The old divide: 'Melbourne' by Sophie Cunningham and 'Sydney' by Delia Falconer

Publishers New South are producing a series of books, penned as memoirs or love-letters to the author's hometown. Having read Sophie Cunningham's Melbourne late last year, I was intrigued to contrast and compare her highly personal journey through the city, and its mix of anecdote and history, with Delia Falconer's homage to my former hometown, Sydney.

I read many reviews of Cunningham's book before I dived in myself. They uniformly fell into one of two camps: Melbourne reviewers loved it, Sydney reviewers felt excluded by it and commented on its narrowness.

The inside cover of the book features a hand-drawn map of Melbourne. It extends from Footscray in the west, with an arrow pointing to Geelon;, to Hawthorn in the east, this time with Camberwell represented on an arrow; and to Brunswick in the north. You can see then where some of the criticism around its blinkered perspective came from.

I didn't find it narrow. True, my six years in Melbourne have geographically coincided with Cunningham's experience of the city. It seemed clear that New South's brief to the author was to write her Melbourne. The book was a synedoche of the city: Cunningham's experience of Melbourne, seen through the prism of a select number of suburbs and interests, stands in for the wider, general experience of other suburbs and occupations.

I did find it strangely jumbled, however. Cunningham frequently jumped between personal anecdotes to issues of national history and culture via some spurious tangents. References to Meanjin articles were frequent; fair enough, given the author is a former editor of the journal, but it pushed the personal touch a little too far. It was fine for Cunningham to focus on her experience, but to mainly bring in support from within that personal experience was a little too inward.

Her account of Melbourne is reverent, loving and at times admonishing. More so than Falconer, she uses Melbourne as a springboard - or testing ground - for national issues. In a discussion on comedy, for example, she rightly points out Melbourne's strong comedy scene as host of the International Comedy Festival. She quotes Rod Quantock, who says he would 'never be a regular guest on Hey Hey It's Saturday', which provides a link for Cunningham to discuss - in a single paragraph - the show's re-emergence, the fact that the majority of its audience came from Melbourne, memories of her and her brother watching the original, and the psyche of homegrown humour inculcated under John Howard. The links are valid, but the execution is necessarily jumbled as she moves between the personal and the public without so much as a hard return.

Delia Falconer takes longer to warm her audience to Sydney. In the opening pages she says Sydney's 'fundamental temperament is melancholy'. In fact, while 'Sydney may look golden' its bright notes 'cast themselves out across a great abyss'. Her Sydney is more ephemeral than Cunningham's Melbourne. Perhaps this is where Cunningham's narrow-gauge storytelling has its strength. It is possible to make valid sweeping generalisations about Fitzroy; harder to make them stick to a full metropolis, which Falconer attempts. Her Sydney is a city with its own light, a city haunted by an erased indigenous history, a unique city in Australia with it origins in the conflict between prisoners and middle-class law enforcers.

Falconer's childhood memories seem to come from a further-off place. I was surprised when I checked to discover she is actually three years younger than Cunningham. Perhaps therein lies a truth about the two cities, and their eternal divide - maybe Sydney stayed in the past for longer, and the city's 'brashness', which Falconer both highlights and criticises, is in fact symptomatic of its desire to grow up quickly.

'The True Story of Butterfish' - Nick Earls

Nick Earls writes what he knows. He's obviously learnt a few new things in recent years. The True Story of Butterfish introduces a new protagonist: rather than a member of the medical fraternity, Curtis Holland is a former rockstar. He's producing albums now and divides his time - and technical descriptions - between music software and cooking.

All familiarity is not lost, however. He lives in Brisbane. He has a persistent internal monologue. He's nervous around women, finds himself in unexpected and awkward situations, but has pop-culture funny lines at the ready.

I enjoy Nick Earls' novels. He writes genuinely amusing scenes, and underpins them every now and then with worthwhile bigger-picture musings. He's whimsical, sure, but there's a philosophy to his writing as well. And plenty of authors use their hometown as a touchstone or motif, so why can't Brisbane play that role?

And you really have to hand it to Earls for the aspirational quality of his work. In an earlier novel, his protagonist - in his thirties - admits that he'd only very recently given up serious hopes of playing cricket for Australia. His male characters (eventually) always ending up liking the girls who like them back, and who can give as good as they get when it comes to those pop-culture-laden one-liners. The protagonist in Butterfish played keyboards in a hugely successful rockband, and while the lead-singer has stayed true to the party-hard stereotype, Curtis remains the deep thinker, enigmatic, moody, lonely. All that fame has led him back to the Brisbane suburbs, and the happy fortune of moving in next door to a woman he comes to fancy (the aspiration works for her too - a highly recognisable rockstar moves in next door and they hit it off).

Some of the early scenes focus step-by-step on the process of making music, namedropping software and techniques. Then Curtis starts to cook, and it happens all over again in the kitchen. But once he really gets to know the family next door - and develops surprising relationships with mother, daughter and son - and the lead-singer returns to face family issues, the book gets stronger. Earls isn't scared to give us an overweight, almost-forty protagonist who is hard on himself and full of regret. True to form, however, his character finds redemption in new beginnings, new relationships and new choices.

Butterfish is more thematic than many of Earls' earlier novels. Its resolution doesn't come from neatly tied-up plot points, but rather from Curtis accepting his past, his choices, and how his actions affected others' choices.

'Little Sister' - Aimee Said

Al Miller is in Year 10 and living in the shadow of her pretty, popular, super-talented, super-respected older sister Larrie, who's about to do her Year 12 exams.

Using this simple, and common, story basis, Aimee Said has crafted a young-adult novel that covers an admirable number of areas of teenage angst, from identity to popularity to sexuality, in a plot that is both modern and believable. Said is young enough to remember what high school was like, but old enough to bring a degree of wisdom to her book. Most impressively, Said's novel doesn't patronise teenagers, but rather respects the issues it raises.

Social networking is a key issue in the novel. Facebook, blogs and mobile phones are used in the way that landlines and letters were when I was reading John Marsden: that is, the book doesn't draw undue attention to modern technology; it simply includes it as the current medium of communication. A particularly effective technique is included an imaginary status update for Al at the end of each chapter. There's a message in that technique: Al isn't putting those updates on Facebook; they're too personal, too honest. It's a reminder (as with several more overt plot points) that we still have multiple means of communication, and the internet is not the place to share everything.

Relationships work strongly in this book, without doting on backstory. As Al's best friend, Maz serves an archetypal role as the voice of reason. It's a common device in YA fiction - the more-sensible best friend - but, again, it's important as a reminder of the power of true friendship, of the existence of multiple opinions at a time when self-centredness can seem the only sane way forward. Al and Maz are friends with boys, and while there are romantic sub-plots for both of them, male-female friendships are presented without undue examination. I also liked that the backgrounds of the minor characters weren't unnecessarily fleshed out: one is wealthy, one has no father figure mentioned, but these aspects didn't need to be emphasised. The characters are granted idiosyncrasies, however, such as stinky feet or a predilection for counting cats. In a novel so concerned with identity, these touches help remind its target audience that we are all unique.

