Rosalie Ham made her name with her much-loved debut, The Dressmaker, continuing her success with Summer at Mount Hope. It’s been more than five years between novels now – but both fans and newcomers to Ham’s dark wit and stubborn characters will embrace There Should Be More Dancing, a novel set in her home suburb of Brunswick. The Age’s Michelle Griffin spoke to Rosalie Ham for Readings’ New Australian Writing series.

In the 25 years that Rosalie Ham has lived in Brunswick, she’s watched her corner of the suburb change in fundamental ways. ‘When we came here, there was no one in the park,’ she says. ‘There was no one there, just a bunch of teenagers who would smoke and drink and root each other, and some older people passed out in the toilets. Now you have to queue for the swings with your toddler, if you have one.’

Ham, 56, is not one to decry the ways of New Brunswick – ‘now there’s good coffee just there and a good pub – you don’t have to travel far’ – but her third and latest novel does work on one level as a serio-comic love letter to the old Brunswick, to the pub-reared boxers and pub-soaked fathers, the linoleum kitchens in the tiny worker’s cottages and the broken cars in the front yards of the share-houses.

While Ham’s first two novels were decidedly rural, almost all the action in the new book takes place within 500 metres of her home. The house where her protagonist Margery sits fuming over her cross-stitch is ‘just down there’, she says, gesturing down the road. ‘I pass it four or five times a week walking my dog.’ It is one of those un-renovated opportunities that the real estate agent son-in-law in the novel paws so covetously: ‘a detached, two-bedroom weatherboard cottage with kitchen and bathroom tacked into the back and outdoor lavatories’. Ham took a photo of the house down the road so she could physically map the landscape her characters inhabited. ‘If it’s true and it’s real, it comes out of your head and down your arms and onto the page. There’s the park and the pub and Sydney Road and Union Square – it’s easy to map their progress. They covered a huge terrain by going not very far.’

She thought that if she wrote an urban novel, it would change her style along with her landscapes. Her break-out first novel, The Dressmaker (2001), was set in the Mallee. Her second book, Summer at Mount Hope (2005), unfolded in a Victorian vineyard a century ago. But as Ham readily admits, her readers will recognise both the stubborn, honourable characters and the assured comic voice. ‘I put all the standard goodies in it,’ she says. ‘Love and deceit and betrayal and lies and lust.’

There Should be More Dancing had a lengthy and troubled gestation, unlike The Dressmaker which Ham calls ‘the one I got for free’. ‘Tragically I came under the influence of Marilyn Robinson. I read Gilead and tried to write my book in the first person. But I’ve found it’s better to write in the voice of Rosalie Ham. It’ll come out anyway. So I rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it. It took probably five years from the nucleus of the idea and mapping out and not writing anything until the time I actually sent it out.’

The story begins outside Brunswick’s borders, on one of the top floors of what is recognisable as the Sofitel in Collins Street. Margery has booked a room and plans to fling herself to her death rather than face the injustices visited upon her by her family and other enemies. This, says Ham, was not the most attractive pitch to shop around to publishers. ‘It’s not a very good premise – a little old lady about to end her life. If you’re going to tackle something like that, you need to do it with humour.’

If nobody else writes with quite the same wry warmth and pitch-black wit of Ham, she does share something of the melancholy and humour of local animator Adam Elliot. There’s lot of fine-grained detail, from the perfectly slicked hair of Margery’s sweetly punch-drunk ex-boxer son, to the daily indignities suffered by the tiny, arthritic and almost silent neighbour Mrs Parsons. Both are based on real people, says Ham.

‘He was someone who used to visit his mother in the nursing home where I worked. He visited every Friday at the same time and he wore shorts and a Collingwood guernsey no matter what the weather. He’d obviously drunk a little too much in his time but he was just adorable ... he had to go in.’

As a child, Ham would travel down from Jerilderie to visit her grandmother in Castlemaine. Next door lived the little old lady who would become the novel’s Mrs Parsons. ‘Her blind would go up or down during the day, and we would go over and tie or untie her shoelaces because she couldn’t do it. It stuck in my mind that you could do that for a person.’

The 25 years Ham spent working in nursing homes has given her an eye for the way the aged move, an ear for the timbre of older Australian voices and an abiding affection for the stories that can be spun out of a life span’s experience. ‘If there’s a roomful of people and I don’t know anyone, I’ll go talk to the old person,’ she says.

The old ladies of the latest novel are neither twinkly vessels of wisdom nor bitter husks of malice, two of the archetypes set out so often for the oldest woman in a story. Instead, we get a spirited heroine with a sharp tongue, a fierce sense of outrage and an opportunity to learn some home truths she’s been avoiding for decades.

In the novel, Margery uses her cross-stitch samplers as both a shield and a weapon, brandishing parables ripped from a doctor’s calendar to comment on indignities, and avoiding any real engagement with the world as she bends over her threads. The dramas that play out, betrayal and love and honour, remind us, too, that love and anger do not always fade away.

‘A theme I had in A Dream at Mount Hope was how to live a life. That was a kind of anti-romance where romance and passion lost out to friendship and loyalty. This is the same thing, a book about how to live your life well. I think I’m done with that now.’ With a third novel finally on the shelf, Ham is ready to start digging away at the next idea for a novel. She’s also waiting with fingers crossed to see if the film adaptation of The Dressmaker is going to be filmed next year. The director attached is Jocelyn Moorhouse, who is best known for Proof – but also, perhaps, for her attempt to film Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus, before Russell Crowe started demanding rewrites. Strong-willed actors permitting, Ham is hoping she’ll get an opportunity to play an extra in a dance scene. Otherwise, her only involvement with the production is enthusiastic support and ‘beaming idiotically on the red carpet,’ she says.

