Book of the week

Stories: The Collected Short Fiction by Helen Garner (Text) $37

Helen Garner has become one of Australia’s best and most formidable authors.

Her first novel, Monkey Grip, was a thinly veiled version of her own life, a mother of a young daughter, trapped in a relationship with a heroin addict in Melbourne’s mid-1970s art scene. It established her as a unique talent, became the basis of a movie, and initiated a genre-defying career.

Garner has written novels, screenplays and, most recently, hard-hitting and frequently controversial non-fiction. The First Stone investigated a case of sexual harassment at a University of Melbourne college. While it was particularly condemned by some feminists, who deplored its assumptions, it eventually sold more than 100,000 copies.

Garner has reported on several murder trials, most recently in her 2014 book, This House of Grief, which told the story of a man who had murdered his children by driving into the water of a dam. In her non-fiction, Garner invariably includes herself as an observer of the aftermath, someone who is understandably conflicted and emotionally involved in the harrowing events played out before her.

To mark her 75th year, Text Publishing’s Stories has collected and reprinted her two books of short fiction, Postcards from Surfers and My Hard Heart, in one volume. It is a collection that carries the unmistakable rhythms of the Australian voice emphasised by Garner’s own sense of end-stopped pacing. The stories are often exemplary examples of what can be done by a real writer in a compact space.

Her stories are often spare and simple, but they can pack a suspenseful and emotional wallop. ‘‘I met my husband at the airport,’’ My Hard Heart begins, ‘‘and there he told me something that stopped me in my tracks.’’

Another, Postcards from Surfers, ostensibly concerns a young woman, coming to stay with her retired parents on the Gold Coast. Garner evokes the balmy but oppressive climate, the proximity to the beach, and the sense of returning home. However, a failed love affair is revealed in masterful increments by the holiday postcards.

Garner’s settings are not insular. She is equally at home in Paris, London, Sydney, or Melbourne. A relationship might begin in Australia but will end in France. This gives her reader a vivid sense of cosmopolitanism.

‘‘At Karachi they were not allowed off the plane,’’ the story A Thousand Miles from the Ocean starts. It is a narrative without borders and it hungers with unresolved sexual desire, deceit, blood, and the eternal mystery of other people.

Garner’s achievement in her fiction is to take a uniquely Australian vision and propel it globally, with great force and power. – David Herkt