During Harry Houdini’s 1910 visit, the famous escapologist claimed to be the first person to achieve powered, controlled flight in Australia. In Houdini’s Flight, Angelo Loukakis uses these bare details as the backdrop for a modern tale about a more modest achiever, Terry Voulos. A second-generation Greek-Australian, Terry confronts, almost in slow motion, a personal crisis that initially seems caused by his own stuttering approach to life. Whereas Houdini descends into water to release himself from heavy chains, Terry must break free from his own limitations to revitalise his life, his attitudes, his marriage to Jenny and his bond with his son, Ricky.

Terry is a bus driver and a novice magician. His dream of becoming a professional magician reflects his brooding dissatisfaction with himself – he wants to be somebody, especially, it seems, to impress Ricky. After he stages a successful magic show for an elderly audience at the Banjo Paterson Memorial Home – ‘he had pulled off six tricks in a row without muffing any of them’ – Terry is buttonholed by a dishevelled old-timer called Hal, who, mysteriously, doesn’t even live in the home. Soon Terry is visiting Hal’s squat to learn magic and to listen to his tales about Houdini.

Tom Shapcott’s most recent volume collects nine short stories and one novella from 1997 to 2005, the period during which he was the inaugural Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. Of his thirty-two volumes, eleven are novels, three are collections of short stories, and eighteen are books of poetry. Tom has received the Patrick White Prize, Senior Fellowships from the Australia Council and an Order of Australia. He has been Director of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, Executive Director of the National Book Council and a member of the Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week Committee. Does the man never sleep?

I hesitate to confess that I first made the acquaintance of Tom’s writing half a century ago, in the pages of Meanjin, where he published several poems. I was bowled over by their physicality, their urgency, their very human heat. Tom may be fifty years older and wiser, but the demands of the flesh still trouble his fiction. The novella ‘Sunshine Beach’, which concludes Gatherers and Hunters, is a moving version of that age-old drama of youth versus age. As Charlie, the retiree widower at the heart of ‘Sunshine Beach’, reflects while travelling north: ‘All the recent Guides praised octogenarian sex, didn’t they?’ That way trouble lies, not to mention embarrassment and shame.

When Rose, the narrator of Kathleen Stewart’s Men of Bad Character, first visits the bathroom of Gary Gravelly, ‘there in the toilet bowl, frayed around the edges and so long languishing that it had stained the water, was the most enormous rope of turd. That, I said to myself, is the death of romance.’ Rose soon forgets, overwhelmed by the boyish charm of her new lover, but the reader is left with an indelible image. Whatever Rose might think of Gary at any stage – and she changes her opinion many times over the next couple of years – we continue to associate that repulsive image with him. This is not just a bit of earthy bad taste designed to shock. It is a bold and nauseatingly effective way of influencing the reader’s attitude to Gary.

Rose, in a fragile and desperate state, requires regular therapy sessions with the exquisite and sympathetic Fleur. We gradually become aware, as the narrative circles round a subject too disturbing to broach directly, of the reason for this. On page two, she writes, ‘My husband, David Flower, had gone away’. A deserted wife, how sad, we think. On page nine, she mentions how he hoped to ‘charm them into giving him bail’. A criminal, then. Poor woman. We don’t know the nature of his crime until page thirty-two, when she wakes in the middle of the night and remembers, ‘My husband is a rapist. My husband. A rapist.’ Forty pages later it gets worse: ‘My husband raped a schoolgirl. There. I never noticed them before but now I see them everywhere.’ Eventually, Fleur advises her to tell Gary exactly what her husband did, ‘to let Gary understand how very traumatised [she] was’. She doesn’t tell him straight away, but, as if prompted by this, she now relates the details to the reader. When she does talk to Gary about it, his reaction is shockingly solipsistic.

A discussion of the outstanding albums of the 1980s might begin with the Shanachie label’s Mbaqanga compilation The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, 4AD’s Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares by the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Choir, and American Clavé’s Tango: Zero Hour by Astor Piazzolla (all 1986), three signal moments in the packaging of global music for Western sensibilities. One could go on to cite such landmarks as Brian Eno’s On Land (1982), Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa (1984) and John Zorn’s Spillane (1987). Add to these Joy Divison’s Closer (1980), Gang of Four’s Solid Gold (1981), Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime (1984), and the decade is beginning to look superior. Australia, too, produced various near-perfect LPs – the likes of Mr Uddich Schmuddich Goes to Town by Laughing Clowns (1982), Born Sandy Devotional by the Triffids, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express by The Go-Betweens, Free Dirt by Died Pretty (all 1986), Cold and the Crackle by Not Drowning Waving (1987) and Tender Prey by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (1988) while New Zealand’s The Chills deserve a mention, courtesy of their Brave Words (1987). To this fledgling list, author Jeff Apter would presumably demand the addition of True Colours (1980) and Time and Tide (1982) by Split Enz, as well as Crowded House’s self-titled début (1986) and Temple of Low Men (1988), each of which is accorded canonical status in Together Alone, his new biography of Tim and Neil Finn. This ought to be a matter of personal taste buttressed by (in the appropriate forum, such as a book like this) robust argument, but there is precious little of the latter in Together Alone. Critical analysis is promised but not delivered. Instead, readers are left to trawl through a skip-load of secondary material, including snatches from the omnipresent Glenn A. Baker and one-too-many customers at Amazon.com, in order to learn what supposedly makes this music definitive.