Their Brilliant Careers

By

In her foreword to Ryan O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers, Anne Zoellner praises O’Neill’s ‘skill and empathy’ in rendering pen-portraits of ‘famous, infamous and forgotten’ Australian writers.

We are used to sporting stars speaking of themselves in the third person, but rarely do they get to invent a critic speaking on their behalf.  

The condensed lives O’Neill recalls in these sixteen ‘biographies’ of invented Australian writers follows various literary traditions, including Nabokov’s playfulness -- Shannon Burn's suggests Pale Fire (1962) in her Sydney Review of Books article. Personally I remembered John Clarke. I’ve read a few of Clarke's pastiche-poems at some point – his website certainly suggests that they once existed:

‘For many years it was assumed that poetry came from England. Research now clearly demonstrates, however, that a great many of the world’s most famous poets were Australian. This project puts on record the wealth of imagery in Australian verse.’

The same self-deprecating humour fires a number of O’Neill’s figures of fun, who write works of fiction mistaken in some parts of the world as plagiarised copies of Australian works of genius. Nabokov, too, makes an appearance as a friend of Peter Darkbloom – a talented writer whose work is re-written by his wife Vivian Darkbloom for her own egotistical purposes.

Various charlatans emerge in the pages of O’Neill’s works – cheats, plagiarists, self-servers and egomaniacs. There are writers made famous by blackmailing editors, and editors who cut books in half because they can. Just how far O’Neill takes all this is seen in his appropriation of the real hoax of the 1940s Ern Malley Affair, which becomes a prank emerging from another (made up!) Australian hoax, the Chapman Affair, ‘fictionalised … in Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake (2003)’ (229).

I was heartened by the publication of Their Brilliant Careers by Black Inc, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award (“Australia’s Booker”) and which won the 2017 Prime Minister’s Literary Award. It is a high quality work – frequently hilarious – but still fortunate even with the timing of prime ministers. I can’t help feeling the PMs either-side may have torpedoed the choice, if they had any influence at all – which I don’t suppose they do. They would in O'Neill's world. 
The success of Their Brilliant Careers demonstrates the existence of a reading public that other publishers must surely underestimate – since a wide-knowledge of both modernist literature and Australian writing is needed to “get the joke”. The lives by Ryan O'Neill are fantastic in more ways than one, but so is the engagement of the local readership.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wood Green

By
Image
Novels and films that explore the relationship between a young, would-be writer, and a more experienced writer-mentor are not necessarily new but Sean Rabin’s Wood Green has done something a little different with this ‘genre’. The idea seems to appeal: think of the success of Joël Dicker’s The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair – a murder mystery of sorts, with a younger writer living with and assisting his mentor. Then there is the very engaging thriller – John Colapinto’s About the Author, which is not so much about the mentor but the idea of literary theft as a shortcut to success. Sean Rabin plays around with some of these ideas, as young Michael arrives in Hobart to assist Lucian Clarke put together his papers (for posterity, or for some biographical project, yet to be determined). At several points, Michael, who has completed a PhD on Clarke, considers how he might either make use of Lucian’s papers for his own purposes, or else appropriate Lucian’s incomplete manuscript as...
Read more

City of Marvels

By
Image
The City of Marvels has the form of historical fiction and the light touch of magical realism. The fact that it was recommended to me by a Spanish professor made me read it with an ear for higher meaning – this is so well disguised in the novel that it may not actually exist at all. And yet I think it’s there in spades. The story – a picaresque tale – begins in Barcelona in 1888, and it is the two Barcelona world trade fairs of 1888 and 1929 that situate the story most concretely in time. Early in the narrative, there are, indeed, explanations of Catalan history that might come out of Robert Hughes’ Barcelona --  readable pleas for the uniqueness of the culture and for Barcelona’s status from pre-Roman times. This sets up the background narrator, a shy historian, perhaps. At the foreground is a young, mysterious stranger whose deeds we soon see are unscrupulous, as Onofre Bouvila sets about moving from poverty to power and riches. In the City of Bombs, he begins...
Read more

Berta Isla

By
Image
  The fact that Javier Marías died in September 2022 has no doubt impacted on how I responded to his last novel  Berta Isla  in 2024. Longer term readers of this blog might remember that I have previously spoken  about All Souls, A Heart So White,  Dark Back of Time ,  and  The Infatuations .  Suffice to say that I am one of Marías’s many admirers and was very sad to hear of his passing.  Berta Isla  may not to be everyone’s taste, but he was a writer at the height of his powers, with (one suspects) much more to say. The story concerns a couple – Berta Isla and her husband, Tomás Nevinson – from their teenage years to middle age. By the end of the story, Tomás appears much older, for reasons we will get to, while Berta’s life has passed by in waiting for his return. Most of the narrative is told from Berta’s point of view.   Part 1 – Berta (pp. 3-33) Part 2 – Berta (pp. 37-40) and Tomás (pp. 41-119) Part 3 – Berta (pp. 124-165) Part...
Read more