient, and few have presented as many ideas in song form. While his contemporaries – Nick Cave, Tex Perkins, Robert Forster, and the late Grant McLennan – have not strayed far from blueprints forged during the late 1970s, Graney’s music and writing have undergone striking reinvention over thirty years. Equally, few of Graney’s generation have met with such indifference from the Australian public, except for a year or so in the mid-1990s, when, ‘for a brief moment’, in Graney’s words, ‘too many people listened, as opposed to too few … walking in on a line I’d been stringing out for quite a while’.

The cookery sections of bookshops are crammed with bright new titles, but how necessary are they? Inevitably, they are repetitive – how many ways are there to boil an egg, make stock, prepare a vinaigrette? – and presentation is often privileged over content. In such a crowded market, awash with flashy covers, glossy photography, and populist titles acclaiming the latest celebrity chef, or niche cuisine, how can we sort out the cream from the whey? How can we be confident that books will edify or endure? Gratifyingly, some publishers are reprinting older works, providing a balance between the new and inventive, the tried and trusted.

If any book market is nearing saturation, it must be the Nietzsche one, yet new titles keep appearing. Julian Young’s biography, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, is unusual, given the author’s academic repute as a Nietzsche scholar. Young acutely surveys Nietzsche’s life, while offering erudite accounts of his philosophy. As Young observes in explaining Nietzsche’s own self-referential style, ‘biographies sweeten the hard-to-swallow pill of philosophy’, and this is also true of Young’s book. Moreover, while Young clearly loves Nietzsche, this book is not written in the sycophantic style that is common of the genre (Nietzsche’s philosophy is criticised in many places, as is Nietzsche himself). Nor is it unduly preoccupied with the salacious and controversial. Although such features will be part of any book on Nietzsche, given the appropriation of his work by the Nazis (courtesy of his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche), his anti-feminist misogyny, his brief flirtations with the idea of a ménage à trois with Paul Rée and Lou Salomé, and his tempestuous friendship with Richard Wagner and others, what emerges is an account of a man who, despite his undoubted talents, was also quite ordinary.

Address to the reader is one of the conventions of the modern essay form, going back to Montaigne, who includes a statement of address by way of an introduction to his collected writings. A question or series of questions refreshes the direct address along the way, accentuates the sense of voice, and vitalises the connection by supposing the reader as an interlocutor, someone whose responses may be silent, but are explicitly solicited. For the reader, this necessarily carries the risk of being co-opted into a pretence of dialogue: there is an assumed complicity in the line of thought, and on the principles guiding it.

The argument of Self Impression, if it has just one, is that literary modernism, despite T.S. Eliot’s decree that it should strive after objectivity and impersonality, was more or less continuously involved in experiments with forms of life writing: autobiography, biography, memoir, journals, letters, and diaries. But Max Saunders is not interested in the obvious – Paul Morel as a version of young Lawrence, Stephen Daedalus of young Joyce, and so on. ‘Fiction can be autobiographical in many different ways,’ he argues, and modernist fiction (in both prose and verse) ‘colonised’ the autobiographic, experimenting with ‘imaginary autobiographies’, or fictional works in autobiographical form (the ugly ‘autobiografiction’ of the subtitle). His key modernist texts are accordingly the great Künstlerromaneof the period, Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu(1913–27),James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(1916), Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)and (in verse) Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). These generic hybrids, Saunders shows, are arch-modernist in nothing so much as their playwith the formaldynamics of auto/biography, which tells us a great deal about the relations between selfhood, art, and modernity.

While spying in Scotland in 1706, Daniel Defoe wrote a letter to the queen’s secretary of state explaining his technique: ‘I Talk to Everybody in Their Own Way.’ In his energetic and instructive introduction to The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists, Adrian Poole takes Defoe’s declaration as a neat summation of the novelist’s method. It was following the success of Robinson Crusoe that the word ‘novelist’ was first recorded in the OED, heralding an art form whose great virtue has been its receptivity to all kinds of experience, its mimicry of all manner of voices: rich, poor, black, white, male, female.

In the early 1990s the cricket tour book, like the western movie, seemed dead and buried. The formulas played themselves out around 1970, though the genre had a strong structure which allowed for fitful new interpretations. Direct telecasts of Test cricket and video highlights of series appeared likely to kill the tour book. Who needed to read about it when, having witnessed the games ball by ball, judgement could be passed again with the aid of electronic recording equipment? Yet a Test series offered a strong structure on which a skilful author could make interesting variations.

To go on thinking of the Korean War as a ‘forgotten’ war in a ‘hermit’ country, as we too often do, ignores the many authoritative accounts of it. Cameron Forbes’s new book is the latest.

