More about National Literary Treasures

I had a distressingly busy week last week and a fit of extreme resentment that I was late for a meeting on Friday because I waited to cross a road for ten minutes but the lights didn't change. It took me (and the other inconvenienced people) a while to realise that this was the RTA mucking about in case Dick Cheney's motorcade came by soon. (The hovering black helicopters were a bit of a clue.) Strangely, when I'd had quite enough and jaywalked, none of the policemen loitering inconspicuously nearby in their fluorescent vests stopped me. And no, I didn't get hit by a speeding limo with diplomatic plates. I wonder if that would have been reported as "disgruntled public servant interrupts motorcade."

Pavlov's Cat and Meredith have written some lovely tributes to Elizabeth Jolley over at Sarsparilla. They sound glad to have known her and I feel less thoughtless for not thinking about her in so long because she had been ill for several years. I mean, it wasn't that I wasn't paying attention and ignored three masterpieces she'd produced. No, that still doesn't sound right... It's hard to know what you're meant to say when public figures you admire die.

In other news, my mother was less than enthusiastic about David Malouf's Every Move You Make which I'd given her for Christmas. It's a collection of short stories. He was reading excerpts from it at a public reading I attended the other week. She did tell me the ending of the one he'd read most of (which was what I'd expected it to be) but she was frustrated by how many of the stories set up complex characters and situations and then just trailed off...

It's a shame she didn't like it that much as Malouf is one of Brisbane's three literary lions (if you count Nick Earls and Andrew McGahan because I don't think people talk about Gwen Harwood and Xavier Herbert so much now) and they're fiercely protective of their own up there. But I expect it's partly her reaction to not being used to reading short stories any more and partly that novelists don't always take the form of the short story seriously enough. This is certainly why I've been struggling to to think of something constructive
to say about China Mieville's collection Looking for Jake for a while now. Some of the stories are extraordinarily good, taut and well plotted. Others just feel like offcuts from his novels. He's one of the most exciting newish fantasy SF writers around but if you're going to start reading his wonderfully energetic and original work, don't start here. Try Perdido Street Station instead.