Which brings us to the endearing title of her new novel: There Should Be More Dancing. Should there be? Ham says yes. The title is a family heirloom. ‘There’s a bit of a family joke that comes from my mother and now has been taken up with my boy [her stepson],’ she says. ‘Every now and then, when things are serious, we always exclaim “there should be more dancing!”.’

Michelle Griffin is a journalist at The Age. You can follow her on Twitter - @michellegriff.

Jo Case interviews Adelaide author Vikki Wakefield about her edgy, darkly funny YA debut novel, All I Ever Wanted.

Your teenage heroine, Mim, is the one straight girl in a notorious crime family, longing to escape her surrounds and fascinated by the brother and sister from the fringes of her dodgy suburb, “glossy with the sheen of parental love”. It’s such an inventive premise – a bit like Underbelly meets Hating Alison Ashley. Where did you get the idea for the story?

Originally the novel was meant to be a story about the underdog and her great escape. Thirty thousand words into the story, I realised I’d made my themes redundant. My antagonists were too likable. At this point I took a major detour and the novel was less about Mim’s escape and more about her journey – I was drawn to explore what she’d be leaving behind. I had to ask myself, if Mim escaped her poverty-stricken life without learning tolerance and acceptance, what kind of person would she become? How would she live her life? As Mim discovers, that glossy sheen of parental love can be all veneer and no substance. Jordan and Kate’s parents don’t understand them at all – Mim’s much-maligned mother knows her better than Mim knows herself. And she will sacrifice herself without blinking.

‘Surely there’s a recipe for it. Follow a few steps and you can cook up your own shiny destiny.’ Tell us about Mim’s formula for a different destiny to her family and classmates – her rules for ‘how not to be’. How does she expect them to work, and how do they work in reality?

Mim describes herself as ‘an outline, a caricature’. That’s how she views the suburb she lives in and the people around her. She’s as guilty of misguided judgment as the rest of society. She sets herself rules to live by – no drugs, no sex, no alcohol, no tattoos, don’t trust anybody, no dropping out of school. And, rule number one: I will not turn out like my mother. It’s an overly simplistic view – it follows that her rules for ‘how not to be’ are destined to fail. Hiding her true nature only works against her and Mim’s rules prove useful only as they are broken.

The idea of things – and people – not being as they seem is central to the book, it seems. As Mim’s neighbour Benny says, ‘Outside’s one way. Inside’s different.’ But it’s not that simple – Mim also learns to see herself and her surrounds differently by looking at them through new perspectives. How important are these ideas to the book?

Many of my characters are hiding something, some part of their character that they keep from the people who love them best. Telling someone your dreams and fears leaves you open to pain, but also to hope. I think that self-absorption and narrow-mindedness are an essential part of adolescence – it’s all to do with the process of separation. That period of being torn between love and loathing is so painful at the time, but liberating when you snap out of it. We call it coming-of-age, but it has little to do with getting older. It has everything to do with perspective, and what has happened in your life to change that perspective.

Mim is such a wisecracking character – she has some terrific lines, like when she tells her best friend, ‘Your definition of fun is puking in a bush, and trying to get your feet on both side mirrors of Ryan’s car.’ Was it fun to write her, and to give her this smart-ass dialogue?

Mim was a lot of fun to write. It was challenging to show the vulnerability beneath her tough exterior and she has a great sense of humour in some pretty dire circumstances. In my experience, teenagers with Mim’s kind of upbringing can be darkly hilarious and utterly human in the best and worst of ways.

One thing you do in this book is show a much-maligned place – ‘A lost street in a forgotten suburb, an hour from the city’ – in a far more nuanced light than we generally see, in books, film, TV or even on the news. Was that something you were trying to do? And how did you know the place you wrote about so well – experience or research?

The majority of this novel is written from experience. I’m easily bogged down by research, particularly the sedentary type. I’d rather see, touch or taste something before I write about it. In All I Ever Wanted, I meant for the setting to be a character, too. Along with the flesh-and-blood characters, its layers are peeled to reveal its heart. In the later chapters I’ve deliberately mirrored the description. The words haven’t changed on the page, but I hope the reader can see place differently, as Mim does. She says, ‘It is what it is, and I know every inch.’ Knowing a place well reveals its dark corners and its moments of radiance, however transient they may be.

There’s some fantastic imagery in this book. Describing the local kingpin drug dealer, you write ‘Dr Frankenstein could have put him together out of spare parts’. Mim’s overweight mother is ‘lying on her couch, like leftover dough’. How important was it to you to get those images just right? Did you spend a lot of time crafting them?

I’ve worked in graphic design, so I think visually. I have scraps of paper with annotated sketches rather than a notebook full of chunks of prose. I do these sketches in the planning stage so I can often refer to a character or setting sketch and translate to the page quickly. I will often discard the first image I write – it’s invariably been done before. Writing vivid description is a joy when I can nail it and, for me, short and punchy is sweeter. It is important for me to get these images just right. I hate to backtrack when I’m reading. It’s a lot like the memory game – if you attach an image to a person, you’ll never forget them.

The loneliness of being different seemed to be a major thread in this book – Mim trying to be straight in her rough surrounds, Kate as an intelligent ‘nerd’ in a rough school, but also other characters who stand out for different reasons. Was this something you were interested in?

I remember how it felt to be different, torn between fitting in and just being myself. At one point, so much of my identity was shaped by my peers that I didn’t know who I was. And often I felt loneliest in a crowd. When Mim and Kate find each other, it’s like seeing themselves reflected as they would like to be. It’s surprising to Mim that Kate would want to be like her. Their friendship gives Mim the courage and conviction that she needs to be herself.

