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Absolutely Revolting

November 1997, no. 196

Stephen Matthews reviews Sparring with Shadows by Archimede Fusillo and Black Ice by Lucy Sussex
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Contents Category: Australian Fiction
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Article Title: Gritty Fantasy
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Awareness of the tension between fantasy and realism in fiction has been heightened in recent years by the trend in young adult novels towards gritty urban realism. The tension itself is not new, however: in America half a century ago it was known as the ‘milk bottle versus Grimm’ controversy. Although there is a clear distinction between extreme examples of fantasy and realism, the intervening grey area encompasses a great deal of fiction which successfully mingles the two. Thus Sparring with Shadows, though on the face of it another example of contemporary realism, is peopled with characters who are clearly shaped to serve the author’s intentions; they’re believable but they’re not as ‘real’ as hyper-realists might prefer. Black Ice, on the other hand, is built on elements of the fantastic – spirits, poltergeists, séances, and the like – but it sets those elements against a recognisable late twentieth-century background in which a teenage girl is struggling to understand the disintegration of her parents’ marriage.
Book 1 Title: Sparring with Shadows
Book Author: Archimede Fusillo
Book 1 Biblio: Penguin $12.95 pb, 219 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Readings Link: www.booktopia.com.au/sparring-with-shadows-archimede-fusillo/ebook/9781742284507.html
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Awareness of the tension between fantasy and realism in fiction has been heightened in recent years by the trend in young adult novels towards gritty urban realism. The tension itself is not new, however: in America half a century ago it was known as the ‘milk bottle versus Grimm’ controversy. Although there is a clear distinction between extreme examples of fantasy and realism, the intervening grey area encompasses a great deal of fiction which successfully mingles the two. Thus Sparring with Shadows, though on the face of it another example of contemporary realism, is peopled with characters who are clearly shaped to serve the author’s intentions; they’re believable but they’re not as ‘real’ as hyper-realists might prefer. Black Ice, on the other hand, is built on elements of the fantastic – spirits, poltergeists, séances, and the like – but it sets those elements against a recognisable late twentieth-century background in which a teenage girl is struggling to understand the disintegration of her parents’ marriage.

Read more: Stephen Matthews reviews 'Sparring with Shadows' by Archimede Fusillo and 'Black Ice' by Lucy Sussex

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David Malouf reviews The Oxford Companion to Australian Music edited by Warren Bebbington
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Contents Category: Music
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Twenty-five or thirty years ago, when it was still fashionable to speak of the Great Australian Emptiness, we took this image of the geographical dead heart of Australia as implying a cultural emptiness as well, a suggestion that too little had happened or been made here to give the mind, the civilised mind, anything to hang on to, identify with or make its own.
Book 1 Title: The Oxford Companion to Australian Music
Book Author: Warren Bebbington
Book 1 Biblio: Oxford University Press, $79.95 hb, 608 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
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Twenty-five or thirty years ago, when it was still fashionable to speak of the Great Australian Emptiness, we took this image of the geographical dead heart of Australia as implying a cultural emptiness as well, a suggestion that too little had happened or been made here to give the mind, the civilised mind, anything to hang on to, identify with or make its own.

Well, the idea of geographical emptiness has gone. Geologically, and as the home of a rich flora and fauna, Australia now looms in our head as a crowded space, made alive to us, in a living way, partly through our own discovery of it as a place we are deeply at home in, partly through our understanding, if only in a beginning way, of that great earlier network of meanings that was laid over it by the Aborigines; crowded too, now that scholars and publishers over these last years have made the whole story known to us, with the products of more than two hundred years of dense and daily living, with country houses, bark huts, regional forms of domestic architecture, furniture, silverware, paintings – artefacts of every sort that mark and define our presence and are, as much as anything can be, the evidence of a unique identity.

Read more: David Malouf reviews 'The Oxford Companion to Australian Music' edited by Warren Bebbington

