But Pacific Highway is also a serious, even a political book. The style represents an attempt at literary ecology. Refusing to force the world into a plot – that’s the way of capitalist exploitation, he says – he lets it be. ‘It’s not a question of trying to talk down the world but of talking to ... accommodate it.’ So his book becomes an image of ‘the world itself which is pretty enduring and can accommodate and enjoy and delight in and maybe even needs the talking, the layers of talking provide its protection from the rays and forces and transmissions of space, much like an ozone layer’. For anyone with a taste for fantasy, philosophy, lyrical description and ironic play with forms of life, politics and literature this is a book to read.

Jim Legasse’s The Same Old Story is also a skilful book. But here the perspective is narrower, more individual. Legasse is obviously more involved in his material, a kind of discontinuous narrative which unfolds the picture of a young American in Australia looking at himself, his American girlfriend, his American childhood, his anomalous, quirky but gifted landlady and his visions and revisions of all this material. This is sharply and precisely dope, but there is also a sense of pressure. The world of the stories seems to expand beyond its proper sphere as fiction and the narrator’s voice grows more personal even as it tries for the coolness of irony: ‘there are too many people telling my story, too many people writing my poem, making me face myself before I’m ready’. The distinction between life and art is an important one especially if art is to illuminate life; but this book has not quite made it yet, though it obviously is one of the writer’s great interests. The result is that the world remains too much itself even within the frame of fiction. As Dad the slaughter man says in the second story, taxed with weeping over Lassie on television, ‘There’s a big difference between killin’ and huntin’, and besides, I wasn’t sure the boy’d be saved.’ There’s an image there, complete with caption, of the strengths and weaknesses of these painfully vivid but unployful stories.

Gedaliah Shaiak moves still more uneasily between life and art. Force and Defiance, set in Poland at the end of the eighteenth century tells of the suffering of the Jews at the hands of Christians. But it, too, deals with the question of identity. Mr Shaiak is a member of the Melbourne Jewish community, and members of this community will find this a moving book. Others may find it less moving because less accessible, mainly because its language and narrative techniques only point towards the world they are describing, not bring it alive.

Billy Two-Toes’ Rainbow is just the opposite: less passionate and personal but very professional. Hugh Atkinson has written several best sellers, and this may be another. The story is timely – about an Aborigine who finds treasure in the desert near Coober Pedy, a prehistoric creature whose bones have turned to opal and about the attempts of various whites and Asians, the good, the complex and an ex CIA operative, who try to find its whereabouts. It is also gripping. The characters may be stereotypes – a journalist whose life is falling apart, a mysterious Yugo Slav with a tragic wartime past, a beautiful widow – and of course – the ex-CIA man, the brute from Vietnam – but, sharply observed arid accurately described, they come vividly alive within the frame of the book. So too does life on the fields. You learn about the mines, the underground houses, the difficulties of hiring a car, about the blacks’ pub and the squalor of the reserve. Most of all, Atkinson knows how to tell a story, keeps readers guessing, at the same time providing clues and raising more questions. True, all this is contrived. But there is no sense of selling the reader’s intelligence short. On the contrary, it is alerted to important issues, the clash between black and white law, the international interests intent on our mineral resources, the inheritance of war and violence at work on many people in our society, and so on.

So, in the end perhaps these four books do hang together, to provide an image of our society; its variety, its anxieties and its brief moments of poise and joy.