Let’s talk about my Too Early Introduction To Tim Winton. When I was a wee tacker with no friends and a constant seat at the library, my parents and teachers often encouraged me to expand my readerly repertoire. As a result, I had a lot of incoming recommendations – one teacher recommended that I read Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, though I must have felt that the rural lives of Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba Everdene (really??) weren’t quite up to my standards, as I’ve never read it.

Whether I took to the recommended book or not was pretty unpredictable. My favourite read was Jane Eyre, and it remains so to this day, despite its being an exemplar of the Possibly Crazy White Oppressor’s Simultaneous Despoliation of the Dignity Of Females From Conquered Races And The Lower Classes genre. But when I tried reading Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet on the shelves at home, I was so displeased with what it offered that I didn’t finish it.

So, however unfair it may be to Mr Winton, I’ve kind of nursed ill feeling towards him since then – more than half my life. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for Cloudstreet then, and I’m certainly not opposed to trying again in future. Occasionally, I have considered a dip into the Winton oeuvre, but every time I thought about it, I’d think of reasons not to go ahead. For example, not so long ago, a couple of my friends attempted to read Cloudstreet, and found it incredibly hard to get through. Nevertheless, I’m not one to ever say never, so I read Breath when I was on holiday in Sri Lanka.

Although it seems that I am gratuitously mentioning my tropical sojourn every time I draw digital breath, I feel like the setting of the ‘I Finally Give Tim Winton Another Go’ melodrama was important. It’s not that I’m so literal as to think a beachside location is integral to appreciating Breath. But interspersing my reading stints with the occasional surrender to tiny but powerful waves, on a shoreline tremendous with whiteness, lent another dimension to my experience of Breath’s grace and power.

Breath opens with Bruce Pike roaring up the road with another paramedic to a house where a seventeen-year-old kid has died of asphyxiation. Jodie, Bruce’s colleague, assumes that the teenager has committed suicide. Bruce knows better; he may be ‘arrogant, aloof, sexist, bad communicator, gung-ho’, but he knows what young Aaron’s motivations were, just like they his own. Once, Bruce – Pikelet – was a kid from Sawyer, ‘a town of millers and loggers and dairy farmers’. But then he chanced to follow his mate, Loonie, clinging gamely one day to the tie-rail of a flatbed truck, and he saw the ocean.

Pikelet’s first glimpse of the surf and its inhabitants haunts him: ‘How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant’. Pursuing the surf swallows up his time, and his fledgling adult identity: to follow the surf is to defy his father, who is petrified of the open water. Pikelet and Loonie get their start with a motley group of surfers, before they succeed to the mentorship of Sando, a ‘huge, bearded, coiled-up presence’, whose ability in the surf is unparalleled in their small acquaintance. Before long Pikelet and Loonie are striving to the heights that Sando sets them, and competing against each other for his regard and the wildest wave.

What blew me away was the sheer physicality of Winton’s ocean. I’ve never felt more terrified and awed and seduced by a description as I have when reading Winton’s Old Smoky, the wave that baptises the boys as local surfing mavericks, and the Nautilus, a notorious wave that taunts Pikelet and Loonie with its unpredictability and danger. Breath parses the surf in straightforward poetry, from Old Smoky’s immense ’sound of sheetmetal shearing itself to pieces’ to the gentler water’s ‘cauls of fizz and light’, which accompany the surfer who’s taken on the impossible and won. I’ve never seen surf like that, but I’m pretty sure I will always be able to call to my mind’s eye the spectacle of thousands of cubic metres’ worth of spine-snapping water curving in a wall towards a person, tiny on a board of fibreglass and foam.

In some ways, the novel’s structure is but a viable vehicle for the absolute, unbiddable presence of the water. Something that I read about Tim Winton and Breath, long before I ever read the book, is James Ley’s comment that ‘Winton is a high symbolist working in a realist mode’. I came across this quote at Kerryn Goldsworthy’s blog, and it stayed with me for two years. Ley’s comment deeply affected the way I read the book. Aspects of the novel feel like they are in service of the novel’s focal symbol, the breath, including Pikelet’s sexual relationship with Sando’s wife, Eva, who herself seems merely perfunctory at times.