Most significantly, the book explores teenage sexuality in an exceptionally mature and empathetic fashion. 'Woman-identifying woman' is the school counsellor's uber-PC term for lesbians, and it's a subtle jab at society's ongoing awkwardness around terminology and acceptance. The book looks at the experience of coming out from several perspectives: those of siblings, friends, bullies and, admirably, parents and other adult figures. Social media, sexuality and science collide for an effective examination of how a teenager not only figures out who they are, but how they are going to tell the world.

I'm so impressed with Said's use of language, and repeated terms that capture the essence of exploratory adolescence. In her earlier novel, Finding Freia Lockhart, the titular character regularly took time out for 'boogie breaks', dancing to her heart's content in her bedroom, often until interrupted by a 'death stare' from her cat. The death stare is replaced in Little Sister by the stinkeye. As in the first novel, swear words are kept to a minimum, with 'shiz' proving an effective replacement (although the one use of the f-word in Freia nails a cathartic moment!). She makes great use of strikethroughs and brackets to add asides to the reader, again paying respect to her audience in acknowledging that they understand what's going on at a deeper level.

I found Little Sister laugh-out-loud funny at times, but it doesn't trivialise adolescence. The problems of identity and peer pressure are genuine, and pressure on young adults is surely only increasing as the global village shrinks ever further and we increasingly express and share our emotions via pixels. This novel is both quietly cautionary and strongly affirming.

'Preincarnate' - Shaun Micallef

The thinking person's comedian, sometimes it seems Shaun Micallef can do no wrong. Newstopia was one of the most intelligent series on Australian TV and rates up there with Frontline for ingenuity and pertinence. I can't say that I settle in to watch Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation (the apostrophes are enough to put me off), but from all reports Micallef hosts with aplomb and warms himself to each generation, whether denoted X, Y or BB.

So why shouldn't he write a witty novella? Preincarnate is a whole lot of fun. Maybe it's a little rambly and maybe its preposterousness slighty outweighs the weight of the story, but it's clever, and it plays homage to a whole range of writers and genres (even Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure). Since sketch comedy on Australian TV is most likely dead, we should be grateful we're able to access Micallef in the written form.

It's a reader's book, too, presented with all manner of delightful touches. There's a ribbon bookmark; a delightfully coloured and swirled frontispiece, with a place to write your name; and illustrations from Bill Wood, in the best boys-own or Famous Five fashion.

The plot? Well, I could try and explain it, but suffice it to say that it involves a modern man who is in fact a clone of Richard Cromwell, and in travelling between 2005 and 1657 we encounter Tom Cruise, Arthur Conan Doyle and Matthew Reilly among others. The book is littered with amusing footnotes, wherein the author and his editor argue over finer points of the MS. You don't need to follow the chronology of the chapters, which is as jumbled as Catch-22, to enjoy the ride.

I had the pleasure of hearing Micallef read from the book at the Writers at the Convent. He chose the scene where the President of Bibliotheque nationale de France reveals the terrible truth that Matthew Reilly spilt crumbs in precious books while researching one of his novels. Micallef rendered it complete with ridiculous French accent for the President, interspersed with his own rich tones, and it was hilarious.

It's that kind of book, one where even from the page characters speak with silly accents. While unwritten, you can visualise sly eyebrow raises, exaggerated shrugs and sneaky glances to camera. It's a whole lot of fun, and an attractive addition to your bookshelf.

'See Naples and Die' - Penelope Green

It was en route to reviewing this book that I came to my musings on the travel writing genre in the previous post. Many of its elements, good and bad, tick the boxes of the classic characteristics of the genre.

The fact of moving overseas for a dramatic change does not imbue the traveller with the skills of a writer. Notwithstanding the fact that many, including Green, who release travel books have a background in journalism, it's a huge challenge to filter an intense set of experiences into a coherent story with a point.

Green is not as new to the style as her name suggests. She has produced three books about living in Italy, the first about her time immediately after arriving in Rome, friendless, jobless and languageless. This is the second, and it's followed up by a third account of living on an island off Naples with her Italian partner (who she meets in this book).

Her purpose in this second instalment moves beyond mere recounting of a foreigner's experiences abroad. Naples is a complex, scary, passionate, intimidating and beautiful city, and Green wants to use her time there to understand it. She uses her contacts and journalistic nous to interview many prominent Neapolitans. Coming to terms with the city - and its equal parts chaos and charm - is a neat allegory for a woman in her 30s trying to choose the right track on which to set the wheels of her life.

It's tough, though, producing a book like this. You need the reader to understand your environment, but too often Green recounts anecdotes without weaving them into a greater narrative. The book wouldn't be interesting enough if it were simply a set of stories about meeting friends in bars - that would amount to a set of emails from a travelling friend - but it wouldn't be a travel narrative if she simply presented her research into the Camorra and Naples' insidious criminality. It's hard, too, to balance details of a one-night-stand with a local against interviews with the city's mayor and her plans for another term in office.

You can tell, too, that while the book purports to be a chronological report of her first year in Naples, it jumps around a lot more than that. And fair enough - this isn't a set of emails sent weekly to friends and family. This is a compilation, a condensed version of events, and it's fine to conflate something that happened in April with a related encounter from October. What's curious is that every 'real-life' figure Green encounters - by which I mean a public figure, rather than one of her friends - is re-introduced at each mention. Rosa Russo Iervolino, for example, is always introduced with the apposition 'mayor of Naples'; whereas I'd lost track of her first-name-only friends by about the third chapter. The repetition makes it easier from an editor's point of view, but it also removes the reader from the conversation, because it's like the author can't remember what they've already told you.

The language issues always intrigue me in a story like this. Green more than once bemoans her 'deteriorating Italian' - her work in Naples is editing English-language articles for a Mediterranean-news website. Yet she's interviewing the mayor, senior church figures, lawyers, victims, and recording their experiences with dextrous language. I'm so curious as to how that comes about, and wish the narrative would 'lift the veil' once in a while to mention the whirr of the tape recorder in the room, or explain what's been paraphrased, not to mention who did the eventual translation.

The book is somewhat overrun with Italian translations, much like a guidebook. Years ago in Italy, it amused my travelling companion and me no end when the Lonely Planet guide bothered to translate Piazza di San Marco to St Mark's Plaza. Some of Green's translations are similarly obvious, though she does also make an effort to include and explain aphoristic gems from the Neopolitan dialect.

To give credit where it's due, Green does undertake a heroine's journey. She decides upon commencing her job in Naples not to focus on socialising with her work colleagues - she'd rather keep that relationship professionally separate. That's commendable - I'd be grabbing at any chance of companionship that was on offer. Obviously Green is made of stronger social stuff than that, and gathers an admirable posse during her time including, inevitably for the genre, an Italian love (Alfonso).

I think some examples of travel writing are better for those who haven't ventured far from home. A lack of empathy can imbue these tales with a fantastical, gripping element. If I'm honest, I can't help feeling a level of competitiveness when following a heroine's travel journey, and sometimes what I want is exactly what wouldn't sell books - more of the fear and failings that must accompany the author's audacity and success.

