The Long View
George Orwell believed we should ignore most books and give very long reviews to the ones that matter. These days, most publications do the opposite, cramming as many short reviews (of as many books) as possible into a shrinking space.
The Long View is a series of ten luxuriously long review essays (up to 3000 words) on Australian writers and writing, by some of our best writers and critics. It puts Australian writers under the spotlight, and gives our critics the room to stretch out – and leap into the kinds of conversations about our literature they’ve always longed to have.
Through this series, we invite you to join the conversation about Australian writing – and hopefully discover some new passions or perspectives along the way.
Reviews
Brilliant Careers: A Quintet of Australian Writers
There can be no more pleasurable task than to read and reflect on books and their creators over the course of an Australian summer. Sprawling enraptured with a book, under a shady tree, while a hullabaloo of Christmas, cricket and cicadas whirls about, is a singular experience, unique to this…
Our Common Ground
One Tuesday in early 2012, the organisation behind the National Year of Reading released its ‘Our Story’ recommended reading list: eight books – one from each state, and the Northern Territory – chosen (according to an accompanying press release) to ‘capture what it is to be Australian’.
Almost immediately, it…
'Dry as a Chip': A Journey Through Humour in Australian Fiction
When I first read Peter Carey’s Bliss, I was smiling by the third page. This is when Carey introduces his protagonist, Harry Joy, who was ‘thirty-nine years old and believed what he read in the newspapers’. This tickled me – and it’s wonderful writing, besides. I know who he…
A Sentimental Yoke
Most Australian books I have loved of late have been publicly admired for their radical unsentimentality: Helen Garner’s The Spare Room (2008) is ‘utterly unsentimental’ and Gillian Mears’s Foal’s Bread (2011) an ‘unsentimental chronicle’, while ‘no hint of sentimentality’ lurks in Forecast: Turbulence (2011) by Janette Turner Hospital, and M.J…
'Not Doing a Novel': Recent Australian Short Fiction
American writer Flannery O’Connor published her seminal short story, ‘A Good Man Is Hard To Find’, in 1953. She released a short-story collection under the same title, in addition to a slim body of work including two novels, a second story collection (not including a subsequent Complete Stories) and…
All Me Make the Roar: On Animals in Australian Writing
At the beginning of Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy, four-year-old Romochka wakes up in a squalid Russian apartment block, its power off and residents gone, to find his uncle has abandoned him. Over three and a half days everything familiar falls away, until he puts on as many clothes as…
Holding the Man and AIDS in Australia
Tracing the origins of HIV and AIDS is a slippery task. You can always go one step back. For Australia, HIV was an American import, helped along by gay men who frequented cheap Skytrain flights between here and San Francisco in the early 80s. Before that, there was so-called Patient…
Peter Doyle's Sydney: Crooks Like Us
There is a conversation about books in Chapter Two of Amaze Your Friends, the third novel in Peter Doyle’s crime triptych starring Billy Glasheen. It’s 1958 and Glasheen, in his mid-thirties, is still getting by on cons, lurks, the occasional robbery and lucky bet. He’s taken a fancy to…
Everyday and Exotic: Australian Asian Writing
‘Australians are the least monolingual of all the Anglos,’ says Timothy Mo in an interview to mark his new novel, Pure (Turnaround Books, 2012). This is a tease, because it’s all relative. Anglos are notoriously monolingual, and Australia is not much better. The statistics for foreign language learning and expertise…
Pitying the Monster?: Abuse and Empathy in Fiction
Children are legally protected from sexual abuse at state, national and international levels – and rightfully so. It’s essential that their developing psyches and bodies not be tampered with; society recognises this by constantly reaffirming the innocence of children as a desirable norm.
While most criminals can expect to be…