Author: Inez Baranay Publisher: Three Sydney Novels Project The great thing about popular fiction is its ability to carry with it a host of criticisms, messages, and social barbs that, if attempted in more literary prose, would seem pretentious, obnoxious and possibly libellous. So, in Inez Baranay's collection of her three novels published between 1989 and 1997, we can see in the historical portrayals of the 50s, 70s and 90s how the bilious streets of Sydney have changed little, the flash cars caressing the corners containing little but cash-hooked corpses, decomposing in the rays coming through their sun roof. As more shit pours out of Macquarie Street than Bondi on a windy day, it's little wonder Baranay decided to republish these tales of celebrities brought down by sex scandals, immigrants fucked over by police and women sucked in, chewed up and spat out by the pathetic and parochial local film industry. Baranay's writing style is generically appropriate - the reader is never assaulted by convolutions nor astounded by any deep revelations. Occasionally though something will sneak through and shine, such as when a young man on a date at the opera tries but "there go all his hopes, destroyed in the raucous dissonance of his unstoppable cough." Essentially this in intelligent chick lit, albeit with whispered undertones of Dorothy Porter amid the soap opera of sycophants and sexcapades, "taking my face right down to take my lips to the soiled and puckered hem, to bury my mouth in its pulsating, cloacal depths." While discussions on the ethics of outing will seem dated in the 97 work Sheila Power, most convincing is the novel Pagan, set in and around Kings Cross and the city in the 1950s. Here immigrant integration, the cultural cringe and post-war philosophy all stride the stage, as country-grown journalists meet up with putrid police, and artists encounter the long and short arms of the law for their difference. It shows that Baranay has done her research, recreating the atmosphere of youthful hope and quotidian disappointment that summed up much of the decade. Then, as now, tabloid journalism retched its offal into the cultural conversation; then, as now, the superficial and the false triumphed over the reflective substance of thought and honesty. Here Baranay proves how potent the popular can be, especially when the speed has worn off and all your friends have passed out in the gutter.
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Title: Three Sydney Novels: Pagan, Between Careers &
Sheila Power
