Fear Factor: Terror Incognito launched

Fear Factor, edited by Meenakshi Bharat and Sharon Rundle, and featuring a wide range of stories looking at the impact of terror on the world (including one by yours truly), was launched at The Hughenden Hotel in Woollahra yesterday by Melina Marchetta. The book is a unique collaboration between India and Australia.
While I wasn't able to make the launch, I look forward to seeing the book do well in sales.
You can buy copies here .

ASA Barbara Jefferis Award 2010: The China Garden

Professor Robert Dixon (right) of the University of Sydney and myself at the ASA Barbara Jefferis Award, 14 March 2010.

The Barbara Jefferis Award 2010 was awarded on 14 March. The winner was The China Garden by Kristina Olsson, published by University of Queensland Press.

"Without feeling the need to resolve every absence or mystery, Olsson gently suggests that it is always possible to make new things out of the past, however fractured or painful.” ~ from the judges' reading report.

The Australian Long Story edited by Mandy Sayer

Mandy Sayer, a Sydney writer, has edited a new collection, The Australian Long Story (ISBN 978-1-926428-00-0), for Penguin imprint, Hamish Hamilton. The concept is good; a package of longer fiction works by familiar and some not so familiar authors. As always with anthologies, the editor's choice is open to debate.
Sayer sets out her reasons for the need for such an anthology and her choice of works in her introduction, and there she offers some grounding points for those who might use a collection such as this for study of both literature and writing practice. She first speaks of her inspiration for a collection of longer fiction, being The Granta Book of the American Long Story and recent collections by Tim Winton and David Malouf. The success of Nam Le's The Boat (also published by Penguin) must also have been on her and her publisher's minds. The works of all three of these Australian writers are included in the collection, and they are certainly among the better stories here.
Sayers gives a potted history of the short story in Australia and some of its practitioners and sets out to define what she means by "the long story". I'm not convinced by her arguments, but at least she explains her reasons for making a distinction between works because of their number of words. I couldn't accept that she refused any Christina Stead as the long stories "were all set overseas". That smacked a little too much of the idiosyncrasies of the terms of Miles Franklin Award. As it is, the Peter Carey piece she includes is set in an unidentified location that could easily be New York, Cape Town or Sydney, so why could we not have Christina?
And while I'm being niggardly, I'm tired too of Kings Cross writers sneering at Patrick White. To say he "commits the cardinal sin of patronising his characters" when you include your own husband's work in your anthology pushes the boundaries a bit too far for me. Finally, I find it baffling for an anthologist to claim that she would have included a piece by Frank Hardy but "it was too different in terms of tone, style and setting (the 1930s) to keep company with what would become the final selection" -- does this mean she seeks homogeneity?
These quibbles aside, the collection offers not only solid stories from Malouf ("The valley of lagoons", an evocative, restrained, fully realised story from childhood), Winton ("Boner McFarlin's Moll", vivid in the description of small-town life, though not entirely convincing in its conclusion) and Le ("Halflead Bay", where family bonds and obligations are covert levers for a deceptively simple narrative), it also provides an opportunity for the genius of Elizabeth Jolley to shine again. Her "Grasshoppers" is to my mind the strongest work in this book. While it seems to be conventional, closer examination reveals some magic realism at work. It's a delight.
Interestingly, none of these are urban stories. All are set in small towns or rural areas, "Grasshoppers" also crossing over to India.
Two other works are also non-urban. Gillian Mears' story is set in Grafton. Unfortunately, over the years I have found myself unable to engage with Mears' work since it brings a sense of suffocation on me. I know this is my fault, not hers, and I think it is largely due to my gender. Female readers may well have a very different perspective on "The childhood gland". The work by Sayers' husband, Louis Nowra, "Ten anecdotes about Lord Howe Island", is exactly that. As a piece of writing, I suspect it sat better in its original showcase publication for the Sydney Olympic Games. I enjoyed reading it, but I wondered whether there were other "longer stories" that might have had stronger claims to be in an anthology such as this one.
Set in Adelaide, Peter Goldsworthy's "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam" is a strong story about choice. If I were using this book in a writing course, I'd ask students to read this work first. The fact that a father chooses to accompany a dying child in death, leaving his wife and son alive, raises a spectrum of ethical and life issues. Death (or almost death) and reactions to it are central in a number of the other works in this collection. I would ask that students read the Jolley work next, then the Le work, then the Mears work (despite my personal reaction, I can see what the work is doing), then the Malouf work, with Carey's work, "The chance", which deals with loss and transformation, as the final piece. Carey's work is urban "speculative fiction" set in a world where people can take part in a lottery and change their bodies for other ones. It is a perfect counterpart to "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam".
The other story included in the collection is Helen Garner's "Honour". It has an urban setting yet, partly because of political references, it seems oddly dated. It is still a strong story, but the tone, style and setting vary significantly from the rest of the works selected. Should it not be here? I think it should, but so should Stead and White and Hardy.
This collection has its faults, but its strength are sufficient to outweigh them. I'm pleased Sayers took the time to assemble this collection.

