Sincerely, Ethel Malley is Stephen Orr's tenth novel and I've read and reviewed all but one of the others, so I can confidently say that this is the best one he's ever written. It works on so many levels: it's a great story in its own right; and it has wonderful characters used to explore enduring themes like courage, fortitude and integrity as well as loyalty and trust within friendships and family. The transformation of the central character and narrator is both entirely credible and wondrous. But then there are questions which emerge from the book as a whole: what is truth and and who gets to tell it? who protects the individual against the power of the press? what is lost when it is so difficult to do anything worthwhile in a conservative milieu? why is tradition so mercilessly hostile to modernity? how and why does a culture drift into mediocrity? and anyway, what are the arts and why do they matter ?

This remarkable novel is a fictionalisation of the notorious Ern Malley literary hoax. Although it's not at all necessary for enjoying the novel, for those not familiar with the hoax, it's well worth reading up on this at Wikipedia because it's a significant element of Australia's literary history which influenced the trajectory of modernist poetry in Australia.

Briefly, what happened was this: in 1943, two conservative Sydney poets, James Macauley and Harold Stewart, rivals of the precocious Max Harris and not best pleased about the success of his modernist literary magazine in South Australia, cobbled together some random texts and submitted it for publication as modernist poetry. Harris fell for the hoax and in 1944 published the poems in a special edition of the magazine, with a Sidney Nolan cover and a brief bio of the poet: 'Ern Malley' who had died young, leaving the poetry to be discovered amongst his effects by his sister Ethel. The hoax was subsequently revealed and Max Harris was tried and convicted for publishing poems that were 'obscene'. Angry Penguins folded in 1946, but by the 1970s those same poems were regarded as good examples of surrealism, and in what I can't resist calling 'poetic justice' today they are read more often than anything written by Macauley or Stewart.

(The excerpts from the poems that are quoted in the novel show just how this could indeed be so.)

Set in 1943-44, Sincerely, Ethel Malley tells Ethel's story, and she is a brilliant creation. From her bemused discovery of the poems to her naïve uncertainty about what to do with them and her subsequent contact with Max Harris via a local 'expert', she becomes a warrior on behalf of her brother when the storm about authenticity of the poems erupts.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/04/15/sincerely-ethel-malley-by-stephen-orr/ ( )