Ryan O'Neill

What a delectable (and delectably weird) book this is. I fell in love with O'Neill's [b:Their Brilliant Careers: The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers|29848070|Their Brilliant Careers The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers|Ryan O'Neill|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1460006993l/29848070._SY75_.jpg|50209168], in which he invents 16 Australian writers to give us their biographies, in turns sad, witty, trenchant, a Chinese puzzle box of a book. The Drover's Wives is much in the same vein but perhaps a bit more accessible to people without as much knowledge of the country's literary history.

The book opens with the original Henry Lawson short story, a key text in the invention of Australian literature, the relation of white people to the land in the 19th century, but also a work that raises questions about the nature of the Australian experiment. O'Neill then comes up with 99 variations on a theme, ranging from a TV sitcom script to an emoji narrative, a TV guide listing, a Joycean reinterpretation, a crossword, an absurdist play, and so on. This book would be good even for highschool students of the text. Although there are further puzzles to be found within (as in his other book, O'Neill has some wicked fun with in-jokes in the index) many of the interpretations are straightforwardly funny or clever.

An interesting satirist whose career I will follow closely.… (mais)

"We Esquimaux have one hundred different words for snow", ejaculated Makittuq Arnaaluk, "but only one for murder!"
-- Dame Claudia Gunn, The Death of Vincent Prowse (1924)

This book delights me beyond belief. I'm not sure that Their Brilliant Careers will delight everyone similarly (although it is delightful) but if your specific interests include alternative history, obscure puzzles, and those unusual or forgotten crannies of Australian literary history... here lies joy.

O'Neill conjures up the biographies of sixteen (sadly) fictional Australian authors, all of whom inhabit a world that intertwines with our own. Here are the tales of literary modes on the ascent and the gradual decline, of our history of rival journals and political movements, oppression and freedom, and most importantly a wry view of the history of my country: the story of groups grabbing power and refusing to let go in our universal climb out of the red dirt.

The authors range from a hack crime fiction queen to an anti-establishment poet running a dirty bookstore while still a child, from the king of 19th century Aussie bush literature (despite never leaving Sydney) to an obsessive biographer stalking his subject across seven continents. My favourite might be the obscenely racist historian who disputes Indigenous Australians' claim to the land only to devolve to the point of arguing they never existed in the first place. We are privy to the origin stories of such classic Australian works as Music for Broken Instruments, Parade of the Harlequins, The Bloodshot Chameleon, A Child's Finnegan's Wake and that great poem The Jabberwock Saunters Along Taree Main Street.

The book is given much greater heft if you are familiar with our literary history, and the ways that many of these figures reflect real authors or movements. But O'Neill is a dynamite writer and parodist, and hopefully this will amuse even those who can't tell their Dymphna Cusack from their Katharine Susannah Pritchard.

Most joyfully, though, is the intertwined nature of the pieces. With the author bios told in a non-chronological order, the reader is given numerous subplots and mysteries threaded throughout the book. There are the rise and fall of various publishing houses, rivalries between literary magazines, a chronic blackmailer, an authoress who conned the great poets and thinkers of the 20th century with her talent, and an extended family who seem to have touched the lives of everyone involved in Australian literature. The tragic tale of Sydney Steele warrants particular mention, as does the uproariously dark mystery of the author himself, who cites in his acknowledgments the woman who so helpfully gave him an alibi just when he needed one! That mystery extends from the author information page to the many clever twists in the book's index, which tells you just how thorough O'Neill has been in turning this into an intricate collection of puzzles. (There was one small mystery I couldn't solve, to my frustration, but hopefully next time I read the book it will jump out at me.)

If you've ever wondered who else might have appeared in our country alongside Patrick White and Helen Garner, then have I got the book for you.… (mais)

Several of the stories in this collection are excellent but overall it is a mixed bag. O'Neill clearly likes to experiment with different ways of telling a story. Although clever, I found them distracting from the story itself and a bit of a dead weight on the collection. The Rwanda stories, challenging in themselves, lacked, I thought, a writer's imperative to balance the clear moral imperative. But his strong ground is undoubtedly his grasp of the complexities of relationships - husband and wife, parents and children - and his ability to capture their essence within the constraints of a short story. The first story in particular is excellent. April 2020.… (mais)