I do not know another Australian writer whose work arouses such divergent, even diametrically opposed, reactions from general readers, students of Herbert and academic critics as does Herbert’s. Reference to the secondary sources listed in Clancy’s Bibliography will provide some confirmation of this. During the past few years I have four times taught a full semester course on Herbert’s works. The reactions of students have varied extravagantly. But the most common critical evaluations have been ones which more or less coincide with those expressed by Clancy, and which I happen to share, although with some minor reservations.

Summed up, Clancy’s evaluations of Herbert’s works are: that his allegedly autobiographical Disturbing Element might be a useful aid to an understanding and interpretation of his major fiction; the novelette Seven Emus is a very slight piece indeed; in Larger Than Life the best of the short stories, the earlier ones, show the ‘beginnings of the much richer and more complex ming­ling of comedy with tragedy that characterises the mode of Capricornia’; Soldier’s Women is an artistic failure partly because of Herbert’s didactism in pressing upon the reader his eccentric ideas about female sexuality, and partly because of his ‘uneasiness in creating an [urban] environment that is foreign to him’; Capricornia is a masterpiece, ‘an achievement unique in Australian fiction’; Poor Fellow My Country, for all its ideas and intentions (which are sometimes noble), is another artistic failure, ‘a kind of literary brontosaurus’, which in future years will be regarded primarily as a literary curiosity (like J.D. Davidson’s The White Thorntree).

Most critics share Clancy’s enthusiasm for Capricornia. Not all would consider it a masterpiece, but, as Clancy points out, it would automatically be included as a prescribed text in any serious survey course on Australian literature. Critical opinion is most sharply divided over Poor Fellow My Country and, to a much smaller degree, over Soldier’s Women.

Clancy’s explication of the weaknesses of Poor Fellow My Country is most persuasive. He argues that it is the failure of the main character, Jeremy Delacy, as ‘a figure who can author­itatively embody the novel’s central insights that is at the heart of its weaknesses’. Artistically damaging also is Herbert’s zest as the omniscient narrator in denigrating certain characters when their own actions in the text do not justify this: Pat, Hannaford, Shamus Finnucane, and Fay McFee are conspicuous examples.

Clearly, in Herbert’s work the reader must distinguish between what the narrator says about the characters and how the characters establish their own personalities through their actions. Most important in this regard is Herbert’s supposed (by himself and some critics) preoccupation with the theme of parental domination. Herbert has referred to this often enough, but, as Clancy notes, it is a preoccupation ‘stated more than rendered artistically.

I must take issue with Clancy on a couple of points. He does refer to ‘one of the more outrageous venturings of [Herbert] the self-styled romantic liar’, yet seems to take at face value too much of what Herbert says about himself, especially in Disturbing Element. Herbert seems to me to have taken almost as much delight in creating mysteries about himself as did that other enigmatic Australian writer Miles Franklin.

His writings and public statements abound in contradictions, distortions, and exaggerations. For example, the description he gives of the ‘sun-silvered strip of sand’ and the railway system he describes at the beginning of Disturbing Element constitute an unlikely Port Hedland, his claimed birthplace. I would take with a pinch of salt several other Herbertian assertions which Clancy seems to accept. Examples are the number and variety of his youthful sexual adventures described in Disturbing Element, and even lists of unfinished or destroyed manuscripts which Herbert described in a Meanjin article and in various letters.

I think Clancy is a little too harsh in his dismissal of Soldier’s Women. He suggests that the minutiae (clothes, coiffure, eating places, songs, not to mention specificity of time, which Clancy ignores) are superfluous, a form of padding, repetitive and mechanical, and finally boring. I don’t agree, but cannot argue my case in full here. Suffice it to say that I think these details of day to day existence have been carefully developed to heighten the contrast with a world gone out of control largely because of the exigencies of war and the unnatural behaviour of the women.

There is, I feel sure, an important omission in the book which I hope will be rectified by other critics who, unlike Clancy, have been granted personal interviews by Herbert. In view of Herbert’s close relationship with ‘Inky’ Stephensen in the 1930s and the importance of Delacy’s involvement in the Free Australia movement in Poor Fellow My Country, it would be interesting to establish Herbert’s connection, if any, with the Australia First movement.

Clancy’s Xavier Herbert contains some errors of presentation which closer editing might have avoided. This is somewhat ironic, for one criticism Clancy makes of Poor Fellow My Country is the ‘slipshod, careless presentation of the book’. While certainly not saying the same about Clancy’s book, I would have been happier had he been able to make up his mind whether he was writing for an overseas or an Australian audience.

Early in the book, for example, he provides paranthetic explanations for the terms ‘bottle-oh’ . and ‘Liberal Party’, but later does not see the need to do so for ‘Yalmaru’. There is some repetition of argument, especially in the preface and then in the chapters on specific books, and it is not always perfectly clear whether value judgements refer only to the book being discussed in a particular chapter or to Herbert’s works as a whole. Finally, there are too many proof-reading errors: Selina is variously referred to as Selina, Selena, and Serena; Prindy becomes Priddy, eunuch is spelt enuch; Rosa is said to be Materkin’s daughter instead of her daughter-in-law; the author of The Thorn Birds is said to be Colleen MacDonough; pagination does not commence until page 23; and so on. But such errors are minor. Laurie Clancy’s book is a welcome addition to the growing collection of Australian literary criticism, and doubly welcome because its subject, Xavier Herbert, has not yet had the critical attention his work deserves.