Though Davies’ Hughes isn’t exactly a likable character, the intimacy is so striking and the intensity of the portrait so great that Hughes becomes someone entirely familiar. Not so much the grand aviator with all the superlatives of his status: richest, fastest, most inventive, but instead, a man like any other, pursued by demons and running hard to find a way to live through them.
Tag: Australian fiction
A review of The New Angel by Ali Alizadeh
Bahram’s is the voice of the newly-arrived immigrant, misunderstood and always alien, at home neither in the country he has come from nor the one he now inhabits. Such people are becoming increasingly common in our globalised society, and their outsider voices need to be heard and heeded if the notion of a ‘global village’ is to ever become a reality.
A review of His Illegal Self by Peter Carey
This last sentence so changes the story, that this reader at least, went back and re-read it in its entirety, seeing everything in a different light. I enjoyed it the first time, but found much to reflect on the second – the hallmark of a good novel. Che is believable, both as the eight-year old boy struggling to find himself, and as the older, wiser narrator he becomes by the end of the book.
A review of Aphelion by Emily Ballou
Ballou has created a much more complex novel in Aphelion than in Father Lands, but it’s no more difficult to read as a result. The complexity of time, place and multiple view points is dealt with sensitively and with a sophistication that is always tempered by Ballou’s great love of character and language, and an undercurrent of enduring humour that’s never far beneath the surface.
A review of Long Afternoon of the World by Graeme Kinross-Smith
The photographs become everyone’s close people. The times and places become our own memories of what we’ve known, and been and where we’ve ended. It is, indeed, a long afternoon – and at the end of it is evening. Though this isn’t a fast novel to read, nor does it leave the reader with a denouement in any sense. Yet it is both beautiful, and powerful in its ability to draw out, like a great poem, the core meaning of a moment.
A review of The River Baptists by Belinda Castles
Castles creates mood skilfully, as in the opening chapter where Danny and his father are fishing in their little boat. The blood on his father’s t-shirt from the worms and other creatures is symbolic of the man and his relationship with his family. The details of the community and the people who live there produce a sleepiness that is tinged with menace. There is much that moves under the surface of the water, occasionally bursting out to wreck havoc.
A review of Every Move You Make by David Malouf
Although “The Domestic Cantata” is the most complex and extraordinary of the stories in this collection, all of the stories are set off by Malouf’s clear love of life that underpins the work. The plots move easily and the characters all develop forward, but it is the collective meaning created by the glimpse at something that goes beyond the prose that builds these stories that makes them so remarkable. This is a not to be missed collection of stories that are as important as they are pleasurable.
A review of The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan
The Unknown Terrorist is being sold as a Trojan Horse of a thriller masquerading the seriousness of the societal critique it provides, but even that statement is a Trojan Horse. At the core of this novel is a nihilism so bleak, that it makes even the horror of the terrorist act, of murder and suicide, seem minor in comparison. It’s almost the complete opposite of the joyous affirmative humour which underpins Gould’s Book of Fish, and except for the occasional forays into stunning prose, it’s hard to believe this is the same author.
A review of Theft by Peter Carey
Although the truth theme continues to be compelling, it never takes precedence to the original and natural integrity of the story, which is overwhelmingly entertaining, first and foremost. On pure plot and characterisation alone, Carey is a master. That Theft like all…
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…