IN SHORT Fiction: [First Edition]

Abstract

OCEAN ROADS

OCEAN ROADS

By James George

Huia Publishers, 383pp, $34.95

Ocean Roads has an intricate, sometimes tangled, plot. There are no minor characters - everyone has a big story - and George struggles to fit them together convincingly.

At the hub of the narrative is Professor Isaac Simeon, a nuclear researcher who worked on the Manhattan Project. Following a breakdown in Antarctica, Simeon was hospitalised in a secure psychiatric facility while one of his sons, Caleb, was still at school. Later, Caleb will partner Akido who just happens to have grown up in Nagasaki in the wake of the destruction Caleb's father helped create. Caleb's brother, Troy, will be haunted by his experience of fighting in Vietnam, a conflict in which their mother, Etta, happened to work as a photographer.

George is keen to explore the impact of war on several generations within one family. It is a worthy project, helped by his ability to create robust imagery. But he has so many issues and characters to keep up with that this fractured work never settles into its stride.

NED KELLY AND THE ODD RELLIE

By Gerard Windsor

Illustrated by Michel Streich

UQP, 116pp, $19.95 (hardback)

Gerard Windsor has written quite a bit over the years about his own odd rellies. Memoirs such as Family Lore prove conclusively that not all Windsors live in Buckingham Palace. But this playful little book shows him in a more flippant mood than usual. It is nice to encounter his beaming face as he indulges in a risque celebration of some of the better-known figures of Australian history.

These 50 clever clerihews take the high and mighty and throw them to the mercy of facetious four-line rhymes. A clerihew, you may recall from school, uses lines of unequal length to create obstacles for the over-slick reader:

Paul Keating

Doubted porkies were cheating;

John Howard

Held they were always allowed.

Or

Dr Peter Jensen

Thought it impolite to mention

That papist George Pell

Was en route to hell.

Windsor's wit works happily with the artwork of Michel Streich. It's a pleasure to see rhyme and reason flirt with each other so shamelessly.

QUEEN CAMILLA

By Sue Townsend

Michael Joseph, 443pp, $29.95

Mark Twain once said famously that "the secret source of humour itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven." Sue Townsend's deep vein of humour bears him out. Her sorrow for a fragile community is scarifyingly funny. There is no mistaking either the fierce pathos or mellow anger which undergird this brilliant satire. She doesn't need fart jokes to show how little her Britain has become.

In a not so distant future, the royal family has been dethroned and removed to a closed public housing estate where the Queen is just another old lady with delinquent teeth and a troublesome family. The whole estate is subject to paranoid surveillance. To make matters worse, the party that got rid of the monarchy now wants to get rid of dogs.

Readers who have watched as the Adrian Mole books have become sharper and sharper will relish this book. Townsend only needs to raise an eyebrow and a familiar world collapses into absurdity.

INES OF MY SOUL

By Isabel Allende

HarperCollins, 320pp, $24.95

Isabel Allende has a talent for rescuing the forgotten stories of women from the shadows of history and telling them with both earthiness and reverence.

Over time, however, her style has drifted away from magic and towards realism. It is more than 20 years since her first book, The House of the Spirits, achieved a marriage of politics and spirituality. In that book, three generations of women walked a tightrope between the real and the unreal. At the time it was both a heady and hearty brew.

Allende's writing is still sensual but takes fewer imaginative risks. Her work exudes comfort, even in a tale such as this which offers a feminist reworking of the early days of European business in Chile.

The central character, Ines Suarez, came to the New World in search of a missing husband. But she fell in love with the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia.

Years later she sets down her story for the benefit of the daughter she had with a third man, Rodrigo. She wants to teach her lessons about womanly power.

ALTERNATIVES TO SEX

By Stephen McCauley

Granta Books, 291pp, $29.95

Stephen McCauley is a competent humorist who rests his jokes on a jaded sense of the world. In this tart comedy, which expects the reader to cringe as much as laugh, he does a reasonable job of describing a life of suffocating emptiness but then loses his way somewhat when setting out to rescue the leading man from his malaise.

Real estate agent William Collins is gay and promiscuous. He discovers blokes on the web and then hooks up with them for long enough to realise that reality is a poor shadow of its virtual counterpart. Collins is an obsessive. He is also gullible. The funniest cameo in this book is of his lodger, an artist who never pays her rent and gets Collins to do his ironing. He also has an amusing mother who has relocated to a retirement village in the desert.

Collins offers wry tutorials about selling property. But, as a character, he offers too little of substance to encourage readers to invest in his re-development.