Now, blessedly, we have the extended studies that we need to muster around Such is Life itself. Following hot on the hooves of John Barnes’s biography of Furphy (The Order of Things, reviewed last month in ABR), there come OUP’s Annotated Such is Life and Julian Croft’s The Life and Opinions of Tom Collins. A life, a marvellously rich edition and a critical vade mecum or omnium gatherum – these are the (adj.) stuff to give the troops. They will help readers from now on to clarify the relations between Nature, Art, and Mirage, to use Tom Collins’s terms.

Frances Devlin-Glass, Robin Eaden, Lois Hoffmann, and G. W. Turner have done a scrumptious job in preparing their Annotated Such is Life. Their three hundred and sixty six pages of annotations are learned, witty, and judicious (despite the failure, at times, to respect Aboriginal sensibilities). Not only would Deputy Assistant-Sub-Inspector Collins himself have rejoiced in reading them, any reader can graze through ‘these short and simple analyses’ with sustained delight, reading them perhaps as an elegantly informative kind of art alongside the thronging life of the novel itself.

These notes are of two main kinds: identification of words and quotations, whether from the Bible, Shakespeare, and other texts or from the seething vernacular, and on the other hand explanations of historical, political and legal background. Even botanical species are precisely identified. The only error that has caught my eye in the notes is a confusion of Ben Jonson with Doctor Johnson.

These annotations come to an end with an elegant gesture which might be said to match the ending of the story itself: ‘But any reader who has persevered with the text and the notes thus far will not need to be told that to reach finality in Furphy studies is often a sign of incomplete understanding.’ Sounds to me a bit like that beaut old paradox of the Cretan liar.

Julian Croft’s Furphy hand book travels under the nice title of The Life and Opinions of Tom Collins. Croft has a pretty good sense of the readerly negotiations that have to go on as we shake Collins and Furphy out of one another. His study of the books ­– not only the big novel, but its two offspring fictions, as well as Furphy’s lesser writings – has a cheerfully raw hide-and stringy-bark feel to it.

Croft enters the discussion of Such is Life by way of a chapter, ‘The Critical Context’, in which he canters through past criticism, lapped in philosophical torpor, but methodical in his appetite for detail. The next three chapters divvy up the ensemble of readerly responses to the novel’s teasing under the successive rubrics of Toe Text’, ‘Preparing a Reading’, and ‘A Reading’. Here he historicises, demystifies, and straightforwardly explicates the text.

Well, more or less straightforwardly. For Croft is foxy enough to keep engaging in Furphyesque one twos, or moments of critique-as-imitation. Thus we have:

‘The original Such is Life was the work of that overdeveloped fictionist; the Such is Life we have today is that of the vulgarian, writing for the crowd up in Sydney in the Bulletin office. The vulgarian produced the better work.’

Or again, taking up an idea first developed in detail by R. M. Adams:

‘There are two obvious errors of fact [ in this chapter], but, of course, they may be subtle disruptions of the text introduced consciously by Furphy either to make fun of Tom or to heighten the reader’s awareness of the artificiality of this ‘realistic’ description of life.’

In passages such as this Croft is responding to literary necessity, for, if Furphy’s marvellous novel resembles the plastic glitter of post-modernist fiction it is strong, not weak, postmodernism that it anticipates, the books that still have something to say, not the flaccid puppets that are squeaked through by academic ventriloquists. And in paying tribute both to daggy realism and to the corridor of mirrors the critic must be double-voiced, or even inconsistent.

This study goes on to discuss Rigby’s Romance, linking the book speculatively with Furphy’s relations (the very word is misleading) with young women. It also provides a helpful census of characters in his fiction. Here we can follow in brief the life of Steve Thompson or Maud Beaudesart or even Pup, who is found to change colour from slate grey to blue to green in the course of events.

An interesting sidelight to all this; in the course of his critical survey Croft cites two essays of mine from the early 1960s, finding them both censorious. When I wrote these pieces I saw them as paeans in praise of our greatest novel. Has the critical climate changed so utterly? And is the change part of a new age in which nothing censorious should be written about any novel, good, bad or indifferent?

Enough of such tactless questions. These two books are very welcome indeed, and I hope that The Annotated Such is Life gets set on courses all over the place.