'A Fraction of the Whole' - Steve Toltz

It's a big book. It's one of those hardcovers you can't help but heave rather than lift off the counter. But thank goodness it's big, because it is so darn good.

In this novel, Toltz has combined humour and insight with rare skill. His writing style is Franzenesque, with bizarre developments such as a character building a house in a labyrinth, or deciding to make everyone in Australia a millionaire. My response to the book reminded me of how I felt about David Sedaris, with his similar combination of provocative philosophy and laughs.

A big distinction for Toltz, however, is that he's Australian. Like Richard Flanagan in The Unknown Terrorist, he unashamedly uses Australia as his landscape and backdrop. Events from Australian history are dropped knowingly into the story, without self-conscious explanation.

The book oscillates between the points of view of father and son Martin and Jasper Dean. Their lives are irrevocably affected by Terry Dean, Martin's brother and Jasper's uncle. The setting ranges from country town, to Sydney, to Paris, to Thailand, but the control of language and scene never changes.

Toltz knows how to build a sentence, and perhaps even more importantly, he knows when to start a new one. His style is both punchy and fluid, immensely readable, making the book's many-hundred-page extent manageable. His themes in this book touch on family and ambition, and revolve around legacy, of what we want to make for ourselves while alive and how we want that remembered once we're dead.

Much of the early part of the book is set around a prison, offering opportunity for plenty of great characterisation ('He scratched at his tattoo. It wouldn't come off.'). Nestled among the humour and hysterics, however, are aphorisms to live by: 'Choosing between the available options is not the same as thinking for yourself'.

A Fraction the Whole was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2008, and it is certainly deserving of accolade and attention.

'Turner's Paintbox' - Paul Morgan

Novels based around the life and works of a renowned artist can go one of two ways: either the story unravelling as the reader learns about the influences and motivations of artistic genius; or the reader discovers how much the author knows about their chosen subject, without it doing too much to enhance the story.

Richard Flanagan's Wanting achieves the former as it interlaces the late years of Charles Dickens with the establishment of the Van Diemen's Land penal colony (an unexpected link, but one that works). Paul Morgan's Turner's Paintbox achieves the latter. It is more in the vein of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, which was littered with references to classical musicians and interpretations of scores: the characters' differing interpretations sometimes served a point; the same could not be said for his obsession with antique furniture.

Morgan's protagonist is Gerald, an art dealer who began his career at the National Gallery of NSW cataloguing an exhibition featuring the works of J.M.W. Turner found in Australia. Morgan explores episodes of Turner's life sporadically throughout the novel. Initially, the two townscapes - modern Sydney and Victorian London - are contrasted, a juxtaposition soon overtaken by the enormous gulf between Gerald and his new lover, Julia.

The Turner episodes, however, are fragmented and within them the narrative tone changes notably. This is inevitable as they move the story from first to third person narration, but the voice presented is a didactic one, telling the reader things about Turner, rather than developing him as a character who could then counterpoint or reflect what is unfolding in the Sydney storyline.

Morgan's style is often overwrought, invoking similes for description when character action could have served the same purpose. Out walking one morning Gerald notes that '[t]he path materialised in front of me like a ghostly rug, and I could hear the water splashing with gentle phosphoresence'. Hearing phospherence? A pretty turn of phrase, but one that doesn't bear much scrutiny.

It's tough to like Gerald: he's pretentious, arrogant, self-absorbed and borderline unfaithful. At a gallery in New York, Gerald mentions Frech artist Jean Cocteau, to which Julia replies with a reference to Jacques Costeau. Gerald notes, 'I smiled at her confusion of Costeau's name but said nothing'. Is this a character note - another reason to dislike - or Morgan revealing more of his own knowledge?

Gerald considers a fling while away from Julia in London. He resists, but toys with regret, and is buoyed in his decision by the realisation that he didn't find the lady so attractive after all. When he discovers that Julia did have a fling while he was gone, he is disgusted, and ends the relevant chapter saying, 'I discovered the splinter of ice inside my heart...and with a raised eyebrow and icy silences...I began to bend Julia to my will'.

Presenting a narrator with double standards is fine, though a little unsavoury, but there's no counterpoint, no repercussion to that action to let the audience believe that Gerald (or Morgan) grew as a character because of it. Maybe he truly doesn't see the hyprocrisy of it. Gerald does reveal some of our less-admirable relationship traits, but again, without an impartial narrator - as a first person novel we hear only Gerald's perspective - no third party is present to moderate the message Morgan might be presenting.

I'm intrigued, too, by the gender roles in the novel. Imagine if the last line of that chapter had one extra letter, making it Julian, not Julia, and our author was Paula Morgan. To be successful, with that kind of 'domineering' female protagonist, the book would have to be written and classified as a Gemmellesque sex piece. Something about literary marketing and readers' tastes says unlikeable, unfair, irrascible male characters are acceptable. Women too often have to be downtrodden or grotesquely exaggerated to take centre stage.

'The Slap' - Christos Tsiolkas

The book everyone's talking about. That's the word on the street about The Slap. For everyone to be talking about it, the book must have an element of controversy, and that is one indisputable feature of Christos Tsiolkas' fourth novel. It's not controversial in that it tackles taboo topics in a radical way. Instead, it's got everyone talking because it's about us: it's about a group of people of different races and generations living in inner Melbourne, now, talking about the social issues that you can read about in the paper today.

Private vs public education, drug taking (in your forties and at school), losing your virginity, career vs family, feminism, misogyny, parenting, permissiveness, social and personal responsibility, morality in relationships...and, quite honestly, that is just the first chapter.

The book is written in eight long chapters, each one from the (third person) perspective of a different character. The critical event occurs in the first of these, when a man slaps a misbehaving child at a barbecue. Each chapter is distinct to that character's persuasions and environment, yet each still progresses the story without rehashing what we've already witnessed. Tsiolkas' greatest accomplishment lies in so completely realising the distinct character voices. His key characters are male and female; from multiple generations: either still at school, in their forties with young or no children, or elderly grandparents; and of varying backgrounds: Greek, Anglo, Indian.

If they share a commonality it's in a penchant for strong and frequent swearing, taking drugs and having a complex sex life. Almost no-one in the book is faithful to their partners. When one character has an affair, their lover rationalises it by declaring they are 'not interested in the morality of our actions'. Nice way to feel good about doing something bad. The majority of male characters have a decidely unhealthy opinion of women. The book's second section is told from the perspective of the 'slapper', Harry, and it was a challenge to wade through the muck of his hateful, misogynist life and come out the other side able to breathe again and carry on with the book.

The two teenage characters in the book enjoy a remarkable level of permissiveness from the adults in their lives, allowing them to indulge in almost as much sex and drugs as the adults. It's an interesting contrast, given that many of the characters regard that same permissiveness, when lavished on a toddler, as the root of the problems that led to the slap. Similarly, the middle-aged adults seem at liberty to permit themselves indulgences - whether to take illicit substances or as to how they treat their family - but not always to permit others the same freedoms.

