Showing posts with label Claire Corbett. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Claire Corbett. Show all posts

Wednesday, 18 July 2012

Crime 2012 releases: What's being reviewed?

Last weekend the tally of reviews for newly released literary works was posted on this blog, and the question was posed whether "genre" books should have been included. The response from speculative fiction authors on Twitter was a resounding, "Yes!" Of course "genre" books should be included.
But which genres? And what do we mean by "literary" anyway?

The question is timely because, as author P.A. O'Reilly tweeted yesterday, new prizes - including  The Stella Prize - are more open to "judging the work, not the 'genre'." So how do we identify the literary?
 
According to O'Reilly, literary books "reward a second reading with another layer of meaning". Author Claire Corbett goes further: "A literary book doesn't give you what you demand but what you never knew you wanted." Quality writing has subtext, according to Corbett, including non-fiction; too much writing has no subtext, she says, because such craft takes time.

Is it all a matter of craft and layers of meaning? Or are some genres more likely to be considered literary than others?

Clearly some Speculative Fiction titles have no trouble attracting the attention of major literary awards - Corbett's 2011 release, When We Have Wings, for one, was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis award, while Meg Mundell's Black Glass was Highly Commended by the judges of the same award.

But what of other genres, such as crime?

When crime writer Peter Temple won the 2010 Miles Franklin Award for his crime novel Truth, an expectation was set up that well-crafted crime novels would attract the attention of literary judges. Last year's inclusion of Kirsten Tranter's psychological suspense novel, The Legacy, and this year's inclusion of Virginia Duigan's The Precipice on the Miles Franklin longlists appear to support this view. Yet PM Newton's 2010 - in my opinion, equally brilliant - The Old School, didn't make the grade. Was it perhaps - being a detective novel - considered too generic?

Which crime novels released in 2012 - including detective, paranormal, YA, historical fiction, crime-romance and nonfiction titles - deserve to be considered "literary" in your view? 

Crime: 2012 releases

The following books released in 2012* and reviewed for the AWW challenge between January and June this year have been divided into subgenres:
  • general/thriller/psychological suspense
  • historical fiction 
  • crime/romance (sometimes referred to as "romantic suspense")
  • crime/paranormal
  • YA/Children's and 
  • True Crime.
*Disclaimer: The release dates on publishers' website don't always accurately reflect the year when the book was first published. If there are any errors, please let me know. EL


Tally: 18 books, 25 reviewers, 43 reviews, 10 publishers.

Publishers: Penguin: 4 books, 10 reviews; Random House: 3 book 7 reviews; ClanDestine Press: 3 books, 3 reviews; HarperCollins: 2 books, 5 reviews; Hachette: 1 book 6 reviews; Pan MacMillan: 1 book, 4 reviews; Pantera Press: 1 book, 3 reviews; Black Opal: 1 book, 1 review; EgmontUSA: 1 book, 1 review; Walker Books: 1 book, 1 review.

General/Thriller/Psychological Suspense

Historical Fiction
Romance
Paranormal
YA/Children's

True Crime

Short Stories
~ ~ ~

Guest author reviews

Of the above authors, Jaye Ford, Katherine Howell, YA Erskine and Helene Young have all reviewed for the challenge (that's why the covers of their recent releases are featured here).

Helene has written multiple reviews, including:
Do you think any of the above books deserves to be regarded as "literary"? Do you know of any other crime books released this year that haven't been reviewed for the challenge so far?

Other crime titles (some not reviewed during January-June period of tally):
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Thursday, 26 April 2012

2012 Barbara Jefferis Award shortlist & Claire Corbett's When We Have Wings


The Barbara Jefferis Award is offered annually for "the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society". The award will be announced at the State Library on May 23. Among the books shortlisted were:

Act of Faith By Kelly Gardiner
Book cover
Highly Commended were:

Challenge participant and author Mark Webb offered to review one of the shortlisted books, Claire Corbett's speculative fiction novel When We Have Wings, for AWW.

