A Pair of Ragged Claws: Two Australian authors to watch
Jo Lennan and Luke Horton are two new voices at an exciting time for emerging Australian literature
Today I want to note two debut works of Australian fiction: Jo Lennan’s story collection In the Time of Foxes (Scribner, 304pp, $29.99), which I mentioned a fortnight ago, and Luke Horton’s novel The Fogging (Scribe, 240pp, $29.99). The two books have something in common: most of what happens in them takes place outside of Australia.
Wollongong-born Lennan, a lawyer and writer who has lived, studied and worked overseas, including at Oxford University, takes us to London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Moscow and St Petersburg and, in one of the best stories, Day Zero, into space. Horton’s novel centres on two 30-something academics, Tom and Clara, who have been a couple for close to a decade. They have decided to leave their squalid home in Melbourne and take a two-week holiday, their first in a long time, in Bali.
They head not to the usual Aussie beach destinations but to Sanur, mocked as Snore by people who think it’s boring, and Ubud. Part of the novel is Tom using this time to look back on their earlier travels together in the US, Europe and Asia.
I was struck by similarities between Tom and Sebastian, the main character in Lennan’s Day Zero. Tom suffers from anxiety and has had panic attacks in the past. Sebastian, a journalist, has a serious health problem. Each of them is in a long-term relationship without being sure why.
Tom almost loses it on the flight from Sydney to Denpasar. Prescription drugs do help. At one point, in Bali, he is trying to stem an anxiety attack and realises “there was little chance of it passing, now that anxiety about anxiety was in play”.
Clara is more outgoing but can be cold and capable of days-long silences that Tom finds hard to take. He wonders if Clara were on holidays with someone else, someone unlike him, whether she “might be the kind of person who hires jetskis”. He looks back on their years together and thinks that from the beginning they were “an old couple, not two people in the first bloom of love”. He worries that this points “to some essential thing that was missing”.
The novel moves into an interesting place when Tom and Clara befriend another couple at the resort, Madeleine, who is French, and her Australian husband Jeremy. They have a young son. Initially Tom wants to keep his distance. The other couple “weren’t awful” but “it was still too much: too much noise, too much accommodation of other people. Too much everything.”
The fogging of the title is the staff releasing a smoke-like pesticide through the resort. It happens all the time — “Everyone gets caught in it sooner or later,” another guest cheerfully observes — but in this case it causes problems for more than the flies and bugs. As Tom acknowledges of himself, he is “thin-skinned and sharp tongued”, and in that he is not alone.
There are a lot of foxes in Lennan’s stories. Sometimes literal ones, such as in the titular opener, set in London, where a woman has to have a “hotbed” of foxes removed from her garden; sometimes metaphorical ones, such as handsome older men who are “silver foxes”. One story, Animal Behaviour, set in a new animal welfare centre at Oxford, considers that well-known difference between hedgehogs and foxes.
The stories are serious but full of humour that touch on everyday life. In Day Zero there’s a passing reference to what’s on TV: repeats of Grand Designs: The Space Edition. I like that combination, and it’s one Horton pulls off too, if in a drier manner. I recommend all of Lennan’s stories. I have room to single out two others. The Understudy is centred on an actress with a supporting role in a six-hour Chekhov play. “The audience will riot,” the director admits. And, perhaps my favourite, The Best Left in Europe, is about two geographically distant cousins — Damien from Wollongong and Max, an Italian who lives in France — going on a surfing trip in Spain.
As the title suggests the two young men are on a quest to find a reputed perfect wave, “an amazing left-hander”. Damien knows he is the better surfer. One day something bad happens in the surf. What happens afterwards, as the two cousins face up to their relationship, is surprising and ultimately beautiful.
Lennan and Horton are two new voices at an exciting time for emerging Australian literature. They are writers to watch.
Congratulations to Tara June Winch for winning the Miles Franklin Literary Award for her novel The Yield. It’s a beautiful, important book and I am so pleased for her. It’s a dual Miles Franklin winner I want to go to for the quote of the week: Michelle de Krester, responding to the passing of Elizabeth Harrower, who died on July 7, aged 92: “A great tree has fallen in my patch of the forest now that she’s gone.”
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