Mim says, ‘I think I’m an anticipation junkie’. Do you think that’s something especially intrinsic to being a teenager – a time when you’re in transition and deciding how you want that transition to play out? How does the thrill of anticipation play into the book?

I think that anticipation, looking forward, is essential to every person’s wellbeing. It makes life worth living and it’s particularly consuming for a teenager. For me, adolescence was a holding cell, a time when I seemed like I was on the edges of myself, waiting to fall in. I couldn’t be trusted; I had a curfew and I couldn’t buy beer or cigarettes, but I was expected to know what I wanted to be. How is that possible?

Mim is a younger me, stuck in limbo, waiting for fate to step in. But there comes a point when she has to stop dreaming, to do something. She realises that she’s responsible for her own inertia. Accountability and ambition don’t just kick in when you turn 18 – it’s an ongoing journey full of wrong turns and dead ends. Sometimes you just have to keep moving even if you don’t know where you’re going.

Who are some of your influences? What books or authors do you like to read?

I love writing that evokes a sense of time, or place. Tim Winton does this brilliantly, as does Marcus Zusak and Annie Proulx. S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders affected me deeply as a teenager – it was the first time I discovered pieces of my own life reflected in a book. To Kill a Mockingbird changed the way I read books forever. I read it so many times that I started reading as a writer, panning for the nuggets that hold such a compelling story together.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? by Peter Hedges was also a huge influence. I should never have watched the movie (although it was brilliant) because I’d imagined the characters as distinctly Australian. I could never read it again without hearing that American twang and seeing the Iowa landscape.

Recently, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help held me transfixed until I finished it and Kirsty Eagar’s Raw Blue made me wish that more books like it were around when I was a teenager.

Kabita Dhara interviews Australian author and former editor of our Readings Monthly newsletter, Peter Salmon, about his pitch-black satirical debut novel, The Coffee Story.

Teddy Everett, the head of the Everett and Sons Coffee company, is telling his ‘coffee story’ from his deathbed. As his story progresses, the reader becomes aware of how unreliable Teddy’s narrative is, and how unlikeable Teddy himself is. Of course, the idea of the main character being an anti-hero is not unusual, but what do you think having this kind of protagonist, as opposed to a traditional hero, allowed you to do creatively?

I like Teddy! I don’t agree with everything he says or does, but then again, neither does he! When I was writing him, I didn’t think in terms of ‘hero’ or ‘villain’. I wanted to create a character who was brutally honest – who tells the things about himself that most of us keep secret. It’s that dark river that runs under our public persona that interests me. And given that Teddy is dying, he’s got nothing to lose by telling the whole truth.

Even though Teddy is dying, and anger and guilt seem to be at the heart of his story, there is a lot of (dark) humour in Teddy’s storytelling. How important was the use of humour in writing your book?

I didn’t necessarily set out to write a humorous book – quite simply, the book grew out of finding Teddy’s voice, and Teddy, bless him, tends towards the scabrous and scatological. If there was one element I wanted to be deliberately ‘comic’, it was the form of the book itself. I have a bit of an aversion to the ‘well-made novel’ (whatever that may be – discuss!), so I liked having a central character who was oblivious to novelistic convention – he does tend to give away important plot points at inappropriate moments, and to break off from key moments in the story to chat about more, ahem, elemental concerns ...

Although Teddy’s story unfolds in a number of locations – America, England, Cuba – it is your depiction of Ethiopia that really stands out in my mind, so much so that it is like another character in the book. What sort of research did you do?

Too much – I actually ground to a halt at one stage as the temptations of showing off my extensive knowledge of Wikipedia started to overcome my desire to tell a good story. This was particularly tempting with Ethiopia – a country with a rich past, condemned to be viewed by the West through the prism of the 80s famine. But, in the end, I consciously put aside all my research and let the story tell its own truth, only going back afterwards to make sure there were no glaring errors. This seems to me to be the trick – to do the research, but then wear it lightly. But gosh, I know a lot of stuff – you don’t want me sitting next to you at a dinner party.

Coffee, its production and consumption, obviously plays a major role in your novel. There are beautifully evocative passages describing the roasting and grinding and preparation of the perfect cup of coffee, and some of your characters have an encyclopaedic knowledge of coffee. Where did your particular interest in coffee come from? And how do you brew your perfect cup?

Legend has it my first words were ‘cup coff’ so it was obviously there pretty early. And working at the wonderful Readings in Lygon Street cemented the love. It really is the best drink in the world. As for the perfect cup, the best coffee I’ve ever had was the coffee I had in Harar recently – a superb coffee is taken for granted, and any family that beckons you to join them will always have a glorious cup for you. I hate tea, by the way. Just so you know.

Teddy leads a cosmopolitan life, right from a young age when he moves to Ethiopia. This migration profoundly affects the family and its fortunes. How did your move from Australia to the UK affect your writing and the writing of this book?

Not greatly, as much of the work was done before the move, but I think the one key thing that informed my final pulling together of the book is the loneliness that comes from no longer being around your friends. Teddy is, essentially, a man without friends and his life has been one long conversation with himself. I’m not quite at that stage, although, having said that, now I’m wondering if I wrote these questions myself and am going mad. Best not to think too much.

Even as Teddy rails against his father, he is in some ways following in his footsteps. How do you think Teddy’s family inheritance, financial and otherwise, affects his own development? And do you think family inheritance is impossible to escape?

Absolutely. It fascinates me – how much of our hard-fought personality is in fact passed down to us. Even those things we inherit which we attempt to reject – it seems to me that they are part of the prison of our personality too. Basically, I wanted to fill Teddy with an almost Proustian sense of inheritance, and then watch him squirm. Endless fun.

