AUSTRALIA
Australia now has a strong local publishing industry, but for a long time, many local authors depended on publishing abroad to reach a larger and more discerning readership. Indeed, many of the best-known Australian authors have benefited from living in proximity to the English-speaking publishing hubs of London and New York. Christina Stead (1902–1983), Shirley Hazzard (b. 1931), Janette Turner Hospital (b. 1942), and Peter Carey (b. 1943) all have spent much of their careers abroad. Even when writing about Australia, they and such bestselling authors as Colleen McCullough (1937–2015) and Morris West (1916–1999) often enjoyed their first, greater success elsewhere.
For much of the twentieth century, Australian literature seemed to have two tiers, domestic and expatriate, though by the close of the century, this divide had become rather artificial. Nevertheless, a conservative literary culture and insular national pride led to, for example, Christina Stead’s being denied a major Australian literary award in 1967 simply because she lived abroad. The separation no longer appears as pronounced in Australia itself, but much of Australia’s domestically published fiction remains cut off from the rest of the English-speaking world.
Nobel laureate Patrick White (1912–1990) remains, with his imposing personality and large varied output, the towering figure in Australian fiction, even though his fiction has not always been as wholeheartedly embraced in his homeland as it was in the United States and Great Britain. His grand but often dark and critical epics of Australia like The Tree of Man (1955), Voss (1957), and Riders in the Chariot (1961) represented a considerable advance from the straightforward realism that had dominated Australian fiction. Voss, based on a real-life explorer who trekked across Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, is a story of mythmaking in a nation that has not yet been completely mapped, both literally and figuratively. Voss is also a surprisingly poignant love story, which, since the two lovers are separated, is played out almost entirely in Voss’s and Laura Trevelyan’s minds.
More experimental novels by White include The Vivisector (1970), a fascinating attempt to describe the life and work of a visual artist, and the faux memoirs of the very unreliable Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray, Memoirs of Many in One (1986). Sexual ambiguity and identity are prominent themes in many of the homosexual author’s works. The Twyborn Affair (1979) is the most intense of White’s novels concerning questions of identity, with a protagonist who appears in a different guise in each of the novel’s three parts.
Much of Peter Carey’s (b. 1943) fiction takes place elsewhere, but Australia nevertheless figures prominently throughout his work. Without detracting from the stories themselves, Australian identity—national and personal—and the country’s myths always are central themes.
Many of the protagonists in Carey’s novels cannot manage to live entirely within the bounds of law, and as a consequence, they frequently find themselves as outcasts. Several are con men and a few are—at least in the eyes of the law—outright criminals. Carey’s characters often have a somewhat hapless yet still noble desperation, as they usually mean well, but their actions, such as the kidnapping in
His Illegal Self (2008) and the forged poetry in
My Life as a Fake (2003), seem to spin out of their control. Several of his protagonists admit to being liars, among the many forms of fakery and imposture throughout Carey’s fiction—involving paintings, poems, and especially identity—and he is expert at playing with the resulting sense of uncertainty. From the Dickensian
Jack Maggs (1997), a reworking of Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations (1861), to the convincingly unpolished voice of Ned Kelly (1855–1880) in his novel about the historic Australian outlaw,
True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), and the narrator’s garrulous flood of invention in
Illywhacker (1985), Carey displays a remarkable stylistic range.
Most of Tim Winton’s (b. 1960) fiction is set in his native Western Australia. He chronicles the lives and changing times in this somewhat remote region in books that strike a chord among Australians and have also been widely embraced abroad. Winton’s depiction of his homeland and the language he uses are carefully balanced between the exaggeratedly rough and the romanticized versions of Australia, giving his fiction an air of authenticity. Cloudstreet (1991), his saga of two very different families living in the same house for the first two decades after World War II, is among the most popular novels of Australian life and one of the most representative texts to come out of the country.
Although Winton’s more narrowly focused novels, such as the coming-of-age surfing novel Breath (2008), with its abyss of risks tempting its characters in ever deeper, are satisfying, his broader novels, like The Riders (1995) and Dirt Music (2001), are better. The Riders is a rare foray abroad for Winton. It is a dark, unusual, and uncomfortably revealing novel in which the Australian protagonist, Scully, goes searching for his wife, who disappeared while she was coming with their daughter to join him and begin their new life in Ireland.
