Historical Fiction

This is a drum I’ve been beating for some time, but it’s worth thumping it again here: now is a good time, if you want vigorous intellectual debate, to eschew highbrow literature and dive into popular fiction.

The Sunken Road is an ambitious novel which sets the crisscrossing lives of families in the northern highlands of South Australia against a temporal panorama of a century and a half and forces that extend far beyond state and continent. It is a compassionate but never sentimental account of a collective experience full of hope, pain, exploitation and double standards. At its centre is a strongly rendered character called Anna Antonia Ison Tolley.

Set in New South Wales during the turbulent years of 1916–19, Graeme Harper’s Black Cat, Green Field evokes the period with particularity and jaggedness. The first of the novel’s five parts introduces the central character: Sidney Nelson, recently wounded in Gallipoli, and now living in Sydney. A former art student, he is yearningly aware he could instead have been in the Paris of Picasso and Gris. He is also a ‘black cat’, a supporter of the radical industrial Workers of the World and when, in the closing months of 1916, the ‘Twelve’ I.W.W. members are sent to prison and police harassment intensifies, the organization goes underground and Nelson loses friends and contacts. Feeling jaded and devoid of artistic inspiration, he decides to leave Sydney and, after a false start, moves up to the north coast of NSW to stay near his sister May. The ‘black cat’ is going to paint the ‘green field’.

Australian involvement in World War I has in recent years attained a high profile in books, film and television. The trend has been to demythologise the legends of heroism and courage associated with war, and the theme often adopted is the rapid and brutal transformation from naivety to understanding of how baseless the myth was. Although this might be considered well covered ground, Geoff Page in his first novel, Benton’s Conviction, has returned to the war setting. However, because he concentrates on an aspect which hitherto has not been fully explored, and sustains the work with deft prose, Page has succeeded in producing a novel of originality and consistent interest.

On one of the early chaotic army days of World War II in France, I was combining the disagreeable tasks of eating and censoring letters home written by the men in my section.