Who will win the prestigious Miles Franklin Literary Award

Elegant, urgent and angry: Geordie Williamson reviews the six titles vying for glory

 

This year’s Miles Franklin shortlist suggests our most storied literary prize has located the sweet spot between political urgency and literary merit.

In a moment when some comparable awards have lost sight of those qualities that make a book worth celebrating – yielding to market forces (the heft of multinational publishers remains significant) on one side or identity politics on the other – the Miles Franklin judges evidently have kept in mind an older and more durable notion of merit.

The make-up of this year’s half-dozen strong shortlist – filled as it is with debuts and sophomore efforts, left-field inclusions and small-press gems – suggests literature is not just an elegant or angry restatement of this week’s news. It also comes from books that have a message that is private or determinedly mysterious. It comes from books that never reach the end of what they have to say.

 

 

Take Amnesty, Aravind Adiga’s inclusion for his fourth novel and first with an Australian setting. The Booker Prize-winner’s entry takes the moral quandary faced by a young Sydney-based Sri Lankan who has overstayed his Australian visa, rendering him an illegal immigrant, and turns it into a contemporary epic of ­homelessness.

Amnestyis a love letter of sorts to Australia, though one shot through with bitter irony. Narrator Dhananjaya “Danny” Rajaratnam evinces a sincere respect for Australia’s rule of law, for example, even as those laws are arrayed against him when he is forced to decide whether to go to the authorities with information about a woman’s murder.

Yet Adiga’s novel cannot help but raise questions similar to those asked by other non-Anglo Australian writers. Like Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Nam Le and many more, Amnesty wonders whether a nation founded on racial exclusion can ever truly welcome those from the global elsewhere. It is a thorny question to answer, though one on which our viability as a multicultural democracy rests.

Adiga’s Picador colleague Andrew Pippos has produced a less obviously political novel in his debut Lucky’s (I should disclose that I was involved with both titles as Picador publisher), but immigrant experience is once again a central strand of the work. The novelist’s picaresque account of the rise and fall of a chain of Greek cafes dreamt up by a man named Lucky Mallios is playful in form but serious in its unfolding.

In Pippos’s hands those mainstays of post-war Australian culture come to stand for something deeper than cheap, decent grub for the masses. They are dreams of intercultural connection and accommodation made manifest.

That tendency of contemporary Australian writing to keep a foot in both camps, setting narratives on native ground that also gesture towards a wider world, is a structural feature of another work on the list, Daniel Davis Wood’s At the Edge of the Solid World.

Britain-based Wood’s second novel is an emotional endurance test in which a father, consumed by grief following the death of his newborn daughter in Europe, grows obsessed by an inexplicable act of violence performed against children in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. It is a kindred loss the narrator hopes will dissolve his own terrible sense of ­solitude.

 Wood’s novel is published by small indie publisher Brio, whose only competition for unlikeliness of inclusion is Britain’s Pushkin Press, publisher of Madeleine Watts’s debut, The Inland Sea.

 Watts has been New York-based for years, but her novel could not be more Australian in setting. It is narrated by the fictional ancestor of John Oxley, the man whose inland explorations failed to discover that body of water that would render Australia a less diminished paradise in the eyes of the wider world.

 Watts folds into her ornate fictional portmanteau a contemporary coming-of-age novel containing extended Didionesque meditations on climate change and ecological collapse, along with the darker recesses of Australia’s colonial histories and the complex, conflicted place of women within them.

 The shortlist is rounded out by two talented Tasmanians, both published by Melbourne’s Text. Robbie Arnott has followed the breakout success of 2019’s Flameswith The Rain Heron,an ecological fable in which myth and realism are held in close tension. It is an old Aesopian tale, retold with complex modern variations, about a natural world poisoned by human greed, envy and caprice. Arnott is a writer of fecund descriptive gifts and bold formal experimentation, and both impulses are given free rein in these pages.

 But his Van Diemenian colleague Amanda Lohrey has written another book entirely. The Labyrinthunfolds in terms of apparently strict realism. It describes, with workaday simplicity, the arrival of an older woman in a seaside town, her intention to settle close to the place where her adult son, an artist, has been incarcerated for a violent crime. While there she employs a stonemason, an illegal immigrant from eastern Europe, to help her realise a curious obsession: the building of a labyrinth in her coastal garden.

 Lohrey’s novel grinds no axes. It does not speak to the moment and does not release its meaning without effort on the readers’ part. But it is nonetheless a wise and beautiful book. It brings the kind of news that stays news, and it is to the great credit of the Miles Franklin judges that they should keep holding such qualities in regard.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian