Nicolas Rothwell Quicksilver
only to have her scoff and counter: “Have we heard of Belomor by Nicolas Rothwell, the Australian writer? Now that is a masterpiece.”
She’s right: it is a masterpiece. And the book that followed it this year – six uncategorisable essays welded together by the author’s inimitable prose style and enduring fascination with Australia’s top end and desert country – is equally deserving of that overused term. Quicksilver opens with a trip undertaken by the author to the Oakover River, an oasis in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. There he encounters a perentie lizard, and the memory of another lizard encounter occurs to him – that between Leo Tolstoy and a Black Sea gecko during a visit by the Russian author to Yalta.
So it is that the narrative slips through a wormhole and out into the Crimea, a century and more beforehand. The many stories that follow work by this random, hyperlink process – between Europe and Russia, Australia and its outback, and writers, explorers and sundry eccentrics, past and present – all in the hope of illuminating relationships that exist among them. This is a signal instance of the southern latitudes writing back against the totalising narratives of the global north: showing how Australia helped shape the world’s imagination, as we were shaped by it in turn.
When I read the eponymous opening short story of Sarah Hall’s collection
Madame Zero, I thought, simply: Jesus! It relates the complacent, sexy, bourgeois existence of a handsome young English couple. But when the young wife falls pregnant, a transformation