Any student of writing, however, knows that fiction is not an exact reflection of reality. For art that holds a mirror up to who we are, turn to documentary. Fiction, by its nature, must embellish and exaggerate. Hence, while Tsiolkas' book presents us with 'real' Australia, racial and gender stereotypes are amplified; sex is never straightforward - everyone is unfaithful and most have had relationships with significant age differences; men are not simply blokey, but misogynistic to the extreme; women are not only mothers, but wilfully submissive to their partner's domination. The teenagers in the book are not only grotesquely comfortable with sex and drugs, but universally have exceptionally permissive parents.

The book doesn't purport to source goodness or a truism of humanity in each of the characters. They are each massively flawed - and some critics argue too much so for the enjoyment of the reader - and in this way only do they combine into a single reflection of who we are. Tsiolkas doesn't scratch the surface of social issues; he comes in with a bobcat and digs up the whole frontyard, flowers and all, until we're down to the pipes. Picking up on any one of the issues he uncovers, however, beats talking about renovations around the dinner-party table.

'Gould's Book of Fish' - Richard Flanagan

After an ambivalent response to Flanagan's latest book, Wanting - in which I highly respected the writing, but struggled with some conceptual realisations - I prioritised reading one of his earlier works, choosing the intriguing Gould's Book of Fish.

This earlier is as audacious in its execution as Wanting was in its breadth of characters. In modern Hobart, a man finds an antique tome - the Book of Fish - that takes an almost magical hold on him. After the book dissolves into water, he determines to rewrite it, to recreate its preternatural story. That recreated story is the memoir of William Buelow Gould, a Tasmanian convict who describes his experiences on Sarah Island - one of the most brutal prisons in the colonial world - with anthropological exactness, as he recounts not only torture and labour, but the true ambitions of the prison's Commandant to turn the isolated, terrible island into a New Europe.

While imprisoned on Sarah Island, Gould gained many periphery benefits by exaggerating his artistic capabilities and thus being recruited to produce the definitive record of Van Diemonian aquaculture. His project overwhelms him; he begins to see people as fish, and eventually cannot tell whether his life is contained within that manuscript - the Book of Fish - or the book in fact contains his life.

Hence, Gould's is not without elements of the supernatural, borrowing some style from the school of magic realism. Flanagan also presents us with an unusual choice of narrative voice, that of the omniscient first person. I spent the majority of the book wondering if this was lazy or canny and how he argued with his editor to retain it. In some of the last chapters even Flanagan can no longer deny its incredulity, as Gould berates the reader who wants to question how he can know what someone else thought, even when he wasn't in the room with them. Conversely, when it comes to seeing the future, Gould often surrenders to his own limitations, often using lines such as 'How was I to know where this would lead?'.

It was insightful to read Gould's after Wanting. They deal with very similar material and, in the main, have the same setting (some characters even appear in both). But their delivery and preoccupations are clearly distinct. Gould's is the kind of literary experiment that becomes a surprise success - something in the way of The Raw Shark Texts, with which it bears a surprising resemblance in the early chapters. Wanting is the experiment of a writer who has gained the respect of his audience and peers, and thereby some comfort and cushioning to produce work that is more intellectually controversial.

Gould's shows us again that Flanagan's strength is in concepts. There are some visual aids to its execution - changing ink colour to represent the rudimentary resources Gould scavenges in his cell in order to write (ignoring that no amount of blood or squid ink could have allowed him to quill several hundred pages of such detailed reminiscence); using ampersands throughout; throwing in the occasional Victorian construction such as verbs before subject (eg 'thought he' as an attribution). While overall it sustains an effect, some sentences taken in isolation are too convoluted to reveal any immediate meaning.

Had Gould's been my first experience of Flanagan, I wonder if I would have been intrigued to see what invention he would try next, or have been happy with the sample, without pursuing any further. Certainly, Gould's prepares us for many of Flanagan's ongoing preoccupations: with history, with its truth and lies, with its ongoing effect on the living, as well as with love - a theme that is often buried within, but vital to, his novels.

I will say again, however, something I perhaps didn't iterate strongly enough in the Wanting review: Flanagan, regardless of style, flaws, content and reader response, is a significant contributor to the Australian canon. His voice is an important part of our national literature.

'Wanting' - Richard Flanagan

In a magnificent piece of comedy, Stephen Fry postulates that 'there's language, and there's speech. There's chess, and there's a game of chess'. In the case of Richard Flanagan's Wanting, this statement could be revised to say there's an idea, and there's the execution of that idea.

In this novel, the former is well formed, and, in an unusual move for a fiction book, quite explicitly explained by the author in an afterword. The inclusion of the afterword could have been at the direction of Flanagan's publisher, or perhaps he chose to do so, due to inevitable confusion over the veracity of the novel. Flanagan uses real characters and recognisable historical settings, but his story is adamantly fictional. While this writing style is the cause of much modern consternation, Flanagan pointed out in an interview with Ramona Koval that several great literary works (eg Tale of Two Cities, War and Peace) do just that and are valued nonetheless.

Wanting's premise is one of enormous scope, requiring research into two very different and differentiated societies, between which Flanagan draws a valid link. To summarise: the book opens with Mathinna, a seven-year-old Tasmanian Aboriginal, who lives on Flinders Island (to which the Tasmanian Aboriginals were exiled after the Black Wars). She is adopted by Lady and Sir John Franklin. Sir John is a famed Arctic explorer and, at the time of Mathinna's adoption, Governor of Tasmania; his wife is a model of refined society. After being removed from gubernatorial duties, the Franklins return to England and Mathinna is discarded. Years later, Sir John is lost on an Arctic voyage, and Lady Franklin employs the greatest writer of the age, Charles Dickens, to refute claims against Sir John of cannibalism. Dickens, late in his career, sees a mirror of his life in the emptiness of the Arctic wilderness, but finds elation in the production of a play and the attentions of one its actresses.

The key theme is that of savagery versus civilisation. The Franklins and Dickens repeat the maxim that the difference between the two lies in the civilised man's ability to suppress his desires, a truism destroyed over and over again by the Victorians' actions, both personal and social. As he has become known for, Flanagan employs a sparseness of style, offset by moments of beauty and trickeries of description, to create an engaging flow of words. The themes trickle far more continuously through the book than their complexity would suggest.

It's in the execution where I start asking questions. For all the beauty and restraint of style, there is some clumsy language, particularly in similes and metaphors. 'Tears falling like rain' and spider webs like gossamers sound lazy and dilute Flanagan's accomplishment. The metaphor of Sir John as a swan (Zeus) and Mathinna as Leda (as she is called on Flinders Island, upon hearing which Lady Franklin explains the story from Greek mythology of Zeus raping Leda and thus begetting Helen of Troy) is clumsy, a little heavy, and too literally borne out.

