GatesyRead

  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...

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 ...