The ABR FAN (Favourite Australian Novel) Poll

Mark Gomes

Good books demand rereading, and the best speak differently through time. Like memory, literature works selectively as ‘an imaginative expression of a culture’ – as Jack Hibberd put it in The Weekend Australian, 10–11 October 2009 – and books can fall in and out of favour spectacularly with readers. New work revives the concerns of old or purposefully sidesteps it; changing mores favour or disdain novels’ allegorical lessons; the perfectly pitched becomes mannered; and the peripheral becomes essential reading.

While surveys of Australia’s favourite book in general, and favourite Australian book in particular, have been conducted this decade, no readers’ poll of the nation’s favourite Australian novel has. In 2003 the Australian Society of Authors determined their members’ forty favourite Australian books, but included in between novels at number one (Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet) and number forty (Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory) were poetry collections (Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright), non-fiction (David Marr’s Patrick White: A Life) and children’s books (May Gibbs’s Snugglepot and Cuddlepie).

Earlier searches for Australia’s favourite books undertaken by Dymocks and the ABC, in 2004 and 2003 respectively, featured only a handful of Australian novels between them. Of Dymocks readers’ ‘Best 101 Books Ever Written’, only Matthew Reilly’s Ice Station, Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi, Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, Bryce Courteney’s The Power of One and April Fool’s Day, and Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and The Riders made the grade. The ABC’s public search for our favourite 100 books turned up only Li Cunxin’s Mao’s Last Dancer. Both polls were topped by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Obviously, these surveys do not speak for the readership of Australian Book Review, bear no meaningful results in regards to our most enduring novelists, are too heavily influenced by extra-literary factors (i.e. film adaptation) and are out of date. As such, this spring Australian Book Review invites voting in the first ABR FAN (Favourite Australian Novel) Poll. Cast a vote for your single favourite Australian novel of all time to help us define the country’s most beloved novel ever published.

Three lucky voters will receive one of the following prizes: the complete set of 99 Popular Penguins (valued at nearly $1000); The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Deluxe Leather Bound Edition (valued at $410); a three-year complimentary subscription to ABR (30 issues valued at $290). To cast your vote email

poll@australianbookreview.com.au with the author and title of your favourite Australian novel and your contact details, or mail or fax the entry form to ABR.

Creative non-fiction and J.M. Coetzee

Mark Gomes

Last week ABR received a query from two Mentone schoolgirls regarding the newly announced Young Calibre Prize. What exactly, they asked, was ‘creative non-fiction’, as referred to in our media release? Google told them ‘non-fiction’ was writing based on facts, so wasn’t our barrelled genre descriptor impossible by definition? Could we please explain the confusion so they might enter this lucrative young writers’ prize.

The term, we replied, was intended to encourage imaginative approaches to the non-fiction genre, and writing that addresses lived experience while informed by personal reflection. We might have substituted the word ‘essay’ for the kind of artful ‘non-fiction’ intended, but felt its overtones of dry obligation in the educational context uninspiring. The task was to tell a compelling true story, or to shape lived experience into narrative.

‘Creative non-fiction’, as a label, has been parlance since the 1970s. Famous early works in the genre include George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Capote perhaps explained the form best as writing ‘using all the apparatus of a fiction artist on a journalistic subject’: a device that now seems commonplace in both print and online publishing.

Perhaps couching our terms of entry to students in the context of blog publishing – where personal inflection in writing is expected, and public meanings are commonly debated at length – would have helped. Equal parts personal publishing heaven and hell, the web overflows with varying quality creative non-fiction; including memoir, unorthodox biography, food and travel writing, literary journalism, and other hybridised essay forms.

More tellingly, growing favour for the form is observable at the forefront of sanctioned literary publishing. The third volume of J.M. Coetzee’s ‘fictionalised autobiography’, Summertime, has just been included on this year’s Booker Prize longlist. In it, Coetzee has friends recount his life through a series of interviews after his death. ‘Those hoping to find the historical record tallying with the fictional record will be disappointed’, the author has remarked.

Entries in the Young Calibre Prize, worth $3000, and the Fourth Calibre Prize for Outstanding Essay, worth $10,000, are now invited. Entry forms and media releases for both competitions are available on the ABR website. James Ley writes at length about J.M. Coetzee and Summertime in the September issue of ABR. The magazine offers giveaway copies of Summertime to new subscribers in September, with thanks to Random House.

On preferring films to books

Mark Gomes

In researching his new survey of the Australian novel, Panorama du roman australien, Frenchman Jean-Francois Vernay noted that in ‘a lot of Australian literary criticism … there was the complaint that Australians preferred film adaptations of Australian novels to the books themselves’ (The Age, 14 February 2009). Whether or not this statement is true, there can be no denying that film adaptations often rescue Australian novels from obscurity and generate untold profits in new, film-themed editions for local publishers.

