Arriving on a different platform

THE Review of Australian Fiction is the most sophisticated and best-designed Australian digital-only magazine that I am aware of.

Zoe Foster

OURS is the era of the great migration, when books in their hundreds and thousands wend their way from the snug county of the printed page to the endless steppe of the digital screen.

It is an upheaval so great that those who venture to discuss literature have an obligation, not only to address the messages encoded in a text, but also to grapple with the medium in which they come.

A case in point is the Review of Australian Fiction, conceived, edited and published by the enterprising Brisbane-based writer Matthew Lamb. The six issues of its first volume (published fortnightly, with four volumes planned for the year) each contain two short stories or novel extracts: one by an established writer, the other by an emerging author picked by their senior partner. This simple pairing has seen Christos Tsiolkas appear with Kalinda Ashton, David Foster with his daughter Zoe, Susan Johnson and Sandra Hogan, among others.

What makes Lamb's undertaking different is that it is wholly digital, with subscriptions sold though the booki.sh ebook platform, which allows access to the stories across a range of e-reading devices (I read the first issue on my desktop's screen and the rest on a tablet device). Each writer is paid on a royalty basis only, but the lion's share of an issue's $3 cover price goes to them. The elegant, minimal, uniform covers for the volume look as if they came off an old-school small press, yet the wider project follows the revolutionary potential of digital publishing to its logical conclusion.

Of course the Review is not the first of its kind. Literary journals designed for tablet reading have proliferated throughout the Anglosphere since Apple released the iPad two years ago. But the Review of Australian Fiction is the most sophisticated and best-designed Australian digital-only magazine that I am aware of. Should this idealistic yet cannily conceived venture be successful in economic terms, it will mark the moment when Australia's literary community finally found a way to make the web pay.

Here, then, is where what the net calls "content" - and what cultural recidivists call literature - really counts. Happily the quality of the contributions for this first volume are high, though the sheer variousness of the authors published, from the speculative fiction of Kim Wilkins to the unapologetically writerly short stories of Tasmanian Geoff Page, is so great that a one-size-fits-all response is pointless. That the church is broad is a matter for celebration in itself, and perhaps indicative of the ways in which digital publication lends itself to a shaking up of established categories.

Who, for instance, would have thought that the ornery satiric genius of David Foster, featured here with a chapter from the forthcoming final volume of his Dog Rock trilogy, could have so mutated in genetic transmission to his daughter, Zoe, as to give rise to the young doyenne of Australian chicklit. And yet to read them side by side is to acknowledge a shared command of language, a cocked humour and a feistiness so beyond the authorial norm that the letters seem to rattle on the page. It is a tribute to the stylistic chops of the parental unit that his 20-page discourse on the regulations that govern Australia Post should stand comparison with his daughter's account of a fiancee's one-night-stand with a younger man patently not her husband-to-be.

Other contributions take a darker turn. Georgia Blain's Secret Lives of Men, an account of a young woman's return to small-town Australia from a decade in London, unfolds with the kind of cool reserve that is really deep emotion barely held in check. Its evident fascination/repulsion with the Australian demi-monde recalls the work of Kirsten Tranter and Malcolm Knox. If you like your melancholy with added hardboiled existential woe, however, turn to Blain's chosen sidekick, Sydney crime writer P.M. Newton, who gives Victorian gloom-meister Peter Temple a run for his money.

Sweet Guy is a fine introduction to Newton's work. It shares with her longer fiction a micro-appreciation of place and a macro-understanding of the dark matter that mostly makes up our moral universe. Only an easy succession of one-liners sweetens a narrative of unrelenting bitterness, in which a policeman who has recently separated from his wife and children attends a fatal crash site on NSW's north coast, before breaking the news to the victims' kin:

Grommet knew about bad news, unlike some. He'd spare Steve the tears, the cries to God and Jesus for help, or explanation or blame, the howls of injustice. Grommet understood bad news, he was bad news, on one and a half legs. Steve followed him down the hall board-shorts flapping collapsed spinnaker around his meatless left leg.

Sometimes a sliver of writing by an author can be as illuminating as a slog through their backlist. Take the case of Christos Tsiolkas. His After Dinner tells the story of a lesbian couple's argument in the wake of a meal where a beautiful, educated Spanish woman has complained at length about Australian parochialism. One woman accepts the criticisms; the other recoils. And as they sit on the balcony of their beachside apartment afterwards, smoking and drinking and bickering, we see how public discourse enters into the domestic bloodstream.

Tsiolkas is an inelegant stylist, and quite consciously so: the lives he describe would be falsified by excessive artistry. But what is impeccable about his writing is the bite of its dialogue and that dialogue's editorial thrust. He has an unerring sense for the sore points of our culture and he knows how to press them hard. Those same virtues inform The Slap. And yet that novel inspired such thoughtless adulation and angry reaction that its point was missed. Its success goaded us into the same state of exhibitionist rancour that the author set out to describe.

One of the many virtues of the Review is that in its calmer surroundings a similar story can make these intentions clear.

Review of Australian Fiction Volume One
Edited by Matthew Lamb
$12.99 for six issues, Booki.sh

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.