My most significant problem with the book lies within the enacting of this metaphor. History does repeat itself between Zeus and Leda, but Flanagan only alludes to the act, three times; he never names it as rape. Mathinna, whose whole life is appallingly interfered with, becomes a prostitute, and at that stage of the story Flanagan wilfully describes what men do to her. I recognise this as a feminist perspective, but I felt it lacked a certain sympathy to treat the two circumstances so differently. If a modern author is going to bring rape into a book, I think we are beyond a hush-hush treatment of it, particularly when its occurence under the guise of prostitution is mentioned, repeatedly, so glibly (Mathinna does not come to that profession by choice, nor is she always reimbursed). In a similar vein, as I read I asked myself whether or not our nation is best served by continued fictionalising of the de-landing and extermination of our indigenous culture.

Despite those reservations, I still regard Richard Flanagan as one of our most commendable writers. When he writes about our small southern island and its original inhabitants he is writing from his own passions. (Which is itself an interesting notion, since so much of the novel is about denying passion and desire.) The greatest accomplishments in the book come from Flanagan daring to occupy the headspace of these huge, historial figures, and present each of their perspectives with such intensity. Each character brings confusion, conflict and yearning to the story; as each endeavours to bend their desires to the quelling force of colonialism, the pressure that shaped our modern country exhales from the page.

Loose similes aside, and looking beyond the issues with meaning and theme, the creation that Flanagan has pursued is testament to his skill and the breadth of his imagination, a writer's most valuable tool.

Also by Richard Flanagan:
The Sound of One Hand Clapping
The Unknown Terrorist

'The Book Thief' - Markus Zusak

I should preface this by confessing I have a tendency to dislike a certain type of bestseller - the runaway success, from an 'unknown' author, commonly set in an historical context, and frequently issued in a bulky volume with a cover designed to stand out at Borders. To wit, Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, a book that shares many characteristics with The Book Thief. Both are hefty volumes running to almost 600 pages; both take books and the power of words as a key motif; both use Europe and war as a backdrop; and both view all of this through the eyes of a young protagonist. Most interestingly, both authors had published young adult literature before achieving international success with a book for adults.

Zusak is an Australian author, of Austrian/German parents. His novel's narrator is Death, an apt character to observe the lives of a small town of Germans in the 1940s. In the book's opening passages, the protagonist, Liesel, is travelling with her mother and brother to a foster family. Along the way, Death visits and takes Liesel's six-year-old brother. She never sees her mother again. Her foster father, Hans, is a gentle accordion player and his wife, Rosa, is a foul-mouthed, hard woman, who softens enough to shelter a Jew in their basement.

Aside from the unusual choice of narrator (which works surprisingly well), the novel's most prominent characteristic is the prolific use of simile and metaphor, often mixing senses - such as the sound of a smell - or using unexpected personifications - 'the music would look Liesel in the face'. The technique results in some beautiful, effecting imagery and emotion. At a Nazi book burning - a potent image as books are a treasure to Liesel - 'the orange flames waved at the crowd as paper and print dissolved inside them. Burning words were torn from their sentences'.

The richness of the language does, however, start to resemble that feeling at about 4pm on Christmas Day, when you've been snacking copiously since lunch and know that another multi-course meal is but hours away. It's not that you don't enjoy the food, and there's nothing wrong with its quality, but there's frankly too much of it. At times the book felt like a performance from a too-clever public speaker; I was often desparate for a passage of simple substance, rather than grandeur.

Most off-putting, for a book focused on language, was the way German was used throughout the novel. I was sceptical at some of the translations that feature late in the book, but given the author's parentage, I'm reluctant to question them. What was frustrating was the way a character would speak a line of German dialogue then simply repeat it, as part of the same string of dialogue, in English (for example 'Vielen Dank, meine Herren,' Franz Deutscher politely said. 'Many thanks my gentlemen.'). It seemed a clumsy, lazy method of incorporating the foreign tongue and thereby lessened its effect.

More effective were the frequent asides from Death to address the reader, reminding them of details of the unravelling story that they already knew (there are many flash-forwards), allowing them to share in the narrator's omniscience - a canny way to keep the reader engaged.

Like a green salad that steals the show at a banquet, it was the simpler things I appreciated in this book. The fact that amongst Liesel's passion for words and the extreme emotions and events of war, the most powerful phrases were still 'I'm sorry' and 'Thank you'. It's easy to understand the novel's success given the innovative style and patches of truly glorious writing, but I would have taken a shorter, tighter story of skilled words over so much clever trickery.

'Breath' - Tim Winton

Can breathing be more than a requirement for life and become an addiction? In Breath, Tim Winton plays on our attachment to that fundamental action to explore his characters’ addictions to the extreme and the dangerous.

Breath begins with Pikelet, its narrator, as a middle-aged man, witnessing a scene that takes him back to his adolescent days of surfing and cheating dangerous fate with his mate Loonie. He reflects on those earlier days of discovery, impetuosity and anxiety for the majority of the novel, bringing the audience slowly to the person he is as an adult. Winton, however, doesn’t allow himself to take the easiest ‘V’ route of literary recall: starting at the end, jumping in a straight line to the beginning then traversing directly back to that starting point. He mixes tenses and mentions things subtly out of sequence to remind the reader that they are within a future reflective. To take the simpler path would render the drama and insanity of Pikelet’s youth far less affecting.

The first passage of the novel punches immediately with the best of Winton’s style: sparse and rough, yet beautiful; withdrawn but honest. At times Winton can become too weird, obtuse (think Cloudstreet) or irresolute (think The Riders) to sustain his audience (not that his book sales reflect that!). Breath features neither aspect of his writing: it is intensely engaging throughout its length (at just over 200 pages, shorter than usual for Winton), and as surely as a wave will break on the shore it comes to an end.

The bulk of the book is set in the mill town of Sawyer. Pikelet’s father is scared of the open ocean, but through Pikelet and Loonie’s friendship with the enigmatic Sando, they not only start surfing but also push themselves to attempt and conquer increasingly dangerous breaks. The majority of descriptive text in the book is reverent of the surf and the coast: on the estuary as a child Pikelet watches “the disembodied shadows of pelicans rushing over the mottled flats”; watching a young surfer take her first wave, the narrator opines that “every time I see a kid pop to her feet, all milk-teeth and shining skin, I’m there;...some spark of early promise returns to me like a moment of grace”.

Despite the daring of Pikelet’s adventures, and the seriousness of his thoughts, he is still a child, as Winton takes care on occasion to remind us: a dead roo prompts him to muse, “I wondered if roos had thoughts”. While his lungs and bravado get stronger, he finds himself eventually in a situation defined by suffocation. Perhaps we are all suffocated – denied free and easy breathing – in some way, whether by something we have sought out (for example Pikelet’s relationship with the surf and danger) or something foisted upon us (such as Pikelet’s parents’ concern for him); whether through a chemical addiction or the undeniable need for something far more visceral.

Pikelet is knocked over by countless ocean waves, but always resurfaces. Eventually, however, he reaches a different outcome in his own life, as he realises “some mighty turbulence had hold of me, and nothing...would ever rescue me”. Pikelet has toyed with breath too often to be able to settle to a steady rhythm of respiration and life. Winton, by contrast, maintains a stunning level of control throughout to bring us an exemplary and undoubtedly Australian novel.

