Steven Carroll

In his third novel, Steven Carroll continues to work on those questions, obsessions, scenes and images that preoccupy him as a writer – the characters and personalities of women, and in particular that figure of a sexually charged and sophisticated young woman so disturbing to Helen Garner in The First Stone; the language of infatuation; the placement of characters in their particular city; mismatched lovers as the centre of a love story; and a certain trick Carroll has of overlaying the inner lives of characters with the narrative of events in the story being told. It is as though his characters swim, groggily, up out of their fantasies into the harsh, ironic events that have been provoked by their inner dreams. Life in his novels operates as a merciless commentary on the evasions and hubris of each character's consciousness.

Is it possible for love to flourish between an oppressor and one who is oppressed? J.M. Coetzee, in his novel Waiting for the Barbarians, thought not, but Coetzee provided some compensation for his hero by ennobling him to an almost mythical degree in order to present the argument that power can be used equally to fight injustice and brutality, or to inflict it. The main character in Coetzee’s novel, the Magistrate, recognises the pathology inherent in his love for a captured ‘barbarian’, and chooses to return her to her·people. He then becomes a victim himself as he fights the atrocities being perpetrated around him.

A first novel written with fine-honed discretion and linking three generations of very ordinary Australians, this book has a satisfying sense of the continuities and disjunctions within families.