A Journal of Australian & International Cultural Reviews, News and Criticism.
Richard’s book More Lies. This is a strange and twisted little piece of work. Blackish, Clownish, Hellish, Funnish. It squarely aims to discombobulate. It is a fractured narrative, a jagged jigsaw, threaded with poems, and shards of poems, to throw you on and off its pungent scent.
Parallax is not an easy read, and demands re-reading, which is perhaps its intention. Morgan explores and upends common dichotomies which, to the reader, are inherently familiar: chaos/ order, sanity/i nsanity, religion/science and freedom/ captivity.
The Seal Woman is a novel with a clear narrative arc, albeit a slow-moving one, but overwhelmingly it is a patient reverence for the continuity of time, rhythm of the seasons, the oceans and, of course, its living creatures.
If you pick this up, you won’t want to put it down until you have finished reading it. That’s what happened to me when Suniti sent it as a manuscript. The first sentence in chapter 1 is: ‘I’ve fallen in love with the woman next door.’
And it was then that Gabrielle began to teach me how to read Finnegans Wake: in a group, reading aloud, going very slowly, line by line, everyone pitching in suggestions and ideas, without too much concern for what might be right or wrong, sense or nonsense, just taking pleasure in the beauty and the strangeness and the glorious and often hilarious inventiveness of the language.
Richard James Allen is a widely published and prize winning author, as well as being a multi-talented artist excelling in many art-forms, he describes himself as a poet, dancer, film director, actor, novelist and choreographer. His latest novel More Lies contains 33 chapters, each chapter no longer than one and a half pages, it is a small book but what it contains is a treasure of laughs and lies.