'The Spare Room' - Helen Garner

A woman in her sixties welcomes a friend, Nicola, to her home. She prepares the spare room with fresh linen and flowers, and prepares herself for the challenge to come: Nicola is in the advanced stages of terminal cancer and has come to Melbourne for a three-week treatment of alternative medicine.

This is the story of Helen Garner's first work of fiction for fifteen years. Her years of measured, intricately researched non-fiction writing have not harmed her ability to tell a story. What they have done is refined her writing to a very pure, distilled style. All the substance is there - this is a book rampant with emotion and symbolism - but there isn't a single letter of frippery.

Within that reduced language there is still, however, a concern for detail. Falling rain is 'quiet' and 'kind'; an oil heater not only heats but also drips and clicks. In life, we rarely experience something singularly - we see it, hear it, feel it etc. When The Spare Room was published questions were asked about how fictional it actually is, since the main character's name is Helen and many aspects of her life match exactly with the author's. Those questions, however, are not important: what Garner has brought us is literature, not just fiction. It does closely reflect life, but not just hers: as in life, the reader experiences everything in the novel multiple ways.

Garner's key achievement is in the emphasis of her sympathy. This is not a book about a dying woman; it is a book about a dying woman's friend. What does that friend have to deal with? What does she go through in mind and body? What must she, the same age as her friend, think about her own mortality as she watches someone she loves in such pain and desparation? Nicola's end is known from the start. The reader is instead drawn to Helen and the questions of her emotional fate. Often, at the end of a chapter, we are given clues to Helen's responses as the narrative suddenly shifts from the action to focus on a colour, a movement, or other event unrelated to the main story.

So closely did I follow detail in this book, that I found myself affected even by the typeface. It is a gentle, ligatured serif, which leads the eye across the page but also retains a sparseness against the paper to reflect the language. Full stops are diamonds, not circles, and the subtle difference more sharply punctuates each purpose- and meaning-laden sentence.

It was rewarding, too, to have several Melbourne locations so shamelessly referenced. Garner treats Melbourne with the respect that Richard Flanagan showed Sydney in The Unknown Terrorist. It was an interesting contrast to Richard Ford's Lay of the Land, however, where his characterisation via east-coastisms was more off-putting.

This is an exceptional work of fiction, one to savour as one would cling to stolen time with a close friend.

'The Lucy Family Alphabet' - Judith Lucy

Acerbic. Sarcastic. Coarse. Nasal. All words frequently associated with Australian comedian Judith Lucy. Sensitive and nostalgic come up much less regularly. And really it's the former group that apply to her book of recollections of growing up in a truly peculiar family in suburban Perth, but her book is not without the latter emotions.

Lucy's family history has informed a lot of her stand-up comedy. Since this book came out most of her publicity appearances have included her re-telling tales from the book in her distinct tone and with trademark nod and smirk. A quick Youtube search reveals some of the stories coming up in stand-up appearances from ten years ago - that's quite a family, to keep a comedian in material for that length of time.

Without the aural and visuals aspects of a Lucy routine, the anecdotes take on a different resonance, and they translate well to the written word, also a credit to Lucy's obvious respect for language and her ability, honed through thousands of shows, of picking the right words to take her audience back in time with her.

I saw Lucy talk at the Melbourne Writers Festival this year, along with Nam Le and David Sedaris. The session was about using personal life experience to create literature, whether fiction or non-fiction. Everyone there, from her fellow presenters, to MC Jason Steger, to the audience, were keen to see Lucy drop her usual dry persona and talk about how she felt about these stories. While her talk was a triumphant mini-gig, she wasn't about to step out from behind the comedian curtain. The book does, however, and it includes some touching commentary about how she genuinely felt about her parents.

This is a great gift for someone who would appreciate Lucy's humour, as well as the not-so-occasional story of rampant drinking. Not just because it's well written but also because it's well presented. It's got that just-right book weight that wraps so well and an engaging front cover. Moreover, it's spot-on holiday reading. Read a bit, read a lot; have a giggle; relax while you're doing it. Dear Lord, I appeared to have turned into a catalogue...

'Landscape of Farewell' - Alex Miller

When researching Alex Miller, one often finds information about his life overshadowed by a longer list of his achievements, nominations and awards. He is not secretive about his past; rather, Miller is a writer who has long been recognised by his peers, but who has not reached the levels of commerical success enjoyed by other Australian novelists such as Tim Winton.

He has won the Miles Franklin Award twice and been shortlisted three times, including for Landscape of Farewell in 2008. The Ancestor Game, winner of the Miles Franklin in 1993, was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in the same year.

This latest work picks up on themes explored in his earlier novels, looking at aspects of indigenous Australian history. In this case, however, the story begins in Hamburg, where an elderly history professor, Max Otto, delivers his final paper, on the 'persistence of the phenomenon of massacre'. He feels it is a weak one, written without conviction; massacre has obsessed him as a topic throughout his life, but the history of his country inhibited him from embracing it as his specialty. The paper receives a vitriolic response from Vita, an Australian academic with an indigenous background. Vita is later moved by an apology from Max, a man struggling to cope with the recent death of his wife, and convinces him to travel to Australia and stay with her uncle, Dougald Gnapun.

Dougald lives on an isolated property in northern Queensland. He and Max build a strong friendship that makes up for a lack of verbosity with their mutual respect for the other's age and experience. Dougald entrusts Max with the story of his great-grandfather and hero, Gnapun, and, fearful of it being lost when he dies, asks Max to write the story down.

Storytelling is a key theme in the novel. Early on the reader is alerted that the story is being presented from the perspective of Max's written journal. Very occasional asides tell us that he is talking from some time hence; given his mindset at the start of the novel it is important to know that he lives for some time to come. Miller also draws a distinction between storyteller and writer. Dougald is the former, but he is prevented by his isolation from ensuring the story he has to tell will live. Hence he entrusts it to Max, who worries that the story cannot exist separately from its teller: "I was conscious that the spirit of his story had been contained as much in the shapely vessel of his telling as it had in the sequence of its narrative."

Dougald's story is that of a massacre orchestrated by his great-grandfather, the warrior Gnapun. Miller based Max's re-telling on the Cullin-la-Ringo massacre, when the Kairi people of central Queensland killed nineteen white settlers.

Is history a story? Are all stories history? As a historian, Max finds it extremely difficult to recount the story, encumbered by his respect for Dougald and his retention of his family's lore, and perhaps also by the formality of academia that has previously informed his writing. Significantly, he has struggled to write about similar events in Germany, and as an adult, was never able to approach his father and ask about his role in the war.

The novel was inevitably reminiscent of Rodney Hall's The Day We Had Hitler Home, as both connect German characters with Australia, and examine historical and cultural responsibility. It also shadows Bernard Schlink's The Reader, which similarly evokes storytelling as a mask for concealing, and eventually a method for revealing, the truth of the past.

