Welcome to the October 2005 issue of Australian Book Review!
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Fiction
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:
The Book Thief marks a departure for Markus Zusak. It is his first novel for adults, has broader concerns than his earlier work, and makes clearer his ambitions to be considered a serious writer. His first three novels, for young adults, were primarily focused on the masculinity of the boys in a working-class Sydney family ...
Book 1 Title: The Book Thief
Book Author: Markus Zusak
Book 1 Biblio: Picador, $35 pb, 588 pp, 033036426X
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Display Review Rating: No
The Book Thief marks a departure for Markus Zusak. It is his first novel for adults, has broader concerns than his earlier work, and makes clearer his ambitions to be considered a serious writer. His first three novels, for young adults, were primarily focused on the masculinity of the boys in a working-class Sydney family. His next book, The Messenger (2002), foreshadowed the development we see in The Book Thief. Presented for young adults, The Messenger could easily have been marketed as a ‘crossover’ novel. It took Zusak into new and strange territory with a story about a young man mysteriously chosen and directed to intervene in other people’s lives.
These are hostile times for literary fiction in Australia. New novels are well advised to don flak, not flap, jackets. And it’s not just a simple case of critics sniping from the sidelines, wanting their piece of the action. This is a full-blown civil war involving all the vested interests – publishers, editors, journalists, publicists and booksellers – not just writers and readers. The smarting adjectival arrows continue to find their targets. Current fiction is too dreamy, starchy, inconsequential, ingrown, belletristic, portentous. While our non-fiction writers have been doing time in South American jails and running the gauntlet of spy networks, our best novelists have been tending the lily-livered genres of historical fiction and fable. Many of them have been accused of skedaddling off to the library at a time when a confrontation with the forces of xenophobia, philistinism, fogeyism and greed is more than ever required. Novel-writing, in a word (and it’s one that has been flung around with a degree of passion recently), has become ‘gutless’ storytelling.
Book 1 Title: The Garden Book
Book Author: Brian Castro
Book 1 Biblio: Giramondo, $27.95 pb, 316 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Display Review Rating: No
These are hostile times for literary fiction in Australia. New novels are well advised to don flak, not flap, jackets. And it’s not just a simple case of critics sniping from the sidelines, wanting their piece of the action. This is a full-blown civil war involving all the vested interests – publishers, editors, journalists, publicists and booksellers – not just writers and readers. The smarting adjectival arrows continue to find their targets. Current fiction is too dreamy, starchy, inconsequential, ingrown, belletristic, portentous. While our non-fiction writers have been doing time in South American jails and running the gauntlet of spy networks, our best novelists have been tending the lily-livered genres of historical fiction and fable. Many of them have been accused of skedaddling off to the library at a time when a confrontation with the forces of xenophobia, philistinism, fogeyism and greed is more than ever required. Novel-writing, in a word (and it’s one that has been flung around with a degree of passion recently), has become ‘gutless’ storytelling.
Custom Article Title: James Ley reviews 'Slow Man' by J.M. Coetzee
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:
Slow Man begins with an accident. Paul Rayment is cycling along an Adelaide street when he is struck by a car. When he emerges from a daze of doctors and painkillers, he discovers his life has been transformed by this random event. His crushed leg is amputated above the knee. From now on, he will ...
Book 1 Title: Slow Man
Book Author: J.M. Coetzee
Book 1 Biblio: Knopf, $45 hb, 266 pp, 1741660688
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Display Review Rating: No
Slow Man begins with an accident. Paul Rayment is cycling along an Adelaide street when he is struck by a car. When he emerges from a daze of doctors and painkillers, he discovers his life has been transformed by this random event. His crushed leg is amputated above the knee. From now on, he will require the attention of a full-time nurse to help with life’s most basic chores; his limited mobility will mean he is rarely able to venture forth from his small flat.
The first third of Slow Man takes the reader through the aftermath of the accident. It is a disciplined and quite masterful piece of psychological realism. Coetzee’s prose is, as always, a model of clarity and understatement; its rhythms are carefully measured but insistent. Paul struggles to be reconciled to his new, unwished-for existence. His bitterness and anger gradually give way to loneliness, which in turn begins to manifest itself in the form of an increasing infatuation with his carer, a sensible and efficient Croatian woman named Marijana.
