Nicholas Birns

Even the cover of this book is a clear indication that there is nothing celebratory about its content: it locates Australia between Manus and Christmas Islands, an allusion to our horrid refugee policies.

Now, I know that book reviewers are not supposed to critique a book for being what it's not, but I am so disappointed by the new Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel that I'm going to do it anyway.

A 'companion' is neither a history nor an anthology of literature, but rather a text which accompanies a reader on the reading journey, enhancing understanding and introducing new ideas, rather like a knowledgeable human companion might enhance a walk through a botanic garden.

Although I was anticipating that it might be too academic in tone for a general reader, I was hoping that the new Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel would be a useful text to fill the gaps in my knowledge of my country's literature. What I wanted to learn, in particular, was something about the Social Novel, and about the 20th century enablers of local publication such as the notable critic Nettie Palmer (who doesn't even get a mention in the index), and about the impact of multiculturalism especially in the post war era. I also wanted to know whether mass literacy had had an influence on representations of class and/or led to the rise of voices from the underclass.

I was vaguely hopeful that I might discover more examples of authors writing in their mother tongue, but of the three I know about, Shokoofeh Azar's novel The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (2017) only rates a mention in a somewhat dismissive way because the political status of authors as refugees does not automatically grant classification of their works as refugee literature because there is nothing explicit about refugees or the travails of asylum-seeking in her novel. Well, I don't know who but an Iranian refugee could have written that novel... which is a tribute to classical Persian storytelling and a depiction of the madness of the Iranian world from which she fled...

As for Ouyang Yu, who publishes bilingual editions of poetry in Chinese and English, but also exhilarating novels, the only mention he gets is using a snippet of a poem to buttress the rhetoric of a chapter called 'First Nations Transnationalism'.

Instead what we get is a lot of sometimes strident content about First Nations literature. You can see what I mean from the ToC:

Part 1: Contexts

Presencing: Writing in the Decolonial Space
Literary Visitors and the Australian Novel
Settler Colonial Fictions: Beyond Nationalism
White Writing, Indigenous Australia, and the Chronotopes
Mabo, Mob and the Novel
Publishing the Australian Novel

This Companion to the novel mentions an author of the stature of Roger McDonald only as a name in the publishing industry; while Elizabeth Jolley gets one mention on page 9 as an influence on Tim Winton, and Richard Flanagan isn't in the index at all, though The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) is discussed in the chapter about the Anthropocene. Yet it has a whole chapter about Helen Garner — one of four Anglo-Australian authors to merit a whole chapter — when what she writes is auto-fiction. Of the six authors to be featured in this more detailed way, two are first nations writers while the others are all Anglo-Australian; there are none from the multicultural community, not even Michelle de Kretser who's won the Miles Franklin Award three times. Clearly the six were chosen to illustrate the agenda.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/09/19/the-cambridge-companion-to-the-australian-no...… (plus d'informations)