The warm reception awarded a newly restored print of the 1971 film, Wake in Fright, and Text Publishing’s tie-in reprint of Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel of the same name, seems to support Vernay’s observation. Text’s reissue of Cook’s novel, the first edition since 1983, comes replete with new endorsements from J.M. Coetzee, M.J. Hyland and actor Brendan Cowell and is selling fast at Readings, Carlton, as fast as tickets sell for screenings of the movie at the adjacent Cinema Nova.

The irony is that while Canadian director Ted Kotcheff’s movie is good, Cook’s novel is extraordinary, and that while resurrection of his novel is welcome and overdue, it is souring that it should come apropos the movie and years after Cook’s death in 1987. Reviews of the film commonly make perfunctory reference to the book before lapsing into wild, adulatory language – Nick Cave comments that the film is ‘the best … about Australia in existence’ – but contemporary mention of Cook’s work of itself remains scarce.

Why the film excites interest enough to sell copies of the novel after fifty languorous years must be more than a question of marketing, or simple sell-on correspondence. Films are implicitly made for more than an audience of one, but this doesn’t fully explain the public’s preference for Kotcheff’s creation over Cook’s. Adaptations of foreign novels to film don’t necessarily pique publishers’ interests here either. So what is it about Australia’s preference for our stories when transferred to the big screen?

In the case of Wake in Fright, the cynical response is that the film is less cerebral and more character-driven than the novel. Echoing a passage of the book included in the film, in which the alcoholic Doc Tydon explains to protagonist Jon Grant that his ‘condition’ is overlooked in the tiny town of Bundanyabba because he ‘is a character’, Kotcheff tends to overlook the most disturbing and affecting qualities of Cook’s prose: falling short of the hideous truths therein; unable to penetrate the characters’ outward, outback eccentricities.

This is not to criticise the film on grounds of its fidelity to the novel – that common interpretative mistake outlined by Brian McFarlane in his expert commentary on literary adaptations in the June issue of ABR – but simply to think about the Wake in Fright phenomenon with Vernay’s observation in mind. Kotcheff’s Bundanyabba, its raffish cast of characters and the unravelling of schoolteacher Jon Grant in their midst is convincing, yet is played for entertainment more than Cook’s original version.

Vernay’s line arguably holds for countless other Australian books adapted for the cinema: James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout, Colin Thiele’s Storm Boy, Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette’s Puberty Blues, Boyd Oxlade’s Death in Brunswick, Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, Luke Davies’ Candy, Raymond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father, the list goes on. You also have to wonder whether the popularity of the film versions of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well has something to do with Penguin’s inclusion of the titles in their next fifty Popular Penguins selection.

The award-winning biographer Jacqueline Kent, who was married to Kenneth Cook, will write at length about the novelist and Wake in Fright in the October 2009 issue of ABR.

The vintage of the human mind

Mark Gomes

Selecting a new body font for Australian Book Review has required many of the same skills involved in good editing. Both jobs call for a general attitude of service, rather than expression, and both demand sensitive reading above all else. Like an effective edit, a good typeface should interpret text – working from within, not without – and hold itself back as far as possible from readers’ notice, so as to grease their reading and not to distract from letterforms’ signified meaning. A font, like an editor, must aim to fuse invisibly with its subject, assuming its voice, and to maintain the modesty and appropriateness of the submissive in a master–servant relationship.

Beatrice Warde famously applied the metaphor of a goblet holding wine to this peculiar situation in a lecture delivered to the British Typographers Guild in 1937:

Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine … [and] two goblets ... One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

Warde’s point is that expert readers, like expert wine lovers, do not want their appreciation of writing or wine obstructed by a mannerist font or ostentatious drinking vessel. In a magazine such as ABR, devoted to written ideas not their materiality on the page, fonts should work transparently in action, in strictly classical fashion. For the same reason, ABR’s new choice of font also needs to recognise and match our readers’ sensibility by being something more elegant than your average Times New Roman, in which the magazine has been presented for many years. The new choice of font must silently chime with our audience’s expectations, not as accompaniment, but as Warde’s ‘crystalline goblet … worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind’.

