Australian fiction has long been interested in the relationship between the local and the global – and the six books shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin Award are no exception. They range across time and place, from Tasmania to Malaysian Borneo and the Middle East. And they engage with histories of empire, environmental ruin, migration, ageing, political activism and war.
There is a striking willingness to experiment with form. Some authors borrow from poetry or genre fiction, while others draw on avant-garde traditions and techniques. Some novels overplay their hand; not every formal innovation succeeds. But the judges have clearly rewarded books that attempt something distinctive, rather than settling for familiar literary realism.
This raises a perennial question about the Miles Franklin itself. Is it primarily designed to recognise a successful work of art? Or should it reward novels that intercede in the public life of the nation? These ambitions often coincide, but can pull in different directions.
This year, the shortlist’s most overtly political novel is its least formally adventurous and distinguished. And the novels performing the boldest experiments are often less interested in direct political positioning than in expanding the possibilities of fiction itself. Whatever readers make of the eventual winner, these novels offer six very different answers to the question: what can Australian fiction be – and do?
Discipline, Randa Abdel-Fattah
Discipline is the most provocative novel on this year’s shortlist. Published in the shadow of the current conflict in Gaza, set during the Israeli bombardment in May 2021, Randa Abdel-Fattah’s novel treats fiction as a form of political argument.
It operates simultaneously at two scales. On the macro level, it examines how conflict in the Middle East has the capacity to reshape Australian universities, media organisations and public discourse. At the micro level, it follows an academic and a journalist, together with their families and communities, as they grapple with the personal and professional consequences of those events. This strident novel insists these two scales cannot be separated.
There is real intellectual ambition here, together with a willingness to confront some of the most divisive and traumatic political questions of the present – without equivocation. Abdel-Fattah asks what fiction can contribute to debates more often shaped by headlines, social media and competing ideological claims.
At times, however, that ambition outstrips the novel’s prose and plotting, with characters occasionally carrying ideas more readily than they inhabit fully realised fictional lives. These are the risks of writing a novel that seeks, unabashedly, to intervene in its historical moment.
Fierceland, Omar Musa
Omar Musa’s Fierceland is the most formally exuberant novel on the shortlist. Best thought of as an acutely self-conscious, sort of postmodern, postcolonial epic, it weaves together individual and shared histories of empire, environmental degradation and destruction, and familial inheritance, spanning Malaysian Borneo, Australia and the west coast of the United States.
The plot follows siblings Roz and Harun as they return to Borneo after the death of their father, a wealthy palm-oil magnate whose fortune was built on the evils of deforestation and dispossession. Determined to make amends for that part of his legacy, they embark on a journey that becomes a reckoning with family history and an exploration of the afterlives of empire.
Musa’s background as a poet, rapper and visual artist is evident on pretty much every page. Fierceland moves freely between prose and poetry, drawing on popular culture and mythology, oscillating between voices and registers, experimenting with typography and embracing an episodic structure that continually reinvents itself.
At times, that abundance leaves the novel feeling a bit diffuse. Not every experiment lands with equal force, and there are moments when the sheer number of ideas can prove distracting. Yet these excesses feel inseparable from the novel’s larger aims. At a moment when literary fiction can seem increasingly cautious in its formal choices, Fierceland makes the case for boldness and creative risk. And that is surely a good thing.
First Name Second Name, Steve MinOn
First Name Second Name, equal parts family saga, road novel and zombie story, is geographically and thematic ambitious.
Steve MinOn, winner of the emerging category at the 2023 Queensland Literary Awards, tracks four generations of a migrant family across Australia, China, England and Scotland. He presents the reader with a narrative both global in scale and indisputably Australian in its concerns. Questions of inheritance and identity stretch across continents and countries, without ever losing sight of the local.
First Name Second Name, which also displays an interest in the conceits of autofiction, toggles confidently between realism and the fantastical, using genre to ponder questions of sexuality and cultural belonging. At its centre sits Stephen Bolin, who escapes from the morgue after his death and begins the long, strange journey back to Far North Queensland, where he was born and wants to be buried. Reanimated by supernatural forces he does not fully comprehend, Stephen’s peculiar posthumous pilgrimage runs alongside memories of his fraught relationship with his conservative father and his struggle for acceptance.
