Jeffrey Poacher

Venero Armanno’s latest novel begins implausibly. A young man is troubled by a recurring dream about a faceless, one-armed, blob-like creature being throttled by someone wearing a pale blue shirt. This troubled dreamer is Mark Alter (the unsubtle last name underlines one of the book’s central concerns), a university drop-out estranged from his parents and now leading a grungy existence in a seaside shack. The cavalcade of unlikely events starts on page four. After watching a so-called ‘cheap slasher film’ at his local cinema, Mark decides to turn his nightmare into a screenplay about ‘a shape-shifting demon from the Id’. The title? No-Face, of course. Mark sends his work to various producer types. One of these bigwigs replies by telephone (this is a novel where implausibilities are piled very high indeed) and accuses Mark of plagiarism. According to this famous producer, No-Face has ripped off the obscure novel Black Mountain, written five years before by the equally obscure Cesare Montenero.

Wheen asked why his later writing had taken on such a different character, Eugenio Montale explained that this was because it came from la retrobottega – literally, from the back of the shop – that place where an artist might unhurriedly conduct a private experiment or two. Something similar might be said of Welcome to Normal, the first collection of stories by Nick Earls in more than a decade. Earls is, of course, well known for his cheerful novels about young Brisbane schlemiels and their tribulations of the heart (though the author must by now grit his teeth every time the label ‘lad lit’ is misleadingly appended to his work). These latest stories suggest an altogether different trajectory for his fiction, one that is more ambivalent, more serious, and much closer to the world we call real.

Declarations of loathing for the other members of one’s species tend to be tedious in reality but hilarious in fiction. The characters in Michael Wilding’s latest novel repeatedly prove this point with their mock-serious diatribes against, among others, the habitués of Sydney coffee shops (‘black-clad, metal-pierced creatures’), the patrons of English pubs (‘maggots … a rabble’), and virtually every kind of male university academic imaginable, from the caddish to the cadaverous. None of this ranting, however, has much effect on the novel’s straight man, the private detective Keith Plant (or ‘Research Assistant’, as his business card coyly puts it). For Plant – someone who has to deal with ratbags for a living – misanthropy is clearly no laughing matter.

In contemporary crime fiction, first-person narrators can often sound irritatingly implausible, either too much the Marlovian stoic or too much the Holmesian savant. This is not the case with The Fix, Nick Earls’s latest offering, in which the narratorial voice is convincing from the first page. Then again, The Fix is hardly a conventional work of crime fiction; it has some ingredients of the genre (a death, a cover-up, a bit of gunplay), but also a good deal of comedy and single-guy angst. Even more surprisingly, the reliable narrator doing the detective work is not some gumshoe or forensics-lab genius, but – of all things – a lifestyle blogger and part-time spin doctor.