Webb writes: 
When We Have Wings is NSW based author Claire Corbett's debut novel. This intriguing story is set in an interesting world where genetic manipulation has made it possible for people to have wings surgically integrated with their bodies. It is still relatively early days for this technology, and wings are the ultimate status symbol - only the very rich can afford them.

When We Have Wings
The story is told from the perspective of two protagonists. The first is Peri, a very young woman who has grown up in the country and comes to the city to be a wet nurse for a rich flier couple. She uses the money and contacts that come from her position to pursue her life long dream of buying herself wings. The story opens with the newly winged Peri learning of the death of a fellow nanny and fleeing the city with the baby she is caring for in tow.

The second protagonist is Zeke, an ex-cop and now private detective who is hired by the flier couple to find Peri and their son Hugo. Zeke is middle aged and divorced, with some limited access to his young son Thomas. His ex-wife is pushing hard for Thomas to start undergoing treatments to become a flier, and Zeke's deliberations about whether to consent form a compelling sub-plot.

The structure of the novel is very interesting, with alternate chapters written from Peri and Zeke's perspectives. The chapters showing Peri's point of view are told in third person and read a little like an urban fantasy. The addition of wings, although explained from a scientific basis, give Peri a "power", and her story has the feel of a person on quest to master that power as well as achieve her stated goals.

Contrastingly, the chapters that tell Zeke's story are told in first person and read more like a crime novel (with fantastic elements of course). The use of first person, so readily identified with a "gumshoe" story, and highlights this change in tone quite effectively. Both characters are drawn sympathetically and with good depth, which helps draw the reader through a longer than average story.

The first thing that really struck me about the novel was the location. While never explicitly stated, the story felt like it was set in a future version of Australia and the "City" was Sydney rolled forward. I had great fun trying to fit the version of Sydney I walk through each morning on my way to work to that described in the novel. This resulted in a fantastic sense of place with enough detail to feel like a legitimate sketch of a possible future world. The description was cleverly done, in that an Australian reader would take something extra away from the story, but the lack of definitive landmarks makes the story accessible to anyone no matter where they are from.

It was also interesting to read a novel that extrapolates issues like climate change without invoking a dystopia, but rather proposes a more gradual change that humankind has adapted to. Higher water levels, an increasingly tropic climate and the exhaustion of fossil fuels have obviously happened, but not caused the end of the world. This has led to some thought provoking technological evolution as well as some interesting social policy, further extending the city/bush divide that currently exists in Australia.

There were a lot of compelling topics covered in this novel. The dilemmas parents face when deciding whether to intervene to "improve" children were particularly strongly drawn. In the character of Zeke, Ms Corbett did an excellent job of capturing the mindset of many fathers and the concerns of all parents trying to do the best for their children in an increasingly complex world. While we haven't quite reached the point where we have to worry about whether or not to give children wings, the debate was an effective way of highlighting the increasingly complex choices parents face (e.g. private vs public schooling, extra curricular activities, playing vs learning etc). I felt a lot of empathy for Zeke and the decisions he was trying to work through regarding his son.

But that wasn't the only issue covered by any stretch of the imagination. The ethics of the wealthy outsourcing more and more of their personal life to the poor, politics making strange bedfellows, the grinding inhumanity that can come from bureaucracy, the horror of human trafficking, divorce and single parent guilt, subtle and patient revenge - this story had it all. In thinking about this review, I started to wonder whether there were too many issues packed in, but when in the middle of reading the book it didn't seem overly crowded. Ms Corbett did an excellent job layering them all so that they were subordinate to the story, but it certainly did create a lot to think about once my reading was done.

The description of the physical act of flying was very evocative, but lost me a little with the detail. The middle third of the book concentrated a lot on flying and more knowledgeable reviewers have indicated that the detail provided is very well researched. Certainly it all seemed very plausible to me as a lay person. However, with large amount of text dedicated to the description of flight it did feel like the plot slowed down in this part, although someone who has a strong interest in flying would probably not have found this to be the case.

