BOOKS with MEG MASON
A LITTLE AREA At the end of 2018, I was on a book program, a live panel discussion with two doyennes of the publishing industry and me, a doyenne of my own kitchen; talking about our best books of the year.
Bookshop shelves had bowed under the weight of good Australian fiction that year so it made sense that the doyennes listed between them Boy Swallows Universe (Trent Dalton), The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (Holly Ringland), The Shepherd’s Hut (Tim Winton) and others. I was surprised that by the finish, neither had named a single international title, since it was also the year of Olivia Laing’s Crudo, Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under and Richard Powers’ The Overstory. Rachel Cusk gave us Kudos, the last of her trilogy. Karl Ove Knausgaard concluded My Struggle and I concluded mine with his. And then, of course there was Sally Rooney’s Normal People which threw critics into such paroxysms of delight, we all felt duty-bound to read it, even those of us with legally recognised relationships and jobs and thus not her target demographic. They were all on my list, as well as the Patrick Melrose trilogy (Edward St Aubyn) which, not new, was new to me and I was fizzing to talk about it. So finally, the moderator said, and now, Meg, what were your favourite Australian books of the year? No doubt it had said so in the email invitation which, even less doubt, I would
have read on my phone, at traffic lights or the fish counter, intending to come back to it later, forgetting to, and thus, missing the key word, ‘Australian’. The studio lights seemed to get so much hotter in the seconds I spent trying to come up with one, then trying to think of a way to say without saying that I hadn’t read a single Australian book that year, nor could I recall an Australian title I had read ever, because I don’t really go in for local fiction. My defence is flimsy, although twopronged. First prong, much of Australian fiction deals with landscape, but I grew up in New Zealand. The landscape in my bones is mountains and kauri forests and dark green rivers. When I first moved here, before I got my eye in, the Australian landscape just seemed brown, and hot. I see the beauty of it now, but there still isn’t a sense of deep recognition, the feeling of home, which I feel as though I need in a book to love it. Second prong, I didn’t read when I was young so I never did the Alibrandis and Alison Ashleys, which are surely preparatory texts for future enjoyment of the Moriartys. When I finally came to reading, I had all the classics to get through and once I’d done
