The prose has a deliberate hard-boiled rhythm (the novel’s opening sentences – “Murder didn’t mean much to Raven. It was just a new job. You had to be careful…” – illustrates this as well as anything) and the suspense is…
Category: Literary Fiction Reviews
A review of You Are Going Away edited by Matthew Ward
Most of the stories, and particularly the three winners, have all of those qualities: are tightly structured with a conflict that pulls the reader in and drives the narrative forward, leading carefully and conclusively towards the ending. Interestingly, a large…
A review of The Professor’s Daughter by Emily Raboteau
The stories of Emma, her father Bernard, her brother Bernie, professor Lestor and Meteke form an intricate dance of stories, an impressionistic picture of life through Raboteau’s eyes. The complexity of the picture is too great to be contained by…
A review of King Harald’s Saga and Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson
This is a vigorous and intelligent account by a man who, although he played the political game badly and with fatal results, understood politics, and was able also to breathe life into his work as very few historians can. Neither…
A review of Arthur & George by Julian Barnes
Barnes has clearly done a tremendous amount of research, and even a reader who comes to this work without the slightest knowledge of Arthur Conan-Doyle will leave with a good understanding of the key events in his life, from his…
A review of The Best Australian Stories 2005
This is an accessible collection with stories that almost always add up to something which wasn’t there before. The economy and careful construction of this work is one which a serious reader will appreciate–Moorhouse has chosen well–but overall, what is…
A review of Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson by Jonathan Coe
Like all heresies, his novels challenge our most fundamental beliefs: our belief in the moral integrity of ‘fiction’, our belief in the usefulness of storytelling when the daily truths thrown up by our misbegotten world cry out for immediate, practical…
A review of The White Earth by Andrew McGahan
This is a passionate, powerful and beautifully written story which contains all of the elements of good fiction, and is the culmination of a skill which has been growing with each of McGahan‘s exceptional novels. In The White Earth McGahan’s prose maintains…
A review of Among the Blacks: Two Works by Raymond Roussel and Ron Padgett
The translation is a delicate, accomplished work that captures perfectly the placid emptiness that lies at the heart of Roussel’s world. A flurry of outlandish and bizarre events is related to the reader, but in a manner that is formal,…
A review of The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
The humour is at its strongest when it mixes the exotic with the homely. At one point Marlborough, a kind of latter-day Noah, says of his sisters, one of whom is a werewolf who comes to mate with a wolf,…