AustLit

'I fell in love intensely and often from an absurdly young age. In practice, my manner of loving involved contemplating a mental image of the girl I was devoted to, dreaming about her most nights, and imagining scenarios that might offer opportunities to demonstrate the depth of my feelings. I wanted to risk my life to save hers, accept responsibility for her misdeeds, or even degrade myself in the eyes of others - as long as she understood what was being communicated. I had no ambition to “win” her affection; all I needed was for her to understand the message. That was my fantasy of consummation.' (Introduction)

'While reading fiction as little more than smuggled autobiography is an inherently crass and undergraduate approach to literary criticism, I’d nonetheless like to start that way. I have, after all, something close to the author’s permission. Pondering the lacerations of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle in these pages only a few years ago, Ceridwen Dovey, in an essay titled “The Pencil and the Damage Done”, wrote:

'I kept being distracted by my own horror at what Knausgaard was doing, slashing away at his world, and by the overwhelming feeling that it would cost him too much as a human being. I googled his wife, his uncle, his mother, even his children, fixating on the walking wounded surrounding the living author.

'Upon reading Dovey’s new novel, In the Garden of the Fugitives (Hamish Hamilton; $32.99), I, too, googled, and under the “Early Years and Education” subheading of her Wikipedia page found a life story remarkably similar to that of the novel’s central character, Vita. The childhood in South Africa and Australia, the schooling at Harvard, the early career in filmmaking. All there, all echoing unignorably. The living author was insisting upon conflation with a fictional creation.' (Introduction)

'“Anything with blood in it can probably go bad. Like meat. And it’s the blood that makes me worry. It carries things you don’t even know you got.”

'So thinks Jaxie Clackton as he hides out in the Western Australian wheatbelt, casing a corrugated iron shack. He’s on the run, having found his father crushed to death under a Toyota HiLux - an accident he imagines will be taken as a crime, since everyone in Monkton knows how mercilessly Sid Clackton beat his teenage son and late wife. With barely two boxes of bullets left for his rifle, and no way to preserve his kills, Jaxie has left camp in search of the salt lake, and it’s here he makes his discovery - an old shepherd’s hut with a single, strange, occupant.'' (Introduction)