The Vance Palmer Prize  for Fiction: Shortlist 2003

Judges report

If the 73 entries for this year's Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction are an indication, the Australian novel has come of age. It is now possible for Australian stories to include the world at large, to reflect on broad themes and large historical events. The novels published in 2003 are stylistically confident and reveal a capacity for sustained imaginative writing.

The panel wishes to commend Kate Jennings for her assured and clear-sighted novel Moral Hazard and Emily Ballou for the powerful and intense evocation of childhood, Father Lands.

Shortlist

Shanghai Dancing by Brian Castro (Giramondo)
The frame for Brian Castro's 'fictional autobiography', Shanghai Dancing, is the decision by Antonio Castro, a writer, to recover his sense of a homeland by returning to China. This is a story about family life - about unfaithful husbands, unyielding wives, duplicitous siblings and the ties that bind uncles with nephews. A sense of life's irony and unpredictability is handed down by Isaac de Castro who was burnt at the stake for refusing to convert to Catholicism in the 17th century, to Antonio Castro who, in the late 20th century, is determined to be a writer in the midst of a family of more and less kosher businessmen.

Shanghai Dancing breaks all the rules. Chronology is subverted as the novel moves across the centuries from the 17th century through to the late 20th century. Locations include Macau, Shanghai, Sydney and Brazil. Momentous events in history are observed through Castro's lens - from the Inquisition through to the Japanese invasion of China. As the narrator's father reminds us: 'the only use for the past is to get a future out of it'.

This is a novel full of riches: there are gorgeously entertaining exegetical digressions on the origin of the term 'ladies' man', the definition of a bastard, an uncle's obsession with calligraphy and disquisitions by Nigerians on the nature of civilization.

Brian Castro is the quintessential post-colonial writer as intellectual writing from Australia, across history and culture, a refusenik of the parochial and the insular.

The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser (Knopf/Random House)
In The Hamilton Case, Michelle de Kretser artfully draws the reader into a tale of intrigue and loss set in Ceylon during the 1930s. De Kretser is a remarkably sensual writer, evoking a world where the lush abundance of tea plantation and jungle, of jewelled silks and whispered dreams, are at odds with the emotional dislocation of the Obeysekere family and the stark politics of a society shaking off the yoke of imperialism.

The Hamilton Case is a superbly balanced mixture of murder mystery and family saga, a generous narrative that explores the lingering inheritances of past events and shifting perspectives on the present. De Kretser is a writer of insight and control, who has the compassion to reveal the small, sharp cruelties of human indifference without ever losing sight of the comic moment or the surprise twist.

With the publication of The Hamilton Case, de Krester has confirmed her reputation as a distinctive novelist of breadth and verve, with a skillful capacity for storytelling about complex worlds that are beyond, and yet part of, Australian experience.

Of a Boy by Sonya Hartnett (Viking/Penguin)
Sonya Hartnett's Of a Boy is set in the year 1977. In an incident reminiscent of the unsolved Beaumont case, three children, the Metfords, go missing on their way to the local milk bar. This event forms a backdrop to the central story of Adrian, a nine-year old child abandoned by his mother and now living with his grandmother and uncle Rory. Amid the media speculation surrounding the disappearance of the Metfords, Adrian attempts to navigate his way through the shifting allegiances and petty cruelties of a world in which people and things disappear.

Written in prose that is ear-perfect, Hartnett's claustrophobic narrative, almost thriller-like in execution, presents Adrian's world as one of perpetual aloneness, a nowhere place lodged between an alien adult world and the uncertain vagaries of childhood. Hartnett, in fact, appears to be writing not so much about childhood as writing childhood itself. It is as if the skin separating experience from actuality has here been removed. At the outset of the novel, Adrian questions how an ordinary child could be worth taking, could be a desirable thing. By the novel's end, we realize, all-too-late, that the very act of childhood, in all its complexity and ordinariness, is perhaps the most precious thing of all to lose.