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…
Category: Literary Fiction Reviews
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.…
A review of This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun
Jelloun’s prose is vivid and alive, whether he is describing the stench of death (“Death has a smell. A mixture of brackish water, vinegar, and pus. It’s sharp, harsh.”) or the shock of seeing your own face in a mirror…
A review of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
The relationship between the opening of the novel and the ending of it are interwoven powerfully. The theme of what makes a person unique, the relationship between human identity, language, the cultural versus the personal memory, and even the relationship…
A review of The Fall of Rome by Martha Southgate
Although not an unusual narrative strategy, it demands much of an author and it is a pleasure here to see how Southgate rises beautifully to the occasion. Southgate goes beyond this to the extreme virtuosity of a narrative for the…
A review of Another Way to Dance by Martha Southgate
It is believability indeed that makes Another Way to Dance such a special book. The style is natural and, if not always grammatical, consistent with the language of an exceptionally bright teenager. I can’t think of any reader who would…