The Great Fire - Shirley Hazzard (2003)

 

Rating: Excellent

Shirley Hazzard’s great achievement, The Transit of Venus (1980), is one of my all-time favourite novels and counts as one of the few books I’ve awarded a sublime rating to on this blog. The Great Fire became Hazzard’s last published novel some twenty-three years later and won the Miles Franklin Award. Set in the aftermath of WWII, The Great Fire explores the lives of a handful of protagonists who are finding their way in a world recovering from the catastrophe of war and its impact on them as individuals. Major Aldred Leith, a decorated and injured (but recovered) war veteran with a complicated back-story is in Japan, writing a book on the war’s aftermath, where he is billeted with an Australian family that includes a brother and sister, Benedict and Helen. While Benedict is terminally ill with a wasting disease, Helen shines as his loving sister and becomes connected to Leith by a deep mutual love. Of course, the world Hazzard vividly evokes with her splendid prose is both tragic and nebulous, proving to be an unfavourable environment for such love to blossom. The Great Fire finds its protagonists in a period of abeyance as they try and find their way toward peacetime lives. Leith’s wartime friend, Peter Exley, is investigating Axis war crimes and their lives intertwine for a time before post-war circumstances take them in different directions. Although the novel is essentially a post-war narrative, it is chiefly preoccupied with the characters personal lives, rather than military, political or historical machinations.

Shirley Hazzard, never to be repeated

As with The Transit of Venus, Hazzard’s thematic thrust involves love in the face of everything that can thwart its chances. Leith and Helen’s love is plagued by both tragic and practical barriers, no less Helen’s eventual journey away from Leith to Australia and then New Zealand, the literal end of the earth from Europe. The novel also explores the notion, without spelling it out, that despite the horrors of war and its disfiguring effects on the human soul, humanity can still display the redeeming characteristics of civilisation: literature, art, empathy, intelligence and most of all, love. Hazzard’s prose is exquisitely beautiful and mannered, bordering on the pretentious, featuring occasional grammatical rule bending, with capital letters in the wrong places and sudden jumps in setting. More accurately, Hazzard’s prose style comes across as an analogue of William Morris’s gorgeous textile designs from the nineteenth century; ornate and intricate, with splendid flourishes of colour.  Although I didn’t quite enjoy The Great Fire as much as The Transit of Venus, it is a wonderful jewel-like novel that requires concentration and care to fully absorb. They literally don’t write novels like this anymore; Hazzard, already ten years gone, can be remembered as a great Australian writer from another age, never to be repeated.

William Morris provides a visual representation 

The Children's Bach - Helen Garner (1984)

 

Rating: Excellent

This is my second read of Helen Garner’s novella, The Children’s Bach, the first time was as part of the Modern Australian Literature unit I completed at university in the mid-nineties. I enjoyed it greatly at the time and on my second read I’ve enjoyed it even more. When I first read it, I was actually, in hindsight, a novice reader when it came to Australian literary fiction, and literary fiction in general. It opened my eyes to the possibilities of a certain kind of literary storytelling, serious, yet playful, told simply, but with mysterious literary mechanisms lurking underneath it all. I was intrigued and impressed by the tale of the Fox family, the married couple Athena and Dexter and their sons, Arthur and Billy, who are living out their lives in Melbourne’s inner suburbs. The novella stayed with me for decades, often coming to mind when I visited Melbourne. The Fox family’s lives are altered by the appearance of Elizabeth, an old university friend of Dexter’s and her much younger sister, Vicki. Both end up being drawn to the Fox’s house, an old run-down weatherboard (my internal image of the house anyway), with cramped rooms and a large, dishevelled back yard. This then brings the cock-sure rock musician, Philip, who is loosely involved with Elizabeth, into their lives, who provides just the louche distraction Athena needs to break free of the restrictions of domestic life.

Helen Garner, in the inner suburbs

Set in the early eighties, The Children’s Bach is culturally fascinating, both in terms of Garner’s portrayal of inner-city Australia and her singular writing style. Garner presents as an Australian writer developing her own literary landscape, particularly when taking into consideration her breakout debut Monkey Grip (1977), which mined a similar, but darker urban milieu. Garner’s style is impressionistic, with characters appearing abruptly and scenes flowing into each other. The novel will perhaps not make sense to readers expecting a linear notion of time and setting (something this critic had a great deal of trouble with, so much so it made me think that he has a limited understanding of narrative), however it’s not that radical, rather it comes across as a more modest and pared back emulation of Patrick White’s high modernistic stylings. The novel is thematically rich, exploring family values vs. the nonconformity of counterculture lifestyles, sexuality and the yearning disaffection of middle-age, mostly played out through Athena’s lust for what lays outside of her established life with the loving, yet overbearing Dexter and their disabled son Billy (who presents as autistic). Of course, music runs all through the novella, with Athena’s attempts at learning to play Bach on a rickety piano a metaphor for attempting to master living one’s life in the face of a complex world. The Children’s Bach is a beautiful, rewarding reading experience and underlines that Helen Garner is rightly celebrated as a talented and important Australian writer who appears as both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time, somewhat like the characters she created for The Children’s Bach.