Forbes provides an emotional narrative of the war. A large part concerns the economic and social background, antecedents, character, and personalities of Australian soldiers and airmen who participated, and their behaviour on the battlefield. Initially these were the pilots of Australia’s 77^th squadron of piston-engined P51 Mustang fighters based at Iwakuni in southern Honshu – part of Australia’s occupation force in Japan. They were quickly thrown into the conflict in a ground attack role, driving themselves to fatigue and reckless action, sometimes even attacking their own side. They were reinforced in September 1950 by the men of the 3^rd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment, also part of the Japan occupation force. After five years of comparative indolence, the soldiers needed quick and rigorous training before joining the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and Middlesex Regiment on the peninsula, as part of the 27^th Commonwealth Brigade.

S.D. Gentill’s Chasing Odysseus provides a fresh perspective on Homer’s The Odyssey for young readers. It focuses on the adventures of Hero and her three brothers – Machaon, Lycon, and Cadmus – during the fall of Troy and on their subsequent pursuit of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, throughout his legendary voyages. The siblings are raised among the Herdsmen of Ida, who are allied with Troy before and during the siege. After the city falls, the Herdsmen are erroneously labelled as traitors. Only Odysseus knows the truth and can free them from blame; the siblings pursue the Greek hero to win the truth from him.

Gentill’s considered prose mimics the heightened tone of English translations of Homeric verse, which may discourage the targeted Young Adult readership, since it often, almost intentionally, erects a barrier between the reader and the characters or action. For readers of Young Adult fiction who can appreciate the complexity of Gentill’s style, who have at least a passing interest in The Odyssey, or who enjoy Tolkien’s prose, this won’t be a problem.

Gentill doesn’t shy away from the fantasy elements in her work. Though not as present as in the original material, the Greek pantheon is a force in Chasing Odysseus, and the magic Phaeacian vessel in which the young heroes travel is, by the end, almost a character herself.

Chasing Odysseus is at its best when it delves behind the curtain of the original Homeric poem. In allowing minor characters and monsters a voice, Gentill provides a contemporary, sometimes humorous, and not altogether flattering critique of Odysseus’s actions and motivations, as well as a poignant reminder that, in the ancient world, you didn’t have to be a nice person to be a hero; you just had to be the last man left holding a sword.

CONTENTS: APRIL 2011

Darkness, both literal and symbolic, pervades these two recent books. Darkwater, the first Young Adult title by established writer Georgia Blain (author of four novels, including Closed for Winter, 1998), and a début book, This is Shyness by Leanne Hall, trace the aftermath of events in which brightness gives way to ‘sudden black’ in the lives of teenage characters.

First books often suffer most in a Selected Poems as the poet who finally emerges from the possibilities explored in the poems of the first book retrospectively weeds out those poems that are not in what becomes the dominant mode. This certainly happens in the case of Dennis Haskell’s Acts of Defiance, which prunes his first book, Listening at Night (1984), down to a mere seven poems. So Acts of Defiance begins with formal, lengthy, elegiac pieces such as ‘Near Gwabegar’, which focus on an atmosphere of depression – economic and psychological – and long to hear, but fail to hear, the voices of the transcendent. ‘The Call’, in which the poet responds to his young son’s crying out in his sleep, is really, as its title suggests, a little allegory of vocation. Like many of the early poems it puzzles out the metaphysical issues of what ‘God’ is and why he is silent.

Poet and novelist Ali Alizadeh’s third book of poetry, Ashes in the Air, reclaims some themes from his earlier poetry collection, Eyes in Times of War (2006). Autobiographical sequences once again interweave with accounts of recent wars and oppression. Alizadeh also explores some conflicting oppositions: neutrality versus partisanship, faith versus scepticism, individualism versus community. Alizadeh travels to the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and China, and recalls his native Iran, but travel here is both actual and metaphysical. Ashes in the Air commences with ‘Marco Polo’, which hails the birth of his son, and closes with ‘Staph’, an elegy. Poet Louis Armand describes Alizadeh’s work as ‘a poetry ... of what it means for a language to speak truthfully, to witness or to fabricate’, and many poems further illustrate how language shapes and transforms identity. As with other Australian poets such as Ouyang Yu who write in their second language, sameness and difference are presiding concerns in Alizadeh’s work, even humorously so when the carnivorous poet marries a vegetarian. Critically alert to ideas of otherness and its adjoining preconceptions – ‘Speak English! / Say something, camel fucker!’ (‘Sky Burial’) – he questions what identity without language might mean.

Uneven realities

Nigel Pearn

The elasticity of fiction, the ‘what if’ – in other words, the genre’s very virtues and interests – are often the characteristics that alienate ‘sensible’ readers. To the literal-minded, literature can present as a self-defeating puzzle. All that pretence is exhausting, irrelevant at best, or, drawing a long line from the Ancient Greeks, morally bankrupt. ‘I don’t read fiction anymore,’ Everyman says (and most often it is a man): ‘thank goodness for non-fiction, for plain speech, for things as they truly are.’