The Literary Lunch: Selected Stories By Geoffrey Dean, Hobart: Roaring Forties Press, 2004, 196 pages, paperback, $20.00. Reviewed by Bianca Ferguson in the June 2005 issue. Help more readers find out about this article
 Slashdot
 Digg
 StumbleUpon
 Del.icio.us
Multi-award winning Australian writer Geoffrey Dean proves once and for all, in his collection The Literary Lunch, that he is a writer in the true sense of the word. It is not mere 'stories' he writes, but people, lives, conditions. Dean reveals ordinary lives that are less than ordinary, and, for the majority of us, lives that never will be known first hand. He hints that the things we dismiss as unnecessary, as futile, or worthless are in fact more worthwhile and important than they initially seem.
One of my favorite stories is 'Clown/Juggler/Magician and the Literary Barbecue'. It is about an entertainer who sees a literary barbecue as the perfect opportunity to sell his entertainment. He performs his act, harrassing the onlookers and receiving scattered applause, and then, as 'admiration is not enough': He places the hat on the grass and whips out a water-pistol from under his decorated shirt. His voice mocks aggression. 'Okay you lot,' he snarls, 'put your money and your valuables into the hat or get a jet of filthy Torrens fair between the eyes ...' he is not impressed. 'Pathetic,' he snarls. He sweeps the gun around again. (p 91) There is an air of impending doom, the scene is described hauntingly, deliberately. The children at the barbecue proceed to steal his novelty rubber eggs and water pistol, they mock and belittle him and shoot water at him. A predictable situation is reversed as the formerly menacing clown becomes an object of pity: his eggs ('they are real after all') are broken and cooked on the barbecue. But the job of a clown is to bring joy to his audience, and therein lies the irony, and also, the sadness.
This type of sadness, and the underlying sinister aspect of seemingly ordinary situations, thread themselves though most of the better stories, to add another layer to their apparently prosaic character. Simple situations become horrifying, indirectly, and seemingly without cause, which contributes to the profound impact of these remarkable pieces.
Further, it is this raw emotion that allows readers to identify with the characters: the unemployed writer, they stay-at-home father, the homeless youth who does not want to be found, the inmate, the man who's wife feeds him his pet pigeons. It is not their lives, their problems, their situations that we can relate to and connect to, but the sadness of Dean's characters at being underappreciated, their desperate loneliness, their melancholia at futile homemaking duties.
The one contention I have is that there is no ambition in the stories. More than once, I confess, I found myself flicking to find some action, some happiness, some color to what becomes the dull repetition of fatal human flaws and wretchedness. There is no doubt that Dean is a master when it comes to depicting the unfortunate aspects of the human condition, particularly in the shorter pieces. The starkness and irony of Dean's writing is its greatest asset, and what makes him one of our very best short story writers, but at the same time this becomes a drawback when not interspersed with lighter pieces.
The more powerful of his tales, such as 'A Week in the Life of the Most Unemployable Man in the Country', 'Leroy', and 'Missing Persons' are so poignant and uncannily human that they are met and encountered by the reader, not as deliberately crafted fictions, but more significantly as life pieces and as truths intimately and secretly told, person to person. Most of the stories describe abject humiliation, misery, poverty and helpless despair; yet somehow, and for reasons that are difficult to pinpoint, one is compelled to read on, and to feel somehow privileged to be doing so. This is a book to read in the heart of the city, with people milling all around, pigeons, dirt, gritty with life, and is a book to be read, then shared, and never forgotten. Citation - Bianca Ferguson. 'Review: The Literary Lunch: Selected Stories by Geoffrey Dean' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 30 July 2010].
Back Cover Blurb - A feast of fiction celebrating nearly 50 years of acclaimed writing.
The 19 short stories in this collection are a kind of 'greatest hits' retrospective of a distinguished literary career that is far from over.
GEOFF Dean's stories have appeared around the world, even alongside those of Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut, and he has received numerous awards and high praise from luminaries such as Thea Astley.
In fact, Astley was among the first to note what she described as his 'haunting and poetic quality'. Various critics have compared aspects of his work with Anton Chekov, Katherine Mansfield, Somerset Maugham, A.E. Coppard and William Faulkner.
In the decades since his first publication, Dean's mastery of the short story has been proved by the publication of scores of his stories around the world, and a truly enviable swag of prizes, awards, commendations, laudatory reviews and praise.
His major credits include the State of Victoria Short Story Award and the Northern Territory Literary Awards Arafura Short Story Award. The title story from his collection Summerbird and Other Stories (William Collins 1989) was translated for an anthology of Australian writers published in China in 1992. His story 'The Town that Died' was selected by the late Thea Astley as compiler, for inclusion in Coast to Coast: Australian Stories 1969-1970, and in 1986 was made into an ABC TV tele-drama broadcast in Australia and sold overseas.
|
About the Network 
Issue 44
Popular Music: Practices, Formations and Change - Australian Perspectives