MinOn’s prose occasionally lacks the assurance of the book’s larger conception. Some metaphors feel a touch overextended or strain for effect. Even so, the novel’s expansive geographical scope and generic inventiveness make for a memorable debut.
Little World, Josephine Rowe
Little World is the shortest book on this year’s shortlist, though its modest length disguises remarkable depth. Josephine Rowe is one of Australia’s finest prose stylists, and this novella demonstrates why.
Her sentences are lyrical without becoming ornamental, creating a dreamlike atmosphere that remains firmly anchored in the physical world. For example, when we encounter “an animal thumping through the ruin of what had once been a house, a bird preparing its home above a lintel” and the guiding narratial voice “is aware of the sea drawing closer”.
The book opens in northwestern Australia during the 1950s, when the preserved body of a child saint arrives at the home of retired engineer Orrin Bird. Outwardly dead and unable to speak, she is in fact sentient, silently observing the lives of those who gather around her. As the narrative moves across decades and continents, Rowe reveals how her presence binds people together.
Rowe’s prose reflects a sustained engagement with literary experimentation and modernist aesthetic conventions. Her winding syntax and fluid movement between memory and perception unsettle conventional ways of seeing and understanding, while remaining acutely attentive to landscapes and textures of everyday life.
Suggesting more than explaining, Little World demonstrates how much can be achieved within a compressed form. It is one of the most distinctive reading experiences on this year’s list.
My Heart At Evening, Konrad Muller
My Heart at Evening is the first work published by the new, Hobart-based Evercreech Editions. It makes a strong case for the publisher’s ambitions.
Konrad Muller’s debut revisits one of colonial Tasmania’s enduring mysteries: the 1832 death of surveyor Henry Hellyer. Sent to Van Diemen’s Land to investigate Hellyer’s apparent suicide, Jorgen Jorgensen uncovers a world conditioned in equal measure by hearsay and rumour.
Part historical mystery, part mediation on the legacies of empire and annihilation, My Heart At Evening examines how societies construct their own myths while suppressing unpalatable truths. Muller plays with the conventions of detective fiction to great effect. The investigation into Hellyer’s death becomes a means of exposing the political and psychological conditions that made it possible, while also commenting on the cruelty and the violence of the colonial frontier.
The result is a a novel that speaks as directly to the present as it does to the past. Muller’s prose is poetic and atmospheric, capturing both the beauty of the Tasmanian landscape and the unease that lurks beneath the surface.
At times, Muller tends towards the elliptical, for good reason – though to explain why would diminish the novel’s conceptual spark. My Heart At Evening is an impressive debut and an auspicious beginning for a publisher that has arrived with genuine literary intent.
You Must Remember This, Sean Wilson
You Must Remember This is unexpectedly prescient. Dementia has become Australia’s leading cause of death, and Sean Wilson’s second novel speaks directly to one of the defining experiences of an ageing society.
The short book follows Grace as dementia progressively erodes her memory and, with it, her sense of self. Wilson abandons linear chronology, jumbling the order of chapters and moving freely across decades as memories surface, disappear and return in altered forms, despite Grace’s best efforts to preserve them. Early in the novel, for instance, she “tries to record the scene in her mind, tries to burn it into her memory so she can keep hold of the image for later”. The discontinuous structure is formally adventurous, yet never feels experimental for its own sake. Its fractured chronology gives readers access to Grace’s increasingly disordered consciousness.
Wilson’s treatment of dementia is resolutely neither sensationalist nor exploitative. He offers a compassionate account of the disease’s effects on both those who live with it and those who care for them, while never losing sight of Grace’s dignity or humanity.
Admittedly, there are moments when the dialogue feels stilted, sitting uneasily alongside the novel’s more metaphorically charged passages. But these are minor reservations in a work whose formal aspiration is consistently matched to its subject.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
