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Ghost Cities

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  As a reader, this is my kind of novel. Multilayered, comical, clever in plot and wordplay. It has also achieved great success – winning the prestigious Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for almost every other Australian literary awards. But famously it took ten years to publish, as Siang Lu exhausted every literary agents in Australia and the U.S. before University of Queensland Press finally published it as Lu’s second novel. I’d like to think that there are lessons to learn for all those agents and publisher who turned down the manuscript. And for writers, to appreciate that perseverance and undaunted self-belief is a job requirement for anyone with an original, quality manuscript in their hands. The novel opens in Imperial China with the coronation of Emperor Lu Huang Du. The Emperor has great power, exercised in both ruthless and ludicrous ways: ‘His first act as Emperor was to order the execution of all who repeated the rumours [of patricide and regicide]. His second ac...
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Dusk

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Like Limberlost , Robbie Arnott’s latest novel Dusk has a small cast of characters, close siblings and a wild animal at the heart of the quest. (Here not a caged native quoll but an imported menace: a South American puma). [My thoughts on Limberlost , here ].  James Bradley compares Arnott’s prose to Cormac McCarthy, with its ‘pared-back textures’ ( Guardian , 2024). Ned Hirst sees the novel as ‘an adventure story [which] contains the narrative momentum to match Australian Beowulf’ ( Meanjin , 2024). I thought of something closer in time and place: Gerald Murnane’s 1982 novel The Plains , with its mythic landscape, its allegorical cartographical suggestions and its gentrified landowners. Iris and Floyd are children of convicts – adult orphans, nomadic and symbiotic twins. Arnott introduces them as curiosities on page 4: Their names were Iris and Floyd Renshaw, and they were both thirty-seven years old … Little was known about them at all, except for the work they did, and ...
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Crime and Punishment

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  How to talk about Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) when the plot is complicated, the ideas complex, and so much has been said already?  I started reading the novel in 2024 and carried it with me for the first hundred kilometres of the Camino de Santiago walk in Spain, only to leave it behind in an albergue in Pamplona. I hadn’t read a word, and it was weighing down my light backpack. I bought a fresh copy back in Sydney at the end of 2024 and finished reading it in the first half of 2025. In other words, my memory of the book is already fragmented, and I have no intention of revising. What has stayed with me in these circumstances is all I promise to write about.  At the heart of the book is the characterisation of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov – a student in St Petersburg, who has stopped attending university and is living in poverty. He has an overactive mind, and a high intelligence alienates him from most people and threatens to derail his acceptance of s...
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Chinese Postman

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 I first came across Brian Castro’s fiction in the 1990s, with the intriguing Double Wolf (1991). A long time passed and I rediscovered his writing, reading The Garden Book (2005), The Bath Fugues (2009) and Street to Street (2012) within a few years. Finally, I met Brian in person in 2018 at an artist retreat run by the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. His presentation was entirely about Coetzee -- he struck me as a modest and friendly man -- but there was a moment around a campfire where writers shared their work, and Brian was a sympathetic and encouraging listener.  Chinese Postman opens with short paragraphs that move between third person and first-person narrative, as the narrator calls attention to a ‘bitter and twisted man’ who ‘sees nothing but fragments’ (p. 1).  He is a lonely, enduring the killing zone as his friends pass away, with a neighbour and dogs for company. Soon we are told that ‘He talks mainly to himself. Clears his throat often’ (an ...
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The Plains

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  The Plains was once described by Ben Lerner as a ‘strange Australian masterpiece’, a novel that ‘can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed’ ( The New Yorker, 29 March 2017).While Gerald Murnane locates the story in the Australian continent, its mythic qualities are such that Lerner recognises the expansive grasslands and unobstructed sky of the Great Plains of North America.   Wayne MacCauley also makes the case for a wider reading in his introduction to the 2012 Text Publishing edition to Murnane’s 1982 novel, placing it figuratively in ‘the library of alternative Australian fiction’ (vii), a reading experience he compares to ‘anything proposed by Swift, Kafka, Borges or Calvino’ (ix). Indeed, these are appropriate references. From Swift and Calvino, the sense of allegory and fable; from Kafka, the alternative world, dream-like but here more faintly oppressive; from Borges, the labyrinth library of poets, artists and writers endlessly specia...
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The Music of Chance

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  Paul Auster writes about chance in most of his novels, from a chance phone call in ‘City of Glass’ ( New York Trilogy ) to writing four versions of the same life, with outcomes dictated by an incident or its absence in 4321 . The Music of Chance has such elements: Nashe begins a year of driving across America on a whim, after missing a ramp on the freeway, Nashe heads in the opposite direction to where he had planned to go. Committed now to the wrong road, he understood ‘that there was no difference, that both ramps were finally the same’ (p. 5). Similarly, when Nashe picks up a beaten-up young hitchhiker, Jack Pozzi, his life changes, ‘for better or worse’ in that moment (p. 19). For the record, decidedly for the worse. The strange, the surreal, also characterise many Auster novels. In Mr Vertigo , Walt undergoes bizare and difficult trainings (such as being buried alive) before learning to levitate, earning a living a circus by making the impossible appear to be simply a tri...
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Limberlost

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  It takes a certain skill to write a historical novel that feels present. And it takes craft and heart to make the story of one man’s life feel so important – not as representative of anything, but so that the reader can experience vicariously the trials, tribulations and triumphs of one human being. That human being, Ned, is placed in a landscape and a family – both play their parts to shape the character and the life his consciousness grapples with to find the right way to live. Limberlost opens with the mythic scene of a whale believed to have ‘gone mad’, destroying boats at dusk. Five-year-old Ned is taken out to the mouth of the river by his father as he and his two brothers wait for the whale to ‘explode out of the river and paste them into the waves’ (pp. 1-3). Chapter 2 begins with a leap in time: ‘A decade later Ned lay on a wet bank watching a rabbit graze’ (p. 5). So, a fifteen-year-old boy who desperately wishes to impress his distant father. Ned’s two older brothers...
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