Yeah nah. This was going strong until about halfway when the mystery-thread took over. Although at first I’d been impressed by Temple’s clearsighted vYeah nah. This was going strong until about halfway when the mystery-thread took over. Although at first I’d been impressed by Temple’s clearsighted view of his characters and their setting, ultimately I needed him to deliver on that set-up for it to really be worth much. He failed spectacularly.
Two points:
1. Do we really need yet another religious-nut villain quoting scripture as he tortures people while believing those tortures will purify them for a higher purpose? To me, the climax was pure Hollywood, which might be fine if Hollywood was what I thought I’d signed up for, but it wasn’t. What I thought I’d signed up for was the laying-bare of a cross-section of some aspect—dark maybe, and not entirely realistic—of Australian culture. Granted some feat of imagination was bound to be involved—I accept that Temple doesn’t necessarily know much about criminals—but did it really have to be so generic, so pointless? Religious nuts? Australia has its share of problems, but I’m not aware that excessive Christian fervour is high on the list. Crime novels are great when they pull apart a society and show what makes it tick. That’s not the only reason they’re great, but Temple’s novel sent all the signals that it would be great after that fashion.
2. (And far more important, as far as I’m concerned:) Along the way, with his repeated insistence on widespread endemic racism, not to mention the hateful character of a crooked racist country cop, he broached a far more pertinent topic which he then proved incapable of satisfactorily exploring. Now I know, believe me, that it’s gonna take more than the well-meaning Inspector Cashin to right the wrongs done by racism in this country, or maybe even to bring down a crooked cop, and as far as The Broken Shore goes I’m fine with that—I don’t require a happy ending—so long as I think it’s been addressed sufficiently. But what Temple does is so flagrant and/or careless I have to question his motives. For 200 pages he liberally doses us with casual racist slurs—“boong” is his favourite—and makes us hate this bastard of a cop, who (it certainly seems likely) is largely responsible for the deaths of three indigenous teenagers. And then? He just drops it. We don’t get a single sentence by way of resolution. Nada. Zilch. Case closed. Now fine, maybe Temple’s trying to say “This is how Australia is: if you kill a rich guy you’re going down, but if you kill three indigenous kids no worries.” And I could accept that if it was adequately signposted. But what the hell happened? An overzealous editor? A paragraph/page/chapter left on the cutting-room floor? Even from the perspective of structure, of entertainment, this, to me, is fatally flawed. I’ll say it again: I just don’t care about the religious nut. I wanna know how it pans out with the crooked cop: he’s a villain I can really believe in, and one that seems, to me, authentically Australian.
Verdict? A brilliant start—great characters, vivid setting, I had high hopes—but the end is an embarrassment. Frankly, it worries me that The Broken Shore is so well-regarded. What does that regard say about Australians? That we hate ourselves, but feel powerless, and would rather hide in Hollywood religious-nut fantasies than work through that hate in the hope of curing it? I hope not. This is a misfire, an average crime novel that could have been much more....more
Publishing event of the year for me, given the previous scarcity of the collection Emerald Blue, included here in its entirety, and the importance of Publishing event of the year for me, given the previous scarcity of the collection Emerald Blue, included here in its entirety, and the importance of that collection as a hinge on which Murnane’s work’s two phases turn, specifically the story “The Interior of Gaaldine”. That story—wow! It’s a classic, remorseless, hilarious, black as pitch. That is, until its strange denouement, a wildly improbable sequence in which the horse-racing-obsessed Murnane discovers another writer, still more obscure than him at the time, who is likewise obsessed with horse racing, so much so that he (the other writer) has built up an entire archive (not unlike Murnane’s own famous archive) dedicated to it. I won’t pretend to understand that denouement, or even to think it wise, but then I’m far beyond demanding coherency from a Murnane story, not to mention anything I can fully “understand”. Oh sure, some of the stories I understand. “In Far Fields”, for eg, that’s brilliant, a masterclass in fiction-writing which I guarantee is unlike any other such class you’ll come across. “Fingerweb”, that’s a dark one, gender politics dubious, but thrillingly honest, deep, disturbing. But overall, I just don’t know if I know what to say about Murnane anymore, and by the look of the videos of the recent Goroke Murnane Symposium I’ve got some serious competition. Besides, the truth is I’m a relatively recent convert—didn’t read Barley Patch till 2016, throughout which reading it gradually dawned on me: the guy’s a genius. Another truth: I’d read half of the stories collected here before: Velvet Waters (the other key collection) graced my shelves in the mid-90s. But I couldn’t grasp it! It seemed so slight. I guess I was looking for some un-Murnanian substance in it, and neglecting to note the Murnanian. I remember thinking (this baffles me now) that the man was arrogant. Maybe he just seemed wilful, too sure of himself, unconcerned about any or most of the usual pacts between a writer and a reader of fiction. Whatever the problem, the substance of his stories floated like slightly opaque gas through my head, and I filed it under “bafflement”. Same thing with The Plains and Inland; I just didn’t get it. (The truth is I still don’t. I read both of those so-called masterpieces earlier this year, in the biggest Murnane binge I’d yet known, and thought The Plains drole and pointless and Inland obtuse, maybe from exactly the publisher-pressures Murnane describes as inescapable in his pre-Barley Patch days.) But Barley Patch, that made sense to me. And from that sense I developed a sense, which enabled me to breathe that Murnanian vapour, at least in the form we find it in Barley Patch, A Million Windows, Border Districts and Landscape With Landscape, and in most of these collected stories—which list, for me, constitutes his best and truest (because, I believe, least compromised) work. If you know that list, if you’ve read those titles and enjoyed them, Stream System is a sure thing. In places, it’s brilliant; in places untouchable. Still, if you’re anything like me you may read through the novella “Emerald Blue” (for eg) and finish thinking “Huh?! What the *$ was that about?” despite its beauty. All I can guess is it’s about the journey. Murnane, when he’s on, writes a page you can really sink into. As he says in “Why I Write What I Write” (in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs):
I write sentences. I write first one sentence, then another sentence. I write sentence after sentence. [...] After I’ve written each sentence I read it aloud. I listen to the sound of the sentence, and I don’t begin to write the next sentence unless I’m absolutely satisfied with the sound of the sentence I’m listening to.
