Fiction

It was a comparatively easy task for Anna Murdoch to have In Her Own Image published. After all, as the critics vied with each other to point out – Rupert does own forty-two per cent of Collins. A cynical observation is that she had considerable difficulty in having it seriously reviewed – when one considers how many critics Mr Murdoch has at his disposal! Everyone wrote about it of course – after all, the Murdochs make good copy. Through her many interviews, we learn a good deal about Anna Murdoch and pick up a few pointers about Rupert the family man – but relatively little about the novel itself.

Tom Howard is a new character/pseudonymous author in the same general region inhabited so prominently by Peter Corris’ Cliff Hardy, although with the publication of his first two novels it remains to be seen how far Howard will be able to rival Corris’ talent for bringing out the local flavour of crime and corruption, and how far his books will simply have Australian settings grafted on to classic forms of the whodunnit. Of the two Howard novels under review The Health Farm Murders follows the formula of a small isolated community with its numbers dropping off like ninepins, while The Beach-Front Murders is a much more credible account of passion and loneliness, of the lure and isolation of the big city.

Welcome again to Morris Lurie’s global village: Melbourne, Paris, New York, London, Tangier, Tel Aviv, Melbourne again, London. Lurie is one of our most reliable entertainers, but he is also, in the recesses of his stories, a chronicler of inner loneliness. The round world for him is signposted with stories; as one of his characters says, ‘everything is a story, or a prelude to a story, or the aftermath of one.’ The sheer variety of narrative incidents and locales in this collection is, as usual with him, impressive in itself. His characters play hard with experience in those bright or familiar places, a Tangier of easy living and surprising acquaintances, a London of the sixties fierce with contrasts. Yet finally they are always partly detached from it all and able to set themselves free, curiously able to resume the role of spectator of life. Many of Lurie’s characters give the initially disconcerting impression of possessing that ultimate detachment of a certain kind of writer, even when, as is usually the case, they are not actually cast as a writer or artist.

Janette Turner Hospital was born in Melbourne, but has lived and travelled abroad in recent years. Borderline, her third novel, is set for the most part in Boston and Montreal. It is a mystery story which contains many of the conventional ingredients of the genre: disappearances, murder and violence, mysterious messages. However, these things are subsidiary to its dominating theme which is an exploration of the nature of reality. In this it achieves mixed results, but on the whole favourable ones.

Expatriate Australian writer and now naturalised American citizen Sumner Locke Elliott seems to have written this novel to dramatise his own sense of cultural displacement and identity. Cutting back and forth in time (between 1978 and 1950) and place (Australia and the United States), it traces the attempt of a woman named Tanya van Zandt in New York to retrace the whereabouts and identity of an Australian, Tilly Beamis, who turns out to be (it does not take the alert reader long to recognise) her actual former self.

It is astonishing how many major works of Australian fiction – and often major works in themselves – are out of print at any given time. Angus and Robertson and Penguin, occasionally assisted by smaller firms like the specialist feminist press Virago and the university presses, have done fine work in drawing attention to novels and writers undeservedly out of print. One writer who seemed out of fashion for a time but whom Penguin are systematically bringing back into print is Martin Boyd. The latest is their series of reissues of his work is a relatively little known and lightweight novel with the misleadingly enticing title of Nuns in Jeopardy (first published in 1940).

At times I was delighted by this novel and at others was absolutely irritated. It is a novel which swerves between metaphors of wit and wisdom and crass punning. It is interesting structurally and it is crudely constructed. It is a novel of commitment, keen observation and loving sympathy. In some ways it is a novel of simple faith reminiscent of the Christian novels I was given as Sunday School awards which emphasised salvation through acceptance of a life of no smoking, no drinking, no dancing and certainly no going out with those who did them. But I’m putting this too strongly, for Gary Langford is not as simple minded as to attack modern medicine as the invention of the devil and doctors as the devil’s disciples. But the central thesis is that the protagonist, Mary Stewart, is the victim of our faith that the doctor knows best.