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…
Category: Literary Fiction Reviews
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,…
A review of Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany
The novel is set amidst the heat, drought and plagues of Wycheproof, a real country Victorian town around 290 miles north west of Melbourne. Robert and Jean work together to apply Robert’s stringent and certain rules for scientific living to…
A review of Last Night by James Salter
James Salter is an extraordinary writer and I envy those who are coming to him for the first time. His stories could be said to “explore character”, but that would be too pat and too simple; rather, they reveal soul.…