At their best, every one of those sentences is a felt experience for the reader, an entirety, an end unto itself. Yes, there’s the sense that they may never really take us anywhere. But maybe, where they are is good enough. Maybe, as I never seem to tire of quoting, the aesthetic experience really is the “imminence of a revelation that never occurs” (Borges). I won’t lie to you: it doesn’t occur here either. Given the rarity of Emerald Blue and the reputation of “The Interior of Gaaldine” you could be forgiven for hoping otherwise. But while I’ll be re-reading that story as closely as I can I doubt I’ll ever feel again the thrill of anticipation that gripped me as its drunken narrator boarded the boat for Tasmania. Just for its tone and texture, it’s a masterpiece. For the backstory—writer at his lowest ebb gives up writing after this story—it’s a crucial part of a myth, a piece of history. For me, the first half of “The Interior of Gaaldine” was the most potent ten pages of 2018, and this book is a treasure, laced with gems. 2018—the year Murnane broke. I don’t care if he never wins the Nobel, living in a shed out back of his son’s house in a one-horse town five hours drive from Melbourne is an outsider hero. On the home-stretch he’s put in a last spurt, eclipsed the favourites. Stream System shows he was quietly keeping pace all along....more
We – or at least I – tend to think prose-fiction is independent of aesthetics. Not consciously, of course, but I’m surprised when friends or famous crWe – or at least I – tend to think prose-fiction is independent of aesthetics. Not consciously, of course, but I’m surprised when friends or famous critics revere Pale Fire or If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, as if it weren’t simply a matter of diverging aesthetics. Surprising too, on the other hand, that I so love Gerald Murnane, because in precis his “aesthetic” (spiralling self-conscious treatment of dun-coloured suburbia, young celibate sexual angst and Catholic guilt) and mine would seem not to match. But subject matter, as we know, is no reliable measure of a book’s worth, and nor is genre.
Genre – it’s an interesting question with regards to Murnane. To glance at his 1985 story-collection-cum-novel Landscape with Landscape might be to miss his “meta” tendencies, while being repelled or seduced by his – as the book unfolds – increasingly glaring idiosyncrasies. As Murnane books go, Landscape... is something of a slow-burner, the black sheep, an anomaly. For those craving confrontation, unlike A Million Windows or Barley Patch or Inland, it won’t hit you between the eyes from the first page with its paradoxes. In fact, aside from a few brain-bending and arch-Murnanian passages, and if not for the severely brain-bending “The Battle of Acosta Nu” (if interpretation is a function then this may be the most functional story Murnane has written yet), the casual reader might reasonably view this book as, from a genre standpoint, pretty ordinary – not parenthetical enough to be meta, nor flamboyant enough to be experimental, just another life of the artist as a young man (and a dull and tortured life at that). More like, if we’re categorising, a plain old confessional / autobiographical novel.
Incidentally, a perennial favourite among young writers of such exposés is here, in Landscape..., as in many of Murnane’s works, in the form of Jack Kerouac. And maybe, who knows, it’s Kerouac Murnane sees when he protests that his works are not “self-conscious fiction” (á la Pale Fire or ... Traveller), even at their most meta. Maybe, after all these years, and despite all appearances to the contrary, it’s Kerouac’s example of semi-fictional autobiography which Murnane is following. Definitely Kerouac had a huge influence on him, and surely there can be few more baffling, confounding or paradoxical outcomes of such an influence in literature. Which is to say (a) that the conjunction of Murnane (who in 70+ years has never left the Australian state of Victoria; who writes like a confluence of the streams of Proust and Thomas Bernhard) and Kerouac in this reader’s mind is apt, in itself, to resemble a near-irresolvable paradox; and (b) that what Murnane has done with this influence is, in itself, so surprising as to suggest a major talent.
To answer the obvious question, then: yes, if I were to file Landscape... anywhere it would have to be (despite the brain-busting “Battle...”) under Artist’s-Portrait Confessional Fiction, but of the most exquisite, exploratory and explosively paradox-hunting variety. Maybe after his previous book, The Plains (published as speculative fiction by a science fiction imprint), it all seemed, at first glance, to reviewers and the few readers it garnered, too ordinary, but to my mind the free-roaming explorations (for, as must be obvious, the near-memoir form offers infinite scope for internal roaming) of Landscape... are deep and stimulating. As to the (fairly cheap, it must be said) structural ruse of having each story “enclose” the next, well, I don’t think he’s entirely serious in this – or if he is, I’m afraid it’s slight overreach by a still-young writer just finding his feet as an experimenter. Nonetheless, while it doesn’t work as meta, to me the ruse is successful in showing structurally a theme and mental / emotional process which seems to haunt Murnane’s protagonist(s) throughout – that of the writer seeking, often through drunkenness, revelation. In fact, when I think back on Landscape... what I mostly see is an image of a young man seemingly on the verge of breakthrough – gazing drunk and alienated through stained glass from outside the Great Artist’s house in “Landscape with Artist”, or along the one curved tree-lined street in his grid-shaped suburb as the tram disappears in “Charlie Alcock’s Cock”. Again and again he seems about to lift the gauze, to uncover something central to his quest, but always he circles back, again, to novicehood. Thus the circling structure, thus (as Borges once described the aesthetic experience) “the imminence of a revelation that does not occur”.
The work of a writer on the very cusp of greatness, Landscape... is, despite surface appearances to the contrary, its own beast entirely, flawed, warped, but nonetheless near-perfect (since Murnane’s craft, his work as prose-writer, is never here less than brilliant). Sure, it got all but ignored in the eighties, but it’s back and it’s here to stay. If there’s any justice (if Murnane – as just might happen, they say – wins the Nobel) then 2016’s reprint of this lost classic will be seen as an Australian publishing event, and the moment when it became clear, to a wide audience, that everything Murnane has written since the mid-eighties is worthy of the most serious attention. ...more
“Time is a straight plantation”, writes Jim Morrison somewhere in his Wilderness: The Lost Writings, and sometimes I think I know what he means. In So“Time is a straight plantation”, writes Jim Morrison somewhere in his Wilderness: The Lost Writings, and sometimes I think I know what he means. In South Australia, a dry land much deforested, when I was a young man of twenty or so, I’d walk often in pine plantations whose geometric formations made them something supernatural: row upon row of straight-trunked trees, not-taken road upon not-taken road, since acid soil and pine needles had put paid to undergrowth and any direction was as much like a road as any other. And always, it seemed, for as long as the ground stayed flat, a glance in any direction could show me where I’d been or where I was going.