Gravity Let Me Go - Trent Dalton (2025)

 

Rating: Mediocre

Trent Dalton novels have been a massive success in Australia right from the off, with his debut novel, Boy Swallows Universe (2018), being long listed for the Miles Franklin Award, and then made into a TV series in 2024. It sold oodles, as did his successive releases, such as Lola in the Mirror (2023) and, no doubt, Gravity Let Me Go, as we speak, right now. This novel is my first Dalton experience due to the book club voting overwhelming in favour of giving it a go. So, what is Gravity Let Me Go all about? Well, its many things, a crime narrative, an examination of the modern Australian male and all his failings, the nature of crime journalism; all spiced up with touches of magic realism, a narrative form that doesn’t crop up much these days. The novel follows Noah Cork, as he navigates not only the release of his new book about the unsolved murder of Tamsin Fellows that occurred in the very Brisbane suburb he lives in, the (fictional) Jubilee, but also a severe case of testicular pain, an unhappy wife, and the unending challenge of taking care of his two teenage daughters. It all seems a bit much, as does his attempt at leaving his suburb in the opening chapters, in which we meet many of the recurring characters, such as Ellis, an annoying retired neighbour and Jim, a cop who handily lives on Cork’s street, considering he’s a true crime writer. All the clues you need to solving what is really going on in the novel are presented to you as Cork is trying to leave Jubilee to attend what turns out to be a very entertainingly problematic interview and book launch (big hint - his testicles feature strongly...).

So, what’s Gravity Let Me Go like? About halfway through it occurred to me that the novel, particularly the first third, is akin to a hyperactive puppy that will not sit still, it is all over you and irritates the hell out of you. About halfway through things settle down a bit when the narrative becomes more crime focused; more like a murder mystery, rather than a manic ride through Cork's ADHD like brain. Noah Cork has been sent a note by a killer that led to him finding the body of Tamsin Fellows, which led him to obsessively write a true crime book that he hopes will solve all of his financial problems, but in doing so has laid bare the inherent problems in his life. However, Noah Cork is a hard protagonist to like, with his inner voice of endless musings about his problems and how he doesn’t really know how to solve them, which all becomes increasingly grating. Plot often takes a back seat, but when it doesn't the novel miraculously improves. There’s the previously mentioned smatterings of magical realism that include nods to The Wizard of Oz (1939), mainly involving his wife, Rita, who has also decided to become mute and could be the one writing ‘gravity let me go’ in the steam on the bathroom mirror. The teen children are well written characters, with Erin and Clem providing opportunities for some insight and wisdom from the mouths of babes, most of which Noah finds mystifying. With Gravity Let Me Go Dalton could have been onto something, with themes about obsession, responsibility and the moral ambiguities of using victims’ suffering as a means to make a living, but instead the incessant ockerisms, Cork’s manic thought spirals and a sneaky suspicion that Dalton is just trying way to hard to amuse and entertain spoils what could have been a deeper and more complex novel. It's a pity, as I suspect that he is a much better writer than the evidence of this novel suggests.

Three Boys Gone - Mark Smith (2025)

 

Rating: Admirable

This is not going to be a typical book review, as, frankly, I’m just too knackered to concentrate on something like that. I’ve just spent the last two weeks (and it is ongoing) moving into my newly built home (a modern wooden Federation style weatherboard house). This involved lots of logistics, packing and then the actual shifting. Such is my dedication to physical media we moved forty-five boxes of books, twenty boxes of CDs and then packed, with the help of some friends, fifty-two boxes of vinyl records, which were then shifted by specialist removalists. Given it is also the end of the year (with all that December entails), and we are still setting up the new house, this will be brief.

