In an article published in yesterday's "Sunday Age", Sonya Hartnett confirms that she is "Cameron S. Redfern", author of a controversial new novel.
"Landscape With Animals is different from my other work: its aims are different, its audience is different, its themes more complex, its touch more subtle, and it seemed fitting it should bear a name fresher than my own. I am not trying to hide from it, or deny it, or treat it off-handedly. If anything, this book is a more original and true story than any I have written."
She also answers those critics who have described it as pornographic, saying the novel "is not pornography because it is, at its heart, a book about love: it examines the rare and extreme kind of love that is balanced on the finest of blades, love that can tip people either way: into joy and fulfilment and the creation and continuation of life, or into moral and emotional devastation and the termination of life...It is the kind of love that people die for, and kill for, the love that heals or ravages hearts. This is an affair, but it is in no way a fling. The characters are steeped in the principles of social existence, in discipline and responsibility, and the novel explores what happens when these principles are no longer sufficient to keep a person vital and afloat - and apart."
My view: if Hartnett's written it, then it's worth reading.