Books, in this sense, are some kind of plantation too, and a book like Junkyard Bloom, pertaining as it does, in my mind, to a specific place and time (Tasmania, 1997, my first port of call after leaving South Australia in my early twenties), is a corridor of light down the tree- or shelf-lined rows, beckoning me back to that time which had been shadowed. As if to seal the deal – to make of this small volume a wood-pulp time machine – upon my retrieving it from storage (or let’s say 6-12 months after I retrieved it, since I retrieved hundreds of books at once and hardly knew which to open first), when I first opened it after 10+ years, a flier slid from between its pages proclaiming: MICHAEL ARISTON’s self-published poetry extravaganza JUNKYARD BLOOM will be autobiopsychosophigraphically manifest at CINEMA AFTERDARK 8pm Wednesday July 9th 1997. Upstairs, Wooby’s Lane Salamanca. Complimentary screening of Mad Max II for those who dare!!!, and the wind of time shook the trunks, because I remembered that day, not because I’d been there, but because my first adult experience of snow had left me trapped in my cabin on the far side of Mount Wellington, trapped enough in any case that I couldn’t drive 45 minutes to Afterdark, my favourite and only hangout in Hobart and the only place where anyone in Tasmania knew me worth a damn.
Well, I heard plenty about the show – a two (or was it three?) hour multimedia costume-drama which evidently put my own rudimentary book launches to shame, as did Ariston’s self-promotional efforts: he’d hawk his book at Salamanca Market (and ultimately in markets throughout Australia) and must, surely, have helped brighten that scene plenty with his postpunk polkadot Poe-meets-Pic aesthetic and willingness to make of his artstruck anxiety-ridden self a spectacle, of the sort that I imagine must be priceless in a tiny place like Hobart.
In any case, it wasn’t long before I met Mr Ariston and, if for no other reason than that we both dug Tom Waits and were liable to break into eager renditions of “The Tell-Tale Heart” at first sign of an audience, we became friends, and kept in touch for 7-8 years (he even flew me to Hobart in 2002 to help launch his second book Sunbathe in Moonlight) before falling silent. Since then, from time to time, and as I grew familiar with this phenomenon they called the internet, I’d Google “Michael Ariston” and/or his publishing venture “M.A.D. Press”, and be deflated to find never – not in ten years – a mention of either, and I’d wonder why and what had happened to all that drive and youthful passion, or whether maybe in Hobart they’d only just heard tell of the internet, or didn’t grasp its import considering you could pretty much bellow your poems from the roof of a sandstone in Salamanca and be heard by every Hobartian closer than Glenorchy, where poetry would probably never be at much of a premium anyhow. Sometimes, I’d think to wonder if Ariston and I would ever meet again, since if I’d ever had his email address it had likely been lost with my first, neglected Hotmail account, and though I vaguely remembered a postal address having been affixed to his publications, if he was anything like me that address had changed so many times he was untraceable, and besides that his books – all four of them – were buried somewhere, along with several hundred others, in my dad’s shed in ever-distant rural northern New South Wales, and who the hell wrote letters anymore anyway?
I needn’t have worried, firstly because Michael Ariston, in the course of four publications over eight years – as I see now – never changed his postal address once, and in the eleven years since, I’m betting, probably hasn’t done either; and secondly because, according to the ancient principles of Qi Gung, all energy that sinks must rise. Cut to 2-3 months ago, here in northern New South Wales little over two hours from Dad’s place in a settled (or as settled as I’ve been in 20+ years) home with my books three years unpacked, and I do my annual/biannual Ariston Google only to find the following:
Hobart’s Peg Man spends five years making artwork from more than 30,000 pegs
PEGSpressionism was created by Michael Ariston, a writer who came up with the idea when he was struggling with the distractions from raising three children and looking after four pets in a small house...
(Full article courtesy Australian Broadcasting Commission.)
Genius or folly or both, I really don’t care: the man has a family, looks healthy, has that same – if anything heightened – look of the nefarious mad aestheto-scientist, and he’s working! Most important, as always, he’s far, far from the mainstream, or at least the artistic/literary mainstream of Arts Boards and Age reviews and Are-we-serious-enough-for-you heavyhanded highmindedness which so depresses the living shit out of me in Australian “letters”. He’s, as always, as DIY as DIY gets. It could be, sure, he’ll one of these days “break on through” and sign some contract and get in some bookstores outside of Hobart and – who knows? – even outside Australia, but if so, for sure, he will have paid his dues. Until then, I commemorate the Ariston who once was: who’d dress up as a Chameleon for a reading of his “Debate of Precedence”; who printed 1,000 Junkyard Blooms and sold every one of them, in a city of less than 200,000 people, when the average first novel (let alone poetry collection) in Australia (population 20+ million) is lucky to sell 2,000; who rhymes as though Hart Crane and Yevtushenko had never been invented; who discusses, gravely, Star Wars, Hanna-Barbera, Goscinny and Uderzo and the Mad Max franchise because he knows it’s what it makes you feel that counts, not how it looks on a grant application.
Hell, I’m inspired now: might be I’ll sit down and write the man a letter....more
I don’t think this is a great book but it’s interesting, and it suggests a strange cottage industry of fiction-writing in Australia in the eighties whI don’t think this is a great book but it’s interesting, and it suggests a strange cottage industry of fiction-writing in Australia in the eighties which I’m glad was encouraged.
What’s good about it? The structure – free, gymnastic, skipping from surface to surface of each character like a stone over water. Also the world: Garner’s Melbourne (to me, like Soseki’s Tokyo) is more sensed than apprehended, and at its most vivid when Garner seems least to be describing it. And it’s short, only 90 pages – to me, the most exquisite length for a story.
What’s bad? The symbolism, the overreach, the heightened sense of its own refinement. Bach, Berlioz, Mozart – all are namechecked, but the rock musician – a key character – doesn’t once name his own influences. In a way that’s good, since it heightens the timelessness, but every time a piece of “high art” was mentioned I cringed – too much like a flashing of credentials. So too the language: when it settles into its groove it’s effective, and it’s understandable in her second novel (her first, Monkey Grip, was a stark confessional piece) that Garner would want to test her power, but too much of this is sleight of hand. Ironically, the apparently rigorous editing may highlight this: the impression is of a loose transitional work corseted for professional ends; in a larger literary scene, with less focus on her, she may have felt more free to fail. And don’t get me started on the “local colour”: at one point a character sits up watching the national anthem at station close on late night TV, a National Geographic style flourish I find hard to reconcile with fiction, and upon which neither author nor character offered reflection.
