Fiction

Cardigan Press’s third offering, Allnighter, promises to keep its reader’s attention all night long, with ‘fiction that burns at both ends’. With forty-four short pieces in this beautifully designed book, the challenge is not to devour the book all at once, but to give each story the time and consideration it deserves.

One of the joys of this anthology is that the stories are of varying length, ranging from two to eleven pages. This allows the writers to demonstrate a feel for their story and characters. Another advantage is that many of the writers are unknown and not constrained by theme, number of words, or the weight of expectations. Their stories are vivid, playful and unusual.

Australian novels about World War I are typically tales of youth sacrificed and innocence destroyed in foreign lands for the Commonwealth. A good example is David Malouf’s coming-of-age novella, Fly Away Peter (1981). Nation and character matured simultaneously in the necessary baptism of fire. From the outset, John Charalambous’s second novel, Silent Parts, proves itself to be atypical and complex, with a forty-something anti-hero caught up in the not-so-Great War.

Aldous Huxley often prioritised the expression of themes and ideas over the development of character and plot in his fiction. Ape and Essence (1948), one of his less well-known novellas, was no exception, but it was also funny and thought-provoking. The Island of Four Rivers, by Christopher Morgan, has none of these redeeming features.

Love, family, hope, death and grief have always been among fiction’s chief concerns. The Gospel According to Luke and Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls, both second books from their authors, share many of these themes. The Gospel According to Luke adds faith, belief, religion and prayer; and Emily Maguire adroitly pulls off what would, in lesser hands, be a farce.

The year is 1806. While pacing the Cobb at Lyme Regis, the tall and windswept Laura Morrison exchanges keen glances with the intense Mr Templeton, but he fails to meet later appointments, leaving Laura in the lurch.

The Australian soap Neighbours maintains its popularity overseas. Busloads of UK tourists bound for Vermont South attest to this. The soap’s popularity lies in its reflection of the domestic and the mundane. It provides a safe means for overseas viewers to explore the exotic: the trials of the Ramsay Street clan are not so different from their own. Soon, thanks to author Célestine Hitiura Vaite, Tahiti may have its own busloads of tourists, searching for the petrol station in Faa´a PK55, location and setting for the domestic, everyday dramas of Breadfruit, Frangipani and Tiare.

Desperate Housewives, eat your heart out. This warm slice of smalltown gothic simmers with barely disguised marital discord, traumatic childhoods, eating disorders, bed-hopping and maternal angst – all centred around a playgroup in the South Australian town of Port Lincoln. Bitchy Madelaine, insecure Danica, sniffy Pauline, downtrodden Jo and earth-mother Nell have little in common but their children and geographical proximity. It is enough to form a friendship of sorts, albeit one spiked with deliberately provocative conversational lures, needling one-liners, sharp character assessments and sly jabs at the fleshy parts of one another’s self-esteem. As the cracks deepen in the veneer of their exterior lives, this precarious network becomes increasingly important – and fragile.

Death of a Whaler considers the grand themes of death, grief, the quest for meaning and the potential for reawakening. Just days before the Byron Bay whalers are made redundant in 1962, lopsided Flinch is involved in an accident and literally frozen. It is not only when he meets Karma, himself troubled by the past, that Flinch reluctantly begins the trial of healing.

Appalling as it sounds, many of us never out-grow our childhood personae. Although people become adept at concealing their petulance and insecurities behind adult façades, among siblings and parents they revert to type, unable to resist lifelong family roles and patterns.

Kate Veitch’s first novel, Listen, is a vivid dissection of a fractured family. Forty years after a young mother of four – the unexpectedly likeable Rosemarie – has abandoned her children and husband one Christmas Eve to escape Melbourne suburbia for Swinging London, the anguish of her flight still reverberates for her children, manifesting itself in different ways. Rosemarie’s eldest daughter was effectively thrust into premature motherhood at the age of thirteen, due partly to her father’s benign neglect. Deborah resents the injustices and sacrifices of her adolescence, when she was consumed with raising her siblings. She is constantly irritable with her husband, and unable to comprehend her teenage daughter Olivia’s preference for animals to humans. Her anger drives a wedge between herself and her family.

Why do we need another edition of Mansfield Park? Particularly, what is the justification for an expensive one, when we can get a plain reprint for $5, or a well-annotated paperback for $10? The answer is the one that all scholarly editors are driven by: editorial principles have changed. What was considered acceptable textual practice even twenty years ago no longer fulfils readers’ desires to get close to origins, to understand contexts.