Nevertheless, what a way to shirk any indifference I felt about a writer many consider Australia’s finest. Good to meet you again, Tim.

In popular TV show Thank God You’re Here, Australian actors and comedians are thrown into a situation they know nothing about and attempt to make it out alive, as well as angle for a few laughs along the way. Even as only an occasional television watcher, I’m familiar with the dark edges of Bob Franklin’s deadpanning; in this skit, he tells his ‘employee’, a tea lady, that she is not going to be ‘sacked’, but ‘put down’. That famously head-cocked view of the world paired with its being the first in Affirm Press‘s Long Story Shorts series made Franklin’s début publication, Under Stones, an immediately compelling proposition when Affirm’s Associate Publisher, Rebecca Starford, told me about it late last year. (Note: Bec and I are now colleagues at Kill Your Darlings.)

Franklin’s comedic experience tells in this collection of short stories, but not in the expected tally of belly laughs. (In fact, it’s the most self-consciously quirky story, ‘Thesis Examining a Student’s Path to Crime’, that strikes the one false note for me.) Rather, he’s a deft technician of story and its elements – tension, denouement, character, voice. These competencies serve him well in drawing the reader down through a suburban landscape that is at once familiar and much stranger than we know it. In ‘Ironman’, the first story, Ironman is a high-functioning Australian middle-class hero who ‘pounds the roads’ past the ‘abo’ perched on the beach. ‘Get used to me, I’m part of the landscape now,’ is Ironman’s catchcry, which rebounds between other racially charged insults and his wife’s tired half-silence. The bleakness that Ironman associates with native Australians, however, is visited upon him in a mocking, symbolic and haunting fashion when he arrives home one evening to discover his wife and children have disappeared.

It is clear from this, and many of its companions, that in Under Stones, Franklin has assembled myriad tales of unexpected disturbance and horror that scratch at the wales and wounds we bear. While the situations he describes are unexceptional, the conclusions his characters draw often are. In ‘Soldier On’, Phil, an itinerant but considerate son visits his parents in Paignton, Devon. Phil carps about illicit substances and the painful but necessary observances required of a filial visitor, but he also witnesses an unsettling longing in the elderly he sees around him. At first, it’s reasonable to suspect that his sensitivity is purely a correlate of his discomfort at being a distant son – one visit to the frozen waterside ends in Phil sighting aging faces under the ice. But illicit substances aren’t only for the young and disaffected among us.

Other stories in the collection possess an even more heightened sense of unease. ‘Take the Free Tour’ is a capacious psychological tale that toes the real/unreal divide most chillingly. Its eerie depths are accentuated by the sheer commonness of its protagonist, one Duncan Shaw – ‘unremarkable local reporter by day’ and ‘Dale Thorn, narrator of some of the toughest, most sarcastic private eye adventures that ever failed to impress an editor’ at night. The ‘tour’ of the title is a complimentary gander at a pornographic website, which speedily turns into a fixation. That in itself is no big juice, but the ‘voyeuristic orgy of depravity’ coincides with a number of inexplicable, vile acts at Duncan’s workplace: ‘marks … the colour of pale flesh, and phallic in shape’ turn up on photographs that are supposed to accompany a piece he is writing, and his autumnal desktop background is supplanted by a graphic image of a blonde woman. Endlessly worse manifestations disport themselves, implicating Duncan to his workmates. Frighteningly for Duncan – and the reader – he cannot fathom how these degenerate episodes materialised.

The conjunction of the ordinary and the weird has long been an inspiration to writers, and Franklin is no different. Far from being merely spooky or bizarre tales, the stories in Under Stones effect their rumour of unease on the winds of what we’re already hiding from: fear, the inexplicable and what’s hiding under stones.