The plot itself was sharp in the beginning and end, and had a mix of sleuthing and just below the surface politics that is very appealing. The mystery at the heart of the story was strong enough to hold everything together. While the novels are very different, the mixture of mystery wrapped in an implied political landscape reminded me a bit of The Courier's New Bicycle by Kim Westwood, another hugely enjoyable novel that has formed part of my AWWC reading.

Last year Ms Corbett spoke on a panel at the NSW Speculative Fiction Festival, where she mentioned that she had worked for the NSW public service at one stage in her career. I was reminded of this when reading her descriptions of some of the bureaucratic organisations in the novel. Having spent a lot of my career working as a public servant, her depiction of these organisations was very authentic and resonated strongly with my own experiences.

Without giving any of the plot away, I will say that this novel has a beautiful ending. The last couple of pages were particularly moving with lovely imagery and generated some strong emotion. The ending was also good from a plot perspective with enough being wrapped up to bring the book to a close, but enough left messy to feel realistic.

When We Have Wings is an excellent debut novel and I am looking forward to reading more of Ms Corbett's work. Highly recommended.

Mark Webb is a part time writer and full time Servant of the Public. His mid-life crisis took the form of writing speculative fiction at a very slow pace. While sceptical of the results, his wife maintains that it was probably a reasonable course of action considering (a) the relatively low cost of the exercise and (b) the clichéd alternatives. He has had stories published at Antipodean SF. Further details of Mark's struggles against the twin forces of procrastination and a lack of measurable talent can be found at his website, including all his AWWC reviews.

Other AWW reviewers of When We Have Wings:
Have you reviewed this or any of the other books shortlisted for the 2012 Barbara Jefferis Award?

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Tuesday, 6 March 2012

PD James is a guy, right? (I: Do men and women write differently?)

This Thursday is International Women's Day. To raise awareness of The Stella Prize writers, readers and booksellers all around the country will be discussing the proposition: "Do women and men write differently?" This question was, in part, inspired by the widely-reported comments of VS Naipaul last June; Naipaul maintained that no female writer was his equal - not even Jane Austen - and he could tell within a paragraph or two the gender of the writer.

Recent statistics from VIDA, a women in the arts lobby group, show that gender bias in the representation of women in major literary magazines continued throughout 2011. Closer to home, over a year ago now, Sarah L'Estrange interviewed Susan Wyndham from the Sydney Morning Herald about its representation of women writers. Wyndham examined the previous six issues of the SMH literary pages and was horrified to discover the bias towards men (via publisher Sophia Whitfield's blog).

So what, if anything, has changed?

Not much, according to James Tierney, AWW participant and blogger, who conducted a two-month audit of substantial reviews in The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald from October 8 to December 3, 2011

Tierney writes: "More than a year after it became a matter for fresh controversy, less than a third (29%) of the books reviewed in the literary pages of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian each Saturday are written by women*. The gates were opened a little wider for XX reviewers, but not by a great deal (35%)."

Tierney goes on to ask: 

Why is this a problem? Surely the only thing that matters here is the literary quality of the works under review and, in the best judgement of the responsible editors, this is where the best work lay. 

Well, no. To accept that, I’d have to accept that the best work is generally done by men and that simply does not reflect my reading experience. 

Tierney makes the point that, if women are being overlooked for reviews based on something other than literary merit, the consequences are far-reaching.

I don’t know this for sure but I suspect that the literary review pages of our major newspapers determine -at least in part- the bookish agenda. This leads me to a truth so obvious that it almost doesn’t bare saying but let’s give it a go nonetheless: books that are reviewed well are more likely to be considered by literary judges for inclusion on prize lists, long & short.

If less than a third of books reviewed are by women, is it any wonder that our main literary prize, The Miles Franklin, has been awarded to women only twice since 2001? (Read Tierney's complete article here.)

So why are women under-represented in the pages of our literary journals and major media outlets? Is there something intrinsic to women's writing that makes it less worthy of critical attention?

