Geordie Williamson

Michel de Montaigne thought little of constancy. It was change in slow motion, he said – ‘a more languishing movement’. The first and still the most miraculous exponent of the essay form instead bragged about his embrace of all that fluctuates: ‘I do not portray being; I portray passing; not a passage of one age to another ... but from day to day, from minute to minute.’

For the inhabitants of mainland Australia, ‘history’ is often complicated by the sheer fact of geography. Instead of one central node, European colonisation expanded from multiple centres, each isolated in space and founded on differing socio-political premises over staggered periods of time, and each with populations too various in background to allow much in the way of agreement about some völkisch collective past.

Michelle de Kretser’s third novel opens with a man and a dog in the Australian bush, an image whose hooks are sunk deep in our national psyche. Recall the Edenic first chapter of The Tree of Man (1955), with its portrait of Stan Parker settling on a patch of virgin wilderness with only his dog for company. In the Australian Garden, Eve is a subsidiary companion.

In 1880, Turgenev visited Tolstoy at his country estate after a long period of estrangement, only to discover that the great novelist had, in the interim, renounced art in favour of ethical enquiry. Turgenev was appalled, and dashed off a letter complaining that ...

Britain’s Prospect magazine recently canvassed a number of leading thinkers on the question of what, in coming decades, would replace the great twentieth-century schism between left and right. In an overwhelmingly pessimistic field, the contribution of Pakistani scientist Pervez Hoodbhoy stood out in its cold-blooded concision. ‘Global and national politics will turn simple and Hobbesian,’ he predicted. ‘In the interim, energy hunger will drive the US and European countries to squeeze out, and steal, the last drops of oil from under Muslim sands. As bridges between Islam and the west collapse, expect global civil war and triumphant neo-Talibanic movements circling the globe.’

If history is a graveyard of dead aristocracies, the novel is their eulogy. It is now, for instance, a critical commonplace to explain the young Proust’s entry into the closed world of France’s nobility as an occurrence made possible by its dissolution. Close to death, holding only vestigial power, the fag ends of the ancien régime lost the will or ...

There is about Lisa Merrifield’s second novel a quality of aqueousness, an obsessive returning to states of immersion, whether in water, sleep, waves, a glass of gin. Hers is a superb exploration of the gelatinous margin between mind and world, innocence and experience, madness and sanity – those interregnums in the government of the self. And while it is from the weird clarity of this amniotic silence that Arriving at Night draws its various strengths, it is the same somnolence – the torpor of fiction in aspic – that comprises its singular flaw.