There’s a reason I avert my eyes from multi-author short story collections, and it’s this: you have favourites among the throng, and nothing can stop you from loving those bright-eyed scamps more than the others. I’m an egalitarian reader, and love to love everything the same. But it’s difficult to shy away in the case of a book like Readings and Writings: Forty Years in Books, a collection no doubt published because independent Melbourne bookshop Readings has a clientele able to discern their Carver from their Chekhov, their Kennedy from their Lahiri. An editorial team headed by Jason Cotter and Michael Williams has brought together the shining lights of the short fiction form in Australia, including Alex Miller, Peter Goldsworthy, Cate Kennedy, Paddy O’Reilly and Tony Birch. The book not only brings good literary will to its readers; in addition, proceeds from the book go to The Readings Foundation, which supports local community and arts projects.

So, a book full of treasures. But the heart is wilful, and it goes where it pleases. Can I say how surprised I was by where it took me, and how grateful I was to discover the final destination? For example, I know who Mark Seymour is – he’s indirectly responsible for the longstanding but one-sided love affair I had with Paul McDermott when I was but an impressionable teen. But I had no idea Seymour was such a master of voice, of getting into a fictional skin. ‘The Scragger’ is a masterpiece showcasing the laconic Australian sporting male. Shawsie is a footballer, the ‘new dog in the kennel’. His anxieties are necessarily more hidden than others’, but his desires are plain for everyone to see. It’s the last game of the season, and he wants a run, badly. But he’s new in from the state league and the opposition players are huge, vicious, scraggin’. Coded in expletives, Shawsie’s verbiage is a wonderful couch for the ‘first run’ dream and the ‘couldn’t give a shit’ attitude expected of the sportsperson:

As if I don’t care about people’s feelings. Course I care. I mean, if I look at your face and you’re upset about something I’m going to notice that, right? And I’ll probably ask you what the matter is. On the other hand, I’m not soft either. I don’t suck up to anybody. I mean, there are bullshitters everywhere, don’t you reckon? Some people really know how to get the sympathy vote. ‘Squeaky wheels’ Dad calls ‘em … Mum too for that matter. ‘Watch out for the squeaky wheels,’ she used to say. That was a long time ago though.

Seymour’s writing is immediate and physical; it feels like it feeds straight into the part of the brain that perceives three-dimensional movement.

Like sentiment and football, youth and small town boredom are uncomfortable bedfellows, and Jenny Sinclair’s ‘Postcards’ is a bang-on sketch of what a kid with an adventurous bent might do: ‘Technically speaking it was a motorbike.’ In four skilful pages, Sinclair wraps the teenaged Owen in well-meaning relatives and benign promises and also the promising dust of the road. It’s a great little piece, with a focus on loving escape.

Now that I look again at Robbie Egan’s ‘Snake’, I’m starting to see a theme in the stories in Readings and Writings that have so enthralled me. ‘Snake’ begins with some kids playing around a river on a day Melburnians won’t need to try too hard to imagine, a day of blazing heat and lazy languor. Fans oscillate and boys smoke while their friends on the riverbank mangle their turn jumping into the water. But every action has its reverse and a single event has the day in tragic rewind.

Plenty of the other stories are great companions. David Cohen’s ‘Woodcutter’ is whimsical and fatalistic in the way of George Saunders, and Alex Miller’s ‘The End’ is a seemingly gentle story that groans terrifically at its end with a brutal kind of respite. In ‘Icarus’, Leanne Hall figures the remembrance of an installation artist in a way that foregrounds the allure of both the work and the strange unknowable person behind tangible flights of fancy. The foreword by Shane Maloney laughingly captures the character of the Readings enterprise, a place where ‘Helen Garner freewheeled past with a gasfitter’s apprentice over her shoulder’ and ‘The proprietor, a ruffian named Rubbo, stood behind an oak-laden counter, idly slitting the pages of uncut hardbacks with a switchblade stiletto.’ Rubbo’s introduction is a great read too, telling the story behind the big blue R.

Such were my bright-eyed scamps. Perhaps yours are different?