A few weeks ago, I began canvassing opinions on The Stella Prize question in order to share those opinions on Thursday night when Kirsten Tranter hosts a panel at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba with fellow authors Tara Moss and Claire Corbett. I approached several eminent bookbloggers wondering whether they would be willing to write on the topic. Only one, Kim from Reading Matters, got back to me, saying she wasn't willing to go near that "hot potato".

A number of women I contacted agreed that men and women writing differently. One, an aspiring local travel/memoir writer, commented via Twitter that she almost never read books by women; her perception was that in her preferred genres (nonfiction and travel-memoir) women didn't publish much. When directed to The Guardian's quiz to see whether she could accurately determine if something was written by a woman, she reported 7/10 accuracy. She claimed women's writing tended to be "soft" and stood out. 

Could VS Naipaul right? Can we tell if something is written by a woman within a few paragraphs? Are being "soft" and/or "sentimental" common to female writers, characteristics anathema to our traditional aesthetic of what constitutes "quality"?

While posting flyers for the Stella event, I sought the opinion of a number of men, including a bookseller and an artist, both of whom answered, "Of course, men and women write differently," but that didn't mean they deserved less attention, they said. The artist went on to say that the situation with Fine Arts isn't so different: there are many examples of female artists, in his opinion, famous in their day, who are nevertheless now virtually forgotten except in relation to their more famous husbands or brothers. 

Peter Karsten from Katoomba Book Exchange had even more to say. He agreed to put down some rough thoughts on the topic for the AWW blog and have them published here (unedited).

Karsten writes: 
As I see it, women’s writing would be different from their male counterparts, insomuch as depending on the genre. That having been said, the genre would determine the difference and or the same writing style, influence, method and manner of the female author in question; as a woman could write with male and or female authority.


Thus it would be a skill needed in today’s society that will determine success or failure in reaching a targeted audience-whether it be male or female. The woman could use a male pseudonym to attract attention to her works, and gain a certain male following by subconscious suggestion that she is a male writer and or not use her full name.

As an example: J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame, does not use her first name-Why? It is a subconscious effort to attract the male reader, (now as she is well known-her readership is male and female) but also a marketing ploy to some degree. Also of note are male writers, like P. D. James, who also don’t use their first name either. With these examples, there are many male and female writers who use their initials.

But is this deception necessary in today’s society - if it is a deception by the male and more importantly by the female author?

The answer is simply – NO – Why? The woman of today needs self-recognition of her efforts, and as her writing skills improve and her ability to deliver strong and authoritative word in written form expands, so to will she gain more recognition through efforts in her chosen genre.

For my own part and reading influence mainly in Science Fiction and Fantasy, I have actually found no difference in writing style, but there is a difference as the main character/s are female, not male, with male characters playing secondary roles. It’s as though there is a merging of styles in these genres; could it be that female writers are in their own way are developing a male form of writing in this so-called male dominated world, in order to compete for the slice of the financial pie?

As an example, male cooks bringing out cookery books, which in the past has been female dominated, we see this merging as this genre has both male and female authors, and there is no difference in presentation and or writing style.

So where does this leave the female writer in general? Is there a difference in the written word by female authors?

I said in the beginning, 'woman’s writing would be different', the word ‘would’ is the key; because it is up to the woman to determine the difference in writing style as apposed to a man’s.

All in all I personally am not worried about the so-called difference; communication is the key to understanding, and the written word has a power all on its own, whether written by a man or a woman, as long as we understand what is being written and or read….the word has no sex discrimination label.

The power of the pen is only as strong as the author wishes, and the success of that author is determined by public acceptance.

If there is a difference between male and female writing styles and skills…it is perspective, as this world needs perspective of both sexes, in order to relate and understand the world as we make it and perceive it though different eyes.

So the answer is simple… Perspective is the key…and through this viewpoint does the female writer achieve a perception that differs from their male counterparts.

AWW notes:
Before publishing, I contacted Peter Karsten about his mistaking PD James for a man. Karsten - being the very good sport he is - agreed to have his mistake stand uncorrected as it so well demonstrates his argument: that a woman may choose to write differently from men, but the way she writes isn't biologically determined; when she chooses to write using a unisex name in a genre dominated by men or which attracts male readers (such as crime), her gender is not immediately - or even over an entire oeuvre - obvious to the reader.

