Brief outlines of Brian Castro's novels.
Birds of Passage
Pomeroy
Double-Wolf
After China
Drift
Stepper
Shanghai Dancing
The Garden Book
 |
Birds of Passage
Joint winner of The Australian/Vogel Literary Award
Brian Castro’s novel was the joint winner (with Nigel Krauth) of The Australian/Vogel award for an unpublished manuscript. Birds of Passage (originally titled Solitude), was published in 1983 by Allen and Unwin. It interweaves two narratives, that of a Chinese, Lo Yun Shan, who comes to Australia from Kwangtung in the 1850s gold rushes, and a contemporary Australian, Seamus O’Young, who is of Chinese descent. Seamus discovers an old journal written by Shan, and as he translates this journal his own life becomes increasing entwined with that of Shan.
The novel investigates questions of identity, specifically in terms of ‘translation’ between cultures.
The novel has been widely praised, and is probably the best-known of Castro’s works. It introduced the reading public to Castro's linguistically brilliant writing, and imaginative plotting.
‘A lyric celebration of the physical and spiritual endurance of two Chinese men who quest for wholeness of soul ... The settings are brilliantly evoked.’ Sydney Morning Herald.
|
Return to the top of the page
 |
Pomeroy
Castro’s second novel did not appear until 1991, an interval of some 8 years. It introduced a new style. The basically realist style of Birds of Passage gave way to a more playful, parodic style. Pomeroy is a postmodern novel that parodies the detective/spy thriller style, and the writing keeps looping back upon itself. It is ostensibly the story of an Australian journalist, Jaime Pomeroy, who becomes involved in a trail of Hong Kong corruption. His adventures in Hong Kong are interspliced with his life in Australia, and doomed pursuit of the love of his life, the emblematic Estrellita.
The novel is witty and fast-paced, and plays games with literary and cultural theory.
|
Return to the top of the page
Read an extract from
Double-Wolf
|
Double-Wolf
New edition June 2005, with introduction by Katharine England
Hot on the heels of Pomeroy, Castro’s third novel Double-Wolf was also published in 1991. It takes as its premise the fact that Sergei Wespe, Freud’s famous 'Wolfman' patient, was an aspiring writer, and adept at spinning tales. Was what he told Freud ‘the truth’ about his neurotic condition, or did he spin out an elaborate narrative to please Freud? If the latter, where does Freud’s own ‘narrative’ or ‘discourse’, psychotherapy, stand?
Based on research about the real Wolfman, Castro combines reality and imagination in a vivid tale that has the reading guessing: what is ‘the truth’? At times salacious and at times outrageously funny, it questions the idea of the ‘myths’ that we consctruct to make sense of our world.
‘Rich, rare, profound, witty and inventive ... a grand arabesque through time an space … this is a remarkable novel, with an intellectual generosity I find exceptional.’
Helen Daniel, The Age
Awards
The Age Fiction Award 1991
Victorian Premier's Award for Fiction (Vance Palmer Prize) 1992
Victorian Premier's Award for Innovative Writing, 1992
Purchase Double-Wolf
|
Return to the top of the page
|
After China
A new edition with an Introduction by Katharine England
An architect exiled from China meets an Australian woman writer who is terminally ill. He tells her traditional Chinese stories as a way of overcoming time/mortality, and of coming to terms with his own difficult past.
For a book which takes loneliness and death for its themes, After China has unexpected reserves of warmth, affection and humour. Insisting on the erotic, it is surprisingly delicate, restrained and chaste. And for a work of such diverse and eclectic reference it is rewardingly resonant and interconnected. The whole novel is thus a brilliant feat of balance.
After China is perhaps Castro’s most immediately accessible and engaging work so far.
Katharine England, Advertiser, 1992
Awards
Vance Palmer Prize for fiction. 1993 Victorian Premier's Awards.