ABR's Favourite Australian Novel

I voted for The Vivisector by Patrick White in the Australian Book Review survey of favourite Australian novels. It made it into the Top 20 at place 14.
The book is also in the running for the 1970 Lost Man Booker Prize. That year, the rules were changed and 1970 books were not considered. The prize is now being reconsidered. Would Paddy have cared? (Probably -- he was a dark horse.)
If you are frightened of reading Paddy and who isn't, The Vivisector is a good place to start. It's a very Sydney novel. I'm thinking of the humidity and dampness there at the moment and the book's atmosphere is already with me. I like to think it is close to being a self-portrait -- the cruelness of the artist cutting through emotional sinews in pursuit of his obsessions.

Copyright cases: Comment

The recent decisions in the iiNet and "Dowununder" cases are quite straightforward, steady-as-she-goes affirmations of the solidity of the legal decision-making processes in the Australian copyright system. On the one hand, the courts have cleared an internet service provider (ISP), that is, iiNet, of providing a means for people to carry out illegal activities. This decision will be challeneged, of course, and the issue will go to the High Court. Why? For the content providers, there's too much money at stake.
With "Downunder", the primacy of 'material form' is again demonstrated. But the offending part of the song is only a very small part.
The real issue, as in all copyright disputes, is how much is it worth. That will be the interesting part of this case.

Anna Goldsworthy: Piano Lessons

I could not fail to notice that Anna Goldsworthy (author of Piano Lessons, Black Inc., ISBN 9781863954433) is the daughter of Peter Goldsworthy. His name is on the back cover, he is thanked for his editorial suggestions in the acknowledgements and he makes his appearance on page 1.
Peter Goldsworthy was awarded a gong, an AM, in the 2010 Australia Day Honours List. He's a South Australian and he chaired the Literature Board of the Australia Council (in which capacity I met him and found him to be professional, courteous and concerned) and he's a doctor and he wrote Maestro. Don't forget this last -- well, forget it if you like -- Anna will remind you of it often enough in her "memoir" about how she overcame the impossible odds of her deprived South Australian upbringing -- private school, dux of school, private piano teacher, both parents doctors, piano recitals -- you know, the usual thing. Personally, I prefer Peter's Honk if you are Jesus, which I think is one of Australia's funniest "serious" novels, even though the title probably hurt sales. Regrettably, Peter's Three Dog Night was not a book for me, and I've never been more than luke-warm about Maestro, but Anna collaborated with her father on a stage adaptation of it, so let's mention it again shall we?
Oh, and Anna had a car accident once, and she was at fault. And then she had another a day before she was to play with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, but a drugged-out truck driver who called her "mate" was to blame for that one.
And did you know Maestro -- have we mentioned the book by her father yet? -- was in part inspired by her music teacher, Eleonora Sivan? While Anna was horrified her father was recording her teacher's conversation in a notebook, that horror didn't stop her producing this uninspired piece of self-aggrandisement, which does little justice to Mrs Sivan, despite that being, I imagine, the author's intention.
Why uninspired? I like to think a memoir is not simply a recount of episodes of a life, but a cumulative narrative that ultimately proffers some revelation or illumination. I accept that the truth of the memoir may only be such as can provide a basis for an engaging narrative, but the more a reader can accept a memoir as true, the more successful the memoir. A Fortunate Life is an excellent example. Piano Lessons, to me, suffers from offering too much of what I regard as the techniques of fiction (and I do hope this is not because of the editorial suggestions of the father).
One particular irritation is the repetitive use of numbers or superstitions to suggest Anna has some obsessive-compulsive or ADHD problem. The Fibonacci sequence (hey, Dan Brown!) is mentioned several times as she counts it down, supposedly calming herself when panicked by what never fails to be success. She'll have you believe (but I don't) that she plays superstitious little games to hold herself together in the face of the enormous pressures facing her -- like winning the Tennyson Prize for being best SA student in English AND the Don Maynard Prize for best SA music student -- at the same time!
It's a device that could have worked, but why should I accept it from a writer who offers me, after all the prizes and successes: "Afterwards I rushed from the room, disgusted with myself, and climbed the steps to the top of the opera house [yes, the Sydney Opera House], where I assumed a tragic, windswept pose". Really, that's what is written.
Melodrama this memoir may be, but Wuthering Heights it is not.
I'm not pointing the finger solely at the author here. The acknowledgements reveal Black Inc. asked her to write the book. These days, she is well-known both for her writing and her musical performances in the Seraphim Trio. I am not questioning her talent in either area in any way. For the publisher, the book may have seemed an easy sell, but there are serious problems in its structure and writing that do neither author nor publisher any good.
Still, I admire Anna's chutzpah. Several times she quotes her father saying "you have to put yourself out there". One time she quotes him suggesting her Trio be called the Stiletto Trio, with the marketing gimmick being the three musicians wearing stilettos on stage. Following this advice, she has put herself out there, but her self-portrait is not a flattering picture and much of this I think lies in the haste to get a saleable book to market, rather than working more thoroughly on a memoir that offers the reader some revelation or illumination.
For instance, "Debra" is mentioned a few times and appears to have some role in music, but we don't ever meet this character. Then there's poor old Sam, who bought the Paddington Bear. He is is dumped and forgotten in a most offhand fashion -- the star has to practise, practise, practise. No time for a boyfriend. Until Nicholas waltzes into the Coda, not a boyfriend but a husband. And finally, there's the caricature of Eleonora Sivan -- the intent was obviously meant to be inspirational, but it all falls flat. Why ?
In an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald following his AM, Peter Goldsworthy noted he loathed piety, something he attributed to his Methodist upbringing. My Methodist upbringing causes me to loathe immodesty, hubris and vanity -- all of which are present in Piano Lessons in spadefuls. All of it about Anna. I wanted to smash the lid of the piano down on her selfish fingers, which I am sure is not what either author or publisher intended.

