Word: novels
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...surplus crops like wheat and into something really different, like raising llamas or growing ginseng. That, at least, was the advice given 5,500 farmers from 42 states who gathered last week in Des Moines for Adapt 100, a conference sponsored by Successful Farming magazine that presented 100 novel ideas for ailing farms...
...vast colonial trilogy, which began with 1988's Captivity Captive and ended with the 1993 Miles Franklin Award?winning The Grisly Wife, was written from notes made while Hall walked his dogs at his beloved headland home on the far south coast of New South Wales. His most recent novel, The Last Love Story (2004), was another peripatetic affair, penciled between coffee shops in Melbourne and Berlin. "If you live long enough, and I seem to have lived an awful long time, you accumulate things," says the sociable Hall, 71, who also happens to be a skilled baroque recorder player...
With his books, Hall is similarly incapable of being restrained. And in an age when reports of literature's demise are a constant dirge, Hall has helped keep the novel alive with his own wildly unpredictable outpourings. From meticulously researched historical sagas to dystopian futurism (Kisses of the Enemy), parallel universes (The Last Love Story) and magic realism (The Island in the Mind), the thrice Booker Prize?nominated novelist has surfed genres seemingly at random. Hall is an automatic writer in the Surrealist sense, giving vent to his dark subconscious. So it hardly comes as a surprise when the author...
...anything, Hall has emerged from the flames a finer writer. Begun well before the blaze, his new novel Love Without Hope (Picador; 269 pages) carries the spirit of regeneration that comes after loss. Here the landscape of "hearty little horsewoman" Lorna Shoddy is also transfigured by fire. "A bell of silence clapped itself down over the blackened trees and turf," writes Hall, "her world curling at the edges and noiselessly crepitating, little spits of silence dodging among the ashes." Stripped of her beloved Australian Waler horses, and without the support of family, Mrs. Shoddy is reduced, by all appearances...
Among other things, Love Without Hope is about duty of care: society's, for strangers like Mrs. Shoddy who hover beyond town fringes; and the reader's, for a character worthy of compassion and completion. Despite seemingly absurdist and sardonic elements, the novel is simpler and less fanciful than Hall's previous ones. It is set in 1983, when in N.S.W. there did reign a Department of, and Master in, Lunacy. And even today one doesn't have to travel far to find larger-than-life Country Women's Association presidents, murderous property developers or delusional district nurses. These...