"The Courier-Mail" carried reviews of three of the novels on the Miles Franklin Award shortlist. Which raises the question: why not all four?
Anyway, Carpentaria, by Alexis Wright, is reviewed by Diane Dempsey: "It is Wright's teasing, seductive, cackling voice which finally gives Carpentaria its authenticity... It is a voice which carries within it the knowledge and burden of her characters' history and the supremacy of spirituality to a mob of Aborigines who deem it wise to make their home on a rubbish tip in the small coastal town of Desperance in the Gulf of Carpentaria...On balance the book's sense of mischief is subdued by its epic design and poetic ambitions. It asks for patience of the reader in order to follow the meandering line of the plot...But the one thing Wright never does in this book of her people is proselytise."
Peter Carey's Theft: A Love Story is reviewed by Rosemary Sorenson: "Recklessly funny is the way the publishers have chosen to describe Peter Carey's new novel, Theft...But the 63-year-old was not, it appears, in a wholly jolly mood when he wrote his story about a fading artist and his scary half-wit brother...The clash of desires -- between naughty and censorious -- crushes this, Carey's eighth, novel...[the main] characters made for loving...That wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the fact they are not made properly for living either. That is, they don't come fully alive in Carey's ferocious, exhausting, adrenalin-rush blast of a novel."
And Careless, by Deborah Robertson, is examined by Bron Sibree, in what is more an interview than a review.