Purchase After China
|
Return to the top of the page
 |
Drift
Through a fictional character, Byron Shelley Johnson, Castro ‘completes’ English experimental novelist Bryan Stanley Johnson's unfinished trilogy. The novel explores the interaction of historical characters from the sealing days of Tasmania with contemporary characters. Does the past influence the present? Both past and present seem to influence each other in an Escherian paradox. |
Return to the top of the page
 |
Stepper
Nominally a spy thriller, Stepper is based on the real exploits of pre-war Russian spies operating in Japan. It is an existential study of a spy who, in a world where identity is not a fixed idea, fails to secure his own stable identity.
‘A political story, a love story, a tale of espionage and duplicity ... Witty, comic and at the same time immeasurably sad, it is written in prose as delicate and illuminating as a Hokusai engraving.’
Thea Astley
Awards
NBC Banjo Award 1997.
|
Return to the top of the page
 |
Shanghai Dancing
Brian Castro introduces his novel as follows:
‘Shanghai Dancing is a fictional biography. Told from an Australian perspective, it is loosely based on my family’s life in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macau for the 1930s to the 1960s. Drawing on memory, stories, photos, and family myths and secrets, the book is about the twists and turns of fiction and personal history. I feel this tale has been lurking in the background for some time. finding its way out of the labyrinth through dissimulation and story-making.’
‘[The narrator’s] commitment to writing, like that of the real-life Brian Castro, cannot free him from his compulsion to tell tales. This is our gain: Shanghai Dancing is sheer delight.’
Michael Sharkey, Weekend Australian
‘Shanghai Dancing is a work of challenging, intelligent fiction.’
James Ley, Sydney Morning Herald
‘The story is an extraordinary polyglot mix of sources: Portuguese, Chinese, English, Jewish and Catholic, and a mysterious recessive black gene. It leapfrogs from 17th century Brazil to Shanghai in the 1930s, to Hong Kong, Macau, Paris and Australia in the recent past, all told in Castro’s characteristically baroque prose, dense with its passion for language and serious wordplay.’
Jane Sullivan, The Age.
'[Shanghai Dancing is] in many ways the summa of all [Castro's] work.'
Laurie Clancie, Age
Published 2003 Giramondo Publishing
For further information on Shanghai Dancing visit
www.giramondopublishing.com
Awards
Victorian Premier’s Award -
Vance Palmer Fiction Prize for 2003
Christina Stead Fiction Prize, NSW Premier’s Awards 2004
Book of the Year – NSW Premier’s Literary Awards 2004
|
Return to the top of the page
 |
'The Garden Book is so abundant and polyphonous that it inaugurates a new kind of reading.' Ingrid Wassenaar, Australian
The Garden Book
Set in the Dandenongs of the 1930s, when Australia was facing a looming war, The Garden Book scrutinizes the obsessions, prejudices and sexual betrayals of the period, shedding a different light on conventional notions of Chinese migrants in Australia. This is a story of unreliable narrators, passionate love and the mis-appropriation of literary legacies.
The richness of the novel lies not only in the tormented, satisfyingly circular love story but in the skilful patterning and echoing of events and the questing, thrusting, interlacing ideas, often manifesting as bold concatenations or dazzling puns that connect love, lies, writing, reading and, in this novel, leaves.
Katharine England, Advertiser
The Garden Book is another triumph of intelligence and imagination by one of the most exacting, yet rewarding of Australian novelists, and when the mood is on him, one of the most amusing as well.
Peter Pierce, Age
Castro's work is all the more notable for its intelligence, humour and daring. There are many fine writers in Australia, but few who are prepared to wrestle so intensely with the limits of the expressible.
James Ley, Sydney Morning Herald
Published 2005 Giramondo Publishing
For further information on The Garden Book visit
www.giramondopublishing.com
WINNER, QUEENSLAND PREMIER'S AWARD FOR FICTION 2006
Shortlist finalist 2006 Miles Franklin Award
|
|
|
© Copyright Michael Deves 2008