Kate Grenville: The Lieutenant

My first encounter with Kate Grenville's The Lieutenant (Text, ISBN 978-1-921351-78-5) was in a warm winter in Alice Springs. Kate was a member of a panel I chaired at the Eye of the Storm writers' festival there, and she read from the book and talked about what had influenced her to write it. I didn't read the book in its entirety until some months after this, but encountering it first in what to me was -- is -- the foreignness of Alice Springs helped me understand the central character of Daniel Rooke a little more.
A visitor to Alice Springs can feel very much the stranger, divorced and alien from both the black and white people and the land. This feeling is at the heart of Grenville's powerful historical novel. She explores it through Daniel Rooke. Grenville hints in the early chapters that today he might be diagnosed with Aspergers or some similar form of autism. He has a gift with numbers and categorisation and "he had no memories other than of being an outsider". He is mistreated by his peers, who ridicule his poor social skills.
These improve somewhat when he joins the marines, but this leads to him being wounded in a naval battle in the American War of Independence. Recovering from this, he learns that an expedition is to set out for New South Wales and he contrives to be on board the Sirius as astronomer.
I had some problems with history here. The Sirius of course was a ship in the First Fleet, which was under the command of Arthur Phillip. In Grenville's book, Phillip becomes James Gilbert, Rooke is a character inspired by William Dawes. I am not sure why the historical names do not have a place in this fiction. Sydney Cove and Botany Bay are there, as are the Cadigal people themselves. Grenville even has a little joke as Rooke, sailing out of Sydney Harbour, stands "at the stern and looked towards the point the natives knew as Tarra, and which he had tried to name after Dr Vickery, but which people seemed determined to call after himself". She is referring, of course, to Dawes Point. Why then can we not have characters called Phillip and Dawes?
Grenville also acknowledges that she is using Cadigal words and conversation in the book, and her story is inspired by "recorded events". So why do we have this need to shuffle in extraneous characters?
I am conscious that there has been some debate about novelists interpreting history, but history is not Grenville's key theme. She is telling a story about, fundamentally, communication, and she is using the well-established genre of the historical novel. I would have been more then happy to have had Rooke named Dawes and Gilbert named Phillip.
But that is immaterial to the core theme, and where this novel excels. It transpires that Rooke, the outsider, has more in common with the Cadigal people than his own. With Tagaran (again, historically Patyegarang), he forms a close bond and sets out to record the language of the Cadigal. This is perhaps the most moving, though problematic, part of the book.
Grenville very clearly defines her crucial message: "This exchange was not a language lesson. For the first time, he and Tagaran were on the same side of the mirror of language, simply speaking to each other. Understanding went in both directions. Once two people shared language, they could no longer use it to hide".
But for this reader there was a problem with a lack of sexual tension between Rooke and Tagaran. We know that Rooke is a man with a mighty member, which he is able to use, from the Antigua scene. It's difficult to accept him almost sexless in his interactions with a naked Tagaran.
That quibble aside, this is a book for a rainy Sunday afternoon, biscuits to hand, and constant cups of tea.