I’m as little physically intrepid as it is humanly possible for a person to be. I do not like rollercoasters. I do not like to change hairdressers very often. God forbid that I go on some kind of orienteering foray of an afternoon. And I detest horror movies. A girl like that needs to get her kicks from somewhere, and I am lucky to be able to satisfy my minimal urges for life’s tasty variety through…can you guess? Books? Oh, you’re so smart. Let me buy you a drink.

You may scoff, but if you don’t think that words can help you can swim in adventure straits, then you haven’t read Crime and Punishment. Or Memoirs of a Bugatti Hunter. Or Liar by Justine Larbalestier. Reading this book is like walking a tightrope. I’m not saying it’s some kind of literal safari or anything. But Liar is certainly a masterful exercise in maintaining reader tension: it’s tight, then lulled, then tight again, all the way to its extraordinary end. And even then, I wasn’t quite sure whether I was off the ride yet.

My father is a liar and so am I.
But I’m going to stop. I have to stop. I will tell you my story and I will tell it straight.
No lies, no omissions.
That’s my promise.
This time I truly mean it.

‘Telling the Truth’: such is our introduction to Micah Wilkins. She’s a liar, and we’re duly warned. So we stick with her through all the stories she tells, and there are a lot. Micah starts off with the time she perpetuated the fiction that she was a boy at school. Then, she tells you about her half-black, half-white family, which includes a strange branch of reclusive folk on a two-hundred acre farm. There’s her brother, Jordan. And there’s Zach, her boyfriend. Two pages in, though, and Zach is missing. Three pages, and Zach is dead.

The death of a young boy is a tragedy anywhere, but in a high school, it’s a trigger. Even at a progressive high school like the one Micah attends, the news is a spritzer pill in a glass of water. Zach’s ‘real’ girlfriend, Sarah, is surprised that he had anything to do with Micah, as is everyone else. Micah is a ‘freak’, a loner. The tacit avoidance Micah usually countenances in her school days becomes full-blown hostility as people begin to suspect she had something to do with Zach’s death. But some of the people around her realise that there’s more to her than strangeness and untruths, and as all this unravels, so too do Micah’s stories. ‘I haven’t been entirely honest,’ she says. Perhaps the liar is becoming a truth teller? If so, then who is Micah really?

In Micah, Larbalestier has created a character whose reliability is inversely proportionate to her appeal. Excruciating though Micah’s physical and psychological instability is for her, she is also a deeply fascinating and vital character. The danger with a book focused on the dichotomy of truth and lies is the potential prioritisation of a moral axis of some kind, but we’re never in any danger of that in Liar. Sensitive exploration of the adolescent spikes of identity is what we get instead. Identity is a popular topic in young adult fiction, and it’s well explored here, with fantasy, metaphor and reality holding hands. Micah is a rustling, sparking ball of falsehood and confusion in the midst of youth’s mysterious hot heat, which Liar evokes superbly. Larbalestier shows how the distinction between reality and fantasy becomes moot in that context, because thinking and feeling is just that difficult, alien and animal. It’s this insight and compassion that makes Liar a riveting, supremely put together book about the addictive utility of saying things that are not true.

I reviewed Alex Miller’s Lovesong for The Big Issue. It’s a lovely book exploring the ownership of one’s story and the proposition that when someone tells you a story it becomes a gift. Ken, an ostensibly retired writer, has returned to Melbourne after a sojourn in Venice. Before long, though, he’s captivated by the exotic smell of pastries wafting out from where the drycleaner’s used to be, the beautiful dark-eyed woman who runs it and her husband, an Australian man with beautiful hands, ‘the hands of a capable man’. He discovers their names – Sabiha and John Patterner – and clamour arises within his writer’s heart for the ‘ancient buried sorrow’ he sees in Sabiha’s eyes; the ‘simple love story between them, this Aussie bloke and his exotic bride’.