After much debate and experimentation, the font we have decided on for the task is Caslon. Designed by the thrice-married, beer-brewing lover of music and British typographic genius, William Caslon (1692–1766), there is nothing self-conscious about this beautiful face, in which the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were first set, and about which George Bernard Shaw famously swore, ‘I’ll stick with Caslon until I die.’ We believe the new typeface will lift the atmosphere of the magazine in a manner befitting both our readers’ and contributors’ taste, retaining a beautiful look and feel while never distracting from ABR’s considered content. The new design is débuted in our July–August issue.

Marcel Proust and the windy heck

Peter Rose

Soon after learning of the appalling Air France disaster over the Atlantic Ocean, I was seated on an Airbus, with even less leg-room than usual and no manuscript to edit, which was most unusual. Looking through the window, I saw one of ABR’s senior contributors strapped to the wing and quite supine. She had placed herself there voluntarily for the windy heck of it – rather like J.M.W. Turner and Chateaubriand, each of whom purportedly had himself lashed to the mast of a ship during a storm, for the full Romantic frisson. My contributor (who shall remain nameless, though I’m not sure why) waved to me and mouthed an invitation to join her on the wing. But I cried off, citing another book I had to write before we arrived in ... wherever it was.

Strange then – or not so strange at all – that this should follow a decision made just yesterday in our office to include an oneiric question in a new feature called ‘Open Page’, which will have its début in our July–August issue. Each month we will invite a prominent author to answer a few questions about his or her work, method, literary politics and predilections.

One of the questions is, ‘Are you a vivid dreamer?’

Our aim in presenting ‘Open Page’ is to find out more about the writers whom Australians most like to read. Here, we have drawn almost inevitably on the famous Proust Questionnaire, so called only because Marcel Proust was the most famous person to complete it – twice in fact, when he was aged thirteen and twenty. Nevertheless, all but one of the questions are our own. We won’t enquire about our monthly subject’s favourite bird (Proust: the capricious swallow) or favourite occupation (‘loving’) or most marked characteristic (‘a craving to be loved, or, to be more precise, to be caressed and spoiled rather than to be admired’). We will leave that to Vanity Fair, in which the Proust Questionnaire continues to appear more than a century after its creation.

And who will our first subject be? And why does she write? And would she do so if she had her time all over again? And if she dreams at all, is she an aviatrix?

Stay tuned for the July–August issue.

The Slap snapped up – Christos Tsiolkas’s novel on the small screen

Rebecca Starford

Local television drama is about to get a much-needed boost: Matchbox Pictures has purchased the rights to produce a television adaptation of The Slap, the recent winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Award-winning director Tony Ayres, one of five partners at Matchbox, hopes the series will unfold over eight episodes, just as Christos Tsiolkas’s novel is told over eight chapters from eight different points of view. Ayres said the series would be shot around the inner-Melbourne suburbs of Fitzroy and Northcote, where The Slap is set. Ayres believes that the novel lends itself to film as it is ‘about intimate human relations and television is such a fantastic medium to for that’.

MUP and the underworld: Mick Gatto’s autobiography

Rebecca Starford

Hot on the heels of Colin McLaren’s Infiltration: The True Story of the Man Who Cracked the Mafia, Melbourne University Publishing (MUP) is releasing underworld identity Mick Gatto’s autobiography, Mick Gatto: My Story. ‘After many years of resisting media attention,’ the press release reads, ‘Mick Gatto has decided it is important to tell his own story.’

We’re sure he has. The autobiography marks a departure from MUP’s more scholarly list – but Louise Adler, CEO and Publisher-in-Chief of MUP, has confidence in the publication: ‘It is the story of a kid with a passion for boxing, the illegal gambling rackets that brought huge wealth to so few and ruin to so many, and it is the story of Australia’s very own violent underworld.’

The book, co-authored with crime writer Tom Noble (of Neddy: The Life and Crimes of Arthur Stanley Smith fame) will be published in October.

ABR hits America!

Rebecca Starford

Thanks to conscientious ABR reader, Lisa Hill, the magazine’s annual reviewing competition, worth $1000, is now listed on the National Book Critics Circle blog, ‘Critical Mass’. NBCC member Janice Harayda, of the ‘One-Minute Book Reviews’ blog, hopes that ABR’s Reviewing Competition ‘might encourage a sponsor in the US to start giving out prizes like that, too. This prize differs from the Pulitzer and NBCC prizes for criticism in that it’s for an unpublished review’. The first prize for the ABR Reviewing Competition is, after all, a big one: Harayda notes that when she was the book editor of the largest newspaper in Ohio, ‘we generally paid $100, on rare occasions $150.’ Operating in a small and indeed recessionary Australian market, it is heartening to see ABR as a forerunner in the recognition and appreciation of robust literary criticism.

Entries for the 2009 ABR Reviewing Competition are now welcomed – click here for more information.