Australian Fiction

Alasdair Duncan’s Second novel, Metro, opens as a perceptive and witty portrait of the urban, metrosexual scene. Once again, the main character is a repressed homosexual: this time his peers are twenty-something business and law students. The novel palls around chapter four, just maintaining interest in loops of nightclub scenes, bawdy behaviour and skin-deep insights. The vernacular tone is refreshing, given today’s stuffy publishing landscape, so it is unfortunate that the cynical and superficial misrepresentations of the contemporary sexual mores undermine the novel’s social commentary.

Why ‘Wyatt’? An evocative enough name for an Australian career criminal, but evocative of what, or whom? Of Wyatt Earp, perhaps, another gunman and homicide, if occasionally and famously on the right side of the law? Or Sir Thomas Wyatt, Tudor courtier, sensitive lover, diplomat and poet, who witnessed the execution of Anne Boleyn while himself a prisoner in the Tower of London? Garry Disher’s Wyatt has been in prison, and witnessed many deaths; indeed, facilitated some of them.

This highly ambitious first novel exists within a fine web of literary influences and allusions. The publisher invites comparisons to The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s novel set in a university Classics department. The novel’s narrator, Julia, a student enthralled by the glamorous, moneyed family of a classmate, echoes that of Brideshead Revisited. Self-conscious references to detective noir and nineteenth-century romance novels abound. All of these comparisons have some merit, but another takes precedence, not only flavouring the text, but providing a skeleton for the characters and plot 

A purveyor of second-hand literature-cum-reluctant sleuth is an attractive proposition. We first met Jack Susko in Lenny Bartulin’s first novel, A Deadly Business (2008). Susko, a one-time employee of the notorious Ziggy Brandt, had finally established a legitimate (albeit struggling) business, Susko Books. Rarely troubled by customers, Susko was entertained by the music of Miles Davis and Muddy Waters, and alcohol. 

Welcome to Moriarty country. This is our fourth visit to Ashbury High, in New South Wales, which is peopled with smart, sassy teenagers given to commenting on their lives and those of their friends, family, and teachers in many modes and many (far too many this time) words. Moriarty has been tracking three of these private-school girls since Year Nine. Now they are tackling Year Twelve.

In the introduction to this latest Best Australian Stories, Delia Falconer – in her second and, she advises, last year as editor – contends that the short story has greater affinities with the poem and the essay than with the novel. She rightly identifies the story as often ‘misunderstood in the public imagination as a kind of less demanding novel-in-miniature’. Stories, Falconer argues, are akin to poems in ‘picking their moment’ rather than working in the novel’s ‘great swathes of time’. The short story advances an argument in the way of an essay, while ‘artfully [hiding] its workings’.

Alan Gould’s imagination has been steeped in a wide range of reading, from Shakespeare, Milton, Kipling, and Auden to less well-known works such as the sophisticated verse of the Cavalier poets. His recent novel, The Lake Woman, also reveals the influence of the tough and tender lyricism of Thomas Wyatt.

In keeping with his successful début fiction, Shaun Prescott’s Bon and Lesley is set in a declining regional Australian town filled with oddball characters and plagued by otherworldly phenomena. The Town (2017) was published in seven countries and garnered apt comparison to, among others, Franz Kafka and László Krasznahorkai, as well as Australian writers Gerald Murnane and Wayne Macauley. Like these influences, Prescott’s work eludes definitive categorisation, though his second novel maintains distinctly ontological and surrealist emphases.

Salt and Skin is the fifth novel by Victorian-based writer Eliza Henry-Jones. Following the death of her husband, Luda moves with her two teenage children, Darcy and Min, from Australia to the remote Scottish islands. Luda, a photographer, is employed by the local council to document the effects of climate change on the islands and to raise funds for related activism. They will live on Seannay, a small tidal island off the main Big Island, in the isolated and ramshackle ‘ghost house’ that bears centuries-old markings on the ceilings, ‘witch marks’ thought to ward off evil.