There is a lot of pain in this book, but Lovesong is also unexpectedly playful. Ken’s circumstances mirror Miller’s own: Ken’s ostensible last book was called The Farewell – a barely disguised Landscape of Farewell; and the accomplished writer cherishes his memories of the Tunisian city El Djem. John Patterner is not free of Miller’s arch self-mirroring, either. Patterner’s Melbourne University education, favoured North African restaurant in Paris and country town provenance are all lifted, bare-facedly, from Miller’s own history. ‘Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait,’ says Ken (pace Lucian Freud) to a nosy interviewer.

Miller is a fantastic writer who is equally capable of the lyrical and the laconic. An example of the latter:

The coffee was steaming. His mother had named Tip for the white tip on her tail. John had not given names to his animals. His father’s old horse had been a big lumbering brown gelding named Beau. A great farter. A monumental farter. When his father spurred Beau up the bank of the creek the horse let out a series of mighty farts. Real stinkers. It would take your head off if you were tailing him too closely.

The other thing is that Miller has a real knack for names. I don’t know how many times I read a modern realist novel or short story and roll my eyes at the names. Wrong names can pull you right out of a narrative – if they’re too sterile, too pretty or too odd, they don’t work. Of course, it’s hard to pick monikers that could come out of a phone book without just flipping open the White Pages. But it’s not often you come across an author with the knack for picking proper nouns that lend a heartbeat to what is really just ink on a page. Sabiha and the two Hourias; John Patterner; Andrea and Tumas Galasso; Ken and Clare. Just kind of strange enough, kind of pedestrian enough, just they-live-right-round-the-corner enough.

I requested Madeleine St John’s The Essence of the Thing for review on Textual Fantasies because I was fascinated by what critics say about St John. I’d never heard of her, but when Text re-issued her novels, it became possible to read a slew of printed praise for her writing, including, from Michelle de Kretser: ‘It is to be hoped that St John, who is woefully undervalued [in Australia], will at last be recognised as the best novelist we never had’. Big call. So, of course, it was necessary to read Madeleine St John immediately.

And, of course, I’m glad I did. It’s a break-up story, albeit one which is tart and charming. Nicola — lovely, clever, loyal — comes home from a cigarette run to the home she shares with Jonathan to this:

Jonathan shrugged very slightly and then got impatiently to his feet. He leaned an arm against the mantelpiece; if there had been a fire he would certainly have poked it. As it was, he looked unseeingly at the objects at his elbow and moved a china poodle dog. Then he looked up at her again. ‘There’s no nice way to say this,’ he said. ‘But I’ve decided – that is, I’ve come to the conclusion – that we should part.’

Anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of similar words will appreciate the swirling confusion that follows such a scene. Nicola’s first reaction to this giant unilateral shift is disbelief: ‘this is just a sort of joke which I haven’t yet understood’; this quickly turns to shock and anger. Later, she manages to pull herself together into a kind of utterly practical and even hopeful embracer of change: it’s not a book with a lot of wallowing. And it’s as far from psychiatry-era emotional-damage-lit as you can get. Rather, The Essence of the Thing illustrates the wretchedness of a regular end to a regular relationship with endlessly empathetic focus on the kaleidoscope twist such an event usually represents.

St John is talented at sketching character with very few words. It’s not a dense book, and it has very short chapters, which tootles the whole thing along very quickly. In that way, it’s rather televisual. I particularly like her dialogue, which is pithy but veridical:

‘What’s your dad doing?’
‘Watching telly.’
‘Take him a caramel then.’

There are lots of characters in this book, mostly couples: the newly-split couple’s respective parents and different sets of Nicola and Jonathan’s shared friends. But they’re all lively in separate skins, all able to be told apart. St John very lovingly pokes fun at the many foibles a person encounters in life’s cast of friends and family, and occasionally enjoys a joke at the expense of her adopted national character (she moved to England in the 1960s): ‘I must, she thought, just concentrate on what comes next, and try to live through this as decently as I can. She was not British for nothing.’ I also loved the little kid, Guy, who is very good-natured and is constantly exclaiming in the time-honoured British way: ‘Cor!’ (as opposed to: ‘Oh my god, that is so random’). And Nicola herself is wonderful, with her smiles as easy as her tears, her passim French words and her desire just to get on with things after Jonathan leaves.

