One of the finest stories in the collection, ‘The Ordeal’’, focusses on the trauma of personal ordeal which is present in all the stories. Set in a hazy courtroom situation that recalls Lewis Carroll and Kafka, the alleged rape of a woman is interpreted from various points of view (lay, religious, historical), to ascertain whether nothing was taken ‘that wasn’t freely given’. Victim and criminal become confused in a surrealistic dumb show of horror and confrontation, which robs the woman of her identity, and reduces her finally to a pitiful image of violation and suffering.

Not all the stories are so harrowing, but the anxiety of some kind of personal ordeal is always present. Clanchy’s characters are somehow deficient in, or deprived of, the nor­mal resources of human affection. In ‘Lie of the Land’, a young couple struggle on an outback farm. Marjorie’s displacement in such a vast expanse (‘An English farm girl, she had never really taken to life in the bush’) becomes symbolic of the ‘vast desert spaces of desire and in­tention’ that separate them. His affections are reserved for Maisy, a favourite heifer. It is a kind of Lawrentian union, where words are an unnecessary encumbrance, and where natural affection for an animal provides an alternative to wasted human potential. It does, however, bordering on the obsessive, and the tragedy of the union is symbolized in the unnamed farmer’s delivery of Maisy’s stillborn calf. Similarly in ‘Sacrifice’, one of the most powerful, and at the same time sensitive stories in the collection, a biology experiment in ‘nurturing and attachment’ (students are given a fowl’s egg to care for) becomes for the central character a cathartic experience of awakening independence and growth. Disenchanted, and at worst repelled by the cavorting of her free-spirited mother, Jenny’s deep and maternal affection for her egg leads to a renewal of her love for her mother, and more importantly, to a newfound individual strength; a strength which is founded on an awareness of mortality, and the preciousness of affection of any kind.

The alienation brought about by the confrontation of different worlds is dramatized in stories such as ‘Decency’ and ‘The Outsider’. But there is also the possibility of a mysterious confluence of alien, even hostile worlds, in two remark­able stories; ‘Guardians’ and ‘The Gunmen’. In these stories, some­thing compassionate and essentially human transpires between in­dividuals caught in conflict of a racial or political nature.

Not untouched by wit, Clanchy has a keen eye for the comic, and is sensitive to the humorous possibilities of the incongruous (‘there wasn’t much call for chilli powder in Northcote’). The sequence of short sketches which comprise the story ‘Murphy’s Lore’ is a portrait of a Catholic education in the tradition of Stephen Dedalus, but far wittier and more unselfconscious (‘I told him I always spent mine (vocation) at the beach with my parents’).

Lie of the Land is an engaging book, written by an author of intensity and insight.