One last thing: at age 20 or so, when I first read this, I liked it. The atmosphere – the family like moles in their burrow. The fable quality. The clash of primitive and refined. I find its lapses embarrassing now, but I’m still rooting for its author, and I’d so rather have its minimal jagged-cum-hazy heightened realism than any number of slick post-Illywhacker “magic realist” tomes purporting to shine a light on Australia. Maybe what frustrates me in The Children’s Bach is that it so very nearly seems universal, but is held back by a sprinkling of Aussie tropes which I can’t help thinking are more for her perceived audience (including the literature board?) than for Garner. A small-scale but impressive piece of work....more
To ask of fiction that it tell us about the world, I can’t help but think, is to sell fiction short. Fiction, surely, tells us more. About the universTo ask of fiction that it tell us about the world, I can’t help but think, is to sell fiction short. Fiction, surely, tells us more. About the universe, say? Or better, about life. And not just human life, though lacking another shape to adopt fiction’s characters may appear as human; they needn’t though, not at all.
Apparently I started something when I read Barley Patch last year; in the past month or two I’ve read Invisible But Enduring Lilacs and A Million Windows and I’ve just picked up A History of Books. All of these are works from Murnane’s “late period”, written after he gave up fiction-writing for eight years following an aborted draft for a long book which was to have followed Inland, and all mine the same theme with variations, the core of which could be said to be the interplay of memory, reading and writing fiction. A Million Windows, the latest, is, to my mind, the culmination. A manifesto, but at times a baffling one, both tantalising and frustrating, apt to break off at the threshold of its seeming complete, as if it were no more than common sense for the “discerning reader” (a favourite phrase of Murnane’s) to piece together the remainder. But that’s not to criticise the prose itself, which, I’m tempted to say, is just about as clear as prose can be. After all, it’s a hard task he’s set himself, this explication of what makes a narrator “strong” in the Murnanian sense by a (we hope) Murnanian strong narrator. And in at least one important respect, Murnane and I concur almost completely:
I have sometimes tried to explain what I consider a widespread confusion about the nature of fictional personages.
Forget, for now, that (as Murnane ensures us) the “I” of this passage is himself a “fictional personage”; in any case (Murnane also ensures us) he’s most likely reliable (Murnane being unable, in most if not all cases, to abide unreliable narrators, or narrators whom he describes as having “acted in bad faith” (or was it their authors who acted thus? I forget. In any case neither Murnane nor his narrators, we suspect, are likely to repeat this so-called mistake)). The point is he means it, I’m certain. Get this:
Rather than struggling to write about her, he is mostly content to accept her existence as incontrovertible proof that the reading and the writing of fiction are much more than a mere transaction during which one person causes another person to see in mind a sort of shadowy film; that the whole enterprise of fiction exists mostly to enable her and numerous others of her kind to flit from place to place in mind after mind as though many a fictional text is a mere bridge or stairway raised for their convenience of travel.
Now if that isn’t the most beautiful image and concept I’ve read or heard of in the past months I don’t know what is. And Murnane’s is, surely, the most singleminded attempt to allow this travel by fictional personages to occur with minimal interruption, so much so that for its sake he’s happy to disrupt any and every apparent through-line which might have otherwise aided the reader in her or his effort to appreciate the text. Images or potential plot-points which in another work might have borne scrutiny are here often ignored, while scenes and images which seem to do nothing more than note a character’s (or fictional personage’s) passing are returned to repeatedly. At times the structure Murnane hangs it all upon seems close to arbitrary, and Murnane (or his narrator) himself comments as if ironically on the structural notes he has beside him as he writes, having forgotten the import or intention of certain sections and instead leaving it to chance to dictate where he turns next, but always with that goal of facilitating his mysterious creatures/entities in their travel via his work to wherever it is they’re going.
As I read A Million Windows (carefully, in blocks of ten or so pages, with time to reflect on each) I became certain that Gerald Murnane is a unique genius, with all of the positive and negative implications that the word “genius” implies. He (if he’s anything like his narrators) is opinionated, and narrow in his tastes, and defensive of a stance which can hardly have helped his popularity or his critical cache, deriding as it does all “social” or political novels, seemingly all contemporary realist novels, and in fact even (what he calls) “self-aware fiction”, a term which he claims, bizarrely, does not apply to his fiction. But for me, the self-awareness in Murnane’s work is like nectar – gold! I flip through the book to find passages on this or that aspect of writing, then turn back and read the (slightly) more traditionally “fictional” passages associated with them.
On the rare occasions when we discuss authors such as Charles Dickens, we seem to agree that we lack for something that writers of fiction seemed formerly to possess. And yet, if we have lost something, so to speak, we have also gained something. We may be unable to exercise over our fictional personages the sort of control that Dickens and others exercised over their characters, but we are able to turn that same lack of control to our advantage and to learn from our own subject-matter, so to call it, in somewhat the same way that our readers are presumed to learn from our writing. [...] The matters at issue were as follows: could the writer predict with certainty how the personage was about to behave? and, if not, could the personage be said to stand, in relation to the writer, in any way differently from some or another man or woman in the building where the writer sat writing [...]
For me, this is a hard book to review, partly because for all that I love about it, I find something in Murnane’s aesthetic dour. (This video may help clarify a little. Will you look at the place he writes in! And that voice! He could just about be much-reviled ex-Australian Prime Minister John Howard!) But then, that’s the beauty of his style, especially as it matures, that it becomes so shorn of adornment that such considerations hardly matter. And when he gets on a roll – as he does here about page 116, where he relates the (secondhand) story of a hobo and the dog which befriended him – the results are genuinely moving, uncanny, and shot through with that glow of the otherworldly that accounts for so much of my pleasure in reading.
The train slowed; the man saw an open door; the man ran beside the train; the man clambered aboard. As soon as he was securely aboard, the man looked for the dog. He saw it keeping pace with the train and looking up at him. The dog was able to keep pace with the train for as long as it climbed the low hill, but when the train passed the hill, the dog began to fall behind. The man lay in the doorway of the freight van and watched the dog falling further behind. The man later wrote in his autobiography that he had recalled often during the remainder of his life his sight of the dog while it tried to keep pace with the train. He had recalled in particular his sight of the nearer eye of the dog while it tried to keep pace. The eye had seemed to be turned sideways and upwards, or so he had thought, as though the dog had struggled, before it lost sight for ever of the only person who had fed it or treated it less than harshly, to fix in mind an image of that person.