Female Australian writers who have chosen to publish under unisex gender neutral names recently include PA O'Reilly, PM Newton and Favel Parrett. (O'Reilly, whose book The Fine Colour of Rust has just been released, wrote a guest post for AWW yesterday.) In the reviews posted by booksellers throughout 2010-11, Newton and Parrett featured highly. In Parrett's case, her novel, Past The Shallows, also featured male protagonists and depicted settings associated with male-dominated activities such as fishing and surfing.

What do you think? 

 
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Friday, 2 March 2012

Kirsten Tranter's A Common Loss: Two reviews

Next Thursday is International Women's day and author Kirsten Tranter, a supporter of The Stella Prize, will be speaking at numerous venues around Sydney, including on a panel at Katoomba with authors Tara Moss and Claire Corbett. The topic for the day, inspired by VS Naipaul's famous dismissal of women's writing as instantly recognisable and inferior to his own, is: "Do women write differently from men?" Details of the various Stella events scheduled around the country can be found on the Stella events webpage; details for the Katoomba event here.

Tranter's second novel, A Common Loss, has been received to wide acclaim. Two guest authors have chosen to review Tranter's book for the AWW challenge, poet Phillip A Ellis and novelist Lisa Walker.  Lisa today posted the full review on her website and provided AWW with the following extract. Lisa writes:

A Common Loss is Australian author Kirsten Tranter’s second novel. Her first, The Legacy, was an assured, fresh retelling of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady.

A Common Loss tells the story of five friends who meet at university and keep in touch over the next ten years. Following the death of one of their number, Dylan, the friends re-group for their annual visit to Las Vegas.

The story starts with the narrator, Elliot, remembering a car accident the five had together. The driver, Cameron, swerves to avoid a deer and they crash. Cameron has been drinking, so Dylan claims to be the driver. As the years go by, whenever Elliot remembers the crash, it is Dylan who he sees at the wheel. This trick of the memory becomes a motif for the story.

Elliot, a professor of literature, sees himself as a bit of an outsider in the group. With Dylan, who Elliot idealised, removed, tensions rise and relationships buckle under strain. Elliot discovers that not all of his friends viewed Dylan the same way he did. Dylan’s death sets events in train where each friend is forced to reveal long-hidden secrets...
The full review appears on Lisa's blog here.





Lisa describes her own novel, Liar Bird, as "possibly the first romantic comedy about feral pigs". Her next novel, about a timid erotic writer, comes out in January 2013. She writes, works and surfs on the far north coast of New South Wales and is studying towards a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland."



The second review is by poet Phillip A Ellis. Phillip writes:

It is true that I do not read as much women's writing as I should, with a tiny amount of that being by Australians. Hence my involvement in the Australian Women Writers Reading and Reviewing Challenge of2012. Because I want to remedy that lack, and because I want to demonstrate my support for my fellow writers, and because I especially want to support writers whose work I appreciate and love, it is with delight that I have been given the chance to review A Common Loss by Kirsten Tranter; her two novels have become favourites of mine for a number of reasons that I will be discussing in this review. This chance, the chance to support a writer whose work I admire, fits in with the challenge, and it fits in with my love of good writing.

Five friends--Elliott, Brian, Tallis, Cameron and Dylan--have been friends since college, and since college have held annual vacations in Las Vegas. This year, things are different: Dylan the peacemaker, the glue that keeps the friends together, has died in an accident, and the remaining four are left facing the secrets that bound them to him. Secrets which threaten them in turn, seeming to promise the dissolution, not only of the friendships, but of their careers and reputations. A Common Loss deals with these, being set in Las Vegas, a place where artifice and reality intermingle, and where moral certainties can be set adrift, and it deals with the relationships between friendship and secrets, grief and betrayal, all while the spectre of Tennyson's In Memoriam weaves through the narrative as a form of parallel text.