The Essence of the Thing is a tender exploration of the middle-class break-up: the turmoil and resilience that can still be suffered by the person whose basic physical and financial needs are all taken care of: the emotional niceties of awkward asset dissolution, the solitude and pendulum swings of someone undertaking to demolish a long-term relationship, what to do with the marmalade your ex-partner’s mother has gifted you with, what to do with the collection of china dogs. What is interesting about The Essence of the Thing is how ordinary all the characters and situations are. People are, of course, drawn to stories that can tell them things they might never find out if they relied purely on their own experience: other countries, other lives and other loves. But readers also love to feel the fizz of recognition between themselves and a story, and in that, this book excels.

MJ Hyland is one of my 2009 obsessions. First reason: watch this SlowTV video to see why. Just two minutes will do. Are you back? That powerfully resonant voice, her dark lipstick, the way she described her third book, This Is How, as her ‘turd’ novel: Hyland has a kind of terrible, magnetic charisma. I’ve heard she only eats meat and chocolate. I’m terrified of her, and I’ve never even met her. Second reason: Carry Me Down, which is almost a perfect book.

I’ve written before about how I seem to be reading a lot of books that feature a child as the main character lately – Lindqvist’s Let the Right One in, Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Larbalestier’s Liar quickly come to mind. Carry Me Down is no different, with eleven-year-old John Egan’s tale beginning as follows:

It is January, a dark Sunday in winter, and I sit with my mother and father at the kitchen table. My father sits with his back to the table, his feet pressed against the wall, a book in his lap. My mother sits to my right and her book rests on the table. I sit close to her, and my chair, which faces the window, is near the heat of the range.

There is a pot of hot tea in the middle of the table and we each have a cup and plate. There are ham and turkey sandwiches on the plates and, if we want more to eat or drink, there is plenty. The pantry is full.

It’s an incomparable picture of familial equanimity, simple and affecting. If a child could feel this at ease and complete on a day of no import, perhaps the family described is like this every day. And if this is an ‘every day’, then it’s a warmly intellectual family: the cat’s name is Crito, and the book John’s father, Michael, is reading is called Phrenology and the Criminal Cranium. He is studying for a university entrance exam and plays word games with John at table, encouraging John to spar with him using the tales of Sisyphus and Tantalus.

Of course, it’s not long until these perfect elements shift and grate against one another. Helen, John’s mother, is changeable. She fends off and interrogates John as she might an adult: ‘You were staring again. You were staring at me’; or she is charming, engaged, fun — a delightful mother who tickles and tells stories. John’s grandmother is there too, or rather, the three Egans live with her, as Michael hasn’t been employed for three years. Michael himself is a gamble at the best of times. One day, he and John must drown the kittens Crito has borne. When John challenges his resolve (‘I knew you couldn’t kill them’), Michael takes one of the kittens in his hand and smashes its head on the bath, and then says he is not sad about what he has done. However, John knows that his father is lying.

John’s realisation precipitates not a readjustment of the way he sees his family, but an obsession with becoming a human lie detector. Obsession is a boon to any plot, but the way Hyland ascribes it to this young boy is both sympathetic and disturbing. John creates a journal called the Gol of Seil and records inside it every lie he witnesses. It’s a simple project that echoes the limits of his ability to understand the many societal roles of untruths, whether they are (in his taxonomy) major, minor or white. His attempt to control the emotional chaos that is bristling around him is touching and remarkably single-minded. As John Egan attempts to strip the people around him of his lies, so too does he strip his world of its protective buffers and linings, uprooting a thorn bush of a family that had well tangled itself across and into the ground. It’s riveting to read, and the results are severe to experience.

Carry Me Down uses deceptively simple language to uncover a fraught domestic world, one in which the players begin with a face for each other and us, through the child John; and another for other times and other places. I said at the outset that Carry Me Down is an ‘almost perfect’ novel, and these other lives evaporate a little towards the end, a little unnaturally. But there’s no denying the power and beauty of this novel. Read it and weep.