An Item from the Late News

by Thea Astley

A new Thea Astley novel is always a significant literary event, and discerning readers will not be disappointed with what promises to be her best effort yet - An Item from The Late News. Wafer is a Bomb Age Baby. Legend has it he was born to an Australian father and a Swedish mother in Europe just before World War II, and as a young child saw his father blown apart by a bomb during the London Blitz. His own shell-shocked youth has been an aimless drifting through boarding schools, odd jobs, and hippie trails all over the world. Finally, he lands exhausted in Allbut, a small and decaying mining town somewhere in Queensland. Haunted by the modern-day myth of nuclear holocaust, Wafer seeks the perfect bomb shelter. And what better place to build your shelter than Allbut, Australia? Allbut, however, considers itself a clean and decent town, and it is soon clear that Wafer does not belong there. He is kind to Aborigines, helpful to travelling strangers, and – Worst of all – he doesn’t drink. A valuable gem stone, found by Wafer in the middle of nowhere on his way to Allbut, is misunderstood by the impoverished townspeople as evidence of a secret strike . . . and what is the town to make of Wafer's friendship with thirteen-year-old Emmeline, a strange and beautiful enfant terrible? As Christmas approaches, tensions and temperatures soar, unleashing the town's hostility towards Wafer, driving on to the story's brutal climax. Thea Astley's chilling story of a misfit's clash with parochial values is set against a fabulous array of myths - classical, modern, intriguing compounds of the two - giving the novel unusual resonance and power.

Genres: Australia, Fiction

200 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Thea Astley was one of Australia's most respected and acclaimed novelists. Born in Brisbane in 1925, Astley studied arts at the University of Queensland. She held a position as Fellow in Australian Literature at Macquarie University until 1980, when she retired to write full time. In 1989 she was granted an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Queensland.

She won the Miles Franklin Award four times - in 1962 for The Well Dressed Explorer, in 1965 for The Slow Natives, in 1972 for The Acolyte and in 2000 for Drylands. In 1989 she was award the Patrick White Award. Other awards include 1975 The Age Book of the Year Award for A Kindness Cup, the 1980 James Cook Foundation of Australian Literature Studies Award for Hunting the Wild Pineapple, the 1986 ALS Gold Medal for Beachmasters, the 1988 Steele Rudd Award for It's Raining in Mango, the 1990 NSW Premier's Prize for Reaching Tin River, and the 1996 Age Book of the Year Award and the FAW Australian Unity Award for The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow.

Praise for Thea Astley:

'Beyond all the satire, the wit, the occasional cruelty, and the constant compassion, the unfailing attribute of Astley's work is panache' Australian Book Review

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finished: 28.11.2020
Genre: novel
Rating: D
#AusReadingMonth2020
Conclusion:
I'm a Thea Astley fan
...but I hit a speed bump in her literary work.

My Thoughts

[Malcolm Frawley · Rating 4 out of 5]

The late Thea Astley was, in my opinion, one of Australia's greatest ever novelists. Her body of work, though not exactly prolific, is extraordinary. She doesn't just write a novel she seems to climb inside it & then explore every seam from the inside. Mostly relatively short (this one is 200 pages) & set in far north Queensland her stories tackle bigotry, sexism &, often, pure venality. Her characters & situations are realistically drawn, painfully so at times, but her prose exceeds mere reality & is exciting, possibly even challenging, to read. Her characters are drawn so clearly that each bead of sweat seems to drip from her pages. I first read this 1982 novel shortly after it had been published & have been slowly re-reading all her work. The sense of doom that hangs over this one sometimes makes it hard to turn a page. You know that people who don't deserve it will suffer disproportionately & those that inflict the pain will most likely get away with it. What is also fascinating is that the female first person narrator is as flawed as any of the characters she tells us about & her role in the inevitable horrors is shameful. The theme of the book can perhaps be best summed up by a quote from page 132 - "If only the men would go away." If your taste runs towards the more literary, & you have yet to read Ms Astley, I highly recommend that you do.

[Arianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not an easy read, but I am enjoying the challenge and also her imagery, often quite ugly of Australian rural males. Still no one comes off smelling of roses in this book. Do not read if you are depressed!

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you didn't already know that things tend to end badly in Thea Astley's novels, the minotaur and its laconic audience on the cover of the 1984 Penguin edition of An Item from the Late News would signal the destination. But still, it comes as a shock.

The novel, narrated by a bitter middle-aged woman with considerable flaws of her own, is the story of a man denied the peace he craves by the venality of an outback town.  Signalled as Christlike by his name Wafer, he lives just beyond the town of Allbut in a shelter that he (naïvely) hopes will protect him from a nuclear bomb.  A survivalist of sorts, he's built an underground bunker, and divested himself of the 20th century as best he can, earning him the scorn of the ugly rural males that Astley likes to portray.  He is understandably obsessed by his fear of bombs — he was a small boy in London when he saw his father obliterated in the Blitz.  But the catalyst for this novel expressing fears of nuclear annihilation, I suspect, was Australian and international protests against the 1966-1996 French Nuclear Testing Program in the Pacific (which subsequently culminated in state-sponsored terrorism: the bombing by French intelligence services of the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand in 1985.)  Other current issues in Astley's sights include a coast miscalled Sunshine of the vanishing sand, the varicosed bitumen, the high blood-pressure of high-rise; and PTSD among Vietnam war veterans as portrayed by the sinister evil of Moon.

Gabby, so called by her father and brother because she's always talking about things they deem to be trivial, has been married to men whose names she has forgotten.  She is a desultory artist, whose nervous breakdown seems to have been triggered by her mother's insistence that she cannot live without a man. Astley's mocking account of a car-salesman of a psychiatrist whose punishment for her 'misdemeanors' is a long-term long-sleep needle is an allusion to the Chelmsford Private Hospital Deep Sleep Therapy scandal (1963-1979), which triggered the Royal Commission into Mental Health 1988-1990 in NSW.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/08/21/a...

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set in the satirically named town of Allbut, whose nearest large town is the equally satirically named Mainchance, Thea Astley’s An item from the late news is framed by the story of a man who comes to the town, fearful of “the atom bomb”, and wanting to live a quiet – sheltered, you might say – life.

Wafer is this man, and the story is narrated, from the perspective of ten years after the events, by townswoman Gabby. Introducing the story, she tells us that she was living at the coast when he arrived for “his sad little attempt at reclusion” ... For my full review, please see my blog: https://whisperinggums.com/2020/08/23...

[Noah Melser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damn that's a mighty good one. 1st person reflective gaze of Gabby and her return to remote fictional town. There's always this gentle distance between perception of people and sometimes yearning which gets me each time in Astley's work. So much writing in this, there are passages which are just so sharp and observant of the place. The cover says a critique of rural Australia, but that's simplistic. It's much more about the protagonist and guilt and passivity, memory and distance. She builds this one beautifully. I'm saying it's her best but maybe it's just the most recent of hers and, after a brief break, the delight of reading her again.

[Andy Kabanoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this novel really engrossing once I got past Astley's annoying writing style - it just jars, maybe deliberately. An uncomfortable read about very uncomfortable events. Horrific small town narrowness destroying well meaning people. I identified with Wafer very strongly and have lived in an 'Allbut' town. Must read it again.