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J.R. Carroll reviews Forget Me If You Can by Peter Corris and The Dark Edge by Richard Harland
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Criminal Quirks
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Just in case anyone hasn’t head of Cliff Hardy, Peter Corris leads off his new collection of short stories featuring the Sydney private eyes, Forget Me If You Can, with ‘The Hearing’ – an informative little piece in which Hardy, his license suspended, undergoes an interview with a ‘psycho-sociological profiler’ to see if he is a fit and proper person to carry on snooping. In compressed form Corris gives us the essential Hardy: aggressive, cynical, hard-bitten, rude or charming (depending), middle aged, battle-scarred, divorced, ex-smoker, drinks too much, as honest as the job allows. You get a good sense of the man’s strengths and weaknesses, most of which are expanded on in the dozen stories that follow.
Book 1 Title: Forget Me If You Can
Book Author: Peter Corris
Book 1 Biblio: Bantam $14.95pb, 255pp,
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Title: The Dark Edge
Book 2 Author: Richard Harland
Book 2 Biblio: Pan $14.95pb, 563pp,
Book 2 Author Type: Author
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Just in case anyone hasn’t head of Cliff Hardy, Peter Corris leads off his new collection of short stories featuring the Sydney private eyes, Forget Me If You Can, with ‘The Hearing’ – an informative little piece in which Hardy, his license suspended, undergoes an interview with a ‘psycho-sociological profiler’ to see if he is a fit and proper person to carry on snooping. In compressed form Corris gives us the essential Hardy: aggressive, cynical, hard-bitten, rude or charming (depending), middle aged, battle-scarred, divorced, ex-smoker, drinks too much, as honest as the job allows. You get a good sense of the man’s strengths and weaknesses, most of which are expanded on in the dozen stories that follow.

Read more: J.R. Carroll reviews 'Forget Me If You Can' by Peter Corris and 'The Dark Edge' by Richard Harland

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Peter Pierce reviews A Nation at War: Australian politics, society and diplomacy during the Vietnam War, 1965–1975 by Peter Edwards
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Contents Category: War
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A nation at war is a less than gripping tide, although it is suggestively ambiguous. Australia was at war in Vietnam for most of the decade covered in Peter Edwards’s book. In senses chiefly, but not wholly, metaphorical, it was also a society ‘at war’, divided over conscription and the commitment of troops to Vietnam. The excellent cover photograph illuminates the latter implication of Edwards’s title, as well as the importance of media coverage of both overseas conflict and domestic protest against it. A newsreel photographer looks back into another camera, and away from the policeman who is struggling to shift an inert demonstrator.
Book 1 Title: A Nation at War
Book 1 Subtitle: Australian politics, society and diplomacy during the Vietnam War, 1965–1975
Book Author: Peter Edwards
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $59.95 hb, 460 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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A nation at war is a less than gripping tide, although it is suggestively ambiguous. Australia was at war in Vietnam for most of the decade covered in Peter Edwards’s book. In senses chiefly, but not wholly, metaphorical, it was also a society ‘at war’, divided over conscription and the commitment of troops to Vietnam. The excellent cover photograph illuminates the latter implication of Edwards’s title, as well as the importance of media coverage of both overseas conflict and domestic protest against it. A newsreel photographer looks back into another camera, and away from the policeman who is struggling to shift an inert demonstrator.

Read more: Peter Pierce reviews 'A Nation at War: Australian politics, society and diplomacy during the...

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Ross Fitzgerald reviews To Constitute a Nation by Helen Irving
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Contents Category: Politics
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Article Title: A Concentrated Act
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Remarkably to some, this cultural history of the drafting of the Australian constitution is an exciting and triumphant book. Helen Irving manages to fill in adroitly the blank pages of our constitution as a cultural artefact and to celebrate the complicated processes whereby Australia became a nation on the first day of the new century.

To actually write the framework for a nation by agreement indeed represents a concentrated act of the imagination. Moreover, it demonstrated, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, a profound optimism in this country’s future. As Irving rightly argues, the nation of Australia itself was the product not of external pressure or crisis, nor due to any religious or ethnic imperatives, but was created in a time of peace. This achievement, and the codification of our national powers and institutions, despite their obvious limitations, rightly deserves celebration.
Book 1 Title: To Constitute a Nation
Book 1 Subtitle: A cultural history of Australia’s constitution
Book Author: Helen Irving
Book 1 Biblio: CUP, $49.95 hb, 272 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Remarkably to some, this cultural history of the drafting of the Australian constitution is an exciting and triumphant book. Helen Irving manages to fill in adroitly the blank pages of our constitution as a cultural artefact and to celebrate the complicated processes whereby Australia became a nation on the first day of the new century.

To actually write the framework for a nation by agreement indeed represents a concentrated act of the imagination. Moreover, it demonstrated, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, a profound optimism in this country’s future. As Irving rightly argues, the nation of Australia itself was the product not of external pressure or crisis, nor due to any religious or ethnic imperatives, but was created in a time of peace. This achievement, and the codification of our national powers and institutions, despite their obvious limitations, rightly deserves celebration.

Read more: Ross Fitzgerald reviews 'To Constitute a Nation' by Helen Irving

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