Murray Bail (b. 1941) has published only a few novels, but he is a major figure in contemporary Australian literature. Although his fiction, in which storytelling often plays a significant role, has the feel of being carefully constructed, the artificiality of his precise sentences and stories is pleasing. The sense of wonder, and the wonderful, in the tales themselves helps. Works like
Eucalyptus (1998) and
The Pages (2008) involve unusual obsessions: in
Eucalyptus, Holland is a father who demands that his daughter Ellen wed only a man who can identify every one of the eucalyptus trees on their property, and in
The Pages, Wesley Antill devotes himself entirely to philosophy, spending the last years of his life working on a project that never progresses beyond being a collection of fragments and jottings. Even though these stories have a serious side, the situations are also humorous, even comical, and Bail teases the reader by wittily undercutting what he presents as profound.
KEEP IN MIND
• David Malouf’s (b. 1934) large body of work includes his novel about Ovid, An Imaginary Life (1978), as well as The Complete Stories (2007).
• Richard Flanagan’s (b. 1961) work includes the artfully constructed Gould’s Book of Fish (2001), a “novel in twelve fish,” and the Man Booker Prize–winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2014).
• Alexis Wright’s (b. 1950) Carpentaria (2006) is an epic of Aboriginal life.
• Gerald Murnane (b. 1939) wrote a short but profound exploration, The Plains (1982), and also a brilliant meditation on fiction, reading, and writing, Barley Patch (2009).
• The great poet Les Murray’s (b. 1938) wonderful novel in verse is Fredy Neptune (1998).
• Thea Astley’s (1925–2004) books are worth reading.
• Thomas Keneally’s (b. 1935) fiction, such as Schindler’s Ark (now published as Schindler’s List; 1982) and his novel of the Eritrean conflict with Ethiopia, Towards Asmara (1989), is often based on real-life events.
• Christopher J. Koch’s (1932–2013) novel of the turmoil in Indonesia in 1965 is The Year of Living Dangerously (1978).
• Dorothy Porter (1954–2008) wrote fiction in verse, including the historical novel Akhenaten (1991) and the mystery The Monkey’s Mask (1994).
New Zealand’s geographical remoteness has limited its writers’ exposure abroad. Even though many of the country’s writers have achieved some measure of recognition in considerably larger, neighboring Australia, the works of only a few have been widely published and read in other English-language markets.
Janet Frame (1924–2004) is the best-known modern author from New Zealand, in no small part because of her autobiographical works and colorful personal history. Mentally fragile and misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, she published her first book while she was institutionalized. Although the mesmerizing poetic language of her fiction is acclaimed, her often loosely structured narratives can be frustrating. Several works, ranging from the autobiographical to highly speculative fiction, explore the mental health issues with which she long struggled. In The Carpathians (1988), Frame introduces a “Gravity Star” that destroys humans’ perception of distance, an element of science fiction that is only the most overt manifestation of how Frame alters and undermines reality and conventional perception throughout her fiction.
An influential professor of literature whose works of criticism may well have outsold his fiction, C. K. Stead (b. 1932) also wrote a number of cerebral but highly entertaining novels that resemble some of those by British author Gilbert Adair. Stead is interested in literary and philosophical issues and adeptly weaves theory into his stories. Writers often figure in his novels, and he experiments with a variety of postmodernist tricks, as in grappling with the mind–body problem in The Death of the Body (1986), a novel that also works quite well as a thriller. Other works look at historical events and figures, such as Mansfield (2004), describing a short period in the life of Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), New Zealand’s most famous author, and Stead’s reimaging of the Christ story in My Name Was Judas (2006). His first novel was the dystopian Smith’s Dream (1971), which imagines New Zealand under totalitarian rule.
Keri Hulme (b. 1947) is the most recognizable New Zealand author with Maori roots, thanks largely to her Booker Prize–winning novel,
The Bone People (1984). Though often derided as one of that prize’s most forgettable winners,
The Bone People has been surprisingly enduring (and has sold well over a million copies). It is a dark and violent tale of a damaged boy—a mute orphan who had literally washed up on the shore years earlier—the father figure in his life, and the woman whose life they become part of, and the complex relationship that develops between them. Hulme incorporates both Maori myth and contemporary New Zealand life in her story.
The Bone People has sharply divided readers both because of its subject matter and because so much of the lengthy novel is presented in a stream of consciousness of short paragraphs, many only a short sentence, that can become grating.
