The Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction: Shortlist 2007

The Time We Have Taken

Steven Carroll
(Fourth Estate/Harper Collins Australia)

In 1970 an anonymous outer-suburb in Melbourne changes its name to Centenary Suburb. It’s a chance for the characters in Carroll’s book to celebrate their past and their identity. But in the process the suburb's inhabitants seem to be afraid of the future. That future is Australia now, and this book helps us describe how we got here. With precision and mesmerising prose Carroll extends his authorial nerve endings into those days leading up to Gough Whitlam’s It’s Time campaign. What’s so interesting about this reckoning of that time is that much has stayed the same, and as such this book questions conventional notions of progress. In the process the characters wonder ‘Are we silly? Are we inbred? Only the most cunning artist can ask these questions.

Feather Man

Rhyll  McMaster
(Brandl and Schlesinger)

Rhyll McMaster’s novel begins in 1950s suburban Brisbane. In a shocking opening scene, narrator Sookie is robbed of the ‘mundane, unexamined happiness of ordinary life’ by next-door neighbour Lionel. Her identify effectively stolen, Sookie leaves behind the innocence of childhood and sets off in search of redemption, embarking on a series of failed relationships with men intent on defining her. It is only via a growing awareness of her artistic talent that she is able to retain her fragile sense of self-worth. Escaping Brisbane by way of a disastrous marriage, she travels to a cosmopolitan London of the 1970s, and it’s there that Sookie’s narrative comes full circle when the sins of the father are visited upon the son in a cruel twist of fate.

McMaster, an award-winning poet, has written an exquisitely crafted first novel rooted in the mundane and the mythological. In a language that is both poetic and visceral, she dissects her characters’ motives with a dispassionate gaze, revealing the darkness at the centre of their lives.

Carpentaria

Alexis Wright
(Giramondo)

Alexis Wright, in Carpentaria, has created an epic centred on the town of Desperance, in the vast Gulf country of northwestern Queensland. Where lives are shaped and measured by the annual destructive cyclonic floods and the daily cleansing tides. At the novel’s heart is Norm Phantom, patriarch of his family and leader of the Pricklebush people.
 
Carpentaria demonstrates that Wright is an inventive writer of great reach. Indeed, it is almost audacious in its scope and ambition. In her marrying of the oral tradition with the written word Wright takes a bold stylistic risk, but it has paid off with a complicated net of stories coming vibrantly alive on the page. Wright has created a strong, confident and vivid voice with a healthy dose of sly humour.