Paul Fulcher

Word, what an outstanding novel this is (from 2015)! Makes me feel once more that Oz so badly needs a Goldsmiths-style prize to give bold fictions such as this some exposure (they turn up on the edges of existing prizes sometimes, but seldom seem to get s/listed or win)

Panthers and the Museum of Fire is about a woman returning a manuscript to the sister of its deceased writer. It is immersively written in a stream-of-consciousness style that takes the reader directly into her reflections on life, friendship and, importantly, her own writing.

The unpretentious truths and agonies, soul-searching and tenuous self-regard of the artist’s life are brilliantly and immediately depicted, in writing that deploys European modernist literary techniques in an Australian setting. In Jen Craig’s novella, voice, character and vocation combine in a sophisticated and accessible narrative.

It is interesting that you can see something in this work that could be compared to Joyce’s Ulysses. If this is so, it is completely unconscious. Of course, there is the walking through a city – I can see that – and the way the main action or event in the book occurs in a single day – a single morning, even (and before work!). But apart from that: my piece is one, undivided work – a single throw, if you like, and is actually much closer to Proust, despite its brevity. But having said that, I can see that the simple fact that my narrator is a woman, and that she is also rather breathlessly pressed in her narration, could have something of Molly Bloom’s monologue about it – a kind of Molly Bloom taking over the male patterning of things but not one to play into the fantasies that they might have of her, nor even what women often have about themselves, as sexual beings, as women. I think Orhan Pamuk’s short novel, The New Life, was an important influence on this novella. Although I have read it twice, I haven’t read it for some years – and all that remains of it in my head, apart from some images of people hurrying along the streets carrying grey plastic bags, and the extraordinary glare and speed of night bus journeys, is something of its urgency and its focus – its sheer determination. Another important influence has been Thomas Bernhard, who was the first to show me that so much didn’t need to be written at all, that you could cut to the quick – which for me, as for him, I think, are the driving nature of thoughts and the way they play out. I grew up in a household that was presided over by a very dramatic, hyperbolic and vividly expressive if usually contradictory monologist and it took me the work of Thomas Bernhard – first Christina Stead’s, but later Thomas Bernhard’s, to make me aware, very slowly, of what I could do with this dominating part of my experience in terms of form.

I do think place is important. It always makes a huge difference where I am and where I walk, which is probably why I am such a creature of habit. Perhaps, too, that’s why I’ve been living in the same crumbling sandstock brick terrace for close on 23 years. Having said that, though, I don’t think it is necessary for the reader to know Sydney to understand what is going on in the book, because place, in this novella, is filtered, almost entirely, through the narrator’s head – it is the narrator’s version of Sydney, and many readers will probably disagree with her version. Many will not even recognise it.