Yumna Kassab devlops a develops a panoramic technique in Australiana.

Yumna Kassab devlops a develops a panoramic technique in Australiana.Credit:

This makes it tempting to read Kassab’s title ironically,as a wry dig at such hokey nationalistic mythologising. Kassab hails from Western Sydney,which over the past decade or so has become the site of a great deal of literary activity,much of it concerned to kick against stale,limiting and downright false ideas about Australia.

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Her widely admired first book,The House of Youssef (2019),a collection of linked stories depicting the lives of Lebanese Muslim immigrants,was one of a slew of recent works insisting that there is much more to the lived reality of our vibrantly multicultural nation.

Australiana is intriguing in this context,partly because it abandons the urban setting ofThe House of Youssef for the provinces,but also because its predominant attitude is not satirical. Though it is billed as a “novel”,the book is an assemblage of short fictions that develops a panoramic technique,skipping from one character to another,affording us the briefest of glimpses into their lives via a sequence of succinct,precisely written vignettes. Only in the last third of the book does Kassab present us with several sustained fictional narratives.

In its understated way,the sympathetic,observant quality ofAustraliana redeems the cliched overtones of its title. Set in the New England region of northern New South Wales,it takes up the hoary “small-town” trope (though much of the action takes place in and around Tamworth,which is not exactly small).

Rather than play up to the idiosyncrasies of the place,however,it tones them down. The conventional literary markers of distinctiveness (landscape,local colour,vernacular language) are set aside in favour of careful attention to the characters’ travails,which transcend their setting by virtue of their intimacy. In their style and substance,many of Kassab’s vignettes,viewed in isolation,could be taking place anywhere.

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Australiana is structured so that as its panoramic technique opens out it also moves towards more explicit evocations of certain national myths,culminating in its two most effective pieces of writing. The penultimate story,Pilbara,is an atmospheric slice of Australian gothic told in 50 lapidary fragments,which takes up the familiar trope of a landscape that is inhospitable and haunted,redolent as it is of the violence of the nation’s colonial history;the final

section is a mixture of poetry and prose reflecting on the life Frederick Ward,aka Captain Thunderbolt,the bushranger who lies buried in Uralla,80 kilometres north-east of Tamworth.

Does Rhett Davis’ novel reflect the anxieties that underlie the idea of Australia?

Does Rhett Davis’ novel reflect the anxieties that underlie the idea of Australia?Credit:Rebekah Halls

In both cases,Kassab’s intention is not to subvert or reinvent such traditional mythologies,as such,but to feel their weight,understand their hold on the national psyche and the human realities they obscure.

It is perhaps not too much of a stretch (at least for the purposes of a convenient segue) to see Rhett Davis’Hovering as a work that is,in its own way,a reflection of the anxieties of impermanence and illegitimacy that underlie the idea of Australia.Hovering won the 2020 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript,and it is not hard to see why it stood out from the pack. It is immediately striking on both a conceptual and a formal level.

The novel is set in the fictional city of Fraser. It begins when Alice,an artist who fled Australia for the usual reasons,returns after 16 years overseas,arriving unannounced on the doorstep of her sister Lydia. In its early stages, Hovering draws out the tension this creates between the sisters and Lydia’s teenage son George,who spends most of his time in his bedroom designing virtual realities on his computer and participating in online chat rooms.

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Into this uncomfortable domestic scenario,Davis gradually introduces elements of the uncanny and the surreal. Lydia,who also has a bit of an addiction to online virtual reality games,is nagged by the feeling that Alice is not her real sister. More alarmingly,the streets of Fraser start spontaneously rearranging themselves:buildings suddenly reappear in different locations;roads start leading to different destinations.

The concept of living in a simulation has its pop-culture referents (The Matrix,The Truman Show),butHovering has its own set of concerns,which are to some degree self-referential. The heart of the novel is the backstory that gradually emerges about Alice’s involvement in a guerrilla art collective that has split acrimoniously in the wake of a disastrous mishap.

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Hovering is interested in both the positive and negative consequences of giving material form to feelings and ideas,and the influence this has on reality. This is fundamentally an artistic question,but has implications that extend well beyond the category of mere art. In creating a fictional world defined by its radical instability,Davis acknowledges (and smartly puts into practice) the basic human imperative to create our own world,arrive at our own understanding,while raising the metaphysical question of whether there exists a natural point of stability beyond our conceptualisations.

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As Alice observes to George,by way of explaining a line from a Whitman poem,“there is no straight line. For everything you do there are billions of things you could have done instead … Yes,we’re lost. All of us. We’re all trying to forge paths out of the void.“

Yumna Kassab and Brett Davis are guests at Sydney Writers’ Festival,May 16-22.swf.org.au

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