'Monkey Grip' - Helen Garner

Rathdowne St, Studley Park, St Georges Rd, Queen Vic Markets. Helen Garner's novel turns Carlton and its surrounds into a significant character, one within a melange of personalities, all of whom drift, meet, collide and separate in her chaotic, rambling novel of 1977. The chaos does not apply to Garner's language, which even in this, her first novel, already shows the level of control that allowed her to almost invent a genre with Joe Cinque's Consolation close to 20 years later. Instead it invades the lives of her characters. Drugs, alcohol, sex and relationships are their preoccupations. Children are regarded in the same manner as adults and the grown-ups act with the recklessness of kids. Much of the novel deals with notions of love: of how much is enough to hold together a disastrous relationship; of how hard it is to let go of something that was once wonderful.

The novel focuses on Nora, a 30-something mother to primary-school-age Grace (at the time of publication Garner was 35 and her daughter, Alice Garner, 8) and her volatile relationship with Javo, a heroin addict. The storytelling is purely linear, tracing a period of just over a year, often taking note of the seasons and effects of the weather; however, it jumps, or flits, from scene to scene. Often the location or content of a conversation is seemingly insignificant, yet it is part of a bigger composition: the very deliberate rendering of a lifestyle and a community intrinsically attached to its part of the city and the earth. Garner has said that a lot of the content grew directly from her diaries from the time (and it is often noted, and grieved, by those who have interviewed her about her latest novel, The Spare Room, that she later burnt many of her diaries). It absolutely has that feel of snippets of information scribbled down about what felt important at the time, often under the influence of drugs, alcohol, friendship or emotion.

It is warming to read something so local, something so reverent about a small patch of a much bigger town. Further, it is prudent to bear in mind that this novel is thirty years old, written by a woman, and makes no effort to pretty-up its origins, nor the free-spirited lifestyle of its characters. From a contemporary perspective, it is also fascinating to go back to the beginning of the career of someone who has altered the shape of Australian literature.

'The Day We Had Hitler Home' - Rodney Hall

Odd title; odd premise. The launching pad of this novel is the imagined tale of a twenty-year-old Adolf Hitler, blinded from gas bombs, stumbling into the wrong queue at the end of World War I and thereby arriving by steamer in 1919 to a welcome-home function for returning soldiers in remote, coastal NSW. This does not extrapolate into a novel encompassing a dreamt-up history for the German dictator, however. Rather, Hitler's presence sets into motion life-changing events for the story's main character, Audrey McNeil.

The story commences with Audrey half-naked and half-asleep but fully aware that she is being filmed by her brother-in-law, Immanuel. Her concern over his motives is kept alive throughout the novel's ten-year timespan. In McEwanesque style, the first chapters deal with Audrey awakening to an adult, but crippingly naive, sexuality over the course of a morning. Just as Shakespeare's Titania fell for the ass-headed Bottom under the influence of a love-potion, Audrey's compulsion to manifest her womanhood fixates her upon the bandaged Hitler. With her brother-in-law's help, she spirits him away in a plane to prevent his detection, and the family's punishment for harbouring a German.

The pages describing this plane-ride are laden with metaphor, description and multiple meanings. Immanuel, Audrey and Adolf fly squeezed into a open-air biplane; the tension in the air is as tight as cockpit space and, while verbal communication would be impossible, so much passes between the three characters - while their lifepaths will be utterly distinct, each is set in motion through this adventure. Audrey plays off these two unlikely suitors in her first dalliance with flirting; Hitler suddenly awakes to his situation; and Immanuel grapples with demons that are not revealed until many years later. As they fly north to German New Guinea, landing frequently along the Australian coast, all manner of traditional, ephemeral journeys are evoked - the personal journey from childhood to adulthood; a nation's development from colony to country; the progression of attraction to love. When they land at Rabaul, the evocation of the forest and natives is pure Conrad. Audrey's journey continues even further as she escapes to Munich; the novel jumps soon after to her life ten years hence and the rise of national socialism.

Such is the scope of this novel that every theme is multi-faceted. Life as it can be visualised and recorded is represented through the visual medium of the camera. Audrey is gifted the Aeroscope camera on which Immanuel had filmed her sleeping and she records her world through its lens ceaselessly. The entire novel is a verbal iteration of the film Audrey splices together from this footage: each chapter begins with staging directions before shifting to Audrey's first person perspective (effectively functioning as a voiceover). Her story encapsulates the history of two nations - Australia and Germany - at critical stages of development, as well as eternal problems of love and origin. Both history and origin, by virtue of being in the past, can only be retold. Perspectives in the retelling can be limitless, however, and although in this novel we view events through the eyes of just one protagonist, our focus is inevitably split as we are invited to witness it through the dual medium of words and jumpy, silent footage.

It would seem an unlikely fit with the themes already discussed, but much of this novel is in fact about integration and race. In the 1960s, Rodney Hall was extremely active in campaigning for the rights of indigenous Australians to choose or reject assimilation. Particularly in the closing passages of this novel, the truth of the colonists' treatment of indigenous inhabitants of Australia is expressed bluntly: 'We pushed them off it and just about wiped them out, we British...Was there ever any race so nearly exterminated?' Throughout the novel characters are treated according to their origins: rich or poor; legitimate or bastard; native or foreign; fascist or socialist; black or white. Hall's work has been described as creating a 'metaphysical history' of Australia and, in this novel in particular, he places Australia, with great effect, in the context of the world it grew up in. Much is made of Billy Hughes being a signatory to the Versailles Peace Treaty - many countries felt Australia was not yet 'mature' enough to take part in such a significant event (America was a key opponent, an interesting parallel to national and international views of our current involvement in Iraq). Audrey leaves Germany, unable to cope with the danger of a tragic relationship with a Senegalese man as much as with her own disgust at political developments, as Hitler is coming to power. Society-wide intolerance has been an inexcusable feature of too many governments and cultures.

Hall is phenomenally accomplished as a writer. One critic compares him favourably to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. While Hall has twice won the Miles Franklin award, his work is better known overseas than in Australia. He is a meticulous wordsmith, never taking the easy option with a description, but instead consistently finding astonishing metaphors to evoke his meaning. His narrative is not without quirks, however. Consider these two samples: 'One night I dreamed that I had my tonsils out...and that it wasn't the first time' (to close a chapter) and 'The harbour, tilted for the ocean to flow over its lip, is a drumskin of twilight'. The first is an example of his ability to craft sentences and scenes through words too slippery to pin them down to a meaning. The second is not an isolated case of capturing a beautiful landscape with words arguably more picturesque than that which they describe.

'The Sound of One Hand Clapping' - Richard Flanagan

The Sound of One Hand Clapping etches the story of Sonja Buloh and her destructive, catastrophic relationship with her father, Bojan. The novel oscillates between two timeframes. The earlier location stretches from mid-fifties to mid-sixties, and is set amongst a group of European immigrants working on a hydro-electric site in Tasmania, during which time Sonja's mother leaves her three-year-old daughter one snowy night, never to be heard of again. In 1989, Sonja returns to Tasmania, after 23 years of her own unbroken estrangement from her father.

