Tegan Bennett: What falls away; Kate Lyons: The water underneath

By JOHN McCRYSTALRD*

The Australians have been rather nice about our writing lately, even giving a major literary award to one of our novelists, Elizabeth Knox. Here's an opportunity to respond in kind, for these are two excellent pieces of writing by young Australians.

Tegan Bennett's What Falls Away is her second novel. Her first, Bombora, was short-listed in 1996 for the prestigious Vogel and Kathleen Mitchell awards.

What Falls Away is the story of a more-or-less disintegrating relationship in middle-class Sydney. Sean and Mary live in the eastern suburbs. Mary is expecting their second child, even as their first, Sydney, has become old enough to start playing up. Sean and Mary are going through a Bad Patch. At the periphery, there is the beautiful, languidly bisexual Juliet. Everyone is bored, confused and wrung with futility.

Sound awful? It's not. It is lyrical and beautiful, and the characters are minutely drawn, perfectly convincing. Nothing much happens, but the reader scarcely feels the lack: the tensions and dramas are the tensions and dramas of real life.

It's short, easily read in a single sitting, and if there's a criticism, this is it: it feels like an exercise, something to occupy the author's time while she dreams up a project worthy of her considerable skill.

More substantial, more challenging to read, as sharp a portrait of the existential starkness of life in the outback as What Falls Away is of urban ennui, is Kate Lyons' The Water Underneath. This, Lyons' first, was runner-up in the Vogel award in 1999, and it is easy to see why. It is beautifully crafted, winding two stories together deftly even as it delicately realises its characters. The prose is terrific, arid and beautiful as a desert sunset.

The Water Underneath begins with the discovery of a body in a lake outside a mining town in New South Wales. It is that of part-Aboriginal Von Cook, who went missing with her baby daughter in 1968, and half of the story is about Von and the people to whom she is, in complicated ways, related.

The other half is about Ruth, Von's other daughter, who is returning to the town, her birthplace, to see her Uncle Frank, who is dying. At the centre of both stories yet mysterious to all parties, reader included, is Frank himself, monumental, silent. It is the mystery of Frank's character rather than the whodunnit of Von's murder which is the novel's pivot.

Talk about bleak: Lyons does for New South Wales what Annie Proulx did for the Wyoming badlands in Close Range. She depicts with extraordinary vividness the fragility of life - of individuals, of society - in the isolation, the glare and the barrenness of the interior of the Big Country. Appearances are everything, and rituals - such as baking the perfect lamington - are what take the mind off it all. Lyons is an author who can show you despair in a handful of desiccated coconut.

There's a strangeness, a gone-troppo quality to Australians, and between them, these two books capture it perfectly. They are examples of a fresh voice which has been added to decolonised English lit, a voice which is unmistakably Strine.

If these are anything to go by, these are exciting times for readers on both sides of the Tasman.

Both books: Allen & Unwin

$24.95

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.