Of course, for a writer who purports to write about the travel of fictional beings, the recurrent descriptions of trains in this work are not coincidental. Nor the butterfly alighting on Machado de Assis’s desk or flying from one side of Casterbridge to another. The best and most thrilling part of Murnane’s project is that he’s alive to the mystery – the shape-shifting ghostlikeness – of his creatures. When last year I reviewed Barley Patch I compared him to Beckett, and again that comparison springs to mind. Compared to Beckett’s late period, Murnane’s is scarcely less focussed, and will, I’m sure, admit of less and less intrusions as it proceeds. If you’re thinking of reading the guy, A Million Windows, I think, is the place to start....more
OK I’ll admit it, this is pretty good. Great even. Certainly unique, and Murnane can sure craft a sentence: the precision on display here is awe-inspiOK I’ll admit it, this is pretty good. Great even. Certainly unique, and Murnane can sure craft a sentence: the precision on display here is awe-inspiring, and if there’s one thing I love it’s precision. He says what he means and if he can’t say it he lets you know it, and tries again. In this he’s like Beckett, and if there’s one thing I love it’s Beckett, but unique in this too―that while his writing shares some of the key salient features of Beckett’s writing, it doesn’t feel unduly influenced by Beckett’s writing. And maybe, in places, it’s the equal of Beckett’s writing, at least in my eyes, and surpasses other would-be contenders to that throne (the clearly Beckett-influenced Thomas Bernhard for eg, whose turn-on-a-dime, high-performance, self-satisfied prose so often resembles its own parody, which is fine and Murnane does that too but you want more sometimes; you want varied tone, direct emotion, more complexity). All of which, believe me, I’m surprised to hear myself saying, given I’ve never made it past twenty pages of The Plains, found Inland cryptic and impenetrable and Velvet Waters self-important (an impression I find hard to credit after Barley Patch) and even Barley Patch I had to start twice before it really struck me. Besides which, I find Murnane’s general drift bizarre. I tend to agree, at least partly, with one reviewer who described him as autistic―or maybe “autism spectrum” in today’s parlance, but with such a degree of self-awareness that, on the other hand, he can’t be, can he? But then, just how should I read him? When’s he serious, when’s he not? When he claims (as he does repeatedly―it’s a theme here) to have no imagination? Or then again, when he claims not to be nor to resemble his narrator even in the midst of that narrator’s describing episodes from what is almost certainly his (Murnane’s) own life? In the end, it may be nothing but a series of tricks with masks, but which somehow doesn’t undercut but enhances the seriousness of the would-be memoir. He’s got something, this Murnane character (taboo word, like “imagination”: “character”). Due to my typically fractured reading habits I may not fully grasp what he’s driving at (the parts about fiction and the world it inhabits/feeds off/feeds into I think I get; the parts about Catholicism and sexuality I’m not so sure) but I know I’ve never read anything like it. No it’s not perfect but it’s serious as hell, if a mundane provincial fifties Catholic hell. I’ll let Murnane tell it:
In the image that I see of my aunt’s face I can find no detail to explain the sternness and disapproval that seems to emanate from the image. However, I have for long recognised that time has no existence in the image-world. I am therefore able to suppose that my image-aunt, during her wanderings among my image-landscapes, has come upon certain image-evidence from the years during the 1950s when I masturbated often. That image-evidence would have included image-details of her image-nephew syping on his image-cousins, her image-daughters, during certain image-picnics on image-beaches during the early image-1950s, whenever one or another of the image-cousins leaned so far forward in order to reach for an image-tomato-sandwich or an image-patty-cake that the upper parts of her image-breasts were exposed or whenever she reached down to pick up some image-object from the image-sand and so caused the lower part of her image-bathing-costume to be stretched upwards, thereby exposing two image-rolls of image-flesh at the base of her image-buttocks. I am even able to suppose that my image-aunt may have come upon one or another image of a woman with an upswept image-hairstyle and an expression on her image-face of image-tolerance or even image-sympathy for the image-nephew and his image-spying, although I have never been able to suppose that my image-aunt would not have been sternly disapproving of such an image-image.
Did I mention it’s funny? Hilarious, like everything truly serious, truly real....more
On the strength of this slim atmospheric ‘literary’ thriller, I like Randolph Stow. As the culmination of the craft of a distinguished Australian noveOn the strength of this slim atmospheric ‘literary’ thriller, I like Randolph Stow. As the culmination of the craft of a distinguished Australian novelist, it’s strange, not to say perverse. Set in East Anglia, England, replete with dialect and loving evocation of place and culture, there’s not one nod to Australia in any of it, presumably rendering it ineligible for Australian grants or prizes and, for the most part, Australian plaudits, I suspect. Meanwhile the mystery, apaque and semi-supernatural as it is, was probably never going to ‘cross over’. But in terms of quiet, competent, sometimes arresting craft this is pretty great. So too Stow’s love for his characters shines through. And the town! I can see it, smell it, taste it. (Never have I seen fog so well described!) No doubt it’s minor, but it’s some kind of classic. Vistitants next, if I can find it. ...more
There’s a great moment in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ when token pasteboard Russian game-character Yevgeny Nourish shouts ‘Death to realism!’ befoThere’s a great moment in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ when token pasteboard Russian game-character Yevgeny Nourish shouts ‘Death to realism!’ before setting fire to a diseased game-pod which, until that moment, has dispensed anything but realism. In this apparently mixed-message manifesto I find meaningful similarities with the pulp triptych Vanishing Points. Whether it can lay claim to the same mastery is questionable (its author was 23 when he wrote it, and subsequent drafts may only have focussed his youthfulness) but somewhere at its heart is a power-drunk revolutionary, setting fire to dispensers of irreality (AKA genre conventions) under the banner of anti-realism and having the time of his life doing so.
Imagine Forbidden Planet crossed with ‘MS Found in a Bottle’. We’re in this strange world as the story unfolds, via the whispered, shouted, static-strafed log of the wayward Captain Kurtz:
It’s late. I should be sleeping. Look at me: a shivering coward huddled in a plastic dome. Damn it, what’s happening here?... I’ve had a dream, and it haunts me, though it passed in an instant. I dreamt of... an eye. A single red iris surrounded by black, and the wide-open pupil at its centre. It was ancient, this eye, as if made of stone, and so huge I could not look away from it. When I tried to, it surrounded me. When I ran to escape, it was infinite. And as I awoke I was falling, plummeting through space towards it...
