Fiction

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’.

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.

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.

‘Somewhere’, Stephen says, ‘there had to be a combination of words that could slow down the world long enough for me to get a look inside, to prove that I existed.’

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.

Where women lead, men generally have the sense to follow. Eventually. Feminist fiction, lesbian fiction have developed ahead of gay fiction in Australia. This is one of the many ideas acknowledged or explored in Dennis Altman’s welcome addition to literature about homosexual relationships.

There are some pretty ambiguous rats in this collection and most of them are male but ultimately, it’s the writer’s own unease that cumulatively gnaws away at happiness and achievement.

It’s high time that bookstores set aside a section for novels that document the increasingly familiar territory of the inner lives of middle-class white Australian women who grew up in the 1960s.

These stories are well written and rather depressing. That makes them, I guess, rather representative of what one might call the current state of short-story writing by urban males. One thinks immediately of recent collections by Garry Disher and Nick Earls. There seem to be a few basic starting off points, the most notable being in the delineation of defensiveness and insecurities that give the male characters, who are often the narrators, a sensitive but decidedly uptight response to, well, almost everything. Women, parents, children (their own), and particularly the drab world that has snuffed out some early spark of liveliness or vitality (which is usually rubbed for sympathetic magic in moments of nostalgic recall).

Herb Wharton’s first novel is a highly readable account of the lives of three stockmen in far west Queensland. Sandy is a white man, Bindi a Murri, and Mulga related to both of them through his parents.