Book of the week

STORIES: THE COLLECTED SHORT FICTION HELEN GARNER, TEXT, $37

Heart, in one volume. It is a collection that carries the unmistakable rhythms of the Australian voice emphasised by Garner’s own sense of end-stopped pacing. The stories are often exemplary examples of what can be done by a real writer in a compact space.

Her stories are often spare and simple, but they can pack a suspenseful and emotional wallop. “I met my husband at the airport,” My Hard Heart begins, “and there he told me something that stopped me in my tracks.”

Another, Postcards from Surfers, ostensibly concerns a young woman, coming to stay with her retired parents on the Gold Coast. Garner evokes the balmy but oppressive climate, the proximity to the beach, and the sense of returning home. However, a failed love affair is revealed in masterful increments as the holiday postcards tell another version.

Garner’s settings are not insular. She is equally at home in Paris, London, Sydney, or Melbourne. A relationship might begin in Australia but will end in France. This gives her reader a vivid sense of cosmopolitanism.

“At Karachi they were not allowed off the plane,” the story A Thousand Miles from the Ocean starts. It is a narrative without borders and it hungers with unresolved sexual desire, deceit, blood, and the eternal mystery of other people.

Garner’s achievement in her fiction is to take a uniquely Australian vision and propel it globally, with great force and power.