In this study of time in Modernist culture, Giles has taken an even more committedly Australian perspective; his title, after all, is drawn from a poem of R.D. FitzGerald’s. As he admits in his preface, this is the first book he has written entirely in Australia. Literary studies in this country is greatly in his debt for the way his thinking about global positioning has shaped and influenced these readings of Modernism and modernity. There’s nothing gestural about this approach. Giles isn’t adding some Australian writing to the margins of a predominantly northern understanding of the great wave of literary cultural modernity. His antipodean reorientation of the chronologies of modernist writing – that’s his specific interest here – is the result of what he refers to as a ‘parallax’ view of modernist culture. Parallax sight foregrounds where one is looking from, but also the fact of relativity, countermanding the idealised perspectives of supposedly ‘world’ or Archimedean points of view. This view not only integrates Australian literary and cultural history into a complex world system, but it simultaneously opens fissures in the NATO-centric version of modernity and Modernism.

This means that reading the temporal unconscious in geomodernist writing for its reversibility, the way in which it turns against the normalised sequences of historical progression, highlights the many effects of retrograde narrative in modernist writing. Thus, Conrad, alongside Furphy, alongside Proust, where The Secret Agent’s plot circles back on itself; and memory and belatedness shape everything Furphy and Proust wrote. James Joyce’s sister Margaret’s emigration to New Zealand as a Sister of Mercy, and their correspondence, allows Giles to follow up the antipodean dimensions in Finnegans Wake, its thematising of contrarieties, including hemispherical time: Tossmania, the Māori lyrics to the Haka, and Now Sealand. The reading of Katherine Mansfield alongside Henry Handel Richardson contrasts their variously deviant writing with the heterodox version of the imperial centre represented by Bloomsbury.

An important thread running through all Giles’s readings is the idea of the burlesque, which he sees as integral to the modes of Modernism. Emblematic here is the effect the strolling players have on Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and the ‘Burlesque’ movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. In a chapter about poetry, the readings of Kenneth Slessor, R.D. FitzGerald, and T.S. Eliot explore disparate levels of voice and personae, recognising their affinities; likewise, Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens alongside A.D. Hope’s antipodean burlesque, imagining anniversaries backwards, and impropriety and obscenity unfurling in reverse, as in Hope’s poem ‘Observation Car’.

Two of the bravura readings at the centre of this study are of Thomas Mann and Eleanor Dark. It’s worth reading this book for these alone. The reading of Mann is led into with a preface about retrograde ideas of time in Theodor W. Adorno – vis-à-vis European fascism and organicist version of time – Heidegger and Thomas Wolfe, as well as in the music of Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Mahler. Giles concentrates on Mann’s Buddenbrooks, Joseph and His Brothers, and The Magic Mountain, as well as Mann’s ideas of primitive regression in Germanic modernism. The perspectives on time in this reading of Mann’s fiction revolve around the insight of Hans Castorp, the central protagonist of The Magic Mountain, that ‘there is nothing “actual” about time’. With the reading of Dark, there is a sense of pique, understandably, about the ‘lamentable state of Australian literary criticism’ in the mid-twentieth century that saw her remarkable novel Waterway, for example, pretty much ignored in Australia, while reviewed widely in the United States. But Giles is most offended by the thickheaded reception of The Timeless Land trilogy and the lack of understanding by local critics of both Dark’s knowledge of the intellectual currents of her time, including liberalism, eugenics, and socialism, as well as the metafictional dimensions of her fiction. Giles reads Dark’s work in tandem with her close American contemporary James Farrell, who had an involvement with Australia in the immediate post-war years, visiting Australia and publishing in Meanjin. There are many fascinating points of difference with Dark.

There is also a fascinating interlude about H.G. Wells, his entanglements with Australia, and his The Conquest of Time (1942), with a fitting preface about Douglas Sirk’s 1937 film To New Shores (Zu neuen Ufern). This film was an attempt by a Nazi cultural organisation (pre-World War II UFA GmbH films) to ‘incorporate the other side of the world within its propaganda orbit’. Wells’s visit to Australia also just before World War II, to speak about the advancement of science in Canberra, was a kind of political antithesis to Sirk’s film, where he invoked Australian history and space in an ‘acidic negative sense, to demystify the narratives of popular nationalism that had cluttered up the Old World with, in 1939, such deadly consequences’. Not that anyone in Australia listened to him.

Giles concludes this book with a reading of Patrick White, Sidney Nolan, and Robert Lowell. This is about late Modernism and draws in the writing of Djuna Barnes and W.H. Auden as well as the music of Igor Stravinsky and Benjamin Britten. But the central figure here is White, particularly his later fiction (A Fringe of Leaves, The Twyborn Affair, Memoirs of Many in One) and the autobiography Flaws in the Glass, where White’s ‘savage demystification’ of humanist centres of social and artistic life are awash with camp, burlesque, the antiphonal and problematic sexual identity. Rather than any Australian compatriot, Giles’s White has more in common with writers like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Vladimir Nabokov. In among these flourishes, Giles discerns White’s particular traducing of ‘time’s linear sequence in favour of a circular structure where the present recoils upon the past and the future is inherent within the present’. And he sees White’s project as a powerfully ambitious one: ‘Rather than projecting Australian time as a counterpoint to American time or European time, White sought … to universalize antipodean time, to make its rhetoric of belatedness and anachronism stand metonymically for the fate of Western culture more broadly.’

There is much else besides in this study of time and Modernist culture, including about Virginia Woolf, Nancy Cunard, Marianne Moore, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and Anthony Powell. These are all readings that don’t issue from the capitals of culture and literature. Giles’s emblem for the kind of reading he exemplifies so brilliantly is The Fifth Continent by E.O. Hoppé, the German-born English photographer, published in 1931, a book of photographs about Australia and the surprising excess he encountered there. What Giles reads in Hoppé’s work is an analogy of his own reading in modernist writing: the cover of Hoppé’s book ‘showed the photographer atop a globe looking back at a map of Australia, and it is this kind of attempt to reconstitute the world in relation to an alternative spatial perspective that provided the impetus’ for the photographer’s work, and for the literary critic’s.