abc– The Miles Franklin shortlist for 2021 was announced on Wednesday: six novels by Australian writers that are deemed by the judges to be of high literary merit in representing “Australian life in any of its phases”.
Besides being Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, it’s also one of the richest, with the winning author receiving $60,000.
This year’s shortlist is notable for spanning from early-career to established authors, with three debut novels (Andrew Pippos’s Lucky’s, Madeleine Watts’s The Inland Sea and Daniel Davis Wood’s At the Edge of the Solid World) up against the fourth novel by Book Prize winner Aravind Adiga, and the eighth by award-winning author Amanda Lohrey.
Sydney features heavily in the shortlist, as a key setting for Lucky’s, The Inland Sea and Adiga’s Amnesty, and a lesser setting in Lohrey’s The Labyrinth.
Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron might be considered a surprising choice for a prize focused on literature about Australia, given that it’s set in an unnamed country that has experienced a recent coup — suggesting that the judges read the novel’s setting as a non-literal version of Australia.
To help you navigate this year’s shortlist, we’ve asked three experts — Claire Nichols and Sarah L’Estrange from ABC RN’s The Book Show, and Kate Evans from ABC RN’s The Bookshelf — to share their thoughts on each book.
The winner of the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award will be announced on July 15.
Lucky’s by Andrew Pippos (Pan Macmillan)
The protagonist, Vasilis ‘Lucky’ Mallios, lives up to his nickname – he’s a man whose life seems to be buffeted along by the ever-changing winds of fate. We follow his life in a series of scattered scenes: as a young GI in Australia who impersonates the jazz musician Benny Goodman; as he falls in love and marries into a local Greek family; as his chain of restaurants, Lucky’s, becomes an unlikely phenomenon, before falling apart in an act of terrible violence; and as the elderly Lucky, living alone in Sydney, attempts to make his fortune one more time.
The story is also about Emily, a British journalist who has come to Australia to write about the failed Lucky’s restaurant chain. Emily is reeling from a recent marriage breakdown, but also from a childhood tragedy that has links to Lucky’s own life story.
Told in clear, direct prose, this is a carefully constructed story about migration, family, and violence. In Lucky, Pippos has created a literary hero you are unlikely to forget. CN
Amnesty by Aravind Adiga (Picador)
Carrying his vacuum cleaner on his back, travelling by public transport to his next cleaning gig, he’s mostly a ghost to white Sydney. Sleeping in a storeroom. Dying his hair to look more Australian.
To other members of his same underclass, as they exchange nods or information about free wifi or legal advice or another way to get by, he can be dangerously visible. He dodges glances of complicity and recognition. To other types of brown men, he comes in and out of focus: revealing a taxonomy and hierarchy that’s both funny and risky.
But then Danny sees something else. Evidence of a murder. He has to make a moral choice about speaking up, risking himself, stepping into an all-too-revealing spotlight.
This character and this novel re-maps Sydney across just one day – with an eviscerating commentary and gimlet eye that focuses unsparingly on hypocrisy.
This is a portrait whose paint is still wet and new, with fumes that sting. KE
The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey (Text)
Erica Marsden buys an old shack in a secluded community on Australia’s south-east coast. She’s there because it’s close to the prison where her son, Daniel, has been jailed for a horrific crime. But she’s also there because she feels compelled to build a stone labyrinth, similar to the one she played in as a child, when she lived in the asylum where her father was a psychiatrist. To build the labyrinth, Erica needs help, and she finds that in a man called Jurko, an illegal immigrant looking to escape his past.
The Labyrinth is a book about loneliness, violence and art. It’s also about parents and children, and the terrible rifts that can develop between them. The scenes where Erica visits her son in prison are heart-wrenching – as Daniel rejects his mother with spite and rage.
The Labyrinth is Amanda Lohrey’s eighth novel. She’s also a previous winner of the Patrick White Award, which recognises an author’s body of work. Lohrey brings all her skill to this compelling and contemplative novel, which will linger in your mind long after you read the final page. CN
The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts (Pushkin Press)
While the story lacks plot, atmospheric tension builds as a heatwave gives way to floods, an earthquake and then a fire-storm; the ravages of climate change for all to see. Working in a Triple Zero emergency call centre, the narrator fields calls from desperate and broken people, engendering a sense of fear and crisis that builds on the tension created by dangerous weather.
This is a multilayered narrative with many threads, one of which explores the hubris of the narrator’s distant relative, John Oxley. Oxley led an 1817 expedition to an inland sea (which doesn’t exist), and despite growing up surrounded by the mythology of Oxley’s greatness, the narrator characterises him as a “feckless imperialist”, “a swindler and a fuck-up”.
This inland sea becomes a metaphor for the shonky colonial foundations of contemporary Australia and also for the inner life of the narrator: a sea of uncertainty as she emerges into adulthood. It’s an assured and complex dive into the Australian female coming-of-age novel. SL
The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott (Text)
But quickly, the story moves away from the allegorical and into a slightly-familiar-but-dystopian place, post-apocalyptic, where a woman named Ren lives alone on a mountain and hides from the soldiers. The environmental, political and military crises that have created this scenario are never really explained. Instead, Arnott trusts his details to create the world, trusts the reader to keep up.
In case any of this seems prosaic, the mythical rain heron reappears. It’s still magical, still powerful, still difficult to contain or explain. Once those in power hear about it, they want it. They hunt it.
And then in a swerve back to the past, Arnott invents a wildly beautiful and strange contract with nature that involves blood, giant squid, and a secret economy.
Somehow, he connects this story with Ren’s exile on the mountain, the story of a tough woman soldier, glimpses of eucalypts, and with that terrible destructive desire to capture and harness ancient resources, in the form of this winged creature made of water.
When we meet him the narrator, a teacher, is living in the Swiss Alps with his wife, who reluctantly left Australia to follow him — an escape fuelled by a sense of being “driven out” by the heat and the lack of connection to the landscape.
Ensconced in the snowy Alps, grief buffering his every encounter, he hurls himself down internet wormholes, fixating on another tragedy. He obsesses over a Bosnian refugee whose child is killed in a massacre in Sydney, and the man, also a refugee, who was responsible for this horrific act.
The narrator’s peripatetic mind investigates historical figures who’ve also grappled with loss and displacement, and the reader must tussle with the overlay of meanings this intellectually sophisticated novel animates. Ultimately, it’s about how we value some people’s lives and experiences over others.
Wood’s novel might be characterised as challenging as there’s no straightforward elevator pitch, but in that challenge lies its strength. SL