There are a number of ways that two texts may parallel each other. For example, two narratives may directly parallel each other, incident for incident, or they may counterpoint each other. There may be a shared language, a shared worldview or shared mood or voice. And there may also be a shared setting or set of characters. While it may be common to expect the texts to be narratives, such as two novels or other forms of fiction, it is rarer for the texts to differ in the way that they do here. In Memoriam is a lyric elegy, whereas A Common Loss is less of an elegy and more a narrative whose inciting act is the death of Dylan, and the losses that arise out of his death. There are, however, many ways in which the two texts parallel each other.

Given that In Memoriam encodes the obsessive nature of grief and mourning, so that the text itself returns repeatedly to the image of the dead man mourned, so to is A Common Loss haunted by Dylan. As a way of understanding this, if we consider that Julius CaesarIn Memoriam also serves as a thematic thread in the narrative. I won't say exactly how, save that it has relevance for the narrator, Elliott, and his relationship with Dylan.

And it is the relationships that define the narrative and the ethos of the book. As a result, while A Common Loss is literary, it does not smell of lamp oil, precisely as a result of its narrative emphasis on the shifting relationships. There is the relationship between Brian and Cynthia, and between Cynthia and Elliott, as well as Elliott and Natasha; while each does not dominate the narrative, they form part of the shifting play of attraction and allegiances, the attraction between the men and women, and the allegiances between the friends, so that the novel is dominated by their fluid interweavings and interactions. There is a skill to this writing, and this skill is evident in the way the characters shift and react towards and against each other.

This skill also extends to the writing. It is literate, eschewing the easy attraction of generic simplicity for ambiguous complexity, and the characters details are deftly handled in such a manner as to sustain narrative tension and believability. It is also, as a result, compassionate. The onstensible antagonist is revealed as equally believable as the others, all of whom are united by an emphasis on their relationships with each other and the absent Dylan. Furthermore, the characters are believable: there is a sense that these are people who could exist, who could live and breathe, and meet our understanding of what a real person is.

And the compassion of the writing extends to the characters themselves. There are, that is, no black-and-white characters, no heroes or villains, only the protagonists, their primary antagonist, and the more shadowy, elusive figures that mainly appear for a moment then fade. By concentrating so centrally on the friends and Cynthia, A Common Loss reinforces its focus on their relationships with Dylan. So that, while there is scope for a much wider cast of characters, the focus on the central group is integral to the novel and its concerns. This focus works with the characters' believability, so that their roundedness works with us to create a sense of engagement. We believe in them, that is, and we are concerned with the outcome of their shared dilemma.  

A Common Loss is only Kirsten Tranter's second published novel. Yet it is a skilled novel, one that uses In Memoriam both as a parallel text and thematic concern. It is also literate; and it does not smell of lamp oil. Its writing is compassionate, its characters also believable and treated in a compassionate manner, and, as a result of these, I can only admit that A Common Loss is a major contribution to contemporary Australian literary fiction. While it is a quibble to consider the use of the American characters and setting as somehow unAustralian, it is a false quibble. A Common Loss is Australian precisely because it is develops an Australian sensibility, an Australian worldview, even as it deals with the wider world. And it is these two that really make Australian writing, and Australian women's writing, as distinctive and worthy of serious consideration as it is, despite our cultures' wider neglect.


Phillip A. Ellis is a freelance critic, poet and scholar, and his poetry collection, The Flayed Man, has been published by Gothic Press; Gothic Press will also edit a collection of essays on Ramsey Campbell, that he is editing with Gary William Crawford. He is working on another collection, to appear through Diminuendo Press. Another collection has been accepted by Hippocampus Press, which has also published his concordance to the poetry of Donald Wandrei. He is the editor of Melaleuca. He has recently had Symptoms Positive and Negative, a chapbook of poetry about his experiences with schizophrenia, published by Picaro Press.