The novel is heavy, very heavy, on motifs and imagery. It is a rare piece in that the central relationship is between father and daughter. The exchanges between Sonja and Bojan are frequently brutal, both physically and emotionally. Despite the anger, spite, and unbearable miscommunications, however, a bond remains. Just as Bojan and his workmates cannot separate themselves from their respective homelands, despite thoughts of their former homes conjuring images of torture and war, nor can he and his daughter ultimately extricate themselves from one another.

Bojan lives a rootless life, as he fails to integrate himself into the Australian culture. Sonja, similarly, marches through a life deliberately devoid of a significant relationship with another man. Each grip instead onto aspects of the land. For Bojan, water and wood are constant motifs. His emotions are dammed, just as is the river where he was laying concrete when his wife disappeared. He crafts his feelings into wooden furniture, made from Huon pine, an elusive, almost inexplicably strong material, forged in the wilds of an island that has broken many willing and unwilling refugees. Sonja returns herself to the earth, either physically at the site of the camp where she grew up, or in dreams where she imagines the feel of blades of grass on her body.

The images are well-chosen, but many of Flanagan's techniques in this book are overblown and his style overwritten. There is an excessive use of adjectives throughout the novel: "The noise manifested itself as flesh in the form of a large, brown-uniformed woman slashing through the green curtain"; "A pair of translucent plastic gloves peeled off and fell into the alligator mouth of a bright yellow bin". At times, too, the similes are cliched, but then Flanagan redeems himself with something wonderful, for example rain on a window "like tears" is followed by a sunrise "like a rainbow trout". Sometimes extended descriptions lose their perspective: a character sees a raindrop fall on a tulip from some distance; or rain changing from soothing to oppressing within a passage. In the sections set in the past, Flanagan often begins with generic stories, describing repeated events, which then morph into a recount of a specific event that has bearing on the tale, a particularly frustrating technique.

While it is overwritten, the novel is not poorly written. It evokes a place - Tasmania - that remains mysterious even for many who live in the same country. It takes that powerful force of isolation and chaos that Tasmania holds - the island that offered prisons within prisons, an island of "wild, mad [weather], its reason lost somewhere out in the aching emptiness of the fish-fat sea" - and thrusts it upon characters whose lives have seen too much turmoil to have the strength to try and tame their new home. All of the relationships in this novel are fraught, often with an excess of affection that remains dammed as unnaturally as the Tasmanian river.

See also by Richard Flanagan: 'The Unknown Terrorist'

'Saving Francesca' - Melina Marchetta

Melina Marchetta is the author of one of the best-received Young Adult novels by an Australian writer, Looking for Alibrandi. Her second novel, Saving Francesca, published 11 years after that debut, draws on many of the earlier novel's fundamentals. The title character, at 16 a year younger than Marchetta's first heroine, is an Italian-Australian school student attending a strictly religious high school in inner-city Sydney. She has family issues, complex and sometimes conflicting friendships and, although she starts out with no such intention, strong feelings for a brooding member of the opposite sex.

Both books centre around identity. In the earlier text this search was strongly rooted in culture, in the sub-groups that make up the Australian milieu. The identity issues in Saving Francesca are less concrete. Francesca is a teenager brought up in a modern household, with a (sometimes embarassingly) emancipated mother and an unfailingly optimistic father. She dearly loves her younger brother. In the year on which the novel focusses however, she has been taken from the girls' school and group of friends to which she was acclimatised, to start Year 11 at a boys' school as part of its first intake of girls.

The friendships at the two schools polarise Francesca's identity crisis. She is a strong, dramatic and articulate young lady, but for the sake of acceptance had made herself into something else at her former school. Yet within that pretence she had certainty and a group in which she felt placed. Now, starting again, she remakes herself, this time into a more introverted form.

It is a canny way of highlighting the despair and discomfort of adolescence. It also runs well alongside Francesca's mother's depression, as an adult also struggles to meet the peg-and-hole expectations of her community.

The themes are strong, but on occasion the language is clunky, too obscure to make a powerful emotional statement. It can sound somewhat like teenage poetry: full of powerful words and analogies but somehow the adjectives and nouns don't quite gel so the precise intent is lost to the reader. It is also a victim of the curse for writing for youth: anyone who has been young knows how awkward most conversations are, yet the writer has time to craft, hone and select the exact way to evoke that hit-and-miss. The inevitable juxtaposition was better handled in Looking for Alibrandi.

However, like Richard Flanagan, this book is proud of its birthplace. It's from Sydney, and more specifically the Inner West: Annandale, Leichhardt, Broadway Shopping Centre. That's important because right there is a reality in which any reader, teenager or not, can find some identity. The teenagers in this book are entrusted with mature topices: they talk about history, politics and women's rights. That respect may just help a teenage reader feel more confident in who they are.

'Making Laws for Clouds' - Nick Earls

Nick Earls writes about Australian males. More specifically, Australian males who live in Queensland, face relationship insecurities, are blessed with wit and humour, and who meet captivating women with whom to share their riposte.

It's a good formula and one that, since the publication of Zigzag Street in 1996, has made good on Who Weekly's claim to 'Buy a Nick Earls novel and never be sad again'. The one non-constant in his universal male protagonist is age: in Earls' adult fiction his characters may be going through crises in their mid-twenties or early thirties. In his young adult fiction they deal with late teenage angst.

Making Laws for Clouds fits into the latter group. Kane is 18 and working for Caloundra Council to help support his family: his mother has turned to rum and television since his father left and his fourteen-year-old brother has a sensitive stomach and a fairly simplistic outlook. Kane meets Tanika on the bus that takes both their families to church each Sunday, which is the focus of their social activities. Their relationship teeters between teenage lust and adult responsibility.

As always, there is plenty of dialogue. Earls' characters tend to be fairly verbose; not always in a lengthy way, more that he employs poetic licence to allow his characters to frequently bounce the kind of quips and retorts off one another that one would associate with a rare, hilarious night out. Since they invariably find themselves in the early stages of a relationship, there is also a lot of rambling to cover awkward moments, eyebrow-raising from the females, and valiant attempts to 'dig oneself out of a hole'. It's all part of what makes Earls' novels so genuinely funny.
Philosophising is saved for the exposition. When musing to themselves, Earls' characters reveal a penchant for metaphysics, such as the discussion that explains the novel's title, and the author himself a flair for poetic description. As Kane and Tanika sit on the beach they listen to waves "Breaking up and piling up and thinning out and running to nothing, up the sand and shells, ending in a rush, disappearing in that last noise, like a long breath out".

Earls shares more than a first name with English author Nick Hornby. Both (though Hornby has diversified more in his later works) focus on flawed men, but embed the exploration in very everyday situations. They rarely come to a perfect resolution at the end of the novel: they do normally end in a relationship, but the male protagonist retains his flaws and uncertainties. Therein lies the novels' cohesiveness - our lives don't nestle into 300 pages either - and their worth, as they can teach us where to look for humour and positivity and that perfection is not the only recipe for happiness.