You have a very distinctive style. Which books and writers do you think have influenced you stylistically? And which books and writers do you look to for inspiration?

As I said, I’m not a lover of the ‘well-crafted novel’ – I like a book that is not afraid to digress, to obfuscate, and do the odd thing that annoys the reader. I really like the strange ... Books like Memoirs of My Mental Illness by Judge Schreber, and The Robber by Robert Walser (best opening lines ever – ‘Edith loves him. More on this later.’). Plus Proust and Henry James, both of whom are far stranger than they are given credit for. But I guess if there is one book that informs The Coffee Story more than any other, it’s The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow – frankly, I owe him most of the royalties. Don’t tell him though. Please.

Hanif Kureishi has called Mary Horlock's novel The Book of Lies 'an unforgettable and brilliant debut’. We think highly of it as well as you can see in our review of the book. Phoebe Bond spoke with the author about childhood in Guernsey, the German Occupation of the island during WW2 and the challenges of writing unreliable narrators.

You were born in Australia but grew up in Guernsey in the Channel Islands where the novel is set. How did your own experiences of island life shape the writing of this book?

It was strange to move from a very big island to a very small one, although I was born in Perth, which in itself is quite separate from the rest of Australia. I like that separateness. Islands have these clearly defined boundaries, and a small island like Guernsey, even though it’s close to both England and France, has very much its own identity. Guernsey people are very proud to be neither French nor English! They have their own history and tradition. But island life can be isolating, and I think most people at one time or another have felt a certain ambivalence towards it – it’s easy to fall in love with the sea and the cliffs and how ‘manageable’ everything is, and the fact that everyone knows everyone breeds a sense of security. But this can become oppressive and alienating. Teenagers in particular have a difficult time, because once you’ve grown out of building dens on the cliffs and you want to get drunk and make all the usual adolescent mistakes, you can’t just hop on a bus and go to the next town to do it. My university friends would always laugh at me when I told them Guernsey only had one town and it was called ‘Town’, and a lot of my stories about growing up became a little comedy routine.

But growing up in Guernsey shaped me, I learned to use my imagination and to make my own entertainment, and that definitely helps when it comes to writing novels.

The story is told mainly from the perspectives of Cathy and Charlie, both 15 years old, born 40 years apart. Can you talk about the process you went through to find their unique voices?

Cathy, the teenage voice, came so quickly and easily it almost worried me. I began to wonder if I hadn’t been this desperately repressed 15-year-old all along! She was inspired partly by my own teenage diaries (littered with exclamation marks and block capitals and green highlighter pen) but also by a couple of girls I knew at school. There was this one girl who was terribly precocious – an only child with a much older father – she talked with a very posh accent (for Guernsey) and although she was clever, she was not as clever as she thought she was. A lot of the girls in my class loathed her. I found her strangely fascinating, and I would often try to bring her into a game or a conversation, and I was always amazed at how she would sabotage my efforts. She wasn’t pretty at all at school but I saw her recently and she has become stunningly beautiful. She is also, unfortunately, quite obnoxious.

The voice of Charlie was both easy and hard. It was easy because I knew quite a lot of elderly people in Guernsey and I have literally spent years hearing them talk. As a child I would loiter in the old covered market and listen to the old boys selling their wares. They often talked patois and it had this wonderful sing-song lilt. But it was hard to put it down on paper, because some of the sentences came out so elliptical and I wasn’t sure how that would travel. In the end I toned down the patois quite a lot.

In The Book of Lies the past continually interrupts the present. There is even a sense that what happened in the past, is predicting what takes place the present. What literary devices did you use to insinuate this?

I structured the stories very carefully so that although the chapters jump back and forth between past and present there’s always a tangible link between them. Specific places and family names keep recurring. I used places in particular. For example, there’ll be a chapter where Catherine is standing on the same spot her uncle was 40 years back, and the connections get stronger as the book moves along. I stuck to the geography of the island exactly, which helps to convey how small it is, as well.

The German occupation of Guernsey during World War II plays a major role in your novel. How important was historical accuracy? How did you go about making sense of the varied accounts of what happened during World War II in order to create Charlie’s world?

I do feel that novels about Guernsey set during the Occupation have tended towards cliché, and I was determined to resist that. I read absolutely everything (and I mean newspaper cuttings dating from the fifties and sixties, self-published memoirs, as well as the official history books) and of course I am very fortunate to know people who lived through the Occupation, so I had primary sources. I found most islanders were happy to discuss their memories, although I quickly realised that everyone had their own story to tell and I couldn’t rely too heavily on one person’s account. That said, I was very intrigued by the differences and disagreements, and these became integral to the novel.

Charlie’s story is very firmly based in reality; his attitudes and opinions are a careful blend of real-life characters who fell foul of the Nazis and who subsequently spoke out against informers. There were not many of them, but they were quite vocal for a time. I think islanders are now far more able to acknowledge that the Occupation was not a black-and-white affair, that there were many shades of grey.

A book by Booki.sh

Cathy is an unpopular, overweight 15-year-old. She is bright, and narrates her struggle with friendships, crushes and bullying in a way that transported me straight back to the trials and tribulations of being a teenager. Did you write this book with a teenage readership in mind?

Someone recently asked me who was my target audience for The Book of Lies. I replied ‘my immediate family’ and that’s the honest truth! I didn’t take it for granted that I would get my first novel published, so I wrote it for my mother (whose age we have conveniently forgotten), my grandmother (who was married in 1939) and yes, for my teenage nieces. I wanted to cut across the generations because that’s just what the story does. I think it does definitely have a big draw for teenagers, but in my experience most people remember their teenage years vividly, or try to equally hard to forget them, and I wanted it to be about the push-pull mechanism of memory.

