The Necessary Angel
C K Stead
Allen and Unwin, $37.00,
ISBN 9781760631529
Salt Picnic
Patrick Evans
Victoria University Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9781776561698
Our Future is in the Air
Tim Corballis
Victoria University Press, $30.00,
ISBN 9781776561179
When a white male editor commissions another white male to review three novels, all written by white males, in late 2017, after the fall of Harvey Weinstein and the rise of #MeToo, the white male reviewer must be forgiven for thinking about absent voices, privilege and power dynamics while reading the assigned books. Stale, male and pale – that’s what cynics might say. Male and pale are hard to dispute when it comes to Stead, Evans and Corballis, but stale? That’s the crux, isn’t it? Are these books vital enough to warrant the bandwidth we might devote to them? What do they have to say that hasn’t been said before?
The “Frame effect”, Patrick Evans
The most famous of Janet Frame’s poems is probably the one about the little boy dying of leukaemia, “Yet Another Poem About a Dying Child”, which ends with the appearance of Death as a giant spider which gobbles the child…
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