literature | Ian Syson

LITERARY PUBLISHING IN A NUTSHELL

• Alex Miller: Prochownik’s Dream (Allen & Unwin, $29.95, ISBN 1741142490)
• Josephine Wilson: Cusp (UWAP, $24.95, ISBN 1920694560)
• Steven Lang: An Accidental Terrorist (UQP, $22.95, ISBN 0702235202)
• M.J. Hyland: Carry Me Down (Text, $29.95, ISBN 1921145099)

TEN YEARS AGO, Edward Berridge said in that renowned literary (and soft-porn) magazine, Black and White, that Australian literature had become the preserve of enfeebled soft-left yuppies and their boring middle-class dramas. A number of critics (myself included) leapt to Ozlit’s defence. Surely Berridge had only got half (if that) of the picture right? His ignorance of the history of literature in this country led him to recognise only one faction, one lineage, to the exclusion of other groupings, including his own. I went in hard because Berridge was asking for it, literally and figuratively.
    Having read a good chunk (and published a small bite) of the Australian fiction published over the past decade my defences have wavered; though I am yet to be tempted to say: Come back Ed, all is forgiven! But having seen the latest Miles Franklin longlist (and the subsequent shortlist) I am tempted to approach him with the idea of our forming a militant Anti-Middle-Class-Ozlit-Organisation (AMCOO).
    While the book trade is publishing a lot of middle-class tripe, books with energy and of significance are still being produced by both the mainstream trade and alternative publishers. The point is that in any random sample of contemporary Australian novels you are going to read a very uneven bunch.
    And so it is with this lot of books.
    Alex Miller’s Prochownik’s Dream is vying for the position of the second-worst book I have ever read. So dreary and boring was this novel that I was unable to finish it (putting it down on page 123). Ordinarily this would mean that I would simply not review the book. But this kind of guff crosses my line in the sand. The story of an artist who has lost his spark but who finds it in the bosom of his best friend and mentor’s wife repeats a narrative and story structure that must have been used . . . oh . . . about a billion times before in the history of human storytelling. Full of self-regarding middle-class twits, Prochownik’s Dream’s only glimmer of interest was in the annoyingly bitchy and unfair cameo presentation of a character based on the successful artist and Overland stalwart, Rick Amor.
    With no other motive than casual malice: I can reveal that yes Virginia, the main character does root his best mate’s wife. (I asked someone who had finished the book, wanting to know whether he’d put the cherry on the top of his cliché sundae.)
    From here the only way is up.
    Like Prochownik’s Dream, Josephine Wilson’s first novel, Cusp also beats a well-trodden narrative path: daughter escapes cloying mother’s clutches, only to find herself inevitably drawn back into the fold so that they can achieve a higher level of understanding, sympathy and love. At first I was worried that this too was just one more middle-class drama – albeit with a feminist edge. The plot seemed also to promise a saccharine ending. If the book’s freshness and sparkle saved it from a position in the bin alongside Miller, its latter two-thirds won me over completely. Within the prison house of its structure the book reveals more and more treasures: laugh-aloud moments, slowly drawn pictures of growing self-awareness, allusions to the themes and moods of the great women’s novels of the 1960s and seventies, and a story-line that turns back on itself to reveal a powerful and surprising conclusion.
    Steven Lang’s Accidental Terrorist is like a breath of fresh air. A contemporary political thriller set in the forests of southern NSW, it pits the forestry workers of Eden against green activists from around the district. This clash has an unexpectedly violent and bloody ending. Running through this tension is the story of Carl, an American Vietnam activist on the run from the spooks and a love triangle that develops between him, Jessica and Kelvin, the misfit central character. A mix of genre and literary fiction, this book will not necessarily please purists of either form but is nonetheless a terrific debut novel.
    The last book in this group is something special. Carry Me Down is M.J. Hyland’s second novel. It is the story of John Egan, a boy in the rural Irish town of Gorey, who is unusually large for his age and obsessed with truth and the Guinness Book of Records. The book’s first-person narrative gives the reader immediate access to the workings of John’s mind and we are in turn delighted, enthralled and disturbed by his musings. Over the course of the novel, the first impressions of John’s endearing wackiness transform into suspicions that he is a boy on the edge of madness and violence. Reminiscent but not derivative of that other Irish study in juvenile madness, Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, Carry Me Down is a book by a writer on the path to serious international recognition.
    One thing that disturbs me greatly about Carry Me Down, however, is the absence of Australia. Indeed, this book will not win the 2007 Miles Franklin despite the possibility that it could well be the best novel published in Australia this year. Hyland was born in Ireland, but has spent most of her life in Australia. She was located in the literary scene in Melbourne as the editor/publisher of Nocturnal Submissions and she worked for a time as a story reader at Meanjin. Yet this book has not one whiff of Australian literature about it (though, it could be argued Hyland’s reference to a ‘soccer’ ball has an Australian provenance). This is not a criticism of Hyland because to me the book feels honestly conceived and has its own literary truth.
    But is this the point to which we’ve come in Australian writing: you can only succeed internationally if you ignore, parody or fetishise your home? Carry Me Down could have been set in Australia. There is nothing necessarily Irish about it. John Egan could have lived in Ballarat or Bathurst or Toowoomba or Burnie or Port Augusta or Geraldton and the novel would have worked just as well. But would it have sold overseas?
    Hyland’s excision of Australia from her palette points to a sickness at the heart of our literature. We have lost the literary-nationalist confidence and bravado that came with the baby boomers and their cultural revolution. We are also pandering to the gods of globalisation and economic rationalism. On the one hand we have big publishers reducing their decision-making processes solely to economic considerations; on the other we have small publishers being suffocated by a lack of media and constricted by a refusal of the major book chains to take their fiction seriously. Only a few middle rank publishers (like Hyland’s publisher Text, and Scribe) have the will and the capacity and the space to publish serious fiction well.
    It’s particularly strange that in this context calls to loosen the Miles Franklin’s criteria are becoming louder. Most recently, Jane Sullivan in The Age has argued that all books written by Australians should be eligible instead of just those presenting ‘Australian life in any of its phases’ because the nature of Australian publishing is so different from the moment when the Prize was founded. Perhaps. It may well be the case that times have changed; it also remains the case that times can always change back! It strikes me that there’s little enough economic motive to write about Australian life already without removing one significant reward for so doing. And the simple fact is we cannot trust the contemporary Australian publishing industry to nurture and promote local culture.
Of the four books reviewed here, one is published by a corporate (Allen & Unwin), one by an independent (Text) and the other two by university presses. For all their freshness and brightness the latter two will fail to make a dent in the trade – for the reasons mentioned above and because their publicity and distribution machines are weak. The independent’s will soar because of its sheer quality and through international recognition. The corporate’s will put everyone who reads it to sleep. And there you have it: Australian literary publishing in a nutshell!

Ian Syson runs the Vulgar Press. Their most recent novel is Subtopia by A.L. McCann.

Overland 183–winter 2006, pp.23–25