The Book of Lies is full of secrets and deceit and as you read, you become convinced that both Charlie and Cathy are somewhat unreliable narrators. What challenges and opportunities did this present for you, as a writer?

To me this wasn’t a challenge; I tried not to think about it consciously. What I mean is, we are all unreliable narrators: we edit and shape the story of our lives. It’s not about outright deceit; it’s just what happens when we try to put experience into words. There is inevitably a layer of interpretation that can change everything. I was very struck by this even within the narrative of my childhood diaries, which I wrote quickly and directly. I was very good at turning something embarrassing into something funny (with the addition of a few exclamations marks and an explosive squiggle). It’s partly a way of coping. I suspect it’s our inconsistencies that make us interesting.

What made you decide to include footnotes in your novel? And were you ever worried it might distract from the narrative?

Cathy is the girl who writes ten-page essays when two would do. She over-interprets, she over-explains. She is all about the footnotes. Sometimes she is trying to be funny, other times she just wants to show off. But she is also copying her father – a self-professed ‘Expert’ whose use of footnotes is, I should point out, much more minimal and reasonable. I did worry they might occasionally distract from the story, so I cut a lot of them. Yes, there was so much more, dear reader!

The novel has garnered high praise from writers including Hanif Kureishi and Marie Darrieussecq. Who are some of your favourite writers? Did any influence you in the writing of this book?

I read so widely and weirdly, I can’t really think of an author who directly inspired me. Would it be strange to say Patricia Highsmith? I love Highsmith – in her novels madness simmers under this taut, smooth surface, and she uses humour brilliantly. I have a very deep admiration for Peter Carey, as well – the extraordinary way he can summon a voice. But, of course, considering the art of the footnote, I have to mention David Foster Wallace, whose writing I find brilliant, disturbing, unbelievably poignant and often hilarious. You have to find humour in the dark stuff. Well, I try to.

Malcolm Knox is the author of three novels, Summerland, A Private Man and Jamaica. He is also a Walkley Award-winning journalist and the author of one non-fiction book, Secrets of the Jury Room, an account of his experience as a juror, and a history of the jury system. He spoke to Fiona Capp about his latest, much-anticipated novel, The Life.

The first thing that hits you when you open Malcolm Knox’s The Life is the narrative voice. Half demotic poetry, half twitchy stream-of-consciousness, it plunges the reader into the head of the tormented, delusional Dennis Keith, a mercurial champion surfer-turned-recluse who now lives with his mother in a retirement unit in Coolangatta. Full of sly wordplay and ironic edgy bravado, it’s a voice that perfectly captures the eternally adolescent energy of surfing culture: a voice distilled from the conversations that Knox, himself a surfer, hears around him when he’s out in the water. ‘It’s not the Tim Winton voice that you hear in Breath – I think that Breath is beautifully written but these men don’t speak in a beautiful way. They speak in a rough, attenuated way with a limited vocabulary. It has its own rhythm and that’s what I wanted to trap,’ Knox says.

Ghostwriting sports biographies, as Knox does when he isn’t writing novels or journalism, has given him an ear for the idiosyncrasies of speech and a habit of playing ventriloquist. As a ghostwriter, however, he is not permitted to put the real voice of the subject on the page. ‘It’s got to be a conventional written voice. The constraints I was breaking free of were the constraints on voice. Here, I was able to put in all the grunts and non-sequiturs and repetitions, an essentially incoherent person’s voice. We’re not allowed to do that as a ghostwriter.’

There is a strong sense, in The Life, of the novelist letting rip, and of the exhilaration that goes with this abandon, particularly in the humour of the book which is sometimes manic, sometimes deadpan, and sometimes satirical. When surf magazines and filmmakers come looking for Dennis years after his breakdown, his mother, Mo, sends them packing. ‘I wasn’t available to say no. I was “incapacitated”, she meant to say, except what she said was, I was “decapitated”. When they come knocking – them magazines, biographers, movie scouts, so-called TV producers – Mo tell them “speak to our solicitors”. Then she give them a solicitor which don’t exist. That sent the right message sent it real well.’

This narrative risk-taking is fitting for a story about a character who is himself a risk-taker: a surfer of extreme daring and freakish talent who lives ‘The Life’ and then lives to regret it. For the surfers at Dennis’s local break, The Life is the dream of being free to do nothing but surf all day, every day, and implicitly, about buying into the myth of the hotshot surfer as a larger-than-life hero or ‘legend’. It’s a myth in which everyone from the surf media and surf industry to Dennis’s family and the general public is complicit.

Dennis Keith becomes that legend, known as the enigmatic DK, his signature line: ‘Well yeah ... but no!’ The fact that he’s riven with contradictions only adds to his aura. He’s desperate to prove he’s the best but can’t handle all the attention. (He is at his happiest inside the barrel of a wave where no one else can see him.) He wants the benefits of fame but longs to be left alone. He’s intensely territorial in the surf but despises the pack mentality; a surfer who hates other surfers. In other words, he has the freedom, says Knox, of the unhinged person to be passionately contradictory. ‘He’s a total believer in the violence and aggression of competition and a total rejecter of the violence of competition as well.’

But you can’t be insanely competitive – he is a compulsive, at times an almost homicidal, hassler and saboteur of his opponents in the water – and expect that there won’t be consequences. Nor can you escape the idolising, the scrutiny and the hero-worship that goes with fame. At the height of his success, everything starts to spiral out of control. He gets into drugs, his girlfriend is murdered, and he disappears from the surfing circuit and into the paranoid world of his head.

