Fiction

Miss Maude Silver, Miss Jane Marple, where are you, with your splendid and authoritative bosoms, your discreet inquiries, natural reticence, and cunning powers of deduction? Oh, a long way from these sisters in crime.

To an outside observer of the Australian literary and cultural scene, the Ern Malley hoax is one of those spin-offs in the Australian experience that keep on conjuring up Mark Twain’s famous dictum of the nature of the country’s history: ‘It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies ... 

This story is told from a number of points of view. One of them is that of Joy, a woman with impeccable light Green political credentials, a job in a suburban library in Canberra and a mother who seems to have a clearer idea of what Joy should be doing than Joy does herself. Joy’s partner, Geoff, takes a job at the Office of Planning in the Marshall Islands. His motives are good. He’d like to help. That’s his problem. He has walked into a culture where much happens but nobody ever seems to do anything. Jane Downing creates both this world and its visitors with a wry sense of humour. She notes that Geoff finds the move to a stress-free environment very stressful. He sets about drafting a plan for improving the local fishing industry. After a while, he discovers an almost identical plan, completed five years earlier. Nothing had been done about it.

If we are to believe Aristotle, or the Chicago neo-Aristotelians (R.S. Crane, Richard McKeown, et al.), or even bluff old Squire Henry Fielding, then plot is the mainstay of drama, as of the novel. This has often been held to be particularly so of detective fiction. On the other hand, Raymond Chandler was notoriously cavalier about the ‘what, who, and why’ of narrative causation, and Edmund Wilson famously asked, ‘Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’

It would seem that voice and character (Peter Corris’s Cliff Hardy, Gary Disher’s Detective Inspector Hal Challis, Shane Maloney’s Murray Whelan, MP) are as important as plot, if not on occasion more so. Milieu is crucial: think of Hardy’s Sydney, Peter Temple’s Melbourne, Carl Hiassen’s Florida, Elmore Leonard’s Detroit and Miami. Plot Rules, OK? Not! Voice is everything. Here’s quintessential Corris:

Readers who share Helen Nickas’s view that Antigone Kefala’s fiction forms ‘a continuous narrative which depicts and explores the various stages of an exilic journey’ may be pleased to find more instalments in her fourth book of fiction, Summer Visit. The first of the three novellas is an account of an unsatisfying marriage, told with a controlled detachment that makes its title, ‘Intimacy’, seem ironic. In contrast, the third, ‘Conversations with Mother’, contains a series of elegiac apostrophes of the deceased; the connections with Braila and other congruities with a figure familiar from previous writings again encourage an assumption of autobiography.

The tradition of supplementary fiction dates at least from the fifteenth century, when supplements to the works of Geoffrey Chaucer were generated by the perception that his texts were unfinished or that he had not imposed a sufficiently firm moral closure on them. Robert Henryson famously thought Chaucer hadn’t punished Criseyde enough for her betrayal of Troilus, and set out to remedy the omission in his own Testament of Cresseid. In a more recent example, Emma Tennant’s execrable Pemberly traces the tempestuous married life of Jane Austen’s Darcy and Elizabeth, though in the style of a Neighbours episode.

A novel by Janette Turner Hospital is an event. Although her new book comes with a disclaimer, suggesting that it should be read as a thriller, there will be high expectations. Even with its cumbersome title, for which the fact that it’s a quotation from Daniel Defoe doesn’t compensate, Due Preparations for the Plague claims attention. Thrillers suggest plot-driven entertainments. Some are relatively undemanding: the sort of thing sold in airport book-shops. This one is too unsettling to be entertainment, and, because its central event is the fate of passengers on a hi-jacked plane, it won’t be a big favourite as an airport novel.

‘It sometimes seems that our whole planet has swung into the fog belt of melodrama.’ The words are Graham Greene’s, but they could equally well come from Turner Hospital. She has always been drawn to that dangerous edge where the safety fence of civilisation fails. She writes exceptionally well about fear. Like Alfred Hitchcock, she sometimes uses such moments for reversals of expectation: sometimes the terror is self-created. In Due Preparations, such a moment comes when the central character, a young American woman who has survived all kinds of threats and physical ordeals, has a panic attack in a Manhattan cab when she sees the driver’s face in the rear vision mirror and reads his name: Ibram Siddiqi.

‘Now listen carefully. I want you to think of the two most beautiful things in the world. One each – and not just beautiful but most beautiful.’ Richard Yaxley examines the nature of relationships, family and grief in his first novel, The Rose Leopard. Father, writer, self-confessed ‘groin-driven’ lover, Vincent is the dreamer; Kaz his muse and the preserver of their family. After meeting at university, they have forged a powerful partnership against those who don’t understand their shared bond of a love for stories and words. In particular, Vincent rails against Kaz’s family, which disapproves of his apparent fecklessness, and curses his pretentious agent, Stu. His other pet hates include American sitcoms, crowds, the lack of news-papers on Christmas Day and being forced to listen to people. Kaz, by contrast, is an island of calm in a sea of neurosis, an organiser of shopping and schedules.

Hannah Arendt pronounced the Eichmann trial a ‘necessary failure’; it dramatised historical trauma but revealed, fundamentally, a narrative insufficiency. The gap between testimony and history, between jurisprudential protocols and the all-too-human and inhuman complexities of murder, left behind anxieties of incomprehension, reduction, and representational limitation.

John Scott began his publishing life as a poet of considerable distinction (albeit as John A. Scott, as the second edition of The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature will not let him forget) and then changed brumbies in midstream to publish pure prose. Between 1975 and 1990 Scott delivered eight volumes of poetry; since then (there is a slight overlap), he has released five ‘novels’ (pardon nomenclatural nerves), if we include the present Warra Warra.