The brilliant Italo Calvino writes If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, the slightest of all his books, but because it incorporates the big trick of shifting the edges of reality we end up getting a landslide of such novels. Not everyone is as good as Calvino and Marquez and most of the rest just end up ruining good books or deliberately creating bad ones.

Mark Henshaw, in Out of the Line of Fire, interrupts quite a good story with slabs of German and questions to which the reader already knows the answer – that is, if the reader is older than nine, the age at which we recognise reality with unerring accuracy.

I grieve for the writers who have allowed the worm into their apple. Recently, I was enjoying a story sent to me for Australian Short Stories. The writer was new to me but had a very exciting style: sharp, witty, rich – the sort of ability all writers crave. The story was a love story, as most stories are in one form or another, but suddenly the author felt compelled to begin a dissertation on the nature of reality, the nature of fiction itself

We had mirrors mirroring mirrors, actors without scripts, scripts without actors, people wondering if they were, all the usual tricks of the nervous writer who has been led to believe that the story is not enough. What a pity, as the Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek would have said.

Roger McDonald is not a nervous writer. He tells a straight yarn about greed, aspiration, dreams, love, and horses. He has no doubt that all of these exist.

The remarkable thing about Rough Wallaby is the almost seamless construction of the garment. There are at least·seven characters who are of equal weight in the novel and each has an independent story which demands a different point of entry to, and departure from, the novel. If you look at the back of this tapestry, you’ll be staggered by the complexity. If you just read the book, you won’t notice the design. Great storytelling. No lumps, no crude darns, no red-herring overlocking.

The reader identifies with each character in tum so that our perspective is switched through a series of different lenses. The least endearing character sounds like the chat show announcer who interrupts callers with ‘Well listen madam, and I’m probably flattering you …’, and ‘Look here madam, and perhaps you are …’ He’d be hard to cherish, that man, and the Terry Punch in Wallaby is just as ugly, and yet there’s a point in the novel when, against our better judgement, we see a chink in Punch’s armour and our compassion floods towards him before the cynic in us staunches the lesion of our morality. Oh, to be Ghandi.

There’s no sneer in McDonald’s book, he loves them all: the lost and the lorn, the rich and the reckless, the halt and the lame, the gnomes and the gods. Without love you don’t have art, that ability to move our souls, our shared soul.

The story goes like this: Talk-back king Terry Punch and expatriate Maoris, the Hinemoa twins, swap one poorly performing race horse for a potential champion. The dud is Vo Vo Connection, whose name is either taken from the current track champion or that biscuit which could only have been created in 1960s Australia. The real horse is called Rich Man’s Gold and his darn is Poor Man’s Roses. You can hum along if you know Patsy Cline’s old song.

The real horse gets hidden on Chink Lloyd and Wanda Malloy’s failing stud farm where Wanda tries to breed champions and Chink and Nils Haase train animals to perform extraordinary acts. Nils, who is married to society Daughter, Regina Delippit, gets buried in his own septic tank ditch and dies, but Royal Dumphry, Punch’s producer, gives him the kiss of life. As Royal is rather a gay blade, there’s also a bad-taste joke in there about AIDS.

My summary cannot enlighten you at all, but that’s how a good story is – impossible to summarise. You need to read the book.

I do have some reservations about Rough Wallaby. For instance, the last chapter could be left out. It neatens things up too much in my mind and deflates the balloon of the fiction. We are lured to care for the characters during the novel and to wonder how they’ll make out, but we’re robbed of that care and wonder in the last six pages.

My other quibble is that Chink’s period of introspection and self-doubt occurs rather abruptly and without premonition and so it stands out starkly from the other more subtle developments of character.

The winners in the novel are the women. Wanda gets her stud farm, Suzy Appleway gets her man and land, and Regina Delippit finds herself and takes on hospitality industry night classes (the latter being a slender victory, but then it’s a rather slender mind).

So there you are – an intricate yarn without one allusion to Freud or Nietzsche, not a mirror in sight, no symbolic snakes in the grass, no allegorical mountain climb, no foreign language supplement to lure the cognoscenti to primp and preen, just a story. Roger McDonald will still have library stamps in the back of his books long after the ‘dance of the seven critical veils’ writers have their tomes propping up the um so that librarians can get their cups under the tap.