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Absolutely Revolting

April 1990, no. 119

Welcome to the April 1990 issue of Australian Book Review.

Kathryn Hope reviews The Weather and Other Gods by Robyn Ferrell
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Contents Category: Australian Fiction
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Article Title: The forecast is fine
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Robyn Ferrell has written a novel as beguiling as champagne on a summer’ s evening - astringent, sparkling and more-ish. The fizz of dry wit comes bubbling up through layers of metaphor as Leo Wetherill (aptly named) embarks on a journey of self-discovery, alternately abetted and frustrated by the quixotic Weather Gods of the title.
Book 1 Title: The Weather and Other Gods
Book Author: Robyn Ferrell
Book 1 Biblio: Francis Allen, $12.95 pb, 167 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Robyn Ferrell has written a novel as beguiling as champagne on a summer’ s evening – astringent, sparkling and more-ish. The fizz of dry wit comes bubbling up through layers of metaphor as Leo Wetherill (aptly named) embarks on a journey of self-discovery, alternately abetted and frustrated by the quixotic Weather Gods of the title.

Leo, ostensibly your average Australian bureaucrat, is the scientific mastermind behind Project Arable, a rain-making scheme designed to convert the Outback into green and productive pasture. But within Leo’s suit-clad breast paradoxes see the – empiricism vs poetry, utilitarianism vs aesthetics – making him prey to doubts about the wisdom of a venture which will impose a European ideal of useful domesticity on the vast red desert. Since his youth, he explains, he has been obsessed with the weather, with huge natural forces who ‘magic’ he has tried to understand through meteorology, while fearing to dispel their mystery.

Read more: Kathryn Hope reviews 'The Weather and Other Gods' by Robyn Ferrell

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Wenche Ommundsen reviews The Mighty World of Eye: Stories/Anti-Stories by David Parker
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Eye am an other: (or Eye and Mee talk about their phobias)
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Fictions about academic life have always been about sex, but these days the sexiest thing to write about is theory. Fortunately for the writer who wants to write about both sex and theory, the equation between sexual and textual intercourses has excellent credentials in the poststructuralist canon. Followers of Barthes and Derrida have taken to the pleasures of the theoretical text with an eagerness aptly defined by the sexual metaphors they overindulge in. Others, less enamoured by theoretical discourses, have found that these provide an excellent target for parody and satire, and thus manage at once to partake in the playful intercourse and retain a critical, mocking distance. What tends to be forgotten, amidst all this textual cavorting, is that literary theory is a reasonably rigid intellectual discipline: playful though it may be, it is easy to get it all wrong!
Book 1 Title: The Mighty World of Eye
Book 1 Subtitle: Stories/Anti-Stories
Book Author: David Parker
Book 1 Biblio: Simon & Schuster/New Endeavour Press, $16.95 pb, 194 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Fictions about academic life have always been about sex, but these days the sexiest thing to write about is theory. Fortunately for the writer who wants to write about both sex and theory, the equation between sexual and textual intercourses has excellent credentials in the poststructuralist canon. Followers of Barthes and Derrida have taken to the pleasures of the theoretical text with an eagerness aptly defined by the sexual metaphors they overindulge in. Others, less enamoured by theoretical discourses, have found that these provide an excellent target for parody and satire, and thus manage at once to partake in the playful intercourse and retain a critical, mocking distance. What tends to be forgotten, amidst all this textual cavorting, is that literary theory is a reasonably rigid intellectual discipline: playful though it may be, it is easy to get it all wrong!

At the centre of David Parker’s complex work (there, my theoretical innocence has been exposed - centre, work and author indeed!) are thirteen apparently autobiographical short fictions, held together by the name of  the main character, Roland Eye. But Roland, or Roly, is not the same person in each story. He is generally a writer or academic, more often than not he has a wife named Magda and two or three young children. The different Eyes are moreover connected by a common weakness – they suffer from some kind of delusion about themselves, about the world, or about their relationships to other characters.