The more approachable fiction of Patricia Grace (b. 1937) and Witi Ihimaera (b. 1944) offers greater insight into Maori culture and history and is worth exploring beyond Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider (1987), the basis for the excellent 2003 film.
Lloyd Jones (b. 1955) finally achieved greater international recognition with his best-selling novel Mister Pip (2006), but that is only a recent peak in an impressive body of work. Jones’s quirky Biografi (1993) is presented as journalistic travelogue, but it also is a work of fiction. Biografi recounts Jones’s travels through an Albania still recovering from the isolation and oppression of the Enver Hoxha regime as he searches for a dentist named Petar Shapallo, who was the dictator’s body double, standing in for him on some occasions. With his own past and person erased, Shapallo was unable to return to his previous life after the Great Leader’s death. Jones uses Shapallo’s life and fate as an allegory of how fiction and reality are presented, and while he never explicitly states it, Shapallo himself seems to be a fictional stand-in, an invention of the author.
The Book of Fame (2000) also mixes fact and fiction, Jones using the triumphant European tour of New Zealand’s national rugby team (the All Blacks) at the beginning of the twentieth century to create a fascinating study of national pride and sporting fame.
Mister Pip builds on the blockade of Bougainville by the government of Papua New Guinea in the early 1990s as experienced by a young local girl, Matilda. Already set apart from the rest of the world, Bougainville is progressively cut off further during the blockade, the children adapting most readily to the enforced self-reliance. The one white man left there, Mr. Watts (also called Pop Eye), assumes the duties of teacher, using the only book at hand, Dickens’s
Great Expectations, to teach them. Most of the novel is entirely foreign to the children, but Mr. Watts nonetheless reveals to them the worlds of
Great Expectations and of great literature in general. When their only copy of the book is lost, Mr. Watts has them try to piece the story together again as an exercise in collective memory. Jones’s exploration of the clash of civilizations and the power of literature and storytelling is charming and, with its tragic turns, affecting. Despite the premise, the story does not come across as patronizing, owing to how convincingly Jones presents the young girl’s perspective.
KEEP IN MIND
• Both of Eleanor Catton’s (b. 1985) novels, The Rehearsal (2008) and the Man Booker Prize–winning The Luminaries (2013), are technically very accomplished, showing great skill in the use of language and structure.
SOUTH PACIFIC
The island nations of the South Pacific are widely dispersed over an enormous area and have different cultural and colonial histories. Most are too small and isolated for local literature to make inroads beyond their shores, especially when competing with the already popular and existing South Sea tales written by foreign authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), Herman Melville (1819–1891), Jack London (1876–1916), W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), and Pierre Loti (1850–1923). Some institutions, such as the University of the South Pacific, have tried to foster a regional literary culture, but relatively few writers have found an audience outside Oceania.
Samoan-born Albert Wendt (b. 1939) is a leading figure of South Pacific literature as both a writer and a teacher. His collection of stories The Birth and Death of the Miracle Man (1986) is a good introduction to his fiction and the region, but his multigenerational Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979) is a more focused, large-scale epic of modern Samoa. In Leaves of the Banyan Tree, the ambitious Tauilopepe Mauga achieves material success, but at a cost of betraying family and tradition. His son and grandson each also goes his own way, which Wendt uses to describe the different cultural and economic forces that shaped Samoa over these decades.
Wendt’s wildly imagined novel Black Rainbow (1992) is completely different, combining science fiction and literary games. It is set in a dystopian alternative world in which the narrator faces a Tribunal that deems him an ideal citizen after he has convinced them that he has destroyed all personal history. With distinctly Orwellian touches and many contemporary cultural references, Wendt has his narrator eventually recognize the mechanisms of this totalitarian and depersonalizing state. Both allegory and thriller, Black Rainbow is an occasionally messy but ultimately compelling read.
Tongan author Epeli Hau’ofa (1939–2009) relies heavily on humor in his writing. The protagonist of Kisses in the Nederlands (1987), Oilei, literally has a terrible pain in his rear, and his search for a cure to his medical ailment makes for a hilarious tour of local mores and ways, allowing for myriad cultural revelations through the different approaches to treating such an indiscreet problem. Hau’ofa’s collection of stories Tales of the Tikongs (1983) takes place on the fictional island of Tiko, a stand-in for Tonga and many similar Pacific island states. Hau’ofa pokes fun at many of the people found in the region, from foreign-aid advisers to various locals.