Guns are fired. One by one, the crew disappears in the fog, only to be transformed – like Lynch’s Fred Madison – before the cycle winds up and... starts again.
A noir fairytale city, steam pouring from sewer gratings as trenchcoated men scurry between red-lit doorways – Jim Thompson meets Kafka in a steam-punk (‘petrol-punk’?) 1950s that never was. Meet 5D pornstar Buck Wilder, test pilot for an ill-fated technology. A Mind’s Eye implant in his forehead transmits sensations to an audience in tri-coloured glasses, which controls him, under the direction of inventor/auteur E.T.A. Horner:
How to compete with the king? 5D, in theory, was democratic. And maybe later, when Wilder fans packed the place to the rafters, it was. But in those days it was a dictator and his subjects. You put on the glasses – bam! – and you’re in some poor sap’s head. But a roomful of deviants is in there too, and when they see which way Horner’s pushing, you’d best go along for the ride.
Disappearance, transformation and... the wheel spins again. Some Nowheresville Sheriff’s office, where the lone teenage survivor of a bloodbath at the lake gives his testimony:
You’re from around here Sheriff, so you’re probably used to it, but I got the creeps the moment we started up that mountain. Under an arch of twisted trees the road turned to dirt. We followed a tight corridor to nothingness. A car’s length ahead, the forest materialised from the fog. A car’s length behind us it dissolved. Then we broke through. The sun set across a sea of cloud. A few crags poked through like islands, throwing long shadows across the cloud. The road hugged a sheer wall of rock. Then we rounded the curve to a crater – a huge couldron, bubbling with fog – and started down.
But just who is this scarred ‘Streetcorner Man’, who tells his latter-day Body Snatchers tale as if it were just another day at the office?
‘Genre parody’? If the author’s done his work, it’s something more. It’s a truism, but genre in Vanishing Points operates as a springboard, to lift us to realms denied us by ‘realism’: metaphysics, magic, madness, irreality. There’s nothing new in that: the Surrealists used porn for the purpose; Kubrick used whatever he could (sci-fi, horror, war film, period drama). But what may be new is the triptych: the same psychic/emotional vectors, the same essential situation, but viewed through the distorting agents of three mutually exclusive genres. Each story inhabits a unique world, but it’s as if they stemmed from the same seed, the same ur-text, which they invite us to uncover. Three points to make a straight line, after all (so Roithamer). Three vanishing points.
And the verdict? The star-rating? One, for what it isn’t. Five, for what it could be. The truth is (quietly): W. COQ, c’est moi. If you’re interested, read the excerpts at Vanishing Points Online. Friends, write me at Goodreads and I’ll send you a free copy. Oh, and so Eddie Watkins’s discreet review isn’t for nothing, mum’s the word re the me-as-COQ thing, eh? ...more
I’ve only read the title piece so far but it was pretty great. Strangely great, given that for half the time I was thinking, ‘Gee, is this all?’ It’s I’ve only read the title piece so far but it was pretty great. Strangely great, given that for half the time I was thinking, ‘Gee, is this all?’ It’s so programmatic it’s damn near abbreviated, all angular phrases, weird comma-placement, redundant semi-colons and an abrupt, urgent-but-distracted style, as if she wanted desperately to say something that could only half be said in words. But by halfway through I was warming to it. There’s never been – or I’ve never seen – a character quite like this before. ‘She’s the ragged, wayward heart of woman that doesn’t want to be caught and hasn’t been caught,’ so the blurb has it. She’s some kind of martyred saint, I guess, a stubborn idealist, a Myshkin. And she lives, you know? It all does, despite being so hastily sketched. I’m gonna put this down now because too much of this style will tax me (and my inbox is crowded with scintillating new purchases), but I’ll get back to it. I knew there must be something to this Christina Stead person. Bravo! I love a good novella....more
Once in a while an event occurs which polarises a country or a culture, drawing into the open traits and tendencies in that culture which had previousOnce in a while an event occurs which polarises a country or a culture, drawing into the open traits and tendencies in that culture which had previously been overlooked. The publication in Australia of ostensible-Ukrainian Helen 'Demidenko''s transparently racist and poorly-written Holocaust novel The Hand that Signed the Paper in 1994, and the subsequent unmasking of the author as 22 year old Anglo Helen Darville after the book had won 3 major prizes, was such an event. That these days this multiple prizewinner garners only 4 full-length reviews (all of them 1-star) and a handful of ratings (average 2.3) on Goodreads says something about its lack of enduring worth; yes, it's 15 years old, but find me another book to have won so many awards even that long ago and be so forgotten. To put it plainly, it's a piece of shit. It only won because it was controversial and because the ruse that it was based on the Demidenko family's 'oral history' legitimised (in the minds of the judges) this controversy. What does it use this platform to say? That the Bolshevik party which ruled and oppressed the Ukraine was run by Jews; that therefore Demidenko's protagonist's uncle, who in the book is shown bayonetting Jewish babies which his brother throws in the air in a demented game of 'catch', does not deserve to be tried for war crimes, on the grounds that everyone had their hands bloodied in the Holocaust. More than this, it tells its story in a tone so flat and bereft of empathy, painting its every Jewish character as a villain, that it reads like the script of some b-grade thriller. Yet when faced with this piece of shit (which I, and author of The Culture of Forgetting Robert Manne, and several readers working for publisher Allen & Unwin - including respected editors and authors - recognised immediately as a piece of shit), the judges of 3 major awards stood up for it on the grounds of free speech, anti-elitism and multiculturalism, likening dissenters to those who declared the fatwah against Salman Rushdie. One of these judges (David Marr, the famous biographer of lone Australian Nobel Prize-winner Patrick White) defended the book on the grounds of its veracity as oral history, calling it 'a really exciting violation, an extraordinary confession of a family's entanglements in these terrible events,' yet on the night of its publication (before any public criticism had been leveled at it) spoke defensively of the 'philistines' who did not 'know how to read fiction' and would cause trouble for Demidenko/Darville in the days to come. (Later he compared her to Shakespeare!) Meanwhile, when it was pointed out to fellow Hand-supporter Andrew Reimer that such a book would never have been published in Europe, he wondered aloud if ours wasn't a more 'resilient society, more liberal and tolerant in fundamental ways'. At the centre of the furore sat ABC Radio broadcaster Jill Kitson, who had been a judge on 2 of the prize panels