In this era of celebrity culture, Dennis’s fate is a cautionary tale for our times. ‘Updike said fame is a mask that eats into the face. We all know that, but it doesn’t stop most of us chasing it. I see DK as one of a generation that was discovering that fame is all cost, no benefit,’ says Knox. ‘I don’t know if he has an exceptional insight into it, but I like that DK is ironic about it; he certainly isn’t chasing it. Yet his talent made adulation impossible to avoid.’

Knox well understands the contradictions inherent in DK’s competitive spirit. ‘One thing I guess I have in common with him is in being extremely competitive when it comes to a ritual with set rules and boundaries. I am a crap tennis player, for example, but on the court I will still do everything in my power to destroy you, while also detesting competitiveness in the wider sense of people comparing where they are “at” in their lives, what they own, and so on. DK’s problem is that his excellence in the former kind of competitiveness means the world will foist the latter kind on to him: turn him into a hero when the idea of a hero, being compared with others, and owned by others, is his idea of hell.’

Knox set the novel in the 1960s and 70s in order to explore surf culture at a key moment when it was morphing from a laid-back pastime into an organised, commercialised, professional sport. This transformation is mirrored in the transformation of Coolangatta from a modest coastal town of fibro shacks into the concrete jungle of the Gold Coast. While his satirical target is the dark side of surf culture – the aggression, competitiveness, tribal mentality, territoriality and drugs (the sexism doesn’t get much of a look in) – The Life can also be read more generally as a satire on the competitiveness of modern life, a competitiveness which he believes we do our best to mask. He sees this competitiveness in everything from driving in traffic to corporate life to the way we raise our children. ‘I know I’m generalising, but I do see a big change having happened in my lifetime. Eastern cities are more affluent, more desperate places. The mass cultural competitiveness which took a breather in the 60s and early 70s was beginning to cough itself back to life in DK’s time, until you get to the stage now where a cultural phenomenon like Mad Men rings such a bell because people recognise the hyper-competitiveness of the 50s as part of the way we live now.’

Just as Knox shares aspects of DK’s competitiveness, so too does he understand the impulse to idolise one’s heroes. Writing in The Monthly about the American cult author David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, he frankly admits to being a ‘howling fantod’ – a Wallacism devotees use to describe themselves – and to regarding Wallace as a towering genius. Asked about Wallace’s influence on The Life, he says, ‘For me, when I read David Foster Wallace, every time I look up from the page I feel sharpened and more receptive. I feel like I want to write. Not necessarily that I want to write like him, or could write like him. I feel that writing is important.’ He also admires Wallace’s humour, the mix of high and low cultural references. ‘While he is brainier than me or anybody I can imagine, he’s not a high-falutin’ kind of speaker, there’s no effort to rise above the ordinary vernacular.’

Which brings us back to the defining quality of The Life: DK’s distinctive voice. At first glance, the way the narrative appears on the page – the truncated, disjointed, often single-line sentences set out like prose poetry – gives the impression that this is going to be a demanding or difficult read. And yet, such is the pull of this voice, like a rip traveling out through the surf, that the reader is quickly drawn into DK’s world with all its outrageous, treacherous and bewildering undercurrents. We watch with appalled fascination as Dennis, who has been living in a state of pathological denial, starts to grapple ‘in fear and trembling’ with the dark truths of his past.

Fiona Capp is a novelist and a surfer — author of the captivating memoir That Oceanic Feeling. Her latest book is My Blood's Country.

Phoebe Bond talks to Georgia Blain about her new novel Too Close To Home, writing about and engaging with the politics of the times and the challenges of being a non-Aboriginal writer writing Aboriginal characters.

This is the first adult novel you’ve written in seven years. How did the writing of this book compare to previous novels? Can you talk a bit about the impetus to write Too Close To Home and the challenges you faced along the way?

I started the book when I was writing my memoir, Births Deaths Marriages. It was my fiction hit on the side as I tried to pin down my own life – and initially it was something I wrote in scraps, not sure whether I had a novel. However, once the memoir was finished, and the publicity was done, I returned to it – sure that there was a story there.

The initial impetus came from attending a talk given by David Marr in which he argued that writers had stopped writing about Australia in the present – that we were failing to face up to the issues of the day. It was the midst of the Howard era; the time of Mark Latham’s run at leadership, and a period when inner city people with left politics were routinely dismissed as the out of touch latte sipping elite.

I felt there were a few responses to Marr’s criticism:

• artists need time to let responses germinate and brew
• artists felt disenfranchised, hopeless and powerless during this period, none of which is conducive to creativity
• and for me, I was always aware of something uncomfortable inside, a sense that it was very easy for me to espouse particular politics, to express outrage at xenophobia, racism and fear politics from within an easy white middle class inner city ghetto where I spent all my time hanging with people very like myself.

This sense of discomfort became all the more heightened when my daughter first started primary school – and like the characters in the book, we lived in an area just outside the fashionable parts of the inner west, an area that is on the turn, and the school she attended was very mixed. I realised how we tend to congregate with people like ourselves, how little we often see of lives that our different to our own, and I wanted to move my characters out of their comfort zone, to really put their politics to the test.

Although it took a long time, the book was actually a joy to write. It’s very character driven, and the more I wrote the more I wanted to know what happened to these people. I wanted them to be alive, intelligent, aware of their flaws – people that readers felt they knew.

When I finally finished, so much had happened in the Australian political landscape (we’d lost Howard and Rudd), and yet in many ways it felt like so little had changed. Political campaigns were still run on a hideous mix of fear and hip pocket incentives. And so I decided to update the book to very close to the current time.

Set in an inner-city suburb of Sydney at the time of Kevin Rudd's overthrow, the characters in Too Close To Home seem to have a strong and fairly unified stance on Australia’s changing political climate in 2010. Who were you intending as the readership for this book? Do you think it will appeal to the politically unengaged?