A Common Loss / Kirsten Tranter (Sydney : Fourth Estate, 2012) ISBN: 978-0-7322-9082-5

Available from participating AWW booksellers:
Print copy:
Abbeys Bookshop, Sydney
Shearers Bookshop, Leichhardt, NSW
Better Read Than Dead, Newtown, NSW

Ebook:
PNP Booksellers Mosman, NSW
Avid Reader, Brisbane
The Book Shuttle
Readings

Australian Online Bookshop

Have you read or reviewed either of Kirsten Tranter's books? What did you think? Feel free to add your link.
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Wednesday, 1 February 2012

Marketing the Boundaries: the fiction of Margo Lanagan

Prize-winning Australian author Margo Lanagan's novel Sea Hearts will be launched at The Hobart Bookshop tomorrow.* Author Krissy Kneen says of Sea Hearts "In Margo's skillful hands we are woven a tale that resonates with so much in our real lives... a longing for something that is missing from our hearts". Her review of the novel, written for the AWW challenge, can be found here.

Last week, Claire Corbett wrote an article on Lanagan's earlier work which questions the common classification of Lanagan's audience as primarily Young Adult (YA). Corbett's post has already appeared in short form on her own blog and in full at Online Opinion. She kindly gave permission to cross-post an extract here.

I’ve just read my first Margo Lanagan books, two collections of short stories titled Red Spikes and Yellowcake. The colour theme is upheld through two other collections, Black Juice and White Time. The covers are also consistent, each showing a feminine figure in a mysterious landscape with totemic creature spirit: butterfly, beetle, spider. I mention this because marketing a writer with a consistent approach is one of the themes of my review; it intrigues me in Margo Lanagan’s case because it says much about the state of literature in this country.

Lanagan is a literary writer, a writer’s writer with a beautiful turn of phrase ("drops of salt sorrow in its strands here and there like smooth-tumbled crystals in a cunning necklace" – Chapter 2, "The Golden Shroud") and a rigorous style. The quality of her writing has been recognised with several World Fantasy Awards and Printz Honor Awards. What intrigues me is why has Lanagan’s work been corralled within the definition of Young Adult (YA) fiction? I am not suggesting there is anything lesser about YA fiction, nor do I know how Lanagan herself feels about this.

To me though, classifying Lanagan’s work as YA makes about as much sense as classifying Angela Carter, Italo Calvino, Jonathan Swift or Robert Louis Stevenson as YA writers. Just because some of her protagonists are young and just because there are fantasy elements in her stories do not seem valid reasons.

Lanagan’s subject matter is dark and adult, though I think teenagers should read it. They should read Carter, Calvino, Swift and Stevenson too. In Red Spikes, for example, there is a clever, brutal story, "Monkeys Paternoster", about the overthrow of the alpha male of a monkey colony, told from the point of view of a young female. She sees baby monkeys butchered by aspiring bachelor males who then rape their mothers; her own rape is vividly described. In what sense is this story not adult?

The controversy that blew up in 2011 over Lanagan's Tender Morsels at the Bitch Media website# originates partly in this confusion over what is/is not YA. The website published a list of 100 Young Adult books for the feminist reader. After a complaint accused the novel of failing to critique characters who used rape as a tool of vengeance, Tender Morsels was removed from the list, sparking furious debate...

Read more of Corbett's discussion here. Please feel free to comment below
Claire Corbett


Claire Corbett was born in Canada and moved to Australia as a child. She has had essays and stories broadcast on Radio National and published in Cinema Papers, Picador New Writing and The Sydney Morning Herald, among others. She has completed the MA Writing (UTS), has taught at UTS and undertook a Varuna Mentorship with Amanda Lohrey in 2000.


Corbett's own novel, When We Have Wings, also arguably defies generic pigeonholing, although Claire describes it as a "speculative fiction crime novel". It was published by Allen & Unwin in July 2011.

Notes:
* According to Lanagan's blog, Sea Hearts will be published as The Brides of Rollrock Island by David Fickling Books and Jonathan Cape in the UK, and by Knopf in the US.
# Lanagan's response to the Bitch Media website controversy, dated 3 February 2010, is archived here.


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