and was the driving force behind The Hand's ascent to fame, praising it passionately it for its 'redemptive powers' and declaring herself oblivious of the charges of anti semitism. I Google her and look at her photo, this cherubic old lady who I could so easily see as one of my friend's mothers back in the idyllic Adelaide Hills, weeding her garden in winter woollies and radiating gentleness and sad content. I want to understand - here, surely, is the answer to the riddle - but all I can think is that Jill Kitson's life was so numbing and without drama or emotion that being made to feel horror and to perhaps even weep over a coldhearted, aseptic, cynical depiction of a man murdering children without remorse seemed to her 'redemptive' if only because it made her feel anything at all. And suddenly it strikes me: Jill Kitson's is not the face of evil, it's the face of a child. Helen Darville too - she sounds like nothing so much as an attenion-seeking child, who counters every accusation with a lie which, when it expires, she replaces with a new lie. But let me be clear: I don't judge Darville. Or rather, if I do, she is so low on my list of priorities under all the idiots who praised her that I have no rancour left for her. I remember when the scandal broke: by a twist of fate I was staying at the Varuna Writers' Centre in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney, on a 'writer's retreat fellowship' along with 3 other writers and a host of literary visitors who would pop round daily or weekly - so I got to see firsthand the responses of a cross-section of the Australian literary community. Tellingly, the only person to share my blithe laughing acceptance of Darville's deception was another writer in her early 20s; as Darville too was in her 20s, the 3 of us were joined by this one sentiment: that to have exposed the old guard for its fakery and pretensions was laudable, despite what it might mean for the reputation of our 'book industry' in France or England, where by all reports they were laughing too. Again, don't get me wrong: Helen Darville sounds like a monster, exactly the sort sub-mentally-ill congenital liar without scruples whom I do my best to avoid in everyday life. But at least thanks to her I had a clearer idea of what I was getting into with this so-called career of mine (which, in the event, I was to quit a year or so later). Robert Manne also had a clearer idea of things after Helen Darville:
I had always assumed that there existed in Australian intellectual culture a rough historical knowledge of what had happened during the Holocaust and a general awareness of the ideological forces which lay behind it. I had assumed that most Australian intellectuals still thought of the Holocaust as a central event in human history, as a deed so evil that the centuries would not wash its mystery and meaning away. I had assumed that we all knew that no-one worth reading would dare write about the Holocaust without humility and high seriousness, without a recognition of what was at issue here not for Jews but for all human beings. And I had, finally, assumed that all Australians - not only intellectuals - would find it easy to understand why an event like the Holocaust should matter so deeply to those of their fellow citizens who happened to be Jewish. As the Demidenko affair deepened, I discovered, rather suddenly, that none of these assumptions was sound.
For those people of other countries who do not understand why it is frightening to be born into the Anglo island outpost that is Australia, this book should go some way to explaining it. The scary thing is: Australia too is a child, and it is not yet clear what it will be when it grows up. An 'orphan in the Pacific' (the words are Hitler's) abandoned by its queen among peoples of many colours and eager to prove itself on the world stage, it just might turn out worse than the rich white self-righteous bureaucrats - of both the 'left' and 'right' - currently running the show can imagine, and only the existence of books such as The Culture of Forgetting give us reason to think otherwise. Thank you Robert Manne, for getting this down in print before it was forgotten. For now, the jury is out, but until I see proof to the contrary I can't help thinking something is rotten in the state of Australian letters. And worse still, in Australia's soul.
POSTSCRIPT:
The Nazi extermination of the Jews was unique because never before had a state, under the responsible authority of its leader, decided and announced that a specific group of human beings, including the old, the women, the children, and the infants, would be killed to the very last one, and implemented this decision with all the means at its disposal.
Holocaust-revisionist novel by a 20-something Anglo writer who made up a Ukrainian last-name (Demidenko) and appeared in publicity photos in a UkrainiHolocaust-revisionist novel by a 20-something Anglo writer who made up a Ukrainian last-name (Demidenko) and appeared in publicity photos in a Ukrainian peasant's blouse, claiming to have based her text on her family's 'oral history'. In this guise she won 3 major Australian prizes, then when the establishment discovered her identity they demanded the book be reprinted under her own name, as if the pseudonym and not the ahistorical racism were the problem.
For my part, I'd glanced through the thing before the scandal broke, as I had a habit of keeping up with the Vogel Award (a prize for young writers), and quickly formed the impression that the award was going off the tracks: the prose seemed inept, wooden, amateurish and the setting of the scene without drama or interest. My first impulse: to throw it aside and forget about it. But in light of the scandal I came to think otherwise: we've gotta remember this, damn it! Of course I'll probably never read the whole thing - it really is painful - but I for one am not going to let the powers that be forget this.
We (Australians) talk unthinkingly about our tall poppy syndrome but anyone who has been involved in journalism knows that, in fact, we are less intent on the cutting down of talent than we are on the exaltation of mediocrity...
Everyone was interested in Helen Darville for what she was not. Not historically accurate enough to write about the terrible events of twentieth century history. Not Ukrainian and therefore not entitled to a maybe inevitable anti-Semitism. Not talented enough to win the Miles Franklin and certainly not truthful enough to justify our interest in the personality rather than the book. For indeed The Hand That Signed The Paper is not very interesting; it is infinitely less interesting than the questions it throws up. For what seems an age now, Demidenko has looked like a symbol of the void around which our cultural life flitters.
"Who is she really?"... Well, somebody had to say it. Helen Demidenko is us.
Wayne Macauley - not a well-known name even in his native Australia, and not a name I would have noticed myself were it not for the epigraph from RobeWayne Macauley - not a well-known name even in his native Australia, and not a name I would have noticed myself were it not for the epigraph from Robert Walser which opens his latest novel, The Cook:
My God, I do hope I shall make something of myself one day...