I really don’t think about the intended readership as I write. I suppose I try and write a book that I would like to read. I want a story that pulls me along, characters that are vivid and engaging, and ultimately I hope that I will be both moved and forced to see the world a little differently. I don’t think anyone is completely politically unengaged, but even if you were very close to the end of that spectrum, I would think that the human element of the story – the dilemmas that the central characters face in their relationships (and this is political in itself) would pull you in.

Too Close To Home comprises a cast of characters in their forties, who work in the arts, who vote Green, who have children outside the confines of the nuclear family, and who you say, espouse beliefs that have become outdated and irrelevant. What propelled you put these characters under the microscope?

I tend to explore issues that intrigue me in my own life. I wanted to put political beliefs that I hold to the test. I wanted to put the kind of people that I know and live with and spend all my time with right there under the microscope – to be brutally honest and to make myself squirm a little uncomfortably in doing so.

Many non-Aboriginal writers are too scared to write Aboriginal characters into their novels for fear of breaching cultural codes. What were some of the challenges and rewards of creating Shane, Darlene and Archie, the Aboriginal family in Too Close To Home?

I was very aware of the difficulties non-Aboriginal writers can face in creating Aboriginal characters but one of the key issues that I wanted to explore was racism, and the divide between black and white Australia. And I didn’t want to do this in a simplistic way – the good Aboriginal characters, the bad whites, the obvious examples of racism. I hate reading books or watching movies where racism is reduced to simplistic extremes. I think it’s dangerous when we do this because it allows us to congratulate ourselves far too easily – we can tell ourselves that we’re not like that. In fact, racism is far more insidious. It’s there in all the assumptions we hold as soon as we meet someone, the quick ways in which we will pigeon hole people, the fact that we so often hang with people like ourselves, rarely moving out of our cultural comfort zone.

I really wanted Shane and his kids, Darlene and Archie, to be completely real. This was absolutely essential. I didn’t want him to just a drunk, or just a spiritual elder. He’s very rough around the edges, politically savvy, shy, a drinker, a neglectful parent and a very loving parent. His kids are exuberant, confident, cheeky and exhausting. They live in a different way to central white characters – and bridging this divide is extremely difficult for Freya, the main female character.

The novel is essentially divided into two halves, Summer and Winter, and your prose beautifully evokes Australia’s climate. Can you talk about how seasonal change and the ever-present sense of weather informed your creative processes?

Since I’ve moved further west, I’ve become very aware of how stinking hot this city can be. I write in little fibro sunroom that is blistering in summer and freezing in winter – so there’s a certain inevitability to the presence of the seasons in my work!

Freya’s friends Mikhala, Anna and Louise, are all older, career-focused women who want (and struggle) to have babies later in life. There was a real sense of them having a finite amount of time. What drove you to explore this theme?

At the time I had my daughter I was 34 (and termed a geriatric mother!). I was fortunate in having work and a partner and fertility - but so many women I know found themselves in their late thirties and early forties missing one of these ingredients. This can be incredibly painful. It’s a dividing time – you suddenly discover you’re on one side of the fence or the other – and for a lot of women (not all) there can be considerable grief involved in this, which isn’t always recognised by the world. I also hang with a lot of gays and lesbians who have had kids outside the confines of the traditional heterosexual family structure, and I’ve known single heterosexual women who’ve looked at ways of doing it on their own. Those last gasps of fertility or possibility when it comes to having kids are emotional, fraught and fascinating – perfect fodder for a novelist.

What are some of your favourite books and writers? Are there any that influenced you in the writing of this book?

I’m terrible at answering this question! I forget the name of everything as soon as I read it. At the moment I’m on a Colm Toibin binge, which is wonderful; I love short stories – Richard Ford and Alice Munroe in particular. I thoroughly enjoyed Fiona McGregor’s Indelible Ink. So, I suppose my ‘bent’ is fairly naturalistic – but I want my books to be rich and complex, to pull me right in, so that I’m completely unaware of the craft, just utterly absorbed.

Craig Sherborne is an extraordinary Australian writer – one who burst onto the local literary scene with an impressive splash with his childhood memoir, Hoi Polloi, in 2005, followed by its adolescent-based sequel, Muck (2007). His many fans include J.M. Coetzee, Clive James and Hilary Mantel, while Australia’s most famous literary critic, Peter Craven, called him ‘one of nature’s writers’. His much-awaited debut novel, The Amateur Science of Love, continues to be as ‘gruesomely honest’ (Hilary Mantel) as his memoirs, and is written with the same irresistible blend of darkly poignant humour and moral courage. Helen Garner has already called Sherborne’s first foray into fiction a ‘fast-moving, sharply focused, fantasy-shattering little thunderclap of a book’. Now, Jon Bauer, award-winning author of Rocks in the Belly, adds his name to the long and distinguished roll-call of Sherborne admirers, as he interviews him and introduces us to The Amateur Science of Love.

Love, let’s face it, is the topic. Love is at the heart of generations of literature, film, oral tradition. If our love of love isn’t instilled through our mother’s milk, it’s promptly spoon-fed to us through fairytales. And we continue to happily devour it, ever after. Most commonly though, love stories are about a struggle against external forces: class, family divisions, war, issues of race or colour. The majority are merely extensions of the trajectory typical to fairytales.

How refreshing then to read a love story that’s generated by internal struggles. A story where the impediments to love are the characters themselves. A story that acknowledges the inherent human need to destroy intimacy, even as we long for and nurture it. Craig Sherborne has achieved all this with The Amateur Science of Love, both his first novel and his third book. With two extremely well-received memoirs – Muck and Hoi Polloi – behind him, his debut novel will be scrutinised, as well as welcomed, for standing at an interesting confluence between memoir and fiction. The two genres often have more in common than we think.

