Foreign Soil (Maxine Beneba Clarke, Hachette)

Recently, and rather controversially, a reviewer of Black Inc.’s Best Australian Stories 2013 complained that overall there was little that was memorable or stuck in the mind amidst last year’s crop of ‘best’ short fiction. Be that as it may, I was reminded of those remarks when reading Maxine Beneba Clarke’s debut short-story collection, Foreign Soil, for of all the things reviewers will say about it, I’m sure this charge won’t be one of them. For without a doubt this rather remarkable book is as vivid and unforgettable, and in several respects indeed resembles, that extraordinary collection from Nam Le: The Boat.

Already with the first story ‘Harlem Jones’, Clarke lobs a Molotov under any reader expecting a literary comfort zone. The eponymous main character, of Caribbean descent, meets up with a mate to attend a protest in London over the shooting of a black man by the police. For all Harlem’s simmering rage and violent urges, it is his despair at centuries of historical abjection as a member of an underclass that resounds.

There is so much to say and discuss about all of the 10 stories here. This is a writer whose settings range from grimy Footscray backstreets to white-picket fence, small-town Australia to the Villawood detention centre; from a wealthy enclave of Kampala in Uganda to a down-at-heel New Orleans apartment block, from Brixton in London to Kingston in Jamaica. Cultural references range from the ABC’s children’s show Giggle and Hoot to the Black Panther magazine. The story ‘David’ is in part a celebration of the Barkley Star bicycle.

But thankfully there isn’t a breath of literary pyrotechnics here, no sense of the ‘this is what I can do’ one sometimes detects in authors perhaps seeking to impress on a creative writing program. These are tales of sheer storytelling prowess, and a deeply ambivalent take on hope and despair in the modern world. Which is not to say I had no quibbles with a couple of the stories—sometimes I thought they didn’t quite gel in their conception, or were otherwise a little problematic—but  paradoxically those stories actually lingered with me the most: namely the two longest stories here, ‘Gaps in the Hickory’ and ‘The Stilt Fishermen of Kathaluwa’.

The final story, ‘The Sukiyaki Book Club’—a sort of coda to the collection—reflects on whether what has gone before is suitable ‘book club’ fare. It’s an amusing—as well as plangent—step into meta-fiction, but ultimately readers will be the judge of this work, and now that it’s between paper covers for the first time, I have no doubt it will be widely and fulsomely celebrated and discussed. Foreign Soil, which won the 2013 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, marks the arrival of a major new voice in the Australian literary landscape.

Martin Shaw is the books division manager at Readings