Read more: Wenche Ommundsen reviews 'The Mighty World of Eye: Stories/Anti-Stories' by David Parker

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James Jupp reviews The Politics of the Future: The role of social movements by Christine Jennett and Randal G. Stewart
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Contents Category: Politics
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Article Title: The Army of God beside Gay Liberation
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Twenty years ago there was a fashion in American political science of putting together collections of articles under a generic title such as ‘Political Parties in Developing Nations’. As with so many other American fashions, this spread to Australia and the edited collection is now common­place in the social sciences. The problem with all such collections, and it applies to this one, is the apples and pears syndrome – not all fruits are the same despite their common classification.
Book 1 Title: The Politics of the Future
Book 1 Subtitle: The role of social movements
Book Author: Christine Jennett and Randal G. Stewart
Book 1 Biblio: Macmillan, $34.95 pb, 471 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Twenty years ago there was a fashion in American political science of putting together collections of articles under a generic title such as ‘Political Parties in Developing Nations’. As with so many other American fashions, this spread to Australia and the edited collection is now common­place in the social sciences. The problem with all such collections, and it applies to this one, is the apples and pears syndrome – not all fruits are the same despite their common classification.

What Jennet and Stewart have done here is certainly worth doing and most of the contributions are worth reading. The question still remains as to whether movements in, for example, Australia, New Caledonia, the United States, Nicaragua and the Lebanon have much in common apart from their self-designation as movements. The title raises another query. Are movements examples of the politics of the future, or are they simply alternative and preceding forms of what eventually become institutionalised political parties?

Read more: James Jupp reviews 'The Politics of the Future: The role of social movements' by Christine Jennett...

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Phillip Siggins reviews The Best Man for this Kind of Thing by Margaret Coombs
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Contents Category: Australian Fiction
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Article Title: Serious comedy at the psychiatrist’s
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Margaret Coombs’s second novel is an account of personal struggle against oppression and an analysis of the painful growth of awareness wryly viewed with humour and compassion. This is not a tranquil recollection; it is a confronting, buffeting novel, racy, witty and uneven.

Helen Ayling (pun intended) is both protagonist and narrator. The narrator, perhaps occupying time present, views her younger Australian self living in London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when she was overwhelmed by misery following the birth of her second daughter, Jemima. She is exhausted and depressed, but she knows that her problem is not biochemical. The combination of fear, exhaustion and isolation forces her, however, to accept the diagnosis of puerperal depression despite her sharp-eyed assessment of her own capacity to self-dramatize and the capacity of others for self-interest.
Book 1 Title: The Best Man for this Kind of Thing
Book Author: Margaret Coombs
Book 1 Biblio: Black Swan, $14.95 pb, 361 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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Margaret Coombs’s second novel is an account of personal struggle against oppression and an analysis of the painful growth of awareness wryly viewed with humour and compassion. This is not a tranquil recollection; it is a confronting, buffeting novel, racy, witty, and uneven.

Helen Ayling (pun intended) is both protagonist and narrator. The narrator, perhaps occupying time present, views her younger Australian self living in London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when she was overwhelmed by misery following the birth of her second daughter, Jemima. She is exhausted and depressed, but she knows that her problem is not biochemical. The combination of fear, exhaustion and isolation forces her, however, to accept the diagnosis of puerperal depression despite her sharp-eyed assessment of her own capacity to self-dramatize and the capacity of others for self-interest.

Read more: Phillip Siggins reviews 'The Best Man for this Kind of Thing' by Margaret Coombs

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Doris Leadbetter reviews The Lawyer and the Rhine Maiden by Lloyd Davies
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Contents Category: Fiction
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Article Title: Radical in court
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If it is a truism that every person has a novel in them, then it is equally hackneyed to suggest that every doctor/lawyer/vicar has a fund of entertaining anecdotes waiting for retirement from public life to allow the leisure for setting them down on paper. Yet we can all recall with pleasure a few such collections of stories. They are not, perhaps, all that well written. They certainly have no place in the millstream of contemporary literature, busily recycling fashions in style and content, and establishing new paradigms for those who follow breathlessly to admire and adopt. Nevertheless, a small book of anecdotal, humorous tales can be just the ticket when you won’t a book that won’t, thank you very much, stretch your mind.
Book 1 Title: The Lawyer and the Rhine Maiden
Book Author: Lloyd Davies
Book 1 Biblio: Poppy Gully Press, 143pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
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If it is a truism that every person has a novel in them, then it is equally hackneyed to suggest that every doctor/lawyer/vicar has a fund of entertaining anecdotes waiting for retirement from public life to allow the leisure for setting them down on paper. Yet we can all recall with pleasure a few such collections of stories. They are not, perhaps, all that well written. They certainly have no place in the millstream of contemporary literature, busily recycling fashions in style and content, and establishing new paradigms for those who follow breathlessly to admire and adopt. Nevertheless, a small book of anecdotal, humorous tales can be just the ticket when you won’t a book that won’t, thank you very much, stretch your mind.

Read more: Doris Leadbetter reviews 'The Lawyer and the Rhine Maiden' by Lloyd Davies

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