Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This is a book set in Western Australia on the shores of the Indian Ocean in a small country town with a family that has been there for some generations. So there is this established life in this very remote place. And then the Second World War comes as a threat to that.
The Second World War is also part of your next novel, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea by Randolph Stow.
Yes, that’s right. It is a kind of coming-of-age novel. It was really hard to choose just five novels to sum up Australia’s modern classics. The ones I’ve chosen all seem to have quite a large geographical sweep and also quite a large sweep through time. Maybe that says something about me or maybe that says something about Australia!
This is a book set in Western Australia on the shores of the Indian Ocean in a small country town with a family that has been there for some generations. So there is this established life in this remote place. And then the Second World War comes as a threat to that. It is told from the point of view of a young boy. He hero-worships his cousin who goes off to the war, has horrible experiences in the Pacific and comes back bitter and disillusioned. It is about the young boy’s reaction to all of that.
It’s a beautifully poetic novel. I read it when I was a teenager and it’s retained its glow for me over the years.
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Nicholas Jose has published short stories, essays, several acclaimed novels, and a memoir. He is Chair in Writing at the University of Western Sydney and Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University for 2009-2010. He is general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature which is published internationally as The Literature of Australia. ‘You get this weird thing in Australia,’ he says. ‘It’s a highly urban place and yet the imagination of the writers so often goes to remote places and remote times. The landscape is so vast and unwritten that it is appealing to writers and I think that is something distinctive to Australia.’