Three Boys Gone is a library book club read and to make sure I was ready to lead the sessions I read it in advance, before all the house moving craziness begun. Therefore, I’m a bit hazy on the details, even though one of the meetings is today (I’ll fudge my way through if need be). The novel is the first adult fiction written by Mark Smith; he usually writes acclaimed YA fiction. It is a thriller about a school camping trip that goes terribly wrong. Whilst trekking along a remote beach three boys are separated from the main group and, for reasons never explained, run into the sea and are drowned. The teacher in charge, Grace Disher, is a witness, and as she decides to protect herself, she does not attempt to rescue them. The resulting outrage, hounding and bullying that follows makes for realistically harrowing reading. The novel is, in part, an examination of the pressures that can be brought to bear in our hyper-connected world. It is also a reasonably traditional thriller in that there is, of course, more to the story, typically leading to an extreme denouement. Three Boys Gone is quite well written, although Smith is not a great stylist, the writing is taut and impactful. Smith makes it easy to connect with Grace and her partner, Louise, who bear the brunt of the aftermath of the tragedy. If you are after a decent thriller written by an Australian author, then you could do far worse than Three Boys Gone. Now, it’s getting time to start unpacking those boxes of books, after I buy some more book shelves…

I Want Everything - Dominic Amerena (2025)

 

Rating: Excellent

I Want Everything is Dominic Amerena's debut novel, a five year effort, emerging after years of successfully publishing shorter works in various publications around the world. The novel concerns an unnamed protagonist, a would-be writer, struggling to actually get down to the business of writing and producing, in his dramatically uttered words, the ‘great Australian novel’. We first meet him as he’s leaving a Melbourne hospital, a place we find out later he is well acquainted with for reasons that are kept from the reader for quite a while, which ends up adding nicely to the narrative spice. He decides to venture down to the local swimming pool on the way home and spots an elderly woman whom he recognises as the great lost Australian cult author, Brenda Shales, who wrote two books in the 1970's, The Anchoress and The Widowers, before running into legal problems and then disappearing. Our unnamed protagonist weasels his way into Brenda’s life in order to extract her story in an effort to make his mark on the literary scene. Brenda Sales is a fabulous creation, apparently mostly based on Australian writers, Helen Garner and Elizabeth Jolley, she crackles with wily self-awareness and cynical cunning. Believing the protagonist to be her grandchild, Shales acquiesces to recounting both her life-story and the circumstance's that led to her cult literary notoriety. The sections that feature the stories of her past, mostly set in the 1960s and the 1970’s Whitlam era, are perhaps the best in the novel; fascinating and visceral, her life becomes vivid in the mind’s eye of the reader. She's cantankerous, difficult, but ultimately charms both the protagonist and the reader. 

I Want Everything is also a satire about writers, their struggles for inspiration, their hubris, and more seriously, the ethics surrounding writing. The main theme at play is literary fraud, principally the fraud the protagonist is attempting to perpetuate by passing himself off as someone else in order to insert himself into Brenda Shales’ story. But Amerena also explores the moral issues around how writers obtain inspiration for the material they need to feed on, like literary vampires, in order to produce their work. The protagonist’s partner, Ruth, a dedicated writer, is ruthless (no pun intended) when it comes to fuelling her drive to write, including withdrawing emotionally from the protagonist as the novel progresses. In one of the novel’s great scenes Ruth and the protagonist are at a dinner party with fellow writers, one of which reacts with jealous horror regarding Ruth’s recent essay publication and success, breaking glasses and even crying pathetically at the dinner-table at one stage. In terms of poking fun at writers’ egos, it is darkly humorous stuff, particularly when we find out that what Ruth has written is considered to be ‘mother-boarding’, which, in the context of the novel, is a term used to describe demonising your mother in writing. Amerena’s writing pops with confident verve, sometimes bordering on pretension, but he manages to get away with it by being fleet-footed in terms of pacing and sheer chutzpah. It also helps that the novel features a satisfying twist that makes you revise everything you’ve read and adds layers to the narrative you didn’t know were there. A book club read, one in which not everyone was enamoured with, however I thoroughly enjoyed this excellent debut and hope that there’s more to come in the future.

The Sirens Sing - Kristel Thornell (2022)

 

Rating: Admirable

The Sirens Sing is a novel in two parts, beginning in the locality of Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, between 1991-93. The second section is set in the 1960s – 1970s, in Sydney’s west. The two sections are connected by two characters, Jan and her son David. David features as a teenager in the first section and in the second section we see Jan’s life as a young adult grappling with growing up during times of generational and political change. The first section is the strongest, with well written relatable teenage characters who are on the cusp of leaving high-school and venturing into the adult world. David and Heather are two awkward teens who don’t really fit in, but they find each other and begin what could be a great friendship and romance. Heather’s friend, the troubled Robbie, is a budding artist. The three enter the orbit of an Italian language teacher, Ada, and by the end things end up going off the rails quite tragically. Thornell evokes a strong sense of place with considerable skill, which adds to the effectiveness of the first section.