‘The path Tilda and Colin follow, the fate they endure, many aspects have come from my own life,’ says Sherborne. ‘The sort of fiction that has always interested me is where there is clearly an author’s lived experience driving the book. You can tell by the details. Real events have been joined up with imagined events, imagined people.’

Narrator Colin, a sheltered country boy from New Zealand, is almost a decade younger than the cosmopolitan Tilda, who he meets while working at a London backpacker’s hostel. She’s already been married, and has sworn herself off men in order to focus on her painting career. Colin is new to adulthood – less steering towards his own future than swerving away from the pressure to step into his father’s farming boots. No surprise, then, that he’s so easily swept up in Tilda’s tornado personality.

After an alternately charming and wrenching meander through the early days of falling in love, Sherborne transports the story to the wheatbelt of Australia, the lovers living off Tilda’s meagre savings and the few paintings she can sell, while Colin finds his way into agricultural journalism. From the start, their relationship is richly seeded with obvious incompatibilities, buried under the initial deluge of their love.

Sherborne’s prose is what you fall for first. The enlivened, playful language (echoed in short, clipped chapters) propels the reader easily through the enchanting sections, as well as sweetening the more tumultuous or bitter scenes, echoing the bittersweet tone of his much-loved memoirs:

‘Congressing’ was what Tilda preferred to call it. Sex was too impersonal a word for our activities. Making love was too ordinary, a term everybody used. Whereas congressing made us sound like a two-person nation. A parliament of us, all to ourselves.

As charming as fiction is, few readers can resist the lure of unpicking it to find out how it works, peeping through the venetian blinds of a writer’s sentences in search of the artist behind. This is especially true when the artist in question is a notable memoirist. ‘I think of fiction as imagining a different truth. One that is true for the novel being written,’ says Sherborne. ‘Lying, dishonesty and bad faith don’t apply. I certainly didn’t lie in my memoirs. They were my past world rebuilt on the page; portraiture using the paint of words and dramatic scenes.’ He confirms that those earlier books were ‘a great help’ when it came to writing his first novel, with many mastered techniques coming in handy: ‘the handling of first-person tone, rhythm, pace and structure, all that’. Sherborne, like his narrator, lived in the Victorian wheatbelt for a number of years and worked as a reporter for an agricultural newspaper. He’s not a fan of researched novels, saying ‘they come up second best to a novel that spills out of actual experience’.

Colin has more trouble telling the truth than his creator does. While not easily described as ‘likeable’, the flawed Colin feels roundly real, even as he hides from the truth – about the growing lump in Tilda’s breast and the viability of his relationship. Eventually, he begins to strain against the everydayness of their love, finding himself drawn to a sultry and less blandly-familiar woman from the community. ‘Here we have a man who in the end is 30 years old, has been tested, failed, but has enough self reflection to know his failure and not be ignorant,’ reflects Sherborne on his fictional alter-ego. ‘He wants to do better than that failure. He wants redemption. He has lived enough to have gleaned a bit of wisdom and know that he wants to embrace life and be happy. He’s a better man than I was at his age.’

Sherborne has not dispensed with truth then, rather embellished and altered it by folding it into fiction. But his is not the kind of storytelling that softens hard reality into the airbrushed hyperbole of romance. Colin and Tilda’s story is as suffused with love’s gritty realism as it is with its beguiling charm. There’s also the solidity of characters with good and bad sides, rather than good or bad characters. In this way, Sherborne’s protagonists are a convincing blend of light and shadow.

Over the years, as their relationship deepens and heady romance is replaced with everyday life, love exposes Tilda and Colin’s vulnerability, their deceit, spite and occasional heartlessness. All of it reinforces the idea that it is our blinkered search for our own happiness that makes us hurt one another, not inherent cruelty. Love, after all, is often mentioned in the same breath as blindness. ‘Tilda and Colin fall in love in that typically fierce and unprepared way we do. It blindsides them, and as their relationship develops, the blindsiding continues. Fate tests them. It probes deep into their very natures. How many of us would ever pass the serious test of fate on our natures? The more dependent on each other, the more unreliable to each other they become.’

The Amateur Science of Love is about how we destroy our own love, as well as how relationships are pushed and probed at from outside. It shows that the very equilibrium of loving someone over many years can unbalance love’s charm. Colin is gradually deterred by his very closeness to Tilda. The more familiar she is, the more real (flawed), so the less romantic his image of her becomes. Love is one of the few ways a person’s true self is expressed. Depending on the kind of person we are it may ennoble us, crush us, derange us, and redeem us. As Colin puts it, ‘Love is not simply sensations of the skin. More is demanded of you than sensations.’ That goes to the heart of the novel: falling in love is so viscerally experienced it is not even an experience, it is an act of nature – like its twin force, grief, which also comes into play over the years spanned by the novel, particularly as it gallops towards its inevitably dramatic climax.

Thankfully, this story is big enough to include the light and the dark, love and its twin, staying with Tilda and Colin long after the initial beguiling force of love has passed. This reminded me, as I read, that most stories – especially films – end with the wedding, as if that’s the summit of love, rather than just the first day of a marriage.

This may be Sherborne’s first work of fiction but unsurprisingly for a memoirist, it’s a work that rings pretty true. ‘There is surely a duty,’ he says, ‘if you are serious about your art, to show convincingly what it is to be a particular person in a particular time in particular circumstances.’

The Amateur Science of Love is enchanting without being saccharine, real without being brutal. Sherborne has delivered a narrative that expresses what we should mean when we talk about true love.

Jon Bauer is the author of Rocks in the Belly.