Comedy isn’t the only art that requires good timing. Poetry also requires it. Indeed, poetry might be partly defined as the art of giving things away at the right moment. Illustrating this we have The Best Australian Poetry 2005. In this elegant anthology, we find Peter Goldsworthy’s inspired description of our planet: ‘Our earthen dish is seven parts water / one part china, and a tiny bit japanned.’ We also find Brett Dionysius on the 175-year-old tortoise Harriet, which, having outlived Charles Darwin, thinks: ‘Now I’m with Steve Irwin at Australia Zoo. / I Harriet, time-lord tortoise: outlive him too.’ We find Jennifer Harrison’s arresting description of ‘grammar’s lovely utterly cold snow’. We find Keith Harrison’s ‘kind of stretched villanelle’ (as he describes it), which begins: ‘The summer night is dangerous and deep.’ We find the unsettling climax of Aileen Kelly’s ‘His Visitors’, in which ‘fetid ivies’ ‘reach up and suck out the light’. We find Anthony Lawrence’s poem about the Wandering Albatross, with its reference to ‘the compass glass of its eye’. And we find the terrible, uncomic climax of Judith Beveridge’s powerful poem ‘The Shark’.
Book 1 Title: The Best Australian Poetry 2005
Book Author: Peter Porter
Book 1 Biblio: UQP, $22.95 pb, 190 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Display Review Rating: No
Comedy isn’t the only art that requires good timing. Poetry also requires it. Indeed, poetry might be partly defined as the art of giving things away at the right moment. Illustrating this we have The Best Australian Poetry 2005. In this elegant anthology, we find Peter Goldsworthy’s inspired description of our planet: ‘Our earthen dish is seven parts water / one part china, and a tiny bit japanned.’ We also find Brett Dionysius on the 175-year-old tortoise Harriet, which, having outlived Charles Darwin, thinks: ‘Now I’m with Steve Irwin at Australia Zoo. / I Harriet, time-lord tortoise: outlive him too.’ We find Jennifer Harrison’s arresting description of ‘grammar’s lovely utterly cold snow’. We find Keith Harrison’s ‘kind of stretched villanelle’ (as he describes it), which begins: ‘The summer night is dangerous and deep.’ We find the unsettling climax of Aileen Kelly’s ‘His Visitors’, in which ‘fetid ivies’ ‘reach up and suck out the light’. We find Anthony Lawrence’s poem about the Wandering Albatross, with its reference to ‘the compass glass of its eye’. And we find the terrible, uncomic climax of Judith Beveridge’s powerful poem ‘The Shark’.
Article Title: Harry Potter and the fantastic Australians
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:
Within a week of the recent release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, millions of children and adults around the world had read it. Now comes the long wait for the final tome in this cleverly designed series by the prolific J.K. Rowling. Nil desperandum. The fantasy novel for children – and especially crossover books which, like the Harry Potter series, appeal to both adults and children – has a long tradition, and there are a myriad other fantastic books to turn to, many of which have been written by Australian authors.
Display Review Rating: No
Within a week of the recent release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, millions of children and adults around the world had read it. Now comes the long wait for the final tome in this cleverly designed series by the prolific J.K. Rowling. Nil desperandum. The fantasy novel for children – and especially crossover books which, like the Harry Potter series, appeal to both adults and children – has a long tradition, and there are a myriad other fantastic books to turn to, many of which have been written by Australian authors.
If nothing else, the series has been an outstanding marketing phenomenon that has attracted millions of children and adults to fantasy writing. There is no doubt that Rowling has a masterly command of dialogue and of the intricacies of plotting. She has created a likeable and resilient main character, and a convincing and enticing secondary world. However, her writing occasionally lapses into the prosaic, some of her ideas are clearly derivative and the later books in particular would have benefited from a substantive edit. Despite this, the series – in particular, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999) – may well become classics, joining other great European fantasies for children.
