Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 'Cocooned in His Own Silence' : Rodney Hall's Outstanding Return to Fiction
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Of the now twelve novels that make up Rodney Hall’s distinguished prose fiction – ranging from The Ship on the Coin (1972) to this year’s A Stolen Season – it is arguably in the latter that the task of remaking is most explicitly and adventurously undertaken, even literally in the case of Adam Griffiths. As an Australian soldier fighting with the ‘Coalition of the Willing’, Adam has been shockingly wounded: he is ‘helpless and isolated’. ‘Cocooned in his own silence’. Now, with his young wife, Bridget, who, in edge-of-panic reflection, muses ‘she ought never to have married him in the first place’, Adam, smashed, burnt, ‘ought to have died’, navigates the pain-racked hours, tortured step by step, with the robotic help of his exoskeleton, ‘the Contraption’. Like Viktor Frankenstein, Bridget recognises that she is in thrall to a monster: ‘He is her monstrosity, hers and hers alone.’ (Introduction)

Notes

  • Epigraph: ‘We are the inheritors of a world we need to remake for ourselves.’
    Rodney Hall, The Island in the Mind (1996)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Book Review ABR no. 400 April 2018 13504943 2018 periodical issue

    'A cynic once remarked that an editor needs two things: good grammar and a long memory. But we all know there’s a bit more to it than that. As we prepare to send the April issue to press – the four hundredth in the magazine’s second series – it occurs to me that an editor’s main function is to be a recogniser of expertise, discernment, literary flair – and, more importantly perhaps, courage even, for sometimes it’s needed in this caper.' (Peter Rose : Editorial introduction)

    2018
    pg. 52-53
Last amended 4 Apr 2018 09:56:33
52-53 https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2018/april-2018-no-400/218-april-2018-no-400/4718-brian-matthews-reviews-a-stolen-season-by-rodney-hall 'Cocooned in His Own Silence' : Rodney Hall's Outstanding Return to Fictionsmall AustLit logo Australian Book Review
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