 

Unfortunately, the second section is where things go awry. After genuinely connecting with the characters in the first section we are taken completely away from them and, apart from some hints about what happened after, the reader is left to wonder. Jan, although otherwise nicely fleshed out, is weakened as a character due to Thornell’s tendency to overemphasise her lack of confidence and self-consciousness about her upbringing. Jan gets drawn into a friendship with with a fellow student, Alicia, meeting her at university during an awkward interaction with a snobby male student. Alicia lives with her hippy poet older boyfriend and they have a polyamorous lifestyle. Jan and her partner fit awkwardly into this bohemian world and then, you guessed it, due to a series of events things end up going tragically wrong. There’s plenty of juicy themes throughout the novel – class, relationships, politics and repression, however a few key flaws weaken their effectiveness. The impact of some key scenes are weakened by nebulous descriptions, in particular during the climax of the second section, which needs to be read several times to work out exactly what’s going on. The fact that the two sections are not chronologically linked is unfortunate, as it breaks up the generational links between the characters and their circumstances. Such criticisms were shared by most of the thirty book club members who came to the sessions to discuss The Sirens Sing. They really wanted to rate the novel higher, but were frustrated by its flaws, which tended to overshadow its attributes. I've rated the novel as Admirable, but it came close to a Mediocre rating, saved by the fact that I’ve read novels far more flawed than this contemporary Australian novel.

That Deadman Dance – Kim Scott (2010)

Rating: Excellent

Kim Scott is a Perth writer of Aboriginal decent who has previously won the Miles Franklin Award for his novel – Benang (1999). The Miles Franklin Award is Australia’s premier literary prize and Scott is in the fine company of previous winners such as Peter Carey, Tim Winton and Patrick White. That Deadman Dance has won Scott his second Miles Franklin Award and like his previous work it involves a narrative that provides an examination of Aboriginal Australia.

The novel is set in the colony that would go on to be called Albany in the period 1833 to 1844. It is written in the third person from the perspective of both the colonists and the Aboriginal people known as Noongars. Albany was the first colony to be established in Western Australia, preceding the capital – Perth, by three years.

In Scott’s author’s notes at the end of the novel he indicates that the Albany region was known as “the friendly frontier” due to the relatively peaceful relationship between the settlers and the Noongars. The principle Noongar character is Wabalanginy, known as Bobby to the colonists. Bobby is the bridge between the two cultures and we meet him on the very first page. He’s a charismatic character who charms both the colonists and his fellow Noongars. It’s Bobby who performs the “deadman dance” - a dance that mimics the effects of European diseases that wipe out a significant portion of Aborigines throughout Australia.

Scott’s writing is an interesting proposition. Stylistically it can be impressionistic and the narrative is not always linear so that events can seem jumbled up in an almost organic fashion. Not having read his other books I’m not sure if this is his usual style, or whether it is a particular stylistic choice that conveys how the Noongar people perceived their world. Either way once you get used to Scott’s writing it becomes quite an engaging way to spin a tale. Scott’s descriptions of the Australian bush and its animals are also beautiful and really capture the uniqueness of the Australian wilderness, with its primeval atmosphere of isolation and immense age.

The colonist characters provide an effective insight into just how tough it must have been to live in such an isolated region. Killam, an ex soldier and convict Skelly are certainly rugged individuals who make their way as best they can in an alien environment. How they carry themselves and the decisions they make are in direct contrast to the Noongar characters such as Bobby and the elder – Menak. Yet somehow the divergent groups find a middle path and benefit from each-others technology and knowledge. The contrast between the two groups is one of the ways in which Noongar culture is revealed to the reader and it works quite well.

There’s trouble of course, in the form of spearings, shootings, thieving and tension created by the exploitation of the whales that travel down the coast. The sections detailing the whaling, carried out in a bay where the poor creatures stop to rest, have an emotional punch and are also fascinating in a macabre way. It’s in this context that the mostly British colonists, the Noongars and American whalers converge into a mostly cooperative group, that is until the whales start to become scarce.

The quality of Scott’s writing is such that I can understand why That Deadman Dance won numerous awards. Scott readily evokes time and place as well as culture and the inevitability of historical change. The book is both heartening and sad – it reveals the promise of what could have been and therefore saddens due to the contrast of what followed for the Noongars and their fellow Aborigines throughout Australia.

Unfortunately I was not ready for this book as I was not in the mood for a novel about colonial Australia. This is sometimes the case when a novel read for a book club does not correspond with what you’d like to be reading at the time. In hindsight this saddens me as I feel like I did not benefit from Scott’s deft handling of a significant time in Australia’s history; but for other readers I recommend That Deadman Dance as a book worthy of your attention.