After listening to Dorothy Johnston being interviewed on radio on her experiences in a massage parlour one would have expected a different kind of novel from Tunnel Vision. No doubt part of Johnston’s appeal as an interviewee came from the publicity blurb which announced that “she worked for a time in a massage parlour in the late 70s, and became involved in a conflict in St Kilda over whether prostitution should be legalized. She helped form a Prostitutes’ Action Group. Though Tunnel Vision isn’t autobiographical, the inspiration for it came partly from this experience.”

For those who wish for a realistic representation of the massage parlour business Johnston’s novel will be a disappointment: for those who desire titillation, try The Delta of Venus. But those longing for a lyrical, nostalgic circling through a world of prostitutes with healing thighs will be taken in by Johnston. She has created a fantasy world in which the warehouse is a whorehouse selling not only relieving massages but also the message that tunnel vision may be as liberating as it is narrowing. It is a novel of paradox.

John Manifold died in Brisbane on 19 April 1985. At his funeral a few days later the Eureka Flag covered his coffin, some of his own ballads were sung, and three fiddlers played. His death removes us from one of the great idiosyncratic talents of Australian letters. Colonial aristocrat, English middle-class intellectual, Australian nationalist and international socialist, his poetry at its best looms as large as any written in his time.

Scion of one of the first Western District families, John Streeter Manifold was born in Melbourne in 1915 and, after early education by governesses on the family properties of Purrumbete and Milangil, was sent to Geelong Grammar, where at the age of seventeen he wrote a translation of a lyric by Catallus which his Classics master, Chauncy Masterman, thought the finest he had seen. In 1934 he was sent for a year to the University of Tours, and subsequently studied at Cambridge. Here he joined the Communist Party, to which he remained affiliated until his death.

The dust jacket puff tells us that Gary Langford’s new novel is “in the richly bizarre vein of John Irvine”. For some this will be a less than enticing recommendation. But Vanities is a less sentimental book than Irvine could have written. Irvine’s humour is the measure of his characters’ untrammeled imaginativeness in an otherwise pedestrian world, a measure this reader finds fatuous. While Langford does have a tendency towards Irvine’s brand of brittle whimsy, his characters’ wit is a dissembling, defensive style, an indication of their vulnerability. He is determined to indulge neither his characters nor his readers with whimsicality.

Vanities, though, suffers from a different kind of sentimentality. It canvasses a wide range of topical social issues as representative of the spirit of the age. Langford believes, in a vague, unspecific way, that these determine individual and family life, a belief that encourages, on the one hand, a facile cynicism, and on the other, a sentimental faith in the therapeutic value of truth-telling:

In the USA recently a group of booksellers brought an action against the publisher Dell. They alleged discriminatory trade practices in that Dell supplied chain store booksellers and supermarkets at discounts greater than those granted to independent retailers. In its defence Dell argued that the massive cost of representation to the many scattered independents precluded the allocation of increased discounts.

Representation – the man or woman, car samples, jackets, knowledge, persuasion, trust and chutzpah which in Dell’s calculations added up to an expensive but essential function.