(Jakob von Gunten)
Imagine my surprise! Perhaps from my own indifference to local publishing, not once had I heard Walser mentioned by an Australian writer, nor had I heard mention of the other favourites Macauley namechecked in the 2 or 3 interviews to which I found links on his website: Witold Gombrowicz, Knut Hamsun, Thomas Bernhard. I was sold! At the very least I had to give him a try. The Cook, which came out this year through Text Publishing (sister-company to Scotland's Canongate and probably the most credible mainstream publisher of fiction in Australia), is maybe his most assured work: it's direct and slick and impersonal and has a kicker of an ending which seems to say a lot about the state, cause and possible outcome of Australia's current prosperity. Especially in its second half, it's as dark and enjoyable a satire as I've read, and while being recognisably and unashamedly Australian it effortly transcends the ghettoising traits of that label. Still, it may be his previous novel, Caravan Story, for which he really deserves a medal, despite that it's rough round the edges, gets a little flabby near the end and occasionally descends into slightly jarring anachronism. The thing is, it's funny. A bunch of unsuccessful arts-funding applicants get rounded up in an impromptu caravan park by an ambitious young sex-kitten arts administrator and made to work on 'culturally relevant' projects for purposes unknown. Macauley (or his alter-ego) is imprisoned with the rest of them, though since he's a dreamer and a passive observer to most things he's never quite sure where his paranoia ends and the ostensible police state begins. Early on - in a hilarious twist - he gives his fellow writer-inmates the names of famous writers to help him remember them: Jane Austen, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Elizabeth Jolley, (to my delight) Jorge Luis Borges, and - for reasons unknown - settles on Georg Buchner(!) as the name of his most frequent collaborator, an overweight kid in trackpants and sandals. Then he has Buchner rant Bernhard-style about the state of the arts in Australia, comparing the population-explosion among would-be artists to the spread of the kangaroo due to the clearing of forests for pasture. It's dead-on, and had me belly-laughing hours later. Why does Macauley deserve a medal? Because, again, I've never heard this shit before, here in the polite-and-serious realm of Australian letters. Check the back pages and sure enough, Macauley wrote the thing on a grant (or grants) from the government, then published it (in 2007) through the ultra-indie Black Pepper Press, no doubt in a print-run of 1-2000, which would have left him in just about the same state of poverty as his narrator. Don't get me wrong: he's not attacking anyone, and he comes across as deeply good-natured, but struck with the same existential crisis as any of us who've grown up reading and aspiring to write life-changing books only to reach adulthood in anonymity with a bunch of half-finished projects in desk-drawers and to pray aloud, 'Oh God, I do hope I make something of myself one day!' Following the publication of The Cook, Text has re-released Caravan Story and the earlier Blueprint for a Barbed-Wire Canoe, which I'm yet to read. Whether this will see Macauley winning prizes I don't know; he flies in the face of the po-faced heavily-researched historical novels the Australian intelligentsia usually favours. But whether he remains a cult or starts making headlines, I'm for him. Thank you, Wayne Macauley, for making me feel less alone.
Perplexing. Good, in many ways. Gripping. But 2 things bother me: the quality of the prose and the likeness of the setting. The prose? It's clumsy, alPerplexing. Good, in many ways. Gripping. But 2 things bother me: the quality of the prose and the likeness of the setting. The prose? It's clumsy, all jagged edges and starkness, broken rules of grammar several-to-a-page masquerading as modernity. Unnecessary in such a straight-up crime novel, and it makes you wonder if the guy knows what he's doing or is just winging it. But worse than that, this is Melbourne?! This hotbed of crime, a place so dangerous that at one point the tough-guy protagonist remembers 'when the CBD (central business district) was still safe enough to walk across on a Friday night'?!! Safe enough for who? Me, I've walked across it 100 times at all hours of the night, and I ain't half as tough as Inspector Villani. And then at one point there's some politician talking about the place as though it's second only to Detroit or Caracas or Johannesburg in the crime-statistics stakes. I mean, get a grip! Is Temple serious? Either (a) he's so introverted and naive that he honestly believes it, or (b) he's scamming, fictionalising the place beyond all recognition so as to create a decent setting for a crime story. And fair enough - but then it wins the Miles Franklin Award?! I mean, don't get me wrong: it's high time a 'genre' novel won that award - I applaud that. But my strong suspicion is that the judges believe this stuff! And that is disturbing. OK, we all love to romanticise; it makes our suburban middle-class lives that much more interesting if we can believe we live perpetually on the fringes of anarchy. But the only things 'culturally relevant' (favourite phrase of Australian awards-judges and grants boards) here are the bushfires and the al fresco dining. The rest is straight-up wanton exaggeration, and anyone who says differently is ill-informed.
That said, if you pair this with that other great romantic-noir view of Melbourne, the film Animal Kingdom, you get a pretty compelling cartoon neo-Gotham. All those skyscrapers are sure ugly-pretty, and ever since I was a kid driving overnight to Melbourne from Adelaide with my dad I would see the place as a kind of southern Chicago. It's got the look. But looks aren't everything.
A bunch of hooey, but entertaining for all that. Wish he was a better scene-painter: it's one thing to mention street-names or a cloud of smoke on the horizon; it's another to describe them. Still, as contemporary crime novels go this was a good one....more
It's over 15 years since I read this and I may not read it again in a hurry, but I remember liking it despite Winton's name being mud in my house thanIt's over 15 years since I read this and I may not read it again in a hurry, but I remember liking it despite Winton's name being mud in my house thanks to an envious writer-father who couldn't understand why he kept getting all the grants. Not even Mum would defend Winton in those days, though she'd come out swinging for Peter Carey, someone I've never been able to stomach. And the truth is until Cloudstreet Tim Winton was probably the sort of writer who, had he suddenly vanished into obscurity, could easily have been dismissed as an also-ran. But here's where he grows into himself, where he unbuttons the constricting Hemingway obsession (fairly common among Australian writers in the 80s) and lets it all hang out, and where, once and for all, he eclipses that cold-hearted big-headed ex-advertising man (Carey) and becomes a kind of institution. Sentimental? Decidedly so. Populist? Check. In thrall to a newfound obsession with Garcia Marquez (influence of choice for Australian writers in the 90s)? You bet. Add to this an idealised retro Aussie idiom that is roughly the equivalent of 'aw shucks' to an American and you've got a book that looks pretty hard to defend in synopsis. And to be honest I really can't remember what saves it, except for the overriding physicality and lyrical descriptions of the sea that are Winton's trademarks, and except for the size of the man's heart. Since Cloudstreet Winton has become the type of a writer who dives into big books without a life jacket and swims out to the deep water. In Dirt Music he nearly drowned - somewhere around the middle his pulse lessened to near-insignificance, and the ending was laughable, crazy. But even when embarrassing himself so shamelessly he still flew the flag for the type of writing that doesn't know where it's going before it gets there, which follows the dictates of the heart. Me, I kind of tuned out around then, but I still remember Cloudstreet fondly, and recommend it to anyone interested in Australian fiction. It's not, and never was, 'state of the art', but it's gutsy and real and some kind of an event. It's pop culture, and it ain't going away soon. I hear The Turning is good too....more
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